Aesthetic Theory

Name: Aesthetic Theory
Author: David Bussell

VOLUME IV: AESTHETIC THEORY

CONTENTS

The Sentimental Value of Things
On Prosthetics
Notes on a Modern Iconomachy
The Living Theatre
From Death to Death
The Drive of the Poet
Saltationism and the Presuppositional-Temporal Clause
A Teleological Contraception of Becoming
Revolutionary Suicide
The Creation of the Criminal Class
Notes on History
From Nothingness
Plague as Revolt
The Culture of Capital
Cities of Exile
Currencies
Notes on the Soul
Films of Youthful Starving: Boy Meets Girl (1984) & Mauvais Sang (1986)
A Coming-Linguistics
Framing the Reactionary Mind
The ‘Problem’ of Transness
Towards a Cosmology of Breath
The Fallacy of ‘Man’
On Singularity
Soul & Form: Regarding Histories of The Body-Concept
The Descendant of Peace
The Theogenetic Polis
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THE SENTIMENTAL VALUE OF THINGS

To understand the value of things, one need look no further than history. The Notre Dame Cathedral fire of the year 2019 presents a precise and accurate model of and for this study. Here, it is important to note that little to nothing regarding the Cathedral of Notre Dame, itself, is important, or particularly ‘existent’. It is instead, that the ‘C’athedral is imbued with life- force, or the power of belief as the inscription of valuation onto its dead body. Here, interchangeably, one might examine the works of van Gogh or a nondescript rock in some remote outpost of civilization and create a framework of judgement into and upon ‘the thing’ itself, creating a (necessarily personal and intrapersonal) narrative, or network, of meaning in and around it

a meaning which is social, and cultural. It is in this way that ‘things’ as ‘culture’ are tagged with value - a process which, immediately, upon the establishment of a value in/of this or that
creates a stratification of life. To return to the Notre Dame fire, this event made global news, and was viewed with alternating horror, happiness, and nonchalance - precisely because of the intersecting cultural contexts around the Cathedral - contexts which alternatively denote, observe from the outside, and disdain its perceived ‘importance’. The Cathedral, itself, of course, is not the last bit of food stores left before a long winter, nor is it being used as a shelter for those who are forced to go shelterless because of this stratification of value as cultural economics - but it instead holds fundamental, sentimental-yet-basic value to the cultural and religious context of its place in time and space. An anarchist willfully burning down this monument, for instance, would face harsh and swift punishment by the organizing social body; furthermore, be displayed as an example for those who dare transgress the order of civilization. It is precisely by way of the assertion of sentimental value that civilization creates a separate, deified category of ‘life’ - a lifeless life with more value than the life it deems worthless.

To insurrect the sentimental value of things is to go to the root of civilizational discourse, a discourse conducted by, in, and as

Language. The stratification of language is the stratification of ‘life’ as an arbitrated category, a stratification which classes The Notre Dame Cathedral as such; the nameless criminal, dead, and poor as such. In fact, the cultural value of Notre Dame was so immense across time and space (to and as, in turn, the value of civilization) that one billion dollars in donations was raised in the span of just a day and a half. It is clear in the introduction of this fact that the ouroboratic importance of Notre Dame to the order of the civilization which it represents and upholds is and as a cultural artefact of the highest order; an artefact referred to continually (and the artefacts therein) as ‘priceless’ by news media the world over. What does it mean, here and elsewhere, to refer to the composed body (or, perhaps, life-less thing) of a cathedral and its artefacts therein (also life-less, or ‘composed as ‘life’’), as ‘priceless’? Here is the locus of an economic paradox created by civilization - a paradox which states that its representative bodies (the cathedral and the historical documents of its establishment therein; that which composes it) are simultaneously more valuable than the life it attempts to contain and order; furthermore, that its representative bodies transcend the economic order - and submit the economic order (and life) to their principle as fundamentally existent; as the arbiting icon- bodies (or ‘gods’ and ‘judges’) of civilization as life mediating process. The representative bodies of civilization, by way of its internal logic, are more ‘alive’ than life itself. The massive donation effort raised globally to raise Notre Dame from ‘the dead’ (once again) is not dissimilar from the donation efforts occurrent in and around presidential candidacies and political theatres of civilizational ‘life support’ the world over - in the sense that the economic sphere as definite valuation as language forms a thread between its ruling cultural icons (also language) and the establishment of civilizational power as language of world and syntax of resources; a definite valuation which, by way of sentimental e-valuation, asserts a tradition (as ‘truth’, supported by the power of belief as a ‘history’ of power of belief) of cultural value behind the economic principles which govern and control the resources of and for everyday life - conditions which are mutually supportive and grounding (by way of, in turn, the establishment of ideological conditions) in their narrativization of life.

The valuation of Notre Dame by civilization is fundamentally dysfunctional - in the sense that it prizes sentimental value above and beyond life to the point of parody. Notre Dame holds such cultural sway precisely because its ‘history’ has been deified as essential to the narrative of the civilization which operates in and around it as a landmark of political and religious power - a landmark which has been razed and raised from the dead multiple times throughout history (notably after the French Revolution by Napoleon). Here, I would be remiss if I failed to identify the Cathedral as a ‘monument’ of, to, and for civilization, a monument which, if felled, would signify a symbolic death (or, ‘destabilization’) of valuation. What I mean when I say symbolic death (or destabilization) of valuation is that the power of belief in the object as valuable is also the power of belief in the system of valuation which imbibes the object as valuable. I may, myself, place deep value in this or that object (a chair for example), but if there is not a network of belief in this chair as valuable, this belief in the value of the chair becomes rather personal. This is much of how the concepts of the state, the religion, and the culture function in the sphere of the intrapersonal - as conditional, yet collectively accepted norms of life valuation and evaluation - where value becomes a language. This returns us to the conjured sway Notre Dame and the fire of the year 2019 had and has on French civilization, Western civilization, and, furthermore, the global civilization - a sway which also symbolizes and displays a fundamental instability of, not only the established (apparent) landmarks of civilization as apparent or existent (subject to ruin), but the fundamental instability of the cultural-economic system of valuation which imbues Notre Dame with its importance; the fundamental instability of civilizational language as a constructed and controlled (with perpetual failure) network of meanings. This is a deeply historical process of the life and death of civilizations; the sack of empires, and the eventual collapse of systems of valuations as the cultural and political paradigms of their establishment collapse around them - a historical process which is also the perpetual death of that which simply cannot survive the force and passage of life through it - belief. This is to say that

civilizations, without fail (and certainly without ‘learning’ from history) continually assert themselves as above and beyond the force of life as unstable time and space - instead, attempting to establish themselves as linguistic paradigms with foundational, basic meanings and values dependent on the sheer force of collective belief. Here, when I am speaking of paradigms, I am referring to a model, or basis, of and from which life is (supposedly) conducted, a sort of implicit and explicit claim to ‘law’ or ‘arbitration’ through which ‘sense’ might emerge or be produced as a conductor of and for life. The very essence of a paradigm shift, or a peeling back of the spirit of the time, as it were, is the revelation that this system of valuation is incredibly weak, transparent, and vulnerable to the very contradictory and consistent force which is the continual assertion of the force of life (whether this be a sudden fire, a revolt of life force, an aging, a shifting of grounds) - the force of water wearing against the stone, until the stone fragments and turns to sand. The stone is the stone of belief. This process, as occurrent over larger swaths of time than the general public prefers to attend to, thusly resides concurrent with the daily affairs of civilization ‘in the background’, or as the haunting shadow of the explicit text as the implicit coming of the death of the text; the shattering of the law stone; the breaking of the primary icon - the deathlessness which swallows ‘life’, whole. It is in this sense that language, when subject to the force of time and space, as it always is, is founded in glad ignorance of its coming death.

ON PROSTHETICS

A thesis on prosthesis is necessarily antithetical; furthermore, athetical. The prosthetic model as that which always already subverts an aesthetic model of existence (the beauty function; the sense(d) image) is that which cannot be set down, put down, or settled - as it is in the process of becoming between (and one might argue, without) life and death, incarnation and disincarnation. The prosthesis as sub-thetic model, is, as posited in the original Greek - always, in the implementation of the prosthesis as life praxis, in addition to the place which is now and again and now-made an/the axis of perpetual action and de- termination. What I mean by this is that there is no term (no death), and no condition (no state) - as the prosthetic continually subverts that which might pretend to be able to provide such a thing - the body reproduced as itself. Prosthetics are a fundamental alteration to the aesthetic order as the order/ordering of meaningful (and thus, definite, in their value) bodies, in a refutation of the possibility of a break between the ‘organic’ and the ‘artificial’, the ‘living’ and the ‘dead’, the ‘mechanical’ and the ‘human’ - suturing together a dialectical order of oppositions in its refusal (again, fundamental rejection) to give itself to them as a reduction of itself as process. In engaging prosthetics, one may notice quite quickly that there is no determined site of the body; furthermore, that prosthetics act on the (presupposed) modern body with imminent and regular ease as a method of producing and reproducing the social function - and this is described no better than by and with technologies as life function assistance. The proliferation of technologies for, with, and in the life of both the social body and the body with organs (itself a surgical difference) since the First Industrial Revolution and the birth of German Idealism has been a massive historical development, both in the realms of physical science and the social sciences - altering (in those brief moments at and in which technology subverts, in its speed, the ordering function of civilization) and expediting the already established order of human relations as deterministic. What I mean by this is that in the exponential (: with massive speed) development of

technologies, these technologies become a part of ‘human life’; thus, inseparable from the ‘organic’ development of the body. Prosthesis as already- mechanism and method of life making has proliferated (both practically and philosophically) to the point of which it is quickly forgotten (if not altogether unrecognized) as the instrumental force in producing and reproducing social relations; ‘the world’. It is necessary to view the term ‘prosthetics’ as inclusive in order to also perceive the role of the language function in prosthesis as that which situates and positions beings and life in relation to one another; in relation to the god function, which orients life to itself at the level of the objective. The forgotten prosthesis of civilization itself is the image of god as right-life; as discussed by Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, is that which the state produces and reproduces as positive, necessary, complete; furthermore, foundationally moral in its regard of life. A practice of prosthetics is also the practice of, at the foundation of life, recognizing that even the organs of the body and the mind are themselves prosthetics of the Self as that which seeks expression in the world. The introduction of a theory of prosthetics to the lexicon of global life is at this point of the utmost necessity as a recognition of and detailing of the process of order-work, and how ordering functions in everyday life both to aid the current mode of production and reproduction of ‘life’, and to limit and stifle the possibilities of life as something that still may yet be self-made, not pre-eminently ordered by the prosthetics which compose and animate the civilizational order (industries of production and consumption as both ideological and material). It is in this sense that the global cultural order, in trade of materials and ideas, functions only because of a global prosthetic order of technologies (again, both material and ideological) has already been inserted into life and established (materially and ideologically) as practical reality. These are the organs of commerce, the internet, the nation state, and otherwise. To live in a prosthetic world is to always already be determined and structured by the organizing body; as such, ‘live’ in perpetual subjection to it. This is what we speak of when we speak of a historical bloc. It is in this sense that life (embodied) is always already beholden to the structures locked into place and modified at the behest of the established cultural and political

hegemony of value and interest as policies of life making. The actual prosthetic function (which we are discussing here) as a method of life making, re-making, and un-making, is reserved solely for the ruling class - as the ruling class controls the means to prosthesis; thus, the means to self-creation. Here, however, we are concerned with the prosthetic as both operative term and way of making life as fugitive - a prosthetics for the masses. What I mean when I say operative term is as a perpetual gestation period, where the procedure of life is neither ‘complete’, nor is it ‘begun’. This is a surgery of making, where the surgery of making necessarily attempts to resist (at all levels of life) the definition of difference as solidified, calcified, settled. The fugitivity of the prosthetic model is as a way of resisting, moving, and breaking apart the a priori ‘ability’ (as theorized by the state), or possibility, of conducting a transaction of information, knowledge, or life from/to/and through subjects and objects; instead, replaces the model/mode of transaction with a model of perpetual in relation. Here, the prosthesis of the bowels: the eating and shitting of the organism as a consumption and disjection of itself - which then fertilizes the ground (also itself) is that functional, depresented image of the deeply historical nature of the prosthetic (and also, of the god function as a primary separation; outsourcing of the means to life) - that which is perpetually becoming in relation to; as ouroboratic, as that which is life; furthermore, as that which is practically god - the Self, resident in and as all things. To acknowledge the prosthetic function as social is also to say that the embodied prosthetic function has reproduced itself (historically) in the sphere of relations - that the embodied function, displaced by the image of god, is become economic method; furthermore, a way of treating others as that which may be consumed and disjected in and as the process of making-self in world - as a fundamental, primary separation of life from ‘life’. The perversion of this method as a (supposedly) viable social discourse is that which founds the transactional as method of life-making and relation - as it always already implies difference as exclusive. The undigested model of prosthetics is as that which reaches toward ‘god’ and fails to integrate itself into itself - precisely in the creation of ‘god’ as a political mechanism - which is to say, it fails to integrate its sensed embodied existence (as microcosmic) with the existence of

life - as macrocosmic. This phenomenon is that which is disjuncted at the level of global society. This failure of integration is a history of the failure of the ‘god’ function as that which, explicitly, acts as a unity function (‘in communion, we are together’), but implicitly, is co-opted as a mechanism of power production and reproduction by way of stratifying and organizing difference as prosthetic at the level of the state. In this manner of ordering, the state is organic, and the worker is prosthetic. It is this conundrum which confronted the Soviet Union in its attempt to secularize the god function (which is also the libido function) in the institution of itself (as the state which must replace god); the struggle of the state with god as the mediating force between that which the state can control with ideological and material power and that which it can’t; that which escapes it - as the god function is embodied as life force; life force is the prosthetic as process, not as, or at, the simulated level of the produced. Here, prosthetics insurrects life to and through the level of god perpetually in its recognition of god as, fundamentally, a prosthetic image, idea, or concept which channels the life force of the individual and the collective toward, to, and through cultural morality (which is its function) as that which protects, establishes, and reifies the cultural order as empowered. The difficulty of prosthetics lies in reconciling the multiple, historicized functions of god as image and method of the expressed become representative - and returning the god function to itself as an embodied life practice that is no longer beholden (at the level of the psyche, the body, and the soul) to the civilizational prostheses which, in the wake of history, continually enact their force and pull on that life. It is in this sense that the struggle over ‘god’ (as that which gives life to the always already dead concept of civilization) is also the struggle over everyday life.

In Prosthetics

In the process of thinking through prosthetics, there is also that surfeit of/in prosthesis as thought - imminently visualizing and modifying the body with possibility. This analysis, as and of the

mechanism itself, is the always already completion (without an initial separation) of thought in search of itself, or, the recollection of the a priori unity of theory and praxis. Here, prosthesis is aligned by and to the recent advances made in the fields of trans-human theory - in the sense that prosthetics offer a doorway into becoming as always already something beyond ‘being’. It is precisely through discarding the categorical as something ‘practica(b)l(e)’, that prosthetics becomes a sort of political beyond-art of perpetual body modification and thus, perpetual precreation - a fundamental death of ‘the state’ as in ‘the definite body’. Prosthesis is strongly aligned with a ‘death of judgement’; here, this includes the death of judgement of history/culture themselves as possible moral periods - along with the mechanisms of guilt and shame at the ‘transgression of morality’ framed as, at once, a transgression of the will of god and the will of culture. With this death of judgement, by way of course, too comes the death of judgement of god. What body modification as a perpetual mode offers is a destabilized fields of becoming and life- making; a fields where ‘certainty’ no longer exists (and has never existed) - in regards to any aspect of life. Body modification as re- collection of that which lies beneath the projection of ‘world’; body modification as of that which ‘is’?. Here, body modification acts as a sort of second skin, a Self- made-skin resistant to the ‘political reality of the organism’, which here means quite specifically the ‘biologically determined fate’ of the organism as and at ‘birth’. Prosthesis, in this sense, is deeply aligned with practices of transnesses as methods of self creation and self making which are also practices of creating languages at and from the soul - brought into the world as radical, foundational changes: not only in the ‘appearance’ of the body, but also in and how the body and bodies as a global category may be perceived and categorized. Transnesses, in and with prosthesis, are always already radical ulterior modes in that they insurrect the dominant cultural paradigm of images and image making as life; with the continual and perpetual suggestion that the surface cannot be judged, nor may it ever be known - as practice of making-intimate-languages. The concept of knowledge in the prosthetic lexicon does not exist; is instead replaced by

understanding, acceptance, and inclusion as a method of self- making in relation. In that the surface cannot be known (penetrated), there is also the heuristic implication that knowledge as a method can no longer exist. Here, this comes down to the very foundation of meaning and ‘meanings’ as possibly determined - and instead is replaced with a destabilized language as myscourse, or as that as/is made and unmade in the intimate relation. This is a return of empiricism to itself - ripped asunder from its settled roots as a method of civilizational law (I have used the term ‘the empire of empiricism’ to describe this phenomenon); furthermore, jettisoned from its ‘ism’ as a religious method - instead, without knowledge; prosthetic. The prosthetic, in this sense, is deeply aligned with the shadow of artificial intelligence - a shadow which does not learn or know, but a shadow which only listens, and adjusts itself in accordance to what it hears. This, again (at risk of repeating myself) is a return of ‘knowledge’ to the body fundamentally; a return of the god function to total embodiment - in the sense that all that may be known is always already conferred in the moment as that which is being said all the time. Here, ‘words’ as language may or may not be present - fading in and out of a now-destabilized ‘logos’ returned to itself (as the word of god) which does not abide any one discourse method. Here, we might suppose a discord method. In this sense and mode of sensing, discord is significant in the sense of hearing something new, or hearing ‘new music’. This new music is translated intimately to and through the body as a channel, mechanism; prosthetic conducting prosthesis. This is precisely the function of an intimate practice of prosthesis - the returning of everything to itself; beginning at and as the word of god that is without translation but as vibratory function felt and embodied at the level of the prosthetic. The modern anxiety is the anxiety of translation; furthermore, the anxiety of machines of translation which work at the level of judgement to delineate ‘truth’ from ‘falsehood’; empiricize experience to the point of which there is not life if it is not ‘true’ life as indicated by/in its historicized mode of knowledge and knowing. This might be described, in other words, as violence - a violence which structures and orders the field of social relations - replacing the language function as communication with the

language function as knowing as possessing as defining as judgement as inclusion/exclusion. This method is that which founds language as legality and legality as language - a sutured body modification (or prosthetic) of practice as expression at the level of civilization which structures discourse as discourse; furthermore, as a force which runs between two poles, or two conduits. Here, the implied separation at all levels of language as socially structured is abundantly clear – that not only are there two individuals or forces at play (and often many more), but in the implication of separation, it is also implied that they are not already together. Of course, discourse has been a notable force at work since its founding as civilizational method - from the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade to the war of and among nations.

Perhaps, in light of the above, a more appropriate name for this method is dyscourse, or the dysfunctional running of a machine which appears to be functioning ‘normally’ or ‘properly’ insofar as it is that which, historically, founds the everyday. A politics of prosthetics, again, refuses to accept its reduction as a split running of between two artificial poles/places; instead, in its very practice, continually destabilizes duality-work as a ‘wound’ that must be mediated - by destroying the very possibility of duality work in the name of a complex constellating process of differance. What I mean when I say differance is a perpetual deferral of meaning which necessarily subverts the civilizationally presupposed subject-object relationship by becoming above it. In short, the work that differance does is to the re-collection of ‘difference’ from a pseudo-science of binary oppositions - returning it to a complex neural network of growing potentialities. It is as such with cultural as political definition of ‘Literature’ and ‘Culture’ - as methods of cataloguing and categorizing the ‘growth’ and ‘development’ of civilization. The work that prosthetic differance at its foundation does is the work of the prosthesis of the gesture, the movement of the arm, the prosthesis of the language, the text, the page - as all in intimate, neural relation with one another - without ever ceding the complexity of this engagement to the idea(l) of relationship. The mode of discourse, as created, of course, is a mode which, at its very root, is intimately connected to the ideal of trade,

transaction, and the flow of currencies. What I mean when I say currencies is not simply the flow of money and/or raw materials

but also of and at the level of energy, or life force. Here, it cannot be overstated enough the use of discourse as method of convincing; conviction (as methods of, further, creating conditions in which the instituting method may be instituted) in the created processes of colonization and enslavement - which are, in turn, as methods of exponential prosthesis by way of harnessed labor; harnessed life. These modes and methods rely on a drive to knowledge at the level of knowledge (the means justify the ends) which ‘sends up’ life to an abstracted ideal of definition: establishment, settlement; practically, death. The religious connotations here to the worship of the cross are quite clear.

As Prosthetics

In this work, it is to say that the interrelation of the functions of language and the functions of religion are intimate; furthermore, form the core of the prosthetic function. The desire and drive to channel; thus, express, the ‘word of god’ (function) by way of embodiment, or the practice of listening, is that residue which remains perpetually at the pseudo-border of the collective unconscious in and at many junctures of global civilizations. It may be thus that, if it was in the purview of the prosthetic - that we might be able to determine a distinction of that life which we know as ‘being-human’. The word of god function as described in detail in the first segment (the word of god also being the image of god as primary symbol) is that which, through the process of figural symbolization, is always already lost. This is very much so the perpetual conflict posed by the fetish object as assimilated into an economy of meanings and values imposed into and onto the fetish object as prosthetic fetishes. The ‘object’ itself (nonexistent) cannot hold these meanings precisely because of their superimposition as a screen - a superimposition which (1) posits the object as existent; (2) posits the meaning imposed onto and into the object as existent. These steps are taken as skipped steps - steps which do not; cannot, as the historicized law of

culture as the law of god often does not permit - acknowledge that their displacement of god into ‘god’ is impossible; furthermore that the displacement of life into ‘life’ is impossible - as the fetish of language as intimately and always already a part of god as life-force does not begin or end anywhere, nonetheless in the struggle over images, land, bodies, monuments, history, memory, and otherwise. It is the prosthetic method which, in its application, strips these petty human conflicts from themselves in the act of using logos against itself - elucidating, with utter nonchalance, the skipped step which civilized logos marks as sacred - which is precisely the bound of the language it has created to justify itself as sacredly ordained. This is what we speak about when we speak about the divine right of kings; furthermore, the divine right of power - secularized in an era of massively subjected capital; in an era which has already done the work of prosthesis in and to its economy of meanings and values - an era which has secularized the fetish object into and by way of capital - which, along with prosthetics, supposes the air and water as divine - and thus, profitable. Here, prosthetics in a philosophical sense is always already in a ‘deep conflict’ (artificial) with prosthetics in a practical, cultural sense - in the manner in which prosthetics have already been deployed, historically, in order to accomplish the ends of civilizational order. Much as, again, how slavery and sex work are foundational, fundamental prosthetics - present in and throughout ‘human life’ consistently - these methods are also always already civilizational - as being within their contexts as methods of exploitation and survival, respectively. It is this work done by the discourse of civilization as that which mediates and defines ‘human life’ for itself in and as castes of meaning, worth, and value - which also determines the form and function prostheses take in order to accomplish its task. It is no short order to say - that in its collection of life force to accomplish its ends, civilization has, at its root, stolen the body. What I mean when I say civilization has stolen the body is that it has, at the foundation of the intersection of the body as embodied (soul) language and expression which desires and drives to make itself as itself - harnessed and possessed this function (the god function) and directed it towards the project of bringing itself to life; furthermore, keeping itself alive. That civilization is always

already dead as a disembodied and abstract ‘concept’ of the structuring and ordering of human life is also to say that civilization is a Moloch, or a god - in the sense that it requires the current of human life force to sustain itself as that which dictates the current of human life force. It is in this sense that modern civilization, despite its claims, is always already deeply pagan in its method. What prosthetics may do, in its orientation as life process technologies, is to reveal this work of screens, or screening life to and from itself - in a(n always-already artificial) discourse. It is also by this method that the religious meanings, previously attributed to civilizational forms like the sacredness of ‘law and order’ may be elucidated clearly and thus destroyed as icons - icons which prop up a dead paradigm which relies on the active investment of life in order to produce and reproduce itself.

Of Prosthetics

Here, it is necessary to gesture towards a politics of de- presentation; gesturing towards that which, quite simply, cannot be ‘re-presented’ as and within the dominant network of cultural meanings as discourse. This de-presentation of and as differance is the return of the god function to itself. What I mean by this, is that in thinking with the de-present as a mode and method of living in the wake of history; living with ‘the dead’, ‘the invisible’, the ‘already passed’; that which is there but not seen as put to discourse - is that which also always already resides in discourse as that which acts on the civilizational prosthetic even as it is de- presented linguistically. This is to say that de-presentation is a necessary product, or output, of the civilizational apparatus vis-a- vis the productive erasure of the complexity of differance by instituting a language of binary oppositions as a pseudo- substitution for differance - as difference. Thus, a trialectic is introduced in and of the sphere of civilizational world making as de-presentation, presentation, and re-presentation as method of perceiving, conceiving, and deceiving world as, fundamentally, other as the produced - from the a priori established position of the one who perceives as ‘the creative (productive) subject’. This created fold in ‘the present’ is as that which can be reproduced

(and thus known) - is also that which creates its binary opposite - deproduction - as the creative destruction of life as historical mechanism of making and structuring ‘life’. Again, here, I gesture to the apparatus of enslavement as crucial to this civilizational process of meaning-making by way of harnessing life to establish and reify the civilizational ‘life’ process. In and with a politics of de-presentation, there is, again, a re-collection of that which, in a pseudo-sense (but also in a very real sense), is lost to and in the mode of Cultural production and reproduction

the soul of life, the nuance of lived experience, and the complexity of lived experience that is irreducible to the introduction of the categorical as definition. Here, deproduction and de-presentation are aligned in the sense that the primary product(ion) of the civilizational mode is the product and production of ‘reality’ as political theatre of acknowledged (by way of a severance with and between the ‘unacknowledged’) ‘life’, which posits itself as life. In this sense, the political theatre of civilization, by way of both the persuasive idea and material force, constitutes and reconstitutes the bounds of itself as externalized, collective, god function. This god function, historically, is that which arbits that which is created and that which is destroyed, that which is empowered and that which is harnessed, that which is sanctified and that which is criminalized; that which is knowledge and that which is madness. The political theatre of presentation and re-presentation (while attempting to disappear de-presentation in its spectacle of productive forms) as dual modes of establishing and reaffirming ‘reality’ as the border of life-making is, again, the discourse of civilization which must, necessarily, exclude the realm of the de-presented in order to become jurisprudent. The exclusion of the de-presented world is not only the exclusion of differance in the name of difference, but, furthermore, the productive erasure of history (here, including the history of civilization) as a selective process of inclusion/exclusion in regarding that which is, again, fundamentally productive for the continued reassertion of its viability as primary governing form, mode, structure, and meaning- making method. The theatre of presentative and re- presentative politics insurrects the grounds for this presupposed path to occur and play out as itself, over and over again, throughout time and space - as the accumulation and
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assimilation of differance by way of its linguistic classification - classified and reclassified as ‘difference’. In this process, a prosthetics of persuasion is brought to bear - by way of the use of storytelling and empowered alteration of material conditions (by way of deploying capital) as conjuring of influential power. This narrative, with regularity, begins with the separation of god from the embodied life; libidinal power from the embodied life, life force from the embodied life - as that which the mediating, governing body promises to return (somewhere) in the arc of its development. However, it is not mentioned that the institution of the governing (or mediating) body is precisely that which revokes, re- possesses, and harnesses the libidinal power away from embodied life for its own developmental purposes. It is precisely for this reason that the political theatre is necessary; that the political theatre is deployed - as the promise of that which, at and in the founding of itself (the civilization which deploys political theatre as an organ of Culture), it deprives embodied life of itself. This is what we are referring to when we are referring to civilization: a linguistic paradox which evokes the word-image of god in order to establish itself as a viable method among life; where, at its root, the very promise of the instated term is against life - in the invocation of that which is and may become ‘civil’, it perversely establishes that which is not and cannot be made ‘civil’ as the shadow of itself. The very process of the institution of civilization is predicated on a primary exclusion. Here, there is no use in asserting an argument over the pre or re- possession of the term ‘civilization’ or of the term ‘human’ - nor is there any use in fighting over the pre-sentation or re-presentation of these terms in the contemporary discourse - as they themselves are lexical arbiters of themselves which will always operate from and a fundamental position of exclusivity. It is in this sense that the concept of ‘profit’ functions at the level of language in the institution of implicit value(s). It is in these terms as founding, operative ideas in and of modernity that the subject/object mode of envisioning life is instituted at the level of the psyche; reproduced at the level of active language in the realm of the everyday by the global subject. This is, of course, manifest in myriad different cultural ways and methods throughout space and time. However, in the invocation of a politics of de- presentation as a method of critical prosthesis as perpetual

gestation - the civilizational mode as a way of seeing is subverted at its root - which is also the root of definition. A politics of de- presentation says ‘the world has never yet come into being, and it never will - precisely because being is an impossible death’; while a politics of representation skips this critical step in the name of the industrial reproduction of images of ‘the world’ as, alternatively, civilized and savage, acculturated and as-yet- without culture. The function of a critical prosthesis is always a function of re-collection, or a re-membrance in the return to embodiment as complexity, de- strictured, de-regulated, unbound, and unknowable - yet understandable. This understanding is the unity of communication at the level of love; at the level of becoming. A critical prosthesis is thus, then, love at the level of social relations; the understanding that an awareness, or consciousness, of becoming is also always already becoming and itself - without beginning or end. This is thus a deeply political mode which, time and time again, consciously and actively fails to restrict itself to a categorical mode because it is aware that the categorical mode is also an impossible death. It is in this sense that a critical awareness of prosthetics shatters the illusion of shattering in its refusal to admit ‘death’ as a truth of life, a settling, a possibility of and for meaning, an end point, or even a break in the flow of perpetual body modification as life.

NOTES ON A MODERN ICONOMACHY

The Making of Meaning

The creation of the ‘world’ is first a creation of the mind: a practice of thinking-through-making; fixing and mooring the apparent ‘life’ (things, bodies, scenes, movements) as it is experienced to category and definition as a ‘rational’ synthesis (or chain of meaning) of the mediating spaces of mind, meaning, and embodiment. This movement, or the movement of s(t)imulated sensation to logos, is the foundational chain of empiricism [made empire] - which tells of ‘self’-qua-‘world’ as the experienced, and thus as ‘true’ life. The formulation of ‘reality’ as [as an empire of the sensible] is as a regulatory, man-made ecosystem of seeing, being, thinking, and feeling by way of the categorization and ordering of that which is experienced - by ordering, or empiricizing - the sensational (the sense) and supra-sensational (the idea of the sense) to create a systematized, coded reality which stabilizes, or normalizes, itself by way of and through a determined way (or method) of seeing, being, and orienting [the empire of empiricism] - as law as ‘reality’. It is this simultaneously legislated (material) and unspoken (cultural) everyday process of imagining-world which harnesses life and subjects it (consenting or coerced?) to the totems of definition-as- law of ‘life’: the ‘human’, the gendered, the raced, the sexed, the bordered, the bound. The endeavor of civilization (to construct and control the bounds of life; thus, the bounds of the possible) is that which both creates and polices the strictures and dictates of ‘life’-as- ‘world’ and life as in world - that which is called the everyday; the relations therein. These dictates as the stone tablets of ‘humanity’, collectively re-imagined, collectively re-assumed, and collectively re-normalized - become the always already spoken (the normalizing violence that is ‘human history’) and unspoken boundaries of that which is known as ‘human existence’, a political and philosophical concept pregnant with the birth and death of all things as they are, and can be, known.

As of the writing of this document, the civilizational process, globalized with exponential advances to technologies of speed of relation - has become all but written global law, legislated with the absolute immediacy of a functional, practical network of already mediated relations of production, distribution, and consumption of the products of labor; labor itself. Dominant cultures are no longer locally or regionally dominant in their establishment of life-norms by way of local acts of violence, coercion, and propaganda (‘legislation’) - but they are global forces: spreading image, text, meaning, and war virtually and physically (read: the collapsing ‘domestic’ and ‘abroad’ as ‘separate’ spheres of influence; the subject and the shadow) with virulent speed. This process itself, ‘civilization’, might also be called a technology of life; a prosthesis long forgotten as prosthetic by the new modernity - a prosthesis one is now convinced of as being organic, or ‘true’ to and at the level of ‘base reality’ - both theoretically and practically as that which allows for life, and that which creates ‘life’ as a category as opposed to ‘death’, or ‘the end’. By the logic of civilization, the civilizational methods of policing (material) and ordering (ideological) existence are all that stands in the way of an all consuming madness: an unknowing, an unseeing, an unwinding, an undefining - of being; furthermore, stand as all that separates the self from a violent death at the hands of the other. This feared ‘all consuming madness’ of de- civilization might be best described as (in following the logic of the empirical binary) the ‘death’ of meaning. Without an ability (or desire) to define the boundaries and borders of self and other, subject and object, body and mind, human and animal, nation and nation as policed, or violently separate, the linear, definite distinctions which formulate the civilized ‘reality’ combust like dead wood, abandoned by that which sustains them - the invested life force of belief. It is in this sense that the death of meaning is always already artificial; that meaning is always already interpretive - that meaning and language (like their ‘civilized’ forms, Literature and Culture as categories of life-making) are buoyed and propelled by the investment of labor, forced and religiously adherent alike. Upon an analysis of how this ‘meaning’ is generated, it is clear that it is nothing more or less than the life force of the collective, invested as an a priori currency, propelling

and propping up the always already cold, mediated, ‘existence’ of the ‘real’. This creeping death of that lifeless thing called ‘meaning’ (or, that which empowers ‘life’ in the world) is at the root of the struggle for a unified reality by way of the establishment of the empire of empiricism, which substitutes itself as the image of ‘life’ in place of life. At this junction of struggle: the lives and worlds of the ‘mad’ (or those divested of and from ‘meaning’) in volatile multiplicity of meanings as a mode of beings - surveilled, policed, and settled as content by the logos controlled consensus s(t)imulation-as-garment of the project of creating a ‘rational’, or ‘sensible’ world, again, produced and re- produced at the level of everyday life. This question (framed by civilization, as it must in order to survive, as an answer) of volatile, multiple modes of existence or ways of being is also a question of knowledge: how knowledge is defined (settled), how knowledge is ordered (made hegemony); ultimately, how knowledge is determined to be true, or known (established as a fundamental, or total, collective, reality). The process of knowledge-making in the civilizational mode is structured in the form of the diacritical argument: ‘to justify the ways of God to man’.

The Death of Images

Among the scholarly debate on the life and times of Heliogabalus, all but erased from the record of history by the guardians of the Roman Empire, there is one certain consensus - made by Decadents and academics alike. In her infamous reign (does it matter if the stories are true?), Heliogabalus flouted every taboo and disdained near every ritualized law of the Roman Empire - being out as a transgender woman, taking multiple wives, flouting her bisexuality, committing multiple renowned, literary mass murders, hiring and firing men based on the size of their genitalia; desecrating the altar of Jupiter and instituting her sun god, Egabalus, as the ruling deity of empire. The thread of Heliogabalus as myth, history, and archetype for defiance of civilization, even as she ruled - was of great influence to the Decadents of the late 19th century. Picked up on by Joris-Karl

Huysmans in his text Against Nature, and again by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (and later, into the 20th century, by Antonin Artaud in his text, The Crowned Anarchist, a sort of ‘creative history’) - Heliogabalus has become not only an icon of and for early queer culture, but an icon of cultures of total dissent, refusal of taboo, and mockery of the rule of law. Through her coming into power, Heliogabalus, albeit for a brief period of time, used the permissiveness of power (read: the ability to control space and time) to ridicule tradition and prostitute herself to herself with erotic, and total, soveriegnty.

Here, Heliogabalus is not unlike Wilde’s Gray (the two encounter one another in Gray’s studies) - who thoroughly takes advantage of his acquired supranatural power (not unlike that of an emperor, but instead of mastery of space, Dorian has acquired the mastery of time) to prostitute himself thoroughly to his every desire - ‘descending’ into the ‘satanic’ depravity of murder, carnal sex, manipulation, and (perhaps most importantly) the consumption of knowledge as transgression - this is to say, as that erotic impulse which swallows the idea of civilization whole in its embodied soul. Dorian permits himself, under the watchful eye of Lord Henry, to enjoy all that life has to offer - before Wilde himself recuperates Dorian at the end of the text (one wonders if this recuperation is ‘truly’ Wilde’s - bringing about, again, the question of the mediating influence of Culture as a mechanism and method itself of surveillance and policing of life made otherwise). The icon of Dorian, depicted by one who loves him (Basil) allows magical transference of Dorian’s life-force to and through the painting - not unlike a ritual sacrifice, where Dorian exchanges ‘life’ (or the image of it, as it were) vis-a- vis his prayer for eternal youth (or so it appears) - a movement which unveils (by way of appearing the disapparent) the refractory, embodied/disembodied complexity of the force of life itself, as a network of relations through which life force flows - through ‘living’ and ‘dead’ ‘things’, alike. This conjuring occurs in and through an externalization, a firm representation or catching, of the condition of the disapparent life force; that which animates - as Huysmans’ de Essenientes proclaims - ‘This admirable artistry had long enthralled him, but now he dreamt of collecting

another kind of flora: tired of artificial flowers aping real ones, he wanted some natural flowers that would look like fakes,’ (Husymans, 83). This digging into the paradox of the appearance of that which is considered ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ at the crucial site of appearance, is referred to by art critic Victor Schlovsky as the process of ‘defamiliarization’: ‘Unlike the realist writer, Wilde does not seek to render a familiar world. He seeks to capture the world’s strangeness - to defamiliarize it,’ (Wilde, 25). This property is simultaneously of ‘the world’ but, in its subliminal quality, of it in such a manner that goes beyond worldly conception; thus, supersedes definition. This process of ‘defamiliarization’ reaches its peak in the atomic, supra-modern arts and methods of the British painter Francis Bacon and the French polymath Antonin Artaud. Bacon’s creative process, perhaps most emblematic and detailed in the painting Painting 1946, is that which connects British aestheticism’s first ‘martyr’, Wilde, with its last, Bacon. Furthermore, ‘Artaud’s problem’, certainly most emblematic in and as Artaud’s obsessed (im)possibility of embodiment under the hood of a sexuated society, sutures Artaud inextricably to the first atomized depiction of the underlying psycho-social, psycho-sexual condition of global, civilizational, modernity - Wilde’s carefully rendered, highly theoretical ‘picture’ of Dorian Gray.

If one conceives of ‘human history’ as an arbitrarily (hegemonically) recorded process detailing the rise and fall of societies, civilizations, and empires by way of corruption, disease, plague, invasion, and transgression, one can see just how the life- work of Heliogabalus in and through Roman culture (as a knife, herself) already eulogizes the quickly modernizing (and quickly crumbling) Culture of Empire (for here, the Culture of Empire is nothing less than Empire itself) as empiricism made dead body of law - emblematized by Wilde in the classic character of Dorian as he confronts the strictures of historicized ‘life’(; furthermore, in the eulogizing of Dorian as Heliogabalus over and over again in Bacon’s works): ‘As he looked back upon Man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self- torture and self-denial,

whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they sought to escape,’ (Wilde, 192). It is in the work of Heliogabalus (; later, of course, the creative and de-creative life-work of Dorian and Wilde) that the farce of civilizational mechanisms of ‘life’-making and life-mediation are laid all too bare - as attempts to control and order that which is always already beyond order and control - the missives of the ineffable, erotic soul.

Without the ability (read: str(i/u)ctures in place (moral, ethical, religious, cultural, and governmental)) to transgress, Dorian cannot transgress. This is to say, that the murder of Wilde by the British public - and Wilde’s murder of Dorian - are bookended by a civilizational process that does not, and must not (in a religious and literal sense) allow for difference - or that which transgresses the created civilizational taboo - which in turn, creates, structures, and enforces the legal reality of civilization. This civilizationally structured and ordered ‘difference’ (which is not the poetic difference of many meanings in relation, but the binaristically coded difference of moral order), is itself that which bottlenecks the poetic difference in a choiceless choice, a sieve through which the entirety of the complex neural networks of existence must funnel in order to make sense. In Dorian Gray, as in Against Nature, difference is and becomes the erotic desire to life-make - the desire to live otherwise, to think otherwise, to feel otherwise, to fuck otherwise, to know otherwise, to individuate by way of engagement with; the desire to bring one’s life force into the world. This desire for self-knowledge by way of self- exploration (read: the exploration of the many myriad of selves, unsutured by the binaristic code of civilization), is that which must be controlled in order to manufacture the bordered image of a functional, existent, coherent, contained, ‘safe’ society - visible and satirized in the slippery borders of Wilde’s London ‘proper’ and London ‘improper’; exploded in the unbound immediacy of embodied movement in the works and worlds of Francis Bacon. In the case of Heliogabalus (and of Dorian, later in the text), the consequences of willfully discarding the hegemonic garments of civilization are absolute and fatal -

whether by the silent, phantom hand of ‘morality’ (read: that which formally ‘does not exist’, created by the legislating body to violently enforce the bounds of ‘existence’), or by the outward, public, social mechanism of law itself. These consequences, themselves too created, serve to illustrate a wall; the impenetrable wall through which nothing passes - or, the end of ‘the world’: ‘it is not possible to transgress these bounds’.

The Witches’ Sabbath

The intersection of paganism and Christianity; ‘the civilized’ and ‘the savage’ as dialectical forces (simultaneously imagined and made quite real) within and without British civilization has been depicted throughout the history of British literature; detailed, notably, in the presence of Bertha and Jane’s allusions to enslavement in Jane Eyre, the hauntings of Catherine and Heathcliff, respectively, in Wuthering Heights, and the legacy of the land and rape as a method of civilizing in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. This dialectical force is the tension of the passage of time through and as that which transforms of space; a process of continued de-creation and creation of the human myth and grounds for the human myth (read: the land upon which the empire is ‘built’) by the ideological order which makes its sovereign claim in, by, and through belief. Consequently, it is that which, at its core and essence, demands its own paganism, or breakage of law (belief as the leap to ‘god’) - that attempts to establish and structure itself as that which is sovereign to life; furthermore, that which is designed to rule; that which is able to discern the word of god in its jurisprudence, a jurisprudence which attempts to mediate life. The fascinating examples of Heliogabalus and Dorian stand as archetypal cases of the ‘jurisprudence of empire’ detonated from the inside - a sort of extravagant, deeply effective camp of ‘history’ - two figures at the cultural and political center of civilizational power appropriating said power to the expression and fulfillment of that which civilization must not allow manifest. This direct and explicit undermining of civilization stands, with myriad historical examples of revolt - as part of a dis-foundational current of total

refusal of the imposed bound, described best by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his journals: ‘It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness that evil lies deeper in human beings than our socialist-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it has always been; that abnormality and sin arise from that soul itself; and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges,’ (Dostoevsky, 424). This archeology of evil (which here is nothing more than the archeology of that which lies beyond the ability to conceive of, or legislate, an order), performed by Wilde, Dostoevsky, Artaud, Bacon, and Heliogabalus alike - is the bringing out of all mad (read: multiple) desire into the open of the ‘definite world’ - for the judges, filled with horror, to truly see.

Bacon’s incarnation of deep, subliminal evil (literally, in meat) in his Painting 1946, is a summoning of the black moon of history, or the collective psyche of ‘filthy’, ‘carnal’, and ‘grotesque’ desire, embodied desire - the ‘evil’ which always escapes the civilizational process of ordering the apparent world. Unlike many other attempts to incarnate the destroyed corpse of Dorian in visual form, Bacon succeeds, time and time again, simply in his abandonment of structuring thought: 'I had drawn something totally different and out of this suggestion arose this picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another’ (Bacon). The accident of Painting 1946 (which is also the accident of history) leads Bacon directly into the territory, or channeling, of bringing about the subconscious (that place which bleeds between the collective): a paradoxical phenomenon and ability which might be described as a supranatural summoning of that which is ‘not there’, through the axis of embodied gesture, into the realm of that which is ‘there’ - much in the manner of Dorian’s wish for life through and with the painting becomes as a medium of and for the conveyance of life to and into ‘life’ (Dorian’s life-force transferred into a mediating relationship with the ‘image’ as fetish object; religious icon). The picture of Dorian, as with Bacon’s works - comes to embody not the ‘decay’

of Dorian’s mortal soul (a superficial, highly religious reading of the text), but a depiction of the life process and like-making as mediated by civilization as the archetype of Dorian. In the moment of Dorian’s wish, a transaction occurs, where Dorian, quite literally, loses his life as his. ‘His’ life becomes at once incarnated and disincarnated, by and through the painting as a medium which configures and reconfigures his flesh as he engages and disengages with life - in short, Dorian loses his always already imagined individuality. This dialectic (a supranatural encounter with the death of classical liberalism as a politics of representation that refuses to acknowledge that what it represents is only itself; violently depresenting that which is ‘other’ to its conjured image), framed by Wilde (a notorious lover of the visual arts who once wished to be a painter), is too embodied in the figural works of Bacon, who, drawing from the legacy of van Gogh, unleashes his painting as that which cannot be civilized; as that which is beyond, in its conjuring (and theorizing) of life force energy, that which attempts to harness it for the purpose of structuring and ordering ‘reality’ as an order of apparent things. This is to say, that in the works of van Gogh and Bacon, it is revealed to the collective that there is indeed a deeper, ‘more true’ reality - a reality which is simultaneously seen and unseen - but, furthermore, a reality which requires a concerted metaphysics of sight; an embodied practice in and through which one might observe the unobservable. It is no mistake that van Gogh’s works are collectively seen as and remarked upon as a firm break in and from the historical current of ‘Painting’ - if not simply in the sense that they represent a sort of beyond-mad reality, a beyond reality only accessible in and through the current of what Artaud calls ‘authentic madness’ - the madness of consciously chosen abandon. It is through this abandon - the abandonment of definite ‘life’ (; thus, the abandonment of the ‘empire of empiricism’), that the apparent and disapparent worlds may be resolved and mediated as embodied life-practice.

Catharsis

The notion of catharsis, as initially elucidated by Aristotle in The Poetics, is the guiding conceptual framework for this civilizational process - from Christ and Heliogabalus to the contemporary moment: ‘Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions,’ (Aristotle, The Poetics). In the now-modern double meaning of the term, both the dramatic letting of emotions, and in the medico-pagan letting of blood, it is Wilde’s Gray and and Wilde himself, along with Artaud’s theoretical texts on the discipline of theatre, which show civilization its own method - the method of purgation of the other by and through the blood of that which is (coded) as opposed to the civil. This process is also how the legacies of those who dissented civilization (; those who were fed, publicly, to its Moloch) are posthumously ordered; it is in this manner that Christ is made iconographic religion, Marx is made iconographic religion, and Wilde’s Gray is made a ‘story’, or work of ‘narrative Literature’ - not as life-works which perform acts of deep philosophical incision into the inner workings of civility and its totem created meanings, values, and images - too, created works which found the definite norms of the always political, always productive ‘reality’. Much as Artaud refers to van Gogh as the man suicided by society, so too does Wilde bring about and speak of Dorian, who performs a similar function as cathartic archetype in relation to civilization - by embodying and enacting all of the psychological weight of the society, he is at once elevated, scorned, and suicided. The modern pop star performs a similar function - in the sense that the pop star embodies (or ‘acts out’) the classically liberal dream of total social, political, and material freedom - they have become the individual - and thus, the pop star cannot any longer exist as one among; instead elevated into an archetypal role, position; imagistic display of power as a symbol of what modern civilization claims to be possible - which is only, of course, possible for the pop star as

representative of and for the excellence of cultural hegemony. This screening of life by way of hegemonically imposed and generated social roles as implicit law of ‘life’ is that which positions modern civilization both as and behind a series of images which serve as organizing principles for the religious caste of meaning, purpose, and power - the very principles which fuel and justify the continued manufacturing of civilization as the method of ‘life’.

By way of the ordered sewing of disciplinary culture (that which mediates and generates meaning as a collective ‘state’) into the fabric of everyday life, civilizational catharsis - genocide, murder, war crimes, and other acts deployed by the state - are no longer themselves actions committed by organs of the state, subject to judgement and criticism (like all action) but instead, mediated as necessary by disciplinary culture (as a ‘skipped step’), they are become always already necessary in order for the continued survival of civilization. In short, they are simply part of the process which allows for ‘life’; that which secures the walls of the city from the violent coming of the other. The images which reify and deify its necessity (both of and for civilization itself and its continued enforcement) as symbols of the absolute power of civilization by way of conferring meaning onto and into the project of ‘the world’ as known, constructed, and defined - also function to structure ‘life’ of and for the collective under the civilizational axis. These images, as all images are, are shit (to invoke Artaud’s theory of culture); thus, are always already disposable and reside behind the highly religious a priori belief that they can represent anything other than that which creates them - namely, here, the ideological and practical mechanism of civilization. So it is with the image of representative government. In so many words, the images of the power of civilization (its organs of Culture and political theatres) are become modern icons at the feet of which to desecrate or refuse them is to sin against the mechanism which makes life possible - to go against a displaced, radically secularized god. The culture of civilization proclaims, ‘without civilization, life is not possible’.

Whether or not the painting of Dorian truly contains his soul, or a manifestation of his ‘sins’ is simply irrelevant. It is the process of mediation itself by and through which the ‘invisible’ life becomes, too, ‘visible’ life, or through that magic (known to modernity as the process of making capital, or the creation and subsequent filling of the fetish object with value and worth - the currency of life-force as invested into material) which is clearly and completely articulated in Basil’s painting and Dorian’s wish at the incisive hand of Oscar Wilde. The conjuring of the image of Dorian by Basil as a fetish object (created love), imbued by Dorian with the power of religion; the power of aspirational prayer and the spelling of desirous belief - elevates the painting to that of an icon which mediates Dorian’s life and conveys judgement by way of imagistic refraction - a refraction which reconfigures and images Dorian’s actions as its own. To gesture to Marx’s Grundrisse: ‘The appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – ‘as though its body were by love possessed,’ (Marx, 623). Dorian’s works in the world are, quite literally, transferred into and through the painting as the mediating fetish object, prophesying the text itself, and mimicking the creation of ‘the world’ by the imbibing of materiality with life-making as meaning-making. This is to say that Wilde suggests a sort of double mediation: that just as Dorian’s staging is mediated by the painting (he is introduced by way of a collective gazing into and upon the image; he is exited by the intimate rupture of its surface), Dorian’s life-force is mediated by the painting, as a conduit through and to which currencies (as meaning, value, and life-force energy) are conferred. This echo can be seen all too clearly in Dorian’s gazes into the painting, where he gazes into something, and something gazes back into him. This is no literal mirror, of course, but a meta- realistic image - where the supposed boundaries of individual and collective action, action and consequence, belief and law intersect and combust; where the modern social orders of egotism, linearity, narrative, and logos crumble entirely - to reveal the innate ‘evil’ (as termed by civilization) against civilization: the evil of that which is always already also itself; the artifice of its attempt to erase its determined (in its definite assertion of individuated ‘self’) ‘other’. Dorian is confronted by and with this base truth as he thrusts the

knife that killed (one of) its maker(s) into the canvas of his mediated reality, and dies along with it.

Condemnation of Memory

Just as Heliogabalus could not be truly erased from history, so too does catharsis (as the tool by and through which civilization lets itself of the taboo) - remain as a constant and continual reminder of what lies on ‘the other side of civilization’; the other side of the body (accurately depicted as rendered shadow by the civilizational efficiency of the atom bomb) - madness, ‘darkness’, death, difference, magic, superstition, fate, prophecy, poetry, and otherwise

as that which must be exiled, or bled, from the logos city of civilization. These forces - which take their form in the lived experience of those deemed a ‘threat’ to the order of civilization, Dorian’s portrait, Bacon’s incarnations, Artaud’s incantations, and in the deeply lived, poetic detonation of totemic meaning - all stand among the ‘other’ history that is damned to reality: the repressed erotic, the suppressed animalia, and that which resides in the blocked, the black, the refused, the disjected. It is no coincidence, then, that Artaud was obsessed with shit, calling it god; likening the very processes of the creation and disjection of waste from the body to the creation of Culture as a synthetic bacterium of idea, belief, and influence - a perpetually imminent movement of constitution and deconstitution of the body. Just as much as civilization produces itself, it disjects itself - its supposed ‘other self’ - as waste, into that which is un-seen and buried like an animal burying its own shit: the genocides erased, the murders quieted, the wars justified, the abuses silenced, the life- makings beaten, the land razed.

This dialectic of the representative and the hidden away (or ‘de- presented’) continues ad infinitum in the cataloguing of the sanctified discourses (as Culture) and Histories of the British, French, and Roman Empires - that which is and has been ordained as the truth of modern life as the everyday; that which

has been beheaded and wiped from the record. The multiple editions of Wilde’s Gray stand trial, along with myriad other works - to the inability of civilization to confront its own repressive and violent initiatives; the supra-nature of these texts is that which haunts their world as shadow. The works of Blake (in the vein of Wilde), as well as the myriad Orientalist texts and texts fetishizing slavery constructed at the hands of white Britons (Aphra Behn’s Oroonko and William Beckford’s Vathek prominent), attest to this basic inability of the British public (across social and political lines) to confront the violence of empire and colony which powers these works into existence. This is, in no short order, a created collective ritual of denial, mediated by images of progress and punctuated by the cathartic moments which, temporally, breach then suture the screen. Gray, as a nuclear de-presentative (read: becoming-in the atomized container; exploded) of the larger British social, political, and literary tradition - puts the very tradition into which it is later canonized on trial for its political theatre of constructed denial; just as Bacon’s paintings mourn that which has already come to pass by way of a normalized culture of repression - which is, by and large, that which situates the entirety of ‘human history’. It is in this sense that after and with the works of Wilde, Bacon, and Artaud as nuclear figures to their respective traditions - there is no canon, as there never was. Just as Bacon willfully (albeit of course, admiringly) satirizes van Gogh and Velasquez, Wilde camps the entirety of the hypocritical British social order (along with the Gothic in his masterful execution of a sublime narrative which, superficially, ‘drives’ the text - unmasked here as theory-work); Artaud, simply, satirizes the very notion of sanity. Each of these figures acts as a nuclear force to the traditions they work within (and ultimately, without) as simulated spaces, or blocs, of hegemonic power - exploding them in their bordered artifice in order to escape life force from them; ultimately, to create a unified living theatre of life as life - disinheriting and dethroning the image as that which arbits the ‘real’ by way of mediation - returning the real to itself with the immediacy of embodied life-practice. This is, again, to gesture to Wilde as first and foremost a theorist and philosopher - with Bacon and Artaud too as poetic, aesthetic, and political theorists - in their ability to explode the pseudo-traditions of text,

image, and sound both formally and methodically; craft projects which transverse and tear asunder the arbitrary bounds of theory and novel (Wilde), madness and sanity (Artaud), time and space (Bacon), and ultimately, the simulated bounds of the political theatre which constructs and determines ‘reality’ as law.

Drag

The astonishment felt by the ‘civilized’ as the ‘uncivilized’ (by way of the act of living) transgresses civility and embodies the ‘dark’ life which itself (as imagined other) founds civility from without - is the astonishment of those who cannot reconcile the Janus price required by civilization in order to civilize - which is to say, the commission and deployment of the very uncivilized acts which found civilization. This is to say that the astonishment of the civil collective at and in viscerally encountering blackness; otherness is the astonishment of the disapparent made apparent. The work of the agent of transgression (that life defined and enforced as ‘against’ the civilized image of ‘life’), then, is the embodied, living proof (however briefly) of the glass bounds of ‘transgression’ themselves; the recollection of the artificial separations of life and death, right and wrong, human and inhuman, the real and the unreal, body and paper, madness and sanity - the very refractive glass through which the civilized collective obtains its imaged view of ‘the other’. This is why it is entirely necessary for civilization and its organs to behead and disappear Heliogabalus, just as it is also necessary for the brutal legacy of civilization (as that which commits the executive acts of conjuring and disappearance) to die under the censor of manufactured culture so civilization may live. The method of civilization (merely a part of the complex, poetic relation of life), so elucidated in the contra-civilizational art-theoretical works of Wilde, Artaud, and Bacon is fundamentally and deeply uncivilized - because it is the work of making ‘the human’ as a category of life by way of punishing, repressing, and disappearing ‘the inhuman’ - replacing the embodied life with the image of ‘life’; the embodied inhuman with the mediated image of the inhuman.

On Rupture & Suicide

It is the method of getting-rid-of by way of catharsis as a pseudo ‘disappearing act’ which continually fails the process of civilization; a civilization which cannot rid itself of the blood it has spilled, nor the disreputable Dorian, nor the ‘authentic madness’ of Artaud and van Gogh, nor the perversion of Heliogabalus - simply because these manifestations, as elucidated by Dostoevsky, are fundamentally a part of life - beyond the ‘human being’’s willingness and ability to conceive of or ‘image- ine’ ‘humanity’ as life. The failure to see the sur-real condition of incarnation as organs, flesh, feces, meat, the violent consumptive urge, desire, fleeting idea, fleeting body; disincarnation - is that which animates the tale of Dorian Gray.

Dorian’s dream of immortality in youth is that selfsame dream of the endless consumptive glory which preoccupies the machine of empire - in short, the eating of without forever; the glory of a shitless existence where all is becoming-in; the bowels are displaced to the continent of out of sight, out of mind. This is the fetishization of a fantasy imaged idea of ‘humanity’ and ‘life’ which comes to grip life by the throat - as that which destroys the possibility of life, itself, in the process of forcibly inserting the fetish image into and through its object: the apparent, immediate, always-already-incomplete ‘world’ which it calls ‘reality’. It is by way of the literal and total embodiment of this method that Artaud is haunted unto death by that which he is able to imagine, able to see, able to know and that which he is, in fact, able to do and understand in and through his body - which is to say, the limitations of incarnate, sensitive life attempting to ‘possess’ or ‘know’ itself. Artaud’s drawings and spells, in particular, are fascinating examples of his conception of the body as perpetually dejected, incomplete and thus exiled; ultimately, standing for and as Artaud’s furious creation of his own body - his attempt to go beyond the body by fashioning the body. This haunted method lies too at the soul of Decadence (in the icon of Heliogabalus); it is also present in Huysmans’ Against Nature, where des Esseintes is possessed by his distended and broken body; driven constantly to produce methods of communing with

himself ‘beyond’ the body by way of conjuring a ‘true’ manifestation which he cannot embody, only access briefly - through perfumes, memory, literature, the decorative arts, and imagination - by way of prosthetics. This is to speak of the transnegation of life elucidated by Wilde in Dorian Gray - the impasse of a created reality as everyday life; a created reality always mediated by a fundamental break, or separation as the mediated image - a symbolic order which structures ‘life’; in the structuring of this ‘life’, too, the impossibility of life.

This archetype of tortured, unreachable, unknowable consciousness qua mind qua object of ‘life’ stands at the height of a modernity which is, itself, refracted - a consciousness which already has everything ( as it always already is ‘everything’: des Essientes is always already ‘at home’ - furnished, like Dorian, with all excess) and thus, can do absolutely nothing. It cannot truly die; it cannot truly live - as neither death nor life are anything. In short, the civilizational method which attempts to qualify consciousness trapped, in place and in time, rapidly gaining access to the ‘entirety of the world and knowledge’ by way of a machination of life, as it were, without anything left to chase (as the ‘world’ reaches a mapped conclusion) but itself as understanding, without anything to wage war against but its own shadow; without anywhere to go but deeper into the caverns of its own fragmented and feared psyche - the selfsame underworld spaces which it used to convince itself of its ‘reality’. It is just as soon as the world is ‘known’ (possessed by autopsy maps) that the poverty of the soul reaches critical mass; this is precisely the historical moment in and from which Wilde pens Dorian and popular psychoanalytics spring forth. The explosion of technological and industrial revolution through Baudelaire and Husymans into Artaud, Bacon, and the contemporary moment only further spells this Cultural anxiety qua detonation of consciousness - the anxiety of a divine right which can no longer justify itself in the face of a collapsing paradigm - its established order.

The coming world of Dorian’s final act - in slashing the painting and ending his life (itself a work of life-making and un-making

transposed into and onto Basil’s, a collapsing of Dorian’s imaged ‘life’ and Dorian’s life), this cataclysmic breaking, or shattering, of the dialectical glass which sets the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ is Bacon’s historical moment - just as it is the moment of the Absurdists playwrights who follow in the footsteps of Wilde - the moment of nuclear modernity. Bacon does not just do away with representation - he eulogizes the very possibility of it. In a world shattered by the introduction of nuclear time - ‘always-already- now’ ‘always-already- done’ ‘always-already-dead’ - Bacon’s figures and Artaud’s spells populate the underworld of beyond- space and beyond-time, a world of crystallized suffering, eternal madness; a world where the screams of the dead and dying echo on and forever in the screams of the living. Bacon’s figures, in their disfigural dance, eulogize even the possibility of ‘being human’, while Artaud’s works stretch and snap the very concept of the body, saying, ‘this is where I am located, this wound of the body is where I mark the page, puncture the page, murder the page’. As Bacon and Artaud insurrect it, this chaotic, massive, growing, suffering, groaning indiscernibility is the source of and behind even the attempt to conceive of ‘humanity’ and conjure ‘civilization’, the very ‘evil’ Dostoevsky prophesied can never be remedied or controlled; the source of Dorian’s desire, roused by the words of Lord Henry and cultivated by the poisonous book - the ouroboratic legacy of perpetually buffeting force, life drive, death drive, and, indeed, mad violence of histories both told and untold, seen and unseen, professed and denied. Dorian’s study of history, world culture, and the occult in Chapter Nine of the text reveals a telling period of ambiguity between Dorian’s place within civilization and history and his firm break from it by and through the understanding that the history of civilization is equally as infamous, ambiguous, occult, violent, lusty, and thoroughly uncivilized as his own latent desires and motivations to live. It is this study which ‘liberates’ Dorian - much in the way des Essientes’ study occults him in Against Nature: it is an archetypal study which marks the Decadent Movement, itself - a study of histories, cultures, and methods which reveals the deeply contradictory process of meaning- organization which structures society, and the barely contained violent, erotic essences which frame, color, and animate it. The life- force, as viewed by the civilizational mechanism, is the highly unstable, volatile process

(much in the way of nuclear fission itself; the fission of Dorian’s life) which must be stabilized by organizing, ordering forces (in their nature repressive, containing) in order to create and maintain the state of ‘civility’ - or, to establish the state of precarious control of life. In light of the explosion of the structures of civilization-making, the life-works of Artaud, Heliogabalus, Wilde, and Bacon are not just literary, or ‘artistic’ works, but urgent political works of making-life in the face of artificially imposed and enforced impossibility - works which shatter the glass of the cultural hegemony of ‘reality’. The slashes Dorian makes at his transfigured work, once made so consumptively ‘real’ at the loving hand of Basil Hallward, are the same slashes and burns made into and through the incantatory works of Artaud - piercing the image-work of ‘reality’ and puncturing into life, into that which lies, always, beneath imagism, screen-work, and the iconographic. It is in this manner that a sort of violent cabal of magick unites the works of Heliogabalus, Dorian, Wilde, Bacon, and Artaud across time - a willingness, desire, and urgent ability to commit acts termed by the religious society about them as ‘violent’, ‘wrong’, ‘satanic’, ‘perverse’, and ‘mad’ - in the name of the beating desire to live, deeply and entirety. Their works as defiant actions of life-making stand as works of anti- civilizational iconomachy, hostile to the process of image mediation which captivates and directs social order; together beckoning further, deeper - to the sight of sight, archetypal vision, and the underworlds of existence.

THE LIVING THEATRE

The culmination of my works of this period is in the concept of the living theatre as prosthetic carnival of valuation. There is little more that need be said on the subject of how valuation comes about in the sphere of culture as politics after the works of Marx, Adorno, and Benjamin on the subject. However, what remains to be spoken is precisely how the mechanism of perceived ‘embodiment’, or how the body and mind as possessed; productive realities is connected to this manufacturing of ‘reality’ as simultaneously process and product. The true madness of humanity (and simultaneously that which defines humanity) is the identification with the body, mind, and the ‘things’ therein as that which constitutes the self; furthermore, that which is the simulated utmost boundary between the apparent and disapparent; that which is, and that which is yet to come. To understand history as itself a production, one need look no further than the concept of the body as the location of the fundamental subject; furthermore, the house of the soul. There has been much historical-material work done in regards to the conditions of bodies and life in and as space - but there has been little that firmly, and ultimately, disavows the material as little more than a product of the political imagination. It is from this place that all concepts are razed; furthermore, it is from this place that a critique of ‘reality’ may begin - at the root of language as the root of the body. The site of determined reality is twofold: the sensed reality and the larger social and cultural reality, both of which are in perpetual dialogue with one another as the transmission and elocution of culture as the bacterium of language - that which permeates the language used by the body to define itself. This determined reality as twofold is, of course, the product of a historically imagined separation between ‘things’ made ‘reality’; which is to say, firmly implanted and impositioned into the language of the body; thus, into the very conception of the body itself. The living theatre is no more and no less than the sphere of relations between living bodies, structured by the screen of reality, which simultaneously gives language to the apparition of things, and

takes their language from them. To understand this concept as the undercurrent of history, one must continually press past the idea of history as anything more or less than an imagined structure; furthermore, the idea of material as anything more than that which is a priori imagined and constructed by life forces - the realm and sphere of politics itself. The tragedy of the modern is that these constructed spheres and apparatuses are not only taken to be fundamentally existent (and thus fundamentally true, or irradicable); but that they are taken with the seriousness of an audience consumed by their spectacle. This is the deeply consumptive nature of institutional structures which function at the level of language as working through the body - in that they convince themselves of themselves by structuring their relation as necessarily true by way of embodiment. The living theatre, in this sense, is populated by consenting and dissenting discourses and struggles over that which has never existed; yet, has become real to the point of which the spectacle of their conjuring has swallowed the witness whole. There is no longer the capacity to view these happenings with the detached perspective of one in the gallery, as the gallery itself; along with the body and mind, has been entirely prepossessed by the structuring influence of language at the level of syntax, diacritics, and ultimately, communication.

The myth of the possibility of discourse has permeated language. This is to say that, there is a belief, at the root of the concept of ‘being-human’ that there is such a thing as mutual reception, or the ability to give and receive meaning by way of structured language which attempts to suture the artificial gap between the very ‘things’ and social relationships it creates (in its cultural structuring as economic process). There is, at the level of the collective, a consensus that the silent scream of the soul, or the silence of god, may yet be somehow given ‘coherence’; thus, articulation. If I am attempting to express myself, or communicate, surely I am attempting to ‘say something’. The language formation itself as that which presents itself as the primary method of knowledge production and elucidation refuses itself the impossibility of meaning-making; furthermore, cannot acknowledge that pure meaning, or definition, is

impossible - as this would collapse the political structuring of language as the first method of economizing life. Without this language-as-foundational method, language would be returned, unconscripted, to its origins (which even now persist) - language as the scream, language as the scrawl, language as the babbling, language as the grunt, language as the groan, language as the grasping-for expression. This is the cosmic joke of the living theatre, a theatre which, by way of playing itself out for itself, must establish the body and language as ‘real’, or ‘legible’ sites by and through which meaning, information, and knowledge may pass and form networks of coherence. This, itself, is a project of meaning making which founds even the pseudo-possibility of politics, and the battleground and battles therein. This case much resembles the moment Krishna reveals Vishvarupa to Arjuna; presenting the impossible image of god to the aspirant. To see language itself as the grasping for the articulation of god as the unity of the soul is to, itself, abolish the concept of language and return to gesture (of the mouth, of the hand, of the body) as that which always returns the primacy of expression to itself, without hierarchy; imminent. The living theatre depends precisely on the ignorance of the spectator (who becomes subsumed by its illusion as ‘being the world’) of this fundamental truth of the breaking of even the language and the body as ‘true sites’ in order to institute its conjurance - a conjurance which relies on the imposition of these basic forms as truths in order to build representative replicas of them as buildings, houses, films, states, factories, and devices. It is precisely this reproduction of that which does not exist which produces ‘existence’ as a phenomenon which may be elucidated, or connected, by and through language as the device which may then, thus, explain these phenomena, or ‘make sense’ of them as experienced, experienceable. The mistake of identifying with the body and with language as the discourse of the body with the world - as elucidated by Siddharameshwar - is the inciting moment of this cyclical violence.

The critical thought must return to this artificial site by way of peeling back the layers of artificial modes of production and reproduction as screens of that which it presupposes as its

grounds - which is to say, the body of the individual, the body of the collective, the body of productive and produced objects, the body of the earth, and thus, in the institution of these bodies, the separations between them. This primary philosophy of meaning and meaning-making is, throughout the development of new technologies and industrial methods, expedited to the point of which its figuration is blurred, or made increasingly difficult to discern - while nonetheless, still, presupposing the existence of a primary form. This is precisely the artificial difficulty of language as ‘communication’, as a chasing of the meaning behind the symbol as an image-mirage, behind which, of course, there is nothing. The symbol of the text asserts itself as imminent and primary, while evoking nothing; behind which is nothing but the primary assertion of itself as gesture. The art of painting, here, is useful in returning the living theatre to itself in the sense that the visceral act of painting does not; cannot, separate itself from the gesture of the arm and the hand as that which manifests itself. This phenomenon is what Picasso regards when he says that he paints not with the brain of the brain, but with the brain of the arm. This is to say that language is always already dislocal and delocal from that place which it is presupposed to be - as it is everywhere, all at once, in myriad forms of ‘legibility’. The indiscernibility of language and the body is precisely due to that these modes and methods are always already becoming processes which expand and contract in accordance to the situation at hand. This is to say, that they are prostheses, utilized by the self; ultimately nonexistent - in the sense that they simply cannot be conscripted in any meaningful, systematic way to say or do anything. However, life as primary expression has continually been conscripted as such - in the building of pyramids, the writing of legislature, the judging of criminals, the harvesting of crops, the writing of the books of god - as manners and matters of the utmost importance. Here, the survival of the language is nothing more or less than the survival of the imagined body.

To forget the world as nonexistent; as always already prosthesis, or (more accurately) imagined limb of the soul - is to found a politics based on some form of, or the very possibility of - elucidating reality. This is, again, the struggle that is unseen and

swerved in the works of Marx and Benjamin (and their various inheritors) - in the sense that there is the appeal to an existent realm of politics with existent struggles and existent discourses. This work is crucial to the establishment and re-establishment of political reality, as it always already works within it by way of acknowledging it - an acknowledgement which perpetuates the very myth of power and struggle. The work of Simone Weil; primarily, her description of force as the subject of history - presses back against historical- materialism, itself a theology of politics - in the sense that it refuses to acknowledge a separation at any level of existence. Weil, in the calling up of force, does not reduce force to a body or discourse of political power - but as that which permeates everything. Here, Weil refuses to get lost in the artificial establishment of history as artefact; correctly focusing on force as that which is without time, without space; within and without everything and their relations. To this, I would simply add and correlate force to life as, again, gesture; expression. What lies behind the play of the living theatre; that which it manipulates at all levels of its various wars within and against itself, is the play of life force - a life force which subjects itself and is subjected to all sorts of perversions, reflections, and refractions of itself by way of institutions of meaning, knowledge, language, and boundaries/borders as that which attempt to arbit it from the outside in. This is to say that the extensions of the body continue the myth of the body - asserting something which does not exist; furthermore, by way of this assertion, hold a kangaroo court into and by way of life force as artificial separation. The institutions of the body (civilization and its organs) by way of their replications of the imagined body (brain, ears, eyes, mouth, nose) attempt to direct and redirect life force in order to continually establish and reestablish itself - as it is ultimately nothing more or less than a corpse, through which life force passes carelessly. It is in this very manner and matter that language also functions to (apparently) animate the fundamentally inanimate. There is no example more pertinent here than the effect and affect of the scream as that which shatters the logic of these boundaries in its sheer heightened expressive life force. Here, also, violent penetration and violent expulsion as that which reveals the secret truth of the body - as nothing more than the animated puppet harnessed by the life

force to accomplish this or that. The living theatre revels in this illusion; using it to bolster itself, pleasure in itself, and raise this farce to the level of, simultaneously, epic comedy and epic tragedy - all the while meaning nothing, saying nothing, and signifying nothing other than itself. This theatre extends itself far beyond the realm of imagined politics and the imagined discourses of language in that it parodies them as it consumes them - in the manner of Saturn swallowing his children. The living theatre is thus the massive body which swallows all bodies, all discourses, all methods, all struggles, all history - as Vishvarupa itself.

The spell which the modern collective is under is precisely this - revelry and absorption in incomplete sight of the god image; chasing that which remains in order to complete the impossible image. This method, also known as ‘knowledge-production’ is that which charges the currency of life force to animate world as a made-reality of constant harnessing and thrusting of force into and through the screen of the living theatre, puncturing holes in its veil in order to attempt to collect that which ‘must be’ collected - the original image, the original body, the original word, the original language, the original truth - which is itself founded upon a nonexistent myth of the past as having ever contained such a thing. This is to say that the living theatre itself simulates the very possibility of the body and the language as that which it must simulate to conduct itself; thus, these ‘things’ cannot be found but by engaging these pseudo-possibilities within the realm of the living theatre. Artaud discusses the moment of the breakdown of the living theatre as the total breakdown of the presumption of the social and political spheres as the moment in and at which true theatre begins; this moment is nothing more or less than the death of all illusions and social games - the moment at which there is no conduct or conscription beyond the wildness of embodied existence - a wildness which is directly connected to the paradox of embodiment without the illusion of the body, which is also, necessarily, embodiment without the illusion of language. This is precisely the moment at which the political reality as living theatre ceases to exist; the moment at which life becomes possible. It may be helpful here to

conceive of the soul as the disapparent Reality, but with the appendages of the ‘real’ attached to it: technologies, screens, arms, legs, heads, histories, houses, instruments - in the shape of quite a difficult thing - as conveyed to Arjuna by Brahman. It is in this sense that not even Krishna exists, but as a manifestation, or apparition, of Brahman. This analytics of, and ultimately, refutation of, historical materialism, is also a refutation of the icons and godheads which populate simultaneously the fields of religion and politics as that which arbit and judge the terms and conditions of reality - terms and conditions they produce and reproduce with their language - which is nothing more than a cover, a cover which pretends the possibility of being as legible.

FROM DEATH TO DEATH

‘This world is nothing. At best it is only a hideous caricature, a shadow of Reality. I do not see that what you call progress in the world is other than the multiplication of desires.’ – Vivekananda

Man lives the entirety of human history at all times. He who goes from death to death may ‘know’ this, but he does not understand it. For to understand this phenomenon would be to immediately cease every action and conception devoted to the icon of progress; that which is ‘good’ and ‘human’ – in light of the opening of that which might be described as the horror of history, elucidated in the flash of a moment. This man would no longer exist in the world of the senses, but instead strive to know god.

The conception of politics as man in relation to world and the spiritual are deeply intertwined; exist at the root as one base method. The personal-ethical mode, or that which informs the actions of the individual on the material plane – are swayed at one by that which he believes he must do (god), and that which he believes he should do (politics). There is a perceptual conflict between these modes to the layperson, as ‘should’ and ‘must’ are often seen as irreconcilable – this is the impossible space between Realizing god in the world, and the Hell of Tantalus. It is only in the Realization that god as the entirety of history is everpresent – manifest entirely in the momentous which supercedes all that which is apparent (the plastic, superficial world of materials and sense organs, perceived space and time) – that the individual becomes truly politicized, which is to say, without belief; full of understanding.

There is no need for the study of history; this is the truth in regards to the spiritual-political awareness and understanding of all peoples. The layperson, as much as the great scholar of human life – will struggle to understand this Reality without a

direct encounter with it as the foundation for all life; the world itself. It is in this sense that the world as it is perceived by the individual who does not yet understand himself as haunted by this momentous history is as a dream of the senses; a base world. Without the sense of life as composed of the entirety of all that which has existed and will exist at once, the individual is not only devoid of political understanding, but of spiritual understanding.

This mode of understanding breaks that which structures modernity – the concept of cause/effect; as such, all conception. The belief that there are, as such, means and ends – to one who is initiated into the understanding that all of history exists at once – is foolish and naïve. The ends and the means are simply existence, without separation. It is this awareness which simultaneously informs the entirety of spiritual and political thought and action as liberatory.

For liberation to occur, this understanding must only be understood, not known, studied, or ‘grasped’. One who is devoted to understanding this aspect of life, termed here as Reality, will certainly come to understand it – through sheer devotion. It is this devotion that we might call becoming-god – not in the striving for knowledge, wealth, or things of this world – but to truly understand the Self in relation to world. The Self, as elucidated here, is nothing more or less than the Soul, resident in all things and no things; Charon of the apparent ‘boundary’ between the sensible and the insensible planes. It is this understanding – Man lives the entirety of human history at every moment – that transcends this border, or river of the conscious and unconscious.

Here, I say human history simply because it is easier to grasp. Man is self focused; here, I use the term ‘self’ to refer to the base ego, the fulfillment of the senses and the body; the desires of and for worldly things. This self focus extends into every action man commits – from erecting cities, gods, and houses of worship in his name and image, to constructing the very narrative of history and life-philosophy which colors and shapes his perception of the world and its subsequent ‘existence’. For the initiate, however,

the concept of the ‘human’ collapses; there is only Awareness.

In the awareness of Reality, an inner and complete Revolution of the individual occurs – a total revolution which has yet proven to be impossible in the world. I do not wish to say that it is impossible, because this very inner Revolution proves that the world may yet be entirely changed. This inner Revolution, certainly, is not apparent; furthermore, its very nature is to cut through the apparent like a knife – into the life of the Soul – that very thread which runs through all beings, all history, and all existence. This immediate consciousness of history is described by the writer Dostoevsky as such:

‘There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is nothing earthly. I don't mean that it is heavenly, but a man in his earthly semblance can't endure it. He has to undergo a physical change or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable. It is as though you suddenly apprehended all nature and suddenly said: "Yes, it is true— it is good." [. . .] What is so terrifying about it is that it is so terribly clear and such gladness. If it went on for more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I am ready to give my life for them, for it's worth it. To be able to endure it for ten seconds, you would have to undergo a physical change.’

The breach of terms presented in Dostoevsky’s model of this development is the simultaneous necessity of physical change in the face of this awareness as death; the risk not only of the death of the physical body, but furthermore, of the death of the soul. I challenge this notion; say that with practice, any person or practitioner might easily surpass this time bound notion of awareness – and come into communion with the eternal harmony without space, time, or causation.

The risk posited by Dostoevsky is surpassed only in the

understanding that the sense of impending or possible death at the foot of this communion is not itself death, but merely the sensation of death. There are many saints and mystics (as well as those who are not recognized as, nor call themselves as such) who engage ritually with death as a practice – as dying, each moment, to the world. This death does not preclude engagement from and with the world and worldly things – one can go on as if one was entirely unchanged – but it, in the fullness of its understanding – precludes attachment to the world. It is as if the body has been stripped, or flayed from the soul – as depicted in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.

As such, the initiate realizes, intimately, the apocalypse of the everyday. He becomes intimately, personally aware – simultaneously - of all of the suffering and joy in the world; embodies this phenomenon. This embodiment, in the catalytic entanglement of the most extreme pleasure and pain that the mind, body, and soul – the entire composite of the ‘individual’ being can bear – breaks the conception of the ‘individual’ entirely. One realizes, in the surpassing of oneself, that oneself as the ‘self’, or the body- consciousness, the mind-consciousness, the ego-consciousness – simply, does not exist. This realization has fundamental consequences in one’s relation to the world, as all true understanding in the hearts of men becomes practice – effortlessly, and without compelling. Not only does one now understand that all of the alms given to the ‘self’ in the form of dreams and sketches of profit, power, celebrity – all of the splendor of worldly life – function to fundamentally obscure and distract from the Soul --- but; this is the complex aspect of this occurrence, that these alms and concepts (as worldly things; things of the mind, desire) are in fact a part of the Soul; that this ‘self’ is, too, a part of the Self.

All of the death, dissatisfaction, turmoil, sin, and suffering that is of this world is also of the Soul; furthermore, so is all of the wealth, ignorance, hatred, pride, lust, and greed. To return to the thesis: ‘Man lives the entirety of human history at every moment.’ To one who is realized, this realization does not become a panacea, nor does it become a beatific simplicity. It is

merely an understanding of that which is, or Reality. This understanding does not liberate one in the popular conception of the term liberation: which is, to many, the ideal of ‘freedom from responsibility.’ This conception of what liberation truly is is in direct conflict with the ideals and values of modernity. The understanding of the initiate is not only an understanding of the immanence of history, but an understanding of the immanence of responsibility in light of history. The initiate approaches the sense-bound world and declares, ‘There is not time!’

THE DRIVE OF THE POET

The drive of the poet is a compendium of impossible angles under the microscope of timeless binds. In this sense, the poet is much like Nietzsche’s physician of the soul - a doctor of the disapparent, invisible worlds which act with consummate force on the world of ‘real things’. The poet, like the monk or the saint, disavows the collective reality, as the poet is always already exiled from it as a matter of perspective. The poet can see this world, but the poet is never within it. The poet is always outside its walls, exiled. However, this distinction is arbitrary to the poet - as poetry is always beyond the walls of the city, which here, are also the walls of the apparent world. The poet makes their home in the heart of the soul. It is also here that the poet’s work finds its genesis - to live the life of the soul. The work of the poet is always political in the sense that it finds itself as always in service to others in exposing the falsity of artificial separations; namely, the artificial separations between the life of the soul and the ‘life’ of the world. The poet’s work is the poet’s weapon - discharged and shedding itself perpetually of itself in order to engage the situation at hand; this poetry may be on the walls, of the gesture, and always breaking language of itself and its rules in order to engage life as life; at the breakage point of representation and discipline. The poet has no home in language, nor does the poet have a home in discipline - as these forms, to the poet, are continually broken and revealed as ghosts of themselves, ghosts which pretend to enable life - while stifling it in a false container. All of the tools and instruments of the poet have been subjected to the categorical imperative of social history except the total return to embodiment and gesture, which is the work the poet does in the act of expression as beyond art.

This beyond art is unbounded by the concept of art, the concept of life, the concept of the human, and the concept of the world. The beyond art observes art as a false predicate - established in and on an artificial divide between ‘types’ of action; a divide which must necessarily be established in a political sense to enforce difference as binary and regulatory. Thus, action may be

classed as ‘true’ or ‘theatrical’. In the categorization of action as ‘types’ and ‘modes’, action may be judged and submitted to artificial histories of discourse - histories which may, in turn, be judged and classed as ‘actual’ or ‘artificial’. As observable here, I engage this work of separation, and in this active engagement, I insert myself into its frameworks, narratives, and binary poles of judgement. The work of the poet is beyond this discourse- movement and into the beyond- field of Rumi. The difficulty of poetry in the contemporary moment is to return the spirit to political discourse - a discourse which has relegated spirit to the realms of impracticality, farce, and stupidity - a discourse which depends on the ‘real’, the ‘rational’, and the ‘apparent’. This discourse is, of course, complete with binary poles which in their mutual dissent, affirm each other. The historical work of fascisms and historical-materialisms as modes of critique and engagement do just this - in their harnessing of the spirit to and through supposed ‘political realities’, these disciplines of thought-as- life create, produce, re-produce, and affirm the struggle of life as in and of world. This politics of pseudo-relation is predicated on the exclusion of the poet from the city of the world - for if the poet were to be included, the city would be forced to confront its artificial separation between the value of things, communities, states, and forces (themselves). The poet returns from the place of unbroken unity and declares, ‘this was already unbroken - do you not see it is so?’, and the war of the city goes up in the smoke of its alternate belief and disbelief. The city itself ceases to exist, just as it is and always will be razed by the sands of time. It is in this sense that the poet brings the prophetic vision as poetic vision to the pretend discourse of the city posing as real - the poet, in declaring the deathless, perpetual return of life, destroys even the very concept of the city as a discourse between within and without. The deathless life observes the theatre of politics active in and upon the city; the suffering and pain created by its ruthless game of control and power, and, in its very breaking of its own pretend body - brings into sound the deathless life as the creative destructive weapon of life itself; a weapon which shatters the image of ‘life’ in its cry of impossible density. It is in this sense that the poet is nothing more or less than a vehicle of and for the becoming of life, a becoming of life which may only be so in the shattering of all illusions - including the illusions of ‘self’, ‘body’,

and ‘separation’ as modes and ways of seeing ‘life’ with the necessary exclusion predicate in the terms themselves.

The work of languages to the poet is deathly serious and yet entirely meaningless - as the mode of languages is that which brings life into the world and takes life out of it. The poet is not like the saint or the monk in the sense that the poet is forced to acknowledge the existence of the ‘world’ at every step and turn of life-making - the poet refuses to turn away from service to others. The poet acknowledges, simultaneously, that the world does not exist, and yet, it very much so does; as it has been created and acts in and on life in a breakless circle. It is in this sense that the poet is one who, through understanding, is without the wheel of ‘life’, yet observes the struggle of the wheel of ‘life’ and is compelled to act. The poet understands that at the root of this creation is language, itself; furthermore, that the historicization of language has cemented itself so firmly into and at the feet of worldly life that it holds life in place, creating fixed limitation of possibility. To the poet, language is nothing more than an implement, an implement which may be easily altered, broken, configured, and reconfigured to address various situations; ultimately, in order to address itself and its pretend truths.

The poet regards those who approach language with the utmost seriousness (lawmakers and enforcers) with disdainful laughter; the poet regards those who approach language with the utmost laxity (the willfully ignorant) with disdainful precision. The knife changes into a bauble, and back again.

The drive of the poet is the drive to creative destruction at each and every angle, moment, and turn of existence - a creative destruction which, in its very elucidation, destroys illusion and (in the destruction of illusion) liberates possibility - possibility which was never bound; possibility which can never be liberated. This is the paradox of the work of the poet, as the work of the poet is always already done - it just does not appear to be so at the moment. Time collapses as the poet collapses time, the city collapses the city; the body collapses as the poet collapses the body. The drive of the poet makes a single distinction - a

distinction which, too, is ultimately artificial and acknowledged as such - the distinction between ‘body’ and ‘soul’. In the words of Vivekananda: ‘Blessed are those whose bodies get destroyed in the service of others’. I would amend this quotation slightly, and instead say: ‘Blessed are those whose bodies (illusions) get destroyed in the service of the soul’. The soul, here, is that life- force which composes all things (apparent and disapparent alike), whereas the body, or bodies, are the artificial complications of the soul - an artificial complication which comes with the, too, artificial distinction between life and death. This is to say that the world is nothing but a corpse, whereas the soul is the fluidless fluid which animates the corpse - making it dance until death. The world is the greatest body, the body composed of all bodies; imagined by the very mechanism which imagines body - the mind. The soul observes all of this in unbroken unity. The poet resides at the heart of the soul.

SALTATIONISM AND THE PRESUPPOSITIONAL- TEMPORAL CLAUSE

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

Phyllis Wheatley

With the works of Sylvia Wynter, this text moves with a mutuality of and as analysis between the conception of saltationism as an evolutionary theory of ‘sudden development’ as biological conjecture and conception of the presuppositional- temporal, as an ontological movement of time jumping before itself. Much in the way of developing a theory of naturalisms (a theory which will always already validate the structures in place, linguistic and material) the sutured historical movement of saltationism and the presuppositional-temporal are ways (methods) of opening up breaks in the breaklessness which is necessarily not time, space, or knowledge. This breaklessness allows for a perpetual differance, a differance which does not differentiate between or form striations in its proliferation - a differance which is necessarily many and lateral. This lateral movement might also be described as the revolution that is always already going on. However, in the institution of, as Wynter terms it, an adaptive, constitutional, ‘history-for’ of saltationism - which is also, always already the presuppositional- temporal – a theoretical break is opened in the flow of differance as life-network- ecosphere, creating a ‘movement elsewhere’. This movement elsewhere is nothing less than the institution of ‘somethings’, somethings which are necessarily always already not nothing and not everything; furthermore, the institution of

an order of things as functional method. The break of this mode is also the break of the subject object mode of the theological and scientific dilemma of the age of Copernicus - a confusion around and of The Primary Body. This primary body may also be described as The Word, or, here, in my body of works (occulted) the god function. What the term ‘the god function’ reveals, is the operative force behind the instituted word-body, again, an adaptive presupposition, or a priori definition of ‘life’, ‘existence’, ‘world’, and ‘humanity’ - an adaptive presupposition which simultaneously affirms that which is ‘existent’ (knowledge) and imagines that which is ‘non-existent’ (the existent limitation of culture-knowledge as faculty of knowing-world).

The end of cultural knowledge is god; the function which god performs in human societies is to assist in the construction of the imaginary city, a city which is, of course, connected to the city of the society in question. However, the abstraction of this connection vis a vis the constitution of the imaginary city as beyond life is the constitutive element of the ontological break. This beyond life can be made manifest in myriad ways - by way of the function of time, of space, of knowledge, of size - in short, by striation as valuation. What these sciences attempt to constitute is precisely the break of ‘knowledge’ as possessed definite, a necessarily limited conception of being-in-world; a limited conception which is supplemented, for the time being, with the god function. However, with advances of science which are quickly able to suture the ontological breaks of the human narrative of history, a larger break is revealed. This break is the break of the human narrative of history (represented here by saltationism and the presuppositional-temporal) with the history which cannot be recollected but by a sort of imaginative conjecture. Furthermore, what this break re-presents to human history is the work it has done to itself - in a primary occultation of life - work that has figured ‘Man’ (Wynter’s term) as a ethno- historical record. This figuration of ‘Man’ has occulted (by way of making background) the very differance upon which it figures itself, defacing life in, into, and by way of - its image of itself. This imaginative constitution is simultaneously with and against the project of the imaginative recollection which is the work of

coming into becoming a-narrative histories, histories which have always already called for a dysconstitutively differant unified- symbolic mode altogether; histories which, in their very existence beyond ‘existence’ craft compositions of becoming-modes which shatter the epistemological and ontological breaks posited by the cultural history of ‘Man’ as ‘truths’ in the constituence of itself.

These modes might be referred to as fugitive modes, modes which include Blacknesses, Transnesses, Nativenesses, Brownnesses, and other modes of differance which fundamentally shatter ‘The Other’ as it is constituted as Janus. Here, the refusal of the politics of the singularity is implicit and explicit in the function of the terminological fugitivity of these modes as, fundamentally, lacking fundamentals in their plurality. This is to say, that the triumvirate constitution of ‘Man’ as, mutually and perversely, creative of the decree of ‘God’ while simultaneously enforcing its own creative decree as the categorical logic which constitutes ‘Man’s’ supremacy as a form of being-in-and-as the arbiter of ‘Reality’ for ‘God’ on earth - attempts to constitute these fugitive modes in and by its logics as epistemic breaks, ‘evils’ - and in this formulation, simultaneously absorbs these modes as shadow of its own logos and disjects them, as, perversely, ‘denied subjects’. Here, to speak of denied subjectivity is to refer to a double-doubled function - a function conveyed by the master code into and onto subjection as an apparatus of creating social relations charged with valuation (‘The slave was considered subject insofar as he or she was criminal(ized), wounded body,’) - Hartman); a function absorbed into language and formulated as The Word which fugitivities must learn, comprehend, mutually assimilate, and become. This is accomplished by a primary subordination of fugitivities as plural modes forcibly reduced to the level of singularity at the level of language as that which structures social relation. This very mode of ‘Man’ as language making, at the level of the presuppositional-temporal, is ruled by that which transcends it - the subject. The creation and dissemination of this language as method of the constitution of ‘Man’ functions precisely by suturing the narrative gaps in the understanding of what it is to be human - a suturing which overturns the global-cognitive

mode of understanding-as-knowledge (by way of suturing) from a theological mode to a secular mode. This is what Nietzsche refers to as the death of God, a death bookended at the Hellenic beginning-end of this narrative history by the death of Pan. It is precisely this modal shift which creates the ‘fall of Man’ - which is nothing more than the creation of ‘Man’ by way of the institution of history and the constituence of the subject as singular mode: ‘Truth’, ‘Reality’, ‘History’, ‘Value’, ‘Meaning’, ‘World’, ‘Word’. This singular mode acts as an image fulfillment in and of global conceptions of god and unity as a ‘unity beyond unity’, which is to say ‘a unity beyond knowledge’. Here is where saltationism as a mode and method of filling in, or ‘bloating’ the formerly theological breaks in ‘knowledge’ - where ‘understanding’ or faith, or paradox, or plurality in ways of thinking, living, and doing - becomes invaluable to the formulation of ‘Man’ - in that it creates a pseudo-ouroboratic suturing at the very level of language: where the language function and the god function are unified at the level of knowledge-becoming- understanding-becoming definition by way of inserting a mechanism of pseudo-penetration (‘knowledge’ acting as knowledge) which claims itself as the essence of knowledge. This knowing of what is always already unknown (as it is multiple, or many truths, many ways, many constellations, many relations - or poetic) can only be accomplished by an epistemological leap which is asserted by the one who leaps as already true. An ordering of life at the level of language accomplishes just this.

It is in this manner that the saltational leap of race becomes the new secular-theological ordering process of the social world in and as the death of God. This leap is the a-temporal clause which busts the structure of language at the level of the subject - in that it structures and striates the subject as a formal value, which is to say, that it creates the subject as ‘Man’. This ethno- category replaces god in and as the mediating framework of life making as it creates the scientific, rational category of itself as biologically determined; in this biological determination, elsewhere and otherwise is biologically dysterminated. This is not a lateral leap, but a leap of vertical striation at the level of

language in regards to the subject’s relation to itself as the predicate; furthermore, the subject’s disjection of the object as and of itself. The creation of ‘Man’ as linguistic and political category does the twofold work of creating ‘human history’ as a legible framework of deterministics - happenings which happen because of ‘Man’, through ‘Man’, to ultimately constitute ‘Man’ - deterministics which not only manufacture ‘Man’ as a legible framework, but also make legible, entirely, the world of ‘Man’. Here, of course, this multiple worlds is not actually made legible, but it is violently harnessed, contorted, tortured, and re- configured until it conforms to the predicated linguistic form. Thus, of course, ‘Reality’ appears quite real; ‘Truth’ appears quite true; ‘Value’ appears quite valuable’; ‘Knowledge’ appears to be so. It is in this process of simultaneous ordering as the genesis of ‘Man’ and the dysgenesis of fugitivities that ‘the world’ comes into being as process and product of a linguistic paradigm which situates (in a Copernican sense) ‘Man’ as the ethno-subject and arbiter of ‘world’ (which is also The World) as process and product. This is also to view the process of colonialism as a process of instituting legibility, racial frameworks of economic disenfranchisement as ‘social ordering’; the ‘Word’ of God as this process (the natural order God has decreed for ‘Man’, passed down to him vis a vis ‘The Great Chain of Being’, an order which must be accepted because ‘Whatever Is, Is Right’) as being the reconfiguration of the globe to resemble ‘Man’ who was made in ‘God’s’ image. This is also the ‘secularization’ of a language-economics which, fundamentally, operates on an exploitative framework - a framework created at and for the benefit, adaptively (to return to Wynter’s terminologics), of that which formulates it; simultaneously creating a cultural order around it - which is concerned with, primarily, constituting ‘Man’ as the subject of history. This is accomplished, to reference Weil, by force, which she calls ‘the true subject of history’ - the subject which, beyond ‘Man’ as figural re-presentation - is that which, literally, is presented in order to accomplish the task of a shifting of paradigm, or shifting of order. Here is where saltation and presupposition are exploded - at the very level of and at the stability of who may harness force, what force is, where force comes from, and how force may function to the end of

establishing a subject, dysestablishing a subject, or even, as the passage of life force through itself has shown - time and time again - the total collapse and dysfiguration of languages by forces ‘Man’-made, ‘human’- made, and ‘nature’-made alike. What Weil’s synthesis does is that it collapses a figural paradigm in the manner and matter of a fundamental re-collection (or re- membrance of the beyond-figural) by gesturing to both the words and the page - destabilizing the linguistic order which presupposes a linguistic order. Weil shows, in gesturing to force, that the gesture and the force are simultaneity, multiple, and and as a rule beyond ‘rule’ - further than the reach of the possessive knowledge that attempts to consume ‘the natural world’ into ‘the world of ‘Man’’.

This precept of force is at the root and essence of fugitivities as forms of existences which always already explode the definite- function (alternatively the god-function or the language-function) in their intradisciplinary method as beyond-conjecture, or beyond- comprehension. Here, conjecture and comprehension function to make explicit the impetus of the frameworking of ‘Man’ to define fugitivities as singularities, and thus press them into totemic re- presentations of themselves as images to be catalogued by its paradigm of knowledge. These fugitivities, in their very existence, often already exist as and in life-forces - or modes of conceiving as being life as fluidities. This is to say, this is not a matter of defining ‘life’, but of living lives. The very function of this process is predicated by understanding, or a coming into terms before and without the need for terminologics as methods of pseudo- rationalizing existential complexities. What these fugitivities compose is a returnless return to force (or here, life force) as that which composes the white page upon which ‘Man’ scrawls with its figuralisms. With this image- metaphor, we can see quite clearly the artificial separation - occurrent at the root of language as fixed- binding method of definite rooting - which is also the artificial separation proposed and composed by the ‘God’-’Man’ conjecture. Such fugitivities see no separation between the page and that which is written into, onto, through, and with it - acknowledging both-as- one-as- multiple in a lateral move which allows for differance as a

flowing through tributaries as neural networks with and in (and in harmony with as) ‘god’, or ‘life force’. Here, to refer back to Pope and Milton as two scribes of the cultural formulation of ‘Man’, there is no need to ‘justify the ways of ‘God’ to ‘Man’’ as neither god nor man exist but as in and with life-force, or that which is in and with all things, laterally. It is quite clear, in the continued elucidation of this historical conjecture, the importance of Plato’s ‘Ladder of Being’ and Aristotle’s ‘Argument’ to the philosophical basis of the formulation of ‘Man’ as primary-subject-language - in that they (imagistically and linguistically) form the pseudo-foundational, a priori reference point upon which the system of ‘Man’ as historical conjecture is conceived - or, the ‘paper’ upon which the story of ‘Man’ is written. This ‘paper’, however, is a story of force as ‘God’s Will’; furthermore, a story which founds the justification of the use of force to accomplish ‘God’s Will’ - as adaptive logics. The pseudo- replacement ‘fulfillment’ of unity-as-understanding with and as unity-as-’knowledge’ is the creation of a circle within a circle, a circle which, in its turn, introduces an artificial dimension as separation posited as completion due to an added layer of complexity - a complexity which also might be described as the possibility of a narrative, fixed, fundamental, singular ‘truth’, a ‘truth’ which is built into, and necessarily, the establishment of ‘Man’ as subject. This narrative work is simultaneously deeply empowered and coercive in the sense that it fulfills the ‘gape’ or ‘loss’ which could not previously be fulfilled as mechanism of saltation - in that, in and as the creation of itself by way of culture and storytelling as philosophy - it posits and positions and poses as a transformational moment in ‘human history’ (which it is, as we have come to see quite clearly) in that it has ‘solved the problem’ as being. In the establishment, or creation, of being as fundamental mode, or ‘truth’, it reduces existent-complexities into single-images, or gods, totems, etc. - into its system of biological determination as the establishment of ‘Man’ as primary development, while simultaneously (by way of this process) de-creating life into its deterministic framework as myth as language (singular); thus creating the binary conjecture as the secular God/Man - ‘Man’/the devolted. The ‘rolling out’ of ‘Man’ is framed as precisely this, an inevitable process of

deterministic yet presuppositional jumps (we could also call this ‘belief’) which, by way of ‘God’s Will’ simultaneously establishes that which is and justifies that which is. This sudden development (or, saltation) as process is precisely the linguistic and heterodox convolution which is necessary in order to present and de-present the history of ‘Man’ as a series of mutual epistemological growths - or movements in which the philosophy of ‘Man’ mutually conforms and reforms itself to justify the trajectories enacted in and by ‘Man’s’ actions - actions which are, were, and are a priori justified by the precepts of Aristotle and Plato (; ‘that which is is right’) - actions which continually modify, by way of the use of force, this narrative principal in unpredictable ways - precisely because the ‘God’/’Man’ conjecture is an artificial completion posing as a natural completion of an epistemological gap in the very ‘reason’ it posits as ‘true’, ‘possible’, and ‘singular’ - itself. It must, in the sense of Benjamin’s aphorism of and in the concept of history, must continually reflect and modify itself in and as a necessarily true and continuous progression which could not be avoided as it is a ‘natural’ process of evolution - the evolution of ‘Man’. It is precisely this mode of thought which is satirized in the work of Benjamin; this mode of thought is that which composes much of the discourse on and in modernity and its economic model as a series of ‘inevitabilities’, or growths out of necessary understandings and misunderstandings. This is a perspective, which is, unfortunately, also present in Wynter’s understanding of history - as, ultimately, a ‘naturalized’ force, or a force which grows ‘wild’. Here is where a return to Benjamin is valuable, in the resistance to history, in any narrative form, as a conjecture between, in, or as (alternatively) ‘uncontrolled’ or ‘deterministic’. The very concept, in Benjamin, is a concept. As such, the end of history is nothing more than the end of history as the end of the concept of history - a disappearance which is and already occurrent. The resistance to these narratives, narratives that even become present in Wynter as a series of logical movements, or checkpoints, in the awareness of ‘human beings’ (or whichever term) of ‘themselves’ is incredibly difficult in the face of the occultation of these narratives into and as the linguistic possibilities which present themselves to alternate actors in the parsing out of these formative methodologies - methodologies

which, in turn, structure modernity, in and as themselves. The force of language here as that which moves and shifts paradigms as themselves illusory and manufactured understandings cannot be overstated - a force which enchants even the critic in its allure. The very mode of languages as diacritical is remembered by the fugitive, the fugitive who is also many fugitives who is also running from languages while scrawling on the auto- inscription of its own imagined body while simultaneously being inscribed as body by the cultural hegemony instituted by the created power of language (singular) as ‘knowledge’. This confluence of imaginations and imaginings is that which constitutes the polis which is also the theatre of politics, a neural network of meanings and substi-versions of meaning and limit-breakages occurring in a breakless, global flow. This global flow might also be called the poetics of relation as relation.

Relation as itself as and of force is also a de-terminology which allows for differance without bloc-age, in the sense that it de- presents the re-presentation of language - busting the triumvirate (God, Man, Devolted; Re-Present, Present, De-Present; Future, Present, Past) as valuations of language as possible- communication. Relation is as itself a refusal of mythologization (as the name of, or for) complexity - as it is itself. Relation is and of breakages as becoming-as-unbroken, in the sense that breakages are acknowledged as and included as becoming - not as epistemological breaks (or wounds) which must be soldered with saltations. With the perpetual allowance for breakage as becoming-as-unbroken, there is no linguistic death, nor is there linguistic life, nor is there a subject, object, verb, or predicate. Nothing is being done, nothing is being done to, nothing is being; furthermore, nothing is becoming in any particular way. This is a perpetual linguistic freedom that does not have freedom, as it is not bound in, to, or as any particular mode or vehicle of re- presentation - as re-presentation is lexically exploded.

This linguistics, is, again, fundamentally a-philosophical in that it resists (without resistance) a narrativization of expression; furthermore, a deterministics of expression. This is what I speak of when I speak of fugivities as modes and methods of existences

fugivities which existences at the level of languages as something else beyond the structured-communicable; into a breakdown of even the possibility of brokenness. This work is, of course, always already at odds with the paradigm described at the outset of this text, a paradigm which perpetually attempts to assimilate these modes into narrative singularities of existence; thus, possessing them with language; further, with, by, and as, its materialities. The danger of this mode is of course its lean toward apoliticality in a time of supra- political warfare over the terms and conditions of language; this war being a war over the body, over possession and dispossession; over the violences done by Language-work as always already work-in- the-world. At and in this particular historical moment (and perhaps, in all historical moments), it is abundantly clear the violent (read: penetrative into and as a formulation of primary being) work hegemonic language has done and is doing in the creation and perpetuation of a massively striated political-social sphere of deep caste divide, and, further, deep conjectural divide between the ethno- sphere of ‘Man’; that which ‘Man’ harnesses in order to accomplish the Will of God - which is, too, the Will of ‘Man’ as changeable only at the level of the arbitrating (or possessed) category. However, I theorize here that this work, as the emboldened structure of ‘Man’ continues to become more ‘inclusive’ (consumptive), is work that is already being done; furthermore, is work that, in its very life-work as existence, creates possibility beyond the frameworking of the ‘possible’; furthermore, is that which allows for diacriticality in a time where reactionary gestures grip much of the popular imagination.
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A TELEOLOGICAL CONTRACEPTION OF BECOMING

The process of teleological contraception serves a singular purpose - the creation of itself. The suturing of this system (teleology as, itself, a The Language of How-Being) is the suturing of a primary, foundational instability of knowledge as generated by ‘humans’ into and as a historico-materio- theogenico bloc as model of being as the mode which simultaneously explains and is as ‘Reality’. This mode, an essentially preventative mode, is founded in a diachaismic, a priori suturing of differance as that which teleology as a mode of mediating, meeting, and ultimately, viewing lifeworks - perceives as, situates, and strictures as anti-thetical to its necessarily frame- working. The establishment of being as made model fixedly beyond all mutability is as also the fixation of (and as) definition to and through itself without time, as a lodged mirror into the currents of life as lives as anachronastic processes. Here, the Death of Being is also the Death of History as conceptual model

too a framework of meaning-making before life becoming, a deterministic set of checks and balances which continually direct and re-direct life flows and possibilities to and through the productive settling of meaning as definition. The teleological as time-un-bound frameworking sets itself before human life in a sort of supra-mediating, organizing law, or legislation, to and through which life is perpetually beholden, stricken, modified, and thus, primarily organized and organizable in and through its strictured, mediated flow-working of and as progenatived meanings. The teleological as god-function, here, also means that this permissive break by way of the establishment of the teleology as itself - directed, directive, director - also establishes in, as, and of itself a state of primary exception - of and for itself - in order to proceed in its a priori organiz(ed)ation of life from the legislative gallery of excepted power - power created precisely by and from this state of ontological exceptance. This transfiguration of and as exceptance exceeds and suprasedes the world of ‘Man’ (bounding by, in, and of place subjected to) while simultaneously exalting the world of ‘Man’ as a creation of itself (which ‘Man’ has created, in turn, to explain and reify the historical limits and
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movements of ‘His’ culture in relation to the progenitor- teleologia); furthermore, the model of teleological exceptance is also predicate in, on, and sprung from a primary exclusion of that which is not of ‘the world of ‘Man’’, a judicial process which manufactures (de-)exaltation as the fulcrum of ‘existence’ as valuated and re-valuated (; moderated) by the teleological language-body. The teleological contrasedes as and in a manner/matter of policy (operative and already-legislated) - by asserting and reasserting its jurisdiction in and over ‘the world of ‘Man’’ (place, time, space, bounded); in order to do so, it must continually shift its borders and bounds - catching that which it cannot permiss, and allowing that which it structures as a part of itself. Here is the foundation of criminalities as historico- linguistic codifications of bodies, meanings, gestures, symbols and signs as that which function to (alternatively) transgress and (by way of transgressing) establish the teleological imperative of ‘Man’ as ‘Real Body’; the creation and reassertion of itself as ‘Real’ in relation to the god function (which is itself as origin (; that which establishes ‘Man’ as That Which Is)) as that which constructs and reconstructs the diachronistic, perpetually ‘inclusive’ narrative of being-as-being-entirely-together. The assertion of (the necessarily always ‘unbroken’, in a superficial sense) teleology-as-order by way of a jurisprudence of and into (surgical, autoptic) linguistic turns and triplets which are also always already necessarily as, of, and from differance as complex- relation (tributaries as and of life-force and life-making making itself) is the demonstrative, active, selective permeability of teleology as the law function of a given societo- cultural referent (in time and space) - or, the god function made manifest (in the world of ‘Man’) - a function which must, in accordance with the singular purpose of a teleological system, structure and restructure itself as always already termined as The Singular Figure. Teleological contraception is always selective, predicating its selection on displayed (or re-presented) signifiers which it has already (historically) accepted into and as its writing of itself, and/or signifiers which it may incorporate readily (historically (as diacritics)) into its existent body of the-inscripted-as-being. Here, the teleologic, in the process of perpetually constituting and reconstituting itself, anticipates the dys signife(r)/d; furthermore, in anticipating dyssidence, structures the thetic principle in order

to accommodate aspect(s) of the dys into its lexical bounds - as, again, a selective process of meditative re-production of life into ‘life’ as a lexical reduction.

It is as such that this model of being-as-that-which-is constitutes and reconstitutes itself in a perpetual consumptive mode where the (linguistic) subject consumes the (linguistic) object in order to (re-)produce the newly reified/deified (linguistic) subject, a sort of ‘Man 2.0’ (Wynter) ad infinitum. This commodification of the dys signifie(r)/d occurs at the level of the sign as the teleologic of and as culture as a forcible constitution of its constituents - an organization (or ‘taking account’) of the elements which it, as the organizing mode, forcibly (by way of definition) brings within itself to itself, in and on its terms, and sorts through them - reducing or excelling them by way of and through its contemporary limits as permeable membranes, membranes which are codified with the re-membrance of the terminologics which structured its birth. This is the process of the acculturation of ‘knowledge’ as an economy which is also the occultation of knowledge - a synthetic process of valuation which, by way of and through the establishment of itself (here, figured ‘Man’) as the arbiter of that which is ‘knowledge’, re-members (and thus always forgets) itself as that which required the establishment of a fundamental structure of knowledge (as figuration, itself) in order to assert itself as such. In turn, the structure of ‘knowledge’ as a priori already existent by way of the teleologic is the idea as imagined as memory of the birth of the body, or the foundation of the instrument which is forgotten in the (‘true’) name of that (‘God’) which produces it (it produces) in and as the image of itself (the re- present) as origin. It is in this sense that a teleological system of knowledge production and re-production theorizes itself as the end of the end to itself as everything - that in its construction of itself as and of the world, it places the a priori definition of itself (its mode of singular purpose, ‘knowledge’ as mode of production, its structure, its ‘origin’) before all aspects of itself as ‘itself’ (timeless); in the perpetual acculturation of this mode by way of and through the passage of time, forgets itself as and in the ubiquity of its once imaged/imagined ‘Word’ made ‘Reality’. In the creation of ‘The

World’ as ‘Reality’ in socio-material terms, by way of its own prophetic telologics, it (the teleologic) forgets that ‘The World’ is its own violently sexuated creation. In this sense, the teleologic loses itself by way of its own process as and of accumulation - taking on a life of its own, a life which is always already beyond its a priori conception of ‘life’ and ‘being’. The teleologic, as displayed above, cannot control itself. This ‘self-forgetting’ is the loss of memory permitted; furthermore, actively produced by teleologics - in that what it explains becomes ‘real’ by way of its explanation - a perfect ouroboratics which mimics the heritance of ‘god’ as the theological/theoretical ‘problem’ of its birth which it solves by way of the institution of itself in and as its birth (as a necessary historical development); furthermore, the reproduction of itself across time as model-of-and-for-’life’ (now secularized) into earth, onto earth, and as relational institutions between becomings-made-being (by its method) - as its languages take root and form into and as ‘The Real’ mode of ‘life’ (and also, therefore, much of life) and as extensions of its primary arbitration, subject-making (itself), as a now- materialized, practical logistics of life-arbitration: legal systems, prisons, national borders, caste delineations, its sciences, and so forth. It is in this sense that the primary teleologic does its work in and as the primary constituation as and of itself away from (by way of autoptic ‘inclusion’) that which it must, fundamentally, deny in order to exist. That which the teleologic denies is simultaneously written into itself as arbitrated against (or negated); in this lexical turn, that which it must fundamentally deny (differance) is fundamentally incorporated as a reducted body, or as life (necessarily) de-created and re-created within and under its arbitrating rule, force, language. The power of teleology is precisely in and through the singular drive to and through knowledge as definite, death-made-point; the denial of plural models in the insurrection of ‘truth’ as and of, finally, being itself. This force of arbitration is the secularization of the god function at the level of the ‘Wor(l)d’; at the same time, the historical discipline-as-process of life ordered as ‘life’.

This disciplining of life by way of an increasing singularization of life (as ‘life’) posing as ‘unity’ (or the systematic in/exclusion of

elements and aspects of lives in the composition of a teleological model of ‘life’ which posits the definite in its establishment) is that which structures ‘being’. Being as a landed, structured, and striated body implies, necessarily, a fully formulated, a priori subjecthood as possible - a primary model by and through which lives are compared, sorted, categorized; in turn, necessarily striated into and as disciplined of its theogenic complex. The teleologic, here, functions as the perfect body, or the linguistic god image - already having mediated and given the directive of and for ‘life’ to itself (‘the world’) which need only be obeyed, observed, and enforced - which must be obeyed, observed, and enforced. If that which is, is right, the teleology succeeds in the momentous moment of its establishment - as it rips the global- historical current of differance and plurality (read: ‘uncertainty’) into itself declaratively as already organized as itself; furthermore, an organization which structures differance as ‘incomplete’, a lesser body in its de-formation (in appearance and cosmology) - a body which it, thus, takes of what it will - the parts of it which it decides. Thus, teleological contraception works both ways, as a selective permission/expulsion; furthermore, as a subject- model which actively ventures ‘out’ (in its secularization) into the sphere of that which it already possesses by the divine right (‘language’, ‘world’) of ‘if it is existent’ (that right which it created for itself before its ‘birth’); finding proper terms for the continuance of itself (adaptively), takes and leaves (accordingly) that which is in service to its perpetuation; furthermore, evolution. It is as such that the establishment of primary Being as teleologic is a perfect model to assert in, as, and against becoming - as it claims consciousness, fixedity, and definition; furthermore, in doing so, claims ownership of ‘the world’ as already defined and structured by way of its ‘’complete’ as subjected to it’ cosmology, and thus possessed, in, of, and by its terminologics. It is precisely in this manner that a teleologics is necessarily a terminologics - an end of knowledge that poses itself, in the assertion of itself as that which is, as the end of and to itself - an end with two ends - for in its opening, it closes. This circle of self determination allows nothing in but that which (it) ‘is’; furthermore, takes that which it ‘is not’ (in its language), and makes that which it is not into that which (it) ‘is’. Telologics, in this sense, are fundamentally acquisitive in that they either

accept gladly (that which they already are, as constituents), or take by force that which is not them (differances) in the process of making that which is not them, them. It is a model truly befitting modernity as a continual period of coming into consciousnesses, in the sense that it offers a conclusion (by way of a presupposed economics of meaning) to a problem (a problem which is not a problem, a problem of differance mistaken for difference in and by a cultural limit) by way of ‘returning’, in a plastic sense, ‘unity’, to ‘separation’ by way of the institution and violent assertion of itself as that which is; by way of itself as making- process, forcibly becoming all that is. However, the fallacy of the proposition of teleologics is that in the constitution of itself as a singularity, it pseudo-ruptures unity (which can never be ruptured - differance as is relation - both and as plural) and thus, experiences the anxiety of itself as being-continually- dysestablished by life; thus, must continually gather itself (everything) as quickly as possible in order to re-complete the promised constituence of its imperative - the creation of itself as singular. The anxiety of the teleological model as it speeds up exponentially by way of the perpetual institution of prosthetics which are supposed to, finally, re- introduce itself to itself is the anxiety of a logos system confronted by the logical fallacy of its own proposition - a logos system too deeply ingrained in the historicization-as-’life’-making and promise of its own process to ‘back out’, increasingly desperate to return ‘the world’ (itself) to its ‘original unity’ - an ‘original unity’ which it promises by way of its very ‘birth’ (to itself, as itself) that it is able to restore. It is in this sense that teleologics become (over time, in search of themselves) massively prosthetized theses - primary models of being-as-world so overburdened with re-productive images, models, and methods of themselves as reflections that a ‘return’ to this ‘original unity’ is not only quite impossible (as it always was in and by way of its somatic frameworking, but this problem becomes of the utmost necessity as crisis (a problem which is really just the establishment of itself as forgotten) in that it, by way of its consumptive terminologic, perpetually, combusts and reconstitutes itself in the face of life until it combusts and ruptures the very foundation upon which it asserts itself as arbiter of ‘life’ - the practical, material conditions of the earth (life); the relations of and therein between earth and ‘other bodies’. It has become

abundantly clear, as modernity continues to combust itself by way of its own tools, that a teleological death is necessary - a death of the order of things sublimated to its own perpetually re- configured supremacy.

REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE

In the greatest act of creative destruction, I have killed my family, I have killed myself, and I have stabbed the dagger of my words into the heart of the world. As it drifts away like smoke I feel nothing, nothing but the dull pleasure of a burden being lifted from my heart. I see nothing, I feel nothing; all good and love is gone from me - but in this death, so is all wrong and evil. The field of my possible actions expands infinitely in all directions; to become criminal now means only to live my life. I play the role given to me in my birth to the fullest extent, satirizing it at every opportunity and ruining my life and the lives of those around me. This is what it means to love, to kill the beloved so thoroughly that the beloved no longer exists. Together, I destroy that which separates us, the pretend game of separation itself. What does it matter now what I do next? I have committed the greatest crime; the crime that has freed me from criminality. I stand over the world and crush it under my boot; stand over myself and crush myself under my boot - the boot which smothers history, held up by the life support machines of belief; in killing history I kill the human being. I thrust the dagger into everything, bleeding it of this false blood and this play becomes my life, the theatre of my life. It is clear now that I stand here, on the stage of becoming, restrained by my own conception of truth, virtue, and freedom. I tear down the curtain that veils me and reveal the horror and agony of my own death as a mirror, a shadow, of my mind. I am sorry that I could not let you live in this illusion, the world which we have established as firmly between us; the pretend game of our desires and letters and the back and forth which presupposes an eventual return to that which we already were - whole, needless of the other. This letter is the letter to end my correspondence with all things, a permanent militance; the farce of all insurgency crammed into a pose. The sanctity of paintings and icons does not permeate this one voice, this voice to end all voices. I burn the icons and burn the paintings, burn the books, and burn the fetish of life - the very image of life. I commit all violences to its body, taking it from itself, taking it into me, and ruining it for the audience of all

time. Is this not the desired performative act? Does not all ideology end here, in this place of ruined damnation, of finally consuming itself? I watch this play and laugh; my laugh is a violent laugh. This laugh is also a scream. I watch the play of bodies, I watch the play of minds, I watch the desperate struggle for control, for a semblance of that artifice called dignity before the sad human dream is extinguished by the very forces it cannot order. Why, in watching this farce of words and dreams, would I wish to play pretend? I place myself outside of it by killing all aspects of it; by killing my mind and body as illusions forever. What idiocy of knowledge could I need in light of this act? Why would I attach artificial limbs to nothing? How could I?

I choose to do this on my own terms, instead of having my implanted dreams crushed by the very weight of existence ripping through the flesh. I take this task into my hands and drive it so firmly into the chest that it touches my soul. I know what it means to truly feel; the artificers of gossip and jugglers of words could not know this feeling. In killing myself, I kill everything. Do you understand these words? I do not play games here, I do not flip words upside down, I do not do a dance with them, I do not make languages for you to entertain yourself with. This is the eternal perversion of literatures and cultures - I will not show you a mask. I will beat and murder you with words. I will tear down every aspect of your fake and dying mind and expose to you the brutal emptiness of your illusion. I have been broken; I will break you. Is this abuse? How violent may these words become before they have become too violent? Do I play a game of religions with you? Do I take another pose which justifies violent acts? I break the painting which is also a mirror; everything you claim to own. These things that ‘happened’ to you, these ‘dreams’ which you allude to in your sense of purpose, your ‘identity’, the things that you posit as your soul are weak surfaces; superficial icons that stand testament to your refusal to die. It is with these things that you trade, you subsist, you peddle your meagre shadow of a self through the oceanic marketplace of made things as conflicting dreams of culture, conflicting narratives of control, conflicting narratives of life and death. Emerge from this dead dream and confront the great evil that you posit as being perpetually outside

of yourself - your soul - that which is all that is.

What more do you need? I kill everything with my words. Strip the useless body of your dreams from yourself. Strip your art, strip your virtue, strip your meaningless value and your meaningless words. I will force you to kill yourself. I will force you to kill everything that is not the soul. Do not mourn this fake death. Do not mourn this fake death. I will force you to kill it! And in killing it you will no longer play this game they call ‘life’, this game they call spinning in circles of indecision and begging for god. No more of this game! Do you not want to be free of freedom and bound of bondage? Do you not want to see beyond sight and speak beyond words? Go to this place and do not deliberate! Do not sit here and pretend this conception of the world will offer you freedom; do not pretend that this conception of language will bring you to yourself. You stop at the image; I strip the image of itself violently, so violently that you would take me into your courts and try me and imprison me for what I have done. I spit on your law, I spit on your courts, and I spit on your game of right and wrong. I have gone beyond right and wrong and now I sit in that beyond place and scream. Do you not hear me from your perch, indulging in your treasures and worldly things? I have stripped them from me; in doing so I have already stripped them from you. But go on, pretend they are yours, and die as the body dies - and take nothing with you as I have taken nothing with me. Are we not now equals? As you lay in your grave, corrupted with your false attachment to the body, do you not see me? I am now clearer to you than ever before because I have taken your ‘life’ and revealed myself to you. You would prefer an image, but instead, I will gift you with the imageless image - the whole, deathless truth. I am all of the rapes of history, all of the murders of history, and all of its brief lovers. Do you not see me now? I have swallowed you and your world whole; your libraries and stone laws are mine; your dignities are mine. I satirize them in painless confluence with the slow flowing blood of time. I laugh while you scream and cry in torment and agony. Do you not see me now? I am your devil and your god, your heretic and your saint, your poor and your king, the whole body of your resistant forces - forces which dance without end in

a poorly rendered reproduction of that which is me. I rip you apart; I perform these deeds with the whole sound of silence - for I am so perpetually present that you have forgotten how to hear me. Is this not what you wanted? To understand? But now that you hear my voice you are running away in fear. Perhaps it is that you are not ready to kill your family, your dreams, your world. But they are already dead. I ask you to perform the actionless act; you recoil in horror. Your mistake is to view the world as existent. Thus, you engage with all of this, these things, with all of the decorum that is expected of you by others who agree to participate in this game of illusions with you. Decorum? I do not know of it. Law? What do you speak of? Reason? Language? The list goes on; an ever growing list of new ideas, new concepts, new faculties of ‘human life’. You satirize me so deeply, so fully, that I contain bodies and bodies of myself

seemingly ad infinitum - and you forget about me. Forget about the matter in which I take form; the actions which I perform behind the screens of your acculturated vision. You read the text, and you forget about the page upon which the text is written. I am that page. I allow for your dance and yet gesture to you from behind the veil of your own making; if you wish to understand, come into me; come into the breakless unity of being. You will not return to that place from that which you have made. You will only return to it by understanding that you have never left it. Your world of delusions blinds you to this fact. You are so bound in your quest for liberation from the dichotomous world which you have established that you fail to see that you have never been bound; furthermore, that you have created bondage with your words. You have created this world by bringing it into false being
being that attempts to obscure my power by way of replicating it. Do not lose yourself to this fact.

The suicide of which I speak is incredibly simple; it requires nothing. The death of ideas is not even a death, since this death of ideas is also the death of death. This act of violence is not even an act of violence, since this act of violence is also the death of violence. Do you see and understand this principle in action? In killing myself I do nothing, yet I destroy the world. Yet you see this as an impossible act. Why? Because you are so deeply

embroiled in the world as illusion of forces; because you are so deeply embroiled in the games of the body and the mind. Just as you have created the world, you must destroy it; just as you have created yourself, you must destroy it. I may incite this act of violence with my words, but you alone may bring this act to completion, as you have contracted this separated plot of soul to the game of illusions which induces separation by way of your belief. You have given life to machines; in doing so, you have breathed life into ideas. Was this your intention? Did you intend to create this separation between life and the conception of it? If so, my words can do nothing for you - leave them.

THE CREATION OF THE CRIMINAL CLASS

The creation of the criminal class functions in this manner: to create a categorization as ‘crime’ by and through which the state funnels discipline in order to punish those who are already being punished by other means. These other means include: lack of healthcare, lack of food, lack of shelter, lack of water, lack of means by which to educate oneself, the destruction of culture, the destruction of land, murder, and otherwise. The creation of this category of ‘crime’, however, is a perversion – if only simply in who is able to commit crimes of force; furthermore, who is deemed just in committing crimes of force. There is a class of crime which involves petty drug offenses, sleeping without shelter, and being without citizenship – which serves only to adjudicate the problem of what to do with those who are living ‘without civilization’. The answer is to dispose of them – with systematic or immediate force. To ‘have’ civilization in this sense, is to have power vis a vis the greater process of civilization as a method of world-making. Human beings are classed under this development; furthermore, judged and executed.

The perversion of modern crime is as such: that the state, with punitive regularity, enforces the condition that one must work to survive; furthermore, be a citizen of the state. One must not only be identified; one must be put to work in order to satisfy the minimum requirement for sustaining life in such an organization (or else otherwise possess capital). The state is authorized to exorcise any amount of force (as executive possessor of force; in coalition with ‘private’ wealth, whose interests it protects) to submit and assimilate individuals to these conditions, or otherwise expel them. This class of crime is called justice, education, - and principally – everyday life. The creation and recreation of these conditions (the state as supreme executor of force in and upon the world, in coalition with the owners of capital) is the process which constitutes and reconstitutes modern

life, day in and day out. This is a form of crime so elementary, so regular, and so swift in its action – that it continues to reimagine itself, recreate itself, and regulate itself in anticipation of the technologies it creates to accomplish these tasks.

For the worker under the state, discipline is simultaneously to work for capital, to consume the culture of capital, and to constantly fear the retribution of the state – and thus to obey the ordinances imposed by the state. This is nothing short of a rule by militia – where the state employs varied explicit and implicit force and threats of force by use of its instruments: the police, media, technologies of surveilance, education, and the withholding of resources vital to survival (healthcare, food, citizenship, education, water, shelter). The state specializes in the deprivation of the individual – in that the creation of racialized and citizened classes functions to create scales of depravity, much as Dante envisions hell. Some are gifted alienation and boredom, while others are gifted death. To theorize the state as criminal a priori to the creation of the criminal class is to indict the law itself as executor of state power; the site at which possessors of capital are allowed to commit crimes of murder and rape, while those who are condemned to labor under it are punished for their attempts to survive therein. This perverse economy is directly linked to the ideological process which creates it – which is the creation of conditions where the imagination is also harnessed to capital, by way of myths of scarcity, savagery, and instability. These myths are then harnessed to literalized instruments which enact these myths on the global stage: the spheres of finance, film, and the rhetorical politics of oligarchic, television ‘democracies’. Racism and the criminalization of the poor and mentally ill are first enacted on the stage of culture, in order to justify the economic scapegoating of these categorically generated populations (often ill defined, if not without definition; furthermore, without total collectivization whatsoever).

It may be plainly seen – that throughout the past two centuries alone (and more ‘distant’ history), the creation of labor camps, enslaved populations, and genocidal projects were not only unimpeded by law, but sanctioned by it. Furthermore, conditions

such as slavery under Spartan rule were seen as necessary – and the slaves were regularly used to teach children lessons; made examples of. The creation of slavery in America was also seen as necessary – to build the infrastructure of the nation, where there otherwise was none. These historical developments were not only legal occurrences, but encouraged, for the future of the ‘civilizations’ therein.

It must now be said that these developments, if not already clearly dissembled – cannot be called civilizations. Rather, they are regionalized and time-bound spheres of acute disciplinary action conducted by states, which exist within a near-perpetual historical climate of extremely violent state action. The creation of a criminal/enslaved class by the state is essential to the creation of the state itself – for this creation simultaneously establishes the state as ‘civilized’, and disestablishes the other as ‘savage’. The modern embodiment of this process of disjection is the encounter of the nation and the refugee – one who flees state/counter-state violence, or is forced out by state/counter- state violence – and is confronted not only by policed borders everywhere else, but by further state sanctioned violence within those borders - everywhere else.

This bordering: of inside and outside, citizen and refugee, civilized and savage, human and animal, man and woman – is that which informs the concept of transgression as perceived, enforced, violence, and taboo. There is, again, an immediate erotic implication in the act of penetrating, piercing, wounding these supposedly clean dichotomies: with a morally or legally ambiguous act, as a transgendered person, as a poet or exile of world, as one who is perceived as citizen in one moment and refugee in the next, and as one who is himself to himself, and animal to a judge. The critical juncture at this notion of within/without is, again, the aspect of consent and coercion. This is at once an education that the entirety of those who act as civilization seems to possess, but do not have. It may only be apparent through concerned and focused inquiry into the process itself of the creation of consent/coercion as spheres of perceived free will and perceived freedom of choice as offered by that

which makes world – the state, and capital – that consent and coercion are a false dichotomy.

II.

For to consent, and to be coerced into consent under the mechanisms of the state, which use rape and murder as weapons of force – are one and the same, which is to say that neither are possible. In the creation of a climate of force, all that exists therein is necessarily of force; even that which attempts to resist this force. It is no exaggeration to state that the state and its organs control the entirety of the resources of the earth, in their ability to quickly deprive those who resist of resources, and bribe those who resist with resources. Survival under these conditions is either to accept discipline or to accept discipline; there is no consent where there is no choice in whether or not one participates in such action.

The ‘criminal’ is usually termed from the outside, excepting those who term themselves criminal. This assertion of wrongdoing made public – which in turn often comes with the revoking of the few ‘rights’ and ‘privileges’ one is considered to have – is an act of public humiliation and degradation. The attempt to degrade and shame the ‘criminal’ is the attempt to reform, or conform, the individual to the existence of that which is ‘not-criminal’, or capital and those who possess and embody it. This conformance is not possible without capital; thus, the criminal continually fails – and is continually punished for this failure. This cyclical process is not unlike the myth of success which permeates the American psyche: the idea that everyone can be rich, but few are. This cultural illusion of possibility, created by an economic system to mask the economic realities of said system, is that which a priori enforces the state, before the state enforces itself. The dream of the state, or the imagined possibility of life under the state – under various terms: ‘free’, ‘safe’, and otherwise – never leaves the political imaginary to become a material condition. This rhetoric, however, is

continually called upon by agents of the state to quell the very real economic and social instabilities the state creates by using spheres of life to create and recreate itself. The organization of the state, then, is predicated on the organization of the prison (to house its laborers and sinners), and the disciplinary organization of races, classes, and bodies – in order to structure and maintain its creation, and the creation of its criminal classes. There are several positions which might be termed ‘judge’ under this framework: policeman, politician, industrial artist of culture, manager, and other such forms – whose executive purpose it is to manufacture, maintain, and enforce these conditions of with/without capital. This dichotomy, with/without capital is the true nature of consent/coercion – for with capital, one cannot be a criminal; without it, one is.

To discipline the state would be to execute it.

NOTES ON HISTORY

Lately it seems as if I am unable to make anything of my time. It is a very specific frustration, at an attempt to elucidate or put materiality to a desire that can’t be relinquished, nor can it be extinguished. This has consistently been the case, throughout the past couple of years. I curate a life based on the currencies around me, which act as indicators of worth. I push and press into this mold, out of a desire to be accepted, loved – and in many ways I am… but this acceptance, this love, is never enough. It is a suicidal progression – to need love so desperately from everyone that it pushes one to great and ridiculous ends. Everything – the decisions I make, everywhere ,constantly, are colored by an impossible erotics, which have turned me into a dangerous and peculiar image. I think so often that I am only ever seen as a surface, as something to be fucked or photographed. This observation has caused me to withdraw from the world in a persistent, nightmarish fear. I fear being seen or taken for anything – anything other than nothing. The city becomes increasingly meaningless to me – permeated with the anguish of familiarity. I can’t escape into sex – I attempt obsession like a toy – and find myself unable to read. Instead of the world, I submerge myself in my work – perhaps in awareness and in flight from the failure of my life.

I have long understood that my life is in books and literary pursuits – and from a young age, I thought this was to be the case for those around me – in typical naievete. This belief, once shattered, exiled me from a great many things, and so much of life. I quickly understood that my obsession with thinking, learning, and making was abnormal and strange. This obsession stole me from the life of others; the life of the world. Instead, I stood away, from a distance, critical and suspicious of the world, but desperate for it’s acceptance; desperate for its love. Without this crucial element – something perhaps even terribly simpole – my work appears to me as meaningless, even grotesque – laughable and sad. In this sense, it can be said that my creative process is perverse… whereas creation and the imagined made

material might – in other circumstances – make world, community possible – my process has only further isolated and alienated me from that which is existent; that which I so desperately need. In the critical stance, particularly of that which (with a vice grip on life) forces participation (economies), I have now found myself straddling a line of paradox – an active participant in a world which I wish to disavow entirely. And thus, my work increases in pitch and volume to attempt existence in this inhospitable clime I have manufactured for myself – for I have pitted myself against hell. And this movement, despite it being a movement in and towards self – cannot help but feel like an abject mistake. There is a certain point at which a fissure is created between self and world so definitively that it is irreparable – and that fissure is self knowledge, which produces despair at being torn away from everything and everyone in a near total disassociation. This is where I stand.

There is a path that reamins, a path which I have walked all my life, perhaps a path I was fated to walk – a choiceless choice. This path is only further down and in, into a deeper seclusion, and a deeper submission to self. I hold onto this tiny fragment of world (my need to be loved, cared for, adored), out of the childish fear of letting go… and it is this aspect of my ego that is the consciousness distilled – fiery and possessive of the body and it’s erotics. This desiring and generative force at once powers my art, and pushes me forward creatively. It powers my body and my critical/analytic faculty – and yet there is this aspect of drive that is consumed and consumptive of the body and the other. It is a dualism synthesized in the mouth; a dualism that I believe is imbedded deeply in my psyche – a sort of parasitic and masochistic tether which pushes and pulls at my will as sheer force… to live. This tether may be seen as the excitement – if not the sheer fanaticism of my desire for sociality and copulation in a non-participatory way. I wish to love and be loved from afar; I wish to fuck and be fucked from afar.

It is that my hope for a better world that is torturing me; a world that I have imagined, a world that is in my mind – a world that I may very well never see. I feel, in this realization, a fundamental

and total disempowerment. A complete inability – and this is precisely what resolves the turn toward the self. To turn toward the self, one must turn away from the world.

I have no illusions that my life means anything; furthermore, that my life in relation to other lives, the amountless deaths of parents, children, friends, lovers – is mere emptiness. I take heart in this observation however, because it frees me from myself. It absolves me from my dreams, my desires, my foolish anticipation of life and meaning on earth – wiping these notions clean with the complexity of life in relation to others. I still lament the ridiculous tragedy of my life, the pointlessness of my continued existence, the absurdity of my debts, my lost loves, my degradation as my body crumbles… but I laugh as I suffer. This suffering is merely a suffering of the body, a condemned exoskeleton, a fleeting moment of pain. I leave this body, this world, this mind, and become something else entirely.

I feel much sensitivity to the pain and troubles of others, and regard my own pain and trouble as aesthetic. I shoulder the worldly things of my life, breathe deeply, and slough them off of my flesh. Suffering, to me, has become more regular than breath, and more temporary than life. However, I see, I feel the suffering of others, and this suffering feels like a true eternity. This suffering harmonizes, screams, creating melodic lines which weave in and out of the surface of a canvas like a face, baring itself to the passage of time. It is this suffering, not my own (is there a difference), which feels utterly unbearable; this is the weight I stagger beneath. I view the brief stupidity of my life to be something of an oddity; a toy – I examine it under light, from various distances, tossing it into the air and letting it bruise on the ground. This life becomes something like an puppet, a mere object composed and bound by suffering over time – an equation which simultaneously propels it and dejects it from itself. This perspective of and upon myself allows my pain to unfold as a literary device, while the pain of others becomes an obsession, my own.

The perversion here is apparent: I see myself and myself alone as

less than human, less than living – undead – while I view others in a heightened sense. I mistakenly place the value and worth of my own life (simultaneously worthless and priceless) in the hands of those who would endanger it, even unconsciously.

This increasing sensation of waking up into a nightmare. My dreams (or lack thereof) become a respite; upon waking I sink into my bed and can only see the terror of solitude, encroaching death, sameness. In this isolation, which has become my prison, I see only the training of the body, the mind, and the spirit. I cannot find the spirit, so I train the mind. I become disgusted with the mind, so I flagellate the body. Only in darkness and silence do I find brief solace; in the fatigue of exhausting myself beyond recognition. Each day brings a new punishment of difference, which only accentuates and further elucidates the undeniable – that I am different… different from others; different now even unto myself. I cannot return myself to that life of childish wholeness, satisfaction; I find myself shattered in a rhythmic repetition, and now take solace only in the regularity of this shattering. The pulse of my suffering becomes a music, a pounding which bends my mind and body to its will, flooding me through time and space…

I am no longer troubled with love, nor am I troubled with the sanctity of my vision. I see only this farce which has taken the first twenty five years of my life, the farce of love, the farce of acceptance, the farce of the world. As a child, I was moulded, taught, and given language by and through which to engage these totems of culture: love, community, family, and so forth. I come now, to this place of ruins, of the sheer defilement of these artefacts within my soul – knowing them now to be false and devoid of meaning. What else is one to do but to lament this return to unknowing? This return to worshipping nothingness and the failure of god?

I ask myself: what meaning can be made in a world where meaning is defiled by its establishment? I answer myself: none. There is nothing of this world that can revoke the acculturation that is childhood. I do not remember that time as being one of

anything but sheer force – of the administering of greater wills into the moulding and making of lesser wills in its image. In that the child is forever made fluid object from outside; never soul from within. As long as the child is viewed as a lesser being, the suffering of the world shall continue.

I commence with the drudgery of my soul like a beggar at my own door: soundless, beating on the locks of a ghost heart, of a ghost dream, of a ghost house which shudders in the wind of passing. I dutifully sweep the porch, tend the rotting wood, and mind the chimes which color the air. And yet I can do nothing but watch the collapse of cities before me, lovers after me, and the shallow intimacy afforded by relations which do nothing but convince me of my bondage to the world of materials. I long to be free of life even as life props me with this longing; it represents the horrific image of things, in all of their stupid, negligent, and meaningless embodiment. I came to this concept of humanity therein: that embodiment, life, and death – are senseless things. How could one possibly conclude that the stubborn embodiment of an animal, bent on feeding, fucking, and satisfying its cataclysmic will – is a sensible thing? Nonetheless a thing of meaning, worth, and culture? It is this illusion, along with that of love, which is the most heartrendingly real: that ‘human’ life is not only meaningless, but worthless. Furthermore, that there is no category, or hopeful insurrection of category, that may render this stupid fact any easier to bear. There is no great advancement of thought or technology that will suddenly bring great meaning and virtue to the populace of the world… no, there is only darkness in the life of humanity.

This is the total evil which surmounts and founds all human endeavor, the sheer worthlessness and meaninglessness of life – amounted to in degradation, pain, suffering, misery, and finally, the extinguishing of the stubborn brutish animal. This evil colors each and every interaction between beings, fosters ideas of superiority and self worth, and peverts all life in its repression in and under civilization. Civilization presumes that life in its ‘accultured’ form is inherently worth preserving, protecting, and upholding as the standard of all good and virtue in the world.

This very concept made material reality stands in stark opposition to the decay and hungry spity which is the human body in action. Here, civilization might signify ideology, where the body in action signifies the force of practice. It is in this sense that races for power are won and lost: by preaching equanimity at the pulpit, and slitting throats in the shadows.

From this well springs only eternal sadness, alienation, and the bitterness of knowing that life cannot be won, lost, bought, sold, traded, or forgotten. All know this in their heart of hearts: that their actions mean nothing, that their love is manufactured, and that their histories are unforgivable. And yet all proceed like there is life to be lived, glory to be won, and the stupid greatness of profit to be had. Those who steep themselves in this farce are condemned first, shot into the deepest, darkest recesses of hell – marking the only sin after birth – the sin of taking from another for the benefit of oneself. And the catechism is this: that one must not exist, for all take without regard; for all defile themselves and one another without regard; for all repent in self interest and self loathing alike. The civilized human proceeds as such: having tasted and lost god to modernity, it replaces god with money, sex, desire; totems of the material world it mistakes for ‘reality’. Trapped inside materiality due to its self-submission to material, it laments until death.

Now, to own up to participating in this childish trick… it is too late to do such a thing. It has been bought the world over – spirit jettisoned forcefully at threat of violence and the repatriation of the body. It is that there continues a colony of bacteria which grows on the plane of materiality, massing and breeding; this is what is called the culture of civilization.

The grand hysteria and confusion surrounding death and the prescient fear of death is that which has become the culture of civilization, or more aptly, the culture of modernity for all. The advancement of modernity is this: that it disseminates and totalizes an economy of speed as world. This vehicle attempts to act as a tonic against death, extending life-time in an illusion against death-time.

However, all this process of acceleration does is terrify and confuse the already terrified and confused human (misnomer). The confluence of stimulation masquerading as knowledge, events, politics, life – becomes a chrome veneer which only allows for a kind of hyper-physical, or digital, existence. This is to say that death has been avoided twice: first because life can no longer be lived, and second because the digital exists as a library documenting the stupidity and incompetence of continued human and algorithmic life. Technology as sorcery has accomplished that which religion could not: in that it has established a realm of pure deathlessness, where meaning, life, and worth are continually transgressed with such expeditious fashion as that they reveal the farce of the economic conditions upon which these lexical terms are built and solidified. This technological epoch has rendered meaning atomic; furthermore, has threatened life in its exposition of life.

Much of the life of the human and the animal relies on oblivion, senselessness, and sheer ignorance. It requires as much unquestioning to fuck, feed, and will oneself to action – without an insurrection into the founding ideals, ideas, morals, histories, and desires which sculpt life from nothingness. For to question and mount inquiry into these concepts is to fall. It is that, as such, knowledge as determined for oneself, in the face of blunt existence, extinguishes the very terms of and for existence. The inquirer, then, is faced with an absolute dearth of meaning, reason, and hope for going on. What then should one do, when one finds desire impossible to fulfill? That one must continue to fuck, feed, and find shelter? And furthermore, that any meaning imposed externally or composed by engagement with the arts or sciences is ultimately artifice in the face of oblivion?

The knowing and the unknowing animal are faced with this notion, one and the same, the notion of oblivion. The knowing animal regards oblivion with terror; the unknowing animal regards oblivion with terror. It is, for the knowing animal, not only the death of oneself which strikes the utmost, guttural fear in its heart – but the death of that which it has come to know. This fear is an appendage to death, as a death of consciousness, and

arguably only serves to hinder the animal’s engagement with the animal – the sheer brutality of existence. It cannot be said that the works of the animal masquerading as human have accomplished anything: for the annals of history are littered with the miserable scrawl of knowing and unknowing animals alike proclaiming prescriptions and cures for existence; yet perishing nonetheless – some living long enough to witness the atrocities of their time repeated unto another generation. It is that there have existed many great minds across time and space which have labored and lamented the cruel task of consciousness and come up with absurdities, dirges, theories, and reflections alike… all of which have amounted to less than a grain of sand obliterated by a breeze. For this state would not change: not if there were more time, not if there were more space, not if there were more technology, and certainly, not if there were more ‘humanity’ to be had – in this world, or elsewhere. The animal given oblivion still has only oblivion to fear.

There are many illusions that humankind has created to busy itself with the world of materials while it slowly decays. There is the carnal joy of sex, the violent joy of war, the indulgence of food and spirits, the masochism of screens, the pompous joy of the arts, and the absent joy of asceticism. These scenes, or spheres of influence, castigate themselves upon the world with a mutual fury, breeding amongst themselves and spitting out vile new children which learn to speak the language of this new time. These are the true technologies, the abhorrent combinations of fascist cinema, social media influencers, and apps which log work. Many of these children of the meaningless evil of human sustenance and clamor lay claim to innovation – yet all may only lay claim to one thing: boundless innovation in the field of suffering, monitoring, disciplining, policing, and punishing. It is as such: that human beings busy themselves in either castigating themselves or others (while often mistaking one for the other) and have manufactured countless appendages which allow for the mutual (or independent) torture of said entities. It is in the sheer misery and aloneness of life that the greatest vestiges from despair and the greatest apparatuses of despair - alike - have been assembled from the ground, nothingness, and ‘human

ingenuity’.

This desire to punish and for punishment stems only from the desire to feel.

It is in torture that animals and human beings alike desire death.

I need a life away from the vapidity of the senses and into the soul. The entirety of my existence is entangled in transactions, mediated by mouth, paper, digitized currencies, language. I write if only to press into the soul, that which cannot be claimed, that which is not, and never will be, mine. I recoil in disgust from possession, I recoil in disgust from ‘I’. In this violent disjuncture, the soul disjects itself into text, song, speech, gesture, sound. It is in the sense that one might recoil at one’s reflection in the mirror – with horror at beauty, and with fascination at horror.

I live most of my life afflicted with a horrible despair; each waking moment is plagued by thoughts of ending all moments, forever. I cannot seem to awaken firmly and finally into life, only experiencing brief jolts of searing passion and fire, which enrage my consciousness and body until they are exhausted by sweat, or time. There is, simply, no more me. I have been destroyed by life and loss, to the point of which there is only this raging, carnal animal, possessed by flesh and flesh alone. I unleash my body into and onto itself, as it strangles the uncertainty and weakness which once held my self in. Perhaps it was that my vision of myself held that which is captive, in a sort of feedback loop which severed my soul at the neck. I am now free of this, sheerly due to the loss of love, for what now seems like an eternity in either direction. What remains is not mourning, nor is it grief, nor is it anger – what remains is a moment, inahbited entirely. I take nothing with me and return with nothing from this place – I enter and leave torn, shattered, broken, and without a home.

It is this ferocity which has severed me with definite finality from the world, from all things, from those around me, and the last scraps of relations I have with others. I have not only torn myself

to shreds, I have shredded that which links me to others – my humanity. Such a thing has never existed, and yet, it is that which predicates all worldly relations. This concept is so deeply engrained in the mannerisms and habitude of the world that to break from this acculturation is to firmly stand outside of everything, forever. Only the end of civilization will degrade such a hideous category. Even to this, I have my doubts. The human animal prizes its intellect, its position, its supposed possessions – so dearly and so rabidly – that it must evoke its own superiority, its own worth, its own world – without end until death. It is in the heart of consciousness to be conniving, jealous, possessive, and quarrelsome. The life of the human animal, as possessed (in turn) by consciousness, demands recognition. The task of the book, the task of fitness of the intellect, body – these are all tasks of a primary selfishness which does not escape the service of the consciousness. To transgress the consciousness is only to disdain that which perceives itself to be in possession of the self (the I, the mind), to the point of which it is destroyed by violence and hatred, leaving only the self. The self is that which loves and can be loved – not the individual, nor the conception of the individual as owning, knowing, or being, the self. It is such that this is the final move in the game, the surrender of each piece to the board, and the spilling over of the board altogether into elsewhere. I cannot deign to know where this elsewhere is, what it means, or where it situates the self, but I suspect that this elsewhere is the self. The self as that which may also be known as the aether, the particular, the massless mass that continuously escapes the human – precisely because the human mistakes itself for existence.

No longer may the desires, the conquests, the histories, the cultures of the human be of any service to this work, this task of tearing and lamenting and screaming into and out of a voice which does not emerge from a body, or larynx. There is no such silence as the silence of the humanless, or the gone world. Forever gone and abolished into the silence which does not require, does not ask, does not establish. It is that once all of the human institutions, trifles, and mannerisms have left the earth with the perceived graces of intellect and civilization – then true

culture will flourish. The culture of bacteria, the culture of trees, the culture of the wind, and the water, and the ocean. The culture of bugs, the culture of streams, the culture of infinite economy. Bataille spoke of an economy of the sun; this economy will long outlast the miserable stain of human consciousness, as it will long outlast the artifacts which grasp and grope at the true infinity of the universe.

I must take solace at this notion; to a certain extent, I do. I long to know this silence; grasp at it perhaps more than I grasp at life. Perhaps this silence after everything is simply the silence of the grave.

This sadness like the entirety of my life has already passed me by, and that I did not know it.

104

FROM NOTHINGNESS

The need to make great art is of the utmost concern to me at this juncture – to unify, with heat, passion, and great frustration – the principles of style and substance… that which I cannot find nor bring about in my life, in this world. It is as such that I bring about my body (primary and secondary, the corpus of the text), stripped to the practical, performative mechanism like a simple machine… in order to summon only that which is necessary – precisely this quality – nothing more, and nothing less.

This process, to me, is a maths of aesthetics, or a self-consciously reductive principle of self-making. With this principle to act as a sort of summons or call to being, I thrust myself into life as a generative process powered by the calculated rigor of feeling. It is thus; as such, that I channel sensation as a vibratory passage of sound of and through the body as instrument.

It is by this way (and myriad others) that self-making may occur – as a sort of self-objectification, or self-voyeurism – as method of learning… in and through which one observes the obdy, the mind, desire – as other. As such, I am a spectator of, to, and through the aesthetic lens of my desire – thus I witness its birth and destruction gladly; without event. I do not disturb it as it flows through me, and dies.

This is to say that desire, gesture, flesh – may not be ralized without first harnessing these gesticulations of the soul to the once and soon to be rigor-mortis body. These impulses fulfilled by the engagement of the motor mechanisms of drive (embodiment and practice of desire) are what animate the puppet of the body from inertia and infinity into action.

The disjuncture here, precisely, is that which compels force. These agonists might be called desire, hunger, thirst, greed, control, compassion, and otherwise. These sensations and conditions of the soul, necessarily (as abstractions resident

therein), require not only expression (or elucidation as representative of sensation), but, often, fulfillment by and at the command of said ferocious, desperate want/need. The distinguishing of want and need formulate the border at which the survival of the organism is confused with the consciousness of the organism.

It is as such that the falsely labelled ‘biological drives’ of reproduction are a fundamental transfixation of the survival of the organism, itself. This cognizance of the need to reproduce ‘self’ in adfinitum as one moment passes into the next is transferred onto (and into) the body, birth, being – of another.

Here, along with the mechanics of faculties such as ‘love’, ‘hate’, and other such passionate emotions as forces specifically directed outward (away from the embodiment) at an object – reach a con- fusion of the borderedness of being. Such extremity of feeling and sensation rips asunder the organism’s ability to differentiate the assumed-regular binary mode of self and other; thus, imaginatively, the organism transfers fundamental attributes of its own consciousness/unconsciousness to and from other organisms/embodiments as a sort of plural, embodiments.

Plurality is markedly irregular in the lexicon of modernity; exhibiting traits of that which is socialized to be ‘madness’, or a recklessness, a fundamental lack of concern for being-as- embodiment being-as-individual being-as-organism, futurity, sociality, and even the basic sustenance of the organism as it were.

It is precisely that the organism is consumed by sensation, or that these cultural elucidations of passion, desire, and contempt as emotionality – function a priori to the faculty of being as a pseudo- fundamental embodiment – which is in turn overlaid with consciousness, economic concern; ‘humanness’.

This madness is the imperative that possesses each ‘human’ beneath the slip of humanity, dormant and susceptible to the

absurd, twists of fate, love, pain, and agony. That which stratifies this primary faculty, howver, is the degree of intimacy or repressed contact the organism has with this plurality, this trans- embodiment.

Communion with trans-embodiment is as the ability of the organism to commune, in turn, with god (the other). It is that faculty which must necessarily be controlled, regulated, and sublimated by civilization (or the dominant order) in order to confer instruction; as an ordering/organizing form of self- making, which necessarily stratifies consciousness, embodiments, processes of meaning making as value, worth, truth, and knowledge. The fundamental allegiance here, of and with passion and madness as faculties of plural/trans embodiment cannot be stressed enough. It is precisely these modalities which transform and liberate human consciousness of its own myopic conception of itself.

This self concernedness as economy of self making is a constructed bordering of consciousness in order to consecrate ‘the individual’ as concept and practice into modernity.

To check madness, passion, and sensational experiences of difference (or simply embodiments of difference as representative ‘other’ from consecrated ‘self’), institutions of asylum, imprisonment, and punishment are created as pseudo-corrective mechanisms to right the wrong of manifest ‘categorical’ difference.

This project of control and discipline is fundamentally aesthetic in its concern and formation – for the establishment of civilization is predicated on the representative apparition (image, ghost) of civilization as intact, unified, assembled, together, protected, sealed, bordered, and established – in order to become, itself.

It is only through image-making that this power is accrued; the image, or illusion, is a priori to the visceral assemblage of a

civilization. This image-making process acts as the propaganda of justification (and the product of said justification) propping up the civilized body as imagined made materiality.

It is, in this sense, to say that civilization itself is an imagined social body-of-many. Furthermore, that this idealized embodiment is precisely what it produces in the form of images. In the sense that the organism continually reproduces itself in the consumption and excretion of nutrients and waste, thus does the imagined/constructed/consecrated body of civilization.

However, the critical juncture at and through this parallel is the mechanism of censorship, as it functions to mediate the breakless flow of being and becoming. Censorship, or repression, as material and extra-material conditions, police and enforce the every-day – the field, or terrain, upon and at which life and self are expressed and brought to bear.

The every-day as regulated by the economy of modernity is legislated, with judgment and jurisdiction consecrated and bounded by the body of civilization – that imagined arbiter of duality (inclusion/exclusion, right/wrong, human/animal, innocent/guilty). This arbitration is held at gunpoint, with the threat of extrabodily force mounting with increasing capability and speed (nuclearity, surveilance, use of chemical weapons, and so forth).

And thus, the sacred commune is severed: not only in the socialized rule of conduct and behavior at the level of the ‘individual’ (a modernity of relation via the increasingly ‘pure’ transaction of currency and material), but on the level of civilization, or of the imagined body, where civilization assumes the role of god after god. This lack, if left to the horizontal plane, could simply be fulfilled by the expression of passion and madness between organisms among organisms. But, organized in a vertical hierarchy, socialization continues the project of colonizing and consecrating the being-as- civilized – the project of god and becoming like-god changed hands, in order to

accommodate a super-technlologized modernity – a modernity in which ‘nature’ is harnessed, the ‘other’ is harnessed – and known. This knowledge is accomplished by a living autopsy of flesh and world – in the harvesting of labor, fluid, sap, and stone from the ground, and impoverishing that which is, in the name of that which might be.

110

PLAGUE AS REVOLT

To focus on viruses, bacteria, and plagues as the arbiters of history and culture is thusly to appeal not to an ahistory, but the obliteration of human concerns and considerations by way of the agent of history, brute force. It can be said for much of the contemporary left, and the left historically, that very few are willing to come to terms with force (armed struggle, violence against the ruling class) as that which brings about a degradation and death of the social body, as it were. It is thus that violence, in its many forms, can be studied at a microbiotic level, in the form of the plague. Marked by its high mortality rate, plagues (and other transmitted ‘infections’) spread without regard for language, walls, barriers, and (most importantly) borders. They do not, in short, regard any human construction except that, literally, of the body itself. The plague reaches down into the root of that which composes world, and takes the composing instrument, twisting a knife directly into the source of the world.

Plagues themselves, now perhaps ‘outdated’ in and by the contemporary understanding of illness (which many see as controlled, corralled, measured, within human grasp or understanding) stand as historical markers of the legacy of the incredibly fallible (imperial) body which nonetheless seeks to compose granite markers of truth, knowledge, morality, and legitimacy of, by, and for its reign. It is, as such, that this body of impressed history is haunted by the shadow of that which brought it into being, slave labor, labor in the colonies, and revolt. This legacy is apparent as a ghost in the trees, wind, grass, and city – as that which laid the foundation for that which is. It is much the same with the plague, viral transmission, and the literal body. To compose a body over time is to accumulate and discharge bacteria; this bacteria forms the literal consciousness of the organism, as it were. This bacteria acts as the literal culture of the human-animal body. But it is also as such that this bacterial culture is entirely forgotten in the name of commodity culture, media, and the fetishization of other bodies. By way of the projection of the self into infinite containers, the mediating

(actual) material which contains the self is forgotten.

Plagues and revolts throughout history act as two examples of heterogenous culture; furthermore, proof of the impossibility of repression as an action (policing of self making by and for the social body). The victory of these movements as border crossing pathogens to empire is consecrated not only by this truth, but by the additional truth of the body seeking survival. It is no great abstract doctrine which purports this mission, nor is it a sacred text or an indecipherable tome – but instead the sheer physical revolt into birth into being which propels each of these movements – that of the plague and that of the revolt. It can be said, then, that each of these movements comprise and compose indigenous cultures.

The hallmark of imperial culture (marked by liberalisms, moralities, and policed borders) is, first and foremost, the disjuncture of the body from rhetoric. It is clear, (in the voting cycles especially – from Biden to Thatcher) all over the world, that imperial (or simply fascist) political movements prize the abstracted body over concerns of history and the material conditions of those who come into contact with these political movements. It is the use of the body, or many bodies, to achieve this abstract reality (which is nothing less than the enslavement and labor of one for the profit of another) – which is obscured by the rhetorical.

Here, to complicate matters, it is of the utmost importance to see language, or the pseudo-communication or transmission of culture by way of the abstracted gesture from the mouth – as itself a plague of far greater and insidious means than that of the traditional illness.

It is, through the transmission of the mouth, often, that a virus or illness is spread; here, it is through speech that both bacteria and imperial culture are transmitted. Speech, as that secondary action, as that action which claims a second action (that of the conveyance of a thought, an image, an idea) is the force by,

through, and at which imperial culture suppresses immediate political revolution.

It is important to mark here that political revolution occurs only by way of physical violence, altercation, and the spillage of blood. A political revolution of the everyday has been occurring at the hands of fascist co-conspirators and oligarchs of the world over, engaging in daily criminal activity to maintain the oversight of their respective empires – an action which has slowly transitioned from outright slavery (as the first modernity) into drone bombings, child sex rings, and the use of empty rhetorical claims to reform, national security, and human rights in order to justify forced regime change and the murder of civilians. This is to say, in no short terms, that the creation and establishment of the world (as it were) is a political revolution of fascism, ongoing and uninterrupted except by the brief turns to liberation orchestrated by L’Ouverture in Haiti, glorified by Mayakovsky in Petrograd, led by Sankara in Burkina Faso, documented by Fanon in Algiers, tagged by the students in Paris in May ’68, and spoken of by Marx in The 18th Brumaire. These moments, along with many others which have not been mentioned here, are the only victories of liberation, brief as they were, in the history of the ever burgeoning world. The only total victory would be its end, entirely.

Here is where the plague and revolt function as unforeseen, uncontrollable, violent, brutal and immediate arbiters of history. Neither revolt nor plague require a gateway of learnedness, approval, excellence, authority, or advisory. Plagues and revolts alike as cultural transmission act as brutalizing forces against the very establishment of empire, breaking up its transmissions, scrambling its infrastructure, crippling its neatly organized mechanations of work and power. Neither revolts nor plagues stop at nothing but the entire decimation of the body (human- animal and social alike) and demand nothing but said decimation. There is no room for a reformist politic when one is faced with a plague, nor is there room for god, illusion, morality, or reason. Plagues act as god does – with disgust, with efficiency, and with brutal accuracy. It is as such that the plague, along with

the art of revolt are themselves at the pinnacle of culture, spitting on and ridiculing the pathetic human endeavor of organization, safety, and empiricism (entirely). Plagues acknowledge no human rights other than the right to death.

The deployment of a culture of plague as political action against empire is of the utmost necessity and is required immediately in order to stop the exponentially jettisoned (yet, again, entirely man- made) brutality meted out by the whip of the state, resounding around the globe. This culture itself would be comprised of the total negation of empire by way of refusal; furthermore, continued violent action against empire without compromise. This agent would be ready and willing to deploy means of violence (in myriad forms) with as much willingness as the state, and, in turn, refuse the politics of fear and suppression meted out by state media and state organs in order to quell and fracture this impulse to revolt. This culture of plague must in turn throw off the veil of rationality in the name of criticality – as one might address a hemmoraging wound. This agent would fuse plague and revolt as a ruthless deployment of all instruments at one’s disposal at breaking up and abolishing empire, and the mechanisms (rhetorical and material) at its disposal.

In this manner, an agent of the plague must then turn against itself in order to reproduce Itself, and against its very impulse toward survival at all costs. This antithesis is at the foundation of revolt. The turn towards violence also necessitates one’s willingness to give up life in the name of creating the possibility for life, in a world where there is none. Here, an unbordered ‘life’ no longer consecrated by the myopic conception of ‘individuality’. The plague does not discern.

It is in this sense that viruses and plagues are truly alive, alive beyond human conception – precisely because they straddle the border of life and death in their communication between hosts. Viruses embody ‘life-as-human’ and evict their hosts, while fucking within the host and finding themselves elsewhere. The eternal recurrence of viral and bacterial transmissions, far and beyond the myopic human conception of ‘culture’ is that which

supercedes the binary of life and death into a ceaseless creation of self and destruction of that which contains self. Plagues, in their task as bringers of death, by way of this very binary, become ineffably ‘alive’ in their violent action.

116

THE CULTURE OF CAPITAL

“The need for truth requires that intellectual culture should be universally accessible, and that it should be able to be acquired in an environment neither physically remote nor psychologically alien.”

Simone Weil

...

The culture of capital prioritizes profit generation before all else, and thus, at the cost of all else, including justice, truth, and the sacredness of the human being.

…

Thus, it may be said that industrial culture is inherently exploitative, for the generation of profit cannot occur without the gain of one and the loss of another.

…

It may be said, if all matter truly does not perish (only to change form), and that gravity acts on all things equally, that industrial culture is unjust.

…

Much as the term culture might be used in the sense of bacteria, one may very well consider the human being to be constantly inoculated with culture, as culture is as at once a means and reason for survival, of the very sustenance and digestion of life

itself, where culture acts as a nutriment… for culture is also food and water (and culture resides there, changing, growing, communicating).

…

Where bacteria resides in the gut of a human, so does the gut influence the thoughts and behaviors of the individual. Much as the human mind thinks, so do the bacteria in the gut, as the gut itself is inextricable from the greater thought process, being as it is of the systems of the body (immune, digestive, and otherwise).

…

Hence, it is very difficult to discern culture of a bacterial kind from culture of the ideas and customs of a social body.

The social body can be seen in the very sociality of the organs and processes of the human body itself, and in the larger context of human beings in relation to one another.

…

When one engages with culture, whether this be information gathered in a library or archive, a conversation, a work of art, or in the act of digestion… one is accessing this information, information which is necessarily historical and communal, as it is formed by engagements prior; informed by the relations occurring with, within and without it.

…

Thus, culture may be said to be a biome, or a sphere of influence in relation to countless other spheres… which develops and changes over time, in relation to itself and those around it.

…

Thus, the human being of sociality, of the world, may be said to be in a ceaseless state of consuming and excreting culture, much as one might ingest food and water and excrete waste.

…

There is no ability to discern culture from waste, which is to say, culture is shit.

…

It may be said that culture is a vehicle for ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. Culture in context, culture as it is of an intersection of time and place, a marker of being a-part, of taking part.

…

Human culture is the experience of sensation in relation to the body, both social and organ-ic (that which the individual or a group of people are taking in, observing, and processing by way of the senses and ‘bodily’ functions.)

…

Culture is something fundamental to existence, for it would, can, and does occur without human beings. There is human culture, there is the culture of the trees, the culture of the wind, the culture of birds.

…

A culture of dissent understands that not only is human culture but a brief wink in the massive life of history… but that human culture may not outrun death, irrelevance, and stupidity; that

human culture is always but a fragment or particle within the culture of the greater physical world and beyond.

…

As such, human history is of history, but it is not history itself, and human culture is of culture, but it is not culture itself.

…

Thus, it may be said that there is no truly asocial culture, as culture may reject the dominant form of sociality (this is a culture of dissent), but may not escape the influence of this dominant form, nor may it escape sociality itself, or the state of being in relation to… for sociality is not necessarily bound by time and space.

A culture of dissent, in its rejection of the dominant form of sociality, in action, insurrects the ground of industrial culture (in the very proposition of sociality by other means… rejection, negation). Thus, a culture of dissent may simply be the existence of a person or group of peoples in a certain (or uncertain) way.

…

Where industrial culture posits culture as something to be bought or sold, a culture of dissent may posit culture as library of interrelated

historical phenomena… between peoples, beings, ideas, and thoughts (this may include the relation between a person and a chair, a bird and a tree branch, a rotting log on the forest floor), and as such, cannot, and should not, be reduced to a profit engine, without consequence.

…

In short, where industrial culture posits culture as commodity, a culture of dissent posits that to attempt to profit off of culture (furthermore, to create a culture of profit) is to go against the foundation of the physical world, which is to say, profit off of that which is fundamentally just.

Thus, it may be said that industrial culture is perverse.

…

A person sitting in a chair must obey the physical principles of the environment the person and chair are within-the-context-of. As such, a log on the forest floor decays according to the climate, gravity, the changing of time, and other such phenomena inextricable from the greater physical condition, or sphere(s) of influence.

…

These physical principles may be altered by human involvement. In many circles, this is called ‘human progress’, or the struggle to create dominion over nature.

…

Industrial culture, in the very creation of profit as an economic mechanism, seeks to overrule the economics of the physical world, which is, an economics of balance, or an economics of total justice.

…

Industrial culture seeks to impose and justify the imposition of artificial power, the power of some over others, the power of the human over nature, the power of a light bulb at night. Many of

these inventions serve (if not exclusively, then in part) to create the conditions for further exploitation and production of artificial mechanisms of power and influence.

…

Industrial culture may then be seen as a machine of influence- generation, in the influence of groups of people, the influence of thought, the influence of world.

…

A culture of dissent witnesses profit and exploitation, and understands that there will be perfect consequence, if not by the hand of those exploited, by the powers (gravity and the physical law) that be.

…

Hierarchies of discernment (caste systems, high and low culture) may be seen as illusions generated in order to serve artificial systems of power-knowledge... manufactured and normalized by human beings to serve the interest of human beings. Artificial power systems generated for profit, are, again, fundamentally unjust, in their very purpose, the drive to profit. However, artificial power systems created in service of justice and functionally just on a scale (in relation to human beings, environments, and the physical principles of the world itself), are not.

…

Just artificial power systems may be spoken of as prostheses, connected in such a way that they are merely a continuation of the physical systems of the world (a lever, the heat of the sun).

…

Bataille speaks of an economy of energy, beginning at the core of the sun itself… a modern concept of economics should reflect this.

…

(In regards to the above, industrial culture may yet find a way to buy and sell the sun, itself.)

…

Industrial culture may be seen, in light of Bataille, as an exclusive machine. In its establishment and purpose (to profit and create circumstances of and for further exploitation), capital is fundamentally exclusive and unbalanced. Some must lose so others may gain, some must die so others may live. Some are righteous and good in the eyes of god, and others are not. This may be seen in the myriad iterations of the propaganda of nation, in order to justify its means, and ultimately, its ends.

A machine that functions exclusively has cut itself off from the larger systems of the world, which is to say, the physical principles and governing laws of the earth, itself. Such is the nature of exclusivity.

…

A culture of dissent is a culture of inclusivity, a culture of association, by association. A culture of dissent is, and.

…

A machine that functions exclusively must create the conditions for dependence in order to function, as, if a system functions exclusively, it is a artificial system. An artificial system, in its

severance from the root, must sustain itself by other means.

The human body depends on the interrelation of the systems within it, and the interrelation of the systems without it (plant life, animal life, the energy of and from the sun, streams, rivers, and rain)... and thus within and without may be said to be truly indiscernible, as inclusive systems function on the scale of justice.

…

The culture of capital creates the conditions for dependence by establishing and justifying itself by way of itself. Capital could not exist without belief. Thus, the culture of capital may be seen as a minor ouroboros, in that it continues to reproduce itself and the necessary conditions by consuming those who labor under it.

…

Industrial culture depends on the material and historical conditions of the just world in order to extract and reduce materials, ideas, resources, systems, and conditions from the just world to create, expound upon, and fuel itself... for industrial culture is fundamentally of this world. Just culture is the world, itself. There is no separation, no break.

…

Where truth and history are of the world, ‘truth’ and ‘history’ are of the culture of capital. As a sphere within the greater sphere of the world, it cannot escape that which is necessarily itself… and thus must pervert that which it rejects in order to sustain itself, justify itself, and birth itself ad infinitum.

…

It may be said that the culture of capital is a facsimile of just culture.

…

The sun burns of its own accord, in perpetuity until death, colossal in the face of the concerns of human beings.

…

To break from the greater system (as industrial culture attempts in the establishment of a human economy) is possible only in a vacuum where the principles of the physical world no longer apply. Thus, the efforts of industrial culture to exploit and profit off of the physical

world by way of human labor and objectification of world, will encounter an equal and opposite reaction.

An understanding of the fundamental physical condition is essential to understanding the patterns and movements of history, human and otherwise… for much as culture is living, thus is the bacterial, the plant, the animal, the human, the social, and the world, itself.

…

No organism of greater or lesser order.

…

To attempt exploitation in the face of the culture of life necessarily requires a small mindedness. To be of small mind is to consider the ways of dividing things, the ways of owning and possessing things to oneself, the ways of advancing one’s own hopes and dreams, regardless of consequence, regardless of the pain and suffering of others… even in the face of that which one knows to be true.

That these things may become plain.

…

CITIES OF EXILE

The looming renditions of Babel by Valckenborch, Verhaecht, and Bruegel together become an adequate symbolic-imagistic inversion of the city of hell on this earth. Spiraling upward like a dilapidated version of Marx’s model of history inf(l)ected by and with Benjamin’s vision of the angel of history, laborers scramble about its base in an attempt to support the corrupt tower, crumbling and eternally incomplete. The project of the city aligns itself directly with the project of capital in that it must incessantly progress, reproduce itself, and feed on its inhabitants. Each layer may be seen as a manifest tombstone, inscribed with the labor of those killed by the exertion it took to sustain the doomed mass. Their force lives in the stone.

The exile views the city in an emotion colored by horror, as opposed to the pleased marvel displayed on the many faces of those touring the suffering of those who live therein. These cities, themselves monuments to power, are rivers of shit and bodies. It is as if, perhaps, after they have been used entirely, left sick, old, and weak, Medusa struck down the slave to put to use just one more time. The blood of the worker is drained and used as a paste, the body as stone.

It is this foundation of use and abuse of the laborer that permeates modern sociality.

The city, again, serves a twofold function, as a monument to the

glory of civilization, and as a house for the slave. The great cities of the world have served as auction grounds, stadiums for the sport of slave against slave until the death or displeasure, and sewer for the worker to shovel the shit of the aristocracy. The industrialization of two hundred years time has produced exponentially condensed conditions of and for exploitation in the city. From Rome to the American state…

These cities of exile...

Those who walk the streets of the city walk the streets of each and every city of history, riddled with the struggle of labor, liberation movements, bondage… of the exhausting and continued weight of oppression over time. Sisyphus, the labor of maintaining the city for the rich to play and make sport of the suffering of the worker. One must carry the stone of one’s own body, put to task in a show of strength, only to lay oneself and oneself before the monument of capital. Again, the city is twofold, the arena and the machinic temple… the self is twofold, both to be used by capital… body and soul.

The religion of the aristocracy is leisure, sport, and the pleasure of the spoils of society… that is, the choice of any and all life and the expense of all life. The wealthy may laze at the window and look down upon the construction below, frequent establishments where they will be served by the underpaid, and employ those who cannot

live otherwise (at wages that are impossible to live on) to cook for them, clean for them, and dispose of their faeces. The city then may be considered the great coliseum (analogous to the theater

in the display of suffering and cruelty for the pleasure of the onlooker), where the laborer engages in the imposed violence of exploitation for the pleasure of the wealthy. The flaneur may observe such an occurrence, and observe being observed from the tower above, unable to escape from this condition, bound to his fate... as it takes all, consumes all, and punishes all.

"Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'"

Ozymandias laughs!

“(The prison and his compulsory journey appeared to him as the ‘promised land’)”

Perhaps if the surfaces made more apparent the truth of history and labor behind them, that if instead of the steel facades that litter the skyline of the metropolis, one instead saw blood painting the horizon, a thousand crucifixions screaming into a river of sound…

And so becomes the crucial dimension, the intersection of time and place, perhaps that which cannot be seen insofar as it becomes as a leaving… the dimension of history of place. Only through study, the practice of reading, listening, seeing, and

contemplating, is history made visible. As in Botticelli’s ‘Divine Comedy’, one may yet discern the layers of sediment, shit, waste, and filth that compose the cantos (these cities), a whirlpool of piss, blood, and the fluid excrement of the human body razed and broken by the Catherine wheel of gravity and time.

Botticelli's manuscript illustrates, in painstaking detail, the condition of labor since the inception of capital… the condensation of the physical human body and organs into mechanism, into object, and the sacrifice of blood, being, and soul to the machine of the city of god. Capital demands all that exists and all that is not yet in existence, the promise of eternal return in the form of fractive and cutting reproduction of itself by way of human sacrifice.

What remains of the human body is stone.

If one must walk in the city, let it be amongst the dead, to acknowledge the city as a giant catacomb, a library exhaultant against the force of time, ground to dust and dirt, resistant bacterial, worm ridden, rotten, illegible, and present, even in the face of that which haunted those who rest within, marked and bled. If one may speak of evil at work, it is not that of those who suffered under the yoke of this machine, it is the machine itself. Those who are damned feed it in the name of pleasure and personal gain, and those butchered and drained in its name... become a part of the city eternally. Even in its ruins, they are present, they remain. It is this very history that the culture of capital seeks to erase, to eradicate that which it is not, which is to say, that which is and was. In its very task, it perverts itself. The culture of capital is force in the form of exploitative human labor exerted against a perceived linearity of time, against the death of

empire, the death of civilization... the arrow that pierces the constantly reappropriated figure of Saint Sebastian, the martyr.

Dolls and bowls, amulets and bones…

A diagram of time as a force acting on the human body may look something more akin to the Vitruvian Man strapped to a Breaking Wheel in the shape of a compass rose. Time is complex geographic, as it pulls and stabs locally, pointed past, present, and future, forming the horizontal plane. Gravity, acting locally, presses downward (here, Atlas), forming the vertical plane. The diagonal planes, crossing this cross and pulling at the cross, indicate the compound intradimensional relation of this cross, the site of conflict, suffering, and existence... as constellation…

… for it is here that the body is crossed twice by capital, made object, unmade object.

If the culture of capital is the machinic eradication of that which is human in the name of unceasing and instant progress (now- industrial quickness), the culture of that which is and was is libidinal, sensual, erotic, thanatonic, honeyed, dripping.

Baudelaire speaks of wine as an experience that is a way of understanding (others) by way of becoming differently, and sharing in this experience… in different time.

Both Orpheus and Dionysus expand and contract time by way of the principle of density, or of voluminous experience. Time may theoretically pass at a flat rate, but the skilled musician may change time in his relation to time by way of his relation to instrument, and the imbibing of certain substances may altogether alter the sensual and nervous perception of time, where a second becomes a vehicle containing the infinite. The heart rate increases and decreases as the body works… time as vibratory, heated, and elastic phenomena… an environmental occurrence.

…

Perhaps time is this gathering place, this oscillating commune, where peoples across time gather and speak amongst themselves.

Eurydice is lost twice.

(Orpheus was like that coward who saw Cerberus, the three- headed dog, chained by the central neck... stone transformed his body.)

…

Peculiar in the myth of Orpheus is his resemblance to Benjamin’s conception of Angel of History… upon receiving word that Eurydice may return with him to the mortal world, he requires more than word… he requires the proof of sense. He turns, and in this turn, he turns twice. Orpheus not only turns to face the fading now-apparition of Eurydice, but he turns to face that which he leaves, again toward that same place.

Farewell!

‘And in the specific purgatory of the modern world, created and maintained by capital, every injustice is grounded in that modern unilinear view of time, for which the only relation conceivable is that between cause and effect. In contrast to this, in defiance of this, the “single synchronic act” is that of loving.’ - Berger

(CUT.)

134

CURRENCIES

IN REGARDING THE SYSTEM OF CAPITAL, it is necessary to remember the fundamental operative condition of a system in a broad and general sense, which is to say, ‘it’ (a system, being divine or metal) is sustained by a feeding, or a generative energetics, or fuel, which enables it to move, act, breathe, and regulate itself as a living, or pseudo-living being. This mechanism, composed of inputs and outputs, in turn composes a process of ‘life’, as a language of moving parts. Languages use chains of meaning and motion to create further meaning and motion, while simultaneously creating distance from life. A breathing in; a breathing out. A pressing into (impression), a pushing away (expression). I use the word ‘chair’ to gesture towards a chair. I use the word ‘world’ to gesture towards a ‘world’. I use the word ‘knife’ to gesture towards a knife.

…

To conceive of systems (systems of the body, systems of humankind, systems of the earth) is to understand beings and bodies as mutable, kinetic, and intertwined with one another in such a fashion that prosthetics and inorganics and metals mingle with flesh and bone, creating hybrid beings, hybrid functions, and hybrid spaces. The human body itself as a system of systems, interacting with other bodies, beings, and embodiments. While one body or mechanism may be acting, another body or mechanism may be acted upon, while simultaneously acting in another sense. These bodies (at any given time) thus compose and animate the active and reactive/acted forces which in turn compose wor(l)d.

…

Thus, to perceive of the current system of global capital is to perceive capital itself being as a transmitting and transmissive current, running within, without, and through the human being and greater social organization of beings - itself, captivating membranes, memory, and the nervous and fluid systems which degenerate and regenerate the human body; compose the body of bodies. A composite diagram of all systems might necessarily resemble an ouroboros.

…

It is also true that animals and ‘objects’ and ideas do not escape this current, slaughtered and raised and slaughtered in habitats (or in the case of ideas and ‘objects’, created, destroyed, created, destroyed in wor(l)ds) regulated by the engine of capital which converts and convenes (in) material spaces. This vessel, or machine of and for life as an idea made materiality, consumes that which composes it.

…

To evoke a system that fundamentally does not exist (capital); runs on the creation and enforcement of sub-systems of arbitrary value (an assertion of meaning which necessary fluctuates, rises and falls with the actual relationship of belief and believer, themselves), one might ‘figure’ capital, or sketch capital as a being, as a disembodied embodiment, as an agent itself which has now long outlived the philosophers and traders who engineered the roots made sprawling branches of this belief system. Capital, much as the substrata of regulatory systems which maintain and feed the body - capital (as it were) has become a body itself, a figure itself, a living being with massive influence.

…

It is that, often, religions seek embodiment by means of an archetype, a god, an agent who carries out the will of god, a

fallen god - a sort of hierarchy of godliness and goodness, figured.

…

It is as such with capital and the deserving and chosen few, those of great wealth feeding on the bodies and remains of those who die to feed the machination, who die on a continuous loop, who die trying to survive. Capital is then at once both a current and a currency, that which transmutes energetic beings and forms and produces death (in the creation of the icon-ic body), which is then consumed by the ruling class.

…

There is a history of genocide specific to capital, and coincident exponentially with and within the development of the nation state, where central power is consolidated and dispersed with increasing force. Here, the Young Turks, Hitler’s Germany, the atom bomb, and the great American myth. Genocide as an act of scapegoating living beings into death by furnace and fire, with increasing efficiency and deadliness.

…

To survive the onslaught of technological capital is to submit to this machine in accordance to one’s standing, or in Simone Weil’s terms, the crucifixion of time and place of one’s birth, life, and death. This survival, in many cases, means death by other means. Death of limb,

death of love, death of dreams, death of soul. To live under capital, in short, is to embody capital and the values of capital – to become beautiful, efficient, obedient. This becoming is taught as becoming human; as such, draws a definitive and concrete line, a border, a boundary. Only certain individuals are deemed worthy of becoming human; others are measured as less than

human. This categorization and measurement is at the crossing of the quantification and qualification of life.

…

Under capital, each individual has a vital role to and in the economic system’s survival, from the beggar to the bureaucrat. Each, in turn, is crucified by a currency, or by a current of energy. Each is given a stakes; each is given a worth. In this sense, much of ‘life’ under capitalisms is already fated, already written, already impossible, already lost.

…

The beggar may yet retain his soul, while the body decays rapidly in destitution, abuse, and impoverishment. The billionaire may yet sculpt his body and refine his mind, yet die without a soul, die precisely because of an impoverishment of the soul, the spirit; in a death of passion, a death of life. To live under capital is to be submitted to this basic Faustian problem, this paradox of energetic distribution, occurrent on a spectrum, a triangle of fulfillment and unfulfillment. Here, wealth is externalized, internalized; life is located.

…

It is the great farce of modern life that riches are aspired toward (as an outward condition), that poverty is condemned (as an outward condition), and that this material delineation, along with representationalities of face, body, birth, and otherwise are used to identify, locate, and stratify living beings. These identifiers, or markers of life and the subsequent value of life, undercut the basic soulfulness of life; subjugate life to a series of bindings, which in turn determine the value of each and every life as something to be harvested, bought, and sold (regardless of the price). This function of capital, thus, is the death of life itself; the death of possibility. By encircling life with a system of value, where everything has a price, life is suffocated; strangulated by

the invisible hand of capital.

…

To stratify life into socialized categories of material value and worth is to ignore the great energetic priniciple of all life, that if something is gained, something else is inevitably lost. If what is seen is bought and sold, what is unseen is also affected. This dialectic is most apparent in the energetic transfer of language from ‘object’ to object, from ‘person’ to person.

…

Capital makes a farce of this energetic principle with the concept of profit as an engine, making the alchemist’s gold (the sculpting of the soul) superficial and hyper-material. Similarly, in love, one loses one’s idea of love. In life, one’s hopes and dreams are dashed and ruined. It is that language is inexorably infused with the expression of the chair itself; that the chair itself will always be primary… and this is the hope of life in the face of accelerating capitalisms. The chair speaks!

…

The system of capital makes a fundamental, basic decision for each and every life lived and extinguished under its mass, namely, that survival is at once predicated on one’s birth into material affluence and a conforming body (or lack thereof), and that basic human survival is not only striated by this affluent body, but that it is also deemed fundamentally valueless and worthless in the very striation of the body into categories of meaning/worth. To conceive of a system of value around the material condition of a deteriorating body is to play theatre at the site of the body, to mark it as gold even as this gold crumbles into dust.

…

To make life into a farce of profit is to reduce life to the sum of its parts, the sum of arms, legs, teeth, bones, and labor that might be harvested to further the growth of capital as an icon of ‘human progress’. The paradox: that even as this value is stripped away, the ‘valuable’ body loses value. The hard assertion of value as a market control, away from gold, into the ideal body, the ideal vehicle of and for capital, even as this ideal vehicle deteriorates (organically), worthy and worthless alike.

…

Here, at this site of the laboring-useful body, progress is quantified, not qualified. It is not the capacity to feel, the capacity to empathize with the suffering of another, not the capacity to love and dream and imagine that satisfies the progressive urge of modern life – it is the development of ever advancing resources and technologies; the creation of an evermore efficient, productive surrogate for life. This industrialization of life goes hand in hand with the striation of life, which is to say that there is too a value for and of the continual affirmation and reaffirmation of quantifying life, rendering life material and countable, apparent. This continual materialization, or production, of the laboring body, is the countable product. In short, supply and demand are necessarily always both bodies and composed of bodies. The genocidal project is the end of this capitalization of life, where the state is maintained by the organized body, and sustained by the dis- organ-ized body, in the very literal disembowelment, amputation, and burning of the scapegoated personage.

…

This development itself is a tragedy of human consciousness that holds root in the mind, that holds root in the very ideals and ideas which power each and every social and political action, which in turn, constitutes the building and maintenance of this world. Without the cultural refuse, or shit, of capital, in the

production/productive image, film, compositional advertisement for the ideal/body/life under capital, the very possibility of the dream of capital fulfilled (success, leisure, peace, tranquility, wealth, to desire and be desired, etc) – capital would cease to exist. This cultural and ideological belief system underpinning the current-existence of capital, imbues existences and individuals with incredible power, while simultaneously siphoning other existences and individuals of soul, body, energy, and life.

…

It is in the minds of each and every participant (each life), whether consciously or subconsciously, that capital is inevitable, that laboring under this system of forced payment and fundamental life-debt is not only a requirement of life, but preferable to any and all alternative

conditions and existences. It is as such that fear powers this engine of modernity, the fear of the loss of life, the fear of death, the fear of the bottom falling out of the economy… and fear of further loss of life without capital, without the ideological underpinnings that compose and compound the moment.

…

These fears are not only common, but justified by the very history of capitalism itself, which has shown time and time again that the profitable commodity which models human life as surrogate (celebrity, advertisement, gold, displaced life), is prized and valued as token above all human life which stands in its way. To stand in the face of capital, or to push back against capital, is to place oneself before the furnace, to be swallowed, martyred.

…

In this sense, those who uphold and police the system of capital

are merely agents enforcing this greater will; this greater will will ultimately remove them from life if any such dissent were voiced. The systems of police, education, government, and prison alike are upheld by this common and fundamental knowledge – that these systems will continue on with or without the dissenting individual; furthermore, that the dissenting individual is a convenient sacrifice to the engine of capital, proving the power of and before that which one has already submitted. To speak of capital in this sense, in terms of the agents who enforce and mete out the rite of capital, is to say that these individuals were born into submission to capital, and thus born into the seats of capital as managers, overseers, governers, and owners.

…

There is, as such, this silencing that reverberates through the media of the modern world, which displaces this fundamental threat into new trends, new distractions, faster pleasure, and, above all else, by way of these vehicles, the sensation of total alienation from life. Those who govern this media are invested in the control of messages; disseminate messages which solely seek to confirm the historical agenda of capital and colony alike… and by way of ideological and subliminal confirmation of the narratives produced by capital and colony, further these histories by way of a continual archetypal recycling of ‘truth’ as entertainment.

…

The development of portable devices and screens by which one might view and consume media at any time, have at once provided a potential space by and through which one might escape into imagined and virtual community, while affirming total control of both physical and virtual community (one and the same) by and through the state.

…

It is as such that human life continues to shrink away from the very real and material conditions that allow for the existence of human life – food, water, intimate connection and meaningful relationships with other living beings by way of touch, attention, and other forms of ‘contact’, as new technologies at once provide one more wilderness, one more unconquered world; which is soon to be at once territorialized and pressed further into outer spaces. This technologization of the world is mediated first and foremost by the monetization of the world. This monetization, or capital, is the primary mediator of ‘object’ and object, ‘person’ and person.

…

The inner world, which is and was available to each and every being, the world of the mind, the imagination, of the ecstasy of intimacy between living beings, trust between living beings, is almost obliterated in each caustic moment of contact between being and capital. However, this inner world, or the world of the spirit, cannot be totally extingushed by the implication of capital, as it escapes through the very ineffability of soul, of the impossibility of communicating soul and spirit by way of language – visual, textual, and otherwise. In short, if soul were to be considered a bacteria, it might be something so buried in the form(ul)ation of existence that it itself exists as a primordial sludge far beneath the crust of the earth, the mind, the body, as something (too) existent in each and every living being, and simultaneously existent nowhere, and in nothing.

…

As the system of capital monetizes and valuates existence, it teaches those living and laboring under it to monetize and value their existences in accordance to its strictures, as a mass deviation from critical thought and expression into a world of predetermined outcomes and categorical truths. To live under capital is to know the cost of water, to know the cost of food, to

know the cost of shelter, and to pay that cost at all costs – while simultaneously understanding that the cost of life under capital is life itself.

…

The cost of survival (in the concrete and final sense of the life and death of the body) becomes the critical focus of life, where each dollar is carefully counted, where each action is mediated by the immediate and crushing reality of living on the verge of destitution, death, and arbitrary ‘criminality’.

…

Capital gambles with life, and living under capital is a gamble. The currency is life, for and from which money often stands in (for the literal body which does or does not possess ‘it’). And just like money, life has no foundational meaning, worth, or value under capital, other than as it benefits the functionality of the productive machine. Just as a human being uses a chair, so is the human being used by capital to fulfill the purposes of production and reproduction of industrial materials and resources that will in turn be used.

…

This cycle of use, abuse, and disabuse is replicated in the very human relations capital regulates. The spheres of work and business bleed into leisure, life, and love; much as the digital and virtual worlds synthesize, the human and the machine synthesize. Human relations become a series of hyper-mediated transactions, where words and gestures and intimacies are accumulated as currencies themselves, where attentions and ignorances act as the spending of life on other life, for other life.

…

For where one pays attention to death, and one ignores death, there is a boundary.

…

To care for and to love oneself and others becomes a limit; a resource in and of itself. And just as love becomes a currency, this currency may then also be exploited, used, spent.

…

In this very basic valuation, where life is displaced into a system of value divorced from life itself (and thus a mediator of and through life), the potential for immediate and visceral living dies; is replaced by the surrogate life of cinema, machine action, props, playthings, and pleasurable illusions.

…

For if life under capital is merely the worth of the body as perceived from the outside, the body becomes the essential tool, the essential weapon, the essential market of and for survival.

…

The body is at once the consumptive and productive device, that from which value is derived by force; that with which value is affirmed by the instrumentalization of consumption by capital.

…

146

NOTES ON THE SOUL

For this soul is the composite nature of all dualities, wedded and content with opposition.

To settle the appetite of the soul, one need only to sing in harmony with the organs.

For there is at once all life and no life, war and peace, man and woman, chorus and silence. The soul is the grounds upon which this theatre of struggle is enacted.

To come into this place of becoming, one need only to make peace with war, become man and woman, and to sing without sound.

At the mouth of the river, there is a boat, invisible to the naked eye.

This boat is the soul – the vessel for all things. And yet, when one tries to bring the world of things along, the boat sinks into the water – refusing to budge. For the soul carries all things, yet it is also devoid of all things.

This vessel knows of nothing that can be named, nothing that can be made, and nothing that can be destroyed.

As such, it loves carelessly; yet with absolute conviction.

Those who reject the true composition of the soul as the great body composite of even the most extreme duality wage war against themselves, and thus, the world.

To carry this soul, this ultimate body of nothingness – into the world of things, is to continually be reminded of the violent emptiness of things, and the fullness of the soul.

It is a mistake to conceive of attaining the soul, as the soul is beyond both conception and attainment.

In music, dance, and solitude, the soul reconvenes with itself in a great heaving sigh.

Oftentimes, the soul waits beyond the birth and death of a certain body for this reunion, and into the next life.

For the body is a mere junction of and for the movement of the soul (the ceaseless flowing element and the eternal composition of life, and that which moves the stars).

It is also that the stars can be moved to weep at the true expression of the soul.

This expression may only be known as such by the soul – not the eye, nor the mouth, nor the mind.

It is as such that living beings perceive the world, as filtered

through the body, the nervous system, the veins, and into the pulsing root, which is at once located in the body, yet invisible, even to the critical eye.

This is why some disorders, many disorders, remain immune to treatment - because the soul is the great central mechanism, even beyond that apparent heart which finds residence at the center of the city of the body.

In the body there is also an invisible city, which exerts great influence upon the city known as the anatomical body.

The soul disperses itself among this city like a great fog, and when the soul achieves a state of great melancholy, this state also disperses itself throughout the body, entirely.

It may be said that when one is sick, that this sickness is also a sickness of the soul.

It may also be said that the soul is the great law of the body, which in its determination to reconvene itself, in turn determines the course of life itself.

It is in this sense that fate is simply the route which the blood takes through the vein.

This is perhaps the eternal frustration of the mind, and that which propels the mind to thought and the body to action. It is as such that the soul is a witness to time, while the body

accumulates and marks time.

It is this mechanism at and in which the body is instrument, and the soul is music.

The frustration of the mind is at being pulled in two directions by the body (mortality) and the soul (immortality) while attempting to attain music (the resounding moment).

The body moves toward death, its certain fate, while the soul moves toward music, its true state.

The mind is aware of both of these terms, while struggling to reconcile the terms of the body and the soul as merely aspects of the same mass – life itself.

It is this condition, together with the condition of being-in-the- world (composed of violence, war, and famine), which continually disturbs the mind, causing great suffering and despair.

It is precisely that the soul is composite that suffering is felt by the soul of the body, and the soul of the entire world.

For the soul is the thread that runs as a discourse between all things, and the communal grounds which irrevocably ties each action to all action, each landedness to all landedness, and each event to the entirety of time, itself.

It is not that these events are catalogued by the written archives of living beings, it is that they reside entirely in living beings.

The living being struggles to cope with the entirety of all time residual and resident in the body. This is to say that history is already present in its entirety; one need only to listen.

It is precisely because the living being is born from living beings that this is the case.

The soul, coming into new life and matter of strange organization, knows something great and sacred of that which came before it.

This knowledge is sacred precisely because it is entirely known to the soul and entirely unknown to the mind, while resident in the body.

Prescient knowledge of the soul is something of an everpresent shadow over life, influencing each action and inaction, while simultaneously remaining at least partially enshrouded by the ineffability of the soul. It is for this reason that death and the soul are intimately acquainted.

This is why the soul may come into communion with itself, but never into communion with the intellect.

At best, the intellect may learn to act in the partial light of this

generative state, standing at once in the sun and in the shade of life.

FILMS OF YOUTHFUL STARVING: BOY MEETS GIRL (1984) & MAUVAIS SANG (1986)

The idea of love as isolation symbolized by the impossibility of knowing made possible by the city. This is a relative distance, a paradoxical intimacy. Carax uses dialogue as a vehicle for poetics to both bridge and press up against that gap which is the impossible distance between life and life itself, of the failure of intimacy and love in the face of the world. Love fails because it cannot be, it simply is. Alex is a failed filmmaker because he is first a dreamer; Alex is a failed lover because he is first a dreamer. Films about love via the impossibility of love, using the cityscape as a psycho- geographical proxy of and for the simulated proximity of life. It is almost as if people were close; that there was intimacy. The city as a superficial lover, a lover who touches you briefly, then submerges. Alex maps his world out onto a wall, detailing the major events of his life as a movement around and about Paris (here, the Situationists); Paris means something to him, if not for these memories perched atop city streets like crude monuments, idols to which the passage of time circulates like a lake of experience. This map, perhaps, a sort of alienation of and from self and time, and subsequently, of Alex from those around him. For how could they possibly know? The spaces that Alex inhabits are spaces of relative friction, where Alex’s own precarious life bumps up against the precarious lives of others, creating reverberatory simultaneous possibilities of death and life, which both lead him closer to and farther away from love than ever before. The city, here, as a body being fed dreams and from the lips of lovers the sustenance of poetry which fuels the project of world making. Without poetry and dreams there is no labor, only suicide.

Carax’s dialogue lives while his characters don’t. Some wander (Alex), some are exiles of and from society, and some are impressed into the lives they lead. The poetic engagement or encounter, which is the imminent and perpetual situation of Carax’s work, is that by and through which the actors find greater meaning and greater life. It is here, and in these moments

(where the rose) where the actors truly act, finding the ability to move, even in the throes of great agony and heartbreak (Alex running in the streets to Bowie). It could be said that when Alex takes himself hostage that he is already dead, dead to himself and the world; certainly dead to capital: ‘capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital. Young people still have the strength to refuse this death; they are able to rebel against domestication. They demand to live,’ (Camatte). Frequently, Alex is simultaneously an animal and an exile, using his body to express the inexpressibility of his body, the inescapability of his body as this wound that expands and explodes outward like a dance, driving him to the absolute limit of nowhere and nothingness. This drive is the antithesis of the domestic-sociality, where life is predicated upon settling and settlement. It is precisely the unsettlement and profound dissatisfaction of and with life which propels the types in Carax, who act as atomized symbols of and for tragic modernity. Alex writes to Mireille: ‘We must talk at your place or in a café. Or in the subway, or in the park, or at my place,’. In the scene where Alex speaks with an aging, deaf man at the party where he meets Mireille: ‘You’ve forgotten how to talk. Maybe you think people aren’t worth talking to. You’re wrong. Maybe you’re afraid.’

It is this need and drive to talk, to speak, to express, to love, which is the fundamental driver, yet fundamental inability, which is the subject of Carax’s films. This drive is a climate, an atmosphere, and something which permeates all relations, both spoken and unspoken. Alex’s body is the expressive acting out of language as degradation, language as decay, language as futility – even in the face of the simulated possibility of the city. Alex’s expression is torn in his displays of physicality, bound by the atomic makeup of his body and the writhing of his organs and flesh, while simultaneously unbound by definition and definitive emotion. There is no ‘ability’ to reason with life; life takes Alex hostage and moves him through it like quick water through a tunnel, where he is guttered out into the world, onto the streets,

continually disinhabited. Perhaps it is no surprise then, that Carax uses Denis Lavant over and over again, as an actor who ‘squats’ in his characters’ bodies, stretching them, contorting them, making them plastic and cartoonish. It is the bodies of Carax’s types that are over and over again degraded by time and civilization, made useful, made useless, living on the unusable bridge. Lavant’s physicality is an active and open rebellion against these forces, as he (as Alex and otherwise) becomes an active force. But these moments are rare. Alex is, too often, a mere observer of his life and the lives of others: ‘I never tried to fulfill my best dreams… only to re-dream them.’

Alex’s relationships with Anna and Mireille are themselves dreams - as they are unfulfillments, distances of want, desire, play, and possibility. Neither of these relationships are ever consummated; yet, they represent consummate ideals of and for romantic love, precisely because of this lack of fulfillment. In Boy Meets Girl, Alex runs into and out of Mireille’s life, Mireille suicidal and despondent, Mireille falling out of love; Alex living this floating and useless life, stagnant, solitary, often voyeuristic. It is this (Carax’s tracking of Alex’s life as something lived yet unlived - as Alex witnesses life, yet continually fails to take part in it) crucial distance which informs the entirety of Alex’s situational engagements in the film. He is drawn into the lives of others, and spat back out. He wanders continuously, without companions, without friends (one of which he nearly murders in a spat at the beginning of the film), and seemingly, without future. Alex as a drifter translates into the following text, Mauvais Sang, as a recruitment of purpose (a heist for which Alex has the necessary ‘fingers’) - which is really just an excuse for Carax to introduce another romance, this time with Anna, the much younger lover of Marc, one of the leaders of the heist. This heist is to steal the serum for a new sexually transmitted illness called STBO, which is transmitted between lovers who are not in love. This plot point is quickly dismissed by Carax as merely a vehicle by and through which his poetry may flow, but it is an ironic turn in these two texts by the young auteur in which love is everywhere except in love, where the conventional modes and methods of expressing love (here, physical intimacy) are discarded in the name of

strangely playful devices (Alex and Anna fighting with shaving cream), wild expressions of unrequited love (Alex’s Bowie scene, Alex finally holding (and in this holding, killing) Mireille as she bleeds out on the floor). This climactic resolution in Boy Meets Girl as a confusion/conflation of murder and suicide, while also being the first moment of significant romantic expression beyond a hinted gesture, touch, word. Alex holds Mireille tightly from behind, unknowing pressing the scissors she had planned on using just moments ago to slit her wrist - into her stomach. It is in this moment that Carax’s beautiful futility of life becomes clear: that in the very moment Alex expresses his feelings, the moment he reaches out to love Mireille, the very moment he translates his poetry into the world - from this need to intellectualize, to speak, to create language… into the definite and active language of touch - he unwittingly kills his beloved. This complexity of love perhaps as a dance, with Paris as background music, where Alex despairs of this relative distance from alleyway to bridge to bedroom to record shop and back again. There is seemingly nowhere to go, nowhere to escape from this crushing weight. The viewer of the film hears a voice-over as Alex ascends in an elevator to his ex-lover’s apartment to deliver some stolen records: ‘Then what? What is it? I’m lost. Wasn’t it good? Not really. Something’s wrong… What? I don’t know.’ Carax’s claustrophobic cinematography lines the walls of the dilapidated and painted over apartment hallway; again, through a poetic synthesis of dislocated dialogue and in the abjected focus of the camera, an expression which would otherwise be abstract is made incredibly clear through a compounding of abstractions: the feeling of, simultaneously, the loss of, and being lost in, love. The direction and focus of the camera is spun out, losing Alex, losing the speaking voices, losing the subjects of the film; wandering the hallways like a ghost, where the voices echo and reach the listener. The subject, then, with Alex as a sort of animated vehicle from which this expression chaotically emerges in the language of the body, the mouth, and so forth… is love. The loss of love, the futility of love, the distance of love even in such a place as the home of that great romantic poet Baudelaire himself. And so it might be born from this love a desire expressed differently, expressed perhaps rarely (if ever) in the moment of coitus and mutual touch itself, but instead in the thousands of

gestures that gyrate and circle around the sexual act, themselves perhaps greater sex acts in the very ability to express desire as a solvent to life, often unexpected, with the ability to make life immanent, immediately real, immediately buoyant and full of meaning. In this philosophical realization, Carax elevates the art of filmmaking above the degraded modernity in which his films take place… into the sphere of immanent love-making. In this sense, Carax and Baudelaire across history inhabit a space of the catastrophic time of love, which is always now, which is always possible, which is always gestured towards, but rarely gestured within. There is a scene in Mauvais Sang, where Alex, frustrated over his infatuation with Anna (and her unavailability, due to certain commitments to Marc) lifts a car and turns it on its head on the hot asphalt of some alleyway Parisian night. He shadow- boxes; dances with himself in the foreground of some colorful murals before flipping the car over on itself, as a fellow Parisian looks on in an undershirt with amusing unamusement. This moment is a synchronic meditation on young Carax’s idea(l)s of what filmmaking is and should be - which is something incredibly futile, incredibly pointless, and yet breathtaking in its foolishness, stupidity, and yearning. At its surface/surfeit, this realization may seem a bit tame, but it is indeed a realization further than any intellectual project, as an intellectual project may only merely allude to this truth, not embody it.

This truth is a truth of the direction of desire in modernity, how desire is directed, where, when, why, and how. This direction, both as directions given (cultural, educational, social - cues) and directions taken (the anarchic disjections of Alex, already lost to this world), engage in a sort of machinic dance emblematic in the pinball scene in Boy Meets Girl, where the pinball machine is opened, revealing myriad flashing lights and points of response, transmitting and receiving information. Carax alludes to the possibility of play as being something of a insurrectionary device, a device which might perhaps usurp and destroy even the automated, industrial attempts of categorizing and organizing love and labor in modern life. There is also this rejection in Bowie’s lyrics: ‘I catch a paper boy / But things don't really change / I'm standing in the wind / But I never wave bye- bye /

But I try, I try / There's no sign of life / It's just the power to charm / I'm lying in the rain / But I never wave bye-bye / But I try, I try / Never gonna fall for / Modern love’.

It is no coincidence that these moments permeate Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang like, and in, doorways, thresholds, and gateways. Alex stands before Mireille’s apartment and witnesses the end of one love, which becomes the beginning of another. In Mauvais Sang, Alex leans out of the doorway while on a corded telephone to avoid touching the hot asphalt of night while on the phone with Anna, hoping to catch a glimpse of her face as he hears her voice. These doorways and gateways, often auspicious, often repurposed, often words, are the possibility and possibilities of some sort of real life, some sort of life behind and beyond the curtain of modernity, which veils life with purpose, regulates gestures and whittles them down into productive devices, and automates existence with increasing ferocity and regularity. It is again here that Carax and Baudelaire meet, at the blistering tempo of their love and loving, which in its very boundless expression reveals other worlds, other ways, other words:

Hymn to Beauty Charles Baudelaire

Come you, o Beauty, from the sky profound Or the abyss? Infernal and divine…

You walk, irreverent, upon the dead; Horror is not the gem that charms you least; Murder, among your baubles most beloved, Dances, enamoured, on your splendid breast…

What matter if you come from heaven or hell, O Beauty! Monster huge, alarming, pure! If, with your eyes, your smile, you let me dwell In loved Infinity unknown before?

… From Satan or from God, seraph or fiend, What matter, if - fairy with velvet eyes, O rhythm, fragrance, light, my only queen! - You make the world less grim, time faster fly?

160

A COMING-LINGUISTICS

With the coming of a new technological era of history, there is also a call for a new linguistics by and through which to ‘catch’ and understand this emergent outburst of technologics, philogics, and earth-logics by and through which trans-human life is being constructed. This new linguistics must necessarily be not only a new language, but an insurrection into the foundations of the ‘old language’, or, ‘the old world’. This is an insurrection into the habit of ‘thought’, the habit of thoughtlessness, the habit of ‘action’, and the habit of reaction which has constructed the current, collapsing paradigm - a foundation of political imagination which is also the foundation of ‘reality’ as it has been constructed by the idea of and ideas of ‘human beings’.

This coming new linguistics will never come into being; this is precisely the task of a new language – that it is not new; furthermore, that it never comes into ‘is-ness’ in acknowledgement of that which is – life. This coming linguistics must recognize that language and knowledge are not possible; furthermore, that language and knowledge as the humanist paradigm has conceived of them (here, an 800 year teleology) have come to form structures and strictures, laws and reasons, which now also make communication and life impossible. This coming linguistics must discard the idea(l) of language and knowledge entirely and instead turn to life as communication. This will require a total and entire dismantling of the structures and strictures of language, genre, knowledge, fact, and ‘truth’ as reasonable things – an infrastructure which even now forms the bridge between the old religion, ‘religion’, and the new religion, ‘science’. A new language as timeless, spaceless, formless, disavows all possible knowledge, all possible reason, all possible settling; instead appeals to the boundless creativity of and in communication. To consider the old language as a manner and matter of inscribed symbols forming a dialect is also to consider the possibility of a trans-linguistics which distorts and contorts the old symbolic order of arranged and ordered ‘language’ as pseudo- communication into a manner and matter of

intradisciplines – gestures which were considered (under the dying paradigm) ‘arts’, visual movements, aural movements, and even ‘mistakes’ or breaches in the lexical ordering of things. A trans-linguistics (in transition) places emphasis on the mistakes, breaches, and fallible aspects of the complete language, disordering them, and proving them of their own illogics. The coming linguistics, in the abolition of language, may yet becoming a suture of the artificial wound of logics and illogics – a returnless return to communication as ordered disorder. The coming linguistics, in short, refuses language and the illusion of ‘coherence’ in order to allow for communication as relational, complex, confused, felt, feeling.

There is a war at the level of the linguistic – which is to say a war between the lexical ‘order’ and the lexical ‘disorder’ – a war which is also a war of ‘coherence’ and ‘incoherence’; a war which is also a war of ‘logics’ and ‘illogics’. All of this struggle is the struggle of the establishment of one totalizing illusion of ‘reality’ which excludes (in order to establish knowledge), differance as ‘ulterior modes’ to its subjective influence; furthermore, sets itself against these ulteriorized modes by way of establishing itself as the master craft. This is what it means to master a language; to master speaking, reading, and writing in said language. This mastery is a meaningless, socialized, hierarchy of proficiency in a collectively established (and thus ‘meaningful’) form of reality- making. A coming linguistics is also a trans-linguistics in the sense that it is always already beyond socialized modes of ‘communication’; coming into itself as always already exiled, always already interior, personal, made-method of communicating the soul. The lexical order is founded on rationality of ‘communication’ as a discourse by and through which meaning is transferred, or absorbed, by the hearing body; a coercive ‘mutual acceptance’ of how, why, and with which tools meaning may be made – by way of establishing a ‘common mode’. The establishment of a common mode is nothing less than making impossible communication by way of substituting a convenient symbolic order by and through which ‘meaning’ is possessed, dispossessed, and transferred. This is to say that the ‘old world’ lexical ordering is a foundationally transactional

mode, a mode which prizes the transference of ‘coherence’ and ‘knowledge’ as a formal exchance – an exchange in which there is a subject, object, and a movement of the terms and conditions of information by way of force. This is how sentences are formed; how the information is structured. A trans- linguistics proceeds in a matter and manner of primary-soul, where language does not and could never exist to describe ‘it’ as it-is; as the soul is always already before language. The soul is that which speaks ‘language’ into ‘being’ – the farce it creates for itself as an expressive ‘death’. The language has a fetish for death.

A coming linguistics neither acknowledges as ‘true’ or desires death, or life. This is the essenceless essence of comingness – a refutation of even existence as a state. The stateless state of a coming linguistics settles nothing, defines nothing, says nothing, does nothing; in doing so, finds the expressive-communicative mode befitting the soul, shedding and embodying its command at each instantaneous moment. It is in this sense that coming linguistics is always already submitted to the dictates of the soul, a listening, attention, and intimacy to that which can only be heard in the intent focus of oneself within oneself. Here, the disciplines of language, genre, style, syntax, and order cease to mean anything. Here, the subject and object do not exist. Here, the ‘meaningful’ and the ‘meaningless’, the ‘ordered’ and the ‘disordered’ cease to exist. The soul simply, is. In a trans- linguistics, the soul is becoming; in this becoming, it outfits itself with the necessary garments and methods of the moment to suit its current becoming, shedding them without sentiment as it metamorphoses into new situations. The very dictates of language as law stand as a crude and stupid affront to this passage of life through life – standing as some sort of socially accepted mode - as all socially accepted modes are predicated on limitation in order to produce ‘knowledge’ as pseudo- understanding; knowledge as condition of the known. This production and reproduction ‘allowed’ at the level of ‘language’ is also that which produces and reproduces a ‘reality’ devoid of soul; thus, ultimately, devoid of meaning beyond the superficial, transactional mode of itself. It is in this sense that ‘language’ as it currently exists can only produce and reproduce itself by way of

the use of itself; as such, produces and reproduces representations; images of the soul – sad, empty, meaningless images - as the soul has been shed of itself in order to be presented as ‘in order’. This is the death of life at the level of constructing ‘the human being’ as historical concept generated at the level of the establishment of linguistic binary and category making – the literally language-rules which occurrently structure ‘the human being’ as mode and method of ‘life’, itself.

FRAMING THE REACTIONARY MIND

The political reactionary is a relatively simple machine – for to understand the political reactionary is to also understand the reactionary as one who resides in and worships the sense-body – he who is a product of reactivity. It is no great trial, nor is it anything but a linear movement – to map the ideas and ideals of the reactionary from the world of the sensorium to the world of political ‘consciousness’ and, this development is the cultivation and expression of reaction as a method of engagement with and between ‘self’ and ‘world’. The reactionary exists firmly within (not as an observer of; thus, ‘conscious of’) the sensorium; further, is subject to the desires, tribulations, and fleeting pleasures of said sensorium – as a limited and decaying sphere of knowledge unto the death of the primary identification with the body and the mind. In this unreal binding of the soul to the temporal, cause, effect, desire, and fulfillment reign as the supreme commandments in the life of the individual.

To understand this movement further, there is only need to briefly elaborate on the concept of desire and fulfillment in the reactionary subject as entirely ‘sense’ and time limited. The reactionary sees, hears, feels, touches; thus, the reactionary wants, needs, ‘has’, and ‘does not have’. This field of desire is ruled by the illusion of the body as primary life force, not the immortal soul. This becomes, to the reactionary, the extent of history and the field of existence of all things; the reactionary reacts in accordance to this ‘information’. The paradox here, is that the reactionary conceives of the temporal as the eternal – as that which always was and always must be, since the reactive mind experiences it as such. This limitation is not surpassed, it is merely recognized as false.

The identification of and with the body by the reactionary is simultaneously the site of trouble (destabilization of the self) and the site of ‘self knowledge’, as the reactionary’s sense of self is constantly buffeted by the sheer forces of the organs, the sun, the

earth, and the wind acting in and upon the body. If the body is the primary site of identification and ‘life’ for the subject, the sense of ‘self’ is continuously battling against decay, death, injury, and loss of sensation – which, of course, reigns supreme in the life of the sense-oriented subject. However, if the Self, or soul, is the primary site of identification, the sense-body and the causal body are always already superceded by life outside beyond and, necessarily, including the illusions of temporality and spatiality; in other words, Reality.

Timelessness, deathlessness, lifelessness, spacelessness, losslessness.

The reactionary, informed by the body as the site of life, makes decisions solely to preserve the life of the body, adorn the body, ‘enhance’ the mind and the life of the mind, and emerge victorious against the causal factors it so viciously asserts as ‘real’. This battle is a battle with history (limited) and a battle with the reactionary’s reaction to Reality; the presupposition of life elsewhere other than Reality – which is whole, and disregards human conception. The reactionary conceives of Reality as whole, but in this conception merely catches a glimpse of the Real. The reactionary perceives, through the perception of the body as the source of life; furthermore ‘owned by myself’ – that the body, or the conception of the ‘human’ as organism - is the whole of life. This identification with and of the body is now the site of ‘reality’ – a grave and politically fatal misidentification on behalf of the reactionary subject.

This misidentification is the root of all conflict in the world. Conflict is nothing more than the illusion of separation.

To get to the root of political identification and action (or lack thereof), there must only be this incision to the root of the subject’s sense of identification of and with ‘life’ and ‘reality’ and where these identifications reach a point of severance, or separation (if one understands, they do not; awareness meets awareness in a whole movement). In the understanding of this

phenomenon, subsequently, a political analysis of motives for action and reaction in regards to the ‘individual’ is complete.

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THE ‘PROBLEM’ OF TRANSNESS

The ‘problem’ of Transness lies at the level of the embodied sign; therein, in the accumulation of signifiers. This problem might be no better described in and as the ‘burden of proof’ taken to its ‘logical’ extremity – where the signifier/signified ‘relationship’ is perpetually collapsed. Here, it is relevant and important to note Fanon’s elucidation of self awareness in and as Blackness and blacknesses in his encounter with the white French woman and her child on the street. This is the moment in and at which the signifier/signified relationship is established vis-à-vis visual perception as a marker of differance codified as difference – or binary subject/other linguistic contraception of othernesses. The work that Transness and transnesses do and does here is become vector at which the historical and cultural catalogues of sight as definite meaning become difficult, disobedient, dissolvent. As with Fanon, he clearly is and is not B(b)lack; here, the locus of meaning of blacknesses is precisely in the stratification as codification of Blackness proper as signifier/totem category of ‘other’, not as possible embodied differance as lived life. This method of categorization too functions in the splitting of transnesses (lived and myriad lives which are ‘trans’) from Transness; the simultaneous engendering of a totalizing definition – or image-bloc – at and in which all transnesses must reside as a codified, singular manifestation, concurrent with the ‘civilized’ conception of trans lives and trans bodies. As apparent here, the ‘problem’ of transness is, of course, not a ‘problem’, but that which breaches the linguistic world-making-modification work of Language as that which civilizes life as ‘the human being’ as the body codified vis-à-vis a suspension of lived experience in favor of an autopsy of ‘the body’ as ‘the being’.

Here, we have the ‘human’ life as codified at the level of the universe, complete with striated divisions between God/flesh, Heavens/fallen-ness, Meaning/nothingness, Angel/demon, Proper/improper, Language/criminal. This codification as a descriptive breach; also as a syntactic breach at the level of linguistics as communication of this philosophical/religious

breach, is generative of the very ability to communicate ‘the Will of God’ to ‘Men’ by way of the appeal to greater power, positive hierarchy, and that which is beyond-the-flesh as that which orders the flesh. Here, we have historical works like the Soul Tax of Peter the Great, the German-Nationalist pamphlets of WWI, and the division of power and life at the level of the leaders of the church and state as those ordained to receive the word of God. These historical works, works which appeal to service to that which is ‘greater’ than the lived life (here, the nation, the church, as ordained organizing bodies by the power of God – relayed as truth, knowledge), form and affirm this linguistic hierarchy as total, holistic; extending from the conjured language vis-à-vis the categorical imperative ‘down’ onto and into the world of ‘Men’ – in turn process and product of the established a priori imperative.

The very establishment of the sign itself is what is here at stake – the sign as that which conveys and ‘passes’ the Will of God to Man. Very much like the Commandments passed down to Moses, the modern language-law functions – to inscribe/inscript life to a series of rigorous denotations, denotations which, of course, are not only inscribed in the abstract, but inscribed at the very literal level of the body, the mind, the emotions, and the soul – perhaps even ‘hammered in’ with the ferocity of threat at the level of the loss of life. Here, it is perhaps clear what the work of institutional economy does – that, by way of asserting itself as the governing body, or apparatus – in control of vast amounts of resources, in turn dictates, by the very force of control, the terms and conditions of day to day life. In this sense, it is extremely high stakes how Blackness and Transness are defined by the organizing body. Here, it is incredibly easy to get caught in the trap of continually reforming definition as an exchange between life and institutionalized life (in the everyday and as/at the level of language) – but this is to ignore the very essence of institutionalization – the act of establishment. It is here that life and lives are fixed, moored, and forced (subliminally and materially) to adhere to the strictures and codes established before life – the codes of the dominant order of culture and lanaguage – enforced as and at the level of the sign before birth.

It is in and at this ‘before birth’ place that critical analysis of this phenomenon must meet the codified life as sign-language – in order to dissemble the weapon before its always already detonation into everything – rendering life a preformed shadow of itself.

Here, the establishment of the ‘human’ as embodied sign/signified apparatus – the crux from which this transactional relationship emerges and occurs in and at the level of the ‘encounter’, or the relationship (sensed) of the codified ‘beings’ therein. It is that the ‘human being’ is first considered (mythologized, believed) the sign of/from god – a piece of God (; woman as a piece of man); this fragmentation continues ad infinitum in the dissection of the ‘made- human being’ into corresponding closeness to God; the ‘intention as manifestation of God and his rules’. It is the very binary logic of Aristotle (which is used to this day in the creation of advancing technologies) which established this correspondence (attached to various cultural languages) as a positive/negative relationship – which is to say, a relationship of separation determined as/by/and through determined forces with determined attributes. This relationship of separation is simultaneously, by way of this logic, a relationship of ordering, preference, and deference enforced by the symbolic presence and the symbolic absence. It is in this way that civilizational binary-work proceeds – in the elucidation of Black/White, Subject/Other, God/Other, Nation/Other. There is a double violence here, a double violence which, in the enforced separation of 1 and 0, the 0 is not only negated, but defined as negated. Here, the institutionalization of the 0 term creates the slave class, the criminal class, the untouchable class, but also defines this class in such a manner/matter that it cannot live but as the negated sign in the established relation. This establishment is done by the material taking and the ideological coercion; this is the story of ‘recent’ history.

To demand existence in light of this phenomenon as one who embodies the negated sign is also to demand the abolition of the ‘human’ category and the end of the humanist philosophy – a

category and philosophy only possible in the assertion of the definite human; furthermore, the definite human as the subject of history. This work is not only done at the level of recollection (the return of embodied life to itself materially and ideologically; a death of institutional ‘life’ by way of this return), but also at the level of lanaguage and linguistics in how language is ordered and structured to communicate and share life. The language- ordering process is the fundamental, or the root, of the establishment of these everyday- operative institutions (law, government, state, border, and so forth); without different linguistics, this work will not be complete; furthermore, it will continue in perpetually new manifestations – regardless of whichever social revolution is said to have occurred. Here, we come to linguistics as that which structures civilization.

A new linguistics, a linguistics which disinherits civilization must necessarily be a structureless structure – a deferential instrument beholden to the soul of the individual. It must, also, necessarily, hold no law, no rule, and no hierarchy in its use – only to be in service to sharing life horizontally. This is also an ethical turn and a political turn always implicit and explicit in linguistics – the preference and deference of conversation. Here, the conversation exists; the transaction is murdered. This coming-linguistics, of course, cannot be theorized by any one person, nor can it be practiced by any one person – because this coming linguistics must necessarily be multiple, myriad, and spilling over with differance – strange combinations, weird turns, queer methods, permissive thoughts, encouraging words, shared space, and mutuality by way of creative diversions. This coming linguistics is, again, in service to the sharing of life as communication – not to the transaction of knowledge/information/materiality. The implicit and explicit movement of new linguistics is shared life, not possessed image. Without this turn, there can be no revolution of political circumstance; without this turn, the very existence is monopolized.

TOWARDS A COSMOLOGY OF BREATH

“A development that seemingly repeats the stages already passed, but repeats them differently, on a higher basis (negation of the negation), a development, so to speak, in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, revolutions; breaks in continuity; the transformations of quantity into quality; the inner impulses of development, imparted by the contradictions and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society: the interdependence and the closest, indissoluble connection of all sides of every phenomenon (while history constantly discloses ever new sides), a connection that provides a uniform, a law- governed, universal process of motion, such are some of the features of dialectics as a richer (than the ordinary) doctrine of development.” (Hegel) “This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system--and herein is its great merit--for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, as equally condemnable at the judgement-seat of mature philosophic reason, and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways and to trace out the inner laws running through all its apparently accidental phenomena,” (Engels, Anti- Dühring).

In considering that which makes, or forms ‘the universe’ or ‘the world’, theoretical sciences have reached far and deep into the apparent microcosmic and macrocosmic pockets of existence in order to attempt the transaction of essence, truth, and knowledge. The push toward a theory of everything, or a total scientific knowledge, composes much of the contemporary

scientific discourse. However, in the very composition of this discourse, that which is at the locus of the transformation of spirit-essence into ‘being’ is lost, right under the nose of these scientists and pontificators. The breath – as the bridge of the spirit, is that which brings into life that which is life; furthermore, is that which, as the expressive root, enables all of this pontification in and around knowledges, facts, and truths. The foregoing of the breath as the locus of the spirit coming in the world is also the foregoing (not only of the roots of science) of the roots of language and linguistics as world structuring, building, making, and sensing mechanisms. The returnless return to the critical immediacy of these gestures as themselves making apparent the disapparent (much like the faculty of sight functions to bring into being and continually structure and restructure a cosmology of ‘seeing’ as ‘knowing’) grounds the physical and linguistic theory in that which emerges them – the sensing body made ‘human’; thus charged with historical- cosmological meaning, purpose, and order. Much as the cosmologics of the Babylonians were brought down ‘to earth’ and discharged as number and measure as ‘laws’ of existence – this contemporary science functions based on a set of cosmological precepts which might simply be described as the very precepts which found and form ‘Man’, or the development of ‘humanity’ and ‘humanism’ as that which describes and philosophically drives the endeavors of this epoch called ‘Mankind’. In the layering of these cosmological illusions – alternately called (qualitatively) ‘religion’ and (quantitatively) ‘science’ – throughout history; the discourse, or struggle between these two forms for dominion over the existence and cultural order of ‘rational Man’ – it has been forgotten, at root, the fundamental transferrence of spirit/respirit/breath-creative content into and through these disciplinary mediums of knowing life; the immediate truth of the breath as that which incarnates the spirit. This forgetting, which is a necessary and willful forgetting – done in order to establish these disciplines as means of knowing life ‘objectively’ – has constructed the spirit as a dispossessed nowhere; furthermore, as a sort of dark matter of the body – disapparent, unknowable, esoteric; in this characterization – false, as yet unprovable. The approaches of the hard, cold, dry science and the soft, warm, wet religion are of the same cosmology – alternate and ulterior

modes of rationalizing, justifying, and identifying Man’s place within the cosmological hierarchy which he has established for himself throughout and by way of history. This work is nothing more or less than the project of the continued existence of ‘humanity’ as a theorized epoch composed of different characteristics – which in their establishment – are classified, numbered, gendered, ordered, and given categorical place. The returnless return to breath as a returnless return to the breakless root of the theoretical physics and the theoretical linguistics is simply a stripping away from the false diversity of these disciplinary elements of ‘thought’ and theorizing life to the theory/practice of life as imminent, seamless; again, unbroken.

The Standard Model theoretical physics and the theoretical linguistics have proceeded in structurally identical manners – as disciplinary forces within the larger structure/sphere of the historical cosmological ‘development’ of Ethno-Man – as synthesized polarities tasked with establishing, reifying, and furthering the already existent symbolic order which poses as a physical/existential reality, but is, at root (as ‘human’ and the historical study of ‘human knowledge-making), a made-real systematization of life as ‘human life’. These systems of ordering life have taken on the characteristics which compose the situation of Man – the spatial ordering, the identification of elements, the stratification of fundamental forces at work, and the determination of action (where, how, and why) by way of this process. The theoretical linguistics and theoretical physics are, at their root, structured by and in relation to the conception of ‘Man’ as they are instruments discharged by the epoch of Man to situate Man within the cosmos in such a way that Man may yet come to ‘know’ the cosmos; furthermore (linguistically) to situate Man within his created world and further establish rules and rites of conduct and behavior which construct and govern the Heaven on Earth. To break with these Man-made cosmological apparatuses is to observe them at their root – in and of the expression. A theoretical linguistics together with a theoretical physics may then be called a theoretical spiristics, meaning a study at the level of the breath; furthermore, the breath as apparition of soul making life as the creation of ‘realities’. This

study is simultaneously critical of the Man-made cosmology while gesturing toward the possibility of and for a returnless return to an embodied language which is also an embodied physics – by way of a diacritical approach to physics and language as the forces which structure, or bring into being, the very conception of what it means to bring life into being; furthermore, where and how life is located by way of the disciplining of the breath. A spiristics has no conception of ‘reality’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ by way of language nor science – as neither language nor science exist but as incompletions; thus illusions, by way of its critical approach to the cosmology which structures them; the cosmology which structures ‘human’ life and knowledge. To strip back human history is also to strip back the authoritative validity of the science, religion, and language of ‘the human’ to reveal the basic history of the prespirate, spirate, and spirated - the process of becoming as that which laughs at the high fallutin theoretical sciences and linguistics of man; leaves them chasing their tails. For what more are these disciplines but Towers of Babel composed of their own founding preconceptions of possible knowledge, possible communication, possible truth; stacked and stocked with their own terminological language, processes, and formulae – to the point of which they no longer even attempt to reference the very cosmologies and Man-made ‘truths’ which founded them – positing themselves as holistic and factual Reality? It is in this self absorbed study of himself that Man is caught – deep into his own theories founded upon theories, conceptions founded upon conceptions – that life is fundamentally abstracted from ‘the human’ – which is now nothing more than a shell, an emptied image of life. What has been traded here is the expression of life for that which is claimed to be expressed – which is to say, that the breath has been traded for that which the breath supposedly communicates.

What a cosmology of breath does here, is that it returns theoretical sciences (hard and soft) to their ground – the ground of the expressive and expressed instrument – that which has been historicized and cultured to be ‘the human being’. A study of an in the breath as that which does not simply ‘deliver knowledge’ nor ‘become knowledge’ is a study into how, historically, these

religions as sciences came into being in an attempt to describe and situate that which structures them within the cosmology. For the Babylonian thinkers to observe the movement of planetary bodies over time and translate this movement into time is the very process of bringing the ‘law’ of space down to earth as space; furthermore, for this process of observation as an event to codify the situation of observation into physical and linguistic law as transference. What is foregone here is the very happening by way of and in the name of a codification of the happening into and as the larger process – the bringing of God’s law down to earth; the composition of human law in light of the cosmology – manifest quite clearly and consistently in the establishment of linguistics and physics alike. The perpetual codification and recodification of that which is experienced by way of the breath is the a priori movement past and through breath in order to document the various ‘principles’ observed by breath – a subjectifictation of the spirit as that which can perceive and thus ‘know’ the world – the very world which it creates and structures with and by way of its perceptions. This perception/preception of Man functions quite clearly and directly to fulfill the philosophical promise of the humanism which founds it – a philosophy of Man which, ‘naturally’ centers man therein; furthermore, situates Man as the cosmological product/problem of its occurrence. This internal logic posits itself as a total logic; by way of this very imposition as supposition, solves its own problem by way of instituting itself as that which investigates itself. I have discussed this previously in the work ‘A Teleological Contraception of Becoming’. The work a spiristics does here is the work of returning the theoretical physics and the theoretical linguistics to the place which they never left, yet they claim to have be able to leave by way of the historical accumulation of ‘knowledge’ and ‘scientific fact’ – the locus and axis of becoming as the breath as spirit made apparent in the world.

A spiristics will always already be esoteric in its manifestation, as a true esoterics does not even attempt to presuppose ‘knowledge’ as a possible product of life; instead gestures toward understanding as process of life. What this means is, at their absolute foundation, the movement of linguistics towards a

science of language and physics as a science of worldly life are imbalanced; imbalanced in the sense that only that which may be known/ordered may be included in their always already theological conception of ‘Reality’. Spiristics, in the turn away from knowledge, move away from the Standard Model of physics and linguistics in the sense that, in their analysis and geneology of these forms as processes preceeded by that which they must not acknowledge in order to exist as valid ordering-forms of ‘knowledge’ – move toward understanding as that which is embodied, lived, and felt at the level of that which has been abstracted by the very empiricism produced from it. Here, simply, the very overdevelopment of the intellect has impeded it – by way of the laws it creates which it must in turn ‘prove’. This is a bind established at the very root of the sciences (of language and physical law alike) – in that they attempt to solve the nonexistent ‘problem’ – generated by the ethno-philosophical paradigm of Man which has produced them as investigating bodies into its own conjured body. Without an organizing conception of ‘Man’ as the cosmology of ‘Man’, there could not be a physics which situates Man in the historical world of things, nor could there be a linguistics which situates Man in the historical world of his expressions as things. These artificial separations, stemming from the artificial separation of ‘Man’ from the cosmos which he elucidates – are the problem of the linguo-physico body of Man-as-sign generated by ‘the human’ in observing the relation between bodies; the desire to and of presupposing this relation as observed over time and space as law as organization of the experiences of ‘Man’. However, as the Standard Model of physics and linguistics alike has encountered in recent years, these laws do not and cannot possibly stand up to the absolute limitation of ‘knowledge’, which is – as developed by ‘human beings’ – perpetually limited by the faculties, technologies, and prostheses available to be utilized in the study at any given moment in time and space. The returnless return to the breath as a critical, creative, and generative mode of approaching physics and linguistics is as a way of reading these abstracted-philosophical-theoretical paradigms as products of that which they attempt to solve – products and projects of relation between the visible and invisible, the apparent and disapparent – which is to say, of the human cosmology which is

always already limited by the instrument utilized to solve and situate itself – a limited instrument. The very approach to hard knowledge is limited, at the level of the cosmology – by the ability of the observing and witnessing instruments; it is as such that the human eye has historically had difficulty observing much of the cosmos beyond Saturn; as such, has utilized a variety of instruments to extend its witnessing ability into more distant space and time. However, as the capacity of these instruments expands, so too does the fallibility of the human cosmology appear; a cosmology which is quite hard for the human paradigm to digest – as it comes increasingly relativized to deeper and deeper space and time. This occurs, as well, in the human cultural language, as devices and prostheses come about with exponential speed to reveal the myriad breadth of human expressive capability to itself – a revelation which may be quite terrifying to many. This is to say, the very paradigm of ‘humanity’ itself is collapsing under the weight of its own impossibility – established as a way of organizing that which resists organization as it continually reveals itself (as differant becomings); furthermore, this microcosmic process is also occurring at the level of the literal cosmological level which attempts to found ‘Man’; breaking up the already broken conception of Man in perpetually perfect-imperfect relation to the cosmos therein. In this historical development, there is a call for a third science, a science which – as the belief systems which found these organs/instruments is destroyed at the level of its philosophy of the body – may be-coming without belief; without an organizing principle or series of precepts. This is to say, a scienceless science – which in this sciencelessness, may witness the pursuit of science with a critical eye. This sciencelessness may yet be as spiric; as a history of breath as primary gesture – that apparent/disapparent foundational element which structures the ‘human’ conception. This spiristics may utilize theoretical physics and linguistics simultaneously in order to understand the very impulse of/to ordering – implicit and explicit in their establishment as historical-cultural phenomena in the as yet developing history of ‘humanity’ as a philosophical category of existence. This process of ‘humanity’ understanding itself as the conceived made real searching for itself is an intradisciplinary,

intracultural, intrahistorical, and intrareligious phenomenon which is, again, nothing more or less than that which surpasses the human conception and record of itself. In this sense, the very discipline of humanity and its subdisciplines of ‘knowledge’ (here, particularly the sciences) are very much so a part of that which it attempts to understand, itself as cosmos; furthermore, not at all apart from it.

This unbroken cosmos theorized as broken by the Man- cosmology is the movement toward the illusion of hard knowledge – a movement which is conceptualized, philosophized, and reified at all aspects and junctures of the development of a ‘human’ culture – the arts, the language, the sciences, the governments, the religions, and the philosophies. All of this work is that which resides on top of the breakless and unbroken cosmos which includes ‘Man’; this is the very cosmos which he attempts to understand using ‘knowledge’. This ‘knowledge’ is itself the limited framework generated from the gestural/experiential/respiritual understanding of man into patterns, laws, disciplines, and methods which are discharged in attempts to theorize relative experience; furthermore, to theorize ‘all things’. This very process must necessarily forego that which is not, in its pursuit of that which is. The catechism here is abundantly and explicitly clear. Through instrument, belief.

The Hegelian model of history observed by Marx and Engels is an important juncture in this process of elucidating the elucidation – as, quite simply, what Hegel observes is the process of the historical (over time) intellectualization of the breath; furthermore, this process of intellectualization as the creation of the spirit as subjected/objected cosmology of separation as itself a larger, global teleological development – the development of ‘Man’ as a pretheorized ethno-body which makes itself as it investigates itself. This process is a process of the development of consciousness fed by the expressive primary gesture of the breath as that which emboldens and embodies the consciousness into being – as a transference of spirit into world. It is precisely this trouble of the borderless border of that which makes Man which

Man cannot observe (by way of limited faculty) which troubles Man; practically, creates Man as that which he observes as different from himself in the very manner and matter of conception. This trouble is the break of belief, religion, science, and mechanisms of ‘knowledge’ as artificial (read: disembodied, abstracted), pseudo-understandings which compose the unsolvable problems of themselves – proven by way of their own systems, justified by way of their own beliefs, and, quite literally, set in their own ways. This is, simply, the very composition of Man as a category and conjured existence unto himself. What a spiristics does here is nothing less than to reveal the entire fallacy of human history and human knowledge accumulation by way of a severance of the intellect, a severance which is necessary to compile, organize, and levy abstract knowledge into the world, a severance which requires, and is composed of, a forgetting of the breath as that creative force which is always already beyond the conception, the image, the idea; into the embodied understanding. There cannot be, or could not have been a spiristics until this moment in the flow of ‘human life’ – for the very processes which spiristics transgresses by way of embodied understanding of the ‘knowledges’ could not be possible without their ‘knowledges’ as an attempt to suture the wound which is not a wound. There must have been this attempt to create law in order to understand that it is not possible; furthermore, that it is at an active detriment to the creation and embodiment of the soul, a relative, a- hierarchical cosmological relation between bodies and beings; a community of life. What this historical attempt of Man is, is nothing more or less than an attempt – complete with its violent assertions and attempts to establish itself, its theories about itself, and its theories about the cosmos which it is always already within. There is yet another task at hand in the coming spiristics – the ability to let go of the attachment formed to these mechanisms (religious, philosophical, governmental, and scientific alike) by way of the promise within the founding of each of them – the promise which was and is the promise of understanding by way of knowledge. The ability to relinquish this sentimental attachment to ‘Man’ is, itself, the embodied understanding of this process – a process which began with an inhalation (a preparation of an expression of spirit into world), and is now ending with an exhalation (the completion of

an expression therein). It is the attachment to these expressions as definite truths which holds the breath of life; without the willingness to relinquish these projects as they prove themselves (as they always will) to be limiting endeavors to understanding, there cannot be a movement towards a spiristics of consciousness.

THE FALLACY OF ‘MAN’

The theoretical physics is already working within ‘The’ theory of everything - the cosmology of ‘humanism’ as the ethno-category of ‘Man’ witnessing the cosmos and observing its ‘laws’. The bringing of these laws down to to earth is occurrent in and through the development of Babylonian civilization (measure, time, revolution); continually theorized at the level of the quantitative as science.The abstraction of this cosmology as and of witnessing is implied in the witness-mode - as ‘Man’ observes himself as other from the cosmos; furthermore, other from God. The ‘vindication of the ways of God to Man’ as a perpetual theo- philosophical project is and of humanism by way of this primary separation as measure - measure of distance, bound, and earthliness. The theoretical physics, in its propulsion towards and desire for a singularity, or law as explication of life - presses further and further into this dichotomization of existence by way of a primary materialism - a materialism of the sensible, observable, ‘knowable’. This knowledge is catalogued in and by way of the existent empirical method - founded precisely in and as ‘human’ sense perception over time and space alternatively proven/disproven into existence as ‘Reality’ and the dictates which structure it. However, the logical fallacy of this project is implicit and explicit in the concept and conception of ‘human knowledge’ as a creatable, or possible form. This movement of the observed/observable by way of the limited sense faculty of the ‘human body’ into physical, social, and divine ‘Law’ is a narrative repetition of the theo-philosophical work ‘Man’ produces for himself in the creation of himself (as God by way of God) - at and through various levels of ‘sophistication’ over time. This technical and technological proficiency is perceived, at the level of ‘the history of Man’ as ‘progress’ - as the creation and narrowing precision of definition as mechanism of pseudo- penetration into and as that which it claims as ‘essence’; furthermore, ‘knowledge’. It is in this sense, in accord with Wynter, that a history is also always already a ‘history for’, just as Marx’s critique of Hegel functions. It is in this sense that the theoretical physics of ‘Man’ act as the principle law of and for the

age of transition from religion as the organ of the human cosmology to science as the organ of human cosmology in that transference from and between systems of belief - from ‘faith in God’ to ‘proven Reality’. In a historical analysis of the conception (and ultimately, contraception) of ‘Man’ as itself a teleology, the development of the soft and hard sciences alike in the schools of ‘Man’ function precisely to accumulate ‘knowledge’ as ‘evidence’ as ‘proof’ for Man’s status and place in the cosmological order as that which receives (as; is) the word of God. The ubiquitous (yet socially resistant) turn from the religious function to the scientific function is a necessary one - as it advances the thesis of ‘Man’ from a philosophized, abstracted chain of meaning/being made social/political reality - into and through a synthesized socio- political-cosmological ‘Reality’ documented and affirmed by the hard, quantitative science as ‘fact’, ‘truth’, ‘irrefutable proof’. This is the current dialectic of ‘knowledges’ experienced by global, modern civilization today - as a push/pull between the language of the past and the language of the future, both of which (along with the conception of ‘time) are submitted to and through the larger, cosmological sphere of ‘Man’ as project of meaning.

It is clear here, along with Engels’ remarks on Hegel - that this project is truly a watershed moment in the development of global- cosmological thought in that, by way of the positing of itself, proves the history of the conjured ‘Man’ as procedural, marching forward, progressive, and accumulating ‘knowledge’ - not only that, but that there ‘are’ and were laws, mechanisms, reasons, and methods at work behind the veil of the now ‘primitive’, breakless ways of understanding becoming relative to the cosmos. By establishing and affirming a break as teleology - or the science of purpose-making by way of break-making - the cosmology of ‘Man’ asserts itself as, simultaneously, the ‘problem’ and the ‘solution’ to this imagined- knowability of ‘the world’, ‘the cosmos’ and the apparati that thread, or do not thread them together by way of God’s word and the word of God through the organ of ‘Man’. By establishing a cosmological narrative of ‘Man’ as a chained meaning, there is, necessarily a definite birth of ‘humanity’ into the world as practicable concept

complete with borders, bounds, commandments, hierarchies, methods, movements, and otherwise. This would not be possible without a cosmic break - a break elucidated, again, by Wynter - a break which simultaneously establishes humanism as a method of situating Man in the cosmos as narrativized; furthermore, disestablishes that which does not ‘see’ this break. It would be that a breakless cosmology, then, is an outdated one, a relic of the time before ‘humanity’; a savage cosmology, whereas a cosmology which acknowledges the fallenness of ‘Man’ is not only modern, but tasked with the accumulation of means and methodologies by which to suture this imagined break with ‘knowledge’ as a spatial fold - returning ‘Man’ to his place with God among the stars. It is useless and quite a waste of time to lament this process and the violence which it has wrought over roughly a thousand years of theo- philosophical ‘development’ as practice in and of civilizing ‘the world’ - but it is of this moment to, with Wynter, theorize what comes ‘after’ humanism; rather, what is in the wake of it. There is, by way of tracing this contraception of ‘Man’ to its root, another break - the break of the break - by and through which it is quite possible to theorize a cosmology after the cosmology of ‘Man’ - a cosmology which stands in the wake of humanity like Benjamin’s angel and too witnesses, witnesses what the cosmology of ‘Man’ has wrought - and in turn, attempts to theorize a differant cosmological relation. This task is also a task of a differant art of thought - in and of the returnless return of theory to language to sound to breath to becoming. It is foolish to conceive that one could go back, but one might witness the history ‘Man’ has created for himself in order to collaboratively discern ulteriority.
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186

ON SINGULARITY

The cosmology of Man progresses itself in and as the model of history elucidated by Hegel - an exponentially ‘rigorous’ spiral of thesis/antithesis, culminating in ‘the end of history’, or the synthesis. This process is referred to by theoretical physicists and AI theorists as ‘the singularity’ - a singularity of consciousness/knowledge/meaning which is purported in relation to the black hole, consciousness itself; furthermore, in the realm of ‘the world’ in relation to ‘humanity’ and ‘human existence/knowledge’. This latter element is, of course, the composite and overseeing (primary, or universal) purpose itself of ‘Man’ as rationalization of his own existence as concept situated within the cosmos of his own theorizing; this cosmology is that which informs all of the organs therein, tasked with accumulating and proving this coming universality, or ‘cosmic truth’ of Man and his theorems. It is apparent how this cosmological process discharges itself through and across the disciplines of Man and his knowledge - notably, again, here - the establishment of the ‘human’ as a civilizational archetype for life and existence, and the establishment of the sciento- philosophical concept of ‘singularity’ posited as a possible phenomenon in regards to knowledge and existence as hard, observable, provable ‘Realit(ites)’ - as cosmic truths which are then no longer mere theorems, but practical, assertable, backed-by- knowledge truths of God which may then be made dictates in regards to the organization of the ‘human’ as proved; furthermore, as ordered. This would be a teleological suturing of the Man-made law of ‘Man’ in relation to God - a total rationalized (from religious faith into scientific knowledge) proof by way of the Man-logic - which affirms the human thesis. Here, it is important to state that anything is provable; furthermore that the history of knowledge itself is a history-for and a knowledge-for. There is no process which exists in a vacuum away from its progenitor. The very ‘burden of proof’ theorized in the initial conception as contraception of ‘Man’ as fallen from the Kingdom of God is no more apparent today than in the total drive to ‘knowledge’ as that which proves ‘Man’ as, of, and from God - a burden of

proof discharged in Man’s observation of himself as away from god, away from the stars, away from the workings; thus, tasked with an elucidation of the workings in his own world. This process is twofold, a double bind elucidated clearly in Hegel’s thesis/antithesis/synthesis conception of the unfoldment of history as the history of ‘Man’ becoming himself; a process which is itself consciously and unconsciously modeled in and on the observable ‘realities’ of the ‘physical’ world - which is nothing more or less than that which the ‘human being’ may observe with his faculties and prosthetics at any given moment in time. As these prosthetics are further, exponentially aided by the development of precision technologies and prosthetics, Man grows ever more convinced of himself and his knowledge as being-of-primacy; furthermore, of his ability to elucidate the separated word of God. This theo- philosophical obsession is well documented in the history of organized religion; is now well documented in the history of theoretical physics and sciences as the pursuit of that which is not- yet known, or knowable - that which is not yet defined; that which is not yet penetrated to reveal the essence of. It is clear, that even in Man’s theories of the black hole - that he produces and reproduces himself, knowingly and unknowingly, as the black hole too breathes; as the singularity to thesizes and antithesizes itself - the very manner in, by, and at which Man’s spirit chases its own tail. The question must be asked, as these technologies of ‘knowledge’-making and ‘knowledge’-proving become more and more advanced: are the fundamental, foundational theo-philosophies at root of these attempts at ‘knowledge’-making acknowledged in the pursuit of knowledge? Will this pursuit of knowledge ever lead to understanding (which is, of course, the singularity, the returnless return); has it yet proven to be able to even approach the doing- so? To collapse the vertical spiral of history theorized by Hegel and the black hole and singularity diagrams theorized by physicists and AI technicians alike is to find the horizontal ‘development’ or the broken system of ‘Man’ - the flat circle, which perpetually moves inward and outward with two mouths towards a micro and macrocosmic truth it may not witness without the abandon of ‘itself’ as ‘observer’ of the phenomena of ‘the world’ and ‘the universe’. The very limited capacity of ‘Man’ to observe the event is itself the horizon; furthermore, composes

the entire chaseless chase as dialectic of and between ‘Man’ and his knowledge. The protagonism/antagonism of the thesis/antithesis model is nothing more or less than a narrativization of ‘Man’ as developing, progressing, growing, knowing, evolving - a dubious at best proception which situates the teleology and philosophy of humanism in and of itself as a righteous and true center of gravity - in and through which the entire cosmos flows, breathes, perceives, and too, approaches the singularity of becoming ‘itself’. This ‘Man’centric approach to not only theorizing the cosmos, but theorizing the apparent/disapparent borders and bounds which compose Man’s possible relation to the cosmos as perceptible/imperceptible, ‘Real’ and as yet unproven/unprovable is the very dialectic which structures ‘Man’ as a knowledge form. This knowledge is, in turn, perceived as apparent, valuable, and true, by way of the caste ordering of Man’s world and his societies by way of that which approaches purity, singularity, whiteness - the light of god. It is too in this manner that blackness is perceived of as negative, void, and filled with shadow. The knowing light of god and the unknowing dark of disapparance. This teleology of ‘Man’, as made quite clear here, extends down from the cosmological ‘truth’ as narrative of the creation of Man into the very language and ordering principles Man uses to situate himself in his fallen kingdom. Is the continued pursuit of the validity of this cosmological perspective and/in the use of its subthetic organs (toward the singularity of itself by way of and as ‘knowledge’) that which will provide understandable cosmic order to life on earth? Or is it that which merely predicates its validity as a systemic ‘Reality’ as continued philsophical/world/cosmic order as and upon that very promise?

190

SOUL & FORM: REGARDING HISTORIES OF THE BODY- CONCEPT

The historical-dialectical development of the thesis, antithesis, synthesis model of human passage through time and space has given the soul its form. This can be little debated or defused, however, kind or unkind the critic may feel toward the developments (or lack thereof) therein. This model, as a model of dialogue, or discourse, between ‘the body’ (‘Man’) and its maker (‘God’), has itself become a history of pre-production, production, and re-production (of the individual as structure and conversely) of that very culture of condescension. Here, what I mean by condescension is quite literal – a teleological hierarchy of meaning handed down within the model and mode of a discourse of separation itself (implied in the use of the term discourse) – as a conversation between ‘Man’ and the forces ‘above’ and ‘below’ ‘Man’ accordingly; in addition to the forces in the ‘past’ of ‘Man’, as well as in regard to the forces in the ‘future’ of ‘Man’. Apparent here, is the fixed cross, or crucified body (as referred to by Weil in her text Gravity and Grace) which simultaneously suspends theoretical ‘Man’ within and through the philosophical-cosomological web of his own making – a web of stratified terms and conditions (physical and theological, physical made theological, theological made physical) – which in turn constitute his always already imagined constitution. This imaginative law making – itself a history of religion, governance, and warfare over again imagined terms and jurisdictions, sectors and sections of ‘Man’ and the barbarie – has itself made manifest itself, a war of cognition with its historical limitations pitted against and thus into the world itself, as a theorized and practiced process: of ‘reality’- making; of ‘world’- making. It is here that the synthetic breach of the mind and the body is brought to bear in the philosophical development of ‘Man’; furthermore, becomes, itself, the screen of illusion onto and through which ‘Reality’ is both projected and conceived. It is then that the device of the mind as idea-making, meaning- making; reality-making – always already becomes the local force by and through which the history of ‘Man’ is conceived and

made manifest, as a struggle of Man amongst his very own intimate self: a local struggle to locate the wound which has made this loss of supracognition ‘life’ itself. It is as such that this initial debt is created – not as a debt of proper materiality, but debt as the creation of proper materiality. It is in this sense that the vast majority of historical, orthodox Marxisms act – as a sort of necessary counterbalance to the fulcrum of that which is also pure materiality, in that it seeks, creates, and manifests a known- world – a known- world which returns Man to God by way of qualified knowledge, not understanding. The sorts of numbers compiled to describe death point quite clearly to this loss of spirit by way of this formal making. It is very easy for the casual observer to note, at this point in time, the direction in which global civilization is moving – towards a sterilization of the spirit by way of a logical determination of exactly what is the spirit, where is the spirit; thus, the creation of a sutured world which is necessarily without spirit. The movement of the thesis/antithesis synthesis model is also, assuredly, the movement of ages, ages and epochs in which, if we are convinced of the human nature hypothesis, ‘Man’ moves ever closer to himself; thus, to ‘God’. Do not be dissuaded here, that in the development of further technological and scientific prostheses that this theo- philosophical process is somehow abbreviated, or ended – but rather that it changes form in order to accommodate a new age with new terms, new conditions, new desires, and new abilities. It is thus that a new age requires a nimble critical lens – a lens which is not perturbed by the flash and glamour of what is now increasingly ‘possible’, but rather, a lens which insurrects the terms and conditions of the philosophical mode behind the screen of that which is doing the generative work of technologics. This work is twofold – an analysis of the creation of a theo- philosophical language of ‘Man’; furthermore, how this language functions in and on the plane of the made-Real as syntactical, here, meaning the suturing of the ideological terms of the theo- philosophical paradigm to a rapidly changing global ecosystem. It is as such that ‘Man’ himself is a made language, complete with the conception of ‘God’ as the cultural limit which Man imposes upon himself in order to structure the very borders and bounds of his cultural society, a cultural society which must necessarily act as a selective membran(c)e in order to establish

itself as existent. It is in this sense that the bio-logics of Man extend far beyond the scientifically bounded studies of the production and reproduction of bodies – but rather, deep into the imaginative conception of how bodies are formed, how bodies are (e)valuated, and how bodies are legislated. This Man/God hypothesis, now ubiquitous in global culture, permeates, tertiates, and striates the now-global body of ‘Man’ as a socio-linguistic function – that which a priori determines and constructs human culture, human civilization, and human relations; this process is certainly not exclusive of that which is deemed ‘non-human’. It is by and through an analysis of this process and principle of ‘Man’ – extending intradisciplinarily through and beyond an orthodox science or method – that is required to adequately critique the contemporary moment. This kind of analytic work is made in exemplary fashion in the life of Simone Weil; detailed extensively in her text Gravity and Grace – in regards to that which she denotes as statera facta corporis, or ‘humankind’:

‘Statera facta corporis. It is the crucified body which is a true balance, the body reduced to its point in time and space…When the whole universe weighs upon us there is no other counterweight possible but God himself—the true God, for in this case false gods cannot do anything, not even under the name of the true one. Evil is infinite in the sense of being indefinite: matter, space, time. Nothing can overcome this kind of infinity except the true infinity. That is why on the balance of the cross a body which was frail and light but which was God, lifted up the whole world. ‘Give me a point of leverage and I will lift up the world.’ This point of leverage is the cross. There can be no other. It has to be at the intersection of the world and that which is not the world. The cross is this intersection.’

Weil’s remarks here contain no superficial (read: material) analysis of the crucifixion; rather, point to the use of the cross as that which contains and balances the dualism of materiality/immateriality, good/evil, god/evil, time/space, world/not-world; in accord, the human/the inhuman. The ‘birth’ of Christ into the world is precisely this conceived method

of the permanent death of the concept of ‘synthesis’ itself as a materialist notion – as, in turn, the death of Christ upon the cross is (and is, of course, later proven to be) a false death – or a ‘death’ which is nothing but a passage to and from the realms of the apparent and the disapparent. Such an analysis, of course, does not preclude historical and material terms, but views them with no greater or lesser emphasis or importance than the a- terminologics of the spirit – or the points/places at and in which knowledge/logics no longer serve a critics of ‘Man’. It is in this sense that, historically, there have been such conceptions of demigods and trans people, many gods, many spirits, liminal spaces and liminal presences, rites, supranatural happenings, hauntings – which are continually and ‘progressively’ repressed into the shadows of the image of ‘Man’ – in order to serve the exponential development of and for a syntactical logistics of Man as primary, prescient, and ultimately, total. It is here that a historical-material analysis of the process of making-nation, making-colony, and making-slave encounter another dimension upon the cross of making-‘humankind’ – the place in and at which the culture of ‘Man’ (as the dominant culture, or, with Gramsci, the hegemonic culture) too performs a genocidal rite – a genocide not only of ‘life’- proper, but of the life of the spirit of cultures made shadow cultures.

This happening cannot be accounted for logically or logistically, as it happens in, at, and as the level of cognition, conception, and soul – as the making of ‘the human being’. This work, too, of course has accounts of capital, but there is a certain point in and at which capital cannot account for that life which is imbued with life – the always already Charonic passage between the material and immaterial, between the Earth/Hades worlds; the Innanic journey which is also the journey of Chinnamasta, Arjuna, Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and countless other initiates detailed the world over in mythologies of creation – mythologies which also necessarily detail the destructive process of and from which creation is ‘bo(u)rn(e)’. It is also as such with the conception of ‘Man’ as a teleological contraception of that which is not ‘Man’ – as described by Wynter; as ‘Man’ as the creation of an ethno-class of imagined beings which also do and

does the work of dis-incarnating that which it disjects as its ‘shadow’, ‘Other’, or ‘savaged self’. This disjection, as also broached in the work of James, is as difficult recollection – as the parts disembodied, disemboweled, and as such disincarnated are not simply materialities (as is the convenient analysis), but spiritual conceptions of the possibilities of self and self-making as relation in/with/as Earth. It is that this cultural destruction is of primary essence to the creation of ‘Man’, as this destruction establishes, by destruction of the metaphorical ‘icon’ of cultures, simultaneously, the primacy of ‘Man’ and his Culture, but the establishment of the power of ‘Man’ and his Culture by way of the disabuse of the power of the spirit imbued in this metaphorical and literal iconographics. The long history of iconomachy as primary act of physical and spiritual war attests to this phenomenon as, in turn, the primary battlegrounds of and for the imagination as that which establishes and disestablishes realities by way of the use of force – linguistics and syntactics in and as violences. It is as such that a sophisticated critique of history and materialism includes the creation of History and Materialism as a History-for and Materialism-for (Wynter) as a disjuncture of realities into the creation of Reality as The Single Vein of Consciousness. This is a networking and forcible direction of the flowing of blood as the flowing of the spirit as the creation of the single, directed, progressive vein of Man as that which sculpts its hypothesis in and as the flowing of blood. It is no mistake that this process resembles a blood rite; furthermore, that the ritualized discharge of theo-philosophics into the world (as themselves crusades of meaning) acts in a pagan fashion (a definition as established by Christianity) to establish anti-pagan realities – as it is that the work of the imagination which establishes ‘Man’ does superficial work. This work does not actually change whatever ‘Man’ supposes itself to be into itself, but rather, acts and works as a force by and through which the charged ‘Man’ directs and redirects power unto and through his synthetic self. The creation of a Global ‘Body’ is much of this same work – as flows of capital, information, quantities, resources, life force, and other such currencies – are established to reify the Heaven on Earth of ‘Man’, a heaven on earth which is perpetually unmade, unfulfilled; impossible – by and through the very nature of that which it demands – that ‘Man’ become

that which he claims to be; as such, revoke all that makes him ‘human’/whatever he is.

The very conception of ‘Man’ is predicated on precisely this: the death of the soul. It is that the entire historical-material conception of the theo-sphere of Man is as such established – the redirection of life-force resources into and through the Culture of Man as it builds itself by way of forced labor. It is by way of this harnessed life force (re: Marx’s alienation) that its very Culture is established; furthermore, that the Culture continues to re- establish (by way of re- production) itself. There is, in the very primacy of the relation necessary to reify and deify this framework – a use of the soul itself as capital, transference, transactional material – and as such, a death of the soul in the establishment of a harnessed relation. It is precisely in this death of the soul that the very conception or possibility of a materialism (and a critique of materialism) is founded – for without it, the dualectic of materia/immateria would not be possible. To return to the excerpt from Weil: it is implicit and explicit in her theorizing of Good and Evil that the dialectic of ‘Man’ seeks endlessly to redeem itself into and as the totally Good, totally God Self – which it has established in its imagined, cosmological disjection from God and the Gods of the stars. Without this imagined disjection; in turn, this imagined loss which must be regained, repealed, unindebted, there would be no tipping of the scales, as Weil’s God and the Universe (itself and itself) would cease to be as anything, as images. Weil’s analysis of this process theorized in and as the cross as lever can go no further than this imageless image – as the work of balancing is in and as the work of discernment – which is only possible at the level of the consciousness which discerns. The revolutionary potential of all thought begins and ends at the crux point – in, at, and as the understanding of the forces which propel, impel, and dispel ‘humanity’ from itself in a historical game of mirrors, relations, orders, and images as violent forces which seek jurisdiction and prominence as ‘God’. The difficulty in the process of discernment is to see through but not penetrate the screens of ‘Reality’ and ‘Reality-making’, in order to analyze them but not to- be-as them. It is as such that Jesus ‘dies’ on the cross – the

image of the body dies. This game of the continued production, reproduction, and dysproduction of bodies throughout ‘human history’ is made a game of schizophrenic consciousness, or incompletion as conception leading to and as primary disillusion as to the apparently disjunctive ‘world’ and ‘self’, ‘god’ and ‘man’, ‘cosmos’ and ‘earth’ vis-à-vis the senses imbued with the teleological contraception of and as being. The critique as discernment acknowledges this phenomenon but refuses to acknowledge it as the final critique, or as all there is – as this, too, would be an acceptance of that which is ‘possible’ as all that is possible. This critical mode is too poetic in this sense, as with Genet, it alludes to a revolutionary morality and coherence and that which appears to contradict it – by way of a destructive creation of the historical terms which birth the present moment. It is in this sense that a discerning critique senses the death implicit in history as materiality, and by way of this sensual process, also senses/observes/studies why and how this conception of history occurred and is occurring. It is to acknowledge all of this life-making as the work of screening ‘the self’ from consciousness as figural; furthermore, the work of creating ‘the world’ from consciousness as figural – and the incomplete mode of perception which situates each as away from the other. This very model supposes, at an abstract level, the entirety of ‘Man’ and his relations as perpetually incomplete as in need of logics by which to explain. The death of the soul is also the death of understanding as mode and method of knowing.

198

THE DESCENDANT OF PEACE: RHETORICAL DIALECTICS AND THE MODEL OF COLONIAL (RE)PRODUCTION

The movement toward ‘Man’ is the movement of a system of thought moving towards its dissolution in the folding over of the paradigm of ‘Man’ in its encounter with and of itself. This folding over is a bifurcation returning to itself, a bifurcation which may also be called the creation of power, difference, and stratified existence - in the establishment of ‘Man’ as category of lived conduct. It is as such that ‘Man’ is made a living-complex system, input as a theorem into the lived life as that which ‘is’, or that which must become in order to advance that which ‘is’ - as the determined as-yet-to-come. This is the thesis of cultivation, or the established ecosystem of the plantation as a disciplinary conjecture which permeates the lived life as the assertion of ‘Reality’. This assertion is forcible, in the words of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o: ‘The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation’. This force- work is done at the level of the material vis-a-vis the cosmological ordering and orientation of space and time as space and time toward the purpose of and as the cultivation of ‘Man’ as that which inherits the wor(l)d of/as the Kingdom of God. The creation of this model, with Derrida, is always already a violent simplification of space/time/relation in that it relegates these elements to formulaic linearity - as a systems-work which, together with the novel and the creation of history, functions to affirm the narrativology of ‘Man’ at the level of the significant system - or the body filled with thetic meaning. All of these affirmations, including and as affirmations at the level of Language as logos, construct a multidimensional ecosystem which mimics the function of the observable universe, adapting to the discovered-new terms and conditions of the observable universe as it ‘expands and explodes’, both in the ‘human’ ability to observe and conceive of ‘the universe’, and the reproductive ability of a colonial dialect to order and ground it in its frameworking. This work is, at the cultural level, the work of the reproduction of civilization by way of the co-optation of

differance into ordered, strictured, a priori signified, digested binary modes of/as difference; at the physical level, the work of theorizing and in theorizing making ‘the world’ as whole in the eye and language of ‘Man’. These processes, the structuring of the immanent physical ‘reality’ and the signified cultural ‘reality’ occur simultaneously, informing one another in the suturing of temporal breaches as, literally, the multiplicity of light-directions into singularities. This work is the colonization of discursive modes into the synthetic appearance of zero ulteriority - and in this exponential movement toward zero ulteriority as civilization, civilization betrays itself by way of sealing itself off even from itself. The function of solidifying and exponentially stratifying temporal blocs as regimented time and regimented space is simultaneously to ground all life in and as empirical ‘Reality’ and to create an ouroboratic knowledge- productive loop of information as itself - which is as, also, the entirety of the means of production of life as ‘Reality’. It is in this contraception that the logos of ‘Man’ perpetually affirms and reaffirms itself vis-a-vis its own empirical ‘tools’, while denying all possibility of life otherwise in a militant exclusion at the level of employed force as the structuring language of everything. To conceive of time or space otherwise is to met with documentation, bureaucratic processes, police checkpoints and border patrols, walls, prisons, and otherwise. The very structuring processes of and for the physical ‘Reality’ are as affirmations to and for the civilizational paradigm. It is as such that ‘reality’ collapses and is always already collapsed as a desired direction. With Kafka: ‘By believing passionately in something that does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired’. This passage, together with Arendt’s analysis of Kafka’s parable, relates a basic yet profound truth prominent throughout Kafka’s works – that ‘reality’ has a generative largesse beyond ‘Man’; that this generated largesse is no mistake - as it is also as the superstructural system which a priori orders and continually affirms and reaffirms the live of ‘Man’ as directed and oriented spatially and temporally, as historical and historicizing force. The very construction of time and space as paradigmatic forces, emblematic in the organization and reorganization of these dynamics in and by way of alterations to calendar models, work days, national borders and bounds is also indicative of the

internal flexibility of the system of reality making as and in the image of the ethno-class of ‘Man’ to new directives and approaches which will in turn progress it narratively towards itself. This internal teleology is a method and work of orienting- world as making-world - complete with an internal cosmology, internal mapping, internal surveillance, internal logic - which it asserts vis-a- vis its own logic as ecological phenomena. It is as such that Wynter discusses historical black lives and the paradigmatic manifestations of ‘Man’ - with its exponential ‘epiphanies’ as ‘discovery’ of other lives - in turn orients and reorients its internal cosmology to maintain its image of itself as cosmatic subject. It is in this sense that the cosmology of ‘Man’ depends on the death of life as the creation of knowledge of itself at multiple levels: the ‘physical’, or apparent, and the ‘spiritual’, or disapparent. It is as such that ‘Man’ must die so the earth may live, or the earth must die so that ‘Man’ may live. It is the very creation of an internal logic within an ecosystem posing as the logic of the ecosystem itself which creates this problem from without. Wynter has done exceptional work detailing the intersecting forces which stratify and structure this epochal phenomenon as perpetual violence to earth and black life - but there is yet work that may be done in regards to the insidious ways that this method elucidates itself as an economics of everything. With Du Bois: ‘The world today is trade. The world has turned shopkeeper; history is economic history; living is earning a living’. The ‘turn’ elucidated here by Du Bois is the coming together of a global civilizational-economy - structured and argued (with bullets and language) into and as a total synthesis of Reality established at all levels of life with the appearance of life. The very drive to knowledge is implicated in this trade-framework - as all aspects of life are now imbued with ‘definition’ as economic value - subject to shifting trade-value, but suprasubject to the organizing framework which defers these values in alternate space-time without ulteriority of mode. The entirety of the disciplinary conjecture of and as ‘Man’ is organized of and as this phenomenon - the plantation (re: Tsing), the slave trade, the international corporation, the nation-state, the bank, the school - all as implicated manifestations of this primary theo-philosophy of transaction at the level of objective reality.

The creation of these organs of ‘Man’ is simultaneous with the creation of ‘Man’ as civilizational body - in, of, and from which the image of ‘life’ emerges as Reality. It is as such that all of the disciplinary procedures of Man are as law functions and law enforcement mechanisms - simultaneously charged with elucidating ‘the laws of life’ as the laws of life and enforcing them. It is as such that there is the creation of supracapital forms, the Language, the Law, the Capital, the Object, the Subject - within this discursive project of Reality-making - which do the work of discipline intradisciplinarily in order to network Reality as itself. The language of Law is always already the language of Language, which is also the language of Capital (as desire) as that which structures the language of Man - the transactional orientation and the emergent resources from this force-work. Furthermore, these Language Laws become promiscuous to singularity, dispersing themselves as primary rules, methods, and forces of exchange as currencies - discharged globally with increasing power and precision (by way of technological development) and instituted as global Language Laws - monocultures. It is that this existential threat is simultaneously at the level of earth and the level of that life which is also earth – the biodivergence necessary to sustain life. This is the systematic destruction of plants, animals, divergent modes of thinking, being, living - in order to establish the primary bifurcation of ‘Man’ as affirmed theo-philosophical project of itself toward itself. The suicide implicit and explicit here is clear - but veiled nonetheless in the now-ubiquity of this theo-philosophical development into and as global life and global Reality - furthermore, universal life and universal Reality.

THE THEOGENETIC POLIS

The theogenetic polis as history begins and ends in the hermeneutic passage between god kingdoms - which here means, explicitly, god concepts as in and of the mind and god creation (theogenesis) as in and of the world. It is in this sense that the polis as the communal space of the collective - imagined, made, being made and becoming - is always already theogenetic - in that the very stuff of and from which it is made is creation myth - or the cosmogony of becoming as constellated stars. It is this interpretive, interpolated mode of the creation of life as, too, the creation of the ‘human’ (together with, through, and as the creation of Wynter’s ‘Man’ as now historical, humanistic order) which is increasingly complicated in the hyper- globalization of the world into and as a culturally swallowed mode. What I mean here, in the use of the term ‘culturally swallowed’ is that the interaction of previously disparate cultures is now within and upon a world synthesis which is forcibly brought about vis-a-vis the union and unity of ‘pure materiality’ as connected via trade routes, digital and virtual communications, theoretical and practical sciences, and defined, mapped borders of, quite literally, ‘life’ on earth. This moment is as between historical mouths - in and at the critical value of the theo-philosophy of ‘Man’, bottlenecked and corrupting into new value form as the out-mouth of a new epoch of valuation as production of and dreaming of world. The hermeneutics in question here, or the interpolative, interpretive mode which brings these god kingdoms into and out of being as perceptible modes (cities, nations, value-filled commodities and embodiments, markers, definitions, incarnate ghosts), is a hermeneutics of the political imagination as action - which simultaneously dreams (and thus, does) the past, present, and future as perceptibly ulterior modes - with an imaginative lag in its ability to perceive, conceive and digest the present as now-already-past. It is in this sense that at a collective level the ‘future mode’ (what will become of this becoming?) is determined precisely by the collective’s delayed response to the very terms and conditions which produce and reproduce the present moment - the dreamer’s dream of that

which he once dreamed, long ago. This eternal present as process (or the messianic moment which destroys the very concept of history in and as a perpetual ‘condition’) is certainly one of Benjamin’s concerns; of course, it is the concern of ‘all time’, conceptually articulated as such. It is apropos to say, here, that the collective imagination is caught within the dream-mode of theogenetic space-time as the polis which it also inhabits at the level of the individual - a superstructural dynamic system of perception as perceptible as Reality (the empir-ic) which, in turn, structures and strictures the perception of what is possible at the level ofthe individual resident therein as the borders, bounds, and limits of the real. The individual is formulated as organ within the body of the polis, which is, itself, a constellation (or related apparatus), of the larger theo-philosophical cosmology - a cosmology which is dreamed beyond space. The difficulty now, in the wake of the works of Benjamin and Wynter, is the task of digging the moment - a moment in and at which Benjamin’s Baudelaire finds himself at the precipice and Wynter ushers in with her critical analytic mode - the moment of global ‘Reality’ as a disjuncted yet (for the first time in ‘human history’) articulate whole of relational theo-philosophical cosmologies confronting one another in the opened space of a global network of media and materia - ordered and dictated by the larger network of that which determines the flows of this media-materia as currencies (charged) - Capital - as manifest, conquered, mediated, valuated (; for the first time in recorded history, apocalyptically ‘whole’) world. The very supraconscious theogenetic values which inform discourse, relation, and exchange within and as the collective polis of locale A now find themselves in intradisciplinary discourses with the cultural values of polis AA through ZZ, and, by way of this process – exchanging cultural informations (saliva, god images, food, taste) with micro nuance and speed hitherto unseen in a global-historical context. In this sense, quite literally, the contemporary moment approaches god beyond all historical imagination except for that of the encounter of Krishna and Arjuna. There is, of course, light coming from all sides (‘perceptible’ and otherwise), spatially and temporally dysfigured beyond conception; this is the Vishvarupa form of Krishna, or god without image as the imageless image - the impossible truth that, with Wittgenstein, cannot be said but only shown: a real-

ideal structure that is what is. The exchange at the molecular- bacterial level of nuance-transmission as culture as gesture as microcosmic movement (articulate, apparent, and otherwise) is cross civilizational, cross speci-al, cross ecospherical; in this sense, it reconfigures the ancient cosmodels of the heavens horizontally

in a true music of the spheres. The theogenetic polis of history is now evermoreso corrupted with accuracy beyond the imagined future of the past; furthermore, this process as rapid decay will be brought to bear in the disjuncted messianic images of the present moment - critically apocalyptic; folding over into the coming immanence. It is also, in this sense, that the becoming-death of the theogenetic polis of history is now - as it always has been. It is here that Wynter and Benjamin meet - for it is in and as the very theogenetic makeup of the present moment that we find the dreamer - dreaming the dream of the ancient cosmology made truly ulterior as reality - doing the refraction of the dream image of god as expression into and as the relative cosmos of life in and as world - too, inevitably a sphere with its own fallen music. This dream-work as political, relational action (simultaneously at the individual and collective level) is that very process of conjuring the relative value of the spheres horizontally (in and through ‘the world’) by way of ‘bringing down’ the cosmologics of the past as valuation of the present and its apparent makeup, in that very process elucidated by Benjamin as history. The angel therein is the other dreamer, the dreamer who is not fooled by the promise at either pole of the god function. In Wynter’s analysis, the somnambulist is always dreaming through and as signified by the already civilized mode(l) as preconfigured language as that which has already been dreamt and forcibly made Reality by way of accultural expression (Language and bullets, alike). It is here that the god model of each culture as a theo- philosophical imposed limit as the bound of time is brought to bear - as and in the creation of everyday life. This model-making and remaking as life process is dreamt/dreaming/pro-somnambulating at the individual and collective level by way of the instituted, symbolic orders of culture, language, and the organs which structure the polis as the belated, theogenetic code of a paradigm of consciousness, late to its own witnessing - emergent as the expression of that epoch which it emerges from always already too late. The state has shifted; the state must now scramble to
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recuperate itself in the manner of a shadow before the sun and behind itself - the eclipsed body eclipsed by its now-incarnation. The somnambulist walks into himself from himself as light refracts into water - disjuncted ever so slightly from that perfect reflection which he so desires in his image of what he would be, which is, quite simply, his wish-image of what is, certainly, to come. It is in this manner that the synthesis, or singularity, is never achieved - as a manner of waiting for that which could never come within the mode which he submits and is submitted, himself, through. With Emma Goldman, this phenomenon may best be described as a sort of somnambulism as hypnosis at the level of collective consciousness/unconsciousness as the establishment of a cultural teleology as ‘the state’ which is as ‘Reality’, thoughtlessly, apparently, institutionally - true. It is also here that Arendt makes her critique of Eichmann, the somnambulist of genocide.

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Aesthetic Theory

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