Architectures of Character: Persistence, Force, and the Churn of Forms (Lecture -- 10/7/26)

There’s a lot always made about human behavior, and I’ll take a winding road here.

I was sitting outside on the porch, I think it was yesterday, enjoying a warm fall day. I was watching ants and bugs crawl across a walkway stone by the front porch in the sun. If you observe nature deeply enough, I think you have a real experience of the transcendental nature of subjectivity. You see it moving through the various persistence architectures in space and time: bugs, insects, cats, men, women, even stones, in terms of configurational architecture.

I wrote a book about that, which is fascinating. It’s very interesting how memory and time are encoded into these devices, into their literal body, their literal form. One of the greatest examples is Botticelli’s map of the Inferno for Dante. It’s a great painting, a great piece of art, and it shows the sedimentary power and quality of the geological earth itself. We also see that replicated superstructurally in the body: in organisms, in regulational architectures.

You see a lot of back and forth about biological reproduction. We have men and women: a two-sexed species system of recombination. I’ll weave that in further in a moment.

Watching the bugs move, stop, and change direction in response to situations, you are watching the same process occur superstructurally. The situations might be an observer, myself sitting there present in the space; other bugs; nutrients; resources; the sun. The process is, again, persistence against constraint.

I’m moving from that place, and beneath that codified architecture: form within the formless, entropic universe of ever-changing, shifting, transforming energetic structures. Within it you have these attempts to persist: local, regulational systems. Here I’m mostly talking about organisms. We could get creative with that, but there’s no need.

So, getting into men, women, reproduction, and the distribution and circulation of energy: we can just look at it in terms of the genome, in terms of the transmission and transformation of information across time. That’s all that’s really happening in the human species. There’s a very slow, glacial process of transformation, and we’ve discussed its paradigm shifts: the opposable thumb and the forebrain.

What’s so powerful is what I’ve called progressive enlightening. I don’t mean enlightening in the sense of revelation or awakening, by any means; I think that’s pretty clear. I mean enlightening in terms of technological light: literally, the energetic grids powering modern civilizations. Industrial modernity progressively lights up the earth itself, visibly from space.

That brings me to my point about civilization and libidinal energy. I think it draws a lot from Freud, specifically Civilization and Its Discontents , and from Marcuse and Foucault. Regardless of what you think of these thinkers’ political beliefs, they are honing in on something real, which Simone Weil simply calls force. She says force is the true subject of the Iliad. Not any particular subject or character, but the manifestation of force in space and time as it presents itself in different situations, through different actors.

That’s why we call Homer an epic poet. There is no single station of individual vision. It describes the ecological situation of force, energetic transformation, and change itself. That is an ontological project.

This is where Marcuse becomes very critical. When we talk about civilization and libidinal energy, we are talking about the structures, the architectures themselves, which become increasingly sophisticated, which is to say increasingly binding. Consider debt, as in the Roman concept of debt. Consider surveillance, technological surveillance. Consider the affirmation, reformation, and reaffirmation of the subject as a state-based subject. These are all ways of binding and conforming energy to structures.

Those structures are then subjected to larger structures: institutional systems, whether the state, the church, the educational institution, or the economic and political architectures that dictate the flow of capital in space and time. All of this preserves power relations. It affirms and stockades them.

This is why the Paris Commune is such an important movement in the history of Western civilization and modernity. It’s also fascinating that Rimbaud became briefly involved with it. The Paris Commune barricaded the streets with furniture. It was an attempt to block and redirect the flows of an increasingly affirmed, superstructural, architectural civilization, which in modern terms is quite simply capital itself.

Power is held in certain infrastructural creations, such as the factory or the bureaucracy. Within them, money and resources circulate freely, outside the bounds and rule of law, while the law is asserted downward. Anyone who has studied or participated in any amount of legal practice understands this quite clearly. It has nothing to do with the law of God or the law of the universe, as you would understand it ontologically through someone like Spinoza, or even Pascal.

So this is simply to say: grids of segregation, control, and the flow of energy. Grids of capital.

When we look at this attempt to construct the artifice and edifice of civilization, that is really what it is. It’s hard to look at the necessary, or natural, slavery that emerges from these political superstructures. They run from the buildings of the law to the departments of education, which then determine which educations are educating.

It is a fundamentally farcical system. But buy-in at the level of culture and ideology is critical for these systems to sustain themselves, because they live off the working energy of those who dedicate their lives to perpetuating them. I understand these are not living systems themselves; they are ideological constructs.

But what I was looking at here, persistence against constraint and architectural difference, is more fascinating to me than the bureaucratic machinery of modernity. I did a whole series on that, with Kafka as the chief figure; you could also look at Melville’s Bartleby.

What fascinates me is regulational persistence against constraint, and the architectural difference that emerges in nature, and how that informs behavior: in women, in bugs, in children, in cats. There are defensive persistence-against-constraint overlays that must be conformed to, in relation to the architecture’s survivability in nature.

So what you see are manifestations of character, and beings emerging according to these architectural grids. Those grids are fundamentally complex: hormonal composition, physical size, musculature, whether or not there is a nervous system, whether or not there is a spine. The character of the being emerges from the form of the being.

I think this is the most fascinating thing to observe in nature: subjectivity as a deep diversity, a Vishvarupa, a thousand-headed Krishna, manifesting itself everywhere through the diversity of the birth of forms. The birth and death of forms. This is deeply Buddhist.

I was sitting here thinking about putting a massive mural of the Buddhist Wheel of Life on my wall. The wheel of life is held by a ghastly creature. So the question is: what is at the center of this wheel of churning energetic transformation? Its caricature would almost be the demon, or the daemon: the ever-consuming, ever-hungry, ever-thirsting cosmological entity, the snake eating its own tail.

That is very much a vision of capital. Behind the curtain of liberal comings and goings, presumptions, and ideologies, capital is very much Aztec in its perennial sacrifice of forms. I’ve gone into this in depth, specifically in my poetic works. It reminds me a lot of Bataille and the accursed share, and of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita asking why he is fighting this war against his brothers and sisters. Krishna effectively says: this is the state of the world, and you must go and fight anyway.

So what I’m really digging at beneath all these observations, things that have been lingering in the substrate of this lecture, is that there is a war. It is a deeply embedded war of forms: the coming and going, the disappearance and emergence of forms, each having its moment on the stage of the grand superstructural energetic architecture of life. And everything that emerges from that process is, in a strange way, fundamentally natural.

So there is the haunting, or haunted, question that emerges from human insecurity: will technology replace what is fundamentally human?

My answer is that technology is what is fundamentally human. There is nothing fundamentally human, just as there is nothing fundamentally technological. Technology is the practice of the universe. It is the formation and reformation of ideas, sketches, and attempts at configurational, persistence-based architecture.

Again, to unify these concepts, the Aeon as a child at play with colored balls, and persistence against constraint, is the universal mind, the cosmological attempt to build ever more sustaining, or sustained, sandcastles. At a certain point, that sustenance became recursive. With the advent of the forebrain, the sandcastle was able to perceive itself not only being created, but being creative in the process of being.

That is the critical juncture at which this high strangeness emerges, along with the acceleration we’ve experienced ever since, in a cosmological-historical sense.

I really do want to fixate on the profusion of this diversity. I think there is an aspect of awe, fascination, and fantasticality in observing this creative power. It is the source of all religious fervor and religious devotion. There is great power, of course, in the theological mode of wisdom: being in awe of the nature of creation, and of the near-impracticality, the improbability, of present circumstances even being as they are.

And there is the attempt to observe or experience God. That is really what we’re talking about beneath this dynamic: the biologically, chemically, and hormonally encoded struggle between men and women to have a real relationship. Or the struggle of civilizations to emerge from fundamentally selfish, self-centered, limited organisms that can barely see beyond their own noses when it comes to their personal preservation.

These are attempts to create a larger vision of what is real and true, out of the ground of an organism that is effectively emerging from the mud. It is emerging from the tide-pooled dawn of single-celled organisms and trying to stand up straight. It is navigating a world it is only just becoming conscious of, and in becoming conscious of world, it is becoming conscious of self: of the vast sedimentary, geological substrate histories of the being. That means a real reckoning with the fundamental.

These are the questions that haunt history: questions of the spirit and the soul, the fundamental void, you could say, behind the technological cast of humanity. Behind it is a churning energetic force that is almost bestial. It is primordial in the sense that it is nature itself, manifesting everywhere and trying to express itself through the current stage of these emerging genetic architectures, even just in the context of Earth itself. And then there is the mass of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, which we can barely contemplate and barely map, even in simulation with the most advanced cosmological tools.

To understand this nature of subjectivity, I had to understand the nature of stars. This is why nuclear stellar physics became very important to me, and why Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was, I think, very critical to my ontological process.

This is why humans always oriented themselves by the stars, and why their myths ran through the stars. There was a deep, intuitive understanding that the stars held the secrets of the universe, as its mechanisms at the grandest scale. This is why we separate astrophysics from cellular biology: to understand, at scale, the systems-level processes occurring across scales in the universe. Sometimes the easiest way to do that is to look at the biggest thing around.

So when we look at stars, at the sun, and try to understand how it works, Bataille comes back into play with the accursed share and the sun’s excess of energy. We’re talking about real power here. Not political power or economic power, although those are enfolded into real power, of course. We’re talking about the energetic transformation itself, in and through which life comes into being as we understand it: consciousness, or sentience, emerging through different architectures of becoming.

That’s what is fascinating when you look at a woman, a bug, a child, or a cat. These are architectures through which a character, a subjectivity, emerges in response to the architectural reality the being is experiencing. The being’s architectural experience of reality is the formation of the character the being then projects.

For the most part this is entirely unconscious. The experience one has in the cast of the cosmological body, at the local level, simply is that being’s total somatic field in relation to itself. It is also in relation to the other, which is the world. We described this in terms of the primordial being in the jungle of immediate relations: other genomically mediated and mediating structures, all attempting to persist against constraint.

This is how the cultural world of global civilization comes into being. Technological advances press up against space and time. They collapse local, regional, persistence-level architectures and expand them into global, almost unmediated singularities: the dispersion of information at light speed, the speed of the digital screen.

And this movement of energy is why I turn again to the Buddhist Wheel of Life, or to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. These are real, critical observations emerging from deep Eastern lineages that conceive of reality, existence, and being itself as this churn: this transformative and transforming churn.

I need to get back to it, because of all the smoke screens of these dialogues, these furies, these vengeances and violences that emerge. The level of complexity is so high. The human situation is a disaster of overcomplexity, which is to say it is incoherent. It is an incoherent mess precisely because there is no higher vantage from which to observe with this level of objectivity and this level of interconnectivity across scales.

This is why understanding human history, mythology, and science at scale is so important for a real, situated understanding of being in space and time. And furthermore, of what lies beyond space and time, at the level of the structural identity of the universe.

This is very novel. It’s not being discussed. Since the pre-Socratics, its lineage has been, in a broad sense, a lineage of exiles, whether we’re talking about Spinoza or Pascal.

This lineage would be the new necessary locus of existence: the new necessary gathering place of beings around this project, this process of understanding creation in a multifaceted, interdimensional way of thinking and being.

This is obviously extremely rare. That is partly due to the diversity of experience at the neurological level of beings. It is also due to the educational realities of existing systems, which are more cattle prods than systems of critical thought, interrogated at the level of academics and learning, so to speak.

I think that’s about it. I covered it in less time than usual, but I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll see you on the next one.