Stone, Nerve, and the City: Regulational and configurational persistence architectures — a lecture Oct 9, 2026

Stone, Nerve, and the City

Regulational and configurational persistence architectures — a lecture

Oct 9, 2026

Stone and nerve

This will be a short one. I want to talk about regulational versus configurational persistence architectures. We’ve already touched on this: stone is configurational, geologically speaking, and nervous systems, cellular systems, are regulational.

What I want to talk about here is neurological diversity. By that I mean emergent complexity in persistence-based organisms, and how it creates the sense of novelty.

The geological is almost like a template or a record. Think of fossils, or even amber. When I was very young I visited one of the Smithsonian museums, I think the National Museum of Natural History, and came home with a fly in amber. It was an extremely formative experience for me.

Stone is configurational. It is molecular settlement. It is the geological record of the earth, and it records regulational developments in nervous systems through fossils and the like.

Then there is the concept of universal, or cosmological, novelty. This is where we arrive at the absurdity of the nose marching through the streets in an official’s uniform, as in Gogol: the ultimate remark, in effect. That novelty emerges from the architectural and superstructural development of regulational systems over time. By that I mean the transformation of regulational architectures.

Homeostasis and the devices of power

In every moment there is a necessary homeostatic state of being. You could call it a direct hit to the nervous system: confirmation of survival and survivability. The regulational system, and here we can treat the nervous system as the direct historical example, is constantly regulating body temperature and exposure. This is the superficial idea of the comfort zone.

What it means is the organism’s safety and survivability: its persistence in space and time as an entropic organism. It is an organ system subject to time, and so it degrades rapidly compared with configurational architectures, or with other regulational architectures such as stellar systems, which we also have to consider. Here, though, I mean regulational nervous systems: organisms.

When these organisms develop sufficient capacity, when they evolve far enough in their technological revolution, which here means the forebrain and opposable thumbs, they begin to create representational devices to mediate power. This is how we get civilization and culture.

This mediation of power is primarily imagistic. It projects the survival body outward into space and time: celebrity, pop culture, bureaucracy, political power. When we talk about the ideological mediation of political realities, we are talking about how energy is transformed and conferred through these ridiculous systems, bureaucratic and cultural. Nearly all of them are empty and vapid, except for a few sparsely distributed existential manifestations. These are usually underground: Clarice Lispector, say, or Van Gogh.

This is how regulational systems scale up into civilization. Acquiring a nervous system and a forebrain, as technological tools and hardware for the persistence project, creates new capacities for nature, the primordial veiling architecture. We’ve talked about the butterfly with the monkey’s face, and about “nature loves to hide” as an axiom. Hölderlin’s nature, whose gleaming reveals the higher, says the same thing. These forms are manifestations of the first-principle operator, persistence against constraint, and of the play of nature behind persistence architectures.

That is, they continue to exist. This is why reproduction is primary. The organism continues to exist as an ontological category, an information-technological structure, a superstructure. Its identity within the larger system, not only the species but the ontological genome, the architecture of existence itself, is perennial. It is being itself in various scalar disguises, from star to cell, as laid out in my persistence ontology documents.

The metropolis as artifice

This is what’s funny about walking through a metropolis, whether Washington, DC or New York City. I’m American, so that’s where I’m coming from. These civilizational centers are the highest-contrast examples of the artifice of all human history. They provide the most sophisticated infrastructure for saying what is always being said, even in the spread-out farmland of the Midwest, the Northeast or the American South.

Everywhere says the same thing. But with population density and the high-frequency circulation of information, currency and resources, the statement scales up: to bullet trains, to bureaucratic buildings in pseudo-Roman imperial style. That is the farce and the hilarity of it.

It happens both consciously and unconsciously. To survive, persist and reproduce is hard-coded into the biology of this organism, as it is in all organisms. And this is the ludicrousness of culture: all of it is built around gratifying, gratuitous urges, around fulfilling the biological technology of the organism itself.

Narcissus at the water

Culture, in this sense, is Narcissus gazing into the water. It doesn’t penetrate the depths of being. It is only a mirror, a reflection of the surface-level technological substrate the organism emerges from, not a real ontological interrogation of being. This is the meaningless superficiality of our cultures, our bureaucratic and political systems, our languages. None of them fulfill.

When Camus describes the absurd as humanity’s search for meaning, I think the real diagnosis is simpler and goes far deeper. It isn’t that there is a search for meaning, or a meaning out there to search for. That framing is the failure of a lower-level culture, ontologically deaf, dumb and blind. The meaning of life is simply to realize oneself, to recognize oneself, at the depths of the ontological ground of being.

I think history shows this clearly, across every civilization. These have been the highest achievements of human life: to exhume this ground of being ever more deeply, to make it manifest, to express it, depict it, become it and act from it.

The novelty of persistence-level architecture is precisely the diversity T. S. Eliot diagnoses in modernity: distraction upon distraction upon distraction. These are all superficial mirror images of humanity’s base technological, programmatic nature, acting itself out continually, consciously and unconsciously.

This is where the grotesque of history comes from, a perennial grotesque. It is a being simultaneously awake and asleep to its own nature, doing whatever it can to preserve itself in an impoverished state: divorced from the ontological substrate, the ground of existence. The poverty of culture, politics and economics all stems from this one source.

The diversity of coping

Back to the technological development of regulational nervous systems: the sophistication of the human nervous system and the forebrain. This is what’s fascinating about culture, and something that can be taken even from the most impoverished farce of human history. It is redeeming, hilarious and interesting at once.

With these developments, persistence architectures grow more sophisticated: the ideologies, the literal structures, the temples, the religious myths. They become more convincing because they do exactly what the butterfly with the monkey’s face does. They veil the fundamental operation: to survive and reproduce as an individual organism, blind, deaf, dumb and isolated from the ontological substrate of being.

They do it through mass media, through the polis, through the delegate’s proclamation, through the warlord’s claim to be fighting a divine war for the nation’s heritage. The obscene absurdities pile up.

At the same time, they’re interesting, because what you’re witnessing is the diversity of the organism’s coping mechanisms. The organism is bleakly, opaquely, obliquely aware of what it does and why. It is absolutely compelled from that place, which is where desire and drive emerge: the substrate, the ground of being. At the level of the ontological operator, persistence against constraint, the being emerges from that ground, and it keeps creating methods to perpetuate itself.

So when you look at LinkedIn, or the businessman’s proclamation, it’s useless to listen to locally. Regionally and globally, though, it’s fascinating, because you’re watching a species in the throes of its own blind passion. It is flailing, wriggling and squirming in the Petri dish of cosmological experiment: the aeon at play with colored balls. It is an active experiment in the history of the play of forms, through which persistence architectures are built and rebuilt, at least on earth, through the genome.

The body of the earth

And the stone, the body of the earth, literally holds this history. It can be read geologically, through the fossil record and the dating of rock. It is the recombination and packing-in of molecular configurations across the entire history of the earth.

Looked at from a real cosmological perspective, geology may be one of the most fascinating fields available to humanity. It holds cosmological history locally, in the very ground we walk on. And that brings us straight back to the ontological ground of existence itself.

So this comedy, this farce of regulational architectures, is the moment before a deeper awakening: an awakening to the ground beneath the persistence operator, the play and recombination of forms, which is life itself, beyond even our conception of genomic, earthbound existence. Until then, there is the existence of the isolated, alienated organism in the jungle. That is the program being regurgitated perennially through the body of the human species.

It produces the actions we observe: surviving, maintaining viability within the tribe. These have nothing to do with ontological truth. They have to do with the organism’s self-preservation.

The novelty, then, is the strangeness of the city, because the city is entirely projected: the made-up artifice of a world built at high density in the species’ current technological paradigm, to perpetuate survival at the local level. Persistence against constraint.

That’s about it. A short one, but I hope you enjoyed it. I’ll catch you on the next one.