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Title: I am not Chuang
Author: Frére Dupont
Date: July 2020
Language: en
Topics: Chuang
Source: Retrieved on September 11, 2020 from http://www.lettersjournal.org/frere-dupont-booklets/

Frére Dupont

I am not Chuang

Introduction: For Karen

I perceived the phylogons and the fact that nothing that is past truly

ceases to be, but, rather, is added to progressively; accretional layers

are laid down, becoming ever more reticulate and arborized. This is the

main discovery, this permanence of past and present reality - hence all

reality. Flux only adds, it does not take away.

M- The Exegesis

What affects me most powerfully: mourning in layers - a k ind of

sclerosis.

Mourning Diary

I realised in a flash that these phrases which I had pronounced (out of

all those that could have been chosen, with diabolical malice, by

persons anxious to do me harm) were the only ones that could result in

making him abandon his intention to give me the help that I had asked of

him.

Within a Budding Grove

The significance of every particular is set at the level of what it is

caught in. This thing is important to the measure it draws along, and is

drawn along by, the tangle of its involvements. As a thing forkd in

itself, naked in its own outline, at the level of the integrity it

expresses in the audacity of its becoming distinct, in its sense of its

own moral standing, in its commitment to the cause, in this sort of

hands or wear a face-mask, whether your opinions are racist, or what you

think of cops, none of that makes a difference - objects are significant

only as evidence of the mechanism that they realise.

Things matter to the degree that they illuminate general usage as it

functions beyond, and separates from, the thing’s discrete use-value.

What I am or might be means nothing. Fire left engine! And what opinions

I hold mean nothing. Fire right engine! But what I am involved in, what

I am an agent of, is decomposition, so the use I am put to, the tendency

I am caught in, is another kettle of fish entirely. Fire left engine!

But all I have to go on is this account of myself, I am the half life.

Fire right engine! I have no content but the voided content. And like

the scarabaeinae, I am coprophagous. I navigate amongst the concentrates

of the 64 volatile chemical compounds that comprise the dung plume!

Now then, now then. So, then, there is no devilry as interesting as the

devilry of private interest mobilising whatever it might drag along with

it through it’s proprietorial hoop in the name of the common good. So

then, now then, so then, like a madman stumbling in the graveyard, my

antennae consumed by beetle intent, whilst I search absurdly for an

adequate form for my repudiation of agreement and common cause. I am

looking for non-identity as a pivot for a better life. I am looking for

a manner of disagreement, for unhappiness in disjunction, but which is

not vendetta, but which, even so, would pattern how to live together,

but without recourse to conventional policies of toleration of

difference . Fire left engine.

So then, but the dung plume of my rotting self but I am invested in the

how of opposition to the cause of justice, how it could be caused to

appear in the world, but in something like the manner that the cause of

Jus post bellum appears there, as a concluding postscriptive shake of

hands, but no strings attached to the inevitable casualties. Fire left

engine. I assume humans are bad, and not improvable. Fire right engine.

I am looking for a way of best including their contemptible

self-destructiveness within the project that seeks to prevent them

destroying everything.

I want no no borders but I want all borders, I want no territory with

that. Fire right engine. I want the faultline in the exegetical

sedimentary strata. Fire left engine. I want what is curdled as a mirror

to what this is. Fire right engine. I want the thing separated from the

flux, twisting before my very eyes, and stark like a laxative saturated

bowel. Fire left engine. I am another dysphoria. Fire right engine. I am

disgusted with my self. Fire left engine. But I observe its logic in

parallel beside me. Fire left left engine. I dissociate. Fire right

engine. If you hide the marionette, then show the marionettist!

I am not sure what I am doing, nor why, nor how to go about it. I don’t

know what this is. I am guided by a sort of instinct, I have set my

compass by the dung plume, and I add to the midden what I think fits ,

but I am not sure on what principle the arrangement is based. There is

an impulse in it to manifest against politics . The frames through which

political ideas and priorities and causes must appear, even where they

are nominally emancipatory, are crushing. Yes, crushing but also false,

not true to process and not true to consciousness. I am like the

climbing beanstalk, my tendrils desire to close around the verticals -

but there is nothing there, nothing to support me, there are only the

representations and framings of attenuated political discourse, there is

milieulessness, there is only what Chuang calls portrayal.

How then, now then, now then, so then, might the actuality of the world,

its operations, be engaged if not through politics? I wonder, if we were

to get to the bottom of it all, and whether perhaps, it would be a good

idea now to scatter across the surface of our texts the metastatic

catchphrases of disgraced 1970’s light entertainers, as roses on a

coffin? In the absence of an adequate discursive register, and the

relations that it implies, the tendrils grow longer, the speculation on

the nature of the necessary content reaches out, inches out, ever

further.

The absolute absence of communism from mass consciousness, and from the

communist milieu itself, induces a rising spiral of uncertainty: what is

it, where will it come from, how will it be recognised? A sort of

unspooling, a sort of unravelling, a sort decaying. That is where we

are, that is what I am - something unsustainable and unrealisable,

something Godot-like, reaching the point where it sees at last how it

has been given up on and, in the metabolising of its having been already

relinquished, coming to the end of itself. Saddam’s observation on the

disciplinary function of impoverishment is never not applicable: starve

a dog and it will follow you.

For reason of the missing objective content, I still present my error as

an approximation - it stands in the place, and draws in the orientation

references, of what should already be there but which has been lost, or

suppressed. An inverse relationship is theorised between bower

complexity and the bower bird’s brightness of plumage - there may be an

evolutionary “transfer” of ornamentation in some species, from their

plumage to their bowers, in order to reduce the visibility of the male,

and thereby its vulnerability to predation.

In a similar way, the absence of what is looked for induces the same

transfers in the ornamentation of the search: variations in the

elaboration of form indicate a greater or lesser distance to god. In a

similar way, the closer we get to something real, the less ornamented

will be our involvement in it - subjective compensatory experiment

becomes unnecessary in circumstances that are themselves unprecedented .

Simple note-taking suffices during revolutionary events.

We are now very far from what is real, so there is inevitably a kind of

dredging in our efforts, but also a lacquering - we scour through the

laminations, and also observe the sedimentary process in action, the

phylogons becoming ever more reticulate and arborized. I have heard that

when Munch became frustrated with a painting he would throw it from the

window - but when he saw how rain altered the substance of the paint, he

was so delighted that it became part of the ritual; soon, he was casting

paintings out of the window in anticipation as would a fly fisherman

whipping his line, the lure and its hook over the surface of the East

Dart at Wallabrook.

The same informant told me Picasso’s favourite painters were Velazquez,

Goya and Rembrandt, and there is only one reason for noting his

influences, and it is not because we desire to use multistandpoint

perspective within a flattened surface; no, it is to situate Picasso in

a distinct genealogy. In a similar way, I like Montaigne and I only tell

you that because I cannot write as he did. Sure, I begin with a

conventional enough observational piece but that’s just the base layer -

then I am driven to throw gravel at it, and drizzle corrosive reagents

over its surface.

The text’s formal distress, as it decays in the moment of its formation,

like the phenomenon in roses that is called balling, its clenching,

spasm, and mourning for the coherence of what is lost from it, becomes

its second content, and also where I live now. I am drawn to paratrepsis

and monosandalism as strategies in writing, I am trying to find other

contents that will give a first impression of their being burdensome or

weak, but which on double take turn out to be organised around another

lightness, another strength, and so extend as another register in the

life-world. Then, shall we tend towards what is over-lain, the

neg-gilded, buried and excavated, scoured and lacquered, the found

object found? Is that the use we are being put to? I am sorting through

the fragments - I belong to the beaker people, for me the vessel has no

worth but as the source of shards that in turn imply my disappearance.

For the reason of the broken, I am aesthetically, and politically,

appreciative of Amber Turd’s work in Johnny Depp’s bed. It is right. It

is eloquent. It is just so. And it is moral. It should be plinthed in

Bristol. She is like Philip E. Marlow who framed Mark Binney for

defecating on teacher’s desk - dung is never an insult, whether it is

intended as such or not, but where it signifies at all it expresses the

desire of a subordinate to appease an authority - it is, in the sense of

Essai sur le don: forme et raison de I'echange dans les societes

archaiques, the original gift, and all other gifts derive from it. One

does not give but to power, and the ambivalence of the giver (the

negotiation around the mutual vulnerability and exertion of control that

gifting opens up) expresses an imbalance within the relation, which may

also be mirrored in the reciprocal gift made by the other, as in a more

nuanced version of complementary schismogenesis. I’m not joking!

The unexpected gift is disruptive of the scene because it expresses and

illuminates the nature of the involvements situated there - certainly,

we prefer not to be a little confronted with the turd-modal- ity of our

personal entanglements, we do not wish to be thrown back upon exactly

what we are, as the turd form so succinctly expresses it, and so, in

compensation, and by climbing the walls, we develop our evasive cultural

repertoire which, in a sense, remains tethered, and mediated through,

the displacement of those most profane of products. If suicide bombers,

and other heroic martyrs, had not so politely interiorised the lessons

of their masters, then they too could have expressed themselves as

directly as Amber Turd, and thus saved everyone all the trouble that

they caused. I’m telling you this because I don’t want to make their

mistake - I don’t want to make sacrifices for the cause. I want to head

in the opposite direction. And to that end, I make this, my contribution

to communism. I’m not joking! My every interruption, misstep, error, is

another little present to the revolution. No, I am joking. No, I’m

serious!

And the writing that has congealed here, all clogged and cloacal, is but

a concluding post-script to, and a digression upon, neo-reaction that is

written as a contribution to the work of communism. Let’s put it another

way, this matter I present here comes from neo-reaction, but it is made

for communism. From the moment the communist milieu gave up the negative

and bought big into the digital network’s circulation of the left’s

fixed moral categories, the negative’s only path into consciousness has

been through neo-reaction. The materials it has extracted from the spoil

heap thrown up, as neo-liberal- ism’s left wing merely burrows deeper

into the apparat, are the rare earth elements necessary to continue the

critique of Totality. What Neo-reaction makes available to the community

of capital must be seized upon, not denounced, by those seeking to

escape it. So then - enemies and their fuel. What is it that they run

on?

The left operates on the principle that reality is motivated by its

self-perfection. It imagines that those who read are open to persuasion

by the orthopedically true - the greater the number of readers, the

greater the number of potential leftists. But reading is not the

internalisation of and adaptation to textual messages - there is no

conviction, there is never a motivation to be found in the text. Reading

is a mechanism integrated into the general process of energy transfers

and conversions. It is the excitation necessary to move the dung ball of

the soul between its states - it is not persuaded by right arguments, it

is either electrified, or it is turned off. Or, more likely, the tedium

is punctuated with outbursts of room pacing and hands rubbing. Writing

is not an appeal, it is a record of the energy drawn from the world and

invested in writing. And, reading is the process of extracting that

energy from writing, as fuel to power whatever - it’s not important. The

message is nothing, the energy is everything. Who hasn’t launched their

fireworks into the dankest swamp?

I know I have. And it is for the reason that the world is not self-

perfecting, and that there is no progressive movement which is, as the

Angry Brigade had it, getting closer to the desired end, that reading

texts written by allies is a losing game - nothing of the world is

expressed in the agreeable. There is no energy generated by alliance. On

the principle of expropriating the expropriators, the winged creature of

communist reading may only really emerge from maggot of reactionary

writing.

The exegetical process derives from the energy with which the enemy

expresses itself - detournment is a cavalry discharge of statuary

draining into the desert. It is structurally impossible to re-route a

friend’s content. Such is the song of artesian irrigation. Factory

occupations of enemy discourse, and not anathematisations, are the means

by which the pathological energies of domination are dissipated. All

ideas should reach the surface, and all opinions should be freely and

openly expressed, but not all should be amplified, not all should be

electrified.

Neo-reaction has the best texts, now they must be ours; incels have the

best techno, now it must be ours; crypto-fascists have the best

part-object signifying chains - their symbolism, now this must be ours.

Their statues, their art, their taste, their manners, their aesthetics,

their morals are always better - because they are expressions of wealth,

because they reflect and articulate the ambivalent totality of the

relations that produced them. The left attempts to refuse, deny,

dismiss, ban and suppress the cultural expressions of domination - but

this is the enemy’s wealth, it is the source of their power so to reject

stained art, is to allow the enemy free use of it, it is why cancel

culture only multiplies what it abhors. Communism is inseparable from

the expropriation of the wealth of domination, because communists also

recognise themselves as its product.

We turn borders into thresholds. We do not brush the mosquito away - let

it do its work. It is necessary to seize hold of every work of culture

precisely because it is also a work of barbarism - expropriation, if not

the use, of what is, is the only subjective exit from, the only

therapeutic involvement within, the life-world of capital. Polarisation

is really a spectrum. For reason of its expropriation, we must recognise

ourselves within culture - we are it, it is us. And we must take

everything, and realise it.

It is imperative to recognise ourselves reflected in every pool of

blood - that’s authentic narcissism. That’s the human community, and

these are the theses on Feuerbach: we do not project what is best, we

metabolise what is worst. Communism, the human community at its fullest

amplitude, is not the perfected realisation of communist principles but

the perpetual engagement with compulsive pathologies and tragic

profanations. That Mike Skinner football chant as militant inquiry:

we’re shit, we’re shit, we’re shit... but don’t we just know it?

Our lamellate antennae are sensitised to the chem-plume of the human

midden. We do not abolish , we realise by metabolisation. We consume the

dead. We’re what you trod in - and if we live, we live to tread on

kings! We are also filth, no different to our enemies, and we are the

lovers of filth. Fire the left hand! We’re pondlife. Fire the right

hand! We are the same, exactly the same, as everyone we loathe. We’re

just pounders after all. Turn a stone over, and see us scuttling for

cover. Fire up the left hand!

I have begun the necessary work of digesting the means of neo-reaction -

it is essential that I absorb its impalpable powder. I will make its

talking points, and motifs my own. I have invaded it. I am the typical

bridge, I am implausibly deniable. I inhabit the periphery. I am a miner

for a heart of darkness. I am a negativity addict. I am Dodds. And like

Barthes, I am reluctant to transform mourning into literature, but like

him also, I understand it’s what literature is. Too late! Too late!

Literature is always and already inside. I am a running dog. I’ve got

death tattoos. And oh, Eurydice! I have decorated the zombie bower that

you might dwell there. And wear your sensibility gown. And pace out the

dimensions of your distracted state. It’s sliding walls enable

vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea

in the morning and return to the forest in the evening. But you only

wanted to mate in it, and then abandon your eggs to their own devices.

You can live in my writing. I built my nest in the forest of thorns. I

am like the inexhaustible video tape collection of Bob Monkhouse - but

you have no VCR player. I’m an invisible worm, frying tonight! I have

the ability to dislocate my jaw when confronted by the intolerable. I am

the fixed grin of either/or. Or both. Or neither. Or whatever. No, wait!

I am preoccupied with the idea of immersing myself in error - of causing

wrong thinking to vibrate like music. I don’t find any desire within

myself to do or say the right thing! I won’t fall in line because I

can’t fall in line. I won’t march in step because I can’t march in step.

And another thing. I carry failure around, I don’t mean occasional

failures. My whole life’s a wreck. Then, I can do business with knaves

and varlets - we share the same affliction. We belong to what is

twisted - we are all eaten up with this, I gesture encompass- ingly, our

common fate. I too am a charlatan. This is all bluff. It’s nothing, I’ve

got nothing. Or reply: raise, call or fold.

But even if we can’t come to an understanding, we’re playing the same

hand, we sit across from one another at the same table - it’s just cards

for money. Our self-hatred and disgust marks the beginning and the end

of the circuit of what we take to be self - the minutes and the hours in

a windowless room lurch compulsively towards dawn. The gambler, the

condemned, the saint, and the confidence man. I’m not even joking!

The work begins from the position of solidaritylessness, from the

standpoint of the irredeemable, for those who can’t get a defence

lawyer, and for those who, if represented, could only ever be mobilised

against - those whose lives could never matter. I am interspersing

layers of callous humour and morbid sentimentality -1 am the laminator.

The writing is the path for the white surplus, the unassimilated,

written as a return to communism. All roles may be portrayed except the

role of the white surplus, and that must be immanentised as the return

from the cosmic whorl of its negativity. This time, I am joking!

No, I’m sentimentalising! The terms are unfamiliar to me, but we had

terms similar to these, and drawn from the same reservoir always the

same meaning, and sometimes different words. This is about something

slag, something dredged, something incel, something skank, something

undeserving, something toxic, something dog rough, something chav,

something malignant, something f-ball lad, something minging, fire left

engine! , something ill, something flake, something sket, something

excluded, something fallen, something recidivist, something sick, fire

right engine! , something cuck, something derelict, something stupid

like I love you. This, the writing of the alchemical process. This, the

writing of empathy. Or, no, it is the writing about that writing. This

is the writing about the writing, I have been there , and I am here for

you . It is about that writing without in any way being, despite

appearances, that writing. I am against war, but I am cruel.

It engages at some level with the work of neo-reaction as I imagine it,

and at the level of the sort of feelings, as I imagine them, felt by

those attracted into the neo-reactionary basin. I am not interested in

anti-fascism but I am interested in not-fascism. Let us agree then, that

we approach the bower as we now do because of neo-reaction, it has

framed our arrival, it has instigated a transfer in ornamentation as

signifier set and affect attractor basin. We cannot function now as we

did before it - a one way gate has opened for us, and it leads into the

state of no going back .

I am making a work of neo-reaction available in the interest of

communism. I have no interest in communism, I do not like the communists

although some of the disdainful and haughty conservative ones, like

Visconti, are alright. I do not like the history of the communists,

their moral weakness, their gullibility before human nature, their

realisation sickness, and I feel no sympathy with any of their utopian,

programmatic or post-programmatic tendencies - although I have a soft

spot for the individualists who imagine their heretical projections are

programmatic, although again these become fewer as the milieu swerves

left and away from the total critique of Totality.

Although there is affection and tenderness, and other pleasant things, I

am, nonetheless, fundamentally incompatible with communism - always,

always not for me . Maybe in another life. Maybe for another soul. Let

them eat cake. Let them live well. Bless them. But not for me. And so, I

sacrifice, I am a martyr to my bunions, or rather I present here, a

unique set of constituted objects to communism’s work of metabolisation.

I am fated to commit to that to which I do not belong. So, I am not

looking for reciprocity. You could say I am whatever tries to find a

home in separation.

My troubles have increased in line with the absence of technique in the

writing. I am degenerating. I am ratcheted. I am entropised. The

absolute limit encountered in my weariness and my distraction only

further distorts the content into an aggregation of half ideas,

observations and non-opinions that must by force of circumstance appear

without redrafting or editing. Where I am original, I am not right;

where I am right, I am not original.

My device is very simple: i. I inscribe a line drawn from inspiration ,

perhaps stolen from Genet or Lucier, and set it within a given frame;

ii. I distress the line, alter it, decompose it, perhaps erase it; iii.

I inscribe another line, drawn from the distress of the first, and

subject it to the same process, then I draw further line, and then

another and on and on. My purpose is to encounter in the writing what I

have not encountered before. I write the same thing over and over and

watch for something else to emerge from the phasing. I am looking out

for the rare stray idea. I like what is stray, and what has gone astray,

but not because I feel pity for it. I like the strength of what is

stray, how it finds another means to survive.

So, I have written what I have written, and it is bad. But it also makes

no difference, and even if it were good, it would change nothing. All

this is irrelevant and we can tolerate it - there’s nothing but

lamellate antennae after all. There is nothing but lamellate antennae,

and the plume of the life-world. There is nothing to be learnt from what

I have done or how I have lived. There are no lessons today, and no

politics, and no theory. Nothing to be quoted, nothing to be remembered.

Nothing to push back against. Nothing to be referenced. It’s just a

record of the same lines repeating and becoming a filter for detecting

traces of random particles.

You cannot get from this to where you want to go; what this is is not on

your way . You cannot, from this, build the structure you anticipate;

what this is is not on solid ground. It is neither literature nor art.

Although it is fiction, it is conceited . Maybe it’s hypnotic? There is

only what you might make out as a real time decomposition in process -

my own private decasia. At most then, intensified decay perhaps, the

path of a decay found in loss. It is another last. A last amongst the

rest, and fixed for all time: I was as marvellously surprised as on the

day on which I read for the first time, in one of Maspero's books, that

we had an exact list of the sportsmen whom Assurbanipal used to invite

to his hunts, a thousand years before the Birth of Christ.

I do not record what I really think, I think nothing. I gave up on

thinking, let others think, but the writing lets the content find its

own level, like consciousness vaporising into an ornamented plume of

free association, like an incontinent gushing over the therapy couch. I

suppose I am trying to perform how I try and break out of single a

descriptor model, and how to fracture totalising explanations for the

world - it is not necessary that I adhere to the right ideas; many and

diverse thoughts come and go, but never enough and I look to open the

way for more. And just as we’re beginning to really get somewhere, and

in conformity to how the effect engages towards the session end. The

point before the end, yeah, before the part where self-knowledge gets

interrupted, and takes up the preparatory work, for next time , and in

anticipation of that moment of recapitulation, previously in in

treatment. The thread must be lost - that is the structure. What was I

saying again? Where were we up to?

Maybe you will find something to be against in it, as an alibi. I know

you prefer not to confront what really organises you, what really sets

you in motion - it is your historic form, the project of your self, to

perfect your denunciation, to sharpen your complicities, to find

employment in the meme swarms. You like acting out, the network enables

you. But the writing here is un-likeable, and cannot be mobilised, it is

drawn on, and dragged out, without even that minimal peer review of the

earlier days - everything here arrives uncooked and collapsed in the

middle; it records what it is to address the social from the position of

the a-social.

I read somewhere that the national character of the British, as the

first population to endure the war of enclosure compounded by the war of

proletarianisation, resembles that of the long habituated victim of

domestic violence. The culturally sensitised appreciation of comedic

absurdity and nonsense, its cults of pets and underdogs, the national

hobbies of sullen queuing, passive aggression, narrow horizons, mustn’t

grumble and the overriding desire to change the subject , thus its

infinite variety of emotional disordering, are all typically symptomatic

of the victim of coercive control.

It is in this sense that what is presented here should be read as the

product of a broken soul. It is what is written after anger, after

rebellion, after the struggle to escape, are exhausted. It is the sound

the abused child makes as an adult. The broken soul is recognised by its

compulsive rituals and by its fixations but it also has a

double-jointed, egg-oriented jaw(n) dislocating, capacity to engage and

endure intolerable circumstances as its own - it has the ability to make

out an almost infinite regress within the otherwise as its alternative

response to whatever is presented to it - or, whenever it’s not

flinching, it can throw its voice onto any object. I sank downward,

inward. Since then, I have found a vanishing point for empathy in all

things. I am concerned with the convergence of perspective on a point

and its opening out, aftenvards . Through the narrowest of hatches, I

crawl out into the most enormous of spaces.

The influence of both early and late Beckett, and also of Proust is

obvious, and in many places it goes beyond influence and lapses

unforgivably into cheap pastiche. Poverty of means have forced me more

than once into the old fall back upon parable. I understand the parable

has no content as such but serves as a frame through which the teacher

may draw meanings for his students; every teacher draws another meaning

but always through the same frame. And the frame is constructed to

prevent canonical readings.

The prism quality of the parable refracts not just the character of the

teacher but his relationship with his students; in a similar way, our

eating habits express a relational context more than our food

preferences - a child will eat that food at another’s house which it has

refused at home. The parable does not make truth palatable, as in fable,

but provides stimulus and materials for wandering reflections upon

truth.

The writing as descent from NRx. The form I preceded. I am a tremulous

being. NRx as the historical point of bad entry - the mistimed negation.

The thumb print on my manuscript. I have excavated something, and

retrieved it. I have brought it to the surface. To be honest, I feel

torment, although that is too strong a word for it, but it is hard to

talk about. The past. A tangle of impulses and attacks of vertigo,

knotting, growing, and becoming impenetrable. I see what is dead as if

scrawled in terrible words on a museum wall. It is the exhibit.

Something like poison spreads through me. I never vibrated, but have

shaken, I have shook, I have shaken. I am beat-the-pad, white-face,

funk-the-ditch, shit arse. Through me, it seems, the fen skies of the

enormous space, the attic nights, as through no other. I am like an

intonation: cherry on the trifle as the cherry on the trifle as the

cherry on the triangle.

Listen to your heart, another listens to it too. I have chanted. I am

exhausted. I have worn the kidskin tunic. I am disported before the

bower. I have transferred ornaments from my plumage to the writing. I

have hollowed a basin of permission whose centre we might say is

everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And you know how shallow

it goes. I am dew flirt, quick scut, grass biter. But I am hidden but

exposed, in the last reel. And you are safe as long as I am living, you

know you are unsafe as long as I am out here, and I am hiding like a

pikestaff. You know as long as I am living, I am carving: not burrow but

basin, not beaker but broken. You can come very near to it, even now -

only, flatten your body to the basin. A threshing passes across the

surface. It is not too unhoming in the enormous space.

Part I: I am not Chuang

Dear Nick,

Trump was unthinkable, Brexit was unthinkable, the pandemic hard reboot

of global capitalism was unthinkable, and actually - though

esoterically - it was the same unthinkable.

https://twitter.com/uf_blog/status/1247233227745607 6gi?s=2i

The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring

about every possible effect, including (consequently) those which one

had believed to be most nearly impossible, naturally slow at times, is

rendered slower still by our impatience (which in seeking to accelerate

only obstructs it) and by our very existence, and comes to fruition only

when we have ceased to desire it—have ceased, possibly, to live.

Within a Budding Grove

The persistent hold of the thought of the unthinkable over patterns in

thinking has a power to fascinate all its own - if the unthinkable is

one thing, then the compulsive thought of the unthinkable, as it moves

across thinking, is another. There was always a distinct declarative and

exemplifying tendency in thinking as it refers to something sinewy,

riotous, immediate, which it points to as the this , which it selects as

the this , as in, this is what triumphs over thinking/. Thinking wants

to point what is not thinking and say, this is better than th inking. It

is a tendency that is particularly pronounced where the thought of

unthought is constrained to move archaically, as the mantic proclamation

of unprecedented events, but then even this claudication-type effect

within the proclivity for thinking against thinking is less fascinating

than the persistence of the pervasive hold of the thought of the

unprecedented event itself.

Where the unprecedented event overlays, and is overlain by, the

unthinkable event, its resultant form becomes eminently theological, and

so determinate of the four stations in prophecy: whatever is unthinkable

is an event; whatever is an event is proclaimed; whatever is proclaimed

is authored; whatever is authored is distributed; whatever is

distributed is context compliant.

The decisive component of futurist thinking, it cannot operate without

this, is a structural reliance upon a repertoire of archaisms:

aesthetic; vengeful; incantatory. The more future-oriented the pattern

of thinking, the more reliant it becomes on occult references. All

futurisms begin with their recovery from having been lost for words,

lost for reference. The subsequent metabolising process set in motion

from this initial state of shock armours itself in proclamatory

affirmations.

The wish-fulfilment component that is inseparable from futurism remains

at the level of incantatory magic and at the level of its hard

programming it is no more sophisticated than that of an infant’s fort-

da game where the traumatised subject position compensates for its lack

of agency through the celebratory evocation of determinant,

supra-subjective powers of recuperation.

As a variation upon Kierkegaard’s whip, the singularity is invoked, and

proclaimed, by those who do not have the power either to urge the horses

of the apocalypse on, or put off their arrival - the greater the power

summoned, the less responsive it is to summoning. Those incapable of

escape routinely discover weak spots in the perimeter fence. In this

sense, let’s say, accelerationism, as a subset of mille- narianism, is a

conjuring of power by what has first declared itself powerless.

Or rather, in this sense, and because futurist currency is constrained

to survive under present conditions, millenarianism is a stratagem of

the weak to make a living from selling messages of borrowed strength in

a market where messages of ordinary frailty have negative value: as

forbidden to one, so abolished for all.

If the incredible shrinking man is trapped, and his cry for help cannot

be heard, if he starts awake beneath the imminent approach of fanged

forces greater than his capacity to master them, then at least he may

summon the thought of vengeance, and to conjure in his prayers,

supplications, and plaints, another web, a vast unimaginably cruel

ultra-web, in which, at a higher level, all things are held

inextricably, buzzing feebly, beneath the golem of his projected

chagrin: It's rather like the perforated sheet music of a player-piano,

or a computer punch tape. Knock out one line with an X-ray beam, lose a

characteristic, change the score.

But every trapped thing, incredible and shrinking or not, is forced, as

the price of its release, to let go of something it had hoped to bring

through with it to the other side. As futurists are thrown forward by

cumulative events into the new normal, losing their priest-caste status,

they are triggered into the third position of nostalgic pastoral- ism,

and essentialist certainties: in some ways, they see time. The older the

surrounding environment, the more sluggish its metabolism. That which

may occur naturally in weeks, is achieved in a couple of hours under vi

varium conditions.

And certain crawling animals, and also serpents, have the wherewithal to

purchase their survival by releasing their tail into the jaws of

predators already fixed upon it, such creatures will later grow another

tail from the coppiced stump - the ouroboros also severs its tale, but

into its own mouth. Who hasn’t, in fleeing a chasing pack of enemies,

attempted to distract them by throwing into the air a pocketful of

jangling change. Such is the song of surface tension.

The imminence of the singularity as it is proclaimed by the mille-

narian is always less compelling as an event than the aesthetic of the

pamphlet in which the news is distributed - it is the pamphlet and not

the event that circulates through the milieu. In this sense, excitation

is metabolised as the message of the thing, and not as the thing itself.

In this sense, the vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it

resonates, so if we could radiate the entire living organism with a low

field at a specific frequency it would act selectively only on the

targeted chromosomes.

In this sense, the category of the aesthetic indicates nothing but the

interregnum of consciousness (whether by the mechanics of shock,

suggestion or seduction). In this sense, at the level of incanta- tory

aesthetics, at the level of the pantheistic internet of things, this

ultimate medium for gleeful and celebratory vengeance where all fall

upon all, where there is nothing but the gotcha of the other as

inconsistent hypocrite, where exchange value is driven to self-harm at

the suggestion of equivalence, in this sense, in the processing of

affects as brute quantities, in the real mobilisation that actualises

present conditions, accelerationism is always fascistic.

For the accelerationist, the message of unfettered productive use,

summoned as a message of inexorability, acts as an interchangeable

placeholder for the function of the Great Leader within the mechanism of

messianic desire. Such is the song of on-time trains.

And in this sense, the fetishisation of the condition in which the

thinkable is suspended, where there is misdirection, where the protocol

is written for ritualised applause, so as not to interrupt the rolling

out and implementation of new times, new relations, never going back to

before, this compulsive fixation upon the unprecedented appearance of

the unthinkable turns out to be, is nothing more than, base piety after

all piety before the image of the monstrous and undetermined but also

where such piety is all too conditioned by the already given, and the

formally, if invertedly, moralistic.

In that sense, this is not a surprise, we already knew that there is

nothing new under the sun, and the old one, the one who died from angry

sickness, has already shown how monsters, and gods, are not

unprecedented at all, and still less are they unthinkable.

In that sense, the single decisive condition for the distribution of

novel forms is that they should operate in the field beyond the sum of

their parts, which is to say they are not caused as such, which is to

say they do not belong to an already familiar franchise but must be made

to appear at the beginning of the next sequence of MAKE IT NEW. The

monster is original or it is not monstrous enough, it is merely banal.

At one level, the unthinkable is unthinkable, at least in the sense that

the unthinkable is untenable. In practical appearance, there is no

monster that is not an assemblage of pre-existing body parts. In that

sense, the monster is a message which is also a lesson in how to read

it.

In that sense, the monster is like a bad messiah, and embodies two

distinct orders of message: firstly, it materialises the incontestable

announcement of its own arrival to the world; secondly, it carries the

burden of an unclear instruction on how such monstrosity should be read.

It is the doubling of its message that distorts the monster’s form, and

causes it to become, monstrous... the monster retains possession of its

first message, merely lending it to the prophets, but the second, by its

very function, must circulate in the public domain as a metastasis of

readings. The most conflicted of texts cannot assume redundancy and must

explain the joke even in its telling. In this sense, the monstrous is

always novel but never fresh .

And at that level, if it is acceptable to attempt to think what is new,

or what at least has not happened before, then the unthinkably monstrous

becomes thinkable at this level of its more or less unique combination

of elements, or in this sense by its formation from previously

unexpectedly converging forces.

The monster is either a product of combining elements that were not

previously combined, or the association, or confluence, or alliance, of

the same conditions, objects and forces but within new configurations.

Or, again, it results from the releasing of that which once had been

bound up.

The monster at this level is either one product or another in this

sense, but it is a product; the monster as what is unthinkable is a

product in that sense, sold as such, at that level, but then, this is

true also for the thinkable.

It’s always the same new thing, the same catastrophic threat, and later,

the same relative diminution as another new thing, bearing its

catastrophic threat, rides into town. And it’s always the same because

it is serving a purpose within the apparatus of the present - futurist

objects have no value outside of the present, constrained as they are to

appear as objects from the future.

And so the monstrous collapse of things is equally exaggerated. Complex

objects are built from simple parts, and by process of decomposition and

decommission, they are de-emerged back to an aggregate of components.

The Ancien Regime was not decapitated but bypassed in favour of more

energised, if not actually more direct, value generating systems - the

category of the Ancien has always functioned within social systems, and

will still be reproduced as a motif for decrepit absolutist

powerlessness. The Ancien Regime was never ancien , and it is no longer

a regime, but it persists both through its formative components since

captured by later systems (the successive avatars of the Okhrana have

appeared successfully embedded within a succession of seeming separate

regimes) and as a totality, or the representation of a totality, that is

employed as a unit of such within cultural, historical, political and

legal systems.

Even so, monsters, or the news of monsters, continues, and the frequency

of their appearing at the threshold of the thinkable is either

increasing or the Totality’s use and metabolisation of such messages has

recently changed, or both. The series of events beginning with 1989 and

Russia’s war in Afghanistan, the digitisation of finance capital, series

of military interventions, the intractable hostilities of others, the

renewed strategic use of neo-terrorism, ecological catastrophe and

social instability, have all served to intensify the production of

messages concerning anomalous threats, which as they are circulated,

seem to serve to artificially stimulate further excrescences of

productivity.

Without exception the organisms we've irradiated have entered a final

phase of totally disorganised growth, producing dozens of specialised

sensory organs whose function we can't even guess. The results are

catastrophic.

Some of these seeming unprecedented events are deliberately manufactured

and released by the state, evidently signalling that the moment when it

genuinely feared uncontrolled chain reactions has long since passed,

today it is more a case of the greater the frequency of unintended

consequences the better. Nothing interests the state less today than the

bismarckian project of ensuring the reproduction of the proletariat as

the foundation stone in the phase of real domination.

On the other hand, another set of unthinkables are profoundly

unpredicted, even if they are also quickly harnessed up to free liquid

capitals. The responsiveness of the state to both categories, its turn

around between problem recognition and boots on the ground, is both

speeding up and increasingly efficient, and through such real time

modelling in contact tracing, the state will soon reach pre-cog levels

for intervention - emergency services will arrive in time to prevent the

emergency.

Only two organs are really affected and injured by the plague, the brain

and the lungs, and both are directly dependent upon the consciousness

and the will.

And perhaps this increased capacity to capture and use misfortune

indicates the ideological gain which is to be extracted from the

systemwide acceleration in the rate of messages beginning, Behold. The

heralded unthinkable, the thus spake, mic-dropping, what fresh hell is

this, quality of the state’s unending sequence of catastrophes seemingly

specially designed to both paralyse critical awareness and circulate

virally as digital messages, is always eminently invest- able: whatever

perturbs the apparatus draws state intervention, and wherever the state

intervenes, contracts are outsourced. After all, what is the NHS but a

giant money laundering racket funnelling tax revenues into contracted

shell companies?

The development of the modern state has now successfully passed through

three distinct phases: i. from the creation and extension of stability

across its entire domain; ii. to the maintenance of stability at home

and the cultivation of instability abroad; iii. to the monopoly

ownership and intensification of every instability within its own

borders, as it latest stage. It is unlikely that this is the last

iteration, but what might come next, de-networking, self-autonomis- ing,

uncontrolled fractal mechanisms of control, autonomous zones and

neo-city states with Islamic State as its basic blue print, for the

moment exceeds description.

The expulsion of labour from production has necessitated a

transformation in the character of state control over populations; where

stability was previously a precondition for the social reproduction of

the workforce, fissile instability and generalised affective agitation

within national populations is now the primary renewable energy source.

The predominant technique for the contemporary state’s intervention

within its subject populations involves a return to primitive

accumulation at a higher level (Virilio’s endocolonisa- tion and Fanon’s

observation on the re-importation of colonial policing techniques), and

the transformation of the social fabric into a Candide-like picaresque,

or whirlwind narrative, of staged data- mineable catastrophes and

misfortunes touching ground on the principle: the disaster is already

here, how can we make money? If we are now living through a significant

change, then it should be characterised as a shift in state function

from expansive repression to the exploitation of decomposition ( just as

landfill generated methane becomes another available power resource).

What does it mean then to filter our observations upon the monstrously

unthinkable through the rule: men resemble their times more than their

fathers ? Immediately, it becomes a mantic game and we start turning

over the cards: ah yes, the unthinkable is without a father; ah yes, the

times demand that men resemble them and not their fathers, so either the

men or the times are unthinkable; ah yes, the times are in revolt

against the men who once were in revolt against their fathers; ah yes,

the times are father to the men and the men are children of the times.

But then, all stratagems must pall.

There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be

touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, whom life and death

are equally jests, there are matters of wh ich no jest can be made.

But the timeliness of the contemporary storm of unthinkable events is

precisely its most compelling feature - everything gone wrong seems

orchestrated, because everything communicated as a message is

orchestrated.

All these flagged-up catastrophes are arriving, wave after wave, as if

they had been summoned, as if they were symptoms of something moving in

the deep. They are portents, signs, auguries, omens and we can read

them, they are cryptic but we can read them, they are unthinkable but we

can think them - such is the song of precognition. But even so, the

difficulty presented in Debord’s little detourn- ment is that of the

value placed on relatedness as it is confronted by the value placed on

resemblance .

Of course, men never resembled their fathers, they start awake in

relation to, in contradiction of, the patriarch - as Bazarov does to the

Narodniks.

Relatedness implies contradiction, components of a whole held together

by a constantly ratcheting of tensions. Resemblance is another manner of

connectedness implying, as in Debord’s formulation, belonging.

Men belong to their times, more than to their fathers. Family

resemblance between particulars is situated at the level of their shared

historical conditions, and resemblances are always as affirma- tory as

they are inadvertent.

When non-relatedness is assigned to events via the category of the

unprecedented-unthinkable, what is being represented are objects that

cannot be contradicted. If the unthinkable is always unprecedented, then

it is also familiar, in the sense that it resembles the other

unthinkable events which, taken together, communicate a message about

something deep moving through the depths.

At the level of the narrative of unthinkable events, and its strategic

prevention of identifications, we come-to in a world that is entirely

verfremdungseffekt, a world system in which consciousness is perpetually

interrupted.

But is the suspension of the category of the thinkable achieved by the

work of the unthinkable, or a product of the strategic conversion of the

unthinkable into a set of messages about inevitable social modification?

Is it thinking itself, the ownership of thinking by a particular set of

compelling thoughts, that seeks to disrupt and degrade thinking? As a

means for making out the answer, we should ask another question: what

does it mean to filter our observations through a game of cards, say gin

rummy?

The short answer, after much editing, is not much, but there might still

be enough invested in the ruse to pursue it. Then, fatally, inevitably,

the unthinkable’s hand, as the ur-position of the unlucky streak, as the

bad seat at the card table, is never simply dealt but must comprise only

the deadwood that it has drawn compulsively, one card after another,

from the sortes-stockpile that is all thinkable the unthinkable is a

mantic read-em-and-weep of bad double-blind selection.

On the other hand, the thinkable plays by building the melds that

comprise its hand, and the thinkable itself is nothing but capricious

melds, from its combination of the dealt and its guided by chance

selections from the discard pile - the lucky streak is nothing but a

sequence of chosen interventions powered by guided chance. What is the

rate of infection? What is the chance of your survival: now, between

uninfected and infected; now, between infected and admit ted; now,

between admitted and intubated; now, between intubated and

refrigeration?

The set valued as unthinkable, in play, is unthinkable. The set valued

as thinkable, in play, is thinkable. But the unthinkable as a set is

drawn in relation to the set of what is thinkable. But the thinkable

must draw at least one card from the unthinkable, that is if it desires

to exceed tautology. But the system by which the unthinkable and the

thinkable are brought into relation, is neither entirely opaque nor ever

quite transparent.

Every reticulated system, includingthat which organises the relation

between thinking/unthinking, draws its own outline around a set of

integrated sub-systems, the viability of which will be expressed by the

integrity of the outline. Both the thinkable and the unthinkable become

distinct as moments, instances, relations, and as subsystems, of and

within the thinkable/unthinkable system, which itself cannot be either

entirely thought nor ever quite unthought.

Just as the processes working through the thinkable are always

contaminated by particles of delirium, so the unthinkable never wholly

rids itself of that which it relinquishes. The R rate of thinking is not

quite warm enough, and the unthinking R never falls to absolute zero.

The symptoms of a virus are the attempts of the body to deal with a

virus attack. By their symptoms you shall know them, and even a totally

unknown virus would yield considerable data by its symptoms. On the

other hand, if a virus produces no symptoms then we have no way of

knowing that it exists... no way of knowing that it is a virus because

it is the human virus. After many tho usan ds of years of more or less

benign coexisten ce, it is now once again on the verge of malignant

mutation.

My point is very simple. The whole human position is no longer tenable.

The variety of reticular subsystem-states supported within the

thinking/unthinking apparatus is in the end of less significance in

generating what is thinkable/unthinkable than are the pressures and

unpressures of that in the world which cannot be included as either not

thinking or not unthinking but which nonetheless bring to bear on

thinking/unthinking the pressures and unpressures that have nothing to

do with either thinking or unthinking but, again but, which both

constrain and release both of them.

As a general guide, those pressures and unpressures which produce

thinking and unthinking, releasing and capturing the breaks and the

sequences by which distinctions, outlines, interior states, become

discernible, cannot be either thought or unthought, or even either not

thought or not unthought.

As a general guide, those pressures and unpressures that become

available as objects for either thought or unthought are no longer

productive of thoughts nor of unthoughts. On the contrary, they become

the products of thinking activity, and of unthinking activity. They

become recursively distinct as subsystems (all objects available to

thinking/unthinking) of the subsystems (the depreciating apparatus of

thinking/unthinking).

Even so, as a general guide: 1. that which is productive of

thinking/unthinking is neither a thinkable nor an unthinkable object; 2.

That which is produced by thinking is one with thinking - the object of

thinking; 3. That which is produced by unthinking is one with

unthinking - the object of unthinking; 4. That which appears at the

threshold between the thinkable/unthinkable is both thinkable and

unthinkable.

The unthinkable event of the Coronavirus has an apparitional quality,

its emergence and perturbation of the life-world sets in motion both

thinking and unthinking, nightmares and flights of fancy, and let’s say,

both utopias and dyschronias.

Over a period of generations the virus established a benign symbiosis

with the host. It was a mutating virus, a color virus, as if the colors

themselves were possessed of a purposeful and sinister life. Something

altered the relation between host and virus and in revenge, the virus

transposed the functions of the sexual and fear centres in the brain so

that the virus converted fear of virus into sexual frenzy wh i lst the

virus information itself was genetically con veyed through sexual

contact.

But as an apparition, a spectral agency, which sets the thresholds upon,

that scatters the seeds within, that tills the medium of, whatever it is

that functions as the psychic apparatus, the virus is not in itself

available as an object for the operations of that apparatus. The virus

and the measures against it fuse together and become a single operation,

moving jointly through the world, in relation to it, as they also move

in relation to each other.

It, or rather the dyadic mechanism generated from the viral- measures

and the institutionalised counter-measures, the viral

anti-counter-measures and the institutional

antiviral-anti-countermeasures, the viral-un-measures and the

institutional un-viral- counter-measures, which constitute the whole…

... The totality that acts as, is derived from, virus-plus-institution,

behaves towards mind and anti-mind, to mindfulness and mindlessness, to

being-minded-to and not-being-minded-to, as if it had gained, or was

awarded, the status of divine instrument of some or other sorting

mechanism…

... As some or other godlike meddler, and becoming some or other, or a

sort of, shall we say, factotum-like psychopomp, and thus in donning the

PPE of shepherd of epiphenomena…

... Or, again, perhaps, this Covid-19 and shall we say, its discontents,

emerging representation, emerging sentient, emerging bureaucratic, will

come to perform that stochastic practice by which is distributed an

eleventh commandment for outlining the segmentation of a post-labour

domesticated behavioural repertoire by which the era of neo-troglodytism

will become distinct. That is to say, virus and state are in alliance;

virus and state are one hand .

Behold, the dawning of a veiled epoch that will breathe-in a

disproportion of its own respiratory-gastric exhalations; behold, by

process of accelerated immanence, Freud’s aversion-rationale for the

colorectal as instrumentalising event of upright posture only now

achieves transference by startle reaction, by slight return, to

reinvestment within the breath-hole, the ante-nasal-oesophageal

diverticulum as part-object border post, and thus to full anaclitic

armouring of the upper GI.

The viral adoption of figleaves for the face has inaugurated a new order

of modesty, and for not dissimilar reasons to every other historical

recourse to the surplus-necessity for head scarves, veils, and facial

coverings. Enclosure of the face by state decreed dompte-regard is only

ever enforced during emergency repressive re-structurings of social

interaction. State expropriation of facial content, seemingly runs

counter to its tendency towards biometric and face recognition

technologies, but in practice they are complimentary.

Whilst otherwise sequestered individual identities are rendered ever

more available for quantification and analysis, and the intimate self is

only revealed via the filters of proprietorial communications

technology, the function of the mask at an interpersonal level is

equivalent to the enclosure of common land in the Seventeenth Century.

The face, which we understand implicitly as the limit of the self and

its expressive capacity, is now assimilated as an alienated appendage

into the productive apparatus.

If machines have outstripped thinking, they have yet to perfect facial

expression as a means to access the symbolic register, this barrier will

soon also be torn down. The face has, in effect, become what the arm

once was in earlier phases of production, the primary limb of labour. If

you want a picture of the future, imagine an affect engine and the

speeding up of its valvular masking/unmasking of a human face – forever.

Historically, ritualised facial covering has always been imposed as an

emergency adaptation during crises and which subsequently sticks around

for decades, if not for centuries. As a conspicuous signal of virtue, it

both operates on behalf of the state against others who must look at it

whilst not knowing its purpose, whilst also hiding the privatised

individual’s own true anti-social purpose which it shares with nobody

but the algorithmic mechanism tracking its progress.

And yet. Another movement in the movement. We end up wearing the

required masks at work and I admire everyone’s eyes and learn, as

millworkers once read each others’ lips, how to read their masked- off

expressions. And yet. If compliance with face covering measures spreads

through shame-dependent, virtue signalling, then individual reluctance

to relinquish the facemask following the all clear will be driven by

anxieties associated with the face as noumenal outcrop.

In part these anxieties are derived from voluptuary-modesty impulses, in

part they are driven by basic outline-proprietorial hard- programming,

and in part, as always, by the will to righteousness, the will to

mobilising in the spirit of what has just passed. Whoever is not wearing

the mask as sign, as immunity passport, as watchword, whoever shows

their face, is a stranger.

It is a convention that masks reflect more than they conceal, but what

they record is always the same: individual micro-fascisms integrated

into the suspended step of infrastructural re-configuration.

For this reason, it is not an insult to perceive the social adoption of

facial coverings as fascism, that is as the adapted habitus of

circulating life units within reconfigured emergency geographies, as the

tolerance of such fascisms is both inevitable and irresistible where the

labour process itself is not overthrown - if public transport must begin

again, and public transport is nothing but labour transport, then the

fascism of masks will follow.

But again, the face mask as a perfection of virtue signalling and

identity indicates an early step towards other re-intensifications of

viral receptive space, and to the re-programming of virally saturated

environmental conditions. The work of the state-capital apparatus is

wholly directed to the project of increasing the receptivity rate of its

territory to viral messaging without, at the same time, permitting the

flooding of its subsystems by the same messages. It desires that you, as

a mass individual, are unsettled but not panicked, receptive but not

passive, moving but not free moving.

The morality conveyed by the dictum, ‘anyone can spread it’ draws a veil

over the machinic apparatus of circulation. The energy of Coronavirus,

like that of all plagues, first discharged into the community of capital

at a locus for super-intensified accumulation and exchange of its raw

components (a warehouse, a market, a bio-lab); plagues are not

transmitted through human interaction, but by the environmental

mechanism for circulating embodiments of labour power, along trade

routes and into cities.

There is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreign n ess.

It lies perhaps in the very con cept of wrong, wh ich is archaically

identical with the non us, the alien. A polluting person is always

wrong, as Mary Douglas has observed. The inverse is also true: a person

judged to be wrong is regarded as, at least potentially, a source of

pollution.

AIDS as Metaphor

Viral pandemics are a product of malignant geographies and environmental

transgressions, they are not a pathology of intersubjectivity - and

furthermore, the state ‘combats’them environmentally, geographically, by

its haussmannising reconfigurations of the same space, utilising

counter-malignancies (the prevention of intimacy) and

counter-transgressions (isolation, quarantine). The war against disease

is also an auctioning off of common space. Intensifying border checks to

commercial and institutionalised spaces increases the receptivity to

messages of control within the human flow.

There is no struggle, no war, against disease outside of state-space

where plague-scale pathologies are the product, and expression, of high

rate/full amplitude transmissions of information that are both

self-saturated and universally diffused. Plagues and information

resemble each other as correlates of depths moving in something deep.

The plague form exists nowhere but in circumstances of highly

concentrated populations, which exist nowhere but as organised entities

of the territory of the capital-state assemblage.

The plague-state of viruses resembles capital because capital behaves

virally within social relations - as an organising/reductive principle

of that which struggles against it.

On the other hand, unlike all other organisations of human community

which are oriented towards death, capitalism is a life support system -

it is a virus which spreads by increasing the reproduction of its host.

Biological viruses, if they survive long enough, must learn from

capital’s organisation of space and time and become more virulent but

less deadly - the now infamous exterior spike-like peplomers covering

the Covid capsid are transformed into hooks for use-values, and for

further expansion and intensification of production around the viral

event.

For the state, the ideal state consists of host and virus in steady

state: virus as governor of negative feedback; host as medium and raw

material for viral messages. If the current political investment in face

masks as a figleaf for business as usual, an institutionalised

observance that should be sufficient to by-pass any trend amongst the

infected towards litigation whilst maintaining the pressure on the

masses to herd together, and which drives the movement towards the

return to productivity of the host under the tutelage of the virus (work

itself will be continued in the condition of les yeux sans visage ),

then the other, corporeal, locus for class-contestation erupts around

competing ontologies of the hand: hands are now constrained to appear as

both makers and products of viral saturated space.

Hand washing implicates a register of rituals intuitively separate from

mask wearing, not least because whilst the face mask may be imposed by

law and policed by some or other Gasht-e Ershad, hand washing retains a

high subjective, and inter-subjective, component that resists

surveillance.

The state’s response to the pandemic passed through two distinct stages:

that of the glove and that of the mask. The phase of the glove was

organised in accordance with the policy of social distancing - dispersed

and socially quarantined bodies are at risk from infected surfaces, of

passing sequentially across shared places, and not from inhaling

airborne particles carried by the breath of absent others.

But the movement of capital is inseparable from its architectural

intensification of populations by which it induces oceanic ebbs and

flows in crowds, setting off chain reactions in the city-scale

convergence, agitation and swirling murmuration of bodies. Economy is

nothing but a function of the critical massing in crowds of individual

beings organised within the same breath space - hence, phase-mask. It is

not a coincidence that scientific arguments for face-masks are advanced

at precisely the moment we must emerge from lockdown and go back to

work, when previously the same science emphasised social distance and

hand hygiene - abstraction emerges from a very specific density of

population. Nor is it a coincidence that the once exigent disciplinary

practice of maintaining social distance is itself no longer maintained

and collapses from two to one metre - the half-life of quarantine is

three months. Opposition to capital space, by extension of the logic,

necessitates a dispersal of bodies below that threshold population

density requisite to sustain and expand production.

Where the face mask instigates fascistic representations of self-

interest conflated with state mediated conceptions of uniformity as

solidarity, hand washing releases endless re-considerations of touching

and involvement that are a consequence of distance and separation. It is

not gratuitous to note that the bitterest of industrial disputes often

focus on securing payment for non-productive work-located activities

such as washing up time... whoever has washed is not working.

The significance to consciousness of ritual cleansing is quite distinct

from, and moving in the opposite direction to, the suppressive veiling

implied by ritualised clothing and mouth covering. The social worth of

hand washing is always unproven, and unprovable - the cause of what

doesn’t happen cannot be proved but the successful proliferation of face

masks proceeds exponentially as it is correlated to seemingly successful

exits from lock down ... the face-mask becomes the flag of cultures

emerging from crisis and as a synecdoche of such grotesque hatchings out

is elevated, by association, to its cause.

The washed form becomes immediately available to both the washed

community and the unwashed community, it is both vulnerable and

trusting, it does not defend itself but opens its own outline to

communion - it is only now that we marvel at the courage of those

healers who once reached out in leper colonies.

The washed hand lets go not only of the viral load and by implication

the profane, contaminated world that is expressed as plague, but extends

away from, avoiding returning to, the threatening surfaces (the handles,

buttons, levers, switches) of the recontaminating workstation. The

washed hand does not work.

But the ambivalence, the twin drives, expressed by the washed hand also

states: only the washed hand may work. Or rather, there is a residual

desire for dirtying one’s hands, and for forgiving the filth of

involvement that the hand implies. Such is the song of the Sixties cult

of the fellaheen . There is set in motion a dialectic between the orders

of soap and of hand sanitiser, between the washed and the sterilised.

The washed permits a return to the erotics of profanation which the

order of the sterilised forbids as it sets out towards the light at the

end of the tunnel of hygienically channelled work acts.

Then, who wouldn’t take the leaden hands of the virus shedding corpse of

the stranger and, letting down the phaedrean-magdalenean locks of their

hair, wipe them, dry them? Who would decline the coughed-into hand? Who

wouldn’t kiss the infected stranger on the lips? Who wouldn’t drink from

the consumptive patient’s sputum pot?

The images of rainbows decorating homes are something like the plague

signals and witch signs of earlier times, warning off contamination by

the unfamiliar and defending the priest-hole-burrow-space. I observe a

father shouting in panic at his son for bouncing his hand against a

stranger’s mattress that is leaning against a wall in the street. Such

dramas are directed against the compulsion to become infected.

Thus the plague seems to manifest its presence in and have a preference

for the very organs of the body, the particular physical sites, where

human will, consciousness, and thought are imminent and apt to occur.

The convivial function of the gripped unwashed hand, which by extension

implies through trophallaxic process the presence of a collective

stomach, and a proclivity to self-abandonment before the custom of

passing, from one to the other, the ceremonial cup containing our

group’s fermented saliva, is to expand to the fullest amplitude the

conception of herd immunity as involvement and participation in life.

And yet, also, the eros sited in the dirty stranger’s mattress is

organised as a wager, or risk that must be taken impulsively, in which

the risk itself functions as the erotic focus.

For some, for those still living, a continued existence within routine

sterilised time becomes the stake that must be gambled against a

temporary state of intense exposure to the risks of contamination it is

not that gamblers actively desire the deathly consequence that might

follow from such risk taking but rather that they wish to

masochistically regulate those harmful rays which the subject’s

reizschutz routinely deflects.

The erotic fetish for the unclean implies a will towards taking manual

control over black box operations, and to apply a dilator to the

socially constrained apertures of the protective shield. And so it is,

that for some, vertigo is not a surplus response of the survival

instinct but implies an inner struggle against the desire to measure the

danger of, to resolve the problem confronting him with, this particular

height by jumping from it.

Ideology draws from similar masochistic compulsions, and is realised

through the state’s compulsive desire to consume the filth that it

incorporates into the production of its smooth surfaces.

The ideological mechanism of incorporation/projection involves elevating

a series of seemingly singular, definitive and easily conceived,

profanations (each with unique characteristics) as opponents by which

the era is defined.

In recent years, fetishistic avatars of this singular opponent have been

deployed successively with each iteration following the same pattern: in

the first instance, the enemy looms over the horizon as a novel threat

(an inverted commodity innovation), and the conflict with it is soon

represented as the greatest challenge since the 1940s, but wherever it

is engaged by state forces, it is shown to be stupid, ineffective, and

soon melts away like Spring snow.

Iraq, al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq again, the banking crisis, Iraq again,

IS, Russia (again), China (again), climate change, Brexit, populism have

all appeared as unprecedented threats that have rapidly fallen away, as

if in illustration of the truism: the problem is never the problem.

The significance of a political event is to be measured at the level of

its correlates, not by the historical sequence of its causation. The

most strategically deployable events, those that least resemble their

causation, are also the most significant events - at the level of

governmental control, the greater the number of other events that a

particular event may be networked to, the more strategically useful it

is.

There is sometimes overlap in the succession of represented threats.

After all, Day of The Triffids teaches us that there must be both

triffids and a meteor shower to execute the pincer movement of

catastrophe, but the ordinary workings of the state seem to require only

the promotion of a single champion from what stands as placeholder for

the exterior.

The function of this sparring partner is classically masochistic, and

employed to stimulate self-regulatory defensive responses - emergency

planning exercises are the operation of the state.

It is through consideration of the Spectacle’s parade of villains that

we may discern the separation between event and representation of event,

between event and the strategic deployment of the event.

The state security apparatus operates by collapsing the domains of

existence to a single strategic register under its monopoly control - in

this way, even illness becomes a metaphor for war and imperialism.

For those wishing to counteract the strategic use of panic and

atomisation as tools for expropriation and control, it becomes necessary

to intensify and another thing to its furthest degree, and thus to a

theatrical principle of resistance - when the state cleaves to the

plague, cleave to environmental collapse; when the state cleaves to

environmental collapse, cleave to the domestication of populations. And

another thing, when exaggerated to the point of derangement, retraces

the network of resemblances, transfers and deals done between things -

the paranoiac’s associative process is compelled to uncover the process

of statecraft.

It is necessary, for its optimal operation, in the context of state

pacification, that the object of consciousness is something other than

the process of its own pacification.

When considering the exterior, and the manufacture and representation of

the unprecedented, the unthinkable, the malevolent forces arrayed

against the state - all these placeholders for heat death, and the

void - it is entertaining to consider the G5 network dimension of the

Coronavirus emergency as having higher objective value to the

reproduction of the general system than any misdirections around

drinking bleach, anti-malarials, ventilator acquisition or citriodiol’s

mosquito repellant properties.

The intensification in some minds of the G5 network’s correlation, or

intersection, with Coronavirus to the point of its hyperstition, its

becoming hyperstitial , reveals an eminently objective dimension beyond

the ordinarily pacifying function of conspiracy theory wherein the

isolated individual is reduced to expropriating otherwise unknown world

truths as units of his personality.

It is surely correct to go with the hunch, when observing the theatrical

overreaction of global capital, that there really is an ongoing state

deployment of the degenerative ratchet to social form, and an attempt to

subjectivise those aspects of history which otherwise had remained

cumulative and tendential. Behind the global lockdown event, the state

has accessed, and attempted to intervene within, a recursively higher

The allergic response of capital to coronavirus, as right wing

antimaskers have pointed out, if this is compared to its insouciance

before the world’s most deadly respiratory plague TB, which causes 4,000

daily deaths amongst peri-proletarianised populations year in, year out,

is significant in itself.

The selection and relative elevation of one or other form of death over

the rest has always been a prerogative of the state but the

concentration of its forces on coronavirus operates strategically at

another level - there is always something else going on, but it is

always difficult to know exactly what that is.

If the state and plague are one hand, then the hand itself, is playing

card tricks. Just as the war against terrorism implied the use of

terrorists for other purposes, and the war on drugs similarly implicated

other seemingly unrelated domains, so the apparatus built up by the war

on coronavirus has the potential for creative applications - carbon

emission regulation as the most obvious, and intensification of data

capture as another.

There is something about Covid-ig’s ferocious velocity, the rapid rate

of its turn around time (its spread from infector to infected) which not

only resembles the movement of capital in the world but which becomes an

opportunity and vehicle for further abstraction.

Both capital and coronavirus operate on a principle of ever-quick- ening

energy transfers, and of the speeded up conversion of product- in into

product-out into product-in again - the temporality of realising

capital, as for plague, requires short term objective potentiality

within the host environment, and the rapid convertibility of money into

objects and objects into money.

The viral exchange of information within the pandemic form depends on

the precondition of an abstract equivalence within state organised

social relations, it is within such close to laboratory conditions that

it can best develop an ultra-infectious form which is also attenuated in

lethality... such homologies with the movement, form and operability of

capital have passed the threshold for signing a historic

Molotov-Rippentrop style alliance between the two systems, each becoming

host to the other.

As always, the use value of an object, its capacity for integration into

the system of exchange, depends upon the duration of its turn around

between its production and its sale.... the temporality of TB is slow

and easily contained amongst the poor; C-19 is rapidly metabolised

socially, being both widely virulent but also relatively targeted in

selecting its fatalities. The usefulness of Coronavirus is ideological,

and expressed in the principle that bad news is the best grave for

burying worse news.

The error expressed in the sabotaging of supposed G5 network masts on

the grounds that G5 causes coronavirus nonetheless identifies an

objective point of historical intensity, and illuminates an intersection

between the two in the scenario of a ‘do you want the bad or worse news,

first?’ Certainly, there is wide scale ongoing infrastructural

reorganisation behind the ideological exaggeration of Covid 19’s

pandemic scale - C-19 is a face mask for Space X satellites, for trade

negotiations with China, for disinvestment from fossil fuels, for the

secession of liberal technocracy from parliamentary democracy, and for

either the acceleration or the postponement of 5G. In this sense,

Coronavirus is causing 5G.

And, it would be a dereliction of their duty, a catastrophic departure

from their mission statement, if the various departments of

state-capital were not taking advantage of the suspension of business as

usual to optimally dilate the arteries of what will become the new

abnormal. It is certain, for example, that Covid-19 is a sort of cipher

for an emergency within and perhaps an SOS for the end of, China even if

the structural collapse is in part complicated and scrambled in the

displacement of its energy onto events in Hong Kong. China is coming to

an end, not because it will be brought down either through spurious

trade sanctions or by street agitation but because the hubristic

overreach expressed in its repressive technologies will entrap its own

cadres and departments, which as they are driven by the feedback to

defend themselves will factionalise and resort to deploying as clients

various competing emancipatory and nationalist/separatist social

movements that will erupt in proxy civil war just as the

inter-departmental struggle in the US has recruited and deployed proxies

in its seeming culture war.

Return from lockdown will not take the form of a great reveal, there

will be no grand collapsing of the Potemkin villages, no theatrical

slashing at the painted backdrop, but there will be, and already is, the

institutionalisation of an apparatus for no going back to before as it

is actualised through other routings, patternings and reprogrammings for

the circulation of labour power - there is no path, there is only the

path that is made by walking it.

The sequence of disasters that have characterised the unprecedented

threats of the last two decades plot the passage of the community of

capital as it realises the project of its progressively abolishing

labour, and for extricating the wider system’s dependence for its

expanded reproduction on the extraction of relative surplus value.

Where the social condition of lockdown is understood as a subset of a

generalised fixing or locking of changes, alongside the subsets of

locking in and locking on , - where a return to the siege-form is

applied at all levels, with Falluja and Assange as prototypes, where

self-isolation becomes a homologous technique of control applied to

individuals and regions, each familiarised by the example of the other -

so locked populations and individuals within populations will be

integrated within a novel ontogenetic/phylogenetic register of

production - where work was, domestication shall be.

The recalibration of economic life, the decommissioning of the economy

itself, and its collapsing into immanent production, into desiring

production, is first registered as capital destruction. The purpose of

the Iraq War was not to seize oil as a possession but to sequester the

apparatus for its supply, and so to expropriate the means for regulating

its worth within the general system.

Such manoeuvres are equivalent to abandoning the invasion of a territory

in favour of strategising enemy bridges, ports, power stations. The

objective of the Iraq War was to put the Iraqi oil fields out of action

in the same way that sanctions against Iran were imposed in order to

interrupt the inherent systemic tendency to oversupply - the objective

never included either Iraq or Iran, except as contingencies, the main

strategic preoccupation has been to very delicately recalibrate the

energy transfers within the fossil fuel industry’s relation to the

productive apparatus as a whole Ordinarily, private capital must be

destroyed where the productive system has entered into a runaway of

oversupply. The orgy of destroying private capitals opens a path back to

an earlier, purer, stage in productive relations that may then reset

itself at a higher level of organisation before beginning again and

thereby ensures and the conservation of the system as whole.

However, the cumulative cost of such punctuating events is

environmentally catastrophic. For this reason, a new system of

exploitation, another path out of capital’s pseudo-cyclical time, is in

the pipeline . The new system will conserve its tendency to abstraction

via the systematic accumulation of forces whilst replacing its

convoluted value set with a more immediately responsive or organic value

set derived from natural inclinations rather than alienated work acts:

the replacement of exchanges by transfers will enter a real phase.

The domesticating system, as something other than communism, will

replace capitalism as it institutionalises the overcoming of the

separation between work and free time as populations are directly

integrated into the productive environment and the individual’s

biological and affective states, rather than the temporal units of their

labour power, will be harnessed as the motor of concretising

abstraction.

The communist response to the accelerating general tendency to expel

labour power from the productive apparatus, and the sequence of

emergencies by which this is being realised, has been, with one or two

exceptions, disappointing and inadequate. As an example, the lauded

Chuang commentary on Coronavirus as an event in class relations does not

succeed in drawing a specific communist quality from its sociological

framing.

Whilst Chuang gathers up content that is otherwise scattered - it is not

in itself successful in making itself remarkable. By conserving a C2oth

style of academically informed journalism it selects a readership that

is by and large professional . The information it conveys is that which

is useful to social managers and PHD students in the present moment. The

class most prominent in the communist milieu, by directing its access to

institutionalised capital, also imposes the procedural form, and its

preoccupations as content, as the stuff of communist thinking.

By retaining traits of institutional objectivity and the motifs of

expertise, it facilitates its own promotion and consumption as a

significant communist text within the serious theory market. It also

triggers the marxist habit of assigning authority by displacement and

deferential citation - the individual marxist is characterised by his

strategy for controlling discourse through his legalistic deployment of

authoritative texts as precedent.

The Chuang commentary has worth at the level of ‘if you only read one,

then this is it’. But it remains within the journalistic parameters of

third estatism and has no subjective core.

For this reason, it is unclear what use it is to its intended readers...

it defends an abstract space of marxological correctness but it is stuck

at the level of ‘portrayal’ that it seeks to overcome.

If it has adopted the old fashioned mode of the serious essay, it shows

no evidence of knowledge of the similarly old fashioned traits and

devices of Twentieth Century exercises in willed subjectivity, not only

does it not demonstrate an awareness of Theatre as Plague or Cities of

the Red Night, it does not show facility with fold-downs, jump cuts,

tape loops, automatic writing, oneiric or compulsive reference,

detournment or collage - the basic manoeuvres in the performative arms

race of self-alienating consciousness.

These, and similar other, outmoded black magic tricks and musty parlour

games are the only authentic mechanisms by which subjectivity is

retroactively accessed under conditions where subject, history and

communism are all constrained by their belonging to that order which has

already passed into history. Chuang shows no evidence for its own

derangement, it is neither mad nor drunk. Then, how could it tell its

readers anything? By what phenomenological means would it ever gain

sufficient exteriority to find things out?

Theory must allow itself to become of unsound mind, and chopped into

shards, if it is uncover the true stuff. As an example, whilst Chuang

comments interestingly on English warehouse generated diseases in the

post-mercantile era, it does not talk of the inherent theatricality of

the Black Death, nor the eros of Biblical plagues... but it is precisely

these exhilarating punctuations of historical form, when considering the

dislocating power of viral systems on host environments (where products

attack production), that should become the compulsive objects of

communist consciousness.

In other words, the Chuang commentary lacks a pataphysical/

hyperstitious/noumenal component and for this reason the old neo-kantian

racket of Nick Land is still in advance of communist thinking around the

machinery of contagion because the former places a subjective content in

the hands of its readers outside of the academy - it is this

watchamacallit, Dark Enlightenment, and not the communists, that has

masqued up and thereby captured the potential for generating avant garde

forms.

To its credit, right at the end of the text, Chuang raises the

subjective possibility of a ‘surreal war’ against society itself but

this small fly emerging from so massive a maggot is actually where we

are already, that surreal violence is the level of our day to day

existence. That so fat a maggot should culminate in so small an

emergence as the idea of surreal war, is just the way of such processes,

everything else could have been cut away as it is just the sort of

formulation that should have been situated at the core of the text and

which would have taken Chuang way off script. Similarly, all the

experimental material I have amassed here, is almost all deadwood, I

could easily discard all the cards in my hand for the one or two

accidental phrases that still amuse me.

Current iterations of ultra-leftism (Chuang, Endnotes, Commune) work

directly against the kinds of improvisation necessary to the movement of

consciousness. For the sake of a compelling thirst for realisation,

their aesthetically realist presentation of communism is inconceivable

except as a funnel trap, or as a further exaggeration, of the

ideological categories of the leftist continuum - as if ultra-leftism

signified a surplus, or extreme, leftism to which it might provide

mercurial leadership.

The compromises necessitated in the throes of realisation sickness have

resulted not just in populist manoeuvrings (Commune magazine is

essentially a communist content within a corporate frame - complete with

the voluntary taxation method of its fundraising) but also the dilution

of critique through attempts to metabolise bourgeois categories of left

identitarianism.

No communist project should ever have aligned itself with analyses that

identify capitalism as patriarchal or even racist, as this inevitably

contradicts the specific quality of total critique which identifies

capitalism as a self-revolutionising system of indirect relations

mediated through representations (including, but not reducible to, the

representations of gender and race).

The characteristic realism represented as the real struggles of real

people which constrains leftism in practice as the realisation of the

left wing of capital, has spread to contemporary communist projects

which seemingly cannot now extricate themselves either from the trap of

solutionism, or the trap of deference to the expert class generating

such solutions - as if a public health crisis is best countered by a

public health department.

The function of ideological realism is specifically the denial of

registers other than that defined by the productive contradiction, as if

that required any further affirmation - one of the variants of the

recent leftist turn of communism, fully automated luxury communism

proposes the present productive apparatus minus work as its system-

immanent solution, but as capitalism is already accelerating away from

living labour, this wretched return to the Second International’s

affirmation of objective pressures immediately decomposes into an

apology for the momentum of dead labour as such.

But theory’s purpose was never to identify a set of plausibles or exit

points as alternatives to the present state of things, nor to supply

vital information to the revolutionary front line, nor to rehearse truth

as the proper standpoint of the minority. Theory is nothing but the

transient state of willed subjective excitation in the world and

recorded at the level of ideas - its only external goal is to induce

symptoms in its readers, and thereby trigger the host’s immune system

response. This is what Artaud is referring to in the text, Theoretica as

Plague .

Theory like plague catastrophises two bodily processes: thinking and

breathing. The theoretician desires to both elicit, or rather spread, a

violent response in consciousness, and interrupt ordinary breathing

patterns, to the point of inducing a state of hypoxic reverie in amongst

its readers.

To this end, the ultra-left, as a pro-communist, exegetically

constituted minority, had, up to this juncture, refused all alliance,

carrying out its work precisely in terms of the theoretical critique of

leftist categories as functions of assimilating recuperation and through

this, positively asserted its refusal of the given form of all struggles

even as they shifted leftivards . Whatever it was, the ultra-left was

against it - including intensifying class struggle, and revolutionary

upheavals. Every object, no matter how preferable, expresses the present

state of things and should be engaged on terms of its viability as a

vector for ideology.

Ultra-leftism had no relevance but as the negation in theory of the

immediate form taken by the reproduction of the world through the

mechanism of class struggle. Its current failure to understand the

disconnect between itself and leftism inevitably degrades its conception

of communism which increasingly resembles the set of potentialities that

are orchestrated by the times and communicated by the managerial

sub-class of professionals to which so many communists belong. Communism

has no more, and perhaps less, relation to this set of exits proposed by

the left wing of capital than it does to the forces of reaction, or at

least to the relations of personal domination to which reaction now

refers.

Communism is specifically a return to direct personal relations, that is

relations not mediated by the exchange of representations, which is, by

definition, impossible through any historical sublation of capitalist

productive forces as these are characterised wholly by their

system-immanent tendency towards abstraction and its supply of the

relational basis of representations.

As a consequence of the contemporary failure to articulate anti- realist

registers of engagement, and under present conditions of state emergency

measures, communists have relinquished all discontent to right wingers,

conspiracy theorists, neo-reactionaries and traditionalists whilst

leftists have not only drawn communists further into acquiescence before

state exigency but leant them their ideological hostility to autonomy,

the discourse of freedom, refusal and opposition on the pretext of

maintaining the solutionism attributed to the expertise of the state’s

social health apparatus.

The spectacle, for example, of left anarchists making Thatcherite

arguments against the oxygen of freedom as a reactionary talking point

is now so routine that it has become unremarkable in a circumstance

where the critique of everything has degenerated into the policing of

bourgeois good thinking and as the old slogan had it, vote Bemie without

illusions.

But all of the meandering above belongs to the less interesting portion

of the question, what’s so thinkable about the unthinkable? Of greater

interest is the preoccupation with what is novel, with what is original.

The event of a new thing seems significant to all attri- butional modes

of thinking which must draw energy from their own mantic portrayal of

such novelty. The invocation of an event’s origins is the magical

framing by which is sought out an occult control over the subsequent

circulation of the event’s messages - the etymological contact tracing

of original meanings and uses is seen as reflective of the occultist’s

own, in the sense of being close to the origin of the thing,

originality. It is no coincidence that every instance of thinking

oriented towards originality also identifies the moment to which it

belongs as the most significant of all moments.

Wherever the production of social wealth overflows the ordinary channels

of ownership, where rapidly accelerating, expanding and massifying

cycles of uncontrolled accumulation bypass established procedures of

inheritance, it is there that the question of the ownership of origin,

the taking control of the argument of the unprecedented, first

originates. And, similarly, it is only in circumstances where expected

conventions of inheritance, property, and investment are devalued

relative to the viral expansion of unconstrained forms of social wealth

that original claims, alongside claims of and for the original, are

aggressively promoted.

I too, have fallen into this trap of sketching an origin, as if the

coronavirus really did originate , by zoonotic process, in a specific

place, a market, a warehouse. There are no entry events as there are no

exit events. In reality, Coronavirus has always existed, and will always

exist, just as capitalism has no origin point but must exist spacelessly

and timelessly as an abstract organising principle of its own

organisation and in its own operation.

In order for the energy exchanges of capitalism and coronavirus to take

place, their own specific plane of abstraction must also have become

operational simultaneously, and on a world scale - this implies a

decisive environmental receptiveness to alteration by its own

particulars rather than the specified virulent property attributed to

the mutating social/viral form. The precondition for every system is

always itself. And so, by extension, the only purpose in considering the

origin of systems is to expand the system of thinking that is concerned

with thinking origins: precisely, identity systems.

The world that cannot go back to how it was before once lockdown

conditions are lifted, this unprecedented world, has not originated from

the pandemic hard reboot of global capitalism - the system of

not-capitalism/post-capitalism was already viable, and the system of

capitalism itself, being derived from the extraction of relative surplus

value, was already relatively less-viable. To say something is starting

is a trick of language, in practice there is only the expansion and

contraction of systems relative to each other. Coronavirus did not

originate within a specific place and then spread but took advantage of

pre-existing conditions in which it mutated and to which its mutations

were particularly suited.

The term, niche opportunism, is a more accurate description of the

process by which particular forms expand into the world and take on

recursively organisational, and self-environmentalising traits.

The success of any system, as indicated in the catastrophe event

portrayed in The Day of the Triffids always depends on the coincidence

of two pre-existing factors, the capacity of the system to reproduce

itself, and an earlier transformation within the external environment

which favours within a particular niche this particular system more than

any other.

The basic structuring of niche opportunism, applies to all systems: to

coronavirus and digital communication, to communism and domestication,

as much as to dinosaurs and mammals. Later forms have never

‘out-competed’ earlier forms - that which comes later has merely

employed a relatively higher potential for adapting fortuitously to

cumulative environmental changes. Without an external intervention, the

earth would have stayed dinosaur all the way down.

Unprecedented things which cannot be thought do not become precedented

things, and eminently thinkable, via their descent from some identified

origin point into history but through that severance event by which an

external pressure becomes itself pressured; that which was once

productive, the unprecedented, becomes produced, the precedented. That

which once made thinking, is later made by thinking. It seems then, the

only fate worse for an objectifying force than its becoming an object of

thought, is its becoming an object of unthought.

Or else,

I am like the wolf, emptied of its mountain

Ridico

Part II: Plinthism notes on mimesis as from within a

neo-reactionary’s cloak

I will assimilate the statue you see there, and it will assimilate me. I

will turn it into my flesh, and make it animal, I will give it the

faculty of sensation and it will cause me to become like a ripple, like

a vibration. It will become me, and I will become it. I will smash it

with a hammer and grind it to impalpable powder, I will mix it with

humus or leafmould; I will knead them well together; I will water the

mixture and let it decompose for a year or two or a hundred, time doesn

't matter to me. When the whole has turned into a more or less

homogeneous substance, into humus, do you know what I do? I sow peas,

beans, cabbages, and other vegetables; these plants feed on the soil and

I feed on the plants. I will have become the statue, cold, living,

inactively sensitive

Diderot

We later millenarians are set the problem embodied and summarised by

someone like the parkourist, Alireza Japalaghy, a sort of moving statue

within the classical tradition. Iranian parkour is a self-materialising

western aesthetic, a special forces laconicism, constituted as capital's

infringement upon theocratic order - Japalaghy is like the remains of

Canute animated by Harryhau- sen, and volunteering for the NMA,

launching his bones through Winchester Cathedral's west window, and

inventing collage in the process. Consider the iconoclastic elan

expressed in his perfected delinquent physicality as it is set in motion

against the gravity-bound trudging of fascis- tic goons, but at the same

time also captured, generated even, by the expanding apparatus of banal

iconographic representations. Our moment essentialises as an image of

smashed images - what fine chisel, could ever yet cut breath?

What interest could we sustain in Alireza Japalaghy, who is ultimately a

content provider for digital communications technology, an agile clown

of the pleroma, if it were not for the blundering attempts at impeding

him as performed as representation of some or other ancien keystone cops

routine by some or other Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the

Prevention of Vice ?

The real movement that abolishes the present state of things, the real

movement of unhoming from personal relations, the real movement of which

we are the flotsam and jetsam drifting on the tide of production, is

inseparable from the expansion of the value system implicit within the

process of social abstraction and within which each must labour at his

revolt, chiselling away at the weight of repressive muck holding back

his personal self-realisa- tion. We are the self-sculpting of ourselves,

the appalling mobiles, set in motion by the objectively given project of

realisation, unreal city! - we had no idea that we were also building as

we sought to bring the edifice down.

But the revolutionising of social relations is the process by which

capital sets out from, and returns to, the world as it is. Consider the

path of parkour, as moving monument, statuary in process, as it becomes

an attractor basin for theorising the optimisation of totalised

environmentalisation:

the architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present

conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and means

of action. The architectural complex will be modifiable. It's aspect

will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its

inhabitants.

Capital is a system of reactor-contained progressive energy transfers

nested within successive addictions to the continued supply of

recursively more material-less abstract inputs which it progressively

inverts in the production of its output - the substance of capital is an

abstraction as verb noun and adjective. The perturbative effects upon

the lifeworld of its energy transfers are metabolised as the

generality's first order homeostasis - and for this reason, such a

system will only die in one of two circumstances: where its inputs are

fatally constrained, inducing starvation; or, where it suffers such a

profound external impact that its metabolising organs fail, causing it

to bleed out.

Only the former of these, the withdrawal of labour- energy, is

categorically subjective . The enormous space is a property of quivering

stillness, which appears only within the interregnum of production, and

where doing nothing takes on a terrible dimension, where silence really

becomes, and a double edged, violence: no going back, the forever

furlough, self-isolation and social distancing, the super-spreader event

held at the terminal beach, these are the objectively given

revolutionary forms opened up by the suspension of labour activity (and

so very distant from the guillotine and the mob). Furloughed life

resembles the refusal of work but it is lacking an authentically

subjective dimension.

Capital is energy and nothing but, its metabolic circuit is the labour

process. Capital dies where labour is absent. But the party of capital

is already acting to prevent the idea of no going back materialising as

foundation myth of an exteriorising life-world. We have perhaps already

lived through the last possibility of quietude - what comes after

lockdown, the return, will be conducted at a higher order of

intensification and abstraction. The productive apparatus is powering up

again, drawing energies into its processors and converting the stuff of,

I gesture expansively, life into potentials, into moving statuary. It is

returning to itself, beginning again from the same manufacture of

contradiction, and re-establishing the dynamic equilibrium that results

from the competition of all against all.

Capitalism is a system of energy transfers that converts the material

constituting productive forces into representations of social wealth,

the representations then enter into a systematised relation operating on

the basis of their mutually regulated equivalence. If we are to be

honest here (and what do we have left to lose?) capital is socially

progressive, whilst communism, it seems, in the final analysis, is the

only truly authentic member of the set that capital designates as

reaction , meaning it cannot advance itself as a member of the

objectively given historical continuum.

It is the work of capital, as the revolutionary subject, to

progressively abolish the statuary of all repressive hierarchical

systems that might be categorised variously as patriarchy or white

supremacy or privilege and generate in their place the representations

of the values of repression, but also the representations of the values

of emancipation. The representation of the relation repression/

repressed is historically in advance of the relation,

repression/repressed.

The representations which supplant relations of direct domination are

then set to work as organs of metaboli- sation and transvaluation. The

representations of repression and emancipation behave homologically, and

also equivalently, both concretely in relation to each other and

abstractly against all other representations, in relation to which their

value is simultaneously measured and exchanged.

For reason of its representational nature, the capitalist life-world

cannot be opposed or even adequately refused

every opposition becomes representation on the basis that money is

already a riot against authority operating at an extremity beyond all

possible other opposition, and abstraction is already a revolutionary

war against privilege waged at a level of intensity beyond all possible

other revolutionary wars. Equivalence is not a property of exchange, but

of abstraction which enables exchange.

The dreamwork of the apparatus moves inexorably towards an

operator-modifiable life-world - where the balletic immanence of

variable capital's clenched fist is massified and frozen as the

architecture of temporary autonomous business parks, and where the

sentience of fixed capital is ground to impalpable nano-powder

permeating the categorical membrane of the variable. Consider the

delinquency of capital passing through revolt, the monumentalisation of

iconoclasm, as a distinct moment in the same organising principle, the

principle inherent to the pressure for every thing setting out again and

again and returning again and again: revolt is manifested as capital and

circulates as the representation of revolt (R-C-R'); capital invests its

technologies in the behavioural repertoire of revolt and derives value

from its technologies of control (C-R-C').

The schematics of relatedness confront us: our adventure, our departure,

our emigration, our journeying, our drifting, all these are catalysts

for the further dimensional regenerative ratcheting of homeworld

familiarity and sameness. The us and them of the protest rationale: It

is because they are inhuman, that they deny what is human; it is because

we are inhuman that we affirm what is human. The message of revolt

realises the medium of capital and the message of capital realises the

medium of revolt. In response to the general trend, and looking for a

subjective ethical autonomy, sectarian radical milieus become

preoccupied with performative and prefigurative structures, as if the

personal, the thing you think, really were political, and somehow there

might be another, a further, dimension in opposition, as if personal

investment might expropriate something personal from its function as

cipher for suprapersonal forces, as if Zeuxis asked of Parrasios to draw

back the veil of an un-captured politics, "Well, now show how you are

going to be the change you want to see in the world".

Revolt, subjectivity, non-conventionality, refusal of the command net,

post-conditioned behaviours, the gait of power, all these techniques of

de-control, operate as engines for realising the expansion of the

immanent apparatus - these are the material modalities of the

organisational principle for abolishing the present state of things.

Revolt is not constrained by conditions it has not chosen but is a

component of the mechanism of the environment of which it is also

product. Revolt, and in particular the revolt against work, is the

qualitative perfection of expelled abstract labour time, the quality

emerging from the quality, the pattern in which the pattern is

embedded - the community of pleroma employs and instrumentalises

negation to realise the expansion of pleroma, and that is all.

If this homeworld process should be understood as ameri- canisation,

then it expands in a doubled movement, through the upstroke of the

strategic measures of its repressive colonisation of social relations,

and then in the downstroke of its representations of spontaneous

anticolonial revolts which it engenders and circulates. What tentacle

are we to strike at of an empire that expands itself by means of its

export of anti-imperialism and the corporatisation of the black power

clenched fist? Which other empire has expanded its dominion through an

institutionalised iconoclasm directed against itself? The proprietorial

character of americanising revolt, and the anxiety surrounding the

proprietorial character of americanising revolt, the who of it, and the

righteous justification of the who of it, the who may claim it and the

who must be denied it, and all the time it's just the same process, just

the same expansion of the network through its amplification of selected

sequences of feuds, polarisations, factions, schisms, that comprise the

repertoire of the culture war.

Within the manoeuvre by which consciousness is captured through the

amplified representation of struggle, a programming may be inferred as

it is inferred from the narrative arc of one like Alireza Japalaghy, a

sinew, a line, a motive force, a figure induced by his seeming own

desire to circulate his content within this other register - the spook

employment of precisely this fleet footed abstract expressionist

aesthetic, the individualisation of dribbles, splatters, interruptions,

explosions, inconstancy, caprice that is designed specifically to

decompose puritanical regimes of fixed meaning and value. All that

succeeds within the domain of representations, the number of views,

likes, follows, is successful as a result of system design more than it

is attributable to the genius of individuals - it is a basic of the

stochastic process that control and manipulation of the message receptor

apparatus is of higher significance to the system's reproduction than is

the randomly self-differentiating message sparks transmitted as

individual creativity.

The second of the two operations in the huge evergrowing pulsating mind

game, the transfer of the energy of acts of revolt against the system

into the system's capacity to capture revolt, is a historical

progression, an innovation of the apparat, and it is this which sets it

apart from all naturally occurring colonising movements - a plague must

have two steps, two bluffs, two exits, two attacks, two dance steps

slowly at first then all at once. The network was never concerned which

of the incompatible factions we adhered to, but only that we adhered,

committed, and invested; all that really signifies is that we, so many

million strangers, participate within one faction or another, and

contribute to the sum of violences from which the Totality emerges.

America's recuperation of international identifications with sympathetic

representations of the opposition against it is bait and hooking of the

highest order: its race musics, its culture wars, its gender identities,

its inter-generational conflicts, its filmic narrative conventions of

against all odds. Can we even begin to imagine the sequence of

traumatising processes and their correctives that culminate in, converge

upon, the promotion of rap stars into representatives and spokesmen who

are permitted a public platform, the amplification from which is

conditional on the degree to which they use the reputed authority of

their recalcitrance, and their ungovernability, to call for

participation in political process?

On a global scale, America realises its representation of the category

of abstract revolt as the ground covering suppression of local autonomy

as it mediates particulars through a self-generalising system of

equivalence. In information systems, the rate of a message's circulation

as an emphatic or declarative statement, as an event in and of itself,

is an inverse indicator of the significance to the system of the actual

content conveyed - information systems only recognise significance in

messages at the level of whether the system retains integrity as a

constant flow of messages to the perpetual question, am I ill or well?

All the rest, every other message, circulates as quantities of freight -

the less true its message, the more expanding it is of the network. In

the end, there are nothing but nodes, lit up, hot, reticulated.

American revolt is the network's process of expansion in action just as

the American network is the expanding process of revolt in action -

money is already riot; the market is already an autonomous zone;

expropriation is already looting; the social relation is already social

war. The system cannot be exceeded subjectively, the momentum of fixed

capital employed by the apparatus in the represented outside surpasses

and encloses every personal swerving against it - Castaneda flees his

confrontation with the worthy opponent, consumed by abject terror,

whilst she, La Catalina, hops beside him, like a bird, quizzical,

intent, laughing. It seems that radicals feel compelled to represent

capital as a mode of direct domination because they desire to directly

experience the finite temporality experienced by the condemned, the

abolished, the cancelled, the fated - they desire for capital to play

the role of worthy, not too worthy, opponent, whilst all the time they

are capital, its shock troops, its stakhanovites. There is always active

in radicalism, the innate preference for the discourse of

anti-oppression over the discourse of anti-exploitation.

Protest movements readily focus upon the goon element of the state

apparatus, let's say the pigs, such movements desire black hats, bad

guys, racists and fascists - they desire totality to play like tyranny.

The preference is structured, subjective agency cannot gain any leverage

upon the diffuse and indirect systems of control that the reproduction

of capital tends historically towards. Whoever demands the abolition of

the police, where abolition is already a meaningless reference and an

action easily called for but fundamentally unrealisable except as a

neo-liberal defunding of social infrastructure, whoever desires the

abolition of the police without also calling for the abolition of

teachers does not demand the abolition of the police. Similarly, where

de-reticulation is not the goal, where collectivities attempt to utilise

the network in their seeming own interest, and to their own purpose,

where networking and its nodes of intensification, its small world

zones, its autonomies, is itself not repudiated, it is there that the

network and the people are one hand.

And so we awaken with a start, dialectics in a lockdown, and find

ourselves living in the parable of the short levers and the long levers.

The use value of every product, I mean every moment in time, becomes an

architectural vortex, a sinister quarter, for every other, bending its

escape back into the whole, integrating its particularity, as a

particularity of the universal, into the universal.

The productive net aligns every tool to its machine, every machine to

its process, and every process to the autonomous totality; each

fragment, at every level, horizontally, vertically, diagonally,

dimensionally, and durationally, is ever-vigilant, primed to make the

intervention, ready to step in and prevent the tendency to come to rest

that it discovers in all other fragments, everywhere.

At the level of everyday usage, net has become a metaphor from which the

principle of capture, the primary function of nets, has been lost -

interactions are not caught because they are neither autonomous fish nor

wild birds. The more appropriate metaphor for the domesticating process

is fold or pen... our experience as browsing ruminants is less free

roaming than it is shepherded. Our desires are not repressed but

enclosed by the algorithmic process of so-called search tools. In that

sense, the productive network operates as a perpetual corrective upon

all by all

everything is always at the point of its acquiescing to the coaxing

buried within every return to the fold.

Track and Trace becomes the whole of the law and poor Janus is our god.

Every machine a demi-devil goading the aggregate of products towards

generalisation. It is hard for you to kick against the pricks. The

crutches in Dali's paintings propping the sagging and deliquescing,

propping and forestalling the headpiece of things, stuffed with straw,

papa's hat, bovary's cap, Quixote's helmet, all these synecdoches for

no-ideas-but-in-products as they inevitably come to rest, because no

thing permits any other thing to leave the vivarium - the Pre-crime Unit

will return the lost sheep before it has strayed. All these unrelated

but related things jostling against each other, mutually estranged but

algorithmically convergent, each compelled recursively by a hidden code

running parallel to functionality, dragging its particular fragment of

totality into the mechanics of everything else. Nothing is realised, but

everything is near at hand.

Every discrete product begins tinkering with the operation of every

other, and not signing off on the completion of the circuit of use; each

gently persuades, and diverts the flow, of all others into the funnel of

abstraction; each holding the other in check, pushing the other on, or

drawing it back; fitting, patching, fixing, employing. Everything

dispersed everything converged. The imperialist swerve of a neo-liberal

Kurtz: the networking, the networking!

And then everything, I mean person, becomes a treadmill upon which the

footedness of every other thing stumbles. Every dragging thing, dragged

again, dragging in one direction but in that dragging, shall we say,

'forward' is also dragged in all directions - piano priest donkey corpse

compulsion. The revolutionary is also motivated by an eating disorder,

or by a hidden perversity, or at least a symptom, and always by a

sickness that is denied direct expression in the stated programme; he is

the Django dragging on, trailing something behind him, like a cluster of

coffins, one for every of his small-world neighbours' neighbours. The

systemic interruption of process, its refusal to allow completion, or

abolition, maintains history in a looping return to and from the same

nodes. And from the return, our same objection to the conditioning

factors of the return, which itself, leopard like, functions as one such

ritualised factor.

And we observe again, in infinite regress, how we can almost imagine but

never quite foresee the complex and audacious beauty of the abstracting

process as we encounter it in the party of capital's classic manoeuvre:

the transformation of revolt against a particular into the raw material

of the expansion of the general.

But it is something else than that, we find ourselves stuck, like

Bunuel's dinner guests, in a bourgeois cul-de-sac: every part of theory

activates the dompte-regard by its de-platforming of every other - as

the network expands in all other terms, the qualitative value of its

content reduces. Nowadays, only old reactionaries are in the position,

the position of for-itself white fragility, to make categorical

statements - only what is pale male and stale escapes the reform

imperative and engages the generality qua generality qua object,

everyone else is consumed by consuming the particulars of their own

identity. We are about to say, and then cannot say, immediately

anticipating another, castrating, movement moving within our movement -

within the phallic, the castration! - as if we are opening our mouths at

the point of utterance and finding it interrupted, displaced by another

mouth opening in the sticking place, saying, or rather announcing, like

a precog Menard, a Menard in anticipation of Cervantes, exactly what we

were about to say, but altered, skewed absolutely.

It is quite clear to us, but no, it is not so clear, or rather, it

couldn't be clearer, but we are in the zone and the path itself moves,

and moves again - there is no walking but the path creates the walking -

and we become aware that what we see is also observed by others - as the

panopticon apparatus is architecturally democratised in Rear Window but

also skewed by randomly drawn observing/observed lots. Everything

possible that we might express is already colonised by those exactly

like us, our doppelgangers in the looking glass world of neo-reaction -

their every word hatches maggots in our project. They thumbed through

our pamphlets before we tabled them at the radical bookfair.

That is not it either, neo-reaction only expresses the frailty of

communist consciousness which self-disassembles as it mistakes itself

for representations and simulacra, which cause nothing to appear that is

not conditionally qualified and nested in a regress of ambivalence and

re-formula- tion. The neo-racist is not a racist. The neo-anti-racist is

not an anti-racist. There is no continuous history of racism, there is

only the novel contexts within which racist motifs may be employed. No

representation represents what it portrays, its true referent is the

complex metabolic structures, energy transfers, and quantitive exchanges

located at the point where social systems converge with mass psyche.

Where first order racism operated as a historical product of more or

less authentically articulated ideology, it remained subject to

intervention and correction - even deliberate and wilful ignorance was

responsive to educative return and right thinking. But neo-racism is not

racism, it's about racism in the same way Westerns after the mid-60s

were about Westerns. Neo-racism stages a pornographic representation of

the excitement of racism within an institutionalised anti-racist context

which it steers towards the eros of transgression - the neo-racist

chooses racism after history, and after the interventions staged by

educative institutions.

Neo-racism has no theory but the theory of maximising the impact of its

violence - it revives the ancient sport of baiting, for no reason, for

reason of gratuitous excitement.

The neo-racist already knows his ideas are in error, it is his

motivation for cleaving to them; the denial of shared error, and not

right thinking, is the kernel of all community but the community of

neo-racists does not deny its error, it embraces it. The neo-racist

addictively seeks out the reward paths laid by inciting outrage and

offence - there is no symptom-based corrective to his dependency;

interventions through de-radicalisation programmes will only intensify

the perverse benefits of his motive.

Similarly, the project of neo-anti-racism, as it organises around

representations of effusive inclusion at one pole and of vile racists at

the other, becomes operational as a set of income streams funnelled

through institutionalised interventionist programmes and initiatives -

the discourse of emancipation describes the process by which the apparat

reproduces itself. The perversity of neo-anti- racism is located in its

economic dependency upon representations of racism as its raw material

which it must process into novel marketable products, the circulation of

a wider range of particulars serves to expand the system as whole -

nothing may circulate as what it is, value is only derived in the

particular's employment in the movement of everything else. For the

corporate neo-anti-racist institution, the representation of anti-racist

commitment is an air corridor, an immunity passport, out of all other

tight corners.

At a fundamental level, neo-anti-racist institutions know they must not

succeed even at the level of their mission statements, and must act to

inhibit any chances of effective measures - institutionalisation of the

esoteric and unfalsifiable theory of microaggression, a useful

therapeutic heuristic for bringing the extraction process into the

liminal, for identifying precisely the pricking out mechanism of

institutional selection (the entire content of minima moralia), is

transformed into an innovative product for opening new markets in

micromanagement.

Similarly, similarly, I am no communist but am complicit in the project

of neo-communism which orients itself to the representation of communism

whilst fully aware that communism itself became historically untenable

around 1914. Communism has become a vector for abstract equivalence, a

node to which any object, action, meaning or form may be attached as

expression or substitute – every particular will contain the totality,

if at low resolution, and communism is no exception. Under such

circumstances, as an embodied communist use-value, I am a vector for the

exchange relation - I am caused to function as a conduit and attractor

basin for the products of my competitors: I become fascist, racist, rape

apologist. My addiction to the perverse knowledge of my own error, a

commitment to that which is not available, is structurally inseparable

from that of the perversity of the neo-fascist or neo-racist, I am

defined by a football fan's partisanship, although it is true that I am

less concerned with cultivating the transgressive, than I am with

savouring the evanescent. Neo-communism forsakes communism for an ersatz

communist market: the aesthetics; the conferences; the journals; the

traditions and myths; the grievances; the networks; the PHDs.

Even so, as Pascal observed, it is possible to knowingly make false

offerings to the false images standing for false gods and yet still,

like good Sebastian, find oneself pierced by the real - it is but a

small step from smirking to tears to resolve. And it is for reason of

its compulsive pursuit of the perturbative real, that consciousness

should record the materials that neo-reaction, giggling as it slashes at

itself, turns over. It is this matter, the what is uncovered, worms as

much as artefacts, and the distance between the use of the

representation of a thing and the mechanism that is productive of

representations as a system of social mediation, that Bordiga pokes his

finger into with his most significant work, The Great Alibi.

The victory of leftist categories over state institutions, and over

American corporations, has resulted in the curious phenomenon of

subversive, even transgressive, conservatism which utilises its

alienated position as a vantage point from outside the political terrain

from which it is free to develop its own critiques of institutional

power. As may be seen from its influence upon the most interesting

contemporary communist theory, the contribution of neo-reaction to the

world's knowledge of itself, now far outstrips that of leftism, which is

reduced to a renegade defence of abstract enlightenment categories

already weaponised by the neoliberal project. What is leftism but

corporations anticipating potential equal rights litigation?

The beneficial element of neo-reaction is articulated precisely in its

exercise of freely speaking, causing offence and transgressing against

institutionalised value sets, drawing objects from the environment and,

by making them distinct, also making them strange - it is through

neo-reaction's readings of the exposed viscera of institutionalised

liberalism that we begin to make out how indirect power blurs its

operations with emancipatory narratives of abstractly constituted

communities.

It is clear that rightists will make the point that world historical

forces are circulating the Black Lives Matter protests to stimulate the

economy's return from lockdown to the new normal - the just in time of

digitised representation is dependent for raw material upon the churning

real. The proliferation of the absurdity of black squares is not genius

but an attractor basin for advertising driven exponential network

effects - the contagious spread of a content through quiescent

populations, no matter what it is, is sufficient to activate market

activity. On the principle that everything appears in the world at the

frequency, and in proportion to, its capitalisation, anti-racism has

become the one permitted cause, and every proprietary apparatus has

taken it up. The question is, why? What use is the Black Lives Matter

movement to the expansion of capital?

Certainly, the movement's rapid global advance is reliant upon a

sustained, if opportunistic, intervention within the reticulated

media... BLM was not only permitted but objectively facilitated where a

similar scale revolutionary movement would have been interrupted,

subverted and dispersed. The newfound commitment of the apparatus to the

cause is less a product of shaming than of its investment in the

opportunity for a rebrand. Similarly, although the street events have

taken advantage of the go ahead, they also express an objective tendency

towards informational momentum, the perpetually re-mediating mode of

social operations, more than they express the agency of street

subjectivity.

There is some appeal in the hypothesis that current events are yet

another epiphenomenon of the ongoing departmental struggle within the

American security apparatus, and of the factionalising of America's

national ruling class in general, as this centres upon the continuing

efforts of the CIA to remove the current POTUS by foul means or foul

whilst the NSA, Department of Homeland Security, US Marshals Service, US

Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protection Service pushes

back to defend their departmental outlines. The recent kidnapping of

protesters off the streets by Trump's faction fishing for outside

agitators which they mean rival departments' agents, proves they

genuinely believe the CIA is staging a coup against them. The level of

support for BLM expressed by corporations indicate rapid calculations

around which branch of intelligence they are aligned to compounded by

the market demographics of their consumer base - everything becomes a

flash mob. Everything to do with the circulation of the content of BLM

is reducible to the schematic: our guy/their guy. Twitter is tending

more to one side, Facebook more to the other, with erstwhile allies like

Unilever distancing from Facebook. Nike, KFC, McDonalds and Coca Cola

have already perfected the narrative of emancipation as product

placement as participation. This is the real locus of the organisation

of mass desire and the struggle of private interests waged through the

social form of production, this is the real real movement.

On the other hand, to observe that proprietorial messaging systems are

to consciousness what shopping malls are to public space, both funnel

trap and digestive system, and that messages only circulate in

proportion to capital invest ment, is already to lapse into right wing

paranoia. Thus, we are confronted with our own reactionary tendencies

wherever we imagine all messages are permittedbut only selected messages

are circulated. We become reactionary wherever we conclude that the

anticipatory use of racism, or rather of neo-racism, is a strategic

product of the corpo- rate-enabled anti-racist racket. Class domination

is also exercised in the spectacle of the bourgeoisie, where ideology is

perfected as irony, and interest convergence is taken to its furthest

degree, in their performance of taking the knee, and clenching their

fists, and videoing themselves tearfully renouncing/confessing their

supremacy, all the while confirmed in their bravery for standing up for,

using their privilege to realise, an objective recalibration of the

dominant ideology.

They will not mobilise against the thirteen billion pounds of armaments

to be sold by the UK state to the Saudi Arabian state for the

continuation of its war in Yemen. The secret of the missing mass

opposition to the war is attributable to the corporate sponsors of

mobilisation qua mobilisation, the proprietors of the logistical

apparatus for moving masses behind hashtags, and who would have nothing

to gain from capitalising such a movement. And it is for reason of the

capital flight from their representation that the lives of those caught

in the moment's worst humanitarian disaster will never matter. But these

are arguments made by reactionaries.

And another thing. The toppling of the oppressors' statues is a further

symptom of the aesthetic monumentalising turn in consciousness - the

made-for-TV symbolic image of a crowd's recursive attack upon another

symbolic image activates the mass conditioned affect repertoire and

floods its associated reward pathways with

belonging/purpose/significance, whilst finding corollaries in the same

trends moving in the opposite direction: religious sentimentalisation

attached to, for example, the historically distant events of The War,

commemorated more with each passing decade, and also in the now

commonplace celebration of everyday heroes and the expediency of fallen

martyrs. The kitsch alternatives to racist art that are currently

emerging from the Bristol milieu, that present themselves as a

new-sincerity, is qualitatively totalitarian and cynically opportunist

in its retreat into cultic fetish and monovalent propaganda. In

political discourse, there is an increasing trend towards

sanctification, and the sequestering of objects from discourse in order

to secure them within a single meaning - in part, this is a response to

the rising rate of human stupidity generated as online culture. However,

the general trend towards producing sentimental attachments to

representations that ratchets the expanding category of that in the

world which may not be questioned, but which, at the same time, also

mines the field of questioning as such. There has never been a better

time to erect beautiful statues to great racists.

The ideological use of sentimental identification is perceptible in

certain threads of argumentation against the dispersive all lives matter

push back, where images of a particularity are shown to take priority

over a generality - if a house is on fire, one does not shout, all

houses matter; if an individual suffers a heart attack, one does not

shout, all organs matter. The bootstrap logic of its motivational sports

star/entertainer advocates propounding how every hardworking individual

can be a star in their own life if only the playing field were level,

not only suppresses other registers of possible engagement, and to

continue the examples, as if there is no experience of housing crisis

other than that of fire, there is no health crisis other than cardiac

arrest, but also suggests that capital's production of crisis as the

general mechanism of its self-revolutionising life-world is of less

objective significance, and the exercise of a sort of privilege to

mention it, than the elevated symbolic register of optimising individual

life- chances as narratives within the ever-rationalising productive

environment currently circulating as an institutionalised mea maxima

culpa. The problematic for the critique of totality is that it is now

always vulnerable to the strategic allegation of racism made from less

radical positions - a lesson the Labour Party is currently

interiorising.

The conditioning mechanism buried within widely distributed symbols of

categorically unquestionable imperatives, of mobilisation and

righteousness, and the orchestrated affective responses that they

trigger, serve to ease the passage of populations across difficult

thresholds, from lockdown to locked on. The potential idea that the goal

of corporate anti-racism has nothing to do with anti-racism is precisely

the object degraded by current aspirational advertising. In its

representation of every domain of the community of capital, white skin

may exchange at a higher rate than black skin, except that is in the

culture rackets of leftism and advertising, the two plague-ridden organs

of capital that are most concerned with the digestion and evacuation of

class consciousness.

But the calculations intrinsic to the Americanising theory of privilege,

the theoretical basis for the BLM movement, wherein the impoverishment

of an abstract child's life chances are abstractly measured against

another impoverished abstract child's life chances, already naturalises

the environment of relations constrained to competitive exchanges of

privately owned quantities, where every subject demand must appear both

in conformity with the trademark of its own community and in opposition

to the proprietorial characteristics of its market competitors.

As a quantitive approach, privilege theory may illuminate the mechanism

of assigning value to fixed categories within the selective mechanisms

of social institutions, the operation and maintenance of contingent

demarcations and differentiations within labour market is essential to

market forces, but as a theory it only corrodes the possibility of

subjective consciousness when re-applied at the level of individuals

already subsumed by the war of all against all. Privilege theory won't

secure a greater proportion of social wealth for the black working class

except perhaps at the expense of the white working class - although the

black bourgeoisie will do well from the theory's institutionalisation,

its management of the cross-class BLM movement will advance its interest

as a faction within the state, where it will use its ideology, like

every other private interest, to further decompose class consciousness.

But that is just another, and another thing. Then, it is also clear that

the rightists will draw transgressive energy from their refusal of

capital's investment in Black Lives Matter and by doing so will attract

those other malcontents previously drawn to social revolution but now

denied any discourse but pathology - where the strike was, depression,

anxiety, addiction, now is. The other rightist talking

point/motif/dogwhistle generated by anti-racism is the ideology of

self-improvement deployed by the left wing of neo-liberalism as a

corollary of the quantifying relativisa- tion of, and blame attached to,

all those crises not attributable to race. Within what discourse, if not

the provided Catch 22, either fascism or medicalisation, is the

not-black identifying individual to make sense of his alienation from

the social product?

The dilemma for the working class is simply put: either enter into a

cross class anti-racist pact that directly contradicts its own interest,

or abandon itself to the behavioural repertoire triggered and remotely

manipulated by populism, which also directly contradicts its own

interest. The second of the options is already selected, and will

continue to intensify as it is refracted and intensified through

networking algorithms. The heat generated by the current race war does

not contradict capital, and it i to the advantage of the politically

constituted bourgeoisie, as it naturally places itself on the side of

history, at the point it expropriates the history of modern slavery, and

against the ignorant white mob, that seems all too ready to slide into

the caricatured role assigned to it, enraged by the subliminal

complexity of the exploitative apparatus which, by the very structure of

its class position, it is precluded from bringing into consciousness.

It is a principle of the mechanics of indirect domination that energy

generated by protests against particularities of the system is

metabolised into the orchestration of intersubjective struggles between

demarcated interest groups as the means to foreclose upon the

generalisation of revolt. That the reductio ad absurdum inherent to the

either/or paths available to class consciousness has been taken up by

the left as a political principle must be a source of great hilarity to

the reactionaries, who are themselves already a dark mirror product of

the self-same leftism.

It is for the reason that the party of capital employs representations

of both anti-racism and racism, of both feminism and misogyny, as

attractor basins for affect driven mobilisations of identity, and that

the right loudly identifies this tendency, that it becomes so difficult,

and delicate, a problem for communists to trace how such representations

operate systematically, and are used to impede consciousness. It is in

the nature of transference that the flow of affect persists but the

triggering part- object to which it attaches may be substituted for

other objects. In street politics, the mobilisation of the crowd, its

heightened state of responsiveness to catalysing messages, persists but

the mutable cause it mobilises for, can and will be substituted.

The white anti-racist movement, currently motivated along an affect

pathway by a sort of righteous pearl clutching and moral fascism,

remains eminently suggestible to the next message. Whatever the trigger,

the state of mobilisation remains constant - in the successive prisings

open of the part-attachments to part-objects, at the end of the

transference chain, is always that gripping onto the last links, work

and shopping. If racism is a structure, and it is, then anti-racism is

also a structure, implying a set of sub-system tendencies and

correctives operating within the reproduction of the totality -

capitalism is the only social relation to generate the representation of

anti-racism as a mechanism of governance operating to the standard of

the general logic of emancipation moving towards abstraction.

And again, it is rightist paranoia to even consider the question: if the

security apparat is not actively utilising implicatory accusations of

racist apology and rape apology to disrupt radical formations then its

ends are being achieved autonomously within those formations - another

case of niche opportunism exploiting naturally occurring events. But

even so, if a hostile entity desired to take down, for example, the

meddlesome mayor of a South Korean city, then a well placed agent could

do it with an allegation of sexual harassment (even within the reformist

project, Sanders was blocked at the level of feminism and Corbyn at the

level of racism). It is certainly a treacherous path to take, as we find

ourselves, at last, beset by the same ideological tendencies that

characterised French ultraleftism's elision with conspiratorial truthism

and Holocaust denial under the rubric of its received anti-American

critique of the spectacle.

It is almost impossible to resist the temptation to observe how the

export of the American preoccupation with representations of race and

gender, coupled to the bourgeois assertion of moral individual

responsibility for the fragments of ideology that occupy and interrupt

personal consciousness, termed checking, acts to constantly interrupt

the possibility of consciousness, my own included. The veteran returns

from every war less comprehending of his participation in the next.

Whilst it is true that the West's racism/anti-racism contradiction, and

the category confusion it engages, makes no difference to the class

struggle which is now practically constrained to China, India, parts of

West Africa and the southern americas, I also cannot see any resolution

to it at the level of individual involvement. I continue to be of the

opinion that capital cannot be engaged except at the level of the labour

process and at the level of the wage as its representation. And I

continue to be persuaded that street manifestations are inherently

bourgeois.

At an inter-subjective level, I do not know if it is possible for groups

to organise across ethnic and gender identties - I personally would not

trust an avowedly anti-racist, anti-sexist white male; how can we not

retrospectively interpret the decision of the populist Commune magazine

to falsely represent capital as patriarchal as an ironic and cynical

prefiguration of what was subsequently described as its rape apology?

The white radical male as ally recommences the radical impoverishment of

theory, and embodies the movement of representation into critique.

Beyond the undoubted voluptuous pleasures afforded by moral exigency, I

would want to know what really animates these bearers of radical

opinion. The operation of the dompte-regard is again found here, the

white radical's failure to express his first world problems signals a

structured assumption of superiority - the deployment of self-conscious

privilege in the interests of the movement is itself an operation of a

privileged status that structures the impossibility of realising the

politics, and reasserts a predominant position within the movement. The

white radical's freedom to act in the interest of others is itself a

form of leadership - but there is an alternative, the struggle against

himself as vector of capital. Nor would I be inclined to support the

engagement with others, even at the level of discussion, on the basis of

gender or race politics, as I would immediately sense the falsity in

it - the objective structuring of such encounters would always prove

decisive. I hereby counsel against all alliances, and their

representation within so-called social movements. Allies are less

reliable, and more dangerous, than enemies.

I also concur that every writer, thinker, artist and organiser should be

immediately no-platformed - that they should engage the world as if

their audience were goons and nothing but. On the other hand, as I am

relatively still able to comment on this - and what difference would it

make anyway? - it seems to me that there is potentially something

irreducibly subjective within the discourse of blackness, and in

particular its Afro-pessimist and Afro- nihilist strains, as it sets

itself against the bourgeois ideology of anti-racism. It seems that

there is a compelling logic in this milieu's amplification of the demand

for reparation payments within the anti-racist movement, and towards

separatism, and thus against all alliances with whites - this in itself,

if nothing else, should shake off the movement's neo-liberal sponsors

and drive a wedge into the conventional aesthetics of the anti-racist

block.

On the other, other hand, let's be clear, reactionaries also make these

recommendations - race separatism will overlap with race realism. Even

so, it is possible that the most conscious members of this separatist

milieu will later break off and re-enter the orbit of communist

thinking, although, hilariously, as a manoeuvre in anticipation-

prevention, communism in a late return to programma- tism should also

never absorb such tendencies except as instantiations of the human

community at its fullest amplitude.

The question of the degree to which an individual is corrupted by

ideology or not, whether they are sexist or racist or not is a nonsense,

of course they are wholly corrupted, of course they are embodiments

ofthe operational principles of social domination in every detail of

their person, just as they express the principles of social domination

in their opposition to the principles of social domination. Every

individual is capable of terrible involvements, and ofthe profound

weakness of not living according to the emancipatory value-set which

they desire to adhere to - the historical impossibility of existence

without exchange is the essence of Totality. But moral infirmity is

objectively meaningless. Communism is not a system of ethics.

The housing blocks, the factories, the prisons are designed specifically

to contain damaged people, there is nothing anywhere but damaged people,

but to represent them as originators of that violence is ideology, it is

another lever on aesthetic sensibility and sentimentalising

identifications, and nothing else. All such damaged people should be

released and the institutions containing them should be disassembled,

even though, and especially because, they are occupied with racists,

rapists, murderers, thieves, and abusers.

Human beings are inherently bad, the structures containing them are

inherently worse, but these are the materials we must work with in order

to increase the proportion of consciousness within sociality. None of

the work of communisation - the objective increase in rate and

proportion of self-reflective consciousness as a social relation may be

commenced upon until the factory system, the control net, and production

itself, that is, the totality of systems by which automated process

inhibits consciousness, are escaped. The environmentalising movement by

which damaged lives are healed is very painstaking, and quiet, not

silent exactly but murmuring, even so it has nothing to do with the

repressive desublimation of street manifestations.

Individual opinion, individual behaviour, individual character are

sequelae of domination, such afflictions cannot be resolved at the level

of individual resolution; good intentions don't beat ingrained habits.

No matter the effort employed in self-critique, such individuals, set

against idealist categories, will always be not anti-racist enough, they

will always be not feminist enough and they will remain so for as long

as their environment is constant. White male communists have nothing to

add, not even their affirmation, to the particular struggle, they have

no object for the work of their critique but the totality of social

relations - they should absolutely disengage from populist and leftist

involvements. Social binds are only released recursively, at an order of

organisation higher than that at which they are manifested. As

individuals, we should give up on the idea that we are agents of social

transformation.

Communism's inextricable kafka-trap is activated by the unavoidable

realisation that anti-racism is an ideological stimulant by which normal

economic functioning is currently reimposed onto quiescent, and locked

down populations, which had been, as a consequence of their very

inertia, drifting away from the productive apparatus and into the

hypnogogic or reverie-state at the threshold of consciousness. For the

moment, anti-racism has become that requisite distracting noise on the

screen that is not portraying the conditioning mechanism by which the

masses are to be persuaded back to work.

Black Lives Matter has eclipsed No Going Back as the sloganised

encapsulation of a possible engagement with the present. The critique of

everything is inundated once again by the American particular; a sort of

grieving in general is suppressed by the representation of this

particular grief. The Party of Capital rationalises the situation

strategically: if racist systems are to be confronted for what they

really are, then logically, they should be powered up again to take

effective, restorative, action. The spectacle of political

representation is the alibi for the operation of the whole.

The class interest of the Black Lives Matter movement becomes

operational at the level of the application of post-fordist

productivity/efficiency reforms to bourgeois institutions - the

ideological function of inclusivity strategies at the level of valued

individuals is designed to break collective bargaining, whilst its

anti-microaggression training, countering bias workshops, white

fragility interventions, maximise the opportunity for micro-management

and surveillance of the workforce. As a managerial strategy,

neo-anti-racism is an adequate distraction from wage freezes, increased

hours and taxes, and mass redundancies.

From the subjective pole of the class contradiction, there is no

struggle but for increasing wages and reducing work hours, and pursued

to the point that the institutions and the class relation itself become

unsustainable. From the objective pole of the contradiction, capital

expresses its supreme ambivalence, and there was no ambivalence before

capital - on the one hand, it looks to abolish work, expel labour and

replace class with more efficient product- control apparatuses, but on

the other, the improved efficiency of reformed institutions, and the

ideological integration of the workforce around company inclusivity

programmes, is inseparable from the expanded reproduction of Totality.

From the standpoint of the party of capital, if anti-racism is doable,

or at least conceivable, then salvaging the natural world, or continuing

quarantine indefinitely is much less so - at the level of energetics,

the less costly out will always be selected above the more costly out,

but it will also be selected in order to suppress the claims of its

competitors; the expedient out blocks the untenable outs, the

unpalatable outs, and the unprofitable outs. By directing popular

attention to a single intractable issue, which must bear the burden of

all complaint, representation will eventually exhaust protest against

the present state of things by means of sheer over-determination and the

perpetual transference onto new objects. We are fated to live in a state

of depleted discontentment with the enabled forms of discontent.

The development of received forms of complaint, and establishing the

proper channels for opposition to itself, is the highest art of

governance: H was Papa's new Hat/ He wore it on his head/ Outside it was

completely black/ But inside it was red. Psychoanalysis emphasises the

organisation of desire within the hysteric's discourse, which is always

less a matter of the desired object than of where the hysteric is

desiring from. The white hysteria of the 'we stand with you' milieu,

follows the same patterning within previous solidarity, anti-fascist,

and anti-imperialist iterations of leftism, and which organises its

demands through its representation of what it imagines is foundational

black experience and to which it assigns a Father's authority. The white

allies of BLM are desperate to get it right whilst the falsity of their

experience, their desiring from an other's position, inevitably

implicates them within conventional guilty racialising stereotypes,

which in turn accounts for the incongruous vehemence of their

protestations.

Of more general significance to the critique of those ideologies which

induce hysteria as an apparatus for intensifying street mobilisations,

is the remarkable capacity ofthe hysteric to attenuate the complexity of

the life-world to their own, borrowed, enthusiasm for the desired

object, the cause, which they imagine, because they imagine the Other

desires it, is also the desire of everyone else, hence the current

sloganised formulation, and coercive ratchet, silence equals violence.

It might be argued, in terms of theatre as plague, in terms of

convulsive beauty, that the hysteric's contribution is, at the least,

confrontational, and a catalyst of events, but it is in the nature ofthe

hysterical form that it is structured around mobilising others through

an over-amplified appeal made from a position of helplessness based on

real, imagined or manipulated grievances, and is productive only of a

spectacle of confrontation orchestrated around the dramatisation of

impasse, and all the while deploying a paratreptic strategy of

distracting from the authority position organising the desire for such

dramatics.

The strategy of collapsing the world to the other's desire necessarily

banishes all other desires and other registers of desire - a

circumstance that is uniquely manipulable by whatever forces control

communications technology and are capable of mobilising representations

of the other as authority. Similarly, the subjective pole of military

discipline depends upon a state of hysterical preparedness, organised

through irrational tasks and routinised deprivation, to receive direct

orders. The diffusive hysterical internalisation of desire from another

is the prepared ground for, but a distinct state from, command based

mobilisitions - first derangement, then marching in formation.

The discourse of the hysteric, because it is driven from the position of

an other's desire and is organised around the internalised but opaque

imperatives of the other, is directed towards the ideal of identity

between speaker and spoken. For the hysteric, one is what one speaks;

speech acts are the decisive signifier of allegiance, sincerity and

authenticity. Because he is acutely sensitive to the externality of his

own values whilst also unable to acknowledge this, and so pressured

between shifting states of displacement and disassociation, he is

preoccupied by uncovering what others really think, the codes, and

motifs of their hidden complicities. But there are no secret opinions,

and no individual is reducible to their adherence to a value set - there

are only psychological states relatively and reactively stimulated by

every individual's personal relay of social values transmitted, and

relatively and actively energised, by market forces. Nevertheless, the

hysteric seeks to hold others responsible for what they say, the

accusatory form and its implied vigilance, consumes his waking state, as

if other people's words and ideas were their personal inheritance, and a

measure of their existential worth.

The hysteric is disturbed by the ordinary function of language which

facilitates the individual's expression of error as a means of

self-orientation; utterance is always error moving through the world and

more or less self- correcting, via the attribution mechanism, as it

encounters and rubs against the errors uttered by others... for this

reason, where speech is returned to an idealised vehicle for proper

thinking, by means of censorship, no-platform- ing, cancelling, shaming,

muting and so on, and where the perversity of ordinary expression, is

denied and its content hypostasised, hysteria becomes contagious and

enters into a state of runaway up to the point where the other's desire

is forced to intervene directly, usually in the form of comedy, and thus

releases the crowd from its agitation.

The problematic of identity populism is generated from its mistaken

assumptions around the functions of language and how discourse

integrates within state institutions. The issue here is not how an

individual asserts its self- understanding and seeks to expropriate

energy from the life-world so as to sustain the reproduction of its own

being - the problem is how its fixed sense of that being, and its

proprietorial resistance to the possibility that it might express itself

in terms of je suis un autre is so simply integrated into the

ideological apparatus. The problematic of identity becomes active in the

use, deployment and circulation of representations of selfhood as

political correctives to, and constraining boundaries upon, lived

experience. The self is a politicised object but not a political agent.

The trap of identity populism is sprung wherever the self is persuaded

to police its natural tendency to exceed the images of its ideal ego,

and is induced to deny the contradiction of what it is in order to add

value to its representation. The tendency to value the categorical ideal

over lived experience, draws identitarian tendencies into the orbit of

neo-liberalism, the cold embrace of which is less a concession to

popular struggle, and the long march of emancipation through the

institutions, than the result of a basic cost/benefit calculation - the

productive apparatus has discovered it is cheaper to recognise, and

capitalise niche identity markets as a compensatory measure of

inclusion, as a path of least resistance, than it is to increase wages

the proliferation of state recognised identities is a corollary to the

suppression of workplace collective bargaining.

Even so, official recognition of a demarcated category- dependent

community only transposes the vulnerability of its members into other

registers. The social construct of identity inevitably draws its every

instantiation into compromise, and complicity, with the forces it

imagined its structure naturally repudiated - identities almost

immediately begin transmitting enemy messages as their own so as to

defend themselves against the claims of competing other identities (see

the impact of the race realists and those who conceive themselves as

gender critical).

Every individual is equally a mouthpiece for the work of language and is

inevitably driven to become the veritable telltale heart, spectacularly

drawing attention to its implication within that which its ideology

demands it suppresses. The hysteric finds it incomprehensible that

meaning must radically diverge from intention, but the inexorable work

of the social relation will always exceed the subject's will to control

the parameters of its own discourse; the hysteric will not countenance

the proposal that he fatally operates against the cause to which he has

so sincerely pledged allegiance - he is only appalled that other people

are hypocrites.

Or rather, because hysteria intensifies as it approaches the threshold

of self-knowledge, as it is inevitably drawn along the spiral path upon

which it begins to suspect its own errors, the hysteric is both

uncomprehending of the escape of meaningfulness but also all too knowing

of the potential gains that are to be extracted from such divergences -

hystericised politics becomes operational as its paratrepsis is deployed

against the impossibility of securing its own position as morally

irreproachable, and so externalises as gotchas, ambushes and exposes the

hypocrisy of others.

Social production and moral integrity cannot appear in the same space.

If racism is a structure, then denunciation of hapless racists, as

products of such systems, logically becomes not only redundant, and

arbitrarily selective, but also erotically gratuitous - a sadistic

perversion ofthe will to dominate. The end point of Privilege Theory is

the erotic-compulsive intersubjective declaration, you are a racist as a

climax in itself. The declaration, which is not even an allegation that

might be answered, is met with a shrug, if so, then what? Yes, we are

fallen, yes we are sinners - it is right to feel shame but there is

nothing to be done to relieve it.

A lovable buffoon scrawls, Dickens racist on Broadstairs museum. It

makes no difference. Everyone is racist, including the buffoon. History

has fixed us in our place and there is no historical evidence that

knowledge of a condition could reverse its momentum - there is much more

evidence to the contrary. Things change but not according to will -

consciousness and agency are a contradiction. For this reason, the

ideology, use your privilege to change the system, mistakes the function

of demarcation within the labour market - a higher wage does not confer

proportionally increased agency. Either human beings are socially

conditioned, or they are morally autonomous. Either there is racism, or

there are racists; individuals are either products of a process, or they

are Robinson Crusoes. At the level of system-change, it is futile to

denounce another as a racist - at best, what may be achieved, is to

trace the implication of individuals within systems of dependency.

And for the same reason, if moral responsibility and not blindly

abstracting social forces are constitutive of world- making, then the

ideological proposition of a revolutionary minority acting impeccably in

accord with its own access to objective truth, and against the abject

complicities of others, would then run against the possibility of

communism - or rather, by its own logic, if good people doing bad things

for a good end was the decisive condition of the life-world, it would

irrevocably cancel the project of communism altogether, at which point

the emergence of real democracy, the bourgeoisie's project of education,

law and exchange, would become the reformable objective basis for such a

politics.

Which brings us face to face with the question of what it is that would

really prevent a return to the infinite expansion of capital, and it is

not a sequence of vaulting expropriations, it is not a matter of

accelerating the forces of production beyond the fetter of value, it is

not progressive, historical, realising, abolishing or sublative movement

at all. The exit from Capital is incomprehensible and featureless,

Ballard locates it as the enormous space, which we may also identify as

a corollary of Tarkovsky's zone - there is no path but, as the song has

it, we make the path by walking it - and the walking it, the subjective

component, is an invariant, a pilgrimage. Communism is going back after

all, a radical dispersive deceleration of the forces of production, and

the willed adherence to an, albeit deliberately invented, therapeutic

self-grounding tradition and mythos - it is a going back, but not in

history, not to an earlier point of departure, but to that which has not

yet appeared in history.

How strange and broken I must seem as I raise the Kierkeg- aardian whip,

hesitating before a command I do not have the power to give. How strange

to consider a course of action for all of which I am already the last

surviving fragment - what audacity! To go on, to stop, to return - there

is nothing else, the recombination of elements is writing, and communism

has no source, no energy, but its transfer from, and the metabolisation

by, the writing of it. Communism is writing, as capital is images. K

writes: to stand in quivering stillness beneath the whip is an act of

will, tremors indicate the strain upon the body, and the necessary

effort to maintain such stillness, is an expression of the absolute, a

mustelid line, like an autonomous sinew, like that sacred shape of

emptiness which may be sculpted between things, like an angelically

inscribed and invisible graffiti that is evidence of the reauthoring of

the world, but also the left handed profanities of those, such as

Alireza Japalaghy, who have become the writing.

Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar

types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the

other, on the exhibition value ofthe work. Artistic production begins

with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult.

One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being

on view. The elk portrayed by the man of the Stone Age on the walls of

his cave was an instrument of magic. He did expose it to his fellow men,

but in the main it was meant for the spirits. Today the cult value would

seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. Certain statues of

gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas

remain covered nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval

cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level. With the

emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing

opportunities for the exhibition of their products

Part III: My name is Ridicolosamente

Fellow Creature,

Shall we say, it’s because it’s a joke that we know it’s real? I am

addressing you with the greeting used by the Ranters, I use it as a

sincere irony because the domain of the creatura, or rather the

participation of Ranters as creatures in the world, is now not an option

for us. We later Ranters may no longer return to that state of nature

that the historical Ranters could also not return to; but the

impossibility of our return, after Lacan’s dompte-regard is now located

symbolically - our intensities and their falling away are abruptly

facilitated as it were, by the triumph of the relation over the

address - to assert fellowship where secret societies are supplanted by

niche markets, to address an idealist commonality where abstract

equivalence sets use in confrontation with use, is but a sincerest

irony.

In general terms, this writing is concerned with what it is to set out

and to then return back, it is digressive, associative, and no doubt

maddening - but it is also a reflection of the time of lockdown, written

over the course of the three months of the interregnum and should be

considered as a companion piece to the more, but not much more,

straightforward text I am not Cliuang written over the same period. The

writing began as a personal letter which was never sent because I felt

its contents could upset the recipient whom I do not know personally,

but it retains some structure of this earlier form.

The writing revisits something I wrote a decade ago for the anarchist

magazine The Anvil, itself a project of return to print from the digital

world, and in part was begun in response to the death of the editor of

that magazine. The content begins in contemplation of the Ranters, a

Seventeenth Century anti-sect sect, which like witches possibly never

existed, and then alights variously upon current events,

curses/blessings, theological readings of prodigality, marxist readings

of the Odyssey, and Japanese hold outs, amongst the other usual magpie

brie a brae and non sequiturs. I have attempted to retain, or return to,

the motif of return throughout but sometimes the path is rather

convoluted.

And so, we shall say for now, it’s from the form of living arrived at by

going out on a limb and then either inching out still further, always

that one inch further, in the inching on, or the other, the leaping off

altogether at the unsupportable, bowing, snapping end, it is from the

damage done by and to the ones who leave, that we begin to imagine how

they will come back and to what purpose. It is all the same. Either way,

it’s the same, both shall stand, the inching and the leaping, as

indicators of a restless itinerancy, that and the mercurial combination

of leaping free association and cunning-inching recantation, of leaping

bibliomancy and inching astrology, of inching and self-dislocating

logics and the leaps in contemplative pipe smoking, of staying one step

ahead of the chasing pack and tarrying amongst the autonomous skirts

lifting, of lazy, licentious songs and gestural pulpit blockading, by

this willed and raucous Brownian motion of self-individualising

secessionism, so it is, by these means that the millenarian participants

within the Ranter-Quaker milieu arrived somehow at the greeting Fellow

Creature by which means they both drew out from pious ranks the ones

they did not know but recognising each other as belonging to the same

extremophile tendency threading through all farthest things, whilst at

the same time invoking a benign commonality of the truly living, that

category of the otherwise, and of the reconstituted home or community,

the lair of such strange strangers - by this greeting, fellow creature

they reset the problem of, and summarised the tendency by which, the

proximity of all to all is encountered from its most distant and

banished exteri-

There is, in the limit set by heavy handed authority, as placeholder for

all natural constraint, a distinct quality of absurd freedom that is

absent where such authority is also absent - in the free world, death

itself is abolished, there is only a proliferation of the living;

different and successive individuals but always the same life. I am

thinking here of how the outside is generated from out of the intimacy

between repression and profundity: of Ava Gardener’s Pandora at the

point of death, ‘it is as if we are under a spell and outside of time’;

and again, of Hugo’s Last Days of the Condemned Man; or, where Paul

Bowles, in The Sheltering Sky considers the actually finite number any

of us will consciously engage with the sunrise and freely draw the

conclusion of his own mortality.

There is in this external constraint placed upon the subject’s sense of

time and place, the objective sparking of the possibility of, and so

aesthetic appreciation for, another time, another place, in which the

minutiae, the seconds and inches become unusually, and profoundly,

significant - Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. Consciousness

is nothing but the consciousness of this other circumstance, it’s

elongated duration set in the narrowest confines, set negatively against

the pressure of what is. What it is, what it is, to return with a start

to the remembrance: not much more now.

Let us say then, we are like the Ballardian character, himself echoing

Webster’s I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take

their exits; and ‘tis found They go on such strange geometrical hinges,

who has three months to live and finds that this plunge pool of finitude

becomes like a limitless sequence of heightened states where experience

both intensifies and escapes inexorability - my god, it’s full of stars.

But then, even exultation in the end, as it also draws out, becomes

heavy with waiting, and repetition.

Just today, I was considering the elder blossom, the last of the

fruiting trees here to bloom in Spring, the passing of which signals the

beginning of summer, and I contemplated how it is that I always welcome

the first of its appearances, the opening night as it were, but becoming

accustomed to the extended run, which after all is not beyond a few

weeks, I do not even notice, and much less grieve for, the day the final

bloom fades for another year. Towards the end of May and the beginning

of June, each day could be the one, but I have never registered it, and

yet, you might say, spoiling the effect, I register it now by marking my

failure to mark, or as Tom Waits almost put it, I place a flower on my

idea of the flower’s grave.

And it is at this crossroads that we two, each having set out along

their own bowing, bending limb of the branching bush of self-actual-

isation, who having set out from the iron rice bowl of behavioural

conventionality, are now also compelled to uncover within our projects

the perpetual recurrence of morgellons-like threads foretelling our

fated, Ariadne-patterned, return. We cannot prevent our own checking-in,

our resurfacing on-grid, our bobbing plastically amid the trash vortex.

We have become the refreshed link to all that we cannot leave behind.

Or, we are always ur-crashing in the same ur-car

The Seventeenth Century’s sudden invention of individuality, which

arrives in the world as an irresistible desire to leave the world, and

which by accident creates another immediate world overlaying what is

rejected, also resets the nature of the tension between the order of the

creatura and the order of the pleroma. By self-estrange- ment from

social relations based in the local traditions of personal domination,

the millenarians uncovered, within their own delinquency, the Ideal and

its subset, the congregation of agreeable outsiders, by which particular

belonging is characterised in setting out from general belonging, but in

the name of returning back to a state of ideal belonging that shall be

located, as the blues song has it, further on up the road. That which is

evoked by fellow creature is precisely the point of disappearance both

intimately near at hand and utopianly far distant where judgment,

vengeance and redemption converge.

If the Ranter-Quaker’s fellow creature asserted the possibility of a

community of self-separating things as a return to a higher order from

the furthest reaches of social derangement and decomposition, then we

are set the problem of the hell-mode of the very heaven imagined by the

Ranters - the veritable totalising steady state, or rather the

cybernetics, of eternal return, where all exits trigger the regenerative

ratchet of the same via the absolute Ideal’s molochian consumption of

its own cultivation of difference. I'm joking, I'm joking.

Fellow creature, allow me to say, fellow stranger, in our own efforts to

break free, we too uncover that we are at the end still beholden to this

velvet fist in an iron glove, so I hail you as creature as stranger,

fellow as fellow, somewhat nostalgically in the spirit that the Ranters

recognised the nature of living forms belonging to the order of the

creatura, knowing that such strangerness is all but impossible now,

knowing that we are incorporated more than we are self-separating, more

the same than different, more conditioned than autonomous.

As those strangers who once greeted each other in the name of belonging

to an impossible community derived from a freshly constituted cosmic

creatura, so now I remember to greet you, how many of our communications

lack an appropriate mechanism of hailing, in the name of an impossible

estrangement from the fully automated community that is realised as

pleroma and nothing but.

We might, in this encounter, at least try to imagine what it was like to

pass naked divine through a low tavern, to swear when swearing before

puritanical authorities afforded as true a sense of physical exultation

as the blackbird’s song in April; we can imagine when it was that

individual autonomy instantiated cosmic significance and what it was to

be a stranger, now that, since the end of the Cold War, strangers have

been discontinued. We can imagine from the standpoint of these depleted

times, what existential abundance might have felt like. And in so

imagining, we can also consider what it would mean to leave home and

what it would mean to consider returning home in circumstances other

than these in which we now find ourselves. More than a decade ago, I

wrote the following:

I recognise the movement of human consciousness firstly in the social

tendency to band together, and secondly, in the counter-tendency to

divergence and secession (hence, the Ibn Arabi effect). We might say

that Intelligence is thus always defined in terms of the minority

position 's separation from what is established whereas interest is

expressed in terms of a falling-back-upon the arrived at, seemingly

natural, apparen tly residual, solidarity of the larger group. From this

hypothesis, it is a small step to perceive organ isations as machines

for man ufacturing the agents of what I have called the Ibn ‘Arabi

effect, that is, organising systems produce the in tolerable particulars

that are necessary to generate the membership's specific complaints

against, and divergence from, the structures which constrain it.

http://theanvilreview.org/print/the_ibn_arabi_effect/

Some time in the 6th Century, the poet Wang Han wrote the line, how many

soldiers ever come home? All at once, he is confronted as if by the

shelter afforded beneath an arching bridge, or as if by the meaning of

what it is to live in the thought of the impossibility of return, or as

if by the thought that systemically forgetting everything was exactly

the same as remembering it, or as if Ballard were writing on the sum of

an individual’s experiences and characterising it as an act of reverse

cataloguing, where the deliberate scrambling of codes becomes its

characteristic trait - just as we may only know of the Beaker People

from their habit of smashing pots.

Every soldier who has ever separated himself from the close surroundings

of familiar attachments, and goes to war, must pay for the experience by

dying one of the deaths reserved for those living on the soldier-path -

lucky is he over whom the path closes. Wang Han asks us, why laugh when

they fall asleep on the sand? The soldier who sets outward to engage the

world’s forces, to express the world’s forces, is soon beset from all

sides and inevitably absorbed into the ranks of the fallen. By one means

or another, they are all lost, they all fall away, joining the ranks of

the fallen, even if many of them must also first die the inglorious

death that is survival.

The dislocation that has its source in the accident of surviving, which

is the perfected form of becoming separated from home, is the affliction

that restrains the survivor from ever truly returning to the condition

of the living. Surviving one’s own separation from the world is always a

traumatising humiliation, a barrier thrown up between the one who has

endured consequence, and the truly living, whom he grasps at, from

outside, as if from the principle, the older the environment, the slower

its metabolism, as if the old place were both unchanged and

unchangeable, but also as if it were caught in the molten surface

tension of a camera obscura, or as if time itself had stood still,

swallowing itself in ceaseless self-adjustment, just there in Shere in

Surrey.

The wandering figure severed from his formative influences is

transformed into a stranger whenever he is later confronted with the

immediacy of the particular world to which he may never truly belong

again. There is then, set within the project of return, the problematic

of another return, wherein the return to before, the earlier state,

races its chariot against its other homecoming, the return to the

present and the recommencement of that another and another and another

life which is bound perpetually to the same place.

If the soldier-poet had not set out, but set out along another path, the

setting out that is commenced in staying put, then another, but equally

necessary, return path would inevitably open before him. The return of

the sedentary wanderer is embarked upon as a damascene flash, as another

rupture with the world, as another starting awake, and as that return to

somewhere else which may only be effected in the home town, but which is

also ritualised, half-falsified, by the local traditions and festivals

which, by half-punctuating the world’s cyclical return to steady state,

half succeeding in half opening the whole by means of faithfully

observing this peculiarity and this perversity.

The unprecedented divergent, the swerving event, is conditioned by the

home town’s unswerving preparedness for the constancy in both transience

and eternity... and contrariwise, where a city’s conditions are

themselves in flux, its particulars, products and dependencies, are

always and ever the same. As an event itself, the city is driven to

repress events. Castenada translates Jimenez: The people who have loved

me will pass away, and the town will burst anew every year.

In both senses, return involves the struggle to maintain what Bataille

calls the self’s discontinuous being, that distinct outline containing

the integrated history of the wanderer as a locatable and particular

self that is maintained, by great effort of will, across time, and

sustained against the temptations and erosions of disintegrating

external forces. As Freud discovered, the organised self, as complex

product of eros, seeks the path by which it may succeed in achieving

sufficient control over itself and thereby discharge all its energies

ecstatically into the abyss.

The compulsion to repeat, and the subset fort-da game, is an organising

impulse of the self’s systems directed towards an obsessive going back

over or replaying past causal sequences so as to capture that portion of

available energy necessary for overriding its own homeostatic tendency

to routinised habits. At the level of behaviour, compulsion breaks

repertoire. By flooding its own system with energy mined from past

events, the self both disorganises and is absorbed back into the

continuity of outlinelessness. The self’s desire to rupture from the

self, as achieved through pleasurable release and ecstatic states of

compulsion, trance and rapture involves taking the path of return as

other, the path of not-becoming, where the achieved state of

non-self-identity is negated in the greater movement of identity with

environmentally induced evanescing effects, and timelapsed processes.

In their presentation of Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens, Adorno

and Horkheimer perceive this confrontation between incompatible orders

of return: to the continuity of the living past on one side where all

that was consigned to the Underworld is redeemed as an immediate form of

knowledge or wakening which is also a serpentine bending back upon, and

cycling within, what it is as itself; and on the other side the return

to the project or praxis of the self, a coming-to as integral to the

immediacy of the moment’s labour, the oared momentum taking Odysseus

back towards an Ithaca that is located on the horizon of willed effort.

Of note here, is Adorno and Horkheimer’s assertion that the compulsive

content of the Sirens’ song is their perfect knowledge of the past. The

song is so powerfully seductive because it proposes an immediate and

redemptive return to an earlier state in which the wandering

soldier-poet may become absorbed into the past’s continuous state, and

so live within it stripped of the strain of having to maintain the

self-interrupting, porlockian I of discontinuous being. If the return to

praxis supposes the self’s expropriation and metabolisation of the

world, then the return to the state of what-has-passed, at it’s fullest

amplitude, involves abandonment of self to a porous state at the point

of incorporation by what Freud calls, the self’s ‘oceanic’ prehistory.

As implied by Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘prisoner at a concert’ remark,

the social mechanism of species being binds the self’s tendency towards

a state of diversion (and, and, and) orthopaedically to the mast of

practical engagement and so, by diverting diversion, heads off the

general tendency’s particular tendency towards destructive runaway. In

this sense, resurrection is not so much a sadistic return to life from

death but a masochistic attempt by organising forces to take control of

those matters that are irrevocably lost and dispersed. The human

community is not constituted as a balance achieved between the

incompatible registers of return, to an earlier state, or to the complex

present, but rather through the consciously lived relation between the

two - the motor of species being is contradiction, at its most basic

level, the relatedness of tension to release, organisation to

disintegration, discontinuity to continuity.

In mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish — that

everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances.. .

it can once more be brought to light.

And here we are fellow stranger, 10 years or so on from our last

exchange, talking of what it would involve to attempt a return home from

wherever it is that we have ended up. You raise the question of coming

back in from the cold, in part as a corollary to our collective

introspection following the death of one also described as a deplorable

asshole, and in part as a means to consider this tectonic fault in time

which has opened and grown since you left behind that anything-goes Bay

Area anarchist nucleus. It seems, the idea of return first forms as an

object for the consciousness of the wanderer, taking shape as a flooding

back in recognition of the past, as the home- world’s return as

affect-laden memory. The wanderer turns for home at the command of his

memories. Home returns to the wanderer before the wanderer turns for

home.

How strange and broken we must seem in our resolution - our life of

imperious caprice, our too-fond embrace of Fortuna, our chronic history

of allowing ourselves to be swept away, and then swept away again. We

catch a reflection of our true worth sometimes, the laughter of the

mirrored skull superimposed onto that surface of who we think we are,

and we are brought low, not by our wounds, but by the bathetic

varicosities knotting and branching within the armouring necessary for

our keeping going We are not prevented from coming and going as we

please but are confronted with every last absurdity that is implied by

the resolute continuation of our projects, the absurdities that also

serve as the locus for our sentimental contemplation of our decisive

turning back for the home, that imperfect place of origin, considered as

if from an about to be struck campsite beside the way.

And without reducing his speed he began to dream of a flat land where he

would never have to rise again and hold himself erect in equilibrium,

first on the right foot for example, then on the left, and where he

might come and go and so survive after the fashion of a great cylinder

endowed with the faculties of cognition and volition.

The extended discussions in which we participated back then also

mediated a, very of the-time, convergence between American stirnerite

insurrectionism with that peculiar extension of the European ultraleft’s

logic of self-quarantining. More specifically, our unlikely

bedfellowship was generated from a shared repudiation of narodnikism -

we didn’t want to perform an appeal to the masses, we viewed the

prospect of any recourse to calling upon The Call as a leftover of

leftism - we abhorred right opinion, that peculiarly american

interpersonalisation of refusal, and its cumulative, ratcheting effect.

It was our fate to arrive at the refusal of that radicalism wherein

social transformation is conceived as the cadre’s catalysing of mass

movements through the circulation of its own emancipatory good thoughts.

How strange and broken we must seem as we are thrown against what is

against what is.

If it is true that in our own way we also set off to war, and that we

were no better than the rest, then it is also true that we instinctively

refused both to recruit, and to be recruited. As if either alternative

could make any difference to those enacting their own extinction event.

As Orwell observed, The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at

Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling

over his testicles. Just as we walked out of our mother’s world, one

midsummer morning, drinking wine from jade cups, strumming guitars on

horseback, so we will end somewhere out there on the road, lost,

unknown, inscrutable to others, incomprehensible to ourselves - quixotic

to all.

And then, and only then, in throes of folly, thoughts turn to the

likelihood of our navigating this torture garden’s forking paths, as it

were, in reverse: and these I reached by rolling over and over, like a

great cylinder. Do we now, in spite of how far we have gone out, have

the energy to turn again towards the point of our departure and thereby

confront the sequential process by which all divisive events converge

back upon their shared causation, the place where men find themselves

emerging backwards, as it were, from the entrance of that infinite

labyrinth reserved for prodigals, adventurers and for all those who have

ever set out? Or don’t we? I am joking of course, but also joking

before, or in a paroxysm of nachtrdglichkeit, in relation to, the Law.

The question of return is set at two points in the separation of the

individual from the group: firstly, immediately, in the throes of

leaving, the conditions for return are set by those remaining as a means

both to ameliorate the loss, and as an anticipatory stratagem for

defending themselves against the traitor returning in arms - which man

leaves, they ask themselves, not consumed with bitter thoughts of

returning one day to conquer that which had caused him? Secondly, the

question appears to the one who leaves, but then only many years later

when home appears in its true guise, as a location that is not so much

distant in space but as somewhere that is locked irrevocably in another

time - he who was exceeded in the midst of proximities, now exceeds by

long shadow, from a distance.

From both positions, from the remaining and from the leaving, the matter

of return becomes a source of torment, a question of recrimination as

those involved are presented with the ratcheting effect of a broken

relation. Ah yes, worse still than violent separation, the mended

bridges. To introduce the difficulty of the problem of return, I present

you, as one who knows the fraud and its truth better than I, with the

passage I always return to on such occasions:

"I will never reach Ixtlan. Yet in my feelings . . . in my feelings

sometimes I think I'm just one step from reaching it. Yet I never will.

In my journey I don't even find the familiar landmarks I used to know.

Nothing is any longer the same. [...] In my journey I find only phantom

travelers…”

Systems, or organisations if you will, converge around their

organisation of the energy that is within their reach which they hold on

to only to secure its more efficient discharge into the world, thereby

effecting their own disorganisation as the basis for the reproduction of

their descendants as the inheritors of the same territory. Or as

Bataille would have it, death is the condition of life. Living systems

are not driven by the urge to reproduce but by the desire to discharge

the energy that agitates them, and the energy transfers supposed in all

such subjective sloughings off are dependent on objectively voided,

environmentally conditioned, available space; for a population to

expand, it must first engage the unequal distribution of competitor

systems occupying the available ground, it must wait for the weakness,

the death, the flight, the collapse of the systems established by those

already present.

But then, before a system reaches the level from which it may discharge

its bound energies along the designated path for the replication of the

same as a sequence of future successions and expansions, it also

produces, as a more or less necessary condition for its continuation in

the present, a tendency towards internal factionalisa- tion around the

control and hierarchy of its system’s components, a conflict which is

only resolved by the solidarity generated through its perpetual

vendettas against external rivals and neighbours.

As you may be aware, the group I belong to has attempted to regulate

the, often unhappy, departure of its members by exercising a

semi-ritualised procedure of recognition, or blessing. He who becomes

separated is blessed by those who remain, whilst those who remain

recognise themselves as cursed for still belonging, for not also being

excluded. The meaning of the blessing protocol, which I think is

operationally viable, is severalfold:

...in part, it attenuates the violence of separation through the

affording of a gratuitous act of generosity; in part, it assigns higher

status upon the one leaving in relation to those who remain so as to

supply an abstract protective cloak to whoever is no longer concretely a

member of the community;

...in part, it mitigates the violent feelings of the community for those

who have betrayed it and thereby introduces closure where a long-running

hostility and vendetta might otherwise emerge;

...in part, it acts in reverse and functions as a sort of curse, the

blessed are those disavowed by, and no longer a member of, the group

blessings are also a form of violence.

There are of course further registers of meaning bound up in the ritual

blessing of the traitors, ne’er-do-wells, deviants, dissenters and

incompatibles who form the army of expelled from the community, whilst

the equivalent self-cursing of those remaining within the brotherhood

operates as a hybrid between self-recognition of the sufficiency of the

communal bond which requires no surplus blessing with a formal

acknowledgment of the community’s fatal limitation, with its metabolic

need for external negative pressure, and with its molochian drive to

feed upon internal enemies, to secure its proper functioning.

From the perspective of the community, the prodigality of the younger

son, who departs only to squander the accumulated wealth of the group

embodies the true character of what it means to be blessed. The father

does not welcome the destitute son back home because he forgives him but

rather to formally engage the destructive forces of the outworld of

which the son is now a representation. As with every culture that

ritually squanders wealth in the form of an accursed share, the father

has assigned the necessary role of betrayer to the younger son in order

that the mechanism of controlled expenditure is triggered, thereby

protecting the community’s life- world from a dangerous build-up of

energetic tensions around the ownership of its accumulated resources.

Just as the theme of the Judas-figure is necessary to the group at the

level of in-group relationships as these metabolise external forces that

would otherwise destroy them, so the community mechanism as a whole

benefits from a sacrificial (and blessed) and therefore carefully

de-limited function which is written into the actions taken by the one

who converts the group’s wealth into abject loss.

Clearly, the controlled fire setting carried out through the younger

son’s prodigality, which operates as a sort of anticipatory and

preventative procedure to secure the group’s reproductive integrity as a

group, becomes ritualised through its recurrence into a cyclical

operation. At a certain point in the cycle of the group’s accumulation

of material wealth generated through the activities of its members fixed

within the self-reproducing constraints of their social relations, the

younger son who, on the pretext of heir plus spare, is transformed into

a personalisation of the accursed share, will be instructed to take on

the blessed/cursed role by which he must perform prodigality, and once

more embark upon a journey into exuberant expenditure.

In what sense does the young son ever truly return now that he is

transformed into an emissary between the community and the outworld?

Remember the other emissary, Strelnikov, and his increasingly convoluted

dash to reach Lara, what is he at the moment of his death: a stranger,

and agent of destructive external forces, or son, eternal student, and

partisan of returned to, self-healing domesticity?

The younger son will always return, as plagues, famines, inundations

return, from afar and unpredicted, appearing upon the horizon that

father constantly scans. As he is welcomed back, the son’s instability

must be distracted with offerings, his capricious character appeased by

deference, because even if he is the returning son, he is also the

uncanny, whose eye will fall upon the quaintness of the community,

distantly, critically. The community has no option but to embrace the

thorn of him, as his very presence will trigger within the community

system the adaptative process by which it will thereby learn the

protocols for herd immunity that it may deploy against the greater

outworld.

If the Prodigal Son returns but is also forbidden to return, except in

the garb of the community’s representation of the figure of the

stranger, as a ghost who must occupy the otherwise empty place at the

table reserved for lost others, whom he must represent, on whose behalf

he must intercede, then that in itself is not an argument against his

own motive for returning. The impossibility of going home does not

prevent the attempt, even if the homecomer knows home will not be there.

Even so, the second son also has his motivation, and is compelled by his

own placement within the group to draw love, by any means necessary,

from his father. He is compelled to secure patriarchal recognition by

taking any path open to him - even the assigned paths of scapegoat,

traitor, lazybones, loser. Informally formalised kinship systems, in

their distribution of power and inheritance, set the second son off on

another path which, in denial, it codifies as negative attention

seeking.

Even so, despite the instrumentalised role he is cast to play, the

second son forgives the father’s world for the degradation he has had to

endure, for the sake of the moment he appears on the horizon as if

before the eyes of his father, who in turn stands on guard against him.

What is the accursed son, but moving boundary marker to the territory of

the father, the limit of father’s reach? The second son holds out for

familial love, and is driven back by the image created as ego-ideal, as

it comprises himself, Shane-like, welcomed home.

From the time of our previous acquaintance, you may remember my attempt

at a theory of the archetypical form expressed by the mythical condition

of monosandalism, and which I approached through an avatar I designated

One Shoe which existed in a state of tension with the project I had

described as Fonoard Unit. This was partially inspired by the boy who

did not follow Hamelin’s Pied Piper into the mountain, and partially by

Brecht’s figure of the ‘Young Comrade’, characterised as the

voluntarist-adventurer who damages the interests of the Party through

his lack of discipline, by his very enthusiasm for its historic project.

The One Shoe, in relation to the group’s generality, either does not act

but is acted upon, or acts inappropriately -1 surmised that it is

through this unrelating relatedness that the character of the group

itself is revealed. At the level of what limps and lags, or pulls and

distorts in the wrong direction and at the wrong moment, the question of

departure and return is reversed: the community will leave its

stragglers behind and may only return in existential crisis.

Throughout Western mythology the single shoed or lame figure recurs:

Jason, the Plataean army, Oedipus, Molloy/Moran. Bruce Lee. The

non-symmetry of the One Shoe figure symbolises the presence, and

potential subjectivity, of another value set within an established

pattern of conventionality, which becomes, through personification

within a project-based set of fixed intersubjective relations, an

attractor for unexpected transvaluations of otherwise latent or

repudiated behaviours, values and relations.

You could say, and I shoehorn this here, such figures pose the

existential question: But do I roll in the manner of a true ball?

Unfettered and frictionless movement is the dream of all abstractly

constituted formations but abstraction itself operates on the principle

that naught is more real than nothing, it is only by returning to the

base swerving and colliding of its internal constraints and hindrances

that it may realise itself as a something: if they were not in the habit

of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the

void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any

blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have

produced anything.

By one means or another, by its failure to adapt, the One Shoe avatar

compromises the set project - he too, embodies the hindering of, or

swerving within, the social mechanism of reproduction which causes it to

not return immediately to its springform self. Those who are not

Spartans, those who might otherwise have been exposed as infants outside

the city walls, those who are not inherently useful, those who by some

congenital flaw or learnt failure to conform and who cannot be

instrumentalised in Silicon Valley, those who do not provide content,

and who by their continued presence in the group, call into question the

second nature of its parameters, its outline, and without intending to,

create around themselves an attractor basin for the group’s own

uncertainties; if not the set pattern, then what pattern? The figure who

fatally hinders the realisation of the group’s project is not merely a

counter to the hubris of the warrior class but a self-separating

embodiment of that order of esoteric knowledge which threatens the

viability of the group, as it were, from outside and above.

The alternative register of activity by which the otherworldly, or

transcendent, character of the One Shoe, is established becomes a device

or frame through which the transformation of established patterns

becomes comprehensible - such is the attractor to which the group may

return to itself through another medium. The limping figure who cannot

keep up, first sets the pace, then calls a halt, then conceives a new

mode of self-locomotion; For how could I drag myself over that vast

moor, where my crutches would fumble in vain. Rolling perhaps. And then?

Would they let me roll on to my mother's door? At a certain point in the

progress of the group it becomes imperative for those members least able

to go on, to sabotage the continuation of its processes, which have

become burdensome, a living death, to them. Every instantiation of the

One Shoe archetype is precisely that of a non-exchangeable

particularity - one who may be portrayed, even recognised, but never

represented.

The group may begin to conceive the burden of the One Shoe upon its

functioning and purpose as its only objective and distinguishing value -

the manner of the group’s organising around those members who cannot

belong to it is the sole means by which it may realise itself as

something with an authentic outline. The group, in relation to its

incompatible members, achieves a clinamen-type form by extracting itself

from the delirium of survival sickness and adopt ing in its place, a

prodigal form of rolling. For what is utopia but a sort of shared

hanging back from the main body, a hungry dog at the door, a tarrying at

the corners, a hesitancy or failure to commit to the historic form of

revolt? For what is utopia but the resonant step of the limping masses

by which the bridge of reality might be selectively collapsed whilst at

the same time causing no damage to the living organism as a whole?

For this reason, we ought to become as the child weighing down upon the

shoulders of the true Christopher, and we ought push his head beneath

the swelling baptismal surface: For of the great traveller I had been,

on my hands and knees in the later stages, then crawling on my belly or

rolling on the ground. So it is that the authentic response to disaster

is not prepping but mendicancy - we should not volunteer but, in falling

backwards, in letting ourselves go, permit others the opportunity to

volunteer to catch us and raise us up, even as we claw at their empathic

eyes: A Single Eye, All Light, No Darkness; or Light and Darkness One.

Nor should we praise the heroic efforts of essential workers but, as we

embark along the via negativa, let us venerate instead the useless and

despised recipients of their good works, without whom such acts of

selflessness and sacrifice would be inconceivable. Beggar strike your

philanthropist! And, in accord with apophatic rite, let us ceremonially

applaud the ingrate patient who throws the contents of the bedpan back

at the sainted nurse; by such means the pillars of sacred institutions

are collapsed and the factory behind them revealed: my progress reduced

me to stopping more and more often, it was the only way to progress, to

stop.

But, there is yet another register in which the lost figure may preserve

its relation to home and by which it resolves the problem of return, or

at least contemplates it, without ever having to physically go back to

the place from which it departed. Popular culture in the 1970s utilised

the stock figure of the Japanese hold out to represent absurd

intransigence. The hold-outs were isolated soldiers of the Imperial Army

who, having been stationed on remote Pacific islands but subsequently

cut off both from news of the outside world and its essential supplies,

carried on the war against America autonomously, sustaining themselves

from their surroundings for decades after the official 1945 surrender.

The by any means praxis of holding-out did not so much involve military

actions, apart from occasional raids against stockpiles, as it did the

maintenance of formal hostilities, and a soldierly discipline directed

towards dwindling munitions, rotting boots, worn to rags uniforms.

The incongruity of these figures emerging back into the post-war world,

a world which they had never inhabited, during the 6o’s, 70’s and 8o’s

was transformed into a standardised product of the progres- sivist see

how far we've come standpoint of the post-war social pact. The hold-outs

became a living representation of a now lost point of departure, an

orientation marker fixed on the horizon as scanned from the standpoint

of the rebuilt world that had, by parallax effect, left all that behind.

In previous eras, late-returning soldiers had arrived as changed values

in a world that was objectively unchanged

but within spectacular time, the value relation between leaver and left

behind, returner and returned to, is always reversed.

For the post-war world, that state of affairs in which war, its inputs

and its outputs, had become inconceivable, the imposter is the truer

more authentic Martin Guerre, and the true Odysseus, scattering suitors

left and right, becomes impersonator, the personification of a bad

belonging to the world. And so it was that the Japanese holdout became

emblematic of what it was to live before the economic miracle, an

iteration of a recurrent theme of spectacular power which also applied

it to, amongst others, the masses of industrial workers fighting to

defend their work in the context of automation and the expulsion of

living labour from the productive apparatus.

The nostalgia of the hold-outs for home, which is maintained as an

unswerving allegiance to formative memories, is the defining trait of

all emigre communities, which preserve themselves as distinct from

immigrant communities, and which are impelled to transpose onto the

reified cultural forms of home the organic instincts of self-

preservation and self-identity - Bunin’s Russian-Parisian cafes: Caviar

rouge, salad russe... Deux chachlyks.... By refusing to adapt to local

conditions, the emigre milieu transforms itself into an outpost of

rassolnik and the old country which, as if in response to its fetishisa-

tion, and with tragic irony, will in turn rapidly and inevitably escape

the loyalty of its old guard, becoming both unrecognisable and always

deplorable to those invoking it: Ben Gunn’s obsessive, pre-proustian,

preoccupation with cheese must contradict both the worthlessness of the

old world’s buried treasure and the natural abundance of his immediate

surroundings.

But we should not imagine, nor take comfort in the idea, that there will

be no return. The chickens do come home to roost; the repressed does

return. The world will right itself by casual violence, as if god were

withdrawing his hand from settled waters. And it is because we know

intuitively that order must be disrupted and scattered so as to return

things to a more basic order, that we may only conceive consequence as a

motivational force, as an avenging angel in the moment just before it

topples the edifice of imbalance.

And so it is that just such a bootstrapping ideologue, another of the

Shane-Orpheus type, will arrive determinedly from another country, so as

to stir up the sedimentary dead, who do not see him, who do not

recognise him, who dimly perceive him at the end of a tunnel, and who

follow his calling in steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,

uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

This too-familiar stranger, appearing before the non-presence of the

dead, returning to the given as deus ex machina, who enfolds the world,

catching it in crisis, on the point of it collapsing, laying its

components on his spread out bed-roll - this personification of the

basis for every intervention, both all-knowing and absolutely

uncomprehending.

The sainted trickster, ascetic and aesthete, with flaming pyre torch, as

if on the point of saving the boudoir from drowning, only then stepping

back, looking on dispassionately, is that all there is to a fire? as

another world folds in on itself, an angel of history deselecting

memory, alienating the life-community from its own members

and the life-community, like Eurydice, wakening, becoming aware, like

something served from the menu of the naked lunch, like something

disavowing itself, and in the same movement, both falling back into and

recoiling from what it is.

There is always a return, and it is the return, and it is already

effected, it begins immediately in the separation, that which once

remained undifferentiated, not functioning even as a potentiality,

appearing suddenly, successively through the rupture of a

particularising movement, and then as secession in relation to the

life-community. There is always a return to the pleroma, to the internet

of things, to devil’s island. Nothing escapes that is not commanded to

escape.

Where there was non-relation, there is relation. Where there was

non-community, there is community. Where there was alienation, there is

immanence. Only strangers will recognise who belongs and who does not,

and the strangers are discontinued: Be ahead of all parting, as though

it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For

among these winters there is one so endlessly winter / that only by

wintering through it all will your heart survive.

Fellow Stranger, consider the paradox, and perfect heuristic, of the

aubade form: as the sun rises, releasing all things from night, the

lovers, who were released by dark of night, are newly bound by light of

day. Shall we say, it’s because it’s real that we know it’s a joke?

Ridico

harpsichord

Just suppose that your harpsichord has the power to feel and to

remember - then, do not presume to play your music on it! It lives in

its vibration, in its inevitable resonance, which holds the object of

its desire present before its rapt attention, while its mind is busied

about the quality that belongs to that object. But vibrating strings

have yet another property, that of making other strings vibrate; and

that is how the first idea recalls a second, the two of them a third,

these three a fourth and so on, so that there is no limit to the ideas

awakened and interconnected in the mind of the harpsichord, as it

meditates and hearkens to itself amid the silence and darkness, beneath

the dust sheets of the shuttered chateau. It is an instrument that makes

surprising leaps, and an idea once aroused may sometimes set vibrating

an harmonic at an inconceivable distance. It plays the garden orb

spider’s frosted web in autumn. It ripples in the mind of Capability

Brown. If this phenomenon may be observed between resonant strings that

are continuous and alive, then why should it not occur between points

that are lifeless and separate?

Diderot

The parable of the crow’s hunger

A bird leaves its dull mottled egg and builds a new nest around the egg

of a serpent. The sh ining egg cracks open. A serpent crawls out. Its

jaws yawn open. It swallows the bird. Its voice is croaking, and as

ancient as salt. Its talons grip the nest's edge. It holds out its

wings. It flies into the desert. It never returns.