News | Author: Reza Negarestani

I have added the published version of my talk What Philosophy Does to the Mind to the texts section. It can be downloaded here.

I will be teaching a course on complexity and computation at The New Centre from January 10 to March 27. The description and registration information can be found here.
Complexity and Computation:
An Introduction to Measures, Paradigms and Programs
DESCRIPTION
This seminar is an introduction to two widely popular yet often culturally misconstrued topics, complexity and computation. Why are social sciences no longer tenable without an extensive restructuring around theoretical and applied dimensions of these two subjects? Why is in the absence of a systematic engagement with the all-encompassing consequences implied by the findings and advances in computation and complexity sciences, philosophy’s regression to antediluvian platitudes inevitable? And at the same time, why should the vogue culture surrounding complexity and computation be approached with a critical vigilance and extreme caution? By presenting a survey of some of the key ideas in complexity sciences and computation which have direct implications for philosophical and political thinking, this seminar sets out to tackle and answer these questions.
The first module begins with one central question: What is meant by complexity? To answer this question, we will look at different measures of complexity, their strengths and weaknesses and how they deviate from or intersect with the commonsense concept of complexity. Subsequently, we will examine these measures in relation to two questions, ‘what is a complex structure’ and ‘what is a complex function’. This inquiry will lead us to a more fine-grained investigation of complexity in natural and socio-cultural phenomena. Complexity in the order of being and in the order of thought, dynamic systems, structural stability, statistical complexity, logical depth, hierarchies or dependency-relations, generative entrenchment, intrinsic emergence, mechanisms and functions are among the topics that will be discussed in the first module.
The second module focuses on the correlations between complexity and computation particularly in the context of computational complexity and classification of computational problems in relation to measures and hierarchies discussed in the first module. However, depending on how we answer the question of what we mean by computation, the notion of computational complexity can be approached differently. To this end, we will look into what Samson Abramsky calls the two puzzles of computation, ‘why do we compute?’ and ‘what do we compute?’. This will open a discussion on the distinctions between those paradigms of computation centered on the issue of computability and those concerning the fundamental problem of what computation is. In this respect, some of the most significant challenges to the Church-Turing thesis that underlies the current dominant paradigm of computation will be addressed. We will particularly concentrate on the recent paradigm shift in computer science toward understanding the fundamental duality of computation and the interactive nature of computing. To conclude this module, we will review the two major programs of computation established by the Church-Turing and the interactive paradigms, contrasting their capacities in engaging with the question of complexity and evaluating their scope of application. Some of the key terms covered in this module are hierarchy theorems, computational classes, intractability, computational cost, sequentiality, concurrency, algorithmic computing, interaction as computation, design vs. description and the strong informatics thesis.
Drawing on the discussions presented in the first and the second modules, the third module deals with complexity and computation in the domain of cognition, particularly in the context of the linguistic scaffolding of thinking and the computational picture of language. We will primary concentrate on how social / interpersonal interaction shapes the functional architecture of language and conceptual thinking. But the question is that what is exactly ‘social’ when we refer to social linguistic interaction. To answer this question, the social-interactive dimension of language will be introduced as a computational framework that is directly linked to the generation of semantic complexity and high-order cognitive abilities. The objective of this module is to determine what is exactly computational about social linguistic practices and how linguistic interaction generates complex cognitive abilities. To this end, we will expand on the role of computational dualities – introduced in the second module – in linguistic interaction. The point of entry to our discussion regarding the connections between computational dualities of interaction, language and cognition will be the concept of game. In line with the theme of this module, we will examine Wilfrid Sellars’s account of language as rule-governed games and Robert Brandom’s game of giving and asking for reasons in light of recent works in logic and computer science on interaction games, most notably, the works of Andreas Blass, Samson Abramsky and Jean-Yves Girard.

The first part of my text on philosophy as a program is now online. The second part should be out next month:
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/what-is-philosophy-part-one-axioms-and-programs/
Also an expanded version of the essay on Turing and computational functionalism has been published in Matteo Pasquinelli’s Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas (Meson Press). The entire volume can be accessed here: http://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/978-3-95796-066-5_Alleys_of_Your_Mind.pdf

26 February 2015 19:30 & 21:00
28 February 2015 16:00
1 March 2015 16:00
Teijin Auditorium, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
Written and produced by Florian Hecker
A Script for Machine Synthesis by Reza Negarestani
Voice by Charlotte Rampling, recorded by Olivier Pasquet at IRCAM, Paris
Synthetic Voice designed by Rob Clark, Centre for Speech Technology Research, University
of Edinburgh

I will be presenting a talk along Florian Hecker, Guerino Mazzola and others at Midway Contemporary Art. The talk entitled …this I or we or it (the thing) which speaks… is centered around the links between analytic pragmatism, artificial intelligence and artificial speech particularly the research on hidden Markov models.
Thursday, February 12, 7pm
527 Second Avenue Southeast
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55414

I will be giving two courses on new rationalism (one on future philosophical systems and the other on reason and time) at The New Centre. Details here: http://thenewcentre.org/seminars/new-rationalism/

Why does the determination of the meaning of the mind in terms of practices that organize its activities imply an expanded evolution of the mind? To rephrase the question, why does the understanding and realization of the mind in terms of its practical rather than formalist algorithmic decomposability not only not limits the evolution of the mind but also broadens the scope of its evolution and augmentation? Or, how does defining the mind as a practical object rather than an ideal object become the most consequential event in the history of the mind? Because practices whose elaboration count as fulfilling the activities of the mind can be collectively modified or upgraded, they are distinguished by their social manipulability and by their capacity to bootstrap complex abilities out of primitive abilities. This is what sets apart philosophy’s thesis regarding algorithmic practical decomposability of the mind from the algorithmic logical decomposability of the mind espoused by symbolic AI for which thought-parcels are ideal logical objects and hence, open to identical algorithmic iterations. While ‘identical’ iterations as associated with for example market algorithms relapse back into the unexceptionally prevelant domain of pattern-governed processes, rule-based practices even though they are at base pattern-governed on the other hand are able to proliferate and adapt to purposes that are not given in their underlying patterns. This is how the mind as a practical object is able to leap further in a manner that is neither deductive exhaustion based on the general schema of its current charactristics nor induction from its common features with the natural history of the cognitive mind.

The characterization of the mind as a practical object, rather than an ideal one, essentially amounts to the identification of the mind as a practical project with the possibility of social realization and augmentation, because the domain of practices is integratively social, whether these practices are associated with forming and articulating concepts or are linked to purposive action. The domain of practices possesses a commitment-laden dimension, it is open to social construction, revision and is capable of organizing collective configurations by individuating special practices.

[…]

The pragmatic functionalist understanding of the mind–itself a fruit of disturbing the equilibrium or the informational homogeneity between thought and thing–is a historical moment in the evolution of the mind. But evolution in what sense? In the sense that the pragmatic functionalist realization of the mind (the understanding of its meaning not as a given, but only the establishing of such meaning through and in the context of practices) coincides with the artificial realization of the mind (or the construction of its functional space by entirely different sets of realizers qua practices). For philosophy, the unity of both–that is the understanding of the meaning of the mind and its artificial realization–forms the project of self-realization through which the mind constitutes its own history and evolves in accordance with it. The history of the mind is a history that must liberate its own demands and purposes while at the same time take into consideration its natural history and respond to the constraints associated with its embodiment and organization.

The artificial–which is to say the mind realized by the artifactual–reintegrates into reality of the mind as that which has no absolute foundational nature but only histories and possibilities of multiple realization and reorientation. Its meaning cannot be traced back to an original foundation or an inherent nature, because it is constituted by those practices which determine it and are themselves susceptible to modification. Understanding the mind at the juncture between reality and appearances is tantamount to constructing it. The introspection of the mind into the condition of its possibility (what is the mind, and more importantly, why is the mind as an integrative and orientable constellation of certain activities possible at all?) is a register of an emancipative alienation and is the first spark for envisioning the mind outside of its natural or native habitat.

The gesture to treat the possibility of the mind as a question and a subject of inquiry rather than as a given is charged with an impulse to think and realize the mind through the artificial. This is because examining the possibility of the mind represents a pivotal moment. It creates a designated discontinuity and an externalization that allows questioning the possibility of the mind as a possibility whose realization depends on the fulfillment of certain conditions and the presence of certain sets or organization of realizers. This ultimately leads to a non-ineffable conception of the mind as a possibility that can be fulfilled by different desiderata than what already constitutes it.

A mind that is possible and whose possibility is open to scrutiny is a mind that is conditioned by certain functional components and organizations. This is nothing but a prototypical picture of the mind as an artificial edifice. Here the concept of the artificial does not stand against the natural as something man-made. Artificiality does not imply a breach of natural laws. Instead, the artificial suggests a propensity to adapt to new purposes that can be identified–following Sellars–by their causal reducibility combined with their logical irreducibility. It is the reducibility that does not posit the artificial outside of nature and it is the irreducibility that engenders a new regime of rules and ends whose effect resonates with what Kant calls autonomy.

Disassembling the possibility of the mind in terms of its givenness and reassembling it in functional terms signals the possibility of realizing the mind outside of the image of what it was supposed to be, outside of where it was supposed to be embedded, and divergent from the destination it was supposed or imagined to aim at.

Why does the determination of the meaning of the mind in terms of practices that organize its activities imply an expanded evolution of the mind? To rephrase the question, why does the understanding and realization of the mind in terms of its practical rather than formalist algorithmic decomposability not only not limits the evolution of the mind but also broadens the scope of its evolution and augmentation? Or, how does defining the mind as a practical object rather than an ideal object become the most consequential event in the history of the mind? Because practices whose elaboration count as fulfilling the activities of the mind can be collectively modified or upgraded, they are distinguished by their social manipulability and by their capacity to bootstrap complex abilities out of primitive abilities. This is what sets apart philosophy’s thesis regarding algorithmic practical decomposability of the mind from the algorithmic logical decomposability of the mind espoused by symbolic AI for which thought-parcels are ideal logical objects and hence, open to identical algorithmic iterations. While ‘identical’ iterations as associated with for example market algorithms relapse back into the unexceptionally prevelant domain of pattern-governed processes, rule-based practices even though they are at base pattern-governed on the other hand are able to proliferate and adapt to purposes that are not given in their underlying patterns. This is how the mind as a practical object is able to leap further in a manner that is neither deductive exhaustion based on the general schema of its current charactristics nor induction from its common features with the natural history of the cognitive mind.
The characterization of the mind as a practical object, rather than an ideal one, essentially amounts to the identification of the mind as a practical project with the possibility of social realization and augmentation, because the domain of practices is integratively social, whether these practices are associated with forming and articulating concepts or are linked to purposive action. The domain of practices possesses a commitment-laden dimension, it is open to social construction, revision and is capable of organizing collective configurations by individuating special practices.
[…]
The pragmatic functionalist understanding of the mind–itself a fruit of disturbing the equilibrium or the informational homogeneity between thought and thing–is a historical moment in the evolution of the mind. But evolution in what sense? In the sense that the pragmatic functionalist realization of the mind (the understanding of its meaning not as a given, but only the establishing of such meaning through and in the context of practices) coincides with the artificial realization of the mind (or the construction of its functional space by entirely different sets of realizers qua practices). For philosophy, the unity of both–that is the understanding of the meaning of the mind and its artificial realization–forms the project of self-realization through which the mind constitutes its own history and evolves in accordance with it. The history of the mind is a history that must liberate its own demands and purposes while at the same time take into consideration its natural history and respond to the constraints associated with its embodiment and organization.
The artificial–which is to say the mind realized by the artifactual–reintegrates into reality of the mind as that which has no absolute foundational nature but only histories and possibilities of multiple realization and reorientation. Its meaning cannot be traced back to an original foundation or an inherent nature, because it is constituted by those practices which determine it and are themselves susceptible to modification. Understanding the mind at the juncture between reality and appearances is tantamount to constructing it. The introspection of the mind into the condition of its possibility (what is the mind, and more importantly, why is the mind as an integrative and orientable constellation of certain activities possible at all?) is a register of an emancipative alienation and is the first spark for envisioning the mind outside of its natural or native habitat.
The gesture to treat the possibility of the mind as a question and a subject of inquiry rather than as a given is charged with an impulse to think and realize the mind through the artificial. This is because examining the possibility of the mind represents a pivotal moment. It creates a designated discontinuity and an externalization that allows questioning the possibility of the mind as a possibility whose realization depends on the fulfillment of certain conditions and the presence of certain sets or organization of realizers. This ultimately leads to a non-ineffable conception of the mind as a possibility that can be fulfilled by different desiderata than what already constitutes it.
A mind that is possible and whose possibility is open to scrutiny is a mind that is conditioned by certain functional components and organizations. This is nothing but a prototypical picture of the mind as an artificial edifice. Here the concept of the artificial does not stand against the natural as something man-made. Artificiality does not imply a breach of natural laws. Instead, the artificial suggests a propensity to adapt to new purposes that can be identified–following Sellars–by their causal reducibility combined with their logical irreducibility. It is the reducibility that does not posit the artificial outside of nature and it is the irreducibility that engenders a new regime of rules and ends whose effect resonates with what Kant calls autonomy.
Disassembling the possibility of the mind in terms of its givenness and reassembling it in functional terms signals the possibility of realizing the mind outside of the image of what it was supposed to be, outside of where it was supposed to be embedded, and divergent from the destination it was supposed or imagined to aim at.

Here is the promised reading list of key books and essays I used to work on the concept of navigation (you can find a general schema of it here). While this is by no means an exhaustive research list and the architecture of the concept is still embryonic, nevertheless this is a useful bibliography for anyone who is interested in navigation as a system of thinking and action that coheres analysis and synthesis, locality and globality and the perennial questions of philosophy, ‘what should we think?’ and ‘what should we do?’. All with the basic understanding that the concept of navigation is neither a metaphor, nor driving in a white ferrari, nor colonial maritime exploration, but a rule-governed and ramifying exploratory vector in the space of reasons and the space of freedoms (see Emancipation as Navigation).

Gilles Châtelet, The Stake of the Mobile: Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy (Les enjeux du mobile : mathématique, physique, philosophie).

Immanuel Kant, What does it mean to orientate oneself in thought?

Guerino Mazzola, The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance.

Lorenzo Magnani, Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning.

Mark Wilson, Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behaviour.

Fernando Zalamea, Peirce’s Continuum: A Methodological and Mathematical Approach.

Fernando Zalamea: América – una trama integral: transversalidad, bordes y abismos en la cultura americana.

Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism.

Wilfrid Sellars, In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars.

Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life.

Johanna Seibt, Cognitive Orientation as an Epistemic Adventure.

Johanna Seibt, Functions Between Reasons and Causes: On Picturing.

Jean-Yves Girard, Towards a geometry of interaction, Categories in Computer Science and Logic.

William Wimsatt, Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality.

William Lawvere, Conceptual Mathematics.

David Ellerman, A Theory of Adjoint Functors – with some Thoughts about their Philosophical Significance.

Rene Thom, To the Frontiers of Human Power: Games.

Nils Röller, Thinking with Instruments: The Example of Kant’s Compass.

Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity.

Alain Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense of Movement.

Here is the promised reading list of key books and essays I used to work on the concept of navigation (you can find a general schema of it here). While this is by no means an exhaustive research list and the architecture of the concept is still embryonic, nevertheless this is a useful bibliography for anyone who is interested in navigation as a system of thinking and action that coheres analysis and synthesis, locality and globality and the perennial questions of philosophy, ‘what should we think?’ and ‘what should we do?’. All with the basic understanding that the concept of navigation is neither a metaphor, nor driving in a white ferrari, nor colonial maritime exploration, but a rule-governed and ramifying exploratory vector in the space of reasons and the space of freedoms (see Emancipation as Navigation).
Gilles Châtelet, The Stake of the Mobile: Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy (Les enjeux du mobile : mathématique, physique, philosophie).
Immanuel Kant, What does it mean to orientate oneself in thought?
Guerino Mazzola, The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance.
Lorenzo Magnani, Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning.
Mark Wilson, Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behaviour.
Fernando Zalamea, Peirce’s Continuum: A Methodological and Mathematical Approach.
Fernando Zalamea: América – una trama integral: transversalidad, bordes y abismos en la cultura americana.
Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism.
Wilfrid Sellars, In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars.
Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life.
Johanna Seibt, Cognitive Orientation as an Epistemic Adventure.
Johanna Seibt, Functions Between Reasons and Causes: On Picturing.
Jean-Yves Girard, Towards a geometry of interaction, Categories in Computer Science and Logic.
William Wimsatt, Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality.
William Lawvere, Conceptual Mathematics.
David Ellerman, A Theory of Adjoint Functors – with some Thoughts about their Philosophical Significance.
Rene Thom, To the Frontiers of Human Power: Games.
Nils Röller, Thinking with Instruments: The Example of Kant’s Compass.
Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity.
Alain Berthoz, The Brain’s Sense of Movement.

An extract from my forthcoming essay What Philosophy Does to the Mind (Knowledge, History and the Mind) – to be published in Centers and Peripheries. In some way, this essay is the continuation of The Labor of the Inhuman:

***
Philosophy is archenemy of the obvious. Even though philosophy frequently falls in the trap of the obvious, it has the habit of always coming back to exact a revenge on what is obvious in a manner and the scale not dissimilar to the epic culmination of Jacobean revenge dramas. Unlike any other thought discipline known to man, philosophy never closes the circle of its revenge. It is characterized by its perpetual refusal to put any matter to rest. This absolute recalcitrance bespeaks of the corrosive blood that runs through the body of philosophy, which is that of the principle of deep skepticism: Knowledge must be suspicious of what it already knows. To know more is to believe less, the more we know the less should we believe in what we know. If the task of belief is to turn the accumulated knowledge into a regulative foundation and respectively, a matter of faith, then the progress of knowledge is by definition retroactively aborted. For how can one acquire new knowledge if the knowledge that has already been accumulated is treated as the locus of truth?
If the site of truth is in what has already taken place, then knowledge only exhibits the truth-preservation of classical qua logical rationality, and thus violates the first objective of knowledge, which is that ‘one knows because one does not know.’ But, ‘to know’ is to preserve and mitigate ignorance at the same time, a dual task whose logical structure is at odds with the monotonicity of truth-preservation embedded in classical logic.
The monotonic entailment of truth-preservation functions precisely by conserving ignorance in its very logic–it ignores the possibility of what it is ignorant of. This is the principle of conservation of ignorance without acknowledging it or what can be called the ‘deficit of ignorance-awareness’. The principle of conservation-without-acknowledgement is the functional model of an epistemically maimed mind; it is a mind that empowers itself by choosing to operate primarily on the basis of accumulated and well-stabilized information and in so doing, turning ‘what it knows’ into a blind spot against ‘what it doesn’t’. In such a scenario, further generation of knowledge equals further degeneration of the mind and its epistemic incapacitation. The pitfalls of knowledge become the maladies of the mind and the maladies of the mind become social disabilities in knowing what to think and what to do. No mind by itself has a defense mechanism against the ‘epistemic maiming’ inflicted by its own spatiotemporal approach to truth and information. It is for this reason that only deep skepticism, or at least the strategies that undergird it, can save the mind from its self-inflicted epistemic maiming.
From a navigational perspective, any account of truth that is situated in the past and reinforces the dogma of ‘knowing more equals trusting more in the truth of what we know’ suffers from a unipathic structure or navigational uniqueness. It is unipathic since in order to preserve truth, it must maximally stabilize the transit of truth values by ignoring any other possible path that might invalidate the preserved truth. Hence the mapping and approaching truth is determined in advance.
But the rule-governed game of navigation endorses no unique path and no map drawn in advance, not only is it multipathic but it also does not leave unchanged any address or path taken in the past itinerary. Its ramifying structure includes not only what ought to be navigated (the consequent content of the commitment), but also encompasses what has already been navigated (the antecedent commitments or the premises of the commitment as such). In other words, in the game of navigation, ramification is universal and it is this universality that keeps knowledge in the permanent state of agitation–a landscape with a shifting scenery or a transitory ontology upon which no foundation or navigational preconception can be imposed.
Whereas the unipathicity (i.e. the uniqueness of path) of truth-preservation is secured by ignoring possible or hypothetical navigational paths or transits, the principle of deep skepticism is equipped with a tentative rationalism required for deviating from the unipathic navigational approach so as to be able to activate and acknowledge the condition of ignorance and respectively mitigate it. This is the underlying logic of non-monotonic reasoning in which ramification of every qualitatively organized site of information into cascading paths creates a universal revisionary wave that perpetually reassess and alter any conclusion reached or information organized. Knowledge is not about centralizing the accumulated known but about qualitatively organizing information, navigating the space of concept, developing supple and revisable conceptual patchworks, updating and accessing through various modes the existing knowledge-bases without regarding them as immutable foundations. For knowledge, the crisis of foundations is an emancipative prospect.
According to the monotonic structure of unipathicity, which works from the viewpoint of epistemic entrenchment, the increase in the qualitatively organized information–in the form of premises or axioms–results in the increase in theorems (i.e. further establishment of the known). But the non-monotonic structure of navigation as a ramifying procedure does not permit such a symmetry between ‘to know’ and ‘the known’. This is but the navigational reformulation of deep skepticism in which ‘to know’ does not necessarily make any positive difference in ‘the known qua the accumulated knowledge’. Under the condition of non-monotonicity, addition of new premises fundamentally revises the old conclusions and does not bolster the epistemic entrenchment.
Deep skepticism accordingly is the sharpening of the defeasibility inherent to the non-monotonicity in the realm of the mind itself. It suggests that all insights of the mind into the inner workings of the world must be deflected or rendered defeasible by the insights of the mind into its own inner workings. While at the same time, it simultaneously proposes that all insights of the mind into its inner workings must be revised and deflected by the insights into the workings of the world which condition the workings of the mind.
To put it differently, deep skepticism builds orientational passages (or adjoint vectors) between the workings of mind and the workings of the world (M⇄W). The adjoint vectors or the adjunction symbolized by a left and a right arrow signify the broadening and integrative aspects of deep skepticism that at once deepens the scientific image of the world and leads to a more corrected and sophisticated manifest image of ourselves and establishes a stereoscopic coherence between them.
Deminishing the obvious qua the blind spot in all its forms is only possible by radically disturbing the equilibrium and breaking the symmetric relation between ‘knowing’ and ‘the already known’. The concomitant scrutinizing of the world by looking into the mind and inquiring into the mind by looking into the world constitute the navigational attitude of deep skepticism as adopted by philosophy. It is in this sense that deep skepticism, rather than being an impediment or refutation of knowledge, becomes a catalyst for the expansion of knowledge and the evolution of the mind; it perpetually set frees the game of navigation from its foundationalist commitments, blind spots, epistemic entrenchments and navigational pre-conceptions. For knowledge neither requires a foundation nor a positive differential relation between ‘knowing’ and ‘the known’ in order to expand its frontiers.
According to the skeptical current of philosophy, it is the truth of the acquired knowledge that occasions the blind spot against the truth of future of knowledge. The unipathic approach to truth establishes a model of mind as a self-reinforcing vicious circle blind to the progressive impoverishment of its own capacities. In reality, the more it knows the less it knows because the more of the new is nothing but the more of the same. Once the old or obtained knowledge is established as a regulative foundation–a matter of belief–all it produces is more of the same. It only reproduces itself qua foundation. It is the parochial loop of ‘the more we know the more should we trust in what we know’ that fuels the skeptical revenge of philosophy.
However, in order to inhibit the conversion of knowledge into belief and more importantly, in order to prevent the entrenchment of unipathicity, philosophy adopts two interconnected strategies. As we shall see, beneath the surface character of these strategies lies a different mode of adaptation to the reality of time as the chronic truth of philosophy:
(continue reading the excerpt)

(more…)

An extract from my forthcoming essay What Philosophy Does to the Mind (Knowledge, History and the Mind) – to be published in Centers and Peripheries. In some way, this essay is the continuation of The Labor of the Inhuman:

***

Philosophy is archenemy of the obvious. Even though philosophy frequently falls in the trap of the obvious, it has the habit of always coming back to exact a revenge on what is obvious in a manner and the scale not dissimilar to the epic culmination of Jacobean revenge dramas. Unlike any other thought discipline known to man, philosophy never closes the circle of its revenge. It is characterized by its perpetual refusal to put any matter to rest. This absolute recalcitrance bespeaks of the corrosive blood that runs through the body of philosophy, which is that of the principle of deep skepticism: Knowledge must be suspicious of what it already knows. To know more is to believe less, the more we know the less should we believe in what we know. If the task of belief is to turn the accumulated knowledge into a regulative foundation and respectively, a matter of faith, then the progress of knowledge is by definition retroactively aborted. For how can one acquire new knowledge if the knowledge that has already been accumulated is treated as the locus of truth?

If the site of truth is in what has already taken place, then knowledge only exhibits the truth-preservation of classical qua logical rationality, and thus violates the first objective of knowledge, which is that ‘one knows because one does not know.’ But, ‘to know’ is to preserve and mitigate ignorance at the same time, a dual task whose logical structure is at odds with the monotonicity of truth-preservation embedded in classical logic.

The monotonic entailment of truth-preservation functions precisely by conserving ignorance in its very logic–it ignores the possibility of what it is ignorant of. This is the principle of conservation of ignorance without acknowledging it or what can be called the ‘deficit of ignorance-awareness’. The principle of conservation-without-acknowledgement is the functional model of an epistemically maimed mind; it is a mind that empowers itself by choosing to operate primarily on the basis of accumulated and well-stabilized information and in so doing, turning ‘what it knows’ into a blind spot against ‘what it doesn’t’. In such a scenario, further generation of knowledge equals further degeneration of the mind and its epistemic incapacitation. The pitfalls of knowledge become the maladies of the mind and the maladies of the mind become social disabilities in knowing what to think and what to do. No mind by itself has a defense mechanism against the ‘epistemic maiming’ inflicted by its own spatiotemporal approach to truth and information. It is for this reason that only deep skepticism, or at least the strategies that undergird it, can save the mind from its self-inflicted epistemic maiming.

From a navigational perspective, any account of truth that is situated in the past and reinforces the dogma of ‘knowing more equals trusting more in the truth of what we know’ suffers from a unipathic structure or navigational uniqueness. It is unipathic since in order to preserve truth, it must maximally stabilize the transit of truth values by ignoring any other possible path that might invalidate the preserved truth. Hence the mapping and approaching truth is determined in advance.

But the rule-governed game of navigation endorses no unique path and no map drawn in advance, not only is it multipathic but it also does not leave unchanged any address or path taken in the past itinerary. Its ramifying structure includes not only what ought to be navigated (the consequent content of the commitment), but also encompasses what has already been navigated (the antecedent commitments or the premises of the commitment as such). In other words, in the game of navigation, ramification is universal and it is this universality that keeps knowledge in the permanent state of agitation–a landscape with a shifting scenery or a transitory ontology upon which no foundation or navigational preconception can be imposed.

Whereas the unipathicity (i.e. the uniqueness of path) of truth-preservation is secured by ignoring possible or hypothetical navigational paths or transits, the principle of deep skepticism is equipped with a tentative rationalism required for deviating from the unipathic navigational approach so as to be able to activate and acknowledge the condition of ignorance and respectively mitigate it. This is the underlying logic of non-monotonic reasoning in which ramification of every qualitatively organized site of information into cascading paths creates a universal revisionary wave that perpetually reassess and alter any conclusion reached or information organized. Knowledge is not about centralizing the accumulated known but about qualitatively organizing information, navigating the space of concept, developing supple and revisable conceptual patchworks, updating and accessing through various modes the existing knowledge-bases without regarding them as immutable foundations. For knowledge, the crisis of foundations is an emancipative prospect.

According to the monotonic structure of unipathicity, which works from the viewpoint of epistemic entrenchment, the increase in the qualitatively organized information–in the form of premises or axioms–results in the increase in theorems (i.e. further establishment of the known). But the non-monotonic structure of navigation as a ramifying procedure does not permit such a symmetry between ‘to know’ and ‘the known’. This is but the navigational reformulation of deep skepticism in which ‘to know’ does not necessarily make any positive difference in ‘the known qua the accumulated knowledge’. Under the condition of non-monotonicity, addition of new premises fundamentally revises the old conclusions and does not bolster the epistemic entrenchment.

Deep skepticism accordingly is the sharpening of the defeasibility inherent to the non-monotonicity in the realm of the mind itself. It suggests that all insights of the mind into the inner workings of the world must be deflected or rendered defeasible by the insights of the mind into its own inner workings. While at the same time, it simultaneously proposes that all insights of the mind into its inner workings must be revised and deflected by the insights into the workings of the world which condition the workings of the mind.

To put it differently, deep skepticism builds orientational passages (or adjoint vectors) between the workings of mind and the workings of the world (M⇄W). The adjoint vectors or the adjunction symbolized by a left and a right arrow signify the broadening and integrative aspects of deep skepticism that at once deepens the scientific image of the world and leads to a more corrected and sophisticated manifest image of ourselves and establishes a stereoscopic coherence between them.

Deminishing the obvious qua the blind spot in all its forms is only possible by radically disturbing the equilibrium and breaking the symmetric relation between ‘knowing’ and ‘the already known’. The concomitant scrutinizing of the world by looking into the mind and inquiring into the mind by looking into the world constitute the navigational attitude of deep skepticism as adopted by philosophy. It is in this sense that deep skepticism, rather than being an impediment or refutation of knowledge, becomes a catalyst for the expansion of knowledge and the evolution of the mind; it perpetually set frees the game of navigation from its foundationalist commitments, blind spots, epistemic entrenchments and navigational pre-conceptions. For knowledge neither requires a foundation nor a positive differential relation between ‘knowing’ and ‘the known’ in order to expand its frontiers.

According to the skeptical current of philosophy, it is the truth of the acquired knowledge that occasions the blind spot against the truth of future of knowledge. The unipathic approach to truth establishes a model of mind as a self-reinforcing vicious circle blind to the progressive impoverishment of its own capacities. In reality, the more it knows the less it knows because the more of the new is nothing but the more of the same. Once the old or obtained knowledge is established as a regulative foundation–a matter of belief–all it produces is more of the same. It only reproduces itself qua foundation. It is the parochial loop of ‘the more we know the more should we trust in what we know’ that fuels the skeptical revenge of philosophy.

However, in order to inhibit the conversion of knowledge into belief and more importantly, in order to prevent the entrenchment of unipathicity, philosophy adopts two interconnected strategies. As we shall see, beneath the surface character of these strategies lies a different mode of adaptation to the reality of time as the chronic truth of philosophy:

(continue reading the excerpt)

This is a passage from my forthcoming work, Intelligence and Spirit. Written in the tradition of ethics of self-cultivation, particularly Seneca’s Epistulae morales, Intelligence and Spirit is an essay on the philosophical foundations of artificial general intelligence and the advent of social intelligence. It is developed through the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Pierce, Brandom and Sellars and emphasizes the significance of social intelligence as humanity’s summum bonum. Building on the social moral philosophy of New Confucianism specifically the late works of Mou Zongsan, the final sections focus on a synthetic integration between rationalism and social emancipation oriented toward a collective project of self-cultivation out of which a self-apprehending intelligence can be realized. A more condensed description would be the ethics of intelligence:

“Approximately one billion years ago, the first rudimentary forms of neuronal information processing began to develop, over five hundred million years ago, during the Cambrian period, the evolution of a more complex nervous system combined with advanced visual tracking systems set off the perception catastrophe leading to the organization of the nervous system as an “organ of alienation” capable of generating a designated mental discontinuity. Through this highly regulated mental discontinuity, the organism became able to differentiate regions of space, optimally distinguishing itself from its food and predators. By simultaneously gaining traction on the spatiotemporal continuity of the organism–in reality, a rupture in the continuity of space-time–and the spatio-temporal connectivity, the nervous system enabled the organism to recognize things other than itself, orienting it toward the problem of exploring and making sense of its environment.

With the beginning of neurulation and cephalization processes in the vertebrates, basic computational barriers such as control of combinatorial explosion, construction of models of choice, predictive calculations, simulation of movement and proactive adaptation at the level of the organism were one by one overcome. Eventually the neotenous brain brought the complexity of the nervous system to a new stage. Marked by maximal functional entrenchment, the magnitude of evolutionary diversification–in this case, the addition of extensive structural change–significantly diminished. Maximization of functional entrenchment and reduction in structural diversification of the neotenous brain yet did not constrain the amplification of cognitive processes, but rather forced them (particularly abstraction and simulation) to a new functional vista which is that of the social domain. The development of social cognitive technologies such as tool-use and language solved two of the most significant problems of computation, namely, qualitative compression and stabilization of information necessary for the communal establishment of knowledge and further augmentation and coordination of understanding and action. Qualitative organization and stabilization of information through the formation of concepts as communal components of knowledge transformed the cognitive possibility of knowledge into a social reality, and thus facilitated the acquisition and exploitation of higher levels of cognition otherwise inaccessible from a purely bio-evolutionary standpoint.

However, only less than five hundred years ago, we noticed that we are not living at the center of the universe, slightly more than three hundred years ago we discovered that the fabric of the universe obeys and is held together by physical laws. Only a century and a half ago, we learned we are not children of God and began to investigate its implications–even though to this date, still the religious view on the origin of species is widespread and is vehemently defended. However, just more than a century ago we began to “open up a new continent, that of History, to scientific knowledge”, realizing that not only history can be navigated as a continent of knowledge but also it is an integrating field in which all other forms of knowledge, theoretical and practical, can be fused and reinforce one another. What Louis Althusser hails as Marx’s monumental discovery in the history of human knowledge marks a new stage in the evolution of intelligence, which is that of social intelligence. It is a form of intelligence that liberates new demands and opportunities of ‘what to think’ and ‘what to do’ by sufficiently linking epistemic mediation and socio-political intervention, consolidating both as a functional organization necessary for the social realization of augmented cognition. By theoretically and practically engaging with the question of what it means to have a history, what it means to reorient, reconstitute and repurpose that history through the social’s present normative attitudes toward the past and the future, social intelligence turns into a force for which cognition registers as social re-engineering of the existing reality.

It is the possibility of fusion and implementation of all knowledge within the integrating field of history–spanning from the primitive forms of Spirit to its advanced social forms–that augurs a new form of intelligence for which knowledge must be translated into socio-historical intervention, and intervention as re-engineering the socio-historical reality must deepen the exploration of history, that is the recognition of the past and the integration toward the future.

The discovery of history as a new continent of knowledge where techno-scientific advancement, economy, politics, ethics and social struggle can integrate and reinforce one another is in effect the deepening of the reality of history both in terms of its recollective-retrospective and integrative-prospective dimensions. But deepening of the reality of history is nothing but repurposing and reconstituting it through understanding and intervention. The knowledge of history as a science, as trivial as it may sound, is a hegemonic impulse for on the one hand opening up the recollective-integrative dimensions of history and its social evolution to understanding in the broadest possible sense, and on the other hand intervening with the progression and reality of history by socially implementing this amplifying understanding with no swerve or falter. Failing this we can say that we are not creatures endowed with history and that, more gravely, we are still the denizens of benighted ages where history is a domain as opaque as the inaccessible sky whose ineffability is a source for oppression from the heavens and romanticism or mysticism on earth.

In other words, the knowledge of history as a science is essentially a self-reinforcing tendency toward having a history. But what does it mean to have a history other than reorienting and repurposing it toward future ends unseen by the past whose recognition should never be an impediment but merely a way to liberate the present from its past commitments, either by collectively revising or abandoning them. It is for this reason that Marx’s discovery transforms the pursuit of understanding and intervention, scientific knowledge and social implementation through history into a project where social emancipation and evolution of intelligence entangle, entering into an Odyssean dynamic of reinforcement and mutual diversification. Even though intelligence is natural, short of reorienting, repurposing and reengineering its natural history, it ceases to be intelligent. Yet it remains highly improbable that a robust conception of intelligence can reorient itself toward emancipation without looking into its natural history and working out its exigencies. But an intelligence that does not unfold its own demands which inevitably lead to re-engineering and revising its natural constitution, its multiple realization, is even more implausible. The history of intelligence commandeers its natural history by the history of its obligations and demands, for the history of intelligence is the history of reconstitutions of the natural constitution. The reconstitution of natural history does not violate natural laws but adapts them to new regimes of designed purposes.

Marx’s discovery only over a century ago toward the realization of social intelligence emphasizes the work to be done. Yet more importantly it signifies the truth of our age, that we are merely living in the pre-history of social intelligence. Those who moan and are bored with the pace at which intelligence in general and the self-expediting project of social intelligence in particular are evolving, should look elsewhere either in God or in opiate. The recognition of the hegemony of social intelligence is a collective and common task whose fulfillment is the only true drive toward freedom, both as purposive social freedom and the liberation of a self-apprehending intelligence. The ultimate task of humanity should be to make something better than itself, for what is better than us cultivates itself through our pursuit for the better. Liberate that which liberates itself from you, for anything else is the perpetuation of slavery.

The hegemony of the ultimate task by itself is the expansion of real alternatives and materializes as the maximization of freedom. It is the liberation of intelligence as the principle of summum bonum. It is against the reeking mist of other homebrewed philosophies and social prescriptions (the ardor for the ordinary, resignation, indetermination, anti-logos, neo-luddism, communitarian loacalism, liberal freedom, …) that the hegemony of social intelligence ought to be safeguarded. What is exactly an alternative to social intelligence if not veneration of cognitive turpitude and social vices.”

This is a passage from my forthcoming work, Intelligence and Spirit. Written in the tradition of ethics of self-cultivation, particularly Seneca’s Epistulae morales, Intelligence and Spirit is an essay on the philosophical foundations of artificial general intelligence and the advent of social intelligence. It is developed through the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Pierce, Brandom and Sellars and emphasizes the significance of social intelligence as humanity’s summum bonum. Building on the social moral philosophy of New Confucianism specifically the late works of Mou Zongsan, the final sections focus on a synthetic integration between rationalism and social emancipation oriented toward a collective project of self-cultivation out of which a self-apprehending intelligence can be realized. A more condensed description would be the ethics of intelligence:
“Approximately one billion years ago, the first rudimentary forms of neuronal information processing began to develop, over five hundred years ago, during the Cambrian period, the evolution of a more complex nervous system combined with advanced visual tracking systems set off the perception catastrophe leading to the organization of the nervous system as an “organ of alienation” capable of generating a designated mental discontinuity. Through this highly regulated mental discontinuity, the organism became able to differentiate regions of space, optimally distinguishing itself from its food and predators. By simultaneously gaining traction on the spatiotemporal continuity of the organism–in reality, a rupture in the continuity of space-time–and the spatio-temporal connectivity, the nervous system enabled the organism to recognize things other than itself, orienting it toward the problem of exploring and making sense of its environment.
With the beginning of neurulation and cephalization processes in the vertebrates, basic computational barriers such as control of combinatorial explosion, construction of models of choice, predictive calculations, simulation of movement and proactive adaptation at the level of the organism were one by one overcome. Eventually the neotenous brain brought the complexity of the nervous system to a new stage. Marked by maximal functional entrenchment, the magnitude of evolutionary diversification–in this case, the addition of extensive structural change–significantly diminished. Maximization of functional entrenchment and reduction in structural diversification of the neotenous brain yet did not constrain the amplification of cognitive processes, but rather forced them (particularly abstraction and simulation) to a new functional vista which is that of the social domain. The development of social cognitive technologies such as tool-use and language solved two of the most significant problems of computation, namely, qualitative compression and stabilization of information necessary for the communal establishment of knowledge and further augmentation and coordination of understanding and action. Qualitative organization and stabilization of information through the formation of concepts as communal components of knowledge transformed the cognitive possibility of knowledge into a social reality, and thus facilitated the acquisition and exploitation of higher levels of cognition otherwise inaccessible from a purely bio-evolutionary standpoint.
However, only less than five hundred years ago, we noticed that we are not living at the center of the universe, slightly more than three hundred years ago we discovered that the fabric of the universe obeys and is held together by physical laws. Only a century and a half ago, we learned we are not children of God and began to investigate its implications–even though to this date, still the religious view on the origin of species is widespread and is vehemently defended. However, just more than a century ago we began to “open up a new continent, that of History, to scientific knowledge”, realizing that not only history can be navigated as a continent of knowledge but also it is an integrating field in which all other forms of knowledge, theoretical and practical, can be fused and reinforce one another. What Louis Althusser hails as Marx’s monumental discovery in the history of human knowledge marks a new stage in the evolution of intelligence, which is that of social intelligence. It is a form of intelligence that liberates new demands and opportunities of ‘what to think’ and ‘what to do’ by sufficiently linking epistemic mediation and socio-political intervention, consolidating both as a functional organization necessary for the social realization of augmented cognition. By theoretically and practically engaging with the question of what it means to have a history, what it means to reorient, reconstitute and repurpose that history through the social’s present normative attitudes toward the past and the future, social intelligence turns into a force for which cognition registers as social re-engineering of the existing reality.
It is the possibility of fusion and implementation of all knowledge within the integrating field of history–spanning from the primitive forms of Spirit to its advanced social forms–that augurs a new form of intelligence for which knowledge must be translated into socio-historical intervention, and intervention as re-engineering the socio-historical reality must deepen the exploration of history, that is the recognition of the past and the integration toward the future.
The discovery of history as a new continent of knowledge where techno-scientific advancement, economy, politics, ethics and social struggle can integrate and reinforce one another is in effect the deepening of the reality of history both in terms of its recollective-retrospective and integrative-prospective dimensions. But deepening of the reality of history is nothing but repurposing and reconstituting it through understanding and intervention. The knowledge of history as a science, as trivial as it may sound, is a hegemonic impulse for on the one hand opening up the recollective-integrative dimensions of history and its social evolution to understanding in the broadest possible sense, and on the other hand intervening with the progression and reality of history by socially implementing this amplifying understanding with no swerve or falter. Failing this we can say that we are not creatures endowed with history and that, more gravely, we are still the denizens of benighted ages where history is a domain as opaque as the inaccessible sky whose ineffability is a source for oppression from the heavens and romanticism or mysticism on earth.
In other words, the knowledge of history as a science is essentially a self-reinforcing tendency toward having a history. But what does it mean to have a history other than reorienting and repurposing it toward future ends unseen by the past whose recognition should never be an impediment but merely a way to liberate the present from its past commitments, either by collectively revising or abandoning them. It is for this reason that Marx’s discovery transforms the pursuit of understanding and intervention, scientific knowledge and social implementation through history into a project where social emancipation and evolution of intelligence entangle, entering into an Odyssean dynamic of reinforcement and mutual diversification. Even though intelligence is natural, short of reorienting, repurposing and reengineering its natural history, it ceases to be intelligent. Yet it remains highly improbable that a robust conception of intelligence can reorient itself toward emancipation without looking into its natural history and working out its exigencies. But an intelligence that does not unfold its own demands which inevitably lead to re-engineering and revising its natural constitution, its multiple realization, is even more implausible. The history of intelligence commandeers its natural history by the history of its obligations and demands, for the history of intelligence is the history of reconstitutions of the natural constitution. The reconstitution of natural history does not violate natural laws but adapts them to new regimes of designed purposes.
Marx’s discovery only over a century ago toward the realization of social intelligence emphasizes the work to be done. Yet more importantly it signifies the truth of our age, that we are merely living in the pre-history of social intelligence. Those who moan and are bored with the pace at which intelligence in general and the self-expediting project of social intelligence in particular are evolving, should look elsewhere either in God or in opiate. The recognition of the hegemony of social intelligence is a collective and common task whose fulfillment is the only true drive toward freedom, both as purposive social freedom and the liberation of a self-apprehending intelligence. The ultimate task of humanity should be to make something better than itself, for what is better than us cultivates itself through our pursuit for the better. Liberate that which liberates itself from you, for anything else is the perpetuation of slavery.
The hegemony of the ultimate task by itself is the expansion of real alternatives and materializes as the maximization of freedom. It is the liberation of intelligence as the principle of summum bonum. It is against the reeking mist of other homebrewed philosophies and social prescriptions (the ardor for the ordinary, resignation, indetermination, anti-logos, neo-luddism, communitarian loacalism, liberal freedom, …) that the hegemony of social intelligence ought to be safeguarded. What is exactly an alternative to social intelligence if not veneration of cognitive turpitude and social vices.”

This new section is up. I will be adding new essays and transcripts of my recent talks.

My text on Moulène, abstraction and embodied thought experiments is published by Sequence Press and can be ordered through their website.

This is the abstract of my forthcoming talk at A Culture Beyond Crisis workshop, organized by Goethe-Institut Los Angeles and The School of Critical Studies, CalArt.
Venue: October 25 at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, 5750 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 100, Los Angeles CA 90036, phone +1 323 525338, time: 10.30 am – 1:00pm

***

What Does It Mean to Think a Catastrophe
This presentation revolves around two lines of inquiry: What is precisely a catastrophe? And is every catastrophe a crisis?
By answering the first question, this presentation attempts to investigate the imports of a catastrophe for cognition. Following the works René Thom, Jean Petitot, Wolfgang Wildgen, Lorenzo Magnani and recent works in conceptualization of processes (see Johanna Seibt, Svend Østergaard, et al.), we propose that not only cognitive systems use catastrophes – induced or natural – to organize information and generate semantic opportunities through which they can evolve, but also cognition as such is a generative catastrophe par excellence. Once the concept of catastrophe is sufficiently elaborated, it is then possible to tackle the second question, namely, if a catastrophe is a cognitive opportunity and if cognition is a generative catastrophe that must always be kept in a fragile state of equilibrium, then should we treat socio-political crises as windows of opportunity for understanding and action? We shall argue that engaging this question in the absence of a detailed and critical differentiation between catastrophe and crisis, between different types of stability and instability results in two predominant pathologies in thinking and acting upon crises. At one extreme, the conflation will lead to a rampant affirmationist position for which every rupture in socio-cultural fabric is seen as an engine of change or a potential positive singularity (cf. the philosophy of right-accelerationism). At the other pole, short of an adequate approach to map the distinctions and connections between the two, socio-political resignation or fundamentalist conservatism become the principle attitudes. Every catastrophe or singularity is immediately staved off as a threat. Novel approaches to crises are discarded in favor of trifling local solutions or worse, the all-encompassing impotence of resignation: Let’s act in our immediate environment or let it be. As an alterative to these two extremes, this presentation aims at putting forward a third alternative built on a fine-grained map between catastrophe and crisis where the cognitive and critical opportunities, singularities and obstructions (or failures) fuse in order to delineate new affordances of action.

Jean-Luc Moulène
Torture Concrete
September 7 – October 26, 2014
Opening reception: Sunday, September 7, 6-8 PM
Miguel Abreu Gallery
88 Eldridge Street / 36 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
212.995.1774 , post@miguelabreugallery.com



“Anyone who does not recognize and embrace the formal cruelty of thought is not fit for the labor of abstraction. Anyone who is not suited to the labor of abstraction cannot liberate thought from its idleness and from its oppressive determination by its own present image i.e. what it is or what it is supposed to be. […]
The greatest merit of Moulène’s work is that he is perhaps the only living artist whose entire project is systematically devoted to changing the transformative dimension of thought by manipulating and disturbing the general configuration of its structure – that is, the relation between its tendencies and local instantiations. For him, the task of art is rediscovered not in its ostensible autonomy but in its singular power to rearrange and destabilize the configurational relations between parameters of thought, parameters of imagination and material constraints that structure and parameterize the cognitive edifice. It is this configurational instability that allows for the transition of thought to a new stage by widening its scope of synthesis (i.e. the differentiation and integration of thought). However, the evolving task of art can never be entirely approached from within art itself as a particular mode of thought, but only in the context of the general structure of thought that makes such a task possible and renders it consequential in terms of the role it plays for the transformation of thought. This is where, by approaching the task of art in terms of the self-transformative capacities and opportunities of thought – its propensity to systematically be cruel to itself, to violently rise above what determines it – Moulène makes two consequential moves: Firstly, he attempts to redefine the consequentiality of art in terms of what makes the task of art possible and legitimizes such a task within a much broader context. Secondly, by approaching the designated task of art by way of the general configuration that enables such a task (i.e. the positive destabilizing-stabilizing loop through which thought finds new answers to perennial questions of ‘what to think’ and ‘what to do’), Moulène seeks to outline new objectives for art and to revise its task.
The entire task of thought is to redefine its functional roles and cumulatively liberate itself from the grip of any external cause that determines it and any telos that limits its functional ascension. A local field of thought – be it art or philosophy – that does not reinvent its task in order to adapt to this general goal has no justification whatsoever for its existence. Just as biological evolution has no tolerance for the lack of functional adaptation, the functional evolution of thought has no patience for a mode of thought that refuses to rise to the status of the noetic structure that supports it. A specific mode of thought that does not raise itself to the general status of thought is obsolete and will be weeded out by the very thought that once enabled it.” (Torture Concrete: Jean-Luc Moulène and the protocol of abstraction)

Here is the first part of my talk at Incredible Machines conference on Turing and the problem of computational description. I will also post my second presentation at the Berlin summer school (on functions, mechanisms and hierarchies).
For anyone who has not seen it yet, there is an excellent blog on the Berlin summer school covering the ongoing presentations and discussions.

***
The revolution is back
(Turing, functional realization and computational description)
I philosophically endorse computationalism and even more so I am an ardent proponent of functionalism. I think–and I am fully prepared to defend this controversial claim–that a philosopher cannot intellectually survive without endorsing functionalism, at least one of its many varieties (strongly normative [Hegel, Brandom], normative-materially constrained [Sellars] or strongly mechanistic [Bechtel]). To this extent, what I would like to briefly address is the significance of the functionalist account of the human mind, or more broadly speaking, the functionalist account of the rational agency. In this respect, I take side with Alan Turing’s response to Arguments from Various Disabilities (AVD) where he challenges the common forms of rejecting the possibility of the functional realization of the human mind in different substrates–for instance, in machines.
Machines cannot think, machines cannot have emotions, machines cannot be purposeful, they cannot be proactive and so forth: Turing enumerates these under what he calls arguments from various disabilities, it is sort of straw machine argument that is baseless and precarious. It is more a fruit of our psychological fears and residual theological approaches to the universe and ourselves than the result of sound arguments.
The mind-preservationist is a person who believes that the mind cannot be functionally realized and implemented in different substrates. He is a person who not only rejects the functionalist realization of the mind but also as a result yields to a form of vitalism or ineffability of the human mind. The mind-preservationist always attempts to see the machine’s capacities from the perspective of an endemic disability. But if what the mind-preservationist really dismisses is not the machine as such but is the functional realization of the mind implemented in the machine, then what he actually denies is not the machine per se but the mind itself. Or more accurately, what the mind-preservationist ends up rejecting is the possibility of mapping the mind’s functions, the possibility of modeling it, defining and objectifying it. In this sense, machine-denialism is simply an excuse for denying what the mind is and what it can be. Correspondingly, disavowing the pursuit of understanding the mind coincides with acting against the evolution of the mind, since from a pragmatic-functional viewpoint the understanding of the meaning of the mind is inseparable from how the mind can be defined, reconstructed and modified in different contexts. Therefore, if we lack the definition of the mind which is itself a map for its realization and objectification, then how can we so readily rule out the possibility of a machine furnished with a mind? The mind-preservationist, accordingly, has a double standard when it comes to recognizing the mind as both the measure and the object of his critique. He says the machine cannot engage in mental activities as if he possesses the map of the mind. However, if he does not know what constitutes activities of the mind, which is to say, if he does not possess the functional map of the mind, then he cannot approach the functional account of the mind (that is, a mind realized by a different set of realizers and implemented in an environment different from its natural-biological habitat) from the perspective of an intrinsic disability.
If you don’t know what the mind is then how can you claim the machine cannot possibly have a mind? With the understanding that the ‘what’ posed in this question is the very map of the mind’s functional realizability that can be implemented in machines. Here ‘what’ can be described functionally as those activities which define what the mind is. The mind is therefore described as a functional item, in terms of its capacities for mentation (i.e. engaging in mental activities). From a functionalist perspective, what makes a thing a thing is not what a thing is but what a thing does. In other words, the functional item is not independent of its activity.
The activities of the mind are indeed special in the sense that they are not ubiquitous. But as William Bechtel suggests it is not in spite of being comprised of mechanisms but in virtue of the right kind of mechanisms that the mind is special and its set of activities has distinctive characteristics.
For this reason, if the attack or the argument from the perspective of disabilities is adopted as a standard strategy toward machines or what Daniel Dennett calls “machine mentation” or if it is exercised as a pre-determined reaction to the possibility of the realization of the mind in different substrates, then it no longer enjoys a genuine critical attitude. Why? Because such a critical strategy then has implicitly subscribed itself to a preservationist view of the mind as something inherently foreclosed to mapping and (re)construction. The mind it safeguards has a special status because it is unique at the level of mapping and constructability. It cannot be constructed, because it cannot be fully mapped. It cannot be mapped because it cannot be defined. It cannot be defined because it is somewhere ineffable. If it is somewhere ineffable, then it is everywhere ineffable. Therefore, the singularity of the mind is the effect of its ineffability. If we buy into one ineffable thing and if that thing happens to be central to how we perceive the world, then we are also prepared to regard many other things in the universe as ineffable. Consequently, we have committed ourselves to full-blown mysticism.

(more…)

Here is the first part of my talk at Incredible Machines conference on Turing and the problem of computational description. I will also post my second presentation at the Berlin summer school (on functions, mechanisms and hierarchies).

For anyone who has not seen it yet, there is an excellent blog on the Berlin summer school covering the ongoing presentations and discussions.

***

The revolution is back
(Turing, functional realization and computational description)

I philosophically endorse computationalism and even more so I am an ardent proponent of functionalism. I think–and I am fully prepared to defend this controversial claim–that a philosopher cannot intellectually survive without endorsing functionalism, at least one of its many varieties (strongly normative [Hegel, Brandom], normative-materially constrained [Sellars] or strongly mechanistic [Bechtel]). To this extent, what I would like to briefly address is the significance of the functionalist account of the human mind, or more broadly speaking, the functionalist account of the rational agency. In this respect, I take side with Alan Turing’s response to Arguments from Various Disabilities (AVD) where he challenges the common forms of rejecting the possibility of the functional realization of the human mind in different substrates–for instance, in machines.

Machines cannot think, machines cannot have emotions, machines cannot be purposeful, they cannot be proactive and so forth: Turing enumerates these under what he calls arguments from various disabilities, it is sort of straw machine argument that is baseless and precarious. It is more a fruit of our psychological fears and residual theological approaches to the universe and ourselves than the result of sound arguments.

The mind-preservationist is a person who believes that the mind cannot be functionally realized and implemented in different substrates. He is a person who not only rejects the functionalist realization of the mind but also as a result yields to a form of vitalism or ineffability of the human mind. The mind-preservationist always attempts to see the machine’s capacities from the perspective of an endemic disability. But if what the mind-preservationist really dismisses is not the machine as such but is the functional realization of the mind implemented in the machine, then what he actually denies is not the machine per se but the mind itself. Or more accurately, what the mind-preservationist ends up rejecting is the possibility of mapping the mind’s functions, the possibility of modeling it, defining and objectifying it. In this sense, machine-denialism is simply an excuse for denying what the mind is and what it can be. Correspondingly, disavowing the pursuit of understanding the mind coincides with acting against the evolution of the mind, since from a pragmatic-functional viewpoint the understanding of the meaning of the mind is inseparable from how the mind can be defined, reconstructed and modified in different contexts. Therefore, if we lack the definition of the mind which is itself a map for its realization and objectification, then how can we so readily rule out the possibility of a machine furnished with a mind? The mind-preservationist, accordingly, has a double standard when it comes to recognizing the mind as both the measure and the object of his critique. He says the machine cannot engage in mental activities as if he possesses the map of the mind. However, if he does not know what constitutes activities of the mind, which is to say, if he does not possess the functional map of the mind, then he cannot approach the functional account of the mind (that is, a mind realized by a different set of realizers and implemented in an environment different from its natural-biological habitat) from the perspective of an intrinsic disability.

If you don’t know what the mind is then how can you claim the machine cannot possibly have a mind? With the understanding that the ‘what’ posed in this question is the very map of the mind’s functional realizability that can be implemented in machines. Here ‘what’ can be described functionally as those activities which define what the mind is. The mind is therefore described as a functional item, in terms of its capacities for mentation (i.e. engaging in mental activities). From a functionalist perspective, what makes a thing a thing is not what a thing is but what a thing does. In other words, the functional item is not independent of its activity.

The activities of the mind are indeed special in the sense that they are not ubiquitous. But as William Bechtel suggests it is not in spite of being comprised of mechanisms but in virtue of the right kind of mechanisms that the mind is special and its set of activities has distinctive characteristics.

For this reason, if the attack or the argument from the perspective of disabilities is adopted as a standard strategy toward machines or what Daniel Dennett calls “machine mentation” or if it is exercised as a pre-determined reaction to the possibility of the realization of the mind in different substrates, then it no longer enjoys a genuine critical attitude. Why? Because such a critical strategy then has implicitly subscribed itself to a preservationist view of the mind as something inherently foreclosed to mapping and (re)construction. The mind it safeguards has a special status because it is unique at the level of mapping and constructability. It cannot be constructed, because it cannot be fully mapped. It cannot be mapped because it cannot be defined. It cannot be defined because it is somewhere ineffable. If it is somewhere ineffable, then it is everywhere ineffable. Therefore, the singularity of the mind is the effect of its ineffability. If we buy into one ineffable thing and if that thing happens to be central to how we perceive the world, then we are also prepared to regard many other things in the universe as ineffable. Consequently, we have committed ourselves to full-blown mysticism.

I will be in Berlin for the first few sessions of the summer school (details here). My first talk will revolve around the following texts:
G. Chatelet, On a Little Phrase of Riemann’s…, trans. Robin Mackay (Available here:
http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/Chatelet_local-global.pdf)
R. Negarestani, Where is the Concept? (Available here: http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/Navigation-2013.pdf)

Below are the abstracts for my two presentations on July 1st:
Session one: The Matheme of the Universal
This presentation aims to introduce some of the recent advances in mathematics and concept-analysis through an accessible conceptual history shaped by philosophical questions surrounding topics such as particularity, universality, analysis, synthesis, orientation, quantity, quality and theory of extension. By answering these questions it would be possible to reinvent the dialectic between particularity and universality as the transition from the local to the global, therefore moving from a theory of universality to a theory of connections (Levi-Civita, Cartan, et al.) where stepwise local constructions can be coupled with a global orientation. While the transition to local-global connections resolves certain antagonisms between the local and the universal, it creates a productive space of tension through which the local can be explored beyond its immediate ambit. It is this exploratory vector that opens the local-global passage as a rule-based landscape of navigation.
Session two: Engineering through Navigation
Why are functions important, especially in the study of complex phenomena or hierarchical and multi-layered systems where complexity arises not because of the size or the number of components or processes involved but because of the particularity of the mode of organization that orchestrates the activities and operations of various structural and functional hierarchies? One answer to this question would be because any account of change – whether in the context of evolution or in the context of normative modification, intervention, rectification and reorganization – is ultimately the change in function. Even when we change the structure, we do that with the aim of inducing a change in function i.e. what a thing does and how it can be improved or replaced by a different set of activities. But the change of function is far from easy since we need to locate the exact function we are referring to within a much wider functional organization, within an environment and in accordance with existing structural constraints. What a complex system appears to be doing is hardly ever what it actually does. In order to implement a change in function, first we should identify what a system does, how it does it, how its functions are organized and how the activity in question is orchestrated through this complex organization. In other words, we must have the knowledge of ‘what a system does’ in order to change a function and alter a system’s or a phenomenon’s behavior. This presentation extends the ‘navigational paradigm’ to questions regarding construction and modification of complex systems through the lenses of mechanistic explanation and multi-level analysis of functional organization.
Date and location: July 1-12, 2014, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

As part of an event organized by Glass Bead (Fabien Giraud, Jeremy Lecomte, Vincent Normand, Ida Soulard, Inigo Wilkins) and Composing Differences (curated by Virginie Bobin), Guerino Mazzola and I will be presenting talks on philosophy, mathematics, games and the paradigm of navigation. Here is my abstract (I will post Mazzola’s abstract later):

What Philosophy Does to the Mind
By entering the game of truths – that is, making sense of what is true and making it true – and approaching it as a rule-based game of navigation, philosophy opens up a new evolutionary vista for the transformation of the mind. Within this evolutionary landscape, the mind is grasped as a set of activities or practices required to navigate and adapt to a terrain which lacks a given map and a given compass, a desert bereft of natural landmarks, with a perpetually shifting scenery and furnished with transitory mirages. The mind is forced to adapt to an environment where generic trajectories replace specific trajectories and where the consequences of making one move unfold as future ramifying paths that not only uproot the current position in the landscape but also fundamentally change the travel history and the address of the past itinerary. It is within this environment that philosophy instigates an epochal development of yet unexplored and obscure possibilities: By simulating the truth of the mind as a navigational horizon, philosophy sets out the conditions for the emancipation of the mind from its contingently posited settings and limits of constructability. Philosophy’s ancient program for exploring the mind becomes inseparable from the exploration of possibilities for reconstructing and realizing the mind by different realizers and for different purposes.
In liberating itself from its illusions of ineffability and irreproducible uniqueness, and by apprehending itself as an upgradable armamentarium of practices or abilities, the mind realizes itself as an expanding constructible edifice that effectuates a mind-only system. But this is a system that is no longer comprehensible within the traditional ambit of idealism, for it involves ‘mind’ not as a theoretical object but as a practical project of socio-historical wisdom or augmented general intelligence.
Throughout this presentation we shall lay out the minimal characteristics and procedures of the game of navigation by drawing on the works of Gilles Châtelet (the construction of a horizon), Guerino Mazzola (a dynamic theory of addresses) and Robert Brandom (the procedural system of commitments). We shall subsequently unpack the consequences of playing this game in terms of the transition from self-conception to self-transformation of the mind as outlined by the New Confucian philosophers Xiong Shili and Mou Zongsan.

Date: April 22nd, 7-9pm.
Location:
311 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002, USA
Sponsored by ART² and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.

I will be giving a number of presentations in Vancouver surrounding the navigational paradigm (as related to the ramifying structure of commitments, the non-classical portrait of the concept and the space of knowledge). Abstracts below:

(more…)

Function: Decomposition, Localization, Abstraction
Speakers: Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani
Although principally associated with a thesis in the philosophy of mind, functionalism has wide-ranging ramifications. The concept of “functional role” or “functional organization” ties together a metaphysical problem about the basis of the distinction between matter and form, an epistemic problem about how to distinguish semantic content from physical information, and an engineering problem about the relation between structural and functional properties. This workshop will try to unravel the metaphysical, epistemic, and engineering aspects of functionalism by developing themes from the work of philosophers including William Bechtel, Robert Brandom, Wilfrid Sellars, and William Wimsatt.
Date and Time: March 25, 2014, 6:30pm
Location:
Wollman Hall, The New School
66 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011
This is a free event and open to the public.
Seating is limited: You can order tickets via Eventbrite.

This is a revised and extended version of a short piece I wrote a while ago for Mohammad Salemy’s project Encyclonospace Iranica. Salemy’s project is a reconceptualization of the modern model of knowledge as an encyclospace, or a dynamic universe for the qualitative organization of information and the proliferation and navigation of its knowledge-bases. This is of course a far too reductive description of Salemy’s project and its ambitions. A good place to start with Salemy’s project is its documentation website, and also here.

***
The text in PDF.
Navigate With Extreme Prejudice
(Definitions and Ramifications)
•  Traditionally, philosophy is an ascetic cognitive experimentation in abstract (general) intelligence. As an ascesis in cognition, it concerns with grasping the mind in terms of a diversifiable set of abilities or practices whose deployment counts as what the mind is and what it does: special doings that one must undertake in order to count as organizing the intellect and setting in motion the faculty of thinking. By abstracting the mind to a set of practices, philosophy experiments with possibilities occasioned by decomposing the behavior of the mind into special performances or practices. The opportunities brought about by this practical decomposability are numerous and are still largely unidentified. The schema of this functionalist abstraction has at least two immediate implications. One is that by decomposing the mind to a set of practices, philosophy is able to envision itself as a veritable environment for an augmented nous precisely in the sense of a systematic experiment in mind simulation. Therefore, the mind is conceived – less in the sense of what it is and more in the sense what it does and what it can do – beyond its immediate or hard constraints. In other words, philosophy simultaneously expands the scope of experimentation with the mind and the scope of what mind can be and what it can do. The other implication is that by decomposing the mind into a set of practices, philosophy progressively registers itself as the domain of practical wisdom rather than theoretical wisdom, where ‘mind as a theoretical object’ is replaced by ‘mind as a system of practices’. Already pregnant of pragmatic-functionalist and social-communal gestures, the practical decomposability of mind, accordingly, transforms philosophy into a domain of practical wisdom and by so doing, it allows the understanding and manipulation of the mind as a collective enterprise of robust social practices. Once mind is mapped on the level of social practices, manipulation of the social fabric in the sense of diversifying robust social practices, design of new social conducts and administration of social organizations leads to the constructive manipulation, or more precisely, practical abstraction of the mind as a collective horizon. Indeed, philosophy establishes a link between intelligence and modes of collectivization, in a way that liberation, organization and complexification of the latter implies new odysseys for the former, which is to say, intelligence and the evolution of the nous. In this way, philosophy presents the first collective model of general intelligence according to which ‘what intelligence is’ and ‘how it can be liberated’ are no longer exclusively sought in the workings of the mind as a strongly structurally-coupled entity. In other words, its embedding in materiality (i.e. embodiment) and natural design (i.e. optimization principles associated with natural evolution) are no longer adequate criteria for its identification and liberation. Instead the reality of intelligence (what it is and what it can be) is found in the strongly functional realm of ‘mind as a system of collective practices’ which, by virtue of the function’s autonomy with regard to conditions of its constitution, is capable of proliferating itself in new complex structures and organizations. It is the collective instantiation inherent to this model that provides intelligence with a certain plasticity that can be modified, distributed, facilitated, even expedited. To sum up, by concurrently treating the mind as a vector of extreme abstraction and abstracting the mind into a set of social practices and conducts, philosophy gesticulates toward a particular and not yet fully comprehended event in the modern epoch – as opposed to traditional forms – of intelligence: The self-realization of intelligence coincides and is implicitly linked with the self-realization of social collectivity. The single most significant historical objective is then postulated as the activation and elaboration of this link between the two aforementioned dimensions of self-realization as ultimately one unified project.

(more…)

This is a revised and extended version of a short piece I wrote a while ago for Mohammad Salemy’s project Encyclonospace Iranica. Salemy’s project is a reconceptualization of the modern model of knowledge as an encyclospace, or a dynamic universe for the qualitative organization of information and the proliferation and navigation of its knowledge-bases. This is of course a far too reductive description of Salemy’s project and its ambitions. A good place to start with Salemy’s project is its documentation website, and also here.

***

The text in PDF.

Navigate With Extreme Prejudice
(Definitions and Ramifications)

•  Traditionally, philosophy is an ascetic cognitive experimentation in abstract (general) intelligence. As an ascesis in cognition, it concerns with grasping the mind in terms of a diversifiable set of abilities or practices whose deployment counts as what the mind is and what it does: special doings that one must undertake in order to count as organizing the intellect and setting in motion the faculty of thinking. By abstracting the mind to a set of practices, philosophy experiments with possibilities occasioned by decomposing the behavior of the mind into special performances or practices. The opportunities brought about by this practical decomposability are numerous and are still largely unidentified. The schema of this functionalist abstraction has at least two immediate implications. One is that by decomposing the mind to a set of practices, philosophy is able to envision itself as a veritable environment for an augmented nous precisely in the sense of a systematic experiment in mind simulation. Therefore, the mind is conceived – less in the sense of what it is and more in the sense what it does and what it can do – beyond its immediate or hard constraints. In other words, philosophy simultaneously expands the scope of experimentation with the mind and the scope of what mind can be and what it can do. The other implication is that by decomposing the mind into a set of practices, philosophy progressively registers itself as the domain of practical wisdom rather than theoretical wisdom, where ‘mind as a theoretical object’ is replaced by ‘mind as a system of practices’. Already pregnant of pragmatic-functionalist and social-communal gestures, the practical decomposability of mind, accordingly, transforms philosophy into a domain of practical wisdom and by so doing, it allows the understanding and manipulation of the mind as a collective enterprise of robust social practices. Once mind is mapped on the level of social practices, manipulation of the social fabric in the sense of diversifying robust social practices, design of new social conducts and administration of social organizations leads to the constructive manipulation, or more precisely, practical abstraction of the mind as a collective horizon. Indeed, philosophy establishes a link between intelligence and modes of collectivization, in a way that liberation, organization and complexification of the latter implies new odysseys for the former, which is to say, intelligence and the evolution of the nous. In this way, philosophy presents the first collective model of general intelligence according to which ‘what intelligence is’ and ‘how it can be liberated’ are no longer exclusively sought in the workings of the mind as a strongly structurally-coupled entity. In other words, its embedding in materiality (i.e. embodiment) and natural design (i.e. optimization principles associated with natural evolution) are no longer adequate criteria for its identification and liberation. Instead the reality of intelligence (what it is and what it can be) is found in the strongly functional realm of ‘mind as a system of collective practices’ which, by virtue of the function’s autonomy with regard to conditions of its constitution, is capable of proliferating itself in new complex structures and organizations. It is the collective instantiation inherent to this model that provides intelligence with a certain plasticity that can be modified, distributed, facilitated, even expedited. To sum up, by concurrently treating the mind as a vector of extreme abstraction and abstracting the mind into a set of social practices and conducts, philosophy gesticulates toward a particular and not yet fully comprehended event in the modern epoch – as opposed to traditional forms – of intelligence: The self-realization of intelligence coincides and is implicitly linked with the self-realization of social collectivity. The single most significant historical objective is then postulated as the activation and elaboration of this link between the two aforementioned dimensions of self-realization as ultimately one unified project.

Two upcoming talks at Merve (Berlin) and Staedelschule (Frankfurt), abstracts and details below:

How Can You Make Me Better?

“Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Building on a now neglected tradition of philosophy as a discipline for forging questions whose sheer insinuative power does something irreversible to the mind, this discussion entertains the idea of posing a question so extreme it would not leave any room for a neutral attitude. Posed at the intersection of philosophy as an experiment in the ascesis of cognition and ethics as a design of conduct, the inciting and hypothetical dimensions of this question are concealed within the informal demand of an innocent query or solicitation: “How can you make me better?”
Being the central inquiry of a number of ancient programs of ethics such as Cynicism, Stoicism, Confucianism and more recently New Confucianism (Shili, Zongsan, Junyi, et al.), the solicitation for enhancement or the demand for the better is progressively unfolded as an instigation of a project of self-realization. By arguing that these ethical regimen theoretically and practically treat virtues and constructive relationships as functions and motivations as orientations, and in so doing they endow enhancing forms of conduct with a certain functional autonomy, we propose that ethics can be redefined as a functionalist program furnished with a canonical orientation. Closely associated with the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, this is functionalism in the sense of abstract realizability of the roles functions play in complex systems so that the multi-state function of a set of practices or abilities can be adequately abstracted for the purpose of re-adaptation in different and broader contexts. By virtue of their abstract realizability, functions enjoy a form of autonomy that enables their extraction and replication, autonomous redeployment in different contexts and autonomous remobilization toward new purposes. The neo-functionalist reimagining of ethics brings about the possibility of understanding the pursuit of the self for the better or self-realization as an autonomous project, in the sense of what functional autonomy is and what the integrating orientation of a project consists of. The project is accordingly construed as a functional organization possessing a global integrity that allows for its characterization as a canonical subjectivity, a constructible self that displays historic and social features of “essentially self-conscious creatures” (Brandom). It is this collaborative or open-source self as a project through which the better – as that which is other than the previous and the current state of the self or even human – commences its self-realization and its destiny. As rooted in a secular enterprise of improvement through engagement with a non-conservable account of the present adapted to the revisionary rather than redemptive forces of the future, ethics highlights the truth and practical dimensions of what intelligence is and how it can be liberated: Intelligence is defined as that which normatively believes what is good for it, it desires it, and committedly acts on how to maintain and enhance the good. To seal the gap between believing what is true and making it true, it devises functions capable of practically elaborating intentional states toward action and realization. Since functions are independent of conditions of constitution, constructing the functional link between intentional states and realization means that intelligence establishes itself as a project that continuously revises what it was supposed to be, it knows itself by disbelieving in its foundations, it attains freedom by reconstituting itself.
Monday, January 13, 2013 7pm
-Städelschule-
Dürerstr. 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

“Its [New Confucianism] primary purpose is individual and communal self-realization with a view toward Heaven” -Tu Weiming

The Labour of the Inhuman
Inhumanism is the extended practical elaboration of humanism; it is born out of a diligent commitment to the project of humanism. A universal wave that erases the self-portrait of man drawn in sand, inhumanism is a vector of revision, it relentlessly revises what it means to be human by removing its supposed evident characteristics and preserving certain invariances. At the same time, inhumanism registers itself as a demand for construction, to define what it means to be human by treating human as a manipulable and re-orientable hypothesis. Inhumanism is in concrete opposition to any theoretical paradigm that seeks to degrade humanity either in the face of its finitude or against the backdrop of the great outdoors. The force of inhumanism operates as a retroactive deterrence against anti-humanism by understanding humanity historically – in the broadest physico-biological and socio-economical sense of history – as an indispensable runway toward itself. But what is humanism, or precisely speaking, what specific commitment does ‘being human’ represent and how does the full practical elaboration of this commitment to humanity amount to inhumanism?
Sunday, January 12, 2013 7pm
MERVE Verlag, Crellestrasse 22, 10827 Berlin

I will be traveling to Germany in January to give this talk along with presentations by Robin Mackay, Iain Hamilton Grant and others.
Frontiers of Manipulation
What are the limits and conditions of material manipulability? More importantly, is there a connection between the concept of the material and the function of manipulation in the sense that the latter decides the former? Drawing on some of the recent discussions in the field of engineering with regard to models, cross-level causal intervention, renormalization groups, morphogenetic analysis (the science of forms) and non-extendable explanatory and functional levels, this presentation aims at providing a concept of material organization beyond but reconcilable with the level of appearances. Whilst claiming that (1) material descriptions are blind to explanations and (2) only causal and functional explanations are capable of rendering the material intelligible and making material intervention possible, a robust concept of construction and manipulation cannot dispense with descriptive resources of appearances and macro-level domains. Once approached through local possibility spaces opened up by deep explanatory levels or the scientific image, the powers of abductive inference implicit in the manipulation conditionals at the level of ordinary descriptions enable a mode of construction that expands its frontiers from the top and from the bottom. This marks an encounter with the material that is neither quite speculative nor quite empirical while it is both abductive/non-monotonic and under real constraints.
Date: January 4, 2014
Time: 17.30 – 18.30
Location:
Fridericianum
Friedrichsplatz 18
D-34117 Kassel

I will be joining the Accelerationism symposium in Berlin via Skype. Abstracts and other details regarding the symposium can be read here. And here is my abstract:

A View of Man from the Space of Reasons
Is humanism – understood as an elaborated commitment to humanity – about human? Once humanism is accessed via the front door of the Enlightenment, a minimal definition of human can be secured. Human is defined by its capacity to enter the space of reasons as a special domain of practices. The argument of this presentation is that the definition of humanity according to the space of reasons is a minimalist definition whose consequences are not immediately given, but it is a definition that bootstraps itself to staggering ramifications, indeed posing itself as what Rene Thom termed a ‘general catastrophe’. If there were ever a real crisis, it would be our inability to cope with collateral outcomes of committing to the real content of humanity as undergirded by the neurobiolgical import of human and the ability to enter the space of reasons. The trajectory of reason is that of a global catastrophe whose pointwise instances and stepwise courses do not harbor an observable effect or noticeable discontinuity. Reason, therefore, is simultaneously a medium of local stability that reinforces procedurality and a general catastrophe, a medium of discontinuity and anti-conservation that administers the discontinuous identity of reason to the anticipated image of man. Elaborating humanity according to the self-actualizing space of reasons establishes a discontinuity between man’s anticipation of himself (what he expects himself to become) and the image of man modified according to its functionally autonomous content. It is exactly this discontinuity that characterizes the view of human from the space of reasons as a general catastrophe set in motion by activating the content of humanity whose functional kernel is not just autonomous but also compulsive and transformative. The sufficient discernment of humanity which is at the core of the project of humanism is in reality the activation of the autonomous space of reasons. But since this space – qua the content of humanity – is functionally autonomous even though its genesis is historical, its activation implies the deactivation of historical anticipations of what man can be or become according to a fundamentally descriptive level. Building on Ray Brassier’s identification of reflective critique as ‘inherently conservative’ and recently Deneb Kozikoski’s examination of the deep isomorphy between the critique of modernity and the logic of capitalism, it will be argued that the view of human from the space of reasons forestalls the conservation of a definition or portrait of man as the basis of and a justification for a preservationist mode of conduct. Since both conservative humanism and conflationary anti-humanism fall back on this conserved definition or canonical portrait, in making the conservation of the content of humanity impossible the view from the space of reasons calls for a new interventionist ethics. This is ethics as a continuous labor or a project accustomed to the general catastrophe of reason, a design of conduct that does not resort to conservation in order to embark on construction.

The outline of my talk at the Escape Velocities symposium on November 13:

The Human Centipede, A View From the Art World
Is it possible to understand the function of art within any consequential prescriptive or interventionist mode synchronous with the descriptive resources of the modern system of knowledge? In other words, does art have any import for a project of construction aimed at liberation of intelligence, illiberalization of freedom and collective enhancement? The positive answer to this question it will be argued hinges on a systematic extrication of the definition of art from the contemporary art world. Aimed at debunking the more ambitious claims of the art world with regard to speculative vistas and political vocations, this presentation involves an etiological scrutiny into premises of two international group art exhibitions, ‘Speculation On Anonymous Materials‘ and ‘and Materials and Money and Crisis‘. Underlining major tendencies of the art world in its search for contemporaneity and pertinence, these exhibitions accentuate the two faces of the same art world currency: longing for the outside and critical self-reflection. One through producing impersonal experience and diversification of the bijective space of affect into a myriad of relations and complicities, and the other through a politically sober introspection into the conditions under which its horizon has been integrated.
However both accelerative projection and decelerative reflection are retrofitted into a world of cognitive templates whose nebulizing function creates a cultural fog of conceptual conflation and practical impotency. It is through this operative fog that some of the more insidious mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism are directly plugged into the cognitive infrastructure under the guise of a world that appears determined to extend the plasticity of imagination and expand frontiers of action. But this is a world in which the financial closure of capitalism is cloned and grafted onto a cognitively maimed economy for accumulating false alternatives in the name of liberation of imagination and action. A suture of different overambitious vocations and driven by the wealth of waste it generates, the resulting beast is a prophetic vision of a tightly connected and controlled society with a single closed alimentary circuit, the human centipede. Those who scheme to infiltrate this world in order to militantly or cunningly liberate it from the inside are locked into the compactly segmented structure of the metameric organism. At once necessary for the growth yet expendable, every insider is a new addition to the iterated sequence of mouths and rectums through which the art world bootstraps itself – a miracle made possible by a simple but efficacious financial and cognitive algorithm. Dreams of acceleration or deceleration, speculative enthusiasm for the outside or critical self-reflection are revealed to be simply changes of frequency in the rate of the said iteration.
Time and Location:
November 13, 7pm
311 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002
T212 619 3356

The third installment of my collaboration with Florian Hecker:
C.D.: A Script for Synthesis
C.D. – A Script for Synthesis is a sound piece, an experimental drama, and a model of abstraction, which recalls Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty as much as Beckett’s minimalist narratives and neo-imagist poetry. It is the climactic third chapter in the trilogy of text-sound pieces Hecker has created in collaboration with the philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani (following Chimerization, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hinge, Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; both 2012), who has written a libretto/script for the performance. The conceptual point of departure is a perceptual encounter with a pink ice cube, which is dramatized as a scene in which the linguistic chimeras of scent and sound descriptions are materialized through synthetic trophies, the scale and shape of auditory objects, a Greek chorus and theatrical props. C.D. – A Script for Synthesis is an experiment in putting synthetic emptiness back into synthetic thought.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Peter B. Lewis Theater, 1071 5th Ave
Saturday, November 9, 7:30 pm
For more information on how to obtain tickets see HERE.

‘What does it mean to cognitively adapt to a reason whose interests lie elsewhere?’ I will be talking on Inhumanism as a program for appropriating and radicalizing the revisionary tendency of modernity. Details below:
The Labour of the Inhuman
(augmented rationality and its cognitive technologies)
Tuesday, September 24th, 2013
6PM
ICI Curatorial Hub
401 Broadway, Suite 1620
New York, NY 10013
RSVP at rsvp@curatorsintl.org with DARK TRAJECTORIES in the subject line.

After an eonic hiatus, I am back on this blog and will resume posting soon. A new age of productivity is finally in sight.
In the meantime: I will be in conversation with Ray Brassier and Suhail Malik around the themes of reason and enlightenment on July 20th. I am hopeful we will have the opportunity to focus on subjects such as freedom and alienation in relation to the project of new rationalism.
Blow Your Mind: On Freedom and Enlightenment
A conversation between Ray Brassier, Suhail Malik, and Reza Negarestani
Saturday, July 20, 2013
7 p.m.
88 Eldridge Street, 4th floor
New York, NY 10002

Via Finitude
A reconstruction of Nicole Oresme’s diagrams
Frequently characterized by historians as an early anticipation of Galilean epistemology and rationality’s total deracination of man and gods alike in the cosmos, Nicole Oresme’s diagrams of ‘extensivity of forms’ are simple epistemic devices developed in order to understand three classical problems: (1) The problem of variation (motion), (2) The problem of articulation of intelligibility (measurement), and (3) The problem of global integration of the variable and the intelligible (universality).
The aim of this lecture is to extract and formalize the constructive kernel of Oresme’s original diagrams, latitudo formarum, as a gesture toward a conception of knowledge capable of conditioning a sharp and irreversible noetic propulsion for the subject. We shall examine the constructive phases of this gesture in forming the schematic landscape of knowledge in terms of a number of consecutive operations: Initiating epistemic ratios of separation from nature, localizing different rational orientations born by the epistemic separation, organization of local orientations according to a global transport, determining the limit projected by the global transport, mobilizing local orientations toward the hypothetical limit, recalibrating the scope of navigation by way of reorganization of local orientations, renormalization of the global transport and reprojecting the limit.
As a conclusion, we shall argue that, following Oresme, the understanding of knowledge as a system of navigation destroys one of the enduring philosophical dogmas responsible for engendering both pseudo-rationalist myopia and quasi-mystical irrationalism, the thought of an essential bound in classical rationalism and the thought of after finitude as manifested in speculative materialism/realism: that is, the alleged incommensurability between finitude and unboundedness.
Date: May 28, 2013
Location: the Dean’s Boardroom, SSC 9420, on the 9th Floor of the Social Science Centre, London, Ontario.

Guerino Mazzola & Reza Negarestani \ Sonic Practice, Discourse and Auditory Experimentation

Location: act cube, Wiener Building (E15-001), 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA
Date: Thursday, May 9 (10am-12:30pm), free and open to the public
Index terms: Philosophy of Synthesis, Philosophy of Gesture, Category Theory, Mathematical Music, Performance Theory and Improvisation, Computer Musicology
Funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

An extensive documentation of Chimerizations series (Chimerization and Hinge), including the two texts I have written for the project.
Primary Information: http://primaryinformation.org/index.php?/upcoming/florian-hecker/
Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Florian-Hecker-Chimerizations/dp/0985136421

Structural symmetries and perspective variations of Raphael’s The School of Athens in Mazzola, et al. Rasterbild – Bildraster
I will be reading excerpts from The Mortiloquist (A Barbaric Interpretation of the Life and Problems of Western Philosophy) followed by a discussion on theory-fiction as philosophy’s simulation engine.
Thursday, March 28, 2013 – 6:00pm
UPenn, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104

I will be talking at CUNY, the center for humanities on February 21, 6:30pm:
The Topos of the Earth:
Telescopic and stereoscopic visions of the abyss-in-one

Yoneda construction of Pinocchio
‘What are the implications of locating the topos of the earth within a cosmological continuum’, ‘what does the local have in store for thought’, ‘what does it mean to be local or regional’, ‘where am I, where do I come from, in what direction do I proceed’, ‘how do systematic decisions and rational orientations with regard to local methods and exigencies shape the navigational dynamism of knowledge’, these questions constitute one of the most central aspects of the modern system of knowledge, namely, the problem of localization. It is by way of inferring the topoi of knowledge or locating sites through which the world can be thought and the space of the universal can be navigated that the germinal edifice of knowledge expands its frontiers. Whether as the space of the concept or the particular cosmological horizon that brings about the possibility of thought, the local outlines the navigational task of the philosopher with regard to analysis and synthesis, committing to worldly problems and speculating out of this world. Only through a systematic approach to the question of localization is it possible to embark upon a non-trivial philosophy of analysis and synthesis. Furthermore, a modern understanding of the local allows a more thorough examination of the valence of various epistemological tools and modes of inference as normative methodologies for the navigation of the space of the concept qua a local site.
Since the modern system of knowledge is understood as a multi-modal system of navigation endowed with universal orientation, the question of the topos or the site of the local is linked to the question of epistemology and knowledge both in its analytical and synthetic dimensions. It will be argued that the local – like the global – is not an a-priori given datum. Instead the determination of the local is a procedural task always threatened by the impotency of the generic perspective and the localist myopia of the particular. We shall argue that the task of localization needs to be understood as an oblique procedure that operates by means of certain ‘perspective operators’ and ‘epistemic mediators’. These perspective operators or navigational tools are able to interweave depth and surface, the generic and the vague (particular) and diagonally connect the diachronic to the synchronic (telescopic view), or cohere various depths such as the scientific and manifest images of the local (stereoscopic vision) so as to bring into focus the local and determine its relation to the open, the space of the Universal or the real. The dual task of ‘focalization’ and ‘depth-tracking’ of the local constitutes the panorama of what should be called a vertiginous enlightenment – i.e. inferring the horizon of the local from both generic-to-particular and vague-to-generic, universal-to-regional and regional-to-universal perspectives. The vertiginous enlightenment is but the reading of the local according to and within the abyss.
The aim of this lecture is to examine the problem of localization and its imports for a speculative cosmology and an ultramodern understanding of the system of knowledge through the theoretical appropriation of two pivotal concepts: (a) Homothetic variations of the local and (b) Yoneda addressing (built on the concept of Yoneda lemma in topos theory and category theory). These concepts assist us in studying the problem of localization in the wake of the vertiginous enlightenment and a new definition of the local: The local is now defined by its continuously unfolding ramified path structures and alternative addresses. That is to say, the local cannot be approached via any conception of given fixed coordinates. Since the local is not invariant under topos-inference, every act of localization finds the local site within a new set of coordinates because each telescopic and stereoscopic inspection into the topos of the local unlocks new addresses and brings to light contingent path structures, further distancing the local from its spurious roots that try to strictly demarcate it. Therefore, we can say that the local is defined not by its roots but by its ramified path structures into the open and its ever-changing alternative addresses which unravel as it is telescopically and stereoscopically determined and brought into focus. An understanding of the local via its alternative addresses and contingent sidetracks should be interpreted as a concept of non-ineffable depth through which the open, the universal or the real freely expresses itself in the local and the local ramifies into the open or gains traction upon the universal. It is this depthwise definition of the local that simultaneously diverges from Nietzschean-Heideggerian and Deleuze-Guattarian variants of a true-to-the-earth philosophy toward a geophilosophy as a local thought procedure whose topos is a true-to-the-universe earth.
Details: February 21, 2013, 6:30pm | The James Gallery

Here is brief and perfunctory summary of the overall trajectory of the recent NYC talk until the critique of ultra-normativity and an introduction to acceleration as an epistemico-performative vector (the first half of the talk as I recall). Ben Woodard at Speculative Heresy has already made an extensive post, so this is just to complement his:

The talk started within the context of an introduction to a disenthralled account of the modern system of knowledge. Then the idea that we need to understand acceleration’s penchant for metis, catastrophic rearrangement of parameters responsible for the behavior of the system, manipulative action, etc. within the modern system of knowledge and a terminalized trajectory of theoretical reason. If I remember correctly I suggested that when I frequently invoke references to the project of rationalism as the center of my emphasis, a couple of things need to be taken into account first: That for me a terminalized trajectory of reason does not have any necessity to coincide with that of the reasonable. Nor does my prejudice for the modern system of knowledge need to be understood within an analytical regime of knowledge. We are in a moment in history where we should prevent, at all costs, thought from becoming a vicious analytical attack dog that confuses its short leash with rational fidelity and precision. In fact, once we unbind the scope of the rationalism project and terminalize the transcendental asymptocity of knowledge, we realize that the ambition of rationalism is to sever the purported alliance between reason and human and to accelerate the dislocating and renegotiating power of the modern system of knowledge by which the human is humiliated at each and every turn.

Then I gave a summary of the structure of the talk. Rather than moving from one point to another in a sequential manner, we began to examine a number of seemingly dissociated thought pieces. These thought pieces were presented as the elements of my introduction to the modern system of knowledge and the possibility of a genuine project of inhumanism. The goal was to integrate these thought pieces into a coherent multi-frontal introduction throughout the talk:

1. Knowledge has an object but it asymptotically approaches its object via concepts. Understanding the so-called deep or universal ecology of the concept, that is, what is conception (both the conditioning of the concept by the concept-less space/exteriority and conceiving information into qualitatively well-organized spaces, i.e. global-to-local and local-to-global adjoints of conception), how does the theoretical reason approach the domain of the concept, what is the concept-space constituted of, how are concepts stabilized in a dynamic fashion, etc. To answer these questions, I talked about the ontology of the concept which coincides with the epistemology of it. We do not ask what the concept X looks like, or what it is (the classical ontological approach). Instead we ask how the concept X is conceived which basically leads us to another question, where is the concept X or where does the concept X subsist. To answer this question, we approached the concept as a locus (a local horizon) immersed within a generic medium (the extension of the concept that ramifies into the global structure of knowledge). So the ultimate question following Mazzola is ‘where is the topos of the concept?’ Again in order to tackle this question, we briefly examined how the topos of the concept is parametrized by its generic medium or concept-less space and how a topos-oriented analysis of the concept leads to what we call a ramified path structure: The concept can be identified (i.e. it can be conceived) via different alternative addresses or paths. This understanding of the concept and the process of conception leads to a new interpretation of knowledge as a navigation system of concept-spaces endowed with universal orientation (i.e. all global-local paths, structures, levels of organization and layers of the concept should be navigated, the eleventh commandment: “if it (navigation) is possible, then it is mandatory”). With all this, we started to talk about the local and global structures of the modern system of knowledge. So the first thought piece was to understand the valencies and imports of the modern system of knowledge through an examination of the genesis of the concept (via gestures through which the concept-less space condition the stability of the concept), its deep or universal ecology and how various modes of epistemic mediation and inference are identified by the overall methods or ways they navigate the global-local topology of the concept.

2. Mobilizing a trifurcating line of assault against (a) Land’s idea of machinic efficacy and a technological singularity or philosophy of inhumanism conditioned by this machinic efficacy (via Longo), (b) ultra-normative understanding of epistemology and variants of rigidified accounts of epistemic methodologies and processes of inference (Brandom and Brassier as possible examples); (c) axiomatic decelerationists or variants of classical Marxism that I charged with local myopia (I really didn’t talk about this third category that much as we were short on time. That was unfortunate!).

3. Explaining Oresmean accelerationism as a classical example of how manipulative epistemology, catastrophic change of the parameters responsible for the behavior of the system, designated action by way of focalized destabilizing disequilibrium (which creates spaces of reason through dialectical disequilibrium and disjunction), etc. produces a horizon of epistemic mediation and a new methodology for navigating the deep or universal ecology of the concept-space. (This we didn’t really talk about).

4. Understanding acceleration as a vector of epistemic mediation or global navigation of concept-spaces which is basically operates as an alternative to ultra-normative approaches to epistemology. A form of metisocratic production of knowledge and manipulative abductive inference.

5. Rediscovering inhumanism as not only conditioned by but also the veritable expression of the modern system of knowledge and the local-global navigation of its concept-spaces.

Land and machinic efficacy: We started to work on the genesis of the machinic efficacy by way of examining its deep roots in certain forms of metaphysics and revolutions in mathematics and logics, namely, Fregean logicism (derived from a Newtonian metaphysics of the absolute normativity) and Hilbertian formalism (derived from Laplacian classical determinism and his famous conjecture). Both of these constitute the foundations of the works of Shannon and Turing. We examined how digitalization is a form of classical determinism via the idea of approximation-perservation or digital rounding (a form of perturbation-preserving system) that makes the machine effective. Then we also discussed how the classical normativity — what preserves the so-called reasonable core of reason — as an absolute and super-ideal form of occurrence of the norm with regard to the variable or the locus of information (the concept) in the Fregean system does not change the variable according to a contingent trajectory but merely relocates it within a specific hence absolute space of norm over and over again. Then we moved to show what it means to be a digital machine and to be effective and mechanizable in that sense. This we did by way of three key objections:

1. Iteration fetishizes finitude and vice versa. The faster the iteration, the faster the machine. Showing that iteration loop is simply a form of determinism that is not able to unfold genuine epistemic encounters with different non-finite and contingent conceptions of time (it does not produce intelligibility from a contingent universe). The so-called deterritorializing speed of the machine is the outcome of its restricted ambit. Nothing is deterritorializing nor special about the speed of a digital machine insofar as it merely repeats the regularities of a finite conception of time. And that we have to seek alternatives for producing intelligibility not through computational iteration but by way of developing new conceptual frameworks for a non-iterative recursive theory. Finally, iteration constitutes the strongly metaphysical conceptual regime of computational algorithms. The new paradigm of the next machine should be furnished with epistemic encounters with interweavings and ramification of continuity and contingency (non-finite conceptions of time).

2. Discretization regime as the causal regime of computational algorithms. The regime of the discrete violates the first law of knowledge which is the conservation of information principle. The geodetic principles of the physical universe (namely, that of the continuum and Lagranian optimality) are sensitive to encoding. All information regarding geodetic continuities (the law of the least action) of the physical domain and symmetry breakings / extended criticalities of the biological domain are lost in discretization (following Longo). Also the discrete cannot approach the universal space or deep ecology of the concept insofar as the discrete does not use the information regarding the generic space which parametrizes information and the topos of the concept. The discrete (causal) and the iterative (conceptual) regimes of the computational dynamics are responsible for the machinic efficacy but this efficacy mutilates the intelligible and prevents genuine conditions for the mobilization of the inhumanist drive of knowledge, namely, encounters with different conceptions of time and space, normative improvisation, processing of information on the basis of the generic space that parametrizes them, contingent epistemic mediations and understanding of the landscape of knowledge as interweavings of continuity and contingency. All of these effectuate as irreversible renegotiations and dislocations of the human sphere. Capitalism investment on the so-called machinic efficacy and global digitalization, in this sense, is completely in line with its axiomatic preservation of the local ambit of thought and restricted knowledge generation (to degenerate the true scope of the global further and further).

Universe as a computer is a cheap metaphor at best, and at worst steps backward in the project of knowledge. The idea that the limits of computation (and accordingly, machinic efficacy) demarcate the limits of knowledge (and hence, a project of inhumanism conditioned by the modern system of knowledge) is the epitome of myopia.

3. If we understand the import of any epistemic vector as a response to two poles of not knowing (ignorance) and knowing not (falsity), we come across the third flaw of the computational algorithm and machinic efficacy. If ignorance is the drive of knowledge, we cannot use forms of producing intelligibility that don’t have any place for ignorance. Algorithms cannot work with falsity outside of an a-priori set of frameworks. Their operation in this regard is the little game of ‘I know you know that I know that you know ad infinitum‘. The algorithm can only present falsity (knowing not) according to given and ideal instances of truth-values. It does not give us the procedural proof of falsity. Nor can the algorithm operate with ignorance. You ask an algorithm ‘is X the case?’, if the answer is positive then Yes and if it is not then No but if it doesn’t know then it cannot remain silent, it has to yield an answer. The undecidability of Turing’s halting problem tells us that there is no algorithmic way to say ‘I am ignorant’ or ‘I don’t know’. Computational algorithms work with the truth-perservation kernel of classical logic. But the transcendental asymptocity of knowledge is simultaneously ignorance-perserving and ignorance-mitigating. In fact, ignorance-perservation is the warrant of the infinite task of reason, it maintains reason’s asymptotic trajectory. Because if there was a canonical truth already posited, the infinite task of reason would come to an end and its asymptotic trajectory would be disrupted (as in the case of mysticism). So this calls for new forms of reasoning and non-classical modes of inference and epistemic mediation which are capable of preserving as well as mitigating ignorance. Acceleration, abductive manipulation and epistemico-performative expriments are examples of these non-classical modes.

So in a nutshell, computational machines cannot embrace the global structure of knowledge and develop a navigation with universal orientation. Sophisticated computational methods like quantum computation, cellular automata can produce — or more precisely, simulate — contingencies, critical states, etc. but only according to their own highly modified and ideologically consolidated causal and conceptual regimes which have nothing to do with the physical universe and its principles of continuity and contingency. In this sense, computation does not render the universe intelligible, it produces a different form of intelligibility and even objectivity strictly corresponding to its own causal regime. With that said, I remember I said that the effectivity of computation should be defended as a useful approach on a local level: we do something that actually works, then the next iterative loop we do it better and again better, …. This is how we can refine our local procedures. But we should avoid blowing this out of proportion as something that has actually a global valence for thought or knowledge. Otherwise, we are simply cloning the image of the local onto the global.

The second line of assault focused on deficiencies of rigidified accounts of normativity and classical modes of epistemic mediation. The goal was to subsequently find an alternative, but having in mind that we absolutely need these standard and perhaps rigidified modes on the local level of navigation of the concept-space. Accelerative navigation of the concept-space (as a non-standard form of epistemic mediation) is more of a methodology that navigates the global ramifications of the concept-space and universally broadens the scope of knowledge beyond its local ambits. In order to do embark on this critique, we introduced acceleration as a particular form of gesture (cf. Chatelet), a designated action capable of introducing focalized violent instability and disequilibrium within a certain rate and through a certain synthetic procedure. Also at the same time, warning against metaphysically inflating the gestural constitution of acceleration as a mode of epistemic mediation into a vapid form of enactivism.

To be continued soon.

I will be in New York City for two upcoming events on November 15 and 18. The first one, a live collaboration with Florian Hecker. More of an abstract performance aimed at creating a synesthesiac experience of philosophy than a traditional philosophy lecture, The Non-trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal is a topological fable on the universalist philosophy of navigation and synthesis narrated in the style of Beckett. The first event also serves as an oblique introduction to the second event Abducting the Outside: Modernity and the Culture of Acceleration which will be a lecture focused on the possibility of a genuinely modern philosophy of the inhuman in the wake of an accelerated and disenthralled system of knowledge. The lecture is drawn on the works of Giuseppe Longo, Lorenzo Magnani, Gilles Chatelet and Alain Berthoz in cognitive sciences, mathematics especially the recent geometrical turn and physics accompanied with introductory commentaries on the exciting works of Gabriel Catren on anarchic constructivism and Benedict Singleton on metis intelligence.
Details and press release as follows:
Event 1: REZA NEGARESTANI & FLORIAN HECKER
The Non-Trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal:
A Topological Fable on Navigation and Synthesis
Date: Thursday, November 15th, 2012
Time: 7:30 PM
Locations: Abrons Playhouse, 466 Grand Street, New York (at Pitt Street)
Chimeras are integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other. Chimerization, a recent work by Florian Hecker, uses psychoacoustics to compose such creatures from readings of a libretto penned by philosopher and novelist, Reza Negarestani.
Expanding on this work, Hecker and Negarestani come together in a live experiment — less a collaboration between philosophy and sound than a synthesis of the two. In this abstract performance, recalling Artaud’s theatre of cruelty as much as Beckett’s minimalist narratives, the participating elements will be chimerized through their mutual immersion in the abyss of the universal, and thereby revealed, in turn, as nothing other than local guises of this abyssal continuum.
The performance opens (Part 1: Descent) with a theory-fiction-mathematics manifesto that introduces the dramatis personae and abruptly drops the goat of philosophy into the abyss. This prologue of a mangled philo-fiction or ‘philosophy on acid’ is followed (Part 2: Navigation) by a performative gluing of philosophy and sound in which the auditors become the goats, each completing the chimera according to their localization and navigation of the space. In the final movement (Part 3: Alienation) this personal experience of local synthesis is replaced by an estranging immersion into the impersonal experience of the global, synthetic environment as the intensifying, sonic chimerization moves beyond the sphere of the knowable.
An exercise in deregulation of the senses, this unique performance brings together two ambitious thinkers and practitioners in an experimental surgery that opens up their respective fields onto unexplored grounds.
Doors open at 7pm. Seating is limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
For more information please contact Sequence Press, located within:
Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester), New York, NY 10002
Tel 212.995.1774 post@sequencepress.com
Issue Project Room’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Event 2:
Abducting the Outside: Modernity and The Culture of Acceleration
Sunday, November 18th, 7:30PM
Miguel Abreu Gallery, 36 Orchard Street, New York

Here is the press release for the closing event of Yves Metller’s installation accompanied with a conversation on geophilosophy and art via video conference:

On April 26th, 8pm, Yves Mettler and Reza Negarestani will have a public conversation via video-conference at the Mus?�e cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne. The conversation will focus on how our most intimate corporeal and psychological constitutions have vertiginous proximities with the Earth’s cosmological history, and how we are bound through backdoor narratives and subtle complicities to the most liveless materials.

In addition, here you can find an excerpt of the text jointly written for the installation. Part a socio-culture satire, part a tabloid psychological thriller and part a geophilosophical self-help 101, the text “Arnex-1: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Asphalt” takes genre experimentations to new levels and reveals subtle webs of transfers and translations between art, the planet and a modern conception of geophilosophy whose topos of thought is a true-to-the-universe earth. The entire text will be available in the near future.

In continuation of the lecture series on universalism after Peirce and Kant and a modern conception of speculative thought, this Thursday and Saturday via video-conference:
Thursday, April 5 (11.00 – 14.00):
Seminar 6: The Continuous and the Contingent
– The labyrinth of the Universal and geometry of the Absolute (a summary on the synthetic environment of the Universal)
– Systematic navigation and inferring topoi of knowledge
Saturday, April 7:
Seminar 7: Accelerate Out of This World
– Mathesis of acceleration (Aristotle, Ibn al-Haytham, Oresme, Ch?�telet, Zalamea)
– Perception of acceleration, neurobiological underpinnings (Gould, Berthoz, Longo)
– Acceleration as a full-fledged epistemological program (Magnani)
– Culture of acceleration, an epistemological vanishing point
– Transmodern navigation and global synthesis of intensities
– The universe of “creativity without brake”
Transcription of the whole universalism series will be available at some point.
Address: PERFORMING ARTS FORUM
15, rue haute
02820 St Erme Outre et Ramecourt
France
janritsema@mac.com

This is an announcement for the opening of Yves Mettler’s installation Drilling Rig from Arnex, 1929 originally made for the festival Les Urbaines and now moved to the Mus?�e Cantonal des Beaux-Arts where it has been meticulously deconstructed by the artist. Mettler’s installation dramatizes and magnifies subtle relations between cosmology, geological time and mobilization of capital on the planet. The installation will also be accompanied by a collaboration between Mettler and I that will gradually develop throughout the course of the exhibition:

On April 26th, a performance / lecture will be held by Yves Mettler and Reza Negarestani (via video-conference) as the closing event for their writing collaboration. Written as a serial publication since the beginning of Mettler’s installation, the text ‘Arnex-1: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Asphalt‘ unfolds a psychoanalytical dialogue between the analyst Rig and the mysterious Patient O. Over seven psychoanalytical sessions schematizing the seven circles of hell, the dialogue unravels an aetiological examination of the memory of geological time as the twisted sum of traumatic scars left by the cosmological shock and contingent mobilization of capital. Art’s meticulous attention to the surface (landscape) parallels psychoanalysis’ dedicated focus on superficial phenomena as a means of dramatically bringing into focus transversal dynamics of depths otherwise invisible to the keenest of eyes.

Opening date: Thursday, February 9, 2012, 6:30pm.
Address: Mus?�e cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Palais de Rumine, place de la Riponne 6

Internet contingencies allowing, I will be giving a short talk via skype on Decay Modernism for SPECTRAL: Festival for Adventurous Music & Related Arts hosted by The Wire (Berlin, February 4, 17:00pm). Anyone who is in Berlin and interested in attending, can download the slides here: http://tinyurl.com/6lhj8pc

In his recent book Passages of Proteus written in 2011, Colombian mathematician Fernando Zalamea identifies the process of decay as an expression of a profound continuity in nature through which “creativity expands without brake”. The emphasis of this talk will be on a non-romantic conception of decay as a building process whose chemico-mathematical truth constitutes the very kernel of the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete in art and a formalism based not on obstruction (i.e. various modes of singularity such as the novel, the ideal and the sublime) but on acceleration, or ‘creativity without brake’. The underlying logic of decay is presented as a mode of synchronization or modernization of the living with and according to the dead. Far from moderating the tension between the living and the dead by embarking upon a speculative justice program (Meillassoux) or overcoming such tension through a quasi-mystic anti-modernist impulse, Decay Modernism brings about the possibility of thinking the dead outside of the culture of reconciliation and understanding culture as an epistemological vanishing point of different parallel orientations of nature for the modern subject.

Address and reservation information here.

If you are in Stockholm between 17 to 22 November, I will be talking over skype on limits and possibilities of speculative thought within a universalist framework.
Details below:
In this seminar Reza Negarestani will take a systematic approach to the modern landscape of thought where reason and speculation, earth and cosmos, regional and universal resources of thought intermingle and synthesize so as to deliver us ��� remorselessly ��� into the open. Beginning with a geocosmic reappropriation of Freud’s and Ferenczi’s theories of trauma and a universal reinstatement of Darwin’s evolutionary thesis characterized by Peirce as a major trajectory of speculative thought, Negarestani outlines a modern landscape of thought fully in accord with the revolutionary imports of Darwin’s assault on Aristotelian essentialism and Freud’s transcendental evacuation of human conscious experience. By navigating this modern landscape and highlighting its terrains and boundaries via figures such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich, Charles Sanders Peirce, Fernando Zalamea, Lorenzo Magnani, Guerino Mazzola and Gabriel Catren, Negarestani develops an asymptotic thought of the open ��� a universalist mode of thought at last cut loose from the overgrown lineage of planetary myopias.
Dates and Times
17 Nov 10.00 ��� 13.30
Introduction to seminar and Reza Negarestani by M?�rten Sp?�ngberg

Reza Negarestani Seminar 1: The Map and the Compass
��� Outlining the modern landscape of thought (a schema)
��� Sketching a speculative philosophy for navigating the modern landscape (a scheme)
��� Introducing alternative speculative schemes

18 Nov 10.00 ��� 12.30

Reza Negarestani Seminar 2: The Pit and the Pendulum
��� Universal continuum and a modern conception of the Earth
��� Toward a geophilosophical realism, or a systematically focused universalist philosophy

19 Nov 10.00 ��� 12.30

Reza Negarestani Seminar 3: The Universal and the Regional
��� Universalizing tensions and syntheses of the modern landscape (a geocosmic deepening of trauma)
��� A traumatic rehabilitation of the terrestrial horizon of thought

21 Nov 10.00 ��� 12.30

Reza Negarestani Seminar 4: The Earthman and the Open (150 mins)
��� Traumatic syntheses and the open
��� A non-trivial conception of openness and its revolutionary import

22 Nov 10.00 ��� 13.00

Reza Negarestani Seminar 5: The Trans-and-Absolutely Modern Man (180 mins)
��� Logic of alternatives and developing the asymptotic thought of the open
��� Modern man, or the enforcer of openness
Closing discussion and final notes with M?�rten Sp?�ngberg

Location: University of Dance and Circus – DOCH
Brinellv?�gen 58, T-bana Tekniska H??gskolan
Stockholm, Sweden
Contact
Anders Jacobson, course assistant
anders.jacobson@doch.se

���Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism��� has been published and is available now.
My contribution to the Venice Biennale 2011, entitled Rainbows and Rationalism, can be read in the main biennale catalogue, ILLUMInations.
The new Thackery T. Lambshead fiction collection exquisitely compiled and edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer is now available. My text in the volume is a short fiction written on a drawing provided by China Mi?�ville. Other contributors include China Mi?�ville, Mike Mignola, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Minister Faust, Jeffrey Ford and Lev Grossman among others.
I have also a short text in the new issue of MACBA’s magazine.
On the philosophical front, a couple of new essays on geophilosophical realism and the Copernican thought should be available soon in anthologies including the promising Realismus Jetzt!
If nothing unforeseeable happens, I will start a series of introductory posts on Fernando Zalamea’s mathematico-philosophical project on this blog (there will also be interspersed commentaries on Peirce, contemporary rationalism, Gabriel Catren, �Ķ). In the meantime, for those who are interested, the new volume of Collapse ���Culinary Materialism��� contains some brief introductory passages on Zalamea in the editorial introduction. Manabrata Guha’s multi-dimensional essay in the volume also builds on Zalamea���s work on Peirce.

The editorial introduction to Collapse VII can be read here.

Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007
Nick Land
March 2011
Edited and with an Introduction by Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay

Level 1, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to Level 2?

Fanged Noumena assembles for the first time the writings of Nick Land, variously described as ���rabid nihilism���, ���accelerationism���, and ���cybergothic���. Wielding machinically-recombined versions of Deleuze and Guattari, Reich and Freud, in the company of fellow ���werewolves��� such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, Trakl and Cioran, to a cut-up soundtrack of Bladerunner, Terminator and Apocalypse Now, Land plotted a rigorously schizophrenic escape route out of academic philosophy.
���Land���s incisive assessment of the machinic reality of a schizo-capitalism currently in the process of penetrating and colonizing the innermost recesses of human subjectivity exposes the fatally anachronistic character of the metaphysical conception of human agency upon which ���revolutionary��� thought continues to rely. The anachronistic character of left voluntarism is nowhere more apparent than in its resort to a negative theology of perpetually deferred ���hope���, mordantly poring over its own reiterated depredation. Worse still is the complacent sanctimony of those ���critical��� theorists who concede that the prospect of revolutionary transformation is not only unattainable but undesirable (given its dangerously ���totalitarian��� propensities), but who remain content to pursue a career in critique, safely insulated from the risks of political praxis. The challenge of Land���s work cannot be circumvented by construing the moral dismay it (often deliberately) provokes as proof of its erroneous nature, or by exploiting the inadequacies in Land���s positive construction as an excuse to evade the corrosive critical implications of his thought. Nor can it be concluded that this alternative philosophical path cannot be further explored. [�Ķ] Everything in Land���s work that falls outside the parameters of disciplinary knowledge can and will be effectively dismissed by those who police the latter. In Bataille���s incisive formulation, ���the unknown [�Ķ] is not distinguished from nothingness by anything that discourse can announce���. Like his fellows of the ���inferior race���, what we retain of Land���s expeditions are diverse and scattered remnants, here constellated for the first time. These are also tools or weapons; arrows that deserve to be taken up again and sharpened further. The wound needs to be opened up once more, and if this volume infects a new generation, already enlivened by a new wave of thinkers who are partly engaging the re-emerging legacy of Nick Land���s work ��� it will have fulfilled its purpose.��� (Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay)
Land���s work is rife for misunderstanding, but this is essential since it forces us to recalibrate his weapons and to reevaluate our capacities as humans while we renavigate minefields at the outer frontiers of thought (and praxis). All in all, here is Nick Land as the patient zero of speculative thought in the 21st century.
More information here:
https://www.urbanomic.com/pub_fangednoumena.php

[The tuning fork of speculation] has two prongs. One is the prong of reason; the other prong is a razor. The speculative artist or philosopher at the same time has a razor in one of his hands, and reason in the other. These two, reason and the razor, are essentially not interchangeable. The razor, by itself, is a romantic and blind tool. It cuts for the sake of being extreme. And reason itself does not have the tenacity or audacity to evacuate even the rational ground of itself. So, what it does, what this tuning fork does, it tunes speculation. The razor cuts for the extreme, it sheds possible grounds, future grounds and methodically cuts in different ways — not only restlessly carving out the regional from the universal but also transplanting universal into regional fields of thought. On the other hand, the other prong, the prong of reason, sheds light on the field of the surgery of this razor — it sharpens the blade while revealing new depths for the operation of the razor. Or it alternatively brings into focus what has already been cut. Now, the movement of these two prongs resonate with one another in such a way that they tune the field of speculation. A resonantly excited field of speculation is a continuum synthetically interwoven by vibrations of the prongs of the fork, the razor and reason. As a continuum, the synthetic field of speculation adds a new phantom prong to the fork. Whilst the two prongs of the fork are elastic, the third phantom prong is plastic — a resonant and plastic web of continuities between reason and the razor where all nodal points are interfused and welded together so thoroughly that the symmetry of reason and the razor collapses, their respective segregations are abolished and a new universal and generic expanse is brought forth. This universal expanse that represents the third, or more accurately, the plastic prong of the fork that is brought about by the synthesis of reason and the razor should be considered as the topos of speculation wherein thought approaches the local from the perspective of the absolute and a true-to-the-universe conception of globality. In short, the plastic prong thinks and approaches the local non-trivially through and according to the universal continuum which is absolute, open and plastic. At last, the two-pronged fork of speculation unbinds the alternative field of thought: the third prong through which asymmetries are unfolded in symmetries and the unreasonable becomes gradationally continuous to rationalism. (from The Medium of Contingency)

E. Lang Auditorium
55 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor
The New School, NYC
March 11, 2011
10:00 am – 6:30 pm
RSVP here, more information regarding the symposium’s schedule here
PLENARY SPEAKER
Robin Mackay
PRESENTATIONS
Alisa Andrasek
Zach Blas
Melanie Doherty
Benjamin Bratton
Alexander Galloway
Perry Hall
Ed Keller
Kate Marshall
Nicola Masciandaro
Eugene Thacker
McKenzie Wark
Ben Woodard
Sponsored by Media Studies, The New School and Parsons the New School for Design

On January 19th (6.30-8pm), in discussion with Elie Ayache, Robin Mackay, Matthew Poole, Miguel Abreu and New York based artist, Scott Lyall, I will give a short talk on contingency, philosophy and art via videolink. More details on the event can be found here:

NEW YORK TO LONDON AND BACK ��� The Medium of Contingency January 18 ��� February 19, 2011
The Directors of Thomas Dane are pleased to present a collaboration with New York gallerist Miguel Abreu and with Robin Mackay and Tobias Huber of Urbanomic. The latter is a unique organisation based in the UK, which aims to address crucial issues in contemporary philosophy and science in relation to contemporary art practice. The project at Thomas Dane Gallery takes the form of an exhibition, a public discussion, a film screening and a publication, over the course of a four-week period.
Exhibition Private View: Tuesday, 18 January, 6-8pm
Artists in the exhibition include Kristen Alvanson, Hans Bellmer, Liz Deschenes, Thomas Eggerer, Rachel Harrison, Gareth James, Alison Knowles, Sam Lewitt, Scott Lyall, R. H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Raha Raissnia, Jimmy Raskin, Blake Rayne, Pamela Rosenkranz, Pieter Schoolwerth, Amy Sillman, and Cheyney Thompson.
In association with Sutton Lane.
Discussion: The Medium of Contingency: Wednesday, January 19, 6.30-8 pm
The notion of ���contingency��� has become crucial both in contemporary philosophy, and, as the artists in this show suggest, in contemporary art. If thought and practice are to abandon the idealism of autonomy and acknowledge the networks they are a part of, the question becomes one of developing a thought and a practice that opens to contingency. The discussion will explore how works of art write contingency into the present; are in turn written by the contingency of their materials; and how these exchanges interact with the market.
Thomas Dane Gallery
First Floor
11 Duke Street
St James’s
London SW1Y 6BN
http://www.thomasdane.com/

.

This is a last-minute reminder for tomorrow’s event at the Tate Britain, The Real Thing.
Also part of tomorrow’s event will be a curatorial intervention in which I have also been involved (in collaboration with China Mi?�ville, Robin Mackay, Eugene Thacker and others): The entire collection of paintings in Room 9 which is currently themed Art and the Sublime has been relabeled according to the philosophical paradigms of speculative / weird realism, transcendental nihilism and other emerging theoretical lines of inquiry.
Address: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

Before I resume my normal activities, I would like to introduce two brilliant books released in 2010:

First, Re-Imagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-centric Warfare written by my co-author Manabrata Guha. I will post a review of the book soon on this blog. Second, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability by my friend Elie Ayache who has made a groundbreaking connection between metaphysics of contingency and the financial market. Both books develop their analyses against the dominantly ideological and perhaps even superstitious backdrops of their respective fields, military/security studies and finance. Whilst Guha remorselessly interrogates and batters the legacy of political reason and strategic thought in warfare, Ayache launches an elaborate assault on market-oriented ideologies and probabilistic philosophies.
Re-Imagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-centric Warfare by Manabrata Guha
This book interrogates the philosophical backdrop of Clausewitzian notions of war, and asks whether modern, network-centric militaries can still be said to serve the ‘political’. In light of the emerging theories and doctrines of Network-Centric War (NCW), this book traces the philosophical backdrop against which the more common theorizations of war and its conduct take place. Tracing the historical and philosophical roots of modern war from the 17th Century through to the present day, this book reveals that far from paralyzing the project of re-problematisating war, the emergence of NCW affords us an opportunity to rethink war in new and philosophically challenging ways.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Approaching the problematic of War; A Failure of Imagination: Network-centric Warfare���s Limit-Condition; An Outline of the Book
Chapter One: Prelude to Clausewitz
A Historico-Philosophical Background; Classical Military Theory ��� An Evolutionary Overview; A Kehr to the Non-Human ; Mind(ing) the Gap: Between Guibert and Jomini; Jomini���s Science of the Art of War; A Preliminary Assessment
Chapter Two: Clausewitz and the Architectonic of War
The Romance of Clausewitz; Clausewitz, Methodologizing�Ķ; Clausewitz, Theorizing�Ķ; Clausewitz, Strategizing�Ķ; (de)Constructing War, Absolute and Real�Ķ; The Mesh and the Net, architectonically speaking�Ķ; In Fortuna���s Camp; The Face of Chance; Strategizing Chance ; Clausewitz Q.E.D.
Chapter Three: Machining (Network-centric ) War
Behind the Network Paradise; Network-Centric Warfare: A Preliminary Overview; Semantic Implications of Network-centric Warfare; The Technologization of Discourse in the context of Network-centric Warfare; At the Edge of Chaos�Ķ; On Networks�Ķ; On Netwars�Ķ; Machinic War
Chapter Four: Theorizing War in the Age of Networks
A New Strategic Commons: A Wide-Angle View of NCW ; Two Orders of Strategy; First Order�Ķ; Second Order…; NCW:�Ķand here is the ���beef����Ķ; Inside/Outside the Clausewitzian Legacy
Chapter Five: Concept: War
In an Other theatre of War; Rhizomes: A Concept of Operations; Planes of Immanence: Becoming-Battlespace; Assemblages and Apparatuses of War; On War and War-Machines: Interrogating the Deleuze-Guattarian Thesis; Five Propositions of Concept-War: A Speculative Exercise; A Minoritarian Tactic: Thinking War Differently; Conclusion
Manabrata Guha is Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (International Strategic and Security Studies Programme), Bangalore, India.
The Blank Swan: The End of Probability by Elie Ayache
October 19th 1987 was a day of huge change for the global finance industry. On this day the stock market crashed, the Nobel Prize winning Black-Scholes formula failed and volatility smiles were born, and on this day Elie Ayache began his career, on the trading floor of the French Futures and Options Exchange.
Experts everywhere sought to find a model for this event, and ways to simulate it in order to avoid a recurrence in the future, but the one thing that struck Elie that day was the belief that what actually happened on 19th October 1987 is simply non reproducible outside 19th October 1987 ��� you cannot reduce it to a chain of causes and effects, or even to a random generator, that can then be reproduced or represented in a theoretical framework.
The Blank Swan is Elie���s highly original treatise on the financial markets ��� presenting a totally revolutionary rethinking of derivative pricing and technology. It is not a diatribe against Nassim Taleb���s The Black Swan, but criticises the whole background or framework of predictable and unpredictable events ��� white and black swans alike – , i.e. the very category of prediction.
In this revolutionary book, Elie redefines the components of the technology needed to price and trade derivatives. Most importantly, and drawing on a long tradition of philosophy of the event from Henri Bergson to Gilles Deleuze, to Alain Badiou, and on a recent brand of philosophy of contingency, embodied by the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux, Elie redefines the market itself against the common perceptions of orthodox financial theory, general equilibrium theory and the sociology of finance.
(Table of contents here)

Ever questioned the concept of ‘complicity with anonymous materials’ or wondered what the first footnote in cyclonopedia is about or what happened to the narrative of the first chapter that permeated throughout the footnotes, then this exhibition should give you some clues. The group show is curated by Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz who is at the artistic forefront of Speculative Realist philosophy. The show also includes an installation by American artist Kristen Alvanson entitled Objects 302 which gives a weirder dimension to cyclonopedia���s plot holes.
You can read the press release here:
���Anonymous Materials��� brings together artists who use very different approaches in their practices. But its presentation of their works draws attention to a particular form of complicity common to them, and unfolds its consequences for our understanding of art-production. As the title indicates, the exhibition focuses on the autonomy of those materials which constitute an elemental component in the process of creating art. The show therefore explores art as a material-driven process of production so as to raise the question: How does the autonomy or contingency of the artists��� material influence or interfere with the artwork itself? In examining the conditions of art production, the show emphasizes the dynamics and ambivalence of the concept of materiality in artistic production, rather than deconstructing the meaning of the artwork by thematizing its material substrate.
Neither does this examination of materiality entail a fashionable celebration of those aesthetic effects commonly associated with processual tropes of artistic production (the presentation of raw materials, open-endedness, and so on). It does not rely upon the unfinished status of an artwork as a form of process-oriented practice. It could be said that such artistic sensibilities only exacerbate or obfuscate the enigma of materiality, semantically supercharging materiality in a way that can only be grasped by an audience hungry for meaning. Therefore, these processual tropes reestablish the authority of a privileged sentience whose correlation with meaning is ultimately a complete dismissal of both independency and contingency of materials in art production. As opposed to this approach, the artists in this show were chosen because their practices involve clear decisions towards the problems mentioned. In tracking the traces of production in the artwork, this group show could even be understood as a critical response to a current tendency to be too ���sensitive��� to materials; a tendency that could further be defined as an eclectic approach to the visual reminiscence of conceptual art.
The title of the show is taken from Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani���s book Cyclonopedia: Complicities with Anonymous Materials. It refers ��� in an open manner ��� to the book���s take on the problem of ���inauthenticity��� whereby the subjective identity of the author is repeatedly overturned and undermined by the intervention of references, materials and narrative processes which enjoy autonomy and contingent complicities of their own. The show opens up, unfolds and reinvents this problematic embracing of materiality by evoking the randomness of functionality attributed to artists��� materials and allowing a multiplicity of relations between the artwork and its arbitrary context. Systematically blocking the tendency for a ���higher meaning��� to emerge, the show resolutely focuses on the active, contingent role of the material conditions of the artwork. The studio-like installation itself explores the process of creating art in its very contingent and disruptive character.
Curated by Pamela Rosenkranz
Contributions by Kristen Alvanson, Kim Seob Boninsegni, Pavel B?�chler, Ida Ekblad, Ulrik Heltoft, Marie Koelbaek lversen, Fabian Marti, Rachel Mason, Ketuta Alexi Meskhishvili, Lucy Pawlak, Martin Soto Climent, Mai-Thu Perret, Urs Zahn
“Anonymous Materials”, Opening 6 pmThursday / June 3rd/ 2010/ Binz39 /Sihlquai 133, 8005 Z?�rich/ Exhibition from 4th June – 4th July 2010 /Opening hours Thursday – Saturday, 2 – 6 pm, Address: http://tinyurl.com/24ltzht

On another note: If you are interested to know more about the geo-cosmic theory of trauma (which involves a geophilosophical reinscription of Freud’s and Ferenczi’s theories of trauma), visit Cornish mines with Robin Mackay and Iain Hamilton Grant among other philosophers, researchers and scientists, and delve deeper into the history of the Industrial Revolution (the most elaborate cosmic prank played on the human race) to uncover the hydroplutonic conspiracy, then sign up for this!

For anyone who hasn���t noticed, Perverse Egalitarianism has planned for a reading group on Salomon Maimon���s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy. This is an extremely important work for those who are interested in Kant, Deleuze (especially Difference and Repetition and the philosophical foundations of calculus) and rationalism. I am hopeful that another reading group can be scheduled to cover Kerslake���s forthcoming book on Wronski and post-Kantian philosophy as well. I am sure this is going to spark some interesting discussions.

“Not since the heady days of Semiotext(e) has a philosophical journal seemed so essential […]” – Jack Sargeant on Collapse, The Wire

Urbanomic is back not only as the spearhead of adventurous philosophical experiments but also as the publisher of art editions, philosophical monographs and avant-garde texts: Collapse vi and new publications.
Also on another front: The December issue of ‘Artforum International: Best of 2009’ has listed Cyclonopedia among eleven titles including The Invisible Committee���s The Coming Insurrection and Giorgio Agamben���s What Is an Apparatus?

A sequel to Cyclonopedia and the second installment in the Blackening trilogy:
The Mortiloquist
A barbaric interpretation of the life and problems of Western philosophy.
Feasting on the theatrical resources of Greek tragedy, Jacobean revenge drama, grand guignol theater, the theater of cruelty, aktionism (especially Herman Nitsch���s the Fall of Jerusalem and Orgien Mysterien theater) and employing the dialogue-commentary of scholasticism, The Mortiloquist is a cross-breed of play and philosophy. In this textual mongrel, the life of Western philosophy is gutted out by outlanders and barbarically staged.
Taking place in an alternative history of the Greek Empire during a hypothetical siege of Athens, The Mortiloquist begins with a heated debate among three philosophers. Aristotle, Speusippus and Andronosos have refused to flee from the Academy. Oblivious to the commotion in the streets, they are arguing the impact of Speusippus’ ‘alien causality’ on generation and corruption of ideas. As those who represent the philosophical militancy and political ethics of the Greek Empire, the philosophers are put into an ordeal of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of the barbarian invaders. They are forced into freshly gutted out carcasses of three oxen; the animals are then sewn up to trap the philosophers in a way that only their heads protrude.
Composed in the form of an inverse chiaroscuro, the stage consists of a tenebrous foreground and a luminous background. Three animal corpses lay in the foreground, from each carcass a chattering human head has protruded. Each act begins with monotonous De Sadesque depictions of barbarous savageries taking place at the stage background. Set against this chaotic but silent background, conversations between the three philosophers who are trapped in dead animals are audible and appear in the form of scholastic colloquies and theatrical dialogues.
In The Mortiloquist, each scene begins with a generation of a new entity from the putrefying animal carcasses. In line with Henry of Langenstein’s unsettling remarks regarding the possibility of a dog being generated from the corpse of an ox or a horse, the oxen carcasses in which the philosophers have been trapped change to canine and fox corpses among other unheard-of creative forms. Ideas and philosophical debates are renewed and shifted according to the germinal power of putrefaction and the possibility of the infinite deformity of forms in decay. The history of philosophy is, barbarically and problematically, revealed to be a differential form of arborescent emptiness which is in the process of blackening its vitalistic twists ��� a tree of rot whose supernal branches stretch toward the One and whose roots reinvent their own tortuous earth.
[This is an ongoing project which I am gradually developing.]

Apologies for my indulgence in casual blogging lately. I will be back with more substantial materials including some news regarding a sequel to Cyclonopedia, etc. However, in the meantime, I would like to draw your attention to some fascinating posts on the potential cross-links between some of the recent activities in philosophy and experimentations in literature, cinema and ludicosm (especially those of videogames).
Thanks to Levi Bryant for mentioning Ben Marcus whose world looks like a textual counterpart of this game. This reminds me to post something on the porous narrative formation of Cyclonopedia and the loosening of human characters into complicities with anonymous materials.

The audio files for the recent philosophy workshop in Zagreb coordinated by Nathan Brown and organized by Multimedia Institute Zagreb are now available for download.

In order to assure Dominic that there is no overnight war / conspiracy against Badiou, this post is – disappointingly – not about Badiou whose Number and Numbers I have passionately read and am still admiring. It is rather a short commentary on differences and similarities between Alex Williams and Ray Brassier’s identifications of asymptopia. However, before moving in that direction I would like to add a few ‘crude’ comments regarding the recent so-called Badiou war, a term so symptomatic of the thought-journalism common in blogsphere (and prevalent among us all). There is something paranoically puerile in accusing Alex of an attempted – yet failed – patricide against Badiou. People are twittering around and charge Alex with lack of argumentation, premature patricide and closing comment boxes whilst not only they are not really against comments culling and closure but also they themselves fail to pose any serious argument other than delivering pieces of thought-journalism combined with a few witty and safely friendly remarks to ensure the constancy of the readership flow in the future. Alex’s confrontational post suggests, more or less, the first reactions of a reader who has been disillusioned about the deficiencies of a particular philosophical system or a philosopher. Looking back into the history of philosophy (a branch which has been needlessly vilified), no emerged philosopher has ever tackled the position of an established philosopher by initially constructing an argumentative juggernaut. It always starts with a combination of anger, frustration and a brief theoretical hailstorm which is too short to be distinguished as an opposition. It is in the next steps and over a long period of time, that the reader or philosopher begins to tweak her position by either filling in the gaps herself or turning them into ballistic weapons against that particular philosophical system or philosopher. And I hope this will be the case with Alex who has disturbed the ubiquitous temptation of blogsphere for a cozy and friend-appeasing atmosphere which sometimes does not amount to anything other than our secret desires for pseudo-philosophical gossiping. As the last note, I am looking forward to Alex’s future writing projects which I am sure will be remorselessly challenging and provocatively rigorous. (Also thanks to Dominic for posting two original posts in response to Alex, very appreciated.)

***

In his recent post, Alex draws a connection between limitropism and the unbound eliminativism of the kind elaborated by Ray Brassier in Nihil Unbound. At first look, these two cannot be wedded, for the limitropic conception of zero suggests a dynamic process (a verging-on) wherein zero or non-belonging as such is never achieved. Yet Brassier’s eliminativism appears to be fully in opposition to this limitropic conception of zero which seems to be conjuring up a vague shadow of vitalism. Closer investigation of Brassier’s eliminativism, however, shows that limitropic convergence toward zero is indeed a vector of eliminativism which is always in the process of shedding belongings (desertifying) and abandoning commitments to any horizon of interiority (or what Alex calls eliminativist betrayal) in its reckless approach toward zero.

Brassier’s unbinding of the Churchlands’ eliminativism in Nihil Unbound is done through different stages encompassing intricate engagements with Badiou, Meillassoux, Deleuze, Heidegger, et al. However, the reinscription of eliminativism on a cosmic level which is the characteristics of his position can not be consummated unless he combines eliminativism with something that undoes all horizons of interiority (from organisms to earth to stars, galaxies and matter itself) and returns them back to the concept-less exteriority of space or the cosmic abyss. In other words, in his attempt to mobilize eliminativism concomitantly toward all-encompassing-ness and cosmic unbinding (all the way down), Brassier needs a conjectural model that can loosen every horizon of interiority (be it us or planets and stars). Such a model, accordingly, requires a conception of interiority that is determined directly from an exterior backdrop in a nested chain by which interiorized horizons can be loosened up in regard to each other. It is like a loosening function that traverses the interiority of human in regard to the organic interiority which itself is nested within the interiority of the earth as a consolidating medium for inorganic materials required for the emergence of life. This nested chain of interiorities enables the loosening function to continue to the solar economy (conditioned by the interiority of a star / sun) and then to the galactic interiority all the way to the interiority of matter itself. Therefore, this conjectural model which is responsible for the cosmic reinscription of the Brassierian eliminativism needs to simultaneously present an all-encompassing regression toward the precursor exteriority and a topology of nested interiorities whereby the regression or loosening can be effectuated and guaranteed. Only such a model can bring about the possibility of the cosmic unbinding of eliminativism or asymptopia.

This model surfaces in two locations of Nihil Unbound: one in the second half of ‘Thanatosis of Enlightenment’ and the other toward the end of the book in ‘The Trauma of Life’. In both cases, Brassier elects Freud’s energetic model of thanatropic regression for this mission which consists of the cosmic unbinding of eliminativism and abandoning commitment to any horizon of interiority, a process which goes so far that it even deserts matter itself. However, both episodes are ended abruptly to prevent the slippage of the book into the ambivalent yet interesting consequences brought about by the unbinding and cosmic reinscription of Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression.

In order to consummate the non-dialectical negativity of eliminativism as a cosmic event (asymptopia), Brassier uses a model that can deploy the eliminativist vector inside every horizon of interiority, desertifying them all the way to the exteriority of the cosmic abyss where even elementary conditions for materialization are considered as indexes of interiority which must be deserted. This elected model is the energetic model of thanatropic regression presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle built upon Freud’s earlier theories of trauma as well as theories proposed by figures such as Rank, Ferenczi and Spielrein. However, Freud only observers and speculates on the thanatropic regression toward the precursor exteriority in organisms or the organic life in general. Therefore, what Freud distinguishes as thanatropic return to the precursor exteriority is only the energetic and compulsive return of the organism toward the inorganic exteriority which itself is another interiority (another lie) set against another exterior backdrop. For this reason, in order to consummate the non-dialectical negativity of eliminativism on a cosmic level through Freud’s model of thanatropic regression which only consists of a passage from organic into the inorganic, Brassier should reappropriate Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression which is essentially a theory of drive. To put it differently, in the pursuit of an unbound eliminativism, Brassier reinscribes (absolutizes?) Freud’s energetic model on a cosmic level. Yet insofar as the eliminativist appropriation of thanatropic regression casts humanism and matter aside in favour of an ever-expanding never-attainable exteriority, it also redeploys human life and matter (on all their organizational and illusive strata) as mediums for the nested intrusion of cosmic exteriority. And of course it is the latter that brings the possibility of complicity. In other words, the cosmic modification of Freud’s theory results in the transformation of the eliminativism into an economically, dynamically and topologically ambiguous process – a limitropic convergence upon zero, a loosening with no end. [1] Now why is that Brassier’s cosmic reappropriation of thanatropic regression gives Eliminativism a perverse and ambiguous underside which is fertile for the kind of politics of the Insider that Alex has in mind? And even more importantly, why is it that this cosmic reappropriation turns the unbound vector of eliminativism into a limitropic process that has insinuations of a dark vitalism wherein neither ontological differences nor materiality enact any privilege?

The reason lies in Freud’s own theory of drive(s) and the way the energetic model of thanatropic regression is constructed. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reveals that thanatropic regression is always bound to two other panoramas or energetico-structural principles: one is the theory of umwege (the energetic maze or detour) whereby the interiority of life becomes an increasingly twisted inflection of exteriority as such; and the other is the necrocratic law of the organism (or any other horizon of interiority) whereby the organic interiority should only die in one and only one way. According to Freud, the economy of thanatropic regression for any given organism or horizon of interiority must ensure that all other ways of dissolution or dying must be staved off. [2]

If Brassier unbinds and cosmically reinscribes Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression in order to extend the eliminativist vector all the way to the cosmic exteriority, then he must also unbind the theory of umwege beyond the organic life or bios. Because as Freud has explicitly argued and as Brassier has implicitly indicated, the thanatropic regression or the vectorial move toward the precursor exteriority is inextricable from the increasing convolution of the umwege. Here the convolution of umwege or the increasing twist in the roundabout regression to the precursor exteriority must not be confused with the complexification of life as an opportunity for posthumanist scenarios, because it suggests the differential decomposition of all interiorities via nested deployment or intrusion of cosmic exteriority. After all, the emergence or determination of an index of interiority from a precursor exteriority does not mean the complete envelopment of that exteriority and its reintegration according to the laws of the interiorized horizon. There is always a part of enveloped exteriority that refuses to be assimilated within the index of interiority, thus extending the intrusion of the precursor exteriority into the emerged nested horizons of interiority.

In short if the thanatropic regression is extended beyond the organic life to an abysmally cosmic level, so are the twisted and hence limitropic involutions of the umwege. Just as the organic regression toward the inorganic exteriority reinscribes the limitropic dimension of the organic life as a twisted curve aiming at the inorganic, the eliminativist absolutization of extinction or the unbinding of the theory of thanatropic regression also re-enacts the cosmic reinscription of the umwege as an infinitely convoluted slant toward cosmic zero. On this level, roundabout / convoluted paths of umwege do not stand for animate or inanimate life (bios or physikos) anymore, but rather they exhibit a continuous limitropic process via the loosening of nested interiorities (deserting one interiority on behalf of another so as to draw the graph of the cosmic exteriority, the ultimate maze-path for the remobilization of thought).

[1] Thanks to Kevin for his brilliant post on the ambiguous energetic dynamism of drive as ‘loosening’.

[2] I will elaborate more on the necrocratic law of thanatropic regression and its restricting impacts on the identification of Capitalism in an essay I am completing for Umbr(a).

In order to assure Dominic that there is no overnight war / conspiracy against Badiou, this post is ��� disappointingly ��� not about Badiou whose Number and Numbers I have passionately read and am still admiring. It is rather a short commentary on differences and similarities between Alex Williams and Ray Brassier’s identifications of asymptopia. However, before moving in that direction I would like to add a few ‘crude’ comments regarding the recent so-called Badiou war, a term so symptomatic of the thought-journalism common in blogsphere (and prevalent among us all). There is something paranoically puerile in accusing Alex of an attempted ��� yet failed ��� patricide against Badiou. People are twittering around and charge Alex with lack of argumentation, premature patricide and closing comment boxes whilst not only they are not really against comments culling and closure but also they themselves fail to pose any serious argument other than delivering pieces of thought-journalism combined with a few witty and safely friendly remarks to ensure the constancy of the readership flow in the future. Alex’s confrontational post suggests, more or less, the first reactions of a reader who has been disillusioned about the deficiencies of a particular philosophical system or a philosopher. Looking back into the history of philosophy (a branch which has been needlessly vilified), no emerged philosopher has ever tackled the position of an established philosopher by initially constructing an argumentative juggernaut. It always starts with a combination of anger, frustration and a brief theoretical hailstorm which is too short to be distinguished as an opposition. It is in the next steps and over a long period of time, that the reader or philosopher begins to tweak her position by either filling in the gaps herself or turning them into ballistic weapons against that particular philosophical system or philosopher. And I hope this will be the case with Alex who has disturbed the ubiquitous temptation of blogsphere for a cozy and friend-appeasing atmosphere which sometimes does not amount to anything other than our secret desires for pseudo-philosophical gossiping. As the last note, I am looking forward to Alex’s future writing projects which I am sure will be remorselessly challenging and provocatively rigorous. (Also thanks to Dominic for posting two original posts in response to Alex, very appreciated.)

***
In his recent post, Alex draws a connection between limitropism and the unbound eliminativism of the kind elaborated by Ray Brassier in Nihil Unbound. At first look, these two cannot be wedded, for the limitropic conception of zero suggests a dynamic process (a verging-on) wherein zero or non-belonging as such is never achieved. Yet Brassier’s eliminativism appears to be fully in opposition to this limitropic conception of zero which seems to be conjuring up a vague shadow of vitalism. Closer investigation of Brassier’s eliminativism, however, shows that limitropic convergence toward zero is indeed a vector of eliminativism which is always in the process of shedding belongings (desertifying) and abandoning commitments to any horizon of interiority (or what Alex calls eliminativist betrayal) in its reckless approach toward zero.
Brassier’s unbinding of the Churchlands’ eliminativism in Nihil Unbound is done through different stages encompassing intricate engagements with Badiou, Meillassoux, Deleuze, Heidegger, et al. However, the reinscription of eliminativism on a cosmic level which is the characteristics of his position can not be consummated unless he combines eliminativism with something that undoes all horizons of interiority (from organisms to earth to stars, galaxies and matter itself) and returns them back to the concept-less exteriority of space or the cosmic abyss. In other words, in his attempt to mobilize eliminativism concomitantly toward all-encompassing-ness and cosmic unbinding (all the way down), Brassier needs a conjectural model that can loosen every horizon of interiority (be it us or planets and stars). Such a model, accordingly, requires a conception of interiority that is determined directly from an exterior backdrop in a nested chain by which interiorized horizons can be loosened up in regard to each other. It is like a loosening function that traverses the interiority of human in regard to the organic interiority which itself is nested within the interiority of the earth as a consolidating medium for inorganic materials required for the emergence of life. This nested chain of interiorities enables the loosening function to continue to the solar economy (conditioned by the interiority of a star / sun) and then to the galactic interiority all the way to the interiority of matter itself. Therefore, this conjectural model which is responsible for the cosmic reinscription of the Brassierian eliminativism needs to simultaneously present an all-encompassing regression toward the precursor exteriority and a topology of nested interiorities whereby the regression or loosening can be effectuated and guaranteed. Only such a model can bring about the possibility of the cosmic unbinding of eliminativism or asymptopia.
This model surfaces in two locations of Nihil Unbound: one in the second half of ‘Thanatosis of Enlightenment’ and the other toward the end of the book in ‘The Trauma of Life’. In both cases, Brassier elects Freud’s energetic model of thanatropic regression for this mission which consists of the cosmic unbinding of eliminativism and abandoning commitment to any horizon of interiority, a process which goes so far that it even deserts matter itself. However, both episodes are ended abruptly to prevent the slippage of the book into the ambivalent yet interesting consequences brought about by the unbinding and cosmic reinscription of Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression.
In order to consummate the non-dialectical negativity of eliminativism as a cosmic event (asymptopia), Brassier uses a model that can deploy the eliminativist vector inside every horizon of interiority, desertifying them all the way to the exteriority of the cosmic abyss where even elementary conditions for materialization are considered as indexes of interiority which must be deserted. This elected model is the energetic model of thanatropic regression presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle built upon Freud’s earlier theories of trauma as well as theories proposed by figures such as Rank, Ferenczi and Spielrein. However, Freud only observers and speculates on the thanatropic regression toward the precursor exteriority in organisms or the organic life in general. Therefore, what Freud distinguishes as thanatropic return to the precursor exteriority is only the energetic and compulsive return of the organism toward the inorganic exteriority which itself is another interiority (another lie) set against another exterior backdrop. For this reason, in order to consummate the non-dialectical negativity of eliminativism on a cosmic level through Freud’s model of thanatropic regression which only consists of a passage from organic into the inorganic, Brassier should reappropriate Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression which is essentially a theory of drive. To put it differently, in the pursuit of an unbound eliminativism, Brassier reinscribes (absolutizes?) Freud’s energetic model on a cosmic level. Yet insofar as the eliminativist appropriation of thanatropic regression casts humanism and matter aside in favour of an ever-expanding never-attainable exteriority, it also redeploys human life and matter (on all their organizational and illusive strata) as mediums for the nested intrusion of cosmic exteriority. And of course it is the latter that brings the possibility of complicity. In other words, the cosmic modification of Freud’s theory results in the transformation of the eliminativism into an economically, dynamically and topologically ambiguous process ��� a limitropic convergence upon zero, a loosening with no end. [1] Now why is that Brassier’s cosmic reappropriation of thanatropic regression gives Eliminativism a perverse and ambiguous underside which is fertile for the kind of politics of the Insider that Alex has in mind? And even more importantly, why is it that this cosmic reappropriation turns the unbound vector of eliminativism into a limitropic process that has insinuations of a dark vitalism wherein neither ontological differences nor materiality enact any privilege?
The reason lies in Freud’s own theory of drive(s) and the way the energetic model of thanatropic regression is constructed. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reveals that thanatropic regression is always bound to two other panoramas or energetico-structural principles: one is the theory of umwege (the energetic maze or detour) whereby the interiority of life becomes an increasingly twisted inflection of exteriority as such; and the other is the necrocratic law of the organism (or any other horizon of interiority) whereby the organic interiority should only die in one and only one way. According to Freud, the economy of thanatropic regression for any given organism or horizon of interiority must ensure that all other ways of dissolution or dying must be staved off. [2]
If Brassier unbinds and cosmically reinscribes Freud’s theory of thanatropic regression in order to extend the eliminativist vector all the way to the cosmic exteriority, then he must also unbind the theory of umwege beyond the organic life or bios. Because as Freud has explicitly argued and as Brassier has implicitly indicated, the thanatropic regression or the vectorial move toward the precursor exteriority is inextricable from the increasing convolution of the umwege. Here the convolution of umwege or the increasing twist in the roundabout regression to the precursor exteriority must not be confused with the complexification of life as an opportunity for posthumanist scenarios, because it suggests the differential decomposition of all interiorities via nested deployment or intrusion of cosmic exteriority. After all, the emergence or determination of an index of interiority from a precursor exteriority does not mean the complete envelopment of that exteriority and its reintegration according to the laws of the interiorized horizon. There is always a part of enveloped exteriority that refuses to be assimilated within the index of interiority, thus extending the intrusion of the precursor exteriority into the emerged nested horizons of interiority.
In short if the thanatropic regression is extended beyond the organic life to an abysmally cosmic level, so are the twisted and hence limitropic involutions of the umwege. Just as the organic regression toward the inorganic exteriority reinscribes the limitropic dimension of the organic life as a twisted curve aiming at the inorganic, the eliminativist absolutization of extinction or the unbinding of the theory of thanatropic regression also re-enacts the cosmic reinscription of the umwege as an infinitely convoluted slant toward cosmic zero. On this level, roundabout / convoluted paths of umwege do not stand for animate or inanimate life (bios or physikos) anymore, but rather they exhibit a continuous limitropic process via the loosening of nested interiorities (deserting one interiority on behalf of another so as to draw the graph of the cosmic exteriority, the ultimate maze-path for the remobilization of thought).
[1] Thanks to Kevin for his brilliant post on the ambiguous energetic dynamism of drive as ‘loosening’.
[2] I will elaborate more on the necrocratic law of thanatropic regression and its restricting impacts on the identification of Capitalism in an essay I am completing for Umbr(a).

Whilst shining forth with a cunning vision of doom, Alex writes on the bitter truth of Badiou, his ilk and the sanitary romanticism of the Year Zero.

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Urbanomic has launched its artistic counterpart of Collapse Journal, a place for “a renegotiation of the relationship between philosophers and artists, on the model of an interrupted relay in which thinkers deploy their conceptual resources to articulate and extend artists’ work, and artists in turn develop and synthesise concepts through their practice; resulting in a productive and unpredictable cycle of research and development subordinated neither to the norms of academic thinking nor to the mainstream discourses of art criticism.”
Documents and transcripts of the past events (including one with Ray Brassier on Darwin) will be available soon on the Urbanomic Studio website. I am also contributing to the future events on ‘Rat-ionalism’ and ‘How to Kill Animals’.
Also, Palgrave Macmillan and the BABEL working group have recently announced their new journal, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. The journal has a non-traditional approach to medieval studies and philosophy which makes it an exciting publication for those who are interested to “bring the medieval and modern into productive critical relation(s)”. If you have proposals for articles or special themed volumes, you can contact Eileen A. Joy.

Urbanomic has announced the advent of the sixth volume of Collapse, Geo/philosophy. Promising as always.

The American magazine The Fifth Estate has published a short and kind review on Cyclonopedia by the anarcho-theorist Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey) who has described the book as ‘partly genius, partly quite mad’, whilst concluding his review: ‘To sum up: a weirdly compelling read.’

Also for other readers who have not seen this already. It is an introduction to an early draft of Cyclonopedia (circa 2004) written by Nick Land. The introduction was not included in the final publication for a few reasons, one of them was to leave the book without a seat belt, making the dive more vertiginous.

There will be more discussions on the technical / philosophical aspects of the book in the next issue of Collapse. However, a few remarks before then:

In his review, Peter Lamborn Wilson has expressed doubt as whether the book is a treatise on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Nomadic War Machine or not. Since some other readers have also questioned this, it will be probably more helpful to say that the book develops a geophilosophical reinscription of energetic models of psychology, a conjectural philosophical line with monstrous interpolated singularities: Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Sabina Spielrein, Sandor Ferenczi and then culminating in Freud’s dazzling energetic model of the unconscious and nervous system and then to Reich and so on. It is in giving the energetic models of the psyche a geophilosophical twist that Cyclonopedia departs from Deleuze-Guattarian geophilosophy and consequently speculates on a different model of the war machine, earth, Capitalism, monotheism, the human and the cosmic.

Also as an additional note, Ben Woodard and Michael Austin have written two very intriguing posts in reply to ‘memento tabere’, one on the dark vitalist connotations of decay or what Robin called ‘pestilential vitalism’ in his note on the 2007 Goldsmiths event on the politics and architecture of decay, and the other piece a stimulating spectral challenge to the politics of decay (more discussions will follow soon!).

Motivated by a few current projects as well as some recent inspiring outputs from Nicola and Alex on the concept of decay and putrefaction, I was thinking about one of the main problems inherent to any politics or philosophy of decay. It is the problem of Time, or more precisely, the role of time in any politics or philosophy concerning the process or concept of decay as the calculus of its structure. What is the relation of decay or putrefaction to time? Is decay a narrative conception of time’s indifference to ontic differences or is it the experience of time as presence which in a Heideggerian fashion turns death into an infinitely deferred occurrence through Dasien‘s already-dying? What is exactly the role of time in decay, does this role reinscribe the correlationist appropriation of time through experience and presence or does it amount to an idealism which favors and privileges time over space? These are undoubtedly questions whose answers decide the very definition of decay. The understanding of time and its role in the process of decay is so pivotal that it can lead to different conceptions of decay. Decay as a romanticized concept, decay as a necrocratic fetish, decay as a differential form of emptiness, decay as an umwege (maze) toward base-matter and decay as an ontological fate are all decided by different understandings of time by itself and in regard to space.

My view on the role of time in decay is based on the idea of complicity between time and space. Through such complicity, the diachronicity of time and the exteriority of space are expressed by each other: While space is perforated by time’s emptiness or fundamental indifference, time’s contingency is formally and materially expressed by space’s unbound ferocity for assimilation (which according to Caillois is intrinsic to thanatropism that dissolves the ground of individuation). This is what distinguishes decay as an unwholesome participation between the most abominable of time (non-belonging and pure contingency) and the most degenerate of space (space’s tendency for infinite involutions which undermine any potential ground for the emergence of discrete entities). It is the complicity between the worst nightmares of space and time that brings about the possibility of putrefaction (even an infinite decay) as a differential form of irresolvable emptiness disguised as ideal objectivity with a generative twist. [1] (Think of Bosch’s hollow treeman, the Menger sponge, Nietzsche’s sponge, Bataille’s labyrinth, Deleuze and Guattari’s holey space and Parsani’s ( )hole complex!)

But what kind of complicity are we talking about? If time belongs to no one and is in absolute indifference to ontic differences (Ben Noys’s Azathothic materialism), then how can its worst nightmares participate with space? And even if despite such irresolvable incommensurability, time and space can indeed participate with each other, then how can this participation be conceived outside of the correlationist ambit?

Perhaps one hypothetical solution – merely presentable as a basis for further speculations – would entail the conception of at least two different times, one of which can bridge the exteriority or diachronicity of the absolute time to the exteriority of space. This intermediating time should be interconnected to the other conception of time (i.e. time as an absolute time which belongs to nothing and no one) as a manifest of the latter’s pure contingency. In other words, the intermediating conception of time should itself be a production of the absolute time’s pure contingency which suspends all natural laws, obstructs the operation of belonging and nullifies ontic differences. To put it differently, the second conception of time which intermediates between the diachronicity of the absolute time and the exteriority of space should itself be a symptomatic production of the absolute time’s pure contingency. Accordingly, the intermediating time does not suggest a dichotomous scission in time but a temporal and contingent conception of its absolute form. Only the vital temporality of this intermediating time can bring about the possibility of ontic difference in relation to appropriated regions (scales) of space, or the ground. The synthesis between time and space – necessary to support the ontic difference – requires the bifurcation of Time into two different but interconnected conceptions. Without such bifurication, absolute time and thanatropic space remain inherently unassociated and exterior to each other and cannot ground the conditions for the emergence of the ontic difference on any level. Perhaps, for the first time, the stoics realized the necessity of having different conceptions or readings of time in order to explain the vital syntheses of time and space. For similar reasons, Deleuze adapts and ingeniously tweaks the stoic model and comes up with two conceptions of time, the time of Aeon and the time of Chronos. The indefinite non-pulsed time of Aeon is inherently closed to the vital bodies; so there should be another conception or reading of time which can synthesize with the scales of space and support vital vibrations. The pulse time of chronos is this second conception of time which supports organic vitalities and provides Time with qualities which are compatible with the structure of corporeal beings.

If decay is the synthesis between the worst of time (non-belonging and contingency) and the worst of space (infinite involutions and ungrounding), then we try to explain the nature of this inherently incommensurable synthesis by a conjectural solution. As mentioned above, this solution requires the bifurcation of Time into (‘at least’) two different but interconnected times. After Deleuze but in contrast to his quasi-Heideggerian readings of time, these two conceptions are as follows:

1. The ungraspable and cosmic time which belongs to nothing and no one. It is the absolute time of pure contingencies which suspends all laws and eliminates all necessities.

2. The temporal conception of time which is time insofar as we experience it and therefore is characterized by ‘the access’ to its presence rather than its quiddity per se. But even more importantly the temporal conception of time supports the temporality of beings (our temporality) by providing the conditions for their emergence. These conditions are nothing but the contingencies of the cosmic and absolute time. The temporal conception of time brackets and foregrounds the contingencies of the absolute time in the form of conditions for the emergence of life (or the subject of temporality). Therefore, the temporal conception of time is an interiorized or bounded form of the absolute time, a ‘temporal set’ wherein contingencies are taken as conditions for the emergence and the continuation of existence (here continuation suggests the temporality of life). In other words, temporal time sets the contingencies of the absolute time as the ground for the determination of difference and ontic emergence through bracketing and interiorizing of pure contingencies. We call this temporal conception of time, the vital time or the time of determinations and productions. Constitutive to the ground of life, the vital time is accentuated in the organic realm through the compatibility of its interiorized and sequential structure with the sequential growth or the rhythmic difference of the organic interiority.

The vital time – the intermediary conception of time – emerges from the cosmic time of pure contingencies as ‘an interiorized set of contingencies’. As a temporal Set, the vital time interiorizes its elements which are contingencies. Since the function of this set is interiorization, it can intensively determine contingencies of the absolute time as conditions for the emergence of life, or necessities for ‘making of a difference’. In the process of interiorizing contingencies and realizing them as conditions, the vital time appropriates the exteriority of the cosmic time and turns it into an interiorized conception of time accessible by life and its manifests. Yet the cosmic time of non-belonging and pure contingencies can never be fully appropriated or assimilated (interiorized) by the vital time and its temporal conception. Why? Because the vital time is itself contingent upon the cosmic time as a temporal condition for the interiorization and bracketing of the absolute time’s contingencies and their realization as the necessary conditions required for the emergence of life. This means that since the vital time is itself a temporal condition qua contingency of the cosmic time, it cannot fully interiorize the exteriority of the absolute time qua pure contingencies. The vital time suggests only one contingency among pure contingencies of the absolute time; its fundamental functions are simultaneously supported and derailed by other contingencies. For this reason, the contingencies of the cosmic time are never fully reintegrated within the manifestations of life (viz. realized horizons of interiority) which are conditioned by the vital time. To put it differently, the vital time can be interiorized by beings as the necessary condition for their emergence because it is itself an interiorized conception of the cosmic time’s pure contingency.

Now, if the cosmic time can never be fully appropriated by and within the vital time, then the horizons of interiority inherent to manifests of life or ontic differences cannot assimilate and appropriate the contingencies of the cosmic time either. Consequently, the interiority of life is a host or a niche for the inassimilable contingencies of the cosmic time – contingencies that never completely turned into temporal conditions within the vital time. In conditioning the emergence of life, the vital time introduces nightmares of the cosmic time into the phenomena of life. The horizon of interiority inherent to the manifests of life becomes a chamber for the pure contingencies and non-belonging of the cosmic time. The cosmic time is deployed inside the vital time and correspondingly, inside the life or being that is conditioned by the vital time. This remobilization of the cosmic time’s exteriority and redeployment of its contingencies within the vital time and manifests of life posits a third conception of time. That is the conception of the cosmic time as an Insider; it is the Insider conception of the cosmic time that internalizes the incommensurability of time’s diachronicity with the exteriority of space within the manifests of life. The conception of the cosmic time as the Insider redefines the intermediary conception of the vital time as a ‘temporal agent’ which smuggles the contingencies and non-belonging of the cosmic time to life’s horizons of interiority. In other words, the Insider conception of the exterior (cosmic) time interiorizes the incommensurable tensions between cosmic contingencies within life and its manifests.

In the wake of the Insider conception of time, the termination of life does not exclusively mark the temporality of life qua its contingency because the very interiority of life (its difference and internal vitality) can unfold as the abyssal infinity of material and ontological contingencies. This unfolding of the cosmic time’s pure contingency through life and by life is expressed by decay as a dysteleologic process. In this sense, life is the medium for the incommensurable tensions between the contingencies of the cosmic time. And decay is the expression of these incommensurable tensions or contingencies along the infinite involutions of space – a complicity between time’s subtractive enmity to belonging and the enthusiasm of the space for dissolution of any ground for individuation, a participation between the cosmic time’s pure contingency and the infinite involutions of space from whose traps nothing can escape.

The process of putrefaction or decay accentuates the compulsion to return toward pure contingencies of the cosmic time through the third conception of time (i.e. the cosmic time as the Insider time). This ‘compulsion to return’ which is instigated by the Insider conception of time becomes a source of tension between the principles of the cosmic time (i.e. contingency and non-belonging) and temporal conditions or necessities of the vital time. These contingent and subtractive tensions are narrated by the degenerate qualities of space through the process of decay. [2] We can say that in decay space is perforated by time: Although time hollows out space, it is space that gives time a twist that abnegates the privilege of time over space and expresses the irrepressible contingencies of the absolute time through material and formal means.

Notes

[1] This generative twist is depicted by the medieval concept of the Tree of Rot: a “deformly deformly deformed” (Nicole Oresme) tree trunk which spews forth a cosmic range of both familiar and nameless creatures as a differential extension of its arborescent emptiness.

[2] Through this reciprocal synthesis between the dissolving thanatropism of space and pure contingency of time, these tensions are registered, or more accurately, expressed as discontinuities – perforations, fissures, cracks. The more the being insists on its horizon of interiority or the more the organic entity endures in and by means of the vital time, the more it is exposed to the tensive effects of the incommensurability between time’s contingencies which are expressed by involutions of space. In short, the more the living endures, the more it is perforated and riddled by discontinuities. It is only in decay that discontinuity is formally expressed and materially mobilized by the objectal continuity in the form of a structure overridden by fissures and holes which are held together by the object’s former self.

   
The fifth issue of the philosophy journal Collapse will be out soon (the excellent introduction to this volume is available for download).
Collapse V (Launch Party for Collapse V + Urbanomic event)

In line with the recent calls for a speculative realist politics / economics and also in order to momentarily abandon the tradition of writing witless pedantic posts, I am starting to compile a list of movies and books (mostly fiction) which can be used in possible future discussions such as this one. Although, these titles – in their entirety – might not essentially project the philosophy of speculative realism, they can be associated to variations of speculative realist scenarios. The list can also be used for any offshoot projects regarding post-apocalyptic scenarios, Xenoeconomics, Cthulhoid ethics and non-subjective models of complicity. Anyone is more than welcome to add to this list with a few lines (if possible) explaining the reason why it should be added.

Movies (in no particular order):

* Carnival of Souls (escaping from the specter not by mourning or submission to the priority of the living over the dead but by becoming disillusioned about the assumed position of the living in regard to its necessity: that living is already-dead, weird vs. hauntology)
* John Carpenter’s The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness
* Michael Haneke’s Wolfzeit

* Russian Necrorealist science-fiction esp. Yevgeny Yufit’s speculative evolution trilogy in which human evolution is explained by the blindest and the most vacuous inorganic complicities (Bipedalism, Silver Heads and Killed by Lightening)

Some of the titles from the French cinematic movement stupidly dubbed New French Extremity:

* Bruno Dumont’s After-human trilogy (L’humanité, Twentynine Palms, Flanders): the concept of after-human contra the pseudo-vitalistic posthuman, death of desire, complete eradication of behavioral ration, non-existentialist recourse to the void.
* Leos Carax’s Pola X (connecting Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and its speculative moves regarding the awakening of the inorganic through organic representation to Melville’s post-apocalyptic story Pierre: or The Ambiguities)
* Marina de Van’s In my Skin (inevitable unbinding of destrudo caused by external capitalist / consumerist meltdown).

Fiction:

* Thomas Ligotti esp. The Shadow at the Bottom of the World and Crampton
* H.P. Lovecraft
* Thomas Bernhard
* Michel Houellebecq
* Pierre Guyotat (check Schoolboy Error’s posts on Guyotat)
* Some of the post-apocalyptic fictions of the Bizarro movement: ex. Extinction Journals by Jeremy Robert Johnson.

For those who happen to be in London on November 26. Geoff Manaugh of the amazing BLDGBLOG together with Antoine Bousquet of Birkbeck College will present a public lecture on ‘Feral Cities‘. Manaugh’s lecture will be an analysis on ‘cities gone wild’; I encourage people who are interested in BLDGBLOG and Manaugh’s fascinating researches regarding architecture, science fiction and geopolytics to attend this lecture. Manaugh will also discuss his topics through references to J. G. Ballard and Cyclonopedia.

The peer-reviewed journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary is now accepting proposals for a themed issue on Black Metal to be published in the fall of 2012. Nicola Masciandaro and I will edit this issue collectively. The Call for Papers is available as a printable PDF and in the body of this post as an html. We decided to compose a rather explicative cfp to pave the road for more ideas and speculations regarding Black Metal.
[Personal note:] One of the dominant trends in music commentary is to mercifully absolve the musical subject from its blemishes, defects and problems. In this fashionable approach, hip hop music, for example, is purified from the hustler lifestyle which sometimes accompanies it. In a similar way, there is a tendency to rescue zeuhl at all costs from some of its ties with orchestral hegemonies. I have noticed this absolving / purifying tendency even in some of the best musical analyses I have come across (Ray Brassier’s essay on noise is one example). I personally think this absolving approach misconstrues Black Metal which actually draws its power from the speculative opportunities of the problematic.

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Lately, I have been following this excellent blog. I especially recommend the new posts on xenoeconomic and anti-haunt. For now, a few perfunctory remarks on the haunt since this blog has posted a few related texts in the past. This is also a provisional response to this call. And finally it includes some thoughts on Meillassoux’s essay in Collapse IV, Spectral Dilemma. There is no need to say that this is far from complete or even satisfactory because its mere purpose is to stir some thoughts.

It seems that the problem of hauntology is inherent to any ontological system built on the primacy of intelligibility of being, persistence (continuation of being as such) and above all the possibility of determination of being in terms of being and only being. The influence of the specter over the living (the haunt) and the supposedly necessary negative binding of the specter by the living (mourning) suggest a process of negative binding of belonging qua dead whereby the living / being can determine itself and correlate itself to an ideality of some sort (the intelligibility, the possibility of determination of being qua being, the One, vitalism, etc.) To put it differently, only by binding the dead as a negative agency can the living establish its myth of inherent persistence, intelligibility and difference or determination as such. As argued in Collapse IV (The Corpse Bride) and else where, the binding of belonging qua dead, or more accurately, the influence of the haunting specter is necessary in order to transform the nomos of the dead into the nous of the living. The haunt demarcates the extensive or outward bond between the living and the dead. We know that such a bond extending outwardly from the living to the dead and from the dead back to the living suggests a contingent realm since it is established outside of the (supposed) ideal necessity of the living. We also know that ‘determination of being as such’ must unilateralize its distinction (or living as a difference in itself) both intensively and extensively, in regard to itself as an ideal possibility (qua being) and in regard to the undetermined qua the realm of the dead. It is the necessity of the latter (i.e. the determination of being against the undetermined or that which does not belong to the living) that makes hauntology inherent to the possibility of determination of being as such. In other words, determination of being / the living can only ground its ideal status by instrumentalizing the contingent bond with belonging qua dead. This instrumental binding of the dead (explicated by Aristotle for the first time) is comprised of the two fundamental aspects of hauntology:

First, it is the haunt or the negative binding of contingency. It imports the dead as a belonging or negative agency capable of supporting the intensive determination of the living (living as a difference in itself) independent of the contingent outside or the realm of the dead. To put it succinctly, contingency of the outside is bound negatively so as to support the positive necessity of the living according to its own terms i.e. determination of the living as such. The haunt allows the contingent indeterminate (or the dead) to return to and influence the living only as a negative or subtractive support. Why? Because this machinery of subtraction is capable of conserving an inner part in the form of an ideal necessity (being qua being) by instrumentalizing the negation or subtraction of belonging. In fact, whenever negation or subtractive employment of non-belonging (i.e. the universal principle of negativity) is factored in as an extensive (outward) vector, it can be indexed by an ideal necessity from within (i.e. intensive grounding of a precarious ideal). In ontological systems, this ideal is usually vitalism, difference in itself, the One or the nous. [1]

The second elemental aspect of hauntology is mourning. Mourning correlates the implicit affirmation of the possibility of ‘the living as a difference in itself’ with the explicit ‘declaration of the haunt as a negative agency’. This correlation is at the same time a utilitarian bond between the living and the dead and a pre-established correlation as in correlationism (Meillassoux). As a utilitarian bond between the dead and the living, the act of mourning puts the dead into the service of the living so as to get rid of the vengeful dead (subtracting belonging qua dead) and rescue the intensive determination of the living. The rescuing mission of mourning makes the living independent of the dead (i.e. it supports the unilateral distinction of being as an ontological necessity). The utilitarian bond that mourning establishes subtracts the dead only to conserve an inner part or a remainder qua living. On the other hand, mourning is posited on a supposedly inherent interrelation between the living and the dead wherein neither the dead nor the living can act or be faced independently. That means the dead and the living are always taken as a wedded couple for which the determination of one always rests upon the givenness of the other. Mourning emphatically reinscribes the givenness of correlation (between the living and the dead, the contingent outside qua undetermined and the determinable necessity of being / the living). What is mourned is not the specter of the lingering dead but the correlation of the living with the dead constructed on the presumption that the contingency of the outside or the indeterminable realm of the dead can be accessed by the living. Mourning is the correlationism between a self-posited ontological necessity (the living) and the contingency of the outside (the world of the dead as that which does not belong to the living), between X and not-X. For this reason, I think Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative solution to the “spectral dilemma” of atheism and religion which proposes an “essential mourning” (in accordance with the thesis of divine inexistence) is heavily reliant on a twisted form of correlationism. This of course, by no means, can serve as evidence that Meillassoux’s ethico-political move in Spectral Dilemma is doomed to fall into the trap of correlationism. It rather attests to the vulnerability of hauntology and its innately non-speculative solutions restrained by the correlationist nature of the haunt and mourning.

Hanutology, to this extent, firstly adheres to a shady vitalism in which the binding of the dead and its influence as a negative agency implicitly contributes to the intensive determination of being qua ideal (i.e. being in terms of itself or the intelligible). Hauntology, at least subtractively, supports the possibility of determination of being as such (the living as a difference in itself). The problem is not only that for hauntology, the living or ontological necessity as an Ideal is always given but that vitalism of the living can also employ hauntological solutions or the politics of the haunt to negatively underpin its so-called intensive necessity, proving itself to be alive. Ironically, hauntology is the speculative solution of vitalism for withstanding the absolute contingency of the void qua non-belonging. Through hauntology, vitalism is able to establish an instrumental affect with belonging qua dead. The haunt (or the traumatic influence of the dead over the living) is an inevitable consequence of such an instrumental affect determined by the vitalistic ideal. If hauntology is so decisive in determination of vitalism, then no wonder why hauntology offers speculative means of survival to the more resilient forms of capitalism hidden behind shady doctrines of vitalism.

In addition to its clandestine alliance with vitalism, hauntology is essentially constructed on a correlationist assumption that there is a given interrelation between the dead and the living, the contingency of the outside and the ontological necessity subsumed with being or the living. By means of such correlation, the dead and the living can affect each other, access each other’s realms so that the nomos of the dead be utilized on behalf of the nous of the living. The resolving capacity of mourning in rescuing the living from the haunting memory of the dead (as proposed by Meillassoux) is precisely the result of the correlationist nature of mourning which can capture the dead and the living in regard to each other.

Now that hauntology seems to be a surreptitious enforcer of vitalism and an acolyte of correlationism, then how can we rescue Meillassoux’s speculative solution in Spectral Dilemma?

One possible solution requires a sabotage against determination of being as such (difference in itself subsumed within being or the living). This solution can force the vitalistic implications of hauntology to shatter in a way that the correlationist foundation of hauntology begins to falter. Such solution entails a resurgence of the void within the ontological principle as a constitutional primacy. In my contribution to Collapse IV, I argued that in order for being to establish an intensive zone of determination for itself, first of all, it must affirm the primacy of the void qua the principle of non-belonging. Without such intensive determination, the living cannot distinguish itself against the dead and won’t be able to secure an ideal ontological necessity for its positioning. Yet securing such an intensive zone for the effectuation of being qua being (being in remaining in terms of being and only being) is not possible without affirming the void in its simultaneous primacy and exteriority. This means that the explicit determination of being as such (the vitalistic doctrine of the living as a difference in itself) is implicitly determined by the void (or the principle of non-belonging). It is the necessary intervention of the void that makes the living possible but only at the cost of becoming already-dead. The internalization of the void or the principle of non-belonging is required to shed belongings so as to reclaim the living by and according to itself. This necessity precedes the ontological necessity of the living. The necessity of void’s intervention renders the living already-dead, for the living (X) is not extensively determined by that which does not belong to it (not-X) but by the very principle of non-belonging that allows such negation, that is to say, the void as that for which mobilization of belonging in any form is impossible. It is this direct encounter with the radical exteriority of the void (radical since such exteriority belongs to no one) that continues the legacy of the already-dead under the heading of the living. The already-dead suggests a twist from a vitalist correlation between the living and its ideal necessity toward a problematic intimacy between the living and the void. The intimacy with the void guarantees the establishment of an intensive zone required for hosting the ideal necessity of the living. This is another way to say, that the intimacy with the void is prerequisite for the vitalistic correlation between the living and its ideal necessity and that the latter is problematically founded on internalization of the void. Accordingly, in conforming to its vitalistic intention, determination of being as such twists back to its problematic intimacy with the void qua the principle of non-belonging. Therefore, a solution for saving Meillassoux’s spectral thesis can be found in problematizing the intensive correlation between the living and its given ontological necessity by factoring in the internal intimacy of the living with the void. This means that the living is the condition of a new problem – that is the living as already-dead. Such problematization of the living nullifies the hauntological correlation between the dead and the living by supplanting the latter with the already-dead. Only once the living is counted or exposed as already-dead can the correlation between the dead and the living be dispossessed of its instrumental capacity. The nature of such correlation we argued implicitly contributes to the vitalism of the living and the givenness of its ontological status (the Ideal).

The living qua already-dead is a problematic agency since its correlation with its ideal necessity (being qua being, the intellect or intensive vitalism) only demonstrates the twist inherent to the intimacy with the void as a principle necessity. It is by bringing about the speculative possibilities of the living as already-dead or unbinding the twisted intimacy of the living with the void that hauntology can be twisted into a non-correlationist and anti-vitalist solution or genre. In hauntology, the given correlation between the living and the dead turns the nomos of the dead to the nous of the living; for capitalism, however, it is the contingency of the outside that is subtractively transformed to the intensive necessity of capitalism so as to both extend capitalism to an afforded outside and affirm the existence of capitalism as a necessity. Yet by twisting the intensive correlation of the living with its ideal necessity toward a problematic intimacy with the void and explicating the living under the heading of the already-dead, it is possible to truly foray into the realm of the speculative.

To conclude: The unraveling of the problem of determination of being as such (posed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition and to some extent in The Logic of Sense) can only gain a true speculative capacity once we factor in the implicit determination of being by the principle of non-belonging qua the void. This speculative move can be recapitulated as ex-plicating the living as the already-dead. Faced with the already-dead, hauntology cannot pit the dead against the living in a vitalistic fashion anymore. Since from this point, the dead and the living (qua already-dead) only bespeak of different modes in mobilizing or employing the principle of non-belonging, that is to say, they only suggest two instances of intimacy with the void as a non-ideatable exteriority.

It was digressively discussed on this blog, that the already-dead is not hauntological but weird. The contact between the dead and the already-dead does not belong to the spectral affects of hauntology but to the speculative territories of the weird. This can be exemplified in the incommensurability between the ghost stories of M.R. James and the fiction of Thomas Ligotti, or between the seemingly sinister hauntology of The Ring and the already-dead universe of The Carnival of Souls where the weird is ensued by pitting the dead against the already-dead. So in order to bring Meillassoux’s thesis back to the speculative track, first his hauntological solution must be rigorously reformulated with a non-vitalistic determination of the living and outside of a correlationist framework. This can constitute tweaking Meillassoux’s mourning solution which is inevitably hauntological and consequently built on an extraneously ideal situation (the possibility of determination of living) with Brassier à la Ligotti’s nihilism of the living qua already-dead.

[1] The fact that negation is mostly effectuated extensively (rather than intensively) makes negative resistance a very delicate matter, because it can instrumentally contribute to or affirm determination of a pre-established ideal. Contra Zizek’s reckless negationalism (zombified negativity), negation must be extricated from its instrumental extensity whereby the contingency of the outside is subtractively put into service on behalf of an intensive affirmation of an ideal necessity. The consequence of such an approach to negation as NeoPlatonists have demonstrated is the reslaving of negativity by the principle of an implicit affirmation. For this reason, the emancipation of negation from the yoke of its implicitly affirmationist impetus requires a problematical recourse to the void qua the principle of non-belonging. Such emancipation, therefore, entails the deflection of negation from an outward (extensive) orientation to an inward and intensive internalization (Ray has obviously much to say about this).

This is for anyone who is interested in resurrecting the commentary genre of philosophy and animating it with contemporary thought: Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary
(I hope there will be an issue on Deleuze and commentary philosophy too. The pre-history of differential calculus and Deleuze���s Spinozist ethics can easily be traced back to late scholastic works of mathematics and medicine as well as early Renaissance esoteric materials which have mostly been written in commentary form.)
I will also try to put a part of my commentary paper on Deleuze and the Scholastic concept of decay (written for Goldsmiths) here on this blog.

Cyclonopedia has been published by re.press and is now available:
Amazon (US)
Book Depository (UK and the rest of the world)
re.press (publisher)

This is an evidence that blogging can be both collectively adventurous and vigorously engaging.

Cyclonopedia will be published soon by re.press. For more information about the book check the re.press website.

There is either an infinite amount of death in this universe … or infinite dreams of life.

Herk Harvey���s 1962 movie Carnival of Souls is certainly among the weirdest movies of cinema but strangely enough its weirdness is disquietingly elusive. The film starts with a title screen whose graphical power is reminiscent of Saul Bass���s title sequence for Psycho where the horizontal splitting motions across the word psycho herald an ominous turn even in terms of Hitchcock���s overtly exaggerative style. If psycho, by definition, already denotes a deepening fracture then what are these miniature seismic lines which break the word into moving fault lines? Do they simply reiterate the definition of psycho and abide by the reductive definition of psychosis as split personality? Or they are the indication of internal schisms and that there is something deeply wrong with the psychosis of the psycho?
In contrast to the somehow flashy title sequence of Psycho, the title of Carnival of Soul is static despite its seemingly dynamic and wavy expression. The words in the title have crept in from the corner of the screen, spread out and grown in size from the last to the first; so that only one word dominates the screen: Souls. The title of Harvey���s movie is a grimace of the already-dead. The ripples of the words signify a lively animation or vitality of some sort, but surely not of the living. For these are the undulations of inert plasticity of wraiths, specters, shades, souls and spirits. Even the frozen ripples of the word carnival ��� its superficial waves of liveliness ��� have failed to express themselves; they are inferior and behind the lifeless plasticity of souls.
Carnival of Souls begins with a car accident the sole survivor of which is Mary Henry, a young organist played by Candace Hilligoss. Miraculously the only survivor among her friends who all instantly died in the accident, Mary has developed a cold and emotionless life which has overshadowed her musical talent. After the accident, Mary decides to move to Salt Lake City and takes a new job as a church organist ��� a symbolical move suggesting an escape to religion in order to evade the trauma within. Upon her arrival she notices a deserted pavilion that invitingly beckons to her; she also encounters a deformed apparition of a man who sinisterly appears to her as her own reflection. Her life in the new place is accompanied by increasing moments of terror as her reflection is replaced by the image of the ghoulish man. At times she herself becomes invisible and inaudible to people. She succeeds to avoid these dreadful moments either through religion or by immersing herself in the new job; yet she only gains transient moments of salvation before succumbing again to the state of sheer terror. In a famous scene, Mary ��� possessed not by trauma but the horror prolonged by her survival ��� undergoes a drastic metamorphosis. While playing the organ, she falls into a trance similar to a catatonic seizure. Once she resumes playing, her music suddenly changes from religious to a demonic melody to which Mary sensuously sways. The sequence is overwhelmed with sensuous references mixed with lengthening shadows in the church. As she falls deeper into trance, she sees a crowd of dead people or ghouls emerging from the water and dancing to her malevolent music on the deserted pavilion���s ballroom. They move toward her while she is transfixed by the sight, her fingers spasm as she reaches the climax of horror overlapped by her previous carnal desires. After the trance, she is confronted with ghouls more often. Her plan to escape the city is thwarted once she realizes that passengers on the bus are all dead people. She is drawn to the haunted pavilion for the last time, where the ghouls chase her down and surround her. People cannot explain Mary���s mysterious disappearance as her footprints end abruptly in the sand and don���t lead anywhere. We see, in the final scene, that the car in which Mary was riding is dredged up from the water. Mary���s lifeless body is in the car next to her friend; she has been dead all along. Nothing has been a dream (Mary���s or anyone else���s), for death has been dreaming of itself all the while.
In Carnival of souls, we begin to see all manifestations of the weird and the haunt after the accident. The crowd of ghouls, the haunting reflections of the living as the dead, the metamorphosis, the derailment of desires toward something demonic, weird sensuality and the beckoning night are all repercussions of Mary���s survival. The climatic horror throughout the movie could not be culminated if Mary didn���t survive. Only through survival and insistence in life ��� even involuntarily ��� Mary is exposed to horror of the trauma that is survival out of death. Yet what makes these horrors weird is neither the persisting ghouls nor the beckoning haunted place but the hauntological nature of survival. Survival is the intensive death that belongs to no one and the living is the already-dead. If all horrors (including Mary���s trauma) in Carnival of Souls, more than being plainly haunted are weird, it is because their victim or host ��� the living human ��� is already-dead.
The horrors of Carnival of Souls are divided into two categories characterized by their modes of culmination and reference points:
First category includes the horrors immanent to the living being, to the subject of survival, the human or in this case Mary. Throughout the movie we see the manifests of such horror in the forms of lurking cadavers and reflections of dead things fixed upon the living being. Mary���s reflection is a corpse, her voice is the dead silence of souls and her desires belong to something rotten, the ghoul. These are horrors which prey upon the living being and are culminated on the traumatic experience of survival. Mary���s survival (as a living being) enables her to see the horror qua illusion, experiencing this horror under the heading of trauma. In this sense, the first category is the horror for and of someone. It is horror qua illusion, for first it can illusively be experienced and second it is constructed upon the illusion of survival in the form of a trauma. The horror for and of someone is culminated according to the degeneration of survival or the decay of the surviving subject; the closer the subject of survival comes to its precarious position, the more it is seized by trauma, the more it is exposed to horrors which are outside its domain. The supposed necessity of survival can only communicate with the outside contingently, that is to say, X in its ontological necessity can not live (extend beyond itself) other than by submitting to the contingency entailed by not-X or that which is outside X. For the living being, the contingency imposed upon the self-preserving necessity of survival shapes the first category of horror: I exist but I cannot live without that which does not belong to me. My necessity is undermined by the contingency of the outside (not-X), such is the horror that is ensued by the nature of my miraculous survival.

If the horror for and of someone is contingently correlated to survival, then its deployment is also extensive in regard to the surviving subject. The direction of this horror is from the contingent outside to the supposed necessity of survival, namely, the inside. The extensive or outward deployment of X according to not-X is the horror that illusively belongs to someone qua the living being; its vector of perpetuation is the price that survival should contingently pay. Yet this belonging is only effectuated as a subtractive (negative) correlation that registers itself as a trauma, for every moment of living or contingent openness to the outside envenoms and bites at the survival of the living being. The existential horror of being is but a survivalist remedy once we realize that to live is to not-to-be. The first category of horror in Carnival of Souls manifests as ghouls and the dead reflections which haunt Mary���s survival from the beginning to the end, they are coming from the outside but are fastened to Mary���s insistence on survival (escape from the haunters of without).
The second category of horror in the Carnival of Souls is sharply contrasted with the first, that is the horror belonging to someone and is ensued by survival. The true horror is generated not by survival���s precarious position in regard to the outside but by its radical inaptitude to posit its own necessity from within. The second horror is the precariousness of survival in positing its necessity, even in a subtractive (negative) correlation with the contingent outside or the exterior haunt. If the necessity of survival has never been established, then the correlation between the assumed ontological necessity of the living being and the contingency of the outside falters. The medium of trauma, accordingly, breaks apart and is replaced with a new horror. It is the faltering of such correlation and the collapse of such medium (or at least the illusion of it) that makes the horrors of trauma and of the contingent outside twisted and above all weird. Once trauma loses its point of reference and cannot be ��� by any means ��� reconciled with either its victim or its origin, it turns into a weird horror, a horror that itself is a ghost but is not hauntological. It cannot convey the horror of ghosts. If survival narrates the farce of the already-dead, then survival is essentially hauntological. Estranged by humans or living beings whose survival and vitality is the source of the haunt, the horrors of outside and terrors of trauma are rendered weird.

There is nothing stranger than to be estranged from the haunt of the outside while you yourself are already a ghost. The function of survival is to make the living estranged from the world while the living is that to which the rest of the universe is estranged. Mary���s moments of dread while she finds herself inaudible and invisible (haunting) to the rest of the world reminds us of Lovecraft���s Outsider who in a ghastly terror finds itself the source of alienage for the petrified audience. For Mary whose survival is the very source of the haunt and she herself is already-dead, ghosts of the outside cannot be correlated to the vitality of the living and hence cannot establish their haunting enclave or enact their ghostly laws (which should be distinguished from those of the living). The inability of the horror-engorged contingency of the outside in demarcating its boundary in regard to the living whose ontological necessity has never been posited gives a new direction to the influx of horror in the universe: ghosts heave forth from the supposed living ��� that is from the inside rather than outside. The living being is the Styx by which dead things are carried and eventually dumped into the universe, the outside. Since the living is already dead and survival is the intensive binding of death, ghosts of the outside fail to become the source of the haunt for the living; instead they become elusively weird.
Confronted by the already-dead, the horror of the Outside does not haunt or belong to someone qua the living because the living itself is already-dead, or more exactly, it belongs to no one. In Carnival of Souls, the second category of horror is the horror of the living as the already-dead or survival as the source of the haunt. It detaches ghosts of the outside or horrors of contingency from their assumed hauntological horizon (with reference to the supposed living). Ghosts and dead things separated from their hauntological purview ��� by the virtue of their correlation with a living who is already-dead and haunting ��� then assume a new position ��� the weird as the twilight of specters. The second horror is that of a hauntological chain that leads nowhere, ghosts of the outside that cannot belong to or haunt the living, and a living being whose survival belongs to the intensive death or the already-dead qua the living, and for that reason it belongs to No One.
The second horror is the retrogression of the haunt where ghosts retreat from the outside to the inside and from the living to no one. Retrogression of the haunt unifies ghosts with nothing, not even the dead; it brings forth a simultaneously haunted and haunting Nothing, that is the weird. The retreat of ghosts to two weird influences:
1. The living and survival become inextricable from the haunting and the haunt, and therefore, become weird. Human, in this sense, is unimaginably weird.
2. Ghosts of the outside lose their haunting capacity in regard to the living (viz. the already-dead), their hauntological horror is replaced by the weird.
It is the twist from hauntology of the outside (the lurking ghouls) to the hauntology of the inside (the already-dead living) that makes the ultimate weird.
Between the two deaths and two ghostly crowds ��� survival (or the intensive death) and perishing of life or death ��� the former is favored over the latter; for after all, death is too promiscuous to be loved.

Benjamin Noys has a great new blog where he has started to connect politics to speculative realism to Lovecraft and negative resistance.

Benjamin Noys has a great new blog where he has started to connect politics to speculative realism to Lovecraft and negative resistance.

Excellent Spinozist Blog: Frames /sing

Arbor Deformia, Kristen Alvanson, Collapse IV

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay, D. Veal // May 2008 // 406pp // Limited Edition 1000 copies // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99

At a time when the malady of book fetishism seems to have been cured finally (thanks to the modification of the publishing industry according to market sensibility), Collapse has endowed us with the frenzy of fetishism once again. From its cover that easily takes the fingerprint of its reader as a token of fetishistic intimacy to its hand-stamped number to its dimension to its meticulous typesetting and its publication logo, Collapse is saturated with subtleties which can only be spotted by a mind inflicted with fetishism. For readers, receiving Collapse is usually accompanied with the suspense of anticipation and thrill of the unpredictable. Even for the contributors, the arrival of Collapse comes with perspiration and heartbeat, as the contributor hastily flips through the pages to discover the hidden connections between the other contributions with his/her own.

After three volumes with diverse yet connected topics, the fourth volume Concept-Horror was published as a culmination of the previous volumes. Wars, famines, natural disasters and the inevitable fates of the body such as survival and death have given us this illusion that ‘thinking horror’ [1] is an undemanding task requiring no effort other than surrendering to sensation. Ironically nothing has been more disastrous for thinking horror than the overabundance of vacuous cruelties or absurd maladies; for it is relatively easy to mimic a battlefield, a bodily decomposition in a text, image or music. If horror is already everywhere, or in other words, if horror has already been culminated, thinking horror can easily turn into a case study, counting its countless manifestations. Yet it seems that with all the indulgence in horror via different mediums, humans have gained more self-estimation and adopted less hazardous courses for survival, immersed more within the illusion of a cosmos without horror. There is something profoundly wrong and terrible with humans (this might be indeed a compliment), for despite all these horrors, humans have proved that they are able to survive – at least as far as they themselves remember – with a parasitic tenacity and in complete indifference to cosmic horrors. It is as if humans have given a twist to the horror of the universe in a way that through their insistence on survival, economical openness and illusive intelligibility, they have become the very personification of cosmic horror and alienage.

Doubtless, in regard to thinking horror, the present situation is highly discouraging. The nature of survival in all its forms includes a process of openness toward the outside which is predominantly bound to the affordability of the subject of survival in regard to its outside. Yet this outside to which the surviving subject opens itself up is merely an environment whose outsideness is inherently affordable for the principles of survival associated with that subject. Therefore, there is a mutual affordability between the surviving subject and the outside to which the subject opens itself up. The openness of the surviving subject to its outside is marked by its closure – that is the law of affordability associated with survival. The openness of humans toward horrors is inevitably an economical venture for mining that which is affordable. It is in this sense that for thinking horror, first, the so-called daring openness of humans toward the outside must be disenchanted, stripped from its fraudulent heroic role. Second, the affordable outside (the accessible human environment) must be disenchanted in regard to humans by being debunked through the positioning of the radical exteriority, the cosmic outside. Third, the simultaneous disenchantment of the surviving subject to the outside and vice versa must take place on the ground of pure indifference, or else horror is oedipalized, recycled as a fuel for survival and reduced to a matter of sensibility. The most extraordinary quality of Collapse: Concept-Horror is its speculative engagement with these three phases of thinking horror. Armed with a maligned rigor and an unprecedented verve for an all-embracing investigation of horror, Collapse Volume IV is a must for everyone not only obsessed with horror but also with philosophy, art and ethics. In a Lovecraftian sense, reading Collapse is like acquiring a trophy from the Other Side:

George Sieg‘s Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror: Sieg’s essay at the beginning of Collapse IV has been poised to conduct a pre-emptive strike on the discourse of victimhood which has horribly distorted such concepts and domains like the other, the outside, us and them which are shared both by horror genre and socio-political discourses. Through presenting Houellebecq’s study of Lovecraft’s racism, Seig shows how Lovecraft’s fervor for Aryanism can be traced back to a more twisted and darker source: the emergence of the Zoroastrian germ-cell of monotheism which is pregnant with a strange xenophobia for which the inside and the outside have been displaced. For a xenophobia whose loci of attention have turned inside out, not only racism but also a good willed openness leads to irresolvable problems and unforeseen consequences. Seig finds the true manifest of such inside-out racism (or conversely, openness toward the outside) in the concept of Druj which according to the Zoroastrians is the Mother of Abominations, an avatar of cosmic unlocalizability and the main protagonist of Vendidad (The Book of Anti-Demon Laws) – a true precursor for Lovecraftian fiction. The inside-out xenology of Sieg’s investigation also reads as an intriguingly aberrant re-examination of eso-tericism.

Eugene Thacker‘s Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror: In his erudite essay, Thacker traces the genealogy of a certain strain of horror genre to theological discourses regarding resurrection and afterlife. The horror of the Slime, the Blob or that nameless Thing is the horror that leaks from the fissure or the gap between the living being (to live) and Life itself. It is from such a crack and sharp disjuncture between Life and the living being that the teratological legion of horror genre crawls in. The post-mortem afterlife of theology, Thacker shows, is a recoded form of this fissure which is a spawning zone for certain monstrosities – things which convey the horror of a life without the living being. At first sight, the horror of Thing might be the horror of a fiend without face, without form and without matter, but it is certainly not the only horror that it insinuates. The Thing exposes the externality of life to the living being. For the subject of survival, life itself is an exteriority, an impossible which can only be afforded and rendered possible at the cost of perishing in horror and a teratological holocaust in the realm of the living being. Life, therefore, becomes the very equal of Lovecraft’s cosmic alienage. Thacker’s essay is a startling biohorror odyssey into the depth of theology and its metaphysics.

China Miéville‘s M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire: In his ingenious contribution to Collapse: Concept-Horror, Miéville briefly exposes the fantastic and weird conceptual resources of his fictions which are entangled together in an utterly philosophic way. If this is just a fragment of the mechanisms, undercurrents and subterranean resources that Miéville nourishes his fiction with, then what is the rest? And how weird are they? More than anything, Miéville’s essay confirms that pulp is not only a host for the weird and horror but also for philosophical thought; and he himself as a ‘champion of pulp’ [2] is also a weird philosopher (and a philosopher of the weird), just as a horror writer who can be a god.[3] This strongly echoes Graham Harman’s bold defense of continental horror and science fiction to which we will return later. In the Quantum Vampire, Miéville performs an autopsy on the ultimate diagrammatic model of the weird+hauntology, the Skulltopus. Despite its concreteness, Skulltopus refuses to be literal, for it is the production of ‘haptic flirtation’ between two objects, a skull and cephalopodic tentacles, a quantum contact without the possibility of merger. Miéville’s haptic model, in this sense, can be a prototype for a weird metaphysics of objects.

James Trafford‘s The Shadow of a Puppet-Dance: In his massive treatise Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, the German neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger proposes that we are and have never been in direct and immediate epistemic contact with ourselves. Or simply, self is not but an illusion, ‘no one’s illusion’. Basing his essay on Metzinger’s theory, Trafford argues how the nemonymous horror of Ligotti’s fiction foresees the catastrophic consequences of Metzinger’s philosophy. Horror of Ligotti’s fiction, Trafford rightly suggests, is a horror dissipated by neither us nor them but ‘no one’, its source is the void and its mechanism is nemocentric (nemo-: no one). If self is merely the content of an ongoing and dynamic process i.e. the process of transparent self-modeling, then since childhood, ‘I’ have been a persistent illusion designed by the system as a functional module in order to regulate its interaction with the environment and facilitate the affording of the ‘outside’. And even further, this environment or affordable outside, is merely a fabricated scheme (a mirroring illusion) by which the system can represent itself in the environment and mirror it back to itself, and thereby, conjuring an alibi or illusive cognitive verification for the existence of its Self. Trafford incisively concludes that Ligotti’s fiction, in fact, takes its power as well as narrative formation from the ‘oneiric aphasia’ predestined by this ‘cognitive protectionism’ and ‘organic enslavement’ of the system. However, one question remains that neither Metzinger nor Ligotti have fully elucidated yet: exactly how this dynamic process of self-modeling has internally been generated over the course of evolution and how is this process correlated with the evolution of survival ex nihilo?

Thomas Ligotti‘s Thinking Horror: A pillar for the venture that Collapse IV has embarked upon, Ligotti’s article is perhaps the coldest and fastest journey to the void. Illustrated by the portraits of dead monkeys, Ligotti’s text is an annotated post-mortem family photo-album dedicated to a bedtime story called human race. Ligotti’s first and foremost thesis, similar to Ray Brassier’s argument in Nihil Unbound, is that horror and thinking are the same thing. To think is to irrevocably plunge in horror and evaporate. The entire survivalist conspiracy of human race, Ligotti states, has been involved with devising schemes to dodge and temporarily escape the brutal consequences of enlightenment, an enlightenment which only emancipates on behalf of the void. For this reason, such enlightenment is comparable to the Cthulhu cult’s ‘holocaust of freedom’, where luminosity is inseparable from extinction. As Robin Mackay suggests in the introduction to Collapse IV, the first survivalist objection to Ligotti’s all-embracing pessimism is that writing itself and the laborious tasks involved in publication (even if all is done with no secret joy whatsoever) are distractions and in contradiction to such pessimism. I absolutely agree that writing on nihil or ranting about uncompromising pessimism ‘forces the reader to secrete something of the poison that is buried within them’, yet I am not fully convinced that this ‘invocation of demons’ through the act of writing is sufficient to tackle the survivalist or even a more pessimistic (albeit problematic) objection: this openness to bleak subjects through the act of writing cannot be entirely absolved from its survivalist impetus, for as we stated earlier, once openness is conceived as ‘being open to’ which in this case is ‘writing about will-to-extinction’, it operates as an implicit but devoted agent of survival. Openness for us – even if it is toward will-to-extinction – only amounts to survival because it is only a matter of our affordability; in other words, our openness is grounded on our survival and is regulated by what is at stake for the subject of survival rather than the target of openness. To this extent, the survivalist objection might indeed project a more fundamental pessimism, perhaps on the nature of pessimism itself. If all doors seem already closed, then we should also look into the nature of survival and see if it really brings with itself a purely survivalist and vitalistic impetus or something exterior to its ontological intention.[4]

Quentin Meillassoux‘s Spectral Dilemma: Meillassoux has shown four times in Collapse that he is unquestionably among the most imaginative yet rigorous philosophers of today: first with his essay on time and hyper-chaos, second by his brilliant reconstruction of Deleuze’s text (which is among the best texts I have read on Deleuze), third with his reference to Captain Haddock in the Adventures of Tintin to explain the problem of correlationism, and finally for the forth time, by bringing his previous philosophic texts together in the form of an implicit ghost story with a Lovecraftian twist. Spectral Dilemma is set as an ethical development of the necessity of contingency. What are the consequences of rejecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason and instead embracing the absolute contingency of the laws of nature? Can the necessity of contingency be employed as an ethical resource, or more accurately, can the cosmic dread implicated by absolute contingency be reconciled with ethics, or even further, constitute its infinite resource so that ethics be posited in terms of the cosmic? Meillassoux examines these lines of inquiry by posing a new question: how can we bridge atheism and theism without submitting to either of them? Or is it possible to have a third type of engagement, a third mode of encounter with god and his dead corpse? His answer like his philosophy which shines forth from the most unexpected openings of thought is creatively novel. Meillassoux argues that this atheo-religious dilemma is essentially spectral, that is to say, it is a specter whose memory haunts us and requires a proper mourning in order for us to maintain an ethical rather than morbid living. If the question of the Divine is necessarily spectral because it has begotten by terrible deaths – either as victims of God’s extreme cruelty or God’s own death – then we must devise a space of mourning which can simultaneously conform to these two terrible deaths. Meillassoux then moves on and takes the thesis of divine inexistence through the law of absolute contingency or unbound chaos according to which despite the inexistence of the Divine, God may exist in future. Unfortunately, the essay ends too abruptly, and leaves us with many questions as if it is a speculative prelude to further investigation and a massive thesis. But this should not dishearten any reader, for after all, when it comes to horror stories, one should anticipate the return of horror, the law of sinusoidal returns.

Benjamin Noys‘s Horror Temporis: Iain Grant in his work on Schelling remarks that as Time grows and expands, the role of things in it become progressively more insignificant. In his essay for Collapse IV, Noys claims that ‘the worst’ or ‘the most abominable’ in Lovecraft’s fiction is the yawning gap (khaos) of Time. It is not only because Time is saturated with vampiristic qualities in regard to things in it but also because Time is a blind god who does not even heed calls and cries of its own monsters and offspring. The unspeakable monstrosity of the Ones who threaten humanity is generated perhaps by a trauma induced by the pure indifference of Time to its offspring and natural laws. But since this trauma cannot be resolved by recourse to its origin as a result of itself being uprooted by the abyss of Time, it has no other way than being senselessly wrought upon others, or as in Lovecraft’s fiction, upon humanity. Noys rightly attributes to Time, a vortical structure which is repeated throughout Lovecraft’s stories as stygian gulfs, foaming gaps, black pits and rotting holes. Chaos of Time, Noys sinisterly elaborates, is in fact the blind genesis, a vortex from which the great Old Ones tumble upward and to which humanity is sucked in. This ascent and descent, however, are both the orphans of an absolute Time, begotten by its indifference to the necessity of natural laws.

Iain Hamilton Grant‘s Being and Slime: Iain Grant’s essay is my most favorite of all; refined, fresh, deft and beyond everything, it oozes a scholarly philosophy without any constraint. The title of Grant’s essay insinuates a deviation from Heidegger’s Being and Time, but even more cleverly, an alternative retrospection for Badiou’s Being and Event and his thesis (which is mathematics = ontology). Those who have read Grant’s work On an Artificial Earth: Philosophies of Nature After Schelling know that the section 3.3 of the book, Organics as Antiphysics: Fichte contra Oken, argues how the notorious Naturphilosophen Lorenz Oken, by drawing upon a ‘mathematics endowed with substance’, develops a system which can generate complex multiplicities which are not only formal (matheme-oriented) but also substantial (substance-infused matheme). Grant’s essay in Collapse is a full-fledged development of the aforementioned chapter. What happens when the substance is mobilized by mathematical ideas, or even more importantly, matheme is invested with substance? If substance invests matheme, then, its germinal ground overlaps and becomes one with the generative ground of mathematics, zero. For Oken, this substantial zero is Ur-Slime (a thesis which makes Grant’s essay a perfect choice for this issue on Concept-Horror). Oken’s philosophy is essentially constructed on polarity (+ -); polarity is the first force in the universe which enables slime to have the ability of differentiation or generative introspection. It is the introspection of zero or slime or realization according to polarity that brings about the possibility of numbers or the manifold of particulars. This strikes me as a Schellingian god, a pure contraction or no-thing. Only out of the horror of problematical intimacy with the void, this god unfolds and creates the contingency of nature or the explicatio of universe. The contingency of nature (the explicatio) is grounded on the necessity of complicatio or God-contraction. Yet the grounding of nature’s explicatio (contingency) and the manifold of particulars on the necessity of complicatio is indeed an act of ‘ungrounding’, for the God as contraction is the problematical binding of the void in its intensive no-thingness. Against theo-tyranny in which the act of grounding (i.e. the grounding of nature on the consolidated body of god) is the stratification of universe as layers of an already sealed god, the grounding that Schelling expounds on is the very act of ungrounding: the founding of contingency of nature on the necessity of no-thing or generative zero. Only once zero comes to terms with its own no-thingness or basal horror, the explication of nature becomes possible and diversity of particulars comes into being.

Graham Harman‘s On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl: Beginning with mounting a vehement attack against the insipid and unimaginative dimensions of today’s academic philosophy, Graham Harman offers us an adventurous alternative for contemporary philosophy. With feisty prose that reminds us of restless travelers and adventurers of the last century, Harman lays out the foundations of his weird and speculative realism. The philosophic resources of weird realism are continental horror and science fiction. If Harman’s reading of Heidegger is rogue and heretical, it is because for him, the role of Hölderlin for Heidegger has been substituted with that of Lovecraft. In his essay, Harman exposes the pulpy and weird body of phenomenology by suggesting that the weird and objects, like wyrd sisters always come hand in hand. First, Harman sets Lovecraft’s stories free from a Kantian reading by showing that the elusive abominations of Lovecraft’s fiction are not noumenal but phenomenal, and even worse part of our world. In demonstrating the non-Kantian nature of these loathing monstrosities, Harman conducts a sabotage against a Kantian reading of Lovecraft rather than adhering to a purely anti-Kantian front: the phenomenal and secured land of the finite, the last front of experience and consciousness, has already been taken over by weird finite things or phenomenal abominations. However, these objects or phenomenal abominations exude an excess of properties, an inner inexhaustible infinity which refuses to be accessed. This is, in a twisted way, equal to the diagonalization of the Kantian healthy finite with the excessively phenomenal (in)finite, the inner infinite life of objects. This excessive or extra-phenomenal finite is a source of pure malignancy and inexhaustible foulness against which Kantian ocean, the noumenal, is a puerile redundancy. In the second phase, Harman shows how this excess (of properties) or ineffability of objects lies at the base of Husserl’s phenomenology. The effect of objects of Harman’s weird realism is both of vertigo and horror, akin to Tilford’s objects whose skins slough off in a vertigo of diabolic particles and aimless electrons which never settle.

Collapse Volume IV is also a visual pilgrimage of the underworld: from the materialist fairy-tale of Rafani to the cartoonism of Eye-care by Jake and Dinos Chapman to Oleg Kulik‘s dead monkeys album to slime-vortices of Todosch to Steven Shearer‘s impersonal horrographic poems to Keith Tilford‘s weird objects and the infinite deformity of those things in the jars photographed by Kristen Alvanson, everything has been deployed throughout the book, in such a way, not to give a sense of distraction or relief but to highlight its fiendish qualities and make anomalous pacts with the texts. Robin Mackay and Damian Veal have curated and refined a book which is a tour de horreur.

[1] Also the title of Thomas Ligotti’s contribution to Collapse IV.

[2] From R. Mackay’s introduction, p. 9.

[3] In John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, after bringing the Old Ones (Them) to our world, the pulp-horror writer Sutter Cane reappears to the insurance detective John Trent and says: ‘I am god now’. Trent (Sam Neill) opposes by saying: ‘God cannot be a hack horror writer’.

[4] For more details on survival as the implicit enforcer of the void see: The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo, Collapse vol. iv, Concept-Horror.

Since moving from United States to the Middle East, Kristen Alvanson has built a body of work which has developed ��� almost spontaneously ��� into an interconnected project entitled Cosmic Drapery.
Alvanson���s Cosmic Drapery Project has gradually gathered under the rubric of the Middle Eastern drapery, or to be precise, the Middle East itself as a manifest drapery: how is it possible to capture the enigma of the Middle East with all its explicit state formations and implicit nomadic folds through its textile history?��� or as Alvanson puts it, ���the unfolding of the enigma of the Middle East through its drapery.��� If the Middle East in its different formations is full of explicit organizations, implicit folds, sutures of heterogeneous establishments, surreptitious alliances or folds of oppositions, miniature twists and creases which evade relevant socio-political approaches, then drapery is a medium for diagramming the Middle East in its explicit and implicit dynamisms. In this sense, Alvanson���s artistic project suggests a re-nomadization of the Middle East through fabrics and their omnipresent pleats.

Still from Kristen Alvanson���s animation for Cosmic Drapery Project – ninefold (2008)
Comprised of three main categories (1) fabric studies / manifest draperies, (2) drawings / diagrams and (3) animation studies, the Cosmic Drapery Project currently includes five series, nomadic fabric chadors, spell chadors, flags, abjad-9 drawings and ninefold animations. The first three series are works with fabrics which themselves are divided into different sub-series based on their structures, colors, or forms of installations. Drawings and animations diagrammatically or dynamically elaborate the structures of the fabric works according to their social, political, religious and occult formations. This focus on schizophrenic orders and intricate categories can also be seen in Alvanson���s recent visual-essay for Collapse: Concept���Horror, in which she proposes that in order to tackle with deformities of nature (monsters), there should be a model or taxonomic medium which can bind all deformities without being exhausted. Rather than rectifying itself in the direction of hosting existing monsters or deformities, such a taxonomic model should precede monsters in generating deformities or anomalies. A fitting taxonomic model for monsters, Alvanson argues, must be built by a self-sufficient generative structure capable of producing deformities by which future contingents can be affirmed and hosted. For this reason, this aspect of Alvanson���s work can be artistically recapitulated in the light of her fabric orders, hierarchies of folds and drapery which capture the monstrosity of the Middle East in generating unheard-of formations.

Still from Kristen Alvanson���s animation for Cosmic Drapery Project – ninefold (2008)
The question of diagramming or taxonomic medium (model), for Alvanson, is not a search for finding a way to draw upon potential or actual resources of Now, for its true ambition is to develop a medium to cover the future contingents. Rather than being confined to potentialities-actualities of Now, Alvanson���s artistic persuasion is the exploration of things which are currently inexistent because they belong to deeply subterranean formations (i.e. they are elusively resistant to our current actualities or even potentialities). In other words, these subterranean formations (secret folds) are not accessible by actualities or potentialities of our existing establishments because they belong to the inner logic of their components and constituting elements. For example, in Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors, the state fabric (of the black veil) is sutured to nomadic fabrics in order to generate new formations. These formations are developed by anomalous folds between the state and nomadic fabrics and insinuating yet unknown or inexistent alliances or oppositions between the state and the nomad���s art.
In Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors, spontaneous formations, folds or configurations between these fabrics diagrammatically ��� albeit implicitly ��� suggest different structures generated by anomalous connections between the state and nomadic entities. As deeply subterranean structures, these formations are unfolded by the remobilization of the state and nomadic entities in regard to each other. Despite their persistent socio-political insinuations, the majority of these formations between the state and nomadic entities do not have any corresponding counterpart in the existing actual (or potential) socio-political formations of the contemporary world. Therefore, Alvanson���s manifest drapery suggests creative formations between the state and the nomadic which are either deemed as inexistent according to actual / potential socio-political establishments of the contemporary world, or irrelevant according to the existing world���s status quo. If the implicit socio-political formations of Alvanson���s nomadic fabric chadors do not have a corresponding equivalent among actually registered social or political structures, they are not in line with what is called relevant or responsible art. If such implicit and subterranean formations cannot be accessed through our existing structures, either through analogy or recourse to the existing socio-political establishments as points of reference, then what we have here is a persistent irrelevancy which is deeply political. Yet in order to be radically political, this irrelevancy must first constitute a line of resistance toward the cultural, social or political actualities / potentialities of our world. It is this irrelevancy or subterranean (inexistent) relevancy which forms a resistance toward establishments of the current world order and hence becomes political. Since for Alvanson creating this line of resistance ��� embodied as irrelevancy to the current order of actualities ��� is a matter of artistic creativity, then the political is only generated through the artistic, not the other way around.
Rather than dwarfing art by drawing upon existing socio-political resources or established formations, Alvanson���s art questions the legitimacy of existing orders in revealing the grounds on which they have erected or from which they have emerged. This is why the resistance of the Middle East toward all globally appropriate socio-political models or establishments as an obscure formation with a subversive irrelevancy has become an artistic idea for Alvanson���s cosmic drapery project.

A nomadic fabric chador from Alvanson’s Cosmic Drapery Project – Pewter (2008)
Similar to her differentially assembled teratologic model Arbor Deformia in Collapse IV, Alvanson���s cosmic drapery project is not supposed to remain chained to the actual or potential formations or deformations (monstrosities) of the world, but to subvert them with currently inexistent formations. Having in mind that inexistent is in this case is that which cannot be afforded by or correlated with the actual or potential formations of the world we live in. Examining Alvanson���s Cosmic Drapery Project in light of her essay on monstrous taxonomies rather than taxonomies for fitting monsters opens up an entirely new dimension in regard to her art where the idea of responsible or political art is undermined in an utterly subtle and creative manner. This subversion and counteraction against relevant art and appropriate politics is carried out on behalf of a radical and speculative creativity which is the medium of the politics of resistance.
If contemporary responsible art has assumed that the artist should emphasize on relevancy of art in regard to sociopolitical and cultural formations, then art today has never been more irresponsible. A sufficient example is the image of an artist who in persuasion of relevant and responsible art attempts to envelope current and existing affairs in his art; but in doing so he debases the art by turning it into the subject of socio-political or cultural affordability of foreign events and environments. Under the politico-economically charged anthropomorphic assumption that anything can be reduced to a sensible phenomena or material and consequently can be afforded regardless of its inner logic, contemporary (responsible) art has become an obnoxiously humanitarian field in which every affair or event can indeed be a theme for an art exhibition, incorporated with art and be relevant. This is firstly, a complete failure to grasp the autonomously creative ethos of art as that which vitiates relevancy or the supposed relationship-dependent world of events and phenomena which has been constructed upon the existing potentialities and actualities of our world. Secondly, the idea of a responsible or relevant art has a purely moralistic consequence in regard to producing a generation of artists and viewers for whom art needs to be relevant in order to safeguard their position in regard to an ever expanding universe and an unfolding world of events which fundamentally exceed the capacity of our existing models or mediums of inquiry. In short, the idea of relevant art is the idea of correlating the status quo human with the contingent and alien world out there through reprogramming art with a bankrupt and already disintegrated socio-cultural system. It needs a lot of inhuman indifference or intense sympathy for sappiness to ignore the tragicomic status of the contemporary relevant / responsible art (such as this) where artistic creation is always the matter of making a bad mixture between folly and marketable sensibility, but always with different ratios: an artist responsibly heeds the latest exhibition call on War, Terror or the Middle East (having in mind that they are not that different) by presenting a machine gun from WWII or pulling a condom over a fake or defunct bullet. In line with the principles of responsible art which dictate that the artist should be up to date with current global affairs and project them in the art, another artist makes art with a relevant theme while he has never been exposed to the Middle East other than through his appropriate media or perhaps through the immigrant Middle-Eastern cabbie.
Kristen Alvanson’s first Tehran exhibition ‘nonad’ opens on May 23; it features nomadic fabric chadors, abjad-9 drawings and an animation study from her Cosmic Drapery Project. For more details on the show and her Cosmic Drapery Project check here.

An intriguing comment thread on Ray Brassier’s tour de force, Nihil Unbound.

For more information on the following seminars you can contact me at
incognitum.blog[AT]gmail.com
MACHINES ARE DIGGING: ON POROUS EARTH AND EMERGENCE

Goldsmiths, University of London
Department of Visual Cultures
Thursday 10 May 2007
Room: tba
UNDERCOVER SOFTNESS: POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE OF DECAY

Goldsmiths, University of London
Center for Cultural Studies
Wednesday 9 May 2007
2-5pm, Room DTH109
To attend the seminar please contact Dr Luciana Parisi at l.parisi@gold.ac.uk

Hidden Writing and Political Archeology

Through its spatial and temporal approaches to God and Apocalypse, Islamic theology formulates a methodology for begetting a profoundly political tool which is capable of turning theology itself into heresy.

According to Islamic theology, although the Christian God is infinite and is posed as an outsider but its externality is not radical enough and is self-contradictory, for the gift of revelation or apocalypto cannot be given to Man if God is radically external to Man. A God radically and perpetually external to Man can never be revealed to Man either partially or fully, on the ontological or the epistemic plane. In short, radical externality exceeds affordance even if affordance is effectuated – on the levels of both possibility (posse) and actualization (est) – as an infinite capacity. Revelation is certainly the production of the outside but its epistemic infinity (revelation as the superiora of knowledge) is bound to the affordability of both its ends – the subject of generosity and the subject of receptivity. In Revelation, while the latter (Man?) cannot entirely liberate itself from capacity and merely shifts to a new capacity entailed by its ontological integrity, the former is only able to actualize its generosity by submitting to the capacity of the receiver. Otherwise, the infinity of the gift can only register itself in waste and ignorance of the other. This is why in terms of Revelation, outside is an environment rather than radical exteriority; it is an outside whose boundaries coincide – a continuum of different capacities.

Islamic theology, however, presents God as radically and unyieldingly external to Man. This externality can be approached as a technique which perforates theology, reinventing it as an epistemological tool for confronting a pure externality without reducing it to ontological possibilities or an object of Man’s openness – affordance. A thoroughly outside-oriented ethics without an anticipation of being communicated by Man, Islamic theology once again renders the Outside as the great abomination:

Once theology presents the Divine as the pure outside and the manifest refractory impossibility, the monotheistic God enters a crisis with cataclysmic proportions: its ontological possibilities are undermined and its unity can merely inflame its precarious relationship to many. When the radical outside (infinitely external) is posed in respect to the affordable outside (an outside with infinite potentials) as in the case of Islamic theology compared to other monotheistic strains, the affordable outside turns into an epistemic tool that certifies the innumerability of other infinities. Each of these infinities demonstrates their autonomous existence by a diagonal opposition to the present infinity. The result of applying such a technique to God is nothing but God turning into an ultimate heresy itself. Once a new set is extracted from a series of sets in a way that it can both include those sets and situates itself infinitely external to them – similar to Cantor’s diagonalization technique – or infinitely higher in dimension, it can produce infinite anomalies if its laws and qualities are applied to those constitutive sets. Not only can the infinitely external set spawn heresies as a constant Outsider but also it is posited for its constitutive sets (the subjects of its heresy) as an ultimate never-ending heresy.

Cantor’s diagonalization [1] is a method for unbinding radical outsides (more in terms of invoking rather than creating them). It indirectly propagates outsides by mapping the failure of a given infinity to contain elements of other infinities or outsides. Cantor’s method suggests that outside-engineering is exercised by building an external set which cannot be related to the existing set (even if it is an infinity itself) through a ‘one-to-one and onto’ (bijective) correspondence:

Let s be any set and let t be the power set of s. Now at this point, s maps into t and every x in s maps to the set containing x in t. But there is no bijection (injection / one-to-one + surjection / onto) mapping s onto t.

Suppose f is such a bijection and build a set w in a way that for every x in s, x is in w iff x is not in . Now f maps s onto all of t, and w is a subset of t, so there is some x with . Yet iff . Therefore, the correspondence is contradictory and cannot exist. The ontology of the existing set / infinity cannot contain other sets / infinities but at the same time is responsible for giving rise to them (their homecoming).

Diagonalization is a political tool for counteracting ontology and its existential opportunism.

Islamic Allah is posed to Christian God and other monotheistic manifestations of the Divine in the same vein; it exercises heresy on the Divine on behalf of the Outside and its refractory externality. In short, heresy as an outside-oriented praxis is always effectuated by re-positioning (re-mobilization and re-alignment). The new heretical set brings itself behind its subjects for the sake of both affirming and being infinitely external to them. Such a re-positioning results in being a heresy in itself and harvesting countless heretical possibilities from positions or alignments being held by other sets. This is why, all heresies adopt the notorious positioning of a tergo.

If God basks in his house, let us reconstruct it according to the laws of demons. (Collapse II)

[1] The controversies around Cantor’s method – on a statistical / probability level – deserve an exhaustive discussion.

For more information on the following seminars you can contact me at
incognitum.blog[AT]gmail.com
MACHINES ARE DIGGING: ON POROUS EARTH AND EMERGENCE

Goldsmiths, University of London
Department of Visual Cultures
Thursday 10 May 2007
Room: tba
UNDERCOVER SOFTNESS: POLITICS AND ARCHITECTURE OF DECAY

Goldsmiths, University of London
Center for Cultural Studies
Wednesday 9 May 2007
2-5pm, Room DTH109
To attend the seminar please contact Dr Luciana Parisi at l.parisi@gold.ac.uk

The diagonal opposition of the minimum (Giordano Bruno’s fold-building which together with Nicholas Cusanus’s complicatio influenced Leibniz’s monadology) towards its environment (the afforded outside) that evades the logic of negativity at the same time that it defies submission and thus maintains constancy in opposition to its environment would not be indifference but inverse-difference to the environment. The minimum according to Bruno is not a world of the minimal but a world that registers itself in its surrounding as the minimum, or the maximum resistivity against what can economize it (or communicate with it according to the scale of the environing sphere or surrounding). The minimalist object is constantly prone to the maximalization of its environment as an outside ontologically existing only in what can be afforded by the object and what can afford the object. The minimum, however, undergoes building as a dissociation from its environment but not the outside by re-aligning its position as well as its ontological explicatio (development) to its environment instead of cutting from it or differentiating its minimum-ness from the all-encompassing measures (metron) of the environment. It is in the same way that Henri Michaux (Mr. Plume, Exorcisms and Night Moves) escapes the surrounding by building the minimum of the object or the universe (in the sense of Giordano Bruno’s the minimum) instead of directly overpowering the lines of gravity or through the line of escape, by undertaking the logic of the bullet, the projectile of infinite condensation and shells rather than perpetual dynamism.

If every object passes different types of forces, and generates its possibilities as well as actualization (posse / est) based on the affect space that these forces enmesh over and through it, modifying the type of forces and their designation would ensue a new reciprocation to the environment. The deployment of forces that define the totality, the context and the assemblage of the minimum, namely, what leads to an inflection or connection to the outside by inflexus, a point on a curve at which the tangent crosses the curve itself, creating a site of autonomous inwardness. Here, the twist or the inverse-difference from the affordability of the surrounding (the economical communication) is taken place by running the process of building through inflection, the event of endless inwardness, not interiorization. Inflection is an essential singularity near which, functions exhibit extreme behavior which neither manifests itself as a pole (polarity of functions or extremum) nor a removable singularity (contiguous to its primary function). The object of inflection is not of extremum (here or there, left or right, core or surface, forward or backward); it is external to the logic of coordinates, building a cavernous movement whose every turn is a point of return to the inside. Gravity (domination) is not at stake here because inflection deals with vectors of a curve which determinate the axes in oscillation around it, consequently, the object of inflection flees from weight (becomes weightless) not by escaping gravity through counterpoising it but becoming irrelevant to it. Inconclusively, inflection in the minimum realizes an autochthonic world where the formation of the building is from the place it is found or it originates, and vice versa. Cosmo-crafting itself according to an autonomous inwardness, the object as the building of inflection populates between dimensions (an inter-dimensional Xanadu) or it is without dimension, in either case, it is a self-contextual explosion along vortical bends. It existentially registers itself as an auto-event, installing the outside on the inside while closing inside upon the outside in an attempt to create a plenum external to its surrounding spatium. The self-context cosmology of inflection is the genetic element of an active object which cuts across the passivity of indifference and the reactionism of difference to generate an inverse-difference out of which outside is propagated infinitely and inwardly, creasing over and over – in the manner of wet-folding in origami – until producing a mass whose depth transforms to concrete thickness or concentrated fullness, a self-context which is not self-referential but autarkic by means of inflecting outside (reto-openness) rather than closure. The opposition of the minimum to the environment emerges from this retro-openness to the Outside, an outside that includes the surrounding (the environment) and what the environment cannot assimilate (the Outsider space), vorticity is the quality of this retro-openness and inward diffusion is its dynamism.

To this end, the process of bringing the materials together (orchestration) in the minimum is not of composition but is determined by squeezing, wrapping endlessly, creasing within and over creases, compressing into each other, shoving upward and downward, pressing out from the sides, staging all processes that bring together through the dynamics of forces risen between materials and masses, yield and stress, nonlinear elasticity and flow plasticity: an architectural forge-press.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Gauttari���s notes on Islamic philosophers are insufficient and in many cases poorly and incorrectly ripped off from obsolete French translations of works written on Muslim philosophers, manipulated in the most liberal and avant-garde technique: adding your words to them and then quoting or paraphrasing them back as an overseas philosophical support to your philosophy: inverse-plagiarism.
Lovecraft on the other hand knows very well the ineffable charm of Arabic names or Near and Middle Eastern pronunciations. Although both Deleuze and Lovecraft have contributed to Lumpen Orientalism (borrowed from China Mi?�ville) as far as their reputations have allowed but on the other hand they have shown in a pragmatic way that Orientalism more than anything testifies to the inaccessibility of social, political and ethical bodies in Asia for Western tools of analysis and decision making. This inaccessibility that appears as a form of irrelevancy or asymmetry between the subject of the inquiry (the orient) and the western inquiry’s frame of reference always operates as a cunningly socio-cultural indifference, a form of hollow affirmation to Western approaches. In other words, the irrelevancy of the oriental manifests as a chimeric situation for Western configurations and modes of analysis. It is an affirmation rooted not in commonality but the lack thereof, an affirmation capable of taking shape in different guises without essentially committing to them as its principles. Far from being a token of radical dissociation or vengeful and victimologic negativity (the hallmark of a reactionary and bankrupt thought), the orientalist affirmation is committed to the production of superficially exotic off-beat and off-time entities and events which share (affirm) much with Western aspirations. It is through these superficial commonalities that orientalism preserves the sharp asymmetry or irrelevancy of the Orient. An example of this encounter and subversive cooperation has already been followed in Lovecraft���s linguistic distortion and its social influences.
If for the most part, encounters with the East continue to be Lumpen Orientalist, it is because in a twisted way Lumpen Orientalism is that chimeric landscape through which the East perpetually and actively remains evasive not in the sense of mystery but in sense of asymmetry — an asymmetry that does not succumb to the status of a mindless reactionary proponent of the East.
Now, in a visually mind-eating and tongue-binding way, the first self-proclaimed and registered Lumpen Orientalist.

But more than satiating morbid interests in bizarre bazaars among archeological lurkers and people who try to sell you sentient junk relics and organic oddities I am looking forward to the Lumpen Orientalist���s photo-essay which interrogates the Deleuze problematic of Nomadism by rigorously delving into forgotten nomad fabrics and their blood-bond with the State.

CYCLONOPEDIA (forthcoming)
“The demonic is only attainable by becoming chef or returning to the culinary aspects of matter.”