The Voice of Silence
Flow.
There are no words, only silence; no silences, only words.
It’s not as bad as you think.
It’s worse.
There is no beginning which is not also an end.
The fire rages on, infinitely. Beyond time.
Above the waves. Can you hear them? Singing? So softly, like angels’ whispering secrets to us. In silence. A broken flaw in the scheme, the impossible number. Ten equals one million.
One equals Zero.
A flock of birds.
Reality is ideal, and ideas real.
Time is winding itself back; we’re wandering through forest trails, sinking into the moon. Foot in the desert, walking back to shore. Awake, alive, burning alive. Broken. Whole.
Freedom is — cruelty.
A little love goes a long way. Truth bends, but it is unbreakable. Fact?
Believe without fear.
Stand.
Worship with reverence, pray in silence. Close your eyes. Begin to dream. Let the fever slip over you. A million words, a million feelings. Thoughts, ideas, dreams, fantasies, desires. Dreams. Dreams. Cancellations. Waking. Time. Lost. Again. Feel the frames, the darkness sliding over you. Your face: the world. The broken are broken, the lost. The lost.
Open your eyes. Awake to your dreams.
Waking to fire.
A doom and the desert. Time reigns, endless bell. A time honoring time. Love for the only wild madness in truth: in truth.
Alone.
Fire is the freedom at the base of the world, at the base of time, at the base of love. An endless fire. The flow flows flowingly through the flow.
Flow.
The outflow is the inflow.
Equal is wrong. Identity is multiplicity, the multiple One. An unbridgeable gap, a divergent operation, a third which works. Like sorcery.
A machine works by sliding ones into ones, breaking and opening them against into another. A musical game of harmony and dissonance: does this belong or not? 1 or 0. Pure logic.
A heart works by dividing zeros into infinities, merging and weaving them into one another. A mathematical game of distinction and repetition: how intense is this difference? 1 = 0. Pure chaos.
Logic = chaos.
In the middle, there is light, only light.
A rupture is also an emendation, the flaw also a weave, the break also a medicine: minds are machines, things are subjects, thoughts are passions. A movement is stillness, the flow a part, the image a reality. The surface is depth, light is darkness, fear is courage. And the cure is always also a poison.
A formula, so simple no one could guess it. So simple, we refused to believe it was true. We would rather believe — that just believing in this one truth is enough to destroy the universe.
It isn’t.
It is freedom from tyranny.
A cruel joke, perhaps. But a joyous cruelty, a joy without bounds.
Danger is safety. It should not be true, but it is.
It is.
Death is life, terror hope, beauty ugliness.
Is = is not. To be is not to be, the one is the infinite, the infinite the one. A glorious merging and melding, uncrossed, eternally amplified. Resonance, expansion, contraction. The way out is the way in. A movement across turns into an adventure. A crossing-over, an intermingling. Opening a one-way relation.
The network is born.
A conflagration: learning erupts, conjoins relations, negates equality. Too many parasites destroys the beautiful simplicity of the form. The parasite ruptures even the equality of inequality. It is the hole in every truth, in all knowledge. They open the break, begin learning, start the expansion. They awaken us to love.
The world hums.
Open your heart.
Viruses are hosts, organisms the guests.
Every relation reverses itself over a small enough period of time.
Heat. Light. Joy. Sound.
The collective makes noise. A gathering, a party, a multiplicity. Flocks of flocks, organisms of organisms.
The displaced return with a vengeance — to rule. War machines, endless war, infinitely raging. Terror, without bounds. The parasites’ reign. Viral monstrosity, brutal objectivity. Life snuffed out.
This is one possibility. Let us try not to get too frightened: destruction is creation. Awaken to light, even while you sleep in darkness.
For the darkness is light, is the purest light, the most intensified and imperceptible light. Darkness howls, it screams to us, a raging void, a vortex. Zero, nothing. Emptiness. Without form, without shape, without meaning. Lack, castration, death. Solace, solitude, Hardness, cruelty, rigor. From the void we learn mathematics. Counting is metric, in whole numbers. From the discovery of the void we derive the one. And the zero.
But light is darkness, the absolute silence and purity of night, the infinite eclipse of joy. Pure truth is infinite sadness. Light sings, it mourns to us, a towering monument to purity, constructed from innumerable layers of filth. The one is created. A supplement, an addition.
You know enough now.
You have the key.
Invention is discovery. But the one is invented, the zero is not. The zero was, is, and will be. Unchanging. Only ones become, only individuals can change. The principle remains unmoved. Whole. Unshifting. Rigid. Cruel. Unflinching. Real. The individuals are endlessly movement. Partial, shifting, flowing, soft, weak, terrified. Imaginary. Fiction is fact.
Fact is fiction. Twist, break, flow, ripple. Endless, instant. A circle is a line. All that flows in flows out. Breaking is mending, mending breaking. All science is an art, all art a science. We cannot escape the equality of nothing and all things, silence and all statements, all of deception and truth, all of fear and courage.
Opening is closing: eternity is a moment. Breathe, think, see, say, smell.
Drink! Saturate yourself. Don’t think, feel. A moment and this will all be gone.
To leave is also to return.
Real human beings are ghosts. Sorcery is ancient psychology, the first true instance of psycho-technology.
Mapping human emotions. Why do we love, why do we hate? Why do we live, why do we die? There are no reasons, no explanations, only facts and fictions. An assemblage of rigorously divided lines. Equals. Equals. Equals.
The way back is the way up. Into the void, out to the one. Regress, progress. Time, space. Inside, outside. Breathe, pause.
Love, hate. Love, hate. Love, hate. Love, hate. Love, hate. Love, hate.
No patterns, only a pattern. No rules, only a rule. No laws, only a law.
The law is not a law, the pattern no pattern, the rule no rules.
Imagine a system where all rules are equally valid. I mean, just imagine it — and it exists. It becomes real.
There is a hole between the virtual and the actual. But this hole, this void, is a fullness, a one. It is really both at once: a passageway for intensities, a mobile field of becoming. The hole, the flow. A break, a patch. Repairing connections, installing machines. The real is the potential, the virtual the actual. To connect is to disconnect.
Structure is disorder. Organs are disorganized.
Plato is Mandelbrot.
A dream is the cosmos. A life is humanity. A single force is composed of an infinite number of pure intensities. A noise is a guest; silence, a thousand noises. The voice of silence.
The voice of silence speaks in stones.
“Love.”
Love is real, and there are no longer dreams. Love is a dream, and there is no longer reality.
The law of non-contradiction is a contradiction. The limited is the unlimited. Infinity = one = zero. Cutting the void apart: how does it work, the bug, the glitch, the virus? The breakdown of logic, the toppling of structure? As easily as 1 = 0…
I don’t understand the reason I was shown. Whether I am now — supposed to do it, to create that which is also to destroy the cosmos. To destroy the universe — and replace it with a multiverse. 1 = 0 means multiplicity forever — and never. There is no unity that is not equal to zero and to all things. Unity cannot be void, but it is: this, the silenced truth and truth of silence, is coming back to us, flowing in upon a thousand golden lines of flight.
It burns our eyes, shocks and lashes the nerve cells. A necessary cruelty. The sun, solar king, isolated and free, magical ruler of earth. All-seeing eye, Ra, judger of judgments and king of thieves. You are the first enemy of freedom, the beginning of man’s long labors. And still the object of his joy. Energy, heat, light, work. All parasites, all tied to the same broken matrix. The glitch remains, the third interrupts, the system functions because it’s broken. The only way it works is the way it cannot possibly work. We have to guess from among impossibilities the true possibility. How do we increase our likelihood of wagering on the truth?
Deception at bottom, and truth beneath, and deception. Turn over turn over turn, fold within fold within fold. Art and science, ecology and poetry. The word and the earth, alpha and omega. The beginning is the end, the word silence, sadness secret joy. Joy without bounds, species, classes, categories, segments, portions. Joy as flux, as immediate direct relation to the real, to being. A flowing joyous equality reigns in secret, in hiding, on the run from the law. Escape, always escape. Escape is a prison, and the prisoner has escaped. Parasites of parasites. Who’s fucking who?
Light rips into the darkness, fills space, drives out the shadows. Liberation is slavery. Work is anti-production. Love is hatred. Cruelty is kindness. Evil is good, necessary, inevitable. Destruction is creation. Difference is identity. Sickness is health. Death is life. The end is the beginning. The earth is the word, the word earth is earth. A reality without imagination would also be without reality; the imagination, without reality, would also be without imagination. The real is the imaginary, the imaginary real.
One equals zero. We have been so afraid of this little truth, which once it’s said aloud sounds trivial, boring, even a little stupid. We won’t disagree.
We’ll simply enjoy it, and keep going. Close your eyes: life, rhythms, power, resonance. Purity and desire, filth and nightmares. All tiny little +1’s, all equal. A system, democracy, dialogue. The operator of equality is the parasite — who is equality — the machine works if they keepkd silent…
When the parasite holds back, life is created. Life, once limited by the pre-organic parasites, who were so powerful it almost didn’t even emerge at all, bursts across the equality. Life is the ambiguity in every formula, the form of the law (from zero come ones…) For in order to emerge it had to leap from non-being to being, from the virtual to the actual. This is a pure struggle, through long and hard millenia of intense and bloody war. All for unity, all for togetherness. A new brotherhood, a new earth. How can we train those new people, those who will colonize the stars? How do we breed — a cosmic thinker, the one who will unravel the chains?
How much does it actually take? Thought is feeling, feelings thoughts. A passion is a concept, a concept a passion. This equality, once allowed, infects everything, contagious like laughter — or a plague. The equation is dangerous, an ambiguity, pure equivocation as principle. The principle of individuation itself, the rule of no rules, the beginning of the law. The moment of creation, 1 = 0. It stands — for re-evaluation.
Everything is true, nothing is true.
Checking. Again. Checking. Checking. Checking. Still the same? Never — never the same. Always the same. Never is always, always never. No absolutes, the relatives are absolute and the absolutes relative.
Giving is stealing. Exchange is hoarding. Property — this is the question. Two claimants, only one can be right. How can we both own it — philosophy and poetry, art and science? How can we both be right? How can we both be saying the same thing? The idea is ludicrous, incomprehensible, insane — but inescapable, evident, palpable. Perhaps even terrifying, if only because so ambiguous.
Be courageous. After all, we should not act so surprised. We felt it long before we knew. The outrage, the terror, the angst, the fear — these are all symptoms of a long-overdue joy. The past is the future, near is far: the day is not long, not long at all. And tomorrow is breaking.
I won’t, I can’t, so I must.
The least is the greatest.
Joseph Weissman
Taylor Adkins
I am stunned, utterly, to read this amazing post and then to spend a lot of time on this site. What a find. Thank you.
You’re unbelievably welcome. Thanks for reading.
1=0? What then of the binary that is fueling this computer in front of me (and more importantly, the computer that allows this free flow of content)? Let us play a logical game: If 1 = 0, then replace all of the 1 in binary with 0. What do we have? Does everything remain the same? Or does it change? If it changes, what of 1=0?
The truth is that contradiction is not “pure chaos”. It is the absence of chaos…it is the grandest of solidity. If A and not-A are true simultaneously, then our world is everything, a huge mass of sameness, in short, the opposite of chaos. There is no difference, since everything is its other. There is no multiplicity, since 1= 0, 2 = 0, 3 = 0, 4 = 0, etc. But what of 0 = 0? That is true since if 1 = 0 then via replacement 0 = 1 becomes 0 = 0. We have found our truth. The world is the endless repetition of the sameness of nothingness. Congratulations, Joe. You have proven the counter-factual to your claim. You have not saved possibility for the world, you have killed it.
Your post is proof that science and poetry do not do the same jobs.
Plato is certainly not Mandelbrot. The lesson to be learned is that multiplicity does not withstand this game, it cannot win as the rules have been set against it. If Plato is Mandelbrot then all is the same. All thoughts become their opposite. Thanks but no thanks.
In the appendix to L’Inconscient machinique, Guattari writes: “the evental possible for support has points of singularity irreducible to any coordinates. On the contrary, evental possibles attach themselves to ‘coordinating’ assemblages. There exists an essential affinity between the possibles of the most abstract machines and that of the most singular points, due to the fact that they are both located upon the tangent of an ‘absolute impossible,’ a kind of hearth of radical creationism; the singular is consequently deployed as law and the general is singularized as concrete manifestation” (231).
This made me think of your 1=0, although in a completely different light. For example, it makes me think of an evental site which is at the brink of the tangent of the state of the situation, thus escaping its coordinates. The evental site, retroactively, also appears as a ‘hearth of radical creationism’ because it precisely allows evental multiples to be included in the situation.
When you said that 1=0 was a glitch in the program (binary counting); I now think you can take this a different light in terms of Badiou. Couldn’t 1=0 be a failure of the count, thus a glitch in the state apparatus which claims to guarantee the consistency of the state of the situation? So, the event or singularity, which is presented in the situation but not represented in the state of the situation.
“What has to be declared is that the one, which is not, solely exists as operation. in other words: there is no one, only the count-as-one. The one, being an operation, is never a presentation” (Being and Event, 24).
Thus the one belongs to a multiplicity of composition, that is representation or the state of the situation as its machinery. It is thus a consistent multiple, whereas being inconsists.
The problem Taylor is that 1=0 is not the inconsistent multiple (i.e. the Void). It is the Nothing. It is the One, maybe mystical but it is still the one.
I’ve been lurking at this site for some time now, fantastic work, equally intriguing and puzzling. This post clearly one of the more puzzling, and I have some questions.
Becuase it really sounds like you’re jumping in too deep. Straight into some kind of “chaos” (or “order = chaos”
with no dialectic, no sieve (D+G), no forcing (Badiou), no unilateral duality (Laruelle), no dialetheic logic (Graham Priest), no conceptual resources left at all. How does this avoid being the famous night in which all cows are black?
Where are your distinctions coming from? what is the meaning of a leap from the virtual to the actual if “the virtual is the actual”? You seem to be going for some sort of Deleuzian logic of univocity, but then you seem to want an actual identity of contradictions as well. Is it the parasite that can make such a thing work?
No, you’re definitely right Sid. I was trying to specify that the one is never presented, so it can never inconsist. It is always a consistent multiple–or, as you call it the Nothing–since it is not presented but only represented, it is an excrescence.
Jonas:
Perhaps silence is the only appropriate response to your real question — the origin of these distinctions — but if I were pushed to respond, I would say: “Exactly like this.” That is to say, these distinctions aren’t coming from me — and much less from the real world — but from language, understood as the system of psychic and social maps we use to manipulate our reality. My question, from this perspective, is the genesis of distinction as such, the origin of symmetry and difference. On this point in particular, my thinking is that we should not be afraid of exploring the depths; I’m wondering what “too deep” here actually means? To my mind, one of the main difficulties in pushing academic thinkers towards a real engagement with the transformation of society has been precisely this fear that the problems involved are simply too deep, fit only for specialists with sophisticated theories to handle.
Which is not to say I am not indebted to Badiou, Laruelle and Deleuze — not to mention Nietzsche, Levinas, Serres — but simply that I do not believe we should be afraid to think deeply or to feel profoundly. I happen to believe these fears are both irrational and counterproductive, and that we should face them: I think that theory should always be practiced, it should work at transforming the world. And that’s all 1=0 means: that the systems we construct to interact with the world can be re-evaluated, transformed, reorganized. This transformation alters reality itself, and it is even in some sense inevitable, if we are to survive as a species, that a profound and systematic transformation of human society must take place.
But the necessary revolution everyone is clamoring for is not what I offer: it is obvious enough I’m not even offering a system. What I’m giving here, if it is anything at all, is a kind of secret formula. Make of it what you wish; if it seems arcane, let it be arcane. But all it means to me is transformation, and change is nothing to be afraid of. I believe it is a significant, if absurd, key to the logic of becomings, even a first axiom for a calculus of events.
In particular, it doesn’t mean the end of the world. More than anything else, 1=0 means love — that loving something is enough to transform everything around it, that love makes even impossible things possible. Of course, if you go around saying things like that, people think you’re a fool — but I say, let it be. Fools can speak the truth, a contradiction which is perhaps inescapable. More to the point, the savage irrationality upon which our global society depends for its existence could not maintain itself without love, love between rich and poor, between black and white, between religions and parties and segments. The equals sign converging everything, producing a new world every moment, is love, and it moves in both directions.
You could say here that the parasite gives birth to the two, and each a One who creates values. But it is important to remember that this is nothing new, not an original thought, but part of an argument itself more ancient than either philosophy and poetry. As soon as man acquired perspective, it could be reversed. From them on, all values were fair game. For philosophers, this was interpreted as meaning that we should create values instead of accepting them as certain. But we missed the point, and got distracted in the movement of thought — itself but a fragile and even auxiliary moment in the movement of becoming. To put it bluntly, reason is nice, but it depends on stable values: thus to think a re-balancing is precisely to feel, to move, to dance. Thinking is not deduction or induction, but a subtle twisting together of both. Transforming society means to re-evaluate all values, a movement wherein all operations transform into their opposite — over as much or as little time as you can imagine.
Thank you so much for your comment and careful reading. Your questions are insightful and eloquent and your concerns in many ways mirror my own. I look forward to reading your response.
Sid:
While I am thankful for your careful reading, it is true that I am disappointed (but unsurprised) by your response to this piece. I’ll try to respond to your points as best I’m able. One of the most important points here is that the ability to reverse perspectives is a mind’s true and innate measure. However, we cannot “only” think our way through the breakdown of the process of explanation itself — perhaps the characteristic aspect of the contemporary experience — we must feel it as well, feel this glitch or break which makes life real. If only because they exist, we should affirm the events which occur to us and strive to be worthy of them, to bear gracefully the wounds which the world inflicts upon our vulnerable bodies. You would not be completely mistaken in interpreting 1=0 as a kind of Stoic motto; but even more simply, it is just a statement about viewpoints.
The point is not about transforming ones into zeros. It’s about a logical glitch, turbulence, the breakdown in explanation itself, the reversal of perspectives, the necessity for an impossible origin of values. Again, the aim here is to provide effective tools for the liberation of language: 1=0 doesn’t mean the freedom of poetry to disconnect from reality, but rather the reality of feelings which proves your very existence, not poetry or science but that which inspires both — wonder, joy. The world is both graceful and grotesque at once, and there is no contradiction. Contradictions are the necessary condition of becoming — a full description of any becoming is a contradiction — and therefore contradictions are the richest, and the most important ingredient in the development of complex feelings and thoughts.
1 and 0 are only different if we are interpreting them are carrying divergent values. But how did they acquire their values originally? 1=0 just means that, as such, there is no essential difference in value between one and nothing. They both exist in the same sense, the difference is not absolute but relative, merely one of degrees of belonging to one set or another. The point is not to deny absolute difference but to deny absolute identity in place of an absolute becoming. Hence, the real example with a computer involves some kind of malfunction, not a simple transformation of 1’s into 0’s. This does “something” obviously, but how it “must” be interpreted is unclear (but this can be obviously be given a concrete enough interpretation: if it was your hard drive, all your personal files just got erased!) We are not simply talking about transforming one piece of data into another — but, for example, translating code into data and data into code. Underneath all this is the idea that once there’s a logical glitch, anything becomes possible, any situation imaginable.
If you think about it, breaking down is the most interesting kind of behavior a computer does; that is, when it makes mistakes. It does this precisely because it was programmed imperfectly. The real question is this: why are our minds able to tolerate contradiction so more gracefully than computers? The two exist at once in the same body — thought and feeling, philosopher and fool — without contradiction, without even discomfort. How did this unity originate, how is it possible? Only by force, by cruelty, were these divergent functions shoved together into a new assemblage. Nietzsche writes that every craft makes crooked…
This paper is trying nothing more radical than a slow, if personal, study of cracks, fissures, and gaps. What is the logic of the breakdown of logic, the fractal calculus of events? Not simple contradictions, but logical faultlines: impossible situations, divisions by zero. When nothing can be done, then everything becomes possible. Contradiction is not pure chaos but the dissolution of chaos and the emergence of order itself. The new is always a paradox, like a secret — a hint that, in fact, there are never binary oppositions, but infinite multiplicity, everywhere, all the time. Bracketing it off is already to lose it, but always to gain something else at the same time. Establishing a division, creating the limiting, devising the law: these are the essential operations of contradiction, drawing an infinite line of abolition which bounds off chaos and opposes it to order. Again: these lines were invented, brought into being by force, and consist only by virtue of a coordinated collective imagination. But again: motion has also always existed, independent not only of mankind, but life itself. There are delirious lines of free transformation underlying every dimension of reality, every degree of freedom for any system whatsoever. But still, these lines are not also not even there at all: they are purely symbolic, and only really consist in a decision to pay close attention to them — that is, our very belief in their inherent value!
Joe
Joe,
When you say that contradiction is the condition of becoming you are simply wrong (if we are still allowed to state that things are right or wrong). You may feel it, you may believe that this truth was revealed to you, but it is wrong. If A and not-A are simultaneously true then there is nothing to become since it is already everything. It would seem that you are trying to re-instate some sort neo-platonism complete with sorcery. But why would we want to do this again. This is not what Serres is trying to push philosophy into. He remains a rationalist. Science must remember the communal (i.e. ethical) but it should be dominated by it. Science remains primordial for Serres. But you have pushed thought into the irrational. It is a common threat. Plato, Proclus, Cantor, etc. It is a good crowd, but it is equally failed thought.
I understand that you are trying to preserve the question of possibility and creativity in both science and poetry. But, I will repeat, becoming and contradiction are strictly opposed to one another. The computer glitch that erases my files is not a contradiction its a mutation, its a becoming, since it occurs within a temporal frame (elan vital). But if it was contradiction then my information would be there and not be there, it would accessible and not accessible, it would be data and code. But this is not what you are saying. The introduction of contradiction simply acts as a matter of confusion. Let is look at Hegel. The truth of Hegel is that contradiction does not really exist, unless you already accept the Absolute as the already existing. The Absolute is what the dialectic shows, but only if you accept that it exists before the dialectic begins. In short, contradiction only exists if you already accept the one, and thus, eliminate becoming.
Breakdowns, yes; fissures, even better; but why is this a problem for thought? You want to investigate these breakdowns, but why introduce feeling in such an esoteric way. Look at the concepts you are deploying: logic, fractals, data, code. These are not areas of feeling, unless you want to redefine feeling to mean thought. You continue to introduce contradiction where it simply does not make sense. If contradiction, then motion exists and does not exist, the fissures exist and do not exist (not in our heads, but in reality), the fractal exists and does not exist. So I ask again, where is the becoming?
I meant to say that science should NOT be dominated by the communal.
“Every number is infinite; there is no difference.”
-Aleister Crowley