But he [Lacan] did not realize the consequences of his rupture with Freudian determinism, and didn’t appropriately situate “desiring machines” — whose theory he had iniated — within incorporeal fields of virtuality. This object-subject of desire, like strange attractors in chaos theory, serves as an anchorage point with a phase space (here, a universe of reference) without ever being identical to itself, in permanent flight on a fractal line. In this respect it is not only fractal geometry that must be invoked, but fractal ontology. It is the being itself which transforms, buds, and transfigures itself. The objects of art and desire are apprehended within the existential Territories which are at the same time the body proper, the self, the maternal body, lived space, refrains of the mother tongue, familiar faces, family lore, ethnicity… No existential approach has priority over another. Thus it’s not a question of a causal infrastructure and of a superstructure representative of the psyche, or of a world separated from sublimation. The flesh of sensation and the material of the sublime are inextricably interwoven. Relationship to the other does not proceed through identification with a preexisting icon, inherent to each individual. The image is carried by a becoming other, ramified in becoming animal, becoming plant, becoming machine and, on occasion, becoming human.

Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different. (Aldous Huxley)

Through saturation an artist brings all the diverse elements of experience into a real interfusion, an affirmative disjunction. The artist opens passageways, a vessel for engendering a pure becoming. An encounter with an outside, presenting a pure force which art can only express — art as transistor, as angel. As the cruelest resistance, which dispassionately disentangles the varieties of forces of essence, cautiously (even systematically) allowing the new to break free.

Art is certainly multiple, social, plurivocal. But our harmony is also a hint — we remind each other at every turn that force is also musical, cosmic, vegetable, molecular, animal…

Greatness in art is the power of resonance, not of reflection. Communication is certainly not the point. An experiment approaches the real precisely in order to catch up, to leap behind it, to stop time. Great art harbors no secret soothing, no escape into transcendence, but real insight into an immanent transformation. The human spirit — that greatest of resistances which causes even the stars to resonate — can overcome even itself.

The dimension called “aesthetic” could perhaps be distinguished as a singular torsion in the soul, a kind of critical overcoming of an internal limit, from which emerge limitless variations. A dangerous dimension of pure becoming which has always been working, in secret, just narrowly breaking free from this abyss overflowing with thorns, diverging lines, machines, animals, molecules, stars.

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 as long as they keep silent, as long as they are imperceptible…

Hold back.

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?

When love holds back.

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.

Let go.

Introduction: Rationality and Affect

The lofty prize
Of science lies
Concealed today as ever!
He has no thought
To him it’s brought
To own without endeavor!

Goethe, Faust (1st part, 2567-2572)

Intelligence is a moral category. The separation of feeling and understanding, that makes it possible to absolve and beatify the blockhead, hypostasizes the dismemberment of man into functions. Praise of the simpleton has an undertone of anxiety lest the severed parts reunite and put an end to the derangement. ‘If you have understanding and a heart,’ a verse of Holderlin’s runs, ‘show only one. Both they will damn, if you show both together.’

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia 197 (“Wishful Thinking”)

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche expresses his desire for independent thinkers to reflect on the origins, and speculate on the future of science and art. On the one hand, he draws attention to the conditions for their invention: in order for scientific thinking and art to have begun at all, a wide variety of physiological and psychological faculties (whose effects are quite different without the framework imposed by artistic or scientific rigor) must become strong enough to overpower their “opposing” functions. For example, in order for science to begin, the impulse to doubt must overcome the impulse to believe, just as the impulse to wait must overcome the impulse to simply make something up and move on, and so forth. On the other hand, Nietzsche reminds us that the divergence between the aesthetic and scientific experience tends to fracture humanity’s spirit, pushing it both further from and closer to reaching itself than ever. At the very moment determinate thought emerges as a unity, science finds itself foreign to itself, incompletely digested. Its great distance and inhuman coldness oppose it to both practical wisdom and to art.

One passage in particular — “On the doctrine of poisons” — exemplifies Nietzsche’s correlation of the future possibilities of science and art with the conditions required for their original development:

Many hecatombs of human beings were sacrificed before these impulses learned to comprehend their coexistence and to feel that they were all functions of one organizing force within one human being. And even now the time seems remote when artistic energies and the practical wisdom of life will join with scientific thinking to form a higher organic system in relation to which scholars, physicians, artists and legislators — as we know them at present — would have to look like paltry relics of ancient times.
[Nietzsche, “The Gay Science,” Book 3, Section 113]

Nietzsche’s vision of a higher organic system uniting science, art and wisdom in concert seems distant indeed. Today’s science appears, by contrast, nothing more than a peculiarly modern cruelty, and at the least grossly indifferent, uncomfortably alien to the humanity it serves. Nonetheless, the future dawn which Nietzsche glimpsed in spite of his time also has given birth in ours to a family of curious hybrids, a flock of syntheses of formerly-disparate functions. Why, then, despite these mutations, does a genuine organic system bridging science, art, and practical wisdom seem as far away as ever? The reason, at its ugly root, is that a melancholy science — the “positivist” law of gravity — has so far tended to reign supreme. “The common consent to the positive is a gravitational force that pulls all downwards,” writes Adorno. [Minima Moralia 118, “Downwards, ever downwards.”] Divergent thoughts are minimized, a superficial convergence deified.

The break between the humanities and the natural sciences repeats itself within every discipline, even perhaps within every experiment. It is itself a minor repetition of the ancient war between art and science. Today practitioners of both art and science discover their specialization narrowing, as though all following some imperceptible signal to think smaller. Any particular branch of science today, any given artistic field, discover its task suddenly to be both overspecialized and excessively abstract. A kind of anti-production masquerading as production is made of intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, any actual “work” in these fields having been long ago been reduced to a narrow repetition.

What is left over (with a few important exceptions) hardly deserves the name of either “art” or “science,” against whose memory these images are like the disturbing shadows of dead gods. What remains, in other words, are an art and an science equally devoid of thought or feeling. In fact, this is a symptom of a more general social condition wherein all dimensions of life are reduced to a purely formal space — a generic task in a total machine.

In a paradoxical way, this process of reduction also yields a kind of emancipation. Despite appearances, all of this evident degeneration is still a positive expression of life: terrified, sickening life, but life nonetheless, whose forced behavior and faux automatism belie the subtle elegance of its co-ordinated movement and expression — not to mention the inner, experimental movements of the mind.

This, in short, is the story of how the real spiritual conditions of science — of the scientist — were concealed. For beneath a calm veneer of scientific rationality, we discover, unsurprisingly, an engaged and energetic spirit. Without this energy, and without this facade, science could not exist. Nevertheless, this intermingling of the “passionate” and “dispassionate” reaches a critical moment within the modern era of science. Mathematics supplants poetry as the language of disclosing being. The most subtle, rare and beautiful symmetries can now be explored, even rigorously constructed. However, we can also discern new, and possibly dangerous hybrids.

Perhaps the most unfortunate and idiosyncratic tendency today is an unreflective combination of empiricism and transcendentalism, yielding, depending on the believer’s base disposition, a vain idealism or vulgar materialism. These function, in general, as impediments to thinking. The predominant tendency is to package them uncomfortably alongside a facile moral relativism and callous economic determinism. It could be added that this symptomatic reductive tendency is unsettlingly widespread today, regardless of the author’s political orientation or whether the author’s department ostensibly devotes itself to “cognitive science” or “cultural studies.”

That there have been many misunderstandings from both shores regarding their schism can make the necessary dialogue appear difficult, and war virtually inevitable. But in our eyes, the friendship between art and science, and again between the sciences of man and the sciences of nature, remains of ultimate importance. Behind the ancient war of philosophy and poetry, there is a brotherhood — a cosmic fraternity. Socially oblivious, reductive materialism on the one hand, and all-too-clever “postmodern” posturing on the other, are superficial symptoms of the severance of this real connection. The only permanent solution to this pregnant impasse is also the most difficult: patience, respect, compassion, and open dialogue are the tools for the transformation of enemies into allies.

Rigorous expression is the essence of this emancipatory reunification. What we want to understand is the following: how has this process of subdivision and divergence failed so often to produce thoughts and subjects opposed to the separation between disciplines — a separation exacted finally as a nullification of both emotion and judgment? My proposal consists essentially in a return to Nietzsche. He demonstrates that a genuine crossing between the two shores is not impossible. It requires more than narrow, mechanical interaction. It requires, precisely, slow reading and discernment. We stand in desperate need of a genuine, thoughtful reunification — perhaps too desperate. My goal is to question the desire for an unlimited unity of wisdom. I wish to ask instead what concepts are equal to the task of resurrecting art and revitalizing science.

Art and science can and must move forward together. Poetry and mathematics need not deny one another’s reality. The motivation is clear enough — perhaps too clear! While we cannot abide this artificial reduction of science to two simple, unconnected spaces of thought, we also cannot abide the direct reduction of either space to the other. We must resist interpretation, and begin to listen. The notion of ‘rigor’ embodies the transversal movement of scientific or artistic or practical thinking, not a robust and formal conjunction but a delicate, fragile synthesis. Translation is the key to this transformation. We have dire need for alliances across the unfortunate schism between poetry and mathematics, the humanities and the natural sciences — today more than ever before. To reflect upon this boundary is already to transform it.

Vivisection

Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure. This is planned, used for undertakings, crammed with visits to every conceivable site or spectacle, or just with the fastest possible locomotion. The shadow of all this falls on intellectual work. It is done with a bad conscience, as if it had been poached from some urgent — even if only imaginary — occupation. To justify itself in its own eyes it puts on a show of hectic activity performed under great pressure and shortage of time, which excludes all reflection, and therefore itself.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (from p. 138, “Vandals”)

A major theme of Adorno’s masterpiece, Minima Moralia, is the symptomatically frenzied lifestyle of the modern professional intellectual, with its evident, and apparently calculated, exclusion of speculation. How is it that we stop thinking, in order to justify our jobs as thinkers? Adorno argues that a profession which demands solitude and reflection cannot comfortably co-exist with a lifestyle totally dominated by the sphere of exchange. Books by the pound, but never looking around. Intellectual work done in such an unreflective way produces a bad conscience. Thus are the most dangerous kinds of contradictions allowed to preserve themselves. Merely an innocent, or at least harmless corruption? We might add there also neatly corresponds to this lifestyle an all-too-familiar maniacal fixity, itself co-extensive with the mechanical self-organization of production. Divided and conquered.

Work usurps thought, in the end overtaking life itself: everything must look like a job, even our life itself must resemble a project. Hyper-specialization. The not-so-hidden downside of this is that everything which does not conform is condemned to be systematically isolated and extracted. Thus the false resemblance of life and work functions to conceal whatever is still, or not yet, directly regulated by the sphere of exchange — the ever-burgeoning body-without-organs of capital. Consequently Adorno believes his trepidation about professional intellectuals reflects a much deeper problem:

“The unconscious innervations which, beyond thought processes, attune individual existence to historical rhythms, sense the approaching collectivization of the world. Yet since integral society does not so much take up individuals positively within itself as crush them to an amorphous and malleable mass, each individual dreads the process of absorption, which is felt as inevitable.” (MM 139)

A world-historical struggle is unfolding to which our private, internal experiences bear profound and characteristic witness, precisely because this struggle affects everyone as well as every dimension of human life. The ever-recommencing “integration” of society affects us unconsciously as a terrifying threat of subsumption. Paradoxically, in resisting the danger of a negative reunification, we reproduce the threat itself. A critical sociology can “read” the near-universal adoption of hectic, frenzied modes of life, already commonplace, even cliche, even at the dawn of the 20th century, as unconscious attempts on the part of individuals to construct a “counter-irritant” — Adorno’s term for an active and urgently subjective transformation in response to the growing threat of totalitarianism. Far too often, we resist the transformation we unconsciously fear by submitting to the system in advance for fear we might submit “all too late.”

This is the universal delirium about which everyone is completely silent. Terror is not only a form of social intimidation, but also has a profound philosophical and psychological meaning. For terror is that operator of passage, that parasite by which we submit to our nightmares. It propagates, in isolated silences, like a viral unconscious agent. It distorts threats and advantages; it distributes weakness, lack, resentment; it “protects” us from a specific threat only by drawing attention to something even more terrifying — an unlimited threat. The specifically modern experience of terror has been shaped by the death of God, the explosive revelation of the subject’s secret finitude. Without the absolute limit of the limitless, nothing again can indeed appear from without to harm us again. Absolute domination becomes imperceptible: like a nightmare we carry within us, a coup from the inside. We create nightmares to protect us; we become the terrifying parasite. Michel Foucault is acutely aware of this dimension of the contemporary experience. In his “Preface to Transgression,” he declares:

“By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting. In this sense, the inner experience is throughout an experience of the impossible (the experience being both that which we experience and that which constitutes the experience.) The death of God is not merely an “event” that gives shape to contemporary experience as we now know it: it continues tracing indefinitely its great skeletal outline.
Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression” from “Language, Counter-Memory-Practice,” p.32

The contemporary experience is only superficially empty; but in fact it consists in erasing external bounds to power and replacing them with internal constrictions. This exacts its price on the very experience of living; life is poisoned and quickly grows sick. Before the need for terror, cruelty stands as the only solution, a determination and rigor which pierces the real. Cruelty is the price for knowledge.

A decision protects our experience by limiting its intensity. Without limit, without form, experience itself becomes unsayable, imperceptible, and finally even unthinkable. What founds our new faith is not fear but courage, even in the event of our inevitable capture. But what of the impossibly distant, tantalizing hope for real emancipation?

We have now determined why the philosophers stopped thinking, and perhaps how life becomes unlife: how life became sick, and haunted by unfulfillable desires. How people became obsessed with work and appearances, and from whence came the terror and uncannily symptomatic frenzy characteristic of modernity. The masses are individually terrified of being swallowed up by an infinite force promising only oblivion, and so combine to become this force.

Hope is a cruel device, a spur: not only do actions intended to minimize a threat ironically end up bringing it about, but faith makes us insist upon our slavery without even being asked first. We fight for domination harder than for freedom — believing we are fighting for freedom. In adopting a frenzied lifestyle, we manage even to outdo the danger itself. We use the hours apparently left to freedom to coach ourselves in becoming a member of the herd. Adorno declares: “The further the individual and society diverge in later periods through the competition of interests, and the more the individual is thrown back on himself, the more doggedly he clings to the notion of the moral nature of wealth.” (Adorno, Minima Moralia 119, “Model of virtue.”) Wealth is not essentially moral, but it does tend to corrupt morality. Against this omnipresent and negative universality, the identity of virtue and money, determinate production itself must be reclaimed as the essential procedure of both art and science. Furthermore, needs and desires must also be re-conceived as positive forces, not as principles “lacking” an object.

Psychoanalysis, in particular, must be urgently reclaimed and rethought as a tool for protecting, revitalizing and amplifying desire. No longer ought we attempt simply to normalize desire. For we thereby only succeed in crushing it once and for all.

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis

Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed; the “specialist” emerges somewhere — his zeal, his seriousness, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science 336 (“Faced with a scholarly book”)

The comfort that flows from great works of art lies less in what they express than in the fact that they have managed to struggle out of existence. Hope is soonest found among the comfortless.

Adorno, MM 223 (“In nuce”)

We turn again to the most basic question of method, the problem of style. A style may be identified with a minimal integrity of experience, or rigor. The “laws” of form are something like pure movements, intensities, qualities — moving through, against, and above history. Style consists in a saturation of smooth spaces, the delicate articulation of a discovery, a deft and graceful construction by combination and elimination. It discovers an original and clever device, a diamond-spur: “Bite, my hook, into the belly of all black affliction!” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Honey Offering”) Style is the only response which exceeds expression itself, unfolding the form of the question.

A style emerges as such in the affirmation of positive distances, spaces, openings. Alternation, repetition, break. A style is always military, but it is also always sexual; it is the abstraction which allows an essential perception — that all is in flux. Style affirms a genuine divergence. Even though through it all questions are articulated, style answers only to the questions how and how much. Style appears, at first, as a supplement to an unquestioned — and even unconscious — answer. A movement is timeless, without history. And whether we drink it down as a stultifying antidote or sip it as a hypnotic love potion, a grandiloquent gesture never fails to enrapt.

Style is the essence of power, the minimal condition of command, the medium of the law itself. It is pure terror and absolute joy. Only through the reduction to a small set of generic commands or operations — a common language — could rigor itself come to impose its rule upon men. Only through such an inversion, too, does taste registers its own, impossible pleasure in a new style. This may indeed be the uncanny sense in which Adorno declares all works of art to be uncommitted crimes. We would add that great crimes are often cover-ups for greater crimes. Behind the hollow, booming, and explosive laughter of violent humanity, we can still discern the terror of a frantic prisoner. (And even in the innermost recesses of humanism, there rages a Fascist who wishes to turn the entire world into a prison.) We should not be surprised that Zarathustra’s words again ring out loudest here: “One man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Of Love of One’s Neighbor”) The neighbor, as solace, comforts the fear of loneliness, the nightmare of our own minds. (Yet from the greatest distance, do we not suddenly discover the neighbor as the first medium of relation and the first true operator of determination? –that is to say, bifurcated, both the first guest and the first parasite?)

Towards a healthier narcissism, a more joyous paranoia: after all, what are the ethics of style but the “anti-laws” of transformative aesthetics, that is to say — internal, residual, continuous movements? The first power is that of making evaluations: mapping the sensitivities of resistances, encoding a certain relationship between expression and experience. The essence of domination, the conquering spirit, is thus experienced as a moment of the problem of style. Is “free expression” a singular point or an operator of passage? The elemental form of the signal is a break, a gap, a mark diverting a celerity. The parasite invents eloquence, grammar prose: style is a passage which transforms by resisting transformation. The real itself is but an inflection of this basic operation, an atom of relationality.

What is the crux of the ethico-political problem of style? Resistance to variation: there is no pure form of the law, only this abstract imperative. A given style must be allowed — that is, we ought to want it simply to be allowed — to answer for itself, in its own voice and on its own terms. To simply cease interpretation, to refrain from crisis-crossing with grids and axes, is not enough — or already too much. For we must also actively resist the threat of over-interpretation. This is, in many ways, the most difficult thing for a mind to do, the true measure of its agility.

Style is a kind of resistance which is also the resistance to thought itself, even the resistance to resistance, a kind of spiritual or internal movement we should not immediately attempt to reduce to moral or aesthetic terms. Rather: can we not finally, at this very moment, discover the law itself as a supplement, determined by the minimal gap between thinking and feeling? Poetry thus at last appears entirely a question of economy, of “spacing”: a rigorous lunacy expressed through a stuttering eloquence. Scientific experimentation is in essence no different — through individually meaningless intensive variations, a procedure is derived. Style poses the problem, the question as such, by introducing a minimal shift, increasing the speed, difference, complexity, or simply the distance to be crossed — all solely so that it may be that much more joyously traversed.

Terror and Lucidity

I do not systematically cultivate horror. The word “cruelty” must be taken in a broad sense, and not in the rapacious physical sense that it is customarily given. And I claim, in doing this, the right to break with the usual sense of language, to crack the armature once and for all, to get the iron collar off its neck, in short to return to the etymological origins of speech which, in the midst of abstract concepts, always evoke a concrete element… From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

Antonin Artaud (from the first of the “Letters on Cruelty,” dated Sept 13, 1932)

Ambiguity is transformed not by reflection or speculation, but by determination. Poetry clarifies by imposing style, repeatedly cutting through layers of metaphor — a stratification which disarticulates, a war machine bursting holes through knowledge. Its reasons are arbitrary and accidental; but, in another sense, so is rationality itself. Lucidity opens resistances with greater resistance. It consists in a kind of holding-back which reveals. The divergence between art and science renegotiates its difference as clarity.

Nevertheless the question will always remain whether we have try sounded the depths — or whether a bloated, hollow sound rings out from within. Let us consider a certain effect of the clarified production of expression. In evoking the horrific and the grotesque, expression pierces a pure recurrence which silences expression. It is not so strange that horror is the characteristic mode in which stylistics functions as a critique of lucidity itself. Silence and darkness here are the primordial equivocation. My question is simple: how is it that we find healing in a deception?

Only (and this is what stylistics resists understanding about itself) by drugging an already poisoned subject. (This is sometimes called today, in better moods, “religion” or “psychoanalysis.”) Aristotle once called it catharsis; today its offspring have burst parasitically onto the surface of every possible expressive medium, providing the driving force behind the creation of these new fields of expression. The development of style is at once a major step towards and away from great health. Cruelty is the condition for the development of judgment, but also for its corruption. Style produces the capacity for both critical and clinical decisions — both, accordingly, a question of timing.

The faculty style develops is judgment, an agile and rigorous spirit which constitutes the integrity of both artistic work and scientific experiment. Style is the medium of power, possession, and praise: twisting language for its own ends, it transforms the world by transforming our spirits. In fact, cruelty is a positive and even “moral” force: the very force in morality itself. The event is undecidable, thought is split into pieces: the world is impossible to either “simply” unify or separate. Styles are evaluative genres. A code must be imposed, planes marked and delineated. We should not be surprised a certain degree of cruelty is critical in awakening the artist’s taste, as well as the scientist’s curiosity.

The Void and its Repetition

Subjection to morality can be slavish or vain or self-interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or an act of despair, like subjection to a prince: in itself it is nothing moral.

Nietzsche, Daybreak 97 (“To become moral is not in itself moral”)

Horror consists in its always remaining the same — the persistence of ‘pre-history’ — but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces. The same duality defines violence as Marx demonstrated in material production: ‘There are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the so-called general pre-conditions of all production are nothing more than… abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.’ In other words, to abstract out historically unchanged elements is not to observe neutral scientific objectivity, but to spread, even when correct, a smoke-screen behind which whatever is tangible and therefore assailable is lost to sight. Precisely this the apologists will not admit.

Adorno, Minima Moralia (“Don’t exaggerate”)

Horror is glimpsed in the similarity of the dissimilar: it transfigures the cosmos itself, grotesquely and constantly realizing its formlessness in innumerable new forms, and at its limit exceeding form itself. Science as extraction of universals enters a dimension of pure horror; science as placing into variation touches upon a joyous celerity whose cruelty is more terrifying than any nightmare.

Art also exposes this hard divergence: beneath the static nausea of horror, we feel the immersive atmosphere of dreams, and the deep voice of midnight: a primordial, formless, obsessional terror which is not merely a symptom of paranoia, but the profound meaning of identity. It is, to be more precise, an extraction of the essence or internal movement of production itself — what, after Marx, we should call the transhistorical abstract machine, perhaps even the amoral or non-subjective diagram of history. Cruelty, as an organizing principle, reaches a critical point of divergence precisely under the limiting conditions of style. It thus comes into its own, as courage, and invents the art of distinction.

The future is sculpted from the void which communicates the boundaries of events. Following in the wake of this untimely intervention, thought diverges from itself. This much-confused moment, which is not a moment, appears within the lifting of the prohibition which had pretended to limit — and to give form to — desire. This sudden and irreversible change is both birth and extinction, twilight and daybreak.

The creation of the law.

Not knowledge but determination, inexorable and indefatigable. Morality becomes distinct only when its foundation is cruelty.

It is easy to mistake harshness for simple bad taste. But I do not curse that which I do not love, nor rebuke for not loving sufficiently. On the contrary. I declare, loudly, how joyous the earth is, but also how joyous it could be; how light, but — but can you hear me yet? — how much lighter!

Escape

They shout at stones, as a man might argue with a doorpost. They have understood so little of the gods.

Heraclitus, Fragments

The morality which assesses itself according to degrees of sacrifice is morality at the half-savage stage. Reason here gains only a hard and bloody victory within the soul, powerful counter-drives have to be subdued; without such cruelties as the sacrifices demanded by cannibal gods this victory will not be won.

Nietzsche, Daybreak 221 (“Morality of sacrifice.”)

Why is everyone annoyed when a philosopher claims he is not a skeptic? Nietzsche suggests in Beyond Good and Evil this is because one would “like to ask, to ask so much” of them, that listeners become skeptical of their own desire for truth. According to him, this is also the reason that among “timid listeners,” such a philosopher is considered so dangerous: “It is as if at his rejection of skepticism, they heard some evil, menacing rumbling in the distance, as if a new explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihiline, a pessimism bonae voluntatis [of good will] that does not merely say No, want No, but — horrible thought! does No.” [Beyond Good and Evil 208, from “We Scholars”] The skeptic acts like a policeman or priest, who is terrified by the subterranean “No!” and scorns it since he finds it terrifying. So he cries at it to be silent, even though in its whisper he must also faintly discern the new dawn.

Man shouts at stones and pleads with vortexes. But that the whirlwind, and sublime cruelty of stratification, terrifies the delicate — in other words, those terrified all too easily — is not, in itself, a moral affair. “His conscience trained to quiver at every No, indeed even at a Yes that is decisive and hard, and to feel as if it had been bitten. Yes and No — that goes against his morality; conversely, he likes to treat his virtue to a feast of noble abstinence, say, by repeating Montaigne’s ‘What do I know?’ or Socrates’ ‘I know that I know nothing.’” [ibid.] Thus the hard-boiled skeptic consoles his agony: through obfuscation, denial, doubt, he avoids the truth of his own condition by what he will claim is “objectivity.” The entire question of spirituality requires clinical re-evaluation.

Nietzsche loves to remind us that skepticism is both spiritual and physiological, a dangerous hybrid, whose sickliness and nervous exhaustion reflect a deep lack of balance, the absence of a center of gravity. Skeptics are playing a role wherein they are helpless victims, innocent, ignorant — but wiser than everyone else. Their doubt, as exemplified by Descartes, is as sick and paranoid as their secret belief. “But what becomes sickest and degenerates most in such hybrids is the will: they no longer know independence of decisions and the intrepid sense of pleasure in willing — they doubt the ‘freedom of the will’ even in their dreams.” [ibid] Skepticism cripples our ability to decide and even to desire, by paralyzing our capacity for judgment. A bad conscience, a morality sick of its own will, is especially vulnerable to this kind of sickness — especially in its more charming guises:

What I wanted to say is this: the partial loss of utility, decline, and degeneration, the loss of meaning, and purposiveness, in short, death, also belong to the conditions of a real progressus, which always appears in the form of a will and a way to a greater power and always establishes itself at the expense of a huge number of smaller powers. The size of a “step forward” can even be estimated by a measure of everything that had to be sacrificed to it. Humanity as mass sacrificed for the benefit of a single stronger species of man — that would be a step forward . .

I emphasize this major point of view about historical methodology all the more since it basically runs counter to the very instinct which presently rules and to contemporary taste, which would rather still go along with the absolute contingency, even the mechanical meaninglessness, of all events rather than with the theory of a will to power playing itself out in everything that happens. The democratic idiosyncrasy of being hostile to everything which rules and wants to rule, the modern hatred of rulers [Misarchismus] (to make up a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually transformed itself into and dressed itself up as something spiritual, of the highest spirituality, to such an extent that nowadays step by step it is already infiltrating the strictest, apparently most objective scientific research, and is allowed to infiltrate it. Indeed, it seems to me already to have attained mastery over all of physiology and the understanding of life, to their detriment, as is obvious, because it has conjured away from them their fundamental concept, that of real activity. By contrast, under the pressure of this idiosyncrasy we push “adaptation” into the foreground, that is, a second-order activity, a mere re-activity; in fact, people have defined life itself as an always purposeful inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But that simply misjudges the essence of life, its will to power. That overlooks the first priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, over-reaching, re-interpreting, re-directing, and shaping powers, after whose effects the “adaptation” then follows. Thus, the governing role of the highest functions in an organism itself, the ones in which the will for living appear active and creative, are denied.. ..

[Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (Essay 2, Section 12)]

We have far too long glossed over the profound meaning of both parasitism and narcissism: by defining life as purposeful adaptation to the external world, what happens to power? What happens to the will? But we should have already guessed. And if it still must be said: they are both extinguished. Fear is not the origin of science, but courage. Cruelty, not paranoia, is the beginning of judgment. Daybreak is not long now — closer than ever before.

Our courage yearns for the stern joy of high places, for the hardness of solitude, distant horizons and silence — but most of all for that rosy clarity which may yet crown the day when humanity no longer needs martyrs to save it from itself.

Conclusion: The Politics of Madness

I employ the word ‘cruelty’ in the sense of an appetite for life, a cosmic rigor and implacable necessity, in the gnostic sense of a living whirlwind that devours the darkness, in the sense of that pain apart from whose ineluctable necessity life could not continue; good is desired, it is the consequence of an act; evil is permanent. When the hidden god creates, he obeys the cruel necessity of creation which has been imposed on himself by himself, and he cannot not create, hence not admit into the center of the self-willed whirlwind a kernel of evil ever more condensed, and ever more consumed. And theater in the sense of continuous creation, a wholly magical action, obeys this necessity. A play in which there would not be this will, this blind appetite for life capable of overriding everything, visible in each gesture and each act and in the transcendent aspect of the story, would be a useless and unfulfilled play.

Artaud (from the second letter of the “Letters on Cruelty”)

There stands a great artist: the pleasure he anticipated in the envy of his defeated rivals allowed his powers no rest until he had become great — how many bitter moments has his becoming great not cost the souls of others!

Nietzsche, Daybreak 31 (“Refined cruelty as virtue.”)

Science owes an unacknowledged, incomprehensible and ancient debt to poetry: mathematics, its spiritual condition and “universal language.” Rigorous and determinate expression is both the essence of stylistics and its characteristic cruelty — the evocation of a positive obscurity, a veil which elevates only by deceiving. Even though a style may indeed be judged in terms of its inherent expressivity, its characteristic mode of resisting expression can also be read, psychologically, as a symptomatic field. A determinate, fruitful ambiguity.

The experience of expressive freedom is not discovered in the declaration of equality of interest, but on the contrary, in leadership itself: the experience of decision-making — in other words, evaluating, making rules, giving orders. The law is thus the greatest of adventures, the final and thus most aesthetic of pursuits. Crime is simply not a moral matter in itself; it is law which gives crime its privilege. It is difficult to exaggerate how frequently freedom is overturned, made arbitrary, simply by a further permutation of spiritual taste. A matter of style, that is, of space.

The criminal is nothing more than out of place — a stronger type in gloomy and unfortunate conditions. A more fruitful, less ambiguous composition was possible. The gaps in our knowledge about our abilities, our talents, point towards a better and more effectively organized system — in short towards a future re-organization. Today our most urgent task is to de-stratify prejudice, and thereby correct a long miseducation. In particular, thought must disabuse itself of several dangerous notions about truth. Truth is not interpretation; it names the movement of creation, the impetus of a decision beyond thought and even beyond feeling. “Truth” expresses the lost origin of the highest law, the empty repetition at the basis of every language, the perfect gap — that characteristic symptom of our painful isolation from each other and ourselves.

In reality, then, truth is simply the source and emission of sound: a deception whereby the one whose commands’ deafen cause us to take our place. But, to say it once more, the point is not to integrate everything, to force all else to submit; rather, on the contrary, the goal is to liberate creativity through developing restraint. Do not only reconcile differences peaceably, but go further, and resist cooperating with hatred and fear. Cultivate excellence, courage and judgment. Struggle not only for the pedagogy of the “oppressed,” but also for your own.

That the stronger force has systematically driven out the weaker — or brought them to heel — gives reflection faith that a leap forward is possible. For what is a history but the sum of shifts in a differential system of power? Spreading out before our gaze, the rosy dawn of a bright future — a future, perhaps, where difference can at last be entirely and joyously affirmed — draws ever clearer and closer. Michel Serres addresses the full depth of our problematic when he writes, in his extraordinarily insightful work The Parasite:

“Knowledge is paid for. Of course, it is positive, favorable and asymmetrical; otherwise everything would be blank; there would be no science. But something must be put on another level. Tartuffe, they say, makes the error of loving Elmire — that is an error, a trap, an investment, an experimental rigor. Nothing would have happened without this love, this heat, this fire, that comes by and suddenly flares up. Without this light, we would perhaps have seen nothing.
[Michel Serres, The Parasite 210, “Midnight Suppers”]

Our question is that of refreshing desire within the over-arching framework of late capitalism. My answer, in one language: intensely reclaiming love in its positive spiritual movement. And in another: transforming hatred, resentment and fear into courage, creativity and love. The age is again ripe for an abandonment of cowardice, an emboldening.

- Joseph Weissman, April 2008

Works Cited

Antonin Artaud

• Anthology
• First and Second of the “Letters on Cruelty”

Michel Foucault

• “Preface to Transgression” from Language, Counter-Memory, Practice

Michel Serres

• “Midnight Suppers” from The Parasite

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Daybreak
• Genealogy of Morals
• The Gay Science
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Beyond Good and Evil

What is the Meaning of Science?
Nietzsche and the History of the Human Spirit

What is problematic about science? What does the “progress” of science mean about human beings? I believe this question turns everything which is unsettling, mysterious, and uncanny about the course of human development (and not only human); who can exhaust what is figured within the folds of this strange question — science thought as a symptom, science grasped as a problem?

What obstructs this question from being thought? How do we interpret this ’secondary’ problem which intervenes at the critical moment to derail thought — this “problem of the problem” of the meaning of science? At any rate it is clear the difficulty we encounter in formulating this problem are manifold, altogether formidable, but taken separately…? For science itself always already understands, justifies, and regulates itself in turn upon the basis of something non-scientific. Science as such is ultimately foundationless, and furthermore, this is one of its necessary conditions. This is a warning for those who would seek to regulate philosophy by means of “scientific” protocol; for these would in turn require their own justification… Which is not to say that such justification exists or should be sought after — but rather to pause right here, so that we can open up our profoundest capabilities of insight in order to ask: what is science as a problem? What is the meaning of science?

We should stop for a moment and reflect upon this question. We are looking for a meaning specific to science, but the meaning of science as it actually operates in history (and not, for instance, an abstract image of “science” considered in isolation of real problems.) We must try to seek the meaning of science in the more general context of human development, and ask what science means for the human species; or even more pointedly, what it means about what the human species has become. This question should be read as signifying science’s concealed meaning-about-us, a partial truth about what we are becoming as a species. The meaning, if we can but attune ourselves to it, indicates something real — albeit darkly, indirectly and only with constant resistance — about the “rate” and “direction” of human development. In this sense the problem of meaning of science reveals a way to diagnose civilization itself.

So what is the meaning of science for us? The history of science is filled with saints and martyrs for some kind of “truth,” and often for relatively real and immanent truths — at least compared to what they were often opposed to (and in some senses slowly supplanted,) namely: arbitrary or theological “truths.” But what in truth are these victories, and what is the real nature of this apparent conflict? For science has come not a single inch closer to overcoming the ascetic ideal (the extreme rarity of exceptions would appear to prove the general principle.) Even today, scientists are still much closer to priests than they are to artists. Where an artist instinctively rebels against the order of the world and engages passionately with his “intoxicating” dream world, science instinctively obeys and plays “neutral subject” with his “sleeping” empirical world.

Thus the priest, the artist and the scientists all share an ascetic myth of one sort or another; while apparently opposed, they are each also opposed to themselves. Right now, their “formal” (in our language: idealized) function is besides the point: what is important is that these apparently-conflicting ideals also aid and support one another in a manner which almost everyone would claim has improved humanity, in at least some senses. But what is this “improvement” taken as a whole, as a problem or symptom? –It is not that we “must” think science in the negative. We inflect this question in this strange way simply in order to be able to think “straight” about a problem which tyrannizes us in return. In other words: why do we tend to avoid considering the “improving” of mankind to be, in some senses at least, a form of sublimated domestication? And again: what kind of living, dominant and spiritual force is indicated by this voluntary innocence?

Science is in a way just a new and more sophisticated development of the same old ideal of saints and philosophers, the “holier-than-thou’s” of all ages; and it is in this sense that “pure science” is a pretext for that highly refined asceticism which requires such an eerie kind of humility. “All scientific knowledge, natural as well as unnatural (the name I give to the self-criticism of knowledge) is nowadays keen to talk human beings out of the respect they used to have for themselves, as if that was nothing more than a bizarre arrogance about themselves.” (Genealogy of Morals, III.25) Why do scientists go on and on about the cosmos, claiming that we are “nothing” in relation to it, in relation to an image and an assemblage of concepts invented by — human beings? Not that there isn’t some “truth” in science, but this faint glimmer quickly disappears into a world of empirical appearances — scientific truth is anything but “objective,” being the illegitimate by-product of an immature psychology and a degenerate politics. In short, it is precisely in science that the ascetic ideal finds its greatest ally and highest triumph to date:

“In this matter we could even say scientific knowledge has its own pride, its characteristically acrid form of stoical ataraxia [indifference], this laboriously attained self-contempt for human beings as its ultimate, most serious demand for respect, for the right to hold itself erect on its own (and in fact, that’s justified, for the one who despises is always one more who still “has not forgotten respect”…) Does that really work against the ascetic ideal? Do people really think in all seriousness (as theologians imagined for quite a while) that somehow Kant’s victory over dogmatic theological concepts (“God,” “Soul,” “Freedom,” “Immortality”) succeeded in breaking up that ideal? [ibid.]

Science is not enough for us to break free of the shackles of the ascetic ideal; even more discouraging, it seems to have completely allied itself with the interpretation-complex of the priests, locking us deep into an ideality which we no longer are allowed to have any “real” knowledge of! Science opens onto the same black hole of resentment, though it appears as a kind of new “faith” to tackle Christianity, overthrow it and bring it to its knees; on the contrary, the movement away from being “children of God” has swung far past the mid-point of civil human existence, swiftly on past even animality towards a pure nothingness, a profound and penetrating sense of one’s non-existence — this rotten core at the heart of all scientific “objectivity” is precisely the way science relates to history and back into the old ideal.

What does science mean? Let us try and be rigorous: a science operates in one way; there is nothing else. But we ourselves are, or are ever more swiftly becoming, this “nothin g else.” And to be more precise still: we are “nothing” else but… — and have not yet even seriously suspected it. The hypothesis maintains its credibility perhaps only on account of its playfulness, its enlightening divergence from “common sense.” But — on this hypothesis that n othingness is the whole problem — why “should” we continue treat it as only an intimation, a “mere” symptom, “collateral damage”?

For the whole metaphysical weight of presence, substance, essence and objective “reality,” serve ultimately as sublime distractions, refined asceticism, shifting our resentment back upon ourselves in order to keep us from recognizing the absence that we are — or rather, are therefore now actively trying to become through all sorts of means. But finally what are these means? Always instincts for overcoming long suffering, sickness, weariness — a degeneration of the spirit is hidden beneath science, it’s “foundational” void (it is very interesting in this context to consider Alain Badiou’s contributions to ontology; among other curiously similar concepts, he claims that the Void is the ‘proper name of being.’)

So, really, what’s the problem with science? Is it just that our substantiality is an illusion? This proposition has a certain aphoristic clarity, but perhaps it is even too clear on this point. After all, it is a formula already eerily close to certain aspects of quantum mechanical systems. Is this nothingness really the essence of advanced science, a deep pesssimism and withdrawal into deserts of finer and finer specializations? The strata multiply infinitely, and it is no wonder that it is here where reason finally collapses — morally wounded — what is this, what to “name” this non-event but as some kind of epistemological break, a profound crisis of knowledges? –But what do such names conceal?

Do we understand the futility, the weariness, the desperation concealed behind this hypocritical and idealistic struggle, seeking the “basis” of science’s “own” mind — always, and what else, but some ideal form of pure function, absolute memory, the same old divine “circle” and primary “algebra” which endlessly orders and arranges lacks and surpluses — but now, redistributing the very principles of organization themselves? Who can imagine a more refined asceticism? Classical science examines a single layer of reality, but conceives of it as unified: a pure homogeneous field extracted from the flux, a fixed viewpoint on the side of the river: on this account science means “efficiency” or “convenience” — though this is putting it rather politely. Convenience, after all, for what? We must consider that advanced technology and the culture of pure automatism may in fact be the clearest sign of decline, a token of the absolute degeneration of the real human spirit — in short, a sign of weariness, decadence and hopelessness.

I have said that science is in this way the “new religion” but I want to stress that scientific inquiry has still utterly failed to supplant the old metaphysic, which is to say it has only shifted the metaphors but not the structure of resentment and sublimation. Turbulence remains castrated. The ascetic of the scientist requires a becoming-nothing which cannot be explained except by recourse to idealities, homogeneous abstract organization — no decoded fluxes except for ‘the’ one which guarantees science itself — who else? The scientist, now deluding himself into imagining he is God! Einstein pondered the mind of God; what price did he pay, what damage was done? Humility is the scientists’ most outrageous and disgusting hypocrisy. While science claims it doesn’t believe in knowledge, it still believes in God. In the Preface to the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche writes:

“…indeed, what does all scientific enquiry in general mean considered as a symptom of life? What is the point of all that science and, even more serious, where did it come from? What about that? Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism, a delicate self-defense against — the Truth? And speaking morally, something like cowardice and falsehood? Speaking unmorally, a clever trick? Oh, Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? Oh, you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your–irony?’

Is our society is in decline? If we consider science as a symptom, where is the “real” parasite? Is it morality itself? If science is indicative but still in some way a symptom of a more general process: the decline into decadence, but also at a deeper and in some way more real level, the surging pulse of life itself, the will to power. Who can deny the vengeful will of the ascetic? This pessimism is a slipping-backwards in some ways, a self-destruction of certain “healthy” aspects of the species and the individual: a heavy price is paid, a worship which is sublimated hatred, a devotion which is the stoic cynicism of one imprisoned within the crystalline lattices of his “soul.” This degeneration is clearly accelerated by the likes of ascetic scientists and priests. The irony persists, despite the real suffering — science suffers from itself, from its inadequacy and infancy, so it adopts a distracting and hypocritical posture which redirects our attention from our suffering to a kind of stupefied wonder at the gentle harmony of the universe, or a dazzled awe at its terrifying power, grandeur — it’s Majesty.

This false humility of science, their confidence that humankind is “nothing,” is science’s ascetic ideal: the irony is that it remains a continuation of Christianity and Platonic metaphysics, which hypocritically claims to have “triumphed” over them; so this ironic and ill-gotten ‘victory’ becomes the repetitive refrains of those idiots who believe science can provide a “new will” other than the ascetic ideal. The day we long for has not yet arrived — and moreover, it is already much later than we realize (is it too late?) In short, the irony is that science has not overturned the old ideals in any significant respect — and that at least in this sense, science is far too late to “save” us.

The best hope science offers is not its formal “methods,” but the possibility of a recurrence of that stranger and more joyous kind of science altogether — minor science, nomad science, gay science: brave explorers on the edges of turbulence. Against senselessness: science is nonetheless still an expression of the will to power. Paradoxically it is precisely the self-destructive structure of the scientific “method” which gives credence to science’s innocent nihilism, their faith in absolute faithlessness. How do we rather encourage the other science, that generative celerity which could possibly push us right beyond the shackles of asceticism?

Classical science deconstructs itself, it is collapsing-device, a machine built around a black hole — it works only because there’s holes scattered throughout it, funny long names to block up real gaps in our understanding. Science is ascetic right down to its very essence: it only works by attacking and destroying itself, by tearing down and breaking apart its foundations. Science is a slow depersonalization — a hypnotism… Inevitably technology will continue to transform humanity into something it recognizes (alas, and can respect!) less and less. In a world where everything can be “controlled,” our future remains beyond our control — and thus the sublime object of our desire, the un-interpretable hard kernel of our subjectivity.

Science is the essence of this self-destructive desire, the dream of a pure line of flight. This is why it simply isn’t about our “lifestyles” — a modern hypocrisy, again a clever method of distracting from a deeper crisis, an angst more profound than the individual, a symptom of general decline…

When the future of the whole planet is at stake because of the industrial practices of the wealthiest nations, they whine about “changing lifestyles” instead of focusing on real causes and collective solutions — extruding the “underground” (e.g., petro-politics) reasons for species-threatening, transgressive overdevelopment… Not that “lifestyle” isn’t important — but we are slowly being put to sleep worrying about our “lifestyles” and whether they are “rich,” “full,” “normal,” “rewarding,” “happy,” “successful,” and so on — not that we ought not to be concerned about these things, but we simply have to ask: rich for what? Full for what? Normal for what? Why, and what do these even mean? Are these obstructions to our own desires, and if so, why do we desire them?

Why is desire made to cancel itself out — what price is paid, and what is gained? How universal is this phenomenon? If science and religion express themselves vengefully, pessimistically, with hatred and self-loathing and disgust — that is, if they remain symptoms of a general crisis of faith, of spirit, a degeneration of the species — then in yet another sense they themselves are expressions of the will to power, the surging force of life itself to preserve and expand. It is here precisely that we are called not only to think, but to grasp deeply: so I require that you grasp deeply what I mean here — why “must” we see science optimistically, as “the future” — in other words, an “escape route” from the present? What is that that doesn’t “allow” us to see science in other ways? What does science really mean about us?

Are we escaping or returning, gathering together or tearing apart?

We find ourselves suddenly in need of a post-conceptual way of thinking.

Perhaps this problem of art and machines has always already begun to make itself felt.

We are discovering that its appearance at this critical juncture signifies a bifurcation point, a new kind of possibility.

Imperceptibly we have moved beyond imagination into the abstract, from dreams to decoding.

The rapid counter-movement has placed us beyond abstraction itself, directly transubstantiating the history of expression.

The problem we face is expressing expression; is this problem ontological, and not historical?

From the extraction of linear models to the production of production itself; and we of course recognize this historical sense is not in itself novel.

However, the forms (or rather, anti-forms) of “immanent” expressivity which the material-historical perspective is adept at exposing are indeed fluid, unusual, rareified — non-alienated, non-delimited spaces of thought.

Expressivity is parasitic, a noise which causes other noises to flee, it clears and occupies space: art suddenly discovers smooth spaces — non-intrusive, non-exclusive spaces of differences: a fluid becoming rather than a repetition, variation rather than serialization.

The opening onto intensive space is the line of the fold of being; multiplicity naturally inheres to folded spaces.

What is thought becoming?

Is the being of art to be found in history?

Or is the essence of expression already encoded within intensity, within light, within becoming itself?

Is art a flourish, a technique, a telling — or a transcendence?

(Joel-Peter Witkin)

The canvas is empty.

It situates itself beyond the situation. It is a serrated vacuum, resonating upon a rupture/screen which is not a nullity but a determination, already a milieu. An emptiness at once expressive, in some sense a transcendent enterprise which calls us to specific responsibility. Art is not just freedom, it produces freedom. Transform the world; but you must already be somewhere to begin to form it, and you must have already produced an emptiness. Creative freedom begins with the preparation of materials for shaping, the production of production. Like love, it begins before its beginning, before the situation, before the empty canvas or the unsculpted lump of clay.

Creativity begins in the preparation of the immediate and intermediate materials of recording and consumption. Beneath the art of transformation, the art of transportation. This, then, is the bifurcation point, the vector of transduction. Not at all a single mechanism, but already an assemblage, an innumerable swarm of interacting and evolving machines. The basic operation is transfer: it is a process of substitution, that is to say, it is joy itself. The mechanism of the production of irreality is transportation; this is the real in the dream, the basis of cybernetics and governance at once. The answer to the myth of dualism and also the hidden reason for its depth and emptiness. In drama as in dreams we see the future through half-opened doors, an aqueous vision through a transient portal. At its most potent intuition ripples out in plateaus; it is not recollection, but an intense and intoxicated delirium.

Yet a delirium not without its utility. We cannot block out the light, the violence of emptiness. The noise is unending, rumbling from outside. Buzzing and hostile swarms. We intuitively understand how an alternate, subterranean truth can pierce through the heart of jealous power, just as better ideas can eradicate error, prejudice and hatred. It may even be that the depth and sadness of beauty is the terror that we feel when we discover that this obstacle we face– is but the first door, in a series endless and increasingly difficult. The truth is untruth, the “one” opening is but a pure and transparent screen onto a horror beyond horrors, extinction and apocalypse: the production of an absolute beginning, but not an absolute emptiness. The fullness of the empty canvas is not merely a function of vision, it is already preparing for dramatic authors, the emptiness is already the production of production, a secondary vector. The void is a parasite. The universe is art, and all art is noise. Frightened or frightening, it is an interrupted interruption. A recurrence, an echo, a stutter. To study history is to be haunted. A life, the complete works — of an incomplete rendition. Gloriously fragmented.

Even the absences are shot through with life.

Science, Information and Time

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

Alfred North Whitehead

It is necessary to go beyond all the pieces of spoken information; to extract from them a pure speech-act, creative story-telling which is as it were the obverse side of the dominant myths, of current words and their supporters.
It is also necessary to go beyond all the visual layers; to set up a pure informed person capable of emerging from the debris, of surviving the end of the world, hence capable of receiving into the body the pure act of speech.

Gilles Deleuze (The Time-Image)

Becoming unfolds along spatial and temporal symmetries. Biogenesis is the slow process of isolating extensive differences (from a million intensive differences) and making its form hard, becoming like a diamond or like a stone in the river — so that the difference become invisible to the stream, to the flow, but resists and therefore modifies the flow imperceptibly.

Slowly these tiny threads wrap together to form diffuse organizations of control and counter-control dipoles, which gather together in symmetry groups distributed across and reflecting the organization of the whole system. Biogenesis, the hyper-differentiation of life which occurs at evolutionary breaking points (like the Cambrian explosion,) is an example of a widespread tendency for a given style of becoming to grow hardened, able to resist transformations.

Ultimately this ability rests on the isomorphic circular orbits of the all various dimensions of life; the problem of resisting difference is precisely about differential speeds. Just the right degree of firmness or porosity: too much or too little and the membrane protecting you will be completely destroyed. Resisting difference is about strategically engaging and breaking symmetries in order to form counter-positions, evolving organizations.

Information is encoded by redundancy and frequency; it is an ordering word, a virtual or artificial precept which replaces and reorganizes a natural or organic one. As our new paradigm for images, movement and otherwise, the overflux of informatics presents the difficult challenge of integration, the real problem of transforming information into useful knowledge.

Hence the concept of interfaces allows us to offer a recursive definition of science, as an interface which can create new interfaces (from the (decon-)structure of previous interfaces.)

In this sense, updating interfaces applies isomorphically to the creative transformation of social and political space as much as to the spatial organization of academic and scientific discourses.

In response to this challenge of ‘updating’ our cultural interface, there arises the possibility of a general critique of the organization of power. Advocates of such a pragmatics of becoming or aesthetics of ‘force’ (molecular transformation,) energetically engage in deterritorializing discourses of ‘knowledge’/power. The logic behind the disruption is the principle that a narrative is composed, even traversed and permeated, by (virtual) multiplicities, by pure flows and alien singularities. All this is immanent, images no longer have an outside.

Thus the ‘crisis’ of science is that the structure of scientific thought is not autonomous. Sciences’ image of its own thought has been given to it by other discourses, by other kinds of organizations. The ‘common sphere’ is in deep trouble because we are so splintered, so segregated in modern society (we tend to unconsciously surround ourselves by a delusional spectacle that constantly reinforces how right we are.) And like any dialogue, the scientific discourse can be abused, taken uncritically and for granted. Science is a tool, the materialist-pragmatists say, we need it only so far as it is useful. Managers of education and research apply what Lyotard criticises the ‘performativity’ criterion: funding those research projects which are going to generate profit, are directly useful to those with money.

Information is political before it is scientific, it is born from the self-organizing interactions of clusters of human beings. Science is structured by the shape of these fractal clusters, by their power for storing and processing large amounts of information. (What can be shared for free? Information, it’s as free and open as air. The world freely expresses abundant information; reality comes pre-thematized. Information is free; that is, as long as the channel is open, as long as both stations are ready. Politics is the opening of this smooth discursive space, the actualization of virtual multiplicity, towards a just and collectively-organized inter-social space.

Organization and Knowledge

A linear increase in energy can produce a nonlinear change in the system that conducts that energy, a change that would be difficult to predict in advance…

(Steven Johnson, Emergence)

So it would seem that where information exists, it can only occur as a process of documenting a process. It is a second one-way signal intervening in a one-way transformation (all single-variable measurements have this parasitic structure.) For without an activity of communication, what would information be? Information is a blank image, a token of exchange, a null place for storage and organization of data. It is structure without form, a real process expressed as a pure act of emptiness and receptivity to qualitative change, of con-forming to other processes. But is knowledge then wider than information, ontologically “broader”? Is information really as narrow as we tend to consign it? Information is a relationship between relations; this structure exhibits a fractal symmetry which underlies scientific thought no less than creativity.

After all, human beings appear to possess a great deal of non-verbal knowledge, such as the knowledge acquired through a creative relationship to the world — as evidenced, for example, in the technical creativity of a musician or sculptor — that have no explicit linguistic content. The content of a craftsman’s skill is non-informational, not part of a narrative, not intrinsically given to symbolic expression. Formal, perhaps, but we might better say it is information embodied, that such knowledge is substantial, because acquired by an observer through a transformative relationship. Learning seems to immerse thought within the quality of the relationship, up to a real psychobiological transformation.

However, described this way, the very existence of such actual knowledge could seem somewhat controversial. To this end let us instead consider the alternate possibility that the ontological division is here only linguistic, and that there are in fact real vectors of translation between the two modalities of observation. “Information” and “knowledge” are then just products of observation procedures; what we would really want to know is how observation works, how it arises in the first place. Instead of asking: how do we reconcile agency and structure (which is ultimately a performative kind of question, begging for analogical solutions) we ask about the genealogy of structure. For example, what is in question in the case of the internal conflict we find in the definition of knowledge is the legitimacy of the observation procedure: is it in accordance with dominant scientific methods? In analyzing agency we enter into a recurring problem of narration, the endless reconversion of knowledge into information, the ontological constricture of scientific knowledge which has been characterized as a crisis of modern science. The crisis is internal to science, it deals with science’s refusal of transcendence. Science requires non-science to confirm itself; it turns freely towards what is otherwise than itself — that is, chaos.

Chaos transcending order; a strange inversion, but nonetheless this decay and transformation is the ontological relation as we here understand it. Transcendence pierces ontological relations just as its does physical ones; it is more primary than ontology. Transcendence is needed in order to perform ontology, to ask the performative, ontological question of any particular aspect of being (particularly science.) Before transcendence is ontological, a question of voids, it is a metaphysical posture, a turning towards the Other, an orientation towards what is otherwise than myself.

Lyotard suggests that postmodern science be understood as the search for instabilities. Then it is a quest for noise, for boundaries of chaos, for turbulence and indeterminacy. A new paralogic for an age of incredulity. The world is constantly expressing its symmetry to us, which is to say, the world is full of self-similar noise. And it’s impossible to completely shut it out (though we can become quite good at ignoring it.) Even if we were deprived of external sound artificially, we could not escape the noises of our own bodies, of our own minds. We communicate through noise: noise is the medium through which information is transmitted. What is noise? Above all it is a heterogenous collective, a relation interrupted, the intervention of non-sense. We can already see noise implies the intervention of another (ontological) order of operations, cross-over from another system in a non-temporal cycle. Noise breaks (through), it is entropy, the de-formation of a relation: the transformation from operation into non-operation. Noise subtracts information from a channel; but the channel itself is noise.

Information may be mediated by noise, but intuitively information seems to come in two ontologically distinct but symmetrical ways: doing and seeing, thinking and feeling, touching and immersion, learning and teaching, ‘content’ and ‘expression.’ Yet, even intuitively, a strict dualism here is untenable. Isn’t it but a moment before some vector of passage between the formal spaces is exposed, an entire inter-space of spaces? Folded within forms, constituting them, are swarming families of anti-forms, vectors of symmetry-breaking, sub-altern modalities of distinction. Indeed, these non-formal substances construct the axiom of epistemological individuation as an independent process prior to and necessary for the separation of distinct fields (information and knowledge.)

Science depends upon the discourse of history, but tends to take it for granted. The way to demonstrate this would be to produce a clarified history of discourse. The point would be to show that already archaeology (and ontology) take us back to genealogy, that is: to the discursive genesis, towards a historical method of transduction. Critical posture: the observer ungrounds his own witness. The admission we must make: we owe everything to history, indeed, the whole organization of human space, scientific or otherwise. An enormous amount of information is stored in our cultural practices alone — indeed, enough to govern the complex interactions of six billion human beings!

A human city has many purposes: a city provies shelter to citizens as well as a convenient places for traders to buy and sell goods. Steven Johnson argues that in addition to all the manifest purposes to a city, like protection and trade, cities also possess a latent, subterranean purpose: managing information. He suggests that cities be understood as information storage and retrieval devices; they are even (spatio-visual) interfaces, because they store and transmit useful new ideas to a wider population. What must happen in order for these hidden capacities to arise in the first place, and then finally to surface? After all, cities are not explicitly planned in order to be able to do this. The inter-facial capacity arises as a macro-effect not predictable from the individual behavior of any of the micro-elements!

When our cultural practices, our unconscious self-organization betrays itself — when the integrity of our social space collapses. In a moment, a hardened culture can grow out of touch with fluid realities (conversely, fluid cultures can fail to respond forcefully enough to danger.) The point is that innovation is our historical birthright no less than tradition. There is no hope in collective movements without a corresponding transformation of unhealthy and parasitic relations. In terms of ideology, we have a paradox of communication. There must be a clear channel to communicate information. But the sender and reciever, they too are “channels” exchanging information. So where does the repair begin: with the relation, or with the relation between relations?

The escape from this paradox is an exception, a code, a difference repeated, modulated, articulated twice. Culture is this secret production of metalepsis, the integration of another ontological order into an actual series. Science deals with strategems, plans of attack — moves in a game, but also solutions to a problem, a solution that changes the nature of the game. Postmodern science searches for these moments of instability, boundary conditions, where a linear change in energy produces a nonlinear change in the system’s behavior: sender becomes receiver, “down” becomes “through”, and so forth (an ontological differend, a non-linear shift in the dimensional structure of the system.) Incompatibility is the cause of the arising in the world of individuation.

Individuation repairs an incompatibility, or rather it incessantly resumes repair of a primordial break. Thus an identity is transgenerationally maintained despite the constant breaks and resumptions of the immanent process of diagnosis restoration. Information is passed down through generations as well as horizontally across generations; thanks to historical critique, we can read the transversal lessons of history, by burrowing underneath biography we discover the curious science of genealogy, or the real history of becoming.

In reality, goals are absent.

Nietzsche

Rivalry is only a spectacle; it is the state of appearance. Equilibrium is phenomenal, and the distance is real. The law of opposition belongs to phenomenology; the law of irreversibility or of falling downstream is real. Behind all representation.

Michel Serres

A Genealogy of Modern Science
Science appears to begin with the Greeks: somehow, somewhere, a resentful pre-scientific impulse begins to criticize the unity of life and culture. Some say that before this interruption, there must be an alien infiltration (the arguments for Oriental contributions to Greek culture,) but ultimately the “true” source is irrelevant, for it is this real criticism, this faithful engagement with the material culture, with everyday life, that is at once of the greatest importance, that is the authentic germ of enlightenment (Greek or otherwise.) For this criticism already contains a larval critique of creativity, of society, and most important for the development of a scientific instinct, a criticism of divinity and images. By Plato and Aristotle, science will separate itself completely from creativity, from works of the imagination and from art. Plato’s criticism of images (what we would call “advertising”) is well-known; Kant’s rejection of the empirical as a source for truth reproduces the same critique in reverse. In short, it is by rigorously separating life and culture that science discovers itself positively (i.e., as this objective dissocation, this symmetrically dis-sociative personality.)

Thus has discovery has been the dominant tone of scientific research for thousands of years. Science becomes a game of discovery, of exploring the infinite folding and unfolding of symmetry patterns; but it would still have yet to realize itself as a creative, affirmative power as in the healing intuition behind the Greek enlightenment. Even the “great crime” of institutionalization, the Greek incarceration of science’s chaotic (a-cultural) discoveries back into an associative hierarchical (living) series, was a necessary phase of development.

Particular scientific apparatuses are anomalies, since it is not the self-organizing ‘system’ of science which matters, but the willing behind science, that peculiar instinct of the Greeks, which is already the entire point: creative joy is the real power behind science, the light by which we understand it and communicate it. Observation and experimentation open exchanges through which generative flows may coalesce. But science has not realized its own creativity, is still young enough to feel ashamed of itself as a half-formed creature. Science has yet to have reintegrated creation as one of its proper modes (though of course discovery already demands a great deal of creativity — in timing and problem selection, for instance.)

Modern scientism refuses re-association with the divine; but in order to proceed, rather than choose pure (‘logical’) refusal, it must finish dissociation, it must finally destroy the fission between life and culture. Here our human fascination within symmetry is perhaps our greatest blind spot. The persistent image of a secret truth behind events, a spark of the divine, seems always to lie in wait to lure us away from a clarified scientific ontology.

Creativity is one of the lures of symmetry; thus, such an ontology would necessarily dissociate creativity, in order to (continually) produce a more creative conception of science (that truly has no need of divinity, or even images.) Thus science proceeds on a extra-imaginary path towards an enlightenment which it never possesses. Not light, but science itself moves in the ethereal.

What is the ethereal? A space of transformation, a gradient. Science dares to diagram black holes. Science moves towards infinite darkness, towards null singularity, the ethereal object of scientific critique. And it is much rather us, our machines and our history, the scientists’ themselves, which are the ‘dirt’ to be transcended, the material objects of science’s critique.
Clearly, dissocation is not this (more-or-less artificial) distinction between the ethereal and the material; rather, it is the actual trans-individuation of the material into the ethereal and back. In other words, a critical transcendence instead of a theological transcendence. The return to the material, the implementation or diagnosis is the most powerful moment of affirmation in science; a diagnosis or theory must be arrived at creatively, but it is also a demand upon creativity to respond to the diagnosis, to test the theory. Transcendence occurs only by anomaly, by creativity. Hence we must first-away affirm (as soon as we hear some ‘call’ to a divinity to guarantee stability, integrity, probability, etc.) there is yet a second lure to a clearer science — the image of the future war machine. The two lures are the same, or rather, they are part of the same machine. This asymmetrical war machine is the spark of untruth flashing in between regimes of scientific “truth.” With a hard eye for anti-symmetry, for counter-symmetries, we have the beginning of a truly modern science.

Information and Noise

There is no irreducible ontological division between noise and image, between information and form, only spaces of transformation between noises and images, between forms and information. This fluent, morphogenetic convergence remains intractable to a solid, clumsy-fingered science; the apparent series are related genealogically, and their law of participation evolves with them. Every age, every language has taken stock of this ‘primordial’ divergence in its own unique way. Yet with science a new thought awakens, one capable of rending this hasty division in twain. Out of the depths of division, we begin to reach for the heights of multiplicity, of chance. The void is not sutured to itself, it folds in upon itself; the point of connection is the space of the fold, the ontological division but the line of the fold.
Anomalies tell stories. Their birth, their generation differed; they remind us that difference is the force of history, that matter naturally combines and integrates forces, but at differing speeds giving rise to all kinds of different forms and processes. Creativity is a power resting ultimately in matter itself; matter is itself productive of new forms.

A joyous and revolutionary science doesn’t liberate from war; it liberates from fascism, from the force of habit and from lack of creativity. Science inspires creativity, it awakens us to the creativity already embodied within us, within matter — in many ways this is its highest and proudest achievement.

If science could learn to affirm probability, at all scales and in infinite dimensions, (that probability interpenetrates space,) it would still then have to learn the epic resistance requisite for the refusal of enlightenment.

To resist is to bring about difference through stability, through remaining unchanged, unmoved, undifferentiated. Revolution is pure difference, pure anomaly, pure capacity. Science is first about discovering what resists revolutions (always advantageous for the war machine) but later it can pause and ask a second, stranger question — but in what do revolutions resist?

This second question aims at my point: revolutions exist only as pure symmetry.
From the standpoint of the state, they are pure chaos. As more perspective is gained, their disorder appears to contain a secret order no less complex than that the state, perhaps even moreso because it is tactically organized to outrun and escape the state.

A complex network is a symmetry group: it is pure information.
A revolution is a miniature signal-sign network, a tiny parasite. The transmitted image of the state gets blurred, stretched, distorted; it becomes a dangerous call to disorder, an anomalous signal disturbing the delicate balance of the heterogeneous multiplicity. It induces and precipitates crisis, but it is already a crisis.
It threatens (further) symmetry-breaking, it demands a revaluation. Science evolves through revolutionary refusal; revaluation never lasts. Revolution takes time to foment but it breaks loose in an instant. The flash of lightning governs the universe. First this way…

Revolution takes place immanently, it is the opening up of a field of political intensities, the arrival of a counter-organization. Why is the social war-machine so often a religious one, centered around a name, a sign, a sacred place? But what is important are the exceptions: social movements without a cause, or with conflicting and impossible demands, which rupture the state space and invite new machines to explore new spaces.

Scientific revolution is needed to break with the war machine — but always in order to produce new war machines! When science becomes positive, when it dissociates itself from life, when it dissociates life from culture, it thereby ungrounds the state, creates or taps into deep and turbulent forces rumbling beneath surfaces and through the earth. We still do not yet know of what a body is capable; science’s most secret prayer is that it never will, this is its primary dissociation, its logical revolt or refusal of mysticism. The scientific spirit becomes awakened through the rejection of negative transcendence, through the positive transcendence of radical critique — but this smooth revolutionary space is not enough, new machines must be created, they must dig into the new earth. Science lives beneath utopia, as though separated only by the thinnest pane of glass (just as the scientific perspective itself is at many points only minimally separated from everyday life.)

Improvisation (Kandinsky)

“I owe to you the most beautiful dream of my life.”
- Nietzsche, [from a letter to Lou Salome]

I cannot help but admire Nietzsche when he writes in Twilight of the Idols that there is nothing beautiful but man. For Nietzsche, vanity is ‘the first truth of aesthetics.’ He even supplies a corollary: ugliness is precisely the ‘degeneration of the human.’ Here Nietzsche method allows us to see possibility for new forms of humanity, but he skirts dangerously close to anthropomorphisizing the entire universe as isomorphic to our social spectacle. Is beauty a vain preoccupation — or an elevation of the human to the cosmic? What is left of beauty, human or otherwise — outside of what we customarily associate with it?

What else, then, is beauty, besides an inborn addiction to custom, which finally becomes natural grace? He is certainly right that beauty, after all, is reckoned by an imaginary yardstick! Whereas, on the contrary, ugliness accompanies — and even establishes — the moral or customary exercise of power. Nietzsche precedes Artaud here in demonstrating every action is (a) cruelty. Thus if our power cannot express itself through action, it turns inward: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward… thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ’soul” (Genealogy of Morals)

Yet as we become part of the human story, we become increasingly beautiful. And only if we give ourselves up completely to custom, from our heart out and from the earliest years of our life, can we ever hope to grow beautiful — by losing our instincts for self-preservation. Our power for violent self-assertion assuredly degenerates from non-use, just as our ability to defend ourselves slackens when we commit ourselves to symbolic rituals and social custom. And it is certain that over time we tend to make ourselves into these kinds of totalized subjects given over entirely to social processes, to a given sequence of cultural practices.

Thus we grow in beauty (or equivalently: vanity) when we do not pass through the tiresome struggle for power and surivival, processes which inevitably leave marks upon our bodies, rip our youth from us, criss-cross our human beauty with lines of resistance, deposit genealogical traces of vital affirmations. Intense engagements never fail to leave their mark; sometimes they can even become the truth of our entire existence.

So what is the beauty of a dream, of a woman? Is it truly a form of degeneration — an abstinence from the exercise of power, from the cruelty of activity? Or is it a much more cunning malice still? Supposing woman is the truth — is her beauty degenerate, or is the degeneration of (“humanity’s”) truth itself beautiful? There is a non-dialectical evolution of beauty from weakness, as of society from custom or of truth from error. The degeneration of survival instincts is at once a becoming-beautiful: “This is why the old baboon is uglier than the young one, and why the young female baboon most closely resembles man: is the most beautiful baboon, that is to say.”

The conflict between ugliness and beauty is no contradiction, but a steady evolution of characteristic forms of cultural becomings. The structure of culture works itself into the symmetry of faces; we now recognize symmetry as the fact of entropy, of decline — pure symmetry is a degeneration (of the human) into a total chaos. The pure beauty of total symmetry, of total chaos, is opposed from the beginning of time to organization, biological and otherwise. All organs struggle to survive within and upon the bodies they parasite. The will to power is a metaphor, and it is not.

We are all familiar with this comic turnabout in older cartoons: that absurd situation involving, usually, a rampant chase, or sometimes a backwards-treading showdown, which ends with the unfortunate victim running headlong (or deliberately pacing) into frightfully empty space. Suspended oblivious in mid-air off the edge of a cliff, the victim of this joke pantomimes the sprinter’s circular leg motions–and, of course, his forward velocity only stops once he has realized the ground is no longer beneath him, that is, gravity only actually “takes hold” in the moments following the ‘revelation’ wherein the character ‘real’-izes that it should have already taken hold of him.

Why is there humor in this moment? Because we recognize ourselves in it: immersed within a theme of universal separation, i.e., surrounded by “nothing,” humor comprehends that the universe is not what we decide it is, but is always only what we real-ize it is. More generally, a joke “cures” us as a vaccine does, by reproducing the disease in an ‘innocuous’ form; in particular, the joke neuters a radical or contradictory situation, but by exemplifying the inconsistent and exaggerating it. There are at least three reasons for this. First, by impertinently giving voice straightforwardly to an a-sensical disjunction, we disarm the imminent threat of the contradiction, we “open up” a void in the world in order to distract ourselves from the actual void, but only for a time–even though by doing so, we (“inadvertently”) introduce further tensions via themes and association, tearing open an infinite number of linked and novel inconsistencies. Which is why, secondly, jokes are a release of unconscious tension: by placing these contradictions into the (“logical”) temporal sequence of events, we “master” and therefore obliviate time itself: humor owes its existence entirely to deliberate timing. Third, by encapsulating the paradox, we position the feared object strictly within the horizon of thought; but a joke always wants to say more than it says, and humor lives entirely in the gap between what is and what is said.

By reifying the glitch between language and being, the joke strikes us both as true and absurd simultaneously, and thus offers a glimpse beyond the horizon at an alternate reality, as enjoyment and effulgent feeling which is not a surprised knowing but is precisely laughter. Thus a joke is a narratively structured mis-leading which is just hypnotic enough to cause a momentary “hiccup” in our stream of reality, the improvised incorporation of an alien and unexpected rhythm. This moment is a break that mends us, a tearing open of a wound that heals us, if only for one instant, from the irreducible lack in this defective world, a makeshift vaccine simultaneously made for and from the inevitable brokenness of being (one-self).

Humor is this cure which reifies the terrifying eruption of naked existence itself. Although a humorous euphemism seems only to reiterate the ‘feared’ or ‘broken’ object in a clandestine and reconstituted shape, it is really a way of forgetting the thing itself, for within the bounds of this deliberate act of self-deception our abstract fear and tension dissipates, but not by being erased: rather, we express the tension all too directly, we magnify and externalize our unnameable fears, surround ourselves with it until it is colossal, all-consuming, cosmically terrifying, and then, of course, it can no longer hurt us because we realize it has become altogether too much, which is, of course, never enough. A joke is only really funny once. A stale joke reeks of the fears which caused it to be created as an armor piece in the very first place.

What is funny in this delayed falling, in the “hiccup” moment of the cartoon just after the unfortunate victim realizes there is no longer support beneath him? It is because the victim himself thereby brings about the very end he only suspects. We identify with the victim of the joke in this minimal terror of sudden foundationlessness. An unstatable fear because it echoes an ex-centered tension, or threat creeping in from beyond or outside the situation, and this fear which is precisely what-is-stated. Indeed, by stating our unstatable fear, this joke is giving voice to the “wavering” between language and reality which underlies our most strictly held beliefs, indeed, our ‘real’-ity itself. A joke, whose superbly joyous and free existence depends almost entirely on its timing, reveals the uncertain temporality of existence itself. The delayed timing upon which this joke depends, the hesitation literalized in this mid-air suspension, reifies the everyday situation where our very fear and ignorance brings about the thing which causes us to be afraid. Perhaps because fear and tension make us distracted and thus vulnerable, allowing us insufficient attention towards ominous constellations of coincidences– (who knows, perhaps the perverse tendency of dangerous but unlikely scenarios to occur at a rate so frequent it would seem to belie their statistical improbability rather reveals our own unconscious though “deliberate” hand in their occurrence, not only in the paranoid formation of nightmare-fantasy but in this precisely forgotten transference between the semi-bodied half-dreamworld and the all-too-real situation–) such “coincidences” indeed turn out to be anything but, since between our crippling fear and empowering anxiety, we are mired in a generative though aversive amnesia: we ourselves bring about the most feared, least favorable condition by our own hand even as we try to prevent it, because we try to prevent it.

An obsessively-feared ocurrence is so dark we cannot help but clarify it, so unthinkable we cannot stop imagining and re-realizing its occurrence. But it is the same fearful thing against which we would enthusiastically raise our entire being up unless the thing in itself did not already present our own desire so completely and positively that to contradict it would be already to contradict this moment of resistance itself, to contradict our own superimposition. Our existence is itself nothing; our position within reality is arbitrary, random, meaningless; but the sequence of events in a human life is anything but arbitrary, anything but random. Such a suspension in mid-air is the result of a deliberate forgetting, an act of doublethink: a moment is forgotten, but (not) consciously, for we remember to forget (to remember…) The “x” which was to be erased is rather just crossed out with another “x”–but such self-censorship is not yet futility, even though through the act of repression itself we give a priveleged place to the underlying unadulterated truth. Repression admits of multiple possible modalities of enjoyment even as it denies this possibility, and is an erasure of (alleged) “bad” through a violent un-forgetting of the “right” way to do things: a legal limit on infinity is already close to society’s definition of ’sanity.’

Self-censorship is an internalization of an entire society into your own mind, and already an expression of loyalty and dependence upon the entire chain of social appearances; thus can we only coherently externalize our “unique” (i.e., apart from “society”) attitude towards life through irreverence and disobedience towards society itself? “Breaking the rules” reformulates the exact structure of repression, though in reverse (“Now, I will impose MY reality upon YOU!”) and thus fails completely to liberate: rebellion and discontent and chaos is not the same as completely liberated and uncensored desire– which means “organized resistance” is already an irony and a contradiction–resistance, ultimately, is banal, about the every day situation, our allotment of time, and what we DO with it–and so “organization” already re-expresses the very repression which justice demands we resist. The problem, of course, is that of replacement: what do we do now that the old organization is out of the way? As Lacan remarks apropos of the events of May 1968, those who look for new masters will surely find them. The question is entirely one of the correct expression of master morality, which is a difficult and obscure question with troubling dimensions. But resistance in slavery is the alternative, and moreover is ludicrous, since we deny and affirm the same state of affairs simultaneously. For between freedom and repression there is a gap, and it is only in between that events take place– in our following, we cannot move to either side without already becoming both part of the happening and irreversibly excised from it. Thus we are forever completely caught up within the “real” situation, without being able or willing to extricate ourselves–and, we are also wholly engrossed with the situation as an obstacle to be overcome: we prevent ourselves from passing beyond or through by the very fantasy that we are at a crossroads and that we are supposed, somehow, to “choose correctly” (even though we may be in “anguish”) and “move along” as though we could terminate eternally all relation we ever had to this event. But we are afraid to say “yes” and afraid to say “no,” and the truth is that it is only when we are unrecoverably stuck in this gap between absolute planes of existence, we actually have a choice.

Only in this gap between the “so-called” choice, which is so axiomatic, simplistic and pure as to be almost meaningless, do we ever exercise any sort of potentiality which could actually be called a freedom. But this freedom is always and only a freedom to perform a repressed act–(perform what?)–the act of demonstrating the existence of freedom, that is to say, an implication, the presentation of the possibility of a violation, the presentation merely of the possibility of such a performance, though it may ultimately be absurd in the cosmic sense. The possibility of something different than the ways things are, in different way than we are used to considering, is worth something: indeed, it’s worth everything, it’s the underlying rhythm of every joke, and the message of every joke is sympomatic of a pre-existing censorship which declares in almighty absolutes the limits of possibility. Thus humor is a teasing of the limits of the virtual. For example, art is always created in response to a repression, and expresses as always only an enduring, resistant, immanent freedom itself, in defiance of the censor: art is an asymptotic transference (i.e., an emancipatory event, an event at the ‘boundary’ of infinity.)

We are to be free in order to show others that there is repression– we recognize in the delayed timing of the fall the true reality beneath appearances, that is, that we willingly suspend ourselves in mid-air, in universal doubt and hopelessness, in subjective anxiety and existential straits and spiritual hardship, in thoughtlessness and boredom and hesitation– not in an attempt to change the ultimate outcome (which is, in any case, known completely in advance,) but simply to escape ourselves–

As in all jokes we learn from these cartoons a truth about freedom, which is only funny because it doesn’t help–we already know that we cannot become free just by running away, whether from repression or from the object being repressed. The revelation is incarceration: we’re only trapped when we realize we’re trapped, left only to perform our meaningless dance in that unnameable intersection between the void and the law (violence/death/universality.) It is not obvious this “metaphysical” situation is not an academic question, or that an agnostic position over this kind of freedom is a contradiction, already choicelessness and pure nihilism, e.g., “supposing such choices are only theoretical, how can they make a universal difference?” It is important that the repressed memory here is humor itself, or more generally, the positivity of the void: running away won’t make us free, because the very force of the desire to escape the threat causes the unwanted event to come about. Pure escape is a paranoid fantasy just as absolute knowledge is a generic paranoid pretension. The difficulty here is that paranoid certainty verges on reality with a cryptic and surreal twist: we are indeed trapped. But then the question for freedom can therefore never be one of pure escape. Rather it is always particularly framed as the problematic of absolute separation, the difficult practical questions of pure revolt, the invocation of thought upon an eminently logical rebellion, a rigorous, a priori militant resistance to injustice. Freedom must be therefore be expressed as simultaneously particular, universal, and transcendending the universal: as resistance in the name of truth, as intolerance in the name of justice, and as courage in the face of annihilation—-

Perhaps the most subtle instant of artistic insight: knowing when the work is complete. Knowing a thing is done is always a decision, a superego injunction to believe, to accept; art lives precisely in this deception, that it is possible to be told what to believe, or put another way, that we can ever know what other people actually want from us. What is the terminating stroke if not precisely the final “cutting” of the art-work out of its particular mode of being into the “universal,” the work of art: a subtraction which makes whole. This point bears elaboration. From what is the sculpture subtracted? The raw materials of artistic production. From what is the work of art subtracted? From the artistic universal– and we can think this in two ways, either as the “sublime” moment of deep sensitivity to the beauty of the universe, or as the universal artistic indeal, that unabashedly subjective universal; in fact, we can also conceive of this “from-what” of the work of art as the “universe” of the painting, that non-existent/empty reality in which the inversions and distortions of the artistic presentation are finally placed into a bizarre-enough context to make sense. So the art work betrays a lack, a cut which would otherwise go unnoticed, precisely by disguising it; yet there is no lack at all. Art persists in this lie as a stain, a horizon: an untameable pulse oscillating in the deep empty void of an (otherwise) still and silent universe.

“There is a reason for everything.”

How can I trust anyone who says this? No one can tell you the reasons for everything. We learn reasonable justifications for many things. But these explanations rely on what? Further explanations. Every rationalization involves an obfuscation; the double movement of knowledge represents a drawing towards a clearer understanding and pushing further away from the truth. Truth becomes untruth when we tell stories, the essential human act which defines us, since it is how we define ourselves. Storytelling is such a double-movement, since stories are both reflection and representation.

The questions ends up looking like many such questions: since the issue is such a general one, where can we ultimately draw the lines? This situation is unresolvable as it stands, that is, of the disjunction between knowledge and theories, between reflection and representation: the question is not whether stories are more reflective or more representation, or whether our ideas are knowledge or theories– since language, knowledge, even reality itself, are constructions which we must doubt in our search for truth, we have no shelter in either our mental constructions or our experiences. Where, then, is shelter to be sought? We are stranded in the abyss beyond language and beyond reality–like orphans, runaways, in the midst of this radical freedom to decide. From what do we derive the courage to face this challenge to believe? Where do we acquire the strength to act? Any absolute lines we could draw to justify ourselves, to determine right behavior, are our own lines–laws change. Our lines are insufficient, our models are fragmentary, our realities are microscopic. Yet, due to the fundamental connection which underlies both order and choas, both subject and object, knowledge and theory, language and silence, each microscopic experience comprises a microcosm of being. All that exists contains all that exists–not as a reflection, not as a representation– and yet, containment falls short of a description of this phenomena. Being shines with borrowed light: the dualism of light reminds us simultaneously of the failure of our scientific schema to accomplish a synthesis and of the flaws in our perception and observation stemming from the mechanism of sight. Vision presents a world to us isolated, carved into separate colors and depths, entites divided from one another, whole unto themselves. Yet our conscious experience belies this–not to say that from lived experience one infers that objects are not real, merely that by existing the self engulfs the entire universe, since it can reflect and represent it– yet reflection and representation are already dividing our consciousness away from itself, when unification is the primal experience. Infinite being is self-evident from the continuous, interconnected experience of conscious existence. Self-awareness is cosmic-awareness, not a rational, emotional, artistic, scientific or philosophical representation or reflection of reality to oneself. The chain of reflection is endless– art is a particularly telling example. The work of art speaks– on behalf of whom? Is it the viewer who accomplishes the synthesis which the artist necessarily leaves unfinished? Art is not merely a reflection or representation. Art is a transcendence of the subject and in this it is related to language. How is it that the message which lies hidden behind the surface of the paint is placed there? Here the analogy with language will serve us well: in what manner are the meanings of words coded into the sounds and symbol-systems? A pre-linguistic meaning, or rather, reflection of meaning–that is, an understanding established between two consciousnesses–must be accomplished prior to any formalized representation or reflection of meaning. Such a radically a priori understanding presupposes the existence of the Other. This means that our ethical obligations to others necessarily precedes the rationalizations. Responsibility is metaphysically prior to reason. Finding reasons for everything is far less important than kindness and love.