A properly ontological investigation is a ceaseless circulation around the notions of emptiness and presence, a rigorous attempt to discern the peculiar concepts of existence and nothingness, always and once again a faithful commitment to seeking out ones and zeroes. Patching up holes; but precisely in such a way that the reality grasped by ontology (like theology) is always-already as a shadow of reality, like the phantasm of another life. Cantor thought transfinite series a pure and untouchable trace of Difference. A proof of transcendence, disguised as a proof of immanence. But how else could a universal theory of events be constructed?

The critique of ontology encounters yet another surprise when it allows its gaze to move beyond the event itself. The patient observer discovers within the folds of interleaving processes an uncanny kind of hidden writing, whose nature is exceptionally difficult to grasp, for the nature of this half-erased or subtle writing ceaselessly shifts its ground as quickly as the question is posed, and can just as easily turn out to have been nothing at all. –A coincidence, upon which ontology has always made a strange decision: that being and nothing are One, existence is non-existence. God may or may not exist, but this subtle writing can be exhumed from the essences of things. It has affirmed this strange paradox precisely in order to allow a meta-philosophical plane of thought to be constructed. 

Being is the first focus of the elliptical orbit traced by ontological thinking. The basic ontological statement is made by Lucretius: all things have within them the seeds of their becoming. Even the void, absolute nothingness, can be seen as a positive emptiness capable of infinite becomings. Being can thus be seen as a kind of positive nothingness, the radically empty pure essence of reality. Hence to be is to become everything — to communicate with infinite becomings, with forces radically exceeding our “individual” structural limitations: the earth, the cosmos; animals, plants, molecules, stars, etc. Thus nothingness is the second focus of the elliptical orbit traced out by ontology, for the reason that to become capable of becoming is the event itself — the paradox which ontology affirms as its rigorous essence: to diagram being. 

Existence is essentially infinite in a precise sense: it has within itself the seeds of countless transfigurations — creative, neutral and destructive events. In fact what ontology can be counted upon most faithfully to remind us is that to be is always already an event, and only falsely divided into subject and object. Being is the source of becoming, already a trans-ontological process ceaselessly disseminating events, communicating with processes beyond its own boundaries. Ironically (perhaps) it is precisely this uncanny inter-resonance of widely disparate events which causes the ontologists’ rigorous functionalization to falter. 

The world is hollow. In-itself anything is precisely nothing. 

A thing exists positively only in the precise sense that it exhibits certain forces, that it forms connections or disjunctions with other things, or assemblages of things, in such and such a way. 

Moreover, is it not necessary that at some point in the process of any machine, there is something that may and must become reduced to a generic and redundant unit? 

It may indeed be said that the machine presents us with the most spectacular and dangerous breakthrough in all of history, a breakthrough written into our desires themselves.

Love is not a question of signals, but of production. Not words but noise. The word is hollow: in itself everything means precisely nothing. Yet no thought is ever without its heretical dimension, its strange and apocalyptic promise — the dangerous promise of possible knowledge. 

Not only does nothing “exist,” but it is the essence of existence itself, and so all knowledge is a kind of nothingness: a rigorous silence, a selective and critical passivity, a dangerous and misunderstood weakness. 

Truth is a parasite, we are infected: knowledge is never without this vertigo dimension of being self-imposed, like a sickness which you acquire simply by imagining it. 

I emphasize this point precisely because it is all too clearly understood by the creature within. and is it not so that when its roaring becomes imperceptible, we encounter an ancient silence, without limits? 

Yet everything begins in noise.

We are not one, but two. Dimorphs, in between, always escaping the fold and the unfold, running off madly in both directions. We are more viral — composed of parasites, miniature bodies without organs — than we are “hominid,” more “dead” than alive.

The origin of religion is the veil, the simplest tomb: the meaning of birth is not death but exposure, a novel opening into what admits of nothing but pure exchange. The two series diverge, but a singularity escapes both: a counter-signal, a nuance.

God is tucked behind innumerable folds, joyously obscured by the interweaving, patchwork garments of the messengers.

Perhaps the difference is tiny enough, and ever shrinking in this cosmos of interfusions. But already we are carefully following them, even — as it were — drawn forward by these untamed singularities…

He dances in their silences. What is the message? There is no answer to this question. Only, perhaps, the briefest of glimpses, the outline of the fold, an opening nearly obscured by dangerous glare.

The frame doesn’t converge with the outline; and there were never really outlines. Without signals the frame bursts, and what remains is neither finite nor infinite, but inter-finite, creation, resonance.

If narcissism could in any sense be said to be the basis for a proto-aesthetics, a necessary condition for the production of any aesthetic intervention whatsoever — if not the outer eclipse of the primordial movement of creativity itself… Then this is because beauty captures, absorbs, exhumes. It fascinates. It opens up new distances, illuminates novel depths, original styles. It pierces a depth whose distance is infinite, the absolutely other. Beauty, what else? –but null futurity, the brutal light of the ultimate apocalypse.

Beauty is extinction.

Both a pure white emptiness and a heterogeneous black abyss: beauty, always a grotesque transfiguration. Without Da Vinci this uglier aspect of narcissism would have gone unnoticed even longer. The history of the theory of art has been about drawing this glittering, distracting line, ultimately proving it not indeed to be a line at all, certainly leading nowhere and anyways, not a thin line.

Nor a no-man’s-land.

But rather a discontinuous movement, a gesture: a non-linear, free, undetermined, anonymous gesture, a suffering and powerful movement of expressivity. (Perhaps even a foundational motion, genesis…?) This creation of an uninterruptible channel for the distribution and division of energies –Is beauty but the tool-building hominid’s dream of infinite celerity, of pure mobilities, that is, a total category of absolute transport?

A transcendence born from distance which already converges obscenely upon terror, stasis and death: the frozen beauty of absolute immobility, rapturous passivity, absolute domesticity, pure receptivity and com-placency. Again and again, the resurgence of the hidden narrative, the overstory of the understory: rupture and transcendence and return. but: exhumation, or resurrection?

Yes, transcendence is always a secret, because immanence is the pure singular truth. There’s nothing here that doesn’t belong. Yet the secret one, the secret line has no home, it unfolds and decomposes. It criminalizes itself. Style is not the secret but the edge of the abyss, the sharpened point, the “critical” distance which allows the flourish and spectacle.

In short, beauty is approached in style only through the distances produced by varieties of interconnectivity. Through becoming other, through becoming a machine, the sharpened point opens onto a new order, a new genre of possibilities. The smoothness of the proto-narrative space is an unground, a native battleground for all varietes of possible forms of expression, an auto-transcendentalizing matrix which is open to countless potential assemblages.

Within it things learn to dream.

Beauty is beyond harmony and chaos, underneath horror and grace. To speak like a psychologist: without our hearts, beauty would still be real, for insofar as it attains towards transcendence of the human, it names the real, the discontinuous event, the line which cannot be obscured, the disintegration of organizations…

Surrealism is pure unconscious violence, a naive violence we’re still not sophisticated enough to understand. Which is also to say, to unleash! And yet, it is strange to think — without hearts, beauty would have never even been contemplated. We would shield ourselves from beauty just as surely if we did not feel it as strongly we do now. Beauty feeds upon itself: it is an autoparasite.

The real behind appearances is always suffering and power, tragic, sublime and transfigured: for even the heartless can fall victim to pity, to the dazzling lure of beauty within ugliness. The real is ungrounded when it encounters the beautiful: beauty is the abominable unground, horror beyond horror, the unlife beyond life, the inert decaying matter feeding swarms of parasites. Not the abyss but concoursing flies, vectors of disorganization, dense congregations of insects pressing in the gaps, eternally unearthing. Pullulating herds of larval awareness.

Digging. Into the ground. (Do we not all remember digging? Are we not digging still?) Unearth, unground: this structured or ethical suspension of reason, this dis-engagement of feelings, is in fact the classical basis of philosophy — in it, not only images but our very feelings are rejected as nothing but sick animals feeding upon our brokenness, upon our finitude, upon our imperfection, guilt and suffering. But, one might rejoin, are they not learning? Learning thereby from our pain, as it were, from our mistakes? Even from our terror? From our moments of distraction and weakness and despair? From our recurring convalescence?

It is in this manner that association becomes a true rival for abstraction. Learning and regeneration: in this way repetition becomes creativity and association becomes intuition. Learning is organic, cosmic, libidinal: but always a parasitic organization. Knowledge infests. It is a noise. The intervention, noise, comes first, before the channel, before the signal. The sign arrives only much later, an instrument of the one, the one which instructs the reorganizers. There is a whole geography of knowledge beyond signs.

There is yet an intervening milieu (which is not organized, not itself semiotic) which deserves investigation. The abyss, the interface, the field of intensity: names for structures the modality of intervention. Philosophy cannot escape the twin problems of distance and style. They relate intimately to speaking, to knowing, to writing, to thinking. We can touch the noise before we hear the sound.

We can feel the terror of decay before we feel its squirming multiple births. We cannot listen to noise. But we have to be able to learn. It is a perhaps a bit like dying: transubstantiation, depersonalization, molecular disorganization. Dispersal, becoming pure intensity, pure sound, pure light. God, the ocean of light, no more than a romantic fantasy: a lantern to guide us through the abyss. Just bright enough to illuminate the depth of our horror, the misery of our position. But, and yet… somehow, impossibly, the brilliant positivity of the world, of the earth and what is beneath the earth… of the fractured lines of light, cracks of awareness opening onto the future…

In music the passions enjoy themselves.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In early 1872, the same year The Birth of Tragedy was published, Nietzsche delivered a series of lectures entitled “An Investigation into Rhythm and Meter.” (The lecture which interests me, “Toward a Theory of Quantified Rhythm,” appears to still be untranslated!)

Music is at the heart of Nietzsche’s effort. In a very important sense, without a musical ear, his work cannot be understood. Music is his framework. Not only that he writes in arpeggios, but that his thought is arpeggiated; to make sense or value from his work, we must hear it performed; that is, we must realize through ourselves all the properly musical moments of discord and accord in his thought, all the contradictions and harmonies which resonate not only through his critique but also through his concepts.

The moment of accord between morality and genealogy (or discord between truth and science) must be felt; they cannot be simply understood. His account of the origin of morality, for example, only seems not to be completely rational for the reason that it is perfectly and even sublimely rational; it is in fact a mathematical argument! Just as the infinite overflows reason, Nietzsche’s style, his thoughts and ideas, must be heard and felt, not only read but performed. His voice must become as a pulsation or rhythm seizing us; or else it remains, merely a contradiction, merely a static critique.

So what does it mean to say that the movement of Nietzsche’s writing is essentially or spontaneously rhythmic? I mean that he strategically opposes meter at every turn, by a free and resonant new rhythm, which affords new modes of expression. By rhythm (as opposed here to meter) I mean a pulsation which decomposes structured space, even as it generates the possibilities for whole new kinds of organizations (meters). [On this point, free rhythm is almost liberation; it lacks only an active form, a metric space to liberate. All the universe needs is to be activated; all the potentials are there, tomorrow can be grasped today through a thousand signals.]

The question of discursive movement is about the sign-signal matrix we move through, the medium of distribution between co-present signals, in short: how to allow the proper signals through, how to achieve the perfect balance of speed and slowness. Prejudice thinks in metre, and even rhyme; but sense and value speak in rhythm, in sparks and bursts of intensity, in swirling vortexes of affectivity, taking the meter apart in order to open up new (human and non-human) expressivities.

Nietzsche tactically transforms metric spaces into rhythmic spaces. Critics often tends to linger a little too long at precisely this point: whether (in whatever particular case) we are dealing with a metric space (where pulses are regularized, achieving identity through sub-division, i.e., by external modulation) or a rhythmic space (where differences are distributed through spontaneous self-organization)? But this dichotomy is confused: all spaces are metric, are spaces are rhythmic. There is only interplay between: rhythms create new meters, meters provoke new rhythmic expressivities.

The coalescence of all forms of being into a single pulse, a single urge: this is an idea of the creative, form-generating power of pure energy — the captivating power of vibration. Resonance is a signal caught in a feedforward loop, engaged in various transductions through differently-structured spaces; power is realizing this energy (these spaces) can be organized in a new way so as to allow the feedforward loops to fold back in upon themselves. Then the resonant signal can become amplified, and new feedforward mechanisms are need to contain the flow of intensities.

An inter-related system of transducers of this kind is a composition, or an aggregate; it forms the common basis of music and mathematics, a sort of blank template. The actual composition is always a modulation of the virtual one; the virtual being the mold; the thing has virtue because it has been molded. The shaping or modulation of subjectivity is already a question of a much different order, but we recognize that the spaces are homologous: we are confronted with a mixture of metric and rhythmic spaces of potential expression and transformation.

Nietzsche’s text is engaged in a long and difficult creative process of becoming music. It would be the end of philosophy as we know it; and we know he struggled to bring the day closer, to capture the future and bring us towards it. To overcome music is to become music, it is precisely not to be overcome by it, enraptured in its pleasurable aspects; it is to so throughly deconstruct the experience that not one shred of prejudice remains, so that the profoundest resonances and deepest sensitivities of which we are capable are exposed to light, re-activated.

The interesting twist is that we have already done this before — we have all experienced profound deaths and rebirths. We have experienced it, if nowhere else, in love. We can yet reawaken to life and light, to sound and color; daybreak is never far off. Yes, it is easier to forget, and over time it becomes harder to reactivate lost sensitivity, lost expressivity. But despair is ugly, and weakening; the eternal return is not to console us, it is to terrify us. That nothing is lost or ever can be is not necessarily a spiritually comforting idea. This is why hope and pity are really weaknesses; they are not full or powerful expressions, they still react. They are not enough, and they deceive us into thinking they are enough. Illusions begone, let’s transform the world. Let our thought find new rhythms; life is waiting, a brief time of postponement between new and old songs. In this tiny intermission, let us not take pause, but unflinchingly experiment upon the future, and strategically compose our becomings without hesitation. Let us allow space and time for our ideas and words and bodies to become intense, to become molecular… to become music.