In book I, section 23 of Gay Science, Nietzsche deploys a theory concerning the rise of the individual in relation to the signs of corruption in a society. This corruption signifies for Nietzsche the development and culmination of superstition in a culture. Superstition in this text is equated with the “second-order free spirit.” Unlike the religious advocate, the superstitious is always more of a person, meaning that the appearance of this attribute is the development of the progress of the intellect in its movement of becoming more independent; thus superstition is the delight and celebration of the cultivation of individuality and individuals. Similar to his attacks on “the good” in Zarathustra, Nietzsche reminds us that the term “corruption”—which here, as elsewhere, appears as a positive condition (for the growth of ‘riper’ individuals no less)—actually stems from a value judgment made by the religious status quo against the rise of superstition. In this sense, Nietzsche strikes against the reactionary (can we say, re-reacts?) and affirms that, on the contrary, this development of superstition is “actually a symptom of enlightenment.” Superstition and corruption become here the means by which morality, its means of capture and containment, its stratification of the individual, and its disciplinary ‘No’ of auto- and trans-policing all lose their primacy in governing and guiding the actions of the individual, which, to follow Nietzsche, we will interpret as the inevitable symptom of the decline of the legislative and repressive power of the collective.

It follows from this that the development of superstition points towards the exhaustion of a culture. And again, Nietzsche is quick to assert and make clear that this seemingly negative term actually creates something positive in its proliferation throughout a culture. After expending its energy on war and losing its pleasure in such endeavors, an exhausted society will experience a shift in the deployment of its energy moving away from the engagement in warfare toward “more private passions [that] merely become less visible.” Now the individual has more resources and energy to squander—something Nietzsche claims could not have happened previously because the individual “simply was not yet rich enough.” Yet this cultivation of the individual’s energy into private affairs leads to truly great events: great love, great hatred, and the “flame of knowledge” flourish, which leads to a paradox. The exhaustion of the society is the potential impetus for the augmentation and actualization of new arrangements of aesthetic, scientific, and ethical projects. Put another way, when a society experiences exhaustion the individual explodes and overflows with so much potential energy that the genesis of the individual comes onto the scene blessed with the gift of squandering more resources than would have been wise or advisable during times of danger and war.

Yes, Nietzsche admires war and danger because it forces the instincts to develop in strength: it forces weaknesses and failures to be culled and excised from life, which is itself the movement of life in its immanent trajectory. But, here at least, Nietzsche offers some resistance to his usual claim of promoting war, for it is after long periods of war that we see a sort of hypertrophy of strength deployed in the individual. These movements are thus inversely proportionate: as the society becomes more and more exhausted in its endeavor, the individual ripens and becomes filled with the capacity to concentrate on the augmentation of its own power. We can now contextualize one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms that is almost always misquoted and—even if it is quoted in full—usually misunderstood because of its terseness: “From life’s school of war—What does not kill me makes me stronger” (Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” 8).

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.

 

“You shall obey—someone and for a long time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself”—this appears to me to be the moral imperative of nature which, to be sure, is neither “categorical” as the old Kant would have it (hence the “else”) nor addressed to the individual (what do individuals matter to her?), but to peoples, races, ages, classes—but above all to the whole human animal, to man (Beyond Good and Evil, §188).

There is today perhaps no more firmly credited prejudice than this: that one knows what really constitutes the moral. Today is seems to do everyone good when they hear that society is on the way to adapting the individual to general requirements, and that the happiness and at the same time the sacrifice of the individual lies in feeling himself to be a useful member and instrument of the whole: except that one is at present very uncertain as to where this whole is to be sought, whether in an existing state or one still to be created, or in the nation, or in a brotherhood of peoples, or in new little economic communalities…What is wanted—whether this is admired or not—is nothing less than a fundamental remoulding, indeed weakening and abolition of the individual: one never tires of enumerating and indicting all that is evil and inimical, prodigal, costly, extravagant in the form individual existence has assumed hitherto, one hopes to manage more cheaply, more safely, more equitably, more uniformly if there exist only large bodies and their members. Everything that in any way corresponds to this body-and membership-building drive and its ancillary drives is felt to be good, this is the moral undercurrent of our age; individual empathy and social feeling here play into one another’s hands (Daybreak, §132).

If you spend yourself on power, on grandiose politics, on economics, world trade, parliaments, military interests—if you give away in this direction the quantity of understanding, seriousness, will and self-overcoming that you are, then this quantity isn’t available in the other direction. Culture and the state—let’s not fool ourselves about this—are antagonists: the “cultured state” is just a modern idea. One lives off the other, one prospers at the expense of the other. All the great ages of culture are ages of decline, politically speaking: what is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political (Twilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Are Missing,” §4).

The individual is a chaos necessary to every political and social order, a chaos enveloped in a structural social machine. This chaos should be distinguished from a random distribution of intensities or an undifferentiated aggregate but instead should be thought of as overdetermined. From our point of view (against a flow of power that remains obscure in origin) this is precisely the problem that must be addressed according to the collective nature of the individual, including the individual’s own place in the social order at large.

From another point of view, it is the individual that poses the problem to the state—hence the horrifying solution of micromanagement wherein the individual-as-problem is solved according to algorithms that divide these ‘solutions’ to their respective function in the social body. And when we say body in this sense, we take the ‘solution-individual’ to mean precisely the transformation of the individual into a tool—the instrumental individual—that nevertheless, functions as a cell assigned to certain duties in relation to different organs (conceived as institutions directing molar quantities of power) linked to the Organism-State (the constituted Whole that literally exceeds its parts through its miraculation as surplus value, projecting a dominant image of repres(sive)entation). The problem with this view is at least twofold: first, the problematic of the individual cannot be solved from a hierarchical political position (without violence, even considered in terms of psychic/collective repression); and secondly, there are, as Nietzsche shows, no criteria upon which to decide where the Whole lies, because the Whole is precisely the illusion of the State as an entity or organism, when in fact the individual calls into question (if its problem is diagonally posed) the (de)stratification that a certain social body undergoes (through entropy and (planned) states of equilibrium).

The problem may not even be that of creating new values. It seems more appropriate to say that what is required is more like an ethics, which we conceive as the methods by which values are genetically traceable in their becoming and questioned in relation to what values can do—what their real effects (potential or actual) are and what types of environmental stresses or affects (social and physico-biological) combine to produce these values (values inherently related to nihilism, both negative and affirmative).

There are, in fact, a number of different ways of approaching the ‘problem’ of the individual. As Gilles Deleuze reminds us in his essay “Nomad Thought,” Nietzsche’s philosophy has (especially in France where the two strands are dominant) ceaselessly been synthesized with Freudianism and Marxism (for better or worse) [1]. Deleuze argues that unlike Freudianism and Marxism (more their strands than the thinkers of Freud and Marx themselves), Nietzsche has opposed the ‘recoding’ of individuals into a framework beneficial to the state. For Freudianism, this involves trapping the individual into representations of the family (drama), and for Marxism, the ‘illness’ of the individual—caused by the state—is to be cured by the state (betraying behind the political (revolutionary) process the real goal of political (fascizing) normalization). Unlike these strands, Nietzsche’s type of philosophy encourages a ‘decoding’ of the individual in relation to society, one that is a ‘decoding’ in the absolute sense, for we have not been deterritorialized enough—or, as Nietzsche would say, decay (in both the individual and society) is an irreversible process that cannot be sidestepped but must be accelerated and augmented through a reevaluation of the coding (legal, contractual, institutional) process.

This train of thought can be traced through Nietzsche’s texts to approach the prospect of a Nietzschean politics through an engagement with the questions of state formations. Institutions and cultural guarantors (the state) must be injected with a little death instinct, i.e. political formations must always be mortal, or, in another sense, must guarantee the renunciation of their will to power (understood as the will to erect a stable being, reproduced through the molecular individuals that come to take on and be identified with the social roles and instrumental values through which the state guarantees itself). The questions this paper will raise particularly address the questions of the evolution of the State apparatus through its mode of capturing a populace and rendering it manageable; only through this genealogy wherein the advent of the state is enlightened can we begin to reorganize the problem of the individual along different dimensions that call into question the self-organizing principle of the state itself. Finally, if possible, the means by which this death instinct can be instilled into the state will be used as the criteria upon which we weigh how effective these conceptual investigations are in the last instance.

Chemistry of Culture: Physics of the State

From the start of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche not only raises the challenge to philosophy to become thoroughly historical and historicizing, but also challenges science to develop “a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone” (12). This chemistry and history would be directed especially toward the way in which reason and imagination function together to produce metaphysical images that overcode the natural world. In other words, Nietzsche argues that because we impose moral, aesthetic and religious demands on the world, we have recreated it in light of these demands—this happens insofar as “it is the human intellect that has made appearance appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things” (20).

This not only applies for these three specific overcodings. Even mathematics produces metaphysical illusions insofar as number imposes a false unity with arbitrary units of measure; however, it is only because these units are imposed with constancy that pure multiplicity can be subsumed under a number or set as a unity and still retain any utility. An example of an illusory unity is custom, defined as “the union of the pleasant and the useful” (52). This plurality exists as a unity insofar as custom is grounded in habit, which produces pleasant sensations because they integrate us within a collective. Custom takes on its power through the investments and productions of herd pleasure. It acts as a sort of arbitrary unifier—it forms a set of the multiple ways in which the social field produces a rhythm that corresponds with habits that legitimate themselves as useful. However, we can unfold or disentangle utility and any criteria relating to pleasure if we are able to create truly vital thought experiments that construct new ways of grouping together different values of the useful and pleasurable—maybe to the detriment of one or the other for the developing cultural forms that this sort of experimentation may produce. The question of the chemistry of social groups would consequently be concerned with the large molar aggregates of custom (representation) and the selection of the molecular flows of pleasure and utility that (de)compose custom and culture at large.

This is one path for this potential chemistry, but it is insufficient by itself because it presupposes a macropolitical view of situations and thus already relates our criteria to a pre-existing social body already pervaded with a dominant culture. On the micropolitical level, we could ask how to create along with this chemistry a physics of mortal and transient customs. Nietzsche sets this task for the free spirits to come so that they may continue the process of the auto-liberation of thought. As he reminds us, “The less men are bound by tradition, the greater is the fermentation of motivations within them, and the greater in consequence their outward restlessness, their mingling together with one another, the polyphony of their endeavours” (24). Nietzsche believes that to create this polyphony, we will have to move “beyond the self-enclosed original national cultures” (24). Nietzsche proposes a historicizing philosophy linked to the natural sciences that can analyze standards for a generic culture, along with the political situations that they entail, and that can act as a constructive milieu for thought. In fact, he challenges us to discover “knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century” (25). Ecumenical has (at least) two significant meanings here: general and universal on the one hand, mixed and motley on the other. With this we can tease out a physics along with this socio-historical chemistry. For if we couple Nietzsche’s proposal for a chemistry of aesthetic, religious and moral concepts and sensations with his injunction to discover the preconditions of culture from a universal point of view, then we start to connect a series of thoughts that point toward a social science that can address the question of generic and universal cultural construction that grounds itself in a physics of the interaction between molecular beliefs and desires (affects) and the corresponding cultural formations (custom) that result from the bindings of the former to a metaphysical image. The historicizing process, then, must deal with the evolution of habit and the institutions of the state that stratify custom within the social field.

Science, Language, Art: Subterranean Universality

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, creating metaphysical alleviations that only serve to quell the truly revolutionary energy flowing beneath the surface of the social body (148). Also, artists are the notorious “glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind,” and even though this has granted us the signification of a beautiful world, we have to ask ourselves the question: if Nietzsche tells of the death throes of art and religion, what does science inherit from these projects and how can their insights and creations be carried on in an affirmative project for the creation of necessary rings of a universal culture of free spirits (220)?

Art’s expansion transforms religious sensations and expressions, lending them profundity and an increased capacity for articulating these sensations—and science (the Enlightenment) is responsible for the dispersion of religious feelings into other areas, even politics (150). But if art is dying, then we must posit that the transformations of these metaphysical and religious sensations through art must also become invested into a new sphere, namely science. This is true because, when one organ of culture has weakened, another organ “has to discharge not only its own function but another as well” (231). Science inherits from art its ability to “look upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so far that we at last cry: ‘life, however it may be, is good!’” and has even made this affirmation “an almighty requirement of knowledge” (222). Thus, we can give up art without losing the capacity and sensibility that art and religion has prepared for us.

Science has to cultivate these capacities and seize upon its true calling as the project of achieving an objective by the appropriate means (256). Nietzsche’s science, gifted with the premonition of the Eternal Return, will assert that “every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen,” that motion is enveloped in an immortality that is the total union of all being (208). Science also must recognize that everyone is “determined by such systems and representatives of different cultures” in a necessary but alterable fashion (274). This power to alter our cultural “determinations” means that we are responsible for our experiences and life experiments, that these are to be fused into a “goal without remainder” that has as its aim the will to distinguish ourselves as forming “a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general” (292). We are cultural artifacts composing necessary links to a universal culture that, even if it exists only potentially, must be achieved by the labor of free spirits, the kind that seem “to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their country or class” (227). Of course, the dominant culture and the established authority will resist the required degeneration of its stability, but the development of a de-centered, non-hierarchical, universal culture can only begin through the process of weakening the fetters of state culture. This will allow for the generation of lines of flight for new social organizations and/or assemblages.

There are three possible factors for the birth of a global culture: absolute music, the scientific analysis of symbolic gestures, and a new language for all. The first two are closely linked, and they require an understanding of how poetry produces a superimposition of immediate feelings in music to the point where the music itself is rendered immediately symbolic for our internal life (215). The development of absolute music for the social ear means that music’s symbolism is understood without further assistance—likewise, the science of cultural tones in vocal patterns that are indicative of mood, feelings and expressions will be necessary to uncovering the vastness of operations at work in unconscious modifications of body and voice. Furthermore, linguistics and philology, as the two dominant sciences of language, can then dedicate their study of the laws of individual languages to the forms of non-verbal thought in a synthesis that has as its goal the creation of a “new language for all—first as a commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in general” (267). Given that this is merely a preliminary overview of an undercurrent in Human All Too Human, the next step in continuing this line of thought has to navigate the role of the state, the relations of states among themselves, and the relations among the responsibilities that we all bare to our composition of immortal vibrations in the links of a universal cultural chain.

Modern Formations of the State: the Fate of European Nations

In January of 1872, less than a year after Germany officially becomes a nation, Nietzsche gives a series of five lectures at the University of Basel on the future of our educational/cultural institutions. Six years later in section 8 of Human All Too Human we find Nietzsche discussing the future of political institutions and the fate of European nations. One of the questions that Nietzsche asks in his analysis of socialism, nationalism and democracy is whether or not these political orientations are strong enough for an affirmative investment in the development of cultural forces­, investments that one day will lead to institutions that address the true needs of all of humanity (476). Nietzsche always comments on different state organizations in terms of their speeds of evolution and lifespan.

Since all institutions are mortal, the relations of power between the citizens among themselves address a problem of the measurement of forces behind the repetition of a set of customs that guarantees the dominance of a state through the rigid adherence to one particular mode of cultural development (474). Arguing against sudden revolutionary change, Nietzsche proposes a slow evolution through inquiries utilizing the political concept of force along with a cultural program for the “gradual transformation of the mind” (452). Nietzsche insists that to begin to create the foundation for a politics of universal address, “the sense of justice must grow greater in everyone, the instinct for violence weaker” (452). In opposition to the passionate revolution of Rousseau, the task for free spirits will be one of moderation. Moderation is the becoming-decisive of thought and inquiry, and the free-spirit cultivates this quality by drawing potential energy to the promotion of spiritual objectives (464).

What may be even more complex for our examination is the fact that Nietzsche depicts socialism, nationalism and democracy to all have close affiliations and family resemblances. Socialism shows the dangers of the absolute state: it demands complete subservience of the individual through segmenting them as an organ of the community (473). It only appears in short reactionary bursts of terrorism because it has a short and violent lifespan. Nationalism is no better than socialism on this point, even if it has a mechanism to guarantee its duration. Nationalism imposes through education an unconscious reverence for the patria and its customs, and if it can instill a fiery conscience with honor, it can more easily ensure its reproduction in the following generation. The question of the benefits of nationalism and socialism must always be related back to the question of how strong these forms of government are internally and how much force they are capable of deploying for the affirmation of new goals, or as Nietzsche writes: “Whenever a great force exists­ even though it be the most dangerous ­mankind has to consider how to make of it an instrument for the attainment of its objectives” (446). If it is a question of justice, a socialist revolution will require a minor population ­the new generation ­to enter into a struggle with the dominant political state. Only after such a struggle can the two parties articulate a calculation of forces. Based on this measurement, the existing state will either be able to reincorporate the reactive forces into a new totality or will be forced to create a new compact to prevent mutual losses through violent struggle. Finally, this compact will be able to guarantee the rights for a new social order, rights that may have the potential to satisfy an axiom of justice [use Nietzsche's criticism here].

Democracy adds another element that disrupts the previous theorization. For both socialism and nationalism presuppose a dominant set of customs that “distinguish between government and people as though there were here two distinct spheres of power, a stronger and higher and a weaker and lower” (450). Democracy, however, puts forth the idea that the government is merely an organ of the people who embody the state’s power in their essence. It is important to realize that this essence constitutes the way in which the relationship between people and government reflects the organizations of other cultural relationships (teacher-pupil, general-soldier, etc.) (450). However, Nietzsche also thinks that “modern democracy is the historical form of the decay of the state,” a decay that is in itself an affirmative process (472). Democracy eats away at the layers of the state and the stratified cultural relations that they entail. This decay allows for the free spirit to collect potential energy for the invention of different institutions that will provide for the prudence and self-interests of all men.

Nietzsche’s utopia would consist in a dissemination of labor throughout the population by means of measuring how much suffering a group of tasks would cause the sensibility of different types of people (462). This cannot be achieved realistically insofar as we lack the instruments to measure the differences of degree and the capacity that people have for enduring different forms of labor. But the idea is a beginning. It offers a vision of a compact that assures the rights of everyone through the development of a form of life that affirms in a radical way the transformative energy behind individual suffering. This minimizes the individual’s suffering and promotes a strong sense of self-worth along with the promotion of a contribution to society. It is with this type of society that individuals are able to exist on a level plane of power: each individual is capable of the same amount of value in his or her production of force, and so each individual is judged according to an immanent set of criteria that does not negate their individuality. This is the true foundation for justice, insofar as Nietzsche believes that only among equals can the sense of justice begin to develop.

Ungrounding Morality: Affirming the Joyous Denial

We should take Nietzsche seriously when he asserts that Daybreak is the work of the subterranean man, one who constantly undermines the foundations of our belief by illuminating the mixed origins from which those beliefs emerge (Preface 1). While Nietzsche indicates briefly that it is the scientist who best represents this figure, the subterranean thinker could stand in general for anyone who conducts thought experiments that examine and dismantle our faith in morality. The active decay of morality also forces us to overcome degenerate artists—like Wagner—who are always trying to persuade us to worship where we no longer believe (Preface 4). Beyond the philosophical pessimisms of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, Nietzsche aspires in Daybreak to construct a train of thought that affirms a sophisticated immorality through the cultivation of the ability to deny joyously an outworn set of customs.

Why is morality unproductive? First of all, Nietzsche asserts that the concept of morality entails nothing other than obedience to customs, and we obey these customs insofar as a higher authority commands us, not because we derive utility from them (9). In fact, every potential activity in an individual’s social life has moral implications and significations that push and pull them to more readily assimilate into a social collective. The emphasis here is on group cohesion, for the individual’s actions are to be performed in accordance with a set of customs. An individual that acts in accordance with cultural laws develops the mark of morality. This mark is necessary so that the community can guarantee its protection by ensuring the individual’s strict adherence to a regimented and segmented mode of life. If the individual fails to gain the mark of morality, he or she jeopardizes the entire community, for the supposed or real injustice of the individual is held to affect the social whole negatively. Primitive society does not only take responsibility for the individual’s punishment, it also lays claim to their guilt as well. Thus society has a deep interest in cementing a specific set of customs to ensure its security along with the individual. Nietzsche’s analyses develop strength here: if the individual is motivated to repeat customs that are not necessarily beneficial in themselves, how can we explain originality in any area of life without understanding how innovation of any kind seems to acquire a bad conscience (9)?

Above all, this seems like a problem that addresses the ways in which a society educates its constituents. A re-education of humanity would take away the concept of punishment by showing how it was punishment in the first place that “robbed of its innocence the whole purely chance character of events” (13). In fact, any “evil chance event” that befalls that community arouses a suspicion whether or not custom has been offended. Instead of promoting scientific interest into the natural phenomena of the world, this type of reaction sees value in reality only “insofar as it is capable of being a symbol” (33). Turning the world into a realm of symbolic coordinates is the beginning of nihilism because it degrades the value of this earthly world. It posits a higher and imaginary world that is in control of the events that befall a community; therefore, any good or evil that happens is interpreted as either a divine or diabolical intervention. Before understanding how punishment can be removed from culture, we must understand the long evolution of the ability to calculate external forces and measure them in relation to a society’s strength. Only through this detour can we understand a society’s will to security along with the critical concepts that can give value back to reality without the recourse to a divine order.

We have discussed the way that primitive society interprets and reacts to chance events along with the disciplinary actions taken on the individual. The customs of a society gain a strong protection from criticism because the individual can never guarantee the ability to perform a ritual correctly (21). Thus, even if the individual obeys the performance of custom, no blame can ever be attributed to the custom because it is above all the individual’s weakness that is forced to take the blame. This supposed incompetence of the individual further decreases the feeling of self-worth and self-confidence that the free spirit needs in order to distance him/herself from a set of customs. Nietzsche goes further and argues that our cultural education instills a sense for custom which makes the fact that we have customs in general a matter that can not be discussed without a negative reaction. It is the sense for custom along with the idea that customs can never be perfectly performed that causes the individual a great distress in facing one set of repetitive laws for living within a primitive community.

The individual’s distress or indisposition, too, is attributed to a divine origin. But the process here is more complex. In order to remove these negative feelings, the individual will at first make other people suffer in order to become conscious of the power that the former possesses (15). Nietzsche is very quick to generalize this type of action as cruelty, but we should not interpret this as a simply evil or sadistic action. As Nietzsche will say elsewhere, cruelty is the movement of culture upon bodies, and so we might ask ourselves what sort of unconscious cruelty we impose on other individuals and on ourselves in order to better assimilate ourselves into a group mentality. I think the most important point about cruelty here, though, is the way in which we train ourselves to incorporate a lot of the social repression that we experience through cruelty and turn it on ourselves in the form of psychic repression.

Indeed, this is the second stage of the individual’s mode of measuring force where every bad feeling or misfortune is interpreted as our own well deserved punishment, a little dose of personal karma (15). Against Job’s method, we interpret our misfortunes as a punishment; by doing so we invent a way for atoning for our personal guilt (with respect to the community) and the means to free ourselves from that which we imagine will result from any supposed or real evil deeds that we may commit. This is the second stage in enjoying suffering, one that gives the individual a large advantage insofar as he can sharpen his or her capability for the measurement of forces. And as Nietzsche so boldly suggests, is this not the ability that we are most subtle in? I’m referring to the feeling of power, the judgment of forces, internal and external, that has always remained a fascination for the individual and the society. In fact, Nietzsche argues that “the means discovered for creating this feeling almost constitute the history of culture” (23). We free spirits who can examine the history of culture recognize all too well the customs of cruelty that stunt us and divert us from trekking out on other paths. Or do we?—is this not only half the battle?

Zarathustra and the State: The Apparatus of Capture and Its Limits

In Book 1 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there is a speech on the state (”Of the New Idol”) that is surrounded by a speech on war and the warrior prior to it and also a speech “On the Flies of the Marketplace” following it. All three speeches in a way need to be read together (not only in order but also juxtaposed in other ways) to be fully understood. Having said that, I want to bracket these other two sections off (keeping them in mind) while focusing solely on Zarathustra’s short discourse on the state. The speech begins:

There are still peoples and herds somewhere, but not with us, my brothers: here there are states.

The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I shall speak to you of the death of peoples.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly, it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’

It is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them.

There are several things to notice here. First, Nietzsche conceives of the state as a development that comes about abruptly, through violence and the ’snares’ of an apparatus of capture. Imposed from the outside, the coherence of a people (considered to also be in flux) faces its ‘death’ through the domination of the destroyers that seize a population and order it through the imposition of forms and customs that force it to fragment under the weight of these new forces. On the other hand, the state’s ‘lie’ is a function of its attempt to erase or disguise its operation of seizure upon a populace by overcoding the identity of the state onto the social body: in other words, it falsifies the origin of the population by indebting it to the state that acts as the primal body or consistency of the group. And when Zarathustra mentions the “peoples or herds,” he is referring to the nomadic nature of primeval societies and the imposition of a sedentary state. The move from following the flows of animal packs to diverting flows of water into distributions of farmland are not only two ways of being but also two ways of organizing beings in the proximity of the vortex of capture.

Zarathustra goes on to claim that wherever the state exists, “the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye and sin against custom and law.” Since every culture has an immanent set of laws and customs concerning good and evil, there can be no understanding of the neighbor’s ‘language of good and evil.” However, the state lies in all languages of good and evil, and “whatever it says, it lies–and whatever it has, it has stolen.” Because of this, Zarathustra proposes that the sign of the state is ultimately its confusion of the language of good and evil.

Although it may seem obvious, it is interesting to highlight Nietzsche’s extremely negative views of the state here (compare, for example, sections 16 and 17 of the Second Essay from The Genealogy of Morals. Here, instead of being called “destroyers,” Nietzsche refers to the state as a “pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad” (Section 17, Essay 2). Though this seems negative and isomorphic to what Zarathustra says, it is important to note that Nietzsche claims that “Their work is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms; they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are.” But again, on the other hand, Nietzsche uses the notion of this conqueror race to understand the development of the bad conscience, not through them, but through their expulsion of the “instinct for freedom (in my language: the will to power).” This will be dealt with at greater length later.) In any case, these are different aspects of negativity of the apparatus of capture–in Genealogy, a macro view oriented towards understanding the development of a symptomatic type (bad conscience); in Zarathustra, a negative principle that, as we will see, calls out to great individuals to increase the function of capture.

Returning to the text, how are we to interpret that the state confuses the language of good and evil (or is the confusion). If the state is the evil eye and sin against custom and law, does that mean that it seizes upon the nomadic aggregates and forces them not only into a new milieu and a new relationship with the milieu, but also forces the nomad into a different structure of values, a new way of evaluating and experiencing the world? As Nietzsche says in The Genealogy of Morals:

I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that mas was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced–that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace. The situation that faced sea animals when they were compelled to become land animals or perish was the same as that which faced these semi-animals, well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling, to adventure: suddenly all their instincts were disvalued and ’suspended.’ From now on they had to walk on their feet and ‘bear themselves’ whereas hitherto they had been borne by the water: a dreadful heaviness lay upon them. They felt unable to cope with the simplest undertakings; in this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ! I believe there has never been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort–and at the same time the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their usual demands! Only it was hardly or rarely possible to humor them: as a rule they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifications (Section 16, Essay 2).

This is where, between the transversals of Zarathustra and the Genealogy, we can start to approach questions of the illness of bad conscience in relation to the subversion or undergoing of values (again, in this aspect, an affirmative process–even if it is associated with the suffering of the “feeling of misery on earth”–that commences the auto-subversion of morality that the Subterranean Man, in Daybreak, asserts is the project of joyous denial).

When the state claims to be the people, Zarathustra says “It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a lover over them: thus they served life.” The state lies, but its lying has to be promoted by real effects of capture. “It is destoyers who set snares for many [my emphasis] and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred desires over them.” On the one hand, the use of force and deterrence, and on the other, the production of desire. This is why I said earlier that the sections on the warrior and the market surrounding this one are illuminated especially through this section. For the state needs both the warrior and the market to capture the many. As Zarathustra says:

Many too many are born: the state was invented for the superfluous!…Ah, it whispers its dismal lies to you too, you great souls!… Ah, it divines the abundant hearts that like to squander themselves!…Yes, it divines you too, you conquerors of the old God! You grew weary in battle and now your weariness serves the new idol!…It would like to range heroes and honourable men about it, this new idol! [my emphasis] It likes to sun itself in the sunshine of good consciences–this cold monster! It will give you everything you want if you worship it, this new idol: thus it buys for itself the lustre of your virtures and the glance of your proud eyes. It wants to use you to lure the many-too-many. Yes, a cunning device of Hell has here been devised, a horse of death jingling with the trappings of divine honours! Yes, a death for many has here been devised that glorifies itself as life: truly, a heart-felt service to all preachers of death!

The state honors its priests and its warriors, its great men, for they are the strongest machines of capture. Though they do not come simultaneously, as Nietzsche loves to satirize through the historical scenario of the adoption of Christianity by the Roman state prior to its downfall. Many of Nietzsche’s sections on Christianity and religion can be illuminated by understanding them as genealogical thoughts tracing the capture of the religion by the state, and thus its dissemination (I’m thinking particularly of his sections on the three Jews, Peter, Paul, and Jesus, or section 68 on Paul, “The first Christian” in Daybreak). The warrior is also seduced by the state and, afterwards, turns into a soldier (celebrated by the state with its badges and ranks): “I see many soldiers: if only I could see many warriors! What they wear is called uniform: may what they conceal with it not be uniform too!” (”Of War and Warriors”). The soldier “hero” is to ensure not only the capture, but the maintenance of boundaries, protectors of the city walls, guardians of the social seizure. They are to guard the superfluous from an atavism of nomadism–they guarantee (ceaselessly) the count of the many.

Here the distinction between peoples, prior to capture by the state, and the many, post-capture, incorporated in the state, becomes apparent. The peoples hate the state, while the many are forced to undergo themselves in the capture of the social machine. “I call it the state where everyone, good and bad, is a poison-drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad, loses himself: the state whose universal slow suicide is called–life.” This is what Nietzsche might call “degeneration” or the product of nihilism in the negative sense. For Zarathustra, almost, the dissipation of the state–or the removal of oneself from the proximity of the state–is the best action to get away from this bad odor: “Only there, where the state ceases, does the man who is not superfluous begin: does the song of the necessary man, the unique and irreplaceable melody, begin. There, where the state ceases–look there, my brothers. Do you not see it: the rainbow and the bridges to the Superman?” This passage, as cryptic as it appears, must, in my view, immediately be juxtaposed with a quote from the Genealogy:

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward–this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ’soul.’ The entire inner world…expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organizations protected itself against the old instincts of freedom–punishments belong among these bulwarks–brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself…But thus began the gravest and uncanniest illness, this from which humanity has not yet recovered, man’s suffering of man, of himself–the result of a forcible sundering from his animal past, as it were a leap and a plunge into new surroundings and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against the old instincts upon which his strength, joy, and terribleness had rested hitherto…Let us add at once that, on the other hand, the existence of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to do justice to the spectacle thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight–a spectacle too subtle, too marvelous, too paradoxical to be played senselessly unobserved on some ludicrous planet! From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus’ “great child,” be he called Zeus or chance; he gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.— (Section 16, Essay 2).

It is important to note that there is a striking continuity between the these two texts that I have quoted at length. The question we may ask is: how is Zarathustra and Nietzsche in the Genealogy strikingly different, though very continuous in content? Zarathustra, of course, speaks in a very specific style: compared to the style in the Genealogy (arguably one of Nietzsche’s most systematic works), Zarathustra sounds cryptic at times. The exhortations coming from Zarathustra paint the state in the worst way possible. Where is Nietzsche’s Archimedean point in this text? i.e. can we detect a literary rival that Zarathustra is addressing? In many of the speeches in section one, there is an obvious recurrence of biblical references and allusions to Jesus (and explicit references), but the voice I’m thinking of is Plato. Doesn’t Zarathustra, in the end, seem like a frantic anti-philosopher-king–instead of preaching to a tyrant, preaching against all tyrants and all states as tyrannical machines. Which then could give a new meaning to Zarathustra’s assemblage of texts as a whole: instead of dialogues, Zarathustra discourses are monologues, staged through a different performance, functioning through a subversive methodology that opposes the perfection of the republic and the philosopher-king, to a dispersion from the boundaries of the territory, or, if failing that, to digging beneath captured culture to at least tend the compost of decay whose going under fertilizes the soil for the growth of the overman.

Domestication of the Human: Kings and Conquerors Are Always Barbarians

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.)

Royal science is inseparable from a “hylomorphic” model implying both a form that organizes matter, and a matter prepared for the form; it has often been shown that this schema derives less from technology or life than from a society divided into governors and governed, and later, intellectuals and manual laborers. …all matter is assigned to content, while all form passes into expression. (Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus)

The difference between state science and nomad science is practice; the difference is as great and as narrow as that between geometry and poetry. The practice intrinsic to each mode of scientific exploration is implicit in their method, in their metaphysical categories, and especially in their respective divisions of labor. Nomad thought works continually against the grain of traditional categories and conventional methods; it upsets orders of scale, imparts unusual rhythms, creates social turbulence and sometimes, if it is fortunate, gives birth to new modes of expression.

The state cannot spontaneously create scientific assemblages any more than it can create poetry; the state struggles only with its habitat, its Other, its medium, never (or only in extreme cases) with itself. And in the end, nomadic science draws the state bloodhounds to its hide-out by its exotic odors. The nomads are not only killed formally and indifferently; they are annihilated precisely for their indifference to the state formalism. Nomadic signals hijack the royal message, forge the signature of the state; such floating signals are seeds, impressions of novel forms, sparks which sometimes inspire revolutions. Conventional science is quite effective at reincorporating these signals, as it is skillful at organizing prepared matter; but minor science contraverts every state by inventing new forms of matter, and just as easily a poet dreams up novel expressions.

Between the two kinds of science there is an epistemological difference and an ontological unity. On the one hand, we have the world-as-object, the knowable or intelligible world with clear properties which can be plainly examined in their palpability. Properties are infused with geometry by virtue of their position within a structure: the state space is a closed symmetric grid. On the other hand, we have the world-as-experiment or the world-as-song, the imperceptible or becoming world, whose properties are not encoded into relations, but decoded flows free from axiomatizations. Nomad space is smooth and open, transitive yet untraversed. There is an irreducible epistemological division between the two modes, but in fact, we need both kinds of spaces in order to ‘perform’ science. Ontologically, the two modes are isomorphic: deterritorialization and reterritorialization are two aspects of the same process, operating at different speeds, moving in different directions. And at any rate, to awaken to a scientific mindset is already to go much farther. To become-scientist is to awaken in a desert, or upon an island, with only the differential forces of wind and sand and sky by which to mark distances, judge paths, measure waves. The scientist trusts himself, but cannot trust the world, not even as as an object. Hence science is already a different practice than conventional object-oriented activity. Michel Serres writes:

We do not know what the world is like today; we are only beginning to know it and this knowledge differs from our knowledge of a circumscribed object. We are just beginning to act on the world and this practice differs from our action on circumscribed objects. (From ‘Revisiting the Natural Contract’)

Thus science forms an ontological unity outside of the consistency of appearances, a moving unity capable of penetrating and reconverging cloven discourses, and then of disuniting them again. Science flows: in its nomadic aspect, it chases becoming; as state geometry, it captures being. The shape of the unity is precisely a turn to the formless, an impression of chaos, and a return to the form, the sublimation of collectivity and noisy assemblages into consistent ‘objects.’ In short, both modes require experimental methods and ways of averting breakdown; the experiment must be guarded against self-destruction. The more experimental the method, the riskier and more difficult it is to follow, the greater the exposure to uncertainty, and hence the greater the potential becoming.

The nomadic mode priveleges multiplicity over unity, but only provisionally, not as a foundation. A home, an idea, a language is built from pieces of noise; chaos and turbulence are at the origin of rhythm, of method, of smooth spaces. Following Serres, we are not against rational unity as such, but as Phillip Schweighauser writes in ‘The Desire for Unity and its Failure,’ we are “against the arrogance of a rationalist discourse whose desire for unity turns violent in its exclusion of everything that does not fit in its rigid order.” Not only must we be watchful of experiments which secretly desire to dominate nature, but we must actually experiment upon our desires in order to transform culture.

Woman at the Window Salvador Dalí, oil on board (1925)

What do we understand to be the boundaries of our neighbor: I mean that which he as it were engraves and impresses himself into and upon us? We understand nothing of him except the change in us of which he is cause — our knowledge of him is like the hollow space which has been shaped. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak 118)

Stripped of its social connotations, tolerance and democracy mean only a desire to say that the external is gone, what belongs (inside) is all; and there are plenty who say it, whether or not it is true! Our existence as social subjects is socially constructed; thus what once seemed outrageous now seems trivial and preliminary. Perhaps our age, though more complex in some ways, is ultimately not so different from Nietzsche’s: for what always matters more than metaphysics is how we actually measure and compare human beings; and now, being without Gods or absolutes to function as a universal scale, where are we to turn? “Actions are never what they appear to us to be!” (Daybreak 116) Still it is always the same story: we turn away, we cannot bear the intensity of the material, we desperately grasp outside, we look beyond for a vision capable of grasping all of being at once.

Metaphysics is done not from luxury but out of dire necessity: above all, we look away from the world, we repress space (culture-space, nature-space, psychic-space): this need for specificity-within-multiplicity is the name as such, the shape of all social oppression, the very cost of ‘civilization.’ Metaphysics traces lines beyond social forms into the formless, the chaotic and subversive turbulence beneath the turgid surface of politics, the violence beneath the ideal image, the flux between the forms. All language is a struggle between times; a struggle within time to overcome time. Language is temporality posed as a challenge; it is a creative space, positive in its empty smoothness, but eerily mute, insufficient in and of itself to initiate the vibrations of a new becoming.

Appearances replace things, literature overtakes myth; but this immateriality is always produced socially as cultural material, as material culture — as the opening onto new possibilities of becoming, new illusions but also new realities. Value in itself is the truly social illusion, all others repeat its primary act of distinction. Values are implicit, “subjective” in the sense that they distinguish individuals, capture the individual as a ‘moment’ of social evolution, force him into regions, territorialize his body. The body is valued as such, as an object, in one historical period; as a subject in another. Merely a linguistic, or a political change? Regardless, values are incessantly crumbling and being refashioned, all things flow. Sometimes the reterritorialization proceeds justly and sometimes hapharzardly, to be sure — but well-reckoned or not, the ‘arbitrary’ names and laws we give often stick, and become in the end even more important than the underlying things themselves. In short, we are always getting in the way of our perception of things, especially ourselves. This is the real reason why we are only able to catch sight of appearances: we ourselves are the obstacle we are trying to see around. Society is a machine which makes historical objects out of human beings; social critique describes new possible a-historical modes of becoming. The social impulse is a-social; that is, the essence of society is beyond the social. We can overcome social objectification, the same way we overcome metaphysical interposition: by overcoming ourselves. Transvaluation: don’t just seek to understand; seek to transform. Trust your senses, not your beliefs: chase becoming, not being. Turn towards the future.

Katie Micheson suggests Nietzsche advances “a dynamic understanding of an unconscious rather than merely a descriptive use of ‘unconscious,” on the basis of an active, custom-shaping force responsible for the historical development of guilt, forgetfulness, debt, pity and resentment. The unconscious for Nietzsche is creative, metaphysical, transformation, transvaluative: in short, “it’s concepts are not simply latent but are actively shaping the conscious actions and productions of the actor.” Micheson suggests that whereas Freud was concerned with uncovering repressed memories in order to re-normalize neurotic subjects, Nietzsche advocated not merely self-understanding, but self-transformation and overcoming. Freud tells us to understand our situation; Nietzsche tells us to face up to it, to overcome it, to transform it, to create new situations entirely. Psychoanalysis should not be about locking down desire inside a power structure; it should be about opening and unlocking power structures to enable desire and pleasure to employ their productive social power. Psychoanalysis is an art of counter-production; in its classical form it is exemplified by Lacan, where the subject is a gap in the transferential space, a ‘donut’ whose empty center transfixes the subject within a social space. Space is always segmented, regulated, already counted and measured: Lacan writes somewhere that society is elitist. He’s right, more or less, but the social question not about subjects, or subject-spaces. The social question is a question about subject-groups, who territorialize spaces in order to exert power and create mechanisms of control. The social question is, in short, a question about power.

The unconscious is the human organ which exerts and responds to pure power. The power of words, images, signs; the power of gestures, faces, crowds; the power of ideas, of hope, of the future: the unconscious resonantes with powerful signals, it responds to power, it forms and coordinates groups of subjects to become responsible to a signal. Thus the unconscious commands (by coordinating groups) and obeys (by responding to power); it hijacks consciousness and is hijacked by consciousness. It is a temporal rupture, it is the anti-foundational foundation of the Lacanian subject. The unconscious is a milieu, a mulitplicity, a self-organizing swarm of abstract machines. The unconscious plays with structure, this is almost a perfect definition: it aligns ontologies, transforms space, spontaneously introduces asymmetry. The unconscious is the signal signalling itself: who is listening, who is speaking? It no longer matters, it never did: the question (as always) is what to do, what to think, what to become. The unconscious is not ‘turned away’ from consciousness, from the world; it is what is turning awareness towards itself, towards the open. The unconscious is resistance to power, and the medium of social power itself. The formation of the subject group, with goals, aims, identity, from the chaotic milieu is the most generic resistance.

Subject-groups can be reactionary or revolutionary. The point is not to be included in the group, not to disappear into the group-structure, not to become locked into docile stable equilibrium. Become a point of rupture; become a million lacerated lines of flight. Do not renounce pleasure, do not abandon your power when it is required most! The pure act, the act done for its own sake, is the most unconscious and instinctual, hence the easiest and thus also the least ‘purposeful’ in the sense of metaphysical or social ends. This is the hidden material meaning of compassion, of culture: the pure act of the unconscious is produced socially, through machines which inscribe desires upon us, which inscribe us within a field of limits to producing new flows of desire. All instincts must be re-evaluated in light of the discovery of the unconscious, of an immaterial social field which coincides with our material critical capacity to resist being controlled and made into subjects.

Reaching Out

The will to power is not essentially political; it aims beyond politics towards a more subtle possession. The will to power is articulated as a higher expression of the will to live, as opposed to the will to survive. It is the will to exercise power. Its primary function is to be functional, that is: dynamic, active and creative. This kind of willing indicates not a static ideal will rather an energetic, even libidinal force to overcome, to dominate one’s environment as well as to exploit and control others. Importantly, the will to power does not function as some kind of pure essence of vitality, even less an aesthetic ‘taste’ or ethical harmony.

Rather, it is struggle itself, the will to raise oneself up, out joyfully from nothingness, into higher and more rarefied regions of becoming. It is not a duty, but a desire to feel energy being actively employed; it is the surging of this power itself. It aims to transcend but is not itself therefore transcendent; rather, the will to power is material, and always more concrete, more real than we are comfortable admitting. The will to power is our desire to possess, to exploit, to dominate, to control. Hence the primary articulation of the will to power is as a singular thrust rather than a multiplicity of drives. Though clearly each will struggles against every other, ultimately every will struggles against itself, operates upon itself, upon its own form or nature in order to improve itself, to overcome.

Every will wrestles its own fate. Multiplicity is a cosmic idea, yet it must itself be distinguished from the pre-differentiated flux. The will to power is the secret principle of multiplicity, the underlying force behind morphogensis. The will to power is the deepest space of expression, whether lexical, genetic or artistic. The dream of the highest reaches of power is fluid without superfluity, the will to power is declination, it is precisely an infinitesimal. It is not the origin of subjectivity, but the origin of flux, of radical differences: a singular, “indicative,” spontaneous passion. The will to power does not hypostasize many separate forces into an ideal, as we find over and over again in countless descriptions of the world: the State, God, the Earth, the soul, the body, meaning, truth, the good, etc. Theory must critique the world; it must seek to change it, to change how we see our environments, our abilities, our potential, our power. How do we feel about our mastery? The question cannot be answered with reference to just any world; it must be actively realized within this world. Nietzsche of course reminds us that philosophers have not yet even discovered the world; they are still bound by God and grammar into describing a world, a historically-specific constellation of events which are woven inextricably into myths about an underlying metaphysical reality. While there is indeed something flow beyond and beneath this sick animal man: it is the same repressed desire, the will to power. It is what has been sacrificed in the rank and file in the name of civilization, civility and consciousness.

Is consciousness an expression of the will to power? But we find much clearer expressions of this will precisely in myths and dreams and tragedies. The unconscious is a spectacle-factory. Our dreams, our lies, our ideas, our work — all tell our unique story without a single error, but ironically this is achieved only through malice, injustice, blindness and cruelty. This is the revenge of Plato, perhaps: our educated distaste for formlessness, for the obscure, for immanence, for the concrete — precisely for pain and for submission. Consciousness is not a special crystal, it is merely specialization. We humanize the universe and ourselves; we tell lies, but thereby create a reality. How long until a world becomes the world? We have to await the birth of the Gods, of heroes, of singular arrangements and parabolic narration. Storytelling is only effective to the degree it resists humanizing reality. Literature is great to the degree it is inhuman, even anti-humanistic. Literature is great to the degree that it affects a never-ending separation from all that inspires shame and guilt and resentment. Literature is like mythology: it is stronger than mere humanity, it is older and wiser and more powerful, more conscious of the exercise of its power.

But what power? Words — that is, symbols, phantoms, hijacked signals? Theory is the furthest evolution of the literary; it marks the point where labor becomes conscious of its segmentation, of its hierarchy and its rigidity. The work has becomes aware of the creator, and so becomes alienated from the creator, separate, opaque, transfigured, no longer identical to itself. It is at the mercy of history, exposed to the elemental forces of differentiation and dissemination. Yet words know when they are misused. The text slowly unbinds itself from the author. It becomes an organless body, infested by differences, by bloodless figurations leading onto the void. The truth of the work is not the work but within the work; as by calculation we may transmit an error-free signal between distant satellites, theory is the work-become-algebra, a self-referential calculus of indications. Finally, labor implodes: total production, total consciousness creates total alienation, total isolation. Theory is radical because it is the point where labor becomes play, where the potential for a scientific management of the ‘labor problem’ becomes realizable.

At the moment when humanity itself is realizable, it is already too late for us to realize it. But yet we refuse to renounce play; we owe this to the impact of art, to the enduring cultural logic of the gift as opposed to exchange. We want to experiment, we want to become more than human. Being human means being made calculable; we want to be more than a social text — we want full lives, we want to be total human beings. We desire this so much we unthinkingly accept a simple image of humanity as the absolute truth: ‘man’ as a pure essence, an organless body, becomes the subject, metaphysical anchor for an entire reality.

Whereas, without ever becoming subject, the will to power is the very production of subjectivity. The locus of the creative is not the sovereignty of power but its absence, that is, its necessity and the conditions for its institution. The elevation of consciousness, inspiring awareness of psychic and collective power over the world, over the state, over capital — these are the post-civic goal of any radical political project. It is not that we are powerless but that we have not yet realized our power, not yet chosen to exercise it. Society transcends the state, the church, the corporation: it is the performative foundation of public space. Awareness of power is the condition for the creation of a smooth space for discourse, the dual basis of theory and ideology. Difference and repetition. But neither are enough to rescue us from the dangers which lurk just beyond the edges of the state. Chaos, turbulence, void. We must bring the war machine within our hearts, we must embrace discipline, paradoxically in order to become free. We must regain the power to will in order to realize the will to power.

Dionysos and Ariadne

We do not generally recognize how temporary our concepts and customs are. Foucault has argued our modern concept of sexuality is rooted inextricably in the specific marriage rituals in late Western society. His genealogical-historical method is reminiscent in many ways to Nietzsche’s. Both will explain by turns how this or that concept has its true origin in a (relatively) quite recent conceptual matrix, as opposed to some ancient transcendent intervention. Both show how nomadic counter-insurgencies have always existed to provoke the stability of the existing binary maps towards self-overcoming. The logicization of sexuality, the reduction to a male-female dipole is perhaps the most discouraging of Foucault’s meditations. Nietzsche already is quite sensitive to this modern theme.

Some of the best meditations on sexual politics come from the Anti-Christ: I am thinking of course of the passages on marriage. We are shown that marriage is dissolving but precisely because of love, because we marry on the basis of transitory contingency rather than sexual drives. Mate-selection is no longer authorized by cultural and social authorities; degeneration of rigid cultural forms is the only result. We can mourn this lost becoming — but we risk losing ourselves in such a mourning. Foucault perhaps gets trapped in a melancholic-historic mode which can only mourn the aborted becomings, the sorrowful anguish of the oppressed, the misery of our collective organisms and individual lives.

But hard as it may be to affirm, things that are falling apart should be accelerated in their self-destruction, so that they may be overcome. We must have space for the new, for varieties yet unseen, for variations not yet rescued from the chaotic abyss beyond the segmented spaces of the state and regimented times of custom. We need to outrun the state, we need to be looking out for weapons. We therefore need a philosophy of speed, of rhizomatic evolution, of fluid time. We need a sexual politics based on difference rather than identity.

Nietzsche’s voice is difficult to consign a single tone, theme, location, duration or intensity. His very style is divergent, charged with lightning, catalytic, an evolution and a return. It defies form while pointing the way towards new formations. His text reforms by deforming, deforms by informing. Information as pre-individual, driven by powerful forces — above all, cultivated. Beneath the human relation a flow, a struggle beneath the tables of public celebrations. Chaos as the limit, wandering in the boundaries. A nomadic politics beneath sexuality, a nomadic sexuality beneath politics. We can read Nietzsche without Freud; indeed, we must. Freud is straight-jackets and transference; Nietzsche is liberation and transversality. The subversions are not of the same order; one is a mystical geometry, the other is a joyous materialism. We must emphasize the limitedness of any relation to Freud until we have unfolded Nietzsche’s original and striking position on evolution, on time, and on sexual politics.
Perhaps the clearest difference which can be drawn between Freud and Nietzsche is the question of sexuality.

In Nietzsche the question is not biological, nor mythical, nor subconscious. Intercourse is cultural and material; sex is our writing and our bodies. Nietzsche accomplishes the return of the subject in his text. He completes the modern project by showing it’s problematic to recur endlessly. We have, are, will always be debating the posthuman under one guise or another; it occurs even before the human, the future within the present. The flower within the seed, the seed’s dream of flowering. The time of overman is not linear. The modern is the open; Nietzsche is with Lyotard in that the ‘posthuman’ implications of human possibility are completely tied up with his present situation. The future can be read from a thousand signs. A psychoanalysis of decoding dreams without recourse to mythology or biotechnology; one which asserts the existence of pure, decoded flows of intensity, a metaphysics of the will to power.

We need a modern sexual politics, one asserting a difference without identity. A non-dialectical difference. Through dialogue, the subversions of Marx and Freud are too often conflated with the singular Nietzschean revolution. Nietzsche’s voice deserves to be heard alone; but making his project into a political one requires conjunction. Yet his voice is hermetic, sealed off — precisely because it is an opening. This paradox will drive us forward, keep us questioning.
First, we need an institutional psychoanalysis which is not an institution of psychoanalysis; this gap, which Freud and Marx also point toward, is what Nietzsche’s text succeeds in opening — and allows to remain open. This is the critical step which Freud could not take, which Marx could indicate only towards the end when his revolutionary fire had consumed itself; whereas Freud could not label anarchic recurrence as ‘neurotic’ quickly enough. On the contrary, Nietzsche places a doorstop in the portal of tomorrow; his text is like a rude guest, whose body/text occupies more than any space allotted specifically for it. A virus, the messy guest who leaves doors open: an importunity which can be forgiven as an inconvenience since it is in hindsight a significant benefit, even a theoretical necessity.

We must enter and exit problems quickly; we must not allow ourselves to be trapped. We must lay traps; but then we must allow our homes to be entered by strangers, we must play hosts to nomadic swarms. We must live dangerously, allow malicious flows of energy to pass through us. In a parable of Nietzsche, the Don Juan of knowledge would consume learning until there was no knowledge left but that which was poison, knowing which would endanger his life. But this would still not reduce its value in his eyes. Knowledge for knowlege’s sake: he would rather know Hell than cease his curiosity. Sexual morality is silence, non-education: not knowing, it is a wanting not to know, to continue to forget. I cannot abide this, therefore I abjure it. I have already forgotten it. Rather than choose, I deny the choice. To say “no” in this way is to affirm multiplicity. Contempt for forgetting is revolutionary, just as forgetting can be a becoming-innocent. We ought to consign prescribed choices to oblivion; no more identity politics. Multiplicity is first, difference the origin of everything. All things from their opposites; everything flows, from a million sources, towards a million black holes. The formation of lines of organic flight: the source of future. We must make hands to make the future; neither will make themselves. We cannot unmake gender until we lose our unwavering faith in grammar. Gender makes new conjugations illegal. The fascism of God, of the State, of language is always also sexual totalitarianism. No politics without sexual politics: the desire which comes first, the desire which means reproduction, transversality, survival.

Sexuality and power: bodies, ownership, identity
Sexuality and energy: sources, flows, instability
Sexuality and the future: genealogy, difference, transhumanity

The space of a remark is not merely a site for events, but always a sort of home: it plays host to flocks of fragmentary feelings, to parasitic swarms of minimal ‘incorporeal’ entities. Language is sense only in immense assemblages. Books are mass conflagrations of innumerable pieces of inchoate noise. This is why the novel is always — unresolved. Feelings and intensities are irreconciliable because they are irreversible and contain their contradictions: words are their own gesticulations, names self-fulfilling marks inscribed upon bodies. Enunciation is always a self-explanatory inscription, a marking by which the object is made equal, entitled, nominated. Language is that violent purging of the blank positivity of Being, in exchange for the darkness of multiplicity, for the silence of absolute prayer, and ultimately for the obscurity of interminable exegesis. Where does the unfolding stop and the refolding begin? The intertial point is not the same as the signifier or the signified, nor even the signal which orders their coordination. For conversation is linear but transversal, a translation between two orders, tracings between various families of signifiers.

So if culture can become cruel, dominating, malicious, until ultimately judgment is the only actual signified — this is because culture is abstract, virtual at its core. It reveals itself in the movement of spirits upon bodies. The incorporeal signal can be hijacked, infected with a counter-signal, the space reorganized: the master-signifier can be overthrown. Engagement in this struggle against established spaces uncovers new spaces for desire, reveals secret escapeways and hidden patterns. The struggle is the battle to understand the other: it seems to require a war machine, the establishment of separate but interfacing positions, pathways and spaces. Language modestly hides its own intervention, allows the dyad to imagine that no relation whatsoever attains between them; and whether as a noisy hospitality or a noise which disrupts hospitality, conversation is the material core of sociality. We trade food for words, thought for bread; the ‘person of words’ is parasitic in more than one way. (For this cultural type, conversation becomes the — ambiguous — cure for living in society.)

An angel passes: there is a pause within the vocalic flow. Intensities are signaling their distribution an intercourse of marked bodies in unmarked spaces: the word is the injunction of a spirit which countermands this movement of bodies, and inspires a trans-figuration. Language is civilization, and music its spirit. Culture is cadence: a song enraptures the laconic barbarian. For before we can speak we must already be taught to love the others’ word, to obey it unconsciously, to attune ourselves to its gaps and continuities: all this in order to speak, to think together, to coordinate vitalities. Where music is dancing joyously together between the fire of noise and the void of silence, language seeks to map these discretized realms onto one another. The problem of society is first the Babelian paradox: a multiplicity of languages and a single task, so that the social relation inherently strives towards inter-resonance, counter-balance, and transversal self-organization. Baptised in this material communion, we finally free one another from the unwavering jealousy of origin-myth.

Establishment always occurs simultaneously with a change in focus, a reconstitution at a higher level of analysis. The origin of institution lies in an emergent super-organization, capable of responding to abstract summarizations of events, persisting as a kind of discipline, a higher and orderly vantage point with which to regard the chaos of local ecosystemic coordinations. Institution is a concept-State: its function is to designate a new layer of coordinated activity which is to established by forces external to it. To think or act institutionally is to shift the discourse neither ‘left’ nor ‘right,’ but rather ever upwards into infinity: not only to a higher layer or perspective, but to a new plane of consistency whereby we become aware of the intrinsic machinic value of energy. The institutionalizing impulse-to-order externalizes its own energy as a dimensional break in the geometry of the local conceptual-political field.

Let us begin by saying institutionalization is a becoming-machine, the establishment of a universalizable operation cycle. The institution is a machine which as such has no authority to impose rules and laws, is impotent as such — and so rather subjects the entire universe to its cycle of operations, utilizing whatever forces are available to it to ensure its survival.

Institutions provoke a cosmic functionalization which is necessarily ambiguous: to open new spaces for coordinated vitality, some others must be closed forever. Society is a machine which unfolds itself more than it folds back in: it is a super-institution, which miraculously donates a positive function to all that which benefits its self-organization.

Thus machinic subjects understand intimately the role of science, even if they can no longer conceive of the scientific as such. Does the institution destroy the possibility of pure science? It is perhaps too much to assert that science can only becomes ‘innovative’ when at a distance from machinic organizations of subjectivity; doubtless they require one another. Yet this very need seems somewhat contrived, something of a fiction. Yet what would such a ‘pure’ science be, in isolation from any predictable processes? And what would such an institution produce, devoid of order, synchrony or goal?

Culture is an institution in the past tense: what was or has been established. But the dynamics of coordination do not necessarily proceed along indicated cultural paths. To all goals, identities, desires, layers, pathways, endpoints, institutions are indifferent.

In short, institutes are organizations which transform energy; speed is the only important difference. Establishment invests energy directly into a circular process of self-renewal. Consider a cube replaced by infinitely many differently-sized spheres: the fact of difference (in size) precludes any question of alternative distributions, and the position of the largest determine the necessary arrangement of the smaller…

The geometry of social order is invested by divisions of life-space, while the intensity of social desire seeks to overcome divisions by reunification, streamlining the separation which produces cultural objects… Eventually the process ends where it had begun: we find our culture has become automatic, our thoughts and actions reflexive, our intensity subdivided until it has become harmless.

Institutions neutralize desire. There is no escaping the fact that the massive coordination of activity has as its necessary consequence the ‘automatization’ of almost every aspect of life, to the extent we are shocked when the world doesn’t correspond to our institutionalized cognition. So my question is this: is it possible to truly think post-institutionally, given that our cultural mode of thought has been irrevocably shaped by institutions?

Institutions combine the ‘eternal memory’ of science, mathematics and religion, with the ‘momentary experience’ of phenomenology, sociopsychology, and critical theory. The problem of institutions is the problem of slavery and aristocracy, the problem of freedom and envy. Approached through the lens of objective science, the subject simply imitates the multiplicity of the institution. Even science becomes an institution only when its sets about to study them as a subject (‘subject to law’) — and, in a real sense, to control them by this study. The universal simulation produced by the institution is the central problematic of hyper-mechanization; it is the dream of establishment — a paradise. All institutions secretly want to become utopias; this desire distorted, become obscene, is capital. Social thought has become almost completely functionalized, embodied as exchange within an open community. The closure of society to the universe is almost irreversible; the functionalization of the universe for society is almost complete. But we are not yet machines, and still have time to postpone the moment of inhumanity.

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art and science. There are developmental factors and connections among these three, for “art raises its head when religion relaxes its hold,” and the “scientific man is the further evolution of the artistic” (150; 223). Poets, for example, construct bridges to distant ages and dying religions, creating metaphysical alleviations that only serve to quell the truly revolutionary energy flowing beneath the surface of the social body (148). Also, artists are the notorious “glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind,” and even though this has granted us the signification of a beautiful world, we have to ask ourselves the question: if Nietzsche tells of the death throes of art and religion, what does science inherit from these projects and how can their insights and creations be carried on in an affirmative project for the creation of necessary rings of a universal culture of free spirits (220)?

Art’s expansion transforms religious sensations and expressions, lending them profundity and an increased capacity for articulating these sensations—and science (the Enlightenment) is responsible for the dispersion of religious feelings into other areas, even politics (150). But if art is dying, then we must posit that the transformations of these metaphysical and religious sensations through art must also become invested into a new sphere, namely science. This is true because, when one organ of culture has weakened, another organ “has to discharge not only its own function but another as well” (231). Science inherits from art its ability to “look upon life in any of its forms with interest and pleasure, and to educate our sensibilities so far that we at last cry: ‘life, however it may be, is good!’” and has even made this affirmation “an almighty requirement of knowledge” (222). Thus, we can give up art without losing the capacity and sensibility that art and religion has prepared for us.

Science has to cultivate these capacities and seize upon its true calling as the project of achieving an objective by the appropriate means (256). Nietzsche’s science, gifted with the premonition of the Eternal Return, will assert that “every action performed by a human being becomes in some way the cause of other actions, decisions, thoughts, that everything that happens is inextricably knotted to everything that will happen,” that motion is enveloped in an immortality that is the total union of all being (208). Science also must recognize that everyone is “determined by such systems and representatives of different cultures” in a necessary but alterable fashion (274). This power to alter our cultural “determinations” means that we are responsible for our experiences and life experiments, that these are to be fused into a “goal without remainder” that has as its aim the will to distinguish ourselves as forming “a necessary chain of rings of culture and from this necessity to recognize the necessity inherent in the course of culture in general” (292). We are cultural artifacts composing necessary links to a universal culture that, even if it exists only potentially, must be achieved by the labor of free spirits, the kind that seem “to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their country or class” (227). Of course, the dominant culture and the established authority will resist the required degeneration of its stability, but the development of a de-centered, non-hierarchical, universal culture can only begin through the process of weakening the fetters of state culture. This will allow for the generation of lines of flight for new social organizations and/or assemblages.

To conclude, there are three possible factors for the birth of a global culture: absolute music, the scientific analysis of symbolic gestures, and a new language for all. The first two are closely linked, and they require an understanding of how poetry produces a superimposition of immediate feelings in music to the point where the music itself is rendered immediately symbolic for our internal life (215). The development of absolute music for the social ear means that music’s symbolism is understood without further assistance—likewise, the science of cultural tones in vocal patterns that are indicative of mood, feelings and expressions will be necessary to uncovering the vastness of operations at work in unconscious modifications of body and voice. Furthermore, linguistics and philology, as the two dominant sciences of language, can then dedicate their study of the laws of individual languages to the forms of non-verbal thought in a synthesis that has as its goal the creation of a “new language for all—first as a commercial language, then as the language of intellectual intercourse in general” (267). Given that this is merely a preliminary overview of an undercurrent in Human All Too Human, the next step in continuing this line of thought has to navigate the role of the state, the relations of states among themselves, and the relations among the responsibilities that we all bare to our composition of immortal vibrations in the links of a universal cultural chain.

–Taylor Adkins

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007

Just as the glaciers increase when in the equatorial regions the sun burns down upon the sea with greater heat than before, so it may be that a very strong and aggressive free-spiritedness is evidence that somewhere the heat of sensibility has sustained an extraordinary increase.
Nietzsche (§232, Human, All Too Human)

As Nietzsche develops it, the specifically psychological question is already a social investigation, perhaps even close to the anthropological question. The psychologist asks: what is the specifically cultural essence, or social truth, which is expressing itself in such-and-such a symptom?

Hence in order to explain scientifically the psychological origins of culture, Nietzsche dares to suggest we have need of a truly new kind of science, one finally made capable of analyzing cultural institutions without prejudice, from a perspective both critical and healing at once. In order to maintain its deliberate and fruitful inconsistency, the science of the unconscious must first of all recognize that cultural shifts are like geological changes. Social evolution shifts all potential axes of action and reallocates the coordination of space and time. Cultural transformations can sometimes even involve a shift in cognitive dimension, as in the ‘cusp’ at the apex of a mountain range, born from a complex balancing of counter-movements.

Indeed, we see Nietzsche intervening in the popular account origins of society, of thought – but always in order to point towards a more legitimately scientific and psycho-historical way of diagnosing and re-evaluating specific cultural modalities. For the psychologist, a fable of creation (whether of the universe or a single idea) betrays jealousy and ambition. We ought to understand creativity in a purely immanent sense: not as diverging from being, but rather perceiving that creation functions as the origin of difference, and is not only concerned with temporary variations in dominant modes of consumption or production. The power of the originary impulse is such that it formulates even the second-order coordinations of coordination which all together frame the conditions of any potential change. This is why unrecognized difference is the very beginning of thought.

The dominant patterns of coordination express themselves culturally as a lattice of ontological limitations a people willingly imposes upon its self-creation: an absolute vision, of an absolute goal. Though creativity may fail, though the goal may be forgotten, the path is anachronistically adhered to: this is the meaning of an origin, as the traumatic real which lurks behind every symptom as unitary cause. Over time a people loses their original vision of the world; and when our very principles have been inverted, how could we hope to understand our own origin? Thus the question arises: have we misheard the voice of history? Has reality been misrepresented, or worse – has representation become indiscernible from reality?

The desire to create continually is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something one really does not need to make anything—and yet one nonetheless does very much. There exists above the ‘productive’ man a yet higher species.
Nietzsche (§210, Human, All Too Human)

“Departure requires a rending that rips a part of the body from the part that still adheres to the shore where it was born, to the neighborhood of its kinfolk, to the house and the village with its customary inhabitants, to the culture of its language and to the rigidity of habit. Whoever does not get moving learns nothing, Yes, depart, divide yourself into parts. Your peers risk condemning you as a separated brother. You were unique and had a point of reference, you will become many, and sometimes incoherent, like the universe, which, it is said, exploded at the beginning in a big bang. Depart, and then everything begins, at least your explosion in worlds apart.” –Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge

From the start of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche sets up the task of burning the corpse of God and religion, along with its bastard son, metaphysics. To do this, Nietzsche not only raises the challenge to philosophy to become thoroughly historical and historicizing, but also challenges science to develop “a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, likewise of all the agitations we experience within ourselves in cultural and social intercourse, and indeed even when we are alone” (12). This chemistry and history would be directed especially toward the way in which the reason and imagination function together to produce metaphysical images that overcode the natural world. In other words, Nietzsche argues that because we impose moral, aesthetic and religious demands on the world, we have recreated it in light of these demands—this happens insofar as “it is the human intellect that has made appearance appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things” (20).

This not only applies for these three specific overcodings. Even mathematics produces metaphysical illusions insofar as number imposes a false unity with arbitrary units of measure; however, it is only because these units are imposed with constancy that pure multiplicity can be subsumed under a number or set as a unity and still retain any utility. An example of an illusory unity is custom, defined as “the union of the pleasant and the useful” (52). This plurality exists as a unity insofar as custom is grounded in habit, which produces pleasant sensations because they integrate us within a collective. Custom takes on its power through the investments and productions of herd pleasure. It acts as a sort of arbitrary unifier—it forms a set of the multiple ways in which the social field produces a rhythm that corresponds with habits that legitimate themselves as useful. However, we can unfold or disentangle utility and any criteria relating to pleasure if we are able to create truly vital thought experiments that construct new ways of grouping together different values of the useful and pleasurable—maybe to the detriment of one or the other for the developing cultural forms that this sort of experimentation may produce. The question of the chemistry of social groups would consequently be concerned with the large molar aggregates of custom (representation) and the selection of the molecular flows of pleasure and utility that (de)compose custom and culture at large.

This is one path for this potential chemistry, but it is insufficient by itself because it presupposes a macropolitical view of situations and thus already relates our criteria to a pre-existing social body already pervaded with a dominant culture. On the micropolitical level, we could ask how to create along with this chemistry a physics of mortal and transient customs. Nietzsche sets this task for the free spirits to come so that they may continue the process of the auto-liberation of thought. As he reminds us, “The less men are bound by tradition, the greater is the fermentation of motivations within them, and the greater in consequence their outward restlessness, their mingling together with one another, the polyphony of their endeavours” (24). Nietzsche believes that to create this polyphony, we will have to move “beyond the self-enclosed original national cultures” (24). Nietzsche proposes a historicizing philosophy linked to the natural sciences that can analyze standards for a generic culture, along with the political situations that they entail, and that can act as a constructive milieu for thought. In fact, he challenges us to discover “knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century” (25). Ecumenical has (at least) two significant meanings here: general and universal on the one hand, mixed and motley on the other. With this we can tease out a physics along with this socio-historical chemistry. For if we couple Nietzsche’s proposal for a chemistry of aesthetic, religious and moral concepts and sensations with his injunction to discover the preconditions of culture from a universal point of view, then we start to connect a series of thoughts that point toward a social science that can address the question of generic and universal cultural construction that grounds itself in a physics of the interaction between molecular beliefs and desires (affects) and the corresponding cultural formations (custom) that result from the bindings of the former to a metaphysical image. The historicizing process, then, must deal with the evolution of habit and the institutions of the state that stratify custom within the social field.

–Taylor Adkins

(c) Fractal Ontology, 2007

Towards a Meta-problematics of Sensitivity

0 / Preface

Can we separate sense from situation?

If sense is first broached in the rupture of presence– if sense is merely an immanent intelligibility– then accordingly we would wish to know which ontological rules, if any, sensibility obeys. But is sense actually structured this way?

In attempting to answer this question, our first guiding principle shall be that not only is ontology inevitably economized and politicized as an active process in classifying and ordering the world, but also that ontology as such is a form of political economy. The neutrality is only apparent, or actual sterility; for ontology is by nature a colonialism. It is efficient organization. A closed ontology is consequently an anxiety, a monumental repression and, when taken literally, a refined form of self-deception.

Since they are interdependent, we can never properly divorce sense from situation. However, we can open out our entire sense-situation system, allowing the whole assemblage to unfold along radically new lines. We cannot change the sense of a situation at will. Importantly, it is an open question whether some new sense-situation system is possible. The encounter calls us precisely to sensitivity and to responsibility. Because sense is always a transversal mapping between and across radically different kinds of reality, sense is not just transparent sensation, but clear agency. Sense is cosmic: it accomplishes an active connection across material and abstracted ontological territories.

A modern Zeno’s paradox: the limit of the self-difference within and between autonomous ontological planes is unbounded. This illuminates three important questions: (1) Can we separate sense from sensititivy? (2) Can we transparently distinguish the perception from the interface? (3) Can we distinguish authoritatively between an ontological system and the energies it classifies?

1 / Space

Sense is nothing without a space in which to unfold, to insist, to happen. Thus in sense we find both inner and exo-natural space, and an active movement coupling them together. Sensitivity is a bridge which subsists from concrete duration: sense is something that happens. Sense in-sists as an event which opens a space within the ‘boundary’ between matter and thought, or between the motion of energy and its trace. These traces, insofar as they constitute our perceptual horizon, form a circularly linked chain: impression, memory, imagination, and language. But is the space open or closed? Are we ultimately bounded on the outside by ‘culture’? Or is culture what allows us to conceive of boundaries, that is, to authorize ontology?

Culture informs the cognitive horizon and en-acts its limitedness. Ontology is a quite necessary cultural function: it performs the degree-zero taboo encoding. Hence a formal ontology states what may or may not be spoken of sensibly. To think ontologically is to label the relation of flows of energy to flows of speech, each according to its own mythical measure. Ontological thought is magical thought with real consequences.

The formal encoding of a relation between energy and speech is always a prescription. Describing the relation between surfaces of varying metaphysical reality– to trace between systems of different ontological dimension– is always to inscribe the relation as a fractal marking upon bodies, which makes possible the internalization of both surfaces, as well as the depths, in a singular transversal mapping. Sensitivity is not limited to the sensical. We are as impressed by the depths of delirium as we are awed by the heights of clarity and eloquence. Within ontology the traces of the sensible are arranged: from intensity to image to sign to thought, sense is in each case a differential relation between a metaphysical and a physical surface.

Sense is therefore an intra-ontological interface, an event which occurs on the edge of the situation. The deployment of sense is a violence, whether onto the metaphysical surface as language or transcendent sounds which inspire focus, order, obedience; or whether sense is deployed upon physical surfaces as marks cut into bodies, sense is a forced fractal mapping which inscribes upon bodies their place not only in the family-social space but cosmically, environmentally, politically, and so on.

Ontology is never indifferent to politics: no one has been more aware of this, perhaps, than Wittgenstein, with whom we agree that naming is always a labeling. Ontology as such, and meaning more generally, can only be considered in terms of its use: as force, as sign, as thought. Sense presupposes the social.

Sensitivity demands a great deal of mutual observation. Sensations are not ontologically equivalent to image-words which in turn are not ontologically equivalent to the rules of language games. All instances of sense are self-destructing, but infinitely adaptive.

But sense is neither logic or reality or culture. The sensible event traces a transversal mapping which consummates the deepest interconnections between reality and culture and logic, and in fact, their mutual foundation . We must remember that not only do the elements of an ontology impose a sort of measure upon reality, but each ontology as such imposes a metric, establishes a field of verbality upon which events can be traced. This field of the sensible cuts across the energies it classifies–it marks them, controls, predicts and explains them.

Ontology is the formal incarnation of an absolute authority, transcendent relative to the energies it classifies. These sorts of organizational schemes always have a sort of neutral and derivative kind of quality about them; the ‘philosophical’ issues involved are highly symbolic, authoritiative, abstract and indifferent. But ontology by its nature cannot be politically indifferent; and we shall turn next to that process by which cultural ontologies fracture reality, logic and their objectivity, in the mark(et)ing process which form and inform subjectivity.

The identity of the same is an equivocation, a place without place. The “I am” is an assertion of allegiance before it attains any sort of meaningful substance, and this allegiance to the same name in the face of the other is the second term of meaning, the same/other dyad being exceeded by their connectivity, which erases their separate identity– and resolves an irreducible separation by re-inscribing this self-difference already in the name of the Other.

Your name declares your genealogy, arrives as the for-what and for-whom you stand; your name stands for you, it already effaces your identification as any separate, autonomous being. A name is a confession to belonging, inclusion into a community of speakers, who at the least acknowledge your awareness. The name is the essence of symbolism. Thus the name presents us with a triple reflection towards/away from/towards the subject: my awareness of the others’ consciousness of my presence already convokes the declaration of my name, albeit by the voice, or even the slightest movement of the others’ hand, at last, merely her gaze accomplishes the same reflection which is sanctified, or rather purged of sanctity, in a name.

But the name only refers to the break within identity; it is the first material, or rather vocal illusion, which in hiding a deeper separation and mystery from itself, refers back to the ultimate illusion. This being the faith in appearances, images, letters, the religious illusion, if you like– though this is confounded still more by cross-currents from the premodern, modern and postmodern re-crisises of faith– but what all of this amounts to a sort of status quo, not progress but exactly a deadlock.

Faithlessness, whether in divinity, in institutions, in religions, in society, or in culture, is here to be read as that symptom of a heartbreaking disappointment, “yet another defective situation.” It is a resistance– to the other in whom trust is not to be placed, leaders who fail at their post and take us not into the promised safety but rather deeper into danger than we were before. The death of God is neither ontological nor religious–it occurs in the loss of faith in the Other, when we observe that justification and responsibility are no longer the criteria of political economy.

Or worse, they never could be: power is not fairly distributed, even so the distribution is irrational, “up for grabs,” as it were; the world seems bent on continuing a destructive spiral of violence and war… Even though boredom is counter-revolutionary, it is not hard to see that apathy is intelligent psychological self-defence in the midst of this perfectly reasonable, terrifyingly irrational society we’ve become. Alienation, disillusionment, disconent–all this speaks to a mass abreaction, to a steadily quickening pace of Events, and to the failure of static institutions to adequately respond, to represent, to keep count, as it were.

The fact is that many if not most of the institutions we are supposed to have faith in have long been exposed as a sham, whose main accomplishment was accomplished at its founding–and it seems as though these institutions have continued existing as if in mourning for the ecstatic heyday of its inauguration. But reactionary behavior patterns, acting only insofar as a spectator, affirms the spectacle of the culture industry, interacting with others through an interference pattern of images.

Belonging to modern society is a non-participation, a relation without relation– Our identities have only a derivative existence, mediated through the mass market, which was the historical moment in which the production of identical lives was made possible. So there is a sort of inevitable, irreducible gap within identity itself, not just in its relation with the Other; but there is another kind of break with time which currently prevails, a dangerous amnesia or alienation of identity from its own future, which with respect to the individual is equivalent to the void (uncounted) place of the individual in the prevailing political economy, his (social, legal, religious) position of powerlessness and weakness in the face of an absolutely transcendent Other.

This is why much of the discourse on ‘respect for the other’ is misguided, since it recognizes only an apologetic stance towards the approach of the other. But what if the other comes to me with war and hate in his heart? Should I both to attempt a face to face resolution? Or, rather, should I protect what is mine, protect myself from the machinations of his evil intent? The resistance towards the repressive other is also an unavoidable ethical stance. But a society without peace is a non-society, and mercy towards the other cannot exist without love.

Freedom is not merely our birthright; it must also be excerised, demanded, that is to say, we must produce freedom positively. Negative freedom is slavery; this is the weakness of the doctrines of ‘tolerance’. They reflect only the powerlessness of the spectator, or rather the false choice of the spectator (what to watch, not whether to watch,) reducing the gap between cultures to the choice between, say, marlboro and camel lights– it speaks of the disconnected, unsatisfied lack inherent in the cycle of addiction without truth or completion, in which it becomes easier to accept than challenge, and we resign ourselves as spectators of the tragic dramaturgy opened up by this radical separation, this inversion of life into non-life, and thereby we are convinced into giving away our birthright: finally, we accept the prevailing status quo, quite ready to defend our right to non-freedom at all costs.

Against culture, we must produce freedom constantly if we are to be free; not hectically, at though trying to catch up with it, as though it escaped our grasp: we produce freedom not by exerting our power, but our right to powerlessness– that is, living without paranoia, without the need to grasp and conquer and destroy, without allergies to the differences of others, without this primitive, aggressive culture of dominance, acquistion and nihilism.

Freedom is the constant demand of this right, the right to peace, without which there can be no society at all. Else we are merely spectators, devourers of the perverse, apathetic images which mediate our entire existence– without peace, there is only non-life, a closed life without life, as a defective, uncounted, exploited appendage of some incomprehnsibly colossal, terrifying war machine and its endlessly entertaining, fantastically profitable culture industry, which together invade, colonize and dominate our entire existence.

Thus freedom is a wager on peace, on the possibility (however slim) of a non-repressive society which lives and breathes freely, which has maturely accepted a limitation of its spontaneity. Culture as it currently exists is a spectacle of images which interpose and mediate our relation with the Other; it is anti-ethical. Thus culture is the socio-political surgery of separating Being into beings, infinity from itself, a reduction of the subject to the pure form of the void. We belong to a culture to the same degree we are de-formed by it–that is, how deeply we believe in its truth. The “truth” of such a violent, permissive culture is the moment in a falsehood in which it is expressed, for this culture will tell you whatever you want to hear, as long as you’re paying up. Thus the political consequence of not resisting such a monological and destructive modality of culture is the revenge of the same violent logic of subtraction: the sudden reduction of every infinite multiplicity– to the same empty image reproduced forever.