The evolution of an ecology expresses itself through both gradual and violent transformations. An ecological system is indeed a continuous system of exchanges, where functions actively extract themselves from an open horizon, producing a conjunction or interface, an active occupation of space.

We exist as these spatial and energetic languages, as regular translations between them, continuously enriching the ecological circuits upon which both they and we depend. Thus we realize the impossible equality of nothing and all things, perpetual motion, the flux, the seafire at the impossible origin of motion: one in, one out.

Energy amplifies the field, weaves separate forces together. There is no cooperation, there is no war, the channel is neutral. We are messengers, a signal from within.

Is there not an angelology of energy itself? A theory of traces which finally erases itself, leaving only the land and the sky and the sea. A beach with stars. What is this signal from beyond with paradoxical demands?

Light is only a hint, a map of time, a confirmation of possibility. The perversity of desire mirrors the perversity of God, the supreme irony — the sardonic lightness which we cannot help but associate with the beyond.

A messenger, a confirmation. A third who works, better than we could have hoped — summoning from without that which could never have been, perhaps should never be: the machine, the forge, that image which burns through the lace tracings of flesh without flinching or fatigue, opening the way onto another sense of being completely: time-as-vortex, turbulent and eternal.

Already a clarity, a power, a disgust which carry their own unique dangers.

Remember this: the cautious, steady, clear path leads into stagnation. It is the cut, the line of flight veering into the wild vortex.

Corruption eating away within. Death is not even as terrifying as these openings, these hooks dripping from every surface, every letter, every face.

Preface

It is perhaps time to see in hypocrisy not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity 24

I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature. The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans Sepulture, “Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their body?’ is also the question whether art now has a right to exist; whether intellectual regression is not inherent in the concept of committed literature because of the regression of society.

Adorno, “Commitment”

Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 422

Our age has borne witness to the most rapid expansion of military and state power in human history. Weapons have grown highly sophisticated in a complex lockstep with global economic and political transformations. The meaning of this enormous growth in power, and the implications for our increasing technological sophistication, is anything but clear and unambiguous. The political mythology surrounding war and peace has also grown in sophistication. Nonetheless, the tool inevitably varies with the specific relationship — that is, the conditions under which it becomes possible, and the situations which it makes possible. This internal capacity for variation and variance is closer to the essence of war than the complex matrix of state and global power relations.

Any tool can become a war machine — at least potentially, and if its object becomes war. Yet war is still not the essence of the war machine, but rather the set of conditions under which the machine becomes appropriated by state power — or even the global order in which states now become only parts. In Deleuze and Guatarri’s account, a war machine is always external to the powers of the state, even though the state may have means for capturing and transforming its power into violence for its own ends. Nonetheless, war machines bring novel connections to bear upon centers of command, static assemblages of power, what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “the great conjunction of the apparatuses of capture or domination.” (ATP 423) The war machine refers to a reality essentially independent from the structures which constitute the state. In it we find the lineaments of a new and general relationship between human beings, between an individual and themselves, which is not subordinate to the state or its means — even when that individual is used as a means by the state.

In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas argues peace cannot be identified with a war that ends for lack of combatants. That integration of the same and the other which would avoid cruelty refuses ignorance of the other; I speak to him. He concludes the work with an argument that the kinds of subjects produced by the state, with its “virile virtues,” find themselves situated at the “antipodes” from subjects living in the “infinite time of fecundity,” that is, a time in which we are capable of another fate. (T&I 306) Morality opposes politics in history only when it moves beyond admiring the beauty of existence to proclaiming itself unconditional and universal, as a relation with a surplus always exterior to the totality. The assumption of finite time — death as end — allows the hero to believe he may gain salvation in an eternal life. Yet Levinas wonders whether in such a continuous time whether identity itself would not have to be affirmed obsessively: “…as though in the identity that remains in the midst of the most extravagant avatars ‘tedium, fruit of the mournful incuriousity that takes on the proportions of immortality’ did not triumph.” (T&I 307) The isolated mode of subjectivity produced by the state confronts death out of courage, whatever the cause may be for which they die — a pure courage that the end may, after all, be merely another victorious transition.

(more soon)

Flow

The moment of death is uncertain and inevitable; its shadow approaches from an unknown region like a silent stranger. Death does not need to follow us; it just meets us where we will be. Like a memory fragmenting, bodies rush towards singular points of annihilation, just as the very possibility of negation is implied by the presence of the law. Protection is absurd, insulation a pure minimum; there is but the most fragile and insufficient veil between ourselves and our vulnerabilities.

Even laughter is a deflective shield for the futile anxiety over this very insufficiency. The subject exhausts its becoming and dies; thus until death he is not composed of a lack but indeed an overflowing surplus, of new expressive modalities, energy transformation-processes, event encoding/decoding regimes. Death crumbles the ground beneath us; it is the pure undecodable, it is a decoding space, a pure body with organs, a body full of pulsating acephalous organisms.

We never encounter our own death as an event. Only in reflections and symmetry do we glimpse the hidden certainty within uncertainty. There is a perfect silent joy and a maddening depth of terror hiding within inevitability. The question of death is not ontological but material, a question of growth and health and beginning: how to die is also how to live. Just as with life, a freely chosen death can be more beautiful, more just, more powerful.

Life poses a question of adaptive constitution; death does not measure or investigate, it is always like a murder when someone dies, however they die. Death is unchosen, but we can choose it. Being afraid does not change anything except our perception. Like the moment of selection for an artist, the moment of distinction for a mathematican, we have already answered the important question not by our being but by our way of being, by our polyphonous adverb and not by our protean identity.

The adverbial state also describes the position of that moment of truth is the one where we finally stop distancing ourselves with inclusive ontological questions (‘Where? When? What is it?’) and start asking exclusive and material questions (‘Which one? How? How much?’) We must ask: what is the best material for our creation, which is the strongest and least-vulnerable stuff we can use to build it? How do we resist, how much do we resist? How do we stand up and become solid, how do we pierce solids and fill them with holes? Finally: how do we diagram the abyss of materiality, how do we ‘teleport’ (carry a hole/gate) through solid space?

We affirm space by affirming probability. Through symmetry we find the cosmos is a river, though time comes in bursts. Through suffering we realize (untimely?) that death hallows immanence with a crown of absurdity, a seal of chaos, a proof of life. Death is not moving beyond; it is being unplugged, an interruption without continuation. In our unconscious death imitates the libidinal drives, the libido imitates the lust for domination, the thirst for immorality and murder and filth, the resistant flow of primitivism against the bursting-in of time and civilization. Sexuality is perversity, there is no normal sexual drive, we are all deviants. Not that we are all therefore normal! We must be careful how far we follow a line of flight, it quickly forms a solid ground around itself and sets the world into order, encouraging millions of new parasitic becomings following new lines of transformation.

Death is a transfiguration, nothing more and nothing less; energy drives us and composes us. Upon decaying bodies the entire natural world proliferates. Life is born through decomposition, life feeds upon life, burrows underneath it and even transposes itself within itself. Symbioses express complex patterns of obedience and command; nature is slavery. Life transforms dead spaces, mineral spaces into vegetable and animal spaces, organic spaces of differentiation and creative evolution. Death comes from the outside of the system, curiously to begin the cycle, to form its basis. Life could not exist without death; decay is at the origin, a surplus of parasitic ungrounding forces.

Life struggles to builds a more dangerous machine, a more perfect machine. War is a conflict in every case uncertain. Even the tiniest difference in forces can be capitalized upon and turned into a victory, but the weakness must be decoded; there are no heroes before stories, without riddles and struggles. Life transcodes energy without form into energy with form. Then from the most minimal gap between forces, true chaos and new becomings result, an emergent coalescence of disjoint forms into new formations, approaching a critical level of self-control.

Life emerges from the pre-living field of chemical and electrical intensities as a highly segmented, globally organized but locally disordered multiplicity. Life comes in packs and swarms, there is no single origin cell but a spontaneously generative ‘soup.’ We can see this empirically: living things always bear a lattice-like symmetry in their development process (morphogenetic folding.) Even borderline living things (parasites and viruses) are specialized towards living bodies; the life-space of a parasite is the inner-space of the host.

Biological struggle tends to favors robust or well-suited aggregates; adaptation is an endless series of combinations of struggling modes of expressive sensitivities (vulnerabilities) endlessly being selected, strengthened, exploited and exhausted. The relative health or sickness of an organism is a function of its homeostatic process; moreover, a process which is not written in advance, never identical to itself, unceasingly adapting and expanding and fighting to survive. Parasites are always eating away at our genetic armor. Only the robustness of our self-composition, the resilience of our singular force-assemblage separates us from non-existence.

The phenomenological character of health means it is in a sense an ontological or political decision; that is, that health is not an event, but an aspect of a developmental process; it should be understood adverbially, infinitively. Health resurges, health renovates; it restores, reinvigorates, revitalizes, and reconstructs. Health is a duplicitous notion: to be ‘healthy’ crystallizes an ideality; but to be healthy is also to adapt, to overcome, to shatter structured (parasitic) limitations. Health is a memory of the future, it functions as the first conceptual spur. The idea of health inspires us to begin thinking…

Everything about the modern State is false: it is cold, mechanical and monstrous. And there is no hope for disruption: machinic production annihilates life. Capital is the calculated sacrifice of whatever is left of spiritual health: profit in exchange for humanity, slavery in exchange for inner value. The enslavement of free creativity is the only positive operation of capital. Without the knowledge of what it is to think adventurously, to journey abroad, to breathe freely, there is only the madness of anti-production: the state and the market stand as the singular figures of parasitism and death. They are opposed to culture, to freedom, to health. Economy is violence, and mute static has replaced the human spirit. This machine devours humanity: it chews, grinds, enslaves.

Slaves to machines and slaves to capital: everywhere interiority, that is to say humanity, has been digested, ground into piecemeal, subsumed in the pursuit of exteriority. The transitory object of capital is catastrophic failure: the machine only works by destroying health, just as capital only accumulates by terror, shock; it is a violent triumph over the human. Capital means a recession of vitality, the collapse of hope, a spiritual sickness: so what indeed could we hope to say is distinctively ‘human’ anymore? Is this not, after so long, just a fiction within a fiction – which is to say, an impossibility?

A deadly serious fiction-machine: this is the State. The corrupt malice of its officials is intolerable; yet the seemingly ‘innocent’ despotism of the institutional machines which support the state of economic affairs is perhaps yet even more indecent, more conspiratorial, and more terrifying. But what if this terror, this fiction, this impossibility was all we ever knew (or had made!) of humanity? What if the time has not yet come for us to know man otherwise, that is, on the basis of his creativity, his spirituality, or – what is both at once — his health? We feel that we must raise again the question of morality; but it is abundantly clear the parasite has no ears for ethics — its digestion is far too noisy. The State is not culture: it cannot create moralities, only inscribe them upon bodies; it multiplies by subtraction. Its only ethical act is suicide. This is why all states are fascist to some degree, and why there is no jungle where one could escape from its terrifyingly internal urge towards purity, towards death.

Really the machine only produces dirt, the motor only noise: the engine of capital is the engine of death of culture and the decay of humanity – or should we say, its corpse? For humanity is dead: this is the secret meaning of the modern sovereignty of machines. Whereas profit is hysteria unmasked, an open nihilism – it is the armed abstraction of cost into value. Capital is devoid of any claim to ethicality; it dulls the experience of reality while intensifying our abstract enjoyment of it. Profit is hollow, a merely external victory; the inner costs, the destruction of any inner values, are all too plain. Capital never breathes freely: it terrorizes because it is afraid, needs violent cures for imaginary diseases, and makes an intense spectacle of reality to distract itself from itself – that is, from its staleness, mediocrity and colorlessness. There is no hope in the machine, only in multiplicity: and again, a terrifying, improbable hope. The State will not be overthrown, except to be chased out by another parasite; this is the lesson of history. The future is not given. A free society demands nothing less the final death of capital.

(an outline of metaproblematics)

1 Problems are objects, or things which block our way.

1.1 A problem is a barrier to the composition of forces in time, and thus a revelation.

1.1.1 Problems do not only impede our abilities, but also allow for their full exercise.

1.1.2 Similarly, objects do not just cover part of the visual field but accomplish the depth and coherence of space.

1.2 A problem accomplishes the disruption and potential (sometimes painful) renewal of a flow of desire.

1.2.3 A problem allows a solemn moment of authentic reconnection whence desire regains the courage to resurrect itself.

1.2.4 So the “real” problem is always what to do to cut the chains of machinic obedience, of the “…and again and again and…”

1.2.4.1 Our desire is in every particular case to make desire-gratification automatic.

1.3 The simplest figure of the solution is the use of a minor object-problem to solve a major object-problem.

1.3.1 Such a prioritization is an arbitrary ordering: solutions always approach (but never encounter) and retreat (but not completely) from a sort of fundamental solutional discontinuity between different degrees of problematic dimensionality.

1.3.2 Solutions decode problems by encoding an infinite rupture, by a breaking or fracturing of the problem space.

1.4 Solutions accomplish a retroactive collapse of the problem space into a singular multiplicity, a ‘patching’ or mapping between problem-spaces (or shapes of objects) of differential problematicity.

1.4.1 Consider the difference between a database of “possible solutions” before and after the solution of (for example) a search query.

1.4.1.1 Prior to the performance of the solution-operation encoded but ‘hidden’ within the problem space, the list has many possible entries: the problem space has a depth and shape characterized by the formulation of the problem.

1.4.1.2 After the solution, however, the problem space collapses to a single point (or set of points, etc.)

1.5 The problem encodes a solution by decoding a secret message, a problem ensnares the infinite/singular solution without revealing it, that is, within a formal figure (of desire, i.e., the solution.)

1.5.1 The solution thus provides a relation resolving the dichotomous break in dimensionality between problem-spaces.

1.5.2 Problems are a cosmically ironic opportunity, because they expose an unforeseen vulnerability.

1.5.2.1 We are always looking in the wrong direction at the right time: this (infinitely coincidental) chaotic violence is in fact the potency and momentum of objective reality.

2 The physical world presents itself as an objective, problematic reality demanding solutions.

2.1 The problem of ‘finding a solution to a problem’ is an implicit and trivial first-order form of self-reference.

2.2 The problem-space, at any dimension, is always infinite even if there is but a single solution.

2.2.1 The extreme case for “single-solutionarity” is identical structurally to the transcendence experienced in religion (or mathematics,) both transcendences which are ultimately impossible to present directly–not for lack of trying, but for the simple reason that desire has absurdly infinite problematicity.

3 A metaproblem is a second-order, non-trivial, form of referential problematicity, and therefore must be considered as part of the solution to all (zero-order) problems.

3.1 In order to avoid Zeno’s paradox, it is necessary to presuppose that, in order for us to be able to find a sensible solution for every, some or any problem, that every dimension of problematicitiy is continuous through infinity.

3.1.1 Any sensible solution must also provide a semblance or template of a fractally-infinite solution.

3.1.2 Thus a solution seamlessly encircles boundless collections of solutions to the same sort of system, the same problem-shapes at infinitely different scales and rotations.

3.1.2.1 While such solutions are indeed ‘finite’ and ‘singular,’ as they are bounded under an n-dimensional perimeter, they also exceed their dimensionality and break it in such a way as to provide a mapping to another problem space entirely (the source possibly not resembling the destination in the slightest!)

3.1.3 A solution’s infinite mapping of dimensionally differential problem-spaces flood and fill the spaces and the interstices so deeply and completely they begin to exhibit a differential quality relative to their strictly topological
dimension.

3.2 Thus the solution can be said to ‘break itself’ open in an infinite flood of awareness and understanding. It is a decoding of the metaproblem; a cut across which ‘separates the wheat from the chaff.’

4 Sense is an agreeable decoding, which always implies that the “meta-decision” (disambiguating dimensionality) has been solved completely, that is, infinitely.

4.1 Sense is genealogically geometric: any solution to any problem must also encircle a (perhaps fuzzy!) solution to the infinite-degree “macro-problem”–the infinite series of all metaproblems which collapses into the unity of the fundamental metaproblematic of disambiguating dimensionality.

4.2 This kind of fractal meta-symmetry is associated with any even the tiniest, most insignificant problems in the field of objective reality.

4.3 Dimensionality also implies a differential quality, and not only an integral quantity.

4.3.1 Dimensions are not hierarchized. This can also be understood as: all problem-spaces are fractal.

4.3.1.1 Thus all mappings between problems spaces exhibit a hypersymmetry which composes sensibly.

4.3.2 All problem-spaces have partial dimension(s), whose shape(s) are encoded within the form of the problem.

5 Sense is not different in kind than nonsense. The difference is rather, quantitative and subjective.

5.1 Sense is a kind of mapping between dimensions which are not hierarchized.

5.1.1 Sensicality is a special case of solutionality.

5.2 Therefore the question of sense presents us with the fundamental metaproblem.

5.2.1 But sense is not a solution like any other where the correctness depends solely on whichever dimensional transcoding the observer is expected to discover between problem spaces.

5.2.2 Indeed, it is clear sense adds another set of second-order fractal mappings ‘onto’ and weaving through our original ones.

5.3 This is because sense is first a marking of bodies.

5.3.1 Thus the establishment of sense is the first (and only) ethical operation of society: i.e., to decide what ‘makes sense’ for ‘everyone’ to do.

5.4 The ambiguity relevant to the sense (not accuracy) of a statement is always a political ambiguity (i.e., “but what side are you on?”)

5.4.1 This is particularly clear, for example, in humor, perhaps especially in the case of seemingly apolitical humor: what possible sense could toilet humor have to an alien rational species without anuses (or even waste, for that matter)?

5.4.2 In other words, we have to make a radical transcoding across objective worlds to ‘get it’: the aliens, for example, could eventually make sense of many or even most human jokes, provided they learned enough about humankind– that is, developed the appropriate fractal mapping across unique and topologically complex problem spaces.

5.5 The solution of any problem always demands the prior resolution of abstractional ambiguity. Thus only a truly objective reality in its very problematicity allows for the depth and flowing poetry of space.

5.5.1 Expressing poetically involves an intimate connection, which is only accomplished in the fractal transcendence of an infinite collapse of ‘total’ spaces.

5.5.2 Poetry stuffs partial worlds-within-worlds into a form.

5.5.3 Expression produces sense not as a surface but as a depth.

5.6 The question of clarity in expression is always then an ethical question: “Do you really mean what you said?”

5.6.1 Avoidance, hysteria, neurosis, psychosis: these cannot merely be described in dimenisonal isolation, or simply analysing desire as displaced, naked or otherwise incomplete, an impotent, defractalized, ‘whole’ desire.

5.6.2 We have to address the fact that desire completes an infinite and fractal mapping across discrete universes of reference and thus even the purest ‘non-sense’ has a sort of sense to it in other dimensions; perhaps sometimes we even desire a dimension in which a particular form would ‘make sense.’

5.6.3 If dimensions are non-hierarchizable, then ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ in terms of the quantity of dimension are irrelevant to the question of sense, and indeed more generally to the fundamental question of solution.

5.6.3.1 For the quantitative resolution of any problem is always an approximation of an infinite series of decisions; but the actual pre-solution situation is constructing a fractal mapping between dimensionally differential problem-spaces such that these spaces collapse upon themselves in a unity of self-relationity.

5.7 In this way we could say that non-sense is autopoetic in that it is not created by anyone, but exists merely as a sort of observational coincidence (once again: the right place at the wrong time.)

5.7.1 Our dimensional expectation doesn’t map cleanly to the space in question whether words or states of affairs in pure nonsense–in other words, nonsense breaks the problem space in a non-fractalized way, without a possible immanent reconciliation.

5.7.1.1 Non-sense is therefore like death: the seemingly endless potential for reconnection is aborted forever, at least at a certain dimension of observation–whence comes the objective brutality and and problematic rupture of the death-event, when subjectivity is silenced without the spark of hope for reconnection.

5.7.2 We need look no further than death for non-sense itself, endlessly observed and so ever reconnected to sense on other dimensions, but at the one level–the level of ‘original connection’–death is the intervention of the unavoidable face, the face of the corpse, the face of the abyss, of the void, whose austere countenance radiates an unbearable and haunting sense of an absolute future.

Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. -”The Communist Manifesto”, Karl Marx

There’s nothing to lose, a world to win… A conscious life and a faithful love, these are our chains, a resolution forged in struggle and hope. They are not the chains of the master. The master is naught but a self-conscious and over-aggressive animal, chained by death and encircled by desire– whereas in a properly human relation, we are freely bound to life, we are creatively engaged with the world, and we are bonded to one another, and to all others, in responsibility and love.

Have we been led into darkness by honeyed words of light and universal acceptance? Are we so entranced by this spectacle of violent love, so subdued by the pure flow of nothing, that when we are left trembling fear before the void— we no longer know which way to turn? The truth ultimately is that unconsciously we know already we will eventually turn back, that at some point we always betray the unique truth of our discovery, by the very act of its dissemination.

We lose our faith at the very moment we gain the full force of it, in the very act of expressing it. This is the deep reason poets lie: like religion, love is a story, the prototype of the pure narrative, a total and complete fiction and yet, love owes its existence solely to the strictness of our belief.

Likewise, the religious fantasy is claimed to be formally real: whereas and therefore, the responsibility lies entirely upon us for the spontaneous generation of the radical movement of faith. As we are at once subjects of the truth we seek and subjected to this truth, we are absolutely irreplacable and we are thus made innocent of the slightest skepticism of our place in existence.

By allowing ourselves to be made incapable of maintaining even a minimal distance from the “unadulterated truth”, to our ruin and to that of the truth itself, we have by now occupied a meta-position outside of self and universe in order to more completely vaingloriously identify with this universal, to become its excess, to exceed this universal in a particular trajectory. We have gone even beyond essence in our presumption that the universal could be given voice.

Indeed, this identification is already death to a separated freedom; the desire to reunite our essence with the universal is against life itself, is the very force of being-towards-death.

Even as we attempt to regain our balance, to recount and give voice to the pure truth, we are actors in a pure surrealistic fantasy of radical lack, speakers of a negativist discourse whose focus is death, non-existence, which thus becomes the rupture around which our “defective” mortal existence radiates– and thus, in earning the right to speak it, we murder the truth itself!

If we aim to start with that which we know even better than ourselves–are we not beginning at the end? After all, we know that we will die, possibly more certainly than we “know” anything else. Death and decay, the termination of biology and at once its first law—it is against these, indeed in resistance only, that we live. We live around death, amidst death, we live against, in defiance of this universal law; yet death is at once the furthest, most remote and ineffable figure. Around death, yes, but never WITH death. Since we really do have a firm certainty that we are going to die, but (for the most part) don’t know the time or the place– the question is not how or when, but why? And here, most of all, when our knowledge seems the most certain, does it not also seem the most paranoid, the most necessary of illusions to deconstruct since, after all, do our aim and our starting place not coincide?