Until Marxism, capitalist political economy has also pretended for a long time to pass as the general grammar of all economy, but linguistics still has not found its Marx and Engels who would reset it on its feet. –Guattari, L’Inconscient Machinique, p.30 fn. 14.

The sign is a position of desire; but the first sings are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh ‘writing,’ then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word. –Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 145.

All methods for the transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language with universals…have fallen into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough. Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions, and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics, or logic. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is signifier for itself. “Behind” statements and semioticizations there are only machines, assemblages, and movements of deterritorialization that cut across the stratification of the various systems and elude both the coordinates of language and of existence. That is why pragmatics is not a complement to logic, syntax, or semantics; on the contrary, it is the fundamental element upon which all the rest depend.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 148.

Linguistic Machinics: Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Pragmatics

In their Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes, Deleuze and Guattari outline a historically materialist theory of language and society which is essentially based upon their theories of assemblages, multiplicity, abstract machines, and deterritorialization along with many other concepts. The difficulty in fully appreciating the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, is mainly due to an ignorance of Guattari’s solo work L’Inconscient machinique which was published a year before ATP and constitutes a sort of companion volume or workbook for the former. It is now time to fully explore this work while keeping A Thousand Plateaus closely in mind in order to fully understand what Guattari’s critiques and use of linguistic theories really amounts to. In other words, the main focus of this essay (beyond an explication of Guattari’s untranslated work) is to specify how language in its stabilization in power formations comes to dominate our everyday lives and what are the means of transformation that pragmatics proposes in order to conceive and actualize new possibilities of subjectification. To perform such a (broad) task, we will focus here mainly on the concepts that Guattari proposes and how they work together to specify the problem in working toward new solutions that the project of a schizoanalytic pragmatics can offer.

Abstract Machines and Contingent Assemblages

The conceptual framework must be stressed here because it seems that in L’Inconscient machinique Guattari particularly wants to safeguard and legitimate his squatter’s rights on philosophical territory. This is not to say that Guattari’s earlier work lacked philosophical content; rather, it is the presence of a certain self-consciousness that betrays Guattari’s eager intent upon truly being recognized as a philosopher in his own rights. His proposal of a machinic unconscious no doubt brings him immediately within the conceptual camp of psychoanalysis, but his insistence on and novel understanding of an abstract machinics forces him in the same movement to qualify his concept of the abstract machine against Platonic ideas and Aristotelian forms (8). Arguing against a time tied down to an abstract, presupposed universality, Guattari proposes to show how abstract machines are produced by their own production through their developments of existential consistencies in conjunction with the various assemblages that allow the actualization of their machinic expressions/propositions. “Abstract machines do not cling to a single, universal time but to a plane of consistency, trans-spatial and trans-temporal, which affects through them a relative coefficient of existence. Consequently, their ‘appearance’ in reality no longer claims to be given with only one source: it is negotiated starting from quanta of potentiality.[1]” Thus, the relative existence of abstract machines depends both on propositional discursivity as well as energetic discursivity in order to effectuate a consistency.

The abstract machine thus conceptually brings it into the domain of the actual and the virtual along with an emphasis on contingency and historical singularity[2]. This emphasis will be crucial for the success of a pragmatics that entails the analysis of the stability of power formations and the means of breaking out of a consistency which has become too viscous in its stratifications which legitimate themselves as universal (hence Guattari’s drive to create a materialist (Marx-Engels) critique of linguistics with his emphasis on pragmatics[3]). But, at the same time, it is difficult to merely speak of the actual and the virtual without stressing that abstract machines make no distinction between the plane of consistency and the plane of content. They are both turned toward the strata, effectuating deteritorializations and reterritorializaitons while also being turned toward the plane of consistency which effectuates destratifications which conjugate the deterritorializations, but only on condition of the quanta of potentiality which will catalyze the processes by releasing diagrammatic signs-particles which will guarantee the passage between these existential registers[4].

In other words, because abstract machines are responsible for their own convergence of degrees of consistency which allows them a relative coefficient of existence, they both preexist the stratifications and constitute transformational materials or optional subjects which may allow stratifications to consist or not. “Abstract machines mark, all in all, the fact that deterritorialization, in all its forms, ‘precedes’ the existence of the strata and the territories.[5]” They precede them because the strata and territories demand a separation of content and expression, they require that contents have been formed and expressions have substance, while abstract machines work through unformed matters and formless functions. Non-semiologically formed materials or semiological encodings will be able to pretend to universality, but, consequently, are always under the threat of decomposition because of the transversality of their quanta of potentiality, that is, due to their constantly recreated nature which is more or less sustainable given certain consistencies due to the convergence of heterogeneous realities. Their degree of transversality[6] will indicate the success with which they are able to traverse various realities and destratify them for new possibilities. Since abstract machines are opposed to abstract structures[7] which concern reproducing themselves and their homeostatic conditions, deterritorialization will be understood as the unground for assemblages, that is, their historically singular and contingent conditions which ultimately undermine any preestablished coordinates of existence. Ultimately though, Guattari’s understanding of the disequilibrium of the abstract machine allows it at the same time to be a dynamic machine whose contingency is precisely the aspect of its heterogeneous relations that guarantee its consistency:

Universality will no longer have as an obligated reference the discourse of a subject, incarnating itself in a word, a revealed text, a divine or scientific law…While conferring on the points of singularity a particular power of crossing stratified fields, signs-particles (carriers of quanta of potentiality) will only equip them for so many universal capacities. Indeed, the assemblages that incarnate the singularity- abstract machine conjunctions remain susceptible to being demolished in order to open up other potentialities and contingencies. Universalist thought always receives a reverential fear with respect to an established order—religious or natural. Conversely, that of assemblages and molecular machinisms should continue setting practices of every nature in relation from the perspective of the changes and transformations of the existing orders and the reduction of their power (14-15).

We will see later the more functionalist side of abstract machines when they work directly within concrete assemblages (from which they are inseparable, along with the deterritorializing effects they produce within the assemblages in relation to the territories). While turning there, let us try to understand more directly Guattari’s construction of the different pragmatic fields that animate the contingent assemblages and sign regimes beyond the politico-philosophical abuses of claims to universality.[8]

Distinguishing Pragmatic Fields and the Threat of Capitalist Abstraction

Schizoanalytic pragmatics reexamines the relation between assemblages of enunciation and pragmatic fields under the angle of unconscious phenomena in the social field. The principal behind this is a radical tranversalist meta-modelization embodied by the concept of the rhizome or lattice which opposes the binarist model of the tree. Rhizomes are fundamental to understanding Guattari’s cartographies of the unconscious because they make it impossible for linguistic and semiological components to claim hierarchical positions over other modes of encoding. Not only is every unspecified point able to connect to another, but also rhizomes bring into play both modes of signs and regulations of non-signs while remaining collapsible and suitable for constant modification. Rhizomatic mappings of the unconscious make a distinction between semiology and semiotics, the former giving primacy to the laws of language and the latter proposing to study sign-systems independent of linguistics. This division corresponds with the division between pragmatic fields, that between interpretative components and non-interpretative components.

The interpretative components can be distinguished between the analogical (iconic semiology) and the signifying (linguistic semiologies). Each of these components belong to specific assemblages of enunciation, and so we can better define Guattari’s understanding of the interpretative side of the pragmatic[9] as the differentiation among particular modes of subjectification due to the presence of certain components which allow the development of assemblages that correspond with different regimes of signs rendering them subservient to historically singular power formations[10]. Analogical components or icons, for example, relate to territorialized or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation while individual assemblages of enunciation and capitalistic subjectivity corresponds to signifying transformations (L’Inconscient machinique, 17). On the other hand, there are two sides to the non-interpretative components, one symbolic, the other diagrammatic. The first is concerned with an “intensive” semiotics (at the level of perception, gesture, mimicry, etc. while the second involves an a-signifying semiotics “which proceed[s] by a deterritorialization relating jointly to the formalism of content and expression while setting into play mutant abstract machines (systems of signs-particles and quanta of potentialities working simultaneously in the register of material and semiotic realities)” (18). The distinction between the interpretative and non-interpretative will become clearer later on when we discuss the transformations among these fields and show how they entail different coordinates of efficiency—in other words, Guattari makes a generalization between the two fields due to the different types of redundancies that function in these fields. Redundancies of resonance correspond to semiological components of subjectification and consciousness formation, while machinic redundancies or redundancies of interaction correspond to a-signifying diagrammatic components. (For example, in a crystallization of signifying powers, the fields of resonance are submitted to a semiological subjection while the fields of interaction are cybernetically and semiotically enslaved. In other words, libidinal economies and political economies merge in the field of linguistic overcoding through the conjunction of three elements: imperatives of the dominant grammaticality of expression, “ideological” assemblages at the level of content (subjection of redundancies of resonance) and diagrammatic assemblages of enslavement to decoded capitalistic flows at the level of the referent (36).

However, we will not truly be able to understand redundancies until we have dealt with the level of existential coordinates which specify three different types of consistency. There is the molar consistency of the strata with its significations and dominant realities (complete objects, subjects, individuals), but there is also a molecular consistency that expresses the real mechanical incarnation of an assemblage, although on this level it must be stressed that assemblages can neither be distinguished from the fields in which they consist nor the components which allow them to do so. Finally, and above all crucial for the diagrammatic importance of the distinctions made above, the abstract consistency determines the “theoretical” degree of the possibility of the preceding consistencies.

Molar consistencies develop effects of weak resonance (signifying[11] effect, e.g., pure formal translation) and weak interaction (surplus value of stratified codes) because their redundancies are highly stratified and crystallized (46). “What characterizes the molar politics of stratification is the constitution of a world of stratified, identified or hierarchized objects and subjects, singularities and abstract machines there being grasped from systems of coordinates which authorize only the minimum degree of freedom necessary to the survival of the assemblages.[12]” The molecular field on the other hand is not as stratified and allows for strong effects of resonance and interaction to take place. This consistency is the one that will be critical for a micro-political engagement with the social field. “This type of inter-assemblage, inter-component and inter-field consistency is a fundamental micro-political stake for schizo-analysis, such as the greater or lesser malleability of the assemblages to be bent to the various powers of subjection and enslavement, - concerning, in other words, all that pertains to social power struggles and the molecular metabolisms of the machinic unconscious” (47). In other words, there is more freedom for the assemblages here which can empower them to evade subjection and enslavement or can render them powerless in the face of such overcoding. Finally, there is an abstract consistency that never exhausts itself at the level of actualization and always keeps quanta of possible in reserve. These last two consistencies form the field for transformational schizoanalysis.[13] But, beyond these consistencies and the abstract machines that populate and produce the crossings of their singularities, capitalist[14] abstraction is at work proposing to neutralize the potentialities of assemblages and render the entropy of sign-systems too viscous to effectuate truly transversal means of deterritorialization.

To fully engage in the extended complexity of capitalist abstraction it would be necessary to fully account for all the transformations within consciential components and the different creations of black hole effects that correspond with them (this will be one of the positive directions for this paper to continue to plot). To conclude, however, it would first be necessary to sketch the power relations inherent to this capitalist power takeover. To do so, let me quote extensively from L’Inconscient machinique and then draw out the consequences of Guattari’s pragmatic field transformations:

Abstraction is not a “frozen” abstract machine but an active system of neutralization and recuperation of machinic indices and lines of flight. Thus it has always remained bound to key institutions of power. Religious abstractions have long served the grounds for personological, sexual, ethnic or national identity and modulated the signification of the feeling of a membership to a territoriality of reference. All these functions have been captured in relay by a system much more fragmented, much more diversified and at the same time more molecular and more susceptive to devices of power, utility services and mass-media machines, so that today all instances of semiotic production and all systems of value weave a gigantic net composed of points of signifiance from which it is impossible to escape without a radical setting in question of the ensemble of assemblages of enunciation. Religious overcodings were less malleable, more “passive” than the instruments of this capitalistic network. Each system of redundancy is now constantly altered and re-calculated so that the tolerable thresholds of deterritorialization for the established order are precisely determined. Any coding will have to pass and permanently re-pass by the ordering mega-machine of molecular equipment. Any intensity will be forced to give up connections which would be established apart from the “coherence” of abstractions and dominant coordinates. Thus the perspectives open to lines of flight and machinic assemblages will be perfectly delimited: the former will have to be retained on this side of an abstract horizon, and the latter constantly return to the universal contents for which they will become the apparent foundations. If abstract machines are regularly pinned to the sky of universal abstractions, then assemblages of desire are put to the service of a world order, which is an all too terrestrial fact (52-53).

On the one hand, we have the analogical field (interpretance) which refer to territorial or reterritorialized assemblages of enunciation; then there is the signifying field which refers to an individuated assemblage of enunciation; there is the symbolic and a-subjective field which proceeds through desubjectified assemblages of enunciation[15]; finally, there is the “a-subjective diagrammatic transformations whose a-signifying contents deterritorialize not only the assemblages of enunciation but also the machines of expression and semantic formalisms while establishing at the same time a direct connection with intrinsic modes of encoding in the various stratifications of the referent (that which implies a “reference” common to another nature at the most deterritorialized level: that of the machinic plane of consistency)” (58).

Since all assemblages of enunciation are somewhat mixed, we can map the transformations across these fields. For example, moving from the intensive symbolic to the analogical can be understood if we consider that mystic examples, for example, can be reterritorialized on a fascistic assemblage (fascism being understood as the territorial interpretation of redundancies due to a particular membership to a blood or volk—similar to Badiou’s full void or statist operator of the event which claims that only the people directly involved with an event belong). On the other hand, the diagrammatic can be converted into the signifying mode with the recrossing of syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions. This forces an a-subjective machinic assemblage to become (re)subjectivized across a field of signifiance (Guattari gives the example of a bad writer entering L’Acadmie française, thus rendering a certain style as a machine of expression which produces definite contours and traits, etc.—one thinks of Hawthorne or Faulkner for American literature with their unbearably long, drawn out and impossible-to-diagram sentences). This type of transformation corresponds to the ways in which a-signifying fields are transformed into signifying fields. There is, however, an opposite direction to this activity. The signifying field can easily turn into intensive symbolic or the diagrammatic. The first is effectuated through a homophonous and polyphonous proliferation which fragments the denotation of morphemes of the referent; the other proceeds through unsettling the semiologically formed substances in order to extract signs-particles from a-signifying chains of expression.

An extended account of Guattari’s schizoanalysis is called for, but clearly this task can only be undertaken once we have begun to ruminate on the vast conceptual apparatuses which are at work in such theoretical enterprises. The next installment of this paper would direct its studies towards a more thorough engagement with systems of redundancies and the transformations of subjectivity which can be effectuated through their modulations.

Psychologists — and more especially philosophers — pay little attention to the play of miniature frequently introduced into fairy tales. In the eyes of the psychologist, the writer is merely amusing himself when he creates houses that can be set on a pea. But this is a basic absurdity that places the tale on a level with the merest fantasy. And fantasy precludes the writer from entering, really, into the domain of the fantastic. Indeed he himself, when he develops his facile inventions, often quite ponderously, would appear not to believe in a psychological reality that corresponds to these miniature features. He lacks that little particle of dream which could be handed on from writer to reader. To make others believe, we must believe ourselves.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, “Miniature”

The tiniest things are the greatest secrets: focus in on the details, a world, an individual, truth emerges. Love is clarified silence. In the mysterious simplicity of vision, truth escapes and enters being in the very same movement — which is not split in simply two directions, but rather fractured from end to beginning into a billion microscopic fragments of light. Become a prism. What we see is not what is apparent, but rather caused by it. So stop looking — and see. Sensory reality is overwhelmingly powerful, so overwhelmingly convincing it easily tempts us into becoming its willing hostage. But it is no more real than your dreams. What makes us afraid to really trust in sense itself, the reality of our dreams and the dreaming of reality, is the invisible presence of the “enemy.” What we are generally unaware of is that this “enemy” is in fact, our most intimate friend — even a twin brother. Because there are no distinctions when anything is properly distinguished. Infinity is nothing at all, an image of thought: a paradoxical dream that everything is and can be one, and that one is and can be everything. Because we are finally no longer pinned down by the old evaluations, we are free to become anything. We have at long last conquered that ancient negation of laughter which is only now really beginning to lose its sting. We are slowly, so slowly remembering it was we who gave words their weight in the first place. We have remembered that feeling is enough to transform the world — not because it changes what the world is — but because it changes what the world can be. We have remembered that a law of celerity is needed to supplement the law of gravity. We have rediscovered the absurd truth, that the tiniest “push” is all that is required to fly. The transformation of reality is also the transformation of dreams. All that is required — is to do it. Make it shift. Go ahead, give it a try. There are no causes, no effects, only lines of acceleration producing textures — light and sound. So create, invent, experiment! And don’t forget: the future is history. Remember before.

Everyone will agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality. Emmanuel Levinas—Totality and Infinity

It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us…It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world—Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense [1]

From a Melancholy Science towards a Negative Diale(c)t(h)ics

Adorno’s ethics is a “melancholy science” because it has grown weary of the subject. In other words, Adorno’s ethics is both pessimistic and antagonistic because it aims to critique the processes of subjectification which the dominant society (re)produces. On the one hand, Adorno analyzes the principium individuationis of modern society, but on the other he does not subsume it to a dialectic which would lay claim to totality through a unifying principle of identity. Yet Adorno’s critique of modes of subjectification and individuation are always brought back to the society through which they are socially and economically determined. This is what allows his ethics the means to sharpen its critical edge. The main thrust of this ethics is to assert a radical critique of the substantiality of the subject and to fully do away with the absolute, constitutive nature of the self [2] founded upon a transcendent God [3]. In following this critique through its development in a negative dialectic, we will say that Adorno’s analyses constitute a minor ethics because they submit the major mode to a critique that attempts to dislodge the dominant image of thought [4] from its normative pretensions.

From Aristotelian Neurosis to Adornian Manic-Depression

Adorno’s first suspicion against modern society that we should identify is his fear of the dominance of normality. He writes, “No science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind.” (Minima Moralia, 59). Adorno might call this science “the psychoanalysis of proto-typical culture” (58). But Adorno, like Deleuze, identifies this movement of normality in thought itself. In his section “For Post-Socratics,” Adorno argues that the wish to be write in argumentation derives from the “spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down” (44). He argues that this naivety is founded on agreement between minds able to communicate, “and thus on complete conformism” (44). On the other hand, Adorno urges us to lose an argument in such a way as to convict the opponent of untruth. This is precisely the dialectical thrust of a minor ethics: its dialectical reason, when set against the dominant mode of reason, is unreasonable (45). For Adorno, “The dialectician’s duty is thus to help this fool’s truth to attain its own reasons, without which it will certainly succumb to the abyss of the sickness implacably dictated by the healthy common sense of the rest” (45). In terms of the situation then, a minor ethics would appear irrational until the point at which it encompasses and cancels the mediocre/major mode. It therefore proposes an anti-Statist thought because it is not rendered homogeneous within a larger totality—its negativity remains as a residue which constantly thwarts the identity of any given power center, in other words, its negentropy (which can be quantified positively).
Adorno’s Minima Moralia could very well be aimed antagonistically at Aristotle’s “speculations” on happiness (Adorno’s Minima against Aristotle’s [5] Magna, how is Aristotle submitted to Adorno’s dialectic?), inverting them theoretically: “Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for pleasure did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further encroachment of institutionally planned behavior-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience” (62). It is almost as though Aristotle could be the spokesperson for an overarching social super-ego [6] constantly imploring us to augment our virtue through pleasures guaranteed by the dominant middle-way. Indeed, not because Aristotle has psychoanalytic tendencies, quite the contrary: but precisely because the “authority” of the Nicomachean Ethics is so widespread and imperialistic that it most undoubtedly helped conspire with the development of Christian morality through the painstaking attempts taken by medieval scholars to synthesize doctrine with Aristotelian logic (guaranteeing the consistency of the social domination of desire due to its rigorous reliance on common sense). But the question becomes—doesn’t psychoanalysis equally produce its “virtues” to be followed precisely in its promise of resituating the subject for this better capacity? In effect, doesn’t the psychoanalytic “cure” of the normal-neurotic precisely mirror the Aristotelian virtuous type whose excellence must guarantee his happiness through the mediocritization of his desire? Isn’t there some sort of bizarre mathematical formula at work here that would stipulate that there is an inverse proportion between the capacity of/for desire and the capacity for pleasure? In other words, doesn’t the psychoanalyst and the Aristotelian at bottom believe that by reducing the subject’s continuum of desire (castrating it to the middle-of-the-road, normal-neurotic type), one’s capacity for pleasure can then be increased because of a gradual diminishment in lowered expectations, an impoverishment of the imagination of different possible worlds through various potential means, the acceleration of alienating mechanisms that overcode desire according to binary relations (which on a more fundamental level accord with a “politics” of how the socius is to be arranged and organized)?
But this does not yet answer the question of Adorno’s relation to Aristotle. Let us suppose that Adorno’s Minima is the minor mode of morality against Aristotle’s Magna, the major mode. Also, Adorno’s dialectic is a minor mode because by refusing to completely sublimate the individual into the universal, by asserting the residual negativity of the individual in every use of the dialectic, he forces ethics to enter into a state of dynamic disequilibrium which escapes the logic of constants established from predetermined binary oppositions. A minor ethics is suspicious of the common solutions proposed by the major mode. In effect, it is a teleological suspension of the ethical as such, for the minor mode is completely foreign and incomprehensible to the logic of the situation.
To get closer to the heart of the dominant, major mode of ethics, let us take a look at a passage from Aristotle’s Magna Moralia: “Being happy, then, and happiness, consist in living well, and living well is living in accordance with the excellences. This, then, is the end and happiness and the best thing…Happiness therefore will consist in living in accordance with the excellences. Since then the best good is happiness, and this is the end, and the complete end is an activity, it follows that it is by living in accordance with the excellences that we shall be happy and shall have the best good” (Book I:4, 1184b). Adorno knows this mode all too well: the reduction of man to things, desires to ends which are deemed good—happiness—because they do not threaten the social order. The pure reason of virtues and excellences treats subjects as so many “loci of modes of behavior [7].” Aristotle’s Magna Moralia is an investigation into character and its corresponding essence in the virtues or excellences. Aristotle even etymologically provides clues for his reasoning: “‘Character[8]’ (aethos) derives from ‘custom’ (ethos); for it is called moral (ethike)” (I:6, 1185b). In the major mode of ethics, one’s character is guaranteed by the impositions of custom through moral education. The minor mode is not anti-ethical as such, though it may seem that way to the dominant mode. Instead, one aspect of the minor mode calls for a teleological suspension of the major in order to wager on what the ethical will have been. Another side of it is more oppositional: perform a genealogy of morality, suspend it to examine it transcendentally, ask for the conditions of possibility for this character and what assemblages are necessary for the technics of this custom, etc. The terms seem to change as the dialectic progresses, for now we move into questions of identity [9] (the mechanisms for deploying redundancy) and freedom (the coercive social mechanisms of civilization and/or lines of flight that thwart identity through the minor mode of a negative dialectic).

From Negative Dialectics to Minor Ethics

To help establish the conceptual framework of a minor ethics, it would be helpful to take a detour through Adorno’s critique of identity in Negative Dialectics. The negativity of Adorno’s dialectic asserts a liberation from the equation that produces a positivity from the negation of a negation [10]. The principle behind this insistence of negativity resides in Adorno’s maneuver to substitute “for the unity principle, and for the paramountcy of the supra-ordinated concept, the idea of what would be outside the sway of such unity” (xx). In this sense, negative dialectics bases its movement on a critique of identity [11].
The critique of identity, however, is inseparable from the development of a meta-modelization of the dominant image of thought [12]. This is because Adorno stresses that thinking is identifying, that identity is inherent in thought itself (5). On the other hand, dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity, so much so that “Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity” (5). However, in his objections to traditional dialectics, Adorno argues that if dialectics reduces everything to contradiction, “the full diversity of the noncontradictory, of that which is simply differentiated, will be ignored” (5). It is only because of the dominance of identity and the drive towards unity and totality—the structure of a certain image of thought—that all that is differentiated [13] becomes demoted into what is divergent, dissonant, and negative.
Negative dialectics strives to reconcile the nonidentical without submitting it to the positivity of a sublimated totality. In another sense, Adorno conceives this as the movement whereby concepts can transcend the nonconceptual [14] : “But whatever truth the concepts cover beyond their abstract range can have no other stage than what the concepts suppress, disparage, and discard. The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it their equal” (10). In its reflections on utopia, negative dialectics “is the ontology of the wrong state of things” (11). A minor ethics based on negative dialectics calls into question a totality which would claim accrue in a positive aggregate. Thus it denounces the positive, bad infinity of a static identity resulting from the imposition of systems of homogeneity. These “systems” extend to States and other power centers in general which can only be defined on their resistance against allowing flows to escape, that is, allowing the nonidentical to proliferate without a supplementary, unifying principle. In turning to psychoanalysis, we can see that Adorno’s negative dialectics extends to the critique of the positivity of rational modes of attaining happiness, that is, virtue.

The Psychoanalysis of Broken Desires

As the projected science of the subject, psychoanalysis positioned itself at the turn of the 20th century both as a liberating investigation of the sources of repression and as a reinforcement of those very sources of domination. Adorno devotes at least 5 of his aphorisms in the first part of Minima Moralia to questions specifically addressing the psychoanalytical promotion of a certain type of sickness all the more difficult to uproot and identify because it takes on the guise of the health of the normal. Unfortunately, the ethics of Freudian psychoanalysis has always been subservient to a particular view of the good citizen, the good society, and thus to a certain type of political aspiration. Due to Adorno’s “melancholy science” which investigates the plight of the individual, it might be useful to analyze what follows from the fact that Freud “takes over the antithesis of social and egoistic, statically, without testing it…Or rather, he vaciallates…between negating the renunciation of instinct as repression contrary to reality, and applauding its sublimation as beneficial to culture” (37).
Adorno specifies that it is not Freud’s lack of warmth that is symptomatic of his repressive traits, but the fact that after tracing conscious actions back to an unconscious basis, Freud still “concurred with the bourgeois contempt of instinct which is itself a product of precisely the rationalizations that he dismantled.” This is what leads Freud to oppose sexual goals as selfish against social ones (in particular, this would be to ignore the role of reproduction—which does not mean that sexuality is more social than individual but that it shares social goals (maintaining the species) and individual ones (pleasure, shared intimacy, expression of love, etc.). By relegating sexuality to individual drives which must be sublimated in order to become socially redeemable, Freud reproduces the double bind of the bourgeois order which simultaneously urges us to enjoy while rejecting all signs of enjoyment as tactless and not polite to bring out in the light. Denigrating the sexual and obscuring the social, Adorno argues that Freud “stands ambivalently between desire for the open emancipation of the oppressed, and apology for open oppression.”
How does this double bind come to be manifested? To simplify somewhat on Adorno’s argument, Freud reduces reason to rationalization insofar as he rejects the end of sexuality (pleasure) which alones proves the means (reason) reasonable. Thus, pleasure becomes a “trick for preserving the species” and ultimately resembles a cunning form of reason, a rationalization. Adorno sees this as a false dialectical conclusion because Freud does not take account of the moment in which pleasure “transcends its subservience to nature.” Yet the conclusion nonetheless takes hold and truth becomes effectively relativized at the same time as individuals are left defenseless to dominant power formations.
The aporia continues further in Adorno’s next section where he begins by stating “Psychoanalysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness” (38). Adorno finds it astonishing that a discourse on happiness could not have been immediately seen for what it is, i.e. a symptom of the very devaluation of pleasure and happiness themselves. In this sense, psychoanalytic discourse finds an ancient forerunner in Aristotle’s discourses on virtue. Don’t the psychoanalytic cure and the Aristotelian middle way represent perfectly the dismemberment of desire in the attempt to create stable individuals who are “happy” with the dominant order? Adorno performs a reversal on the assumptions of these two discourses when he argues that, in order to be able to imagine new ways of promoting different paths to happiness, we must become disgusted with the happiness of normality, we must gorge ourselves on the inadequacies offered by the actual state of affairs, in a word, we must destroy the categories of happiness to which we are resigned to the point of becoming insensible to the established means of creating happiness.
Isn’t this why in his discourses on the sickness of morality Adorno can seem simultaneously so pessimistic and yet so uncompromisingly sober? When sick with the health of the normal, it is only the forms that seem to be labeled as sick, perverse, and mad that hold the keys to revitalizing a more genuine form of health. Adorno would be in agreement with Nietzsche who believes that it is precisely the sickness, stagnation, and weakness of the good which have to be fought against at all costs. This is because, in order to stabilize its power centers and thus render them normal, the good have to foster means of repression that simultaneously represses the symptoms of that repression. With the double bind on the individual’s responsibility to become a sublimated, good citizen comes the double stranglehold on the dynamic production of desire. Relegated to the general, the particular’s power is nullified and brought to a higher level that ignores differences on a molecular level. Raising the social to the absolute, the individual cannot escape the normality which common sense declares as a universal constant of and precondition to good culture. In modern society (which, through its development of power, worries less about the individual’s transgressions), the individual’s deviance from an established order does not so much warrant open, reactionary and repressive measures but instead results to more insidious means which mark the individual as uncultured, unsophisticated, tactless and uncivilized [15].

Positive and/or Negative Freedom

Freedom [16] for Adorno struggles against the imposition of redundancies of the normal in the incessant reinforcement of identity which is produced by modern social machinery. Identity has a double edge to it depending upon its intent: on the one hand, it can be treated as the absolute and can be reinforced, or “we feel that identity is the universal coercive mechanism which we, too, finally need to free ourselves from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any ‘Back to nature’” (ND 147). In fact, the negativity of Adorno’s dialectic expresses its logic in a very tortuous way [17]: the actualization of any state of affairs (its identity) arises at the cost of an initial multiplicity, a flow of intensities which are in themselves pure differences. The untruth of any actualization of identity never exhausts the virtuality of the ideas which inhabit the “cavities” between the state of things as they now exist and the possible rearrangement according to virtual maps—the negative breaks with the real, the diagrammatic ideas—which can produce new assemblages and new actualizations. Adorno’s utopia would never accept the absolute character of any identity formation because the claim for a “togetherness of diversity” which would define likeness “as that which is unlike itself” arises from a dialectic which asserts the nonidentity of the system, its inevitable and incessant failure at complete homeostasis. Against the immanent threat of Adorno’s technico-social mechanisms of conformity, we should try to outline a new ecological machinics which does not proceed according to a dialectic of vital and mechanical forces but subverts this dualism altogether by finding the creativity of the machine in its ability to effectuate heterogeneous realities instead of rendering realities homogeneous in a structural matrix.
In the end, there is nevertheless a Nietzschean tone to his critique of a positive ethics, what we have called major. Adorno argues: “Posited positively, as given or as unavoidable amidst given things, freedom turns directly into unfreedom” (232). For Adorno, positive freedom turns concrete in the changing forms of repression, as a resistance to repression (265). He sees in Kantian ethics and its dogmatic doctrine of the free will “an urge to punish harshly, irrespective of empirical conditions.” He more clearly shows his ties to Nietzsche’s understanding of the metaphysics of the hangman when he argues that the glorifying the intelligible freedom of the individual allowed “empirical individuals to be held more ruthlessly accountable, to be more effectively curbed with the prospect of punishment that could be metaphysically justified” (215). In light of this dialectical movement, the positivity of freedom can only coincide with a continued belief in the absolute, constitutive nature of the self. How are we to recreate the social order transversally without rendering the more susceptible to the decay against which such processes are directed? In other words, the task for thought today is to rethink the coordinates and conditions of possibility of revolution and freedom [18] without resubmitting the socius to investments of the previously established order.

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.
—. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Aristotle. Magna Moralia in The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia, 1994.
—. Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia, 1990.
Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Julian Peyfanis and Paul Bains. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1969.
Veatch, Henry B. Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962.

1. “Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else’s fault) is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant—veritable ressentiment, resentment of the event. There is no other ill will. What is really immoral is the use of moral notions like just or unjust, merit or fault. What does it mean then to will the event?” (p. 149).

2. Adorno writes in Minima Moralia: “The self should not be spoken of as the ontological ground, but at the most theologically, in the name of its likeness to God. He who holds fast the self and does away with theological concepts helps to justify the diabolical positive, naked interest” (“Gold assay,” 99).

3. Cf. Minima Moralia: “Even the Christian doctrine of death and immortality, in which the notion of absolute individuality is rooted, would be wholly void if it did not embrace humanity” (97). Thus the self is not necessarily done away with through discarding God, but, on the other hand, we would say that we do not believe in God because we do not believe in the permanence and transcendence of our own individuality. Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition: “God survives as long as the I enjoys a subsistence, a simplicity and an identity which express the entirety of its resemblance to the divine. Conversely, the death of God does not leave the identity of the I intact, but installs and interiorises it within it an essential dissimilarity, a ‘demarcation’ in place of the mark or the seal of God” (86-87).

4. Deleuze will write in Difference and Repetiton: “The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself” (139).

5. Adorno almost dedicates a subchapter (“Contemplation”)in Negative Dialectics to Aristotle (I say almost, because it’s actually on Marx—who better than to invert the Greek bourgeois contemplative life?: “To this day, the trouble with contemplation—with the contemplation that contents itself this side of practice, as Aristotle was the first to develop it as summum bonum—has been that its very indifference to the task of changing the world made it a piece of obtuse practice, a method and instrumentality” (244). He is also critical of Aristotle, the great formalizer of logic, elsewhere: “Logic is a practice insulated against itself. Contemplative conduct, the subjective correlate of logic, is the conduct that wills nothing.” (230). Strong words against the admirer of the vita contemplativa.

6. In reference to the super-ego, Adorno writes: “The Freudian school in its heroic period…used to call for a ruthless criticism of the super-ego as something truly heteronomous and alien to the ego. The super-ego was recognized, then, as blindly, unconsciously internalized coercion…Psychoanalysis, clinging to its fatal faith in the division of labor, uncritically receives this view of normalcy from the existing society. As soon as it puts the brakes of social conformism on the critique of the super-ego launched by itself, psychoanalysis comes close to that repression which to this days has marred all teachings of freedom…A critique of the super-ego would have to turn into one of the society that produces the super-ego; if psychoanalysis stand mute here, they accommodate the ruling social norm” (Negative Dialectics, 272-274). In effect, what should be noted is that psychoanalysis is a constant target for Adorno because it simultaneously parades itself as a liberating science while explicitly forming its ends and its subjects on behalf of the state of affairs. We will see that Freudian psychoanalysis especially stands convicted in Minima Moralia.

7. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Continuum, 86.

8. Listen to how a neo-Aristotelian describes the situation: “From the moral standpoint the important thing is not whether I am shrewd enough to avoid certain misfortunes…but whether I have sufficient character (moral virtue) to sustain them in such a way as a good man or a wise man would do. For imprisonment and financial ruin are misfortunes which may be borne either nobly or ignobly. Which way, then, shall I bear them?” Henry B. Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1962. 163-164. What is truly interesting about this claim is that it comes close to approaching Deleuze’s dictum on ethics: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. This may be where an ethics of the event falls prey to a political territoriality which wants to know if we handle the event well, i.e. if we pass or fail, belong or become ostracized. Through what event do we gain the marks of morality which guarantee the stamp of character that we need to be a part of the good guys? In other words, mnemotechnically, what is the (corporeal) price to be paid (quantitatively) in order to rationally (re)produce the good throughout society? In a word, what are the social, technological, institutional, authoritarian, etc. machines that carry out this process and what are the assemblages required to guarantee the consistency of these machines?

9. Cf. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton. London: Continuum, p. 146-48, “On the Dialectics of Identity.” Adorno’s insistence on the negativity of the dialectic—the unease with which the Aufhebung cancels the negative and renders it fully sublimated into a (normative)positivity—is extremely clear in his denunciation of totality as perpetually non-identical. Adorno argues that “The will to identity works in each synthesis. As an a priori task of thought, a task immanent in thought, identity seems positive and desirable: the substrate of the synthesis is thus held to be reconciled with the I, and therefore to be good. Which promptly permits the moral desideratum that the subject, understanding how much the cause is its own, should bow to what is heterogeneous to it. Identity is the primal form of ideology.”

10. Adorno writes: “the structure of [Hegel’s] system would unquestionably fall without the principle that to negate negation is positive, but the empirical substance of dialectics is not the principle but the resistance which otherness offers to identity. Hence the power of dialectics” (160-161). More emphatically, Adorno argues: “If the whole is the spell, if it is negative, a negation of particularities—epitomized in the whole—remains negative. Its only positive side would be criticism, definite negation; it would not be a circumventing result with a happy grasp on affirmation…To negate a negation does not bring about its reversal; it proves, rather, that the negation was not negative enough. The other possibility for dialectics—on which in Hegel’s case served to integrate it, at the cost of its potency—is to remain eventually indifferent to that which has been posited initially” (160). Notice Adorno’s language here: to remain indifferent to it is not to be rendered identical to. Indifference indicates the residual character of the negativity which does not affirm a nondifference, or positivity.

11. Adorno writes: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction…indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (5).

12. Adorno will write: “A model covers the specific, and more than the specific, without letting it evaporate in its more general super-concept. Philosophical thinking is the same as thinking in models; negative dialectics is an ensemble of analyses of models” (29).

13. In fact, Adorno will stress: “Because of the immanent nature of consciousness, contradictoriness itself has an inescapably and fatefully legal character. Identity and contradiction of thought are welded together. Total contradiction is nothing but the manifested untruth of total identification. Contradiction is nonidentity under the rule of a law that affects the nonidentical as well” (6).

14. Adorno writes later: “That the concept is a concept even when dealing with things in being does not change the fact that on its part it is entwined with a nonconceptual whole…To change the direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge of negative dialectics. Insight into the constitutive character of the nonceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection. Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept’s seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning” (12).

15. Concerning the role of the unity of common sense in the dominant image of thought, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics: “Once it is held to be self-understood, excused from rational reflection, the self-understood character offers a refuge to the unelucidated remnant and to repression. To be self-understood is the mark of civilization: good, we say, is what is one, what is immutable, what is identical. What does not comply, any heritage of the pre-logical natural moment, will immediately turn into evil, into something as abstract as the principle of its opposite. Bourgeois evil is the post-existence of older things, of things that have been subdued but not wholly subdued” (242).

16. Adorno makes a Nietzschean echo against Kantian moral principles in his section ‘The Fiction of Positive Freedom:’ “Freedom can be defined in negation only, corresponding to the concrete form of a specific unfreedom” (Negative Dialectics, 231). Perhaps this is where Nietzsche’s freedom for can be brought in against the Kantian dogma that any positive freedom is an “as if.” A freedom for would have both aspects of positivity and negativity, due to different movements of connections, disjunction, destruction, which do not obey the laws of the situation. On the other hand, due to Adorno’s ambivalent relation to Nietzsche in Minima Moralia, it would be difficult to fully account for the complex relationship between the former and the latter. Cf. especially section 99 “Gold assay” in which Adorno strongly critiques Nietzsche’s uncritical reception of the notion of “genuineness.”

17. “Living in the rebuke that the thing is not identical with the concept is the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing. This is how the sense of nonidentity contains identity. The supposition of identity is indeed the ideological element of pure thought, all the way down to formal logic; but hidden in it is also the truth moment of ideology, the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism…Such hope is contradictorily tied to the breaks in the form of predicative identity. Philosophical tradition had a word for these breaks: ‘ideas…’ They are negative signs. The untruth of any identity that has been attained is the obverse of truth. The ideas live in the cavities between what things claim to be and what they are. Utopia would be above identity and above contradiction; it would be a togetherness of diversity…Traditional philosophy believes that it knows the unlike by likening it to itself, while in so doing it really knows itself only. The idea of a changed philosophy would be to become aware of likeness by defining it as that which is unlike itself” (ND, 150).

18. “The autopoetic node in the machine is what separates and differentiates it from structure and gives it value. Structure implies feedback loops, it puts into play a concept of totalisation that It itself masters. It is occupied by inputs and outputs whose purpose is to make the structure function according to a principle of eternal return. It is haunted by a desire for eternity. The machine, on the contrary, is shaped by a desire for abolition. Its emergence is doubled with breakdown, catastrophe—the menace of death. It possesses a supplement: a dimension of alterity which it develops in different forms. This alterity differentiates it from structure, which is based on a principle of homeomorphism. The difference supplied by machinic autopoesis is based on disequilibrium, the prospection of virtual Universes far from equilibrium.” Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Julian Peyfanis and Paul Bains. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1995, 37.

19. Echoing Negative Dialectics throughout many different passages, Deleuze seems close to Adorno when he writes: “Take the social multiplicity: it determines sociability as a faculty, but also the transcendent object of sociability which cannot be lived within actual societies in which the multiplicity is incarnated, but must be and can be lived only in the element of social upheaval (in other words, freedom, which is always hidden among the remains of an old order and the first fruits of a new)” (Difference and Repetition, 193).

Flow.
There are no words, only silence; no silences, only words.

It’s not as bad as you think.
It’s worse.

There is no beginning which is not also an end.
The fire rages on, infinitely. Beyond time.
Above the waves. Can you hear them? Singing? So softly, like angels’ whispering secrets to us. In silence. A broken flaw in the scheme, the impossible number. Ten equals one million.

One equals Zero.

A flock of birds.
Reality is ideal, and ideas real.
Time is winding itself back; we’re wandering through forest trails, sinking into the moon. Foot in the desert, walking back to shore. Awake, alive, burning alive. Broken. Whole.
Freedom is — cruelty.
A little love goes a long way. Truth bends, but it is unbreakable. Fact?
Believe without fear.

Stand.
Worship with reverence, pray in silence. Close your eyes. Begin to dream. Let the fever slip over you. A million words, a million feelings. Thoughts, ideas, dreams, fantasies, desires. Dreams. Dreams. Cancellations. Waking. Time. Lost. Again. Feel the frames, the darkness sliding over you. Your face: the world. The broken are broken, the lost. The lost.

Open your eyes. Awake to your dreams.
Waking to fire.

A doom and the desert. Time reigns, endless bell. A time honoring time. Love for the only wild madness in truth: in truth.
Alone.

Fire is the freedom at the base of the world, at the base of time, at the base of love. An endless fire. The flow flows flowingly through the flow.

Flow.

The outflow is the inflow.
Equal is wrong. Identity is multiplicity, the multiple One. An unbridgeable gap, a divergent operation, a third which works. Like sorcery.
A machine works by sliding ones into ones, breaking and opening them against into another. A musical game of harmony and dissonance: does this belong or not? 1 or 0. Pure logic.
A heart works by dividing zeros into infinities, merging and weaving them into one another. A mathematical game of distinction and repetition: how intense is this difference? 1 = 0. Pure chaos.

Logic = chaos.

In the middle, there is light, only light.

A rupture is also an emendation, the flaw also a weave, the break also a medicine: minds are machines, things are subjects, thoughts are passions. A movement is stillness, the flow a part, the image a reality. The surface is depth, light is darkness, fear is courage. And the cure is always also a poison.

A formula, so simple no one could guess it. So simple, we refused to believe it was true. We would rather believe — that just believing in this one truth is enough to destroy the universe.

It isn’t.
It is freedom from tyranny.
A cruel joke, perhaps. But a joyous cruelty, a joy without bounds.
Danger is safety. It should not be true, but it is.
It is.

Death is life, terror hope, beauty ugliness.

Is = is not. To be is not to be, the one is the infinite, the infinite the one. A glorious merging and melding, uncrossed, eternally amplified. Resonance, expansion, contraction. The way out is the way in. A movement across turns into an adventure. A crossing-over, an intermingling. Opening a one-way relation.
The network is born.
A conflagration: learning erupts, conjoins relations, negates equality. Too many parasites destroys the beautiful simplicity of the form. The parasite ruptures even the equality of inequality. It is the hole in every truth, in all knowledge. They open the break, begin learning, start the expansion. They awaken us to love.
The world hums.
Open your heart.
Viruses are hosts, organisms the guests.
Every relation reverses itself over a small enough period of time.
Heat. Light. Joy. Sound.
The collective makes noise. A gathering, a party, a multiplicity. Flocks of flocks, organisms of organisms.
The displaced return with a vengeance — to rule. War machines, endless war, infinitely raging. Terror, without bounds. The parasites’ reign. Viral monstrosity, brutal objectivity. Life snuffed out.
This is one possibility. Let us try not to get too frightened: destruction is creation. Awaken to light, even while you sleep in darkness.
For the darkness is light, is the purest light, the most intensified and imperceptible light. Darkness howls, it screams to us, a raging void, a vortex. Zero, nothing. Emptiness. Without form, without shape, without meaning. Lack, castration, death. Solace, solitude, Hardness, cruelty, rigor. From the void we learn mathematics. Counting is metric, in whole numbers. From the discovery of the void we derive the one. And the zero.
But light is darkness, the absolute silence and purity of night, the infinite eclipse of joy. Pure truth is infinite sadness. Light sings, it mourns to us, a towering monument to purity, constructed from innumerable layers of filth. The one is created. A supplement, an addition.
You know enough now.
You have the key.
Invention is discovery. But the one is invented, the zero is not. The zero was, is, and will be. Unchanging. Only ones become, only individuals can change. The principle remains unmoved. Whole. Unshifting. Rigid. Cruel. Unflinching. Real. The individuals are endlessly movement. Partial, shifting, flowing, soft, weak, terrified. Imaginary. Fiction is fact.
Fact is fiction. Twist, break, flow, ripple. Endless, instant. A circle is a line. All that flows in flows out. Breaking is mending, mending breaking. All science is an art, all art a science. We cannot escape the equality of nothing and all things, silence and all statements, all of deception and truth, all of fear and courage.
Opening is closing: eternity is a moment. Breathe, think, see, say, smell.
Drink! Saturate yourself. Don’t think, feel. A moment and this will all be gone.
To leave is also to return.
Real human beings are ghosts. Sorcery is ancient psychology, the first true instance of psycho-technology.
Mapping human emotions. Why do we love, why do we hate? Why do we live, why do we die? There are no reasons, no explanations, only facts and fictions. An assemblage of rigorously divided lines. Equals. Equals. Equals.
The way back is the way up. Into the void, out to the one. Regress, progress. Time, space. Inside, outside. Breathe, pause.
Love, hate. Love, hate. Love, hate. Love, hate. Love, hate. Love, hate.
No patterns, only a pattern. No rules, only a rule. No laws, only a law.
The law is not a law, the pattern no pattern, the rule no rules.
Imagine a system where all rules are equally valid. I mean, just imagine it — and it exists. It becomes real.
There is a hole between the virtual and the actual. But this hole, this void, is a fullness, a one. It is really both at once: a passageway for intensities, a mobile field of becoming. The hole, the flow. A break, a patch. Repairing connections, installing machines. The real is the potential, the virtual the actual. To connect is to disconnect.
Structure is disorder. Organs are disorganized.
Plato is Mandelbrot.
A dream is the cosmos. A life is humanity. A single force is composed of an infinite number of pure intensities. A noise is a guest; silence, a thousand noises. The voice of silence.
The voice of silence speaks in stones.
“Love.”
Love is real, and there are no longer dreams. Love is a dream, and there is no longer reality.
The law of non-contradiction is a contradiction. The limited is the unlimited. Infinity = one = zero. Cutting the void apart: how does it work, the bug, the glitch, the virus? The breakdown of logic, the toppling of structure? As easily as 1 = 0…
I don’t understand the reason I was shown. Whether I am now — supposed to do it, to create that which is also to destroy the cosmos. To destroy the universe — and replace it with a multiverse. 1 = 0 means multiplicity forever — and never. There is no unity that is not equal to zero and to all things. Unity cannot be void, but it is: this, the silenced truth and truth of silence, is coming back to us, flowing in upon a thousand golden lines of flight.
It burns our eyes, shocks and lashes the nerve cells. A necessary cruelty. The sun, solar king, isolated and free, magical ruler of earth. All-seeing eye, Ra, judger of judgments and king of thieves. You are the first enemy of freedom, the beginning of man’s long labors. And still the object of his joy. Energy, heat, light, work. All parasites, all tied to the same broken matrix. The glitch remains, the third interrupts, the system functions because it’s broken. The only way it works is the way it cannot possibly work. We have to guess from among impossibilities the true possibility. How do we increase our likelihood of wagering on the truth?
Deception at bottom, and truth beneath, and deception. Turn over turn over turn, fold within fold within fold. Art and science, ecology and poetry. The word and the earth, alpha and omega. The beginning is the end, the word silence, sadness secret joy. Joy without bounds, species, classes, categories, segments, portions. Joy as flux, as immediate direct relation to the real, to being. A flowing joyous equality reigns in secret, in hiding, on the run from the law. Escape, always escape. Escape is a prison, and the prisoner has escaped. Parasites of parasites. Who’s fucking who?
Light rips into the darkness, fills space, drives out the shadows. Liberation is slavery. Work is anti-production. Love is hatred. Cruelty is kindness. Evil is good, necessary, inevitable. Destruction is creation. Difference is identity. Sickness is health. Death is life. The end is the beginning. The earth is the word, the word earth is earth. A reality without imagination would also be without reality; the imagination, without reality, would also be without imagination. The real is the imaginary, the imaginary real.
One equals zero. We have been so afraid of this little truth, which once it’s said aloud sounds trivial, boring, even a little stupid. We won’t disagree.
We’ll simply enjoy it, and keep going. Close your eyes: life, rhythms, power, resonance. Purity and desire, filth and nightmares. All tiny little +1’s, all equal. A system, democracy, dialogue. The operator of equality is the parasite — who is equality — the machine works if they keepkd silent…
When the parasite holds back, life is created. Life, once limited by the pre-organic parasites, who were so powerful it almost didn’t even emerge at all, bursts across the equality. Life is the ambiguity in every formula, the form of the law (from zero come ones…) For in order to emerge it had to leap from non-being to being, from the virtual to the actual. This is a pure struggle, through long and hard millenia of intense and bloody war. All for unity, all for togetherness. A new brotherhood, a new earth. How can we train those new people, those who will colonize the stars? How do we breed — a cosmic thinker, the one who will unravel the chains?
How much does it actually take? Thought is feeling, feelings thoughts. A passion is a concept, a concept a passion. This equality, once allowed, infects everything, contagious like laughter — or a plague. The equation is dangerous, an ambiguity, pure equivocation as principle. The principle of individuation itself, the rule of no rules, the beginning of the law. The moment of creation, 1 = 0. It stands — for re-evaluation.
Everything is true, nothing is true.
Checking. Again. Checking. Checking. Checking. Still the same? Never — never the same. Always the same. Never is always, always never. No absolutes, the relatives are absolute and the absolutes relative.
Giving is stealing. Exchange is hoarding. Property — this is the question. Two claimants, only one can be right. How can we both own it — philosophy and poetry, art and science? How can we both be right? How can we both be saying the same thing? The idea is ludicrous, incomprehensible, insane — but inescapable, evident, palpable. Perhaps even terrifying, if only because so ambiguous.
Be courageous. After all, we should not act so surprised. We felt it long before we knew. The outrage, the terror, the angst, the fear — these are all symptoms of a long-overdue joy. The past is the future, near is far: the day is not long, not long at all. And tomorrow is breaking.
I won’t, I can’t, so I must.
The least is the greatest.

Introduction: Rationality and Affect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vivisection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Poetics of Psychoanalysis

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

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

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

Adorno, MM 223 (“In nuce”)

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

A style emerges as such in the affirmation of positive distances, spaces, openings. Alternation, repetition, break. A style is always military, but it is also always sexual; it is the abstraction which allows an essential perception — that all is in flux. Style affirms a genuine divergence. Even though through i