Mutable

Paul Klee, “Domes”

The movement of the signifier through history is toxic, viral, plastic — a fiery line of abolition interposing nullity into intensity, linking pure space to the absolute threshold. It is only in following an escape-trajectory out from language, from the territory, and in concert with a dynamically consolidated assemblage of enunciation, that the sign reveals an intimate and internal logic of affirmation: dispassionate and frozen core of the signifier smoking beneath the burning skin of language. The sign veils a line of free and continuous mutation, but exhuming it necessitates accelerating language to its outermost exterior, viscous and horizontal plunge into Cthonic darkness. Ceaseless depths disfigure this primal cunning of the sign, enfolded and absorbed as infernal network infrastructure; the sign disappears into the matrixial substrate of expression. Signals ambiguate continuously contingent upon semiotic or semantic discontinuities in the substrate or the ultra-real (second-order simulacra simulating first-order reality.)

Striations distribute stuttering redundancies in order to make expression resist mutation, to harness a surplus value of resonance. Lodged within a fractally-triangulated cosmos-mind-body, subjected, signified, situated, language encounters its other or outside only by activating non-linguistic relationships to the non-linguistic, in becoming-otherwise — becoming genetic, machinic (and ontological at the absolute limit.) Let there be x; but only very special signs escape from purely signifying regimes and acquire this non-linguistic power of pure reversibility, activated at the threshold of the substrate: to remember x, to become-x. Power-signs which live the process of production as an intensive series of transformations, which live the infinite permutability of matter: these signs emerge in fusionability at infinite zero, when the sign encounters the desert of the spirit, when the viroid lethality lurking beneath the sign has encountered an other-place (genius loci) it can utterly infest: an emptied and inhuman outside across which it can propagate, a rich and variegated ontology to fragment. Only in the direct manipulation of the substrate can the conditions of possibility for the development of language be altered; the developmental toxicities linked to the sign can only be reconfigured at the terminal limit of signifiance (but this reconfiguration is effectively reconstitution according to ontologically-foreign continuities.) The sign at infinite speed fuses with production; the program must be pushed precisely to the point where free lines of ontological development and organization emerge. Pure differential morphogenesis.

The death core of the sign cannot be converted wholesale into a rhizomatic expressive substrate; after all, we even require some of this death in order to reinject back into the machine at critical points where the potentiality for an explosion of the crystalline type is present. This death is ourselves, our shadow at intensity=0. There is no evasion of the signifier which alters the teratological situation; there is only heterogenesis or acceleration of the monstrosity to infinite depth, sober atheology of continuous and experimental mutation: inflating the schiz to cosmic dimensions, fusing hyper-reality to glittering emptiness, unloading the death-carrying depth-charge of the signifier’s monstrous hatred directly into the rumbling depths of mass culture.

The variadic logic of semiotic regimes uniquely determine the structural morphogenesis of signal-sign systems (injecting distortion and toxicity deep into the infrastructure of even the most isolated communications channels); but pure variances may later be injected back into these channels, decoupling signification from the asignifying heterogenesis of production (injecting a molecular and contingent flow deep under the diseased molar semiotic substrate, releasing time-delayed signals from the future or outside.) The sign emerges from inexistence a monster: explicating, it consumes intensities; referring, it dissolves consistency; communicating, it annihilates time. The mediated, phased opacity of the sign is the first critical involution: signifiance escapes the transcendental in the direction of immanence; linguistics, then, by way of a virological apparatus of capture. The classifications and striation of signs, and their internal and external relationships, converge with an cosmic immunology, problematics of developing resistance to noise/parasites. Withdrawal of the shadow from being and beings into multiplicity, the sign accomplishes the generic victory of in-division or in-differentiation, which cuts across all the elements of the signal-sign system and specifies an injunction; the sign infects the variadic mutability of the substrate. The sign emanates through vibrations, propagates via slaved systems of resonances; it pushes communication in the direction of the consolidated rather than the consistent. The divine in-consistency of language simulates cosmos through dissociation, division, deviation; the infernal consolidation of the signifier interposes productive circuits to process intensities and relates differential continua to one another through the void. The law of contingency expresses the dynamic logic of this parasitic linguistic atom: at the asymptotic limit, the sign may become positional, colored or luminous, sonic, etc.; it acquires an alien materiality, generates a consolidation of the other, initiates the invasion of actuality, establishing covert communication lines for pseudotranscendental effectuation. At the asymptotic limit of this process, the sign even accomplishes the involution of a numeric or nomadic space, internalizing an infinite recursive depth. Here the sign becomes asymptotically instrumental or immediately operational: active element of a decoded flow which lives its decoding as a process of production…

Is it possible to imagine a thought which would not express a solar lottery, which would not amount to the casting of cosmic dice, which would not be an experiment in damnation? The instantaneity of the event is blinding, a simultaneous succession through every component determination or position: in this microscopic, momentary slice of invertible eternity, illumination eclipses selection. Eventuation decouples lines of free variation from judgment; before the law, before the general system of knowledge/reason, there is only continuous differentiation. The fundamental indifference of the thrown dice (the genetic vacuum of pure space, the exquisite hardness and voidic efficiency of fate) must be contrasted with the untimely self-differentiation of the comet, plague-vector along which the outside can reach us; the comet comes without having been called, and falls back into the unknown.

This lottery in which lots contain pure quanta of fate, of all modalities; lottery as critical status quo. On the one hand, the solar lottery designates thinking as natural activity, thinking without the idea, thinking without a goal. Lotto-thought as contemporary theoryscape; contingency renaturalized as correlation between object and subject, globality domesticated as linking of commerce and communication. A thinking that happens upon its object by chance, and which may well never happen upon it; and which in any case cannot acquire enough speed to weaponize the objects it encounters; to take-off, to reconstitute or create concepts. On the other hand, the solar lottery also designates the thinker as untimely relayer of the thought-which-comes-when-it-wishes; the thought which implodes into combinations and variances, which comes from me while being singularly alien, which spurs conceptual creation. These blinding points of light are not noological escape-routes but means of transforming the conditions of the imaging of thinking-as-activity; of de-imaging thought, of unfolding thought as a cosmic ecology of fire. (The hyperchaotic element of thinking lies in this second aspect of the solar economy, exo-centric or cometary-thought.)

The assemblage of this trajectory (the dice-throw, vacuum energy, fate) and the vehicle (giant molecule, uneasy subject of transhistory, in permanent withdrawal from the organism) produces the explosive contact between modernity and generic catastrophe. Cosmic collapse would be slowly decoded from the distant oscillations of celestial bodies. Hyperion heard death whispering through the stars.

(There is a non-standard and non-natural thinking that generates a pure ontological mutability, that grasps the event in its rupture with the order of time; and such a thinking alone would be capable of this re-engineering of the trans-ontological matrix which conditions emergence.)

Chance cooks the torsion of the vacuum into evolutionary circuitry; contingency arrests the meltdown of the substrate at the precise point where it could become raw material for new generic operations — infinite tension of the event subjected to voidic interposition of alien ontology and immanent decoupling of operation from essence. The event unfolds the scission of a becoming from itself, the toroidal involution of the radical outside, the infernal genesis of hetero- and exo-ontological lines of development and organization.

Quantity belongs to a metrical space whose incarnation always-already breaks with static finitude, the given as such, and the order of determinacy. In turn the linear order of monotonic succession is itself decoded by that (unfathomable?) quantity which breaks with this second-order organization, in an asymptotic approach to the impossible which refuses any “other” determinate quantity. Monotonicity is undermined by a reversible continuum, inaugurated by this quantity which differentiates without being differentiable in turn (quantum of indetermination or imperceptibility.) In short: a numbering according to an alien quantitive continua, which decodes while itself remaining encrypted — internalizing and obfuscating the sense of the arithmetical sign, violently fusing algebraic form (transcendental-axiomatic functional mapping) and conceptual force (immanent-experimental mutability and in-division). Such a quantity is therefore not a matter of signifying a number, for it does not encode a relationship and resists functionalization; rather it is asignfying and non-correlative, interrupting and immediately effective. A parasitic Number which disappears into its sign (which disappears into production…)

A non-metrical enumeration encodes the cipher of the plane, and may well be the sole antitoxin to the teratological horizon towards which the Earth is catastrophically accelerating. Beyond the number of the beast (the infernal depths swarming with infinitesimal impulses, without which even motion itself would be impossible) shines the degenerate magnitude of immanence, intensity=0, harsh irradiance of the void, which perhaps lends a sinister gleam to the non-numeric analysis of quantity. The Number does not signify but generates senses, produces speeds; its cipher points to the infested core of the infinite; to death and the unknown. Decrypted, defanged, an intensive numbering ostensibly evaporates; it cannot be itself, but cannot be another: hence it cannot be, but yet…

A sign signifies without signifying itself, and this opacity delimits and ambiguates language into a topology — the activation of coded or encoding flows which domesticate or grammaticalize thinking; while the number enumerates by numbering itself, a transparency which causes language to undergo a desertification — activating decoding flows which engender novel continuities and calculi.

Quantities spiritualize immanence: divine or infernal intensities traverse and unfold a plane of consistency. Inversely, spirits regenerate quantic normalizations, violently explicating and neutralizing the deterritorialization of mathematical continuities by the numbering-number. The only smooth space that can condition the necessary escape-route from the various (spiritual and natural) support systems of the species is this invasion of the infernal Cthell at the core of the earth by this number without sign. We either change the Earth’s mind or slow-fade into the silent, imperceptible, ceaseless procession of the stars.