Dali, Instrument masoquista. (1933-34)
Melody and Morphogenesis
Refrains of Culture, Crystals of Time
by Taylor Adkins and Joseph Weissman
Table of Contents
Soundworld (or Sonocultures) | Musiconomy | Occulturation | Wavebands | Dream Philosophy | Euphony | Spectrum
Abstract
Positing that philosophy may be dreamed otherwise, we conduct a non-standard philosophical experiment according to the musical model. Installing a plastic, collective, and abstract motor scheme into writing, we synthesize and investigate several occultural instances, including Adorno’s musical intervention in popular astrology, the uncanny loop of Proust’s ‘dream book,’ Simondon’s elaboration of crystalline amplification… Can this material be elaborated according to another (unilateral) syntax? Examining these instances, we offer an unacceptable hypothesis: the sentience of music.
In the time of the refrain, we discover sonocultures—cultivations of sound-worlds, crystallizations of temporal, spiritual and politico-economic lines. We suggest the concept of musiconomy as a vehicle for analyzing the extended criticality of life, thinking, and the city from an experimentally-unified musico-morphogenetic perspective. For musiconomy, time is the object of a design practice. In this sense, art and especially music capture or recover chronogenetic potentialities and thereby produce or dismantle crystals of time.
How do our knowledges of life, cities, and thinking individuate? We offer several musiconomic theses: urbanism, cognition, musicality (1) participate symmetrically in living structures of determination (extended crisis); (2) continuously transform via symmetry changes according to specific principles of individuation; (3) respond to temporizing morphogenetic principles (Longo/Montévil) or chaosmotic abstract machines (rediscovering Guattari with Deleuze). It is in the spironomic melt-up or transdifferentiation of living forms, societies, and ideas that we find or create ways to dream philosophy.
Biographical Notes
Taylor Adkins is a translator of French philosophy, including the work of Simondon (Course on Perception and Individuation in light of the Notions of Form and Information, UMinn, forthcoming) Laruelle (Dictionary of Non-Philosophy and Philosophy and Non-Philosophy) as well as Guattari (The Machinic Unconscious).
Joseph Weissman is a software engineer and an independent scholar in the humanities. Joe writes essays on works of philosophy (“Isocritique”, a study of Kant’s first critique); and has given papers at several philosophy conferences, notably on Deleuze’s relationship to the philosophy of technology (“Technoscience and Expressionism” at Deleuze Studies 2014).
Together Joe and Taylor founded the theory weblog Fractal Ontology (http://ontology.io) and now host a philosophy podcast called Theory Talk (https://soundcloud.com/theory-talk). They live in the Atlanta area in the state of Georgia, USA.
Introduction
In melody, at times, we discover a sonoculture — sound-world of a culture, a crystallization of musical and political lines… Is it not almost as though a people are formed from pure sound, almost as though the music came first? –In this spirit we elaborate the perspective of musiconomy, which analyzes the extended criticality of thinking and of the city from an (experimentally-unified) musico-morphogenetic perspective. Musiconomy suggests that time may become an object of a design practice; and that we may individuate our knowledges of life and thinking. Finally musiconomy posits that we may ‘detune’ philosophy according to higher euphony or harmony-in-harmony; and that we may extract (from this attunement) the transcendental wave (or sound ontology) of the virtual.
Along these lines, and building on J. Sey’s concept of an “imaginary waveband”, we suggest theorizing an abstract waveband that conditions every discourse and assemblage. In fact we will suggest Plato discovers it ‘first’, by superposition of images of cities, thoughts and music, finding at once their universality and expression of a singular essence or viewpoint. Musiconomy suggests this series of lines (of development, of thinking and of composition) follow from the morphogenetic matrix of living forms. Urbanism, cognition and musicality (1) participate ‘symmetrically’ in a living structure of determination (or extended crisis); and (2) continuously transform according to specific principles of individuation; (3) they respond to spironomic morphogenetic principles (Longo/Montévil) or chaosmically ‘generative’ abstract machines (Guattari’s ‘return’-to-Chomsky).
It is in this spironomic meltup (extended crisis of the living form, city, thinking) that we will find or create a way to dream philosophy. Inspired by Laruelle, we conduct a non-philosophical experiment according to the musical model… Dream-writing and (collective) automatic writing; the ‘recursive’ dream book in Proust; can these (elements) be elaborated according to another syntax, a unilateral DLI? A question to orbit, circulate around: what does a decoding or deterritorializing wave do to an occult formation? We study a few examples (beyond Proust’s dreambook, Adorno on astrology) and suggest an unacceptable hypothesis (the sentience of music). And finally a spectral analysis: the occult forms the elements of a time war, an ‘occultural’ war between times; or war against Time (considered as the superior individual whose structure of determination makes justice impossible.) We thereby pair our analysis of the deterritorialization of occultures with a minor exhumation and deconstruction of the occult as a form of faith-knowledge; which permits a final dis-enclosure and re-statement of our hypotheses.
Soundworld (or Sonocultures)
Until the advent of transduction, the cry of a raven had not been heard more than a few kilometres away. It could now be heard anywhere, provided it was transduced and transmitted.[1]
Sonoculture is a first name for this attempt to theorize and objectivize this ‘unilateral’ intuition (of the ‘transduction’ of a people from the ‘spirit’ of music). Provisional goals in elaborating soniculture; an analysis of ‘sono-culturality’ permits a methodology of research-listening — isolating plot holes in the matrix of fictions of listening. The micro-politics of listening, how to avoid negative, authoritarian, ‘worldly’ models of sono-culture? The theoretical task is double articulated, and sonoculture can only exhume the first …
- To analyze: to trace the vibrant imprint of a sound-world (to break down the major image, illuminate its plot holes; to cause the idol to re-sound in order to reveal what is unsound).
- to synthesize:
- a global map of the minor lines of musical evolution (the nexus of micro-political and bio-temporal transdifferentiation)
- a ‘localization’ or micro-diagram of the ‘combinatory’ territories of the occult (guided by Faust)
A soundworld radiates spherically outwards: it is a standard-bearer, operating an extension and creation of a world, constructing or regenerating a territory. Sound traverses the landscape in service of expression. For inert matter, the sonic territory has no obvious ethological values; but considering geodynamics, hydrodynamics, meteorology, etc., all these regimes engender sonorities correlate with the inert world; which may be captured (or not) by an matrix of listening (animal or machine): the tracing of sonorities (marking), and mapping them out into zones of audibility (forming sonic territories). To speak above the background noise, to identify oneself: the sense of the sonic territory can be derived from the function a given expression plays, in warding off chaos: the role expression plays in the series of universal production (reproducing the line, staving off invasion); the role expression plays in the series of consumption (habit, reproducing the organism, staving off exhaustion); the role expression plays in the series of sound-production itself (forming lines of composition, determining degrees of intensity; or else expressing singular perspectives, styles or points.) The rhythms imposed by a soundworld convoke the resistance of the territory to chaos[2]; they expel chaos, by drawing a vibratory line that circulates, concentrates or completes a cycle, produces concentric shells, life-spheres. The soundworld is a vibrant image of the lifeworld: it traces the curvature of major identities and maps the intensive depths of bodies; it even prismatically transduces the vibrancy of the inert (spectrography, in which the spectral traces of objects their compositions may be derived[3].)
The minor traces or illuminates plot-holes, as part of its conjugation and transdifferentiation of the major image (icons, language, etc.) What is the relationship between the plot-hole and the black hole, center of signifying resonance? The soundwave is apprehended, made audible [and decoded]; but before this we are in the ‘grip’ of sound, stuck fixed to an animal center (Bonnet). It [perhaps] takes even longer for the ‘third’ sound-knowledge, comprehension of sound — in a way it is very recent (classical acoustics) and in another way, contemporary (string theory); and in another way eminently and entirely futural, consonant with the ‘infinitely’ resonant question of reunifying technicity and totality. Religion and science function as major images for [minor lines to ‘occultate’…] an occulture to decompose [and diagram; or else recombine, transcode?]. In the occult a soundworld is made to generate anti-pathetic machinery; the occult, an immune response [to an overloaded pathos]? The protention and retention of communal waves; is it not the rhythm, the vibe, the motor scheme which is subverted in the occult? Writing, numbers, images are made plastic; a whole surrealism of the unconscious is at work in the occult imaginary. Unsound subversions.
The soundworld is a zone of potentials, a field of singularities shaping and reshaping temporalities, temporizations. The mimicry of temporization is the propagation of a soundworld; it evolves along railway lines, but also through the engine, the motorization of time. Is it the conflict between man and machine, social totality and its technical excess, which re-sonates in a soundworld? The intensive gap between these extensive images (science, religion, art, philosophy…) An in-between-modalities, which walks a knifes’ edge between disciplinary-fusion and occult-tics — the danger of involution, when only an evolution will do. The universal cuts a way out, the tympanum cannot block the cosmic wave transducing us. People are born from sound, from musicality; from resonance forming a crystal of time, a pure disjunction of temporal series. A new temporization, informationally intense, pregnant with the future.
Soundworlds are sonorous hyperspheres: they have extreme poles (noise and silence). At any point on the surface of the sonic hypersphere a specialization of sound, an evolution or involution according to a tensor field. Each sound is encrypted; the soundworld crystallizes every wave in a hysterical archive or transcendental matrix of sound; deus ex sonus. The dramaturgy of sound: sonorous composition of a universe, musical interweaving of narrative lines (with their attendant loose ends, plot-holes.) The interior of the hypersphere is a black hole complex, a singularity of infinite informatic intensity, whose data is slowly leaking out. All of soundworld that we experience, this narrow abstract waveband very near the equatorial temperate zones, is an echo, radiance cast off as waste-heat. The central core is what drives the macro-dynamics of soundworld; and yet this core can itself be modulated, set resonating along with other soundworlds. Through resonance, sound passes between worlds (sounds even pass between sounds, and interfere constructively or destructively as they do so.) Classical visions of vibrating materialities still reverberate, even as they must be corrected by an ‘acoustic vision’ (already a kind of motor; alternating engine of compression-rarefaction.) Wave machines. Sound is a war machine, radiating its intensive level or degree in every direction, articulating a zone in soundworld, a territory marked on the hypersphere — a territory which may be productive; sound is in the end production, vibration of machine parts resonating through the space between the machinery. Does the machine work or not? A characteristic sound reassures or dismays (carries characteristic movements, relays relations of movement and rest; the internal resonance and composition of bodies are propagated in becoming-sonorous.)
People are born from pure or transcendental sound, which is to say, from musicality. In the crystallization of music, we catch sight of what is to come: a people, a politics, a culture, a world, and an image of thought (technosphere, mechanosphere). Music or future-photography. The control of musical lines is important for this reason: because the refrain plays you as you play it. Bi-univocality of a life and a refrain. The time of life is spiralling out, an extended crisis like that of the musical work whose enharmonic dissidences are never really fully ‘resolved’. Everything is there in musicality; of all the arts it is ‘especially’ music which produces crystals of time as part of its normal functioning. It disjoins the past and the future, elements of pure time interact. A new temporization: music foretells, it foreshews untheorized modes of organization (Attali). Music gauges the depths of a metaphysic; we can tell by the musicality in the philosopher’s voice when she has attained to the characteristically-utopian dissidence of metaphysics. Musicality is perhaps itself deeper than can be imaged with purely-sonic techniques; regarding this depth we can now only prefigure unacceptable hypotheses (that music is a sentient entity; that the refrain plays us; that a people are born from pure sound in the form of prophetic musical lines).
Sonocculture develops from ‘decoding’ of the characteristic relations of movement and rest in the sonic territory — isolating position, longitude and latitude, on the sonorous hyper-sphere. A sono-culture articulates certain motilies on this plane, expanding the abstract waveband of culture in the direction of its unraveling, subversion or exhaustion. A sonocculture (deterritorializing wave) is in the last instance indistinguishable from sono-cultures, soundworlds (territorial assemblage = expressive hyper-sphere). The spiral is superposed with the sphere: a torsional extraction of a new line of development, a spiralling-inwards and spiralling-outwards that coincide in a metastable tension or flexion of the [soundworld] sphere. This is the morphogen, instance of diffusion-rearrangement, chemically a mechanism for breaking or halting the infinite symmetry of radial diffusion (subverting the infinite representation of the tautological object: ‘I am object qua object, empty of properties and hollow’.) The object is always covered over, patina or halo; a dream-object lurks beneath every real one (Baudrillard in System of Objects, quoted in Bonnet.)
Sound and morphogenesis. In the epicycle of life, there is a vital negentropic crystallization of time. Life stores information, records it in a one-dimensional code, replays it. Life is this replaying, this transduction of a refrain from a stored information code repository: a sonic territory, abstract sounds of pure relations. Already pointing, hinting towards harmonics, melodics. Certainly already rhythmic: life embodies the notion of extended criticality or crisis, it extends the instant in both directions, according to ‘protention’ or expectancy (of a future stimulus) and according to preconscious memory or ‘retention’ (of certain stimuli traces). Life is recurrent and precurrent… Instead of a snapshot, the cut of an instant, life is already a circulation of affects, a cyclone-knowing of sensuous realities (in a complex or ‘long’ moment).
[Synaesthesia of pure perception which overflows every abstract category. The dream is papered-over, the fault or gap between society and technology is naturalized. Perception is accordingly restricted, its infinity delimited to an abstract band of intelligibility, associated with the circulation of certain ‘packs’ of signs together, as though signs were also particles, as though there were a chemistry of codes conspiring to organize perception, function, conception. Architecture and dance canalize movement, orient bodies…]
Passage to Crystallization
The music comes first: the refrains of culture play us as surely as we play them. The bi-univocal links between people and sounds, between a people and the sound-world that inhabits them and which they variously adorn, decode, translate, abandon, transfigure, etc. This religion-without-religion of music, which brings along all the dangers of the signifying center despite the apparent asignifying character, the diagrammatic or diaphoretic relation between musical degrees and levels (or between perspectives: the gap between critical points of audition in a sonic territory…) We must succeed through several perspectives on music, to catch sight in parallax of the singular essence of time which is transduced through musicality. Music precurs, it is precurrent; it whispers of dreams and the sky and the future, it is the aerial root of common time (tick-tock…) The beating heart of culture, music propagates its donated blood into the sublime: [engendering a] metaphysical birth of a life, a people, a way. It prefigures (predicts-without-prestating) the new life, a people to come, some way to move.
Musiconomy
Time is the intensity of bodies.[4]
A nexus forms between life and thought, in which music resounds. Music ‘demonically’ combines living and thinking into a Work or destiny[5]. In the crystallization of music, time is recovered, regained or regenerated.
Time is disjoint or serialized; at best the series may be fixed in a complex moment: the various instants disjoin, and the series of time is transfigured in crystallization. As such the temporalities involved in art are ‘of the last instance’, a one-time each-time; Artaud suggests the poem is burned on reading. Art is consumed by immanentizing it; and afterward it can only be resurrected from ashes. It is ‘flush’ with the abstract machine, forming an extension of abstract machines in the direction of cultures; cultural machines, abstract cultures. The consumption of cultures and the production of universes; the world is caught up in a vortex between (the series of consumption-habitus and the series of universal production). Is a parallax ‘occultation’ necessary to catch sight of the torsional lines of the world, the curvature the worldly signs take on in the void? The conventional sign is ambiguous because it is arbitrary; the other series of signs turn ambiguity into profundity, manufacture specific yet increasingly abstract, dematerialized or ‘spiritual’ signs that will finally form the signs of art. This last series of signs, in the time of the refrain, are the elements of crystallization: signs of times long past and still to come; signs of ‘impossible’ times, pasts never past, or the ‘alternation’ of the present. Art turns the world into a machine: the meaningless signs of the world, cast into the void, are reclaimed; their proper series of time is restored or regenerated. The future beams into the present at these critical moments and places, crystallizations possible through music, the harmonic conjunction of signs or the melodic disjunction of time. Critical transdifferentiation of time on the basis of a musical model of philosophy; what has the future still in store (evolution of the concept of the concept) –The question of what remains in philosophy, a question which resounds ironically in the most abundant times of metaphysical research and development — the resonance of this problem can only deepen (a coastal shelf on the edge of a great abyss?) The glare of the blank horizon of time; or joy-wisdom to-come.
Musiconomy perhaps implies that what is first and foremost privileged and at stake is the sonic dimension of music, but what the notion of an economy accentuates is in fact the circulation, evocation, generation (etc.) of affects[6]. The question of what a refrain, a musical assemblage, a sonic vortex can do is bound up with and determined by the question of what a body can do. Affects can sweep us away in and along deterritorializing lines of flight, but they can all too terrestrially keep us ensconced sclerotically in reactionary territorial formations. The feeling of belonging-to a territory (with its concomitant opening onto universes of value) has both musical and affective dimensions (among others). Being drawn to or warded off by a certain artist, genre, instrument, mode (etc.) goes deeper than and beyond something that might simply be called individual “taste” and demonstrates (perhaps diagrams) the cathexes and anticathexes, the proclivities and repressions of the (machinic, but also collective, individual, musical…+) unconscious. What sort of formations and stereotypes invest a musical genre, and what sort of transformations disinvest it, leaking from it, perhaps planting the seeds for others? These are just a few of the concrete (Spinozist) dynamics at work when we discuss the reality and possibility of musiconomy.
The music of our lives, the music that plays us even as us we play it. The time of the refrain is also the time of “a life”, a life-time (passes) in musical crystallization. Music, or a sonorous map of a becoming. Time crystallizes into (disjunction of) a moment-context, a refrain-signal, a body-transceiver. The series diverge, in the last instance only unified by accident or contingency; or indeed by a deliberate crashing of all the stratifications of time. Music can do this; the phenomenological singularity and revelation of music. Worldlessness of the purest phrases of music, their fragmentarity and ‘precosity’ carry them forth into these ‘wordless’ encounters, these pure innocent moments whose lines converge into tensors — innocent like a geometrical relation or chemical reaction, the innocence of musical composition. It doesn’t even demand, like some forms of art, a total availability: only the resonance, the singularities and dynamisms which we have; and may elaborate in our harmonizations: our dance, our excitation, our voice. Music is spirit, or the spiritual matrix of a becoming. People are born from the spirit of music. At a certain moment a symmetry changes, forms or breaks, and all the singularities line up anew (the distinctive points of a life: a city, an idea, a moment…).
Musiconomy is not trying to name a science of music; it is a dialogue with the space of music. It has to be constructed again and again. The space and spatialization at the heart of music, which render it prophetic, capable of the most immense and serene immaculations. The miracle-machine of music: what a phenomenological singularity the musical form constitutes; how it has programmed the singular points of our bodies and cities and ideas, in order to make them dance according to one refrain. The musicality of society is a binding which is both more supple and more insidious than that of shared oaths, explicit teachings, written laws. Musicality has more to do with the economy of music which governs implicitly the shape of time, the spacing of key events and the timing of critical moments. Music governs the unwritten, the illegible, what exceeds and conditions collectivity: sociality and emotions. It is the vector of power and its subversion at once; as Attali says, prefiguring untheorized modes of organization. Musicality pulls a species up and out, attunes it to a universe; it is a higher politics of pure spacing, pure timing. Leap-diagrams.
Musicology, political economy, theoretical biology: what ties this knot together, how is the fuse constructed? It [the answer] is temporization, [in the] lines or series of time which stitch together a city, an idea, a life. A crystal of time is produced; time in its pure state is frozen, compactified. The crystal thaws: pure time is released, time is regenerated or recovered; time regained, time reconquered. In crystallization, a repetition in space; in vitalization, a crisis of time, a ‘repetition’ at the limit of maximal approximation, non-ergodic quasi-repetition of a system far from equilibrium. The being-(of)-phases: musiconomy recognizes fundamentally time is non-substantial (the past does not exist; the singular poignance of the disjunction of time, the recovery in memory of a past never present.) Time operates according to the crystallization, the vitalization, the culturalization: the repetition of spatiotemporal dynamics according to a distribution of singular of points, conjugating according to the ‘crises’ of these points, according to the extension of this crisis, the transformations of the critical point (of saturation-crystallization) into a critical threshold (of vitalization-culturalization). A culture, a living form, a crystal: these are ‘stratified’ time, forms or moulds of time, beings which are their ‘own’ phase, far from equilibrium… A new (compactified, ‘curled up’) dimension of time is formed; or else (the operation) forms apparatuses of temporal capture, machinery for refrigerating temporalities. Music forms the nexus, like an abstract matrix of pure time which knows how to make temporizations crystallize, thaw, saturate, distill: from the crisis of instantaneity emerges a threshold of pure time which reproduces all of time in disjoining it. The instant is no longer a point but a complex moment; a new line of time has intervened, propagating an internal rhythm which paces the external one… Local and global time: music forks or bifurcates the line of time. In vitalization or culturalization, the production of one-dimensional codes (localizing or individuating, accumulating ‘random’ events and mutations: writing, the genome); transducing programs for the generative abstract machinery of three-dimensional forms (considered almost like Kantian wholes, ‘cosmic’ or ‘planetary’, wandering-dispersing lines of specification/speciation; radiantly distributing a revolutionary ‘reversible’ temporality: living forms, worlds).
Strange, cunning pages of Longo and Montevil; a curious reinvigoration, reincarnation of Simondon. Their (masterful) efforts seem to us to be thoroughly Simondonian (without a single reference to the thinker as far as we can tell.) The metaphysics in the work are confined quite ‘thoroughly’ to the theoretical object (the living form) and the objectivization of this theory through knowing subjects, scientists and experimenters, in dynamic relay (between theory and experiment); the only explicit reference to metaphysics is generally ‘eidetic’, about the transcendental field of subjectivity as it is elaborated in Husserl; and relating phenomenology to the living form, in the form of characteristic lengths, intervals, the generation of bio-temporality (a complex moment or Whole in which more and more of the past and future are swept up, protended or retained…) The living form and the knowing subject: Longo and Montevil are very curious about the individuation of our knowledges, not so much the origin of the living form from the inert, but the transition between theories of the inert to theories of living forms. This theoretical transition operates according to a plan and achieves a new perspective; it is at the very least a profoundly resonant schema and diagram they assemble. For us the notion of critical-extension of the point, the extended criticality or crisis of time (and so music, cities, thinking) has become of critical importance in understanding the process of temporal-crystallization, as part of an analysis of the Deleuzian notion of the crystal of time. Simondon is fundamental to all this; the attentive reader cannot help but notice the schema (the individuation of technical and vital knowledges, knowing subjects and living forms; approaching the living form as a transcendental field of singularities, symmetry transformations, plastic transdifferentiation, transduction of form-matter-content). Let’s look closer at their perspective of extended criticality or crisis. The perspective in this case (which Longo and Monetvil engender through their daring conception of extended criticality) “approaches the mathematical nature of biological objects as a limit or asymptotic case of physical states: the latter may yield the dense structure of critical points in a non-trivial interval of viability — a situation not considered by current physical theories. In a sense, it is the very principles grounding physical theories that we are modifying through an ‘actual’ limit. In short, biological objects are analysed here in terms of partial but continual changes of symmetry within an interval of viability, as an extended locus of critical transitions.” Biological time is paced by symmetry changes; we are cycling between singularities, subject to anomalous orbits in phase space. Life is the limit of physical inertia, a super-saturation of critical points, inducing a new internal temporization. Crystallization by other means: the capture of singularities by the living form, the transcendental evolution of time, revolutions in musics. Music is a revolution against time, the invention of a new order of time; a vitalization, regeneration of time. The time of refrains is time reconquered, or at least, it holds out this possibility: warding off black hole effects, preserving singularities unscathed, thawing the crystal, permitting new cycles of symmetry transformations. Life goes on, or it is combined with thinking into a new earth, a people to come; this strange and wandering destiny (of the living form and the refrain: to reverse the flow of time, to form systems in time.)
Occulturation
There is no occult in itself. Occultures always imply counter, adjacent, or subjacent acculturations with respect to the majoritarian cultures as their conditions of possibility. (Does culture depend ‘recursively’ on the occult?) It is important to distinguish in cultures and occultures between the cruelty of the primitive territorial machine, the terror of the despotic machine, and the post-mortem cynicism of the capitalist machine. The movements and maneuvers sweeping along the occult are not the same from machine to machine. Does this mean the occult always reacts to the dominant codes?
Like the question of writing[7], the question of the first occulture indicates a disparity between zones of power and a nascent imperialism. Question of the first initiate and the first occulture: Solomon straying from Yahweh’s exclusivity. The lure of Moloch; can we say it is simply allure of annihilation, or of the cruel music of destruction, sacrifice? Does the enjoyment of music lie in sacrifice[8] — love of life burning itself out, love ‘in burning immanence’?[9]
Case of Newton: occult foundations of the physical sciences. Strange geometries; the unworldliness of the alchemist. Does the occult represent the old way of knowing? Newton’s prism, or the diffraction of history. The occult knows “the old way” because it still resists communication, it forms a site of heretical resistance especially from the perspective of information ecology. Does the occult then correlate with slower movements of information? A greater resonance in the hyper-chamber of the matrix of listening, hyper-consciousness; is Zarathustra ‘occulting’ when he retreats to the heights and undergoes rarefaction[10]? The occult, or the revolt against time (the revolt of the abyss of time against the height?) Does the occult perhaps mark an indignity of communicating: asserting the impossibility of communicating, or rather establishing levels of communication (communicating from different perspectives as needed[11]…) Perhaps the occult is more clearly identified by the mode of organization it operates, the disjoint zones of power; heresy and dissimulation, chameleon infiltration of all the strata. The occult time war involves everyone, especially if they’re largely unaware. We’re all susceptible to this lure from the outside which emanates from within literature. The greatest work is always universal (even if access isn’t, or isn’t ‘easy’.)
The occult implies minoritarian collective assemblages of enunciation. This assemblage of enunciation infuses a marvel with the uncanny; an occult signifier lures away from the majoritarian image of thought. Combinations of elements of the image: permuting letters, numbers, symbols; but also conjugating critical points and lines (with the singular fluctuations of the body…) The combination of times into a moment, using fragments of time which may be of the inhuman-ancient past or the remotest future. The signs of the occult are combinatory. Strange plane of consistency upon which occulture weaves its uncanny plots (deploying lures or constructing marvelous devices.) An occult assemblage of enunciation orates the unconscious of an abstract machine, as its combinatory underside taking enjoyment in the mechanical permutation of elements and generative principles.
What is the status of the six dimensions of language as Roman Jakobson lays out {footnote}: context, message, sender, receiver, channel, code? How are these deformed, deterritorialized and reterritorialized by the occult and by the recycling of archaisms? What is the futural aspect of the archaisms that are cycled in this way?
The general law or the form of the cyclone[12].The message is received through a ‘matrix of fictions’ (Bonnet). There is nothing stable in the structure of determination (e.g. of listening; of series of signs); or rather, ‘nothing’ is stable: there are only speculative schema, and provisional strategies for transforming these schema. Yet occult channels are by no means the only way to access the plane; in fact (like the tympanum of the ear) it may at first appear an insuperable obstacle to hearing the abstract wavelength of the future.
Occultures counter-actualize the past: mobilizing the schemas and strategies of the past within the present. The occult regime of signs, participating obscurely in the series of time; I emit signs which are countersignifying or asignifying or both, at the optimal time and place where these signs can extend the speculative abstraction of culture into the world. The inherent barbarism of the occult (from the dominant perspective): an indifference of interiority (dissonance between schema and strategy, meta-political warp), but (also) a challenge, a potential violence to exteriority, threat to the structure of determination. The occult mutates the programs executed by the abstract machines, which are responsible for distributing degrees of reality or ‘existence’ to the variously-stratified bands and packs of the unconscious; granting and selecting the pure multiplicities which will be ‘of’ the world (disjoined into crystallization in the ‘conventional’ series of the worldly/the void.) This is the threat of the minoritarian that refuses to replace the major mode, minoritarian culture qua minoritarian. How to move beyond simple opposition, resemblance, contradiction? A question of the authenticity of difference and repetition. Against the background of universal inauthenticity, only a functional or ‘machinic’ selection is possible: the past is sifted, the ruins exhumed; the (occult) seeker is after artefacts that may still function.
How does the occult want the truth? Is it like the way the inquisitor wants the truth, according to his own lights; or is it more like that of the lover, who sees in the eyes of his beloved an inaccessible universe, and is condemned to jealous deciphering of the beloved’s lies? Deleuze’s occultation within the history of philosophy: Laruelle thinks that Deleuze acts like he has recovered a long-lost Secret, some precious metaphysical treasure. Deleuze indeed does ‘rediscover’, but only as a necessary-provisional step in finding a way to form a new creation of his own. Indeed the crystal of time is one of Deleuze’s “last” concepts[13], one that ‘especially’ conducts his own lightning-bolt insurrection within thinking[14]. In the disjunction of times, in a connection of temporalities without conjunction, we are permitted to become attuned to the distance, disagreement or dissonance of these distinguished times, forming a complex momantaneousness rather than an instant, a singular multiplicity rather than a unity-plurality dyad. (In the moment: the biological time of morphogenesis, the sonorous time of transduction, the luminous time of transdifferentiation.)
What does the dream prefigure? Musicoanalysis of dreams. A dream is an information ecology… Signals pass into each other, forming bridges (overtones) or gaps (cancellation). Cuts appear; scenes are transfigured. A catastrophe occurs, obscure. The reality of the dream can sometimes seem overwhelming (the veritable sense of being-there.) The sign of the dream is “especially” significant because of this phenomenal virtualism: the symbolism of dreams operates apparently without fiction; although the memories we form of the dream seem to possess a fugacity, an ephemerality not unlike the evanescence of sound. Sonoanalysis. J. Sey asks what your dreams sound like... We sonoanalysts might ask the shape of your sonic territories, the noise your desiring machines make, the dimensionality of your soundworld. How to measure musical writing, musicality in writing, perhaps especially in the scene of dreamwriting, the (refrains of the) factory-floor of the unconscious?
From Simondon’s point of view, whereas signals pass between individuals, it is with the appearance of signification that we can talk about the existence of an individuated being. The individual is that by which and that in which signification appears…
What can be cultivated from Adorno’s perspectives in his “Theses against Occultism”? For Adorno, there is an acerbic pessimism and skepticism against what he takes to be the vapid goal or consequence of a vulgar reversal of Hegel. The virulence with which Adorno rages against “occultism” perhaps betrays the fact that his perspective is geared toward seeing only a process of knowledge at stake and not the immanence of lived experience, what Laruelle calls “ordinary mysticism”. If the status of the occult is not bound up with reason or the understanding, how does that charge it with the sublime labor of the imagination, pushing thought beyond its sedentary headquarters, toward a “rationalism” set adrift? Perhaps Hume’s demeanor is more appropriate in this vein, insofar as the status of “miracles” are from the start open to speculative engagement and eventual verification. A dose of Hume could lead Adorno back from the pessimistic precipice…
[Yet] Adorno’s pessimism was justified and highly relevant for the era, for the time (for his life.) Perhaps we even might do well to adopt some degree of the pessimism of that era today: which after all enabled a solidary resistance to growing fascism, [which was] indexed by rampant irrationalism (not incidentally tied up at every point with [non-rational] occultating lines.) Irresponsible usages of mystical disjunctions. The importance of a dose of experimental verification is well-known to the great master of aesthetics, dour as he may have been or been made to become by the tragedies he endured (I am thinking of the Shoah; his “exile”; the terrible certainties such a life must have offered.) The problem of optimism and pessimism is perhaps besides the point of the occult, whose joyous devaluation of the major image and subversion-ridicule of images of reason may take on a positive or negative valence. It is the negative pole of unreason which connects up with fascist irrationalism. In this sense the positive occultic valence seeks ‘another’ image of reason, or a ‘non-reason’ whose rationality is nevertheless intact, vigorous. Hyper-reason of the last instance, ordinary mysticism without unreason. Adorno thus provides indications for a kind of ‘musical’ critique of the occult. How to conduct an ethico-aesthetic analysis capable of sounding the occulture for these (un)critical redundancies of resonance, interaction…? Industrialism and reason: in unreason the occult becomes servile, a servomechanism of the law and the state, part of a magical apparatus of capture; where instead in “positive” non-reason (hyper-reason) it could become a nomad war machine…
Wavebands
What beautiful waves you are making…[15]
The future comes in waves; the waveform of the future (transcendental anastrophe; or cosmic transduction). The past qua past is also a waveform, hyper-concrete and reified in actual historical modalities yet subject to virtual lines of variation. Time itself varies between lines or series, depending on how it has been transduced (‘fixed’, sequenced or stored) in material singularities. Time itself becomes the subject of a critical or ‘existential’ serialization, a crisis which the future continuously transforms. We could call this immanent morphogenetic principle “a life” (after Deleuze): these one-or-many lines are in tension-flexion; the ‘virtual’ tensor field (between-around them) governs the spiral or sinusoidal curvature of a characteristic intensive duration (lifetime or half-life). Time-dependent (e.g. technical) processes also form their own temporalities. Artists and engineers re-form or design time. Innovation gives back to people the time “stolen by life”.[16] Art makes or regenerates time.
The universal wave. A wave of temporalization; life is like a sonorous becoming in the temporal medium. It is important not to over-substantialize temporalities, vitalities. There are no ethereal fires animating bodies, unless it is the transcendent solarity of the Plane, the glare of immanence. Nevertheless it is important, it “attests to an intuition” (Bonnet) — that is, the imaginary waveband (J. Sey) which individuates bodies, signals on the basis of an ‘emotional aesthetics’. Tesla dreamed [supposed] that he heard cosmic voices, that the earth had become a cosmic radio dish, a transmitter-receiver which had brought the alien intelligence of the stars into his chambers; he was unwavering in this imaginary wavelength in which the transduction of sound opens humanity up to the becoming-sonorous of the cosmos. Radiophony or becoming-cosmic. We have to be ready to receive the signals, we have to be aware of the context; that interference in the channel can disrupt the immanent wave of rarefaction-compression. A sonority is a wave of ‘successive’ compression-rarefactions; sonority is already a vitality; the medium-without-medium of vibrancy. The cosmos is brought alive when we become more sensitive to its sonority, that it is speaking on wavebands that eclipse our perceptibilities, our narrow angles of intelligibility onto the world.
The past, too, like the future has a waveform, but infinitely condensed, gregariously compressed, such that, to paraphrase Nietzsche, becoming is chained to and drags along behind it the history of being. The gregariousness of the past (to forego the search for a better descriptor) lies in the same cries of protest issued by bodies relative to the organs (which is not against the organs per se but against the organizations of bodies, the stratifications and constitutions of consistency that force a body to be what it is). What the occult conjures, summons from the past in its symbolic selection and refinement of archaisms is like a violence to the inherited gregariousness of the sign and signal, and it is in this break with the herd-mentality of ‘accepted’ and ‘received’ signalization, signification and symbolization that occultures wager on the spectacular effectiveness and ritualization of what thereby becomes intrinsically egregious.
Center of the signifying vortex, at the heart of the black hole: a singularization, a singularity of infinite curvature. In materiality this singularization captures an unlimited density; in the spiritualization of the sign, along this trajectory through thresholds of serialization, what can this singularization contain? The signifying-center emanates: it resounds, it resonates with all the other black holes. It leaks out a tiny molecular stream, red-hot radiance. Conjunction and disjunction of the series of time: the time of the refrain has to do with the line of escape out of the black hole, the way an intensive burst of information, an expressive line, can find its way out of stratification by redundancy and overcoding via overtones, counter-resonances. The molecularity of the sign-particle escapes the major identity of the conventional sign by a thousand plot-holes, “spy routes”, a strategic or tactical vector in touch with another plane of development, hinting at productive machinery still more profound, or indeed still to come. Embryology of the sign, pedagogy of the sign; or rather the fluctuation of the lines of time, prodigious in their emission of different orders of signs, arranged according to distinct symmetry-transformations and singularities, reproduced alongside and through musical crystallizations which combine life, thinking, cities into a destiny. This trans-convergence of signs, this universal wave which crashes the line of time and produces a singularization: how could it not also be at risk of producing new relations of redundancy, new resonances surrounding the line of time it has generated, a new spiralling “machine” time of the Work or pure destination, projection? Transcendental tacheometry of the series; what matters in the crystallization of music, or the occult connection to the plane, is the distances that are retained-in-disjunction, this pure heterogeneity which is allowed to become “alongside”, a mapping in vivo rather than tracing (axioms of schizoanalysis).
Spinoza on the radio… Abstract music of the wave, the fluctuation, which in the last instance is one thing; and not even a substance but a wave [series] of compression-rarefaction; in the last instance a vibratory region, where an audibility of the universal wave of the hyper-sphere of sonority is made possible. Bonnet wishes us to think schizo-logically here: sound is double-articulated without possible resolution; it is both in the vibratory (object), and in the undulation (wave) which reaches towards us, and which we reach towards in listening. (This coincidence between orders is part of the mystery of sound; Bonnet emphasizes we shouldn’t try to reduce it away, or seek a synthesis.) Listening or reaching-towards is in the last instance a part of the sound; the sonorous phenomena which is universal includes these minor, local involutions; delicate architecture of the ear and tympanum, which Nietzsche said must be born from nocturnal ages; sharp hearing is also a weakness, reactivity-anxiety born of long ages of timidity (the longest age there has been.) Listening in the primordial animal mode pins us to a sonic center, an animal center of fear-listening. (One of Bonnet’s central problems seems to be: how do we overcome authoritarian listening practices? How do we not regress, keep the matrix of fictions involved in listening in mind, even as we reach towards the sonorous? We might ask: what is research-listening, how could it work?)
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Perhaps Plato found it first… In the conjunction of images he discovers a minor line, an eidetic quality… Notice all the forms are abstract particulars: redness, tallness… The form blocks the way to the universal, it establishes a musical mode or rhythmanalytic prescription, operative at the level of the spirit, the city and the universe. Superposition of cities, bodies, ideas; hyper-time of this superposition. In the cosmic sphere of time Plato discovers that all discovery is memory, that knowledge is repetition of time, repetition in time. Let no one ignorant of music… The pacing of philosophy, its essential cadence; desperation, searching for truth, justice, hope. Hopefulness of philosophers until the end. The real philosophy of hope in Plato is strange, it is a hope for the future recurrence; our time precurs the infinite development of spirit to come. Heaven of ideas, this is the universe more than the form, which blocks the way of utopian pure morphisms, absolute universal symmetries, dualities that crystallize and vitalize…
Dream Philosophy
The object and the plot hole. Fiction achieves hysteria by degrees, levels–or else by perspectives, transposition and conjugation of viewpoints. An alien universe intervenes, infusing local sequences with a disconcerting rhythm or vibe. The first pages of Swann’s Way are marked by the (momentary, imaginary) intrusion of an uncanny marvel, a ‘recursive’ dream-book[17] whose subject is the dreamer[18]. Plot holes psychosomatically indicate another plot[19]—
not ‘merely’ suggesting the interference of an ulterior agency, but rather indicating radical inauthenticity.
The ur-plot is the bifurcation of time; the occult rhythms of every society betray another society behind it, within (without) it. The double-articulated structure of determination of society: our identities are said twice, major and minor. But our non-identities are also double-articulated (e.g., the technoccult and meta-mysticism.) What lies between these articulations of social bifurcation, between technoscience and social totality, between society and hind-society? (A concept become cyclone, or revolutionary-transcendental speculation?) Technical societies–with their quasi-occult languages separate from the community, ‘hidden’ behind abstractions, abstract jargons, jargon-machinery. The pure semiotics of the machine and the ambiguous miracle of semio-society: the sign undergoes this embryogenesis, it passes through the void of the world and conventional significations. It must find a plot hole if it wants to escape this endless descent (and realize its dream of hinting at something more profound….) There is only the void to be found in a never-ending katabatic (down-going) accumulation of consequences. And as yet, without transversal access to any other line of time, the sign will be unable to articulate anything other than its major index[20], its minimal difference or universal-referential value. This value may become scientific (by taking this value within a functive-universe of reference) — or aesthetic at another limit (by taking this referent as compositional matrix of universes, crystallizing-material.) However these artistic and scientific routes are thresholds; they lie on the other side of plot holes in the world: anomalous encounters, uncanny short-circuits, marvellous portals. Chronogeneses of the sign.
Astral diagram. These fictional elements can also be effectuated in the superficial commodified forms of the occult that have become increasingly popularized, specifically that of tarot card-readings and astrology. While astrology still exists in its daily form in newspaper columns[21], it’s more immediately accessible form has become available in various genres on the internet. Similarly, the divination of tarot readings can be easily accessed: one can buy a variety of decks (including a variety of price ranges) along with the general knowledge involved in the constitution of any divination-deck in general, such that users can potentially create their own decks with a minimum amount of materials. What is important in these two examples is the increasingly-accessible generalized dispersion of practices that beforehand were limited to local or idiosyncratic occultivations. At the limit, the practice of everyday life can be folded into a generic practice of futurality and divination. The occult rises up to the surface of everyday life, which then can assimilate it on an individual, case-by-case basis, as though the shadows, secrets, and profundity of its historicity now defer to a trans-signifying transparency and a speculative clarity. The idea of the occulture of these two practices has succumbed to a universally commodifiable form, thus elevating to a higher level but also canceling out their status qua occult. An occult dream deferred/differed, deformed, and diluted, but also decoded and deterritorialized.
In this enervated form of newspaper astrology we find occultism delimited to the field of daily habits and plugged into the circuit of consumption. Adorno’s analysis is exemplary here, linking the irrationalism of Fascism with the non-rationalism of the Occult. The great aesthetician; and philosopher of the ‘future’, at a moment when perhaps it (couldn’t have but, must inevitably have) seemed unimaginably, unbearably bleak. Can we imagine his ink-stained fingers tracing the various occult signifiers found in the pages of a years’ worth of daily newspaper? Determining their structure as undoubtedly regressive: the sorts of regression that tend to, within a certain kind of general system of knowledge, correlate non-rationalism (of occult gnosis) with irrationalism (of anti-semitism). Reason also has its regressions, tendencies to ossify within a general system; but of course it is nevertheless indispensable, and the sobriety of a certain kind of reason is critical, perhaps even for creative experiments with an occult aspect (whose planning, undertaking, analysis must proceed with the utmost caution; pure water &c.) The testament of the occult is the dream signifier (or verifier-instance). It is a gift, says Deleuze, to have a desire to find signs in the world, to look for them (perhaps to think to look for them); but the gift is for naught unless we have the necessary encounters; and these encounters are for naught unless we become equal to them, are “ready” for them.[22]
The links between popular non-rationalism and fascist irrationalism are distressingly clear. The occult always has this danger, maybe something like mysticism; in its poesis, in its making and ritualization, all the old bodies are awakened. What begins as a kind of poetic or metaphysical solidarity with death (eventually…) engenders the worst; these dangers are maybe like those of philosophy itself. The false glamor of the negative, which infests every reaction, even the ‘reactoccult’. Still we shouldn’t reduce the mystical, gnostic, occult lines here; even to a kind of poetry or popular guide which can be used for political ends, or whose end is essentially political. I think the problem of getting out, finding an escape from politics, often takes shape in mystical intimations. The problem may be that the direction isn’t prescribed (and that our immunity against the negative isn’t perfected…).
Ethereal fire. Coursing through the metaphysical ether, riding the plane of the concept, wild signs-particles escape, draw a madly-tangled curve. Spironomic logic of the last instance: everything without everything, anything without anything. From no-when, no-where, the victim issues their demand-without-demand, prior-to-priorization. Metaphysics collapses into infinitely-rapid particles, dispersed back into worldly signs, into the void. Is it right to say the ‘imaginary’ waveband? Music channels the future prophetic wave of catastrophe-anastrophe (the past disassembling itself, the future assembling itself). An abstract waveband conditions the temporal series, the rhythm of vibe. The series are extracted, abstracted from a spiritual time without time, a past never present: the pure form of time, which resonates with ethereal fire, and can be heard singing its celestial song of the spheres, in the delicate (non-)frequencies associated with quantum foam. Crystallization is always a moment away; the instance has to give way to its “last”, a momentaneity has to unfurl, unfold, surge forth. Is it that a singularity is captured, recognized? The crystal or preconscious intimation of time (as disjunction of instants). In ethereal fire, in cosmic static, an electronic voice; do we portend in this strange fiction-listening, these words without words, the cybernetic reduction of the voice (at long last)? Wherever the plane touches, heat radiates: in conjunction with the sonorous plane, the wave becomes passionate. Burning waves. Immanence, a life, consumed in the fire of art, literature (and ‘especially’ music…). Pedagogy of letters, the thresholds the sign must pass, the intensities the fluctuation must attain. High spirits to the last. The becoming-saint of the philosopher contends with a becoming-mystical, a wanting to make use of the pure virtues discovered, the pure lines of creation and destruction, the machine-making powers to transform universes, to translate one world into another. Textual machines qua deux ex literae. The tempo of the lived imbibes a pale ethereal fire (in which it swims and which conjugates it with a plane). The rhythm of the territory–the terrain is always curving away into rivers or mountains, ascent or descent. Ethereality of transit, transmission, transports.
Hauntics. Aesthetics is a future-haunting; we are haunted by the future crux, by becomings-transhuman and the possibility of ‘reconsilience’ (e.g. of science and philosophy, technicity and totality). Art draws technoscience and totality up and out. The spectral incompossibility of the art object which functions as a marker within culture, tracing an external or internal limit (fixed in place = burned into memory.) External and internal limits of culture: art extends culture at a keypoint, expands the territory, but it also intensifies, plunges deep within a black hole, recombining the order of the territory. Art reconvokes our powers against exhaustion-invasion, regenerating (crystalline) temporizations and installing (abstract) machines. Art remembers the internal limit, but it forgets bifurcation; it generates a new sequence in which both series of time can contemporize; it introduces a new dimension to the territory (spiralling, compactified time; a new motor scheme for the abstract machine).
Nightbreak. “You wish to dream philosophy anew? Well! Then let us begin at the beginning…” How do we awaken from a nocturnal metaphysics, which seamlessly fades into its own daybreak? A day that always has to come from outside, from a transcendental solarity. The encounter has to come from somewhere, thought has to confront its own powerlessness; the recognition that we need events to think, we need an event to render possible the event of thinking. Does the event of thinking trace this event and interpret it? Or does it map the eventuality, following lines of development and evolution? Life-lines, heat-maps: where does the machine assemblage touch the plane of immanence? Where does it achieve temporalisms, temporizations where before only silent orbital movement? N-body problems: how does the temporization of each body, each organ within each body, come to form a hyper-time in which the entire field, the manifold of the solution may be complicated? Consilience of all life, conformity of every morphogenetic principle with the principle of identity. Turing wonders how a spherical form of life could ever develop into other shapes, if all it was subject to was diffusion operations (which won’t produce necessary symmetry changes.) A morphogen is needed (biochemical driver of asymmetry); somehow the sphere must be superposed with a spiral: a spiraling line of development, a morphogenetic infusion, is needed to elaborate transfigurations of the body, the mind, the world… These symmetry changes are driven by morphogenetic principles, principles of symmetry-change and elaboration of symmetries; principles of time-compactification and the spiralling development of ‘local’ bio-temporality. A bifurcation in the temporal series: global time which is reversible-spherical; local time which is irreversible, accumulating random events, accidence, gathering the incidental transformations and bearing them forward. The angel of history is local time; the demon beyond time is global, waiting to reverse time, regenerate it by combining our life with our thinking — perhaps with so simple a mechanism as a musical refrain. And perhaps it is especially music whose phenomenological singularity renders us so vulnerable to reprogramming, to re-crystallization, to miracle machines. Music engenders spiritual and personal developments, alongside collective and trans-individual ones. At times, it conjures an impossible vision of a past never present (or makes possible certain other access-points to the plane…)
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The spectre of dream philosophy haunts every living wakeful rationality: beyond insomnia and in the depths of sleep, a rightful accession of philosophemes to infinite sphericality, euphony… How can philosophy become enharmonic, achieve the dreamlike euphony of time in a pure state? A convergence with the poem, and a crash into the spiritual signs of art, which are conserved in metaphysics only through bifurcation, interpretosis, endless reflection of light (which covers over the sea of shadows at the heart of the dream, the entire reality of the unconscious.) Dreams are becomings; what is a philosophy in becoming, one that hasn’t halted yet, a sonance which hasn’t degraded into resonance, repetition of the same? (Is the wave a broken spiral, a spiral which has faced some unrecoverable resistance?)
How to reach the plane as quickly as possible? Where is the dream-key, the transcendental passcode between the dream and pure immanence? A dream of burning; a schizoanalysis of the dream of the father’s anxiety reveals a passion, an incomplete burning. Fire and jealousy. The temperance of the plane is not the same as moderation. Sobriety is demanded in order to jealously decode these fascinating lies of the beloved. A high spiritual tone is required in order to attain to the singularity of the authentic Work. A refrain which combines a life and a thought, an idea and a body into a Destiny, does so by introducing a compactified line of time: a spiral out to a radically-external relation (the idea), converging ‘metabolically’ with a spiral inward (to the body). A signal, a sign flashes between orders or series; music is the precurrent instance of the lightning-bolt, the revelation that will make clear, even if through indistinction and impression: “so it’s…”
Euphony
Euphony is not defined by opposition to cacophony. Rather (each is specified) by the ways in which they are taken up in ritualized variations by the minoritarian aspect of concrete (e.g. occult) social forms. Bonnet cites Levi-Strauss on the uproar accompanying eclipses (a universally observed ritual). The function of noise is to draw attention to an anomalous development in a “syntagmatic” series[23].
Noise and the nomos[24]: the outburst forms a sonorous seal, marking an exception and mapping an initiatory group-belonging (acculturated consistency). Does noise mark a “quasi-crystallization” of the group-in-fusion? At least we can say: noise reasserts consistency after the fact of rupture, “in the event”: an inconsistency is marked; the plot of an anomalous contact is traced. Noise makes time sequences present; it marks an aberrant serialization. Is the series of time lost, or perhaps wasted? It seems instead that in ritual cacophony the series of time crashes, the line is fractured; we find a central collapse of the grammar of time (that noise isolates, ‘quarantines’.)
Euphony as technique, a modulation of phonemes according to their lines of consonance — a technique which is in the ‘mellifluousness’ of a beautiful voice (the sweet music of the beloved’s lies…) To a philosopher’s ear many strange combinations may sound pleasing; conceptual euphony, harmonic alignment of conceptual ciphers. Transcendental passcodes. The metaphysical reality of euphony as the harmony of notions or monads or souls: who can deny this consilience of all thoughts, this conspiracy of all beings, in other words the euphonious form of world? All bodies and languages are complicit in this anonymous euphony, which operates a continuous transformation: a universal revaluation or convalescence, learning or healing of times and cultures, the transdifferentiation of spirit. Disjunctive conjugation. Art is this euphonious abstract machine that extends bifurcated cultures towards still-virtual junctures (the future temporal joint between technicity and social totality) for the (benefit of) people-to-come, in the direction of infinite or continuous variation.
Quasi-occult line of development of philosophy; strange conjunctures that it sutures together. The musicality of a philosophy tells us everything: the way it respects the distances that make up the elements of its auto-crystallization. According to a non-philosophical experiment, measuring the degrees of symmetry-changes within a work, it should be possible to measure a sort of anti-entropic coefficient of its musical lines. How much does the philosophy subvert power? When does it find or discover a new order of its own singularities, generating a lightning-bolt? Precurrence: how many times does it send out precursors, spy lines out towards the future, gauging and traversing possible trajectories? Navigation in reverse of philosophical research. Dead reckoning on the plane of immanence: how much further is it; how much more machinery is needed to assemble the given operation? What are the degrees of efficiency required to assemble singularities into the critical order, or to exceed a given threshold of performance? Machine-operators of desire, technicians of the soul: does philosophy still have the same old work after all? For each of the lines, series, strata of existence, discovering the sense of its euphonious correlation with a world, interpreting its refrain (that condenses characteristic relations of movement and rest). Does it then fall to art to generate new refrains? But this is philosophy too (in part), creating new refrain-concepts. Philosophical mutations in music: what are the effects that a philosophy could have musically? (We can imagine scientific transformations for instance transfiguring the space of music: the necessary changes in music achieved by classical acoustics may be considered; but perhaps more clearly to us today, the discretizing of musicality through machine synthesis — wherein we should also glimpse a transductive-unfolding or hyperplication of our ‘own’ cultural logic, through analysis-synthesis via machine intelligences; we can imagine for instance (one incidental result of musico-machinic deterritorialization being) a synthetic personalized nano-music-industry for each individual).
Euphony and cacophony are not in contradiction but are a part of the same continuum of infinite becoming, differentiation, and variation. Concordance and discordance reach an accord when taken to the limits of what they can do, i.e. their transcendent exercise. There is a violence attached to harsh discordances, but also to the surfeit of a melody too sweet to bear, a chorus too popularly insidious, overcoding “normal” [typical?] brainwaves too deleteriously. The violence that forces thinking coincides at times with the violence that forces listening. The power of language is repetition, says Deleuze. I repeat, I use language; strength and violence of logic, the word spoken again. (Sonance of the last instance, which doesn’t have a chance for resonance, pure ir-resistance: infinite transmissibility of the terminal sound. Language games melting down, or spiralling out into other territories?) The interiority of the syllogism, the substrate of synthesis, is a repetition according to formal principles of relation (superficial, external relation of object-level terms in a system.) System-level interiority is coded (segments are open/closed, etc); their structure is transduced from the resonance of syllogisms (or lack of it; foreclosure and disjoint lines). The [chaotic, collective] organization of concordance, of consilience, of confluence; all discovered in the last instance, by accelerating through accumulative contingencies, anomalous syntagms.
Musiconomy of euphony: harmony of the city, melody of the spirit, music of the ideas. Celestial music of the plane, and its infernal overtones. Every line of flight emits its mournful little elegy for itself, for the future it is certain to discover at infinite rapidity. We are looking for a way out, a way to cut out to the universal, to find a way to move. How is the accelerated line holding up? Is it threatening to bifurcate, to spiralize? The plane of immanence is also the plane of heat, temperature, statistical fluctuation. Pure numbers, non-frequencies of the abstract waveband. The line develops in extension from points, or else by dimensional descent, intensification of the plane, contraction of the plane… Restriction of the infinite plane to the infinite line, the line traversed at infinite rapidity, line of light from the perspective of the photon. The restricted infinity of the line of development permits exploration within a narrow waveband, articulation of various dimensional elements capable of compositing at the limit an Icon or Image (instance), through an extension and disjunction of these fleeting instances a precurrent Work of music, a refrain of time which paces life and seeks its own cadence in the world, in a Search, in a destination which is transitional. The diagram is ‘caught’ in extended transition, each of its points are in crisis; it has to activate, to seek a phase change in its own materiality, inject heat (death) at critical points (identity in the last instance of crime, critique, crisis.) Diagrammatism seeks immanence, seeks an immanence with fire or the sun, with the crystalline activity of life and the noisy transparence of societies, languages, powers… The vortex-diagram [of music], or a black-hole machinery ‘servomechanismed’ to a transcendental computer (xerodata extractor…)
Music as servomechanism of the law; cacophony of the depths. Musical intelligence: the sentience of music, this strange and iridescent hypothesis. What if music were a higher-order intelligence, a higher-dimensional “demonic” agency? Master of the depths, mastery of leap-diagrams. The conjunction with the Outside, the encounter; it is always also a disjunction, a return or resonance leaping across, a sign-particle flashing brilliantly, rendering-immanent, immanentizing, impassioning. Imprisoned on the plane, the sign-particle can only serve this secondary role, it is relegated to black-hole effects or rather to achieving their dis-articulation; it is involved in the ‘complexification’ and evaporation of black-hole effects. The particle can achieve a stasis, a stratification, by passing through layers; plots pass into one another at these privileged points of planar disjunction, plot holes driven by black hole effects. Universal inauthenticity, universes pass into one another. Multiversity, school of the immanental disjunction of time, conjunction of sonorous, luminous planes; inhabiting the space, resonant with exteriority, open because of the ‘living’ bifurcation of time, laceration of culture by the abstract ‘trans-finite’ distance between technology and social totality. Science and religion: music plays in the gap between, the plot hole by which they [separate sovereignties] pass into one another. Cities pass into one another, exhume their own history in transducing their futurity; and all this takes place through a tiny phrase of music, a fragment of time in a pure state which conducts the lightning, convokes the sadness of the highest joy, prepares the ground for future-joy-wisdom, a new earth and a new people to come: in the translation and transfusion of cities, an idea forms of the city which ‘diverges’ from itself, city distorted onto the black mirror of Aeternity: transcendental city of multitudes, Combray as it was never lived; precisely not the city of memory, but a city we access through a [dream] portal, through discovering the way; the city of multitudes is the curious destiny-without-destination of pure temporization. “Speaking of nirvana it was there…”[25]
Spectrum
Spironomics. The intelligibility of the cosmos depends on waves, on pure sonorousness or vibrancy. How can we maximize our angle of ‘interpretance’ over these sonorities which exceed-condition audibility, over which audibility traces its narrow abstract waveband upon immanence? How can we map these audibilites? Assemble or refract the spectrum; install a (logical) prism for analysis-decryption. Starlight; the microwave background. We know about the internal composition of stars (and the spatiotemporal dynamisms of Creation) by the becoming-perceptible the phenomena of starlight and microwave-background have become entangled with. To be sure these are alien remoteness, abyssal depths; and yet we can say something not unlike what a tuning fork might report about the internal composition of a statuette (whether or not it is hollow, and perhaps a hint towards what the interior might be filled with…) Sonority and re-sonance: a sonoculture always repeats, it transforms the rhythm in order to produce a new one. A new diagram must sometimes be drawn, between the series, and music enables this production which repeats differentially; which transdifferentiates, learns or heals: engaging in a process of learning and healing time, recovering lost time, regenerating wasted time. Transfiguring the shape of time, redesigning time. (By what means does life, music, the city, a moment, etc., engender a compactification of time; how are these ‘curled-up’ dimensions of time produced in crystallization, such that the crystal is a kind of photograph of time?)
What institutes the communication of disparate systems? As Simondon has shown, this is a question of amplitudes and amplification. Given the proper amplification, previously non-communicating systems may undergo disparation, thereby promoting the possibility of internal resonance. This is also what Deleuze takes up in Difference and Repetition, and he describes it in his own way as a question of what he calls the dark precursor. The dark precursor flashes like a sign between systems, instituting processes of different/ciation. As in spironomics, in both cases the question of transdifferentiation leaves asunder the hitherto privileged and ancient category of identity, which forms the bedrock for analyses and syntheses of stable systems. It is the stable system qua dominant image of thought (in its aesthetic, political, metaphysical, semiotic…instantiations) that has to be dealt with practically and theoretically before any proper engagement with occultures can be made possible.
The subversion of an image is foreshown in music; musicality is prophecy or precurrency. The morphogenesis of time: in music a new spiral of time emerges, a new black hole forms. Sign-particles radiate from the edges of the territory; in this way sounds pass between territories, but territories also pass into each other…
System-level languages are caught up between evolution and involution of the object-level relations; managing the syntax of external relations. The virtual object gives a set of relations which effectuate at the limit the given object, without actually constituting it. Symbolic constitution of the object, a “real” without actuality which covers over the “actual” synaesthetic dream-object of pure perception. A similar conciliation plays out at the level of intuitions and syllogisms. In the end are we to believe that pure connection is impossible — everything is mediation, interpretations and transductions, conjunctions and disjunctions? The pure connection, absolute external relation or planar transit: this vision-in-one of the radical outside, whose “truth” is a matter of what we can afford to undergo. Many truths are (formally, structurally) unavailable for the crystallized post-larval body. (All truths are of a time, as Zourabichvilli says; of a phase, we might suggest.) Is this perhaps another musical function: thawing the crystal it has disjoined in a given refrain, thereby releasing time in its pure state… Dancing; or the crystal of time melting [up and] away.
Acoustics articulates the pure language of waves. The sensorium of the wave as it successively propagates instances of its rarefaction-compression “dyad”; structuring symmetry of the wave, its duality reflecting its sinusoidal coordination. Sound is an omnidirectional radiation of compression-rarefaction waves: this classical vision shatters every previous image of sound as ethereal substance, as blows within a sonic medium. Every substance is a medium; however, sound is not a wave in the medium, but rather immanent within it (part of, an aspect of its internal relations of movement and rest): inherent within every substance is this capacity for rarefaction, compression; for [these] rarefaction-compression dualities to successively fluctuate it [substance], [there must be a source] generating a sinusoidal dynamism. Sound is a hypersphere, compositionalizing a universe around it, declaring its existence to reality and articulating a vibratory line of development which evolves according to symmetry changes in the milieu [relations of movement and rest within and between substances]. It is expression in the flesh, the sublime matrix of desiring-production which converges at the limit with the formation of expressive territories. Desire connects up with the understanding in the territory: territories comprehend the translation or decoding of desires, they form the spiritual or temporal diagrams which bootstrap the ‘impossible’ anti-entropic effects, the ‘right solutions’ for crystallization. It is not enough to have the right mixtures, but also [we must assemble] the right singularities, [prepare] simple seeds for the crystal to act [upon], bifurcate [over]. Life radiates around these prismatic points of singularity: phenomenologically music is the pre-eminent singularity of this kind, a pure and Universal Wave of decoding which converges with the formation of new territories, new becomings, a new earth, new modes of creation, new forms of art, untheorized modes of social organization, the imageless thought of the future, the people to come and the new abstract machine… Music forms an abstract machine which combines a life and an idea into “the path to creation”, a new destiny. [Which of course we may never attain; but if Ventuil was enough to get Swann out of his black hole, even if was not enough to immediately lead him to the path of creation… The pure possibility was at least there, it was part of the crystallization.]
Music is creation, the abstract genesis of time, the introduction of new dimensions of time. Temporization: without substantiality, in the immaterial production of music, an infinite rapidity of thought. Music is an infinite sentience, an abstract waveband of pure time, a continuous field encompassing ideas, cities and living forms. The internal composition of every (combusting) body is reveal(able) on a spectrum, a graph of emission spectra, capturing the molecular song of existence, of the existence of a given materiality. Ideas are also subject to a spectral analysis; perhaps here we should emphasize as well the ‘enharmonicity’ of ideas, the importance of overtones, overlapping waves. What is interesting are the transcendental harmonies of the ideas, the overtones of overtones, the shape of the structure of the concept [of the concept] (which is an image of a world, of a living form; of a thought, a city, a song…) Everything plays out as though it were all pre-arranged; everything is improvised. In musicality we extend the present moment: music is the operation of culture on time, the ‘time of the refrain’ is the crystallization of cultural world-making, sonic territorial-expression and ‘pure temporization’, pure disjunction. The time is out of joint; love, a many-splendored fire at the heart of time. Consciousness attains to the realization of time at the cost of tragedy; the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music. The past does not exist: the infinite poignancy of disjunction, and the essential duplicity of memory. Music initiates becoming, it is the subject of becomings, it is a means by which a culture latches itself onto becomings…
Conclusion
Memories of a sonoanalyst. Taking time for sound, making space for it; without sinking into noise, but traversing, in [archipelagic] movement, the fantasy of listening… The matrix of fictions is the audible, which connects us along an imaginary or abstract waveband to the plane of sound, to a soundworld, [prepersonal singularities of] sonority in its pure state. (Sound is upstream of culture…) The way in which we hear a cultural refrain, the way a worldly sign passing through the void strikes us, becomes a fascinating sign to decode lovingly: the attachment (always the same song, it had to be you); and the way the sad passions are tied up in this expressive line of pure sound or subjectivation, the musicality of territorialization. [The subjection of music is the object of territoriality.] [How does] music [become] the property of the territory? [A pure sonic trait or aesthetic aspect, a dimensional factor or coefficient of deterritorialization…] A musical line is like a vector field or tensor which leads us forward, pulls up and out along a spironomic line of development: towards the transindividual, towards rarefaction (in the direction of infinite variation.) Pure variability of the music line, pure phasing of musical time, a time which intervenes into its own elaborating, inducing serialization, crystallization, fragmentation. The time is out of joint; it coalesces into crystalline disjunctions, it rewrites itself through memory, it is transfigured in a becoming-intense which activates the entire milieu, the whole universe takes on a new tint (the temperature is increasing, chromatic distortion to pink…) Music is love or universal consciousness, a becoming-everyone and everything which follows the path of infinite variability, adrift on a line of continuous transition, subject to a pluripotent and cyclonic symmetry, dynamic extension of crisis, plastic amplification of catastrophe, incomplete burning (perhaps incomplete owing to the counter-formation of anastrophic lines of regeneration, recovery, temporal reconciliation.)
~~~
In the conclusion to his monumental Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information, Simondon asserts the intimate co-belonging of ethics, information, and becoming: “There is ethics to the extent that there is information, i.e. signification overcoming a disparation of elements of beings, thus making it such that what is interior is also exterior. The value of an act is not its universalizable character according to the norm that it implies, but the effective reality of its integration in a network of acts that becoming is” (footnote). Reworking a famous phrase of Malebranche’s, Simondon articulates the idea that the moral act or the free act is defined by its abundance of reality that allows it to ever go beyond itself and encounter other acts. This conceptualization of ethics qua information by definition means that the free or moral act is one whose condition of possibility and reality is delimited in terms of the power of amplification that it contains. Thus ethics qua acts is a crystallization in actu, and it always implies going beyond itself; musically, it can never be a single note but is always already beyond itself, concatenating in temporally divergent symphonic registers.
On the contrary, and this is something whose possibility Simondon merely suggests, the amoral and immoral act has a confused and obscure status in relation to ethics, insofar as it would imply an act that would be self-contained or, at the limit, would destroy concatenations of acts. While Simondon leaves open the possibility of these kinds, he circumscribes them to perhaps an insufficient analysis of the infinite ramifications of acts, as though the amoral/immoral were merely the negative, projected, psychological image of said act divorced from what it can do in temporal infinitude. Simondon’s skepticism about the possibility of the immoral act and its distinction from the moral and amoral act can be summarized in the following way:
The amoral act is lost in itself, an act that is covered over and covers over a part of the subject’s becoming: it is that which achieves a loss of being according to becoming. It introduces a rift into the being that will prevent it from becoming simultaneous in relation to itself. If it exists, the immoral act is one that destroys the significations of acts that have existed or that will be able to be called on to exist, and, instead of being localized in itself like the amoral act, it is an act that introduces a schema of confusion preventing other acts from structuring into a network. In this sense, the immoral act is not an act properly speaking, but like the inverse of an act, a becoming that absorbs and destroys the relational significations of other acts, that drags them into false paths of transductivity, that misleads the subject in relation to itself: it is a parasitic act, a false act that draws its semblance of signification from a random encounter.
Thus, the question that is fundamentally posed is the possibility of a loss of information or a destruction and undoing of information, a de-concatenation of information, a prevention of the condition of possibility of amplificatory power. It is not so much that the immoral act is impossible but that the immoral act is impossible, since it is ultimately contradictory with itself (“like the inverse of an act”). At this level, though, we are beyond the realm of good and evil and contemplating act, potentas, and potentia on the Spinozist paradigm, sub specie aeternitatis.
As Simondon makes clear, ethics is the precipice upon which everything can be lost or gained, at least when considering the conditions of possibility of subjective lived experience. The possibility of signification is inaugurated with individuals, and to the same extent, the possibility of ethics is inaugurated with subjects. Insofar as perception is a negotiation of individuals in terms of worlds and affectivity is the negotiation of subjects in terms of the pre-individual, ethics transduces these regimes in the transindividual. Simondon makes this clear with the closing lines of ILFI:
Ethics is that through which the subject remains subject, refusing to become an absolute individual, a closed domain of reality or a detached singularity; it is that through which the subject remains in an ever-charged internal and external problematic, i.e. in a real present, living on the central zone of the being, not wanting to become either form or matter. Ethics expresses the sense of perpetuated individuation, the stability of becoming, which is that of the being as pre-individuated, individuating and tending toward the continuous that reconstructs in an organized form of communication a reality as vast as the pre-individual system. Through the individual, the amplificative transfer emerging from Nature, societies become a World.
[1] Bonnet, Francois J. The Order of Sounds, trans. Robin Mackay. Urbanomic: London, 2016, p. 47
[2] “Rhythm is the territory’s answer to chaos” D+G, ATP. (Quoted in Bonnet.)
[3] Not to mention the Cosmic Microwave Background, the earliest possible ‘signal’ we can detect — the soundworld of the inert, propagated to us from the beginning of time (or ‘quite close’ to it.)
[4] Zourabichvilli, Francois. “Time and Implication”, in Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, trans. Kieran Aarons. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2012, p. 100.
[5] “For the poet, what was at stake in the demon was the attempt to turn the nexus of his life and work into a destiny.” Agamben, Giorgio. The Adventure, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. MIT Press: Cambridge, 2018, p. 7-8.
[6] See Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Essay on the Origin of Languages”, chapter XIII “On Melody”, where he writes: “Just as the feelings that painting arouses in us are not at all due to colors, so the dominion music has over our souls is not at all the work of sounds. Beautiful colors, finely shaded, please the sight, but the pleasure is purely one of sensation. It is the design, it is the imitation, that endows these colors with life and soul, it is the passions which they express that succeed in moving our own, it is the objects which they represent that succeed in affecting us” (319-20).
[7] Cf. Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari relate the example of Jean Nougayrol concerning the situation of the Sumerian and the Akkadian involving the interplay between a language of masters and the language of slaves, thereby instituting a biunivocalization. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1983, p. 208.
[8] See Attali, Noise.
[9] Negarestani’s impressionistic concept of the abstract lover is “usually associated with love as incomplete burning, chromatic distortion of all colors to pink, and involuntary submission to the desert.” Cyclonopedia p. 237
[10] “I stand before my highest mountain and my longest wandering: therefore I must first descend deeper than I have ever descended, –deeper into pain than I have ever descended, down to its blackest stream! So my destiny will have it. Well then! I am ready. Whence arise the highest mountains? I once asked. Then I learned they arise from the sea… The highest must arise to its heights from the deepest.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The Wanderer”)
[11] Deleuze says Leibniz does something like this with his correspondents; identifying the ‘level’ of the correspondent and then supplying an argument correlate with the ‘system at that level’, the ‘personalized’ pedagogical perspective of the system, with all of its attendant ‘lies to children’ that will have to be corrected later. There is a necessary-provisional aspect of knowledge that the differentiation of perspectives taps into; the need to continuously transform, to move between perspectives, in order to catch sight of singularities or symmetry transformations (perhaps not unlike Zizek’s concept of parallax.)
[12] “The figure of the cyclone is a rudimentary example of such configurations or germs of speculative programs. A powerful speculative schema conceived during the legacy of the romantic sciences and natur-philosophie, the figure of the cyclone is a schematic map of ‘thinking’ according to or from the perspective of the individual nature, zero or eternal qua the nothing of nature.” Reza Negarestani, “Figure of the Cyclone”. Leper Creativity (Punctum: Brooklyn), p. 292
[13] Discussed in Cinema 2, the crystal of time “disjoins” diverging lines of time.
[14] Zourabichvilli says something like this in his dictionary entry for crystal of time.
[15] Elyse Weinberg, “What You Call It”, Greasepaint Smile (Numerophon: 2015)
[16] Cf. chapter 9 of Zielinksi, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance. MIT Press: Cambridge, 2006, p. 274.
[17] As Blanchot says of Proust, “he also realizes that art is not possible without a nonrational revelation and that the sense of art is to restore to this revelation an expression that the intelligence can put to use”. Blanchot, Maurice. “The Experience of Proust” in Faux Pas, trans. Charlotte Mandel. Stanford UP: Stanford, 2001, p. 42.
[18] “And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. The belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking…” Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1: Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis. Penguin Books: New York, 2000, p. 3.
[19] “Plot holes are psychosomatic indications of at least one more plot densely populating itself in the holes it burrows through and digs out”. Negarestani, Reza. “Bacterial Archaeology” in Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. re-press: Melbourne, 2008, p 61.
[20] [A Thousand Plateaus, plateau 9 on Micropolitics concerning the leaking of desire].
[21] Adorno, Theodor, Stars down to Earth,
[22] See Proust and Signs. Also see Logic of Sense and the idea of the ethics of the event–not to be unworthy of what happens to us, which implies a tripartite evental temporality: not being equal to the event, becoming equal to the event, and…the third time […]
[23] Bonnet, Francois J. The Order of Sounds, trans. Robin Mackay. Urbanomic: London, 2016, p. 55.
[24] Félix Guattari writes: “The trades and corporations of ancient Greece…possessed their own kind of sonorous seal, a short melodic formula called “nomos”. They made use of it to affirm their social identity, their territory, and their internal cohesion; because each member of the group “belonged” to the same sound-shifter, the refrain thus took on the function of the collective and asignifying subject of the enunciation” Guattari, Féiix. The Machinic Unconscious, trans. Taylor Adkins. Semiotext(e): New York, 2011, p. 107.
[25] Frank Ocean, “Seigfried”. blond (Frank Ocean) 2016
Fractal Ontology 