We circle through the night and are consumed by fire

2.46am, 26th August 2022

ingirumimusnocte-etconsumimurigni

This itself is a deathly resurrecti-reification of endless cycling circles, but ...

Here is the schema: World -> art/truth -> reification -> alienated existence -> world. Abbreviated form: Process->recess.

Schol. Fundamentally, the second half of this movement is a misattribution of 'originality' or 'purity' to an endpoint of something, to the result of a material and historical development. There is a process, a radiation, a blooming, i.e. something machinic takes place. It 'works' in its given context and, in this case, works really really well. Next, its (uprooted and now senseless and arbitrary) qualities (the flowers of this tree) are held as the basis of the world (or of an aspect of the world, a field of aspects of the world, etc) from which an axiomatic (not processual) derivation is performed to arrive at a supposed comprehension of the world. Axiomatic: pure forms as tickboxes. The best example of axiomatic logic (which is how capitalism works) is in these lists of company, school, or national 'values', and how they change over time. In the USA : freedom, later: democracy, free speech, etc crap,, only after e.g. the civil rights movements, and feminism, do we see things like 'anti-racism' and 'gender equality' surreptitiously added, like lego bricks, to these lists. There is no process that leads you from this abstraction (an abstraction is always the result of a material process! there are no 'abstract concepts' floating around just a priori) to whatever process in a world. The history went: there were real movements (various movements against racism and sexism, for example), these by their very nature as machinic processes produced their own values, but values in themselves can be isolated, plucked like peaches and added to a sterile list of axioms in a jar of formaldehyde. (I.e. bare words of explicit revolutionist social movements are plucked and retained in a meaningless, castrated form ... another e.g.g is probably may 68 etc: the revolutionary slogans become marketing slogans). There is this reversal from process->value on one hand, to value(axiom)->recess(regression to alienated existence).

Another thing that made me think of this was this friend of mine who suddenly stopped talking to me. My experience of the memories of him etc has since then taken on a strange, paper-like quality, like all the times and scenes and thoughts of him, memories, are paper-thin and empty somehow. There was a time when all of these considerations were held up by a regular process of social intercourse with this person. There was kind of a alimentary pathway bringing nutrients to this entity, this topological model of him in my head, and now it had been cut off. What were left were scraps, preserved fruit from a cut down tree. I realised that these were results, that what they had came from was gone, and that there was nothing i could do with them. To try to produce some kind of image from the remains would be to produce a ghostly non-world completely unrelated to anything. In this case I couldnt even bring myself to attempt it, though in these other instances (e.g. morality, see below) the case is that this kind of reconstruction is the only thing anyone remembers and the original process itself can only be guessed at, at most.

The best example is contained in Spinoza and Deleuze's distinction between ethics and morality. Where morality poses laws (axioms)-- pure forms that are good in and of themselves and from which 'morality' springs--, ethics is basically just geometrico-scientific understanding of the world in terms of its different elements and how they interact with each other. One body may interact with another body such that body A's power to act increases while that of body B decreases in proportion (e.g. eating, destroying the body of something to increase your own body's power to act). It's a question of perspective, often enforced perspective, whether a given event is 'good' or 'bad'. Originally though it would just have been a matter of practice: we ended up coming to the point where we decided it is not worth abiding murder in general (because pretty much every time somenody commits a murder all sorts of crap ends up happening etc etc). This produces a value: against murder. But then we re-apply it backwards as if the words of the value-statement itself had a magic power as a source for good. We decide not to kill 'because murder is wrong' rather than for whatever given reason that killing someone in a given instance would harm others and yourself as a world. People get confused about the difference between ethics and morality because at the core ethical and moral statements both involve a value-statement. "murder is wrong" - the value. But while the movement of ethics is process->value[plus a whole series of other process->values, some contradictory], i.e. the process resolves to a value, that of morality is value->recess(axiomatisation), the value resolving to a ghost-process.

Ghost-process? I use this freakish term Recess to refer to how an alienated existence is a backwards existence, where literally what is experienced is a pastiche of a dead forgotten reality held up as the holy basis of every thing now (cul de rat mort suspendu au plafond du ciel). I mean, instead of experiencing an own body, its actions, its interactions w other bodies socially, and having things spring forth from that, there are sets of holy pokemon cards (pure essences, forces, blah blah blah) that we treat as perpetual-motion engines at the source of everything, which really are nothing at core. Not because 'they're disconnected from their roots and everything has to be connected to its roots in the same way as it always was' (fascist logic). The movement spanning the whole process-value-recess is not a line, unipolar. It's more like a water molecule, V-shaped, with two different hydrogens attracted to one oxygen. Once the starting point is a value conceived as an axiom, we are no longer in the realm of processes, but of axioms. The serial nature of the axiom makes it infinite, a never-ending list of what is and what could be arranged as a bottomless pit. And, aptly for a pit, its role is consumption, destruction, as the end-point of the process, where desiring-machines plug into as their output. Now I realise all I'm doing here is going back to anti-production as conceived in Anti-Oedipus.

in Death of the Family, David Cooper describes 'normal, well-adjusted life' as an illness called ekanoia. Messing around with greek etymology, he comes up with a whole series of noias. In Ekanoia, "one is so estranged from every aspect of one's own experience, from every spontaenous impulse to action, from every bit of awareness of one's body for oneself, rahter than one's body as an object for inspection by others in the world, from all the carefuly refused possibilities of awakening change, that one might truly and without metaphorical sleight-of-hand regard this normal person as being out of his mind. Most people in the first world submit to this chronic murder of their selves with only faintly murmured, fast forgotten dissent." By a movment he called 'metanoia', you arrive from ekanoia to paranoia, being "beside oneself". Next, at noia, you really directly experience your own body's experience, which is perhaps the worst of all. Next, the state of anoia, or antinoia, brings you outside experience. Does this make sense in relation to the schema heading the blog post? A point I forgot to make above is that this kind of circular, negation-negation movement goes in circles forever, leading us nowhere. Because our world really is a row of putrefacting corpses, or maybe: like how rotting tree trunks sometimes have other trees growing out of them. It's a backwards movement, but because there is no limit to complexity these arse-backwards sign-systems really can become complex enough in their axiomatisations for their putrefaction (metabolism, splitting up, schizophrenisation) to give rise to real processes in turn. I think ekanoia is a name for getting caught in the vortex of anti-production.

I think this is particularly true in the kind of world we're in now where our 'material' really is directly socio-technological, our experience is the experience of nodes on a network of machines connected by algorithms etc.

yes, yes, the paradox of fruitless attempts to recreate the past being precisely what make the production of new things that work like how the past worked impossible, because the movement is upside down. I want an idea of my lost friend again ... but my experience of that relationship was an evolving machine that took up what happened to be there and ended up creating beautiful things, and this development was the relationship itself. I could do something else, make another friend, engage in any kind of process, and it would be truer to the force of what it was than to try to re-create (recess), from an arbitrarised end, an idea of an essence as a beginning. A similar thing: those freaks who maintain the idea that it is impossible or worhtless to read e.g. marx or hegel without having 'mastered' the ancient greek philosophers, hume, kant, etc beforehand. Precisely by trying to go back, to re-run the whole history of philosophy in your own head, you would be doing the opposite of philosophy. Because no, obviously you can't re-run the whole history of philosophy in your own head (Above all because if you really did, like Stephen Jay Gould's videotape of life, running it again from the beginning really would wind you up with a completely different result (the philosophical descendants of Hallucigenia marching around in top hats)). Paradoxically, this insistence on 'knowing the context' really is the ultimate act of a post-facto closed-mindedness based on how things ended up. Because why are you reading these particular works in this order? To read marx (or whatever) because someone on the internet said that this was the genealogy of marx! The whole movement itself is tautological. It's also quite funny to hear philosophy PhDs or whatever say that Capital, or the Phenomenology of spirit, is impossible to understand unless you've read the complete works of aristotle, kant, hegel etc. Because goddam, how stupid do you have to be not to be able to understand it? They're sets of words, goddam a lot of the primary ideas are simply stated in plain sentences. Sure the they're written in a difficult style, use particular terminology, refer to other texts, and obviously were influenced hugely by previous thinkers, but if they couldn't stand on their own as statements, communications, they would not exist.

How music works (it works like everything else)

2.19am, 21st of August 2022

Normally, just living in the world and looking around, hearing the words of passers-by etc: singular movements are injected, impressions are recorded. Each time, the one-dimensional force, movement in one direction, presses its echo/ripple bounces through the mind's web. The automatism of nervous processes disintegrates it, an injection of energy is diluted and absorbed. "X = Y" -- well, no, not really, no ... but it does make sense in way A ... blah blah (dialectical process) ... a primordial intrusion, a positing (Gesetztsein) is gradually disintegrated, like Mainländer's theory of the rotting corpse of God. Like food.

Desire as a process: kind of the comprehension of "desire for enjoyment" as a process of enjoyment in its own right fundamentally indistinguishable from other forms, and the overcoming of simplistic notions of desire being necessarily "of" clearly defined whole objects. I don't actually want a glass of orange juice: I may say that but really I want to be sitting on the beach with my friends, on the weekend, looking forward to the tv show tonight, and to drink some orange juice, sip by sip... etc etc. The process itself is desire.

Why does music "work"? Just like eveything else. The simplest image of a line of flight, says Deleuze, is a river carving out its own bank as it flows along. A desiring-process is precisely a production, and that is all there is to say about 'desire' in general. It is just production. It works because it works, anything about how or why or what can only be to do with the specific structure of the process. Hence D&G's critique of the psychoanalysts' tendency to push all forms of desire back to the oedipus complex, etc etc.

What an effective small-scale desiring-engine (e.g. art, music, film, literature, all kinds of other things) does is let you 'plug in' and 'play along'. Contemplation of the Other is self-consciousness. When you watch a film, you get 'lost' in it, the machinery becomes yours, it sets up a little ad-hoc mechanism in your head that obviously does its own specific thing (because someone else made it) and yet the consciousness which it IS is you, and here is where using personal pronouns becomes unhelpful, because in a topological sense the process itself is the same whatever 'medium' it travels through, even though the process of its travelling through a plastic network of neurons is experienced as 'experience' by the body it happens to.

In films, tv etc we see the whole procedure muddied by ideas of personhood, depiction, realism, storytelling -- the idea that it's primarily a matter of 'relating' to a particular character is too tempting a simplification, but in any case the fact that this kind of stuff is involved makes it hard to think of clearly. Music offers the best example of something where really the only thing going on is process in a pure form. A bare tone is nothing, empty ... One tone, then another tone of a different pitch: there is no connection between the two except that "they have been placed in juxtaposition with each other" for no reason other than "just because, just for its own sake (the sake of: making music, i.e. of putting arbitrary tones in juxtaposition)". There was a desiring-process: putting these things together. A ghostly electric force links the abyssal gulfs separating arbitrary values, a force that survives its creator and is precisely the force that animates the intert experiencer. This might have something to do with all that stuff about information theory, the only true information at the end of the day being by definition pure uncompressible randomness. In any case, once a singular positing is made (one interval, one linkage-abyss between two different tones), everything else can flow out as a process. I'm clumsily talking about two different things at the same time here. Anyway the notes, rhythm etc obviously only make sense in relation to each other, all the deep feelings we get from music are arrangements (agencements) of notes, movements between different arrangements, etc etc etc. I don't really have to prove that music is a process.

So yeah the thing is, when you listen to music you are playing along in that process, 'taking part' (or really: being). ding ding ding diddle etc etc. The process of music is: this note increases in pitch, that one goes down, they repeat, etc etc etc etc etc. The reason it is so pleasurable, i suppose, is that it can produce extremely complex 'mechanisms', so it is like the satisfaction of seeing a piece of clockwork function but times a million. The moral of the story is that in a world where people find great pleasure in things like model train sets, the mystery of music is not so mysterious. Enjoyment (it seems like a clearer term than 'desire', though like D&G's use of desire, I mean enjoyment in a broader sense which pretty much covers all of motivated human acitivty) is participation in mechanisms/processes/production. The medium of sound is a realm with so many variables (pitch, duration, volume, timbre) allowing for elaborate processes to play out. It's just the same with literally everything else in the world, only with music it's so clear because with a few exceptions (e.g. that minor little thing we call language) sound isn't otherwise a huge part of our lives.

Whereas: film etc, we look at the hero and see a Person, going through their Life, blah blah blah. In music we don't recognise a C chord from obvious day-to-day experience. Or do we? This brings us to the historically-contingent aspect of the whole question. Above we have explored the possibility of music, but not the specific , pretty limited form which we see in released music albums, singles etc, i.e. the singular dendritic form of music. The western music tradition took its distinctive shape with that guy who invented triad chords and harmony etc [Rameau]. Again it's like a case of the story from the start of this blogpost, but on a much larger scale: originally, we are faced with a mulitplicity of a world, so much stuff, then the (arbitrary?) selection of one particular thing takes place, the taking up of it, and its gradual disintegration from contradictions, like the rotting corpse of God. Though it is a simplification (considering the huge impact of musical traditions outside of the western canon over time), it is more or less the case that the typical notion of 'music' today (e.g. in schools) is a deconstructed version of that italian freakish church music or whatever it was, with a single primary 'trunk' to the tree. We got jazz chords, for example, by adding more notes to the ends of the triads. And here we're getting into some music history which I don't know well. Let's skip past this part.

'...govern these ventages with your lingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music.'

Playing a wind instrument like the recorder gives a strange impression of music. Each note really does feel like an isolated pure Platonic Idea with its own fingering, not clearly related to anything else. You can understand triads, chord progressions etc only after you have memorised a scale, but even there it's a case of: fingering combination A, fingering combination B, produces this effect when juxtaposed. You can't see or feel what this interval is, as the interval and the process of producing it is (usually) completely different for each given pair of notes.

When I had a go at bass guitar it was incredible because absolutely everything that is a pain when playing a woodwind instrument: memorising every different scale and its chords etc etc ... is not even a thing. Every interval is the same everywhere. Playing one major scale is exactly the same as playing any other major scale, you just start somewhere else, but make the same movements. Another demonstration of the processual nature of music (which I am getting very excited about even though I guess it's just kind of an obvious fact that I don't even need to try to prove ...): play a melody canonically in C major in B major, or C# major, and no listener will notice or care, unless they happen to have perfect pitch. Everything about what makes the melody what it is is in its process.

Well, that was a long ramble. These blog posts are getting a little bit embarrassing, especially since I cannot be arsed spell-checking and stuff. For the past few years I have had a bit of a problem with producing anything of any kind, but recently I've been reading various stuff and getting excited about ideas and processes etc and getting led down exciting and mysterious (at least to me) paths, leading to occasional sudden runaway lightning ideas which i have the urge to jot down, which for me is an improvement ... So yes, a lot of this is actual crap, and probably second-hand, half-remembered crap at that. A noncharitable observer wouldn't be wrong to label it verbal diarrhoea, but ...

the sewer

11.23pm, eighteenth of August 2022

when the air is sprinkly soft radio static onto the roofs of the world, sponge-like earth absorbs, past tender green grass stems, the vast draught, and through rough open conrete throat-slips gulps, the sprinkle grows into a torrent, into a tempestual uproar, magnified and concentrated, in dark tube networks, the toiletverse, beneath a quiet floor is a muffled rumble, if you were standing in the pipes you would be shocked and awed, like when you see a waterfall, by the majesty of loud water. It would not be possible to hear someone speaking right beside you.

There is a blockage in the sewage system. Due to torrential rains, a pipe has burst and is spurting untold masses of high speed water onto the street. At once the original consistency of earth, soil, ground, bitumen, is recreated and all collapses in a slurry. The townhouse on the river bank is swept away in an instant. 15 years later, a boy watches footage of this in a clip show on television entitled 'wild weather'.

We dont like there being too much water. A tubing system is produced in order to reconfigure the flow distribution. Less here, more there. Motto of the drainage engineer: Dilution above/ concentration below/ that is how/ we run this show. Rats live in sewers.

Drainage basins are kept clear of housing and infrastructure. Ocasionally they are also the site of power line towers, other things that aren't safe to build houses under. Walking along drainage basins, sewer jungles, under power lines, under motorway overpasses, swamps, jungles, of deterritorialised vegetable matter. The plantain's distribution is synonymous with agricultural social organisation. Our concrete social colon is blooming with a jungle panoply of all of human-plant history-- shepherd's purse, salsify, chickweed, lucerne, wild radish, wild oat, escaped garden plants ...

I am a weed.

Blog post 2: the return

12.58am, eighteenth of August 2022

"Eigentlich erscheint uns dieses Verhalten nur darum nicht pathologisch, weil wir es so gut zu erklären wissen" (Really, this behaviour [mourning] only appears to us not to be pathological because we can so easily explain it.)

I see the whole world of knotted brambles and tangled threads of processes that span and comprise everything as their current moment shows them to be destined to putrefy, from the sense of the postdiluvian heat death (ultimordial death soup). Not a temporal post-death but a conceptual one: at both ends, any idea, any attempt at a process, comes undone (or rather: we get to the point where is never was nor could be "done" to begin with). Say: in a sea of nihil there are islands of res. All i mean to say by this is that knowing the edges of your world, and knowing that there are edges, is hugely liberating. We reach the edge of something, and yes very well we could build something there by extending stuff, etc etc, but at the same time, we can rightly say "there is nothing here", as well.

What happens if you pretend there's something instead of nothing? Walk over a chasm as if there's solid ground there? You pave over a chasm with a film of glad-wrap , and, surprise rsurprise, the resultant environment has a mysterious, unpleasant atmosphere. We call it a pathology. What else was Spinoza thinking of when he said that free will exists only because we are unaware of the causes of our actions? At this point the concept of reason reveals its contradictory essence. When all a person's actions can be explained, the actions are thereby shown to be perfectly reasonable (she developed psychotic symptoms because she lived in a perpetual double-bind) and at the same time profoundly senseless. Why did it happen? Why is the question of death. "why are we here?" -- "because we were caused to be here by x, y, z..." Nihilism can be summed up in the faulty question 'why', an obsession with answering it and failing.

Deleuze and Guattari championed the rhizome. But not everything functions like a plant. In worlds of abstraction, infinities and abysses abound, you cant swing a cat without bumping into kinds of infinity. Any kind of simple 'object' or 'structure' here has planes and lineaments that stretch on forever. Every point is a crosshair, an asterisk, with lines bounding accross infinite space, lassooing object A at distance X, B at distance Y from the cetnre ... In a BwO world, no 'object' is conceivable except as an octopus. All it is is its interconnexions ... Yes, the only way you can get to comprehending "a thing" like this is by presuming "a thing" there in the first place. At the end of the day, this comes from one connection -- the one with you, or us, etc. It appears distinct to us from other sensations. Rhizomes are made of trees.

Heliotropism (Benjamin). It's not that "the past only makes sense from the perspective of the future" -- rather "sense" is itself this movement, and cannot be anything else. Sense is confluence, a comprehension of another nexus as a nexus.

"is there really a nexus there? This question is easier than expected, because we only have so many senses.

Blog Post Number One

Well well well, here is a website. I created it using a layout creator for people who do not know html or CSS ... Very cool very cool. I intend to use this site as a centre for all my rhizomatic hacktivist ecologist communizationalist artist poet productions.