Further Notes on Barker and Challenger

A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real, or a coincidence intensifier. The rational and the irrational bleed together; the distinction collapses. Part of this hyperstitional ‘coincidence engineering’ is Quernomics.

Quernomics, when applied to associations on a linguistic register, would view language as a system of arbitrary symbols in relation to other arbitrary symbols that connect with contingent configurations of base matter in a way as to still ‘makes things happen’ (diagrammization). There are finite amounts of symbols within a finite system of organization that is further finitely reduced, both intentionally and accidentally, by human utility and preference and inhuman incentives alike.

With limited options, trends catch on, and certain words, phrases, spread like a plague. Coincidences intensify, an impersonal cultural unconscious takes shape as a subject, or more accurately an assemblage of enunciation, and this assemblage reproduces the semiotic material it received from the outside, makes it inside, and grafts it back onto the outside (Outside folds into inside, inside maps Outside). Words, floating in thin air, connecting to each other, take on a reality of their own, then a body in real time makes it real. Fictions become real through somatic simulation.

As D and G articulated through Professor Challenger, the human mouth-throat-chest assemblage can only articulate so many ways; it behaves within limits. The chest may push only certain intensities of air through the esophagus, air which is modulated by the cheeks, lips, teeth, and tongue configuration. Horrific and brute asignifying sounds – clicks, pops, growls, shrieks, even tics – over time, with the honing and selection of muscles that map onto and internalize the faces of others, morph into phonemes, letters, and words. This is the 'material base' for language - the body, faciality.

As DC Barker has shown, human language is limited to human morphology, is limited to Earth’s geology, is limited to Earth’s place in cosmology, is limited to… etc., etc., Through these constantly recapitulating limits, relatively arbitrary chaos locks into a feedback loop of a limited set of terms and sounds (deterritorialized base material or the plane of immanence drifts towards the plane of expression, or forms – alphabet soup Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz sentiments in Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm). Screams become not-screams. Sounds become words. Fictions become real.

In Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think it is?) Deleuze and Guattari. through professor Challenger, write:

“the lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips…an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human females have breasts…deterritorialized mammary glands: the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accompanied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts, and the breasts on the lips)…a curious deterritorialization, filling one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe…exerted strong pressures of selection: the ‘supple larynx’ is a development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryngeal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the forest…” (pg. 61-62).

That is, terrain exerts pressure over time thereby altering the human form, the human form then alters the terrain, etc. [annotated, from upcoming CCRU Sightings: Encounters with the Outside (or Capitalism a Love Story 2020].

Vocal passages as material forces, not significations; a break down into an animal past, a turn to goo in order to slip into the machinic timestream.  Could this not describe Challenger and  Land?   Could it not map onto Land’s oft accused of misappropriation of  Darwin, D and G, etc.  and  accelerationism’s constant misunderstanding  by the media?  It would  even  be easy to call Challenger, like  Land, a  ‘pseud’  who collapses distinctions and slips into incoherence, who  overrides  the games  that  occidental philosophy  obsesses  over,  and,  who, before you know it, is  on the floor croaking into the mic (some of us are still ‘philosophers’ you know!)…” [annotated from A Response to Philosophical Critiques of Landian Accelerationism: Fiction, Deterritorialization, Oscar Sarkon & Professor Challenger 2020]. 

Some Notes on CCRU's 'Barker Speaks'

It’s interesting to point out that the introduction given to Barker in the printed text of his interview with the CCRU – that hes a polymath geo-scientist gone rogue - could  easily describe Professor Challenger of Deleuze and Guattari’s third plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It is?) [see my piece on Professor Challenger and Landian Acceleration].

'Who does the earth think it is' is in fact the question for Barker. 

Barker’s work is solely about decoding anorganic codes, or stratoanalysis.

MIT represents an attempt to signify, appeal to what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as royal science (don't forget Chomsky, who Guattari opposed most if not all of his ideas to, is the posterchild of MIT and their structuralist linguist propoganda). MVU is a shadow of MIT, and resonates with the anorganic, that which can’t be signified but which acts on reality (hyperstition). 

In line with this reductive MIT-MVU binary, technological advancements bound up with accelerative cultural vectors (See Nyx Land's genealogy of MIT) and creepy sexually deviant tech-giants (Dollar ‘Bill’ Gates from the CCRU's 'Who’s Pulling Your Strings’) are modern instantiations of demons (see my piece on Techno-Moloch). Remember, the rich are occultist weirdos who meet at secret villas in Cali.

Along these binary lines of critique – no signification, only hypermaterialism, geotrauma - we're forced to ask: 'what is the difference between “intelligent communication and complex…nonintelligent pattern…” or signal and noise, anways?' As Barker says, it's a misguided question. There is none, or at least none that 'means' much. In fact, meaning is out the window. Diagrams are in. Feedback only uptakes signal. It flattens things out (see Mark Fisher’s dissertation Gothic Flatlines).

Following from these conceptualizations, intelligence is purely anthropomorphic. Barker’s project breaks free of MIT and ventures into the MVU precisely when it ceases to care about agency, subjectivity, intelligence, humanity, etc., and in doing so gets sucked up in outside flows of anorganic, autopoietic organization. Feedback oscillates and locks into resonance with itself, producing systems that preference A or B, while also being A and B. This is seen in the tension between the therapeutic aspects of psychoanalysis and its uncanny, cybernetic speculations as seen in Freud’s 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

As Deleuze and Guattari rightfully points out, Freud oedipalizes his own outside flows.
***

If this post does not clarify a thing, it's done its job...

The Minor Science of Caninepistemology / Doggypsychiatry

Provocation

This is a true story of how I successfully psychoanalyzed my dog. Yes, you read that correctly. However, it is not so much a story about the strengths of psychoanalysis as it is about the way we think critically about our world and gather 'knowledge,' and how we can implement that knowledge in every day life.

Anti-Vet

I've written at length about the shortcomings of the scientific methods elsewhere. These shortcomings are intensified more than ever in the field of veterinarian science which is just scientific enough to claim authority, but not authoritative enough to autocritique or adapt to its clients, and ultimately lacking in structural incentives to improve in those areas.

The vet mixes true Scotsman fallacies with confirmation biases to masquerade as medical epistemology. You bring your dog in, the vet looks at it for a minute, gives a diagnosis based on incredibly limited information generated from abstract models of knowledge, then prescribes general medicine. If the meds work, the diagnosis was correct, and there is no reason to reflect. If the meds don't work, prescribe more meds, test more, and there is no reason to reflect. There is no true, rigorous way of testing the effect of vet treatments, and the vet has no incentive to get it right the first time because they'd rather rope you back in once a week over the next two months to up the doses, charging you each time.

In this sense, 21st century veterinary mirrors 19th century psychiatry which pulls from - as I have written elsewhere - 16th-18th century medical ('blood letting') and cosmological ('lunar cheese') epistemological models, which then reappear in 19th-21st century critique of sociopolitical models (nonactual vs. 'actual' communism).

Analogies

1:

A: a true Scotsman would never drink milk
B: there is a Scotsman drinking milk
C: they must not 'really' be a Scotsman

2:

A: the moon is made of cheese
B: we mined the moon and found only rock
C: the moon is made of cheese, you just didn't dig deep enough

3:

A: blood letting cures diseases, saves lives, etc.
B: we let a great deal of blood from the patient, the disease wasn't cured, the patient died.
C: blood letting does work, you just didn't let enough blood.

4:

A: the patient is diagnosed as X, treatment is Y
B: the patient of diagnosis X did not get better
C: the patient must've not kept up with treatment Y, prescribe more Y

5:

A: communism is x, y, and z
B: in general, countries that referred to themselves as or based themselves in communism failed
C: well, that's not 'actual' communism

6:

A: veterinary treatment is helpful and grounded in correct assumptions
B: these treatments have not helped our dog improve
C: we just did not give enough helpful and correct treatment

Vignette: Ethology Meets Psychoanalysis

About a year ago my girlfriend and I's wonderful little dog began exhibiting odd behavior in the house. Seemingly unprompted, he would assume a defensive position - tail between the legs, hunched legs, ears down, etc. - and would began scanning the room above his head anxiously with his eyes. His eyes would then appear to lock onto and follow objects that were not there, then he'd jump and attempt to bite the invisible objects. The vet diagnosed our poor boy with a rare neurological seizure disorder that required intense medical treatment or surgery, both of which were as dangerous as they were expensive.

My girlfriend and I decided to think on it before responding, at which point I got the idea to help our dog on our own. Spoiler alert - our dog no longer displays these symptoms, nor any other symptoms of such disorder, and is perfectly healthy. In line with our above critique of veterinary epistemology , the vet's response was simply 'Well, we can't explain how the symptoms have gone away, but we don't need to if they, because that's good!' End of story.

More interestingly, here's how I 'cured' my dog:

Through first drawing inferences from the symptomatic behavior - defensive stance, looking around for and jumping at invisible objects, etc., - and then associating to them - behavior reminded me of the time  our dog first encountered flying insects on a hiking trip where he displayed the same behavior - I theorized that our dog was having a behavioral response to a perceived stimuli that was not there. In layman's terms, the dog believed there were bugs and thus its body unconsciously acted the part.

My thinking was that the first experience of bugs on the hiking trip had triggered latent behavioral structures that were inherent in him but, due to the sheltered nature of the dog, previously inhibited or unexpressed (in-born vs. learned behavior). The bringing out of the new behavior structure meant it was fresh, and had not been exposed to various situations where it would cybernetically feedback with the environment and thereby hone the stereotype or schema. As ethologists show, behavioral structures or stereotypes / schemas take in and sort out noise and signal over time, and thus develop more precise models and therefore more precise parameters for triggering a behavior.

As developmental psychologists similarly show, a child learns 'dog,' sees a dog, says dog, gets positive feedback from the parent. Next, a child sees a cat, says 'dog,' and gets negative feedback from the parent - 'no, that is a cat.' The child uses negative and positive reinforcement - or feedback - to modulate parameters, and learns to exclude the aspects pertaining to the 'cat' model from the 'dog' model. The dog model is now honed, and more precise. This process continues on and on until our internal working models are more and more precise and therefore better at mapping the outside. 

For my dog, because the information 'gate' was so sensitive, the behavioral response was easily triggered, and because the stimulating object - certain insects - were so scary to my dog, being as they were so new and in a foreign location, the whole experience was 'recorded,' so to speak, as a trauma. In less anthropomorphic terms, it was evolutionarily important to my dog (and therefore perhaps biochemically intensive, i.e. life or death) that the experience of insects be stored along with an associated 'danger' or defense response.  This meant a 'perception' of high risk coupled with a very sensitive, low , threshold to trigger the macro-behavior of responding to flying insects. This meant a very loose behavioral schema.

In humans, in psychoanalytic terminology, this is close to anxiety or hysteria, or more generally what we could call neurosis, in the sense that it is an experience of having real, intensified or exaggerated bodily responses to imagined or hallucinated objects or sensations based on unstable internal 'object relations' or internal working models.

The treatment, then, was to help the dog realize that there were no bugs, i.e., to enrichen and expand the stereotypical model or schema to include more information that could be used to hone the triggering of the behavioral response (not necessarily a brute exposure to 'the real' but a cooperative process of helping the dog filter information). Whenever my dog would begin to display these symptomatic behaviors, I would first shame the dog, but then immediately comfort the dog, hold the dog up to the spots in the air he was looking at, then play with the dog. After about a month of repeating this, our dog would began to scan the room, though would not enter into a defensive stance, and then would avert the scanning gaze and instead look for a toy. After a few more weeks, the scanning behavior, along with all other symptomatic behaviors, had disappeared.

Conclusion

It's not that this 'proves' psychoanalysis is grounded in more scientific fields such as ethology, behaviorism, development psych, or epistemology (though it does show where these fields resonate and can functionalize concepts); rather, this shows that the field of veterinary studies, along with mainstream pop-science - what D and G refer to as 'royal science' - as a whole tends towards uncritical, uninformed, and expensive surgical and pharmaceutical interventions that may be unnecessary, and that given there is little monetary or intellectual incentive to challenge this, this poses both an epistemological and ethical conflict for vets.

It may also say something larger about the 'physicalist' trend in the royal sciences, that demarcates a hard split between what is physical and therefore real and what is 'theoretical' or mental and therefore unreal. Where the materialism of psychoanalysis meets up with the cybernetic theory beneath behaviorism and cognitive science is an interesting cross roads that hints at a deep, hyperstitional, sorcery - or minor science...On that note - one wonders, what happened to the good ole days of doing individual, experimental, research? This is the question of D and G's minor sciences that should be explored further.

Post Script
As a last comment, I urge people to listen to their vets. I am not an expert, and in what is probably the majority of cases, listening to your vet will save or at least help your animal. What I have introduced here is merely an incident where it was beneficial to challenge a 'medical' authority, and try an alternative approach; an exploration that is intended to produce thought, not obedience. It would be foolish to insert myself and this blog as an authority over the vet. The point is, like the concept of the behavioral structure / schema we discussed here, to expand our models of thinking to be able to consider all information, and filter out noise and signal.

Alien Objects

God/10.Xero/0.Xeno/O.

"God...makes crooked all that is straight"

- Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

“[Capitalism makes]...all that is solid melt into air, all that is holy profaned"

 - Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

“[Capitalism makes] schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that the schizos are not salable”

 - Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 245)

“[Capitalism, AI, and God:]...the notion of a supreme cosmic intelligence as a deity is accompanied by this massive anthropomorphization of what that being will be like…resonances between god and man...the most archaic forms of religiosity are found at the end.” 

– Nick Land, conversing with Justin Murphy

"Behold the Xenochrist" 

- The Faceless, Planetary Duality

A clear Weberian diagonal cuts across multiple planes - literature, society, mental instutitions, music, etc., -  pulling God, AI, and Capitalism together into  a schizophrenic, alien, horror, not unlike the time-travel method of theological-sci-fi film Event Horizon (1997) that pulls two separate points in space and time together into one zero-hole passage.

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Ariana Grande compels us think of "God as a woman."  Though she ignores existent alternatives to theological female power - the 'misogynistic' but still no less powerful Gnostic Lilith, and Mary Daly's proposition to 'look beyond god the father' - and instead panders to 3rd wave feminist empowerment tropes, Grande's platitude can be recuperated and filtered through knock-off xenofeminist jargon where it comes out the 'other'side looking like 'god=woman; woman=alien; god=alien.'

Look no further than the Species film series (1995-2007) and the similarly but more recent Under the Skin (2014), and their disjunctive counterpart, Ellen Ripely in the Alien film series (1979-2017). The former portray female sexuality as seductive, dangerous, predatory, and alien, while the later portrays - if we are to dabble heavily, if not equally briefly, in Freudian tropism - female sexuality as violent and powerful through the use of a competent, intelligent, woman character who defeats a phallic, penetrating, womb-dwelling, parasitic alien.

In fact, whereas the Alien series is often juxtaposed to the Predator film series (1987-2018) which features hulking male hunters fighting hulking men with giant guns, Species more closely parallels Alien by making the alien a female predator, thereby synthesizing Ripely and the alien she fights (and interesting to note that 'female' Predators are not introduced into the Predator universe until the graphic novel Alien vs. Predators, which was later made into a film). Species and Alien are cousins in the cinematic unconscious, Predators is the 'other' on the outside looking in.

We see women, and aliens against a backdrop of implicit capitalism captured in on-screen technoscience, but where is God? Always late. He - or she - only appears in the Alien film franchise's fourth installment Alien: Resurrection, and the two prequels that followed, Prometheus and Covenant, which all use overt, on the nose, Christian symbolism to explore God, the origins of organic life, AI, and psychosis.

Alienation and Commodity Fetishism 

Marxism is at its most interesting in its attempt to conceptualize alienation and objectification, not because these attempts pan out in any way preferential to the humanist project of Marx and Engels,  but precisely the opposite; because these attempts - the materialist critique of spirit in all its abstract forms, i.e. religion, philosophy, ideology, etc. - act as preliminary map for the future alien (hyper)objects of capitalism, the very kind of weird objects found in the Strugatsky brothers' 1972 sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic and its film and video game adaptions, Tarkovsky's 1979 Stalker and 2009's PC game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In other words, Marxism, not unlike 'the alien zone' of the stalker universe, is most interesting when considered through the strange alien 'artifacts' it leaves behind.

Throughout Capital Vol 1. (1983 Sam Moore Ed Aveling translation, pg. 35-37, 40-41, 46-52, 71-73, 74-75, 82-83, 146-147, 151-153, 177, 191-194), Marx unwittingly conceptualizes the material process(es) beneath the alien object:

An object is needed,desired, and therefore exchanged between one person and another, the latter whom, at this stage of  goods trading, will use it for its ‘use-value.’  

The use-value is independent of labor as it is given by its utility, and can be abstracted into a relative form assuming the quantities of the two commodities being exchanged equate (trade wool for wood). This is known as exchange-value, a relative relationship in constant flux.  

The relativity of the exchange-value means that the objects - or commodities - on either side of the exchange relationship are equal to one another or replaceable with one another even if – or only if - the objects are themselves different.  

This relative, abstract relationship obscures the utility of the use-value of the commodity and thus the focus shifts from the utility or physical attributes of the object (it’s material origins and materially intended purpose) towards a relationship of objects which have no specific qualities of their own other than what purpose they serve in relation to another object (focus only on exchange value, i.e. ideological and not material, i.e. relativization), or what Marx calls commodity fetishism (what Zizek in his first book The Sublime Object of Ideology refers to as a perverse Freudian symptom). 

These commodities in relative relationship to each other are in relation to a third common ‘unit’ which is known as ‘value.’ Value is a creation of human labor that can only appear in the social exchange of commodities to other commodities, and because value is relative (as implied by its existence only in the relation of commodities), one commodity always presupposes another commodity, as one commodity needs to be expressed in the other commodity, and vice versa (not unlike the baselessness of the Lacanian signifier). This notion of value is related to labor time.  

Regarding labor time - the greater the productiveness, the lesser the value. The lesser the productiveness, the greater the value. To conceptualize this, Marx lays out two graphs of circulation: C-M-C and M-C-M. The former is when one sells a commodity (C) to acquire money (M) to use to buy commodities (C). The latter is when money (M) is used to buy a commodity (C) only to sell the commodity for money (M). The former is indicative of the worker who sells his labor to whomever owns the means of production, while the latter is indicative of whomever owns the means of production – the capitalist- and buys the former’s labor in order to produce for money.  

The capitalist gets more money out of the commodity than originally invested into it by having his workers produce more than is needed to break even for the capitalist’s costs of maintaining the means of production. The resulting excess production is known as surplus-value. This is how capital is created out of using money to relativize commodities, and how the capitalist 'exploits' the worker.

What is of importance here is not the (boring) particulars of Marxist theory, but that we bring to attention the general process wherein the base material circumstances that produce objects and those very produced objects become disconnected, and in its place, a relativized, relationship between random, arbitrary objects and other random, arbitrary objects takes primacy (what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as deterritorialization).

In other words, instead of being a farmer (class and work), needing a plow (tool or object to use for its use value), seeking one out (desire to produce a tool to aid in one's work), and trading produce from one's farm (unalienated fruits of labor, food that the other person can use) for a plow, one works for someone else's farm (someone who controls the means of production, i.e. has a plow), accepts money or tokens that are exchangable for anything (value) as opposed to goods one needs, and uses these tokens for whatever entry level hedonistic time-kill purchases farmers engage in. Thus, the plow is disconnected from desire and material circumstance through an arbitrary mediating unit, capital, leaving desire to waste. 

As Mark Fisher points out in his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016), it is this tendency to disconnect objects from their sources that makes capitalism an uncanny entity; one of this world (not supernatural) but at the same time radically other (extraterrestrial); and it is this aspect that maximizes the perfect formula for making objects weird, uncanny, strange, - or alien. This is - for D and G -  how Capitalism produces the schizophrenic, who can be viewed philosophically and clinically as an alien in his/her own body, and - for Marx - how capitalism produces alienation as it not only separates the worker from the fruits of their labor, but separates the worker's desire from its object, and the contingent material context from its object, and in its place installs a an impersonal flow of strange, disparate objects interacting with other strange objects (assemblage).

Roadside Picnic

To briefly capture the book's premise - aliens landed in Russia, drastically altering the physical and metaphysical properties and qualities of the terrain for miles - what is called the zone - and when they departed, they left behind all kinds of mysterious objects with peculiar and sometimes deadly qualities. As indicated in the book's title, just as insects would be baffled by the objects left behind by humans picnicking in the park - a paper bag, plastic wrap, a tin can, etc. - humans are baffled by the objects left behind by aliens in their brief and mysterious time on Earth (see here for more).

I read it in my freshman year of undergraduate, watching Tarkovsky's film shortly after (at which point I had been playing the 2009 PC  game S.T.A.L.K.E.R, along with its expansion packs, for years). At the time I was a neurotic, psychology-philosophy double major amidst my first true romance, and struggling with my parents divorce, who had yet to begin studying or undergoing psychoanalysis. Thus, I naively took Roadside Picnic to  be about existential anxiety in an unjust world. I assumed the book to be proposing the adolescently Kafkaesque query 'what if everything we knew to be true - our givens, basic assumptions, etc. - was radically different tomorrow?' Despite the naivety, this was not without its reasoning and evidence. As the book so well illustrates, the characters of Roadside Picnic, despite making all the appropriate calculations, taking into account all the right variables, etc., still may fall victim to a sudden violent death due to a single wrong step in the zone. By the book's logic, no amount of preparation could guard one against the random variation of the unknown godliness of nature.

To reflect on the book today, however, one would have to say my original interpretation was far too anthropomorphic, and that the main thrust of the book is not a comment on the anxiety supposedly inherent in the human condition - a morose Francophilic miserablism -  but rather a much more Germanic demonstration of the very limits of the human condition itself. That is, the random variation of the zone, the uprooting of the basic laws of physics, and the seemingly random alien objects found therein, are indicative of not a subject and its neurotic anxieties over personal narratives, but of impersonal, Outside flows of noumenal experience, and the affirmation of chance and necessity (the most prepared may be killed, the most naive may survive). They are a snapshot of the schizophrenic mechanosphere of Deleuze and Guattari coupled with the Gnon of Nick Land.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia 

The alien objects - called 'artifacts' in the videogame, 'swag' in the book -  that populate the zone are objects that have become disconnected from their material sources or 'use values' (the material needs of the alien populations that produced them), and for which there exist no means of reclaiming that original connection. Some of these bizarre objects of the zone have been integrated into human life as fun gadgets, or functional tools. Despite this seemingly mirroring Marx's commodity-usevalue binary, the likeness is superficial as even the alien objects humans make functional are not used for their original, alien-given material function, but merely a human appropriation that overlooks the alien intent (or accidental incentive forces) present in the object. Thus, the only 'meaning' or 'sense' given to the objects is through the  black market erected by humans who desire the objects enough to pay steep prices to specially trained 'stalkers' who can navigate the strange and dangerous zone to retrieve them (in a Quernomic moment, randomly generated desire-loaded arbitrariness short circuits agentic rationality).

This is not unlike, in psychoanalytic terms, the traumatic primal scene that is repressed and not remembered but cybneretically reconstructed through fictions within the frame of psychoanalytic treatment and its specially trained 'analysts' who can nagivate the strange and dangerous zones of the machinic unconscious (see my Hyperstitional Therapeutics text in MVU's Plutonics Journal Volume XIII). But to limit things to psychoanalysis would be an error that distracts from Marxism's accidental conceptualization of the alien outside and its fictional instantiation in Roadside Picnic. Here we are only using some aspects of psychoanalysis - one's that align with the alien aspects of Marxism (as opposed to the project of Freudomarxism, which aligns with the humanist aims of Marx and Engels [schizoanalysis = alien marxism; psychoanalysis = human communism) to aim us towards the outside.

To get back to the outside, we need Kant. Luckily we can get Kant and Marx through Wilfred Bion, a British psychoanalyst who explicitly used  Kantianism to create a method of psychoanalytic therapy focused solely on human synthetic reconstruction of the inhuman noumenal experiences (see here for more), and who was one of the first psychoanalysts to develop a working clinical theory for conceptualizing and treating schizophrenia.

Bion, roughly following Nietzsche and Freud, posited a materialist theory of mind wherein bodily forces  (instincts, drives, wishes, etc.) pressing for discharge are either satisfied by bodily processes (fucking, eating, killing, running, - i.e. doing things, etc.) or, if not satisfied, become affect (a rough, presymbolic translation of bodily material processes into sensations, and proto-feelings) which then, through the human feedback systems, becomes a more solidified feeling or a thought. If one proceeds along a healthy path, one learns to acknowledge how feelings and thoughts are connected or 'linked' to bodily processes such as instincts, drives, wishes, etc. If one becomes neurotic, hysteric, fetishistic, or perverted, it is because one is having thoughts and feelings that one refuses to 'link' - or think about through emotional-logical-analytical methods - to instincts, drives, etc., or one fails to find outlet for instincts, drives, wishes, through action or language / feeling.

Similarly, if one becomes schizophrenic, it is because one finds their instincts, drives, wishes, etc., intolerably horrific, and the mechanisms of the mind (repression, super ego censorship, ego fragility, etc.) interject to disrupt links between instincts and actions or instincts and thoughts/feelings. To use a general clinical example in line with Bion's own clinical examples, many schizophrenics I have treated as a therapist had at some point in their lives wished to do unspeakable acts. One wished to murder  a loved one, another to beat to near death their school rivals, another to have sex with their sibling, etc. If these impulses turned to thoughts and feelings aren't dealt with in a way that provides containment and knowledge (elaboration as to their instinctual origins that relieves pressure to act) - i.e., an understanding that it is natural to have an urge, but that one must find an appropriate outlet to express this urge (what Lacan would call castration) - one enters into a catatonic state to shut out others, i.e. prevent stimulation that could lead to a violent or transgressive outburst; one scramble's one's mind as to prevent the occurrence of bad thoughts and feelings.

In the case where the mind is not completely fried like an egg, the inability to handle an impulse without acting on it leads to a tremendous fear  that makes the patient believe in magical thinking - they believe that by merely thinking of hurting someone they will in fact hurt someone (nursery rhyme 'don't step on the crack you'll break your mother's back'). This is, as Deleuze and Guattari relying on Freud, put it, the primary process of experiencing 'words on the level of things.'

This combination of magical thinking and disrupting material processes and their incorporeal aspects often leads to 'free floating' affects, images, ideas, etc., that 'haunt' the patient. These can sometimes be projected into hallucinations of or fantasies about objects that aren't 'real,' or objects that are real but have strange, exaggerated, unreal, features,  what Bion refers to as  a "bizarre object." In less clinical jargon, a patient wishes to beat his brother for whatever reason, the patient finds this intolerable to feel or think for whatever reason, the links between the bodily sensations and thoughts and feelings are destroyed, the unconscious belief that the patient can beat someone up by only thinking of it takes its place, and disconnected images - the minds attempt at translating the bodily sensations and affects - of violence fill the mind's eye. These are felt as equally intolerable as the original instinct which one is attempting to avoid, so the intolerable states are projected onto the outside world (this isn't me, its them). Now the patient sees angry, evil faces in the designs on the walls, etc., or, as I have written elsewhere - ghosts and demons!

In other words, mental illness - a symptom of which is the 'bizarre object' -  is caused by a disconnection between material and its incorporeal translation (what Lacan, refering to schizophrenia, calls 'a breakdown in the signifyin chain'). This mirrors the disconnection capitalism introduces between material contexts and their objects and desires that results in alienation and fetishistic objects, or what I have been loosely calling alien objects. As D and G suggest - capitalism, by scrambling codes and deterritorializing materials, produces schizophrenics in the same way it produces other commodities.

Xenomarxism

In short, its not to say my initial experience of the book was wrong - i.e., that the book is not about subjective anxiety - but rather, following the studies of the outside (Kant, Nietzsche, early Freud, Bion, D and G, CCRU, Accelerationism, Xenofeminism, etc.), the subjective quality should be viewed as secondary, and when viewed as such, the anxiety assigned to the subject collapses into an experience of various intensities. It is no longer a worry over death, or losing one's ego (going mad), but a plane that makes no judgments such as these, and turns itself over to the alien forces appropriated (or produced) by capitalism.

This mirrors Marxism's attempts to conceptualize a humanism out of what is essentially an inhuman world of impersonal flow of objects, before going on to use psychoanalysis to bolster its humanism despite psychoanalysis' strong inhumanist undercurrents.  It is fitting then that it is Roadside Picnic, a 70s Russian novel, and its videogame counterpart S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - which rewrites the book's story so that 'the zone' is the result of the USSR Chernobyl Meltdown, not aliens - that resonate with the accidental, dark side of Marxism - its alien side.

Land, who in his New Center for Research and Practice seminars identifies Mao's understanding of Capitalism as being like 'weeds that sprout up everywhere when one is not looking' as a helpful conceptualization similarly points out in volume 13 of Šum Journal for Contemporary Art Criticism and Theory that it would be incorrect to assume the left fails altogether to capture the reality of what it sets out to study or critique - such as capitalism - but that in capturing some aspects, the left too quickly offers moralistic prescriptions in place of  interfacing with the real ('accelerating the process'). Likewise, elsewhere, Land has named Marx one of the first thinkers to conceptualize the accelerative processes of Capitalism. Consistent with this, Marx is the first thinker - labeled an "anticipatory" of accelerationism - encountered when one reads #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (2014), something Vincent Garton has expanded on in his blog posts Excavating the Origins of Accelerationism and Accelerate Marx (2016-2017).

That is, the more humanity cracks down on prescribing programs of critique, the more that which is being critiqued squirms out the other side, and comes back twice as strong. Perhaps this is why we have ended up with Xenofeminism (which is certainly aware of the D/G/Land-Roadside Picnic connection...)?

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