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].
