COVID Update from the (Fake) Frontlines

I recently reflected on my inpatient and mental health clinic experiences in Kurtz-Gradient: Do Long Inpatient Hospital, Some Notes on Hell, DRM_ARCHATXTR.exe (Dream Architecture), and Some Notes on Land's Notion of Capitalist Efficiency and the Process. Synthesized - the inpatient and mental health clinic setting is an uncanny, surreal, horrorscape where the limits of the human, and therefore the inhuman, is brought to the forefront. 

In my general entry on epistemological errors The Minor Science of Caninepistemology / Doggypsychiatry, as well as my series on COVID and epistemology Viral Epistemology, Viral Epistemology II: Quaternary Park and The Human Security System, and Viral Epistemology III: Science, the Death of God, and Mike Pence, I commented on the media reporting of the scientific understanding of COVID. Synthesized - the virus is by its nature a surplus beyond reason, science, and human control, one that deals with Nietzschean complexity, chaos, and chance. 

Today I will synthesize both my experiences in the psychiatry setting and epistemology - not unlike  how I started to do with Canineepistemology - to provide an anecdotal account of COVID. 

As I argued in the above entries, things are always more complex than they appear. Some will be exposed to COVID, not get it; some will be exposed to COVID, get it, and be asymptomatic and recover; some will be exposed, get it, be mildly symptomatic, and recover; some will be exposed, get it, be severely symptomatic, and recover; some will get it, be asymptomatic, and die; some will get it, be mildly or severely symptomatic and die. Some will attend high risk ares and not be exposed, some will attend low risk areas and be exposed, etc. Some will have compromised immune systems, or generally be at higher risk, and not catch it - or catch it and recover; some will have healthy immune systems, or be at lower risk, and catch it - or catch it and die. 

Molar statistics map well onto populations, but do not map well onto individual cases. Chance and chaos - random variation of nature, surplus of code - rule in this domain. 

For instance, I was recently appointed to the inpatient hospital ward to train the staff. In talking with the supervisor there I learned that 3 residents with incredibly compromised immune systems (literally near death in many ways) had contracted COVID, recovered, and returned to inpatient (and additionally, spread of COVID was quickly prevented from going beyond the 3 patients by - so it seems - sanitation, mask wearing, and quarantining). This of course goes against what we would assume - cramped quarters, locked doors, compromised immune systems, etc. - surely COVID will spread like wildfire and kill with certainty. The reality is is that these units are cleaned deeper and more often than other places, and traffic from the outside is limited as much as possible, so if there is a population of COVID negative patients, they will likely remain COVID negative. However, I have no way of explaining how these very physically and mentally ill patients did not simply die. I may not know enough about their treatment or care. 

What is more interesting is that several adolescents in the inpatient attempted to intentionally catch COVID in order to be discharged from inpatient, and all of them failed. 3 or 4 kids could not catch this stupid virus in a confirmed exposed unit even by licking the door knobs and floors. Strange.

On this note, I've been around high risk or exposed populations since the start of the quarantine, and have only ever tested negative. I know of only three people - all of which are once or twice removed (friends of friends) - that have contracted COVID, 1 of which was in her 90s and recovered without impairments, one of which was in her 30s and recovered without impairment, and one of which was in her 20s and recovered with slight shortness of breath. Considering men are significantly more likely to catch it than woman, and older people are significantly more likely to be effected than younger, this is all strange as well. 

Even though it's ripe with its own epistemological fallacies - my sample size is too small, I have no method, blah blah blah, etc., - I find it interesting to highlight how abstract molar statistical models often do not map onto intuitive personal experiences. I do however believe that through wearing a mask, using hand sanitizer, and not touching my face, I have done some things to lessen my risk of catching the virus. 

Anyways, I think this is a lot of words to say I am surprised I and many of the people I know and work with aren't simply dead...

A Personal Note On Twitter Drama and ACC Rhetorical Hangup (Baby's first polemic)

Recently Twitter mutual and PHD researcher on Accelerationist adjacent academia (for lack of a better term) Gregory Marks went hard on popular blogger Xenogothic (see the thread here). 

What went on between these two thinkers doesn't matter, but it was brutally funny to me, and more importantly helped me be more open with how I feel about Xenogothic - I've tried to like him, I read his blog, bought his book, etc., but the guy's annoying, morose, miserable, humorless, thin-skinned, overly-defensive, stuck in the need to change others' minds, to convince others of this or that academic detail, groping for master narratives and daddy-figures under the guise of being reflective, dark, open, exit-oriented, and denouncing of master narratives and oedipalization, etc. 

Tl;dr: I don't like him, but I'm not here to convince you not to like him too. Do as you desire. Make up your own mind. Buy his book, etc.

In fact, I actively try to avoid how I feel about others on Twitter or my blog as it is often of no importance, boring to read, reactive, and against my personal ethics. I'm a psychoanalyst, teacher, and therapist, and I'm of the belief that if you don't have anything nice to say, just keep it to yourself. Speech is for constructive communication, not attack - and as for critique: if you expect someone to learn from it and grow then it has to be given in a way that the other will be able to incorporate it, otherwise its merely a kind of petite-bourgeoisie virtue signaling, or academic bullying not unlike when Leftists dunk on clearly stupid conservatives for TV laughs.

Put differently: Often, when one has disagreeable things to say in the public sphere, one is acting (or reacting) to some kind of personal pathology; they're looking for some kind of 'other' to validate or acknowledge their side of the story - 'yes, you are so right, the person you don't like is as bad as you say, and you are so smart and good for thinking so, good boy.'

As Deleuze says (likely inspired by Guattari and his psychoanalytic practice), if you are trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked. And being trapped in the other is always bound up with resentment - the inability to sit with and process frustration with others and their different experiences; it is simply an inability to feel and tolerate the frustration of unsymbolizable difference.  

In other words, as a psychoanalyst and Nietzschean, I have no interest in convincing others to change what they feel or believe, and find affirmitive communications the only ones worthwhile. Regardless, I am here to ride this new wave of open dislike of Xeno by looking at an older blog post of his.

In You Are Not an Acclerationist Xeno makes the point that calling yourself an 'accelerationist' is "dumb" and "bad" and that "hauntology" "or accelerologist" is "better" because one ultimately has no say in what happens with the process of acceleration (Capitalism and its effects on us human subjects). 

Xeno's issue here seems to be with the suffix 'ist/ism' as opposed to 'ology.' 'Ism' means practice, 'Ology' means 'study of.' As many have pointed out, there is no Accelerationist praxis (Vincent Garton  /  Edmund Berger), and as Xenos says himself, there is really only the study of Acceleration as a process happening without our consent, hence 'ology' being the better suited suffix. This is why Xeno says "Hauntology is a better term."

Xeno seems to assume a position of condescending authority - 'you're a dumb wanker if you call yourself an accelerationist.' This is probably true, but not for the reasons laid out here, and if it is true, it a 'truth' with little to no significance. 

Who really gives a enough of a shit about the small, linguistic, rhetorical difference between 'ology' and 'ism/ist,' especially when - as Xeno points out himself in writing "there’s nothing I can do to impact the process of acceleration" - Acceleration is indifferent to human agency, especially the kind of human agency that gets hung up on the details of linguistics?

In other words, if Xeno's position is 'Hauntology is a better name because we have no say in the process and Accelerationist implies we have a say' then whether or not we fret over this or that suffix is completely besides the point. In fact, following 'accelerationist thinking,' for lack of a better term, one might accept that language is but a sloppy shorthand, a functional fiction not to be taken too seriously, and additionally one might get interested in why the term 'accelerationism' was 'selected for' over 'hauntology' to begin with...

This symptom betrays Xeno's entire conflict - attempting to craft this kind of dark, gothic, alien, ACC online brand while also trying to be a snooty, run of the mill humanist who cares too much. Thus, what is being said here when Xeno says 'ology,' specifically 'hauntology,' is the better term than accelerationism is what Xeno has always said about everything - 'Mark Fisher is good and cool and actually better than Nick Land and if you don't think so you're dumb!' except its dressed up as something substantial.

As the Sayre's Law saying goes - the lower the stakes...

Scattered Thoughts On Cute/Acc

"Cute" as found in Ethology: The Biology of Behavior Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1970 pg. 432

1: G(ossip)/Acc 

As I pointed out in my recent ode to Robin Mackay's love of McDonalds, I'm getting back to the roots of this blog - crudely filtering irrelevant and abominable low-pop-culture artifacts through poorly understood high-culture theory for the entertainment of a small most likely imaginary internet audience. 

In other words, I spend too much time explaining online jokes -  memes as the kids say - to people who who didn't ask.

 

Today's meme is 'Cute/Acc.'

The superficial reading is that Cute/Acc came onto the scene via Amy Ireland's twitter as a kind of humorous commentary on the multitude of  '[Insert Adjective Here]/Acc' derivatives that popped up around the internet, many of which were overly serious, self important, and lacking in the dark humor that cuts across most of the founding ACC texts.

That is, to counter the stale, overly academic miserable L-Acc and the boring right-wing-talking-points-dressed-up-like-high-brow-theory R-Acc alike - not to mention all the [BLANK]/Acc's in between that used some humor but frequently broke character to slip into some sort of serious project - Cute/Acc was - well, simply cute.

On another register, if I were to speculate as the psychoanalyst in training that I am, I would have to say Robin Mackay and Amy Ireland's somewhat apparent online (and in person? who am I to say, I'm trying to avoid being a nosy tabloid!) flirtatious romance influenced the creation of Cute/Acc to some degree, perhaps to the degree that Cute/Acc is merely an inside joke and any attribution of a 'deeper meaning' (a notion antithetical to most if not all of accelerationism) is misguided. 

2: On the Origins of Cuties

Luckily the origins of Cute/Acc are of little consequence for our goal today.

Our goal today is to assert that Cute/Acc is not merely undermining the misguided seriousness of much of the Acc stuff, but that Cute/Acc is, par the course of accelerationism, going 'even further still' down the Acc trajectory precisely because cuteness is the libidinal excrement of cold, horror; the product of random acts of bioviolence.

That is, Cute/Acc is more in line with other Acc than it initially betrays. 

In Ethology: The Biology of Behavior (1970 pg. 431-432), Eibl-Eibesfeldt writes 

"...we react almost automatically to certain releasing stimulus situations in a predictable way...likely on an innate basis...behavior patterns of caring for young and the affective responses a person experiences when confronted with a human child are probably released on an innate basis by a number of cues that characterize infants...specifically the following...1. Head large in the proportion to the body; 2. Protruding forehead...; 3. Large eyes...; 4: Short, thick extremities; 5. Rounded body shape...We find these objects 'cute' "    [see the above image for examples]

Cuteness serves an important biological function. Biological functions are honed through the feedback process of evolution. Evolution works through random genetic variation as opposed to anything teleological or theological. Random genetic variation is a 'mechanism' whereby nature, in its endless churning of cycling permutations, spits out a bunch of versions of a thing, many of which die, some of which live, at which point the living ones continue to reproduce and the dead ones continue to be dead.

To use Darwin's famous finches as an example - say the food needed to survive in an environment is mainly worms in a fallen tree that has rotted. The birds randomly generated by nature to have long beaks will be able to get the worms and live while the birds randomly fixed with other beaks will not be able to get the worms and will likely die. Thus, through random variation, we get an increase in the population of long beaked birds, a decrease in other birds, etc., and 100 years later we have a population of long beaked X birds in Y milieu, and little to no short beaked X birds in Y milieu. This is what we have come to know as 'survival of the fittest.' The random variation that fits with the environment best is 'selected for.' 

Though there are "spurious" traits passed down that appear to have a function but are in actuality relatively non-functional and merely smuggled in with attached code or functions by accident, this means the majority of traits passed down in populations serve - or at least have served - the survival of the organism. This of course means that 'cute' is a more than likely a trait that was passed down genetically for survival - or in other words, the 'cute' variations of the organism won out over the 'non-cute' variations (in the least, the variations of organisms that during their gestation period appeared more cute than other organisms of the same kind, as cuteness is associated with certain developmental stages as opposed to being a consistent factor across development). One theory for this, as mentioned above, is that 'cute' features trigger innate caring responses, increasing the likelihood that the organism will grow up as opposed to dying in its vulnerable young state. 

What is interesting here is that random genetic variation is itself very not cute. It is a cold, cruel, horrific, violent, ugly process wherein animals starve to death, or in the throes of desperation attempt to compete for food or space with other more 'fit' animals almost guaranteed to win the competition, often resulting in injury or death to the less fit animal. Just as a lump of coal turns to a cluster of diamond under high pressure over many years, a lump of cold and ugly turns to a cluster of warm and fuzzy; ugliness on one side of the process produces cuteness on the other.

3: Nature, Gnon, and The Eternal Return of the Cute

Nietzsche's most significant concept is arguably "the eternal return" which my undergraduate philosophy professor (who wrote his doctoral thesis on Nietzsche) explained to me as 'a pseudo-scientific materialist theory of nature that posits that if the material in the universe is finite, but time is infinite (or near infinite), then given enough time, the material in the universe will complete all possible combinations and start over.'  Deleuze, in his book Nietzsche and Philosophy describes this concept as a dice throw that demonstrates the possible combinations of chance and necessity that captures "a reproduction of diversity... a repetition of difference..." (pg. 46). 

From this 'materialist' theory of affirming the random generation of difference - what could be - while accepting what is - reality of the limits of nature - and the synthesis of the two, it follows for Nietzsche that one 'ought' to make the decision in one's life that one would always make given the choice. I argue this is a materialist reversal (or inverse) of Kant's categorical imperative, one that replaces the mandates of God with an affirmation of nature's random variation. Whereas with Kant one has to act consistently across all situations to remain ethical (never lie), and with God one needs to make decisions consistent with a judgement system based on an afterlife of reward or punishment, with Nietzsche one makes decisions based on whether one would want to relive this decision over and over again for an eternity, which means one wants to make decisions consistent with one's own system of not reward or punishment, but self-affirmation. 

Though Nietzsche posited the eternal return as beyond science, and criticized Darwin and positivist science throughout his career, and though, as Deleuze points out, Nietzsche's eternal return is not to be simply equated with thermodynamic theories found in physics, it does seem to be the case that the eternal return, with its basic materialist premise of 'finite material + infinite time = cycling of combinations of finite material,' is not unlike the random variation mechanism of nature. 

'Mad black Deleuzian' Nick Land has been compared to Nietzsche, written essays on Nietzsche (Shamanic Nietzsche), and his first book (Thirst for Annihilation) discusses Nietzsche along with Bataille, who himself was a sort of Nietzschean. Scott Alexander / Star Slate Codex writes " 'Gnon' is Nick Land’s shorthand for "Nature And Nature’s God." In other words, with the concept Gnogn Land is synthesizing Nietzsche and Darwin (and Kant) with Deleuze.

Though we cannot equate Darwin's random genetic variation, Nietzsche's eternal return, the thermodynamic theories of physics, and Land's Gnon, we can touch upon a common underlying theme - libidinal excess. As Land has explicated in his first book, part of the Nietzschean 'metaphysics,' for lack of a better term, is a libidinal economy of excess. A system always produces more than it can spend. Nature churns away, senselessly producing random variations of form and content upon a plane or in a milieu (to use Deleuze and Guattari's jargon). There is no God in this picture, only a feedback system that boot-strapped itself into existence and can't seem to kill itself fast enough to escape its excessive production of life, a life that, like cancer, spills over into death uncontrollably and gives back life.

So nature produces a million variations of some dumb thing, and the cute ones are selected for, and the non cute ones aren't. The cute ones step on the backs and faces of the non-cute ones, pushing them further into the mud. As Amy has stated herself - perhaps in her Twitter bio, I can't recall - warmth and cuteness are born out of the furnace of coldness (I'm paraphrasing).

Wherever anything is cute, there is surely a trail of bodies not far behind. Perhaps this is part of the misogynistic narratives of the seductive evil woman - Lilith, Medusa, the archetypes of the seductive spider-woman or the witch, etc., - found among all cultures throughout all times. 

Cuteulhu anyone? 

4: Post Script: Cute/Acc - A Dionysian Re-invigoration of Acc

Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt's 1970 book Ethology: The Biology of Behavior is an interesting artifact I'd like to call attention to. 

As I've written elsewhere, I discovered Deleuze and Guattari by accident after seeing a film and initially hated them, only to shortly thereafter find Anti-Oedipus in my psychoanalytic institute's free book shelf where I of course snatched it up and fell in love. Along with AO, I also snatched up the above book, by Eibl-Eibesfeldt. Both books were donated to the free book shelf by the same professor, who I have talked about here and here, a professor who was active during May '68, and likely bought these books in the 70s or 80s and likely donated them at the same time. I assumed this to be random, unrelated until I began exploring Guattari's solo work, where I encountered a diagram that looked familiar. As it turns out, the diagram was drawn by Guattari into his book and taken directly from Eibl-Eibesfeldts book! With this is mind, I went looking for citations throughout Guattari's work and to my surprise found that this Eibl-Eibesfeldt book was one Guattari's most cited books, and likely the one that informed the biological and ethological thinking throughout both Guattari's solo work and Deleuze and Guattari's work together. 

What are the chances of getting both books? I'm inclined to say slim. But chance and strange coincidence are where life really happens - the libidinal explosion of something strange out of the mundane. This is in part what Cute/Acc did. The cuteness undermined the stoicism of the left, right, and unconditional. 

From The Birth of Tragedy to The Will to Power, Nietzsche talks of 'the serious man.' In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he appears as the enemy of Zarathustra and the Overman. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes of this 'serious man' that

"Dialectical rigor...thinking seems to them something slow and hesitant, almost a labor...never something light, divine, something closely related to the dance and to playful high spirits. 'Thinking' and 'taking something seriously,' 'taking it gravely,' are to them the same thing" (138).

This man has no fun. Too angry like the right, too morose like the left. Both mired in boring resentment. This man - and resentment for that fact - is not cute. Not cute at all. 

Cute/Acc, in my strange reading at least, employs us to stop overthinking, stop being so serious. It employs us, through my connection to this Ethological book of Guattari, to return to the energy of crazed, dancing Nietzsche, and stimulating abusing Guattari. 

What was Guattari to Deleuze if not the cute one of the two? Though Deleuze embodied Nietzsche's Dionysian intoxication impulse by being both a drunk and the 'real' Nietzsche scholar of the two, Guattari was certainly the Dionysian energy embodied. Look no further than Deleuze's own words on the difference between Guattari and himself.

"He [Guattari] would have to be compared to the ocean, endlessly moving with reflections of light constantly breaking on the surface; he can jump from one thing to another, he does not sleep much, he travels, he never stops, never ceases. I would be more like the hill, very little movement, unable to do two things at once, my ideas are stable and whatever occasional movement there is is internal..." (Dosse 2011 pg. 10). 

Deleuze, the rigorous philosopher, Guattari the dancing ocean. One cannot help but think of the constant mentions of jumping and dancing employed by Nietzsche to capture the process of joyous life overflowing itself. 

This is all a lot of words to say that ACC loses its fun when it takes itself too seriously, and that perhaps we need to get back to 'saying stupid shit' and 'fucking around with the schizo-maniacal flow' as Guattari put it. Perhaps we need to keep our humor, and become becoming-cute.

Kurtz-Gradient: Do Long Inpatient Hospital

"Look what it did to Kurtz, a special forces ultra-capital meat-machine hacked and cored-out by K-virus, touched by  a dark future, recycled through hell." 

- Cyberspace Anarchitecture

"Kurtz cauterizes his compassion, burns it out, argonizingly meticulous, becoming ever more methodical, efficient and relentless (on a cyberpositive slide). He explores hell." 

- Meat

1: 

As Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier point out in their introduction of Fanged Noumena, the 'Kurtz-Gradient' - a reference to Kurtz of Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now - is an important Landian concept, one that makes an appearance in the CCRU writings, and Land essays such as Cybergothic, No Future, Kataconix, etc. 

Kurtz-Gradient manifests in the most wild, haunted areas. From deep jungled Africa, to swamped-out Cambodia, to the sterile inpatient hospital. 

2: 

I've written on institutional mental health before - this current post will integrate previous posts with Kurtz.

In my DRM_ARCHATXTR.exe (Dream Architecture) blog  - a title that shares unintentional resonances with Land's Cyberspace Anarchitecture - I wrote about the surreal nature of the panopticonesque structure of the inpatient unit I sometimes visit for my day job; my point was that the architectural layout of the inpatient unit is already dream like, so when i dreamt of it one night, it was not distorted or exaggerated by the representation models of the dream process. That is, the inpatient unit is a certain kind of hellish nightmare.

In my Notes on Land's Notion of Capitalist Efficiency and the Process blog, I outlined how COVID19 accelerated mental health professional 'burnout' - a term for when when caretakers become physically and emotionally exhausted, lose patience with the populations they are supposed to care for, and begin to act out coldly or cruelly - which thereby leads to thoughts such as "Program would run better, smoother, more efficient, if it simply didn't have patients." In other words, a hospital could get more work done if it didn't have any patients to take care of. Paradoxically (which is how complex time or 'templexicity' works), the institutions designed to aid the repair of the human ultimately aids in the cold, zero-trending obsolescence of the human.

3:

Similarly, as illustrated above via the pull-quotes, Kurtz gets more and more "burnt out," "cold," and "efficient" as he traverses a surreal architecture, a hellish geography; as he flaots down the river (Hades).

This has all been on my mind as of late because I've recently been tasked by my bosses with  visiting the inpatient unit more frequently (as opposed to the half-way house type environment I spend most of my time in) in order to 'supervise' and 'train' the staff on how to better help the patients (the staff has slipped into doing the bare minimum to help the patients). 

When I arrived at the inpatient and began asking about protocols, methods, chains of commands - how things really tend to go 'on shift' - I felt like Capt. Willard of Apocalypse Now.  As Willard follows the river further down, descends into the jungle of chaos, deeper and deeper into the warzone, he learns more and more how the chain of command has broken down, how authority has collapsed; no more generals, captains, colonels, whatevers, etc., giving orders, only a free for all of uncoordinated soldiers taking the war into their own hands. 

Willard: "Who's the command officer here"

Gunner: "Ain't you?"

Willard: "Hey soldier - do you know who's in command here?

Grenadier: "Yeah..."

Yes, in the inpatient I got a glimpse of how bad things had gotten, how chaos had overtaken order. The patients had intimated the staff to an extent that the staff no longer felt comfortable maintaining any kind of healthy boundary. As the adage goes, the lunatics were running the asylum. 

Mirroring the above scene, when I asked the staff who was in command, no one could tell me.

4:

As many have pointed out, for Land, the Kurtz-Gradient is one of many materializations of schizophrenic collapse. Oedipal order - daddy and the family tree, commander the dog soliders who follow, etc. - fragmented into a collective free-for-all. The incest taboo broken. Do Long bridge.

To this effect, in the appropriately named Meat (Or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace), Land writes

"With each telling of the story Kurtz becomes colder, darker, more inevitable, fatally anticipating K-virus catastrophe, as if a tendril of tomorrow were burrowing back. Whe he found among these African or Cambodian aboriginals...reports of military bestiality, butchery, carnage, head hunting, collecting ears, severing the vaccinated arms from children. The Kurtz-process masks itself in wolf-pelts of regression, as if returning to the repressed, discovering a lost truth, excavating the fossils of monsters" 

Africa jungle, Cambodia river - how about inpatient hospital? Reports of bestiality, butchery - how about taking off all clothes and flailing on the ground because someone asked you kindly not to throw food at other patients? 

Each time the Kurtz story is told it is compressed and microsized to fit the dimensions of your television screen. Now its squeezed inside the walls of an inpatient hospital.

5 / Postscript:

As I began writing this, I put on a film on Shudder "Adrenochrome" that, unbeknownst to me, is centered on drug induced psychotic collapse of rival soldiers in California. Right as I finish writing it I encounter a scene that references Colonel Kurtz. Sometimes things resonate oddly.