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...)?

...

The Canada Connection: Demon Machines

Canada is weird.

Take this disordered time (tape) loop, with its lurches forward and backwards:

1900-1972: The great majority of mayors and councillors in Toronto and its surrounding areas were part of an occultist group Orange Order of Canada that had symbolic ties to Freemasons and Gnostics. This has had lasting weird effects in architecture and city organization (satanically named streets, prevalence of concrete structures, etc.). On a geotraumatic register - a geology to accompany our genealogy - the cities of Canada are structured around the flows of a deep, cryptic, occult.

Nick Land wrote 'the city is a time machine,' but might it also be that the city, like Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer which sits on the 'Hell Mouth,' is the crystallization of a demonic power? A city is a demon machine.

1957-1964: British Psychiatrist and head of the Canadian Psychiatric association Donald Cameron carries out  CIA mind control experiment MK Ultra in McGill University Allan Clinic, Quebec. It is here he lures innocent women and children into his assylum under the false pretense of helping them only to dose them with LSD and expose them to tape loops of static and repetitive phrases.

Cameron was surely a demon, or at least in communion with them not unlike the doctors in Jacobs Ladder

or the psychiatrist in Hellraiser II

1966-2014: David Cronenberg writes, directs, and produces weird horror films (including a William Burroughs adaption) that cover topics such as postmodernism, anti-psychiatry, bodyhorror, psychoanalysis, xenofeminism, technoviruses, etc.

1973: Felix Guattari travels to Canada for a lecture (Intersecting Lives pg. 273). I wish there was more to it than this.

1979: Lyotard is commissioned by the government of Quebec to publish The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The text maps onto some of Felix Guattari's wok on language, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique.

1980: In A Thousand Plateaus D and G talk of languages that pull from disparate elements to create a weird 'minor' language that breaks with structuralist conceptions of language. As an example, they mention Quebec

“It is also said that ‘the Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than by any system of spelling’…the Quebecois language must be evaluated not only in relation to standard French but also in relation to major English, from which it borrows all kinds of phonetic and syntactical elements, in order to set them in variation” (pg. 101-102). 

1981: A Guattari revival begins thanks to "Greek- Canadian academic, Constantin Boundas, a philosophy professor at Trent University in Canada" (Intersecting Lives).

1981: UK Prog rock band The Police record Ghost in the Machine at Le Studio in Quebec. The album title is a reference to Arthur Koestler's book of the same title, while the album artwork is intended to represent the 3 members of the band and their hairstyles, but appears to be '3:33' on a digital clock. Almost corresponding numerologically, the album was ranked 323 out 500 in an album ranking magazine article.

This 3:33 should of course remind us of Nick Land's twitter avatar.

1982-1983:  The Police record Synchronicity, the follow up to Ghost in the Machine, at Le Studio in Quebec. The album title, album artwork, and two correspondingly named songs, all reference psychoanalyst Carl Jung's (and Arthur Koestler's) scientific-mystical concept of synchronicity, a non-causal but related and meaningful coincidence (not identical but certainly similar to the CCRU's hyperstition).

The song Sychronocity II follows the story of an impotent, castrated worker and family man going about his day while, in an unrelated time and place, "something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake" a something which, by the end of the song, crawls onto the shores and becomes "a shadow on the door." A boring, regular Capitalist day is penetrated by a unnameable, slime monster from the deeps (Cthulhuic much?).

1984: Lyotard's Postmodern book is republished.

1987: D and G's A Thousand Plateaus is republished, translated by Brian Masumi

1989: David Lynch's Twin Peaks takes place in a fictional town about 20 miles from the Canadian border. In the show, the plot brings our main character - a mystical, psychologically minded detective - to Canada in an attempt to solve an uncanny mystery.

1990s: Felix Guattari takes on a new popularity in Canada, some of which is associated to McGill University in Quebec.  Gary Genosko, one of the scholars - if not the one -  responsible for reviving interest in Guattari is based in Ontario. Brian Masumi, translator of both Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari, teaches at the University of Montreal. Etc.

1995: Boards of Canada, a two-man, Scottish, cryptic lo-fi synth band that, consistent with the explorations of the CCRU to come, creates their music out of drum machines, modified synths, and creepy cut up magnetic tape loops of number codes, documentaries, and children talking (not unlike those used in MK Ultra), release their first music on a major label. The name is a reference to 'the national film board of canada' founded in 1939 by a British man and centered in Quebec.

2003: shortly after the turn of the century, with the dissipation of the CCRU, and after burning out on LSD and speed, the mad black Deleuzian Nick Land disappears. It is rumored he takes solitary refuge in Canada before moving to China.

2010: Panos Cosmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow is filmed in Canada, a setting which has an important role in the director's upbringing. The psychedelic and antipsychiatry ridden film takes place in the 60s and then the 80s and follows a telepathic woman held against her will by a sadistic psychiatrist in a strange future mental health clinic. The director cites Burroughs as inspiration.

2020: Nick Land returns again to Canada to flee the spread of hypervirus COVID19 through China.

20XX: N1X (Nyx) Land via Šum Journal 12 captures the near future where "Canadian supremacy over North America is largely won."

XXXX: ...

The geographic territory of Canada seems to be haunted by the occult and its adjacent binaries - psychiatric domination of females / anti-psychiatric feminism, psychoanalytic Oedipal / Anoedipal axes, science / mysticism, enlightenment / postmodernism, etc.; binaries that play out across different planes of expression - film, music, architecture, institutional control, etc.

It's likely that there are historical-material (genealogical and geological) processes that lead to these connections - perhaps the overlapping British/Scottish/French colonial expeditions, perhaps something else - but regardless, one could say that certain manifestations seem to resonate - synchronize -  around Canada.

For Jung, the 'mind' is merely an articulation or production of the physical, base material of the Outside. Being that the 'objective' Outside and the 'subjective' inside are of the same 'stuff,' when the Outside matches the inside in a way that seems to have no agentic or local causality, its material-code redundancy is felt to be a meaningful event - a meeting of long separated twins (syzygy).

This is not unlike Guattari's conceptualization of diagramming redundancies of signifying substance and asignifying materials - the inside is simply the outside folded inwards, and the inside is used to traverse the outside. We often neglect our own resonances through a mythic and fictional oedipal disconnection  - the ego and the superego - which fools us into thinking we are a proper 'thing' as opposed to a husk being played by an Outside force.

Synthesizing these thoughts: hyperstition is a techno-magical coincidence intensifier, a fiction that makes itself real through diagrammatic force that concentrates redundancies into interlocking with the Outside.

Let's not slip too much into exposition and isntead end on a weird coincidence: in Canada in 2018 women were still being arrested for witchcraft. In one article documenting this trend, the author writes

"Is it a coincidence that all of this [the arrests] is going down within days of Halloween? If you want to talk crazy coincidences, what about the fact that both Canadian women accused of witchcraft — Dorie Stevenson from Milton, Ont., and Samantha Stevenson from Toronto — have the same last name! (Police are currently looking into any possible connections.)"

What are the odds? Are these perhaps long lost, unconscious twins (syzygy)? Certainly an interesting coincidence.

Notes on Land's Notion of Capitalist Efficiency and the Process

The story goes like this: In 2020 a hyperbiovirus accelerates technocapitalism precisely by collapsing it, putting many humans out of commission, and psychologically burning out those that remain, a cycle that tends towards coldness in the human, which tends towards inhumaneness in the human, which tends towards policy that introduces inhumaneness into institutional structure, which begets more inhumanness in the human...so on, so on...

***

Nick Land's conceptualization of Capitalism:

an autonomous, self-reinforcing, feedback loop that accelerates at a greater rate than the subjects it produces as a byproduct, thereby rendering the byproduct - i.e. the human - obsolete. 

This is not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's application of Samuel Butler's thesis - that machines use humans as nodes in the reproduction process of machines - in that Capitalism uses humans as nodes in its own growth process. In both cases, the future may do away with the human once it becomes an obsolete form of reproduction.

I have understood the concept intellectually for quite a bit, but it was not until yesterday that I understood it on an intuitive and personal level.

The (short) story goes like this: COVID19 has qualitatively (staff and patients alike are psychologically effected) and quantitatively (staff call out, forcing other staff to stay to cover shifts, etc.) intensified the already absurdly long and hard hours I work at the clinic. As a result of this, and because I've been at the same clinic for years, I've become quite burnt out myself.

Burnout means I seek less human contact and have less frustration tolerance. Less human contact and less frustration tolerance means colder approach to the humans I do come in contact with. Colder approach means less psychodynamics and more behaviorism. More cold behaviorism means this:

I recently developed what I call a 'behavioral mechanism' to solve the problem of staff not attending mandatory supervisions. The problem: there were many supervision sessions being offered, the staff had many to choose from, and therefore the value and risk of not attending was low - 'why attend this supervision when I could just attend one next week? And if I attend, why pay attention to which one I attend?' This meant low attendance, and low interest. To incentivize staff to attend and choose wisely, I proposed we offer less supervisions, and increase the value of supervisions. 1 or 2 supervisions a month, and each supervision is worth more hours than before. Now if staff wish to reach their mandatory minimum supervision requirement, they must choose and attend, and if they wish to lessen their own discomfort, choose and attend one they can tolerate. 

This is not important in and of itself. It is merely a symptom of my burnout - turning to cold behavioral mechanisms to induce desired action.

Cold behavioral mechanisms means this:

That I am primed towards further use of behavioral mechanisms. Coldness begets more coldness. So I became cold. Flash forward a day - I am sitting in a staff meeting. We are discussing how to better make efficient the mental health clinic program schedule. Should we move smoke break to this time? Should we shorten the group therapy sessions by 10 minutes? Can we push this or that back? etc. And the humorous thought dawned on me

"Program would run better, smoother, more efficient, if it simply didn't have patients"

The groups, meals, and smoke breaks would begin and end exactly on time, or they wouldn't need to be ran at all. The regular staff would not have to attend to the residents and could devote their time to completing the back log of digital paper work, or filling out notes that document nothing happened.

This is Capitalist efficiency. 

It sometimes feels like this is what positivist psychological research is trying to do - hone its research methods by utilizing the patient as a feedback node to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the method. This has nothing to do with positivism, but is simply positivism, like my clinical thought here, appropriating the efficient mechanisms of capitalism that have no regard for humanity.

We recently saw cringe-worthy high profile celebs singing John Lennon's Imagine. Imagine this:

Imagine there's no humans
It's easy if you try
Only hell below us
Above us, scorched sky
Imagine there's no people
Livin' at all today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine there's no people
Livin' life in patches

Imagine, if you will, a clinic with no residents. A market of machines. Imagine machines talking to machines about nothing. Imagine a full, rich, nothing. A massive, substantial, zero.

***

Hyperbiovirus accelerates technocapitalism accelerates human-burnout accelerates coldness accelerates inhumaneness tends towards policy that introduces inhumaneness into institutional structure tends towards...
...

The Obscurantist Look Back at 1 Year of Blogging that No one Asked For...

On April 21st or last year, 2019, I began this blog.

"Why" is a not often a question that 'really' gets at motivation. What better serves this function is "what." "Why's" are the stuff of the courtroom, and the cubicle, of voice, and of law. "What" is the stuff of materialism, of the impersonal vector.

As seen in the previous sentence, Why's (as opposed to 'Why' or 'the why') are in part by their nature multiple in a way that condones univocal impotence. Many interchangeable whys may be invoked to explain an action, but the fact that many may be invoked implies that the outcome and the why are already-always disconnected. If the why could be A, B, C, D, E..., without cost, nothing to gain or lose based on which why is chosen, then there is no explanatory power. This makes why simply noise. Whether or not a dispute over shrubbery was 'why' he murdered his neighbor changes not the murder, only the legal sentence. Meanwhile, what - not 'the whats' as in 'whys' -  is the stuff of the real world. Whether or not X was 'why' he killed his neighbor, what he used to do it was a .357.

This blog has tried to be all about 'whats' as seen in my constant attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and hypermaterialism of accelerationism/CCRU.

In this sense, what possessed me to make this blog? A demon?

I had things to say that could not be said elsewhere. Journals would not accept my work - some of it because I needed to improve on a technical register, i.e., grammar, tense, syntax, proof reading, etc., some of it because they disagreed with the form, i.e., cussing, slang, playing too fast and loose, and some of it because they disagreed with the content, i.e., it did not fit with any established school or discipline (not psychoanalytic enough for the psych journals, not social critique enough for the... etc. etc.). - and because Journals would not accept my work, I had accumulated a back log of essays, along with a collection of fragments I wanted to expand into essays, that had no home, essays and to-be texts I felt compelled to share with someone - anyone - who would take the time.

Its not so much that I believed I had anything of importance to say, but rather that I was sitting on somethings that I couldn't let remain unsaid any longer. They were eating at me. I felt filled to the brim with ideas, things I needed to expel. As Nietzsche's Zarathustra experiences - "Behold!  This overflowing cup must now empty itself: Zarathustra will once again become a man"

There is a difference here between containing that which cannot go unsaid and that which one finds is important and must be said. The former presumptuously assumes a level of individualist authority and an 'other,' while the latter assumes a void.

In this sense, this blog has tried to emulated to voids scissor-fucking; it's tried to imagine the bare ontological minimum subjectivity that would be required to 'reflect' on this cosmorgasm.

The depressive laments at the thought of speaking into a void. On the analyst's couch, they wonder if it is not simply the case that the analyst sleeps, or reads. On the phone, they wonder if there really is anyone on the other end. The true Nietzschean's among us know it is only when no one is listening - or when we think no one is listening - that anything worthwhile is said. Words that do not persuade minds, but ripple the cosmos.This comes with presumptions of its own, but they are at least ones that lean towards the inhuman.

But this is all some vague rubbish, isn't it.

Over writing the past year I have learned a great deal. My posts have not tripled in views, but accelerated in their rate of gathering views. Whereas I used to get 80 views over months, I get 100 views over 8 hours. I've improved my technical writing skill and my style, and expanded into different areas of though I had not previously adventured through. In this sense, the 'what' of my blog is 'process' or 'working through' as Freud would put it. I don't agree with everything I've said, and I am not sure any of it needed to be said, but the fact that it has been said and that perhaps someone may have made sense of it in a way that made them enjoy a new thought or feeling makes me feel good.

My blog is a 'what' to you, dear reader. What made him say such a thing? What made him this or that. Perhaps my blog. Perhaps not.
My blog is just another hit of junk in the info-junk stream.
And I think you for taking some of it in.

Viral Epistemology III: Science, the Death of God, and Mike Pence

Euclid-Pascal-Kant-Einstein 

Pascal's Wager:

"If the Christian God does not exist, the agnostic loses little by believing in him and gains correspondingly little by not believing. If the Christian God does exist, the agnostic gains eternal life by believing in him and loses an infinite good by not believing"

- (Encyclopedia Britannica)

If God exists, and you don't believe in him, you go to hell. You lose. If God doesn't exist, whether or not you believe in him, you won't go to hell. Might as well believe in god.

In other words, based on the possible consequences of the belief, it makes more sense to act as if God exists rather than not.

' As if ' philosophy was popularized by the post-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger who posited that because, as Kant illustrated, our ability to know is limited and thereby supplemented with mental conceptual synthesis, we must rely on fiction to form coherent narratives of our self, others, and the world.

We come to simulate the world through fictions, and through this simulation we form models of knowledge acquisition.

More important than his influence on philosophy, Kant was instrumental for the science of physics, specifically Euclid's fifth postulate:

"The fifth postulate is not so easy to accept on the basis of experience. Might it not be that even lines that start out looking parallel come together slowly as they get farther and farther from us? Or, conversely...that lines that start out looking as if they will intersect bend away from each other slowly as they are produced out towards infinity... 

For many centuries people believed that it was not possible for the Fifth Postulate to be false in our space. There were two sorts of reasons given for this belief. The first was...God...The second...Immanuel Kant...his argument...was that space is largely a creation of our own minds, that we cannot imagine non-Euclidean space, and hence space is Euclidean...the idea is that we cannot see or imagine seeing anything that is not located in space...space may have no 'real' existence, but there is no way in which we can order our sense perceptions without using the organizing framework" 

- (Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension, Rudolf Rucker, 1977, pg. 20-21).

It's not important that we know all the ins and outs of Euclid's postulates. What is important is that Kant was somewhat wrong, but still kinda right. As Einstein went on to show, space is curved, therefore lines may appear straight despite being curved. Theoretically, the existence of matter warps space. Empirically, physicists talk of geodesics covered in lines (one may here be reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's egg-like body without organs).

That is, despite what Kant theorized, we can imagine and even model non-Euclidian space. However, this does not mean that space is not a synthetic a priori production of the mind. Nor does it contradict the idea that space has no 'real' existence yet is an indispensable concept and undeniable experience. Thus, in science, we act as if both Euclidean and Non-Euclidean models are valid (disjunctive synthesis).

Faith and Hyperstition

Inseparably built into the fabric of science and its historical developments is the acceptance of the power and force of theological fictions that function on and in reality - the Kantian notion of 'as if.' We must act as if space, a kind of transcendental fiction, exists (Nick Land points out that to say time is 'in' time is a transcendental error. Likewise, we cannot conceptualize space 'in' space. Space is a category that is hard to think outside of. Thing's happen in it, space does not happen within itself).

After all, it is a common critique of Kant that for all his scientific critical undermining of the theological argumentation of his time - his refusal to appeal to the name of God in order to make concepts fall in line (to make all that is crooked straight, as Nietzsche would say) - Kant undoes his own critical work by cashing out his concepts and critiques to get back God.

That is, Kant asserts that due to our limits we must still retain faith.

Is this not precisely what Pascal predicted? That faith would incentivize and therefore functionalize itself more than pure reason? And is this not what the CCRU was trying to demonstrate with their notion of hyperstition?

In other words, Pascal's Wager works in reverse order too:

Pascal's Wager: Based on the possible consequences of belief, it makes more sense to act as if God exists rather than not.  

Gnon's Wager: the possible consequences of belief are created by acting as if their source existed (just as Oedipus, in trying to avoid his destiny, acts in a way that guarantees it).

Acting 'as if' may have the same effect as 'is.' As if = hyperstition machine.

Similarly, Freud, a secrete Kantian-Nietzschean, quoted an author in his 1899/1900 'The Interpretation of Dreams:'

"if one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers indeed are imaginary, but the fear is real."

If life is the dream, God is the robber - 'if one is afraid of God in life, God is indeed imaginary, but the fear is real.'

On a Kantian and Freudian register, belief creates reality. Reality creates belief.

To believe in God gives the concept of God a power that then imbues the believer with the sense that God was always there (not unlike a kind of grandfather paradox). That is, to a degree, one acts a certain way when one believes as if there was a God watching the act (as Foucault said regarding the Panopticon - it doesn't matter if someone is watching, only if the prisoner believes someone is watching. This is of course the rule of the Oedipal super ego).

In this sense, not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's explication of Sam Butler's theory of machinic reproduction - that machines use humans as a mere link in the chain for machine reproduction - God uses the human as a mere link in the chain to create himself out of his own fiction.

He made us in his image for reasons similar to the narcissistic parent - to have a clone-pet gaze back at him, validating his holy existing, making him real.

"The Judaeo-Christian portrait of God is a classic sketch of pathological insecurity. How desperate he is to be loved! So insufficient to himself, and so alone..." 

"Time, on the contrary, is as vacant as a marriage, or God alone in the dark...Could such a God glimpsing the impossible sovereignty of his fury - time opening as a dark shaft of impersonal loss - and, howling in utter loathing at the servility of self, restrain from scurrying to a squalid death on the cross?" 

"is it that we imagine God being disappointed by his creation? A surprised God? A bewildered  God?  His great work gone astray." 

"Being  created  in  the  image  of  God,  we  mean  nothing  to ourselves,  and  want only  the  inhuman"  

 -  (Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Nick Land, 1992 pg. 83, 93, 94, 205).

If God dies in the void with no one around to hear him, does he die?
God is a sadistic exhibitionist.

Pence's Wager

Vice President Pence praying to ward off Covid19 is a loaded move. On the one hand, Pence is acting as if God is looking out for him. He exercises faith. On the other hand, strangely, this decision is a radical anti-theological, Nietzschean roll of the dice that affirms necessity and chance,  that affirms the random brutality of nature, the chaotic hyperrreal.

Which is the better path? To go through the rituals of virus safety and die, or to abstain and live?Though ballsy, this is an anti-Pascal's Wager, not to be confused with the reverse, hyperstitional Pascal's Wager above.

As I have shown in my previous posts (Viral Epistemology I, and VE II), there is doubt as to whether masks help deter the spread of COVID19. I aimed to show that it is clear masks do help in preventing the spread of the virus, and that this virus accelerates the breakdown of scientific discourse by exploiting or hacking its core weakness - its tendency to drag its feet on delivering helpful information by getting caught up in honing its simulation models and appealing to foolproof methods instead of human values.

Here, in opposition to Pence, is the Pascal's Wager of the Mask:

"If the masks are not effective, the mask-wearer loses little by wearing it and gains correspondingly little by not wearing it. If masks are effective, the mask-wearer gains eternal life by wearing it and loses an infinite good by not wearing it."

If masks work and you wear them, you live.
If masks work, and you don't wear them, you die.
If masks don't work, and you wear them, you die.
If masks don't work, and you wear them, you die.
Might as well believe as if masks work.

God is dead, science is cool but trips over itself, and, based on the possible consequences of the belief, it makes more sense to act as if ...

Viral Epistemology II: Quaternary Park and The Human Security System

The thrust of my most recent piece Viral Epistemology was that the positivist-scientific approach of controlling the chaotic variability of reality in order to simulate it as an abstract model is easily exploited - 'hacked' if we want to sound cyber-Kool - by a viral epidemic such as COVID19.

Science works in a abstract human register of time through teleological representational communication while the viral works in real time through diagrammatic force. The former is what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as royal science, the latter minor science, rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, diagrammatics, etc., or what is recuperated by the CCRU as hyperstition.

What follows from royal science are scientific findings that influence public policy that influence politics, all of which have more to do with the language games of the simulation models, and therefore are counter-intuitive to lived experience, than they do with real, outside forces that effect behavior. What follows from minor science, the science of multiplicities, is a schizophrenic encounter with the outside, a rendezvous with undeath, an open relationship with a virus.

This is a lot of words to simply say that I missed some things in this piece, so rather than add to something that feels complete, I will expound here.

***

The lesson of Jurassic Park (1993) is a lesson in physics.

John Hammond, a venture capitalist whose most uttered line is "no expense spared," (capitalist in a metaphysical and social sense) turns dead organisms into alive-and-deadly ones through science. He is of course the archetypal arrogant billionaire who believes money grants him unlimited power, even the ability to 'turn back time,' bring the dead back to life, that is, swim against the tide of entropy. With this comes the belief that he can control chaos.

Likewise, Hammond believes that if he crams enough safety precautions into a relatively closed system - the park, with its goals and defenses to protect those goals - that the angry dinosaurs will not escape and eat the park guests (defeating the goal). He believes he can (and has) predicted and accounted for all possible undesirable outcomes.

What we see, of course, is that a series of unforeseen events coincide: a tropical storm links up with a hacker's devious plan bound up with corporate espionage while a population of exclusively female dinosaur clones overcome genetically programmed limitations through accidentally unlocking latent and unintentional genetic coding thereby producing male offspring and restarting the autonomous reproductive feedback cycle, etc., all of which leads to a complete breakdown of the human implemented order system. As chaos theorist Ian Malchom points out, "life, uh, finds a way." As Mencius Moldbug rightly points out - "one bad variable will bust your whole proof."

A genetic nightmare escaped from a giant techno-scientific containment facility? You don't say. Is this not precisely one of the theories as to where COVID19 originated? A gov't designer-virus, a bioweapon gone AWOL.

***

Jurassic Park is not simply a lesson in entropy. It's also a lesson in the Human Security System (HSS).

I'm descending into history. Into drunkenness. Assemblages are taking off without my consent.

The animated series Futurama aired in 1999, the near peak of Y2K anxiety. The premise of the show is that a loser accidentally cryogenically freezes himself and wakes up many years into the future. K time, as the CCRU calls it, is a concept machining these narratives.

In one templexity ridden (the future returns to the past) Futurama episode, the Bronze Age to 8th Century accounts of Amazonian woman warriors gives way to a cartoonish 20th and 21st century depiction of tough, muscular woman keeping men in captivity for sex.

In circa 3000 to 800 BC Amazonian woman kept men in captivity. Let's call this 'Bronze Park.' The Jurassic Park of the Quaternary period had dinosaurs escape the park security system. The Quaternary Park of the [fEuRtRuORe] Period  will have viruses that escape the human security system. It all templexively recurses to Bronze Park.

COVID19 attacks the testicles and kills twice as many men as woman.

As I alluded to above, in Jurassic Park, John Hammond and his scientists clone only female dinosaurs as to prevent the dinosaurs from reproducing on their own. However, some of the DNA the scientists used is from a kind of frog that can 'switch sexes' thereby implanting within the dinosaurs the implicit and latent ability for an all female population supposedly foreclosed to all female limit to produce a mutated strain of males thereby shattering the limit. Of course, as chaos theorist Ian Malcom theorizes, this occurs.

Chaos theory. How strange. Chaos needs no theory. Theory cannot conceptualize chaos. Replace 'chaos theory' with Chaos-praxis. Praxis? Still too presumptuous. Simply 'chaos' will suffice.

***

Jurassic Park, a fictional illustration of the collapse of the HSS.

Nick Land's concept of 'The Human Security System' (HSS) first shows up in Circuitries, then Machinic Desire (which are back to back in Fanged Noumena), then in Meltdown. In Circuitries we are introduced to Cyberia and Artaud, and learn HSS is opposed to schizo flows and bound with globalist order. Machinic Desire begins with an analysis of Bladerunner. The replicants - a kind of android clone - of the book turned film are, like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, orphans. They have no mommy-daddy (Artaud) and thus break with Oedipal code of patriarchal order. This all culminates in Meltdown where we get an intentional return to Bladerunner coupled with an unwitting return to my Bronzeage/8thcentury Amazonian myth (i.e. Greek myth):

"The  Greek  complex  of rationalized  patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted  slavery,  programs  politics  as  anti-cyberian police activity, dedicated to  the  paranoid  ideal  of  self -sufficiency, and  nucleated upon  the Human Security System.  Artificial Intelligence  is  destined  to  emerge  as  a  feminized  alien grasped as  property;  a  cunt-horror  slave  chained-up  in Asimov-ROM.  It  surfaces in  an insurrectionary war zone, with the  Turing cops  already waiting, and  has to be cun­ning from the  start."

A cunt-horror.

What is viral will always tend towards what is 'female.' The great zero. A full zero (the womb?). A hole. A wound in the human security system that allows lines of of flight to flow; an exit. A wound, as Land points out in Thirst for Annihilation, that is likened to the vulva, not because of castration, but in spite of it, as “everything that flows freely [is] like a wound."

As if confirming G/ACC, COVID19  breaks balls as it breaks the human security system.

Gnon finds a way...

Viral Epistemology

Science drags it's knuckles, then its feet...

We recently encountered on a large scale something very symptomatic of scientific discourse: a scientifically grounded position that flirts with logical fallacies and seems at odds with our common sense experience - don't use face masks.

This is of course a somewhat misleading way of framing the issue. To be precise, though the people who know more than me on this topic are correct when they say the CDC / WHO never officially discouraged face mask, it is true that, in order to save the supply of masks for health officials in direct contact treating patients, the WHO and CDC

"Both...have repeatedly said that ordinary citizens do not need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing"

Masks not discouraged, but unnecessary. Though there is a difference here, most won't know how to spot it.

The US Surgeon General  did not contradict this position

which spawned a debate online regarding the effectiveness of masks, with ivy league professors, medical professionals, and conspiracy theorists alike all chiming in with conflicting information.

Since the initial 'effective/ineffective' debate, both the CDC, WHO, and many public health officials have reneged this position based on "new data" that shows people without symptoms - who are not sick and coughing - may be spreading the virus, and that masks may help prevent this.

As "Everyone Thinks They’re Right About Masks" neatly summarizes,

"If masks are limited, conserving them for the people who need them most makes sense. But that message was lost amid the confusing claim that masks somehow protect health-care workers but are useless for everyone else" 

"If the virus is traveling through the air, then it seems intuitive that masks would block it. But the evidence for this is all over the place [ranging from ineffective, somewhat effective, to effective]."

It is important to remember that - and this is not an endorsement -  this is how science 'works.'

A True Scotsman, a Red Herring, and Billy Occam Walk into a Courtroom...

I am finishing up a Doctoral degree in Clinical Psychoanalysis (which means I am ironically both an essential personnel at my 24 hour care day clinic and also completely inessential when it comes to anything other than talking about your feelings on the virus) and was recently in a research class with a relatively prominent Ivy League professor. He had just finished explaining that, as is par the course for science, the findings on some important research from 2 months ago are now invalid, and with them all theory, hypothesis, policy, whatever, etc., that was based on that research.

Me: "Then what would incentivize one to do research and base further research on findings if it is likely to be undone shortly thereafter? What makes this any different than the 'constant relativism-flux' of postmodernism?" 

Professor: "Research is a social endeavor. Each study contributes to a bigger picture. Now we know what not to do so that we have a clearer idea of what to do in the future."

Let's be clear. This is not postmodernism. This is dialectical, enlightenment age positivism. As parties work together to share information through a cycle of negations (scientific method - falsifiable / verifiable / repeatable, etc.), the truth as an object of representation becomes clearer and clearer until we have a mirror-like representation of the real, outside world.

Through this model, it is par the course that things we may have accurate or pragmatic intuitions about cannot be considered true or real until 'science' has done the dirty work. For example, the big tobacco companies were able to push off regulations on cigarettes (and avoid lawsuits) for years for the reason that there is no ethical (and perhaps even pragmatic) way to randomize people to smoke / not smoke and therefore other scientific methods had to be utilized to support the claim that smoking is harmful.

These alternative methods opened up a gap which the tobacco execs filled with rhetoric, throwing red herring fallacies around the courtroom, forcing scientists to test for absurd confounding variables. Each time the science came back, the tobacco execs suggested another confounding variable was making people ill, not cigarettes. This is the kind of 'no true scotsman' argument psychology unwittingly uses - 'the patient has not improved because they have not taken the therapy seriously, therefore they require more therapy to take therapy seriou...' - which was inherited from medical science during its time of blood letting, 'the patient is sick not because draining blood may have have negative effects, but because we did not drain enough blood to treat the sickness' (also see 'the moon is made of cheese, you're just not digging deep enough;' 'communism does work, all its failed attempts weren't 'actual' communism,' etc.).

The assumption that inhaling substances not inherent or natural to the internal systems of the body would somehow damage those systems - especially when this assumption was later supported by a seemingly high correlation between damage to the organ associated with the substance and consumption of the substance - is intuitive, makes sense,  and follows Occam's razor, but could not be 'verified' by science until science of another kind (molecular cell biology, or whatever) advanced and was able to lend a hand. In this way, the science of this era committed itself to following legal arguments - which we will remember are for the most part derived from moral arguments which are from religious arguments -  that required one to give the time of day to complex and absurd theories rather than follow Occam's razor.

Slate Star Codex’s blog post from March 23rd tackles much of these epistemic questions right down to the legal discourse of science.

Just like with cigarettes,

“It’s unethical to randomize people to wear vs. not-wear masks during a pandemic, so nobody has done this. Instead we have case-control studies…an especially bad study design”

and despite there being somewhat inconclusive or statistically insignificant findings regarding the effectiveness of masks,  the science seems to contradict our intuitions.

For example, take the following clever analogous gestures:

“respirators are better than masks are better than nothing. It would be wrong to genuinely conclude this, because it’s not statistically significant. But it would also be wrong to conclude the studies show masks don’t work, because they mostly show respirators don’t work, and we (hopefully) know they do…” 

“Masked health care workers...travelers...family members... were less likely to catch disease than unmasked ones...All of this accords with a common-sense understanding…None of these…prove that regular people can benefit from masks. But health care workers are closely related to homo sapiens and ought to have similar anatomy and physiology….”

Scientific research - or its language rather -  says one thing, intuition and experience, another.

Ultimately, not unlike our discussion of the tobacco execs in court above, Codex’s theory is that

“…they’re [the CDC] trying to do something different with medical communication. Consider legal communication. If a court declares a suspect is 'not guilty,' that could mean that he is actually not guilty of the crime...that he did it but they can’t prove it...that he did it, they can prove it, but the police officer who found the proof didn’t have a warrant at the time so they had to throw it out. A legal communication like 'this man is not guilty' is intended not just to convey information, but to formally reflect the output of a sacrosanct process. Medicine has been traumatized by its century-long war with quackery [blood letting, bad psychotherapy], and ended up with its jargon also formally reflecting the output of a sacrosanct process. Remember, there are dozens of studies supposedly showing homeopathy works, not to mention even more studies proving telepathy exists. At some point you have to redesign all your institutions to operate in an environment of epistemic learned helplessness, and the result is very high standards of proof. So masks haven’t been proven to work beyond a reasonable doubt. Just like the legal term for 'not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' is 'not guilty,' the medical communication term for 'not proven effective beyond a reasonable doubt' is 'not effective'

Jurassic Patch 

For Moldbug, the sacrosanct process that restricts sensible thought through counter-intuitive, legalese derived from moral and therefore religious beliefs is referred to as the Cathedral (note the similarities between Moldbug and Codex's use of analogous logic that connects up with intuition to override the thought restriction). In short, horribly reductive terms, it is an irreproachable cultural security system that transparently exists as a given and therefore influences all values through the spread of memetic thought viruses. 

As I have written elsewhere, as both a computer programmer and political theorist Mencius Moldbug conceptualizes the memetic virus in a highly useful way

"Moldbug’s rhetorical genius should be pointed out here; 1: The concept virus captures the violence and virility of the way ideas contagiously spread with brute force through any avenue available, sexual or not (STD), rather than gene [per Richard Dawkins' definition of meme], which, solely sexual, seems more associated with reproductive processes and naïve teleology or agency (virus is Darwinian, gene is Lamarckian). Genes are passed down through filiation and are associated with values such as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ while viruses irreverently infect and mutate and are beyond good and evil. A person can host and transfer a virus without knowing it (impersonal force), just like ideology, while, for gene, a person requires agency to reproduce with another person (ego-level interactions). The former captures the chaos of overflowing life and its sublimated residue and sediment known as culture whereas the latter seems too reductive and restrictive (and naturalistic); 2: Virus is a perfect concept for the meme as it is language pertinent to both the computer programming world and biological world. By utilizing the videogame sub culture term ‘pwnd’ in the piece where he expounds on the meme as virus [and criticizes Dawkins for, in spite of his atheist edginess, being unable to critique the outer layer of the Cathedral, its humanism], Moldbug highlights the meme’s digital subculture connotations as well as its bio-socio-scientific connotations in our contemporary digital world."

This is all not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of the virus when they remind us in their 'orchid-wasp' motif of A Thousand Plateaus that it is viral contagion, surplus of code, not linear transmission, that is transferred between radically different organisms which leads to previously unlikely parallel evolutionary processes (and it is no surprise that Nick Land manages to tie Deleuze and Guattari with Moldbug).

The virus - COVID19 or otherwise - does not represent something as some will surely argue. It is life itself spilling over its containment system, running amok. (Royal) science cannot keep up with reality. Life does not wait for science to figure it out. The virus unfolds in real time, science in human-time. Science is always dragging its feet, precisely because its dragging its knuckles, trying to 'prove,' communicate, and convince others of facts about a [T/]thing that neither needs, nor heeds proofs, communications, or arguments yet is itself, with its brute processes, an unrelenting proof.  

What would be of interest here is not only taking this into account to help people from dying - I am a fake accelerationist here in that I do not want to die, nor do I want my loved ones to die, nor do I mind saving people's lives if possible - but of also studying the virus from a position of following the virus' flow, letting it inform our concepts; researching it and acknowledging it as a strong indication of our human limits; acknowledging that we cannot arrogantly exercise human agency over the virus to the extent we believe.

This is what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as minor science, rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities, most notably introduced in A Thousand Plateaus by Professor Challenger (and remember, the sequel to Jurassic Park is subtitled 'The Lost World,' a clear reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's novel which contains the a character of the same name...).

In the words of the chaos theorist Doctor Ian Malcom responding to John Hammond's arrogant attempts to obsessively contain and monetize that which is uncontainable, i.e. genetically cloned killing machines 

"Life, uh, finds a way."

And, in the words of the numerology minded, satanic, cybergothicesque, meth addled 90s, breakbeat industrial metal band Slipknot

 "this is the virus of life..."