Darknesses

The limit or non-limit of darkness is its terrifying feature – if  the darkness is expansive and not invasive (oil or plague like, creeping inside organisms) then it is its formalized bound that must be decided which also allows for the possibility of a darkness within darkness. Take the following from Ligotti’s “Flowers of the Abyss”:

“With the darkness I saw the darkness. And it was immensity without end around me, and I believe within me. It was unbroken expansion, dark horizon meeting dark horizon. But there were also things within the darkness, within me and outside of me, so that if I reached out to touch them across a universe of darkness, I also reached deep inside of this body.”

Monstrous Futurity

Drugs in Milk makes a few notes on my Lady Gaga post which points out LG’s articulation of the monstrousness of fame-as-drive. The strange repetitious motion of the drive (the pleasure of the mouth moving and not the food within it, not the object within it following Zupancic) describes the function of fame and yet its ubiquity seems to signal something even more troubling.  Referring to fame as ‘the fame’ acknowledges the fact that fame appears as an objectless object (a process – becoming famous) which itself is representable as a collection of objects (the contentment of wealth).  Fame functions as the running together of the scopic and invocatory drives (sight and sound) as a doubly partial relation (and only partial relation) to the big Other.

As Zizek concludes in “The Big Other doesn’t Exist”:

“Thus, the fact that “the big Other doesn’t exist” (as the efficient symbolic fiction) has two interconnected, although opposed, consequences: on the one hand, the failure of symbolic fiction induces the subject to cling more and more to imaginary simulacra, to sensual spectacles which bombard us today from all sides; while on the other, it triggers the need for violence in the Real of the body itself (cutting and piercing the flesh, or inserting prosthetic objects into the body).”

The inexistent of the big other becomes ‘anyone can be famous’ where fame is accidental yet deserved.  The inability to achieve fame is one side of its cruelty whereas its consumptive capability is on the other side.  I would say that the pursuit of fame itself has become visceral – where the dominant alternative is not the real of the body but the imaginary-real of attitude – the non-belonging sense of belonging where one participates in the big Other of fame by ‘being oneself’ or ‘just being who you are’

The most interesting/troubling aspect of LG’s performances is her futurism – which constanly repeats the past just enough to actually seem oddly futuristic. This asserts that culture, technology, and fame are smashed together in a way which they can never be redeemed but only grossly enjoyed.

The Unnatural Natural

In a recent post Reid writes:

“If the difference between nature and artifice is itself artifice, then it seems in vain to probe into uncontaminated nature, which itself exists in its distinction only on behalf of artifice, and as itself artifice.”

Reid writes that this does not lead to social constructivism but instead that:

“Nature, rather, means necessary or of necessity, whereas artificial means unnecessary or contingent. The ‘nature of being’ speaks of what is necessary or essential in being, whereas ontical artifices could either be or not, without affecting being itself.”

The central question of nature still remains what is nature (as Iain puts it what is the ground of ground) and what exactly is the nature of the relation between thinking and being while vitating any appeal to the natural.

Reid goes on:

“The distinction between ground and grounded, nature and artifice, is preserved, with the simple adjustment of emptying the former of any content – the ground is not some metaphysical thing (God, Nature, World, etc), but rather only groundlessness or facticity itself.”

The issue then is dividing nature from the natural where the natural takes nature as what is and transforms it into what is supposed to be. This also seems to be the essential problem with politics in relation to nature and ontology. Calling something unnatural is a political move – queer politics is an obvious examples where forms of desire/identity. Reid’s connection of nature to groundlessness advocates, I would argue, a process philosophy emptied of anthrocentric guarantee via the virtual, the eternal, the logical. Meillassoux’s weakness in regards to nature is that, as Martin Hagglund pointed out, he relies on a transcendental skyhook or thinkability of nature which approaches, or perhaps even emulates, virtuality.

Paradoxically then politics is unnatural but is not unaffected by the processes of nature itself. As Mark states here, a return to nature is a naive political gesture (following Zizek) since nature is not a thing (or state) to  return to – any purported return to nature is actually a return to the natural – an arrestation of progressive nature that transmogrifies nature in itself to nature as such which sneaks in a thinkability of nature in with it.

Racing to the bottom or Doomful Nature

Over at Infinite Thought, Nina has a post critiquing a ‘race to the bottom’ in contemporary philosophy; a trend in thought which purportedly draws politics from the laws of nature and asserts the meaninglessness of nature and philosophy.  The post makes a number of statements which need to be addressed.  Nick has addressed some of them here already.

1 – Nature as a theoretical object cannot be neatly meshed with the ‘laws of nature.’  Nature is either reduced to what can be discerned from the laws (following from Bacon, Boyle and arguably Leibniz) or exalted in an obscure form (Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche).  Both of these gestures severely limit the ontological weight of nature particularly, as Iain Hamilton Grant has shown, as a productive entity.

2 – Presuming that a feeling of dread or negativity or that any focus on nature leads directly due  a phenomenological account or that everything is ontological is faulty.  The necessity of articulating nature leads to the process of separating the ontic and the ontological.  This is the two philosophies project of the late Schelling.

3 – Following Nick, the two philosophies or what we could call the division of ontology and politics is a strength and not a weakness of many variants of Speculative Realism.  This does not raise ontology above politics but questions the inhumanness of nature and highlights the artificiality or decisionality of politics contra ontology.  Nature should be taken away as a political standing stone.

4 – Pessimism and/or realism is not the same as defeatism – something fairly clear in a number of marxist and post-marxist texts.  This pessimism is often disregarded as apathy, solipsism and the like instead of addressing the unacknowledged positivity of a politics or ontology which must disavow its humanist underpinnings.

5 – The point where many of these issues coincide is that of process philosophy where an ontological positivity hides behind a supposedly realist take on nature.  This positivity however, manifests itself as a pre-thinkability of nature, where categories of the virtual, or the whole or reason necessarily place nature in an intellectual containment field.  This is similar to Meillassoux’s critique of Hegel yet Meillassoux himself (as Hagglund and others have shown) relies on a virtuality (or logical accessibility) which is undermining.

To say that articulating a dark or doomful nature is throwing in the towel politically appears oblivious to the fact that the spirit of positive philosophy has been over endorsed. To say for instance that the ecological movement is without a (erroneous) metaphysics of nature is no different then saying that it is post-ideological.  Nature requires despiritualization, re-contamination and an unbearable bringing-closer of a nature which is faulty purported as ‘out-there’ when really it is passing through us, under us, and above us.

“It was something black and twisted into the form of a man, something that seemed to have come up from the earth and grown over the wooden planks like a dark fungus, consuming the structure. There were now black legs that hung as if charred and withered; there was a head that sagged like a sack of ashes upon a meager body of blackness; and there were thin arms stretched out like knobby branches from a lightning-scorched tree. All of this was supported by a thick dark stalk which rose out of the earth and reached into the effigy like a hand into a puppet.” – Thomas Ligotti, The Shadow at the Bottom of the World

In The Grounding of Positive Philosophy Schelling argues that at the bottom of an issue is not being but potentiality, the inner organism of potentiality which is the cause of reason itself (p 142). Politics must acknowledge this generative yet obscure darkness of nature.

Thought and Nature (some notes)

“It was the age of everlasting night. The sunset of man had long since gone by, and the last few millions who still dwelt on earth in those far future days took refuge in the mighty pyramid of imperishable metal that was the last of all men’s cities and would ere long become his tomb” – Nightland, William Hope Hodgson

“Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:

“- The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.
- The sign of doom is written on your brows- how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
- But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
- Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.” – Peter Zapffe, The Last Messiah

Zizek Speaks! (about the economy?)

Slavoj Zizek “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce”
Wed Oct 14 @ 7pm
Cooper Union, The Great Hall, 7 East 7th St, Astor Place, New York
Sliding Scale $10-15, $15 tickets include a free copy of Zizek’s new book
Sponsors: Verso Books, The Brecht Forum
Tickets: http://brechtforum.org/zizek
For more information, call the Brecht Forum (212) 242-4201

Should be an interesting event, too bad I’ve fled Brooklyn…

The Splendid Rot of Fame

“And fame a thing devoid of judgement…” – Marcus Aurelius

“Pop ate my heart [...] like a beautiful monster” – Lady Gaga

In one of her Warholesque short films used on her most recent tour, Lady Gaga mentions that after being eviscerated (and the organs consumed) by the monster known as Pop what remains is not an emptiness but a freedom and a desire for the fame.  The immediate image one draws up is a Schreber-like insanity where ones insides are filled with bright rays but not of the sun but of a purified desire, not be to be famous (being itself is too cumbersome) but to want fame as an object.

Dysphorias

Alex and Nick have both posted their contributions to the Militant Dysphoria event on Wednesday in London.  One of the points in Dominic’s book which struck me was in relation to his discussion of Xasthur in that  suicide is not a solution but a capitulation (44) and that misanthropy must be cleaned of all self pity (55).   The important point here is that it is negativity is often assumped to be self canceling in that the accuracy and place of misanthropy automatically appears questionable.  The common micsonstrual of dysphoria/misathropy or various forms of negativity is that the assumption is that such negativity can never be as broad as it claims to be – it is either against a particular group (racism masquerading as negativity for example) or as actually directed against the self and in this case the sad, angry individual should merely get it over with and kill themselves.

The negativity of thought, to the contrary, invokes a inhumanization of the self and an outward inhumanization towards the end of the comfortable gap between the process of worlding and the earth, the non-human world or even the desolate, non-anthropic cosmos.

Nidus Bloom

“Nurgle is one of the four major Chaos Powers. He is titled the Great Lord of Decay and represents morbidity, disease and physical corruption. Of the Four Chaos gods he is said to be the most involved with the plight of mortals. Those afflicted by his contagions often turn to him in order to escape their suffering. The physical likeness of Nurgle is described as gigantic and bloated with corruption, with foul-coloured leathery and necrotic skin. Nurgle is also the Lord of All, because all things, no matter how solid and permanent they seem, are liable to physical corruption.” – Lexicanum

The question of the rotten generation of life surrounds the node of decay and vitalism as it crosses through the track switch of interiority/exteriority. That is, for decay to function (in both space and time as a function of both and expression of both) there must be a decision of what is a point or an entity. As Reza has written:

“[...]decay as an unwholesome participation between the most abominable of time (non-belonging and pure contingency) and the most degenerate of space (space’s tendency for infinite involutions which undermine any potential ground for the emergence of discrete entities). It is the complicity between the worst nightmares of space and time that brings about the possibility of putrefaction (even an infinite decay) as a differential form of irresolvable emptiness disguised as ideal objectivity with a generative twist.”

Dark Vitalism III

Repeatedly I have formulated Dark Vitalism as the description of the cosmological cascade or emergence of varying modes of reality schematized in the following way.

Real—Immanence——Sense——Extilligence

With matter as the operator between the first and second, life as the operator between the second and third, and pathology/drive as operating between the third and fourth.

The first two results of the Prohairesis (volition) of the indiscernible Sub-Planck epoch are intensive and space manipulating/creating whereas the latter two are Extensive and space filling.

This process proceeds from the One not as an eternality but an initial potential which is unfolding not as a plasma but as a simultaneous creation and destruction of entities via forces and powers. From the one we have only the piling of Zeros (in an Okenian sense) the reformatting of the detritus of the One. The procedure appearing as such:

1.00000000

The Force of Forces or Prohairesis following from the One.