This is a last-minute reminder for tomorrow's event at the Tate Britain, The Real Thing.

Also part of tomorrow's event will be a curatorial intervention in which I have also been involved (in collaboration with China Miéville, Robin Mackay, Eugene Thacker and others): The entire collection of paintings in Room 9 which is currently themed Art and the Sublime has been relabeled according to the philosophical paradigms of speculative / weird realism, transcendental nihilism and other emerging theoretical lines of inquiry.

Address: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

First, Re-Imagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-centric Warfare written by my co-author Manabrata Guha (Collapse VI, and the forthcoming Beyond the Wall of the State). I will post a review of the book soon on this blog. Second, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability by my friend Elie Ayache who has made a groundbreaking connection between metaphysics of contingency and the financial market. Both books develop their analyses against the dominantly ideological and perhaps even superstitious backdrops of their respective fields, military/security studies and finance. Whilst Guha remorselessly interrogates and batters the legacy of political reason and strategic thought in warfare, Ayache launches an elaborate assault on market-oriented ideologies and probabilistic philosophies.

Re-Imagining War in the 21st Century: From Clausewitz to Network-centric Warfare by Manabrata Guha

This book interrogates the philosophical backdrop of Clausewitzian notions of war, and asks whether modern, network-centric militaries can still be said to serve the 'political'. In light of the emerging theories and doctrines of Network-Centric War (NCW), this book traces the philosophical backdrop against which the more common theorizations of war and its conduct take place. Tracing the historical and philosophical roots of modern war from the 17th Century through to the present day, this book reveals that far from paralyzing the project of re-problematisating war, the emergence of NCW affords us an opportunity to rethink war in new and philosophically challenging ways.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Approaching the problematic of War; A Failure of Imagination: Network-centric Warfare’s Limit-Condition; An Outline of the Book
Chapter One: Prelude to Clausewitz
A Historico-Philosophical Background; Classical Military Theory – An Evolutionary Overview; A Kehr to the Non-Human ; Mind(ing) the Gap: Between Guibert and Jomini; Jomini’s Science of the Art of War; A Preliminary Assessment
Chapter Two: Clausewitz and the Architectonic of War
The Romance of Clausewitz; Clausewitz, Methodologizing…; Clausewitz, Theorizing…; Clausewitz, Strategizing…; (de)Constructing War, Absolute and Real…; The Mesh and the Net, architectonically speaking…; In Fortuna’s Camp; The Face of Chance; Strategizing Chance ; Clausewitz Q.E.D.
Chapter Three: Machining (Network-centric ) War
Behind the Network Paradise; Network-Centric Warfare: A Preliminary Overview; Semantic Implications of Network-centric Warfare; The Technologization of Discourse in the context of Network-centric Warfare; At the Edge of Chaos…; On Networks…; On Netwars…; Machinic War
Chapter Four: Theorizing War in the Age of Networks
A New Strategic Commons: A Wide-Angle View of NCW ; Two Orders of Strategy; First Order…; Second Order...; NCW:…and here is the ‘beef’…; Inside/Outside the Clausewitzian Legacy
Chapter Five: Concept: War
In an Other theatre of War; Rhizomes: A Concept of Operations; Planes of Immanence: Becoming-Battlespace; Assemblages and Apparatuses of War; On War and War-Machines: Interrogating the Deleuze-Guattarian Thesis; Five Propositions of Concept-War: A Speculative Exercise; A Minoritarian Tactic: Thinking War Differently; Conclusion

Manabrata Guha is Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (International Strategic and Security Studies Programme), Bangalore, India.

The Blank Swan: The End of Probability by Elie Ayache

October 19th 1987 was a day of huge change for the global finance industry. On this day the stock market crashed, the Nobel Prize winning Black-Scholes formula failed and volatility smiles were born, and on this day Elie Ayache began his career, on the trading floor of the French Futures and Options Exchange.

Experts everywhere sought to find a model for this event, and ways to simulate it in order to avoid a recurrence in the future, but the one thing that struck Elie that day was the belief that what actually happened on 19th October 1987 is simply non reproducible outside 19th October 1987 – you cannot reduce it to a chain of causes and effects, or even to a random generator, that can then be reproduced or represented in a theoretical framework.

The Blank Swan is Elie’s highly original treatise on the financial markets – presenting a totally revolutionary rethinking of derivative pricing and technology. It is not a diatribe against Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, but criticises the whole background or framework of predictable and unpredictable events – white and black swans alike - , i.e. the very category of prediction.

In this revolutionary book, Elie redefines the components of the technology needed to price and trade derivatives. Most importantly, and drawing on a long tradition of philosophy of the event from Henri Bergson to Gilles Deleuze, to Alain Badiou, and on a recent brand of philosophy of contingency, embodied by the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux, Elie redefines the market itself against the common perceptions of orthodox financial theory, general equilibrium theory and the sociology of finance.

(Table of contents here)

Ever questioned the concept of 'complicity with anonymous materials' or wondered what the first footnote in cyclonopedia is about or what happened to the narrative of the first chapter that permeated throughout the footnotes, then this exhibition should give you some clues. The group show is curated by Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz who is at the artistic forefront of Speculative Realist philosophy. The show also includes an installation by American artist Kristen Alvanson entitled Objects 302 which gives a weirder dimension to cyclonopedia’s plot holes.

You can read the press release here:

“Anonymous Materials” brings together artists who use very different approaches in their practices. But its presentation of their works draws attention to a particular form of complicity common to them, and unfolds its consequences for our understanding of art-production. As the title indicates, the exhibition focuses on the autonomy of those materials which constitute an elemental component in the process of creating art. The show therefore explores art as a material-driven process of production so as to raise the question: How does the autonomy or contingency of the artists’ material influence or interfere with the artwork itself? In examining the conditions of art production, the show emphasizes the dynamics and ambivalence of the concept of materiality in artistic production, rather than deconstructing the meaning of the artwork by thematizing its material substrate.

Neither does this examination of materiality entail a fashionable celebration of those aesthetic effects commonly associated with processual tropes of artistic production (the presentation of raw materials, open-endedness, and so on). It does not rely upon the unfinished status of an artwork as a form of process-oriented practice. It could be said that such artistic sensibilities only exacerbate or obfuscate the enigma of materiality, semantically supercharging materiality in a way that can only be grasped by an audience hungry for meaning. Therefore, these processual tropes reestablish the authority of a privileged sentience whose correlation with meaning is ultimately a complete dismissal of both independency and contingency of materials in art production. As opposed to this approach, the artists in this show were chosen because their practices involve clear decisions towards the problems mentioned. In tracking the traces of production in the artwork, this group show could even be understood as a critical response to a current tendency to be too “sensitive” to materials; a tendency that could further be defined as an eclectic approach to the visual reminiscence of conceptual art.

The title of the show is taken from Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s book Cyclonopedia: Complicities with Anonymous Materials. It refers – in an open manner – to the book’s take on the problem of ‘inauthenticity’ whereby the subjective identity of the author is repeatedly overturned and undermined by the intervention of references, materials and narrative processes which enjoy autonomy and contingent complicities of their own. The show opens up, unfolds and reinvents this problematic embracing of materiality by evoking the randomness of functionality attributed to artists’ materials and allowing a multiplicity of relations between the artwork and its arbitrary context. Systematically blocking the tendency for a ‘higher meaning’ to emerge, the show resolutely focuses on the active, contingent role of the material conditions of the artwork. The studio-like installation itself explores the process of creating art in its very contingent and disruptive character.

Curated by Pamela Rosenkranz
Contributions by Kristen Alvanson, Kim Seob Boninsegni, Pavel Büchler, Ida Ekblad, Ulrik Heltoft, Marie Koelbaek lversen, Fabian Marti, Rachel Mason, Ketuta Alexi Meskhishvili, Lucy Pawlak, Martin Soto Climent, Mai-Thu Perret, Urs Zahn

"Anonymous Materials", Opening 6 pmThursday / June 3rd/ 2010/ Binz39 /Sihlquai 133, 8005 Zürich/ Exhibition from 4th June - 4th July 2010 /Opening hours Thursday - Saturday, 2 - 6 pm, Address: http://tinyurl.com/24ltzht

It is this energetic invocation of exorbitance as the cosmic exteriority that is flawed; and this invocation is explicitly manifested in the life-dynamics of stellar bodies such as the Sun. This is because, first, exorbitance as an index of exteriority is neither energetically nor climatically an all-encompassing cosmic model of extinction or exteriority. Beyond the stellar domain, extinction cannot be grasped in terms of ‘exorbitant’ cosmic forces. Even the model of stellar death (the iron-trauma whereby heavy and decaying iron and nickel isotopes disrupt the stellar burning process) cannot be perceived within the model of general exorbitance. Second, because exorbitance is always – by the virtue of its excess over the capacity of the interiorized horizon – a matter of unsuccessful binding. Again as argued in the previous post, this unsuccessful binding finds its true expression in the restricted economy of the interiorized horizon which in its fundamental inability to avoid the unilateralizing power of exorbitance has also no choice but to afford this exorbitant index of exteriority according to its economical terms of binding. In other words, exorbitance obliquely underpins and implements the economical regime of affordance which is characterized by its inherent parsimony, affordability-driven dynamism and strategic decisionality. And it is this economical regime of affordance that fundamentally trammels the speculative opportunities of thought in regard to exteriorities by enacting a restricted economy of binding that not only narrows the scope of the abyss but also actively and vigilantly restricts exteriority to a mode of binding that strictly corresponds to the economic terms of the interiorized horizon.

The restricted economy circuitously imposed by the exorbitant index reduces exteriority into that which must be afforded by all means and at all costs, yet since such means and economic terms are dictated by the correlation between the exteriority and the interiorized horizon, the regime of binding becomes inherently restricted and auto-positing. That is to say, only a mode of binding or a fashion of dying that corresponds to the economic terms of consumption and dissipation of the interiorized horizon (which mark the latter’s affordability toward the exteriority) is authorized, pursued and wished for. Any other mode of binding or alternative fashion of inflecting upon extinction is actively staved off and thwarted.

Instigated and supported by exorbitant indexes of exteriority, this spontaneous antimony against alternative modes of binding becomes the ultimate expression of any general economy or nihilist philosophy of extinction that indexes exteriority as an expression of exorbitance. Interestingly, it is the restricted image of exteriority as the exorbitant that generates analogous and parallel expressions of monistic binding – that is, pluralistically life-oriented yet monistic in relation to exteriority or extinction – in Bataille’s system of general economy and Freud’s theory of the death-drive. Whereas this simultaneously restricted and restricting model of binding surfaces in Bataille’s system as unsuccessful models of consumption with regard to the exorbitant exteriority (terrestrial life being one of such unsuccessful consumptive solutions), it manifests in Freud’s theory as an unsuccessful, or more accurately, traumatic form of binding of the exorbitant inundation (überschwemmung). In both cases, the unsuccessful binding ensued by the torrential ingression of the exorbitant registers itself as an externalizing incision or cut that dichotomously posits the exteriority as an energetically exorbitant externality against the interiorized horizon that it has given rise to. In other words, positing exteriority as an exorbitant index eventuates in an unsuccessful – that is to say, an economical – form of binding. This unsuccessful binding, in turn, effectuates itself as a specific form of cut or incision that sets the exorbitant exteriority against and outside of the interiorized horizon so that it can never be fully bound yet at the same time it must be afforded as an inexorably exorbitant truth. This incision or form of cut is directly the outcome of conceiving exteriority as an exorbitant index. Such cut or incising wound (trauma) generates a field of restricted economy wherein only a mode of binding that is able to afford the external exorbitance and therefore, capable of integrating the irresistible exorbitance of the exteriority within economic terms of the interiorized horizon is pursued and recognized as a proper response (or mode of binding) to the problem of the outside and the real. It is this exorbitant and external deployment of exteriority that – as it was argued – opens up, aggravates and enacts the monistic regime of binding by reinscribing exteriority within the affordable and hence deeply economical correlations of the interiorized horizon.

Land’s insistence on both escalating and diffusive acceleration of (unsuccessful) consumptive solutions under the heading of techno-capitalism as well as Brassier’s more subtle emphasis on philosophy’s traumatic (unsuccessful) binding of the exorbitant truth of extinction, accordingly, conform to the restricted economy of exteriority as the exorbitant. Therefore, both Land and Brassier abide by a mode of binding that is determined by an exorbitant image of exteriority and manifests as an externalizing, or more accurately, splitting form of cut or incision whose effect is that of enacting exteriority as the exorbitant. Such an incision or cut subjects the mode of binding to the economic affordability of the interiorized horizon and its capacity. By capacity we do not mean the static or relatively variable degree of the interiorized horizon to hold and receive what is exterior to it. Capacity, in this context, can be defined as the tolerance in amplitude of the interiorized horizon which is necessary for maintaining an undisrupted continuity between the excess that gives rise to the interiorized horizon via the originary splitting incision (i.e. the Freudian conception of urtrauma or primal wound) and the excess that subsequently pulls back the interiorized horizon to its precursor exteriority. The latter is not essentially the ‘zero of interiority’ but rather a pull-back or inflection into an exorbitant index of exteriority.

Moreover, the function of the externalizing incision or the splitting form of trauma imparts a strategic disposition to binding of radical exteriority, and this by means of positing the exteriority external yet correlated – under the energetic index of the exorbitant – to the economical conservative regime of the interiorized horizon. When the unilateralizing power of the exteriority which cannot be averted by the organism couples with the exorbitant conception of exteriority, exteriority becomes a matter of emphatic affordability: Since it cannot be deflected, nor can it be successfully bound in its externality and exorbitance, then it must be economically afforded. This recalibration of exteriority as an exorbitant and external unobjectifiable immanence conditions an illusory state wherein ‘binding of exteriority’ is grasped, understood and even realized in terms of strategy or strategic thinking (in its Clausewitzian sense). Yet such strategic encounter with radical exteriority or the unilateralizing real is precisely the restricting mode of binding that totalizes the multiplicity of binding into only one – which is to say, affordable – mode of binding (the strategic one). Whilst for Land’s libidinal materialism, this strategic binding is fundamentally adopted in the accelerationist engagement with techno-capitalism, for Brassier this strategic thinking toward exteriority is subsumed within the still valorized (if not enchanted) figure of ‘philosophy’ and its traumatic binding of extinction qua an “exorbitant death” (Brassier, 238). Here the domain of strategy is consolidated first by the exorbitant conception of exteriority that brings about – by means of an externalizing cut – an unsuccessful binding which is subjected to affordability; and second, through the effect of the monistic binding whereby other forms of binding which are indifferent to the economy of the interiorized horizon are actively and antagonistically staved off.

At this point, one can ask what are these alternative modes of binding if not ways by which the exteriority breaks and enters into the interiorized horizon on its own terms, generating its own fields of complicity, mobilizing its contingencies through the intricate topologies that it simultaneously occasions and degenerates; and all this in absolute indifference to the dominant regime of binding and terms of the interiorized horizon. Accordingly, alternative modes of binding suggest an insurmountable and ultimately detrimental asymmetry with the strategic, or more precisely, affordable mode of binding. Such asymmetry is the non-dialectical identity of exteriority tout court. In every restricted economy, the intrinsic proclivity of the strategic thinking or political reason is to seal itself against such asymmetry for even insinuations related to such purely tactical bindings are realized as anti-axiomatic fits of terror. In his forthcoming groundbreaking book Reimagining War in the 21st Century, Manabrata Guha painstakingly traces the pathology of this strategic thinking among both the so-called war theorists and contemporary philosophers. Guha argues that the unilaterally immanent conception of war is frequently subjected to this strategic thinking which is conveniently espoused by politics. He contends, however, that it is the tactical exteriority of war (beyond the power principle and beyond a philosophy of antagonism) that is indifferent to “the politics of this world” (Hallward). Here, Guha's tactical exteriority of war can be grasped in terms of alternative and therefore, asymmetrical modes of binding whereby radical exteriority enters on its own and unpacks innumerable modes of complicity and binding within but indifferent to the interiorized horizon. [2]

Strategic thinking has become such an indubitable politico-philosophical trope under whose influence neither politics nor philosophy has managed – to this date – (re-)imagine war in terms of its tactical exteriority. For this reason, both politics and philosophy have remained chained to a definition or imagination of war which is at once naively irreal and precariously antiquated. The politico-philosophical myopia of strategic thinking as Guha suggests is not only passively received as a pre-given decision by politicians, philosophers and military commanders alike but also is vigorously reenacted and defended in contemporary politico-philosophical analyses (see Hallward, et al.) to such an extent that non-restricted binding of exteriority is discussed in terms of something that must be warded off and appalled – for it brings a terror that does not pose a threat from the outside but instead radically corrupts and vitiates the very axioms of political reason and its philosophical supports. [3] Whether conducted under the heading of the ‘accelerationist embracing of techno-capitalism’ (Land) or ‘strategic thinking and action according to this world’ (Hallward) or ‘(military) transformation of future forces’ (Rumsfeld), strategic thinking is distinguished by its peculiarly restricted and restricting economy toward radical exteriority. And as Guha elaborates, it totalizes different vectors of thought and courses of action into a ‘strategic common’ that ultimately levels the differences between the aforementioned political or philosophical orientations.

The grand illusion of strategic thinking (or binding) is occasioned by the monistic regime of binding which itself is effectuated by the externalizing cut that sets the exorbitant image of exteriority against and outside of the interiorized horizon. In order to disperse the illusion of strategy and debilitate the monistic regime of binding, first the order of trauma whereby exteriority enters on its own terms and enacts the freedom of alternative or asymmetrical bindings must be rethought and its topology must be revitalized with a new calculus. This rethinking of trauma or exteriorizing binding can also be recapitulated as a question: How can new forms of thinking be tactically determined by different forms of cut or different calculi of trauma, since there are forms of cut that restrict the binding of exteriority and the ones that tactically expose thought and reroute it to radical exteriority that acts, penetrates and slashes on its own? Although the Freudian account of trauma is a monstrously ingenious speculation in the history of thought, its calculus of deployment and mobilization of exteriority – as it was argued – is susceptible to a form of conservative or restricted economy that is reinforced by the monistic regime of binding it gives rise to. Both Land’s conception of capitalism as a process that repeats and deepens the originary trauma into the exorbitant outside and Brassier’s nihilist binding of extinction through cosmological reinscription of Freud’s account of trauma are strongly attached to the vulnerable edifice of Freud’s account of trauma. Their ‘speculative opportunities’ are to an extent circumscribed by this attachment and by their model of binding according to which exteriority is always reinscribed as an exorbitant index. Here neither the anthropomorphic residues are purged nor are opportunities for positive projects unbound.

In order to break away from the ultimately economical understanding of cosmic forces / exteriorities in terms of exorbitance, we should search for and invest in new forms of binding or new configurations of trauma. Only once the trauma or the unilateralizing cut is remobilized inside the interiorized horizon, it can degenerate the axioms of interiority and its restricted economy. And only the acceleration of such internal cuts – characterized by their asymmetry to the strategic and monistic regime of binding – poses an anti-axiomatic threat against the interiority of the world-capital. Alex Williams’ call for modes of binding capable of “maintain[ing] the tension and complex topological relation between the two (organic/inorganic, exteriority and its interiorized horizons)” correctly addresses the prerequisite for a purely tactical acceleration or asymmetrical mode(s) of binding. Such internal and topologically degenerate tensions cannot be generated by externalizing cuts or incisions which constitute Freud’s rudimentary account of trauma. Because a non-restricted index of exteriority breaks and enters on its own: Rather than exorbitantly sets itself against and outside of the interiorized horizon, it employs internalizing cuts to generate nested horizons of interiority which are asymptotic to its immanent outside-ness. Trauma, in this sense, is more than an incision or a wound; it characterizes a cutting process that generates interiorized spaces nested – or asymptotically within – the exteriority. Therefore, the function of the cut is more of boring through (tetrainein) the precursor exteriority rather than inflicting splitting or dividing cuts. The interiorized horizon (life, organization, organism, etc.) is, in this case, generated by the precursor exteriority cutting itself into a nested space. For this reason, exteriority is always diagonally posited against the interiorized horizon, yet in the same way, the interiorized horizon also finds an asymptotic relationship to the exteriority that has resected it.

In this way, trauma – as it is understood asymmetrically and modally unbound – renders a topology of tension in which the exteriority is immanent more to the inside of the system (or the interiorized horizon) than to its outside. Accordingly, the traumatic cut nests cosmic exteriorities within bounded horizons as inassimilable (hence unilateralizing) yet convolutedly interiorized insiders. The understanding of such topology of trauma perhaps requires a shift from the concept of trauma as incision (Freud) to an understanding of trauma as envoiding and perforation (Ferenczi). Sandor Ferenczi understands trauma not as an incision that cuts the energetic horizon into an interiorized horizon (manifestations of life) and an originary bedrock of immeasurable exorbitance. For Ferenczi, trauma is a form of ‘alien transplantation’ (or the interiorization of the originary cut or wound) that does not restrict itself to the affordability of the interiorized horizon by directly and immediately positing its exteriority ‘against’ the limited capacity of the system in conserving or dissipating energy. Instead, Ferenczi’s model explains trauma as a positive wave of radical exteriority that on its own cuts a problematically convoluted and nested horizon of interiorities. And this by means of turning the externalizing function of the splitting cut (Freud’s trauma) into the temporarily formative function of the ‘internalizing cut’ which creates intricate topologies of nestedness (continuous internal fissions) rather than externalizing incisions. Therefore, the alien transplant posits radical exteriority as a perpetual anti-axiomatic Insider for which life and all manifestations of interiority are but the topological asymptotes of its exteriority. In his The Clinical Diary, Final Contributions and letters to Freud, Ferenczi even claims that what we know as organic evolution is the inorganic mimicking its own nested topological mobilizations. In another occasion, he remarks that by becoming organic, the inorganic does not succumb to a passive or repressed state but becomes active again by finding a homeomorphic topological equivalence with the organic space itself. This is a far more consequential (and probably more insidious) than anything Freud has ever said about the return of the inorganic / the repressed. Also in Ferenczi’s model of the internalizing cut, radical exteriority is actively inside the interiorized horizon of life as an inassimilable but twisted mobilizing principle. In this scenario, the ideas of successful or unsuccessful binding of the originary trauma imposed by the exorbitant cosmic forces simply become irrelevant – relics of an antiquated strategic thinking.

Notes

[1] Not to mention that in the context of economy, energy is also a rather vague and questionable concept. See P. Mirowski, More Heat than Light: economics as social physics, physics as nature’s economics.

[2] In a similar argument, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy approaches the spontaneous eruption of non-strategic conception of war under the heading of ‘larval terrorist’: an autophagic subject driven by the force of nihil which has its own – i.e. asymmetrical to the traditional strategic subject – modes of destruction and creation.

[3] Here, of course, non-restricted is not a Bataillean concept that is connected to excess or the exorbitant image of exteriority in one way or another. Instead, this term suggests more than anything the plurality or the freedom of alternatives in complicity with and binding of exteriority. Yet this freedom by no means is an object of politics, for it bespeaks of the exteriority in bringing about such alternatives or fields of complicity not in terms of the interiorized horizon but on its own terms.

On another note: If you are interested to know more about the geo-cosmic theory of trauma (which involves a geophilosophical reinscription of Freud's and Ferenczi's theories of trauma), visit Cornish mines with Robin Mackay and Iain Hamilton Grant among other philosophers, researchers and scientists, and delve deeper into the history of the Industrial Revolution (the most elaborate cosmic prank played on the human race) to uncover the hydroplutonic conspiracy, then sign up for this!

If the aim of Landian accelerationism is to fulfill 'the repressed desire of capitalism for meltdown' (Land), how can accelerationism detach itself from the embedded energetic model of dissipation inherent to conservative-dissipative, antiproductive-productive structures which are only capable of binding unilateral negativity or inflect upon death by means of an economical model of energetic dissipation or dying that they can afford? In other words, how can accelerationism bind exteriority or draw upon the so-called speculative opportunities of extinction in ways which are not already interiorized by conservative structures as economical 'models for affording' the exorbitant truth of exteriority? If accelerationism simply aims at accelerating the rate of dissipation, then its 'speculative opportunities' (Brassier) are limited to the most immediate source of exorbitant or traumatizing energy that the interiorized horizon has come into contact with. This is because in an interiorized horizon, the accelerative degradation of energy cannot bind or see anything beyond the very exorbitant index of energy (which means another interiorized horizon or 'source' of energy) whose model of dissipation has been at once partially repelled and economically adopted. Therefore, acceleration in this sense reinforces a restricted economical correlation which has never been more than a blockage against exteriority.

For the terrestrial sphere, this source or illusory exteriority is the sun. So, is accelerationism only capable of thinking exteriority and extinction in terms of a model of solar expenditure and thermonuclear decay (Bataille’s solar economy) or is it really capable of thinking extinction in terms of radical exteriority (i.e. ancestrality, deep space, material disintegration, asymptopia, …)? Is it possible to think of accelerationism in terms of alternative (i.e. plural and perhaps even multiversal) ways of binding exteriority? So far the Cartesian dilemma as the territory of philosophical thought has been about determining the course of life one should take, namely, the freedom of alternatives in life. But how can we shift the question to the radical freedom of having alternatives in binding exteriority and inflection upon death: instead of 'what course in life shall I take?' (Quod vitae sectabor iter) one should be able to ask 'what way out shall I follow?' (Quod exitūs sectabor iter)

The bastardized Cartesian speculation 'What way out shall I follow?' is meant to emphasize the freedom (in thought and action) of having plural or alternative options of binding exteriority or inflecting upon extinction. However, this question should be further corrected as it still seems to erroneously imply that the unilateralizing truth of the outside is dependent upon a subjective decision or desire.

The main focus of accelerationism should be shifted from the act of acceleration itself to 'what is accelerated', because if acceleration coincides with the dissipative or energetic economy of the organism, then it is simply a restricted project. Why? Because what is accelerated is the very economical form of binding which is determined by the exorbitant source of energy but is unsuccessfully adopted by the organism as an affordable yet traumatic consumptive solution that inscribes circuitous paths for dissipating into that exorbitant index of exteriority (whether it is the exorbitant truth of extinction or the sun). As Freud argues, dissipative regression into the exorbitant or traumatizing bedrock of the originary is numerically monistic and functionally exclusivist by nature. The conservative organism does not have any choice regarding binding or not binding the exorbitant source of energy since the binding is unilaterally imposed by the exorbitant index of exteriority. However, the way binding is effectuated corresponds to the conservative economy of the organism according to which the exorbitant index of exteriority must be afforded by the organism in order to circuitously transform the unbindable excess into conservable yet dissipative – at an accelerative rate – energetic spaces (umwegen). Accordingly, the exorbitant exteriority (extinction, sun, ...) is inexorably bound but only in a way that is affordable by and for the organism. This is why the organism is inherently vulnerable to traumas: Traumatic binding of the exorbitant exteriority is not as much an 'unsuccessful binding' because it is energetically unbindable as it is unsuccessful because such an index of exorbitant energy should be economically afforded by the organism and correspond to the consumptive-dissipative rate dictated by the organic economy. Therefore, although the exorbitant index of exteriority is bound, this binding never naturally happens outside of the economical correlation with the organism.

The aim of all life is death but dying (binding death) happens only in a way that the interiorized expression of life can afford. This affordable way of dying registers itself as an economical correlation between the organism and the exorbitant index of exteriority. And it is this economical correlation that manifests itself as the dissipative rate of the organism. Since this economical binding or affordable correlation is energetically dissipative, it tends to generate new energetic spaces, that is to say, it moves toward emergentic processes and increasing complexification on semi-stable, local and transient levels. Landian accelerationism – especially by adhering to an escalated technocapitalism – seeks to intensify this dissipative rate that simultaneously coincides with an intelligenic complexification and the dissolution of organic conservatism on behalf of an exorbitant index of exteriority (viz. capitalism as an off-planet or planet-consuming event). However, as argued, the dissipative rate is energetically conceived as an economical (and hence, restricted) correlation; its existence is dictated by the exorbitant index of exteriority but its modi operandi are conditioned by the affordability of the interiorized horizon of the organism.

Therefore, as Freud maintains in BPP, the organism binds the exorbitant index of exteriority only in a way that it can afford. Or in other words, the organism wishes to die only in one fashion, which is another way to say, it wishes to die only in one fashion because such a fashion captures the inevitability of death in terms of the economical capacity and energetic requirements of the organism. Any other way of dying or binding the exorbitant index of exteriority (that is to say, alternative ways of binding unilateral negativity or inflecting upon extinction) are vigilantly staved off because they pose a fundamental threat to the economical – rather than passive – correlation of the organism with death. Since it is the economical correlation with the exorbitant index of exteriority (sun, meltdown, etc.) that determines the courses of life for the organism, this correlation is regarded as an irreproachable and axiomatic foundation that must be safeguarded by any means possible. For this reason, we can say that even in its most self-dissolving or schizophrenically emancipative moments, the organism conforms to a conservatively monistic regime of returning to the precursor exteriority or binding death. Monistic not only because it is the one and only one way that the organism affords but also because it is a necrocratic way insofar as it actively precludes the possibility of other fashions or courses of binding exteriority and inflecting upon extinction.

In fact the history of philosophy has consistently remained an accomplice in promoting the social and political consequences of organic necrocracy by corroborating the monistic regime of binding exteriority as an axiomatic and untouchable foundation of earthly thought. As far as the politics of exteriority is concerned, philosophy has not gone further than relocating – rather than disposing of – the organic economical teleonomy. Even the most passionate proponents of nihilism (Nietzsche, Bataille, Land, et al.) hold that life is determined by an exteriority irreversibly outside of the interiorized horizon without questioning the restricted economy or the monistic regime of binding such exteriority. For them having or thinking a unilateral and exorbitant index of exteriority is sufficient to break away from the conservative ambits of the organism and infringe the confines of our interiorized horizon. But what is really at stake here is the way the exteriority is bound: Is it bound only in a way that the organism can afford (therefore, it conforms to an ultimately conservative economical correlation between the interiorized horizon and the exteriority) or is it emancipated from such restrictions by being able to alternate between modes of binding because it does not conform to an emphatic economical correlation any longer? For example, Ray Brassier maintains that speculative opportunities of philosophy can be unfolded simply through the traumatic binding of extinction. In claiming so, he conforms to the traditional limit of philosophy whose object of critique is the unilateralizing power of extinction (manifesting as the inevitability of death of both thought and matter) and not the economical correlation between the organic conservatism and the exorbitant truth of extinction which is presented as a restrictively monistic regime of binding exteriority and inflecting upon death. In other words, by holding that the cosmological reinscription of the death-drive (anterior-posteriority of extinction) is sufficient to unbind the speculative opportunities of philosophy qua the organon of extinction, Brassier fails to question the ultimate comfort zone of the organism. Since a fundamental question still lingers: To what extent can the traumatic or rudimentary binding of extinction situate itself outside of the economical correlation with death that the interiorized organism conservatively remains committed to because it is the very affordable (and hence unsuccessful) way of binding extinction?

It is not the unilateralizing power of extinction that demolishes the comfort zone of the interiorized horizon; for such comfort zone is punctured precisely by those plural and multiversal ways by which the exteriority of extinction can be alternatively bound in order to abolish the monistic and economical system of binding exteriority that restricts the speculative opportunities of binding extinction to terms and economic conditions of the organism or the interiorized horizon. In short, the speculative vistas of extinction are only unlocked when extinction can be bound or inflected upon in plural or alternative ways. Positing the exorbitant truth of extinction alone as the apotheosis of enlightenment does not fulfill the conditions for unbinding the speculative power of philosophy since the exorbitant truth of extinction has never been repelled by the conservative economy of the organism in the first place; instead the organism is forced to 'economically afford' and bind such a disjunctive truth by any means possible, that is to say, by its own energetic capacity and economic conditions. Therefore, the emphatic positing of extinction (viz. conceiving extinction as an exorbitant index of exteriority) is usually doomed to be trapped within the axiomatic restricted economy of the interiorized horizon according to which binding exteriority should only take place in the fashion the organism can afford. It can be argued that accentuating extinction without questioning the monistic regime of binding inherent to the organism is tantamount to abetting the organic necrocracy in warding off alternative ways of binding exteriority and thereby trammeling the speculative opportunities of thought.

As long as accelerationism works on behalf of an exorbitant index of exteriority or operates according to an energetic-dissipative model, it risks abiding by the monistic regime of binding whereby the unilateralizing excess of the exteriority must be economically afforded at all costs. Respectively being in conformity to the monistic regime of binding means all other possible ways of binding exteriority (viz. alternative ways of inflecting upon extinction and binding exteriority) which harbor the speculative power of exteriorization must be thwarted. If as Land suggests Capitalism is imbued with courses of life (complexity and emergence), it is because capitalism as a process that conforms to the monistic regime of binding finds its plural and alternative expression not in binding exteriority or extinction but the interiority of life that is energetically made possible by the economical correlation that the organism utilizes to energetico-dynamically afford the exorbitant index of exteriority. Capitalism is abhorrently inflated with life-styles and courses of life precisely because it abides by a monistic regime of death. If philosophy should indeed hunt the speculative opportunities of thought, then its ambition should be shifted from investing in alternative courses of life to searching for alternative ways in binding exteriority, for it is the freedom of having alternatives in the latter that turns thought into an asymptote of cosmic exteriorities.

Related post: Trauma and the Outside: 1000 forms of cut

Urbanomic is back not only as the spearhead of adventurous philosophical experiments but also as the publisher of art editions, philosophical monographs and avant-garde texts: Collapse vi and new publications.

Also on another front: The December issue of 'Artforum International: Best of 2009' has listed Cyclonopedia among eleven titles including The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection and Giorgio Agamben’s What Is an Apparatus?

A sequel to Cyclonopedia and the second installment in the Blackening trilogy:

The Mortiloquist

A barbaric interpretation of the life and problems of Western philosophy.

Feasting on the theatrical resources of Greek tragedy, Jacobean revenge drama, grand guignol theater, the theater of cruelty, aktionism (especially Herman Nitsch’s the Fall of Jerusalem and Orgien Mysterien theater) and employing the dialogue-commentary of scholasticism, The Mortiloquist is a cross-breed of play and philosophy. In this textual mongrel, the life of Western philosophy is gutted out by outlanders and barbarically staged.

Taking place in an alternative history of the Greek Empire during a hypothetical siege of Athens, The Mortiloquist begins with a heated debate among three philosophers. Aristotle, Speusippus and Andronosos have refused to flee from the Academy. Oblivious to the commotion in the streets, they are arguing the impact of Speusippus' 'alien causality' on generation and corruption of ideas. As those who represent the philosophical militancy and political ethics of the Greek Empire, the philosophers are put into an ordeal of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of the barbarian invaders. They are forced into freshly gutted out carcasses of three oxen; the animals are then sewn up to trap the philosophers in a way that only their heads protrude.

Composed in the form of an inverse chiaroscuro, the stage consists of a tenebrous foreground and a luminous background. Three animal corpses lay in the foreground, from each carcass a chattering human head has protruded. Each act begins with monotonous De Sadesque depictions of barbarous savageries taking place at the stage background. Set against this chaotic but silent background, conversations between the three philosophers who are trapped in dead animals are audible and appear in the form of scholastic colloquies and theatrical dialogues.

In The Mortiloquist, each scene begins with a generation of a new entity from the putrefying animal carcasses. In line with Henry of Langenstein's unsettling remarks regarding the possibility of a dog being generated from the corpse of an ox or a horse, the oxen carcasses in which the philosophers have been trapped change to canine and fox corpses among other unheard-of creative forms. Ideas and philosophical debates are renewed and shifted according to the germinal power of putrefaction and the possibility of the infinite deformity of forms in decay. The history of philosophy is, barbarically and problematically, revealed to be a differential form of arborescent emptiness which is in the process of blackening its vitalistic twists – a tree of rot whose supernal branches stretch toward the One and whose roots reinvent their own tortuous earth.

[This is an ongoing project which I am gradually developing.]

Thanks to Levi Bryant for mentioning Ben Marcus whose world looks like a textual counterpart of this game. This reminds me to post something on the porous narrative formation of Cyclonopedia and the loosening of human characters into complicities with anonymous materials.

Thanks to Urbanomic for making this sold out volume of Collapse available online. (Urbanomic's note: If you are able to, please duplicate and host this download elsewhere online so as to limit bandwidth use on the Urbanomic server.)

This volume contains two of my favorite Collapse texts: Iain Grant's Being and Slime and China Miéville's M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire. It also includes my contribution The Corpse Bride (horror for kids).

In his recent post, Alex draws a connection between limitropism and the unbound eliminativism of the kind elaborated by Ray Brassier in Nihil Unbound. At first look, these two cannot be wedded, for the limitropic conception of zero suggests a dynamic process (a verging-on) wherein zero or non-belonging as such is never achieved. Yet Brassier's eliminativism appears to be fully in opposition to this limitropic conception of zero which seems to be conjuring up a vague shadow of vitalism. Closer investigation of Brassier's eliminativism, however, shows that limitropic convergence toward zero is indeed a vector of eliminativism which is always in the process of shedding belongings (desertifying) and abandoning commitments to any horizon of interiority (or what Alex calls eliminativist betrayal) in its reckless approach toward zero.

Brassier's unbinding of the Churchlands' eliminativism in Nihil Unbound is done through different stages encompassing intricate engagements with Badiou, Meillassoux, Deleuze, Heidegger, et al. However, the reinscription of eliminativism on a cosmic level which is the characteristics of his position can not be consummated unless he combines eliminativism with something that undoes all horizons of interiority (from organisms to earth to stars, galaxies and matter itself) and returns them back to the concept-less exteriority of space or the cosmic abyss. In other words, in his attempt to mobilize eliminativism concomitantly toward all-encompassing-ness and cosmic unbinding (all the way down), Brassier needs a conjectural model that can loosen every horizon of interiority (be it us or planets and stars). Such a model, accordingly, requires a conception of interiority that is determined directly from an exterior backdrop in a nested chain by which interiorized horizons can be loosened up in regard to each other. It is like a loosening function that traverses the interiority of human in regard to the organic interiority which itself is nested within the interiority of the earth as a consolidating medium for inorganic materials required for the emergence of life. This nested chain of interiorities enables the loosening function to continue to the solar economy (conditioned by the interiority of a star / sun) and then to the galactic interiority all the way to the interiority of matter itself. Therefore, this conjectural model which is responsible for the cosmic reinscription of the Brassierian eliminativism needs to simultaneously present an all-encompassing regression toward the precursor exteriority and a topology of nested interiorities whereby the regression or loosening can be effectuated and guaranteed. Only such a model can bring about the possibility of the cosmic unbinding of eliminativism or asymptopia.

This model surfaces in two locations of Nihil Unbound: one in the second half of 'Thanatosis of Enlightenment' and the other toward the end of the book in 'The Trauma of Life'. In both cases, Brassier elects Freud's energetic model of thanatropic regression for this mission which consists of the cosmic unbinding of eliminativism and abandoning commitment to any horizon of interiority, a process which goes so far that it even deserts matter itself. However, both episodes are ended abruptly to prevent the slippage of the book into the ambivalent yet interesting consequences brought about by the unbinding and cosmic reinscription of Freud's theory of thanatropic regression.

In order to consummate the non-dialectical negativity of eliminativism as a cosmic event (asymptopia), Brassier uses a model that can deploy the eliminativist vector inside every horizon of interiority, desertifying them all the way to the exteriority of the cosmic abyss where even elementary conditions for materialization are considered as indexes of interiority which must be deserted. This elected model is the energetic model of thanatropic regression presented in Beyond the Pleasure Principle built upon Freud's earlier theories of trauma as well as theories proposed by figures such as Rank, Ferenczi and Spielrein. However, Freud only observers and speculates on the thanatropic regression toward the precursor exteriority in organisms or the organic life in general. Therefore, what Freud distinguishes as thanatropic return to the precursor exteriority is only the energetic and compulsive return of the organism toward the inorganic exteriority which itself is another interiority (another lie) set against another exterior backdrop. For this reason, in order to consummate the non-dialectical negativity of eliminativism on a cosmic level through Freud's model of thanatropic regression which only consists of a passage from organic into the inorganic, Brassier should reappropriate Freud's theory of thanatropic regression which is essentially a theory of drive. To put it differently, in the pursuit of an unbound eliminativism, Brassier reinscribes (absolutizes?) Freud's energetic model on a cosmic level. Yet insofar as the eliminativist appropriation of thanatropic regression casts humanism and matter aside in favour of an ever-expanding never-attainable exteriority, it also redeploys human life and matter (on all their organizational and illusive strata) as mediums for the nested intrusion of cosmic exteriority. And of course it is the latter that brings the possibility of complicity. In other words, the cosmic modification of Freud's theory results in the transformation of the eliminativism into an economically, dynamically and topologically ambiguous process – a limitropic convergence upon zero, a loosening with no end. [1] Now why is that Brassier's cosmic reappropriation of thanatropic regression gives Eliminativism a perverse and ambiguous underside which is fertile for the kind of politics of the Insider that Alex has in mind? And even more importantly, why is it that this cosmic reappropriation turns the unbound vector of eliminativism into a limitropic process that has insinuations of a dark vitalism wherein neither ontological differences nor materiality enact any privilege?

The reason lies in Freud's own theory of drive(s) and the way the energetic model of thanatropic regression is constructed. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud reveals that thanatropic regression is always bound to two other panoramas or energetico-structural principles: one is the theory of umwege (the energetic maze or detour) whereby the interiority of life becomes an increasingly twisted inflection of exteriority as such; and the other is the necrocratic law of the organism (or any other horizon of interiority) whereby the organic interiority should only die in one and only one way. According to Freud, the economy of thanatropic regression for any given organism or horizon of interiority must ensure that all other ways of dissolution or dying must be staved off. [2]

If Brassier unbinds and cosmically reinscribes Freud's theory of thanatropic regression in order to extend the eliminativist vector all the way to the cosmic exteriority, then he must also unbind the theory of umwege beyond the organic life or bios. Because as Freud has explicitly argued and as Brassier has implicitly indicated, the thanatropic regression or the vectorial move toward the precursor exteriority is inextricable from the increasing convolution of the umwege. Here the convolution of umwege or the increasing twist in the roundabout regression to the precursor exteriority must not be confused with the complexification of life as an opportunity for posthumanist scenarios, because it suggests the differential decomposition of all interiorities via nested deployment or intrusion of cosmic exteriority. After all, the emergence or determination of an index of interiority from a precursor exteriority does not mean the complete envelopment of that exteriority and its reintegration according to the laws of the interiorized horizon. There is always a part of enveloped exteriority that refuses to be assimilated within the index of interiority, thus extending the intrusion of the precursor exteriority into the emerged nested horizons of interiority.

In short if the thanatropic regression is extended beyond the organic life to an abysmally cosmic level, so are the twisted and hence limitropic involutions of the umwege. Just as the organic regression toward the inorganic exteriority reinscribes the limitropic dimension of the organic life as a twisted curve aiming at the inorganic, the eliminativist absolutization of extinction or the unbinding of the theory of thanatropic regression also re-enacts the cosmic reinscription of the umwege as an infinitely convoluted slant toward cosmic zero. On this level, roundabout / convoluted paths of umwege do not stand for animate or inanimate life (bios or physikos) anymore, but rather they exhibit a continuous limitropic process via the loosening of nested interiorities (deserting one interiority on behalf of another so as to draw the graph of the cosmic exteriority, the ultimate maze-path for the remobilization of thought).

[1] Thanks to Kevin for his brilliant post on the ambiguous energetic dynamism of drive as 'loosening'.

[2] I will elaborate more on the necrocratic law of thanatropic regression and its restricting impacts on the identification of Capitalism in an essay I am completing for Umbr(a).