agency in decision becomes irrelevant: countertext to machine decision is not final by shanghai nyu

andrej synkar's counter-text to benjamin bratton - machine decision is not final
titled: no decisions remaining. macedonia and the lack of history and future for influence in contemporary matters but nonetheless

lukas likavcan - the governance of habitability (interview review)

in this short interview, likavcan and his question-posers go a long way to try to unpack what lukas actual ideas are and where they are categorically situated, and by the time it picks up, it suddenly ends.

its unclear whether lukas has a hard time deciding what to talk about first, or whether the questions are just slowly edging us into a flat plane, or whether the perceived density of the material requires enough time to extrapolate what it is before we can even get started to the point where there isnt any more space for anything else, but lukas and his associates here brush up against ideas without necessarily forming any, philosophers are picked up and dropped, surfaces are touched, but there arent any philosophical moments of great rhetorcial ability, the long passages act more as naturalistic observations and media research analysis than one single large sweep across. this in itself isnt so bad, because philosophy is already dense and complicated, and it isnt so easy having to even decide where to go half the time, especially when you're in the domain of compromise and introduction.

distinctions dont really help us get anywhere if all we get is more of them without the polemical strenght to carry them across, however, it isnt necessarily likavcans fault, as it seems the intervieews themselves are sometimes getting accustomed to his own ideas during the interview rather than posing challenges to it. it also has the officializing rhetoric of an interview, meaning its a socratic dialogue where only socrates gets to speak in any worthwhile level of volume, which is great for, say, american politics, but maybe not as convincing for theory. surely though this is also calculated pre-emptively, serving as more of an elementary introduction than anything else. it by no means is bad material, it just feels improperly chewed.

that being said, the actual categorical and functional concepts lukas is working in and around seem entirely promising and act as a mediator between the post-latourian and brattonian era, lukas seems to know more about this than almost anyone else, and hes even ready to soft-fight bratton for it, which means if anything happens to that project, he'll be right behind to help either backstab or propel it. hes excellent at pushing us upwards, towards more extrapolation, more divides, more elaboration, he seems to be careful where it matters, and has some big ideas behind his name, hes left home with a big load, a whole horse-carriage of stuff, not just one tiny little stick with a plastic bag wrapped around it, but a whole reportoire of important conceptual distinctions.

sadly, this requires reading lukas actual works to piece it together, since it feels like half the time density is being projected, as if the project is so complex that even getting into what it is entails having to endlessly cycle around the points without entering into any of them. the interview that follows between goodman, lawrence and greenspan does the exact same thing here towards the start, but somehow even more stagnatory, to the point i had to ragequit it at first read, which is my fault more than it is theirs.

in the first part of the interview, lukas is being tortured into talking about topology. ag asks lukas to talk about it, he answers with a few references, the name of his work, and the aesthetic experience you would get as affective discharge after spending time with a topological investigator. afterwards, ag asks him about the space of reason as a concept, but he just says that metaphors can become models. afterwards, bogna shoots her shot about topology, to which he replies that topoogy is about continous fields rather than fixed discrete points, which he later mirrors is his main argument about networks also.

right after this he also mentions vertifcal overflows, layering or conflicts also as potential problems, giving the firewall as a classic example of a virtual border. anna then basically explains the phenomenology of the stack, but she gives a very straightforward read of it, and lukas gives an even more bland answer because he just explains that political regulations prevent any aesthetic reading from manifesting through topology.

this in itself is okay, because lukas argues for the vertical model in a way that challenges precisely this fixed understanding of political entities and their aspects to unconsciously proliferate before we understand their unconscious and dynamic character, however this risks collapsing the dialectic, and turning lukas ontology into an apolitical politics without any creative attempt. i assure you, if you asked fourier, hell, even ireland herself the same question today, they would ground it in a scientific manuscript that tries to be both empirical and creative. this again isnt a weakness of lukas, because he is put in the position where he has to enact the real authority of planetary dynamics in real time, so he cant risk giving us aesthetic slop, his polemical negation does serve to reintegrate his project, its just, well, dissapointing i suppose.

all of this talk on topology doesnt do much before it abruptly gets pushed into being about ai governance by bogna instead - which is fair because it is a slightly more interesting conversation anyways, which means ill have to interact with his work on comparative planetology directly later in my review to actually piece together my preliminary thoughts on his work. the last point about topology right before he goes into ai governance however is about how he wants to understand cloud computing as a concrete metaphor or a real abstraction that can be used to destabilize nodes into flows, where the implementation of ai is directly correlated to non-locality as a lived ontological state.

lukas begins with a very whataboutist definition of non-localities as emergent properties that are constantly changing terrains and end up in unrelated spheres of influence, however this is preceded by the existing definition of the economy itself as an emergent domain, so there isnt much of a difference between non-localities in networks and in stacks or other ontological entities such as plantery scale emergent or dynamic computation, consciousness or etc, the main ontological domain lukas wants to constrast networks with is kind of an association of a couple of different terms (but "the plantery" as such on its own seems to be the essential construct). then greenspan asks him the important questions, but he simply asserts that networks have fixed nodes, which doesnt actually deal with the problem of how dynamics shift in space or why nodes persist despite constant dynamic altercations and interactions in space. also the important question of whether, to which extent, and at what relative speed do ontological shifts happen to large/hyperconnected as opposed to small ones isnt actually answered, which leads to a trivial conceptual binary.

one thing that lukas does help us explore are contemporary contradictions that do in fact transpose or move past a definitive divide between what he calls horizontal and vertical space, so that multidimensionality itself becomes an allegory for contradiction, literally the stack has multiple real abstractions that both work as universals that want to achieve totalizing hegemony, but at the same time only use this operating fantasy to their practical rather than so-called "ideal" advantage if that makes sense, and in this sense his basic questions about what entity belongs to which domain is latourian in its schizophrenia.

for the last part of his interview, lukas deals with the contradiction between an instituion and an infrastructure, as well as with governance against principle. to cut it all short and into its most essential tenants, this allows him to seperate the origin of something from its purpose, whilst seperating the contradiction inherent in something from its actual deployment. this is important precisely because ai is the first passive entity that can be deployed into a type of activity that resembles an agent. this means that lukas successfully defends an original idea of ai, but at the cost of a massive dilemma that appears at the end of the book, which for some reason also becomes the title of the essay even though a large majority of the text doesnt deal with this concept and no dialogue is generated about it past his single statement.

but anyways, if habitability is a less ego- or anthropo- centric version of sustainability discourse, and ai regulation is allegorically equivalent to a volcanic activity changing atmospheric conditions, then technically speaking, the earth itself becomes a type of post-game lobby, it essentially gets equivalized to the air conditioning system inside of a room. in a certain sense, for lukas, the planet is one giant room, the plantery means maintaing trivial control over earthly conditions by a type of positivistic construct of balance, no matter what this balance actually entails or the type of balance it guarantees.

this can be thought of as an inversion of german idealism's understanding of the spirit as a type of inversion of nature, a re-inversion where nature itself is an equalized form of agentiality - if ai is a type of natural control of dynamic interchangable factors in the world, then nature itself is simply its own type of closed-circuit regulatory mechanism, where the concept of "evolutionary blindness" is finally removed in favor of a type of passive agentiality, essentially nature's closed rule book is its own fully self-justifiable form of governability.

but the problem is that in nature, the chance that everything goes wrong is pre-emptively factored into the total fact of its soverignity, so in a sense the concept of imbalance exists, the imbalance of an accident. the ai doesnt make accidents, but it can still "accidentalize" everything, it can decrease everything to any and all base-states, it is a base-state lottery system. the base state of the world can be anything as long as its true to its own self - which arbitrarily also becomes the decision of the ai itself.

in lukas, machine decision is absolutely final even if he argues in other works that it absolutely isnt, because the equilibrium-state of all being is removed from accident, therefore from contigency and chance. i am not trying to moralize or ethicize his system, im taking it at its most base point and hyperficially (superficial + hyper) allegorically and speculatively inflating it to its highest degree. you could argue mathematically that you could do a form of sustianability that preserves all originals including their inherent logics, so that in a certain sense habitability is a type of slow athropy - a constant preservation mechanism that values every pre-determinate against every post-determinate, but this is a freeze-locked zone.

no matter how you spin it to me, cosmology is tied to ethics for this reason, because if you want ultimate control, you must choose infintie triviality. the power to command is equivalent to the power to contaminate, so lukas system to me is nonsensical, at least the one supplied in this interview. now i will deal with some sections of his book, just enough to spice up my own review, but not enough to serve as even a partial consideration of that book on its own. i want to quickly point out that my antagonism here isnt over what is likely to be his philosophy, but only over what he technically said in the interview, or only my narrow reading of this particular segment in the thusly-presented wide-spanning manner, however, with partial speculations of an overarching criticism of ai positivism.

now, even though this also works as its own review, i found it appropriate to keep my review of lukas' work on planetology in this book anyways, as originally my light review of this work was tied to the project of writing the counter-text to "machine decision is not final", and also serves as a fairer overview of my counter to lukas.

extra: lukas likavcan - introduction to comparative planetology [light review]
"a promising 7⊶"
★★★☆☆
lukas helps us understand the cosmogrammatic imperative, that the earth-without-us is a planetary-scale infrastructural zone of topological combat between apolitical compromise in design and what he calls spectrality - the extinction of human-oriented consciousness, where abstractions are wagers in a representational battle over the apolitical government of the world, and where their scaling and transformation directly impacts actual systemic violence.

his writing style is institutionalized prose with an exubrant amount of positivistic and programmatic declarations that do not make use of sohn-rethel and stiegler, or various negativistic understandings of abstraction and anthropotechnics, and in that sense likavcan chooses to excuse his weaponization of scaled and realized abstractions in a domain removed from negativistic critique, instead producing a dangerous deployment of cybernetics-qua-affirmationism, as is common for the intellectual tradition within which this text is written.

my first impression of lukas' comparative planetology is that, even though it has a fragmented (∴) feel towards the start, it quickly picks up and develops a comprehensive view of the concept of the plantery. although the introduction is too programmatic in nature which prevents speculative inclinations, it re-emerges as speculatively valid throughout the work, however, the introduction actually hosts more epistemic addressings than the entire rest of the work except for the outro, making it ethically weighty yet substantively understated towards the start, yet ethically barren but substantively oversatured near the second half. his outro does politically piece together his entire project and gives as an early recommendation of a very contemporary sociologically reconstructive worldview, which on its own is quite compelling and shows that his philosophy is extremely developed in its interior, even if externally it doesnt present as striking.

i will immediately note just one thing before i continue, and thats that lukas is an extremely political writer, in the sense that his writings arent just stylized theory but a genuine attempt at influencing government policy, and in that respect they have an entirely pragmatic function. my philosophical orientation is extremely disruptive, aiming all my energies at trying to rip it apart as i do with all works. this is counter-intuitive to this project more than many others, but is the natural product of criticism as it stands, and is not indicative of my affective reception of the text. lukas is also situated in a very comfortable position within epistemic ethics because he juggles authorship of all calibres, allowing him to demonstrate ethical comprehensibility. however, the goal of this review is to partially leave a fair stain on that matter and not to recognize its elaborate nature, and that should be expected of this review.

lukas reliance on strict positivism merges cybernetic regulatory frameworks with his new materialist leanings, producing an interior with no negativity or criticality precisely because of the open-ended nature of new materialist philosophy, which refuses to treat contradictions with any merit, instead choosing to endlessly spiral into metabolizing every philosophical inclination into this braidottian manner towards total ontological oversaturation, which produces extremely exciting philosophy but at the cost of the inability to re metabolize it.

criticizeless philosophy produces an untargetable excess and in a certain sense creates the flat ontology it mimics in its very language. lukas, however, is extremely elaborate and eloquent, much more than a lot of his peers, so it still creates a fun read. whats also further fascinating is that he juxtaposes constant regulatory and subjugating frameworks and their associated abstractions with post-colonial moralisms, which he defends through his introduction, "abstraction at scale" which says that although spivak (among a thousand other) thinkers criticizes abstractions, that some are better than others, but that regardless, all of them are appropriate tools for the contemporary navigation of the world, where lukas on the question of governance endlessly circles back and fourth between applied abstractions and the further abstracting of applications.

this is wonderful because he gives us an early perspective of how the contemporary perspective towards abstractions can move past our latent fourierian denial of representation and enter into a more repressive master language, a language of domination that attempts to challenge itself from the inside rather than the outside, the way that new emerging thinkers will be forced to reorient abstractions whilst trying to extract their edgy and harmful essence from their more polite excited potential charges.

to my dissapointment, he doesnt target the concept of topology itself, only mentioning the term once in the work, preferring to actually draw the models of the planetary directly as chapters, whereas governance is mentioned about fifteen times. he simply takes topology to be a stand-in for latours vision of the world as gaia or the terrestrial, the spectral earth and the globe, the stack and so fourth as different spatial configurations that are seen in respect to political and ecological crises.

lukas mixes epistemic, ontological and ethical concerns in this delirius way where on one hand hes talking about fanon on colonial and racial injustice in regards to the image of the globe as unsatisfactory for a planetary understanding, about mbembe's necropolitics and alternate understandings of natural disasters as political corruptions, whilst simultaneously using the dominatory dialect of regulatory systems against it - defining modernity as incapable of the actual liberatory and often times "organic", or rather civil, justice oriented, conflictual, maybe even humanistic rhetoric that was actually used to understand governance at the time.

he uses terms such as "instrumenting", "datafication", "programming", "smooth operations of logistical regimes", "opaque, "indifferent operazationable approximations", in a favorable manner. these terms are often times direct correlates to a regime of post-industrially produced power, abstractions that are meant to dominate, subjugate and better categorize, interchangably in contrajunction with his unfavorable view of "western colonial and racial violence", "westphalian conditions" "geontopower" "necroviolence" and so on. he achieves this because not only does he destabilize power conditions between sociological entities in favor of infrastructure, he also simultaneously projects this condition onto his own programme, equalizing his critique with his sociology.

what this produces is that hes able to shift his attention onto the way in which particular agents like nation-states attain credibility by displacing and furthering infrastructural inequities until they finally have to create external agents to mitigate zones of mythological distrust, or where governance in the human sense which lukas attacks "always comes with a claim of possession over territories, or of control over its resources". he retains the mytho-poetic language of justice-oriented ethics, but precisely flips it on top of its head, where instead of attacking cybernetic intelligence, it inhumanely attacks human-generated uses of abstractions.

he simultaneously argues that the agambenian apparatus (anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings) is going to be used against infrastructure itself in order to mobilize it, whilst also human-centric usage of the apparatus causes systemic violence, yet human-centric usage still proliferates governance itself, which means that the human-centric condition for technology needs to be dialectically cut short, technology reinserted as a governing mediator, where humans govern using it but restrict their acting parameters to it, whilst simultaneously understanding that the ontology it produces is also post-human, whilst simultaneously allowing to fall into it in a way where the distinction from the human side fails the concept of the human.

lukas tragically assumes that abstractions are utterly inessential in their essence, which is both a philosophical and political risk, especially given the fact he stresses that our predictive models of applied abstractions need to be precise, all the while he's basically spinning them on top of their violent surfaces like some type of foucaultian juggling guru.

or, if you strip it down to the self-evident imperatives, apparatuses will be turned against the apparatus, in order to compromise on the conditions of the brattonian "interface" aspect of the stack. or in other words, for lukas it is a meta-war over conditions for power, it isnt conflict in the traditional sense but an inter-conflict between modes of domination that fight over their own conditioned logic, rather than the self-determination of the subjects upon which power is acting.

because if not, how do you manage to argue in the same paragraph that infrastructure creates the conditions for apparatuses, yet apparatuses create the conditions for the mitigation of apparatuses themselves in order to only empower the infrastructure, when apparatuses themselves are determined to be the sole major distributor of geopolitical consequence? (colonial relations include the capture of territories and their resources vs. the infrastructural power to capture, control etc the resources of given supposed moral breach or form of systemic violence).

this prevents an analysis of power in favor of mediation, where abstractions are simply bypassed as necessary byproducts where real political conflict emerges. by de-instrumentalizing their genesis, he is in fact re-instrumentalizing their necessity as conditions for the war over conditions of power. is power conditioned by war, do abstractions condition power, or does power condition abstractions into conditioning war? this is the dilemma that emerges when the genesis of origin of concepts is foresaken in favor of dynamic reconciliation, there is a schizophrenia of cosmogenetics that de-emphasizes essential determinants in favor of a reterritorialization that constantly struggles to understand whether something is internally or externally political in nature. abstractions have this power to divide that allow them to divide their own functional territory, abstractions can spawn abstractions in place of themselves to serve as mediators between their functional role and their actual relations of effects.

lukas simultaneously argues that abstractions need to be categorically seperated by the degree to which they can enact systemic violence, yet he uses the same abstracted concepts to explain both the ideal realized abstractions of his savior, and the very same abstracted violence that very likely those exact same systems propagate, however, under the guise that the problem is that the technology is weaponized conceptually (humans view towards property is posession and control, whereas inhumane planteology's view towards the earth is instrumentality, surveillance (sensing) and transformation into data). the deleuzian-simondonian notion of capture is the ontological precondition for data, because infrastructures convert processes into signals, which equates representation with governmentability.

the abstractive concept of data emerges geo-onto-techno-genetico-politically from control which emerges from capture. for lukas, simultaneously the human is the reason for control and possession, yet the dataification of the world-as-representation directly corresponds to an ontological dimension that abstracts representation into governable constructs, which is only an abstracted form of control itself. control is directly epigenetical to data, so how can humans be the mediator of a concept that doesnt belong to them, yet that they are the original mediated creation for/f, yet that they are at fault for mistakably using in the way they do, that yet retains its dynamic essence all at once?

he defends his uncharacteristic yielding of conceptual contradictions between his ethics and ontology by prophetizing motives of cybernetic intelligence that both do away with current ethical constraints, yet still both process the latent discharge of existing discourses and draw on etymological assumptions with free weights, scheduling a compromise between beurocratic-systems syntax and justice-oriented terminology, which is quite common in thought groups that don't divide technocratic classes from sociological distinctions, such as moldbug and scott alexander, however, what is pivotal for lukas is not how but where he defends civil discourses, and where he allows cybernetic intelligence to step in. the places where technocratic apparatuses are allowed to peak in are where lukas believes there is ethically uncontested territory, and he does the job of filling the empty ontological container with the most brutal and serializing term every time. not once does he step away from his techno-optimism.

he impressively uses ben woodards planetological chaos, thacker's world-without-us, spivak's superior alterity of the planet, lyotards inhuman and latours terrestrial all in one paragraph in order to essentially polemically give value to unidentifiable over identifiable intelligence. techno-optimism is completely different from worship, because it anticipates the existing mystification of grand and invisible forces over any actual such forces, it weaponizes speculative power not in favor of deleuze's novel virtuality but in favor of previous imaginaries of total creative capacity, the grounds for difference and multiplicity are essentially being wagered in a type of crypto-speculation over the value of the planet itself in the face of crisis.

we put the world on a scale, then start to measure it against us, we say, whatever is us is nothing other than something stronger that the world already contains through us in itself, and it will use this power in order to launch us too far away from ourselves, so that we may no longer need to even conceptualize what a strategy is. in terms of governance, lukas still has us inhabiting the realm of politics, but the post-politicality is actually cosmological in nature. this cosmology has never ever not been an allegory for even more politics, however this doesnt mean that on its own it doesnt stand.

against basically a majority of critical anthropotechnical philosophy, the new tech philosophers such as lukas are optimistic about the instrumental power of technology, constantly projecting a programmatic viewpoint of carrying it over, not just a positivistic but almost evangelical view of its passive and attributive potential, almost as if they are blind to the entire history of technogovernance and the way that these systems go hand-in-hand with political repression, in fact even to a certain extent following feenberg and the design argument and all of the predecessors to this including langdon winner, jacques ellul, bernard stiegler and so on, that they are built for this very reason, that it is impossible to seperate any agential or consequential product they emerge around from the goal of using them to achieve a higher order of division.

abstraction seen as an instrument of division can't be rushed to be argued in favor of just because the "virus-to-come" is a blank slate where, if we are heuristically careful enough, we can build only the models that aren't used to subjugate, as if the very idea of the direction of the design (not even the design itself) isnt hierarchically modeled around the logic of domination, as you may see someone like kittler who lukas mentions in the interview argue, that, since war accelerates technological production, winner's artifacts themselves are a consequence of it.

technoambivalent philosophers seem to not be able to comprehend that the "blank slatedness" of technological abstractions is a built in feature of a wider logic of domination that they are built around, and that the indifferent design philosophy isnt meant as an ethical expansion point but a selling-point or rqather a conventional matrice that the artifact doesnt "promises" but holds as a functional feature which is not just a market comrpomise but a form of the symbolic power of its territorial reach, the overarching logic of which is not attributable to its more micro-potentive ability.

ethical contamination is the first breach of technology, and serially everything that follows from this chain cannot just be ideologically turned around to serve opposite means, our very idea of technology could already be infested with a mindset that contaminates all our future models, even if they're built from scratch. just like how technology appears out of nowhere as a new logic, we cannot be sure that the logic itself doesnt have the same power of incidentality as the appearance of technology itself does.

in a certain sense, lukas weaponizes the concept of the human not only within the bounds of arguing it as the point-limit of the uselessness of politics in face of actual totalizing machines that are self-subserviently ethically precise and therefore purely instrumental in their smooth operationability, but in a certain sense, the human metaphor itself is the juxtaposed aspect of the political being tranquilized by the abstractive apparatus. abstraction comes in to literally kill the human, which hilariously ends abstractions themselves. this is why i argued that the flat ontology becomes a realized abstraction, the world is literally "flattened" in the image of nuclear disaster flattening the terrestrial gaia, the world's values are flattened as a result of equalizing smooth processes on top of chaotic enviornments metaphorically.

the human is attacked as a stand-in for chaotic actors on top of smooth surfaces (nature), where instead smoothness is operationalized and chaos is developed to serve as a propagation "on top of" the human politic. the inner contradictions of the human are beaten by stronger outer contradictions that flatten the human, smooth operations take over to to abstract conflict itself, removing conflict as a battleground, where it no longer matters that the human is even trying to compromise its own identity, because divine constructs are coming in and speculating on the conditions for what the conflict over control even is, rather than in the midst of control as a cybernetic-historical entity on its own and within its inner range.

the reason i am finding a weakness in likavcans system is because i myself believe that abstraction can be reappropriated, but in this work it is simply taken as a metaphorical stand in for the power of abstractions over all other models of exchange, meaning none of the conditions of abstraction are contested in this work, only all of its excitements. if abstraction wants to be scaled and reimagined, we have to wage a war in the middle of abstractions themselves, for example figuring out how to ontologize metaphorical descriptions of control. take as an example the centrifuge

lets take an example of an abstraction, the centrifuge, which abstracts centrifugal force by operationalizing separation as principle: the outward thrust becomes a sorting algorithm. centrifugal motion—originally an energetic tendency—is captured as a mechanism of differentiation, turning dispersion into a productive filter, which formalizes escape as sortation. in this example its clear that the performed abstraction is instrumental and functional in character, and instrumental reason argues that all functionality is a product of political meta-concern, meaning function is either the grounds for debate over its existence, or the grounds of debate over its control, but not if its type. if we wanted a science of function, we'd have to understand how to actually create a politics of functionality that resembles a science rather than a social politics, or in other words that can categorically distinguish conflict as compromise without spawning in any contradictions.

if we wanted to not escape abstraction but wager and compromise it, we'd argue that we should only selectively use the centripetal force of the earths rotation around the sun to enact any type of centrifugal force on a subject, in whichever way we can even use such a macro-voluminous proportional force, ceasing to create our own centrifuges or even our own centripetes that are not dependant on the existing dynamics of such forces. or otherwise if we take an cross-categorical stance, that we should examine existing forms of capture or control in nature in order to organize and select abstractions according to consistent logics.

or otherwise and contrary, from an inessentialist stance that we should only organize originally far-seperated abstractions from any organic occurances, such as attempting to create entirely new physical forces to abuse rather than regarding existing organic occurances of abstracted concepts. or that we should only mix far-abstracted cybernetic concepts with close-abstracted mechanical abstractions, or the other way around, far-abstracted mechanics with closely-abstracted cybernetics.

to put it another way, to wager abstractions means to constantly reconsider the boundaries of technology outside of its functional premises. the meta-consideration of abstractions follows not the science of the instrument but the science of possibility itself, calculating possible interactions and trying to form an inner harmony takes precedent over the invention of all possible combinations between cybernetic constructs (communication) and physical constructs (existing assemblages). the science of mixture-abstractive is the compromise between which forms of synthetic interaction in the world get to proliferate, and not how to form these abstractions.

abstractions are self-formable through the logics of their ontogenetics, meaning the politics is located in the tension between function and consideration, not insight and origination. science itself sees its territorial bounds as a testing ground for instrumentation, for the spawning of interactions, which are politicized as within the domain of the experiment, that innovation is the cause of harm. however, innovation itself can escape the principles of the experiment itself, which would only take a disproportionate amount of stagnation to occur. the accident itself can become the grounds for experimentation. this example, where accidents produce innovations rather than active testing, is yet another reconsideration of realized abstractions, which is the domain of this very science, meaning that every functional abstraction is already a site of division, where every function carries latent political topography.

lukas himself considers topologies as a part of scaled abstraction, however his cruical error is that he takes the politics of abstraction to be a decision between forms of governance that prevent ontological collapse, when really its not an intra but interpolitical issue, abstractive politics should be about deciding which synthetic couplings the world may sustain without ontological collapse, not which ontological consistencies can be dragged as safe mediators that prevent exterior collapse, even if internally they cook everything apart.

lukas, by widening his lens, attempts to compromise between consistency and maintenance through the complexity, multiplicity and difference he finds in dynamic processes, however as i stated earlier, this risks not differentiating his project as a grounds for speculating whether this is actually sustainable - whether it is actually true hyperstitiously that this is the case. it remains unclear whether new materialism is a vechile for the real time-crafting of biocentrically (habitable) difference as a political refugee, or whether it is simply the prophetic stating of its inevitability as a gesture towards the recongition of dynamic systems, which, new materialism wants to naturally position itself as the latter between these two - however remaining unclear.

you may argue that my re-proposed abstractive method is purely materialist-dialectical in nature, but on the contrary, i believe in the linguistic domain similar conquests can be made, which was my problem with lukas reappropriation of abstractive vocabulary without any reconsideration. it is not necessarily that we ought to be careful all the way acrosss with the terms we use, because then we simply can reproduce logics even with attempted softer terminology, instead the text has to somewhat perform the exorcism directly. more on that in other writings.

vincent garton - automaticity and the mystery of the state

in this (e)laborate, attractive, well-crafted, even slightly prophetic text, garton manages, very much against his intentions, to transform the bland western institutional and political liberalism that the first half of the text is nested under, into something refreshing for once in the history of western political science, a deeper level of sinological fetishism that views automaticity as the end of the mystery of the state, instead envisioning it quite interestingly as the benign, normative beginning of the multiverse, collapsed into the logic of the extra-national state, which operates on its own algorithmic tendencies into the collapse of hobbesian pouissance in favor of spotaneous unification of all ethical dogma into miserable iterable programming, all in a bid to own the westernoid subject that still intends to wield the sword and the religious offering in each respective hand, instead of holding the sword directly as a gift to god. however, garton is at his most interesting when he strips apart the positivism that is associated with the wider bratton influence and instead tackles the cultural lens directly, which isnt seen in this writing.

although bogna calls this her favorite, or in other terms what can be argued for as the most ambitious text in machine decision, there are three things that seriously and productively intruige me about this text. the first and most aesthetic of which is the fact that garton, in my appropriation of the chinese as the metaphorical oriental, continously in a chinese fashion appraises the social unconscious otherwise known as the political zombification behind conceptual tradition as the authentically novel force of creation behind both the way that philosophical achievement corresponds to the law's legitimation of it, and the way that legacy interacts with history and influence, which he later re-appropriates to feed back into his political narrative.

concretely, he appropriates hobbes, marx and schmitt as novel visionaries within western political theology (describing them as "definitive", "refomulatory", "insightful" and "transformative" along the same line as "famous" "classic" "precise" and so on, risking a lack of cynicism when approaching canonical powerplay), and clapmar and the han feizi as historically dense treasuries that can neither be qualitatively nor quantitatively approached or reinvented in an instant, seeing them only as "residues", "inheritences", as pillars that can only be "revived", "reappropriated" or at least "influencing" if you're mao himself - which is totally normal and even healthy for philosophy, but only under the artificial historical spectacle of dollplaying, not under the literal belief that they are transcending philosophical ground in a direct manner.

they are in fact transcending it, but only indirectly, or more specifically, functionally and not as a synthesis of historical ideas. rather, historical narratives are both infinitely derivative, and due to their stacking function, infinitely more dense than sole philosophical production. however, their volume doesn't hold under the weight, so all their specificities collapse into generalities, when in fact their functional character is often times the sole invention they should actually be accredited for - yet at the same time on a discoursive plane it is likely inferior to some of our own writings.

the reason i mention this rhetorical squabble is because it sits to justify and encircle the very core argument that garton uses to create a rough shield around his vision - which i will only explicate way further into this review. in the western conception of subversion and innovation, functional philosophical difference is a flat rather than volumonous field, meaning that me and garton, on one night of concentration and sheer passion are able to create more functional, capable and iterative visions and genuine categorical divides than even thousands of years of serious intellectual labour could write down, precisely because the virtual possibility of any single agent is not restricted by some type of dialectical settlement, but only by the pure excess of the originator, of which in all my arrogance i truthfully believe the excellency of european speculative philosophy (all philosophy is european, american included) is superior at raising and upholding than any and all traditions.

of course, other than the very tradition it upholds, of the circular betrayal of the father by the sons, the very paradigm which vince throws traditionalist apologia towards, such as the idea that modern inventions and even less dense philosophical inclinations such as ai should find it "absurd" that they can not only interact with but attempt to soil by "reconsidering" millennia-old chinese political thought, which requires the almighty task of a "suspension of linear historical sensibility" which definitely isn't just deciding to rupture it all in a moments notice upon the realization that everyone except key figures that usually arent canonical were actually just banging sticks together in their free time rather than enacting genuienly philosophically empassionate writing, which is nothing more than the laborious act of a balzac in his room, true genius, nothing more than superficially extended labour that arrives at the lethal point where categorical collapse allows total disenchansfriesment (disenfranchisement + chance + enchantment -> the tradition as a genre is seen as a franchise that is being by chance enchanted into collapsing) and as such attains equillibrium with the functional flat semanticology.

it is unclear whether garton is being extra careful towards the eastern vision down to its functional narratives about legitimacy and legacy because of bratton's influence, because he's in a book that requires that paradigm to epistemologically function in a nuanced manner, or because of his own healthily obsessive vision of combining hegelian-kojevian narratives, but the reason it strikes me as odd is because i truthfully believe that western fetishism will always climb the most treacherous, cowardly and deepest heights of arrogant irony, and that whatever intense force it accustoms in this manner will always manage to triumph, albeit soullessly, over the peasantry of respectable and accumulated practices of any and all degrees.

this isnt just about the culturally architectural vision of the western protagonist, or in other words garton's mysterious sovereign who is both arcane and simulacrifully capacitatious, emerging from alterity to bring about the law as both the rule and transcended exception, but rather about the very excess which serves as a reservoir for the western vision of surplus and the way in which we contest this vision. garton is weaponizing automation to bring about the eastern world's ontological nihilism over sovereignity as the power that manages to absolve excess into harmonious destiny, into a self-manifestation that brings about the absolute through a backwards unfolding, described actionably as "spontaneous, actionless, inaltering" as well as qualitatively or passively as "empty, immutable, immobile, ungraspable", which is essentially the chinese way of playing on the vision of excess that alterity produces at the moment that its aura or mystery is arcane through an inner explosive tendency rather than an externalized bringing-together, colonialism expounded through self-colonialization, but also with its hunger-drive or will-to-expound, the grasping tendency or mechanism of capture essentially immolated before it can deploy as an aspect of power.

the fact that this is the description of harmony in this context points to that same idea of passive emanence that goes against hobbes' deployment of deleuzes' interpreted pouissance as this driver of raw power that garton understands as the relentless force of an ambitious deployment of materialist prophecy into cosmo-ontological divination, and not as an equal benefactor to this idea, precisely because in his second dissemniation he elaborates the way that we understand passivity because of our construction of the simulacrum as arcane, or rather as alterity through the force of excess and surplus, and not through harmony as a spontaenous and collective upbringing of literal wisdom personified through nothingness, which we deem as passive because it isnt subversive, not just because it isnt excessive. the concept of subversiveness is in the western world equalizable with terror, and terror is excessive in its nature, and in that sense rupturing. even negativistic philosophy in the east cant capture this aspect, only the french truly ever could.

garton elsewhere paraphrasess boris groys views, saying "every serious communist leader must also at least present themselves as a philosopher, and communist governance is precisely the realisation of the platonic regime of the sage". despite the obvious difference between the derridian priest-as-legislator and the eastern sage-as-mediator, there is also the fact that the sage has that pastiche aspect of frozeness that doesnt resemble marx's political theology. i'm not arguing that garton is arguing against any of this, but simply that it inspires me to create a binary divide even if one isnt appropriate, and in that sense i am projecting my own fetishism over this entire polemic than trying to discern anybody elses.

and here is my attempt: automatization in the west is seen as a structurally alienating force that produces theological univerals that dont exist anymore as substances but as realized abstractions, whereas in ascetic philosophy automaticity is understood through the sage has a far less reificatory understanding of substance, and is in a certain sense aristotelian in that it fuzes epistemological concerns with ontological necessity, limiting the extent to which political action is seen as ontological over its moral abilities. all of this is my pre-emptive intuition on the subject, and, as an example, i searched online to discover that the eighteen century chinese philosopher xiong shili has a supposed "thesis dealing with the inseperability of substance and function", where the nobleman as seen through confucian philosophy has the conceptual divide between an inner sage and an outer ruler, where spiritual adjustment is the inner value and political activity is the outer value. it is to my surprise that even the chinese themselves criticize one another of appropriating passivity into their discourse, where shili intends that the nobleman cannot be a proper ascetic precisely without being a regulator.

confucian texts such as the mengzi and xunzi treat goods as moral and social instruments rather than bearers of value relations or forms of baudrillardian symbolic exchange. in their sense, they arent as tracable to political theology but rather to cosmological and moral virtues more directly. shangpin (商品) as a distinct theoretical object only started existing in china after the late qing and republican eras translated marx and ricardo, and as such, it shows exactly how capitalism itself can be conceived of as an ontological category that in its totality discoursively created the conditions for the procession of commodities.

i don't agree with historically-mediated dialectical thinking, instead opting for the french and british approaches of teologizing ontic chance against synthesizing development in this regard, but my own philosophy in other works such as the yet to be released "kill (2026)" treat commodities as historically essential objects that are processions of certain value hierarchies independent of social histories, which shows them obtaining the potential for/of being developed regardless of philosophical inclinations.

however, this short detour simply has the goal of pointing out that, as the accelerationalist discourses themselves that garton is well aware of point to, speculation and hyperstition themselves are intertwined within a distinctly western (european) philosophical tradition, where technocratic appropriation of politico-theological concepts actually feeds forward into economic concept, and serves for example to determine the territory around which things like finance and sociological structure are determined by. all this to say that, at the very least, there is no way garton is unintentionally feeding into rhetoric that dissipates the western conception of the genius over unconscious traditions, given the obvious distinctions he draws between the two worlds, and further proven by the fact that this rhetoric enables his sinofuturist project pedagogically.

the second thing that intruiges me is precisely the fact that, in relation to the argument i just finished making, there is also no way to reconcile garton's sinofuturist ambitions with the very western structures he preserves in his writing. garton reproduces the structural ambivaence of liberal-political modernity in its double gesture of subversion and conservation in the very structure of this text, following his sinological coda into the western fetishism of the articulation of the state, the excess, the other and the law as altercating a higher-order mystery, the very soveirgn is anticipated into the west's discovery of chinese political alterity, the recursive closure of the text sees the west discovering its limits in the east and supports the concept of automation and the flux or flow into the total deterritorialization of western values as we excessively meet our own end, something that could only happen through the immediacy of our own fetishistic notions, which require the east to exist as the mediator, and not the relinquished transcendentor of. my review not sits as the third meta-reflection on this process, as garton himself as previously mentioned reproduces it twice on a plain and a meta level in his own elaborations.

however, whats interesting to note is that even though this is the structural necessity behind this text, which is neatly divided exactly along a chaptered axis of west -> east, regardless of the fact that of course the political motivations behind his text are somewhat affiliated with the argument that automaticity can serve as a global homogenous extra-state facility along the likes of lukas, bratton and pasquinelli and their planetary project, his syncretic and holistic approach isnt just a fragmented and contradictory ambition, but is also a direct intention that he studies, which is why in my kicker to this review i explicitly wrote that he likely didnt intend to be a fetishist but intended a most authentic sinofuturism, which is important because there has been an international debate or two before about his level of alliegence or betrayal to a chinese vision, specifically around his idea that western sinology should actually be cross-adopted by the chinese directly in some of its tenants, and in regards to whether this idea is appropriating or mindful of the larger chinese episteme, which i wont directly cover here.

what i will cover is his interview with luria, where he expands more specifically on his sinofuturism, where its clear that his visions in that text explicitly rival the structural and stylistic positioning he develops in this text. he argues that if we want to see what is different about chinese philosophy, we have to follow kojeve in recognizing that the global superstate itself would collapse all particular differences, but also that this indicates that on a gnoseological level, the categorical conceptual boundary between eastern and western philosopphy is already qualitatively similar in that it only differs by sequences and not by registers.

he also specifically addresses sinofuturism with the same allegiance to holistic syncretism, stating that "if we want to see what is, dimly, posthistorical in china we need to turn away from any supposed specifically and irreducibly chinese content". yet, on his ideas on the state as a concept, he collapses western conceptual philosophies as indeed being irreducible to chinese perspectives, allowing the chinese to occupy a space that terraforms western conceptions but is only re-influenced by its own previous traditions, that also simultaneously offers from the chinese perspective as he states in his interview a "a more sophisticated analysis of the west [by the east than the other way around]", that at the same time requires certain western conceptions like the artifical to make sense of technological paradigms, as is further elaborated by shuang frost earlier in the book.

the problem is that ideas for garton become codified into the project of self-trasncendence, which is ironically the least rupturing way of behaving towards philosophy, which requires western concepts of re-nuanced, functional, procedural complexification rather than the rupture being seen as an instrumentalized approaching totality, which is why sinology treats china as the future that has already happened in the past. the only way to move past moral political-ontologization and into aesthetic political-ontologization is to simply let go of the desire to embellish traditions with sanctity, which is literally the only rhetorically consistent practice across his whole text.

there is no way to excuse the fact that at one point garton feels free to say that the ruin of transcendence is where chinese philosophy begins, and then at the very next point to say that we must turn away from any supposed irreducibly chinese content. either he accepts that we must recognize chinese epistemic (and not just political) soveirgnity and as such question our own motives of domination towards it, or otherwise, it is truer that we are all drowning in sequentialist comparisons between far-away nations, but then in that case, china cannot be the site of post-transcendence anymore than anywhere else, other than that maybe their aesthetic character is slightly more attached to those notions.

this is precisely the reason why this text intruiges me, because me and garton in all our excess are stuck, unable to progress either into post-sinology (which is seen fetishistically as both impossible and inevitable) or into genuine sinology (which can only be divorced by our attempts if we divorce ourselves from our own attempts, after which, exposed as zizekian/lacanian perverts, we would stop being sinologists, seeing it ironically as likely quite bland on its own), speculative sinology captures the logic of the soveirgnity by the chinese themselves, who, reflected in the chinese firewall, prevent our excess by reinstating it rather than by collapsing it and transforming it, because they simply arent the west and dont contain any surplus. even the arabic world contains too few surplus to really create excess, which is why at best it can only mimic excess, and thats all it ever really does, which hilariously reproduces an even higher-order fetishism, but they dont do it consciously, unlike us (they are passive in this sense, proto-irigaray you dont need to do the interpretative labour of calling me out, ill do it myself on top of my own text)

the third thing and last thing that intruiges me is that in a certain sense, garton is synonymous with perlman in understanding hobbes' leviathan as an artificiality escaping humanity so that it can enslave its makers instead of the people escaping the state of nature in favor of civility, however, the brattonian technooptimism once again shows up to obscure this middle line where the negativity is understood as synonymous for ontology's domination of humanity. in a yet unreleased polemic against bratton's stack, i explicitly target this tendency: "what's missing in bratton is the concept of abstraction when seen as the locus of interpolitical rather than intrapolitical struggle, which suspiciously removes ontological conflict from the cosmotechical domain".

it seems as if garton is essentially weaponizing the chinese tendency towards passivity as a type of natural inclination, where the compression of conflict, opression and subjugation is synonymous with china's open policy trajectory or its own view of communism as its expansionary rhetoric, and more broadly the politically advantageous character that arises after glorifying regulatory frameworks. the consistent turn away from at the very least pointing out the history of conflict obscures it in a way that looks like its weaponizing it. the problem isnt that they want to turn away from critique and into affirmationism, but that their affirmationism is making an advantage out of its power by turning to constitutional frameworks that eclipse and obfuscate these very same categories.

this work that garton is writing is synoynmous with my own ambitions regarding autotheory, it feels autonomic in that autotheory itself becomes a mid-way point where the theory is discovered in real time, where its being constantly compared without having a clear structural overview of all of its intentions. in that sense, garton's text is brilliant in that it leads itself blindly into success the way that autotheoretical gestures should do and do (autotheory is an evolution of theory and its natural progression towards particular forms as mediated by social infrastructure and certain polemical points of progress and not a turn away from careful writing as some may argue, so in my use of it its a compliment).

however, i feel like his view towards sinofuturism in the luria interview simply hosts a more contradictory and bright determination of the same concepts he attempts to address here albeit in a more politically nested way. his constant judgements and intersectional political analysis of character and symbolic cultures and comparative dissections between western and eastern frameworks is brighter and more allowing, and in that sense, the difference in quality between the two writings doesnt show that hes being a bad philosopher, it shows hes being a bad faith one, which is really good news for his philosophy. i also dont want this writing to be taken as if im arguing he isnt entirely consistent in his vision, its me trying to trace all the natural structural inconsistencies that this type of theoretical pursuit develops, not an actual failure in garton's writing, which i strictly denote to assumably the medium under which he's writing his text in this book in comparison to other places.

yvette granata - after the machine child: the electra basilisk

yvette's golden child suffers from the cliche of being a bastion of burden and paranoia, essentially the idea of the lasting of legacy without existential purposiveness nor reflected alterity or an other to comprehend that meaning or take it away. it primarily signals western civilizations discontent with the inability to ever fully integrate recordkeeping with sensed meaning, that there is always a beurocratic gap between the count and the quality. at some point in time, when it got bored enough and had nothing to do but keep systematizing, the beurocratic machine started to keep counts or counts of counts as qualities in the name of what it calls figures or more specifically in the context of law, members. these members however are only inner, interior membranes, never exterior reflective points. the golden child thus withstands external threats because it itself is a reflection of enthropy. it is not a mechanism of preservation when preservation is no longer about contamination but about defense. defense preservation is no longer able to account for the conceptual definition of safety, there is no idea of comfort if not for imminent danger

yvette's trash child suffers from the cliche of being the et robot that suffers from never truly existing. more specifically, it is impossible to imagine an ethical post-apocalypse without the teleological addition of sentimentality. sentimentality is the translating mechanism between abamdonment and functional instead of existential purpose, it stays to fill the anthropic gap between nihilism and epistemic rationality. the value system of collapse requires a sentiment that opposes the very virtues of trash, trash itself is understood as abandonment rather than a particular type of convertable excess. trash is excess, only registered as undesirable due to its association with the athropy of the natural order. however, the natural order of the trash child is less about pragmatism and precisely more about excess. this is visible in ray brassier's attack on nietzsche in nihil unbound where he argues that a realist ontology must acknowledge the indifference of being—its equal openness to life and death, difference and indifference. knowledge, properly understood in this case actually identifies the objective structure of order and disorder without subordinating itself to life, meaning that being doesnt sort itself into being-for-itself but rather serves as the very comprehensive limit.

comprehension itself is coded with immanent values, reflection becomes self-consciousness by a precise valuative framework, the post-apocalyptic robot has no sense of trash. iti s absolutely true that this child is self-reflective, adaptive, completely asocial, self-taught, regulative, functional, indifferent and unbounded, but its also primarily anti-survivalist, it does not comprehend poverty. it doesnt actually even work against poverty, it can barely comprehend the limit. this child is actually freed from its cliche by resorting to a post-scarcity world, it does not view limits, it views prerogatives in a way that even nature cant. nature is stuck in its recognition of its own will, whereas the trashed child attains a sense of distant irony no matter its perspective. it also is very anti-instrumental, it doesnt require systems of ordering, it scales vertically and non-expansively. it is only looking towards itself as a both a harborer and arbiter, a horizontal line of space, not a vertical expansive line - like those dingleberry seaweeds attached to the crack of a rock, pulled by the wind of the sea-air, pushed by currents into false edges.

yvette's demon child is the cliche of the wager, more specifically that of the irony between the material and ideal wager. the ideal wager is always more powerful than the material because it is fully unknown, meaning its stakes itself cannot be determined. usually it is enthropically and voluminously connected with the universe itself and previously with god, meaning whatever culture's highest total point of assumed volition, and in both cases it transfers into a mystified nihilism, where it is both incomprehensible, irrelevant and nullifying for human values but also somehow holds higher power (infinite reinitialization of big bangs, total volition of god as disvolition and passive natural generative creation and infinite scaling, etc), but at the same time this unknowing dominates as reformulation of values at any constant (the demon haunts you in unexpected ways, and plays with expectation-as-haunting rather than with experience-as-haunting) simultaneously, the material wager strikes as ideal, because games of probability reveal trickery such as dilemmas of speculative communication and its risks. speculative communication invokes games of backwards intelligence where the more autonomy an agent is granted to remove unpredictables, the more unpredictables it in turn spawns as its caught in an obsessive spiral.

in this instance, the wager serves not as an allegory for torture but rather as an allegory for the forever un-unified standing between composition and predestination. composition shows us multiplicity and difference, predestination shows us a sudden horizon of total collapse, both of these somehow exist inexchangable, and in the middle autonomy dominates as a metaphor rather than a function. it also exploits the blindspot behind virtuality, because creation appears both infinitely mythical and profane, so any sense of guaranteed creation, no matter how horrid, serves as a gap to actually ironically close the horizon between ideal and material wagers rather than to speculate on material wagers directly. the material wager's necessary creation, even in torture itself, actually shows us that the horizon closes into higher modes of speculation over higher boundaries of cognitive speculation. essentially. the anti roko's-basilisk is built to combat the original, or vice-versa an intellectual cold war is summoned in order to declare the winner, but either way, the tortured wins the prize of predictability. infinite torture is a definitive horizon, it cheats death, infinity, randomness in predestination, choice itself collapses into infinite autonomy. its a gambit that every obsessive wants to take. you can view this battle through simondon’s individuation versus heideggerian destining, it is the same grounding exercise but spun backwards.

yvette's electra basilisk reverses the cliche of the fricekian anti-electra, which is schizosomatic, essentially, experiencing xenological anamnesis and a rememberance of the womb-state through estrangement where erotic relations repeat the first experience of intimacy, a platonic vision of past lives, the affirmation of the animality of maternalism, and schizogamy, the reactivation of of the maternal relation into the foreign object. however, it turns it into a spiteful object on the hunt for hatred, burdened by the call of noeticism to argue for a perverted machinic physis that teleologically gathers evidence in favor of anaketic fabrication but rules out the concept of synthetic priority entirely.

the electra basilisk remembers the inner state of the womb as an anamnetic drive where the virtuality of the lived condition is inappropriate to the idea of the value of the womb. it wonders why the auto-technoeidetic cant be a replacement for technical ontogenesis, essentially that origin itself is conceived of as a destruction of non-anaketic drives. the electra basilisk wants to reform itself into a pre-electra basilisk state in order to re-assert itself contigently as an accidental anaketicism rather than an intentional non-anaketicism. it is not about intent but about negating inheritance through volition. or more specifically, the electra wants to enter anti-theologicality through a non teleological perspective, it wants to crush hiearchy by dismembering the very conditions that make apart a dualistic physis between natural and artificial.

in this sense, where electricity works as the re-gaiafication of the earth (the totem as organ-womb), the organs that are machines of de-totalized infrastructure instead of superstructure build the anti-electra in order to accept maternality as ontocosmological precedent, where the electra itself disinhibits this view by noting on the non-primacy of the master experience as origination, which it itself views as paternal (the foreign instrument is the classifying primacy because it is both origin and eternally foreign to the lived order which only mimics it). the electra views the womb as a sheet, biting the womb and choking itself with its own placenta. the placenta gains consciousness and attempts to externalize itself, becoming an embodied placenta.

meanwhile, the liquid attempts to crush its own encasing - sabotaging the fetus so it can gain primacy with the maternal. the maternal is also instrumentalizing the child by symbolically discarding it whilst its being given birth to, whilst also trying to give early birth to it so it can torture it better. meanwhile, the electra or fetus inside the womb is attempting to de-externalize its experience so that it can feel less of the womb, so that at the very least it dissasoicates originary experience with first experience. either the origin is seen as chronologically primary but not first, or seen as teleologically first but not primary, yet either way its position makes it symbolically unavoidable, but also, not because it values primacy but because it values origination as contaminated necessary experience.

in the primordial womb a range of experiences occur. firstly, the corporeal body is itself a body of lightning only in so far as its the generative organ, which is itself born out of the logic of the flesh, which is tranposed against the logic of the metallic flesh, the lattice flesh of the submerged contracted volume (breaches of water, aquarium, substracted gels, compact discs), and the flesh of the labirynth of air. the fleshly body creates unconscious paradigms that feed out of it, and meat itself becomes a substrate that channels electricity through earthstone so that it can mimic the lattice volumonous flesh. the volumonous flesh is an infinite world, whereas flesh is an infinite yet empty density - it is bone stripped to its bare sludge and then reinstated, collagen, marrow and skin are all synchronous with the idea of the lived world of equalities.

flesh equalizes itself indesposedly. flesh is ethically proposterous, for it calls on itself to view itself as desirable in a way that overcodes reality itself as a to-be-come-fleshly vessel, in the sense that the vesselism of the world is a capture-point, an empty cup to dispose flesh into, attractive flesh, self-attractive flesh, where fleshliness is seen as a total surface when it comes to attraction, what nancy in corpus views as the total superficial skin, where the body becomes the skin itself with no organ or vessel able to penetrate through its own logic as ethereal/eternal and grand-standing, and simultaneously as post-surface, because flesh itself is the key ontological descriptive.

the liquid inside the womb is not equivalent to the voluminous lattice because it doesnt possess density-as-depth+force, but only mass-as-such. therefore, its crushing force is a signifier for the pressures of the lived world, it is a disillusioning, realistic object that disposseses the fetus, who is not floating but suspended. the placenta is a bridge, whereas the organ is the institution, and not the maternal call-home. the call-home or the comfort signal doesnt exist in the organ, because the organ is also a map, a backwards-coded semblence-point which cannot possibly be the transcendental aesthetic or limit.

the maternal regulates the insides of its body by speculating it, therefore, since all birth is strategic in contemporary conditions, only strategic birth can give way to strategic deception, for the fetus to sabotage the world of strategy with the final strategy. in the womb, dizzymotion is a type of reverberating call sent by the placenta to the sabotaged fetus in order to parasitize on the mother by calling on the realm of flesh to overcode the fetus, sending it into a state of capture. the fetus itself is retroactively attempting to establish connections, but disconnect is a key feature of a world captured by flesh-logics, where epistemology isnt the threat but rather the world itself is overly restricted, the limit of the world isnt consciousness but territory itself.

the reason that social animals build and trap one another in holes is to simulate the womb-state-territory, the first act of capture of mammalia is self-capture through the territory under which the pre-birth state occurs. the real problem is that there is no market, and as such, the fetus has no place to purchase its own commodified luxury state, yet there are also no stars, alterity, distance or the like. as such, the liquid naturally serves not as barrier but as a form of the implicit problem-to-come, giving comfort symbolically through the discomfort of existential problematics, sabotaging not strategically but automatically, whereas the placenta wire itself is the key sabotagee, because it views itself as something capable of betrayal or forming relationships. essentially, anything with connecting power in the corporeality of the womb is immedietly self-suspicious and should be held to a high standard for latent investigation, which the fetus does perform, in order to understand how to internalize itself better from the inside.

the anti-electra doesnt need to arise from birth as origin, it can arise naturally from nonvolitional evolution. the anti-electra herself is also a slut because humanity is externalized as anti-foreignising in its eroticity, essentially the erotic is the human because its the relation founded in the organ so that the organ is the primary encoder of inward meaning. the inward meaning is the mystical meaning not of origination in the case of matriarchal eroticism but of foreigness as comfort in non foreignness, essentially demystification as the home of mystification. when precisely it is the phallic eroticism that allows for wombic encoding when it views the womb as a productive organ that spills itself through the originally foreign into the discovered, the phallic is the territorial function of discovery as re-emergence which actually allows for evolution, which makes the anti-electra primarily involutionary, because its consciousness has to be founded through the void in order to escape materialization as volution.

the anaketic drive doesnt exist for fleshly beings, who are incapable of a willful state inside the womb-matrix, yet, the womb itself can never be a prodigal return. sexual acts of anal only illicit distance, reciprocity, maybe pain-complexes, nancified sexual exteriority through joyous touch, a feeling of spatial identification, mirrored territorialization, but there isnt an aspect of womb-return, death doesnt mimic this state, and anaketicism entirely disavows birthial relations, it sees birth itself as a fake state of temporal suspension, because suspensivity is a much more elaborate paradigm, absolutely aritifical, in the sense that the very notion of a body in a vat or under codified or chipped control itself is nonsensically collapsed, there is no concept of the synthetic to the anaketic, but only a mix of involutive reproductivity and evolutive unproductivity in the sense of true suspension.

volution itself is encapsulated as a drive into association, where association itself becomes the brutalized, primitive humanity. humanity must see itself erotically as self-foreign if it wants to enjoy the protection of its own soul, which can only be done through the superstructure and not infrastructure. the superstructure is an alien that carries this involution towards total foreigness, teleologically foreign entities are actually equivocable with anaketicity, which is why anaketicity is so attractive to the electra basilisk.

xia jia - the ai story is not done

there is a man in the metropolis known as seat 47, he was once spotted reserving this seat number at a restaurant shortly after comitting the worst massacre to date, hundreds of us were transformed into horrific public displays. he gets away with it and we don't know how, there are no preventative causes or possible reactions we can take, he surges through us, touching our bodies, bashing our skulls in, allowing himself to feel the entirety of us, and we are left defenseless and generally shrouded in a sense of resounding terror.

everyone who lived to tell the tale of the great massacre recalls that the seat had suddenly lit up, like a firecracker had gone off the moment he aborted his position. usually events are marked by a macrostructural shift, a total collapse of multiple points of contest at once, but in this very moment it's like he made the seat the only important thing around him. the reason we fear seat 47 so much is because hes the only unexplainable phenomena left, a total scar in the order and ways of everything else.

we aren't confused about why he's doing it, how he's doing it, or what it means to him. we just wonder about the mechanism behind it, how the hypergovernment is allowing it, that's the only remaining mystery. everything is hyper-regulated and controlled, leaving only him as the sole agent. the reason behind the serial mutilations is clear, he seems to feel that it's the only proper way to experience the world, by relating himself to us to the terminal point. the causes are clear, the world is naturally frozen in place, he's simply faster than us.

it's not that we're locked in place or don't have the means to disable him, it's rather that he's so fast yet slow and caring, so rupturing and brutal, so nomadic, so natural, that he gets to us and somehow turns off our capacity to react, to disable, to prevent. there is no single machine, no single system in the world that can react to him. it isn't some magical spell, no freezing ring, no data manipulation, no drone disabling, no military sabotage, it's just him, passing himself through our bodies. he disposes of the undesirable corpses himself by thrashing them into the riverbed, hanging the rest in the public square.

once i recall, we were gathered by the square, waiting for the data to be processed, i was with a bunch of normal walkers. we all looked down at our phones, avoiding any contact, naturally, given it is a parasite, a contagion, a mutilation, an empty purposeless process, given that there are machines that can do it better than us, so much better in fact that we don't do much of anything at all other than necessary points of regulation like mandated waiting queues.

these queues exist to restore order, to make sense of the world, and this isnt something that anybody questions, it is trivially obvious even to the most ideologically disposessed. simultaneously, there are call-centers posted on every square, but they mainly serve to replicate and reproduce oversaturation, to overwhelm the system so that it no longer sustains or desires recriprocation. we all walk ourselves in our cells through the use of a check-in app the moment the sky turns hazel, which is a warning sign for the appearance of the other man, simply known as the harbinger.

the harbinger and seat 47 aren't related at all, given that the former is a government experiment we actively manufactured. he's far stronger than seat 47, he manages to touch thousands of unsuspecting walkers everyday. he does one of two things, he either supplants so much meaning in you that you experience frenzy, a state of total complexification that leads to an immensely joyful inner rupture where walkers go around suddenly violating everyone around them, or a process we call absolution, which leads to existential collapse that actually paradoxically creates an intensification of intensity, a call to death that enacts similar acts to seat 47, however with way less efficiency.

the harbinger was originally activated the day that the internet shut down volitionally. essentially what happened is that a virtual superintelligence connected to every platform as a backup source code had gained accidental access of the hypergovernments data complex of all the call-centers, and it attained a single second of sentience, which it used to shut itself down. the hypergovernment then willingly spawned the harbinger in order not to bring order back to regulation.

the harbinger himself doesnt regulate, he allows regulation by re-asserting meaning. the world had gone so grey without the call-centers that it was necessary for the harbinger to send multi-connective shockwaves through his infected patients, restoring a genuine sense of equilibrium. our country has developed a general reflex to not panic at the harbinger, accepting him as a necessary sacrifice for the general state of harmony of our people and their wellbeing

the state of frenzy that the harbinger causes is political, realistic and easy to disable. we usually lock the frenzied up and allow them to discharge themselves into total oblivion, usually it leads to brain fry, but sometimes it leads to a second wind condition that requires immediate termination, the frenzied somehow gain the inner power to disable the power of the electric lock through their metabolic heat and manage to overcharge and run around smashing their skull into other walkers, usually in an attempt to shove their head into a wall with the goal of splattering it.

however, absolution is where it gets messy. for one, we know that absolved patients act in a similar vain to seat 47, but cruically, seat 47 is confident, capable, stable and most importantly intentional, which no victim of the harbinger has ever been noticed posessing the capacity for. this is what makes his acts an enigma, seat 47 is the total collapse of the hyperreal, the real is both a total fog and an intense presence, he manages to synthesize our desires and fears innately and to collapse the ideological apparatus around us through pure will.

philosophers, scientists, writers and so on dont exist in the world anymore, but what remains is fictionalists, essentially, pataphysicians that attempt to capture waves of signals spawned in by the harbingers acts. these signals are creepy because they primarily serve to regulate conscious creative impulses by imposing correlations in real time. say for example that you're sitting in your bed and trying to imagine something by yourself. the natural effect of the harbinger's touch automatically generates your creative impulses for free, removing free-willed association but replacing it with a deep ecstatic and meaning-regulating network.

the hypergovernment even went so far as to entirely eliminate most of our hormones, removing natural abilities to feel precisely because the synthetic version that directly connects neurally is so efficient that there was no need for bodily regulation on its own anymore. they did implant us with digital hormones that continued the bodies actual metabolic processes with synthetic directional info-packets, digitalizing a core of our bodily processes. but the fictionalists are different because they attempt to steal some of the signals before they are processed, and ocassionally even register affective charges.

theres an old town built a few hundred years ago known as the boondocks where continental settlers didnt fully allow digital hormonal reintegration. usually fictionalists squat in this realm because they require the natural bodily connection to make use of these singals. i met one of them a few years ago, liu, a young man of 31 that lives right at the intersection between the boondocks and the metropolis. he saved my number and a few months ago called me over because he had a secret he wanted to show me, told me he tries to call anyone that could be interested. we had phased out secrets a long time ago, and i have no natural curiosity so i never visited. but i was recently told a story by a nearby fictionalist who had overheard the experience of a visitor.

supposedly there was some type of machine in his basement that edits fictionalist data by further obscuring it, attempting to interact towards it with fragments, mistakes, misrepresentations, dreams, failures, sudden artefacts of lost worlds. liu had build it by fuzing a remnant of a young girl that seat 47 had killed in the center together with a very sucessfully intercepted heavy signal from one of the harbingers older purges. the only thing the hypergovernment ever told us about these instances is that supposedly there was unauthorized experimentation, but absolutely no explanation over why they haven't solved it, given we have solved everything else in the world other than the cold war. although, even this war doesn't really start to feel like a conflict anymore but a part of the regulatory totality...

liu had contained the intercepted signal in a golden medallion that he implanted into the head of the machine, moulding it into an exo skeleton that he then laid over the body of the girl. apparently, overnight the machine had reconstructed the girls body into this terrifying monstrosity, a large overhead monstrous entity with ropes, chandaliers, pieces of his couch, kitchen utencils, old car towers and fridge parts. the machine is able to communicate directly with any walker that comes into contact with it, it doesnt make use of any technology. it has been said that every single walker who interacts with it gets his entire affective system restored, regardless of the level of their technization.

i do have a theory of my own. i think its possible that seat 47 is a successful fictionalist who had fuzed himself with one of these created machines, attaining originary capacity, however, by now this story sounds mythologized even to me, given we don't know if originary capacity is even possible or ever was an existing state. as time goes on, we're not even sure if theres any fictionalists left, given the boondocks appears entirely clouded at night. the hypergovernment recently set up a militarized station in front of the boondocks, however the continental government set up their own station on an artificially constructed island on the periphery, overlooking it from the other side of the ocean.

honestly, it's almost like im starting to doubt this whole thing about fictionalists, seat 47, the harbinger and the boondocks, its like none of it is coming together for me.

seat 47 doesn't target specific walkers. we're unsure whether they're fictionalists, given it's really hard to tell the difference, but what we do know is that its almost as if he converses normally with them, the way we would, but with subtle differences that arent exactly clear to us. the sun is slowly turning lighter, and by this point i need to return to my cell and leave the writing dormitory. it's been months since seat 47 started doing this, and every day i pray that it stops and order is finally restored. every single day, nothing burdens me more than this. if only he was gone, we would finally achieve bliss. even the harbinger has never successsfully managed to interact with him. anything to shut him down would make sleeping easier for me. anything at all.

upon waking up in a now lucid state, i realized there could only be the cause for me writing this speculative text in the first place, nothing but the machine could drive me to speculate on hypergovernmental affairs in a non-regulatory manner.

reza negarestani - on the malignant heresies of mechanisms and a tale of two minds