Category Archives: Aeolian Inquiries

Why distinguish between the machinic and the organic?
If the machine is a contrivance of power; one which enables the possession of power through devices, stratagems, and tricks; then is it not an engine of decisive resolutions?
Whence the culture of decision?  Is it only organic? Or is every so-called ‘natural event’, a ‘decision’? Are ‘natural laws’, ‘decisions’?
Because, are not all of these, arrangements and machinations?

A decision, is a determination.
Preoccupying itself with the culture of decision, the contemporary philosophical scene’s enthusiasm for those, like Laruelle, who return to the comforts of its metaphysical habitat, can be seen perhaps as a nostalgia for conventional modes of determination, the wish to escape the ever more tangible possibilities of synergy that are in play. It is an anxiety of both power and understanding, as those occur in fixated forms. The irony is that such fixations are mechanical, ‘machinic’; traditions, habits, are ‘machines’. On this basis, organic economies, insofar as they are habitual economies, or economies of habit, likewise, can be said to be machines.
If decisional enthusiasm is the anxious nostalgia of and for determination, what else could this be, but the Occidental android’s desire to objectify, according to the metaphysics of machine?

The denial of lack, is the denial of desire. If the ‘becoming’ of any process or tendency requires the concept of need or desire to explain transitions between initially posited and alleged forms or states, this of course implies that those forms or states are not complete in themselves, that they are lacking, and that this lack powers transformation. Of course, this metaphysical scheme is contingent on the initial positings of ‘forms or states’ that it simply assumes. But given such assumption, the calculus of presence and absence, regarding forms and states, is unavoidable, at the level of their transactions.
To view this metaphysical mechanism of becoming only through its presences as configured by the substance of desire, whilst denying lack (absence), as both Deleuze and Lyotard do, in their libidinal philosophies, uses the conventional intuitions and common sense habits of substantial presence to elide the ‘negativity’ of absence implicit in any objective metaphysics. This partiality to the positivity of substantial presence, is bought at the expense of both; a loss of negative perspective; and of
the systematic and objectifying origination giving rise to the categories of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, in the first place.
The concern is not so much with Deleuze and Lyotard’s libidinal investigations, in themselves, and the contexts which they were addressing, but rather, in the potential appropriations to which they had been subjected since then. Whilst, for me, their works are brilliant openings out of constrictive tendencies, it seems to me that the areas, zones, and territories, they opened up have merely become the sites of constricted and closured nostalgic development. They have become guidebooks of a continuing positivist instrumentalisation, which to some degree, their texts can’t be said to not entirely support.

{AK}: The “complete substantialization of desire” that you suggest is an absolutism of desire. This absolutism is the inflation of a particular ‘monoconceptual convention’, that of ‘desire’, into an ur-principle.

To assume that nothingness is impossible, on the grounds of referential, factical and ontological assumptions, begs the question, tacitly introducing objectifying or reifying expectations without questioning their axiomatic presupposition. This is a delimited theology of ‘desire’, constrained by objective horizon. This is why you spoke of “an immanent god”; and it is surely not without significance that you attach a litany of potencies to this conception.
Buddhist nothingness, is not bound by this objective or objectifying horizon, or its axiomatic presupposition. Thus, there is no requirement to objectify nothingness, as the ‘something’ of a ‘void’, which is merely objective op-position. Buddha said: “He who attaches to the void, is truly lost.”

Objectivity, in general, may well be driven by libidinal production, but there is no libidinal production if there is no objectivity or objectifying.
Thinking “desire as free from subjects and objects (from o towards someone or something)”, might question objective categorisations from the perspective of a libidinal principle, but the objective horizon has only been deferred on to that principle, if a “desire in-itself” is proposed.

So, though libidinal interpretation liberates consideration from traditional and substantial fixation on ‘subjects and objects’, it does not exceed the objective horizon which produces them, having, ‘itself’, become this horizon. This is merely the displacement of fixation, the rewriting of a traditional anxiety, according to the same circle of objective need.
Schopenhauer is aware of this, as he writes: This “nothing,” however, “is also the PrajnaParamita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 41112)

This is why I wrote, in the context of transcending the logic of objective and objectifying need: “then ineluctably another way of proceeding comes into play, beyond & other than the usual response of simply restating neglected metaphysica, as ‘positions’ or posited anchors. The angst of anchoring proves redundant.”

[Mario Hierro] “Mario Hierro I think I loose some meaning in the intersection of the subtlety of your text and my shortages in english. Still, this substantialization was just an experimentation, in fact desire would be a non-substantial substance, it is like a pure relation had agency and power (to bind things together, to take them to its limit…). Is like if I was saying, to substantialize difference, which in fact is what de-substantializes anything. Also, is interesting this emergency of void or nothingness, which in fact comes into play with this centrality of desire. A desire without a body would have to operate, somehow, in vacuity. In my opinion, nothingness is impossible (because in fact, is something), and there is a curious dialectics between the impossibility of nothingness (which is condition for its possibility) and the potentialities of desire.”
 

{AK}: I guess there’s more than one way of substantialising, it doesn’t have to be quite such an absolute binary sort of thing.
The notion of ‘pure relation’, together with its configuring power, drawing that which it configures to a limit, suggests the metaphysical picturing is energised, and ‘at work’. Your point about substantialising the difference that desubstantialises, hints at that, too.

I understand what you’re suggesting with the substantialisation of desire beyond its usual configuration with its corollary and conventional distribution of ‘agency’.  Desire itself becomes the agent. That’s why I thought Buddhist considerations might be relevant.
The question of ‘nothingness’ being ‘impossible’, because ‘in fact’ it is ‘something’; is the metaphysical question that the Schopenhauer quote distinguishes aptly.
A fact, or ‘factum’, is a ‘thing made’. Just as any identity is a construction, one constructed out of substantialising assumptions; so, too, is any ‘factual identity’. The referential ‘something’ is in advance an assumed position, which seeks substantialisation if subjected to the pressures and conditions of ontological demand and enquiry, as in ‘What is it?’.
You’re right, that there is a curious dialectics involved, in the expectations of desire.
Nietzsche’s phrase: “The highest will to power, is to imprint Being upon Becoming”; outlines effectively this printing of yearning, as it were.

[Mario Hierro] “I would bet for a complete substantialization of desire.

Desire being everywhere, anywhere. Desire being a substantive, not just a verb (desiring) or an adjective (desirable). Is not just that I desire to eat, neither that eating is desirable, but that desire eats.

A desire without a body, with its virtual machineries or diagrams. Desire as an univocal content for multiple expressions. An immanent god.

Concentrical and centripetal vectoriality, condensation into affective attractors and passional triggers, dissipation into actions and explosions. Also power, as its codification, regulation, fixation, domination, exploitation. Also potency, as its force, capacity, frequency, liberation, exploration.

Potency as the affirmation of desire; power as its negation; resistance, as its reaffirmation.”

{AK}: Desire, as an ur-principle, has no problem at all in producing a semantic field or grid, total in coverage, one whose seeming universal extent can then be substantialised on the basis of this completion.
Desire and dunamis; the power of need, the power of capability. Interlinked concepts, a semantic climate within which it is always possible to dwell.
But the exclusive privileging of this conceptual level, in its conventional senses, as in the artificial constancy of a ‘climate control’, bespeaks only the monoconceptual conventionality of the substance it incessantly declares.
The anthropic dramas it celebrates through such declaration, are artefacts of encounter, selected and scaled; metaphysical habitats, self-veiled.

[Schopenhauer]: “On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.
This “nothing,” however, “is also the Prajna­Paramita of the Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp 411­12)

{AK}: I guess, if anything can be ‘Nothing’, i.e., if no determinate substantia can be said to obtain, in such a way, as to ground traditional metaphysical schemas, or ‘worlds’; according to the remits of the usual dogmatisms; then ineluctably another way of proceeding comes into play, beyond & other than the usual response of simply restating neglected metaphysica, as ‘positions’ or posited anchors. The angst of anchoring proves redundant.
But the calculi of clinging to determinations of ‘desire’, as in the simplicities of positivist instrumentalisation, more often than not leads only to the classic Occidental oscillation: “Rather than not will, it wills nothing (destruction) at all” Heidegger.

If desire is the production of refications (“things”), it is thus a principle of their production.
But the notion of a thing or entity arises as an abbreviated perspective; that is to say, a construction of entitative (en)closure produced as in an intersection of forces, of which a subset of forces are responsible for entitative interpretation.
When entitative interpretation is radically responsible for the abbreviated readings of objectivity, the notion of desire as their ostensible mode of production, becomes a feature of perspectival interpretation, one facet of metaphysical possibility, glinting intermittently in the light of revolving consideration(s).

If the metaphysics of desire is substantialised as an explanatory perspective, it requires objectifications, both at the level of principle and the level of operation, as structural moments of the logic describing its metaphysics.

Desire is always towards the desired, which is refied or objectified, as such.

If the metaphysics of physics and energy (energiea, work) are similarly substantialised, as explanatory perspective; objectivity has to do with structural recurrences, and appears through the interaction of these structural recurrences, of which a subset of interactions are held to constitute systems of structural perception – they perceive those structures.

These two substantial perspectives play out the twinned logic of another, ‘form’ and ‘force’. The articulation of the one always requires the resources’ of the other.  Although, it might be thought that the logic of negation emerges out of a more formal logic and consideration suited to objectivity, rather than the differential nature of force or forces, the notion of a ‘force’ is just as much a reified identity or ‘object’ as any other, and therefore just as susceptible to the logic of position and negation.
Prior to any consideration of positing or negating; of ‘form’ or of ‘force’; the radical origination of identity, its usual metaphysics and supervenient assumptions, all need to be mobilised according to a mutual combinatorics of speculative projection; where each and every objectification, regardless of its traditional positionings as ‘element’ or ‘derivation’ in local metaphysical systems, is a possible substance and monadic perspective in its own right.
This is a necessary first step in generating the space of a new theoretical agility, no longer solely bound by perspectival notions of structure, and the local notions of ‘purpose’ and ‘interest’, from which their identifications originate.
The radical mobilisation of identity does not at all neglect the traditional and contemporary preoccupations associated with those notions, but neither does it neglect the opportunity for unlimited intercessions prior to the operations of identity assumption. Such a radical priority alone, cannot constitute a General Conceptual Holography, especially when considering the contingency of both logical, and chronological or temporal, sequencings. But as methodological strategy, enabling nominally ‘radical’ considerations that nonetheless exceed the holding patterns of positivist fixation responsible for the blockages of contemporary thought, the tactic of declaring a more profound beginning, has the merit of introducing a fresh configuration of inquiry, unburdened by the insular expectations of habitual nostalgia, though without neglecting possible aetiologies of that nostalgia.

Quick response to Terence Blake’s “ZIZEK ON DELEUZES LETTER: against identitarianism“

[terenceblake] “so it is only fitting that Zizek misreads it, and Deleuze’s work generally, as avoiding any encounter with Hegel, who he (Zizek) claims represents “absolute Alterity”.

{AK}: What would “absolute alterity” mean?
The notion of otherness, inherently presupposes that of identity. Without an identity positioning, the ‘other to-‘ relation cannot obtain. So, strictly speaking, if “absolute alterity” is in any way identified, as severed from identity, it could no longer be ‘alterity’. Its absolute inflation exceeds the relation of its production.
As can be seen in the italicisation above, this absolute inflation is itself a product of a totalising identification.
Zizek’s phrasing, reflects the positivist assumptions of a simplifying, substantialist procedure, neglecting logical and implicative conditions. It has never been the case, that identity thinking, or differential thought, are in and of themselves essentially inadequate or deficient in any way. How can they be, given their essential complicity? But it is the case, that practices of positivist abbreviation and assumption, lead to the cul de sacs and fixations of habitually unthinking and inappropriate, substantial commitments. Such an entrainment of abridged assumptions; mechanically, lazily, illogically, and incompetently applied; results in insularity and positivist instrumentalisation. It is the inflation, not of identities or differences, but of fixations, however those fixations might be characterised, in what can only be called an imperialism of insularity.
The question might be asked, however, as to how the determination of ‘fixation’ is to be accomplished. For some, asking questions and honest consideration, are all that is necessary to discern theoretical blockage. For others, caught in the grip of fixation, more work is perhaps necessary. But the question itself, when in the modality of hasty demand, exemplifies fixation.
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[terenceblake] “All the uncertainty is left out.”

{AK}: Yes, and all the stupidity is left in! That, in a positivist nutshell (nut’s hell), is the exclusionary procedure of positivist instrumentalisation.

[terenceblake] “Laruelle’s “non-standard” thought is thus a half-way house between standard philosophy and ontological pluralism.

{AK}: Academic philosophies of-, are, without exception, metaphysical-semantic inflations of concepts. There is an unlimited conceptual alphabet, so to speak, the majority of which is neglected in favour of the anthropic and academic preoccupation with the notion of realisation, and it’s hypostatic imaging as the ‘real’. The inordinate inflation of this principle is mainly due to deprivation and expression anxieties.  There are others, but their delineation requires a more expansive context of explication. We can call almost all socially institutionalised philosophy ‘realist’, in this sense. The reality principle is a not so strange attractor, exerting its pull on all communi-cable philosophies of the anthropic.

Laruelle’s response to both epistemological and ontological proliferation, is essentially a monist empiricism, or empirical monism, which he achieves largely through a judicious appropriation of Buddhist techniques of metaphysical deflation.  His borrowings, though, are selective, serving the purposes of his monist empiricism.  The nature of that selectivity; its procedures and omissions; strongly characterise it, I would argue, as an insidious apologia at the outset, for innate forms of positivist instrumentalisation at the social core. The instrumental option is nothing new, but the lengths to which Laruelle has gone, in order to absolutise it as a reality-bolstered axiom, show both a degree of intriguing defensiveness, and an ideological inflation of a very specific idea of ordinariness, which can only be characterised as some yet to be determined cultural resistance. The notion of resistance bespeaks a threat, whether hallucinated or not. Obviously, whatever its forms, that threat is interpreted as a threat to the core reality of positive instrumentalisation.
Laruelle’s conversion of philosophies into a Lego or Meccano set of material possibilities is something that SF thinking has been doing all along, with far greater range, but it doesn’t just do that alone, nor as some kind of monotonous revelation.
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">[terenceblake] "There is the non-standard voice of an unknown stranger and an unassimilated foreigner in Laruelle’s texts (“étranger” in French means both stranger and foreigner) along with the more standard voice of a Continental academic philosopher. Even the title of the book expresses Laruelle’s awareness of, and struggle with these two voices.
Laruelle’s appeal and continuing relevance lies in the difficult and conflicted harmony (or at least co-presence) of these two voices. He maintains the exigency of immanence in perhaps its purest form today, although that very purity may have prevented him from attaining it except in its most general, and programmatic, outlines.</span>

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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">{AK}: How 'pure' can such an exigency be, if there are two irreducible voices? Is that not a telling duality artefact of the current fad for the transcendence of immanence?  To describe it in terms of 'purity' at all, betrays this idealisation of the immanent, and thus, concomitantly, of its polar twin, the transcendent.  The same conventional and questionable logic of metaphysical distribution informing both terms is at play; the same hallucinated surfaces of substantial structuring and positivist instrumentalisation continue on, like cartoon characters running past the edge of a cliff, in theoretical mid-air, their dogmatic limbs spinning around according to their misplaced nostalgias of effective philosophical or non-philosophical, action.
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[terenceblake] “Reading this book and the immediately preceding books (where Laruelle tries to come to terms with Lacan) and also the succeeding ones (where he tries to come to terms with Levinas and Althusser), we can see that something more than non-philosophy is required if Laruelle is to actually implement his research programme.
Laruelle is in need of a non-standard supplement to allow him to pass from the critique of philosophy’s sufficiency and abstract programmatic talking about a different mode of thinking to its concrete practical effectuation.

{AK} When John Coltrane said that he didn’t know how to stop playing his saxophone solos, miles Davis told him: “Take the horn out of your mouth!”
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[terenceblake] “We can conclude that despite the seeming promise of its (negative and positive) heuristic principles of Laruelle’s metaphysical research programme it is missing a crucial element: the bridging principle that would permit the practice of non-philosophical thought. This un-bridged gap accounts for the disappointing attempts at realisation, usually amounting to repetitive affirmations of a “new use of philosophy”  by Laruelle and his disciples, as if simply proclaiming something made it so. This characterises Laruellean non-philosophy as a form of performative idealism

{AK}: I agree. There is a risk of instituting an insularity of action or performance, something I cautioned against, almost two years ago:

“[John Ó Maoilearca]: “Individually, they are all One – and this is firstly a performative gesture before it becomes an ontological thesis (that tells us ‘what they are’)”:

{AK}: If this “One” is “firstly” a somatic sign, is such deliverance into an ecstasy of accomplishings, not a flight into an ‘action mysticism’?
There are two possible subtextual registers operating here: one, is the anchoring in a kind of  Wittgensteinian “showing” that sidesteps interpretative drift; two, is the implicit valorisation of an unquestioned expediency, in the appeal to ‘practical action’ as an unquestioned ‘given’.
The dancing ‘body’ is, in-deed, important, but it is precisely because of that import that it risks returning to whatever insidious & coercive dualisations are floating around: the remnants of Cartesian afterglow.”

(http://visionfiction.theotechne.com/WordPress/?p=886)