I stands for human.［白森］
1
As sabotage is to war. Literary subversion is to ideology.
I maintain that no ideology in-itself shall be held sacrosanct and that wherever we may be so equipped, we should subvert the ideologies of domination. Not to say that all ideas are bad; or that certain principles are not worthy of admiration; or that we should not adhere to them. I am only saying that we should always question the validity of ideas which conspire to dominate. Particularly those which do so covertly are most worthy of the subversive effort. After all, why shouldn’t we the people of the world play an active role in the creation of our own belief systems? If there is to be a collective belief system at all, let it be in the state of perpetual, collective creativity! Otherwise only the sovereign individual shall be the one legitimate author of any belief.
Ideas should be shared between likeminded individuals and presented nobly in civil negotiations of mutual discourse. Best of all is when we exchange new ideas through the medium of artistic expression. In this domain the binary nature of argumentative language can be transcended, such as with humor, jokes, etc. “A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea” (George Orwell). Humor sustains us human beings. It is not only a powerful tool for survival but also a powerfully subversive tool. Knowledge of this power dictates that art must be substantive. Art must do something other than simply entertain. Not to say that art must always be subversive, destructive, etc., but in these times of profound cultural decay, the first step towards reinvigorating our cultural landscape is to tear down all decadent structures. The good, the beautiful, the true—never die. These ideals not only stand the test of time. They persist through any malevolent strikes of subversion. Let us be literary subverters, therefore. All we have to lose are the nefarious ideologies constraining us—restraining our creative urge.
2
There can be no single, dogmatic approach to our system. Our ethics must overthrow what Christopher Hitchens would have referred to as the “celestial dictatorship.” Ours is the becoming of a dimension more philosophical than purely political, although it is the entwinement of both; at the core a dedication to the principles of not only anarchism, but also the Taoist Way.
3
Especially in the way that it functions in our society today the media is perhaps something more akin to the antimatter of human consciousness. Pointing this out is not to say there is no great artistry in contriving moving pictures or in composing an image or in arranging words into meaningful patterns. Indeed, I am far from saying that because after all, I am a huge fan of the cinema, of art, of literature, etc. My point is that moving pictures and images and the written word wherever they may be, which is to say everywhere, are working on us in propagandistic fashion; expanding our awareness yet funneled into only one preordained, unitary herd direction that is I dare say, alien to the natural flow of human consciousness. Another way of putting this would be that the media as it exists today solely exists for the purposes of narrowing our consciousness through the process of expanding it ever more towards the artificial, the technocratic, the fake. At every waking hour of every day, provided that one does not live under a rock, one is being bombarded by a constant stream of messages. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would deny that; but maybe you argue these messages are largely benevolent, benign, inconsequential. Thinking in this way is skeptically optimistic, but tragically naïve. For throughout human history, as long as the written word has existed—and, perhaps, even having been adapted mostly for this one purpose alone—the rulers of humankind have utilized a steady flow of propagandistic messages as a form of mind control. We have long been fed the maxim Think for yourself but ironically this was just a subtle nudge into the cage of isolation. Before one can truly think for ones self one must become liberated from the fortified illusion of Self. We cannot allow consciousness to expand into the pyramidal funnel of artificiality. Reject that—permitting instead the mind taps into the eternal everything that already is.
4
Who among even the most enlightened class of human beings could claim to know with absolute certainty the full scope of our mysterious universe? Certainty looks good. It feels good. It sells well. Whereas doubt, on the other hand, appears weak. It depresses. It spurs decay. Shall we go on feigning certainty then, among those whom we cannot bare to let down by exposing our fears?
5
Let us remove authoritarianism from religion. We shall liberate our human soul from the tyranny of superego. I advocate meditation as opposed to prayer for this reason. There is a subtle, but I will maintain important, difference between these two practices that has to do with the substance of identity. Both prayer and meditation involve a focus on interiority and the connection one may discover about metaphysics therein; however they may be distinguished by their contrasting active versus passive modes. In general that is to say that prayer is an appeal to divinity, whereas meditation is the contemplation of emptiness. One is in essence a form of wishing. The other wishes to transcend wishing by recognizing the illusory aspect of wishing itself. Wishing reinforces earthly desire. It is precisely this kind of psychic behavior that locks one into the realm of appearances. It is intimately bound up with the substance of identity, as the occurrence of wishing requires a subject to do the wishing, i.e. an ego. My argument is that ego becomes immorally conflated when desiring unification with the image of supernatural authority invested in superego. It doesn’t matter from an ethical standpoint whether the object of prayer is someone else as opposed to one’s self. Altruistic desires fuel self delusion as much as selfish ones. Speaking about what is and isn’t moral, I should assert here that there is nothing inherently moral about authority in itself. Morality is rooted in choice and the eternal moment which is everything that exists as an infinity of choice. Authoritarianism aims to reduce this into one coercive moment of making the “right” choice. I will hold that actively conflating oneself with this illusion of immutable correctness is irreconcilable with cosmic freedom. The most radical statement available to make is the simple fact that it is just not moral.
6
Could a single will effectively break itself? Am I capable of tearing down my very own psyche so as to build it back up again, but in only the manner that I sees fit? Is it possible for one in the same consciousness both to submit and be submitted to? Moreover if it were, would that be a worthy project? Is that not the absolute zero point of sorts? A valuable project befitting of all fully autonomous, moral individuals?
“Stoicism is self-tyranny,” says Nietzsche. . .
If tyranny as a concept was ever considered in the positive sense, then it would have to be in this one. We must resist political tyranny in all of its manifest forms. Except for one. In ourselves, towards ourselves. This is the only moral form of political tyranny. If we are to resist it, first we must overthrow it in ourselves. We must take it over, indeed turning it on itself, in ourselves. This is called the conquest of the dominator urge. It is the first step towards opening up a space for liberation. It is the principle of no rule but self-rule.
Self-rule with an iron fist.
7
We live in a new Dark Ages, where paradoxically there’s never been greater potential for illumination. Information is everywhere. Whereas a comprehensive knowledge of how to adapt to this state of affairs is lacking. A starting point for untangling this matrix of wires might be in learning how to exert greater control over the faculties of the mind, rather than in ceding more territory and surrendering more will to cybernetic control and technocratic authority.
Is it possible to develop a dual faculty for an idea, to understand it in such a way that one can use it both for power and disarmament? Or is that not already a double edge? What I mean to say is that in our State of Affairs, there’s no information that can’t be turned into disinformation, and these days disinformation is the norm. Hence, one must at all times try to disarm information in order to reveal the point, where one can see closest to its naked essence.
Just think of Marx or Nietzsche. A good idea is not enough. It must be interpreted. It must be practiced and rehearsed. And forget good ideas, think about how many great ideas have been perverted by the powerfully mediocre! Think of the ways they have been inverted, or rendered impotent by those who would claim them for their own, or sapped of their vital force through commodification, or obfuscated through a hidden layer of ideology.
We might have to accept the idea that no idea can be outright accepted prima facie. What we lose in certainty, we only have to gain in the ἀταραξία of Pyrrhonism.
In avoiding being mislead, one can avoid misleading others. And carry it like a talisman into the bizarre theater, aflame with this insane project of knowing everything through science, through religion, through State symbolism, states of affairs, etc.
“We’re reaching for death / On the end of a candle / We’re trying for something / That’s already found us” (Jim Morrison).
One more thing: maybe concepts precede words in the same way that mythology precedes history. Or maybe like cause and effect on the quantum level, their relationship is not precisely this logical.
A dual faculty therefore teaches us to beware of conflating a distinction but as importantly, not to privilege one before an other.
8a
You are not your thoughts, yet without them you are surely nothing. This idea however mustn’t lead one down a path to despair, but rather into the boundless space of liberation. For nothingness alone is boundless.
While in despite of the incorporeality of thought, every mind is a delimitation. Every concept is a vanishing point, if and only if understood in the widest sense. Broadly speaking then, thoughts are the building blocks of appearances. Their concreteness in macrocosm is the prerequisite for being to exist. However if one falls victim to the illusion that such a substance is quite actually solid, or that this image of the thing-in-itself is more than just an image; thought becomes the generation of a perceptual cage, precisely due to this illusion of imperceptibility. One mistakes for the essence of what they’re thinking, their very own spiritual chains.
One assumes they are the map, rather than an experience of the territory.
Go beyond the concept of an origin to realize that since no One thought generated, no One thought can dictate, the terms of All-in-Existence.
8b
Unification can be paradoxically also a process of division. Conquerors of the world have used this technique to enlarge their tyrannies. We however shall counter these measures by becoming our very own liberator of the soul. One does so by becoming the cybernetician of one’s own spiritual code.
Thought if you will, is a code of sorts. It is the underlying demiurge, writing operations for this phenomenal world. Each line of code or concept, every nuance of this system has been contrived. Nor would anything exist otherwise. Knowing then, really, is as they say. Knowing that thought is a necessary contrivance is already half the battle, for then no one without your conscious awareness, shall ever again put a thought into your head.
There shall be no more room for a helmsman, besides the one that controls from within; for truly, no thought may control anyone, who stands at least one step removed from their own head.
9
I will now sing into existence my concept of the warrior poet.
A warrior poet is no soldier. Nor is they even a writer in the traditional sense. There’s no writing for profit, there’s no going to war, for the warrior poet. One does however, live and die by a code of the sword like pen and the pen like sword. Or that is to say, one takes its conceits seriously, as if they were principles. And one regards all principles as if they were conceits. To a warrior poet, there’s no difference between a pen and a sword. And yet this difference means everything.
The first key principle of a warrior poet is that thought must be understood as a form of action. Our goal is to act in ways that interface with the created and the one who creates. We must live our lives in accordance with the dictum, that art can’t merely reflect, but must also shape.
10
Another: We cannot merely let our art descend into propaganda, but must make art that is so authentically meaningful that it becomes more true than propaganda.
A shining example of hitting this mark is George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. These works manage to extract the essence of propaganda and ideology, presenting to us their raw schema after deconstruction, and reassemblage into an artistic diagram.
Said in another way. If we are to achieve this effect we must become like serpents, that eat up a poison, spitting it back out as the cure. A process which goes by many names, the most obvious one is: Solve et coagula.
11
The next is called the principle of writing with a water brush on a block of hot granite.
“Writing” is a shadow side to life but also creates it and gives it form, which is a paradox because: It is formless.
Reason and Imagination are tracked in this mold, these faculties which can section off discrete units of the territory that get onto the map. By another metaphorical name, this process may be likened to the construction of a ladder, rung after rung. The principle of writing with a water brush on a block of hot granite means essentially, to climb a ladder then kick it away. The point is that height is an illusory reward, a mere plateau in the vast range of emptiness, where there is nothing to “get”—only an infinity of places to go.
Wittgenstein tried his best to delineate a realm of perfect sense, so as to discover the exact shape of nonsense, because it was the latter (and not the “ladder”) that truly interested him.
Not to say that this is what our lives will have amounted to ultimately, but that in living life in such a way, we might find the invisible pattern beneath.
If you think this is nothing, words also won’t help you.
12
No concrete thought, no immaterial word.
A definition may be true but no language is created through a dictionary, no law is universal beyond a mere contingency. The Logos is like the Tao. This is not an anthropomorphic god or transcendental logic but an immanent cause, a primordial chaos that creates order out of itself.
From where else does this power, the authority to create a law, originate?
In our time, this power was invested in the State. Until we began to question just why one apparatus should have a monopoly on this capacity.
Precisely what is it that forbids a sovereign individual their capacity to judge on their own terms; to associate with other sovereigns freely, and to form communal organizations, effectively creating an independent code of conduct?
13a
If it’s possible that art can shape the world; if it’s not bound to a mere reflective function, then this is a power that we’ll call the power of equivalence. Of course the idea of equivalence here is a metaphor, and indeed another word for this power of equivalence is metaphor. And it is ποιεῖν, where “to make” is also “to do” and “to bring something into being that did not exist before” and hence, it is precisely where poetry becomes praxis.
And hence it can be said that the concept of the warrior poet is the same as the figure of Orpheus.
We could also categorize our principles as Orphean. The possibility of even making this move however is dependent on the power of equivalence, and hence we may also call this move the mere Orphean principle.
13b
This can be worked as a double edge: As equivalence or equivocation. Equivocation is more like a Siren’s Song, i.e. the conflation of appearance with reality that leads to being swallowed up by an illusion. It’s that method of artificing which skillfully cuts out the truth, and reassembles it, “the truth,” as a collage of extraneous detail, or as a reduction to pastiche; whereas equivalence is to weave what is seemingly irreconcilable into “One,” i.e. the power of metaphor and signification, let’s say. What is meant, for example, by saying that art is like life, in how: “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the whole radiance of Eternity, / Until Death tramples it to fragments [and we can] No more let Life divide what Death can join together” (Shelley, Adonais).
This is a conceit that we might also deem Sympathy for Pluto.
13c
Equivalence beats equivocation, every time.
Art beats propaganda.
Creating is a force for good. Poetry is praxis transubstantiated in the figure of Orpheus, and adhered to as the way of the warrior poet.
14
One interpretation of the folly of Arachne in ancient Greek mythology demonstrates the tactical importance of pretense.
As Ovid writes in Book VI of The Metamorphoses: “. . . Arachne dared / To rival Pallas [Athena] at the loom, to think / Herself superior in art. [. . .] . . . she, foolish, / Ready to show her skill, raced to her fate. [. . .] Not even Pallas nor blue-fevered Envy / Could damn Arachne’s work. The gold-haired goddess / Raged at the girl’s success. . .” (English translation by Horace Gregory).
If we conceive of this mytheme in terms of a battle, especially one in which there’s a power imbalance between the two sides, the strategic flaw presents itself to us as failure to heed the precept: “Pretend to be weak, that [your opponent] may grow arrogant” (Sun Tzu, The Art of War, I.xxii). In this light, we may now consider the efficacy of darkness, the 陰 side of things. And thus, we’ll consider the use of equivocation as a stratagem for deceit.
Consider those who were executed poets. Think of the medieval troubadour called Marcabru, who was put to death for criticizing the Lords of Gascony in his songs. Consider the techniques of the classical Chinese poets like 白居易, who used the art of symbolism and romanticizing to enact sociopolitical criticism of a current regime. Think about what Alan Moore says about the archetypal bard.
Our art redeems those who were executed poets, doing what those who were executed poets once did in the empires of old; namely, using codes to mask the true nature of our subjects, in order to criticize power by way of asymmetrical warfare. For one can’t expect to outwit a tyrant or expedite the fall of tyranny through sheer honesty alone. But rather the authenticity of our just rebellion if it’s to be successful, and if dedication to the emancipatory struggle is not to be in vain, our warrior-poetry must presuppose knowledge of how to use and thusly of how to counter the arts of deception.
Again, this is where the power of art to suggest unconscious meanings can’t be underestimated, in both the pursuit of enforcing repressive ideologies, and in sowing the seeds of their implicit destruction. Hence, our maxim bears repeating: “[Our art,] literary subversion is to ideology, as sabotage is to war” (白森).
But take heed not to engage in this battle without significant foresight. Mind Chapter IV, precepts xiii, xiv, xv of The Art of War: “[One wins their battles] by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas [one] who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory” (English translation by Lionel Giles).
Creation may only take the form of destruction insofar as the better, more beautiful and truer object is posited from the ruins of the target, before the process is even unfurled. Before making the first move, a diagram for victory must have already emerged victorious in the mind. And after all, this move doesn’t literally destroy the target, so much as set beside it a mere alternative. It opens a new door.
And where once all seemed immutable, that image has now been shot through with holes, allowing the light of a rhizome of individual minds to pass freely beyond it, indeed; “[it ticks] off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you” (Jim Morrison).
15a
What does it mean to be the author of a value? Which is more desirable, morality imposed from without, or morality composed from within?
“The healthy person is virtually without compulsive morality, but neither does he have any impulses that would require a restraining morality” (Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution).
What is it that we admire in the morality of the rebel? Of the voyou or rogue? It’s in the freedom of choice out of which the heart is followed, from which good is performed. To be sure, one may also follow their heart into badness. But whenever good is performed, also to be sure, it will be entirely of one’s own volition.
Whereas compulsory good is volitionally the same as accidental evil. A rogue may be a total bastard sometimes but at least they live by a code created from volitional purity, and hence the true rogue or scoundrel—our voyou—simply can’t act badly out of nihilism. Instead one must live with the consequences of being the sole author of meaning, and of the interpretations of karma.
For what the “moralist” calls “nihilism” is precisely a power vacuum, the contingency of all rulers.
What the “moralist” calls “nihilism” is actually the fear of anarchy, as defined as the absence of rulers.
What the “moralist” calls “nihilism” is actually the fear of chaos, as defined as unconditional freedom.
What the “moralist” calls “nihilism” is actually the fear of meaninglessness, as defined by our responsibility to create our own values.
It’s certainly true that the absolute definition of good and bad will always be at perennial odds. For there is an evil so evil that evil is good; and that law in the hands of a psychopathic ruling elite is a means of protecting unlawful action. We can see when ends are said to justify means that pragmatism becomes morality and yet morals simply can’t be prescribed. We must all move in the “wrong” direction first before knowing which is truly “right,” and if we are so convinced, let us put our all into it! Acting “wrongly” is one thing, but to act “wrong” and call it “right,” now that is something altogether less forgivable! Unless history one day ends, which is impossible, then there will always be room to criticize that ends justify the means.
In the sense that all causes are immanent to their effects, all moral action, indeed all action itself, must be founded on the covenant of no means that aren’t ends in themselves. Every I is an end in themselves, and every I is immanent to this universe.
Must not I define my own subject, or else by another be defined?
Power to the people to define their own subjects! Power to the people to define their own methods of self-control, for “[the] only discipline which is of any. . . value is self-discipline. . . Authoritative discipline, imposed from without, is invariably immoral [. . .]” (Bayard Boyeson).
Let us return to our rogue,—voyou.
Our principled rogue whose principles are founded on the principleless ground out of which codelessness produces a code, and whereby their one rule is rulelessness, out of which a harmony of rules must flow. By necessity order grows out of chaos but conversely all order “imposed from without” must descend into chaos.
15b
Where there is badness in the rogue, it manifests in the form of trickery. Now might we tease out the degree of badness that distinguishes evil from trickery, or more specifically: Where is that threshold which lies in between evil and good, known as bad, located
Orphically I wish to suggest that it can be found in the concept of a double-edged sword said to be like a φάρμακον.
This takes us back to the question of deceit, or of the tactical importance of pretense. There is the tactic of equivocation as a mode of defense, and the tactic of artificing as a mode of offense; all communication is dependent on artificing, and hence all of control too is even dependent on the strength of a message. Without a medium, there can be no message. So the medium is key. “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind” (Jim Morrison).
Any medium can be thought of as a threshold, or as a kind of liminality and what else emerges in a threshold, it is precisely trickery. The trick is a successful artificing of reality, also called illusion or magic. Every trick is in this way a provocation, too; an act that demands reaction, and not any reaction will do, only a thoughtful one.
Bad artificing is see through whereas evil artificing is an illusion and good artificing is a code that can be decrypted. The quality of the message in good artificing will be in proportion with its aesthetics. In evil artificing this translates into depth of illusion. Bad artificing is, of course ineffective, but can also be helpful or harmful in varying degrees.
But this is the constant, that wherever a fabrication can become true; wherever truth cannot exist without the possibility of lying, and where a form of lying can be raised to the virtue of an art, such as in the actor; or writer who portrays unconscious truths that, for whatever reason, can’t come out, or be understood without this form of lying, this is our territory. The issue of ambiguous morality now becomes a metaphor for our questioning of the generic division between fiction and non-fiction, a division without which, no propaganda could actually exist. For “[one] can’t speak precisely / of the way that things are besides / in a form of metaphor” (白森).
This is an axiom of the warrior poet, whose sword is a pen and whose pen is a sword; whose theory is praxis; whose actions and thoughts are bidirectional, in the sense that causes are immanent to effects; and whose covenant is: All means are in harmony with the ends.
It’s a duty imposed from within, never without, and yet flows in and out, bidirectionally, inside a liminal sphere. This liminality is art; a composition that we share. Language is a system within which, we all must play, the poet especially, whose ability to craft images, and to create concepts, is dependent on it. Furthermore, language is that which is the same as what and different from what it purports to be.
As a thing that purports—an image—is both a real appearance and an unreal equivalence, because an image is empty. To see into it thus is to know the truth of appearances.
The creation of ideology,
lines of sense and innate concepts
spun into a web,
the demiurge codes
each nexus
point with
A powerful image.
One has the power to reveal or conceal, to enlighten or deceive. How shall we continue, then?
16a
in The Lords
Morrison showed how art is a φάρμακον,
or double-edged sword.
The Lords “vitiate possibility” (Ruth Jennison / Julian Murphet)
through artifice (or ποίησις).
Artificing can be used
as a means of obfuscating and interpellation,
But also as reversal,
ἀποκατάστασις and Verfremdungseffekt.
For: “If one has learned to think dialectically one can find it possible that a technique which is taken from the realm of magic can be used to combat magic with.” (Brecht)
16b
We must represent the world
in a way that emphasizes
its changeability,
Not as an immutable
Elizabethan stage play
With a tragic script
conceived of in the mind
of a god-genius.
Francis Bacon is still alive!
boo, hiss. . .
16c
Pound was the modernist poet par excellence
Suggesting that modernity is madness.
Has any World War ever left one solitary individual
unscathed?
“Thinking over precisely / the same fields of conflict / again and again, / Dressing in general / the war machine / down to primary causes, / Every war in human / history has been fought / principally in the mind. / An idea that begins / with its culmination; / already over in a sense / once the concept is realized” (白森).
16d
There is a kind of magic that works only with the complete disavowal of magic altogether: The idea of objectivity and that what is real are called facts.
17
What are facts? A fact is something that happens; if something can’t be shown to have happened, then it can’t be considered a fact.
Illusions also happen, but as it turns out no illusion presents itself as such, besides a self-conscious illusion; no real illusion presents itself to us as an illusion, otherwise it wouldn’t be an illusion. Rather a real illusion will always appear as something real at first, indeed it will appear to exist as indistinguishable from fact. This is the defining feature of an illusion, that the fact of an illusion is prefaced on a condition in which one can make perceptual errors. Understood in another way, ultimately there can be no concept of reality without there first being a concept of illusion.
Now what is fiction? Or along similar lines, what is myth? Fiction is for us defined by what it is not, non-fiction, and non-fiction is true. It’s factual; it really happened or happens, as opposed to something that was made up. Fiction comes from somebody’s imagination. There’s what’s real and there’s what’s been imagined according to which myth is fiction, but like an illusion it’s also something that’s been mistaken for, or understood as, having really occurred. Furthermore it goes without saying that myth, unlike fiction but exactly like illusion, ultimately doesn’t understand itself to be or present itself as myth, as fiction, but rather, as an account of something that’s believed to have occurred, as something factual, or at the very least, something that’s considered “true.” And in this way we might also say, then, that there can be no concept of mythology without there first being a concept of history, history being to non-fiction what mythology is to fiction.
And yet, what if today much of what we understand as history, reality and non-fiction has more in common with mythology, illusion and fiction, than we realize? Are we so sure that our history is history and not mythology; that our journalism is journalism and not propaganda; that our concept of reality is real and not merely a more sophisticated illusion than ever before? Putting aside the fact that this is something we may never know, might we shift our focus a bit. Might we reduce these grand subjects to their everyday functions as words, and consider this: How does the concept of reality function? What does this word as a concept do when employed in conversation, and specifically in what ways does it interact with its opposite, not precisely illusion but rather the imaginary?
What’s the difference between the imaginary and an illusion? Again, an illusion purports to be real, whereas the imaginary—defined as a thing that’s made up—doesn’t deny this fact. And uniquely, furthermore, the imaginary as a product of the imagination, isn’t always restricted to the realm of having never occurred, insofar as radically often, an object or occurrence in reality manifests that was only first conceived of in the imagination. It’s not only possible, but in fact very often occurs that things in reality which never existed before, come to fruition as a result of the imagination. While an illusion can only ever purport to be real, the power of the imagination is such that not only can it make things up, but actually make them become real.
Properly understood in this way it doesn’t seem like a satisfactory line can be drawn that strictly divides reality from the imaginary. Clearly this line must exist. Although to assume it exists absolutely, in an objectively fixed predetermined category, is extremely suspect. One clear indication of this is because the categories of reality and imagination are already human concepts, and hence its unequivocal that they’ve been prefigured, or indeed, that they’ve already been imagined. There are no objective categories; data always has and always will require an interpretive framework in order to make sense of itself. Reality is a concept.
And so how does this concept function? We might say that reality is an organizing principle, whereby existence is divided and subdivided in an infinite regression. Ultimately this leads to an imagined split between the internal and external world, the creation of a schism between subject and object, grounded by cogito. If this process can be historicized and categorized as the term, subjectivization; and it results in the prefiguring of these categories of reality and imagination; then I wish to suggest that a function of this process is, for whatever reason, the subjugation of one category over another; its function is the subjugating of the imagination to this concept of reality.
From my point of view, this is the negation of nonduality into duality, and I believe that the utility of this move is equivocal. For all the problems it solves, I think that it too is a φάρμακον. “Mind is my weapon / Thought a cutting edge,” (白森). Individuation cuts both ways, like a trip undergone that afterwards leads right back to the same location. If we expect to arrive someplace else, we will surely become lost.
18a
Truthful speech is good, poetic speech is beautiful. What is good is that which delights in its repetition. However good is merely the inversion of bad and both are indeterminate. One chooses to ground their stance in the field of negatives or positives.
First positive is the understanding of the interdependence of reality and illusion, all truth by necessity arises from this irreducible fact.
How can we know the difference between them?
All that we can know for sure is that there’s no such thing as absolute certainty.
First negative: demiurge/Demogorgon. The difference between these two may be as hard to call as that between ΑΒΡΑΞΑΣ and ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ. But who knows, it’s not on me to decide.
I merely apply the first positive here in order to define the first negative.
The definition thus becomes: Demogorgon is a demiurge which denies its true origin. It’s an illusion, because it purports to be “real.” Reality is constituted by the imagination of the demogorgon. In this way it makes concrete, that which is fluid.
18b
Lying is a means to an end, whereas truthful speech is an end in itself. Fiction belongs to the former category however so does ethics.
There is no ethical statement, only ethical action. And hence we understand: 大道廢有仁義, 慧智出有大偽. “It was when the Great Way declined / That human kindness and morality arose; / It was when intelligence and knowledge appeared / That the Great Artifice began” (Tao Te Ching, xviii).
Speaking is a means to an end, the power of communication. Truth is the negation of speech in its correlating between the map and the territory. All ethics therefore are founded on the use of force, for the silent also speaks, and every word is a form of violence. The Orphic also knows this. This is why their song becomes a force valued above non-fiction. This is why every polemic is preferable to an act of war. This is why even equivocation isn’t purely wrong, because no act of violence is ever purely right.
18c
Stating is ethical compared to the ethic of might making right. Cyclicity establishes right; cyclicity being the force of irreducibility. Law is the founding of prescribed cyclicity. Even the concept of cyclicity is differentiated through a description of what should be expected. Once an expectation is in place, its violation is of universal concern; indeed the question remains the same in all circumstances: How should one act?
Is there a fundamental difference between action and reaction? Is there any statement that can ensure the right of one to use might or said in another way, isn’t the use of might neither wrong nor right?
Second positive: non-violence is right, powerful and good. No indication of weakness is more obvious than in the outwardly mighty, in the recourse to violence.
All violence is an assault on the self. It should only be used in the name of preserving non-violence, for only the will can deny itself. Every will is double; either a vicious or virtuous cycle. So, do as the Way; there is no ‘say.’
Communication is non-violent force, by using words we war peaceably with each other.
It evolves from here into a problem of codes. One might say that all of life breaks down into an ὁρμή for the perpetuation of a code. We are a part of that code, a code that is heautonomous. The individual is microcosm, the community macrocosm; each irreducible to the other, interdependent with itself. The code for this is ὅλος. Deeper understanding of the reciprocity of its inner and outer flows is the key to self-mastery.
Mastery is dominance, control. Over which mastery exerts itself as either physical or mental. Physical control over one’s self is mental; control over another can be either physical, or mental, or both. Whereas physical control is obvious, mental control where it’s successful, is hidden. Mental control over the exterior which isn’t hidden or physical isn’t dominance, or the controlling of another but rather reflects the reciprocity between the world and conscious organisms. For wherever we’ve mastered ourselves, we’ve mastered the world, each other. Needless to say this form of selves-in-control-of-themselves is the only desirable form of control. There is no other form of control which locates itself strictly external to the self, and yet is also ethical.
19
One power of the Demogorgon is schismogenesis, or the ability to create stasis out of the contrivance of a conflict, or the illusion of change. The tendrils of this propaganda are also like that of the hydra and by trying to oppose them head on their dominance is only magnified. The only way to confront this ideology is by plucking it out holographically at the root, demolishing its foundational plinth. At root this confronts the same principle employed in the tactic of controlling the opposition. The technique of controlling the opposition is dependent on the use of disinformation and agencies of disinforming, also know as double agents. It works in the sense of contriving a more extremist form of one’s opponent that serves to destabilize its ideology, and hence may scramble its control schema.
A possible destabilization could be to say, scramble the code that structures the difference between a “terrorist” and a “freedom fighter” effectively inverting our common sense notions of “good and evil.” This is then, precisely what Shelley meant in 1.380-381 of Prometheus Unbound with “Evil minds / Change good to their own nature.”
20a
“Skies don’t conform to east or west,” (白森). The bourgeois revolutions of the West merely created new kingdoms called now a “State,” as the so called Communist revolutions of the East created new forms of tyrannical Empire.
We might call this the Animal Farm effect.
One of the ideological affects of this phenomenon has been the tacit assumption that real change is impossible, made worse by political technology that exacerbates this despair, this paralysis in the face of political palindromia. Such ideological stultification produces an unconscious result that goes by various names. The cultural theorist Mark Fisher called it Capitalist Realism. As mentioned in a documentary by Adam Curtis, University of California, Berkley anthropology professor Alexei Yurchak (Алексей Владимирович Юрчак) called it hypernormalisation. William S. Burroughs called it One God Universe, a control system. A control society, Tiqqun’s “Cybernetic Hypothesis,” it’s the cyberneticization of our world.
A critical node of this ideological freeze, I’m convinced, is in the enforcement of linear time. This would be a discourse of chronology that applies a cybernetic correction to the absolute nature of time as an unbounded sequence, a repetition of difference, made instead to repeat differences that make no difference, or to contrive differences that are in essence a mere equivalence.
I relate this, if not equate this, to the concept of the Demogorgon, an abstract construct that may be conceptualized as the redirection of eternal recurrence into a “disinformation loop [that] can be seen as the shadow form of [Claude] Shannon’s [communication] model, a sort of bugged bull’s eye,” (John Kimsey, “The Ends of a State”: James Angleton, Counterintelligence and the New Criticism). Another diagrammatic description might be the inverse of squaring the circle, or the conflation of a circle with a line, also the subjection of chaos by order, the slaying of a dragon, if you will; for there’s an unchecked cultural assumption that all dragons must be slain, on the contrary, why should they not be revered?
Fear of the Shadow, psychological imbalance is a fundamental neurosis in the so-called West. In the most grandiose of individuals it can mutate into a zealous “Cold War Manichaeism,” (John Kimsey). A prime symptom of this neurosis is basically Fascist tendencies, in “the West” a delusion of cultural supremacy that affirms the superiority of Judeo-Christian values, and/or a dedication to Enlightenment values, affirming of a specific historically contingent theory of reality, “a purely material order. [A] historically unprecedented environment in early modern Europe with its scientific revolution, its enlightenment, its novel, experimental, capitalist way of life,” (Greg Anderson, What ancient civilizations teach us about reality). And/or, appealing to a conspiracy to dethrone the supremacy of “the West” from without, this neurosis is always in crusading mode against its perceived enemies, “Cultural Marxism” (an evolution of the notion of “Cultural Bolshevism”), Communists, the Devil, Islamicists, terrorists & anarchists, et al. In short, this psychological imbalance is incapable of nuance, or intolerant of uncertainty, leading to cognitive dissonance and eventually obsession with the differences that make no difference, by defining along ideological lines absolutist, often contradictory, understandings of the Goodness in Good and the Evilness in Evil, where never the twain shall meet.
In this way, Heaven and Hell are mere inversions of the other, and hence they lack complementarity, or the fundamental reciprocity of true dualism that is unitary. They are, in this model of Totalitarian thinking, contradictions rather than contradistinctive natures. Each is the extreme reactance to the other, creating an unstable relationship between them in which the one could at any time collapse into the other, and this would destroy them both. It’s only in their marriage, or coming into balance that their irreconcilable parts can be revealed, otherwise this state of collapse keeps this vital differentiation concealed. Truly, no difference which makes a difference, but which reproduces more of the same. Like a cancer, it is the disinforming principle of the universe.
At the core, this Totalitarian neurosis betrays not only a fear of difference and uncertainty, but also of circularity, specifically the cyclicity of chaos. On a certain level, the Totalitarian mindset is an extreme reaction to the freedom of emptiness, the affirmative nihilism that requires a creation of personal values, such that a mania for order, and a sadomasochistic desire for self-annihilation for the sake of that Higher Order is what results. When really the cyclicity of chaos is nothing to fear. There’s a form of order which grows out of it, Nietzsche called it Amor Fati, most call it karma. Cyclicity is also an important force to understand and recognize if we are to understand revolution. For, it is not only every war, and every battle, (“every war in human / history” is fought first in the mind) but also every revolution too, must be carried out, only after the ends have been achieved “principally in the mind,” (白森). Hence the means to that end will already be the seed of the realization of that end; thus establishing the fundamental reciprocity between the means and the ends. Then truly, the “revolutionary patience” that is needed, according to Mark Fisher, becomes a viable tactic, the 無為 of emancipatory strategy, or Tao of Revolution.
20b
The production of the Same
from Difference,
a keystone of cybernetic propaganda,
DEMOGORGON is built on ideologies
wherein deep disagreements obtain.
(A deep disagreement is resistant to Aufheben.)
The cyberneticization machine par excellence
is social media,
a self-regulating
Panopticon wherein
we become our own regulators
internalizing our cybernetic
Self, colonized by
the simulacrum.
In this Interzone,
One God Universe,
if one fails to become a heautonomous source of ideology, to create ideas of one’s own, then one can only adopt the ideas of another.
It’s certainly great to share, but in this Age of Cyberneticization it becomes exponentially harder to know from where ideas are originating; to discern liberatory ideas deconstructed through counterintelligence programs.
For liberation is the counter aim of a control system.
“There is a will to be free
that even if neutralized
by freedom’s enemy
is always on the rise,”
(白森).
It can’t be snuffed
out once and for all,
so it must rig
“a sort of bugged
bull’s eye,”
(Kimsey)
that creates the
Möbius strip
of simulacra,
a disinformation loop.
Hence,
we must
become
the source
of our own
intelligence,
ΩΑs (Orphic agents)
who cultivate ἀταραξία,
Never acting on any
ideology external to our
own, that we share
At the base radical cipher,
無為 (or, the ideology
of no ideology).
What is the ideology of no ideology? It is a zero point that an infinity of consciousnesses can share as a collective origin. In this way the ideology of no ideology is the reverse of the Demogorgon, it’s the reversal of its plinth, a real ἀποκατάστασις. It’s the suspension of all preconceived notions and the need for absolute classifications and immediate closure. It’s an emptying of the mind, the primary action in meditation. It’s the ground of heautonomy. And it’s the door to reflexivity. For, “to get out of OGU [One God Universe], a systematic shedding of all beliefs is a prerequisite,” (Ccru, Lemurian Time War).
This returns us to what was called, in point [6] above, the conquest of the dominator urge. We overthrow it in ourselves and then turn it against itself, arriving at the principle of no rule but self-rule, a corresponding concept to that of the ideology of no ideology. Without a revolution from within we can’t reach heautonomous ground, first we must attain the zero point, otherwise we are fighting first and afterwards looking for victory. Only after becoming the will in one consciousness that is submitted to and submits; only after a successful conquest from within, can we be assured of our efficacy in the outward struggle for emancipation.
21a
Mapping a paradox,
Using the imagination to draw
out a sketch of ἀπορία,
Or climbing a ladder to kick it
away, using reason to undermine
reason itself. This
is called ‘closing the circle.’
ii
A motif
a trope echoes,
Known variously as a theme
it creates a structural relationship
And as a propagandeme
can take over ideological spaces
like a virus.
21b
“[T]he correctness of an idea can / be confirmed only by its repetition in time. / But because something gets repeated doesn’t / necessarily mean that it’s correct, / and hence we have at root, / the problem of propaganda. / Hence no lie is truly a lie / before it imposes on us as true; / No propaganda would actually exist without this / key distinction between fiction and journalism,” (白森).
Black propaganda (disinforming) must incorporate information along with disinformation in order to be effective/affective, call this the Abraxasian principle.
The problem of propaganda is not so much to draw attention to the fictions of it, so much as ask ourselves how are we prepared to deal with the question of what’s real and what’s an illusion; if we are prepared to take up the work of a militant self-correction, also known as becoming our own cybernetician behind the algorithm of our positive and negative feedback loops.
What is a propagandeme? It’s a meme of disinformation.
One structure of the propagandeme is dumb conspiracy minded thinking. In a nutshell this is when the consumer of information takes the word of one authority, that another authority is trying to dupe them. Usually both authorities, in a schismogenetic component of this structure, are connected along a node in which deep disagreements, formed by the schism, create an equilibrium. Between the “left” and the “right” this node is authority, either God or State, Religion or Science, Republican or Democrat, etc., etc.
One propagandeme to rule All propagandemes is the Propagandemeic Thoughtform (a type of ideology).
Conflating all of one’s opponents together, various propagandemes or memes, as a part of an Other, or one giant Conspiracy to undermine values or institutions in which one is deeply invested, or the Truth, is a basic structure of the Propagandemeic Thoughtform. So on a meta level the very concept of a Propagandemeic Thoughtform is itself a propagandeme. It’s the One propagandeme to rule All propagandemes, both a mindset that explains all political phenomenon, and even reality, through the lens of conspiracies, while being, paradoxically, itself a conspiracy—a conspiracy of political technologists to control and manipulate information.
Propagandemeic Thoughtform is a directed strategy, employed by living, breathing propagandists, so it is by definition, a Conspiracy to disinform the public, and disinforming the public is in principle the same as establishing control over the public, such that people begin to believe in various propagandemes, or memes, that get filtered through the lens of Ideology, or the One propagandeme to rule All propagandemes, the Propagandemeic Thoughtform (Stirner called these/this spooks).
As a result of conspiring to disinform, a vacuum of comprehension is created, requiring an interpretation that is filled with disinformation, a mixture of truth with fiction. Disinformation can be as simple as the way information is framed; to equivocate as to the true cause or meaning of an event, while the event itself remains a factual occurrence.
Without complete information the public is manipulated, if wanting to manipulate the public or deceive more broadly one must first conspire to disinform; for if there is perfect communication between a transmitter and receiver, then there’s no room for deception which is, in essence, a corrupted message that appears in ways at variance with how it actually is.
Michael Shannon called this noise. So another definition of disinforming might be, the strategic control of noise to disrupt communications.
The operational purpose of a disinforming strategy is (1) to obscure the conspiracy to disinform through totalized disinforming, or ideologization of the public, namely, by way of cybernetic control; one in the same with economic domination, a sort of spiritual violence. Or, what we might brand in a loose way as Cybernetic Control Capitalism (CCC). And (2) for this system, or OGU, to tighten its grip on control over All narratives, most essentially narratives on the nature of Reality itself (the concept).
21c
In the sense that knowledge is power, disinformation is disempowering. Hence, we must create a dove of Minerva, a non-violent warfare, a counterintelligence of the people. The first goal of a counterintelligence of the people is to reverse the effect of totalized disinforming, or ideologization of the public. Counterintelligence officers of the people are Orphic Agents who operate on this principle, that if disinforming is a process by which fictions are disseminated through information, then the inverse of disinforming must look like activity that smuggles excluded or controlled information back into collective consciousness through fiction. Propaganda is art presented as journalism, so too is counterpropaganda, information presented as art.
A simple reversal, no?
Now, let’s take a look at one example of propagandemeic reversal, so as to understand the operational functionality of the reversal of this reversal, that is the counterintelligence of the people. One example of a propagandemeic tactic is an attributive deflection; a classic example of this move being to, say, label journalism as fake news, implying that disinformation rather than information is true. As a meme fake news it also grows in power as a propagandeme in much the same way as the operative designation conspiracy theory. In both designations we can see the operative function is to enact an enantiodromia of truth and fiction.
The best way, nay the only way to fight or counter certain forces is to become like them, not become them, become like them. This is not fighting fire with fire but finding the water of fire, the water in fire that can bring that force to completion. (☿)
But mind this: Completion not termination, for in seeking to destroy, one may well bring on the enantiodromia of one’s own destruction.
This! Use it, this principle to find the inherent contradictions within one’s opponent, using their own powers against them. In praxis this is to exploit the weakness of disinformation in its inherent flimsiness of verisimilitude, for only truth can withstand the full power of critique, a critical interpretation.
For, then truly, “where once all seemed immutable, that image has now been shot through with holes, allowing the light of a rhizome of individual minds to pass freely beyond,” [14].
22
A revolution that must be the most authoritarian thing possible est une révolution à la papa.
A revolution must be in microcosm what it will become in macrocosm like a seed. Authoritarian revolutions become authoritarian regimes, hence a revolution must be the liberation it wants to see now in the world.
So too, an ideology of revolution which insists rigidly on only one path to revolution, est une révolution à la papa.
Can we make prescriptions for others? No, we must make prescriptions for ourselves and win by example.
23a
The things that we fear and are therefore thankful to the State, authority in general, for protecting us from are themselves a consequence of the existence of that State; the authorities protect us from the horrors they themselves create, this is the transcendent They, the They with a Capital ‘t.’ It is a prime realization for those who are to become anarchists, built on the ontological principle in Taoism that 民莫之令而自均.
23b
Our messages must be propaganda-negating, never propaganda-affirming. Our hidden strength shall be the truth. Our fundamental move must be a fog of deception that simultaneously dispels all systemic illusions.
23c
We hide, so when confronted on our deception, we can throw up all instances of our opponent’s deception. The opponent’s strength is in the invisibility of its power. In going invisible ourselves, if they wish to ideologize our invisibility, they do so at risk of compromising the history of their invisibility. A fundamental move of ours must be to reveal the history of their invisibility to the world. And what to call this invisibility, for the first step in revealing is of course in mapping, making symbolic, ideologizing? We call it, as it has been historically called, κράτος ἐν κράτει. [Footnote 1]
O, State within a State, L’éminence grise, first historical, and eternal enemy of Anarchism!
23d
Use investigative methods to reveal the facts, strategize, then prop up what disclosures will contribute to Mental Liberation, what knowledge increases the momentum of an ongoing, perennial General Strike.
Don’t push the facts, lest the opponent try to harness that momentum for reversal, Propagandistic Smears. Merely prop them up; but protect their visibility. Present it in ways that maximize All People to reach their own conclusions.
Smuggle these facts into new mythologies, Works of Art.
24a
What is this folly of immortalizing theories in isms? Please leave the door open for Je who est autre! For fear of loss one makes the future repeat.
24b
To what do we oppose these “new mythologies, Works of Art”? Our opponents are none other than the monolith of the past. We may view this as authorship itself, or the subjugation of spirit to bourgeois identity.
Identity after all comes from the Latin, identitas, which means “sameness.” There is a lie at the center of this subjugation, a truth which we must reveal and prop up through Orphic agency. This is epitomized in the knowledge that William Shakespeare is a pseudonym, that power in knowing the extent to which our indoctrination into a World of Contrivances is Total.
Let us dare, in our collective creativity, to overthrow the supremacy of all historically codified Demogorgons, by becoming each and everyone of us, our own Demiourgos of the Self!
24c
Why do we identify with personalities, figures, authorities, Authors? Why do we cling to the rightness of their ideas, or insist on the incorrectness of others?
Is this object clung to a transference of god, is this conceptually the same?
To deny the essence of identity; is this tantamount to blasphemy in some people’s eyes, and if so, then why? Is it because illusions only function when we believe them to be real? What would be the socio-political consequence of shattering this illusion?
(i) Indoctrination is subjugation into the illusion of bourgeois identity; (ii) Identity is the stabilization of class relations; (iii) Class relations are a socio-economic hierarchy; (iv) Hierarchization is a function of classifying with an authorial presupposition; (v) Heterarchical forms of classification permits of centerlessness.
The center, the authority in Hierarchy comes from the ancestral concept of god. Hierarchy is Rule by the sacred or holy, as the prefix hier comes from the Greek, ἱερός, “sacred, holy.” A heterarchy is a different form of rule, substituting the ἱερός for ἕτερος, “other, another, different.”
There is not one form of authority but many, a plurality of centers.
The imposition of a Center,
the contrivance of god
reverses the energy
Flow of Orgone,
Giving birth
to Anxiety.
This is simultaneous
to the contrivance of Subjects
That creates Anxiety
out of the Illusion of
a Self
that will pass away,
Hence all anxiety is connected
to death,
A reversal of Orgone energy.
The flowing of Orgone
to the center,
Awareness and constant
Fear of Death,
Living under the God
Delusion is a necessary
Effect of Hierarchization,
the imposition
of Top-Down
Rule by the Holy.
Fear of sex is the Ultimate Double Bind, turning Orgone into a phenomena to be both desired and dreaded.
Life and death become conflated! O most primordial Demogorgon, that makes us shudder at the thought of the Infinite!
25a
The centerlessness of heterarchy, the centerless centers of the ideology of no ideology is an expression of the concept of Alterity.
Alterity is a principle to embrace within like entrainment with Water, to become a nomad citizen.
Cybernetic Capitalism draws us into the network of Sameness. Bourgeois identity is sameness, and this is the inversion of Monad.
Nonduality of Awareness is fractured into the binary system, creating a reciprocity of feedback that subjugates our consciousnesses to technological class relations. This is the epistemic permutation we find ourselves stuck in, also known as Capitalist Realism.
Capitalist Realism is a form of Hard determinism, and Hard determinism is the enemy of Alterity.
25b
Tao is like Alterity, “without shape. . . hidden and nameless. / Yet [it] alone supports all things and brings them to fulfillment,” (無形. . . 隱無名 / 夫唯道善貸且成, Translated by Arthur Waley). Its inverse, the Demogorgonic shape, is exchange value, quantification, naming (i.e. classification).
Tao is emptiness, the root of the dialectical process, in which “Being itself is the product of Not-being,” (有生於無, Translated by Arthur Waley). Hence this is of inestimable value to our cause, acting to create social change, we must be aware of the inherent Emptiness of phenomena.
Capitalist Realism is a reification of the Ideology of Domination that denies the contingencies of our historical moment, by indoctrinating the people into ideas of hard determinism or the naturalness of Cybernetic Control Capitalist social orders of ‘Now.’ Its Power like Tao, as its is a hidden power lies utterly in the concealment of this contingency, the notion of realism in Capitalist Realism that conceals its operation on folks as Ideology. As it turns out Reality itself is a concept; Reality is Empty of any unchanging Essence, and so whenever we think fit to make sense of this predicament, we must inevitably contrive. To know we do this in order to prevent self-deception, the hypnotizing of ourselves with illusions of our own making we can employ Principles of the Ideology of No-ideology. That is to say, we can combat all Demogorgons with Demiourgos, we can swap the Illusions of Power for Real Power that originates inside ourselves.
26a
The Author and Reader are in a nondual relationship, the dialectic of difference that unites them is the act of creation.
This act of creation is the fundamental technique of Orphic agency, the Orphic Agent, O warrior-poet both without and within!
This is because interpretation is a poetics. And to clarify this, let me clarify similarly the Difference between saying that Tao is Alterity, and that it is like The Logos. The difference between saying that something is something else and that it’s like something else is precisely the difference between simile and metaphor. They are like each other insofar as one is a subset of the other and yet they aren’t fundamentally different functions, their difference is one of mere degree, not of kind. In the sense that emptiness is form and Form, Emptiness, here we are dealing with the difference between Becoming and Becoming-like.
Truly, Becoming is the dialectical truth of the universe, whereas Becoming-like is the Shadow side of it. It’s the Demogorgonic energy, that we use for making exchanges, equivalencies, such as symbolized in the character of 貸.
I mean, is it really a coincidence that what rules the world today, Money, is created ex nihilo?
26b
The market force,
O Hermes, O Thoth,
O messenger, O Liminal
One, O God of Words,
O threshold between the
light & the darkness,
O god of trade
& the silver tongue,
When raised to the highest good
results in imbalance,
It’s a perilous liminality
like the Siren’s Song
—exchange value
executes a coup d’etat,
& hence we see the negative
form of equivalence,
The conflation of
Heaven & earth,
the spirit
becoming
Material worth.
26c
Consider this equivalence: That insofar as we believe language is correlated with states of affairs, we are dominated by material forces.
The material force is money which is ironically already a symbol, no more Now than ever when it is creatable from nothing like a discourse. This abstraction called money is a becoming-like value, a quantifiable unit that becomes a qualifiable equivalence. Exchanging requires symbols, this is the basis of fungibility. The symbol is the medium,—the medium is a liminality between subjectivity and objectivity.
A medium is say, a Buch. It’s a poem, it’s a commodity, language, maths, Identity. There is both construction and matter in it, a nonduality of Matter and Mind. It could even possibly be said to be like a pantheistic substance,
an Absolute
emptiness that
is like the Tao,
Logos & Alterity.
One who creates
for the Je
who will interpret,
And whose interpretation
is the Poem
of the World.
27a
Create something, you never lose. Imagine a better world. To think past it—to think creatively, radically; not to think within the épistémè, or to think within it but as a Double Agent of Orphic Agency, this is the Way of the Ideology of no-ideology.
27b(甲)
The world of Ideology and of the Ideology of no-ideology are invisible, both. And here is the realm of Commanders. In the domain of Mercury (☿), there is a battle of wits, hidden skirmishes with information. One of its vehicles is language, with its maneuvers of images. These are the same as what and different from what they purport to be, Representations of Appearances.
A thing that purports, that which is both a real appearance and an unreal equivalence; an Image is empty. To see into it thus is to know the truth of appearances. It is to “stand at least one step removed from [one’s] own head,” [8b].
There are unsolvable mysteries, and enigmas artificially created to be unsolvable—the wisdom of the warrior-poet, after the First Principle of Thought-as-action (or actionless action, 無為), and the Second Principle of Art as anti-propaganda, and the Third, Writing with a Water Brush on a Block of Hot Granite—is in being able to make this distinction. Making in this way can be thought of as a sword slice: “[It] slices through / Life’s rigid dogmas; / Explodes lies about as much / as it authors myths, / Carving meaning out / of obscure substances,” (白森).
27b(乙)
Those who can’t detect the patterns or interpret conspiratorial designs, separating the wheat from the chaff, fail to understand militarism and intelligence. For truly, ours is “a war universe,” after Burroughs. The patterns of conquest, domination of the many by the few, and indoctrination runs throughout the history of civilization. When we take for granted the starting point of civilization as the origin of progress, we misunderstand this fundamental truth. WAR IS PEACE / FREEDOM IS SLAVERY / IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Is to remain blind to the brilliance of Demogorgonic reversal, when what is its opposite is taken for what it is.
27c(甲)
Language is a becoming-like, the mapping. All mapping is iterative. This power or function isn’t separate from the ontology of Becoming, like “L’Éternité. / C’est la mer allée / Avec le soleil,” (Rimbaud).
Writing is the coding of the human mind, that presupposes the existence of a universalizable linguistic code.
It, writing, is a duplication of phenomenon in symbolic form, that can be used to conjure an image of that phenomenon in another’s mind, and in some cases even to produce that phenomenon. In the case of the latter, a phenomenon can be produced, for example an affect of behavior, through the transmission of ideology. What is being transmitted is essentially a concatenation of things, for example lines of code as in programming, or verses in a poem, scenes made of motion picture, etc. Always what is being transmitted is Language, or a kind of language. And so without the creation of codes, as if out of nothing, how could one learn to interface theoretically with the world?
Let us consider the code of the warrior-poet, whose Third Principle is Writing with a Water Brush on a Block of Hot Granite. In order to create ideas, the aggregate effect of words in a phrase, morphemes in a word, structures in a concept, concepts in an ideology—must become something greater than the sum total of its parts. We might call this the latent commander, or 零, a Cipher.
O, Commander, master of the technique of Climbing a Ladder then Kicking It Away,
Whose weapon is
like the surface
of a lake,
Whose weapon
is vajra
a reflection
of reality,
Whose mind is
a sword
like mirror.
兌, ‘The Joyous,’
太白.
O 阿閦佛,
“Immovable One!”
自相矛盾.
27c(乙)
We strike
with invisible
patterns.
In order to reflect,
the mirror must be made
hard,
diamond-consciousness.
The power of the sun,
Zoroastrian fire.
The vajra,
diamond-consciousness
is the sea
in the sun,
The water in fire,
East in the west.
Indra’s net,
A Teumessian fox
& Laelaps.
Substance, ὕλη, 木 is
changed through fire.
In this sense
it is also
The storehouse consciousness
(alaya-vijnana), or as
information;
The neutral, empty
zone before volition,
Karma
Divides it into
Power & knowledge.
27c(丙)
“Both the data of the ‘territory’ and the knowledge of the ‘map’ are forms of information, but one is distinct from the other due to a level of abstraction. This level of abstraction differentiates matter from mind. […] [W]hat binds them together is the same property that divides them into classes apart, that is to say, difference,” (白森).
Another word for this is dialectics.
Data and information are nondual, aufheben is interpretation.
The symbol is [☿], Hermes.
Data is symbolic,
language is data, for instance.
Interpretation, or coding, is
also required to create Data
from the Absolute.
This is mapping, the creation of diagrams,
Or codes[Footnote 2] of power.
Such as law or ideology.
28a
On the Shape of Demogorgon: All at once, like in how Language originates within us ready to hand, the world is ruled by The Code.
The domination by Capital which is the State, alienates the means of production which are the People, Life itself, from themselves. This becoming alienated from ourselves is paradoxically sold to us through interpellation as “Individualism,” or Freedom; a freedom that is Slavery.
Not a dialectic, this is an antipode posing as the inverse; an image imposing as reality, which defers dialectical synthesis indefinitely. It is the end of history, rule by ideology—a system which subjugates itself. When people become so totally alienated from power, knowledge reigns supreme in the form of a self-regulating technocracy.
The primeval alienation that we face is to be made dependent on money for life, which first through violent conquest and then fortified by systemic violence is the establishment of private property. This gradually evolves into a dependence on technologies of living, for making a living, like automobiles or smart phones, that are now required if one is to get the money, made equivalent to life, by dominant institutions of private property. Chiefly this is Landlordism. As Mao says: “The political authority of the landlords is the backbone of all the other systems of authority.”
28b
Is not The Code, reified, precisely the internet?
The essential power of The Code is its ability to absorb critiques of the system, and in so doing to trap would-be dissidents, unawares, inside cells of cybernetic control. This holds especially true for intellectuals relegating themselves to the realm of discourse only. But the coup de grâce of ideologists of this sort will be to claim that the world itself, that what’s essentially real, is discourse.
And indeed what better way to obscure solutions to this primeval alienation, then to mythologize it with theories of The Code?
Doesn’t a return to Marx plain and simple, especially in this era of influencers, really betray a stultifying of the radical imagination, which is a symptom of The Code and its simulating of resistance?
When everything, everyone, all possible meanings become a mere reference point, only sign values under the reign of The Code, then we must encode alterities into it, that allow us to imagine differently.
We must distribute freely our schematics to Climb a Ladder then Kick It Away, showing others the emptiness of ideology so that they may take its command.
29
Resistance, rebellion, revolution: Which is the most radical, reasonable, irrational?
What philosopher denies the poetry of their thinking out loud, writing? Is all poetry instantly good, what makes it good?
What’s harder, making art or philosophy? What’s the difference? Is it not all about ideas, though with varying emphasis on whether to show or tell? So is this not how propaganda functions as art, and philosophy (theory) as ideology?
If you control appearances, you control reality.
One controls appearances by destabilizing their connection to reality.
There’s a correlate in the way propaganda, ideology uses images. This is also to say language, and facts. The basic effect of public relations (propaganda) is denial, or confabulation. This shows the function of any propaganda. It arises wherever there’s a need for mediation but more precisely, a mediation between reality and appearance.
A need that is already homologous with whatever connection exists between language and “metaphysics.” At the level of metaphor is where all things are transformed into ideology. It is where all things are transformed into speech, and where all speech is transformed into poetry. This poetry is actually the pure metaphorization process itself. This is a process that’s tied completely to sense which implies a medium of interpretation; there can be no poetry without language and neither without metaphor, things only mean things conversely by going inside themselves to add a supplemental image, a code to what exists.
We are appearances, our existence has a relative reality to it. There is no absolute reality of the self. Defining the self in absolute terms however, such as through the prescriptions of biopower, is one way of controlling appearances.
If we understand the dictum of there is no self as the notion that the self is created, as it were ex nihilo, then we have arrived at the true power of the Imagination.
The problem of value in both ethics and aesthetics, axiology then becomes a question of the unity of the Beautiful and the Good, which is True, insofar as it’s Literary, Art; a legacy or mythology the merits of which shall be judged throughout the infinity of interpretation.
All beauty has an ethic attached to it, and no moral value is free from aesthetic considerations; in how it was made, the effects it inspires, the joy it brings or the amount of suffering.
Connections of beauty to truth is in proportion. For example the distance between proposed values and their actual effects, the harmony between the ideal and reality.
In political philosophy we can connect this to the notion of means and ends. Thus we say the covenant of the warrior-poet is means in harmony with the ends.
30
There is no Absolute truth beyond the absolute Emptiness of the Absolute, a fact that paradoxically fixes a concept of Truth relative to this absolute Indeterminacy.
This indeterminacy is connected to the pure potential of emptiness without which Freedom would be impossible.
To elaborate, the notion of truth is meaningless until the introduction of τέχνη, that is Art, artificing, technologies such as Language, etc. It is only with the metaphorization process that evolves into a code, the creation of Meaning, that a distinction between two worlds as it were, Symbols and Reality have the possibility to be at variance.
Truly, this is the basis of the ethic of Taoism, that distinguishes between the Uncarved Block of The Way, and the Naming that results from the imposition of a categorical hierarchy.
31
Is there in this dilemma an intimation of power: the right says to the left, why do you not practice what you preach? To which the left responds, first we must take power, then we can implement our designs by which everyone will then live.
As the right lives to deny the left, thusly it has proved that its opponent is guilty of an inconsistency in principle. What other way can one rule but to rule by example?
Or: what better way can rules be applied than by example?
For it is I who is the Marcus Aurelius of my own soul!
32a
With the onset of the consumer society the theoretical structure of capitalism changes utterly, as the locus of production moves to the Third World, wherein exploitation can not only continue to function but increases. For First World Marxists, to make revolution in this context theorizing will never be enough. The revolution must be a General Strike of the Mind, creating schizoanalytic resistances all over the map as in Mai ’68; taking on a body that will try to harmonize itself in both image and action with Guevara’s Great Man, making perennial guerilla Time war against One God Universe, in its current incarnation as the neoliberal Control Society.
Up until now this class struggle has only played out in the domain of space, we must bring it into Time.
This is where Art comes in. And it forces us to confront a strange question: What is the connection, historically and literally, between art and “magic”?
32b
Morrison’s concept in The Lords of “[t]he cleavage of men into actor and spectators / is the central fact of our time,” shows in the shift from the Age of Affluence into our neoliberal societies of control, what would become the preeminent cybernetic figure, the figure of the Influencer. Unconscious influence is the Other of Control. It creates a complimentary schismogenesis which connects up with an antithetical influence that makes for the symmetrical schismogenesis, such as in Cold War; an equilibrium through Manichaeism, as in the notion of Peace through strength. Almost unsurprisingly here the root principle is connected to Demogorgonism, a power that we must defuse and disable, invert in the way that we subvert ideology.
32c
The warrior-poet fights Demogorgonism, a kind of interpellation, in all its forms. What is Demogorgonism? Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare?
Who’s asking? Is it possible to distinguish the mythological from the historical Socrates? What can we make of the formal distinction between the Author and the Poet? Well, if we take Socrates as a Speaker—the Poetic Consciousness of an author Plato, we can see that The Forms are a concept, a simulacrum. Making the Demiurge of Platonism a Demogorgon only if taken literally, that is to say, Demogorgonism is to take philosophy or Ideology for Reality as opposed to literature.
What is Literature, then? And what do we mean—
The labile nature of culture
is what we mean
by the dialectical relationship
between self & other,
the Liminality between
the mind & art,
Mind & discourse. The difference-in-itself or relative Noumena within us is a generative principle, personified as Imagination. This emptiness or godhead, pantheistic Substance, projected as Absolute onto the world, is Hierarchy.
What was used to create, can also be used to dismantle itself. This is the root principle of solve et coagula. As warrior-poets this informs our disposition towards Propaganda, our stratagem: Eat Up a Poison, Spit It Out as a Cure (ptah).
Remember as Blake says, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
33a
“[T]hinking and writing, / Creating an edifice,” (白森) even if by writing here we mean speaking to another, its clear that codification is a reciprocal process. The intangible and the tangible meet so to speak, creating each other. The image crystalizes into a code, a tool. A mental tool that is language; this is the essence of technology.
Ruled by technology as in the technocracy, we live under The Code or in an epoch of Demogorgonism. Capitalist Realism is the ideology of The Code in its current manifestation of the control society. The Code is the (word) virus, the mirror image of imagination spat back (Ptah) as The Reality.
The Code is produced through suppression, the excluding nature of a frame, censorship. Or through repression; like when sex and death are pushed in this move, out of the conscious mind into the subconscious. In this liminal area, their values become equivalent. The fear of death can be circumvented away from a valuing of love, to a worshipping of strength in violence, or in the fetishizing of a desired object.
Due to the necessity of not precisely repression or sublimation, but of enframing, the creation of context, there is a code. It is labile. Social and communicative, it is also conventional, and of course susceptible to change, innovation.
The key Anxiety of modernity is an equation of the fear of death with a need for money, a conflating of affects yoked together through a move familiar to both poetics and disinformation. This yoking together could also be viewed as an enframing. Enframing thoughts, a thought-form, structures certain signifiers in the unconscious, what’s known as repression in the individual or suppression in the collective, where those symbols can be conflated. For instance one possible conflation is dissolving strict distinctions between want and need. This could also work on kinds and degrees of fear, where the fear response becomes exaggerated in dissolution of distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate threats, real existential threats and perceived irrational threats.
By “bugging” let’s say, the perception of the world to perceive everywhere irrational threats, as if they were truly existential—the modern State of anxiety, seen in the anxiety disorder—behavior can be controlled through learned coping mechanisms; the desired effects or goal of behavioral control. Irrational thinking becomes normalized that is, when in an enframed state like the cage of modernity through the violent establishment of private property, we can only survive by participating in a system of rewards and punishments, i.e. working for money, obeying bourgeois mandates, etc. Coping mechanisms like obedience become the result of the desire to avoid perceived “threats,” which when yoked together with an operational target creates a sustainable feedback loop. This is provided that each “threat,” like fear of “getting in trouble,” can be institutionalized to the degree that it is calculable, predictable, controllable.
So, by connecting or yoking a desired behavior to fear, by way of a coping mechanism; theoretically by controlling the degree or kind of fear messaging—and similarly desire messaging—one could manipulate human behavior.
33b
The rumination is an inchoate thought-form that if resolved would disperse into silent awareness. This silent awareness is being in control, an emptying or awareness of representational thinking. We always think representationally, when our thoughts are inchoate, we are lacking in information, and hence are steeped in uncertainty. The state of uncertainty is anxious-thinking, a rumination, for good reason; for there’s danger afoot in not being prepared or in control. Yet in the societies of control, in order to assert unconscious influence, noise is an operant conditioning; noise being the deliberate disruption of a flow of information, leading to uncertainty. One in a state of total confusion, utter disruption of silent awareness, is thinking inchoately and thus, searches desperately for information which would resolve this state of anxiety. If you can bug that crucial piece of information, you have won the battle for control; the game of counterintelligence by creating an environment of overanxiety, then releasing bugged resolutions in the form of disinformation.
So essentially Demogorgonism is the systematic overtaking of an environment, controlling of space, followed by the domination of time, carried out through this bugging: To control the spaces or channels, then moderating the messages which determine how one moves within the space. In principle these moves look similar to the movements called deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
What is the bug? It is the feedback that keeps the thought-form inchoate. Or which causes it to resolve erroneously, one in the same thing.
This is a disinformation strategy which operates with the structure of a bugged bull’s eye.
As a stratagem which is both offensive and defensive (as is the nature of counterintelligence), this technique weaponizes sensitive information, by “bugging” it with a fraudulent implication.
The “bug” is a master code.
The easiest way to employ this “master code” is by solve et coagula, yoking it together symbolically with other Master symbols, nested one inside the other like a hierarchical chain.
Bugged in the sense that the remaining distance to its τέλος continues to multiply infinitesimally.
What quality that gets exploited here in the make up of information is its why. Hence, the shape of the bug is essentially teleological.
God is the ultimate “telos,” or Master Code.
O how obviously
the Master codifies
His tyranny
by everywhere setting
his Slaves to aims
that are to be justified
in their completion,
all manners of violence
which are to realize
Paradise, by making of this
Earth a Hell;
When means are said to justify
ends, you know it is
the Demogorgonism:
War is Peace!
33c
The majority of information communicated to humans must be delivered narratively. All narrative is structured thematically like in how language is syntactic; meaning the structure of narrative is like a code of meaning.
Bugging information is a creative skill, analogous to the craft of a poet. So a successful bug is a function of meaning creation.
In the construction of the meaning of a text, the disinformation, an overall tone or affect, related to the subtext or connotation of the discourse, will point in a similar way that Poetry points, to a certain exegesis in interpretation. Skewing the conclusion of this interpretation is what is meant by bugging, hence it’s a form of deception.
As a full blown strategy of propaganda the disinformational text results in conspiracy-minded thinking, resonant with the “Manichaean” thought-forms of the conservative, religious type. Liberalism or rather neoliberalism is triggered to react against this ideological framework, which schismogenetically, both complimentary and symmetrical, schismogenesis reinforces the system that has produced it all. It has bugged its internal contradictions to work like a dynamo. Within the inverted totalitarian regimes that are Western Democracies (“Democracy,” in scare quotes) for the Manichaeism of the right-wing mind; the Nation would be benign were it not for “global,” or some or other malign influence that corrupts an otherwise “Good” society from within. This is to a degree the epitome of projection of the Shadow onto others, to find a needed scapegoat to absolve one’s self of an internal contradiction, the “evil within.”
34
The artist is by nature economical, only consuming in proportion to what one can produce.
Art is naturally anticapitalist; for its qualitative value remains forever unnegotiated in monetary terms, without the violent institution of private property.
35
The technocracy is an evolution of Taylorism that creates a division of labor among the managerial classes.
Manufacturing power or the force of production is no longer within the working class then, which becomes more of a precariat than a proletariat. In the control society, real power is with the managerial class.
The control society comes about when the world takes on the appearance of such overwhelming complexity that a technocratic class, the managerial class is required to keep things running. The powerlessness of the underclass then, the former working class or precariat is reinforced by its general obsolescence.
The powerlessness of the underclass creates a new product in the societies of control; commanded by influencers, our disillusionment with the system—our unhappiness itself—becomes a resource to be exploited. Worse even is that the bewildering complexity of the control system becomes a check on those who are powerless within it to come to terms with it, or to even understand it enough to begin to imagine how to change it. This reinforces the power of the technocratic class over the underclass.
The resulting anger and confusion generated, and exploited, and therefore reinforced by the control society creates the necessary conditions for a Propagandemeic Thoughtform.
The propagandemeic thought-form bugs reality itself by destroying all meaning in representational discourse. It does this by unmooring discursive codes from semiotic reality, destroying all meaning which doesn’t funnel into conspiracy-minded thinking.
Conspiracy-minded thinking is a master code that becomes polysemic with the master code of theism.
For this reason, theism and atheism may enter into a symmetrical schismogenetic relationship.
Ideologies or “isms” are master codes, also called spooks.
Hence the Ideology of no-ideology is against all master codes which are Demogorgonic, that is the ones that deceptively reify their ghostly nature. Moreover if ideologies are systems of thought, then the ideology of no-ideology affirm the negation of ideology to the degree that ideologies are systems of domination.
36
The fear of Hell is a plateau above the fear of Death.
The idea of a chosen few is naturally the selling out of one’s fellow beings to save one’s self; and what does one save themselves from, well, The Worst Thing in the World.
— — —
In discourse the mind most readily constructs the seeming reality of their identity; without discourse, religion is powerless.
37
There is a State-within-a-State and that State transcends the authority of individual States.
This nested structure is the very essence of a hierarchy.
Furthermore the existence of this transcendent State (a synarchy) is not visible to the naked eye. Its very existence becomes conflated with mythologies in the indoctrinated mind, where a distinction between reality and fantasy breaks down. Subjects of the State-within-a-State are played against each other in their ignorance of the transcendent State, thinking that they are at odds with other States; even with other Individuals. We all know this as the principle of divide and conquer. In a nutshell, Capitalism has divided and conquered the world and in a way it does this by pitting everyone against each other. Ironically the war of all against all is not a state of nature corrected by the State but rather the exact opposite, a condition created by the State itself.
I think the two-party system in the United States is the perfect example of Synarchy. Both parties serve the same ruling class interests but are presented as if they represented two opposing demographics. This illusion of conflict in the parties gives rise to real conflict between individuals, especially keeping the ninety-nine percent at odds with each other. It is absolutely the same thing to say this Synarchy creates an illusion as if it were a Democracy. Representative Democracy in the United States, often propagandistically referred to as “our democracy,” is really a Synarchy. In this way we may say that through its synarchism in point of fact, the United States is a totalitarian State.
[. . .]
[Footnote 1] We can also call this concept, “Dark Alliance,” in honor of Gary Webb. A working definition of the concept may be: An invisible layer of governance that consists of an Alliance (Axis) between Intelligence Agencies and Organized Crime.
[Footnote 2] Codes are prescribed out of pure potential, the Absolute but at root are always ciphers, Commanders, orderings of emptiness, e.g. 白森.