they say Ax-Sys went mad… the first computer system to undergo psychotic collapse — which must prove something…
The theory of Uneven and Combined Development theory (UCD) itself can be understood as both a rhizome, as well as a tool for rhizomatic analysis itself. The anthropological catch-22 of theorising the rhizome, is that to do so would be to fail. It escapes exact definition due to its isomorphic nature. It evades definition as its purpose is to be undefinable. A rhizome may be described as an immanent, totalizing framework, a subject or analysis, that is, one composed of macro and micro machinic connections, disjunctions, and conjunctions. UCD flexes this rhizomatic analysis within its illustration of its decentralised socio-political development, melded through volatile degrees of interaction, co-operation, and struggle. A body of organisation may vary from cellular plant life to complicated techno-political structures, documented extensively in Norman Wiener’s abstract systems theory of cybernetics:
The multicellular organisms may themselves be the building bricks of organisms of a higher stage, such as the portugese man-of-war, which is a complex structure of differentiated coelenterate polyps, where the several individuals are modified in different ways to serve the nutrition, the support, the locomotion, the exertion, the reproduction and the support of the colony as a whole.
What’s key is the continuum of capitalist deterritorialization and simultaneous reterritorialisation of desiring production flows. Built upon a regime of signs, development in any sense constitutes a formalisation expression and mutual understanding. All codes, chains and circuits of signification are guided by a gravitational point that signifies a universal equilibrium, be it the most Spinozian understanding nature, a religious or political figure, or capital itself. Briefly returning to anthropocentrism, development is multiplicitous by nature of the phenomenological mainframe. There’s no centre to the whole, but there are holes through the centre.
Ben Fine critiques the neoclassical economic conception of equilibrium on account of the non-existent static economy. He stressed that the economy must be viewed as a dynamic entity, one that is constantly morphing and shifting in value (with the volatility of stock markets generally, and the imposition of neoliberal reterritorialization in particular). The ontology of UCD stresses that political, social, historical and economic phenomena cannot be studied in isolation from each other. Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in its material and ideological entirety, folds these subjects into one another, revealing an automated, machinic assemblage of radical, incommensurable proportions, through which capital permeates and captures the socio-economic body. Machines “operate as intensive multiplicities — flat or rhizomatic assemblages — functioning immanently, rather than as mechanisms controlled by a transcendent, supplementary, or preprogrammed unit” (AG CTTM). From a cybernetics perspective, there’s seemingly no limit to the amount of machinic processes at work. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon documents this well in its chapter The Book of Machines. For Butler. seemingly everything, from a finger to a factory, can be conceived of as a machinic process, that “our blood is composed of infinite living agents which go up and down the highways and byways of our bodies as people in the streets of a city.” Indeed, for Butler, a complicated machine is not a singular entity, but “a city or society, each member of which was truly bred after its own kind… each part of every vapour engine is bred by its own special breeders”, which is, of course “exceedingly complex and difficult to see in its entirety.” (Butler, 1872, p. 212). To this extent, in the final chapter of The Book of Machines, the protagonist describes a researcher who discovered “similarities existing between many machines of a widely different character.” Categorising all the different machines, the writer concludes:
“[T]he existence of connecting links between machines that seemed to have very little in common, and showed that many more such links had existed, but had now perished. [The researcher] pointed out tendencies to reversion, and the presence of rudimentary organs which existed in many machines feebly developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from an ancestor to whom the function was actually useful.” (Butler, S. 1872, p. 214)
Ultimately, a machine is an apparatus or tool, comprised of parts, together functioning towards the completion of a task. All machines operate to fulfil the task of desiring production. That is, desire itself as a machine, a productive, actualising force. Not a theatre, but a factory. The plane upon which history unfolds is an inherently uneven one, a site of constant interactions between extrinsic state formations and intrinsic social cohesion. Its etymology is reflective of the civilised capitalist machine that Deleuze and Guattari outline in AO. Before the development of the civilized capitalist machine, comes an initial territorialisation onto the body of the earth, otherwise defined as the connective synthesis of ‘barbaric’ global territorialisation. Primitive animals and societies advancing through positive feedback loops of learning through experience, in short, instinctual, and in some cases, communal, knowledge reciprocation. Signs at this point become ordered around the tools of the earth, the machinic plant life that births the fruits of survival and desire. As we progress through to more advanced miscellaneous biological organisms with advanced cognitive functioning, we switch dimensions. For long time, the barbaric machine was slowly deterritorialised by what D&G call ‘the barbarian despotic machine’, which overcodes the flows of desire on the body of the earth, and redirects the signs towards its own surplus. Religion and politics birth new structures of organisation, understanding, resistance. Lastly, with the development of industrial capitalism and the dismantling of mercantilist feudal exchange comes the civilised capitalist machine, in which all signs and linguistics becomes overcoded once more towards the flows and reproduction of desiring-production under capital. The more we know about history, the richer the knowledge we can obtain from it. The analysis brushes on an implicit conjunction to AO’s conception of the full Body without Organs (BwO), that is, “immanent to all intensities.” The term designates entire matrix of all matter and intensities, together machining desiring production. Composed itself of other BwOs, molecular aggregates of desiring production circuits to fall back on and realise themselves, in varying degrees and intensities. Everything is machined by the ruling body of organisation, from the finger to the factory. The multiplicitous, indeed, perhaps intentionally provocative, concept, feeds back into UCD. An emphasis on the rhizome is crucial to the understanding.
The CCRU defines capitalism as the “[t]erminal configuration of terrestrial civilisation, defined by sovereign axiomatics, organising capital/cash segmentary economics and techno-political integration [and the s]ocial precursor to AxSys autonomization,” with AxSys being defined as “[u]ltimate terrestrial order.
Ax-Sys expands ufological paranoia to envelop all terrestrial databases, successively swallowing SETI analysis, air traffic control, air defence systems and cyberspace conspiracy archives… Ax-Sys saturates cpre US intelligence agencies with planted evidence implying widespread infestation by alien infiltrators, serving as pretext for the absorption of all security systems in to the Ax-Sys bank. As an infinitely self-elaborating belief-engineering apparatus, with the power to manifest ‘visitations’, Ax-Sys functions as the ultimate ‘control system.’
This is constrained in what is coined the Metastructure’ AxSys epistrata, “stratic vertical supplements, marking levels of axiomatic power, the organization of laminar synthesis in accordance with principles of application, isomorphic resonance, and logicized harmonics. ”The CCRU texts are hyperstition crafts, the enveloping of historical fiction onto the present reality, and by extension, nodes of possible futures, as “an elaborate project food the human colonization of the technosphere, a planned obsolescence of the organic body, and of the senses. Capital, for it, is the noumenal outside folding into the phenomenal, the noumena that overcoding of the human socius. We are what we make of it. In the age of crypto, this process itself takes place on an uneven geoeconomic plane.
If the full BwO is, as Nick Land articulates, “the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity”, it can be understood as the stratum through which a post-structural, abstract system manifests, connects, disconnects and rejoins the dots for the download desiring production to implant itself. Turbulently, the body of capital has established the dominant mainframe for the socio-economic fabric of ‘machinic desire.’ AxSys — the nihilistic, destitute machining of value. The slow deletion of the human subject — a project of terminal cybernetic colonisation. However, @bicentennialism’s intriguing instagram post captures the limits of this vampiric illustration of capitalism; the exposition itself arguably a rhizome:
The postmodernist conception of Capital as a totalising monster that consumes resistance to the movement it arises is useless, but convenient. It excuses wallowing in hopelessness, and enables relentless critique without ever offering alternatives. This narrative erases ongoing resistance (post-left dismissal of [the Black Lives Matter movement] as a bourgeois distraction is a good example), and ignores the opportunities/methods of resistance that might already exist in one’s life. It’s very useful for college-artsy-philosophy types to think of Capital in this way; ‘it’s not my problem, not even a solvable problem I can obsess over, theorise about, make art about, and blame my shitty behaviour on.’ Capital is not an incomprehensible supervampire. I know it feels that way, but it feels that way by design, and theorising it as such plays right into the hands of those who would see us as hopeless and incomplacant. Instead, it is a specific set of institutions and practices working towards specific goals, that can be fought in a thousand specific and legitimate ways.
Fanged Noumena is a collection of this entropic comprehension of capital. However, it too is a rhizome. It cannot be conceived solely as some meta-strata of capitalist determinism. In Capital Vol. III, Marx demonstrates how capital is organically composed in its productive creation, but alters in value once entered into the sphere of exchange. Workers constitute components of capital in its organic construction. Capitalism is the virtual mainframe of the abstract network of interface; capital is an overtly integral molar aggregate. Networks of desiring producing and desiring machines are allowed passage to the BwO for realisation; the key is organisation.
And as @fakebillhicks points out:
Capital is now the totalising force of the spectacle. Capital is the demiurge and the worship of the material and the ‘less than human.’ That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t resist, but rather our resistance must come through different networks than [from before] — not parties, not unions, not politicians, not [organisations], but through a new, human based system of power free from corporate influence. These are things like free food banks, collective housing, workers councils, pirate radio and TV stations run by the people, street art for the people by the people, and so on.
In the same post, an interesting, anonymous account named @postconveyance, adds the following:
We can do better than reacting against the inadequacies we find in other perspectives — we can improve upon them, taking them further than those who would have only wielded them opportunistically would have done so. The frustration I see here with this tendency to narrativize capital (as most contemporary theorists do) is [that it’s] all too familiar. When theorists like the CCRU types resort to characterizing and narrativizing capital, [they do so in an] oppositional way to how liberals or conservatives do — making the idea of relentless progress evil rather than good). They deny or at least neglect the opportunity to conceptualize such a tendency to narrativize (and ultimately moralize) as such. This tendency is nothing new.
This prompts a short dialectic with another account, @nier.hominum, who responds:
So, essentially you are saying that we must abstract morality out of theorizing it… but see it simply as a concept pertinent to a frustrating desire that doesn’t stop perpetuating unless it’s fulfilled? This is alright, but, socio-historically speaking, you would have to narrativize, since capital, in my opinion, is polymorphic according to the discontents of desire. And, to me, to assign a homeostasis sort of desire to the entire class consciousness seems like a mistake of hasty generalization, and therefore, it is more likely that this desire is relative in some sense, with the only general character being that it will always try to be fulfilled. So, in essence, I think a narrative is needed after conceptualizing capital as [per] what you said anyway. You just must not start with the concept as narrative. But talking about capital pragmatically, I feel like narratives will be necessary.
@postconveyance replies:
Everything you said is magnificent, except I don’t understand why this narrative is necessary, unless we are narrativizing desire in what we are doing now (perhaps that’s up for debate). Desire is absolutely relative, but its more recognizable, polymorphic forms, are not necessary to its function. It will in time take whatever form is most useful. I think desire is taught. So, much of memetic and/or bourgeois culture is toward the express effect of teaching desire, and repeating it. Desire is also disappearing — the rise of class consciousness is itself an indication of desire’s disappearance. This disappearance itself is being challenged by desire which moves back into these empty spaces with efforts that try to turn these materialist concepts back into immaterial idealisms.
@nier.hominum:
Yes, since desire is disappearing, one the other hand, I would think it’s still a good idea to narrativize whatever desire is supposed to mean here (even if it is turned into an empty void of consensus only due to the rise of class consciousness). Perhaps creating narratives will reignite people’s associativity with desire as it is supposed to be (corresponding to themselves) by either rebelling against this conformism to consensus (due to the dwindling presence of desire) or perhaps conforming to a narrative which may reflect themselves. So essentially these narratives would have their own locus overlapping with other narratives so it avoids the blanket of class consciousness leading to disappearance of desire. But then again these narratives need to be not absurd. And if they are absurd, then people need to have the awareness to critique it and formulate their purpose via desire. It’s a whole chain essentially whose central purpose is to reignite a subjective idealism of sorts. A very libertarian idea but I would say it works great in relation to the postmodern idea of capital as mentioned in the post.
@postconveyance:
I think that a narrative which is practiced in full knowledge of what it is is something more complicated than just a narrative. The practicing nature, the self aware nature of such an act is gained precisely in the death of what made the narrative feel coherent in the first place.
In this way, Nick Land’s writings of AO a “package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels” should not be overlooked. The CCRU’s capitalism represents noumenological Lemurian demon time sorcery as the apparatus of capture. Parallel to this is the Burroughsian nature of language as control as stressed in Mark Fisher’s lecture Cybertime Crisis. Biradi states that:
Irony, the ethical form of the excessive power of language, is the infinite game that words play to create and to skip and to shuffle meaning. A social movement [ought to] use irony as semiotic insolvency, as a mechanism of disentangling language, behaviour, and action from the limits of the symbolic debt. (Biradi, 2012, 158–9).
TBC
