Our assumption throughout was that philosophy/social theory could be exciting, and that the deadening of all visceral response to intellectual exchange was a semi-deliberate strategy serving oppressive social interests.
I'll be using this webpage as an excuse to write more, please expect a mess. I've been exploring new potentialities which are quite far removed from my usual fixation on Maoism: of these, three have been occupying the majority of my attention. First, I've been developing an interest in the works of the French philosopher Georges Bataille, partly because he's kind enough to write short essays which don't take me terribly long to read in the original language. I've begun with a reading of three of his shortest works from Visions of Excess, these being The Solar Anus, The Notion of Expenditure, and Base Materialism and Gnosticism. I've been able to find more detailed analysis of two, but I've yet to find decent enough information explicating The Notion of Expenditure. There's four books of Bataille's that I'll be dedicating my attention to, these being The Limit of the Useful, Theory of Religion, Guilty, and Inner Experience. I have a physical copy of Inner Experience, but it's in French. I don't know when I'll be capable of reading it.
Secondly, I've decided to take a little bit of an interest in cybernetics. The seed of this was planted by my reading of the texts of the CCRU, but I went out looking for historical works of the field of cybernetics more grounded in material reality and within the history of the theoretical terrain itself. From my initial dip into the pool, I came across a book from the person who coined the word 'cybernetics' itself and it looks like a perfect entry into the field specifically from my vantage point of being more interested in philosophy and the social sciences, this book is The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Wiener. I'm hoping a foray into cybernetics will provide helpful analytical tools for an eventual analysis of Red Gaurds and the defuct Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party of the United States. Truthfully, Bataille is likely to figure into my analysis as well.
Lastly, I've been itching to finish my reading of both the writings of the CCRU and also those of the Gruppo di Nun found in Revolutionary Demonology. I think these will pair well with a reading of Inner Experience and the works from cybernetics that I've put on my reading list. My interest in these will hopefully serve useful in an analysis of the Order of Nine Angles and the Tempel ov Blood, which I see as organizations who've engaged in fascist time sorcery to serve the ends of the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton. As a particularly strange aside, I did the tiniest bit of searching into the history of the reception of cybernetics in China specifically during the Mao era whereupon I came across the work of Chinese cyberneticist Qian Xuesen, so I've added his 1950's work Engineering Cybernetics to my reading list as well. I'm glad to know that the Chinese communists didn't seem to have much of a problem with cybernetics while it was labeled as a bourgeoisie psuedoscience during the Stalin era.
Lately, I've felt a bit more optimistic towards my work due to a podcast I listened to from Hugo of InnerFrench where he talked about how the brain learns, I've come to accept that forgetting is an essential part of learning and that taking a lazy
approach to my studies could perhaps be quite beneficial. So, I've decided to stress about all of this much, much less, it'll simply take however long it takes. Nothing is ever lost, your brain just has to dig harder to find it again. Furthermore, I hope to use this webpage to help bridge the gap between all the reading I make plans for and the reading I actually engage myself in, so hopefully as I read there'll be time to make scattered, unsystematic notes that I'll be able to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle in the future as I continue to learn. This will hopefully allow me to also have a more intimate and epistolary approach to my writing and research.
Hopefully I'll be able to reread Josephson-Storm's Metamodernism before the next semester begins. I'm trying to go back to school by taking some classes online, just the fun classes for now to help get back into the swing of things. As a true final aside, I've been wanting to make time for a reading of Being and Time at the prodding of Dr. E. Part of me connects to the figure of Heidegger, a fellow provincial from the countryside fascinated by things far removed from the concerns of the small town people we're surrounded by. I may never see the Black Forest of Germany, but I've spent my life surrounded by pines.
There's a few works from the Marxist tradition that I'd either like to make time for or reread, principally I'd like to reread Althusser's Philosophy for Non-philosophers, the first work of his that I truly fell in love with, then the classical work of Engels' Anti-Dühring as a preliminary to reorient myself towards historical materialism, and K. Murali's Of Concepts and Methods, an essay collection which Moufawad-Paul called one of the finest philosophical investigations of the meaning of Maoism. K. Murali, codenamed Ajith, was a cadre of the Central Reorganisation Committee, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), an organization which helped to found the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. He also served as the editor of the magazine the RIM published, A World to Win. He would later go on to be a cadre of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) before his arrest in 2015. Interestingly, I managed to find a document from the CPI(Maoist) that I'd like to read as well, rather short, called Strategy & Tactics of the Indian Revolution. For now, I haven't been able to find many organizational documents from the Communist Party of the Philippines but I'll keep looking around.
A strange business, I'm fascinated by the works of Bataille and the CCRU, as well as the more explicitly occult works of the Gruppo di Nun and the Order of Nine Angles, but I'd prefer to maintain a certain level of distance from them. My justification, I've come to accept that historical materialism is, strictly speaking, a scientific terrain and that philosophy proper is a second-order operation which can serve to investigate and clarify the meaning of theoretical terrains. Thus, my job as a para-philosopher in the service of Marxism, is that I've elected to investigate occult terrains and their ensuing ideologies as well as the philosophical investigations of Bataille and the CCRU, my analysis tempered by a certain fidelity towards historical materialism. My only problem, I've yet to enter into the science properly myself. For the duration of my studies, I've mostly stuck to traversing philosophical documents from its history and have traveled through little of its scientific documents. This marks my studies with a certain contradiction, perhaps even a certain weakness. I lurch forward with the tools of my craft that I've yet to master.
Through my engagement with Struggle Sessions and Tribune of the People, even my fidelty itself to Marxism has been compromised and distorted. This feeling of corruption, of guilt, is what motivates my recent turn towards the works of Georges Bataille. But, even this is marked with a certain suspicion towards his attempt to substitute the politics of Marx with the politics of Nietzsche, as I'm willing to note that he wrote and organized in a time before the emergence of the terrain of Maoism. Thus, I'd like to read even Bataille backwards with an eye on the present. Truly, I feel home nowhere. In addition, I recently discovered a Soviet textbook on both capitalist and socialist political economy titled An Outline of Political Economy: Political Economy and Soviet Economics which I've decided to read alongside Fundamentals of Political Economy, this I think will be excellent to consult as I read Bataille's Limit of the Useful and The Accursed Share.
In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the conception of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkess (which would not simply be the absence of light, but the monstrous archons revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would not be the absence of good, but a creative action). This conception was perfectly incompatible with the very principle of the profoundly monistic Hellenistic spirit, whose dominant tendency saw matter and evil as degradations of superior principles. Attributing the creation of the earth, where our repugnant and derisory agitation takes place, to a horrible and perfectly illegitimate principle implies, from the point of view of the Greek intellectual construction, a nauseating, inadmissible pessimism, the exact opposite of what had to be established at all costs and made universally manifest.
Base Materialism and Gnosticism, page 47 of Visions of Excess.
Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations. But the psychological process brought to light by Gnosticism had the same impact: it was a question of disconcerting the human spirit and idealism before something base, to the extent that one recognized the helplessness of superior principles.
ibid., page 51.
Bataille argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. Then he attempts to use this to develop a radical libertarian Marxism, opposed to both Stalinism and fascism. Although it provided a critique of the emphasis in Marxism on production, the active flux of base matter could not be contained in a political discourse. This means that Bataille's thought has an impact beyond the political and into the wider domain of theory. [...] Despite attempts to force base materialism into the mold of a new form of materialism it disrupts conventional materialism and the 'radical' politics that often goes with it. Bataille destroys the promise of liberated spaces and offers a more radical and disorienting freedom which inscribes instability into all discourses.
Georges Bataille's Base Materialism, Benjamin Noys (1998), Journal for Cultural Research
The 'logic' of base materialism is that whatever is elevated or ideal is actually dependent on base matter, and that this dependence means that the purity of the ideal is contaminated. The dependence of the ideal or elevated (the 'high') on base matter (the 'low') and the contamination this produces is systematically denied by the ideal, which splits off base matter as whatever is disgusting, vile, sub-human, etc. In this way it hopes to keep base matter in its place, as the base, but this splitting off can never be completely successful because base matter is at the basis of the ideal and the 'higher values'. Base matter is an eternal reminder, and remainder, of all that threatens to drag down and ruin the ideal. [...] It is a recurring insult to human dignity and any attempt to purify or idealise, because it can never be done away with despite the massive cultural, political, and philosophical denials of its existence.
ibid.
[Sidenote: I'm partially interested in Stuart Kendall's assessments of Bataille's works partially because, as I heard in an interview he did with Zer0 Repeater, he's willing to point out explicitly where Bataille gets Nietzsche wrong and I think those (mis)readings could potentially be quite valuable in my assessment of Bataille's overall project.]
Pt: Mesh-30. Nummamad. Cyclic Chronodemon of Subterranean Commerce. Net-Span 8::2. Voodoo in cyberspace. Completion as final collapse.
Ps: Mesh-11. Tukkamu. Cyclic Chronodemon of Pathogenesis. Net-Span 5::1. Rapid deterioration.
Fu: Mesh-34. Mommoljo. Amphidemon of Xenogenesis. Net-Span 8::6. Cosmobacterial exogermination. Extraterrestrial residues.
This is a brief attempt at divination in 500 words. My methodology is quite simple, I simply draw 3 numbers from 0-44 to invoke 3 different demons (or lemurs), each which represents the events of the past, present, and future. Today, we have Nummamad as past, Tukkamu as present, and Mommoljo as future. Nummamad as representative of “voodoo in cyberspace” and “completion as final collapse” makes me think of my time on the internet as a whole, a chaotic frenzy in and out of various subcultures and digital brothels. I think of completion in the sexual sense. The result? Complete collapse. Presently, we have Tukkamu, Chronodemon of pathogenesis, a swarm of rapid deterioration. Fascism as time-virus resulting in entropic embrace of chaos. High Courts unchaining a High Priest. Orange as the color of the present. Turn on, tune in, crash and burn into brilliant wreckage. In the near future, Mommoljo, alien mother, Amphidemon of xenogenesis, extraterrestrial residues and cosmobacterial exogermination, not sure what this brings yet. This does remind me of one particular issue I have with the CCRU writings at times, the penchant for jargo-plexing by the creation of new words from aesthetic summation of scientific prefixes and suffixes. Xenogenesis, introduction of laboratory-designed genes, extraterrestrial residue of escaped cosmobacterial DNA segments intended as cutting-edge biological weapon by alien intelligence operatives. How does it damage everything it contacts? Infection from the inside. Knots of fungus start to appear on the skin before shooting out into fetid mushrooms, oozing festering fluids.
One might wonder of my turn towards divination, am I returning to mystified occultism? Simply put, no. I merely want to turn writing 500 words a day into a more consistent habit, but it’s often difficult to find any kind of motivation on my own, and I find writing prompts often strangely unsatisfactory. Therefore, I’d like to use random number generation to invoke 3 lemurs that I'll use as the basis for exploration and introspection. I do not have any illusion of invoking alien or supernatural entities, everything is immanent to my own experience and the texts of the CCRU themselves. I expect many failed attempts. But, there’s only so much space to use for self-reflective segments such as these before my experiments take me to places I never thought I’d be able to reach. At least, that’s the hope. I’m reminded of an interview with Georges Bataille, where a writer can often feel guilty simply for the act of writing as the act itself can be seen as the polar opposite of work, or even similar to a child’s fascination with a game. One can feel evil simply by writing as there’s so many other things that can or should be done. What right does one have to do something so unproductive? What right do I have to write at all? Part of my motivation, I think, is wanting to feel as if the time I spend on this planet is in any way meaningful or important. I feel further from that every day.