It’ll be the story of a miracle worker who lives in our time and doesn’t work miracles. He knows that he is a miracle worker and can work any miracle he likes, but he does nothing. He’s thrown out of his apartment. He knows he need only lift a finger and he could keep his apartment, but he does nothing; he moves out submissively and lives outside the town in a shed. He could turn his shed into a fine brick house, but he doesn’t; he goes on living in the shed and in the end he dies, not having worked a single miracle in his life.
Daniil Kharms, The Old Woman
It might be conventional to suppose that the more miracles there are performed in the world, the more miraculous the world would thereby become. But the very opposite is true.
Miracles regulate the miraculous, they are not its source.
Miracles regulate the miraculous, they are not its source.
Miracles impede, and adulterate, what is miraculous because miracles are the actualisation of desire. And wherever desire pins the world, there is a mess of jetpacks, time travelling, and butter that spreads straight from the fridge.
The miracle refutes the miraculous by replacing complexity with reduction.
If a miracle is the rearrangement of the world onto the territory of a single desire, then the miraculous seeks to re-invert that inversion.
But it has not the strength to do so.
The miraculous is manifested wherever the nature of desire itself is pinned back, wherever desire is re-situated as a second order realisation in the otherwise demandless convolutions of the world.
And thus the miracle worker, if he so loves miracles, ought not to work them.
He aint no stakhanovite.
He refuses to recognise the cumulative model of transformation.
Instead, he must spend his energies on preventing any further miracles. That is, he must if he is to correct the imbalance between what is miraculous and what is adulterated banality – which overwhelms it at every point.
For, the miraculous is very flimsy.
The miraculous does not overcome the bounds of possibility, but is itself a sort of boundary; which is ignored routinely.
And nor does the communist cause the world to be rearranged onto the territory of his political movement.
He aint no udarnik.
He foresees that he must foreswear the practices of communisation, if he is to contribute to the rediscovery of the lost gemeinwesen.
The communist cannot make community. He may, at best, unmake its unmaking.
His is a losing game that must be set against the losing game.
The communist’s relation to humanity’s lost relations is not described by the events that he himself has set in motion, but rather by his struggle to hold back from manifesting any of the further events that are always and already encroaching upon the gemeinwesen from the edges of the world.
The communist eventually recognises that communism must be defended without compromise against everything that is possible as mere abundancy.
The molecular theory of modern chemistry first scientifically worked out by Laurent and Gerhardt rests on no other law. For the explanation of this statement, which is not very clear to nonchemists, we remark that the author speaks here of the homologous series of carbon compounds, [...] each series of which has its own general algebraic formula. Thus the series of paraffins: CnH2n+2, that of the normal alcohols: CnH2n+2O; of the normal fatty acids: CnH2nO2 and many others. In the above examples, by the simply quantitative addition of CH2 to the molecular formula, a qualitatively different body is each time formed.
Note, Chapter Eleven: Rate and Mass of Surplus Value, Capital
