Two wives are allowed in the army - an apologia for the tradwife in an extended reflection upon the masochist motifs exhibited in the perverse psychology and rank sophistry of nihilist communism, and marking the occasion of the 20th year since its publication

It is not for us to know if we will arrive safely at our destination - Agatha Christie

For is it not written that every wise woman buildeth her house, but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands? But then, is it not unwritten that the limit of what might be built at any given moment, what is available as material for every possible building, is never more than a this-house before its own particularisation in the moment of its falling, and so its solidification is therefore nothing but the arrested and unspoken anticipation (amongst some of those dwelling there) of its melting away? If the fallen house describes its former state more perfectly than it ever achieved in its standing, then the built house achieves no more than the permanency of its vulnerabilities at the moment of its completion. What is built commences immediately upon the path of its falling, and may not be added to, or even be mended, without multiplying the number of its points of weakness. Spiders and draughts, damp and mould enter at will. 

So it is that Kierkegaard tells of a needlewoman who sewed an altar cloth as the materialisation in the world of her devotion directed beyond it. The woman dedicated every hour of her waking life to the work from its beginning to its completion and she worked at the highest level of needlecraft - only the greatest of endeavours may thereby be withdrawn from the world. The needlewoman embroidered the cloth with flowers and stars of exquisite and intricate design - and these expressed with the utmost eloquence the profundity of her faith. Upon its completion, she considered it adequate to its function, a human and therefore imperfect and therefore humble but nonetheless authentically committed expression of the path, and of the approach along the path, to god. 

The embroidered cloth was a true work of dedication, a true expression of devotion. We may only imagine her distress then as she observed others looking at the cloth, her work of faith, as if it were but a work of her art. It wounded her to hear them attribute the work to her and not to god, to praise it and her, and not god. The needlewoman had embroidered her faith into the cloth but the sacred meaning was not understood by those who saw it, and the sacred itself, that which she sewed before, and sewed in the name of, was also not present in the cloth. What she had sewed expressed a house, a plucking or unpicking, falling away from itself. 

In contemplating her own work, she felt her powerlessness in supplication before that to which she was devoted. Through the gaze of those looking at her work, she understood there was nothing in the cloth but the mode of her life energy vibrating in the world as this materialised itself as technical proficiency combined with the profundity of her vision. We may also imagine her iconoclastic desire to destroy the cloth, to plucketh down the building, and yet also not acting, knowing that her desire whilst seeking a truer and more direct approach to the divine, would, at the same time, feel sacrilegious, a desecration. What is the iconoclast’s white walled interior but the exuberant raiment of his faith, unpicked? It is exactly this predicament, where we are caught between our commitment and our anguish at our commitment’s limits, at our building up of something that is also only a falling down, a gaze sewn into the world, unpicked, where we encounter the nature of our involvement in what lies beyond us - the form taken of our beggaring by the world. In our faith we stray, in our straying we return. Just now, I glimpsed, by no other means than association, a carnival of souls spinning like so many teetotums beneath the skin of the world, pressing upwards, reaching for a return to life, but never touching it.

Every radical of my acquaintance, who has sought to cajole or to persuade me, has done so successfully. Why not transfer my thoughts from what I had just then been thinking? Why not turn my attention from my path to his? What difference does it make if I give or withhold my assent? Fate decides. It has become my habit that I will always begin by agreeing to see things his way. For the enchantment of it. But I have also always considered messengers, in the presumption of their approach to me, as it were, knocking on my door, canvassing my support, as a sign of malignant intent. Indifference and disinterest are the only traits I trust in others. These world changers and message bearers are wolves beside the forest path. I never considered anyone who was ready to bend my will to their’s, even as they succeeded, as anything other than as spies or sociopaths. And it was precisely this quality of their malignancy that persuaded me to accept everything they had to say - I feel deep sympathy for devils, I see the pain they manifest in the logic and argument that they advance as proof of their fervency. I feel no anger against them, nor disgust at their need. For this reason, I see no function in mercy but in the mercy that may be shown to fallen tyrants. But I forgive them before they fall, they are the rock, more treacherous than sand, upon which the city will be built. So the radical persuades me with his failure to persuade me, his charming charmlessness, guileless guile. It is the effusion from his wounded core, the magma energy of his frailty, that turns my attention towards him. 

Might we know commitment only from the place of ambivalence? Loyalty is a moment in betrayal, and not the other way round. Or, rather, commitment is a false relation to what is committed to. But equally, I may express my faithlessness only in my faith. And so it is that transgression becomes distinct from trespass at the level of an intimacy in intent. I have no capacity or will to deviate from that to which I am opposed - whatever I repudiate is fixed and preserved, it becomes, in the most profound sense, what I am committed to. The more I hate a thing, the more it belongs in my life, and the more it is there, the more deeply I depend upon it so as to continue as I am. I am changed by my unswerving commitments, and in my inadvertencies; by refusing to adapt I am swept along; compromised because uncompromising. I have never found myself a member of a crowd without also feeling a wave of profound melancholic sympathy for whatever is being crowded against. I have never chanted slogans nor insults, or shaken my fist, nor stoned an unbeliever, and I am habitually careless in my prayers. 

I do not think truth is born from suffering, nor that the oppressed either understand or know how to escape their oppression - to be sure, creation is a product of constraint and not abundance, of being in relation to power but not being powerful. But it is so easy to trespass against another without knowing you are causing offence, but transgression is always a deliberate act against external constraints. Of course, it often occurs that the transgressed against creates elaborate territorial rules in order to trap the transgressor who at first merely trespasses but later, also offended, is then provoked by the enjoyment of the trespassed against, continuing with the policy of incursion - each enjoying, and feeding off, the energy expended by the other upon their own antagonistic and yet also co-dependent concept of where the line is drawn. The church will uncover its heretics, and the state its enemies within. 

That is only to say, transgression is an event situated within established relations - so where it involves persons invading territories, that is one thing, but where it is persons intruding upon other persons, that is another. The territorial desire to offend and to take offence depends, as the ground of the transgressive relation, upon an immediately conditioned temporality - a transgressive act triggers an instantaneous response from the transgressed against. The conditioning that is structured as the transgressive relationship, taking offence and taking offence against that offence, provoking and feeling provoked into provoking, may be disassembled where its immediate temporality is bypassed. Where offence is slowed down, and there is no social form that is not constructed out of offence, it begins to escape itself (cf mouse on the moon). 

Imperceptible transgressions within the Law, gentle driftings inside the territory’s gravitational field rather than a friction generating direct confrontation, begins to describe an altered ground from which new relations are derived, and other rules are negotiated. Before the Sermon on the Mount, nobody had considered non-resistance as a stratagem of inoffensive transgression: if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Welcomed invaders forget their homeland. The wilful transgressor may intrude only a short distance into the enemy’s territory but then drift from, even as she obeys, the rules by which the borders of her own territory are enforced. 

The radical agitator before me, this unother, seeking to seduce me, desires that I desire him. He stakes his claim upon what he claims has already come to pass, it’s already here, already inside, the disaster, the rapture, is now. The power of every rhetorician is drawn from his conjuring in the perception of his audience a sense of manifest latency - he wishes to persuade them of the imminence of their doom, their salvation, the collapse of all things, the immediacy of the city on the hill. His appeal buried within his imperative is the sound, moment by moment, of a primitive desire to transform (in the perception of others) the example into explanation. If we assent, he encloses us. It is then perhaps, my capacity for responsiveness to the other’s unlikely appeal, a predilection for the pathos of tricksters and conmen, a predisposition for my ears to hear the wrong note; my desire for the lie qua lie that will clinch it for me, causing my separation from natural born scepticism, detaching me, sweeping me along. The untenable sets me in motion, as I seek out make do and mend arguments and perspectives, no matter how fantastical, to establish their possibility, and to make it so (cf saps at sea). 

And so at every juncture, my journey was deflected, as in a Markov chain, as in a pinball game, by the most recent encounter with yet another devil on the road. At every station I was gently separated from my way and my possessions diverted down ever narrowing, ever more lonely, paths and into ever greater obscurity. After Beaumarchais, ‘It's your world, but I make my way in it.’ I am convinced now that those who deflected me from my own brilliance into my own occlusion did so on purpose. Whether they did it in concert, I cannot tell. But I do not regret it at all, I may carry out my work cramped in the furthest corner just as well as if I were amplified from the widest platform. I went with them gladly, it was a picaresque. And if it is not quite right to say, in obliging them, in assenting to step their way a little further into the shadows, that in entering their world I thereby acted against it, after all I did not act against them, then at least I did nothing but see them in a position other than the position from which they saw me - if I was never a thorn in their flesh, then I have become a sort of flesh buried in their thorn. 

But anyway, devils met along the way are not so significant. Such encounters only precipitate what is already in motion, bringing to a crisis tendencies that were present before I had set out on my journey. If I accept the challenge of the Chinese finger trap, I also escape it.  At each step we take, pressing down upon the skin of the world, our pressure is met magnetically, with equal force, from under the earth by another’s step pressing upwards with a teetotum’s pressure. These are the footsteps of the dead to which we are bound. They draw our movements from us, we follow their design as if we were wearing enchanted shoes. From beneath the surface of the world, pressing up against the bulging embroidered cloth of the living world, the dead set out our every movement, as if our image were reflected in a mirror, as when a prisoner and his visitor place their palms to the security glass between them, not touching but matching. But the things under the earth live upside down - as we move with our head above our feet so they move with their feet uppermost, pressing upwards against the crust containing them, tracing the moves of the living as like the patterns of skaters upon the icy surface of a frozen river. The dead are like the fish that sometimes push their mouths out through the skin of the river, or like moles pushing furiously away from them, the substance of their world, desiring hollowness below and solidity above. 

I did not hold anything back from them, my earthly masters, those who would lead me by the nose, even as I pledged my obedience, I did not hold anything back that was mine to give, and yet I could not prevent myself from seeing them, as Lacan might say, not in the position from which they saw me. In part, let’s say, the cause of my disloyal calculations of the absurdity of this commitment in its moment of its greatest sincerity (of, for example, the pathos in this minority’s presentation of the incommensurability of its revolutionary truth), to not believe what I truly believed, was a consequence of my obligations to similar others who had also persuaded me by way of antinomies, of their incomparable truths. What they said to me, in their great enthusiasm, I understood to be but a formal device, a vehicle, for a purpose and desire that could not be directly expressed - their fantasy to live unchallenged, their desire to serve a higher, hidden, satanic master to whom they could deliver me as a recruit - 'I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.' The escape from each master became possible for me at precisely the point where I began to follow another - after all, isn’t agency the last unflushable turd of the bourgeois revolutionist’s image repertoire, and thus the greatest argument for the toilets of decomposition? We do not free ourselves by the process of a simplifying intensification of our commitment (to relations, or to truths), freedom is not a white walled interior, there is not One (‘too many for me’), but on the contrary, we encounter what is free and easy through a neg-uniformity of inputs (Beer’s variety at its fullest amplitude). 

Or again, from another way, very small animals make their nests in the lairs of great predators. They are aware they exist beneath the contempt of their host, but know also that the lesser predators will be warded off. In that sense, I am an extremophile, living innocuously alongside the vent. I seek out the pettiness of fanatical tyrants, their vanity, the limit to their power, and I make my home in that shadow, under the volcano. My submissive awareness of my master’s errors is expressed in my willingness to shore up the collapsing house of their delusions. I want to save them, not from but within, the inferno. Above all, I enjoy playing their hand, making their arguments, acting their role - adding the depth and sophistication which their own quixotic enthusiasm forecloses upon. I am the bird that swoops down to peck at the grapes the master has painted - for have I not unwillingly suspended my belief, and thus reinstate it? We see in the world, that the committed must commit in every instance to the discourse that they are committed to - the lines the gods have written for them, they must speak. After all, what is commitment but playing the role they were cast into. To fail in the instance, is to introduce a weakness that the enemy will exploit. My role as very small animal is to add plausibility to the confidence trick in the master’s discourse, as if the world really might be changed, souls saved, and prophecies seen to come to pass. My contribution to changing the world is to contribute to it as if I were contributing to it. Then, haven’t I, in some sense, tricked the tricksters? Transgressed against the transgressors? Betrayed the traitors? I mean falling into the building. I mean being unsewn into the cloth. Have I, or haven’t I? In some sense?

Where the Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete streets have no name: a rubble strewn approach to the idea of apophatic mercy

 And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint; 2 Saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man: 3 And there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. 4 And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; 5 Yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. 6 And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith. 7 And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? 8 I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?

Traditionally, the parable of the unjust judge is interpreted as if it were an allegory rather than a parable, and specifically as an allegory for the power inherent to persistence in rightful supplication - it is retold as a try, try and try again fable of that power, in a civil rights sense, inherent to sustained subjective engagement with the cold indifference of established institutions. There are expanded versions of the allegory, where the emphasis is placed either on the ‘persistent widow’ (i.e. on her righteousness) who, by pursuing her interest, succeeds in neutralising objective bias personified by corrupt officials; or alternatively, an amen to that lesson is drawn from the ‘unjust judge’ (i.e. systemic bias and/or as a variant of the evil counsellors trope) whose failures by omission and/or their self interested cronyism, act as a constraint upon the possibility of righteousness in the world. In both versions, the story remains essentially the same - we shall overcome/they shall not prevail. However, the parable as parable, has another register, perhaps an underneath, which reveals the standpoint of the unjust judge... the only example, I have found of the this version (from the judge’s side) is in Tolstoy’s story, Father Sergius.

The unjust judge is unresponsive initially to the supplications of the widow, who appears to him first as if before the seat of religion and then as if before the throne of Caesar. But his unresponsiveness is not a product of his allegiance to the powers that be, nor is it a result of any corrupt hostility to the widow’s cause. Both widow and judge are thrown into their encounter, they have no choice in the matter, but the widow approaches the judge because she is driven by her complaint whilst the person of the judge is only caught up in that particular engagement by accident of his social function. The unjust judge is a bureaucratic time server. He has no motivation. He is an instrument. His aversion to the approach of complainants is a symptom of his lassitude, a characteristic trait of the nature of his burden.

The judge is not committed either to the Good or to the State. He is not committed to anything but the evasion of the position of responsibility in which his hearing of the widow’s case would inevitably implicate him. He finds himself there, in the place where his interest isn’t, in the place where he encounters the widow as other. He recognises how she works upon him, seeking to cajole and seduce his interest. The judge is not other to the widow, he is not therefor her. He is merely an instrument, a lever of otherwise abstract powers. The judge finds himself, as if before the widow’s judgment of him, precisely at the point of contradiction where the good must confront the state. Her complaint places him in the crisis of making a decision where the necessity of decisiveness indicates precisely a breakdown in the relational process of which his position as mediating instrument is a product.

Above all, the judge seeks not to be ‘worn down’. He finds himself thrown into the paradoxical position of immovable object against which is directed the irresistible force of the widow’s persistence. But whilst her persistence is self-identical with her interest, his own interest is located elsewhere than in his objective immovability. He neither wants nor does not want to accede to the widow’s demands (we can almost hear the old refrain: if it was up to me…) - already, he senses the paradox is resolved, as if by Zeus, at the level of a transposition into constellation, into a designated non-position. This weariness which seeks only not to be ground down, so that he might continue and not be overcome, realises the judge before the reader. We know nothing of the widow’s interest but recognise the self in the judge’s desire to evade his responsibilities.

Suddenly, as if before the judgment of the reader, and only in Tolstoy’s telling, the judge is transformed into a conflicted soul, as if he were trapped in some Levantine Greeneland, incarnating the eternal honorary counsel, the archetypical whiskey priest - we know the apparatchik desires to be left alone, weltschmerz is the affective ground from which every tv cop extracts audience sympathy. So much has already happened and now this, now the call comes, now the demand for engagement. The unjust judge is not actively malign but is fatally incapable of realising, from his abstracted position, the persistant’ widow’s desire for the Good. Why should the widow approach him and distract him with yet another intangible catastrophe that he is always the unequal to? Why must the whisky priest hear yet another deathbed confession, and thereby activate the trap of his fatal hubris?  The unjust judge recognises the widow as if positioned in the jaws of the veritable deus ex machina - but without the necessary and objective instrumentalisation of his predicament, as he desires only not to give way but then also snagged by the conditions of his employment, the widow’s complaint cannot even begin to attain the full realisation of its righteousness, derived as it is not from a confrontation with the judge but from the counter claim of the ‘adversary’.  Without the particular of his refusal, his concretisation of injustice, the widow remains stuck in mere vendetta: 

So, the revolutionary process (or what we could call destituent power) thus consists in creating an adversary, in creating a “united counter-revolution.” It’s not about fighting for the revolution, but rather doing it in such a way as to produce a powerful counter-revolution, that, as you struggle against it, it allows you to go beyond the immediate situation. I find this illuminating. The insurrectionary party will only mature when it has a powerful enemy to combat. That’s why I am enthusiastic when the enemy grows stronger. 

Tronti, On Destituent Power

Even endlessly repeated banalities find their moment: the only thing necessary for the triumph of good is for evil men to do nothing. And so it comes to pass that only the sadistic revolutionist is gladdened at the evanescent spectacle of a lordly power in its autumnal season, worn to ruin, and passing unrecognised amongst the righteous and insurgent desire of the other. The death-gripped, self-conflicted consciousness of the non-judging judge at bay, then giving way, articulates very precisely the standpoint of the other-knowing knower, who knows fatally he is not known by the other. Doesn’t the victim capture with its final gaze upon the world the image of the murderer in the dreadful act? Doesn’t the sudden collapse of RAAC built infrastructure reveal something oh-so allegorical about this, our Potemkin world? Then, in giving way to the widow’s force of will, i.e. not actively deploying but suspending institutional power, the judge allows for a good to be realised in the world as it were in the form of a non or infinitely suspended judgment; his let it be so (one imagines how Peter Ustinov would play it in one of those Hollywood epics of the late ‘50s: the simpering, the wave of the corpulent hand) is the implementation, in spite of his own proclivities, and in spite of his objective positioning. It is also more precisely the condition of his apophasis, his non-work (desoeuvrement). The judge recognises the work of the other in the event of his non-judgement, as his own inoperability. By, for once, not playing the role of mouthpiece, he channels at last the will of that of which he is already supposedly the instrument - he utters the will of god as he ceases to play god’s representative. 

In this non-act of giving way, in this desiring not to be worn down (may you never be weary uncle!), not abandoning his given position, and therefore becoming immediately worn down and thus immediately unpositioned, he rehearses the humanistic theatrics of Pilate (but with inverted outcome). In the Tolstoy story, a mother beseeches a hermit to lay his hands on her sick child, he does not want to do it, but he is worn down, even if he has no healing powers he might still act as a conduit. The child recovers, the fame that this brings the hermit presents a new problem... if he is a conduit of divine power, it is eroding him, replacing his inner life with an external life. The perceived will of God corrupts him. If he had persisted in refusing divine possibility, he would have maintained his internal life and the possibility of a different encounter with the sacred (but then from that which is the widow’s position of non-recognising, supplicating desire). Tolstoy reveals, or rather creates, the distinction between the widow’s adhering desire and judge’s separating desire - it is this distinction that we make when we set the either/or between expropriating and relinquishing, between occupying and vacating, acting and not acting. 

The parable of the unjust judge is strange and obscure - and an exemplar of the anti-allegory. Almost everything that lives in it is now lost to us, and yet what caused it to live familiarly when it was first recorded, still lives if strangely and obscurely to us. We read it archeologically, as if it were an unlabelled and unplaceable artefact, a liminal, sculpted coulaged ambergris regurgitated from the depths, and pocketed by some shadowy curator haunting the strandline of the British Museum. The judge is a given, and an unjust judge only more so, but why a widow? What is a widow before whatever a judge might be in that world at that moment? Who is the widow’s adversary, and what is her claim? If the adversary were another widow, or a daughter, or a mother, or a mistress, a whore? Perhaps the complainant is not a widow at all, perhaps the adversary is merely the other wife, and the husband is not dead, or is dead and they are disputing an inheritance. Yes, perhaps the husband is dead and it was this judge who condemned him to death, and in doing so cast the woman, or women, into poverty. Who, if not this particular judge, would judge the widow’s claims to be just? Who would know how to judge such mysteries? Would the judge finding in her favour thereby find justice because she is persistent (we know from literature, never surrender is invariably a slogan of the villain - and the unjust judge at first is also objectively persistent)? And why the state of weariness before the force of erosion (is it an allegory of the attritional nature of history as RAAC dialectics: ‘gradually at first, then all at once’)? 

It is no accident that we find the parable of the unjust judge is followed by the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector which acts as a sort of corrective. Every parable, in sequence, is altered by what follows and succeeds - the whole becoming a meal of palate cleansing starters. And it is no accident that Christianity locates its own movement in the irresolvable predicaments of the unsavoury and unrighteous stock characters of folklore, the very personifications of corruption whom all revolutionaries negatively fetishise: judges, publicans, tax collectors, lepers, outsiders, gaolers, madmen, soldiers, traitors, prodigals, crucifiers. And the dead. And the Samaritans. The purpose of this identification with the unclean is twofold: firstly, it demonstrates the possibility of movement, and thus release, of the chance for redemption, which might be discovered beyond the works of activists and movements of enthusiasm, and located within that higher if interruptive register located further on than the register of fate which we call Grace; secondly, it inhibits the tendency to feedback runaway amongst the pious and patriotic who, by the very nature of their persistence, are only ever one step from acting on their indignation at the infidels and outsiders (the danger in the majoritarian discourse of appeal, the consciousness of acting in the name of the 99%).  

The uncorrected trajectory of the persistent widow narrative has lately found its perfected expression in the sub-capraesque film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. We are reminded that in the allegorical version of the widow’s appeal, the best outcome would be the institution of a just judge judging justly for the widow and against the ‘adversary’. In the enlightened world, complaint driven reformism must result either in the white police chief being replaced by a black police chief, or in generalised extra-judicial vigilantism - no justice, no peace! In reality, under the conditions thus given, there is no political exit from the particularity of predicament except along the path into abstraction and thus representation. The function of motivating grievance, loss, grief, agony, as the authentic vector of the complainant’s interest is never anything but the casus belli of a runaway into inevitably justifiable war, and thus atrocity - precisely what the Christian parable form seeks to inhibit. 

The characterisations in Three Billboards… are necessarily and absurdly truncated - the simpler the message, the more stupid (that is allegorical) the characters become in order to live the truth by recognition. Propaganda always brings its audience to the point where it must contemplate the necessity of injustice as instrument of justice. We are reminded by reference to the capraesque (unworthily rhyming antagonist to the kafkaesque) of how closely New Deal propaganda echoed the propaganda of its fascist contemporaries. We may also remember, as the ‘problem’ play of Three Billboards is succeeded allegorically by the ‘problem’ play of Barbie (as the persistent widow/unjust judge is followed by the pharisee/tax collector) that grievance can never be represented. The complainant may generalise only from this particular recognition of injustice as it is derived from her divergence of interest from the that of ‘the adversary’ against whom she seeks to be avenged. The resultant projected understanding of the generality takes on a motive-type exclusive form where social relations are stripped of their reproductive and mediating aspects and are conceived only as the non-relation of oppressor and oppressed. The export by American corporations of these truncated, complaint driven forms, converting them into products, advertising and entertainments has proved unsurprisingly successful in obscuring the complex of actually existing relations. Hollywood’s morality reminds us fascism is a modality of mass society where grief’s concrete particular is amplified into permanentised representations by corporate power.  Complaint is the most viable, and also most corruptive, driver of social change - it recognises as success only its own enshrinement, and thus perpetuation, as a lever of exception on established power. 

Perhaps in the end, the parable of the unjust judge, when separated from its allegorical escape routes and returned to the convolutions of its white box functions, articulates something that is more Greek than Hebrew - it is true that persistence and giving way have become the two sides of Christian ethics (first, the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and then the acquiescing before earthly power), but the balance and the internal weighting of the parable seems to point more towards Athens than Jerusalem in the sense that both the parable of the Unjust Judge’s work and of its unwork must be metabolised as material of the ‘political’. Both the persistent widow and the unjust judge create worlds in the world, the widow’s world is cumulative (the persistence of force), whereas the judge’s world is interruptive (the giving way of the concrete). The widow overcomes, the judge relinquishes. Then, by way of dogleg, and also by association: High Pigs /  Spectacles / Judges / Property.

Fragments of night 4

1. Another way: the Historic Party overlays a-historic and a-social patterns in messianic traditions and seeks to identify the suspension of social process and to substitute the event of itself as the path and the destination. But experience indicates that what is sought will be found in the possession of another - the desired object, if we call that truth, we mean only a bad Maltese Falcon, a demotivating and dispersive skatter-fetish, a brandished neg-MacGuffin, manifesting at the in-group boundary, and as a property belonging to the Other.  The very core of sociality is the other’s truth content held back from the home team turning for home, none the wiser. 

2. Another way: when considering the Singularity, or environmental collapse, or social revolution: /Mankind inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is incapable of solving, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are lost forever (/nachträglichkeit/) or at least in the course of decomposition/. 

3.i Another way, according to it’s own materialist principles, the chances that the products of communism would be carried by the Party of communism are, as the phrasing has it, /slim indeed/ - by what process would the communist milieu, a truncated product of class conflict, possess the content of what emerges as a set of social relations under /other/ conditions? A more consistently historical materialist theory of communism’s Party would make the case for it as a repository for all that communism is not - the Party of communism is a ruined folly, a midden of premature formulations, inappropriate gestures, and rank error. No, it is an orbiting satellite, tethered always at the same distance. Or it is that endeavour which constantly drifts further from the object that it seeks to approach, and which it never loses sight of but never gains ground on. Just as a painter will continue with a painting as he regrets not declaring it finished at an earlier stage, and now not finding a way out from it.  

3,ii The Party is an expression of the problematic of communism set at a higher level, it is an openness, or turning towards communism as a fallen form, a fallen ruin, an architectural structure built to align with the dawning solstice but realised as misaligned, and becoming that glowing burial chamber illuminated by a wrong light. In a similar way, The Church is not the agent of divinity, it does not transport the cargo of God across the threshold between heaven and world but functions as a unique library, a repository, of all the dead-ends accumulated in mankind’s foolish efforts to break down from within the /reizschutz/ that shields humans from the inundation of God - why do they rush to expose themselves to the extra-atmospheric forces that are always about to roll them away?

The five stratagems - an extract from an abandoned critique of the post-left

 If the Chinese and Russian regimes are more authoritarian, the US state is more totalitarian - America is most successful at integrating its various departments and functions into a totalised system for realising itself as an environment. Whilst China and Russia are still imprisoning and assassinating opponents, the US has developed a performative system of inclusion of differences that functions as a client driven control system. The homeostasis of the US totality is maintained by its constant readjustment to the manufacture of included differences. The process of governmental metabolisation of difference via the agency of manufactured opposition (where the manufacture of consent is taken to its logical inclusion) only really becomes apparent where the system’s good guy operatives are subjected to the sort of attacks that are conventionally directed against caricature enemies as exemplified by mobilisatory popular front style ‘punch a Nazi in the face’ and ‘ACAB’ slogan-memes, first widely circulated, and then abruptly discontinued. 

The ticklish matter is not that those who cleave to emancipatory ideals are not authentic, on the contrary,  sincerity is a condition of employment, just as the best salesman believes in his product, the difficulty is that the recuperative moment is located elsewhere than within the problematic of commitment - the authenticity of revolt, whatever the personal level of participation, is imbued with a positive/monetary value within the system against which it is directed, and for this reason it is reproduced. And wherever the form of revolt transforms into a circulated product, the revolutionaries are dissuaded from revolting against the binary oppositions they inherit  - at the most basic level, as an example, there is a structured presumption that feminism cannot be one of the names of the father. Whilst the totality is geared to orchestrate attacks on clearly designated skipping villains, the fascists, racists, misogynists, it has yet to come up with an adequate response to the antileft strategy of shaking the apparat tree to see which of its nice, good, tolerant, generous social critics fall out. The antileft approach suggests that it is only when you go after the Totality’s exemplary ‘blue tick’ revolutionaries, the allies who have adequately demonstrated their opposition to ‘oppressions’, who possess the fabled ‘free pass’ (i.e. make a paid living from their opposition to their employers) and meet the threshold for what it is to be an official opponent of the regime, that you find out how the system manufactures dissent against itself. 

What was it in 2020 that induced so many sectors of the American establishment to converge upon the strategy of investing in protest politics? The question is almost too big to answer, or to put it another way, it is because there were so many inputs, a profusion of programming, persuading the state-industrial complex to head down the route that it did, an issue-policy patterning that is repeated with its response to the Covid pandemic, drug decriminalisation, and climate change, that it is this overdetermined aspect, the multiplicity of causal inputs, the confluence of pressures and tendencies upon a single output, that distinguishes the present moment from everything that went before. Significance is no longer located strategically, there is no single objective (expressed in policy of interest and the financing of policy of interest) to be realised, but rather the policy is decided structurally, and then the reason for it, the objective, is added later - both added, and added to through a proliferation of rationalisations, and investments. Why did the security apparatus commit to, and facilitate identity politics? Why did the biggest corporations invest in and sponsor identitarian protest movements, even as they looted and set fire to corporate buildings? Why did the grand families constituting the political elite take the knee as they took up the cause of identity politics? It’s bizarre, it’s outlandish and it’s unprecedented. Yes, it indicates crisis but only in the sense that the party of capital has harnessed broken window theory as a source of accumulation. 

Capital has discovered the 2003 mantra, degrade, disrupt and dismantle as applied to itself constitutes the path of recomposition. The party of capital has taken a Bakuninist turn, and it is working. Camatte observed that post-war capital had realised and incorporated the project of the historic workers’ movement on the objective terrain of the community of capital, we are now living through actualised insurrectionism as a productive relation. But the answer is never singular, the reason for events always approaches the dreamwork’s navel, the event horizon. Every sector of the establishment found its own reasons for acting in 2020 as it did, and every sector had multiple justifications for the swerve it took. For the reason that ‘policy’ has entered a post-strategic state and undergone a qualitative transformation, the reason for anything undertaken by the state has become difficult to describe and much less explain: in effect, the motte-and-bailey doctrine has entered a borgesian state of infinite regress. 

How extraordinary it is, how paradoxically, elegantly bizarre, and so very beautifully fascinating that the greatest project of colonisation the world has ever known is now ideologically sympathetic to anti-settler ideology - alliance to the struggle against white supremacy becomes the veritable thirst trap, the Pavlovian trigger, for a conditioned identification with the world’s most recognisable commodities. All those Portland anarchists are transformed into exemplars of HR, the rioting sandwich board. Verily, Seattle is the locale where la poésie est dans la rue touched asphalt as taglines are in the street. Every revolt, whether it is constituted as violence, diversity, intelligence, divergence, deviance or flight is incorporated at the level of its compatibility with the apparatus of circulation, and contrariwise, a veritable Catch 22, only that which cannot be circulated (that is, the most unpopular and incommunicable of forms) continue to resist the totality. If it can be communicated it is within the state; if it resists the state, it cannot be communicated.

If we consider just one example here, we can observe in action what I have elsewhere described as niche opportunism, and also briefly consider how current operations indicate a step change in the modus operandi of social control. At a certain level everyone already knows that images are always separated from what they represent - every image can be put to use strategically by careful editing to elicit and displace affective responses onto other objects. The use of images of ‘resistance’ and the feelings generated by them severing as a path into collusion with fragments of the state is a remarkable and long established technique, the function of the provocateur (now also called ‘thirst trap’) is often acknowledged but rarely identified because, put very simply, we are predisposed to desire that the semblance of what is good really does express what is good; we do not want to think that the image of someone bravely standing up for justice and what is right, might also be circulated as a Trojan ruse for inducing acquiescence to what is craven and unjust. I borrowed the notion of niche opportunism (I cannot now remember where I borrowed it from) to describe adaptive behaviours triggered by environmental transformations which could not be otherwise attributed to design, strategy or intent. The idea supposed that subject formations no longer sought to realise (modify) their environment in accord with their desires  - the capital resources had dried up and all capital-heavy investments were productive of unforeseen consequences and crippling unexpected costs which rivals could swoop in on and exploit (communications infrastructure such as broad band cellular network technology and fibre optic cabling are obvious examples). 

At a certain moment, modern states gave up on the idea of making history and instead allowed history to make itself which the states would then affirm, seek to adapt to, and exploit to the best of their abilities - whilst at one level, the post-strategy position really is just another iteration of Renaissance city-state constrained pre-strategic realpolitik, the situation is irrevocably shifted historically. Fortuna is converging with the singularity, and this, beyond the exigencies of a surface level machiavellianism, has radically transformed the role of princes. The modern prince subsists in the shadow of the greater power, waiting for it to enter a state of crisis, and when this inevitably comes to pass, the prince expands his forces to occupy his moment in the sun, utilising for capital the moment itself, the opportunity itself. In the natural world, very small birds and fish dwell in the vicinity of top predators for which the small animals do not meet the threshold of prey items; the small animals gain a level of protection from attacks by mid-level predators whilst performing services to the king predator (both feeding on their parasites, and attracting mid-level predators into the jaws of their protector). The flock of images of justice and emancipation which routinely circulates within the apparat, taking flight in crisis, serves a grooming function performed by small animals not worth devouring. Amongst certain sections of the left, niche opportunism is theorised as communisation where the revolution and the new society, on the basis of the principle, ‘nature abhors a void’, operate inseparably and immediately - the movement is powered by the moment, the moment is powered by the movement and both are powered by an objective tilt of conditions. In all versions of niche opportunism, the strategic element, the transitional phase (where policy is formulated for the realisation by agency) has become operationally redundant. 

The recent example that perhaps best illustrates the niche opportunist mechanism, and best demonstrates the ultimately inscrutable character of its overdetermined products, are the recruitment videos published by different departments within the US security apparatus. The videos variously show individuals belonging to one or more marginalised and minority grouping categorised by sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity and ‘neurology’. The video narratives show how those who were once outsiders can now be included as authentic soldiers for the state in its phase of post-imperial teleoplexic realisation as the city set on a hill. But what do these inclusionist narratives really say about the post-Trump strategy of the security apparatus? That it is in ecstasy? That the control society has entered the moment of its apotheosis, and incorporated every fragmented scroll into its Logos? I can imagine five strategems within the dreamwork which might indicate that the idea-limits of both over-determination and the dream’s navel are now exceeded - there is a mining in the mining, not just in the spoil heap but in the process of mining itself:

The first strategem, Shakespearean perhaps, is that such inclusion indicates a sort of promotion sideways of the rainbow movement of useful fools who did such good work undermining the Trump narrative of parochial isolationism. Public recognition and acknowledgement of the heroic role of oppressed minorities is also a sort of disengagement from them, a variant (in the age where Prince Hal has become his own Falstaff) of I know thee not old man which is neutralised into a soft blocking, I see you baby shakin' that ass. Pride communities are transformed into totemic icons of acknowledged victimhood, whilst official recognition of their previously hidden contributions functions as a readymade casus belli for every operation of the drone corps. It is easy to imagine that members of these minorities will be assigned back office duties but it is more likely that they will be sent into crowd control and population subjugation operations - whoever fights against them reveals their hatred of difference. What else says ‘we are not Hamas’ better than the dancing, cat-eared ‘hot’ IDF girl? 

A second stratagem built into the apparat’s inclusionist videos might suggest that although these are intended for consumption on the domestic market they are not recruitment tools at all but are intended as ideological bridges between psychologically profiled individual types and security forces. The types of individual identified and recognised are classified by their googled sense of personal vulnerability, their ressentiment, their sense of justification in deplatforming, doxing and denouncing, their Milgram-path into repressive desublimation, their nascent receptivity to totalitarian drives. Their browsing history suggests their latent responsiveness to high profile security apparatus promises to defend all inclusive ‘lifestyles’. The videos rationalise the necessity of becoming an informant in the fight against fascism - everyone against fascism can do their bit for the alliance, whilst at the same time everyone else, identified through their internet searches and cultural proclivities are revealed as potential Trump supporters. 

The isolated individual conditioned to identify with communities extracted algorithmically through search terms and equally conditioned to be wary of the threat posed by others in their actual physical locality are also more emotionally susceptible to the apparat’s propagandised obligation to defend the substance of their abstract category-based identities. In other words, these recruitment videos are not recruitment videos at all but mere propaganda videos for home consumption by targeted demographics (not necessarily those identifying as belonging to the Pride communities), just as in previous eras the security state deployed emblematic images of happy families to elicit affectionate feelings in individuals (even if they were not a member of a happy family) for that which might be lost if the status quo were ever to change. The subject’s conservative impulse, to stick and not twist, to defend what exists and what has already been won, is easily manipulated into making justifications for the cause of emergency measures, as the left’s ‘cheerleading’ of the state’s ‘listen to the science’ response to the Covid pandemic has amply demonstrated. 

A third stratagem suggests that the recruitment videos only pretend to be targeted at a domestic audience, whilst the real targets are members belonging to minorities working in the security apparatus of rival regimes. There has been a lot of discussion comparing the American’s ‘pansy’ military videos with equivalent Russian ‘macho’ videos. It is suggested, wrongly, that the comparison proves American cultural decadence. On the contrary, it is well established that an image may have a function very different, in fact in no way related, to the represented subject matter - this is the stuff of Three Day’s of the Condor. The third hypothesis suggests that it is possible that, for whatever reason, the recruitment videos are directed at members of opposing forces, perhaps for the reason of persuading them of America’s harmlessness, where the video functions as a sort of paratrepsis or distraction display. Alternatively, the videos might also function as a recruitment tool for potential double agents, perhaps they are directed (as virtual honey traps) at closeted members of enemy security forces and are intended as a stratagem for inducing identification and ‘solidarity’ with America’s progressive cause that moves in line with their disaffection from the ‘repressive’ character of their own nation. If this is the case, the US apparat may intend to simply recruit enemies or, more efficiently, once their sympathies have drawn them into the trap, they become, as in the old days, highly vulnerable to blackmail under the threat of exposure. A recruited gay operative in Iran will prove highly cooperative. 

The fourth stratagem would replicate the arguments of the third but in this version, the videos are directed at the general populations of foreign countries, or more precisely, the repressed minorities within such countries. If sizeable ethnic and queer minorities at the level of particular market entities within Iran, China and Russia could be persuaded to identify with, and act in the interest of, American capital, buying into specific (the water drinking Ronaldo proving the exception) iconic commodities, on the grounds of progressivism and inclusivity, then that in itself would demonstrate sufficient justification for the form taken by the video subject matter - there’s a home for us is still a resonant, throat catching, formulation of hope. 

The fifth, and last conceivable stratagem would present Itself speculatively, let’s do anything (fuck around and find out). An operation can be severed from a specific objective, it can function precisely at the level of pure operability, and as it becomes real and begins to generate outcomes, the agency can monitor the links, clicks and retweets, collate the conspiracy theories,  and then perhaps integrate the best of them after the fact as the true purpose in making the intervention  in the first place. The number of ‘file under miscellaneous’ state instigated events intentionally severed from all rational meaning seems to be spiralling, as signalled by the recent opening of the UFO floodgates, and which appears to operate  something like cloud seeding - at the level of operational objective, any form of outcome-precipitation registers as a win, the more un-modelled the outcome, the better the agency likes it. Fucking stuff up and shit happens has always played a strategic function, sowing confusion, interruption of normality by inexplicable occurrences, and misdirections deployed to bury bad news, all these are basic manoeuvres in spy versus spy. But the turn towards post-strategy where techniques once used against enemies are now deployed on home territory as a sort of therapeutic stimulant is another level.  

 

The perversity of recent governmental politics, indicates a transformed teleoplexic relation within the executive’s relation to the processes of power, and seems to reveal an eager readiness to resort to a form of occult incantation, or attack sorcery, wherein the experimentally unknown is actively sought out for its own sake: unknown events are manufactured by unknown agents for unknown reasons so as to produce unknown outcomes - incantatory investments of speculative capital are re-directed towards fictive outcomes, which are thereby summoned into the world, all that is air solidifies into matter. The return post-strategically to that inadvertantly acknowledged central plank of neo-conservatism, the ‘unknown unknowns’, as a form of open-ended, open handed policy, that is rebuilt around the traumatic kernel of willed social dislocation, appears to indicate the beginning of the end of the era of instrumentalising rationality, the sine qua non of bourgeois governmentality. From the perspective of the party of capital, everything and anything can be hooked up to an income stream. Spies too, as entrepreneurs of the unexpected, can make anything happen: if they plug an object chosen at random into a seeded or tilted stochastic network, then link it to a Patreon, Substack and/or Onlyfans account, it will begin to operate as an attractor basin, even if only to bots, and start generating revenue as long as the tilting of the host environment is maintained in steady state -  Alicia, 17, makes £10,000 a day on TikTok lip-syncing to Katy Perry songs. 

Monosandalism - self-deprecation as second order narcissism

 /And you accept them with despair

these things that you do not want.

But your soul seeks, weeps for other things;

the praise of the Demos and the Sophists,

the hard-won and inestimable ‘Bravo!’;

the Agora, the Theater, and the Laurels.

How will Artaxerxes give you them,

How will you find them in the satrapy;

and what kind of life, without them, will you live.

- Cavafy/

A hampered figure as it emerges from the distance, a figure becoming recognisable for wearing a single shoe, is a recurring symbolic unit transmitted along the Hellenic mycelium threading across western culture, a pinch of Attic salt sprinkled over distinct folk traditions. In narrative, the loss of a shoe has significance, and therefore history. The more the image is looked for, the more examples of it are discovered. Motifs are the tethering posts of narrative from which lines of invention and elaboration are played out and returned to. How should such an image, beyond its function as a formal device, be understood? Certainly, there is a formal error of approach inherent to the collating of examples of a particular motif which causes loss of specific meaning from each narrative, and which ends in the reductive expropriations of structuralism. On the other hand, there also appears in such collections a vanishing point which once passed through causes the assembled examples to talk to each other,  as they coalesce into a new narrative in the late style. 

Although Thucydides attempted to ascribe a rational motive to the one-shoed Plataean army, the true register of monosandalism is allegorical and context bound. The signification of one-shoedness is not fixed but as a general rule it shows a prophesied or retroactively assigned constraint imposed by the fates upon the forward movement of a protagonist (as with Jason) and constitutes an interruptive  ‘challenge’ of character within the terrain of the quest (as with Cinderella), but it also suggests the marking out of one who is appointed by some /always already/ circumstance to undertake an extraordinary task - the hero already has, and will always have, one foot in the other world, and one sandal in this. The proper function of all familiar motifs in narrative is absolute particularisation; it is through such devices that the problematic of this individual is presented as both separate and belonging.

The hero, the agent, the subject, the indivdual catalyst, is /realised/ by his traversal of his terrain, and he is /characterised/ in his traversal of his times. He has one foot in the other country, he has left his shoe in the old times. He is an alien presence in the new circumstance even as it crystallises around him, whatever begins with him begins as contrary to his desire. The one who happens to actualise the new conditions, bringing the world into the world, is pure contingency, a seed from another tree, and belongs inextricably, paradoxically, to the old world to which he eternally seeks return. The damaged foot, the lost shoe, dramatises the simultaneous groundedness and groundlessness of his position, as he finds himself impeded and constrained even as he is set in motion at the level of his connection to his country. Where we are attached, where we are bound, that is where we shall be torn up. He is extracted by the roots from his country. He is unhomed. From the ground and into time, from the times and into dust. 

It is necessary that the hero should ‘be partly strong and partly brittle’ (Daniel 2:42), that an aspect of his strength should be his fall, that he be sheered away from, and therefore enact the loss of, the world of which he is the ultimate product and final herald, ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desart’. The hero, Achilles, also doth bestride the narrow world, and yet like the Rhodian Colossus, severed at the knees, Achilles is fatally weakened in his radicality, in his rootedness, at the point of his connection, his motivation, his cause, his movement, his war. He is undone at the level of his particularisation, which is his weakness. He is broken off to be blown away like chaff from the threshing floor and yet also remains a mountain that fills the whole earth. 

The hubris of the hero consists of a presumption of his either being truth, or possessing truth. He acts as if his actions are his to take, he speaks as if his words are his to utter. Similarly, the political radical presumes his rootedness in reality, his radicality lies precisely in the certainty of his becoming distinct from what he opposes by means of his actions and words. The radical roots himself in reality by separating himself from falsity and error. In other words, the radical presumes a rootedness within reality that is distinct from his actual interpellated rootedness. He does not ask if the acts and words by which he distinguishes between truth and error, reality and falsity, domination and revolution, he does not ask if what he says and what he does, is contrariwise, perverse, ambivalent. He does not ask as if to Jesus, ‘Master, is it I?’ The modern anarchist, constituted declaratively, and by naive commitment (ideal-ego), does not achieve even the sophistication of the awareness of Judas, and thereby cannot countenance the tragic double bind that Judas presents, /Master, am I a dispositif?/

The contaminated figure of the radical, little suspecting he is already an apparatus, appears in the world as a sort of Titan, a primoridial giant emerging amongst proliferating Olympian deities, but cursed with a fixed and unambiguous, simplistic and ultimately insufficient, message brought out from a world now submerged. Or, again, the rootedness of the radical resembles that of the vanquished product, the automaton Talos, who was animated around a single vein running from his neck to his ankle and fortified by a single bronze nail. Just as the elemental Titans, and their chthonic dependents (Gorgons, Erinyes etc), were constituted around singular passions, found themselves suddenly vulnerable to the cool caprices, false allegiances, double bluffs, swerving meanings and treacherous surfaces that distinguishes the time of the Olympian gods, so the radical is fatally compromised at the level of his one-sidedness, his simplistic chthonic/automaton message. Both the Titan and the radical are metabolised at a discursive level that their constituted awareness cannot recognise or respond to. The primitive idea that an individual /is/ what he declares himself to be, the hero, the champion, articulating the magic inherent in the naive presumption of nominative autonomy, ‘I am a communist’, ‘I am a marxist’, is fated to vanquishment, humiliation and banishment by the forces that set it in motion,  monosandalled. The hero, no matter how he twists and turns on the hook of himself, is food and drink to both laughing gods and recuperating institutions. 

In reality we are never what we declare ourselves to be, nor are we what we commit ourselves to, but as Sartre observed, we are condemned not to exceed the interplay (that is the sum) of all the reflected traces of our presence as perceived by others (the sunlight thrown back from ‘smashed human bone’). In each and every instance, it is always, whatever you say I am, that is what I am. Collected together, the simple declarative messages of radicals, titans and automatons function as components of the complexity enjoyed by both gods and marketplaces. By weaving a multi-stranded world from an infinity of single threads, the gods discover ambivalence, transience, and games. 

The separation between the order of the titans and the order of the Olympian gods is better understood by imagining a return to the earlier, pre-irony, state. What would the world of the imaginary, a world without signs, be like? Only the approach to it can be known and this is illustrated in Karen Blixen’s play for marionettes, /Sandhedens hævn/, translated as /The Curse of Truth/. A witch curses the members of a household so that every lie told within it will become true: the poor woman who pretends to the rich man that she loves him, does fall in love with him; the braggart becomes the hero; the hypocrites become virtuous; the miser loses his money. We might observe that such a return, as from Racine to Corneille, could be summed up from the /The Curse of Truth/: a crust of dried bread feeds better than all the contents of a cookery book.

  

The Gods did not destroy the titans, although they force departure from the world of elemental messages where words and meanings are inseparable (cf the univocity of being after John Duns Scotus, notwithstanding the processive immanence of deleuze), but instead put them to work in the dark factory of Tartarus . The radical  or chthonic message is incorporated and converted into an ideological tool - the revolutionary is deployed by /the party of real domination/ as the minotaur was kept in Daedalus’s labyrinth, a regulatory apparatus within the regime of Minos. And just as the chthonic Medusa could not anticipate, comprehend nor respond to the mirrored shield of Athena raised by the winged sandalled Perseus, so the revolutionary cannot anticipate nor prevent his recuperation and conversion into a representation, a fetish, an interpellated /realising/ dispositif, by the forces he assumes he was set in motion to oppose. 

The question that could not be set to the Titans but may still be asked of the revolutionaries, appearing as they do, subsequent to the Olympian age of fatal irony, without in anyway inheriting or sublating it, is whether it is preferable to try and anticipate and thereby incorporate the social (that is recuperating) component of their own message back into their project - the introjected ego-ideal of self-reflexivity - or whether it is better to perfect and defend a given positional one-sidedness, as one might willingly assume the character of a Judas or Iago in a play, in the full knowledge that the Machiavellian substance brought into the world by such functionaries will be metabolised  (woven as one strand amongst many), relativised and constrained by and within the totality of social process. The question thereby sets ‘what is to be done?’ as a recursive and constantly recurring problematic - in cybernetics it is the question of variety at its fullest amplitude (a sur-requisite variety) where an attained senescent, post-optimality indicates the possibility of a heuristic within ‘what is to be done?’ as either the quietist /abstiens toi/ of dupontism (after Tolstoy) or the endlessly proliferating accelerating stress path and tinkering-patching (bricolaging) of Kafka’s mole creature. 

In practice the solution to the problem of anticipatory counter-recuperation (shall we recourse to negating the negation, or to Betty Boo Doing the Do) is necessarily always messy and leading to an endless regress: to what measure are social  forces present in self-critique (cf Lady of Shaghai)? At what point  do perfected self-separating radical gestures become finally cut off from, and insignificant to, the symbolic order (as in Fassbinder’s Third Generation)? There is no finality here, only endless mutation and recycling of available materials. As a get out, we might then effect a return to the problematic of what is rooted in what, by setting the question in terms of the originally presented image as if scripted by Švankmajer: ‘is there a distinction to be made between the lost shoe and injured ankle? Perhaps, I reply airily. But that is a distinction made within and by the story itself, I add vaguely.’

The limping variation of monosandalism probably signifies the capacity to attain knowledge by other means than expeditionary force - the lame figure cannot keep up with others, but in his thoughts, he flies ahead of them. His knowledge is post-hubristic, he is the only one able to recognise things as they really are in the midst of the event, and is marked, and is chosen, and is charged, in his wounded wandering, to bring the absolute particularity of his knowing out of the past, so as to emerge from the wilderness at the edge of town, burdened by the obscure irrevocability of all that has already happened.  

/The music stopped and I stood still, 

And found myself outside the Hill, 

Left alone against my will, 

To go now limping as before, 

And never hear of that country more!/

The one shoed figure moves, as does the rolling Moran, across a post-tragic terrain, moving as if from the terrain before the story, of the pre-story, and emerging archetypically /into/ as an organising function, a familiarisation device, of /this/ story. The one-shoe infects the present community with what went before, the significance of their living is suddenly knocked from their hands, and is relocated chthonically, inaccessibly, into the order of all that escapes them. For those who are always about to make things new the assigned fate is reversion to the picking up of broken pieces, a rediscovery in the hurricane of the midden at their heart.

/Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.

― Ballard/

Self-imposed constraint as a way to self-knowledge, by diet, by study, by exercise is the only means available to the individual to create itself as a form not wholly determined by exterior forces. And yet, it is through these acts of self-delimitation and our struggle to be ‘my self’, as set against everything else, that we also become, paradoxically, the beasts of burden for fads and gimmicks, and then acutely susceptible to niche cultural and political advertising. 

Such is the nature of the dating app and by extension, all the proprietorial softwares through which we must reach out, our reaching through branch-form algorithmic yes/no sorting processes, to facilitate and mediate encounters with ‘like-minded’ or rather, similarly limping others. There are so many one-shoes transmitting their loss, their wounds as advertisements, as grounds for community.

Self-advertising in an anonymous and infinitely expanding virtual space that both replicates the job application format and encourages an insular tendency towards the ruminative state now termed, narcissism of small difference. We convert ourselves, as a last throw of the dice, into living advertising images set within a corporate medium in the hope that we might counter the growing tendency of our isolation, and escape the otherwise inevitable entropic fate we have otherwise identified for ourselves - we emerge perpetually at the edge of the lives of others to sell them our wares.

Rumination and misgivings, the ambivalent form of consciousness ascribed to the one who is fated always to have one foot in either camp,  impedes the chance for success of his own project - that which was already difficult becomes near impossible where the protagonist inflicts his own Achilles heel. To begin from an assumption of the loaded nature of the environment in which one must appear is to dwell in defeat from the start - it is, in effect, a swipe left against one’s own self-interest. 

And yet, it is also the case that monosandaled consciousness is predicated upon a commitment to the dating app ideal of the One, and collectively upon the gathering of The Ones, who will redeem it, and for this reason, nobody else will do. To lose a shoe in the endeavour undertaken, as with Cinderella, is a sign of the self’s absolute commitment. It is precisely because the project constituted on an assumption of /Kin/ only limps, that it might also arrive. 

Clearly, this is not the manner by which real relations are constituted, community is not a consequence of likemindedness and shared interest. The members of any electively constituted group do not really wish to be members of it, except in the sense there is nothing else but commodified niche similarities - people who read that, also read this. The group is already in error, and they do not want to meet each other. And yet, there persists the possibility, even where it is given that that the gathering is a category type error, and its members wrongly brought together, that either fire or liver might be plucked from its hampered form. Each is aware, are we aware, of the vortex of self, being both whirlpool and the debris it has trapped - and if they are reduced to advertising in this manner, then might they not also dress such humiliation as an exercise in neg-advertising (as the very detournment of lop-shoedness)?

/I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim. I take it that the final destination of the 20th century, and the best we can hope for in the circumstances, is the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology.

- Ballard/

And so, at the end, we encounter the lame exemplar, and cultural bottleneck, Oedipus, the limping king. Another threshold is crossed as Oedipus re-emerges into the blithe world of autonomous and self-presenting relations, he is not wounded and burdened by the gods but by men, by history. Oedipus is the first subject of history, implicated, compromised, impelled - made by and a maker of consequences. Oedipus sets, for the first time, the general problem of agency traversing history, of retroactive re-orientation of relations following the otherwise unexplained emergence of new forms out of the endless rupture of events (Nachträglichkeit). If Laius had not... if Jocasta had not... if the shepherd had not... if Polybus and Merope had not... if Oedipus had not... if the Sphinx had not... if Tiresias had not... if Apollo had not... if the Oracle had not. And there are multiple chances, at every crossroads, there is always the option to back down, to not take the path to be taken, but every action is re-doubled so its significance is not lost - redundancy is the core of Oedipus Rex. 

The elaborate mnemonic orality of Oedipus is also the plotting of any magic trick - it must begin with the end and lays a path of selective and baffling unlikelihood back through the desert, back into the past, screening out noise and chance, filtering alternative causal influences, and making history, so that when the story is turned right side up, when it is retold, from beginning to end, it becomes its own illustration, replete with multivalent redundancies and retroactive investments (as in the law of requisite variety), a mise en abyme, of what could not be otherwise. 

The wounded infant re-emerges from the past, interrupting the present as a bearer of latent knowledge of things to come, and Oedipus has traversed a terrain of recursive contingency (between the statistically possible and the state of materialised actuality) and realised, perhaps conforming to Murphy’s Law, and in accord with Sherlock Holmes major thesis, the least likely as most involving. Everything /must/ go wrong. Implicating involvement, as a vector of reality, transfers itself homologously across the magisteria: /And I get bleach on my T-shirt/.

The means of knowing, as alluded above, becomes the object of knowing through its perturbing effect, and is transformed again as exit and entrance, as presence and trace. If we are to recognise our own monosandaled project in this (‘a moral and just psychopathology’) wherein, as Baudrillard observes somewhere, disablement is suddenly disclosed in the rupture of present circumstances as the furthest evolutionary (i.e. lamarckian) point, a threshold embodied and crossed from nature into history, and integrated immediately into the mechanism of social metabolisation, then we must also recognise the constraints placed upon our actions as agents of the past, from the past (our resembling most, the demonic approach /within/ The Mezzotint). Say I am Oedipus, say I am emerging from the desert into the ruptured terrain of the present (memory is waking as the old french song has it), say I must say what only I can say. 

My burden, this pin, these binding strips, insignificant but massified as the mountain where I was to be exposed. This affliction is not what I choose to bring out of the desert, I also wish to avoid the message I am carrying, but the burden of it is intrusive, a compulsive tick, and overwhelming. I want to bring good things, make a positive and hopeful contribution, but I also know both the desire to resolve, and the content of all possible resolutions, is already ideology. I am set in motion, and not by my own volition. I recognise like everyone else that the idea we can divert our fate is another name for, another moment in, the expropriating process. 

There is nothing available to say, not sadness, not terror, not pain; there is nothing to articulate from the left wall of minimal existence, than what fixes us all to the negative way. The atrocity exhibition, the wound parade, is in reality all we are, it is all that we have left to communicate (a tolstoyan peasant grinning and rummaging in a sack). It is midnight, and like Cinderella, we must traverse once more the terrain between the statistically possible and the present state of materialised actuality. We must bring out the burden of the message that we carry with us across the difficult terrain. Is it /the/ message, or just /a/ message, not even our message, not even something belonging to us but a message that has attached to us like a leech in the fenland that we must wade across? 

 

Is it a sealed but empty envelope? A message without information, a message without content, a messageless message? We bring it out from the desert, the fen, the forest, the depths, the mountains, the place of desolation and as we are about to deliver it, it is nothing, there is nothing there. There is nothing to say. That’s laconic. For two hundred years, the bourgeoisie have brought us their good news/bad news. For two hundred years they have broadcast their news, brought us their message, they have discovered the technical response to the disaster they  caused  by the technical response to the previous disaster they caused. They have perfected the development of the one hand, the simultaneous arrival of problem and solution, plague and remedy, famine and glut, repression and emancipation. But the world is exhausted by its own news. The threefold message consisting problem, argument and solution is ideology. It is also not a message.

The messenger will bring news that is not only unwanted but entirely immaterial. The news is not of what comes next but of the end of what is passing. It is never news from nowhere, not news of dawning utopia nor of the conditions of possibility for communism. All the products of the passing world, including the forms assumed in fantasises of exit and overthrow, will die with the old order. All the ideas, and not just the ruling ideas, are the ideas of the ruling class. One of the features of the message that is brought out from the past is that it is not in itself fatal, nor even telling in a direct sense. It is not realised prophesy. But rather, it is one of the autumn leaves that has fallen but it happens to be the one that did not decay.  The past’s message is not carried out like an urgent and necessary burden by the little people fleeing in their big cars with volcano or flood at their heels, but is conveyed as an inconsequential scrap of banality carried by long striding titans.  The hero brings out the message at the greatest cost to himself, but the message is extraneous - that is what history is, a library of fragments recording incomprehensible feats separated forever from their meaning. The hero’s message is a shell added to the midden, a pebble to the cairn, another forkful to the steaming dungheap.  

What would you say of your encounter with the sublime, that is of your surviving the loss of the world that has produced you,  if recourse to theory was the very worst that you could say of it? Even the most inspired of your words, inadequate anyway, would soon be lost irretrievably, lost even as you draw them out from yourself into the world, and even as they are drawn from the world into yourself. What would the message of your encounter express but its redundancy, its severing from what it was rooted to, its failure to persist, the sense of its paper melting away, its ink blurring, the evaporation of its meaning as a puddle in the road. What is the message but a message about the impossibility of the message, a mark of a mark, a record of what is not recorded. The translation of Wang Wei’s poem, /Sitting Alone on an Autumn Night/, ends with the lines: ‘To eliminate decrepitude / Study the Absolute.’ It’s an exit made for us, like Django dragging his coffin, because our own heroism consists in turning to face the gathering uselessness that confronts us. What is pataphysics but the study of the absolute particular released as the reproductive senescence, the accreting bric-à-bracking, of things? I’m not joking you. And when I see your status is /online/ and there is no hailing, no acknowledging ahoys, between us, it is like we have become ghosts, reaching out from separate looping stone-tapes, and holding hands.  

/You have never been in love 

Until you've seen the sunlight thrown 

Over smashed human bones/

There must be no more solutions to the problems caused by solutions, changes set in motion by changes. There must be messagelessness. There are no answers, neither reform nor revolution, there is no way out, no way forward and no way back. It is over. We are at the end. We have achieved message immunity. We no longer receive. We have lost our slipper. The one hand has lost its mitten. We limp out of the distance with a scrap of paper, we can’t read what is written on it. We are the antagonist of the change we want to see in the world. We are the crisis of capital, but not in a redemptive sense. We are at the entrance not the exit, perhaps one day others will emerge in our ruins as peasants in the Middle Ages worked amongst the whirling density of remnants from classical antiquity, without reference to, comprehension of, what went before. We are the crisis of capital, where capital expands itself forever from the crisis of us. 

 

/He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of petrochemical plants, their unconscious incest made explicit in this colliding metal, in the heamorrhages of their brain tissue flowering beneath the aluminized compression chambers and reactions vessels./

Note: I forced myself to complete the writing of this by listening to /Zuckerzeit/ on continuous loop - it is thoughts as sugar rush (and of course, as always, completely untrue). A companion can be found here: https://thetheologicalturn.blogspot.com/2021/02/saturnine-and-fugitive.html