Fish In the Afternoon

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Note: this was written prior to Biden dropping.

There is only one significant political question: which side are you on?

Trump and Biden are made-up. Trump parasites the rage of white dispossession, a time worm rotting in the head cavity of America. A soulless hydra, Trump is puppeted by a new ruling class, the credit class, the virtual expression of rentier capital, capital loosed from property. In response, Biden limps along, the walking corpse of managerial capitalism. The Democratic Party is a worthless organ of professional politicos, a bureaucrat class intoxicated on the game of social organization. The managers took over in the wake of WW2, the duopoly of competing capitals vampirically absorbing the machinery of fascism, responding to colonialism’s necrosis in the heart of Empire with the neo-colonial apparatus of debt. Released from a commodity medium in the abolition of the gold standard, capital re-realizes itself in floating accumulation, power’s ghosting of material violence in immaterial discipline. Starvation is naturalized.

What Trump and Biden enflesh is the breaking-apart of the End of History, the unipolar world of American capital. Liberal democracy can no longer accumulate fast enough; the Time-Machine needs fuel, hurling itself off the cliff of constant capital. Variable capital in the core disappears and its function is re-routed through the colonies, bubbling up a multipolar world of patchwork capitals competing for virtuality. Sensing the decay of the old order, the patchwork terrorizes the earth, laying claim to a dying regime, to the accumulation of material power in constant capital and the simulacric absorption of attention in variable capital. The managerial class shifts-about to avoid Trump, but he roars into history, the horrorchild of multipolar nationalism and the capital tetris of the American Empire. American Capital separates itself from the liberal order and lays claim to its imperial mission – to use the reawakening body of fascism to fashion a new history, a new sequence of accumulation, multipolar war machines vying for the last scraps of variable capital as constant capital eclipses labor-power. The surplus is now the whole; the president is a warlord.

Trump is a performer, not an idiot. He toetaps the late stage republic, the mirage of democratic participation fading into the monarchic terror of reaction, MAGA Bonaparting the new elite into power. Reagan was the farce of America’s tragedy, Trump its tragicomedy. The Founding Fathers cloak themselves in Greco-Roman splendor, slave traders occupying the constant capital of land, the degenerated virus of Rome spreading across Turtle Island. Reagan re-thumps the heart of America through the phantasm of the cowboy, an occupier occupying an occupied role, suturing capital to the myth of its past, the lebensraum of the frontier. Trump is the summation of both, a celebrity Caesar, the hollow, paper-thin self-story of American capital, necrotic imperial violence smiling underneath the spectacle of wealth worship, the Prosperity Gospel materialized in the state. Trump is a Sears catalogue Hammurabi, law as something to be bought and sold, the state re-entering the circulation of capital as privatized injustice.

Patriotism is gang loyalty. Violence is leveled against the homo sacer, the non-citizen, whether migrant, criminal, foreigner, or terrorist. The old regime obscured war by naming it a police action; in the new order, the multipolar cartels un-name their victims and wield genocide by naming it as self-defense. The homo sacer are those who the gang does not offer protection, or for whom that protection has been revoked. Citizenship is contingent on loyalty, and it is citizenship that determines whether one is mourned. Lives lost become numbers passively referenced on the New York Times front page, a barely-whispered acknowledgment of the terror at the heart of capital. Gaza is the blueprint for the communities of the homo sacer, for any colony internal or external that seeks to break away. Capital builds concentration camps that cover entire cities, entire nations, while un-naming them – detention centers, migrant processing camps, occupied territories, prisons, institutions, ghettos, reservations, and black sites interlinked across the world. In this present-future, the land of the free expands to the whole of capital, freedom being not- homo sacer. To be free is to be worthy of mourning.

Gang politics requires gang politics. Schmitt understood that politics is rooted in us vs. them, friend and enemy; however, he mythed friend and enemy by localizing them in blood and territory, by sewing them to the state and a fascist worldview. Friendship, however, is alliance, and alliance births community. In the class struggle, the enemy is capital itself, the force of accumulation that terrorizes being. Life is our friend, the joy of being-together, of Uniques unfolding in the Gemeinwesen, the community-of-communities. The ruling class, cycling through its many forms, each a historical simulacrum obscuring capital, allies itself with the death machine, populating Tartarus with devils. But even here they are turning-against their essence, the common-being that thumps restless in the heart of humanity. Homo sapiens revolt against death in expanding the us to all, realizing liberation in allying across lines of struggle, a decentered network of resistance against Leviathan. Pan emerges from the mass strike and the black bloc, from Uniques working together to defeat Moloch, to re-enchant the world through abolishing capital, through friendship.

The enemy of accumulation is all held in common; the enemy of capital is the community-of-communities.

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. – Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Image: Message from a Desert Star by Mark Tobey (1972)

The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.
- William Wordsworth, The Simplon Pass

ἀποκάλυψις – ἀπό-καλύπτω – apó-kalúptō – apokálupsis – apocalypse – un-cover, un-veil, un-conceal, reveal

I gift to you the unveiling; you gift to me the apocalypse.

Nine days from heaven, nine days to hell. The earth reveals the concealed, above and below. We animas in animation ballet the possible, hylomorphs of spiritmatter dueting the cosmos. I flower in time, the bloom of the here-and-now. Sunflowers mystic the senses, the what-is unveiling beauty. Every moment is an apocalypse and every motion a rebirth. Creation creates creation.

Thinking is a doing. Cartesian gnosticism haunts the bodymind. There is no form outside the forming and enformed, no world other than the one of spiritflesh. We talk the same world that we think and think the same matter in our listening. Walking. Kneeling. Rocking back-and-forth. Consciousness bubbles up from bodies-in-placetime, the circulation of attention in kenosis. The self is gift and given, same-as-love. How many Seraphim can nap together on a couch? Perichoresis charts the ineffability of the is; love animates the imago Dei. Jesus weeps and thinks that makes him special. We weep and pretend that we don’t. Humanimals mundane the special. Animanimals special the mundane. We never left the Garden but forgot that it was growing. To understand is to apocalypse, to reveal the already-here. To apocalypse the all, one spirits the cosmopsyche, unraveling the universe in particularity, the eternal super-kenosis. Sophia is as Pan does.

We forest us forests. Every life is a biome, the ecosystem of my body, the placetime of my mind. There are no properties in the thing; the properties emerge from relation. Each bundle of spiritmatter potentiates powers that enform the faculties of other powers, the lifepower of subjectivity. This enforming actualizes a potential, manifesting a property as a relation between you and I. No leaf is green, but I and the leaf together qualia greenness. There is neither subject nor object, only world. Consciousness is the world-in-animation, the flow of actualizing potential that is spiritmatter. To perceive is to apocalypse, to reveal the potential, to make-new the world. God Gods as I I.

You gift to the One, Many; I gift to the Many, One.

γένεσις – γίγνομαι–σις – gígnomai-sis – génesis – genesis – origin, source, to-come-into-being, to-become

What one needs to do at every moment of one’s life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world. – Nikolai Berdyaev, The Beginning & the End

Image: Genesis by Alexander Bogen (2002)

Home is where the heart is. – Pliny the Elder

Here.

En-placed and en-homed, togethers draw-together in the doma. Sophia is loving-wisdom, and one wisely-loves only in place and in time. Placetime. I am here-, now-, with-you. I am never nowhere and nowhen; where and when are always -with-. Being inhabits being in dwelling in the here-and-now with-you, the neverplaceless moment of togethering. I Sophia onward the dawning sunlight, the in-the-world that inaugurates the here.

Placetime has the quality of hereness, but this hereness emerges from the act of dwelling rather than the naming of place. I dwell in the world, not in ‘America’. The -time of placetime is itself timeless, a being-now that qualifies rather than quantifies, the never-measured ellipsis of doing through which the Unique Uniques. Placetime is the arena of Uniquing, the unfolding of Unique-togethers in their Unique dwelling. This togethering architects the doma, the home or nest where the unfolding of each overlaps the unfolding of another and matters the matter of their dwelling. The doma is not nowhere or nowhen but a -where and -when so close to the skin that each atom vibrates the history of the together. Uniques unique together in the historying of their dwelling, making home in the warmth of their being-with. Togethers hearthing together.

The good of the doma is the enacting of the good-itself: the Unique. This Uniquing is always a Uniquing-with, and the good of each Unique is the good of the dwelling in which the Unique resides. Because of this, to enact the form of the good, each Unique must attend to the Uniqueness of their Unique together, loving-wisdom being a loving-dwelling with the beloved Unique. Love loving love is the essence of the good, reflecting the creating-begetting-proceeding of the all. The oikonomia of the doma is an energeia, Uniques in hypostatic union acting-together to unfold their together in the world, nesting virtue. To enact the good, one must en-home.

With you.

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise. – Novalis, Fragment No. 51

Image: Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio (~1596)

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars;
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer:
For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
- William Blake, Jerusalem

This was originally written for my students.

What is an idea? Ideas are partitions of the senses, both present and absent, divisions of spacetime into objects, into this-and-thats in-the-world. This-and-thats are action-potentials, or affordances: layers of what-it’s-for within this-and-that. Our ideas have a direct effect on what we can do and what we imagine we can do. The can-do is a function of the what-it’s-for of a field of affordances, a what-it’s-for that is both invented and discovered, both in-us and in-the-world.

The properties of the spacetime bundle constrain the what-it’s-for by defining the physical limits of what-can-be-done. To stop thinking of a chair as a chair may change the what-its-for, but it can not take on the what-its-for of a lamp. We also, however, invent the what-it’s-for. Our ideas are world-embedded, overlaying on the this-and-thats of the real. The what-it’s-for emerges out of how the idea modifies the affordances of the physical, a uniting of both what-can-be-done and what-we-see-it-as-for. Though we may not be able to change the what-can-be-done, modifying our concepts modifies the what-it’s-for through modifying what-we-see-it-as-for. Conceptual engineering is also agential engineering, the changing of our ideas for the sake of changing the what-it’s-for of things around us and opening up new possibilities.

There are, however, things that do not have a what-it’s-for, or where the thing-itself is what-it’s-for. This is the Unique, that which is itself-in-itself and irreplaceable with any other. The what-it’s-for of the Unique is Uniquing, unfolding as it is in the way that is right to it. The Unique grounds value, everything is either valuable-in-itself as Unique or valuable-to-a-Unique. Ultimately, the what-it’s-for of all things is the Unique, everything else appearing as valuable in the overlapping Uniquing of Uniques-in-the-world.

Every person is a Unique in this way. People are that which do not have a what-it’s-for or who are themselves their own what-it’s-for. This extends to all living beings: life-itself is the Unique and the Uniquing of all is life-itself. Life is what does and acts in the world, and which through this doing makes manifest the what-it’s-for of everything else. This means that the what-it’s-for is mutually-shaped, not just a what-it’s-for for me but a what-it’s-for for me and you and you and you and you. The what-it’s-for is -for all of us and to exist in community is to take all others as the what-it’s-for of your activity. What-it’s-all-for is me. And you. And you. And you.

What-it’s-all-for is all of us. All of our hopes and dreams and fears and anxieties. All of our pasts, and all of our presents, and all of our futures. All of our wants and needs and desires and loves.

What-it’s-all-for is the world-as-it-is and the world-as-it-could-be.

He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God. – Blessed Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Image: The Human Condition by René Magritte (1933)

God remembered Noah, all those alive, and all the animals with him in the ark. God sent a wind over the earth so that the waters receded. The springs of the deep sea and the skies closed up. The skies held back the rain. The waters receded gradually from the earth. After one hundred fifty days, the waters decreased; and in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day, the ark came to rest on the Ararat mountains. – Genesis 8.1-4 CEB

Mournwest. Present-tense. Into the eternal, do you see the erising? I barely know you, lost-one. I. I. I the I. I fail. My way of knowing unknowable? To know can never be unknowable, the unknowable hears, from you to me. The you to me is the markable.

Imagine us. Echo, the divine dust. The us. Spacing out our wonderkite, we everbright. I’ll share my watch, weary weary gale El’el. I dwell in you, the hungering, the evering. Sainting. Aetherning. I go-step the remarkable, wavering. The aliening. Autoing. The autos autos the autoing.

There-is. The is is’es, inhabiting. The is-here represents the dawning. I gainerestesse. I lose, I rest, the rest, I lose. I’ll take off my fingernail polish soon, the fasces glares ominous. Consider this. Against-Napoleon, we shutter the reckoning. The fasces this-time has cloaked-itself in the simulation of the Carpenter. Remember Rushdoony? The Institutes of Biblical Law, under the bed though it may be, haunts the future, theocracy. The Puritans never left us, that Pilgrim Ethic, the Roundhead deity malochs. Galeforce winds the Ragnarok.

Walter Benjamin. History elopes. Affirm the new commoning. Become, become the creative nothing, dwelling in the Gemeinwesen. An eternity of I’ing, being in the common beinging. Our estrangment begins with quantifying qualia, through measuring. Chopping the dwelling, concepting the being-here. This estrangement is neither friend nor foe, it is both the source and haunting of the I’ing. The demon-creeps, the Tartarus, not only estrangement but simulating. Marking the I’ing as only quantifying, atoming the unimaginable.

Rememberhere. Here, here. We weep. We weep. We here. Hear me, hear me. Hearhear. Herehere. Hear. Here.

Sophia-ing.

But wisdom, where can it be found;
    where is the place of understanding?
Humankind doesn’t know its value;
    it isn’t found in the land of the living.
The Deep says, “It’s not with me”;
    the Sea says, “Not alongside me!”
It can’t be bought with gold;
        its price can’t be measured in silver,
    can’t be weighed against gold from Ophir,
        with precious onyx or lapis lazuli.
Neither gold nor glass can compare with it;
    she can’t be acquired with gold jewelry.
Coral and jasper shouldn’t be mentioned;
    the price of wisdom is more than rubies.
Cushite topaz won’t compare with her;
    she can’t be set alongside pure gold.
But wisdom, where does she come from?
    Where is the place of understanding?
She’s hidden from the eyes of all the living,
    concealed from birds of the sky.
Destruction and Death have said,
    “We’ve heard a report of her.”
God understands her way;
        he knows her place;
    for he looks to the ends of the earth
        and surveys everything beneath the heavens.
In order to weigh the wind,
        to prepare a measure for waters,
    when he made a decree for the rain,
        a path for thunderbolts,
    then he observed it, spoke of it,
            established it, searched it out,
    and said to humankind: “Look,
        the fear of the Lord is wisdom;
            turning from evil is understanding.” - Job 28.12-18 (CEB)

Image: Noah’s Ark by Marc Chagall (1966)