I wish to disclose more explicitly a certain metaphysical pattern I discovered in things as wildly divergent as the topological mapping of key words in the book of Genesis to torroids, to Heyting algebra, to the metaphysical diagrams of Cusanus, modern physics and biology, my own philosophy, and in fact, all philosophy; to music theory, so on and so forth, as well as the ars I developed for utilizing this structure as an engine of thought, creative tool, etc. A structure that is capable of encoding and decoding all human knowledge. Music theory to linguistics, to ontology, semiotics, history, theology, all the way to the occult sciences; alchemy, astrology, Western cabala and Judaic kabbalah alike, Gnosticism, etc. etc. Why would such a structure be valuable? It has to do with “meaning” itself being the result of self-embedding, autopropagating, self-organizing systems, for if a perfectly-self embedded structure could be found, it could be used to embed (to ‘understand’/‘explain’) any other self-embedding structure, and that is in fact what ‘meaning’ signifies: such structures, that is, the embedding of such structures. To possess the ultimately self-embedded system would give us a key to all human and divine knowledge, and a means to accomplishing its integration and cross-correlation. Of such a structure, we have Yeats to refer to, who says of the faith of the mystic Judwalis Arabs, who purportedly discovered just such an abstract form:
“To the Judwalis, as interpreted by Michael Robartes, all living minds have likewise a fundamental mathematical movement, however adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind. A supreme religious act of their faith is to fix the attention on the mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment. The intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends, upon the intensity of this realisation. It is possible in this way, seeing that death itself is marked upon the mathematical figure, which passes beyond it, to follow the soul into the highest heaven and the deepest hell. This doctrine is, they contend, not fatalistic because the mathematical figure is an expression of the mind’s desire and the more rapid the development of the figure the greater the freedom of the soul. The figure while the soul is in the body, or suffering from the consequences of that life, is usually drawn as a double cone, the narrow end of each cone being in the centre of the broad end of the other.”
Note that the ‘crystalline seeds or programs for the unfolding of being’, as stated in the next excerpted text, refer to the ‘self-embedding’ of various systems in the self-embedded structure of an ultimate abstraction, (like how lie groups are embedded in higher dimensional polygons that can be projected into lower-dimensional lattices, or how the 6-dimensional hypercube of a Boolean algebra can be represented by infinitesimal 3-dimensional slices) or what this text calls a hieroglyph, for this process of self-embedding is the ‘unfolding’ of Being. William Irwin Thompson, “The time Falling Bodies Take to Light; Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture”:
“… the unitive state of the great mystics; it is a state of being, analogous to music, in which myth is not simply a description, but a performance of the very reality it seeks to describe. Here history becomes the performance of myth, for the experience of recalling (anamnesis) enlightens the individual to see that myth is the history of the soul. … In these parables and koans of spiritual enlightenment, there are certain root structures or archetypes of order that derive from principles of cosmic order. These principles are not so much symbols of being as they are crystalline seeds, or programs, for the unfolding of being. At this level, we have moved beyond the symbolic or figurative level of consciousness to the hieroglyphic. The hieroglyphs are really the nonverbal forms of the languages of gods or angels, for the bottom levels of angelic intelligence overlap with the highest levels of human. That an initiate like Plato can think in the hieroglyphic language of archetypes when he is in an exalted state of consciousness.”
As Damascius and the Diadochus tell us, such hieroglyphic images are used because communion with the Ineffable One behind all causation is impossible. We thus separate ourselves from the All and ascribe to it predicates that apply only to us, until,- yielding at the precipice of such impossible endeavors,- we learn, not only to observe, but to think with and speak through the divine Images or Forms, which are hardly the sophrosune or passivity most read Plato as indicating, but rather a mode of active, creative force and expression.
The rediscovery of this true meaning of the “Forms” is essential. To the classical evaluation of the golden, silver, and twilight ages of Men, that apocalyptical aeon must be superadded,- that in which the cycles of history, by corso and ricorso, have, in the words of Vico, become interpenetrating, spirognomic, ‘spiralized’ and fractalized, through whose mysteria we might be returned to the golden age of heroes,- the mythic era, by means of such Images. I believe that this ricorso manifested itself, for example, in the work of the Hermetic philosophers, whose multi-media texts somehow anticipated the modern internet,- whose strange confluences of disparate bodies of knowledge anticipated the post-romantic deviation from structuralist classicism, preferring a view toward man’s overall psychological organization, and that mode of analysis for which all hermeneutic efforts are staked on recovering signatures of such an underlying phusis,- the anamnesis of Plato, or the ‘history of the soul’. In our era, digital media has permitted a vast correlation of strange knowledges, that is, just such a ricorso as we find in the work of those Hermeticists who, having paved the way for the Renaissance, the rediscovery of our classics, etc. perhaps give us hope that we too might be paving the way for another Renaissance.
At any rate, the structure I discovered, I call the spirogram, but the first consideration to be made is a certain substructure of it: the tetrapole. I prefer to model the tetrapolar network on 1) Damascius’ four-fold causal map of the Ineffable, 2) a doubled-dialectic model of immanence-transcendence, (what the Areopagatie called the lepsis and Plotinus called the epistrophe) and 3) Bruno’s multi-dimensional elaboration of the Phaedrus’ account of divine ascent.
As I write here:
" The opposition of Man and God cannot be explicated by a univocal dualism, like that formulated by the Hegelian dialectic. Instead, both man and God must be multivocally de-composed into their own self-opposition, (their ‘bivalence’, recalling the term used at the beginning of this essay) each revealing two principalities at work such that, in their dynamic rearrangement, a four-fold pattern (the ‘tetrapole’) emerges through an ‘inner and outer’ dialectic that traces the interpenetrating, spirognomic dance of the immanent and transcendent within the superimmanent and supertranscendent prime-cause, as Eriugena calls it, which exists both outside and within time,- inside of, external to, and within all of Nature. The first opposition: Being and Nonbeing, the other, Dasein and Sosein. The two dialectics are developed by utilizing ‘dialectical triads’, (these triads are worked out by Cusanus, namely in his diagrammatics of the enneagon) in which the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of the univocal dialectic are replaced by two agonistic categories including a third category signifying a ‘non-opposition’ in which the other two are reified negatively, following Bataille’s formulation of the ‘absent third’, or the ‘non-synthesis’ of Spare’s symbolic hermaphrodite.
Damascius likewise made use of the tetrapole in clarifying the causality of his Ineffable, arranged in terms of the Limit-Principle opposing the Unlimited-Principle and the Limit-Element opposing the Unlimited-Element. Nerciat’s unique, highly syncretic divinatory cabala, Zoroaster’s Telescope, also relates a four-fold double opposition, namely of Sisamoro and Senamira on the one hand,- the Zoroastrean principles of ultimate Good and Evil,- and Sallak and Sokak, or the destructive and affirming daemons/intelligences, whose confluences ebb and flood within each of the planets, presided over by the 28 angels of the Lunar Mansions. In Yeats, who also figures the 28 Lunar Mansions in his visualization of the spirogram, this four-part structure again makes an appearance, in two contexts: as the Celestial Body (solar-static) opposing Spirit (solar-active) and the Passionate Body (lunar-static) opposing the Husk; (lunar-active) then once more, in the Will (antithetical-active) opposing the Mask, (antithetical-static) and the creative mind (primary-active) opposing the Body of Fate. (primary-static) Both of these noted systems, interestingly, involve prognostication on vast time-scales, as opposed to the personal horoscopes offered by nearly all other divinatory systems. This is no coincidence, for indeed both systems have integrated a spirognomic pattern that naturally lends itself to supra-human proportion. Kircher similarly diagrams the 28 mansions of the moon in relation to a twin-gyre system he named the sciathericum seleniacum.
One of the many exceedingly profound diagrams (Fig. XIII) in Welling’s Opus Mago-Cabalisticum depicts the New Jerusalem as a transcendental hyperobject outside of linear time,- or, more properly stated, a supertranscendant ‘first cause’, like that in Damascius’ account of the Ineffable and Eriugena’s Periphyseon, collapsed from a higher-dimensional tesseract. (This tesseract being a 4-dimensional spatio-temporal construct, much like the tesseract is collapsed into the 3-dimensional ‘Cube of Saturn’ representing both alchemical lead and linear time.) This tesseract features a Geraldian tetrapole at the center, seemingly projecting from this center-point the immanent Jersualem at the beginning of History,- visualized as its own tetrapolar network within the cube,- while also being interpenetrated by a transcendent Jersusalem at the end of History,- visualized by a secondary, outer tetrapolar network external to the cube,- with the total structure therefor representing the fundamental pattern of History indexing four ‘periods of crisis’ as epistemological blind-spots underlying transitions of phase during which what Kant called the antinomies of transcendental reason unfold in a kind of binary-switching network implicated by the tesseract’s 16 vertices, as so many unpredictable transformations of concepts into their opposites at those points where the minima or ebb of one gyre is transfered to the maxima or flood of the second gyre,- (in the language set forth in Kunze’s metaleptic discourse, such transformations indicate a ‘site of exception’ and ‘predicative-reversal’ across the ‘chiasmus’) of moved into mover, immanent into transcendent, etc.- recalling what Yeats said of Cusanus’ Sphaerica, which was “a phaseless sphere that becomes phasal in our thought; Nicholas of Cusa’s undivided reality which human experience divides into opposites”. The two permutations of the tetrapole used by Yeats, as noted in the preceding paragraph, can of course be readily combined with Welling’s diagram. "
Next thing to consider is the Idearium.
The “Idearium” is a central diagram in one of my books featuring a square with its four points labeled after one of the four epistemes in my combinatory metaphysics: epistemos, ontos, immanence, and transcendence. There is a horizontal line with nine items written across it (comparatio to ektheosis) signifying one of the two inter-penetrating dialectics unfolded out of the tetrapolar network, with a vertical column (dianoia to noia) thus marking the later dialectic. The 9 by 9 expansion of the resulting table gives 81 subcategories which, with the 18 categories of the two main dialectics, populates the table with 99 total entries. The horizontal lines (like ‘comparatio to ektheosis’ or ‘dianoia to aisthesis’) are all meant to be written across circles, and the 10 resulting circles are meant to be placed on top of each other to form a volvelle you can turn around to find new associations between all the categories, new verticalities, for every movement horizontally causes an automatic change in the string of entires read vertically through the interpenetrating circulatio. This Tabula Omnis Idearium is thus a zairja or philosophical computer; through its art, one can literally think three dimensionally, as you are thinking in the dimension of the horizontal, that of the vertical, and that of the shifting table. As I elaborate here:
" One can observe in the structure of the Idearium a movement beyond the simple diagrammatics of Lull to a kind of three-dimensional ratio circularis, recalling both the extension Bruno made to the model of erotic ascent and descent in the Phaedrus and Ficino to his own multi-dimensional ascent, discent, and circulatio of the daemon, as well as the ars cyclognomica or ‘cylognomic art’ of Cornelius Gemma. As Hiro Hirae elaborates, in “Cosmology, Medicine, and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Louvain”: “… the mind of the practitioner of the cyclognomic art thus performs a kind of ratio circularis in three dimensions, each of the figures allowing the user to move longitudinally (the ‘vertical’ fulfillment of the Phaedrus’ metaxy, ie. the noesis) and latitudinally (metalepsis and dianoea) as well as in particular columns. This mental running over of the cells of the circular diagrams is compared by Gemma to the golden chain of Homer (Homeri illam catenam auream) in which the mind runs to and fro, passing now latitudinally, now longitudinally …”
The Idearium is simply a 3-dimensional extrapolation of the spirogram, in which the ‘inner and outer dialectic’ of the four unique metaphysical vocities is encoded as a dynamic zairja-based techne.
The Pythagorean Cabalism of Nature signifies what Dee calls a symbolic theology; a kind of semiotic reconstruction and simulation of reality itself, fulfilling the Renaissance dream of connecting representation and that represented, the world of speech and the world of matter,- that is, sympathetic magia- for, at the highest-most level of abstraction, that being our symbolic theology, to represent a thing is to invoke the thing itself; the representation and that represented become one. In the same way the Sigilium Aemeth and Monad are capable of encoding all 16th century astrological, kabbalistic, geometrical, and alchemical knowledge, so the Spirogram, from a more comprehensive advantage, accomplishes the same,- extending its potential to that of encoding all possible human knowledge. Some ‘encoded’ forms of the spirogram: the four epistemes, Mallarme’s tetrapole, Lacan’s four discourses, Harman’s four-fold epistemological withdraw of the hyperobject, the twin-spiral of the Overtone-Undertone series, Cusanus’ Enneagon and its four interpenetrating circles, Giraldus’ diagrams, * etc. etc. This same duplicated polarity or ‘doubled-double’ is seen in Damascius’ Causality of the Ineffable, in which his own ‘Ungrund’, that is, the Ineffable as situated higher in the ontological hierarchy than even the One, is enfolded with the One in a series of revelatory emanations. In Harman’s system, this doubled-double is constituted by noumenon and phenomenon on the one side, and by persistent unity and constituent plurality on the other. Peter Wolfendale, “Object-Oriented Philosophy; the Noumenon’s New Clothes”: “Things are not just torn between their subterranean execution and its phenomenal effects, but also between their persistent unity and its constituent plurality.”
- Yeats speaks explicitly of such a ‘semiotic reconstruction’ of the world, in Vision: “The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form. (The double-gyre or spirogram of Giraldus.) … A supreme religious act of the Judwalis’ faith is to fix the attention on the mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future of humanity, or of an individual man, (simply the history and future of Mind) shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment.”
Cusanus’ metaphysics involves a grand contemplation of the Sphere as an ultimate reality which, in collapsing on itself in the entrance into human consciousness, must necessarily express itself through the series of antinomies embodied diagrammatically in the polar network of the enneagon. It is to this series of antinomies within the phenomenal expression of human consciousness, as succeeded temporally moment to moment toward an interminable future state,- much as the surface of the sphere itself can be recomposed by superimposing an infinite number of lower-dimensional planes,- to which Yeats properly refers in mentioning a fundamental ‘movement’ of thought whose pattern could be conceived in a mathematical or purely abstract form,- the tetrapolar ‘spirogram’.
As Giraldus-Yeats associate a solar and lunar polarity to each of the two gyres, so each of the two gyres may be thought to possess its own poles and antipodes which, when encoded by the epistemes, give four categories in combination, between which the pattern of the spirogram is plotted as a trajectory constantly in motion. On one gyre, we have the dual categories of nullity per transcendentiam and nullity per privationem, while on the other, Being per transcendentiam and Being per privationem, ie. the agon of Being and Non-Being alongside the agon of Dasein and Sosein; the interplay of Absence and Presence, Nullity and Being.
Thus:
- Epistemos: the Ungrund.
Nothingness per privationem: Boehme’s Ungrund, Schelling’s Un-Intuitable, Bovillus’ concept of nothingness, Damascius’s Ineffable. While serving as the first of the epistemes, this one also proves the most obscure. Very few philosophers have conceptualized it, and those that did, were for the most part left out of the canon simply due to the unusual or ‘aporetic’ (I do not use the word aporia at a whim for, indeed, the ‘esoteric Plato’, often directly opposing the exoteric Plato, must be placed into this small order of thinkers.) mode of argument. Bovillus and Damscius both seem to invest to the philosopher’s experience of the “nothingness of first principles”, or the nullity of Being per privationem, (what I call ‘pure negation’ or ‘gnostic fire’) a certain ethical quality, in that it spurs us toward embracing an ethical struggle with the incommunicable for the sake of our fellows. See Kalogiratou’s essay, “Damscius and the Practice of the Philosophical Life: On the Impossibility of Communication about and Communion with the First Principles.”
-
Ontic Episteme: the Grund.
Nothingness per transcendentiam: Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriguena; Apophatic theology; Parmenides, Thales, etc. In this category we must also include concepts like Lacan’s model of desire,- a metonymic propulsion around an empty core or existential lack,- and the Cartesian cogito, whereby a differential ontological minima is established in the form of the empty subjectivity of the self-observing consciousness likewise appercepted from the mental schemata in Kant’s formulation of transcendental imagination. -
Immanent Episteme.
Being per privationem: Being(s) exist as privations from an ultimate being. Pantheism. Spinoza; (all qualities as variable quanta of a central affect, a ruling qualia a la. joy) Nietzsche; (all will as a variable quanta of the Will to Power) Heidegger. -
Transcendent Episteme:
Being per transcendentiam. Being(s) exist, that is, are qualified, only in their participation within an ultimate Being, (Being itself) from which they inhere those qualities and are temporally differentiated. Hegel. Most metaphysics. The common interpretation of Plato. No satisfactory theory of participation (what Plato calls the choreia) has emerged, though the philosophers named here, and countless others, made the attempt to formulate just such a theory, with it often becoming their singular, overwhelming ambition. Schelling too, advanced through all three epistemes in a unique way throughout the course of his own writing in pursuit of a theory of participation.
Concerning these four approaches to the interplay of absence and presence, it should be noted that the nominalists, tracing their own intellectual heritage from the likes of Plato and Pythagoras, claim a direct connection between sign and signifier, such that magic can occur by activating sympathetic associations between language and the world, like that employed by talismans and amulets, by literal ‘magic words’, the ritual re-enactment of divine dramas seen in the Eleusinian, Orphic, and especially Mithraic rites, etc.
Pseudo-nominalists like Dee affirm that there is such a direct connection, though once available only to some signs and their signifieds, namely at the highest level of abstraction, in which the structure of reality itself can be semiotically reconstructed or simulated by certain powerful signs, like the monad. Mathematical Platonists would also fall into this category.
The Realists, in which the entire field of modern linguistics is contained, claim meaning to be related by signs only through their syntax, that is, there arrangement with other signs under a given system of grammatical rules and contextual or idiomatic conventions, such that a number like zero, which literally refers to nothing external and thus cannot possibly have any ‘sympathy’ with something outside the sign-system, can generate meaningful statements when used in correct syntax.
The CCRU’s tic-decoding, along with a variety of ‘post-structuralist’ camps, gives us a formula for a kind of hyper-realist position in which all semantic content is reduced to a pure syntax, such that any sign or sign-system can be reconstructed from any other purely through syntactic recombination, therefor rendering meaning itself in a state of radical contingency."
The spirogram is tetrapolar, but a tetrapole is not by itself a spirogram. The spirogram is an ur-zairja capable of producing other zairjas; a tetrapole capable of enfolding other tetrapoles in on itself.
One part of my work is explicating the pattern itself, “Mathematically, Magically, Cabalistically, and Anagogically considered”, as John Dee said of his attempt at explicating the symbol of the Monas Heiroglyphica to the Emperor. Another part of my work is actually encoding all human knowledge with it to create a full system of knowledge along the lines of Iziquerdo’s Pharus Scientiarum or Gemma’s Ars Cyclognomica; a vast compendia in which every branch of knowledge is inter-related with every other. After successfully encoding all human knowledge with it, which I finished some time ago, I reversed the operation and developed all kinds of different systems based on this one inherent structure, the spirogram, which is the metaphysical substrate of reality itself,- for its power to integrate, co-relate, and embed is equal only to its power to project, create, and express. Indeed we are far beyond mere philosophy here: he who masters this structure and its ars, possesses unparalleled ability to expand his creative will into whatever branch of science or form of art he wishes, indeed perhaps all of them. I expanded the structure into a whole system of music theory, (the twin-gyre system superimposed on the circulatio and the tetrapole take the form of a dual temporality expressed between the Undertone and Overtone series, where every shift in one or the other automatically causes a shift across the circle of fifths, just as every horizontal shift causes new vertical associations to appear on the Idearium.) a combined epistemology-ontology-metaphysics-semiotics with the episteme model, a model of history integrating economics, psychoanalysis, media technology, etc.
Considered musically, one might imagine the entire doubled pattern of the Undertone-Overtone series, but the ends of each of the two opposing series are twisted, so that the two become a gyre. Then imagine the circle of fifths and place this gyre, horizontally, passing through its center: every tightening or loosening of the gyre/spiral causes movement along the circle of fifths, either to the right or left; the notes in the two series are, in other words, transposed in either direction to corresponding notes on the circle of fifths. This reciprocal pattern is the basis of my own meta-tonal system, which essentially maps out the relationship of the ‘Universal Gravity’ of the Circle of Fifths to the ‘Telluric Gravity’ of the tightening/loosening gyre.
My main sources in uncovering this structure were Hinaxius’ lost translations of Apollonius the Gnostic Prophet, who discusses the subtle geometries of the Mizan, by which the stellar or ‘astromantic’ forces are brought into coherent unities or ‘balances’. It is a form of higher alchemy. Add to that Cusanus’ ‘spherical metaphysics’, upon whose diagrams I superimposed the balances of the Mizan, throw in Giraldus, Yeats’ recovery of Judwalis philosophy, the Arabic zairja-mystics or diagrammaticists explored in the work of Kunze, etc.
The spirogram is, in other words, the ultimate self-reflexive system, entirely embedded in itself, such that any other system can be permuted from it. Why? Because the ultimately self-embedded system could explain all other self-embedded systems, and that is what a system is- a self-embedded, self-reproducing structure like the developing embryo, a dna double helix,- any dynamical self-organizing system, including the universe itself. Rigorously defining this concept of self-embedding requires a naturalist and a transcendentalist conceptualization; I will begin with the former, citing one of my books:
" The nomos, analogous to the ‘emergent operators’ of certain string-processing schemata, spontaneously increases the information-contents of a system while allowing that system, from within itself, to exploit its own organizational processes in order to access that new information, re-incorporating it in its own evolutionary trajectory, such that a kind of self-modification occurs, by which the strict I-O model of Darwinian selection by environmental pressures is wholly overcome. The nomos, in a word, permits circular self-selection, self-modification, and self-direction, [“Dynamics-based considerations (differential equations, kinetic models, etc.) of the circular ‘self-supporting’ processes necessarily deprive them of their meaning.”… Self-Modifying Systems in Biology and Cognitive Science, a New Framework for Dynamics, Information and Complexity. George Kampis.] and this through processes within which any computable structure might be embedded while at the same time remaining irreducible to any computable structure themselves. ["Liberman shows that abstract enzyme systems can realize any normal algorithm, using enzyme function as substitution rule and molecular subsequences (‘addresses’) as markers of the place where substitution has to be done. A simple example for such a system is the set of ‘emergent operators’ in the Holland system. Most interestingly, cellular proteins and DNA/RNA sequences do actually contain such ‘addresses’, halting symbols., ,etc. so the analogy is very natural and deep. … These systems are not programs but they can embed any computer program … " Kampis, ibid.] "
And from the transcendental, or purely philosophical perspective, we have here a passage in which ‘self-embedding’ refers to a ‘self-mapping’ of Simplicius’ concept of empereia:
" … Socrates, by discovering
the forces of marginalization which compromised the integrity of the demos and therefor the
liberty of the individual, allowed for the possibility of the individual to reassert himself, through
self-directed language or ‘philosophy’, against the hegemony of Athenian power,- yet, sophists
adequately skilled in the use of this new language or ‘mental technology’, as Stiegler calls it,
whose political application would become clear in the coming centuries, could easily co-opt it
for far less reverent purposes.) converting subjectivity, as boundary, into that object bound by the
inscriptive structures (phyla) of externalized language, (thus we may understand by this
conversion, more precisely, a subordination of the autopoiesis of self to the allopoiesis of
Luhmann’s divergent phyla, or in yet another lexicon, that of the Simplician empeiria or
self-mapping taxon to an extraneous nomos in the derivation of a kind of psychosocial ‘syn-tax’
in which the mutual differentiation of self and other informs the horizon of emergence under
which the collective demos appears as yet another manifestation of the image of techne) and that
intervening programmatic or ‘techne’, whereby the fatal ‘patterning’ of behavior (In pataphysical
aesthetics, we might relate this concept of ‘patterning’ to the instrumentation of the conditions of
vision as technical praxis and the reduction of the artistic object to gestural performativity,
namely as an opening- not to the emergence of the ‘missing-third’, but to the possibility of its
emergence, whereby the secondary-process of individuation is sublated by the primary as a
poemenon, that is, an unabsorbed negativity or kenotically emptied and thus transindividuated
possibility-phenomenon whose basic aporia, as non-philosophy, or a purely speculative opening
to its own lack, demands the reactivation of the process of individuation in its opposite,- as
philosophy,- insofar as non-philosophy is incapable of questioning the Grund of philosophy’s
emergence, whose interpellative discourse would lie necessarily beyond the horizon of its own
epistemological blind-spot, but only that of its own emergence and missing-third. Thus the third
does not negotiate absence and presence in a metaphysical-univocal positivization of the
dialectic, but serves as the kind of Sparean point of nucleation discussed in these texts, around
which tertiary identities are accreted beyond the mappable strictures of individuation from the
constitutive dyads driving the very individuation-process itself.) is finally achieved and
free-mimesis begins propagating through the consequently induced repetition of certain patterns,
(culture as virality; what Stiegler calls nanomutational grammatisation) as having replaced the
‘analogue signal’ of the pre-digital universe."
This “possibility-phenomenon”, upon which all possibility of the human subject exists, is bound to a ‘transcendental auton’ upon which it is meta-teleologically suspended, like the first digit of PI upon the transfinite ‘last’ digit of the interminable series. This suspension in the transcendental auton offers yet another vantage toward the concept of the tetrapole as a kind of doubled-dialectic. I go into great detail on this ‘super-teleological’ suspension of the Object in the Non-Object in this section, where I relate it to several different versions of the tetrapole drawn up from different sources, like Harman and Morton’s object-oriented-ontology:
" A theory of theory,- a philosophy of philosophy,- a ‘theory of everything’, cannot formally exist, because Theory [Philosophy] cannot account for its own Negativity, that is, for its own negation, which would be ‘pure negation’- that Negativity which cannot be accounted for through Theory or ‘absorbed’ by the strictures of System, in Bataille’s formula,- or the ‘secret of consciousness’ as appercepted by the appropriate schema through transcendental synthesis, which Kant claimed existed only in the depths of the soul, rent fatally beyond the veil of the Dialectic. This is the nature of Bataillean violence: the fundamental scissure of Discourse. Thus when we point the dialectic against itself,- when we work out a dialectic of the dialectic,- as Kierkegaard ironically recapitulated the Hegelian philosophy, we achieve what Kierkegaard called the ‘paradox’ (what Plato called the ‘aporia’) as an engine of thought, while similarly, when we invert the dialectic, as Marx did, we initiate a process of de-construction by which all concepts are dissolved into elementary fragments of material-history and reduced to a singular quanta of Force a la. the Will to Power. As the Hegelian thought builds up, within the movement of Geist, the Babel-tower of positive knowledge toward the Absolute, so the Marxist dialectic deconstructs System and descends toward a bare materiality, within whose conflux of elementary forces the image of Utopia has been hopelessly distorted. A reductio ad absurdum of the categorical Negation occurs as well, when we attempt to circumscribe a dialectic of the dialectic, leading to Baidou’s ‘bad infinity’ 1 and Bataille’s un-absorbed Negative as an accumulation of those entropic stresses upon the system of Capital produced by the flow of material-history, to again return to the Marxist formula. This reduction was precisely the meaning of ‘Death’ in Heidegger’s account of Being. Heidegger sought in fact to fully explicate Dasein’s opening toward Death by bearing the Negative to its implicated reductio ad absurdum, (this titanic struggle was his project of de-struktion) peering beyond the veil of History through a kind of ontological black-hole compressed within the folds of Aryan race-memory, whose event-horizon had trapped the European soul within the inescapable orbit of Capital, Modernity, the image of Techne(ology) and the merely ontic,- that is, the metaphysical Presence of ousia’s Absence, toward which the human dimension is properly enfolded by Death,- by Death as a kind of noetic ‘escape route’ out of the ‘phenomenal bind’ of correlationist philosophy, [Or, in other words, an escape route out of the confused nebula, bereft of political or ‘emancipatory’ potential, found in the purely intermediate or initiatory role of Dasein, which rests on a movement from its own horizon of possibilities (Moglichkeit) to the disclosure of an actual futurity, (Wirklichkeit) to be later grasped by a pure ontology of time in which the movement from potentiality to actuality, in terms of the Aristotelian categories, becomes a movement from the non-ego to ego,- that is, a kind of cosmic awakening of insensate matter to Geist reenacted on the part of Dasein. “Hoher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Moglichkeit.” Ernest Joos, 1983: “Lukacs’ last autocriticism, the Ontology; On the Usefulness of Ontology.” On the inter-mediation of Heidggerian disclosure, see Raymond E. Gogel, “Quest for Measure; the Phenomenological Problem of Truth.”] in Meillassoux’s reconceptualization of ‘finitude’, which we must also pair with our conceptualization of Dasein. [See: Anamnesis; Aesthetics After Finitude. When the post-Kantian correlationist doxa is dispensed with, we are left with an ‘un-territorialized’ domain of the human Subject formerly rejected by the three modes of Kant’s critique,- criticism, skepticism, and dogmatisma, a la. ‘philosophy’,- an uninhabited subjectivity awaiting a new ‘terraforming aesthetics’, just as we are provided with the converse, that is, a hyperrealist or ‘inhuman’ vision of the cosmos in which the distinction between primary and secondary, or ‘subjective’ and ‘external’ qualities has been extinguished. In “The Existence of the Divine”, Meillassoux calls this radically contingent separation of the human subject and the ‘arche fossil’ of the Real simply, “the impossibility of the whole”, for whose assertion object-oriented ontology and speculative realists, like Harman, have been accused, to some extent justifiably,- and to a greater extent, unsurprisingly, given the fact that we find here an oblique continuance of the Heideggarian strain,- of disavowing the philosophic vocity of the Subject,- much as the assertion of Dasein disavows the vocity of the ‘human’ subject. The chiasmus torn in this absent Whole, or the ‘disjunction of exteriority and immanence’,- in order to be brought out of the theoretical depth of the impossible and so made philosophically readable,- must be conceptualized through a new, properly ontological thinking-through of Time, which Heidegger had promised in the third division of Being and Time, but had not achieved, and Badiou simply ignored. While I find great intellectual sympathy in OOO and speculative realism, most especially with regard to their implicit rejection of the pre-Socratics as well as the respective modern equivalents in the cult of popular science, (A thinking which undermines philosophy, like the pre-Socratics and the sophists equally accomplished, as though philosophy were simply an outdated mode of science,- as opposed to a fundamentally different human project entirely. See Harman’s book “Object-Oriented Ontology” for a great account of the Pre-Socratics in their undermining of the Western philosophical project.) or likewise an assumed faith in the tenability of a Theory of Everything, it should be clear from my own conceptualization of the episteme that an alternative to their theorizations of a pure ontology of time is pursued in these books. In the third dialectical triad, the logoic chiasmus noted here is intellectually supplanted by the ‘lepsis’, such that the pure ontology of temporality is then left to trace the movement of a super-transcendent methexis (toward ektheosis) through the super-immanent lepsis (using Eriugena’s notions of supra-immanence and supra-transcendence) and its resulting perichoreia,- an ‘Image’ of Time which cannot be reduced to the merely intramundane or ‘encosmic’ (See Joshua Ramey, in “The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal.” Thus: “The cosmological and metaphysical problem for orthodox Christian thinkers was that, if in creation the same divine being is both the expressor and the expressed of a world, how it is possible to avoid the unwanted consequence that God’s nature might be limited to the expression of intramundane or merely encosmic possibilities? Some kind of process theology seems to loom, whereby God’s essence would be seen as restricted by time, or even that God might be forced to discover God’s own essence through time.”) movement from potentiality to actuality within the ‘tritogenos’ like that at the basis of a causal or correlationist theorization of temporality,- namely as a distinctive vocity: the vocity of the Subject as a kind of “hepatic inscription of the chora” capable of confronting the “choraic motility of the semiotic” and infiltrating the symbolic order, as divine perichoresis, with an intrusion of jousissance (beyond the threshold of structured and socially reinforced libido) which embodies the inherent lacuna 2 or instability of the body, that is, the Negativity of the mortal Subject, whose unstable forces, as graphe or traces of more elemental universal forces, therefor draw the subject upward into the visionary ekstasis of the eidos,- into the mantic presence of the Symbolic.] * The inability of Theory to account for its own Negation leads to what I have named ‘mimetic hyperinflation’, while the subversion of mimesis appears as a consequence of the perfection of techne as a hypermnemata, in whose image the direction of human history has been deterministically bent. We take the hypermnemata as a potential theory of the ‘Spectacle’,- meaning, a conceptualization of the Spectacle amenable to philosophical analysis, namely through the use of the episteme-model of vocity and Truth, (and its respective counter-Hegelian epistemology and aporetic metaphysics) by which the underlying ‘mnema’ of the technomimetic subtrate might be excavated from its own autopoietically generated materials without encouraging further viral transmission of those materials. The first task of such a project would be the deployment of a kind of buffer-zone in which the mnematic core of ‘System’ might be unloaded, with a secondary protocol focused on a re-engagement of the symbolic-exchange function and thus, eventually, a reconstruction of philosophy out of its at that point inert materials. The episteme, as a model of the subject’s unique vocity as well as that of the variable thresholds to the Real which the Subject can access, promises a theoretical explication of the category of ‘experience’, that is, an explication of the experiential subject’s vocity, recalling one of Walter Benjamin’s most urgent tasks,- (for he felt that it was this,- a conceptualization of the nature of experience in its totality,- which the Kantian framework most urgently lacked, with the ‘secret’ of the appercepted subject being said to reside unutterably in the soul, by Kant himself) a task which, given the limitations of critical-theory as merely a mimetically inverted Hegelian dialectic, was fated to remain unfulfilled. Such a model of human experience,- one of experience in its totality, in its vocity,- would, in its praxis, give rise to a theory of creativity, not merely an aesthetics- and therefor, would materialize the very creative techniques and strategies as served for its subject precisely as what I have before called “a mode of aisthesis capable of conforming the very effects whose techne it informs and so inverting the series of causes”,- that linear series whose ultimate telos is self-fulfilled in the image of Capital. (ie. inverting the structure of temporal co-relation, to use the terms utilized in the present text.) It is with these techniques that the reconstructive task hinted at here would be initially surmounted. **
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The ‘bad infinity’ of the Hegelian dialectic can be traced all the way back to the Aristotelian deconstruction of the Eleatic and Pythagorean monads. See Luigi Borzacchini, “Incommensurability , Music, and Continuum: a cognitive approach.”, on the artificial construction of the mathematical continuum and the evolution of its more philosophic underpinnings: “To outline this evolution, I must first and foremost remind … that the Pythagorean monad could not be divided. However, Aristotelian empiricism could not remain insensitive to the idea of the ‘one’ as a measure unit, and Aristotle’s philosophy had to remove the antinomy inherent in the idea of ‘One’, both indivisible- the ‘Being’ in the Eleatic framework, and the monad, both unit and point, in Pythagoream Mathematics- and divisible, the measure unit of the ‘magnitude’. The solution required that the idea of continuity based on the divisibility-of-the-magnitude had to be connected to the idea of continuity based on the singleness-of-the-separating-extremes through the idea of sign/point. A sign/point can always and everywhere, potentially but not actually, distinguish/divide the continuum, whereas a unity actually is an already distinguished and well defined object to be considered as a whole.” (He calls this ‘apeironic’ treatment of the concept of continuous magnitude the hidden evolutive principle of Greek-descended models of the mathematical continuum. He goes on elsewhere, describing it in “The Sophist: Genesis of Formal Thinking in Philosophy and Mathematics”, as “the source of never ending paradoxes well recognizable ever since the beginning of formal thinking. Negation, truth and being ground an antinomical argument, from the “negative judgement paradox” (impossibility of asserting falsity), through the “liar paradox” (contradictory nature of self-asserting falsity), to set-theoretical paradoxes and to Gödel’s and Tarski’s limitative theorems.”) In fact, this incommensurability of the two formulations of the monad, the 0-dimensional substrate for all higher abstraction, and the consequent duplicity of the Pre-Aristotelian and Aristotelian models of the continuum, can be observed by us in the modern crisis concerning the incompatibility of quantum mechanics and relativity, for, as Bohm states, concerning his notion of an Implicate Order, this is in reality simply an incompatibility between the continuum modelled in relativity, which represents indiscrete continuous motion, and that in quantum mechanics, which concerns discrete transformations and phase-spaces, spin-systems and discontinuous motion,- that is, ‘quantized’ motion: “…in relativity, movement is continuous, causally determinate and well defined, while in quantum mechanics it is discontinuous, not causally determinate and not well-defined. Each theory is committed to its own notions of essentially static and fragmentary modes of existence (relativity to that of separate events connectible by signals, and quantum mechanics to a well-defined quantum state). One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails is unbroken wholeness.” This inherent antinomy appears elsewhere in modern research, as in the relationship between parallel D-branes and muti-sheet spacetime, citing Pei-Ming Ho and Yong-Shi Wu, in “Noncummutative Geometry and D-Branes”: “Indeed, there are striking similarities between the D-brane dynamics and the non-commutative geometric construction of the standard model: the parallel D-branes versus the multi-sheet space-time, the inter-brane connections versus the Higgs fields, and so on.” The continuous and discontinuous models of the continuum and their integral paradox thus go all the way back to the very foundations of Western logic and, just as Aristotle failed to unite them by way of categorical reasoning and dialectical synthesis, so any further attempts at a constructed synthesis on the part of modern physics is equally unlikely to bear much fruit.
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The lacuna serves, when ‘digitally modulated’ by the binary logic of the chiasmus, as a ‘site of exception’ or Kunzean metalepsis, that is, as an ambient signal through which the ‘stochastic resonance’ itself becomes an extravalence and trans-apparition, a steganographic liquidity and non-representation “to be mapped in a flux of encryptions”,- [See Cabrales and Carruthers on ‘Poetry as Cosmic War’.] a feedback-loop for the Landian abomena of the ‘Outside’ within an abiding-between conceptuality and matter, recalling the manner in which Irigaray and Plant define the female symbolic lacuna as a kind of binary zero,- not a lack of signification, not simply an ‘exception’ from the system of positive male exchanges and the driven metonymy of libidinous becomings, not an absence at the missing center of gravity,- but a zone of multiplicities which, like the Cantorian aleph, enables that proliferating digital continua to exist from which it itself springs forth as a ‘ghost in the machine’,- a phantasmal extroprojection, the technological excruciation of self-sublimed capital making way for the anastrophe, that is, an anthropocentric de-conditioning. However, the hypermnematic conversion of the productive forces of the Market ensures that these forces cannot exceed capitalist control,- which is, was, or never-was, the fundamental hope of accelerationist doxa and the aesthetic praxis of its xenopoetics, or the essential feature of an anastrophic reorganization of market-forces. [Benjamin Noys, Cybernetic Phuturism: The Politics of Acceleration.]
- For more on this term, as it relates to the Platonic theory of Presence, see Nicolet., Isar, “Chora: Tracing the Presence”; Review of European Studies, 2009. The perichoreia defines the final manifestation of the chora’s impossible presence. The aporia of metaphysical Presence is one of Plato’s most significant, reaching its most energetic pitch of course, in the Timaeus. Presence is here encoded by the unstable logic of the ‘chora’,- a kind of hypnagogic or transitional phase (tritogenos) between the immaterial eidos, on the one hand, and the material eidolon on the other, that is, the world of Being and that of the Image, the world of the actual and the potential. The ‘impossible presence’ of the choreia, (like that of the Aristotelian monadology noted above) which is absent from itself, only instantiates the distorted logic of ‘pure difference’ for which it has been so often attacked by critical theorists with the mistaking of absence for presence, with the conflation of negativity and knowledge,- for such a misconstrual of the eidos for eidolon,- arising out of the reduction of this ‘Image of Time’ (the perichoreia) to its ontological minima, that is, the chora or ‘Being of Time’,- (as stated concerning the correlationalist dynamis) gives rise to an illegible graphe of the Platonic choreia,- and thus, to the loss of its hepatic inscription in the choreia of the body, which replicates the ‘Form’ of the higher universe in the lower one as a ‘participation’, according to Plato’s account and the cosmology of the Timaeus. Recapitulating what we have said regarding Stellardi and thought’s own impossibility, or negativity, as the very engine of thought, we find Sallis reaching the nearly identical conclusion, specifically with regard to his delineation of certain aporias within the Platonic corpus. He tells us: “What is it that thus withholds the Platonic text from metaphysics at the very moment when metaphysics is founded? What is it that holds the Platonic text at the threshold of metaphysics?” Heidegger understands the lethe to be a kind of choraic counter to phusis,- one which performs the basic phenomenological closure and counters all emergence into presence, thus imposing a ‘phenomenological withdraw’ which, at a lower level of abstraction, echoes that withdrawal we have already discussed at the epistemological level. Sallis indicates that it is precisely this belonging of the lethe to aletheia that renders the impossible presence of the choreia as Thought’s very arche: “Then it would be a matter of tracing in the dialogue the lines- or, rather, the shadows- of archaic closure, of the closure belonging to the arche, belonging within the origin at the origin, at the threshold of metaphysics.” Thus, we draw the main insight from Sallis’ “Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics”, as succinctly given in Bernard Freydberg’s interpretation, citing “The Thought of John Sallis; Phenomenology, Plato, Imagination; Delimitations”: “The end of metaphysics has been, is always, prefigured in its beginning. The drive to presence constitutive of metaphysics reaches its limit- is delimited- at its outset by that which makes it possible at all: aletheia, to which lethe essentially belongs. “Beginning” and “End” no longer constitute an opposition and most surely do not constitute a temporal order of any kind.” Of course, the perichoreia is just this “image of Time”, which cannot be absorbed by any temporal order.
** I would clarify several terms in relation to what has been said here. The interaction of the primary and secondary processes, (the inorganic and organic, the inhuman and human, cosmic and egoic, social and individual; the ‘anorganic’ and ‘aorgic’, to recall Schelling’s distinction) borrowing the terms used in Simondon’s socio-psychology, has thus far occurred on great scales of time,- giving rise to what Land and the CCRU referred to as long-range feedback cycles,- the kind of cycles we find ourselves unable to statistically model, much like the massive data-sets related to weather patterns and their computer-driven prediction, which had inspired the concept of the hyperobject. This unpredictable feedback-cycle has produced an epistemological blind-spot (this blind-spot is, simply “critical-theory”.) within which one such hyperobject (A ‘dragon’; see Consolandi, in: “I Saw a Dragon! - Envisioning Hyperobjects: culture, collaboration and madness in the Anthropocene.” Note also J. Sheu, in: “Conceiving the Hyperobject in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris”. ) has been generated, namely through the process I refer to as mimetic hyperinflation: Capital. Capital represents a final submission of the secondary or human, individuating process, to the primary one. The hypermnemata is the auto-poetically generated form in which the secondary process, ie. human history, has been re-encoded on the higher-dimensional surface of the unreadable hyperobject. This sociological trajectory, because it is the eventuality of an inertial telos suspended within the image of Capital itself, constitutes the self-fulfilling prophecy par excellence,- inevitable, perhaps, though only from within its own ontological horizon. The question is one of first reaching an ontological ground-zero, or what I have called the skhisma,- an ontological-minima of differentiation,- and then finally escaping that horizon. In the past, man possessed a metaphysics, and not merely a statistics-driven, scientifically derived model of himself and the world, as that reified by critical-theory, such that a revitalization of metaphysics is required in order to excavate the human mnema from the process of material-history. The ‘episteme’ is posited as just such a metaphysics.