Being it that I’m not a being of pure mind
it’s not in my Being to be the being that always asks questions.
Being it that I’m not a being of pure doubt
it’s not in the Being of my being to regret my toes
and my soles and elbows and the knots in my fingers
but being it that I’m not a being of pure bone
I must desire sound and smell and the fleeting and
ghostly and sometimes feral (sometimes au contraire sedated)
experience of being one with bar crowd.
Still, being it that I’m not a being of pure sound
my ears and throat must be the vessel of something more
light-like and sexy like the gods of the Indian subcontinent
Yet, being it that my Being is not a being of pure sex,
it must be but the pretext to something else
like music or muscle ache or somesuch deranged pleasure.
Each alarming fact about the Being of my Being tells me something
about something: real, debased, willingly fallen.
The gods of my Being perverted sensualists;
the bones of my fingers feral and/or sedate
my elbows and soles filled with regrets
My mind filled with questions,
lost in clouds, shrouded by concepts
and theories without end.
The flash-fad for Greg Bateson (already subsiding) made me do it. It wasn’t all bad — going there (feedback loops; cybernetics; systems theory; macroprudentiary regulation!) indeed points to hard consequences of our own complication of time in (chronos/tempo/kairos). But the unplanned rhetorical development led to this wallop of a paragraph in our last essay:
Failure to thrive both clearly and undeniably evidences human nature (you must be this heavy to thrive) and the inhumanity of nature. Humanity (in the timescale where H. Sapiens is a relatively stable entity; that is, as an explicitly and specifically human process) has developed within a feedback loop that has encouraged certain tendencies (toward sociality and social construction) and discouraged other (antisocial) features. In humanity, this feedback loop is no longer in direct and strictu-sensu-Darwinian touch with reality, but is mediated by all sorts of mental models that dramatically accelerate tempo. For example, men and women can experiment with medical treatments in animal models (and increasingly with simulations) and minimize the waste of human lives. This feedback loop has produced the ambient axiologies; but it also has been produced on the ambient axiologies. We like to imagine that this is the surplus over reality that allows us to say “reality kicks ass” and have the theurgy of human culture to kick its ass. But this theurgy is built in tempo and very often “the time is out of joint” and the ongoing conditions drift around and away from ambient axiologies. How can ambient axiologies work, then?
Man, is that a pressure-cooker bomb if something ever is. That paragraph should have been spread over several blogposts, each with various kinds of attractive imagery — psychoanalysis, girls who kiss each other seductively, the racist genius of cinema, infinite wealth, hints at “pick-up” tips, infinite wisdom.
There’s an aspect of the problem that emerges (the parasynchronic feedback loop, the booty-shaking-to-the-funky-music, the hard problem of chronicity) that can be presented quite objectively in terms of ordinary and delay-differential equations. Supply chain managers are usually taught about delay-differential equations in simplified form through the so-called Beer Game:
The goal of the game is to meet customer demand for cases of beer through the distribution side of a multi-stage supply chain with minimal expenditure on back orders and inventory. As we said there are four stages, manufacturer, distributor, supplier, retailer, with a two-week communication gap of orders toward the upstream and a two-week supply chain delay of product towards the downstream. There is a one-point cost for holding excess inventory and a one-point cost for any backlog (old backlog + orders – current inventory). In the board game version, players cannot see anything other than what is communicated to them through pieces of paper with numbers written on them, signifying orders or product. The retailer draws from a deck of cards for what the customer demands, and the manufacturer places an order which, in turn, becomes product in four weeks.
Surfers and skateboards have a physical intuition of the resulting “bullwhip effect”: overcorrecting is doom because signals are always out of turn with the ground conditions of reality. But this is one aspect, and it’s mainly intended to present the unexpected complexity of something as simple as a beer trucking operation, rather than provide solutions.
Now, we’re not saying we have the SCM silver bullet just yet (but might soon in the future). On the contrary, we speculate that SCM is a wicked problem because delay differential equations are founded on naive chronicity. Like their cousins (PDEs, FDEs, etc) these equations run across a linear interval that mathematicians call simply t and, encouraged by physicists we give the naive name of “time”.
II.
It would seem that tempo and kairos are either overly complex time concepts or unjustifiable, just-so stories. But there’s nothing either simple or justified about t. Ask Feynman or Susskind or anyone — the problem of making an “arrow of time” appear is profoundly vexatory. Indeed, classical mechanics — which is to say, the ordinary setting of human experience — allows for no such thing (except, of course, as a statistical effect from large ensembles, and still then as mathematical abstraction). Fundamental symmetries of the universe (notably that the rules of reality are invariant to where in this clock-time we are) lead inexorably to conservation of energy, which in turn leads to phase transition groups. Because phase transitions are groups, the operation that leads from “state of the word(now)” to “state of the world(now + some time)” is reversible.
Translation for people afraid of math: in the classical setting — in the chronicity we actually experience in human mesoscale — there is no past and no future.
And it’s not like physicists are unable to give you some add-ins to that chronicity that yield an arrow of time of some type you might find existentially satisfying or not; it’s that the feedback loop (deep geological time and evolution y compris), funky 11/4 jazz music, beer distribution trucks, diegesis (strictu and latu sensi), pick-up scenarios, etc. are all commonly referred to a deeply unsatisfying ground chronicity in t, the time of Newton, Lagrange and Hamilton). Since you, patient reader, can’t breathe quantum effects into any given situation, that’s what you get.
This is the root of the discomfort around “clock time”: chronicity fails to give any insight into the choppy, multicentered, asynchronous structure apparent to all events that surround you — what, your very metabolism fluctuates in pace, your heart, your eye saccades.
III.
There is reason for elation at the discovery of the “parasynchronic feedback loop” — it’s a neat concept that crowns the tempo/kairos split driving so much of theory so far. But its implications make me dizzy to the point of sickness in my throat. Earlier on some sweet nothing was written (and subsequently deleted; it pointed the way to a version of the Tarski program we have already long discarded) about “concept drift”. That confusedly assumed naïve chronicity, although in naked contradiction also assumed this naïve chronicity to be carried forward by the frame axioms.
That we can’t recover “concept drift” should tell in how much trouble we are: frame axioms run in a discrete sequence that’s implicitly even-spaced. Does the choppy loop emerge from a sufficiently large quability program? (I’m not a point percentage powerful, in sheer brain chops, to handle a formal problem that size). Are frame axioms embedded in the choppy loop? My frightened heart wants to run with this; this would be Deleuze’s advice, although the emergence of synchronicities (the visible effects of the choppy loops) are a bitch to manage.
(To be clear: the choppy loop puts the entire Tarski program in peril. But you have to follow theory where it leads you.)
Three surprisingly high level topics have popped up in my internet watering holes. This not being a scholarly effort (not to mention the cost of collating randomly-placed things that show up in my komórka), so there aren’t actual references. They’re in the “microzeitgeist”; you’re probably exposed to them as much as me.
First, there was a (frankly correlationist, but still enlightened beyond usual internet standards) debate on human nature. Second, the question of time and the ways it can possibly either be naturally unstable or destabilized. Third, a thousand Gregory Bateson stories came out of the ether, mostly coalescing on the topic of the “double bind”. Not all of these discussions were in the spirit of topologos disputatio — some, like the Rogan-Weinstein duo, oscillate violently between an interesting degree of pure exploration and longer rounds of mutual congratulation.
Greg Bateson aside, the issues of time and human nature collide on an edge between the “correlationist” horizon (until which “being and thinking are correlated” and nothing in the Great Outdoors of nonhuman reality can be thought) and the great violent sea of “reality” as strongly emphasized by friend of the blog Uriel Alexis (which is closely related to the Lacanian “Real” which we overuse; but also quite dissonant from the Tarski story of ambient conditions as satisfiability problem).
In light of this idea that we’ll misname the reality principle (thoroughly confusing people who expect to see Freud in it), it’s jarring, if rhetorically seductive, to deny human nature. What, smack the top of your head with a flexible ruler — there you are! But the qualified debate on human nature necessarily focuses on the human as a process; the correlationist fallacy is not a binding constraint as long as the human process remains one, since, well, how can one even talk of the Great Outdoors — that immense space where no human is available for navel gazing? Indeed skeptics about human nature are invariably ethical consequentialists (a tricky system of implicit equations on the axiology hierarchy, but quite natural to humans under correlationist conditions): what ends, they ask, does realist discourse on human nature serve?
[Lower-level versions of this debate are always in “background radiation” — IQ, gender roles, overactivation of the amygdala in conservatives. But suddenly discussions that can be more… realistically… dragged to the plane of topologos disputatio are popping up online.]
II.
Uriel Alexis’s cry of “reality rules!” depends enough on intellectual influences that it would be unscholarly to refer to this principle as being specifically his, rather than something that hangs off a particular iteration of an intellectual tradition found in the antiquity of antiquities. This is not to devalue his own stuff (particularly as he manages to stay in disputatio with Nick Land): it’s an excellent t-shirt sized phrase that not only identifies with laser-like precision the gravitational center of a huge politico-intellectual movement, but leaves a few hooks from where to hang theories-in-disputatio.
“Reality rules” points to at least three universes of meaning:
A nominal assignment that transpiles to “rules of reality”. From a sufficient distance, this is a wild ontological claim that nevertheless works sometimes from within the correlationist circle — physicists claim that reality does appear to follow certain regularities that can be even somewhat misnamed as “laws”. Still, there is something circular to this: within the correlationist circle, it seems possible to validate a dissolution of the very same circle. Having sailed a thousand miles into the ocean, I claim sea dragons are not there.
A terminal statement (“it is ultimately reality that reigns”) about the process view of reality in which skeptics of human nature take refuge. This differs from meaning 1 in that “reality” becomes an enforcer rather than a lawgiver, a cop rather than constitutional law. Our own reading of Lacan sees the Real as the process of random cruelty that can never fully be accounted for within the correlationist circle. But this is also how the “rules of reality” are validated — by letting Queen Reality express herself.
A loose underdeveloped axiological claim — “reality is great!” This is almost always an attempt to dissolve the so-called “is-ought” question as a pseudoproblem. Yet getting rid of “ought” can be achieved as a forceful political move (an axiological castration, so to speak); what would remain, if someone was brave enough, would be to dissolve the “is” problem, that is, disolving the correlationist circle and claiming knowledge of the Great Outdoors, reality itself. What is, is; but what is? The rules of reality, maybe.
Discarding meaning (1), we could rephrase the cheer-scream as “reality kicks ass!”, somewhat demoting meaning (2) — maybe something kicks the ass of reality too? In any case, (1) and (3) together give some buoyance to a weakened version of (2), in which the process of reality is given considerable autonomy but denied imperium. In this way, science (rules of reality) and axiological optimism produce a type of vaccine against realism, which may have nasty consequentialist implications. This view, which Steven Pinker has been misnaming “enlightenment”, is actually pastoral; nature gives us milk and grains, but we can bend it to our will.
On the other hand: demoting meaning (3) and restoring meaning (1), we could say with Laibach that “Life is life!”. This view tries to obviate axiology by stating that reality continues in the absence of meaning (3). But it is impossible for an all-powerful tyrant not to be great: this view a fully circular dispensational view — tyrant-Queen Nature defines the whole general axiology and produces meaning (3). It is also Laibach who says “in the absence of God we all pray to police“. One can devalue this reality, but only at the cost of producing an axiology machine beyond it where the rules of reality evolve, out of the grace of God, either through Whig history or the afterlife.
Aren’t these close to the left- and right-wing of philosophies of reality? Can we ever bring them together in topologos disputatio?
Of course not. More abstraction is needed! Thus formulas like “reality rules!”. Maybe an algebra around it is needed; who knows what Uriel Alexis is coming up with next.
III.
There are, of course, situations where pastoral and dispensational assumptions break down. The pastoral view fails where despite the best of our efforts we can’t convince Queen Nature to help us out. Take the titular medical jargon, “failure to thrive“. A (small) human’s untimely death is chalked up to failure to thrive when through no commonly-understood pathological process it fails to achieve the “developmental milestones” that are indispensable for the kid to survive — this in a society sheltered from ancient evolutionary menaces. Humans are notoriously born premature; our huge heads wouldn’t come out otherwise. This means infanthood is a provisional period where the baby has already been incorporated into society but cruel Queen Nature still holds the reigns.
In other words: a kid may fail to thrive as a plant seed may fail to take. The plant fails to grow enough leaves to make food, the raw nonhuman thing of the baby fails to make enough weight to make humanity. The story according to which the human soul weights however many grams is literally true. Failure to thrive is not only a limit to the kind of thinking according to which humanity is fully constructed by humans; it is also provides (in dead babies) a much closer correlationist horizon than those brought by Meillassoux in the arche-fossil or the accretion of the earth.
But failure to thrive is also a clear limit to the approximately right-wing cheer scream of “Life is life!” — it clearly is not! The dispensational bargain is that submission to reality produces the Ought. A type of dispensational bargain is Darwinism, by which infant death is coextensive with maladaptation to the environment. But what when humans have acquired near-demiurgic powers over the environment (in the controlled setting of the neonatal ICU) but the the sheer indeterminism (some people use words like “Cthulhu” at this point) of reality still takes over? Yes, reality rules like a haphazard sea monster; also, reality sucks and doesn’t even follow the rules.
The bridging element between the failures of pastoralism and dispensationalism is the now-fashionable double bind. Failure to thrive both clearly and undeniably evidences human nature (you must be this heavy to thrive) and the inhumanity of nature. Humanity (in the timescale where H. Sapiens is a relatively stable entity; that is, as an explicitly and specifically human process) has developed within a feedback loop that has encouraged certain tendencies (toward sociality and social construction) and discouraged other (antisocial) features. In humanity, this feedback loop is no longer in direct and strictu-sensu-Darwinian touch with reality, but is mediated by all sorts of mental models that dramatically accelerate tempo. This feedback loop has produced the ambient axiologies; but it also has been produced on the ambient axiologies. We like to imagine that this is the surplus over reality that allows us to say “reality kicks ass” and have the theurgy of human culture to kick its ass. But this theurgy is built in tempo and very often “the time is out of joint” and the ongoing conditions drift around and away from ambient axiologies. How can ambient axiologies work, then? In dispensational fashion. Does the feedback loop reward dispensational tendencies, then? Is the Enlightenment just submission to Cthulhu?
IV.
What’s the upshot here? Clearly, Absolute Realism is a losing proposition, no matter which way you vote. In the sense of the feedback loop just sketched, it’s fully incompatible with a culture built through the synchronic update of ambientaxiologies; rather like market failures in economics, it demarcates the boundaries around which the best-of-all-possible-worlds does work. In other words, it’s a concept of crisis, and the adequate response to something like failure-to-thrive (i.e. infant death). But it’s possible that Absolute Realism is not a feature of crisis, much like failure-to-thrive deaths are not a feature of Darwinian maladaptation.
It’s all too to fetishize Cthulhu as the core constitutive force that it may not be. Like any fetish, this would work by substitution: first the foot summarizes the entirety of the human figure, and then the boot abstracts and suspends the desire for specific human feet. The time is out of joint; the human world (i.e. the feedback loop) is built in tempo, but this tempo is not always synchronous along all persons — and besides, nature is commanded by mr. Susskind’s arrow-of-time. We therefore see successes and failures (in our tempo) as summary substitutes of the feedback loop; later, we substitute these summary signals for an inhuman (and human-made) construction, or rather for an impractical fetishized variant with spike heels that are horrible to actually walk and carry a human figure, a whole human figure.
This is no definitive argument, of course. Maybe the crisis is itself made of Absolute Realism; maybe most of the feedback loop is crisis and pastoralist progress is temporary respite. Still, to put these things to disputatio the speculative work of abstraction must take places. Thus we toil away in theory.
