Babelon

 

Like nowhere else on Earth, American farming communities are constructed without any regard to functioning as communities. As opposed to a collection of houses centered within the larger area of land (common land and farmland), America has its rural land being organized into small houses isolated within immense plots of land. Each household is responsible for its own private land, in complete isolation from its neighbours. The isolation of the individual is taken for granted here, with it being an assumed fact that the individual is completely atomized and alone, the solitary pioneer with nothing for company except those he controls as his property - his women reduced to objects, his slaves reduced to a multiplicity of colour not even differentiated between each other, his land being nothing more than a spreadsheet of calculations. In the very geography of his land, taken for granted is the nature of his farm as a bourgeois cellular body, alone and isolated from its neighbours and entirely existing by one individual man. It is through this that agriculture in America continues to this day, farms being composed not as an extension of a community in order to acquire food, but as corporations or factories which happen to occur outdoors, vast fields dedicated to forcing the land - by any means necessary - to produce an unnatural amount of an artificial crop and nothing else, for export only.

This layout of American farming communities elides the origins and nature of the nation itself. As opposed to the process of enclosing for the creation of capitalism atop existing society in nations already established, under settler-colonialism, the nation itself is built on the principles of what enclosure attempts to establish. In viewing the land as tabula rasa (regardless of how true this may be), settler-colonialism creates the nation directly from capitalism and therefore creates a nation with no organic history or meaning behind its basic construction - its rulers, its people, its institutions - all of those being instead founded as cold economic processes which elsewhere had to be imposed upon pre-capitalist institutions. The uncannily geometric borders of the western United States evidence this, the principle of the entire United States, which is a nation not of a nation at all, but a grotesque assemblage of capitalist constructions, borders drawn before anyone has settled within them, land staked out without even one generation of experience on the continent, a population consisting of all other continents divorced from their homelands and whipped free of history until all that remains is a sterile economic racial category to identify themselves - it is from this that the United States constitutes itself.

In order to establish this capitalist nation (Der Raketen-Stadt) an immense apparatus of communication must already exist, not only in the sense of speaking to one another but in the sense of connecting people regardless of reasons for that connection to exist, with the nation’s capitalist machinery being codependant with the lines of communication it draws between all peoples. The effect of this is terminal, prompting the Marxian prophecy “all that is solid melts into air”. Equality is made with false promise, achieved by isolating and then alienating the human, making all people equal by removing all barriers between them and thus interconnecting them while removing any ability for them to form a genuine community between each other. By demolishing all borders, Der Raketen-Stadt destroys all communities, scattering all peoples to aimless existences, floating about in vast machines beyond their control, equal by virtue of being equally possessed of the bourgeois soul and thus equally alienated within Der Raketen-Stadt’s vast machinery.

The striking down of this communication was the true lesson of the Tower of Babel, the same lesson known in the doctrine of Calvinist predestination. Babelon, the demonic assemblage, the tower extrapolated, and its uncountable crimes exist on the backs of the Tower’s universalism - Catholicism, Liberalism, Socialism, Capitalism, Rationalism - all things which posit the universal nature of all people and thus lay the foundation for the establishment of Der Raketen-Stadt and thus the emergence of Babelon. The lesson of the fall of the Tower of Babel was not only that such universals should be struck down as arrogance and falsehood, but that no nation can be built upon them. Not everyone can be an Israelite and it is only by exclusion, can the identity and community be in any way robust or real. To defeat the Tower it has fallen to us therefore to destroy by refusing to participate, by establishing pluralities and identities, re-establishing what Babelon has taken away, overthrowing our captivity by forgetting it.

The Murder of the Text

In the liberal-rational quest to do away with all things deprivileged as irrational and mystic, it is necessary to deny the ability of a text to speak for itself. All texts, which when properly engaged with are able to act as a linguistic system of meaning with which to begin from and work within in for a creative process from reading, must instead become an enclosed object which can then be packaged and then investigated and dissected. Instead of speaking for itself, the text is made into an object for interrogation at the hands of an external phallic sign which seeks to, through rationalist inquiry, map out the perfect anatomy of the dead object and then move on.

Of the various objectivities, one in particular that has attained unique popularity in social media based communication, wherein one's social and economic capital is increased through a building of a “presence”, lines of communication flowing into a social media user’s profile, is an objectivity which prizes above all else, the author’s soul as the object’s complete makeup. As social media is built around an expression of a single user building themselves (signified by the username, profile picture, etc) through the content they create, showing their “self” through things which they produce (thus making the author the central meaning inherent in all content produced), so does this style of reading work. All texts are content which extend from the central figure of the author, making therefore, the task of the reader to penetrate into the text and judiciate the objective fact of the text, that being the content creator, the author.

What emerges is a style of reading which is incapable of reading texts as existing for themselves, but texts as being ruled by overcoding signs, the sins of the author, uncovered in the text. A text, for example, contains a scene in which rape takes place. This is interpreted, not in the context of the text, but, as the text is an extension of the author and nothing more, as an individual act which occurs within the sphere of the person of the author, interpreted thus in the moralistic language of sin. The text loses all meaning except to signify that the author is a rape-author, nothing except evidence of the internal nature of the author. In opposite, when a text contains a virtue, the text is valued for no reason other than as evidence of the author’s virtue, the author now being a woke-author.

It is this which is the full and final impact of social media on culture. Criticism becomes no longer a method of dealing with texts, but of dealing with authors, with their texts being nothing more than evidence for the true nature of the author. This is the product of social media, The Murder of the Text.

Strategy as Enclosure

In order for a game of Chess to enter in checkmate, the King isn’t simply captured, but put into a state of absolute capture, a state unique for not being the capture of all squares surrounding the King, the capture of all potential Kings in every possible square the King could travel to. In order for these squares to be captured, they must be threatened in some way, that is the enemy has the potential ability to move onto that square in some way, thus “controlling” that square as their territory. In this way, territory in Chess works identical as it does in Go, on the principle of territorial control. In Go however, territorial control is abstracted - as opposed to a general good principle underlying play, territorial control is the win condition, read at the endgame as abstract quantity. In Go, both territory and armies have no face, no identity, but a multiplicity which represents a presence of one side or the other. The transformation which Go makes upon Chess is done in in reverse in the transformation Multiwinia makes upon Chess. In Go, the territory and military, both present, are unified under the central principle of territory, with military being only implied in the drama of marking territory. The opposite remains true in Multiwinia, where territory is only implied in the manipulation of a multiplicity of soldiers. Again, like the stones of Go, abstracted to be only a multiplicity of a team, but a multiplicity of troops which are manipulated through the game in various ways in order to attain objectives, with the same dramas of territorial control still being present, but only implied beneath the surface.

This unification of territory and soldier to one force speaks to the discourse of warfare, which is that of enclosure. Each invasion, each conquest, is here recognized for its central aim, which is the ability to gain control through two dynamics, Military and Territory, the former being the forces which mark out the boundaries of that which is enclosed and the latter being that which is enclosed, the drama being the attempt to successfully complete this enclosure so that Territory can be utilized (for whatever purpose) freely, without competition from enemy Military attempting to enclose it for themselves.

With the advent of immense technological gulfs, traditional wars between colonial powers and their subjects were won before they even begin, with enclosure being able to occur (in the eyes of the enclosing power) often without the full knowledge of the human lives being enclosed. What occurs thereafter is a war which is not a war, a war which is a series of atrocities in attempts to force the claimedly objective truth upon the population which has been supposedly enclosed. It is here that infinite violence can occur, as those within the enclosed territory are not enemies, but reduced to less than human by virtue of their being wrong - an aberration against the holiness of “truth”, against the objective fact of the territory’s nature as a property of the force which enclosed it.

Objects, Subjects, Entities

Objects

In the eyes of an animal, “water” does not exist, only drinking. “Water” is a thing, while drinking is done with an object that exists from its usage, existing only as it is used. So is every other part of the wilderness - the mindset nature drives into one is that of viewing the wilderness as a collection of things, created by their existence as resources, ignoring all other qualities. The animal thus views themselves as existing not only in relation to a great pile of things (Objects), but they constitute their being as that which is not all these Objects, forming themselves in relation to the Objects, as an Object.

Subjects

What makes the human unique however, incapable of being only an Object, is the ability of the human to have an ego and technology, two codependant forces. The interaction of these when the human enters into constructing itself in relation, forms the basis for the human creation of the Social. Human relationships, despite their similarity and basis in this primordial nature of life, have a mediating layer due to the ego and technology. The human is conscious of itself and therefore desires clothes upon itself in order to shield this central core of its consciousness. Technology (included within this language) and the ego form then a codependant relationship, where the ego builds upon itself technology while technology needs the ego to sustain its existence and need for mediation between the human and other things. 

Henceforth, in order to fulfill the need of the animal - making oneself whole - the human needs to use technology/language (henceforth referred to as Mediation) to access other things and make them as objects, and more importantly, to make themselves fully constituted as a complete and wholly enclosed object. The evidence for this can be seen in behaviors of patients in solitary confinement; whose Subject deterritorializes wildly without anything with which to put oneself in relation to.

Entities

Mediation then begins to attain life of its own. With more than one input into it, Mediation forms a system which takes on characters of its own, which are fed by those participating in it but not directly in control of it. Such is the creation of all things which we live within, all systems which we participate in - culture, rules, customs, economics, etc.

Mediation increases in its ability to speak to itself as its ability to speak is increased. Communication between people increases the amount of Mediation by amplifying its volume and technology increases Mediation by increasing its dominance in alienating the Subject from that which it mediates access to. This manifests in Entities, things that exist solely in the realm of mediation - art, ideology, capital, etc, which attain behaviors of their own by virtue of the vast diversity of inputs which enter the Entity. Mediation becomes not only Mediation, but the method of feeding and sustaining Entities

Entities are different from Objects, not only in their creation, but in that they exist sovereign from the human, something only possible by being above and from the human. As an Object, water only exists as a resource, something which fulfills a role. As an Entity however, water is no longer just a thing, but the word “water”, within which is contained an entire system, from which all the qualities of water emerge. Every writing on “water”, every utterance of “water”, ever interaction with “water”, this is Mediation which inputs into an entity of “water” that is distinct, larger, and broader reaching than the Object, unnamed, ever would be. “Water” contains within itself rivers, oceans, floods, spilling, gushing, filling, pressure, valves, pipes, whorls, vortices, none of which is contained within water which only exists in the cupped hands of the primate drinking it.

There is no turning back from this and to proclaim it to be negative is to disregard one's own complicity in it. Mediation is essential to the formation of a complete Subject. The process of regressing back into the unconscious Object is one that is most likely impossible and attempts at doing so render one destroyed beyond repair, the same, but significantly retarded from what they were before. All that can be done is to cope with the nature of Entities, something we’ve been with since the origins of anything we’d recognize as “human”. Applying this generally, an even playing field must be made between all things which fit this model, not to annihilate individual characteristics of all things, but to acknowledge their existing with far less human input than one would traditionally think in a misguidedly anthropocentric viewpoint.

Cross Sections

At irregular intervals, an event takes place which allows the unconscious flows of culture to be explicated, a cross section in the cultural and political timeline. This occurs due to an event being made up of a collection of symbols which summarize these flows, creating a response from any readers of the event wherein they become possessed to study and think about and write on the event, going along with the thought-objects lodged inside them. This produces cultural products, writings, editorials, opinions, etc, which in turn loop around to greater exposure to the event. This cycle eventually burns itself out as it runs of out of new hosts susceptible to infection, giving it a neat period of time wherein it can be said to have occured. At the end of it, the writings produced in this period of time constitute a cross section of the context in which the cycle occured in, thoughtflows being all expressed more explicitly in ways they would never get the chance to normally. Going forward, the passage of these cross sections produces change afterwards. By allowing undercurrents of thought to be explicated through communication, they now seep into entities and machines of society, capital, politics, industry, etc.

It is this lesson, the same that Arendt learned in studying the Dreyfus Affair in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that we must apply diligently in an era when communication has reached a state of ecstatic overheating beyond any experienced previously. In the history of the contemporary far right, Gamergate was the most recent such event and just hours ago, we have witnessed the inciting event for another such cross section to be created. The shooting has within it countless mimetic details, which will implant themselves into the minds of anyone with a platform - the music, the cinematography, the memes, the 8ch post, every word of the manifesto, every element of previous far right violence (Dylan Roof, Charlottesville) is made clear and perfected like never before and made in relation to pre-existing smaller discourses that are now joined in the larger picture of this event.

Going forward for however long the discourse around the shooting lasts, we are about to enter a transitory period which will be revealing and transformative for politics in the future. Unlike many events previous, the discourse around this latest killing will be extreme and massive, but must be studied as the cross section will provide a road map for the coming years.