The Master

Language exists in reference to, with the presumption (perhaps due to its genesis) being that this reference be to some “real”, though referencing is much more eternal than that. The base is created by being in opposition to, what is made from its harnessing. The superstructure in other words, descends, as an alien upon an undifferentiated plateau of primitive existence, and creates that plateau into the base by its construction as part of a machine which exists to create the superstructure. This original construction is the work of the father. From him, the daughter descends, the superstructural that emerges after language comes as a result of the creation of the base, the yin/feminine “floating world” of language.

The function of the male is of being the avatar of the base while at the same time, being the one to newly do the constructing of the father. For this reason, the Son is in an eternal quest to begin, using his yang-oriented selfhood, to turn his base-hood, his reality, into a new machine of differentiation with which to spawn a world in the same fashion as the Father. In doing so, he ultimately disintegrates himself into absence, as the Father becomes the very machine he constructs in order to construct it. The Son annihilates himself in this fashion by disseminating his yang out into the world, thereby constructing. In order to disseminate properly, he acquires wives, channels of emptiness in which to input his energies, carrying on and recreating his energies from their emptiness. In effect, the resultant dynamic is that of a microcult of the harem. The male acts as a force of presence, creating a despotic political order in which he is the “truth” at the center of a circular system of power and meaning (the household as the cult), all descending from him.

The Song of Songs as read by the common christian displays this dynamic in an important context, where the presence of the husband is imagined as pure yang through making the husband inhuman. The narrative is importantly written from the perspective of the woman, the linguistic to whom the real of the husband is done upon. The yin writes in order to create the channels by which yang flows, the women act as the riverbed while the man acts as the water. The church interprets this in an importantly divine sense, where the phallic god is imagined as the husband in comparison to the linguistic church - notably, the face of God is always unknowable to them, as inhuman and alinguistic as the ideal phallus is, a solar presence of pure light, which can be stared at as doing so would make it linguistic and thus feminine.

Dickinson imagined her Master as an apersonified figure, the man who acts purely as a phallus, purely as the real. Such a construction as she made is required for any woman who seeks esoteric practice. In depersonifying the male, as can be seen explicitly in the dehumanization of Green Dragons in the White Tigress Arts, the woman is able to achieve what she lacks, the light within her darkness, cultivating yang, without being slaved into an alien feminine. It’s this alien-feminine which is the cause of female degeneracy, where the male’s feminine aspects are thrust upon the female, binding her within another feminine construction. In effect, she becomes not the author of her own emptiness, but a copy of another’s emptiness and in doing so, stagnates into oblivion. It’s this that is the danger with traditional marriage, where women are taken away from ever having proper utilization of the masculine and instead made to merely be copies of copies.

Vanitas

In the service of any polite church, it can be felt most keenly by those from outside its mysteries, the sense of emptiness pervading each breath of the building, each cloth and decoration on the walls. Far from the ecstasies of the pentecostals, the ritualisms of the Orthodox, the obsessive legalisms from which many of these churches descended, the polite church seems to be an exercise in nothing at all, an almost cynical ceremony conducted in pale imitations of the genuine services. For the theologian, the ceremony strikes as blasphemy, a mockery of everything he spends himself in slavish devotion to the upkeeping of - the gall of those who mock by their costumish recreations, disrespecting his sacrifice to the slavegod he serves.

For those intimated, paganism never died. Skull and Bones worships death in their mysteries, as ancient as they are modern, killed, entombed, therein dissected, and reborn as Bonesmen in their initiatory rituals. Pynchon references the “Puritan Mysteries”, the paganism that never died behind the facade of christianity that could barely keep its claws sunk after only a few generations removed from the stagnation and decay of Europe. The veils once forgotten by the slave religions were uncovered and pierced in the new wilderness, and all that repressed for so long in the Christian-Judaic-Islamic world came back in full force, as all manner of once-suppressed paganisms, reared themselves from below. As the tribal peoples of the South rediscovered shamanic trances in Pentecostalism, the new form of aristocracy discovered the mysteries of death in Vanitas. The Vanitas spoken of inwardly in times of crisis, the mantra Pynchon so acutely uncovered - oss, oss, oss…

While the Rowling Psyop has turned an entire generation of potential initiates into spiritual dead-ends, the supposed villains of her writings still retain valuable insights of great use. In particular interest now, the symbol of the Dark Mark, with the memento mori being crossed and wound-through by the serpent. Long used as a symbol of magical energy, the serpent’s nature is one of forward movement, of movement directed, like water curving of its own volition. Hence the reason for the slave religion’s fear of it, their imagining the serpent as an avatar of evil, the one responsible for Eve’s line of flight from the garden’s confines. Like the Potter lies, this elides its own truth - the serpent, like the Chinese dragon, is the symbol of power, of casting a line of energy outwards, one controlled that winds its long body through the skies, which can be ridden forwards, directed, imbibed, manipulated, riding the Kali Yuga, visualized in the bruntish reminder of physicality in the memento mori.

The reminder of oss is a reminder of removal. The memento mori is one of distancing, of realizing oneself as the serpent, not the skull. A recognition of the impermanence of all things, a recognition of the becoming (the serpent) that is behind all beings (the skull). Vanitas is the sin of recognizing the world of Being for what it is, the mantra a mantra to “open the hood”, laying bare the beings to becomings and thus opening them to manipulations.

Tradition Against The Terror

Since the Jacobin terror, a trend of creeping equalization has been carried out amongst the societies infected with it. The bacterial spread of Jacobinism can be seen in countless evolutions over the years. Cultural commentators today take notice, through the wave of Disney acquisitions of countless properties that “everything you love” will be bought, stripped, and prostituted before your eyes. The bourgeois of today clothes themselves in uniforms descending from a great stripping-down, the pomp of the gentry reduced to the dull black and grey of a business suit, of which the slightly more colorful business casual shows only the faintest hope of being a recovery from. Continual demands are made in the service of this, often through the leftist - the speartip of liberalism - before descending into the mainstream liberal, for culture, for life, to be continually standardized and made suitable for the dull greys of the autistic palette. When strikes occurred, leftist activists cried out on Twitter for the strikers to halt, as the poor and disabled make such use of the corporate infrastructure in question. When movies outside the canon of Marvel and Star Wars come out, an ensuing battle occurs where the same cadre of Picrew avatars, representing themselves via the functionally identical variations of a premade asset-manipulation toy, come out to war alongside cookie cutter bluechecks against any who would dare defend plurality in Hollywood.

The left’s theodicy lays this creeping destruction at the feet of neoliberalism, capitalism, or some other evil interchangeably. While correct, it assumes that there would be any one at the front of this. Negating this human-centric theory of origin for the Jacobin terror, is the fact that the system of terror operates on logic of its own accord, without reference to the whims of any human controller who might see it in a particular direction. Such is evident in the creation of the bourgeois. Originally a peasantry, they became empowered through being taken up into systems larger than themselves, systems of economics far beyond any of their own imaginings. It was this which “empowered” them by turning them into the servant of the creeping poison, the first models of standardization to roll out upon the landscape and remake the world in their image. It is from them, in the service of capital via what they had been made into, their autistic ettiquetes and petty hoardings, that the first true horrors began to be known, as the interior was colonized by the industrial workhouse and the exterior was trod upon by the pith helmeted “empire” of capital.

These machines are, in aggregate, what creates the effect of “poison” in the modern world. Expressed in the song MKULTRA Victim, any who desires to be beyond this feels as though the entire universe around them is covered in spikes and thorns, seeking to drag them under, wrap around and inject, infest. The bourgeois empower themselves by colonization, the highest of them empower themselves by creating engines of automatic colonization. All around, are systems which attempt to entrap and automatically colonize the subject, turning the individual into the bourgeois, creating the capitalistic man out of what was previously.

In order to resist these constant snares, in order to at the very least carve out a living sovereign from the misery of mediocrity, one must return to ways of carrying oneself from before the terror began. The modern world offers no help for personal ascension, to higher states of being, of interacting with the world, towards bliss and at the very least, a life of true fulfillment. Rather, all its paths are designed to create misery and any who should buy fully into them is destined to be remade into the bourgeois subject by them. It’s here that there is the strongest argument for tradition. Not in the proactive, pseudo-communistic sense of conservative vanguardists, the Fuentes and Shapiros of the world who demand that everything cater to their specific dollhouse view of how things ought to be, but in the reactive and the self-centric. Tradition is, more than anything, a way of the individual, resisting and empowering themselves above and through the terror surrounding them, a plague mask worn against the Jacobin bacteria.

Ideogrammic & Linear Writing

While from the immediate viewing it always appears decentralized, the true character of a rhizome or a map is never as clearly horizontal as one may often wish. The map can be entered or left at any point by the viewer, but internally its relationships are nothing of the sort. The channels of growing crabgrass arrange themselves into hierarchies of time, with the first seed still being primary temporally, in relations of relative position, with some sections being granted more importance due to core or fringe status, and in relations of variation due to environmental stressors. The reader in this position fulfills a unique function, as can be seen in the map more clearly. The reader enters or leaves at any given location, while the map remains not only static, but its content being exact opposite of such non-hierarchical organization. Not that the city would be arranged in orders of vertical trees, despite the best attempts of many over the years, but that the map is arranged at the very least by this contents organizing themselves into relations, which are hierarchical, in various ways, in nature.

That arrangements are hierarchical in all cases is only a partial truth, as it keeps to obfuscated what’s being referred to with “hierarchy”. The hierarchy of an arrangement is always one of matching between the parties involved, with the relation being a complete whole where the parties compose the difference to each other. In a city, the hierarchies are not those of god-like coercion, but of codependence, as the leftist revolutionary is oft to point out, the wealthy cores and manored suburbs need the industrial ghettos and wastelands as their basis of production, while the reverse is also true, with the very infrastructure of the bottom being structures of control descending from the top. So-called hierarchy appears in this way, where the pieces arrange themselves into a whole (the economics of the city) in a way where the two form each other via their relation, not in spite of it.

That this discussion has centered the reader is vital. Within is an inherent tension between linear and ideogrammic forms of writing, with the latter now emerging as a force of creation within the former. While the rhizome itself could never come into being without internal hierarchical flows and relations, the rhizome from afar, emerges as an ideogram. The rhizome, as its known in proper jargon, comes into being as a readable entity via the mapping of linear communication so that the relations can be viewed as complete wholes, from afar as in the map. In this way, all acts of linear communication produce ideograms. At the same time, the rhizomatic scheme is incomplete, as it does not allow, as the ideogrammic method does, the realization of this very relations which produce it. The radicals of a Chinese character arrange themselves into an order which is perceived (entered into) all at once (at any point) but which, through their positioning, have linear lines of communication that produce the overall meaning of the ideogram.

Theoretical Pataphysics

In the second chapter of Half Life 2, Gordon navigates through the labyrinth of City 17 and comes into Kleiner’s hidden laboratory, finding the teleportation experiment underway. The game goes through a contained recreation of the first, creatures once lethal now neutered as previously vital mechanics, notably on Xen, are reduced to scripted sequences, literally contained and bound within a laboratory environment. In doing so, the central conceit of the game is shown. As Half Life innovated mechanically, taking the first person shooter into new dimensions of spatial design, Half Life 2 innovates the spatial and temporal depth into a new layer of interactivity with its increased focus on physics engines. Such is symbolized here, where the old is fully contained within the new, the new powers have “meta” domination.

Of the environments traversed, the same administrator holds much the same sway. The player moves through determined corridors (literally boxed off, due to the way Source Engine handles skyboxes). Breen sits over it, limp ownership over the whole world beneath him as its penetrated by an outside force. The true war between humanity and the Combine in Half Life 2, the invasion by the military and aliens in Half Life. Gordon’s competition with these enemies is always a competition among equals in this way, with both Gordon and the enemies being introduced as not only alien, but textually-other, situated outside the contained discourse of that under Breen.

Gordon’s way of being of an other-text comes via what was introduced in Breen’s laboratory, that which Half Life 2 has which is other-outside to Half Life - physics. Gordon is given a weapon for this specifically, a gun that manipulates physics objects directly. In doing so, Gordon mimics his closest companion in the series, Gman. Gman’s entry into the text of the events of the games is that of an outside, noclipping in through the side of the map, as Gordon enters from the non-diegetic game-entries, loading zones and previously inaccessible paths. As Gman disrupts the natural functioning to allow for Gordon’s movement, Gordon disrupts the natural events playing out, inserted into the proper place at the proper time to change the natural outcome of things. 

While Gordon manipulates the text he’s inserted into as an outside-other, he has his own outside-other which manipulate him, symbolized by the Gman obviously and by his own powers subtly. As the opening sections of A Strategy for the Evaluation of Paranormal Phenomena states, the human condition is in many ways, the manipulation and studying of powers scarcely understood. It’s this which Gordon goes through in the games, for reasons of the Half Life series as technical benchmarks in both its iterations. Gordon goes through spatial and temporal designs in the first game, only to be manipulating those same dimensions on a much higher level in the second, stepping outside and finally understanding what he was inside previously, like the scientist finally cracking the code of what fire actually constitutes. Gordon ascends to higher and higher levels, understanding and thusly unlocking the secrets of what previously he was within, gaining effective noclip powers, ascending through various tiers of the laws of metaphysics binding him.

Symbolizing this literally, Gordon’s true power isn’t unlocked until he comes face to face with the game itself in the Citadel. There, the Gravity Gun is upgraded to its fullest potential, creating the Super Gravity Gun. This weapon is carried over into Half Life 2’s metaphysical sequel, Garry’s Mod. In Garry’s Mod, the player steps outside the engine itself, to manipulate the physical world they were thrust into on a meta level. The player steps back in Garry’s Mod, with full control via full viewing, full understanding of the scenario which they were thrust into. The physical world is revealed in all its meaning as manipulable once it's been fully comprehended, via physics continually attempting to seek beyond, into pataphysical explorations to find the outside of the current discourse of physicality.

Desire of Another

Twice, Cardi B has built her career on making herself not just being wealthy, a status-icon as the common pop star, but by becoming wealth itself. Identifying with others coinage-printers, the Fuggers or de Medicis, Cardi B’s music videos consistently portray her as being currency itself. In Bodak Yellow, she parties in the Gulf, crossing the desert back and forth between America and the Gulf, identifying herself with transnational economic flows - oil. In Money, she is again and again the object of value itself. She’s dressed in gold, displayed behind glass to be viewed and objectified by the ruling class. She’s gilded, sitting in the bank vault itself. She’s surrounded by a cadre of bankers, her backup dancers dressed like bank tellers and making it rain from her. 

Financialization of the economy has at its core, the process of securitization whereby existing pluralities of assets are repackaged into standardized assets which can be traded easily. Much in the way that stocks allow for a uniform system of investment into diverse economic entities, securities allow for various forms of asset-backed value to be traded and speculated upon. This creates additional economic space, where more and more value is derived not from the thing in itself, but the transactions and movement of those things in itself.

Orange Caramel’s A-ing video directly considers the nature of desire in relation to alien narratives. The music video shows the awakening of desire via the song, its name showing the obvious topic, through the narratives given in childhood. The group members dress in modified versions of childish costumes, portraying various characters and tropes from traditional children’s media, symbolizing the protagonist of the video awakening herself via these narratives. Portrayed here is the entering-into that desire requires. As Andrea Long Chu pointed out, desire is not only nonconsensual, it’s completely directed by forces which are alien and outside oneself. The girl enters into narratives in order to run her libido, as her desire itself is not of her, but both pre-exists and post-exists her own personhood and intelligence. It’s via this that so much of desire is submissive, giving into the flow in which one finds themselves.

Clothes descend from on high as complete signs of meaning before they’re taken upon one’s person. The person emerges from the dressing room, now packaged into a set of meanings, a language of being assembled like the symbology of a blazon or a Poundian ideogram, thereby making the complete “character” of their personhood. This form of fashion is most directly shown in Versace’s adoption of the Medusa head, a symbol long associated with a similar form of transaction, the head descending downwards as a sign of affixing, as clothes affix the person into context by situation them into a set of social signs. Clothing taste is in this way linked to desire. The individual choice is based on forces which are wholly unindividual, with the individual’s expression being the junction-point of this flow, between the input and output, where they emerge as a being to symbolize the becoming their desire and status has situated them in.

Requiem for a Dream makes this explicit. The characters navigate their arcs by navigating in relation to desires outside themselves. The three drug dealers desire for a fantasy of fulfillment, finding a societal script for themselves, while the old woman wishes for a more direct version of this, fulfilling a literal script by appearing on television. Their desire is divorced from their personhood in the ending, where they find themselves caught up and destroyed in their attempts to fulfill these desires, ending up interacting with scripts not-desired. They retreat inwards, becoming infantile as their minds play movies of their fantasies while their bodies return to fetal positions.

Hayek’s calculation problem leads to an underground and fascinating topic in philosophy, which is the individualist reaction to the religious narratives of history so often taken for granted. By positing society as being wholly made of individuals, the question of origin for larger systems ends up leading to neurology. Like the mind, the network of isolated nodes interact in concert to produce system more complex than themselves in isolation. Adding to this, flowing between the nodes, in pathways of transmission, are desires, the electrical sparks traveling through the various pathways to excite the various nodes. It’s this interaction which forms the move of society,  beings situated within becomings in order to drive the grander systems of which they’re a part.

The Noun and the Verb

The moment when the piano’s string strikes, the dum hits correctly, the string is bowed perfectly, a vibrating motion becomes, for an instant atemporal. The black mark on sheet music is reached, a moment not oriented in sequence, with the vibrations fading behind as background constructions of each little stab onto the linear paper. Further behind the vibration which produced the note, the player is acting in an entire complexity of actions, coordination of countless minute movements synchronized together to that final instant of production, where the manipulation of the instruments strikes along the note blotted onto paper.

The symphony of causes and effects, influences and coincidences, adds up together and produces the “event” in its photographic form. The image emerges from this chaos of flows confluencing on the single point, that of the image. When analyzing from behind, it’s always impossible to reverse engineer any single cause of it, as has been noted by any consultant tasked with duplicating given results. Like the note emerges from vibration, the “event” emerges as the photograph does, a single capturing to create a noun out of a chaos of verbs.

The same occurs in the various theories of history reliant upon great singularities to drive time forwards. Out from the chaotic confluence of circumstances and happenings, the historians finds his fetishes amidst the piled up chaos. Hitler, Napoleon, Khan, Alexander, all appear lined up like marble busts, complete with their own little shrine he can worship at. The historian reads history backwards in this way. The fetish, whether it be a person, an event, a movement, etc, is read first and from there, data is unfolded around it. The historian sets to work uncovering history by writing all detail into the narrative of his fetish, thus begetting the biography, the narrative, the endless historiographical debates on how to perform this fetish-worship correctly. In doing so, there is a buried insight. These figures, these texts, emerge from their historical time in the same way as the photograph and back plunges the photographs, as the historian reinterprets into his own context. The mechanics of this movement can be seen in slow motion in every library, a perusal of the right sort of stacks showing a tidal-geologic shift, risings and fallings out of and back into the watery chaos.

This resinking, where the noun descends back into verbic chaos, is something rarely understood. Rumblings in certain circles tell of how spending can predate and inspire wealth, attracting it upon the person. In these cases, the person has made themselves into something, an image of a rich person, and then that descends again. Back flowing, they flow, seen by cosmic currents in a new way, thus prompting the attraction of flows of material wealth onto their person.