Aquarian Trinity

Human settlement has always been defined by its relationship of proximity & integration to the water. The ocean moves inland, waters carried, breaking to land against the coastal settlements, floating over the continent to enrich and create as they move inland, forming forests. Land itself only stops water after a certain point of intensity, barrier mountains preventing water from reaching deeper inland to create countless deserts, the great plains and steppes arid as they are from water’s exhaustion over intense distances.

These three differentiate themselves in kind by this presence of water in them. Foliage becomes increasingly intensive of its water-usage on the coast, with swamps and deltas forming environments where all creatures live partially oceanic, water in such an excess that they grow from recessed water, the spilled over dam, the river overflown to a delta. The forest works via water-trapping, water in a balanced quantity to create, as plants and animals integrate water in their beings, thus creating enormous trap-structures, trees and megafauna and foliage abounding. The steppe/desert is in slight contrast, a desperation, each creature designed to obsess over the seeking of water, to hunt down and hoard water, existing to it as a single end.

No one understands the coast better than the promiscuous to have emerged from it. The writer and cataloguer of tales, journeying through the entrapped waters of a detail float with growths of mangrove-homes and strange peoples who provide infinite rabbit holes of curiosities, scribbling down the mariner’s stories as they filter into the bar of a thousand languages overlooking the expanse of the blue Earth. The merchant creates the wunderkammer resulting, stories, curiosities, small facts and details in such a kaleidoscope array that their schizophrenic massing becomes an art of its own.

The End in Metal Gear Solid 3 begins and ends the battle fully integrated, at first so part of the forest animals crawl about him, then finally decaying to autumn leaves to melt into the ground, his micro-bomb setting off a flurry of these leaves to the sky escorted by his birds. Arborescence ends this way with decay, returning into integration as chemical materia to be reuptaken. Yet its living-being is one of a library. The forest is obsessed with hierarchies of information in the same fashion as the traditional school of learning. The tree organizes itself is a ruthlessly logical fashion, building a glorious structure into the heavens on the backs of its formal order. The wizard constructs his tower in the forest and knows this, memorizing every last demon of Solomon, every last letter of countless ancient alphabets, as he walks the forest, remembering the leaves as the descendants, the trees as the source, the forest as a collage of Truths.

The empty land of the desert or steppe creates a monotheistic relationship in the terms of Negarestani, the flat expanse and the void of heavens, where the human is reduced to nothing, a single point tracing lines across an unmappable infinity, all transformations become topological. Standard geometry can no longer affix anything with solidity, transformations being wholly of intensities in relation only to themselves and their own qualities across the void. Rommel understood this in his tank maneuverings, taking into himself the mindset the steppe or desert creates, simple going around and flanking the British attempting to fight a desert war on arborescent principles. Emptiness creates the conditions of such a mind, a mind of internal qualities of motion and transformation, the mind of the stars, shifting of the dunes, the eternal ride…

On Human Energetics

The common mistake of anger management wisdom is to assume that anger is as hunger - a finite end to be expended and satiated. Any experienced counselor knows this is not true however. Anger always works not as a hunger, but more akin to the theory of sexuality put forward by proponents of nofap, who resurrect long forgotten techniques of male vitalization under a modern language. In all, sexuality works as a producing-machine, a factory of a flow of desire. The male version of sexual energetics is to withdraw-inwards this inherently expulsionary force within themselves, uptaking the energy back into their selves and re-using it as is seen fit. The female version of this is given differently, though modified. The producing-machine is a machine producing internal pathways, increasingly insatiable hunger formed by the creation of spiritual entities within the self. Through processes akin to the semen-retention sex of the male, the female can uptake this energy and expel the positive bodily force created, the hunger’s being itself, in a process akin to menstruation.

All of this is to say, the nature of energy within the human body is one often misunderstood and vulgarized to be a fluid system, ie, a set of “appetites” desiring to be “satisfied”, thirsts to be slaked, and similar notions. This goes against wisdom of how the human form operates in countless ways, however. As Taleb laid out in tremendous detail in Antifragile, the human organism is an organic system, which therefore works on cyclical, not linear logics, along flows. As the body becomes more corpulent, its appetites increase in turn - the flow of eating is not a finite appetite, but a flow, which the self can integrate-within in increasingly intense ways, as they grow fatter and fatter and their daily consumption grows in turn.

Libidinal fucking reveals a similar notion to that of cyclicality, that of conversion of energies along the same plateau. The oldest desire has always been the desire of sex ignited by the heating of unsexual conflicts, male conquests, female defeat, enemy-friend relationships taken in account, all in order to create a scenario of blood-boiling hatred for the other partner, which provides a potent source of energy which is then easily converted into sexual-production, as at the level of the body, hatred and desire are the same force, that of blood or libido, hence the common expression of “blood boiling”.

The imprisonment cast upon those who lose their vitality is not an expansionary, but a contractionary, not an expending, but a gradual limiting. The male phallus is castrated further and further and without being given any alternative means to express itself (as in the martial tradition) or to replace itself with a feminine apparatus (as in the androgynous tradition), it gradually withers away. Flows work in this sense as monks always knew, their sexual desires dissipating after enough time in the monastery, their hunger making each successive fast that much easier. As images of the ultimate self-submitting slaves, these monks showed the way of the modern world, as people are entered into institution after institution of stricter and stricter tightening of the belt, until they’ve fully withered away, into dead-conduits, hollow tumors grafted onto the corpus of the social-machines.

To Write Fantasy

Ancient quests describe their heroes in minute, assemblage-detail. Limbs are said to be endowed specifically as limbs, as are the weapons, the abilities, the armor, each seen as a set of distinct pieces assembled to form the already exceptional person of the hero into being one fully endowed with all the material extensions of their status. The hero makes a secondary corpus atop their flesh, in order to construct the abstract-body of the hero. The same is seen again and again, continuing from ancient sources onto the medieval era through modern fantasy, where this appears in the concept of gear and equipment in modern RPGs.

The fight in a JRPG or CRPG is a completely symbolic one. The heroes arrange themselves, represented by their abstract-bodies, their beings an amalgamation of statistics and qualities derived from their equipment, against a foe who arranges itself in the same fashion, its being drawn to be a wholly abstract representation, its statistics and qualities hinted at it in its surreal visage. The battle is a battle which occurs on this plateau, that of the symbolic forms attacking each other representationally as their abstract-bodies do damage unto each other by way of hidden mathematical calculations. While novel to video games, this in itself has nothing truly unique in it. In the same fashion as the abstract-body emerged, so does the abstract-challenge, the arena of the fight as the staging area for these invisible calculations. Such is shown in the intensely symbolic nature of traditional settings, the ritualisms encountered by Christian Rosenkreutz or the various symbolic encounters of The Quest of the Holy Grail. 

The obvious answer here is to say that this is an act of downwards manipulation, ie, that the story is a vehicle for performing these transformations within itself, as is the case with those who follow the Campbell school of mythic criticism. This would be false, however. The reverse is true. Consider what occurs in the abstract-arena. The flows (the things being calculated) are represented backwards, with the story acting as an index of access to them. The text branches outwards from itself to interact with flows and ideas larger than itself. Rather than the story being a vehicle for the change of its components, the components are all the larger elements which are manipulated by the story in order to achieve the ends of the story. Esoterica is referenced, reinterpreted, drawn upon, presented, all in a ritual-form by its being processed through the story, the same mechanic as when those very things are processed in more traditional ritual or magic.

A certain act of ritual-creation takes place in the magician’s mind as they enter the fantasy-world. Worldbuilding is through all of this, identical to the building of Solomon’s temple. The fantastical world reaches out and affixes-to, the demons from outside, by being branded by the sigil of Solomon - entrapped and interacted with via the index-function of the worldbuild. The worldbuild, fully inhabited by the author, becomes the Solomonic Temple, the ritual space of working. Such is the reason behind the “pantheon” structure of many such worldbuilds, as well as their non-linear “canon” opposing and superseding any linear stories which they may contain. All fulfilling the same function, of allowing the worldbuild to be freely traversed and its index-contents accessed and written and read in free correspondence with that unwritten beyond.

Masseuse Capitalism

In the explosion of 9/11 Pynchon writes of proprietary dust falling down, synthetic spores of drywall and steel as the vertical monuments of the 1980s come collapsing. Contrary to a more standard reading of D&G, it’s important to recognize the verticality, even in temporary fashion. In order for a rhizomatic system to be affixed by language (ie, to be written at all) it has to be in some way captured, made into a vertical structure. Words do not change, thus being their eternal instability, and the fact of their being the only thing that is capable of being at all (indeed, language is itself, the realm of creating-being from the becoming of the rest), therefore to make words on anything is to make becoming into being in some capacity. It’s in this way that we get the fungal structure of things, in contrast to a more stricter notion of a rhizome. Capitalism pushed out from its becoming, the being of monuments, the fruiting bodies from mycelium to temporarily create an affixation-point around which to analyze and read the organism. The destruction of the twin towers was the castration of the phallic dream that created this. The enlightened kings, those empowered by pseudo-monarchical symbols, were torn down by force, without their fundamental nature being destroyed. Their phallic verticality was destroyed, while the economic movements from which they emerged remain, beyond any possibility of their grasping them - the becoming begets temporary being, not the other way around. Such is the rise and fall of centralization schemes. The system invigorates itself via a humble servant who supercharges the centralized infrastructure (the monarch) until that very infrastructure produces flows of its own, dissolving away the power of the monarch (the scattered nobility) - the monument of New York’s gaudy power destroyed by the shadowed movements along the oil-based lifeform of 21st century economic mycelium.

While a great author, Murakami has only ever written one novel (in several dozen different editions). His essays notwithstanding, his novels share the same fascination: an everyman goes through some strange “portal” event and comes into a world very much like our own, but with a different clockwork behind the scenes, making the watchface (that is, reality as it appears) different than it was before. In 1Q84, it’s two moons in the sky, corresponding to the strange fairy creatures that now exist. In Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it’s his wife going missing and the internal emptiness of people. In Kafka on the Shore, it’s the fantasy world after trauma, a shattered glass reflection after the death of the father, the atomic bomb falling. In all of these, the protagonist spends the majority of their time navigating the clockwork of this new set of machines via the help of someone shown as being hyper-integrated or hyper-competent. Often smooth, clean, professional - physical appearance delineates morality while the function remains the same. Ushikawa appears multiple times, acting as the jaw-clamper, bringing the worst scourgings of the alien machine down upon the protagonist, carefully and steadily. Masseuses appear again and again, manipulating occult flows of the body in order to bring about various transformations. The process the protagonist must go through is always one of sculpting, to come out the other end. The journey is a journey of submission, submission to higher powers in order to let the mechanisms of an alternate, more powerful world remake him into a higher being, gaining something he was unaware of having lost in the normal world.

“Strands and tensions” as Pound describes the world, the phrasing appears reformulated to say the same again and again. Accumulation of qualities, flows, becomings… What’s important from all of it is the same. The world exists as a singular substratum across which differentiations occur by varying degree, in the sense of the ocean’s currents differentiate via temperature and direction. Murakami only encounters the clock at the level of the outsider-looking-in, his protagonists. The building up of his protagonists occurs via the same mechanical interaction with this vast ocean of everything as the creation of economic monuments. Systems come together by manipulation, the Mycelium Ocean twists and flows, and from it fruiting bodies. The corporation rises as the organizing system for economic flows to create the American petrochemical infrastructure. The fruiting body rots, dissolves back into nitrogen and carbon, the soil continues on, newly invigorated as its spores sail the wind, the bellies of animals, down streams and creeks. The masseuse, the magician sits in her perfectly kept office, laying our protagonist down. His being is dismantled under her gaze, she plucks the strands, pulls, pushes, re-arranges his flows. He awakens, his being now forever shifted. He sees it as clockwork, though trusts undeniably what has happened.

A Perfect Circle of Teleology

At the point of the user, there is no fundamental difference between the M16 and the AK47, despite the protestations of those who see them as fetishes of Being. Even moreso than in combat, this is true in video games, where the same entity can be used to create many different supposedly different things in the game world, all fulfilling the same function. Games utilize textures, showing this very function. All static walls are static walls, with only their texturing giving them any sort of relation to the game’s written story at all, fitting into the atmosphere of the scene in which they’re placed. It’s no wonder then, that almost all games which make use of custom mapping or custom content created by players have some sort of “development texture”, such as the orange or grey cubes in the Source engine.

The latest discovery among the various pseudo-academic formalists who’ve taken their disappointing stabs at interpreting video games has been the insight brought about from this realization: that games are games and their narrative works not on their diegetic or cinematic storytelling, but on their mechanical and gameplay elements. The insight is one which is surprisingly difficult, occluding much of games-studies behind cart-before-horse interpretations, focusing on the gameplay as an almost an accidental addition, the text being more or less seen as an incomplete movie. Though the mistake isn’t unique to gaming at all, as it can also be seen in the above-mentioned example of firearms, with strategic and tactical studies often being hindered by the obsessions of so-called historians who treat each battle as though it were a trade show for different kinds of machinery all serving fundamentally identical functions.

In all of this, the emergence of function shows itself as an even more fundamental element of games, where the emergence of function (ie, the creation of a mechanic in regards to its purpose) is the emergence of the complete context of the game, where all various things are bound together by meta-mechanics operating invisibly. As an example, the various cars in Grand Theft Auto all fulfill the same function, being vehicles which the player character enters and then uses to traverse the open map. Behind all of this is a meta-mechanic tying all things together, that of the map, transit, the player, movement, etc. The camera moves behind the player as the player moves through three dimensional geometry, going in a linear order from one coordinate position to the next on the finite grid of the map. The car is a part of this meta-mechanic of movement, where it allows the player to bind their entity with another, an entity solely existing for the purpose of enhancing movement.

These meta-mechanics bind all functions together into a fully enclosed loop of the entire system, that is the final game. The final product of a game is ultimately a machine in this way, a piece of clockwork in which the various functions are subordinate within mechanics, within meta-mechanics, all interlocked to a closed system. The player interacts with the machine always as a watchmaker, manipulating variables of functions, pulling on different strands as it were, to produce various results.

Moonseeds

Micro-organisms in a particularly crowded network of life begins to cross paths and mutate. Just as the incredible density of the brain produces original thoughts by exponential possibilities of recombination, the lines and paths in certain locations does the same, briefly produced densities of life that recreate “primordial soup” hyper-evolution. In Central Asia or China, depending on who you ask, rats begin to interbreed and intermingle as carriers of the soupy mass of bacteria through them, combined and recombined until new offspring was created. One of these had success beyond the normal, becoming bloodborne as said rats traveled vast land distances. From one small seed, the greatest relative loss of human life documented occurred, as the Black Death swept over Europe, bringing down in predictable patterns the lives of countless people deprived to vulnerability by the perfect mix of environmental conditions.

Interpretations abound as the wreckage scatters through the world. The audience delights in the final scene as Legasov explains to the court the minute scientific details in an arrogant attempt to explain the unexplainable. The burning core of reactor 4, torn open to a twisted mass of hair-like metal coiled wildly around the screaming fire of the inside, encased in total concrete darkness, defies any attempt to reason with it. Legasov desperately attempts to smother it and in some ways he succeeds, tamping out extremities of pollution, but can never undo the eternal resistance of the explosive center itself. The same can be seen in the black waters across the Titanic, the face of the truly alien as it annihilates oncoming, something defying any understanding of existence by its total anti-relationality to human affairs.

The moon is said to cause insanity in some commentaries by the fact of its being an object which escape the one-ness of the sun. The sun forces one to never gaze directly upon it, its light projecting warmth, its disc brighter than bright, its image screaming it out, as if it were its own name “I Am That I Am”. The moon emits light, schizophrenic trajectories of linguistic light that cast wild shadows through the cold and abyss, that bathe in soft blue, that draw distorted, hallucinatory illuminations. No longer “the best disinfectant” now the best liar, the liar that twists even lies from their stability into illusions into the pained chaos of true delusion.

“Now everybody-“ and the rocket strikes, LA or London? The arc completes at its terminus, the only move now is back. Workers dig into the wreckage, dig until the parabola is completed in reverse, down in the negative numbers to come back around and find it again at the origin. The goal is an ellipse, a complete whole which can act as some sort of fetish to explain the wild lights of the moon, the half-arc of delusionary blue light. The ellipse is always imaginary, the trajectory implied in reverse, the crescent half-completed to satisfy the craving to make a fetish out of the wholly-alien.

Seducing Poseidon

The chambers into which the Red Death penetrated already had contained within them the seeds of their own forceful opening-unto the outside. The compound was first constructed as a being defined always in relation to the Red Death, its walls built on contours against its adversary, its doors barred in the name of its adversary, every last brick of its sealing being constructed in a strange worship of that which it opposes, the eternal defensiveness of those denying the God they know to be absolute. The compound is then made hollow, with its nature built to receive. The chambers and the fortifications exist solely to be penetrated and filled, their violation imminent when they were blessed for their purity, for the very fact of this purity, the state of being not-filled only exists as a positively asserted negation of that which it is created to be filled by. As example, the chambers are constructed in order to be not-filled, their natural state being filled. The entry of the Red Death into the compound is an entry of osmotic equalization.

Weakness is in this mechanic, always done by an invitation. The chink in the armor is a gap, an accepting-channel built for the forceful penetration of that which it exists in relation to, the enemy’s sword equalizing pressure when it slips into its natural state, filling the gap. It’s in this mechanic that weakness of any kind is always a tacit invitation. Notice the ritual of performative weakness, rolling over to show the belly - the invitation is denied, showing civilization, showing a constraint of fluid-dynamics of libidinality coursing through the one deferred to. The one who accepted the display of weakness demonstrated themselves not to the one rolled over, but to their own self-hood, their own castration and thus initiation into linguistic sublimations, denying their desire (operating as a fluid, flowing along the path presented) by the will of their own superegoic thought.

The basic construction here is a particular form of monotheism, which shares a similar but ultimately flipped construction to the standard. The common way of imagining the relationship between God and the World is that of God being an ephemeral-Being and the World being a present-Becoming. In other terms, God is Being which is foreclosed beyond, only expressing itself through the impurity of the Becoming which makes up the world. This schema however, that of the flood, is one of ephemeral-Becoming and present-Being. Being is an eternal all which exists forever in all directions, the unchanging mass of the Red Death, of the water flooding in, which the inside guards against, the castle sealed off, the boat made stable, all things which preserve the state of purity, of emptiness against the outside.

Such is the process of the seduction of the outside. The Song of Songs shows this beautifully, with the love poems importantly being about the perspective of the one to whom is done-upon, the woman. The voice of the Song of Songs speaks about an inhuman force, a fluid power beyond her comprehension or grasping, but which is perfectly willing to be invited into and upon her. It’s in this way that she ultimately achieves congress with it, whatever it may be, by constructing weaknesses of herself. She builds weaknesses, passageways of flow to invite-in, this being her beauty which she constructs as channels in order to invite-in the flood beyond herself.

The Coder

The coder was a being created when the hacker turned themselves into full devotion to a monolingual discipline of their machines. The hack, beginning from the wilderness-rudiments of the machine’s lowest levels (with knowledge tracing down a genealogy to core components built before abstraction) and then ascending upwards in any number of arborescent directions, the fruiting bodies of mushrooms from the circuitboard. The coder emerged within the mushroom forest, worshipping the tallest of the fruiting bodies and copying them in rote religiosity. Entire disciplines descended from this, with the slavish devotional behavior of professional engineering, the copying and repetition of formulas of abstractions, an endless legalism emerging as specialization created deeper and deeper subcategories of expertise in these abstractions - APIs, devkits, SDKs, languages, libraries, proprietary tools, engines…

The mindset of the coder is a mindset which emerges always after-the-fact, in a literal sense. The mind of the coder is one which sees themselves as eternally after, standing on the ashes after the dust settles, overseeing the facts which have gone before them to solidify into the now. On rare occasions they take a childish, fetishistic glee in “explosions”, reversing this process through their various ritualistic excuses, the Mythbusters tropes and episode-structures being strong examples.

After-the-facts thinking informs the structure of Reddit and its attendant, Hackernews. The focus of these sites is never on original content, but on functioning as a sort of extended comments section, with a link posted in a heading and then the responses (after-the-facts) mulling over its relations to their various disciplines of process facts-after. Each of them does so differently, but their way of doing so remains identical, a disciple of schema taken from an already existant fruiting body, and the facts read in relation to its scholarly rules and strictures.

The problem of the Coder is one unsolvable, a problem of spiritual class. The mind of after-the-facts thinking is a mind of wholeness, a closed loop around which thought circulates like a hamster wheel’s captive producing the electric motion of labor. It’s this wholeness that produces the stunning androgyny of the working classes. Notice that every year the uniform of uncaring comfort becomes closer and closer to a median, yoga pants and a hoodie, sweatpants and a hoodie, t-shirt and jeans, the same fundamental ideas of rejecting all that which is outward-moving, that which is creative, and instead wishing only for ease of completion, integration into the already existant feedback loop. It’s from this that countless strife occurs, as for the peasant, gender (and its attendant, the libidinal drive outwards inherent to being one-of-a-pair), is nothing more than an arbitrary distraction, a strange alien force thrust upon them which they would ultimately rather be completely absolved of.

Reddit has, in recent years, become itself a feedback loop akin to the peasant-mind of the coder. The almost identical political groups have now become completely codependent in their mutual abuse, filling countless hours of labor with posting about the other in a perfect and almost entirely contained cyclical motion. It’s here that the laboring state of the peasant’s soul is laid bare. In the realm of supposed truth and freedom, that of politics, they fall into the same pattern which they apply to their technical discipline. Facts, reaction, all along someone else’s schema. Even in leisure, they know only the joy of laboring for another’s systems.

Negative Conservatism

What Is, Is

The Mandate of Heaven is the same function as forest fires - the brush builds up, its detritus beginning to hypertrophy across the entire living body of the biome, until its cleansed away by the brushfire. This prevents the catastrophic action of the crownfire, which, though still non-destructive for the living being of the forest, is incredibly destructive to the life trapped within in a fashion the brushfire isn’t. The legitimacy of the Mandate is through these same means, the individuals given power by are legitimate for the very reason of their being in power. Concepts of legitimacy often rely upon the same instinct that leads many forest managers to withhold the brushfires long enough for the crownfire to take place, with the “conservative” faction of politics being those who fetishize the existing order as somehow destined by eternity to rule in their specific character. This is, as the old phrase goes, a worship of ashes. If the old order becomes sclerotic, it deserves to be ousted. In doing this, the individual people in which positions change, and their position is no less legitimate, for the very reason than the conference of legitimacy is the existence of their legitimacy at all, ie, they are because they are.

No One Is

Following from this, the instinct of concepts of status legitimacy in regards to individuals is one which confers them some form of soul, even if not explicated as such. The liberal idea of the “individual” recreates this in cryptic form, where the individual is blessed with the same internal objecthood that the spiritual soul gives. This is rejected for the same reason as the latter - the very fact of an individual is given by nothing greater than what there is. People don’t exist until they’re born, with their context entirely informing who they are to all experience except their immediate internality. As Lacan was so commonly pointing out, to all except the very individual experiencing things, the ego’s own experience, the individual is nothing except who they are to other people, they are solely their masks, in other words. Concepts of cryptic souls cause an inherent tension in all ways of examining the world, which should not be present. Rather, people are recognized for what they are, masks (beings) emerging from the performances done by the internal ego.

Against Revolutionary Platonism

The Christio-Platonic concept of the world is one of a particular form of dualism where the world is always an imperfect attempt to live up to the perfect world of Being. The family tree of these forms of thought carries down a pattern of the left through history. Christianity, the original left against the Pagan elite of Rome, carries its Platonism into Liberalism, the left against the Monarchy, carries its Platonism into Socialism, the left against Capitalism, and etc. The Revolutionary Pagan instinct is here always one of destruction for this reason. The world of becoming-against-being, as is imagined, where all movement and life is an imperfect seeking of the perfect, causes their praxis to be a praxis of endless destruction. The Christians of Rome sacked and burned countless libraries and temples, enraged at the discrepancy, hoping to be saved through the very performance of actions which will bring the world one step closer to God. This is explicated by no better than Codreanu and its consequences can be seen all throughout the history and action of these ideologies, the intense ideological schisms of fringe protestants and academic leftists, the endless purges of various rationalist-revolutionary states, the endless seething of their commentaries on the world, outraged at every little news item of so-called degeneracy or capitalist greed or whatever else fulfills the role.

Counterrevolutionary Inaction

It’s not to say that there is inherent virtue in doing nothing, but that there is inherent virtue in avoiding the sorts of attempts at overcoding the ideal onto the real that is so characteristic of revolutionary action. The opposite of this form of imposition of the known-perfect onto the perceived-imperfect is an embracing of the perceived-imperfect. The masturbatory actions of the revolutionary are not only ultimately destructive outwards, but inwards as well. Whatever goals of praxis of politics should follow, they should those which go along with the current ways of the world, navigating and utilizing it in order to pursue the truly traditional, the mechanics and systems underlying which remain changed only in their practical beings. To take inaction in this way is to both radically embrace the true nature of things and to, in a practical sense, take far more action than the revolutionary ever dreams of. To see the world through its mechanics and becomings, and not be blinded by the spectral fantasies of revolution.

Beautiful Fragility

The images of the Titanic fascinate and confound viewers. The manor-like interior, paneled oak and ornate tiles, the lush glass of the Turkish baths, the long, sunlit promenade which never saw a day of rain in the fleeting lifespan of the ship… Countless projects are underway and have been underway to recreate this splendor, in whole or in part, and for good reason. The Titanic is presented to the consumer like a Faberge egg, a delicate capsule of infinite depth of beauty, which no amount of demystification could ever completely remove. This effect is granted to the ship through the very destruction of this beauty. in the same fashion that the Faberge eggs which hold the most fascinated attention are those thought lost, the very beauty of the image is its removal. Being withdrawn is the ultimate seduction, forever drawing the seduced on a predatory hunt through the forest for that which enticed them, a hunt pleasurably prolonged by the very unreachability of the thing desired. 

Desire work as a machine, as shown plainly in this example. When the seducing-object is forever withdrawing itself, then the seduction lasts forever. There is no moment of grasping which transmutes the seducing-object into an object of the real, the object instead remains forever possessed with its mystical powers, pulling in on an endless motion, forever seducing, forever producing-desire. It’s this production of endless motion which is ultimately what the possessive sexuality wants, in practice. While in truth, it desires what it desires, in practice, what it desires is endless withholding, to be dragged along an unending quest. Countless men fall victim to this very impulse, their wives becoming “boring” as they become known, becoming entranced by the new one just out of reach, sent on the hunt for it…

The Titanic could never match the beauty it achieves for us today if it hadn’t sunk, and in this fashion, the fact of its sinking is the event of fascination. The much-lauded chick flick Titanic by James Cameron takes great care to show this in all its depravity and detail, water rushing through these same fetishized interiors, glass bursting, doors breaking open, first class passengers sinking beneath the waves, the grand staircase taking on water from below, the lights shutting off one final time. The ultimate possession, the ultimate entrapment into desire is this. The Titanic, the seducing-object becomes-abyss in the ultimate way, with the water rushing over every last bit of its being, to fully realize its potential within its liquid body. It’s no wonder then, that the male fetish for their navies has been transmuted through anime culture into erotic art, with Kancolle fandom taking this drama to an extremely literal extent, their ships turning “abyssal” in their most depraved fantasies of ultimate sexuality.

But why require the externalization present in the first place? The second fantasy is of course the ultimate fulfillment of the promises of seduction, but why externalize it onto the other? Why need the ocean to swallow the desired in the first place? The male fantasy so often includes the female, and for that we have to examine the function for the male of precluding himself from ownership. The primitive course of his desire is to be the ocean himself, so why externalize it? By externalizing it, he brings the object into eternal seduction but it’s a rare man with the intelligence to recognize this as being his truly ideal form of eroticism. Rather, the mechanic at work here is an externalization by the man of his own phallus.

The civilized male is constructed as an incomplete woman. Being possessed of an inherently primitive nature, but forced to civilize himself into the feminine ways of the superstructure into which he’s ingratiated. From this, his self-conception is one which relies on his own preclusion of himself from the phallus, to externalize the phallus onto another. The man will then either begin to take on drag-like costumes in order to prove his own virility, pomping himself into various roles which offer him a chance to perform phallus-hood, or he’ll begin to fetishize the process of externalization of his own phallus, which then creates the need to construct the ocean in the first place. It’s here that the civilized man finds his ultimate fulfillment of his entire system of desiring-machines, where the seducing-object is de-facto captured in his eternal chasing of it and his Self is retained as solid by the externalization of his own desire.

This externalization can be seen taking place in countless male and female fantasies. The woman as well, in order to preserve the stability and integrity of the men she desires, must externalize phallushood as well, onto the same others that men do. This is the fundamental sexual process behind the construction of the “primitive” or “natural” - the externalization of the phallus as an extension of greater externalization of fundamental but uncivilized processes, in other words, sublimating the base into the other who has not been uptaken into the structures of the society.