Song: Fluent bodies a digression on Miller
Viewed: 6 - Published at: 10 years ago
Artist: Nick Land
Year: 1992Viewed: 6 - Published at: 10 years ago
> If now the brain and spinal cord together constitute that corporeal being-for-self of spirit, the skull and vertebral column form the other extreme of it, an extreme which is separated off, viz. the solid, inert thing [H III 246].
In order to find one’s way in a maze of this kind it is unfortunately necessary to resume things historically. The important thing…is the fundamental and originary division between two principles, spirit and matter. Insofar as that division is established, there is, whatever onе says, a superiority of spirit over matter, and spirit harvеsts all conceivable superiority, that is; on one side the divine, and on the other reason [VII 368],
> the whiteness of the sea and the paleness of the light concealed the bones [III 369].
To revert to a naïve question: what ‘is’ matter? Is it possible that we could receive a message that could respond to this interrogation? There is an anthropocentric conception of messages as transmissions between beings that share a code. According to such a definition the reception of a message depends upon a prior agreement with the sender. One can receive messages from other humans, or from personal beings such as God or angels, as long as there is a pre-established system of significations. If a message is not coded according to the rules of a familiar system it might still be possible to translate it into the terms of such a system, deciphering or interpreting it. It is thus possible for messages to be retrieved from extinct languages, as long as sufficient similarity exists between them and familiar languages for a systematic series of correspondences to be established. Such similarities can be described as the ‘formal’ or ‘structural’ properties of the signifying system, distinguished from its ‘material’ or ‘empirical’ instantiation.
Methods of structural analysis have the great ‘advantage’ that they are able to exclude extraneous aspects from consideration, ignoring everything except for the formal relations between the terms—signifiers—of the message. The densely encrustated matter of historical associations, which is the impurity inherent in real transmission, can be washed away from the message like the mud from a fossil. One need not be prejudiced about where the text came from. As for the formal relations that remain; they are also a matter of exclusion: this time the exclusion each term operates upon the others, sublimating itself into a transcendent unity, a pure nexus of articulation.
Developments in the technology of information have lent urgency and concreteness to the study of codes. Techniques have arisen for the translation of messages into codes built out of a single alternative (bilaterized and reciprocal) of ‘one’ and ‘zero’. These are digital codes, according to which messages can be generated by the presence/absence (flow/blockage) of an electric current. Such codes are readily adaptable to machines which can transmit, store, and operate upon information of a logical and mathematical kind, since decimal numbers can be converted into digital ones, and logical functions are easily reproduced by ‘logic gates’. With an appropriate coding system any system of symbols can be allotted its digital equivalent; a series of binary digits (‘bits’) adequate to specify it. A precise quantitative determination can be given for the minimal length for sequences of bits required to recode an alphabet of symbols n: log2n
Bataille exhibits no positive interest in the philosophies of structure (to which he was, in any case, scarcely exposed). Like the thermodynamicists and information theorists his concerns lay not with the analysis of discontinuity, but with its explanation, or rather, with the genealogy of its cultural presupposition. Far from being a possible content of articulated signs, Bataille’s matter is that which must be repressed as the condition of articulation, whereby immanent continuity is vivisected in transcendence. The importance of structural thought is real, but symptomatological; incarnating matter’s positive effacement by utilitarian sociality. In a short early text called Architecture he writes:
each time that architectural composition is found elsewhere than in monuments, whether this is in physionomy, costume, music or painting, one is able to infer a taste for authority, whether human or divine. The great compositions of certain painters express the will to constrain the spirit to an official ideal. The disappearance of academic construction in painting is, on the contrary, the open road to the expression (and thus even to exultation) in the pychological processes most incompatible with social stability. It is this that explains in large part the lively reactions provoked for over half a century by the progressive transformation of painting, up to then characterized by a sort of dissimulated architectural skeleton [I 171]. Structure, bilateral articulation, reciprocal exclusion, and determinate negation all belong to bones and not to soft tissues. That structure comes to the fore is a matter of the momentary dominion of the profane:
For primitive people the moment of greatest anguish is the phase of decomposition; when the bones are bare and white they are not intolerable as the putrefying flesh is, food for worms [X 59].
The ahistorical, descriptive, and normalizing study of language usage is pragmatics, which can be contrasted with the historical, epidemic, and aberrational experiments in flow summarized as ‘libidinal-’ or ‘base materialism’. Base materialism is the plague of unilateral difference, which is a difference that only operates from out of the undifferentiated. Thinking of this kind is flagrantly inconsistent with the principle of identity. The aberrant phenomena summarized under the label ‘spirit’, for instance, are spiritually differentiated from matter, whilst remaining materially undifferentiated from
it. Similarly, culture is only culturally different from nature, such that the most strenuous deviations from nature leave nature uninterrupted. The human animal rebels unilaterally against its animality, just as life differentiates itself against and within the undifferentiable desert of death. A unilateral difference is the simultaneity of a tendency to separation and a persistence of continuity, which is a thought that cannot be grasped, but only succumbed to in delirium. For any ardent materialism truth is madness. The dominant tendencies in philosophy are complicit with ordinary language in their suppression of unilateral differences, and their insistence upon bilateral or reciprocal relations. Because separation is normally thought of as mutual discontinuity, the world is interpreted as an aggregate of isolated beings, which are extrinsically amalgamated into structures, systems, and societies. Such thinking precludes in principle all possibility of base contact or communion.
Spawned by unilateral difference, the human animal is a hybrid of sentience and pathology; or of differentiated consistency with matter. Knowing that its community with nature sucks it into psychosis and death mankind valorizes its autonomy, whilst cursing the tidal desires that tug it down towards fusional dissolution. Morality is thus the distilled imperative to autonomous integrity, which brands as evil the impulse to skinless contact and the merging of bodies.
Base materialism is compelled to acknowledge that Henry Miller is a ‘saint’ [XI 46], and that the Tropic of Cancer is a sacred book.
To an important degree Miller’s Tropic of Cancer responds to the surrealist culture of 1930s’ Paris, especially to the creative practice of ‘automatic writing’ which entangles literature with sexuality in a guerrilla struggle against repression. The stylistic infelicities and thematic confusions of his writing are inextricable from its force as a seismic upheaval in the history of literature, stemming as they do from his passionate rebellion against the normative regulations of aesthetic and moral censorship. It is precisely the jagged and meandering character of this text that attest to its torrential emancipatory energy; liberating writing from the pedantic bourgeois delicacies that cage literature in the prison of the ego. In the opening pages he insists that: ‘I have made a compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions’ [TC 19]. The unconscious does not coo sweet lyrics or unroll immaculate and measured prose, it howls and raves like the shackled and tortured beast that our civilization has made of it, and when the fetters are momentarily loosened the unconscious does not thank the ego for this meagre relief, but hisses, spits, and bites, as any wild thing would.
This is not to suggest that Miller is without inhibition. He is, for instance, notorious for his misogyny. It is obvious to anyone reading his books that women frighten him. It is not mere fear that grips him but anxiety; terror of nothing, the horror that patriarchy interprets in terms of castration. Who is in a position to condemn him for this hesitancy at the brink of dissolution? Is it not rather the nakedness of his avowal that triggers an inane and moralistic response? Phallus is the great security of male-dominated culture, and beyond it lies an ocean of loss as desolate as zero. Miller writes: ‘if they knew they were thinking about nothing they would go mad’ [TC 82]. He quotes his friend Van Norden’s anguished comments on the vulva: ‘It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing…All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—just a blank’ [TC 144–5]. His own response is different:
When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign, the world at balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace of remainder. Not the zero on which Van Norden turned his flashlight, not the empty crack of the prematurely disillusioned man, but an Arabian zero rather, the sign from which spring endless mathematical worlds, the fulcrum which balances the stars and the light dreams and the machines lighter than air and the lightweight limbs and the explosives that produced them [TC 249]. Upon zero or utter continuity everything flows without resistance. There is no possibility of becoming settled, rooted, or established, of instituting stable communities or codes. Names and labels regress to the magmic-pulse of language, sliding in useless digression. According to Freud kissing is included amongst the perversions because it digresses from procreative sexuality, wandering erratically across the cosmic desolation of the unconscious. Zero is the vortex of a becoming inhuman that lures desire out from the cage of man onto the open expanses of death. Not that death as utter digression is the same as the becoming inert of the body. It is first of all the anegoic psychosis of communicative fusion; floating on the far side of all effort.
There are times when Miller, confronted by the oceanic blank of zero, falls back upon the spurious identity of bones, which he associates with Phallic rigidity: ‘Animals with a bone in the penis. Hence, a bone on…“Happily”, says Gourmont, “the bony structure is lost in man.” Happily? Yes, happily. Think of the human race walking around with a bone on’ [TC 11]. Which doesn’t prevent him remarking two pages later that ‘[t]here is a bone in my prick six inches long’ [TC 13]. A corpse has one preeminent and historically fateful heterogeneous distribution: that between its skeletal structure and its soft tissues. This is apprehended as a difference between what is perdurant, dry, clean, formal, and what is volatile, wet, dirty, and formless. On the basis of this resource Western civilization has been not merely thanatological, but osseological, which is something reaching beyond the fascination with the skeleton—and particularly the skull—that is distributed extremely widely across cultures. Osseology, in its deep sense, is the usage of the difference between the hard and soft parts of the body as a logical operator in the discourse on matter and death. For instance, differentiation between eternal form and perishable substance, celestial purity and terrestrial filth, divine architecture and base flow. The skeleton is thus conceived of as an invisible harmonious essence, an infrastructure beneath the disturbing tides of soft pathology. It is the prototype of intelligible form, contrasted with the decaying mass of the sensible body.
The skeleton is the relatively dead part of an organism, and because of this it is also the part relatively immune to dissolution. Which is another way of saying that the hard parts of an organic body are those most isolated from the communicative generaleconomic flows of its metabolism, but also the parts it most faithfully transmits into the future. The residues of life follow upon a pre-emptive compromise with death; what remains of life is only the disloyal part of itself.
The grimacing skeleton that invaded the iconography of the late Middle Ages seems to have been unknown to Greco-Roman antiquity. On the other hand, the cult of the skull goes back to Peking man (440,000 to 220,000 BC). Veneration for skulls is to be found in all primitive religions as well as in all the great religions of antiquity. Cortez’s Spaniards, counting the skull-trophies in Mexican temples, found 136,000. The Toltecs cut off the skulls and used them as bowls. The Gauls cut off the heads of their dead enemies and brought them back to their villages, suspended from the necks of their horses, then nailed them as trophies in front of their houses. In New Caledonia widows kept the skulls of their husbands in baskets [SD 10–11].
There is something treacherous about a skull, that most intimate companion, so indifferently adapted to an inorganic regime, so untouched by the disappearance of flesh. It is the natural emblem of piracy, criminality, and cold betrayal. Perhaps everybody occasionally imagines their skull become a paperweight, or (less modestly) a museum exhibit in some distant time. Such thoughts are a little more cynical than those which capture it shortly after interment; a chamber of heaving maggots and filth. One only glimpses its calcic imperviousness by imaginatively stripping it of our rot, ageing it tastefully, polishing it. In the end one comes to feel that it merely tolerates its momentary participation in us, numbly awaiting the cessation of our tedious biological clamour.
> Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All the unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness [TC 255–6].
Washing about the rigid parts of the body are the swirls of ecstasy and filth whose only fidelity is to zero. Not that rigidity and fluidity enter into any kind of opposition within a structure or dialectic. There is no elemental duality at stake here, since this would involve a rigid difference transcending and dominating its terms, as if a typology, signifying system, or patchwork of language-games were extrinsically organizing base flows, in the manner of Wittfogel’s hydraulic bureaucracies12. The savage truth of delirium is that all ossification—far from being a metaphysical separation from decay—is a unilateral deviation from fluidity, so that even bones, laws, and monuments are crumbled and swept away by the deep flows of the Earth. Far from establishing an eternal logos on the model of pure ossification, the tongue rots into a delirial meander of oozing slime and dirt, indistinguishable from the contaminating mess it vomits into the gutters of literature.
There is a boundary of sorts along the banks and shores of the body where fluidity and rigidity meet, but this is not sufficient to authorize the irrigational idol of rigid differentiation. It is not difficult to imagine how such an idol might have arisen, of course. Is it not natural to imagine rigidity setting the terms for its contestation? It is almost tautological to conceive liquidity as giving way. Nevertheless, differentiation is contested at the scurf-edge of the flow, where sediments of detritus are tugged problematically between solidity and liquification. If fluidity prevails the bank is dissolved, washed away, permeated, flooded; it is only in the momentary constraint of fluids that the fixed channels of an irrigation are realized. However desperately Miller clings at times to his bones, to his bone on, to the mouldering patriarchal infrastructure of his corpse, in the end there is infiltration and collapse into the deluge, into the unsurpassable hydraulic mega-machine: ‘I am a writing machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows. Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I am the machine …’ [TC 34].
Speaking philosophically, and in accord with common sense, flow is gauged in terms of a fixed grid assembled from space, time, and matter. Flow displaces mass in space over time in a strictly quantifiable fashion, and is therefore—as a concept—posterior to the apparatus of its representation. Not only does time function as a dimension of its description, but a deeper temporal prioritization of the representational grid (whether this is idealized or naturalized) locates flow as an empirical content, mapped along axes achieved in advance. Becoming is subordinated to a transcendent law, allowing it to be judged, denigrated, and condemned. Compare Miller’s words:
> For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced the utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hairtrigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama [TC 102].
Even ordinarily time is thought of as a flow, but flows characterize the repressed of thinking. That time is conceived as a river, streaming dissymmetrically from the future into the past, is a representation controlled by a defensive system, simultaneous with mature patriarchy, nucleated upon the ego, and correlated with the generation of a utilitarian hydraulics. A transcendent differentiation rigidifies a stabilized subject/object couple or appropriate synonym; the former as a fixed point of apprehension, the latter as an underlying essence. This double deliquification channels a quantifiable homogeneous substance through a rigid conduit; the transcendent apparatus of time as such and the ego, ontology as managed flow.
Nothing of this pompous monolithic architecture can resist the torrent of Miller’s prose when it surges most ruthlessly out of zero:
> Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gall-stones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, which brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit towards death and dissolution [TC 258–9]. Between the body and the utterances that traverse it there is not in truth a relation, but rather a repressed continuity. Literature surges and foams wherever bodies diffuse, vomit themselves, melt into each other, and subside into the heaving toxic syrup of solar tides. It does not stem from the architectural design of a transcendent author-god, imprisoned in rigid individuation, but accumulates black and excremental, like a rich silt at the edge of the great impersonal flows. ‘Looking into the Seine I see mud and desolation’ [TC 70]. If intense literature seems very often to have an autobiographical character—as with Miller—this is not primarily because a life expresses itself, it is far more a matter of an integrated life being haemorrhaged into the laceration of writing, rhythmically dishevelled and coagulated down to an impermanent clotting in the subterranean lava flows of base culture. ‘And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly,’ writes Miller, ‘I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted’ [TC 254]. To describe Miller as a writer is not to lend him a personal integrity as one who writes, but to scatter the ashes of his name into the rivers of fluent textuality which nag all personalities to pieces, as they bear their luxuriant froth of words downstream towards chaos and death. ‘I feel this river flowing through me,’ remarks Miller in the penultimate sentence of the book [TC 318].
None of this has anything to do with metaphor. Metaphor is only an issue where literal and figurative usages can be bilaterally distinguished, where orthodox functions have been diked-up against the currents of digression. To write of the body being traversed by rivers is not mere metaphor, except when the body has been penned into its solidity and rivers have been degraded to drainage ditches. However many rivers have been integrated into urban and industrial sewerage systems, there are still solar rivers, pathological rivers, rivers of sex, madness, literature, and plague which refuse to slumber wretchedly within their banks. The word ‘river’ in its ordinary usage is an instrument of irrigationist repression, and its aberrant upsurge is not metaphor, but catastrophic erosion.
For so long as we persist as dammed-up reservoirs of labour-power we preserve our humanity, but the rivers flowing into us are an irresistible urge to dissolution, pressing us into the inhumane. Beneath the regulated exchanges of words we howl and gnaw at our fettered limbs. An impersonality as blank and implacable as the sun wells up beneath us, a vermin-hunger for freedom:
> If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms [TC 257].
Humanity is a petrified fiction hiding from zero, a purgatorial imprisonment of dissolution, but to be stricken with sanctity is to bask in death like a reptile in the sun.
God is dead, but immeasurably more importantly, God is death (except ‘God’ means the fascist ass-hole of the West). The beginning of the secret is that death ( 0) is immense.
From birth we are brain-washed into conformity with the cage, taught to accumulate, to shore ourselves up, to fear madness and death. Trapped in a constricting tangle of language routines we tread a narrow circuit in the maze
We are told that chance will not take care of us, and that it is difficult to live
but work and seriousness are slums of delusion the garbage-heap of individuation has no worth what is called life at the outer edge of patriarchy is a bleak box of lies, drudgery, and anaesthesia blended with inane agony what matters about the outside of the box is not just that it is the outside of the box, but that it is immense what matters is the abyss, the gulf
They want us to fear death so much, but we can inhabit it like vermin, it can be our space, in our violent openness to the sacred death will protect us against their exterminations, driven insane by zero, we can knot ourselves into the underworld, communicate through it, cook their heavenly city in our plague.
we can scamper in and out of the maze in a way they cannot understand,
during the first weekend of June
at half-past one on Sunday morning
deep in the crypt of the night
together with a fellow voyager in madness
i crossed the line into death
which is called Hell because the police control heaven
Melting shells drunk on our inexistence
torched in the flame of the sacred
we trudged though the burnt and blackened swamps of the shallows
testing the edge of the estuary
dripping brimstone from our boots
an immense ocean of annihilation stretched out before us
There has been a revolution in Hell
Satan hangs from a gibbet and rots
wreathed in the howls of anarchy
out there beyond the stars
the cold wind of zero rages without interdiction
In order to find one’s way in a maze of this kind it is unfortunately necessary to resume things historically. The important thing…is the fundamental and originary division between two principles, spirit and matter. Insofar as that division is established, there is, whatever onе says, a superiority of spirit over matter, and spirit harvеsts all conceivable superiority, that is; on one side the divine, and on the other reason [VII 368],
> the whiteness of the sea and the paleness of the light concealed the bones [III 369].
To revert to a naïve question: what ‘is’ matter? Is it possible that we could receive a message that could respond to this interrogation? There is an anthropocentric conception of messages as transmissions between beings that share a code. According to such a definition the reception of a message depends upon a prior agreement with the sender. One can receive messages from other humans, or from personal beings such as God or angels, as long as there is a pre-established system of significations. If a message is not coded according to the rules of a familiar system it might still be possible to translate it into the terms of such a system, deciphering or interpreting it. It is thus possible for messages to be retrieved from extinct languages, as long as sufficient similarity exists between them and familiar languages for a systematic series of correspondences to be established. Such similarities can be described as the ‘formal’ or ‘structural’ properties of the signifying system, distinguished from its ‘material’ or ‘empirical’ instantiation.
Methods of structural analysis have the great ‘advantage’ that they are able to exclude extraneous aspects from consideration, ignoring everything except for the formal relations between the terms—signifiers—of the message. The densely encrustated matter of historical associations, which is the impurity inherent in real transmission, can be washed away from the message like the mud from a fossil. One need not be prejudiced about where the text came from. As for the formal relations that remain; they are also a matter of exclusion: this time the exclusion each term operates upon the others, sublimating itself into a transcendent unity, a pure nexus of articulation.
Developments in the technology of information have lent urgency and concreteness to the study of codes. Techniques have arisen for the translation of messages into codes built out of a single alternative (bilaterized and reciprocal) of ‘one’ and ‘zero’. These are digital codes, according to which messages can be generated by the presence/absence (flow/blockage) of an electric current. Such codes are readily adaptable to machines which can transmit, store, and operate upon information of a logical and mathematical kind, since decimal numbers can be converted into digital ones, and logical functions are easily reproduced by ‘logic gates’. With an appropriate coding system any system of symbols can be allotted its digital equivalent; a series of binary digits (‘bits’) adequate to specify it. A precise quantitative determination can be given for the minimal length for sequences of bits required to recode an alphabet of symbols n: log2n
Bataille exhibits no positive interest in the philosophies of structure (to which he was, in any case, scarcely exposed). Like the thermodynamicists and information theorists his concerns lay not with the analysis of discontinuity, but with its explanation, or rather, with the genealogy of its cultural presupposition. Far from being a possible content of articulated signs, Bataille’s matter is that which must be repressed as the condition of articulation, whereby immanent continuity is vivisected in transcendence. The importance of structural thought is real, but symptomatological; incarnating matter’s positive effacement by utilitarian sociality. In a short early text called Architecture he writes:
each time that architectural composition is found elsewhere than in monuments, whether this is in physionomy, costume, music or painting, one is able to infer a taste for authority, whether human or divine. The great compositions of certain painters express the will to constrain the spirit to an official ideal. The disappearance of academic construction in painting is, on the contrary, the open road to the expression (and thus even to exultation) in the pychological processes most incompatible with social stability. It is this that explains in large part the lively reactions provoked for over half a century by the progressive transformation of painting, up to then characterized by a sort of dissimulated architectural skeleton [I 171]. Structure, bilateral articulation, reciprocal exclusion, and determinate negation all belong to bones and not to soft tissues. That structure comes to the fore is a matter of the momentary dominion of the profane:
For primitive people the moment of greatest anguish is the phase of decomposition; when the bones are bare and white they are not intolerable as the putrefying flesh is, food for worms [X 59].
The ahistorical, descriptive, and normalizing study of language usage is pragmatics, which can be contrasted with the historical, epidemic, and aberrational experiments in flow summarized as ‘libidinal-’ or ‘base materialism’. Base materialism is the plague of unilateral difference, which is a difference that only operates from out of the undifferentiated. Thinking of this kind is flagrantly inconsistent with the principle of identity. The aberrant phenomena summarized under the label ‘spirit’, for instance, are spiritually differentiated from matter, whilst remaining materially undifferentiated from
it. Similarly, culture is only culturally different from nature, such that the most strenuous deviations from nature leave nature uninterrupted. The human animal rebels unilaterally against its animality, just as life differentiates itself against and within the undifferentiable desert of death. A unilateral difference is the simultaneity of a tendency to separation and a persistence of continuity, which is a thought that cannot be grasped, but only succumbed to in delirium. For any ardent materialism truth is madness. The dominant tendencies in philosophy are complicit with ordinary language in their suppression of unilateral differences, and their insistence upon bilateral or reciprocal relations. Because separation is normally thought of as mutual discontinuity, the world is interpreted as an aggregate of isolated beings, which are extrinsically amalgamated into structures, systems, and societies. Such thinking precludes in principle all possibility of base contact or communion.
Spawned by unilateral difference, the human animal is a hybrid of sentience and pathology; or of differentiated consistency with matter. Knowing that its community with nature sucks it into psychosis and death mankind valorizes its autonomy, whilst cursing the tidal desires that tug it down towards fusional dissolution. Morality is thus the distilled imperative to autonomous integrity, which brands as evil the impulse to skinless contact and the merging of bodies.
Base materialism is compelled to acknowledge that Henry Miller is a ‘saint’ [XI 46], and that the Tropic of Cancer is a sacred book.
To an important degree Miller’s Tropic of Cancer responds to the surrealist culture of 1930s’ Paris, especially to the creative practice of ‘automatic writing’ which entangles literature with sexuality in a guerrilla struggle against repression. The stylistic infelicities and thematic confusions of his writing are inextricable from its force as a seismic upheaval in the history of literature, stemming as they do from his passionate rebellion against the normative regulations of aesthetic and moral censorship. It is precisely the jagged and meandering character of this text that attest to its torrential emancipatory energy; liberating writing from the pedantic bourgeois delicacies that cage literature in the prison of the ego. In the opening pages he insists that: ‘I have made a compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions’ [TC 19]. The unconscious does not coo sweet lyrics or unroll immaculate and measured prose, it howls and raves like the shackled and tortured beast that our civilization has made of it, and when the fetters are momentarily loosened the unconscious does not thank the ego for this meagre relief, but hisses, spits, and bites, as any wild thing would.
This is not to suggest that Miller is without inhibition. He is, for instance, notorious for his misogyny. It is obvious to anyone reading his books that women frighten him. It is not mere fear that grips him but anxiety; terror of nothing, the horror that patriarchy interprets in terms of castration. Who is in a position to condemn him for this hesitancy at the brink of dissolution? Is it not rather the nakedness of his avowal that triggers an inane and moralistic response? Phallus is the great security of male-dominated culture, and beyond it lies an ocean of loss as desolate as zero. Miller writes: ‘if they knew they were thinking about nothing they would go mad’ [TC 82]. He quotes his friend Van Norden’s anguished comments on the vulva: ‘It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing…All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it’s nothing—just a blank’ [TC 144–5]. His own response is different:
When I look down into that crack I see an equation sign, the world at balance, a world reduced to zero and no trace of remainder. Not the zero on which Van Norden turned his flashlight, not the empty crack of the prematurely disillusioned man, but an Arabian zero rather, the sign from which spring endless mathematical worlds, the fulcrum which balances the stars and the light dreams and the machines lighter than air and the lightweight limbs and the explosives that produced them [TC 249]. Upon zero or utter continuity everything flows without resistance. There is no possibility of becoming settled, rooted, or established, of instituting stable communities or codes. Names and labels regress to the magmic-pulse of language, sliding in useless digression. According to Freud kissing is included amongst the perversions because it digresses from procreative sexuality, wandering erratically across the cosmic desolation of the unconscious. Zero is the vortex of a becoming inhuman that lures desire out from the cage of man onto the open expanses of death. Not that death as utter digression is the same as the becoming inert of the body. It is first of all the anegoic psychosis of communicative fusion; floating on the far side of all effort.
There are times when Miller, confronted by the oceanic blank of zero, falls back upon the spurious identity of bones, which he associates with Phallic rigidity: ‘Animals with a bone in the penis. Hence, a bone on…“Happily”, says Gourmont, “the bony structure is lost in man.” Happily? Yes, happily. Think of the human race walking around with a bone on’ [TC 11]. Which doesn’t prevent him remarking two pages later that ‘[t]here is a bone in my prick six inches long’ [TC 13]. A corpse has one preeminent and historically fateful heterogeneous distribution: that between its skeletal structure and its soft tissues. This is apprehended as a difference between what is perdurant, dry, clean, formal, and what is volatile, wet, dirty, and formless. On the basis of this resource Western civilization has been not merely thanatological, but osseological, which is something reaching beyond the fascination with the skeleton—and particularly the skull—that is distributed extremely widely across cultures. Osseology, in its deep sense, is the usage of the difference between the hard and soft parts of the body as a logical operator in the discourse on matter and death. For instance, differentiation between eternal form and perishable substance, celestial purity and terrestrial filth, divine architecture and base flow. The skeleton is thus conceived of as an invisible harmonious essence, an infrastructure beneath the disturbing tides of soft pathology. It is the prototype of intelligible form, contrasted with the decaying mass of the sensible body.
The skeleton is the relatively dead part of an organism, and because of this it is also the part relatively immune to dissolution. Which is another way of saying that the hard parts of an organic body are those most isolated from the communicative generaleconomic flows of its metabolism, but also the parts it most faithfully transmits into the future. The residues of life follow upon a pre-emptive compromise with death; what remains of life is only the disloyal part of itself.
The grimacing skeleton that invaded the iconography of the late Middle Ages seems to have been unknown to Greco-Roman antiquity. On the other hand, the cult of the skull goes back to Peking man (440,000 to 220,000 BC). Veneration for skulls is to be found in all primitive religions as well as in all the great religions of antiquity. Cortez’s Spaniards, counting the skull-trophies in Mexican temples, found 136,000. The Toltecs cut off the skulls and used them as bowls. The Gauls cut off the heads of their dead enemies and brought them back to their villages, suspended from the necks of their horses, then nailed them as trophies in front of their houses. In New Caledonia widows kept the skulls of their husbands in baskets [SD 10–11].
There is something treacherous about a skull, that most intimate companion, so indifferently adapted to an inorganic regime, so untouched by the disappearance of flesh. It is the natural emblem of piracy, criminality, and cold betrayal. Perhaps everybody occasionally imagines their skull become a paperweight, or (less modestly) a museum exhibit in some distant time. Such thoughts are a little more cynical than those which capture it shortly after interment; a chamber of heaving maggots and filth. One only glimpses its calcic imperviousness by imaginatively stripping it of our rot, ageing it tastefully, polishing it. In the end one comes to feel that it merely tolerates its momentary participation in us, numbly awaiting the cessation of our tedious biological clamour.
> Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All the unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness [TC 255–6].
Washing about the rigid parts of the body are the swirls of ecstasy and filth whose only fidelity is to zero. Not that rigidity and fluidity enter into any kind of opposition within a structure or dialectic. There is no elemental duality at stake here, since this would involve a rigid difference transcending and dominating its terms, as if a typology, signifying system, or patchwork of language-games were extrinsically organizing base flows, in the manner of Wittfogel’s hydraulic bureaucracies12. The savage truth of delirium is that all ossification—far from being a metaphysical separation from decay—is a unilateral deviation from fluidity, so that even bones, laws, and monuments are crumbled and swept away by the deep flows of the Earth. Far from establishing an eternal logos on the model of pure ossification, the tongue rots into a delirial meander of oozing slime and dirt, indistinguishable from the contaminating mess it vomits into the gutters of literature.
There is a boundary of sorts along the banks and shores of the body where fluidity and rigidity meet, but this is not sufficient to authorize the irrigational idol of rigid differentiation. It is not difficult to imagine how such an idol might have arisen, of course. Is it not natural to imagine rigidity setting the terms for its contestation? It is almost tautological to conceive liquidity as giving way. Nevertheless, differentiation is contested at the scurf-edge of the flow, where sediments of detritus are tugged problematically between solidity and liquification. If fluidity prevails the bank is dissolved, washed away, permeated, flooded; it is only in the momentary constraint of fluids that the fixed channels of an irrigation are realized. However desperately Miller clings at times to his bones, to his bone on, to the mouldering patriarchal infrastructure of his corpse, in the end there is infiltration and collapse into the deluge, into the unsurpassable hydraulic mega-machine: ‘I am a writing machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows. Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I am the machine …’ [TC 34].
Speaking philosophically, and in accord with common sense, flow is gauged in terms of a fixed grid assembled from space, time, and matter. Flow displaces mass in space over time in a strictly quantifiable fashion, and is therefore—as a concept—posterior to the apparatus of its representation. Not only does time function as a dimension of its description, but a deeper temporal prioritization of the representational grid (whether this is idealized or naturalized) locates flow as an empirical content, mapped along axes achieved in advance. Becoming is subordinated to a transcendent law, allowing it to be judged, denigrated, and condemned. Compare Miller’s words:
> For the fraction of a second perhaps I experienced the utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hairtrigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama [TC 102].
Even ordinarily time is thought of as a flow, but flows characterize the repressed of thinking. That time is conceived as a river, streaming dissymmetrically from the future into the past, is a representation controlled by a defensive system, simultaneous with mature patriarchy, nucleated upon the ego, and correlated with the generation of a utilitarian hydraulics. A transcendent differentiation rigidifies a stabilized subject/object couple or appropriate synonym; the former as a fixed point of apprehension, the latter as an underlying essence. This double deliquification channels a quantifiable homogeneous substance through a rigid conduit; the transcendent apparatus of time as such and the ego, ontology as managed flow.
Nothing of this pompous monolithic architecture can resist the torrent of Miller’s prose when it surges most ruthlessly out of zero:
> Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gall-stones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, which brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit towards death and dissolution [TC 258–9]. Between the body and the utterances that traverse it there is not in truth a relation, but rather a repressed continuity. Literature surges and foams wherever bodies diffuse, vomit themselves, melt into each other, and subside into the heaving toxic syrup of solar tides. It does not stem from the architectural design of a transcendent author-god, imprisoned in rigid individuation, but accumulates black and excremental, like a rich silt at the edge of the great impersonal flows. ‘Looking into the Seine I see mud and desolation’ [TC 70]. If intense literature seems very often to have an autobiographical character—as with Miller—this is not primarily because a life expresses itself, it is far more a matter of an integrated life being haemorrhaged into the laceration of writing, rhythmically dishevelled and coagulated down to an impermanent clotting in the subterranean lava flows of base culture. ‘And when you show me a man who expresses himself perfectly,’ writes Miller, ‘I will not say that he is not great, but I will say that I am unattracted’ [TC 254]. To describe Miller as a writer is not to lend him a personal integrity as one who writes, but to scatter the ashes of his name into the rivers of fluent textuality which nag all personalities to pieces, as they bear their luxuriant froth of words downstream towards chaos and death. ‘I feel this river flowing through me,’ remarks Miller in the penultimate sentence of the book [TC 318].
None of this has anything to do with metaphor. Metaphor is only an issue where literal and figurative usages can be bilaterally distinguished, where orthodox functions have been diked-up against the currents of digression. To write of the body being traversed by rivers is not mere metaphor, except when the body has been penned into its solidity and rivers have been degraded to drainage ditches. However many rivers have been integrated into urban and industrial sewerage systems, there are still solar rivers, pathological rivers, rivers of sex, madness, literature, and plague which refuse to slumber wretchedly within their banks. The word ‘river’ in its ordinary usage is an instrument of irrigationist repression, and its aberrant upsurge is not metaphor, but catastrophic erosion.
For so long as we persist as dammed-up reservoirs of labour-power we preserve our humanity, but the rivers flowing into us are an irresistible urge to dissolution, pressing us into the inhumane. Beneath the regulated exchanges of words we howl and gnaw at our fettered limbs. An impersonality as blank and implacable as the sun wells up beneath us, a vermin-hunger for freedom:
> If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms [TC 257].
Humanity is a petrified fiction hiding from zero, a purgatorial imprisonment of dissolution, but to be stricken with sanctity is to bask in death like a reptile in the sun.
God is dead, but immeasurably more importantly, God is death (except ‘God’ means the fascist ass-hole of the West). The beginning of the secret is that death ( 0) is immense.
From birth we are brain-washed into conformity with the cage, taught to accumulate, to shore ourselves up, to fear madness and death. Trapped in a constricting tangle of language routines we tread a narrow circuit in the maze
We are told that chance will not take care of us, and that it is difficult to live
but work and seriousness are slums of delusion the garbage-heap of individuation has no worth what is called life at the outer edge of patriarchy is a bleak box of lies, drudgery, and anaesthesia blended with inane agony what matters about the outside of the box is not just that it is the outside of the box, but that it is immense what matters is the abyss, the gulf
They want us to fear death so much, but we can inhabit it like vermin, it can be our space, in our violent openness to the sacred death will protect us against their exterminations, driven insane by zero, we can knot ourselves into the underworld, communicate through it, cook their heavenly city in our plague.
we can scamper in and out of the maze in a way they cannot understand,
during the first weekend of June
at half-past one on Sunday morning
deep in the crypt of the night
together with a fellow voyager in madness
i crossed the line into death
which is called Hell because the police control heaven
Melting shells drunk on our inexistence
torched in the flame of the sacred
we trudged though the burnt and blackened swamps of the shallows
testing the edge of the estuary
dripping brimstone from our boots
an immense ocean of annihilation stretched out before us
There has been a revolution in Hell
Satan hangs from a gibbet and rots
wreathed in the howls of anarchy
out there beyond the stars
the cold wind of zero rages without interdiction
( Nick Land )
www.ChordsAZ.com