Going Under
Not a place but a direction—which is to say an experimentation with directives. The thinking of the Under is equipment for this worldly experimentation with light, but it appears as a thinking of the universe, shrouded in Black. As a thinking of the remote, it also thinks the horizon on which light appears as event.
The thinking of the under is a phenomenology of the fold.
When the precariat goes under, it absconds from view. No light touches it. Only the overseer sees the whatever precariat.
Not going underground—which would be an engagement with roots—but getting underneath the structures of Empire. Getting underneath infrastructure, underneath the metaphysical vestments of state power. Reckoning with the waste underneath Empire.
Man moves infrastructure; the whatever agent moves toward what is under infrastructure.
When the particle leaps it diffracts the remote under the weight of infrastructure.
Two forces oppose Empire. One is animated by light; the other is dense with matter, lurking under this light. Whatever agency is the unity of these forces.
When the whatever agent’s light illuminates the under, darkness hides his mask.
Under forms-of-life is the fabric of the universe. The under weaves this fabric. The fabric is the plane of consistency of forms-of-life and the entanglement of targets. Empire nurtures the form of life even as it disentangles this fabric.
The scientist understands history, which is to say the turning and the under. The overseer understands the experiment, that is the outcome and its trace. The whatever agent understands spin. Bloom understands Nothing.
The scientist remembers the generation’s history and produces its infrastructure. The scientist knows the remote and understands the divine.
The trace of the under is the energy of the millennium. Where nothing is instituted, the millennium edges.
A remote light diffracts the generation’s melody and spins it toward the millennium.
When an imperial agent hears the generation’s melody, its movement no longer spins toward the millennium.
Flesh
The flesh is a world. When this world is animated by light, it is invisible. When it is dense with matter, it turns.
When Empire’s yes calls on the precariat’s no, being is flesh. When matter’s yes answers light’s yes, the flesh is a body without organs.
The visible folds onto the invisible. The invisible unfolds the visible. The flesh is a technique of the fold.
Touch
Feeling is eternal. Touch is ephemeral. When being feels, it sleeps eternally. When the whatever agent touches the world, it is animated by light. Touch is an agency that knows no interiority.
The densest matter acts on the whatever agent. It has no agency but turns around a constantly shifting center of gravity. This matter feels the whatever agent but never touches him. When it touches the whatever agent, it escapes its orbit. When the whatever agent feels this matter, it no longer touches beings.
Melody
When the generation goes under, it becomes a multitude. The present generation’s direction is an iteration of the previous generation’s. Multitudinous time lapses with a screech or with a melody, according to its density. At the end of the century, which could as well be the end of the millennium, time screeches to a halt. On the last day, all will have been water or all will have been light.
When the melody flees bloom, it becomes agential.
In the end, life’s yes will confront Empire’s no. The light by which these forces appear is the flesh of the world. When this light is seen, it vanishes.
The trace of the no is the intensity of the yes. What reconciles is destroyed and becomes light.
Each iteration of the melody is traced on the plane of consistency of its refrain. Light bends according to the consistency of the melody on the last day. The consistency of the melody traces the density of its vibrations. The relation of this tracing is divine.
The melody owes its sense, its sway and its rhythm to discourse. When imperial nature appropriates culture, the melody is reduced to the wave. The chorus is the apotheosis of the melody and its gravity.
When discourse spins in the absence of speech, it sings a melody.
When the melody lifts the under, the violence of the precariat writes the history of its trace on the body without organs.
Fugue
The whatever agent resists a methodology that would force it to choose between a phenomenology of apparatuses and an experimentation with apparatuses. The whatever agent’s experimentation chases phenomenology in a fugal configuration.
Voice
The lightest voice speaks ephemerally. The densest voice sings eternally.
The Directive
The whatever agent defers to the directives of the overseer—which is to say, defers their direction. The directive appears as a law dictating the agent’s direction. But for the whatever agent this law appears rather as a concept dictating appearances. The whatever agent appears to accomplish the directive without accomplishing its direction. For the Whatever agent the directive is rather a gesture—it gestures toward the Under.
When the remote overseer directs the multitude, it becomes a swarm.
The multitude forms in the absence of power. The swarm forms in the presence of will.
There is no payment for power. Will exacts payment according to the conditions of its affirmation.
Bloom is the man who can afford no will. Monstrous is the bloom who in his precarity pays for power.
Experimentation
As against Bloom’s endless experimentation on himself, the whatever agent engages in experimentation on others—on young-girls, on agents of Empire.
Black Hole
Under the light of Empire is the groundless ground of the black hole. As the being without light, Bloom is infinitely dense. On the remote hologram, what is within the black hole—Bloom—appears as light, as color. It is only with an infinite light that the overseer maintains the blackness of the Under. And it is only with an infinite blackness that the whatever agent makes the Under appear as light.
What revolts with light is in orbit. It turns. Turning, matter becomes infinitely dense. Its spin is coded on the remote hologram, its agency erased.
Bending with light, matter becomes precarious. When it falls past the event horizon, it turns and becomes dense. Precarious matter reproduces precarity.
When matter spins, it becomes entangled with its trace. The trace appears on the remote hologram, while the material agency that initiates spin is veiled in black. What spins becomes dense through this entanglement; its writing is mapped as a remote erasure of presence. In eschewing authority, this entanglement is thoroughly whatever.
The black hole is both an infinite density of matter and the erasure of matter. What doesn’t escape the black hole sees the depth of matter, never its surface. It makes foreign matter present.
What turns on the ephemeral sinks into the eternal, and what turns eternally no longer sees the ephemeral. What flees whatever being becomes agential yet remains whatever in its spin; what remains in Bloom allies itself with whatever agency. What spins the ephemeral goes under. The imperial agent and the whatever agent weaponize spin differentially.
When the whatever agent sinks with light, its particularity comes to matter for Empire. The eternal hides the ephemeral, and the ephemeral shows the eternal.
Call
The densest matter calls on being. When being is deaf to its call, it turns. When being answers its call, it becomes animated by light. The purest light sees the densest matter.
The absolutely ethical calls on being. When being is agential, it answers with a yes. The absolute responds with a no. The consistency of this refrain is the line of the common. This line is common insofar as a multitude gives the call.
The test is multitudinous because matter is particular. The densest matter spins when being heeds its call.
Struggle
Bloom struggles perpetually; the demon lives eternally.
The densest matter’s yes has a gravitational attraction to light’s no. When the precariat struggles, there is a repulsion between these forces. The separation between Empire’s yes and the periphery’s no is inscribed remotely on the plane of consistency as the identity of pure différance. The precariat’s struggle creates a magnetism that polarizes these forces.
Empire’s yes is common to the precariat’s no.
The Scratch
The aporia of the whatever agent lies in the gesture of the scratch. Empire itches; the whatever agent is obliged to scratch it. The outcomes of such experimentation are twofold—the totality of scratches leads to the deferral of the insurrection that never arrives; and the totality of scratches governs what forms of magic are possible. The wound that is Empire festers. An alternative to the scratch is the remedy of the mask. Like the veil, the mask is a vestment. But the whatever agent invests in this ecstatic piece of equipment as something that is worn and then discarded, not worn as a permanent vestment.
The mask is intensive to presence. The remote is intensive to the mask. Method is the donation of the remote. The remote overseer gives the mask and the remote overseer unmasks. The overseer sees the Under and the Under sees the remote overseer.
The monster scratches empire eternally.
Finance
Gentrification turns the metropolis, pauperizing precarious bloom and enriching imperial Bloom. The whatever agent moves toward what is under real estate, under Bloom and its finance—the territory. Under the presence of real estate, the
presence of debt is the gift on the one hand and the hedge on the other. The standard is no longer present, but it still lurks under finance. The whatever agent spins this materiality toward the periphery of the metropolis and the periphery of Empire.
The Virus
The virus erases what will have begun. The ephemeral substance will have been written. This writing, erasing presence, arrives without a trace.
When the whatever agent answers to the virus’s no, the virus’s no erases its own agency. When the virus hears this yes, its agency pacifies the whatever agent’s violence.
The virus is a contagion. The whatever agent inhabits this apparatus and the contagion inhabits the whatever agent. The measure of the whatever agent is the différance between these habitations.
Energy
Bloom’s production of itself as a precarious subject reduces us to energeia—to the work internal to Bloom. Bloom’s precarity is particular, but its agency is common. When Bloom’s flight is energetic, the wave is a writing of gravity. When it moves toward the Under, the whatever agent spins its quantum rupture. In its precarity, Bloom forgets to think precarity.
When light bends, it becomes particular. It turns around a center of gravity. When it continues to bend, it acquires its own center of gravity. When the matter it is attracted to becomes black, light cannot escape. When this matter becomes light, the energy proper to each particle magnetically attracts the other. This is the flight from Bloom.
Essence
Man’s will is real when his essence dies. The demon’s will is real when his word plays. The monster’s will is real when his presence destroys.
Communication
The presence of bio-political communication is the relation as spectacle. Communication addresses itself to the Other as Self-presence. The mask erases this traceable address.
Biopolitics binarizes communication while erasing the conditions of its supplemental polarity. The whatever agent, intensifying the terrain of biopolitical communication, weaponizes this polarity.
Ephemeral communication is the folding of forms of life onto the fabric.
Biopolitical communication is the folding of Bloom onto Bloom. When Bloom folds, it becomes densely entangled with matter and turns.
Gesture deprived of sense is pure discourse.
The limit of the gesture is the unassimilable.
Bloom’s discourse is the unassimilability of the gesture.
Event
The event fractures the world, polarizing it in its fragments. It relates itself to other events. The event as such is never present.
Polarization
The confrontation agency produces implies the polarization of bureaucracy. When bureaucracy is polarized on a binary, the liberal state withdraws. This state of exception creates a civil war among forms of life in which power is distributed non-binarily.
Where the liberal state is fragmented, civil war traces its state of exception. Where the state is divided, the camp makes it whole.
The imperial agent produces the camp and consumes the state (of exception).
The precariat bends according to the spin of an agential polarization or it turns on the gravitational polarization of an infinitely dense world. When it turns, the precariat folds one Empire onto another instead of Empire onto the common—it folds Empire onto its form-of-life instead of its form-of-life onto the fabric. Turning on Empire’s gravitational polarization, Bloom makes the world water.
Magnetism attracts matter with the same force with which it repels its agency. When matter attracts its own agency, being is polarized.
The Name
The sacred gives the supplement name/nom de guerre. Playing with the name gives the bare. On the last day, the proper will have been pure play, the written différance between address and significance. The messianic unconceals the play of the name.
Adaptability
The sacred is what is inadaptable—what fails to bend, becomes dense, shrouded in black. Edging on the event horizon of a black hole, whatever agency includes the sacred in its bend, writes it on the hologram. This writing is at odds with the entanglement of turning matter, which erases the spin of the dense. On the last day, all whatever agents, which is not to say all Blooms, will adapt to the tempo of the remote.
In the time of our adaptability, these statements will have become axiomatic for us:
We are not what we are. We are what we are only through a spectacular presence that is erased by the event of our agency.
We are not where we are. We have no address. We address the other as ourselves.
We reproduce reproduction—the material conditions of our existence and of our discourse.
While neoliberalism erases the under, the whatever agent’s adaptability to neoliberalism—its spin—moves toward it. Make Blooms adapt to neoliberalism; blame whatever agents for neoliberalism’s fall. This is empire’s directive.
Prostitution
The neoliberal apparatus consummates the directive but does not adore it. It adores power, the conditions of its own private existence. The neoliberal overseer is a young-girl that reproduces itself by the same gesture with which it reproduces neoliberalism. State power defers to the reproduction of the citizen— that is, to a global apparatus for producing citizens. Reliant as it is on private citizenship, global imperial power never arrives, but it occasions the arrival of the Common.
The word has possibilities. When it touches the flesh, it has agency. The whatever agent’s word moves the young-girl’s agency.
The whatever agent’s word is attached to his will by a semiotic machine. When the whatever agent’s word is separated from his will, he sinks into bloom.
When the whatever agent’s word touches Bloom, grace moves the flesh.
Bloom’s will is common to the young-girl’s agency. Bloom moves the young-girl ephemerally; the young-girl moves Bloom eternally. The young-girl produces infrastructure; Bloom moves toward what is under infrastructure.
Games
Bloom and the whatever agent speak patois’ of the same language. The words are the same, but Bloom’s concepts are dense, while the whatever agent’s are light. When the whatever agent’s concepts encounter oversight, they bend; when Bloom’s presence encounters gravity, it turns. Bloom is stricken with a precarity of concepts, which is to say its concepts are specters; when they turn, they displace their violence onto the remote precariat. The whatever agent thinks the gravity of the precariat, including it in its bend. The whatever agent thinks the concept of Bloom.
Empire’s discourse folds onto common speech. Bloom refuses to play Empire’s language games knowingly; in refusing to know that it plays, it still knows how it refuses—innocently. The whatever agent knows how to play with this refusal.
How
Man asks what is to be done. The whatever agent and Bloom are both engaged with the how, but they pose the question differently. Whereas Bloom asks how presence arrives, the whatever agent asks how we inhabit the apparatus. These questions measure the ethical, the aesthetic, and the divine, respectively. Bloom sleeps in the merely aesthetic; man is present to the ethical law; the whatever agent bridges the ethical and the aesthetic under the divine.
Man resigns himself to reading the divine law, the law that institutes the bridge. He only adheres to the ethical law.
Bloom turns in the nothing. Man is present in nature. The melody succeeds the human.
Nothing prepares Bloom for the presence of knowledge. Nothing touches the demon’s understanding. Nothing moves the force of the monster.
Possibility
Where Bloom has no possibilities, the whatever agent plays Bloom’s presence. Co-extensive with a space that no light touches, agency is intensive to Bloom’s presence. The whatever agent no longer dwells in subjective possibility but in divine plausibility. Fleeing presence, he institutes the plausibility of the bridge.
When man feels nature, his possibility is the end of nature. When the whatever agent moves in nature, his possibility is the reconciliation of the divine flesh.
When bloom is subject to empire’s violence, nature leaves its trace on man’s skin. When the precariat’s violence touches empire, man’s mask hides nature’s face.
Bloom’s possibility is the end of possibilities.
Power
Bloom dies and kills in the Spectacle. Subjectivity is present in law. Agency ek-sists for the divine. It is in-static in relation to divine life—it stands in for the divine. Bridging the aesthetic and the ethical, divine life acquires power.
The discourse of neoliberal governmentality stands in for the common speech of Power. When the common speaks in the discourse of power forms of life obfuscate the under. When life relates the parole of empire to the discourse of power, agency erases governmentality through this entanglement.
The trace of the monster’s power is the unveiling of his presence. The trace of the demon’s subjection is the ek-sistence of his agency.
When the demon affirms the monster’s will, he no longer subjects himself to its power.
The Tear
The biopolitical world is a humongous monstrosity dense with matter. The ephemeral tear sheds its vestments, makes the world light.
The ephemeral tear is magnificent. The ephemeral eschews biopolitical communication and invites the community. The solitary tear of the young-girl wants company.
When the tear touches flesh, the blood boils.
The Gaze
The ephemeral gaze can never see itself. When it sees itself it drops into the eternal. The gaze that turns has power. It is a monster with no target.
The whatever agent’s gaze responds differentially to its targets, and to Bloom. The whatever agent’s gaze sees Bloom but doesn’t know Bloom. Bloom never sees the whatever agent’s gaze.
The monster’s eyes are flesh. The demon’s eyes are a body without organs. The gaze that makes the demon’s eyes flesh is a camera.
The monster destroys in darkness. The demon destroys with the diffractive light of its translucent gaze.
The flesh behind the gaze is bare. The tear that mourns its wound falls on a blank face.
When Bloom is seen in its depth, it acquires density. It understands depth but doesn’t see depth.
Eternal is the gaze that doesn’t turn. The eternal gaze affirms what it denies. The devil gazes at Bloom and Bloom sees itself.
Vision
The monster’s vision is understood by his party according to their destiny and the demon’s fate. The monster’s light is never seen by his party. The demon sees the monster’s vision and his party’s fate with the same knowing gaze.
The fate of the demon is chance; the destiny of the demon is science. The fate of the monster is the authority of his will; the destiny of the monster is the knowledge of his vision. The fate of the world is the authority of the monster’s vision.
Tiqqun
The monster’s vision is a shattered vessel. The Tiqqun that makes the vision whole determines the fate of his world and the destiny of his party. The demon’s vision withdraws from the Tiqqun with the same force by which Bloom withdraws from its world.
Force
The force of Bloom’s vision engenders the monster; the force of its withdrawal engenders the demon.
The Map
The map is a material-discursive apparatus for producing Blooms and whatever agents. The mapping that produces ephemeral agency is traced on the remote hologram. The origin of this apparatus will have been determined.
Instinct
The measure of play is the trace of the demon’s agency.
Moment
Bare is the life of the whatever moment.
Flight
The whatever agent reterritorializes the line of flight from its own plane of consistency. His thinking is a map that folds onto a tracing. On the last day, there will have been a proliferation of flocks—a deterritorialization of matter and a reterritorialization of all lines of flight.
The adaptability of one flock is intensive to the inadaptability of another. And the adaptability of the overseer is intensive to the inadaptability of the under.
Captivation
Biopolitics spins each line of flight as a line of capture. The whatever agent’s flight withdraws from its own deterritorialization. The divine captivation by which it evades capture is both thoroughly agential and thoroughly subjected, spinning captivation as a total withdrawal from the terrain of biopolitics—a human strike that evades capture through the captivation of flight.
Plastic
The whatever agent does not engage in plastic surgery on apparatuses for producing the young-girl or apparatuses of Empire. Rather, he molds himself to these apparatuses. When matter becomes dense, light bends.
The trace of the no is the intensity of the yes. What reconciles is destroyed and becomes light.
Age
The young-girl’s secret is the nakedness of her veil. The whatever agent’s secret is the impermanence of his mask.
Age is the catastrophe of the young-girl’s subjectivity and the truth of the demon’s agency.
Age is the facade of the monster’s destruction, the truth of the knight’s peace, and the crisis of the whatever agent’s target.
The Face
The teeth of the whatever agent eat young-girls and imperial agents. The method of this eating is the cheek. The whatever agent laughs in the face of the ephemeral.
The ephemeral face is intensive to eternal substance. Becoming intense, the ephemeral bends around the dense. This intensity can be mapped—which is to say, it is also co-extensive with the eternal.
When the eternal eats the ephemeral, the under turns. When the ephemeral eats the eternal, the whatever agent turns the under.
The whatever agent uses its teeth to turn the ephemeral.
The Monstrous
Bloom has no enemies. The whatever agent has only targets.
Monstrous is the man without a target. The monster turns on the gravitational vector of the global precariat. It has been said that the monstrous man adores the eternal.
The target moves in the ephemeral; the monster dwells in the eternal.
The fallen overseer is followed by a monster. The overseer sees this monster with the same light by which he brings the monster into being.
Only a monster can destroy the monster. It can destroy it but never target it. When it destroys its children, the monster goes under.
When the whatever agent destroys, it is touched by a monster.
When the monster destroys, it folds.
The Party
The devil leaves the party. The whatever agent never arrives at the Party. Bloom attends the Party. The knight of eternal peace guards the exits.
The imperial agent sets the table at the party. Bloom serves the guest of honor.
The party of Empire is common to the party of Bloom. The community that forms around Empire’s target is destroyed by the same gesture that destroys the community that forms around the whatever agent’s target. The relationship of the party of the monster—that is, the party of sleep—to this common is that of an enemy. The gesture that destroys the monster’s party elevates the party common to Bloom and Empire. The confrontation between the party of Empire and the party of Bloom destroys the monster’s will.
The party of the devil confronts the party of the demon. These parties live and die ephemerally. The knight’s party pacifies this confrontation. The knight makes the party of the devil and the party of the demon sleep in eternal peace.
The will of the monster is catastrophe. The monster’s party accomplishes this will without appearing to accomplish it.
The will of the demon is mercy. The demon’s party accomplishes this will without appearing to accomplish it.
The will of the knight is eternal peace. The knight’s party accomplishes eternal slumber.
The knight of eternal peace consumes peace and produces young-girls. The demon consumes young-girls and produces monsters. The monster consumes the demon and produces peace. The imperial agent consumes presence (the young-girl-) and produces play (the monster-). These agents go on strike in a divine moment that constitutes (undoes-) them as agents. The state of exception consumes (writes-) the law and produces (destroys-) the strike.
The knight knows peace and understands sleep. The monster knows sleep and understands the eternal. The demon knows production and understands the strike.
The knight of eternal life knows peace and understands poverty.
The young-girl inhabits the apparatus as a monster. She destroys the target with the same gesture by which she destroys the differential possibility of targets and the apparatus itself.
The will of the knight is the demon’s slumber. The withdrawal of Bloom’s sacred presence is the reconciliation of the knight’s will.
Poverty is the fall of the precariat’s life.
Fall
The fall of the knight is the monster’s chase. The fall of the demon is the presence of his desire. The fall of the monster is the gravity of his word.
The face of the monster mocks the world. The face of the demon mocks empire. When the demon shows its face to the monster, it falls.
When the demon scratches empire, it falls from the world. When the monster scratches the bare, its world falls.
The fall of Bloom’s presence is the trace of its being. The fall of the demon’s will is the trace of its gaze. The fall of the monster’s world is the trace of its vision.
The fall of the overseer is the evidence of his understanding. The fall of the demon is the weight of his vision. The fall of Bloom is the evidence of his sleep.
Laws of Gravity and Concepts of Agency
Numerous metaphysical vestments cloak the concept of agency in the laws of gravity—the veil, the robe, the IDF uniform, the police uniform. The whatever agent wears a mask when he/she invests his/her agency in these garments. Bare life—sacred life—and the hologram are traces of these vestments, related to them through the divine violence of humanist metaphysics. These vestments—internal to the black hole—appear as traces on the hologram; they can be coded. This coding gestures underneath these metaphysical vestments. This under is a direction, not a habitation; the ground of the black hole is groundless. Nothing is underneath the black hole but Bloom—the whatever being that wears no vestments, that does not invest. As a trace of the vestment, the mask is coded on the hologram at the edge—the event horizon—of the Black Hole. Presence dies; the event of the mask edges.
The arrival of metaphysics is occasioned by the entanglement of agency with its trace.
What doesn’t spin but remains present is reoriented. It acquires a new direction. Its presence brings it to the edge of another formation, where it turns. Its eternal presence is a shifting center of gravity that is always hit with light, until it encounters a center of gravity that is stronger than its own and darkens eternally. What doesn’t turn spins; it ek-sists on the edge ephemerally.
Storm
When he is caught in a storm, what follows the overseer evades his direction. The monstrous overseer is caught in a storm that deterritorializes his agency. The trace of this deterritorialization is the remote reterritorialization of oversight. The monstrous overseer doesn’t turn, but his agency flees and turns around a distant center of gravity, attracting matter and becoming dense. Monstrous oversight’s ephemerality owes to its eternal flight. When he edges, the overseer directs the storm itself; what follows him turns around his own center of gravity; it spins but never falls; his targets become dense.
What reconciles is the most dense. When this force is destroyed the yes has a light that corresponds to the no’s weight. The no calls on a yes, and its yes calls on a no. This reconciliation corresponds to the force of the yes. The force of this reconciliation creates a storm that reterritorializes the overseer’s direction. When this force is destroyed, its reconciliation is a yes. There is a flood but no storm. This flood is the pacification of being. It pacifies the violence of the precariat.
What says yes to the no has the greatest force. Its deferral intensifies its own agency. Agency is deferred; the precariat has time.
The storm that evades direction is eternal; the storm that reterritorializes direction is ephemeral.
The storm comes to matter for the common but never for the overseer.
Distance
When the ephemeral is the most distant from the eternal, it has the most light. This light has a gravity. When it is closest to the eternal it is dense with matter. This density produces a light. When distance and proximity are reconciled, being is pacified.
The Test
The remote gives sleep by the same movement with which it gives presence. The consistency of this refrain is the test.
The sacred man inherits the test but does not meet its measure.
The test measures taste. The whatever agent tastes what gives the supplement whatever being and metaphysical vestment, thinking and metaphysics. The sacred gives this supplement. What is tasteful tastes the sacred; what is proper offends, which is to say defers. The test is the non-deferrable decision between the proper and the tasteful, in which the proper is deferred.
The surveillance state is the fall of the test and its secret. Accident intervenes in the test; the ethical intervenes; the spectator intervenes; the law intervenes.
Spectacular political action (Kobanê, Ayotzinapa) is the fallen form of the test. The spectacle folds one imperial world onto another by the same movement with which it polarizes these worlds. In sacrificing beings, political spectacle mocks the sacred.
The school gives the test; the sacred man the bridge; the route, what is under the bridge. When the bridge falls, what remains? The Under.
The test is a sacrifice—when the whatever agent sacrifices the bare, the divine gives the infinite gift of the bare’s renewal as flesh, as a being with the depth of agency. The spectacle, by contrast, hedges the precariat’s renewal against its continued pauperization. Whereas the whatever agent folds the common onto Empire, the spectacle eschews this double movement, disentangling forms-of-life from their fabric.
The test and the spectacle make knights of whatever beings. The whatever agent edges in faith, whereas Bloom dies in infinite resignation. The peripheral school gives the test; the neoliberal school, which is to say the camp, gives the Climafication of the teacher and his student. Hedging the common against its renewal, these turning Blooms resign themselves to Empire infinitely. Their fallen double movement creates a polarization that makes waste of the earth and its people.
In resignation, Bloom executes the absolute law by the same gesture with which he flees its precept. He innocently actualizes the absolute law devoid of any ethical pertinence even as he adheres to the merely ethical. Bloom dwells in the ethical and gives the absolute, which is to say resignation and the spectacle. The whatever agent adheres to the absolute but gives the ethical. Bloom and the whatever agent give the same quantity of precepts, but their quality is different.
The front of the camp is the spectacle of imperial society. Divine light illuminates the back of the camp, makes the bare flesh.
Knowledge of the camp’s flesh is common to whatever agents. Knowledge of the whatever agent’s being is common to the remote.
Bloom desires the flesh of the camp. The whatever agent understands the face of the camp.
The imperial agent inherits a succession of tests. He makes a demonic sacrifice. He sacrifices the ethical and the absolute and dwells in the aesthetic eternally. His children heed the call of false idols and sacrifice the purest light for the densest matter. They dwell on the periphery as foreign agents and abhor the violence of the remote. When the absolute calls them, it makes itself known as a blinding light. They fear this light and dwell in the absolutely ethical, fleeing the absolute. They are eternally strangers to the remote. The imperial agent sacrifices his children, never himself.
Whereas Bloom is wounded by the spectacle, life acquires power through its shock. Marveling at Imperial agency, life marvels at its own agency. Life heals the wound of Empire. The spectacle represents the bare, but the bare always already exceeds its representation. What exceeds the spectacle’s representation is the sacrifice. The sacrifice gives itself to light for the bare. The bare is inscribed remotely.
The sovereign sacrifices the bare and the sovereign constitutes law. The Law intervenes. The quality of the ephemeral test erases the spectacular.
Vassal
The demon arms himself against justice; the knight of eternal peace arms himself against the demon.
The demon offends presence by serving the precariat. The knight of eternal peace calls on the demon. The knight tastes peace but refuses to test the demon. The knight destroys the demon, which is to say light. When the demon is gravitationally attracted to the knight, the knight’s materiality is transformed into energy, the work that pacifies being. The knight of eternal peace is a monster that knows no target.
The devil that serves empire calls on the knight of eternal peace to pacify Bloom. The knight destroys the demon that serves the precariat. The precariat’s vassal is destroyed that his children might live in peace.
Nothing says no to the devil. The devil says yes to the demon until it answers with a no. When the demon says no, it turns eternally.
The reconciliation of the demon’s agency calls on the yes. When the reconciliation of this yes is ephemeral, the demon erases matter. The demon escapes the knight’s gravity by the light of this absolute affirmation. When the demon flees the knight’s orbit, it becomes a devil, which is to say an imperial agent. Only this agent can erase Empire’s discourse.
When the demon targets the knight, it turns. To escape the knight’s gravity, it must spin out of this orbit. A devil comes to occupy it in place of the demon. The demon spins this devil’s power in service to it.
The demon is animated by power/grace, but it cannot think it. The knight lives in fear of power/ grace. The remote gives power/grace. The Devil’s yes is solar. The demon’s no is black.
An ephemeral community forms around the target. An eternal community forms around the knight of eternal peace. A demonic community forms around the monster.
Writing
Writing spins the common gesture. This tracing does a spectacular violence to the global precariat.
The problem of the text is the indeterminacy of its target. The demonic text speaks differently to different readers. It murmurs in secrecy, but its secret is transparent to the addressee. The monster writes a text that creates spectacle wherever it is read. The outcome of its murmuring is spectacular.
The whatever agent’s writing plays. Its play gives the proper test to the proper agent. The secret of the whatever agent’s text is its discourse, not its speech. The relation of the monstrous text to its reader is one of private sovereignty; the relation of the whatever agent’s text is one of a common divinity that nevertheless spins the relations inherent to the text differentially. The whatever agent’s writing sacrifices a common addressee for an address that invites the common.
The epistolary plays with direction. It erases oversight by the same gesture with which it institutes oversight. The epistolary is a gift and a curse. The curse of the epistolary gives its target.
Writing enfolds the time of the word.
When the word is transparent, meaning is veiled.
Magic and the Other’s Language
For the whatever agent, the outcome of the experiment determines meaning. The Other’s language is always already meaningful because of the uncertainty of the outcome. The apparatus determines what can be said—instituted. Homo sacer is the whatever being that evades articulation—that which is included in the apparatus by its exclusion.
Magic is an apparatus in the sense that it determines what can be said and what remains unsaid. The unsaid is the material configuration of the experiment. In this sense, the material configuration of the experiment is sacred. Homo sacer determines the material configuration of whatever agents’ experimentation on the apparatus. Experimentation always aims at that which is excluded from mattering.
The many worlds theory erases the magic of quantum mechanics. According to this interpretation, the Other’s language is always already meaningful because there are many worlds, rather than because there are multiple possible outcomes of the experiment. Actually there is only one world—the world of the commons, which is to say the world of Empire. This world is the folding of Empire onto the commons, the folding of the State onto the Imaginary Party—the inclusive exclusion of one party by another. The differential instantiation of these two parties are two possible outcomes of whatever agents’ experimentation. Empire is a commons by the same measurement according to which Bloom is a commons—Nothing is held in common. To put it differently, whatever agents hold the apparatus in common.
The other’s language speaks to its targets differentially. The différance among targets is the measure of the overseer’s word.
The overseer sees itself in the flesh of the other’s word.
Silence
The demon speaks to its targets in the same language with which it speaks of the différance among targets. The monster is silent regarding this différance. The essence of the demon, that is, Bloom, does violence to the monster’s agency—a silence that speaks of the other without addressing the other. The trace of this silence is the différance between demon and monster. The demon speaks to the other in the other’s language, refusing this silence. When the demon targets the devil, it speaks to him as an imperial agent, not as a monstrous essence.
The word calls on its trace. The knight of eternal peace hears the word but does not respond to its call. The demon hears the trace; his response calls on the word.
Science
The science of the other’s language is divine.
The whatever agent is equipped with a technical concept of science. Man has a precarious concept of science.
Man knows how science understands man. It understands itself but doesn’t understand itself as a target—that is, scientifically. Man thinks as a target without thinking itself as a target.
The whatever agent knows how to target man. The whatever agent’s concept of science is a technique of divine agency.
History
The whatever agent understands its target; it remembers its history, it knows its possibilities, and it moves under its infrastructure. The target remembers its own being but not its concepts. The weight of man’s history and the light of the overseer’s understanding are the conditions of science’s possibility.
Man’s concepts are too dense to touch the remote overseer. When the overseer’s light touches the demon, it illuminates man’s history and his possibilities. It moves under man’s flesh.
The whatever agent remembers the camp with the same divine light with which it remembers its target. The monster sees the front of the camp and the face of the target. The demon understands their depth. The demon moves under the camp.
Man sleeps in the time of eternal peace. The demon acts in the time of divine agency. The monster understands the history of Bloom’s pacification.
Apparatuses of the Theater and the Theater of Apparatuses
The world of the metropolis is a theater. At the same time, the theater is a part of its world. The surveillance state, with its police apparatus, its central intelligence apparatus, along with the precarity apparatus that nourishes these like a life support tube, overdetermines the conditions of producing theater. It overdetermines the conditions of union membership. For non-union actors it overdetermines the conditions for employment. The same actors who are governed by these apparatuses in their work on the stage people the apparatuses that spectator subjects encounter on the stages of the metropolis—the subway stage, the restaurant stage, the sidewalk stage, the park stage, the concert stage, the university stage. In a moment that is both thoroughly determined and thoroughly agential, the world of the theater and the theater of the world collide in a production that unveils the conditions of its own production, as well as the conditions of the reproduction of the apparatuses that govern it. This is the divine theater. The world of the theater is the world of the actor, that is, of the agent. This world is thoroughly post-structural. The idea is not to oppose the apparatus of the bourgeois theater or the apparatus of the police studio to the Real of class struggle or the struggle with power relations but to inhabit these apparatuses. To inhabit an apparatus is to become a whatever agent. The world of the theater is an agential realist world in the Baradian sense. Discourse matters but only insofar as the material (and, by extension, affective and social) conditions of existence matter. These conditions are constantly thrown into question. There is a scarcity of material resources at the same time that there is a boundless wealth of discursive material. A whatever role must be performed. The human strike is the becoming spect-actor (in the Boalian sense) of the spectator-subject as much as it is the becoming spect-actor of the actor-subject. To become whatever is to become an agent.
The theater of empire is a circus in which the rings are hidden from view. Bloom performs in this ring without knowing that it’s performing, only how it’s performing. Man displaces what is on the center of the ring to what is on the periphery. The whatever agent plays with the pyrotechnics of this circus, shedding light on what is in the shadows; the ring bends with light. This play makes the audience murmur.
The ring creates an orbit. What says no to Empire repels the ringmaster.
At the end of the day, Bloom took solace in the law of the ring.
A light particle spins the ring into a spiral with its magnetism. The gravity of a dense particle folds it into a line.
When Bloom subjects itself to the Nothing, Empire spins the line into a ring. When the whatever agent edges, it produces a spiral.
The metaphysical vestment that the ring master wears and then discards is whatever.
When the whatever agent dances, the ring becomes a line.
The Gift
The gift plays with subjectivity. It traces agency on the body without organs. The under gives the gift and undoes the subject.
The gift traverses the periphery. Its science remembers the remote.
The violence of a financier
I concealed my money. My finances multiplied. I displayed my money to the cashier. It disappeared. I moved toward the door. My cash appeared in the cashier’s hands.
The violence of a pauper
I displayed my money. A child grabbed it out of my hand. I moved toward the child. He handed it off to his father. I struggled with the father. I grabbed the money from his hands. It disappeared.
The violence of a poet
A child poured bleach on my money. The writing disappeared. I copied the printing with a pen. I concealed my money. Everywhere I went, I waved the pen and said spells. I never paid.
Perfection
Sleep is the perfection of being. Violence is the perfection of agency.
Pacification
The yes and the no were made flesh. The precariat’s violence confronted Empire’s violence. The energy of this confrontation produced light. The yes and the no became dense. Empire’s yes reconciled the precariat’s no. The force of this reconciliation pacified the precariat’s violence.
Only the yes can darken the yes. Only the no can illuminate the yes.
When the state subjects agency to metaphysics, violence leaves no trace. When the whatever agent subjects the state to its violence, the precariat edges.
Speed
The precariat’s speed responds differentially to light’s diffraction. When light diffracts the whatever precariat, it no longer subjects itself to the state’s violence.
When Empire destroys, the target edges with the speed of a demon. When a monster destroys, the target dies with the resignation of a knight.
Intensity Precarious affirmation and precarious denial are foreign to the trace. When bloom flees precarity, its reconciliation leaves a trace.
When intensity flees the periphery, it leaves money as its trace. When money flees the periphery, it leaves violence as its trace.
Erasure
The precariat’s violence chases its target. Empire’s violence erases its target; its violence leaves no trace. When the precariat becomes whatever, its violence turns on empire’s axis. When precarious bloom becomes a whatever agent, its violence disappears. The whatever agent spins empire’s violence.
Camera
Being’s exposure to life produces an intensity. When this intensity flees matter, it touches the remote. The body without organs is a camera that captures this intensity and inscribes it on its margins.
Trembling
The whatever agent’s yes is entangled with empire’s no, but it can never see it. When it sees this no, the confrontation produces a friction that trembles eternally. The earth drifts remotely, trembling on its axis. Polarization ceases.
The interval is a tension. It disrupts the density of matter.
I showed the card I could not see. It turned to face me.
I examined the card I could not see. It turned to face the game.
I examined the card I would not show. It turned to face the game.
I placed the card I could not see next to the card I would not show. They both disappeared.
Along with a list of references, Zack sent this text to a group of friends in the hope that they would comment on and perhaps add to it. With that intention in mind, some of those friends have contributed annotations that include Zack’s original references. To see them, activate the toggle here: