The World Keeps Swerving: Following “non-materialism” all the way to Venus
*Editor’s introduction to PARÉKKLISI
06.10.24
Preamble
This text has been prepared as the editor’s letter that accompanies the opening of the project ‘Parékklisi’, a virtual publishing space for digital editorialism, curated by Becoming. Taking its name from a term used to signify the swerve of Lucretius, PAREKKLISI (παρέκκλιση) describes a subtle deviation or inclination that everything in the Universe is subjected to; a drift that can gradually accelerate until a line turns back in on itself, forming a loop or a fold.
As many now know, Becoming originally started as a print-magazine published by a record label, until eventually growing into an online publishing platform with its own editorial line. As Becoming started to deal with various mediums, such as films, books and audio, the workflow became convoluted and there was an opportunity to restructure. As a result, Becoming has now split into a series of interlocking modules, each responsible for a different domain: one for music, one for films, one for printed materials and one for virtual immaterials. These strands were separated out so that they might be woven back together again in a more organised arrangement.
For many years, the editorial line that held all of this together could be summed up by the slogan “queer cynicism, quantum sociology and non-musicology”, or, as a catch-all term, “negativism”. However, this editorial line gradually swerved until it started spiralling, forming a region or a field as it did. The initial flight-line, as a result, took a lot more under its wing than had been anticipated, and the need to restructure also presented an opportunity to evaluate the state of our editorial spiral.
Having first separated out the strands of music, prints and films, the remaining collection of what could be loosely categorised as ‘digital editorials’ (interviews, letters, articles, essays, and so on) seemed to form an interesting interpretation on the overarching editorial spiral. Across these editorials, the ideas of “queer cynicism” and “quantum sociology” seemed to slowly compound into something else that is difficult to name, a kind of cynicist, underground materialism that was equal parts chthonic (Medusa), sinusoidal (Tethys) and Delphic (Apollo). A materialism that is unified with sociology that has as much to do with hegemony as it does matter, or a materialism that positions the social as an order of matter. It is a materialism that cannot be classified as New because it is really quite old. Louis Althusser, and later Thomas Nail, wrote of what they called “the underground current of materialism” that ran from Heraclitus through to at least Marx. Yet this was not an identarian order, it was simply a group of philosophers who were grouped retroactively by Marxists through a process of mapping different forms of philosophy which appeared to rebuke or counterpose an enduring social hegemony. This form of materialism merged with a form of sociology that drew a lot from Baudrillard and those who might be called the Modern Cynics. A non-materialism, if you catch my drift. This presents an opportunity for the editorial line of Parékklisi to form the subterranean undercurrents of Becoming by reorienting around “the swerve” and this obviously-loaded sign “non-materialism”.
An exposition of the terms
There is a need to treat such a term with a certain suspicious apprehension, as it is the kind of term that seems extremely well suited to hype, simulation, and other processes that cause a sign to proliferate en-masse until inevitably becoming diffuse and meaningless. The word “materialism” and its prefix “non-“ are both contronyms, words which have multiple contradictory definitions, so when they are put together in such a way, the amount of possible interpretations spiral outward, wildly, until the sign transforms into a machine: a kaleidoscope. As you look through the sign, and as you twist it, different formations are realised, and the total set of variations forms a differential field. An excursus on this semiotic contraption ought to function rather well as an opening piece for Parékklisi, as it is through this differential field of formations through which the current line is now swerving.
The sign “non” has at least two important meanings within the world that Becoming inhabits. The first meaning is clear, non- is a term of negation where non-philosophical would mean not pertaining to the philosophical. The second meaning is a dark horse because it is also a term of negation, but there is a twist. Francois Laruelle began using the term to signify how western hegemony had recoded signs. In this case, Philosophy was to be regarded as the “Capital-Form of Thought”, and non-philosophy could gesture to a pre-capital or post-capital-form. In this sense, non-philosophy is not “not pertaining to the philosophical”, but somehow the opposite, of signalling to a philosophy that is somehow more true to what philosophy could be. The result is that non-materialism could mean either not pertaining to materialism or not pertaining to that kind of materialism.
This term, materialism, is almost beyond use due to its highly diffuse definitions. Materialism pertains to the philosophical position that there is nothing beyond matter, and it is usually positioned in opposition to Idealism. As can be explored in detail later, it can even be argued that the term Materialism doesn’t mean anything without the term Idealism existing first, existing therefore as a rebuke of Idealism. Materialism, as a philosophy, is often understood as empiricism, or otherwise as a general preoccupation with a particular understanding of matter that regards what can and cannot be measured. This idea of materialism is one that complies with western philosophical hegemony by following the logic of the language. Signs like “exist” are pre-coded as a part of a hegemony, in this case baring the result that the sign in English that represents “what is really there” or “not imaginary/figurative” is positively-charged via the “ex”. The “ex” describes a leaping-out of, thus a process of differentiation from something that is otherwise undifferentiated. Until something asserts itself in the positive, there is neither positive nor negative, there is only the undifferentiated. These positivistic metaphysics that operate with the assumption that only the positive ex-ists, implying a negative Other defined by a lack of presence, an abyss or void of absolute emptiness (something we now know is physically impossible). If the most seemingly-empty space is, at least on the quantum level, full, or maxed-out, then precisely what defines the positive? What exists positively and what exists negatively are ontologically inseparable as they are two orders of the same, and this fundamentally contradicts the basis of the assertion of the positive.
Baudrillard wrote that oppositionally-structured binaries like positive/negative are inherently masculinised, as to say they are produced by the positive for the positive, and never produced by the negative. The positive necessarily attempts to differentiate itself from everything else, and in doing so creates the idea of a not-positive which it labels negative. It is not possible to conceive of any hypothetical negative without first asserting its diametrically-opposed inversion. Until the word capitalism exists, its hard to conceive of a not-capitalism, even though the absence of the word capitalism might seem to imply exactly that, that there is yet no capitalism (not-capitalism being the opposite of capitalism). The preconditions of a sign contain the possibility of, if not being the exact definition of, the hypothetical negative, yet it isn’t possible to reasonably conceive of the hypothetical negative without the presence of the asserted positive. Until the masculine asserts itself as the positive, against everything else which it designates, as a part of its assertion of itself, not-masculine. Baudrillard’s semiology here reflects his broader understanding of metaphysics.
For Baudrillard, the real is singular, but it always appears two-fold. This is significantly different to Platonic or Cartesian metaphysics because the binary is not fundamental but illusory. When the singular real swerves until it folds back in on itself it takes on a two-fold appearance. In the case of Baudrillard, the singular real is Secret, indeterminate, and reality is a simulation of the real that has been determined through the arrangement of signs into a symbolic World. The World is a sign that, like all signs, tries to determine what is indeterminate, in this case attempting to draw a circle around the totality of where we seem to exist. In Laruellian terms, the Universe is the real and the World is the illusory simulation. In trying to determine what is indeterminate, signs must also swerve. Our understanding of the World swerves in one direction, the World itself swerves in another, and there may be moments where the two lines intersect but it certainly feels as though the World is constantly getting away from us.
Real Materialism & a sonorous Metaphysics
The work of Baudrillard and Laruelle here coincide very well with the metaphysics of the underground materialists, especially with Lucretius. In The Nature of Things, Lucretius formulates an inverted-Platonism where matter is an auto-generative flow. Matter creates matter by moving, or more specifically, matter appears to create more matter by folding in on itself. Matter moves chaotically and in-doing so creates metastatic orders, and this idea of materialism acknowledges the two-fold appearance of things without asserting either fold in the positive. The work of Szepanski and Nail can be brought together, where Nail’s Chaos is analogous to Szepanski’s Noise, and each respectively produces the analogous Order and Rhythm. Rhythm emerges from the Noise, but Rhythm is saturated by noise on every level and at every point, it is noise that has been injected with a sign: silence. There is no silence in a real that is fundamentally noise, so for a sound to differentiate itself from the background noise, it needs to be extremely loud. The presence of an extremely loud sound, creates the negative sign “silence”, a physically impossible ideal that takes the concept of loudness and hypothesises an oppositional other; this hypothetical negative is always a simulacra. Silence is not noise, silence is the attempt of sound to produce a sign that represents what noise would be without sound. Where Baudrillard would describe silence as a simulacrum of noise, a copy that has no relation to the original, Lucretius would also call silence a simulacra, meaning a weak illusory image of the mind (the mind and imagination having the weakest images of all). The chaotic arrangement of sound and its negative simulacrum leads to the miraculous/inevitable formation of order, a layer of morse code of Sound and Silence that covers up the singular chaotic Noise therefore making the real take on the appearance of being purely Rhythm (ordered) which is two-fold (sound and silence).
There are all kinds of reasons why this view on materialism contradicts the prevailing hegemony of the west, whether that be 1) contradicting the law of thermodynamics that suggests while order dissipate into complexity, order inevitably re-materialises within complexity, or (2) undermining the symbolic order of Patriarchy by suggesting that there are no grounds for the masculine to assert itself in the positive beyond self-interest, or (3) identifying and critiquing the internal logic of unilinear accumulation that characterises the hegemony of capitalist modernity. This version of materialism holds true to what materialism should be by its own definition: nothing. If materialism is the simulated negative other of idealism, it means that there is only a materialism that folds itself into idealism as a Lucretian simulacra. While taking the deliberately meaningless term “non-materialism”, there is an opportunity for this to remain distinctively anti-disciplinarian in the sense of Deleuze & Guattari — non-materialism can be all of its variations plus the additional interpretation of deliberately meaning ‘no-ism’, a wonderful term that also unravels upon inspection. After all, the philosophy of cynicism has much to do with rebuking and resisting hegemony in the form of customs and practices, sometimes being described as the philosophy of “No!” Or “the art of refusal”.
The World Rhythm
The World is a sign that refers to the simulation of the real that we produce on Earth as Man and experience as I, or We. The World is precisely where we exist, though our roots go beyond the World into the very matter that the World attempts to be in taking on the appearance of Earth. We have roots in the Earth because that is what we are made of, and the Earth and Man are both orders of chaos/swerving matter. On the other hand, the World, being of the order of Rhythm, represents an illusory and intermittent pattern or arrangement of all positive signs — the World is the Universe as it pertains to the simulation we produce on Earth as Man, it is the Universe minus everything unidentified, inapparent, or undefined. Yet, this idyllic positivist World, where there exists only that which is already accounted for, is cursed with a mistake. All signs are noisy, because what they attempt to signify is fundamentally noisy, no matter how rhythmic it appears to be. In order to keep up with chaos, the sign must be noisy, which brings this back to the first image of a sound breaking out of the noise by being noisier than noise. The World must contemplate with its own movement as well as the movement of all the signs it represents. The World must constantly recalculate—stopping, starting, infinitely—in a complex rhythm that increases in complexity until it swerves all the way back around to noise as its details become inaudible, undifferentiable.
Trying to name this way of understanding a unified philosophy and sociology, or a unified Lucretius and Baudrillard, could go on for a long time, though the subject matter appears to demand the right to constantly renegotiate itself. This editorial spiral pertains to Cynicism, to Underground currents of Materialism, to Marxism, to Poetic Mythology. The construction of this term “non-materialism”, a paradoxical non-identifier built out of contronyms, hopefully proves as an effective way of grounding the practices of this new project and provoking a wave of activity.