THE CATALYSIS OF THE BLACK SUN AND THE EVIL SPIRIT OF THE CURSED COBBLESTONES

G i a n   L u i g i   B i a g i n i

AGAINST THE LEFTIST ACADEMIC CONFORMISM:

A CURSING INTRODUCTION

“Utopia isn’t the right concept: it’s more a question of fabulation”. (Deleuze, 1995)

 

As you can understand from the title, this mini-essay winks at forms of hybrid narrative that cross the social sciences into fiction. With this I do not mean to devalue the concept of “fiction” in opposition to a supposed objective superiority of “reality”. In fact, from a Deleuzian point of view there is no clear separation between fiction and reality. Reality is simply a fiction institutionalized by powers that extract it, select it, stratify it and axiomatize it into a dominant syntax coded and decoded by a Signifier. This abstract machine of stratification reduces the immanent multiplicities of DIFFERENCE to a transcendent actualized identity-field: “reality”. This identity-field becomes the "given" for the production of a territorialized subject that experiences the oedipal affection of a striated, commodified, codified, disciplined space-time. It’s what Lukacs defines as “reification” of reality; what Mark Fisher addresses as the “Capitalist Realism”; and what Jean Baudrillard calls “hyperrealism”. Seen from this perspective the creation of new fictions is the productive effect of a subversive desiring machine that deterritorializes the dominant narrative and destratifies new becomings. A new fiction frees immanent virtual potentials beyond the actual present, for a people yet to come. The production of fiction allows experiments that, being anomalous "singularities", can break the general-particular scheme (of Aristotelian inheritance) on which the modern ideology-narratives are based. In fact, the big narratives do not place themselves in an immanent topology moved by singularities but in a perspective where the transcendent general of the actual is opposed to another transcendent general of the future: i.e., to values, narratives, institutions, fictions, already written for a people that already exist. It matters little whether these general ideologies confirm the present, like the neoliberal ones, or are projected into an alternative utopian leftist future. What these narratives lack is an immanent and singular experimental space-time where the fiction is experimented and embodied in the fold of an untimely anachronism.


For me, having discarded the possibility of an art subordinated to the dominant capitalist code, a fusion between expression and politics is possible only on this singular, experimental, anomalous and inchoate ground. With my bastard praxis, I destratify my expression from the capitalist code but also from the propaganda of the supposed leftist moral superiority of an already written counter-narrative for an identity-people of militants. This implies a reconfiguration of the idea of politics as a singular immanent production of new fictions - i.e. "myth-sciences" (O’Sullivan, 2016) or "hyperstitions" (Nick Land, 1995) - able to create interspaces, arrhythmias, cracks in the dominant narrative, but also in the already established historical counter-narratives. I do not recognize history as a matter of fact because it is always written by the winners. I also do not recognize a counter-history of revenge of the losers. I do not even identify with any historically constituted origin, as a point of projection for a political position or a militant consistency. Instead, I participate in a heterogeneous practice of simulacral becoming that starts from the messy middle of a singular life. Furthermore, fiction for me is not simply a matter of "minor literature" (Deleuze, 1986) but is a throwing of my body into a limit-experience: often at the risky limits on the edge of the Law, where the intervention of Police establishes the boundaries of "reality" through punishment. This reconfiguration of politics as a singular event of “a” life is often misunderstood by academic scholars perched up in their militant leftist tradition, and sometimes my texts and my praxis are the subject of violent personal offense and vilification. Unfortunately, the relationship between "judge" and "accused" (a sad Kantian legacy of the tribunal of pure reason established in the academy) is not symmetrical - and does not allow the accused to resort to a third judicial body, as ordinary and administrative justice, at least, guarantees.


Other concepts that the left-wing judges of the “political/artistic field” detest are those of "simulacrum", "perceptual-affective writing", "occult", and "Je". In the first case of the list, the Platonic tradition is evident, rooted also in the ideology of the left, which sees in the “simulacrum” a form of malicious and dangerous falsification of authentic political-ethical engagement. The condemnation of experimental and perceptual-affective writing, is instead a Kantian prejudice of the academic judge based on the Critique of Pure Reason that Jean-Francois Lyotard has widely deconstructed and counter-attacked. In "The Differend" (1989), Lyotard unfolds a subversive interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and thoroughly explains the advantages of an aesthetic and hybrid approach to the text to show through a “crack” what, with a  strictly rigorous format or established genre, could not be revealed. Even Deleuze often alludes to the advantage of a "shape" text, over an arborescent textual "form", to by-pass the censorship of the Court of Reason. Writing in a singular, figural, and a-modal form is in itself a political act! All post-Nietzschean thought asks us to embody Dionysian intensities into the text! However, most of the Academy, in search of scientific legitimation, remains coldly planted on the first Kantian critique founded on scientific formalism, which excludes the integration of “affects” in a text. Is not this scientific formalism a paradox if our texts concern with heterogeneous artistic expressivity instead of sociological positivist phenomena? In addition to this positivist paradox I have noticed that when I mention the words "gnosis" or "occult", left-wing reviewers immediately cling to Freud’s or Adorno’s prejudice, who saw in magical practices a form of dangerous regression. In this case, I invite my reviewer to read the book The Hermetic Deleuze by Joshua Ramey ( and to consult the intertextual network referred to in the bibliography of this essay. Last, but not least, I want to refute the possible accusation of some reviewers to use illegitimately the pronoun “Je” (in english “I”) and, consequently, to give a narcissistic account of my experience. I agree that a schizo-nomadology of DIFFERENCE, based on an impersonal and pre-individuated field - mediated by a third person, in my case the Anartist transpersona - can screech with the use of the subjective pronoun “I”. Indeed, the Anartist is a multiplicity of differential daemons that breaks with the ontology of the first person.  However, one can listen to Deleuze's video-recorded lecture on the "Je" (on you-tube) where he elaborates on the immanent tension between “I” and “It” (or between an i and an I of the Earth). Yet, in this lecture, Deleuze invites us to consider the use of "Je" not as a tabu. Rather, he adds, it is not bad habit to transgress a tabu! It is clear that the experience of writing, memory, and subjectivity are reconstructions of the twilight experience of an impersonal “third person” who is too broad for the subject; but this does not have to castrate a creative re-writing of the experience, which is always an artistic act. (Otherwise, an almighty-writer should re-write every istant from the implicated perspectives of an infinite number of subjects). 


With this preventive deconstruction and reconstruction of my perspective - and its possible objections - I ask the “court” of reviewers to take into account the epistemological-discursive basis from which my writing and my practice start, and I therefore ask for a fair and non-offensive judgment. Obviously, my heterogeneous form of expression and content can be criticized from other epistemological and more supposedly “orthodox” political-artistic perspectives;  but since there is no dogmatic common ground to define a discursive or stylistic “truth” in this "fringe" of knowledge, I cannot tolerate a blind totalitarian arrogance of judgment. Therefore, I invite the “court” to accept the invitation of Derrida’s “Margin” (1984), that it would be good practice, “persephoner le tympane”, before expressing judgments of “truth”.


To conclude: this text pursues dark political interspaces on the guise of the uncanny, the subversive, and the unknown as well as my  Anartist practice. This text therefore only responds to my praxis and can only be accused of not being sufficiently occult by the purist modern “demistificator” of the Enlightenment, but not of not being "political" enough; just because it pursues an ambiguous and seductive path.

 

 

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

If the unheard, unspoken

Word is unspoken, unheard;

Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,

The Word without a word, the Word within

The world and for the world;

And the light shone in darkness and

Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled

About the centre of the silent Word.

 

T. S. Eliot

A r j a    R e i m a n     d e s i g n e r

I am doing a ritual of political sorcery inside the Museum of Cultures of Helsinki. I want to introduce disturbing elements of black bloc counter-culture inside its abstract machine to make stammer the reality-effect. 

SPELL AND COUNTER-SPELL: THE BEWITCHING REFRAIN OF THE CAPITALIST SPACE-TIME

"Differences induced or produced by repetitions constitute the thread of time?" (Lefebvre, 1993)

 

"In the theatre of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary" (Deleuze, 1994)


Space is designed by the abstract machine of the money-form to capture time and inscribe its rhythm for the production, consumption and reproduction of capital. This coupling forms a capitalist space-time potentially conflictual. One can perceive it by reading both Deleuze’s and Lefebvre’s literatures. Both of them not only have in common a perspective based on rhythms, refrain, and music; but they would also agree that repetition is an intensification, and, therefore, time has the tendency to escape from the capture of designed space. This happens because the resonance of repetition generates a Difference that cannot be annulled in a perfectly circular and identical identity. What eternally returns is the ellipse of Difference - partially captured in the Capitalist repetition of the abstract machine implemented in urban space - but that tends to exceed it. What returns is the immanent metamorphosis of the Earth that exceeds the fascicular signifier of the Capitalist abstract machine and its space-time articulations.


Urban space is today an intelligent techno-capitalist machine, able to respond to the excess of difference integrating it in its flexible axiomatic evolution. Capitalism is an intelligent predator that can renew its rhythm and develop an evolving differentiation originated and mediated by exchange value. Is capitalism a metamorphic machine that has integrated its own death (Land, 2011) to evolve and speed up until it reaches a catastrophic melt-down with the plane of immanence? This is the accelerationist perspective. O'Sullivan, instead, counter-poses a praxis of narrative cut-ups that generate vacuoles and bifurcations, that slow and deviate capitalist dynamics. Apparently, the two visions are not incompatible because there is always a re-coding of the line of flight and its cut-up. Indeed, urban space is a coded space that always manages to revolutionize itself and integrate lines of flight in an innovation of the division of labor of space.


In this way, the variable design of the urban space is always differentiated, and its parts are connected and processed by a code that decodes every flow (desire, energy, info...) through the rhythm of an extremely flexible production. The control of the rhythm is the key of the axiomatic. Space is produced, Lefebvre would say, to produce and reproduce a rhythm. Rhythms are conjunctions and disjunctions, opening and closing. According to Lefebvre, the subaltern class should develop a new marxist consciousness of urban space to organize and appropriate the means of production of space in the moment of its crisis - when the contradiction between the rhythms of the living and the abstract space clash in an open conflict. But this is easier to theorize than to do, in fact, after ’89, with the onslaught of delocalization, globalization, and digitization, the code of capitalist space has become so complex, abstract, fast, and flexible that it resembles an ungraspable bewitching refrain - as Isabelle Stengers (2004) has noticed. The partition of space is commanded by an invisible and ubiquitous force that profanes everything without being profaned by nothing - as Agamben (2007) has put it. Urban space is a totalitarian space that aims at total commodification, reification, and fetishization - a space that Debord has named the “Integrated Spectacle”.


In this blinding and paradoxically ubiquitous space-time, Lefebvre's urban-revolutionary project of the late seventies appears obsolete; not only because the conditions of a consciousness of space are no longer given - the space appears as an infinite, instantaneous, and aleatory prison-labyrinth – but, also, because in such a pulverized space-time, the idea of project itself is obsolete, let alone a collective project. (In fact, a project is a modern tool that presupposes a consistent separated identity-subject from which to project and organize a future in a structure.) As Marx prophesied "everything that is solid melts into thin air", now also the subject can only be an antagonist super-ject in emergence: expressed quasi-mystically by the plane of immanence and its singular conjurations of speeds and rhythms. Even if locally structured collective projects of socialization of space were possible, capitalism would exploit the added urban value of enhanced livability through Gentrification. For example, as it happens in Berlin with urban counter-cultural expression of graffiti artists (at this point, more decorative than subversive), their expression is captured in a branded effort to increase rents. (See Fig. aside).


Berlin has been transformed into a hub for young tourists looking for metropolitan stimuli and a cool scene in which to place the representation of themselves. Often these cool tourists are artists (or at least creatives) who wish to project their consumerist narcissism, built on a romantic-bourgeois ideal, into a trendy scene; while remaining captured in the artist residency business. Residencies today, not only in Berlin, but in all the metropolitan centers of the world, are becoming a business machine to speculate on the "Urban" brand that arises from the institutionalized molarization of the molecular underground: turning an atmospheric and heterogeneous assemblage in apparatus of capture. The art system, made up of curators and other employees, extracts value and indentity-visibility from the molecular dimension of the creative scene. This art business is well integrated with the city's commercial and tourist appeal policies carried out by the planners that govern the city. In fact, we live in a metropolis-world whose main node is a cluster of city-centers that compete for the flows that cross them. Focusing on the "Urban" brand is surely a good strategic move for marketing differentiation in the competition for global touristic flows. In this way, predatory Capitalism imposes its spelling rhythm on everything on Earth.

 

 

 

 

I am spreading black mana on the streets of Berlin to infect the "Urban" brand-marketing of the City. I am surrounding a milionaire art residency with a cursing tape to make visible the camouflaged speculation.

THE ANARTIST AS SUBVERSIVE SORCERER

If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume”. (Deleuze,1995)

 

The future of free expression in this digit-urban network appears blind, one can only experiment with subversive interventions that, as Baudrillard would say, can produce a disorientation of the space even more confusing than the urban simulated space - in order to escape the control of the code. These experiments must be able to generate an anomaly in a mobile panopticon-space dominated by super-intelligent algorithms that manage the capitalist rhythm through instantaneous processors, and treat the individuals as "dividuals", “data” and "objectiles". In this instantaneous space without planning, only subversive temporary lines of flight of super-jects are possible, which could "elude control, generating new space-times, however small their surface or volume" (Deleuze, 1995).


A line of flight is like a narrative cut-up embodied in an action that tries to un-work and generate arrhythmias in the narrative instituted in space-time. The super-ject of these interventions, that I have called Disturbanism, is the Anartist. The Anartist is a figure yet to come, like Nietzsche's over-man. In fact, this figure is born as an avatar from my subversive practice, my experience, and my imagination – even though I know I will be judged too narcissistic if I said that the Anartist’s features coincide perfectly with myself and my practice.


Therefore, the Anartist is a potential space for experimentation of a subjectivity enfolded in the urban space, and Disturbanism is his or her practice of destratification. (Anyone can experiment with the potential of the Anartist). Indeed, the line of flight of a Disturbanist intervention cuts the cartesian striate of space-time, and throws the enfolded capitalist subject – produced as a discontinuous egocentric entity by the money-form – into a super-ject, unfolding in the immanence of the continuum. The super-ject in its becoming-animal, and anorganicity regains the intense and deep refrain of the Earth.


The Disturbanist intervention unleashes the powerful magnetic forces of the occult acting under and above the extended surface of capitalism. The transition from this surface to the occult is like a passage from organic to anorganic, from witchcraft to switchcraft, from spell to a more intense and powerful counter-spell. The Disturbanist intervention participates in a more or less intense telluric fault-line that crosses the space with its chthonic vibration, provoking a crack of the established sense that starts stuttering in a “dissensus” (Rancière, 2010). In fact, this passage throws the Anartist and its intervention into participation with the chthonic occult. Therefore, this passage can be seen as a sort of urban sacrifice of transgression and dissolution, that produces a deterritorialization on the edge of the immanent death, where the actual is counter-actualized in the virtual. The cut generated by the line of flight produces an arrhythmia in the capitalist rhythm that immediately stammers and frees time from its spatialization and unleashes a bloc of becomings in which time is "out of joint" and the "I is another". Here, in this schizophrenic line of flight, the Anartist - the mediating figure incarnating a Disturbanist super-ject - can experience the immanence of Difference in a becoming of becomings where demons, spirits, and monstrous intensities of a Cosmic Ayon reveal their occult presence. The repetition of these magical experiences of the outside not only generates a daimonic mythology that is a direct expression of the plane of metamorphosis, but also generates a gnostic practice of contact with occult forces.


The Disturbanist intervention generates a chaosmagic nihilophany that reveals the mysterious ground of a chaosmic body without organs that activates the vital percept-chakras of the Anartist’s body and its capacities to affect and be affected by the virtual plane (the Undead) at each new chaosmotic experience. This Anartist practice of participation with the Undead allows the Anartist to acquire the deep uncanny experience of the immanence that allows an ontological rupture of being. The Anartist becomes the avatar of a political shaman. With each intervention, the Anartist intensifies its accursed refrain-territory to emerge as a daimonic avatar that brings my action into a singular worlding of incremental potentiality. The Disturbanist intervention of the Anartist is a practice of destratification of a political "apprentice sorcerer" (Bataille, 1985) that learns to harness the violent magic forces of the back-ground to produce symbols, sigils, and actions charged with provocative black mana.

While the Nigredo-cube in the Museum is almost concluded, I build a talisman of stones in Kamppi Square. As I am constructing the sacred altar to the" rioter" in front of a commercial center, I sense a metallic cloud of empty cubes behind me. As I approach the structure, I read that is the monument to the "entrepreneur". This is one of many weird synchronisms that happen in my interventions. My provocations have an enigmatic revelatory dimension that is also ironic. They elicit mysterious sympathies of an occult alphabet. 

 

 

 

 

THE MANA OF MONEY AND THE ALL-SEEING EYE OF THE MASONIC DOLLAR

“Mana is not simply a being, it is also an action, a quality, a state. In other cases, the word is a noun, an adjective, and a verb. One refers to an object as mana in order to refer to its quality; in this sense, the word acts as a kind of adjective (it cannot be said of a man). People say that a being, a spirit, a man, a stone, or a rite has mana, “the mana to do such and such a thing”. The word mana is employed in many different conjugations - it can be used to mean “to have mana”, “to give mana”, etc. On the whole, the word covers a host of ideas which we would designate by phrases such as a sorcerer’s power, the magic quality of an object, a magical object, to be magical, to possess magical powers, to be under a spell, to act magically. The single word embraces a whole series of notions which, as we have seen are interrelated, but which have always been represented as separate concepts. It reveals to us what has seemed to be a fundamental feature of magic - the confusion between actor, rite, and object.” (Mauss, 1972)

 

Mana is not definable, it is not representable, it is schizophrenic, it is everywhere, it is a field of intensity. The Mana is under and above, before and after, within and without, the structuring of an organizational and syntactic plan based on a Signifier and a Signified. Mana is pre-linguistic and pre-identified or over-identified; it is a bloc of becoming-cosmic that constitutes an anorganic and counter-natural machinic phylum. Mana is also exchanged in the sacrificial self-destruction of the “gift”. The gift of the Potlatch is not only a pure expenditure that forms a sort of sacrificial cosmic bond between tribes, but also an accursed action that abolishes the dangerous threshold of accumulation that could generate a Despot and a State. The mana remains a-Signifying until the body of a Despot, magically capture it, and becomes the center of signification and articulation of a State imposing taxes over the subjugated territories (Deleuze&Guattari).


In the contemporary world mana is accumulated in money. The money-form also re-codes the State as an executive quasi-slave. The assemblage between money and State forms a space-time that captures mana to make it work for the reproduction of that space-time matrix-configuration. In fact, one can superpose the pure form of time and the flow of mana captured in the rhythmic machine of Capitalism. The rhythm itself is spelling mana. Money beats the time of mana in a tam tam articulated in the totalitarian spell of an abstract transcendent Idol. This is the hypnotic and mystifying spell of exchange value that materializes, as Marx would say, in the fetishism of commodification (that is the concentration of reified mana). 


The most evident symbol of mana concentration in money is the pyramidal Eye of the American dollar. Here it is clear the magical influence of the Egyptian and Hermetic tradition present in Masonic esotericism - that since the foundation of the USA (George Washington was a high-rank mason) has crossed and cemented the US establishment. The Eye first appeared as part of the standard iconography of the Freemasons in 1797, with the publication of Thomas Smith Webb’s Freemasons Monitor. It represents the all-seeing eye of God and is a reminder that man's thoughts and deeds are always observed by God (who is referred to in Masonry as the Great Architect of the Universe). Typically, the Masonic Eye of Providence has a semi-circular glory below it. Sometimes this Masonic Eye is enclosed by a transcendent triangle. US political, military, economic, and financial elites (in addition to obvious imperial purposes) are also composed of members of closed and occult circles that, one can assume, perceive themselves as the eyes of a Great Architect who decides the fate of the World, and probably also that of the Universe. The suspicion of an occult plan by the masonic american establishment grows when we consider that the dollar was created when the US was preparing to become the global empire and also today the petrol-dollar represents the geo-strategic key of the empire.


The sorcerous symbol of the "dollar" was chosen in 1935 by president Roosevelt. The declaration of the Secretary of Agriculture and Vice President Henry A. Wallace in a published letter written in 1951 clarifies everything: "Roosevelt, as he looked at the colored reproduction of the Seal, was first struck with the representation of the "All Seeing Eye," a Masonic representation of The Great Architect of the Universe. Next, he was impressed with the idea that the foundation for the new order of the ages had been laid in 1776, but that it would be completed only under the eye of the Great Architect. Roosevelt, like myself, was a 32nd degree Mason." You must consider also that Roosevelt was the 32nd president of the USA and the New York Masonic lodge, to which Roosevelt and the key figures of his administration belonged, was Lodge 32. This is just the occult numerology related to dollar but there are many interesting stories about this symbol of intense mana. I read that Roosevelt and Wallace were very devoted to a Russian occultist who contributed to the choice of the symbol.


In any case, in addition to proven facts, there are many legends and conspiracy theories on the occult origin of the symbol. This is part of the concentration of magnetic mana. Nonetheless, I enjoy imagining the conspiratorial connections between the dollar symbol and historical facts. For example, the fact that the bricks (masons) of the pyramid, which gave name to the Masons, have been used to reconstruct, in a very profitable way, the European cities in the post-war period according to the dictates of the Marshall plan - that we know was managed by masonic lodges. Furthermore, if one looks at the frescoes that decorate ancient Masonic lodges, one will notice the skies in which the dollar symbol stands out above and the euro symbol immediately below. Is it possible that there is an occult project of the Western elites that spans the centuries and refers to Freemasonry? And that new technologies, such as BIG DATA, are just a paranoid, occult prosthesis of this project and its anxiety of control? If that were so, then the apparent elusiveness of capitalism would be just an illusion that covers a secret and centralized cryptic techno-project of conspiracy networks of elitist circles, like in  Delillo’s novels. Perhaps that new technologies do not work through encryption of codes? The mana has filled the crypt. Even the police alternate cryptic surveillance, crypto-data and front-line militarization. All conspiracy theorists agree that this hidden elite controls the FED where dollars are printed (or better, techno-digited). However, the vision of a financial market dominated by instantaneous, aleatory, and ungraspable dynamics is not incompatible with a centralized financial pseudo-Keynesism and globalization promoted by a market-deregulating elite. The effects of these dynamics shape urban space and affect everyday life. As you can see by my Disturbanist intervention in Pittsburgh, I have played with the intense mana of the all-seeing dollar on the streets of the city to remodulate the sense of this powerful “energy”. See figures aside.

 

 

The pyramid of dollar was made with cardboard found on the streets. In skating through Pittsburgh, that is a city with a strong masonic tradition and full of modern-gothic skyscrapers with pyramid-roofs, I passed through begging homeless and other characters laying on the street under the shadow of corporations' offices.  

 THE EVIL SPIRIT OF THE BLACK COBBLESTONES

 

"'The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous'." (Deleuze, 1988) 


The reading of the dollar symbol shows that its power is based on a solidly imperialist, occult-Masonic institutional construction. This imperialist institutional building is also supported by an elitist pyramidal hierarchy and an architectural sense of power - even if today, the masonic elite promote a deregulation that unleashes complex dynamics decoded by a techno-code approaching the speed of calculus of Artificial Intelligence. The metaphoric material that bonds this Dark Enlightenment’s architecture - and its elite - is the “Masonic brick” symbol. In Italian language brick is translated with "mattone" and in ancient times the "t" was written with "s". This is why "mattone" became "massone" (mason). The mason is also the worker who builds with “mattoni” (bricks) following the plan of an architecture. The symbolic material that openly opposes the elitist masonic “brick”, and its power of construction, is the “black cobblestone” that the antagonist rebels, mostly Black Blocs, extract from the streets to launch against the police which, ultimately, guarantee the occult order imposed by the elite. Against the elitist monopoly of violence of the molar institution and its “bricks”, exercised through the arms of the police, the black cobblestones, extracted from the streets, are the only symbolic weapon that anonymous citizens have in their availability to claim their "right to the city". Extracting a cobblestone from the street is a anarchitectural and deconstructive act of the urban money-form, a counter-actualization of the capitalist architecture implemented in the city. While the symbol of the masonic brick, present in the pyramid of the dollar, captures all the transcendent mega-violence of global capitalism, whose code organizes and builds the con-separation of space-time of the World-City, the cobblestone expresses the symbol and the mana of a micro-immanent, decentralized, and widespread molecular violence.


The Black Bloc Riot expresses a disjunctive symbiosis with the deep intensities of the Earth that exceed the capitalist techno-architecture and its money-rhythm. The Sacred Riot, as an excess of expenditure, is an urban sacrifice where the minor heterogeneous not only transgress the profane order of the capitalist homogeneous everyday of the middle-class, but also the major sacrum of the elite (Bataille, 1985). Even the Black Bloc, so much as the Great Architects, are inscribed in a   sacred crypto-economy and a sacred crypto-politics. It is interesting to note that even Black Blocs, which embody the mana of the profane minor sacred, are creatures of the occult with their black clothes and their black balaclavas. One might think that the Black Bloc costume has only the tactical value of becoming anonymous to the police during urban guerrilla warfare, but it is also a sacred costume. Wearing a black balaclava is a dissolutive act by the identity of the subject to join the continuum of immanence. It's a s-witching gesture derived from the Alchemical Nigredo. By occulting his or her subjectivity the Black Bloc becomes the medium of the "black mana" power that lays in the dark background from where every figure of identity emerges. This back-ground is crossed by differential forces of immanence. It is interesting to note the consonance between "mana" and "im (man) ence" even if they have different linguistic roots. (Is not this an example of the irony of the occult heterogeneous series of rhythms?)

 

 

This installation was realized in a gallery-window located in front of the line of poor people that go to get food from the Salvation Army. It's clearly a provocation: almost a trigger for a riot. The stones are also set in a way that risk to crumble and breaking the glass.

THE BLACK MANA OF BLACK BLOC: THE COUNTER-CAPITAL

Personally I can only decide in one way being myself precisely this "unemployed negativity". (Bataille, 1937)


Today, the only ones who can produce a counter-intensity to profane capitalism and regenerate the sacredness of urban space are the Black Bloc with their Dionysian violence that has no utilitarian project. In fact, Capitalism can integrate any transgression but cannot integrate the Black Bloc's pure wasting violence. This expenditure of creative violence is based on an ancestral ritualistic force that generates an alternative mythology infested with a more intense and deeper mana - a will of intensity that is in excess to the one captured by the digit-capitalist tam tam. The Black Bloc participate in the intensity of the black mana that invests them with a powerful and mythical evil aura. This is why capitalism keeps them at a safe distance. Because when the Black Aura is captured by the Integrated Spectacle it amplifies and expands. In this way, Capitalism, which normally does not fear transgressions, risks to incorporate an expansive viral infection inside itself. Black Blocs engage Capitalism in a destructive Potlatch: an exchange of heterogeneous mana with different intensities. In fact, Capitalism has profaned with its violence any form of traditional sacredness, accumulating a vast reserve of mana-power-energy, but with the contagious power of the Black Bloc’s Evil Aura any accumulation becomes a negative counter-accumulation. Capitalism must face this more destructive, subversive, viral, and energizing mana - the corrosive black mana. Black Mana is too sexy for Capitalism. The Black Bloc is the war machine of the desiring anti-production that reverts production with a virulent infection of the capitalist medium. The Black Blocs, due to their participation with immanent intensity, from which they extract aura, symbols, and mythology, can form a counter-attractor and a counter-capital inside the Integrated Spectacle. This Black counter-attractor is the Black Sun: a specter of specters infested by the demonic nature of the Chthulucene’s forces (Haraway, 2017).

 

 

Here, me and John Dunn, we are playing a series of provocative performances between the gallery-window full of cobblestones and the line of poor people getting food for free from the Salvation Army.

THE ANARTIST,  THE “SCREEN” AND THE SPECTROPOIESIS OF THE BLACK SUN

"To this principle, which seemed to come in between all other principles to separate them, and yet to link them together, I gave the name of Demonic, after the example of the ancients, and of those, at any rate, had perceptions of the same kind." (Goethe, 1849)

 

"And Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"

"He replied, "My name is Legion; for we are many."

(The Gospel according to Mark.)



The Anartist, who is the avataric figure embodied in my Disurbanist interventions, spell-parasites the Evil Aura of the Black Blocs’ anti-production, re-modulating their mythology, aesthetics, symbolism and occultism in new site-specific, sorcerous compositions. In fact, the Black Block mythology is a concentration of Evil, a cursed counter-capital, which the Anartist can spread as a contagious cuss to profane Capitalism - but also to screen and shield itself from the valorization of the Evil Eye of the Integrated Spectacle (a panoptic eye well represented by the symbolism of the dollar). Capitalism can integrate every artistic transgression in its code, but cannot integrate the Black Bloc profanations, whose evil contagion cannot be stopped by the negative stigma of the Capitalist Eye. Conversely, the contagion of the evil specters can expand in large measures when absorbed by the avid pupil of the Spectacle. In this dynamic, the strategy of the Anartist - that is a “trans-persona” marker - that as such can be single but also a swarm of multiplicity - is to remodulate and expand the hauntology and the spectral infection of the Black Bloc Aura in the urban Spectacle. This contagious affection could be spread until the blinding of the Capitalist Eye and the counter-emergence of a darkly shining Black Sun mythology. This mythology should be an emerging attractor, a virtual quasi-cause, triggering the production of an anti-productive desiring machine nested on the Black Bloc’s urban war machine. This assembling Heteron should work as an open-source machine based on Difference.


In fact, anyone who is brave and creative enough, can dress in black clothes and disguise himself with a black balaclava to expand the contagion of the black mana energies and symbolism with site-specific interventions or installations. The Anartist can invade and infect galleries, museums, biennials, or directly the streets or squares of the Capitalist Global City. Thus, every Anartist is a Black Bloc simulacrum and a transpersona marker and can remodulate the Black Bloc hauntology in an expansive bifurcating spectropoiesis. The Anartist passes from the position of spectator to the one of spectrator implicated in a rhizome of black mana. The black mana becomes the basic fold for new chaosmotic lines of flight from which the Anartist, who is a political sorcerer, extracts new mythology, new intensities and new profanatory counter-capital and counter-spells. This black mythology is therefore like a never completed chaosmogony that generates an aggressive and corrosive counter-refrain within the capitalist urban space and the Integrated Spectacle which is a catalyst of spectra.


The line of flight of the Anartist will then deterritorialize not only the site-specific space of his or her interventions but also the mythology in which new spectra and symbols will be injected and added. In this way, the chaosmogony generated by the symbiosis will never crystallize in a closed cosmology but it will always be opened by new dark precursors, new lines of flight, new becomings, new differences. Because the Anartist is a transpersona marker, the heterogeneous and singular production of each avatar’s incarnation will not be dispersed and subsumed by the Capitalist Machine but re-territorialized in the magnetism of the Black Sun. Each singularity of the multiplicity of the Heteron of the Anartist will generate a counter-accumulation of black mana that will be re-invested in new desiring and deterritorializing lines of flight that, nevertheless, will conserve its evil trace. The disjunctive investment will be repeated again and again to increase the intensity of the Black Sun. This machinic Heteron will mark the catalysis of an uncoded and expanding territory: a black terra incognita. The raising Black Sun of black angels will be a concentration of mana that will give full expression to the occult monster-plane of the metamorphosis with its chaosmagic production at the limit of the Undead. The Heteron of the Anartist is an heterogeneous assemblage non-mediated by a center of signification. The Heteron will invade the urban space with a multiplicity of molecular and decentralized symbolic deaths, that will unwork the money-form and its techno-eschatology of mega-violence and mega-death. The money-form dissolved in the Nigredo of the formless-city will unleash new affirmative and decentralized becomings of becomings that will invade, with black dissensus, the space of the city as black waves of a Black Tide or black rays of a Black Sun.

This installation-performance appeared in the exhibition of 3 Anartists (me, John Dunn, Vito Giorgio). We provocatively titled the exhibition DOLF. We wanted to provoke a schizo-profanatory event by integrating the evil spirit of the Black Bloc (that are Antifa) with the specter of Hitler that is the fascist symbol of the Evil. A monster-conjunction that raised leftist stigma on my person.

HYPERSTITION AS A SWITCH-FLIGHT

“Hyperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality. The hyperstitional object is no mere figment or ‘social construction’ but it is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it.” (Land, 2011)

 

“Hyperstition has four characteristics: They function as (1) an element of effective culture that makes itself real, (2) as a fictional quality functional as a time-travelling device, (3) as coincidence intensifiers, and (4) as a call to the Old Ones.” (Land, 2011)

 

 

Hyperstition, a term coined by Nick Land, is a fictional idea that magically catalyzes its actualization through an explosion of magnetic positive feed-backs. As, for example, the fiction narrative of “Cyberspace” has catalyzed a vast diagram of financial, intellectual, and other virtual forces for its own becoming-actual. According to this notion, one could read the catalysis of the BLACK SUN as a potential hyperstition. All my practice could be said to reside on the hyperstitional edge between praxis, theory, and fiction; but my practice can also be seen as an untimely prophecy for a people and an Event yet to come. A prophecy that is already lived and embodied in the now. Indeed, in a Disturbanist intervention and in my writings about it, I already live and already experience an anachronistic tension toward the future and toward an immemorial past of simulacra and specters that possess my becoming. In fact, in the BLACK SUN hyperstition, not only fiction and reality fade into each other, but also the virtual and the actual, the unconditioned and the conditioned superpose and intertwine.In this superposition of planes, I live in an unrooted now or in a deterritorialized presence - that is also an absence and a void full of potential. This paradoxical ontology, similar to the one of the shaman, can only be lived through the untimely pre-sentiments of an hyperstitional threshold that one can try to explicate by language but is veritably implicated in a zero-infinite chaosmystic intensity. Furthermore, this paradoxical becoming proceeds with ordeals and revelatory hyrophanies extracted by the chaosmosis of my transgressive interventions in the urban space.  These interventions are like revelatory hieroglyphics of an occult sense. In fact, as Ramey would put, it is the ordeal of a sorcerer that grounds the belief in the power of an animistic and immanent res intensa that unfolds as an implicated rhizome without dualisms. Because the Anartist practice is a sort of immanent phase-space, “spatium”, that crosses many thresholds of metamorphosis at many levels, it can be seen as the subtle line of a witch-flight, or, if considered as a counter-spelling of the capitalist spell, as a joyful switch-flight in the body without organs.

 

 

Chaos Bells, Chaos Bells

AEPALIZAGE

belief systems come crashing down,

because we sigilize, hey!

Chaos bell, Chaos bells 

Chaos all the way, oh what fun it is to

ride on a star made of 8 rays.

Crashing through belief, on a star made of 8 rays.

watch the mortals weep, trying to seize the day

Immanentizing Eschaton, don't forget us in your wake,

We’ll return to planet Earth and Chaos we’ll remake.

Ohhhh, Chaos bells, Chaos bells

Chaos all the way, oh what fun it is to ride

on a star made of 8 rays.

 

James Lin

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This profaning intervention was realized in the female shaman section of the Museum Dar Si Said in Marrakech. The Black Cubba and the outline of the King-check represent a concentration of paternalistic religious and political power. The women revenge by launching stones of the streets over their cage in a ritual of destruction.