**Links to**: [[Marx]], [[Marx in Motion]], [[Du Bois]], [[C. S. Peirce]], [[Hegel]], [[Necessity]], [[Nietzsche]], [[Schopenhauer]], [[William James]], [[Dao]], [[Communism]], [[Choice]], [[Constraint]], [[Chance]], [[Tychism]], [[Freedom]], [[Free will]], [[McKenzie Wark]], [[Alicia Juarrero]], [[Polycomputation]] ### Central Claim The idea that follows is very simple and has been repeated throughout history _ad nauseam_ (in flows of the Dao, or more recently by Nietzsche via Schopenhauer), yet we still desperately hold the vomit back, shutting our *traps*. What follows, chiming in with this historical chant, will be tuned to and by this: a *verbal*, and thus conceptual; *dialogical* and thus political move needs to be made from **choices to chances**: from isolated “decisions,” to distributed conditions and the layered implications of their perspectival [[Vantagepointillism]]. Forgive the banality, but this is a move from the vestiges of domination and control (a presentation of Deleuze’s _reactive_ memory), to the variations of chaos and contingency (perhaps his _active_ forgetting). This is a simple argument and in its implication lies true communism. Getting rid of the concept of *choice* gets rid of the bullshit, free-agent, future-capturing, colonially regurgitating, meritocratic condition we seem to inhabit under the various guises of desiring-legitimacy (fearful hoarding; capitalism). An encounter with *chance*, instead, actually awakens the distributed, modulatory power that is held by the tuning of a collective historicomaterialist process. Chances are based on what is given (not that anything strictly _is_ given, clearly), on conditions, while choices (and ensuing “decisions”) are surreptitiously presented as commandeering eagle-eye outlashings. It seems much of what we do rests on the question: _why did **x** do **y**_? But, given our dis- and re-orienting narratives throughout (deep) time: there is no **x**, only **y**. **x** had no choice, there were only chances that **y** would happen (and that this could be contemplated as such). The suggestion made is that language can be more attuned to chances. In order to present these considerations different concepts will be explored. **Condition**: historical calls (Du Bois, Peirce). **Context**: contemporary contemplations on constraints (Juarrero). **Calls** to order and **(dis)composition** (Moten). **Construction**, capacity, concentration, contestation (_Atlas of Experimental Politics_). **Collaboration**, **capital** and **contrast** (Marder, Wark). (Poly)**computation** and **control** (Levin). Cause, change, care, caution, camaraderie, combination, coordination, characteristic, creature, carcass, center, chaos, collapse, class struggle, contemporary catastrophe, consistency, complexity, comprehension, collection, connection, comparison, cosmos, collusion and conclusion (though there will be none) are also interesting.^[Rest, interesting, restraint, restant, wrest: “... of energy as rest and accomplishment.” “It will be of vital import to forge an association, a synergetic bond, between these limits and a community that is, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, inoperative, and that is sympathetic to Georges Sorel’s proletarian general strike with its suspension of “productive” work, which reproduces the worker’s existence strictly as an appendage to the reproduction of capital. I will maintain, in chapter 5, that _inoperative_ communities and general strikes are _more_ energetic than the productive business as usual, not less. They instantiate the positive powerlessness of accomplishment, putting an end to work that operates on behalf of capital and that follows the predictable pattern of means and ends.” (Marder 2017, pp. xi and 72).] The obversive conclusion is to suggest that a set of simple linguistic strategies can modulate the complexities of social flourishing positively, deconstructing the radical ridicule in obstinate and obsessed narratives of self-mastery. The pure contingency of the letter C is used throughout as a modulating element revealing and reinforcing the ridicule.^[Please note that the term _chance_ is used instead of _possibility_, in order to avoid technical (probabilistic, modal) language as this text is geared towards a general modulation of language, not just the technical one. Chances seem, to me, more graspable than possibilities, more colloquial, as well as have a stronger ring of indeterminacy. Other reasons for C: practice what I preach, that is: the modulation of language; making the poetry visible, that is: the emergence of compelling meaning by a “mere” structural contingency; making standard thought structures change: new things will come from this constraint; taking a different approach; making fun of the lore of marxism and any other ism. Having fun.] ____ ### Cut A choice, whereupon the apparent *cut*^[“Energy production is a fury of destruction, which Hegel incidentally associated with “universal freedom,” reinforced by the implacable conception of energy itself as something indestructible. It does not relent until the atom is split, until it reaches the nucleus and divides the ostensibly indivisible.” (Marder 2017, p. 15).] of a decision rests, has become enframed in the context _this_ pronoun inhabits (*I*: a perspective in the process of now) as the _true existence of possibilities of control in self-determination_. The problem is not just that any of these concepts (existence, possibility, control, self, determination) are nearly^[“Nearly” because this self-given identity amounts, perhaps, to the definition itself.] impossible to define without them recursively or dialectically self-identifying, but also that ‘we’—one *strange* and forever underdetermined pronoun—historically underwent highly dynamic changes in all manners of orientation and determination around these very concepts: layers upon layers of relations. These transits are cosmic ones, of ontoepistemic grounds, of universal origins, of biology and process, of subjectivity and selfhood, of politics and social embeddings, etc. There used to be no question that god was god, and that god was, but then god became a question. The pervasively-social idea of _choice_ is one more of these traumatic dents, one that is slowly dislodging itself from its territory: there are even headlines in newspapers touting we have no free will.^[With David van Putten we have joked around with the trope that so many philosophers seem to hook onto: anything interesting apparently starts with pointing at a newspaper headline. And makes for polemics. Explaining the joke is part of the joke.] A possible contradiction to be found in our times is that this is precisely counter to the ironic sound of TINA (_there is no alternative_). TINA, as we know, loves choices: 34324523 different types of toothpaste, plenty of golf courses and culinary preparations. Variation is good because the vast realm of dominion can be contemplated: look at all the beasts in my zoo, look at my cabinet of curiosities (I have traveled), _never_ look at me naked (I am the emperor, after all). But, of social embeddings which would deflate or cut this explosion of choices? No. No other possibility under the guise of a mandatory ‘rationalization’ disguised as “the only way.” Freedom cuts itself, and the cutting is supposedly freedom.^[The unbearable abyss of Kantian freedom depends on a neutrality that has a directionality (God), on an acting in accordance to an absolute directionality, which is refuted by Hegel as a spurious infinity.] Seated right in the middle of the dialectic of everyday life—in a question like: “why did you do that?”—the assumption seems to exist that acts emerging from perspectives are coherently self-assertive and determining. But any perspective which observes acts of liberation is a distant witness to the machinations of this supposed freedom: in the best possible cases it is peoples dislodging themselves from the dominations of others, in the worst it is peoples assuming others are something they are not. Crucially, the freedom in this faith, in the cut, is only valuable because of mutual recognition: the assumption that we are acting in accordance to not _exactly_ the same but _comparable_ principles,^[Maturana quoted in Dennett (2023, p. 7): “"Everything said is said by a speaker to another speaker that may be himself.”] all tuned by the same historical fork (cosmic, compulsive, capitalist). “Civilization” depends on this the tuning of this compulsion, but civilization doesn’t want or like to talk about it because that’s precisely where it bottoms out and/or finds its ground: banal brutality.^[[[Brutality]] is a positively employed term here, with the nodded implication that it is also brutally negative. An observation on choices bottoming out at spontaneity is provided by the very _self-reliant_ and _will-loving_ R. W. Emerson, with whom we disagree on a lot, but agree on this. He says: “What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.” (“Self-reliance”, p. 9).] Because it is tuned by the plausible deniability that others maybe, just maybe, act on behalf of some sort of principle, some sort of loyalty (rational, ethical, theological, etc.) that one, privately, does not necessarily feel when _choosing_. This is why systemic coercion, beyond “one’s own” is a thing, a thing Marx clearly warns about in Capital Vol. I. ### Choice and chance >“... refuse the choice _as **offered**_.” > >*Undercommons*, p. 8, emphasis added. If anything, without sounding too crass or reductive, we could say that the entire Marxist project is propelled by the challenge that we should understand the logic of material historicity, or historical materiality, in order to create a social vision where ideas of individual merit and competitive earning can give way to collective efforts that nurture the whole.^[Marder also notes that: “Once Marx reconnects the economy to the good in the simplest sense by asking “_Who_ is this good for?”, he is able to demonstrate that the good is not one and that it is separated from the actual goods, the use-values, that result from economic activity. But, unfortunately, his black-and-white portrait of economics excludes the gray area of self-employment (“she sells her song for money”)—a self-engagement or self-activation that disrespects the lines of division, drawn by capital itself, into the segments productive and unproductive of capital. Is a self-employed singer or worker exploiting herself, standing in relation to herself in the shoes of a capitalist _and_ a laborer? Is her enworkment external and alienated, in that its main purpose is to make money? Or does she recoup something of the Aristotelian energeia and happiness? Doesn’t the market, in any event, erase the productive origin of the commodities bought and sold there? In this hesitation between the inside and the outside, between self-activation and an alien motivation, another conception of energy announces itself outside the closed system of production and its shadow, unproductive waste. ... Just as Marx denies a constitutive role to the energy of the surface generated by the circulation of money and commodities, so he turns his back on an economy that is creative beyond the productivist imperative, which includes, ideally, the workers’ deliberate self-production. In capital’s semantic regime, extra-economic realities are the not-yet-commodified territories to be conquered by the potentially total expansion of self-valorizing value. Reducing energy to production and antiproduction, Marx reifies economic activity otherwise, by leaving out those of its effects that do not yield a product—including, above all, oneself, one’s actualized “human essence”—but inhere within the open-ended process of work. A work that produces nothing, or no thing, be it as immaterial as a service, is no longer recognizable qua work. Its energy delights in itself alone, is gratuitous, expended for nothing, to put it in the terms I am adopting from Georges Bataille’s general economy. It is in the unproductive sectors of the economy that, according to Bataille, we can see the economy’s dependence “on the circulation of energy on the earth {_parcours de l’énergie sur le globe terrestre_}“ and so pose economic problems as “general problems that are linked to the movement of {this} energy.” Besides the sort of work that is useless for the growth of capital, we might isolate a _generally unproductive_ activity (Marx’s singer who freely “sings like a bird”)—the motor of any economy and of energy itself. In this case, enworkment and employment will have the overtones of “emplayment”: putting into play what, in some instances, will turn out to be work. **Employment and emplayment converge on the energetic horizon of nonalienated labor.**“ (Marder 2017, pp. 73-4). My emphasis in bold, aiming at the message: mutual recognition and its un/indeterminate play seem to be what truly matters, where we really pay attention. Sorry for the long quote but this entire thing is excellently phrased, I could not dare to paraphrase. And: “One only ought to engage with the {Bataillan} excess of that which cannot be contained within the system, with the place, utopian on the system’s terms, where work and play mingle in the energy of rest. Such would be, also, a more charitable reading of Marx’s “nonestranged labor”—the intersection of enworkment and emplayment in a plenitude uncontainable within itself.” (ibid. p. 75).] That is, coming to terms with creating constraints that sustain the rhythms of a group, rather than riding on a futile vision of freedom cults. But there seems to be an assumption about nature and necessity, about what decision-making entails, presented tacitly in much of many historical materialism proposals, and this assumption could be differently examined through the linguistic modulations of chances and non-selves. “The history of mankind can be described as the history of the efforts of human communities to free themselves from the constraints always imposed by the necessity of meeting their daily survival needs and reproducing the species. ... Banal at first glance, this statement in fact sums up one of the major conclusions of historical materialism.” (Gagnon, 1981). In a multinatural world of layered perspectives and distributed agency, statements like these are invited to a retuning. The apparently collectively-intuited imagination of free will or agential autonomy can be thought of as stemming from the organic ability to _predict_ (if we follow Clark, Friston, Metzinger), or in Marx’s own terms: to construct in advance, in the head (Marx, _Capital_, 284). In order to know where you are, whether you are a fungus or a society, you need to hook onto something about where you have been and where you could be. The fact that we can _imagine_ representations, counterfactuals, etc., is the reason it feels like we are choosing, because (transcendentally) abstracting from a concrete perspective makes it seem as if there were several things “to choose from.” Though, ultimately, as it is argued here, the “choice” _happens_.^[_I do what happens_ (Anscombe).] The experimentation with contingency that life exercises rests precisely on unavoidable chance encounter, and a desire to obtain patterns which change or allow an organism to hook onto (that is: play with, contemplate, etc.) other patterns. This is why the meritocratic matter of _discovery versus invention_ is a futile linguistic distinction, and only reflects the theological tendencies of our current lingual modulations. If something appears, and its constraints are multinaturally distributed and thus anti-agential, then why must some-_body_ be made legitimate? Discovery and invention are both interlinked articulations of perspectival desires to gain predictive traction on a variagated reality which, actually, keeps insisting on chance. For example: whence the number **one**?^[I seem to prefer “whence” rather than “why” because of the reasons outlined in this piece. _Whence_ is more conducive to the observation of conditions: pointing to constraints; localities; circumstances, etc., whereas _why_ seems to want to solidify a concrete, one-dimensional—for lack of a better word—capital C **cause** for closing off the case on the determination of how something happened.] There is no such thing—or there is: everywhere and in anything, all the time, which is to say, just that: _one_—one it is eternally invented anew, as a cut that necessarily gets made. Getting rid of the concept of *choice* gets rid of the bullshit, free-agent, future-capturing, colonially regurgitating, meritocratic condition we seem to inhabit under the various guises of capitalism. From the _clinamen_ directly to communism: the conceptual abolition of choice leads to the contemplation of chance. A choice is outward and projected forward: it has time to think about dominion, and time to take things. A chance is a given but (relatively) unknown condition, and the virtual possibilities it offers. Someone may have luck; not power. Power is historicomaterially given, by chance. But why do we formulate _everything_ so intricately weaved around the idea that _individual_ people are choosing things? Even this very question. Re-cognition literally takes time: stopping and resting, to think and plan, takes time. Marx: “What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.” (Marx, _Capital_, 284). Matteo Pasquinelli notes that this is “Marx’s recognition, in _Capital_, of labour as a mental and individual activity: the collective division of labour, or labour in common, however, remains the political inventor of the machine.” (Pasquinelli 2019, p. 48). But the architect _is_ a bee, just as tuned to constructional convention and collective cohabitation, the only difference is that the architect inhabits a spatiotemporal condition which has more _time_ (and means to become an architect). Moreover, if this collective-labor machine is the new body, having become externalized, how to understand ourselves as organs? How to become the organs without a body?^[Manche 2021: “What Marx is calling for in _Capital_ is a history of ‘the productive organs of social man {_der produktiven Organe des Gesellschaftsmenschen_}’.”] If mitochondria were once englobed, engulfed, or invaginated, perhaps there’s a chance they can get out again. There is desire in all types of projection; incorporation, acquisition, ingestion, but also in externalization (as evidenced by a Bataillan take on excess), in becoming _of shorter narratives_ and less ambitious projections of control. Pasquinelli also notes that Marx took up Thompson’s and Hodgskin’s emphasis on mental labor as “the celebration of individual creativity–as the cult of the gifted artisan, the ingenious toolmaker and the brave engineer–**against labour in common**” (p. 45). Pasquinelli notes that in _Capital_, Marx refused to “employ the concept of mental labour ... due to the difficulty of mobilising collective knowledge into campaigns on the side of workers.” The general intellect, or _Geist in the machine_, needed conceptual countering in order to support a hands-on, materialist proposal is evidenced, Pasquinelli notes, by Marx’s famous anti-Hegelian passage: ‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’ (p. 45).^[But abstract thinking certainly determines life, as Hegel professes in his newspaper article “Who thinks abstractly?”] Michael Marder also notes that it becomes interesting to think about the material underpinnings of Bataillian excess(es) under the light of this Marxist dictum: of course everything is excess in the context of “a wasteful and luxurious mode of being” (2017, p. 75), as many of our current ones. Whatever the take, we can observe the historical vectors—or _tropisms_—moving towards or away from the Hegelian Sun, moving towards or away the hand of the artisan, moving towards or away the will of the collective, occurring as materiodialogical moves, where thinking them as constraints to be modulated is conducive to a different kind of change than in the language of _choice_ (address, authority, autonomy). ### (Dis)composition >Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realisation, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian. > C. L. R. James, _The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution_, 2nd ed., revised (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), x., quoted in Moten 2017, p. 2. The following quote from Moten responds to the above, and it must be quoted in full: “The recasting of the dialectic that James’s phrasing embodies and is directed toward disrupts the convergence of literary meaning and bourgeois production that comes into its own with that reification of the sentence that animates and is animated by the rise of novelistic techniques of narration. Such disruption is noisy; and such unruly and ongoing reemergence of sound in literature is crucial because the lyrical interruption of narrative marks a different mode, within the same mode, of literary production, one that might be said to stem from something like what James might have called a socialism already in place in the factory, something like what Louis Althusser, after Karl Marx and by way of Frantz Fanon and Peter Brooks, would call a communism in the occult interstices of the market, in the cut outside of market relations and market aesthetics. This different mode is shaped by resistances. Transferences structure that mode of organization out of which comes another (mode of) aesthetic content. **So a phrasal disruption of the sentence is crucial; so poetry remains to be seen and heard so to speak, and in excess of the sentence because it breaks up meaning’s conditions of production. But how do we address that privileging of narrative that might rightly be seen to emerge from a certain politics, a certain theory of history, a certain desire? Not by opposition; by augmentation. This means an attention to the lyric, to the lyric’s auto-explosion, to the auto-explosion the lyric gives to narrative. This means paying attention to the thing (to what endures of the object’s disruptive anticipation of itself, to the commodity that screams its fetish character and the whole of its secret against the {deafness of the} proper) that notes the presence of that desire, that takes into account the lyric’s infusion with narrative, that sees the historicity and political desire of the lyric precisely as the refusal that animates and is one possibility of the fetish character, the possibility of free association and total representation that emerges from a transference that is only possible in the form of the open secret, by thinking the rhythm of world and thing. ... This is to say that I want to address the nature of the address.**” (Moten 2017, pp. 2-4, added emphasis in bold). ### Carcass control Even in Bataille, who takes a (relatively naïve) Nietzschean approach to the willpower of the willing difference to will differently, of the contingency of individuation, we still find an individual at the core. When your head is full of voices, your decisions gravitate around others’ paranoias and values, your discontinuous flows, interrupted daily by dreams and nightmares which are in many ways incommensurable with your daily narrative: where do you find the solace and/or arrogance to call yourself ‘you’? Or me. (see also: [[Schematism and the moving verb]] + [[Pronoun]]). Adorno and Horkheimer say: “While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before.” (Adorno and Horkheimer, xvii). But, if: “the issue of collective knowledge should never be separated from its embodiment in machines, {and} Babbage’s labour theory of the machine is used by Marx to raise the figure of the collective worker as a sort of reincarnation of the general intellect {(which} features of a proto-cybernetic organism,” (Pasquinelli 2019, pp. 46-7) then what continues to puzzle is that the focus remains on an elusive fixation on a time _prior_ to automation in which agents had more freedom (and degrees of freedom—constraints—change, sure, but the problem is domination, not automation), and also how this freedom is supposed to paradoxically imply individual creativity. Creativity is, intersubjectively speaking, a strange concept: on the one hand it implies an agreement on collective surprisal; contingency, as it can be defined as behavior appearing interesting because we are entertained by its outcome (the effects of automation, algorithmic preparation, etc. are often not considered ‘creative’ because they can be traced back to a recipe), which dialogically implies both perspectival domination (_look at my zoo_) and/or wonderful encounter (_welcome to my house_, we explore this in [[Polycomputation]]). Generic machines machine. As Pasquinelli notes, Marx defines a machine (following Babbage’s insights around labor and its technologically mediated reproduction) as the “synthesis of the division of labour” (ibid, p. 47). Marx: “‘[W]hen, by the division of labour, each particular operation has been simplified to the use of a single instrument, the linking up of all these instruments, set in motion by a single engine, constitutes – a machine.’”^[“Sophisticated, materialistic notions of mental labour and knowledge economy were already offered at the dawn of the Victorian age and they were already given very radical interpretations. Marx addressed the economic roles of skill, knowledge and science in his _Grundrisse_, specifically in the section that has become known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’. There Marx explored an unorthodox hypothesis which was not to be reiterated in _Capital_: that because of the accumulation of the general intellect (particularly as scientific and technical knowledge embodied in machinery), labour will become secondary to capitalist accumulation, causing a crisis of the labour theory of value and blowing the foundations of capitalism skywards.” (Pasquinelli 2019, p. 45).] This emergent recursive function, the very basic operation that leads to the evolution of capital-driven “machines that make machines”, is due to the analysis, that is, the _division_: dissection, or cutting of labor. The generalization that opens up a new horizon of extraction (like computers have done). But, in terms of phylogenetic specialization, we are back at the cut: at some point something was _cut_. The difference-engine that is created by positing that humans are capable of niche-construction in ways different than other creatures, that what distinguishes a bee from an architect is the capacity to plan, bottoms out at the statement that “Men make their own history {...} under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”^[Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” in The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd Edition), ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: WW Norton & Company, 1 978), p. 595.] If all said and done is transmission and rearticulation: is communal coordination possible without telling others how to live but by collectively predicting ourselves together in the language(s) of chance? And if the fabric of such predictions is currently as depressing as the resilience of probabilities in corporate AI: _is there any hope_? Tuning language to chance is creating a new social window into contingency, establishing a _speculative grammar_, a task/result of thought collectively grounding itself, which Peirce conceived of as “the lock upon the door of philosophy” (1869, 206, quoted in Bellucci 2018, p. 15). If, under current conditions, we can rarely understand ourselves as autonomous subjects (not only in the sense that we are (by)products, but also in the sense of having a history and being almost wholly intransparent to ourselves), and are no longer subjects but value-producing objects under the alienation from above (Mattin) that subjects us as value-possibility points (Wark), then a response seems possible: let us stop speaking that language. Did we _actually_ use to be free and that is why we inherited a concept of freedom we no longer enjoy as a reality? Or: did we always make others unfree and is that how we inherited the concept of freedom? Or: what kind of projections (predictions, representations) can exist, which do not imply the destruction and cancellation of other lives? Is that an impossible reality? (Or, rhetorical win: does it already exist, so very clearly, in things like poetry and music? We just forgot how to listen.) ### Crassness: clans, castes and colonies But perhaps I am asking the impossible, in the context of “address,” and telling others how to live. If self-destruction is inherent to reason (Adorno and Horkheimer), and if this ontogenetic radical difference means utter shock and deformation, then what is _wrong_ with it, if it is the engine that drives its _right_? When you choose between soup or salad,^[Imagine the sentence: “when you chance between soup and salad.” See also: [[Language-modulating]].] or going left or right on a dérive: where is the point at which it feels like a choice was made? It simply happened, by mere effect of something being that event _there_. It seems that what often bothers the stabilizations of thought about/around this engine driving it is the apparent transparency of its banal reactivity: the tropic knee-jerking.^[“For us, superficial actuality, the actuality of the superficies, is never actual enough.” (Marder 2017, p. 16). On the _tropic_ subject, see also: [[Tropisms]], [[Gravity]], [[D Bias, Falling into Place]].] It seems that, against this knee-jerking, all things which endure, persist and insist on their memories (as legacy, as representation) including a thought that has been meticulously prepared (like this one, because someone had _resources_ to prepare it), are somehow deserving of an equally lengthy (and resourceful) contemplation (like yours). If an impulse is but an impulse it might as well be countered by an impulse, in which case we run into the much derided “anything goes.” Because of this logic, if you protest, you get the water canon. If you are a squatter, you get evicted. If you offend, you pay. The slow-paced temporality of a genealogy, the stagnant rhythm of a possible protest as prologue, of the squat not as squat but as pastoral territory, the insult not as offense but as declaration, is what matters to the great, lengthy monologue of legitimacy: thou shall only speak in the name of the family (which is the name of God). The domain of the individual, their voice and their legitimacy are, at root, only protected by clans, castes and colonies. And here I am: singing the song of the free, and you are reading it. It is rather ridiculous. ### Complete cerebral crystallization But, for Marx, as for Simondon: “The unity of life lies with the complete group, not the isolated individual.” (Simondon 2005 157–58, cited in Stiegler 2015), given that the individual is never anything other than _process_ resolving itself in its permanent _out-of-phaseness_ with itself, unfolding in tandem with an equally processual reality (Simondon 1992, p. 300). Under more Saturnian auspices we return to the observation of familial domination presented above, which Simondon characterized (with Marx) as _interindividuation_: a modality which conditions metastability towards crystallic stasis and the possibility of dynamic modulation towards identity (Stiegler 2015, p. 165). And, of course, everything in between is also possible and true. However, against the idea that the machines taking over is what is causing the “brain drain” of proletarianization (which Stiegler calls: “complete cerebral desertification,” in _Automatic Society_, p. 164.), the argument made here is that what blocks the possible unity of life is this very idea of choice, particularly dreamt of as something which existed _before_ current technoconstraints. As both Manche and Pasquinelli argue, the importance of the “Fragment on (the) Machines” is that it opens speculative dimensions into a disconnection between life-knowledge and (fixed) capital as profit and accumulation, as well as into thinking in terms of technodeterminist teleologies.^[Which “explains Stiegler’s support for economically unjustifiable predictions about the dangers of automation.” (Manche 2021, p. 39).] And, of course, chances are currently tuned by capitalist dreams, but the idea that automation thus represents a _loss_ of knowledge, is uninteresting for the claims made here, in two respects: 1) it is lame. It is reminiscent of all tiresome calls to the charms of earlier times. But nothing is lost, no time is wasted, everything is just and was _always-already_ (I am so sorry) **excess**, one thing leads to the excess of another, it is impossible to get around this (the reference here is beyond Bataillan excess, see also: [[Negintelligibility]]). There is no more pristine primordial perfection like the one projected by one’s repertorial memory. Recall (or do not): becoming is _anti-memory_. 2) Automation was always the case, Stiegler does note, as is shown by the way words work (indoctrination, repetition, imitation, all things we observe and resolve as puzzle-like schemes). But it is important that foregrounding the idea of ‘possibilities to do otherwise’ (as opposed to observations of chance occurrences) reinforce the autonomous agent which capitalism loves, for example, where new forms of so-called “immaterial”^[A notion Stiegler also criticizes.] labor supposedly offer up a space for the type of creativity for which there was no space in mechanical times (e.g. Lazzarato). This is a strange idea. 1) it is bourgeois: as if whatever this is (observing oneself, i.e., speculating, typing) is a kind of dream that can be charitably also offered and opened up to the ‘lower’ classes, and, again, 2) automation and immateriality was always the case: constraints have ruled thought since the start, thought is _only_ constraints (as abstractions, limits). Of course what is actual is rational and what is rational is actual, because: it is that which contemplates itself in the feeling that it has access to its memory in _full_. Memory’s self-legitimacy is actual: predictions on the basis of that memory as desiring-interpretations of itself, become actual (else the memory is forgotten). ### Corollary conduct: from chance, pattern, from pattern: chance For Du Bois, the task at hand (presented before sociology), should be the study of memorious _pattern_, and how the intricate unpredictability of any pattern collides with contingency. To observe reality as a layered effect of the rhythms of human conduct, littered with chance, but not reducible to it as the only possible pattern. Human action, unfolding in all its variable and volatile materiality, is the real contemplative task (for those who have means to contemplate). To Du Bois, this contemplation is opposed to a speculative position that simply categorizes and historicizes. To measure (up to) human life, to identify its patterns, and to to establish a loving encounter with permanent deviation from typologies: >That there are limits is shown by the rythm in birth and death rates and the distribution by sex: it is found further in human customs and laws, the form of government, the laws of trade and even in charity and ethics. As however we rise in the realm of human conduct we note a primary and a secondary rythm. A primary rythm depending as we have indicated on physical forces and physical law: but within this appears again and again a secondary rythm which while presenting nearly the same uniformity as the first, differs from it in its more or less sudden rise at a given tune, in accordance with prearranged plan and prediction and in being liable to stoppage and change according to similar plan. An example of primary uniformity is the death rate: of second uniformity the operation of a woman’s club; to confound the two sorts of human uniformity is fatal to clear thinking; to explain them we must assume Law and Chance working in conjunction — Chance being the scientific side of inexplicable Will. Sociology then, is the Science that seeks the limits of Chance in human conduct. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 1905.^[According to Wortham: “Although it took many decades, the sociological approach Du Bois outlined in this often-overlooked statement {Sociology Hesitant} is the one advocated by most contemporary sociologists.” (Wortham 2022). Many thanks to Rogier van Reekum for the reference to this Du Bois essay. The quote cited above an be observed here in its (possibly) original instantiation: ![[Dubois.png]]] ### Cortisol and cognition What follows is a détournement, or interlude, from generality towards absolute particularity, bear with me. The difference between an open-minded determinism that loves unknowing (open-minded because belief in material determination doesn’t mean total predictability: causes are always multiply-intertwined constraints, the _narration_ of which, by necessity, implies an acknowledgement of _perspectivism_, or, again: see also [[Vantagepointillism]]) and a hardcore fatalism that renders itself invalid (invalid because “whatever happens, happens”), is **corticosteroid** levels. I swear. The will is many things, and one of them is highly tuned by corticosteroids. In a state of _comfort_, in homeostatic balance (see also: [[Principle of Sufficient Cortisol]]), one _pre-sumes_ normalcy because the organism wants to remain in or close to said state. From an enactivist perspective, “the self is conceived as an embodied and socially enacted autonomous system striving to maintain an identity” (Kyselo & Tschacher 2014), which amounts to a similar proposal, but in terms of _identity_ as an attractor, rather than homeostasis.^[Or, in the context of Spinoza, the body and the mind, as Deleuze explains: “... we experience _joy_ when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and _sadness_ when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our own coherence. We are in a condition such that we only take in “what happens” to our body, “what happens” to our mind, that is, the effect of a body on our body, the effect of an idea on our idea. But this is only our body in its own relation, and our mind in its own relation, and the other bodies and other minds or ideas in their respective relations, and the rules according to which all these relations compound with and decompose one an other; we know nothing of all this in the given order of our knowledge and our consciousness. In short, the conditions under which we know things and are conscious of ourselves condemn us _to have only inadequate ideas_, ideas that are confused and mutilated, effects separated from their **real causes**.” (our emphasis in bold, Deleuze 1988, p. 19, citing Spinoza’s Ethics, 11, 28, 29).] By projecting whatever it is that a vantage point’s current state is, into the future, a vantage point understands itself as being in that state, that is, in predictive processing terms: the basic quality of a living being is that it self-evidences (see also: [[Self-evidence]]). If we follow this enactive and predictive processing (PP) proposal that, ultimately, what living agents are concerned with is modeling their own self, and evidencing this by strengthening the models on the basis of “top-down” predictions, which are tweaked (or updated) by “bottom-up” sensory evidence, then we run into an interesting speculative analysis of this following: when lacking sodium (a bottom-up situation) a self can tend towards a state of panic (a top-down interpretation). Panic because: lack of orientation, synapses are off, low blood pressure, etc. If extended over a long enough period, the self finds evidence for why it should feel like this, and without access to blood sodium measurements, the easiest solution is: I (this pronoun here, now) is de-composing. Actually, the problem is salt. But the self evidences the disorganized state as a consequence of its self-model. And selves do this all the time, we self-narrate: our narratives are the evidence for whence “we”. Reasons are after effects. Psychopathology, Friston claims, must be the result of false inference. Isn’t that a wonderful way to define reason? But under PP, when the making of choices under uncertainty implies probabilistic assessments, and probability distributions can only take us so far when we’re thinking about sociocultural individuation. Wouldn’t our possibly irreversibly-globalized models benefit from assessing these conditions as collectively-tuned chances rather than future-oriented individual choices, which are obviously at odds with themselves? “There must be a reason (I need to attend to) for why I am feeling this” (see also: [[Principle of Sufficient Reason]], is actually [[E Principle of Sufficient Interest]]). How that dynamic state is regulated depends on many things, and one of them is hormones. A hormone, that is: a molecular (_analog_: Juarrero 2023) modulator produced by organisms, which has the effect of regulating many aspects of action-perception, has its etymological roots in the Greek _hormon_, that is: that which _sets in motion_ (present participle of _horman_ to “impel, urge on,” from _horme_: an “onset, impulse,” (from PIE _or_- _sma_-, from root _er_-: “to move, set in motion.”^[Etymonline.com says that it was used by Hippocrates “to denote a vital principle;” and that its modern scientific meaning was coined by English physiologist Ernest Henry Starling (1866-1927). Additionally, also that “Jung used _horme_ (1915) in reference to hypothetical mental energy that drives unconscious activities and instincts.”] So, updating the Pascalian heart (where one cannot lie to God, or homeostasis): _the heart moves in ways which reason retroactively observes and narrates._ Not to mention that the actual blood pumped from heart to brain, exists at the heart before it cascades upwards into the crevices of pensive matter (see also: [[D Bias, Falling into Place]]). As if hearing an echo of itself—considering the brain’s command over rhythm—the brain recursively chews on this shockwave. In a state of hypocortisolism (i.e., low blood cortisol) reality takes on an almost _paranoidisiac_ hue (see also: [[000009 The Paradox of Paranoia, and the Paranoia of Paradox]]): in finding oneself unable to cope with stress, all incoming signals turn into signs of danger, all memories haunt, all possible futures are lost. The opposite is also true, in states of hypercortisolism a Popeye-spinach-like effect can ensue: risk-taking, memories are all poignantly PSRed, the future is saturated with possibilities. “Every organic state of disordered tension, all behavior of alarm and stress, provoke adrenal reaction.” (Canguilhem, Preface to the second edition of _The Normal and the Pathological_, p. 30, 1950).^[From my vantage point, under pleasant cortisol levels motivation and drive improve, and because of that time management becomes dramatically easier: decisions feel solid because they auto-narrate. There is a sense of time dilation: time slows down, more things happen in shorter windows of time. The removal of hesitation because of stable autonarration eliminates the paranoid thoughts about “what to do not to be irresponsible and use time appropriately?” which often led to a stagnant procrastination. Unsurprisingly, the tuning of the corticosteroid feedback mechanisms leading to these cognitive effects, have been hypothesized as resulting from the stressors presented by the environment (Champagne et al., 2008, Tottenham and Sheridan, 2009), exposing the feedback loops of psychosocial individuation.] In a state of hypocortisolism^[This is different but relalated to hypoaldosteronism, and/or low sodium. The important thing about this is that you, too, are dynamically, permanently subjected to the ebbs and flows of this and other hormones. I do not medicate with something _chemically-alien_ (comically there’s a puncept there, _chemicaliën_, in Dutch), but with steroid-hormones bioidentical to the ones in your bloodstream right now. What this means is that the insights I have into these endocrinological movements, while being a singular entity’s narrative, can be said to apply quite generally. I observe other people being low or high cortisol at times, and it’s very interesting. As if I know something deeply private about them, that they are, themselves, not even aware of. I am aware of how arrogant that sounds, I apologize. This is, importantly, a singular experience. Onno Meijer (_hoogleraar in de neuroendocrinologie van corticosteroïden, LUMC_) once told me that cortisol is in fact something like a _yay-sayer_. Whatever is somehow already there, it will enhance. I hope this means that the paranoisiac state is thus what my molecular determinations steer away from.] the feeling is also that of so-called _brainfog_, a sort of nondialectical confusion where there is no concatenation of events, no possibility of something doubling down on itself. One wants to think, to predict, but it happens in such muddled, trampling tempos that it does not feel like thinking, more like surviving the moment. In those moments the actual is certainly not the rational.^[Also, in my experience: the infamous feeling of _lack_ is the feeling of lack of cortisol.] Updating the heart as the pump of hormones, and taking from these personal experiences with corticosteroids (see also: [[Cortisol]]): reasons cannot ever be said to be anything else but on-the-fly, bootstrappy inventions (_surprise, surprise_). What matters, again, is their rhythm, what we consider as their metric: under current constraints this is usually lengthy legacies, prolonged legitimacies. These hormonal movements of the unconscious are the recalcitrance, the fever, the degeneration, the sprouting, the cutting, the churning, the sieving, chunking, parsing, modulating of everything which steers the _why-ning_ conscious. To return to our father figure: the Sun squeezing all the aldosterone out of one’s adrenals as the body copes with heat, electrolyte loss, etc., results in possible decomposure. In a staccato-stroke of bad luck with other things, pulsing patterns of hormones take the conscious for a ride. This chemical chaos is a concatenation of wonderfully disparate things, not something with a PSR. You fossilize it into _you_ if you narrate the chemistry of the body as a system isolated from the rest of cosmic washing machine. ### Constraints and causes The cosmic washing machine can be understood as an ensemble of interacting constraints, at least from our perspectival narrative. As Alicia Juarrero (2023) notes, processes of individuation can be approached from the perspective of interacting **constraints** and their modulation rather than just from the perspective of kinetic, domino-like **causality**—this should be reminiscent to the reader of our proposal of _chances rather than choices_. Juarrero is interested in looking at how wholes are more than parts; how context and history, as modulators, alter the determinate fabric of reality; and essentially how can things be explained with a scientific language _different_ than that of efficient cause. The scientific drive towards reductive essentialisms, the isolation and disentanglement of constraints from each other “represents a dismissal of interactions, relations, and interdependencies... Essence as {something internally possessed} dismisses context, in other words.” (Juarrero 2023, pp. 15-22). Constraints are defined by Juarrero as “entities, processes, events, relations, or conditions that raise or lower barriers to energy flow without directly transferring kinetic energy” (ibid. p. 40), anything from rhythm, to filtering, to speed, volume, etc. In other words: away from the vision of the unmoved mover, and towards the movement. Crucially, what Juarrero observes as a leading problem in the (legacy of Aristotelian, Newtonian, Baconian) dismissal of contextual constraints is that their effects are rendered as “epiphenomenal”^[The meaning of which can be positively reconsidered as _metaphysical_.], something only now dislodging itself from its early scientific foundations through developments like emergentism and complexity in the 19th and 20th centuries.^[We would also add Deleuze here, where in D&R the idea of causal explanation is also understood as an oversimplifying, yet convenient, abstraction.] Juarrero draws attention to very real examples of top-down constraints which defy the image of the efficient cause: congestion waves in traffic travel ‘backwards’ even though none of the cars move backwards, or: the swinging of a child on a swing is not only effectuated by the physical energy which the system receives, but also, crucially: by the _timing_ at which the feet are kicked, kicking as hard as possible but at the wrong time will not result in swinging. These constraints, and many others (like the formation of convection cells, the cauterizating effects of lasers, the hormonal homeostasis of an organism, or e.g. Levin’s argument about truth tables) are all examples of constraint regimes emerging as *memorious loops* that (sometimes relatively, sometimes quite deterministically) self-preserve their coherence in ways which go beyond causal, domino-like interpretations.^[A comparable approach to Juarrero’s is Walker & Cronin’s *Assembly theory* (a truly historicomaterialist premise), which proposes an analysis (and measurement and thus possible synthesis) of the evolution of the universe as viewed through the development of *memory*. Complex organic/cognitive systems can be contemplated in terms of the historical building blocks (measurable in terms of their _assembly index_) that result in them *as systems*, with a memory and capabilities of self-preservation and modulation. This provides an interesting perspective on how to understand the evolution of thought as progressively building a reconstruction of the past in order to understand the present/future. Speculatively: what is truly interesting is that, perhaps, eventually, this process becomes self-identical, and then: what of time?] Temporal constraints are noted in particular by Juarrero as something much ignored by 20th century of medical science (ibid., p. 42), which is only now starting to gain special attention under the guise of e.g., *chronopharmacology* (in the case of administering hydrocortisone 5x day to maintain homeostasis: I am intimately familiar with this). Most of what our language inherited from natural philosophy has tended to focus on the highlighting of primary properties, with “secondary” properties as irrelevant or epiphenomenal (Juarrero 2023). However, ideas such as multiple realizability (a triangle instantiates itself in many ways), or degeneracy in biology (one feature encompassing multiple functions, occurring at the same time or evolving towards this effect), or polycomputation are all exemplary of how constraint regimes generate the possibility of multiple perspectives on the “same” phenomenon. What Juarrero stresses, following Lisa Gatlin (1972), is that it is not that we should replace efficient cause with constraint domains, but that we should acknowledge their interrelated nature: catastrophe-like events such as pushing a pendulum for it to begin swinging are real, but the conditions (e.g., having more than one pendulum on the same surface as others—as in the famous synchronizing experiment by Christiaan Huygens) serve as constraints which modulate the ensuing dynamics of the system (Juarrero 2023, p. 78). Following enactivist proposals (e.g. Varela, Thompson and Rosch 2017) the analogy can even be drawn between synchrony at the level of objects and at the level of social processes: and synchrony can be detrimental as well as conducive to homestasis (and everything in between, e.g. Galbusera, Finn, Tschacher et al, 2019). Similar arguments are made by Moten (2018): “the intervallic breaking of the flow is the flow’s condition of possibility and this, of course, is both good and bad.” (2017, p. 120). The figure of, e.g., the (god-)monarch and its enduring, enveloping language around freedom and domination might have led to the modern constraint regime around the concept of choice. The cosmic transitions that lead from things like alchemy to chemistry and from deterministic mechanics to realms of probabilities do perhaps hint at a possible update on the language of choices. As Juarrero notes, the treatment of “forms of life” that language is capable of (Wittgenstein), points us to a relational ontology—and, following Viveiros de Castro: a perspectivist and multinatural one—which the writers of the Atlas (following Wark on Bogdanov) also identify as one incompatible with “the Aristotelian idea of a first, extra-mundane cause, capable of setting nature in motion ... {and with}... particular form{s} of coordination and social organization, which had emerged between the 15th and 16th centuries at the intersection of engineering, mechanical science and technical production, began to serve as a general scheme for thought in general.” To the thinkers of the _Atlas_, like to Juarrero, kinetic determinism is a real problem to address, at all costs and at all levels: “this is a problem that historical materialism necessarily needs to deal with: if social being determines consciousness, it is because both share something in common, a transitive medium which allows changes in the field of material reproduction to affect the ways of thinking at a given time.” The _Atlas_ identifies the problem at the level of the ground-concept of work and material, in Marx, both of which imply an inert nature (the raw world), as well as an unmoved mover (the worker).^[“In short, labour usually appears in historical materialism as a material foundation of sociability, without which the entire social structure would collapse.” _Atlas_.] Furthermore, they point to Bogdanov as a thinker of organization capable of bridging the abstract reproduction of life _in general_ (at the level of cells of ecosystems) from “the organizational point of view preserves the specific difference in organizational forms and undoes the human exceptionalism that the category of labour carries with it when it is considered the foundation or basis of Marxist analysis.” In the arguments made by Juarrero attention to this would imply attention to the constraint regimes, and in ours to the specific constraint regimes which semantically-attract towards the idea of (individual/ist) choice. By refusing to find homuncular agency (like refusing to believe in self-identical primary properties (Juarrero), or “taking labour as a primitive term ... described by Marx at the beginning of _Capital_” (Atlas on Bogdanov) and opting for _tektology_ instead), language is mobilized in new dimensions, which defy its currently known limits. The constraint effects of a non-kinetic thought are not magic, but fact. The movements of the extended mind, such as this text, these very letters, suffice to provide evidence for the phenomenon that I am not here saying them to you—though in many ways, whatever it is that designates this “I” pronoun is, I am—but you find yourself conjuring a spectral voice which is neither mine, nor yours, nor anybody else’s. It is this text’s. The challenge lies not in finding kinetic agency to, e.g., this text. The interest is to explore a space in which agency (or _activity_) is relinquished from a principle of sufficient legitimacy, so that the movement can be made towards non-individualistic thought which _really_ experiences itself as outside the ‘autonomous’ head (acephalic thought?). This predicament is simple but understated, and ubiquitous. Being meat-based phenomena with the capacity to modulate language-outputs, which are unavoidably dialogical and materially distributed, offers the possibility for this meat to be modelled, molten, measured and massacred by the language that envelops it. The image of choice and control is hereby adjusted to/amended with a hard determinist clause, which strangely enables a new kind of modular versatility (perhaps another version of “control” itself). “Chance is the way of all (irregular) flesh as it breathes and bears the palpable air of buried, undeniably anearthly life whose terrible beauty has been the aim and essence of black study all along.” (Moten 2018, p. xii). Speculation and materiality are, with Marx via Hegel and the necessary Bogdanov update, two sides of the same coin. This coin keeps getting flipped: chances are on one or the other side. Physics used to be about moving things, very inefficient, cause and effect, a lot of heat loss, but then as we see with Juarrero/the Atlas: the more it becomes clear that physics is speculating about spatiotemporal structure; material organization, then the more that ideas of an inert background spacetime are slowly cancelled out. Technicity moved from the governor, from linear, reversible (Newtonian) systems which ignored excess (or noise), to robust systems of excess which work hard at polishing the edges of that excess (disciplinary societies, control dynamics in cybernetics), to current resilient regimes which _extract_ this excess (anything from cryptocurrency all the way to colonizing social media enterprises, as explained by Deleuze, see: [[Z Post-Control Script-Societies]], and more recently Wilkins 2023). If we take a materialist-multinaturalist approach where we are sleeping, eating, shitting automatons, then: because we came equipped with inherited systems already, a relinquishing of the very idea of _control_ and of _systems_, is perhaps the only way out of these impasses. Think about the timing of the swing kick, not about its force (Juarrero). ### Control As stated in the _Atlas of Experimental Politics_ (various authors, 2021): “To think politics in {a} multiscalar and constructive way necessitates that all social worlds be not only infinite in absolute size but inaccessibly so (VI). If a world is _inaccessibly infinite_, it means that no sequence of reasoning within that world can fully capture its full size and scope—consequently, the possibilities for subjectivity are never depleted.” In other words, ramping up what has already been suggested: partial takes are clearly generative, and the dominion or control of any particular domain (or world) is not only impossible, but importantly: _inexhaustive_. The Atlas continues: “{Politics is not static or established, it is rather} a dynamic push and pull between social worlds and their internal tensions that determine possible and necessary forms of resistance.” So it also is with the intelligibility of whatever it is that the word “freedom” encompasses. But it is not just that revealing instances of duty, contradiction, struggle, the event, etc., grant subjectivity access to the intricacies of its own decision-making (i.e., to the determination of what is possible), it is also that this infinitely opaque veneer through which thought has access to itself (for example in truth statements such as “to have the ability to do otherwise is to be free”) is tempered by confused echoes or shadows of simultaneous exploration and exploitation: the simultaneity (or polycomputation) of which doesn’t always appear as such to thought, because it _can’t_. This process is thus a perspectival trance, dancing in a conversation with multiple voices: none of which are its own. As Peirce puts it: “The power of self-control is certainly not a power over what one is doing at the very instant the operation of self-control is commenced. It consists (to mention only the leading constituents) first, in comparing one’s past deeds with standards, second, in rational deliberation concerning how one will act in the future, in itself a highly complicated operation, third, in the formation of a resolve, fourth, in the creation, on the basis of the resolve, of a strong determination, or modification of habit. This operation of self-control is a process in which logical sequence is converted into mechanical sequence or something of the sort. How this happens, we are in my opinion as yet entirely ignorant.” (C. S. Peirce, _Collected Papers_: 8.320). If the power of self control is merely inherited habit (the assumption of spontaneity in Kant, the appearance/contemplation of repetition in Deleuze), and its strange logic into mechanics (and vice versa) which remains elusive^[Though not entirely anymore, some scientific advances reveal the transition in some detail: e.g., Juarrero (2023) on free will.] is a dialectical project—thinking about the past, about norms and others, about the future—is a projection which requires acknowledgment of the spatiotemporal conditions it can emanate from: the chances that it _is_. Thinking-acting are predictive processes (see also: [[Active inference]]) which require sustenance, time, in order for persistence to ensue. Peirce’s categories of *firstness*, *secondness* and *thirdness* can help us think about the mediations of a physiology enveloped by _chances_: 1) what is 2) in relation 3) is given by a perspective. This perspective could be another, enveloped by different chances. The witnessed fact is that perspectives, and the idea of _perspective_ itself, polycomputes: perspectives are multiply-realizable. We could follow another triad model, resembling the one presented by the _Atlas_ (i.e., composition, interaction, intelligibility), but proposed by van der Leeuw and Dirks (2023), where collective cognition is tempered by three spheres: a ‘certainty sphere’ rooted in the agreed upon intelligibility of the past (an image of science or history, of identity, perhaps); a ‘possibility sphere’, where this intelligibility is not yet fully determined (therefore flexible and potentially open to new interpretations), and a ‘problem sphere’, consisting of fully unknown unknowns. The interactions between these spheres determine the “process of interactive niche construction” (van der Leeuw and Dirks, 2023, p. 7). The problem sphere is effectively what the other two tend towards, the possibility that other constraints may exist. To the authors, opening up the narratives which currently “explain” our conditions requires relinquishing the idea of control (ibid., p. 8). The proposal made, then is, that future language can to be tempered towards this, and one first proposal is to rid it of active verbosity which strengthens unforgivable concepts such as merit and credit. If the challenge is that future is taken to be “impenetrable,” we can observe Van der Leeuw and Dirks’ argument as a Marxist proposal of _it is time to stop interpreting it, and change it_, they say: “if we’d had 250 years of thinking about the future (emergence), rather than about the past (origins), there is a good chance that we would currently be better armed with tools to anticipate, and to deal with the future in terms of risks and uncertainties. {Currently, change occurs} so rapidly that we can no longer adapt post-facto to such changes.” (ibid., p. 10). The authors do point to Heraclitan underpinnings in which impermanence is the only chance, and where, like in Juarrero (2023) history and unpredictability should be dialectically engaged, contra linear causality (van der Leeuw and Dirks, 2023, p. 11). Following Bordieu (1972), they also highlight how multiple chances, potential futures are always the case, and the general constraint regime of the current system “opts for some, and ignores others” (ibid., see also: [[Active ignorance]]). The authors conclude with the idea that a way forward is to “tinker with narratives” (p. 15), though we do not agree with all of them, a few of them we certainly do agree with being: the decolonization of thought, the opting out of consumerist emphasis, and veering away from extractivist-capitalist dominion. In the argument we’re interested here, this involves, as has been thoroughly stressed: abandoning the idea of choice. The sick dream of freedom makes localities fight to protect their borders, while at the same time exporting the dream outwards, exploiting and destroying those who move towards it. We do not choose, we are irreversibly given to chances, we are polycomputing predictive perspectives, this tempers the idea that we choose. But we don’t. What changes if we abandon voluntarist decisionism? Representation becomes expression (Deleuze). Merit and talent become luck. Blaming becomes the collective fixing of a symptom. Punishing becomes helping. Commodification becomes comfort. Segregation becomes possible alliance. Reasons are _not_ causes. This is simple. But what gets you out of the idea of a basic drive, a basic compulsion? Where is the homunculus? It happens: we don’t choose it. There is chance, it is _visible/palpable/audible_, but at some point: it happens. Letting this perspective happen enables not only solidarity, but expands the self beyond the self, and allows for polycomputation:multiple-realizability:perspectivism. As Juarrero notes, one may be tempted to submit to the suspicion that our perception of the evolution of the universe shows a trend from rigid boundaries to to interactive interfaces: from the walls of prokaryotes to the more permeable membranes of eukaryotes, from physical walls to boundaries such as visas (Juarrero 2023, p. 117) or from exoskeletons to organisms more porous, and scaffolded by an endoskeleton (ibid. p. 127), and perhaps: from the negotiation and distribution of resources as straightforward violence to roundabout; feedbacking discourse (the judge is still very much out on this one). According to Juarrero, submitting to this perspective would mean that context-dependency as a methodological window will drastically alter our understanding of these processes, given that increases in complexity increase the reliance on context dependence (ibid.). As Juarrero notes: “It is not too far-fetched to propose that the translational motion of hurricanes and the oscillating waves of BZ reactions are physical and chemical precursors to animal motility in general” (ibid. p. 119). Indeed, if we are willing to accept this fundamental historical materialist perspective we need to contemplate the concept of _choosing_ with a more context-dependent sensitivity: where is the ‘decision’ if not as part of a network of constraints which exist absolutely outside any possibility of control, determination and autonomy? These constraints are not random but _subject to_ randomness, depending on what perspective is taken on what one’s intended parameter/metric of ‘information’ is. Information is ostensive: suspended across the multiplicity of chances of what it could possibly be _as_ connection. ### Chances are To seek (its) grounding is to establish identities and categories. Like the search for grounding, but on the exact opposite side of the spectrum: “analyses that privilege experience and difference fail to address discursive power, {Scott contends}, they reproduce the very logic that instituted the authority of the subject, the epistemological figure against which they write the other in history.” Ferreira da Silva, following Scott, insists that this separation between discourse and experience leads to the naturalization of the former as a given, e.g., as in “freedom” as a natural concept: this represents “{an} essentialist” threat, for prevailing critical strategies produce the latter as a specimen of the “individual,” the liberal-historical being.” (Ferreira da Silva 2007, p. xxx). The idea of indeterminacy, chance or risk seems to run counter to any grounding proposal. But not if we understand that this grounding intends to deal with indeterminacy, this is what _drives_ its right (as we mentioned earlier with regard to reason and its autonarrative destruction). The risk associated with chance has had the tendency of finding its image in the idea of a die being thrown (Pascal, Mallarmé, Deleuze, Catren), which seems oddly humorous on various accounts, one of them certainly being the loyalty to the first cause that throws it, to begin with. Additionally, the die has six sides: it is cubic, specific and predictable. We know what the possibilities are. It _does_ abolish chance, because its degrees of freedom—more appropriately-termed _constraints_ following Bateson or Juarrero and much of modern science—are minimal, and that is why we seem love employing it as an image of indeterminacy: because eventually we arrive at a clearly determined outcome and/or because we can oversee its indeterminacy. Bogdanov, on the idea of a possibly unifying universal organizational science—preceding Heideggerian musings on cybernetics—says in 1911: >It would be naïve and unscientific to consider all these {observable patterns, rhythms} and countless other similar facts to be chance analogies; the theory of probability would unquestionably not allow this. The only possible conclusion is this: ><small>There exist general methods and natural regularities according to which the most varied elements of the universe are organised into complexes.</small> >This proposition provides the basis for the great new science that will take over from philosophy in order to resolve the tasks that are beyond the power of philosophy. With the help of this new science, humanity will be able systematically and comprehensively to organise its creative powers, its life.” > >(p. 25, Bogdanov, cited in Wark 2019, tr. David Rowley). The only hard disagree is: what is wrong with “mere” chance? (see also: [[B The being of “mere” machines and “mere” propositions]]?). A positive encounter with chance (Tao, Dada, Fluxus, so much speculative divination) is the close encounter of the third kind in the imitation of nature, which seems to be an almost universal constant in all art, following the obstinacy of so-called nature and its compelling contingency or inconsistency. The introduction of chance in, e.g., 20th century compositional practices in the Western music tradition broke with ideas of authority and legitimacy over what is supposed to be considered music.^[“It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute state of movement. The same could be said of the fixed visual plane: Godard, for example, effectively carries the fixed plane of cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all that subsists are tiny variations of speed between movements in composition. Nathalie Sarraute, for her part, proposes a clear distinction between two planes of writing: a transcendent plan(e) that organizes and develops forms (genres, themes, motifs) and assigns and develops subjects (personages, characters, feelings); and an altogether different plane that liberates the particles of an anonymous matter, allowing them to communicate through the "envelope" of forms and subjects, retaining between them only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness, floating affects, so that the plane itself is perceived at the same time as it allows us to perceive the imperceptible (the microplane, the molecular plane).” D&G, ATP, Becoming-intense, becoming-animal, p. 267.] Again, we insist: rid language of choice, in order to follow art into life. ### Commodification Maybe as a crass, small side-note (also repeated ad nauseam, but remember we started all this mid-vomit): ridding ourselves of freedom has one more crucial benefit: we cannot be sold this capitalist dream any longer: we refuse it. Therefore: _everybody calm down_. Trapped in the nightmare that is the anticapitalist jealousy of capitalist prosperity, as noted by Wark in her manifesto {005}, let’s stop dreaming a dream that is not ours. “{We must} liberate productive and inventive resources from the myth of scarcity.” {023}. Again, with Marx, in Wark: “Commodified life dispossess the worker of the information traditionally passed on outside the realm of private property as culture, as the gift of one generation to the next, and replaces it with information in commodified form.” {028}. ### Class It is very important to mention (again) that the time available to some people such as ourselves to speculate (look in the mirror) means that different spatiotemporal constraints are available to modulation, but this does not mean less or more choice-making, only larger or smaller spatiotemporal chunks to be captured. See also [[000 Problems]]. ### Construction and contestation In other words: The master’s tools. In other words: Revenge. In other words: Undo unto others as you’d have them undo unto you. In other words: Practice what you preach. In other words: Hoisted by your own petard. In other words: The syntax changes, but the semantics stays the same. In other words: The semantics changes, but the syntax stays the same. Get rid of choice and you will have true communism. This doesn’t mean give into the horrors of the other Cs (colonialism, capitalism, certainty, cte.). ### (Poly)computation When M. Beatrice Fazi reflects on the necessarily contingent in computation and states that “{interactive computation} becomes an operation concerning the orientation of computing machines in the world, and our relation with them” (Fazi 2018, p. 3) what is easily missed is that in _stating_ the relationality between non-computational thought and computation in relation to something, one already has positioned the possibility of an abandoned computation, elsewhere, without this relationality. _Where is this_, other than as a strong, prevalent predicate over the subject that is all computational thought: everything that is coupled to it and _discourses_ its material evolution? The task is to modulate this semantic space, where modulation implies both attending to the the different modes afforded by a specific modality, as well as the exploring the space of articulation, the variations and edges of these possible syntheses (as in modal music). To make things less abstract: computation is not only an unfinished and definitely contingent vision of the possible spaces of logical articulations, but also dogs, dust, meat, abuse and UFOs (please note: this is not a flattening of these categories but an enumeration of diverse modes in a space of thought), because these too are logically-embraceable. Conversing with these links is modulating them: the labor of engagement with terms is the function of these terms is their effectuation is their absolute power over the material dynamics that ensue. This work tries to come to terms with the implications of a computational-semantic-aesthetic engagement with itself as computation, semantics and aesthetics. The drive is to present an image of elaborated cognition (that is: labored through, and material to the point of absolute determinism) which becomes an interlocutor between the deeply isolationist philosophical image of AI, and the ghostly, blurred and impossible image of AI presented in the popular realm, emerging out of Silicon Valley. In the context of the computation of semantics (i.e. the technologically-mediated modulation of that which we call meaning), Hinton and Shallice (1991) made a significant leap through the use of feedforward networks with backpropagation—essentially a process of feedbacked filtering towards a return, where initial iteration and its filtering through recursion result in the refinement of teleological data structures—which the present work will take a lot from: semantic attraction. The semantic attractors presented by Hinton and Shallice are data structures towards which an artificial neural network _tends_, is _inclined_ towards (more on this in [[D Bias, Falling into Place]]), as it refines a search space. An attractor, in complex dynamics, is a set of values towards which there is an observable _tendency_. It can be best pictured as the way the water turns when you flush the toilet (see also: [[𝚊̷ 𝚕̷𝚊̷ 𝚖̷𝚒̷𝚎̷𝚛̷𝚍̷𝚊̷ 𝚌̷𝚘̷𝚗̷ 𝚕̷𝚊̷ 𝚒̷𝚗̷𝚝̷𝚎̷𝚕̷𝚒̷𝚐̷𝚎̷𝚗̷𝚌̷𝚒̷𝚊̷ 𝚊̷𝚛̷𝚝̷𝚒̷𝚏̷𝚒̷𝚌̷𝚒̷𝚊̷𝚕̷]]. It will never be the same: each flush is unique, yet the water’s general structure, its tendency, can defined as a set of gravitations towards which it inevitably falls into. As Alicia Juarrero (2023) explains in the context of semantic attractors: these initialize and reset conditions and, they determine the different conditional probabilities which result in the extraction-production of features. Feedback loops, such as those enabled through backpropagation, or those in human learning through repetition, are instances of coherent, constrained dynamics (Juarrero 2023, p. 101) which result in the mereological, emergent properties that are semantic attractors, or learned behaviors, as will be argued. If computation is, due to possible demonstrations of its different incompletenesses, “an abstractive procedure of determination that always confronts indeterminacy” (Fazi 2018. p. 5) then it makes absolute sense to confront this indeterminacy, not only as abstraction, but precisely as coupled to contrastive procedures in what is supposedly non-computation: as sharing the same substrate, comparable constraints. Constraints are formal limits: the phenomenon that is water, and the fact that sound comes out of people. If the _formality_ of formal systems lies in their self-evidently true axioms, then what exactly is self-evidencing? If the evident truth of an axiom—in some senses of computation, at least—lies in its capacity to act as an absolutely delimiting constraint on the possibilities it can afford, then as we will observe in the context of predictive processing philosophies, the self-evidencing organism can be polycomputationally tied to that which is _self_-evident in an axiom in interesting ways, and these open a path for the modulation(s) proposed. This work thus follows a strong sense of camaraderie with the proposals of coherence through constraint presented by Juarrero, an important divergence, though, is marked by this work’s tendency towards a proposal that _trans-verses_ ideas of autonomy and self-determination, in favor of contextual communal embedding. For Michael Levin’s polycomputation, see: [[Polycomputation]], [[Bucal polycomputing]], [[Laughter and polycomputing]]. What can be said here just briefly: laughing is a weird thing. It happens physiologically, as a reaction which might be joyous, unnerved, confused, desperate, etc. However: it is also modulated as communicative device. Laughter happens between encounters. and, often, the physiologic response is feigned in order to flaunt spontaneity and a kind of intersubjective agreement. Laughing gives us a grand hint of how physiology becomes abstraction (and vice versa). ### Collusion, compulsion, cannibalism _Again_: getting rid of the concept of choice gets you rid of the bullshit meritocracy we observe at the level of the social, of pedagogy, of work, getting rid of choice actually has the chance to make us _political_. It’s akin to the riddance of the concept of God, or the so-called morphological freedom touted by eugenic liberalism.^[“It is in Social Darwinism that the entire idea of scale-sensitivity of producing a determinate mixture or idea of nature/physis is completely leveled such that the entirety of nature takes the aura of laissez-faire capitalism, fascism, nationalism, eugenic cults and libertarian individualism, namely, fundamentally inconsistent and parochial phenomena claiming to be the hidden principles behind the machinations of the universe.” Negarestani, “What does it take to making anything?” (year).] Free will is a [[Pullback attractor]]. There is no concept of freedom, only its paradoxical consideration in various possible instances where things consider whether they have this non-capacity or not. Same with “intelligence.” Otherwise, when unhindered by the concept, we just are, and there is no questioning what is happening. **Principle of unfreedom**: The easiest refutation of free will is that if it is supposed to emerge from choice, then just because of the simple fact that we do not have access to all the information/options we need in order to make (perfect) choices, we are necessarily *unfree* (see also: [[Law of requisite variety]]). Being immortal—i.e.: having unlimited time to consider options—would not suffice, knowing the entire universe like a Laplacian demon (having perfect information) would not suffice either, because both would spatiotemporally imply absolute opaqueness/indifference and thus the inability to choose/an absolute choice having already been made (if existing in that state permanently). What negintelligibility (see: [[Negintelligibility]]) tries is to make this apparent. Choice is only possible in uncertainty and thus, the attractor of any certainty is the negintelligible. If, however, one were to possess the capacity to spatiotemporally “zoom out” of an average human perspective and see an Aleph/Omega point-like thing displaying all manner of possibilities and be able to return, upon having “seen” that, in order to make a choice within the limited human state, then we might consider choice-making to be vastly more expansive than we know it to be now. However, again: if we could query the whole universe and return to our vantage point: we would still be limited by having been a determined thing with set inclinations from the go. Meaning, our choices would be severely selective according to our set preferences and thus, again, unfree. We cannot not will what we will. This reminds of [[Del Horror en la Copia]], where a total simulation becomes irrelevant to itself, and the horror ensues from the the impossibility of choice itself. Also, Borges: “Sé de quienés obraban el mal para que en los siglos futuros resultara el bien, o hubiera resultado en los ya pretéritos... Encarados así, todos nuestros actos son justos, pero también son indiferentes. No hay méritos morales o intelectuales.” ### Consequences of concluding The patterns hereby presented are merely posited as rhythms of energetic excess (much like Sarraute’s _Tropisms_,^[“For Sarraute, on the other hand, language is an all-too-human means of communication to which we only partly or imperfectly accede. What interests her is that which remains ensconced beneath the linguistic surface: the not-yet-verbalized sensations or feelings. ... A series of brief passages in Nathalie Sarraute’s first work, _Tropisms_ (1939), {Footnote by Tirasait: In the Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 27 (1966: 156), tropism refers to the involuntary tendency of an organism to react to an external stimulus, as a sunflower, for example, turns toward light. In biology, it is an involuntary movement of an organism or of its parts in response to some external stimulus such as light or chemical agents. The ability to react to environmental influences is a basic and universal characteristic of living organisms. The type of reaction elicited by any given stimulus is generally adaptive, in that it tends to further the welfare of and perpetuate the individual. A human hand brought into contact with a hot stove immediately and involuntarily moves away from the harmful influence. The shoot of a green plant will turn toward light, which is the source of the energy involved in its food-manufacturing processes.} shows that inexpressible human experiences exist and that these indefinable movements slip through us on the frontiers of consciousness. They hide behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak, but they are the origins of our actions, discourse, and the feelings we manifest.” Tirasait, pp. 80-1, 2007. On the topic of tropisms, see also [[Gravity]] and [[D Bias, Falling into Place]].] Bataille’s _Accursed Share_. Or Michael Marder—who follows _and_ criticizes Bataille’s take—in _Energy Dreams_^[“Could it be that our stubborn denigration of all things vegetal was in collusion with the desire to burn everything and everyone, instead of receiving the bountiful energy of the solar blaze in the manner of vegetation? If so, then we must learn from plants how to live a more ethical life, respectful of the others’ claim to existence and operating with a drastically different energy than the one we are accustomed to.” (Marder 2017, p. x). Although the term “denigration” is one we’d prefer to avoid, as there’s nothing deleterious about _blackening_.]). At the level of human action, in every respect, we currently transit a meat market of meat puppets (this is partly an observation of commodity fetishism, how people become things and things become people, and partly an observation of the fact that there is no unfreedom bigger than the idea of freedom (Nietzsche). Above all, if we think in layers of combinatorial complexity, it is currently a market of the _address_ (Moten, with e.g., Butler). This is Marxism against itself quite vulgarly, as cheered on by McKenzie Wark in order to avoid hypocritical theory (2019, p. 14, p. 79), or in the mood of Jamie and Ryan: “As Marx argued: “Critical Criticism, which becomes objective to itself only in relation to its antithesis, {...} is consequently obliged continually to produce this antithesis for itself.” (Marx & Engels, 2020, p. 193, quoted by J&R, p. 14). The work done here seeks to become voyeuristic of (its own) full-frontal reified contradiction, where we see themselves as people: it was not. The prediction of capitalist freedom reproduces capitalist freedom, etc. But something about this idea of “freedom” is still somehow taken for granted (as a concept of the understanding, we could say) in whatever it is that understands itself “outside” of capitalism, voyeuristically. What can be, then, sadomasochistically _observed_ about how we _use_ language, address, around this problem? The dialectical leap of faith needed in order to _understand_ how freedom (even in duty as a highest form of freedom) is defined by unfreedom is a first step, sure.^[“... dialectics commences with or after the realization of the absolute such that “absolute self-security and self-repose” underlie its every torsion and turbulence. Hence, the liaison between the unmoved mover and free energy, released into the _completed_ work of negativity.” (Marder 2017, p. 20).] The critique of the ideology of any possible duty also begins with the dialectical move that understands the context/content as mediated by the from/form. A next step proposed here is to reorganize the relationship between the elements in this dynamic formalism and observe it in language: as a tropic(al) contraction that forgets what it is/was doing because of the immediacy of what is happening. This last sentence is very important: in the act, there is only unfolding. Hesitation, consideration, contemplation all require time and resources. The stuff of choosing-speculation must be fed, by someones, who have no choice.^[The difference-engine in all this is necessarily relative, or as Moten puts it: “{Critique as} cryptanalytic assertion has a cryptographic condition of possibility.” (2018, p. 238). Put even more simply, D&G in ATP: “_Becoming is an antimemory_. ... {and} From chaos, _Milieus_ and _Rhythms_ are born.” pp. 294 & p. 313. (See also: [[Assembly and assemblage]]).] None of what preceded means that there is a moral to this story, involving questions of responsibility/accountability, and/or solutions to major world problems. This is not about solutions, most of the time: solutions are the problem. If anything, “you cannot will what you will,” a certain kind of betrayal of the “fidelity to the event” or, more anciently: the principle of non-action, are the only conclusion. Perhaps the soul really is immortal and unbreakable (Plato) in the sense that it is sociohistorically distributed and co-constructed (Hegel). _Self_-mastery, a category merging both these aforementioned gentlemen is, under this condition, impossible: the soul is not only multiplicitous and dialectical, but even under the most lonesome conditions it will never self-master, as this feat would only entail that a new limit has been reached, one which must be trespassed if true mastery is to be accomplished. This is why Schwarzenegger went from body-builder to politician. However, his story, mythically presented as one full of choosing, is one of pure chances: his body grew and displaced itself through spacetime, like Hegel’s blossom, dialectical, procedural, given.^[“... in the preface to his _Phenomenology_, {Hegel} likened stages in the life of Spirit to phases in vegetal growth and reproduction, or when, in _Lectures on the Philosophy of World_ History, he wrote: “Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity; its activity is the transcending of immediate, simple, unreflected existence,—the negation of that existence, and the returning into itself. We may compare it with the seed; for with this the plant begins, yet it is also the result of the plant’s entire life {_Wir können ihn mit dem Samen vergleichen; denn mit diesem fängt die Pflanze an, aber er ist auch Resultat des ganzen Lebens derselben_}.” (Marder 2017, p. 22). See also: [[On the importance of vegetables and sand for philosophy]].] Spatiotemporal chances take perspectives along for the ride. Nobody ever asked to emerge, yet here we are. Notoriously, in his presentation of _tychism_, Peirce wanted to admit or submit to the concept of chance, else we lose all variation and hope. However, this is only partly the case. Existing, just being there, without formalizing that condition into something spanning a definite amount of time which we can abstract from and predict, is also a strategy, and it’s all the more _chanceful_ if it actually disregards rigid formalisms for the moment being, in favor of a contemplative attempt at clashing and resolving fully into its own conclusion, itself, pure connection, no dictation: the actual _living_ of the understanding-reasoning is that the understanding-reasoning is coherently at odds with itself (again: see footnote 31: this is not Heidegger). As Peirce also noted—which Borges took note of in his famous _On Exactitude in Science_—the only placemoment at which the map actually coincides with itself, that is where the subject lies. It _lies_ with regard to all other subjects: the most important thing is that we don’t tell others how to live, but live our lives together contemplating these points of individuated subjectivity as singular and therefore endlessly interesting, just like everything else. This is a simple statement, it is a crucial statement. By abandoning the myth of clarity and transparency, we admit new levels of solidarity: we do not know the other simply because we do not know ourselves. We, therefore: collide in contingency, converse in communality, converge in chaosmos. **0th layer**: A decision is nothing more than a _scission_, where a scission, a cut, is simply divergence from pattern. This is the classical take on freedom as contingency: the unexpected, the event, the veering, our eternal, incongruous dislodging from the plane. This, contested, can also be framed as: anything that happens, happens, and often in retrospect appears as if it was necessary (in the true manner of the cunning of Reason). This exchange of ‘forces’ shapes the topologies of the big, multidimensional Venn diagram enveloping concepts such as decisions, freedom, free will, etc. But interestingly: this scission existing everywhere at all times, cannot be said to reside within an agential locus, as this locus is _inexcretably_ tied to its context. **1st layer**: We would all agree, perhaps (if not, let me know): liberal voluntarism: be gone. If _subject = substance_, the fall generates that which falls, then this negation of particularity as that which generates the vision of freedom, the one which liberal voluntarism depends on. Marder: “What we can do (and this modal verb _can_, promising potency, as much as the active _do_, should not be taken for granted) is let another energy work and dream, as it gushes forth from the fault lines of the productivist worldview.” (Marder 2017, p. 29). **2nd layer**: but why do we keep talking about freedom (especially _a_ freedom of the self)? Is the simple answer our embeddedness in _choice_-ing? As in: _chose_, cosa, cosificación: thingification, reification back to the thing in itself. About 90% of the things witnesssed every day have to do with people explaning to themeachothers why certain things are done, why certain things will be done. None of these things have an answer in freedom, only in _constraints_. **3rd layer**: if these layers are taken seriously, a different reality can be seen, a communist reality where there are nobodies, and nobody can be said to chase individuality. Because: 0) decisions don’t exist, 1) liberal voluntarism is a strange (christocapitalist) dream, 2) it makes no sense to judge ‘free agents’, and thus 3) once we understand that replacing the concept of _choice_ for the concept of _chance_, chances become much more active and apparent than reactive choices. “Beyond the theoretical quandary the racial creates for contemporary critical analyses drawing from historical materialism —the labor of slaves and indentured workers, for instance, has been considered productive and yet never fully integrated into the historical-materialist arsenal—the most troubling aspect of examinations of the intersection of race, class, and gender is that they deploy these categories as descriptive devices.” (Ferreira da Silva 2007, p. xx). Precisely because of this, at this hinge, at this vertex, at this impasse, at this exclusion is: freedom, free will, the ability to do otherwise. Break this enchantment. If not beginning from the perhaps clinically distanced position proposed here, the at least from the movement towards a complete restructuring of those under the harshest constraints today. ### Contemplation or collapse To unground and reground elsewhere is the philosophical operation par excellence. Fredric Jameson opens _The Prison-House of Language_ (1974) with the Nietzsche quote from which the book takes its title: “We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit...” The suggestion here is thus to modulate language so that it enhances the non-personal, non-individual, non-choosing qualities of sociocultural life. The intersubjective narration of lives. The crossed-wire desires which run the tragic walking carcasses that we are, the incredible, loving bipeds that we admire. If the “concrete character of the social life {is an} intricate commodity network {which} may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs” (ibid. ix), then change not just the concepts but their exchange value: sounds or meanings? Cadence or message? Generality or specificity? If it is two it is also three. Do we need a name for this thirdness? Is that what real action or expression entails? Jameson reflects on “the unique structure of language itself, with its twin faces, of which Saussure has said, in a famous image, that it is “comparable to a sheet of paper: thought being the recto and sound the verso; one cannot cut one side without at the same time cutting the other; and in the same way, in language, one can neither isolate sound from thought nor thought from sound.” {footnote: 1 Ferdinand de Saussure, _Cours de linguistique générale_ (Paris, 1965, third edition), p. 157.” (p. 3). Just imagine the following situation: I say something _bad_. Maybe I do something bad. Whatever “bad” is, in your head, right now, I don’t know. Not only that: imagine if, instead of asking me, or others “why did you do that?”, to get at the sense from which my action, from which _I_ emerged, you contemplated said actions and imagined me incapable of rendering something _else_. Perhaps, maybe, maybe, maybe, just maybe: there would be no “good,” no “bad,” no _if-then_. There would be no judgment, there would be nothing interesting to say _right now_. But other things would be interesting: _becoming_ involved. ### Confounded compatibilist compromise The idea of self-determination as based on availability of knowledge and the time to project future possibilities in order to make choices is a dream of lordship. It happens, but it’s not free, it only oppresses. The idea of self-determination as total (self-)knowledge and control is but a theological dream. “True freedom in the sense of the most primordial self-determination is found only where a choice is no longer possible and no longer necessary.”^[Heidegger in _Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom_ (1936, quoted in Braver 2013).] Freedom as necessity and necessity as freedom. We do not vibe with this, because necessity implies the commandeering eagle-eye perspective we are not interested in. All of us, here, heaps of flesh, are the result of the colonial machine. The prosperity that enlivened discrete zones of the world flowed through bodies that merged and collided and gave rise to more, every time _more_. Love amidst carcasses. Hope amidst ruins. The only thing deserving of the denomination of _compatibilist_ is the acknowledgement of this, and search everywhere and anywhere, with all senses wide open upon the spectacle that murmurs on. Desperately, become seekers of abolition of that which brought your crepuscule about: observe chance as it flows. And express it: express the immovability of the entire machine: and become it. If philosophy is the interest in perspective grounding itself in something (in seeing through, or filtering through a situated point and how that might be communicable with others), is it possible to talk in terms of the collective or distributed perspective? Do we need another term? Mass only means “what this perspective thinks mass means, but that very thinking is composed of masses” (lumpenproletariat all the way down). The idea that history moves towards freedom can sound good, but only in terms of its absolute immanence, not in terms of its positing as a framework of freedom under currently observable conditions, which all are ‘free’ in deplorable terms (free _from_ the point of view that observes a subjected slave, and free _to_ exploit, expand, excavate). So, to veer course: away from the implementation of apparently established freedoms, to the permanent state of reciprocal, loving (meta-)learning. My message is so banal, that this should be cause for alarm. “If we begin to see, and hear, where what it is to be liberated into is inseparable from what it is to be liberated from, then we enact a fugitive consent. No word, no world.” (Moten 2018, p. 87). If that doesn’t mean anything to you then think about this: if the point is to transform the world (wait, what? Is it?), rather than to think it, to represent it, and it propelling ourselves into the future is done by means of prediction (permanent, unceasing representations which require time and resources), isn’t the predictive will that ultimate spectral speculation we must transform in order to See also: [[Everything cut away from C is for Communism]]. (The above is left unfinished _on purpose_). If this is how choices _happen_, what are the constraints that enable our interactions? We continue to explore this in the following chapter, on the concept of _bias_ and how this is not only etymologically but also _literally_ referring to our gravitropic givenness. Continue reading at: [[D Bias, Falling into Place]] and [[Gravity]]. ### Footnotes