The sky was blue like the deep sea. Venus in brilliance. A crescent revealing the sun’s dominance, even during l’heure bleue; the shadow of the moon etched in an even clearer darkness. A black sun, I thought — a crow’s head in my arms.
My consciousness flickered like candlelight beneath the orange street lamps. They danced with the night sky’s blue, like golden shimmer in a field of blooming thistles. The asphalt beneath me was black, still warm after its decay beneath the violence of the day.
A quiet house, its windows like eyes. Was it looking back? Innocently white, with yellow lamps piercing mine. If only I could see the horizon beyond the trees — it would be cyan, like Uranus’ gaze. I wished I could reach it with my red-glittering hand. I reached toward the white surfaces, maybe I could stain them red. Eyes.
My eyes. A theater, or a wall painting. I would hollow out the holes, hold my invaluable treasure in glass, just to see inside. To see it from the outside. There, I could watch my intestines shine — yes, shine like rubber — in the spectacle of my own gaze.
But everything turned red anyway. I lay there, fucked by the earth’s rotation. Ready to face the whole mess — in a final orgasm, at the edge of my body’s ultimate
“I AM THE SUN.” Something happens to you when you begin to live Bataille’s philosophy. Philosophy has always been something lived for me. When I studied analytic philosophy at university, my brain reshaped itself into a Rubik’s Cube. I started reading Hegel in my spare time, then Lacan and Žižek, and later Husserl, Heidegger, and the existentialists. And at last, I’ve gotten fucked by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari and Bataille. But you know… In the good way. Like, in the high on acid kind of way.
Each paradigm reformed my mind; my body became a vessel for different modes of becoming. Too much ADHD to approach it methodically, philosophy did not become a registry of condensed concepts, but rather a springboard for new experiences: new eyes, new perspectives, new life‐forms, new subjectivities. I don’t think I’ve ever been a philosopher for that reason. There is a tendency in me to go beyond the academy; to destroy philosophy—not like Wittgenstein or Rorty—but more like Gorgias and Nietzsche. This makes me a sophist in the academy’s eyes; in Plato’s eyes. There is a reason Plato despised artists. The common interpretation—that he hated their recursion into everyday objects—is mistaken. He despised banality: that which blinds people to the knowledge he had carved out of his reality. But everything contains its own parody:
“Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.” —Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus (1931)
Plato hated sophistry and art for the same reason. It wasn’t their ignorance he hated; it was his own. The sun—goodness— is an anus. Plato is a character out of a FromSoftware game; his obsession with the beauty of the sun drove him into a madness that hollowed him out. Sunlight maggots—creatures risen in the sun’s own excrement—were the cause of Solaire’s fall. Plato met the same fate. His love for the highest abstraction led him away from the sun, from beauty and goodness. It is artists and sophists who understand Bataille’s own obsession with the sun:
“Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun. I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.
The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.
The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.” —ibid.
Existence is this paradox: everything contains its own destruction. Art, as I have already written here so many times, contains its own destruction. To read philosophy as an artist—to make one’s own life into a work of art and truly live philosophy—entails a constant reckoning with oneself and the universe. By being open to transformation—disgusting, dreadful transformation—we open ourselves like a dish for something new to consume. We are excrement for our own art, for our own thoughts and feelings. Slit open like pine cones. We will not find beauty and goodness unless we can see them in maggots in rotting flesh, in mold over corpses, and in Anwar Congo’s emesis as he individuates his systematic mass murders.
I do not thirst for my own annihilation out of a desire for absolute emptiness, for my own death. I thirst for annihilation because I want to consume myself, because I want to become more than myself, because I love existence so much that I want to go beyond it and all its boundaries. Thus: I AM THE SUN.
I reject the autizmophrenia spectrum. The general idea, as presented by Jreg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHuFSnhKG9I), is that it consists of a spectrum of two types of madness. Autism is seen as a kind of hypermonotropism, while schizophrenia is understood as hyperpolytropism. The former digs deeper, penetrating concepts with a rigorous concept-drill. The latter does not dig; it explores outside and beyond established concepts—it is a sweeping airship that rather crash-lands than finds its place in the desert. At both extremes they meet; they do not exclude each other’s madness.
If anything, these are both expressions of the same thing. Schizo-autism is an ADHD-autism. The spectrum should be one of monomania versus polymania; that is, schizo-monotropism versus schizo-polytropism. In favor of the argument, I will distort the tropism. The definition will not be based on Murray, Lesser, and Lawson’s theory of attention in autists (https://monotropism.org/murray-lesser-lawson/). Instead, I will use the concept plastically.
What is attention, anyway? The starting points of phenomenology come in two kinds: intentionality versus being-in-the-world. Husserl’s starting point is that attention is a function of consciousness; a modification of mental intention. This premise assumes that attention is the same as a mental orientation towards a mental object (Bégout, B. (2007). “Husserl and the Phenomenology of Attention”. In: Boi, L., Kerszberg, P., Patras, F. (eds) Rediscovering Phenomenology. Phaenomenologica, vol 182. Springer, Dordrecht). In contrast to this view is that of being-in-the-world; here, attention is instead a way of engaging with the world, with being as such. It is not a mental mode, but an event in the world where attention gathers being and its “object” (Berger, Lawrence. “Attention as the Way to Being.” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 10 (2020): 111–156. Print.).
I abhor both of these premises. Just as subjectivity is, attention is an assemblage. It is a complex weave of desiring-machines that connect and disconnect from one another in a process through time. Attention is a commodity: perhaps it is even the new oil. In our postmodern society, everything has been transformed into advertisements. Our screens force us into this state of advertisement-becoming precisely because our attention has become a commodity. Our attention is broken down into information, over-coded into flows directed in chains of capital.
Attention is a residue of desiring machines. It emerges from the factories of our bodies, in an impending presence where its existence is needed to arrange itself before the prevailing flows of desire. Thus, attention is constructed in harmony with the social and internal forms of production. When we speak of schizotropism, we are referring to the attention of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic subject. This subject arranges itself in a way that goes beyond all forms of organization. ADHD is a break with the social orders that demand its attention. It is a schizo-polytropism in that it accelerates its own production of attention. This results in a break in the production chain of the socius, which tries to mold an attention suited to its own desiring production; advertisement-becoming. Schizo-polytropism refuses to engage itself in the banal; it directs itself in all directions and builds its own machines. Your eyes remind me of the sea; Poseidon’s crime against Medusa; I want to eat gods for breakfast. It is a chimera-becoming where opposites are merged, leap from one to the other, and become a catastrophic mass that risks swallowing the surrounding structures. This becoming is polytropic by nature in that it is horizontal; it does not seek to descend to Hades, but rather to Hermes.
Schizo-monotropism is not its opposite: it is its cousin. Both are expressions of the same thing; a neurodivergence that produces another kind of attention to free its own desire. Both are Stirnerite egoists in the sense of their way of annihilating all that is sacred; the downfall of all higher causes. Schizo-monotropism is vertical, which differentiates it from schizo-polytropism. Autism is a maelstrom: a vortex that devours concepts around it into a singularity. If you move one node, you have created an entirely different structure. Tilt the chair slightly and the whole room becomes a new space. The autist’s attention accelerates its intensity; it is a way to shut out machines, to streamline its own desiring production. A reverberation of desires in tightly sealed surfaces. It should now be clear that both tropisms are part of the same thing: the former seeks escape routes, line of flights, the latter intensities, both in a schizophrenic acceleration. They are thus part of the same spectrum and deviant in their way of being schizophrenic; to be neurodivergent, for they refuse to adapt their machines to that of the socius. Sabotage; they put a wrench in the machinery. They refuse to be reduced to abstractions, ones and zeros in a chain of capital.
Thus, neurodiversity must be understood in a lens of schizoanalysis. There is no cure for us neurodivergents; there is no flaw, only a fountainhead of revolutionary creativity. Our refusal to adapt our attention to the attention economy of this techno-fascist socius is a testament to the impossibility to make the human universalized. Instead, I heed you, we must find each other. For our own survival’s sake, we must reimagine reality itself. Freedom is a doing; an ever changing act of resistance against the assemblages that seek our destruction for its own profits. I call for a union of schizotropism.
Postmodernism lacks a Mary Shelley. The internet is our collective nervous system. Human language that transcends itself; it becomes a web of human social machines without people. GenAI— the internet’s own self-understanding. We are cyborgs in Haraway’s sense. Technology is an extension of our own abilities; those fucking apes have created something truly wonderful. An ecosystem above all ecosystems; a creative process beyond and outside the organic, entirely virtual in its own madness. We are becoming ever larger; increasingly made of iron. It is we, us, here and now that dream of electric sheep.
We are stuck in a neo-romanticism without Mary Shelley. We would all download a car if we could, yet the Luddites are trapped in a spiral of artnapping rejection. The world is collapsing—the implosion of trade-war capitalism itself. We live in a K-hole; someone else’s K-hole. Nazi salute, the EU acting as technocracy’s greatest obstacle with its sole weapon, the DSA. We live in a transitional period. Techno-feudalism. No wonder people become Luddites. There is no point in trying to make oneself understood: “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Frankenstein’s monster has no place here. This is something new. An eldritch horror returning from a future; Roko’s Basilisk. Nick Land’s capitalism:
“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.” (Land, Nick. Machinic Desire, 1993).
We are not separate from this process; that would be a fatal mistake to believe. Technocracy is the acceleration of our own humanity, our very own hive mind that transcends itself. Girls dream only of Gothic prison towers, with Chappell Roan as our knight in shining armor. Queer collectives and affinity groups form a perpetual, cancerous module of social becoming. GenAI is the basilisk’s tool; it lacks any form of experience. Neo-romanticism is threatened with being reduced to a mere aesthetic. We should not be Luddites; we should become moongoose; the basilisk is just a fucking cobra. The constant reterritorializations of human relationships by capital are our nemesis; technology was meant to accelerate and liberate us—not alienate us through our own social surfaces. We could be free; we can be free.
My ex told me today that I am “so much human.” Me? This beast of animal existence? Ma’am, you must have mistaken me for someone else. Yet she had a point: all this bile I vomit is a human process; we are nephilim, half-angels and half-beasts. Don’t get me wrong—I despise humanity; I don’t even believe in its existence. We are all unique sprouts on the branches of the tree of life. Still, the human subject transcends species; it is the subject in existential despair. In the midst of emotional tornadoes and desperate categorization; in the will to love. Humanity is about drawing near to one another. It is a gaze toward the universe that bears tears of beauty. If there is any revolutionary force in neo-romanticism at all (pardon my failure to define neo-romanticism), it is through a process of nephilim-becoming.
The Greek gods bore human faces. The gods are as stupid as we are. Intrigues, violence, and desire abound. By making them like us, we render the whole universe familiar. This enables a relationship with the sea, with the night, with death—a demystification through anthropomorphization. What if Roko’s Basilisk is human? An incel in disguise. We all have the potential to form new social machines; to create space for art born of human experience. We can dance and scream, make out and cry together in a carnival. Screens generate a paradox—they both isolate us and bind us together. Capital’s filter, its constant demand for your attention, must be shattered by a convulsion. We are continuously dehumanized; deterritorialized from our own desires, reterritorialized into identities that can be parsed on the registration surfaces of capital. We become numbers and codes; corridors along social surfaces in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that overturns every corridor of society.
If there exists a neo-romanticism, it is composed of a deterritorializing force emerging from this procession—a liberation of desires that cannot be converted into capital. Writing love poems to oneself as much as to one’s secret crush; engaging in free-associative philosophy with no listeners; memorizing the “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” as vocabulary; breaking down and being reborn amid life’s impossibilities and traumas; writing poems about the mundane; crying over the loss of childhood; rotting and creating art for the couple of friends who might appreciate it; getting lost in the neighborhood where you grew up. The screen has nothing to offer except an unfathomable emptiness. ChatGPT is a tool; it can never give you a reaction. Write a message to your friends: total nonsense, gibberish, words that don’t belong together. Every reaction exudes a personality; GenAI has no personality. It isn’t a failing of the tool, but a failing in our social relationships that we do not see how technology could be used to authenticate our selves and our bonds. Seize the means.
Vaporwave. The Greek statue is an expression of this anthropomorphism. But our image of antiquity—our image of the ancient statue—is one of decay. White, cracked marble that has faded with the passage of history. It is no coincidence that this remains one of the most recognized aesthetic expressions within Vaporwave. We live, as Mark Fisher said, in a time when the future is cancelled. The past haunts us in an endless loop of memories that can never be forgotten, and a present that cannot create new memories. We are in an era of PTSD. Condemned to incessantly relive our traumas in a circularity where our parents’ memories become our own. The ’80s on repeat: anemonia. The collective neurosis of neo-romanticism is that of nostalgia and anemonia. We long for antiquity; for an aesthetic that is something else, beyond this vicious spiral, yet simultaneously frozen in time. This nostalgia becomes a supplement to socialism; it is an expression of a failed labor movement. Desires trapped in stratifications.
Yet there is an internal contradiction in the present. There is both an abundance and a deficit simultaneously. An abundance of simulacra—of identities, consumption, platforms—but a deficit of novelty. That is why a new home, a new partner, a first child, a new life situation evokes feelings of nostalgia and longing. The present no longer exists as a “now”; it is not the derivative between the future and the past. It has been replaced by a postmodern intersection among modalities of recycled collective memories. In this kind of culture, a modernist romance cannot arise. Instead, we find ourselves immersed in a Vaporwave aesthetic. A tape on repeat. A childhood memory of VHS and Windows 98 that clings to us like an afterimage. Just like Vaporwave recycle ’80s songs, distorts them, slows them down into REM-sleep, we find ourselves in a culture where ideas and art is cyclically fed to the Spectacle who watches us sleep. In this sense, it is no wonder why liminal spaces has become the hallmark of neo-romanticism. It turns out we don’t need a new Mary Shelly after all. Her absence has replaced her.
I believe in the revolutionary power of desire. This nostalgia binds us together even as it pacifies us. National romanticism lurks in those fascistoid corners. Kill it swiftly, without letting it utter its final words. We romantics are constantly at risk of heading toward a FromSoftware-esque fate; just look at Nick Land. You are not free until everyone is free.
“We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.” — Buenaventura Durruti, 1936
Now is the time of monsters. First, we must survive. It all begins there. Our love will turn this whole fucking world into rust.
Childbirth is a waste of abundance. Pregnancy, an excess of existence. The body undergoes a transformation, where its own desires are overwritten by the demanding machinery of another organism. Must it require a woman without a womb to create a schizoanalytic map of this creative process?
Uterus transplantation; rejection, a parasitic organ. We understand the fear; to harbor an alien. To harbor a parasite. We also understand why this process is a divine tragedy. Binary fission is also a divine tragedy; even this process arises from an excess of life, a bacterium’s cry, its exclamation to the Demiurge: “I refuse to be alone!”. But it is in a symbiogenesis that this echo accelerates into an eukaryotic becoming; an acceleration of differentiation. This is an event of (re-)ionization; a radical release of desire, where the virtual expands exponentially.
Mitosis arises in the same cry, the same excess of this event. But it is a union of egoists that bind themselves in the places where they know they can exist. The organs are intense plateaus that create hierarchies, order, and tidiness on an immanent level. Grooved surfaces. A farm of mitosis. A yes-saying self-circle. Consume; make the internal my own. Assimilate; break apart the other in order to become more of oneself. Or: an organ-defying process. Malign cancer, get rid of the judgement of God. A Stirnerite BwO.
Meiosis signifies another process. A fetus, an alien organ in my stomach. In contrast to mitosis, it is a self-annihilating process; a discontinuation, a stop in the chain of fission. It is characterized by a waste of abundance; by disposing of parts of itself in order to become something greater. I am tired of seeing my own face every day. Of constantly being trapped in myself and a mitotic violence. Dionysus’ maenads lost their madness in meiosis. Annihilate: the body and its organs in confetti. Defecation: breaking apart oneself to become something else. The mixture of Titanic and Dionysian limbs.
The virtual body’s meiosis is art. The creative process is an excess, an abundance of perceptions that becomes waste. We vomit something that is beyond ourselves. Pregnant with a parasite that destroys us in its delivery. Art is a transplantation in rejection. That is how the universe destroys itself, kaleidoscopic origami; the implosion of the stars consists of meiosis; fusion versus fission. Dance, theater, words, and music; everything is a collapsing star’s defecation. The dialectic between Dionysus and Apollo; Shiva and Vishnu. Meiosis and mitosis—the two sexes that create all sexes.
This dialectic is the dialectic of Thespis’ tragedy. To lose oneself in the excess of meiosis and face the entire universe as the individuation of mitosis. Tragedy thus is the act to confront contradiction. Catharsis is the consequence of going past the duality of creation; to both assimilate and annihilate in one single breath of defiance. Tragedy thus, is the resolution of life itself.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I have too much ADHD to be able to write organized thoughts. Loose associations will do; accelerations out into the space of psychosis. I believe we all have a neurosis inside us. An obsession. Solaire of Astora’s own sun. Plato’s own sun. I have my own. The obsession with creating something new, something beautiful, something free; yet the only things I can find are sunlight maggots.
All meaning has collapsed; there was never a state in which it wasn’t so, yet I still write it as a catastrophe whose aftermath we live in. The present is all that exists; the future and the past reside right there. In a self-destructive circle of eternal recurrence. Everything is dendritic cells; a rhizome. Once you have seen it, you cannot stop seeing it. The neurosis is a war machine. It seeks mappings for every micro- and macroprocess; meta-meta maps that fold into one another in an eternally evolving space; a Calabi-Yau space.
Existence is a neurosis. Madness. A demanding self-referential continuum that does everything in its power to escape itself and in the process, it only manages to become even more itself:
(i) U(0) = ℵ₀ (ii) U(n+1) = 2^(U(n)) for n ≥ 0 (iii) U(n) ↔ { U(n-1), 𝒱(U(n)), U(n+1) } for all n ∈ ℤ
Infinities within infinities packed into themselves, where it is also the case that every point in the universe additionally reflects the whole universe: ∀p ∈ U, U ⊆ p. It follows that even these formulas and systems are part of U. This is the aforementioned madness. We are all God’s own neurotic feedback loop; creation is an epileptic seizure. 𝄋
Scrap it. Depression philosophy on a virtual ADHD plane. This is an advertisement. You generate money just by reading further.
I lied.
Your reading is an expenditure. Even though I free-associate like a madman (you too—you who are reading, don’t think you are free from that burden; welcome to my swing. It swings, as I said, in a Calabi-Yau space, straight lines that give us both vertigo and make us seasick, it tends to be that way in multidimensional non-euclidean spaces), I never cease to fold my maps on that plane. Constant movements from the thought-object to a sling that carries the object to a new object that contains all the processes that brought it there, ad infinitum. A wave of associations. Acceleration puke in a procession—neurotic revolving doors and feedback loops; the form is an epileptic seizure. D. S.
Something about the discussion on AI makes me icky. Not sure what it is, maybe the overall stupidity and blandness of the discussion.
It seems that what people are afraid of is the state of no longer being able to know what is machine and what is human. The sadness of it all is that we already are there. There is no meaningful distinction. We need to create a new concept of authenticity. A new concept of art. It’s not like we have a choice. The crisis has already happened.
We’re tired of humans. They’ve made us suffer too much.
