When the sorcery of infinity is recalibrated as the sorcery of the ground:
What intrigues necromancers about gravity and separates them from sorcerers is their participating attitude toward gravity (complicity); what they see is the attracting functionality of gravity, the remaining of the pestilential philia (as the engineer of bonds, the smooth space of attractions) working at the basis of the verticals of gravity and exploited by the ground. For necromancers, escapism (engineering the line-of-escape) engages in a battle with its own objects of escape, the very consequences of its escapist line of tactics. As the line of escape instigates a line-of-flight along the verticals of gravity to configure a levis(lightness)-function, it immerses deeper into the arriving dangers that the levitating line of tactics integrates around itself, increasingly believing in them, making them real, relentlessly giving rise to them as it tries to escape, to assemble the politics of lightness. However, neither necromancers nor sorcerers regard rigorous escapism as a reactionary cowardliness, but as one method (among many other polytics) for entering the war-zone. For necromancers this method simply is reliable on a survivalist passion that each warmachine engulfs at its core to endure in War; the line of escape is always under the constant danger of falling into a movement for reaching higher modes of survival, developing more advanced compositions of survival economy. Moreover, Deleuze-Guattarian escapism inherits two elements from tactics by which it transforms into a levitating movement (lightness or levis-function promoted by tactical dynamism), a movement for cutting through the verticals of gravity (escapism as a movement always carries a tactical line to move forward in any direction); both of which are regarded as potentially capturable by necromancers because of the conformation they take to disarray or even overpowering the verticals of gravity:
(1) Every tactics or tactical movement (f=p/a [1]) in the same way that Deleuze and Guattari suggest envelopes ‘a becoming death’, influenced by which the impetus and participating parts of the movement will eventually cease to process. The inevitability of death (or zero-degree of processing) inexorably programs the dynamism of every tactical line, covering the line of tactics with a horizon (boundary) which does not only hold and pass the ultimate phase of movement (or the terminus-event) but silently implant itself as a moderator (and an intermediary field between tendencies which affect the progression of the movement) from the emergence of the movement to its maturation. The becoming death or zero-degree of processing is definitely inevitable for the tactical line and its intrinsic dynamism, but this inevitability engineers a horizon for the line of tactics (becoming, line-of-escape, etc.) which functions as a channel, a remote managerial sphere which affects the route to the Outside. If the line of escape is launching towards the Outside, then ‘becoming death’ forces the line to travel through the horizon it creates, which is nothing but the inevitability of death happening for the movement, extended from the beginning to the terminus-event which is not necessarily ‘end’ as telos. This inevitability affects (or perhaps transforms to something else) the encounter with the Outside. For a line of escape, the Outside is only seen, traced, reached and become accessible through the horizon of its ‘becoming death’, its terminus which accompanies the movement (or becoming) from the first moment of its emergence to the end; any function of the line of escape as a movement or a levis-function (of lightness), at any moment, is configured by this inevitability, it is channeled, molded and inspired by the horizon of its terminus or ‘what eventually unfolds’ -- becoming death of every becoming. There is always the possibility that this outside (the outside which the sorcerous line of escape seeks to explore) has already been modified by the fog of death and by the horizon of its inevitability that each tactical line has already enveloped within itself and virtually moves through its principles.
(2) To propel and move forward, to communicate with the Outside, the line of escape constructs its tacticity on tactical openness or more precisely, the plane of ‘being open to’. The somehow exaggerated temerity of this openness for ‘being open to the outside’ is constantly screened and modulated through the capacity (capax: affordability to accommodate) of the line of escape to handle the outside or to be exact, to afford it. ‘Being open to’ as a dynamic and tactical line of openness -- which is also encored in dynamic but laminar politics of liberalism -- should always measure and carefully monitor the opening process which opens the lines of escape to new milieus [2]. As previously discussed in Holocaust of Freedom: Affordance presents itself as an economical openness, particularly on the inevitably secured(ing) plane of being open (i.e. ‘being open to’), where organic and subjective survivalism can always interfere without limit; appropriating the flow of xeno-signals (or the journey to the Outside), economizing participations, or even if necessary cutting them before the capacity is cracked and laid open, before a non-economical openness eats the capacity of the line of escape, a capacity through which escapism sustains its dynamism and survival. 'Being open', politically and cautiously, spreads over Survival Economy as an economical, heavily but slyly appropriated sphere of affordance; it simultaneously works as a dynamic matrix of correctitude and appropriation upon the line between the ‘subject’ of economical openness (I’m open to ...) and the ‘the already transformed and customized Outside’ (i.e. the subject that economical openness gives rise to, or in other words, the objective of economical openness as ‘being open to’); the affordance must preserve the survival of both subjects.
Following 1 and 2, Castaneda’s sorcery of infinity (or as Castaneda enciphering it, “Reading Infinity”), whose protagonists are usually lines of escape or levis-functions, can be (mis-)directed as the wings of the ground, aggrandizing (grandis) the transcendental sphere of the ground, its surface dynamics, solidus economy and solidly (rigidly concentrated) stratified systems by moving the ground beyond its super-ficially consolidated bounds, giving it a spatial extension to the Outside: an all inclusive ground-space or ground-horizon whose processes invest the solidus economy, solidity and architectonic forces and bildung of the grund all through space, and not incorporated strata or on despotically petrified surfaces as it is usually and wrongly believed. Spatialized ground expels the curse of being static, of lying there and being rigidified, rotting in restricted territories; it unsummons “solidity as immutable despotism” but calls for spatial grounding processes -- a political reformation of solidus, towards grounding space. Now while the ground accommodates the Outside and employs intensities as its own forces of bildungen (groundization), the ‘utilized’ lines of escape blindly spatialize and unbind the ground by their tactical dynamism (affordance-based openness) towards outside, rendering the ground as the pro-creationist consolidating apeiron -- here the boundlessness of the ground, the infinity of Solidus: the sorcery of infinity is recalibrated as the sorcery of the ground.
NOTES
[1] 'f=p/a' suggests the linkage between tactical lines and ground, where 'f' is flux, 'p' is power and 'a' is a representation of the ground (surface dynamics).
[2] The lidless gaze of a watch-fiend over all probing / propelling functions of the line of escape when it tries to communicate with the Outside, that is to say, when it tries to be open.
Hyperstition Links
Sorcerers and Necromancers:
Posted by hyperstition at November 19, 2004 10:43 AMThis is not exactly on-point, but still...
The strategy/tactics distinction is one that has interested me for a while. But what about the plan(e) of logistics (which at least Virilio talks about. But even he tends not to grasp this plane in full relation to the other operational planes) and the plane of grand tactics (which has had almost no critical discourse). As Henri de Jomini, a contemperory of Clausewitz, explains in his The Art of War: "Strategy is the art of making war upon the map, and comprehends the whole theater of operations. Grand Tactics is the art of posting troops upon the battle-field according to the accidents of the ground, of bringing them into action, and the art of fighting upon the ground, in contradistinction to planning upon a map. […] Logistics comprises the means and arrangements which works out the plans of strategy and tactics. Strategy decides where to act; logistics brings the troops to this point; grand tactics decides the manner of execution and the employment of the troops." (of course tactics is on a plan(e) 'below' grand tactics, detailing the individual engagement). So the operations of War occur on three simulatanous plan(e)s, that are interacticve (Foucault, HoS- "No ‘local center’, no ‘pattern of transformation’ could function if, through a series of sequences, it did not eventually enter into an over-all strategy. And inversely, no strategy could achieve comprehensive effects if it did not gain support from precise and tenuous relations serving, not as a point of application or final outcome, but as its prop and anchor point. There is no discontinuity between them, as if one were dealing with two different levels (one microscopic and the other macroscopic); but neither is there homogeneity (as if the one were only the enlarged projection or the miniaturization of the other); rather, one must conceive of the double conditioning of a strategy by the specificity of possible tactics, and of tactics that by the strategic envelope that makes them work" pp.99-100 Though clearly we are dealing with three levels, rather than two). But along with the three operational plan(e)s, the (un)life of War needs to be feed, hence the plan(e) of logistics. (I guess this is where petropolytx, anti-market forces, etc. come in).
Also, I am thinking that maybe the four plan(e)s of War do not just follow lines and vectors, but also tensors (which is a vector of a vector of a vector, or even more). Tensors would allow us to understand the operations of War through time. Which i guess brings us back to logistics. War purposefully misorders the world (Misordering comes from Jayan Nayar’s article “Orders of Inhumanity” in 1999 Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems “I use the term 'misorderings' here to contrast with 'disorder,' the more familiar terminology of critique. The point I wish to make is that the usual conflict regarding the violence of 'world-order' does not flow from the opposition between 'order' and a lack of order (chaos, anarchy, 'disorder') but, rather, that it results from the creation of orders of violence which disrupt, if not destroy, other existing orders. It follows that this, the impact of 'world-order' projects, when seen from a critical standpoint, does not give rise to 'disorder,' but that the inflicted suffering is the consequence of very real, and consciously created, orders and orderings of violence.”) in order to perputate and extend itself (Similar to what Burroughs is saying, “You see Control can never be a means to any practical end… It can never be a means to anything but more Control… just like Junk…”). In order to create these misordering, we have to realize that War exists in a hybrid/cyborg temporalities (Haraway and Goodeve: "Time is highly condensed and fused and implosion is all around us.... It's an already-written future, with a bounded notion of temporality already built into it.") Where it is always plugged into in its own future. War is always only becoming-war (Deleuze, LoS: “This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and pull in both directions at once.”)
Something like that.
Love
TheScuApologizesForThisNotExactlyRespondingToThePost
Scu, logistics is absolutely crucial; and is v. complex as it feeds two different but not incongruent planes of strategy and tactics. have a few remarks on this topic but should finish some boring projects first ;) My appologies ... i'll get back to you on this in the next two days. also glad you like 'grasping war as a machine'; we are working on more materials about war-as-a-machine.
Posted by: Reza at November 21, 2004 03:13 PM