This is new version of ‘Machines are digging’ extensively updated in the wake of Dr. Hackhammer’s studies of Shoggothic Materialism and biopolytics of pest.
An interesting conversation with Craig is still moving forward and getting more exciting, more dynamic in different directions; here some preliminary and crude answers:
First, the machine we are interested in is a non-mechanistic (running un-dispositif), non-utilitarian, immappable machine (machinic machine); intrinsically insurgent to any instrumentalizing process. It can be grasped through radical contagious participations between parts, and its machinery of bond-engineering or epidemic attraction (which according to DG is the ‘functioning’ itself), an attraction which never accommodates parts in matrices of correctitude (what gravity does).
Craig: “Cthulhu, Minister/Priest of the Outside brings a new kind of existence to the Machine-Shoggoths. The Carven Rim and Black Pit are the Holes, tunnels of Holey space through which the Unlife may seep through. That proto-Shoggoth is Unlife itself, the seething chaotic profusions of value-stripped War that repels us with its Strangeness, and in a desperate attempt to comprehend the blackly Numinous labels it a place of Soul-Shattering Evil.”
Holey Space or more accurately ‘( )hole Complex’ (with an ever-evaporating W) speeds and triggers the opening of the Unlife and its convoluting, holing, coring out processes – vermiculating lines or tendrils of Anonymous-until-Now (see previous posts) – that eventually transform into a violent process of ungrounding, re-inventing the Earth as an Unground or what Deleuze and Guattari slyly appropriated as “the New Earth”. The question is: The Tellurian–Omega or the Unground can still be called Earth? And then according to what chronologic current or based on what calendar, according to what becoming, it can be mapped as NEW (the new earth)? The Unground is a shadow out of time.
Lovecraft has an alarming but over-neglected passage about this holey space or ( )hole complex as the zone through which the Outside gradually but persistently emerges, creeps in (or out?) from the Inside.
“Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.” (H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival)
From the following paragraph: "The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl." (H.P. Lovecraft, The Festival)
The ( )hole Complex is actually a machine to facilitate the awakening of the Old Ones through convoluted compositions of solid and void. Paraphrasing Nick from The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism: “void excludes solid but solid includes void to architectonically survive” ... solid needs void to engineer composition; even the most despotic / survivalist solids are compositional solids, infected by the void. Through these inter-collisions of void and solid, the Old Ones – according to Lovecraft – can revive their Holocaust of Freedom, both by consuming solid and pushing compositions towards highest degrees of convolution (as a result of the ambiguity of solid and void i.e. the foggy space of hole and its surface dynamics), by engineering ‘the corpse of solidus’ as we call it – installing ungrounding machines at molecular levels that exhume (ex + humus: ground) the earth from within and without, turning it to a vermicular composition whose strata (The Economy of Solidus) are not dismantled but intricately convoluted at each level of their formation and composition; they are incapacitated from running their stratifying / grounding functions; instead they are charged to engineering the corpse of solidus, or in a Lovecraftian sense, a worm-infested body (earth) exhumed by worming processes – holing / vermiculating machines.
Although void devours solid but solid feasts on void i.e. its outsider. In compositions, solid becomes hysterically gluttonous for the void. This is what intrigued the Cult of the Old Ones in their mission to perform their awakening ritual: If the Old Ones should fly through ( )hole complex or holey space, then the only strategic technique to speed their return is to mess with ( )hole complex – the zone of their emergence. A technique which also perceived by the Z. crowd as a strategy to arch-sabotage monotheism and inter-connect it to undercurrents of Tellurian Insurgency (for example petropolitical undercurrents in Islamic Apocalypticism), and actively – but without attracting too much attention – participating in the Project of Tellurian-Omega and its diverging lines (where the Earth reaches utter immanence with its burning core [or as Nick suggests, “the burning core of the real”] and the Sun) and the Unground.
Awakening Strategies: Holey space is nothing but a composition (of solid and void) but a vermicular one, burrowed by worms or vermicular lines convoluting and coring out anything they touch. In a composition, solid narrates the anomalies generated by void or the infection of void through solid (when void comes to solid, it works as a convoluting plague, a coiling swirling epidemic rather than a nullifying process or a solid-annihilating agent); in a composition there is no pure solid but a defiled one, a diseased and deflowered solid. Once you realize that in a composition (as in ( )hole complex) solid is the possessed narrator of the void, you can see that solid works as two different entities overlapped on each other and functioning concurrently:
(1) As a compositional agency whose dynamism and behavior (topological changes, surface modifications, transformations, motions, wrinkles, folds, etc.) can induce changes to the compositional side of the void through Surface Dynamics:
At a compositional level, holes compile surfaces out of the hegemony of solidus. Every manifestation of ( )hole complex passes a certain type of surface dynamics (in terms of evoking periphery, itinerancy, and affect), breeding a new genre of surfaces with their exclusive itinerant lines depending on the locus of hole and the way that void interplays with solid. Holes offer new polytical activities to surfaces; the crisp boundary of surfaces is dissolved into blurred and cryptogenic boundary of hole. In the presence of hole, an asymmetric parallelism between surfaces and the crust occurs; while they remain analogous and remotely connected to their common genus but each one spawns its own different, independent operational entities and geometries; here, surfaces do not necessarily conduct and synchronize the ground’s local hegemonies through the consolidated coherence of the crust and countermine the stratification processes instead of supporting it (each surface has a command line with two heads: a trellis and a taxis, one receives the accumulation and distributes it i.e. a textum / groundwork for fixation, positioning and support and the other, for granting what has been supported a tendency according to the mutual affordance between surfaces, the eco-logical web). Inner holes and connected cavities, simultaneously, come with two types of surfaces or two active linkages with solidus, a surfaces-supporter that binds the cavity to the crust (therefore, the ( )hole complex cannot be merely reduced to a subterranean / subsoil complexity) i.e. the ‘eco-logical’ outside, and a surface-transmitter that joins with the itinerant lines passing through hole or connected cavities, the one that binds the cavity on the inside where hole emerges out of the ambiguity of solid and void, or in a topologically oversimplified sense where the cavity is.
“The surface is where most of the action is. The surface is where light is reflected or absorbed, not the interior of the substance. The surface is what touches the animal, not the interior. The surface is where chemical reaction mostly takes place. The surface is where vaporization or diffusion of substances into the medium occurs. And the surface is where vibrations of the substances are transmitted into the medium.”
(J.J. Gibson, quoted in Surfaces, Avrum Stroll, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception)
For example, on a mereotopological level, changes on surfaces or the solid part are directly conducted to the compositional void and cause new convolutions and alterations by means of changing the ways or mechanisms through which void is presented through solid. Less technically: if you twist, inflate or heat a tube or a holey ball (with tunnels spread through it) you can see that changes in the solid part are transmitted to the holey side of the tube or the ball, the tunnels or the holey side becomes more convoluted and intricate. These changes through the compositional void can only be perceived through the solid part – this is the compositional inevitability of ( )hole complex.
(2) Solid as an entity possessed by void; the only way that solid can initialize its architectonic / compositional activities (processes for survival, development, etc.) is by letting the void in. The dynamic traits of solid can only be actuated when solid is eaten, convoluted and messed by the void. There is no other option.
In the ( )hole complex, on a superficial (bound to surface dynamics) level, every activity of solid appears as a tactic to conceal the void and appropriate it, a program for inhibiting the void, accommodating the void by sucking it into the economy of surfaces (as in the case of niche [1], a dwelling / accommodating system) or filling it; but on a deep compositional level (the machinery of the real), all activities of solid are moving towards engineering new voiding-functions, convolutions, vermicular spaces (henceforth, Nēmat-space) which eventually unground (but not erase) solidus. On this deep compositional level, solid conducts the convoluting functions of the solid-contaminating void, in the form of vermicular lines, “Worms” as Lovecraft suggests or worm-functions (Nēmatical machines, the nēmat-function), itinerant lines in the form of knotted holes or the other way around (When a nēmat crawls in the ( )hole complex, it metamorphoses into a different geometric structure by internally reconfiguring its modules, turning into a more versatile line through participation with the complex whose all points and recesses are interconnected without the supporting tyranny of Whole and its connect-to-economize hegemony.) In holey space, Solid actively conducts and mobilizes the worm(nēmat)-functions of the void rather than its phagic / purgative mechanisms or its desire to devour. Solid runs as the void enforcer, a pestis solidus executioner.
In ( )hole complex, void is also contaminated by solid, this is why convoluting, undermining and ungrounding nēmat-functions arise in the ( )hole complex instead of merely erasing, consuming and purging mechanisms of Void. Solid performs the confusion of void through the ( )hole complex: every activity happening on the solid part increases the degree of convolution and entanglement at the holey side of the composition, fabricating the intricate meshwork of the Nēmat-space which eventually engineers the corpse-of-solidus, and disables or sabotages all grounding (signification, con-solidatin, stratification, etc.) functions of solid. While vermicular complexity of the Nēmat-space activates the tortuous side of the ( )hole complex, it also covers each compositional level of the complex with poroelastic traits. In fact, poroelasticity continuously uses diffusion as a means of radical deformation and alteration in the dynamism of the composition, narrating the diagrams of the fluid flow in the animorphic composition of the Nēmat-space as a heterogeneous porous complex which is more than a structure with interconnected holes, it is a complex with a strange rubber geometry, its porous side is actually its itinerant lines rendering synchronous possibilities of relaxation, metamorphosis, folding, spreading tortuousity, heterogeneous dynamism and compositional anomalies for the complex. The Nēmat-space is basically a machine for a radical and pestilentially inventive communication and participation between fluid and solid. In the Nēmat-space, the flow of the fluid and the deformation of the solid matrix are couples, heavily interconnected as foundations of a radical participation giving rise to diverging series of becomings for ‘each level of the composition’ whose wholeness has been utterly nullified. Agitated by the flow of fluids (which themselves have been anomalized in the nēmatical machine), elastic waves dissipate through solid matrices and radically displace the grains of the solid skeleton throughout ( )hole complex; the spasmodic deformations of the solid skeleton, consequently, changes the stress field by which the (re-)modifications and manipulations of solid are transmitted to the Nēmat-space in a synergic communication, and progressively fold, twist and open the ( )hole complex, polishing its sinister facets to a greater extent.
The displacement / locomotion of solid particles generally happens in cluster-like colonies near the regions where solid has reached an equilibrial stability, whereas fluid particles divergently move and disperse in a manner corresponding with the vermicular complexity of ( )hole complex. The interactions between the free movingly interstitial fluid and solid matrices on the one hand and fluid with porosity gradient of the Nēmat-space on the other hand result in two main mechanisms along with anomalies in the property of the fluid, the viscosity, permeability, the properties of the coupled fluid-solid complex and the bulk density of solidus (ex. tensile failure or propagation of shear fractures, etc.): (a) the increase of pore pressure induces a dilation of the ( )hole complex (including its solid matrix) and the escalation of poroelasticity (dilations of the complex customize the porosity to enhance the fluid flow.); (b) compression of the solid matrix or any attempt of solidus to keep and save its consolidated and molar state (by preventing the fluid from running or escaping from one porous network to another) causes a substantial rise of pore pressure which triggers further and radical deformation of the solid matrix, dilation and contraction of pores (compared to the plateau engineering mechanism of the libidinal vulvo-spasm), progressive exhumation (ungrounding) of solidus, regional pore collapse, and finally composition of new Nēmat-spaces. Nēmat-space is an ultimate crawling machine – essentially cryptogenic, interconnected to Anonymous-until-Now with its probes and lines of itineracy moving unpredictably according to the subsoil / superficial ungrounding machineries that weaken the solidus by perversely exploiting / manipulating it (exhuming solidus) – you never know where it exhumes surfaces and disperses its nēmats – worms, countless coils of them. The intrinsic permeability is a function of the Nēmat-space; the contact between solid and the fluid, itself, is also a compositional factor of the poroelastic complex: local velocity gradient in the fluid induces new convolutions, shear stresses, ruptures and deformations to solid matrix, tuning the surface dynamics to the entire machinery of the complex and the flow of the fluid (enhancing the flow and building up the flood). In the Nēmat-space, the diffusing pore fluid thereby smuggles much of its affect space through the solid matrix as well as its own particles.
Once the Nēmat-space starts to infest, the periphery does not necessarily starts from the crust, active surfaces emerge from everywhere, from crust-surface-periphery to innermost recesses; the ( )hole complex carves ultra-active surfaces from solidus when it digs holes (once again, inner cavities at least come with two types of active surfaces), unleashes delirious itinerant lines and constructs its nēmatical machines, installing peripheral agitations on the surfaces it cuts from internal solid matrices. When such a peripheral upheaval (in the sense of its diversifying excitations) ‘potentially’ runs everywhere and overspread from the crust to within, the despotic necrocratic regime of from periphery to the terminus of core is introduced to infinite deferral until the rise of the ultimate Unground through the ( )hole complex where the radical Outside is reinvented from surface to the core.
The grounded flux (inseparable from the architectonic and appropriating forces of pseudo-flux) is generally described as flux f = p / a (p as the imposed power on the regional surface a), but through the Nēmat-space, it is the coupled Trellis-Taxis mechanism of surface which fails to enforce the economy of the ground; the distribution of p according to the consolidating and self-referential wholeness of solidus is too incapacitated. What is ‘polytics’ in terms of the ( )hole complex in which the full body of ‘p / 0’ precedes all power formations and becomings which envelope a terminus, a becoming-death as their simultaneous restraining and propelling machinery?
On a modeling and reductive level:
Pore material of volume V = Vs (the combined volume of solid and isolated pores) + Vp (interconnected pore space)
Porosity gradient is then defined as the ratio of Vp / V
The distribution of solid is obedient to the logic of solidus but this is the logic of solidus that follows the polytics of the ( )hole complex and the dynamism of its Nēmat-space; every entity-event in the ( )hole complex is discontinuous according to the measures running through solid but continuous according to the Nēmat-space, or in other words, the interactions of events happening under the influence of the ( )hole complex; an entity which is believed to loom from a particular location, rises from an entirely irrelevant location according to the logic of solidus. Every activity on the solid part of the ( )hole complex awakens something radically contaminated by void (a vermicular space), opened by the outside (void as the outsider for solid) from within and without.
The mutual contamination of solid and void in holey space is increasingly intensifying (with no sign of stoppage) since it is the internal impetus of solid to be active, to re-modify itself, to knit itself through economic networks which maintain and guarantee its survival, aiding it to be grounded. All the activities through the solid part are reinvented as convoluting lines (nēmat-functions) at deeper levels of the composition. Whenever, solid messes with void to keep itself dynamic and solidly constructive or consolidated, void becomes more contaminative, its worm-functions become more furious, excited to the point of frenzy; they begin to rise from compositional depths to engineer the vermicular space of the Old Ones; an intricate anomalous traffic zone, the ( )hole complex. This way solid levels all obstacles in its path to damnation by each activity that it undertakes. The ( )hole complex is never low on infidelity and perfidiousness, it is the source of clandestine manipulation of solidus and double treachery to both solid and void. In the past, the holey space of mines incited peasant revolutions and barbarian invasions, but now they are the oil fields which make technocapitalist terror-drones and desert-militarism of Islamic Apocalypticism cross each other, forming the coupled diffusion-escalation mechanisms while both are flushed out in the burning soup of petroleum – the double betrayal.
It is not a politico-economic evolution that oil has converged upon a process of weaponization on the Islamic front of War on Terror. In Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Syria and even Arabic clusters under the Persian Gulf, the Islamic state must cross deserts to feed on oil fields, but the desert is the space of nomad-burrowers, nomad warmachines with minimum climatologic heads; this is why both the renomadization of Wahhabistic state [2] through off-time sorcerous desert-militarism and semi-sedentarization of nomads and their metamorphosis to naphtanese (clandestine petro-nomads whose itinerant lines wander between oil fields instead of oases) were inevitable (see Triggers for Islamic Apocalypticism: Oil, Desert and Nomads in Saudi Arabia). Other than forging lines of slips sliding from the exclusive traits of both nomads and the State while composing a participating space between the two (as in the case of ambiguity between solid and void in the ( )hole complex which traffics and smuggles the itinerant lines of its own), oil fields draw nemat-spaces for manipulation of the State by furious desert-nomadism and reconfiguration of desert-militarism according to the polytical trends welling up around the oil fields and rising from the synergy between the State’s uncompromising and Uttunulistic nomad’s sorcery. The problem of oil fields and the ( )hole complex they exhume is indeed far more sophisticated that the problem of mine and their ambulant dwellers, first there is no equivalent of miner for oil fields, the connection of naphtanese (former desert-nomads) with oil is not an intimacy based on consumption, production or even transportation (what connected especially old miners to mines as their temporary niches); second, oil as an ubiquitous earth-crawling entity – the Tellurian Lube – spreads the warmachines and polytics of naphtanese as totally pervasive (diffusing-escalating) entities. Finally, even in the absence of desert-nomadism, oil turns Time to apocalyptic blasphemies. If oil does not benefit the middle class (an economical boom initially moderating economy but consequently giving rise to economic fissions) and if it doesn’t lead to the outbreak of cannibalistic economies as in the case of Mexico, Venezuela, Sudan and in a near future Mauritania, it will surely charges clandestine-military pipelines with apocalyptic modes of divergence. In either case, it cheats the divine’s chronologic Time with the utmost irony and obscenity.
Nēmat-space is neither about undoing the Genesis Project and its survival economy nor erasing solid, it reduces the monopolistic holiness of the creation, the functionality of the ground’s economy (which also forms a taxis-trellis pincer to support the Whole) and applicability of Whole to Zero without wiping them out. This is the polytics first practiced and exquisitely elaborated by the Persian cult of Kaxuži or Kakhurid(kaxvareδa) or Kastaran-e Farre, the reducers of wholeness or the reducers of purity, who have been introduced as the devastators of the Iranians (for the Aryans were believed to represent the greatest purity and wholeness) in Zadspram.
Nēmat-space is infected with gate hysteria; it is always prone to auto-collapse and re-emergence from somewhere else thus restlessly clicking new gates open; it gapes, yawns, bloats, coils and slathers as an endo-symbiotic parasite with a sempiternal endurance over and through the Earth, giving more passages than is needed to legions which surge and ex-hume all stratified assemblages along their paths. The heretic Zoroastrians, deavo-Yasns, Kaxuži and Yatumants or Akht-Jadu(Yatu) called this indefinable earth (even impalpable and unexplainable in terms of Tellurian-Omega) which secretly squirms from of the Outside and fermented upon the full body of ‘P/0’, Drujaskan, technically the most messy space that awakens from and by the Earth to unground (Erathicate) its wholeness. Pests teeming forth from Drujaskan, from passages which themselves are inseparable from the writhing bodies of pest-legion. Ungrounded histories of the Earth are full of passages, vents and soft tunnels mobilized and unlocked through artificializing participation with the Earth as a compositional entity. These histories are engineered by openings and what crawl in them; every movement in these passages invigorate the fibers of Erathication.
Only as a Nēmat-Space, the Earth endures; an opening through its whole, a solid-glitch drawing its cartographies on mal/multi-functioning surfaces of the ( )hole complex.
The awakening ritual that the cult of the Old Ones practices to speed the return of the elders, is “messing with the solid part”: advanced re-modifications and operations on the solid part of holey space to strategically assist new vermicular lines or worm-functions be composed and autonomously digging passages for the Old Ones’ Return, opening yawning pits as zones of their rebirth. Each activity ‘on the solid part’ or ‘at the side of solid’ is a sacred oblation to the Old Ones. As in the case of the Z. crowd, this strategy reaches its schizotrategic extreme; they, with a cryptic muttering, incessantly repeat: “join and participate with solid, assist its ground processes to fulfill their projects, be a devoted architect of solid,” this is the only way you can feed solid to the vermicular lines of the void, its worm-functions.
Craig: “Even the addictive properties of the Oil engineered by the Islamo-Apocalypsists are made invalid – replacing the hunger for fuel with the hunger to Hunt. This Hunger is Greater than the addiction.”
The important point is that this is not oil as fuel that matters (oil = fuel as you have realized is just one trigger among many others in petropolytics) but the ways that hyperstitional entities of oil fuse with western warmachines.
The thirst to hunt that howls in warmachines is the simulation of the Unlife of War that comes through the capacity of warmachines to grasp something that is external to them yet giving rise to their machinery and the thirst to hunt; ironically, it is the simulation of the radical frenzy of war to hunt all warmachines.
NOTES
[1] Roman Witold Ingram after separating from Husserl through criticism of transcendental idealism, in his works focused on ontology discusses that closure (or completely modulated openness) is a priority for open systems, and niches as power projection zones and inhibitors of unwanted collisions. The openness of niche protects itself from what makes it open by opening itself to what makes it closed. Only through such an openness, the existential moments can be afforded and modes of Being are able to emerge.
[2] One should not miss the fact that the formation of Wahhabism and the Saudi State root in desert-nomadism.