The following text is a short excerpt from the lengthy paper discussed at the seminar on porous earth and subsurface politics. The lecture took place at Goldsmiths University of London and was organized by Eyal Weizman at the department of visual cultures. Eyal Weizman has recently published his work Hollow Land, a tour de force on militarization of geodynamics and space which I will later talk about at length.
During the talk, the following section was elaborated by examples on the logic of poromechanical distribution of consistencies and the employment of this logic in locating ancient necropolises, underground facilities and decoding steganographic texts or works of hidden writing. For keeping the text short and suitable for one post, I have skipped the examples used in this section.
Deleuze and Guattari’s holey space can be addressed both as an event and entity. As an event it demarcates the limitropic degeneration of a whole which never effectuates full annihilation or complete effacement (hence the nomenclature ( )hole complex) and for this reason it perpetuates a poromechanical decay whose incessant dynamism is maintained by differentiation between solid and void. As an entity, the holey space is characterized by its anomalous distribution of consistencies through the poromechanical space.
The politics of the holey space is defiant toward the existing models of harvesting power, manipulating and analyzing events on the surface. For the world order, inconsistent events around the world are failures or setbacks since they resist the contemporary dominant political models. According to the politics of poromechanical earth, however, inconsistencies, regional disparities and insidious nonuniformities across the globe constitute the body of the ultimate politics. The emergence of two entities (political formation, military, economic, etc.) from two different locations on the ground is inconsistent, but according to the logic of ( )hole complex they are terminally inter-connected and consistent. In terms of emergence, consistency or connectivity should not be measured by the ground or the body of solid as a whole but according to a degenerate model of whole and the poromechanical entity.
The asymmetry between ground’s consistency and the consistency of poromechanical entities or porous earth has long been formulated by military and political practitioners as an archeological law – for every inconsistency on the surface, there is a subterranean consistency. The law of subterranean cause in archaeology bears a striking resemblance to Freud’s suggestion that for every psychosomatic breakdown, there is a Complex (an anomalous convolution and knottedness) beneath consciousness. The reason for this similarity lies in the fact that according to both archeology and Freudian psychoanalysis, the line of emergence (the worm-function) travels according to the resistivity against emergence, the dynamism of emergence and degree of porosity. The course of emergence in any medium is identical to the formation of that medium; the more agitated the line of emergence becomes, the more convoluted and complex the host medium will be. In terms of poromechanics and ( )hole complex, the superficial orientation of both archaeology and Freudian psychoanalysis are too complex – immersed in multiplex dynamics of surfaces and their interactions with emergence – to be fathomed. The myths of obtuse flatness or totalitarianism attributed to Freudian psychoanalysis by postmodernist rivals are in most cases the symptoms of misunderstanding the problem of surfaces and emergence as related to the lacunae of consciousness. The superficial (as related to visible, circumferential and grounded surfaces) entities of Freudian theories only come into existence as products of unbound activities in emergence, or more accurately, the convoluted and porous formations through which emergence takes place. In the domain of emergence, every surface – whether of constraining ground or porosities – belongs to and is mobilized by the poromechanics of ( )hole complex. And in ( )hole complex, depth exists as the ambiguity or the gradient between inner and outer, solid and void, one and zero; or in other words, as a third scale or a dynamically balancing, intermediary agency which operates against the unitary or binary logics of inner and outer, vigor and silence, inclusion and exclusion. Holes spontaneously develop a ternary logic.
For both archaeology and Freudian psychoanalysis, the process of emergence and its immediate connection with formation and dynamism of surfaces, namely, ( )hole complex inevitably coincides with paranoia. For every inconsistency on the surface, there is a subterranean consistency; here is an overlap between two consistencies. One is the consistency according to the dynamic surfaces of holey space or simply cavities, and the other is the consistency between cavities surfaces (holes) and the circumferential surface of the solid (ground or visible surface). For every cause with a vertical distribution, there is a cause with a horizontal or slanted distribution, or vice versa. The effect is simultaneously produced by two causes with two different logics. For being registered on the circumferential surface or the ground, the schizoid structure or consistency of ( )hole complex should be transmitted to the solid body where it has to be consolidated. Anomalies on the ground-surface are imminent to the two planes of schizophrenia and paranoia. According to the archeological law of contemporary military doctrines and Freudian psychoanalysis, for every inconsistency or anomaly on the ground, there is a schizoid consistency; to reach the schizoid consistency, a paranoid consistency or plane of paranoia must be traversed. (See Fig. 13)
The militarization of the contemporary world both in its politics and concrete approaches is architecturally, visually and psychologically paradoxical (too paranoid to be schizoid and too schizoid to be paranoid); since its agencies – as of in War on Terror – are shifting from the logic of grounded earth to the poromechanical earth and the logic of hole agencies. Although making examples restricts the vastness of militarization in respect to the poromechanics of war and archeology as the science of military innovation in the twenty-first century, but enumerating one or two cases might increase lucidity.
1. In countries with detailed homeland security protocols or relatively high level of alertness, where ground or aerial operations as of hostile, subversive or stealth activities cannot be conducted, the emergence of intricate poromechanical entities is escalated and cannot be avoided. In such countries, the distribution of illegal immigrants or smuggled products such as drugs and weapons around the border regions follows not patterns of activities on the surface but the formation and the architecture of nested holeyness beneath the ground. Activities or lines of movement (tactics) are not separate from the architecture of such ( )hole complexes. According to military experts or urban planners with military educations, criminal and hostile activities can no longer be explained, analyzed or traced on land, aerial and water levels. These activities only conform to (paranoically that is) structures of vast underground vermiculate spaces and their constantly displacing lines of emergence (schizoid formations of surfaces). The distribution, escalation and diffusion of complicities is identical to different aspects of hole trafficking. For military experts, the terror market is nothing but that of porosities of earth. Cross-border wormholes under the US-Mexico border, tunnels under Gaza-Egypt and all other examples of hole trafficking confound the polarities of surface globalization and its politico-military facets. Economic and power formations for clandestine Guerilla-states, anti-State movements and ambiguously Imperialist states configure themselves on poromechanics of war.
2. The Battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan mainly escalated by coalition forces (especially US forces to the point of using BLU-82 bombs and a potential nuclear bunker buster strike) based on the collected information about vast underground facilities and terror networks in Tora Bora Mountains. US and British forces initiated a surgical strike comprised of sophisticated tactics, innovative command and control and inventive use of military implements and weapons. Tactics and the entire logic of military progression in Tora Bora were formulated precisely in order to match the mountains, and give an appropriate military response to the holey architecture of terror compounds. In short, the military formation of the entire battle was determined based on the supposed tortuousness of the holey complex within the mountains, and then techniques and solutions for neutralizing and clearing them. The complexity of movements or formative dynamics belonging to US and British forces was compatible and in counter-geographical correspondence to the nested complexity of holes, tunnels and underground chambers. The Battle of Tora Bora was actualized based on the complexity of Tora Bora sub-surface facilities but in the absence of actual holes and vermiculate complexities. Bound to the paranoid logical line in holey complexes (from the ground to the cavity) and unbound by a nonexisting schizoid architecture of nested holes, coalition forces led by United States developed the first full-fledged example of Cappadocian Complex. Adhering to the logic that wherever hostile activities and threats are inconsistent and asymmetrical, there is an underground cause of nested holeyness; and consequently one must formulate formations to counteract these convoluted and subterranean architectures is the heart of Cappadocian Complex. Where in Tora Bora, there was no sub-surface nexus or complex, in Cappadocia beneath every surface and in every mountain or hill there is a multiplex of holes, lairs and passageways, an elusive machine digging in and out.
Poromechanics is simultaneously construed by the vector of schizophrenia and the vector of paranoia. For contemporary world politics, militarization is inevitably determined by the differentiation between these two vectors.
In case the new announcement for Collapse III hasn't reached the dark side of the Net, you might be interested to take a look at its table of contents and even consider ordering it. Since the first issue (Numeric Materialism), Collapse has proved to be an outstanding journal of philosophy which simultaneously defies the swamps of academia and rigorously ravages the overpopulated territories of post-structural / post modernist theories. For those who are solely interested in hyperstitional and political themes, Collapse I has articles on Qabalah, Prime Numbers and desert war machines traversing War on Terror, including an utterly compelling essay by Nick Land. Collapse II has two articles which stand out among the rest of contributions: Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier's essays. Brassier's essay scrutinizes -- in a technical and superbly literate way -- the enigma of realism and an alternative causality capable of perforating the real. It is a piece which silently exudes a Lovecraftian dilemma on reality and intelligibility in regard to cosmic abyss (realism of horror). Collapse III (the forthcoming issue, Unknown Deleuze) is, as it confesses, a remobilization of Deleuze's thought against the specter of a post-Deleuzian era and a philosophic age choked by the reckless fecundity of Deleuzians. In addition, Collapse III includes two previously unpublished English translations of Deleuze and a science-fiction story by J.-H. Rosney the Elder who elusively lurks in Difference and Repetition. Whereas Lovecraft and Professor Challenger expose the undertones of A Thousand Plateaus, Rosney and Doctor Van den Heuvel (absent in Deleuze's book) encapsulate the themes presented in Difference and Repetition. The term Inverse-Lovecraft rightly suits Rosney. Collapse III also includes the full transcription of the Speculative Realism conference at Goldsmiths University of London. The document features a fresh appearance from Iain Hamilton Grant who has been working on his now complete infernal machine, On Artificial Earth: Philosophies of Nature after Schelling. The Speculative Realism document is particularly important for a thoroughgoing discussion on horror, realism, causality and the truth of extinction.
This is part of the text for one my three talks earlier this year in London. In contrast to the other papers this is very short so I deemed it appropriate for hyperstition especially because it is a brief retrospection on discussions we have had on hyperstition regarding alphabets, sounds, txts and other teratological components of Middle Eastern writing systems as mobilized by socio-political dynamics. The original paper contained two sections, barbaric tongues and their shape of writing. This post features the first part of the paper – barbaric music.
Barbaric Music and Vowelless Alphabets
To call a population barbarian is to measure their vocalization perceptually and sometimes quantitatively as noise; roar, shriek, howl, ululation, bark, yelp, wail, a lupus orchestra, a constant vociferation of the language. The Greeks and the Romans’ vigilance against the uncivilized was not originally denoting or aiming at the way of living or the form of architecture but rather the foreign vocalization of people who were marked as savage, ill-bred and uncivilized. For the Greeks, the savages were the ones who vocalized consonants non-linearly, those whose vocalization turn the language to gibberish, harmonized sounds to noise, the divinity of the Word to demonized outcry. Savage languages transformed the serene facial traits which were of the Greek face (a face which was the face of a politician, a philosopher, a militant all at the same time) and were shaped by vocalization into insensate, heathen, bestial and inhuman faces and not merely facial expressions of a profound savagery. The word barbaros or barbarian as the foreign savage attests to the Greeks’ most fundamental criterion for addressing one’s distance or gap from the civilized world and cultured populations. This indisputable measure for scaling one’s civility was, in fact, vocalization (i.e. adding vowels to unheard-of consonants and alien utterance). To this extent, speakers of Semitic and African languages could be categorized as barbarians or those whose vocalization and speech can only be detected as the bar sound (i.e. the bar-bar sound), or the sound similar to the emphatic repetition of the tap sound (tap-tap), expressing the b sound and mapping its characteristics. In mammals’ territory, when the process of vocalization or harmonizing noise functions as a means of communication, noise can be found both at the background or as an additive element – combined with vocality – to vocalization. For the Greeks as well as the Romans, barbarians were those who could be understood if only their speech is translated to the bar-bar sound. Such foreigners transform the pleasance of hearing or speech as the divine senses for sympathy to the antipathetic feeling of nausea (Nαυτεία) accompanied by vertigo, vomit, ear drainage, dizziness and the sensation of spinning and loss of equilibrium. According to the Greeks, listening to barbarians results in an alien sensation called Nαυτεία or more accurately, something profoundly wrong in the ear caused by the confusion between the actual movement (actual vocalization process used by a barbarian) and perceived movement (what can be heard from that barbaric vocalization in the Greek language), and also movements in different directions which were the characteristics of the noise (nausia) made by barbarian vocalization in the Greek language and phonetic system. For the Romans, likewise, the barbarity of vocalization was a touchstone to determine the quality and value of culture, social dynamics as well as motivations and alignments of people with Roman civilization, bureaucratic pantheon of gods and their political system. In the course of a mass slaughter of a tribe or a village populated by the ‘foreign vocalizers’ (mostly of Semitic and African languages) known as barbarians, Romans frequently referred to the utterances of outlanders during escape, battle and emotional arousal as ruckus and demonic dissonance (dis-sonare) or disjointed sound as what lacks the orderly structure of Roman dance music (ορχήστρα) whose boisterousness was demonstrated in its militant order and bloodied ecstasy.
For the Roman soldier it was an ethical responsibility to give the demon imprisoned in the throat and oral cavity of the barbarian an outlet to flee by cutting the throat or the head of the savage. A humanitarian act whose consequence might drive the soldier insane as the result of the last unintelligible shriek which the demon made, the exclamation noise rooted and formed by a vocalization process whose even systematic communicative units such as sentences are considered as noise. Romans had bizarre tales about barbarians who were stalking in the outlands and transmogrified by a severe felinity. Romans justly called them cat people, a title which was indeed accurate; for speaking with languages constituted of vowelless alphabets causes an excessive vocalization – or sophisticated phonetic systems and vocalizations – which is the mark of cats and felidae. The Samaritans, the people of Arabic peninsula and even western borders of Persia were frequently addressed as Dung People, not because of malodors fermented under the scorching sun of the Near and Middle Eastern regions but because of the noise they emanated which belonged to the unorchestral body of Beelzebub, the Lord of Flies: I romp around with the sound of flies.
The barbarians who could be distinguished by translating all they vocalized to the bar-bar sound by the Greeks and Romans were exactly those people whose vocalization process was not really dominated by the bar-bar sound (which is of the b or β sound). In fact, the Greek and Roman languages were monomaniacally haunted by the b sound. Betarrhea – or the abnormal flow of the Beta sound to other consonants and the way they are vocalized – was always exclusive to both empires and their citizens.
Vocalization of vowelless alphabets (as of Semitic languages) or barbaric music can never be grasped entirely through sounds with pulmonic egressive initiation in which the air stream is created by lungs (pulmo) and releasing or pushing out (egression) the air, but rather different initiation mechanisms. In these vocalization mechanisms, in contrast to pulmonic egression, air flow is generated through the vocal tract such as glottalic (through glottis) and veralic (through velum), and not only pulmonic (through lung). In Greek and Roman languages – unlike Semitic and African languages – the majority of sounds are both pulmonic and egressive akin to the airflow initiation of the b sound, or to be exact, the real bar-bar sound. However, in Semitic languages as the most contractible languages in the Middle East, consonants can be vocalized not only by being initiated from the lungs to the lips but also as nonlinear blasts, thus, not satisfying the originally Greek fetishism with the Beta sound. The initiation mechanism of β as pulmonic egressive is categorized as the airflow mechanism primarily involved in producing the consonantal sound of the b or beta sound which is ‘voiced bilabial plosive’, or in other words, the b sound mostly denotes and comes from the voiced bilabial plosive sound). Painlessly utterable, the voiced bilabial plosive is a consonantal sound which can be easily mapped by its eschatological tendency towards definite stoppage and its stubborn linearity. While it is created through stopping – plosive – or obstructing airflow in the vocal tract (the manner of articulation), it is initiated through lungs and is articulated by both lips, a route directorially linear and facially civilized in conclusion – the Greek Face.
The Greek aesthetics, as opposed to the Middle Eastern ominousity, has been established on this linear route from lungs to both lips as the territory of an articulation so audacious and impeccable that it is only matching the cold efficiency of lips on the face capable of articulating everything in the same manner and political demeanor. If the Greek and Latin busts bear the majestic beauty of Greek and Latin faces even during the most heated lectures, quarrels, battles and adventures, it is because the lips and eyes (as the addendums of articulation) as the pivots of expression are fully used on a simplistically linear route. The Greek and Roman faces demonstrate the suppression of the linear pulmonic egressive mechanism with a sense of a crude realism one can only expect from a barbarous art.
No art takes the harsh realism of the vocalization process involved in creating standards of its facial beauty as serious as Greek and Latin art; but to this extent, one can hardly speak of standards as in these cultures there is only one facial expression as the inspiring element of beauty. And this facial expression is triggered only by one dominant articulation process, the sole process they were capable of and out of which the standards of civilization and barbarity were determined. For the Romans, having a vermin face was intrinsic to Middle Eastern vocalization. Exquisitely Greek and Latin, the iconographic face of Jesus of Nazareth who spoke in Aramaic ironically sympathizes with the Latin and Greek facial aestheticism, the cold serenity originating from their inflexible vocalization process and linear articulation of consonants. But the Aramaic language with its insidious sophistication both in writing and phonetic systems can only render the face of a carcass (for the consonants which are fully vocalized internally without being concluded by the lips) or a face of thousands of spasms (for the articulation process which non-linearly twitches the whole face in different directions) during vocalization. All Christianity wants is a Roman savior, but we speak with the face of a brute.
If there is an accurate western media, it is essentially on the side of terror because it has to abide by vocalization, pronunciation systems and spelling relevancy that only exists on the side of terrorists. The more irrelevant the pronunciation, the more civilized the speaker is; because it will have less in common with the original pronunciation which can only be vocalized by a Middle Eastern terrorist. In the case of pronouncing a name like Ghatar [Qatar] starting with the letter Ghaaf which defies English vocalization, the pronunciation ‘guitar’ is remote enough to be civilized but the proposed pronunciation ‘gutter’ is so far off that it signifies the zenith of western civilization.