Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Maybe that's magick

Ancient accounts of the universe do not include the assumption that the world is brute material; brute matter doesn't exist in this realm; on the contrary, matter is always already formed; for nothing exists without form. Is this position trivial? Of course it seems so: Nothing fails to have shape in the sense of spatial parameters, usually distinguished by difference and spatial continuity or identity. I am this 'mereological sum'; some specific amount of matter constitutes my shaped being.

I think magickal thinking involves the assumption that the universe is not just brute; that the void doesn't define bits of matter colliding in this way or that, following Derrida, following Epicurus; but rather, that things seem to gel together, functioning according to (seemingly) predictable laws, but not in a way that cashes out as perfectly necessary, surely. In other words, metaphysics was assumed to be part and parcel of ancient explanatory accounts of the universe; the (in)formed matter, fixed by an end (its final cause) gave it the air of absolute being as such because the architect (God, First Being per se, the efficient cause of this secondary beings' first being as such, etc.,) yielded a relatively absolute (X just is that way). With God no longer serving this purpose, final causality has taken on another (and via patriarchy, an analogous) sense: we just are civilized beings, structured according to reproductive futurism--which doesn't seem necessarily heteronormative if we consider 're(producing)' per se, that is, when repetition is a matter of repeating ourselves. But this second, analogous just is, is hardly absolute. We can cut the rope and hop the fence. For civilized being cannot be constitutive; it is defined by its opposite; its sin; its animality; its downgoing. 

Whether or not the absolute architect commanded its relative subject to behave as such, or whether matter formed itself absolutely comes down to a difference in narrative fit. Either story works depending on how we wish to see ourselves. Most of His-Story has been a claim of Patriarchy; and only an imaged non-power, a mirroring of lacking-patriarchy, seems better disposed to name anarchy, the rule of disassociation, the collapsing of unity, the dismantling of the propped up single pole phallic circus tent. Maybe that's magickBut if we're gonna call that Queer-Nature (avoiding matriarchy) I think the logical form/critical form we want is both-and, or, paradox; something (y) that clings to something else (x), making the reaffirmation of that something else (x) impossible. "Both unity and disunity" seems to coherently imply distributive unities and collective disunity, yet in infinitum. Our meaning of collective liberation then becomes not "for everyone", but for us; and not because we wish to rule out the possibility that anyone could join us, but rather because we are not deluded into thinking that everyone would be seduced by anarchy (cf. Terror Incognita).

This Becoming Impossible suggests utopian trajectories, perhaps little better off than the desire for unity, peace, and whatever. But deflating its import leaves us at least two ways which both can lay claim to 'better', noting here that being hopeless deflates not the better, but the best. The two ways are opposed: from the position of the civilized, outside the walls is hell; and from the position of the wild, the fortress is hardly seductive. Being hopeless, of course, applied to the better seems to be an articulation of failed intellectual fit---which seems to lack heart. That is, one might argue: how can we say the better is good enough? For unless we know the best, we cannot know the better. But we are saying 
that, on the contrary, there are at least two bests, and that we prefer the downgoing anti-civ trajectory, which is a rejection of civilege.

I think this entertaining whatever possibility, openness, but being committed to the opposite of civilized patriarchy, is an affect of magickal thinking. And I think its healing is as follows: Since the best is not available, since there are good reasons to be hopeless about that limit, we might as well make things better, however we mean it. And moreover, we affirm that our acts in the gift of these means without end, are all the better if our hearts will it. So against the intellectual position, we abut our hearts; not to replace intellectualism, but to temper it. We thus hold two propositions in paradox, without equivocation: If we inquire: If there is no hope for the best, why do anything?, we deflate this intellectualism with: Since there is no possible best, we might as well make things better.

We know not what is above, but we postulate this below, as a potentially pleasing sacrifice for absolute immanence. Because even if it was all for nothing, at least we can stand ourselves.

2 comments:

  1. Isn't this just reformism/leftism?

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  2. Decomposition ends as recomposition or it doesn't end. Reform requires an end.

    ReplyDelete