“Mischief and craft are plainly seen to be characteristics of this creature.”
Claudius Aelianus, 3rd century AD
Capital fears the earth’s procession.
Fred Moten and Stefan Harney[1]
Schizz
Schizoanalysis is an alter-economic practice: its work is to unmoor the financialization of the individual as metric of preexisting value. The schizz cuts through the middle, neurodiverse in its call for the more-than. No more normopaths! it squeals. How-else-with-and?
The schizz of the schizoanalytic practice must never be reindividualized by setting up the figure of the lone shizophrenic, or any figure, as its cypher. Contrary to some interpretations of Anti-Oedipus, nowhere do Deleuze and Guattari idealize psychosis or schizophrenia. As everywhere in their philosophy, the aim is not to moralize but to couple the pragmatic with the speculative, asking how processes unfold and what immanent valuations run through them. The differentiation they make between schizophrenia as process and schizophrenia as entity is vital in this regard. The schizophrenic entity “can only be defined in relation to the arrests, the continuations in the void, or the finalist illusions that repression imposes on the process itself” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 379). The schizophrenic process, or what they call the schizoid pole, refers to the manner in which desire invests itself in sociality. At the schizoid pole, knowledge schizophrenizes, passing beyond its own axiomatics, creating new operations. “Figureschizzes” are produced “that are no longer either figurative or structured” (1983: 371). These two operations, the schizophrenic entity and the schizophrenic process, are in continuous co-composition, the schizoid pole always also in proximity with the threat of the pathological. Desire is the force that schizzes, a productive desire that breaks with any notion of discrete causality. Desire, the impersonal force that activates socialities in germ, is the revolutionary process through which new lifeways are born, schizzing all the while.
What distinguishes the schizophrenic from the neurotic is psychosis. What is of interest to Deleuze and Guattari is that psychosis cannot be oedipolized.
[T]he neurotic is the one on whom the Oedipal imprints take, whereas the psychotic is the one incapable of being oedipalized, even and especially by psychoanalysis. The first task of the revolutionary […] is to learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs. Such a politics dissolves the mystifications of power through the kindling, on all levels, of anti-oedipal forces – the schizzes-flows-forces that escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions: orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories) (Seem in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xxi)
The schizz must always be considered in terms of what it processually can do, not in terms of what it defines. It is from this vantage point that the figure of the schizophrenic must be understood in the account of capitalism and schizophrenia, with Oedipus always as the overdetermining pull to the neurotic replaying, in all pathologies, of what holds them to the narration of a preexisting structure. Oedipus should not be considered an actual formation, however. The Oedipus complex is virtual: “it must be actualized in a neurotic formation as a derived effect of the actual factor” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 129). Psychosis schizzes oedipus. This is why Freud disliked schizophrenics:
For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn’t like schizophrenics. He doesn’t like their resistance to being oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers – ‘an undesirable resemblance’” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 23).[2]
In schizzing the “neurotic territoriality of Oedipus,” psychosis produces new circuits (1983: 136). There is no promise attached to these circuits. They could just as well fold back on themselves, returning to all the forms of neurotization that reduce psychotics to the apparently unmoored, disjointed paranoid figure psychiatric institutions enclose. “Perhaps there is only one illness, neurosis, the Oedipal decay against which all the pathogenic interruptions of the process should be measured” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 319).
In pushing up against what can be extracted from the schizophrenic experience that resists the neuroticization imposed on it, Deleuze and Guattari pursue the question that most troubled Jean Oury and was central to the work at the La Borde clinic: “how does one avoid the institution’s re-forming an asylum structure, or constituting perverse and reformist artificial societies, or residual paternalistic or mothering pseudo families?” (1983: 319). What techniques can be put in place to schizz the institution’s penchant for all that retriangulates?
Urgently necessary is the decoupling of experience from the pathological valuations of the deficit model. As in the wider field of neurodiversity, the aim is not cure but a commitment to the singular ways difference expresses itself and the qualities of desire, knowledge and creation it produces.
A true politics of psychiatry, or antipsychiatry, would consist therefore in the following praxis: (I) undoing all the reterritorializations that transform madness into mental illness; (2) liberating the schizoid movement of deterritorialization in all the flows, in such a way that this characteristic can no longer qualify a particular residue as a flow of madness, but affects just as well the flows of labor and desire, of production, knowledge, and creation in their most profound tendency (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 321).
Against normopathy, schizoanalysis never does its work from outside the encounter. Sensitive to the schizz, it moves with it, following its tendencies. “Foucault announced an age when madness would disappear, not because it would be lodged within the controlled space of mental illness (‘great tepid aquariums’), but on the contrary because the exterior limit designated by madness
would be overcome by means of other flows escaping control on all sides, and carrying us along” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 321).
From this vantage point, schizophrenia shifts from entity to force, desiring-production its motor. “[L]ike love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines” (Deleuze and Guattari1983: 5). There is no longer “a specific, identifiable schizophrenic entity” (1983: 6). What there is instead is a practice of the schizz that attunes to the multiplicity of “I, Antonin Artaud, am my son, my father, my mother, and myself” (1983: 15). Multiplicity in differential, the schizoid pole explodes the great tepid aquariums of our pathological imaginations. Beyond pathology, there are no criteria.
It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 15).
Is this madness? Or is the psychosis to be found in the imposed adherence of systems on worlds too differential, too multiple to tame?
The schizophrenic is the limit-case of existence that troubles our certainties as regards the stability of subjectivity. To repeat the mantra that drives chapter 5: “A schizoanalysis schizophrenizes in order to break the holds of power and institute research into a new collective subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick, so sick, of our selves!” (Seem in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: xxi).[3]
Schizoanalysis is not a practice for the individual. It is not a practice of pathologization, of singling out the one whose neurology will invariably be considered a deficit. Schizoanalysis is a practice of the event where I, even schizo-I, is not yet.
That the schizophrenic refutes the limited envelope of the individual is certainly part of the story. But the work of schizoanalysis is not done on the body (of the schizophrenic) per se. The work is done in the relation where the phonic leaves its resonant traces. The schizz, the effect of the schizophrenizing of experience, cuts subjectivity as we know it, subjectivity as the claim to the human (the category that excludes the neurodiverse, and all qualities and forces of life-yet-to-be-invented that threaten the I as white, colonial neurotypical being).
Capital
A schizoeconomics is committed to the schizzing of capitalism. Its challenge is to work in careful attunement to capital’s own infinite appetite for circulation and deviation.[4] Flows, processes, detours are, after all, what capital is made of, its movements faster, more mad and often more creative than we would like to admit. To compose with capital is to coincide with its movements to schizz the more-than that runs through them, connecting to the speculative share of its own decidedly more-than human process.
The cutting edge of capitalism is in the financial markets, which have evolved forms of abstract capital so abstruse, contingent, and objectively undecidable that it is impossible to get an effective grip on them. They run according to their own process, and sometimes run away with themselves, periodically crashing and burning. The financialized economy is beyond the human pale: beyond full human comprehension and beyond effective human control. It is a self-driving machine, operating more and more abstractly, with no one in particular at the steering wheel. It was created by the human, but not in its own image, emerging rather as a monstrous offspring that turns back to engulf its maker and drive away with it (Massumi 2017: 9).
To schizz capitalism is to develop a keen account of quality that can discern the difference between cuts that breed the count of assets, and cuts that revalue value. In its infinite capacity for deviation, capital is a powerful adversary. The aim of finance at the limit is always alter-capitalist, but it in no ways purports that there is an outside of capital as we know it. To schizz capital is to watch another limb begin to grow elsewhere. Alter-capitalist futures will be built of more than the schizzing of capital: they will be led by the development of practices that exert the force of other ways of living in a logic that refuses the tenets that undergird capitalism – the relentless drive to quantitative increase, inexorable growth and inequality, the capture of life intensities for profit. Practicing the schizz is an operation that begins there, in the midst, asking what kinds of techniques can be crafted for those other logics, logics that sidle, in approximation of proximity, an aesthetic sociality of blackness, thereby experimenting with the minor that runs through a sociality born in the being of relation. This is to say that the practice of the schizz is never structural, never aimed at a totality, as though something as stable as capital-as-structure existed and could directly be taken down. The practice is transversal, operating in the circulation of flows themselves. This modest aim may seem useless. Indeed it is: an ethos of the pragmatics of the useless runs through it. It claims nothing as regards grand schemes of productivity. The gesture is otherwise: to practice the art of life-living at the differential of minor socialities in a livingloving that angles toward the instauration of new modes of (merest) existence. Schizoeconomies will not come into themselves once and for all. They will always need to be (re)invented, at every turn bringing with themselves new techniques for practice unlimited.
The relationship between schizophrenia and capitalism is important in this regard. Capitalism breaks bodies, its devaluation of qualitative difference at the level of aesthetic sociality so complete that bodies barely hold up. Exhaustion, anxiety, depression and all their offshoots are everywhere palpable. Capitalism breeds paranoia, the ground so uneven, our bearings so unsteady, that we fold into a self-possession that leaves no room for what exceeds us. Limited by the hardening of our edges, we become more enclosed on our-selves, less turned to an outside that would revivify the more-than that courses through us. This is what Deleuze and Guattari are referring to when they talk about how capitalism produces the neurotic, and at the extreme, the “sick schizo” (1983: 362).
But capital is crossed by lines of escape, and this is what finance at the limit exploits. “Capitalism is continually cutting off the circulation of flows, breaking them and deferring the break, but these same flows are continually overflowing, and intersecting one another according to schizzes that turn against capitalism and slash into it” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 376). Cleaving capitalism from within, the schizz produces social fields that may operate only for an instant, but nonetheless provoke the seeding of a different mode of investment, and with it different operations of value. Paranoia will always be around the corner, counting its coins, but as Hartman’s Wayward Lives demonstrates, minor practices of the art of life-living have always existed, even under the worst conditions: “[t]he wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise” (2019: 11).
“The revolutionary investment of desire” schizzes worlds into otherwise-living (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 378). Desiring-production is the force against which capitalism has no power: unquantifiable, in a logic of the relation of non relation, desire as force too impersonal to claim, bends the pathways toward intensities for which no preexisting code, no quantification exists. This is why the schizophrenic as conceptual persona is vital to the project of schizzing capital for Deleuze and Guattari, because the schizoid pole is the pole of desiring-production, and as such, “is revolutionary, in the very sense that the paranoiac method is reactionary and fascist; and it is not these psychiatric categories, freed of all familialism, that will allow us to understand the politico-economic determinations, but exactly the opposite” (1983: 379-380). Revolutionary desire is a practice, not a tool. It does its work transversally, moving waywardly where we might least expect it. Writing of Mattie, a young laundress, Hartman culls from the anarchival force of the photographs that nourish her critical fabulation the force of what desire can do in the face of racial capital’s devaluations:
Mattie has been credited with nothing, deemed unfit for every role except servility, condemned in advance of wrongdoing, and destined to be a minor figure even in her own verified history. To esteem her acts, to regard rather than vilify Mattie’s restive longing, is to embrace the anarchy – the complete program of disorder, the abiding desire to change the world, the tumult, upheaval, open rebellion – attributed to wayward girls. It is to attend to other forms of social life, which cannot be reduced to transgression or to nothing at all, and which emerge in the world marked by negation, but exceed it (2019: 98).
Mobilizing the schizz, inventing schizoanalytic techniques for practices of the event, requires diligence as regards capital’s (de)valuation of existence. Techniques must be invented to learn to attune to the difference between finance unlimited (neoliberal capital) and finance at the limit (schizoeconomy), to become attuned to what sanctions the extreme deterritorialization of capital on one end of the spectrum and empowers the infrathin registering of the ineffable on the other.
Deleuze and Guattari speak of capitalism’s process of production as unleashing “an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit” (1983: 34). Capitalism is a movement that skirts the limit, continously coming up against the dangers of crossing the threshold: “it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit” (1983: 34). This is even more clearly the case today than when Deleuze and Guattari conceived of it in the late 1960s. Neoliberal capital is the flow of all flows. As Massumi writes: “The ‘capitalist process’ is how the capitalist system dips into its own immanent outside to draw out new potentials for its becoming, or continuing self-constitution” (2018: 11).
How to invent platforms for schizoeconomic finance at the limit that do not simply facilitate capital’s seemingly infinite capacity to capitalize on process for monetary gain? Precapitalist marginal economies may give us a clue. For their operations, unlike those of capital, are rich with emergent sociality. The notion of the penultimate is key to understanding how limit and threshold are mobilized in these early economies to engender modes of relation.
Take two abstract groups, one of which (A) gives seeds and receives axes, while the other (B) does the opposite. What is the collective evaluation of the objects based on? It is based on the idea of the last objects received, or rather receivable, on each side (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 437).
The receivability of the objects in the account above refers not to the last object received, but to “the penultimate, the next to the last, in other words, the last one before the apparent exchange loses its appeal for the exchangers, or forces them to modify their respective assemblages, to enter another assemblage” (1987: 437). The seriality refers to the cycle the exchange produces.
The last as the object of a collective evaluation determines the value of the entire series. It marks the exact point at which the assemblage must reproduce itself, begin a new operation period or a new cycle, lodge itself on another territory, and beyond which the assemblage could not continue as such. This is indeed a next-to-the last, a penultimate, since it comes before the ultimate (1987: 438).
The ultimate changes the assemblage and with that change, produces a new series. The limit is here understood as “marking a necessary rebeginning” while the threshold marks “an inevitable change” (1987: 438). “What counts is the existence of a spontaneous marginal criteria and marginalist evaluation determining the value of the entire series” (1987: 438).
In the marginal economy, exchange creates the conditions for an encounter that, each time anew, establishes a valuation.
There is neither exchange value nor use value but rather an evaluation of the last by both parties (a calculation of the risk involved in crossing the limit), an anticipation-evaluation that takes into account the ritual character as well as the utilitarian, the serial character as well as the exchangist” (1987: 439).
The immanent limit sets the stage for “a collective feeling out” that cannot be done in advance of the event (1987: 439). Both sides are altered not only by the actual exchange but by their collective retuning to the limit. What has been “exchanged” is more than an object. A sociality has been invented that accompanies the object, giving it the allure of the event through which it came to value. The economic event cannot be reduced to the exchange itself. It is a platform for relation that facilitates a process of collective feeling out that intuitively responds to the intensifying approach of the penultimate. Deviations in the process will cause punctual redirection but an immanent choreography is in place to assist the process in not tipping into a new assemblage.
The power of the penultimate is the sociality it carries through the system. Consider an argument between a couple. No matter how angry they are, the couple will argue with a collective feeling out of a limit, intuitively aware that to cross the limit might very well untether the bonds that hold the relationship together. The argument might sidle that limit, but the couple will be careful not to allow the threshold to be breached. They will do this by holding back certain thoughts, by attuning to the texture not only of what is said but how it is said, listening for what might crack their collective carapace, exposing them to what they cannot bear to hear. If they do cross that limit, everything will be up for renegotiation and their relationship might end. The penultimate is of course never precisely knowable in advance – it is best known in retrospect from the perspective of the ultimate (after the assemblage has tipped into a new one). Attending to the penultimate means being sensitive to the field of relation in composition.
Holding the process to the internal texture of its schizz is a way of attuning to the quality of a limit, collectively composing the relation in relation. When the schizz does the work of attending to the penultimate, what it does is value the pulse of duration’s serial rhythm as minor sociality. An exchange happens but it is not here that the value is located. The value is located in the collective feeling-out that attends to the event’s composition. This can look like nothing. It can look like a simple exchange between seeds and axes. But it’s much more than that: it is the staying-with of the complexity of a seriality lived not as a transaction but as a proposition for life-living itself.
Practicing the schizz toward altereconomic postcapitalist futures is a commitment to the quality of sociality highlighted in Deleuze and Guattari’s account of marginalist economies and sidelined by contemporary capitalism’s way of tending toward the limit. For capital too, as mentioned above, flirts with the limit, pulling back before it goes over the threshold. The difference is that capitalism catches itself through quantification, toward the generation of profit. What is being collectively affirmed in the marginalist economies is a mode of existence. When there is a pull back from the limit it reflects a collective desire to remain within a field of relation. In capitalism at the limit, quantification runs wild. When there is a push to the limit, the qualitative stakes are masked by the quantitative drive. This has devastating effects whose run-offs create a deviation of limit-conditions that become capital’s new field of creative potential, its limits reset within the bounds of its own domain. This can be seen in the cyclic crises through which capitalism lurches, catching itself each time before it tips over (up to now).
Schizoeconomics attunes to the quality of sociality in the collective feeling out of aneconomic fields of relation where finance at the limit revalues value.
Cut
The schizz cuts. A cut reactivates a field of experience, tuning it to new frequencies. The question is, what is the difference between a limit-cut and a threshold-cut? The difference has to do with the more-than of exchange outlined above. A limit-cut attunes to the conditions of the process by feeling-out the process’s own limit. This attunement is a folding-through that is social in the sense that it is collectively attentive to the penultimate, to that which precedes the tipping-point into a new assemblage. A threshold-cut tips the process into a new assemblage by going straight for the ultimate. Everything is rejigged in the threshold-cut. While the more-than also accompanies the threshold-cut, the intensity of the collective feeling-out is less palpable since the process is re-forming and in so doing, creating new modalities of existence.
Contemporary capital’s excess, the way it carries its limit, involves not the production of sociality but the release of volatility. “Market makers pronounce their actions as making liquidity for the markets, but the process of liquidity making is the staging of uncertainty and the constitutive act of releasing volatility” (Wosnitzer 2016: 255). The release of volatility is done in an atmosphere of uncertainty, in the logic of the derivative.[5] This is an uncertainty deeply unrelational that unmoors any sense of emergent sociality, focused solely on the punctual transaction and its yield for the individual parties involved. In this logic what is moved through the trade is speculation itself.[6] When the market is spoken of as a “sociotechnical grid,” what is being foregrounded is a form of the social completely tuned to profit (Wosnitzer 2016: 255). In this account of the social, everything moves toward the potential for quantification. The derivative is the speculative motor of this quantification. Capital’s excess trades on the speculative potential of this motor, the surplus-value of flow of the market its driving force.[7] This surplus-value of flow – which includes the market’s own volatility – is not itself quantified. It is that quantification overcodes the more-than. With this overcoding comes a generalized belief that value itself can be quantified.
There is little vocabulary in finance for that which accompanies the trade but is not the measure of it. With finance at the limit, the focus turns to the more-than and the ways in which it resists value-as-measure. Attuning to the process of financialization in neoliberal capital, it asks what escapes the force of the market’s susbumption of the excess and its affirmation of emergent sociality.
The time of the trade is an ideal site for a consideration of the imbrication of the speculative and the quantitative in capital’s surplus-value of flow. The trade of derivatives happens in a time-without-time. The no-time of the trade – the emergent valuation that occurs in the split-second of decision that moves value into tradeability (and thus quantifiability) – is a time of invention: it is the very invention of time (as value).
Through the dynamic delta-hedging and the anxiety that it generates (Will I execute it right? When to rebalance it, etc.), the market-maker penetrated the market. He penetrated its volatility and he could now feel it in his guts. In a word, he became a dynamic trader. He now understood – not conceptually, but through his senses, through his body – the inexorability of time’s decay, the pains and joys of convexity (Ayache 2008: 36– 37).
In the time-of-no-time of the trade, what come together are currents of the past (valuations that have had effects on the market) and futurities (the potential of capitalist value-creation). These futurities are composed of qualities: hunches, gut-feelings, intuition. Pastness and futurity schizz into decision. This decision is a cut that alters the field. It is not a cut made from outside the process: the decisional cut at one and the same time values and quantifies. Capital plays the more-than exclusively to tune it to count. Unregistering the more-than, backgrounding its immanent valuation in the name quantification, it (dis)counts it, subsumes it, (de)values it.[8]
The more-than that composes life-living, that creates the force of an aesthetic sociality of blackness, can never quite be counted, however. Something always resists, troubling the count. In the afterlife of slavery, it is “the object” of capital that resists, the objectification of the body into the exploitable labour-form, “body-object” understood as that which is (un)counted in the count. “This becoming-object of the object, this resistance of the object […] is the activation of an exteriority that is out from the outside” (Moten 2017: 33). Blackness resists by refusing finance unlimited, by refusing to limit its force of bodying to capital’s logic. Out from the outside, blackness tunes toward black life, “toward the life we locate and imagine when the materiality of the subprime cuts the sublime by grounding its excess in the anarchic, historical materiality of our fleshly sociality” (Moten 2013: 244). “At the convergence of the surplus […] and the aesthetic,” black life schizzes the very terms of oppression that work to maintain impoverished accounts of subjects and objects over a poetics of relation (Moten 2017: 35-36).
When the “object” resists, it is the break that sounds. The break schizzes the field. This cut is aesthetic: it touches the limit at its most sensitive nerve, crossing the threshold into a new assemblage. For the touch does not seek to rehabilitate the object. There is no rehabilitation of a social field that has reduced itself to the violent interpersonality of whiteness. Returning to the logic of whiteness only cements what is already dead. Black life moves in another logic entirely, a logic “at the convergence of the surplus and the aesthetic” that is anagrammatical, “blackness anew, blackness as a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made” (Sharpe 2016: 76).[9] Black life as force of resistance doesn’t compose with the myriad ways whiteness in its colonial-capitalist formation continues to position the black body as subpar, less-than human.
Even though the captive flesh/body has been ‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise (Spillers 1987: 68).
Black life haunts this metric and any metric, its force of valuation the relational between where “even under the most extreme circumstance imaginable, such as the condition of enslavement, both subjectivation and subjectivity occur in relation between parties. […] constructed in relationship and not before” (Spillers 2006: 23-24).[10] Black life’s production of subjectivity is moved by the phonic materiality of its resistance to the metric of whiteness (and the neurotypicality that runs through it) that runs value-as-measure. Black life is schizoeconomic.
Surplus Value of Life
Cephalopod dreams, which involve the crafting of an anti-capitalist alter-economy for the seeding of a 3Ecologies Institute, seek to mobilize the unquantifiable. Their experiment is to reclaim surplus-value of flow for what Massumi calls surplus-value of life, a purely qualitative [surplus-value that] concerns the intensity of lived potentials (2019: 16).[11] Anarchiving is key to this.
Surplus-value of life is useless. It is anarchival. It carries the anarchic share and seeds it toward future potential. This is its sociality. Speculatively, pragmatically, sparking its way into phonic materialities, surplus-value of life is never separable from how it accounts for itself as life-lived, never quantifiable, never archivable as such. There is no way to abstract it from the sound, from the tone and the tune, from the touch and the feel of living, from its sociality.
Minor sociality runs through that which exceeds the count. It cannot be given to a people – it is created in the offing, at the convergence of the vague essences of included disjunction. Transindividual before it is individual, exuberant with what exceeds the form it takes, it is the undercommoning at the heart of an aesthetic sociality of blackness. For it must be emphasized, while blackness is practiced first and foremost by those who live the daily violence of segregation from what counts, who have paid with their flesh for the advances of capitalism, it does not measure in the logic dehumanizes it. Blackness is the force of an emergent collectivity that moves beyond property and propriety.
Blackness, which is to say, black radicalism, is not the property of black people. All that we have (and are) is what we hold in our outstretched hands. This open collective being is blackness – (racial) difference mobilized against the racist determination it calls into existence in every moment of the ongoing endangerment of ‘actual being’, of subjects who are supposed to know and own. It makes a claim upon us even as it is that upon which we all can make a claim, precisely because it – and its origins – are not originary (Moten 2013: 238).
A gesture of reaching-toward, an invitation to collaborate, blackness is not what is pre-formed. Blackness is “the essence that is given in and as sociality itself,” (Harney and Moten 2017).[12]
3E Process Seed Bank
The 3E Process Seed Bank[13] is first and foremost a collective proposition for anarchiving. As described in chapter 3, the process of anarchiving involves catching the more-than of the event and mobilizing the ecology of relations it has set forth. Less capture than bend, the aim is to reorient a set of conditions so that a spark can catch on the edges of an existing process, seeding a new one. SenseLab’s practices of the event have always been about this: creating process seeds for future activation elsewhere. How things move is their value, a value deferred. Value as speculative share, as force-of-form resonating.
Conceiving a cryptoeconomic platform as an anarchive is a way of returning to the minor sociality of emergent valuation feeling itself out, making it a practice. This practice is conditioned through a continued exploration of what things do when they shape each other. Anarchiving is a way, not a state. To hone a practice of attuning to the anarchic share of a process underway is to become sensitive to how that which exceeds registering nonetheless transforms the phonic materiality of life-living. Foregrounding the anarchic share of events in the making, the 3E Process Seed Bank does not disseminate a form for sale or exchange. Nor does it seek to display value, or to measure it. The 3E Process Seed Bank is a sandbox for seeds of process to germinate in the hope that they will grow elsewhere, seeding new processes.
The 3E Process Seed Bank takes the notion that money is a social relation to its immanent limit. “Cryptocurrencies are not just ‘money’ – they are part money, part asset and part political organization – and these other dimensions must impact the way we see ‘stability’. […] The simple point is that money is a social relation; not just a technical mechanism” (Bryan and Virtanen 2018).[14] Our goal: to move beyond any notion of individual share or exchange to learn collectively, through practice, to value the minor sociality of the more-than through which emergent valuation makes itself felt. To take seriously – to make it a life practice – that the value is not in the product but in the way. To learn to account, in a register where quality is at its most intensive limit, for what else is expressed in the way things shape each other. To index this intensity – an intensity with no bearing on quantity – in an operation that distills to number what differentially registers across a system tuned to what anarchivally moves across it.
What is rendered exchangeable here is not process itself, or affect, or relation. What is made shareable is a technique, a practice for attuning to the anarchic share in experience. Following Moten and Harney’s thinking on debt in The Undercommons, the aim is above all to get rid of the debt/credit relation.
[T]here has to be a way in which there can be elaborations of unpayable debt that don’t always return to an individualisation through the family or an individualisation through the wage laborer, but instead the debt becomes a principle of elaboration. And therefore it’s not that you wouldn’t owe people in something like an economy, or you wouldn’t owe your mother, but that the word ‘owe’ would disappear and it would become some other word, it would be a more generative word (Moten and Harney 2013: 150).
The 3E Process Seed Bank begins with debt – a debt to the earth, a debt to that which does not quite register but changes the quality of a life, a debt to the more-than. The 3E Process Seed Bank works without credit. There is no repayment here. There is no system of adequation that would create a mirror between its aneconomic principles and the wider field of capital. It’s an enclave, a system that depends on a relational field composed of other altereconomic propositions committed to sharing not the measure of experience but what indexically runs through it, connecting to the dynamic contours of its most intensive limit. The aim is to work to create the conditions to live, not to repay the debt of life itself, and not to take credit for the living, for the land, which is not ours to give, not ours to own. We begins in the outside of finance. We begin here and attempt to remain here in the collective feeling-out of the limit where the hinge to finance proper is called “occurency,” its value the differential, infrathin unmeasurability of the being of relation.
Self-Organizing Propositions (SOPs)
To create the conditions for the differential of value, entryways into the process have to be invented that propose modes of relation which resist the setting-into-place of existing practices of self-presentation and the economies of prestige and position they bring with them. In addition, practices have to be seeded that facilitate attunement to what exceeds the archival contour of a given encounter. Anarchiving requires a care for all that impersonally moves through the event. To compose with anarchival minor movements, the 3E Process Seed Bank’s digital platform must conceive both of ways to solicit ongoing engagement with processes underway and design ways of activating the thresholds on the platform itself that invite entry into those processes. On a digital platform, participation usually implies entering through a mode of self-identification that is password protected. While this identification can be a cypher, it nonetheless immediately sets up an individual marker, and with it a presupposition of individual agency that carries through all movements on the platform. While this can’t be altogether cast aside in the crafting of an altereconomic digital platform, our aim is to background the reindividualization of the process as much as possible. How can individualized participation be detoured? What kinds of processes can be coded that allow sideways modes of relation?
In an economy where the gift is sociality, the first step is to code the entryway differently. The 3E Process Seed Bank refuses the form of the token as means of exchange (and mechanism of entry). Our proposal is to focus directly on sociality itself, entering through the modality of the proposition. Taking advantage of the figure of the “smart contract,” building on the ways it has been coded in the post-blockchain landscape as the mechanism through which entry into the system takes place on the basis of an agreement directly written into lines of code, itself situated on a distributed, decentralized ledger, we are designing if-then propositions that set movements into play from the perspective of their own lure for feeling. The hope is that these propositional operations will be able to access modes of process directly rather than having them mediated by individual agents. We call these “self-organizing propositions” or SOPs.
The propositional force of the SOPs is its capacity for immanent orientations. Its aim: to “shift SenseLab’s collective ethos of self-organizing participation into the way in which the 3E Process Seed Bank online platform is fundamentally structured.”[15] Refusing the limitations on the social enacted by individual entry onto the platform, SOPs facilitate an entering in the act, in the middling of a process already underway. “Coded to facilitate repetitive, core actions undertaken on the 3E Process Seed Bank, SOPs take the place of the traditional ‘governance’ structure built into blockchain and beyond-blockchain distributed systems, attempting to fulfill the need for some kind of regulatory framework, but in a non-normative way.”[16]
Channels for the self-modulation of the process, SOPs “regulate the flow of interactions rather the form of transactions.”[17] Examples include the entryway SOP (proposition: gift of process), the welcome wagon (proposition: greeting), the cat herder (proposition: move into collaboration), the creative-cut call (proposition: tipping-point toward actualization), the regroup call (proposition: regroup around failure and begin again), the goddess of anarchy (proposition: decisional-cut making power).
SenseLab sees SOPs as schizoeconomic threshold-cuts. They are lively, strange, alluring techniques to tune the process toward new assemblages. While the entryway SOP does the traditional work of the smart contract, the 3E Process Seed Bank seeds the SOPs across more than the entry, designing operations for SOPs wherever a threshold-cut is needed. This is done with the knowledge that conditions change. While the new assemblages activated by the SOPs will be carefully tended by the process seeds as they germinate, we recognize that all new assemblages carry the risk any thresholding technique does: what if we are not ready for the worlds they create? This is especially the case with the SOPs since they formalize and schizz at the same time. What if the entryway becomes a gateway? Practice is key: finance at the limit must be lived. It will not do its work, even given the most alluring platform, if new techniques for activating body-worlds don’t accompany it.
Processual Operator Thingies (POTs)
If practices of the event seek to engage with the more-than of experience in the making, this by necessity includes collaboration with nonhuman forces. Nonhuman forces allow us to better understand the modes of perception of a neurodiverse sensibility that refuses frontality as the matrix of attention, participating instead in experience from its more-than human edges. Composing with nonhuman forces facilitates the recognition that humans, too, are suffused with the nonhuman, those more-than human qualities that forge openings toward an aesthetics of the earth. The world pushes into us, makes us. And then there is the collaboration between the nonhuman forces themselves, the geological time pulsing through the rock, the strange wasp-likeness of the hammer orchid’s deceptive play,[18] the angle of the sun shimmering in the whistle of the breeze, the “degrees of indeterminacy” in algorithmic infracommunication (Parisi 2019: 4).[19] Emergent sociality across mediums of expression requires an attunement to these nonhuman forces. The danger otherwise is that we return to the instrumentality of human self-centredness.
The crafting of the digital platform for the 3E Process Seed Bank is deeply committed to a sensitivity toward the outside of nonhuman expression that courses through us, computational and extracomputational. In the context of the 3E Process Seed Bank, what this requires in practice is designing techniques that foster compelling ways of encountering how the coded world might collaborate with the more-than that courses through the analog. At the same time, a curiosity about the digital on its own terms emboldens an approach that resists making the digital platform a simple mediator of our practice. In the spirit of immediation, we are lured by the “indefiniteness of ‘incomputables’ that expose dynamics in computational logic, where proofs preserve degrees of indeterminacy” (Parisi 2019: 5-6). We are fascinated by the notion that complex systems produce a “field of communication” where “algorithms talk to other algorithms (through set protocols and through learning) […] across parallel and distributive networks” (2019: 7). While the systems we are working on are nowhere as complex as the ones Parisi describes above, the speculative potential of the network’s own indeterminacy is important to what we are trying to achieve. With practices of the event our central operation, the aim is to design a platform that can sensitize us to what exceeds the instrumentality with which we tend to approach the digital realm.
As anarchival transport, the 3E Process Seed Bank teaches us, in emergent relation with coding’s own logics, how to collaborate with the anarchic share of a digital process. That said, it is important to remember that the digital process is always allied to a live one. The 3E Process Seed Bank is, after all, the aneconomic proposition for the 3Ecologies Institute, which will foster local sites where practices of living and learning are composed. But we do a lot of work online, especially now that we have collaborators from such diverse locations. We share files, send messages, discuss concepts, join each others’ reading groups, sit in virtually on workshops. The 3E Process Seed Bank is conceived as an alternative proposition for this daily distance collaboration that might be better capable of transducing practices from the digital to the live and vice versa. For what we have found with event-based practices is that the relay of distance and proximity is important to how techniques unfold. For some of us physical gatherings are necessary for the consolidation of collective processes. For others, the online is much easier – even the most neurodiverse environments are challenging for those who have no sensory buffers. The 3E Process Seed Bank aims to foster practices of anarchiving to facilitate modes of coming into relation at a distance that maintain the intensity of the work across time and space, thereby creating process seeds for practices elsewhere underway. To some degree this is already part of daily SenseLab practice – the aim is to open it up to a wider field of collaboration, including those who have never physically participated in a SenseLab event. To achieve this interplay between what seeds it and what it seeds, the 3E Process Seed Bank must be seen as a machine that is alive in the interplay of the minor socialities that run through it, and affect it. How it comes into being is as important as what it does.
Working at the uneasy limit where non-capitalist futures can be imagined, both the 3E Process Seed Bank and the 3Ecologies Institute are invitations for others to take off from the middling of our process. This work can only be done in relay, collective at every step. To facilitate this sharing of the process, we have simplified the kinetic field of the platform into a second operation that will accompany the SOPs as governing tendencies. This second operation, conceived as bundles of code that agitate and deviate all-too-human tendencies of instrumental navigation, are called Processual Operator Thingies (POTs). POTs are propelled by more-than human tendencies, bringing a qualitative edge of nonhuman participation to the platform. A variation on the figure of the BOT, POTs are quality intensifiers that detour processes to make them less goal-oriented, inviting infrathin collisions of sense and sensation. The proposition is that we POT our orientations. In the reorientation, POTs produce a relational shift, lending texture to an activity, or what Leslie Plumb, lead designer of the 3E Process Seed Bank, calls “touch-tones.” In their design, the focus is on the quality of emergent valuation across registers of life-living. POTs nuzzle, tend, germinate, steal, seize the day.
Kleptopot is perhaps our most emphatic POT. Klepto is a force of redirection. Klepto steals not the content of our contribution but our assurance that we know where we were going. Stealing up against an image, a piece of text, a sound, Klepto acts like a charcoal rubbing, pulling a texture off the surface and depositing it elsewhere in the system. Other POTs include Nuzzlebot (moving with polyrhythms of scale and duration), Foreground/Background (experiments with contrast), Go-to-Sleep (with the quality of turning on the porch light), Carpe Diem (gives a stand-out of salient value), Fuzzbot (gathers fragments of things like a dust ball), Reverbbot (returns and amplifies), Murmuration (registers a flow), ReZonator (catches emergent appetites and moves them, glitches, interferes, cuts). And then there are the minor qualifiers, the ones more tone than texture, backgrounded in the system: vibrating-string (minor disturbances), spaghetti-string (tangling into untangling, giggling looking for laughter), dot-on-a-walk-pot (a line of colour, a vector for entering a complex field, a lure for elsewhere alternatives), compost-pot (resting for a time to come), ticker-tape (polyp-like feed of disparate chats bits and bytes), radio-pot (playlists for making-reading-thinking).
Processual operators cooperate with or interrupt humans to make felt the differentials in the collective process online. Coded shapes of process, they defy the directedness of any given individual gesture, inviting us to participate in a practice that surprises or reorients us in the way a shift in the breeze can do on a windy day. Processual operators are the online techniques, the online relational platforms, that orient toward the more-than in the system.
Transvaluation
Mechanisms for the transduction of the anarchic share and its intensities into indexable units are required. We stumble here, and will need all the transindividual collaboration we can get to remain in an ethos of the pragmatics of the useless.
Value, as we conceive it, is pure quality. Yet, as Whitehead makes clear, value cannot be known in itself: it always accompanies actualization. Value is cohort, companion, ally. Value is relational, emphasizing the very unquantifiability of relation. A transductive technique for valuation that moves toward financial evaluation must therefore refrain, at all costs, from imposing any kind of constancy to the notion of what matters.
Speculative value drives the markets. What we are working toward is a different kind of speculative value: a value that doesn’t invent quantifiable sums based on hype and risk and scarcity, but builds beyond exchange toward the abundance that is active in the infrathin of worlds making themselves. This is not value from nothing. It is value emergent from the tweak that altered the conditions of experience in just this way. This speculative mode of valuing values the way of the anarchive, the attunement, in the event, to the infrathin coursing through the anarchic share that left experience open for future experimentation. It values what remains negatively prehended in experience. If negative prehension has subjective form, as proposed in chapter 1, a speculative mode of valuing must attune to the formative force of what is backgrounded but nonetheless shimmers in the between of foregroundingbackgrounding. An attunement to what moves at the interstice – the being of relation – is necessary for a revaluation of value that doesn’t simply return to quantification as its motor. This is not about more. It’s about the more-than, that differential force that accompanies experience in the making, but cannot be reduced to it.
This is where cephalopod dreams come in. Cephalopods are extraordinary creatures. Their bodies more fold than form, they are shape-shifters in all senses, their modes of appearance in defiance of the logic of representation. Cephalopods camouflage, they entertain, they do both at once, the movement of their colours adrift. Radically intelligent creatures, they perform for the world in a way that leads Godfrey-Smith to describe evolution as “not goal-directed” (2016: 132). The thing about the cephalopod is that it doesn’t have the cones in its eyes necessary to perceive colour.[20] This creature that dances and shapes and colours the world, often matching itself to its surrounds, cannot actually “see” the world it composes alongside. This has stumped scientists, who have sometimes argued that the octopus arms may have cells that engage in some kind of seeing-function. But is it really the case that seeing must be relegated to cones in the eyes or to cells in the arms? Recall John Lee Clark’s architectural seeing, his obsession with the underside of furniture so-called seeing folks habitually unsee (to avoid the dust bunnies). Might the cephalopod be engaged in a seeing-feeling of relational luminosity that cannot be separated out from its activity of colouring and shape-shifting?
In true cephalopodic form, no anarchive can be centrally controlled. An agencement of processes, its orientation always toward the more-than, its lure the shape of its own exuberance, it is self-producing. Cephalopodic in tendency, the representation of the useful is anathema to it. Transindividuation meets transvaluation.
Process Seeds
We have no idea how the cephalopod-anarchive will make contact. We don’t know what finance at the limit looks like or whether the lure of the anarchic share will yield anything close to the exquisite cephalopod display we dream with.
Image1 Cephalopod
What we do know is this: we have an appetite for other ways of learning, making and thinking. Sending out a collective call via the 3E Process Seed Bank for the revaluation of value feels urgent at a time where capital’s infringement on life is as total as it is, its surplus value of flow everywhere contaminating life as we know it. Experiments with other ways abound, and we connect to them with excitement, knowing that cephalopod dreams are never achieved once and for all, and certainly never lived alone. The cryptocurrency marketplace is in many ways nothing more than an amplification of the horrors of capital. To situate ourselves there is to risk being subsumed by its flows. Our tentative collaboration in those processes has taught us a lot about what we want to avoid at all costs (its libertarian edge, its maleness, its whiteness, its lack of foresight as regards computational capital, its infinite appetite for profit – in short, its capitalist tendencies). But experiments to explore finance at the limit are also happening there, and we have learned rich lessons from cryptofinance’s conceptual outliers, from those who share the urgency to develop anti-capitalist futures that value the art of life-living. As Jonathan Beller writes with respect to current alter-capitalist cryptoeconomic experiments: “the mutual stake-holding or risking together changes the terms of sociality and creates the possibility to evolve new relationships and new social forms” (2019 forthcoming).
New social forms have always brought with them the seeds of altereconomic processes. This is what I learn from the aesthetic sociality of blackness.
To be white was to own the earth forever and ever. It defined who they were and what they valued; it shaped their vision of the future. But black folks had been owned, and being an object of property, they were radically disenchanted with the idea of property. If their past taught them anything, it was that the attempt to own life destroyed it, brutalized the earth, and ran roughshod over everything on God’s creation for a dollar. As items of cargo, they had experienced first-hand the ugliness and violence of the world as seen through the ledger and double-entry bookkeeping. They had endured the life of the commodity. They had been propagated and harvested like any other crop, treated no differently from the tools and the animals owned by massa. They knew a corporation was not a person, not flesh and blood, and that a piece of paper secured nothing that a white man was bound to respect; they knew starvation wages weren’t freedom, but another kind of slavery. The things they valued most had no price on them (Hartman 2019: 401).
In the infrathin of experience, value is without count. Always in excess of measure, in excess of it-self, value is what cannot be possessed. Shimmer, gloss, pulse, value is the qualitative edge of the being of relation. A pragmatics of the useless is value’s way, its artful orientation to the anarchic share that moves through process to reveal what couldn’t be contained. Cephalopod dreams begins here, in the uncontainment, proposing a relationscape of vivid dissonance. To see-feel in the affirmation of discord is to approach a movement in variation with itself. Where minor gestures abound, minor socialities thrive.
[1] https://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/162888/base-faith/
[2] It must be noted that, like most of the thinkers of their time, Deleuze and Guattari have a deeply falsifying reading of autism. They see autism as the catatonic edge of desiring-production turning on itself. Bemoaning Freud’s superposition of autism on schizophrenia – “[w]e may well ponder the possibility that the analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex led Freud to rediscover, and to lend all the weight of his authority to, the unfortunate misapplication of the concept of autism to schizophrenia” (1983: 23) – they see autism as what holds schizophrenia back: “The schizophrenic appears all the more specific and recognizable as a distinct personality if the process is halted, or if it is made an end and a goal in itself, or if it is allowed to go on and on endlessly in a void, so as to provoke that ‘horror of … extremity wherein the soul and
body ultimately perish’ (the autist)” (1983: 24). In the history of pathologization, it was quite common to overlay schizophrenia onto autism, a practice which Deleuze and Guattari saw as deadening the force of what else moved through schizophrenia. Their mistake was to not understand that the figure of autism that was being imposed was itself a pathologization that had nothing to do with autism: autism has absolutely none of the deadening tendencies it is purported to have! Indeed, the irony is that autism is much closer to the description of schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari create in opposition to the psychiatric model, a description that emphasizes the creative flows and productive potential that come of an innate capacity for the schizz. I see many similarities to autisic perception here. Deleuze and Guattari made it their project to pull schizophrenia out of the limiting arena it had come to occupy, and in so doing they inadvertently repathologized autism. The hope throughout is to demonstrate the importance of the schizz for neurodiversity more broadly (beyond schizophrenia), emphasizing the manner in which both schizophrenia and autism compel us to explore what is in excess of normopathic perception.
[3] A contemporary effect of the misreading of the schizophrenic as an individual pathology plays out in work on autism that takes autism as the schizz of our time, reading autism as the double of the schizophrenic. Too often, in these (mis)readings of Anti-Oedipus, we are given an individual rather than a field of forces. The ethos of schizoanalysis depends on the creation of techniques that attune to the diversity in diversity of neurodiversity. Any attempt to engage with autism must ask how the analysis carries with itself neurotypical (pathologizing) preconceptions. It must ask how desire is produced in the context of something like an autistic schizz. The work of schizoanalysis must never be reduced to generalities.
[4] In Principle of Unrest, Brian Massumi writes: “Contemporary capitalism is increasingly concerned with setting in place the conditions for its products to emerge. They are not only made to emerge, but this happens as a by-product of circulation itself. There are many ways this happens. Examples are the feedback loops that have formed between crowdsourcing and the data-mining of internet, cell phone traffic, and credit-card use on the one hand, and product-development and marketing on the other. The network becomes a matrix of emergence for products that do not preexist, but take shape in and through networked circulation. In the ebb and flow, marketing potentials appear like waves cresting on a sea of movements. These are skimmed off, “mined,” then concretized as new products to be sold for profit. You could look at the profit generated as embodying a “surplus-value of flow”: a yield of added value emerging from the complexity of movements under way, directly as a function of them. Philosophically speaking, capitalism has learned to motorize itself immanently to its own movements” (2017: 11).
[5] While typically defined as a contract that derives its price from an underlying asset, a derivative is actually a speculation on value itself: “derivatives are defined precisely by their ability to abstract themselves from the value or even ownership of an underlying asset” (Massumi 2018: 21). Taking the shape of futures, options, forwards, swaps, hedges, derivatives bet on how value will register in the no-time of the trade. Elie Ayache writes: “As opposed to the actual practice of trading, derivative valuation theory only deals with probability and stochastic processes and stochastic control and knows nothing of market price or implied volatility. These valuation theories have hitherto proceeded on the theoretical assumption of a stochastic process, and have disregarded the effect of the recalibrationof the market on itself. Trading derivatives in the market is precisely pricing them at a variance with the value theory prescribes for them” (2015: 27-28).
[6] “Capitalism’s driving force is the differential between profit and surplus-value: their systemic/processual, systolic/diastolic asymmetry” (Massumi 2018: 16).
[7] “The concept of surplus-value of flow is an extrapolation from Marx’s analysis of interest-bearing capital as money ‘already pregnant with surplus-value,’ such that the profit generated ‘is not the result of the act of purchase, the actual function that it performs here as money, but rather of the way in which this act is connected with the overall movement of capital’” (Marx 1991, 463; emphasis added) (Massumi 2018: 28). Through the surplus value of flow, derivatives push capital toward a limit “where the gap between system and process tendentially closes” (Massumi 2018: 50). The flow, the excess agitated in the hedging, converges with capitalist capture, moving the process toward measure. Here, “quantification rejoins the singular, becoming fully evental rather than reductively indicative. This is not an overcoming of capitalist capture, but a singular intensification of it” (Massumi 2018: 51).
[8] Different phases of capitalism have composed with value differently. In the period of primitive accumulation, when capitalist surplus-value production was based primarily on the extraction of labour, and labour itself was its raw material, value was inextricably connected to racialized labour. “Racialization and the ‘universal’ value-form are not separate phenomenon: value is not constituted simply from deracinated labor dissymmetrically exchanged for the wage, but from racialized labor, historically devalued colonial populations, and slavery” (Beller 2019) “For 400 years, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the capitalist mode of production in Europe engulfed agrarian and artisanal workers, transforming them over the generations into expropriated, dependent fodder for concentration in factories, disciplined to the rhythms and turbulences of the manufacturing process, the organizers of the capitalist world system appropriated Black labor power as constant capital” (Robinson 2000: 308-309). Effects of racialized labour continue in contemporary times, of course. The emphasis here on surplus-value of flow does not deny that. It simply emphasizes that in this period where capital is most driven by the non-human flows it releases, the breadth of its violence must be recognized as exceeding any kind of so-called “rational” process. “The individual subject of interest forming the fundamental unit of capitalist society is internally differentiated, containing its own population of ‘minority practices’ of contrasting affective tone and tenor, in
a zone of indistinction between rational calculation and affectivity. In other words, there is an infra-individual complexity quasi-chaotically agitating within the smallest unit.” (2015: 8).
[9] On the anagrammatical, Christina Sharpe writes: “As I continue to think with Spillers’s grammar, ‘which is really a rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation’ (Spillers 2003b, 209), and Fred Moten’s opening sentences in In the Break, that ‘the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist’ and ‘blackness—the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line—is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity’ (Moten 2003, 1), I arrive at blackness as, blackness is, anagrammatical. That is, we can see the moments when blackness opens up into the anagrammatical in the literal sense as when “a word, phrase, or name is formed by rearranging the letters of another” (Merriam-Webster Online). We can also apprehend this in the metaphorical sense in how, regarding blackness, grammatical gender falls away and new meanings proliferate; how ‘the letters of a text are formed into a secret message by rearranging them’ or a secret message is discovered through the rearranging of the letters of a text. Ana-, as a prefix, means ‘up, in place or time, back, again, anew’”(2016: 76).
[10] Spillers is thinking with Chandler in this citation. See full citation in note 5 in chapter 2.
[11] Surplus-value of life is “purely qualitative and concerns the intensity of lived potentials” (2018: 16). “A qualitative life value is something that is lived for its own sake; something that is a value in and of itself, in the unexchangeable ‘currency’ of experience. A life-value has value to the exact degree to which it is incommensurable with any other experience. It is the singular color of an experience, such as it is, all of its own, that makes of it a life-value. In fact, a quality of life has value in exactly the way we say a color or a sound has a value. It has the value of the qualitative character of its own occurrence” (2018: 25).
[12] http://www.e-flux.com/journal/86/162888/base-faith/
[13] For an account of some of the 3E Process Seed Bank’s economic and philosophical concerns at the point in 2018 when the platform was in its infancy, see Erin Manning and Brian Massumi: https://thenewinquiry.com/a-cryptoeconomy-of-affect/ For working papers about different phases of the process of thinking finance at the limit see http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/3eprocessseedbank/
[14] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GblmfXNeaIwEfdgVEVpxIF4NDAQHzB-pBa8YBAruBbw/edit
[15] http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/3eprocessseedbank/
[16] http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/3eprocessseedbank/
[17] http://senselab.ca/wp2/immediations/3eprocessseedbank/
[18] Dwarf hammer orchids’s flowers are pollinated by male wasps (thynnine) who are drawn to the specific odours emitted by the orchid which imitate the sex pheromones of receptive female wasps. To the human eye, they have a strange resemblance to purple wasps.
[19] Luciana Parisi “Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality” in Theory, Culture and Society (May 2019), pp 1-30. Parisi’s provocations are very important for the transversal operations proposed via the POTs in the 3E Process Seed Bank. Parisi argues for a nonhuman thought with respect to computation, “a possibility of machines to think
beyond what they do” (2019: 4).
[20] On cephalopod vision: “As already stated, both cephalopods and vertebrates have very complex image- forming eyes with lenses. Both cephalopods and vertebrates have single lens eyes. They work by allowing light to enter through the pupil and be focused by the lens onto the photoreceptor cells of the retina. However, between the two groups of animals there are differences in the shape of the pupil, the way the lens changes focus for distance, the type of receptor cells that receive the light as well as some more subtle differences. In vertebrates the pupil is round, and it changes in diameter depending on the amount of light in the environment. This is important because too much light will distort the image, and too little light will be interpreted as a very faint image. The cephalopod pupil is square and adjusts for the level of light by changing from a square to a narrow rectangle. The way in which the two groups use the lens to focus differs. Vertebrates use muscles around the eye to change the shape of the lens, while cephalopods are able to manipulate their lens in or out to focus at different distances. The receptor cells of vertebrate eyes are rods and cones. The cones are used for vision in high light environments, while the rods are used in low light. The time of day the animal needs its vision to be most effective will dictate the ratio of rods to cones. Cephalopods, however, have receptor cells called rhabdomeres similar to those of other mollusks. These contain microvilli which allow the animal to see polarized and unpolarized light (see page on polarization vision). Lastly, the way in which light is directed at the retina differs between the two groups. Cephalopod retinas receive incoming light directly, while vertebrate retinas receive light that is bounced back from the back of the eye.”http://www.thecephalopodpage.org/cephschool/CephalopodVision.pdf