Introduction to Desiring-Materialism: Sensory Dynasties, Quantum Theogony and Universal pre-galactic traumas
I want to talk today about several things, to try and offer a way for people to “catch up” with the literature and theoretical side of Mille Plateaux, whilst also, hopefully, offering something “new” within that discourse, as some of you here today may not be familiar with these ideas, whereas some of you have read it all, so I hope to offer something that operates on both levels, or that resounds in both registers.
We will be journeying into another semiotic realm, one which was envisioned by Louis Althusser as a secret subterranean river which he called “the underground current of materialism”. Today we are crossing into the in-between of various planes/discourses like Quantum Theory, Philosophy, Semiotics, and Mythology; the immanent plane where they all connect and bleed into one another. It is a nebulous place, full of obscured secrets; so when we arrive, we will need a guide, someone who is a master of hidden flows—and who better to navigate the Styx, the river of Hades, than one Titus Lucretius Carus?
Lucretius, as he is more commonly known, is a philosopher who explores the story of the Universe through the language of Ancient Greek creation mythology. His natural, materialist philosophy, which is rooted in an interpretation of Hesoid’s Theogony, has become very important again, and certainly the likes of Thomas Nail have argued that an understanding of Quantum Theory is contained with Lucretius’ famous text De Rarum Natura. This title is of course translated as the Nature of Things, or of Everything, and it is an epic poem that takes the form of an invocation of Aphrodite. I would agree with Nail, that one of the most important metaphysical claims of Lucretius is found in the decision to format his philosophy as an act of communication with the Goddess of Desire—the fundamental claim here is that everything in the Universe is Matter, and that Matter is Desire.
I can summarise the mythology as follows: everything begins with Chaos, which brings forth Darkness and Night, Earth and Sky, the Waters, and so on. Chaos folds into higher-orders of complexity, into the elements, into the mountains and oceans, into mammals and flowers. There is a lot of drama in Theogony, and in Greek mythology in general, a lot of fighting, revenge, retribution, betrayal.. It’s Chaotic, but at some point within this maelstrom of Titans, Giants, Olympians, and so on, the World we know arrives on Earth. When I use the word “World”, I am rooting this in the semiotics of Baudrillard, an example of someone who would define the World as being composed of signs, oppositionally-structured, fundamentally dualistic signs: dualistic in the sense of signifier/signified, semiotic/symbolic, phonetic/phonemic. Our world is language, and included in our world is only what can be referred to with signs.
The birth of the World on Earth is precisely worded: the Goddess of Earth, Gaia, recruits the support of the Goddess of Water, Tethys, and they enact a revolution against the Sky, where they literally castrate Ouranos, whose genitals crash into the ocean, producing a great foamy-splash upon impact. Aphrodite is born from this foam, she arises from the foam inside a shell—so she is born from an inverted conception, she is immaculately conceived. When she rises from the foam and walks upon the beaches of Cyprus, the Heavens have arrived on Earth, and our World begins. God is the Word, once the Word arrives on Earth, we have the World. This moment is the ancient Greek equivalent moment of the Christian idea of the Fall; the defining moment of humanity, and yet this moment represents a paradox: it is the moment that Chaos appears inside of itself, which seems impossible, a second-iteration of Chaos–Chaos comes again, or repeats itself.
Interestingly, Deleuze defined the Earth as being characterized by the process of stratification; Earth represents Order in that sense, though typically we might agree that the Earth is chaotic–so somehow Deleuze’s conception of Earth is a chaos that inevitably tends towards producing strata or order, a kind of entropic process. Yet, Chaos is restored on the Earth once Aphrodite arrives and destabilizes everything; so Earth arises within the Chaos, and then Earth gives way to Chaos again, because Gaia brings forth Aphrodite:
There is a rhythm to this bloodline that I find interesting:
Chaos, which in Greek is “to xaos”, which is a grammatically castrated word: the OS in Chaos signifies that the word is Masculine, but the definite article TO, in greek, signifies object, not neutral, but object–its a male word that has been clipped, so to speak, or immasculated. So when we say that Chaos produces the Earth, it is not some heteronormative sexual reproduction, it’s not a birth, so to speak; rather Earth arises within Chaos. Then, again, the coming of Aphrodite at the beginning of the World is also the result of an act of castration; literally–the cycle repeats itself, and so Lucretius treats Xaos, Gaia, and Aphrodite as a rhythmic pulse. Chaos tends towards stratification, until it reaches the Earth, which itself is a chaos that produces stratification, and then we arrive at Aphrodite, the goddess of desire, which is another chaos–and if Lucretius is arguing that matter is both Chaos and Desire, then from Chaos to Earth to Desire; it’s like a pendulum swinging, Chaos to Order to Chaos; base-superstructure-base (again).
Chaos is, within Lucretius’ work, defined by its tendency to produce Order. The argument is, that the constant linear motion of Chaos deviates due to the fundamental principle of the Swerve: the Lucretian Swerve is the imperative for linear propagation to deviate, and if the intensity of the deviation is high enough, the line will eventually turn back in on itself and form a loop, which is a fascinating topographical change: from one perspective the line continues as a singular vectoral propagation, but from our point of view, there are now several new properties: the appearance of separation, and the creation of so-called negative space.
The illusion of identity is produced in this erroneous, glitch-like moment, where our mortal position as subjects means the truth of continuity is concealed by the illusion of repetition.
We could image an A4 piece of paper, call it Chaos; when we fold this in half, we get 2 conjoined A5 sheets, which is still fundamentally chaos, but we can no longer point at/refer to the original A4, instead we have two new expressions of Chaos, which would have to be referred to as Chaos 2 & 3, because both are different from each other and both are equally different to the original, which must now retroactively be called Chaos 1. We’re just talking about Chaos, but once Chaos folds into more Chaos, it has miraculously materialised Order. Perhaps for Deleuze, something makes Matter fold, but for Lucretius, Matter folds of its own will—chaos creates more chaos from itself—matter creates matter from matter. How does Chaos as Matter have the will of its own, the will to fold? Well, it doesn’t—matter doesn’t have a will—yet if Matter is Desire, then it is its own will.
For Lucretius, everything that exists in the Universe is matter, which he models on the Ancient Greek concept of Chaos. So Matter is not to be understood as atoms—as atoms are but an expression of matter—rather we can think of matter in terms of flow. In Lucretian materialism, matter is a material flow, matter is not just “in motion”, it is motion; here matter & motion form a Möbius strip. Matter is something beyond just the motion of atoms.
Karl Marx wrote, I believe, his Ph.D thesis on Lucretius and someone else, and at some point he is writing about matter, about atoms, where he says something like: “atoms disappear as they dance”, or “they become invisible when they move”. Therefore, what you do not see, is just as much “matter” as atoms are—matter stretches beyond what we can see—what we don’t see is atoms in motion, we are just seeing the stuff that is hardly moving at all, at least relative to everything else. We see just the tip of the iceberg, we see just the crust; and we only really bring into our World, which is, per Baudrillard or Kristeva, made of signs/semiotics—what we can identify and point at. This process of defining what “exists” based on what “appears to be”, is, per Francois Laruelle, to operate under the Authority of Light. As if light is a dynasty—Whereas, in the shadowy underworld to which we are travelling, Light has no authority to determine what is and what isn’t—Light only has authority over a very small amount of the Universal Chaos-matter. And in a way, the domain where Light has jurisdiction is arguably, paradoxically, outside of matter or the real. Yet to explain this, I can turn to natural or quantum theory.
So this dualism of visible/invisible, splits the universe into two; the real and the world; the real vs. reality. In Derrida’s work, this is the fundamental dualism which rules over the history of western philosophy, though he doesn’t call it visible/invisible, rather presence/absence–so if you hear people talking about the metaphysics of presence in relation to the symbolic order, it likely stems from this discourse surrounding the likes of Derrida and Lacan.
Interestingly, this splitting of the Universe, or of flattening the Universe into a surface topography, somehow maps onto contemporary understandings of total Universal energetic make-up; 95% of the Universe is made up of the Dark Sector, Dark Matter and Dark Energy–Dark because we cannot get to it, we cannot perceive it; leaving us just 5% to play with, to build our symbolic out of.
Quantum theorists today would agree that the space which seems emptiest, is rather the most full; overflowing actually. Where it looks as though there is the least amount of matter, there is actually the most. We cannot see it, or measure it, so we cannot give it a sign or point at it, so it is void from our World. In Quantum Theory, we can think about “empty-space” in terms of Quantum Fluctuations, or, Quantum Foam, which implies that the boundaries of the observable Universe are demarcated by this foam which accumulates like crema on an Espresso—the metaphor of universal foam implies an underlying universal liquid.
Lucretius places immense importance on Foam—after all, Lucretius is writing a poem to Aphrodite; an invocation of the Goddess of Desire who is born of foam; Aphro-diti- Aphrós- means foam in Greek. From foam the World is born. When Deleuze and Kristeva and the likes rewrite Lucretius two-thousand years later, they inherit his idea of foam, or they at least inherit the metaphor of an underlying liquid matter. They also inherit the centrality of desire, because they make the same association between desire and matter as Lucretius, who is arguing that the signifier closest to Chaos, to Matter, is not Gaia/Earth as we might imagine, but her illegitimate grand-daughter, Aphrodite. By dedicating his entire philosophy of Nature and Matter to Venus, Lucretius is making that crucial metaphysical claim that desire is the Matter of Nature and the Nature of Matter; which expresses itself as matter-in-motion, or matter/energy.
Deleuze, Kristeva and Lucretius effectively write of a material desire—or desiring-material—underlying everything, and this “raw desire” is either specified into specific/actualized desire by machines in Deleuze, or is folded into this Moving-Matter in Lucretius. Perhaps most useful is Kristeva in her work on semiotics and the Chora, an aptly hellenized word that refers to a magmatic semiotic material which sometimes bursts into the symbolic register, where it crystallizes as signs—bursting bubbles on the surface of subterranean magma. So our World is made of signs, and those signs are just the semiotic plasma being flung into the air where it might temporarily solidify or calcify. Eventually everything returns to the fire from whence it came. Nonetheless, we have this recursive notion of a Universal super-liquid or plasma; something that is simultaneously metastable (solid), flowing (liquid) and particulate (gas), and we might say that the process of plasma differentiating as solid/liquid/gas and then recombining is the same process as the semiotic differentiating as signs (the symbolic register)—this is a neat trick to deal with the problem of dualisms, because it says that there is both a semiotic and symbolic, but it’s really the same thing; there is chaos and there is order, but they’re really the same thing; there is Dark Matter and there are Baryons, but they are really the same thing.
I can add a note here that some scientists call this pre-state plasma “absolute zero” or “ground zero”—which i find really apt, because it implies that Chaos is in the middle of everything, it is the “in-between” of things. The magic comes from the gaps in-between—I have said before that this also draws on the relatively well-known concept of Ma in Japan, Negative Space; you leave negative spaces because that is where life arises from; this also is not just limited to “minimalist interior design”. Achim Szepanski characteristically wrote that “Zero is the center of the number line”, it is what roots all of mathematics, but somehow does not exist, the center shifts wildly as it is constantly recalculated as the radius between two poles. Absolute zero is a paradox, as zero is the opposite of absolute.
So—recap: we are talking about the overlap between the idea of Desire and Matter, a desiring-matter, somehow analogous to a dedifferentiated liquid or plasma that everything in the Universe falls out of. This analogy is everywhere, especially in Theogony and Lucretius, and in contemporary science, and in all of this… “post-French” (?)... philosophy. It is not “uncanny” that Deleuze & Kristeva reproduce Lucretius’ ideas, and even though it seems uncanny that Quantum Theory also rewrites Lucretius, especially in regard to Foam as the “base” or “root” condition from which everything falls out, it is also not uncanniness there either—Lucretius is in the same canon that Deleuze is, western philosophy, and the same canon that Quantum Theory is, western science—two different canons that intersect through Lucretius, though this may indicate that the two canons were, at one time, dedifferentiated.
I contend that Contemporary Scientific Theory largely agrees with Theogony, certainly in its... dare I say, rhythm, in the sense of being periodic. Everything begins with Chaos and descends into more chaos. While Theogony might talk of Chaos, then the primordial gods, then the olympian gods, and then the world of Man, so on—dynasties—In contemporary scientific theory, there are also loose/overlapping periods.
Just after the big bang, there is just this infinitely hot pool of quarkogluonic plasma, gluons-becoming-quarks then dying again—as this process unfolds, the universe is expanding, and within seconds it becomes a billion kilometers across. Even these fundamental ideas of Energy/Matter were basically the same thing due to the uniformity of the immense heat. As the Universe expanded, the heat was spread out, and slowly the dedifferentiated pre-galactic universe began to differentiate, creating pockets of relative low or high heat, or density, and eventually pressure.
In this early phase, Dark Matter flowed towards points of relative high density, due to gravity, within the Universal superliquid. “Regular matter”—sometimes referred to as “Baryons”—was all “melted together”, so the atomic nuclei were stripped of their electrons; it was in plasma form. One source says, specifically, that at this time, Light & Matter were “locked together”.
These Baryons compressed into “overdense” regions, creating an intensification of pressure leading to collapse. These Baryons collapse, and produce oscillations of pressure. In this ultrablack beginning, where light and matter were bound together, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations reverberated through the Universe.
It is quite apt, an elegant metaphor, to say that these primordial sound waves set the rhythm for the universe. It is an image that reminds me of the mythology surrounding Lord Shiva, especially the drum wielding Damaru-Shiva who makes the first sound and keeps the rhythm of the Universe, and the other form of Shiva, Nataraja, who dances—when shiva stops dancing to the beat of his own drum, the Universe ceases to exist. So it’s nice to think about the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations as the song that everything dances to, but also the dance itself—I think, in Quantum Theory, this is not quite as metaphorical as it seems. These pregalactic sound waves would quite literally become the seeds of galaxies; these spherical rings of pressure are eventually frozen in place, at the onset of the galactic universe—and so they became the outer shells of these eggs that would develop within them the embryos of galaxies that exist today. So before the era of Light/Radiation Oscillations, there was an era of Sound/Pressure Oscillations; dynasties of sensation.
The story goes that when the first atoms formed, Light decoupled from Matter, it was released from its imprisonment in tartarus, and that event was imprinted on the Universe in the form of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation—within Television static, there is a tiny percentage of “noise” which constitutes this “Cosmic Background”. So while contemporary scientists are not reading Theogony, and they may not be reading Tea Leaves or Palms, but they are reading something; the Planck Map of the CMBR. This map, supposedly, is a kind of snapshot of the early Universe, and it is read as a distribution of micro-variations in heat within this snapshot; these micro-variations are interpreted as the impressions left upon the Universe, tracings of the micro-variations of density within the early Universe.
If someone said the Universe is musical, we can think about this CMBR as an interesting explanation: we have this idea from learning to decode the CMBR that the Universe is, in a very fundamental way, stacks upon stacks of metarhythmic fluctuations; we are able to decode highly complex superpositions by thinking about them as megalithic stacks of simple pulses—this is an image of a polyrhythmic Universe; though it is perhaps still nothing more than a beautiful metaphor.
When Scientists divine the CMBR, when they examine the markings on the map, they are effectively conducting a psychoanalysis of the Universe—this is the moment where everything really begins, when the Universe comes to life, and by comes to life, I really mean: this is where everything went wrong. We might think of this moment, which in contemporary science is roughly correlative to the beginning of the recombination period, as the kind of miraculous emergence of a new set of conditions, Aphrodite miraculously arriving on Earth and birthing our World as the master sign that holds together our Language.
We can remember what Marx said about visibility; atoms disappear when they move fast enough. They move faster than Light. Atoms formed when the Baryon Plasma cooled just enough that the conditions allowed for the metastability of neutrons and protons. Yet, it was not a moment of positive accumulation, but the opposite: the formation of atoms is rather the creation of negative-space within plasmic matter—the atom is an ordered formation, it is an instance of Order within Chaos, it is the negative of Chaos forming within itself; it is the subtraction of a negative from a negative, which in maths, paradoxically, produces a double-negative, which renders as positive. We can imagine the formation of Hydrogen atoms as the inception of double-negative-spaces within Matter, gaps, which Light can permeate for the first time.
It is also at this time that the quarkogluonic metastasis, this process of gluons momentarily condensing as quarks seems to subside, and scientists say that the Universe enters a new set of conditions, where it has to “make do” with what it has, and so it begins recombining everything.
The dynasty of sound gives way to a dynasty of light at the moment when the universe begins dying, when the pure undiluted chaos becomes porous through the production of atomic structures; the dynasty of invisible sound is then forever obscured by silent light.
This is mirrored by Ancient Greek mythology, in a way, with the ordering of the Universe; first Chaos, then Darkness, then Night, and then fourth to the Universe comes Gaia; earth. It is as if Theogony is painting a picture of the “Dark Sector”, two different darknesses, Dark Matter/Dark Energy mapping onto Darkness and Night, which then produces a thin crust of Baryons on the outer edges.
It is only later that Erebus and Nyx, Darkness and Night give birth to Light and Day, so “Brightness” comes quite a way down the Universal blood-line. The era of Light is significant to us because of its effect on Language when we eventually arrive on the scene and when Language develops in us and is projected outwards in the formation of the World on Earth. All this stuff about the illusion of separation, is in-part attributed to the Eye. It’s easy to see now why Laruelle would write a work such as “On the Black Universe: in the Human foundations of color”.
I want to talk a bit about this because Laruelle is really important to Mille Plateaux, it is where the terms NON and Ultrablack find their meaning
With Laruelle, the Universe, the Earth and Man are Black, and the Philosopher and the World are white, but this has a specific coded meaning, because Laruelle is joining Derrida in ultimately trying to attack the dualistic symbolic of western philosophy; Laruelle wants to make the claim that there is no Black and White, only Black, a statement which could also be written as “there is no positive, only negative and double-negative” or “there is no order, only chaos”.
When Laruelle says that the Universe, Earth and Man are black, it creates a paradox: how can there be three different blacks, which are all the same and yet presented as different; wouldn’t they just become one indistinguishable, all encompassing, ultrablack–Effectively, laruelle thinks black is not a color, it has no bearing on the concept of position, and light cannot interact with black, it can only conceal the truth of black. Black cannot be defined as the Other of white, because its “opposition” is illusory.
This is where the idea of position, and op-position, comes from. In order to differentiate the signifiers universe, earth and man, you have to introduce signifiers of position, which we know as prepositions. The difference between Universe and Earth is that the Earth is in the Universe, it is black-in-black; man is on Earth, so Man is black-on-black-in-black. Gaia arises in Chaos, and Aphrodite arises from Gaia, a repetition of chaos within itself and with-on itself.. While there is only chaos, only black, only negative, we keep perceiving an order, a white, a positive, because of our position within this as subjects–we hallucinate the ordering of the Universe as a consequence of being imprisoned within time, as the plane of chaotic propagation. Once we take our position, the optical illusion jumps out at you, the differentiation of chaos into patterns jumps out at you like one of those artworks where the position you view it from determines which form you see.
So our sense of position defines our worldview, which is ironic because our sense of position is literally determined by the Eye, which is an organ which evolved in response to the condition of light. The decoupling of Light and Matter is a defining schism for life on the Earth, it is both found in the impact of the Sun, and in psychoanalytical discourse:
I have touched on this topic before through speaking about Sartre’s idea of “being as a nothingness”, instead of “being” as an object—Sartre’s de-objectified being is replaced by Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of Becoming, which is a transition in line with the whole movement from space-as-empty to space as overflowing. Sartre, who is writing at the very beginning of the French philosophical period, is of course referencing something which others attribute to Hegel, which is this narrativized exploration of the formation of the self, where the story goes: “other people are looking at me, so there must be a me”. Other people come first, and the Other produces the I in you via negation. This is framed in Sartre as a moment where being-as-a-nothingness somehow decays into being-as-a-something, “the gaze of the Other in your Eye” transforms you into a “something”. Rasheeda Philips has this wonderful line in one text that reads: Becoming collapses into Being, like a piece of Light that is suddenly shy when observed. This breaking of Becoming into Beings is framed as the central antagonism that we experience, the source of the need of politics perhaps, an antagonism that is found in the schism between the Eye and the Look. Our Eyes are organs that have evolved because of the presence of Light, which decoupled from matter all those billions of years ago. Somehow the schism of matter and light shows up here in psychoanalysis; a glitch that was impressed upon the Universe like a watermark.
Even Judith Butler, for example, will say that the body is relational not discrete, the distance between us is illusory, an effect or glitch caused by light, by our eyes which perceive separation. Therefore light is the authority of our Language, and it is the judicator of identity. It is a rhythm upon which all other rhythms accumulate; it is the primordial axiom upon which the Chaoids rest: Art, Science, Philosophy; one system for Desire, one for Matter, and one for Chaos. Perhaps Chaos, Earth and Desire are the holy trinity of the semiotic realm of Mille Plateaux. Chaos folds of its own will into Order, the Earth folds of its own will into strata, and Desire.. Its folds into its own object, its own open-ended end-point. This is one of the main reasons Lucretius invokes Aphrodite, as she is fundamentally dualistic, because she is both the desire of Man, and the desire itself—this is called a double genitive by Thomas Nail. So she is both the object and the process. So desire folds into its own object, which itself desires, and so on.
I always felt as though Achim’s work, and the general theoretical approach of Mille Plateaux and NON related to this underground river of materialism, somehow the inheritor of a blood-line. I have been trying to bring you into a particular semiotic realm where I believe Achim’s work needs to be read from. I can try to show how this works now:
In Ultrablack of Music Vol. 1, Achim wrote, and I paraphrase: rhythm arises from the noise, but it is saturated with noise on every level. Rhythm arises from the Noise, but it is made of Noise, it is somehow noise interrupted by artificial gaps.
We can imagine a Theogony where everything begins with Noise, which slowly brings about rhythms which accumulate; one rhythm becomes the base of another, a superstructure, which itself becomes a base and so on. Rhythms continue to accumulate upon the fundamental rhythm until the fundamental rhythm subsides, taking everything with it. Humanity itself rests upon a staggering stratification of polyrhythms, on water cycles, tectonic plates, and chemical processes and light distribution, or even bees pollinating flowers; don’t look down if you’re partial to vertigo.
If Noise is like Chaos, it is inevitable that its wildly fluctuating internal intensities will occasionally burst over their limit, and fold back in on themselves; noise breaks.
I like to think about this in terms of a cup which is being filled from a faucet. If the pressure is stable enough, the cup will fill up with water until it steadily overflows; then, if you turn the pressure up dramatically, loads of water will burst out of the faucet and impact the overflowing surface of the cup, and momentarily the cup will empty. From adding more water into an already overflowing cup, the result is a paradoxical subtraction. Or we might imagine a faucet turning on and off rapidly, resulting in “breaks” in the flow”, steady-flow decays into pulses.
As Noise intensifies, it creates these double-negative spaces, interruptions in the flow or breaks caused by changes in pressure that cause gaps to open up within an otherwise continuous substance, and we might call these breaks: silence. This happens at home on my audio-system, because my the circuitry of my DJ mixer is caked in the dry, red soil of Cyprus from many a rave—so, distortion on my soundsystem renders as clicks and cuts—like Mille Plateaux’s old manifesto—so the over intensification of the signal produces these errors (flat-line distortion) that render as silence. I like the idea of double-negativity over positivity because it doesn’t try to hide its illusory nature; it’s a term that admits its own intangibility. So if we imagine these glitches appearing, as silence interrupting the noise, gaps in the continuity of noise that produces the same paradox as chaos and order: Noise is noise, and when it breaks, there is still only noise, but it is noise that appears to repeat, becoming a noise which keeps coming back rather than noise which keeps cutting out. Somewhere between the convergence of cutting out and coming back, Noise produces, out of itself, within itself, all of its opposites: Sound, Silence and Rhythm. You start with Noise, noise breaks, producing not-Noise, which we arbitrarily call Silence, and once you have the concept of Silence, you have the concept of Sound. Sound is not identical to Noise, Sound is an expression of Noise.
It is the negative differential process of Language: to identify Noise, it must first cut-out, because we must first experience Silence, and to experience Silence, Noise must first come-back; we paradoxically require a Rhythm to identify Noise. Noise is like the overflowing, invisible plasma from which everything falls. It is as if sound, like light, is set free of its containment within noise when noise-becoming-rhythm becomes porous with pockets of silence. The more silent the Universe becomes, the louder it sounds.
Silence gathers between Noises—if you put two mirrors into an opposition, light gathers between them: so when Baryon Oscillations cause atoms to form, which decouples light from matter, that light gathers between atoms like a hall of mirrors: yet atoms are metastable, so they come and go, so the mirrors are always moving, so light pulses around as it tries to stabilize between these shifting mirrors…
If God did say, Let there be light, and there was, then clearly God speaks in Baryons.