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Accretive theory seems to have a similar feel to Deleuze and Guattari’s work. The way I see it is that accretive theory has very little to disagree with in what D&G say except that accretive theory has a strong sense of having something overtly correlate like about it, whereas D&G’s work does not. The pneuminous accretions are a correlate, they are all we have access to. Every description of non-human existence is mediated by human created accretive structures. These pneuminous structures are formed by humans but they not bound only to them. In accretive theory, the conceptual stuff (pneuma) is attached first to a layer called the vector field (unconceptualised perceived existence) and through this to the umbratic -that which is outside of perception.

In D&G language an accretion is largely a molar entity. Why? Because there need to be actual entities that can be named, that can be designated. Why? Because the appearance of magick is ineradicable (see agnostic disjunction). Wittgenstein’s later work is almost flawless. You can fill in more details but the premise is pretty cast iron. This is the click that people get and become Wittgensteinians: ‘meaning is use’. This pithy phrase provides all the machinery you need to understand in principle what’s going on in language. A word can only mean what it means in its use context. There is no designation as such. Words meaning objects is an illusion that confuses us endlessly.

This is perfectly fine unless you introduce something like magick into the picture. If the agnostic disjunctive argument works then the grammar of magick cannot be ignored and magick needs designation in the strongest sense possible. If I want to interfere with some individual, magick is expected to be capable of making this interference by possibly using only their name. Of course systems sometimes require body matter e.g. hair, but the name should be really sufficient. How can magickal acts tell who we mean? If this occurs then it must travel from the operator through the name (as part of that accretion) to the individual (vector) by the sheer fact that the operator knows who they mean by that name. It might not be the name, it might just be a mental image of likeness, yet still the connection is necessarily still their just by virtue of the fact that the operator knows who they mean. Image in this instance is also part of the accretion, to see such an image is as real a connection as if the person were right there because it is all the same accretion. Accretions mean designation is metaphysically real and that in  a sense objects really are certain objects. Of course it is possible to start using an object as something else, this process layers the pneuma of the new concept over the old one, yet it will not eradicate it, the pneuma of the old concept is still there: a saucer now ashtray, still has the saucer accretion hiding in there.

D&G also provide the useful term intensity. This can be used in relation recent ruminations on the will to give a way of describing why a magickal act does something where an idle thought does not. Magickal acts bring about a certain intensity. This intensity is the power the operator seeks in order to impose a new accretion onto a vector -as this is what magick is, the imposition of new concepts onto vector regions which may already be inhabited by more original accretions.

Now just because accretions behave like molar entities does not mean that the magickal thesis has eradicated meaning as use. It has not. The meaning as use relation is still always in operation and represents the ground from which the accretions form. Use relations reify into fixed accretions. Use relations are more akin to molecular becomings as opposed to the accretive molar. This relation is reflected in the epistemological characterisation of things as either incoherently coherent (accretion as molar entity) and upon analysis coherently incoherent (the bleeding edge of becoming).

Magick creates opportunities to create strange becomings in a very literal sense. It may be that D&G already acknowledge occult interaction however this conclusion seems far from clear -there are differing interpretations to their occult references. Pneuminous accretive theory says that all conceptual attachments to vectors are essentially magickal. Regular objects are accretions attached to vectors that perfectly fit the rules for their use. Hard things of various sizes made of certain substances (more accretions) take the concept stone. The stone accretion is applied to the vector and reflects back onto it making the vector in a minute way more like the accretion. This is just the regular action of the accretion upon the vector.

Magick occurs when an accretion is applied to a vector that would not normally take it. Intensity draws a pneuminous line (of flight) from one accretion and attaches it to the alien vector forming something new, not just in the mind of the operator but literally at the pneuminous level (which is partially independant from the operator). Their must be an intensity or the pneuminous line will not be drawn out. In this way I may have an umbrella purely and for the fun of it want to attach the concept of octopus to the umbrella. In this strange instance I must use some form of repetition of ritual to attach the octopus accretion to the umbrella. Now clearly the becoming-octopus of the umbrella is not in a sense in which the umbrella can participate by intensity itself, however their will be some interaction and the greater I try to forge the line of connection the more the umbrella will be (incoherently) wedded to the octopus accretion. Likely results will be some form of synchronicity regarding cephalopods around the umbrella but the actual nature of the whole assemblage of myself, the octopus-umbrella and its usage is really impossible to determine.

As confessed maybe this possibility is already inherent in D&G’s work. If it is though it certainly isn’t unambiguous. Accretive theory though is explicit that pneuminous lines of attachment are not simply psychological but represent points of actual connection between accretions, these in turn may alter what we call physical reality.

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The will is a difficult issue in accretive theory insofar as when we consider magickal acts we associate them with the application of the will. Predetermined harmony/psychological reducibility concerns aside, the phenomenology of magick would seem to entail that the will seeks to alter events to its nature. Elsewhere we have used the definition: ‘to apply a concept to a vector that would not naturally take it’ to define magick. That is, there exists the status quo (a vector region (the how things are) with a description which suits it attached to it) which we are unhappy about. As a sorcerer we create a new concept (the idea of how we would like things to be), we then attempt to apply this concept to the vector region in order to try to replace the current situation with a description (concept) of our own.

The issue here is that in order to replace the current description we seem to need an extra element: will. The will is not what we want (though conceivably we could will to augment it itself), the will is how we want. The differentiation between magickal acts and regular ones is largely going to turn on the application of the will to alter the description. We may often dislike the description of the (a) situation but in regular life often either accept the unpleasantness or seeks to change the situation from within the regular rules of reality. For example, if I do not like the table being dirty I can change the description by cleaning it. In doing so I have used my will and my physicality.

In magickal acts we seek to ask the accretive powers to impose themselves upon a situation without our necessarily doing anything other than the magickal ritual itself. We might following such a request, notice a favourable circumstance arise which then requires our action to realise the full description alteration, but this too would (if we were in a mode that accepted this kind of thing as real) be taken as a response to the request.

The act of ritual is supposed to focus the will in order to connect with the possibility of altering the description. This is how magick shows itself. Something like the conceptual substrate (pneuma) postulated in a lot of the work on this site is necessary for any kind of chaos magickal picture. It may or may not have a further underneath (the umbratic), though the phenomenology would suggest there is such an extra. This picture seems to us sound, except that is for the will itself. Is the will then an extra element that emerges from beings of a certain complexity? Or can it be reconciled more obviously into the pneuma insofar as to see something as willed for is to add an extra conceptual layer to it i.e. when I see something I want, that I want it is part of the concept of that thing/situation.

There seems to be something to this latter account, except we driven to a certain kind of vector field explanation. In its simpler version the vector field is the transcendental realm of stuff behind perception. Different regions of it are given different names, objects, smells, etc. So there is a vector and concept or pneuminous accretion which is plugged directly into the vector. But here we are forced to recognise a different kind of vector region, a kind of affective vector region by which we would say of this feeling we call ‘anger’ ‘joy’ and so on. These affects are the regions, our culture gives us their names. Note that in accretive theory there is a feedback mechanism that makes the object more like the accretion (concept). Once formed, the accretion is attached to the vector. By means of a low level magickal effect, the attached accretion seeks to make the vector region more like itself pure ideal nature. The effect is negligible, but it is there. With respect to the affects, this will no doubt be in evidence and may be exemplified by the reification of the emotions. That is, the naming of the emotions, the attaching of accretions to these vector regions, will make them more like their ideal forms and reduce emotional variation in general.

But again the will is not so easily trapped. We look upon a thing as desired and to us that thing evokes this sense of longing for this thing. There is definitely an attachment going on there in such an instance. The desirableness is attached to the thing -not in ourselves, though it comes from us. But a kind of passive desire does not entail the will has been engaged to obtain said thing. Even on an ordinary level we might long for something and never act upon this desire. So desire is neither a necessary or sufficient condition for the engagement of the will (for I might desire something and not will it and I might will something yet not desire it).

This points to a certain sense of the will being, both in its magickal and non-magickal application a kind power that we may bring to bear to alter the description that is in some sense possible to abstract from the affects. This does not undermine the application of the vector notion to the affects but it does slightly undermine the relevance. The question then remains ‘what is the vector that the concept will is applied to?’ if it is not an affect. It would seem to be its own kind of force. An internal directedness that may manifest either as a call to a series of actions in regular reality that seek to bring something about, or the idea that the application of the will by means of a certain magickal concentration (for want of a better term) may bring about an alteration in the description of a situation that is more in line with with the one willed. Such a situation may well be desired and indeed often is, however it seems to us that there is a certain uncoupling of will and desire necessary to get at the grammatical sense we are after.

This revealing does indeed seem to indicate that as a component of a magickal phenomenology, whilst still a concept and as such an accretion, the will is a kind of special case of that which must be presupposed for active forms of magick. It is the means by which we tap the accretions when we seek to alter regular solid reality.

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The umbratic is a curious intersection of different ideas. It is necessary and unnecessary. Its necessity is derived from the fact the idea cannot be removed. It’s lack of necessity from the fact it is technically not needed.

What is it? The umbratic is the idea of the unseen. It is the incoherent phantasy of being outside of perception. It is the wood where no one is watching or listening. The idea emerges out of sceptical thought that attempts to answer the question: is being that is perceived identical to being that is not perceived? The resultant inability to answer this question leaves the agnostic disjunctive appearance over the answer: we cannot say if there is a difference or not. The phenomena that point to there being a difference are again the occult ones. The point being that in synchronistic/magickal phenomena reality has shifted somehow outside of our perceptual sphere -we mean this specifically to the exclusion of the manifestation of spirits/immediately visible/audible phenomena (these invoke different kinds of concepts). That is, we do not see the mechanism by which magick/synchronicity has occurred. There is simply an uncanny rearrangement of things that has the appearance of some kind of agency being involved. This appearance is suggestive of a radical reality rearrangement that was only possible outside of perception, hence the invocation of the umbratic as a space in which the rearrangement was possible. Of course this doesn’t entail that magick/synchronicity could not still be functional in a metaphysical sense without umbratic rearrangement. Such possibilities exist as attractor models: the reality alteration is brought about metaphysically in some way by bringing certain things towards the protagonist without literal finger clicking alteration (such models also entail accretive type entities). However, the fact that the sudden alteration model exists is enough to give the umbratic life.

One can think on the impossibility of the umbratic, on how a space that isn’t perceived is not possible, on how there maybe always something there to detect, to perceive. But the impossibility of the umbratic is not enough to defeat it. It is a strongly incoherent concept that thrives on that impossible sensation of attempting to think what it is to imagine a space that is not being perceived. From here it derives a lot of its power.

The umbratic is related to the thing in itself. It is similar to a perfect scientific object. Something without any observer bias. This is part of its phantasy. But all prostheses act with our consciousness, there are no reports back from the umbratic.

We can try to do away with it. In the pneuminous theory we can imagine that there is only the pneuma, only the conceptual stuff. The umbratic, as mentioned, becomes unnecessary. But the appearance of the beyond the pneuma, beyond the vector field is still there, the phantasy of the outside, the absolute beyond the human security system. So a pure idealism always generates the idea of its beyond which it can never ascertain the validity of.

The umbratic gives the idea of structure. In the Tractatus this is how it is often mentioned. This association is related to the pure idealist issue. The appearance of the idea that there must be something behind the image invokes the notion that this part is what does the holding together. This is reinforced by the way in which the pneuminous level of concepts seems so easily detachable from the vectors. The pneuminous accretions can be unbound from the vectors and clearly perceived in the mind (a field of pure pneuma).

Does this mean the vector field and the umbratic are the same thing? No. Because it is possible to catch a kind of glimpse of the vector field. Phenomenological stripping down achieves something like this. But the vector field is still perceived being. It is like being without any accretions attached, or at least as best as we can achieve. However we can never be sure that there are not inbuilt structuring forces that mean the vector field itself is perceived as a limit, that is there is some kind of Kantian aesthetic holding things together even at this level.

The umbratic is darkness, literally. Darkness is where we cannot perceive so again the notion of the unperceived reemerges. This creates the curious identity between the space behind you and the space in the shadows. Seeing the shadow is the closest one can get to perceiving the umbratic. Of course a certain aspect of the shadow accretion means that it is totalised, that we simply understand it. But the ontological shadow is different from this. The ontological shadow reveals darkness to be the space in which the regular accretions of that shadow space are more prone to being taken over by different ones. That is, the umbratic is presupposed to be a structuring power that lies beneath the vector field. The accretions, the concepts, plug into the vectors, this unity makes our world of things. But the accretions exist unbound also and operate on their own unbidden by our conscious minds. The accretion has the power under rare circumstance to alter the umbratic. To do this is must alter an existing vector-accretion arrangement. In perception as it is happening, the feedback of the realness of the world enables the perpetuity of the solidity itself. But outside of perception it is different, outside the accretions imprinted on the vectors are in some sense still there, yet immediately there is a loosening. This loosening is what makes magick/synchronicity possible. This loosening happens in the darkness because ontologically the lack of perceptual ability facilitates the loosening of the solidity and interference from rogue accretions.

There is power in the shadow.

 

  1. Manifestationism
  2. Incoherence
  3. Phantasy
  4. Pneuma
  5. Accretive theory itself
  6. Design a god.
  7. Significance/Insignificance
  8. Designation
  9. Vector theory
  10. The Umbratic
  11. The Double
  12. The zone
  13. The numbers/the system
  14. NARP

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I am haunted by this theory. I can see there is no relinquishing it. It may mutate over time but it remains basically the same. Like so many others have done, the same idea is gone over and over. Hence I ask myself once more what is an accretion? And why did I need this idea?

The notion is one of something sticking together, something building up. There is not a loss over time, there is just steady accretion of something. What is the something? This is the substance I have called ‘pneuma’ but this is just a word chosen for ‘conceptuality’. I have previously used the term ‘information’ yet abandoned that as the Shannon definition makes the use of this word confusing. Accretions of pneuma are necessarily conceptual.

Conceptuality sticks together. This is a description of what occurs. We, whatever we can be successfully be described as being, are something that can stick concepts together, we can accrete pneuma at will. We can if we choose, draw a random scribble, learn that scribble, name that scribble and ascribe a meaning to it. In doing so we would have an accretion. That accretion was created at a certain time, on a certain date. Both of these pieces of information are themselves part of a wider accretive network. They are our interfaces into temporality and they have a certain specificity. This specificity would apply to the creation of this symbol and its meaning. Though everyone had forgotten it, it would still be necessarily true of it. The mood we were in when we drew the scribble necessarily would alter the nature of it and equally have accreted to it -psychoanalysis might tell us the scribble itself holds further secrets.

There are two choices regarding such matters. One is that, even though such connections are necessarily true in a certain sense, they are not necessarily actually attached to the object (in this case the scribble). The other is that they are. 

That conceptuality is actually attached to a thing, or to a symbol or sound is a notion that we flirt with all the time, yet when pushed we deny it. I sometimes refer to the two choices as soft and hard accretive theory. The soft version is exactly the recognition that our various particulars, either physical, mental, temporal (things, ideas, events) can be thought of as having certain other concepts attached to them. This in no way suggests the concept is in the ‘out there’ and is just the simple recognition that the theory is one more description of memory. The hard version though says that the concept is accreted to the thing (whatever that is). This is a much stronger claim. The question here is ‘why on earth would you want to make such a claim?’

The answer to this turns, at least originally on the notion of synchronicity. The argument goes roughly like this. The phenomenon of synchronicity is very powerful. It gives the appearance of connections occurring in existence that regular existence would not seem to permit. Psychology and statistics give us reasons to deny that anything strange actually happened in the experience. Yet if something strange had actually happened, this is what it would have looked like. If something strange had occurred, this would also mean reality in general was a lot stranger than it seems to be. To deny that this is the case, the statistical and psychological perspectives must say that reality conforms to the everyday solidity that we ascribe to it. Yet the synchronicity is the prima facie evidence against this being the case. In order to deny it they must presuppose the ontology they work with is true and hence beg the question. This does not prove the strange version is true, but it does mean that its possibility is untouched by the psychological/statistical explanations.

What has this got to do with conceptuality being accreted? It turns out everything. Synchronicities are of course conceptual. They are connections between concepts that occur in ridiculous ways. Whether it’s a recurring 47, 23, 11:11 or a series of connections involving the star Deneb it doesn’t really matter. These curious lines of a temporal connection are between concepts. This means, unless the whole thing is predetermined in a harmonious way, the concepts must be functioning in some sense autonomous to ourselves (and yet connected). Now of course our regular experience of the mind can have some sense of this. Ideas just pop into our minds, this is perfectly reasonable. This theory however means that the action of concepts under certain circumstances is to reverse the ordinary flow of play. That is, rather than concepts emitting from our engagement with ‘reality’, under certain circumstances, concepts can bend it in ways we simply cannot understand.

Pause one second here and understand that by this we do not say that this is the case, only that this is the case if you believe that the synchronicity is something actually strange. But if we do accept the strangeness we need the accretion. The concept needs to be meaningfully externalised from the subject and yet simultaneously plugged into it. The feedback of the subject’s interaction with the concept continues to accrete the concept as an entity. This is very similar to the Jungian notion of archetypes except that there is no sense that the accretions are fixed and finished nor that there is any particular difference in kind between an archetype and any other accretion. The archetypal accretions may be of a particularly hoary nature but they are not of any different pneuminous kind per se.

In the event of synchronicity, the phenomenon suggests the alteration of reality by the accretion being attached to two different spatio-temporal positions. That is, the accretion is acting autonomously. This does not entail it acts with sense or meaning, only that it acts outside of the control of a subject. So if I am not deluded and a certain number is actually appearing with increased regularity in my experience then the number is actually doing this. I am of course attached to that number and no doubt supplying a kind of feedback to the system i.e. the importance I ascribe to the number will be literally accreted to it.

You will spot here a kind of nonsense. The ‘importance of the number’ will be accreted to it. Do I actually mean this? Yes, I do. This importance is itself an accretion. We cannot retreat at this point. If conceptuality is capable of this kind of effect we are in a utterly strange realm in which, even though of course we can concede that importance emits from our realm, it can escape into its own autonomy. The autonomy of such concepts, indeed of all concepts is totally incoherent but this does not stop it being the case. The accretions are not coherent. They are -if they are at all, and yet we dice with them at every superstition we idly engage in- incoherent amalgamations of our endlessly proliferating conceptual usage. The madness, the incoherence cannot be retreated from. The strange becomes the the true in this flickering world of manifestations (alternate ontologies).

 

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Pneuma is a transcendental conceptual substance employed in the theory of (chaos) magickal actuality. As such all things as we see in them in our understanding of them as things are pneuminous accretions. We as a being are a pneuminous accretion ourselves. This is very similar to a kind of idealism certainly, autonomous idealism one might call it. The way in which pneuma as a concept attaches to regions of the vector field has been relatively well covered before, however what has received insufficient treatment is the manner in which space-in-general exists.

In a sense there is no additional problem to solve here. Space is a use word that has become reified to some extent to attempt to mean the spatial framework in which we exist. Any modern conception of space must take into account our awareness of the moving nature of the planet. This is where difficulties creep in. This is a phenomenological account but a phenomenology does not exist in a vacuum. As Heidegger observed, phenomenology is deeply entwined with hermeneutics. Different people have different levels of scientific understanding altering their interpretation of what is in different ways. The implications of relativity are readily processed by some and totally lost on others. What I would say is that the comprehension of the mobility of the planet is a relatively well accepted and comprehended idea, even if this comprehension is somewhat incoherent upon reflection.

This in a sense is all we need to proceed. That is, if we can comprehend the mobility of the planet then we can encounter the difficulty of trying to conceive of a place as somehow occupying the same space as we can know that the whole system has actually moved -is continuously moving. Of course on a level of ordinary language ‘occupying the same space’ can just mean that a thing is in the place that it was before. But this is not the thought we wish to think. When we try to think the question as to whether or not this thing is in the same place in the framework of space then we can know by the mobility of the planet that in some sense this cannot be the case.

However pneuminous theory would in a sense counter this exact confusion. Whilst pneuminous theory is there to account for magickal phenomena it necessarily must equally say what is going on in regular reality. This is usually characterised by the feedback system in the featured image. That is, when we have extracted an idea from the vector field, we tend to form an ideal version of it. This pneuminous ideality, which unlike in magick, largely fits the vector, is applied back onto the vector, which in turn, by the logic in which magick alters an inappropriate vector, has the possibility of altering the appropriate vector to be closer to the ideality. The plant becomes more like our idea of the plant and so on. In this case we are talking about space. The vector for the concept of space in this manner is the extended nature of everything conceived as not being understood as space -the bracketing off of the concept as best as we are able. It is this nature that makes the grammar of space possible. This means the vector that facilitates space has accreted onto it the space accretion, or in other words an active ideality of space. As per the nature of the feedback mechanism, the pneuminous ideality of space makes space more like our conception of space.

The phenomenological ideality of a spatial world that seems like it can contain notions like ‘in the same space’ actually can. This is possible because the pneuminous ideality is attached to the vector field but it is not the vector field. In the pneuminous accretive world this place is not moving through space because the deep accretive structure is not telling us that, the vector does not take that concept. The deep accretive concept applied to the vector field speaks of stability. No one is denying physics but in the pneuma the whole world may exist in this ideality. This place here, actually is this place here, the mobility of the planet, even at our current levels of recognition is a minimal interference to this accretive power. When we think the problem of the moving planet we try to disturb the pneuminous ideal spatiality. We feel the alarming dissonance between the two and for sure this indicates that physics makes an impact upon this accretive structure and maybe in time will alter it. Our spatial accretion is an overlay but it is not purely phenomenal, it exists in its own right as magickal feedback entity attempting to render the underlying vector more like itself. We live, not in the vector, but in the accretion.