Posts

by on

What are the accretions? The accretions are accretions of pneuma. Pneuma is the conceptual substrate that we postulate as necessarily existing when we choose belief in synchronistic phenomena as metaphysically actual and not harmoniously determined -as discussed under agnostic disjunction. Phenomenologically all beings of awareness must necessarily have pneuminous interactions, but certain kinds of beings (Narps, in this case humans) are capable of binding pneuma into incredible forms of complexity and excess: accretions.

The accretions of pneuma are attached to vectors. Vector here is a carrier for the pneuminous accretion, the conceptual stuff. The vector field is itself pneuminous as it is base of all accretive possibilities. Phenomenologically the vector field is laid over the umbratic. The umbratic is the phantasy of being outside of awareness. It is the appearance of the structural elements underneath the conceptual overlay and vector field (pneuma).

This laying-over is one of minimal interaction. In normal reality, vector regions with accretions attached are part of a feedback system that makes them more into the thing the human takes them to be. Here is  vector, I attach the concept pen to the vector. If the vector is such that we would normally use the concept pen for then the application of the concept performs a minor magickal act upon the vector making it curiously more pen-like. Such actions take place all the time and are largely inconsequential. Actual magickal acts/synchronistic ruptures are caused by accretions attaching themselves to vectors that would not usually take them. This may result in an unusual configuration of conceptuality that is somehow arresting.

Accretions are formed by humans (Narps) but are free floating from them. As such accretions exist in two manners, both of which are related. Accretions may be bound to vectors. All physical things are accretions to some degree or other. Everyday disposable things, rubbish, accretes very little, but some things accrete a great deal. As these things travel through life with us we feel how much of our story is in them. In the theory described here, this story is literally in them, the pneuma is actually attached to the vector. Human made things have conceptual specificity embedded in them at the point of creation. These pieces become e.g. this dishwasher, this dishwasher becomes a certain kind of character in a household. Intensity binds pneuma to vectors, this may happen in the course of life or it may be done intentionally.

The other way in which accretions exist is unbound. Pneuminous accretions that are unbound  are easy to experience, one only has to remember anything or imagine anything and the accretion is detectable in some sense, either as non visual structure or visual. Since accretions are often built around a word-seed, the word seed will summon the accretion easily. Pneuma is sticky. We may take two ideas and with will force them together thus making an accretion.  Magick is largely based around humans abilities to manipulate unbound pneuma and to beseech the unbound pneuminous accretion to alter the regular solidity of things. Memory houses, kabbalah etc all use unbound pneuma. Active magick of intent seeks to apply new conceptual structures (an unbound pneuminous accretion) onto a vector which does not currently take it but might do so -this extensive contingency is important.

The regular solidity of existence as ruled by the structural umbratic can sometimes be breached by the accretion. Intensity can be responsible for this though in the case of synchronicity the action is down to the accretions themselves. No doubt factors which might be called unconscious are related to the manner in which the accretion behaves, ultimately though this is pure speculation. All that can be said is that some idea has inserted itself into someone’s world in an uncanny way and when paranormality is chosen (as a belief), the accretion must be responsible.

A human then is attached to accretions and is formed of them. The word-seed for most humans is their name. Around this word-seed the neurotic-accretion or self is formed. This accretion is embedded in the body-vector. In normal human functioning the neurotic accretion controls the conscious aspects of the vector and regulates the ability of other accretions to control the vector. The neurotic accretion though is in perpetual struggle with accretive powers which seek to dominate it, to control the territory. In the case of severe insanity the neurotic accretion fails to regulate the other accretions and they wander freely through the body-vector.

We can analyses accretions vector relations into 4 principle types.

  1. Accretions bound to vectors that fit the description of the accretion or even if they have escaped the original vector the attachment is still sensible from the Narp’s perspective. Hammer as use term, becomes hammer accretion embedded into vectors capable of taking this accretion.
  2. Accretions unbound from vectors that still represent the vector  in some way. The vector as the source of such an accretion determines the appearance, even if now the appearance has taken on a platonic type hue of perfection -ideality. These are what we call representations in the mind.
  3. Accretions unbound to any vector and having the appearance of never deriving from a physical vector. Imaginary images or magickal constructs/manifestations fall into this category.
  4. Accretions bound to vectors that they not suited to in ordinary life. These occur in magick, humour, surrealism/dadaism/pataphysics. This is the instance in which we take a vector and say ‘this vector will take the concept x’ even if the vector is nothing to do with x. We take a spoon and we pretend it is an owl. In doing so we infect the vector that readily takes the spoon concept and stick onto it the owl concept.
  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

by on

This is the first in a series of posts which will all interlock. Each one covers a key area of what I’m trying to say. When finished each post will feature links to its counterparts making the whole thing easier to understand. Hopefully this will also help me synthesise the whole thing further.

 

  1. Synchronicity as Generative of the Agnostic Disjunction Argument.

The agnostic disjunction argument says that there exist certain kinds of choice which transcendentally cannot be reconciled. The decision on such a disjunction may be made on what seem to be good grounds, however the ground can be shown to be quite unstable. The agnostic disjunction relevant here is the one demonstrated by synchronicity like phenomena. The synchronicity appears as a rupture into the everyday order, this is why it has that arresting feeling. The agnostic disjunctive choice is between whether the phenomena actually obtains in a metaphysically meaningful sense or whether it is simply a psychological projection of significance upon a statistically possible event. It has its transcendental status because in order to deny the phenomena its strong (metaphysically meaningful) status one would have to know the nature of reality with enough certainty to be able to do this. However the synchronicity itself is phenomenological evidence that such ruptures exist, that is, the synchronicity occurring is what it would look like if such things were metaphysically real. This means in order to deny the reality of the phenomena with certainty one must beg the question by presupposing the nature of reality (its solid non-magickal nature) in order to deny the metaphysical existence of the phenomena i.e. because reality is not compatible with synchronicity, synchronicity is not possible. But as the synchronicity called the nature of reality into question we cannot make such a claim. The appearance of the phenomena is agnostic disjunctive at the metaphysical level.

Units

  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
  15. Phantasy
  16. Coherence/Incoherence

 

by on

The CEO is still taking submissions for Parasol 5 which will be themed on the topic of Zones. The inspiration comes from the Strugatskian, Tarkovskian and Lynchian usage of the term. Writers however should not feel limited to this though the sense of Zone is intended to convey something otherworldly e.g. Ballard and psychoanalysis are both capable of doing this without unambiguous weirdness.

Fiction/theory fiction/poetry/art and straightforward theory are all welcome.

Enquiries should be sent to ceo47@outlook.com

by on

How does process philosophy fit with the accretive theory? Is the obvious necessity of ‘meaning as use’ equivalent in force to the notion that existence is necessarily process? Are these two in some sense the same? The notion of ‘meaning as use’ means that we can understand the meaning of a word by looking at the social situation in which it is used. That is, we should not look for an object that the word points towards, rather to the general rules in which it is possible for the word to be cogent. In this way objects which do not conform to ideal images of objects can easily be capable of having the names of such objects applied to them. The ashtray that is the empty beer can in the context of ‘pass the ashtray’ not be ‘really’ an empty beer can, it just is the ashtray. This does not mean there is always such flexibility, some words may have fairly strict rules the transgression of which means the application is simply ‘wrong’ -though wrong of course is also a use term. As noted elsewhere, the issue of the perpetuation of metaphysics is not something Wittgenstein can actually stop since it is often not possible to tell when a word has been deterritorialized to the point where it definitively lacks meaning. The phantom of meaning is indistinguishable from an originary meaning.

Nevertheless no matter how convoluted the pathways become, meaning continually emits from its usage. It is a secondary effect of language that produces the accretion, or ideality. In the strong sense of accretion as chaos magickal entity, the designated object as actually real. Magickal practices are often predicated on the ability of a word or symbol to uniquely pick out an individual or event. Designation in the strongest metaphysical sense is necessary for this to be the case. Wittgenstein would be totally correct if it were not for the appearance of magick. The use term though, generates the accretion. The current ideal version of a given kind of object sticks to the word. Thus we have two essences, the false essence of the accretion as word/object and the real essence of the primordial use relation. Not all words generate this duality but many -especially visually possible- words do.

What of the notion of process? Does this have the same status as usage? It seems there is a relation insofar as both offer a kind of ground of necessity. To deny process is to deny time. However the two issues cannot be conflated as identical, they are not. Meaning as process would still lapse into a naivety of things existing without conceptuality. Process means that being exists in flux. Usage as meaning recognizes this by allowing open the horizon for the extension of the remit of a given concept.

In this sense accretion is the enemy of process. This is basically true and yet it points to importance of a phenomenology of magick that cannot be denied. Designation and magick go together; this is the phantasy of the words reach out to touch the object -which in magick is literally true. Accretion means that there is a time resistant dimension (the pneuminous), where the accretions of pneuma (conceptuality) dwell. The accretive flickering image is not of a thing in time, it is of an ideal abstraction. Process largely happens too slow for us to perceive it directly. We necessarily see fixed accretions and can only understand flow as a necessity. This kind of claim is disputable. Goethe for instance claimed to have been able to retrain his mind to perceive process directly in certain ways (e.g. plants) and even claimed this possibility was available to all. Even so his method was predicated on being able to perceive the phenomena from start to finish in order that one might replay the segments to the mind to reveal the a temporal ideal unity (or entelechy as he called it). This though does nothing to undermine accretive theory, indeed it is largely grist to its mill. Goethe successful accreted the extracted plant image into the atemporal perception he achieved. His phenomena certainly would be attached to the vectors (the object we attach the concept plant to -see vector theory elsewhere on the site) but they are still just another form of pneuminous accretion. The Goethean entelechy recreates time and escapes it simultaneously. Goethe extracts time only make a small passage of time (the plant entelechy) abstract. His accretion is a temporal enemy in disguise.

The possibility of magick though means the picture is much more complicated. For if the use relation generate  accretions which exist of necessity (and let us say they do exist) then there exist feedback loops from the accretive structures to the vector field (and beyond). That is, the accretions will be feeding back into reality, not just under ritual conditions but under any conditions. That is, as the accretions are not outside of all that is but simply a part of it, process cannot be considered a pure truth that we should strive towards as process itself will be necessarly shot through a temporal accretive structures that persistently attempt staunch the flow.

by on

There is it seems, a way in which the system here may be repeating an inherent issue in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. I say issue as it is not necessarily a problem. It runs something like this. D and G seem to put forward a philosophy that, whilst difficult to penetrate seems to be capable of being understood. Elsewhere in my recent notes on Wittgenstein, I had in particular someone like Deleuze in mind where I commented that such philosophies are not necessarily nonsense but rather that intelligibility is strained. The Deleuzian language games take a lot of rules to learn and need several aspect flips to be in place in order to follow them. However following these various hermneutic junctures correctly comprehension (and hence conversation) is possible.

It seems however that whilst it can be understood to mean a roughly particular something, it also (kind of) matters very little if this something is adhered to. By this I mean the well known call to ‘conceptual creation’ that has become almost the defining feature of the whole system. Production is taken to be important not comprehension of the system. This metaphilosophical exhortation does seem to raise some kind of issue about why one should bother expending any effort trying to understand such difficult work. Indeed I have read accounts of readers of D and G who have simply given up on the work and then felt a sense of relief upon realising that their lack of comprehension was allowed. After such realisations, they have read the work with more relish and allowed it to encourage production without worrying about theoretical comprehension. It is this notion of conceptual creation that I wish to consider and I wish to consider it because I want to know if it has some relation to what I have elsewhere called manifestationism.

Manifestationism is an inchoate meta-philosophy. The issue of manifestationism was noticed by considering occult phenomena, more specifically synchronicity. The synchronicity shows a reality reconcilable to rationality and a reality of incoherent spatio-temporal rearrangement with equal force. We act as agents for a one of these tendencies. but we may be never completely sure about the correctness of our preference. This means these broad ontologies are competing. Further observation notes that ontologies, especially in philosophy, are also always competing, with philosophers acting as agents for different philosophies. Some under the names of dead philosophers, some under an ism. No territory can deliver a knockout blow to the other. Debate occurs but no one really shifts. Ambiguities and different interpretations of words and positions are all exploited to ensure that each agent by and large remains an agent of their inhabiting ontology. Furthermore one cannot even say what kind of subject the agent is, as to answer this would have committed oneself to a particular ontology.

Manifestationism is a description of this situation, of the situation. A meta situation of no particular theory being correct as such, only an endless competition for dominance with no end actually possible and way to access a means to speak about what kind of being is actually doing this without lapsing back into a particular ontology (I feel this particular impasse may be close the problems that drive Laruelle). Of course similar predicaments exist in many fields, however the difference is generally that differing theoretical approaches in science may at some point find some kind of answer that actually renders an enemy theory largely disarmed. Philosophy though, is unique insofar as it is the field that essentially is capable of continually holding all its previous versions as still viable, with no particular one holding any particular ability to defeat the others.

It seems likely that D and G understand this and that this is related to conceptual creation. However, for them, this (the manifestationist predicament) was not simply the description of an increasing catalogue, rather it was a desiring production itself. As such, the status of the catalogue (of ontologies) is not that one philosophy tries to supercede another, rather only that one provokes another. What they decipher is that we need to produce, which in a sense is why metaphysics can never end. That is, to return to another Wittgensteinian observation, his correctness about language games and the possible nonsense resulting in their deterritorializations is in a sense a toothless observation as we will never actually be able tell whether the word is still cogent (or not) in its new home. This truth guarantees that metaphysics (as desiring production) can continue indefinitely. Manisfestationism must pull back at this juncture as ‘desiring production’ is itself an ontological choice. But there is some kind of harmony between the two approaches insofar as they both recognise an endless proliferation of philosophies and neither see such activity as necessarily doing anything other exercising some kind of dynamic action: production or power relations. Indeed it seems the one thing that manifestationism is willing to say is that the manifestations (the ontologies) must compete with each other. This competition though is also not incompatible with the interpretation of desiring production indeed it may just be the flipside -the what-happens to the various ontologies when they are ‘produced’.