Re: runaway (warning:quite long)

The following is a cut'n'pasted version of bits of my BA dissertation
`Postmodernity and the Posthuman:Identity & Integrity, Subjectivity &
Control', which may give some vectors helpful to an understanding of `runaway
critique' (Nick i believe `invented' the term although I don't presume to
speak for him).  Nb. This was written several years ago and whilst I don't
want to defend it specifically since I've developed and sophisticated my
thoughts on these matters considerably(i hope!) I would welcome any
discussion stemming from it generally.

Cheers.
---DeLtA----------------------------------------------------------------------
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- `For a ghost traveling on a photon the universe had to look black' -
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Kant's `Copernican revolution' moved philosophical enquiry away from what was
crudely imagined as an objective standpoint in which the world, and the human
subject within it, could be described as if from a (implicitly divine)
outside, and reconstructed it as a critical investigation into the activities
of the subject, so as to yield transcendental laws whose necessity would stem
from their conditioning all experience.
Kant's critical method, "not a doctrine, but a discipline", consisted in
eliminating propositions which could have no basis in experience, and thus in
a sense furthered the empiricist project. Nevertheless it was not crudely
materialistic.  The world being (as far as experience can vouch) nothing more
than subjective modification, its structure could be revealed only by way of
a dissection of the `faculties' necessary for this construction.  However, as
Kant was extremely eager to point out, neither was his project to deteriorate
into a solipsistic Berkleyean endeavour3. Empirical realism is always
conjoined with transcendental idealism - which is to say that the empirical
is to be retained as such only under the condition of the transcendental.
 These two movements saturate the world from either side, rendering
irrelevant previously intractable problems of metaphysics.  
The critical system is thus partially syncretic of empiricism and Idealism
but goes beyond both in this double-edged manoeuvre.  I refer to it as
transcendental irradiation.
The relevance of all this to the thinking of postmodernity will become
apparent.   For now it is sufficient to observe that whilst
`postmodernism'(the name which I give to the intellectual movement which has
emerged recently) has addressed itself predominantly to studies of cultural
phenomena, I wish to investigate it both in terms of, and in the form of,
this critical mode.
The synthetic rationalism and transcendental thinking of Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason is deeply embedded within the world of modernity.  Postmodernity
emerges as an almost paradoxical result of the ostensibly positivistic and
humanistic practices of modernity.  By way of an explication of the  factors
both positive and limitative which constitute modernity, and a reading of
their interplay in and beyond Kantian critique, we may understand better that
which `drives' modernity, and its (ir)resolution through and out of
postmodernity.

The `grand plan's object was to delineate the conditions of possibility for
particular enterprises and their sphere of proper operation, and hence
increase efficiency through a generalised division of labour, for the benefit
of humankind.  The movement toward a synthetic rationality, functionally
descriptive rather than ontologically or essentially concerned, was
precipitated by this new directive.
As each discipline subjected itself to a rigorous critique, their efficiency
and autonomy amplified themselves until at last the `grand plan' cracked up
under the weight of its own success.  Automation, for example, led to
decreased labour costs, increased competition, and thus drove manufacturers
to develop ever more machines which broke down the manufacturing process to
the simplest elements and reconstructed it more efficiently.  The evolution
of increasingly abstracted forms of exchange, e.g., paper money, led to
increased and accelerated flows of capital.  This put pressure on the holders
of `solid' material assets which came to be at the mercy of market
fluctuations, to participate.  In similar terms, Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason has become prey to an escalating critical examination, questioning the
conditions of its own possibility, breaking down its unquestioned elements
even further into an increasingly materialistic transcendental theory of
production which goes beyond the secure boundaries of metaphysical thought.
[-hence runaway critique - D.]
There is a hidden menace beneath the positivist sheen of `Pure Reason'.  Real
thinking is always hazardous,  but there comes an inevitable catastrophic
point at which it exceeds the striation of its own operator, and only then,
and always too late, is the threat perceived.  The `thinker'
deterritorializes himself, his codes collapse, meaning breaks down, his words
open up onto zero, nihil.  Going critical.  The same principle applies to
capital.  Apocalypse occurs at a singular point of the monetarizing process.
 The gold-standard is lost, everything is floated, no value remains except
relatively, in what Baudrillard calls a `structural play of value'5.  And
again with technology.  It no longer `augments', is no longer instrumental,
it machines itself, its `producers' becoming a subordinate link in its
development. It is always too late to put the brakes on, or apply human
rationale:  Stop! The body can take no more!  For at such a point, this would
be mere fetishism, an embarrassing atavistic spasm.  These processes imply
irreversible risks which fundamentally jeopardise control and violate the
integrity of conservative social and individual systems.
To begin to question the ambivalent position of the human subject in these
matters is immediately to confront the problem of control. None of these
processes are any longer under human control, at least not under the control
of the mythical `rational autonomous agent' of modernity.  As has been
intimated, and more worryingly from a humanist perspective, they no longer
function in human terms. The champions of human supremacy, dignity and
progress have found none of these developments as wholesome as they had
wished.  In fact the disgruntled modernist-humanist has been as instrumental
in the formation of `postmodern thought' as post-humanist materialism.
These characteristics of modern rationality are seen at work not merely
intellectually, but on a general material level.  Nevertheless, we are driven
to discuss this process parochially to some extent, namely in terms of one of
its sub-effects: The immanentization of the body of the earth necessarily
involves a decomposition of inhibitive strata, among which are the control
mechanisms which have held together the human subject and its attendant
culture.  The three aspects which have already been nominally discussed viz.
critique, capital, and technology, are in a sense arbitrary terms for parts
of a generally distributed process, but they aid us in delineating its
salient features.  Each of them reaches a significant stage in their
development during modernity, and each presents a palpable threat to human
subjectivity during the present period, which we may call `postmodernity', or
in Nietzsche's words, `the age of nihilism'.
The pragmatic task of postmodern thought then will be that of formulating
consolidatory political, personal and social strategems to resecure some
foundation for political, subjective and social order, or conversely a
tactics of collapse, of speeding these processes toward the dissolution of an
anthropomorphically configured world.  The latter essentially involves a
large element of risk, an amoral affirmation of the future, irresponsible in
the extreme.  Conversely, in doing the former one has always an eye to the
past, reconstituting global identities, setting up new policing strategies.
This strategic manoeuvre so dear to philosophy, which stands guard at the
black gates of nihil passing backhanders to craven humanists, can be termed
illegitimate policing, a divine/state intervention (implementing communio)
into a deregulated economy (commercium). I shall also be tracking these
defensive manoeuvres throughout, and critically appraising their viability.
 Such conservatism will inevitably be an ongoing task since the critical
movements will continue presenting increasingly extreme waves of disassembly.

The problem of postmodern subjectivity is a general-economic problem of
security, similar to that tackled in `laboratory conditions' (always an
escape route reserved) in sceptical or nihilistic modes of thought.
  `Postmodernity' describes the state of a humanity overpowered by
something(s) alien.  We will track the development of three interrelated
strains of postmodern infection, and attempt to describe their dangerous
proliferation.

The division, and later the automation of labour maps human labour onto a
functional matrix, deterritorializes or abstracts it into a function-diagram,
and reterritorializes it as software to be used by human, mechanical or
electronic machinery, at a higher rate of efficiency.  Likewise, the
abstraction of productive value into monetary units is a reterritorialization
onto a more efficient matrix of circulation, diagramming objects into the
terms of an abstract general equivalent.  The last few decades have seen an
unprecedented intensification of these processes because of their increasing
implication together . 
To apply the DeleuzoGuattarian terminologies to these processes, we may say:
firstly, that each engineers a plane of consistency which immanentizes a
particular sphere of activity, particular flows of matter and energy, and
creates for them a Body Without Organs on which to circulate immanently.
 This irradiated matter then has been deterritorialized, and is
reterritorialized into the new plane of consistency.  The BwO (the abstract
machine which has been created for the circulation and engineering of labour
or technology) then falls back upon the flows, so that under pressure of
increased circulation and inscription, the flows themselves begin to conform
automatically to it.  This Deleuze and Guattari call miraculation.  In this
way the abstract machine is perpetuated and intensified.  Systems which `mess
up' the abstract machine are increasingly viewed as aberrations to be
recoded. Further planes of consistency are created, each being further
irradiated, each increasing the immanentization of all components.  What may
have been originally an instrumental diagramming, because of its efficiency,
takes on a `miraculous' life of its own.  So it is with monetary and
technological systems, which gradually escape their instrumental definitions
and designator-functionality to become systems at least as powerful as those
humans who remain embedded within them.  They  escape their referentiality to
an external or hypostatized reality, to circulate and refer only in their own
terms.  They no longer  signify a construction upon an equivalence with  some
real model, but have become autonomous active zones of production.
Baudrillard writes:
"A revolution has put an end to [the] `classical' economics of value, a
revolution of value itself, which carries value beyond its commodity form
into its radical form.
This revolution consists in the dislocation of the two aspects to the law of
value, which were thought to be coherent and eternally bound as if by a
natural law.  Referential value is annihilated, giving the structural play of
value the upper hand.  The structural dimension becomes autonomous by
excluding the referential dimension, and is instituted upon the death of
reference...a total relativity, general commutation, combination and
simulation - simulation in the sense that, from now on, signs are exchanged
against each other rather than against the real."7

 
In the case of the technocapital machine we find a positive feedback process,
where a deterritorializing process encourages its own exacerbation and
proliferation: the metabolism of capital is more like a virus than an
organism. Such a singularity is followed by a `runaway' line which
intensifies exponentially.


Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which introduces the system of critique,
displays an isomorphism with important characteristics of modernity.  The
materialist strand of Neo-Kantian thought has, respectively, tended to live
up to the bad reputation of postmodernity.
Transcendental irradiation provides the material conditions for a smooth
space to emerge.  The planes of consistency of thought mapped by critical
philosophy in intensifying stages of deterritorialization have developed
confluent modes of thinking which are capable of engaging with the
immanentized global systems of postmodernity.  Kant clears a transcendental
field consisting in the synthetic operators of the imagination and
understanding.  Nietzsche goes further, and is the first thinker of a
transcendental unconscious, inhabited by pre-personal energies and flows, the
depersonalised will to power.  Bataille, Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari
each develop this line of thought further.

Kant stresses that under the regime of critique, reality is always
conditioned, and hence conditional.  Empirical reality is always coupled with
transcendental ideality, which signifies that an analysis of reality is
always conditional upon an immanent subjective transcendental constitution 
A transcendental technics of subjectivity (the Kantian project) therefore
involves an exteriorization of the subject and a simultaneous
endocolonization of the self by its apparent `other'.  If the transcendental
move is to relocate so-called external phenomena (empirical reality) in the
subject's apparatus of intuition and representation (transcendental ideality)
then it can be said both that: the subject has become a part of `the exterior
world'; and, the external has become interiorised.  More precisely, these two
have become immanentized .
The levelling of the kampfplatz of transcendent metaphysics into an immanent
space inevitably involves the devolution of particularized and closed
dispositifs : immanent critique forces the transcendental examination of
globally specified units, shutting down transcendent operators and resigning
absolutist value-systems to an impoverished survivalism, sending them
spinning into weightless relativity.
The danger of this transcendental irradiation operated by immanent critique
is that it tends toward an undermining of all metaphysical determination, in
its mapping of the transcendental field, and rather encourages a technical
delineation of synthetic mechanisms.  The field of inquiry created by this
procedure is a plane of consistency.
In Kantian critique however, this levelling is bound to act only as a
precursor to providing new foundations, a new Grund for knowledge to built a
secure palace upon.  Kant tempers what can only be (in terms of philosophy) a
destructive drive with a faith which serves along his way as a constant
guarantee: he reinscribes subjective interiority upon the irradiated zone.
However, Modernity and Post-Modernity became so taken up with the work of
critique, deceived as much as Kant himself by the residual faith of
enlightenment, that these inhibitions began unmistakably to succumb, things
started to become-alien, unheimlich...


Once one has asked the question "what are the conditions of possibility for
x" as Kant does, one can ask it again interminably: what are the conditions
of possibility for the text, or for asking this question: And  this is the
way in which critique constantly outruns its own instantiations, becomes
beyond itself. Nietzsche writes:
"...it is high time to replace the Kantian question `how are synthetic
judgements a priori possible?' with another question:`why is belief in such
judgements necessary?'9
In The Gay Science Nietzsche extends Kant's geographics to encompass his own
radical deterritorializations.  Ultimately he draws a new map for his
position in the critical voyage:  an infinite, boundless ocean with no land,
no Grund.
One of Nietzsche's criticisms of Kant in Beyond Good and Evil is that the
Kantian system only goes so far as to address the conditions of possibility
of the understanding tautologically as `faculties'.10 Nietzsche's genealogies
redistribute conscious phenomena to the subconscious  of an impersonal `will
to power', taking critique beyond the anthropomorphic, and the will to power
presents the transcendental realm as `a monster of energy'11.
The development of Nietzsche's thought displays to us his own route through
nihilism, a `pathological transitional stage' which is not seen as a radical
break, but as an expression of an inevitable, if paradoxical reversibility
inherent to value-systems.  The Christian-moral framework of human culture,
when pushed to its limits, reaches a stage of saturation where the `will to
truth' subverts itself and collapses in upon itself: the incessant searching
for reasons inevitably leads to an aporia of sorts. His diagnosis of the `age
of nihilism' is therefore as a time of revaluation or transvaluation, an age
when new values, new territories, can be experimented with `beyond good and
evil'.  It is that singularity of modernism which I have mentioned above.
 And the Uebermensch holds place for the possibility of a creative
intelligence developed from the deterritorialized radical indeterminacy of
nihilism.

In general economics (a Bataillean mode which has as its dark precursor
Nietzsche) one views specific systems (that is, configurations of elements
that, under a-perhaps clandestine-external control, utilise energy in an
end-directed manner) as relatively autonomous enclosures operating according
to a dedicated code of linear iterativity.  The same cannot exist
economically.  In fact, no system can ever be fully `closed', isolated from
the general economy; for any system to function it must have some capacity
for exchanging energy with exterior elements, however surreptitiously this
may be done  (this observation has definite resonances with the
`illegitimacy' of metaphysics in the critical system).  After the extirpation
of transcendent pretension, any teleological system can only be such when
described according to its own code, and can always be seen as part of a
wider, eventually aleatory, movement of energies12.  In this way,
`identities', analytic unities professing an essential interiority, become
exteriorized and open to machinic syntheses.  There is no privileged interior
space, and no transcendent ontology.   Through such a rigorous materialism,
Bataille arrives at a delirious `mysticism' where the thinking of exteriority
and becoming dissolves the subject in ecstatic states of immanence.


Critique is a system of positive feedback, whereby the body of rational
knowledge is repeatedly subjected to its own analysis.  We experience the
real collapse of this in Lyotard's Libidinal Economy.
To read Libidinal Economy is most certainly to experience the end of the
world.  And it is impossible to comment upon without betraying one's
engagement with it.  Although to do the latter would also seem impossible.
 One could go on...But since it is precisely this effect we are interested in
here,  we must stop and create for ourselves space in which to describe this
event.  
Although Lyotard disclaims `critique', seeing it as a particular intellectual
system, the text itself bears witness to the most extreme critique
possible13.  An immense speed and a refusal to invest in anything, even a
principle of non-investment, burns through the prose.  What is to be remarked
on above all in this text is that its words constantly effect exponential
increases in the intensity of the critical drive, and thus of themselves, so
that each sentence immediately becomes drained of any concrete claim by its
successor.  This is not simply a case of effective prose, or poetry.  The
semantical operators and synthetical concepts form a literary machine whose
object is this very effect.  The author's refusal to slow down and take any
stance produces a kind of white heat, a pure burning with no solid base or
residue.  The last chapter (`Economy of this writing') effects a collapse of
any status the book may have claimed for itself, other than as a pathological
site of intensity.  Thus the text is set up as (or rather has nothing left to
it apart from) an energetic site, and affirms itself as such, but (in a final
refusal of any political posturing) without a disingenuous denial of what may
be termed its possible persuasive truth-effects.  This is an important point
for critique, for one has pushed through nihilism to a position where one
recognises only experienced movements of intensities and affects with no
transcendent claims or abstractions. It is in this respect that the form and
content are absolutely integrated, since the text already does what it says,
the discourse and its style are indissociable.
The movement of immanent critique whereby these extropian and integrative
tendencies are accelerated beyond the bounds of `common sense', a
deterritorializing and delirious use of thought hostile to transcendent or
existential definitions of the subject, invokes a merciless objective irony.
 Its movement programs for the most severe atheistic ascesis imaginable.
 Never content to rest within, furiously clearing every territory it
encounters, critique is the endless driving-out.
It is impossible to keep check on this process: Indexicality, logical
analysis and consequently control, is possible only within a hierarchically
striated domain with an unquestioned axiomatic reigning (the Grund, or root
of the tree).   As Tarski and Goedel have shown, only an artificially imposed
regime can act as guarantor of truth.  Once the transcendental question is
posed (or, as Lyotard might have it, once a differend is raised), one can
fall back only on an inconsistent semantically closed system which breeds
antinomies (of which one of course legislates ignorance), or find oneself
thrown into a radical indeterminacy inhospitable to rational agency.
In this sense, Goedel is the transcendental irradiator of logic.  From his
angle, it is a problem of indexicality; Critical thought is always
precipitous, on the edge of itself, unless some `wisdom' artificially
completes it.   As any critical system appears to approach completion, the
fact that the transcendental delimitation must be immanent to its own
diagnostic methodology, and the logical impossibility of this, means that an
outspill is inevitable.   The sea walls begin to seep `noumenon' back onto
the land, in the form of a nihilistic or unconditioned desire which escapes
`the' system of meaning.  The incessant revenge of the unconditioned then
makes itself known only mediately through the fierce renewal of the critical
drive