In my “Substack” on After Finitude, I granted that there is no “necessary entity,” at least not in Meillassoux’s sense, but took this to imply that the act of to be itself, i.e., Being itself, that by which anything is at all, is not one of the beings. It, if we can use the word “it,” is not nothing either, since beings are, and that by which they are cannot be nothing.

In this “Substack,” by way of Przywara’s Analogia Entis and against Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which I use as a foil, I ask how finite beings hold Being itself: what is the “is” a finite being holds but isn’t?

Adorno calls this a child’s question: “functional ontologists might argue that every child asks about Being. Reflection cures him of that habit.”1 Why ask it anyway? Because finite beings are, and that they are is not explained by what they are. We can make whatever move we want, dismiss this as an empty tautology, claim it applies only to concepts and is nonsense when applied to finite beings, etc., but we still remain confronted by the “that,” “the sheer unexpected ‘thereness’ of the thing,” as DBH puts it, “devoid of any transparent rationale for the fact.”2

2. Why Przywara & Adorno

Why Przywara? Because analogy, as far as I know, remains the best answer, or reductio in mysterium, to the question. Analogy is the only way Being itself can be said, an analogous term being a mean between an equivocal term and a univocal term, a simultaneous likeness and unlikeness in a given respect between two or more things. The Hegelians are already bristling at my saying that Being itself, “without any further determination,” cannot be nothing, since for Hegel, famously, pure being, so taken, is nothing.3 That is exactly why I turn to Przywara, though, whose whole answer, or reductio, unfolds from the “is not not,” his reading of the principle of non-contradiction. Of Przywara’s three modes of the logos—logic, dialectic, and analogy—only analogy keeps both nots without letting them collapse into one.

Besides non-contradiction, everything in the book turns on the “in-and-beyond,” and not only of essence and existence but, in the book’s first chapter, of knowing and being, “the ultimate correlation—Zueinander—of consciousness and being,” out of which, Przywara says, the three problems of metaphysics “unfold out of one another.”4 In Przywara’s words, “There is no [finite] being other than ‘analogy as being’ (which consists in the ‘in-and-beyond’ of essence and existence).”5 His formula for the finite being, then, is “essence in-and-beyond existence,” i.e., what a finite being is is both in and beyond the fact that it exists.6 His other formula, Being itself beyond-and-in the finite being, gives the corresponding structure from the other end of the analogy, and the relation between the two is what he calls the “decisive analogy”: essence in-and-beyond existence is analogous to Being itself beyond-and-in the finite being, the two related, as John Betz puts it, “not directly, but as one proportion to another.”7 I unpack the “is not not” and the in-and-beyond more below.

Why Adorno? He’s the perfect foil, and he’ll keep us honest. Negative Dialectics does most of what an account of the finite “is” needs, and against the right enemies, but it stops short: Adorno sees that every finite being is more than it is, and he won’t give what that “more” points to an “is” of its own.8 Everything the book rejects is a test the analogy has to pass, either by refusing the thing along with him or by showing that the charge doesn’t apply: identity (i.e., a thing being equal to its concept), the whole, a first principle, eternal invariants, the negation of the negation as a positive, a primal word exempt from thought, domination projected onto Being, immanence deified, ontological need, etc.9

3. What the “is” is

I don’t understand how we’d get around the real distinction between what a finite being is and that it exists, a distinction in the thing itself and not just in our concepts. A finite being can be conceived as existing or as not existing, and its definition makes no reference to existence or nonexistence.

I understand that Frege and those after him, e.g., Russell, said that existence is “a property of concepts,” not of things, and that “it is a sheer mistake to say that there is anything analogous to existence that you can say about” individual things, which leaves nothing in a thing for its essence to be really distinct from.10 Dealing with that objection (or, for that matter, with the scholastic debates over whether the distinction is real or merely formal) is a topic for another “Substack,” but, in any case, it seems to me already sufficiently dealt with by DBH’s point that Frege’s rules “are ways of talking about talking about existence, rather than ways of talking about existence as such.”11 On those rules, to say something exists “means simply that some concept is instantiated, as opposed to not being instantiated, and nothing more; what causes or allows for this instantiation to be a real concrete event in the first place is not really considered.”12 In other words, what makes an instantiation a real concrete event is what is at question here.

No one runs head-on at the question, and Przywara himself, over and over, seems to forbid precisely this anyway, i.e., philosophy’s method must be a posteriori even if its object is a priori.13 In Przywara’s Analogia Entis, the crack, a true lack of identity between what a finite being is and that it is, antecedent to and independent of the mind’s perception of it, runs two ways. The first way, viz. that what a finite being is is always both in-and-beyond that it is, inasmuch as a finite being was something different and will be something different than it is now, is analogous to—i.e., gives us analogical knowledge of—the “instantiation” itself, i.e., Being itself, always beyond-and-in the finite being, inasmuch as the finite being has being but is not Being itself, i.e., although it is in the finite being, Being itself is not reducible to the finite being but is also everywhere beyond the finite being. This is Przywara’s “answer,” or, more properly, his reductio in mysterium, to the question of “instantiation,” or Being itself. Importantly, we are always talking in analogical terms here, not identical ones, and not in purely apophatic non-identical ones, but real analogical knowledge, i.e., “understanding or judging something indirectly by comparing it with something better known that only imperfectly resembles the second object.”14

But, in any case, according to Przywara, there is a positive limit concept arrived at here in relation to our question: what is Being itself? Przywara’s “positive limit concept” is “positive” only inasmuch as it is a ground, end, and definition at work within finite being.15 But, inasmuch as it is known only by analogy, and not by identity, it doesn’t fall under Adorno’s ban on identity. Moving on to the second way, the “is not not,” which relates to Adorno’s ban, Przywara’s point is that Being itself is never arrived at this side of the analogy in terms of identity, A = A, but neither is it a pure contradiction, A = ¬A: the “is” is always necessarily the “is” of the “is not not,” it is not nothing, and it is not the “Is” itself. Threaded together, the crack and the “is” of the “is not not” show us what can be known, analogically, of the “is” itself this side of the analogy.

A. In-and-Beyond

I’ll start with the in-and-beyond. Picture any thing that’s becoming. I don’t know what example to use, so how about the cliché acorn becoming an oak? The oak is in the acorn, as what makes it an acorn rather than something else, and beyond it, as the tree it has not yet become. Przywara ties his formula to just this, by way of the old saying “Become what you are.”16 In Betz’s gloss, what a thing is forms the existing thing, making it what it is, and at the same time runs ahead of its existence at any given moment, as something still to be reached.17 Besides that, what a thing is and that it is are not the same, which is the real distinction. You’ll have to forgive me for giving the most cliché of examples: I can know what a phoenix is without knowing whether one exists. (I mean, I could use the unicorn example too, but then we’d have to picture a uni.)

Przywara rejects, over and over, two ways of getting this wrong (i.e., the many in-or-beyonds opposed to the in-and-beyond). The first are philosophies of essence (e.g., Plato’s ideas, the scholastics’ universals, the “forms” and “laws” of modern philosophy, Edith Stein, etc.), in which A = A is an eternal essence, Przywara’s paradigm being Parmenides’ one and unmoving being.18 The second are philosophies of existence (e.g., Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Simone Weil, et al.), in which A = ¬A is an endless becoming or flowing existence, whose paradigm is Heraclitus’ pure becoming. Both, Przywara says, are absolutes “because and insofar as they posit an ‘as’ in the place of an ‘in-and-beyond’: ‘essence as existence.’ In this, each is a (usurpatious) [infinite] ‘Is.’”19 He claims Aristotle, and analogy, are an attempt to stand in the middle between these poles: Aristotle “will equate analogy with the middle,” and the principle of non-contradiction is “the most basic midpoint of equilibrium between Heraclitus and Parmenides.”20

The in-and-beyond holds the middle between these, “a suspended middle that oscillates back and forth,” where what a thing is and the fact that it is are neither the same nor apart.21 The finite being is held in that tension, a “span,” Przywara says, “between truth and history,” a “unity-in-tension” in Betz’s word for his Spannungs-Einheit, which overlaps with Adorno’s own suspicion, that finite being is always held in tension.22 The back and forth is the “rhythm” so many readers of Przywara have fixed on, and he means it: “analogy is a rhythm,” and “Only in the sense of such a rhythm and such a measure is analogy a ‘principle,’” which is why the book ends on the fugues of Bach’s Art of Fugue, “which, interweaving one another, pass beyond themselves into ‘great silence.’”23 That middle is the mark of a finite being, and it is already an analogy, since an analogy is “neither an identity nor a contradiction, but rather a coordinated relation.”24

B. Is Not Not

Since what a finite being is doesn’t include the fact that it exists, its “is” is had, not owned, and Przywara locates that “is” in the principle of non-contradiction: “‘is (valid)’ as ‘is not not (valid).’”25 (“Valid” is his word for the noetic, the “is” of a true judgment, and in the principle, as Aristotle formulates it, “its noetic and ontic forms interpenetrate.”)26 He calls non-contradiction “the most negative of formal positions” and adds that “even if one denies everything, one cannot deny ‘this,’” crediting St. Augustine with its sharpest formulation: “the doubt that doubts everything still cannot doubt that it doubts.”27

The answer to the question, then, or, rather, the reductio, is the “is” of the “is not not”: the finite being’s “is” is what Przywara calls an “is in the not,” St. Augustine’s est non est.28 In the “is not not,” the first not says the Being in which finite being participates is not nothing, and the second says finite being is not Being itself, that, in fact, it is of itself nothing. It is here, Przywara says, that the analogy is pronounced “in the sense of the ‘ever greater dissimilarity,’” the rule he takes from the Fourth Lateran Council as “the classical formula for analogy”: within every “similarity, however great” an “ever greater dissimilarity.”29 Every likeness between a finite being and Being itself is a likeness across an absolute difference, and the finite “is,” beside the “Is,” is as nothing. The likeness runs one way, too: analogy “does not mean that the Is (Truth, etc.) is ‘similar’ to the ‘is (valid),’ but rather, conversely, that the ‘is (valid)’ (as the participating image) is ‘similar’ to the Is (Truth, etc.) (as the imparting archetype).”30

If the finite “is” were simply its own, A = A, it would be the “is” that belongs to Being itself alone, and the “is not not” would lose both nots: this is Przywara’s “logic,” from Descartes to Husserl, which reads non-contradiction as identity, “what is, is.”31 If Being itself were nothing, the finite “is” would be had from nothing, and the “is not not” would lose its first not: this is Przywara’s “dialectic,” from Hegel to Heidegger, which aims at “pure contradiction,” A = ¬A, and makes nothing, das Nichts, the ground of the finite being, “as is, quite logically, the teaching of Heidegger.”32 Dialectic, Przywara says, is then “suddenly converted into pure logic and unmasks itself as a more refined version of the same,” and “This is most clearly the case with Hegel.”33 In Przywara’s one-line map, logic is “identity from beginning to end,” dialectic “identity in contradiction,” and analogy “a ‘self-ordering within a being-ordered.’”34 In the book, Przywara distinguishes the ἀνά, “according to an orderly sequence,” from the “upward movement” of the ἄνω, and the analogia entis, as a principle, “consists in the unity of its ἀνά and ἄνω: the ἄνω of the ever ‘above-and-beyond’ and yet—and therefore—the ἀνά of inner order,” the decisive analogy once again, the order within analogous to the order above that measures it.35 The “above” of ἄνω, just like the “beyond” of the “in-and-beyond” and the “beyond-and-in,” is bound to raise some hackles.36 But we needn’t be concerned here that anything supernatural or “transcendent” (pejorative) is involved: the “measure from above,” or from outside, simply means immanent thought cannot call anything its opposite without a measure.37

Only analogy keeps both nots, and only in analogy, Przywara says, is the principle “preserved in the form in which it is given,” as “the energy of this movement between the limit concepts of ‘pure contradiction’ […] and ‘pure identity.’”38 Analogy passes two of Adorno’s tests here: it refuses identity, and it does not let two nots become a positive. Analogy does not “merely state a pure facticity” either, because this would cut the finite being off from Being itself.39 Rather, it keeps the finite “is” from being what Meillassoux makes it, a bare fact.

That “is” points beyond itself, to Being itself. An “is” that’s had, not owned, points to Being itself rather than to nothing because finite beings are, and that by which they are is not nothing (nothing is nothing, it is not even to be), but ipsum esse subsistens. It is, in Przywara’s words, “essentially ‘from’ the Is (Truth, etc.),” “just as the luminosity of the air is the luminosity of the sun.”40 From essence in-and-beyond existence, by analogy, we have Being itself beyond-and-in the finite being, the decisive analogy. As Betz explains, there is an infinite identity of essence and existence, an infinite “Is,” “to which the real distinction of essence and existence in [finite] being (as ‘essence in-and-beyond existence’) obscurely points.”41 Being is said of both “according to modes that are only proportionately the same: infinite being is being whose essence and existence are identified, whereas finite being is being whose essence and existence are really distinct.”42

4. Where Adorno Stops

Negative Dialectics, along with Przywara, rejects identity: “To think is to identify,” and “What remains equal to itself, the pure identity, is the worst.”43 Against Hegel, it refuses the negation of the negation that comes out positive: “To equate the negation of negation with positivity,” Adorno writes, “is the quintessence of identification,” which is Przywara’s verdict on dialectic in other words.44 It refuses, too, the closed system, the whole that swallows its particulars, and in the analogy there is always necessarily an ever greater dissimilarity to Being itself, nothing is whole, nothing is finished: the analogia entis, Przywara says, is not “grounds to be satisfied with a system that is once and for all finished.”45 Adorno refuses relativism and absolutism together, too, and in Przywara’s way: dialectics “is as strictly opposed to [relativism] as to absolutism, but it does not seek a middle ground between the two; it opposes them through the extremes themselves,” and truth “will last, along with its temporal core,” which is Przywara’s “truth in-and-beyond history,” whether Adorno calls it that or not, truth “as what is ‘beyond history’” making itself known “always only ‘in history.’”46

Against Heidegger, it refuses a Being that is exempt from thought, a primal word that cannot be thought through, and it insists on the old division: “Demythologization is division; the myth is the deceptive unity of the undivided.”47 Against first philosophy, it refuses a first principle that would degrade its correlate, and the claim of all prima philosophia “to be a doctrine of invariants.”48 Being itself is not something, it is not any thing, it is that by which there are things, i.e., finite beings, at all, and deductions of any kind would be second order; even the principle of non-contradiction, for Przywara, “is not something ‘from’ which one can make deductions.”49 There is nothing “invariant” here, i.e., in the thatness by which all variance is given. Against the “wholly other” (Kierkegaard, Barth, Levinas, et al.), it refuses any content “summoned up from outside, in a dogmatic and arbitrary leap.”50 It breaks through “the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity.”51 Przywara breaks through this fallacy because analogy forbids the move Kant’s critiques make, i.e., the moving of the true, the good and the beautiful out of Being itself and into the structure of a timeless constitutive subject exempt from the crack. In Kant, Przywara says, the transcendentals are “principally meta-noetic,” “the inner formality of the acts of ‘pure reason’ (the true), ‘practical reason’ (the good), and synthesizing ‘judgment’ (the beautiful).”52 Adorno also holds that “neither in its conditionality nor as its totality is immanence to be deified.”53 The analogia entis refuses this too: because it’s analogical, rather than univocal, because it rejects A = A as much as it rejects A = ¬A, and Being itself is given only analogically in the “is not not,” there is no possibility of any sort of deifying pantheism or theopanism, which is what Przywara calls Hegel’s and Heidegger’s dialectics, “the theopanistic dialectic and the pantheistic dialectic of the one principle of identity.”54

Analogia Entis and Negative Dialectics both see a crack in every finite being. Adorno calls this a “more” and a “not-yet,” i.e., the “non-identical,” and Przywara calls it essence “in-and-beyond” existence. “‘A’ is to be what it is not yet,” Adorno writes. “Such hope is contradictorily tied to the breaks in the form of predicative identity.”55 So, both Adorno and Przywara read “A is A” as pointing ahead, Adorno as hope, Przywara as “Become what you are.”56 Where they part is around Przywara’s willingness to acknowledge that, by analogy, we have some notion of the “is” now, of the “that,” of Being itself as a positive limit concept and not as a mere child’s question. “Every entity is more than it is,” Adorno writes. “It therefore points beyond itself.”57 For Przywara, too, any given “is (valid)” points beyond itself. Negative Dialectics keeps the difference between a thing and its concept (“objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder”), and both of them need two nots.58 Adorno has the non-identical, the double negation, the preponderance of the object, and the refusal of every idol, which are Przywara’s own tools, and he uses them to brush first philosophy, Heidegger, Hegel, and ontologists of every stripe off the table.

Where Przywara and Adorno part is around the question of where the non-identical, the in-and-beyond, points. For Adorno, the non-identical is immanent Verflochtenheit, imbrication (Redmond), entwinement (Ashton): “that everything is more than it is—means entwinement, not something transcendent to entwinement.”59 For Przywara, this is only one half of the decisive analogy, essence in-and-beyond existence. The web of relations, imbrication and entwinement, only explains the “what”: a thing is this and not that through everything it is not, because its determination requires “something which the entity itself is not.”60 Imbrication says why this thing is this, but it does not say that there is a web at all, and Adorno’s own concept of mediation concedes this limit: “Mediation makes no claim whatever to exhaust all things; it postulates, rather, that what it transmits is not thereby exhausted.”61 Something is left over in every finite being after all its relations have been counted, and since the relations give its “what,” what is left over is its “that.”

As best I can make out, where the question is so much as hinted at, Adorno brushes it away as a child’s question, the question being whether the “that” of the bench is anything other than its “what.” For the child, he says, the two are one: “To know what the word ‘bench’ means and to know what a bench really is—which does include an existential judgment—is one and the same to that consciousness.” Moreover, where any sort of answer would be possible, because it would involve the most general and most familiar of all “things,” viz. Being itself, it is always suspect to Adorno: “The boring for the ‘why,’ for the first cause, is pre-formed.”62

Adorno puts the nots on what the “more” and the “not-yet” point to, “something which is not and yet is not only not,” and Przywara puts them in the finite being itself, which “is not not.”63 But where Przywara sees analogy, Adorno sees only a contradiction that thought, in an unreconciled world, cannot yet get past. He knows what the contradiction is, and says it in Przywara’s terms: “it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived,” and “Total contradiction is nothing but the manifested untruth of total identification.”64 Left there, as A = ¬A, it is Adorno himself who is open to the charge of identity, in all the ways Przywara laid out for a dialectic that “unmasks itself as a more refined version of the same.”65 In the Metaphysics lectures he says so himself: “nothing can be even experienced as living if it does not contain a promise of something transcending life. This transcendence therefore is, and at the same time is not – and beyond that contradiction it is no doubt very difficult, and probably impossible, for thought to go.”66 Adorno twice names the empty slot: “neither a system nor a contradiction,” and “Utopia would be above identity and above contradiction; it would be a togetherness of diversity,” which is Przywara’s analogy by another name.67 Adorno describes the third way as a state of things that does not yet exist, while Przywara names it, “a coordinated relation, and thus an analogy,” and finds it already in every finite being.68

Adorno won’t cross the line because, having, in Przywara’s sense, only logic and dialectic, he understands analogy only as a “magnet,” Aristotle’s unmoved mover, “like a magnet of pure actuality, or pure energy, pulling up everything which is merely potential towards it,” where “the idea of the analogia entis […] is thus already sketched out,” or as a cross-eyed mystification, an empty tautology: “This Being ends up in a tautology from which the subject has been evicted.”69 I acknowledge the danger, as anyone who’s come up reading backwards from the French ’60s is bound to, viz. that Being itself, the other term of the analogy, can become a concept emptied of content and then worshipped for its emptiness. Moreover, Adorno is right that this happened in Heidegger, but I don’t think it happens in Przywara.

5. Przywara Isn’t Cross-Eyed

So does Being itself fall under the critiques Adorno makes of Heidegger’s Being? Obviously Przywara is as critical of Heidegger as Adorno is, but is Przywara’s Being itself—known analogically—merely a primal word? An empty tautology that blurs and effaces differences? An “absolute” only because it’s a mystification? Is it the first cause, or first being, come back to us, and only because of an ontological need? The test is Adorno’s own: “If the alleged primal word cannot be defined and fulfilled in thinking, if it cannot be critically confronted with its aims, the impossibility indicts all talk of Being.”70 The analogy does the reverse of every charge Adorno lays at the feet of Heidegger’s Being, of every danger and every warning.

“In the word ‘Being,’” Adorno says, “the totality of that which is, the copula has become an object,” and “The insight that ‘is’ can be called neither a mere thought nor a mere entity does not permit its transfiguration into something transcendent in relation to those two definitions.”71 The copula is not made into an object, and here I am returning to the refrain of this “Substack,” because Being itself is not an object, it is not one of the beings at all, it is that by which finite beings are.

Every definition needs a genus and a differentia, but there is no genus above being, and whoever doesn’t conceive being conceives nothing.72 The differentiae by which being is contracted can’t be extraneous to being, or they would be nothing. Being itself may look like a primal word because it can’t be defined, but it can’t be defined because it is not a what: it falls under no genus, and there is nothing, precisely, that it can be differentiated from, i.e., Being itself can be differentiated from nothing, and only from nothing. In other words, it can’t be defined because of excess, i.e., because it is beyond-and-in every finite being. Adorno saw this move coming: in Heidegger, he says, “each substantive deficiency, each absence of a cognition, will be revalued into a sign of profundity,” and he calls it “dressing up the deficiency of the concept as its surplus.”73 This excess isn’t a dressed-up deficiency, though, because every description of a thing is made from notions clearer and better known than the thing described, and being is the best known of all notions.74 DBH puts the reason this way: “It is the very synthesis within beings of what they are and that they are (and hence of what they are not) that makes it impossible to say, within terms of ontic process, how to speak of being.”75 For Przywara, metaphysics is the “going behind” into the “backgrounds” of being “insofar as it—as what is grounded, directed, and determined—points to a ground, end, and definition at work within it.”76 Being itself can’t be defined for all these reasons, but Przywara shows that, by analogy, this ground, end, and definition is “something like a ‘positive limit concept’ of the metaphysical movement of thought”: Being itself is an object of thought only insofar as the finite being is an object, which is Adorno’s rule as well: “No absolute can be expressed otherwise than in topics and categories of immanence.”77 And, obviously, and again, for a generation like mine that’s read backwards from the French ’60s, all of these terms (i.e., ground, end, and definition) are suspect. What’s important to remember here, then, is that all these “in-themselves,” i.e., “the ground-in-itself, end-in-itself, and definition-in-itself,” are known only analogically, only through the crack, through finitude, they are never “in-themselves” this side of analogy but rather only and precisely what gives finite beings their “that.”78

Being itself doesn’t efface differences; rather, it is, as DBH puts it, “the infinite plenitude of the transcendent act in which all determinacy participates.”79 How else would a finite being differ than in the very act of its being? The absolute in which essence and existence correspond would be, Adorno says, “the night in which all cats are grey”; but Being itself in the analogia entis isn’t one of the beings, it is that there are any cats at all, of whatever color.80 “We are to conceive Being as the absolute,” Adorno says, “but it is to be the absolute only because we cannot conceive it.”81 Incomprehensibility would be the sign that it is Being itself, and comprehension, the sign that it isn’t. Every identification of the absolute, Adorno adds, is an anthropomorphism, so that “at the approach of the mind, the absolute flees from the mind: its approach is a mirage,” and the ever greater dissimilarity of the analogia entis is exactly what escapes this, since nothing finite is a likeness of Being itself without a greater unlikeness.82 Przywara’s “incomprehensibility” follows necessarily, and comes not in place of an argument, but at the end of one: it is what he calls a reductio in mysterium, a method “in contradistinction to both deduction and induction.”83 It’s rejecting the analogy, as DBH says, that makes the absolute “a sublime absence or contradiction,” and Przywara shows this over and over: “The ontic version of the principle of identity, ‘what is, is,’ thus implies an immediacy to the ‘I am who am.’”84 In other words, logic’s “what is, is” claims the “I am” for itself, and dialectic’s Nothing claims this too: “The Hegelian ‘contradiction’ has been radicalized in the Heideggerean ‘Nothing.’ […] This ‘productive Nothing’ utters the ontic-noetic ‘I am who I am’ of the principle of identity.”85

“Prima philosophia and dualism go together,” Adorno writes, and “Dialectical criticism is due the concept of the first Being itself.”86 Every word of this is right against a first being. The fact is, however, that none of it has to do with Being itself in the analogia entis. Being itself is not a first being. It is necessarily “outside every genus,” so it is not at the top, nor is it the most identical thing or the best thing.87 It isn’t a thing at all. Adorno’s own analysis of the copula ends “in the constellation of those moments, not in a third that would be superior, or at least more general,” and analogy isn’t a third thing either, because, in Przywara, there is no third: everything is referred to Being itself, “without any ‘possibility of appeal’ to a third (being, etc.).”88 A third thing over both, Przywara says, “would stand above both; that is, it would itself be what is really divine.”89

“Heidegger drills in religious customs, but all that he retains of them is the general confirmation of dependence and submissiveness as surrogates of the objective formal laws of thought.”90 Elsewhere Adorno puts it more sharply: “Domination is absolutized and projected on Being itself, which is said to be the spirit.”91 It’s not at all clear to me how that by which finite beings are, Being itself, i.e., that by which they are what they are, different from the other ones in their givenness, would be a domination over them. Being itself doesn’t dominate, but, rather, is the liberation of things as themselves, that they are at all: “[Being itself’s] maximal proximity to the [finite being] is the maximal liberation of the [finite being] unto active, free self-movement.”92 The ever greater dissimilarity answers the charge here too: what is unlike Being itself in ever greater measure is neither its copy nor its instrument.

“The ontological need can no more guarantee its object than the agony of the starving assures them of food.”93 But the analogia entis does not follow from the concept of a perfect being, but from the crack in an existing finite being, which Adorno admits. Adorno makes the charge sharper: “the fallacy is the direct elevation of negativity, the critique of what merely is, into positivity as if the insufficiency of what is might guarantee that what is will be rid of that insufficiency. Even in extremis a negated negative is not a positive.”94 There’s no theodicy or remedy in the analogy. What it holds isn’t a need but simply a fact about the “is.” Again and again, the refrain of this “Substack,” Being itself, known analogically from the in-and-beyond of the “what” and the “is” of the “is not not,” isn’t the highest being, isn’t the most perfect being, isn’t one of the beings at all: it doesn’t answer a need but is simply an ontological necessity.

In a deep sense, then, this side of the analogy, Being itself is not yet, i.e., not all in all. As DBH puts it, “Both our being and our essence always exceed the moment of our existence, lying before us as gratuity and futurity.”95 I’ve already established that immanent imbrication is Adorno’s name for essence in-and-beyond existence, but the non-identical can’t possibly be exhausted in that, because the “that” by which things are hasn’t been reached. Przywara reaches it by analogy, precisely from the crack and the “is” of the “is not not.” Since what a finite being is is always in-and-beyond that it is, its “is” is held but not its own. Being itself beyond-and-in the finite being shows in the features of essence in-and-beyond existence, so it is known only as the far end of the crack, a positive limit concept known insofar as the finite being is known, and always in ever greater dissimilarity. This is the decisive analogy, and it’s what can be known by analogy, by “resemblance without identity,” of Being itself.96 Adorno has the same rule from the other side: the affinity between knower and known, “indelible, yet infinitely far removed at the same time,” must never be “posited as positive,” and “affinity is no positive, ontological individual definition either.”97 Precisely: the likeness that makes knowing Being itself possible, held with its ever greater unlikeness, is the analogy.

6. Conclusion

In Negative Dialectics, the non-identical, where it isn’t exhausted in immanent imbrication, holds open, in hope, the not-yet and the promise of the redeemed world. “Without hope there is no good,” and “if the possibility, however feeble and distant, of redemption in existence is cut off altogether, the human spirit would become an illusion.”98 “Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption.”99 Adorno says that “beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.”100 But it obviously does matter, because what is hoped for is Being itself, and if it weren’t, finite beings would not be. Adorno acknowledges a not-yet, a hope for redemption, what is not yet. But, it isn’t exactly clear to me how he can do this without any concept whatever of what that is, now, i.e., this side of the analogy. The analogia entis gives us that, analogically. Being itself is both a “not-yet” and a “now,” but it is not the “naked affirmation of what is anyway.”101 It seems to me there is a whole rabbit hole we could go down here, having to do with theodicy and secondary causality, etc., or we could open up a can of worms about the privatio, and so on, but that is far outside the scope of what’s being argued. “What is must be changeable if it is not to be all,” Adorno says, and it is: what is isn’t all, because Being itself isn’t a thing at all, which is why things that are not their own existence change at all, and it is what gives the “that” of every difference.102 Nowhere are we saying the way things are now is perfect, and Adorno is right: “After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims.”103 There obviously aren’t any claims being made here that the world as it stands is good or positive or whatever the charge would be, simply that things are, that they are is not identical with what they are, and that that crack, that distinction, gives us an analogy to Being itself.

What the “reconciled world” looks like from the standpoint of analogy is not necessarily any different from what it looks like according to Adorno, i.e., “Peace is the state of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other.”104 “To this day, all happiness is a pledge of what has not yet been, and the belief in its imminence obstructs its becoming.”105 If Adorno had no taste, in this unreconciled world, of what the reconciled world would be, he wouldn’t even be able to think this something else. I mean, and this is the cliché argument, and I’m almost embarrassed to make it, that to even posit that the world itself remains unreconciled, the whole creation “groaning as in the pains of childbirth,” is already to have some idea about something else, viz. the reconciled, i.e., what a reconciled world would look like.106 How can he? By analogy. Adorno’s own answer is that “there would be no conceiving it if we were not urged to conceive it by something in the matter.”107 “Something in the matter” is the crack, and they both acknowledge the crack. Only, Przywara is willing to take it as far as the “that.” This might be a good place to rehearse Przywara’s account of the transcendentals. In Przywara, the true, the good and the beautiful are three names for the crack: the true, essence as possible, the good, essence coming into act, and the beautiful, essence and existence at rest together, or, as he puts it, “in the case of the true, the stress of this ontological correlation falls on the side of a relatively pure essence; in the case of the good, on the tension of becoming between existence and essence (‘become what you are’); in the case of the beautiful, on a relatively ideal existence.”108 Without going down the rabbit hole of the privatio, or of the at least provisional dualism any concept of an “unreconciled world” necessarily implies, “peace” is already here this side of the analogy by way of the transcendentals, and moreover, by the fact and to the precise extent that whatnesses are given, here and now, however imperfectly unreconciled.109 As DBH puts it, “The being of creation is an essential peace, hospitable to all true difference,” and “peace and being are equiprimordial.”110

What I’ve tried to show in this “Substack” is, simply, against Negative Dialectics as a foil, that the “is” which the finite being holds, but which it is not, the “is not not,” is necessary, i.e., unavoidable inasmuch as finite beings are, and that extending the purview of what the non-identical holds, beyond immanent imbrication, before even the not-yet, to Being itself as it is known by analogy, doesn’t come under any of the charges Adorno laid at Heidegger’s feet. Moreover, not only does it account, by analogy, for the fact that finite beings are, it also gives the not-yet the “is” Adorno withholds, St. Augustine’s “It is not yet possessed so long as it has not arrived […] It is and is not.”111 So, I’ve been circling these thoughts again and again: Adorno’s thinking ends before what has not yet come. “There is solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall.”112 Przywara also acknowledges the not-yet, but as it is known, analogically, in what is, or, what “is not not,” in a reductio in mysterium, a return into the mystery “outside every genus.”113 They both keep this double negation, and they both refuse to turn it into a positive. Adorno reads the two nots as a contradiction and waits, Przywara reads them as a relation and calls it the finite being.

It has been at least twelve years since I’ve written anything, and I figured it was time to flex those muscles, and write about some of the things I’d been thinking about lately. There were no clankers in 2014, but I remember thinking even back then, “man, I wish there were clankers, I wish I could just tell a computer ‘write a paragraph using as technical-manual a style as possible.’” I even got books in 2012 about writing for biochemistry journals because I really wanted to achieve a prose style that was as generic and un-individual as possible. Then, clankers finally came out and I was like, “damn, I can’t wait to use one of those clankers, it will definitely be able to do what I wanted.” Finally, I had some free time, i.e., time to try out a clanker.

Why? I’ll tell you why. Take this paragraph from my diss:

In addition to stressing information over meaning and process over identity, control societies would inspire external relations (i.e., “behavior”) over interiority and causality. There is less of a need to discipline the interior when, by way of its purely external relations, the exterior can be controlled. Whether apparatus or person, identity as such is of less consequence than behavior within a network of external relations.

“Clanker, rephrase that sentence perfectly.”

Control societies favor information over meaning, process over identity, and external relations, or “behavior,” over interiority and causality. Where the exterior can be controlled through its relations alone, the interior no longer needs to be disciplined. For apparatus and person alike, what counts is not identity but conduct within a network of external relations.

You see what I mean? Why would I NOT use a freaking clanker?

So, first, the “empty aevum.” Aeviternity is a medieval metaphysics concept a lot of people today don’t know about, even people in philosophy and theory. The Logic of Sense puts forth its own concept of the Aion, so, why don’t I put the two things, i.e., The Logic of Sense and the medieval aevum, into constellation with each other and show (because Rousselot had tipped me off on this about knowledge already) that the older account gives us more of what Deleuze wanted most, viz. immanence? Cool, so I read Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense again, after 15 years. It’s a slog, it’s not fun. Frankly, dude is kind of pissing me off because I’m 46 and I’m over all of that now. Time to write. “Clanker, (and here is the exact prompt, I checked) write me a very very concise & clear paragraph, in the declarative prose style of biochemistry journal, laying out Deleuze’s two temporalities, Chronos & Aion, starting with ‘In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze puts forth two…’” etc. I proceed through the whole draft that way. The prose style is perfect. Perfectly generic. Much better than mine. Sometimes it does the corny clanker stuff (e.g., “it’s not X — it’s Y”) and I remove all that. Other times, I’d start messing with the sentences and think, “What am I doing? The prose is already perfectly generic, I’m just making it worse!” I go back and forth like that for a few days, drafting the piece, finessing the piece, working in stuff from Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth-Century Thought, aevum done.

Next, Agnès Gayraud’s book, Dialectic of Pop, which a dude in NYC had told me about and I’d read a few months ago. I figure there are maybe some people who are interested in hearing what I have to say about music. Probably a lot more than are interested in hearing what I have to say about aeviternity or ‘necessary being,’ so, I’ll write about that book next. This time I start with an outline. Same process. Back and forth for days with the clanker, uploading Leppert, etc., “Clanker, find the part where he talks about gramophonic music!”, “Clanker, find the part where he talks about how ‘an artist today must be an exponent and a sworn enemy of the prevailing historical tendencies’!”, “Clanker, find the part where he’s ripping on Boulez!,” back and forth, back and forth, cutting stuff, adding stuff, it’s formatting the footnotes so easily!, always having the machine generate the sentences because the machine’s prose style, as you can see, is much better than my prose style. I spend a day transcribing/analyzing a Bladee track (maybe I should’ve used Eyedress’ track New Money, or Nick Nicely’s Whirlpool instead?). After several days of back and forth with the clanker, I have another one done. It’s fine. I engage with Agnès’ book, our two different Adornos, our two different takes on where the singularity of pop lies, etc. Job done. Pure generic prose. None of my dissertation’s “perhapses”, none of my dissertation’s “of courses”, none of my dissertation’s “howevers”, just pure generic machine prose at last.

Time for a politics one, this ought to be good! A lot of confusion about where I stand politically for some reason. So, let’s do a tour through my milieu and talk about where I think it comes apart now (the person, the common good, reason, etc.). Again, I start with an outline. 1. Where I Come Up. 2. What Politics Is Instead. 3. The Genealogy. Several days of back and forth. Several days of finessing and bending clanker prose to make it say what I want to say. Here, let me ask the clanker what I did. “Clanker, I’m writing an article about writing [the politics] article now, please tell me everything I did that you did not do to make this article.” Clanker: “You outlined it, mined the quotations, read ten drafts, marked up the pages by hand, rewrote the sentences you couldn’t stand and reverted the ones I had smoothed out, specified a few thousand changes down to the comma, sent back the ones that missed until they stopped missing, and decided when it was finished.”

Finally, the last one. I see young people on Twitter, grad student types, still talking about After Finitude. The book came out basically just as I was getting out of school and it argues contingency all the way down. How about I write a “Substack” arguing that’s incoherent and we need necessity in the equation somewhere, arguing that the “necessity of contingency” is incoherent? Arguing, basically, from a book about classical metaphysics I’d just read and loved called Thinking Being. So, that’s what I do. It’s the densest one, I’m smuggling all the classical args for necessity into the thing, torturous syllogisms. Eighteen drafts. Back and forth. We’re at about three weeks now. THREE WEEKS of going back and forth, (writing?), with a clanker. Three weeks of drafting. Three weeks of bending. Three weeks of finessing. I finish the damn “Substack” the same way I finished the other three.

And what do I get at the end of all this? Do I get to proudly announce my “Substack” on Twitter and Instagram? No. It’s only shame for me, SHAME! SHAME for the STUPID OLD MAN who thought HE was writing. What I get is: “98% AI generated”, that’s what I get! “Clanker, can you explain, as if you were me, in my own voice, why I was so mystified that I got a ‘98% AI’ score?”

Clanker:

Why was I mystified? Because I did everything. I made the outlines. I decided what the argument was, every time, and what it wasn’t. I made thousands of edits. I transcribed a Bladee track by hand and timed it to the second. I found the passages, I cut whole sections, I added whole sections, I took out the corny clanker stuff, I bent sentence after sentence for four weeks. In my head the ratio was obvious. The clanker typed, I wrote.

You see that clanker’s beautifully generic prose? Why would I use the DOG SHIT human style I’m FORCED to use right now when a clanker can do THAT?! Do you know how much time it would take to beat my prose into ANYTHING approximating that level of genericity?

But, anyways, that’s what I get. Four weeks. FOUR LONG WEEKS OF GRINDING. What? I did “2%” those four weeks? That’s what I did? 2%? How is that possible? I ask the clanker what the hell is going on, and it explains to me that the sentences all did basically come off the machine. The scanners obviously can’t tell what I did, they just see the sentences. So, what am I going to do now? Go through the four pieces with generic clanker prose and “move things around” to make them more human again? Why would I do that? The prose is how I want it: generic, machine generated.

That’s the story of this Substack. Lesson learned. Don’t draft with clankers. Don’t EVER draft with clankers. I put disclaimers at the bottom of the four articles that I used the clanker to write them. I actually did think I was writing for some crazy reason, I really did, but, but the scanner says it was the clanker writing all along. I’ll leave the articles up as an “experiment” or whatever, because I WASTED FOUR WEEKS ON THEM! And, if and when I add anything else here in the future, I promise I WILL NOT use a clanker for drafting ever again.

“Clanker, end this article please”

Twelve years ago I wanted prose with nobody in it, and I got it. There is just a meter for it now, and it says 98%.

That’ll be all, clanker, that’ll be all.

The first is negative: “the absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being.” Every metaphysics, on the book’s account, is dogmatic in that it holds that “some determinate entity” must absolutely be, whether the Idea, the atom, the infinite substance or the world-soul, and the modern refutation of the ontological proof, since it shows that “being is never part of the concept of the subject,” finally ends the “illusory manufacturing of necessary entities.”2

The second is positive: since nothing must be, the only necessity that remains is that nothing be necessary, so that “contingency alone is necessary.” That absolute is hyper-Chaos, a Time “for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable.” It can destroy any law and produce any other, and it needs no reason to do either.3

I hold the first thesis to be true and the second to be false. An absolute is answerable for two things: why there is anything rather than nothing, and why what there is has any determination at all. After Finitude makes a capacity answer for both, and a capacity is the name for what has not done anything yet.

Two words carry most of what follows. A thing is in act when it actually is, or actually does, whatever is in question. A thing is in potency when it merely could be, or could do, that thing. Boiling water is hot in act; water in a cold pot is hot in potency, which is another way of saying that it is not hot. Nothing is reduced from potency to act except by a being in act.4 Cold water does not heat itself, and if it grows hot, something already hot has done the heating.

Five parts follow. The first states what the book wants. The second shows that ‘necessary being’ has two senses, and that only one of them died with Kant. The third shows that a capacity cannot be an absolute. The fourth follows the argument back to what it kept needing. The fifth returns to what the book wanted for the world, and grants every clause.

I. The Case After Finitude Makes

What the Book Wants, and Why It Is Right

The way to the two theses is the achievement of After Finitude, and it should be stated in the book’s own terms first. Correlationism is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” Thought, on this view, “cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us,’” and the strong correlationist adds that the in-itself might be wholly other than anything thinkable, so that even non-contradiction is “anhypothetical with regard to what is thinkable, but not with regard to what is possible.”5

To hold that the in-itself could be otherwise, the correlationist has to think the capacity to be otherwise as absolute, and not as a mere limit on knowledge: “in order to grasp my own mortality, I must construe my death, the possibility of my not-being, as an absolute possibility.” Facticity, i.e., the absence of any reason for things to be as they are, is therefore not a boundary around knowledge but a property of what is known, and the move is to “put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.” Two things in that procedure are right and I keep both: the refutation of the skeptic out of what the skeptic must presuppose, which Aristotle called the elenchus, and the conversion of a supposed limit of thought into knowledge of what is there.6

On the moderns the book is right as well. In the metaphysics of the seventeenth century essence reigns, and philosophers who agree on nothing else agree that the first principle exists in virtue of its own essence. Descartes calls the perfect being cause of itself. Leibniz holds that in the necessary being essence involves existence, so that for such a being to be possible is already for it to be actual. Spinoza opens the Ethics by defining the cause of itself as that whose essence involves its existence. Here is exactly the target After Finitude describes, “a necessary being ‘par excellence’ insofar as the essence of this being provides the reason for its existence,” an entity that “must be because it is perfect, and hence causa sui, or sole cause of itself.” That entity does not survive Kant.7

Three things follow that the book does not say.

First, the correlationist circle needs a premise the book never examines. It closes only if mind and being stand outside one another, so that what thought has is a representation while the thing waits behind it for a comparison thought cannot perform. Every realism After Finitude considers grants that arrangement and differs only in the conclusion drawn, the naive realist trusting the comparison and the correlationist despairing of ever performing one. Perl calls the arrangement itself incoherent: “the modern interpretation of knowledge as a relation between consciousness as a self-contained ‘subject’ and reality as an ‘object’ extrinsic to it is incoherent.” The older account never granted the premise. To be is to be intelligible, “there is no thought apart from being and no being apart from thought,” so that being is neither mind-dependent nor mind-independent, an antithesis that “presupposes an extrinsic duality between mind as ‘subject’ and being as ‘object’ which is entirely alien to classical philosophy.” The book knows this and says so, naming “the Parmenidean postulate, ‘being and thinking are the same’” as “the prescription for all philosophy up to and including Kant,” and formulating strong correlationism as its exact contrary, that “being and thinking must be thought as capable of being wholly other.” The circle has nothing to close around. To be shut inside thought, thought must have an outside it is shut off from. The older account gives it none, since to reach anything at all is already to have reached being.8

Second, Kant was not the first to refute that entity. Granted that everyone understands the name to signify that than which nothing greater can be thought, it does not follow that something so described exists outside the mind, for a thing must be posited in the same way as the meaning of its name, and from the conception of what a name conveys it follows only that the thing is in the intellect. The argument proves a hypothetical, that the most perfect being exists of itself if it exists, and no more. That objection is from the thirteenth century, and its author could rest in the hypothetical because he proved the first principle the other way round, from the existence of beings that have their being from another.9

Third, ‘cause of itself’ describes nothing, since a thing that gave itself being would have to be before it was. What the older account meant by a first principle is not the self-caused but the uncaused, what needs no cause because nothing in it is received.10

The rest of the diagnosis is right, and older than the book allows. The “derivative absolute” of Cartesian science, the mathematized world, hangs from a proof of the “primary absolute,” a perfect being who does not deceive; but Descartes reaches bodies only by inference, and his own disciples drew the conclusion, Malebranche that physics would be what it is whether or not there were an external world, Berkeley that if matter can neither be known nor need be believed the wise course is to say that there is none.11 The derived absolute was never derived. The plan to keep it while dropping the primary one inherits a derivation that did not work even when the primary one stood.

Fideism, “the other name for strong correlationism,” is an old sequence too. A theologian, so that nothing may be taken from the first principle and given to things, holds that the first principle alone acts, and nature is left with no power of its own and no necessity of its own. A philosopher keeps the powerlessness of nature and drops the first principle, so that nature has no powers and nothing supplies them. What remains has neither reality nor intelligibility, which is skepticism. The occasionalists’ world is hyper-Chaos with a faith still attached.12

The strongest pages in the book are the ones on fideism. Philosophers “seem to ask only one thing of these absolutes: that they be devoid of the slightest pretension to rationality,” and thought “has relinquished its right to criticize the irrational when the latter lays claim to the absolute.” Both sentences describe the absolute the book itself reaches, which is unreason. One answer is open to it, that it arrived there by proof, and that answer is the right one. That is why the rest of this “Substack” examines the proof.13

When the book says that “it is neither possible nor desirable to return” to dogmatic metaphysics,14 I agree, and nothing below returns there. The position I am about to describe never was that metaphysics, and was its first and most exact critic.

The position is metaphysics all the same, and so is After Finitude. The book denies it on a definition it supplies itself: metaphysics is “every type of thinking that claims to be able to access some form of absolute being, or access the absolute through the principle of sufficient reason,” and the book escapes because “we are not thinking any thing (any entity) that would be absolute.” I grant the criterion. The book also sets a rule for applying the criterion, and the rule is stricter than the criterion itself. A doctrine that affirms no necessary entity may still be metaphysical, it says, if it holds “that a determinate situation is necessary,” which is “still to obey the injunction of the principle of reason.” The book goes on to prove that “the necessity of the contingency of the entity imposes the necessary existence of the contingent entity.”15 That there is always something rather than nothing is a determinate situation, and the book proves it a priori.

A book that says what the absolute is, and that it is a Time able to destroy any law and produce any other, has given an account of the absolutely first principles of being, which is all that ‘metaphysics’ ever meant. “To think anything at all is implicitly to think it as a being and is thus already to be engaged in metaphysics. Thought cannot dispense with being. The only alternative to metaphysics is to think nothing, that is, not to think.”16 The debate is between two metaphysics. Both agree that no necessary entity survives. They differ over what ‘necessary being’ was ever supposed to name.

II. Two Senses of ‘Necessary Being’

Kant Killed Only One of Them

The disagreement does not concern whether the necessary entity is dead. It concerns what ‘necessary being’ has meant, and whether the sense in which Kant killed the concept is the only sense it has had. After Finitude takes the identification for granted at every step: a necessary being is “a determinate entity” that “must absolutely be,” one member of the totality of what is, marked off from the others by being unable not to exist.17 The older account meant something else.

1. Kant’s Premise Is the Older Argument’s First Premise

I begin with the premise the book takes from Kant and takes to close the question, that “being is never part of the concept of the subject.” Far from refuting the older argument, this is where it starts. Anything definable can be understood without knowing whether it exists. I can understand what a man or a phoenix is and not know whether there is one, and in such things what they are is other than that they are.18 Nothing here turns on ‘essence’ in any strong sense. To say what a thing is, e.g., a man, a phoenix, is to have said everything the word carries, the whatness in virtue of which it is this and not that, and anyone who can answer the question has already granted the term, whatever he holds about essences.19

Whatever belongs to a thing belongs to it either through what it is, as sweetness belongs to sugar, or from outside, as sweetness belongs to coffee from the sugar. It does not follow from coffee’s being coffee that it is sweet, so where coffee is sweet, something else has made it so. Existence cannot belong to a thing through what it is, for then the thing would cause its own existence and bring itself into being. Nothing can do that. To cause is to act, and to act a thing must already be, so a thing causing its own existence would have to be before it was. Everything whose existence is other than what it is therefore has that existence from another. Whatever is through another is traced back to what is through itself as to a first cause. That first cause, as Perl puts it, is “the universal cause of existing to all things,” and it is “neither a thing that has existence, nor the existence of anything, but rather just existence itself.” “What a thing is,” he writes, “does not include or explain that it is,” and the argument above turns on nothing else.20

Kant’s premise does not close this way. It opens the way. Precisely because existence is no part of what anything is, whatever exists has its existence from elsewhere. The refutation of the ontological argument and the demonstration of necessary being share their first sentence.

2. The Definition Fits No Entity

What that demonstration reaches is fixed by the definition. A necessary being, in the strict sense, is “that of its own nature must exist and cannot be nonexisting nor existing in any way other than as it is; that which essentially exists.” A contingent being is one “whose essence itself is not determined to be existing or nonexisting.” Pure act is “the unqualified perfection of existence, which is not present in, not united with, and not limited by any passive potency.” None of these names a being among beings. The candidates After Finitude lists, “Idea, pure Act, atom, indivisible soul, harmonious world, perfect God, infinite substance, World-Soul, global history,” are entities with one exception, and the exception is the only one the definition fits, since pure act is not a member of the totality but the actuality in virtue of which there is a totality.21

The confusion of the two senses can be dated. With Scotus’s univocity “the first principle becomes a being, subject to a conceptual grasp and included within the whole of reality as a member of it,” and “it is precisely here that ‘metaphysics’ in the pejorative, postmodern sense begins, with the reduction of the first principle to a conceptually representable being and the fading from view of the very question ‘Why are there beings, rather than nothing?’”22 The necessary entity that Kant refuted, and that After Finitude refuses again, was born there, or rather recovered there, since a first principle that is itself one of the beings is where Greek thought began, with water, then air, then fire as the stuff of the whole, and it was given up because a principle that is one of the beings cannot account for the beings.23 In the long interval between, from Parmenides to St. Thomas, the phrase ‘supreme being’ was, as Perl puts it, “a contradiction in terms: no being can be supreme, because to be a being is to be something, to be one determinate ‘this,’ and therefore to be not supreme but dependent.”24

3. The Absolute Is Not One of the Beings

The point is not confined to a school. Being, Plotinus says, “must not as it were float in the indeterminate, but be fixed by limit and stability.” To be a being is to be one, an integral whole, some determinate this, and every being is a being in virtue of the determination that makes it one. All beings therefore depend, in order to be, on unifying determination itself, which is not any one determinate this, and so is not a being, but is that in virtue of which every being is one: “measure and not measured,” “the power of all things.”25 The answer to the question why there are beings at all “cannot be another being, another member of reality, for such an answer would not only be erroneous but would reveal a failure to understand what is being asked.”26

The first thesis of After Finitude was stated in the third century, and stated better. “An absolute that would not be an absolute entity” is precisely what the One is, and what existence itself is in the argument above. The book is right that the absolute cannot be an entity. It is wrong that the only alternative to an entity is unreason, and the error lies in a supposition it never examines, that whatever is not a being must be either nothing or Time. The position it has not read holds a third alternative, and the word ‘thing’ is already wrong for it: what is not a being may be that by which beings are.27

The book allows the question two answers, one that invokes “a God or Ultimate Principle” and one that delivers the question “from the jurisdiction of reason to the benefit of God or some instance of the Wholly Other.” This is neither. What is described here is no ultimate entity, and it is not the wholly Other. An alterity defined by negation alone never arrives at all, and it defeats itself in the defining: were the One “separate from or other than beings, then it would be another being, defined and limited by its otherness in relation to other beings,” and so “included as one distinct member within the totality of beings.” The wholly Other is made a being by the very otherness that was meant to exempt it from being. The One is reached by argument from what is, and it is the source of intelligibility rather than an escape from reason. Existence itself, the One, and pure act name the same thing, which the arguments above reach under each. The plurality is of names and not of beings, and even that is loose, since what is named is not one of the beings there are to count. Nothing more is claimed here than existence itself, that by which anything is at all. It is not one of the beings, and it is not nothing either, since the beings are, and that by which they are cannot be nothing.28

4. Necessity Is Not an Attribute a Being Has

There is more here to grant than Kant granted as well. A necessary entity, a discrete being carrying ‘necessary existence’ as one attribute among others, would be just there, inexplicably incapable of not existing, and no less in need of explaining than anything else. All of that I grant. But necessity, on the older account, is not a property that a being might have or lack. It names actuality itself, in which what a thing is and that it is coincide, and which is therefore neither a being nor the totality of beings, the totality being still a bounded and composite whole. It is, rather, the actuality out of which all beings receive their actuality. To have refuted the necessary entity is to have refuted a demiurge, whose own existence would need explaining as much as anything else’s, and not pure act, which needs no explaining because nothing in it is received.29

III. Why a Capacity Determines Nothing

Hyper-Chaos Does Nothing

Unreason is to be “the veridical content of this world as such.”30 I take the demand seriously, and the trouble begins there, since the veridical content of a world is what the world is by, and a capacity is a potency, and a potency is nothing yet.

1. A Capacity Is a Potency

The absolute, After Finitude says, is a capacity, “the capacity-to-be-other of everything,” and the book describes it as a power, “a rather menacing power,” “capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything.” I ask what it is for a capacity to be. What can be other than it is, is not yet that other, so a capacity is a potency, i.e., the not-yet of some actuality. A potency is not even sayable except by naming the act it is a potency for, since “the potential is defined in terms of the actuality to which it is relative.” A potency for anything whatever, belonging to nothing, is defined by nothing.31 A thing acts only insofar as it is actual, and a potency does not bring itself to act. Cold water that can be hot does not heat itself, and what is potential, since it is not yet, cannot act at all.32

A capacity to be otherwise therefore brings forth nothing and destroys nothing of itself. If the capacity really is a power, something that can bring forth, then it is actual and determinate, and so is one of the beings whose capacity it was supposed to be. The dilemma admits no third term. Either the capacity to be otherwise is actual, in which case something is actual of itself, which is the necessary being the book denies; or it is a pure possibility, in which case it does nothing, and I have still to ask what it is for a possibility to be. Nor does it help to call the capacity neither a power nor a possible but a bare modal fact about everything, since to be able to be otherwise in every respect at once is to have no respect in which one is this rather than that. Hyper-Chaos is asked to be both at once, a pure possibility “which may never be realized” and “the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law.” The pairing is deliberate, since “anything might happen, even nothing at all, so that what is, remains as it is,” and nothing in it is self-contradictory, because the ability to do a thing is not its exercise. The pairing holds only if the ability belongs to something.33

What is able both to be and not to be was identified long ago and placed at the opposite end of the scale. Aristotle: “All things that come to be by nature or art have matter; for each of them is able both to be and not to be, and this is the matter in each.” Matter, taken itself by itself, “is neither something nor any quality nor anything else which is said among the things by which being is defined”; it is not any this, has no intelligibility, and so “is not anything,” and it cannot exist without form. The capacity to be otherwise, raised to the rank of the absolute, is matter supremely promoted. What the book has put at the summit of what there is, the older account put at the bottom, and for the same reason: it is what has not been determined to anything. The book sees the difficulty and answers it, granting that its absolute yields “a knowledge whose content seems as indeterminate as the most complete ignorance,” and holding that chaos limits itself, since any constraint on it “can only be a constraint which comes from the nature of chaos itself, from its own omnipotence.” That answer concedes more than it intends. What has a nature of its own, and an omnipotence of its own, is determinate, and what is determinate is one of the beings. Hyper-Chaos escapes indeterminacy only by becoming one of the beings, an entity, which is the horn the book began by refusing.34

After Finitude puts its reader to a choice: either some determinate entity must be, or everything whatever is absolutely contingent. That pair is not new. Aristotle describes two schools. The Megarians said a thing has a potency only while it is actually exercising it, so that a builder who is not building cannot build; nothing is then in potency to anything, and nothing can come to be. Others said that nothing is impossible, so that even the diagonal of a square might be commensurable with its side. He rejects both, and for one reason. The first leaves no potency, since everything is either doing something or able to do nothing; the second leaves no act, since a capacity that excludes nothing is a capacity determined to nothing. Necessitarianism and absolute contingency are those two errors under later names, and the objection to each is the same objection: potency and act have collapsed into one another.35

2. A Possibility Is Founded

The book prefers the second of those, that everything whatever is absolutely contingent, contingency being “a real possibility” that “could occur for no reason whatsoever,” and the capacity to be otherwise an “absolute possibility.” But something is called possible with regard to a capacity in the thing itself, or with regard to the power of an agent, or absolutely, by the mere fact that the terms do not exclude one another. Before the world was, it was possible for the world to be, not by a possibility inherent in the world, which did not exist, but only by the power of what could bring the world into being. A possibility inherent in what does not exist is a possibility of nothing.36

In the order of concepts a contingent being is expressed by its indifference to existing and not existing. In the order of reality a possible has no reality of its own before it exists, and so cannot in itself be indifferent to anything, not being a subject at all. A possibility is thus the possibility of some actual power or the object of some intellect, and an absolute possible belonging to no power names a consistency among terms and no possibility at all.37

The book makes an obvious truth about beings, that the possible exceeds the actual at every moment, into its absolute. But the play of possible and actual would remain inert, never coming to pass, if it were not already enfolded within a prior actuality. Nothing passes of itself into something, and even possibility must first be. Necessity, in the sense the argument needs, is not the necessity of an entity that must exist. It is the necessity of whatever makes a possibility possible in the first place, and only something in act can do that. The question is sharpest at the origin. What accounts for the world containing what it did contain, when there was as yet nothing in which its possibility could reside?

3. A Necessity Must Belong to Something

“Contingency alone is necessary.” The necessity belongs to no entity, and the book insists on that, since “the principle of factiality does not claim that contingency is necessary; its precise claim is that contingency alone is necessary.” I grant the distinction and ask what is left to be necessary. What is left is a rule: if anything is, it can not-be. That rule is the only necessity the book has left, and the rule is not itself necessary. A rule is a relation, and a relation needs its terms, as heat boils water only where there are heat and water. The rule holds only where there are things, and every one of those things, by the book’s own thesis, can fail to be. The book grants the demand and turns it, replying that a rule with no terms is incoherent, so that terms must exist: “it is not a fact but rather an absolute necessity that factual things exist.” The reply is honest and it moves the difficulty rather than settling it, since it secures that there be beings without securing any being, and, as Aristotle says against exactly this, “everything may be capable of being, but still not be.” What has been derived from a property is an existence, which is the one inference the book took from Kant that it may not make.38 The one necessity the book allows rests on what it has already declared contingent.

On the thesis, everything that exists is contingent. So the necessity of contingency is realized in contingent beings, in which case it exists as they do, contingently, and is not “necessary, and hence eternal”; or it is a hypothetical truth, in which case it demands an existing foundation that it cannot itself be; or it is realized in nothing, in which case it is a name and not a necessity. I take the middle horn. A truth is true of something, and on the thesis there is nothing it is true of that must be. What the principle asserts is therefore true while there are things for it to be true of, and it is as precarious as they are, which is what “necessary, and hence eternal” was supposed to rule out.39

4. Non-contradiction Is Not Derived from Unreason

Non-contradiction is the clearest case, since the book makes a consequence of what every argument has to assume before it starts. “It is because the principle of reason is absolutely false that the principle of non-contradiction is absolutely true,” the reason being that a contradictory entity, already what it is not, could never become other, and would be “a ‘black hole of differences,’ into which all alterity would be irremediably swallowed up.” The order is the difficulty. After Finitude rests on a refutational proof, which works by showing the skeptic contradicting himself, and to convict a man of contradiction is to have non-contradiction in hand already. The book grants as much, calling non-contradiction “the minimal norm for all argumentation.” It has the objection and answers it: the proof assumes only that contradiction is inconceivable and concludes that it is impossible, which is a distinct thesis, so nothing is assumed at the start that is proved at the end. The passage from inconceivable to impossible is made once for unreason and then borrowed for non-contradiction. The postulate that licenses it is the one the book named at the outset and replaced, that being and thinking are the same, and it is wanted back here. With the postulate the passage is good and the correlationist circle loses its premise. Without it the circle stands and the passage is never made.40

Nor can the two principles be separated in the way the derivation requires. To deny a thing its sufficient reason is to say that it is with no act by which it is, and such a being would both be and not be. To call uncaused what is not actual of itself is to say that it is actual of itself after all. The denial of sufficient reason is therefore a denial of non-contradiction under another description, and the two stand or fall together as laws of the real and not of the thinkable only.

5. No Existence Follows from a Property

Why is there something rather than nothing? The book answers that “it is necessary that there be something rather than nothing because it is necessarily contingent that there is something rather than something else,” since contingency needs something to be the contingency of, so that “it is not a fact but rather an absolute necessity that factual things exist.” The argument passes from a property to an existence, and that passage is forbidden by the premise the book accepted from Kant. Facticity is “the ultimate property of the entity,” a determination abstracted from existence, and from such an abstraction no existence can be drawn. From the actual the possible follows, since there is water, water is possible, but from the possible nothing follows about what exists. The only necessity the derivation attains is that if anything is, something is, and that was in hand before the derivation began. The “two imperishable poles” of existence and inexistence are no better, since the opposition of ‘is’ and ‘is not’ is a play of limitation among beings, not a determination of being.41

6. The Principle Undercuts the Argument for It

The last objection is the one the book’s own method invites. Whoever asserts the principle of unreason asserts it as proved, and to hold a claim proved is to hold that there is a reason for it and that the reason is why the claim is accepted. I apply the principle to that. If nothing is as it is for a reason, then one’s holding a claim is not as it is for a reason either, and the reason and the holding fall apart. The principle cannot be kept for things and dropped for thought, since the refutational proof that reached it demands that the skeptic’s assent answer to a reason.

The book takes the elenchus against those who said that contradictories may hold together to show only “that no one can think a contradiction,” which would make it a report on the limits of thinking. But it reaches further. It is enough that the opponent signify something, since otherwise there is no debating with him. Once he signifies something, what he has signified is some determinate thing and not another. Something has been found that cannot be otherwise, and what cannot be otherwise is what ‘necessary’ means.42

One consequence follows for the absolute itself. It is a possibility, i.e., the capacity of everything to be otherwise, and it is arrived at by declaring that nothing is impossible. The possible and the impossible are correlative, so a Time “for which nothing is or would seem to be, impossible” leaves nothing for ‘possible’ to mean, and the one impossibility later restored to it, contradiction, is restored by the derivation disputed above.43

If nothing needs a reason, then something may begin from nothing with no antecedent, may cease at any moment for no reason, may take on any property at any time, and may perform any operation, with nothing to determine it to one effect rather than another. Under any one of those, no statement about the world could open onto a necessity, and the “manifest stability of physical laws” would be a record of what has held and no more. The book asserts all four as knowledge, and asks the question itself: “How could such a disaster provide the foundation for scientific discourse?” The absolute was reached in order to secure the reach of mathematics into the world, and the stability that reach requires is granted it, at the end, only on a hypothesis the book says it has “merely supposed.”44

7. The Objection After Finitude Writes Against Itself

One objection remains, and the book states it better than any opponent could, because it is the book’s own. The correlationist is allowed to say, in the book’s words, that “the correlational circle undermines the thesis of the absolute contingency of everything just as effectively as it undermined the thesis of the absolute necessity of a supreme being.”45 That is correct, and it is the whole of the case above: the instrument that killed the necessary entity does not stop there.

The reply offered is the refutational proof, that whoever raises the objection already presupposes unreason in the raising, since to tell the in-itself from the for-us at all is to think the capacity to be otherwise as absolute. What any objector must presuppose in order to argue at all is non-contradiction, which the book itself grants to be the minimal norm of all argument, so the proof spends what it needs before it reaches unreason, and what this objector must presuppose besides is a premise the realist never granted. Beyond that, whoever asserts the principle of unreason takes his assertion to be justified, which the principle forbids him.

The book never refutes the circle. It calls it a faultline and looks for a passage through, and it argues from inside it throughout. Every opponent in it is drafted by its author and defeated by its author, and the one opponent never drafted is the realist who declines the premise the circle needs. That is why the position described here was never met: not because it was answered, but because it was never raised.46

IV. What the Argument Kept Needing

Four Ways to the Same Place

Everything so far has been negative. A capacity cannot be the absolute, a possibility cannot be founded in nothing, and a necessity cannot belong to nothing. What the book gave to chaos is what act alone does, i.e., determine a potency to be, or to be something specific, the two things an absolute is answerable for. The same premises, followed one step further, say what can. Four ways to the same place. The first sets out from what can cease, the second from what becomes, the third from what depends on another, the fourth from what happens by chance.

1. From What Can Cease

The book defeats the idealist with a premise: I can think my own not-being, and this capacity not to be holds of me in myself, not merely for me. I grant the premise and look at what it contains. I am something that can cease. What can cease does not have existence by what it is, since nothing loses what belongs to it by what it is, so my existence is held from something else, and the only candidate so far in view is the totality of which I am a part. That does not settle the question. What can lose existence is in act by another, and what is in act by another still asks after its source, so an existence mixed with nothingness requires, in order to be at all, an existence with none. The totality cannot be that, since the whole too “could actually collapse.” The thought of my own not-being is the first premise of the oldest proof of necessary being, and not the seed of an absolute contingency.47

The same follows from the thesis stated in the book’s own words: there is no reason for anything to be, and “everything must, without reason, be able not to be.” What can be or not be does not exist by itself, since what exists by itself cannot not-be, which is what ‘contingent’ means for the book as for the older account. What is uncaused holds its existence from nothing outside itself, and so either exists by itself or has no existence at all. An uncaused contingent being would therefore exist by itself and not by itself. Either it has no reason at all, in which case nothing relates it to existence, or it is its own reason, in which case what it is and that it is are one. The principle of unreason takes the first horn and calls it an absolute.48

The reply will be that this shows what cannot be thought and not what cannot be, since the in-itself “might differ toto caelo from what is thinkable for us.” A thing exists only if it stands in some actual relation to existence, by itself or through another, and the uncaused contingent stands in neither. The absurd is what lies outside every relation to being, as a square circle does. The supposition also defeats itself in the making, since “it would be incoherent to postulate an unintelligible being, a being that cannot be thought, because to do so would already be to think this being and thus to commit a performative contradiction.” Of what could not be thought at all, “‘anything else’ is mere empty noise, or nothing.”49

I take the capacity by itself and the way ends in the same place. Whatever has a “capacity-not-to-be” stands, in itself, equally related to being and to not being, and what is equally related to two outcomes does not settle on one of itself, so if it is found actually to be, something else has determined it to be. The same reaches the “power” the book describes. Every action proceeds from a determinate principle, heating from what is hot and cooling from what is cold, and what is indifferent to everything, with nothing to determine it, cannot act, so a lawless omnipotence, taken strictly, describes something that can produce nothing. The book grants the description in its own words: an omnipotence “equal to that of the Cartesian God,” but “without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections.” What remains when the perfections are deleted is not a greater power but a power with nothing to determine it to any effect. There must therefore be something necessary, and, since a caused necessity still asks after its source, something necessary of itself. What is necessary of itself has no potency in it and what has no potency is act and nothing else.50

2. From What Becomes

Hyper-Chaos is the Chaos that Aristotle refutes in the twelfth book of the Metaphysics. Suppose potency prior to act absolutely. The first things would then be merely possible, and what is merely possible may not be, so nothing need ever exist. Nothing could be brought from possibility to act either, since “matter will not move itself, but technical knowledge will move it,” and the possible waits on what is already in act. Aristotle finds one view in two schools, the theologians “who generate everything from Night” and the physicists who said that “all things were together,” and refuses both for the one reason. “Chaos or Night did not exist for an infinite time ... granted that actuality is prior to potentiality.”51

The ninth book rules out an eternal potency. “Every potency is at the same time a potency for opposite determinations,” so “whatever is capable of existing may either be or not be,” and “what may possibly not be is corruptible.” Nothing incorruptible is potential, and “none of those things which exist necessarily are potential.” After Finitude asks for an eternal capacity to be otherwise and holds that “only unreason can be thought as eternal,” which is a demand for an eternal corruptible. That the disappearance of time can be thought only in time, so that time is eternal, is Aristotle’s own, in the twelfth book, and it supposes what it sets out to prove, since a prior moment is required only in imagined time. The refutation of Chaos and the proof of an eternal Time stand side by side, and only the first is a demonstration.52

The Time “capable of destroying even becoming itself” fails for the same reason, one step earlier. Whatever is changed must be some being, Aristotle notes, change being from something to something in a subject that undergoes it and remains. What becomes is not yet actually what it becomes, and it supposes something that is actually. To say that everything becomes is therefore to assert together that nothing is actually and that something is actually. A Time that destroys becoming is a succession of annihilations and fresh starts, and neither of those is the change of anything into anything. Calling the absolute “something akin to Time” leaves the ‘is’ of becoming as difficult to account for as the ‘are’ of any perishable being, and both are accounted for in one way or in none, by something that is in act without becoming.53

3. From What Depends on Another

The same result follows from a disjunction. Either there is some unconditioned reality, one that depends on nothing else in order to exist, or there is none. Suppose there is none: each being is nothing until its conditions are fulfilled, and its conditions are nothing until theirs are. If the conditions are finite in number, there is a last one whose own conditions are not fulfilled, or a circle in which each waits on the others, and a conditioned reality whose conditions are not fulfilled is nothing at all. If they are infinite in number, no condition in the series is ever fulfilled, and this is not because a series cannot be got through but because nothing in it is unconditioned. Either way nothing would exist, and something does. The order in question, moreover, is not the succession of one thing after another but the present dependence of what exists on what holds it in existence, which is a relation and not an event.54

4. From What Happens by Chance

The book is careful to distinguish contingency from chance, since chance “presupposes some form of physical invariance,” while contingency is to be “capable of affecting the very conditions that allow chance events to occur.” The distinction is correct. The accidental happens neither always nor for the most part, and a cause that acts of itself is prior to a cause that acts by accident. Chance yields fixed numbers only where there are predetermined elements, not themselves by chance, among which it can play. A chaos could not produce laws unless it were already governed by laws, since a disorder with the power to bestow order would not be disorder, and a disorder without that power bestows nothing but disorder.55

The Absolute Is Not an Answer

After Finitude is right to insist that the answer to the question ‘Why are there beings?’ cannot be a being. An absolute that is “an absolute entity,” some “determinate entity” that “must absolutely be,” would be one determinate this among others, included within the totality of what is as one of its members, and so could not be that in virtue of which there is such a totality at all.56

The transfinite is sometimes said to have settled this. There is no set of all sets, so the possible is no totality, so there is no One that is an All. The point is older than it looks. The One was never an All. It is “not One, as one of many, but before every one and multitude,” before “limit and illimitability, and term and infinity,” which is to say prior to the distinction between the totalized and the detotalized rather than a term inside it, and not a member of the totality, “even the ‘first’ or ‘highest.’” That the possibles are not totalizable was held long before, and held for a reason: they are the inexhaustible ways of imitating an infinite act, so that there always remains some new way in which a copy can imitate the original. They are non-totalizable because they are grounded and not because they are groundless. “The one is not” and the older “the One is not a being” are the same sentence with opposite intentions.57

From the impossibility of a necessary entity After Finitude concludes that unreason must be “put back into the thing itself,” and that “there is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given.” That does not follow, and nothing here is offered in its place as an answer. No being can answer the question, and what the older account puts where the book puts unreason is not a rival answer but the condition the dependence of beings requires: existence itself, as distinct from whatever has existence. “‘Just existence’ or ‘existence itself’ can mean only ‘whatever it takes such that there are beings,’” and even that, Perl adds, “is already saying too much, since the word ‘what’ in ‘whatever’ implies a distinct, definite essence.” Neither side answers the question. The difference is that one is directed by it to what beings depend on and the other dismisses it, and dismissal costs the fact that anything is at all.58

The four ways end in the same place, and none of them turns on a totality, a beginning, or a count. Nor is that place escaped by making the absolute a capacity, since a capacity that is anything at all is already in act, and a capacity that is nothing at all is not an absolute. Chaos does not escape by being chaos, since without existence there would be no chaos, only nothing. After Finitude is not the first to stand there. Hesiod named it Chaos and the theologians named it Night. It is the first to defend it by proof, and at every step the proof needed what it had denied itself, something already in act.

V. The Wants, Granted

Everything the Book Wants for the World, Granted

What, then, did After Finitude want, and who has what it wanted? It wanted a world that “must, without reason, be able not to be,” whose laws and whose totality are contingent, in which “everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws,” and about which no reason could be given why it is thus rather than otherwise. Every clause is granted.59

Aristotle’s world is not the model. Since its peak is substance and in substance what it is, it is one with its own necessity and cannot not exist. A world of dependent beings is otherwise. It is contingent in its very existence, since it might never have existed, and contingent still while it exists, since it might at any time cease. Neither contingency is a tendency in things toward their own annihilation. What is in act does not tend to its own absence, since a being acts out of what it has and not out of what it lacks. It can cease because its being is held and not owned.60

That is where the contingency lies, in the holding rather than in the things held, and the necessity lies there too. Necessity is not a property a being carries among its others. What is necessary of itself is act and nothing else, so that what the older argument calls necessary being is what it calls act. The division the book never makes is in the dictionary: what is necessary of itself has its necessity uncaused, and what is necessary through another “has a caused necessity of being.” Everything in the world is necessary in the second way and nothing in the first. Whatever must be, here, must be on the condition that its act go on being given. The world’s existence is absolutely contingent, and the necessities inside it are real and received, being the necessities of what is in act. That is what a law comes to, and no third thing hangs between the two. An eternal world of that kind would still owe its being to something other than itself.61

The book’s “there is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is” is granted here for the whole. What is refused is only the place where the absence of reason is put. Nothing about the world requires the world, and so no reason drawn from the world will produce one, which is not the same as there being no reason at all. A being whose existence is not contained in what it is has that existence from another, and the reason for it is there and not in itself. Unreason places its absolute in what has done nothing. This places the gratuity of the world in existence itself.62

There is no necessity in history once every principle of necessity is subordinate to what need not have been, so the refusal by After Finitude of “global history” as a necessary entity is reached here from the opposite premise. As for the contingency of the totality and not merely of its members, the contingency on which the older proofs are built goes further than the Aristotelian idea that things might have been other than they are. It is the notion that the whole world of nature might not have existed at all, so that existing appeared as something that comes to an essence from outside the essence’s definition. That was the founding intuition of the doctrine After Finitude thinks it is leaving behind.63

What the older account adds, and what the second thesis cannot, is an account of contingency itself. The contingent is what of itself can be or not be, and to be that is to be conditional: to depend on something prior in order to exist and to persist, to be mutable, to be composed and so dissoluble, and above all to have what it is distinct from that it is, so that a description gives no reason for a being. Each of those is a mode of dependence, and each is a way of having act from another. A contingency that keeps the capacity to be otherwise while severing it from that dependence has kept a symptom and denied the condition.64

Hence the reversal at the end of the book. Unreason was sought as the last bulwark of freedom, and what it delivers is a necessity stricter than the one it refused. Even a Heraclitean metaphysics of chance, as Nietzsche and Deleuze understood, is no philosophy of the freedom of what is but a doctrine of the absolute necessity of the being of this world. They understood it because they followed the affirmation of chance to its end, and its end is amor fati, the love of what could not have been otherwise. A world that must be able to be otherwise stands under a law as strict as any. Something is necessary on either account, and the difference is only whether it is a rule about everything or existence itself. Contingency is not an essence but a relation, and it cannot go all the way down, since a relation with one term missing is no relation at all.65

End

“It is neither possible nor desirable to return” to dogmatic metaphysics. Nothing here has returned to that metaphysics. The necessary entity, the essence that entails its own existence, the reason that accounts for itself, the world deduced from its principle, have all been refused above, on grounds older and more exact than Kant’s.66

What has been shown is narrower and more difficult. I return to the two theses. The first was that the absolute is the impossibility of a necessary being; the second, that contingency alone is necessary. The first thesis of After Finitude is a thesis of the position the book takes itself to have left, and it was held there without the equivocation on which the second thesis depends. The second thesis affirms, as a principle, what that position had catalogued as the one alternative to itself, and it does so by placing a necessity in nothing, a possibility in no power, and a becoming in no subject. Each of those is one mistake in a different place: a determining that only what is in act can do, given to what is merely in potency.

The book says as much itself, before taking it back. Hyper-Chaos, it allows, “lies at the furthest remove from the absolutization we sought,” and far from guaranteeing order “guarantees only the possible destruction of every order.” The word it uses is Pyrrhic.67 My word for hyper-Chaos is Bob’s Burgers.68

“Our task was to uncover an absolute that would not be an absolute entity.” The task was well set, and the book completes only its first half, the description of what such an absolute would have to be. One question is left. Existence itself was not disproved and then abandoned. Nothing in After Finitude refutes it, and this “Substack” has done nothing but ask, four times over and from the book’s own premises, what anything is by, and got the same answer each time. It was mislaid rather than refuted, at a datable place, when the first principle became a being and things were denied the whatnesses in virtue of which they are what they are. Everything since has been conducted as though the question had been settled, and the settlement is nowhere to be found. That is the strangest fact in the whole affair, stranger than anything in After Finitude, which at least had the courage to say what its absolute was.69

What answers to the description was named long before. It takes an article only because English requires one: an actuality that is not a being, because it is that in virtue of which there are beings, and which grants the world everything the book asked for on its behalf, its contingency, its collapsibility, its freedom from any reason why it should be thus, while refusing only the four-sided triangle of a necessity that belongs to nothing. The debate was between two metaphysics, one whose absolute is a capacity and one whose absolute is existence itself. If an absolute that is not an entity is what the book wants, its name is not hyper-Chaos.

[I used a clanker to draft & proofread this “Substack”.]

Three Days, and the Flag They Belong To

November 11, 2008. Masked anti-terror commandos descend on a village of a few hundred in the Corrèze, and some twenty people are arrested that morning in three towns, nine of whom will be charged, among them the young people who run the village grocery. The charge calls the little cooperative and its film club a pre-terrorist cell, and the principal piece of evidence is a book that nobody will admit to having written. The affair will end on April 12, 2018, when the judges rule that the terror cell was a fiction.2

March 8, 2009. A soft-spoken Italian philosopher stands in Notre-Dame de Paris, before the archbishop of the city and his clergy, and tells them, “with words carefully weighed,” that “nowhere on earth today is a legitimate power to be found; even the powerful are convinced of their own illegitimacy,” and that “according to Christian theology there is only one legal institution which knows neither interruption nor end: hell. The model of contemporary politics” is, strictly speaking, infernal.3

July 1, 2009. One of the most-watched men on American cable television, round pumpkin face shining, on the network that bills itself as da only one dat ain’t biased, holds that same book up to the camera, says it’s a call to arms for violent revolution, and tells his audience to buy the book. Somewhere at Semiotext(e) the publisher is delighted, and the English edition ships in August.4

For roughly twenty years, some version of that book’s flag was mine. What follows is yet another survey of radical Left political theory from 1968 to 2026, in an extremely oversaturated world of them, written by someone years out of the scene, who came up under that flag and finally asked what it was raised for. The flag has its answer, that a rising is for itself, and this is thirty pages of disagreeing with the answer I used to give.

It Is Forbidden Not to Be a Democrat

The No, and the Arguments for It

The reflex: voting is not politics, liberalism is not politics, and the whole representative apparatus is management wearing politics as a costume. What normally goes by the name of politics is what the philosopher of the part with no part (Rancière) calls the police: the apportioning of parts and positions, the procedures by which collectivities are aggregated and their consent obtained. Politics is the other thing, the disruption of that order by “the part of those who have no part,” and the two words are kept separate in everything that follows.5 “Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.”6

The reflex has arguments. The parliamentary form of politics is “that commodity without concept,” which “by virtue of the thickness of the consensus it organizes renders almost invisible and untenable all genuine politics.”7 Voting “is so obviously foreign to all truth” that it “brings Hitler to power just as easily as Pétain or the Algerian Islamists.”8 The word democracy is “the principal organizer of consensus,” a word of “authoritarian opinion”: “It is forbidden, as it were, not to be a democrat,” any subjectivity suspected of not being democratic is regarded as pathological, and the sanction runs from “patient re-education” to “the right of military intervention by democratic paratroopers.”9 “In the parliamentarisms of the West, as in the despotic bureaucracies of the East, politics is in the last instance confounded with State management,” and the name for our side of the wall is capital-parliamentarianism.10

The milieu, meaning the post-situationist current that runs from Tiqqun to the Invisible Committee and its readers, says the same thing in its other registers. The “politician” of the spectacle “put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others.”11 The count runs further down than the ballot, into who one is allowed to be: “I AM WHAT I AM” is “marketing’s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising,” and the tautology has a moral: “I am me, you are you, and something is wrong.”12 The Young-Girl is the citizen who consents to her own management, “the holder of a sacred power: the power of commodities.”13 The milieu’s senior philosopher (Badiou), surveying the American election of 2016, finds the whole political class become one abstract group: “The exercise of politics today is the exercise of very small differences inside the same global way.”14

I came to the arguments after the reflex. I first read The Society of the Spectacle as an undergraduate, and like anyone of my generation I read it as a clear statement of the bare fact of life. Commercials, “politicians,” music, news, every one of them a sign in that economy, so that nothing was itself. We are treatlers in the deepest sense: no Greek and Latin at six, no Goethe, no Bildung, rich or poor; Cookie Crisp, Coca-Cola, cartoons that were commercials for toys. We are the generation of the completely integrated, and it only integrates further for the zoomers and the alphas behind us. Twenty years after the book, its author wrote the sentence that describes us:

“When the spectacular was concentrated, the greater part of peripheral society escaped it; when it was diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The spectacle is mixed into all reality and irradiates it.”15

“Commodities are the opium of the people.” At street level the doctrine is one sentence: people have begun to suspect “that it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote.”16 This was not a teenager’s contempt for the grown-ups’ politics but a definition of the word politics, with arguments behind it, and the definition is the No: what the reflex refuses, the vote, the statute, the whole juridical apparatus, on the ground that none of it is politics at all. “Politics is in the streets.”

We Will Ask Nothing. We Will Demand Nothing. We Will Take, Occupy.

The Yes, and Its Ten Thousand Names

The Yes is what the No is for, the thing the refusal was clearing a space to say, and its oldest root is older than the workers’ movement itself. The essay on the Jewish question was written in 1843 and printed in February 1844: political emancipation is not human emancipation. Where the political state has attained its true development, man “leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.” “None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic man,” “an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community.” “The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen.”17 The name for what the split divides is species-being, Gattungswesen, communal being. Anti-liberalism as the reflex of the revolutionary Left is at least that old.

Beneath every qualification the state counts there is what the state cannot count. The right to have rights has one source, “unqualified mere existence”: “existence without qualities and thus mere being in its possibility of claiming the right to qualities, predicates, and property,” a being “without nature and without history” that alone “can be a being that is capable of nature and open to history.”18 Qualifications are what the state counts, and mere existence is what erupts. Politics proper is the eruption of the part with no part, a redistribution of the sensible, “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception” that determines “what is visible or not in a common space,” “who has the ability to see and the talent to speak.”19 Politics is when the tanks come out. The sentence is mine, and the famous passage it abbreviates I have quoted twice before, in a dissertation and in a 2009 essay, and it is the best card the flag holds:

“Whatever singularities cannot form a societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. In the final instance the State can recognize any claim for identity, even that of a State identity within the State. What the State cannot tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging. Wherever these singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.”20

They are all talking about one community. The coming community, the inoperative community, the unavowable community, the community of singularities: four names for it, and my word for it, in the dissertation, was the unworkable community.21 Its three books never define it, and each keeps circling the place where a definition would go. Community “is made of what retreats from it”; it “is presuppositionless”; “a community is not a project of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project, nor is it a project at all”; “being-in-common is not a common being”; “in place of such a communion, there is communication”; “one does not produce it, one experiences or one is constituted by it as the experience of finitude.”22 It is “the community of those who do not have a community,” “a community of absence always ready to transmute itself into the absence of community,” “the presentation to its members of their mortal truth,” and it closes by asking whether it “does not acknowledge itself or that it is such that no avowal may reveal it, given that each time we have talked about its way of being, one has had the feeling that one grasped only what makes it exist by default.”23 It is made of whatever singularities, quodlibet ens, “being such that it always matters,” which “communicate only in the empty space of the example, without being tied by any common property, by any identity”; “tricksters or fakes, assistants or ’toons, they are the exemplars of the coming community”; and if humans could “be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.”24 The unavowable community, again, says what May ’68 was: “without project, without conjuration, in the suddenness of a happy meeting, like a feast that breached the admitted and expected social norms, explosive communication could affirm itself,” and “Presence of the people? Recourse to that complacent word was already abusive,” unless it be understood “as their instinctive refusal to accept any power, their absolute mistrust in identifying with a power to which they would delegate themselves.”25

What the milieu calls the community of singularities is species-being recovered without the name. For the schoolmen, singularity was the fact of being this one rather than the universal, and the names denoting singularity were “person, suppositum, singular, first substance.” In the schools the milieu raids, singularity’s own name was person.26

They say it ten thousand ways. Workers’ councils, in which “the free explosion must escape us and any other control forever”; “the elementary human unity is not the body, the individual, but the form-of-life”; the human strike, “a wildcat strike of behaviors” that “comes out of the kitchens and beds” and “puts forth no demands”; “the Imaginary Party is the party that tends to become real, incessantly”; “communism is possible at every moment,” and “the practice of communism, as we live it, we call The Party”; find each other; form communes; all power to the communes; “the effort made to enter one another’s geography.”27 Whatever singularity, being-in-common, dissensus, the people who are missing, the cracks in capitalism, the multitude, communization, autonomy. The thing has ten thousand names and one referent, the being-together that no count can count, and not one of the ten thousand is a program or for anything beyond itself, which is their glory here and their undoing later. “Don’t consume Marx, live him.”

I have seen it at its best. September 17, 2011, and the two months after it: the unrepresented appearing in the street and occupying, with no identity to vindicate and nothing to demand but the taking-place. “Whose streets? Our streets!”28 It was politics in the strict sense, the disruption of the police and not the police, and if anything it would have benefited from more of the flag I carried. What percolated around its edges instead was the foam: two occupiers on Comedy Central demonstrating the hand signals to a host who had toured the park dressed as Che Guevara, the “temperature check” performed with wiggling fingers, the host asking who speaks for the movement, hearing “no one,” and nominating himself.29 The scene might have risen to a higher pitch had it been braced by theory rather than by what it was braced by, the little speeches in the middle of the event, the fingers twinkling up and down to vote on them, and Jeffrey Epstein associate, Noam Chomsky, who addressed the Boston camp that October and whose remarks became the movement’s first pamphlet.30 “Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.”

Those Who Make Revolutions Half Way Only Dig Their Own Graves

A Tedious Genealogy, with Dates

The core of what follows is borrowed, and I say so: a Brighton journal’s three-part history of the theory of capitalist decline, which showed that the theory of decadence was the theology of the workers’ movement, “the notion that capitalism must inevitably decline and, by implication, that history is on our side,” an “objectivist,” “fatalistic,” “contemplative” faith whose “passive and reactive conception of the working class” made the class the audience of its own apocalypse. When the movement died, the theology mutated instead of dying along with the movement.31

The critique of the citizen was born inside the movement, not against it: the Jewish-Question essay of 1843, the Manifesto of February 1848, the Commune of March 18 to May 28, 1871, “the biggest festival of the nineteenth century,” the First International of 1864 to 1876, the Second, founded in Paris in 1889 and dead on August 4, 1914, with the vote for war credits.32 The workers’ movement was at once the affirmation of labor and a critique of the citizen, and that double birth is the whole story in embryo. “Bureaucratic capitalism has found its legitimation in Marx.”33

What died was the classical workers’ movement as the affirmation of labor: seize the means, generalize the producer. Its theology guaranteed that capitalism was dying on schedule. The critique of the content of socialism came first, from Socialisme ou Barbarie: the enemy is not just property but bureaucracy; socialism is workers’ management of everything or it is nothing; the journal ran from 1949 to 1965, the group dissolved in 1967, having taught a generation that the official Left is part of the apparatus.34 On July 28, 1957, in the Italian mountain village of Cosio d’Arroscia, eight people out of three tiny avant-gardes founded the Situationist International.35 Define the spectacle in their words: “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”; “separation perfected”; the star “the enemy of his own individuality”; “In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.”36

May and June 1968: the largest general strike in the country’s history and, the situationists insisted, the first wildcat one, on the order of ten million, situationist graffiti on the walls, and then the punchline this whole “Substack” turns on: the sequence ends in a snap election. On June 23 and 30, 1968, the order the strike rose against wins an absolute majority in the National Assembly on its own, a first in the history of any French Republic. The ballot box buries the barricades, and the No is born here, not as a mood but as a lesson drawn from a fact. “Under the paving stones, the beach.”37 While the Paris strike dies at the ballot box, the Beijing revolution dies into the army: the last political sequence still internal to the party-state, dated November 1965 to July 1968, its “repressive inversion” beginning in September 1967, the experience that “saturates the form of the party-state” and, failing, teaches the militant minds of the whole world “the end of the party-state as the central production of revolutionary political activity.”38 Mass action can no longer be assigned to the logic of class representation, East or West. Italy’s long ’68 taught the same lesson over a longer war: Quaderni Rossi in 1961, the Hot Autumn of 1969, Potere Operaio from 1969 to 1973, Autonomia and the movement of ’77, and the state closing it with the arrests of April 7, 1979, among the arrested the professor of Padua (Negri) who would write the empire-book at which the milieu spends the next two decades spitting.39

In 1972 there is a strange double exit. The Situationist International dissolves itself in a book about its own split, theorizing defeat as diffusion.40 The same year, the ultra-left names the mutation: revolution is no longer the affirmation of the working class but its self-abolition, communization, immediate, no transition. “Communism is the self-abolition of the proletariat,” and programmatism, “the whole of that period of the class struggle of the proletariat” whose “immediate content” was “the increase in strength of the class within the capitalist mode of production and its affirmation as the class of productive work,” is over and is not coming back.41 In 1988 come the Comments, the sentence already quoted. From 1992 to 2008 the Marxist wing buries its dead. Aufheben in the autumn of 1992; the decadence trilogy from 1993 to 1995; the exchange with Théorie Communiste across 2003 to 2005; out of it, ex-participants found Endnotes in Brighton in 2005, and the first issue, in 2008, opens with an article called “Bring Out Your Dead.” The rigorous wing carries the corpse out with full honors and, by the account of the historian of the negative (Noys), with no answer on organization, on motivation, or on how any of it is ever won.42

While the ultra-left buried programmatism inside Marx, another line walked out of the workshop through the Heidegger door. Dated, and funny: in 1966 and 1968, while the other Italians his age chanted for Chairman Mao, the young philosopher of the coming community (Agamben) was in Provence, at René Char’s, doing seminars with the Black Forest sage (Heidegger) himself.43

A Nazi rector working his way into the heart of serious Left theory is the joke history tells with a straight face. The philosopher of shelteredness, of “Swabian rootedness, which is irreplaceable,” of “the false eternity of agrarian conditions,” becomes required reading for the children of the spectacle.44 The deeper piss-take is this: what Being had named for at least a thousand years is remembered now only well enough to be forbidden. “You can’t do that, bro, that’s a heckin’ onto-theology!” In the years the rector was writing what would become Left scripture, the one German-language document that named the person and the natural law against the divinized State came from the pulpit, in 1937. I’ll return to that document later.45

The post-situationist splice is dated too. Infancy and History in 1978, The Coming Community in 1990, Homo Sacer in 1995, Means without End in 1996. The spectacle is re-read as the expropriation not only of productive activity “but also and principally” of “language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus’s fragments identified as the Common,” and in the same breath, the positive possibility: “precisely because what is being expropriated is the very possibility of a common good,” the violence of the spectacle “is so destructive; but for the same reason the spectacle retains something like a positive possibility that can be used against it.” What the possibility consists in comes next: under the old regime the common was a presupposition serving as a foundation, and once it is separated into a sphere of its own and emptied until it reveals the nothingness of all things, nothing is left to presuppose, so that what appears in its place is “not this or that content of language, but language itself,” and the first citizens of “a community with neither presuppositions nor a State” would be whoever carried that emptying through to the end.46

February 1999 brings Tiqqun, issue one, and the subtitle off the cover reads: Conscious Organ of the Imaginary Party. Exercises in Critical Metaphysics. The flag announces itself as a metaphysics from its first cover. Issue two, October 2001: the zone of offensive opacity, the cybernetic hypothesis, and the group dissolves in the shadow of September 11.47 Then the appelliste sequence: the anonymous Call in 2004; The Coming Insurrection, La Fabrique, 2007; Tarnac, November 11, 2008; the terror designation dropped on August 7, 2015; the verdict of April 12, 2018, the cell a fiction; Glenn Beck on July 1, 2009, the spectacle completing its loop by selling the anti-spectacle as prime-time terror; To Our Friends, October 21, 2014; Now, April 2017. The diffusion west takes one clause: post-situationism and appelisme cross to Québec in the early 2000s and to the United States, with the international journal Liaisons from 2018.48

The milieu’s one constant ritual, from the refutation to the last book, is spitting at the empire-book and its author. The “ridiculous hope for a global democratic state” is “the ultimate goal of Negriism”; the palace walls of the old political philosophy are “left there, uninhabited, unusable for anything, to serve, for example, as a decoy for the dissenting herds of Negriism”; a whole section is titled “Refutation of Negrism,” in which Negrism “will step forward as the last possible socialism, cybernetic socialism,” the man himself is “a veritable disability, a tremendous human deformity,” and his best-known disciple is “Negri’s loyal dog.”49 Thirteen years on there is still “no shortage of ideologists, such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.”50 Why tf would they do that? The milieu’s own Italian critics saw what it was: “the I.C. has its bogeyman, the rival that obsesses its thoughts,” and “Toni Negri has been and has done everything that the I.C. would like to be and do.”51 Everyone in the room is trying to dismantle the same beast; the empire-book ends on St. Francis of Assisi and “the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist,” and the refutation quotes the ending in full, in order to sneer at “our suit-clad theologian.”52 The purity spiral is not a character flaw of the milieu but a necessity, and the flag does this every time it meets a friend.

It continues to this day, with no shame about becoming the caricature that has been made since at least Demons, where the conspirators at Virginsky’s vote on “whether we are a meeting or not,” the theorist of the group announces that “starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism,” and the plot arrives at the murder of a member for wanting to leave.53 The People’s Front of Judea will not be confused with the Judean People’s Front (“Splitters!”), and reads a statement at the foot of the cross instead of cutting the man down.54 The live version is whether the phrase is settler colonialism or white settler colonialism, one adjective, and the parties agree about the settlement, the colonialism, and what was done to whom. The narcissism of minor differences is the clinical term.55 Our own genealogy is made of it: of the seventy men and women who passed through the Situationist International, more than half were excluded, until two or three remained to dissolve it; and the First International expelled its anarchists at The Hague in September 1872 and died in Philadelphia four years later.56 The critiques of the tiqqunists themselves are the same sentence twenty-two years on, aimed one ring inward. “Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition.”

The destituent decade, destitution being the milieu’s word for deposing a power without constituting another, “desertion and attack, creation and wrecking, all at once, in the same gesture”:57 Occupy on September 17, 2011; the squares; Ferguson in 2014; Nuit debout in 2016; the yellow vests from November 2018; the George Floyd uprising of May 2020. Destitution goes worldwide as a gesture and produces nothing lasting that a program could name. The theory keeps pace, and so does the joke: the lecture on destituent power is delivered in Athens on November 16, 2013, to a party’s youth wing, the destitution of power sponsored by a party angling for power.58 The Use of Bodies closes the Homo Sacer series on it in 2014, and There Is No Unhappy Revolution gives it its communism in 2017.59

Then death and terminus, the flag pronounced dead in the American radical press in a single fortnight of October 2023: a lifelong member’s defection letter on October 2 (“we’ve created the exact terrible community that we sought to flee… the time has come to destitute our own terrible community”); the anarchist prosecution on October 9; the queer obituary on October 14, “Appellisme is dead! Long live Bash Back!”60 Then, on the record and in this order, the resurrection-language: the milieu’s own children begin writing communion where their fathers wrote community, a French book on the coming communion (2021), a collective named for anastasis, the Greek for resurrection (2025), and the Roman essay on resistance (Tarì) signed this May.61 The genealogy stops at that threshold and does not cross, though this “Substack” crosses it later. What the genealogy does first is deliver me, around the millennium, standing under a very specific flag.

Play to the Powers That Be Their Own Melody

The Same Wager, in My Own Hand

My flag came from the factory ripped.

Appelliste is an insult built from a text.62 Fine. I am a tiqqunist, a member of the Imaginary Party, assuming Bloom, the milieu’s name for “the man so thoroughly conjoined with his alienation that it would be absurd to try and separate them,” and I qualify by the obituary’s own figuring: “the experience of camaraderie around a text from the 2000s is old enough for those concerned to be around 45 years old today,” “a group of fallen forty-somethings,” “old anarchists living in the countryside,” “frustrated forty-year-olds.” I was forty-three when it ran; I am forty-six now. The same obituary concedes that “appellistes are the first antiappellistes,” which I will take as a license.63

Before I knew their names, my dissertation had found the thing they were describing. Control is negative feedback: the servo loop that measures its output and corrects toward the design, and the anti-aircraft predictor, unveiled in the war, in which “the pilot behaves like a servo-mechanism” and gunner, gun, and target are inscribed as servomechanisms within a single system, is the epoch’s founding apparatus.64 Their nearly identical diagnosis, written the same years, is the cybernetic hypothesis: “a political hypothesis, a new fable that after the second world war has definitively supplanted the liberal hypothesis,” which “proposes to conceive biological, physical, and social behaviors as something integrally programmed and re-programmable,” “today the most consequential anti-humanism,” which is not to be critiqued but “fought and defeated.”65 Nothing escapes the loop. Withdrawal, invisibility, and the void are state variables; “not even nothing remains beyond control”; Bartleby is detectable. The loop has since stopped waiting for its input, and preemption does not prevent an occurrence but effects it, acting on a future brought forward into the present, so that a diagnosis which began with a gunner and a target now runs on people who have not done anything yet.66

From one diagnosis come two exits in opposite directions, and theirs is subtractive: fog, opacity, panic, slowness, zones of offensive opacity. “Interference is the prime vector of revolt”; “fog makes revolt possible”; “we want more opacity and more intensity”; “panic makes the cyberneticians panic.”67 A third party named the other exit, in the same years and in the same vocabulary. The network theorists who gave us the word protocol, one of whom would put the milieu’s civil-war book into English, begin by refusing the consolation the whole milieu runs on: it is “foolish to fall back on the tired mantra of modern political movements, that distributed networks are liberating and centralized networks are oppressive,” and, flatly, “the mere existence of networks does not imply democracy or equality,” the swarm being “value free, useful for military, marketing, terrorism, activism and new forms of coercion.” A network is instead “a type of massive amplifier for action,” in which “something small can turn into something big very easily.” Then, my wager in their words: “the concept of resistance in politics should be superseded by the concept of hypertrophy”; “the goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go”; “we must scale up, not unplug”; “the best way to beat an enemy is to become a better enemy.”68 The value-free sentence is the second charge, printed in 2007 by the people most sympathetic to the move, and neither they nor I drew the conclusion. Mine was additive: not reserve but over-donation. It is “neither a question of mindless participation nor the willful holding of one’s potentiality in reserve”; “signals tend to reinforce themselves and grow larger”; “it is a question, then, of adding system output to system input such that the sum is itself input into and so ‘explodes’ the apparatus.”69 The motto came from the media theorist (Kittler), and I set it in the middle of the page:

“If ‘control,’ or, as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century, then fighting that power requires positive feedback. Create endless feedback loops until VHF or stereo, tape deck or scrambler, the whole array of world war army equipment produces wild oscillations of the Farnborough type. Play to the powers that be their own melody.”70

The dissertation’s summary of itself is one sentence with three names in apposition:

“Throughout, I have argued that the principle of positive feedback, beginning from where the danger comes, the free use of the proper, marks the best wager for politics in control societies.”71

The flag’s second Heidegger seam is sewn right here, and positive feedback is the media theorist’s. “Beginning from where the danger comes” is the poet’s line as the Black Forest sage read it, that where the danger is, the saving power also grows. “The free use of the proper,” der freie Gebrauch des Eigenen, is the same poet’s letter to a friend as the same sage read it and as the community-thinker took it from him: “the free use of the proper, as Nancy understands it, follows Heidegger’s original distinction between artwork and technology,” and “a community of singularities comes only by way of communication, if the latter term is defined as a free use of the proper.”72 The wager’s own name is a poem run through the Black Forest. The joke of the genealogy includes me and every other grad student who panted over sentences like “the Being of Dasein means ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world).”73

The wager was reached through exemplars, and the bet was that the treatlers’ own culture already carried the countertemporalities and the free use the flag wanted. Every character the last bourgeois reached for declines something: Odysseus at the mast with his rowers’ ears stopped, Juliette, Odradek on the stairs, Hamm and Clov in their bins, the flâneur, Bartleby at his wall, and the milieu’s own, whose name comes from Joyce and whose pedigree the theory of Bloom gives as ‘Jarry’s Sengle,’ ‘Michaux’s Plume,’ Pessoa, ‘The Man Without Qualities,’ ‘Bartleby,’ ‘Kafka.’74 The ones I reached for do crimes: Bill and Ted get out of the San Dimas police station by resolving that once the report is done they will take the time machine back to two days ago and leave the keys behind the sign, whereupon the keys are behind the sign, and the trash can Ted tells himself to remember comes down on the police-father there and then, the deed still owed. The quantum leaper who shares a name with the author of Endgame is the counter-Bartleby, “Oh boy” where Bartleby would prefer not to, “a passivity that everywhere effects,” and he never returns home.75 The reach was for the chaplinesque rather than for Hamm and Clov, and the music chapter ends on a punchline that turns out, given the apposition above, to be on me: “Who needs a development section or Hölderlin when there are distortion pedals?”76

All of it was anchored on the sinthome, and there is a version of this “Substack” that spends five pages on Lacan, the graduate-student-itis from which no one is immune. Two sentences survive the whole apparatus: anchor the signifier on its material remainder rather than on its meaning, and “something ungovernable will always emerge”77; and in the good pop song something almost certainly exceeds the mechanisms it is otherwise only reinforcing, though it does so as art, and a good song is an analogy for a good politics rather than a piece of one.

The paradigm was mine and stays mine. That wager already has its own “Substack,” my first, in which a song exceeds its standardization by affirming it and even the sympathetic critic files that as a determinate negation of recuperable negation; I will not re-argue it here.78

The nearly identical twin I had not read said the same thing from the other direction. “One truly frees oneself from something only by reappropriating that from which one is breaking free”; the assumption of Bloom is “a practice of the self as trickster,” “not struggling against the dominant schizoid state, against our schizoid state, but setting out from there.”79 Same door, opposite directions, and there is not one occurrence of any of them in the dissertation, a convergence.

The concluding chapter offers “some speculations,” and what it speculates is not Bartleby. The wager runs the other way, over-donation instead of reserve, hypertrophy instead of withdrawal, “donating more potentiality to potentiality than was there to begin to with.” The exemplars above show the shape of the thing. The quantum leaper is never present, seeing someone else in the mirror, remembered by nobody, amending history “from outside history”; Bill and Ted reach the police station from outside the sequence, and the trap is set in the past by a deed still owed in the future. The change happens and nobody is there as its author. That is a real improvement on preferring not to, and it buys nothing, since an act with nobody in it cannot be imputed, and what cannot be imputed cannot be ranked or praised or answered for. Withdrawal empties the person by subtraction, over-donation by addition, and the person is gone either way. Every charge in the next section is a version of that. The chapter half knows: the wager is conceded as a wager, “the best wager,” and twice hedged as “a more workable alternative,” and the evidence for the achronology is the ease with which children follow the achronology.80

Then, by 2017, the wager’s vocabulary was airport-bookstore melancholia: “being able not to be able,” eros “situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability,” the milieu’s own potentiality-not-to re-sourced to Levinas, in a bestseller with a foreword by the milieu’s senior philosopher, the same bestseller answering the praise of profanation with pornography.81 The flag had reached the gift shop. “Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.” I am tired of Bartleby and I have been for a long time.

At the End We Prefer Hillary Clinton

Eight Charges against the Milieu

Here are the eight charges against the milieu, and I bring them as one of the accused rather than as a spectator.

The first charge is stultification. The pedagogy that teaches the pupil “her own inability” “constantly confirms its own presupposition: the inequality of intelligence,” and “this endless confirmation is what Jacotot calls stultification.”82 The gnostic partition, assumers of Bloom, the pneumatikoi, on one side, and the Young-Girl, the hylikoi, on the other, repeats the schoolmaster’s logic to the letter. The description is not wrong: the Young-Girl is real and she is everywhere, thumbing her magazine “as though picking through the rosary of an unloved religion,” an image from 1999 that ten years of Instagram and TikTok have made literal.83 Being right about her is what makes the partition fatal, since a description that ends by calling its subject an imbecile cannot be addressed to her.

The second is the criterion: amplification is content-blind. Feedback intensifies whatever is in the loop, and nothing in the mechanism ranks the deserter over the rampage killer. The milieu’s best answer comes from its senior philosopher’s theory of the event, the unforeseeable break from which a truth and its subjects proceed: the true event convokes “the void of the earlier situation,” the simulacrum “its plenitude,” “the absolute particularity of a community, itself rooted in the characteristics of its soil,” and “the striking break provoked by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, although formally indistinguishable from an event,” which “is precisely” what “led Heidegger astray,” is a simulacrum because it “is faithful only to the alleged national substance of a people” and “addressed only to those that it itself deems ‘German.’”84 The concession is inside the answer: formally indistinguishable. The first issue of the journal canonizes a school shooter in print, “the Beautiful Gesture of Kipland Kinkel, exemplary Bloom by all accounts,” and rules that lamenting his victims “didn’t deserve to die” is inadmissible, “because they didn’t deserve to live, either.”85 The doctrine’s own text supplies the rampage killer, and passes the hylic verdict on the dead.

The third is that the delight does not discriminate. The book says it in its own voice: “we can’t help but delight in the fits of anger and disorder wherever they erupt,” and all the incivilities of the streets “should become methodical and systematic, converging in a diffuse, effective guerrilla war,” on a maxim borrowed from sabotage, “a minimum of risk in taking the action, a minimum of time, and maximum damage.”86 Wherever they erupt, since a distinction would require a criterion and there is none. I gave money to the orange man, not for the lulz or because I was in my Nick Land era but out of spite for what the party had just done to Sanders, and I could not then have told you why that was wrong. Nothing I was carrying ranked it below any other piece of maximum damage. A doctrine that cannot rank risings cannot forbid this one.

The fourth is real effects, and I will read my own sentences of 2009 back slowly. The goal is not rights but revolution; rights struggles feed the machine; “any viable campaign against capitalism” “must be political, that is, not economic, cultural, social, much less moral.”87 Delaney Hall: a thousand-bed detention hall on Doremus Avenue in Newark, a fifteen-year contract worth on the order of a billion dollars announced in late February 2025, a mayor arrested at its gate that May.88 The vote the reflex called beneath politics decided who runs that building. The second fact is the milieu’s own. At the ZAD, the zone à défendre at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, they dealt with the state, dismantled the zone’s own defenses on the barricade road as a gesture of good faith, and then brandished the outcome as a victory: the destituent gesture ending in negotiation, on their own most sacred ground, with the military police carrying out the eviction on April 9, 2018, anyway.89 My dissertation concedes in advance what the detention hall proves: the residues of sovereignty and discipline “swarm within” control, and the layer underneath is load-bearing for whoever stands there.90 “No replastering, the structure is rotten,” said the wall, and the building on Doremus Avenue is standing.

The fifth is the Hillary sentence. My GC calls itself a “utopian community of friends,” and the people in it are real: a Whitman-Merton-Eckhart-Zen wizard, a Yale guy who will not answer me about Skull and Bones, a Massignon man still working out the Badaliya, a Harvard philologist, sore about the monotonic reform, who would almost certainly puke if he were made to read this “Substack,” a proper communist, Left Caths, DSA and DSA-adjacent, and an unironic (maybe ironic?) watcher of Maddow and Chris Hayes, and so on. The grown-up libs among them are the ones telling the radicals in the chat to vote or get PEPFAR switched off. At the end of the day they are right, and the milieu’s senior philosopher, in November 2016, says so in a subordinate clause: all political oligarchy is less horrible than a new fascism, “so I understand perfectly that at the end we prefer Hillary Clinton,” but this difference is inside the same world.91 The whole metapolitics of fifty years arrives at the same lesser-evil arithmetic as the liberals it scolds, conceded, then revoked: “against Trump, we cannot desire Clinton.” He says the true contradiction was Trump against Sanders. That is where the streets of 2011 went, too: the park was cleared on November 15, 2011, and the energy of the taking-place arrived four years later as a primary campaign, the eruption filed as a voting bloc. The party apparatus made sure the contradiction never reached a ballot, and the former president told the prophet to his face: “Bernie, you are an Old Testament prophet, a moral voice for our party giving us guidance. Here is the thing, though. Prophets don’t get to be king.”92 So what politics is this, that scolds the vote all that time and then understands perfectly? Either the arithmetic matters, in which case the No, the refusal of the whole juridical apparatus, was overdrawn; or it does not, and there is no reason to prefer anything at the end. “Inside the same world” is the dodge: a preference you act on in the booth is the arithmetic, whatever world it is inside. “Masochism today takes the form of reformism,” said the wall, and the wall did not say what to do on the morning after.

The sixth is the material. One good thing about the old communists: they never had contempt for the material. The commissar came back from America in 1936 with ice-cream machinery and spent a career celebrating improvements in production; the premier of world communism was denied Disneyland in 1959 and threw a tantrum at the studio lunch: “Do you have rocket-launching pads there? … Then what must I do, commit suicide?”93 Calling the whole domain of goods spectacle implies that material improvements are beneath politics, animal-level, and the parody writes itself: would breaking up the big banks end the commodity form? The sentence it parodies was a real candidate’s argument, in the 2016 primary, against her rival’s one redistributive proposal.94 The Imaginary Party has the flavor of its decade, the 2000s, mass politics in total collapse. You need an imaginary party when you have no hope of a real one.

The seventh is that identity mobilizes, obviously, and I watched it happen in the sovereignty presence on campus at Mānoa, Dr. Haunani-Kay Trask and others, a nation standing against a state while the theory in one ear called the nation politically impotent. It is not a philosophical question when you are looking at it directly. The tradition folds in its own corrections: the community book exists because community-as-essence was the century’s most potent political force. Late in his life the community-thinker prints the sentence the community book could not have printed: peoples are primarily the exposing of singularity. The milieu’s senior philosopher, pressed, concedes that “no category is in itself blocked from its possible politicization,” that even “French” had “a progressive signification, that of anti-Nazi resistance,” when it was addressed from London, and that between the particularity “present in the practical, concrete support of any political process, and the statements in the name of which the political process unfolds,” “there is only a relation of support, but not a relation of transitivity.”95 My 2009 prospectus said of the civil rights movement that these “lesser peoples,” who had recourse to absolutely nothing within that situation which could prove otherwise, somehow impossibly managed to change everything.96 The era’s purest event chose to end in the franchise: rights, statutes, votes. Either the ending betrayed the event, or the contempt for the juridical residue is wrong.

The eighth is that the Left’s own flanks agree, and these are not liberals scolding. The Marxists convict the milieu of having no organization: an implicit teleology, a faith in accelerating struggles abstract and unconvincing against the material force of state and capital; a commune-versus-metropolis opposition that is false, the trains not to be repudiated but taken; the ontological trap, that suturing politics to a destiny of being turns every wrong into proof that only catastrophe can answer it; the book-length objection, printed by the milieu’s own publisher, that you do not live without institutions, police, money; a gap that is not yet a politics; a “political autonomy” that free-rides on the democracy it claims to refuse.97 The anarchists convict it of the reverse, a covert party: old ideas dressed “up in hot new language and aesthetics,” “composition” as fabricated consensus and “plain old authoritarian power,” opacity as deniability, the whole thing “an informal strain of authoritarian communism that looks like informal networks but acts like a party.”98 The oldest charge is the deepest and predates the Call by five years: written against the first issue of the journal in February 1999, “la Tiqqounnerie aime encore trop les messes pour admettre que ‘Dieu est mort’”; a decade later the same charge reads “spiritualisme, voire mysticisme, vision cyclique de l’histoire sur le mode de la décadence, du destin et de la résurrection, fusion des individus dans la communauté organique.”99 The French deflationist closes the pincer: the whole affair has “les contours d’un mythe,” the anti-appellistes are convicted of Leninism by mirror-effect, the object is too marginal to be the conspiracy either side needs, and “ce qui est hégémonique dans le champ culturel c’est malheureusement BFMTV et pas lundimatin, Houellebecq et pas le comité invisible.”100 Charged with no party by the Marxists, a secret party by the anarchists, a myth by the deflationists, and, by its own sympathetic archivist, with having built itself on opacity, on the no-face, so that even the historian who loves it must ask, “comment interroge-t-on les sans-visages?”101 How do you interview the faceless?

The oldest charge is also the one the milieu confessed to, in that same first issue. The journal names itself for the Lurianic tikkun, “a process, one of redemption, of the restoration of unity between meaning and life, the repair of all things by the action of human beings,” and it owns “its relatedness to messianic movements, millenarianisms, mysticisms, the heresies of the past or even with Christians before Christianity.”102 Its scripture is the theses on history, “a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim,” the angel blown backwards over “one single catastrophe,” “every second” “the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter,” and behind the theses the sketch that names the enemy as a cult: “Capitalism is probably the first case of a cult that produces guilt rather than atonement,” “a monstrous consciousness of guilt” that “reaches for the cult not to find atonement, but rather to make the guilt universal,” and “finally and above all to include God Himself in this guilt.”103 So the question was never religion or not but always which cult: the one that universalizes guilt without atonement, or the one that atones. The whatever singularity is lifted from “the Scholastic enumeration of transcendentals”; the doctrine of the modern State “explicitly secularizes one of the most fearsome operations of Christian theology: the one whose dogma is expressed by the Nicene Creed”; “the real model of every institution is universally the Church”; “the question of organization” “exists since those Bolsheviks of Late Antiquity, the Church Fathers”; the empire-book ends where we found it, on St. Francis; and the late masterwork finds its favorite medieval experiment in a form of life “through which the very life of Christ is made newly present in the world to bring to completion, not the historical meaning of the ‘person’ in the economy of salvation, so much as his life as such,” the life of Christ minus Christ.104

The anarchists put it with less patience and at more length than the one line of theirs quoted above. The gurus “manient ‘l’essence’ avec bouillie rhétorique comme d’autres jouaient auparavant de l’encensoir,” “toute la curetaille moderne,” promising “le paradis d’une transparence religieuse accompagné de pratiques mystiques à forte intensité,” the famous metaphysical experience in front of the bakery being “une extase en boulangerie, à défaut d’en avoir avec les boulangères elles-mêmes,” and, “en désespoir de cause, on rehausse le cadavre divin.” Later readers heard the insurrection “invoquée comme le faisaient quelques prêtresses de religions à mystères” and filed the whole thing under “philo-métaphysique-mystique : totalement indigeste.”105

Notice, too, that the anarchists run against the appellistes the very spiral the appellistes ran against the empire-book: the obituary of October 2023 is “Refutation of Negrism” turned on its authors. Every one of these objections is a variation on the seven above.

The eight are three. Charge one and charge eight are one failure of address, since a doctrine that sorts the world into those who see and imbeciles has nobody left to argue with, and no flank of the Left was ever brought to agree. Charges two through five are one failure of ranking, from the school shooter the doctrine cannot rank below the deserter to the detention hall the vote decided and the arithmetic conceded in a subordinate clause. Charges six and seven are one missing person, since material improvement is beneath politics only where there is nobody for whom it is good, and a nation is an impotent identity only where there is no people to be wronged. The purity spiral was the first sign of it, a politics with no person and no common good to measure against having no way to rank its neighbors except by purity, so that the nearest neighbor is always the enemy. The wager as I made it cannot say to whom it matters, why the rising is better than the ruin, or how any of it could be thought by someone who does not already agree. A rising that is for itself needs none of the three, which is the whole appeal of the answer, and a rising that is for itself also cannot be wronged.

The Very Possibility of a Common Good

A Philosophy So Old That It Looks like New

Recall the cover of Tiqqun, because the recovery has to start on their ground. The flag announced itself as critical metaphysics from its first issue, and I accept its reasons. There are “fragile moments when the bleating unreality of our world, which generally masks the sediments of habit under a compact layer of apparent concreteness, suddenly gushes forth, like a ghost flying out from some crumbling tomb: Absence.” “Nothingness has visibly taken up residence in the intimate depths of things and beings, and the smooth surface of spectacular appearances is cracking everywhere as a result of its growth.” The example given is a bakery. The journal “exposes the cracks in the world of homogeneity.”106 Its definition is precise. Metaphysics is “in no way something abstract, because it is the basis for all concreteness; it’s what stands behind the physical and makes it possible”; it is “experience as experience”; “man is a metaphysical animal,” and “human beings physically wilt when they negate their metaphysical” dimension.107 The hinge is verbatim: “The critique of the Spectacle is either metaphysical or not a critique at all. And it must be explicitly metaphysical, or else it will turn against itself and reinforce the Spectacle.” Our era is “furiously metaphysical.”108 I agree. Politics and everything else is downstream from metaphysics.

Their metaphysics I refuse, and in their own five sentences. Critical Metaphysics “feels no regrets about helping” the “steady undermining successfully carried on by nihilism for five centuries”; “its watchword is: GENERALIZE DISQUIET”; “by starting from nothingness,” it “creates a truer, more compact, and looser fullness than the apparent fullness of the Spectacle: the fullness of dereliction, the absoluteness of disaster”; it “is the doctrine of transcendence which alone permits a liberation from and annihilation of this world”; it “affirms itself as the determined negation of commodity domination.”109 A metaphysics whose fullness is dereliction cannot rank a rising above a ruin, since a ruin is fuller of dereliction than a rising.

Looking for cracks is not a metaphysics but a phenomenology of absence, and a metaphysics worthy of the word involves being, what it is for anything to be at all, that beings are. The book in front of me now opens with it: “To be is to be intelligible: on this law hangs all being and all thinking”; the claim “is constitutive of metaphysics itself, as the thinking of being and the only alternative to nihilism”; form is act; being is said by analogy; and “that metaphysics leads to divinity is not an accident of history but is intrinsic to the very enterprise of metaphysics,” since God, as the cause of existence to all things, is “in all things, and innermostly,” for the reason that he is not a being among beings.110

You hunt for cracks when you have decided in advance that being is not there to be thought, and five centuries of nihilism, “no regrets,” decided that. Our education, mine included, began with the French of the sixties and read backward from them: Descartes as the cogito that excluded the madman in a quarrel of 1963, Kant as the Kant of the difference-books, St. Thomas as a rumor, the schoolmen as the thing the moderns were congratulated for escaping. We learned the moderns as the villains of a story told by their great grandchildren and never met the people they were escaping. Reading the being-book is reading in the right order for the first time.

The reason indicted in the enlightenment book is the philosophes’ instrument; the schoolmen’s ratio is “a name for the entire rational nature of man: as, ‘Reason is man’s nature.’”111 The individual of the rights of man, the egoistic monad of the Jewish-Question essay, the atom that counts one, is the Enlightenment’s; the schoolmen’s individual is an instance of a species, “matter marked by quantity” for the Thomists, “thisness” for the Scotists, and their singular exceeds it, and its proper names were person and suppositum.112 The milieu’s “singularity” is a scholastic term with the schoolmen filed off.

This is not a return to the manuals as if the last four centuries had not happened, throne and altar restored and the critical turn unread. The line I am on is in the control essay itself, which allows that older methods, “borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications.”113 The best of the neo-scholastics reckoned with modernity rather than wishing it away: the Jesuit who found in St. Thomas an intellectualism the moderns had missed (Rousselot), the one who read him through Kant’s critique (Maréchal), the personalists who wrote against liberalism and against the throne at once (Maritain, Mounier), the one who carried the same line into the rector’s own seminars and came back with the Vorgriff, the reach toward being without limit inside every act of knowing a limited thing, which leaves man a hearer of a word that may never come (Rahner), the Dominican who read St. Thomas with Wittgenstein and Marx (McCabe), and the philosopher who answered Nietzsche’s genealogy with three rival versions of moral enquiry and chose tradition with genealogy’s lessons learned (MacIntyre).114 The modifications are necessary. “Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.”

The effacement of the person runs on two lines that meet. The older line, from the Black Forest through the milieu, subtracts the person into “language”: where the tradition said Logos, and logoi, the reasons in things, the milieu says language, form-of-life, whatever singularity. The political line is the Nietzschean genealogist’s (Foucault), and 1966 is its hinge. The Order of Things closes on man as “an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end,” to be “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea,” and notice that the erasure arrives as “some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility”: the milieu’s own category making its debut as the thing that wipes the face.115 After that the demolitions go deeper than the rights-of-man “man”: the soul as “the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body,” a soul “which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint”;116 the carnival of masks where “nothing in man, not even his body, is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition”;117 and the late formula that negates the old definition term for term, the subject “is not a substance. It is a form.”118 Three datings converge on 1966: The Order of Things in April, the first Le Thor seminar in early September, the Spiegel interview on the twenty-third of the same month. The milieu inherited the interdict as a presupposition and never argued the point: “I first understood homo sacer after reading Foucault’s biopolitics.”119

Concede the history and keep the question, because the genealogy of a concept does not settle whether anything corresponds to the concept. The soul the genealogist treats as a modern police-product has older and stranger names than the one he prosecutes: in Hebrew, nephesh, breath and throat and appetite, not a part of a man but the man insofar as he is alive, a word used of animals too; in the schools, something else again, the Aristotelian soul, form of the body, dogmatized as such in 1312, so that a soul without its body is an incomplete thing and wants it back.120

To test the older line, I ran an experiment. Thirty sentences from the philosopher of the coming community, with “language” replaced by “Christ.” Nineteen become well-formed classical theology with one noun changed: the Word as the Common of humankind, “that logos which one of Heraclitus’s fragments identified as the Common,” which is roughly how the second-century apologist who counted Heraclitus among the Christians before Christ read the same word; the Word as the exemplar in which each thing is itself; the revelation whose only content is the Revealer.121 The rest strain or break, and the breakage is not random: every outright failure occurs at the person. “Communication without the incommunicable” fails because the tradition defines the person as the incommunicable; a language “no longer” referring “to any Voice” fails for the same reason, since a voice is someone; existence “without being called there by any Voice” fails again on the someone who calls. The transposition runs perfectly until it reaches the one word it was built to avoid.122 Once the mask slips altogether: the essay on the idea of language says that the radical alterity of revelation is what “Christian theologians express by saying that the sole content of revelation is Christ himself, that is, the Word of God,” and then continues, in its own voice, about “a truth that concerns language itself.”123 The milieu’s “language” is not a metaphor for the Logos but its continuation under interdict, a Word held as Common, as Name, as anything but someone, a Logos that never takes flesh, hence no person.

The giveaway is the apostle, the event’s exemplar, “a poet-thinker of the event,” “a Lenin for whom Christ will have been the equivocal Marx,” and the gospel is waved away in one disclaimer sentence: “Let us be perfectly clear: so far as we are concerned, what we are dealing with here is precisely a fable.”124 The Hegelian (Žižek) makes the third, and PROVES it the Hegelian way, with FACTS and LOGIC: the frame stands without any faith at all, what dies on the Cross is “the God of beyond itself,” the Spirit is “the community of believers” and nothing besides, “theologians are the only true atheists,” and “materialists are the only true believers.”125 It is one operation in three hands: the first keeps the Logos and declines the flesh, the second keeps the apostle and declines the gospel, the third keeps the Cross and declines the God who hangs on it, and what is subtracted every time is the one thing that could be wronged. The machinery is Pauline, and only the person is declined.

The tradition they raid has a canon forbidding the third move by name, the claim that the mysteries can be reasoned out rather than revealed, which is the whole labor of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, where the Trinity is deduced as the Concept dividing itself into Father, Son and Spirit, and the Incarnation as the necessity that the idea appear once, in a single man: “If anyone says that in divine revelation there are contained no true mysteries properly so-called, but that all the dogmas of the faith can be understood and demonstrated by properly trained reason from natural principles: let him be anathema.”126 Bad Catholic! His own best line concedes the structure is “the ‘leap of faith,’” “with no ironic distance, no fingers crossed.”127

The recovery I have in mind is a metaphysics of the person, with persons, and not a theological text; the person is native to metaphysics before theology arrives. The old definition sits in a philosophy dictionary: “an individual substance having a rational nature,” “an individual intellectual substance that is complete in itself, uncommunicated, and existing for itself,” and, in its second sense, “the name of unique human dignity.” Beside it sits the principle of predication, actiones sunt suppositorum: “actions belong to supposita,” “the man sees rather than his eyes.”128 That principle answers the criterion the charges demanded as a metaphysical need: no person, no one to whom the rising or the shooting can be imputed. That is half of the criterion, the who, and the first of the three things the charges said the wager could not say, to whom it matters. The ranking comes below, with privation. The metaphysics of the person is what can be thought by anyone.

On Passion Sunday, March 14, 1937, composed in German and read from the pulpits of the Reich the following Sunday, Mit brennender Sorge, with burning anxiety said: “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power,” “whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God”; “none but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion”; and, in one paragraph, both of the words the event-theory lacks: “man as a person possesses rights he holds from God, and which any collectivity must protect against denial, suppression or neglect,” rights being, for the schoolmen, not the individual’s claims but ius, the just thing itself, the object of justice, as their ratio is not the instrument,129 and “the natural law, written by the Creator’s hand on the tablet of the heart,” “which reason, not blinded by sin or passion, can easily read.”130 The hedges are real and I make them. It came four years after the Concordat and is framed as a complaint about a broken treaty; it never names Hitler, the party, or National Socialism; it “neither mentioned nor criticized anti-Semitism per se”; it defends the Church’s schools and youth before it defends anyone else, and its complaint about the compulsory state youth organizations comes down to sport on the Lord’s day. You can have your Hitler Youth meetings, just not during Sunday Mass. The draft that would have named the thing directly, commissioned in 1938, was never issued.131 It came late, it came with calculus, and it may have been prophetic only in the sense that a prophet is not a king, so the point is narrower than praise. In those same years the schoolmen’s person and the schoolmen’s ratio were the instruments with which the divinized State was named for what it was, by the criterion the event-theory concedes it does not have.

When I say reason, it invokes the philosophes: deism, powdered wigs, the goddess Reason enthroned in Notre-Dame by decree. That reason was indicted from the Left long ago: “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”; “enlightenment is totalitarian”; reason “the organ of calculation, of planning; it is neutral with regard to ends.”132 The indictment convicts formalized reason, and the book that made it keeps determinate negation and calls for a positive concept of enlightenment. The schoolmen’s reason is a nature and an end, prudence and conscience, and there is the third thing the charges said could not be said, how any of it reaches someone who does not already agree. What I mean by reason, then, is older than the public square and not procedural. The Parmenidean law quoted above governs here too, the same is for thinking as for being, so intelligibility is not a standard the intellect brings to things but the way things stand, and thinking is the intellect’s share in that. Reason in that sense is not a method for settling arguments among citizens but what makes there be anything to settle, and the universality is in the object rather than in the convening of a public. What is the case is thinkable, which is why it can be thought by anyone, and a doctrine that begins by denying that is left with force, or with a partition between those who see and imbeciles.

The apostle’s politics is the messianic line, a coming that must never arrive, the narrow gate, the à-venir, “he who comes, that is, he who never ceases to come,” and its metaphysics is the impersonal: “Ce qui est sacré, bien loin que ce soit la personne, c’est ce qui, dans un être humain, est impersonnel.”133 The milieu’s children stopped subtracting and wrote communion for community: “the principle of communion is opposed to the state principle: the more the State grows, the more singularities are reduced; the more communion grows, the more singularities surge up”; the parish, from paroikia, “the sojourn of a foreigner,” the lecture’s own word; and the word they chose for uprising, anastasis, “the word which, in Greek, designated insurrection,” “the uprising, which surges up without being expected.” “If all power comes from God, the thrones are empty.”134

With the old metaphysics comes the other half of the criterion, the ranking, and it is metaphysics, not revelation: evil is privation, “a sort of absence of good”; every privation is founded in a subject that is a being, so every evil is founded in some good; evil is recognized precisely by the inapplicability of the questions of form and finality, no formal cause, no final cause.135 Under the event alone, no criterion internal to the rising distinguishes the martyr from the murderer. Under privation it is sayable: the school shooter’s act is unmaking all the way down, whatever he wanted he wanted under the aspect of some good, and the act itself has no form and no end of its own, only the absence of the order it destroys; the civil rights rising participates in the good it demands, a rising that is a rising-again, the destitution of death and not of life, and the good it demands is the common good below, which is why the two concepts arrive together. What made Birmingham not Thurston is, at last, a statement with a truth-value, and only in this grammar.

Hovering over all of it, refused as reactionary nonsense and not silenced, is the sentence from the interview of September 23, 1966, published the week of its speaker’s death ten years later: “Only a God can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a God, or for the absence of a God in the decline.”136 Is that where this lands? Singing to the trace of a fugitive God?137

The phrase nobody came back for was in the milieu’s own scripture: what the spectacle expropriates is “the very possibility of a common good.” The very possibility of a common good requires a concept of the common good, the good of a whole that its members share without dividing, the end for the sake of which the schoolmen defined law itself as “an ordinance of reason for the common good,” and the concept requires the other two, a person to whom the good is good and a reason that can say so to someone who does not already agree.138 There is the second thing the charges said could not be said, why the rising is better than the ruin. The milieu refused itself all three, on principle, in its first issue, and then spent twenty-five years surprised by the silence that followed.

The people who went back for the phrase are the children of the milieu, and they went back without crossing into the properly theological. The coming-communion book argues the person before any theology lands, by the negative way the Yes always promised and never delivered, not the species-member, not the individual, not the citizen: the notion of person “does not designate the member of the human species, nor the individual, nor the citizen”; the person is “inalterable: one can observe its birth or its death but not its alteration, for there are no men or women who would be more or less persons”; “the notion of person refuses every definition of man that submits him to a power, for power always begins by counting men, which presupposes having defined them beforehand”; and politics is “service to the poorest and the universal common good.”139 The Roman essay of this May names the enemy as “the possessive individual who, over the centuries, has become more and more individual and more and more possessive against the person and the common good.”140

The same Dominican whom a friend of mine, half joking, calls the founder of Red Thomism argued the politics on reason alone: “if I think (as I do) that all my fellow Catholics should support a socialist immediate programme, it is not because I am a Catholic but because I am a socialist,” and the review the milieu’s children publish, this August, takes his side, Christians in the revolutionary struggle “alongside atheist militants and on a basis independent of biblical revelation,” “not as Christians” but “quite simply as human beings created by God,” “political animals capable of justice in virtue of our rational nature, which grace perfects without destroying it,” on a natural law “knowable by all from our simple rational humanity.”141

The line between that and the properly theological is one the tradition draws itself, and it is the line of revelation: what reason can know from created things on one side, the mysteries “which, unless they are divinely revealed, are incapable of being known” on the other. The person, the common good, and reason are on the first side, the Resurrection is on the second, and this “Substack” claims only the first. Scholars, said the peasant-aphorist of the Catholic Worker (Maurin), took the dynamite of the message, “wrapped it up / in nice phraseology, / placed it in an hermetic container / and sat on the lid”; what is under the lid is “not a new philosophy / but a very old philosophy, / a philosophy so old / that it looks like new.”142

The coming-communion books and the new personalists are Christians addressing Christians, even where the argument itself, as we saw, runs on reason alone. The book opens “as Catholics”; the manifesto addresses itself “to all persons open to the idea that the fight for justice can accord with religious faith”; the Protestant anarchist has “no proselytizing aim,” because faith “is not a privilege” but “an additional commission,” and offers the unbeliever “the same battle from the same standpoint, though with no confusion or illusion.” The difference is in the word commission, since a privilege is held over a man and a commission is only laid on him, so the supernatural addition falls outside the political argument altogether and lands as extra weight on the one who has it, and the believer who takes his seriously owes the unbeliever more than the unbeliever will ever owe him.143 The one exception argues the politics on natural reason alone, Red Thomism. Whether that exception carries is an open question.

You Can’t Do That To People

What the Rising Is For

Reaction, oligarchy, management, and police gather in force. Politics in the strict sense, the disruption of the police, keeps happening anyway: the park in 2011, the squares, the uprising, the crowd at the gate of the detention hall. The tanks still come out, and the eruption still erupts. Neither fact cancels the other, and neither has moved us toward a program. “Our hope can come only from the hopeless.”

I take the most recent example. The encampments of spring 2024 were politics in the strict sense, the part with no part appearing where it was not counted, and they were also the one thing the doctrine forbids, because they made a demand. Divestment: specific, addressed, grantable, and refused. Making it is what made them legible, and being legible is what made them defeatable, which is their argument and not mine, conceded, and the count did the rest in the ordinary way, by trustees and administrations and donors and police at dawn. I say they were good, which I cannot say without the concept of good, and I say it anyway.

The thing they were about, Gaza, went on, and is going on. I have no standing here: I know it the way everyone I know knows it, through a phone. What I can report from that distance is only what happens to the vocabulary. Nothing in this “Substack” is adequate to what is happening, and, indeed, in the face of it, all of this is pretty ridiculous, the taxonomies and the ten thousand names, the airport book about being able not to be able and the trash can on fire.

But there is a test for inadequacy. A theologian I have been reading imagines a father reciting the names of his drowned children in descending order of age, and says that only a moral cretin would offer him an explanation.144 If we would think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say a thing in the moment when another’s sorrow is most real, then we ought never to say it at all.

This, of course, applies to everything I have been talking about. Say it to that father: your child was a whatever singularity, his death is a crack in capitalism, generalize your disquiet, the fullness of dereliction, the absoluteness of disaster, and so on. Then the last one, which is not my parody but the journal’s own sentence, printed in its first issue about children shot at a school in Oregon and never withdrawn since: they didn’t deserve to live, either.

But along the other line, merely an acknowledgment, maybe even left unsaid: it was evil.

That is all, and I want to be exact about its smallness, that it stops nothing. It has no policy in it and no organization and no next step, above all, it is not offered as a consolation. What it does is refuse to put the thing to work, whereas every doctrine in the preceding thirty pages puts the thing to work. Decadence makes the collapse a stage, and the event makes the break the condition of a truth. The ontological trap makes every wrong into proof that nothing but catastrophe can answer. The angel of history files it under one single catastrophe with a redemptive index, and the Hegelian makes the Cross come out of necessity. Privation alone assigns it nothing: no formal cause, no final cause, nothing owed to it, nothing recovered from it, an absence of the good that should have been there and no more. What fails is every attempt to make it mean.

That is the whole recovery: a person, so that there is someone for a rising to be for and someone to whom a wrong is done, since a whatever singularity cannot be wronged and what cannot be wronged cannot erupt against a wrong but can only occur, like weather; a common good, so that one order can be worse than another and acting on the difference is rational rather than betrayal; a reason, so that any of it can be thought by somebody who does not already agree, the difference between a politics and a milieu. Even the objection runs the same way: if a wrong is a différend, one that cannot be put in the idiom of the court that would judge it, saying so is still an argument in a shared idiom, addressed to someone who does not yet agree, and the man who explains why the case cannot be heard has just held the hearing.145 The milieu is what died. That is not a program but what a program would have to be for, and for twenty-five years we refused ourselves all three and then wondered why we could not say what a rising was for. So we are back to older methods, with the necessary modifications. Fifty years of theory, and the sentence I end on is one that any person says without being taught, which is the dogmatic image of thought entire, everybody knows, the good will, the upright thinker recognizing what was given him to recognize, and I plead to the whole indictment: “you can’t do that to people!”146

[I used a clanker to draft & proofread this “Substack”.]

Notes

In Chronos, the duration of production, only the present exists. It is the duration of bodies and causes. Every present is contained in a more extensive present, a folding series of presents that terminates in a present comprehending and complicating all the others at once.2

In Aion, the duration of expression, no present exists.3 It is the duration of incorporeal effects, which neither act nor are acted upon but insist. Every present is divided by an instant without thickness or extension into past and future, a division that terminates nowhere.

The two durations are joined: the bodies and causes of Chronos produce events, i.e., incorporeal effects, and these events, once produced, are linked among themselves by quasi-causes along the empty line of Aion, indifferent to the bodies and causes that produced them.4

The thirteenth-century taxonomy, by contrast, distinguishes durations by the mutability of the being whose durations they are. Eternity is the duration of Being Itself, immutable in both existence and operation; aeviternity (the aevum) is the duration of a being immutable in existence and mutable in operation; and time is the duration of a being mutable in both.5 The principle here is grammar, not authority: a duration is always the duration of some being, and takes its kind from the mode of being of its subject.6

Within this taxonomy, Chronos is not one duration but two. At its lower bound it is time: the corporeal present that measures out the movement of bodies and causes. At its upper bound it is eternity: the present that complicates past and future at once, a bound The Logic of Sense refers to Boethius, whose famous definition of eternity it is: interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio, the whole, simultaneous, and perfect possession of unbounded life.7 But in a metaphysics where only bodies exist and incorporeal effects insist on the surface, every presence must be corporeal, and a present more immanent to itself than a bodily present is inadmissible.8 Moreover, these presents can be graded only by magnitude, and so time is folded into eternity.

Again, within this taxonomy, Aion is the middle duration under its own name, i.e., aevum is nothing but the Latin form of aiōn.9 But where, e.g., St. Bonaventure counts as many aeva as there are aeviternal beings, each receiving its whole existence at once and holding it, the aevum of The Logic of Sense is the duration of no being at all: events insist on it, but nothing endures there, and nothing receives or holds anything.10 For in a metaphysics where persons are late products of an impersonal field, a duration that is a person’s duration is inadmissible, since its receiver and possessor would have to precede its own production. Durations belong to no one, and so the aevum is retained but emptied.

Both commitments are principled. They would guard becoming against being, and the event against the constituting subject, and nothing here is careless. But the thirteenth-century grammar is not foreign to The Logic of Sense either, and its two clauses are broken in order.11 Every duration is the duration of some being, and takes its kind from its subject’s mode of being. Chronos keeps the first clause and breaks the second: it is read off bodies and causes, but it grades every presence by magnitude, refusing the difference in kind that its own upper bound requires. The emptied aevum breaks both: a verb with no subject, duration left in the infinitive, where St. Bonaventure conjugates an aevum for each aeviternal being.12

Each operation forecloses what it was intended to secure. Since presents differ only in magnitude, nothing at Chronos’s lower bound, which is to say in time, ever ceases, and so nothing there ever passes: every present is conserved in a more extensive present, and before and after, the differentia of time, become merely apparent, real relative to a lesser present, unreal in being.13 Since the emptied aevum, “the barren infinity of the aion,” belongs to no one, nothing anywhere holds its being whole: self-presence, i.e., immanence, becomes impossible in principle, and the surface’s population, sense, events, problems, are the acts of an intellect retained after intellect has been disallowed.14 The result is a philosophy of immanence in which nothing is fully present to itself or to anything else, i.e., in which what is least immanent is held up as pure immanence.

The thirteenth-century grammar forecloses nothing here. It has a form for everything the two durations were built to secure: a present that passes, because bodies change, and a present that is perfectly possessed, i.e., pure immanence, because Boethius’s definition is the definition of a life.15 Between these two, moreover, it has the aevum, a whole existence received at once and held, which is a more possessed, and in that sense a more immanent, duration than the surface ever offered. What the grammar has, and The Logic of Sense lacks, is a measure; it admits of degrees of immanence, and The Logic of Sense knows this in practice, since it grades everything by intensity and decides, in advance, where immanence comes to an end.16 But a plane cannot state its own gradient. A gradient belongs to a function, and on a level surface it either vanishes or points away. Immanence taken seriously is not a plane to occupy but a perfection, had by degrees, and the ranking principle is simple.

Immanence is measured at the operation: a being is immanent to the degree that its operation begins within it and completes itself there.17 Bodies set the floor of the scale, and not by anyone’s decree. A body is a being whose parts stand outside its parts, each impenetrable to each, none holding any other; and matter, taken itself by itself, is not even that, but only pure potentiality, with no look of its own, able to become the other only by ceasing to be itself.18 No body is matter alone (i.e., every body has a look), but what changes in a body changes on matter’s account. The direction of the scale is set by knowing, or rather by what knowing manages that nothing corporeal can: in knowing, a being becomes the known while remaining itself, and can return upon its own act and possess that too. Human intellect does this by fragments: to reason is to assemble, a little at a time, what cannot be seen all at once, though judgment by connaturality (the chaste, e.g., who know chastity by what they themselves are, or the native speaker, who knows the ungrammatical sentence by ear and not by rule) already takes a shorter way.19 An intellect without matter takes no fragments at all: an angel, a separated human soul. Nothing here turns on whether such beings exist; the degree is defined by its measure, not by its examples. The angel receives itself whole at the first instant and holds itself unchangeably, and, held whole, it holds more than itself: the more immanent a being, the more of the other it can receive and hold, and the angel is no windowless monad but the widest window.20 Stone, tree, man, etc.: angelic intellects possess their intelligibility exhaustively and at once, deeper in things rather than farther from them, and this is what it is to be in the aevum rather than in time. Nothing about the scale suggests that it stops there, and at its limit is not the most extensive present, the outermost circle in which every present is folded, but Being Itself, whose act of understanding is its very being: life without remainder, pure immanence. Nor is this a stillness, for determinacy toward the other is more dynamic than any motion of change, let alone chaos, could ever be.21 The scale is what anyone finds who asks of each being how much of itself it receives and holds.

Read the taxonomy again with the measure in hand, and it stops being a taxonomy: a duration is how much of its being a thing has at once. The body, whose parts are outside its parts and whose acts are outside its acts, has itself only in a vanishing present; its duration is time, existence spent as fast as it is acquired. The aeviternal being receives its whole existence at the first instant and holds it; nothing of it lapses, and nothing of it is still owed; only its operations succeed one another, and so a discrete succession is annexed to a standing wholeness. Boethius’s definition names the far end of the scale, and its grammar did not escape St. Thomas: Boethius wrote possession, not duration, because duration implies distension, and what is possessed is what is held peacefully and entire.22 The three durations, then, are three grades of immanence. Time is possession always partial; the aevum is possession whole but received; eternity is possession whole and unreceived, identical with its possessor.23 The taxonomy was never merely a classification of durations, and it is, in other words, the doctrine of degrees of immanence, written in the margin of the doctrine of being.

From the Sentences on, the angel comes first, and the human is expounded after, by comparison.24 The concept, like the symbol and the dialectic after it, is what immanence looks like when it must be assembled rather than received; the concept is a prosthesis, but prostheses presuppose the limb.25 Pure intuitives possess at once, each according to its nature, what human intellect pursues through the laborious multiplication of acts.26 Transpose the rule to duration, and the order of explanation reverses. Time is not the self-evident base from which the aevum is a departure; time is what standing wholeness looks like in a being too exterior to itself to receive itself whole, and fragmentation and succession are, then, the signatures of partial possession. Plotinus’s example is the composer and the audience: the whole the composer knows at once, the audience must take part by part, and the part-by-part hearing is not a second piece of music but the same piece, had in the mode of a hearer who cannot hold it whole.27 St. Thomas points the same way from his side when he illustrates eternity and time by the difference between understanding and reasoning: the conclusion understanding sees at once, discursive thought must walk toward. The rule scales: Gabriel exhausts Gabrielity at the first instant; nothing of that nature is left over for a second Gabriel or a later one.28 The individual human never exhausts humanity, but unfolds it act by act, in the shadow of space and time, and the unfolding is what we call a history. Even so, the unfolding is shot through with foretaste: by intuition and by connatural knowing, we participate in aeviternal life, and the poem or the face or the musical piece that gives us a concrete individuality whole and at once is time’s foretaste of the aevum.29 We do not build the angel’s duration up from ours by addition; we read ours off the angel’s by privation, as a fragment is read from the statue.

Nothing on the surface has to go. Sense, events, and problems were never the problem, and the problem was the subtraction of the beings whose acts they are. Undo the subtraction, and the two clauses mend in the order they broke: every duration is again the duration of some being, each again takes its kind from its subject’s mode of being, and the surface’s population, sense, problems, the instant that runs its line, returns piece by piece as the act of some intellect, so that the middle duration takes its subject again. What was lost in the emptying can now be said clearly: the aevum is more immanent than time, because a being that receives and holds its existence whole is more present to itself than a being that is mutable in its existence. It is less immanent than eternity, because its wholeness is received. Nor does the scale fold its terms like nested containers. The Logic of Sense pictures Chronos as an encasement of presents, with eternity as the extreme circle or the external envelope, and rejects the picture rightly. But the thirteenth century’s own figure for eternity was not the outermost circle but the center, equally immanent to every point of the circumference, and a center is not a bigger circumference.30 Presence is graded here by kind and not by magnitude, which is what saves the grading from being a hierarchy of size. Durations are said of their subjects as being is said of beings, proportionally, each in the mode of its holder. A body’s present, an angel’s wholeness, and the pure immanence that Being Itself possesses, or rather, is, do not conjugate in one voice, and the thirteenth-century grammar never pretended they did.31

The reversal of Platonism was principled, and it was carried through to the last consequence. But I hold it to its own standard. A philosophy that set out to affirm divergence and disjunction as such delivered the minimum: chaos, becoming, bodies, and a duration without immanence.32 The thirteenth-century taxonomy, graded by the measure The Logic of Sense uses and cannot state, affirms more. It gives the body its passing present, i.e., change; it gives the aeviternal being its standing wholeness (its aevum, its immanence), received and held from the first instant and troubled by no clamor; and it finds at the summit not a totality but perfect possession, pure immanence, life so fully had that nothing of it waits.33 If immanence is what we want, the aevum is its creaturely share: aeviternal life.34 The Logic of Sense names the duration correctly and gives it no subject. The tradition it inverts gives that duration its subjects, as many aeva as there are aeviternal beings, each holding its being whole. What was there was never a taller hierarchy but more difference, more immanence.35

[I used a clanker to draft & proofread this “Substack”.]

Agnès Gayraud’s Dialectic of Pop runs four hundred and seventy pages, and near the end of it there is a footnote quoting an email I sent to Ariel Pink in 2006. The argument I make in it is that a pop song can exceed its standardization by way of affirming that standardization, that is, by being too much a pop song, and that where any negation gets bought and sold, this excess would not. Gayraud quotes the thing at length, and then in a closing sentence she files it: the affirmation, she says, is precisely a determinate negation of recuperable negation.1

She is not being unkind, and I am glad to have earned a place in the footnotes. She is not wrong about where the gesture sits, either. She is doing what the dialectic the book works in requires, which is that when something in pop looks as though it has escaped, one shows where it stands in relation to the dialectic, and the escape closes. The email lists what gets standardized: song form, centricity, an invariant metrical grid. Her fourth chapter tests pop’s material under the first two of those, in that order, and then under a third of her own, the colors of the sound. We are looking at the same object, then, which is why the correction is worth answering rather than shrugging off, and I have not written anything in twelve years, so it is probably time.

I want to say that the escape was never dialectical, and that saying so is not a defense of a screed I wrote in my twenties but the only way I know to get at this music. The question under the footnote is worth more than the footnote. I had, in any case, stopped describing it that way long before she wrote Dialectic of Pop; by the end of a dissertation on control societies the term I was using was “positive feedback,” which comes out of engineering. Either postwar popular music has a singular truth, a truth immanent to the works, in that it is nowhere but in their effects, and singular, in that it circulates into no other register, or else it is merely a symptom, and thinking about it means reading the symptom. Nearly everything serious written about pop that I have read assumes the second, the writing that likes pop included. This “Substack” assumes the first, and tries again to name the truth of this music. Condemnation and celebration are one operation with the sign reversed: the demystifier reads the symptom and finds the commodity and class position, the poptimist reads the same symptom and finds representation and empowerment. The importance always belongs to another register, and both agree that the truth of the track is somewhere other than the track.

A word about the object: when I say pop I mean the whole procedure that runs from Berry through the Beatles and the Sex Pistols to whatever was made this week on a laptop. In the dissertation I called all of it punk music, which was a mistake in every practical sense. “Postwar popular music,” although it is a mouthful, is what I generally say now. Where the line falls at the front end is a real question.

One thing to say at the start: the man who wrote the case against popular music spent the last fifteen years of his life withdrawing the criterion his case rested on. Adorno gets to the truth of this music before anyone does, and most of what follows is an attempt to show that he did, and that he did not know he had. He was probably the last great philosopher in that tradition. He wrote over a million words about music.

PART 2: DIALECTIC OF POP

Dialectic of Pop is the best book on the subject I have read, and the reason is that it begins in the right place. The situation it appeared in has otherwise remained a situation of sounds-like-this, sounds-like-that, a situation of influencer clowns “giving it three quatloos out of five quatloos,” so I am glad somebody is writing seriously about pop music at all. Gayraud’s claim is that pop is not a genre and not a style but a regime of production: the recording is the work, not a document of a performance, not one realization of a score.2 The record is the thing itself, and technological mediation is not an alteration of the music but its condition of possibility.3 Everything else in the book follows from that, and in my opinion it is correct.

Her theory of pop language proceeds by way of the syllable rather than the sentence. Pop words, she argues, are largely glossolalic; intelligibility scarcely matters, while articulation counts absolutely; and her examples are phonetic rather than thematic.4 I said something adjacent in the dissertation about the Ariel track whose lyric is essentially the word freckles, and called it a phonetic assault on meaning, which I now think is only half right. Greil Marcus has the better version: considering exactly that reading of Little Richard’s syllables, as an assault on meaning as such and a perfect liberation from it, Marcus declines it, on the grounds that the glossolalia runs back through the Pentecostal churches to chant, an inheritance that was never in the business of meaning.5

The singularity of pop, for Gayraud, is located in the voice, and that is why her examples are phonetic: what recording is for, on her account, is the capture of a vocal idiosyncrasy, a grain or a break or an inflection the singer could not necessarily produce twice. Idiosyncrasy is her word for it, the irreducible singularity of one body rather than another, and the microphone holds on to that where notation never could.6

Gayraud also has a long section on machines: FM bandwidth and signal-to-noise, Spector’s three-track and his campaign against stereo, the damaged amplifier on “Rocket 88,” the razored speaker cone, the Barrons’ circuits with lifespans of their own, the TB-303 in full specification.7 This is where the book comes nearest to what I want.

I came at the same object from another direction. In the dissertation I set the music of control societies in relief against the musics that preceded it, because I could not see how else its singularity would show: Rameau’s fundamental bass as a classical taxonomy grounding music in nature; tonality as a disciplinary apparatus, with the theorists comparing the diatonic degrees to a bailiff, an overseer, a head maid and an errand girl; the sonata as the dialectic in sound; the twelve-tone row as the last disciplinary music rather than the first modern one; and then the gramophone, where the whole thing finally crosses a threshold.8 That method is unavailable to Gayraud, because she rules it out: the determination of pop, she says, will in no case be musicological.9

It is a decision, not an oversight, and it costs her the argument she does best. That argument appears once and is then dropped. Adorno disqualifies folk music because monody suppresses the harmonic dimension and the ostinato is an unconvincing means of creating form. Gayraud answers that to disqualify monody in the name of harmony is to disqualify popular music at the root, and then she turns it over: the time of repetition, identified as liturgical time, becomes archaic in relation to the rational time of development that the nineteenth century expressed as sonata form, and it was that rhythmic time which came by way of Black music and the blues into rock and roll and everything after.10 The argument is stated and it does not come back, and she takes less from it than the thing will bear. Repetition is not a failure to develop but a different organization of time, and it looks archaic only when it is measured against developmental time, which is not neutral either, but one nineteenth-century form, the sonata, installed as the standard. So Adorno’s charge was never quite a diagnosis. Disqualify monody in the name of harmony and popular music stands convicted before a note of it has been heard, and the verdict was already in the yardstick.

Three things would let that argument be developed rather than stated, and those three things are what the rest of this “Substack” sets out to do.

First, an account of the apparatus rather than the industry. Attali is not in her bibliography and Kittler is one footnote, and the consequence is that she can describe standardization but not prescription, that is, what gets channelled, what gets stockpiled, and what the equipment was built for and by whom. She asks what the equipment does, which is the aesthetic question and she answers it well; the other question, what the equipment was built to prevent, is the one her frame cannot put, and it is the one everything after this turns on.

Second, the musicological relief she forbade herself, and Adorno’s own rule is the one I want here. No analysis is of any value if it does not terminate in the truth content of the work, and that content is mediated through the work’s technical structure; the work insists that the question of its truth be put immanently, rather than by arbitrarily bringing some yardstick or other of the cultural-philosophical or cultural-critical varieties to it from outside.11 There is no way to say what is singular about postwar popular music without saying what it does that other musics do not do, and that means timbre, temperament, mode, harmony, form, cadence, and, above all, the physical media involved in its production.

Third, Adorno, whom she installs as the necessary antithesis, and whom I want to install as the person who already answered the question for us.

PART 3: ADORNO

§1 — The “Hyperbolic Hater”

The charge is not that pop is simple. Adorno says so himself, in “On Popular Music,” of 1941: the Viennese classics are rhythmically simpler than a stock jazz arrangement and harmonically more limited than any Tin Pan Alley writer drawing on Ravel, and none of this has anything to do with simplicity and complexity.12 The charge is standardization. In Beethoven the position of a detail matters because it stands in an integral relation to a concrete whole; in a pop tune position is absolute, every detail is substitutable, and a detail not permitted to develop becomes a caricature of its own potentialities.13

“The composition hears for the listener.”14 Not the music, the composition; the agent is the structure. The schema dictates how one must listen while making any effort at listening unnecessary, which is compulsion and superfluity together. Standardization keeps the customer in line by doing his listening for him, and pseudo-individualization keeps him in line by making him forget that it has been done.15 Standardization does the listening, and pseudo-individualization hands the result back wearing the halo of free choice.

The rest of the litany runs off that machine: plugging, glamour, baby talk, the improvised break that is only a disguised cadence, the rhythmically obedient listener whose musicality consists in following a pattern without being disturbed by individualizing aberrations, the emotional listener who gets catharsis and stays in line, and so on. Baby talk, for example, is not a remark about lyrics: the musical marks of it are the unabating repetition of one formula, melodies limited to very few tones, harmony deliberately incorrect on the model of a child’s grammar, and over-sweet sound colors. Adorno is right about all four, and the track I take apart at the end of this “Substack” has every one of them.16

Two things in the case are usually got wrong, and the corrected versions are worse for us rather than better. Regression does not mean the masses declined; Adorno denies that everywhere, and concedes that structural listening was always confined to a narrow group. What has regressed is contemporary listening, arrested, not childlike but childish, a primitivism not of the undeveloped but of the forcibly retarded.17 Nor is his stupidity a lack. It is a scar, that is, not the simple absence of a mental ability but the mark left by its mutilation.18 Musical stupidity even has a technical definition in him: the unearned sequence, repetition that is not development, reified consciousness drawing a veil of musical babble over a real contradiction.19 The last sentence of “On Popular Music” is the strangest sentence in the essay. To become an insect, Adorno writes, a man needs the energy that might have made him a man.20

In the second part of “Difficulties,” written in 1966, Adorno says the thing this “Substack” has to answer. Young people, he writes, and especially the long-haired ones, resist, and with good reason; only what mobilizes them musically against the establishment is nothing but the dross from the consumer culture they would like to escape.21 He credits the refusal and denies them the means. The reply is in Gayraud’s own book, and it is Steve Reich’s. For an American in the real context of tail fins, Chuck Berry and millions of burgers sold, to pretend that we are really going to have the Angst of Vienna is a lie, a musical lie.22 The dross was not a poor substitute for the material but has always been the material.

§2 — The “Hyperbolic Hater” against the “Hyperbolic Hater”

The demand is usually reported as the priority of the whole, that is, as the demand that a work prove the whole’s untruth, and that is finally not what Adorno says. The whole, he writes, is itself the relation between the whole and its individual moments, within which those moments keep their independent value throughout, and not the obtuse and aconceptual priority of the whole over its parts. Structurally, one hears the first bar of a Beethoven symphonic movement only at the moment one hears the last bar.

The political content of the demand is stated once, in his own words, and it is the sentence this “Substack” turns on: tonality, he says, corresponded to the classical liberal model of society, in which the totality arrives as an invisible hand, produced by individual spontaneous events and intended by none of them.23 Sonata form is the invisible hand, which is precisely why a music, and only a music, built like one can prove the whole untrue in that way.

Then, and this is the important part, Adorno takes his own demand apart.

In “The Radio Symphony,” of 1941, Adorno explains that the part-whole dialectic has a physical precondition. The sound has to be larger than the listener, so that he can enter it as he would enter a cathedral; a symphony has to be around him and not merely in front of him, a medium he lives in. Radio removes that, and he says why: partly, he writes, because of the monaural conditions of broadcasting, a limitation that was gone within fifteen years. Then he describes the consequence, which is postwar popular music, in advance and in detail: the symphonic particulars become atoms, and atomistic listening acquires its exact and objective technical foundation in transmission.24 A theme, which is nothing in itself but rather something out of something else, becomes quotation. What is heard is not Beethoven’s Fifth but merely musical information from and about Beethoven’s Fifth. Thirty-five years later Walter Murphy put a disco beat under the first movement, and “A Fifth of Beethoven” went to number one in the USA. Adorno had specified the record down to the word potpourri.

Then, in the same essay, we find a theory of the hook, from the man supposed to have had none: if radio atomizes and trivializes Beethoven, it simultaneously renders the atoms more expressive than they had been before; the details are deified as well as reified; and the atom, sentimentalized by the combination of triviality and expressiveness, reflects something of the spell the totality has lost.

I do not know whether the secondary literature has already picked this up, and, after all, this is only a “Substack,” but Adorno never draws the inference. If the dialectic is hardware-dependent, then it is one music’s condition and not music’s as such, and a medium that cannot carry it is not a medium carrying nothing. It carries a different form, whose unit is the atom made more expressive than it was, and whose logic is juxtaposition. Postwar popular music is the music made out of the atoms that radio and the record produced.

Adorno also takes the demand apart directly, in the first person, four times between 1959 and 1969.

In “Little Heresy,” a short piece from 1965, Adorno notes that he probably coined the concept of atomistic listening himself, and that musical insight and experience, if they do not want to become idiotic out of conceit at their own level, must not stop there.25 Attention to the whole has become one-sided, and threatens to atrophy the individual aspects without which no whole has any vitality. Then the sentence that dissolves the 1941 essay: with the irreversible downfall of tonality that possibility is a thing of the past, and, its principle having become transparent, it is no longer to be desired. He closes by saying the image of the joyful whole is more readily captured by the single scattered measure than by the triumphal whole.

In Aesthetic Theory Adorno flags the reversal as a reversal: contrary to current aesthetic views, the whole in truth exists only for the sake of its parts, that is, for the instant, and not the other way round.26 In the same breath he rehabilitates the listener who loves various passages without considering the form, says the quodlibet and the medley testify to a real need, and adds that as soon as unity becomes stable it is already lost. Elsewhere in the same book he classifies the rondo, with its intentional freedom in the alternation of refrain and couplets, as a decidedly open form, against the sonata’s precarious closure.

In the first part of “Difficulties,” written in 1964, Adorno says the organic itself was largely an art of appearances, that great tonal music actually bears some resemblance to a puzzle, and that music represents itself as if one thing were developing out of the other, without any such development literally occurring.27 Musical logic, he adds, may never have prevailed in traditional music as strictly as the idiom made it appear.

His own supreme case, late Beethoven, gives the demand up altogether. The late works are full of convention left bald, undisguised, untransformed: an unabashedly primitive accompaniment in sixteenths under the theme of op. 110; framing measures in the last Bagatelle that resemble the distracted prelude to an operatic aria; in the notebooks, a bagpipe accompaniment of almost unprecedented crudity, and a theme whose riddle lies in its conventionality.28 The power of subjectivity in the late work is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves; the conventions are no longer penetrated and mastered but left standing, and standing there, as splinters, derelict and abandoned, they finally become expression themselves. Of the Missa Solemnis Adorno says it outright: the form is not achieved through developing variation, it is not a process developing under its own impetus, it is not dialectical, and the fugue subjects have a peculiar character of quotation, as if built to models. In private he was blunter: the omission of any developmental principle, a mere succession of formal elements with endless simple repetition; instead of motivic work a puzzle-like procedure; totality as leveling.29 He finally gives the reason. Late Beethoven had become mistrustful of the unity of subject and object, of the roundness of symphonic success, of the totality emerging from the movement of all the parts. He exposed Viennese classicism as classicizing. Something in him refused to reconcile in a single image what is not reconciled.

In the notebooks Adorno convicts the form from inside. Out of the recapitulation, he writes, Beethoven produced the identity of the non-identical; but the recapitulation, in itself the positive, the tangibly conventional, is also the moment of untruth, of ideology.30 Then, in a note dated 1 June 1950, the sentence I would build a whole “Substack” on: in his last works Beethoven did not abolish the recapitulation, he concentrated it; and the recapitulation is not bad in itself, since tectonically it has an extremely positive function in pre-critical music. It only became bad through being made into the good, that is, through being metaphysically justified.31 The untruth is not convention, the proper, the idiomatic, but the dignifying of convention into a philosophical achievement, and that is the operation performed on sonata form and refused to popular music, and Adorno convicts it himself.

The same thing is visible from the other direction. In “The Aging of the New Music,” a lecture of 1954 published in 1955, Adorno turns to the music that actually did what the 1941 demand asked, a serial integralism such as has never before been tried in music, every parameter subordinated to the whole, and he convicts it in the vocabulary he had reserved for the hit song. The atomistic disposition of musical elements liquidates musical coherence; the arrangement of the material becomes the sole artistic intention, the palette becomes the painting; alienated and pre-established rules are blindly followed, as a good schoolboy might follow them; the music regresses to the pre-musical, the pre-artistic tone; the electronic sound has the musical tin-can taste familiar from the radio, only much more extreme, because every tone is stamped by the interposition of the equipment; something artifactual is set up as a primal phenomenon and prayed to, an authentic instance of fetishism, and the mentality behind that, he says, is infantile. It sounds, he says, as though Webern were being played on a Wurlitzer. What he holds up against Darmstadt is not a sonata but Webern’s op. 5, written in 1909, before the technique existed, not dodecaphonic, in which a shudder surrounds each dissonance and each sound is held fast until its expressive values are exhausted.32

The criterion that replaces the one Adorno gave up is the one that admits everything cheap. Unity concentrates into the fragmentary; the work makes the impossibility of aesthetic harmony into its own aesthetic content, making failure in a highest sense a measure of success. In a radio talk of 1965 called “Beautiful Passages” he put the demand itself aside: precisely in legitimate works, he said, the whole and the parts cannot coincide in the way an aesthetic ideal by no means confined to classicism demands.33 In another radio talk, in 1966, the last thing he said about Beethoven, he named the alternative in one clause. He does not seek to cleanse music of ready-made formulae, but to make these formulae transparent, to make them speak.34

So the answer to the footnote is not mine and it is not Gayraud’s. It is Adorno’s: the banal fragment, undeveloped, unintegrated, substitutable, sounded through a mass-produced appliance and structured like the working day, the thing that on the 1941 account is the proof of pop’s untruth, is on the 1964 account the only remaining form the true work can take, not because anybody negated anything but because the whole was already untrue. The fragment is not a failed development but an affirmed one. The dross of the long-hairs stays winning.

§3 — Record Scratch

There is a third body of material, three short essays on the record itself written across four decades, and it is the one that gives the form its matter. In “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” of 1934, Adorno writes that there has never been any gramophone-specific music. It reads like a prohibition and it is a report, a perfect tense, an observation about what had not happened yet; and it was already false when he wrote it, because Stravinsky had called for exactly such a music four years earlier.35 In the same essay he describes the single and files it under non-form, on the sole ground that a symphony will not fit on a shellac plate: the only thing that can characterize gramophone music, he says, is the brevity the disc dictates; dances composed of dull repetitions suit the domestic hours better; and one can turn them off at any point. Three minutes, repetition, interruptible: the paragraph is a definition of postwar popular music.

In the same essay, Adorno explains notation is a sign: the note stands for a sound it is not. The groove is not a sign. Music, previously conveyed by writing, here turns into writing itself, and this writing can be recognized as true language precisely to the extent that it relinquishes its being as a mere sign, inseparably committed to the sound that inhabits this and no other acoustic groove. A record is a script identical with what it scripts.

Seven years earlier, in “The Curves of the Needle,” of 1927, he had already given a criterion of legitimacy, and it disqualifies a record only if the record is a copy of something. Only where the body itself resonates, he writes, where the self to which the gramophone refers is identical with its sound, does the gramophone have a legitimate realm of validity.36 A record made as a record meets that better than Caruso does. There is no anterior body it fails to reproduce and no performance it falls short of; the self is the sound, literally, because the sound was never anywhere else. Gayraud arrives at the condition without him: the recording is the work and not a document of a performance. I made the same observation in the dissertation without noticing whose criterion I was satisfying, namely that the guitars on a certain track, recorded directly into the board, will not have lived in any real space unless and until the track is played back in one.37

Adorno revoked the 1934 verdict himself, by citation, months before he died. As late as 1934, he writes in “Opera and the Long-Playing Record,” of 1969, it still had to be claimed that the phonograph record had given rise to nothing unique to it; this may well have changed since the long-playing record, and revolution is hardly an exaggeration. Then he names the mechanism: the record becomes a form the moment it unintentionally approaches the requisite state of a compositional form.38 That is Kittler’s structure.

PART 4: MISUSE OF MILITARY EQUIPMENT

Kittler describes the same object fifty years later and shows no sign of knowing Adorno got there first. What he adds is the numbers. Intervals and chords, he writes, were ratios: fractions made of integers, the subdivided string, the fractions to which Pythagoras gave the name logoi. That was the logic on which everything in Old Europe that went by the name of music was founded, and it required a notation system that enabled the transcription of clear sounds separated from the world’s noise. The grooves of Edison’s phonograph recorded nothing but vibrations. Frequency replaces ratio, time replaces the measure of length, and a logic of sound becomes a physics of it; according to Kittler, the Real takes the place of the Symbolic.39

That is Adorno’s distinction with the reason attached: notation is a sign because it is a finite alphabet, and a finite alphabet works by selection: it admits what can be written and drops the rest. It is a filter, and what it filters is noise, and the groove, having no alphabet, does not select. That is where Adorno stops, at this sound and no other. What follows from it is that a record holds not only the sound somebody made but everything nobody chose, the room and the hiss and the body and the floor. Rilke saw the limit case in 1919, and Kittler reprints him at length: run the needle along the coronal suture of a skull, along a line that was never the graphic translation of any sound but existed of itself naturally, and a sound would necessarily result, a track that no one encoded.40

That is the dimension opened by postwar popular music, and it is what I was describing in 2006 without knowing whose argument I was standing in: tape hiss, room resonance, sixty-cycle hum; wow and flutter; print-through laying a ghost of the downbeat one reel-layer early, so the loud chord is faintly audible before it happens; the thump of the record head switching in on a punch; and three decibels of hiss added every time two tracks are bounced to one, and again, until the noise floor is a pad. No music before it had made those audible as such, let alone mobilized them on purpose, as material of the work rather than as conditions of its transmission.

The title of Kittler’s essay is “Rock Music: A Misuse of Military Equipment,” and misuse there is not a figure of speech. Mißbrauch von Heeresgerät is an offense under German army regulations, and Kittler found the phrase in a Wehrmacht history of wartime propaganda. The first man charged with misusing army equipment was charged for playing records: Hans Bredow, broadcasting gramophone discs to troops near Rethel in 1917, prohibited that same year.41 Radio as a misuse of military equipment, Kittler writes, could then begin.

What happened after 1918 is that a hundred and ninety thousand demobilized radio operators came home knowing how to build transmitters, and for a few months it was genuinely unclear who was going to own the air. The state’s answer was not to ban civilian radio but to build it deliberately crippled. What civilian radio excluded, by means of built-in technical handicaps, was the misuse of military equipment; and reception, Kittler says, is only a euphemism for systematically obstructed interception.42

Then the inventory, which is checkable item by item, and which I give unabbreviated because the specificity is the argument: VHF from Guderian’s tank divisions. Ping-pong stereo out of the bomber beams that crossed over the target, dots from one transmitter and dashes from the other. High fidelity from Decca’s FFRR, developed so that RAF officers could be trained to hear the difference between a German and a British submarine engine. Magnetic tape, because one cannot cut a disc inside a moving vehicle. The machine at Abbey Road as a civilian reconstruction of a captured German monitoring rig brought back in 1946. The vocoder, built as a single unit so that Churchill and Roosevelt could speak on a scrambled line. Kittler’s own summary: just as the misuse of equipment constructed for the positional warfare of 1917 led to medium-wave monophony, the misuse of equipment devised for tank divisions, bomber squadrons and packs of U-boats led to rock music. Without them, he adds, every innovation of the Beatles would have gone up in smoke.43

Hi-fi and stereo both descend from localization technologies. Bomber crews learned where they themselves were, and submarine hunters learned where the enemy was.44 The entire spatial vocabulary of a pop record, that is, the width of a mix, the depth of a reverb, and where a voice sits, comes out of two problems in finding things in the dark.

Adorno asked for a music whose form came from the record, and said that when it came it would arrive unintentionally. Kittler supplies the mechanism of unintentional arrival, and it is misuse: equipment turned to an end nobody designed it for, by people who did not know and did not need to know what they were holding. A speaker cone damaged on the road from Clarksdale and packed with newspaper. A pencil pushed through a cone on purpose, and a razor drawn across one. The turntable turned back into an instrument. Software written to find oil by listening to sound bounced off rock strata, and then pointed at a voice. A bass machine that failed because it sounded nothing like a bass, discontinued after eighteen months and sold off cheap. Transistors bought deliberately faulty because the bad ones sizzled, in a drum machine discontinued after about twelve thousand units. A sound chip specified to make coin noises for children. It is a cliché to list these and I list them anyway, because the pattern is only visible in the aggregate, and because in the two cases where we know the most about the design intent, the designers had no idea.45

The two halves are one answer, and neither man could have written the other’s. It also settles a question Gayraud leaves open, and which I do not think can be left open, and which I left open earlier. If the event is a wax cylinder of a novelty song, it starts in the 1920s. If the event is the Second World War turned into music, then the equipment is not incidental to it; the equipment is what it is made of, and the dates follow the equipment. Nineteen fifty-five is the presentment: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sam Phillips and Presley, a music made on gear that had been at war ten years earlier. It is not fully itself until multitrack and stereo, the tape machine used as a compositional instrument rather than a capture device, and the amplifier used as a source rather than a reinforcement, which puts the thing at 1967 or 1968, and not before.

Pink Floyd, whom Kittler loved, are instructive here. EMI offered British consumers stereo in 1957 on the strength of technology developed to locate U-boats, and EMI is the label that a decade later had the Floyd under contract.46 By the winter of 1966 they were the house band at the UFO Club, a basement Irish dance hall on Tottenham Court Road, playing under liquid light. In 1967 an EMI technical engineer named Bernard Speight built them a box with two joysticks that panned four channels across six loudspeakers ringed around the Queen Elizabeth Hall; they called it the Azimuth Coordinator, and somebody stole it after the first concert.47 Barrett’s delay was a Binson Echorec, made in Milan, which held its repeats not on tape but on a rotating magnetic drum read by four heads.48 In April of 1968, by which time Barrett had gone, over four weeks at Abbey Road, they cut twelve minutes of music that none of them could notate, so Waters and Mason drew it instead, as an architectural diagram: three sections recorded separately and mixed together, closely miked cymbals, prepared piano, a drum loop, cymbals reversed, and a guitar part got by running the leg of a microphone stand down the fretboard.49 There is no theme in it and nothing develops, and what there is instead is a drawing, executed on war surplus.

The point of the inventory is not that a great deal of the equipment came out of a war. It is that equipment arrives with a specification, and a specification is a set of decisions about what shall be possible and what shall not. Adorno had asked for music proper to the gramophone, which was the right demand aimed at one machine, in 1934, when one machine was most of what there was. What arrived was proper to an array: transmitters, tape, valves, echo chambers, loudspeakers and faders, none of it designed for music and all of it specified by people with other intentions. Gayraud describes that array well but does not ask where it came from or who wrote its specification. Who wrote it and what it required both matter, since the singularity of this music lies partly in the free use of that equipment, that is, in its misuse, and Kittler supplies the engineering name for what happens next. If control, he wrote, or as engineers say negative feedback, is the key to power in this century, then fighting that power requires positive feedback: endless loops until the whole array of world-war army equipment produces wild oscillations; play the powers that be their own melody.50 He meant it literally enough to hear it in one track, calling “Brain Damage” not a song about love or anything of the kind but a single positive circuit of feedback between the sound and the listeners’ ears.51 Three of the four at Abbey Road had trained as architects, and what they were doing in the studio of the firm whose submarine work had become domestic stereo was running state equipment past the point its specification allowed. The formula I used in the dissertation was for exactly that, a music that would donate nothing to the design of its control. Not a music that refuses to be used, but rather a music that has been used all the way up and has something left over.

PART 5: WHAT IS TRUTH?

A word about the frame before the track, since I have been leaning on one for four parts without ever quite laying the frame out.

There is no aesthetic theory of pop. There is criticism, some of it very good, Bangs and Marcus and a few others, and there are the musicologists, who arrived late and who, Tagg and Middleton excepted, mostly brought the wrong tools, and there is an ontology of the rock recording, Gracyk’s, which arrives at Gayraud’s claim twenty-three years before she does. What there is not is an account of what would make one of these works true. Possibly this is because the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk, and the thing is not over.

The reason to think the owl may be close to flying anyway is that the situation which produced this music is visibly ending. Palestrina’s music, the baroque, the gallant style, Wagner: each of them emerged within a configuration of power, mirrored it and resisted it, was not reducible to it, and then passed when the configuration passed. Music has never at any point in that history been entirely reducible to what was prescribed for it; there have always been musical truths.52 Postwar popular music has no exemption from the pattern either, and the evidence that its turn has come is not hard to assemble. The postwar order is in the middle of a phase transition, and one can list the symptoms without editorializing: a handful of tech bros owning the equipment the rest of it runs on, nationalist reaction rising everywhere, institutions collapsing at a rate that has stopped being newsworthy, the arrival of systems that generate music on demand, and so on. Whatever situation is coming will probably not talk about the human, or about genius, or about the subjective expression of the objective. The line of force is legible in the equipment, which is the only place I know to look. Recommendation engines that stop recommending and start generating; a model trained on everything ever digitized, that is, on every work this music has made; biosensors in the headphones, so that the thing measures what the music is doing to you and adjusts pleasure while it plays; listening itself as free labor, since every second of attention is the training data for the next second; the audience molecularized past scenes into micro-scenes and past those into an audience of one. Massumi has the formula, and I used it in the dissertation: preemption does not prevent, it effects, and rather than acting in the present to avoid an occurrence in the future it brings the future into the present.53 Such a mechanism does not manage a preexisting taste but produces the object it seeks to control. You put the headphones on and click, and something nobody has ever heard plays, exactly the shape of your musical pleasure, and you click again to add credits in order to continue listening, it is for you, personally, over and over, forever, like TNG S5E6, The Game. Nobody will talk about it the way people talk about television, because nobody else will have heard that music. It will be individual in the strict sense and open to all in no sense at all.

I am not going to produce the missing account in a “Substack,” and I would be suspicious of anyone who offered. I will say which frames I have been presupposing, so that the reader can discount for them. Baumgarten and Kant and the tradition that follows them are not really a thought of this object; aesthetics in that line was built to explain the beautiful and the judgment of taste, and this music is not especially interested in either (the quatloo, however, descends in a straight line from the judgment of taste, and so was minted, properly speaking, in 1790). Music has only been art since the Renaissance anyway, before that a branch of mathematics, the study of number in relation, and the aesthetic became an autonomous domain only in the eighteenth century, so we are not obliged to think music as art at all; nor does it help to say that music is beautiful, or that it affects us, since a mathematical demonstration and a political revolution can do both. The account I would most like to understand better is much older, the medieval one, art as recta ratio factibilium, right reason in relation to things to be made, where art is a virtue of the practical intellect and the question is not how a work is judged but how it is rightly made. Art on that account asks not that the maker be good but that the work be good, which is the one thing from it I am certain about and the thing this piece finally rests on. I went to Maritain and Gilson for it and came away disappointed, which may be my failing rather than theirs. Adorno, from whom I have taken most of this, had both feet in a Viennese procedure that he took to be completing itself in Schoenberg and Webern, just as his negative dialectics was Hegel completing itself; Badiou’s book on music, when he came to write one, was five lessons on Wagner. None of them was built for the object.

So here are three tools, briefly, and then the object. Adorno’s is the one I have been using all along, unnamed: truth content is what a work does with its own material, not what it announces, and the question of a work’s truth has to be put immanently, through its technical structure, or it is not being put at all. Everything I have said about atoms and fragments and conventions left standing has been running inside Aesthetic Theory the whole time. Rancière’s is a claim about the sensible rather than about works: a distribution of the sensible settles in advance who is audible and who is merely noise, and a hierarchy of genres according to the dignity of their subject matter stands in a relation of global analogy with a hierarchy of political and social occupations, tragedy for the nobles, comedy for the people of meagre means.54 He is also the one who blocks the easy move that a technical argument invites, since one cannot deduce the aesthetic and political properties of a form of art from its technical properties.55 Cheap, mass-produced and universally available does not by itself convert into anything, and something has to be recognized first, which is the thing in question. I will need that block in the next part, where everything I say is technical.

Badiou’s is the one I actually used, twenty years ago, without having thought hard enough about what I was borrowing. Art is one of four places where truths are produced, and an art-truth is immanent, in that it is nowhere but in the effects of the works, and singular, in that it circulates into no other register, that is, is not reducible to knowledge; there is no philosophical truth of art that art then illustrates, and no political truth that art then carries.56 The unit of such a truth is not the work but the configuration, the sequence of works that a single question opens and exhausts. My great teacher, Michael Pisaro, made that list for music in ten theses of his own on Badiou, written in 2004: four musical truth procedures in the twentieth century, Schoenberg and his circle through Boulez and Xenakis, jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, rock and roll from Presley to the Sex Pistols, and Cage and his circle.57 Nothing about the list is definitive, he says, and the testing is something composers do in their own work, seeing how far a truth extends and where its limits lie, if it has any. Twenty years ago I wrote a set of theses on punk rock in the same vocabulary, and the second of them still says what I would want to say: punk rock, like every truth, is singular, open to all, without being, proceeded upon by subtraction, giving of the impossibility of totality, and a disordering of the police.58 What I would add now is the reason Adorno gives us for thinking the first of those is true, and the reason Kittler gives us for thinking the fourth is not a metaphor.

I put the three together, and the finding of this “Substack” can be stated in their terms. By Adorno’s criterion, the one he arrived at rather than the one he started with, the fragment has been emancipated from the whole, and postwar popular music is the music in which that emancipation is not a loss. The evidence is embarrassingly easy to come by. Keith Richards recorded the fuzz figure on “Satisfaction” as a placeholder for a horn line he intended to add later, voted against releasing it, and lost; what he took for a sketch of the work turned out to be the work.59 “Seven Nation Army” is a riff played on a semi-acoustic guitar through an octave pedal, which left the track altogether when a stadium in Milan took it up in October of 2003, and is now sung by people who could not name the song.60 Seven seconds of drumming from the B-side of a 1969 single, played by a man who was never paid for it, became the rhythmic ground of two entire genres after somebody put it on a compilation of breaks for DJs in 1986.61 In each case a detail that was not permitted to develop is much more than a caricature of its own potential.

By Rancière’s, the answer is more careful, which is one reason a longer section on redistribution is not in this piece. What can be said is that the hierarchy has gone, and that it went from the inside: there is no scale for the ranking of artworks, Adorno writes, their self-identity mocks the dimension of more or less, which I quoted in the theses without noticing what it costs him.62 By Badiou’s, the answer is that this is one procedure and these are its works, which is what licenses everything that follows. If the unit of the truth is the configuration rather than the work, then no single track is the truth, any of them will open the question, and one taken apart properly is worth more than fifty gestured toward. What follows is an attempt to hear it in one track.

PART 6: GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN

This is the musicological relief Gayraud forbade herself. Adorno’s rule was that no analysis is of any value if it does not terminate in the truth content of the work, that the truth content is mediated through the work’s technical structure, and that the question has to be put immanently rather than by bringing a yardstick to the work from outside. I have been holding him to that for four parts. If it cannot be shown in one track, in its details, I have not shown it, and here is the track. “Girls just want to have fun,” by Bladee and Ecco2K, produced by Whitearmor, released in February of 2020, two minutes and fourteen seconds long, made on software anyone can buy.63 The title is borrowed from the most commodified sentence in the lexicon, and nothing else in the track has anything to do with Cyndi Lauper.

One warning about the terms I am about to use. I will say I, vi, IV, and dominant, and subdominant, and cadence, because there is no other way to point at a pitch on a page and be understood. They are coordinates, not claims, and the reader should hear them the way I mean them, which is in the common-practice vocabulary I am obliged to use. Even the word progression gives the game away. People talk about the “chord progression” of a pop song as though something were progressing, as though functional tonality were still in force and this were a Haydn sonata, the whole of it an adventure away from I and back to I, when what is actually there is four things, or what we agree to count as four things, repeating until the track stops. I made that objection to somebody years ago about a Joy Division song, and it still seems to me the right one: inasmuch as the vertical is an afterthought of the horizontal voices, we never have exactly enough harmonic information to say Em D Bm Am, and even if we supposed we did, would we not be refusing to engage the work immanently and on its own terms?

The skeleton first, so that we can watch it break: eighty bars of four at a hundred and fifty beats a minute, in four sections of thirty-two, sixteen, sixteen and sixteen bars. A runs from bar 1 to bar 32, that is, to 0:51. B runs to bar 48, or 1:17. Then a section I am calling A′ to 1:42, on the ground that the bass is the same as A’s and the melody is not, and then sixteen bars that come apart and fade, the eighty bars running to 2:08 and the file to 2:14. Ternary with a coda, a container borrowed from music that had reasons for the shape.

Seven pitch classes in the whole track, the white keys, and nothing else, anywhere, in any voice.64 A bass in straight eighth notes, one pitch a bar, four bars of C, two of A, two of F, and repeat. In the common-practice vocabulary that is I, vi, IV, the fifties progression with its dominant amputated, which is the most conventional object in the entire postwar repertoire and which the dissertation lists among the caricatures of tonal relationship that bound the electric blues. Once every eight bars the bass touches G on its way from C to A, so that the only dominant in the loop is a passing note inside a deceptive cadence, built into the loop and gone before it can mean anything. Above the bass there are two keyboard layers: one playing bare fifths on the same three roots, and above that a C major triad that does not move for two minutes. There is also a lead, very high, which sounds a little like the Edge’s guitar on “With or Without You.”

So the third of every chord, the one thing that would tell a listener whether what he is hearing is major or minor, comes from the only layer that is not following the bass. Over A the held C and E make the chord minor. Over F the held E and G make a major seventh with no third in it at all. Nobody chose those chords. They are what a triad casts when a floor rotates under it, and the vertical sonorities are an accident of the horizontal ones.65

The voice enters in bar 8, on “touch all night,” and for eighteen bars it sings four pitches, E, F, D and C, inside a perfect fourth. Two cells. A neighbor figure, E, F, E, which ends each time on an E held for three, five or seven beats: “touch all night,” and then, on the same pitches, “out of this world,” and later “flowers bloom.” A stepwise one, E, D, E, D, which drops to a C and holds it once and, the second time, does not bother: “everlasting,” and then, on the same melody, “never ending.” Then “story of my life,” then “ballad for the sins.” Different words, the same four notes, an ambitus of a fourth, for a quarter of the track.

What holds those fragments together as one melody rather than as seven scraps is not any relation among them, because there is none. It is the E. Every cell rests on it, and the bass keeps turning underneath it, and between the two of them the section coheres without anything in the melody itself doing any of the work. That is the whole difference from the music this vocabulary was built for. In a period, the first phrase makes the second one necessary. Here nothing makes anything necessary; a pitch is simply held long enough and often enough that the ear takes it for home, and a bass simply comes around again. This is what Gayraud saw and let go of: repetition is not a failure to develop but a different organization of time, and here is that time with bar numbers on the page.

Nothing in that melody develops, nothing answers anything, and it is not, strictly, un-periodic either; the cells recur every two bars and then every four, and none of them is a question. What changes is not the cell but the floor. Over C the E–F–E is a suspension; over A it is the Aeolian sigh, five to flat six; over F it is a major seventh rubbing against the root and resolving onto it, twice over in bar 24. Across the five statements the notes are identical, the bass is not, and neither is anything the notes mean.

This is the atom of the 1941 radio essay, the detail with no living relation to a whole, standing on its own, position absolute, which Adorno said radio had made more expressive than it had been before, sentimentalized by the combination of triviality and expressiveness. He wrote that as a diagnosis. It is a description of bars 8 to 25.

Then the track starts coming apart, and the coming apart is what the B section is for.

At bar 27 the voice leaves its fourth for the first time and slides upward, G, A, B, on nothing but “ahh,” gliding between the pitches rather than striking them, holding the G six and a half beats and the B eight. Underneath, the drums thin out until bar 30 has one kick and one clap left. The line skips C on the way up, the B still sounding while a D enters above, then comes down onto C from above in bar 31, over the F in the bass, and holds C again across the first two bars of the next section, over an A. The one place in this track where a voice behaves the way melodies are supposed to behave, that is, where it goes somewhere, is the place where everything underneath stops holding it up. The C it reaches never has a C beneath, and the confirmation a rising line is owed is simply withheld.

From bar 28 a second voice starts, and I cannot tell you whether it is a second singer, or the same one pitched up and cut short, or a sample being played from a keyboard, which may itself be the point. For sixteen bars it squeaks eighth-note bursts on beats two and four and nowhere else. Single notes first, A and B alternating, then E hammered, with sixteenth-note flicks of D into E. Then it begins doubling itself: thirds mostly, C with E, D with F, then in bar 36 a second, C against D, then fourths, G against C. The words are “some one like me, some one like, some one like me, love me, touch me,” one syllable to a burst. Behind that, the sustained melody and the lead have themselves become a pad; whatever was a line four bars ago is now a wash, and the only articulated thing in the track is a chipmunk on the backbeat “some one like me, some one like, some one like me, love me, touch me.”

In bar 41 the drums stop altogether and do not come back for eight bars, and for the first four of those that squeaking is the only pulse in the track, in eighth notes, on two and four, on one pitch. The main voice has been quiet for five bars. Out of that hole, over a bass that has left the loop and walks A, G, F, the figure the rest of the track is made from arrives: E, D, C, a two-beat cell entering on beat four, so that its long note always covers the downbeat and the bar line falls inside a held pitch. The syllables are “oh” or “someone.”

That is the heart of the track, and the figure sounds familiar. It sounds like a callback to something you have heard before, and you almost certainly have, because three descending steps in a major collection is about as common as musical material gets. Adorno has the exact formula for this and puts it under the heading of the genial rather than the derivative: the signature of it is that the new appears, by virtue of its newness, as if it had always been there.66 He has another version of it too, that what art longs for is metamorphosed in it as remembrance, and that ever since Plato’s anamnesis the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance.67 Three notes and a non-word, arriving out of a hole in the texture, and the thing they most resemble is a memory. The syllables are also not words. The one figure the track is built on carries no semantic content at all, which is what Gayraud says pop language does, articulation counting absolutely and intelligibility not mattering.

From there the two things run together. The chipmunk bursts and the figure permute against each other, the figure doubles itself a third below, the bass walks down, the lead meanders across the top, and none of this is a build. The texture is being subtracted a layer at a time, and what is left at the bottom of the subtraction is a three-note cell and a pulse made out of a mutilated voice. Figure 1 shows what happens when the doubling meets the G in the bass. Two voices sliding in parallel thirds produce, inside one bar, a bare dominant, a cadential six-four, and a dominant again; then the thirds keep sliding, the bass goes to F, and the whole apparatus dissolves into the subdominant.

That is the only place in the track where the components of a cadence are all present, and they are present as a by-product of two lines moving in thirds over a passing note. This is the case I have been trying to make and could not make in the abstract. A cadence is not a set of pitches but a syntactic event, an arrival that has been prepared and is then delivered, and the tension between preparation and delivery is what three hundred years of music was built out of. Here every pitch of one is present and the event does not occur, because nothing prepared it and nothing receives it and the lines that produced it simply carry on sliding. The residue of function is there, and function is not. The reason to say that is not to convict the track of a deficiency but to locate what it does instead, which is to let a sonority happen on the surface, as an event, and then let it pass without consequence, the way one of Warhol’s soup cans just sits there being a soup can.

The drums come back at bar 49, at 1:17, and the bass loop with them, and that is A′. It is A′ because the bass is A’s bass, four of C, two of A, two of F, unchanged. It is A′ rather than A because the melody over it is a different melody: a step lower and an octave higher, D and E now instead of E and F, bursts of six and seven repeated notes on one pitch. “Let me go, you can’t hold onto ghosts. Fold in on myself, I fold so, so close.” By about 1:35 the fast note-groups are finished and the voice is on “hold, hold, hold on,” and then “ohh.” In a sonata the return is thematic and the accompaniment is incidental. Here the accompaniment returns and the theme is somebody else, which is a recapitulation of the one element a recapitulation is not for.

At about 1:45 the same lines come round again, and from bar 65 the drums are gone but for two stray kicks, the bass drops its downbeat and plays five of the eight eighths a bar, and the three-note figure floats over it again. The last thing sung on the track, in bar 79, is B, one beat long, on a downbeat the bass has vacated; the bass comes in under it half a beat later on F. The loop is then faded rather than ended.

That B is where the whole argument sits. B occurs sixteen times in this voice, three of them phrase-final, one of them, in bar 37, with a G underneath, and the singer neither resolves nor avoids the note. A composer working inside tonality would resolve it; a composer reacting against tonality, a deliberate modalist, would write in Aeolian or Dorian precisely to be rid of the note. This voice sings it whenever it likes and never once hears it as a leading tone, which is the difference between reacting against function and standing outside function altogether. That is why I say this music is not atonal but beneath tonality: it has not negated the leading tone and it has not avoided the leading tone, it has declined to hear the note as one, and a leading tone nobody hears as a leading tone is not a leading tone. It is a B. The positive half is what the note is instead, and the answer is that it is a surface, a pitch with no tendency, which means it can be attended to as itself rather than as a promise of the next thing. Diatonic material with the syntax subtracted leaves a residue that is not a lack but a field, and the flat monotony of a field with no syntax running through it is precisely the condition under which a single sound can tear it open. Concentrate the sameness rather than looking behind it, and the event appears on the surface, singular and depthless. Four pitches inside a fourth, one formula repeated without variation, three notes that are not a word: Adorno called that baby talk, and every musical mark he listed under it is on this track, and he was right about all four.

That leaves the one place where I would push Gayraud. Everything she says about the recorded voice holds here, and I do not want to be read as denying it: this voice in its materiality is part of the singularity of this track, and the machine has caught a particular body making a particular noise on a particular afternoon. The catch does not come apart from the machine, though. What arrives is a voice already inside its mediation, deliberately so, since the pitch has been corrected, and correction removes precisely the microtonal variation she counts among the marks of vocal idiosyncrasy, the way fuzz removes the string.68

Kittler ran the same problem the other way, and his answer is harder than mine, since on his account the machine did not mark the arrival of the voice inside its mediation but abolished the category altogether. The sigh is his subject from the first line of Discourse Networks 1800/1900. German poetry begins with an ach, and the ach is the sign of the soul, the one utterance that designates an individual without becoming language and losing him; Schiller states the trap in a couplet, that once the soul speaks it is no longer the soul that speaks; Hoffmann builds the machine that springs it, since Olympia is an automaton constructed to produce vowel sighs, and all particularity is lost in the exchange of the most individual for the most general.69 Then 1900. A well brought-up girl wishes the phonograph had been invented a century earlier, because Goethe was said to have such a beautiful vocal organ, and she gets the wish: a professor takes a mould of the skeleton, rebuilds the larynx, wires it to a phonograph, and Goethe speaks. What the machine stores, however, is not the beautiful organ but a complex of physiological data impossible to write down or to counterfeit, unfakeable precisely because it means nothing. Phonography, on that account, means the death of the voice, since it stores a mortal one rather than eternal thoughts and turns of phrase, and the bodiless has become material.70 After 1900 there is no voice, in Gayraud’s sense, for the singular to inhabit. What the record holds is a trace, and a trace has no particular reason to be a larynx.

Her position is the other one, though she comes nearer to his than she settles for. Recording, she writes, is never a faithful medium of reproduction but rather a medium of production, one that creates the singularity of voice that it captures and generates an embodiment that did not exist before the track.71 Grant her that and the voice stops being the privileged site, because a produced embodiment need not be a body at all. Her paradigm case stays Piaf and the Melodium 75A, a machine catching a larynx rather than a machine manufacturing the thing it appears to catch. So she is not wrong. The voice is one dimension, sublated, kept and outranked together, of a singularity that on this track runs through two keyboard layers, a four-note cell, a bass entering at bar nine and a drum machine that quits for eight bars. Where there is no voice at all in the instrumental records (e.g., “Telstar,” “Walk Don’t Run,” “Atom Heart Mother”) that she waves past in a parenthesis, the singular is somewhere else by definition.72

I do not know what software this was made on, and it does not matter, because an apparatus leaves marks and the marks are measurable: the tempo holds at a hundred and fifty across the eighty bars, the bass sits within a cent of equal temperament, nothing anywhere is finer than a sixteenth, and no event in the track is off the grid. That grid is the proper here. The inventory Kittler drew up is not on this track, since there is no tape, no valve, no room and no transmission, and therefore none of the noise that postwar music had learned to hear as material. What there is instead is software offering models of all of it, tape saturation and console and compressor emulations, the behavior of the old machines rendered as a preset; the captured recorder that reached Abbey Road in 1946 is available now as an algorithm imitating what it used to do. Gayraud saw this and put it in a footnote: digital sound technology enriched by algorithms to warm up the sound by emulation, that is, the synthetic recreation of analogue sound, confirming pop’s affinity with the characteristic alterations of electric transmission, albeit by retroactive re-creation.73 The free use is what happens on top of that. The grid is obeyed absolutely and its hierarchy is made to mean nothing: the three-note figure enters on the fourth beat so that the bar line falls inside a held pitch, the only articulated voice in the middle of the track sits on two and four, and by bar 65 the bass has given up its downbeat and plays five eighths where the loop wants eight. Operate the apparatus exactly as designed and yield nothing its owner can use.

Now I hold the track against the criteria. Position absolute and every detail substitutable: the cell at bars 8, 10, 14, 20 and 24, the same each time, placed by the loop. A detail not permitted to develop: the figure at 42, 43, 45 and 46, never inverted, never sequenced. Conventions left to stand as the naked representation of themselves, an unabashedly primitive accompaniment: seventy-two bars of eighth notes on one pitch a bar but for the half bar where the G falls, a keyboard playing fifths, a triad that does not move. A form not achieved through developing variation, seeking accomplishment by a balance of sections: thirty-two, sixteen, sixteen, sixteen. Unity that concentrates into the fragmentary: the last sixteen bars and the fade. Each sound held fast until its expressive values are exhausted, which was the criterion of 1955 against Darmstadt: an E held seven beats, a G six and a half, a B eight, a C across two bars. Every tone stamped by the interposition of the equipment: the kick is tuned to a pitch and colors the spectrum of every chord, the bass is tuned to within a cent and locked to the grid, the voice is a performance smoothed afterwards and lifted into registers it does not own. The brevity the disc dictates, dull repetitions, and one can turn it off at any point: two minutes fourteen, a loop, a fade. The self to which the record refers identical with its sound: there is no anterior body it fails to reproduce and no performance it falls short of, so it meets the criterion of 1927 more completely than Caruso does.

None of that, by itself, makes the track true, and Rancière is right that the aesthetic properties of a form cannot be deduced from its technical ones. What the bar numbers establish is narrower and it is the only thing I claimed: the truth content of this work, if it has one, is nowhere but in these effects, and every item on the list has a bar number. Immanent was the word. The other word was singular, and the list earns that one as well, since nothing on it is a message: there is no proposition here that could be lifted out and restated in some other register, no politics the track carries and no philosophy it illustrates, and the effects circulate nowhere but among themselves. The fragments, moreover, are free of the whole not because they broke away from one but because there is no whole present for them to break from: no key that leaves home and earns its way back, no theme that deserves its return, none of the long adventure out of the tonic and into the world and back again that the borrowed container was built to hold. What stands in its place is a cell of four pitches inside a fourth, in its own element, on a field flat enough that one sound can show up on it as an event. The idiom, meanwhile, is inhabited completely: the beat is the beat, the material is diatonic, the grid is obeyed to within a cent, the container is borrowed intact, and nothing here would fail to be recognized as pop. Inhabiting an idiom, however, is not the same as being exhausted by one, and that difference falls inside pop rather than between pop and something better. The perfect contemporary track is the other case, and it is not a bad object; it is an object whose parts can be named before it plays, since the videos explaining how to write a Top 40 hit are public and accurate, down to the chorus inside the first fifty seconds and the three or four melodic parts introduced one at a time and recycled. A form that can be named in advance is knowledge rather than truth, which has nothing to do with obedience, since a track can follow every one of those rules and be true, or break all of them and be nothing. The difference is the direction in which the thing was derived. There the details are consequences of a plan; here the plan is a residue of the details, since the ternary shape is what the details left behind rather than a mould they were poured into, and the origin of the work is precisely those details, which unwrite the whole backwards out of themselves and stop as soon as they are done. Not every pop track has the truth of pop, then, and some of them are the proper and nothing besides. What the details point at here is not themselves and not this track either, since one track was never the unit of anything: they point at the configuration they came out of, the idiom read backwards from a place inside it where the idiom does not hold, and that configuration, rather than the voice alone, is what I have been calling the truth of postwar popular music, which contains the voice Gayraud centers without being contained by the voice. The track is not less pop than the perfect one. It is too much a pop song, which is the phrase I had in 2006 without the means to show it, and the operation that takes the idiom to its limit is not execution but concentration.

PART 7: CONCLUSION

I have been circling one question for six parts, and there is a version of the answer I wrote down twenty years ago and then forgot I had written: pop is about concentration, in the sense of the act or process of concentrating, not in the sense of paying attention.

Concentration, in that sense, is why the track is two minutes rather than forty, why the detail is not developed, which does not make it a caricature of its potential, since this music runs the other way, and why the apparatus Adorno describes is not incidental to the music but the means of the music. The banal fragment, undeveloped, unintegrated, substitutable, concentrated and sounded through a mass-produced appliance and structured like the working day, the thing that on the 1941 account proves pop’s untruth, is on the 1964 account the only remaining form the true work can take. The untruth is not convention but the dignifying of convention into a philosophical achievement, and pop never dignified anything. In its truth it has always been a free use of the proper, and the proper is whatever the equipment of the day hands over, war surplus in 1968 and a grid with a loop on it in 2020. The conventions are no longer penetrated and mastered but left standing, as splinters, derelict and abandoned, and standing there they become expression themselves. The particulars that do the concentrating are themselves concentrated in the process, which is the part I never spelled out: materiality, multiplicity, commodity character, all of them used to concentrate and all of them compressed in the using.

There is a second sense of the word, and that one is Adorno’s. What is asked of a listener here is not that he follow a process across forty minutes but that he attend to a particular that is not going anywhere, which is a different faculty and a harder one. He knew that. In the last of the essays Leppert collects, he complains that the capacity for concentration is unquestionably declining, and says that in demanding concentration the new music commits an offense against one of the main ideological props of the dominant musical culture.74 He was right about the demand and wrong about which music was making it, and the sentence about the long-haired ones and their dross follows almost immediately. Pop concentrates in the first sense and asks for the second, and he could not see that the two were the same demand because he was listening for a process.

Was it negation or affirmation? Neither, and the pair belongs to a music that is not this one. Dialectics and critical philosophy are monumental achievements, and nothing could be more alien to pop than either of them. The vocabulary that fits came out of cybernetics rather than out of Jena: a system’s output added back into its own input until the thing oscillates. The audible result is the zebra stripe of stupidity, and it means an undonatable remainder, that is, the part of the signal the control loop cannot put to work.

Does postwar popular music have a truth of its own? Yes, and the case is technical rather than sociological, which is why I keep declining the sociological version even though it is easier, better paid, and currently more or less compulsory. That this music has been pivotal in various redistributions of the sensible is beyond doubt; questions in relation to those events, however, are questions in relation to those events. Pop music remains music. Its truth is that it is the first musical truth in centuries to abandon thematic development and to be neither involved in nor reacting against the narrative of harmonic-tonal relationships. Not atonal in the Viennese sense, which was still a negation of function and therefore still bound to it, but simply outside: modal fragments; third relations where the dominants used to be; chords that are accidents of independent voices and never become aware of themselves as chords; and works that end by fading out, or coming apart, or just stopping, without cadence, so that, as somebody said in relation to something else, the absence of God is no longer discerned as an absence.

The last question is in relation to being forty-six rather than twenty-six. Tiqqun’s Young-Girl is everywhere these days. She is the model citizen as redefined by consumer society in explicit response to the revolutionary menace, which is to say the shape a person takes once capital has worked out that it cannot go on exploiting labor alone and must colonize everything outside production as well.75 Every count against this music is true. It mirrors the power that made it, structurally and phenomenologically, in all the ways Adorno said and all the ways Attali said, and the negation, where there was one, asked for the Kingdom and got another bank commercial.

As I wrote twelve years ago, the cosmetic is never simply a handing over of the surface to power. Even where the surface is intermingled with power it is already tragic enough, or cynical enough, to reveal something other than power, precisely what had hoped to be seen, coming to its ruin and its true expression in the intermingling on the surface. The only condition is that it not be exhausted in its own ennui, not be reducible to the mechanisms that gave rise to the thing. Adorno put the same condition on the artist and put it better, in an essay he wrote in English in 1945: the artist must be in complete command of the most advanced means of artistic construction, and therefore has to be both an exponent and a sworn enemy of the prevailing historical tendency, at once, in the same gesture, with no recipe for how to manage it; and an artist who still deserves the name should proclaim nothing.76 Both halves matter here. Exponent and sworn enemy together is exactly the situation of a music made entirely out of the equipment and the commerce that produced it and not exhausted by either. Proclaiming nothing is why the irreducibility cannot take the form of a message, which is fortunate, since this track has no message, no future, whatever. It has “oh, oh, oh.”

That is the criterion, and it is the only one I have, and it is not whether a work developed or refused but whether the surface is exhausted. I put on the perfect Max Martin record. I play it again, and again. Everything about it is perfect, three floors of a building somewhere working on it, the new cyborg lady wearing a diaper or a guy with wet hair wearing gloves or whatever, and I am too old to know who half of these people are anymore, and my only complaint can be that there is no zebra stripe. Nothing is wrong with it and nothing in it is stupid either: there is no remainder, nothing the machine that made it cannot put back to work, no place where the thing stops being useful to its own conditions. Everything is available and everything has been spent. Nothing whatever rules out one of the smiling toothpaste girls owning the entire apparatus and coming out the other side with the thing itself, since the criterion sits in the work and not in the maker. The zebra stripe is there or it is not, and no amount of building floors puts it there.

I should say whose criterion that is, because it is not mine. I did not bring a standard to this music from outside, and I would not know where to get one. It is Adorno’s. He arrived at it in the course of a case against the very music that meets it; he set it aside four times in his own first person between 1959 and 1969; the works he held highest gave up the organic whole that the criterion was supposed to require. The word I have been leaning on is his as well. In the last of these essays to be collected, from 1966, he asks the new music for concentration and, later, tells the long-haired ones that they do not have the means. He was wrong about the second thing. Whether he was right about the first is not for me to certify, and I may be wrong about the whole thing. What I can say is whose condition it was, and that this music meets the condition. I am handing it back to him. He did not want it back, and I would still like to think it counts.

A critic writing about my records concluded, in a short book of 2011, that ultimately it did not matter whether heaven is real.77 I understand the appeal of the sentence, and I think it gives the whole thing away. If it does not matter, there was no truth and no subject of one, and no reason to have made this record rather than some other record, and fifty years of misused equipment was an aesthetic effect, a decorated corpse.

[I used a clanker to draft & proofread this “Substack”.]