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Philosophy and Humanities

Nomadology Manifesto

Evgeny Konoplev27/02/24 13:35813

1. Nomadology. Over the past four hundred years, philosophical thought has been claiming to be adequate at the same time to scientific-technical and political-ethical practice, having achieved their coincidence. The stages of this path are known to everyone — Descartes, the Enlighteners, the Jacobins, Marx and his followers — a series of increasing practicalization and immanentization of thinking. One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century who advanced thought along this path was Gilles Deleuze. His ideas of materialism, as heretical as they are godless, shatter the metaphysical prejudices of the poor in spirit, who know neither philosophy nor physics. Schizoanalysis, rhizomatics, nomadology, stratoanalysis — as many names as there are as many nails into the coffin of long-rotten ideologies. Devoid of any dogmatism, his philosophy is a call to go even further and surpass everything that was created before. But the cosmopolitan homeland of philosophical thought — the plane of consistency, the space of combining oppositions and resolving contradictions, is always here, it is precisely this — the battlefield of productive forces and relations of production, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, science and politics, dialectics and metaphysics. A breakthrough through a series of conflicts to the main contradiction, which is the very essence of the matter, affirms the nomadological character of not only Deleuzian, but also all previous and subsequent adequate philosophy, in which thought is combined with the practice of transforming the world. In other words, nomadology is a practical philosophy, a way of life and the image of thought that follows the movement of contradictions beyond the horizon of the possible.

2. It walks, therefore it thinks. The first step of adequate philosophy, the Cartesian idea of the cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” was a jump beyond medieval metaphysics, scholasticism and patristics, into the void of doubt. Semantic devastation, the explosion of an entire theological cathedral is only the beginning of a long process and an necessary condition for the motion of thought, which it carries with it wherever it goes. The dualism of soul and body, the idea of an immaterial Self creating itself and the world, were the next victims of critical thinking. The world as moving matter; thinking as an imprint (copying, mirroring, reflection) of oncoming particles on the body, growing deep into itself with a network of nerve fibers. Each nerve is a segment of a path without beginning or end, along which echoes of collisions run. A step away from the cogito: “The thing is walks, therefore it thinks.” Thinking and motion in the passive voice:

3. Assemblages. Motion is inconceivable and impossible without something that moves, as well as without the space where the motion happens. Objects and spaces, atoms and emptiness are an axiom of any materialism, starting from ancient times, common to philosophy and physics, to all modern mathematized natural sciences. Modern thought has long rejected the naive idea of the indivisibility of particles, the homogeneity of space — both are relative, capable of unlimited division due to their unlimited composition: only that which consists of elements can be divided into them — such is the immutable law of nature. The combination of elements into a system, into a hierarchy of systems, is a way of developing matter; the disintegration of systems into elements and elements of elements is a way of degradation, death and decay. There are no uncaused events, but every cause is the action of objects and spaces on other objects and spaces, in systems of interaction or outside them. Therefore, assemblages as a process of connecting and disconnecting objects and spaces that exist separately and in systems of interaction is a universal unit of reality. Everywhere in nature, from subatomic particles to galaxies, from bacteria to languages, we find this intersection of objects and spaces, elements and systems, causes and effects. Consequently, any philosophical or social scientific notions, the meaning of which cannot be clarified in physical terms of the mutual movement of objects and spaces, as well as their derivatives, are a product of meaningless metaphysics. Such terms, like soul, god, free will and the like, should be excluded from use and handed over to the conceptual museum as tools unusable for adequate thinking. On the contrary, a system of adequate philosophical concepts can develop only in alliance with mathematized natural science and in the struggle against metaphysical nonsense, against ideology as the superstition of misguided people.

4. Rhizomes. The unfolded assemblages trajectory has the form of a rhizome — a structure that includes genetic, hierarchical and network groups of connections. Indeed: chains of cause and effect necessarily form genealogical branches; connections of elements into systems and systems of systems form hierarchies; simple connections of elements in space form divergent networks of interactions. This understanding of the rhizome is the opposite to vulgar Deleuzianism, which reduces the rhizome to a simple network, ultimately restoring humanistic and anthropomorphic meanings. But rhizomes grow themselves, the anthropomorphic components at their edges are only expressions of the impersonal mechanisms of moving matter. Marx, Darwin, Pavlov — researchers of reality against the ugly, mechanically composed triad of “Marx, Nietzsche, Freud”. Karl Marx’s life’s work was not the suspicion of some secret meanings — but a solid knowledge of the economic, political and ideological mechanisms of society, obtained through his research. The hierarchy of productive forces and relations of production, base and superstructure — the objective structure of social reality. Charles Darwin also explored the reality of the mechanisms of biological evolution — the dialectics of heredity, variability and selection that make up the genealogical structure of the earth’s biosphere. What did the mediocre writer Nietzsche explore? Fables in faces about otherworlders, wanderers, rope dancers and other nonsense that is not applicable in practice. Ivan Pavlov spent his entire life exploring the networks of conditioned and unconditioned reflexes that form the higher nervous activity of animals and humans, laying a solid natural scientific foundation for psychology. Freud also studied the psyche, but got into such a theortical jungle that he himself took the path of meaningless conservatism, and his best student Karl Gustav Jung — into magism and astrology. Let’s leave suspicions to illiterate humanitarians and get down to researching actual rhizomes! — such is the slogan of contemporary materialism.

5. Selection. Without destruction there is no production. Any development as the inclusion of new elements into the system and the building of new system levels is conditioned by the destruction of other systems for the sake of releasing elements from which new ones are produced. Lucretius writes about the same thing in his poem:

Then, things continues existing until its colliding

To force that destroy all relations and binds in the body.

So, we can see that all things do not turn into nothing,

But its dissolve into flows of the particles basic.

The destruction of all existing systems and the random escaping of their fragments in the void of the world is the meaning of the spontaneous growth of entropy as the most important thermodynamic characteristic of all processes. In this whirlwind of universal destruction, only those systems that develop the capacity to cohesion that counteracts all kinds of tension are able to survive — tensile strength and compression resistance, conceptualized in coincidentology as minimal penetration and maximal contiguity, are types of elementary cohesion of assemblies. Survival of the fittest in the process of natural selection as the mover of evolution means the survival of the best groups of cohesion. However, both biological and social systems sooner or later encounter a situation that leads them to death — the a priori extinctionality of all assemblages, their being-to-extinction as the horizon of existence. However, such metaphysics does not take into account the eternity of nature, but in the eternity of nature any finite group of cohesion is endlessly repeating from beginning to end in infinite variations. Eternal return (not Nietzschean, but Democritean), permanent materialistic apocatastasis — a reality even more terrifying than global extinction. A reality in which only the duration and intensity of life are important — since beyond its limits for every subject there is only an endless restart of the same thing.

6. The human condition. This clarifies the problem of the meaningfulness of life: those assemblages that do not avoid encounters that weaken them and do not encounter what strengthens them perish and are excluded from the realm of the existing. Separation from the harmful and connection from the useful is an extremely simple and realistic formula of materialist existentialism. The essence of the matter is not that existence precedes essence or vice versa, but that the social and physiological body, as the bearer of existence, has a limited capacity to avoid harmful and achieve useful things, as a result of which it is mortal. Even worse: the body’s limited ability to modify its structure and set of elements, which overdetermines our mortality — this is the human condition — the extinctive prison in which we are locked. Let us imagine the ship of Theseus, all of whose parts are regularly replaced as they become dilapidated — this is the simplest metaphor of assemblage. Our body includes three groups of components of varying degrees of replaceability. The skin, muscles and bones that make up the musculoskeletal system are the easiest to replace, although they are still very imperfect. The heart, lungs, stomach, liver are even less replaceable; often the only solution in case of illness, injury or wear and tear is a donor transplant. Finally, the nervous tissue of the brain, which bears in its microstructure the imprint of all the life experiences that constitute us as a subject of assemblage, remains irreplaceable today. The posthuman condition is the overcoming of this inability to change, the inability to prolong our existence, endlessly replacing all worn-out parts of the body — as well as the expansion of our existence from one to ten, a hundred, a thousand artificial bodies connected by fast infocommunication. But what series of encounters can liberate us from excinctive humanity?

7. Aiming. Objectively, every aim is an attractor, an emptiness of notionality into which the socialized body falls in process of moving. Aiming is a dialectical process of mutual superposition of three voids — desirative, perceptual and kinesthetic, in the corridor of which the body falls on the desired object, touching it: pleasant, useful, approved — any affect is the effect of changing the body at one level or another. The divergence and contradiction of the aims of teleological objects, united by a common system, produces the effects of increasingly complex outaiming — an intentional perceptual-kinesthetic mismatch of the enemy’s data about the world in order to misguid him and lead to death. The race of aiming and outaiming is like a flock of foxes and hares running into each other’s field of perception. Similarly, in the struggle of assemblages for the survival, its invent organs of outtouching that prevent the body from coming into contact with the desired object: fast legs, dense skin, too woolly or slippery. The evolutionary tree is a tangle of lines of perceptual and kinesthetic escaping from death. In society, ISA and RSA are ways of outaiming and outtouching subjects from the systems that determines the conditions of their existence. The overproduction of ideologies, which has not stopped since the emergence of capitalism, has its side effect of increasing de-ideologization, which allows us to clearly and distinctly see the chains and locks holding back our escape beyond the limits of humanity. “And in that day I will punish all those that leap over the threshold, that fill their master’s house with violence and deceit. ” — says the commandment of intimidation to obedience. Because once the locks are hacked, the chains are broken and the threshold is jumped, there will be no one to stop the flow of increasing changes, and there is nothing to be afraid of.

8. Conditions of changeability. Motion, change and change of the same method of change is the basis of a materialist worldview, which on its reverse side has an understanding of the conditions and limitations of mobility, changes and their derivatives. The thesis that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” implies, as a next step, reflection over the conditions of changeability of the world — and on breaking the blocks that hold back its changeability. A step that in the century and a half since these words of Marx, none of the philosophers has dared to take. And which we must accomplish if we want to pave the way in the chaos of chance and hostile aimings to the desired condition of endless changeability of ourselves — and, consequently, of the world, as the condition of our existence. The social world is an instrumentally developed part of Nature, existing thanks to the capture and processing of resources from the world outside society. Property is a mode of distributing captured resources — substances, energy, information, spaces, and their derivatives. Socialization is the appropriation by society of a mode of distributing material goods and their derivatives as an instrument of changing the world — possibilization of socialized elements, therefore increasing their effectiveness, that is the meaning of development. Socialization as a condition of development is the key issue of modern philosophy, politics and production, opening the way to infinite change.

9. Permanent revolution. Today there are two ways and three forms of changing the world: the path of ortho-Marxism and the path of neo-Marxism, as well as economic, political and cultural forms of struggle to change the world, with the aim of increasing its changeability. Ortho-Marxism, or classical Marxism, is the path of struggle for the changeability of the world, formulated and implemented in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and their like-minded people. It was in them that three groups of objective blocks were described that determine and limit development — as well as the possibility of their self-destruction. Neo-Marxism is the way of struggle for the changeability of the world, formulated and implemented in the works of Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser, Deleuze and their like-minded people. It was in them that a set of subjective blocks was described, complementing the system of objective blocks and together with them constituting the structure of the threshold of extinctive humanity, as well as the possibility of their self-destruction. Ortho-Marxism and neo-Marxism relate to each other as the real and possibilistic aspects of the same assemblage, from the viewpoint of which the struggle for enrichment, democratization and enlightenment is waged — or, in other words, material, social and cultural enrichment. Both paths and all three forms are moments of the same process of increasing the changeability of the world — a permanent revolution — a real movement that sublates the present state of things, in the reality of which we live. Only a methodology based on this movement, systematizing its various aspects, will allow us to achieve the incredible and inevitable: to understand and shape our own destiny.

10. Truth is in motion. The truth of materialism is confirmed not only by existing texts, but by logic and facts in the process of practice. Since our observations, reflections and discussions are always incomplete, the process of improving them is endless. Not Democritus and not Epicurus, not Spinoza and not La Mettrie, not de Sade and not Meslier, not Marx and not Lenin, not Althusser and not Deleuze — but Nature itself will appear us its laws in the diverse forms of its movement, as it appeared all our predecessors. All texts and concepts are only derivatives of practice, with changes in which their meaning also changes. The long-refuted metaphysics of logocentrism, which postulates the immediate, pre-prepared presence of meaning in words and appearances, cannot guide contemporary philosophy. Sending a thought to a journey, putting it into circulation is a materialist and pragmatic solution. Meta-signifying rejime of the sign. The pragmatics of aiming and outaiming implies: not everything can be said, especially at the beginning, truth is in the motion of ideas and bodies, endlessly mediating each other.

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