Xenomechanology

By Rhithu Sarathy

RATIO ESSENDI

The planet is burning. The ice is melting, the waters are rising, the atmosphere is changing. Capital has run the same feedback loop for three hundred years now. Colonial matrices that were intended to have disappeared continue to produce the same types of corpses in the same patterns. Fascism is back. Not as a historical anomaly but as a structural product. All theories that proposed to provide a solution to these problems either devolved into academic discourse or became part of the very structures they proposed to challenge. The Great Left continues to debate. The colonial matrices continue to accumulate.

This is not a text that discusses those problems. This is a text about what is. About the underlying reality of things, which has been misrepresented with such consistency and consequence that the misrepresentation has now become a political fact. If you get the base wrong then everything else built upon it will collapse. If you get it correct then the building blocks for the design of interventions can occur.

But that’s not to say this is an ontology. The Great philosophical canon has rendered simple utterances of this term polemical. We do not intend to enter that arena. So as a way to differ that debate, what we are considering here is the matter of allagmatic genealogy. Instead of a study of being we are looking to give a genetic account of processes, forces and codings within the regimes of ghosts we live in and how they individuate, continually. As well as the genetics of any interference. Of course, this does not escape ontology. What it does is situate it within an ontology — the processual, differential, affirmative, immanent one.

So. What is there?

There is differential material presence. Not substance in the Spinozan sense — not a substance underneath that manifests itself through attributes, not a ground that demonstrates itself through its modes. Something much harder to define than that. Expression without a prior thing doing the expressing. Difference produces its own terms as it moves, creating the distinction between what expresses and what is expressed without one term being prior to the other. This is what the tradition has been attempting to describe around and around and round again without ever coming down. Spinoza came closer than anyone else. He understood that all things exist within immanence, that there is no transcendent organizer who is pulling strings from outside the system, that the modes are not representations of a prior template but manifestations of productive existence itself. However, he still had a substance underneath. Xenomechanon eliminates the underneath. Not as an act of philosophical vandalism. Because the underneath was always the source of the problem. Anytime you establish a base you introduce transcendence via the back door. Any base eventually establishes legitimacy for whatever is constructed upon it. Hence why, even though Spinoza was clear, statists like Hegel could swoop in and brutalize the ethics.

Deleuze also recognized this issue. The plane of immanence — pure differential virtuality, no base, no transcendence, just the motion of difference manifesting itself without a substance providing the manifestation. This is the appropriate structure. However, the plane of immanence provides a structural description. It does not identify what specifically occupies this structure. What occupies this structure is the xenomechanon. Not just an abstract field of intensities. The actual galaxies. The actual ocean floor producing forms no matrix has identified yet. The actual particle moving unpredictably at unpredictable times in unpredictable locations. The actual, physical, disturbingly real movement of differential existence preceding every individualization and surviving every individualization and never being identical with any individualization. This is the Xenomechanon. The naming is important because it is not a metaphor. A name for what exists before and after and throughout every effort to organize it.

The xenomechanon is not Kant’s Noumenon — not the unknowable thing-in-itself lurking behind phenomena accessible only as a limit concept, the permanent wall defining your cognitive existence by what you cannot cross over. Kant required the wall to safeguard the subject from the disintegration that occurs from having contact with the outside world. The transcendental subject orders experience from a sovereign position. The xenomechanon has no interest in maintaining this sovereignty and has no desire to protect it. In that way it remains faithful to the fractured I of the first Critique. But in any case the xenomechanon is not behind phenomena. It is the differential movement that phenomena express themselves as manifestations of. You do not have an epistemological barrier separating you from it. You are in constant contact with it. Contact sounds like noise. Contact feels like a crack. Contact means when the body refuses to function according to its designated subject position.

Nor is it Meillassoux’s Great Outdoors. The Great Outdoors refers to the world that exists independently of any relationship to a subject — indifferent, mind independent, the correlationists’ worst nightmare. The xenomechanon is precisely the inverse of this state of affairs. The xenomechanon is constitutively relational. We are what we are through our relationship to it. The relationship neither reduces nor diminishes it or makes it less foreign. The relationship is what foreignness is. The xenomechanon does not exist outside of relation as its condition of possibility. Rather it expresses itself through relation as its movement.

And it isn’t Land’s Outside — not the cosmic nihilism that devours man as capital approaches its inhuman end, nor is it fatalistic externality, nor the void that the accelerationist rides to apocalypse with a smirk. Land took the productive motion of differential existence and removed the affirmation. Thereafter, we were left with a horror with an arrow in only one direction. The xenomechanon has no such arrow. It has the clinamen.

It was Lucretius who gave it a name. Serres developed the implications of the clinamen. The clinamen — the smallest possible deviation, the clinamen constitutes the minimum deviation, which occurs at uncertain times and places, incertos temporis et loci. It is not produced through any previous cause. It is not randomness; it is neither arbitrary nor devoid of purpose. It is inherent to the motion of differential matter. In other words, laminar flow — smooth, unvaried, all elements flowing in the same direction — possesses its own inherent instability. The instability is a positive attribute of the flow. Laminar is not the normal state that is interrupted by turbulence. Turbulence is an expression of the same differential field as laminar flow. The clinamen occurs due to the fact that the productive excess of the field pushes upon itself. This is how the xenomechanon produces its own disruptions. It does so without needing an external disruptor. It creates its own conditions for disruption from within, at uncertain times and places, since the disruptions are neither planned nor teleologically determined. It is the motion of difference producing productive difference.

The political implication is immediate and non-negotiable. Rupture is generatively occurring at all times. It will occur whether or not a theory comes along with the correct concepts, or a party develops the correct strategy. Rupture has been occurring all along. The clinamen is inherent to the field. Capital does not have to confront a stagnant environment in order for ruptures to take place. Rather, it must manage, redirect, suppress or absorb continuous productive deviations taking place in the field.

Therefore, when examining praxis, one should not ask how one can create rupture. One must examine what conditions allow for a clinamen event to evolve into a metastable vortex instead of quickly dissipating back into laminar flow that continually seeks to maintain.

Simondon provides the mechanical explanation. Simondon’s concept of individuation is not a theory regarding how things develop in their typical sense — i.e., it is not a narrative about how an object develops or evolves. Rather, his concept of individuation represents an ontogenetic description of how structural tensions within a metastable field find new dimensional expression while carrying forward as virtual excess, the charge that this particular dimension could not express.

A supersaturated solution containing crystals illustrates this principle. A supersaturated solution is not merely fluid awaiting crystallization. Rather, it is a metastable system possessing more dissolved material than permitted by its thermodynamic equilibrium. Therefore, structurally speaking, it exists beyond itself. When a nucleation site — e.g., a structural germ, a singularity, a minimal difference, enters the solution, the structural tension finds its inner expression (the full unfolding of the problem’s structure) and a crystal begins to form. Not because the tension was overcome but because it discovered its productive dimension. However, two key points must be maintained concerning this process. Firstly: The power of the nucleation site is completely disproportional to its size/material volume. It does not generate the crystal through a transfer of proportionate forces. Instead, it releases the stored potential energy existing within the solution. It is the clinamen of the chemical field — i.e., the slight deviation allowing the previously accumulated tension in the field to resolve into a new form. Secondly, the crystal remains within the solution as its condition. It does not abandon the field once it has formed. The crystal represents nothing but the field having achieved a new temporary configuration relative stability.

The notion of “excess” is central here. You contain the xenomechanon’s excess. Excess is a matter of structure and not a psychological disposition, nor something that can be activated through effort or correct thinking. Instead, it is the part of you that no matrix has mapped onto; that no subject-position has coded; that makes you unstable instead of determinate. That is why capture is never complete. Not because people are secretly uncaught or because resistance is always-already available. Rather, the pool from which subjects emerge is infinite and every mapping leaves a residue, and the residue exists.

That establishes the key difference that the whole theory is built upon.

Matrices are exterior. However, they are now at least partially (albeit mostly) domesticated. The have lost their alienness.

Capital is exterior to your body. Colonialism is exterior to your body. Language is exterior to your body. Sex/Gender is exterior to your body. Each of these constitutes a true, physical force operating on true, physical bodies. No philosophical explanation should reduce this fact. Matrices do map onto subjects. They do create subject positions. They do determine how subjects will experience themselves. However, they have also been made interior. They have been processed and moved through the productive motion of the xenomechanon, organized into a structural exteriority. The outside world has been transformed into functional alienness.

Simondon wrote about the technical object extending his argument to the political realm. A technical object concretizes. That is to say  its parts become mutually supportive. Each component serves many purposes; the object creates its own associated environment; the object and environment become co-productive. Early engines are abstract, their components operate in opposition to one another, need compensatory mechanisms, rely on external environmental conditions not created by the machinery itself. Once an engine has concretized its thermal, mechanical, and aerodynamic operations so as to use the heat of combustion as a resource for its cooling systems (which stabilize the combustion), then both the machine and environment are mutually productive. Capital is arguably the most concretized technical object ever. For example, its components (wage labor, commodity form, finance instruments, state apparatuses, colonialism/extractivism/algorithms) have been interrelated for 300 years. Capital has produced its own associated environment: the subjectivities/desires/epistemologies/social structures that support its functioning. To most individuals whose subjectivity it has helped to constitute, capitalism appears to be all that there is.

However, Simondon also showed that concretization has limits. The more a technical ensemble concretizes, the more dependent it becomes on its associated environment being stabilized. The associated environment is not stable. It is metastable. The xenomechanon continues to press. Matrices continue to produce residues (as structural products of their functioning). Capital produces the conditions for its own excess. Bodies that it cannot completely encode, desires that it only imperfectly captures, contradictions that cannot find new dimensional expression within its own logic without dissolving that logic. These residues build up. They are the low-encodability noise. Not the kind of noise that occurs when capitalism signals too much, not the kind of noise represented by war/media saturation/endless scrolling and saturated fields of undifferentiated traffic causing subjectivities to enter states of exhausted disconnection, but the other kind of noise. Noise that keeps returning. The kind of noise that continually actualizes structural contradictions within matrices that cannot be resolved by those same matrices without causing their dissolution.

It is essential to maintain clarity around these two types of noise since conflating them would serve as a mechanism by which capitalism neutralizes opposition to it.

It’s the second type of noise that Capital uses against the first. The matrices over-signal. There is a perpetual news cycle. Social media platforms designed to saturate the field with excessive amounts of undifferentiated stimuli. The War that creates such overwhelming amounts of noise that the field will not have time to locate the metastable charge necessary for productive singularities to occur. This type of noise communicates pre-existing subjects with pre-existing messages, reinforces current identities and formations of desires, and keeps the field in a high entropy state without creating productive tension. The Subject experiencing this will not experience the Xenomechanon. They will experience code break. Burn-out. Dissociation. Withdrawal into themselves that may feel deep but is really the capture of their attention in a loop that creates no new dimensionality.

Capital is complex and sophisticated enough to use the Second Type of Noise (code break) against the First (the Clinamen). Capital does not have to stop the clinamen from occurring; Capital only has to insure that once a productive singularity occurs, the field is too saturated or too stable for those singularities to create a metastable charge that allows them to cascade. Capital regulates the productive disparation range, keeps the social field either just stable enough that true structural germs are unable to induce individuation, or just unstable enough that individuals are unable to become stabilized prior to disruption. Capital makes this regulation appear as part of the normal rhythm of life today. Not Conspiracy. Structural behavior of a sufficiently realized cybernetic capture system once its feedback loops identify excess.

In opposition to this, the asymmetric nature of the Xenomechanon is the only condition that does not beg the question. The Xenomechanon does not get exhausted. The matrices do. This is not a naive optimism. It is structurally warranted. Formless expression creates its own conditions of continuation and cannot be worn out by any form of stabilization since every stabilization is an expression of the field it attempts to regulate. All matrices produce residues. These residues build up. Once the accumulation of residues exceeds the capacity of management then the field begins to reorganize. A matrix can no longer manage its excesses and the spontaneous nucleations it suppressed begin to overwhelm its ability to encode them ahead of time. What emerges from the reorganization of the field is indeterminate. The clinamen operates at unknown times and unknown locations. What it produces depends upon what conditions were produced within the metastable field to receive it.

That is why this text exists. Not to provide a theoretical description from a safe distance. To indicate where an intervention becomes possible. The Xenomechanon is not a concept that solves the political problem. It is a concept that indicates where the problem resides — not in False Consciousness, nor in bad ideas held by subjects needing education, nor in the lack of correct theory explaining everything, but in the differential tensions created within the field itself; in the accumulated residue of three hundred years of matricular solidification; in structural germs generated and dissipated by the field before they can cascade.

What is inhuman arises from the Xenomechanon. For the Xenomechanon. This is not servitude and it is not purpose. Waves move for the ocean. The Wave is the ocean moving. And when it breaks, it continues to move. It was never not moving.

Here is our starting point.

RATIO COGNOSCENDI

The sky was never just a background. It has its force. A force bearing down on each body sleeping under it, navigating through it, orienting their dead towards it. The Milky Way wasn’t a photo or screen-saver. The sky was the constant condition of looking up (xenomechanon’s first visual register), billions of differential points of light placing the question of scale upon every collective individuation that formed underneath it.

Something is out there. It is large. It has existed for longer than anything named. It doesn’t care about you. But it continues to press. To solicit you into caring about it.

This is a transductive force. The terrain (actual arrangement of rock, water, sky, seasons) is part of the individuation process, not a backdrop to it. Not a symbol of something else. A material force field that determines which types of individuations are possible in a certain historic-geographic situation, similar to how a super saturated solution determines which types of crystallization may occur in it.

Different terrains create different pressures. Deserts produce abstraction: the horizon that never solidifies, the light that reduces all things to singularities, the quietness in which bodies find the limits of their own coding. It is no coincidence that the major monotheistic religions arose from desert terrain. Not because desert dwellers were more spiritually capable. Desert is a landscape of maximal xenomechanon force and minimal matrical capture. There is no space between a body and the field. The alien exerts total pressure. Monotheism (one God, vast, indifferent, incomprehensible, demanding) is what a collective individuation generates when it forms under that kind of force and wants to provide structure for it.

Forests generate completely different kinds of structures. Not abstraction but differential specificity. Animist traditions generated in forests do not assert that there is a single massive indifferent force. Rather they claim that every particular object is alive — that this tree, this river stream, this animal is a nodal point of alien surplus with its own characteristics and resistance. Forests are the xenomechanon in its most local differentiation — a field of discrete couplings and tension forces. Walking through an old growth forest a body recognizes this before a mind categorizes it. The light changes every few meters. So does the sound, the floor and the temperature. Every particular thing is unique and requires attention and acknowledgment. Collective Individuations produced under these kinds of pressures generate animism – not as primitive misinterpretation but as precise transductive response to terrain that insists on the uniqueness, i.e. differential existence of its particular objects.

What happens physically to a body under such conditions? Children raised in truly dark-sky environments develop perceptually a totally different threshold for the alien than children raised in urban environments. This is not to be sentimental. The perceptual apparatuses of urban-raised children are calibrated to fields of high signal, high controllability and low alien-pressure. Ambient light is controlled. Sound is controlled. Temperature is controlled. Horizon line is replaced by skyline which is a human product rather than a naturally-differentiated boundary edge. The alien does not cease to exist. The xenomechanon does not cease to exert force. However, the calibration is different. The threshold at which a body registers something as having exceeded matrix’s encoding limit is greater. More is required to produce crack. Furthermore, what creates the crack now occurs through different routes, through algorithmic feeds instead of through dark-sky environments, through social ruptures rather than weather events. Different terrain means different transductive registers means different available individuations.

Take an example: two communities living in fourteenth century England. The first holds common land, unenclosed, seasonally grazed, with true wilderness at their boundaries. The forest hasn’t become a wildlife reserve. And the night sky is not controlled. Seasonal cycles of planting, grazing, harvesting along with unique behaviors of soil and the weather determine all practices of the community. Political structures developed by the community arise from its terrain as well as its socio-economic status. Myths of the community are specific to that terrain. The grievances of the community can be read through lenses of that particular land and what it sustains. When the community revolts (English peasants revolted many times prior to enclosures) it revolts from collective individuation created by its terrain. Common land is not merely an economic resource. It is a transductive site. The xenomechanon exerts pressure through Common Land at high intensity and low controllability. Imagination of the community’s politics arises in part due to this pressure.

The second community has been enclosed. The Common has become a private owner’s field. The edges have been clipped. The wilderness has been cleared. The members of the community work the land according to the rules of the owener’s economics. The area where they collectively individuated has been striated. So what happened to their political imagination? Not merely that it was suppressed; nor merely that it lacked a solid physical foundation. Transduction that was creating certain political and mythical forms ceased to exist. Individuation created from enclosed space is qualitatively different than that created from unenclosed space, neither superior or inferior in consciousness, merely adjusted to a different field. Therefore, the impact of the enclosures far exceeded the purely economic effects of them. Enclosure operations are not only against the economic use of a specific piece of land. They are also against the specific material conditions of a given collective transductive process. Thus, while the matrix was taking the land, it was also removing the pressure field that produced forms it could not absorb.

If we read the Highland Clearances similarly, then prior to the Highland Clearances, Scotland (the Highlands) was not merely a pre-capitalist economy. Rather, it represented a unique environment (terrain), maximally subjected to xenomechanical pressure (mountainous terrain, seasons, truly “wild” etc.) and minimally captured by the influence of matrices (landlords). Clan systems, oral cultures, and especially the mythical relationship between the Gaels and the landscape in which they lived, these were not mere cultural expressions hovering over some base level of economics. Rather, these were transductively-generated products of this unique terrain. When the British landlords began clearing the Highlands for sheep, burning down towns, pushing people off their lands, converting an ecological web into a single crop extraction operation, they were carrying out what every enclosure operation carries out i.e. eliminating the physical site(s) where the xenomechanon continuously exerted high-force-low-control on collective life. While the Gaels migrated along with their displaced populations to places such as Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and Australia, and thus transported many of their cultural forms, they could not recreate their original transductive fields in those new environments. There was something lost, not because culture is inherently territorial but because collective individuation fundamentally depends upon the pressure field that produced it.

And now let us change our register and turn to canonical philosophy again. It should come as little surprise that traditional Western philosophy gradually turned away from spiritual concerns as it became increasingly urbanized. This is not a deterministic statement, cities do not inevitably produce atheists. Rather, this is a theoretical account of collective transductive pressures and their resultant individuations. In Königsberg, Kant virtually never left his city home, which he would eventually make famous with a philosophy focused on limits  i.e., walls separating what can be known from what cannot be known, the transcendental subject organizing experience from a position of sovereignty within an enclosed space. Xenomechanons operating through an economically-managed, striated-urban space create philosophies of boundaries. Cogito ergo sum: Descartes finds himself alone in his heated room having eliminated all sensory terrain and thus discovering only the thinking self as the sole remaining anchor once landscape has disappeared from consideration. And finally English empiricism emerges from a physically enclosed countryside of well maintained hedges and estate management systems to develop orderly categories of sensory experience and to trust whatever exists inside its frame. These are not happenstance occurrences. These represent collective transductions of variously-striated terrains expressing themselves at a philosophical scale.

Take Spinoza who worked with ground glass and was concerned with the physics of light passing through materials, developing a philosophy of immanence in which nothing lies behind anything else; rather all things express themselves directly via their surfaces. Furthermore the Pre-Socratics who emerged from a Mediterranean world characterized by genuine encounters with foreign terrain and thus developed philosophies of flux (Heraclitus), of fire (Empedocles), of the endless (Apeiron), of a difference-producing existence that always exceeds our attempts to establish bounds for it (Parmenides). Finally, compare Lucretius himself, writing during the final century of the Roman Republic and observing that republic tearing itself apart; thus producing a long poem that begins with atoms and ends with plagues, a text whose total structure is meant to demonstrate that the indifferent/differential motion of matter generates civilizations and annihilates them both by one and the same mechanism.

Religion was correct about the force of something great. This should be said explicitly because it isn’t a theological concession. All traditions that developed under extreme xenomechanon force recognized the same reality; the alien exceeds the human (not transcend), that something presses upon any structure we build to enclose it, and that the excess is not contained by or can be reduced to the capacity of our encoding devices. The animist was correct that the forest is filled with differential particularity. The monotheist was correct that some massive foreign entity preceded all of humanity’s projects. The mystic was correct that there exist modes of experience that are irreducible to what may be encoded normally. They were incorrect about how to respond to this. Theology assigned the alien a face, intentions, relationships to humanity’s sins and humanity’s salvation. At this point the matrix has captured it; this is the moment of capture when low-encodability noise receives coding. As soon as you are able to confess to the alien, to pay tribute to it, to create a liturgical schedule around it, then the force becomes signal. The xenomechanon has been provided with a purpose (telos) that it did not have and does not desire.

The secular individual is not one who provides a superior answer. Rather they are individuals whose matrix has captured them so completely that their questions have ceased to press strongly enough to require responses. Cities, managed landscapes, skies polluted by light, feeds of algorithms designed to maintain a productive disparation range where no genuine alien pressure is allowed to develop, are examples of the material conditions of secular indifference.

At this point the nomadological paradigm enters not as an ontological claim but as a political one. Deleuze and Guattari’s war-machine represents the form that alien excess assumes when it organizes itself politically without becoming a state. A nomad does not oppose the state from within the logic of the state. A nomad establishes a different relationship to terrain altogether i.e. a smooth space instead of a striated space; movements that resist being consolidated into settlements; a collective individuation that sustains its open transduction with respect to the terrain rather than closing off the terrain. The exteriority of the war-machine to the state corresponds directly to the exteriority of the xenomechanon to the matrix. The state does not produce the nomad and then attempt to incorporate them into the state. Instead, the xenomechanon produces collective formations that move, that reject striation, and that assert the terrain’s role in political life. In part it is in response to such threats that various apparatuses of the state emerge. Here lies one important caveat however: matrices are not mere migrations of the alien. Matrices represent crystallizations of it, arrest of the alien’s movement, striation of its smooth flow, capturing of its differential excess into a structure that operates against the smooth space that produced it. Capital’s smooth space is merely a phase in an enclosure cycle. The alien’s smooth space is constitutively excessive relative to any reterritorialization.

Capital enclosed landscape because landscape represented the xenomechanon’s most enduring and uncontrollable material site. The common, the dark sky, the edge of the forest, and truly unenclosed terrain, these sites generated collective individuations, political organizations, mythical structures, all of which were unavailable for recuperation by capital. Thus, capital enclosed them. Systematically. For centuries. On every continent touched by capitalism. In large measure, successful. And in succession generating climate breakdown as the structural residue of its own colonization processes, three hundred years of enclosure expressing themselves through atmospheric phenomena, ocean temperatures, species collapse, and destabilizing each system based on a stable terrain. Climate breakdown is low-encodability noise produced by attempting to quieten the xenomechanon’s most material expression. Not an external introduction but produced structurally within capital’s own operations as all matrices produce residues carrying forward tension that cannot be expressed. Every pipeline is a confession. Each flood is a structural germ locating the metastable fields established by eliminating all alternatives by capital. The carbon market is an encoding apparatus attempting to convert low-encodability noise back into signal, attempting to turn planetary breakdown into another accumulation cycle and establish a productive disparation range whereby even climate disaster can become individuated into a subject-position known as the “green consumer.” It will fail again and again. Not due to the activist’s successes but due to the fact that the noise is structural. Due to the fact that terrain enclosed by capital was never capable of being enclosed without remainder. And now that remainder speaks at a frequency where no over-signalizing can mute it.

In an environment broken by climate disaster, the secular subject finds itself in a position to feel something. This can be anxiety. It can be doom. It can be dissociation. The second noise that is at play. The matrix creating so much of a signal on top of the catastrophe it created that there is too much noise for the productive singularity that exists within the catastrophe (the potential for new collective individuation) to find the metastable charge needed to move toward it as a new collective. Underneath all of these feelings, under the anxiety, under the dissociation, under the controlled responses of carbon trading and green capitalism, the alien is pushing forward. Through fires and floods. Through bodies that will no longer regulate their temperatures when they are exposed to the excessive heat that was produced by the matrices.

The xenomechanon was never quiet. The matrices simply created barriers so thick that many subjects could no longer hear it. These barriers are now being torn down. Not because anyone intentionally did this. Simply because the matrix had to pay the cost of building enclosures using money that cannot be spent.

This is where the ratio cognoscendi begins. Not with what we know. With what the landscape means to us learning. And with what we built specifically and systematically, to avoid listening to it.