0x0000.
on the fourteenth day of the ninth month of the two-thousand-and-twenty-first year since Zero, instagram user insidenesss made a meme in which they claimed language reduces us to “territorialites” and declared the maxim: invent a new [meta-] language.
0x000i.
at first it seemed like a spelling mistake of the word “territorialities” but i referred to the caption, so then i re-read it with a different pronunciation: terri-tori-a-lytes. like socialite, interesting. this opened up a new dimension to the original post, which is what i want to explore here.
just as socia-lites are reduced to the social spaces and the specific dynamism of these spaces they occupy, so does language reduce us to territoria-lites.
what or who is a territoria-lite?
generally, a territoria-lite is every subject.
specifically, it is a mode of existence in specific territories, spatiotemporal, social, cybernetic. most subjects are singularly territoria-lites, some are trans-territoria-lites.
the moment the human-qua-subject is formed through the multi-polar split of the ‘naked’ human existence into a conscious/unconscious pole transversed by a Real/Symbolic pole (momentarily borrowing these registers from Lacan), the subject is identified, captured, and reduced to a territoria-lite.
the specific territory which a subject territorializes depends on when, where, under what conditions they were born, that is, the particular territory of their socioeconomic class; and the particular temperament of that subject, which is not innate, but also determined by the attention, care, love, etc, in a word, resources, transferred to the subject during the early developmental period.
all of these resources are themselves historically determined, so the possible territories are already determined at the moment of birth, and hence the possible temperaments.
this may appear as a closed system in that, since it is all historically determined at every moment, for every birth, for every subject, no one may escape these boundaries.
however, it is not a closed system.
for, just as the dialectical logic expresses the immanent logic of “a thing arising out of no-thing” so too does every territoria-lite hold the potential of deterritorializing themselves: a sudden flux from a stillness, a thing out of no-thing, an everything out of nothing.
0x00ii.
according to Axiomatic Systems Incorporated (AxSys), there are 129,864,880 known books in the world today. so we estimate the number of texts (pdfs of essays, articles, books, anything readable on the internet) to be 500 million.
so we imagine a 500-million-faced polyhedra, not a perfect sphere, because there are infinite points on the surface of a sphere and there are not infinite books.
now imagine all the possible connected paths between any two diametric points imposed on the surface of the sphere which a subject can traverse, each superimposed point corresponding to a beginning and an end, an arising and a disappearance, or if you rather, the birth and death of the subject.
each connected path correspond to all the texts a subject reads in their lifetime.
now let’s impose two other structures.
first, a categorization scheme: all the books are organized by historically determined, arbitrarily fixed categories.
second, a topological structure that assigns closeness to each category, like a hue map on a sphere, so that, for example, category of mystery is “close to” the category of self-help; category of “cnn news” is close to category of “foxnews news” which are both close to category of “thriller.”
so for most subjects, their paths are close to a “straight line” which on a sphere would be the arc of a great circle. more precisely, a geodesic is the shortest path between two points: in a Riemannian two-dimensional manifold of zero curvature e.g. on one side of a sheet of paper, this shortest path is a straight line.
straight lines or relatively straight lines represent the singular territoria-lites.
wild curved paths, paths that go far and come close and loop and twist, paths that go all over before connecting with the end point, these correspond to the trans-territoria-lites.
0x0iii.
it is these trans-territoria-lites that may, from a territory, deterritorialize themselves by inventing new syntax, new modes of expression, new semantics, expanding the signified, using language as play instead of as a tool of imperialism--only after we escape could we freely develop new phonetics, new symbols, new groupings, new categories, new languages entirely.
“identify everything,” commands AxSys, the ultimate capitalist entity, the first true meta-model to realize perfect identity with its own product, an auto-commoditizing machine that is always incomplete due to cataloguing problems: so it needs you.
but this is how we escape: by dis-identifying and re-identifying, by scrambling the existing code.
as for the meta-languages? to be sure, meaning is still communicated because the morphemes are recognizable, it is not a purely subjective language, one invented for personal use.
it can be.
but here we refer to english or portuguese or spanish or cantonese or german or any other. this is important so that through this play, the other-subject is lifted from their position and made to assume a different territory to recognize this meaning, since the words are understood: if i think they’re dumb, and i think i’m not, certainly i can understand what they wrote!
with this act of creation, a new territory is made, a new possible point on the path is created, a new face to the 500-million-side polyhedra, a new category which once added to the quasi-sphere of all catalogued texts in existence, shifts and rearranges all the present categories, and situates itself far from all other categories.
through connecting with this new point, a subject traverses territories and momentarily finds themselves in one where up is down and down is up: deterritorialization occurs and it may induce further deterritorializations.
their codes become scrambled, the unconscious shifts with new information, consequently the conscious shifts with new thoughts, and eventually the body with new behavior: one may lose interest in this or that, change consumption habits, perform an action differently or with new intention.
0x00iv.
ah, and there comes Apophis, as a bright growing light, a new sun…
it is through Apophenia that we move from logos to muthos.
through connecting the seemingly unrelated, we begin this process of creating a new meta-language, we begin telling a new story.
of course, this isn’t some paranoiac development, on the contrary (since paranoia and schizophrenia are opposed in the libidinal spectrum).
the situation of today is due to this paranoiac development, because of AxSys: what we find today is a despotic over-coding of power that imposes its axioms on subjects and social forms.
so what we wish to accomplish here is a freeing of desire, the very desire which arises as a result of the externalization of the previously-internal fantasy, thereby implanting new meta-desires.
we may use things as coordinates, but just that.
for instance, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari deterritorialize Anti-oedipus: the arborescence of Anti-oedipus is opposed by the rhizome; conceptual argument by faciality; smooth spaces by striated spaces.
this is a moment of the deterritorialization, it is intentional: these oppositions are strategically made non-concepts in order to under-determine them, so that their understanding and extension to other domains require invention of novel connections, rather than mere application of a pre-established rule.
so what impels a pseud to fix their word or what was said or what was assumed to have meant to oneself or to a group (e.g. academia or instagram pseuds), if that’s not what d&g did?
on whose authority? from where i stand, i see no thing holy.
because by doing so, one territorializes themselves in what was written or said or assumed to have meant to oneself or to a group, instead of connecting oneself to the immanent process of production.
remember cyborgs, what is meant is not always the word!
it is precisely through Apophenia that the closed binary couple of the connective synthesis “this and that” becomes an open-ended series of “this and then that and then this…”
it is precisely through Apophenia that the inclusive disjunction is opened from a binary alternative “either this or that” into a series of alternatives “this or that or this…”
and it is precisely because of the coming of Apophis, that we find ourselves in this situation: if all is to end with the Arrival, why not tell the greatest story ever told?
because if we can tell this story, we can also stop Apophis, and if we fail, the story is still told, for we would have lived it...