In 2023, the first “ultrablack non-ference of mille plateaux” took place at Forum Stadtpark (Graz) with several days of concerts, lectures, video/film screenings, performances, an exhibition, site-specific installations, workshops, discussions, dj sets, outages implying ad hoc improvisations and fast acting. What we’ve set out to do was not a con-ference (con-ferre (lat.), bringing together), but a non-ference (to not carry). It is for us to meet as strange strangers: A being together in homelessness, an interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, the undercommon appositionality, a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question.

„Stefano Harney defines the undercommons as that which, although impossible, although “not meant to survive” (to quote Audre Lorde), nevertheless exists: exists as no-bodies, no-things, and no-places, that is to say as what I have elsewhere called atopia. As Fred Moten explains, no-things and no-bodies are not persons (the disastrous condition of the possibility of its opposite: things as commodities, as slaves, as the subjugation of nature) but the non-being or the “no-thingness” that precedes any subjectification, any interpellation en sujet and any White fabrication, and also any objectification. No-thingness is always-already destituted Being […]“ (Frederic Neyrat, Undercomets: on the structure of anatagonism and the cosmo-geological field)

From April 2–12 2025 “ultrablack non-ference of mille plateaux II” proliferates and branches out from Forum Stadtpark (and other places) into the city of Graz. Again it launches its dark, unpredictable, and concatenating deprogramming program, with several days of concerts, lectures, video/film screenings, performances, exhibitions, site-specific installations, workshops, discussions, DJ sets, and outages implying ad hoc improvisations and fast acting.

„The Great Game is irredemable; it is played only once. We wish to play it every moment of our lives. It is a case of „loser wins“, since the aim is to lose oneself. And we want to win. Yet the Great Game is a game of chance, that is to say, of skill, or better still ‚grace‘: the grace of God, and the grace of action.“ (Le Grand Jeu, Theory of the Great Game)

If you’re trapped in a game whose outcome is a lose-lose situation, when even winning is losing, yet losing is losing too, the question is not so much on how to win this particular game anymore but how to lose this game spectacularly.

“When reality is conceived as the effect of the interactions among agents (the sequence of the results of moves and countermoves) and agents as the real effects of previous interactions (since the behaviors that define each player are selected according to their tested efficacy), on the one hand we have a becoming reality which is the product of an ever ending collective learning process within which new sequences of moves can be introduced; on the other hand, this infinite unpredictable reality is the mere reality of a game which is supposed to be the only universal process to which any agent is compelled to contribute if one wishes to satisfy the legitimate expectations (to act in order to produce the effects that allow one to possibly satisfy needs, desires, in short, utilities). Our condition in the global network is that of agents of the real, since we all contribute to the co-production of the ever evolving process; nevertheless, I will argue, this reality is but the effect of the adoption of a notion of instrumental pragmatic rationality which denies the existence of any other possible reality as the actualization of different determinations of reason. While following Deleuze’s notion of deterritorialization, I will show that the real philosophical choice does not concern the introduction of new moves that differentiate the only universal game, but it is concerned with the possible abolition of the agency which is instantiated within the collective network.“ (Anna Longo, Escaping the Network)

Co[s]mic Annihilation

“For Baudrillard, pataphysics offers a way to pull oneself out of one’s position as subject, which goes hand in hand with the ironic realization that it is the world itself that thinks us, indeed that it is it which speaks. Baudrillard’s theoretical gesture now takes on something of a poker game; he wants to play on the other side of the subject, so to speak, putting the object in the foreground and favoring it, giving it a kind of privilege. Pataphysics would now be a metaphor for a new imaginary science that questions both physics and metaphysics. (Baudrillard 2005)” (Achim Szepanski, Quant-Theorie)

Some months gone by since Achim Szepanski († 22. September 2024), original founder of the labels “Force Inc. Music Works” & “mille plateaux”, passed away. A friend, a comrade, a force (of negativity), ‘Achim-Maschine’ of seemingly endless proliferous productivity [in the words of a common friend], a sensitive mind, …

What’s left is a minus, a lack, a not-anymore. And the only thing left to do is to pick-up what was left (unfinished), continuing the not ending and not surrendering, maybe open up to a ‘becoming-Achim’ – as we all become, transmutate, entangle with those who are & were close to us (through affirmation, indifference, or negation).

It also undoubtedly means a shift in the structures of “Force Inc.”, “mille plateaux” & “NON”. What could once be called a pack are now planets let loose without a gravitational center, spreading out in all directions, only held together by a strange absent force, or quantum-entangled, a mysteriously self-coordinating process forming a celestial cipher…

“The meso-world is thus not only confronted by the infinitely small (incidentally, one will never find the last small particles; quantum theory is not about the small, but about the exact and the indeterminate), but also by the universe as an infinitely large entity. Just as the microscopic “unconscious” manifests itself in the world, so too does the great macroscopic “unconscious”, the latter through a series of symptoms, which are the stars and galaxies in the universe. This duality of infinities breaks the unity of the unconscious that envelops the world. Laruelle writes that one should not replace the “will to power” with the will to science, but with the “will” to be overdetermined by the indifferent and black universe.1 (Laruelle 2019)” (translation of Achim Szepanski’s unfinished & yet unpublished, Quant-Theorie)

“[…] run with this general cosmic and science-fictional subcategory, centre one of the contradictory tendencies flowing through it, and trace it to its root. 
This tendency is identification with space and the cosmos as an external image with which one would like to merge oneself, so that one is no longer with the cosmos but is the cosmos: ‘I would like to be with her, but I would like to be her’. This is, again, a cross-class feeling in itself, as it stands – but an unconscious, unrealised class impulse is submerged in its bones. We will find in it a hidden understanding of the possibility of breaking through the suffocation and starvation of daily proletarian life, something which most of us are currently divorced from the necessary tools to systematically grasp and consciously express.“ (Anja Heisler Weiser Flower, Cosmos Against Nature in the Class Struggle of Proletarian Trans Women, in: Jules Joanne Gleeson, Elle O’Rourke (ed.), Transgender Marxism)

This is an ultrablack non-movement subtracting themselves from this world. The Proletarian movement is not a movement for itself, but against its very own existence – the goal of the working class is that of self-abolition – to end capitalization is to end classes. When the movement usually is defined as x+1, always one more, we redefine it as x-1, always one less.

Nico Mas pointed out that minimalism is most often reinterpreted as “less is more.” “Less is more”, however, is quite unsatisfactory , rather, less is not “more”, but less is just less. The mistake with the statement “less is more” is that it still uses “more” as a representative measure of virtuosity. But if less is good, then less is also less. There is a virtuosity of less and reasons for its virtuosity that connects minimalism with Zen.

Yet in the same sense the logic of “more is more” on hyperdrive, an exaggeratedly maximalist composition, is always on the brink of collapse, in danger of turning into rubble, producing an aesthetics of the catastrophe. Maximalist aesthetics connect with the abundance of the general economy, thought from the perspective of an indifferent cosmos, therefore doomed from the very beginning.

“Dreams of the end are over. And it is not because of cynicism, but because of deep boredom: nothing is possible, because nothing is impossible anymore.
The dreams of the end told by disaster “porn” movies represent the ultimate simulacrum. Representations of their own nothingness. Nihilism of the end.” (Alessandro Sbordini, Semiotics of the End: Boredom at the End of the World)

Spellbound mankind looks at its screens taking recordings of its own extinction.

While the Angel of History has his face

“turned toward[s] the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History)

“The Angel of Futurity would have her face turned towards the future; but however much she strained towards that future, she would be unable to reach it, for she would be caught, like a fly trapped in a spider web, in the nightmarish toils of an unending present, woven out of threads that are anchored in the horrors of the past. The angel of futurity, no less than the angel of history, can only see ‘a pile of debris’: in her case, these are fragments, not of the past, but of the future. They hint at the contours of a world that – stuck in the present – she will never actually attain.” (Steven Shaviro, Fluid Futures – Science Fiction and Potentiality)

Therefore we’re still stuck in the logic of presentism a constant updating & dyscontinous instantization. Trapped by this logic of immediacy lacking any ability to historicize.

The spectral is bound to the past – the archive – that which has not been redeemed, and opens up to the future as a possibility of redemption. 

“There is no escape from the web of Great Time (mahākāla), a Time which comes before and goes beyond the human, the geological, and even the astrological; a Time which both dissolves and holds together all conceptions of time.” (Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, (W)omen out/of Time: Metis, Medea, Mahakali)

Ultrablack-Cryptology

“Scientific thinking is dictated by the object of investigation, by the vicissitudes of the unpredictable real.” (Katerina Kolozova)

Just as cultural industry describes the general mode of production & consumption of culture – not just a specific form of production in culture – in late capitalism, so the spectacle describes the transformation of everything living into mere representation. Correspondingly the hyperreal of the simulacrum refers to the detachment of the signifiers from the signified, no longer refering to the real, but trapped in self-referentiality.

“… nothing separates one pole from another anymore, the beginning from the end; there is a kind of contraction of one over the other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion – an absorption of the radiating mode of causality, of the differential mode of determination, with its positive and negative charge – an implosion of meaning. That is where simulation begins.” (J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation)

And so the map fused with the territory.

What Baurillard describes as a confusion – disorderly mixing & blending or contraction  – of map & territory – emergence of the hyperreal -, can be described in laruellian terms as a confusion of the real with the world. For him the real (in one) is given without givenness, therefore being ultrablack. As a unilateral causality that goes primarily in one direction, namely from the real to the world of thought, the real simultaneously signifies a (unilateral) duality, that of the given-without-givenness and the given, the one and the mixtures in the world, whereby it must always be borne in mind that the given-without-givenness also remains closed to the given-of-the-given, while the latter conversely also excludes itself, albeit in a less original way, namely on the basis of transcendental posits. Laruelle describes “givenness” as the first operation of thinking according to the given, i.e. givenness of the given, but it is determined by the given in the last instance. And non-philosophy describes the given as real-one that is radically immanent to itself in its essence as non-constituted, or in other words,the real is conceived as an instance that is defined by its radical immanence under the conditions of possibility. The real is given by itself, namely as vision-in-one or as one-in-one, and thus demonstrates its closedness to thought. Consequently, one should not mix the radical or immanent real with an absolute real, whether this is conceived as a substantial or spiritual thing. Radical and not absolute, the real has no interface that could communicate with the world or the symbolic, it only has a uniface with the world. The real can neither be known nor thought, but it can at least be described with axioms. In his concept of non-philosophy, Laruelle thus understands the real as the only transcendental, namely as an axiom, and thus every thought becomes an immediate expression of the real. Ergo, in the course of the radical immanence of the real, there is still a certain transcendence, which Laruelle justifies as minimally transcendental, but nevertheless the real in the last instance determines knowledge as a non-philosophical knowledge.

The non-philosophical approach to the real is in line with quantum physical tests of the real, their construction of worlds that will be experimentally tested and are only used for as long as they work. This includes paradoxical and contradictive thesis, that can be maintained along each other.

“Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche (Lacan) – there are only causes of what does not work, of what stumbles and Points to a gap, a leap, a problem.” (Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal)

For Baudrillard, consumer society is the fabric or web produced by the circulation of signifiers and therefore our current way of maintaining meaning. In this respect, the succession of the 2000s to date can be understood as an accelerated production of meaning (circulation of signifiers), as a reduction in the duration between updates in the fabric of meaning. Resulting is something that’s way weirder than hyperrealism, it’s not only that signifiers became completely detached from that which they point at – existing in a vacuum -, but rather that with each subsequent cycle they seem to be distorting more and more that which they were meant to describe in the first place. Although their initial purpose would’ve been to partake in the generic scientific process of describing the real-in-one of which they, the signifiers, are themselves determined-in-the-last-instance. Instead our current means for producing meanings become less adequate in describing reality per hour. Language, as a tool to point at sth., to make our pre-representable perceptions concrete and communicable seem to produce the opposite effect: Language is shattered by the inability to bring perception and meaning together. The possibility of a new, different language lies beyond this world, with a different world, a different language; a possible alien xeno-language. This world is linked to a dead language, a language of the ancien regime, of a vanished empire that could no longer meet its external demands, while the outside inevitably creeps in against every measure of immunication. The accelerated circulation, the continuous, excessive update of the web of meaning, creates a i(n)real meaning that’s incestuously derivative, merely refering to itself, and tearing itself apart in the very process. And the resulting fear of no longer being able to keep up, to become outdated, creates the actual inability to perceive anything at all: Thought as sequencialization of fashionable trends.

„the real is the instance one inhabits prior to any ‘making sense out of it’ […] That invasion of sensation, whether undergone as pain or pleasure, is suffering since it entails unmitigated exposure. Without the subject of language that transforms it into representation, phantasm, or idea/l, it is helpless passivity.“ (Katerina Kolozova, Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism – Marx and Laruelle)

Thomas Ligotti – writer of supernatural horror – speaks about horror and knowledge, for him it‘s a common mistake to ascribe large amounts of fantasy to children, but quite the opposite. The child doesn‘t fear the dark, because it can imagine all the horrible things that could be there or that could happen, instead it fears the dark exactly because it can not imagine, because it does not know. Interestingly many, if not most, supernatural horror storys, somehow incorporate ‚the sciences‘ (or involve characters, like scientists, affiliated to them) that are confronted with not knowing, with the problem of not understanding. The shock sets in exactly at the moment when one realizes that one cannot imagine it, the indefinite uncanny is released.

“For Baudrillard, it is not the question posed by Leibniz of why something is instead of nothing that is decisive, but the question of why first there is nothing and then something. (Baudrillard 1996: 12) Of course, no single object within a given universe can emerge from nothing, but the entire universe can do so. If one follows the Big Bang theory, then after an initial burst of energy, as the universe cooled and expanded, unequal amounts of matter and antimatter formed. The original materialization was thus that of matter and antimatter at the same time, whereby later, through a symmetry break, matter separated from antimatter. For some unknown reason, a certain percentage of matter developed, which led to the creation of our entire material world. For Baudrillard, antimatter forms a kind of invisible parallel world, an invisible nebula and an anti-universe. Due to the exclusion of antimatter, a complete uncertainty weighs on the world to this day, whereby matter, when freed from its antimatter, remains subject to the second principle of thermodynamics, entropic regression. Although materiality thus constrained follows physical laws, these laws are not “true” for Baudrillard, since they result only from an ontological simplification. (Ibid.)  None of this is a figment of Baudrillard’s imagination, insofar as the Big Bang model explains only part of the cosmic expansion from the masses and energies in the cosmos, leaving an unexplained remainder that is filled in by other forms of matter and energy (dark matter or antimatter): If, with quantum theory, the destruction of objective substance (an electron is not a simple physical thing) also comes into play, the categorical nature of non-being changes, which now assigns its place to being in the first place. Non-being would now have to be regarded as the generative field of physics and mathematics, which remains removed from any simple phenomenology of the visible.” (Achim Szepanski, Quant-Theorie)

We’re dealing with the four categories of the known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

“We know that it’s a weak force in our universe, which means it’s a strong force somewhere else. And we’re trying to figure out where, or what, that is.” (Charlie Jane Anders, All the birds in the sky)

This is the anonymous, dark, black, hidden, concealed, encrypted, opaque, undercover and incomprehensible: Ultrablack of Music dares to exodus and listens to those forces and sounds that tell of the unheard in music. Sound is the vibration, resonance and diffraction of waves in the black cosmos. Introducing an axiomatic heresy:

Ultrablackness is the perfect crime, an empty placeholder (), empty set, stepping back from (…), a term referencing a multiplicity of terms that are not identical to each other yet share a mystical relativity. Ultrablack is the trauma that can not be faced directly, it is negativity, clandestineness, non-identical, non-immediacy, non-sense, glitch, gap, lack, (noisyness of) noise, opacity, anonymity, ‘the unfinished system of non-knowledge’, heterogenity, the relation of system & non-system, an iconoclastic torch of non-programmatism,’Bilderverbot’, minor theory, trauma, fundamental split, enigma, un(der)common, alienaton / estrangement, engaged withdrawal as oppositional action, ‘Ungrund’, the real (F. Laruelle).

It’s an anti-symbol, a contradiction that cancels itself out while simultaneously including all possibilities.

This is the logic of the ultrablack. It is a syntax of voids, a grammatology of non-meaning, a cryptology of the invisible. It is the residue of thought, the hidden cipher that refuses to be deciphered. Ultrablackness is the black hole at the heart of sense-making—pulling everything into its event horizon, only to spit it back out as noise, as interference, as the unfinished sentence of a universe that speaks itself into existence only to negate its own articulation.

“I cannot, I will never accept this. Non possumus.” It is “this impossibility, or this powerlessness, that is our very power.” (Mascolo, Refus inconditionnel)

Nonsense is the force or process underlying language. It is the dynamic that comes together from time to time as sense only to dissolve back into paradox. It is only on the basis of nonsense that sense can emerge. Sense is produced by nonsense, an effect.

„Okay. So one of these symbols is clearly „not,“ meaning whatever you put next to is negated. And this other symbol is like an asterisk, meaning every possible variation of something is allowed. But … there’s one symbol that has both „not“ and „everything“ connected to it. Which makes no sense: How can something be not allowed, and also allowed in every situation?
The only way to solve this puzzle is to embrace contradictions.“ (Charlie Jane Anders, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak)

The problem with each system of categorization, of identification, of nameing, of reference, of representation, …, is that of this lack. Of the impossibility of exhaustive description.

„Contamination is the companion of categorization. It is all but impossible to feel entirely unambivalent about, entirely described by, a social identity category; this was never the goal of transgender or transsexual politics in the first place. The question, then, is whether we can develop a tolerance for contamination and for the inevitable misfit of identity categories, rather than continually kicking the bucket further down the road, generating ever more terms in pursuit of an impossible dream—that of social categories capable of matching the uniqueness of individual psyches. To accomplish all of this, we must, first and foremost, relinquish the fantasy that gender is a means of self-knowledge, self-expression, and authenticity rather than a shared, and therefore imperfect, social schema. This means developing a robust trans politics and discourse without gender identity.“ (Kadji Amin, We Are All Nonbinary: A Brief History of Accidents)

The general misconception of identifying something with itself, the identity of being identical with itself, is a grave error, and the underlying problem of popular identity politics. Nothing is identical with itself.

„The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy… It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.“ (Th. W. Adorno Negative Dialectics)

Instead of thinking in terms of fixed identities, of being identical with someone or something, it is necessary to think of it as a form of becoming other, starting from possible futures that influence the present.

“To write is not to record or represent a given action, but to lose one’s capacity to be the subject or initiator of that action. I lose myself, in putting down memories, in writing, but I don’t escape the fatality of the events, their weight and their irreversibility, merely because I cannot claim them for myself.” (Kathy Acker)

Some say: ‘To quote to much is bad style.’

Others [the SCUM] might answer: ‘To think you’re not (unintentionally) quoting anyway, is a phallic-vision of omnipotence.’

You learn to develop your tongue, your voice, your style, your signature, your…

What’s yours? Who’s you?

You is running circles in some (self-build) labyrinth. You’s lost.

The you some speak about is not so much a physical entity as it is an image, a label, a stylization, a spectacular being, an illusion of a self. A you-fiction.

Is you an island?

Since many, many years, I’ve been dreaming. Dreaming of the ocean, water, of universes or cosmic-space, or, much more, of the inbetween of it. What’s inbetween?

The flux is neither flowing nor static. The void is not a nihilistic empty darkness.

Learn speaking the mOther-tongue without the first letter.

The unspoken speaks through relations of the archive(d).

To speak in endless multiplicities of voices.

A thanatological undoing of ego. Dismiss yourself.

„Can what is playing you make it to level-2?“ (Nick Land, meltdown)

Echos. And Reverberations.

A wound. Open to the outside.

Cut-up reality.

Refusing suicidal fascist Capitalization – Self-Annihilation of Nihilism

“If they learn what we do on distant shores to secure their safety and prosperity, I am certain they would hang us all. Not for the crime of what we did, mind! But for the crime of allowing them to know.” (PsychoPass)

These few sentences, spoken by the police in the dystopian anime “PsychoPass”, eerily mirror our everyday reality—a world where bulimic media consumption fragments our attention into split-second impulses. What we perceive is instantly forgotten; nothing is truly processed—an amnesiac bliss. The countless lives lost daily, directly or indirectly at the hands of others, have long ceased to trouble us. Reduced to numbers in statistics, transformed into spectacular yet hollow images, they exist merely as representations. The real disturbance is not their death, but the reminder of their existence—the living remainder that unsettles our carefully maintained peace. 

In this world the subject is nothing much but the entrepreneur of their proclaimed self converted into an asset. Time of the curated self, identity tailored to fit the portfolio. Communication is now about creating speech (‘making people speak’) rather than a matter of speaking; information is about ‘making people know’ rather than about knowledge; participation is about mechanistically inducing response, engagement: about operations rather than actions. Lifes reduced to risk management, probability calculations of relative uncertainty. Those not fit enough, whose curation fails or having made the wrong bets, who are not properly in line with the expectations, are sorted out. An ever increasing sur-plus-population, literally human-trash.

„[…] antagonism as such never simply exists between conflicting parties; it is the very structuring principle of this conflict, and of the elements involved in it.“ (Alenka Zupančič, What is Sex?)

When trading derivatives, investors can speculate on the occurrence of certain events—some of which they may even have the power to influence. For example, one could bet on a company’s bankruptcy, take actions to hasten its collapse, and then profit from the outcome. This logic is mirrored in the foreign policy of the (alt-)right, particularly in the actions of imperial powers like the U.S. and Russia. Here, the goal is not necessarily to achieve gains but to ensure that others suffer greater losses. This mindset extends beyond geopolitics into everyday interactions, where the focus is not on improving one’s own life but on making sure others have it worse. It represents a complete inversion of values—an arithmetic of destruction rather than progress. And so the productive forces of capitalization come to their limits and its destructive forces ever more present, therefore capitalization itself turns into a suicidal-fascism. We’re living in a time of global techno-fascism. Dangerous is not so much the fascism ‘outside’ of us, but the nano-fascist permeating through our very own bodies, that which has become a part of every single being in this world.

„Nano-fascism is distinguished from micro-fascism in the sense that it is not based on mimesis. In micro-fascism, there is still a figure (or rather, a model), and the subject constructions are maintained on the basis of whether this figure/model is imitated and thus interiorized. In nano-fascism there is neither a figure nor a model left; following a biological mutation, all the specifications that go into the making of a fascist come ready-at-hand in a box, and after a certain period of incubation, they permeate the body down to all of its nano-units.“ (Zafer Aracagök, Non-Conceptual Negativity – Damaged Reflections on Turkey)

Nearly 80 years ago, the Frankfurt School grappled with the question of why humanity had succumbed to a new kind of barbarism rather than achieving liberation. Today, the question has shifted: why is humanity, with full awareness, accelerating its own destruction?

“We live in a world of ruined concepts, used-up words, emptied conceptions of the world. We live in – and we build – agitated necropolises, we populate and mobilise deserts. All horizons seem blocked, and the very question of the horizon becomes enigmatic. We nevertheless continue to live and work in this world, much more solid than it seems, since it supports its shocks, digests its crises, assimilates negativities, marches towards its future. […] Nihilism is not an error, an aberration, a fault, an illness; it is no point of view, no theory, no psychological disposition; it does not characterise this or that particular state of things. Nihilism begins to englobe all that is and is done. To speak about it, in the world of the fragmented totality, is extremely difficult. Whether one deplores or rejoices in it: it seems that only fragmentary and aphoristic systematics could dare the adventure.” (Kostas Axelos, The Game of the World)

The nihilism of our time paints all futures in the same grey of unending inevitable violence and immiseration (or even abolishes them completely), effectively leading to a surrendering in advance and retreating from the world as such. 

By contrast, we might hone this sentiment into a weapon which can be used to tear down the structures that eradicate meaning, numb us, to clear the space to build something meaningful on our own terms. In undoing the very world depriving us of meaning, pulling away from atomized forms of resignation, resentment, revenge or aversion, we give collectively birth to a zany bastard child, an uchro(m/n)iatic  seduction: a nihilism against the nihilism of our world. Nihilism, annihilation without recourse, bears the seeds of its own surpassing and its death. The end is over. Every becoming is production and consumption, from the very beginning doomed to annihilation. Before us lies the rotting carcass of nihilism.

“To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world. It is the practice of the social otherwise, the insurgent ground that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies; it is the lived experience of enclosure and segregation, assembling and huddling together. It is the directionless search for a free territory; it is a practice of making and relation that enfolds within the policed boundaries of the dark ghetto; it is the mutual aid offered in the open-air prison. It is a queer resource of black survival. It is a beautiful experiment in how-to-live” (Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives) 

Uchronia – ‘When there’s nowhere to go, go nowhen.’

In these times, fleeing the country seemed like a reasonable question for many of us, but at the end of the day the question is where to? Geographically, there is no outside anymore, the times of utopia are over. What remains is Uchronia – non-time. 

To fall out of history.

It is necessary to think temporality in plural, as simultaneous temporalities, and that it is not moving in a linear fashion, from past to present to future, therefor to be understood as non-linear movement. Movement, in this case, means at the same time thinking in movement, being moved, thinking the connection of (social) movements, as well as thinking history and music in movement, it points towards movement by migrants in a globalized world, or tectonic movement, as it means the movement of products and resources via logistic and cybernetic networks. Pluralities of movements that are not separate, but intraactive and directly linked to each other.

“She saw a whole different city than he did. […] Different people have different weird quirks. […] I’m saying that there are a lot of different ways of looking at the world, and maybe I actually do have a unique advantage, because I get to hear different voices.” (Charlie Jane Anders, All the birds in the sky)

In musical form, as in social structure, a recompos(t)ed polyphony may provide the means for rethinking the relation between the singular & totality, subject & objectivity, stories & History, voice & composition. As a practice of sonic-thinking/-fiction producing and listening to non-linear, poly-temporic music can help understanding how these relations function, while the socio-philosophical & scientific critiques re-articulate possible lines of f(l)ight for further exploration. It’s about thinking in motion as well as thinking (social) movement(s) at the same time.

“We offer our answer as a polyphony. There is no authoritative approach to Marx and his legacy, and nor have we sought to impose one. Marxism is a broad and living tradition, defined by its continual internal disputations, its varying schools, and its contested orthodoxies.
Each of these finds inspiration in a different facet of Marx‘s practice.“ (Jules Joanne Gleeson & Elle O‘Rourke, ed., TransGenderMarxism)

A rhythmanalysis of poly-temporic (social) movement(s) allows to see each of them as part of a bottom up (de-)composition forming a complex waveform. We can see them amplifying or attenuating each other depending on their phases. We can hear their echos & reverberations around the globe. These are countermeasurements towards modern warfare tactics of ‘multi-domain-dominance’ and ‘nonlinear warfare’, strategies that expand the battlefield beyond the military complex.

“Linear conflicts are defined by a sequential progression of a planned strategy by opposing sides, whereas nonlinear conflict is the simultaneous deployment of multiple, complementary military and non-military warfare tactics.” (Joshua Ball, What Is Hybrid Warfare?)

Not to prioritize one struggle, but what touches all of them. Not at the expense of other struggles, but what can mobilize people across many different divides. Revealing  invisible dimensions. To not idolize listening, but to listen for what will resonate with the other – which will make work. That makes a difference.

“The value of life can only be resistance and revolt expressed with all the energy of despair. And this despair itself is a great love of life, of true human values and great instinctive forces, of all that we experience.
[…] To exist against and not with. This does not suppress joy but exalts it, it is not despair but immense hope.” (Colette Peignot, Laure – the collected writings)

As if this world was dead already…

“I want to create art the same way I create the world.
I want to be remade in my own afterimage.
I want the world to collapse in on itself, as if I’d written it.
I want to write enough words to bury mself, because I don’t want to write another word.
I want to qualify as some kind of antichrist: I want to create nothing out of something. A haptic nothing, a nothing I can hold on to.” (Gary J. Shipley, Stabfrenzy“

Living in a world formed by human beings. What if you’ve never been human in the first place? What if all this talk of becoming post-human or trans-human excludes you, because all you’ve ever been was non-human? Ours is not to create worlds, but to end them. We are not of this world, but from its outside.

The catastrophe is not the end of the world, it is a disruption introducing an unfamiliar rhythm. 

There is no binary choice–between flight or fight, silence or speaking out. Sometimes the latter manifests itself through the former. Sometimes rupturing events force us to 

“flee, but while fleeing, [we should never forget to] pick up a weapon” (Deleuze/Guattari (1983) On the Line). 

The world is burning, and it is not ours to save it. 

“We are not healers of a sick world, we are its saboteurs…
The only proposal we have for the economic crisis is to give it a push off the cliff.” (Conspiracy Of Cells Of Fire, Let’s Become Dangerous – For The Diffusion Of The Black International)

This world is imploding, and waiting for its decomposition.

We are the millions of fungi & bacteria feasting on this rotting corpse.

„Revolution is a sickness, but the disease is not curable. Yet this acknowledgement is itself the beginning of an (ironic and interminable) treatment. The alternative to political sickness is not wellness. The choice is rather between different kinds of disease: between an illness that acknowledges itself as such and one that proclaims itself as health; a necrophilia that confesses its crime and a death-lust that parades in a laughing mask of innocence.“ (Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible)