Pleromatica, or Elsinore's Trance by Gabriel Catren (Analysis - Part 1) 1. How can one describe Gabriel Catren's Pleromatica? Stephane Mallarme's poem titled "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance" links the immanent with the transcendental. We immanently throw dice while chance itself rests Outside our control. Modern-day society must be submerged into a phenoumenodelic solution. "Delic," which is included in the word psychedelic means "to manifest," advocated extensively by Timothy Leary (though "delic" has a specific definition as we'll later address). Phenoumenodelic, of course, plays on the Kantian concept of phenomenon and noumenon. The modern world is disenchanted to Catren, lost in a black nihilistic abyss. Immanent scientific progression has killed the transcendental God. Men seek nostalgia or else get lost in the hubris of Promethean heroism. The transcendental it seems is no longer taken seriously. Can science merge with the spiritual (much like Owen Barfield did when relying upon Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, with the exception, of course, that it is given over to no father sky-god)? Can we move beyond capitalistic and materialistic consumption while society collapses, mimicking Mallarme's shipwreck, where every thought we have forces us to throw the dice. Catren asks if science and truth can be untangled from the technical ways it has been appropriated by our Debordian consumer spectacle of commoditization. The transcendental father god is akin to Hamlet's father (a ghost) that haunts us in an Elsinorian drama. In Elsinore castle, we throw the dice, where chance open us up to endless pluralities and Deleuzian multiplicities, allowing us to become Other as a form of escape, accepting the nihility of modern-day science. That, or we suffer Hamlet's fate in this conspiratorial castle, haunted by the ghost of our dead father, unable to become anything, trapped to our ORGANized body of being. Like the particle-wave duality in physics (which is a metaphor for the immanental-transcendental duality), the wave function must collapse to arrive at any measurable outcome. Unlike Hamlet, we cannot remain haunted. The immanence of Spinoza and the transcendentalism of Kant must be spliced in this schism. The ideal and real, the finite and the infinite, the subjective and objective, etc. must be synthesized. In a way, we are leading a double-life as an ambivalent being, producing James Joyce's "Allmaziful Plurabilities," as noted in Finnegans Wake (relying upon the process of Deleuzian difference and repetition as opposed to Derridean deconstructionism to manufacture multiplicities). This will allow the Gnostic Pleroma to self-manifest. The phenoumenodelic is the foreground to the immanental background of life's painting. To Catren, the alchemic wedding of these opposites (the transcendental and immanent) will counterbalance each other's errors. The neo-Gnostic idea of salvation from an immanent and fallen world led Pascal to depreciate the sciences. Meanwhile, Spinoza would see God as the one immanent substance (the atheistic god of nature to which most physicists speak of). To Catren, Spinoza is quite dogmatic, though, in his own right, since nothing can exist outside this one substance. To Catren, the transcendental nature outside of us is revealed by our immanent experience. Since all opposites rely upon each other's existence, the pleroma becomes self-revealing, denoting the fullness of revelation. Though Catren doesn't bring up Taoism, the idea of yin operating within yang and vice-versa (or how yin cannot exist without yang) comes to my mind. In this shipwreck we are facing, we are not to be like Nimrod and construct the Tower of Babel, symbolic of ORGANization as well as the regimes of signs. Moving nomadically causes the Tower of Babel to topple; and, with it, men are reduced to speak babble, forcing them to become barbarians (as brought up by the Gruppo di Nun), where common language is lost, relying upon diagrams and lines of flight to the outside as a means of escape. In this sense, Mallarme's shipwreck is not a disaster. To Catren, it throws us into the phenoumenodelic solution, which is compared to the sea in which our shipwreck is situated. Avoiding order and tradition, it is an atonal daydream of hallucinogenic droplets. Catren references Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson's Eight-circuit model of consciousness (which was also used as a plot device in the anime Serial Experiments Lain, connecting the real world to the wired, or the virtual to the real). James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are commonly quoted. To Catren, the pleroma is thus not stationary or fixed or tonal or an endpoint to reach. It is in constant Deleuzian flow, endlessly becoming Other, never frozen or ORGANized, but operates akin to the BwO (an ungrounded, unhierarchical multiplicity of phenoumenodelic data). It is akin to Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic's schizo-database in some sense. The pleroma is the phenoumenodelic insubstance (since it cannot be ORGANized or fully immanent enough to be a substance) from which all finite experience unfolds and from which all immanent experience is extracted. Hegel would criticize Spinoza since Spinoza's one substance did not include the subject (Spinoza's god or substance dealt with objective nature as Spinoza was a well-known altheist). Like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's Cannibal Metaphysics (which was discussed in Culp's Dark Deleuze), we can occupy the Other's point of view. Thus, the immanent must take the view of the transcendental and vice versa.
2. Since we have several inside of us in the Deleuzian sense, the I and not-I dichotomy develops. The finite can expand to infinite perspectives. Alpha & Omega does not bring about a Final Judgement, but, like Land's OAsys, it opens us up to multiplicity (it is thus never-ending and openly spiraling). To Catren, we're dealing with subjective abstract experiences. Using Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the subject/subjective is incorporated into Spinozian immanence. Immanental phenoumenodelia is the pleromatica. However, it is different from Husserl's transcendental phenomenology since it incorporates Kant's noumenon. These are what he calls the "abstract cuts" of the "concrete pleroma" (i.e, the abstract dimensions of experience), which feature affective fields, sense/perception fields, rational/logos fields and social/political fields. These cuts can, of course, cut into (Dedekind) other fields, thus diagonzalizing through pluralities and multiplicities (Cantor). This is a delic nature as opposed to a logical nature. To quote Catren: "This subordinates the transcendental constitution of experience to an immanent institution of constitutive subjectivity." Philosophy is thus to expand upon the abstract human experience. We're looking to the infinite ideas (i.e., transcendentals) that guide abstract forms of thought and practice (like truth, beauty, etc.). Through the delic, we're addressing experience to its full concreteness (a philosophical "stonedness" (drug joke)). The ORGANon of these experiences still acts horizontally and through multiplicity (i.e., rhizomatic). It is not sutured (Badiou) to abstract forms of exploration but transgresses beyond them and human experience. Pleroma does not presuppose a logical or theoretical thesis on the ultimate nature of the real. It is tribal multiplicities of new worlds, opening the doors of perception (Huxley), mediating the transcendental limits through abstraction. As Althusser claimed, philosophy has no object (i.e., it's not objective). As Alexander Grothendieck warned, mathematics works within set limits; instead, we are expanding perspectives by diagonalizing the subject (Cantor). It is not a Theory of Everything (no closed unity or totality). Like Badiou noted, the "Event" is a multiple (akin to Set Theory, which again relies on Dedekind and Cantor (who are basically Set Theory's founders)). With Kant's transcendentalism, experience is "correlative" to finite and subjective phenomenon through experience. This proves problematic for science since the noumenon cannot be known and that science is supposed to be impartial and objective. Science thus uses invariants (basically, the phenomenon won't change even if the subject's perspective does). This makes science rather limited. Like how Dublin is seen from a variety of perspectives in Joyce's Ulysses as noted by Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), we are introduced to a relativity of truth (much like how each side of a die (numbers 1-6) is equally true when viewed at from a different perspective). All six perspectives are true concerning the die. Like Mallarme's poem, the throw of the dice thus involves a Deleuzian-like multiplicity of perspectives. Why confine yourself to a first-person or third-person perspective when we can have a multitude of perspectives? More perspectives thus broaden experience. This is still immanent, however, since the transcendental cannot be viewed. We are immanently adding dimensions of perspective (drilling through multitudes of Deleuzian stratum or layers) that do not transcend the human experience. Science itself is all-too-human in this sense, as Kant noted. Scientific tools (e.g., a microscope) can expand upon our limited human perspectives (what Catren calls a reductive transcendental framing). But, again, the human or anthropocene is just one perspective. Like RAW noted, it seems we all exist in separate realities (looking through our own "reality tunnels"). But we must not abstract things to the point that they all become the same. To Hegel, only uneducated people think abstractly since abstraction can, of course, be dialectically resolved through negation. In short, we exist on two planes (a known empirical one and an unknown transcendental/noumenal plane). We may move nomadically empirically while remaining sedentary on the noumenal plane. Again, it is an ambivalence (like particle-wave duality) between a human and inhuman perspective (inner versus outer). How does one thus transcend beyond the transcendental and abolish the chance noted in Mallarme's poem? To do this, we must alter our perspective and tune-in (Leary) to different forms of perception. This is the speculative landscape, whereby everything is flattened. Again, flattening can be seen in reference to flat diagrammatical lines of escape to the outside (Catren even uses 0-location and 0-type to describes this (most likely in reference to Land's zero)). Like in evolution, mutations allow us to move along different stratum (again, think of Deleuzian strata and Becoming Other through the BwO). Like the "ignorant schoolmaster," the teacher does not teach; rather, they allow students to learn (even to the point that they wil learn things even the teacher does not know), allowing the outside to open up. This is the 2nd level or stratum, where the teacher is no longer needed since the student (who is no longer just a receptacle of knowledge) can offer its own input and, like a cybernetic feedback loop, can alter its own outcomes. When A.I. is able to alter its own dataset, it, too, will be able to alter its own output. Thus we go from learning, to meta-learning, to meta-meta-learning, etc., whereby algorithms regulate themselves without an external advisor. Thus, we now have a self-regulated system. Again, this self-learning is the self-revelation of the pleroma. The problem, as addressed by Kant and later by Meillassoux in After Finitude, is that the transcendental would determine the limits of human experience, not allowing us to go beyond a certain point. Simply put, we are trapped to phenomenon and cannot know the noumenon. It therefore limits (rather than expands upon) experience. To break outside this, man would need to jump over his own shadow. We can throw the dice but we cannot escape the contingency of transcendental perspectivism or chance. We could take a "leap of faith", or, as Hegel did, we can eliminate the shadow (i.e., human finitude) and jump into the sun (as Heidegger noted).
3. Like how Copernicus changed our perspective to a heliocentric one, it also freed us from the limitations of a geocentric model (a human-centered model). Similarly, Kant's noumenon is based on a humanistic ideal (tied, of course, to Christianity). It encompasses the transcendental essence of man. To Catren, however, since the "a priori structure of experience is linked to an a posteriori product," transcendental constitutions are linked to immanental institutions. The Kantian a priori is thus existentialised, transformed in Schelling's swirling vortex (from First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature). Remember, Schelling basically reduced the noumenon to the role of the unconscious (as we brought up with Taubes, Voegelin, and Jason Jorjani). This keeps it open to cybernetic circuits and feedback loops through subjective impersonal experience, which, like evolution, lead to change over time. We can also rely on kinship (as discussed with Land's prohibition of incest) to engage with the outside. To Catren, if the transcendental has a limit we cannot surpass, it is only because of a lack of imagination. The non-human (or post-human) may give us new insights that alter everything. So, here, we see the break from Land, who (as we discussed in Cute Accelerationism) embraces the limitations (or unknowability) of the noumenon, which leads us towards an inescapable singularity point. To keep things always becoming Other (like how Amy & Maya advocate for in their work), all noumenon is reduced to Schelling's unconscious, where the transcendental [eschaton] is immanentized (again, as Jacob Taubes and Eric Voegelin noted). Transcendental idealism and immanental realism become complimentary to Catren. Like Deleuze, the Plane of Immanence is immanent to transcendental subjectivity. All can thus be augmented gnostically and alchemically, where the gnostic rebel revolutionizes like Copernicus, going beyond dogmatic constraints like Kantian limits, which are to be transgressed as we head, again, down the road of history. Catren talks then about the transcendental structure of numbers systems and their limitations. Pi and 'e', for example, are transcendental numbers. Catren notes Lacan, too, since he uses imaginary numbers to represent the Imaginary Realm, making "holes" through mathematical "limits" of a function, where points "do not exist." He also talks about asymptotes that approach (but can never reach) zero, as well as going "hyperbolic" on an accelerative curve. Again, we know in philosophical terms what these metaphorically mean. Using the transcendental to look for new solutions, Catren notes Kant's "pure intuition" and Milton Friedman's "relativisation of the a priori." Still, irrational and imaginary numbers make it difficult, hindering immanentization since the speculative relies upon transcendental reason. In Kant's mathematics, new concepts (like irrational and imaginary numbers) cannot be represented and are thus denied from creation. In terms of aesthetics, Lyotard's "allusive strategies" intend to "point/show" (Wittgenstein) what cannot be said, taken to transcendental limits. James Joyce did the same, deconstructing and dismembering Ireland's language (infecting it, cannibalizing it [Viveiros de Castro], queering it, and vomiting it back up), getting outside the incestuous colonial perspective brought about by England. The transcendental is deformed or changed so that its limits are differentiated and thus displaced, allowing something new to be expressed, opening the doors of perception (Huxley). If this all sounds New-Age-like and gnostic, it's because it is, always attempting to immanentize the transcendental limits (which is the major theme of this channel and my works, going back, again, to what Taubes and Voegelin noted). Hippy drug-induced perceptions and shamanic trance states can bring about these experiences, traversing the interzones (Burroughs). Catren thus concludes that Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena is inadequate since the noumenon cannot account for any of these experiences. He cites Konrad Lorenz, noting on how what might be noumenal to one subject or species may be phenomenological or knowable to another. He thus diagonalizes phenomenon and noumenon through his concept of "phenoumenon." He does this again through comparing real and complex numbers as well as Grothendieck's functor to show how different sets of solutions can be found in different domains. Again, these speculative extensions open us up to more transcendental possibilities and potentialities through a parallax structure that would have been otherwise unavailable. He then talks of a transcendental landscape that is free from colonial, progressive, and Eurocentric restrictions. Science must be absolved to Catren from this European monopoly. This includes expanding upon language instead of forcing everyone to assimilate to one (which, of course, kills their language and culture in the process). Again, this links to the multiplicity of babble that occurred once the Tower of Babel fell. As Walter Benjamin noted, we need to take on the task of the translator. We need an absolute (Hegelian?) language that does not foster one privileged language, but which contains a multiplicity (Derrida), linked to Grothendieck's functor. The reason why works like Finnegans Wake are untranslatable is because they have already encapsulated so much of the linguistic outside (i.e., it is written in an absolute language). Catren then gives an example of how a coin's phenoumenal properties might be solely phenomenological to some subjects while noumenal to others (thus being problematic since we need scientific invariance for validation purposes). Phenoumenal is thus a twofold form (empirical and transcendental). it is a revelation (self-revelation of the pleroma) that appears differently (through Deleuzian multiplicity) as phenomenon. The appearance of the phenomenon changes when the subjects changes its empirical state (again, think of particle-wave duality here). The phenoumenon is compared to Graham Harman's "real objects" (from Object-Oriented Ontology). The phenoumenon is thus never exhausted by any phenomenal manifestations. The phenoumenon is revealed (self-revelation) by way of filtered objects. Similarly, "real objects" withdraw from being directly accessed and manifest as "intentional objects." In this speculative stance, every form of experience is both made possible and limited by a transcendental frame.
4. Catren looks at transcendental "viewzones" by relying upon the notion of a "sheaf," which is a tool used for tracking sets of data of a topological space. He basically uses a Venn Diagram or set theory model, where a phenoumenon is considered a phenoumenal sheaf when all integrable profiles are integrated in a unique manner (i.e., a sheaf condition). This sheaf offers experiential depth for subjects in wider viewzones on the transcendental landscape. Again, this is a subjective shared multiplicity of experiences towards the immanent outside. Finite experience is always the experience of the phenomena constituted out of the phenoumenal by the transcendental faculties of the subject. Self-revelation is thus the pulling of finite phenomenological experience from the phenoumenodelic solution. Again, it is an immanent outsideness we are engaging with. All can thus be reoriented by a speculative techne. Like RAW and Leary in Prometheus Rising or the 8-circult model of consciousness, like a TV, we can be tuned-in or tuned-out to certain channels or frequencies. What is now tuned-in can be tuned-out and we can channel surf. This is a form of neurological programming. To Catren perspective must be varied and altered to allow for others to come in and shape new horizons. This immanent transcendence is the heart of the pleroma (i.e., experiential depth). All is thus "inter-" and between or betwixt, caught in diagonalization and new virtual becomings, leaving us to a somewhat larval stage (as Deleuze noted). While abstraction is needed, it can make rationality pathological without concreteness (i.e., lost in deals). Like the virtual and actual, there is balance and double articulation between the two (like the claws of the lobster god). It is a two-way street of "abstract forgetfulness" and "resolved memory." As Deleuze noted in his work on Foucault, memory is not contrasted with forgetting, but with forgetting about forgetting. In other words, in dual representation, always remember something is being forgotten or left out. Through this morphogenetic force of the immanent outside, we can mutate into new life-forms. This, however, is not a Promethean project. To Catren "Prometheus radicalizes his separation to appropriate divine force and thus embody ontotheological patriarchy." Catren cites Saint Paul in the second epistle to the Thessalonians and brings up the concept of the katechon, which keeps the anti-Christ from coming. The Promethean figure is the anti-Christ who sets himself up in God's temple. And, again, we discussed the katechon in relation to Jacob Taubes, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben with reference to the "state of exception." Taubes and Schmitt actually communicated extensively in letters. The Promethean lawless one affirms its own sovereign power of technics to destroy and create new worlds. By taking the place of God and assuming His role or identity, he encloses himself in finitude; and, thus, the lawless one becomes the fallen one, unable to get outside. Again, I feel like I am reading Taubes or Voegelin, only from a more modern philosophical perspective. So Catren describes Prometheus as one who immanentizes (he brings the blazing source of life to man from the gods). He empowers man through technical fire. At times, he is unbound, curing man of his finitude through techno-scientific progress via Shelley's Frankenstein, igniting a pantheistic quarrel between Goethe and Jacobi. In truth, Prometheus is both bound/unbound. So there is an ambivalence and deconstruction needed here. The problem, as Hans Jonas noted (who Catren brings up and who've we've discussed) is when Prometheus is definitively unbound. Armed with technical-scientific power and deconstructionism, he denies subjective finitude (e.g., we know Jorjani's dislike of Kant's noumenon). As Simone Weil noted, unbinding Prometheus from his rock is akin to saving Jesus from the cross. Immanent life is a finitude that should not be forgotten.
5. "Unbound Prometheanism longs for a liberation from finite life rather than the liberation of finite life" as Catren notes. Prometheus thus should not be saved. He shall remain bound to his rock. Technoscience, of course, can be oriented by the infinite idea of truth. Capitalism and imperialism, of course, betrayed the Promethean gift. Should we use science to accelerate to our own end or should we die discreetly without so much drama? Technics can alter our transcendental structure, indistinguishable from magic as Arthur C. Clarke noted. According to RAW, the brain is a self-programmable computer. Maybe we just need a new program or reality tunnel? Like horizontal shamans, we are mediums between inner and outer, diagonalizing and inhabiting inter-worlds through a multiplicity of perspectives. Speculative operations don't remove transcendental framing, but loosen it to allow for more phenoumenondelic freedom. To Goddard, speculative ethics balance between (1) the finite and psychotic Promethean subject that seeks infinity and to overcome the transcendental limit and (2) the neurotic that submits to patriarchal order, symbolic order, and the law (Jorjani might calls these the traditionalists). Speculative ethics balances between these two extremes through the phenoumenodelic experience of an existential nature that has no preset or fixed essence that prevents it from becoming Other (it must be like plastic instead of stone in some sense). The ultimate subject integrates empirical, transcendental, and speculative perspectives from the well of the phenoumenodelic solution and integrates them to the nth-level, enveloping every possible life-form on a plane of immanence. Yet, Mallarme's Maitre was not just about sublating chance. Languages codifies and cuts in the pleroma, acting as a web, where there are holes in the symbolic order. The Maitre's grimoire is tied to grammar. Remember, grimoire, glamor, and grammar are all linked in magic, as we discussed in some of our writings. Like Finnegans Wake, we approach an absolute language. As Badiou noted, the poem and the matheme are the two extremes of language. To quote Catren: "philosophy must progressively construct a linguistic organon intended to tune in to the wholly scripture of the phenoumenodelic revelation." Obviously "wholly" is a play on holy. Through speculation, like light, we are refracting and reflecting, engaging in "transcendental reflection" and "refractive meditation." Like Narcissus, we reflect on our image and refract when entering the narcotic waters of the phenoumenodelic solution. Narcissus is thus baptized, acting as the talisman for phenoumenodelic magic just as the ichthys splashes in the sea. Again, we brought up Narcissus before in relation to Herbert Marcuse in some of our Epimetheist videos. Transcendental reflection and speculative refraction is prefigured in totemism, where incest is prohibited in totemic clans. All thus becomes "inter-" related, producing hybrids (again, a Land reference to the prohibition of incest). Similarly, one does not eat the totem (or, to Freud, the father). Eating one's own is incestuous (it's why Land likens eating the eucharist to incestuous cannibalism). To Viveiros de Castro, Tupi cannibalism allows for transmutation, where "I" becomes Other. By eating the Other, they become you. You are what you eat, after all. Alterity is thus a view of the self. Homi K. Bhabha discusses this as well in terms of ambivalence and hybridity, where the colonizer sees himself in the colonized, which produces anxiety. Life is pure devouring (the treats! The omnomnomadology of the vore machine in Cute Accelerationism). Cannibalism is fine as long as we eat the other (taboo thus becomes totem). Capitalism prohibits incest to Land, resulting in inter-totemic cannibalism. However, to Catren, if, before encountering otherness, we already know its relation to us, it gets obliterated in advance, which is a paradox of enlightenment. Thus, the flaw of Kant's aperspectival (noumenal) synthesis of the outside. Thus, the need to rely on speculative variations through which the other is experienced. The materialistic view of matter is reduced to ma[t]ter (i.e., mater or mother). Matter thus allows ones to mutate their own transcendental structure. Like a mother, we are always procreative, producing or birthing new things into being, thus differentiating and creating multiplicities. Instead of accessing the noumenon, we differently mediate the transcendental limits through immanent experience. Thus, all is self-transformation where we are born again, acting as our own mothers and fathers in the Deleuzian sense of difference and repetition. You are to be different from what you currently are, always a being that is becoming. As the Puppet Master said to Motoko in the first Ghost in the Shell film: "Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you." Thus, we embrace infinity and endless difference while living in the finite.
Great to see this, I actually read through this book not too long ago. I was intrigued as the promise that this book seemed to make was that it would in some way go beyond prior philosophies of the transcendental or speculative materialism but as you say here, it seems to just end up recapitulating the same structure just under slightly new terms and metaphors, which is perhaps something that can be said about a lot of work in philosophy. I am not sure if it only comes up in the second part, but one reason that Catren might justify this book as a step forward so to speak, is its relationship to decolonisation and the decolonised subject. The decolonising aspect of Vivieros de Castro's work is an important justification for his philosophical endeavours despite other aspects of his thinking not living up to the hype. Similarly Catren talks about basically continuing the program of German Idealism, but this time around a decolonised subject rather than a European colonial subject etc. He seems to be envisioning a philosophy for a new utopic world order or society, and his re-encounter with religion seems to suggest he is not just working at the level of transcendental critique but consciously ideologising too, almost preaching. I didn't see it doing anything more than trying to refit German Idealism into a decolonising politics, although I am not sure what else could be achieved in terms of this type of philosophy at the moment. It is interesting that he returned to religion/religious language though as this seems to be a recurring trend in philosophy, Zizek, Negerastani, Land even. Will be interested if you find anything more in the 2nd half. Always interesting to hear your thoughts, thanks.
