How To Not Live Life As An Inanimate Object

Chopped and Screwed In 7 Parts

Hello all. There’s much to tell (time has tumbled on). But I should not return polished. So, as re-introduction, a porous and partial explanation of my absence (immanence) in 7 jabby limbs that, somehow, only arrive at “6”.

Also—an experiment in omni-dividuality. Instead of setting this Substack on fire for reaching a threshold state of expectation (my modus operandi), I’ll be color-coding my posts going forward for reasons central to the topic of this post.

Double Black and Black for high density (steep stuff), Double Blue and Blue for intermediate density (steepish, but basic stuff), and Double Green and Green for basic density.

Some pieces will be uniformly one or the other, and some mixed terrain—engage at will. What follows is mixed Blue.

0. NOTHING SIGNIFIES NOTHING

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Who can blame Macbeth for the macabre. Alas, no. Nothing—no thing—signifies nothing. That is the problem with signification, after all—it knows not how to be not. Shakespeare here signifies, rather, the inextinguishable neurosis of language.

Language man Jaques Lacan would say that symbolism’s inability to express nothing is enforced by a pre-linguistic realm (the “Real”), which resists signification. But I think the issue is, perhaps, more straightforward. Language isn’t prevented from communicating dissolution—it refuses to.

Death (the subjective force) runs us to into infinitives, into endless statements of eternalized being—a totalized eternity of language. Our so-called finite verbs are all, actually, eternalizations of existence. Nowhere is there a not-is. Isn’t is merely an infinitely negativized positive. I am not infinite only states that I am infinitely not infinite. “He is dead” only means he exists in a dead way.

Everywhere we avert the meaning of dissolution, everywhere we fail to signify flux. Well, not fail. Rather, this “failure” is the preoccupation of neurosis, which generates, on behalf of our existential dread, our greatest success—language. And as language (the grand total of symbolic interpretation and communication, I mean) is our portal to meaning, “meaning” is 100% neurotic.

Neurotic realism, in other words, is the encompassing realism. Capitalist realism, masculine realism, and all others fold themselves into its terrified bosom. And while just about all of humanity’s biggest achievements have been rightly termed “immortality projects” by Earnest Becker, the one project we tend to forget to mention, ironically, is language itself.

Most studies of our symbolic reality and its power over us only weft themselves into their impressive complications when they forget this: Power is neurotic. And so they delight in forgetting this, and we (some of us) enjoy their unnecessarily “necessary” pretzeling. Plenty of genies have tried to excavate just what it is that suppresses us. Some have come dangerously close to putting the dragon’s bones together. But then they mistake the bones for scaffolding, and negate the bloody animal for a machine. Truth is more easily confirmed to lie, and wisdom more easily won by denial than by certainty. Death scares truth from all tongues. Mine too.

And So….

We inherit and pass on a language hell bent on objectification. We’re dying to be inert. Of course we are. That which is inert may be dull, its dynamism collapsed into the density of that, there, but it’s got all the stability of inertia; holding within it the narcotic stillness of arrival; swaddled in the embalmed bosom; to make us wax figurines of certain being—safe from flux.

Moving on.

1. PREDICATE KILLS THE SUBJECT (a very short play)

(Someone pipes up in the back).

“Linda is a boulder!”

Yes, I say. Indeed, “Linda” was a wonderful person, but “Linda” is not so much Linda anymore, is she. The boulder is what remains of her.

(The room murmurs. Another speaks up).

“John Dunderthwap is a cook”.

Oh good, I’m hungry. Now that we know what John is—a cook—the whole “John Dunderthwap” bit has become unnecessary, yes?

“NO!” another cries out. “John Dunderthwap is a particularly spectacular cook—he’s a UNICORN! He’s irreplaceable!!!!!”

Oh, but you just replaced him. Yes, you replaced “John Dunderthwap” with “a particularly spectacular, UNICORN”.

“Yes but that’s his name!” someone else laments.

Who’s name? (I indulge them).

“THE UNICORN’S!!!” (disgruntled, in unison).

Ah! The name belongs to the unicorn—so “John Dunderthwap” is not actually a person, but the name of a “unicorn” chef…

(They demure). (I continue).

…I’m not sure “John” is going to enjoy learning that he’s not a chef, but rather a chef has his name!

(Everyone leaves and I have no ride home).

…FIN.

2. UNPREDICATED “I”

Naturally, the subject subjects itself to objectification. Whether in subject-verb-object (SVO) languages like English or subject-object-verb (SOV) languages like Japanese or verb-subject-object (VSO) languages like Arabic, the subject is objectified, sublated by the predicate.

That’s why God doesn’t play around much with any of it.

“God” knows “I am God” doesn’t quite do the trick, nor does a spurious infinity of never-ending predicates. Instead, God says:

“I am who I am.”

And when Moses asks what he’s supposed to tell the Israelites, old Yahweh doesn’t budge:

"Say this to the people of Israel, 'I am has sent me to you.”1

God (if God were a thing) isn’t about to spend eternity rattling off an infinite series of predicates. God is in excess of any multitude of determinate forms—and so must be absent of determinate predicates. Apophatic. Precisely because god is quantitatively all, god must be qualitatively absent.

*(This bound relationship between quantitative excess and qualitative absence is something I’ll be getting into as I continue to roll out freQ theory).

The “I am” which views itself as a complete statement is the self which, un-constrained and un-negated by predicates, retains its full, universal breadth. The “am” copula tethering the “I” to the excess domain of potential. The non-predicated “I” as pure potentiality—uncollapsed into to any determinate category of language. In physical terms, this non-predicated “I” as the wave function of the uncollapsed particle. In meditated terms, the “I” is the state of indeterminate identity, of the atman or paramatman.

…Have I mentioned that I dig the singular/plural confusion of they/them pronouns?

3. THEY ARE A LOT

If there’s one thing about the ascendence of they/them pronouns that accords with my own philosophy, it’s that a single person can more readily be confused for the plural form. Most “straight” people low-key complain about that… I think it’s the brilliant point of an otherwise fainting spear.

Trans without destination—pure trans sans finality—is the pure vitality of becoming. While we tend to cling to a singular destination—straight, gay, boy, girl, doorman, mother, good guy, bad guy—”trans” holds the promise of a declaration of motion beyond the self. A refusing of stasis and, so, an embrace of dynamism.

Yet I can think of no better exemplar of humanity’s compulsive repulsion of vital motion than that the motion of “trans” has slumped into the objectification of “trans”. A movement of movement turned into a declaration of immobility.

I prefer perforated, permeated, liquid, slippery trans.

Sue one of me.

4. MULTIDUDES, DUDE

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman’s famous line from his most famous poem should have been mine. Or it should have been the charm meson’s, the beauty meson’s, or the strange meson’s—particles which oscillate between themselves and their anti-selves. Or it should have been the poem of Schrodinger’s cat, caught in sublime superposition, simultaneously alive and dead, here and there. Physicist David Bohm would tell you it’s the poem of existence itself—that all points in space contain a dense holographic storage of the totality of creation.

Perhaps it’s not your poem. Perhaps you are one of those more trustworthy beasts of more singular repetition whom we all can count on, day to day, to be precisely the same thing you were yesterday. Your identity stabilized by some essential ground, your being an endless and evenly poured asphalt stretching crackless into the infinities.

If so, I envy you. We all do. You must have “found” yourself. All our lives we are told to “find yourself.” Not “find yourselves”. That might promote schizophrenia. No, find your one, true, singular, stable, essential self. And then (and this is the most important part), after finding yourself NEVER leave yourself.

Those who leave themselves cannot be trusted. Obviously. They are scammers and fakes, or, at the very least, they are the definition of self-destructive. Who on Earth would leave the self they found? A a dork, a madman. Me. A fraud.

I find too many of them! All over the place. You may already know several of me. And you just know the public ones. I find other me’s meditated in midnight cave or in magnetically mathematized madness, or down there, derelicted under afternoon sun, or right here, bespectacled and riddled, the writer….or the pugnacious activist or stoic father or nihilistic punk, nasally or rotund, gargled or mellifluous.

But instead of moving from one me to the other—instead of this transdividuality—I would like to contain these multitudes, as a sublated Hegelian being-for-self, as a still witness to the flux eruptions.

It may upset the gatekeepers of predicates terribly (those vigilantes of singular identity). It may make me untrustworthy. Indeed I am...

5. TRUST

There are morality-based “trust theories” and motivation-based “trust theories” and academic distinctions between trust and reliance, but all of it strangely fails to examine trust itself. Take this nearly meaningless definition from Stanford University’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Trust is an attitude we have towards people whom we hope will be trustworthy...

Most trust theories out there are operating at just about this depth.

Meanwhile, trust is risk redundancy, and our looking for things to trust is the base operation of neurosis. That you are balking already only adds bullion to my heavy case. (And makes it nearly impossible to hoist into public view).

We tend to think of trust, in the broadest sense, as some degree of confidence in a given probability (behavioral consistency, usually). If Tom will be the same Tom in 1 hour as he is now, you can trust Tom to not act like Not-Tom. The more Tom is perceived to be capable of consistency, the less perceived risk there is of Tom changing into Not-Tom. As Tom repeats being Tom (and more importantly, not being Not-Tom) the risk assessment for Tom being Not-Tom becomes redundant—that is, you can always seem to count on Tom not to be Not-Tom.

In our neurotic promotion of trust, we promote redundancy. Same clothes, same filters, same taste, same voice, same meme formats, same tone. As if we were a brand, a commodity. Where the redundancy of risk is highest, trust is highest. Where risk redundancy remains high across time, we stop considering whether or not we trust Tom to begin with—Tom is always Tom. Tom is Crest toothpaste. He’s a Keebler elf. You can rely on Tom.

(Note this definition doesn’t require that Tom be a fraud or the genuine article. If Tom is always lying, you may trust him to lie. It is possible, after all, to trust someone to be a rascal.)

6. BE A PERMISSIONARY

“I accept that you may not be you tomorrow”. A participant in a Voicecraft podcast I did last week said that to me. Her eyes beaming, smiling. I was flooded with appreciation and permission. I think it was the nicest thing anyone has ever told me.

Me not posting anything here in a while was praxis. The praxis of identity loss. It was difficult. But it works. I recommend it. Not at the expense of your job, of course. But there are other, more intimate ways.

Forget “finding yourself” and “expressing yourself” and “being yourself” for a second.

Start with giving yourself permission to not be that particular, formed you. Witness yourselves. Witness your multitude. Don’t even pick one. Just watch them. Let them form a sloppy choir; let that choir multiply itself, oozing between the toesy keys, a blurred cacophony of you’s yammering. Take them as a One. As a nothing. Maybe give a few winks.

And tell I’ll tell you the nicest thing you’ve ever heard…