1677: Unfinished Note on Materialist Technology

Materialist experience is a blade that continually slices through being and assembles it in open arrangements of communication and invention..

- Antonio Negri, Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo: Nine Lessons to Myself

You have to imagine the wild hallucinatory power of a Saint Ignatius, or the many thousands of Christian martyrs who went to death in the second century AD, as they looked up at the sky and invoked, before a crowd of feasting spectators and an awesome regime of earthly force, a *higher authority* in the heavens. The subsequent history is full of millenarian anarchists who restaged this tactic, where God becomes avatar for an ontological adventure into the legitimacy of the to-come, and in doing so toppled kings and reimagined, beyond any law of force, an antinomian heaven on earth.

What heretics took this movement to its logical end and collapsed God down to the very political and ethical imagination that animated them, giving his omnipotence to the plane of nature (rendering dissent not an act *for* God but an act *of* God)? The followers of Amaury of Bène were burned at the stake in 1210, proclaiming - “All things are One, because whatever is, is god.” Those few who slipped through the stacks are said to have inspired the Brethren of the Free Spirit, that “pantheist heresy” that resulted in underground networks animated by secret codes, defiant orgy and free property from Germany to France extant until the modern period.

In the Ethics of 1677 Spinoza formalized the pantheistic heresy, shaping in his glass-shop the scholastic propositions that would blaze a hole in intellectual history and announce the collision of Deus with the plane of nature. equates to a loud claim of nonservium: the plane of nature is animate, powerful, ferociously productive, and it has in its many transformations the power of constitution or genesis. Previously, to the extent that we were bound by our ephemerality to the swimming floor of nature, we were trapped or damned; but now that floor is alive and we are fused with it: A god of joy and empowerment in the common condition of constituent power.

My attempted intervention in the technology space (especially in the collaborative work of the Open Protocol Research Group) has been to assert that technology and the practical ethos I call “maker metaphysics” is located in the faith in the suffusion of novelty, the knowledge of the grace of difference-in-itself of the materialist tradition. This is not to be confused with the empty physicalism of the institutional sciences, which sees only extensive quantities and has no concept of the intensive quality that animates subjective experience. The materialist tradition, on the contrary, starts from the perspective of process and sees in objects nothing but the quivering metastable forces of the to-come. This is the practical creativity, the ‘intensive science” of the undergrounds, asking no permission from a higher power before challenging the brutal force of Rome with a new organization of reality.

Is the nihilism and pettiness of our moment a sign of the high tide of institutional capture? How can this curse of slave consciousness continue on, with its kleptocracy, it’s sweaty megalomania, its techno-mythological restaging of the wrath of God, its aggressively self-obsolescing conjuring up of a sixth great extinction? Extitutional theory says that institutional technology is a feckless masturbation, barely worthy of the name - little artifices of enclosure, ragebait traps, or contraptions of planned obsolescence and intentionally disempowerment, imagined in atmospheres of extractive sadness and woe transparent to a schoolchild. Centralization’s psychotic farce: if you find a useful technology in this trash-heap, free it.

The affinity between extitutional theory and the “cutting edge” of technology is about the temporal and spatial regimes that institutions construct and the real intution, known to every maker, programmer, craftsperson - the profound empirical, that is, experiential faith - that there is a real infinity behind those regimes, whole tantric constellations of cells, signs, structures, innate with powers of construction and constitution, metastable with the panoply of them. That this realm of pseudo-objects, things that twist and turn and resist clear sight (they are only available when all structures of detached vision or spectatorship have been removed and you are in the work) is primary - material in motion, more real - is not in service to the world of stable things, of ruled objects - that it resists servitude, satanically - nonservium. The technological cutting edge or pointe machinic is the conspiracy with these vital lava flows of the possible, not to be rendered into a soothsaying product but to be shaped and crafted into something explosive, untimely, mobile...