Hard-to-Stomach Artifices: Techniques of Disturbance in the Belly of the Monster

A Call To Arrangements That Cause Disarray

The traditional name Baten Kaitos for the star Zeta Ceti comes from Arabic and means "the belly of the sea monster"

Last Thursday, November 28th, Bruno and I kicked off Studies of the Critter and the Machine with the online event Faunalia Artificialia. It all started from conversations where, despite our very different frameworks, something kept passing from one to the other: a desire for exchange, debate, and transformation. A desire for differences that make a difference.

Before recounting how the session unfolded, I want to highlight some underlying assumptions, foundations, and intentions. It strikes me that, increasingly — and at an accelerating pace — we tend to predefine who our allies and enemies are, almost in a Schmittian sense, guided by deeply moral criteria. We aim to align ourselves with the “right side” and the “right people”, siding with what is considered “good” — understood as something universal, absolute, and pure. In this framing, being “good” seems to stem from affiliating with the “good ones”. There is something unsettling in this dynamic, whether it lies in the claim to such “goodness” or in the pursuit of purity.

How can we act from the middle — par le milieu - embracing both its senses of middle and environment/surroundings? In the milieu, through the milieu, and toward the outside, as exhorted by Isabelle Stengers, herself a thinker and practitioner of deceleration and hesitation, who also warns us that the desire for purity is fatal to politics. Thinking par le milieu, in philosophy, compels us to “go visiting”, to recover the situationality of questions and concepts, and to resist treating them as givens.

I also recall Donna Haraway, who tells us that we inhabit the belly of a monster and suggests we act in order to produce generative indigestions - differences that make a difference, in Batesonian terms. Being in the belly of a monster means not only being inside a living, dynamic system but also being subject to the processes of assimilation, metabolism, and rejection that occur in this environment. This system is regulated by feedback loops that maintain its homeostasis, its internal balance. The image of the digestive system of a monster carries with it the character of a chimera and of terror. To create indigestion, therefore, is a call to deregulate this system - through excess (overload), incompatibility (something indigestible), or disturbances that destabilize it.

To act politically within this setting, creating differences that make a difference, means fostering disturbances that drive the system to either readjust — something Capital relentlessly does —or collapse. If we understand the monster as Capital, the goal is to bring about its failure. Conversely, if the monster is the world itself, the task becomes one of provoking differences potent enough to reconfigure its feedback mechanisms, leading to new parameters of homeostasis.

I’ve learned from others that agency is assemblage (agencement), i.e., that the capacity for action resides in alliances. Alliances are punctual, processual, imperfect, and impermanent. It's not exactly to my taste to ally with just anyone - heavens forbid, as we say, hahaha. There are commitments and desires that must remain non-negotiable. But I believe far more communication happens through cracks and fissures than prior judgments are able to perceive.

I prefer the idiot persona — the idiot of the Russians, of Deleuze, of Stengers — over that of the police, as claimed by Kant in its "positive utility" of “bolt[ing] the door to the violence that citizens have to fear from other citizens, so that each can carry on his own affairs in peace and safety." Experience has taught me that bolting the door is often slamming it shut in the face of others in the name of a few. We must be cautious with the door: while some must never be let in, many are barred by hasty or authoritarian judgments.

While writing my doctoral thesis, I felt as though I were in a room— philosophy — whose tightly shut gates blocked out an infinity of beings who banged against them and shouted, emitting sound waves rippling in myriads of frequencies, shapes, and types through countless phonatory apparatuses — and even without any at all. Inside the room, it felt uncomfortable, knowing (or believing) I had access to the keys to those gates. I do not desire this role of police, guard, watchman. In that moment, my wish was to tear down the gates, to dismantle the walls that held them up. By touching the locks of those gates with writing — gates that only open inward — I wished to put them to pieces not so others could enter, but so I could step out and be with them.

To hell with enthroned reason and its demands of accountability. Idiocy suits me well. I’ve already witnessed the miracle that possesses the bodies of some policemen and compels them to abandon their posts, joining the side of the protesters — a multinfested manifestation. I want the stupid and unproductive courage of, before the sovereign, demanding accounts instead of rendering them: demanding “account to be taken of ‘every victim of History'“ - this manifestation of the One, the one Spirit, the One Ring.

(To my friend Jean, without whom much of this would have remained unseen.)