The world is, in itself, a system. It is a coalition of elements and being. Not individual beings, but processes of being. All of these are natural and all of these are artificial. There is no distinxion. No division. It is a lake in which all things flow, held in by a boundary of nothingness, of non-nature, of nonexistence.
All of this is facilitated in our plane of being, in the mechanical plane of temporality, by the passage of linear time, time moving as we, the being of this plane, perceive it. Things happen at certain points, at exact points. Things before lead from and to things to come. That’s how the river flows. That’s how existence continues.
This is the boundary, the enframement of processes. A process can only exist with the passage of time, can only exist in a world where time passes. Being linear is by comparative necessity being a process, or in the case of humans and many other things, a machine--a totality of processes. The plane is mechanical because the form of being is that of machines. A process allows for linearity and linearity allows for processes.
What then, is a system? Simply, a system is a mega-meta-machine. It is a large-scale process made of constituent parts of machines and processes, a totality of totalities, created by machines, and, like any process, working towards a goal--one always defined by self-perpetuation.
The world, nature, the stream, in essence is a system, the holistic system, a super-system made of subsystems, like a body made of cells. But there are those subsystems, those of the everyday. Some came from the machines of humanity others came from the primordial and were inherited. In the Neu, there is no system more pervasive or far reaching than that of Capitalism. The interweaving everchanging economic governor of life.
And Capitalism, to its credit, is a special kind of system, a designation it shares with brethren political births; it is a System of Transfiguration.
SoTs are specialised totalities. As suggested, they are systems, made of machines, made of processes, whether intentionally or not, all working towards a goal, both inwards and outwards, and bound by time. But unlike all other systems, SoTs have a particular funxionality, an equational conversion.
This funxionality is similar to a large scale desire circuit, only with separate inputs and outputs. The SoT receives an input of machines and processes which are antithetical, or at least subversive to the goal, and produces an output of consistent beliefs.
In the form of Capitalism, this conversion is ruthlessly efficient. The uncooperative machine--take a young college student with subversive ideas--is molded through the SoT into a funxional constituent--someone who buys commodified subversive Media (in itself a victim of the equational transformation), who works within the system out of necessity of existence (the individual goal of the machine), who is whittled down to docility by the produced culture of agreement.
Each process, each machine, a victim of this transformation. This begins the shift from humans to drones, both machines, but the former a true machine--that is still existing with a goal and a sense of preservation--and the latter existing as a process within the larger machine, the system--only serving the ends of the greater goal.
From person to consumer. From being to statistic. From artist to entrepreneur or content creator. From dangerous to markettable. That is the mechanical repossession through transformation, but the same happens to an individual process, or a totality of ideas.
An entire ideology, such as the revolutionary processes which work counter to the system, become tools for the systemic propagation. Marketplaces sell communist flags and memorabilia to allow those disposed towards revolution to enter a field of safe costumed fantasy instead of direct axion. Books are not banned (outright, often)--as this would counter the imagined co-system of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’--but they are buried by unprofitability or remarketed to avoid access. Faces of revolution become paid actors to keep hordes as reliable listeners rather than responsible actors. Unions are bought out. Politics are run by corporations. Every input becomes the output of the ultimate goal. Every wheel becomes a chance at profit.
This profitability is a drone. Machine for profit. Machine for consumption. All outputs of this SoT are drones. All machines which work for the ultimate goal are drones.
This is the crossroads of Fisher. Capitalism, naturally, being a system, cannot imagine an existence outside of itself, and being a specific system, one with equational transformation, all those imagined ideas must be repurposed to serve a singular vision. Thus, all subsystems of the system, be it history, science, politics, psychology or anthropology must all be input into the equation and reshaped for the singular and self-perpetuating goal.
Under a SoT, there is no future outside of the system. For that future to exist, a machine or processes must already exist outside of the system. Such is the same judgement as life and nature. Nietzsche taught us that life cannot be judged by an observer within it. An ulterior system cannot be imagined inside the confines of a funxioning SoT. Because the most optimal systems, those built with the most care, will continue to funxion long after the engineers are gone.
Look down from space. Look down on the little blue dot. Or even from the view of an airplane. Look down at all that carved up land. Carved up into little squares and circles and triangles. Into roads and rectangles of concrete and brick. Look down at those scars left on the face. Those of empty parking lots and abandoned fast food chains. Look down in a thousand years and see not the colosseum of Rome scattered on the horizon, not the Pyramids of Giza or the rocks at Stonehenge. You won’t see the remains of Chichén Itzá or the Great Wall. You’ll see a still glowing neon sign for Dairy Queen, an overgrown Walmart Lego sexion, a faceless, endless waltz of identical concrete slabs big enough for business or a single family. That is the future. The only imaginable future. That is the perpetuation of a vast machine, of a system without operators. The bricks remain in place long after the tenant has died. That is the ultimate triumph of systemic perpetuation.
That and one other thing.
What does it mean to be human? What is our special phenomenological brand of being which can allow us to distinguish ourselves? To syphon ourselves off from that which spawned us and label it as an other?
Arguably, like life, understanding our form of being goes beyond the bounds of our comprehension during the experience. But, we can understand the funxion of the being while being. That is the nature of desire. That is our own mechanical work, as a process totality, striving towards a goal at any input in our own machine. We are the funxion of our desire circuit.
Then, to glean the corrosive nature of SoTs, we must see how their own system circuits transform the desire circuits of the machines within.
In the mechanical plane, within the supersystem, there is the building block: the process. In truth, there is no bottom. Every process is really a totality, but it’s easier to look at the smaller as individual in themselves.
A process is motion with purpose. Always a goal. A gluon holds together the nucleus. An atom moves. When two atoms exchange electrons, suddenly a machine is formed. A momentary machine. The totality of processes, two atoms moving.
Machines, like processes, have a goal. They move towards some end, always self-perpetuating. A special machine, that is a special type of being for a machine, is the desire machine, the human. A machine with surprising efficiency, most processes in the totality working towards the given goal, the current desire. Though machines always have a degree of inefficiency.
Any totality must have disagreement. Each process has its own purpose, a separate goal. When coming all together, a machine will never have every process work towards the mechanical goal.
The same is true for systems. The next level. A full collexion of machines. But not all of them will work towards the systemic goal. There will always be inefficiency. And when there is too much inefficiency, the system will collapse, like a body whose systems refuse to work. A failing kidney or heart. A damaged brain. A lack of blood.
The solution to this is a System of Transfiguration, one which can self correct inefficiency and thus further perpetuate. And there are many ways the input-output algorithm continues.
Firstly, the system redirects, as seen in our example of reappropriation and docilisation. Something dangerous and counter to the systemic goal is turned voyd by turning the counter-systemic axion into systemic axion itself. Buy your Marx T-shirts.
Another funxion is ostracisation. If a machine becomes too dangerous to reappropriate, a system might have to momentarily remove the element until it can be reconditioned into the system. There are a number of subsystems and apparatuses to serve this funxion, most notably a form of literal imprisonment, but usually, relying entirely on the SoT itself, the removal will be a social and cultural experience. This can be through a rewriting of cultural vocabulary, such as a switch in political focus from material and antisystem concerns to a focus on identity and cultural problems, many of which draw from the system base but serve as covers for their original agitators. The idea of a culture war and the associated Media, propaganda and all, create a climate of social ostracisation for unruly elements.
Finally, if every option fails, there is complete expulsion from the system. Though rare, it is not an unused option.
When the stars shine in the sky, we see the brilliance of funxioning machines. We see the light from a million processes coming and going, floating through the firmament until they dissolve on the mantle of our eyes.
When we look to the earth, there is a shared brilliance, yet we remain blind to it, locked in perpetual ignorance by our own prison bars.
We haven’t been human beings for a long time. Each day less and less. Soon we won’t be around at all and only our ruins will tell our story.
You can never teach a person what to think, their basic capacities never change; you can only teach a person how to think. To think in a different way. Because thinking differently, because moving beyond understanding is the only way to return to the form of being which bounds us and opens up the endless.
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