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The present paper was written in the weeks between the End of October (Halloween) and the
End of November (November 28) YMAYear of the Mayan 1 Apocalypseand begins with these dates:
first, November 28, which in Deleuze and Guattaris Thousand Plateaus marks the plateau about How to
Make yourself a Body Without Organs, and then 28 days before that, in Deleuze and Guattaris [con]text,
the Lovecraftian H.P. or Halloween Plateau: Memories of a Sorcerer. A kind of Kabbalah or NickLandscaped Qabbala 2 seems to be at work in this second of their two volumes on Capitalism and
Schizophrenia: one which subtly suggests (or rather, recalls: remembers even in the wake of
dismemberment) that you Make yourself a Body Without Organs via Sorcery, that the tenth plateau (the
texts tetractys, 3 hearkening back to Deleuzes essay on Malfattis Mathesis 4) precedeseven as it
succeedsthe sixth. The sorcerer or magician (sorcier in the original, which is [a] witch, warlock,
sorcerer or magician) is in[tro]duced in A Thousand Plateaus as a cryptic (cabalistic?) conduit of sorts 5
within that system which would in the words of Stengers and Pignarre be a sorcery without
sorcerersnamely, capitalism. 6 The world of an operative system of sorcery without sorcerers (a
system of sorcery without sorcerers deeming themselves to be so 7) is a world which judges that
sorcery is but a simple belief, a mere superstition that therefore doesnt require any adequate means
of protection. 8 In[tro]ducing magicians or sorcerers in[to] the interstices of this otherwise adequately
protected and auto-[re]productive economic ecosystemas cryptic/cybernetic (cybergothic? 9)
conduits within its gaps, cracks, blindsides and blindspotsis a tactic which theorists like Deleuze and
Guattari, Dtienne and Vernant, Pignarre and Stengers, Flusser and Zielinski, and even to a certain
extent Gilbert Simondon (not to mention the notorious Nick Land) have taken in their respective works.
This brief excursus takes up some of their in[tro]ductions and examines the nature of those sorcerous
transductions which Nick Land has called hyperstitions (these as distinct from the mere
superstition[s] above): put succinctlyhence a bit too suggestivelythese would be the sorcerous
switchcraft and stitchcraft (a cunning conjunction, mixing, or mtis-mtissage: 10 see below) which
occurs in the techno-epistemological interstices of captivating systems of capture like capitalism.
Proceeding by Aporia:
We sorcerers, write Deleuze and Guattari, 11 operate [...] not by following a logical order but
instead by proceeding along paths such as those in the preface to The Order of Things: 12 paths
passagesthat traverse 13 apparent impasses, proceeding by aporia (harkening here to The Unnamable 14
and of course also along Borgesian Borderlines 15) between categories, identities, established timings and
settings, breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame
the wild profusion of existing things 16 and permitting the latters otherwise improbable or impossible
propinquity (this by cunning conduits of contagion and miscegenation: 17 the mtic mtissage of this
path or passage, here conjoining ancient Greek notions of cunning, mtis, 18 with the semiautochthonoushence heterogeneousmixing mlanges of mtis 19). Sorcerers in this sense have
access and bear witness to the veritable oddity and quintessential quoddity of a resolute (albeit
dissolute) je-ne-sais-quoi: that which gets excluded from and/or gets occluded by our actual
epistemologies, burnt by the light of their enlightened gaze (and thereby razed like the witches of
yore). The sorcerer sees that with respect to which our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of
our age is blindthat which, with our minds eye and/or our mindful eyes, is categorically impossible
to think 20 ([a]s if one could ever really work things out, winks Nick Land between brackets; [o]ne
does not think ones way out: one gets out and then one sees 21). The vision here, a veritable Vision of
D. Mellamphy, 1
Excess, 22 is a vision [a]gainst the grain of shallow phenomenalism, 23 counter to and countering the
business of imposed and supposed isnessthis is that, that has to be this, et cetera. The art of
sorcery, explain Pignarre and Stengers in their treatise on Capitalist Sorcery, counters all such we have
tos and this has to be thats which minions [of capitalism (i.e. of this system of sorcery without
sorcerers)] make into a principle of legitimacy; 24 what it encounters instead are concrete situations
accompanied by the halo of what can become possible. 25
Hypocrite Lecteur[s]:
Countering shallow phenomenalism (thereby potentially encountering and experiencing
fearfully fanged noumena: 26 what gets occludedhence occultedby our Zeitgeist and Worldview) is
a strategy, or rather a tactic, for the artistic exploration of the unknown; 27 it entails, in the words of
Deleuze and Guattari, a being-traversed-by-strange-becomings, 28 a being-riddled-with-unknownaffects, 29 and an embodying of the pack or the swarm: that is our way, fellow sorcerers, hypocrite
lecteurs, mes semblables, mes surs. 30 [T]he mode of the pack or the swarm, a.k.a. a multiplicity: this
is, according to Land, the same anarchitecture of infection, unrestrained communication and
uninhibited illegitimate synthesis that poets had mined, but by producing it. 31 As Andrew Goffey
astutely asserts in the introduction to his English translation of La Sorcellerie Capitaliste, sorcery is the
production of an autonomous power: the efficacy of a technique that is more powerful than the
technician and that collapses the supposed hierarchy which privilege[s] episteme over techne
(understanding technique without tacitly presupposing its hierarchical subordination to science and
vice versa). 32 The power (Macht) in question is that of magic, the bastard sister of science, 33 i.e. of the
Proto-Indo-European magh and maghana, the Greek machana and mechane, the English machine and
mechanism: technical rather than scientific power, capacity and capability ([a]t n dimensions it is
called the Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere: the Rhizophere, the Criterium, the Planomenon or
abstract Machine 34). 35 Or rather, not quite or not merely technical: a power at once (schizologically)
physical and metaphysicala kind of technicity and religiosity at once, avant-la-lettre (indeed avant-lltre), or what Gilbert Simondon would have called their primitive magical unity.
A Unity Incorrectly Deemed Human:
Primitive magical unity definesforms and informsa universe at once subjective and
objective, prior to any distinction between object and subject, consequently also prior to any emergence
of the separate object [or subject], suggests Simondon. 36 Technical objects and religious subjects (the
idea of subjectivity being, for Simondon, religious; matters of objectivity being instead technical) result
from the scissipation of their magical medium qua Macht/power-source, their primal (hence primitive,
primary) unity, which is the unity of an anarchitectural allagmathesis: a network of privileged points-ofexchange between a being and a milieu, i.e. between figure and ground (the Greek allagma
designating a [trans]formative change or exchange, an [ex]change-in-formation and/or alteration, an
allos/allasso 37-mathesis: 38 the searchhigh and low, back and forthfor new form[s]). The sorcerer
who would work this anarchic allagmathesis is in no sense an object or subject of investigation or
investment, but instead the dstre 39 of their inf[l]ective in-between and thus part of (rather than
apart from) the figure-and-ground of their landscape: one of its privileged points-of-exchange. Sorcery
is allagmathesis, and the sorcerer is in this sense an allagmathematician/mathemagician or FrancesYatesian mathesist/mathesistitian 40 involved with and in an actual algebra, complicitas Deleuze says
in his introduction to Giovanni Malfattis Mathesiswith the calculus of a vital and ongoing synthesis,
a living unity incorrectly deemed human. 41 The mathesis here (in Latin, the educere: the conduction)
is that of a complicitous chthonic transduction prefiguring the relations between the human and the
infinite 42 in which and through which things human, all too human (i.e. subjects and objects) arise.
D. Mellamphy, 2
D. Mellamphy, 3
D. Mellamphy, 4
References:
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, edited and translated by Allan Stkl.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press, 1958.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sur, 1944.
Burkert, Walter. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Clarke, Susanna. Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell.
London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles. Mathse, Science et Philosophie.
In La Mathse, ou: Anarchie et Hirarchie de la Science
by Jean Malfatti de Montereggio (a.k.a. Giovanni Mafatti di Montereggio),
translated by Christien Ostrowski. Paris: ditions du Griffon dOr, 1946.
& Flix Guattari. Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrnie.
Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1980.
Dtienne, Marcel & Jean-Pierre Vernant. Les ruses de Lintelligence: La mtis des Grecs.
Paris: ditions Flammarion, 1974.
Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion.
New York: Macmillan, 1922.
Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les Choses: Une Archologie des Sciences Humaines.
Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1966.
. The Order of Things: An Archology of the Human Sciences, translated by Alan Sheridan.
New York: Vintage Books, 1970.
Goffey, Andrew. Introduction: On the Witchs Broomstick.
In Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell by Philippe Pignarre & Isabelle Stengers,
translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Harper, Douglas, editor. Online Etymological Dictionary, 2001-2012.
http://www.etymonline.com
Homer. The Iliad, with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, in Two Volumes.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0134:book=3:card=200
Kahn, Charles. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus:
An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007,
edited by Ray Brassier & Robin Mackay. New York: Sequence Press, 2011.
Liddell, Henry George & Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon, Revised and Augmented throughout by Sir Henry
Stuart Jones with the assistance of Roderick McKenzie, 876. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940.
http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3Dma%2Fqhsis
Malfatti von Montereggio, Johann (a.k.a. Giovanni Mafatti di Montereggio).
Studien ber Anarchie und Hierarchie des Wissens, mit besonderer Beziehung auf die Medicin.
Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1845.
Mauss, Marcel. Esquisse d'une Thorie Gnrale de la Magie. In Anne Sociologique VII, 1904:1-146.
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/1_esquisse_magie/esquisse_magie.html
Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
D. Mellamphy, 5
75-word Bio:
Dan Mellamphy (Ph.D) is currently Visiting Research Fellow at The New School in New York and Adjunct Professor
of Interdisciplinary Theory & Criticism at Western University in London. He studied comparative culture and
ethnographic techniques with Santa Cruzs Roger Keesing at McGill University, comparative literature and
oulipology with Ann Arbors Ross Chambers at the University of Toronto, as well as comparative literature and
interdisciplinary theory at Western and York Universities. Further information is available at
http://uwo.academia.edu/mellamphy (c/o Academia-edu).
ii.
iii.
iv.
,
and the available sources, from Posidonius on, show how these four numbers contain not only the basic intervals
fourth, fifth, octave and double octavebut also, according to the Platonic pattern, point, line, plane and solid. The
harmonic ratios, the perfection of 10, and the role of the pebble figuresthe Latin calx, Greek psephoiare all
aspects of the Pythagorean mathesis (Burkert 1972, 72). Making a curve of each angle in this triangle, the neoPythagorean Giovanni Malfatti (cf. Malfatti 1845, Deleuze 1946) saw in Pythagorass mathesis the form of an
egg/zero-glyph, which figures in the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a diagram of the Artaudian Body-withoutOrgans. Further mutations of the tetractys, mathesis, or Pythagorean decade can be found in the decadence of
Land 2011, 504 (via Dan Barker), where the curve[s] become[s] spiral[s] and egg[s] become[s] cyclone[s]; the latter
literally wind[s] up, in the Negarestanian Cyclonopedia, as a post-Pythagorean Hamid-Parsanian trison (cf.
Negarestani 2008, 30-36).
4
Deleuze 1946, ix-xxxi.
5
The sorcerer is always a figure of sorts (cf. Harper 2012, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sorcery
& http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sort).
6
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 59, 182.
7
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 59 (emphasis added).
D. Mellamphy, 6
D. Mellamphy, 7
40
This is the type of magicthe mathesisticalwhich was carefully suppressed and superseded by Pico when
be introduced practical Cabala: the new, safe, learned kind of conjuring ([Giordano] Brunos return to an all-out
Egyptianism means that he returns to an old style of frankly demonic conjuring[*]); cf. Yates 1964, 314, 323324. [*] A side-note re: demons/dmons: dmonslike avatarslook like real people, suggests Neal
Stephenson; indeed a dmon is like an avatar, but it does not represent a human being: [**] it is a [] piece of
software, a kind of spirit that inhabits the machine (Stephenson 1992, 55). [**] A second side-note re:
machinic/dmonic anthropomorphism: as Land suggests, [a]nthropomorphic surplus-value is not analytically
extricable from transhuman machineries (cf. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=machine + Land 2011,
346-347, 354-355).
41
Deleuze 1946, xii.
42
Deleuze 1946, xii.
43
cf. les magies de lintelligence ruse outlined in Dtienne & Vernants study of La mtis des Grecs (the magic of
mtis or cunning intelligence) 1974, 65ff.
44
Deleuze 1946, xii.
45
Later, of course, magic was dispossessed altogether: Techniques gradually discarded everything coloured by
mysticism, and those that remain [] no longer possess anything but an automatic actionalthough mystical
virtues were once attributed to them (Mauss 1904, online).
46
Perhaps this is why God is profoundly sthetic: here I misquote Lands quoting of Bataille, and link in so doing
(or undoing) this passage from Shamanic Nietzsche with one from his essay on Art as Insurrection (namely the
passage about the positive negation and sthetic insurrectionthe death and pre-personal/preorganic/non-agentic willof God; cf. Land 2011, 215, 155).
47
Simondon 1958, 160.
48
the artistic exploration of the unknownBrassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 32-33 (Editorss Introduction).
49
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 188-189. As Land (2011, 577-578) explains, sorcery does not seem to be at all
interested in judgements as to truth or falsity. It appears rather to estimate in each case the potential to make
real, saying typically perhaps it can become so. Sleth hud dopesh: perhaps it can become so (Land 2011, 579).
50
Land 2011, 210.
51
Zielinski 2002, 292-296; Zielinski 2006, 255-260.
52
Just as magic is a hinge that articulates episteme and technewithout privileging one or the otherso too is it
also a hinge that mediates or articulates chronos and aion, divided and undivided lots or measures. Perhaps it is
the kairos (in Greek) that stitches chronos to aion via the cunning switch-craft of a Greek mtis and more Latinate
mtissage (harkening here to a bracketed passage in the second paragraph of this essay): the [hyper]stitching,
stitch-craft or switch-craft of episteme and techne.
53
Zielinski 2002, 296; Zielinski 2006, 258.
54
(the bracketed mtic mtissage of our second paragraph; asides switch place in [s]witchcraft)
55
[S]witchcraft: assemblages of flows, switches and loopsconnective, disjunctive and conjunctive syntheses
(Land 2011, 324). Witches, sorcerers or shamans are not persons, but rather the intensive variations of a
vibratory spiralling movement: inclusive disjunctions, necessarily twin states, through which a subject passes on
the cosmic egg, cf. footnote #3 (above) re: the elliptic tetractys as egg/zero-glyph or Body-without-Organs (Land
2011, 419). It was an experience of soul-carving horror for me to witness [the witchs, i.e. sorceresss] meticulously
deliberated descent into the splintering of selfcomplete personality disintegration/dstrement (Land 2011,
577-578).
56
Heraclitus, Fragments 51 and 10:
([people] do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself; it is an
attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre) and ,
, (graspings: things whole and
not whole, what is drawn together and what is drawn asunder, the harmonious and the discordant. The one is
made up of all things, and all things issue from the one); cf. Kahn 1981, 64-65, 84-85.
57
Zielinski 2002, 296; Zielinski 2006, 295-296.
58
Brassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 6.
59
Brassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 26. In and through hyperstition the question arises (a Rlyeh interesting one)
as to who writes, and who is written? (Land 2011, 579). Hyperstition []. We thought we were making it up, but
all the time the [witches/sorcerers] were telling us what to writeand through them (Land 2011, 581-582).
D. Mellamphy, 8
60
D. Mellamphy, 9