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Dan Mellamphy

The Sorcerers Magic Milieu.


Memories of a So[u]rcerer:

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

Prefiguration and Magico-Mtic Transduction:


In and as a magical (some might say mtic 43) mathesis qua anarchic milieu, figure and ground
are not to be thought of as separate: the allagmatic [ex]change here should be seen as transductive
rather than dialectical; the points-of-exchangeand sorcerers as suchmerely channel and
foreground (or if you like, figure, configure) the forces inherent in the [back]ground, and the emergent
figure is therefore, strictly speaking, the figure of the groundi.e. in no sense (or no way) a
separate reality. In the condition of magical unity, figure and ground are not yet the technical
and/or the spiritual figure and ground (not objects or subjects as such) but instead only their
prefiguration (here echoing not only Malfattis Mathesis 44 but also the statement by Marcel Mauss in
his General Theory of Magic that magical actions are the prefigurations of techniques and that
[t]echniques are like seeds which [grew and] bore fruit in the soil of magic 45).
Visions of Division:
Techniques and technologies (practical and theoretical modes of technicity or technical modes)
along with morals and theologies (practical and theoretical modes of religiosity or spiritual modes) are in
Simondons schema the division, bifurcation, scissipation or phase-shifts in and of primitive magical
unity. And just as primitive magical unity phases-out into technical and spiritual (or religious) modes
with practical and theoretical dimensions, so too do the practical and theoretical dimensions subdivide,
bifurcate, scissipate: scientific knowledgescienceemerging as the milieu, mid-point or middleground between theology (or religious theory) and technology (or technical theory) and ethical
thinkingethicsemerging as the milieu, mid-point or middle-ground between technique (or
technical practice) and morals (or religious practice). In the initial ground-breaking phase-shift (the
bifurcation of primitive magical unity into technical and spiritual modes, or technicity and
religiosity), prior to the existence of either science or ethics an stheticstheticsemerges as
the milieu and mediating middle-ground between the technical and the religious. 46 According to
Simondon, sthetic thinking is therefore more primitive (i.e. more primary, primal, precedent,
progenerative or prescissipative) than science or ethics, since the birth of science and ethics within
technics and religion requires a prior division within technics and religion between the theoretical mode
and the practical mode. From this results the fact that sthetic thinking is truly situated at the neutral
point, in this way extending the existence of magic, whereas science on the one hand and ethics on the
other are in conflict in relation to this neutral point. 47
Palintonic Hyperstition:
The sorcerers sthetic exploration of concrete situations 48 with an eye to the halo of what can
become possible 49 in contradistinction to their otherwise shallow phenomenalism 50 is one that
holds potential for new impulses and inspiration; indeed it is of vital importance to know that a
magical approach to technology continues to be possible, states Siegfried Zielinski in the concluding
section of his Archologie der Medien (translated as Deep Time of the Media). 51 This way of looking at
things should not be understood as an underdeveloped precursor of the experimental approach to the
world of things and their relationships that flourished and died-out in premodern times he insists.
Magical, scientific, and technical praxis do not follow in chronological sequence, he continues; 52 on
the contrary, they combine at particular moments in time, collide with each other, provoke one another,
and, in this way, maintain tension and movement within developing processes. 53 And magic, indeed, is
at the heart of this combinatory switch-craft 54 as its sthetic allagmathesis: a disjunctive conjunction or
discordant concordance of episteme and techne (science and technique) 55 which refuses in its artful and
attentive tension (in Greek, its palintonos harmonia: its [in]tense synthesis or synthetic syllapsis 56) to
privilege one side of the equation over the other. [T]he operations of the magical arts cannot be tied
absolutely to a particular purpose, writes Zielinski, and their prerequisite is a specific mental

D. Mellamphy, 3

attitude 57that special type of attention/attentiveness which is a kind of purposiveness without


purpose, if you will (hearkening here to a Kantian sthetic and ultimately to Kants sublime: his Critique
of Judgemental attitude). In the words of a theorist at the core of [whose] thought are the works of
Immanuel Kant 58not Jean-Franois Lyotard in this case, but the other (and herein oft-quoted) postmodern/post-structuralist explorer of the technological sublime, Nick Landthis attitude and approach
is one of fictional engagement/hyperstition: 59 of the flattening fact onto fiction and fiction onto
fact (textual experiments [that] aim to flatten writing onto its referent 60), thereby intensifying 61
both fact and fiction through the force (Macht) of magic understood in this case as a machine for
affecting reality (the palintonos harmonia of practice and theory). 62
Stengerian Starhawks, Strange Starlings and other Sorcerous Siths:
Turning at last (in this final paragraph) to the Collective Writings of Nick Land and to the Other
Lands of Jonathan Strange (see below), one might begin with a nod to the formers filmic and fictional
references, i.e. a short list of sources (beyond those that have already been encountered in this essay)
evoked in the 666-page 63 sorcerous counter-text 64 of Lands Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 8707. These include the novels of H.P. Lovecraft, of Philip K. Dick, and of William F. Gibson, as well as films
such as Cronenbergs Videodrome, Ridley Scotts Bladerunner, Camerons Terminator and Coppolas
Apocalypse Now. His filmic, fictional and philosophical engagements are haunted throughout by a
profoundly cyber-shamanic outlook (see the Cybergothic and Shamanic Nietzsche sections of Fanged
Noumena for example): a Sith- or Sdhe-like visionthe sthetic of s-sdhe 65which even finds its way
into works of more recent fantasy- (as well as science-) fiction such as the 780-page Jonathan Strange &
Mister Norrell of British writer Susanna Clarke. In the latter novel, the Sithean/Sdhean landscape bleeds
into that of Britain itself: the vague virtualities and magic possibilities of the so-called Other Lands or
flickering Frie begin to infect and anxiously affect the supposedly stable borders of The British Isles.
A kind of Colonel Kurtz, long thought lost in the Sdhean wilderness, re-emeges through a glas[s] darkly as
the changing changeling John Uskglass, Raven King, one of the most feared and most fearsome
figureless figures of Frie. Frie, which magicians sometimes call The Other Lands, is a strange
country, writes Clarke. When people talk of The Other Lands, they generally have in mind Frie or
some other such vague notion; and when they talk of John Uskglass, they refer to the Raven King, who
[w]hen he was a child in Frie the Sdhe had called [by] a word in their own language which, we are told,
meant Starling. 66 The Starling of Stengerss and Pignarres treatise is a modern-day witch known as
Starhawk (a sorcerer with a hawk rather than raven cognomen). Taking on the name sorcerer or
witch, nevermind Starhawk or Starling, is already an act of magic, argue Stengers and Pignarre. 67
Even using the word magic is magic: the word puts to the test, compromises, exposes to sniggering.
It forces us to feel what it is in us that balks and which is, perhaps, precisely what renders us vulnerable
to [capitalist] capture. 68 But these words, these names, are factual fictions, hyperstitions, 69
experimental fabricated character[s] 70 (mtic mtissages), and the latter are also, in addition, its
power, potential, Macht, magic. Here Maya (Sanskrit ) rises like Medea (Kolkhian/Kartvelian )
from the midst of a long-lost chthonos (Hellenic/Macedonian ). If one said to them, but your
goddess is only a fiction, they would doubtless smile and would ask us if we are among those who
believe that fiction is powerless, or that behind every fiction there is something that should be explained
in acceptable, scientific, rational or intellectually reliable terms. In terms that reassure. And
straightaway this demand to be reassured puts us on the side of the believers, those who believe that
they can classify, that they can separate out the true causes from those that would only be
superstition. 71 The witch is on the side of hyperstition, which is in factand in fictionin the middle
(inthemedievalmiddle.com) as much, if not more, than it is on the margins. This is the Sorcerers magic
milieu.

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

Melbourne: Re.press Books, 2008.


Pignarre, Philippe & Isabelle Stengers. La Sorcellerie Capitaliste: Pratiques de Dsenvotement.
Paris: ditions La Dcouverte, 2005.
Simondon, Gilbert. Du Mode dExistence des Objets Techniques.
Paris: ditions Aubier, 1958.
Slater, William, ed. Lexicon to Pindar, 33. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1969.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0072%3Aentry%3Da)lla%2Fssw
Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.
Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.
Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1964.
Zielinski, Siegfried. Archologie der Medien: Zur Tiefenzeit des Technischen Hoerens und Sehens.
Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002.
. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, translated Gloria
Custance. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.

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).

[J.R.R.] Tzolkin: the [Just-Roughly-Rendered] Mesoamerican Long-Count Calendar, calendrical equivalent


(roughly speaking) of the Nahuatl Tonalpohualli.
2
Land 2011, 590-605 (Qabbala 101).
3
The kernel of Pythagorean wisdom is the tetractys or four-group made up of the numbers 1+2+3+4, which add
up to 10. They are represented in pebble figure by the perfect triangle,
i.

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

Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 59.


Land 2011, 345-374.
10
Mtis-mtissage conjoins ancient Greek notions of cunning, mtis, with the semi-autochthonoushence
heterogeneousmixing mlanges of mtis, as [re]stated between brackets in the next paragraph (cf. Harper 2012,
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=metis along with Dtienne & Vernant 1974, 7-14).
11
Deleuze & Guattari 1980, 306 (also see 298, 294 & 292).
12
[T]he title of [] Les Mots et Les Choses (Words and Things, translated as The Order of Things) should be
understood negativelyi.e. as no[n]-words and no[n]-things (Deleuze & Guattari 1980, 87n28). We ceaselessly
pass from order words to the silent order of things, as Foucault says, and vice versa (ibid. 111); lordre muet
(the silent order) here is utterly mute: Wintermute, writes Land (after Deleuze & Guattari), with reference in
this case (Henry Dorsett) to William Gibsons Neuromancer. Wintermute, by which he means dead as winter:
the dead of winter, or the winter of us, dead. [] Wintermute [as an] intelligence without self, the intelligence of
and in dead time (O-intensity) (Land 2011, 371-372). ( ) or (( )) or ((( ))) does not signify absence. It
manufactures holes, hooks for the future, zones of unresolved plexivity, really so (not at all metaphorically) Land
insists. He refers us at this point to Gibsons Count Zero (Land 2011, 372-373); reference might also be made to
Hamid Parsanis ( )hole complex in Negarestanis Cyclonopedia (2008, 42-68).
13
or transduce (i.e. are transducedas in Land 2011, 499).
14
Beckett 1958, 3-4the Beckettian mode and Beckettian modernism: in the words of Nick Land, [this is] the
advance modernity of Beckett (Land 2011, 266).
15
Borges 1944, 43-48.
16
Foucault 1966, 7 (The Order of Things, xv).
17
Foucault 1966, 7 (The Order of Things, xv).
18
Dtienne & Vernant 1974, 7-14.
19
Harper 2012, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=metis (previously footnoted).
20
Foucault 1966, 7-8.
21
Land 2011, 209-210 (Shamanic Nietzsche).
22
Bataille 1985.
23
Land 2011, 210 (Shamanic Nietzsche).
24
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 182-183.
25
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 188-189 (concrete situations accompanied by the halo of what can become
possible: the purview of polymtis Odusseus Homer, III.200; Dtienne & Vernant 1974,
29-30).
26
Fear in a handful of dust. Fanged Noumena is, of course, the title of Lands Collected Works; fear in a handful of
th
dust is drawn from the 30 line of T.S. Eliots poem, The Waste Land.
27
Brassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 32-33 (Editorss Introduction).
28
Deleuze & Guattari 1980, 293-294.
29
Deleuze & Guattari 1980, 293-294 (also see 299 re: such affects).
30
Deleuze & Guattari 1980, 294-295, with a nod (in this essay and this footnote) to The Waste Land [again].
31
Brassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 32-33 (Editorss Introduction).
32
Goffey 2007, xx, xix.
33
Frazer 1922, 50.
34
Deleuze & Guattari 1980, 308.
35
Harper 2012, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=magic (+
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=machine a.k.a. device, trick; [] means, expedient, contrivance;
alsore: device, trick, contrivancecf. www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=metis + Dtienne & Vernant 1974,
7-14).
36
Simondon 1958, 163-164.
37
Slater 1969, 33 ().
38
Liddell & Scott 1940, 876 ().
39
The dstre, plane of consistency/compositionplanomenonor body without organs. In the November 28
plateau, Deleuze and Guattari argue that you are always already this dstre, that you yourselfas selfare
already scurrying like a vermin, groping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic upon the plane qua
planomenon of its desert: desert traveler, traveler of the dstre; cf. Deleuze & Guattari 1980, 186.
9

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

Brassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 32.


Brassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 32.
62
Brassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 32.
63
(give or take the last page of its indexthe one that indexes witchcraft; that particular page fell from my
volume, which now ends with will, werewolves and war)
64
Land 201, 579.
65
Since Wikipedia sounds at once both wiccan (wicca-paideian) and NickLandian (wikiwiki being a term of
acceleration or pure speed in the offshore coloniesa term to accelerate the process [of capitalist colonization,
a.k.a. expansion] as Nietzsche put it: Deleuze & Guattari quoted in Land 2011, 449), the reader is here pointedly
pointed in the direction of its Sdhe entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aos_S%C3%AD).
66
Clarke 2004, 498.
67
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 181. To call ourselves witches is part of this [sorcerers] apprenticeshipwhats
more (and more particularly), [t]o call oneself a witch is to learn to present oneself in a mode that catalyses the
memory of the last great eradication not to concern colonized peoples but which happened at the very place in
which capitalism was invented (ibid. 184-185); what we have here then is catalytic efficiencyBrassier &
Mackay in Land 2011, 33 (Editorss Introduction).
68
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 181.
69
Brassier & Mackay in Land 2011, 26.
70
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 181.
71
Pignarre & Stengers 2005, 186.
61

D. Mellamphy, 9

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