vincent garton, automaticity and the mystery of the state — ideas
in this (e)laborate, attractive, well-crafted, even slightly prophetic text, garton manages, very much against his intentions, to transform the bland western institutional and political liberalism that the first half of the text is nested under, into something refreshing for once in the history of western political science, a deeper level of sinological fetishism that views automaticity as the end of the mystery of the state, instead envisioning it quite interestingly as the benign, normative beginning of the multiverse, collapsed into the logic of the extra-national state, which operates on its own algorithmic tendencies into the collapse of hobbesian pouissance in favor of spotaneous unification of all ethical dogma into miserable iterable programming, all in a bid to own the westernoid subject that still intends to wield the sword and the religious offering in each respective hand, instead of holding the sword directly as a gift to god. however, garton is at his most interesting when he strips apart the positivism that is associated with the wider bratton influence and instead tackles the cultural lens directly, which isnt seen in this writing.
although bogna calls this her favorite, or in other terms what can be argued for as the most ambitious text in machine decision, there are three things that seriously and productively intruige me about this text. the first and most aesthetic of which is the fact that garton, in my appropriation of the chinese as the metaphorical oriental, continously in a chinese fashion appraises the social unconscious otherwise known as the political zombification behind conceptual tradition as the authentically novel force of creation behind both the way that philosophical achievement corresponds to the law's legitimation of it, and the way that legacy interacts with history and influence, which he later re-appropriates to feed back into his political narrative.
concretely, he appropriates hobbes, marx and schmitt as novel visionaries within western political theology (describing them as "definitive", "refomulatory", "insightful" and "transformative" along the same line as "famous" "classic" "precise" and so on, risking a lack of cynicism when approaching canonical powerplay), and clapmar and the han feizi as historically dense treasuries that can neither be qualitatively nor quantitatively approached or reinvented in an instant, seeing them only as "residues", "inheritences", as pillars that can only be "revived", "reappropriated" or at least "influencing" if you're mao himself - which is totally normal and even healthy for philosophy, but only under the artificial historical spectacle of dollplaying, not under the literal belief that they are transcending philosophical ground in a direct manner.
they are in fact transcending it, but only indirectly, or more specifically, functionally and not as a synthesis of historical ideas. rather, historical narratives are both infinitely derivative, and due to their stacking function, infinitely more dense than sole philosophical production. however, their volume doesn't hold under the weight, so all their specificities collapse into generalities, when in fact their functional character is often times the sole invention they should actually be accredited for - yet at the same time on a discoursive plane it is likely inferior to some of our own writings.
the reason i mention this rhetorical squabble is because it sits to justify and encircle the very core argument that garton uses to create a rough shield around his vision - which i will only explicate way further into this review. in the western conception of subversion and innovation, functional philosophical difference is a flat rather than volumonous field, meaning that me and garton, on one night of concentration and sheer passion are able to create more functional, capable and iterative visions and genuine categorical divides than even thousands of years of serious intellectual labour could write down, precisely because the virtual possibility of any single agent is not restricted by some type of dialectical settlement, but only by the pure excess of the originator, of which in all my arrogance i truthfully believe the excellency of european speculative philosophy (all philosophy is european, american included) is superior at raising and upholding than any and all traditions.
of course, other than the very tradition it upholds, of the circular betrayal of the father by the sons, the very paradigm which vince throws traditionalist apologia towards, such as the idea that modern inventions and even less dense philosophical inclinations such as ai should find it "absurd" that they can not only interact with but attempt to soil by "reconsidering" millennia-old chinese political thought, which requires the almighty task of a "suspension of linear historical sensibility" which definitely isn't just deciding to rupture it all in a moments notice upon the realization that everyone except key figures that usually arent canonical were actually just banging sticks together in their free time rather than enacting genuienly philosophically empassionate writing, which is nothing more than the laborious act of a balzac in his room, true genius, nothing more than superficially extended labour that arrives at the lethal point where categorical collapse allows total disenchansfriesment (disenfranchisement + chance + enchantment -> the tradition as a genre is seen as a franchise that is being by chance enchanted into collapsing) and as such attains equillibrium with the functional flat semanticology.
it is unclear whether garton is being extra careful towards the eastern vision down to its functional narratives about legitimacy and legacy because of bratton's influence, because he's in a book that requires that paradigm to epistemologically function in a nuanced manner, or because of his own healthily obsessive vision of combining hegelian-kojevian narratives, but the reason it strikes me as odd is because i truthfully believe that western fetishism will always climb the most treacherous, cowardly and deepest heights of arrogant irony, and that whatever intense force it accustoms in this manner will always manage to triumph, albeit soullessly, over the peasantry of respectable and accumulated practices of any and all degrees.
this isnt just about the culturally architectural vision of the western protagonist, or in other words garton's mysterious sovereign who is both arcane and simulacrifully capacitatious, emerging from alterity to bring about the law as both the rule and transcended exception, but rather about the very excess which serves as a reservoir for the western vision of surplus and the way in which we contest this vision. garton is weaponizing automation to bring about the eastern world's ontological nihilism over sovereignity as the power that manages to absolve excess into harmonious destiny, into a self-manifestation that brings about the absolute through a backwards unfolding, described actionably as "spontaneous, actionless, inaltering" as well as qualitatively or passively as "empty, immutable, immobile, ungraspable", which is essentially the chinese way of playing on the vision of excess that alterity produces at the moment that its aura or mystery is arcane through an inner explosive tendency rather than an externalized bringing-together, colonialism expounded through self-colonialization, but also with its hunger-drive or will-to-expound, the grasping tendency or mechanism of capture essentially immolated before it can deploy as an aspect of power.
the fact that this is the description of harmony in this context points to that same idea of passive emanence that goes against hobbes' deployment of deleuzes' interpreted pouissance as this driver of raw power that garton understands as the relentless force of an ambitious deployment of materialist prophecy into cosmo-ontological divination, and not as an equal benefactor to this idea, precisely because in his second dissemniation he elaborates the way that we understand passivity because of our construction of the simulacrum as arcane, or rather as alterity through the force of excess and surplus, and not through harmony as a spontaenous and collective upbringing of literal wisdom personified through nothingness, which we deem as passive because it isnt subversive, not just because it isnt excessive. the concept of subversiveness is in the western world equalizable with terror, and terror is excessive in its nature, and in that sense rupturing. even negativistic philosophy in the east cant capture this aspect, only the french truly ever could.
garton elsewhere paraphrasess boris groys views, saying "every serious communist leader must also at least present themselves as a philosopher, and communist governance is precisely the realisation of the platonic regime of the sage". despite the obvious difference between the derridian priest-as-legislator and the eastern sage-as-mediator, there is also the fact that the sage has that pastiche aspect of frozeness that doesnt resemble marx's political theology. i'm not arguing that garton is arguing against any of this, but simply that it inspires me to create a binary divide even if one isnt appropriate, and in that sense i am projecting my own fetishism over this entire polemic than trying to discern anybody elses.
and here is my attempt: automatization in the west is seen as a structurally alienating force that produces theological univerals that dont exist anymore as substances but as realized abstractions, whereas in ascetic philosophy automaticity is understood through the sage has a far less reificatory understanding of substance, and is in a certain sense aristotelian in that it fuzes epistemological concerns with ontological necessity, limiting the extent to which political action is seen as ontological over its moral abilities. all of this is my pre-emptive intuition on the subject, and, as an example, i searched online to discover that the eighteen century chinese philosopher xiong shili has a supposed "thesis dealing with the inseperability of substance and function", where the nobleman as seen through confucian philosophy has the conceptual divide between an inner sage and an outer ruler, where spiritual adjustment is the inner value and political activity is the outer value. it is to my surprise that even the chinese themselves criticize one another of appropriating passivity into their discourse, where shili intends that the nobleman cannot be a proper ascetic precisely without being a regulator.
confucian texts such as the mengzi and xunzi treat goods as moral and social instruments rather than bearers of value relations or forms of baudrillardian symbolic exchange. in their sense, they arent as tracable to political theology but rather to cosmological and moral virtues more directly. shangpin (商品) as a distinct theoretical object only started existing in china after the late qing and republican eras translated marx and ricardo, and as such, it shows exactly how capitalism itself can be conceived of as an ontological category that in its totality discoursively created the conditions for the procession of commodities.
i don't agree with historically-mediated dialectical thinking, instead opting for the french and british approaches of teologizing ontic chance against synthesizing development in this regard, but my own philosophy in other works such as the yet to be released "kill (2026)" treat commodities as historically essential objects that are processions of certain value hierarchies independent of social histories, which shows them obtaining the potential for/of being developed regardless of philosophical inclinations.
however, this short detour simply has the goal of pointing out that, as the accelerationalist discourses themselves that garton is well aware of point to, speculation and hyperstition themselves are intertwined within a distinctly western (european) philosophical tradition, where technocratic appropriation of politico-theological concepts actually feeds forward into economic concept, and serves for example to determine the territory around which things like finance and sociological structure are determined by. all this to say that, at the very least, there is no way garton is unintentionally feeding into rhetoric that dissipates the western conception of the genius over unconscious traditions, given the obvious distinctions he draws between the two worlds, and further proven by the fact that this rhetoric enables his sinofuturist project pedagogically.
the second thing that intruiges me is precisely the fact that, in relation to the argument i just finished making, there is also no way to reconcile garton's sinofuturist ambitions with the very western structures he preserves in his writing. garton reproduces the structural ambivaence of liberal-political modernity in its double gesture of subversion and conservation in the very structure of this text, following his sinological coda into the western fetishism of the articulation of the state, the excess, the other and the law as altercating a higher-order mystery, the very soveirgn is anticipated into the west's discovery of chinese political alterity, the recursive closure of the text sees the west discovering its limits in the east and supports the concept of automation and the flux or flow into the total deterritorialization of western values as we excessively meet our own end, something that could only happen through the immediacy of our own fetishistic notions, which require the east to exist as the mediator, and not the relinquished transcendentor of. my review not sits as the third meta-reflection on this process, as garton himself as previously mentioned reproduces it twice on a plain and a meta level in his own elaborations.
however, whats interesting to note is that even though this is the structural necessity behind this text, which is neatly divided exactly along a chaptered axis of west -> east, regardless of the fact that of course the political motivations behind his text are somewhat affiliated with the argument that automaticity can serve as a global homogenous extra-state facility along the likes of lukas, bratton and pasquinelli and their planetary project, his syncretic and holistic approach isnt just a fragmented and contradictory ambition, but is also a direct intention that he studies, which is why in my kicker to this review i explicitly wrote that he likely didnt intend to be a fetishist but intended a most authentic sinofuturism, which is important because there has been an international debate or two before about his level of alliegence or betrayal to a chinese vision, specifically around his idea that western sinology should actually be cross-adopted by the chinese directly in some of its tenants, and in regards to whether this idea is appropriating or mindful of the larger chinese episteme, which i wont directly cover here.
what i will cover is his interview with luria, where he expands more specifically on his sinofuturism, where its clear that his visions in that text explicitly rival the structural and stylistic positioning he develops in this text. he argues that if we want to see what is different about chinese philosophy, we have to follow kojeve in recognizing that the global superstate itself would collapse all particular differences, but also that this indicates that on a gnoseological level, the categorical conceptual boundary between eastern and western philosopphy is already qualitatively similar in that it only differs by sequences and not by registers.
he also specifically addresses sinofuturism with the same allegiance to holistic syncretism, stating that "if we want to see what is, dimly, posthistorical in china we need to turn away from any supposed specifically and irreducibly chinese content". yet, on his ideas on the state as a concept, he collapses western conceptual philosophies as indeed being irreducible to chinese perspectives, allowing the chinese to occupy a space that terraforms western conceptions but is only re-influenced by its own previous traditions, that also simultaneously offers from the chinese perspective as he states in his interview a "a more sophisticated analysis of the west [by the east than the other way around]", that at the same time requires certain western conceptions like the artifical to make sense of technological paradigms, as is further elaborated by shuang frost earlier in the book.
the problem is that ideas for garton become codified into the project of self-trasncendence, which is ironically the least rupturing way of behaving towards philosophy, which requires western concepts of re-nuanced, functional, procedural complexification rather than the rupture being seen as an instrumentalized approaching totality, which is why sinology treats china as the future that has already happened in the past. the only way to move past moral political-ontologization and into aesthetic political-ontologization is to simply let go of the desire to embellish traditions with sanctity, which is literally the only rhetorically consistent practice across his whole text.
there is no way to excuse the fact that at one point garton feels free to say that the ruin of transcendence is where chinese philosophy begins, and then at the very next point to say that we must turn away from any supposed irreducibly chinese content. either he accepts that we must recognize chinese epistemic (and not just political) soveirgnity and as such question our own motives of domination towards it, or otherwise, it is truer that we are all drowning in sequentialist comparisons between far-away nations, but then in that case, china cannot be the site of post-transcendence anymore than anywhere else, other than that maybe their aesthetic character is slightly more attached to those notions.
this is precisely the reason why this text intruiges me, because me and garton in all our excess are stuck, unable to progress either into post-sinology (which is seen fetishistically as both impossible and inevitable) or into genuine sinology (which can only be divorced by our attempts if we divorce ourselves from our own attempts, after which, exposed as zizekian/lacanian perverts, we would stop being sinologists, seeing it ironically as likely quite bland on its own), speculative sinology captures the logic of the soveirgnity by the chinese themselves, who, reflected in the chinese firewall, prevent our excess by reinstating it rather than by collapsing it and transforming it, because they simply arent the west and dont contain any surplus. even the arabic world contains too few surplus to really create excess, which is why at best it can only mimic excess, and thats all it ever really does, which hilariously reproduces an even higher-order fetishism, but they dont do it consciously, unlike us (they are passive in this sense, proto-irigaray you dont need to do the interpretative labour of calling me out, ill do it myself on top of my own text)
the third thing and last thing that intruiges me is that in a certain sense, garton is synonymous with perlman in understanding hobbes' leviathan as an artificiality escaping humanity so that it can enslave its makers instead of the people escaping the state of nature in favor of civility, however, the brattonian technooptimism once again shows up to obscure this middle line where the negativity is understood as synonymous for ontology's domination of humanity. in a yet unreleased polemic against bratton's stack, i explicitly target this tendency: "what's missing in bratton is the concept of abstraction when seen as the locus of interpolitical rather than intrapolitical struggle, which suspiciously removes ontological conflict from the cosmotechical domain".
it seems as if garton is essentially weaponizing the chinese tendency towards passivity as a type of natural inclination, where the compression of conflict, opression and subjugation is synonymous with china's open policy trajectory or its own view of communism as its expansionary rhetoric, and more broadly the politically advantageous character that arises after glorifying regulatory frameworks. the consistent turn away from at the very least pointing out the history of conflict obscures it in a way that looks like its weaponizing it. the problem isnt that they want to turn away from critique and into affirmationism, but that their affirmationism is making an advantage out of its power by turning to constitutional frameworks that eclipse and obfuscate these very same categories.
this work that garton is writing is synoynmous with my own ambitions regarding autotheory, it feels autonomic in that autotheory itself becomes a mid-way point where the theory is discovered in real time, where its being constantly compared without having a clear structural overview of all of its intentions. in that sense, garton's text is brilliant in that it leads itself blindly into success the way that autotheoretical gestures should do and do (autotheory is an evolution of theory and its natural progression towards particular forms as mediated by social infrastructure and certain polemical points of progress and not a turn away from careful writing as some may argue, so in my use of it its a compliment).
however, i feel like his view towards sinofuturism in the luria interview simply hosts a more contradictory and bright determination of the same concepts he attempts to address here albeit in a more politically nested way. his constant judgements and intersectional political analysis of character and symbolic cultures and comparative dissections between western and eastern frameworks is brighter and more allowing, and in that sense, the difference in quality between the two writings doesnt show that hes being a bad philosopher, it shows hes being a bad faith one, which is really good news for his philosophy. i also dont want this writing to be taken as if im arguing he isnt entirely consistent in his vision, its me trying to trace all the natural structural inconsistencies that this type of theoretical pursuit develops, not an actual failure in garton's writing, which i strictly denote to assumably the medium under which he's writing his text in this book in comparison to other places.