Five Myths of Zoroaster Part I: Facets of the Culture-Machine: Groundwork

///I finally feel done enough to start releasing this version of "Five Myths." This is part one, and I'll be releasing subsequent parts every few days until it's finished. An apology for the almost 18-month delay feels a bit ridiculous, so I'll refrain. It's written to a point I feel comfortable sharing. Thanks to everyone who helped and thanks for reading.\\\

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Five Myths of Zoroaster

Culture as Process of Production

Camp des Milles by Wols

The word ‘culture’ attends an intuitive simplicity that any endeavor to define it immediately belies; our attempts begin confidently but soon sputter out—our definitions always rely on series of ellipses. What follows ought to sputter, and those places where it does not only betray some linguistic trick or other on my part. What follows is a series of tricks:

א. Facets of the Culture-Machine: Groundwork

Culture consists of beliefs, habits, actions, but not so simply. Culture is the matrix-nebula of lived existence, constituted by those experiential causal chains of behavior reproduced into and by its repetition into difference. Culture is a lab-culture dropped in a swamp—watch it swell or die or find pockets of stasis.

A belief: in a God, and in what type of a God; in a form of life, in its virtue; in other forms of life, in their vice; in a sort of world, and in an expectation of one's lot in it; in sorts of people, and assumptions about these sorts.

Belief influences practice, but not as an arrow with a point at one end and a particular heading fixed to its singular trajectory, but as a boomerang on a rope, looping to stretch attachments or binding so tightly the haecceities blur in superposition. Assumption goes viral, a social gene, vicious in its bid for survival in repetition. Schoolteachers, like siblings, deliver bacterial payloads at fatal velocity, swept generalizations as discursive-symbolic data packets, concepts luring us into a unifying delusion. That is to say: belief is a feeling, and it is a certain contagious mode of feeling-with which produces something called community, an in-group. Those concepts which hold us in fidelity lure us into a “feeling of wholeness or togetherness in experience that aims at the continuation of order, but with greater intensity,” a transcendence into the relief of deindividuation which belief and belonging so graciously offer us.[1] Belief proceeds along aesthetic corridors as myth-building gets to work; appealing narratives gently envelop the dispersed warmth of pulsing ego and guide us inward and down—unless shaken out, hard. Societal de factos set out the firm (but always permeable) limits to the range of belief, deterritorializing old mores and reterritorializing belief systems into alignment with the point-of-sale ethos (so Christianity becomes the plaything of Mammon-possessed Kenneth Copeland types, Judaism flounders in the deep waters of “compassionate liberalism” which coos while it pilfers, and Buddhism becomes a thousand pewter figurines sold in a head shop built on the site of a bombed-out rowhome. Pilgrims who raise their heads from supplication at the Kaaba are treated with the sight of the grand Pullman ZamZam Hotel, gaudy with decadence).

The anti-burgher counterrevolution waged by Abrahamic traditionalism is soundly beaten, and little has risen in its place. Belief, flowing from the successful mobilization of psychic lures, has the potential to be changed as those lures are recapitulated and redeployed. Propositions which realign one’s aesthetic relation to symbolic connections can be metanoiac, a neuro-symbolic fissure operating at the extreme limits of the affective process. Metanoia is a vectored catapult, an encounter with a form of experience which cracks open metanarrative, opens us up to new comprehensions of relationships between parts, objects, bodies—words, deaths, roles, gods. Every revolution in personal or collective symbolism, in belief, is a metanoiac process which harnesses, redirects, and accelerates existing or potential momentum. All potential, political or otherwise, resides in belief, which realizes itself and does not exist beyond in practice and action—that is, all potential resides in movement, the simultaneously ultimate and original stage of the symbolic process.

A practice: rituals—hygienic behaviors, variance of dress in context, toasts, shoe-etiquette, hand gestures, language, routines of mourning and morning, food cultivation and preparation—which imbibe the nihilistic stuff of phenomenal life with meaning. Practice is and instigates ritual, repeated action generative of belief through movement. Habituation turns belief into an activity, something felt and held below and above all else, it orients behavior, reaction, and, ultimately, it produces epistemic force, it instigates symbolic-discursive truth. Habit-ritual discloses an individual within its setting, its societal environ. One is implicated into a social relation, a sea charted by communalization, with no more powerful or convenient or useless tool than language, that directed flow of hopeless intention, directed not by any one, but by its own dao, its own happening in movement-production. Who does the directing? Not I…

Language is shaped by such ritualized practice, develops alongside culture, and ought not be separated from its understanding. Language in all its nuances (endlessly variable but not endlessly open), is especially relevant for the navigation of the complex topographies of human social life. The registers of language are qualitatively unique, but their functionality for navigation exists only insofar as they find resonance in the cultural landscape being traversed. The potential of language to effectively communicate exists only alongside the creative operations that undermine any understanding of language as a merely descriptive tool employed by some rational subject that lives only in the gloomy fetishes of the libidinally stymied philosopher. Language is less like inputting code into a matrix than it is like echolocation—an echolocation that terraforms culture as its means of navigating it. Language becomes ritualized as discrete cultural phenomena by the contours of its real boundaries. These boundaries can be very basic and intuitive. Language as a composition of speech acts depends on much: to give a rudimentary example, on the consistent human physiology of mouths, lungs, ears, and eyes in order to function adequately as a repeatable act of transmission. It is therefore machinic, requiring variable but reasonably consistent interlockings of functioning parts in order to work.[2] So it is obvious that whatever form language takes, it meets and shapes itself inevitably to these limiters, even as it carves its own boulevards of possibility. This is so self-evident that it is very difficult to imagine how language would function without these basic limiters, and if we were to imagine some alien language as in the far reaches of Asimovian fiction, this too would be defined by a new set of founding limitations.

Yet these real boundaries to language’s creative operations are opaque and shifting. To go beyond physiology: in a sudden rainstorm with howling winds language as speech must become language as shout. Certain avenues of expression are closed off by new boundaries placed on tone and pitch, and shouting, otherwise signifying some kind of distress, is recontextualized by a mutual, extra-verbal limiter intuitively registered by speakers. In dim lighting body language is exaggerated, and in total darkness it falls away entirely. The visual modifiers of speech activity are no less ‘linguistic’ than spoken words (evident in the occasional awkwardness of a phone call), and in the pressing dark reassuring words are accompanied by gentle touch instead of a warm smile. Where these constitutive boundaries extend outward, their relevance to culture at large starts to crystallize. In the open prairies of the American Midwest, vowels widen to reach across the plains, and in the Northeastern cities words get cut off and compressed to a quick staccato in order to be heard over the clattering of traffic and machinery. For our purposes, the constitutive limitations, or consistent avenues of possibility, that are seen in the simple physiological limits of language, allow for an understanding of culture that avoids the deadlock between the discursivists (those who hold that culture, politics, thought, and behavior is structured and shifts based on discursive, epistemological, and performative normativity and the ensuing machineries of escape and capture) and the determinative social scientists (those who hold that culture, politics, thought, and behavior is the result of permutations of variously social and Darwinian adaptations selecting for fitness utility). Language shapes as it navigates, and is shaped by its navigations. Our references to language as a distinct element of social life are necessary in order to speak about it, but the distinction doesn’t hold outside of the utility of metaphor. Just as the howling winds in a storm present new boundaries that shape language, the historical and contemporary processes of social reproduction are the context all languages and cultures exist within. This is the weather that all language shouts over.

Everywhere, language (within certain limiting factors) proceeds by variability. Variations of English in Southern California and English in the mountains of Kentucky are

crisscrossed by difference, despite relying on a shared stratum of reference. Even within Southern California, within Orange County, Santa Ana speaks a different language than San Clemente, and so on. These languages, like culture (see section III), are composed of inputs and outputs, nebulous boundaries, and work by breaking down, by ingress and exodus, and by the flux of each of these. And within these regions, within the neighborhoods, within the blocks, even within the households, language moves by fluxing into variance:

In an upper middle class, suburban household in Mission Viejo, a teenager says to another, “Yo, let’s mob clindo and cop some moonrocks, then hit up Jon’s joint.” To their parents this is incomprehensible, a language which wefts infuriatingly just beneath comprehension. A recreational/medicinal marijuana “clinic” gets stylized as “clindo,” the act of heading toward a destination as a group becomes “mobbing,” etc. Youth attends a freedom from restraint, and its intersection with a neuroplastic vitality renders an organic ability and tendency to play creatively with language, an ease of switching through codes made possible by as yet unfixed patterns of habituation. At work, the teen’s professionalized parent can no longer speak in the language of their youth—the dynamic, insular, and unofficial slang of their youth faded from habituation as their actions more and more intersected with a professional environment, and as their friends’ did as well. Slang, meanwhile, has not ceased its incessant transfiguration, and becomes nonsense to the now-uninitiated. Age drives repetition into a consolidation and a limit, and its intersection with hierarchically enforced behavior (received via a forced vergence into the professional world, for example), leads to a fixing of patterns, a repetition of the same which consolidates and freezes, rather than the repetition of variation found in unrestrained youth.

Language has an intimately causal and contingent relation to the actions which give rise to it: the teen wouldn’t have learned to speak a word of this language had she not developed a weed habit, which led her to buying from a guy who introduced her to their friends, who absorbed her into their group, and so on. Down another fork lies a different group with a different language, which varies with region, pastime, nationality, race, income, neighborhood—which is essentially to say with culture.

Yet youth and a drug habit do not lead us fully to the bottom of this problem of linguistic variation.[3] For it was not simply youth that gave this teen’s dealer and their friends their vocabulary; it was too the result of an intermingling, a “going out and bringing back seeds on [one’s] clothes” (section II). “Clindo,” for example, develops in black and Chicano communities in Los Angeles, and leaks out through drug distribution chains and popular music. So I do not mean to construct some imaginary binary or even spectrum between an orderly, official, and absolutely fixable language of the professional world on the one hand, and a chaotic, totally improvisational language of slang (which would effectively resemble a dialect of Gibberish) on the other, with some intermixing as one travels from one side to the next or even back and forth. Rather, like culture itself, language operates on a striated continuum, and fixes for itself boundaries and barriers, walls which nevertheless break down with age and wear; which are subverted by tunnel systems and chainlink cuts to allow cross-boundary intercourse; which eventually collapse, the materials salvaged, loaded into the beds of pickup trucks, transported elsewhere, and built anew.

The Queen’s English is spoken nowhere perfectly—not even in Buckingham Palace. Rather, there is Chomsky’s English,[4] a mechanical fantasy, and then there is language as it is spoken and used, language as emerging from and defined by modes of variation. This former mode of language in ideality finds reality in the tendency to fix boundaries to language, the tendency to consolidate a system of signification and protect that system in order to secure a reliable means of communication without the threat of disruption. The ideal language may not anywhere be spoken, but it is nonetheless real in its attempts to bring speech into a regulatory regime. This tendency is real, and it is characteristic of all systems of speech; it is the perfect language which this tendency sometimes treats as its subject which is imaginary. There is no fixed language impervious to imposition and variation—and everyone knows this (it is only the linguists who pretend otherwise).

Dialect speech itself, rather than being some truly free rendition of signification which exists to subvert some fascism of Oxford or Webster, in fact has its own modes of insularity, can itself be unforgiving of experimentation, addition, and even or especially cooption. A black Philadelphian enters a Los Angeles black or Chicano community and might share much of the same slang, shortenings of words, terms disseminated into and out of hip-hop music, etc. Yet “clindo” and “moonrocks” stand out to the Philadelphian ear as much as “jawn” or “boul” does to the local ear. A white Temple student who gets their black slang from the internet and southern trap music says “finna” in Philadelphia and is treated with some suspicion or derision by native speakers. Our Orange County middle class white teenager can adopt the slang terms of black or Chicano L.A., but without long immersion and association, this will always take the form of private additions to their already existing lexicon without a meaningful overlap of grammar, pronunciation, inflection, gesture, etc., and performance of this slang around native speakers will be instinctively recognized as “fake” or adopted. Here the interpersonal dynamic plays a major role in regulating the micro-language as foreign speakers are shunned or at least recognized as other. As a foreigner or even foreign population begins to integrate into a certain region, a complicated cross-over takes place as variation from outside is simultaneously absorbed and resisted even while internal slang goes through its own revolutions.

Yet while dialects endeavor to employ their own means of enforcement mechanics, variation drives wedges into the cracks, providing micro-breakages which propel the evolution of the language. As Deleuze-Guattari have it, “the more a language has or acquires the characteristics of a major language, the more it is affected by continuous variations that transpose it into a ‘minor’ language”.[5] The constants of languages becoming major are drawn themselves from variation itself. As the language evolves within and out of this dialectic, variation comes in to weft beneath the major, embedding breakages which themselves, becoming minor, eventually constitute a collective mode of signification, and thus re-instantiate a shared system of signification and so trend towards the “major”…and so on. As Deleuze-Guattari put it, “There are not…two kinds of languages but two possible treatments of the same language.”[6] There is only language itself, a singularity brought into existence as a side effect of endless multiplicity.

Variation in language, just as in culture, is the only stable characteristic. As it disrupts stability itself it provides the instance for an evolution which in turn consolidates into a limit which breaks as its own momentary stability meets with the serial breakages of Creativity. A set of stylized acts get repeatedly referenced in a language until spoofs, accidental mispronunciations, or immanently reinvented renditions of the references arise and are themselves repeated until they achieve a stability and endurance of some kind. New stylizations roll off the tongue, or have an impressionistic flavor absent in the official renditions. Codes switch, patch into each other’s frequencies, hijack transmissions, and reroute directionality. Barriers break, but not without resistance, and that which breaks the barrier reconstitutes the barrier elsewhere only to be broken itself. Minor languages seethe in flux beneath between and within the major language’s imposition, blending through abbreviation and innovation, constantly morphing through repetition and creative stylization.

Action is the stuff of practice and is indivisible from it. Action is largely ritualistic—while there are actions which occur outside of overtly defined ‘rituals,’ a significant expanse of these remains ritualistic still. Common vernacular knows this: terms like ‘a morning ritual’ or ‘a bedtime ritual,’ betray our own awareness of the ritualistic nature of our habituated activities. Action and habit are also culturally cohering, give one a sense of belonging to a delimited group: axe-throwing, brewery tours, and donning J-Crew coheres a certain young, white, Post-Fordist professional maleness in shared activity, affect, and self-stylization—and, in time and through repetition, these actions come to establish a common mode of valuation. How this valuation proceeds, how action is defined and classified (as good or bad or evil) varies between forms of life and their understandings of a world and one’s role in it. These modes of conceptualization and valuation, in turn, arise from the playing out of a material and immanent contingency of power relations generating societal relations over time. A certain mode of ritualized practice produces its ruts, gets stuck in feedback loops of its own reproduction. Action which escapes or augments ritualized repetition can glitch, be hacked, jump its tracks on lines of leakage with varying levels of success. Action is interrelated with all other action—it is reactive which is also to say productive; that is, it is creative of novel conditions, circumstances, and connectivities, and in a process of habituation it works to (re)produce even itself. Action can therefore be inculcated, and it is through this inculcation of action, habit, language, behavior, that culture comes to be. It moves, predictably and unpredictably, in stops and starts. Action is the revving of desiring-machines, and the down-channel racing of desiring-production.

[1] Thomas, Michael, Resisting the Habit of Tlön: Whitehead, Borges, and the Fictional Nature of Concepts, (PDF, 2018), 5. [2] Alternatives to language as speech-act still rely on consistent human physiology (signing for the deaf, braille for the blind, etc.). [3] Thanks to Quinn for pointing out this weakness and on whose extensive notes much of the subsequent argument is based. [4] An English which exists nowhere outside of Noam Chomsky’s own abstractions, an English constructed of homogenous signifying constants which must behave identically within certain repeatable instances of communication. [5] Deleuze-Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 102. [6] Deleuze-Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 103.