ג. The Culture-Machine: Volcanoes, Societies, Tectonic Breaks-Flows
Culture arises naturally, which is to say immanently, from human interaction: and by this is meant not simply human-to-human interaction, but that dynamic as mediated through a tremendous variety of contingent environmental factors: flows of water, the slow and sacred movement of tectonic plates, soil content, wind patterns, and ocean currents all contribute to precisely how a culture comes to develop and assign the meaning which it assigns to the (phe)noumenal stuff of life. Cultures are inculcated in the young, naturalized
to their consciousness. Culture and the playing out of its attendant power relations produce sensibility, the difference, for example, in the somatic and cognitive effect of the sight of a police car on the body of a black or white child in the United States. Culture is enforced, but it also finds escape routes, perpetually intermingling, going out and bringing back seeds on its clothes. It proceeds properly dialectically, which is to say, not like a seesaw, but rather like soundwaves encountering one another in the high air, entering into composition with one another in equal or unequal pulsions, or causing the decomposition of one and/or the other’s parts. It proceeds violently and softly, by genocide and migration, by material relations, through joy and sadness. In other words, a culture proceeds or is destructed by the nature of its encounter with other cultures—or, better, with other societies, in the Whiteheadian sense (for Whitehead, even a boulder is a society, a tight ensemble of atoms and molecules which, in their own way, interact and move mysteriously and causally). Some of these "societies" which augment culture are human societies, and some are inhuman to the extreme: for example the society of Mount Vesuvius, in the utterly inhuman violence of its clash with Pompeiian society, introduced the volcano, an entirely new emblem and concept into Latin culture and consciousness.
Culture is an unfolding, an incessant carrying-out which birthes itself continually on a plane of immanence. It is a network (or a patch-work,[1] a network between the past and its never-ending yawn into the present) with its boundaries in flux, to a greater or lesser degree (the Sentinelese culture, for example, has lesser boundary-flux than, for instance, West African or North American cultures). A culture is a machine which works by breaking down; culture evolves by remaining in a (non)state of continuous change. The machine technically endeavors to maintain a nominal constant; it fails, breaks down, and through this breakage it evolves, adapts to changing circumstances and, if done well, it survives: the culture-machine churns amidst a matrix of flows, consisting of input and output vectors of varying magnitudes. These introductions and deaths produce breaks-flows in the smooth functioning of the otherwise isolated technical machine (the engine in vacuum, or any stable or formal theory of culture); however, the culture-machine, unlike an ideal machine, requires the invigoration of incorporation, newly assembled rituals (fuel), and the expulsion of destructed or vestigial practices (exhaust). Breakages (additions, subtractions, extrapolations, extractions) propel the churning ensemble.
Culture is not pre-given, and has no authentic originality. There is no primordial model or stasis which was later disrupted, augmented, and reformed through "outside" imposition or internal decay; culture is itself constituted by change, by warp and weft. Culture is not as the original ground, subject to the erosion of wind and rain and runoff or the addition of sedimentation, but rather it is the inundating becomings of the wind and the river as they flow over the ground which is itself the momentary incarnation of a long history of sedimentation and transfiguration.
Culture produces itself through propagation—that is, it must reproduce itself in order to continually generate itself. As it repeats through each generation, it mutates, produces difference; indeed, without this change it would not survive. In this way it functions much like a species: in order to continue it reproduces, and through reproduction it augments itself—and this is not a fault nor a “loss” of itself, necessarily. Again, culture works by partially breaking down, through symbolic refreshes, through movements of consolidation but also of release, where vestigial organs are expelled, reformatted, or cannibalized. These vestiges often drag out behind the organism on tendrils for some time before total severance occurs, before the full body finishes its revolution.
The Sentinelese (a name you may recognize from the news)[2] culture survives in its form due to the enforced lack of its encounters with the outside—but this policy, enforced as we saw in early 2019 through admirable and uncompromising violence, is informed by the remembered imposition of alien doctors who abused and catalogued them like cattle.[3] The Incan culture barely survived its encounter with Spanish imperialism, and what of it survives is different for it, is in part defined by that genocide. Whiteness in the United States, too, works by breaking down, by allowing into its ranks greater numbers as concession or material advantage—its machinery swelling with the input of the Italians, the Irish, the Jews…all in order to contradictorily cement other hard lines which bar still other
groups from inclusion and therefore from ethical consideration and the protection of (and from) the polis. Cultures often attempt to obscure one another for control, as whiteness blots and extracts and exploits blackness as it sees fit. African cultures, Chinese and Korean cultures, were changed when they entered the United States through repetition into new environs and adaption through new encounters, but they are no less “real” for that.
Culture is also that matrix which produces, in accord with its specific polyvocal symbolic law, the terms by which the bodies which are regulated within it come to be intelligible. The constructed materiality and Reality of race, gender, sex, etc. comes into being and produces its becomings and the becomings of those subjectivated by it in a culturally specific manner. More broadly, the ways in which the human is thought, delimited, and, no less significantly, the ways in which the human slips these bounds into the densely populated zones marked as inhuman and the unintelligible, make up and are made up by the full body of societally specific culture itself. (A full examination of these abstract dynamics is not undertaken herein, despite its clear relevance. This polemic can, and, we think, ought to be read with and through the above, and these features were prevalent in our own minds during this writing, but ultimately we have left it to others or to our future selves to expound upon these relations. As Judith Butler writes in her introduction to Bodies That Matter, “it may be precisely the partiality of a text which conditions the radical character of its insights.”)[4][5]
So it should be clear that I do not intend for culture’s machination to sound like a happy process—indeed, culture’s favorite fuel is often violence. The phenomenon of the Shoah, and the way Jewish culture responded in the 70 subsequent years, is an example of such violence of culture which results in such augmentation, an evolution embodying the principle of “survival by whatever means:”
[1] This is not to be confused with L/Acc or U/Acc’s recently popularized concept of “patchwork” (which, to be frank, I don’t claim to have a great understanding of and hadn’t heard of at the time of writing). Taking the term (more or less) literally I simply mean to signify a connective relationship, a continual “patching” between two points often with wormhole-like skips and jumps, which is continually augmented based on the ever-growing mass of the past and its continual patching-into the present. This patching is done on purpose and it’s done immanently and disinterestedly causally (not that these are always oppositional) during the ongoing construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of culture. [2] Conroy, Oliver J, The Life and Death of John Chau, the Man Who Tried to Convert His Killers, (The Guardian, 2019) [3]@RespectableLaw, (Twitter.com, 2018) [4] Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), xxvii [5] This conceptual exclusion is also attributable to the shortcomings of my accounting of culture: I am still struggling to articulate the mechanisms and contingencies of culture without stumbling too detrimentally upon the conundrum that, in trying to abstract to the general and thereby attain wide explanatory applicability, something of the specific workings of power within a given culture-machine seems to be inevitably excluded or lost.
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