KNOTCIRCUS

Or “Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River”

By Jonathan Priest

Included in Stockholm University of the Arts publication series:

X-position nr 4, ISSN 2002-603X;4

2019

ISBN: 978-91-88407-12-2
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For those who are always with me, Natalie, Bobby and Charlotte

And for those who have gone, Jack and Rachel

With thanks to Rolf Hughes, Andre Lepecki, Nathan Hughes, Wille Christiani, Mike
Bell, Rosy Roberts, Mike Wright, Anja Duchko-Zuber, all the Past Life
Regressionists, DOCH and the 7 wagons
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Index:

Chapters:

One: Introduction

Two: Rope-Writing

Three: The Trick

Four: The Tautological Ground

Five: Short-Circuit Road Trips

Six: Doing The Splits

Seven: The Marxist Critique of Gravity

Eight: Celine, A General Relativity of Value

Nine: Past Life Regression (Perfect Long Riders)

Ten: Value-Time

Eleven: The River is Time

Twelve: The Cercis of Jude

Thirteen: Glossary, Bibliography

There are five short films that accompany this text. The links to these can be found
in the relevant chapters and in chapter fourteen, after the bibliography.
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CHAPTER ONE: Introduction

ABSTRACT:

This is an investigation of the trick as it relates to three fields; gravity, language

and capital.

I will fully break down and unpack what I mean by ‘trick’ later in this introduction,
in the mean time I refer to it as something that refutes the systemic validity of the
system through which it proceeds.
It is a proposal of how circus physicality might be structurally related to a method
of ‘circus thinking’ that likewise moves through restrictive fields in order to refute
the authority of those fields. In this way the trick is offered as a tool.
This is an investigation of how that thinking might operate in any field.

Three distinct kinds of trick are discussed in each of the three aforementioned
fields:

TRICK ONE: exposes the limits of a system.

TRICK TWO: conceals the limits of a system.
TRICK THREE: jumps out of the system entirely.

The approach I have taken is to think of these three tricks as occurring within fields
of value; in which there are two separate registers: the qualitative and the
quantitative.
For me then what is exposed, concealed or jumped out of is something I feel is
inherent to the subject’s position within a field of value. This is the conflation of
incompatible registers of value.
This conflation, or false union, is discussed as a cause of tautology within the field
that can lead to either subjective or systemic compromise, depending on how the
trick is performed.
As such the main internal relation of the trick for me, and its place in relation to the
formal limits of the system through which it proceeds, is one of contradiction,
paradox, impasse, bind or knot.

The trick is therefore is proposed as a tool for reconfiguring systems of value; in that
its relation to exposing or concealing tautology define how the system of value is
perceived; ether as limited or total, respectively.

The work speculates upon systemic restriction and interrogates, through its
transposition as a mechanism of tautology, what the trick is supposed to ‘do’. This is
done in awareness of what circus practice supposes about itself as well as the way
circus is embedded in fields of value as it makes proposals about mobility, agency
and individual freedom within them.
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In reference to both the trick functioning around a knot in value and my own circus
practice as a ‘rope artist’ there will be complexity ahead. I will attempt to take the
argument step by step in awareness of the connotations of the word ‘trick’ and the
difficulty of discussing subjective agency.
The writing here attempts in many ways to be ‘of’ what it is ‘about’, and in this
mode its speculative style is attempting to perform that which I am discussing.

Within this text the trick is modelled on Gödel’s Uncertainty Theorem accompanied
by an explanation of the trick through a basic diagram of signification that outlines
this relation. This diagram is also the basis of a proposed form of ‘knotation’.
Just as there are texts that explain the mechanisms of jokes, pranks or confidence
tricks, this work attempts to explain the trick and highlight the knots that ensue in
each tricky case, as well as those that form between the tricks themselves.

In very simple terms a difference is drawn here between tricks. For me in this
particular ‘circus time’, there are those tricks that acknowledge their ‘trickiness’ and
there are those that conceal it in order to privilege some kind of gain for the trick-
making subject. A third kind might be said to be the performance of a trick on the
difference itself that seems to separate the first two forms. All will be performed
here.
This is not an ethics but merely an attempt to show that contradictions, paradoxes
and tautologies are perhaps better examined in the open rather than internalised in
an unspoken manner.
In this sense it begins in exposing the defined form of the trick by transposing it
into language; by attempting to ‘speak circus’ as a way of getting all of its ‘moving
parts’ into the open. This will be the first step that links the body in gravity to the
subject in language and the act of signification to the inner workings of capital.

Parts of this text are marked in red as ‘additional reading’ and in this regard I think
of the entire work as an encampment of different sideshow booths. You will not
have time to visit them all and so I will clearly outline those within your temporal
range. The sprawling and looped nature of this text is designed to disorient and
provoke the reader to ask both where is the central position and where is the escape
from it. In many ways I am a victim of my own labyrinth, but this is the precise
entanglement and compromised perspective to which the trick calls again and
again…hence, the work will proceed in different voices.
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A BRIEF GUIDE:

*****
Dear Reader:

This text is presented as a Circus, with many sideshows. They are presented exactly
251 years after people are saying that Circus began. This timing is deliberate, and is
chosen to be precisely wrong. In this regard it is Uncorrect, which is the misspelling
of incorrectness, and is therefore the achievement of Rightlessness in the tawdry
gravity of the day. Things are always further back in time than you think; it is hard to
say, because speech designates the moment from which language is different to
time.

All of these sideshows will cost you time to read, and you have an allotted economy
of time to do this. Those tents that I feel that you cannot afford to enter will be
clearly preceded by a red border and colour coded. In some cases there will be an
accompanying précis in the form of a Circus Introduction for the section that I feel
you do not have sufficient time allotted in your economy to read, and the cost in
time will be clearly spoken by the text. Whether you chose to dally or not is rightly
left to you, Dear Reader.

***

THE COLOUR CODING IS AS FOLLOWS:

Anything in this red is not to be read, and there will be clear warnings when
particular parts are to be skipped over. They are considered, for the purposes of
this submission, to be additional reading. This colouring may designate the
exclusion of theoretical, speculative or fictional parts.
Otherwise this red is the only red to be read.

But things on a white background are available for your perusal.

Some parts of the reflective document and the fiction will be marked in grey and
are also to be engaged with by the reader.

Parts that are coloured in this yellow are fictional and are either The adventures
of Happy Down-River, or the tale of The Hypnotist and the Horserace. The two
stories interweave with each other, and also in part mingle with the rest of the
text.
There is an emphasis on fiction here that will unfold as you read on.

There will be errata, there will be knots, there will be jokes, and there will be errata.
 6

TRICKY:

So, I propose three tricks for your consideration; it is perhaps an act of only three
similar figures performed in different costumes and on different pieces of
equipment, but the act becomes quickly folded double, turning in on itself, showing
how one form paints a self-portrait that is the likeness of the other.
In some cases the act even regards itself as the gravity within which it is
performed.
This is complex; and each trick is a different form that relates to structures that I
will outline in the other areas. Examples are given from mathematics, genetics,
programming, political philosophy, psychoanalysis and economics.
There is the first trick, delineated as the appearance of an event within a field,
because an event can be thought of as something that reconfigures the ‘set’ of what
is considered possible.
Then trick two is proposed as the controlled misreading of that event, which seems
to suggest that the integrity of the original ‘set’ is uncompromised by the ‘new’
event. Or this second trick is seen as a ground that is ‘tricky’ enough to cause that
misreading to persist.
Then there is the third trick, seen as a trick performed on the terms under which
the event, its possibility and its legibility are defined.

They are later discussed as interlinked, in that the limitation exposed by trick one
seems to imply or lead to trick three, whereas trick two is often a counter to the
exposure of limits that trick one activates. Trick two persists in order to prevent trick
three from being conceivable.
This complexity has been understood in this research through various terms, which
I will outline here.

It might be said that I am merely describing a dialectical process, in which a

highlighted contradiction is evidence of a flaw and an implication of progress
towards a ‘higher order’, but it is equally important to add the proviso that this
contradiction is evidence of a need to simply ‘bear’ the contradiction, as no ‘higher
order’ is possible. We are embedded within inescapable fields.
Whether the material or the immaterial conditions of the field are considered the
trick is a way of thinking ‘about’ escape, and whilst not perhaps actually achieving it,
it allows the encircling of an impasse with other possible futures.

I take the difficult position of acknowledging inescapability but also the position in
which it is vital to be speculative; it is vital to continue to fictionalise the possibility,
even if this is only the fictionalising of further fictionalisations of what escape might
look like. This is at least my circus practice in which it is vital to be haunted by the
possibility of a trick.

Each field is thought of according to the parameters that exist within a gravitational
field that affect the subject within it, and thought of also according to the
parameters of a split register of value: in this way gravity is approached as if it were
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linguistics or economy, and these forms are tackled as if they were an organising
field.
This transposes the physicality of the trick into the study of value, and the study of
value into the field of gravity.
There are restrictive forces present in each of the fields discussed and the resultant
exposure or concealment of those forces as either a limited system or a totality that
encloses all possibilities are the salient features of what I am here calling Trick One
and Trick Two respectively.
I will attempt to clearly show the subtle difference between a trick that exposes
the limits of a system and a trick that attempts to conceal them by this delineation.
Both tricks are iterated through a system but with very different effects.
Thus I am also proposing that any such ‘circus thinking’ derived from the trick as a
mechanism can be applied to expose the limits of a system, by the fact that the trick
makes a ‘fictional’ rupture, or to conceal those limits, in which instead the
implication is that the system in question is a limitless arena, and in which tricks
supposedly produce an ‘actual’ freedom within that system.
This can be simply thought of as the trick-making subject that acknowledges the
difference between how they appear within the field of gravity in relation to their
actual position within it and a trick-making subject who believes themselves to be
genuinely superhuman; who is therefore unable to delineate fiction from fact.
So in relation to any field, what I am calling ‘circus thinking’ can take either a
position of ‘demand upon’ or ‘complicity with’ a limited system.

Some fields themselves are inherently ‘tricky’ and in this instance any tricks
performed within them can also seek to expose this inherent tautology as a
limitation or by concealing it, utilise the trick to exploit that tautology to claim a
‘surplus’ that serves to also expand the field into a limitless arena and imagine the
subject as a free agent within it; often with an ensuing internalisation of the
inherent tautology at play.
There is a proposed necessity therefore for a trick to acknowledge the terms of
tautology by which the agency, which the trick proposes, is ‘fictionally’ possible, in
that it is only ‘weightless’ in terms of one of the registers through which it is
proposed, and that is the condition of its ‘weightlessness’.
The importance here is to highlight the possibility within the trick to acknowledge
that weightlessness only appears to be agency because it is ‘told’ that way:
weightlessness is a ‘telling’ of something that might be possible but only outside of
the final conditions through which it is conveyed: it is told as fiction precisely
because these are the conditions of it being weightless. For weightlessness to be
validated in terms that do not recognise its possibility means that it is invalidated as
soon as it finally lands there: its validation is equal to its invalidation.
Therefore ‘fictionality’ and weightlessness are equated in this research and this
will be both discussed openly in this text and in the form of fictional writing that
accompanies it.
The trick proposes weightlessness, which is impossible within gravity, and yet this
moment facilitates previously unavailable mobility within the field, and so it must be
acknowledged as a fiction of a factual demonstration? Or is it he enactment of a
‘telling’ of weightlessness? Can it be a ‘real’ rehearsal of something that will never
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happen? However it is thought of the central point here is that it is proposed that
the trick is a mechanism of tautology, which speaks through and to tautological
fields.
The distinction I am making here is the necessity to acknowledge this problem of
tautology is what Trick One seeks to highlight, whilst this same problematic is what
is concealed in Trick Two, as the trick-making subject here seeks to ‘profit’ from this
loop of logic, and present themselves as genuinely ‘free’.
Trick three on the other hand is the attempt to leap clear of the terms by which this
acknowledgment of fiction is necessitated altogether, and clear of the terms by which
any exploitation of the conflation of fact and fiction is possible.

Trick One: acknowledges that its ‘escape’ from gravity is fictional.

Trick Two: implies that this ‘escape’ is factual.
Trick Three: attempts to get beneath the source of the difference between fiction
and fact.

All of the thoughts here on the difference between different kinds of tricks will be
expanded as we move through this text, but first this introduction will attempt to
explain the terminology and approaches that surround the explanation of these
differences.

WHY THREE FIELDS?

Rather than look at the institution of circus directly let us look at how the trick might
operate in the fields of gravity, language and capital and then determine what this
might say about the institution of circus and the context within which it is
embedded. It is worth noting that partly the explanation of how this mechanism of a
trick sits in the institution of circus is, for me, inherent in how it sits in these other
fields; and it is also worth noting that I feel that this ‘loop’ is unavoidable.
The rationale here is simply to say that I feel we cannot look at ‘circus’ and the way
it negotiates gravity without examining the other restrictive fields within which that
‘circus’ is embedded.
I believe that the trick gives an opportunity to make this study.

So to describe further the three fields:

Gravity: this is the physicality of the practice located in a field that it negotiates.
As a later extrapolation this research also discusses how to get to Trick Three by
jumping out of the terms under which this Newtonian negotiation proceeds. This is
problematic as the subject is inextricably embedded in the terms of perception by
which gravity is manifest to that subject.
Examining the trick in this field begins by trying to understand why a moment of
apparent weightlessness is central to the technique.

Language: this is specifically represented as a ‘field’ by Lacan’s unbreakable circuit

of desire as lack. The impossibility of meta-language here represents a restrictive
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field or impasse, which again is negotiated by the desiring subject; and the
reciprocal, interdependent nature of two registers, one of which is ‘subjective’ and
one of which is ‘subjectless’ is seen as central to this impasse.
The later discussion here is how to get to Trick Three and to jump out of the
reciprocal terms under which this negotiation proceeds. This is problematic as it
proposes the collapse of language, which unfortunately is the medium through
which this trick is discussed, as well as being, in Lacanian terms at least, the medium
through which the subject constructs him or herself. It is therefore acknowledged in
this text that it will be composed of many different voices that dissolve and reform
their validity by turns.
Examining the trick in this field takes in how a trick might operate in the body of
this text as a moment of apparent weightlessness.

Capital: the immaterial that wants to solidify, the spectre that wants to be full.
Capitalism is here discussed as a field, which in its specific relation to language
becomes more like the impossibility of meta-language; that is, it is not possible to
get outside of it.
Again if it is important to get to Trick Three and to jump out of the terms under
which this inescapability from capital is iterated, and becomes the problem of how
to write your way out of writing itself. Tricky indeed.
Examining the trick in this field then sometimes assumes the form of a fiction; this
being the only form that can effectively achieve weightlessness in a field that is
inescapable.

In this way all three fields are seen as inescapable but possible areas for the writing
of fiction.

These three impasses are interrogated through the lens of the trick. Its mechanism,
its construction, its inevitability and most of all its capacity to be thought of in the
three different ways that I have outlined above, as an acknowledged fiction, as an
unacknowleged rip-off or as a leap out of the terms that rely on a reciprocal
tautology of registers.

The proposal for ‘circus-thinking’ is not prescriptive, it merely proposes that there
should be some. Important here is that there is an establishment of how the practice
of circus becomes praxis, moving forward as it reflects, and is therefore able to
affect the forms with which circus may attempt interdisciplinary collaboration as
much as those forms affect it.
This comes from an awareness how circus practice is often subsumed to
imperatives that exist within the less underdetermined disciplines with which it
tends to collaborate, but also from an awareness of how it is underdetermined in
circus as to what extent theatricality, choreography, musicality or textuality may be
inherent within circus anyway.

Going forward I will define what I mean by the trick in reference to critical alliances
made in the fields of logic, linguistics and politics. Later in this chapter I will mark
some key modes of delivery.
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Theatre has performativity, dance has choreography, I am proposing perhaps

tautology is the over-arching theory that relates circus practice to the world.

THE DIAGRAM:

I will use a simple diagram to illustrate my ideas on how these three proposed
‘gravitational’ fields can be thought of as being made up of two incompatible
registers of value and also to show the differences between the three forms of the
trick that I designate here.
This is primarily to keep diagrammatically relating the practice of circus to
discussions of value that occur in the fields of language and capital.

The diagram consists of an alphabet that represents an autonomous and

horizontal system of difference and words that represent statements that float
momentarily outside of that set order.
Simply put the alphabet is quantity; the word is quality. Once the word enters the
‘alphabetical field’, that word is then subject to the force ‘exerted’ by that
‘alphabetical field’, which seeks to ‘pull’ the letters in the word back into their
‘correct’ position in the alphabetical order.

The thing that makes each letter different from the next in the alphabet is defined
by the quality of difference that the letter receives as it is pronounced in the word.
Thus the letter is only able to occupy a differential position in that alphabet through
the way it ‘sounds’ in the speaking of the word. A receives its quantitative
‘difference’ from B, by how the word ABRACADABRA gives different qualities to A
and B that enable those letters to take up different positions quantitatively in an
alphabetical order. But it must be regarded that while ABRACADABRA supplies the
quality to enable a quantitative order to occur, ABRACADABRA is itself composed
of the letters, which it enabled to exist in a pool of letters that are available for the
construction of words. This spelling of ABRACADABRA is a reciprocal and endless
loop is not magic, it is semiotics; in which the word and the alphabet logically
precede each other, which is tautological.
The alphabetical field, in order to quantify differentially the quality of each letter in
the word, is unable to incorporate the word back into itself without destroying that
word: in this regard the word is thought of a floating in a momentary fictional
suspension above the hard difference of this horizontal order.
This is merely a representation of two incompatible registers of value, which, as
already stated, I will highlight within the three tricks and three fields under
investigation here.
Within the terms of this diagram, the alphabet is gravity; the word is a trick uttered
by the subject within that gravitational field.
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I propose that any word that enters into this ‘alphabetical field’ can then be
thought of as a ‘trick’; its ‘weightlessness’ within the field is its ability to cohere as a
word in the face of the alphabetical order that seeks to tear it apart; just as the trick-
making body coheres as a weightless moment before it is pulled back into its
‘rightful’ place in the order of bodies of mass.
In this way every word you read momentarily performs its weightlessness before it
is pulled back to earth by the alphabetical field. The words perform a
‘weightlessness’ that is both there and not there.

The alphabetical ‘field’ tends to reduce the wholeness of the word, formed from its
constituent letters, by returning those letters to their designated places in the
alphabetical order; the word cannot exist here.
This alphabet does not recognise any ‘spelling’ of the letters except the
alphabetical order, it is indifferent to and unregarding of any word spoken by any
subject. In this regard we can think of any word’s position outside of this
alphabetical order, in transgression of it, as fictional. That is, in terms of that
alphabet the word is a purely ‘fictional’ and momentary rearrangement of that
alphabetical order. It is a momentary aberration in the way that the field organises
its constituent differential parts.
I relate this to the trick; also a momentary aberration in the usual way that the
field of gravity organises the body parts and forces of the circus subject within it.
As stated, there is a loop here however; a tautology, which features strongly here
in this examination of the trick: even though the word is unrecognised by the
alphabet, each letter within its set order is only able to take up its quantitative place
‘of’ difference to another letter because it receives this differential quality from the
way it is pronounced within the word itself. The way in which the letter is spoken
about in the pronunciation of the word, speaks ‘about’ its difference.
No trick without the field, but no field without the trick.
When I say no field without the trick, what I mean is no possibility to ‘see’ the field.
We cannot see the field as a field; that is we cannot momentarily take up a position
of observation of its limitations, without performing a trick that imagines us outside
of it, while we are of course still within it.
This diagram is of course where writing and speaking meet in an awkward
choreography. Once we engage with writing, the way of speaking is that which
gives us the possibility to form an alphabet from which to write, but the alphabet
does not recognise the spelling of any word within it.
What exists for the subject, and what exists in autonomous registers that
delineate what it is possible for the subject to say, sets up two distinct and
incompatible registers. All this diagram attempts to do is cover the existing ground
of Saussure and later Lacan in highlighting the tautological interplay of these
registers, and further attempts to show how they relate to the trick as I see it in
different fields.
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C I R C U S
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
< > > < > >
C I R S U
v v v v v

In the above diagram this idea is played out in which we imagine the alphabet as an
immutable gravity that always seeks to return the letters to their places at ‘rest’
within the field.
The words makes a leap, it is composed of body parts and techniques, all of which
are returned to their place within the field.
The placement of the word ‘CIRCUS’ here is arbitrary but it can be quickly seen how
this placement is problematic, with the two ‘C’s of CIRCUS being ‘pulled’ to the left
by the force of ‘alphabetical gravity’, whilst the ‘I, R, U and S’ are ‘gravitated’ and
‘reordered’ to the right in order to take up their ‘correct’ position in the alphabetical
field, as demonstrated by the directional indicators, the arrows < and >. The
indicator v in the bottom row in red shows the letter at its point of ‘rest’ within the
field.
When placed in this field the word ‘CIRCUS’ is torn apart. It is reduced to a garbled
form by its rendering out into the autonomy of the subject-less field from which it
was enabled to be spoken.

NOTATION AS CONUNDRUM:

This insoluble conundrum, in which the word relies on the letters in the alphabet,
and in which the letters’ differential ‘place’ in the alphabet are defined by how word
delineates that difference, gives the title of this research as ‘knotcircus’ and also
later proposes this diagram as a form of ‘knotation’ for circus, that acknowledges
the complexity of the trick.

This notation for circus, that relates text to circus physicality in a perfunctory way.
This is offered as a blunt tool to be used in the studio in relation to circus physicality
but which contains the idea of the trick as an interdisciplinary mechanism that can
be ‘performed’ in any field, as well as a description of what I feel is the reciprocal
loop implicit in these three forms of trick.

In this sense it is hoped that this ‘knotation’ will be both useful in the practice of
circus physicality going forward as well as being a way of thinking ‘through’ that
practice here in this format.

Why is it important to do this?

A: CIRCUS IS NOT EMPTY: to find an intelligent response to the critique (some of it

self-critique) that what I am doing in my circus practice is the daily rehearsal of mute
 13

or empty spectacle, that perhaps it is nothing more than the demonstration of a

non-existent freedom designed to garner praise and approval.
Perhaps people attend the circus less and less as more and more the narrative of
the ordinary journey from zero to hero pervades the arena of consumerism. We are
so familiar with the idea that escape from any kind of restriction is possible through
recourse to capitalism that the circus no longer can tell us anything we did not
already know.
It is to ask if the high level techniques of circus can ‘say’ anything other than, ‘I can
become free.’

B: CIRCUS AS A WAY OF THINKING: so I have already stated that it is also to inquire

if there is something more ‘interesting’ in this action that is repeatedly done, that
could reveal an approach to the world, not just a commodity or currency and that
this could reflect on my own practice and deepen my pedagogical engagement with
others

C: CIRCUS AS A WAY OF THINKING TOGETHER: to perhaps find a way of thinking

that I could share with others in a future ensemble. To devise tools to explore these
ideas as a group composed of artists from other disciplines. To perform tricks in
‘any’ area as an iteration of my circus practice as well as provide collaborative tools
for circus artists in interdisciplinary processes.

D: CIRCUS THAT ACKNOWLEDGES A CONTEXTUALITY OF THOUGHT: not to

posit THE way of circus thinking, but to propose that it is possible to construct a
mode of thought from the practice; thus opening the way for other forms of circus
thinking to be explored.

E: CIRCUS THINKING DERIVED FROM WHAT IS DONE: it is important for me to not

simply locate this research in the cultural or social or performative dimensions of
circus as a whole phenomenon, but to look at what is actually done in the
physicality. The drive here is to arrive at a theory integral to the practice, so as to
puncture external theorising of it; as stated not to claim that my way of thinking is
‘correct’, but to show how it might be possible to derive a theory or mode of
apprehension of thought that imbricates with this practice.

TO EXPAND:

What is a trick?

This section will explain firstly my definition and then unpack some of the provisos
that necessarily attend the use of this term. Please be patient as I am aware of the
contentions involved here in using the word ‘trick’. I will attempt to expose
structural relations here not just a play with semantics.

I think of the trick as a mechanism; I feel it does something to the system through
which it is activated, but what it ‘does’ is hard to define. I define it in simplest terms
 14

as a tautology that is constructed through the system it refutes. It is both made

through and stands against the system.
It might be said that what the trick seems to ‘do’ to gravity only occurs in the
presence of the subject who either executes or witnesses it; this is as trite as saying
‘if a tree falls in a forest…etc.’ but what is implied here is the relation between two
kinds of register: one that requires the presence of a subject to assemble the values
therein and one that does not.
But firstly, before it might be transposed, this research attempts to expose how
the mechanism of a trick in my specific practice might be understood as it operates
within the field of gravity.

In order to understand what is happening in my physical practice perhaps I have

already made some kind of transposition though, in that I understand how it
appears to create weightlessness in relation to certain other ‘suspensions’ in logic
that occur in tautology.
I am caught here looking through a lens but it is one that I think aligns well with
what I feel is my own intention as a trick-making subject. In order to gain a
previously unavailable mobility I have to activate the musculature in accordance
with certain techniques, that perhaps requires something different from different
parts of the body; tension here, fluidity there, extension or contraction in different
limbs simultaneously. This technique is executed in order to activate the feeling of
reduced weight experienced by the body, so that in this brief moment a shift or
move can be attempted that benefits from this feeling of reduced weight.
I am aware all the time that these techniques are the only actions that are available
to me within the field; they are ‘of’ gravity, and that if I assemble them in a certain
way, make a certain ‘spelling’ of them, then this may form the trick I am looking for.
I am also aware that the body itself is ‘of’ gravity, evolved in its fibre and structure
under the pull of the field; I am ‘built’ evolutionarily according to gravity, but that if I
can organise the limbs and body parts into a certain expression that this might ‘spell
out’ a trick that will give me the weightless moment I am looking for.
Simultaneously I am aware that weightlessness is the only thing forbidden within
the field and so in my construction of a trick I am utilising that which is available to
me ‘of’ gravity in order to posit that here is the existence of something that can only
exist outside of it, thus making a statement ‘about’ the limits of gravity from inside
those limits.
There is a flicker of logic here in that we can say that the weightlessness I create is
not weightlessness at all, just the appearance of it, but also we have to acknowledge
that this weightlessness that cannot be there actually does enable a previously
unavailable mobility, which is impossible as weightlessness cannot exist. This
previously unavailable mobility is the ‘view’ I momentarily gain of gravity as if I were
a body of mass outside of its field, it is thus the imagining perhaps of a meta-
position, a position outside the field.
There are of course two incompatible registers here: one in which the quality of
‘weightlessness’ as a value for the subject of zero-mass might be forbidden, but in
which the brief quantitative changes in value that permit the momentary
disordering of a body of mass from its designated course are permitted, so that
 15

from a subjective point of ‘view’ it is possible to experience what zero-weight might

be like.
The subject is as absent as weightlessness is useful to that subject, the body of
mass is as present as any other body of mass within the law of gravity.
The two registers represent absence and presence of the subject to each other, as
they reciprocally try to fulfil their inherent and incompatible criteria. This is a trick.

THE DISCOURSE OF GRAVITY:

I am being pedantic here, and of course we can just state that within the field the
action of bodies according to Newtonian Law behave in a variable manner,
displaying different properties according to the forces that are applied to them. The
problem for me is how this image, or ‘real’ weightlessness within gravity is read.
If Circus reads its own tricks as the production of ‘genuine freedom’ then the
interesting flicker disappears and is replaced with the idea that all that glitters is
actually gold. It is this reading of weightlessness that enables circus ‘success’ that
will be interrogated here, and an acknowledgement that a circus that imagines this
freedom production within the field of gravity as real is exacerbating the tautology
that is inherent in the trick, that utilises gravity to say something that is impossible
within it, not as a demand but as a misreading of both the trick and of the field itself.
It is concealing the tautology to gain this production of so-called genuine freedom.
This is the structural relation for me between the purely semantic connection
between the word trick meaning circus physicality and the word trick meaning a
deception. It is then acknowledged that whether we call the trick a ‘loop’ or a ‘circus
figure’ that this structural relation to the possibility of deception remains.

So to reiterate that it is through this precise awareness of the trick as the

engineering of moments of weightlessness that are vital to the execution of any
technique within gravity that I am firstly speaking about my technical approach to
the practice; this technical approach is then coupled with an awareness of an
aesthetic presentation of such technical requirements that tend to privilege the
reading of those moments of agency as well as the mobility they allow as the
execution of a supposedly genuine ability to produce freedom within a system that
simply cannot even register weightlessness, never mind permit it.

I have come to see the trick then as a tautology in that it implies something that is
both there and not there, which is weightlessness, and it is this known occurrence
within logical systems of implying two things at once that I am referencing here as
the definition of tautology.
I refer to a suspension in logic formed from components available within that
logical system, that then becomes my template for thinking through the idea of
weightlessness as a similar suspension that enables the ‘telling’ of an area outside of
gravity from a contradictory position within it.
Tautology implies that something is both there and not there: it implies that a
statement that sits outside of the inherent logic is possible here within that logic,
whilst simultaneously suggesting that because it is only formed from things
 16

available within that system that it is in fact just another part of the capacity of that
system to contain that which is contradictorily outside of it.
What we are returned to is the implicit presence and simultaneous absence of the
subject, who has to be present to realise that potential ability to think outside of the
current system of logic even if the statement that is proposed is illogical: in this
moment the subject is exposed to another area outside of the current logic, but the
subject must be present to do so, otherwise all that is suggested is a nonsensical
statement that is invisible to the system in which it is momentarily and arbitrarily
iterated. Weightlessness simply does not register in gravity any more than
uselessness registers in the market.
In such an instance, in which a tautological statement is unregisterable in the
purely quantitative reckoning of a system, the subject who might be activated to
think in other than systemic terms is implied also to not exist within that system, as
the system itself cannot perceive anything that might imply that there is a subject
that could utilise tautology to think beyond the current terms. The subject
themselves is in the tautological position inherent in the field and is inextricably
entangled therein.
The trick can be thought of in this instance as merely the discourse of gravity; the
simple execution of Newtonian variations that return to a designated order of
bodies of mass in time, but this is not how circus sees itself.
As an example of something that implies that it exceeds its material conditions,
the circus is full of larger than life subjects. There is nothing wrong with this except
that it is my feeling that these subjects are constructed out of tricks that do not
acknowledge the tautology that is present and instead imply that seeing gravity as a
container for weightlessness, and therefore genuine freedom, results in no
contradiction whatsoever for the circus subject. Circus in this example is in denial of
the problem of tautology but gains a profit from doing so.

BEING UNCORRECT IS ACHIEVING RIGHTLESSNESS

So we can see from this circularity that before there is discussion of how the trick
might operate in different fields I draw on certain logical models and homological
examples to try to find a workable definition of this mechanism. But always the
shape of this definition is drawn from the parameters, relations and structures that I
feel are in operation in the execution of the negotiation of a weightless moment
within the gravitational field.

Through a transposition of what I feel occurs in the trick in parallel registers that
both convey an image to an audience whilst contradictorily operating definite
principles in gravity that deny the possibility of the conveying subject within those
principles I am aware that there is a logico-linguistic element to the physicality of
the trick. So in trying to delineate what is actually happening in the physicality I
have transposed this mechanism into the field of value, in which split registers then
conspire to compound the tautological nature of the image of weightlessness in
gravity or suspension in logic. It is then this fundamental transposition of the trick
into this field that then enables these other transpositions to occur.
 17

This has further been informed by a rigorous analogical mapping of the trick as it
that relates to the instance of tautology in several examples and through which I
have arrived at different ways of describing logically what I feel is happening within
the execution of the trick in circus.

There is however one model of tautology to which I will primarily refer as it can form
an isomorphic match to many of the other examples I draw upon, and it will be
related directly to an understanding of the trick in the proposed alphabetical
diagram also as we progress.
This primary logical model, which I will outline shortly, also is related to the image
of language as a linear, topical progression, which refers to things external to itself,
but which once folded back on itself, forms irreconcilable knots or binds, that
compromise the efficacy of that ‘referentiality’ for the subject.
Within this image are strong references to certain modes of nonsensical speech
that occur when language is similarly forced to self refer, or when the subject is
asked to internalise such knots as if they were merely normative elements of
language, and also how these modes are either enabling or disabling depending on
how their mechanisms are revealed.
In this way the material of my practice, the vertical rope, held in a linear form by
the pull of gravity, and knotted by my presence, also materialises the shape of the
self-referential loops that I find in logic, in language and in gravity. So the object of
rope is present here also.
As well as being an investigation into how a trick might be perhaps spoken in the
field of language then and how the subject might be bound in what is supposedly
the medium of free-speech, there is another aspect of agency that comes to the
fore when dealing with tricks as they might be iterated through the field of capital
and how this relates to the inherent split registers of use and exchange.

In proposing that the trick is a form of tautology, and that this is then a form or
strategy for ‘circus thinking’ in any field; in Gravity as a challenge of physicality, in
Language as a challenge of meaning and in Capital perhaps as a more complex
challenge of political agency I will draw certain conclusions about what the
performance of the trick might ‘say’ and ‘do’ in the world.
This work proposes the trick as tool for thinking in restrictive fields, perhaps as a
circus way of thinking. It does not prescribe and does not position itself as a new
definitive approach but something circus may find useful in addressing how it can be
thought of as an art that can fruitfully cross-pollinate with other forms. The trick is
also proposed in relation to its capitalist past in a time when capitalism is an
inescapable expression of the future.
It is hoped that this text will be something around which an ensemble might form,
to use, discard and rework the ideas within it.
 18

THE TRICK AS A MECHANISM:

FORMAL TAUTOLOGY:

For the main template, the tautology I refer to here is of specific type.
It is not rhetorical tautology but a tautology in logic.
This kind of self-refuting or circular argument in mathematics is called a “reductio
ad absurdum” whereby a pair of statements imply, in the way that they refer to each
other, that they are simultaneously true and not true.

KNOT I:

This is if terms A, B, and their negations Not-A and Not-B are introduced where:

If Not-A implies both B and its negation not-B, then not-A must be false, then A
must be true.

But Not-A is known to be true within B, then A must be false.

So I can say that here if A is weight (the body of mass at rest) and Not-A is ‘No
Weight’ (the body of mass is in suspension) and B is the existence of Gravity

And if we further state that Not-A both implies B, Gravity (techniques ‘of’ gravity
have been used to create this situation of No-Weight)

But it also implies Not-B, No-Gravity (it results in a ‘weightless’ moment, a No-
Gravity moment) then this moment of ‘No Weight’ is false as it cannot imply two
contradictory outcomes. Being false it must be Not Not-A, it must be A, that is it is
simply ‘weight’.

Thus Not-A implies that it is both ‘true’ but ‘untrue’

But this occurrence of simultaneity of both B and not-B is also an impossibility and
so this impossible condition cannot be used as a rationale to imply that Not-A is
false, as this simultaneous condition is itself false.

Thus since gravity cannot both be present and absent, and since it is omnipotent in
this formal system, it cannot be both there and not there, therefore the situation of ‘no
weight’ is false…except it is not, as a weightlessness (not-A) can occur within B,
therefore if not-A is true, then weight (A) must be false.
But the existence of the field B must imply that any thing within it must have weight
A.

But the use of B has resulted in not-A, so B implies not-A is true, then A is false.
Or But not-A is the result of B, i.e. not-A is true because there IS a moment of
suspension in B, caused through B, that results in not-B.
 19

It is a loop.

A linguistic example of this would be the Epimenides Paradox:

“The following sentence is false.

The preceding sentence is true.”

This loop is my definition of a trick.

In this linguistic puzzle, in the looping of these sentences, the endless, pointless
journey that points back from where it came, something else is suggested (other
than a clown traversing the circularity of the ring as he moves from problem to
solution and back to problem again.)
An exterior to language is referenced, but one which we can ‘feel’; there is a sense
that this moment of weightlessness is true but un-provable and this specific
definition of this moment is central to how this text unfolds.
This sense that there is an externality to the system through which you are
moving, renders the system as limited and implies its incompleteness, you remain
uncaptured by this incompleteness however, once the discourse is shown to be
flawed you can carry on without it; or rather the potentiality of this carrying on is
imagined here as you are utilising the discourse itself to imagine this position.
I would venture to say, in a science fiction style, that this loop is an engine of
Affect, something ‘un-provable’ leaks out, but which is felt to be ‘true’. That it is an
image of a trick and its excess that I am thinking about…

In this form an endless loop is established. In the case of my own understanding of

the trick in my practice, I feel this as the construction of a moment of
weightlessness, that proves that gravity does not have an effect on me, which is
necessarily made through precisely utilizing the set effects upon me of that
medium.
In the moment of the trick I am Free/Not-Free. The trick both proves and disproves
the capacity to escape gravity.

“The following circus is false.

The preceding circus is true.”

Another way to see it is as the recombination of things that exist within a system to
momentarily refer to an ‘outside’.

THE TRICK SPLITS.

Within this research the trick will be examined as it might be said to behave in the
field of language and I am constructing this sentence in this way deliberately to
refer to the problem, in which, through language, I attempt to show how a trick
might be thought of in the very field through which I am discussing it.
 20

This is trite perhaps, but I have to get it out of the way, and more importantly I
have to acknowledge that there are the possibility for tactics here to make this text
‘perform’ what it is ‘about’.

TWO APPROACHES:

I will highlight two approaches to modelling a trick in the field of language, and in
an awareness of the trick here as transposed into a field of linguistic value; one is a
model derived from clinical definitions of psychotic utterance, the other from more
deliberate formal constructions in logic.
I will note here that the research was intertwined and had I not attempted to look
into what a psychotic attempts to do as he/she falls through language, trying to
take up viable positions of subjectivity in that which coldly refuses to signify them,
and in treating the words not according to their topicality but according to their
materiality, perhaps like a circus artist handling a rope, I would not have come
across a similar formulation that elegantly describes the problems of creating such
a position in which the processes that allow the production of topical meaning from
basic components are re-handled as if they are themselves only components.
I arrived at this theory of uncertainty in thinking about how certain forms of
psychotic utterance seem to do to language what circus does in gravity.

This re-handling of attempted statements ‘about’ language as if they were

statements ‘of’ language, such as the psychotic might do in focussing on how
‘brain’ rhymes with ‘pain’, and so positions itself externally to the topical logic that
is supposed to govern the establishment of an autonomous register of linguistic
value, is for me a process homologically described in logic by an Austrian
mathematician in the 1930’s, who posits the idea that if you number statements
‘about’ the differential quality of numbers in a formal system you can create
tautological statements that while they imply that they are correct there is simply
no way of proving that they are correct.
Treating statements ‘about’ language as if they were ‘of’ language and therefore
treating them as if they were still capable of generating meaning is perhaps
psychotic; treating statements ‘about’ numbers as numbers and therefore treating
them as if they were still capable of generating solutions to axiomatic
mathematical problems is what this particular mathematician performed in
Number Theory.
Such statements are correct and not correct. They are ‘uncorrect’, which as I have
already stated, is the achievement of a moment of ‘rightlessness’ in the gravity of
truth, just as the tautology of the trick is the achievement of weightlessness. Is it
wrong to escape from right?
So first I think of the trick as a tautology, then in looking at ways of speaking a
trick the definition of psychotic utterance suggests itself as a similarly tautological
mechanism, and in looking at self-referential linguistic statements I arrive at a
logical model for the creation of tautology in formal systems.
It is this set of models that I propose is a particular way of ‘circus thinking’.
 21

So if we return to the problem as it relates to Circus Tricks:

“The following circus is false.

The preceding circus is true.”

The above statement about circus following and preceding itself is of course
incorrect, but it does reflect upon the fact that circus is speaking about freedom in
terms of a tautology constructed in a field that cannot finally register the agency
that is referred to by that tautology.
The agency referenced in the trick may be ‘true’ but we should not detach this
from its ‘unprovability’; this is important as we discuss how this detachment might
mean a circus implies that its artists are truly ‘free’ within gravity, rather than
acknowledging how the ‘unprovability’ of this weightless position might be its
advantage.
The original formulation of the truth/falsity conundrum to which I refer can be
found in what I will use as the primary model for understanding the trick in this
research. As stated there is already a transposition at play here in which the
physicality of the trick within a restrictive field is transposed into the field of value
and what is important for me here is an examination of the narratives of agency
within what is essentially an indifferent and subject-less field of ‘value’ such as
gravity, language or indeed capital, with which circus production seems to be
entangled.
The main point then is to find a template for the trick that deals with the
construction of a statement that acknowledges that there is something that is ‘true’
for the subject about what a tautology implies but that what is implied is totally
‘unprovable’ as it exists in a loop that undermines the very nature of the duality of
truth and falsity.
This model I feel can be found in Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness or Uncertainty
Theorems.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that

demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of
modeling basic arithmetic. These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are
important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The
theorems are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that, another
mathematician, Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for
all mathematics is impossible.
The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose
theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e., an algorithm) is capable of
proving all truths about the arithmetic of the natural numbers. For any such consistent
formal system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are
true, but that are un-provable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem,
an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot demonstrate its own
consistency.
 22

What is highlighted in this basic extract is that the possibility to construct

statements that can be shown to be true within the internal laws of a system but
which are impossible to ‘prove’ to be true according to those same internal laws,
thus highlighting that the formal system in question is a limited system that is
incapable of fully enclosing all operations and incapable of proving its own
consistency on its own terms, and is therefore exposed as not being a total system
or totality capable of defining ‘truth’ for all of the statements possible within it.
This is the model I will refer to in describing the trick.

In definitions of psychotic utterance the iteration of a linguistic escapology is made

through the language itself, again and again, negotiating the impasse that
delineates that all positions external to language are impossible; the tautology here
is that meaninglessness and incommunicability are formed from a new treatment of
language according to its material conditions as opposed to its topical content.
Form is treated as content and this is what sets off the tautology. The sound quality
for the subject is treated as a new quantitative instance of a signifier. Quality is
treated as quantity.
The psychotic subject is here taking up the ‘correct’ implicit linguistic operation,
which is that the origin of the signifier’s ‘quality of difference’ to another signifier,
which is the origin of its quantitative value, originates in the subject, but with the
wrong result because to view a word purely on its materiality is to treat a statement
‘about’ topicality of language as a statement ‘of’ that topicality. The psychotic
utterance is the right approach to language, but one that language does not permit,
and here the frisson between language, which does not operate primarily for the
subject’s communicative function is highlighted, which propels the subject to make
further positions to try to correct this refusal of language to primarily represent him
or herself.
Gödel perhaps demonstrates that the conclusion of tautology is not succumbing to
the excessive productions that seem to be implied in the system, but simply viewing
the system as no longer a totality, or perhaps in acknowledging that escape is not
possible finding ways to ‘bear’ this enclosure.

In looking at how this operated within formal logico-mathematical systems, it was

clear that Gödel had found a way of constructing the capacity for tautological
statements ‘about’ the form of the system, which were then treated as content ‘of’
that system, which enabled the construction of statements of tautology. This meant
that for all axiomatic systems statements could no longer be true or false, instead
they were rendered true but unprovable.
It is my feeling that the trick makes ‘true’ for the subject an unprovable
weightlessness that it is not possible for gravity to ‘see’.
I am aware that it may be possible to misread this statement; it could sound like it
is advocating the worst kind of post-factism, in which appearance is the equivalent
of fact. This will be addressed also.

What I am noting here is the fact that without this conception of one approach to
performing a trick in language, which is a certain definition of psychotic utterance
 23

(a more Lacanian definition perhaps in which the psychotic is endlessly trying to

get to the bottom of signification from which they are ultimately barred) I would
not have arrived at this model of performing a trick in logic.
This will be discussed in greater depth in chapter three, but it is this congruence
between how both systems form tautological, insoluble conditions but which are
acknowledged as ‘true’ for the subject within the system that is key here.
What will become important is how the tautology that may inhere to any system
is exposed to or concealed from the subject, and it is important also to note that
Gödel may not have constructed tautology, but merely unearthed its inherent
presence by which it is possible to create things that look like meta-statements but
due to the accompanying impossibility of meta-statement, they are treated as
infra-statements, with the ensuing contradiction whereby something that refers to
itself interacts with the system that allows that self-referral to occur.
This is important for circus to contemplate, are tricks created by the circus artist or
merely already existing ‘loopholes’ waiting to be unearthed?

This conflation of incompatible registers of value is also important here, as it

features as part of the trick mechanism. Qualitative statements ‘about’ a system
are conflated as quantitative statements ‘of’ the system, and tautology ensues, and
I will attempt to show how this conflation of value can occur within the three fields
that I am discussing here.

In gravity. Tricks about gravity treated as statements of gravity, and which point to
a position outside gravity; by ‘appearing’ to be a position that cannot exist within it.
Freedom, a subjective concern, cannot be effectively registered in the subject-less
field of gravity.

In language. Statements ‘about’ the material quality of words in the mouth are
treated as if they were statements ‘of’ language based around the primacy of
communicability between subjects, this was never more uncertain as the field of
language presents itself as autonomous and discreet from the subject’s un-
registerable conception of the value of a signifier. In this conundrum of language in
the subject’s mouth, which cannot refer to the subject, the psychotic is propelled
through language in search of the subjects central place only to find lack after lack.

In capital. In Marx it is conflation of labour-power, which produces value as

qualitative statements ‘about’ the value of commodity, but which is treated as a
statement ‘of’’ the value of commodity, as a statement then of commodity. That
which provides statements about value of commodity are treated as if they are just
further statements of commodity value. The tautology here is that the subject of
labour, who is the origin of the value of a commodity, is alienated from that
commodity as this statement ‘about’ its quality is treated as a statement made by
the commodity itself of its purely quantitative value relative to another commodity
only, with no reference to the subject who crated it. Its quality is treated as
quantity; this is the clearest conflation I will reference here.
 24

It is important to engage with the distinction between the entrapment of the

psychotic within language (as well as other subjects caught the circularity of trying
to fulfil contradictory injunctions), which is due to the concealment of tautology
within the linguistic form, and the more deliberate, ‘knowing’ exposure of a
tautological mechanism as it may be constructed or discovered within a formal
system. This distinction refers to the fact that these operations relate to the
differences between versions of the trick, as I will unfold them in this text.
The exposure of tautology relates to what I term Trick One, while the
concealment of it, and concealment of the incompatibility between registers of
value that cause tautology, relate to what I am calling Trick Two.
Perhaps it is too simplistic to say that Trick One acknowledges the tautological
problem, Trick Two hides it and forces the subject to internalise it, but this is the
general distinction here.

PSYCHOSIS:
I am proposing here that a tautology occurs in a field of value, within which the
ability to take up an external position as a hermetically sealed subject is impossible.
This means that any statement made by the subject that stands for that subject’s
position external to that field of value has to, because of the inherent impossibility
to adopt a position external to it, submit to the fact that this position will be treated
as a position within a field of value that is organised primarily not around the
subject but around the discreet horizontal differences between any position that is
adoptable within the field.
This predicament then propels a further positioning that attempts to get outside
of that which it can never get outside, as every position external to the field has to
be made under the conditional terms inherent within the field. The adoption of
positions accelerates, and produces an excessive and precipitous tumbling through
the field of value.
For me, this relates to what is exposed in Gödel’s construction and to an extent
Lacan’s analysis, that this is a limitation of the field that the subject must ‘bear’,
and it is this acknowledgement of the ability and strategies to perhaps ‘bear’ this
divided state that is concealed from the sufferer of the ‘unbearable’ horror of a
psychotic break.
Concealing the self as unrealisable causes an excessive production of solutions. It
might be inferred that certain modes of production are organised then around this
concealment.

The psychotic feels himself or herself to be ‘true’ but ‘unprovable’ in language,

which produces more language. This then is a trick but one in which the
acknowledgement of tautology does not occur (as it does in Gödel) the psychotic is
propelled to solve the unsolvable conundrum, drawing themselves ever deeper into
an impasse.
I am fully aware that this is a gross over-simplification of psychosis, and I
acknowledge here that I am focussing on certain clinical definitions of psychotic
language-use, which I will expand on later.
 25

CIRCUS IS NOT SICK:

It might be fair to say that, the cultural strictures of circus institutions
notwithstanding, this fundamental relation to gravity is that you try to achieve
weightlessness, a position external to gravity, in the face of the impossibility of
such a meta-position. If concealed this might result in the psychotic over-
production of supposedly genuine acts of freedom, which are in fact only the
expansion of the field in which you are continually falling. To say that you are free
in the act of circus is only the reproduction of a field that holds you down.
But to be clear this research does not propose circus to be ‘sick’, nor does it
advocate blaming the practice itself for failure to prop up the desire to be an
extraordinary individual, that then must be teased out of the subject as an
abandonment of an ‘unhealthy’ practice.
I do not necessarily advocate its abandonment, and this dematerialisation of it is
only to deepen the material practice of it. Circus has ‘health’ in that if it
acknowledges and exposes the tautology it deals with it can be repurposed as a
rigorous meditation on the potentiality for agency within any field.
I hope the impact will be on circus’s capacity to more deeply collaborate with
other fields, disciplines and modes of production, but bringing into this open
collaboration its own ability to affect those fields, as much as they affect circus, and
propose reconfigurations of their values that better reflect the position of the
subject in the real relations of production therein.

Again I will relate this to the DIAGRAM in which the word is a statement ‘about’ the
alphabetical order.

THE WORD WITHIN THE ALPHABETICAL FIELD:

The point here is that the word is attempted to be understood as something

performable within this alphabetical field, just as weightlessness is here attempted
to be understood as something that is performable within the field of gravity.
So how can we understand the word in relation to an analogy with what Gödel
does with his refined collection of meta-phrases that can be used to define the
quality of the quantitative nature of numbers?

Thus here there is a reciprocal relation between the word and the alphabet, both
define and regulate the other in some way.
The word is the reason for the alphabet to retain its differential horizontal relation,
and the alphabet is the order that enables the disorder of the word to have capacity
to produce ‘meaning’.
The trick occurs when the two are placed together. In Trick One it is performed in a
open manner; the word is openly placed alongside the alphabet, as a disorder of
that alphabet, which the alphabet cannot allow if it is to retain its power to give the
capacity to mean to the disordered letters of the word. The word is ‘performed’
 26

within the field that states it is impossible to occur, and yet the meaning of the word
is conveyed trans-individually.
It is this conveyance, an inter-subjective and qualitative communication that is
happening but impossible within the subject-less and quantitative register that
horizontally governs the difference between letters in the alphabetical field that I
see as being analogous to the idea of a statement being true but unprovable in
number theory.
Every word is a tautological statement in the field of alphabetical gravity; every
word is a trick in the ‘field of alphabetical gravity’. I will call this Gralphity.
This is the congruence between the Diagram and Gödel’s formulation. The word is
a similar meta statement about the qualitative phonetic logic that governs the
alphabetical order, in the same way that Gödel’s meta statements ‘about’ the
qualitative dimension of difference that governs the numerical order.

QUALIT-ATIVE = META-STATEMENT, ABOUT: a description of how the letters

receive their qualities, in being ‘about’ letters it is a meta-statement, but being also
a statement it is acknowledged to be subject to the law of the impossibility of meta-
language, and so even though these are qualitative meta-statements (i.e. inferring a
position outside the set) they must be included as they are statements.

QUANTIT-ATIVE = INFRA-STATEMENT, OF: the letters themselves that have

values that place them in a specific order in relation to each other, each
differentiated horizontally that exist as infra-statements (i.e. inside the set, they are
pre-meta-statements) These go to make up the components of any possible meta-
phrases.

I am aware of the problem of calling such a construction within a field a ‘meta

statement’, but I do acknowledge the impossibility of it; as it is exactly this
impossibility of meta statement that causes the treatment of something that is a
statement ‘about ‘ language to be treated as if it were a statement of language, the
inherent meta-logical impossibility ensures that this is always the case.
Therefore any meta-statement ‘about’ the nature of the system made within that
system is as it must be; no externality of it is possible as the terms from which the
statement is made inhere to that system. Therefore meta-statement has to be
treated as an infra-statement ‘of’ that system.
Meta-statement is impossible but not impossible to create.
This is what Gödel constructed within certain formal axiomatic systems to create
the resultant tautological statements that ensue when statements that make
qualitative judgements about the nature of a system are conflated with
quantitative statements ‘of’ that system (which ironically is exactly what they are)
that further ‘true’ statements that ensue from this conflation show themselves to
be simultaneously and contradictorily ‘unprovable’.
I acknowledge here also that Lacan is referring to a more fundamental and total
‘embeddedness’ of the subject in language. Language is not an axiomatic system
with limited powers of description; it totally forms the subject’s power to speak
about him or herself.
To perform Trick Three that leaps clear of these terms is tricky indeed, and will be
 27

discussed in time.

So in terms of the proposed diagram, the words are statements ‘about’ the
differential quality of the letters within them that shapes the alphabetical order as
a system of difference but which operates that difference on purely quantitative
terms that do not acknowledge the origin of that qualitative value that originates in
the word.
In terms of circus the diagram shows words to be tricks, as meta statements
‘about’ the alphabetical order that are then treated as if they were infra statements
‘of’ that order, and subsequently exist in a tautological state in that they occupy a
space of ‘wordness’ about the alphabet that they cannot occupy under the
indifferent ‘pull’ of the alphabetical field that reduces them to ‘letterness’ of the
alphabet.

Further to this exists also the loop by which the words require letters to be spelt but
those letters can only exist in a utilisable ‘pool’ by being assigned qualitative
difference from the word itself.

There are implications here to for set theory, and this will be discussed briefly in
relation to Badiou’s theory of the event in chapter three, as well as implications
within Lacan’s ideas on extimate causality.

Repeatable Difference:

This Gödellian model is then my main template for understanding the trick in these
different fields, and ideas on how it relates to language and to capital and to
definitions that highlight the constellation of a financial mutation of linguistic
tautology. It relates strongly to the Diagram also.
In later chapters I will expand on how my position as a stand up comedian relates
to speaking a trick, and also how this Godellian structure relates to jokes and pranks
that seek to disrupt order as well how the Godellian process of renaming statements
‘about’ how supply creates demand as statements ‘of’ supply might be employed to
produce desire directly, excessively and inexhaustibly. The art of understanding the
production of desire is utilised to produce desire not to analyse potential agency in
the face of it. This could be the subsumption of the analysis of desire to the
imperative of capital perhaps.
Another version of this might be to say that it is a tautological operation to make
statements ‘about’ difference that are then treated as statements ‘of’ difference,
thus mass-producing a repeatable difference that is obviously self-invalidating, but
which in a context of enforced extraordinary individualism creates a circus of tricks
that all end in lack, and ending in lack are repeated to get to the ‘new’ difference.
But this central operation that acknowledges how the necessity for meta to be
treated as infra, outside treated as inside, quality treated as quantity is part of the
trick mechanism that is balanced on a very fine line in such a way as to enable the
 28

subject by giving a clearer view of a limited system or disable that subject through
the internalisation of an unprovable truth that must be proved externally.
This is very tricky.

There will be other examples going forward that seek to show how this praxis that
imbricates tautology with the practice of circus can be found operating in other
systems and as a tool for reconfiguring what is possible or potential in those other
systems. And how systems can be seen differently as limited enclosures through the
operation of this praxis and the thinking with which it is reciprocally entangled.

This concludes this brief introduction to my definition of the trick. Now I will
continue to outline some of the semantic difficulties of calling the central unit of this
research a ‘trick’ after a brief word about my position in relation to this subject.

NO AUTHORITY:

From where do I derive my authority to make these observations? These

observations come from 25 years of experience in the field of circus, but over 40
years experience of performing to live audiences. This is not an ethnography, I will
not be examining certain shows or companies’ work but all impressions are
gathered from my embedded presence in these years, in hundreds of performances
of all kinds, in the myriad of different scenarios that constitute the circus market, its
education as well as the private daily practice.

During this time I have been exposed to various directorial and dramaturgical
modes in which theatre struggled to appropriate the physicality of the practice, as
well as other forms of ‘thematic draping’ in which circus ‘wears’ character, scene,
motivation like an ill-fitting costume.
I have been directed by those who have never practiced circus, as well as those
who have. Both can seem equally possessed by the notion that the circus body must
‘behave’ according to theatrical principles and the trick was some kind of self-
interested aberration. I will argue this of course, but only as one iteration of the
trick, of Trick Two.
This defaulting to the tropes of theatre is for me partly to do with circus trying to
validate itself through these forms, as well as an acknowledged older link between
its physicality, ritual and spectacles of religious meaning.
Perhaps it is fairer to say that there are many reasons why circus is rationalised
theatrically but the time needed to do this ‘well’ is, in my experience, rarely taken.
I myself have explored the ‘meaning’ of circus on a daily basis with a wide variety
of students of all nationalities, and have investigated the smallest gestural motif,
entangled in some obscure technique, to more overall concepts of cultural
contextualisation in training sessions that try to locate the practice in an awareness
of the non-circus community that enables it. I have done this at the ‘coal-face’ of the
practice, as well as in directorial or dramaturgical roles, workshops, seminars and
lecture formats.
I have worked with different forms of notation that might be applicable to circus
movement to either abstract or to derive what could be called ‘meaning’; this
 29

method has lead me to isolate different components of the more polished figures,
that might be called ‘tricks’, and to follow each element as a technical form to be
investigated in its own right.
I intend to unfold one such example of notation within this text in the hope that it
will further explain my position in relation to the trick.

So the individualised forces at play within the physics ‘of’ circus such as circular
movement, momentum, rhythm, tempo and other parameters that can be
combined to form governing statements ‘about’ how bodies of mass behave under
gravity have formed years of study in the fields of teaching circus as well as the
dynamics of rigging and safety at height.
Statements ‘about’ gravity, statements ‘of’ gravity this is all I have dealt with in
relation to my own body and the bodies of others.
As well as looking at these Newtonian components in relation to the conveyance
of ‘meaning’, I have deeply studied other forms that might accompany circus less
problematically; forms such as cabaret, burlesque, clown, buffoon, grotesque, as
well as the difficulties of stand up comedy and live art. All have all been examined as
possible ways to privilege specific accents within the repertoire of the circus body in
an awareness of how circus is ‘impure’ infected with other already designated and
established forms. I acknowledge here that to say that circus is impure implies
boundaries between theatre and dance and musicality and circus that may or may
not necessarily exist but are boundaries that have been undoubtedly drawn through
cultural time.

I have engaged with themes as wide as virtuosity, vulnerability, mastery, object use,
risk, magical illusion, violence, gender roles and artistic context in regard to a wide
range of political standpoints of tradition or transgression. In this way the action,
the context and the intent have all been deliberately entangled to find new ways of
working and communicating through that physical work that seems to organise
itself around these particular atomised circus movements, these units of execution
that have a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ and which activate through a moment of
weightlessness in the restrictive field; these ‘tricks’.
These studies have been undertaken in my almost daily engagement with
professionals and students alike, from BA to PhD level, in the field of professional
international circus as well as the performance experience in which I myself have
been engaged; from theatre, to film work, to stand up comedy, to circus.
My authority is reflected through my engagement with the writers and thinkers
that I choose to highlight here, and this study of one of the most problematic
elements of circus, the trick, is here understood in relation to thoughts of a subject
that is acknowledged to be embedded in language and in capital; an entanglement
just as challenging as that of the body within the field of gravity.
Drawing on this knowledge I describe how moments of weightlessness form a vital
moment in the execution of circus physicality, and how the success or failure of
these extreme movements often relies on the generation of this moment of lift, or
reduction in the feeling of weight executed through parameters available within
gravity, as well as the ability to ‘feel’ when this moment is at its apex.
 30

This awareness of the moment of lift enables previously unavailable forms of

mobility, which are then subject to varying levels of interpretation. How this
mobility ‘reads’ or ‘appears’ is of course partly the subject of discussion here.

…I am able to fictionalise my embeddedness within the human perception that

fails to see curves and therefore feels gravity…

PROVISOS:

There are some thoughts here, which will be developed further, and which form a more
technical discussion of the kind of physicality that is referenced, as well as addressing
some of the interpretations of the term ‘trick’ that I have encountered in my practice.
It is my feeling that circus is made of tricks, and if you speak to any circus artist you
will quickly find that they know the figures of which you are speaking.

Proviso 1: WHAT IS IN A NAME

I acknowledge that from a position within the English language the word trick might
not find its equivalent in other languages, which prefer to speak about circus
movements or figures. It has been suggested to me that in lieu of the conception
here of the trick as a tautology, it might be better to name it as a ‘Loop’.
I am happy for this figure to be so named if it avoids the overlap with a term
meaning deception; but I will stress here that if the relation to the word ‘deception’
is the problem then it is worth noting that I feel there is a link that remains in the
discussion of the trick as a mode of concealment or conflation of values. This study
points to the trick as being related not purely linguistically but structurally to modes
of prank, joke and confidence scam, perhaps meaning that this word is more
relevant to acts of untruth, subterfuge or lies that at first glance.

Proviso: 2 PIECES OF WHAT

This research is laid out in full awareness of the difficulties of using the term ‘trick’
generally.
Suffice to say I acknowledge that this figure is a constellation of many kinds of
base principles and is not a ‘sealed unit’ or a ‘given’ in circus practice, but it is
present in the practice as something that is honed and refined precisely from these
base principles.
My attitude to this word is that it describes a kind of circus movement or figure
with which all circus artists have an awareness and daily engagement; one which
has a perceivable beginning and an end and which activates a negotiation with the
gravitational field or the body that is made in response to that field.
Tricks happen on the nerve endings and in brain stems often too fast for them to
know how they have happened. They have been made from thousands of moments
of failure, from overcoming the screamed thinking of self-preservation, from
accessing the inner workings and aesthetics of different movement qualities for
 31

sure, but now these actions are burned into the synapses and they begin and
happen and end almost without thinking.

I am not advocating the circulation of set figures, or the ‘handing down’ of

prescribed routines that can be delivered as a series of packaged self-contained and
immutable executions.
I am aware that the trick is the concrete result of many other equal and opposite
Newtonian actions and reactions and its final form has to contain an awareness of
the component parts that enable it; parts such as tempo, counter-tempo, balance,
force, rhythm, swing, dislocation, rotation, extension, tension, circularity or
musicality.
So it may seem regressive to speak about the thing rendered out from these
sensibilities as tricks; as these tricks are in many ways seen as the monetary units of
circus in an economy of skill, the term ‘trick’ then implies a view of technique as a
currency that does not acknowledge, as it tries to assume its correct value among
the tide of circus media, that tempo, force and musicality etc. are the components
that go to make up this figure.
This economy then perhaps sets a high value on the outcomes of these figures
made through gravity, as being valued as executions of genuine freedom without
reference to the tautology of their composition, and this value system will also be
discussed.
In regard to an awareness of base technique, I fully acknowledge that
pedagogically it can be an effective approach to focus the student on the virtuosic
execution of these base principles before any such attempts are made to formulate
a composite ‘trick’, and this is taken into account when I speak about this
mechanism. I acknowledge it is made of components.
Such component parts may also be thought of as ‘letters’ that exist in a pool of
statements ‘of’ gravity, that go to make up the tricks that in this analogy are the
words that say something ‘about’ gravity.

Proviso 3: IS FLOW LEGAL

I want to stress that the singular, isolatable nature of the trick as a unit or ‘atom’ of
circus practice is not enforced here. As an example of how it might be possible to
develop a mode of theoretical approach that is derived from the observed structural
relations within circus physicality I have chosen the trick as the object of this study.
The word is used in acknowledgement of how a figure that is rehearsed for years
as a separate event can and should also be thought of as part of a whole approach to
physicality.
Within Juggling practice, these figures can be notated as ‘patterns’ in Site Swap,
and one repetition of this loop can be thought of as a ‘trick’. Such a pattern can then
segue into another, which can also be isolated in notation.
A figure composed of base elements can itself become a base element for a more
complex figure and this is the layered system of circus physicality than persists in
what I consider to be good practice. A flow, a routine, a sequence are all
acknowledged here and this focus on the trick in no way advocates necessarily the
presentation of episodic, isolated moments of unrelated physicality (unless this
 32

fractured approach is of aesthetic requirement to you, and I am also aware that this
also can function to punch where more choreographic forms merely gesture.)
The point here is that the aesthetic mode in which these figures are employed is
acknowledged, but this is a study of a moment of physicality upon which circus
artists tend to agree. As stated there is a before, an after and within it there is a
negotiation of that which is wholly indifferent to your wishes; a figure for which you
must train hard.

Proviso 3a: LAWYERS IN THE COURT OF GRAVITY:

On this note there is little point to my mind to enter into narratives that suggest
that it is circus-training culture that is barbaric and objectifying, when it largely
operates basically as your’ legal representation in the court of physics’, wherein you
are to be prosecuted according to the full weight of the Law of Gravity.
It is harsh and direct at times because gravity is this way.
It can legally advise you how best to present your technical case for liberty and be
clear in outlining that the Law simply does not care if you go down.
I believe that there are obviously useful and not useful approaches to this legal
representation but I believe the indifference and objectification does not stem from
the institution as a whole but from the inhumane physical law in which we are all
embedded. There are obviously improvements to be made, but everywhere I look,
they are being made.
There is no physical law in this practice that accepts or even vaguely registers your
right to express yourself. The training has to establish a way for you to perform for
others, that which fascinates you in spite of the existence of this law, which neither
wants nor does not want you to do so.

Proviso 4: IMPROVISATIONAL GOALS

This research does not address the possibility of improvisational performance that
much although I think that the ultimate outcome that privileges these parameters,
or base principles of circus movement would be one in which it can become possible
to enable the artist to perform freely improvisational pieces of circus movement.
This goal is one which I wholly endorse but only with the caveat that, as regards
improvisation around these base principles has to engage even at the deepest
acknowledgement of flow states, with the idea that these base principles crystallise
out into set figures that are known to be effective when faced with certain
conditions.
Parkour artists ‘free run’ but they also employ set figures or ‘tricks’ that include the
core technical, elemental components of that discipline, so that when a certain solid
surface of a certain height or width is encountered they know that this or that
particular set figure will be successful as part of that improvisational approach.
A trick can be a tool when you hit a wall.
This is more so in circus and while I would encourage all students to get to the
point where they are improvising live I am aware also that this for many is perhaps
later in the development of their technical approach. (To note here that jugglers are
particularly advanced at this kind of improvisation, and I have also seen some
talented acrobats who can mix and match set figures at will) because even though
the base principles employed may crystallise into usable, repeatable ‘tricks’, as they
 33

do in Parkour, so that they include the base criteria, what will also have to occur to
reach this improvisational goal is an understanding of ‘bridging’ principles, this
means an understanding of where certain figures tend to begin and end (in my
experience it is the designing of a circus movement around certain end and start
points that delineates the construction of a ‘trick’ and this awareness of ‘top and tail’
of technique that forms an essential part of improvisational ability) It cannot be
emphasised enough how the notation of these entry and exit ‘shapes’ are also ‘base
principles’ in the free assembly of ‘routines’ or pieces of circus choreography.
Knowing the parameters of entry and exit to these figures I am here calling tricks
forms also a vital core understanding and guide in the construction of a trick.
So here I am acknowledging a movement towards improvisation, I am also being
pragmatic in stating that the trick for me is still present as a set unit composed of
adaptable elements, which may or may not be informed by an awareness of how it
might be part of a whole repertoire according to its rationalisation as a kind of Lego
brick with studs to both be an inserting or receiving piece.
Tricks change shape over the years too, even for the die-hards who believe in the
sanctity of the atom, and I am acknowledging this and in no way asking for a return
to the master system in which tricks are taught without this needed breakdown of
principles. The altering of technique can mutate the trick as the musculature
becomes used to performing it or tired of doing it in equal measure.
I am not in any way saying the trick is not a fluid entity. As it deals with the value of
weight; and this is acknowledged to be a mechanism that deals in value over time, it
is clear that I am not asking for a purely synchronic designation of the figure but
acknowledging it is an object of value that should be viewed diachronically. Tricks
do exist, but they are Tricks Over Time, this is important; that it is first to
acknowledge their temporality, and then to acknowledge them as a ‘telling’ of
weightlessness in time, as a memory of the cancelled future of weightlessness.
I am very clear with myself and my students that everything they think of as a trick
or witness online, a sealed immutable unit, was devised by someone like them from
these base principles and is open for further refinement or deconstruction according
to those same parameters, in a measured way as well as in an improvisational
setting.
I am just acknowledging what I feel actually occurs in the practice. Core principles
crystallise into tricks, there, I said it, but these should remain opening and not
closing structures, always affecting and affected.

Proviso 4: MACRO/MICRO
This point deals with an acknowledgement not just of the ‘big’ elements, but that
any moment of shifting your weight could be thought of as an example of a trick.
Walking in this regard utilises a moment of suspension before falling to initiate itself
and these smaller moments are not forgotten here.
In relation to the moment of weightlessness that is referred to in the trick, I would
like to acknowledge here that this moment also refers not perhaps to full
weightlessness but to a moment in which there is a perceived, exploitable
discrepancy between the physical requirements for the body or circus object to take
up a set place in the order of gravity and the actual potential to take up another
place not designated by the physical conditions of the masses involved. When the
 34

body of mass in question does not behave according to the physical conditions
under which it usually operates due to some ‘suspending’ action. These micro
moments of lift, or feint, or tempo are also thought of as trammelled up in this
discussion of tautology, in which the operation implies physical conditions other
than those in play.
This point also deals with this definition of a trick as applicable to all disciplines and
objects.
This definition is not just for aerialists, and moments of suspension are marked
here as enabling in many other disciplines; the ball at the top of its thrown arc, the
apex of a jump or assisted bounce that facilitates rotation etc. all are considered
here.

Proviso 5: THE TRICK STICKS

So I will keep the term, with its connotations of being the derivative of a moving
curve of undifferentiated forces; but I do this deliberately because it is exactly this
distinction between a figure set in a systemic register and its immanent potentiality
that I want to bring to the fore by sticking with the concrete term that renders out of
an acknowledged multiplicity of other terms.
By this I mean that the trick can be thought of as a word spelled out of various
techniques ‘of’ gravity. These techniques are the letters, that when performed
together say something ‘about’ gravity.

The task here is not to draw a semantic link between the idea of the trick and the
idea of illusion or deception, but to demonstrate an inherent homological
structure between the many forms discussed throughout this text. From financial
scams, to political pranks, to jokes to psychotic utterances and to the
appropriation of modes of escape into an endless chain to be followed:

This is what I mean by trick.

ON THE WRITING STYLE

So there will be a difference in tone, this is not a study of the cultural phenomenon
of circus in the style of the humanities. I am not writing ‘on’ circus here, ‘about’
circus here, the attempt is to produce a piece of work that in being what it discusses,
in being ‘circus writing’ it highlights some of the themes I feel face circus. The writing
is a trick. If writing is a rope this is a series of knots, some get tighter, some undo
themselves, some need to be cut…

In its fiction, its complicity in restriction, its self-image, its exploits in response to a
double-bind, its ineffectuality as well as its potentiality it is a document that
attempts to hold the writing-practice I have developed alongside my circus-practice.
In many ways I hope that it cannot hold it…

It does critique circus, the subjects that populate and proliferate within it, it is a
compromised account of my embeddedness within this field, and represents the
 35

seriousness of weightlessness; it falters at the spelling of a trick that is a fiction; a

fiction that wants to take shape in the world. The trick contains desire, and the need
to satirise the way power works its own tricks. There are rip-offs everywhere that
similarly solidify in contradiction of their fictionality.
I do not know how to describe this style of writing other than to say that whenever
it detects the gravity inherent within its own approach, a trick is attempted; so in
the same way ice cream melts backwards, this is the joy of a newsflash without the
newsreader.
This is not simple self-deprecation, or the nervous, humourous asides of someone
who is unsure of the subject matter; I am sure of this subject, and I am sure that such
asides are a vital and continuing argument for increased agency in the narrowing
gap of any discourse.
The horses run in circles, and we must be ready…

In Zizekian terms, and in terms of the succinct nature of joke structure, I am

attempting to sell you some ‘red ink’, which in itself is a wholly compromised
entrepreneurial move.
I will not tell it here as I think it is funnier that way.

In many ways I consider all quotes to be better presented by their absence.

I discuss the theoretical references in linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and

political economy that I consider to be relevant in unravelling what a trick could be
and it is this examination that I hope will inform the discussion of the place of this
problematic unit in both the way circus views itself as different, as well as inform its
modes of inter disciplinary collaboration.
This is done in relation to a structural schematic that I adopt for the trick that
serves as the main structural template existing between what would otherwise feel
to me like purely semantic associations between the trick, the joke, the rip-off, the
magic trick, the con, the prank and the outright lie.
All of the writing contained here deals with the trick in some way. If you are
looking for a link, this is it.

Every piece of writing is informed by trying to understand this unit of labour, that
simultaneously conveys escape by going nowhere and also discussing how it is not
an instant recipe for resistance; it is just as easily turned into deceit, trap or
inescapable double-bind, and in this sense I try to puncture the notion, often held by
practitioners, that there is an innate anti-establishment inevitability here in the
circus. In looking at the trick, that forms the central unit of this practice, it can be
seen that nothing is further from the truth. This is only one potentiality that seems
to be released and which lies latent in the original form; it is important to realise we
may be repeating the expansion of an enclosure rather than rambling ‘free’ on an
infinite landscape.
At the risk of artificially polarising Circus and Power I am merely examining the
image circus often has of itself as an anti-establishment movement, and
questioning whether this position is best maintained by leaving it unexamined or in
 36

fact a closer inspection of its resolute muteness might not be undertaken through
something it does repeatedly seem to say, namely the trick.
By examining the trick as the first and last word of this mumbling circus I am only
here undertaking circus’ own attitude toward the impossible act, in speaking circus I
am responding to circus’ own cries of “It can’t be done!” In speaking circus I am
attempting to perform the physicality of the trick in the immateriality of language,
to satirise what I see as circus’ unwillingness to talk about itself.

In the words of the song:

“Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying”.

Pink Floyd, (1982) The Wall; Comfortably Numb.

In asking circus about its relationship to power and employing a translation of its
physical practice into a medium that is immaterial but effective I am enquiring if
circus is as transgressive as it claims to be.
I am not only examining its relationship to power structures but also addressing
circus’ own complicity in power in structuring itself as something that does not
speak. Is circus something more real than the illusion of theatre and therefore does
not need to speak, or is this real just another form of ‘telling’?
Whether fiction or fact, what does the trick ‘say’?

The discussion moves between modes of escape and instances of impasse as they
exist within circus practice and those in other fields.
I have focussed on the modes of fiction that are employed in the tricks and counter
tricks that are played out across this surface and ask what modes of trickery are
most deceptive, which of them can appear politically effective but be swallowed
whole, which say one thing but do another, which of them serve the audience and
which serve the performer, which are employed as grand counter-tricks that
invalidate all subsequent resistive trickery and which are just plain lies.
In structuring a document around these themes it soon becomes imperative to
shift styles and formats, as I discuss modes of capture, the very letters on the pages
seem to close in andifeelthatihavenospacetosaywhatitisineedtosay.
Oh very clever, take a bow…but applause in this case is a closing down of
potentiality; the inevitable clap for the trick is, to its potential for meaning, what the
inevitable ‘cut’ from the world is, to the potential of language.

In trying to speak circus to power, I am asking circus to address Capital, and in this
sense I am asking circus to address itself.
Its ties to capitalist expansion and exploitation are unavoidable. 250 years of circus
is being celebrated as if colonialism never happened; circus was organised around
the celebration of this, so I think proposing Capital, as one of the fields of enquiry for
a trick is perfectly apt.
 37

In this aspect I find congruence between the structures of language and capital and
so in asking is it possible to speak a trick, I am also asking what is a trick in finance,
and homology is a tool that I am using to do this, looking for structural links that
enable me to leap from one track to the other as in a fast moving train.
I delve into the impasses of linguistics seen through linguistic implications of
psychoanalysis in which the subject is implicated as in a gravitational field. Lacan
here exists both with the research and within this text itself as a description of
gravity.
From here, engaging with the notion of semio-capital, as described so eloquently
by Franco Berardi, it becomes clear that this strange mutation and its attendant,
ever somersaulting and trick-making subject is similarly enmeshed within capital.
Capital iterated as a linguistic form, vertically detached but horizontally
autonomous, perhaps the definition of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation;
this I see as something of a feat.
Semio-Capital is free to be free from reference, which means it uses freedom to
enclose.
In this way Lacan’s impasse for the desiring subject in language, and the influence
of Marx in his reworking of Saussure’s semiotics, is seen through the lens of the
Marx that flickers in Deleuze and Gauttari’s Anti-Oedipus, in which, rather than
stating the unconscious is structured like a language, it is stated to be ‘like a
factory’, and this other metaphor operates to highlight for me the way in which the
self-construction of the subject is done through a context of capital that is as
inescapable as the linguistic potency of context that is figured by Lacan and as fully
appropriated as it is claimed to be by Berardi.

So this research seeks to then engage not only with the trick-maker within gravity
but also with deep structural similarities between these tricks and those enacted by
deregulated capital.
In asking how circus will address the so far underdetermined ‘thinking’ that must
exist within its practice to other fields, this research then seeks to engage with what
tricks might be available to the circus subject in both language as an indifferent field
and capital that behaves linguistically.
As circus is seen within this research (if not by the community itself) as something
that also has its origins in the financial shake down or rip off, then this engagement
of how it is possible to work tricks within capital becomes how can circus make a
trick that escapes the capitalistic gravity of its own origins?
This (im)possibility is perhaps part of the provocation. That is, as circus
consistently seems to agree with the tenets that follow from late capitalist
neoliberalism, how can the trick, the central unit of circus, address this complicity?
Also as mentioned, this becomes a question of how can the circus artist perform a
trick on the gravity of circus itself? Circular as it is; so circus is its own gravity.

I am not against the Circus however, and I know many people who would be lost or
homeless or unfulfilled were it not for the protection and meaning that the circus
has given them. These stories however are easily captured and crushed in the ever-
googling grip of likes, and it is the appropriation of sweet wine as vinegar that I am
trying to highlight but avoid here.
 38

This is one of circus’ overriding internal goods that it can house those that have no
other place to be. But this does not mean that by joining the circus, attending a
circus course, or engaging in circus training you have the right to think of yourself as
a misfit, outsider or rebel.
Many of the well-off middle class young adults, who now are the only
demographic whose parents can afford to enable them to study circus, are under
the impression that the circus will transform them into people who do not fit
anywhere and thus will be bestowed with the individuality that is demanded of
them. This individuality is ironically demanded of them by structures, which they
seek to escape by ‘joining’ the circus the first place; so in disagreeing with
hegemony, they follow its injunctions implicitly. That also will be examined as a
twisted topology upon which the act of escape is to be returned to captivity.
This I believe is indicative of the on-going conflation of fiction with fact that occurs
in a culture that is focused on the site of extraordinary individuality, its maintenance
and performance, as the site of labour. It is also indicative of a culture based on the
image as the equivalent of truth.
Post-factism is an edict and the pressure of transformation that young people are
expected to undertake in the process of answering the impossible task of ‘becoming
unique’ in the market is perhaps lessened by paying to join the circus; occasionally
you come across students who are labouring under the impression that no further
work needs to be done now that they have officially ‘arrived’. For some it is merely a
matter of handling and juggling the impressions that emanate from social media; in
an infinite forestalling of technique in the frozen moment of the image. There is an
ever-growing market that enables you to look the part, whilst achieving almost
nothing that could be called circus physicality at all.

That is the conflation of image with reality, as witnessed by the way the circus
community images itself, and speaks about itself. Much of this in anecdotal but
garnered from thirty years of performing and teaching and being aware of how
genuine identity that enters the circus is blotted out as a way of becoming
extraordinary within it.
I will say however that in some cases this is a legitimate departure from precarious
lives for something more positive; in many cases it is the frustrated frisson between
reality and image that feeds the mistaken conception of the circus as a ‘freedom-
machine’ reliant on post-factism as fuel for its transformative power.
Within this text the satire of an ideology called ‘Circusism’ is supposed to highlight
this. It catalogues a ridiculous extrapolation of the injunction to transform by which I
believe people can be swallowed whole; partially dissolved and trapped within the
painful indigestion that boils away in the frantic production of liberty.

‘Plink plink, fizz, fizz…oh what a relief it is…”

Peter Schaffer. (1973) Equus. Scribner, New York:

Please welcome onto the stage Le Petomane, a man who can fart a thousand
tunes, he is one of a kind.
 39

I am for a circus that can image the potentiality of freedom, but not one that agrees
with the capitalist idea that in a post-fact world the image of freedom is the
equivalent of your freedom, that a statement ‘about’ freedom is the equivalent of a
statement ‘of’ freedom; that is power insisting you are free by activating the
duplicitous logic that implies:

“Well, how else would you be able to produce such an image of freedom if you
were not within a free space?”

The fact is that the production of images of free individuality is what is demanded
of you. This is the trick you must perform.

I will define power as a form of gravity in this case, and develop this into a larger
homology that deals with my reasoning for these ideas.
What we are faced with is the erosion of the capacity of circus to acknowledge that
its practices are able to issue demands precisely because they are not a real escape:
the question implicated in the trick should be:

“How is it possible to make these virtualisations of extreme mobility and they

not question how restricted we actually are?”

How does this go unspoken into the leap?

How does the image of a body in flight refer only to the success of that individual
and not the failure to be able to be free of unavoidable demands to be an
extraordinary individual?

As regards the question of circus as an art form. I will be more general. What is at
stake is how the tenets of capitalist production have captured the arts and why
circus is adamant that it is unaffected by this?
By ‘capturing’ I refer to how power reduces art’s fictional power to detach from the
referent, to produce new meanings, to utilise affective communication, to whisper
ideas not yet possible, to effectively remain weightless for a moment, and I refer to
how these intersubjective and transindividual modes are collapsed into registers
indifferent to the subject; that is, into capital.
The fictional power to ‘tell’ of things that are not yet here are conflated with their
supposed factual validation as a monetise-able individual entrepreneurship through
a contradictory and incompatible reduction to the autonomy of systems of
difference.
Fiction should haunt us with a present absence, with a ‘not yet’ and as such remain
as none of capital’s business. The possibility for fiction to arrive, like a ghost-train,
through having not yet arrived is that which Power debilitates and undermines by
selling rail tickets in advance.
This question of fiction will be addressed in depth.
 40

There are several factors here:

1: That circus, in the West at least, no longer houses those who could be deemed
precarious, and

2: that ideas of resistance, temporary autonomy and mobility are corporate

mandates, and

3: that circus seems to agree with the maintenance and performance of

individuality. It seems to couch this as the profit of weightlessness within the
apparent meritocracy of gravity. For me this implies that technical excellence is
somehow robbed of its capacity to mean anything as the proposal becomes that
you have a right to be weightless in a field that is designed to appropriate you.

These points mean that, for me, something has to change in the circus, lest it go
forward in this new twisted iteration of itself as the art form that is the most closely
related to the self-interested, financially embedded and entrepreneurial subject.

It is with respect that I make this critique. I have been involved with many
interesting people over the years, both in traditional and less traditional settings,
and it was always most rewarding when the structures were loose, when the
outcome was not certain, this instability was the glue.
There is something lost when you find it all and it is worth noting that thirty years
ago, deciding to join the circus meant you were committing to an unknown, there
was no career, there was no outcome that you could see at all; perhaps just a
handful of shows that changed the way you saw the world.

This research is the development of a personal methodology, and it is the

development of a critique, but in full awareness that circus has had to fight hard to
remain afloat in the viscously competitive context of capital, and without such
endeavours and cultural reading of the populist mood it would have disappeared. So
perhaps this critique sits with those more established, less precarious
establishments of circus; the big successful outfits and the embedded educational
establishments, who are not currently going under. I have ultimate respect for any
collection of circus minded people who manage to tour to play and to survive in this
climate.

“Every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that
nothing can be changed”…here is Zizek on Orwell and to a degree on the petit objet
a of fiction…
It may be that Orwell was referring to those in the liberal left of his time that did
not really want big change, but I feel it rings true at any level in regard to fiction. I
want to be clear that I am not privileging this fictional aspect of weightlessness, as a
moment before capture, to weakly jeer from the left wing. I feel it is important for
art to fictionalise potential escape routes, even when the routes themselves are
inoperable, and this is not out of a palpitation of doubt or a secret conviction that
nothing can be changed. It can but the new and developing circus artists, the first
 41

generation to have grown up in social media, have to understand the gravities of our
time, and decide for who will they tour and play and survive.
For me the circus has to be for those who come and watch, who may in the end be
cut off from all other forms of live performance, from poetry and from art of any
kind.

That the power of a desire for change is agitated partly upon the premise that this
will be impossible, the fiction of it is the only palpable element ; the ghost that
makes an injunction is also caught in the paradox of a barrier that forms a positive
condition of the barred.
But in reference to Derrida I do feel that the spectre cannot be packed with
compromises, the ghost is onstage, ladies and gentlemen to demand the
impossible. Whether this is part of a pathology or not I do not care anymore, it is my
act.
For your delectation I will now before your very eyes, empty out the ghost so the
unfulfillable demand can haunt me. In this regard a trick should reveal the fiction of
the self, not in a self-help kind of way but in the sense you are able to commune
with ghosts in a two-way conversation about any future.
The obstacle to it constitutes its appeal, and this is the acknowledgement of a
tautology, a living with it. So as the iteration of impossible fictions, and as constant
statements that agitate for the refutation of an insurmountable impasse go, then
circus tricks are a prime example.
However it is my feeling that this kind of circus is not the one that currently
reproduces itself as an example of our freedom.

One irony is that the romantic vision that circus has of itself, as outside of society,
may be the lasting impediment to its ability to take up a position of political critique.
It is this outsider status that de-necessitates circus from having to justify its
position within. It is simply exempt, and this enables its muteness, its muteness
facilitates its apolitical nature, its apolitical nature places it in close proximity to
capital, its proximity locates it as inside the mainstream. This un-knowledge in
which a belief of being outside is exactly what returns you to the interior is the
topology of late capitalism upon which circus pitches itself, as a series of false
premises.
Its own feeling that, in speaking it will somehow be complicit in negating its
natural un-capturability, is the exact content of its complicity with its enclosure.
Another way of saying this would be to note that as long as circus does not speak,
then other people who have no connection to its practice would speak for it.
As a practitioner my experience of this is either my practice is reflected back to me
as a romanticised reinforcement of my brute, animal authenticity or I am attacked
for being a vacuous, self-interested show off.
I will try to navigate between these two designations, as a vacuous animal…only
joking…I will try to focus on what is done.
The main accent here is on the nature of the circus trick as a way of privileging any
tactic that might hang in the air.
 42

SPEAKING THE TRICK:

OR: ‘HOW YOU SAY THINGS DOESN’T MUTTER’:

So now I have outlined what I mean by trick and some of the associations that it is
necessary to address I will explain that this idea of a ‘spoken circus’ was present in
my work from the very earliest days of my engagement with circus. So this was
naturally the early form of this examination, which originally began as the question,
‘is it possible to speak circus’.
The question was initiated by the kind of work I was making at the time, which
pursued this idea of knotted speech and tongue twisting logic.
This focused the research specifically in the field of language and has thrown up
some of the complex structural impasses I have outlined here.
I am interested in pranks and misdirection, jokes and logic puzzles all as ways to
expose the reader to the trick in this form, but primarily the existence of overarching
tautologies in the fields of language and capital and specifically in their constellation
as complementary enabling forms of tautology in value comprise the main
contradiction that I now reflect back onto the practice of trick-making.
Therefore the text itself is what I qualitatively call ‘circus writing’ and deals with
knots and circular arguments that float above the quantitative pull of the format of
this text, which could be said to be a requirement for that which might appear to be
a ‘factual’ argument, and so the investigation is done through a mixture of fact and
fiction to test out what kind of agency I myself have in writing ‘about’ circus practice
that is performed as an example ‘of’ ‘circus practice’ in this research frame.
If the frame of a doctoral thesis is to arrive at the proof of an argument, to
demonstrate new knowledge, then the knowledge here is of the trick as a tool,
which is applicable to any field, even the format of this writing itself.
The tool itself is compromised, constantly slipping into a reinforcement of
restriction as opposed to an exposure of potentiality, and that potentiality is based
around the inoperable proposal of an unprovable truth.

These cross-pollinations that occur between the knot, nonsensical speech and
formal logical tautology are all present in the model I propose for the trick in this
research; the practice, its material, the body as an instrument of both weight and
mass all feature here as central concerns within this thinking; all these elements of
the trick as I see it transposed into fields understood as comprised of split registers
of value.
From a contradiction anything follows and so this also lays the ground for an
examination of how the trick can be thought of here in three distinct forms as some
of the consequences of contradiction play out in various fields.
 43

JOKES

JOKES AND STRUCTURE AS RATIONALE FOR TRICKS AND

STRUCTURE:

In looking for other possible forms that reflects the structural relation of a
mechanism that moves through the assumed meaning within a system in order to
subvert that assumed meaning I focused upon the joke.
I had for several years worked as a stand up comedian, lived with comedians,
performed my own material as well as written for others, and also taught a yearly
module that attempted to examine how circus might be integrated with this
particular form of joke delivery.
A joke also says something ‘about’ what we assume language to mean, and the
humour derives from these statements being delivered or treated as if they are
simply statements ‘of’ that assumed meaning. The punch line exposes this conceit.
This idea of the usefulness of a joke to sum up a situation, to find lightness in the
awful things of our lives; not to reinforce bias, but to subvert it, then suggests to me
that the joke is just such a useful tool for thinking as I intend to highlight within the
trick.
In the sense that there can be instructions in how to write jokes from a purely
structural point of view, so there can be instructions in how to write tricks

Just as jokes can be useful in any field, not just as part of a rehearsed sequence of
humorous mechanisms or ‘routine’ so can tricks. Jokes serve a purpose. They can
provide light relief for sure, but often they acknowledge something deeper: both
that the concept under discussion can be succinctly conveyed and that the speaker
is taking a meta position in relation to the subject under discussion. Jokes are a way
of implying that you are not fully embedded, that there is a brief position outside of
the discourse from which it is possible to see the humour in that discourse; thus
implying there is a potentiality for agency within that discourse. So too can tricks be
applied as a mechanism in any field to similarly imply a meta-positionality to that
field.

Look how this concept has revivified the comedy community. The fact that jokes
apply anywhere about anything have reflected back into the comedy routine to
diversify it in previously unheard of ways.

The joke is perhaps the most important mechanism for the politics of language at
the moment.

There are not many linguistic structures that are so good at contesting what it is
‘correct’ to say or not to say that they cause a totally involuntary bodily reaction that
is pleasurable, a series of convulsions accompanied by deep respiration which marks
that an assumed set of meanings has been exposed. I'm talking about laughter; so
don't be so dirty minded.

So perhaps I can draw a rationale for this research into the trick as one that is no
stranger than a book on the structure of jokes.
 44

THE WORD AS A JOKE:

In regard to the diagram of alphabetical gravity (of ‘gralphity’) every word is a Joke,
just as much as every word is a Trick, in that it exposes the limitations of the value of
letters as they are assumed to be within the field of the alphabet.

The speaker demonstrates their position that is able to make a statement ‘about’
what we assume is the meaning of a word, but only from within language. A joke is
both an acknowledgement of a position outside language, whilst also
acknowledging that there is no escape from it; all difference that implies a meta-
position is occurring within language because difference is a primary necessity for it
to function, thus we can think of the ‘escape’ from the linguistic bind that the joke
implies, that the subject is mobile ‘despite’ what language forces him or her to say,
as a purely fictional escape.

That the joke exists in many fields and this has only enhanced the practice of pure
stand up, the technique of joke construction, as elongated, deconstructed, as bent
out of shape, as self referential as hidden as tragedy, in character comedy and irony
positioning in relation to comedy itself, all of these forms exist because the joke as a
mechanism can be applied to any field. The joke can be taught, its formula
uncovered. This is all I am attempting here, not to be prescriptive, or to kill the ‘fun’,
but to provoke (this is what artists should do, not lie on the couch and try to become
‘satisfied’) Thus this research attempts no more of a mystification than a set of
instructions on how to tell a good joke, and acknowledges that, regardless of any
‘correctness’, a good joke always exposes limitations of discourse, a bad joke on the
other hand only reinforces and expands a limited discourse as a totality, often for
personal gain, and this distinction, made here between what I call Trick One and
Trick Two, will be discussed.
You cannot fake a joke; we are either laughing at the absurdity of life, or we are
laughing at someone else’s expense. Everyone can tell the difference between Joke
One and Joke Two.

A joke moves through the assumption to refute the validity of what is assumed to be
meant.
Here it is possible to again refer to the base principles of such a mechanism. This
mechanism of humour that has to crystallise somewhere, to become a definite
structure organised around a definite material, but it is also made up of base
principles that form the operation of that mechanism.
The secret of great comedy…

…Timing, made up of pace, rhythm, tempo, and self-reference made up of call-

backs that re-introduce themes, parody, satire, irony in which literal and actual
compete for dominance of meaning, the power of three in the structuring of bad,
worse, worst as modes of delivery, the pull-back-reveal, and of course the
contradiction or double bind, even the pun takes its place as an element that draws
humour from the random congruence of the materiality of language and, as will be
discussed, is also a factor in psychotic utterance.
 45

When two clowns get divorced, who gets custardy of the pie?

But at root these elements must also form into set formulas. Premise, set-up and
punch is perhaps just as derided as the definition of joke structure as the trick is
derided as the definition of circus movement, but the argument here is that we
cannot ignore the presence of tricks. It is certain that tricks can be spoken of in other
ways and that this insistence on tautology, that is derived from studying my own
practice as well as other mechanisms from other fields, is only as useful as saying a
joke is defined by this three phase delivery. I concur that humour can happen
outside of these structures in imperceptible ways. But it will form the mode of
examination here in full acknowledgement of there being other ways to perceive
circus movement just as there are other ways of perceiving the definitive structure
of a good joke.
Like many things it is affected by emotion, and emotion can be as indefineable
and tautological as the most deliberately wrought conundrum.

For instance, I am distraught, utterly inconsolable as I write these words because

my wife has run off with my best friend.

God, I miss him.

This can be read as either a joke that reinforces misogyny or a joke that exposes our
assumptions about heteronormativity.

There is a main point about acknowledgement here, so that to say ‘did you see what
I did there’ is necessary, but perhaps this necessity is fulfilled implicitly; not by the
clumsy admission that you ‘made a funny’ but by the way the stark U-turn in the
assumption with which the joke plays. This ‘about face’ locates the teller as a subject
of difference from the assumed meaning of the ‘set-up’, who has taken up a meta-
position in relation to the way we assume such statements to play out; the humour
derives from this meta-statement being treated exactly as if it were an infra-
statement within that system of assumed meaning.

I say I am upset because my wife has run off, you assume that I am sad that she is
gone (you assume that this statement is within the assumed system by which a man
loves his wife)

I say ‘God, I miss him’ and now you can see that I am occupying a position that is
external to this assumed system (the meta-statement was treated as an infra
statement to achieve this meta-position, which is not actually a meta-statement as
soon as it is uttered, as it is now a new ratified position ‘within’ the reconfigured
assumed meaning.)

What I mean by this is that the assumed context in which the joke-telling subject
appears is highlighted as one that is unsuitable to house them. The assumption that
I will miss my wife more than my best friend is then highlighted as a hegemonic
 46

enclosure that you the listener bring to the verbal exchange and it is within this
‘given’ context that through the joke structure I am speaking about how this
enclosure has limits that do not include how I, as a speaking subject, actually feel.
This means that the joke is an ‘event’ in that the set called ‘possible meanings of a
man’s relation to his wife’ now contains something that is not in the assumed list of
things present in that set; so that momentarily what the joke teller is saying exists
simultaneously outside of and inside of this set. The set must be reconfigured, an
event has occurred.

Now this is also problematic as what occurs here is stand up comedy predicated on
the assumption that your individuality will naturally construct incongruent humour
when faced with any hegemonic context and this is fine, until this positioning and
self-creation becomes compulsory for you to undertake for your entrepreneurial
survival in a humourless register of the market. The position of difference is fine
until it becomes compulsory to repeat that difference in order to not privilege your
individuality but to follow the imperative to reproduce capital.

There is a paradox here of course in that the unprovability of the ‘truth’ of

language, which implies that a subject is present within it, has to be concealed if
that subject is to utilise that unprovability of truth to solidify themselves in a register
that cannot operate on unprovability. For the subject to appear ‘provable’, they
must conceal the fact that the unprovability of language can in fact be registered
within language itself. That is they must show that a meta-position within language
is possible in order to solidify the persona telling the joke, thus they are caught in a
tautology: it is ‘just a joke’ but I am a ‘real subject. You cannot of course have you
cake and eat it because ‘there is no such thing as a meta-language.’ Thus the
weightless position external to the hard differences of language has to be
acknowledged as something that cannot support the subject, in exposing the
unprovability of truth it also exposes the unprovability of the subject. The
acknowledgement here is a feature of what I am calling Trick One. This can of
course be concealed in order to solidify a subject of great humour, an individual with
their own brand of comedy that is intrinsic to their commodified comic persona and
simultaneous proof of it. This self-inflated subject is perhaps one I wish to highlight
as an exponent of Trick Two in circus.
The acknowledgement is subtle here and so is the mode of capture. It is as old as
the Fool’s relationship to the King perhaps, in that you are accepted as an individual
who is defined by their critique of hegemony by the hegemony that they critique. It
is perhaps this problematic that I am addressing here also with the trick, that the
problematic is one that both enables and disables the agency of the joke-teller and
the trick-maker in equal measure.

Happy Down-River: It’s so funny…

Rover Joe: Yeah, well, I don’t see anybody laughing…

 47

…this is supposed to be virtuosity eating itself remember...

I feel that you cannot tell jokes about gravity because this requires language, and
language needs to be laid out sequentially through time by the speaker, or read
sequentially by the reader, to be understood, and for this to happen you need the
dimension of time. So it can be said that since time is a function of gravity, in that
the strength of gravity determines the rate at which time passes, the idea of a joke
being able to critique the ‘assumptions’ that gravity implies about the weight of
things is impossible as the construction of such a joke is reliant upon the terms,
which it is attempting to critique.

So an Actress and a Bishop falling at a constant rate have nothing to say to each
other at all, they are too busy fucking.

But let us leave this for now, as a critique of the corruptibility of the clergy depends
upon Actress A implying both B; Bishop and Not-B; Not-Bishop, and this tautology
being compromised by the assumption that language can be used to critique gravity
is something we will get to in time.

I feel that the joke creates a persona that announces itself as someone who is
acknowledging that language and its assumed meanings are a game with limits, and
that the joke ‘is not ‘about’ what it is about’ but ‘about’ this possibility of
highlighting the limits of the game; of possibility for an exteriority to the game, to
point out the players. I believe that it this potentiality for escapology that the joke
implies is its joy, rather than the joy of becoming a ‘funny’ guy.
Life is already absurd; it is a duty to point this out, not to imply that you are the
bearer of radical ‘news’.

It is not the apotheosis of the free individual, because language clearly does not
permit such a figure, but an acknowledgement that we are not free of assumptions;
the joke then is a demand for the limited nature of assumptions to be addressed.
But, as discussed here, it can easily be co-opted into the reinforcement of
hegemony also, as in racist, sexist or mean-spirited jokes of any bias.

Just like a joke, the trick is explored here as something that can be applied to any
field, not just any subject matter, but to fields outside of the traditional format of
stand up comedy (one person and a microphone perhaps) or to areas where jokes
are simply inappropriate… It is to apply jokes to the field of politics, to the social, to
maths and literature and to circus itself.
And it is true that once you tell jokes you cease to be taken seriously, but for me
there is no more serious challenge to assumed, seemingly autonomous meaning
than a joke; this structure is designed to expose limits.

It is simply ignorant to think of a joke as something that always reinforces

hegemonic views and established bias, just as it is ignorant to think of a circus trick
as the mute display of a self-interested subject. These forms can be iterated in this
 48

way but this research tries to draw a distinction to highlight that this dumb moment
holds potentiality for something other than cruel laughter or the vainglorious bow.

Two cannibals have captured a clown and are cooking him in a huge cauldron of
boiling water. As the first cannibal is stirring the pot he turns to the second cannibal
and says:

“Circus is the physicalisation of a particular conundrum in language; we can

acknowledge language as a ‘cut’ from the world that ensues when we signify, but
we can also conceal that ‘cut’ and read signification as a direct connection to the
world;

when language is thought of as real in the autonomous register that delineates its
possibility, the unprovability of language is concealed and a false impression ensues
in which the fictional metaposition implied by utterance is possible as a real
position.

If weightlessness is thought of as real in the register of gravity then this implies that
circus is the production of freedom. I do not believe that it is, and that its poetry and
visual punch as an art form lie in acknowledging that these moments of
weightlessness are tautological, and as such are demands upon the imagination.
Thinking of circus as enabling genuine agency within gravity is similar to claiming
that the provability of the truth of language is possible within it.
A circus that thinks of itself as the production of freedom will inevitably find itself in
analysis, as it will be repeatedly trying to enter the word ‘weightlessness’ into the
register of linguistic value as ‘real’, only to experience the ensuing lack of fulfilment.
I do not believe analysis helps as it only exacerbates what is the elephant in the
room; which is that the expression of weightlessness in gravity as genuine freedom
involves the concealment of ‘weightlessness’ as a ‘cut’ from the field, thus implying
that this ‘telling’ of weightlessness is the equivalent of genuine freedom. The
surplus that the subject activates in the trick is re-appropriated as intrinsic to this
freedom, when in fact this surplus is unregisterable in gravity at all.”

The second cannibal meanwhile tastes the broth, turns to the other, offering him
the spoon, and says:

“Does this taste funny to you?”

The above notes on joke structure inform how I feel about the trick as something
that can equally be spoken, as well as pointing out that, just as there are books on
joke structure, this is merely a book on trick structure.
Ha Ha…

Please Welcome onto the stage Lingo and

Cash?
 49

Having dealt a little with clarifying what I mean by Trick, I would like to explain my
choice of fields.
Why I have chosen these two other fields in particular through which to explore
the mechanisms of circus? For me at this time, the fields of Language and
Capitalism seem to be equally as insurmountable and indifferent to the subject as
the field of gravity, in that they present systems the exteriority of which seem to be
only the useless, worthless, meaningless, senseless and incommunicable. As these
fields become increasingly intertwined and interdependent, as signs accrue value,
and signification is monetised it is however not the subject who is given access to
the joys of that which is useless to capital, but the subject who is expected to
purchase these priceless elements and further expand the domain of the register
indifferent to him or her. The combination of language and capital activates the
subject as a speaking factory and aligns the inescapability from language with the
inescapability of capital so that both seem to imply the other. As this combined
‘gravitational pull’ increases, What better fields of gravity for a circus artist in which
to perform tricks?

But the more in depth research here will address how illusions of agency are tied
into the way circus agrees with capital, and how the concealment of a conflation of
incompatible registers within language also seems to enable the actor within
capitalism to activate the linguistic potency of that field to agree with circus.
An examination of how the value of being beyond weight, beyond meaning and
beyond price are all noted here as qualities that are sought to be reduced to the
quantitative register through which they are produced. As the indefinable ‘word-
ness’ of a word is sought to be reduced to the wordless register of the alphabet
through which it is produced.
This is not done as a Romanticising of circus practice or a circus-metaphysics but a
necessary study of how if no such viable meta-position can be located then the
question is rather what is implied about the system through which this tautology
occurs.
It is to examine this proximity of Circus and Capitalism that I have chosen these
fields to be accompanied by a linguistic medium, both as circus and capital try to say
something about agency through a medium of restriction.
For me acknowledging this, rather than accepting that gravity and capital can
effectively house freedom, means the trick implies the system through which it is
iterated is severely limited in its ability to preserve or even register that which is
spoken through it.

In many ways a central concern here is a shift in ideology that is analogised here in
this research.
The shift is one in which the primary concern that perhaps should ask, “how can
this unfair system be addressed?” has changed into “what tricks do I have to
perform in order to get what I want out of this system?”
 50

THREE TRICKS

HOW TO SPELL FREEDOM:

If we are to think of these fields as restrictive then it becomes necessary to address

the questions of subjective autonomy and agency implied as the antithesis of
restriction.
The delineation of the trick into three forms addresses not only the possibility to
acknowledge the fictionality of agency it terms of the hard facts, but also then
acknowledges that certain actions can appear like agency precisely because the real
restrictive conditions are concealed.

In a third form is also addresses the terms through which agency, as it is perceived in
the trick, is either one of these two forms, as a fictionalised version of it or a
concealment of its impossibility altogether.

In Gödel’s theorem, the premise is that within any system it is possible to make
statements ‘about’ the nature of the way that system is organised; highlighting the
differential quality of its components that allow those components to function as
they do in a set order that is essentially a system of difference. What Godel did was
to make definitive statements ‘about’ that quality of certain numbers that
differentiated them from other numbers and so allowed that system of difference to
operate. He honed these statements down, technically refining them to be the
simplest most efficient descriptions of the qualitative nature of those numbers, then
he numbered those statements. In doing this, in setting up a possibility for meta-
statements ‘about’ the operational workings of a system of numbers to be treated
as numbers, as infra-statements (pre-meta-statements) ‘of’ the operational
workings of a system, it was possible to construct statements of tautology, that
there ‘true’ but ‘unprovable’. The statements ‘about’ numbers were numbers, what
was supposedly ‘outside’ the set was ‘inside’ of it, the other was included in the one,
difference becomes repeatable according to its own difference, the processes that
described numbers were allowed to operate on themselves so that a description of a
number could include itself. This kind of chaotic tinkering in the logic of number
systems meant that a kind of ‘consciousness’ had been placed into the dumb
system, in that the system could now regard itself; it could self-refer and ‘comment’
on its own nature, but these comments being within the system upon which they
commented had to then submit to being treated as if they were regular statements
from within that system; this is where the trick occurs. The impossibility of a meta-
statement, and yet its possibility somehow to be constructed through the presence
of this self referential loop, means that any meta-statement is both possible and
impossible simultaneously, just as weightlessness within the system of gravity is
both there and not there in the trick. A meta-statement once present has to submit
to its impossibility and so is treated as an infra statement that then proves that it is
not there as a meta statement , thus confirming the impossibility of meta-position.

As stated the short version of this is:

 51

The following sentence is false.

The preceding sentence is true.

ROM FEED:

This was what Gödel exposed about all axiomatic systems in logico-mathematical
processes, destabilising these once reliable systems of logical progression and
exposing them as no longer the totalities they were once thought to be.
This is a definition for me then of Trick One, in which meta-statements ‘about’ the
field of gravity (the trick makes a statement in that it proposes that weightlessness
is something outside of gravity and that therefore this implies a position external to
the field from which the field can be regarded, it is ‘meta’ in nature) This meta-
statement is assembled from many different pre-meta-statements ‘of’ gravity, just
as Gödel’s tautology was constructed from numbers ‘of’ the formal system in
question.

RE-MODE F; DIAGRAM ON IMPOSSIBILITY OF META-POSITION:

In our diagram the word enters the alphabetical ‘field’ as a trick. The word says:
‘hey, I represent another way of ordering than this alphabetical order’. Thus the
word implies that there is an external position to this field, another area outside of
its range in which it is possible for the letters to adopt a different order, proposing
that there is an external position from which to regard the alphabet as non-total:
thus the word is a meta-position.
But because the word is composed of the letters that form the operational
ordering principles of the alphabetical field, it is only the proof that a meta-position
from this field is impossible, because it relies on the very letters of that order to
compose its disorder, it must therefore be treated as if it were an infra-statement, a
statement ‘of’ that alphabetical order.
This autonomy of the alphabetical system of difference from the word, which
attempts to perform itself in another direction than the horizontally organised field,
is the gravity here, that then returns all of the letters in the word to their ‘correct’
places thus destroying the ‘wrongness’ of the word that is the ‘right’ spelling of it. In
this way in a similar way to Gödel’s formulation the meta-statement, due to the
impossibility of it because it is composed of elements that only exist within that
system or field, is both there but not there as it must, according to its acknowledged
impossible status, be an infra-statement ‘of’ the alphabetical field.
The gravity here is the indifferent autonomy that the alphabet takes as primacy
over any speaking subject that might form a word within the field.
In terms of a circus trick, the trick is a ‘word’ that is spelled from statements ‘of’
gravity (technical applications like tempo, rhythm, force, momentum, swing etc.)
but which forms a meta-statement about the limitations of gravity. The trick implies
that there is an external position to this field, another area outside of its range in
which it is possible for these techniques to ‘mean’ something else, proposing that
 52

there is an external position from which to regard gravity as non-total: thus the trick
is a meta-position.

This is how I would define a trick that exposes the non-total nature of the system
through which it moves. And remember here I am trying to approach the trick as a
tool for the renegotiation the values in any field, so I am seeking a transposable
definition here, or something that emerges from the transposition of the trick into
the field of value.
This exposing trick is for me Trick One.

FREEDMO; WHAT IF GÖDEL WAS IN IT FOR THE MONEY?

But what if Gödel was interested in manipulating this inherent possibility for
tautology in the system of logic for profit; what if Gödel then discovered a way of
utilising this inherent circularity of meta and infra position to create statements on
the stock market that were simultaneously ‘true’ but ‘unprovable’ (well is not this
the position of money anyway) but he chose to exploit this loophole not to expose
the limitations of the market but to conceal this flaw and use it for his own gain.
Such concealment would be what I term here Trick Two, the trick to conceal
limitation.

So the trick can either conceal the limits of gravity or expose them. It has to be
noted here that in exposing them, this is like the position of the magician that
acknowledges that his show contains no magic at all. This for some magicians is
there bread and butter, the appearance of the impossible trick that allows them to
profit from this concealment of the flaws in the system in question that allow the
trick to appear magic. The point here is that in acknowledging that there is a flaw in
the system that allows the appearance of something in gravity that simply cannot
be there, namely weightlessness, something is gained not lost.
This telling’ of the potentiality of a position outside gravity for me has more worth
as it proposes that such an area exists, whilst it is currently unreachable due to the
impossibility of meta-position. Whereas to conceal the limitation of the system and
to allow yourself to enjoy the gains of such a concealment gives the contrary
impression that the field is ‘magical’ and is an endless area that can ‘house’ any
eventuality.

This concealment of the impossibility of meta-position within the field is thus a

denial of the possibility of benefitting from an acknowledgement of its fictional
status. The meta position is thought of as fictional here because it is unrecognised
as a ‘fact’ by the overarching and inescapable terms of the autonomous register that
seems to form its only recourse to validation.
This register is the only place it can be simultaneously validated and invalidated as
the law of the impossibility of meta-position is inescapable.
The benefits in this case might be to allow the acknowledgement of a meta-position
as just a ‘telling’ of a meta-position to imply that the current field is not in fact an
ever expanding totality that can encompass all forms of agency within it. The
 53

‘telling’ is allowed to operate as a critique, rather than being closed down and
rendered into ‘a dream come true’.
The benefits of acknowledging the meta-position as a conveyable fiction are that
they can operate as critique, whereas in seeking to profit from the concealment of
the inherent tautological flaw in the system does nothing but agree with the totality
of that system.
Concealment of the possibility to acknowledge weightlessness as a continuing
fiction of agency, forces the subject to internalise the insoluble injunction which
demands that they fulfil this fictional promise in the ‘factualising’ and only register
available to them, that seeks to expand itself through such conflation of
incompatible terms and self-reproducing excess that the subject is forced to
undertake.

Circus is steeped in narratives of ‘freedom’ and this will be discussed in terms of

the presentation of freely mobile physicality in the practice, as well as how the other
practices associated with mobility in Language or social mobility afforded by
accumulation Capital relate to the performance of ‘tricks’, in terms of what they
expose and what they conceal.
What is constructed here is a many-faceted homology between these fields that is
used to examine mobility and agency within them in order to clearly delineate the
differences in the three kinds of trick discussed by comparison of the subject of
circus with the subject of both language and capital.

Trick One or Trick Two is a vital designation in whether freedom is seen as a possible
future or a supposedly current fact.

This designation is problematic as we have a limited system exposed in fictions of its

externality or a limited system, which lies about itself as an endless zone.

This is why Trick Three is also discussed here. This is more complex as it attempts to
perform a trick in the field of gravity represented by the terms that delineate the
forms of Tricks One and Two.
If Tricks One and Two represent ‘thinking outside the box’ with all of their positive
and negative implications, Trick Three attempts to think outside of the geometric
principles that allow a box to even form itself. But this is later.

These three forms are:

Trick One, this exposes limitations of the system through which it is iterated, but
through being originated through that system can only fictionalise its externality;
but in fictionalising it, it is exposed as possible to think of.

Trick Two: this conceals the limits of the system in question, specifically by covering
over the incompatibility between what can be made to appear fictionally and what
it is possible to realise in the available autonomous register within that system. This
trick in proposing no difference between fiction and fact also proposes no
 54

exteriority to the system through which the trick is iterated, thus maintaining its
totality.

Trick Three: this is both simpler and more complex in that it is a leap out of the
terms that delineate the difference between these first two tricks.

It might be said that Trick One may lead to Trick Three, But Trick Two leads
nowhere except back inside the system.

A MECHANISM WITHIN THE RESEARCH:

In so far as what I call a ‘mechanism’ can be the researched as a theoretical

structure, as well as activated in practice, I have tried to stay faithful to the
definition of the trick that I propose that is threaded throughout this text. And if it
seems blunt and ignorant to focus on what is considered to be the most worthless
part of circus then this is only because it is central to the practice while everybody is
talking about how it is not important. It is because I want to preserve the extreme
nature of this physicality, the years of physical research that it provokes, the joy of
it, the brute idiocy of it perhaps; I want to preserve the bruises and days of
bandages, of wrapping up to give something to an audience, of pushing and pushing
and pushing to make a movement that no one has seen before. I want to keep that
alive as part of the conversation about where we in the circus think we are going.
The question for me is very much about how this mechanism can speak and as
such to ask if it is possible to translate this mechanism back and forth between
these linguistic, theoretical and physical registers. The definition then of
‘mechanism’ was to be maybe its translatability, but more than this its potential for
transposition; to be a tool that can be applied to any field

It was important to look at how this mechanism engaged with the physical laws of
space and time, but also at how it was possible to refer to meanings other than
those that simply followed these laws.

THE SPECIFICITY OF THE MECHANISM TO CIRCUS:

The trick as a mechanism is something that could be said to be in operation

throughout the practice, something that is a ‘feature’ of the practice that is the
focus of it, this element is in contention, as it can be seen as an entity or part of a
flow, as a ‘thing’ in itself or as merely another form of generalized movement, but as
‘movement’ is supposedly the defining feature of dance I wanted to be specific and
locate a type of movement with parameters specific to circus as a starting point.
There is nothing new here, circus traditionally extends its practice into new areas,
new objects, new challenges, and so for circus to attempt to extend its practice into
 55

a field beyond its reach, namely the immaterial, was for me a way to suggest a new
path but also to retroactively establish a theoretical practice, a circus approach to
theory, that could then act as the basis from which the physical practice could be
the praxis.
It is also a parody; a parody of the way capital itself behaves, insolently sauntering
into every area where it simply does not belong.
This aside, there is a dual goal here: to extend the practice of circus into new areas,
and in doing so that this might generate a more rigorous theoretical standpoint that
future circus practice might be the praxis of this theory.
This is to deepen the pedagogical approach to circus, as stated to deepen its
capacity to work in an integrated way with other disciplines in other fields and to
offer a much needed theoretical rigour in terms of the way circus sees itself and its
relationship to society.

“Today’s circus rests much of its identity on a self-devised, and quite Romantic, image
of its own practice as a marginal art form enjoying its own freedom. Even putting aside
the question of whether this image is accurate in the contemporary scene, it has
become very difficult to separate the romantic clichés that surround the circus from an
understanding of circus as a medium.”

. Bauke Lievens (2015) Second Open Letter to Circus

[Link]

There exists a Romanticism in circus that all too readily matches with the romantic
assumptions of corporate ideology masked as post-ideological individualism, that
we can make our own freedom. I propose the trick here not as the activation of an
actual Romantic ideal of freedom , but as something that needs to acknowledge the
fictional nature of this agency so that the trick becomes a question about the
parameters of meta-positionality, rather than taking this for granted.

But there is also a charge within Lieven’s Open Letter also that identifies the
fascination with insoluble paradox as a Romantic trait.

ROMANTIC GESTURES:

In regard here with my own fascination with the loop, I would answer that I am
aware here that instead of focusing on romanticism’s relation to nature and rational
thought I have related romanticism to its capture within rational systems that
peddle it while negating it, and I am definitely guilty of circling the paradox, and
chasing my tail, the kind of activities that pass for a noble hopelessness in the
Romantic oevre that Lievens identifies.

Although this is the case I feel that the lack of theoretical rigour in the circus field
that has not only allowed a rejection of reason as being supposedly antithetical to
circus vitality (or vitalism) but that this designation also prevents circus from seeing
that the context in which it is permitting itself to ‘romanticise’ is in fact paradoxical. I
reiterate here that ‘unthinking’ romanticism is the dark face of circus precisely
 56

because in expounding this as an approach the artist only expounds a neoliberal

cynical enforcement of being free ‘from’ thought, free ‘from’ any ideological
position, without offering anywhere for freedom to be ‘to’, which is precisely the
conflation of Isaiah Berlins two forms of liberty. The injunction is almost to ‘be
romantic’ so that the institution that grants freedom to be is also the one that
demands you be free from institution. It is neoliberal precisely because it offers a
formless freedom that rejects anything except the continuation of this image of
liberty, which might draw attention to the supporting self-repeating enclosure
within which such post ideology is possible.

I will discuss this mutation later but I think the fascination of paradox for me is not
the emergent trait of a general Romanticism; it is a response to a double bind that is
generally felt by the subject. We are already embedded in a paradox, the Romantic
aspect is just one way of dealing with how this tautological ground is concealed
from us. It is more productive to say that there are better ways perhaps to address
this ground than the pointless doomed romantic gesture of circus. The circus
subject feels it and sometimes expresses it precisely because it causes an excess of
fascination as the meaning of freedom, of agency, mobility, by which circus
erroneously defines itself is embedded in a self negating loop by power.

The doomed feeling is an adaptation to an insoluble double bind, in which circus

insists that operations within gravity will yield an agency that is simply not possible.
This impossibility is forestalled by the applause one receives through the precise
performance of a doomed romantic pose. The only way to feel saved is to act like
there is no hope; this is a gothic, teenage bow followed by rapturous adult applause
in response to a no win scenario in which victory is epic failure. We need to get past
it, but it is there understandably. It is perhaps the result of getting stuck in Trick
One, in the impasse of a doomed fiction. This will be addressed in the text on Trick
Three, but I feel it is worth noting that perhaps this Romance is only the repetition
of what is a rational response to an unwinnable game.

Ironically the love of paradox that Lievens levels at circus is indeed a problem for
circus because this kind of paradox (you must be free) forms the backdrop upon
which circus must survive. Circus is conflicted because it is trying to be different to a
post-ideological neoliberalism with which it agrees. I feel that this problem is
processed as hopelessness, which a certain kind of circus, in trying to be the image
of freedom, can only cope with the impossibility of by striking Romantic poses. The
trick has to be re-invented to deal with an enclosure that demands it.

We are far from free yet and I do not see anything Romantic in the paradox that
makes that so. I do feel circus, in its obsession to move freely and its haste to act as
a conduit to create ‘free’ individuals, has forgotten its role as a purveyor of fictional
escapology.
Such fictions, far from being ineffectual and hopelessly ‘doomed’ are important
not in their capacity to falsely represent freedom now, but to point at the perplexing
conundrum of constructing images of what freedom might look like within a formal
system that permits every freedom but one; leaving the field entirely.
 57

Circus is important in its ability to point to a ‘freedom to come’ but this is not to be
mistaken for ‘special status’ in its position within a system of insurmountable
restriction.
This research aims to discuss the complicity of circus in the same gravities that
affect us all, but to highlight its central mechanism as being a model for the
construction of such fictions. Fictions which can either perpetuate the restriction for
profit or remind us that it is possible and perhaps preferable to point outside of
restriction…this I feel, is its fictional power, not its resigned Romantic swan dive.
It may be that I am guilty as charged; that I am also striking a Romantic pose, but in
a situation of double bind, in which all the other more viable positions are occupied,
in which all the other costumes are taken, at least I am trying to wring something
useful out of this ridiculous get up, rather than wearing it at face value.

CIRCUS THINKING:

One of the goals of this analysis of the trick in relation to different mediums is to
establish a circus thinking and writing that is ‘true’ to the practice. Analogy and
homology are unavoidable here and will be touched upon but I am aware that I am
putting the cart before the horse in thinking about what a practice might mean if it
were already a kind of ‘thinking’. Such time shifts are part of artistic research I feel
and I am caught within it.
There is a subtle time loop that is a cheat maybe, in that it fabricates a theoretical
ground after the practice that is the drive behind circus practice that already exists
to be called ‘praxis’, but in imagining what circus activity might be possible in the
fields of speaking and writing I aim to deepen the investigation of what might be
called ‘circus-thinking’, so that the physical practice can link back to a body of
theory as well as stretch itself forward into new areas outside of its usual physical
remit.

So what would be the method of going into a new area, if that area holds entirely
different parameters?
I will employ a cross register analogy here, a transposition, in that I will apply the
physical mechanism of the trick to Language. Partly I take as my inspiration for this
the cross register analogies of Saussure, as he compares value in commodity with
value in semiotics, to the Homological links through which Lacan is inspired to
reinterpret Marx’s alienated subject as his own barred subject through a critique of
Saussure, I will take as a deepening of this crossing the work of Samo Tomsic who
analyses Marx through Lacanian paradigms.
Further to this I will look at how Berardi’s idea of semio-capital, which through
reference to symbolist poets, serves as an analogy of how capital is enabled to
capture linguistic potencies. I will take as reference Deleuze and Gauttari’s re-
imagining of the unconscious as a factory that reconfigures Lacan’s own linguistic
template of the unconscious as subject to the imperatives of capital.
All of these different cross register analogies or homologies reveal new
potentialities for thought about the nature of this circus mechanism and it is in this
vein that I activate my own attempts at making tricks in these new arenas. In
establishing homological links between Gravity and Language, Language and
 58

Capital and Gravity and Capital I employ various techniques. I apply the physicality
of the trick to linguistics, I apply the science of value to gravity to arrive at a split
between qualitative weight-value and quantitative mass-value, I apply the theory of
general relativity to the science of value in order to arrive at a conception of Four-
dimensional Value-Time. This is a unified fabric of value and time, which is able to
delimit the autonomy of linguistic-value, exchange-value and mass-value thus
implying that a meta-position is in fact not an impossibility, if the subject is willing
to accept the attendant dissolution in value-time.

Value time is a fictional plane through which ‘value-events’ are geometric points
that can be viewed simultaneously, thus negating the synchronic autonomy of
value. In making transpositions, the parameters of thought that open up one area
are applied as techniques to unsuitable areas; in a sense I am chasing the
unworkable analogy.

A JUMP:

I have addressed this need to ‘jump out of the system’. I shift between theoretical
discussion and fictional exposition in this attempt to write circus, which seem to be
the only way to demonstrate in words what words will not allow me to say.
It is perhaps to get underneath the words.

NOW TRICKS IN GRAVITY:

THE TRICK WITHIN GRAVITY WILL BE DISCUSSED IN TERMS OF THE FREEDOM IT

SUPPOSEDLY CONVEYS:

It depends what you believe about the Circus, and it is my belief that it is just as
firmly embedded within capitalism as anything else even though its mythology
seems to be centred on a form of counter-culture Romanticism.
Its industry acknowledges this, and as an arts business model it can be successful
to varying degree at drawing its own remuneration without state support of any
kind.
It is acknowledged also that times are hard; and this drives up the need for
excellence, virtuosity and originality, as well as stratifying the market in certain
ways as it struggles to compete with other more easily accessible and proliferating
forms that reshape our culture generally.
I am not ‘against’ any of these things, the system is insurmountable and this is the
point here, but it is interesting to me that in the current climate in which I feel that
this form of global capitalism is a disregard that is largely out of control, in which
sweat shops, factories and exploitation continue at 19th century levels, and in which
expansion the environment is suffocating, and in which the subject is enmeshed
within the reproductive imperatives of a linguistic form of commodity that
comprises the very nature of that subject, it is vital to draw attention to the way the
supporting ideologies of this rapacious expansion align with the narratives that I
perceive are present within the practice of circus.
 59

I am highlighting this just so we can be clear about what a circus artist would have
to do in order to actually achieve the much discussed status of the radical, critical
outsider in the face of what Mark Fisher calls ‘the cancellation of past futures.”
(Fisher,M. (2009) Capitalist Realism. Zero Books. UK)
This is not a petty critique; what I propose here is a radical circus thinking that
seeks to escape the terms upon which circus is predicated but without inviting the
circus subject by default into an equally objectifying ‘ring’ presided over by this or
that master of ceremonies.
The master is unnecessary to create as a position from which to assist the circus
subject, we get enough of that in the field of gravity, thank you very much. Even if
that master feels that it is necessary to hystericise the subjects position to draw out
what is clear in the negotiation of gravity: you cannot win, deal with it.

So again I wish to stress that this is not prescriptive. Presented here is one mode
that circus thinking might fall into; it is particular to me but perhaps relevant to you.
It is interesting to me to propose this thinking for circus at a time when it seems
largely to agree with the current mode of production.

The focus here is upon how the kind of agency that the trick seems to generate is
valued as ‘real’ and what are the concealments, distortions, fetishisations, or
conflations necessary in order to present circus as a proponent of this supposedly
‘real’ agency.

In thinking through the homological relations between these two areas that I
name as fields of gravity, as well as gravity itself, I hope to demonstrate how gravity
can be seen equally as something that is a totality; expansive enough to ‘house’
freedom, or it can be exposed as a limited field to which freedom is an external
event, visible only in fictional form. This is an important distinction in a time when
circus seems to be reiterating the mantra of neoliberalism in which expressions of
personal agency are monetisable signs capable of the reproduction of capital.

If a trick that claims it is the production of genuine ‘freedom’ actually merely

expands the propensity of the systemic field to enclose that act then the research
asks what would be the benefit, if any, of thinking of such agency as only fiction,
rather than a ‘proof’ that freedom is possible within gravity. It is a question of how
images of freedom, that I feel are created by the trick, are valued within the
prevailing narratives of circus and the role of the trick as a mechanism in exposing or
concealing these value systems.
Would acknowledging the agency generated by the trick as fictional retain its
capacity to point outside of the field within which it was iterated or to something
immanent to it? If the agency within the trick was never attempted to be ratified
within gravity, would that preserve its quality as opposed to entering it into a purely
quantitative scale?
The trick ‘says’ something different about the systemic boundary that contains
what can be legitimately repeated about that boundary from within that formal
system, but is this statement of difference merely the repetition of what a more
complex and tricky formal system demands of it, and is circus’ self-image
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compromised by its embedding within this complexity? In asking about how the
ideologies of circus are embedded within those of capitalism, the question is about
imperatives. What is the capacity of a trick iterated within a trick-like arena?

In fully acknowledging the ‘insurmountability’ of capital, I am still asking how does

the proximity of Circus with the prevailing mode of production affect what it says?
What does circus have to say about another field of which there seems to be no
‘outside’, what tactics does it contain after hundreds of years of negotiating the
indifference of gravity to be able to perform tricks in the indifference of capital?
What trick could escape this gravitational field of ever-expanding monetisation? Is
this a prank on money of some kind? Is it not all manner of tricks and contortions
that we perform to evidence our agency in capital that actually only ever reproduces
the expansion of that field on its own subject-less terms?

Is freedom then a value that circus claims to be able to produce at will? If this is to be
a study of how circus relates to value then it should be the a mechanism that I feel is
central to its practice that takes up this relationship to value.

Obviously one of the main reasons that I think of the trick in relation to value is that
value is a feature of the congruence that I have proposed between these fields.
In seeing these three fields as systems of value I have tracked the way that value
can be iterated through them and as such how the object of this research, the circus
trick interferes with those iterations; thus the trick is seen as a tool for reconfiguring
value within the systems of Gravity, Language and Capital and how this
reconfiguration reflects upon the trick-making subject.
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BREAK DOWN OF CHAPTERS:

2: A GLOSSARY:
This merely comprises a list of the concepts within the work as a guide to how the
complexity of three tricks in three fields will be managed.

3: ROPE WRITING: this gives some background to my practice and my performing

history through which I explain the writing style and approach of this piece. Some of
the themes here are comedy, the clown, rope practice and how this object forms a
circular yardstick for the measurement of impossible architectures.

4: TRICK:
I will continue with a description of the trick as I see it, just the physics perhaps but
also its relationship to my own engagement with performance, the audience and
the practice, to locate myself within this mechanism.

The trick is examined between affect and hard logic, I feel that both of which can
be said to cradle paradox, but both of which cannot be said to let it live. What I
mean by this is that what affectively escapes from a tautology in one register is
logically destroyed in another, the question for the circus trick is how to avoid the
validation of mobility being couched only in terms of its invalidation.
As stated I will look at both the illogical and hard iterations of cold logic, both of
which seem to escape through the impasse from which they issue.

Fiction and affect are main elements here.

In looking at the fictional and affective as both things that are not included but
include a potentiality that becomes inoperable as it is swallowed by inclusivity; and
thinking of these as modes of virtuality that demand something of the actual, I try
to get closer to the disparity between what is conveyed in the trick and what is the
inevitability of no conveyance at all.
Subjective and objective registers are looked at here, incompatibilities between
quality and quantity are examined in relation to fiction being allowed to remain
suspended as a useless, unmarketable demand and its fetishisation as genuine
liberty in the autonomy of gravity that ultimately disallows it. Something escapes in
the trick.

5: A TAUTOLOGICAL GROUND:
I will look at the forces, impasses and autonomous registers that might be ‘said’ to
form a kind of gravity within language for the subject, and I will look at how the
theories of these impasses and a desiring subject implicated within them are a form
of linguistics embedded in psychoanalysis, but then to also look at how this project
of psychoanalysis is complicit within the project and imperative of capitalism, and
how this complicity forms a kind of ‘tricky environment’ in which circus has to
become a proof of freedom. The ground itself is twisted beneath what analysis
attempts to reveal so that it only exposes that which is useful to the imperative of
capital.
 62

What is hysterical reaffirms what it resists. This is already prefigured in Lacan; the
subject, in resisting the name, resists himself or herself.

6: SPEAKING CIRCUS ON THE ROAD: this is a description of the first attempts

to ‘speak circus’. First as a road trip that culminates in the hammering in of a
stake in the middle of nowhere; to mark that a circus of one speaking a circus to
nobody might only need to place one pin in the ground to mark that circus is
unmarked. This is the pitching of a conceptual tent on a rambling journey. These
journ-ettes then begin a slow shrink to nothing at all, via short circuit road trips
that gradually try to extract meaning in smaller and smaller increments until we
are travelling without moving. Attempted here is a road trip that is the duration
of one breath. Goodbye I’m leaving…inhale, exhale…oh, I’m back.
What did you learn?

7: SPLIT GRAVITY:
From this I propose the beginnings of a fiction. In applying the science of value to
gravity I try to activate the homology that I construct between gravity, language
and capital. This is done so that I can first explain the split between what is
fictionally proposed by weightlessness and what is conflated as real freedom by a
circus in complicity with late capitalism.
I propose simply that gravity is divided into two registers: that of weight-value,
which is qualitative, and that of mass-value, which is quantitative.

8: SPLIT VALUE: This acknowledges the incompatibility of registers of value in the

three fields. Within this research a split in value is proposed in the fields of Language
(following Saussure through Lacan), of Capital (following Marx through Tomsic and
Berardi) and finally Gravity (following the homological model of Semio-Capital)
Splits are discussed homologically between meaning and linguistic value, use and
exchange, and weight-value and mass-value.

9: A MARXIST CRITIQUE OF GRAVITY:

From here I take up a critique of circus from the point of the split value internal to
the gravity through which it seeks to validate itself as the production of freedom.
This critique itself is pure fiction, but which seeks to remain as such, weightless
above its reduction to and negation in the register it critiques. As fiction it is a ghost
but one I hope will remain as a provocation and an injunction to circus.
I will provide extracts only of this text.

10: CELINE:
This is a brief look at the conundrum of Celine’s writing style in relation to a
Marxist critique. This chapter attempts to examine the process of bending the
‘truth’ before it is passed through the distorting lens of writing fiction so that as
this bend is bent it comes out straight again at the other end. This process of
writing is examined in terms of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which
posits that gravity is an illusion caused by moving in a straight line through the
curve of space-time. What is proposed as general relativity is tentatively applied
to the science of value, is that this inability of the human perception to ‘see’ the
 63

curve of space time is the cause f gravity, and that this perception is a form of
writing that accepts the pre bent curve of space time and in bending this bend
the world comes out straight as three dimensions and sequential time. This
proposes a trick that might be performed on the human ‘writing’ style to
suggest an ontology that is prior to the written fiction of the world.

11: PAST LIFE REGRESSION:

I move on from this narrative ‘about a critique’ into describing another part of my
practice, which has been past life regression.
There is an engagement in this research with voices from the past. Part of my
practice is involved with hypnotic states and the supposed voices of the dead. In a
desire to perform in the imperceptible tides that foam between time and gravity, I
have adopted many back-room, side show attempts to enter the water.
These voices that represent the ghosts of my ideas are a circus ensemble that
whisper also about the relation between fiction and history. In acknowledging that
what I live now is a ghost that affects those not yet born, and in acknowledging that
fictionalising a ghost is a way of altering the past forever I researched the difference
between time and gravity, eventually consenting to be wrecked on the inoperability
of the trick.
This was an attempt to move outside the edict to be mobile that I found to be
present in my earlier research travels. In trying to speak circus on the road in the
early phases of this research I found myself repeating the tropes of individualism to
the point where I felt it necessary to reduce these journeys down to nothing. This
process is fully documented here but past life regression, as an immobile speaking
of journeys across landscapes of the past, seemed to be the culmination of the
problematic of mobility.
As a trick, it was performed in time. As a system it was approached as a form of
gravity. As an un-academic methodology it was valued, and as a sideshow circus
practice it was performed. As clowns we went to Vienna in 1402, to America in the
30’s and to Sweden in 1644.
As a trick it is also a parody of the area of post-fact within which anyone can
become anybody, which draws us deeper into a question. If freedom has to
acknowledge itself as fiction, where does that leave the fictionalisation of an area
beyond diffference in which freedom no longer has to make such
acknowledgements? Is this still subject to those same terms? This is about gravity
and that gravity being the impossibility of meta-language, of saying something
outside of the discourse upon which you rely for speech.
There is a larger fictional adjunct to this and to the following chapter on value time
of which I will only provide an extract.

12: VALUE-TIME:
The issue of time them looms large for me, and after tying myself in knots
throughout this research in order to establish a trick that could remain fictional long
enough to point to freedom, I try to imagine myself simply outside the rope of time.
This for me becomes a way of addressing the above question; a fiction of time travel
is the only viable fiction left.
 64

If all of the binds involved within gravity, language and capital are caused by a way
of seeing, then I fictionally propose another perception. In the final loop I make the
solution for the trick to not have to be fictional by fictionalising the space in which
that might be possible. And so the final knot I hope will undo itself.
I will engage with fiction as a tool to research how the circus subject might
become able to work a trick through the complex and intricate gravities at play in a
fabric of space time comprised of language and capital that compromise and enable
each other in equal degree…the circus subject here is fictionalised as someone at
the edge of reason, on a rolling wave of impasses and contradictions; ever agreeing
and disagreeing with the vagaries of capital, ever uttering yes to no, and no to yes in
a knotted wave.
In an examination of binds, the last part of this text is the examination of either a
space outside of the idea of rope as negative, or the inevitability of an eternal knot
as positive.

Time features as a form of gravity, greater than Gravity itself, as to work a trick in
time is to evolve past the body, past the terms under which circus is defined.
That is an engagement with resisting time is posited as resistance to gravity, as to
enter a four-dimensional field is to be in a space in which gravity cannot exist as a
force. It follows the premise that gravity is an illusion caused by moving in a straight
line through the curve of space-time. So if gravity is caused by an inability to see
space-time and gravity demands that weightlessness be acknowledged as only
fiction; this then implies that the only way to ‘see’ space-time and escape these
terms that demand acknowledgment of weightlessness in gravity as fictional is to
fictionalise what space-time might look like. This is a loop as to be free of the terms
under which the only agency is fictional, you need to fictionalise what it might be
like to get beyond those terms.
Thus Time represents the last gravity, and which requires the trick of altered
perception, as this is the trick that can perhaps dispense with the split in the register
of value that binds the subject and so defeats the gravity of the impossibility of a
meta-language. The corollary of this is that it sees human perception as the
fictionalisation of space-time into three dimensions and sequential fourth.

Thus this is the trick performed on the trick itself that can no longer function on a
tautological ground, but which may dissolve the subject as it is performed.

13: CERCIS OF JUDE:

This chapter is largely fictional and attempts to bring together the consequences
of the trick. What has been proposed to be the various outcomes of the trick as it
seeks to be transposed in the three fields in question all meet here and try to answer
the riddle of fictionalising real weightlessness.
 65

14: CONCLUSION:
I will try to sum this all up.

I think it is necessary to be well versed in the code you are trying to hack, just as it is
important for a clown to know a ladder inside out, how it behaves under the law of
gravity, down to its every nuance, creak and wobble as without this intimate
knowledge he will not be able to appear to fall off it accidentally. This is also a trick.
There is no clumsiness here in clowns, only technicians that attempt to know what
they are tinkering with in order to get things to do what they are not supposed to
do, to remind us that the way a ladder is organised need not tell us what to do; that
ladder-makers do not get to design the subject of ascension.
So in engaging with the very real practice of circus, the grip and sweat of it, I am
aware that I can only be fictionally free, as the fiction I have made of a world with no
gravity is now so real I cannot get to weightlessness.
As a hacker I am restricted to the laws of code through which I try to write my
trick, so I need to know them. It is perhaps as a clown I am writing theory, to
demonstrate some virtuosity at falling off the shoulders of giants. So be it.
Let it come down.
 1

CHAPTER TWO: ‘Rope-Writing’

This chapter outlines the influences upon my attempts to speak and write circus.
This is an examination of different areas that might facilitate transposition of the
trick into other fields, as well as being a delineation of a joke told to make you laugh
and a joke told to make me appear funny. This is a designation central to this text in
relation to the trick.

“Is it possible to speak circus?”

This is the question with which I began, and it came from the two main threads of
my practice, a desire to weave them together.
These two threads are working on a vertical rope and of speaking directly to the
audience. This chapter could equally be called Rope-Rambling.

“Is it possible to speak a trick?”

The decision to write a book was not taken lightly; it was done out of a concern for a
field in which there is not much writing, so it became important for me, in regard to
certain prevailing narratives of the virtues of muteness, that the loudest break I
could make with this tradition was to write down what I want to say. I am trying to
do this through what I consider to be a central mechanism of my practice.
So in this regard I am also interested in writing a trick and how this unit might
become operable on the page as well as in the mouth, the play between these two
registers is also my concern, and so features here in these pages also; they represent
a glimpse into the earliest thoughts that have lead to this work, and so flirt with the
‘harder’ designations that appear elsewhere in the text.

The attempt has opened up a discussion of the subject and how, in trying to speak
this complicated, tautological unit, this subject has become entangled in the
contradictions, paradoxes and double binds that categorise structural linguistics.
Further to this, in an attempt to locate this voice in a socio-political context, the
speaking of a trick has also lead the ‘trick-making’ subject to become compromised
by entanglement in the tautologies and internalised knots of Capitalism.

The premise of transposing the physicality of circus practice into another register
calls for many approaches and here I use models, templates, diagrams, association
and fiction to transpose the trick within this text.
I try not to follow resemblances too literally
It is a methodology that try to operate with precision, however as with any
transposition, there is poetry, association and belief involved and the work also
acknowledges this.
 2

COTTON-VERSATION:

In my practice I climb pointlessly up and down a cotton rope and so another

influence was to try to incorporate this practice into my work here. I climb, I come
down , I speak to you, I climb, I climb down while speaking, I speak holding the rope,
I talk to you as I perform rope magic. But a true transposition eluded me. What then
would be a recognizable template for directly addressing the audience, taken from
the physicality needed on the rope?

This research question is on-going but transposed utterance such as this, or the
journey to it, can put forward ideas that are rooted in concepts of artistic research
itself; that there are no nested structures for abstract or conceptual thought per se. I
am performing ‘thinking’ operations whether I am handling a rope or a concept. The
part of my brain that handles rope, handles equally well the philosophical impasse
of Lacanian thought. When you add to this the corollary, which is that the tongue is
handling words, lapping and flexing at the air that I expel from my lungs, the lips
and teeth are all in a complex choreography to say ‘things’, to manipulate concepts,
then the brain thinks in the material of rope, as the gums flap up and down around
the abstract.

“The cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes
above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. I am
referring to such operations as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials,
simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison,
problem solving as well as combining, separating, putting in context. These operations
are not the prerogative of any one mental function; they are the manner in which the
minds of both man and animal treat cognitive material at any level. There is no basic
difference in this respect between what happens when a person looks at the world
directly and when he sits with his eyes closed and ‘thinks’.”

(Rudolf Arnheim (1969) ‘Visual Thinking’ Berkeley.)

This goes some way to making analogy the obvious default position, in that if
thinking has to occur through ‘things’ then it is clear that if I can find out what I seem
to be doing in the trick that this could structure a mechanism of thinking that is
essential to trick-making, that could then be transposed into other fields. I need to
be better than analogy.

Just as I am saying that a hand gripping a rope is similar to a tongue gripping a word,
I am saying that moving is thinking within as much as talking is dancing in another
space.
So is it possible to speak a trick? To actually utter it I see, as a goal that is in a
constant state of slippage, as are the terms that one would use to set the
boundaries, being couched as they are in the medium of language itself.
This is also true of the objects that I play with in my practice, which are constantly
slipping away from my control, forcing me to exude more and more technique; any
technique, any desperate flexing of the limb in question to remain alongside them.
 3

The speaking of circus is similarly slipping away; it is always ‘to come’. This approach
I also see in the trick itself, which speaks a little liberty, inoperable, simultaneously
free and not free, nodding forward to a freedom ‘to come’.

As an aside: I have chosen to deal with the field of Capital and in relation to
researching through my practice I think that, as artistic research becomes a
negotiation with what is ‘done’, and what is ‘done’ in the practice is often done in
the presence of capital, then I cannot pretend to be out of this looped perspective.
Artistic research intends that the knowledge of artistic production is in its
production; the know-how in the craft is the thinking, and this is to be exposed. But
for me, because the production of art is now inseparable from its modes of
dissemination as capital, the knowledge of the production of art is located in the
financial know-how that presents art to itself as viable art and not in the craft itself.
The practice is a timed response to the new alone, the thinking therefore is in the
temporality of the ‘new’ before it loses value. In this way dissemination of art as
capital is the new hands on know-how, it is the craft. I acknowledge many artists
embrace this.
Thus the ‘craft’ of art can be executed with no knowledge of its material
production, no practice to draw from except the knowledge of its internal relations
between the two incompatible registers of use and exchange. Some art seeks to
expose this, some seeks to conceal it…the problem of artistic research as verifiable
knowledge of artistic production then has to perhaps engage with capital.
Tricks in capital therefore will be discussed.

The Hypnotist and the Horserace. Part One.

DAY ONE, Late Afternoon:

I awoke feeling feverish. Cold sweat, the contradiction of it made my

clothes into my skin and my skin on the outside…it turned things upside
down…cold sweat, like being poisoned by a doctor.
I was here to find out more about Dr Mary Minkowski. Our first brief
meeting, being shown around her strange greenhouses, here in this
unlikely place. That meeting seems infused with mist, an impossible
pollen in the air, the multiple planes of glass intersecting the intense
humidity… as I imagine passing through that greenhouse following the
back of her white coat, brushing leaves and insects from my face…I
imagine it now as a bizarre geometry, of panes of milky glass suspended,
free-floating from their designated frames, that the greenhouse was
somehow a mathematical expression of an inhuman diagram…the panes at
 4

angles that express the impossibility of the space…

The plants grew here improbably…had I been bitten by something…as she
turned and spoke to me I felt woozy.

“The plants we grow here are done so in the future. They are future
plants. They grow without sustenance, because that comes later. It is
not until they are fully grown that they will finally receive all of the
water and sunlight they would have received during their life. They owe
the sun, they owe the rain.
But I speculate now. I know how to harvest now what has not yet
been sown. The plants you see here have not yet been planted.”

I can remember mumbling some questions about her processes. She

sharpened her features in my direction, I felt her gardener’s interest in
my body grip me briefly, as if she was assessing the weight of a recently
unearthed tuber.
The greenhouse at this end was built on sticks over the river and some
local clay bricks. I could feel its instability rushing beneath the thin
boards at our feet. I realised I was trying to steady myself by imagining
good, solid, British house bricks.

“Take this Japanese Knot Weed for instance..it is the exact reverse
example of what I am doing here. This plant is currently being
introduced to botanical gardens in England…”

England. Did she know I was thinking of home? My mind reeled with the
journey I had undertaken to arrive here in this remote part of South
America…the train …the ship…the snaking river to arrive here at this
isolated Mission, the centre of Dr Mary Minkowski’s research.

“…but what the keen botanists of the bourgeois, ornamental gardens do

not realise that this little plant will infiltrate the soil, it is a rhizome,
and as such it is unstoppable. Its shoots are many, its stems are fibrous,
it can extend in all directions at once and, like a slow explosion, it will
rend the old Victorian brickwork into fragments. This Knot Weed will
 5

crack and de-stabilise the foundations of the colonial institutions that

brought it there. I predict that this plant will destroy the value of your
home by up to fifty percent.”

I remarked that perhaps the study of botany and property were best
left as separate disciplines.

“…No. I speculate on growth. This is what we do here.” Her voice was

thin and piercing as if it were a hypodermic seeking some access to my
feverishness.

She continued, “…I have understood and realised the single most
important discovery. That it is possible to end speculation. Just as the
Knot Weed burrows its roots into the supports of the institutions that
try to host it, so I have come up with a way to reap something not
yet sewn. The Knot Weed destroys value to create debt…I have found a
way to create debt to destroy value. I have found a way to make
speculation a thing of the past.”

Our entire first meeting had now the damp remorse of a dream.

To speak something physical is already implying, and it is no more than an

implication, that there is a way of ‘doing’ thinking that could mean ‘thinking’ is
doing and it is this to and fro and sometimes fusion in my practice that I will try to
explain. Writing and rope inform each other.

It is this last point, that of ‘rope-writing’, which leads me, as W.S. Burroughs would
say, “to write my way out of here”.
It seems only fitting that the frame that should make ‘sense’ of all these practices is
a fiction.
So for this next section, I will posit a story, an imaginary situation, to which I feel
my work, is a very real response.

THIS IS FICTION:
 6

THE RULE OF CIRCUS LAW:

I imagine a society in which Circus is compulsory by law, a society in which

the only way that you can be a viable, functioning member is to be able to
perform some kind of circus act or trick. Anyone who does not comply is
marginalised or removed.
It is necessary for you to be able to perform your ‘act’ whenever you are
called to do so, and there are random, regular calls, rather like Jury Service,
which a citizen must attend. This freedom to make whatever act you desire,
is rigorously policed so that you must comply with the activation of your
freedom to make tricks.
The doctrine here is that everyone has an act inside them, everyone has
the capacity to fashion a trick that frees them from restraint in some way,
and that these public shows are celebrations of every individual’s capacity
to evoke a moment of personal freedom; to display their own version of
resistance, temporary autonomy and mobility conferred on them by their
activation of the trick.
Those acts presented must reach a certain ‘score’ on the Clap-O-Meter, an
autonomous device that measures the level of applause. Acts that do not
receive the requisite score will be socially penalised. Those with no trick at
all will be imprisoned.

SOCIETY AS APPLAUSE:

Please after reading this, take a moment to close your eyes, to make
yourself comfortable and to imagine such a scenario.

“I want you to imagine walking down your street to the Local Square or
public hall to witness a show. You will be witnessing the acts presented by
loved ones, by those you may see around your neighbourhood. Perhaps a
local shopkeeper, a delivery boy, or the girl who works in your office are
getting ready right now, stretching, warming up, checking props and
equipment. Builders, Judges, telephone sales people, Web Designers and
Factory workers all are performing tonight their own special iteration of
circus.
As you walk along, the breeze rustles your clothes, the sun warms your
limbs as you feel that Summer is on its way.
You have been given a date and you have been regularly attending your
designated slot in one of the many circus rehearsal spaces that exist in your
area. You think through your act, aware of what still does not work properly,
worrying over the details of the choreography.
A delicious ripple of nervousness flushes through your abdomen as you
think of what can go wrong, of where you are injured, of where you are not
yet strong enough. You think about your diet, your power training, and your
aerobic fitness. You plan which parts of your body to expose, which to
conceal.
 7

You calm yourself by imagining your costume, it cost a lot of money but you
know that it will make the difference. You are walking up the path to the
show now, it is warm in the early evening, the shadows are long and stretch
across the stones, each one you step over increases the volume of excited
conversation in the queue, as you approach the entrance to the hall.
You take your place, sighing into the sunset as you grip your ticket.
Wondering exactly what tricks you could perform to demonstrate your inner
freedom as an individual. How can you become what you are told to deserve?
Soon you will be on the inside, getting ready, and everyone you know will be
queuing up to watch you perform your place in the society of Late Circusism.”

Please take five minutes now. Put down the text, find a comfortable spot
and with your eyes closed just walk through these events, imagine yourself
in this mandatory scenario.
Take the time to think through fully what you would perform for us, how
will you capture our attention, how will you climb or flip or juggle or
balance? What costumes will you wear, will you smile, what attitude
exactly captures the essence that you desire to portray, what music will
accompany you as you take your place in this circus society?

When you have done this, open your eyes. Where are you? Can you describe
your surroundings?

What is the trick you would perform… here… now?

There are obvious references here. Circus itself is such a ‘society’; the circus schools
enact exactly this societal demand actually, but I am not critiquing these
establishments for asking students to work, it is more complex than that.
But also more subtly I am getting at the inherent, adopted performativity and
construction, through consumerist accumulation, of the “extraordinary individual”,
which seems to exist as an activity within our actual society. This fiction I believe is
actually not so fictive, but here I employ it as a story to reflect upon the practice.
Here an awkward analogy begins to form in which the circus, the container of all
tricks against gravity, becomes a form of gravity against which it is necessary to
perform tricks.

In one sense my practice is driven by the question of how a circus artist would
perform tricks in opposition to the gravitational pull of a society in which such
‘Circusism’ was compulsory? That is, if circus is gravity what tricks are possible or
even functional?

This conundrum is folded further by it being asked through a fictional

dystopia/utopia.
 8

But either way it becomes entirely necessary to ask what if something that seems
to be essentially ‘transgressive’ were not only permitted by law but made essential
for your survival in society.

Knots:

So the trick reaches the point where it can even be applied back to itself and its
notions of transgression.
There are also notions here of how the tropes and clichés of my circus practice are
captured in corporate capitalism. There is a line of reasoning about how the trick
involves a certain self-reflexive tautology, which I hope to explain here, and which
demonstrate the rationale of a trick that tricks itself, and how this can perhaps
enable the inoperable.
Double binds can yield paradoxical results, so if the mandatory edict is ‘to be free’
there needs to be a paradoxical solution to evade such an edict.
It may be that we have to re-craft the awful ‘anything goes’ of post factism into
something that does not conflate fiction with fact, but which owns up to being a
fiction of what I might be like to get underneath the separation between something
not yet realised and something concrete.

I am aware that my circus is to some extent a self-made bind, that I am inventing

the problem of climbing a rope for myself. This adding of obstacles is part of a
tradition of ‘making it harder’ which we all acknowledge in circus but I want to note
here that I will not be psychoanalysing this practice, but only focusing on what is
‘done’ on a daily basis and this perhaps is a further reason for this ficticious frame
which insists that circus must be ‘done’.

We have already seen how it is knotted, convoluted and infuriatingly self-referential

and I apologise for that in advance but I feel that these main points will assist in
knowing some of the approaches that have formed my thinking and which have
been present in and through the work I have produced, and I hope will indicate some
continuing circus life after the pages are folded up.

Stand-Up for your Rights:

Another major influence here on modes of speech that are self-contained

comments on the rules of assumed meaning is my use of jokes.
I simply do not believe that a joke is something light.

Part of my performance history has been taken up with comedy. I worked as a stand
up comedian in the early 90’s in London, during which time there was a boom in this
wholly individualised form of public speaking. It was generally cheap to set up a
comedy club: one microphone, one light, a small room above a pub, a sympathetic
landlord looking to draw in customers. It was an immediate and cheap approach to
performing.
 9

I was always interested through comedy in the position of the clown, and although
the stand up is not strictly in the position of the clown or fool, there can be
deliberate misunderstanding, word-play, subversion of assumption and logic gone
awry to play with as opposed to the ‘wise’ stand up raconteur who necessarily
knows ‘more’ than the audience, revealing his observations and insights with a dry,
ironic wit.
In some regard I was enjoying stand up comedy but also considered it to be a kind
of ‘automated agent’ that tries to predict what you like to hear, or focus in on who it
gleans you might like to see derided. There was an ugly side to it in which the act of
speech was about reassurance of prejudice and affirmation of mainstream thinking.
The goal for me was to say the unsayable, but there seemed to be a large portion of
performers who were merely echoing the darker sentiments of the public and doing
very well.
It seemed that jokes could reinforce hegemony just as well as they could be
iconoclastic.

Within its history there were seminal figures like Lenny Bruce, who embracing the
constellation of spoken word poetry and jazz, ‘improvisationally’ blew his gag-
trumpet right into an obscenity trial. The belief that was fostered here was that you
are the joke, that is your position within a rigid structure as a self-expressive
individual was comedy in itself, and all you had to do was blow, blow and keep
blowing your ‘truth’ and its juxtaposition to how you were supposed to be in a
society would naturally form the necessary two-step narrative structure of set-up
and punch.
Jokes are in two halves. The first story was how we assume a person should be and
the second is how you really are. Examine a few jokes and this becomes clear.

The individual became a trick that it was necessary to perform in order to occupy
social space, to have a voice, and the stand up comedian was formulated along the
lines that this ‘trick of individuality’ could take the form of a joke. So that your
persona, your look, your view, your ‘take’ on life would generate a humourous
juxtaposition between the virtual narratives of assumed meaning and your actual
standpoint.***(see below in red)
The joke can be thought of as two narratives, the first is expounded as a statement
which contains the needed socially accepted assumptions of meaning or value, the
second narrative is your as of yet unincluded viewpoint that subverts or contradicts
this primary narrative whilst remaining true to its conditions.

The construction of this new voice called stand up comedy relied upon you being as
much of an individual as you possibly could be. This is where the joke was. To tell a
joke was to tell your ‘truth’.
The trick you performed here was your individuality; that was the whole gig, man,
you dig?

Birth of alternative stand up is tied up with the birth of the individual and in this the
emphasis shifted from the idea of an entertainer to an individual voice, which, if it
 10

was honest would naturally find itself at humorous odds with the mainstream
delineations of how it was supposed to be.
This echoed the growing trend of encounter groups who fostered the belief that
health lay in the peeling back of layers placed there by society and that beneath this
lay a new self-expressive individual who should forge their own way of living starting
by saying everything that they were not supposed to say.
So we can see there is a belief system here in a new subjectivity, one in which the
subject is essentially good and it is the following of restrictions placed on him or her
by society that cause disruptive or unhealthy behavior, so here there is a definite
belief in this cathartic explosion of verbal riffing, the laughter it creates as being
directly connected to social health. The opposite however was also true in that the
combination of becoming an individual and trying to say that which reaffirmed the
publics already established bias meant that individuality had to fit into an individual
mold whose transgressions reaffirmed the hegemony. This seemed to echo the idea
that in order to preserve the market, as it already was it needed to be flooded with
constant change. The new had to maintain the old.

INDIVIDUALISM AS A DUTY:

In this section I have to digress a little to talk about how for me the compulsory
construction of an individual was formulated as the duty of every citizen as I feel it
relates to injunctions that for me are implicit within circus currently. I would also like
to outline how stand up comedy was predicated on this expression of an individual
‘take’ on the rigid structures of social meaning; as a cathartic exposure of them.

I am proposing that circus, just like Stand Up comedy, becomes an extension of the
beliefs of the human potential movement of the 60’s; that the goal seems to be
extraordinary individualism.
This movement focused on personal ‘growth’ as an agent of social change, and
which largely grew out of the realisation that to enter into conflict with state power
was too dangerous, and that this new subtle resistance was based on the forging of
a new self expressive, ‘changed’ individual, who, by challenging the norms within
themselves, placed there by society, would necessarily ‘change’ the society as they
became more able at expressing their inherent difference and individuality.

In this sense the joke is the verbal equivalent of the trick, in exactly the same
problematic constellation to the hegemony as the trick, in the sense that to be ‘like’
a stand up comedian in the way you iterate your own personal view of life, this is
another way in which you exercise the compulsory trick of expressing your own
individual ideology, but which is compromised by the double bind of becoming
individual enough to become part of a group. The corollary of this is also true in
which your identity depends on your identification as part of a collective group.

I highlight that the premise of a joke is essentially the counterpointing of the

assumed socially normative meaning of the topic with the new expressive
 11

individual, the theory is here is that this will naturally always result in humour as all
the individual will have to do is to express their own honest view, and this will
naturally be in surprising, subversive relation to the accepted norm.
The only edict here is that you be honestly self expressive, the narrative of the new
stand up is that your very position as an individual will be at odds with any accepted
position on any subject, precisely because you are unique.
There is only one problem “Be yourself” is an impossible injunction to fulfil without
error, as we fine upstanding citizens are all fully aware.
In terms of the joke being a rationale here for the study of the inner workings of
the trick, it can be seen here that just as the joke can propose its functionality on the
creation of the self interested individual telling it, it can be seen here how the trick
can be iterated in this same fashion. The trick also can be the proof of as well as the
originating principle behind the individual who performs tricks to keep the profits of
this self-referential loop rolling in. How funny is that?

Being The Adventures of Happy Down-River. Part One.

“…the crowd is hushed, the drum rolls, I roll my shoulders and breathe deeply
offstage…1…2…3…I am here, I am here, I am here…Here I am in another body:
Good evening my name is Happy Down-river, I am a Souix Indian”

Happy went through his opening lines, saying them to himself silently, waiting to
enter the circle. His white Roan stirred beneath him, snuffling for un-popped corn in
the sawdust.
He pulled his heavy feathered cloak around him, “damn cold”, he breathed a cloud
of steam, that his horse repeated like an echo.

The Ring Master continued his introduction: “what you are about to see will defy
logic, addle your brain, and leave you reeling…”

“What is being sold here is a lie”, Happy thought to himself as he waited for the
Ringmaster to finish.

“Ladies and Germs what you are about to see is a feat rarely attempted in the
western hemisphere. I will present for you now a genuine North American Indian
Shaman who plays heathen games with the words of our Christian tongue. He will
profane…
GASP

He will blaspheme…
GASP

But not the lingo itself, oh no, he will desecrate the value of our money that
supports those words.
 12

“I will defile your English gold, that you stole from the womb of our world…” intoned
Happy, going over his lines idly in the wings.

The Ringmaster continued with a rising, theatrical invective: “He will attempt to
perform a feat of memory so vast it will astound you. He has memorized the entire
day’s trading on the Foreign Currency exchange, ladles and jellyspoons, where hour
by hour huge fortunes flow back and forth, more money than you or I could dream
of, and he is equipped with a prestigious, nay prodigious, nay… perspicacious…”
The crowd lowed like cattle as if the barker’s acrobatic adjectives were better than
straw,
“…a PERILOUS knowledge of the likely forecasts of today’s trading and he will
predict to the penny the value of anything you care to name.
But this is not the end, lintels and gentle-beams, he will go on to demonstrate how
he has memorized a currency value for every letter of the alphabet.
The letter A has the value of the Deutschmark, the letter B is that of the Pfennig,
X, Y, Z are the Hot-Headed East Caribbean Dollar, the mysterious Yen and the
sensuous perfume of the Moroccan Dirham…yes latelys and Gentle-Whens, exotic
currencies from around the world will appear here tonight in this ring of the English
Alphabet.

This wild and wholly genuine Red Indian shaman will demonstrate how every
foreign currency can be brought under the yoke of the English language, and words
that we know and love can be ter-rans-lated before your very eyes into real values
floating on the foreign exchange market of this day the 1st of September 1844.
Yes, you heard me correctly you will think of a word and Happy Down-River
Shaman of the Dakota tribe will tell us in a heartbeat the trade price of that word on
the market…the words will dance before your eyes, the currencies will melt as
Happy trades them back and forth to make a financial crossword the likes of which
will rattle the value of the spare change in your pocket…

“I am Lakota, you moron,” breathed Happy, practicing his stage grin.

“…all of these shenanigans will be verified by our own Alderman Edgar Japes of the
London Stock Exchange and the Laaa-test invention of scientific propensity, the last
word in addition, subtraction and up to date mercantile prestidigitation…THE
TICKER…TAPE…MACHIIIIIINE!”
The expansive gesturing of the showman only lead the Alderman to fidget into a
nervous bow, still holding onto the frame of the telegraph printing device that was
to verify Happy’s feat of memory.
The crowd vaguely applauded for this latest innovation. Happy winced and shifted
in the saddle. This was a tough crowd.

“Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome into the ring, all the way from the
Americas, Happy Down-Riverrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…”
“What is being sold here is a fiction…” thought Happy as he urged his horse
forward into the gas light.
Spreading his cloak wide, speaking only to himself:
 13

“I am no longer a mud man, I am Eagle, soaring above the useless flood of their
paper money. In the wind the blood of the dollar tastes like poison rain, our children
die as seasons are traded for endless death. Those that count, you will pay all you
have…”
The crowd gasped at his dark, angular and heavily painted face; it was set deep in
the bone and bead and feather of his transformation, as he drew his bow, every
muscle in the tent was taut as wet canvas.

Clown Success is Failure:

But for me it was the clown I was more interested in, perhaps not as cool, but
somehow more universal. Acrobats for success and clowns for failure as they say in
the circus. And to me these new blowhards of self-expression seemed to be more
like successful verbal acrobats who took a word-profit from language as they used it
to inflate their individuality, rather than those who unassumingly displayed fragility
and vulnerability in their comedy of errors.
There seemed to me more elegance in saying something wrong to reveal hypocrisy
than saying something right to be better than those you critiqued. If it was a
performance, why not expose the bigotries and selfishness of the scene itself by
performing as a compromised human being rather than as a master of language.
There was a finer and more nuanced negotiation to be undertaken from a low
status position if jokes were to be operated as a critique of those above you. It
stands to reason that to laugh at those below you was, as stated, the darker side of
the comedic arts.

Speaking Clown:

I went into circus precisely because it was not inculcated into the mainstream. The
clown, I felt, was a more provocative and genuine figure of comedy than the stand
up who idealised and epitomised the individualism of the time. ‘Stand up’ seemed
the opposite of bearing your own guts as it purported to be but the wearing of
others’ skin in a kind of bizarre ingratiating display of infinite mirroring. I reinforce
your assumption and you reinforce mine. Stand up comedy is perhaps the first
tracking algorithm, recording ‘likes’ and reflecting more likeability back at the
audience; “if you like that, you’ll love this…etc. etc.”

So as a clown who spoke, I found a rope. In climbing up and down and speaking
perhaps I was still bisected by a huge microphone-stand from floor to ceiling.
They say that the stand up comedian is closer to the buffoon, a damaged clown
who knows more than he should, but I felt that if I was flirting with the verticality of
the buffoon more by being on the rope rather than behind a mic stand. The Buffoon
exists on line from Heaven to Hell and the rope seemed like such a line. It would be
more ‘true’ to that figure to mock even the idea of becoming a viable individual by
performing a few jokes or tricks. The joke lay in a joke played on the formula itself.
 14

So I was not in it for the glory.

I was interested in the connection through the guts, through the visceral body, from
the bestial earth, all the way down to Hell below and through the rope in my guts up
to the ideals of Heaven.

“Just for jolly, wouldn’t you?”

(Burroughs W (1984) The Western Lands. Picador. London)

How to navigate that line as a more honest figure; not saying what you wanted to
hear for laughs, but to use comedy to say what was otherwise un-hearable, not to
prove I was unique, but to try to get at what was universally funny for all of us. Ha
Ha Ha. I was incredibly noble in those days.

Inaudability was something I valued on the rope, its silent critique of the line of
reasoning with which you supported yourself. I liked knot speaking on it; I liked
speaking before and after it. I tried not to be cynical.

“…I don’t mean to sound cruel and heartless…but I am…so that’s how it comes
out…”
(Hicks, B (1997) Rant in E Minor. Rykodisc. New York)

The rope made a space on the stage to say other things, it allowed me to be there
but it also changed what I thought about speaking…it knotted what I said, or I
allowed this other practice, of negotiating the awful laws of heaven and hell as a
clown, to colour what I spoke about.
In identifying the laws that ran between heaven and hell as a gravitational law and
making this my meditation, I began to be aware I was meditating physically on what
you were not supposed to say in heaven just as much as what you were not
supposed to say in hell, The trick could go either way.
This attempt was not to substantiate a subject, but for the joy of jokes.
Occasionally you meet comics like that, who genuinely only care for the art of it
and are happy to give you a joke because they know it will be funnier coming from
you.
That is a nod to the same idea, in which the subject’s position is acknowledged as a
naturally ridiculous position; but not however an approach organised around the
desperate construction of one’s own individuality.
And so in this sense the clown was the figure of use here, in his iteration as courtly
fool, he also negotiated a fine line, he was designed to enter court, to enter the
place where the gravity of the law on utterance was at its greatest, the most
extreme verbal gravity of all: in the presence of the King and/or Queen and to utter
what was not supposed to be said.
The game is nuanced because while you can say what is not usually acceptable all
the while you are falling back on the idea that this was the utterance of a fool. So
the power of this utterance laid in its invalidity…its truth as critique came from the
fact it could not possibly be true…its inoperability was its active strength.
 15

As well as making statements from the position of invalidity, it was important to

build this invalidity into the utterance. The spoken word humour I was interested in
was often the kind of looped, self-referential ‘logic gone awry’ that seemed to be
creating a grand theory but which was actually an erroneous architecture, held in
place by one misunderstanding, and once this tie became undone the whole edifice
would collapse.
This idea of building self-important constructions out of language that mocked the
sense of language itself, and the speaker who spoke them, seemed to me to be a
better way of deconstructing the ‘successful’ wordsmith, the blowhard, the
trumpet-faced individual who had got the smell of themselves.

The rope was also a pointless journey that goes nowhere, the futility of drawing a
line out of gravity was the perfect thing for a clown to undertake…
There was an inoperability about this ‘travelling without moving’ that seemed to
match with the ‘speaking about nothing’.

As I worked on a rope…with knotted guts, with loops, tongue twisters and

tautologies, all forms of nonsense designed to parody the double binds of power
that insisted that ‘I make sense of I’, this fed into my ideas about speech.
I worked with the line, of how to remain on the line of acceptable language but to
make that line say unacceptable things; to be un-correct.
In this way the combination of the rope and the joke started to form my ideas
about how to speak a trick.

The Hypnotist and the Horserace. Part Two.

The thickness of the air was gathering. I felt like I was breathing in the
spores of these invasive floras. We were at one end of the immense
greenhouse, sweltering in a tight alcove, the late afternoon sun bearing
its yellow teeth through the fogged glass. We were surrounded by thick,
bamboo-like shoots covered in shapely leaves with dark red veins. The
Knot Weed seemed to lean in as she gripped my arm.

“I have found a way to grow plants now without sun or water. They
grow creating a nutrient-debt, which can be fed to them later, after
they have been cut down. This is what we have been doing…”

Her voice tailed from enthusiasm to suspicion. Her blue eyes seemed
convinced of a future that was not yet planted in the here and
 16

now…but I sensed I was already not part of that future. I had arrived
to help her collate her studies, to go through her notes prior to their
publication, but I was already feeling that I was an unwelcome presence
here.

“…we have been retrieving the plants as information, before it is possible

for us to know it, which then tells us what seeds to later sow, so that
we can retroactively enjoy now what is not yet known to us. This Knot
Weed has received no water or sunlight until today. It was possible for
me to grow it and only water it after it has finished growing. You do
not realise yet, but once we start work, you will understand that it is
possible to paddle gently in both directions in the river of time.
I have found a way to see what has grown downstream, before I need
to go upstream to plant those same saplings.
Imagine collecting a stick that you threw in the river, upstream from
a place where you have not yet thrown it in.”

My head was swimming. I made my excuses…the journey, fever and I left

the greenhouse…it seemed to me to be full of mad tendrils, that had
burrowed deep into the foundations of my own ideas of space and the
order of time… the doctor was clearly confused…
As I walked away she was still talking about how her discovery would
make all the markets crash, that her knotweed would crack the temporal
logic of bourgeois capitalism.
Was she shouting? All I know is, as I turned, I could barely see her
amidst the impossible weeds.

Accidental Meaning:

So I am a rope artist, and I believe that in following a line you have to be open to
coincidence, that this is as much part of the linear process as any rigorous method.
 17

Between me affecting the line, and the parameters of the material of that line
affecting that around which it wrapped itself, including me, things happen.
And here is an idea of a purely abstract thing like a line having qualitative
properties…that a concept can be handled, that it can then have material qualities…
I am causing this crossover because I am thinking about my rope in this way…just as
an example of how a conceptual register can end up in a material register…how an
encounter with an object can create concepts, how handling a rope could be like
handling a piece of language.
Rather than let my image of the line, that I hold, exclude things from being part of
that line, I decided to allow the line to form as it moved forward, that this rope
would unfold before me by becoming entangled in things, and that these knots
would become part of the line.
As I encountered objects, concepts, writing, image this line would allow itself to
become wrapped around and threaded into them, and that this was a more valid
journey, across a landscape of things, than one that was prejudiced by a single
destination.
In saying this I am letting you know that concepts formed as I worked with the
materials of my practice. Any chosen destination would be filtered through that
which I encountered, and into which I became knotted, along the way.
This was a research with a rope

So by way of illustration of these ACCIDENTS I will tell you how I

mistakenly discovered the beginnings of speaking circus:

“My name is Jonathan…”

“How old are you Jonathan?”
“I am nine…”
“Where are you? Can you describe your surroundings?”

“When I was about nine years old, my father left home, not to return.
I still saw him, but not often and I used to search the house, where I
lived with my mother and younger brother, for signs of him; traces of
his presence.
I suppose I was looking for clues, hints of how to be a man.
He was a Scout Master and although I always hated attending these
pseudo-military meetings in the church hall, I remember that he was
impressed when I achieved my knot-tying badge.
“Well done, Jon.”
 18

So one dusty, sunny day, the kind of day when it is exciting to see
motes hang in the air in long, bored beams of light, I was idly running
my fingers along the bookshelf in my mother’s room when I saw the
spine of a book.
The book was called ‘Knots’ and I quickly grabbed it before my
mother came back into the room, swirling the road of glinting dust
tarmacked across the breathlessness in the air.
I put the thin book up the font of my jumper and got up as casually
as I could. I had found a piece of my father. This was my business, she
did not need to see what was between me and Dad.
I walked past my mother, who did not seem that interested in me.
The bathroom could only be accessed through her bedroom and it looked
as If I was on my way back to my room after using it.
“I’m going to play in my room for a bit”, I said.
“Why don’t you go outside? It’s a nice day.” My mother replied.
“Nah, “ I said and just kept walking.

I was out and on the landing. I walked across and into my room. There
was no sun on this side of the house but it was warm and stuffy. My
room was a mess as usual.
I closed the door and sat on the bed; eager to learn more about
knots, about my father. The book was a plain, black paperback with the
single word ‘Knots’ written across the front in bright lettering.
There was something written in the yellowing pages at the beginning.
‘Dear Annie, hope you enjoy these puzzles’.

This was not my father’s book! This was for my mother, Annie. Why did
she have a book of knots? I pulled the book open sharply at random.

“Can you describe your surroundings? What’s Happening?”

“I’m in my bedroom. It’s 1975. I’m looking at a book…”

“There must be something the matter with him

because he would not be acting as he does
unless there was
 19

therefore he is acting as he is
because there is something the matter with him

He does not think there is anything the matter with him

because
one of the things that is
the matter with him
is that he does not think that there is anything
the matter with him
therefore
we have to help him realize that,
the fact that he does not think there is anything
the matter with him
is one of the things that is
the matter with him
there is something the matter with him
because he thinks
there must be something the matter with us
for trying to help him to see
that there must be something the matter with him”

The book was ‘Knots’ by Ronnie D Laing. It contained no physical knots

of any kind, no diagrams of ropes; nothing with which you could impress
your old man. He was long gone, caught up in some bind of his own
making in which I could not tell him that I was looking for him in what I
thought was a book of knots because I wanted him to come back to me
but the book turned out to be my mother’s book and in it were just
awful problems in which people turned against each other and there was
no love, only games within games and it made me feel very alone.

The book deals in tautological binds and self-referential statements…and many

years later after moving to Sweden I still had it. As it represented a failure to
apprehend my father, I had held onto it.
I had since allowed myself to be impressed by the elegant tautologies that it wove
through simple statements and I realised that in my speaking to an audience there
could be something in these looped conundrums that could match what I was trying
to do on the rope.
 20

KNOT CIRCUS:

This became the Show ‘Knot Circus’ which I made in 2013 and played both in the UK
and Sweden. It was not a popular show but for me it was a good beginning to a
project that I am still immersed in through this research.

KnotCircus: [Link]

Within this show I tried to speak in the looped, self-referential form that I found in
[Link]’s analysis of simple familial and social interactions. I was aware that how
a subject caught in a ‘no-win’ scenario might be propelled to try to unpick the logic
within it, and the nature of its structure would necessarily propel that subject into an
excess of speech, as each revolution of the logic found itself back at the start of a
contradictory injunction, which then demanded more unpicking. This kind of speech
created a clear persona, one that could easily be categorised as being in the grip of a
psychotic episode. That I was falling through this language; the more I tried to make
it make sense, to finally refer to something I could grip.
Its endlessness was an impasse.
There is a question here about what precipitates this fall; was it language’s own
endless deferral of meaning, its reduction to pure difference that was causing this
tumbling, or an installed ‘un-solvable’ instance of double bind, caused by power
relations over which I had no influence? I felt that both of these things featured in
the way the script for the show developed and these themes were first approached
in this show and continue to be discussed in this research. But there was a question
here about how the subject responds to power, which could enforce the installation
of contradictory injunctions unchecked. The subject had to be complicit in some
way in their own enclosure, and the maintenance of it. Tricks seemed to only
expand the enclosure in the context of such double binds.

This show can be found at [Link]

WHY PSYCHOSIS AS A FOCUS?

I used this as a method to speak in the same way that I felt that I was negotiating
the rope. I felt that my body proposed temporary solutions to what was an insoluble
problem, that of traversing a rope, a line of reasoning, with a variety of tricks that
just could not escape the insurmountable force of gravity that surrounded it. Each
new trick offered some construction, a rest point on the rope, a dynamic movement,
or a weightless moment not previously available to me that I managed to grab
through the construction of a trick, but I was returned each time to the beginning of
this impasse.
Gravity still sucks.
I am driven to make tricks, which make me appear weightless but within a system
that makes me heavy, the body itself desires lightness from the heaviness that it is.
The construction of a trick is a way of coping with this unending pull that seeks to
fragment me, but this ‘coping ‘has a cost; in this economy I pay in tautology; the
 21

trick can never be acknowledged as true weightlessness. The gravity was within me,
I was constructed according to its rules but within me also was the ‘impossible
possible’ of escape.
I felt that within this show, that wound knots of logic around this predicament so
that there was a congruity between the seemingly incompatible activities of
speaking and working with the rope, I reached a conclusion that was to do with how
I was received in the performance.
There were jokes, there was nonsense, there was recollections and paranoid
theory and the prevailing reception that was fed back to me was that this was a
portrayal of psychotic utterance.

Perverse Architecture:

Another feature of psychotic utterance is the construction of vast but ephemeral

theories, that try to compensate for this failure of language to refer to the self.
The temporary and collapsible nature of these theories not only suggest to me the
moment of weightlessness in the trick, to momentarily delay the fall into indifferent
registers, but also the nature of one of the itinerant structures used to house such
physical trickery, that of the circus tent. The trick and its circular dwelling could both
be psychotic defences against the permanent rendition into a fixed syntactic
landscape.
These architectures could perhaps be thought of as a vast complex of
interconnected concepts that follow the structural relations inherent in logical and
topical language use.

Architecture: “The term can also be used to connote the implied architecture of
abstract things such as music or mathematics, the apparent architecture of natural
things, such as geological formations or the structure of biological cells, or explicitly
planned architectures of human-made things such as software, computers,
enterprises, and databases, in addition to buildings. In every usage, an ‘architecture’
may be seen as a subjective mapping from a human perspective (that of the user in the
case of abstract or physical artifacts) to the elements or component of some kind of
structure or system, which preserves the relationships among the elements or
components. “

([Link]
[Link])

So there are architectures of the trick, and perhaps inhuman architectures against
which we perform tricks.

Michel de Certeau said that town planners have strategies to design the city and
people have tactics to negotiate this design. This delineation being the illumination
of the human tactic as the ‘short cut’ or the ‘loop hole.’ This relates to the attitude
that I am describing, the feeling that there is a small autonomy from the way we are
‘supposed’ to go.
 22

This is a way of doing circus in language, but also a way of thinking about a
temporary structure of erroneous logics that parody more established architectures.
Again I am referring to the myth of circus as something nomadic and able to
comment from an external and unfixed position on the rigidity of more ossified
structures. But perhaps there is something useful in this idea.

So in terms of speaking circus, could a circus tent be also a spoken complexity, a

large interconnected web of associations possessed of a circularity that did not
follow the logic that supposedly enables language to fulfil its communicative
function, although this function relies not on the primacy of the subject but on
autonomous subjectlessness. What if the spoken circus tent followed a more
associative logic that preserved the relationships between the parts according to
some other ‘useless’ logic?

God’s Rope:

In circus there is such a thing as God’s Rope. This is the rope that is carried by the
Tent-Master, and it is used, along with the knots at specific distances it bears, to
measure out in a circle the exact location of all the stakes and poles (the pins) that
are needed to erect the Chapiteau.
This using of rope as a tool of architecture is not new; it has been a tool of
mathematicians and architects since before the Middle Ages. A rope bearing
thirteen knots was an indispensible tool for multiplication in medieval architecture
because it allowed the construction of equilateral and right angled triangles as well
as the construction of circles and gradual domes.
So God’s rope is the rope used to measure out the Temporary Autonomous Zone
of the tent. It is a mobile, portable component of the very idea of more ‘permanent’
architecture. Churches were built using rope and the architecture of them
represents a commitment to a body of thought, to a construction of systems of
thought and the attendant language, all pinned in place by the architecture.
Architecture supports the production and ossification of knowledge.
The rope itself in this process is displaying its ability to be straight (i.e. not
perverted)
It is a momentarily straight object that is straight for a very short time, for the
moment of measurement then it returns to its kinked state.
It is held tenuously in a line to create a fabrication, an architecture of language? So
for me, in a practice concerned with misuse, with folds, loops and knots it becomes
the thing that can be coiled back upon itself to create a new, deformed architecture.
If I can draw an analogy here between the rules of architecture and and topical
logic of language; then a rope, a god’s rope, that is not held straight will yield a
twisted architecture, a ‘wrong’, psychotic language, that has doors leading
nowhere, blind balconies, inverted useless arches.

“A labyrinth is a structure compounded to confuse men; its architecture, rich in

symmetries is subordinated to that end. In the palace I imperfectly explored, the
architecture lacked any such finality. It abounded in dead-end corridors, high
unattainable windows, portentous doors, which lead to a cell or a pit, incredible
 23

inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards. Other stairways,
clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, would die without leading anywhere,
after making two or three turns in the lofty darkness of the cupolas. I do not know if the
examples I have enumerated are literal; I know that for many years they infested my
nightmares; I am no longer able to know if such and such a detail is a transcription of
reality or of the forms, which unhinged my nights. ‘This City’ (I thought) ‘is so horrible
that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert,
contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars.”

(Borges, J. L. (2000) Labyrinths. Penguin. London)

In Borges these perverse balustrades and columns call into question all architecture,
all thoughts, even the fixed nature of the stars. This, for me, is a description of
psychosis and so relates not just to the rope as a perverted measuring tool but also
to the thinking, speaking and doing of my practice: Measuring out a structure from a
crooked ruler.
In this composition of the world it is no longer given that it will be measured out
according to the rational and self-interested economies of sense, but each decision
might be taken from a position that does not care about itself at all.
This bent stonework forms a labyrinth, and this is the point, perhaps, that I am
looking for labyrinths, not looped around a circuit of despair and momentary gain as
in this extract, but of hope, that the rope practice offers itself as a labyrinth that
constantly returns to the same room, to the now, but on the way there is a method
of calling into question the forces that restrict us now and blot the future. The way
out is ‘to come’.
For me these ideas form a link between architecture, space, choreography and the
construction of language that inform the idea of ‘speaking circus’.
God’s Rope is perhaps the line of logic that precedes the master signifier;
something crooked and unformed from which a derivative can be placed. The first
stake put down in a circus is a master ‘pin’ that anchors all other signifiers in place.
The problem is the ground is already fugitive, is already twisting its topology away
from fixity. Perhaps an over-arching master signifier is already in place before the
circus pitches itself, and it is a double bind from which only more and more
psychotic constructions can ensue, that all are in agreement with the ground.

Anti-Hooks:

Martin Creed, a fine artist and Turner Prize winner, once produced small brass bells,
which he fixed into the walls of the Slade School of Fine Art, little bells sunk
perfectly flush into the white walls of the entrance hall, like little hollows you could
put your finger in them and feel how smoothly they had been lathed.
I attended the Slade at the same time and would often allow my finger to circle in
the smooth brass fittings as I drifted aimlessly around the edges of Bruce MacLean’s
studio.
When asked what they were he explained that they were the shape of a picture
hook in profile spun through 360 degrees, thus forming a negative space hook, a
kind of idea of a picture hook which, through a process of viewing as a spinning
 24

object, had been rendered into a wall mounted ‘negative’ of a hook on which it
would be impossible to hang any kind of art at all. By viewing the tool used to erect
art in a perverse way he had made the hanging of a piece of art into a negation of its
possibility.

This is in my thinking a lot when I make figures and contort the straightness of the
rope, there is an awareness of the shape the rope would make if it were
geometrically spun like those impossible picture hooks. Is there an impossible way
of hanging?
That the odd shapes I make, if used in construction, would yield a new psychotic
architecture. This is the thinking in the doing, a link to speaking circus; that the
language is a perverted, temporary, impossible architecture taken from the non-
straight geometrically chaotic rope shapes. This is not God’s straight rope but a
crooked path, or a profane snake, over which I am not in complete control.
Like an ‘old timey’ member of the Church of Jesus, I am holding onto something,
not as a master, but in awareness that it is wriggling free of me and that “the service
ain’t over until all the snakes are back in the bag.”

So in the practice of speaking circus I am looking for where the straight rope that
renders the construction of language might be folded back on itself; like a word that
can only be correctly pronounced by swallowing your tongue.
The word ‘to come’.

The Fold in Architecture:

I would like to talk about the image of a rope as a tool to make architecture, how, as
posited above, if this supposedly straight tool is misused and folded back on itself,
or allowed to fold itself back, it could lead to a psychotic architecture, one that
challenges the permanence of systems of knowledge but also presents a
simultaneous ‘double state’, of being two things at once, that the nature of folding
can be a locus for opposites, just as in the trick I am talking about being free/not
free; freedom is folded into restriction. The fold might be a useful ‘thinking’ in
understanding what is done/thought simultaneously.
Deleuze has explored the fold as a unifying structure, and whilst I am not going to
try to illuminate all of his work with this image, I would like to focus on the fold as
the site of “intricate topographic and spatial effects and affects; this means a singular
gesture can achieve great complexity, and has to engage an infinity of folds.”

(Livesey, G. (2010) ‘Fold and Architecture’ The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh

University Press. Edinburgh)

This idea of infinity caught in a finite gesture is an example of freedom being

expressed through what is essentially restricted. It also references the temporal
aspect, that a gesture now could alter the infinity of preceding gestures, or can re-
order the importance or meaning of such gestures long since past. In this sense the
fold is a ripple in time also.
 25

“The ability to reconcile opposites, a hallmark of Baroque art and architecture,

means that inside and outside (coextensive space), illusion and reality, light and dark,
movement and stasis, finite and infinite, and space and mass, interact in complex
interplays, both unifying and blurring the distinctions between each…Greg Lynn, an
important proponent of folded architecture, [has] extended the concept into cooking,
and the folding of ingredients together. He writes: ‘ if there is a single effect produced
in architecture by folding, it will be the ability to integrate unrelated elements within a
new continuous mixture’.”

(Livesey, 2010)

There are a lot of references here to some of the concepts and practices I am
dealing with; the knot, the time-loop, the tautology, the double bind, and an
architecture that follows these designs.
So here is a theoretical link between the doing of rope and psychotic utterance via
the idea of the knotted rope as a tool for making a new architecture to come; little
flashes of light and shade folded together.
The image of a kinked rope extruded laterally, or spun like Martin Creed’s picture
hooks creates fold upon fold as in “[Baroque] ceiling frescoes, [which] come closest to
achieving unity and infinity, an endlessly folded condition set off by light and the
extensive use of gilding”.

(Livesey, 2010)

Perhaps the intention of such décor is not the subversive erection of temporary
autonomous systems of thought that I am talking about (perhaps rather an
ostentatious display of wealth and power) but still this fold upon fold creates a
quantum site, where two things exist in the same time/space; in/out, on/off in a
super-position. Such things are fictions to difference, perhaps.
There is an important point here that power also can create folded spaces,
unorientable labyrinths of hopelessness, in which all escape leads back to the
interior.

It might be better to try to mark that the master pin should be removed as it is only
creating a tautology that invalidates the escapologies we are trying to make. The
irony here may be that as the ‘upholstery button’ is removed from the ‘hard’
architecture, the thing holding its place in meaning, making it pliant and free-
floating this surface is inescapable. Its topology can now be folded so that any point
can meet up with any other point, and while this activates potentiality, it will be
noted that within certain contexts this potentiality can be concretised into an
enclosure.

Implications in Thinking:

So I am implying that this folding is a kind of reconciling of opposites…and that this

is a component of the trick, whether that trick is an attempt to escape gravity or in
 26

fact that ‘trick’ is the concealed nature of an over-arching enclosing field in which
tricks are neutralised. This idea of two kinds of trick will be addressed but for now
the trick seems to potentialise:

1: The concept of free and not free are folded together in the trick. The idea of
weight and flight are folded together.

2: The folding back on itself of the rope is a meeting of two topologically isolated
parts. When applied to language, it might be said that a psychotic folds language
back on itself, so that parts that are not usually connected, touch. Not glossolalia
but origamilalia, Fold-Speaking.
The isolated concepts of say ‘god’ and ‘dog’ are folded together in psychotic
associative play, a kind of folding together of the these disparate points on the
topology of language to create a “new continuous mixture,” a god/dog.

3: the folding of the rope back on itself as a re-orientated tool of a crooked

architecture. A straight rope gone Baroque. This links in with ideas of opposites
being folded together.
There could also be a kind of paradox here of how the intense, infinite repetition of
folding becomes some sort of order, becomes a smooth surface. (N.B. How often to
the extreme repetition of displays of mastery become their opposite; become the
image of someone who is become a servant of their own mastery?)
Or perhaps here I could talk about how in the midst of the madness of utterance
there could be moments of clarity just as in the midst of a drinking binge there is
insight. That nonsense can yield sense.

LET US THINK IN LINKS:

This idea links to the idiot savant, who in his or her idiocy is free to make the
occasional incisive observation. Which in turn links to the trick in the sense that the
‘wise fool’ is a difficult trick to pull off; the fool ‘allowed’ by the king to imply the
king has no power as part of his power structure. The fool’s denial of the King’s
power is a process that denies the thing through which it proceeds.
This is the idea of the king and fool folded in together to make a ' new continuous
mixture’. A quantum moment of "king/fool"
Just as in John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ the figure of Satan is rebellious, offering
profanity and dissent to Heaven, and actually perverting the course of God’s
Creation as the protagonist in a narrative allowed to occur by God. Satan is
programmed to challenge God by God, he is the embodiment of freedom that is not
free at all. His dissent is folded into his obedience.

I am weaving ideas and images together here in a haphazard fashion but essentially
rope links to fold, which links to perverted architecture, which links to the
reconciliation of opposites, which leads to psychotic utterance as being that which
rejects the parameters of the language that carries it, which leads to quantum states
which leads to the trick which leads back to the rope.
 27

Doing folds in the technique is causing and allowing for some simultaneous
thinking.
This kind of associative talking became important for my practice as I attempted
to put this speaking of circus on the road. Long journeys of continuous talking were
conceived that ended in the mute placing of a stake at a distant and irrelevant
location.

This description of a new architecture from the same article could be, for me, a
description of a circus tent: “the theories of Deleuze have inspired an architecture
based on smoothness and pliancy; this approach strives to generate unprecedented
connections. A folded, or pliant, architecture is able to interconnect with a context/site
in a seamless manner, and is able to create complexity from a singular gesture.”
The doing of the tent is linked to the thinking of psychosis and to the trick as being
something that calls into question the absolute uncollapsibility of architecture. This
was also the thinking that inspired the making of films in which complex paper
structures were devised, filled with knotted hieroglyphs and which were intended to
be temporary perverse architectural and self collapsing structures that could
accompany me on various speaking road trips.
However, not to finish by grounding this idea in the concrete application of the
Temporary Autonomous Zone as imagined by Hakim Bey, perhaps “Deleuze’s
concept of the fold is more useful for defining new kinds of practice, rather than the
new architectural form. Like the concept of assemblage, the fold brings together
architecture, space, and that which occurs in time (expression, social arrangements,
etc.; it unifies, produces, and creates connections.”

Ranting: RAMBLING…

As stated I have undertaken several ‘speaking circus journeys’ of varying length, and
within these humour was very important as it often could undercut in just the right
way.

Folding can be used to understand two things simultaneously, or even to pronounce

two words simultaneously, to fold-speak is to fold words into one word/word. A
piece of language that is two pieces of language, like a sandwich only more of a
mouthful,

Here is a mixture of grasping at meanings, puns, rhyming, mispronounced phonetics

and misspelling that folds the topology of language back on itself so that the site of
where ‘these’ and ‘there’ meet becomes literally ‘touching’. It is close to the
construction of a joke, a deliberate process rather than a debilitating one. Or it is
debatable and at no point do I wish to promote psychosis, schizophrenia or other
disassociating mental states as a form of prop for arts practice. I am referring to
clinical definitions of psychosis that are pronounced externally to the state itself, I
do not wish to ‘glamourise’ in any way the dark and alienating processes that can
occur in the sufferers of real mental illness.
Mental illness is no joke but some studies have shown that comedy and the
imitation of psychotic process are linked here, and it is clear that the subversion of
 28

topical logic to make associative leaps is a necessary tool in-joke writing:

“[Comedians’) talent to amuse people lies in having unusual personalities and

displaying what researchers say are high levels of psychotic characteristics, according
to findings which appear to support the widely held belief of a link between madness
and creativity.

The results are based on a study of how 523 comedians from the UK, USA and
Australia described their own personalities and beliefs when they filled in a
questionnaire measuring psychotic traits in people who are not troubled by mental
illness.

The creative elements needed to produce humour are strikingly similar to those
characterising the cognitive style of people with psychosis – both schizophrenia and
bipolar disorder," said Professor Gordon Claridge from Oxford University's department
of experimental psychology. He is also one of the three co-authors of the findings,
which are published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

"Although schizophrenic psychosis itself can be detrimental to humour, in its lesser

form it can increase people's ability to associate odd or unusual things or to think
'outside the box'. Equally, 'manic thinking', which is common in people with bipolar
disorder, may help people combine ideas to form new, original and humorous
connections," Claridge added.”

In response to this Sara Pascoe writes:

“How do I come up with my material? Well, I get a daily visitation from Christ, who is
neon and glittery, he transcribes jokes for me, which I then jot down in menstrual
blood. Sarah Millican gets her stuff from an alien who lives in her freezer, while
Katherine Ryan employs a whole writing team of voices in her head. John Bishop has a
spirit guide. Russell Brand gets his inspiration from being Queen Victoria. David Baddiel
can read minds so he just records that, and Josie Long can hear the dead.”

(The Guardian. Jan 24th. 2014.)

Ha fucking Ha…

The point here is that it is about doing thinking where you are not supposed to do
thinking. As discussed later there is also a hint here that the functioning of the joke
requires the fashioning of an authentic individual voice which then forms an
automatic ‘sore thumb’, that can ‘stick out’ of the accepted topic.

There are a few comics possessed of genius that are touched with some kind of
mental illness, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Hancock all suffered genuine,
unglamorous pain and so there is also here in these observations a cosy ‘madness’ of
the observational stand up comedian in a relatively safe and mainstream market
that simply reiterates the double bind of how to appear mad enough to sanely
navigate your mandatory performance. Individuality is here linked in a trite way to
 29

your own personal brand of insanity and becomes almost an injunction to

entrepreneurially delineate the usefulness of your incapacity to follow the norm to a
waiting economy.

The market goes mad for crazy new ideas…

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River. Part Two

The Ringmaster: “who can tame these indifferent and unpredictable beasts, that are
no more rational than a cloud of steam in a summer breeze, no more predictable
that the rippling of this very canvas above our heads, who can bring these wild
creatures of capital under the yoke of the Christian tongue. For this we turn to the
unlikely figure of the savage, perhaps Ladies and Kind Sirs, it is only the Wildman
who can understand how to bring these unknowable beasts under the lash?”

“I’ll savage you in a minute, ducky,” snarled Happy under his breath.

“The savage Etheopian Escudo, the feral Brazillian Dollar…”

Happy was obsessed, Happy wanted to know “How do we destroy Capital? How do
we evolve past the trick that seeks to grab an ounce of freedom,”
He despised the circus artist as salesman, and he said as much to his sidekick Rover
Joe “…how can we instead work some actual tautological elegance that will shift the
totality of tonnage from off of our bones?”

“Take it up with Bill Custer, “ replied Joe laconically cleaning his Bowie knife.

Happy continued, striking the pose of the earnest pilgrim: “When will circus come
out and do what it has been meditating on for all these centuries? It was born in
capitalist expansion, the tent itself is nothing but the pioneers push westward into
new markets.

When will circus labour throw off the yoke of gravity, instead of working little profits
of weightlessness that only perpetuate the need for more profit. A circus that only
takes the coins of gravity?”

Joe was practically rolling in the sawdust. “What ‘til they get a load of your
routine…”

The cloaked and angry figure of Happy Down-River worked the numbers every night
in his act, and he worked the alphabet so that the meaning of this or that value was
lost, so the value of this or that meaning turned to smoke.
 30

Cut to the packed tent on an average night in Hackney, November 1848.

Happy is there in the circle, no longer knowing what is real, trapped in this
excruciating comedy of bourgeois gestural manners:

“The meanings drift across the dead fire and touch the back of your throat, you
stare at the dying embers of the market place as your tears refuse to bind with the
hopeless ash at your feet.” Happy is performing the terror like this every night for
years on end.

“You are choking on your money now as every number folds inside out like a
scream that misspells the mouth that makes the sound.”
Money is howling, shivering, growing pallid as it folds double in financial pain, and
all Bankers are running through the streets, trying to get home before it hits.
They had no idea the act was real, that it would have an actual effect. Word
spreads about the shaman who can wither money on the vine.

Happy wheels in the dimly lit ring, his thick, feathered cape leaving trails in the
sawdust. He points accusingly as stomachs churn. His eyes go wide in what his
grandmother called his Owl Frenzy:
“You are all your own money, and you mean nothing to each other, you can form
no family from this unforgiving substance. You are made of cash now and those
who have always reminded themselves that money means nothing smile as you
choke in the dust.
You have nothing and it feels good to us who were stripped of our lands.”

He is operating actual trades on the stock market but with money that is bound to
the meaningless somersaults of words. He can flip a mattress full of savings and
blow it to the four winds, as a word in Arabic worth a small fortune in Italian Lira is
translated into German and turns into a handful of Yen.

“It’s all part of the act, luv…” thinks Happy to himself, adopting the vernacular, as he
tomahawks eighty eight percent from the savings of an investor in the front row.

“He won’t realise until he wakes up tomorrow, poor as a church mouse in the jaws
of the bank.” Mutters Joe in the wings. Happy and he have been working the circuit
for what seems like a thousand decades, “in dog years that’s nearly a hundred quid.”
They liked to say.

So how do we destroy Capital? How is it possible to create a hyper-inflationary virus

that would invalidate all holdings overnight?
Happy prepares as if in a trance, the Ringmaster takes his time to explain his
method to the crowd. He explains that although he is a Wildman, Happy has studied
mathematics; (this was true: taught to him on the road by a down at heel Professor
who had a goldfish act.
 31

The fish could tell your date of birth, spelled out in bubbles, it was a genuine
mystery and a wonder to behold. The Prof drank arsenic cocktails and died
penniless in Albuquerque New Mexico.)

“First he will assign a monetary value to the alphabet, so that every word becomes a
commodity.
Then he will show the logic that determines the construction of words as strings;
he defines laws and gives each law a place upon a list of rules of how to build words.
“There is a letter ‘a’, such that when combined with consonant forms a hard
sound.”, “There is a letter ‘e’ such that when placed at the end of a word forms a
hard preceding consonant.”
He will call these functions ‘c’ and ‘d ‘ respectively…and in this way in renaming the
laws of speech with letters, the laws of speech are made to operate upon
themselves.
In assigning a letter to each one of those laws, then the processes of word
construction themselves become subject to themselves.

These vile and arcane doings mean, ladies and gentlemen, that money assigned to
words, and the way in which one word can be the monetary equivalent of another in
value, becomes subject to an excessive logic that it cannot control.
The logic that determines how words are made that has become subject to itself
and NOW Ladies and Germs…

…It enters the market place. “

GASP.

In this moment it becomes possible for Happy Down-River to construct impossible

statements in value such that a value becomes impossibly equal to these two
different values simultaneously.
In this moment the laws that delineate how to build words fall victim to their own
logic; meaning that meaning is made the slave of its own irrefutable law…these
words are formed from the things that form them acting as if they are the
components of a form…and the content simply empties out!
“The bottom simply drops out, darling…” snickers Joe.
Bankers everywhere will cry out…”What is the meaning of this?” As new words are
floated onto the market that are simultaneously worth everything and nothing, all
trades come to zero.
The streets run with blood…word trades become the new high-risk investment
portfolio. Businessmen fall from the skies like a priceless Magritte trading down to
nothing.

Happy continues; shrieking after them as the fee-paying punters flee the big top…

“The markets will flood with words that invalidate themselves in the moment of
exchange. The rules governing the autonomous systems of difference become
 32

labelled as commodities within that system and in that awful moment, inhuman,
non-negotiable, indifferent capital turns back and sees itself, becomes self-
aware and in horror tears off its own face.”

It was quite an act.

Unanagram:

This is a lesson in breaking a rule whilst simultaneously following it; it is a short

spell of utter disbelief.

What would occur then if we looked at a system that is involved in the creation
of associative meaning, that defies logic, and then tried to defy it. This kind of
contrary and obtuse behaviour is also part of subversive speaking. We could
think of tis as a warm up; a way of preparing to perform a trick on the trick itself.

I insert here an ‘unanagram’ as a demonstration of all the associative techniques it is

possible to apply to ‘unanagramming’ your way from the word ‘rope’ to the word
‘body’.
Obviously in a regular anagram you have to compose new words from the ‘bones’
of another, this is something often found in psychotic utterance, that meaning is
derived from the fact that ‘dog’ is an anagram of ‘god’ for instance. I have allowed
myself to take this loose approach to meaning a step further and imply that not
even the original ‘bones’ of the word are fixed that they are possessed of a fuzzy
logic and sliding and there is nothing holding the letters in place.

The unanagram itself is a strict/not strict system in which you are free/not free to
make anagrams. In unanagram you can make a new word from any other word, as if
the letters of the alphabet are not fixed, so that the only rule becomes not that the
words created share the same letters as the original word but only that they share
the same number of letters. For instance ‘hand’ can be an unanagram of ‘foot’
(which refers to a past future climb that refutes the synchronic logic of climbing the
alphabet) all you need to supply is the link between the letters ‘H’ and ‘F’, ‘A’ and ‘O’
etc.
It could be a new way of moving across an alphabet in order to refute its synchronic
autonomy, in that the practice of unanagram references the fact that no alphabet
can hold its gravitational authority over time. But more of this trick later.
The goal is no longer to try to rearrange letters in a paucity of choices, but to
expand beyond the limits of the psychotic links themselves that one might forge
‘after’ the anagram has occurred into a full activation of a mysticism that is only
predicated on such links. This is a way of climbing higher on the rope of language.
The defiance of the rule of anagramming is such that you can misspell the original
word in any way you choose so as to drive it to be any other word of equivalent
length, but you must elucidate clearly the associations that you are using to get
 33

from one letter to the next.

It is an anagram where you are allowed to misspell the original word. Anagram, as
first a way to pervert language, but then a perversion is added to the rule of the
perversion; by which I mean that you can mispåell the anagram itself. Thus opening
a new door in which a defiance of sense is defied. This is not to bring us back to
conservatism, but to forestall the capture of defiance as a means of expanding that
conservatism. This resists the capture of resistance to ‘sense’.
This is an attempt to look at both psychotic utterance and the trick simultaneously
in that the aesthetics of the associative leaps are in defiance of the restriction of a
traditional notion of an anagram through which the aesthetics proceed.
It is a process that denies the thing that enables it, and which pre-empts the co-
opting of a propensity for associative links for the purposes of reduction of that
propensity to a system of control.

‘A Prayer from Rope to Body in Eleven Holy Phases’ or

‘A Spell to Protect You from Your Government’

Rope…to be spoken out loud.

1: you take the ‘r’ of rope to be a sigh of relief in the mouth; “aaaaah”
2: and you will ‘be exhaling’, and when you inhale “haaaaa”, you will ‘exhaling be’
3: and so it’s ‘b’ for the ‘r’ of ‘rope’ that’s ‘bope’
4: but the ‘p’ of ‘bope’ cannot be hung by the neck like Judas on a rope, but hung by
the foot
5: like the hang-ed man, the ‘d’ man is Judas ‘p’ escariot inverted
6: and so a ‘p’ of ‘bope’ becomes a ‘d’ of ‘bode’
7: and this bodes well why? Or why is the end of ‘bode’ unwell? Or ‘y’ is the end of
‘bode’ full stop?
8: which means that ‘e’ is now ‘y’
9: and ‘y’ knot?
10: because ‘o’ remains ‘o’ remains ‘o’
11: because oh where the ‘rope’ becomes the ‘body’ remains.

…Body, to be bound in silence.

‘Thank you Lord, Amen’

or if you prefer

‘Praise Be to The Dark One, Please Help Us to Destroy Utterly Those who
Seek to Control Us’.

There now follows a description of a notation system for turning circus into
language and back again. There are several pieces throughout this text; not all are
 34

accessible but they form part of a study in circus notation that has been on-going for
the last seven years. It is entangled with the fiction, and entangled with the diagram
that explains the trick as a tautology.

KNOTATION DREAM PART ONE:

There is a book that escapes Happy’s reason; he glimpses it in dreams….

Happy dreamt of a war paint he would wear to face gravity. His dark skin
was painted in thick white greasy pigment with the letters of the alphabet.
In the dream he thought of each letter as a different clown face recorded at
each joint. The letters all had flourishes of red and black and grey within
their designs, each one resembled a different Red or White face clown,
assembled there to make unreasonable statements in the court of gravity…
Gravity wanted him to lie down, to be still. Gravity wanted all of these
body points to lie in horizontal order, in a line, on the ground. Just by
standing there Happy was proposing an aberrant order to the alphabetical
gravity; just by moving, breathing and living Happy was proposing words
that simply could not be registered in an alphabet fixed in time.
His body ‘spelled’ words every time it moved but the word is meaningless
to the alphabet. There is no capacity for the meaning of the word in the
order of the alphabet, just as there is no capacity for the weight of the
body in the order of gravity. The alphabet is the meaninglessness of the
letter, the word is suspended above it as a work of fiction.

“It is not that the alphabet is meaningless as a word, it is that words are
meaningless to the alphabet.”

The point here was that any word that his body spelled out, defying the
supine position he would have to adopt to allow the points of his body to
fall in horizontal alphabetical order. He agreed with gravity only when it
made his lie perfectly still, as if dead. As an inert body of mass he agreed
with the gravitational pull of gravity…of GRALPHITY.

Each word he made was a trick then that exposed the meaningless and alien
landscape of the alphabet as a word. The word he made floated in a briefly
held meta-position outside of its designated order in the horizontal plane.
The irony was no lost in him however, that he could only glimpse this form
of writing with the body when he was fast asleep; lying exactly where
gravity needed him to be, so that his body spelling nothing except an
alphabet.
Happy thought of himself as lying underneath it, immanent to it, and so in
dreams he was privy to how the letter came before him, but how it needed
him to chase after it in order to exist.
 35

The problem for Happy was its arbitrary nature; who was to say that if his
elbow was labelled M today that it would not be labelled F tomorrow. Time
played havoc with the body’s complicity in the alphabet of gravity.

HERE THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY IS AS THE SUBJECT OF TIME:

Happy had fallen asleep painted with twenty-six letters on his front,
twenty-six on his back. He went off like a deck of cards; poker-faced in
many different hands throughout the night.
In this particular dream, he was experiencing a laboratory where the
symbols on his body were being explained to him on a chalkboard, by the
cadaverous Mr Davenport.

“Any word when placed onto the alphabetical order will yield a series of
arrows.
The nature of these arrows is determined by in which direction they are
being ‘pulled’ by the force of alphabetical gravity, which we will call here
‘Gralphity’.

LET US LOOK AT THE WORD ‘DIG’:

D I G
A B C D E F G H I J
v > >

If the word ‘dig’ is placed onto the alphabet, we can imagine that it is being
placed within the ‘Gralphabetical field’ of this set order of letters.
The word is placed or occurs within the field arbitrarily, and in this
instance we can see that the letter D is at rest; it is in its correct position in
the order established by the field of gralphity, you can imagine it as a ‘body
of mass’ at rest, placed in its correct relation to other larger bodies of mass
in an established gravitational hierarchy.

“Ain’t no such non such no how, “ thought Happy trying to resist the onset
of logic.
But it was no good; he was only fighting a diagram that he knew was
inevitable, in which the war paint drew every blow into an alphabet that
could be repeated battle after battle.
 36

“Silence, this is powerful Ju Ju.”

The teacher continued to explain the diagram;

“However we can see also that letter I is being ‘pulled’ four spaces to the
Right to its correct place at rest, and G is being ‘pulled’ one space to the
Right.
The arrows below indicate the direction of pull.”

Happy was getting bored: “Why do you keep putting the word ‘pulled’ in
quotation marks, and why do you spell right with a capital R?”

“Because the gravity is a quote uttered by the memory of your body and
because the letter R represents Ronnie D Laing, the father of resisting that
which you agree with, he is the epitome of something so far Left he is
practically Extreme Right Wing.

The teacher placed one foot on Happy’s desk and struck a heroic pose:

“The Left has gone too far when its program of highlighting how you
should free yourself from all inter-subjective games by acknowledging them
as the concealment of self-interest is the same rationale for positing that an
inherent self-interest is the organising principle behind the existence of
those games of which we must then free ourselves.
The Left has gone too far when its narratives of freedom become an
imperative double-bind that installs that which it orders us to be free of
through the enactment of that freedom.
When freedom installs restriction, this is when the Left has gone too far.”

“Seems trite when you say it like that!” muttered Happy.

 37

The teacher droned on: “When freedom from restriction is achieved

through the opposite of collectiveness and the ensuing death of love, then
the Left has gone too far…as it simply enables the Right to say, ‘I told you
so…’”

“Now be quiet…” He continued taking his foot off Happy’s desk, leaving a
faint dream whiff of long, searching walks across moonlight parks.

In this sense then the word ‘DIG’ as it is entered into the field of the
alphabetical order is torn apart, each of its elements, that are out of the
alphabetical order that the field ‘organises’, are returned to their proper
place with a ‘bump’, just like a trick that must inevitably come back to
earth.
In this regard the words are momentarily formed as being outside this
organising field; they are momentarily ‘weightless’ within the field of
gralphity before they are returned to their ‘ground’ within it.

D G I
A B C D E F G H I J
v v v

The arrows indicate now that all letters are ‘at rest’, returned and
assimilated into their positions, indistinguishable from the letters in the
alphabet, which bear no relation to what the displaced letters of the word
intended to convey. The ‘meaning’ is destroyed in the pool, even though
this ‘meaning’ relies on this pool of letters from which to form itself as a
disorder.

The letters of the alphabet do not bear a resemblance to what the word
‘means’. This non-resemblance, this incompatibility, is an important point
here as it highlights the idea that here are two distinct registers, two
distinct sets of statements made in those registers. The letter says nothing
about the word that pronounces that letter’s ability to be so silent.”

“I beg your pardon, sir” Happy was playing along with the schoolboy
fantasy. He pretended to not know that this was a dream. It was only polite
to the down at heel actors that seemed to proliferate there.

“I said the letter does not ‘know’ the word, but learnt everything it does
know from the word. It is a ‘fetish’ that does not know what it knows.”

“I see, said the blind man.” Happy understood more or less than he was
letting on.

“ Ahem…Quite…There are statements about the quality of letters made in

words, and there are statements of their quantitative difference to each
other made in the alphabet.
 38

Just as Kurt Gödel delineated meta-statements about the ‘qualities’ of

numbers that described from where a number such as a prime or a square
received its quality of difference to other numbers.
For example Gödel set out to give definitions of the ‘qualities’ of certain
kinds of numbers but utilising as primitive and reduced terms as possible; it
is vital to note that this was done using the terms that existed within the
over-arching logic that was agreed to govern the operation of numbers:

So when faced with statements of typical Number Theory he sought to more

clearly delineate what certain elements within these statements might
mean. He sought ‘words’ about numbers that he could then give numbers to
so as to make Number Theory ‘go critical’, so to speak…”

“To speak so…” Re-ordered Happy.

“The purpose of this complexity , boy, is to enable me to explain to your

slow-witted mind how the words here are ‘meta-phrases’; just like tricks
are, made up of the basic elements of force, momentum, balance, pivot,
swing, tempo, counter-tempo etc. etc.”

“There are a lot more that that, sir.”

“I know that boy, just look it up in the nearest FEDEC Manual. They are all
in there.
Anyway you can think of these technical ‘elements’ as the ‘letters’ that
go to comprise the Trick, which can then be thought of as the ‘word’ that
floats out of place in the order that gravity requires to be the order of
bodies of mass. These techniques are ‘of’ gravity, they exist within it, but
are used to make statements ‘about’ gravity in a Godellian construction of
tautology.
Likewise each body part is similarly ‘of’ gravity.

“’No bone, no muscle, no flesh without the field’, You always say, sir.”
Happy felt himself to be rooted to the chair so he thought he may as well
look like he was joining in.

“Precisely, hmmm …you are catching on, boy. The Trick is a word spelled
out of body parts and techniques; all ‘of’ gravity, but which add up to
weightlessness, a statement ‘about’ gravity.
If we return to the alphabet then these meta-phrases describe the quality
of ‘A-ness’, or ‘P-ness’ or even ‘O-ness’ that mark these letters as having a
quality of difference to each other, that sets them in the system of
quantitative difference that is the Alphabet.”

Happy was sniggering behind his hand, reek of old locker rooms, musty stale
smell of boys long since washed and gone off to run the rotten, bloody
country.
“So the onus is on my penis or my anus, sir?” He giggled
 39

“Boy, why do you insist on referencing this kind of scene? Is it because it

reminds you of other writers, other voices; other bodies in which you feel
more able to defend against what I am trying to show you? What does it
bring to reference transgressions in secret places that have nothing to do
with you?”

“I reference not the supposed ‘transgression’ of being this or that, sir, but
the transgression of any inter-subjective space when love is unsure of the
‘law’ of love; will it be a transgression or will it be allowed by the one you
love?
This space exists between all of us as we wonder if our love will break
the law of the other. So the space between two beings that like each other
is no different, the ‘transgression’ of that law that exists between them as
each perceives the unseen law set by the other in barely perceptible
motions of the fingers or the moistness of eyes, when both are not sure if
the other likes them back…it is always what is possible inter-subjectively
that I am trying to privilege, always what meanings and legalities are agreed
between to independently mobile subjects; never what is possible in
relation to an agreed subject-less register.
I’m not trying to hide, I am open to new ideas, sir.”
 1

CHAPTER THREE: THE TRICK.

I will make the assumption that it is still clear from the general provisos, which I laid
out in the introduction, that the term ‘trick’ will be used here in acknowledgement
of its ‘tricky’ legibility.
In light of this I will further outline the nuances that I feel are in this thing I am
calling ‘trick’ and how two main approaches have informed its shape for me. These
are my journeys through an attempt to record what leaks out when two registers of
value that do not get along are forced into a union. This unholy and incompatible
fusion, one within the other, is what enables what cannot be located in any of the
available parts.
This is I feel what happens when the subject ‘speaks circus’ through gravity;
something excessive is there as a subject who does not show up in the alphabet.
This chapter tries to name that excess as you might name part of any mechanism.

A MECHANISM WITHIN THE RESEARCH:

In so far as what I call a ‘mechanism’ can be researched as a theoretical structure, as

well as activated in practice, I have tried to stay faithful to the definition of the trick
that I propose that is threaded throughout this text.
And if it seems blunt and ignorant to focus on what is considered to be the most
worthless part of circus then this is only because it is central to the practice while
everybody is talking about how it is not important.
It is because I want to preserve the extreme nature of this physicality, the years of
physical research that it provokes, the joy of it, the brute idiocy of it perhaps; I want
to preserve the bruises and days of bandages, of wrapping up to give something to
an audience, of pushing and pushing and pushing to make a movement that no one
has seen before. I want to keep that alive as part of the conversation about where
we in the circus think we are going.
The question for me is very much about how this mechanism can speak and as
such to ask if it is possible to transpose this mechanism back and forth between
these linguistic, theoretical and physical registers.
The definition then of ‘mechanism’ was at first to be maybe its translatability, but
now more its potential for transposition; to be a tool that can be applied to any field for
the reconfiguring of value.

WHY ARE THE DIFFERENT PROPOSED FORMS OF TRICK IMPORTANT?

They are important because it is through the variation in these forms that I intend to
produce

1: a critique of circus in its proximity in and complicity in capitalist modes of

production and ideology.
 2

2: a form of knotation that is taken from the diagramming of these three forms, so
that there is a tool to be activated in the studio that contains the three phase
instructions on how the trick can be used as a tool for thinking in any field.

3: To demonstrate therefore how this mode of thinking for the circus artist and
practitioners in other fields might play out in the fields of language and of capital in
which the subject is obviously embedded. This addresses the trick as a way of ‘circus
thinking’ just as caught in a tautology rooted in the congruence between the
signifier and the commodity.

THERE ARE TWO METHODS:

The first is this already outlined idea that perhaps a trick in language is similar in
structure to a clinical definition of psychotic utterance, which tends to state that the
subject ‘handles’ language as a materiality, that its connections are defined by
parameters not related to accepted linguistic syntax, and also that the forming of
one such ‘knot’ then binds the subject in a tendency to form another; that it
precipitates a ‘fall’, precisely because the impasse remains unseen.

The second is that there is a more formal logico-mathematical iteration of the

mechanism of a trick, which has more to do with certain deliberate or innate
operations within the bounds of a system of logic that can cause loops of illogic.

So there is a non-deliberate and a deliberate form here. It will be discussed how a

trick may be designed to rupture restriction, or it can accidentally create a loophole;
how there may be inherent loops within the current system designed by no one and
which are merely there in the nature of the field in question, or in fact there may be
a deliberate iteration of a concealed deception that forms a trick that swallows all
attempts to escape.
This is a constant flux in this text, and it is a constant itch; is the trick performed
within that which is already a trick?

I hope to look at both of these methods in relation to how I have researched the idea
of ‘speaking a trick’.
I will reference further different sources that I feel are relevant to the internal
workings of this mechanism, and slowly I hope to build a picture of the trick that
exists in other forms already, which will help to suggest a template for its
transposition into speech and/or writing, and how then this exercise influences ideas
about the capacity or ‘usefullness’ of the trick itself in relation to the subject, who
performs it.
I will conclude in asking what excess is rendered in this figure and how might we
define that which is left over from definition.
For now before returning to these main threads I will continue to discuss some
other versions of the trick that I think highlight its different potentialities.
 3

GRAVITY:

It is one of the biggest tropes of circus but let us continue with the cliché of circus
versus gravity. I am not the first or the last practitioner of circus arts to state that
‘my art is a struggle against gravity’, circus is not the only art form to discuss it
either, dance also has had a relationship to verticality and the expression of
‘lightness’, as does gymnastics, and the narratives of the sporting hero are filled
with images of the human figure in extremis and in defiance of limits. Circus is well
known for falling awkwardly into the gap between art and sport.
I am fully aware that gravity is undefeatable, insurmountable, irrefutable and
pervasive as a field and I want to be clear that the ‘lift’ discussed here is but an
image of weightlessness, not actual weightlessness, not actual escape or freedom
itself, but an arrow that points to it. But I will also discuss how this weightlessness
can be used to point only to the individual success of the one who performs it, and
perhaps how this ‘mix-up’ between appearance and truth is often exploited to
promote gravity as the necessary condition for such ‘freedoms’ to occur.

MOVE THROUGH TO GO AGAINST:

By circus trick, I mean when the application of a general technical approach,

summarised here as ‘how to use gravity to beat gravity’, becomes specific to a
moment involving gravity, the body and perhaps a certain object, thus rendering a
mobility or a new position that was not previously available under the resting
restriction of that gravity.

‘An operation that moves through a system of restriction in order to refute its
authority to restrict’.

‘The re-performance of law in another context that critiques the validity of that
law.’

The techniques that occur ‘in’ gravity, such as force, tempo, momentum etc. are
used to forge a statement ‘about’ gravity; namely that this imagining of
weightlessness through techniques within gravity refer to the potentiality of a space
external to that field. Techniques are then statements within gravity that can be
assembled into a meta-statement about gravity.
It is a suggestion of something that it is not possible to reach, that impossible is
rendered as a potentiality; something that might yet be.
In the moment of the trick you are in a Quantum State of being simultaneously
Free and Not-Free.

In positing an area that is outside of what is currently available to experience I

understand how there are pseudo-Christian implications, but this thought does not
feature here. The metaphysical implications are to do with systems outside of which
it seems impossible to move, and this is also then analogically to do with systems
outside of which it seems impossible to think. I am not advocating a religious or
metaphysical turn, but to find a use for the inoperable in this art form, and I am not
 4

suggesting a noble metaphysical aspect but one that acknowledges what is

immanent to the law of the field in question. In seeking to redefine terms delineated
through incompatible but interdependent split registers of value it has to be
conceded that the meta-position is impossible; the question is ‘what comes before
difference?’ rather than ‘what is outside this field’?

SMART/STUPID:

I think what I am trying to say is that I wish to take the thing that is often thought of
as the ‘stupid’ moment in circus and suggest that this is the heart of its intelligence.
However what is thought of as the self-interested ‘showing off’ is often a correct
reading of its intention, but that this is indicative of a circus approach that has been
wholly captured by the context within which it is pitched. So although this ‘heart of
intelligence’ is often co-opted into the on-going construction of self-interested
individualism, there is, for me, an extreme and elegant form of thinking here in the
structure of a trick. This is what I try to privilege here.

In saying something that does not make sense it creates enough lift to be
momentarily free of other critical theories that seek to subsume it. It is therefore
also important to discuss what circus tricks mean from within circus rather than
hang there mutely waiting for a definition to arrive.
This last point is background radiation and part of a larger discussion of the
usefulness of research in circus, which I don’t want to get into here, but this will
shape the discussion as it progresses
I have tried to establish what this unit is by transposing the loop of logic that I find
within it (specifically within my own rope practice) onto other mediums, contexts or
systems. In transposing the trick other elements of it are revealed, and this I feel is
the use of such processes and dislocations, to reveal potentiality that is only latent
(even if this potential is conveyed through its inoperability.)
Through the following examples I am looking for what could be said to be ‘smart’
about the trick, all the while being aware that corporations are ‘smart’ when they
are flexible, nomadic and exceed limitations; that is, when they adopt what I am
calling, a certain, ‘Circus-ism.’

CANADIAN GRAVITY:

In a recent meeting of FEDEC, a prominent artistic director of a large circus school

stood up and said,

“If a circus artist opens their mouth on stage and speaks then it ceases to be circus”.
 5

So if it was supposedly forbidden to speak in circus (and I am fully aware that this
sentiment is not the norm) then that is what I felt I should do, in the same way it
seems ‘forbidden’ to juggle nine rings.
In this way I had identified this Circus Director as a kind of preventative
gravitational force. I saw him as a form of ‘gravity’.

This is part of the transposition of the mechanism of the trick also, to identify the
‘physics’ of a situation, field or system, to identify what seems ‘forbidden’, to
identify the ‘gravity’ in order to construct tricks that could specifically utilise that
gravity against itself. So methodologically here was an approach; to identify the
restriction in any field. This is not done wilfully or blindly but to examine through
practice what seems to be impossible in a given field.
I want to note here that this is also a certain feature of the political prank, which
tends to address Power in a similar way; using control against itself.

To a certain extent as I looked at the idea of transgression I felt that my rope

practice has already been a kind of vertical meditation on the negotiation with
Power. So for me, this research was a way of meditating further; on how I
experience the ‘capture’ of the trick by Power, but also the capture of the
supposedly ‘core’ tenets of Circus itself.

Early on I decided that these tenets would be Resistance, Temporary Autonomy and
Mobility and it quickly became clear how these were romanticisms of the capacity of
circus, but more on this later.

But as regards not being allowed to speak, there was a further wish to address this
injunction: to actually use the medium of speech as a fabric upon which circus could
be enacted.
Not just to speak as an ‘actor’ in a circus context, this is what was being forbidden I
suppose, (and which also forms a ‘lazy’ directorial shorthand for the ‘integration’ of
the circus arts into the body of established theatre) but to take speech and use it as
a circus material, subject to circus processes and transformations.
So this project was not just to speak ‘in’, ‘for’ or ‘about’ circus but to try to ‘speak
circus’; that language would be one material to which I could apply the trick. That I
could ‘do’ circus through the medium that forbade me ‘doing’ circus through that
medium.
I hoped in this way to set up a ‘primary template’ that might go some way to
establishing a theory of how circus could ‘integrate’ with other more theoretically
established forms. Language was to be approached as a field that bore its own
impasses and restrictive tendencies.
I wanted to therefore find a way of speaking that was this circus that forbade
speech.
That was my ‘nine rings’.
Are Tricks ‘Permitted’?
 6

Still it had to be said that the trick could end up being spoken in two ways: one was
pronounced as a potentiality to resist, the other was just playing safe games within
the confines of the system.
Again there was a feeling of capture, that the trick in this sense was no better than
a deceptive sales pitch from a slick corporate brochure that seeks to inflate the
value of a commodity in order to merely perpetuate further inflated
commodification. I was concerned that the trick I was focusing on was just the
‘selling’ of a freedom that is simply unavailable?
So there are not only two tricks: one to expose a flaw, two to conceal and exploit
that flaw, but also of two different kinds of trick-making subject. The idea of self-
interest is important here and will be discussed in relation to models of societal
equilibrium that rely on just such a self-interested subject to supposedly maintain
social balance.
This is the same delineation as the two types of trick in the DIAGRAM. Trick one
exposes the word as a mere fiction to the set order of the alphabet; trick two
conceals the incompatibility of the word and implies that it can become a fact within
the alphabetical field with no ensuing contradiction, but is it the speaker or the
listener that then has to internalise this apparent lack of conflict?

TWO IDEAS OF THE TRICK:

1: I already felt that the trick was a statement made through the system that it
refutes; a statement that is then a questioning of the totality of that system.
This was perhaps a quality that the trick-making subject could see.

2: Or possibly that the trick is just something that refutes its own validity by utilising
the thing it claims to refute as proof of that refutation.
This was perhaps how the system quantified it.

A main point here is to highlight that the trick seems somewhere on a line between
expressing the potentiality of freedom and not disclosing the inevitability of
capture.
The trick seems perilously close to capture within the field it tries to refute, and
this proximity to capture is part of its nature as I try to define it here. This idea of
being organised around a weightless moment that is created through a field that
can only designate weight seems paradoxical and there follows a series of examples
of what I feel are mechanisms, circuits and instances that display paradox.
The potentiality to point to escape is always close to capture or total inoperability.
What is examined here is what needs to be acknowledged to draw the line between
these two versions of the same trick as they are designated in our diagram as Trick
One and Trick Two.
In a sense this diagram pre-empts what is discussed here as the diagram itself is
drawn from one of these iterations of paradox.

The tricks seems to be in two places at once. It was important to look at how this
mechanism engaged with the physical laws of space and time, but also at how it was
 7

possible to refer to meanings other than those that simply followed these laws, I will
return to this idea of paradox shortly.

UNSUITABILITY:

The research aims to transpose the mechanism of the trick into unsuitable areas.
There is nothing new here, circus traditionally extends its practice into new areas,
new objects, new challenges.
This was also for me a parody; a parody of the way capital itself behaves, insolently
sauntering into every area where it simply does not belong.
And so it was for circus to attempt to extend its practice into a field beyond its
reach, namely the immaterial. This was for me a way to retroactively establish a
circus approach to theory, that could then act as the basis from which the physical
practice could become the praxis.
This was also to deepen the pedagogical approach and to deepen its capacity to
work in an integrated way with other disciplines in other fields and to offer a much
needed theoretical rigour in terms of the way circus sees itself and its relationship to
society.

“Today’s circus rests much of its identity on a self-devised, and quite Romantic, image
of its own practice as a marginal art form enjoying its own freedom. Even putting aside
the question of whether this image is accurate in the contemporary scene, it has
become very difficult to separate the romantic clichés that surround the circus from an
understanding of circus as a medium.”

(Bauke Lievens (2015) Second Open Letter to Circus.)

[Link]

There exists a Romanticism in circus that all too readily matches with the romantic
assumptions of corporate ideology masked as post-ideological individualism, that
we can make our own freedom. I propose the trick here not as the activation of an
actual Romantic ideal of freedom , but as something that needs to acknowledge the
fictional nature of this agency so that the trick becomes a question about the
parameters of meta-positionality, rather than taking this for granted.

But there is also a charge within Lieven’s Open Letter also that identifies the
fascination with insoluble paradox as a Romantic trait.

ROMANTIC GESTURES:

In regard here with my own fascination with the loop, I would answer that I am
aware here that instead of focusing on romanticism’s relation to nature and rational
thought I have related romanticism to its capture within rational systems that
peddle it while negating it, and I am definitely guilty of circling the paradox, and
chasing my tail, the kind of activities that pass for a noble hopelessness in the
Romantic oeuvre that Lievens identifies.
 8

Although this is the case I feel that the lack of theoretical rigour in the circus field
that has not only allowed a rejection of reason as being supposedly antithetical to
circus vitality but that this designation also prevents circus from seeing that the
context in which it is permitting itself to ‘romanticise’ is in fact paradoxical. I
reiterate here that ‘unthinking’ romanticism is the dark face of circus precisely
because in expounding this as an approach the artist only expounds a neoliberal
cynical enforcement of being free ‘from’ thought, free ‘from’ any ideological
position, without offering anywhere for freedom to be ‘to’, which is precisely the
conflation of Isaiah Berlins two forms of liberty. The injunction is almost to ‘be
romantic’ so that the institution that grants freedom to be is also the one that
demands you be free from institution. It is neoliberal precisely because it offers a
formless freedom that rejects anything except the continuation of this image of
liberty, which might draw attention to the supporting self-repeating enclosure
within which such post ideology is possible.

I will discuss this mutation later but I think the fascination of paradox for me is not
the emergent trait of a general Romanticism; it is a response to a double bind that is
generally felt by the subject. We are already embedded in a paradox, the Romantic
aspect is just one way of dealing with how this tautological ground is concealed
from us. It is more productive to say that there are better ways perhaps to address
this ground than the pointless doomed romantic gesture of circus. The circus
subject feels it and sometimes expresses it precisely because it causes an excess of
fascination as the meaning of freedom, of agency, mobility, by which circus
erroneously defines itself is embedded in a self negating loop by power.

The doomed feeling is an adaptation to an insoluble double bind, in which circus

insists that operations within gravity will yield an agency that is simply not possible.
This impossibility is forestalled by the applause one receives through the precise
performance of a doomed romantic pose. The only way to feel saved is to act like
there is no hope; this is a gothic, teenage bow followed by rapturous adult applause
in response to a no win scenario in which victory is epic failure. We need to get past
it, but it is there understandably.

Ironically the love of paradox that Lievens levels at circus is indeed a problem for
circus because this kind of paradox (you must be free) forms the backdrop upon
which circus must survive. Circus is conflicted because it is trying to be different to a
post-ideological neoliberalism with which it agrees.

I feel that this problem is processed as hopelessness, which a certain kind of circus,
in trying to be the image of freedom, can only cope with the impossibility of by
striking Romantic poses. The trick has to be re-invented to deal with an enclosure
that demands it.

We are far from free yet and I do not see anything Romantic in the paradox that
makes that so. I do feel circus, in its obsession to move freely and its haste to act as
a conduit to create ‘free’ individuals, has forgotten its role as a purveyor of fictional
escapology.
 9

Such fictions, far from being ineffectual and hopelessly ‘doomed’ are important
not in their capacity to falsely represent freedom now, but to point at the perplexing
conundrum of constructing images of what freedom might look like within a formal
system that permits every freedom but one; leaving the field entirely.
Circus is important in its ability to point to a ‘freedom to come’ but this is not to be
mistaken for ‘special status’ in its position within a system of insurmountable
restriction.
This research aims to discuss the complicity of circus in the same gravities that
affect us all, but to highlight its central mechanism as being a model for the
construction of such fictions. Fictions which can either perpetuate the restriction for
profit or remind us that it is possible and perhaps preferable to point outside of
restriction…this I feel, is its fictional power, not its resigned Romantic swan dive.
It may be that I am guilty as charged; that I am also striking a Romantic pose, but in
a situation of double bind, in which all the other more viable positions are occupied,
in which all the other costumes are taken, at least I am trying to wring something
useful out of this ridiculous get up, rather than wearing it at face value.

TO CLARIFY:

At first I saw the trick as a loop in logic in which an escape or a resistance was
something to which it was possible to refer; and that this ‘reference to’ resistance
was tied into a moment of temporary autonomy which could allow further
‘specialised’ but temporary mobility, all of which was in order to preserve the
possibility for a future resistance. Each trick added to the continuation of the project
of resisting gravity in this way.
So I do not deny that the mobility afforded by the technical organisation of the
body around moments of facilitating weightlessness is real. I am questioning
however the reading of this temporary state, which can be both felt by the circus
subject and conveyed to an audience, as the activation of genuine freedom.
In this I am questioning the overarching reading of the trick that seems to persist
and support the myth of circus, which is that it is somehow the production of real
freedom, and that it exists apart from the commodifying forces that afflict the rest
of society.
I am interested in ‘hearing’ or ‘reading’ the trick then, as part of the idea of
speaking or writing circus, not as a fact but as the continuing project of fictionalising
what the end of restriction might look like; as a discussion that I feel we must
undertake.

Notwithstanding the importance of discussing restriction; for me it is important to

pursue this research to demonstrate that within this ever present mechanism, given
all the provisos, there could be a method of thinking that imbricates with the
practice as it seeks to ‘hook into’ other areas and which might form a glue for
ensembles going forward in various collaborative modes.
To suggest practice can develop theory then does not box in what can be thought,
but opens up practice to develop other modes of thinking.
 10

GRAVITY SUCKS:

If I can presume to speak about other disciplines for a moment: it is possible to deny
that a ball once thrown up in the air, when it reaches the top of its arc, in the
moment before it comes down, does not technically ‘weigh’ anything.
Its weight, due to the forces applied to it as lift, which have dwindled to
equilibrium in regard to the force of gravitational pull, is zero. It is technically
weightless, but not actually. Whilst we can experience the ‘quality’ of our own
weight as less than usual, and we can aesthetically convey this ‘feeling’ to another
body in the audience, the mass of the body remains the same. Gravity does not
notice a difference.
In the order of things, its fixed mass is momentarily ‘out of order’, (just like the
Word in our diagram represents a disordering of the alphabetical field) but
remaining essentially unchanged in its ‘quantitative’ sense, it is returned to its place
in the order, which is determined by how different quantities of mass exert
gravitational force upon one another, (just as our word in the Diagrammatical
example has each of its letters returned to the designated position of differential
value that is autonomously set by the field as it operates as a system of difference.)

This is the issue here; I am dealing with weightlessness as an image only. The
image states the ball weighs nothing, it can move as if it weighs nothing, but in
actuality it continues to weigh exactly the same, its mass is unchanged. This
movement then is only an image of what it might be like to be in a meta-position.
This newly available mobility is poetry that is possible to scrawl on an aberrant
surface as it returns to order. Circus appears to be a process by which an object or
body can behave according to parameters it does not possess. We have to decide if
the ball here is weightless or only appears weightless.
The additional agency is real enough, so you can capitalise on a change in weight
that is not there, suddenly the entire process starts to feel like the financial
manipulation of a deregulated and detached currency. There is no change in the
value of the currency but there is. Presence of change and complete stasis pursue
each other in this unprovable image.

A trampolinist will tell you the same thing, in this moment when weight is used to
push against a sprung surface, when gravity has been utilised in order to negate its
own effect upon the body, there is a space-time for unusual things to happen.
Mobility can occur in this image of space-time created to be outside the image that
gravity has of itself.

Also I am implying that the arm that throws the ball is moving through, utilising
gravity in order to realise this moment when gravity does not apparently exist. In
another sense there is the notion that gravity is moving against itself in that the arm
is ‘evolutionarily’ constructed by the gravity it seeks to defy. The arm is ‘made’ of
the gravity it seeks to trick.

I use the word ‘image’ here not just as an acknowledgement of the impossibility of
escaping gravity but also because there are aesthetic concerns that enhance this
 11

null moment: the flourish of the juggler, the arc of the body of the flying trapeze
artist at the end of the swing…there are often things ‘told’ here about the
expression of freedom above and beyond the naked physics that provides this
refutation of gravity’s hold over the body; but here I am looking at mechanisms that
I experience in my daily practice, moment by moment, in the minutiae of contact
with the skin, on the rope as I climb, slide, drop, re-negotiate the vertical pull.
These tiny little iterations of this moment of weightlessness that range from the
shifting of grip to a full somersault are vital for any ‘trick’ to occur.

A TRICK AS A RIP-OFF:

A trick is something that tinkers with the appearance of the weight of the body; its
‘value’, according to the authority of gravity to give ‘weight’ to it, is interfered with
through a manipulation of both the techniques and the aesthetics that it is possible
to draw upon whilst moving through that medium.
In regard to the ‘added’ performance of this already double-edged moment as
something more than a permitted aberration within the gravitational field, to me
there is a corollary here where the trick is just another form of deception or rip-off;
which highlights my concern that the trick is merely a sales pitch for the mobile
individual.

This seems to match with the behaviour of digitised finance in which the Dollar can
behave as if it is equivalent to a specific weight in gold precisely because it ‘appears’
to be able to refer to that weight and therefore does in fact weigh that much. In this
regard the Dollar refers to nothing at all except the network of established aesthetic
readings that support its value and the analogy here is that the ‘freedom’ that
seems to appear to be the real value of weightlessness is similarly performed. To be
Dollar-Weightless is to experience a fund that seems limitless.
The value of a Dollar is determined by how business ‘appears’ to be proceeding.
Money in this regard is a free-floating sign and it moves through the medium of
signs, the trick here is the manipulation through this monetised semiotic medium
that renders an inflation in the perceived weight of the money-form, or more
effectively such manipulation refutes the authority of the money-form to accurately
‘give weight’ to itself or to anything. A currency can be made to appear to hold a
value through the manipulation of media that have nothing to do with the medium
of exchange, and so the ‘authority’ of that medium of exchange to set value is
entirely compromised in the fluctuation of value according to a purely afffective
criteria that it cannot even register. The authority of the market to effectively give
value to any commodity is effectively performed through a medium that it cannot
register. The authority of the market is composed through its constant refutation.
The market operates as an individual that is post ideologically free of its own
bureaucracy. Like a boss, who pretends to be one of the crew. I feel that it is the
same with the trick; the expansive area and potentiality conveyed in the trick are
not possible to register within the field of gravity and yet they are conveyed; the
difficulty lies in exposing or concealing this.
 12

Currency values rise and fall daily according to such trickery, rumour, presentation
and narrative. Value is mediated through the subject that it refutes.
The fact that it is possible to think of the trick as a refutation of the authority of the
money form to give value to anything that enables the market to function is another
indication that something is performed in the markets that is concretised daily as
‘real’ value. This analogy between a trick in gravity and a trick in capital is a slight
indication that this mechanism is more prevalent and linked to the reproduction of
capital than at first thought.
The point here is that an inflation of value through the way any commodity
‘performs’. This is a refutation of the authority of the money form to give weight to
it according to its supposedly set differential value of exchange in relation to other
commodities. This exchange rate eventually settles to its true exchange rate but as
part of the privileging of the performance of the ‘new’ and the attendant built in
obsolescence that renews the ‘new’.
This trick is part of our daily lives, as a simultaneous refutation of the authority of
exchange and a mode of the reproduction of capital that reinforces the authority of
that exchange as irrefutable.
The appearance of pricelessness, like weightlessness within gravity, performs a
refutation of what it confirms, namely the authority of exchange value.

In terms of our diagram the word is possessed of a certain ‘pricelessness’, a cetain

something that is outside of the order of the mute alphabet. Its priceless nature is
exactly that it is un-registerable in the alphabetical field, but it is this pricelessness,
necessarily formed from letters within that field, which propels it to address and
ultimately be entered into the alphabetical field where this pricelessness is torn
apart.
What might be suggested here is a trick that conceals this inevitable
disembodiment of the word and which suggests that the word can be entered into
the alphabetical field with no ensuing contradiction at all.
What is suggested by such a trick is that there is no incompatibility between this
quality of ‘pricelessness’ and its sale at a reasonable quantitative rate.
Thus it is only the reciprocality between quality and quantity that is highlighted
whilst the tautology in which this reciprocality really dwells is concealed, and so the
alphabet is presented as a limitless arena within which all words can be entered
without compromise.

This entire introduction is to lay the ground for the places I have found ‘trick-like’
structures, places where the trick is still there but in a changed identity.
Power is seen here as the power to structure discourse, the power to withhold or
to give value, and the trick is seen as a tool for re-configuring those given values.
 13

WASP ORCHID:

In looking for this moment in which ‘sameness’ to gravity inscribes that which is
different to it, a moment in which that which is just another moment ‘of’ gravity is
inscribing a moment ‘about’ gravity and also as a counter to the Lacanian logic that
pervades this text, I will reference Deleuze and Guattari here; the quote is taken
from p.122 of Franco Berardi’s book ‘The Uprising’:

“The orchid deterrirorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the

wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless
deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But
it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as
heterogenous elements, form a rhizome.”

Berardi goes on to say…

“…the wasp and the orchid are not homogenous. They even belong to two different
natural realms. But this does not prevent them from working together in the sense of
becoming a concatenation (s’agencer), and in so doing generating something that was
not there before.”

(Berardi, F. (2012) The Uprising. Semiotexte. Los Angeles)

Just as the wasp is inscribed upon the orchid, gravity has no awareness of what is
drawn through it, or upon it (although it is complicit in this drawing), but its
authority to be separate from or not complicit in ideas of its end is called into
question; the image of its limited authority to be a totality are drawn through it.
Weightlessness is deterritorialised as becoming-gravity, just as gravity is
deterritorialised in becoming-weightlessness.
This is an imperfect analogy, but there is something here about drawing through a
closed system the possibility for another order of system outside of it.
If I were to return to more structural thought then there may be something to do
with what is made possible between two heterogeneous registers, that the
possibility to write upon gravity, a graffiti that refutes its authority, is to do with the
difference between qualitative ‘meaning’ of graffiti, as opposed to the purely
quantitative aspect of brick-laying that forms the wall, which cannot ‘see’ therefore
the ‘meaning’ written upon it.
How gravity is reterritorialised here is an important question. That is, is gravity
spread further or collapsed by the execution of the trick?

ASIDE: If I return to my image of the trick as a sales rip-off or scam, it may be argued
that tricks in money momentarily deterritorialise money’s authority to state accurate
value, subject as this value is to manipulation of signs, but ultimately reterritorialise it
in furthering the spread and power of capital, OR it may be argued that each financial
instrument that deterritorialised the authority of money in this way leading up to the
 14

2008 crash had a permanent deterritorialising effect, which now needs to be masked
by massive injections of taxpayers’ money.
Again here I am forcing an analogy between gravity and power iterated through
capital. This is part of an attempt to make the trick relevant as a meditation on other
forms of restriction than gravity.

DISCOURSE:

Or if we were to return to Lacan, I could reiterate that the trick of weightlessness is

constructed from elements that exist externally and prior to it; that is the trick is the
discourse of gravity. The congruence between these ideas is there, one accepts the
lack of duality, the other sees it as an impasse.
So we can see the capture here, the trick is captured by the gravity through which
it proceeds but in proceeding it creates an image, a flicker of the potentiality of no-
gravity. The trick cannot defeat gravity as it is ‘named’ by it.

Lacan remains for me present in this text precisely because he represents the
impasse within the linguistic field, the double bind, the insurmountable restriction
of signification that offers what it cannot give. What he exposes represents a form
of gravity in this attempt to perform a trick in language, although he himself offers
analysis as a kind of trick to expose it, and finding a way to ‘bear’ it perhaps.
The idea that within the hermetic seal of the subject there is an extimate presence,
something that is intrinsic, intimate but external, which is responsible for a loop
between desire and lack; in which that which is missing is both the cause and telos
of desire simultaneously. This condition that includes its negation is for me like
weightlessness that includes gravity.

In terms of our diagram then, this problem is set up in the same way as the
Epimenides paradox, in that the word and the alphabet precede each other
simultaneously so that we can say that the word is ‘caused’ by the letters, but it is
also the ‘telos’ or end purpose of the word is the establishing of an alphabet. In
Lacanian terms the word is in a similar loop to desire over lack in that the two
organisations of letters are occurring in different kinds of registers that are then
treated as only one kind of register, with the resultant effect that these two kinds of
statements appear to precede each other simultaneously as in the Epimenides
statement. Tautology arises from this conflation of registers.

The alphabet comes before the word, it is the ‘cause’ of the word, but the word
comes before the alphabet, the word ‘causes’ the alphabet, the alphabet is its telos
or end or purpose. In this instance the word, supposedly a singular intersubjective
communication made primarily with the subject in mind, actually precedes itself; it
comes before itself, therefore referencing nothing but itself and leaving the subject
entirely out of the picture, so to speak.
The word creates the letters but the letters create the word, the subject is not
included. Thus in the subject’s intimate act of speech is included a subject-less
extimate presence. The subject in speaking their own name cannot ever escape the
 15

pull of this linguistic field and so this is the rationale for my inclusion of Lacan and
his definition of the un-delimitable autonomy of the register of linguistic value as
my definition of linguistic gravity in which I attempt to examine the nature of a trick.

PAPER TIGER:

I am saying that Circus is a language composed of images that refute the page
through which they are carried.
Gravity is the medium that makes the impulse for a jump; a jump that defies
gravity is made through the medium that it defies. A jump flows from gravity but
carries the sign of freedom from gravity,
The gravity and the jump are joined in flow; one is the condition of possibility for
the other. So gravity turns a jump into a possible event by being a force to push
against. The jump draws attention to gravity, calls gravity’s name, and creates an
image that connotes that it is possible or desirable to be free from gravity.
As stated I have interrogated other kinds of restriction than ‘actual’ gravity to
push against in this research.

THE VEIL:

According to the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, Zeuxis and his contemporary,
Parrhasius staged a contest to determine the greater artist. When Zeuxis unveiled his
painting of grapes, they appeared so real birds flew down to peck at them. But when
Zeuxis asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting, the curtain itself
turned out to be a painted illusion. Parrhasius won, and Zeuxis admitted, 'I have
deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.'
Whilst Zeuxis’ painting confirms that truth and falsity are opposed, Parrhasius’
painting contradicts this notion, by revealing that truth is deception and vice versa.
The trick is like the painting of the veil. It is in denial of painting whilst being
transmitted through it. It is written on a piece of paper it denies.
Zeuxis’ deception is a simple simulacrum like theatre: something resembling
something, but the trick defies painting itself through the medium of paint.
Truth is deception here precisely because the thing that is supposedly concealing
the painting is the painting itself, there is no painting, but there is, it’s a painting of
a non painting so lifelike you want to draw it aside to see the painting, which isn’t
there.
Just like the trick appears to be a weightless moment, appears as a defeat of
gravity, its mastery of paint is an illusion that is no painting at all, it is in defiance of
the thing through which it is enacted.
The paint on the canvas in this case denies that the canvas even exists. Circus is
painted on a canvas, which is no longer there. This is the trick of circus aesthetics.
Circus attempts the virtual ‘impossible’ merely to create an image that connotes
that the actual impossible is possible? But the image is written in the medium that
makes it impossible. This is a kind of representation that will not admit itself and is
one of the reasons I think it is hard to make theatre and circus agree.
It is more complex than saying circus is ‘real’ and theatre is not.
 16

There is another form of trick here, which does attempt perhaps to ‘realise’ these
theoretical structures of resistance as praxis in the world.
This is also a proposal for any circus ensemble to transpose this physicality into
the street, in awareness of what structures might descend there.

PRANKS:

If a joke moves through that which we assume the words mean to mean something
contrary to that meaning, then there is another kind of ‘joke in the world’ that
moves through that which we assume is happening to create another kind of
contrary event. I am not talking here about simply placing a pin on the teacher’s
chair, although the re appropriation of the teacher’s need for comfort as a method
of subjecting authority to pain of having to sit down could be an example here of
using the known choreographies of power against itself, but it is not just this simple
‘trap’ to which I am referring.
Here again is an approach that could be said to follow the same internal
mechanism as the trick. Often the performance of formal power relations in a re-
contextualised space could form the kind of loop that is discussed here.
In thinking about speaking the trick to power this was an obvious model and it still
features in my thinking about ensemble work; that the circus ensemble should be
more prankish in their attitudes to ‘power relations’.
Here I will sketch out some ideas about its efficacy but also about its subsumption
into the general ‘prankish’, viral nature of appropriated media.

Prank is a term that can be confusing, in the sense that it might be iterated as the
most mindless act of bullying or vindictiveness.
The prank I am referring to, and the mechanism that drives it, I feel contains an
elegance, not unlike a perfect case of irony, and that it aligns with my definition of
the trick in so far as it is a kind of provocative act. It is a form of resistance that
specifically moves through the medium of restriction in order to refute the authority
and/or validity of that restriction.
In this way I align it with a tautology, a loop or a joke (which moves through the
appearance of assumed ‘facts’ in order to subvert those ‘facts’ as false or
misleading.)

In logic terms there is a parallel also that research into Artificial Intelligence is
founded on sets of symbols within formal systems which can be used to critique or
examine their own position within that formal system; and so the attempt to mimic
critical thinking stands and falls on being able to critique the formal system of
thinking through which that thinking proceeds.
To me then a prank is a form of critical thinking, done by re-arranging,
anagramming if you will, the available elements of a formal system of restriction in
order to question the validity of that system. It is perhaps more than an anagram, in
that it should not just rearrange the elements but in doing so should question the
very method of rearrangement it utilises.
 17

I have focused to two versions of the trick previously, versions which now may be
categorized as those that seek to produce disrupting images within the ‘status quo’,
and those versions which are practically the same mechanism but which somehow
produce supporting images of the ‘status quo’. I have spoken about them in
Berardi’s terms as being ironic or cynical respectively. This same separation applies
to the Prank.

If a prank is a loophole, such a loophole would imply what? I feel that it highlights
the edges, and implies that there is a field of operation outside of those edges.
This thinking came from what I do in my practice; big or small, it is about finding a
way to get enough space/time to move.
A trick points outside of the pull of physics from inside of it; points at something
outside that it is only possible to glimpse in the tense knotted manipulation of the
internal workings of the system in question.
Some refined, looped, delicate actions can point outside of the room from a subtle
recombination of the things it finds inside the room.
But this again can be read in another way, of capital’s incessant desire for the
production of the ‘new’.
So there are two ‘readings’ here.

AN EXAMPLE OF TWO READINGS OF THE PRANK:

From (Vale, V (1986.) RE/Search #11: Pranks!. RE/Search Publications. San

Francisco)
Interview with Juno, A.

V: “What makes a prank ‘bad’?”

A: “In America the outstanding socially sanctioned prank is the college

fraternity ‘hazing’, which means, "to harass by exacting unnecessary or disagreeable
work, to harass by banter, ridicule, or criticism." Usually characterized not only by
unoriginality but also by conventionalized cruelty, these pointless humiliations do
nothing to raise consciousness or alter existing power relationships.
They are deeds, which only further the status quo; they only perpetuate
acceptance of and submission to arbitrary authority, or abet existing hierarchical
inequities. Basically these include all pranks readily recognizable as "clichés"—those
which contribute no new poetic imagery.”

I guess that I have this same attitude towards tricks, that some see it as a
mechanism to display such mute clichés.
But there are more elegant versions.
 18

A PRANK BY ABBY HOFFMAN:

“One day we went to a junkyard and bought a bench that looked just like a park
bench; we had a bill of sale and everything. That night, around midnight, we started
walking around town carrying this bench. Some cops grabbed us and took us in,
thinking we had stolen it from the park, and so at the station we said, ‘We've got a
bill of sale.’ So the guy at the desk released us.
Then we were picked up by another cop, we were brought in, we showed the bill of
sale, and then released. Only about twenty cop cars were working the town, so, to
avoid further pointless arrests, they broadcasted to all of them on the radio: ‘If you
see two guys walking with a bench, just forget about it; don't bother picking them
up. They own the bench.’
As soon as they did this we then called the dorm, and then about twenty of us went
all around town picking up all the park benches.”

(Hoffman, A. (1982) Deuce of Clubs. Xtra. New York.)

I felt that this was a good example of a prank, although puerile it is something that
moves through the fabric of the “game”, according to its rules, and yet through
using those rules ends up calling into question the idea of public property enforced
by police.
I remembered that prank, it stayed with me, the elegance of it like the David Mamet
film, House of Games in which the long confidence trick is enacted by the victim on
themselves, that the trick appears to be enacted not by the conman but by the
conman moving through the fabric of the assumed meanings within the act of a
confidence trick itself. He involves the victim in a ‘con’, which is in itself just a
fabrication of what a con looks like. When it is staged to go ‘wrong’ the complicit
victim is only too willing to part with money to help cover it up.
The question remains is this a moment of freedom or just lies that reinforce the
“status quo”.

What I am getting at here is that the trick is a puzzle to transpose from circus onto
other forms or to find matches for its looped and circular
self-referentiality in other systems. What we might find is that this has already been
done.

PROGRAMMING:

Like a programmer who program's a computer to be able to discuss the very fabric
of the program and the programmer’s intentions for that program.

Like Artificial Intelligence; this is a program that becomes aware that it is ‘more’
than the code from which it is composed. There are two ‘images’ here:

1: Something that goes ‘un-captured’ by the limits of the code itself,

 19

2: There is only code, with nothing outside of it.

So to be clear a prank is a recombination of existing elements, or the performance

of an existing role within a formal system that achieves the opposite of its originally
intended purpose.
Another example of this mechanism, which is not technically a prank, but which
displays these parameters is the story of the London Pickpockets.

Therapist: “Can you tell me what year it is?”

Patient: “In the late 70’s the Transport Police put up posters in the London
Underground Railway System warning travellers about the danger of
Pickpockets, who would target and steal from commuters in the busy rush
hours, who were crammed into the Tube system.
In the end they had to take all the posters down as it was discovered that the
pickpockets were operating a new tactic. They were simply standing next to the
posters and watching the passers by.”

Therapist: “What happens next?”

Patient: “Typically when you see a poster warning you of pickpockets your first
action is to immediately check about your person to make sure you still have
your wallet. This action is achieved by placing your hand directly onto the item
in question.
So all that it remained for the thieves to do was notice who noticed the
warning notice and notice where they placed their hand, thus alerting the
pickpocket to two things A: they had something of value, and B: exactly where
it was located. The poster warning of crime was helping the criminal.
In this way the poster moved through a desire to prevent theft but in
concatenation with the thief was complicit in the facilitation of the very thing it
conspired to avoid.”

Therapist: “On the count of five you will open your eyes…”

Patient: “Hey, Where’s my wallet?”

 20

It is this kind of mechanism that I refer to when I refer to the prank. That some
‘unaccounted for’ constellation of elements conspires to undo the very thing that
those elements exist in order to maintain. But are you using what is there for merely
personal gain, or to point up some deep flaw in the existing structures?

A FLIP SIDE OF THIS TRICK COIN:

The prank was all very well, but the trick is surely also something that refutes itself
by utilising as a method of refutation the thing refuted.
And so here again was an alternate image of the trick; of something that formed an
agreement with gravity rather than a resistance to it.
A prank was twofold, a method of creating images of resistance or it was just an
amusing play within the bounds of the system; like joke it could carry no weight.
Like satire it could poke fun at power but change nothing.
In relation to this idea of being employed to poke fun at power there is also return
to the awareness of the twofold position, or superposition, of the clown at court, or
the king’s fool. Only a fool can mock the king because his mockery is only foolish
and carries no weight, but you are in a position to legitimately ridicule the seat of
power.
Only something of no threat can critique power, but the position of no threat, of
speech that carries no weight, does enable critique to occur.
Here are perhaps two images of the fool or clown: one as a trickster, a critic of
royal policy, and the other as a mere puppet of royal power, a royally sanctioned
valve. This is also perhaps the position stand up comedy has found itself in, of
standing up only when its told to stand up.

Or perhaps it is about excess. That the clown is just as much of an ‘unaccounted

for’ quantity as the thief who used the anti-theft poster in order to steal.
If I can borrow the term ‘supernumerary’ from Ranciere, in which he defines the
relation of the one who does not fit into the metrics as the active principle of
struggle:

"Politics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted, a supernumerary

subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a
society"

(Ranciere, J. (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics. Bloomsbury. London)

It is an unaccounted for response; a way of using what is supposed to be total

surveillance to go unseen. It is something surplus to the total. If there is excess then
it is something made here in the self-repeating loop that happens between literal
and actual meaning.
These loops by which a mode of capture sets something free I liken to an endless
production or a loop keeps looping. In the excess of rambling babble, in the
pointless repetition of a journey that goes nowhere something does escape. The
 21

machine cannot handle how it is operated by the clown and the importance of the
subject who will not play along is highlighted as excess to machinery.
I am looking at the mechanism of the trick and how it resonates through a formal
system, I'm thinking about Charlie Chaplin’s body as it is processed through the
pipes and cogs of the factory innards.
The clown operating a machine in ways that both follow the rules of the machine
but these rules when filtered through the clown only result in the glorious
disintegration of the machine, which could never account for or include the
irrational ways in which the clown associates fingers, levers, eyes and buttons.
So perhaps excess should be the focus, in the sense that I am trying to find a way
to speak to the audience in tricks and that this excessive speech comes from the
concatenation of ‘machinic’ constraint of set meanings and organic movement of
the tongue.
I can join with a machine and produce excess, which does not disturb me, it
rejuvenates me, but it may disturb the machine, only by suggesting that there is
something beyond the area of its control: an excess; A spanner in the works...

I have looked at recursive loops and will highlight these within this text. These to me
form similar mechanisms or templates for a language that if spoken in a certain way
it could refute the authority of the internal rules of that language. This to me could
be a mechanism for speaking a trick.
This forms a much more formalized response to the internal law of a system of
logic, so that rather than being a response to the loss of self in the bottomlessness
of language, this method is a more logico-mathematical response to the task of
exposing a system’s authority to prove what is’ true’ according to its own terms, and
in doing so enables perhaps the momentary existence of another self that can
‘think’ past that which would ‘crash’ purely quantitative logic.
Two approaches to a trick in language then:

1: Unintentionally; a psychotic approach continues to deconstruct only to find a

negation of self.

2: Intentionally; a logical approach deconstructs to find an affective self that cannot

be realised.

CHAOS:

What I am implying here in this first image of the trick is that these tautologies,
these re-shuffling of the available, create a ‘remainder’, which for me could be seen
as an affect, something that leaks out from between two occurrences that point at
each other in a circularity of impossibility, but that this leakage, this extra or
remainder can be seen also as a figure that struggles to then be included; whose
existence within a tautology created from parts within the system is, according to
Ranciere, a challenge to the validity of how the ‘sensible’ is policed, that this effort
to make these statements, affects or subjectivities are tied up somehow in the first
image of the trick;
 22

Ranciere draws attention to the role of the Police in the street as calling out,
‘nothing to see here’, and it is to this injunction of the enforcement of an incapacity
to register the acts of those who are not counted that I relate to the indifferent
autonomous registers that sit in the fields of value I am discussing. It is this , what he
calls , ‘the distribution of the sensible’ that has a resonance here for me in thinking
of how the trick makes a moment of weightlessness that the indifferent register of
gravity answers with the same call: ‘nothing to see here.’
(Ranciere, 2006)

Obviously the position outside the system from which to mount a resistance is a
problem, but in this action is there the potentiality for an image of a subject that has
not yet occurred, who is rendered as appearing outside at some later date through
the mechanism of flawed tautology that can only loop within to imply an outside
from which a resistance could be mounted in order to state a tautology in the first
place that could imply an outside.
Thus this is a kind of futurism, the creation of images of freedom that ‘could be’,
that then reflect back into the now to allow the creation of an image of freedom
that ‘could be’. It is allowing the ‘now’ to be ‘haunted’ perhaps.
This futurism then is tautology itself, as it self-refers. It states that an image of a
future self that is created can re-create the image of the subject now as more free
due to feedback from a future that they themselves are acting out in the present.
This ‘being wrong’ to be right is a tactic, in a context when wrong is the only right
left. It is a time-trick and relates to the work on Past Life Regression that will be
discussed in this research.
The supernumerary must also be fictionalised as a future haunting.
For me moments of weightlessness can do this better than they can become
genuine escapology.

WHAT IS WRONG:

Perhaps by being a piece of useless code, that does not 'run' properly, that does not
make sense to produce a prank can be played on how meaning is controlled. In
mockery of production, in alignment with it, moving through the medium of
production in order to refute its value, spurious copious amounts of useless
material, code, data, text, voice, movement...a stream of useless unsalable
stuff...this is the only way that a trick can be made within the system of useful
production that follows its tenets in order to critique its tenets.
The production of garbage is the main example of critique here of the capitalist
system, it is something that is made according to the tenets of neo liberalist
capitalism but which is useless to it, and which clearly critiques it as a problem of
poison for the organism that sustains this mode of production.
Is it useless, spurious code that needs to be produced? Not literally to produce
more litter, but to try to find ways of speaking that play a prank on the usefulness of
language production as only useful to perpetuate the current linguistic field,
indifferent as it is to the subject. As indifferent as capital itself...is this to speak a
trick, just to spew garbage, to free associate according to the rules of being in the
 23

museum, the factory of meaning, but to apply this to every waking step in the social
field. We will come to this nonsense talking later as a practice of rambling across
landscapes and along the street.

PSYCHOSIS AND LOGIC; THE ENDLESS IMPASSE:

It can be said that the tautology is felt differently in different registers. The subject
‘feels’ it or ‘sees’ it as agency in the face of restriction in the register appropriate to
them, the system of gravity does not ‘see’ it at all, it is, in Newton’s terms, merely a
body of mass on a predictable arc towards rest and in Einstein’s terms merely a
return to order relevant to the local geometry of space time.
Can it be said that the difference between understanding this compromised
subjective position and this more formal iteration of tautology are roughly
delineated by the difference between speaking and writing. Psychosis could be seen
as what happens when a speaking subject encounters their location within the
written word; and formal tautology what happens when a subject, acknowledging
their compromised position within language, tries to construct a way out.

I can roughly delineate this here as the difference between the endless production
of speech that seeks a viable position external to language that will imply a viable
subject versus written formulations of logical symbols that display an awareness of
an indifferent internal logic of an autonomous register of signifiers that represent a
subject-less objectivity.
The two are of course linked in that what is spoken drives the existence of an
agreed autonomous pool of language that then drives what can be spoken.
Two approaches to what a trick might entail within language that acknowledge
the complex relations between being the victim of an inherent linguistic tautology
and being able to halt the search for a viable external position to language and
simply bear the fact that it is possible in some way to experience what a tautology
implies; which is that there is an as of yet unattainable exterior to this system.
This follows my project of trying to speak a trick
Briefly, in terms of our diagram, in which the word is a trick that is suspended
momentarily in the alphabetical field of ‘Gralphity’, the importance of this exercise
is no stranger than examining what happens when a trick-making subject
encounters their location within gravity, and attempts to ‘realise’ a viable position,
or accept that they are compromised.

This approach comes from my early studies that focussed on psychosis and also
the study of formal tautology, both of which were informed by various artistic
research practices taken up in relation to these ideas that I will document
throughout this text. I then ask is there something between these two ways of
thinking of the trick that might unify them?
Through looking at the structure of Gödel’s formulas of Uncertainty in relation to
other forms of loop that include critiques of contradiction in political economy, in
set theory and in genetics I am trying to find the link.
 24

The most useful phrase from Gödel is that it is possible to produce statements that
are true but unprovable, as this suggests something that escapes the forms that are
available within the discourse.
The key phrase here is’ true but unprovable’.

I have lost many friends to mental illness, with catastrophic tragedy, misery and
death the only outcomes of being seized by an incomprehensible disorientation
and in no way am I referring to any psychotic state as ‘interesting’ or ‘inspiring’; I
see there only horror that decimates anything you might hold up as a human
candle to the black hurricane of it.
Family, decency, value, morality, complicity, understanding, friendship; all gone
in the blink of a seizure. It is as ghastly and mundane as Allen Ginsberg reciting
‘Howl’ in a Job Centre.
This side of mental illness I acknowledge every time I discuss here the clinical
definitions of psychotic utterance only; it is the flip side of the capacity to open
your mind perhaps.

So to continue with the proposal of a link between Psychotic utterance and the logic
of tautology it may be that an endless circle is the same as a full stop.

TWO METHODOLOGIES TO SPEAK OF:

In these examples the trick or the mechanism I am assigning to it, seems always on
the verge of capture, of flipping inside out to present only its complicity with that
with which it claims to be at odds.

But there is a further division here, tricks in language seem to be the result of an
attempt to get at or expose the origin of language as broken or self-referential, and
this is attempted by the subject either in a haphazard or chaotic fashion, or there
seems to be a methodical approach; one that uses a careful process to make the
object of language deliberately self refer in order to to expose its limitations.
This is the difference perhaps between a psychotic break and a mathematical
study of the logic of paradox, or the difference between a schizophrenic falling
through language and a Zen Master considering an insoluble Koan.

As regards this split it is also necessary to look at those examples of trick that seem
to proceed through modes of speech, like jokes, cut up, nonsense and the wilful
absurdism of anything that resists categorisation or internal rules of taxonomy or
set, and to posit that these are different from those that seem to be more formally
constructed, and which take on a more rigorous approach to exposing the internal
limits of a system.

I will outline two methods here and then posit a way of looking at them that unifies
them on some basic level. This involves the complex discussion of inherent
tautology versus those that are deliberately installed as double binds, as well as
arguments about whether the ‘rational’ response to such un-winnable ‘games’ is in
fact the endless deferral of the psychotic state, which can be thought of as the
 25

equivalent of a linguistic impasse. That is to say that the realised potentiality to take
up endless meta-positions is, in the final analysis, the same problem as the
impossibility of meta-positionality. This is the argument that suggests that Lacan
and he deconstructionists are actually talking about the same problem.

There is a point here about the deliberate ‘hystericising’ of this kind of excessive
production of meta-position as a form of ‘individuality production’ and as a way of
expanding an area of control over this production that will be touched on in Chapter
Four, as it relates to the above question on whether capital itself as a field is
manipulated to be a double bind or whether this is an inherent fault.
This is important for circus because the production of endless meta-positions in
relation to gravity that buttress the image of the ‘extraordinary circus individual’
then directly implies a complicity with the kind of endless production of
individualism that capitalism requires, in that capital, being aware that desire is
founded on lack that produces more desire is an engine organised on the insistence
of deconstruction as endless production of an ever progressing subject that appears
resists control.

Again there are two perceptions here: within this there is either the way the system
of logic perceives the trick; as a ‘crash’ of logic within the system, which the system
perceives not as a ‘victory’ against its own totality but merely as something totally
inoperable. This ‘crash’ is to do with the formal system being perhaps a limited
‘imitation of thought’, not a conscious Artificial Intelligence.
Or there is the way that the trick-maker perceives this trick, that the ensuing
tautology rendered by this re-naming, re-shuffling of internal signs, whilst ‘crashing’
the system does not ‘crash’ the subject that made the trick, it enables this subject to
momentarily ‘jump out of the system’, to imagine another area outside of its now
limited boundary. Something unaccounted for is rendered.
Again the boundary may be implicit in an autonomous overarching discourse of
logic, or it may be imposed deliberately as a method of control.

I will look at both kinds here.

MY SPEECH IS LEAKING:

What I then address in both examples is that in being able to say that something is
conveyed through language use that suggests an exterior space to language, but
simultaneously acknowledging that no such position is possible from which to
speak, I examine what is the nature of something that cannot be said but is still
conveyed. What escapes here, so that the moment of weightlessness is true for the
subject but unprovable in gravity?

In looking at how such ideas are pure fiction to the systems that might be used to
track them, I begin an examination of the relationship between fiction and
weightlessness.
As something we feel as ‘true’ in that it is believable, but which is unprovable, in
that it acknowledges its own ‘falsity’.
 26

Perhaps like a painting of a veil that hides the painting.

This section will then discuss the trick in relation to different structures in the two
areas and seek to arrive at one unifying definition.

“Where are you? What can you see?”

“I am at a crossroads…no, it’s a fork in the road…there are two ways to

go…”

“What year is it?”

“I don’t know…I’m wearing some kind of white robes….there is a city

ahead…it looks like it is made of white marble…”

“What is the city like? Can you tell what year it is?”

“The buildings make no sense, they are beyond time…”

PSYCHOSIS:

These two threads consist firstly of psychosis, a kind of free-rambling, associative

construct, based at times upon the modes of psychotic utterance, as well as other
forms that nonsensically undo what language is supposed to address.
Interestingly in trying to escape the non-primacy of the communicative function
of language this kind of utterance can be a linguistic dinner for one that does not
communicate anything intelligible at all. The question here is what forms of
nonsensical utterance may be considered to achieve weightlessness in the gravity of
language and does the communicating subject vanish in the attempt?
Non-sequiturs, cut-ups as well as jokes are looked at here, and in general I will
again draw attention to the tendency in clinical circles to highlight the psychotic
subjects material use of language over its topicality; thus highlighting language in
the mouth as a material to be handled according to perhaps circus principles.
There is also the idea here of the linearity of the rope of language being subject to
knots and loops that ensue due to the subject’s manipulation of it as a materiality
rather than a topicality.

But I will engage with the idea of ‘uselessness’ as an escape from sense also with an
awareness of economies of meaning and how a broken commodity of utterance still
activates on some other circuit that loops outside the finely tuned management of
what is needed to be spoken in order to have value in that economy of meaning.
In this sense I am looking at forms of speech that just ‘go on a ramble’, I am looking
at the ‘dangers’ of jouissance and the ‘potentialities’ of desiring-production, but as
 27

stated, with an awareness that to romanticise mental illness is both vulgar and
deeply unintelligent.
How can ‘language-use’ escape from language; perhaps what is precipitated is a
fall, an excess or an utterance that is just the equivalence of silence. In this regard an
endless deconstruction that seems to ‘move’ is seen as the same as an impasse that
is immobilised. Travelling without moving is perhaps both the preserve of the
psychotic and the mystic; or the mathematician, who can logically plot the pointless
circularity of those steps as a geometric wonder.

In terms of the designation of three kinds of trick; this is a description of psychotic

utterance as trick one, the attempt to expose, that fails on the twisted topology of
trick two, the trick to conceal.

TRICK TWO IS A DOUBLE BIND

The issue whether mental illness can be caused by purely social conditions is open to
contention, and as there is a sense of this in Laing’s work let us start with the double
bind. It is offered here as a kind of trick, or a structure which then produces an
excess of looped verbiage that could be called verbal acrobatics, as the subject
wriggles in the impossible bind.
What is interesting here is does the copying of these kind of looped structures in
language represent a good template for a verbal trick against the power of language
in this research, a kind of escapology, or do such structures represent a larger trick
worked at the levels of extreme Power to set up an already tautological ground
within which all tricks worked by subjects to try to get free of such binds will be
invalidated by its matching looped structure?

The double bind here could also be related to the folded and insoluble injunction of
a situation that already is structured around a tautology. Imagining how a space
could be organised around the self referential Epimenides paradox could possibly
yield some insight into how a trick is captured: the idea here is that because the
space is trick-like ; tricks are invalidated within it. This will be discussed later as the
idea of the ‘tautological ground’, but for now it is enough to note that a trick could
also be iterated as an over-arching structure, within which everything that occurs is
predicated on a central but hidden contradiction or paradox.
It could, however, be briefly mentioned here as that which is predicated in the
diagram as the inherent conflation of qualitative ‘meta’ and quantitative ‘infra’
statements and in relation to the Epimenides paradox as an endless continuous
surface, from which there is no exit.
This is an instance in which the trick is implicitly and automatically installed in the
inevitable ensuing conflation that occurs for a subject embedded in a system of
autonomous difference. The system itself is looped, and forms therefore a double
bind of the sort described by Lacan, in which the only way to cope with
fragmentation is to become whole through a language that cannot satisfactorily
hermetically seal you against the extimate causality of your wholeness.
 28

A circus that demands the production of genuine freedom could be thought of as

such a double bind.

THE DOUBLE BIND:

Gregory Bateson describes this situation as being interactions characterized by:

1. Two or more persons or institutions. 2. Repeated experience. 3. A primary

negative injunction. 4. A secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more
abstract level, and not unlike the first enforced by punishment or signals, which
threaten survival. 5. A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from
escaping the field.

The ‘double-bind’ is seen by Laing and Cooper as a situation where the person,
who is the victim of it, has no means of responding to it in a meaningful or rational
way and for whom escape is impossible. The double-bind is a no win situation where
you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

(Bateson, G. (1956) Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia Behavioral Science Journal.

Vo1 Issue 4. Wiley and Sons. London)

This may or may not be a factor in the generation of psychosis, but the terror that it
represents is real enough when institutionalized in conflicting instructions for
citizens. Bateson partly sees the schizophrenic state as an adaptation that is
‘reasonable’ given the insurmountable impasse of two contradictory injunctions and
no escape route.

“Be an individual, but don’t be an individual to the degree that you do not obey the
edict to be a certain kind of individual…and you can’t leave.”

Or “Speak freely but be careful what you say.”

Or “Become unique.”

This kind of problem could be represented as a Zen Koan, an impossible,

unanswerable question, the answer to which you should know without asking.
This kind of non-dualistic puzzle free-floats as a Question/Answer, two things in a
single state and on the one hand represent an acceptance of flow of many
conflicting qualities but on the other a terrible consequence delineated purely
quantitatively.

It becomes necessary to ask: ‘If this kind of scenario is deliberately inflicted by

Power onto subjects, does this constitute a trick?’
This is an instance whereby it may be inferred that Power would like to create a
situation in which the kind of thrashing around that befalls a subject as they try to
scratch an unscratchable itch because the system itself asks for truth in an areana
 29

predicated on the fact that truth is now post ideologically unprovable and the
subject has to adopt a position accordingly in which their individuality both proves
and disproves their ‘truth’ as real.
This kind of desperate behaviour that ensues is good for production as subjects try
to identify through irrelevant objects, this is the discourse of capitalism of course,
with the added bonus that the built in obsolescence is seemingly an inherent fault in
the broken subject not the fault of an insoluable set of contradictory injunctions…in
such a scenario it may be possible to infer that Power is a deliberation , an enforced
installation of Gödel’s conundrum into the societal fabric, in which the thing that
causes production is produced, and from this contradiction any commodity follows.
It may be possible to infer this, but this may not be correct.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, I feel that the system is broken in many unfixable
ways, but I do believe some benefit more than others in exponentially
disproportionate ways.
Yes there is the Pareto principle but the disproportion is way beyond this, into
medieval proportions. It seems to be a prince and pauper narrative that is deeply
unhealthy for everyone, even those who feel they are winning.

This is important to ask in relation to the three fields under discussion here in that
it is clear within gravity that there is no ‘invisible hand’ organising a deliberate
restrictive and insoluble injunction, within language it can be said that the self is
organised according to linguistic structures which necessarily contain their own
logical impasse of impossible double bind between desire and lack, and in the case
of capital it can either be argued that this similar inherent impasse is the nature of
this particular system of value or it can be argued that those who are already ahead
in the accumulation of value can gain the possibility to turn up or down the gravity
of restriction according to their own interests.
If a trick is performed on the subject, and concealed as a trick, the normative
appearance of the conundrum becomes the problem of the subject who cannot
solve it. So it is not only the mechanism of the trick that must be constructed but
also the concealment of its central conflation; namely that a contradiction can be
solved. This is Trick Two.
But let us try to continue with the hapless instance of psychosis without
necessarily inferring that it is the result of social, institutional or familial binds. Here
the focus is on the kind of mechanisms that occur in language that are trying to
slough it off, or be free of it, or establish its ‘truth’ for the subject who produces it.

To sum up this section then is to say that the trick may be installed or inherent in
some prior manner so that the trick we have been discussing that uses power
against itself in fact uses the subjects trick against themselves and thus only serves
to expand power further.
 30

CLINICAL PSYCHOSIS:

This furthers the idea of a trick one performed in response to the un-full- fillable
edict of trick two.
Simply put psychotic production ‘fills out’ the ever-expanding area predicated on
an insoluble set of injunctions. These can seem to be for the continuing agency of
the subject who is ‘enabled’ to flee restriction, but in fact is re-iterating the terms of
the enclosure.
This mode of excessive production occurs in a factory of language and seems to
question the validity of communication as the defining criterion for the production
of language, and instead interrogates how this signifying ‘quality’ produced by
‘labour-power’ is now seemingly located as an intrinsic quality of a word that is in an
autonomous and inaccessible ‘market’ of language.
Masses of useless products flood the market that problematise the subject’s
relation to that market as the producer of the quality, off which it feeds.
No word without the alphabet, no alphabet without the word; this is a tricky
landscape.

Such a backdrop or ‘ground-zero’ represents an unsolvable crossword, the

tautology of which remains concealed. As you fill in the blanks, more blanks appear.
Superman appears to fly past your window, you cannot see the wires and,
convinced that this kind of individual flight is the birthright of everybody, you fling
yourself willingly from the window ledge.
It is clear how this kind of injunction to perform a re-enactment of something that
will mark you out as unique, that is to undertake a repeatable difference in which
the contradictory nature of repeatable difference is concealed, can become a
problem for the subject falling through the puzzle of being extraordinary.

“Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I

would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of
anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring to is constituted not by an inability to get
pleasure so much as it is by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.
There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this
mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure
principle.”

(Fisher. 2009. p21.)

The pursuit of extraordinary sensation also feeds into the notion that this is
perhaps transformative and noteworthy of recording as a constant stream of proof
of extraordinary pleasure that equates to an extraordinary individual. The trick that
it is compulsory to perform here is a hedonia that is debilitating but which is perhaps
the hysterical repetition of the Lacanian loop of desire over lack upon which capital
is happy to feed, but in the name of a free production of realisable desire.
To further quote Fisher on the notion of a materiality of language, a pleasure at
handling language that suggests escape but further enmeshes, not here in relation
to psychosis but to schizophrenia.
 31

“It is in fact eerily reminiscent of Jameson’s analysis in ‘Postmodernism and

Consumer Society.’ Jameson observed there that Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia
offered a ‘suggestive aesthetic model’ for understanding the fragmenting of
subjectivity in the face of emerging entertainment-industrial complex. ‘With the
breakdown of the signifying chain’, Jameson summarized, ‘the Lacanian
schizophrenic is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other
words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.’…What we in the classroom
are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture
– a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital
micro-slices.”

(Fisher.2009.p24)

The point here is that each new supposed meta-position or trick to escape the
topical chain is then a temporal impasse; a slice of bookended time,
incommunicable and babbling. This utterance attempts to mark that its
incommunicability is the result of how difference iterates itself through slices of
time to undo the subjective meaning and make it mean nothing as a meta-position.
This relation between how time is ‘policed’ by each enclosed synchronic definition
of autonomy is reciprocal in that each indifferent register is ‘policed’ by the
temporal slice that it renders into being as prior and external to the subject.
In the diagram, the instant of time in which the alphabet exists is perhaps also
brought into being by the alphabet that makes the word subject to the autonomous
difference that tears it apart.

The ‘material quality’ of words said to be felt by psychotics in a cut-up portion of

time that removes the word from its meaning in a topical context; it is experienced
as pure material signification. Unaware of the concealed tautology, which is that no
matter how intimate they are with the signifier its cause is extimate.
This is what leads to the connective leaps between words that are not normally
there in pure syntactic relevance. Again there is to be noted a mutated melange of
incompatible registers, of the quality of words as a method to navigate what is the
purely quantitative dimension of their difference; and an attendant fantasy or
overarching fiction that this will be possible.
This conflation of registers is in psychosis as a desperate misreading, in mysticism
as a wilful incantation, and can appear in society as a deliberate manipulation of
desiring production for self-interest.
The belief that quality can be validated in the register of quantity can drive you
mad.

The parallel between language as a currency that simply cannot validate the worth
of the subject and capital unleashed as a linguistically accented virus through which
subjects are asked to value themselves places psychosis and capitalism in close
proximity as a subject loose upon a tautological and inescapable landscape.
To return to the parameters of its iteration, here are some parameters of an
utterance that attempts to back somersault out of the restrictions of language. The
 32

emphasis here is on how it is through language that an exit from language is sought,
as in circus it is through the laws of gravity that weightlessness is pronounced:

“Linking words together based on similar sounds rather than coherent meaning is a
symptom of psychosis in people with bipolar disorder. Such bipolar symptoms occur
during psychotic episodes in the manic phase, but can also occur with depressive
psychosis.

“This speech pattern is characteristic of disorganized thinking in psychotic

disorders,” psychiatrist Michael Peterson, University of Wisconsin.

He offers these examples of ‘Clanging’ or word-associations:

“The boat that hope floats” or “the brain-drain rained on me.”

The words involved often have a rhyming, near-rhyming, or punning (choosing

words based on double meanings) quality to them.

“He is called Mr. Mazel, because he was made by Hazel.” The logic of origin here is
determined by the rhyme not the reason. Production proceeds according to criteria
which attempt to locate the subject as central and primary to that which is external
to them.

There are other types of language changes that may be present with bipolar and/or
psychotic symptoms in addition to clang associations, including:

1 Word salad. A jumble of words that are not apparently linked and
may be hard to understand.

2 Disorganization. Jumping from one idea to another without

transition.

3 Neologism. Making up words that have no meaning to anyone but

the speaker.

4 Echolalia. Repeating others’ words or phrases.

Typically, if you spend time with a person who is becoming psychotic, you will
notice that their language use gets less sensible and understandable as the
psychosis gets worse.

The subject may not be aware that he is not making sense as he strings together
‘clangs’ or other unusual language associations. Eventually the subject may become
totally incoherent or appear to be “speaking in tongues.”

“Rationalizing with him or trying to talk to him about what he is saying is not going
to get you any clear answers. Instead, start seeking treatment for his bipolar
symptoms as soon as you notice that his language is starting to fall apart.”

(Rochester, S et al (1979) Crazy Talk, A Study of the Discourse of Schizophrenic

Speakers. Plenum Press. New York)
 33

The flip side of this kind of vigilance can also translate as:

“Say what you want, but be careful what you say.”

So here there is an image of a ground in which the psychotic may adapt to perform
what we can call tricks in language that follow the model of Trick One, but the cause
of these tricks is the maddening and insoluble attempt to adapt to what is a
tautological topology of Trick Two, which counters every attempt at agency.

WORD-TRICKS:

Let us return to the diagram to examine how the loop between that which defines
the quality of difference of a letter relies reciprocally upon the quantitative
repeatability of that letter as it exists in the alphabet in order to form the words that
delineate that letters possibility to enter that autonomous register.

C I R C U S
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
< > > < > >
C I R S U
v v v v v

First there is the word ‘circus’, which is entered into the alphabetical field. The word
is uttered by the subject; whose experience of it as a materiality seems to precede
the mute and lifeless letters within the alphabet. But these letters are the
components from which this word is formed, and so the experience of that
materiality seems then to be that the word has uttered the subject, which propels
the subject to escape from that which was experienced as no longer intimate, thus
rendering more extimacy as no meta-position can be found.

In the above example the fact that the word ‘circus’ is experienced as a materiality in
its own slice of time contains within it the subject-less spelling of CCIRSU to which it
is returned; what was experienced as your own personal circus is torn apart by
gravity, which precipitates the next trick.

The psychotic falls precipitously through the gravity of language precisely because
the insoluble double bind of the reciprocality between letter in the word and letter
in the alphabet is felt as a problem that the psychotic subject needs to solve, thus
propelling them on a ramble through a landscape that is seemingly by ‘nature’ a
tautological topology. Importantly the field implies it is the subject’s problem to
solve, whilst concealing the twist in the ground that causes it.

The topology is of course the nexus between language and the desiring subject
embedded within it, language on its own is merely a straightforward alphabet, it is
the subject’s presence within it that puts the twist in the band thus making it an
insoluble and inescapable double bind. Or so the story goes.
 34

The Hypnotist and the Horserace. Part Three.

Evening: DAY ONE.

That evening I took a small meal in my room. Brought by a sulky boy

with animal features. I did not see the Doctor. The thin stew tasted
brackish. Impossible this far inland? It tasted not of river water but of
the sea. How could I taste the end before the beginning? I felt there
was something in it that made me dream…

“ I was lying on a low table. I was in a Hut of some kind. Cracked white
paint on the walls. The Doctor was standing over me, not worried by
the fact there was water coming in under the door. She tells me to
relax. She shows me a brick…an ordinary house brick, such as you would
find in any English house. She places it on my chest, telling me it is
about knowing when to remove the brick.

The brick moves up and down as I breathe. The doctor speaks. It sounds
backwards or the words are jumbled. The brick cracks, green tendrils
emerge quickly, curling, groping down to my skin, the brick is being
disintegrated from within as the plant grows with organic ferocity,
turning it to dust that mixes with the sweat on my chest.

I gasp as she snatches the plant from the shattered pieces of brick,
just before it starts to burrow into me…

“Do you see, autonomous value is destroyed… I have grown this plant in
no time.”
 35

The metaphor of precipitously falling through language in the very instance of

trying to grasp it as a material, or a fabric, is not lost to me as a rope artist.
There is a terrifying gravity here, activated by the subject of language being
exposed to its subject-less indifference, that does not openly disclose itself,
implying that self realisation within language is totally possible; within semio-
capital this problem is exacerbated exponentially. The subject produces that which
bars them but this time it can take shape as actual material conditions, which is the
proof that fiction can become fact that then implies that the subject can self realise
also.
Once the value of utterance is perceived as seemingly only value as difference to
another word, which is also only value as difference etc. etc. the subject experiences
a horrifying bottomlessness in which the self is rendered as elusive according to the
non-negotiable terms of an indifferent autonomy.
Here perhaps is a trick that, in beginning to free the speaker from the bounds of
language as a ‘unique’ or ‘individual’ speaker, ultimately negates them as being
absent in the crushing system of differences.
Proving you are ‘real’ in language only proves you are not there; rather like a Flea
Circus in which there are no fleas, and we are watching merely an absence being
pushed along by a miniature cart.
William Shakespeare defines ‘nothing’ as “a tune played by the picture of
nobody,” and almost captured here is the elusive location of the word ‘nothing’ itself
as it fails to register in tune, in picture or in person.

Psychotic utterance often includes negations of self, the feeling that there is
“nothing and nobody there…”

“Transaction 5.
Patient: I’m nobody anymore.
Doctor: how long have you been here now?
Patient: I’m not here yet, mate.
I’m not here
I’m just a bottom that’s lyin’ here
You can see that I’m not here
Doctor: And where are you now?
Where are you now, just tell me
Patient: I don’t know anymore, it’s just a bottom
That’s lyin’ here, lady.
You can see nobody anymore, no John to be seen,
just a bottom.”

(Ruth Wodak, Pete Van de Craen. (1987) Extract from clinical dialogue. Neurotic
and Psychotic Language Behaviour. Multilingual Matters. Canada.)
 36

NON-SELF HYPNOSIS: AS ENHANCED BY SEMIO CAPITAL.

Doctor: “Where are you?”

Patient: “Write here…”

Doctor: “ Ladies and Gentlemen, I present for you now a spoken-word act, in which
someone, who ends up not being there, is able to hypnotise the one who performs
the self into a disappearing act.”

This also relates to the ‘enactment’ of psychosis, engendered by the playing of

various forms of psychotic utterance, that the psychotic is also in this performative
sense both there/not there.
If I am to try to summarise this feeling I might say I am both myself and a persona.
If I am a flea circus, then both are present: as a flea pushing a miniature cart, but
also an absence, which is seemingly presented by a cart moving on its own.
The illusion is that I am operating the language, performing tricks on it, but
actually, simultaneously, its mechanisms are performing on me, performing ‘me’
actually. I have seen through the looking glass at how ‘I’ am subject to its terms of
endless reference.

If we are to follow other clinical descriptions whereby psychotic utterance

hypnotizes the subject into further psychosis, we encounter a scenario whereby I am
not pulling the cart of language but I am ‘made’ present by the cart pushing nothing.
Just as the thought is made present by the ‘doing of a pushing’ that pushes a cart
full of no-thoughts.
Thus the subject, as they perform tricks, is pulled further into the insoluble practice
of trick-making, and further into the realisation that gravity cannot effectively
render me as weightless, thus causing more attempts that embed me even further.
To me it is pointless in a way to highlight Circus itself as the objectifying force
when gravity is doing such a great job of allowing the circus subject to utter
statements of weightlessness that only confirm their own inescapable binding to
the earth.

Here is an extract from a paper that argues for this kind of utterance.
The tenet here is that the ‘act’ of making a psychotic utterance is a factor in being
drawn more deeply into the psychotic state itself. The relationship to the materiality
of language is such that the speech enacted is acting upon the speaker as it is
spoken, thus forming an instruction for the next speech, or in fact action. This is a
loop where neither the speaker nor what is spoken is in control; both are things
alongside each other, merely exchanging dissacociative atoms:

“Basing ourselves on `Speech Act Theory', we hypothesize that psychotic speech, apart
from representing desocialization and serving as a diagnostic tool, contributes to the
generation of psychosis.
 37

We argue that a patient in an acute psychotic state assigns unique features to his/her
utterances:

1. The illocutionary force of any utterance is maximized to the fullest extent possible
2. Speech acts are marked as felicitous, regardless of the pragmatic reality (as
perceived by the psychiatrist).

Speech production in the acute psychotic state resembles the communication between
a hypnotist and his recipient. The recipient treats any utterance made by the hypnotist
as an order. In other words, he/she assigns maximal illocutionary force to it. In
addition, the recipient acknowledges felicity in all of the hypnotist's utterances. Due to
the change in the pragmatic value of the perceived speech induced in the client, he/she
follows the hypnotist's orders: watches clouds in an imaginary sky, smells non-existing
flowers, or crawls along the ground like a baby.
We conceptualize the psychotic patient as combining within him/herself the qualities
or features of both the hypnotist and the recipient. The patient produces both the
`orders' (the utterances that he/she acknowledges as felicitous performatives), and
obeys them. This mechanism of `auto-generation' of psychosis allows the patient to
`slide' into a new reality.
Consequently, the patient accepts this new reality as natural and consistent. In view
of this substitution of reality, the patient's utterances cannot be judged as true or false,
but only as felicitous or infelicitous.”

(J. Zislin, V. Kuperman, [Link] (2002) The Generation of Psychosis: a pragmatic

approach. Harcourt. Australia.)

Therapist: “Who are you? What year is it?”

Patient: “My name is Tom. It is the 17th of December 1930, and I’m in London.”

This idea, that the psychotic utterance is an order, embeds the psychotic in another
reality that precipitates further orders. What is clear here is that proximity to the
tautological ground of language without recourse to escape the experience fosters
further attempts to get free, which only compound the impasse.
In this regard you cannot get out of language by thinking of it as ‘real’, and by
thinking of words as made ‘real’ within it. This only renders you to deal with an
indifferent register.
If this incompatibility between fiction and fact, quality and quantity, meta-
statement and pre-meta-statement, and meaning and linguistic value are concealed
from the subject, there is an endless production of excess that tries to account for
the excess; which amount to an endless stream of imperatives that draw the subject
deeper and deeper into the impasse.

The attempt to solve the impossible double injunction within language that
demands that the production of the quality of difference of the signifier precedes its
place in an autonomous order but in turn also insists that this autonomous
quantitative order is the origin of the possibility of production of qualitative value
 38

that feeds it, precipitates a fall through language that becomes a very real and
imperative architecture of dead ends and endless corridors. This is a maze
constructed out of the indeterminate ontological primacy of the chicken or the egg.
This random and painfully incommunicable state is proof that from a contradiction
anything follows.
In semio-capital we have the added problem of signs that take actual shape as
economic consequence; thus the incapacity of the word to refer is forestalled by it
concretely referring to value that takes actual shape…the semio capital takes real
shape in mockery of you, as it still fails to render you anywhere except to another
signifier and another and another. This concreteness of capital adds an imperative
to semio capital that ridicules the subject as not as good as capital at taking shape in
the world. Perhaps this is the imperative dimension of statements of semio capital
that once uttered tend to hypnotise the speaker into more and more such
statements.

WHY IS THIS A TRICK?

But how does this relate to the trick: the mechanism I am focussing on here relates
to this state in that as the subject is unaware of any incongruity between their role in
production of value and the intrinsic value of the signifier, the problem seems not
within the union of incompatible registers to arrive at a false economy of meaning,
but appears to be the labour of the subject to solve a problem, which is also an
insatiable work-station or factory of desire, of which they seem to be the owner.
The labour is endless, the hours are eternal, there are no wages.
In a circus where individuality, the ability to be a subject, is at stake, the labour
turns inward towards the unprovability of truth within gravity.
This is part of a discussion then of Circusism, which I see as Trick Two in Field One,
which conceals the indifference of gravity.

The over-arching context for all of this is Capitalism, in which words accrue
meaning; any statement of resistance can become advertising space. I also see
semio-capital as part of the trick two of a tautological landscape, and further proof
that what is exposed in the congruence of capital and language can equally be
concealed.

This could be thought of as a trick that just will not remain weightless, there seems
always to be a return to the earth with a bump. If this infinite weightlessness cannot
be derived from the finite resources of the trick then the shortfall has to be made up
somehow. If the trick will not render freedom, perhaps there is another body of
subjects, a mass that could be exploited to cover the deficit.
If only this kind of trick could be performed in front of an audience, then they could
make up the missing surplus that might transform ordinary fictional weightlessness
into genuine superhuman freedom.
 39

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River. Part Three.

In terms of a trick in the field of Capital, Happy had an act to die for.
First there he was as the ‘savage’, he could pay you off with a word. He talked
money like a monkey chatters bananas. Ha ha ha; A regular performing seal of
approval. An animal for the dollar, he chowed down on words that others paid
for…gourmet style.
“Nobody can touch my disregard, its painted in streaks across any immanent
surface…fuck the words, I breathe out money, and shit Manzoni’s gold.”

Happy had slipped through time. He pulled the old time trick that he got from Mary
and now, lost in a new town, wandering the streets still looking for her; he turned his
head at a familiar voice and the purr of a souped-up engine.

‘These are Circus Days, so Let’s get out of here, Happy,’ Rover Joe, his old partner
in the big swindle, swung the door open, pulling in alongside.
“What am I, a word-whore?’ Says Happy with a slow leering grin; his features
seemed to move like a slow Cadillac, kerb-crawling his face in response to Rover’s
ride. “Where did you steal this?”
‘Just get in, darling’, laughed Rover Joe, ‘ a man as beautiful as you is lookin’ to get
kilt at this hour, or worse.’

And there it went: Happy was pulled into the car.

‘Savage servility slides by on grease…’ he thought as Rover jerked it into life. Pull
back reveal, pull back reveal; drive me to a bleak heaven, which is only hell rendered
down to the purest liquor.

‘Moonshine made of sunlight, that’s what we drink’ laughed Rover handing Happy
a flask. ‘Try some 80% proof mindlessness…think and be merry’
Happy swigged the brackish spirit. Might as well live a little, he could still perform
the act half cut, and if he was going to have a manager he may as well take up with a
murdering swine like Rover Joe. At least he would get paid on time. No one would
argue with Joe’s 1933 Ruger.

“I’m taking you to a new club. The gig at the army base fell through. Who wants to
entertain the troops when you could undermine the state? I’m taking you to the
Prairie Club…one thing you can say is it’s an expansive joint.’
“You mean expensive?”
“You’ll see,” said Rover as he gunned the automobile through the tired rims of all
red lights between here and the horizon, “the venue is derived from a curve of all
possible locations in all cities.”

“Well, they say you play this place once on the way up, and once on the way down.”

“It’s good to be back…”

 40

What was Happy’s act? I mean I know it’s a show and all, but what could he ‘do’?

Well… I tell you, you never seen a vocal performance like this. Happy had perfect
pitch, see, and according to whatever unheard-of, inhuman scale he employed, (all
set down by his North American Indian blood, you dig) he could shriek the dollar
value of a word so loud it could melt the spare change in your pocket.
He worked a version of Gödel’s Theorem of Uncertainty. By assigning a dollar value
to various letters of the alphabet at various exchange rates of currency he could
work a neat conundrum.
He spoke currency tautologically. Any word could be made to trade at the value of
an equivalent word, by which financial magick, Happy Down-River could show that
one value of a word disproved the other, thus rendering the trade both worth
something and nothing simultaneously.
Con-sequent-ally, full grown commodity traders would have spontaneous
nosebleeds when Happy spoke his linguistic cash-mash act…he once bankrupted
the chief financial advisor to the Sultan of a Turkish province on vacation in
Cincinnati, who returned home without his head.
Sometimes just the idea that a trick could be made was the trick itself. The effects
were real and far reaching. Happy kept moving from town to town one step ahead
of the Pinkerton scum who pursued him.
Well, it was a living.

As fast as he rinsed some moneyed bigwig, the Law were there: at the train station,
in the after show bar, at the hotel. Making lewd offers, trying to recruit, trying to
disable his ability to talk the talk, trying to kill the gaping hole in capital.
There seemed no logic to their advances. They were in a panic. He had to be
stopped. They were trying to invalidate his invalidations without much purchase.
If words that contradicted each other could be traded on the market, all hell would
break loose…

Now this means that

Once we left behind
The second car
We were third rate
Bank robbers
But we could wish upon a star

I pull on you
You pull on me
We circle, we speak, we follow and we feint
We fool the town
We wont go down
We become the things we ain’t

Rover and Happy were singing; drunk now, weaving across all lanes of traffic,
soused at 5:30 in the afternoon, blowing the smoke from 60 dollar cigars into the
 41

faces of the jerks and rubes of fucking nowhere town.

Sirens made them leer at each other harder; these pigs clearly did not know what a
word from these blue lips could do. Happy could grin like a purple lasso, his grimace
pulled tight around the set of yellow teeth, ready to speak words of wisdom that
would shred a policeman’s life savings like a spring tornado.

“From such a howling word-wind you wake up ‘boracic lint’.”

Any copper that leaned into their trajectory would be reduced to a pennyless
shambles, crying into a paper cup by sundown as Happy inexplicably spoke their
wages into thin air.
“Try bringing home the bacon now, pig; with your asshole in hock to the bank.”

He was come to wreck the joint…and wreck the disgusting values that passed for
things these days he would.

“…And he would, wouldn’t you?”

He would wreck the face of quantity; tear it off to reveal the random flow of
meaningless items beneath. He could pull a number of teeth with quality pliers and
perform a rain dance as his patients tried to sue.
His condescending utterance could crash any market as particles of value
screamed in the ensuing maelstrom like diseased chaff in a hurricane.
What was once advertised here as shoe polish to wholesome mothers whirled now
as a dark slurry of detritus that blacked your teeth and stained the wedding dresses
of every Wednesday bride from here to Christmas.

“…and he was come to wreck the joint, to make them see the point of his spear. A
warrior of vaudeville, he can tear your wallet in two with a whisper…drink up Happy
because tonight we fuck this town…”

And he could do it too, knowing it was all a load of fucking Nancy Sinatra, so he just
sang it like Dean Martin and altered the value of Scotch, “Straight down the middle,
it went straight down the middle.”

Twilight approached them; the streetlights opened their eyes to Happy and Rover.
The tarmac permitted them and they were allowed by the noises of the night.
The heads all turned as they sang foul carols from the open top car. Long shadows
now on the backs of Rovers hands, he forced the wheel back and forth through the
laws of physics, the car jumped and held its sides in every turn. All of the speeds
were folded hard into the ingredients of metal and muscular swerves. Every light
made what they said permissable as faster than the speed of light that allowed the
words to land.
And in this way, a car was manufactured from two men, a song and every other
fucker out there…
 42

“All pedestrians must die…” they screamed as a schoolteacher threw himself into a
recently cut hedge.

Rover passed Happy the flask and in the flash, in the last sip, in the squeal of brakes,
in the momentum, they crashed through the thirteenth roadblock like an
improvised psalm of horror.

In the end the Law got wise. Nowadays everybody performs verbal tricks currency-
wise. It’s sink or swim down on Wall Street as everybody tries to pronounce the new
back somersault.

“Time is not like the old days when you could pronounce it slow enough to be
quicker than the dollar.”

“Language is a Time-Whore, and Money is the pimp.” Agreed Happy.

LOGIC:

So the other thread is logic. It is discussed here as it weaves through gravity,

Language and Capital.
How can a trick follow the axiomatic rules within a system and yet be made to say
something that highlights that the system within which it has been constructed is
too limited to contain it? These kind of formal tautologies made within a formal
system, also produce an excess, but once this surplus runs along a closed loop it can
either be ‘read’ as a ‘crash’ in the logic, or a potentiality. Again this depends in which
register this excess is ‘read’.

Psychosis also has its loops, and as stated I am acknowledging that an endless
circularity is also an impasse depending on the parameters of the register in which it
is entered, but here in logic I am looking very much at systemised internal problems
that suggest an externality to the systems through which they are iterated.
In this sense the system is highlighted as no longer being able to effectively
delineate between what is true, and what is false. This effect can of course be
concealed and exploited, just as much as its concealment can propel the subject into
insanity; which is perhaps the fine line between the deft use of flaws in logic for
personal gain and psychosis. I am not advocating either.

The method of Self Hypnosis mentioned above as a model for psychosis also
provides a link to the next section on the Trick as it might exist within a formal
system, within which it is possible to form a series of strings according to a purely
associative logic of pun, rhyme, clang, and echolalia. As such it forms a mix of
formality and chaos.
But if we imagine logic as just as susceptible to hypnotise itself deeper and deeper
into statements of nonsense then this defiance of logic can be formulated by
 43

making logic similarly self-refer to create the same looped excess that then causes
further questions about the validity of that system.
In a similar way to how the utterance of a psychotic phrase de-stabilises the
linguistic logic to further enable the production of psychotic phrases, the
establishment of one tautology with a system can lead to others: from a
contradiction, anything follows.

Within a system of logic however there is a ‘check’ against the proliferation of such
nonsense. In one register the aberration will always read as ‘nothing at all’, and all
implications of the loop are erased.
It is the split register that ‘accounts’ for the operation of tautology as implying an
outside or merely designating certain phrases as ‘useless’. In this sense of
‘accounting’, there is an economy suggested here, in that immediately upon viewing
tautology through a subjectless register the implication of use and uselessness to
the reproduction of that ‘market of logic’ becomes the primary concern, the
preservation of discreet horizontal relations between signifiers , commodities or
logical elements of the system as values in differential autonomous relation is the
main designation of use and uselessness .
What is interesting perhaps is how capitalism utilises that which is useless to the
market, namely purely qualitative, associative affects, whose pricelessness should
be a form of uselessness to that market as a way of market expansion.

Our first example has been the Gödellian Formula, which shows that truth is there
but may be unprovable in any axiomatic system. It has been intimated that the
subject present at the event of such a tautological instance will ‘read’ it differently to
the autonomy of symbolic order from which it is derived.

OTHER IDEAS ARE EXPLORED BELOW BUT THIS GÖDELLIAN MODEL WILL
REMAIN OUR MAIN APPROACH TO CATEGORISING THE TRICK AS A
MECHANISM, and its relation to the Diagram.

The important question here is what is the excess that seems to be remaindered in
the trick, between ‘truth’ and its ‘unprovability’?

*****
Welcome to the threshold, I am sorry to tell you that you will not be able to
enter because of the way the tent has been rent, the tear in the cloth has
come off and the entry is barred …one of the ways that people think I am
able to stop the door from sliding off is the way I sit at the piano, and the
way I stand when I am not at the piano…it is different to how others sit at
the piano. They have told me to be bold and to smoke cigarettes and go out
into the street and make a show of it and wear the old moustache and go
and be at the circus …well here we are and I can say that it sure is lonely.
 44

You can’t come in …so I know I’m allowed to tell you because that inside
there are some more acts about the trick and why… how its all related to
the mechanism of a bicycle or some such thing and it rides round on one
wheel so you can feel real good…there is DNA and we all play that game and
there is some more on how Mr Lacan is different to what he was before he
was sitting at the piano and how Badiou is in a pickle in the middle of his
set and how Hegel is the tail that Marx barks and barks and barks…naughty
dog…goodbye.

You can just hop like a flea to p 77

***

INCOMPATIBLE, THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE:

Let us look at the idea of both an external position being referred to and no such
position being acknowledged as everything that occurs in one register is not the
same as in the other.

IN A QUALITATIVE REGISTER: It is ‘true’ that the limits of the system are exposed.

IN QUANTITATIVE REGISTER: no such limit is ‘provable’ as everything that

happens only occurs within the field of gravity.

This is the moment of the event, in which the event is categorised by something
that is subjectively thought of as being external to the set is objectively permitted to
occur within it, thus causing an event for the subject.
Two registers that do not acknowledge the validity of each others parameters are
conflated to interact in the moment of the trick, so that what is seen as qualitatively
true is quantitatively unprovable, and what is seen as quantitatively true is seen as
less than the excess of what was qualitatively experienced.
Gödel’s theorem seems to operate in both registers but as a phenomenon that
each accuses the other of unprovability in relation to their own truth.

Weightlessness is a fantasy in terms of gravity, but something irrefutable for the

subject. The incompatibility of registers is what causes this, and their congruence in
the moment of the trick.
In the qualitative register weightlessness is felt by the subject; a moment at the
end of a gravitational technique but which shows that there is something outside of
gravity.
In the quantitative register, it never happened as something that refers to the
outside of gravity, it is merely part of the technical execution that is permissible
within it.
 45

We can see here that something akin to extimate causality is at play as the
discourse of gravity, the presence of it as an empty set, from which all bodies of
mass are ordered, is present as a vital component of the imaging of a space external
to that discourse; something that is experienced as hermetically sealed from it but
compromised because it is ‘from’ it.

Quality is pure fiction in a quantitative register, but quantity is the register through
which quality makes its meta-statements ‘about’ the quality of that quantity.

EITHER:

1: that it is possible to construct a trick from only the internal components of a formal
system that can imply that there are boundaries to that formal system and thus
suggest an externality to it.
In relation to Gravity; the gravitational field is undoubtedly a ‘truth’ but in some
instances it ceases to be able to prove itself to be true, through the interference of
bodies ‘artistically’ mobile within it; bodies that convey through that gravity a
weightlessness that is impermissible within it. This is a purely qualitative view.

OR:

2: it is only possible to refer to further different arrangements of components within a

system that all occur only within that system, i.e. no external position is referred to at
all, this is simply impossible within the available terms. This is a purely quantitative
view.

Both of these readings are true. The existence of two incompatible registers accounts
for this. Gravity is indifferent to what may or may not appear as weightlessness,
regardless of what quality it may bestow upon the subject who enacts it. We could say
that although an external position is referenced, there is no such thing as a meta-
position; these statements exist simultaneously in two separate and incompatible but
conflated registers.

In terms of logic then, what we have above here is a deliberate re-organisation of

the available symbols, in logic not-A is used to imply both B and not-B and it is this
re-shuffle, this specific manipulation, that leads us to arrive at a tautology, to arrive
at the trick.
This is markedly different from the involuntary ‘playing’ of a tautological loop as in
a psychotic episode; in which language is used to try to exit the law of language,
which is in response to the endless insoluble reciprocal circuit within language itself
that the psychotic responds to as a double bind that they need to solve.
Circus is not psychotic in that it deliberately renders this tautology; there are
perhaps other consequences of not acknowledging the impossibility of moments of
weightlessness to become moments of genuine freedom, but this will be discussed
later in the text.
 46

The trick occurs as both an image of something ‘outside’ the system, thus implying
an outside and occurs merely within the system.
As stated, it is both of these simultaneously. The circus body BOTH free AND not-
free; a more complex mode that either/or it is both/and.

For instance, two things can occur:

One: in the way a Hacker operates. He or she writes code according to the available
symbols in the code, nothing that exists outside of the formal system can be
included or it will not be recognised, but using only the available symbols a set of
programming instructions can be written that refute the authority built into the
system. This action suggests an externality to the limits of the program but
necessarily expressed through internal components.
When a crash occurs within the particular formal system of the program this is
because as far as the purely quantitative parameters of the code within that
program are concerned, the particular self-referential piece of code (the trick or
hack) represents something that cannot exist within the program, its presence is
impossible, and so in the terms of the program to register its existence causes a
systemic breakdown.
Obviously gravity is not broken by the trick but the point is that if that
weightlessness were ‘real’ it would be broken, as gravity would include a body of
mass equivalent to zero, which is impossible (at the Newtonian level at least.)
The point here is to demonstrate the impossibility of registering weightlessness
within gravity. It is not possible, weightlessness is a qualitative statement within
gravity, an imagination of what it would be like to be weightless, but the mobility it
can engender is real enough. It momentarily enables previously unavailable
movement, the lift creates new possibility, but the lift is paid for in techniques that
must proceed through gravity.
Gravity allows something it cannot see, which is the moment of weightlessness.

Two: The Hacker is paid to look for loopholes to improve the code or to falsely sell
anti-virus software.

As discussed it is this propensity for capture that seems ever present in the trick and
this is to do with the possibility of exposing or concealing the central conflation of
registers that is inherent in the tautology.
The statements that seek an exit from their ‘statement-ness’ are proposed meta-
statements (and here I am referring to the Gödellian construction of tautology) but
are placed together in the field in question and as such are treated as regular infra-
statements, and it is this conflation that causes the problem, the statements refer to
each other in a way that creates a flicker, an insolubility.
This can cause a psychotic crash if the system or subject believes it must be solved.
Statements can be constructed that are ‘true’ but unprovable, which either implies
the subject or the system is broken depending on whether the way that conflation
of incompatible registers that enables this tautology are exposed or concealed.
 47

It becomes necessary now to look at other possible iterations of a trick, which are
more related to formal systems in which typographic symbols and numbers are
shuffled according to a series of axioms, and how such systems can be made to
display self-reference, self-duplication and tautology.

DAWKINS:
In trying to think of the most extreme example of parts internal to a closed system
that can then refer to some other area outside of that closed system.

So I am inferring that a certain re-shuffling of symbols into a certain order, with a

tendency to self-refer, within the formal system of matter has engendered the
possibility for statements that refute the limits of that formal system of matter.
If we look at Richard Dawkins description, in the introduction to the Selfish Gene:
he imagines the beginnings of life as a soup of molecules, in which re-shuffling
occurs continuously.

“…and in those days large organic molecules could drift unmolested through the
thickening broth.
At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call
it the Replicator. It may not necessarily been the biggest or most complex molecule
around, but it had the extraordinary property of being able to create copies of itself…

He goes on to describe how this chain would then form further copies of itself as
other molecules would latch onto those in the chain that matched them:

“ …Actually a molecule that makes copies of itself is not so difficult to imagine as it

seems at first, and it only had to arise once. Think of the replicator as a mould or
template. Imagine it as a large molecule consisting of a complex chain of various sorts
of building block molecules. The small building blocks were abundantly available in the
soup surrounding the replicator. Now suppose that each building block has an affinity
for its own kind. Then whenever a building block from out in the soup lands up next to a
part of the replicator for which it has an affinity, it will tend to stick there. The building
blocks that attach themselves in this way will automatically be arranged in a sequence
that mimics that of the replicator itself.

… It is easy then to think of them joining up to form a stable chain just as in the
formation of the original replicator. This process could continue as a progressive
stacking up, layer upon layer…

On the other hand two chains might split apart, in which case we have two replicators,
each of which can go on to make further copies…”

(Dawkins, R. (2016) The Selfish Gene. OUP. Oxford.)

 48

Here he implies how the first chains that we know as RNA or DNA may have formed.
And we know how that ends up.
What is interesting is there is no dynamic lightning bolt moment that brings life,
just a tendency to self refer, to make something that makes something that is the
same as the thing that makes something,
(It is this self-referential looping that I am suggesting is a mechanism for referring
to a space outside the limits of the parts)
In Dawkins imagination it is just a slow process of random molecules splitting up,
re-combining, in endless cycles, until ‘being’ is reached.
Then we could say that fragmentation and re-folding in self-referential loops;
something that both implies itself and its negation, are the beginnings of all life, not
just an incorrect spelling of alphabet soup.
These parts have arranged themselves into a trick spelling, one that can go on to
form life. Something that often likes to think of itself as beyond or outside mere
matter.
A great way for matter to have given itself a problem…that the not-A of
consciousness implies both matter, B, and not-matter, not-B, therefore
consciousness is false, and unconsciousness is the true, but since consciousness can
only see itself as irrefutable unconsciousness is not true…so we return to the start of
the loop.

Symbols, molecules reshuffled within the limits of the formal chemical system
have resulted in an image of something outside the limits of the image of that
formal system, namely a consciousness, something that is composed of non-
matter. Regardless of whether this is what really happened it serves as an ‘image of
a trick’, as something that moves through a medium in order to create an image of
something outside of the limits of that medium.
Something is present within life that is from outside; the lifelessness of the
molecule is there within the set of things called ‘life’ as a possibility for the set to
occur. Difference or the Empty Set has to be present within the set that does not
contain it, difference is present within the set as that which is not in the set but has
to be in order for difference that forms the set to occur.
Life is an ‘affect’, that escapes the description through the available chemical
symbols, in this sense it is tautology that has rendered this; life implies both matter
and its negation not-matter, therefore life is false, but since it is experienced as true
it loops back to the beginning. Life is true but unprovable anywhere within its
material register. Like a horse race to nowhere, this endless loop remainders
something that happens too fast to have happened.

GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH:

Let us discuss another take on Gödel at this point , who has formed this definition
of the trick.
In his book G.E:B: Douglas Hofstadter, a computer programmer in complex
systems, refers to what he calls ‘strange loops’. These are statements made within a
formal system with a tendency to self-refer.
 49

He describes here something that occurs in music, specifically in the ‘Canon per
Tonos’, which is an endlessly rising canon, so whichever key you start in it
modulates in a loop:

“…In this canon, Bach has given us our first example of the notion of ‘strange loops’.
The strange loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards)
through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves back
where we started…”

(Hofstadter, D (2000) Gödel, Escher, Bach. Penguin. London)

This is a description that can also be applied to the shorter loops that we have been
examining here. In the Epimenides paradox, no matter which way you go, a level up
or down, you are returned to where you started, acknowledging that the truth of the
first sentence means both the falsity of the second but which then implies the falsity
of truth itself; rather like Parhassius’s painting of the veil over the painting, and
here discussed as being a definition of the trick, which similarly describes the
possibility of weightlessness within a field that does not permit it but which allows
the procedural construction of weightlessness to occur.
The DIAGRAM bears out this loop as it exists deep in language, in that no matter
which primacy you attempt to prove, the letter in the word or the letter in the
alphabet, you can never arrive except back where you started, rather like the
psychotic propelled endlessly through an insoluble and reciprocally negating double
bind.

Hofstadter attempts to explain his own attitude to the writing of artificial

intelligence software, programs that can ‘notice themselves’ and exhibit behaviours
that demonstrate awareness of an externality to the formal system of logic of which
they are composed, and to do this by a logical reorganisation of the code which
exists purely internal to the system. These systems display hints of consciousness,
and Hofstadter also implies that this is the beginnings of Artificial Intelligence, that
systems can be made to ‘work out’ things ‘as if’ they were sentient. But they are not.
The point here is to highlight the different possibilities to reference an externality
to a formal system by highlighting its limits in dealing with tautological statements
constructed within it and how this is dependant on the register in question.
Hofstadter could be said to be chasing a program that can perceive the qualitative
register, and make qualitative decisions as being one of the criteria of AI, it is this
ability when faced with a tautological impasse that makes the difference between a
non-sentient system simply crashing at the impossibility of its externality, and a
sentient one being able to continue to leap out of the tautology onto another level
of cognitive operation.
Hofstadter works primarily on projects concerned with the programming of
Artificial Intelligence, in which the drive is to operate a Grand Trick. This trick would
be the generation of a self-reflective, self-aware form of consciousness through the
medium of typographic symbols arranged into code.
A ‘thinking’ software that can run on an inorganic hardware. This is a long way
from Dawkins description of the Trick of Life.
 50

The iterations of ‘strangely’ looped programs created on the journey towards to

such a complex dream form ‘imitations of thought’, often able to cope with deeply
convoluted and nuanced loops of reasoning, but essentially the great divide remains
uncrossed, these systems are still vulnerable to ‘crashes’ precisely because there is
no consciousness that can be iterated through a code in which it is ultimately
impossible to write a tautology, an impasse beyond which the program cannot
‘think’.
In consciousness on the other hand there is an ‘affective’ ability to jump out of the
system, an ability to imagine past the breakdown of logic, and an ability to use such
loopholes, that crash less agile sentience, to convey the existence of another area
beyond the limits of the logic through which such ‘tricks’ are spoken, to another
similarly agile sentience.
Remember here I am referring to this strange loop as something that has a similar
structure to a circus trick.
A trick conveys something to an audience that gravity cannot see: a moment of
apparent weightlessness that simply should not be there.
The presentation of this tautology, does not cause our thinking to crash, we
ourselves as audience members simply leap out of the system of gravity and can
imagine that there is a space beyond this field, within which the statement is made.

RECAP GÖDEL:

As a backstory to Gödel it can be observed that there have been many attempts to
rid mathematics, especially set theory, of paradox. Russel and Whitehead laboured
to produce a series of categorisations to prevent the problem of sets of everything
not being able to include themselves. But it was Gödel that demonstrated that this
instance was unavoidable, and in fact inherent in any axiomatic system of logic, in
which logical statements unfold from a basic set of principles.
Gödel created a greater trick from the components internal to Russel and
Whitehead’s ‘solution’, which created another impossibility that implied that their
solution was incomplete, it was still possible to form a statement that refuted the
authority of the system through which it moved, even in this refined, locked down
system that appeared to be a totality.

He proved by the construction of statements in number theory that are made about
number theory using only the symbols of it, that prove the ‘incompleteness’ of the
system put forward by Russell and Whitehead to solve the paradox problem.

Whereas the Epimenides paradox is neither true nor false, the statement Gödel
created is un-provable, inside the system of ‘Principa Mathematica’, but true.
This was not the end however, ”Gödel’s proof pertained to any axiomatic system
which purported to achieve the aims that Russel and Whitehead had set for
themselves. One basic method did the trick. In short, Gödel showed that provability is
a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved.” (P.19, GEB)
This is an example of moving through a system, applying itself to itself to refute
the authority of that system.
 51

The next important question following the explanation of these two methods is to
ask what is ‘remaindered’ by this inability of proof, something ‘outside’ of the formal
system is implied?

What is this excess?

NOT EXTRAORDINARY, SUPERNUMERARY

Is there a political definition of it that might be useful to explain this difference

between what is seen or sensed in different registers?

We have looked at something Supernumerary is implied as the numbers reflect back

and forth endlessly, something that is not available for rendering in the distribution
of the system.
The possibility to be rendered visible to the senses as they are organised in a
quantitative order does not occur to such excessive subjects; the implication here is
that you can be walking around as ‘true’ but there does not exist the register in
which you are ‘provable’.

In reference again to this extra figure; for me it is the potentiality for the trick to be
thought about through an image of this politics.
There is a corollary here, which implies that such a figure is assimilated in the end,
thus the society opens up to encompass this once supernumerary subject, and it is
not so much this moment of assimilation that I am referencing but the moment in
which the existence of such a figure highlights the limited form of quantatitive
evaluation upon which the system is based. What interests me is the fictionalising of
a space outside of a societal system that is imagined by such an imperceptible
figure.
Of course the societal structures exist as extimate causalities within this external
space as they do within the whole, as they form the positive condition and barrier to
that external position. I am not saying a meta-position is possible, but that there is
something that escapes capture in the ‘telling’ of how this space looks or feels.
So in moving through images of systems that are refuted by the tricks that occur
within their workings in the fields of biological evolution, logic and mathematics, I
am aware these are just metaphors, but they are isomorphic in structure to the
mechanism I see in the trick. So to deal with the problem of how to think about
circus I will further quote Hofstadter:

“ …the perception of an isomorphism between two known structures forms a kind of

knowledge – and I claim that it is such perceptions of isomorphism which create
‘meanings’ in the minds of people”

(Hofstadter, 2000)
 52

So perhaps here is a meaning, that the trick could ‘mean’ an image of political
action?
To address the formation of a ‘thinking’ that is within the trick there are clear
steps. In approaching any field
So we see the mechanism at least…and I am highlighting this ‘play’ within logic to
draw analogy with a kind of dissent and to perhaps explain the way I try to use
language as a material, that I am trying to use it as a rope, folding it back on itself,
looping it and tying it into the inevitable self-collapsing knots.

AESTHETICS OF THE TRICK:

Partly what I am saying is that there is an elegance to the trick or loop as I see it, and
that in this elegance is a kind of elegance of the ironic perhaps, the way that a loop
occurs when we see as a group that the actual meaning is the opposite of the literal
meaning, and that we float free above the given ‘meanings’ to play with our own.
The irony I am referencing is that of a system of meaning that is turned on itself, as
in the kind of loops I am positing.
There is a kind of solidarity in recognizing this kind of ironic loop, and we laugh
together as we do when we realize that it is a kind of joke or trick to allow yourself
to be run over by an ambulance.
I wish to work these ideas in a group for an audience to break the inherent cynicism
that is evident when we acknowledge the impossibility of defeating gravity
(whether we make analogy with power, money etc. or not, there is an impossibility
to get free of it in circus practice).
My thoughts now are focused on presenting these ideas as maybe something that
now needs to be taken up and shared in order that the group, our being together in
a troupe can fracture the impossibility inherent in the solo repeating of these loops.
Something larger that approaches a group acknowledgement of a shared laughable
irony needs to be the next step, and here I will refer again to Berardi, and in this text
there may be a hint of the difference between what I consider to be tricks or loops
that point at freedom and tricks or loops operated by power that point back into the
system of limitation:

“irony suspends the semantic value of the signifier and chooses freely among a
thousand possible interpretations. The ironic interpretation implies and
presupposes a common ground of understanding among the interlocuters, a
sympathy among those who are involved in the ironic act, and a common autonomy
from the dictatorship of the signified.
Cynicism starts from the same suspension, but is a slavish modulation of irony:
irony at the service of power. While irony does not postulate the existence of any
reality, cynicism postulates the inescapable reality of power, particularly the power
of the economy.
Irony is an opening of a game of infinite possibilities; cynicism is a dissociation of
ethics and possibility. The cynical mood starts from the idea that ethical action has
no possibility of succeeding.”
 53

(Berardi, F. (2012) The Uprising. Semiotexte. Los Angeles)

In this quote that falls at the end of the book The Uprising there is much hope, and I
not always gripped by hope, but I do wish to take these ideas and explore them
within the framework of a mobile ensemble, who share a sense of the possibility of
the impossible loop.

I will discuss later my recourse to purely ‘inoperable’ practices as a way of moving. I

do not feel this might be giving into a cynicism, of being an almost Christian ethic of
admitting that there is no possibility of escape in this life and so we pray for a better
one to come. There is something of this in my thinking but I am not suggesting that
action be abandoned and the only movement left is the inoperable move. It is
important to state here that I think that the working of these inoperable moves in an
ensemble and their presentation to an audience is greater than the sum of the
logical parts that make these recourses greater than the cynical acknowledgement
of the impossibility of escape from restriction, or indeed greater than the cynicism
that sees the desire to be free as merely the following of an edict to be a ‘good’
neoliberal citizen.

There is a question ‘for whom is this work’, I see it as a collection of tools and ideas
to hold an ensemble together, and here I can only really be anecdotal in my
evidence of this, but the small collection of players that have engaged with these
ideas have formed a bond of sorts; the existence of this bond seems to alleviate the
cynicism inherent in the loop and is experienced as something that escapes the
external gravities that mean we cannot continue to work together for longer
periods.

HALLUCINATING THE TRICK:

I will engage in a very brief sketch of various instances where I can locate some trick-
like mechanism in various thinkers, and also to note that there is perhaps for me,
something conveyed in each case that is not effectively ‘registerable’ in the closed
system in question. Something escapes even though we are told of the logical proof
of inescapability.
The goal here is not perhaps to definitively state that ‘this is a trick’, but more to
give an overall impression of how perhaps I locate the potentiality for what I am
calling a trick within each example. In some cases the trick is the merely the
highlighting of an inherent tautology.
This exercise is not to prove ‘trickiness’ but to give access to the way I might
delineate the outline of the circus technique within each example. It is not to prove
that the faces are there, but to show how I can see faces in the curtains.

BADIOU:
 54

Badiou’s theory of the event is based in set theory and I will sketch it here in
awareness of its depth and complexity that warrant more space. The point here is to
present models that I feel are trick-like, only to map these structures onto my own
practice as I see it, in order that where these critical alliances ‘fit’ and do not ‘fit’ then
these areas hold the potentiality for new knowledge.
If there is a set of possible things, a set of the world and what you know is possible
within it, then the trick represents the inclusion within that set of something that
should not be in the set of possible things but which is nevertheless there. The trick
then is perhaps the discovery of something hidden that was there all along or it may
be the ‘telling’ of something that is not in the set, but told in such a way as to make
it appear that it is there, that is a fiction. Such a fiction would have the impression of
being something present in a set that cannot contain it.

The ‘telling’ of this inclusion of that which is excluded requires a split in the channel
of communication, a split in the register, whereby the subject can receive
something not visible in a subjectless register. It can be ‘told’ to be ‘qualitatively
present, whilst being ‘quantitatively’ absent. So the trick presents itself as an ‘event’
at the basic level (beyond the various instances where we can claim that circus does
things we did not know were possible) in a way that is more related to linguistic
conundrums, in that within the set called ‘things that are possible within gravity’ it
includes weightlessness, which by definition is not included. Again we must
acknowledge that the split in the registers that record this weightlessness as a
quantitative aberration that is a function of dynamic bodies in motion in the field,
and as a qualitative reality of a moment of suspension that images the externality of
the field itself are responsible for this seeming tautology, but the registers are
conflated as soon as the subject is present in a field of any kind of value, be it
weight, mass or whatever form. The presence of the subject, like Hofstadter’s
dream of AI, creates a potentiality for thought that leaps out of the set, presenting
itself as contradictorily external to that set but from within. This leap does not need
fact but can equally use fiction as a springboard, at least to imagine what the
externality of the set might look like whilst remaining inside it. What is important
that the set-ness of the set is now exposed, even if only as an inoperable
potentiality, a ‘telling’ of fiction.
The trick is an EVENT as it exposes set-ness (in Lacanian terms the discourse of the
analyst addresses the subject in order to help them expose the master signifier that
they are repressing???), in that it asks us to reconfigure the set called gravity as no
longer a totality, the set must now contain things that are outside of gravity even
though this reconfiguring of the set occurs entirely within the field of gravity itself. It
is important to note that at no moment has an event occurred that is outside the set
called things possible within gravity.
This definition of the Trick is of something that is again Both/And; an event both
outside and inside the set called gravity facilitated by the incompatibility of registers
that govern the overall field.
Momentarily therefore, the set contains something that exists outside of it, and
this is in part related to the subject themselves. The subject can be thought of as
being a supposedly sealed set of subjectivity containing an extimate intrusion; so an
‘event’, something like a trick, exists within the subject itself. The condition of this
 55

sealing from externality is that this externality has to be included. This is an

unorientable enclosure that in order to be sealed from the outside, that outside
must be manifest on the inside to complete the seal. The seal is completed by that
which opens it…in no less an incongruous and tautological way we can think of
Dawkin’s model of ‘life’ as containing the presence of ‘no life at all’. The event of life
is a non-event.
As regards the circus body in space: the subject contains this event, and thus is
complicit in the trick. Without their presence , there is only the movement of bodies
according to what gravity permits and moments of weightlessness have no quality
of being either inside or outside gravity, only displaying the fluctuating quantities
inherent in bodies moving through it. Nothing is implied about a space outside of
gravity at all.
This would be a circus without subjects.

LACAN:

Deep in language there is Lacan’s idea of extimate causality, which is the presence
of something external in the conditions by which the subject thinks of themselves as
internally whole. The cause of desire to be whole is focused externally, and the
presence of this component ensures that this desire is unfulfillable.
The subject wishes to be a hermetically sealed unit that is at the proximity of a
subjective component, ie it is ‘intimate’ but which is not from that subject, not even
from that register that acknowledges the possibility for the presence of the subject.

This presence is therefore ‘extimate’; both inside and outside the set of the self. This
inclusion of the empty set which is the necessary reciprocal condition for a set to be
configured, this ‘set-ness’ is close to the subject but represents an autonomous and
subjectless register from which the subject necessarily draws the power of
signification that copes with the once fragmented parts they were and seeks to
unify those parts into a whole image.

The image is composed under differential terms that invite the presence of a
persistant empty set, but which remain as the condition of impossibility of
wholeness that is the purpose of the differentiation.

The { } empty set persists after it is added to the thing to become the object, but
there is a minimal difference that adheres to the object, otherwise without this
“minimal self-difference” it would just be a being-object.

The minimal difference — the empty set — persists after the object is precipitated
from the thing. It persists as the object’s minimal difference from itself … In effect,
the object is generated from the conjunction of being and minimal difference or
being and the addition of a negation. (35)

Once the object “is precipitated from the thing” it contains this minimal
difference, and this minimal difference can also be called the “addition of a
negation” or as we’ve seen the empty set {}
 56

Now in order to understand extimate causality, we have to keep in mind these two
important functions of the { } empty set: as a cut necessary “to bring an object into
our world from sheer being” acts as the external cause and as the minimal
difference “that makes an object non-self-coincident (and therefore not a sheer
“being-thing”) adheres to the object as an internal cause.

Taken together, (as they must be, because they are the same function), they form
the exitimate cause”

“The extimate cause functioning by way of the specific mechanism of the formal
negation, engenders a structured field or system (with its concomitant objects,
properties, and relationships) out of what would otherwise be a state of
undifferentiation or monadic unrelatedness.”

What is also implied here is that the object so rendered also has a ‘minimal
difference to itself’ in that the empty set that allows it to take up a quantitative
difference also is the negation of its undifferentiated state, hence this presence that
negates ‘that which it was’ is its difference to itself is a consequence of its ‘object-
ness’. This minimal difference to itself is then necessarily attended by an excess,
which is the surplus of this minimal self-difference.

“At the same time, it inevitably gives rise to an element of nondeterminacy, surplus,
or excess. Speaking in terms of the social arena, we could put it this way: the
operation that bestows identities, properties, and relationships also leaves a
residue, so that every subject bears some excess. At every point in the social field,
then, an irreducible excess attends social relations. In fact, although it seems
paradoxical, this excess is what makes the social field itself possible and makes its
structure potentially analyzable

(Rothenburg, M (2010) The Excessive Subject. Polity. Cambridge)

EXCESS

In terms of a Marxian surplus; it might be said that the surplus is that which sits
unacknowledged by the exploitative process as being the leakage, the minimal
difference between the raw material, the thing, and the finished product, the
commodity. This unacknowledged presence within the commodity is due to the
fetishisation of it, which denies the presence of the origin of its propensity for
surplus value as the subject of labour.
This subject is paid in the same criterion of false equivalence that enables the
fetishisation to occur which does not acknowledge the relative value between the
inter-subjective relation between the subject and the market as empty set.

In terms of our diagram extimate causality is the letter drawn from the autonomy
of the alphabetical order that sits within the word as it attempts to meaningfully
 57

and wholly seal itself off from that autonomy as a singular signification of a specific
‘truth’, it contains that which means it is not capable of containing.

The letter allows the word to form but is also the condition of that word’s self
difference and the attendant excess.
At this diagrammatical level it might be said that this is a trick. The letter in the
word is present within the set of differential ‘qualities’ of the subject as an extimate
causality for those qualities, but which can only iterate themselves through recourse
to a system of difference that deals only in differential quantities.

In this sense there is a trick deep within the subject, and again this trick can be
acknowledged as being a conflation of incompatible registers or it can be the
concealment of those incompatibilities which necessarily compounds the ground
upon which the subject stands into an insoluble double bind in which it becomes the
subject’s problem that they cannot satisfactorily signify themselves rather than
seeing it as a trick within the systemic contradiction of language itself, as it is
founded on a subject-less difference.

This difference between exposing the tautological ground or reading it as neutral

and thus propagating a subjectively internalised knot will be discussed later as the
operation of Lacan’s impasse is examined as it is installed in a topologically twisted
surface.

The trick here is defined as a mechanism that exposes an already inherent

tautology, the exposure f which reveals the limitations of the formal system and
allows for the fictionalisation of an excess or surplus.

IN HEGEL:

Within the dialectic is the process that I am perhaps referring to, although there is a
continuity here that is suggested by Marx to be a fallacy. Mentioned above the trick
is defined not necessarily as an iteration of elements in kernel form within the
existing system as the unfolding of those elements (a kind of extimate destiny) but
more that the trick ruptures the totality of the form by exposing how those kernel
elements perhaps establish and install an inherent tautology.
This therefore implies not its assimilation of the rupture as a natural expression of
its inherent nature towards a greater logical goal inherent in the current injunctive
nature of the formal system but the assimilation of that non-total system into a
wider perspective.

What is highlighted in Marx’s inversion of the dialectic is a praxis that is galvanised

by the highlighting of inconsistency in the material conditions, and the exposure of
the conflation of incompatible registers of use and exchange value that necessarily
also exposes the myth of the equivalence of relative and equivalent value, exposing
also the origin of surplus value in the subject of labour who produces it.
 58

Such praxis requires action that is more of a rupture than the natural evolution of
change than is suggested in the idea that this new state inheres within the elements
that are currently in motion.
Within the idea of Hegel, thesis finds its contradiction in the antithesis and then
unfolds into the synthesis, no such active struggle is referred to. The sublation of the
no longer useful structure, that is its negation but preservation as the underlying
condition of the new structure implies a continuity of social order perhaps not
implied in Marx.

It can be argued that an underclass will refer to late Hegel, a bourgeoisie will refer
to the younger Hegel and the inevitability of master/slave relations.
However the idea of a discontinuity within the thesis, and the existence of the
antithesis, which now cannot be ignored implies that there is a new whole, of which
the previous totality is now only a part.
This event means that the formal system that was, is no longer perceived as a
totality and something else is suggested.
The extrapolation of this is what escapes, there is a suggestion here of Spirit,
which cannot be found as registerable within the procedural steps of the dialectic, it
is an inference of something implied by the existence of an area yet to arrive.
The idea here that the establishment focuses on the early Hegel of Master and
Slave, as the legitimisation of a struggle as the natural order, that then legitimises
the inequality in the distribution of value as the result of a equilibrium, an invisible
hand or a natural ludic order in which class inequality and conflict over resources is
an inevitable but balancing societal mechanism will be discussed in relation to Trick
Two.
Whilst those on the lower tier will focus on the dialectic inevitability of the end of
such systems as the procession towards perfection ensues.
The focus here is not so much upon the containment of the new that is the logical
progression of a permitted evolution according to the terms inherent in the system
but more that the trick here, that highlights the system as limited, calls for a rupture
of that system, a highlighting of the subject’s ability to demand change through the
fictionalisation of an excess that is implied by the exposure of the systemic
limitations.

IN MARX:

For me, the trick performed here was to show the inevitability of the falling rate of
profit. In a sense his trick, highlighted at the same time that this limit is the result of
a trick of exploitation. This can be forestalled of course by the movement of capital
to other cheaper labour markets and overseas investment, but the limit is there.
Its exact location is the subject that operates on the wrong side of fetishisation,
and labours at that which is unknown. This trick in concealment directly involves the
relationship between fetish and exploitation, in that one is the enabling condition of
the other. The equivalence that results from the fetish is exactly what creates the
possibility of the money form to take shape as the expression of falsely attributed
exchange value, the wage that is formed from the concealment of exploitation is
therefore that in which exploited worker is paid, which receives its inflated value
 59

from the very exploitation of him having to accept it. This trick is highlighted in the
exposure of the limit of capital.

In terms of trick one and two: If Marx identified a contradiction within capital, then
what is highlighted here is a tautological ground in which Marx performs the trick of
exposing the inherent limitations of this system, which is the form of trick one; that
which exposes the limitations of a system by utilising the components within the
system in order to do so.

In following the Gödellian model, and to a certain extent the diagram, we can see
that the subject of wage-labour creates meta-statements about the quality of
difference of a commodity, which then allows that commodity to take up a position
of autonomous and purely qualitative difference within the market (in this sense a
meta statement about value is taken up and treated as a fetishized infra statement
‘of’ value, seemingly intrinsic to the commodity), the Gödellian feature of Marx’s
trick here is that he identifies a doubling of this process of meta statement treated
as ‘pre-meta-statement’ in the instance that the conflation proceeds to the point at
which this wage-labour is treated AS a commodity. In this point the tautological
ground of capitalism takes shape in which the same reciprocal loop occurs in which
the conditions for the production of meta statements about value rely wholly on
drawing their components from the autonomous register of value , which is the
market. In this sense the linguistic impasse highlighted by Lacan in which the
subject is barred from the signifier takes up the same form as the impasse of
exploitation in which the subject of labour is alienated from the commodity that
they produce.

Wage-labour is treated as a commodity…in terms of our diagram, this can be

thought of as the inherent conflation that has been described in Lacan. The internal
presence of the external will result in contradiction, and the exposure or
concealment of this loop that highlights an excess occurs whether the process is
exposed or not.
A word is a meta-statement ‘about’ the quality of difference of the letters within it,
a letter in the alphabet is an infra (or pre-meta) statement ‘of’ the differential
quantity of that letter in relation to the differential quantity ‘of’ another letter.
Necessarily the word in the alphabetical field (that stand for all of the fields of value
discussed here; namely gravity, language and specifically here Capital)
automatically elicits this tautology that ensues when that which is a meta-
statement (word) is treated as an infra-statement (letter) due to them both being
derived within (ie infra) to the field. The tautology occurs as meta is treated as infra.
If we think of Wage-labour as Marx does; as the origin of value, as the source of the
quality of difference that the commodity is then able to take up in relation to other
commodities, then wage-labour is a meta statement ‘about’ the qualitative
difference of that commodity. But since within the field of value that is the market,
wage-labour is doubled as also a necessary commodity , then it is necessarily
treated as if it were an infra-statement ‘of’ differential quality. The loop here is clear,
within capitalist production a tautology exists by which labour is the cause of its own
value from which it is alienated simultaneously. The differential of the market is the
 60

extimate cause of labour never being able to be the origin of its own value, as it is
the origin of value that is treated as the commodity within which such value is
barred from the subject.
The trick here is to expose this tautology, rather than let it remain concealed or
allow it to become the counter trick in which the entrepreneurial labour produces
only according to their own means but according to means of meaning production
that is beyond their control.
Marx’s trick exposes the limits of capital.

IN DELEUZE AND GAUTTARI:

This exposure of capital is responded to by its excessive expansion past this limit
that is highlighted by Deleuze and Gauttari in their formulation of desiring-
production. Here I will focus on this mode of production in its captured form that
stimulates an excess that should be impossible for capital to recruit as its main
engine of concealment of its incapacity to process such surplus that Marx exposed.
This trick in which the exposure of the falling rate is countered with a shift in
production to the cause of production, that is, a shift to the production of desire
itself is for me Gödellian in structure.
In that what is supposed to be the cause of production is the thing then named as
the product to be produced, in a mirroring of the Gödellian logic who ‘renamed’ the
processes of number law with that which they produce to produce the excess of self
referential processes that produces themselves.

Desire is supposedly a process that elicits production, that is it is a Meta-statement

‘about’ the quality of difference that is then fetishized as intrinsic to the commodity;
this is the first acceleration of desire into its own production in that it becomes a
meta statement about commodity that becomes a statement ‘of’ that commodity.
Secondly this production is accelerated if we consider the shift in production to
produce desire itself. Then desire, which is the production of meta-statements
‘about’ the quality of difference of a commodity, is itself produced and so is similarly
treated as if it is a commodity; as an infra statement ‘of’ difference. The production
of statements ‘about’ differential quality are renamed as statements ‘of’ differential
quantity in relation to other statements ‘of’ differential quantity only in a subjectless
way…thus desire produces itself without a need for a subject, and becomes an
endless production of production.
The production of desire in the context of capital is thought of here in the same
terms of human production within nature, that is nature reproducing itself. If what
occurs within the system is merely the system reproducing itself, then the
production of desire within the ‘naturalised’ capitalist context is merely capital
reproducing itself.

Thus desiring production to me is a trick whose template in some way matches the
circus trick. In moving through restriction; the very internal limit is reconfigured to
give an impossible lift.
 61

The importance here is the structure of this counter-trick is the same as the original
trick that exposed the internal limit of capital; thus Trick One can expose, but it can
be countered by Trick Two; the trick to conceal.

The process by which the unconscious is reimagined as a factory from its Lacanian
designation as structurally linguistic, highlights the further capture and
subsumption of semiotic tendency within the subject themselves and implies that
the subject is implicated in the repetition of ‘desire as lack’ and kept in the
concealed tautology of that loop as a labourer is kept in the concealment of
exploitation at a conveyor belt perhaps.
Capital meanwhile utilises something more akin to what the subject is denied, a
free desiring production, in order to reproduce itself and expand through the
appropriation of new ‘desiring’ markets.

TRICKS WITHIN TRICKS:

What is perhaps exposed in Deleuze and Gauttari’s description of Capital, as being

able to utilize the affective means of production on production from which the
subject is logically barred, then critically implies that there must be an answer to this
meta-positional impasse that facilitates capital as it debilitates the subject. What is
implied is a further trick that can deal with the capture of the mechanism of Trick
One so that it serves as an expansion of the field even as it seeks to escape that
field. Marx is here applied back to Lacan perhaps, to highlight how the Marxist
critique implicit in the structures of Lacan are now perhaps captured within Capital
itself.
This suggests the third trick, upon the terms of the trick itself.

This is trick three the trick upon the terms of difference that delineate the necessity
for the edict ‘there is no such thing as a meta language’, if we continue to think of
language in Lacanian terms as an insurmountable gravity , defined by the
impossibility of delimiting the autonomy of the quantitative register, of horizontal
difference, then this Deleuzean trick is one in which the ontological primacy of
difference is itself exposed as an assumption that at heart is causing its own deeply
established tautological ground in which the desiring subject is embedded. The
name of Marx is here evoked as the idea of an unconscious that is like a language is
re-fictionalised as like a factory. In terms of semio-vcapital it is because it is like a
language that it can become a factory , with the concealment of the conflation of
incompatible registers of value in the market and in the linguistic subject amounting
to the subject who labours to desire the reproduction of capital within an
inescapable field.
The trick here is to leap clear of the system that places difference as the enabling
primacy of thought that legitimises the possibility to operate either trick or indeed
to necessitate trick one as its exposure.
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IN LACAN:

The trick in Lacan exposes the impossibility of weightlessness or meta-positionality

in the linguistic field. This impossibility IS its inherent gravity within the limited
terms of this research model, this autonomy of register and the impossibility of its
delimiting is what forms the impossibility of meta language…the word always
contains letters from a register that cannot register the word without tearing it
apart…

Thus the exposure of analysis as a trick to show this impasse, ie to fictionalise a

position that can see it, that is, create a meta-position that is only fictional because
it is still within language is all a Lacanian trick one can do

Trick two is the concealment of this revelation that propels the subject to endlessly
desire and to endless lack…it is this concealment that I am calling trick two, and it is
this trick two that leaves the field of gravity un exposed , and does not expose it as
limited (even though its enclosure is endless, THIS IS its limitation in that a subject
who acknowledges there is no escape is already more able to conceive of freedom
than one who thinks that the field itself contains freedom)
The gravity of the field is portrayed as an area of free speech in which desire can be
fulfilled
Trick two does this through concealing the incompatibility of quality and
quantity…
Trick two makes a gravity seem endless area of freedom
Trick one exposes the limitations and it does this through highlighting any tautology
within the field that it is possible to find…

Within Lacan there are several features, which will be addressed, but one pattern
that matches with the tautology I see in the circus trick is the loop between the
desire that causes endless deferral and how that ungraspable end then is the reason
for desire.
This seemingly unbreakable irrationality is something that I see in the idea of
weightlessness offered up for validation within gravity. In that the medium through
which you cope with your heaviness is the very medium through which that
weightless ‘coping’ cannot be registered, the medium is the heaviness through
which you seek to convey weightlessness.
Within your hermetic moment of weightlessness there exists an extimate causality
of it, which is gravity. The empty set is the scale of mass-values that gravity
represents, within the formation of which weightlessness cannot feature.
The DIAGRAM is a clear example of this; as such it is a stripped down and
somewhat clumsy version of what Lacan is suggesting about the relation between
Saussure’s idea of le parole and la langue, and draws from the exposure of the
assumption that Saussure makes about the equivalences between the
speaker/producer of linguistic value and the pool of ‘set’ language that follow the
 63

exposure of similar false equivalences that Marx exposes between wage-labour and
commodity.
In that Marx highlights that the surplus value produced by labour is ‘dissappeared’
into a seemingly intrinsic value within the commodity by the process of fetish, which
then sets up a misleading form of ‘equivalence’ between the value of wage-labour in
relation to commodity. It is then Tomsic who notes that this disparity and
concealment of what might be called ‘the real relations of production’ within
speech, whereby the affective or qualitative force of an utterance is then fetishized
into an autonomous pool of la langue (a discreet market of words that is subject-
less) from which the subject of speech-labour is similarly ‘barred’ with the ensuing
misleading form of equivalence between speaker and signifier.

The Diagram can show the same loop whereby the subject implicated in the
construction of a system of communication/self-signification. The subject who
speaks the word, and in our diagram the word itself is simultaneously barred from
the order of letters in which the letter of the alphabet appears as the extimate
causality that sits within the supposedly hermetic seal of the spoken word: and this
word is that which that then determines the ability of that horizontally organised
alphebetised letter to be extimate to it.
The word is formed from an extimate causality that the word itself establishes for
it to be pronounced. The ‘word’ precedes and bars itself. Thus language is never
alone with the subject to be subjective, it is always attended by subjectlessness.
This structure is a match for the template of the trick that has been brought into
this research: whereas Gödel’s mechanism is a deliberate construction, he shows
that it is or can be present in all axiomatic systems: so within this Gödellian example
there is some doubt as to whether the trick is made to occur or if it already exists as
a tautological state that is a given, and this idea will be discussed in later chapters,
but what is clear here in this Lacanian example, examined through this simplistic
diagram, is that there exists an inherent loop in the field of language already. This
loop is not ‘done’ by anyone it is just ‘there’ when the subject is there, embedded in
language.

Language here is a special case and it is important to note here that as I see the
trick structure in this loop of language, and this loop exists as being placed there by
no one but is inherent just by the subject being there in the field, then this suggests
that the field itself is ‘tricky’ and it could be possible to say that the linguistic field is
indeed an overarching trick.
As an in-built tautology it can be thought of as Trick Two to be precise; whereby
the ‘fictional’ (unrealisable) nature of the signifier, as the subject appropriates it, is
concealed and the problematic arises when the subject attempts to realise what is
signified within a register that cannot ever validate it.
In our diagram this approximates to the word attempting to ‘land’ in its coherent
form within an alphabetical field that tears it apart.

Just as a circus artist tries to register weightlessness as ‘real’ freedom perhaps

within a gravity that cannot even ‘see’ it.
 64

What Lacan exposes then is this tautological loop, he acknowledges in terms of

our diagram that the word is pure fiction in terms of the autonomy of the
alphabetical field. He acknowledges for the subject that the Agent of the analyst,
the truth of the discourse, is that the petit object a is only organised by the master
signifier which is repressed by the subject as cause of their desire.
Otherwise the field of language itself lies ready to drive subjects insane as what is
concealed is exactly this loop in which false equivalence between qualitative
utterance and quantitative signification is implied, what is concealed is the necessity
for the subject to acknowledge their ‘priceless’ utterances as both weightless and
meaningless in terms of the linguistic field into which they are spoken, and what is
concealed is to acknowledge that petit object a is the repression of the real relations
of production that could expose the limitations of a linguistic field ordered around
the as of yet unexposed totality of a certain master signifier.

So this is not a confusion between a concealed trick and gravity…the linguistic field
can easily become inescapable if the exposure of fictionality of the word does not
occur, and by implication the fictionality of the subject. A subject who
acknowledges their agency as fictional stands a better chance of handling this than
one who incessantly propels themselves towards its realisation. But the problem is
two-fold: what happens to social change? Who can achieve it if the subject is
embedded, and what if this process that exposes limitation is captured so as to only
expand the limited field within which the trick to expose is performed?

The gravity is there in language, tricks can be done to expose it as not a totality,
but they are only those psychotic tricks that must acknowledge the fictionality of
that which they produce, the weightlessness in language must be acknowledged as
just word play, fictions in lingo, otherwise a psychotic tumbling through the field
ensues.
Mystics swim the waters in which psychotics drown, this is the point here…there is
no way out of language unless you engage with how it speaks you into the world.
Trick one exposes this.

Trick two, however, is the darker, more vitalist double-talk that, in asking the
psychotic to solve meaning, only reproduces more language; this is the psychotic
production of semio capital in which the gravity and the concealment inherent in
trick two go hand in hand.
Every process that forbids ‘holding it in’ recruits our desire to produce and produce,
to connect, to complete, to arrest. There is health in this perhaps but it has become
impossible for desire to remain uncompleted; and within the context of capital this
is the reproduction of that context.

This is the other point here that language has an inherent tautology, placed there by
no one, but the invention and institution of capital that has activated its linguistic
potential has overcome its internal limits precisely by appropriating this inherent
tautological endlessly productive loop. This is what for me Deleuze and Gauttari
partly intimate.
 65

Trying to solve subjectivity without the analyst’s revelation that I posit here as
being like the mechanism of trick one, will only mean its potential exposure plays
out on the tautological ground of semio-capital as concealment.

The analyst could be said to highlight that Gödel’s loop exists for the subject in
language; and trying to solve subjectivity without this exposure only produces a
jouissance that capital loves to harness to any petit object a.
This can be repeated endlessly with no Trick One to point out that this is Trick
Two: the concealment of a false equivalence between quality and quantity.

The gravity of the linguistic field is this impasse in which there is no such thing as a
meta language and operates on these words. The gravity is inherent because
tautology is inherent.

However the Lacanian loop is ‘machined’ here or how it features within a capitalist
context is obviously up for debate (but the reciprocal loop between an origin of
value that is then utilised to be a repeatable difference as a commodity do follow a
similar model here) but there is still the notion that an affective capacity attends it.
An excess attends the existence of the empty set that facilitates any system of
difference, such as a market, or a language or in fact a gravitational field.

For me, something is extra to the sum of its calculation as impossibility as a

metaposition, that is explained in this reference to a ‘set-ness’ that determines the
possibility for difference to split away from the subject and only mutter to its
neighbour.
The reason I am so adamant that this affective potency be looked at is precisely
because it is what I see is fetishized in the completion of the inevitability of
repeatable difference.
Minimal difference is the almost imperceptible gap between a thing-being and its
derivation into difference that installs it as an object; there is affect here. It is all
there is in the trick to hint at an area outside of the differential field through which
the trick is conveyed.

But it is also utilised in Trick Two: If we think of the way in which capital
appropriates the affective component of an image or text or piece of music in order
to replicate itself, it seems that far from being an unregardable emanation that is
excess to the hard calculations and orders of difference, it is a vital component for
the ‘realisable’ truths of capitalism.

In the same way that use-value is a vital component in the fixing of exchange-
value, and it is a basic Marxist idea here that use-value is fabricated or falsified along
with the commodity at the point of production precisely in order to necessitate the
entry into the market at an inflated exchange value.
In this sense a qualitative and wholly un-registerable excess in terms of exchange
is the rationale for that exchange value to be formulated. In this sense the hard body
of capital uses what it normally considers to be ghosts in order to reproduce itself.
 66

Capital seduces by claiming that the ‘spirits’ told it that you wanted a new pair of
shoes. The excesses that capital denies are the voices to which it secretly listens.

The point here is that affect is far from being useless to systems of difference,
capital the dominant horizontal register relies on these emanations that it
disregards as valid for only as long as they serve its reproduction. Capital will say
anything to get laid; this is the kind of trick I am referring to here.
Capital utilises exactly this affective potency to replicate itself almost
parthenogenically according to Dawkins schematised life from nothing, this is the
vitalist thought of the capitalist in which we see something from nothing, money
made from spending money…Marx’s formula of M – C – M’, in this new iteration the
hard materiality of the central C is replaced by the petit a of re-appropriated desire,
choreographed by the capital A of Affect, to be M – A – M’.…
This excess upon which Capital relies is not a phantom, but a belief that Capital
does not hold as the enacted ritual of its reproduction…it is capital as the Priest who
has lost his Faith but continues to pass the collection box anyway.
Excess is here as life with no explanation, as something that happens with no
explanation, and capital uses this . I focus on it here as it is the psychotic excess that
capital appropriates and further shows how closely related the trick that exposes
and the trick that conceals become…as life beyond life, capitals ‘jouissant’
production is to be examined here as I believe it relates to what is captured in the
trick when this fragile fiction of weightlessness is conflated as neoliberal freedom by
the current hegemony in circus production.
In terms of parthenogenesis then; capital as the extimate causality within the
desire of the subject is installed to be the condition of its own reproduction, just as a
letter in the alphabet is able to precede the word that gives it the quality of
difference for it to be necessary as the essential component of the word that came
before it, and so ‘be’ before its ‘being’ in an impossible temporal loop …in this sense
instead of the subject being able to signify subjectivity through the medium of
capital, capital precedes itself endlessly through the subject.

In terms of trick one and two, Lacan performs on Marx a similar trick that Marx
performs on capital, because in identifying that all systems of value will contain
impasses and extimate reciprocality that ensures that what is desired is missing.
And in delineating that the necessary system of registering horizontally that, which
must be the established order of meaning, is simultaneously reliant on, and is the
negation of, the positive condition of becoming free of that horizontal order.

Namely, Zizek said it, when he established that Lacan got what Marx did not,
which is that capitalism is both the positive condition of and the barrier to the state
of communism that Marx implies.
The Lacanian position saw the protests of ’68 as structure descending in to the
street, and this marks the impasse perhaps that Marx missed. For me I am still
interested in escapology; this text is speculatively taken up with the potential
execution of a trick in spite of the insurmountability described here.
 67

THE TRICK AS DECONSTRUCTION:

‘A method of critical analysis of philosophical and literary language which

emphasizes the internal workings of language and conceptual systems, the
relational quality of meaning, and the assumptions implicit in forms of expression.’

‘Deconstruction is a name commonly associated with philosopher Jacques Derrida's

critical outlook over the relationship between text and meaning. ... The purpose is to
expose that the object of language and what, upon which any text is founded, is
irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible.’

‘A philosophical or critical method, which asserts that meanings, metaphysical

constructs, and hierarchical oppositions (as between key terms in a philosophical or
literary work) are always rendered unstable by their dependence on ultimately
arbitrary signifiers.’

These are Wikipedia definitions of deconstruction, just for jolly, wouldn’t you?

The same process is used by Gödel to establish ‘incompleteness’ in the axiomatic

systems through which he iterates his mathematical tautology, or trick. The process
that establishes that processes that operate on numbers can be numbered and so
be made subject to themselves, the resultant irreducible complexity, instability, or
impossibility are all captured as functions of the conflation of the potentiality for
meta-positionality being contradictorily enclosed in that to which they are
purportedly meta-positional .
This to me is the same trickery as establishing an overall arbitrariness of meaning
by stating that the discourses that operate on language can be thought of as
languages themselves, and as such are themselves representations.

The meaning that you perceive as being related to a meaning that implies a relation
between you and the one who issued the ‘meaning’ is reliant on its position in
autonomous relation to its linguistic value that is value as difference to another
value, hence it ultimately relies on ‘meaning’, that is not communicable as meaning,
because its value as meaning is only iterated as an autonomous and ultimately
inhuman difference to another arbitrary meaning.

In the parallel disciplines of structural linguistics and political economy there exists a
congruity between them as sciences of value. It is this congruity of function, the
dimensions of inhuman difference, of systemic indifference, coupled with the split
in qualitative and quantitative data that for me render the trick, a form of
deconstruction that highlights the endless deferral of meaning from sign to sign as
the same endless deferral of value from commodity to commodity.
Coupled with this is the proximity to insanity as one operates deconstruction after
deconstruction, the failure of one meta-position will only suggest another attempt if
the inherent tautological cause of meta-failure remains undisclosed.
I am not saying deconstruction and psychosis are the same process at all only that
in seeking to ‘speak circus’, to deconstruct gravities totality as a discourse, I have
 68

noted the similarity of the trick spoken as a nonsense of gravity with schizophrenic
utterance as a nonsense of language.

In looking at the societal construction as discussed in the previous section as an

amalgam of double binds, contradictions and mutations; Berlin’s presence of
absence, Game theory’s functional reliance on a robotized subject, and the
deference to the power of quantitative data as a form of quality of life, the trick fails
to operate as the mechanism of freedom as it is matched by the psychosis of
capitalism.
Something also escapes from this kind of utterance that cannot be said to be
verifiable as occurring within it.

This then goes towards some idea of a circus thinking, a re-capturing of the deeper
tautological power that floats in these moments of weightlessness, in whatever
discipline we address…this moment is even in walking and we will look at this simple
promenade as an action that can carry ad reinforce an ideological import, as an
example of an examination of a simple physical action that has certain ideological
parameters.

NOTHING OUTSIDE OF IN HERE:

In each of the examples there is a strong sense that there is no meta-position

outside of the formal system from which to attain any kind of agency for the
subject, and yet each one affects us, each one does something to suggest an area
outside of the totalities that are structurally described.
What is clear is that an excess is implied; something between a pre-differential and
post differential installation of an empty set, that flickers in the available tautologies
to hint at the cause of irreducible extimacy being the desire of the subject to exceed
it.
The trick is to perhaps follow the desire rather than the impasse, and get to a desire
that does not desire to be the kind of desire that is so easily subsumed to validation
in a furnace of indifference.

So what escapes gravity?

Deleuze and Guattari oppose the Freudian conception of the unconscious as a

representational "theater", instead favoring a productive "factory" model: desire is
not an imaginary force based on lack, but a real, productive force.

The concept of desiring-production is part of Deleuze and Guattari's more general

appropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche's formulation of the Will to Power. In both
concepts, a pleasurable force of appropriation of what is outside oneself,
incorporating into oneself what is other than oneself, characterizes the essential
process of all life. Similarly, a kind of reverse force of "forgetting" in Nietzsche and
 69

the body without organs in Deleuze and Guattari disavows the Will to Power and
desiring-production, attempting to realize the ideal of an hermetic subject.

In his seminar "The Other Side of Psychoanalysis" (1969-1970) Lacan introduced the
concept of "surplus-jouissance" (French plus-de-jouir) inspired by Marx's concept
of surplus-value: he considered objet petit a is the excess of jouissance which has no
use value, and which persists for the mere sake of jouissance.

These simple definitions imply that there is a will here to exceed the logic of a
positional impasse, and there is the production of something that seeks to remain
‘un-captured’.
The problem of course is that desire operates throughout the overcoming of
capitals internal limits. As stated this productive force is encouraged to arrest in
forms designated externally. Signification is literal here; desire manifests
commodity directly, there is no representational mode. Desire goes straight to
production.

Although both of these processes are clearly captured in the perverse and endless
desiring production of the market that does indeed seem to promise the consumer a
hermetic unity and in there being no shortages of petit object a’s that can be
harnessed to the injunction to activate pleasure for is own sake; both of which are
central features of late capitalism, both of these concepts also hint at something
immanent to the logic of signification and the logic of pleasure, that breaks the
circuit between them.
As in a trick another space is suggested in which minimal difference, affect or
fiction can be grasped as really available perhaps, however close to Disney-fication
this may sound.

There are the exceptions to an impasse perhaps in free desiring production in which
the direct creation of immediate reality is posited instead of an endless referral to
depth behind what is desired that returns the subject to lack caused by the barring
inevitability within a linguistic conception of the unconscious, even though this
could also be a definition of how capitalism become Capitalist Realism perhaps.
Something of which there is no outside.

The point here is that what is economically ‘realistic’ is the establishment of a

market for rebellion against what established capitalism represents. The excessive
feeling that ‘must’ exist for the subject beyond capture is precisely what is sold here,
it is a ‘fictional’ rebellion because it is enclosed, but which therefore still comes ‘true’
even though it does so in terms that negate it.

The proximity of these ideas as ‘opposites’ is largely the point here.

‘Jouissance’ likewise could be thought of beyond the ‘economy’ of desire, but
Lacan likens this to ‘a tickle that leads to a raging bonfire’, and the conception of its
 70

power is due to its inclusion of the death drive as part of its onward force; that it no
longer even cares about the subject who is experiencing this ‘jouissance’; thus for
Lacan there is no creation of new realities, just an uncontrollable journey with no
defence against destruction. Again this could easily be thought of as a market out of
control and imlies that harnessing either of these definitions of freedom from the
impossibility of meta-position could better serve the markets that the subject
subsumed to them.

As a general rule I am seeing that in each case there is no possibility for what each
suggests, namely agency, to be incorporated within the formal system itself and yet
in each case something is suggested.
As in the basic example of tautology; our capacity to continue to use language
does not crash, we push into another level of reasoning when we encounter an
impasse and what I am pointing to here is how such impasses can be felt as pointing
into other areas.
Granted we are only on another level under the conditions of the same language,
but the affective signal is stronger in tautology than it is in regular, functional,
axiomatic progression.
Something emanates from the trick. It is there but it should not be, and this is
based on the mechanism I have highlighted within the physical practice. The trick
can convey a sense that is not possible to be there is we take the system at its own
set of irrefutable value.

There is an excess here but the important point is something happens to us as an

impasse within a system occurs, thus implying that we are not caught within what
was once thought to be total.

There is no set of sets, as this set cannot have something outside of it as the positive
condition of its oneness Within the logic there is no possibility to be external to set-
ness, That is it is impossible to have a ‘one is not’, therefore there is no totality
outside a totality and therefore no meta-language.

And yet Badiou speaks of the possibility of a continuing fiction of possibility, in his
‘Philosophy for Militants.

“…let us say, like (Wallace) Stevens: it is possible, possible, possible, it must be

possible. Perhaps, we hope, we must hope that it will be possible to find the possibility
of our new fiction.”

Badiou, A. ‘Philosophy For Militants’. Verso. 2012.

In relation to something, a fiction not yet here that the subject cannot grasp
Deleuze denies that there is a place ‘beyond’ but instead posits the plane of
immanence, that there is a pre-differential plane out of which the subject is derived,
becoming, forming, dissolving. The outside is already in here perhaps, and affect is
alive and well in the undoing and becoming of derived forms.
 71

Within these contradictory ideas of an impossibility to get outside of difference,

what is clear is that something is communicated that is not possible to be there. It
may be just the vagaries of perception a trick of the light…but the trick, at both an in
and an out, not up but not down, weighing nothing, but still captured as a mass
reads as something outside the scale…
I am drawing attention to this so that it is clear I am not apotheosising the moment.
I do not think romantically here. I feel strongly that narratives that force an
equivalence of freedom onto this frail moment of ‘telling’ are doing the work of
capital. I draw attention here to the operation of capital as both in and out of the
set, in that I am not suggesting that this moment where something is
communicated should be made real. This is the inevitability that capital shows in
putting a price on the priceless.
I think this is party of capital’s linguistic capacity, that utilises the exact affective
moment that is in discussion here to reduce it contradictorily to difference.

WHAT IS FELT?

So what is visited or felt in the trick is that the totality of a formal system is shown to
be compromised; why do we not simply shut down now that the fabric of our
discourse, our software, has returned an error? Well, there is no narrative here about
spirit or the metaphysical existence of a better place, but there is the adaptability,
that folds, then re-folds to take in the difference from difference.
‘Something has happened that is too fast to be recorded in any of the instruments
but it has just happened to me’. This is the general reaction; and just as this
happened in the highlighting of a knowledge that is not known that Marx elucidated
in the fetish, the position of capital as a totality was not the same.

Capital has largely become omnipotent but this is also due to the working of its
own Gödellian shift in production, this as highlighted by Deleuze and Gauttari was
what I call a counter-trick that responds to conceal the exposing of its internal limit.

Who is afraid of jouissance?

As for Lacan, he was aware that desire was a defence against jouissance. That
even the inevitability of the circuit of desire based on lack had something beyond
the totality of its economy, and again I do not wish to sound like a metaphysician , it
may be that all there is outside of it is a breakdown and a precipitous tumble
through language to the catatonic bilge below the decks of reason.
 72

AFFECT:

Nevertheless I would suggest that Lacan is right, there is no such thing as a meta
language and yet within the sum total of psychotic utterance that fails to escape
language something is transmitted from the subject of that psychosis, something
about an exteriority to language. What I am getting at here is that we can suggest
that something makes it out, some minimal emanation.

We can both suggest that there is something in Gödel’s theorem that does not
qualify as metalanguage, and there is something in the psychotic utterance that
does make it beyond the totality of its binding within language.
The impression that Gödel’s theorem creates in us, this is what escapes, and this is
not registerable within the code that houses the statement that causes this
reaction.
The impression that is caused by the utterance of the psychotic likewise affects us
in a way that simply dismissing his speech as a failed attempt to get to a meta
language does not capture. Again something gets past the unregisteability of what
is implied by the obvious breakdown in communicability.
Both cause failures in language, and show how meta language is not possible, but
both communicate something.

So in regards to the trick; the weightlessness is not registerable within gravity, it

operates to provide a new previously unavailable mobility, it is not unreal, but it fails
as meta gravity and yet something is communicated…

What is interesting is that in all of these tricks something is remaindered for the
subject to feel, there is an emanation, a leak, another level is available at the total
crash of any of these systems.

CAPITAL AND AFFECT:

The shift to desiring production has many other implications but subjects recast in a
capital of semiotic viral potency have not shut down upon realising that the
tautological behaviour of capital that utilises this exact capacity to continue after a
tautology has been highlighted in order to reproduce itself as difference. Capital
performs the trick of being pre-differential in order to enforce itself as the
inevitability of the reduction to difference.
Capital utilises the very notion of a defiance of setness, an event for capital is the
identification of a new market, in that the designation of something that is not yet
within the set called ‘commodity’ as a rationale for it to enter the set called
commodity is the highlighting of capital’s own magical act. The trick performed
here is one of self fulfilling prophecy; as if St Paul could fall off his donkey in order to
create a vision of the Lord God Almighty; that is that the event itself is its own
event, the proof that the uncommodifiable has now been commodified is the
adoption of a metaposition in order to prove that a metaposition is impossible. This
is pure circus, with donkeys in a ring.
 73

This is perhaps the last irony, that the subjectless indifference of exchange has
found a way to imitate the human ability to exceed the tautology that should
rightfully foreclose it.

Capital behaves immanently without exposing the fact that if this immanence
comes before difference, then capital itself is compromised…as being based on
difference.
In the rip off that is capital, it behaves as if there is no difference between
something in the set ‘outside capital’ and ‘inside capital’, it overcomes all limits,
without revealing this immanence as a primary necessity to come BEFORE entry
into the system of differences of exchange…to fabricate use value is immanence at
work…and this necessitates being prior to reduction as difference…capital does this
all the while it behaves as if difference is prior to and fetishized as intrinsic to
commodity’s self identity.
A commodity is rightfully included within capital as ‘for sale’ when it fact this can
only be achieved through immanence, the capacity for tricks to operate to render
the set of ‘things in capital’ anew…to do this capital behaves as Berardi states as
symbolist poetry.
Capital behaves as detached vertically from its referent, so as to be able to be
attached immanently without this surface to depth verticality of representation, but
then claims that this detached verticality should be collapsed into exchange to
enable entry into the following state of difference that a commodity needs to adopt
to enter the marketplace.
Capital opens objects to their thingness to make them commodities; it gets inside
your clothes and makes you dress up like a million dollars.

Hello Dear Reader, welcome back to the text, please feel free to read through to the
next red section, and skipping lightly past, enjoy Happy and Joe as they get into a
fight with some actors.

***
I am moving through arguments ‘for’ affect but also to show how it is captured, the
reason for this is that one of the arguments ‘for’ affect is that it is so often captured
for its power to be ‘true’ for the subject. So partly the argument ‘for’ affect has to
include how this capture proves its potential power if it can remain un-captured.

Capital behaves as if immanence is prior to difference, but enforces difference as

prior to immanence.
It wants to have its cake and eat it too.
 74

So what escapes from these impossible meta-positions, that implies that they are
true… where is the Houdini feeling that we feel?

There are two elements here that point to further examination of supposed
affective excess.
One: that we can feel something that does not seem to be registerable, and
Two: affect is clearly an efficient enough device for it to be the mainstay of the
reproduction of capital.
As in the Gödel formulations something is ‘true’ for us but ‘unprovable’, whereas
for capital this ‘unprovability’ is concealed, and instead what is only ‘true’ for us has
to be maintained as something that is entirely ‘provable’ within exchange-value.
For me, the fact that post-factism exists points to the existence of affect,
otherwise there is nothing that is not ‘factually provable’ that can end up being
falsely co-opted into ‘provability’.
‘Unprovability’ is the proof that post-factism exists.
So if we take post-factism as ‘true’; I would like to suggest that the only thing that is
possible to be falsely rendered into fact is fiction.

The edict that prevents an area outside of language is clear enough, but something
is conveyed in language’s ability to touch us in some unknown way and capital’s
ability to detach from its referent and be weightless enough to put a price on the
immaterial relates to the event of the trick and how closely the trick that exposes
and the trick that conceals are to each other.

Similarly for me, the moment of the trick does convey something, that is not
registered by the indifferent order of bodies of mass, but that can be registered by
the sensory apparatus that attends that mass.
How is this possible? I will dig deeper into the idea of registers within gravity but
for now it is clear that the trick ‘says’ something that it cannot ‘say’, it ‘tells’ but does
not actualise what it tells, nor is there anywhere concrete that this ‘telling’ can be
‘proved’ to have occurred.

It is important for me to not end up in a mind/body dualism here, but to look for
another way to suggest that the subject is the contradiction in the system of gravity.
It is important to acknowledge that there is no transcendence intended here. In fact
something immanent to dualism is suggested: telling in the same way that is
different to itself. The point about minimal self difference is important here; that
this excess is the telling of difference to the same as itself.

I am not either in Hegelian or Marxian mode in claiming a birth right of perfect

place for the subject once freed from restrictive alienation of an imposed
autonomous register, but more that there is a secular, ordinary ability to reference
an area that is perhaps ‘underneath’ or ‘prior’ to a set of material conditions.
These conditions are so differentially ingrained and ask us to think of it as a totality
and think also of our practice contained within it as the only definite way of dealing
with its totality.
 75

The idea that the circus subject is defined by gravity, and the trick is the discourse
of gravity are both impasses that I wish to examine, as I feel it is essential in circus
addressing what the tricks seems to attempt, and addressing circuses trite
insistence on itself as a meta-positional area.

What we need is a theory of ‘Affect’

Something needs to explain how weightlessness is true but unprovable in the

mechanism of the trick. What registers are at play here and how do subjective and
autonomous modes of ‘registering’ value interact and imbricate to create the
tautology in which a weightlessness, which is impossible to prove in gravity, is ‘felt’
or ‘witnessed’ as true.

THE DIAGRAM OF AFFECT: it’s no different to a diagram of no affect.

In order to be clear about what we are looking for here in terms of the trick I will
briefly DIAGRAM where the affect is supposed to occur, however ridiculous that
may seem.

C I R C U S
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
< > > < > >
C I R S U
v v v v v

The instance of affect in this diagram is the fact that this word ‘circus’ means
something to you; the way it hangs there in the alphabetical field; illegible to that
field in the minimal difference between your reading and the alphabets illiteracy.
Affect is the illiteracy of the alphabet.

The word is ‘there’ in the alphabetical field, whilst there is no possibility for this
statement to be ‘there’ due to the alphabetical field, to which the hermetic integrity
of the word is reduced, being the preceding and extimate cause of the possibility of
that seeming integrity in which it is inevitably torn asunder.
This problem can be summed up by the question: ”does a book-worm keep a
diary?” In that the words that record the consumption of words are consumed as
they are written down.
Such a statement is relied upon by the alphabet for meta-designations ‘of’ its
values to be derived and the statement reciprocally relies upon the alphabet as a
source of components from which to assemble further meta statements ‘about’ the
values in the order. The affect is that which remains after it is acknowledged that
the alphabetical field reproduces itself through the word but is indifferent and
antithetical to its integrity.
In that the Word is BOTH ‘there’ AND ‘Not-There’, it fulfils the definition of
tautology in which the Word A implies both B and Not-B, where B is ‘being
there’.
 76

So where is affect? It is at the point that we acknowledge that the word means
something even though it is located within a field that does not recognise the
viability of the statement that is created therein, the letters are not incorrect in
themselves, they posses the correct calligraphic formatting, it is the way the letters
refer to each other in an ‘order’ other than the alphabetical order and how this
implies that the alphabet is not a totality and that the origin of meaning of its
components lies elsewhere from it or immanent to it.

ANIMAL PLAY:

For this next section I will turn to a discussion on animal play from Massumi’s book,
‘What animals teach us about politics’.
I want to look at Massumi (and Bateson’s) notion of implied affect in what is
termed the ‘play bite’ in relation to the trick. The complexity of communication is
something that we do not readily attribute to animals, but this is not the point.
The point here, I feel, is a definition of affect as something ‘told’ where there
should be an impossibility of ‘telling’, and here this telling of another register of
conveyance occurs within the same gesture already committed to a final immutable
register. Within a gesture that seemingly has no room to convey something other
than it is, something other to the nature of the gesture is conveyed.
This is what I am suggesting in the trick, that both weightlessness and its
impossibility are simultaneously conveyed in the single activation of the trick. A
moment that conveys both Free and Not-Free simultaneously.
The denotation that is activated does not carry the connotation that should be
carried through the available medium of denotation. The number One can connote
singularity but it cannot connote nothing. What is denoted is a meta-position. The
ludic gesture is spoken through its opposite. The sign system utilised does not
convey the meta-position but there is something conveyed that is not within the
register of that gestural language.
In this flirtation with meta-language I am not disagreeing with Lacan, I am merely
designating this instance of affect in the play-bite as meta-language that is not
possible but which then must be some kind of fictional ‘truth’ because it is
communicated.
As meta-language is not possible I will call this a fictional telling of ‘this is play’
within the available gestural language of combat, as the trick fictionally tells “this is
an escape” within the available gestural language ‘of’ gravity.
In this sense I am preliminarily inferring here that affect is fiction with regard to the
factual impossibility of it being ‘real’ within the system of denotation through which
it proceeds.
The ludic gesture of combat ‘tells’ a different story than the set position of such a
gesture within the system of differences that autonomously order gestures of
combat, of which a real bite is one.
I am saying this difference to difference within similarity is affect. Perhaps similarly
as Rothenburg cites minimal self-difference that is the surplus between what an
empty set necessarily demands of a thing and the object it becomes.
(Rothenburg.2010.P50)
 77

The ‘story’ of affect is fiction. This I see in the trick as a ‘play-bite’ on gravity, or
perhaps a play-bite on the audience’s idea of gravity.
The trick ‘bites’ gravity within the laws ‘of’ engagement but still manage to convey
something ‘about’ that engagement that cannot be included there.

1: Two animals that abandon themselves to play, for example, a play fight, perform
acts that ‘are similar to but not the same as combat.’ (Bateson 1972, 179)
Each ludic gesture envelopes a difference in a display of similarity. This could be
taken as a definition of analogy. Playing doesn’t involve producing a perfect
resemblance between two acts belonging to different orders. It’s not about making
‘as if ‘ one were the other, in the sense of making one pass for the other. The play
gesture is analogous because what is in play is not the same. The play gesture holds
the analogue activities apart by signalling a minimal difference, in exactly the same
act in which it brings them together. It brings acts belonging to different arenas
together in their difference…A ludic gesture must signal its belonging to an arena of
play if it is to avoid falling out of it…A ludic gesture must signal ‘this is a game’” but
within the confines of something that is not a game.

Perhaps there are shades of R.D. Laing here who notes how, if this subtlety of
affect is concealed, the tautology of playing a game of not playing a game can be
internalised by the subject as a painful knot; and becomes an inner combat that is
‘real’.

2: So what is referenced here is a gesture that ‘envelops difference in a display of

similarity’, and it this statement that I feel is applicable to the trick. It shows itself
different to the laws of gravity whilst acting in a fashion that makes it similar to other
bodies of mass within gravity. What is important here is how that difference is not
registered within the order of bodies of mass but in the other ‘player’ that is the
audience subject who spectates this play fight with gravity?

The complexity of animal analogy here is such that the situation is acknowledged
as being composed of signals that denote meaning, but what is suggested here is a
meta-position that is outside of that situation but is able to ‘tell’ that it is ‘meta’ to it
through use of ‘infra-statements’; through exactly the only symbols and signs
available within the situation. The animal gets into another situation using signs
within an order that can only delineate a situation that the animal is ‘telling’ it is not
in.
In this sense also, as in the trick, a meta position is ‘told’ of through the exact same
register that would not, for reasons that this system has to remain vitally organised
as a sign system for imminent combat, permit a meta-position outside of it. It would
not be efficient for these signs to be ambiguous.
This means that the order of the system of signs for combat remains as something
that does not recognise a meta-position outside of it, and yet in the ludic gesture
such a meta position is told.
It is my conjecture here that as with the trick this ‘told’ meta position is therefore a
fiction.
 78

It is a fictionalisation of an externality to the rigid totality of the sign system for

combat, rather than an actual meta-position.
That is the signs within the system that are gesturally available become able to
fictionalise a position outside of that sign system. They communicate a ‘minimal
difference’ to themselves, and it is this communication that I am calling affect. It is a
fiction of a meta-position, in which the normal operation of the value system that
would register those gestures as facts positioned ‘within’ is held in suspense.

3: For me it is imperative that the trick signal that its weightlessness is fiction, in
order to avoid it falling into an antagonistic rationalisation of turning that fiction
into fact for a profit, or victory, of supposedly genuine individuality over
insurmountable odds that have not been actually overcome at all. But I am getting
ahead of myself here.

Massumi goes on to say:

“The play statement “This is a game”, Bateson explains, is far from a simple act of
designation. It is the staging of a paradox. A wolf cub, who bites its litter mate in play
‘says’ in the manner in which it bites, ‘this is not a bite’. The play bite, Bateson says,
actively ‘stands for another action (180), at the same time as it puts the context in
which that action finds its practical force and normal function in suspense….The wolf
cub says through his teeth: “this is not a bite; this is not a fight; this is a game; I am
hereby placing myself on a different register of existence, which nevertheless stands
for its suspended analogue.”

(Massumi, B. (2014) What Animals Teach us About Politics. Duke University Press.
Durham, USA)

4: In the statement about admitting that the gesture places you in a different
register.
It is my feeling that circus artists would be able to activate another level of play
within gravity that spoke more honestly about our position within it if that position
were to implicitly admit its fictionality with regard to its proposed exteriority rather
than claiming it to be an actual escape, but my feeling is that a self-interested circus
artist is only as likely to communicate such a thing as is capital. By which I mean, not
likely.

That is, if capital were to firstly activate its internalisation of affective potencies
that are tied into its capacity to produce desire directly, and which enable it to
‘playfully’ deterritorialise and reterritorialise these potencies for its own
reproduction, but then secondly admit during this procedure “this is not for sale; this
is not a commodity; this is just a game;” it would admit it has no claim on such inter-
subjective areas. It would be admitting pricelessness is out of its reach.
To reiterate that to show how capital utilises affect may not be its invalidation but
proof of its efficacy.
That is if capital were to play outside its own register and then admit that this was
only play by saying; ‘I am hereby placing myself on a different register of existence,
 79

which enables me to playfully designate or ‘bite’ this affective potency, but which
nevertheless stands for its suspended analogue, namely that if this were not a game
then this affective potency would be for sale.’
This kind of admission would bring profits crashing down, as money effectively
admits that it is unable to secure a meta-position outside itself other than by
fictionally doing so in ‘a game’ and its final register of exchange that it requires to
reproduce itself as expansive and total enough to do so is wholly limited in its
capacity to capture such affective potencies. This would effectively undo the
desiring production that capital has installed to overcome the internal limits
highlighted by Marx perhaps.
To be clear I am not saying the animal at play ‘tricks’ its playmate in terms of
deception; this would only be the case if the animal used the signalling of play as a
subterfuge for viciously injuring a playmate, but I am saying that is similar to the
operation of capital and that such a deceptive use of what is signalled as the
complex gesture of difference that encircles similarity is what capital utilises to
reproduce itself.
This duplicity relates to circus how? It is the same rationale a circus artist uses to
imagine the weightlessness that they experience is genuine freedom, to admit that
freedom is out of reach brings profits of extraordinary individuality crashing down.
So this circus artist, like capital, cannot admit the fiction they perpetrate.
The virtuosity celebrated here is only the virtuosity of concealment of the real
relations of weightlessness production, which is entrepreneurial.

In short capital cannot admit that when it captures affect it is capturing a fiction it
cannot register, and yet it does capture it. It conceals a qualitative meta-statement’s
incompatibility with a quantitative order of infra-statements.
Thus It is a trick to conceal capital’s own limited range, and admitting that it can
only ‘play-bite’ in the affective register is the admission of its failure to be able to
expand to realistically commodify such potencies.
“This is just a story of impossible weightlessness,” there is simply no profit of
heroic, romantic individuality in such an admission. “The focal moment of each
gesture here is something I cannot achieve,” no one is going to pay to see that?
(Cue funding proposals that deal with the theme of ‘inoperability’)

What is interesting here to me is the structural homology between the circus artist
and capital itself. The way that capital moves, for me, is a similar operation to the
ludic bite gesture but which finalises itself in a different way, as mentioned earlier,
almost as a feint within a real fight that the other does not realise is happening.
I want to be clear here that these digressions in which the movement of capital is
anthropomorphised is part of an attempt to remind that the trick mechanism is not
a guarantee of anti-establishment. It is a fine line.
So, capital is different to difference itself also employing an ability to denote in
dollars that which it can never denote, thus forcing the ‘stolen affect’ to no longer
proceed as a fictional meta-position in relation to the market; it is forced to become
a set quantitative value again and so is lost to the qualitative dimension that defines
it.
 80

Difference is denied but enforced simultaneously; in the disparity between truth

and falsity, that is in highlighting its unprovability…the authenticity of a new area
that becomes within the field of capital, or the ‘gravity’ of its autonomous register,
is called into question.
Provability is complex here as capital needs the ‘unprovable as true’ quality of
affect to become a ‘provable as true’ quantity for affect to become commodifiable,
but this authentic ‘unprovability’ is disproved by its ‘provability’ as a commodity.
Its authenticity or unprovability as ‘true’ is what adds value to it as a commodity,
but its existence AS commodity, is proof of its inauthenticity, that is its provability
AS true is the very thing that calls into question its priceless authenticity…In
pointing at authenticity capital destroys it. The difficult sentence of capital then
reads:

Only excluding the word ‘commodity’ from this sentence makes it

authentic.

Affective elements are captured as commodities which then fetishes them as still
affectively potent even though within the market they are invalidated as the
fictional telling of a position outside the market, which is simultaneously the
rational behind their inclusion in it. This is a trick in which pricelessness is given a
price, through the enforced conflation of a fictional metaposition as an equivalence
to a metapositional fact.

The point here is that although the ludic gesture of play fighting is ‘not’, cannot be,
‘actual’ in this context, it points to an area outside of that system of ‘restraint’ in the
formal arrangement of signs, and this is the positive condition for it to be
performed.
The fact there exists an external area to the necessity for this bite to be ‘not-a-bite’
refers clearly to the fact that this area could be possible. That is the play-bite implies
an area other than the enclosed system of combat by fictionalizing it. Fiction is
necessitated as the sign used cannot ‘carry’ what it ‘says’.
The fact that there exists an external area to the necessity for this ‘fact-of-
weightlessness’ to be a ‘fiction-of-weightlessness’ refers clearly to the fact that this
area could be possible.
Weightlessness is a fiction ‘about’ gravity precisely because it imagines a position
outside of the field thus implying that gravity could be regarded from that position.
We are all aware that there is an area outside of gravity, I think perhaps what I am
referring to here also is an area outside the possibility of gravity. I think that circus
refers to this rather than merely the weightlessness of space travel, but I will return
to this theme.
Obviously the lion cub is not play fighting to suggest the end of all conflict, this is
not the labour of the cub, and to suggest it is the labour of the subject is a longer
argument to which we will also return.
There are two points here. Firstly, what is then the system in place that prevents
full-blown violence, is not this a better practice for the ‘real thing’?
 81

We can say perhaps that the restrictive system that prevents it being there as
useful, is that exact game-theory genetics in which it makes no sense to fight and
kill a member of your same species or familial group. This is only one version of the
answer here, but I do not feel it reflects on the affective definition.

5: Massumi discusses how the ludic gesture transports those involved “to a register
of existence where what matters is no longer what one does, but what one does
stands for.”
For me this is obviously the realm of language, but also the initiation of meta-
statements about the qualititative use-value of ‘bites’ as quantities that have an
exchange-value in a fight. These qualitative meta- statements that are outside
fighting are included within the system of quantitative pre-meta-statements AS
fighting, and it is this conflation of registers along with the intrinsic denotation that
‘this bite does not denote what it denotes’ that forms a mechanism that I feel is
congruent with Trick One, the trick to expose.

The conflation of qualitative statement about bites and the quantative value of
bites are conflated together but with an implicit acknowledgement of their
incompatability, that is, as Massumi points out, another ‘register of existence’ is
clearly referred to.
It is this exposing and acknowledging of the incompatability of these registers of
value of bites that is communicated here, in that the play bite says, ‘this is play’ or
more exactly ‘this is fiction that a real bite cannot see’.
This implies that gravity is blind to circus. I feel that this is ‘true’ although I cannot
prove it.
To not expose and acknowledge this incompatability of registers of value would be
deceptive, as the more devious cub could utilise the play bite to denote that this is
play and then strike a deadly blow for self-interested gain. This would be Trick Two,
the trick to conceal, where what is concealed is the act of conflating registers that
are wholly incompatible in order to conceal the immanent descent into genuine
violence.

So here is a language of combat: “… a register of existence where what matters is

no longer what one does, but what one does stands for.”

(Massumi, 2014)

Is this the same as it being no longer important if I say ‘I’?

ON SHARING FICTION:

Further to this he states that such gestures of play are ‘made of performative
gestures exerting a transindividual force’. This force passes between subjects,
something is conveyed that is unregisterable in the quantities of speed and pressure
of the bite technique.
 82

What is important here is to privilege the sharing of this transindividuality of the

acknowledgement of the weightlessness as fiction, to share the play perhaps,
without sounding too trite, with the audience. The most important element here is
the shared aspect, affecting and affected, of exposing the weightlessness as a
fiction of an area that cannot be registered in terms of what is done.
Contrarily I feel that in the case of the circus artist who does not admit that the
weightlessness they perform is fictional, they deny the possibility for the audience
member to join them in this ‘transindividual’ conveyance. The audience member is
invited to keep out of the act of conflating fiction with fact, which is necessarily is
organised around an apparent ‘real’ demonstration of freedom. The ‘realisation’ of
fiction here is a prop, or much-needed supporting rationale, to the narrative that
this circus artist is a ‘real’, ‘genuinely free’ individual, while the audience member is
not, but ‘free’ within a meritocratic field to try to become such an individual.

EXPLOITED AUDIENCE:

Hence I feel that in performing the ‘fetishized’ instance of supposedly genuine

freedom no such game (or fiction) is admitted to, and like capital, the artist utilises
fiction conflated as fact to play a game on the audience rather than with them.
The register of qualitative use-value is conflated with the quantitative register of
exchange-value, but this conflation or false union of these incompatible registers is
concealed in the myth of equivalence; the myth of value being intrinsic to the
commodity.
This ‘exploitative’ tone is part of circus ‘agreement’ with capital in its insistence
that it proposes real freedom from restriction, this is a trick to conceal played on the
audience rather than one that fictionally exposes the limits of gravity to them. This
is the myth of the value of freedom being intrinsic to weightlessness, and by
implication, the circus artist that performs the trick; which for me glosses over the
real complexity of the word ‘freedom’.

SPORT/ART, SUCCESS/FAILURE:

Acknowledging the fiction, is perhaps acknowledging that this circus practice is an

art, not a sport (which is its own conflation of play and genuine combat that
reproduces capital like there is literally no tomorrow.) And sharing this
acknowledgement is more akin to the challenging play of a clown that exists in a
‘here-now’ transindividual moment. What is referenced here is a wish to privilege of
the art of the clown rather than the sport of the acrobat perhaps, but with an
acknowledgement that at the level of extreme athletic physicality there is still room
to explore this transindividual play-bite.

Massumi says that Bateson summarises the meaning that the ludic gestures
perform ‘in the following formula: “These actions in which we now engage do not
denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.”

I would like to appropriate this statement as a description of weightlessness in

circus as it shows how the conflation or ‘fetishisation’ of this weightlessness into a
 83

supposed actual display of freedom would destroy its capacity to remain as it is;
namely a politically complex injunction to discuss the possibilities of a continuing
struggle against restriction, which we can undertake together.

It can be said that the real combat against gravity IS to expose its limits not by open
conflict, this is impossible, but by the construction of statements within it that imply
that it cannot accommodate what is referenced. In this sense Circus is a resistance
movement in the mode set out by Cargill in On Resistance; some thing that
condenses out and then evaporates to avoid being openly absorbed by the
insurmountable force.

The complexity of this idea is acknowledged, but I feel that some clarity is needed.
As the trick is delineated as a tool for reconfiguring value, it is imperative that the
fine line between how this structure may be used to imply that there is self-
acknowledged, qualitative dimension of shared play that is immanent to the
necessity for the efficacy of every gesture to be reduced to the deceptive expression
of combat masking as play.
It can be stated that there is a similar fine line between what I feel are the
accompanying concealments of welfare as business, labour masked as creativity,
knowledge masked as capital which seem to prevail in the reductive processes of
the market.
This fine line is between exposing that you are deliberately conflating the registers
of quality and quantity in order to construct and therefore highlight tautology that
questions the systemic limits and concealing those limits through the same deniable
conflation.

This open acknowledgement that ‘there is no such thing as a meta-language’,

therefore acknowledges what is conveyed in the complexity of the ‘play bite’ as a
fiction.
It may be that this fiction is as Lacan also implies ‘a tragedy that befalls the subject
as these expressions can therefore find no expression, but it is in the
acknowledgement that they are tragic perhaps (but not Romantic) in their
unprovable truth and that this for me is the affect of weightlessness.

Please go to meet Happy on page ninety

***

LET US IMAGINE THE CUB VS THE ELDER LION.

There is another elephant in the room that is addressed here; of performance

masked as genuine subjectivity; in that the performance of a play bite on gravity
under the fallacious impression that this play becomes somehow equivalent to a real
assault on the field of gravity.
 84

What is complex here in this second iteration of the trick mechanism is that
the deliberate act of concealing real combat as play is the process that enables the
impossibility of combatting gravity to be masked in order to create a self-interested
gain.

Here I define ‘real combat disguised as play’ as this self-interested act, where I take
from you to profit myself. This self-interest is couched here as the play-performance
of circus, but which is able to extract something from the other through this precise
masking of the impossibility of the bite being anything other than a play-bite…

Perhaps the analogy here is better imagined in a situation in which the cub is playing
with an older lion, the cub is only ever able to play fight as to enter into real combat
with a more experienced and larger opponent would only result in death; in this
sense the restriction of the situation, its gravity, is insurmountable. In this scenario
there is only the possibility of the play bite, as to enter into combat with gravity is to
lose.

6: Nevertheless, it is not for me to suggest an ethical circus here.

But in drawing attention to exposition or concealment as the fine line between
these different versions of the trick, I am interested in pointing out the similarities
between the way capital designates that which displays fictional meta-positionality
to its field, as the viable rationale for inclusion in in that field as a method of its
expansion, and the way the field of gravity seems to be expanded as a meritocracy
by the claim that circus tricks genuinely display freedom within its field.

The fine line is also highlighted here as a focus on the circus mythology that thinks
of itself as being in an actual meta-position to the restrictions in place elsewhere in
society.
Addressing this is part of the necessary examination of the mechanism of the trick
as supposed freedom-production, and how this central physical component informs
the self-image of circus.
I feel that the agency implied by the itinerancy that is associated with circus is one
factor that goes to make up the myths of freedom that accrue in the circus and the
trick, while its capacity to conflate the registers of weight and actual immutable
mass to create freedom of movement and manipulation is the other.

What I feel Massumi and Bateson show us here is that the thing that is active in the
trick is its fictionalising of an exteriority to gravity, which I think is a continuation of a
political future of potentiality rather than suggesting freedom is possible now
because gravity allows it within its field, thus cancelling any alternative examination
of the field itself.
What is suggested here is that the weightlessness is true but unprovable, that is
anexcess or affect that is the result of a tautological friction around the minimal self-
difference of itself to something that is viable within gravity.
In finding no place to land within the register of gravity; the fiction remains
weightless, the weightlessness remains fictional.
 85

As for the notion that affect must be real otherwise capital could not profit from
it.

In relation to the earlier notion that ‘unprovability’ is the proof of post-factism,

which is clearly ‘true’ as this is the central tenet of post-factism anyway, then its
ideal material is fiction, without which there is no raw substance that can be
rendered into fact. What the engine of post-factism needs is the unprovability of
affect, which can be harnessed to something that can be exchanged for profit.
The immaterial is raw material, so in this regard a circus that operates on nothing
seems like good sense.
For an engine that thrives on the fallacy that dreams can be made real, that
pricelessness is purchasable, what is needed as fuel are dreams and the
pricelessness that attends unfulfillable desire. In activating its linguistic potency,
capital is the ideal medium to profit from the minimal difference that exists
between something ‘unprovable’ and its derivation out into being ‘true enough’ to
take up a position in a differential autonomous register according to the empty set
that must now attend it for it to take up that position.

The essential process of semio-capital is acting as a symbolist poet then moving in

to close the deal
The only thing this process can utilise to exist is fiction, and the only source of this
is the subject’s experience of an event that is nowhere registerable as being present
in that event.
Subjectivity itself that attends the event is the affective fuel needed for the engine
of post-factism to perform the trick it performs, which is to profit from something
that its own definitive differential register cannot admit ever occurred.
Affect has to be fictional in this regard for it to be of any use to capital to profit
from falsely proving that what you feel to be true for only you can be made true in
the market.
Affect has to be fictional to the register that profits from post-factism. It is in this
sense also that affect is pure fiction; Its unprovability as truth is exactly its
exchange-value, precisely because the register of exchange cannot register it as
fact. A post-fact market needs commodities it cannot see.
Capital needs that which it cannot validate in order to validate itself for
reproduction; which in a strange way proves that affect is real, as it is acknowledged
to be there by ‘capitalist realism’.

How is it acknowledged, through what lens? I am suggesting here that it is

acknowledged through the processes delineated by Lacan that becomes ‘more true’
in capital.
Usually in this process any attempt at a meta-position from the ‘factual’ register
within the available autonomy of difference, is attended by the extimate presence
of the causal node of that autonomy of difference, which then ‘proves’ the meta-
position to be ‘unprovable’. But the extimacy that Lacan exposes, capital conceals,
 86

thus utilising the circuit of desire as lack as the internal engine of the subject to
produce more affective, fictional, pricelessness that can then be the fuel for the
engine of post-fact that operates upon such concealment.
This is the equivalent to the concealment of the fact that weightlessness cannot
come true in gravity.

Please note that I am not pointing to a Lacanian definition of circus practice, or of

the institution here, but of the fields of value in which it is embedded, in gravity,
language and in capital and especially in the post-factism that must attend semio-
capital as it attempts to convert what it cannot see into the spectacle of profit.
I am trying to logically show there is a form of trick here that agrees with capital,
but which in its post factism cannot help but prove that what is ‘true but unprovable’
is true for the subject and can exist as a fiction that does not necessarily have to be
‘factualised’ to have value.
In fact its actual value is in maintaining its fictionality so that it can continue to
demand.
It can demand that we address the limits of the formal systemic field of value
through which that fiction was ‘spoken’.

This is to draw a clear line between Trick One that acknowledges this fictional
weightlessness and Trick Two that conceals its incompatibility with the inherent
definitions of ‘fact’.
This is based on the fact that in tautological constructions what is ‘true’ for the
subject cannot always be ‘provable as true’ for the structural elements from which
they are composed, Trick Two conceals this, instead contradictorily claiming that
the excess between a meta-position and its extimate causality that bars its
possibility, is simply another permissible expression within the differential system.
 87

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River. Part Four.

‘Let us imagine a triangle’, intoned Happy Down –River, his face lit in such a way as
to remind whitey of the dead legacy. Feathers all down his back, robes of hide..
“This triangle is your infected logic. It is a triangle of language, capital and gravity.
These are the three indifferent wraiths that haunt your lives. Words with no
meaning, money with no wealth and a freedom with no weightlessness.”

He drew a triangle drunkenly in the air. Rover-Joe snickered behind his hand
backstage. In the red sidelight you could see the powder burns from his revolver.
Black dots of his insistent hate handed out to bystanders.

Happy continued, leaning forward into the breathing of the crowd that had slowed
down to almost nothing. “What is the binding force of this triangle?”

Silence. This was too easy. Happy felt that he was back on the open prairie, ready to
hunt, ready to partake in the balanced and endless spear. He could not do anything
in the open plain to upset the plain. If he moved this way or that way….this stage
was just the same, nothing he said or did could tip the stage in any way except the
way it was supposed to go…
…this was the performance of ecological balance…
 88

“What is the binding force of this triangle?” This time he did not wait seven drunken
seconds.
“It is INDIFFERENCE. There is nothing you can expect but indifference from these
three ghosts. They will never let you win, they will never let you in, you cannot sing
or dance anymore outside of their design.” He laughed until he nearly threw up.

“Ha Ha human remains. Ha Ha human remains. You in the triangle of despair. In its
three dimensions that each insist is pointing to the right, ha ha human
remains…stuck in the letter three, in three coordinates of useless pain, stuck in
poetries that unwrite themselves at right angles to the money to the gravity to the
words …ha ha it only remains for me to say that those of you who think supply and
demand are balancing then the human remains are you…”

Rover grabbed at the arm of the promoter, preventing him from rushing onto the
stage…

“Give me a word from one to ten, you bones and dust.” Happy was swaying in the
spotlight like a venus fly trap.

“And I will tear it into pieces on the stock market of your misery.”

He was an old hand. Time in paris, time in London… “je suis tetu comme un mulet”,
“his sort’s nowt a pound, and shit’s tuppence.”…the look of a Swedish millener
who double crossed him in Ystad, his last words…”jag ar hungrig…tank grisse.”
Happy was ready in a vegetable rage to undo every semiotic brick that stopped the
weeds from tearing this town to pieces.

“You are the fertiliser that grew this thorny argument…I have grown these plants in
no time…”

The hired hands that policed this tawdry venue rushed onto the stage and stumbling
through the loops of costume and old acrobat procedures that Happy still had up his
sleeve, they wrestled him grinning from the stage…

“Wait, wait…I have magic to show you…I have the contortions of the East African
Dollar to show you…do you know that every letter of the alphabet has a value?” The
guards tried to cover his mouth.

“…And the word ‘Transgression’ floated on the stock exchange in Persian Gulf
Rupees has exactly the same value as ‘Apathy’ in New York Proclamation
Shillings…”

Happy wriggled like a Sunday Trout at a monday morning market, “…And if you
were to spell out the name of any President in Ukrainian Hyrvnia, I guarantee in less
that three trades I can make it worth nothing in Italian Lira…”
 89

In the wings Rover Joe went for his gun too late and found himself pinned against a
startled pantomime horse, who was waiting to go on.
“Behind you!” His assailant yelled, as he, both ends of the equine fraud and Rover
Joe collapsed in a comedy of anger. In the melee the gun went off, shooting the
horse’s ass in the mouth.

Happy was dragged past kicking like a mule, and the whole menagerie propelled
itself from room to room in a punch-drunk tango; costumes filled with blood
wrapped around each other in a 24 hour dance marathon. The fight dragged on past
the capacity for recollection…

See biro notes in the original manuscript here…

Happy’s attitude to the fighting was heavily notated, he kept a mental record of it as
it unfolded from his liquid poise.
He operated upon the premise that any line of poetry might be useful in a punch-
up. He would occasionally use a haiku in a brawl.
“Beware the poet who lays down his pen and picks up a sword”. He was using
Charles Howard Hinton’s blade, something with more than three parameters that
could no longer be sharpened on the inadequate whetstone of X Y Z. Its edge was
entering the fourth dimension at a fair lick. Time fights you, so fight back.
His movements however were pure Knotation. Every sentence had a subject, a
verb an object and some other sundry parts designed to dress up the bones of ‘who
did what to whom’ with some recognisable human skin.
Happy mused on which poetic form to employ as he broke the nose of the
cigarette girl by accident with his elbow. A few lines came to mind;

Here the poetry of Joseph Weaver, 1949:

“If declining waves were to fold upon the thirsty shores;

Like Mormon’s wives all guessing at the monthly days.
Heavy they were with child-like stones, upped and left him to his bristles.
Awash with regretful inky tides,
The tattooed octopus upon his chest could never be removed.”

Every body part had a letter of the Alphabet. Happy pronounced the letter A that
represented the crown of his head.
The slight smile in any language, the lips curl back, the teeth half exposed there is
no quantity of ‘A’s that can give value to the open-throated exultation of the ‘A’

The body was labelled and ready to be shipped out. Twenty-six letters, each fixed on
every point of interest. The words of the poem, and the letters they contained,
would determine then how his body would move in this fight to the death.
 90

His elbow joint was called an ‘M’, it spelled “crack” across the bridge of Maisy’s
nose, her two front teeth came flying out, like alabaster angels, in a chariot of wine.

Happy chose another line, this time it was Jules Atlee in 1891 on the early morning
streets of Whitechapel:

This is to be written as a fight move taken from a line but then the opponent
counters in an unexpected way and happy has to rewrite the poetry to break his ribs
in three places…
The fight turns into a cut up and unexpected injuries ensue…

“Every brick of wakefulness is mortared by a dream.”

Happy’s mind worked at martial speed. The subject in this sentence is the ‘dream’,
that is D R M, the right shoulder, the heel of his left hand and the elbow again.
Happy lunged forward from the left because the verb ‘mortared’ contained the
vowels O and A, which was movement from back to front towards his opponent, the
‘brick’ in the line was the object, played convincingly by a backstage roustabout the
size of a Dublin Orphanage.
The E meant that he kept his weight moving to the South.
The consonants B, R and CK in the word ‘brick’ meant that once Happy had shifted
his weight to the front left, all shoulder and Queensbury shuffle, he was to strike the
dumb rube with a fluid flick of the left arm, leading with the elbow M to brush his
opponent’s left wrist aside and making contact with the heel of his hand R, following
the musicality of this muscular ripple to land the blow squarely on the exposed chin,
labelled B.
The resulting rhythm would fold the ape in the middle so that the base of his
throat C meets his navel at K.
Unexpectedly however the lumbering stage-hand did not counter with what was
supposed to be the word “brick” but instead lowered his centre of gravity at P, using
the tempo to block Happy’s left hand with his wrist thus crashing into Happy’s own
chin B with his upper chest at C.
This forced Happy to parry the oncoming brute by switching to the directions U
and E instead, up and to the right, which then altered the spelling of the verb, and
raising his right knee was able to force his opponent off balance.
All of which positively butchered the poetry, which, to Happy’s dismay, now read:

“Every prick of wakefulness is murdered by a bream”

Happy pulled his Derringer and shot him for ruining a perfectly divine stanza.
“You philistine, that poem was designed to break your jaw,” jibed Happy at the
unappreciative riff raff; as the whistling bullet busted through his opponent’s
clavicle in iambic pentameter.
“Everyone’s a critic”, he moaned, as blood spattered his petulance.

”And no one appreciates Art”, replied Joe removing his stiletto blade from the
venue owner’s back and wiping it on the curtains.
 91

‘Hmmm’ thought Happy, ‘I must make this notation official somehow.’ He was
imagining the alphabet as a form of gravity, pulling at the letters; making them s
l
i
d
e
off the page…he dreamed and dreamed of a book in
which the knotation would be revealed to him.

The combat wore on in gas light… Happy, absent-mindedly throttling a man playing
an out of work sailor in the third act of the fight, was remembering a dream…

“I’m in a circus tent. A female companion is right behind me. There is no audience.
Up in front an athlete exercises on a high horizontal bar or trapeze. He’s young and
strong and has a pointy beard. My companion whispers to me: “This is a scientist
who does gymnastics here. He is working up his sleeve the binding force of this
triangle.”
Two little boys about four or five work out with him. They lie on mattresses
suspended in the air. They are on the stock exchange that grew this thorny
argument. The man swings the mattresses, and the boys must then make contrary
motions. The mattresses are stuffed with money, and all manner of currencies
flutter across the floor of the empty arena. The child closer to the athlete repeatedly
loses a rope, almost falling off. The other child has no problem and is no longer
observed. The man says, ‘This is worth nothing in the balanced and endless spear’.
Everything reeks of sadness and I feel as if I am trapped in a burning car.”

Rover Joe has a medical degree and is not shy of his quackery. He makes a diagnosis
as he stamps repeatedly on an usher’s spleen, “you clearly got daddy issues.
Probably some unresolved fear of castration. Do you identify with the child who
loses grip of the rope?”

At this point the police arrive and both our heroes escape by crashing through a
stained glass window that is in the shape of god’s own penis.

Cut to later.

Joe is picking glass out of his pockets. “What is the matter with you compadre? Why
so quiet.”

Happy had ‘gone dead’, in this state he is no more able to understand human
interaction that a lizard baking on a rock. Sun is my body, rock is pushing upwards
through sunlight to the reptile nothingness of heat upon heat.
I am below the sun; sun is below me as the trails of light are molten rock in my
death eyes. I am perfect stillness of the no difference.
 92

It is from this place he is able to access the absolute worthlessness of money. This
is what enables him to perform the act of invalidation. There were harder yet more
fluid values of meaning, and meanings of value that could undo them, before the
ridiculous paper wishes of the human sap. The magic spelt deep in the binding of
sticks with purple thread, strips of bark dipped in chicken blood were solid in the
world long before numbers and letters swarmed like ants across the failing magical
skin.

Eventually he spoke, “if the world was real, poetry would not exist.”

CAPITAL AS AFFECTIVE

In trying to get to a circus position that does not agree with capital it is essential
then to clearly delineate between trick one and trick two. So as to allow a possibility
for a circus praxis that is not informed by the profit of individuality that can be
garnered from the operation of a trick as a form of post-factism that allows the
register of gravity to similarly feed on weightlessness in which it does not believe,
whilst concealing this disbelief by implying that weightlessness has become ‘true’
within it.
It will be discussed how does this excess between weightlessness and its
impossibility within gravity get misread as genuine freedom that conveys the circus-
subject as ‘free’?

So in acknowledging that capitalism that operates through post-factism,

categorised by the implication that your unprovable dreams can become true within
it, is the supposed proof that affect is ‘real’ sustainable enough to be useful to the
register which cannot validate it as a form of expansion.
Capital admits daily that affect is both valid enough to profit from , but not valid
enough to allow it to remain ‘true’ to itself on its own pre-differential terms. Capital
uses affect but has no respect for it or the instrument capable of registering it, the
subject. The subject is asked to perform the tricks that generate such weightless
and priceless iterations, but as a machine is asked to produce packaging for more
concrete items.
Affect is ‘real’ because capitalist realism uses it while concealing its indifference
and disbelief. Affect is fiction because this process of post-factism cannot operate
on something it believes is ‘true’.

‘Un-provability’ is proved to be a necessary component in the reproduction of

capital; if desire is this ‘unprovable’ fiction in terms of its designation as the
inevitability of lack through the terms of its iteration, then the production of desire
is the reproduction of capital.
It is this argument that I focus on here to show how circus agrees with capital, even
as it projects the desirable image of freedom. It is founded on freedom production in
the same manner that capital is founded on desiring production.
 93

I wish to avoid apotheosising the trick as some immediate ‘hot-line’ to un-

capturable affect.
As discussed affect can be captured by the operation of a trick that seeks to profit
from its capture,
It seems to float but, but as its telling is reduced to hard facts, and the facts state
that a meta-position is impossible.
The operating principle is a concealed double bind in which capital expands itself
by using the impossibility of commodification as a rationale for entry of any thing
into the market.
In short affect here is like a deep see creature that once brought into the light of
day is unable to survive. What I am getting at here then is capital as a diver, which
enters the area of affect that is alien to it, and then brings affect to the surface
where it cannot survive, but through the activation of fetishisation it is animated to
still seem to possess the intrinsic affective vitality that it had in the depths that are
unreachable to capital.
The pearl is true but unprovable once it is set in the necklace.

The point here is that the power of affect, its movement, is held in it being fictional
to difference.
Circus can produce a trick that rips you off just as must as it can produce one that
fictionally exposes the limits of gravity.
Capital has only one trick, the one where it rips you off, as to expose its own limits
would be Capital doing the work of Marx.

What I mean by this is that capital also fictionalises, also play bites but that this
meta-positioning is then removed from the context of a game and becomes an
actual bite.

PLAY BITES OF CAPITAL:

The trick of capital is to locate that which is of zero-value to it and attempt entry of
that zero-value into the market where it absolutely should not be; this is because
things of zero-value to capital cost zero to produce as the production costs are
carried by the labour force of desire.
Capital playfully nips at affect and gets enough of a bite to pull it into the den of
exchange, capital therefore creates a new commodity, which is destroyed as ‘what it
is’ as soon as it enters the market.
It still does denote differently to what it denotes, but in an entirely reversed
fashion, it no longer denotes that it is something that denotes differently to what it
denotes. Capital has found a way to sell the fictionalisation of a meta-position to the
market as a fact.

SYSTEMISED DESIRING-PRODUCTION:
 94

This to me is the process of desiring production systemised to capture affect in the

semio-capitalist mode of production. Desire is directly produced by capital
suggesting new immaterial markets of mood, feeling and affect.
The trick is a semio-gravitational tautology.
The conclusion here is affect is not a meta-position but the fictionalisation of one.
Affect is a form of fiction to the system through which it is iterated.
For me here it is useful to say that fiction is affect and affect is fiction. We hear it,
we see it as a story told that cannot be real, but which makes a demand on the real,
not in a metaphysical way, but that suggests something else other than that which
is here now is here now.

FREEDOMS A TO Z ARE ON SALE NOW:

So to think about different freedoms that might be referenced by the trick and by
circus that practices it.

A: Rip-off. Does the trick convey actual freedom, or

B: Romance. A desire for freedom, or

C: Political critique. A demand for freedom…

It is important to scan the nuanced difference between these modes, because each
reveals a relationship to gravity and to the audience that I feel is vital in
understanding circus capacity to retain its possibility as an art form or to simply
agree with its capitalist roots.

That is, the first mode here appears to be an ‘actual’ leap beyond gravity as is
‘sold’ as such, the next is an expression of a desire for freedom in the tragic mood of
Romanticism, tragic because its longing acknowledges the impossibility of what is
longed for, the last is a political critique, which notes that current freedom is
impossible and acts as the spectre of freedom that haunts the current impasse.

Conflations, Poetics and Play-Bites:

AFFECT AS ROMANTIC TRAGEDY BEFALLING SUBJECT.

In performing a ‘desire for freedom’ the circus artist primarily asks the audience to
witness the melancholy performance of a noble yet doomed attempt to break free
of restriction whilst intimating that escape is not possible. This act simultaneously
references something in the soul that still yearns to be free and transposes actual
mobility onto the poetic power to imagine it, this then is still presenting a mythic
freedom that is attainable, the freedom to dream; which also features strongly as
what Fisher terms a ‘precorporated’ market; circus as the cultural zone of ‘hopeless
beauty’ perhaps. Of beauty at the end of the world, an act in which an aerialist
covered in oil turns the death throws of a swan into heart-breaking lightness.
 95

For me this still is tied up with the project of Romantic individualism in which you
are free to reference the fact that escape is not possible and that this is your
freedom. Painfully close to acknowledging the fiction of weightlessness perhaps,
but minus the sharing; we are still asked to validate your individuality and thus
expand the neoliberal field of ‘all for one’ without the ‘one for all’. The emphasis
here is still metaphysical and so in the mould of ‘thinking outside the box’ with no
concern for why there is a box or what causes it; in this sense it is apolitical
drama…’full of sound and fury , signifying nothing’.
What is characterised by this doomed romanticism is the activation of Trick One to
highlight that the meta-position is fictional and impossible , but to only remain
there , repeating this impossibility as a poetic ship grounded on the unfairness of
the rocks. This is perhaps Trick One that does not find a way to refer to Trick Three,
the trick upon the terms that are fixed in meta-positionality.

Also to note here is the fact that Lacan considered affect something that tragically
befell the subject, perhaps here is an example of the performance of this tragic
befalling.

Lacan gives a quite enigmatic but interesting remark in an address on French

Television in 1973 which echoes this semi-tragic aspect of affect in relation to a body
that might be said to endure it:

“Affect, therefore, befalls a body whose essence it is said is to dwell in language …

affect, I repeat, befalls it on account of its not finding dwelling-room, at least not to
its taste. This we call moroseness, or equally, moodiness. Is this a sin, a grain of
madness, or a true touch of the real?”

(Joan Copjec, trans. by Denis Hollier and others (1990) Television: A Challenge to the
Psychoanalytic Establishment. W. W. Norton. New York pp 22-23)

What might Lacan have meant by this? Perhaps that affect is that which does not fit
in the body that is caught in the signifying chains of language. It is not therefore that
Lacan doesn’t find a place for affect in his theory, but that his theory is that affect
doesn’t find a place in the body as such.
What is intimated is that it is still the minimal difference between essence and
that, which is derived into difference, and that this is a tragedy.

When the trick is presented as a demand, the circus artist acknowledges the
impossibility of freedom within the fictional ‘telling’ of an area outside of gravity. In
this acknowledgement the affective imagining of that space is present as a ludic
gesture that does not seek to cast gravity as an area that would permit escape.
Rather than the impossibility of escape being used to highlight a supposedly
poetics within circus technique that equates to actual freedom, the emphasis here is
 96

not on the personal struggle of the individual poet with the gift of sight, but on the
exposure of the real material conditions under which freedom may not be possible.
The emphasis here is on immanence; that fiction is one thing, but something
needs to change. Thus this form of Trick One does find a way to point to a further
Trick Three that might be performed on the terms of difference under which meta-
postionality is impossible.

In light of this there is also the question; if circus points away from the current
system of gravity, which forms a totality with no actual exterior, then is this a theory
of transcendence? To what exactly are we prevented from having access?
What we follow here is perhaps the thinking from Feuerbach to Marx, in that first a
sense of utopia is imagined not beyond that of the one imagined by the church but
on the actualisation of better conditions now.

WHAT HAS FICTION GOT TO DO WITH ANYTHING?

Unification through fiction: everyone loves a good story, but not necessarily in that
order.
What for me unifies the two approaches then of psychotic utterance (the endless
fall) and formal tautology (the insurmountable impasse) is this excess that is
both/and.
The two approaches to transposing a trick are seen in some regard here as the
same thing, in that the endless repositioning to deconstruct the origin of language
by the psychotic and the cold insistence on a logical extimate impasse within the
subject amount to the same thing. In Lacan the Cartesian subject that is used to
prove it does not exist precipitates an endless loop in as much as the endlessness of
falling through language equates to a brick wall.
The examination of these two different forms of transposing the trick into
language shows that both forms seem to emanate affect, an excess beyond the sum
of that which the system will register.

Both psychotic utterance and formal tautology within axiomatic systems,

although configured entirely differently (as perhaps involuntary and voluntary, as
horizonless or circling a closed loop respectively) both convey a surplus.
Both perform play-bites on language that do not denote what they denote;
psychotic utterance that speaks in rhymes or clangs does still convey something
that those words are not set up to convey, the Epimenides paradox does not cause
us to fall into catatonia as language has been broken, we jump out of that system
and carry on. Both forms encircle difference to what they ‘should’ say in similarity.
Thus affect occurs here in both approaches and following the idea that affect is
then a fictionalisation of a meta-position accompanied by the instantaneous
acknowledgement that such a position is impossible I am suggesting that the
unifying factor between these two proposed modes of ‘speaking a trick’ is in fact
fiction.
 97

I believe the trick can be thought of in various different ways in relation to its
fictionality:

And as I have highlighted the point here is that I believe that circus has fallen into a
continuation of its agreement with capital in that often this fictional weightlessness
is fully conflated as genuine personal freedom. This gives a very different picture of
gravity, as not indifferent but benevolent which I feel is a reiteration of a general
misconception, in that it is a continuation of a narrative in which capital is
meritocratic as opposed to voraciously non negotiable.

The other conclusion here is that it is how this fiction is acknowledged, privileged,
shared, concealed or conflated that then determines the difference between Tricks
One and Two.
For me what is suggested is that although fiction can be conflated into fact in
order to gain a profit in Trick Two, what is lost is the affective power of demand that
the trick can achieve in Trick One.

Fiction is what is created here in the circus trick, and its art is the extreme effort and
drive that goes into this ‘sharing’ the ‘telling’ of a freedom not yet here.
I feel that Trick One can also get stuck revelling in this ‘unarrived’ freedom and so
take on a more self-interested ‘doomed’ Romantic aspect however. In this case Trick
One is proposed here as a trick that calls for Trick Three , a trick performed on the
underlying terms of the system.
If all of these imaginations of the trick mechanism as it might be understood in
linguistics, in political economy, in philosophy, mathematics or biology are all
paradigms…then it is fiction for me that unifies these paradigms; fiction here
categorised as affect.
This project of transposing the trick into three fields of value is to interrogate how
the trick can be a tool for reconfiguring fields of value generally and the
acknowledgement of the impasse and acknowledgement of a proposed meta-
position as a fiction is I feel a useful addition to the thinking here.
Fiction is a position that recognises two factors: whilst acknowledging an ‘un-
provability’ of overcoming the logic of the autonomous register it acknowledges
also a possibility of sharing something that is ‘true’ inter-subjectively.

The existence of two registers, is of course a function of thinking of gravity,

language and capital as fields of value, and it is through this conception that I will
proceed.
Within the operation of capital we can think of the conflation of fiction with fact as
the operation of fetishisation, in so far as it represents the factualisation of
something as the unknown knowledge of its purely fictional status. A surplus is
reified to be registerable in a market for profit.
The disavowal of a subjective or social dimension to what is produced and its
conversion into the seemingly intrinsic equivalence denies its origin as fiction. Affect
is likewise denied as only conveyable trans-individually in the qualitative register by
its inclusion within a register of pure quantity. This is this operation of concealment
of real relations.
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In language we can think of this conflation of incompatible registers as either the

grip of psychosis, in which the subject believes that they can effectively achieve a
validation of their subjective meta-postionality in relation to a register that cannot
acknowledge their existence; or we can think of it in formal terms as the
concealment of tautological argument for self-interested gain, or the issue of an
insoluble double-bind as a means of control. In both cases the fiction of being able
to ‘get outside’ of language whilst still in it is unacknowledged as fiction or
concealed. It might be said that the psychotic is the victim of what the second more
formal installation of unsolvable contradictory injunction creates; that a double bind
can lead to subjective loops that are endlessly unprovable.
How the combination of these two fields, as semio-capital, relate to a subject
enmeshed in such conflations of fiction and fact will be discussed.
In gravity it is the conflation of weightlessness with actual freedom that imply that
what is an intersubjective fiction has been misread as something that can be
validated in an autonomous register of bodies of mass organised indifferently
according to the field.
It is this conflation of registers that create the possibility for the trick to either
expose or conceal limitations within the system through which it is iterated; but the
difference lies in acknowledgement or concealment of that conflation of fiction with
fact; that is the difference between a trick as a producer of fiction that exposes
limits and therefore demands more space or one that conceals and implies that the
space is systemically endless.
It is the difference between Trick One that exposes the limits of a field, and the
ossification of the hidden tautology of Trick Two as a field in which modes of escape
lead you back inside the enclosure.

The conclusion is that through an analysis of affect, and through Massumi’s take on
Bateson’s description of the play bite, is that fiction is the unifying principle that
could be used here to unify these two approaches of psychotic utterance and logical
tautology, and secondly it is how this fictional meta-position is acknowledged that
determines the difference between Trick One and Trick Two.
As stated I reject the Romantic implication here, this is not to celebrate freedom,
but celebrate the free-living individual, but to propose fiction as a position of
incomplete desire that demands change in the inevitability of gravity.
For me this is useful, more useful that thinking of circus as freedom-production;
this is a rationale for thinking of circus as an art, as the production of fiction that
retains its power to demand. It perhaps avoids capture by not deferring to the
‘factual’ register that promises to validate it and from which it might ‘profit’.
This difference is a tendency that will be examined also, but for now it is thought of
here as a conflation of registers, and as Trick Two, the trick to conceal the tautology
within the system.

AND ALSO FOR NOW LET US SAY THAT THE TRICK IS FICTION.
IT IS ‘TRICKTION’.
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ROAD TRIP: god’s rope

Moving and Speaking:

In this section I recount a form of research that occurred quite early in the process;
as ideas of tricks and speech were still forming, another shape of circus that I tried
to transpose language into was a journey. Just a mobility that spoke itself; in this
way I was trying to construct a circus of words, a chapiteau of language, that might
be held on the map by the placing of one pin; by the hammering of one stake in the
middle of nowhere.

As mentioned in the section on pranks, the rambling generation of a kind of

spurious language production was suggested as a way that circus –talking might be
mobile and produce something uncapturable. However pointless this may sound I
would like to discuss the way I see the relation between the trick and mobility.
How can the generation of fictions give us more mobility?

Much of the research has been taken up with finding ways of moving, whether it
be a random kind of road trip, a parody of the ‘knowledge-generating’ quest, or
‘travelling without moving’ in the hypnotic states of Past Life Regression .
These three forms have fed into each other and represent both a way of looking at
circus’ supposed nomadism, its capture as corporate policy, and also to reference
the research journey itself as a supposed epic wandering in uncharted territory to
return with some kind of ‘knowing’.

There are of course clichés in both of these ideas of the journey and these ideas
cross over here; in journeys that try to speak circus as a travelling nonsense, a poetic
thread, dislocated but responsive, falling in love with things along the way; in short
trips that generate knowledge in epic disproportion to the scale of the ‘quest’ and in
other imagined iterations of travel, hypnosis, out of body experiences, past life
journeys as new ways for the circus artist to move and speak.
These exercises have also formed for me a series of rigorous tools for developing a
binding ‘code of useless meanings’ between collaborators in an ensemble.

The value I see in being ‘on the move’ is not so much the movement itself but the
position of being able to inhabit a shared channel that is useless as some kind of
quantifiable product in which the connections are not ‘set’, a channel that still allows
for the conjunction of bodies in new unheard-of ways and through which the idea of
restrictive force can be temporarily refuted.
In speaking this may be just the revival of a nonsensical poetics, in moving this may
be the fore-fronting of the imagined journey that allows for the generation of such
 100

poetics. It was hoped that the two actions could redeem each other in some way;
that moving could lift speaking out of stasis and that speaking could become a
praxis for moving.

Also here moving, speaking and making tricks of both are played with and cross-
pollinated to address my fiction of a world in which circus is compulsory, so that
again these might be thought of as conceptual circuses of one speaker, verbally
mobile across a landscape of fixed linguistic architectures.

MOBILITY:

Much of the ideas in the filmed work deal with moving across landscapes to access
the possibility to assemble knowledge in new ways, to fall in love with what is there
and how it fits together in that moment.
What is a trick for, what does it achieve? I operate techniques through a force to
gain mobility not otherwise available. It is for mobility that I move.
I use the idea of the trick, the figure or the movement in my physical explorations
on the rope and always it is an operation, which yields something else: this is further
mobility; on the road/rope.
If all of this is for anything it is to be able to move under restriction to speak about
restriction, whether this be the body’s ability to take one step or the way a whole
ensemble can be mobile across a landscape.
So I see mobility as the goal, to be able to move in ways that you are usually
forbidden, to follow short cuts, to traverse areas to connect things previously
unconnected, with objects or other bodies. Just as new conjunctions are made
available so they are just as quickly swallowed up as ‘set’ connections in a fixed
network.
This part of the research that involved long and short journeys also was taken up
with how fictions attend and are created by journeys and how fictions keep the
journey as a potential for moving.

However, mobility is captured by corporations, advertising, marketing and

dispersed precarious labour in so many ways that it feels that there is no light in the
term at all, it exists merely as a vital function of capital, of the new workplace, of the
new worker. To keep moving in new and extraordinary ways is an edict not just in a
fictional state of compulsory Circusism.
This addressing of the edict ‘be mobile’ is again something to which I am trying to
respond in my research; to look at ways of perhaps being mobile in another way.

ON THE ROAD:

So between these two mechanisms for speech, the psychotic and the tautological, I
decided early on that I wanted to try to be mobile. I wanted Ramble in both senses
of the word.
 101

I made a short Road Movie in which I tried to ‘speak circus’.

“These problems of image circulated, I wasn’t sure how being on the road, in a road
movie, with a jaded film-maker, could constitute a prank or a trick but I wanted to
move; to go somewhere, to do something…the result was ok…just ok…but it started
something. Not a solution but a start…”

Originally I was looking for a form that could carry these ideas and although the idea
of being ‘on the road’ now seemed as radical as a trip to the shops. I imagined a
journey for this circus research, one that captured the practice I was at times used
to, show, travel, show, travel, show etc. One in which the circus did not ever arrive
but just travelled from place to place and that this rambling was a way also of
speaking. That rambling was an unstructured form of speech, and a ‘useless’
nomadism, a way of resisting the topical logic of language, that could create
verbally vast, temporarily autonomous structures in language, like a circus tent, but
also an aimless journey.

That to speak on the road was, of course, not a new idea but it felt that as a method
of writing and documenting it could be valid.
At this early time these parameters of resistance, temporary autonomy and
mobility were leading to ideas around being on the move, speaking transgressively
and thinking about temporarily autonomous structures, like a circus tent..
The idea of the comedian fleeing through language is perhaps the same as the
psychotic falling through language, or the mystic swimming religiously through the
Word.
Either way there is a movement here, a forward momentum. I wanted to take that
image of the psychotic falling through language, as a motor for generating speech.
I wanted to talk my way forwards, to take that fall horizontally, and to send it into a
journey both verbally and topologically…
The road trip to me was a way of speaking circus.

So let us forget that it is possible that these parameters could be stated as all props
to the existence of the free market individual, or instructions for new workers in a
factory rest room.

Here is a description of a ‘resistance’ group formed in 1947:

“Mont Pelerin was the unlikely birthplace of a counter-revolution that would one day
sweep the globe. For the first few days of April 1947, nearly forty intellectuals from
across the Western world – academics, economists and journalists among them –
descended upon the town’s Hotel du Parc. After a week of rigorous and often heated
debate, the assembled group convened to pass sentence on a new global order that
had emerged from the rubble of WWII. “The central values of civilisation are in danger,”
read the group’s damning Statement of Aims. ”Over large stretches of the earth’s
surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already
disappeared.”
 102

To these thinkers the roots of the crisis were clear ; they had been fostered by a decline
of belief in private property and the competitive market.” With the stage set for a
generational struggle in defence of an increasingly besieged free-market capitalism,
the Mont Pelerin Society was born.”

(Jones, O (2015) The Establishment. Penguin. London.)

They saw themselves as proponents of resistance, temporary autonomy and

mobility in the face of the gravity of post war socialism, they saw themselves in
danger of being reduced to objects of state controlled market restrictions, they saw
their autonomy and individuality threatened by and state consciousness.
Admittedly this restriction was enjoyed from the bar of the Swiss hotel, and
complained about their bondage on private aircraft.
These and later members of this society went on to become hugely influential in
Thatcherite and Blairite Britain in which these then ‘outrider’ views are now
mainstream, unshakeable neo-liberal policy.

This was the feeling as I set off, that mobility was defunct, or co-opted, then I had to
find a way to collaborate with someone embedded in the film industry, which
necessarily had its own tropes of representation that informed the ‘road movie’.

Nathan Hughes and I made two trips. One from Stockholm to Helsinki and one
from Helsinki to St. Petersburg . This was documented and is submitted with this
text.
In many ways the compromises of this form of documentation were to be another
attempt to get at a form of weightlessness that in film could only land.

‘GOD’S ROPE’.

The link below is to one documentation of a road trip undertaken with the
director/film-maker Nathan Hughes. It is framed as a ‘ramble’ in both senses of the
word. Both a ramble across a landscape, in this case Finland, and a rambling voice
trying to find a way to speak circus. It features extracts from the earlier work
entitled ‘knotcircus’, which as explained, was also an attempt at this kind of logical
knotting, or intellectual contortion.
The format of this film, a kind of loose documentary-style, is something I have
kept. It exists as a way to give easy access to the subjects involved and to allow the
processes to be captured. Documentary is a strange beast, playing fake to real and
vice versa.
I am aware that this can be a problematic format for documentation as it also
comes with its own tropes and captured narratives but it is something that I have
used as a way of stating that I am not a film-maker. Nevertheless this kind of
documentation and particularly editing forms a new way of writing about what I am
doing. This ability to layer images has lead to some later experiments in live and
filmed work existing together.
 103

Link: [Link]

Or: [Link]

AFTER THE ROAD TRIP:

The feeling of having to engage with the epic, transformative narratives of the road
trip as seen through the tropes of loose documentary and ‘buddy movie’ left me
feeling defeated, but helped to clarify some thoughts on the idea of capture, and of
travelling across a surface that was organised according to Mark Fisher’s phrase to
‘precorporate’ any journey that tried to leave the track.
It felt like no matter what I did, the big other of Film and how it demanded that the
road trip be rendered was not going to leave me alone to investigate my own
concerns.
So tired of having constant negotiations about the un-marketability of my
interests with my collaborator I decided to say ‘cut’, but aware that this ‘failure’ to
move and speak ‘freely’ was a vital step forward.

The experience left me feeling that the original tenets of Resistance, Temporary
Autonomy and Mobility were captured. This mobility felt like stasis. Without this
journey the investigation of the tautology of the landscape as complicit in this stasis
could not have been undertaken.
I decided to investigate this notion of circus thinking captured as the tenets of the
corporation, and the establishment of a tricky ground upon which tricks no longer
worked.

The Hypnotist and the Horse Race. Part Four.

DAY TWO, Morning:

She showed me a bizarre experiment on that second day.

After the dream I had to drag myself awake, and just lay there sweating
in the morning heat.
Moments after I had awoken, she came into my room before I had
 104

arisen brandishing a revolver. I was naturally startled and leapt from the
sheets at great expense to my modesty.
She was framed in the doorway as I came to my feet and I saw then
that what at first appeared to me as a deadly weapon was in fact
completely dysfunctional.
In the moment of waking I had perceived its general shape but now I
was focused on the pistol I could see that the barrel was completely
bent upwards, at a point about an inch below where it extended from
the frame that housed the cylinder, it had been forcibly altered to
diverge upwards at an angle of perhaps 30 degrees.

This meant one of two things, which I seemed to realise simultaneously:

Either discharging the weapon would be dangerous only for the one
wielding it, as the round would not be able to pass through the barrel,
effectively destroying the hand that fired it. Or by some contortion of
the wrist downwards it would be possible to still operate the gun with
deadly aim. These two thoughts seemed to momentarily occupy the same
space in my head causing me to trip over my own feet. I winced and
stumbled, half awake as the weapon seemed deadly to both of us.
Lending perversity and an unpredictable self-destructive violence to its
aim.

The Doctor was agitated at my dramatic reaction, but kept extorting

me to calm myself, that she wanted to begin with some first principles,
and that this was merely a useful prop. “Worthless but useful” She
kept saying, pointing it indirectly at me.

She seemed to float in her gown as she intoned about the violence of
the work. Why violence? What was so intrusive about Past Life
Regression? It was a re-playing of events that had past, not an
insurgency.
She insisted that it was only through violent change that we can
work with the past, but that violence had to be impossible, it had to be
an inoperable act, a ‘busy inaction’ she called it, one that took all our
energy.
 105

She took my arm softly and brought me to the wash-basin. It was

deep and wide, enough volume of water could be stored there for a
decent wash, and I was grateful of it in the swelter of the previous
evening, sticky and dirty as I was from the journey up-river.
I kept my eye on the revolver as she filled the basin to the brim
from the green tap that hovered above it. Where did the water come
from, how was it filtered, was there a storage tank somewhere. I
pondered this as she turned off the faucet with a squeak. Was I still
feverish?

“I have had this weapon configured for time travel” she spoke softly,
smiling at me, lifting her hand at an angle so that the bent barrel
pointed directly at me, which left her wrist strangely arched downwards
from above her head.
I tried to stay calm and match her scientific smile “Is it loaded?”
“Of course, even the inoperable is loaded…” she corrected herself,
“…can be loaded.”
“That which can never be is loaded with possibility…” I tried to keep
the tone light, but inside I was perturbed.

At this she seemed piqued and exhaled sharply. She let her hand return
to a normal position for firing into my chest, the barrel was now aimed
above my head, or at least through the parting in my sleep tousled hair.
I felt my skin prickle in the morning heat, the choreography of her
wrist in the accepted firing position for shooting me through the heart,
even though the barrel’s trajectory was directly over my head made this
seem an even more threatening stance.

“Which do you prefer? Me holding the weapon at the wrong angle, but
aiming at you, or me at the right angle aiming above your head. In
breaking the accepted position I threaten you, in adopting the correct
stance for firing you are completely safe.”

“I do not have a preference, I think …”

 106

“When something has been already distorted, there is a need for new
positions to accommodate for it. Something distorted calls for a
distorted process to return it to its proper state. Reaching through
time is such a process…to subject the distorted events of history to the
distorting lens of past life regression is to make the barrel straight
again, by distorting a lie we get the truth. Do you see?”

“Not really…I think it is to do with how you see distortion.”

 1

CHAPTER FOUR: The Tautological Ground:

***
Some of this chapter will be highlighted as additional reading and does
not therefore form part of this official doctoral submission; as already
explained it is there to augment, if you can spare the time. As stated,
dear reader, the text is pitched as a circus, with many different
sideshows, some of which you can afford the time to enter, some of
which you cannot. If time is money it is only because language is a trick.

***

The text attempts to get outside of the text; only as a way of describing the
trick, only as a way of describing that the problem I outline in circus, which
is to get outside of capital, is as impossible as writing your way out of
language.

There is an idea here that is not so much: ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you
tell me,’ but: ‘fuck you for telling me to not do what you tell me.’

In this chapter I will discuss what I mean by a Trick Two, the trick to conceal.
Instead of exposing tautology this trick ‘hides’ it, in order that the ‘trick-making
subject’ might make a self-interested gain; but what is also discussed here is how
the subject is still just as compromised by the indifference of the field.
While ‘gains’ may be indeed possible, this second trick is ultimately unavoidably
configured only to expand the field through which it is made, as its internal limits,
which normally would be exposed along with the exposure of internal tautology,
instead remain concealed, thus allowing the field to present itself as both suitably
configured to respond to the qualities of the subject as well as endless enough to
accommodate the subject’s post-ideological diversity.
The gain in being ‘realised’ is returned as not real.

What could be meant by a ‘trick’ in capital is examined here through the way that
ideology, the market and the subject relate and through a further definition of a
homology between language and capital; as defined by the term semio-capital.
This pursues the idea of the three fields in this research as fields of value and so
will implicate the subject within gravity in this examination of the subject in capital
that has mustered its linguistic potency to expand itself into a seemingly endless
and meritocratic field.

I will also define what I mean by capital and the power it exerts and the relation of
desire to these forces, specifically as desire seems to be schematised into a circuit of
lack that ought to operate to expose the reproduction of capital through the desire
for irrelevant objects.
 2

While I am not saying this circuit is an incorrect reading of desire, I am noting how
it could be combined with semio-capital to serve the expansion of an area of post
truth.
This is done in relation to the Gödellian notion of a tautology that produces
statements that are ‘true but unprovable’. The ground examined here is one that
claims that ‘unprovable truths’ are in fact verifiable as true within that ground,
which conceals the incompatibility of this proof to the integrity of the ground.

I will then go on to outline some examples of ‘tautological ground’ that I feel relate
to the installation and concealment of tautology. These un-winnable games seem to
ensue in the injunction to achieve agency within systems designed around game
theory.
The unanswerable command here is to achieve a ‘meta position’ by ‘playing’ the
system of difference that invalidates such a position, and then using that system as
the process that ratifies ‘meta-positionsality’.
Implied here is that a one armed bandit that only pays in casino tokens is thought
of a sound post-ideological premise.
These examples will deal with definitions of ‘freedom’ and ‘ideology’ that are
contradictory in their insistence upon individual agency that can result only in a
definition of the individual as tautological, which again, I will relate to how the
mechanism of the trick to expose can be co-opted into being one that hides internal
flaws thus allowing the subject to internalise such flaws as their own.

There is also here a brief examination of the rationales and theoretical

manipulations that construct the idea of society as a game played by a solo, self-
interested actor. The larger ‘social study’ arguments that form this backdrop to the
second trick as a base layer are here but as additional reading and include reference
to the theories of John Nash on social equilibrium, Isaiah Berlin on liberty and R.D.
Laing on the un-winnable game.

The summation of the ideas contained in these examples are for me overarching
ideological tropes that I attempt to show have also been absorbed into the circus; so
that tricks to escape restriction only repeat the restriction as they are performed on
a neutralising platform, which is itself a concealed version of those performances.

This tautological ground will be proposed as a structural relation that iterates a

compromised circus practice, particularly that of trick making as a method of
freedom production upon a ground that refutes it. Just as tricks are supposed to
refute authority downwards, this concealed trick refutes agency upwards; and
therefore acts as a similar self-perpetuating corporate ideology to the construction
of a tautological ground.
Circus makes an illogical moment within the logic of gravity; in a tautological
ground the form of that illogic is appropriated, so that the illogical moment seems
to ‘fit right in’.
This is short lived however and is returned as a ‘fail’ to the subject, even as it is the
‘success’ of the illogical field that then looks expansive enough to accommodate any
 3

statement at all. This concealment of incompatibility and failure to delineate

between fact and fiction is Trick Two.

This delineation between trick one and trick two according to how self-interest
plays out in relation to desire is one approach here. In that a subject who does not
mind exposing desire for meta-position as a fiction is very different from one who
seeks to factualise that fiction into a concrete gain and is a good rationale perhaps
for delineating between how desire plays out in both forms of the trick discussed
here.
I will look at how this self-interested subject, this image of the subject cannot help
but ‘come true’ within the ground that conceals the tautology by which it can be
observed that desire for meta-positionality to the ground is indeed only fictionally
viable.
It is also a good rationale for positing that each attempt to find a meta-position
‘outside’ of the authority of the market, which then necessarily gives pleasure both
in terms of senses and in its fulfilment of the edict to be free, is the process by which
the market expands to encompass that ‘outside’ of itself as this ‘outside’ has to be
validated ‘inside’ of it. This is implicit in the double bind imperative to ‘become
unique’.

In short the subject is propelled to perform tricks in the gravity of the mass-market
that will yield moments of weightlessness of individuality from it.
I propose that this is done in a tautological ground, which as we attempt to
designate here, is an over-arching installation of trick two, in which this
weightlessness is conflated, fetishized and misread as something compatible to be
registered within the indifferent scale that is set as the inevitable system of
difference by which all things in the market are equivalents, mediated through an
agreed form. What is concealed here in trick two as we have established is the
incompatibility of the two conflicting but interdependent registers that flicker back
and forth in their reciprocal tautological arrangement.

The same reciprocal loop in which the market needs the subject it alienates, who is
alienated from that which they produce but whose differential position is created by
their own production, so the assumption of a self-interested subject as the
equilibristic centre of societal management is responsible for the creation of that
exact figure who repeatedly enters their singular difference to complete their
individuality and freedom into the market where it is invalidated and the ensuing
lack is then perceived as the subject’s own lack of merit within a fair system, thus
reinforcing the ludic nature of the subject, who has simply lost that round of the
game.

The point here is the same one Mark Fisher makes as he argues that public space
needs to be reclaimed as expressions of ‘general will’:

“This involves, naturally, resuscitating the very concept of general will, reviving –
and modernising – the idea of public space that is not reducible to an aggregation of
individuals and their interests.”
 4

(Fisher,M. (2009) Capitalist Realism. Zero Books. UK)

It is in this sense that I am suggesting that spaces organised around such self-
interests create self-interested players who expand such spaces as the image of
endless possibility. Here the individual execution of trick two that aligns with the
overarching tautology of the space or ground, in its execution, serves only to return
the player to another round, as the primary imperative of the game is to expand the
potential for the repetition of the reproduction of capital. In a self-interested space,
there is no self interest greater than the indifference installed therein, all ‘wins’ only
expand the ideology of that space as a limitless housing for ludic possibility.
In short, in the ludic space of the tautological ground, the house always wins.

Fisher notes something interesting about repeated pleasure seeking …that the
subject does not seem to see the problem: the insistence that they ought to be
always fulfilled, which hinges on the rationale that the only way to be free of a
desire is to fulfil it is activated in a market of endlessly ‘new’ pleasures that privileges
the idea of built-in-obsolescence to maintain what is ‘new’.

“Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to me to be in a state of what

I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterized as a state of
anhedonia, but the condition I’m referring tois constituted not by an inability to get
pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.
There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ – but no appreciation that this
mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle.”

(Fisher, 2009)

Thus in regard to this depressive hedonia, we have a subject following the image
of a subject who is able to achieve satisfaction in the markets, but who never does,
thus propelling that subject to regard the lack as their own, which returns them to
the market to seek further satisfaction.
Here a market is seen as the network of possible fulfilments, which offer to assuage
the depression they cause by implying that only a hedonistic subject, willing to
labour at their satisfaction in these meritocratic and limitless markets of pleasure,
can achieve the end of depression. Each pleasure is empty but seems to only refer to
another in an endless non-realisation, like a metonymical chain of semio-capital.
The ‘new’ offers pleasure now but the tautology here is that the definition of ‘new’
includes its inevitable condition as ‘old’. What is concealed is this knot and it is this
kind of hidden insoluble bind to which I refer.
This is a self-interested subject whose self-interest serves only to create new
markets.

Looking through the mechanism of the trick, what could be best categorised as
freedom from desire?
 5

TRICK ONE: denial: an altruistic subject who can forestall fufillment and let the
desire float as a fictional demand. The desire is not falsely completed in an
incompatible register.

TRICK TWO: fulfilment: a self-interested subject bound to seek validation of desire

in a subject-less register. Desire has to be produced towards arrest, thus redefining
its production as for the arresting field.

This chapter looks at the problem of this second trick. In relation to circus this is the
constant desire for weightlessness that has to be fulfilled in gravity.

I do not subscribe to the view that the subject is essentially self-interested, but I do
believe that the market society makes it hard not to be this way and that the
structures through which we interact are set up to favour those who are already.
In the argument around the inevitable reading of all altruism as virtue signalling I
will attempt to outline how a rationale for a capitalist ‘ideology’, masked behind the
idea of ‘post –ideology’, creates the tricky conditions in which the subject has to
adopt the ludic sensibility that casts all altruism as self-interested game play.

This post-ideological ‘position’ is looked at here as a counter to the ghost of

communism during the Cold War, and which was also championed out of the ideas
of repression in Freud through to the self-defeating knots of R.D Laing .
These ideologies that supposedly rationalise capitalism as an ideologically
unbiased and self balancing system are based on the ideas of game theory, and
which for me paint an over simplified picture of the subject that fits this model.

It may be that much of what we do is, unbeknownst to us, is an act of self-interest

but these narratives must not define us. This is the attempt here anyway in the trick,
to escape…
The delineations made here between tricks one and trick two attempt to
demonstrate how acts that claim to expose oppression and restriction and point
towards freedom, so easily can be captured as trick two, the outcome of which I call
here the tautological ground, upon which the tautological mechanisms inherent in
the trick are re-concealed, and cancelled out.

FINE LINE AND POST FACT:

In this fine line it becomes clear that in reference to the Gödellian model in which
the tautological statement is categorised as ‘True but Unprovable; in Trick One this
un-provability is exposed as a question for the totality of the system; whereas in
Trick Two the exposure of this un-provability is withheld, or concealed, which then
implies that tautological statements that are incompatible with the internal laws of
truth can be accommodated within these laws and thus creates an area of ‘post-
 6

fact’ within which statements do not have to be provable as true to be true; in which
the truth is not different from the appearance of truth only, or in fact from falsity.
Thus the proposal of a fiction that becomes possible as truth becomes the
flirtation with disaster, as the idea that ‘art is a lie that tells the truth’ relies on its
exposure and acknowledgement as wholly unprovable for it to retain its demand
upon the limits of the system that serves to register what is factually ‘possible’.
For me, once this un-provability is concealed, the limits of a system are also
concealed as it becomes an area, within which the capacity of art to be a ‘lie that
tells the truth’ is used to create a seemingly limitless enclosure in which expands to
accommodate ‘any lie that desires to become the truth’.
This becomes a way to discuss the trick that becomes a definition of a certain kind
of circus that operates as supposedly genuine production of agency, and of images
that imply that this agency is freely available. This is Circusism, and its trick is Trick
Two.
Now I would like to discuss the subject of weightlessness in relation to Trick Two
by pursuing an analogy.

THE ASTRONAUT:

If the road trip turned out to be a journey that did nothing to escape the capture of
gravity, what would a journey outside of gravity actually be like? How is it to
experience an absence of gravity? What is it like to no longer be within the field of
influence responsible for your inherent structure…the density of bone, the muscular
strength, the thickness of tendon or blood pressure; the uprightness is gone, the
compass spins aimlessly, no up, no down.

This is the realm of the astronaut.

The sun will consume this earth in a few billion years, it is inevitable that we will
have to leave. The Anthropocene era may ruin the earth sooner than that, and we
will have to leave. The journey outside of the field that defines us is inevitable if we
are to continue; outside of the discourse of bone, muscle, skin and fluids, which is
gravity, this is where we will have to jump. To jump out of the system that created
us. The discourse is earthly, and we may never find another field that is exactly like
it.

Circus practice is a meditation on this moment when gravity is gone, or different to

its current state, and in this sense it is about leaving the earth. Even jugglers work
with objects at the point where they no longer behave according to the mass they
possess.

So perhaps all this talk of space travel makes this into a science fiction…and in this
sense I have imagined a dystopia…I have posited a society where circus is compulsory. I
have set up a hypnotic practice in order to make you see it…maybe.
 7

This research is part fiction, and this is deliberate…as inevitable as leaving behind the
reference of the earth…it is a science fiction because it leaves behind the facts…they
will just hinder us on our journey…
Perhaps this is petulance, in that I am responding to a post-fact world. I am reacting
to the lies of my father by telling more lies, perhaps…but I am telling lies and the
difference is I am admitting that they are not true. My spaceship is a lie, it is a game
that is real, a hypnosis that is awake…
If I copy capital it is only because it copied me first in order to become that which
copies itself through me.
It could be one of those sci-fi horrors in which a virus from outer space infects a small
town.
So if this is a science fiction, what kind of story will it be? So what first appears to be a
‘Quest’, forms a loop and becomes a ‘Voyage and Return’ in the sense that although
we might escape the pull of Gravity, Language or even Capital, we still cannot get free
from the autonomy of Value that comprises these fields.

In fact I intend to travel in this spacesuit of lies to the most extreme iteration of gravity,
to a black hole…if we go there all the usual laws that apply fall apart, so that at the
point where law speaks loudest it speaks nonsense, and fiction becomes possible as the
truth…perhaps I could take off the suit and still survive?

SPACE SUIT ANALOGY:

My space suit is made of a Deleuzian fabric, the lining is folded double, with a
Marxist air-pump, the remote controls are by Derrida Inc, and I am running/ruining
Lacanian software on the internal [Link] processor; I should be able to access all
areas. But I can find no qualitative registering of the actual nature of deep space in
any of these instruments and I continue to drift in my aqualung, flailing at the black
curtains with a gloved hand.

The reason for stressing this idea of being able to wear Lacan’s shoes to survive in a
Marxist vacuum, or in fact to put on a Marxist hat to travel as a Lacanian through a
Saussurean city, is that it is only through an establishment of this methodology that
I am able to translate what I find in the practice of the circus trick into these other
fields.
This research is predicated on actual physical practices being applicable in
situations other than the mediums of conveyance that define them. As with
speaking in a vacuum, the voice can no longer rely on words designed for
atmosphere.
What is interesting here is that the space suit becomes an analogy for analogy itself,
which means the glove is within another glove already. But this is exactly the
problem that I am trying to elucidate.

TWISTED SURFACE:

If a surface upon which you move has a twist in it that is invisible to you, as you are
engaged in its traversal, then the experience of such a twisted surface may be the
experience that you yourself are twisted.
 8

You could become convinced that the circle in which you move is in fact your own
internal knot, which could cost you a fortune in therapy to undo.

It might be possible to think of trick two as something which could be installed, as a

general overarching concealment of the incompatibility of registers, that forms a
surface upon which the trick making subject is encouraged or coerced into repeating
only this second iteration of the trick that further conceals the limits of the system
in question, and so makes the system appear as exactly the kind of limitless space in
which such tricks could occur.

That is, the loop here is concealed. In this trick rather the un-acknowledgement of
the ‘unprovable truth’ of a statement of agency is not able to become a critique of
the system, it becomes the self-critique of the subject who is unable to achieve the
merit of agency in a supposedly meritocratic field, thus returning the subject to the
lack they think they own, only to repeat the statement of agency that returns as
lack.

CIRCUSISM:

It is this phenomenon that I attempt to analyse here as a satirical fiction: that of

CIRCUSISM, a society in which everyone is forced to perform tricks to demonstrate
their freedom and individuality. The ground is twisted and everyone that sees it as a
flat-out opportunity is knotted deep inside.

As regards activating this fiction as a satire, this text is a fictionalised account of

research into that which actually happened…or perhaps I believe that it never
happened at all, because I lived through it. Either way the point is that I feel fiction
and fact are related here in a reciprocal loop, where what is said fictionally cannot be
registered as fact and what is actually happening can only be stated clearly as
fiction.

Perhaps this is just the petulance of a son to his liar of a father…

So I will proceed here to look at what I call Trick Two, not only through the lens of
Circusism, a fiction, but through other more ‘real’ events and structures in which the
ground itself seems to be ‘tricky’ and how this ground organises the subject to
repeat its conditions through the performance of ‘tricks’ that operate concealment
for the purposes of self-interest. Little Trick Two’s that petulantly repeat the
untruths of a larger Trick Two perhaps.
What will be analysed here are the rationales for the overall installation of such
self-interested behaviour as the mandatory trick to be performed, as well as an
acknowledgement of its inevitability in a system of capital that inherits impasses
from language as modes of reproduction.
 9

In short, ideas here of encouraging the performance of freedom in order to expand

the capacity for an enclosed system may be deliberate or inherent; the effect is the
same.

This to me operates in much in the same way that a word ‘closes down’ the
possibility for itself to realise what is meant in the moment it is uttered under the
concealment of the fact that the primary rationale of language is not inter-
subjective communication but the maintenance of the order of horizontal
differential value.

It is with an awareness of the highly regarded talents of the trick-making circus

artist that I note that such encouragements of flexibility and mobility are seemingly
organised around the subject’s needs, but are often in place to add flexibility and
mobility to the otherwise rigid and static base register around which the validation
of capital is organised.
In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher points out, with reference to Zizek, how
‘smart’ corporate practices organise around the image of agency. Here he notices
how socialist ideas are re-located in time as conservative proposals:

“…the so called ‘liberal communists’ such as George Soros and Bill Gates who combine
rapacious pursuit of profit with the rhetoric of ecological concern and social
responsibility. Alongside their social concern, liberal communists believe that work
practices should be (post) modernised, in line with the concept of ‘being smart’. As
Zizek explains,

‘Being smart means being dynamic and nomadic, and against centralized bureaucracy;
believing in dialogue and co-operation against central authority; in flexibility against
routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial production; in spontaneous
interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed hierarchy.’”

(Fisher,M. (2009) Capitalist Realism. Zero Books. UK)

These ‘smart’ tenets increasingly resemble a set of ideologies that are assumed to
be an appropriate accompaniment to techniques that seek to produce moments of
individual freedom within a field organised around the inevitable reduction to
difference of all values, no matter their origin.
They are tenets that imply incorrectly that the field is capable of registering
qualitative proposals on merit, whereas the instances of flexibility, dynamism and
nomadism proposed here are actually organised to facilitate the rigidity of profit
and loss in the register of exchange rather than the addressing of the need of the
subject for agency and expression. The reward for these attributes happens
elsewhere.
The circus analogue to this implication for me is that gravity is a field well disposed
to accommodate the expression of the circus artist.

Fisher continues:
 10

“…liberal communists, who maintain that the amoral excesses of capitalism must be
offset by charity, give a sense of the way in which capitalist realism circumscribes
the current political possibilities.”

(Fisher, 2009)

Other futures are foreclosed by all possibilities being possible to perform within the
current field.
What possibility is circumscribed here is that as Capitalism is the most suitable
iteration of the tautology in which it is proposed as a ‘housing’ for freedom, then the
accompanying ideology follows that Gravity is the most suitable ‘housing’ for
Weightlessness.

It is my contention that this tautology is concealed in the ground of these

assumptions about the subject embedded within a reciprocal productive
relationship with a field of autonomous difference.

In terms of a Gödellian model, the subject operates not the execution of tautology
to expose how truth is unprovable, but performs any proposition as an equivalent to
proof.
What is concealed here is the concealment of the un-provability of truth; all
‘truths’ here are seemingly validated as possible to exist realistically side by side;
contradiction is banished as a bureaucracy from which you are now free, which
masks the actual potentiality of becoming free of a system that cannot handle or
effectively process tautology and so is exposed as an unsuitable and limited area
that is too small and rigid to register qualitative proposals such as the possibility of
‘freedom’ within it.

At the risk of sounding petulant again this is the preservation of an essentially ludic
system for its on sake, because it already benefits those who are currently winning
the game.
What is ‘pushing’ here? Only a practice that is the daily negotiation of
insurmountable force that I try here to transpose.
What is implied is that any failure to realise a fiction as a fact within the field of
capital, or any discrepancy or disparity between desire and lack is within the subject,
not in the ground. Thus the practice of circus can make you feel defeated only if you
think that your weightlessness is real and it is not fair that you cannot achieve it.
Tricks here fail to produce freedom; because concealed is the fact that this failure
is built into the topology.

Trick One here is compromised and invalidated by a counter trick that comprises
the ideological ground within which it is embedded, and for me in thinking of Late
Circusism as a description of a Circus that is embedded in and complicit with Late
Capitalism, it is important to draw parallels with how the exposure of the
exploitation of labour has been once again subsumed by the shifting of the twist in
 11

the field to a twist in the subject. In labouring to be an individual you labour to

expand the enclosed area in which individualism is measured subject-lessly.
The point here is that if the trick fails to function as it did, embedded as it is within
a tricky ground, then a ‘new’ trick has to be ‘pronounced’:

As Fisher notes:

“In any case, resistance to the ‘new’ is not a cause that the Left can or should rally
around. Capital thought very hard about how to break labor; yet there has still not
been enough thought about what tactics will work against capital in conditions of
Post-Fordism, and what new language can be innovated to deal with those
conditions.”

(Fisher, 2009)

The trick is floundering, as it now only demonstrates the inclusivity and liberalism of
gravity, concealing its glacial indifference to any subject at any time. The trick here
extends not the possibility to imagine ‘freedom’ but the appearance of gravity as a
suitable ‘housing’ in which any exercise of an imagined agency is equal to the real
thing.

In order to extend the ground in which the only moves are those organised around
self-interest, it is vital to propose such a ludic system as being for the benefit of
everybody and it is vital to disable other rationales for behaviour that fall outside of
the notion that selfishness is a form of altruism.
We will return to the astronaut in a moment (check this) but first I want to talk
about tautology as an overarching ideology and also its alignment with other similar
contradictions that falsely posit post-ideology as not an ideology: these structures
are examined here as a twisted surface, and in later chapters examined as an over-
arching condition in which the twist is concealed and experienced by the subject as
an internal engine that repeats the demands of the field.

DIAGRAM OF THE TAUTOLOGICAL GROUND:

Let us imagine that the alphabet is written on a strip of paper in black ink. On the
reverse side the letters are similarly written in red ink, so that on the opposite side
to the black A there is a red A, but inverted. In this fashion the red letters are
repeated, upside down on the opposite face to their black counterparts.
This strip is then made into a loop, but with one twist, so that it forms a Mobius
Strip; this is done to give the alphabetical field the feeling of a totality.
If we read along this strip, which now technically has only one surface and one
edge, we can see that the two opposing alphabets that are actually on opposite
 12

sides now read concurrently as one continuous surface, perhaps like an ideology
that claims to be a continuum of post-ideology.
The two alphabets are now arranged so that the black alphabet reads A to Z; and
the red A of the opposing alphabet immediately follows this black Z. In this way
two opposing and counter-inverted alphabets are made to read concurrently, all the
same way up.
Both sides of the strip are now one continuous surface, as is the case with a Mobius
Strip; this means that you can travel along an edge also that is one long looped edge
with no end. In this way when travelling from a position above a letter in the black
alphabet and entering the red alphabet, you will discover that you are now on the
edge that is below the letters of that red alphabet. This is not so important to
recognize fir now, but I mention it here as it will become relevant elsewhere in this
text.

What effect does this have?

Only this: in the Diagram of Trick Two this twist in the surface is what is concealed,
so as to make the word seem possible to be entered in its current order using the
available alphabets and present no contradiction to the alphabetical order imposed
by the field.
The word can simply be entered in the correct order simply scanning from left to
right along the strip from the previous letter until the next appropriate matching
letter is reached. What is inferred here is that the field appears to invite the word
into itself, concealing its incongruity to the internal order, implying that the word
can exist in its current state, retaining its current meaning. Thus the alphabet
conceals its indifferent and purely horizontal differential nature, and it conceals its
tautological topology.

E S U
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

B C J T
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Above, the word ‘SUBJECT’ is entered one letter at a time into the two concurrent
alphabets that we will imagine here are in a Mobius loop that makes travel between
them available. The rule is that you just keep moving right until to reach the letter
you need, this enforced movement to the right is what gives the impression you are
simply entering the letters in the correct order as they are in the word and that the
alphabetical field accommodates this, but as you are moving through an enforced
direction in a twisted surface we can see that entry into this autonomous field
means that ‘SUBJECT’ is now ‘ESUBCJT’ But all the letters as designated by the
arrows are in the ‘right’ place, so any disordering of the ‘SUBJECT’ must be
something wrong with the ‘SUBJECT’.
‘ESUBCJT’ is just an object of the alphabet that conceals its subject-less topology.
 13

As stated this gives the impression that entering the word in its non-alphabetical
order presents no contradiction to the alphabetical field, the ‘weightlessness’ of the
word in the field, its re-arrangement of letters out of the set order, is not a problem
and can be validated as perfectly congruent with the alphabet, which seems to allow
this to occur.

I am aware that this works equally well with a loop of one alphabet with no twist
but the point here is to highlight the enclosure of the field as a seemingly endless
three dimensional surface, which we perceive as flat. The point here is that the word
is not equipped to surmise that there is an opposite side or alternative area.
This promise of register, but resulting destruction of the fiction of the word in
suspension above the field, is not wholly because the twist in the ground is not
revealed, it is also to do with the enforced direction that implies ‘flatness’ and in
which insistence a two dimensional approach is taken to an unseen looped surface
in three dimensions. The tautological ground is concealed.
The deception is that the ‘three-dimemsionality’ of the Mobius construction in
space is simply not recognizable by the word as it traverses across the two
dimensional surface that is proper to it, and which it assumes is the obvious setting
for an alphabet.
In ‘three-dimensionalising’ the alphabet and its opposite side, an invisible twisted
loop is created that is imperceptible to the word as it spells itself out in the
seemingly flat, two-dimensional alphabetical field. The alphabet is presented to the
word as a two-dimensional strip of two consecutive alphabets, the arrangement of
which provides even more possibility and flexibility to the entry of letters.

Here we can see that because the Möbius strip is not referenced; the alphabet is
presented as a two-dimensional strip of two consecutive alphabets the arrangement
of which provides even more possibility and flexibility to the entry of letters.

In this way any word can become true as an expression of a ‘new’ individual
alphabet and which seemingly sets up no contradictory conditions within the field
itself which forms the perfect ‘housing’ for such agency in spelling.
The alphabet is indifferent to the trans-individual need for effective and affective
communication to remain the primary directive of words and letters. What we can
also see is that the indifference of the seemingly accommodating register simply
tears apart and randomly inverts the word that is entered here under the guise of its
compatibility, and is rendered as possible in the alphabetical field but only as
something stripped of its possibility to communicate an un-registerable excess of
meaning. This excess is disavowed by the offer of its realization as ‘fact’.

The simple fact is that the un-orientable, looped surface allows this word to be
entered in this seemingly hermetically intact order, but if we look at the result we
can see that the word is actually rendered meaningless as the order of its letters,
when entered in order onto a looped and tautological surface that is characterized
by not being able to discern between red and black, between the fiction of the word
and its ‘factualisation’, is torn apart just as it would be anyway. This is therefore a
post-fact surface in which the un-registerable, ‘un-provable’ fiction of the word loses
 14

its communicability and inter-subjectivity as it is made ‘true’ in the register

indifferent to it.
The difference with this concealed surface is it appears that validation can occur
without a contradiction between the order of letters in the word and order of letters
in the alphabetical field; the letters are disordered by their entry in correct order onto
a surface that does not admit that it is looped.
Therefore the fact that the word is rendered meaningless becomes the internal
problem of the word itself, which finds that it is no longer organized as it should be
but is still seemingly entered into the ground in the correct order. The word has
internalized the tautological ground, because the ground conceals that it is looped;
implying that the word is lacking whilst the field is total and meritocratic.

This is the Diagram of Trick Two, the trick to conceal

In broader terms then the idea here is that a fundamental condition is not disclosed.
Whether this is deliberate or inherent it occurs whenever something that
appropriates elements from a differential field in order to construct itself ends up
forming a statement that defines reciprocally the qualities of difference that are
ordered within that field.

The reciprocal loop that occurs when meta-statements are treated as infra-
statements is re-presented as not an incongruity but an opportunity.
The tautology that occurs (or is possible to construct as a trick) is concealed and
the ground is presented as a congruent cohesive and limitless surface of opportunity
for the subject; it seems to be for the subject.
In regards to the diagram what is falsely presented is an alphabet, the letter order
of which does not represent a clash with the letter order of words; so that what is
concealed is the incongruity of these two reciprocal but incompatible systems of
ordering letters. One of which produces qualitative statements about a letters
quality of difference the other being an order of quantitative statements of
difference.

In masking the incompatibility between these two different registers, words are
entered into the alphabetical field as if it is a simple, linear but endless register into
which letters can be entered in the same order that they exist in the word and still
be in the same order in which they appear alphabetically.
That is, what is falsely presented here is that there is no disparity between desire
and its realization.

Rather two exposures are perhaps forestalled here in this tautological ground that
relate to bottomless psychosis as well as to a realisation of linguistic impasse.
The impossibility of registering the qualitative value of the letter in the word
within the quantitative register of the alphabet is discussed as both the endless
positional deferral of deconstruction as well as the end point, or impasse, of
signification. The two seemingly opposing positions between deconstruction and
structuralism are here noted to be the same impasse, with psychotic excess being
seen as an expression equivalent to a full stop of linguistic logic.
 15

In circus terms, the word is a trick that thinks its fictional meta-positionality can still
be maintained in the factual register of gravity. It refers to the trick-making subject
that conflates their weightlessness in the field within genuine agency.

A DIAGRAM OF CAPITAL:

Let us push this idea a little. If capital is limitless growth from finite resources, the
value has to be gotten somewhere. This surplus has to be tricked out of you in order
for it to be used to reproduce capital…because it needs an infinite source to achieve
infinite growth…the above conflation is this infinite source.
If the conflation can be concealed, your surplus, which the alphabet of exchange
implies is perfectly verifiable within its field, serves to expand the market.

If the alphabet is the finite resource here and the endless production of words is the
infinite growth, then it becomes clear that this conflation of registers, by placing the
word in the alphabetical field, has to retain its seeming acknowledgement of the
qualitative capacity of the terms upon which the quantitative value of those letters
are determined in order that they be scrambled to inhuman meaninglessness within
the autonomy. Thus capital is happy to expose the capacity of the subject and an
individual spelling that makes the market hum, but the resulting tune is
indecipherable.
All this only conceals the inherent tautology anyway in which the subject’s agency
determines the values in the restrictive field through which the subject’s agency is
compromised.

In contrast Trick One here takes this origin of value in the word and its subsequent
barring from the field in anything but its fictional state, as the rationale for its
acknowledgement as fiction. But it also sees its potential as a demand that exposes
the current alphabet as an inadequate or limited register of words. As opposed to
Trick Two, which implies that the differential quality is intrinsic to the letters
themselves, and that this clear and fair equivalent economy of meaning is available
for subjects to use if they are up to the challenge.

This image of meritocracy derives from concealing the incompatibility of quality

and quantity…and not retaining the ‘unprovability’ of the qualitative within the
register of quantity as the truth of its quality.

The definition of quality is its impossibility (as a meta-statement within an infra

lower order register), therefore I am viewing the qualitative as fictionally meta-
positional within a quantitative field, and that TRICK ONE has to acknowledge this
otherwise it risks being complicit the tautological ground of Trick Two.
 16

In the same way that a moment of weightlessness is a statement about the weight
of a body that is the subject of that statement. The subject makes a statement
through something of which they can only be the object.

THE GLOVED HAND:

So this diagram is just an analogy and here I will briefly speak as regards satire and
analogical diagrams: and how they relate to the real world examples here….
As regards building links between different unrelated fields; I have already discussed
the idea of thinking in a cross register manner as it relates to the image of the space
suit; in which an untouchable or uninhabitable area can be understood by entering it
wearing the space suit that you constructed in a more habitable zone according to
the parameters available to you in that zone; this is of course an analogy for analogy
itself and highlight the inadequacies of any system of signification.
I make a suit based around the lung to go somewhere airless; I voice here my travel
to the voiceless vacuum of space. The space suit is fiction, as it only ‘tells’ of being in
space, it simply does not allow you to touch it at all.
It is this gloved hand that appears to touch the moments of weightlessness in
circus.

I posit a fictional world to point to this one; I posit operations in one set of
structures as analogous to those in another. In this regard analogy forms a
complimentary tool to satire and both are organised around saying something in
one location that seeks to resonate elsewhere.

With satire I speak over there about here, in analogy I speak here about over there,
this is perhaps the difference between a science fiction in which aliens visit earth
and one where an astronaut visits outer space.
As we move forward in this chapter I will be outlining a collection of ‘real’ examples
of a tautological ground that have informed this fiction of Circusism.

GRAVITY, LANGUAGE, CAPITAL:

I will refer to the writing of Franco Berardi and his notion of semio-capital, Samo
Tomsic for his homological links between Marx and Lacan, Isaiah Berlin for his ideas
on ‘positive and negative, and the Documentary critique of Adam Curtis, specifically
his tracing of familial links between the inventor of ‘public relations’ in advertising
and the founders of psychoanalysis, as well as historical references to how Game
Theory pervades notions of social management.
It will be discussed how this ludic model further renders the subject as embedded
within a hidden and insoluble tautology in which the only available register through
which to validate ‘needs’ that accompany ‘uses’ is one predicated on the primacy of
‘exchanges’, which invalidates those ‘needs’, but the ‘game’ of which encourages
more ferocious ‘play’.
This is presented as an inescapable enclosure.
 17

The problem here is that it is, in the words of the Zero Books podcaster Douglas
Slaine:

“It is a room with no escape, that we have built, but which appears to be the
natural world.”

([Link]

The man-made double-bind, ‘be free,’ is naturalised and so to feel trapped

becomes an internalised ‘unnaturalness’ that you alone must address, while the
impossibility of wholeness is concealed from you. Psychoanalysis obviously has a
role to play here as both complicit within this bind but also as a revelation of its real
relations and this will feature here too.
This idea of a self-contained perspective that can be achieved only by not
recognising the room as inescapable, or the ground as twisted, will feature in later
chapters. The implication is that a hermetic Cartesian subject that rationalises from
an external perspective can only exist on a tautological topology that is invisible to
that subject.

These ideas form some of these links between language, capital and gravity, but
extrapolating from these ideas in later chapters I will also attempt a clear structural
relation that will enable me to speak about circus and its ability to translate the trick
in ways that do not simply repeat the internal double binds of the ground upon
which they now find themselves iterated.

Whilst the goal here is to define Trick Two as an installation of a concealed twist in
the landscape within which circus is now embedded, it is still also the goal to
elucidate a viable model of ‘circus thinking’.
The surface can of course be also thought of in less conspiratorial tone as a surface
with an inherent twist, that is just not apparent to the observer, as the act of
observation is what installs that twist; as in Slaine’s observation.
This is the reason for reference to this crude alphabetical diagram as it represents
hopefully the beginnings of a clear delineation between the three different tricks
that I propose here as tools for reconfiguring conflated values that might pass for a
kind of ‘circus thinking’.
This ground with its inherent version of Trick Two that we often cannot ‘see’ is the
reason that Trick One fails to render the agency it ‘stands for’.
It is important for such a circus thinking, I feel, to then acknowledge what I call the
‘fine line’ between Trick One and Trick Two.
Exposure and concealment circle each other here as the gaze installs the cage out
of which we are trying to see. This is what they call an impasse and as a circus artist I
am interested in what other kind of trick is needed here.
As we move from logical models and psychotic templates into the actual instances
of tautology that seem to pervade the current iteration of capital as a field that
activates a linguistic potency, we will examine how the trick to conceal (by which I
reference deliberate deception as well as inherent myopia) operates upon
 18

incompatibilities in registers of value to make such a system one of promises and

rip-offs; in which the trick of the ‘unfulfilled pledge’, and the trick of the ‘blatant
scam’ are daily occurrences.
This is to deepen an understanding of ‘circus’ or ‘trick thinking’ as being that which
can imagine an exit but also that which can perpetuate the inescapable field. It is to
structural similarity I will refer not merely to semantic links between tricks and
deception.

This is only a prototype if you will, that whilst therefore only held together with tape
and string and a few words, it will hopefully serve to locate the potentiality and the
pitfalls of offering the trick as a way of ‘doing‘ this thinking in highlighting its
mechanism as involved in the tawdry installation of an endless enclosure, as well in
the spectacular.

WHAT IS CIRCUS THINKING? IS IT TAUTOLOGY?

So what could we call this ‘circus thinking’? I have mentioned this already but I will
give it a name here if only to suggest that we need to address the fact that ‘circus
thinking’ does not seem to exist. No offence, it just does not seem to have a name.
Where Theatre has Performativity, and Dance has Choreography, which are ways
for those practices to locate themselves as discourses with wider implications in
many fields, I am tentatively suggesting that Circus has Tautology.
The tautology may be that it is thought that circus thought is what destroys the
circus. This may yet prove to be true, but in attempting this transposition I have to
make proposals.
I propose here in this text that Circus has Tautology, drawn from how I delineate
the mechanism of the trick. In its three separate forms, for me it is this loop that
they share. The tautology is perhaps because I say it is.
But the problem examined here is one in which many of the power structures and
flows that exist, against which circus claims to range itself, have fully absorbed this
idea of tautology so as to create paradoxical systems of ‘open enclosure’ formed
from the double bind of enforced freedom, or seemingly endless choice that
masquerades as freedom.
Just as Performativity can describe, either the possible multiplicity of shifting
personas reacting contextually, or a world of faceless illusion and an accompanying
set of demands to ‘appear’

(I am thinking here of John Mackenzie’s book (2001) Perform or Else. Routledge.

London)

and Choreography can enable discussions of agency and self authorship as well as
delineate installed forms of ideological deportment or rigidity of access.

(Hewitt, A. (2005) Social Choreography, Ideology as Performance in Dance and

Everyday Movement. Duke University Press. Durham, USA)
 19

And so tautology is here posited as a similarly double-edged sword. Likewise it is a

non-object of the discourse of tautology, in the way that performativity or
choreography are not objects of themselves.
It hovers here as a word-trick in an otherwise unforgiving alphabet.

In regards to thinking of an ‘open enclosure’ I will liken this ground not only to a
Mobius Strip but to a Klein Bottle, within which every avenue of supposed escape
leads you back inside (as well as the interior seeming to be permanently consistent
with a view of the outside), and I will suggest that circus is uniquely posed as being
expertly in possession of the very mechanism that comprises the system of such
enclosure; that is the trick as a form of praxis, predicated on ‘telling’ of a potential
exit or ‘telling’ of the potentiality of this closed system to be an endless vista.

The challenge of circus here is subtle as it can easily ‘speak’ itself to be in agreement
with the very tautology that encloses us as opposed to the one that demands
escape; the difference here is one of acknowledgement of of itself as just the as of
yet unrealised ‘telling’ of escape that avoids its falsification within gravity as the
enactment of genuine freedom.

I will seek to examine how in not acknowledging the fiction of freedom as merely a
fiction, but claiming it to be true, tautological grounds can be constructed in which
freedom becomes impossible: that there is enough post-factism here to write a
book, in which I will overcome it.
This doubling I claim is no less prevalent than performativity and choreography as
physical practices through which we seek to understand the world, and so if there is
a central mode of thought in circus that accompanies and imbricates with its
practice then this, for me, could be tautology.

PROVISO ON MY POSITION:
I want to be clear here that, in the West, as I am, as I was born, I am ‘free’
comparatively, but aware that my free movement is largely at the cost of someone
else’s restriction. I acknowledge that I have not lived ever in a totalitarian state, but
in a subtle but compulsory performativity that I am obviously relating to my practice
within the cultural structures of circus.
This is how I choose to see it; there is almost not enough space in one thousand
dissertations to document the current levels of global misery that daily enhance our
position here in the cradle of capital.
This is the reason also for my insistence on freedom that I take up from this
privileged position in the University, and my insistence that circus must address it,
as it is circus subjects that seem to say over and over again that circus represents
and champions the values of the outsider, the precarious, the itinerant and the
oppressed.
I am grateful to be writing from here but choose to use this moment to ask circus
to examine its complicity in modes of production and representation that challenge
 20

nothing in particular and only seem to serve as expansions of narratives surrounding

an area of unacknowledged indifference and disparity.

While accepting that disparity is inevitable in any system of value, the current levels
of inequality are unacceptable to me, and I feel strongly that the future of circus lies
not in the re-iteration of the cancelled futures offered by capitalist expansion that
are reinforced through images in which ‘anything goes’, but in finding ways to
operate the mode of physical critique that it already performs on its own field of
restriction in awareness of how easily this mode is employed as an expansion of
restriction.

The future of circus for me lies in its continued transposition into other fields, to test
itself and to test those fields and this research represents only one such attempt.

The suggestions here are not prescriptive, but there is an acknowledged

responsibility to the rigour of the argument, to ensure it has no loopholes, or in my
case that there is a loophole, but that it is shown to be an escape from the enforced
activity of escape.

I accept that it is my own artificial construction to reduce the trick to a mechanism

of tautology, but I feel that the affective charge it gives and antagonism it may
cause are worth the accusation of didacticism. I accept also the blunt force trauma
of my analogical method, but a bruise is intended, I feel strongly that circus
misreads itself, and in lieu of there not being many models of thought that attempt
to follow the structural relations of the physical practice I offer this to highlight that
although this may not be the ‘circus thinking ‘ you want or find useful, I feel it is
necessary to undertake some form of thought to operate circus as a practice
imbricated with theory.

So I accept that circus is vastly more complicated that the stripped down
mechanism of tautology I refer to here, but in doing so, in drawing uncomfortable
analogy between the trick and impasses in meaning, and worst practices in capital, I
hope that such an analogy will resonate positively in the community of circus
practitioners…

I consider the construction of such analogies to be clown work no more necessary or

less vital than the negotiation and reconstruction of a bicycle that is falling apart as
it is ridden in a circle.

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River. Part Five.

FIRST THREAT TO HAPPY.

Happy decided the best thing to do was feed the confusion. No one was listening,
no one was reading, no one was watching.
 21

He got up inside where no one knew it was coming; he got in there like the old
judge wears a nappy at weekends; with a sense that he deserved a better nurse
maid, but what the hell, she will do…and they came for the fantasy just like that, in
droves as he un-fetishised their monies right before their eyes.

He proved mathematically night after night that money was worthless and no one
cared, they clapped and actually threw coins on the stage. As if a gesture towards
the shattering of the earth’s axis could be faked. You can’t fake a thing like that and
he winced as the metal discs clattered and pinged around his feet. I have danced in
fire; I have seen the cracked earth that spits out your metal, it is just iron dung,
copper faeces, tin excrement worn by sheriffs and girl scouts for a equal pin prick of
authority.
They showered him with small change. At first he declined to pick them up letting
the ring boys and jossers fight over them (note to self: there are no jossers anymore,
everyone is a ‘professional’) but his agent took him to one side and said it would be
better if he picked them up.
Happy simply refused.

It had been only a week into the tour; the Agent came into Happy’s caravan without
knocking, two mean faced roustabouts occupied the doorframe.

“Look Chief, we all think it’s real hilarious…that ya prove that money ain’t worth
the paper its printed on, it’s a hoot…the crowd they get a kick out of it, sure and we
all love ya ‘authenticity’…”

Happy was steady, eye for eye. “But your money IS worth nothing, it’s the false
name written on the rocks and trees, on the sky…”

The agent screwed his face up as much as its obesity would allow and leaned in a
little closer. Whiskey and undisclosed shame breathed through the words, “yeah,
yeah…drop the act, its one thing to pull off your crossword stunt on the stage, but
just bend down and take the coins, it let’s them know you are just joking…that its all
in fun.
Otherwise they start jerking around at the bar, saying that it’s all for free, and
goosing the cigarette girls. Poor little Maisy came up short again this week…” he
licked his purple lips, “…you don’t want Maisy to get robbed now do you, chief?”

“But I don’t want their money…that is the whole point.” said Happy. He could not
understand what was unclear about his act. As soon as the money was released
from gold and tied to words, you could make it perform a sword-swallowing act, a
dive from a hundred foot scaffold, you could make money hang itself or reproduce
like smallpox.
The money was in the look, the wink, the odour of the cut of a suit, a certain song,
a way of walking. Everyone was banking on the moments.
Happy spoke clearly:
 22

“I don’t want your mist, your steam, your impotent weather that tries to land on a
dime store postcard”

“Hmmm yeah okay…okay…he don’t want the money, boys.” The muscle rolled its
eyes.
He jabbed at Happy’s chest. “ Well I don’t want you to ‘want’ it either, I just want
you to…PICK…IT…UP! Hell, you can just give it away to charity…give it to me…give
it to Maisy!”

He smoothed the feathers on the front of Happy’s cape, “look things are gonna
change around here. New ideas…new opportunities…soon the circus is gonna be
the only game in town. You could be working thirteen shows a week…big
money…the novelty of your act is that you invaluditate the dough, but
then…then…” He had leaned in close and was now straightening the beaded
medallions on Happy’s headdress,

“…all you gotta do, your highness, is bend down and pick up the money they
throw… otherwise it’s way too serious, makes the rubes feel that you don’t
appreciate them… otherwise it’s like a joke with no punchline, see, and round here
we always finish with a punchline.”
One of the heavies cracked his knuckles.

They left, leaving the door of his wagon open, and Happy knew that it was not even
the money that was worthless it was the entire structure of the joke itself. Someone
had misread the rules of comedy. Someone was not a someone anymore; they were
a something that melted into any shape; an un-dead accountant, a wraith that could
be anybody’s darling.
They wanted him to first make a show of exposing language as misleading and
unreal then claim that one of the outcomes of this inherent ambiguity was true.
The joke only made fun of language but then pretended the flaw was elsewhere.
Now what is funny about that, that’s just laughing while the whole shit house blows
up in your face.
The agent was the kind of guy that had grown into his violence, a fat lonely kid
who stole an ice cream and never looked back, who found the nerve to call his
mother’s boy friend by his first name and leaned on everybody since. Happy was
looking at his faded photo.
Happy fingered the fake leather of the Agent’s wallet that he had lifted from his
jacket while he was busy being intimidating; it was stuffed with business cards and
cash.
“Now I know where you live…”
 23

CIRCUS ADDRESS:

A tricky ground is a reference to Circusism, in which the Circus is imagined as a

factory for Freedom-Production; in an area that is infinitely hospitable it is the
spacesuit itself, analogy itself, which suffocates. The space suit is the tautological
ground that no self-interested astronaut will admit to wearing.
You do not need a space suit here because the freedom is endless, no analogy
need be constructed to help you understand how to inhabit someone else’s ideas as
you can just ‘be’ them, you can be whatever you want, analogy is dead in the post
fact zone.
The congruence between the subject in Marx and the Subject in Lacan drawn by
the idea of semio-capital, and the ideas of alienation and barring are perhaps
implicit in the new tautological ground.

In relation to being unaware of the surface upon which you are standing, the fetish
as a form of knowledge that is unknown to the subject also features here as part of
the organisation of your own desire as a repetitive choreography of consumption.

I will refer to the Marxism in Deleuze and Gauttari that recognises how capital
moves into areas that do not belong to it in order to better reproduce and conceal
its inner tautologies.

“Felix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but
both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of
capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his
analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that's constantly overcoming its own
limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its
fundamental limit is capital itself…
…Deleuze and Guattari's assertion that the 'line of flight' is primary in, and functional
to, capitalist assemblages echoes Marx's famous description of capital as a state of
being where 'All that is solid melts into air' and where relations 'become antiquated
before they can ossify' (Marx and Engels 1973: 37)”

(Thoburn, N (2003) Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Routledge. London.)

In terms of what I mean by fetish here I will refer to how a process is interrupted
and ‘machined’ into a loop. In the tautological ground described here, something
affective flows only as a pretext for its collapse into a register that cannot support it;
for an ulterior motive. The subject works such a trick for gain, but it is the continued
possibility to halt such processes that is expanded. In the way that fetish imbues a
seemingly intrinsic value to commodity, this for me is a description of a process
halted. In the end of Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Gauttari talk about how

“…the new earth… is not to be found in the neurotic of perverse reterritorialisations

that arrest the process or assign it goals… it coincides with the completion of the
process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it
proceeds, and as long as it proceeds.”
 24

(Deleuze, G and Gauttari, F (1984) Anti-Oedipus. Athlone. London)

The point here is that fetish is just such an arresting of the flow, but it is that which
through capital expands; implying that this never-ending process can be just as well
reduced to a cost (that is, it has assigned a goal to an essentially affective process to
expand itself.) The other important point here is that I will propose that this
‘arrested’ desiring-production, which is no longer itself as it has been halted in
fetish, has been schematised in this way to appear to be a flow, but which is given a
task, to reproduce capital; the ghost has been allowed but only if it is filled in with
flesh.
The fetish here is that you do not know that this tautology of a filled in ghost is
there, it has been concealed, and the ground seems like it can accommodate your
every desire. It is a fetish because it is perhaps the ghost of Marx that has been filled
in.

But I do not wish however to talk of symptoms in reference to psychoanalysis but of

behaviours that repeat precisely because they are made to appear as symptoms
that are treatable with capitalism; in fact it is the pricelessness of symptoms that
end up in the market.
The spectacular nature of the dominant mode of production within Guy DuBord’s
theory is relevant here as a precursor to the linguistic potency activated in a capital
that flows through that which it cannot touch and floods the subject with arrested,
fetishized, commodified images that it can.

"All that once was directly lived has become mere representation."

"The decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing."

"Passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity".

"The spectacle is not a collection of images… rather, it is a social relation among

people, mediated by images."

(DuBord, G (1984) The Society of the Spectacle. Black and Red. Detroit)

Another reference that implies the inescapability of this pervasive

dematerialisation of the commodity into signification that operates at the level of
subjectivity, is the implication that if restriction is apparently removed, as in the
procedure I am proposing here to render a kind of post-fact wonderland, then how
is it possible to organise collectively against the fulfilment of your individual wishes
to which the processes of production and consumption are constantly attentive:

“One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied
to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces
of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new
 25

forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough
outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many
young people strangely boast of being ‘motivated’; they request apprenticeships
and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they are being made to
serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the
disciplines.”

(Deleuze, G (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, Vol. 59. MIT
Press. Cambridge, USA)

I feel it is important to first look at how the three different areas of Gravity,
Language and Capital ‘talk to’, ‘trade with’ and ‘trick’ each other:

I will refer to the definitions of ‘semio-capital’ from Berardi’s book, the Uprising, and
to parallels between Lacan and Marx highlighted in the ‘Capitalist Unconscious’ by
Samo Tomsic as indicative of a turn in the potency of capital.
It is through these links that I see correlations between the physical trick
performed in circus as a fiction of weightlessness, the trick in language as an
unrealisable meta-position, whether it is the headlong and endless deferral of
psychosis (or more deliberate deconstruction) or the infinite loop of reciprocally
dependant and self negating logical statements, and the activation of similar
mechanisms of tautology in the operation of capitalism, but which are positively
organised around the concealment of that contradiction. It might be stated that
Capital has worked hard to cover up the contradictions that Marx exposed, and this
thinking features here too as I move towards a harder edged satire in which it is
imagined how not only what Marx but Lacan exposed as irreconcilable knots within
capital and language respectively, are the operating principle of a dematerialised
capital mobile across information networks as a kind of super-positional Morse
code, in which a dot can be equally a dash or a gap in the message.

“In Morse Code every symbol, dot or dash, has to be separated by a gap equivalent
to one dot in length. Every letter is separated by a gap three dots in length; every
word by a gap of seven dots. So, when you add it all up any message you receive in
Morse Code is mostly silence.”

(Priest, J. (2013) Knot Circus Performance at Doch. Stockholm.)

LITTLE TRICKS:

For me it is not possible to separate the trick within language and the semiotic
nature of deregulated currency through which we are confronted on a daily basis
with the little ‘tricks’ of capital; the minutiae of being ripped-off in a multitude of
micro-transactions seems to have become part of the fabric of thinking, we expect
to be tricked even as we expect the presence of gravity. That a portion of surplus
will slough off every conceivable interaction with another player; that no matter the
good nature of the transaction there will be not only an excess, an affect, but there
will be a profit rendered out of thin air as sure as crumbs fall from the breaking of
 26

bread, and that in fact the focus within semio-capitalism is the subsumption of
affect to the reproduction of itself.

Everywhere value is inflated and intrinsically imbued according to a trick iterated

through some form of semiotic manipulation, as DuBord outlined, and it is for these
reasons that I locate the construction of hidden tautology, and the translation of the
trick into language as a deception within the operating principles of capital.
What happens when the Circus also constructs the tautology of its practice as a
concealment?

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Six.

‘There should be a time-travel that can undo this infernal ticking’

or

“If the world was real, poetry would not exist.”

Scene: Happy Down-River, The ‘Seven Stars’ Public House, Bristol 1844.

“No one is around a black candle.” Happy Down-River had no idea where that
came from.

Happy had been on a long tour of the Unhappy Kingdom. He was on the run.
Shows performed had often been attended by the same shadowy figures. Agents
of some kind observing his act from the cool distance of control.
He felt that his wagon had been searched on several occasions, things in
exactly the same place as where he left them and then some. Close friends and
work colleagues made off-colour remarks. Nothing strange or startling, just
intimation.

“So how will you be changing your memory act when Circusism becomes law?”
They would ask. “I mean once it becomes compulsory for everyone to perform
tricks we will no longer be on the edges of society, Happy. We will be
‘society’.”

“I won’t be changing the act.”

“Yes but as you are performing a circus act that ‘rattles the cage of money,
that bates the Bear of Capital…Ladies and Germs blah blah blah’”, this was how
 27

he was introduced, all bark and bluster, but he could feel that the idea of such
an act was making the management uncomfortable.

His colleague, a tuppenny acrobat, continued, “…don’t you think that’s now in
poor taste considering that the powers that be have now made our profession
the very model of good citizenship…you should avoid confrontation with the
management…the world is changing…new order…progress…roll up roll up…smell
the coffee…time to put away childish things…and now for your
entertainment…the latest…please welcome onto the stage…the man
who…incredible…unbelievable…in seven continents…the future…history in the
making…mind-boggling…astounding…with the greatest of ease…no place for
petty politics…exotic…wild man…the new and improved…never-before-
seen…unheard of…authentic…brand new…shocking…don’t rock the boat…once in
a lifetime…all the way from the ‘over there’…don’t bite the hand…simply
amazing…toe the line…will now walk the plank…blah blah blah…”

Happy just kept walking, straight past his wagon, past the makeshift fence that
surrounded the tent and off into the world…returning to the abandonment of
circus.

The acrobat, in a compliant stretch, called out to him, “Hey Chief, where are
you going, you are on in ten minutes!”

Where were they this week? The mud of the Port town radiated the River Avon
into every side street.
Finding himself in a public house full of strange looks, he had drunkenly
enquired if there were lodgings for the night.

Nine large glasses of rum later, Happy was striking imaginary poses in his hastily
rented room above the bar, he had painted his body with white letters and now
tried to adopt fluid poses that spelled out certain magic words. He could move
into a sigil of intent, spelling with his body.
Elbow was G, his ankle U, his hip was I, arsehole an O, his pubic bone was of
course a P. Thrusting… “POP POP POP!”

He remembered how he was beaten at the mission by his English Teacher,

“This is my backwards-talking body saying SCREW YOU, Mr Davenport” He stuck
his arse out of the window, posing in the frame like a cross between a
misshapen crow and a crucifixion.

“I am the new dictionary. You won’t find me listed here”

This town was founded on the slave trade he thought petulantly, climbing
down. Drunkenly contorting himself to gesture the word ‘slave’ he tripped
backwards over the chamber pot and bumped his head on the dresser. Sharp
reek of amber piss in the Paisley rug. Time to go!

It was time to leave time. There was no time left before he had to make the
jump to light-speed. He eased forward on the ritual, the cigar smoke, the
chicken blood (get over it), the deck of cards, the purple thread wound around
a black candle…words were not the only things that could be rearranged…
things in exactly the same place as where he left them and then some…these
were the controls.
 28

Untraceable to a certain tobacco plantation, a certain farmyard,

haberdashery or candle-maker, these were now unconnected things, things that
magickally referred to light-speed. Sticks and mud and rope. This was language
‘proper’, not that muck they speak in the drawing room:

Gone, “Oh sip dolorous at my cup, you angels of thirst, for no one is lipped
around the liquid utterance of speed alone, there is a taste of slowness here.
For in being one who rushes up to love, I am becoming a duet of precipitated
solitude.”

[Gaskill, (1708) ‘On Inattentive Love’]

Gone. Velocity folds in an origami of pain, there just at the edge of his skin,
crisping like fatty bacon in an oven of acceleration, he was quoting through
bared teeth…

“…Drink up and become as the vessel that the liquid left behind, fulfilled in
emptiness.”

[Hussein, (1614) ‘I will be with Thee In Nothing’]

Gone…but there NOW, the ritual had worked in the two of hearts and the
nine of spades; the travel was complete. Farmyard wound around a black
liquid. Plantations of thirst were now unconnected things, eased forward on the
light-speed. Misshapen to leave time, a sharp reek of backwards-talking. The
word ‘slave’ he tripped over the chamber. Posing in the untraceable. Were the
controls emptiness?

“No one is around a black candle”.

THE BLAND LEADING THE BLAND:

Fiction has already been highlighted as the excess or affect of weightlessness and
the trick as defined here points outside from within a restrictive field at the
potentiality of this excess, which remains unregisterable in a horizontally organised
autonomy, which nevertheless relies on it for statements within the field to be made
at all.
The field cannot be ‘seen’ at all without statements made ‘about’ the field, but the
field cannot ‘see’ those statements.

The quality of this ‘pointing’ or ‘telling’ has been designated as the construction of a
fiction, precisely because the field of autonomy is insurmountable in which there is
no such thing as a meta-position, and fiction is no such thing.
 29

If it is the case that there is no such thing as a meta-language; that is an utterance

or written construction that can remain un-captured by, or delimit the autonomy of
horizontal difference, then I have assigned the existence of any such
communicability that arises from the nonsensical, from the self-referential, from the
excess of tautology, from contradictions, from quantum statements, from paradox,
from non-topical associations as fiction.
This definition is not necessarily reliant on the communication being a non-fact,
but rather ‘something that retains something’ by not entering the binary market in
which it is designated as either true or false. Fiction here is something
acknowledged to retain its quality by not being reduced to inevitable register of Fact
or Non-Fact.

And by ‘fiction’ I mean here such statements that, although they may be inoperable
within the systemic processes from which it is possible to construct them, they are
necessarily perceivable as affective by the subject who then complicates that
system that they necessitate by being able to perceive them. This draws us further
into criticality that asks what is the structure of a system that in order to ensure fact
can occur, then renders the subject to which those facts are presumably useful as
secondary to the inter-factual relations therein .
Fiction is left over from realising that fact has nothing to do with the subject.
Capital utilises these ‘left overs’ however to imply that the coming true of fictions
is organised on the subject’s behalf.

What is inferred here is that while the negative reception of fictionality prevails,
and is seen as something ‘useless’ or as merely desire that has not yet been fulfilled;
that needs to be made real in order to fulfil desire; this negative conception of
fiction as ‘incomplete’ results in the insistence on its transformation into ‘fact’ but
which does not highlight the structural installing of loss as an inevitability in the
incapacity for the insistently proposed scale to register desire: this remains
concealed.

In the tautological ground what is implied by the designation of these moments of

weightlessness as genuine agency, is not the primacy of the subject but the
concealment of the primacy of an autonomous register of value that seems to
validate the weightless impossibility as possible in the same moment that it
fundamentally negates it as an inter-subjective potentiality of communication.
Thinking of a trick as producing freedom conceals the negation of its possibility to
highlight the potential for a freedom outside of gravity, implying falsely that it has
occurred within the field.

In Hofstadter’s terms the subject is able, unlike a formal program, to ‘leap out of
the system’ whilst the system simultaneously denies the possibility of any such
meta-leap.

(Hofstadter, D (2000) Gödel, Escher, Bach. Methuen. London)

 30

This leap is what concerns us, its possibility within its impossibility; of something
like the play-bite in which something that appears the same as an impossibility
encircles the difference to itself. The trick is the fiction of a meta-language, and as
such it is political satire.
In the same way the complexity of the play bite pulls the other into a game space
that is ‘transindividual’, this shared space is a more fertile area in which to
experience the physicality of telling “this is not real freedom”. This activates a
demand upon the totality, within which this freedom is presented as desirable but
unattainable under current conditions, which is a demand that is political in nature.
A need that is agreed inter subjectively is highlighted to be not permitted under
current conditions.
For me there is a truth here that is not complicit in the fetish of capital, in which
games are played in a self-interested way to gain advantage or to exploit
disadvantage. This game playing subject will be examined also in this chapter as
conceived by various neoliberal think tanks in stark contrast to the trans-individual
model that sees ludic engagement as a shared engagement with the indifference of
life, as opposed to an extrapolation of that indifference. In the first the game is
acknowledged in the second it is hidden, with R.D. Laing complicating the rules.
The idea here is of fiction as one mode of shared truth telling, albeit compromised
as being the impossibility of meta-language. In this regard I see it as the same
iteration as the play-bite, a gesture that acknowledges that we must negotiate
indifference together, and that truth has to remain unprovable to be exercised as a
demand on totality.
This is perhaps the structure of a Circus Trick as opposed to a Circusism Trick.

Here I am using the links between Lacan and Marx to build a picture of restrictive
forces within which fictional tricks might occur.

The point here is one of register, or rather that there are two registers; one which
does not recognise the legality of the other.
The congruence between capital and linguistics shows that this state extends to
both fields of value in which

“The appearance of value being intrinsic to commodities is thus a logical consequence

of the autonomy of exchange-value and demonstrates the structural overlapping of
commodity language, the way commodities communicate amongst themselves
through values, and human language, the way signifiers relate to each other behind
human communication.”

(Tomsic, S (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious Verso. London)

Here Tomsic works between two seemingly unrelated fields to make sense of what
occurs homologically between language and capital that makes capital able to
‘speak’, and what works homologically in capital to make language’s first concern to
be nothing to do with intersubjective communication.
The point here is the autonomy; the register through which the supposedly
intrinsic value of a commodity or signifier is determined is one that is devoid of
 31

subject, and therefore incapable of registering the excess from which the
commodity or signifier represents an abstraction.
The conceit here is that the commodity or signifier is effectively capable of
‘carrying’ that excess, that then presents itself to the subject as a fetishized, intrinsic
value or invested, inherent meaning respectively, but which is now inaccessible to
the subject. What is concealed here is the tautology in which a subjective,
qualitative value is proposed as being rationalised through an autonomous, subject-
less register: if we return to our simplified diagram this relates to how meta-
statements ‘about’ quality of difference are tautologically treated as infra-
statements ‘of’ difference.
We have previously continued this homology across the three fields: in order to
say that the tautology also occurs when statements ‘about’ gravity are contained
within it and so treated as statements ‘of’ gravity.

So, just as we might expose the conflation of registers by which a commodity or

signifier is seemingly imbued with a qualitative value that it cannot logically possess
(thus also exposing the operation of an obsessional consumerism and its relation to
a fixated psychotic tumbling through language) so it is also possible to leave such
conflations concealed in order to perpetuate the tautology of the field purely for
self-interest or in a failure to understand how such a tautological ground might
operate upon the subject as a double bind.

Although Tomsic does not specifically refer to the ‘appearance of value being
intrinsic’ as the result of a contradiction, I am inferring here that it is the registering
of a ‘surplus’ or excess produced by the subject that then appears to be registerable
in a purely autonomous and subject-less register, and which ‘appears’ to be an
intrinsic value that situates that commodity or signifier in that autonomous register,
this is that which forms a contradiction. The contradiction renders that which is
produced by the subject in a register that is inaccessible to that subject, this is the
main congruence between Marx and Lacan of course: the tautology that they both
expose is that in in which the commodity/signifier implies both subject and not-
subject simultaneously.

This contradiction is masked, and as such forms a trick to conceal. As discussed in

the last chapter, this is already the potentiality for capital to conceal its internal
limit; and here I would like to open up a way of discussing how I would like to imply
how a Marxist or Lacanian ‘trick’ that exposes limits can be compromised by being
performed within a context that is based on a trick that conceals the inherent
tautology that they expose, which then has implications for how subjective agency
‘appears’.
This is important as it informs the critique of Circusism, a circus in which the
limitations of gravity are concealed not exposed, and in which the tautology
(wherein the excess that the trick produces simultaneously implies both subject to
an audience and not-subject to another body of mass) is concealed. A subject who
attempts to realise their agency in gravity is unable to point at an area outside of
gravity, but only to point to an endless, subject-less autonomy that contradictorily
 32

seems to contain such qualitative affects as the feeling of ‘freedom’ as the real
thing.
Meanwhile capital, and the power it wields, moves forward exactly by appearing as
one thing to an audience and the negation of that thing to another exchange-value,
for the purposes of realising the reproduction to itself.

WHY DO I SAY THE TRICK DEALS IN FREEDOM:

I want to be clear here that I am addressing freedom that is seemingly conveyed in

the trick not because I can prove that this is what is conveyed, but that this is what
circus states is the qualitative definition of its output; namely freedom and
unchecked mobility.

So in one way this research asks in what way is this agency present in the basic
unit of circus, which I designate as the trick, (or figure, or loop).
It is because circus artists make these claims that I address this.

I am asking in light of the discussion of fiction in relation to a proposed possibility for

a fictional meta-language that is perhaps only the proposal of post-factism? Is this
freedom real, and if so how does it not seem to operate as freedom?
Put simply I feel that circus is lamentably apolitical. What I see around me is the
growing hegemonic nature of ‘Capitalist Realism’ (Fisher, 2009) and what I hear is a
diatribe of freedom issuing from the culture of contemporary circus that agrees with
this hegemony. The circus artist seems to negotiate gravity with the same Zizekian
definition of ‘smart thinking’ as the corporation negotiates the market.

Circus artists are not free of law, or boundary, or taxes anymore than any other
subject, or anymore than they are free of gravity, and the temporary autonomous
zones of Hakim Bey are compromised into non-existence in that they are included
as actual, repeatable possibilities in a register that destroys them; their
ephemerality as the production of inter-subjective affects ‘for one night only’ is
translated into a spatial commodity that can repeat every Thursday night at eight
thirty (in this Burlesque Club for instance, that celebrates the dead eyed nostalgia
for the bigoted, sexist and colonial 19th century...)
(Bey, H (2011) T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Pacific Publishing
Studio. Seattle)

Every night the same difference. Rather like the way the letters in the word are
entered into the alphabet as if they present no threat to the repeatability of their
difference, even as this tautology of repeatable difference tears the meaning of the
word to shreds.
This is perhaps a definition of capture.
I have no proof of this except to say that Jack Kerouac’s road trip can now be
experienced as a guided tour ([Link]
kerouac-guided-or-self-guided-walking-tours), but as these moments of
spontaneous happenstance are digitised, monetised and quantified it feels like
autonomous zones winking out of existence in the exact same moment they occur.
 33

Where is the wild frontier of free living that circus artists supposedly embody, as
they are more or less entirely dependant on government or lottery funding? Into
what commodified body has this ‘freedom’ been fetishized as an intrinsic value?
So where is this supposed freedom? Is it not just an economy of pleasure that is
referred to here? The freedom to be self-interested enough to experience pleasure
from the notion that the appearance of freedom is the same as the real thing;
therefore the pleasure of freedom is now thankfully disentangled from any inter-
subjective responsibilities to the other or need to share it? Is this the new
weightlessness in circus, merely the abdication to autonomous registers, to
apolitical, indifferent fields that we pretend are meritocratic?
As we look at the difference between ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’ it is this
mutation that we will discuss: freedom to experience freedom from the
responsibilities inherent in positive liberty itself, rights without responsibility
perhaps. Gravity is reconceived as the right to weightlessness, its indifference and
inability to register the subject’s agency at all misread as ‘fairness’.

My interest is partly to interrogate:

A: how complicit is circus in continuing capitalist expansion, as Lievens claims:

“The romantic cliché has it that the circus is a nomadic (and free) marginal practice –
an isolated and chaotic state of exception, where different rules apply to those that
govern ordinary, well-structured lives. In this view, circus is thought to have a
subversive and perhaps even political power as a form of cultural expression – a
fanciful idea, however, that forgets the roots of nomadic circus in a mainstream
capitalist system.”

(Bauke Lievens (2015) Second Open Letter to Circus.)

[Link]

B: to examine how this complicity may produce a new relation between the trick
and gravity that occurs on a kind of tautological ground. Also to ask how, that which
I identify as potentially resistive or expositional in the trick, is rendered inert.

It may be that the trick is truly effective, so much so that it has been well
incorporated into the fabric of global late capitalism and exists as the contradictory
state of capital that prevails to absorb, commodify and subsume all tricks that do
not necessarily agree with it. I am not pretending the circus is responsible for this,
only that there is an uncomfortable correlation.
I want to emphasise that the impasse that I see in Lacan is examined here as
implicit in the trick as I think it is accurate but that here I am still speculating on a
loophole. These ideas may seem to lack hope but they have to be outlined here as
part of what circus is not saying.
 34

TRICK IN RELATION TO SEMIO-CAPITAL:

The congruence between capital and language I feel is vital here in the
understanding of how this ‘tricky ground’ is formulated, as some of the tautological
mechanisms highlighted within the logic of linguistics also relate to the capitalist
mode of production;

William Eggington in ‘The Philosopher’s desire’ makes an important distinction

between two kinds of interpretation:

“Primary interpretation is the active, productive shuttling internal to the subject as a

bipolar logos, the transformation of words that are productive of meaning.
Secondary interpretation is modelled on the awakening, a moment of retroactive
decision that collapses a vibrant series of possible meanings into a past experience
or thought.”

Interestingly Eggington makes the point that within the friction between pre-
differential fiction of Deleuze and Gauttari and post-differential fictions of Lacanian
analysis the very process of this latter distinction is acknowledged within the
former’s work, in that they acknowledge that something is primary to the arresting
of a process, that could continue un-arrested but that hard wired into the
designation of what that continuation is or might look like, is the secondary
reduction or derivation that closes the potentiality of that fictional proposition; and
he suggests that this is in the very way that they approach Lacan; acknowledging
that he correctly designates the closure of that which they are using to refute his
formula of lack as final and inevitable as capitalism.

“Anti-Oedipus and its sequel, A Thousand Plateaus have been interpreted as battle
cries against psychoanalysis’s stifling of of primary interpretations’s productive
desire by the imposition of phallocentric, normatively obsessed paternal function.
Another version of secondary interpretation, however, must be at work in Deleuze
and Gauttari’s thought, one that ensures that, despite some disputed terminology
their project and Lacan’s are in harmony.”

So a critique of Lacan’s theory of lack is implied in Deleuze and Gauttari’s work, but
they perhaps does not dispute the efficacy of the delineation of logical impasse in
signification based on difference, but highlights that there is an insoluble tautology,
by which all attempts to make desire ‘realise’ itself occurs now in the context of
capital. This tendency has to operate a reliance on lack and the masking of its source
in the tautology itself (the loop that places desire in an endless reciprocal knot
founded on a ‘chicken and egg’ relation to lack that is diagrammed here as the
chicken and egg relationship between the word and the extimate causality of it. The
word is infected with an alphabetical virus).

WHAT IS TRICK THREE?

 35

This will not be the last time that this problematic third iteration is discussed as it
forms a considerable knot in this project. For me what is highlighted then is that the
inevitability of lack is currently built into the collapse of desire into exchange-value.
Lack, and therefore desire, in the context of capital is a mode of reproduction of
capital.
This does not mean that Lacan is therefore not ‘true’, but in relation to Trick One
being a Lacanian analysis that exposes the double bind between the opposing
injunctions of desire and lack, then Trick Two is an appropriation of this looped
feature of a desiring subject embedded within a linguistically activated capital and a
concealment of the tautology.

But also here is highlighted that there is a Trick Three, a trick that does not
necessarily recognise the terms of difference upon which the definition that
separates Tricks One and Two operate along such a ‘fine line’ between exposure and
concealment of the tautology that ensues when subjects are embedded within a
system of difference through which desire is supposedly mediated.
The problem here is as above; how can such a play-bite be activated so that the
difference to a necessity to call weightlessness a fiction can be encircled in the same
recourse to fiction that such a third trick necessitates?

In his book The Uprising: Berardi discusses the deliberate non fulfilment of the
desire to grow, a desire he states proceeds from an external edict but which seems
to now be internalised. He calls this the deliberate allowance of decline. This is the
act of puncturing the role of fulfilment of desire that now serves only the expansion
of capital; in disabling its inevitability as lack to further enhance and expand the
predominance of a capitalism that relies on lack to repeat itself is a circuit that
remains un-completed.
This to me is allowing desire for weightlessness in the gravity of capital to remain
as fiction.

“The question that remains is: who says that economic competition is the only
standard and political criterion of choice? Bateson would define the European* malaise
in terms of a double bind, or contradictory injunction. Neoliberal dogma is dictating
European society to compete, and is simultaneously dictating the destruction of the
structures constituting the cultural and productive condition of its wealth. The
neoliberal idea of wealth is advancing social misery more and more. Gregory Bateson
suggests that double binds have paradoxical outcomes. And the paradoxical solution
for Europe could be to not fear decline. Decline (reverse growth) implies a divestment
from the frenzy of competition: this is the paradoxical push that may bring us out of
neoliberalism’s double-bind.”

(Berardi, F. (2012) The Uprising. Semiotexte. Los Angeles)

 36

(*Please note that Exit or no Exit, there is no Exit from the ground.)

What is implied here is to see freedom from the neoliberal concept of desire is to
stop desiring; when desire is only desire to self-interestedly compete, perhaps, or
even to stop desiring to survive in terms that already do not recognise you.
The tautology is slightly different here, but what is highlighted is a general
tautological ground at the outset of production, in which the terms of cultural and
therefore inter-subjectively qualitative production only serve as rationale for entry
into a quantitatively competitive register that fails to register them, producing only
a debt that requires more production of a resource that is unregisterable in the
market that demands it. The tautology is concealed as neoliberal progressiveness.

WHO’S IS THIS?

Also here is the idea of a ‘blurring of ownership’ of desire. Here desire to grow is
seen as a ‘given’, something implicit in the state or subject, when in fact it is a desire
installed by the gap between states or subjects that is thrown into sharp relief by the
implied necessity for competitiveness; the installation of gap, or debt or lack as an
inevitability but one that is ‘owned’ by the subject will be discussed in later chapters
also; in that it is a solution that disables the Marxist critique that stems from the
highlighting of the ownership of means of production as a root cause of the
exploitative nature of capitalism.
If you ‘own’ the disparity between what you produce and what you get,
acknowledging that it is in the nature of ‘lack’ then you feel the need to
competitively upgrade your factory rather than address the terms under which the
injunction to compete in issued. This seems to be the handing over of the means of
production but not the means of meaning production and is a consequence of the
semiotic capacity of a deregulated capital.

For the circus subject this capacity for weightlessness to contradictorily appear as
registerable as one of the things that can occur within gravity sets up a similar
double bind within the insistence on circus as freedom-production, by which the
lack you feel as the trick does not seem to amount to genuine agency is falsely
diagnosed as your issue, when in fact it is a combination of the injunction to enact
freedom within a register that simply cannot register it.
Decline or reverse growth in this context could be iterated as simply the
acknowledgement that the system permits no such meta-position of agency, and
that is the result of a fundamental disjunction between the qualitative leap as a
fiction and its quantitative value as a fact. In this sense this idea of reverse growth is
the acknowledgement of the fictionality of meta-position supposedly promised by
competitive labour that implies it can be made ‘real’.
 37

Maybe it is not necessary to say this: but I want to stress that, for me Circus’s
proximity to capital is vital to address here, I feel it is already compromised in its
relation to this mode of production and in its relation to an audience already well-
versed in images of supposed, agency an individualism in the face of
insurmountable odds; iterated as the righteous war against the enemies of freedom
or the insistence to go shopping, or meddle with your online presence until it is
perfect.
So some circus narratives that are not the repetition of neoliberal doctrine have to
be teased out here that can support future circus production outside of the
entrapment of the circus subject in a double bind that iterates the further
propagation of that bind as the production of freedom.
An implication is building here that circus needs to reposition its feet on a twisted
surface to avoid speaking in circles.
What I am developing here is the possibility to begin a sentence in reference to
gravity and end it in reference to capital; to speak circus to power.

DEFINE CAPITAL:

It becomes necessary then to define power when I say ‘speak circus to power’.
Power for me is an accumulated position. I am not a conspiracy theorist; only that I
consider accumulated capital to bestow power upon an individual or group of
individuals, and that this power, as it iterates itself as the substitute for politics,
enables capitalism, once a progressive turn against feudalism, to be its re-
installation, in which elites are possessed of an agency that then becomes the
promise implicit in the expansion of the system by which their ultimate agency is
maintained. I do not think that the subject is naturally predisposed to desire control
over others, but I do think that to experience an accumulation of the possibility for
control means that power seeks to maintain itself at any cost.
I feel therefore that in speaking to power circus ought to address capital, as here
the trick is examined as a tool to reconfigure value in such a field.

To be clear by capital I am referring to any kind of accumulated holding or fixed

capital that is then circulated through the medium of variable capital in order to
realise surplus value so as to reproduce more accumulated capital. In this sense I
refer only to what seems to be a vitalist, parthenogenic reproduction, in which all
means are subsumed to the repetition of difference derived from an excess, and the
origin of excess is barred from the circuit.

By capital I also refer to the accumulated machinery invested in desiring-production.

This term should refer to a process that should continue, but here is modified to
refer to the excessive process that has been arrested and given an imperative.
This complex term I will designate briefly here in its ‘truncated’ form as a shift in
production from commodity to desire for commodity.
This shift I consider to follow the Godellian model insofar as meta-statements
‘about’ the quality of difference of a commodity are treated as infra-statements ‘of’
differential quantity in a commodity, and the resultant treatment of quality as a
 38

registerable quantity and the concealment of the tautology of this condition places
a desiring-production unnaturally organised in this way as the overcoming of a limit
internal to capital.
This desiring production ‘schematised’ around a self-defeating but excessive but
closed linguistic circuit of desire/lack seeks to expand capital, and relocate the
efficiency of the fixed capital of machinery installed in the production process to
within the exploitable internal logic of subjective variable capital.
As mentioned ‘ownership’ of means is blurred here.
This could be said to be a shift in the capitalist mode of production to relocate the
subject as a machine for the reproduction of an endless source of semio-capital: an
endless source of priceless affects that are rationalised into a market that then tears
them apart.
In relation to the diagram that essentially describes the trick in gravity as a word
suspended in an alphabetical field; just as the Word enters the alphabetical field in a
seemingly undisturbed order, it is is soon returned to a jumbled state, which
demonstrates that the preservation of the communicability of subjective meaning is
not certain in the field. What the trick is assembled to ‘mean’ is incommunicable to
gravity.
A myth of equivalence between letters in the word and letters in the alphabet
prevails.
It is possible then to think of Trick Two as the fetishisation of letters in the
alphabet so that they appear to possess the intrinsic qualitative value that they have
in the word that can never be reduced to mere alphabetical terms, even as they sit in
a horizontal register that refutes that quality.
This would be a diagram of a Tautological Ground, related here to capital as the
trick to conceal its internal limits.

“Deleuze and Guattari’s view, the unconscious was better understood in political terms
as a productive and potentially transformative force – a force that could change the
world. The unconscious, as they saw it, was a deliriously innovative ‘factory’,
ceaselessly producing new and transgressive combinations of desires.”

(Dosse, F. Trans, Glassman (2010) D Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting
Lives. Columbia. USA)

Here the factory model seems like something that produces ‘freely’ beyond
principles organised around economic gain, and this is acknowledged, but I feel
what is also activated in this description is the potential within a spectacular society
for this factory to not be owned by the subject.

FACTORY OF LANGUAGE:

In seeing the loop of desire that is founded on lack as perpetual; that is the signifier
endlessly receding as it refers only to another signifier and the investment within
the signifier as intrinsically possessed of the fetishized quality of desire projected
there in its formation, this for me forms a schematic for a machine for reproducing
 39

capital. In the way financial value is tied to the sign, here we have a Lacanian view of
production that bars the producer from the product that is of course pre-figured by
Marx.

I feel that a useful view of the tautological ground is configured in the way Marx’s
view of production is implicated in Deleuze and Gauttari; in recasting the
unconscious as a factory, what comes into view here is the Lacanian subject whose
unconscious is internally structured like a language, but from whom is concealed the
outcome of analysing the impasses inherent in that structure, so that repetition of
desire is the outcome.

In terms of semio-capital it is precisely because Lacan delineates that the

unconscious well of desire is linguistic in structure that it can be re-organised as a
factory subsumed to the reproduction of capital that has activated its linguistic
potency.
The unconscious is then a factory for the production of desire; production, which in
the context of semio-capital, is simply more semio-capital. The subject is a hybrid
machine/worker; programmable and ‘variable’ but not causing a falling rate of profit
by being purely machinic and, once programmed, ‘fixed’ in their response. The
machine here is as Marx describes it: the abstract knowledge of production, but
here this abstract knowledge is psychoanalysis, but without its power to expose the
inevitability of lack.
This shift from an unconscious that is structured like a language, that seeks to
highlight in a Marxian way how you are barred from and dominated by that which
you yourself produce, back to the very site of labour in the image of the unconscious
as being like a factory is very telling. For me what is implicated here is that although
Lacan is entirely correct, within the context of capital, the language of the
unconscious is formed into an assembly line for capital that has itself internalised
the relation between desire and linguistic potency.

What I am implying here is that the process that seeks to expose how desire
returns to itself as lack in a cycle of want and release and back to want is captured as
something that conceals the internal limit of capital.
This diagramming of the reciprocality between the production of desire in
signification and the inevitability of its return to lack because what is signified can
only represent subjective desire to another signifier and never realise it exposes the
same knot as Gödel’s theorem of Uncertainty.
Each meta-statement ‘desires’ to be realised as ‘true’, but its location in proximal
order as if it were an infra-statement, still within the linguistic system, means that
its referral to and referral from language are looped, which in turn means that this
‘desire’ to come ‘true’ can only result in its unprovability; in its fictionality as truth.
As stated the linguistic simplification of Gödel’s premise is as follows:

The following statement is false.

The preceding statement is true.

This is also the relation between a meta-position and gravity.

 40

So it might be said that Lacan’s exposure of desire for objects as a pointless

exercise is concealed and utilised as the solution to over-production.

The diagram of words suspended in an alphabetical field can be thought of as a

factory also. If the ground is essentially an unacknowledged tautology, concealing
the knot, that which takes part in production cannot partake of what is produced, as
production can only be validated in that which does not acknowledge that which
produces; although in order to produce in this barred fashion that which is
unreachable is necessary as a resource for that production.
To speak in words the subject must draw from the alphabet, from which the
subject is absent. Concealing this knot means semio-capital is reproduced endlessly
as a poetry with no subject.

Art is a perfect match for the reproduction of capital, which is nothing ‘new’, so
apologies for that.
If the trick is offered here as a tool then, it is as something that exposes. It is
offered as a schematic for a self-defeating virtuosity of logic that can be assembled
in any system like a conceptual art work of tautology. It can be thought of as a Sol
Le Wittgenstein, a Frankenstein that exposes what the living subject lacks.
You can build it yourself anywhere by following the diagram, it leads to tautology,
which is its power to expose.

Within the overarching structures that are touched on in this chapter there is a
different kind of trick. This trick is concealed and therefore not offered for common
use at all.
It is concealed precisely to falsely point to a hole in the subject that is the absent
engine that reproduces capital as a variation on a geometric theme, like a Sol Le
Witt instruction for a drawing that you can never own.
This second trick is offered as a seemingly neutral ground upon which the subject is
only able to construct lack as an inherent fault in their acts of consumption, rather
than lack becoming something that could illuminate a built in obsolescence.
Rather than giving agency to production, like a conceptual schematic for a drawing
is supposed to do; to liberate artistic production as the joy of unfolding geometries
that are fictions of an immanent multiplicity; to liberate this as a communal fiction
operated on spatial restriction. Rather than this the overarching ‘tricky’ ground
appears flat and places the subject again and again in front of the singular and
‘factual’ works of art, the access to which is barred. The subject can only consume
the instructions for artistic production and feel more empty.
Imagine if the only thing left to eat were Sol Le Witt’s instructions for drawings?
This is where capital places us; consuming statements about hunger as if they were
food.

Everyone is getting in on the act:

 41

‘For Hyundai, art is a source of inspiration that leads to creative thinking without
limitations across performance and design – a notion the company is keen to pass on to
society.
“We embed these creative ideas and thoughts within our products in order to achieve
what is beyond the concept of ‘driving’ or a ‘vehicle’, explains X, Hyundai Motor’s Chief
Marketing Officer. “Our hope is to create an experience that moves our customers
emotionally through our brand and products. The common language between art and
our brand helps us to learn and move ahead.”’

(Sponsored Advertisement. Bloomberg Businessweek. Oct 22nd 2018.)

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Seven

Happy is now in Japan, he is there to take care of business, you dig?

“There is no common language here; you cannot conflate what issues from my
mouth with the private mutterings between your ‘vehicles’.

Cut to the boardroom of the Hyundai Corporation, where the CEO is cornered and
lies whimpering on the floor.
Happy had come crashing through the window on a rope of pure silk, scattering
the minions. The rope was woven from a thousand Kamikaze headbands. He had
been buying them up online for decades, ‘just for jolly, wouldn’t you?’

He stood over the disgraced executive.

“You are disgusting,” smiled Happy, “how about I embed my own creative idea… in
order to achieve what is beyond the concept of a ‘knife’…but directly into your
windpipe, you bag of lies?
How dare you sell back to me the one recourse I have to surpass your tawdry
conception of the object? How dare you reduce my excesses to the conveyable
poetry of the factory floor?
Drill, de-burr, polish, galvanise and paint your stolen aluminium alloys all you like
but they will never be sharper than my blade…”

Happy strutted up and down not knowing what to do; was this fat, distraught father
of two really the target? How had sent him on this mission. Who was in the control
tower?
Who had designed the tower to be the epitome of innovation; a symphony of
artistic flair combined with the efficiency of modern materials that seamlessly
presents a union of vision and material expertise. Who had re-configured the
Panopticon brand into an experience beyond surveillance and control to become a
lasting emotional engagement with the horizon?
Who had done this?
Who?
 42

At this point Happy was fading out like an old film, the rhetoric was crackling,
recorded long ago in a nice warm studio off the Old Kent Road in the 1970’s.
Picture Happy as a has-been rock-star with string of convictions; well, it’s a living…

Happy is talking to the sound recordist, “you know Terrence, people often ask me,
how will you manage to escape your own logic? And I simply reply that it is not up to
me; my lyrics are all about proposing that the wall is there and in a way this proposal
is really the only way to get through it.”

The smell of incense in the studio is almost stifling.

EXCUSEME, HOW MUCH IS THIS WEIGHTLESSNESS?

Within the Hyundai statement, what is given a price here is pricelessness. What is
offered here is what we already know and what we already possess.
The ground captures the potentiality of that which it conceals; it conceals the
structure of the trick as a way of fictionalising an escape from internal limits. What is
presented instead is a flat method of factualising that fiction to forestall over-
production by corporations and the activation of excess in the face of dwindling
resources.

I remain weightless, as I have no solid answer to this impasse…just for jolly, wouldn’t
you?

For me capital becomes synonymous with power as it restricts in order to grow, and
conceals the real relations of production. Obvious.
But it relates to an overlap, as between Trick One and Trick Two, in which to state
that desire could be productive in a different way to its inevitable reduction to a
differential register, is using the same method to say something different. Capital
conceals that desire within it is in a closed loop so desire appears to be able to
directly create reality. This problem will be discussed later in relation to Trick Three
that seeks to be different to the terms of these first two tricks.

In lots of ways to propose that something can remain un-captured you are only
repeating what capital promises; that there can be difference to difference, that
pricelessness can be bought, that weightlessness can be real, and acknowledged
here is the problem of trying to delineate between ghosts, between a fiction of pre-
difference as being different to post-factism.
Capital claims to embrace and encompass and be able to produce affect, it claims
to accommodate fictions and can produce them as facts, thus concealing the
tautology of making the difference to price into a commodity.

“If difference is not given in terms of contradiction then the difference that Deleuze
emphasises might seem to be somehow indifferent to materiality, austere and
otherworldly. Supposing, as is generally done, that the inequality between production
 43

and capital is made known only through contradiction and opposition, does this not
put Deleuze in league with the mystifications of capital itself?”

This is the point here: what is the difference between a flow of desire that remains
fictional or pre-differential and post-factism, in which fiction is also purported to
endure, but as fact derived out into a differential register?
Tynan continues:

“As Marx points out, the specific illusion to be dispelled is that capital rather than
labour is productive: ‘[Capital] becomes a very mystic being since all of labour’s social
productive forces appear to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to
issue from the womb of capital itself’, while the market becomes ‘an enchanted,
perverted topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame le Terre do
their ghost-walking’
(Marx 1972: 827-30)

(Ed: Jain, D (2009) Deleuze and Marx. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh.)

It is this similarity of desiring-production as being un-arrested to that which capital

also promises that is for me an essential illusion here in the tautological ground and
a central tendency for the seemingly free production of desire to be able to be
harnessed to the expansion of the differential field that refutes its validity as
anything except its propensity to enable that expansion.
This for me is Circusism, in which the desire for weightlessness to be real only
repeats the difference of gravity.

Ok, who cares, perhaps circus does not care to be political, but for me , if it does
then what emerges is perhaps an awareness of the gap between the mechanism of
the trick as either a psychotic utterance (trying to get out of language) the joke
(attempting to expose our assumptions) and the prank (that seeks to short-circuit
mechanisms of control or order by re-performing sign systems against themselves)
and their seeming ineffectuality in the face of capital’s power to appropriate all of
these tactics.
When you speak a trick to power, power already has performed a trick in advance.
This is the tautological ground; this is Trick Two.

SUBJECT TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS:

And so the subject caught in fields of words, of money and of gravity will be
examined in relation to this overarching concealment that disables fiction by
making it come true.
How boring, to make your dreams come true…wouldn’t you?

I could think of Trick One in circus here as a fiction of freedom, taken as a demand,
that is then a true picture of a situation of restriction, to which the fiction, as a
demand, then addresses a critique.
 44

The critique is then the ‘true’ picture of the previously unregarded or concealed
situation. The fiction changes fundamentally the total space, which is constituted by
the area ‘other’ to that fiction as fact. Fiction tells the limit of fact, therefore altering
fact from the hidden limit of experience to the exposed limit of it as the possibility of
another future.
Fiction is the interjection of a full stop after the previously unending utterance of
factual space, thus causing it to be seen as an utterance within space rather than
space itself. It is utterance ‘about’ that is utterance ‘of’; it is prepositional and
expositional. It is language use rather than linguistic law; that is, the totality is
exposed as subject to the same terms that it enforces; like pointing out that Lacan’s
desire for a theory in which desire is founded on lack makes it subject to its own
terms as the lack of lack, which is the production of production.
Or in the words of Groucho Marx on December 24th 1945, which could easily be
taken as a double negative: “Don’t ya know there ain’t no Sanity Clause?”

Fiction is the acknowledgement that the system can always be made subject to its
own terms with the ensuing tautological construction forming an exposure of the
systemic limits.
So for me this activation of the fiction of weightlessness and how it is
acknowledged or concealed in the trick is vital to how the trick works or does not
work to disagree with capital.

“The best way to understand this phenomenon is to think of the understanding-effect

that the figure of a period or full-stop can have on the flow of speech or writing. During
the time of the listening or reading act, the meaning of the sentence remains
suspended, we engage in micro-hermeneutical guesses, which themselves involves a
certain spacing or interruption in the flow but whose main function is to pre-empt a
more radical beat whose purpose is to conclude a thought.”

(Eggington, W (2007) The Philosopher’s Desire. Stanford. California)

What I feel is acknowledged here is the inter-subjective negotiation of the

indifference of language that occurs between speaker/writer of the message and
the listener/reader of it, in which a game is played between two independently
mobile subjects where we acknowledge that this is not the real biting down on this
language, but a play-bite in which its difference to what is meant is encircled by its
similarity to it.
We accept that what is meant by the words is happening in spite of the words, and
that we accept as Tomsic points out, that language has little to do with
communication. I accept that you will interpret through your own temporal breaks
and guesses what lies behind that which I structure as an attempt at a whole.

The play-bite conveys the different same. This subtle difference in pressure is what
needs to be conveyed in the circus trick, that this conveys something different
‘about’ the inevitability of gravity but which is encircled by similarity ‘of’ behaviour
that follows that inevitability. And that this is shared.
 45

As an adjunct, implied here also is a temporal dimension to the conveyance of

meaning that does not necessarily feature in the synchronic nature of systems of
difference. This will also be fictionalised later.
For now we can observe that…

Fiction is a full stop in the sentence of. fact. It is in suspension.

Perhaps the difference is that capital does all of the above, all of the allowances and
poetic shifts in meaning are played out, right up to the point where capital arrests
the process into a single irrefutable meaning.
Perhaps the difference between fictional meta-position and post-factism is that in
the former in leaving the fiction unfulfilled there is a responsibility to the other, to
not drain from them the energy required to turn weightlessness into genuine
agency. By contrast in the latter, self-interest is simply not able to propel the
suspended fiction, (which self-interest desires to become fact) to be collapsed into
an autonomous register without needing to draw from an exploited surplus from the
other in order to forestall the inevitability of its destination as lacking inter-
subjective meaning of any kind.
This is freedom, realised from a surplus in spite of the impossibility of meta-
position, and held in place as seemingly ‘intrinsic’ to weightlessness, by a fetishizing
process performed by the artist and audience as owner of means and workers
respectively.

And this is gravity, an inevitability that is represented in the autonomy of the

horizontal register and with which a self-interested and entrepreneurial
weightlessness is in full agreement .
The difference to the inevitability of difference is that in Trick One as Berardi
would say, the desire does not fear the decline of not becoming fact. It is
acknowledged that weightlessness can and should remain as a fictional demand and
this also acknowledges that within Trick Two fiction cannot be made fact without
the myth of equivalence (the myth of being able to sustain difference to difference)
that masks this incompatibility.
This myth is the over-arching fiction of Circusism, against which I could say that,
like Morse Code, when you add up all the spaces between the claps, any applause
you do receive is mostly silence.

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Eight.

The Lambeth Morning and the Doors of Theatre:

On money devaluing over time....

All interrelated quantitative data is waning just as inevitably as having to leave
gravity behind. Just as time stretches out to diminish gravity to nothing more than a
byproduct of human myopia, so quantity itself wanes as perceivable…
 46

“It will crumble as the husband, the coming and going of the lard. Termites do so
much to keep the doorways filled. To what end is Astley in the saddle? Old hands,
mouth like an awful gravity, time is zero trailing off, just a rotten exit.”

In Happy's mind now there was no difference between the human form banished to
the surface of a planet in a losing fight with gravity than the human form in a
banishment to the surface of its own skin, whereupon was played out an
externalisation of its own hard-wired sense of value… the planet was alien in the
same degree that an autonomy of value relied on alienation…

“This is worth two of those and any one who don't know that needs his head
examined...” banished to a distant planet in a losing fight with exchange value.
Where was this place?

That gravity was split was so obvious to happy. The fact that every trick that did not
expose this exile to a planet of gravitational value, which was alien to the human
form of weightlessness, was felt to be a pure rip off by all members of the Straight-
Up Club. Happy was the ‘Treasurer’.
And any trick that did not highlight that banishment was immanent, that is we had
not travelled anywhere…we were right here at home: ”Well the apple does not fall
far from the tree, son, your freedom from your father is immanent to the reach of
his fist…”
Happy felt the punch coming years ago…it felt like a sad kiss goodbye through the
soft steam of locomotive drunkenness…

“We were right here at the hospital when the Doctor said he would pray for you,
boy…”
Happy, ten years old with a black eye and a fever his grandmother could have
cured in one night by talking to the Wolf-Spirit. Here he was strapped to a white
bed, in a white room, with a bottle of white medicine and always the bible-black;
the sinister avoidance of payment through the eye of a needle:

“Do you know your scripture, boy?” Asked the Doctor, leaning too heavily and too
close upon the bed.

“I know one better.” Said Happy

He could quote what was wrong like ringing in his ears on a Sunday morning:
He sat bolt upright in the bed:

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the
copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the
essence…illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be
enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest
degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

(Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity.)

 47

Why did these good folks want everything to die?

The Doctor trailed off to the Cancer Ward to dispense his wisdom, “Its no wonder
his father beats him. The child is disrespectful and needs to learn the value of
things.”

And years later in some flea bitten ‘Cabaret Français’ in London, Happy was all
grown up different in the same old story.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I present …The Value of Things!”

A sales pitch intended to extend gravity through the enforced performance of a rip-
off circus so that there was nothing visible outside of gravity. It was the horizonless
act of here and now.
But Happy was bothered by the fact that this gravity itself was perhaps rendered
visible only by a myopia incapable of registering value over time.
He tried to rationalize it to the remaining ensemble…they were gathered in the
dressing room in badly lit feathers, all trying to understand his act.

“It's a simple sum, see boys...” Happy was addressing his bewildered crew
"Value divided by time is zero",
“Less than nothing in fact as no value is possible, only an interval between two
value events as they present themselves as momentarily useful between two
independently mobile subjects of need.”

Such subjects however had to submit to the improbability of their fixity as self-
identifiable members of sets. Subjectivity had gone out of fashion like last seasons
slip-ons, “those identities are a train-wreck, Difference is so last year, Duckie.”
Difference no longer uses sets but circular motions, rather like magicians rings.
There is a way for these rings to be both inextricably linked and entirely separate in
one and the same moment, rather like a horse that once controlled in a fixed circle
of 42 feet can both be inside the set of earthly gravity but also inside the set of its
own gravity that holds Phillip Astley in the saddle.
“Ooh, I love a man in uniform…someone should ‘do’ for that fucking colonial
prick.” Thought Happy just in time to go on stage.

Cut to 250 years ago.

A damp Lambeth morning opens in the eyes of Happy Down-River.

He has travelled back to kill Philip Astley, to put an end to this circus nonsense
once and for all. What end? What trick could suffice to bring circus to a standstill
before it becomes an insurmountable crushing gravity of its own?
Circus had become the town that it now found it impossible to arrive in from the
inside. Or was it “outside”? Anyway, Happy had to ‘act’, before circus became the
indelible stamp of mass value on every single trick-commodity.

“Rather like a horse by time is zero. I have fumbled at the lock and such wooden
 48

adoration only further serves to fill the human hole.”

Happy knew that circus was a doorway but that the circus artist was as wooden as
a shithouse door. The trick itself could be used to block the opening so as to give the
impression of a solid human presence, sodden with theatrical anxiety... the wooden
individual, materialised out of the scenery by some old backstage hand in a
supporting technical role.
All the circus artists were just bits of scenery, opening and shutting on the idea of
theatrical identity.
Exit the ghost…

Enter the technician:

“Hey this door won't last another run. Twenty more shows tops and it will crumble
as the husband slams it on the way out”,

..or as the young girl finds her true calling, sneaking out of the family home, closing
the door on her father’s wishes, thought Happy, or the posh boy bullied at public
school opening the door to the locker in which he fetishises his developing
musculature as a currency of revenge on the awful gravity of his fear. All those
clichés, wearing thin on their hinges.
All performable with a little squirt of 3 in 1 oil…

“It’s an open and shut case, all these doors won't last another show” intones pickled
Judge Hume; disgraced Judge Hume who thought justice was arbitrary and was
struck off.

They are worn so thin, patched up, ‘mending is better than ending’ and anything is
better than becoming the empty space where the individual door used to flap and
flap and give so much meaning to the coming and going of the lard.
The door is a word that just does not mean what it used to, slammed like a tongue
against the lips, “Jonathan Joe had a mouth like an O, and a wheelbarrow full of
surprises”.
The door is a word trailing off; it opens and shuts wordlessly, framing the linearity
of its ellipsis…
Every scene that lends us an individual is just a rotten exit and an entrance through
the door that covers over the empty becoming of the doorframe. An actor is just an
upright trap door to nobody. This trick is what keeps the whole theatre going.

The individual door is slammed upon the meaningless, undecided roles that await
everyone backstage. The theatre is rotten. Old hands can only do so much to keep
the doorways filled.
Once the cry goes up, it's every doorknob for himself, "Termites!!!"
 49

*****
Ladies and Germs, you can step no further, this part of the sideshow that opens up
the rollercoaster is closed. What is shut is the possibility for further exposure of the
political and economic landscape that affects and is affected by this tautology. Text
below that is highlighted red will cost a time-fee to unfold. It may be that wandering
the perimeter you may glimpse some further yellow sections; fictions that can be
spied through the twisted folds of the tent that is pitched simultaneously to exclude
and enfold you. For instance should you wander from pages 62 - 91, you will find
some more tales are available. You are welcome to keep out.

***

FICTION AND FETISH: CAN AN APOLITICAL CIRCUS BE WEIGHTLESS?

I want to be clear here that there is a difference between the fiction in suspension
here (above its reduction to fact) and the fetish as the seeming materialisation of
something that cannot be truly intrinsic to a material.
Fiction that remains suspended acknowledges and exposes the incompatibility of
the registers of use and exchange, or meaning and linguistic value, whilst the fetish
denies, retains as unknown or conceals that incompatibility.

Fetish I consider ironically to be more of an ‘overarching fiction’ or fantasy of

equivalence, an unknown known. This fetish is the force behind alienation in that
the hidden knowledge here is that exchange represents an autonomous relation
between commodities that masks the social relations that come to compose the
values therein.
Thus in this overarching fiction agency is revealed/obscured, in order to expand the
limit of capital; to conceal it in a false equivalence that then perpetuates as a wage
equivalent to that of which it masks the social dimension.

To further the homology it might be stated that the social relations that come to
compose the values within the signifier or within a body of mass are equally masked
as the signifier and the body of mass both attempt to make intrinsic to themselves
the denial that they represent a ‘cut’ from what they represent rather than a
congruence. That is, freedom cannot be registered in gravity.

In terms of the diagram, in which a meta-statement ‘about’ the differential quality

of a letter that occurs in a word is treated as if it were an infra-statement ‘of’
quantitative capacity of that letter, which enables an autonomous position in a
horizontal order.
This occurs much in the same way when labour is treated as if it were a
commodity. The meta-statement of labour ‘about’ the quality of a commodity is
itself treated as an infra-statement ‘of’ commodity.
(Here ‘infra’ refers to that which is understood to already be within the market,
whereas ‘meta’ refers to those social relations that exist as the origin of value that
end up being treated as if they are intrinsic market values.)
 50

So there are two fictions: one which remains suspended not drawing on the excess
to cover the lack, the other is an over-arching fiction in which this covering of lack is
itself concealed.

In Massumi’s affective take on Bateson’s example, the fiction of the play bite tells
of a meta position that is outside of combat and also therefore ‘about’ the quality of
combat, and this is an awareness of the power of fiction (or affect) to reveal a truth.
The ‘truth’ here is no more than sharing the statement that perhaps what we
perceive is not a totality, but merely one limited system among many; whereas a
more over-arching fiction that fetishizes one register as wholly compatible with
another is an awareness, and exploitation, of the power of an installed fiction to
conceal truth.
Sounds lovely. Again however there is an awareness of overlap here between a
shared acknowledgement of limits and post-factism.

Again we return to how the acknowledgement or non-admission of the over-

arching fiction of the union of use and exchange that was clearly revealed in Marxian
thought, creates either a trick that exposes, or a trick that conceals respectively.

Thus although this acceptance of fictionality may infer a seeing of the self as
fictional as a negative result of an immutable force such as language or capital and
which does not necessarily help the subject to be free of these fields of gravity, it
does allow the overarching fiction to be acknowledged so that the negative position
of the subject in that bind can be seen, rather than exist as an un-scratchable itch.

In exposing and acknowledging overarching fiction it operates a demand on the

supposed totality of the fetish, now seen as the over-arching fiction of fact, an
unknown known.
If capital is exposed as an overarching fiction, then it is simultaneously exposed as
exploitative because the implicit origin of value has to be acknowledged as located
not intrinsically in the commodity but in the social relations of labour-power. I feel
that circus needs to engage here and in doing so address its own historical
complicity with this dominant mode of production and signification that now forms
the tautological ground upon which it is pitched.
Circus is complicit in the chicken and egg tautology that is at the root of the market
society in which it is embedded when it thinks of itself as the production of freedom.
Non-engagement of circus with its mirroring of hidden paradox implies two
iterations that I feel are both adding to the confusion.

TWO BAD ACTORS AND ONE GOOD CROWD:

Firstly we can think of not addressing the complicity with capital as the creation of a
subject who is prevented by prevailing narratives in circus from realising the power
of weightlessness (meta-position) as fiction, and rather instead performs it as
Sisyphic impossibility which necessarily leads to the ‘realisation’ of the circus subject
only as a noble and hopeless figure of Romanticism. In this sense I am proposing the
 51

fictionalising of meta-position not as a meta-physical poetics, or longing for a better

world than this, but rather as the highlighting of current conditions that do not
work, have limitations or are exploitative and can be addressed. For me fiction
preserves the possibility for change.

Secondly if one of the prevailing narratives of circus is that meta-positionality can

retain its subjective affect even as it is relocated in the market then these are
contradictory proposals that are in full agreement with capital’s own utilisation of
meta-positioning as a realisable possibility but only to highlight and exploit new
markets.
In such an agreement with the idea that meta-language is contradictorily entirely
possible and that the freedom felt in weightlessness of the trick and the previously
unavailable mobility it facilitates are always translated as real examples of freedom.
This ‘realises’ the circus subject as ‘entrepreneurial’.

Thirdly I wish to look at the position of this second circus subject in relation to an
audience who are complicit in the fabrication of this fallaciously genuine freedom.
The surplus has to come from somewhere that covers the incompatibility and
fosters the illusion that a fiction has been made real.
In terms of appropriated excess, this surplus is fetishized as intrinsic to the
weightlessness displayed and in lieu of any recourse on the part of the circus subject
to forestall the inevitable lack, the image of achievable freedom within gravity is
held aloft by the audience.

In this way I hope it is clear that the homology between gravity and the subject-less
autonomies that prevent meta-positioning within both capital and language (and
which are reflected in the concept of semio-capital) serves to highlight a problem of
a mute apolitical circus within an excessively ‘verbose’ and tyrannical context of late
capitalism that conceals the reciprocal tautology that flickers between two very
different forms of value.

THEREFORE THIS IS FICTION:

What is strongly inferred for me is that any critique of the misreading of freedom as
the intrinsic quality of weightlessness should exist in the form of a fiction. This
seems fitting and as critique it would exist as that which is as impossible to construct
as meta-language; reliant as it is on statements that are both ‘true but unprovable’.
The fictional forms on offer here, as further reading to the theoretical examination
of the trick, are an attempt at a weightlessness that does not have to land in this
concretised form.
In relation to this; here is another story that may or may not have ever happened:

“According to the famous anecdote Freud supposedly said to Jung during their visit to
the United States (1909) that Americans are not aware that he and Jung were bringing
them the plague. In turn, Freud in his enthusiasm remained ignorant for the fact that
American capitalism already possessed an antidote against this continental disease.
 52

This antidote was nothing other that the ideology of economic liberalism. Freedom,
Equality, Property and Private Interest, this efficient ideological junction of political
universalities with private egoism, or ‘human narcissism’ as Freud would have likely
have put it, successfully neutralised the radicality of psychoanalytical insights…and led
to the oblivion of the critical truth that Freud revealed in his discovery of the
unconsciousness and the interdependency of subjectivation and alienation.”

(Tomsic, S (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious Verso. London)

The construction of a ‘real’ subject is a guarantee of inaccessibility to it, this is what

Tomsic claims here to be the ‘critical truth’ of Freud. He offered the insight that you
were a fiction that is destroyed in its factualisation, (therefore the extrapolation that
Lacan perhaps advances is that one goal of analysis is to accept this fictionality of
self.)

What is implied here in a tautological ground is that the antidote to realising that
you are constructed on terms that are beyond your control, is to offer this
precarious fictional ‘you’ up to the market for realisation.
This was the possibility to make yourself factual again through the factualisation
of that fictionality that the market offered. This was all in development at the time
of Freud’s U.S. visit.
Rather than fiction referring to ‘freedom not yet’, it is the possibility to become
anything you can fictionalise yourself as being; as ‘freedom now’. This is perhaps the
leaden Disney-fication of the self that Freud wanted to unburden.
Here the ground described by Tomsic neutralised the effectiveness of the radical
proposal for critique contained within the idea of the subject afflicted with
fictionality; neutralised as this precarious self was seemingly made factual in capital.

As is expounded neatly in Adam Cutis’s documentary “The Century of the Self”,

Freud’s visit however was not purely professional, Freud was also there to see his
nephew Eddie Bernays, who after re-appropriating his uncle’s work in the service of
consumerism according to his own intuition about freedom, became the founder of
the discipline of Public Relations. Bernays reinvented not only commodities but
political figures and celebrities through his manipulation of psychoanalytical
techniques to stimulate cathexis in relation to irrelevant objects and figures, thus
producing desire where there previously was none, by the reverse-engineering of
Uncle Sigmund’s ‘critical truth’. He did this within the context of capital that was
waking up to the idea that the key to avoiding over-production was to produce
desire in large quantities and Freud’s technique could b played backwards to find
out the associations consumers held about commodities. The process honed the
product in relation to its capacity to activate desires not necessarily associated with
cake mix, cigarettes or wax polish.

(Curtis, A (2006). The Century of the Self. TV program. BBC. London)

 53

To further the homology between the structures at work within political economy
and a psychoanalytical processing of linguistics as a reproductive engine of
capitalism:

“…two new figures of negativity in the social link: labour-power and surplus-value. It
is in these that Lacan will recognise his subject of the signifier and object a.”

(Tomsic, 2015.)

This idea that the later Lacan developed of the petit object a, the ‘little other’
through which we attempt to make whole the fragmented image of the self is
proposed here as the epitome of the commodity that will restore the ‘real you’ to
you.

IE here he analogises the productive power of the subject that creates value as
fetishized into the commodity, with the productive power of the subject that
creates ‘meaning’ in the signifier but which is then out of reach for that subject
locked in a horizontal relation with other signifiers. Both the commodity and the
signifier can be fixated upon by the desiring subject as a ‘petit objet a’ that then
seems to intrinsically hold that value or meaning, but as an object the positive
condition of which is the barrier to it, thus the subject is negatively alienated from
what they themselves have produced in signification. Desiring means a failure of
satisfaction, which is here proposed as a model for the ‘ideal’ commodity, in which
desire is elicited and its impossibility of fulfilment is decentred from the object as
cause.

If you believe your lack of satisfaction stems from within you, initiated in some
unreachable primal scene then true cause of the object’s failure to satisfy you rather
than its irrelevance. If you think the commodity fails to satisfy you because you are
inherently unable to get to what lacks, then this is the definition of the subject that
if installed within the commodity makes it perfect.

So the logic here is broken in that if you realised that the lack was caused by an
impasse in the system of signification then surely this is the death knell of
capitalism…as you realise that each object you buy is never going to satisfy…it is
merely a sign of something else…but what we have here is a kind of forestalling of
this realisation in favour of a kind of implied retail therapy, in which even though
you acknowledge that desire only represents, and is the very process of
representation, you continue to let it take shape as the real source of desire that you
must have…

If you acknowledge the source of dissatisfaction is your primal scene then you never
blame an object that is essentially irrelevant to human desire or needs for failing to
fulfil you, thus the presence of psychoanalysis as a narrative never addresses the
indifference and autonomy of the field of capital.
 54

As long as psychoanalysis is never fully activated but remains a pretext for the
inevitability of lack then it remains as the concealment of the subjectively irrelevant
and indifferent field of semio-caåital within which the subject continues to desire,
and the built in obsolescence of which as an iteration of the new continues to let you
down.

Psychoanalysis becomes the ultimate commodity as it lays the ground for its own
endless purchase.
Or in the case of those that wish to be ‘cured’ of circus the ground is laid for the
endless and fruitless exploration of the inner world of dissatisfaction that stems
from never realising that you should acknowledge all agency within the practice of
circus as fictional, and that this fictionality might be better proposed as a demand
for currently unavailable freedoms.

AS CIRCUS SEEMS TO AGREE WITH CAPITAL THAT HAS OVERCOME ITS

LIMITS, MARX SEEMS MORE AND MORE RELEVANT AS A REMINDER OF
THOSE LIMITS:

In drawing attention to the Marxist dimension here, there is also a deepening irony
in the fact that capital is appropriating a semiotic dimension to its expansion that
effectively doubles the fictionality and possibility to utilise unknown knowledge (the
fetish) within the subject to imply that desire is produced as if it has its genuine
origin within that subject, so that the trick to conceal appears as an exposure of the
possibility of the realisation of what the subject wants.
To conceal the limits of an enclosure becomes a way to offer the freedom to go
anywhere.
Concealment of lack appears as the exposure of the infinite fulfilment of desire.
That which is fiction is offered here the possibility to become fact to ensure that it
never occurs. In this offer of perpetual fulfilment is the cancelled futures that Fisher
discusses in his ‘Capitalist Realism’.
If fiction of weightlessness is conflated as actual weightlessness through this
overarching post-factism how does this change the subject’s dependency upon a
register that is independent from them entirely? They are then beholden to that
which is indifferent to them. I need what does not care about me, which is close to
the rationale for desiring fascism perhaps.

What develops here in thinking about the trick in the field of capital is a question
about whether circus will acknowledge that its engagement with freedom is
perhaps to demand it, rather than pretend it exists. As stated, such a pretence is
merely fetishizing weightlessness into a commodity that appears to have the
intrinsic value of real agency.
This fetish is an ‘unknown knowledge’ that which, in claiming that the practice of
circus is a limitless, open and free practice, innately politicised, is merely being
subsumed into an ‘overarching fiction’.
 55

This larger fiction is categorised here as the subsumption of the capacity for smaller
fictions to activate exposure of seemingly total systems as limited, and which
becomes the neutralised apolitical activity of reproducing gravity and capital as
limitless benevolent regimes that are organised around and meritocraticly
responsive to the desire of the subject.

The over-arching fiction is the tautological ground, that fantasises there is no

incompatibility between registers, the smaller fiction is the one that can be
acknowledged and maintained as the quality of a proposed meta-position to this
incompatibility.

If we take this idea of a congruence between the production of commodity and the
production of signification and there starts to appear a homological relation
between the operations of language and that of capital then we can see how Marx
might apply to the image of weightlessness.
At this point it is good to ask circus: ‘in this practice that features displays of free
movement for an audience, how detached is this practice from narratives of
freedom and meritocracy within capitalism? And what prevents the delicate
demand iterated in the play fight with gravity from ending up as ludic self-interest?”

I wish here to proceed with another coagulation of semio-capital:

“…to reiterate, the idea of commodity language implies that commodity exchange
is structured like a language.”

(Tomsic, S (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious Verso. London)

“ The unconscious is structured like a language…”

(Lacan, J (1993) The Seminar of JL, Book III. The Psychoses. W. W. Norton. New
York.)

In Anti-Oedipus the unconscious is described as a factory, and the importance for

circus here is that the trick is a subject embedded in semio-gravity, producing
weightlessness as the ideological completion of desire; the freedom-production
necessary to maintain the enclosure.

PROFANITY:

Within this speaking of circus to power there is a reason for profanity.

In utilising the profane, which Agamben describes as ‘returning the sacred to

common use’ (‘What is an Apparatus’. Agamben, G. Verso. 2007) there is a feeling of
inappropriate use. In this idea I am referring to not just to the kind of object use that
circus employs; re-appropriating the everyday object to somehow highlight its inner
 56

life. I feel that this is an important element of the practice, and one that can
effectively puncture the colonial associations that come with the masterful use of an
object with which you choose to share the stage.
However this idea of profanity also speaks of the trick, in which somehow the
totality of the sacred is utilised against itself to suggest a new position from which
the sacred appears to be just another area within the common.

I have no idea if Circus has any capacity to produce such a thing, but I am asking
with how much profanity is it actually engaged in relation to its own narratives of
transgression; is it able to wrest weightlessness from its place in the temple of
gravity where it receives a vital demand for veneration but unattainable possibility.
Worship of weightlessness as freedom locates it as out of reach. Returning
weightlessness to common use could be thought of here as returning it to a shared
fiction.

I am thinking through this idea of profanity towards an established order not just as
a profaning of language, but also of Marx as a profaning of political economy, of
returning the means of production to labour-power.
The return to common use seems to be here a clearly Marxist idea of course in that
it is that is happy to undo the mysteries of the fetishized and therefore sacred
object, from which those that supply its power are alienated by the power they
transfer to it.
But profanity in language is then of course complicit in this reading as it then
resonates through Lacan and demands, perhaps, not a further political reworking of
the same conditions of impasse inherent in value or meaning but an
acknowledgement of the fictional condition of the subject in relation to these
structures as the only freedom available. Fictional subjects fictionally mobile.
Some of the past-life regression practices within the research have attempted to
engage with this as both a satire of post-factism and as a way of testing out this
fictional subject, as well as referencing the ‘profane’ practices of the sideshow.

The general tone of the profane as an act of making something previously

unthinkable or unreachable at least fictionally visible within the current alienating
formality of a system links us to the idea of the trick, and of taking things from
unusual angles, perhaps folding the entry point back on itself to reveal a point of
departure as in the knotted process of rope-writing. A profane slipknot, whose
‘pronunciation’ is organised around the disappearance of knots.
Unfortunately the rope of language itself is already knotted, and I feel capital
makes good use of this, presenting that which is bound as free.
The problem is this kind of pornographic contortion is already hard wired into the
profanities of capital, so that any untoward or ‘kinky’ approach is performed in an
already perverse context. This is the point, there is no pornography that can shock
the pornographer, who ‘captures’ it all on a loop of film.

As a surface in which capital takes on a linguistic potency: this landscape then is

thought of in terms of this congruence, between the way a prevailing fiction
 57

operates to neutralise the power of fiction to imagine possible alternative futures

through the instant ‘factualisation’ of that fiction, the act of which supposedly
‘realises’ the desire invested.
The potentiality of a dream is negated by it becoming possible to buy and it
therefore enters the waking world minus its potentiality; merely as a Disney Ghost,
an minimum wage drama-student in an off-white sheet.
The problem is that this process relies on concealing incompatibility and utilising
an excess that cannot be validated to forestall an inevitable lack. More excess is
needed.

The context is referenced through an awareness of the trick as no longer belonging

to circus, it is now become the obscene ground upon which circus fails to be
profane. What circus unwittingly speaks of now is the continuing obscenity of the
landscape upon which it politely pitches itself.

Capital and language are implied to share the same problem; both are immaterial
but effective, both rely on each other in a kind of reciprocal embrace, the condition
of becoming real relies upon the lie of excess as included, just as any 13% extra ‘free’
is possible because of a lessening of outgoing cost. Likewise, what is said by
someone ‘in the money’ can affect the price of eggs, just as much as money makes
the utterance of such a ‘somebody’ capable of altering the price of eggs.

Power makes the word have enough power to increase the power of the word. What
is unspoken here is that the price of eggs relies upon rumour, image, association and
affect just as much as its structural relation to the price of bacon and beans.

The embrace of affect and capital is one that is hidden from the paparazzi perhaps,
as neither can admit the other.
Within the vitalism of capital, money would never admit to being influenced by a
semiotic gesture, any more than such a gesture would admit owing its semiotic
power to money. And yet they meet and profanely copulate.
The Romeo and Juliet of Capital and Semiotics can never admit their love to either
Montague or Capulet; it remains concealed and therefore enables the kind of star-
crossed Romantic doubles act of lovers striving against the insurmountable odds of
the societal field that is perhaps the preserve of circus in agreement with capital
anyway.
Unfortunately, the unlikely chance of an inevitable mis-communication between
the two lovers means that neither is contemplating suicide any time soon. This is
something noted by Franco Berardi in that the mode of communication has evolved
beyond hand-written missives into an entire info-sphere through which the
congruence of language and capital propagates itself uncontrollably.

Berardi describes partly the info-sphere that mediates the connection of semiotics
and capital as:

“…digital technology [that] is based on the insertion of neuro-linguistic memes and

automatic devices…
 58

(Berardi, F (2015) AND, a phenomenology of the END. Semiotexte. Los Angeles)

And…in The Uprising he talks of the first and second level of languages complicity
with capitalisation; the processes of the monetarisation and indexicalisation of signs
that binds capital to semiotics:

“…the subsumption of language by the semio-capitalist cycle of production effectively

freezes the affective potencies of language.”

(Berardi, F. (2012) The Uprising. Semiotexte. Los Angeles)

Affect now is only something to be reduced from an excess to a procedural,

manageable quantity because the market offers to realise that which is promised in
the un-capturable excess or surplus of affect.
It promises the mermaid, but in a bottle, a unicorn, but on a lunch box, a haunting
but as a theme park. This hyppereality is well documented by Umberto Eco and it is
this proximity of affect to its use as a rationale for entry into a market that ‘freezes’
what is the effect of affect into the efficiency of the reproduction of capital. As part
of a project that encourages a culture of ‘fuck you, buddy’, as an expression of what
is uniquely and irrefutably ‘you’, It only is affect then that is profaned.

This is exactly what I mean when I say that there is a potentiality within fiction,
which can avoid becoming a fact and so avoid this ‘freezing’.
For me fiction remains liquid as it is not attempted to be made into fact: frozen
synchronically in the exchange rates and catalogues of trade in order that it meet
the quantitative criteria of the market. This is reminiscent of Deleuze and Gauttari’s
un-arrested flow of desire perhaps.

This point then about commodity exchange being structured like a language brings
us to a kind of confluence. When an utterance can be linked to a monetary value, or
when a sign is monetised and operates simultaneously and reciprocally as an
element within language and within capital. The interplay between how affective
implications of signifiers might escape difference and how tautologically capital
reduces everything to hard differential relations, the interplay here that is tied up
within the notion of desiring-production is captured in Berardi’s phrase ‘semio-
capital’
Which he categorises as a kind of landscape upon which certain abilities to
highlight the limitations of current systems are no longer operable…the body is fully
adjusted to the tautological ground, and each produces the other:

“In the sphere of the current bio-economic totalitarianism, the incorporation of techno-
linguistic automatisms produced by semio-capital has produced a form that is not an
external domination that acts on the body, but a mutation of the social organism itself.
This is why historical dialectics no longer work at the level of understanding the process
and the prospects: the prospect of irreversibility is replacing the prospect of subversion,
so we have to rethink the concept of autonomy from this perspective.”
 59

(Berardi, F. (2012) The Uprising. Semiotexte. Los Angeles)

What I feel is described here is the cancelling of futures imagined out of the
dialectical possibility. The fact that forms contain their own mode of evolution is
now unthinkable as an area of post-truth makes contradiction into a market, and
the materialisation of new forms instantaneous as opposed to those forms resulting
from contradictions, inconsistencies and perhaps exposed limitations within
previous forms

I feel that this is another way of saying if all tricks that can effectively demand
weightlessness are rendered inert by an over-arching trick installed within the
landscape, then we have to rethink the concept of the profane and the trick from
this perspective.

A BRIEF NOTE ON COMMODITY FETISHISM:

If we take a look at the most basic definition of commodity fetishism here by way of
designating the kind of known qualities of the circus body that are conveyed that
perhaps are the unknown divestment of value into a register that cannot support it.
This relates to the body, the signifier and the commodity as homological
equivalents between the fields of Gravity, Language and Capital.

Commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in

production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among
the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As such, commodity
fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective,
real things that people believe have intrinsic value.

This is a Wikipedia reference.

I am proposing that abstract here could be a homological equivalent to fiction.

In that abstract value might sit here as a definition of something that can only exist
as an abstracted form in terms of the concrete nature of things, commodities and
exchange values that are relationally discreet between each other in a subject-less
manner.

In terms of a ‘play-bite’, if we ignore the problematic inference of game theory, a

play-bite in the market would be that commodity which appears as the ‘same’ as
any other fetishized commodity but which encircles its ‘difference’ to that known
component of what seems to be the known and intrinsic quality, as being the fact
that this fictional, abstract quality simply is not present in the commodity that
appears to hold it. It appears as the same ‘known’ but which encircles the exposure
 60

of that known as an ‘unknown’. Just as the bite states this does not connote what it
is, the commodity would state that it does not infer its value exists within itself.
What kind of commodity could include such a reference to the negation of its own
ability to hold value as a fetish? Is this not pricelessness?

Here I am opposing abstract and concrete to relate to use and exchange value. The
values are abstract in the sense they exist as ‘meta’ to the terms that govern the
register in which they are fetishized, namely material, quantitative terms, that is
they are treated as if they are infra, that is as concretised commodity.
The commodity can only speak of other commodities, but the value that it utilises
as the medium of this horizontal relation derives from the inter-subjectivity that it
cannot pronounce.

In terms of exchange value the socially relative value is pure fiction, but it is a
fiction that it requires to define the qualities that enable a commodity to take up its
place in the field of the market; located in its designated orbit around other more
valuable items or in fact being surrounded by lesser satellites.

The fetish means the subject is absent; the alienation means the commodity is
inaccessible. In Lacanian terms we could think of this alienated subject as the
‘barred subject’.
There is the same reciprocality here in which a precedent is indiscernible, in that
each component sets the condition of the other. The register of exchange value in
which the commodity takes its place through the concretisation of abstract social
relations determines the parameters for those social relations as a productivity of
labour that must be met in order to reproduce capital, whilst those abstract social
relations are the origin of a value that is fetishized as intrinsic to the commodity that
in taking its place forms the market that is based on autonomous exchange-values.
The market sets the social relations and the social relations allow the market that
sets them. We have a chicken and an egg in which neither and both are the
commodities. It is this blurred treatment of ‘meta’ and ‘infra’ statement, the
conflation of that which can only be outside the market and that which can only be
inside of it that causes this endless referral to each other. Commodity and wage
labour become interchangeable as sentences about value that refer to each other
but in a tautological manner.

As in the Epimenides paradox:

The following wage labour is commodity.

The preceding commodity is wage labour.

What is necessary for exchange value to occur is destroyed within the register of
exchange. Thus we have a register that negates that which sustains it, which is the
‘character’ of capital that I am trying to highlight here as the ‘character’ of the circus
artist who imagines that freedom can be effectively measured in terms of gravity.
 61

Thus the tautology continues, exchange value requires a form of value it destroys
in order to materialise that value as intrinsic to itself, but the concealment of the
incompatibility here means that this contradiction is also concealed.

The myth of equivalence enables the capitalist owner of the means to pat a fair days
pay for a fair days wage and claim the surplus.
I do a trick, you applaud…that’s only fair…

The point here is about social relations, in which value is created, being abstract to
the terms of the register for which they are destined. I am therefore thinking of
these abstract relations as a fiction to the terms for which they are destined.

Welcome back Dear Reader…

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Nine.

HAPPY IS THREATENED:

After the first threats from his manager to pick up the coins, after the disgust he felt
at circus’s own vanity, after the distribution of his critique. The screw began to
tighten.

For every victory there is a cost, for every yard of territory, a mile of regret and
fleeing from the earth. Over the next few months the harassment escalated
however. This meant that Happy had to keep moving. Previously trusted safe
houses seemed to dissolve into self-interest as subjects fell in line.
There was comfort in the perfect performance of conflicted loyalty; it looked great
as an image, as it closed the door in Happy’s face.

“Look its not that I don’t think weightlessness shouldn’t be decided by gravity alone,
I do think that, its just that I’m getting soooo much work, and Its not just me, there
are others involved, y’know dependants…” Slam.

Or here in a friend’s doorway, a performance of “…I put away childish things.”

“Ha ha you should wake up, mate. This kind of left wing lunacy is just out of date. I
gave up playing cowboys and Indians a long time ago…no offence, chief.” Slam.

As the water holes dried up, the evaporation seemed to steam just ahead of him in
the once believable mirage of his allies.
 62

“Oh well a mirage that believes in itself had better enjoy making thirst of belief,”
said Happy drinking from the canal, huddled beneath a disused bridge.

Eventually they cornered him on the back row of a cinema, where they beat him
black and blue in glow of the Technicolor, watched by the flickering indifference of
the film lovers gathered there. Each punch, like popcorn, was delivered absent-
mindedly to the open mouth of his body, while the thugs watched the violent movie
of their own making.

It was a late-night showing of ‘Trapeze’, with Burt Lancaster, ‘who actually was a
trapeze artist, you know’. The fake veracity of Lancaster hit him hard between the
eyes.

He was hauled off to see the ‘boss’.

“Did you really think we would tolerate this kind of disruption?”

Happy had been roughly thrown to the floor in front of the imposing Chinese
Lacquer desk. Squinting through his black eye he could see the neatly cropped
white hair of Chingo Lame, not one of the chief architects of Circusism but someone
to be feared. The closest Chingo would ever get to the smoke-filled room would be
to gain an audience with someone who once cleaned the ashtray but he still revelled
in his limited power; he still commanded a network of operators.

“I don’t answer to you, Chingo. ‘Thou art not the hand that splits the dawn in
variegated blades of shadow and gets to choose then blink’ed daggers of the
light…’”

One of Chingo’s men, a leering, muscular catcher from a Mexican flying trapeze
troupe, delivered a well placed kick into Happy’s quote.

“We do not have much time for poetry here. There is too much to do. Your
theorising bores us. Marx is dead, Deleuze is dead, Derrida is deader; those that still
live obsess over the dead words. Here in Circusism we must simply and silently
move forward…”

Poetry was to Chingo as lace was to a washboard; Happy knew he was in a tight
spot, ‘here comes the detergent’, he thought, rinsed of words.

“Why are you down there, and me up here? Can you answer?” Sneered Chingo.

“You want that I should answer from all the way down here? Why, the words may
not reach you in time for you to receive my rationale, contemplate it, before I was
up and away…” Happy came up onto his elbows.

“You will never be up and away from down there…”

 63

“I know my place…”

“You no more know your place, or the reason for it, so bent are you on twisting the
facts of life.”

“The facts of life, my father told me how he and my mother made me.”

“They made you for the gutter.”

“I have tasted the water that trickles down from above and the very taste of it
reminds me that gravity is in the service of the wealthy.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, gravity effects every man woman and child in equal measure.”

“Why else does dirty water trickle downwards, if not to show the poor they are
beneath the rich.”

“Clean water trickles down too, idiot, moron, imbecile. As a man called Down-River
you should know that. Without gravity there would be no sweet rain, no hot
showers, no pristine waterfalls. And besides we in this Circusism don’t believe in
class, everyone is free within gravity to become weightless at any time.”

“At any time…weightless at any time. Time is the problem. Money has made time
so solid that it passes in units of value. This can only be undone by abandoning the
sequentiality of time…things that are worn out, broken, useless and dirty trickle
down into our hands. Gravity is a stream of piss.”

“So why are you down there and me all the way up here?” Chingo stretched longer
in his chair and smirked uneasily at his guards.

“Why else do things fall, why else is all matter destined for the black hole.”

“Are you being rhetorical?”

“I don’t have the strength…”

“He doesn’t have the strength boys. Well I will tell you that without gravity there
would be no possibility to be weightlessness.”

“You are stuck in thinking only this or that, like a man who would die in an avalanche
just to say he saw a black cat.” Happy felt confused, could he have been wrong, was
he merely swimming against the order to swim against the flow, didn’t that mean
he was actually complying with these idiots?
 64

“Well it doesn’t matter what you say about gravity, it is not going to change the
LUMP of you. You might say the only lightness you will experience is in the fact that
your critique of gravity carries no [Link] does NOTHING! Therefore it says
NOTHING! It is NOTHING!”

“Touche…but if it does nothing then why have you now bothered to put me all the
way down here?”

“It’s not the effect of your critique of gravity that has brought you down, but gravity
itself that puts you on the floor…you simply have no capacity for weightlessness,
you think that bleating about how unfair it is to labour under gravity will make you
float…this is Circusism, where everyone has the chance to fly…You cannot think
your way out of it. Weightlessness is measured in Gravity. You are down there
because you do not try hard enough to get up.”

“I’m saying that trying to get up is what makes it harder…circus is not what you have
made it, it goes on regardless, even outside of gravity.”

Chingo opened a drawer and threw a copy of ‘A Critique of Gravity’ at Happy. He

ducked and it struck the wall, which wobbled like a bad film set, causing a large
painting of a Fat Bearded Lady to come crashing to the floor.

“YOU SEE!” Shreiked Chingo, turning puce…it was his sister in the painting. The
bodyguards clumsily lurched around trying recover the portrait.

“Stay where you are!” He ordered and they leapt back into position, looming over
Happy.

”Here you are confronted with your weakness. Did you really think your tawdry little
pamphlet could alter things like this?” Chingo nodded to his henchmen who both
simultaneously performed a back somersault with a half twist, landing so that their
heels struck Happy sharply in the ribs. The pain made the entire scene go black
around the edges.

Chingo spoke softly like a hypnotist, “There! Did you feel that? That pain was
fashioned from the gravity that you claim is an illusion. Your proposition that tricks
are fiction…ha, TRICKTION! This is a lie, everything that happens in circus happens
within the well of gravity, everything that happens in Circusism is the proof that you
can be free within the well…’All is well’, so to speak.
Implying that freedom is impossible here is simply unhelpful. Gravity is not going
anywhere, any time soon. Circus without gravity is just nonsense. Circus people are
very angry at your dense academic drivel; they would throw you to the lions if they
could, they have thrown you to us instead. They are the pioneers, not you. Their
beauty in the face of gravity says more than your scrawling could ever do…”
 65

Chingo got up, came out from behind the desk, elegantly touched his toes and sat
back down again. He gestured to the embossed slogan above the door, which was
the emblem of the ‘circus police’, it read “WE ENFORCE CIRCUSISM”. He continued
his dreary exposition…

“Nothing can be made to move with any meaning unless it can be weighed in
some scale or other…just relax and feel the gravity, feel it pressing you now into the
carpet, relax…breathe…give in …”

Chingo fingered a green jade figurine of a young girl on his bureau. He touched the
girl in the exact spot where Happy’s rib was broken.
The velocity of intention was felt, all the way from the slave who mined the jade,
through the artisan who carved the image of the living girl, through the different
colonial homes and auction houses to the tip of Chingo’s grubby finger on his
disordered desk; the carved momentum of this instant was a solid jade object that
stretched through space-time, a trajectory of pain now aimed by the tiny gesture
directly into Happy’s body.
The pleasure that Chingo took from Happy’s pain was the amplification that never
happened but landed anyway, made from the fingering of jade.

Happy wheezed through the broken rib, and focused on the potted plant just ahead
of him. Its vines were contorted, purpling at the nub, interlocking, as the room
turned hazy. The tendrils seemed to flicker into new positions, and he wanted so
much to be an ant crawling on the chlorophyll possibility of those crossings.

“Sunlight into sugar, sugar into matter, I will shrug you off, you are nothing but
photons.”

“Stop whining, Circus is freedom, and you are merely standing in the way.”

Happy knew that all forms were delineated by a series of lines that tangentially
brushed the absence, forming it from the impossibility of acknowledgement in that
linear register, regardless of its impermissibility within the line of sight.
 66

“Now you have to choose: the punch line or the punch. Think of these wounds as
nothing but play-bites. These bruises are just the results of a great game. Choose
you next words very carefully Mr. Down-River. You are the cub and we are the Lions,
teaching you that a game has rules.”

Happy knew that rules believed that forms were real; that forms could both be
made by eyes that cannot see and therefore be seen by eyes that are not made.
Rules were nonsense. They are lines around a circle that is not there in any line. This
includes the circus as it is drawn by misguided trajectories. Its circle was being
rendered here by romantic ballistics that missed the mark repeatedly to form a
circle of a fictional circus. If the circle remains as affect that escapes a line, then it
makes a political demand that linearity is not a limited enclosure for the circle.

Chingo stemmed from the belief that a series of random intersections made a
viable handle with which to hold the world, just as he assembled himself as real by a
series of interrupted pictures of others. (philos desire p84 on mirror stage)

Just before Happy passed out into the sea of dark green tendrils, he whispered:

“Gravity is just an absence formed by where the lines of sight don’t fall”.

Blows rained down.

Black hole of unconsciousness. Ultimate gravity concedes that time is nonsense.

Sugar into lines of sight. The girl in the exact spot from Happy’s pain. The next few
months dried up sharply in the ribs. Circus people are very angry auction houses so
to speak.
 67

Marx is landing so that their heels spoke softly like a hypnotist. Nothing but play-
bites, I will shrug you off. Rules are nonsense, and we are the Lions.

I AM IN-KLEIN-ED TO AGREE:

“It’s cold outside… but come in and warm yourself on the frozen exterior”

So we are looking at a ground upon which the enclosure is no longer visible, because
to act post ideologically, free from doctrine, outside of external restriction is to
remain within the ideology of the right to that free action as absolutism.

In this sense the topology is one of a Klein bottle (or surface); within this knotted
structure the bottom of the bottle extends downwards, loops back up and proceeds
to pierce the side of the bottle again joining seamlessly with the opening at the neck
but from inside the bottle.
In this way the interior and exterior of this vessel form one continuous surface; it is
the three-dimensional version of the Möbius Strip.
Although this procedure can run both ways, I am suggesting that the tautological
ground upon which circus rests is such an enclosure, within which tricks performed
on certain portions of its surface can be shown as a genuine freedom exterior to the
bottle but which inexorably follow the surface upon which they are realised back to
the interior of the enclosure.
In this sense the Klein bottle is also a three-dimensional manifestation of desire
based on lack, in which the construction of meta positional statements rely on
components interior to the system in question.
I am aware of Zizek’s proposal of the subject caught on a Mobius strip and this idea
of an unorientable surface which both presents and hides itself is within the thinking
here.
What is presented here is a seemingly flat meritocracy that is actually a surface in
which all tricks to escape return the subject to the interior.
 68

The structure of trick to expose, which is tautological in that it moves through a

system to state something within that system that is not possible thereby
questioning the total authority of that system, is contradictorily utilised in a trick to
conceal, which simply implies that the statements that are impossible are in fact
possible and so no questioning of totality is necessary.
In this way circus that claims to be truly free is only expanding the totality of
gravity, and produces only statements that agree with authority.
Perhaps the problem is that the ground is not tautological enough in that meta-
position is conflated into an actual position, so the tautology is hidden in a fake
possibility for fiction to become fact.
Perhaps this is the antidote that Tomsic was speaking of when he referenced the
plague carried by continental psychoanalysis, that the processes of being made free
of irrational desire can be so easily reversed to create irrational desire that can be
directed in some way.
Here again is the idea that fetish can be perpetuated as a ground of not knowing
into which can be inserted commodity as a solution, in the direct mirror of a cure.
To escape this is to see these significations as your own? To see them as proof that
you are able to inhabit a fictional meta-position. But in this fictionality is a in fact a
weightlessness that could be construed as a directionlessness.

The tautological ground will be discussed further as a mutation of ideas that cancel
each other out. This idea of enforced mutation, or necessary evolution, is one I will
return to as it chimes again with a tactic that could be seen as something to counter
 69

the hegemonic enclosure of control mechanisms. It becomes hard then to imagine a

new kind of trick that could short circuit this capture.
Much of my research has been in this direction; of looking for differences in scale,
application or duration, utilising transposition of practices to try to perform a trick
on the circus itself, which I see as captured as a satellite of capital.
A more slippery trick may be to evolve out of the box altogether; to reject the
terms upon which the impasse within these three fields is based. One method may
be to extrapolate the perception that renders the box as consistently solid and
inescapable, to imagine another unseen layer, to fictionalise further outside of the
differential relations that dominate the trick itself.
.…in terms of warfare…all tactics are possibilities for all sides.

The image of the astronaut once more floats into view, hopelessly entangled in the
tube that is supposed to bring him oxygen.

Interior: a bunker deep in the Rand Corporation Headquarters.

The ongoing project to insinuate that the fictional event can be exactly the
same as a real event takes hold of all eggheads.
Eggheads at the Rand institute are all walking around under a fictional
light bulb…suddenly the light bulb turns on! Let there be Capital!

“Hey boys, instead of going to the moon, why don’t we just fake it?”

“Hey Joe, you’ve really got something there…why, are we not the world
leaders in cinema? I will run it past the ad boys in the morning…we don’t
have to beat the Ruskies we just have to be seen to beat the Ruskies.”

“Cream cheese anyone…” They fall about laughing in Warm-Tone.

Backslapping ensues at sixteen frames a second.

Cut to the ‘Moon’:

Armstrong plants the flag on the moon and his suit folds up like an empty
garbage bag.

“This is ground control to Armstrong…Armstrong…”

The operator covers the intercom with his hand, “Jesus, has he got stage
fright? If he doesn’t believe it how are we going to sell this to the American
people?”

“Gee, it’s real lucky we never went’, All the camera men agree this is the
best paid gig of their careers. Six months in a remote studio, filming moon
landings on triple paychecks.
 70

“Ok, Ok, that’s a wrap, let’s shut down for the day, boys, Somebody
revalidate Neil, he has self-negated again.”

Neil was prone to thinking of himself as real, which kept causing him to
faint.

“Ha, Never mind ‘Neil Armstrong’ , more like ‘Standing Leg-Weak’…eh

boys?”

No one laughs, as this joke is stale and does not go over in the stuffiness of
the Nevada film studio. No atmosphere.

THE EMPTY SUIT:

In this mode you use a form of thinking in doing to affect the area that is
incompatible with the material.

Two Aqua Lungs Don’t Make a Right:

“Kim knows that the first step toward space exploration is to examine the human
artifact with biologic alterations in mind that will render our H.A. (Human Artifact)
more suitable for space conditions and space travel… We are like water creatures
looking up at the land and air wondering how we can survive in that alien medium…
Kim reads all the science fiction he can find, and he is stunned to discover in all these
writings the underlying assumption that there will be no basic changes involved in
space travel.
My God, here they are light-years from the Earth, watching cricket and baseball on
Vision Screens (can you imagine taking their stupid pastimes light-years into space?).
Yes, sir, the fish said, I’m going to shove a little aquarium up onto the land, got
everything I need in it.”

(Burroughs W (1984) The Place of Dead Roads. Picador. London)

What would this be to no longer have to analogically ‘touch’ space, to actually go

there on ‘space terms’?

This research is to show how the trick is a process not defined by any gravity; in that
its refusal to be measured by the register of differential relation in the weightless
moment is its acknowledgement that it is only possible as a work of fiction…a fiction
in which it is possible to travel without a sace suit…to be weightlessly mobile
without the reduction to difference that analogy necessarily implies….,
The circus trick needs to evolve into all other fields through its practice within
gravity. The practice of meat against pull is a research for the trick in any field.
 71

So as the trick seeks to avoid capture by any gravity, that is any restrictive force,
then surely the trick has to avoid capture in analogy itself, which is the tool I am
using here to explain this…I am like a dog with a spade made of bone, I do not know
what to do. I will just dig a hole with my paws and bury the spade for later.
…the irony I am getting at here is that in seeing other forces that restrict as suitable
analogical ‘gravities’ we are all the while utilising analogy itself to designate them as
such. This is only the impasse in signification that I have already discussed but I wish
to discuss it here in relation to artistic research.

What is difficult here is that we must ask circus to always be looking at where the
restriction is and apply the trick to this area. Well, what is difficult and important
here is that analogy itself is extremely restrictive…

“…the kinds of transposition, which are of interest in the context of artistic research,
operate outside of registers of representation, resemblance or mimesis. Since these
notions suggest a functional identity between two things, for instance a score and a
performance or a sitter and his or her portrait, the change of position that a
transposition affords cannot be so potent that it disturbs this identity. Conversely if the
change of position affects what something is – that is, if an identity does not underlie a
difference but may emerge from it – a new non-representational, transpositional logic
is required in which something at its previous position is not easily reconciled with what
appears at its new position, altered as it is by the move. We may also express this by
saying that the logic of representation is singular, remaining the same across different
instances, while the logic of transposition is multiple, needing to be transposed from
instance to instance.”

(Ed. Schwab, M. (2018) Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic

Research. Orpeus Institute. Gent)

What is interesting here is that analogy is shown to be limited; and in the knotted
style I am employing I am proposing that the space suit that keeps us operable
within an unsuitable field is itself not suited to experience that field in the same way
that analogy might not be, then this again points to a deeper understanding of the
trick as it might be transposed into other fields. In making a third trick beyond the
terms that operate within tricks one and two, will I lose the identity that is looking
for agency; is this the desired agency actually, the unidentifiable subject? Roll up
and witness, the Invisible Man. Without the suit that shows he is not there he cannot
be present.
It is hoped the trick will emerge here, as I try to break down the logic of value that
iterates itself through these examples, approaches and figures. As we move towards
a third trick that is more of a play-bite on difference itself.

In highlighting that analogy is a kind of space suit we put on to travel to an area we

cannot understand, we are ‘touching’ that unfamiliar area in the gloved familiarity
of an analogy-suit…as I said, even in doing this we utilise analogy to describe
analogy itself.
 72

This endless shift from analogy to analogy is the same impasse within language
anyway.
Perhaps this is unhelpful, or perhaps it exactly describes the problem here; in
identifying analogy as a form of gravity, then this asks circus to evolve, and points
up its area of expertise not in being good at saying this trick ‘represents’ this idea,
but that the trick is about highlighting an area that is beyond the reach of the idea in
question
The trick is a Tool to highlight where it is not possible to go and fictionalise what
that journey is like, and again this is something of the impossible that barks itself
into the ring and what I have attempted to allow in my practice, not just here in the
writing but in pitching a circus with one stake, in making an epic road trip in one
breath, in travelling without moving, in trying to loop time.…

In designating representation as just another form of gravity I am of course pointing

up a fundamental incongruence between theatrical representation and circus, but
also that there needs to simultaneously be an admission of the fictionality of the
event of weightlessness, it is not as a capitalised circus would infer, the
demonstration of genuine freedom, but a ‘telling’ of it. The trick ‘tells’ of the limits
of ‘telling’.

THE UNSUITABLE SPACE SUIT:

The relevance to circus here is vital.

If the process of trick making has to first ‘see’ a restriction

If the space suit is what must be removed so as to experience space in terms not
dictated by space

Then this forms a link to a weightlessness that is experienced in terms not dictated
by gravity.

But there has to be an acknowledgement that this weightlessness is a fiction, and

then a determination to present that fiction as injunctive.

The trick simply questions totality in suggesting that the physical practice of circus
is organised around physically thinking outside of the image of gravity as a totality.

What is complex here is as complex as the trick. I am both proposing that analogy or
homology is an essential tool for me in this research, and which I feel is present in
the translation of theory to practice and back again; but I am also proposing that
this tool, which I am likening to a space suit, is the very glove that prevents you from
touching anything.
Michael Schwabb’s idea that your practice should become a form of writing is
valid, but I am asking is that possible without analogy; this space suit that enables
travel to other uninhabitable areas?
 73

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FICTION AND POST FACT:

To go there without a space suit; this is still the fiction of weightlessness?

I am saying that in order to get into space, you have to leave the spacesuit behind
and instead adjust your physiology to suit space conditions.
This fiction of a body evolved to suit the environment to which it wishes to travel is
again just a fiction of a metaposition above analogy, which suggests an impossible
‘pure translation’ of a practice into theory or theory into practice.
If this is a fictional metaposition, then let it be a science fiction, or a biological
fiction in which the construction of a suitability to go from theory to practice or
voice versa is the construction of the body as an unworkable analogy, the body of
practice as the impossibility of analogy, the physicality of the research to be an
impossible homology with the thing that is researched.
Changing into something ‘of’ space as a better way of becoming ‘about’ space.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE PRACTICE OF THE TRICK THAT MAKES ANALOGY

UNSUITABLE?
Is it even possible to construct an impossible analogy? Capital would say not. Is this
only possible as a fiction that evades the gravity of the inevitable signification that
must ensue, that can simultaneously never capture what was done?
It seems to me that in an acknowledgement of a literally psychotic propensity to
form patterns, links and knots between things, there is no possibility to remove the
space suit of analogy without theory suffocating in practice or practice suffocating
in theory; to get past analogy itself as an essential tool in artistic research.

Perhaps we should defer to Schwab’s remarks, and think of the potential clashes
and conceptualisations that can occur in such encounters between inappropriate
disciplines and prepositionalities. Perhaps again this refers to the profanity of
research as a positive, to profane past a reasonable analogy in to UNANALOGY.

The only analogy that I can propose here that might be unworkable in the body is
that the analogy itself is like a spacesuit that must be removed in order to turn the
body into an unsuitable analogy for space conditions.
This is perhaps my own psychotic propensity for Rope-Writing.
In the acknowledgement of exhaustion as a method, perhaps I am allowing the
theory suffocate within the practice of this knotted text.

WHO PAID FOR THIS SPACESUIT?

CAPITAL WILL ALWAYS FIND A WORKING ANALOGY; ALWAYS SUIT UP TO

GO WHERE IT CANNOT GO.

Just as the trick to expose is close in structure to that which conceals, so the
activation of fiction as a future proposal is close to fiction as something that can be
realised now.
 74

It can be said that the over-arching project of capital, which proposes that fiction
can be fact is the disabling of the capacity to fictionalise potential futures, so in
regard to the proximity between fiction as desire, or fiction as demand I have to ask;
is the process of artistic research only what capital uses anyway?
I am only asking this in the same way that I imply affect must be real as capital
utilises it all the time.
That is a question that surfaces as it becomes clear that transposing a practice into
an area unsuitable to it is a similar deterritorialisation as capital operates as it
proposes the association of an irrelevant object with the production of desire. The
practice of an autonomous register is transposed into a pre-reflective, instinctive,
qualitative and affective register where it operates to conceal the inevitable close of
sale that will negate those affects into profit.
I am asking this as I am concerned likewise about circus reproducing ideas that are
formulated on the reproduction of capital, so I am wondering am I likewise
compromised here in a circus orientated artistic research?
My concern is that Capital is engaged already in a research organised around
prepositionality; of purchase AS security, commodity AS family, product AS peace
of mind?

The difference is in the deception, as implied previously, capital is perhaps without

the courage to expose that analogy is compromised and impossible to remove?
That its removal can only occur in the elegant fictionalisation of a meta-position
that can occur in a trick that acknowledges that this fiction is nothing to do with the
terms through which it is iterated. It is a word that denies the authority of the letters
of which it is comprised.
The difference is that a profit in an artistically indifferent register is not the
intention of artistic research.

Capital prefers to conceal this problem of analogy never touching what it

describes, and claim that it can travel anywhere, naturally.

In suggesting that a purely affective element, like ‘joy’ or ‘security’ or ‘well-being’

for instance, are now available as commodities capital forms an analogy in the same
way I would do in trying to theorise ‘what is a trick in language?’
I transpose the delineated mechanism into language analogically without ever
touching what it really is to perform circus in speech or writing. Perhaps the point is
that I acknowledge and expose this impasse
Capital visits planet ‘joy’ without acknowledging that this joy exists on a wholly
alien register to the inevitable destination that capital has in mind, the register that
capital actually represents, the register that capital breathes; which is autonomous,
subject-less and joy-less. Not maliciously joyless, but only in the way that metal
pressed into embossed discs, or paper bearing an intricate design of a monarch is
joyless.
 75

CAPITAL AS AN ASTRONAUT

Well the difference is that I am here acknowledging that the gravity of analogy
permits no such meta-positioning and that my bridging is pure fiction; I am here
acknowledging the impasse that is set within the praxis.
Capital, in highlighting that joy is for sale, is suggesting the fictional possibility of
capital to really be there, to really visit ‘joy’, to inhabit ‘joy’, thus concealing the
contradiction of pricelessness for sale.

Subsequently capital cannot admit that it only went there in a space suit, it does not
admit that it only went to joy analogically, through association, by spuriously
attaching joy to some irrelevant ulterior object in order to reproduce itself at your
expense, who needed ‘joy’, who desired it and was promised it faithfully, who were
tricked.

Upon purchasing joy it was realised that capital was in the space suit the whole time
and that it has no more propensity to breathe the joyful air than Armstrong can take
an honest lung-full on the moon. It is in this sense the Moon landings were fake.

In not admitting that there is an impossibility to get from where capital lives to ‘joy’
without a space suit, capital proposes exactly what we are saying, which is that the
fiction of a meta-position beyond analogy becomes fact in capital.
If capital were to admit to needing an artificial means of analogically appropriating
‘joy’ as a commodity this would be admitting that the register through which it
intends to iterate joy is a register that is wholly unsuitable to ‘joy’.
In this admission capital’s limitless ability to go anywhere would be exposed as a
lie. In this way capital is an artistic research that has to continue the fiction that
there can be a ‘pure translation’ of capital into anything, this non-admission of the
difficulty of such research and the impossibility of meta-position is a fetishisation; as
it implies the continuation of the knowledge that does not know it cannot get
outside of the ‘gravity’ of analogy.
For me, perhaps Schwab’s ‘Transpositions’ seems to be aware of the associative
power of capital perhaps to survive long enough in what it must feel is the vacuum
of affect to make its analogies and close the deal, and so it proposes other more
subtle modes of trans-individually recogniseable identities.

Again I am stressing that this propensity for the trick to conceal is as prevalent as it
is for it to expose.
The analogy here is convoluted I admit that, but in positing analogy as a space suit
that helps you to go from one register that you understand to one that you do not, I
am stressing again that it is important to acknowledge that practice as research is a
fictional meta-positioning where you fictionalise the practices of the body as
adjusted to the conditions within a register that are unsuitable for them to inhabit.
This is the same acknowledgement I am urging for the circus artist to engage with;
that the freedom they present is a fiction.
It is this acknowledgement that keeps the fiction alive as a play –bite, which as
Massumi describes is the encircling of difference in similarity.
 76

There is a fiction of a body that is suitable for space by being unsuitable for analogy;
that is the space suit is no longer necessary. This fiction is vital so that you can
imagine that you are suffocating in a register in which you cannot breathe, rather
than constantly checking that you are analogically alive there…
Perhaps I am guilty of this…
In asking circus to think past gravity…I am asking it to think past capital and
mechanisms of language that it appropriates…and this is a larger point, that the
trick is composed of this ‘thinking past’ and yet it is not being activated…this
thinking past is not even about capital, it is way beyond that into deep space travel,
millennia hence when capital is a distant tale told by an idiot…

THE TRICK: It is a tool for thinking…PAST…

Doctor Hyundai: “Past what?”

Patient: “Thinking past even thinking itself…”

Doctor Hyundai: “Very interesting…”

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Ten.

Cut to a low orbit around the moon:

Happy drifts bleeding oxygen; far from home in an alien environment: If he

dies in this unknown area would this constitute a kind of evolution to that
area. If we die to the alien area is this the activation of ‘seeing’ that area,
beyond the necessity to fictionalise it through a space suit, through a Geiger
counter, through a telescope?
Happy was drifting in and out of consciousness, he didn’t know if he was
really here in a space suit…he had no recollection of the training program;
of the launch.
Why could he not recall the goodbyes, the camaraderie of space flight,
the kudos, the shuddering terror of the rocket…he could remember nothing
of agreeing to undertake this journey, had he been hypnotised? He was
drifting, gasping, delerious…he had the most vivid picture of standing in the
kitchen…breathing through a darkening glass of oxygen starvation…

No, he was here and he was running out of oxygen, the dull, moist hiss of his
breathing was slowing; the ever decreasing circle of vision flickered like a
19th century vignette around a black and white safari.
“I wish this was a film…” thought Happy, trying to flatten his breathing
into silver nitrate in celluloid lungs.
He had originally scoffed at Armstrong. But when he was given the chance
to go to the moon had he simply jumped at the chance. Jumped out of his
body to get into the iron bellows of the suit?
 77

Now here he was floating in a low orbit, next to his shattered capsule
breathing in the last of the oxygen. Had he really agreed to this, had he
even been trained?
“They say that asphyxiation is the way to access magickal states, “ he
thought of Joe, conducting bizarre rituals and laughing as he conjured the
old, dark spirits..
…was he really here, is this it…

He looked down and saw that he as holding a feather, was this standard
equipment for an astronaut…he felt like Dumbo the elephant in a Disney
circus moon-shot cartoon…the cannon way below. The human cannon ball…

“He went off without telling his wife…” the off colour joke was glowing red
around his retina as he gasped in the airless helmet…so cold now…if I could
just clear my thoughts, I can figure out what to do…he blacked out into a
reverie…

He needed to clear his thoughts, he needed to escape this airless

freedom…he was in the kitchen…

THE BEGINNING OF THE EMPTY CUP:

“Happy stood at the sink, he had to clear his mind. He took the dirtiest
coffee cup he could find on the counter, still half full of three-day-old
coffee,
“This is Un-Half Full…” he thought unwilling to commit to the binary of
outlook. “We do not need this useless duo of designation.”

He placed the dirty cup underneath the tap and turned it on; not too much
pressure, enough that a trickle of clean water began to fill the thick,
congealing brown liquid. It had lumps of turned milk in it that danced
around in the circle of Brownian choreography as he looked on.
His thinking was now in the cup, plugged into the water, in the sink. The
thinking swirled and different pieces came to the top to meet the incoming
stream, coming up each to each was submerged by the very energy of their
ability to reach the surface.
The thinking had occasional bubbles, thin skinned concepts that, although
their form was perfect, held nothing but the negation of that which they
were composed, ideas that formed from encircling a business that was
nothing to do with them. The bubbles burst, unable to sustain an empty
form in the unsuitable viscosity of the drink, but spheres of nothing had
been there and they had escaped then a definition in terms of the thing
that made them possible. They were like prayers of an unbeliever, bubbles
to god blown in a heathen broth.
There were circular eddies that gathered energy in the wet thinking only
to fold over themselves at a zenith of pattern recognition, to once again be
smooth and illegible. Elusive thinking rising to the top of the cup.
Then there was the overspill, the bulging of the surface tension at the
lip, the last law that could mitigate the excess, before the new clean
thinking, the blank water forced the muddy whorl to speak over the rim.
 78

Past this edge the dark ochre was running over the sides of the cup and
down the event horizon of the drain. Slowly clearing.
The bubbles, the white flecks persisted but a subtle tonal shift occurred
in the thinking, the colour was lightening, the thinking was getting clearer
moment by moment. The thinking received the clean water that replaced
yesterday’s dirt in suspension in the day before yesterdays boiling
enthusiasm.
In its excess the thinking behaved to expel all the debris and stain, to slip
the leash of the unwashed and bark cleanly at the sun that now refracted
through the thinking to show it clear and free of broken pieces, it was a
clear, overflowing thought, a clarity that ran over the edge and was the
same colour of foison as that contained within itself.
Its movement undifferentiated from itself as everything was in a clean
cup on a new day here at the beginning of time. He was clear.
And in this magic act that was indistinguishable from a science, and from
an art, in the mundane hoodoo of the day there was a better thinking than
thinking.
His thinking was the doing of this rinsing. Happy watched as the
materiality of the cup and clean water and drain all thought themselves
clear and this moment was undifferentiated from his own self, from cup,
from day, from now. He was freed of thought-law by things.
And if someone were to try to quantify what had happened here in
words, all they could say was that a man washed up a dirty cup at 11:33 on
a Thursday morning in November.

This is Practice as Research…no different from a spell, or an art, or a

science. Nothing really happened and as such it was an event.

THE END OF THE EMPTY CUP:

Happy jerked to full awareness, the last clarity before oxygen death, ‘Alas, I
am here’, gasping , choking, ‘Alas I am here…’ the pulsing and deep trauma
of sucking in his own carbon dioxide gripped him in a panic, he was being
woken to death, each alarm going off in the body alerting him that unless
he addressed the non-negotiable register of chemical and neuro-electrical,
purely quantitative reactions everything thing he thinks he is will cease to
be, ‘the body does not care if it dies’ it is just reacting to the new situation
as an inert system, changing form, it is only me as the instrument that
registers death that can register the ‘care’ of death…

My body is hard wired with language , with capital and gravity, I am wired
up to see something else

Gasping for air that wasn’t there Happy Down-River, simply took off the suit
and flew home.

“That’s a wrap”, said the cameraman.

…Blackout!
 79

PAR DARLINGS:

The complex point is that Practice As Research includes a kind of voodoo of affect, a
qualitative dimension to something that is un-seeable in the materials.
This is then the fictional power of an event in which the cleanliness of cup ‘demands’
that the mind should also be cleansed.

There is I feel a circus trick deep within artistic research itself as in order to activate
practice as research we need to activate a ‘doing’ that is experienced in terms
dictated by ‘thinking’.
And this involves analogy. As in the example of the Dirty Cup: there is a positive
outcome here in which, the analogy between cup and self becomes so fixed that
operation in one ‘means’ operation in the other…this is a specific kind of attention
needed to do this ‘thinking’ by ‘doing’.
We have to fashion a spacesuit to wear, made of various things and processes; we
have make an analogy.
We have to admit that the thing we are trying to do cannot be registered in any
component of the analogy; we will not feel through the suit. We can only feel by not
registering in the register we need in order to go there; we will make a fictional
meta-position; an undoing of the suitability that is pure fiction.

This positive outcome is due to weightlessness acknowledged as a fiction, so that it

can execute an injunction upon the body. The body and the cup are pulled by this
play bite into a transindividual space, into space conditions, and both the cup and
the subject fictionalise that they can go to the register of the other through the
fiction of an unworkable analogy. Is this a trick?

Perhaps it is just a spacesuit without organs?

What am I getting at? Why is this important? It is because the process that I am
describing, of having a bath…to get clean…and this makes an affective cleanliness
of thought…this is analogy…a suit which we wear composed of bath and soap and
water and taps and plumbing and heating elements and power and mining and
turbines and labour in order to access this realm we cannot otherwise get to…and
the space suit of the bath is the analogy that we wear to inhabit the uninhabitable
vacuum of affective cleanliness of the spirit.
We cannot get the soul clean, so we do it through by wearing a space suit of suds
and soda.
In this sense having a bath is artistic research in that the cleaning is one thing, but
the reset of the mind, the new feeling of freshness, the way this alters the day, the
feeling of the day, the way the day can be re-conceptualised…this is beyond the
activity of water with the skin, soap with sweat and oil …something else is activated
and achieved here in the doing of the bathing the day is re thought.
The thinking of the day is bathing, and in this sense there is a practice as new
knowledge of the day…this is what I am calling affect and which in the realm, or
 80

register, or measure of the chemistry of H2O and bodily fluids where there is no
recognition or permission for such knowledge to exist, such knowledge cannot exist
within the register of these things. This means the assembly of objects, the
activation of a ritual can add up to something that is not registerable there.
This is magick. Is this a trick?

THIS KIND OF ‘CLEANING’ IS A FICTION IN THE COMPONENTS OF

CLEANLINESS, SUCH AS WATER SOAP, BATH ETC.

This is the rub, that then we must call this new knowledge fiction, because it is a
‘telling’ of the body as cleaner in thought than it was before the doing of the
bathing, and this ‘telling’ cannot be told in the minutiae of the reactions that can be
said to have happened in bathing, it is fiction because it is the ‘telling’ Of something
that has not happened.
To really speak about space travel is to engage with weightlessness not in terms of
gravity…
As a model for circus thinking…Niel Armstrong is not thinking outside the box, but
within the space suit…still talking about breathing in terms of vacuum. We circus
artists have to get past this, thinking more like Uncle Bill:

“The trick is ‘thinking past the thing that creates the restriction’ and not just
‘thinking past the restriction’”

Burroughs, W. ‘He Never Said This.’ Methuen, 1985. P-159.

This requires research. The trick moves ‘through and against’ simultaneously as a
fiction, a fiction that demands freedom not on the terms of the restriction that
necessitates the metaposition to only exist as a restriction, as opposed to a fantasy
of freedom that is taken as real…or a fictional statement that is a real “quote”.
A true circus trick is one in which weightlessness is no longer measured in terms of
gravity…
Also in talking about your fictional response to insurmountable force…no matter
who opposes you…you have to front them out; to fictionalise your victory.
”Let it come down…”

A NEW KIND OF CLEANING…WITH AFFECT!

Capital’s operations to reach into areas that it cannot go, ie areas of affective quality
makes exactly this kind of conflation in which it seeks to profit from visiting these
areas where it is not welcome but only on its own terms…capital is like Armstrong
on the moon, claiming it is there on the moon of affect, when it is in fact only in a
space suit of capital because it cannot breathe there….
 81

To recap then:

1: To be in a metaposition is necessarily a fiction.

2: To be beyond analogy is just such a metaposition.

3: Therefore to be beyond analogy, that is, outside of your spacesuit is

necessarily a fiction.

4: You need to get outside of your suit to perform artistic research, to get
beyond analogy.

5: To avoid being similar to the operation of capital there needs to be an

acknowledgement that this is fiction, and that this fiction is an injunction on the
gravity of analogy.

6: Capital implies that the metaposition is attainable, that it is something that is

not fictional but can be made real within capital. It implies that quality is not in a
different register, because what is implied is that it is within the limitless
register of capital.

7: Capital claims it can represent quality un-analogically that is, without a space
suit, by metapositioning itself in post-factism; it therefore does not reveal that
this is impossible. It cannot do this it can only represent quality analogically in
an alien register; through exchange, which necessarily reduces quality to
nothing but a fabricated use value for the reproduction of itself as
metapositional.

8: Capital cannot admit the fiction it perpetrates, as the concealment of this is

vital to the project of the continued reproduction of capital as an area in which
fiction is the same as fact. Capital has to keep on lying.

Does artistic research agree with capital; only if the fiction of meta-positionality
remains unacknowledged.
What does this mean for artistic research? I can only speak for myself as an
instrument within it. Perhaps for me that I have to try to privilege its essentially anti-
capitalistic tendencies, in that the new knowledge is detectable only by the
instrument, the subject, that is denied or reduced to a secondary position by the
primacy of horizontal relations of difference between different knowledge-values.
For me it means that fiction has to be employed and be validated upon its own
terms.

I am writing this in the bath…soaking in Radox ‘wake Up’ foam energiser with extra
soothing peptides.
 82

I will return to the tautological ground again shortly as I feel there is more
background to this idea of individualisms and personal validation that needs to be
explored. But I wish to digress into a research I made with ropes.

A FILM ABOUT ROPE-WRITING:

“THE RIP-OFF” or “K IS KNOT HERE”:

These kind of conclusions about capital can seem good on paper. During the
research period that came after the first initial road trips, where I attempted to
speak circus on the road I set up a series of experiments in trying to get the material
of my practice to hold the ideas about tautology that I was developing.

In regard to really applying rope to paper then I undertook an experiment with a

friend of mine to see if it was possible to suspend the body in paper using knots that
formed a kind of writing in the flimsy surface.
I tried to follow the material, I tried to follow the idea within the material. I tried to
handle the ideas and ‘write’ myself as suspended in the paper. I tried to allow the
tying of a self-defeating knot to be a kind of writing suspended in the paper.

Film outline:

This research is referencing how we tried to look at tautology in the material. How
can we ‘write’ with rope in the paper, how can we explore self collapsing structures,
which were informed by thinking about being on the road in previous experiments,
and what is the relation between a practice and a way of thinking?
We brought many analogies with us, some were formed along the way. This is a
description of how we tried to activate through the knowledge and practice that we
held in our hands some of the ideas that they seemed to suggest.
There was a focused technical expertise to this that was lead by the material and I
include it here because in this two month long exploration with rope and words and
shackles and knots and paper there were a few moments when the material and the
praxis and me were fictionally metapositioned, and the space suit was off.

Here follows the description that accompanies the documentation of this film:

LINK: [Link]

I wanted to investigate material again, and try to build some structures that could
come with me on the road, but which could collapse as quickly as they were erected.
I wanted to look at how the negotiation of a material came with its own language
of jargon and implicit babble.

This was an encounter with Wille Christiani and the task was to rig collapsible
structures using only rope and paper.
 83

As rope has been used to create straight lines in architecture so we were looking for
ways of knotting and threading that could create collapsible structures, with the
feeling of the circus tent.

Five parameters here (four impositions and one freedom)

1. That it could be a complex structure, like a circus tent. Design goal.

2. That this impossibility of rigging with paper was a match for the impossibility of
speaking circus. Re-transposition.
3. That the complexity of it would generate a way of speaking that we could look
at as an iteration of speaking circus. An output.
4. That the materials chosen and our work with them could stand for ‘paperwork’,
for the complex rigging of legal, juridicial and academic apparatus, through
which we could look for ways that a body could fall or be supported or travel. A
metaphor.
5. That this would also be, outside of any metaphorical constructs, an
investigation of the thingliness of the substances approached, that we
approach them slowly, carefully…being attentive to what they wanted to do…
A negotiation.

We wanted to apply circus problems to the research material of paper.

Paper as a something impermanent, as something that could pop up on one of our

journeys, as an even more fragile , ephemeral tent…as another carrier of erroneous
theory…as a substance that, due to its lack of rigour, due to its role as bearer of PhD
research proper, due to its status as the legally binding statement of permanent
leasehold on property and commodity…I wanted to try to make it do some things it
should not do…

It is a legally binding document…I wanted to see if it could physically support the body.
Paper in its designated role as a juridical substance is investigated against its will,
outside of the parameters that they themselves seek to limit.

To deal with it as a wild animal constantly getting away from you…

Paper as both a binding legal contract and a substance fugitive from my control.

There was an experience here of an incompatible union. The knot itself , in that it
was tied in accordance with the premise of a godellian trick, that is it was tied to be
something that appears to be there but is not. The knot is not there and formed the
title ‘K IS KNOT HERE’. In this sense the unorientable surface of the knot, as
something held in place only as a ‘fiction’ to the rope, and that as soon as the rope
were loaded, ie activated as a load bearing object, ie become differentiated from its
ripeness by a specific ‘use’, as soon as this rope entered difference the knot ceases
 84

to be. It was tied this way as a slip knot so that it would undo upon loading, but the
point here was to examine a surface that would be destroyed by this problematic.
The paper then represented the fixing of these un- knots these fictions in rope into
a surface of post truth. And in this regard the knots formed a kind of post truth
hieroglyphics in fictions of rope (slip knots that cannot endure difference) that were
seemingly fixed into a surface of post truth and which do not raise any
contradiction…the loading of the rope represents what is exposed when the hard
difference of the autonomous register is exposed; the knot as a trick supposedly
written into a surface that wholly supports and enables it disappears as it was only
ever a fiction of rope and the surface that supposedly was able to carry it is
destroyed as unable to both sustain hard difference and an unorientable fiction that
sits suspended between differences as neither this nor that…a tautology is written
into the paper, that destroys it as it exposes that differentially determined surfaces
incapacity to house what it proposes , namely something in excess of difference, a
knot a loop a tautological statement…

LINK:

[Link]

After this time, which was early enough to be close to the road trip, but not yet far
enough away from it to allow me to process exactly what bothered me about it.
I know now it was the capture, it was not an activation for me of escape; the
proximity to the imposition of narrative that the film-maker brought with him, the
insistence within the journey that the tropes of its structure would somehow form
us into characters was the opposite of the fictional suspension that I was after.
I was not interested in the escape becoming real, and how that would make me
into a character that was redeemed on the road. I was interested in how aimless
travel was linked to aimless speech.
I did not look to a journey to put me in a suitable analogy.

THE USA GOING TO THE MOON WAS THE SAME AS CAPITAL GOING INTO
LANGUAGE…and capital is very much a space man who wishes only to remain
firmly in the spacesuit, he likes to imagine he is evolving into a space being, into
space conditions, but value like any system of gravity, simply will not permit
anything except the reduction to the difference between a vacuum and a lung
breathing ape…CAPITAL is going Weightless, is just so capital can reproduce itself
on an ‘all you can eat’ diet...there is no desire to change or travel anywhere…

Happy knew that the space program of the 60’s was about the longer term. Once
the laboured threat of communism was inevitably subsumed by the voracious
apolitical nature of capital, a new politics could ensue, one which was non-
 85

negotiable but which had to be couched in terms of freedom. How to make

something utterly indifferent look as if it was a game in which anyone could win?

The idea was to present an image of weightlessness, and this would be the
freedom on offer, and who better than the all American male?

No one was saying that Armstrong did not ‘go’ to the moon, but that the entire
escapade was the equivalent of a fiction that nobody would own up to, just as
money is the equivalent of value.

The Freedom that was proposed that filled the hearts of every boy on earth had to
be proposed in terms of American capital. Images of a Communist on the moon
would be a disaster.
In this way, in the same last minute fashion that an ideology was constructed with
which to clothe capital, the US space program was on the back foot. It only existed
in response to Marxist ideology. It got there first but with a set of ethics that were
built only out of a desire to invalidate a set of ethics. The ideology of capitalism was
a ‘communist repellent’, and as such it was unexpectedly toxic.

In this way the moon landing WAS fictional, as it was pulled off, like an impossible
circus trick, under the direction of a negative space that existed around the
supposed solidity of communism, which was hardly better, in
Happy’s opinion at least. It was done in the service of that which exists only to
counter that which exists.
It was the ‘not-there’ to Soviet ‘there-ness’. It was done to prevent a catastrophe, a
man on the moon who did not believe in private ownership, perhaps not even in a
fixed and in-div-id-ual self-identity!
It was an inversion of a long dive into an impossible bucket. The desire behind it
was simply so that no one got to perform the same trick.
Happy put on his best deep southern drawl…

“Jonny, why did ya do it?”

“I only did it so’s Boris wouldn’t get to go first.”

To let go of ‘things’ formed a solid ideological object of which capital is the shadow,
letting go of ‘things’ was something capital wanted nothing to do with.
The illumined moon was visited by shadows in 1969. The moon shot was a trick
performed to install the tautology that an ideology, which is only formed as the
umbra of another more solid ideology, is still an ideology.
To push a drug that made you think all drugs are evil, you had to push what looked
like nothing but a harmless placebo shot.

It was an image of weightlessness as an image of freedom in the service of a system

of difference that could not ever permit such freedom. The weightlessness ‘imaged’
in black and white on the moon was not ever free of the gravitational terms that
existed back on earth.
 86

A communist weightlessness however, Happy thought, now that was a trick. It was
weightlessness not couched in terms of private property; it was the weightlessness
available to those who could let go of a thing. Here was a trick that acknowledged
itself as a trick, that made a demand; to be free of gravity we need to evolve beyond
gravity, beyond property, beyond value, otherwise we are just in a weightless
moment organised around the primacy of gravity.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION:

Cut to a film set in the Nevada desert. The mesh fence is hot to the touch; the guard
dogs pant and sneeze and have fine, dry sand between their teeth.

Neil is on a break, trying to get into role;

“Guys, guys, guys, how can I look weightless if I don’t feel weightless?”

The tech boys shrugged, “all we can do is attach more wires Mr. Armstrong.” They
gathered round him. “Look we can attach wire A here to your forehead, then, say
wire B through G can attach to chin, shoulders, elbows etcetera. About 26 wires
should do it. We gotta alphabetimise you.”

Neil shook them off angrily. How could he expect them to understand his art, “But
don’t you see, that stuff is just the mechanics. I gotta FEEEEEL it. The audience have
to FEEEEEL it. I gotta get into this spaceman thing, I gotta really believe…Do you
have anything that can, you know, make a fellah feel lighter maybe?” He winked All-
Americanly.

“Well, Mr Armstrong, there are any number of chemical, uh, enhancements we can
make…”

Not knowing how to play it with the blue collar workers, Neil dropped into his
gangster routine:
“Now listen here you buncha torpedoes! Screw that, and stop bumping gums, boys
we all know wires is straight off the cob, am I right? Take me up in the plane again; I
need to be in free-fall. I wanna go all the way, and I don’t mean fudge with ice
cream.”

The tech boys looked at each other, this meant refuelling the plane (Ol’
Immanence), waking up the pilot and going up to high altitude to perform endless
dives in which Neil and every object in the plane would behave and appear, as they
would do in the weightlessness of space. The tin can of the plane would behave
reverse-wise according to Einstein’s thought experiment in which gravity is posited
as no more than the constant acceleration upwards of an enclosed area, outside of
which perception is not possible.

This inability to see that gravity is only the result of an accelerating frame was what
 87

made gravity ‘real’. We cannot see the outside of the tin can; we cannot see the can.

Within this illusory frame therefore, the plane would construct a further illusion that
created the opposite effect to gravity, so it looked like nothing weighed anything,
and vice versa.
However, it could only achieve this by merely copying the overall conditions of
limited perception, to create a further enclosed environment, a limited point of
view, in which a virtual freedom of movement could be experienced. In this way the
inability to ‘see’ was magnified to give a sense of freedom. It could be said that this
merely rubber-stamped myopia as the defining authority of gravitation, in which
appearance of lightness was lightness.
The production of freedom became the reproduction of myopic enclosure. The
production of weightlessness became the reproduction of our inescapable mass. We
see ourselves as weightless through gravity’s eyes. Etc. etc.
The whole realisation just simply ‘weighs’ too much, thought Happy idly.

The technicians, trying not to catch each others eyes, responded likewise: “It’s
gonna take a lotta cabbage to get that bird in the air, Mr Armstrong. Right now we
got the bulge on those Commie bastards, but, and if I can speak plainly, you lollygag
on this milkshake and the butter and egg man is gonna go soft in the kitchen.
Besides the cheese and bits don’t want you playing this like no hoodlum, gotta be
real smooth, like a regular Ivy League college boy, real edumacated, see?”

“Well ain’t you cute as a bug’s ear.” Neil paused; his mouth flapped open and shut
like a filly, who just woke up to the fact that all is not eggs in coffee.
These half portions were gumming the works, and Neil knew that any amount of
Lincolns was worth not seeing Joe Stalin singing ring-a-ding-ding like a moon-side
Sally. This was no trip for biscuits, it had to be the big pay off.

“Fire up Ol’ Immanence…we’re going to make ourselves weightless, boys”

The technicians sighed and consoled themselves by adding up the overtime.

In the free falling plane Neil Armstrong could experience the illusion of an inertial
frame of reference upon which no forces were acting. The only ‘acting’ going on
however would be from Neil himself who whooped, puked and then cried as he
experienced the overwhelming sense of freedom that he wished to portray.

“Just get me in the blue yonder, youse crumbs!”

Joe the head technician sighed, “This dumb wheat is just chiselling at a Brodie.
Instead of soiling a perfectly good flight suit, he should just try to come up with
something classy to say when he hits the paydirt. Something real epic.”

AEROPLANE INTERIOR, DAY:

At 40,000 feet Neil was feeling woozy, the words seemed to float around his
 88

head…couldn’t put two and two together if he only had four fingers…overwhelming
sense of Neil, high altitude to perform fudge with ice cream…every object in the
plane would behave to Soviet “there-ness”. It was done to prevent a thought
experiment in the blue yonder. The tin can of freedom is gonna go soft in the
kitchen. Who whooped?

In the free falling plane, not knowing how to play it, this was no private property.
High authority of gravity; cute as capital. He threw up to blackout.

“Some trick,” mused Joe, tapping the fuel gauge. “Let’s hope he gets that
‘weightless’ feeling this time, eh boys?”

*****
You are presented with yet another impasse. This part of the sideshow is
perhaps not for you, but from this foyer it can be explained as a deeper
look into the political landscape that might constitute a tautological
ground. Isiah Berlins two forms of liberty are seen to circle each other here
and R.D. Laing’s theory of escape from circular binds will be stood on its
head, while the infinite number of monkeys on the stock exchange conspire
to ride the tautology for all it is worth; a circular act that involves a dead
horse and much flagellation.
I fear the time debt is too great here for you to step inside, but there are
holes in the canvas at p108 and p145, and the conclusion to this chapter
awaits you at p152.

***

This section stands as a brief examination of some of the ideas that seem to lead to
a society in which everyone is expected to operate some kind of individualised
deconstructive mechanism that will lead them to freedom, as a method of
perpetuating a master system of control and exploitative, unaccountable power.
In this sense it looks at some of the ideas that are satirised in Circusism; a society
in which tricks are performed for personal gain in the face of a concealed but
inevitable lack, a lack that is forestalled by applause that seems to validate the trick
as the genuine iteration of freedom. It examines some of the detail that informs the
compromised idea of freedom I am getting at, whereby a surface that could be
identified as tautological, contradictory or paradoxical is presented as a flat,
meritocratic plane. This plane is maintained as endless by its ability to imply that the
appearance of freedom is the equivalent of the real thing.
 89

It is complex, in that it looks at how a circus and its tricks might become a force of
gravity if those tricks are installed as the neutral ground that invalidates further
tricks that seek to highlight the limits of the ring itself.
It is complex in that a post-ideological position is regarded as the over-arching
societal model that must be perpetuated.

GAME THEORY:

It is the time of the Space Race. Two conflicting ideologies are ranged against each
other at great potential cost.
The Cold War required strategic thinking on both sides and a well-funded
department was created in the United States to shore up the capitalist ideal against
the communist threat.
Established in 1948; it was financed by military funding from the U.S.
government and by private endowment, corporations, universities and private
individuals.
It currently describes itself as aiming “for interdisciplinary and quantitative
problem solving by translating theoretical concepts from formal economics and
the physical sciences into novel applications in other areas, using applied
science and operations research.

This think tank, known as the Rand Corporation, set about formulating a
rationalisation of capitalism as being an implicit component of democracy.
RAND stand for Research And Development.

It is important to note that this rationalisation was done in the shadow of

Communist ideology, as a reaction to ideas about the ‘common good’ rather than
from any kernel of ideology that was felt to be implicit or unavoidable within the
project of capitalism itself. In this sense it was begun on the ‘back foot’.
If ever something was solidified around the ghost of Marx, then this set of
strategies attempted to form antidote to ideology itself, that it then intended to
conceal. It proposed a ‘non-ideology’ in which selfishness was the new altruism.
This is of course was also the conclusion of the later evolutionary geneticist Richard
Dawkins, but this earlier Cold War response to the communist approach to
possession, property and production tried to counter the evolution past the
capitalist mode that was central to communist ideology.
It sought a logic to counter the Marxist critiques of capitalism as self-interested,
exploitative and compromised modes of production and so was a project organised
to rationalise conservative perpetuation of market society.

The project however was not only to justify production and consumption by
private interest as an essential form of ‘freedom’ but to render communism and
other socialist ethics of the public ‘good’ as false.
I have to credit Adam Curtis’ excellent documentary ‘The Trap’ for this perspective
on the development of these post-ideological rationales, and for the detail on John
Nash’s equations on social management.
 90

(Curtis, A (2007). The Trap. TV Documentary. BBC. London)

What was developed was a cynical counterpoint to Communism, a supposed

answer to its critiques of exploitative capitalism, a default position in which was
contained a new theory of the subject as a rational and strategic individual.
John Nash was one of the mathematicians hired by Rand Corp and the US
government to work on this problem. Nash had developed a series of mathematical
games, which showed that in any situation where game play was necessary it made
statistical sense to always betray your opponent, exploiting the rules of the game to
say one thing but do another. He called this game ‘Fuck You, Buddy’.
This outcome was intrinsically linked into the thinking of the Nuclear stand off
between Communism and Capitalism as a game, in which it was essential to be able
to predict as many chess moves ahead of your potentially deadly foe. In this game
you had to assume that your opponent would betray you so it was always rational to
operate a pre-emptive betrayal.
But what Nash’s, theories seemed to show was that if this game play was
extrapolated out into a model of society based on capitalism that equilibrium would
ensue; in a not dissimilar way to how the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction
as a stand-off between nuclear powers could be considered an equilibrium.

His calculations showed that if everyone behaved in this self-interested way, that an
economic democracy would find balance, that society would settle itself into an
order. The implication was also then that this would be a fair society, because the
implication was also that everyone would have an equal chance in this ludic
scenario.
It is clear that this ethos was born out of taking on communism as an opponent,
that the game theory designed to outmanoeuvre a nuclear superpower was then
utilised to describe the subject of an ideal capitalist democracy, who was alert to the
consistent outmanoeuvring necessary in a competitive market society. However
this precluded that the subject identified mathematically as a perfect fit for such a
‘game’ was ontologically accurate.
If Nash exposed the possibility for social equilibrium through self-interested
behaviour, he also masked the necessity for an ontologically simplified subject to
make his equations work. This simplified subject that fit neatly into the theory was a
purely rational game strategist, who would always make the most informed rational
choice in any and all of his or her interactions with the world. This cartoon subject
could be counted on to be selfish.
It was only a model of course but this model not only helped in the grand strategy
of the Cold War but it seemed to suggest the capitalist subject that was to undo the
myth of communism, the model human that could thrive in the exchange value
system. A simplified automaton that was then well adjusted to the binary rhythm of
the markets; profits, losses, rise and fall.

This cartoon subject was both suitable for the arena as well as a counter to the
communist ideology, in that it implied that any posturing over the ‘common good’
was merely the ontologically rooted self-interested behaviour anyway, simply
 91

dressed up as communism. This self-interested model for subjectivity cast all

ideology as merely a front for self-interested behaviour.

The kind of Capitalist outriders, that longed to reinstall the free markets of the pre-
war era and who were behind the funding for the RAND Corporation, needed to be
free of big government and socialist interventions in trade that promoted the
common ‘good’ in order to further expand their holdings.
This theory then gave credence to the idea that these narratives, such as
Communism, were in fact tyrannical hierarchies, precisely because they were
promoted by these same subjects; naturally selfish game-playing strategists,
operating behind an ideological mask that stated it was for the good of the
commune.
This may have been an entirely accurate picture of the large-scale corruption and
faceless terror tactics of late State Communism, and in this regard the failure of
such societal models obviously shored up these rationales and helped to cancel a
future that capitalism wished to be cancelled. But the deeper problem was the
accompanying loss of a valuable model of the human subject; one that was
acknowledged as complex, self-deceptive and unpredictable and who did not
always act for self-interested gain, but was capable of genuine altruism.
This is what was eradicated as a human model and replaced with an entity that
seeks only its own reproduction. Of course this is the senseless rationality of capital
itself, but projected as the ultimate form of ‘fairness’: indifference.
We are familiar with the prevalence of gaming, we are familiar with the
omnipresence of semio-capital in these ludic ‘worlds’ and the avatar could be the
subject that Nash predicted; trained to virtually treat the actual world as a game.
Game theory seems like an ontology come true, but one, which over time, that can
perhaps cancel the capacity for altruism.
So this thinking activated a belief in not just communism as ideologically
hypocritical, operated by self-interested rational individuals hiding behind bogus
ideology, but in all ideology as a mask for our true natures.
As a default position it posited itself as an ‘ideology’.
In the harsh light of the new mathematical picture of the true ‘free’ ludic individual
as painted by John Nash, what this new ‘ideology’ proposed was that all ideology
was hypocrisy.

Nash was later diagnosed as suffering from paranoid psychosis all through this
period, and has subsequently stated that his subject was a deeply simplified version
of the complex ethical beings that he believes we are.
So in a situation where all narratives are subterfuge, what would be the guarantee
of veracity of political intent? It only seemed logical to defer political power to the
unbiased scale of the market. Consumer confidence does not lie, even if it was only
a measure of the efficacy of the ability for advertising to manufacture desire for
whatever irrelevant object was being produced.
If human nature was a treacherous desire for gain then free enterprise was the
guarantee of a free individualism, and communism was pure self-interest disguised
as altruism and therefore portrayed as a less ‘honest’ form of capitalism, from which
only imbalance and disharmony could ensue.
 92

To the funders of this think tank this had the pleasing effect of showing capitalism
to be a true form of societal management that communism was only attempting in
a deceptive and manipulative manner. It made communism seem worse than the
owners of means of production in Marx’s critique, at least these entrepreneurs were
honest about their endeavours and in many ways offered a model of excellence to
those below them who could equally compete to one day rise to own their own
factory etc etc.

Perhaps for me, the relevance to circus is that in an indifferent field that you paint as
a meritocracy so that agency within it seems like merit, a similar set of values is
being iterated, which states that every trick that self-interestedly pleases me is
something to which you too should aspire.

As hinted here, the trick is another tautology, and its relation to a double bind is
contained in the nuanced definition of absolutism that is employed here. The
ideology proposed was its own absence, as this contradiction was the only thing
that could activate a force that was indifferent to the difference between truth and
falsity, freedom or enclosure, as from a contradiction anything follows.
Capital as a measure simply cannot tell the difference between socially beneficial
and socially destructive acts and this was the default form of an ideology that
enforced post ideology.
As capitalism developed and communism failed there became no outside to this
model, and this is the sense in which it was enforced. The infinite multiple choice
within it formed a singularity that was the only thing available.
The double bind of a free ideology that you had to follow, but which was absent of
any content, of course was the ideal social plan for a subject that was full of self-
interested emptiness. It was ideology in form only, as empty as the capital that was
waiting to fill in every other form made available to it.
The maths showed ideology was dead, there was only games with binary
outcomes, in which subjects engaged rationally for gain, therefore capitalism based
on such binary values of gain and loss was the ideal system for managing society.
The tautology was that this proof of the cynicism inherent in all ideology was then
treated as an absolute ideology, one which must be promoted globally as the
counter to communism.
As an ideology of non-ideology it was a trick, because it promoted therefore the
presence of an absence. It proposed an ideology, which simply cannot exist within
the field of post-ideology except as a fiction, as an unavoidable fact.
This is one comprising factor of the tautological ground discussed here, the trick to
conceal.

I am hinting that a circus artist who claims their weightlessness is genuine freedom
is in full agreement with this tautological ground. This is Trick Two.
The accompanying fiction that completed this trick was that one register could
provide value for another heterogeneous register. It implied qualitative social
structures that existed between subjects could be quantitatively validated as ‘good’
or ‘bad’ within the moral indifference of the market, through the binary accounting
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of ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’, and furthermore that these quantified qualitatives could be

traded as commodities for self-interested gain.

It is interesting to note that this simplified subject was not even complex enough to
operate a play-bite; the kind of transindividual play in which the bite is the
difference that encircles similarity. It is this subtlety that is necessary for the
activation of trick one. This is the irrational intelligence that admits defeat and
victory simultaneously as the pliable surface underneath the hide of conflict.
Without an inoperability that is a potentiality, the trick is structurally merely a
deception that exploits the needed surplus to forestall the inevitability of gravity’s
indifference.

THE MARKET THEORY:

Once this strategy for war was understood in terms of its re-application as
programming a ‘balanced’ society it spread and developed over the following
decades. There was top-down enthusiasm for the idea that people could be
ideologically free of top-down structure, and business elites were in favour of
subjects who could be ‘at liberty’ to operate their life and work as they wished; as
long as they met the clear targets provided by the exchange-value, which logically
and therefore increasingly became the only yardstick with which it was possible to
measure the accelerating divergence of components of their life and work.
The competition and paranoia implicit in combat had leaked into all inter
subjective interactions as a model for a faceless and post ideological altruism. This
was an altruism enacted by nobody, precisely because nobody could be trusted to
enact it unselfishly: capital became the perfect overseer of this new defaulted
‘fairness’.
With it came an ossification of the idea that the idea was not to be trusted as a
method of organising subjects, that freedom lay in resisting ideology, in marching
to your own tune. The use-value of ideology became ‘dinner-for-one’, and its flavour
had to be ‘democratically’ approved against the new yardstick, which the market
provided, before it could have socio-political value.
So here was free market thinking applied to subjectivity, you were free to invest in
yourself, and the dividends could be measured in the only scale available, the
system of autonomous difference, which necessarily invalidated subjectivity as this
was the subject-less dimension of exchange-value.
In this way ‘tricks’ to forge your own subjectivity, provided moments of
weightlessness, before returning you to earth as the components of this
weightlessness were re-configured to be detached from the subject that entered
them into the field by the subject-less-ness of the register.
You could only buy a lasting image of yourself momentarily.
The corollary here is of gravity of course. The analogical reading is one in which the
circus artist uses techniques to momentarily refute gravity, which that gravity then
reclaims as ‘nothing to do with’ the subject. Your act of freedom returns you to
earth because outside of what you can make appear to be weightless, gravity is
‘none of your business’.
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In terms of our Diagram the circus techniques themselves of tempo, force, rhythm
etc. form the letters of an alphabetical field, they are statements ‘of’ gravity, which
when assembled into tricks as ‘words’ then follow the analogy to produce
statements ‘about’ gravity and about the subject’s position within it and their
capacity to view it as a limited field. This is what for me is modelled in the trick; a
possibility to view gravity as a limited enclosure and a ‘telling’ of the existence of the
possibility of that viewpoint.
The trick-words are then assembled from technical letters that similarly have
nothing to do with the subject that assembled them into a meta statement about
their position in gravity, and this is to be acknowledged; that the field of gravity is
utterly indifferent to the statements made about the subject’s fictional meta
position and is not an endless meritocracy that supports or even recognises in any
way such statements.

What I am describing here is a change in analogical focus. Gravity is no longer an

analogy for power; gravity is an analogy for a system, which allows you to make
tricks that appear to give you freedom from the gravity of that system.
As in the diagram of a tautological ground , what is presented at first is the
possibility for any word to be entered into the alphabetical order and to not present
an incompatibility with that order, but in fact at the final summation, it becomes
clear that in entering that word onto the twisted surface it has been scrambled
beyond recognition. The tautological ground gives the impression that any
statement can never be in contravention of the endless twisted order of the field
into which it is entered, but what is revealed , and which throws the subject back
into unrealised desire, is that this register , which is the only ratified destination for
these encouraged statements, utterly destroys their meaning for the subject who
uttered them.
The product fails to deliver the promise, because what is promised is not
registerable in the medium assigned for its validation.

This is convoluted, but this is the problem, power is masked. So if the gravity,
against which I feel resistance is required, is something that allows tricks, then
gravity is an analogy for circus itself, which promotes an over-arching fantasy that
tricks actually create freedom, but which masks the fact that these tricks go
nowhere and do nothing towards the project of increased agency, but do in fact
advance the circus artist as a successful post ideological entrepreneurial individual
who will not submit to the ‘ideological’ constraints of gravity. The Circus is the
Gravity against which we need to perform tricks. And Circus’ agreement with the
overarching fantasy of a compatibility of desire and capital as its realising medium
forms part of a Grand Trick against which we need to perform new tricks in perhaps
a new form of disagreeable circus

I am trying here to draw attention to a society in which the tenets of neoliberalism

appear as those of a circus. That is to highlight it as system in which tricks are
compulsory, but they have no effect on power, or on gravity, merely being
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appropriated into the double bound system in which the overarching belief is in no
belief at all, in which there is no site for meaning as this would be counter post
ideological but in which it is compulsory to create meaning as commodity . This site-
less-ness is recast as a method of freeing yourself from old structures and
interferences, but which always returns you into the field of control. It is like a ‘free’,
rambling road trip that follows a set route and returns you back to the start knowing
less than when you started. It is a road trip performed as a lead pencil across the
surface of an eraser.

BUSINESS MEETS PSYCHOANALYSIS:

There were corporate ‘outriders’ who were interested to promote this Grand Illusion
in which ‘free’ individuals ‘freely’ expressed their individuality as commodities for
validation. The merging of identity and brand meant that all interactions had indeed
become ludic and competitive arenas for self advancement and accumulation of
gain.
There was new tricky thinking. There was drive to replace the ‘focus group’ of the
50’s and early 60’s, in which members of the public were invited to meet salesmen
and free associate about the ‘value’ of a product.
This was done according to accepted psychoanalytical structures and was mostly
overseen by qualified psychoanalysts in the pay of the manufacturing corporations.
The idea here was to use psychoanalytical techniques to make irrelevant objects
mean something to the inner semiotic structures of consumers. This was to allay the
capitalist factory owners’ fears of loss, so that psychoanalysis was used to produce
desire for things with a short life-span to render unnecessary the manufacture of
reliable, durable products with a long-life–span, thus avoiding loss through over-
production.
This forms the rationalisation and lays the ground for Lacan’s revelation of desire
as lack to become the major installed mechanism that forestalled exchange value’s
reliance on a verifiable use value and focused on the primary desire to display
individualism. Marx already notes that use can be manufactured alongside the
commodity. In this iteration, the desire is manufactured even before the commodity
exists.
What was needed was a methodology that drew consumers not towards mass
produced commodities but towards objects that held the promise of individualism.
(It can be noted that the computer is the ultimate mass-produced commodity, as it
can become any device that you wish it to be, from tool, to window, to entire other
identity. This machine is an invisible commodity, as it seems to offer a place in
which ‘you’ can become ‘you’ as it seamlessly connects the site of labour with social
interaction, with cultural reception and with advertising. It forms perhaps the
hybridisation of fixed and variable capital that facilitates the circuit of desire as lack
as the simultaneous site of late capitalist production and representation.)
This obvious manipulation or trickery became increasingly unpopular as subjects
who were embracing the new self-expressive mode of individualism moved away
from being seen to endorse the mass-produced items of the post war marketing
drive. Instead the same idea of a self-determined subjectivity was taken up, that the
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game was now called “I did it my way”, still through consumption (the marketing at
the time, heavily influenced by the game theory cynicism, showed that these new
self-expressive beings were still consumers, that the political radicalism was a mask
for the drive to self-interest, which essentially meant that products that appeared to
be politically ‘aware’ would suffice in place of an actual politics) but through the
consumption of ‘uniqueness’ that expressed individuality. The edict was
tautological, ‘become unique.’
This formed the input mode, in which subjects assembled themselves through
accumulation, the output mode then constituted another ‘trick’ in which they
entrepreneurially re-entered these new individualised selves back into the market
for validation. The trick was to perform a valuable self, a profitable subjectivity that
would be ‘liked’, and through the contradiction of the repetition of its difference
would become the binding of brand and identity.

There was developing a corporate practice, according to the doctrines of game

theory, that relied on logging the quantative data from all kinds of human
interactions, now seen as strategic game-play; a new marketing and a way of
turning this marketing into targets, goals and outcomes for all manner of social and
economic scenarios. Corporate investors were interested in quantifying the
qualitative components of human interaction to both predict and control production
and consumption, and monitor the workplace; again labouring under the fantasy
that these two essentially incompatible registers could be fused in an over-
simplified reading of the subject as a rational, strategic individual operating for self-
interest.

There were gurus of this data. Figures like Anthony Enthoven, a master of the then
newly formed doctrine of Systems Analysis, whose career spanned collating
collateral damage and casualty targets in the Vietnam war in the 60’s, under the
guidance of Macnamara, to re-organising the UK Health service in the 80’s to be
more target and therefore market-orientated at the behest of Margaret Thatcher.

VIETNAM:

Within this conflict it was widely acknowledged that there was no material gains as
such; territory was ever really won or lost, there was no front so land gained was not
the issue. In this regard, in lieu of any quantitative victory, something had to be
measure, there had to be some metric of progress.

“The problem with war is the metrics; if you cannot count what is important, you
make what you can count important. In Vietnam this was the bodies.”

“You don’t get details with a body count, you get numbers…and the numbers are lies”

The point being made here is that the idea of loyalty, of ‘side’ became blurred by
the demand for metrics. What was at stake was the validity of military presence;
which could only be measured in the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese People. In
the tautological logic of the seemingly unwinnable conflict, innocent people died
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but then had to be counted as enemies so as to legitimise a presence that was

unsustainable because of the death of innocents as collateral damage. The war was
being won against those whose defeat proved you were losing.

The numbers were seen as lies because they were a fiction in the register in which
they are perceived, which is morale.

“If body count is your marker for success then you are pushing otherwise honourable
men to become liars”.

This is the stark outcome of handing politics over to metrics.

“If body count is a measure of success, then there is a tendency to count every body
as an enemy soldier.”

This is the interference of the qualitative judgement of enmity in the quantitative

fact of victory. The registers are conflated already, That is you are judging success in
war with numbers, the ground is already tautological, and so what ensues from a
contradiction is anything…you are through the looking glass into the propositional
calculus in which any dead body can be an enemy, and any fiction thereof becomes
a fact, as a result of the situation in which a qualitative statement such as ‘are we
winning’ is rendered in quantities of dead.
The scenario creates enemy soldiers out of non-combatants as they are counted as
dead…therefore the unspoken injunction that follows from quantitative analysis is
to kill everyone, as the act of counting them dead will transform them into the
enemy, which is the required metric for success.

(Burns, K. (2017) Vietnam War: A Film S1. E4 “Resolve”.) Quotes taken from serving
professionals.

What this yardstick generally proposed was the ‘eternal market’, a model of the
free market, in which there would be a number of quantifiable outputs that could
produce measurable performance targets at all levels, all to mimic the competitive
pressure of the free market which could be applied to public servants; to make them
more efficient according to the philosophy of game theory, as well as rid these
departments of any outmoded doctrines of public service that were now seen as
ideological and to be dispensed with as masks for the operations self interested civil
service bureaucrats.
Thatcher was gleeful in her eradication of these figures still possessed of a sense of
public good, they were vilified as hypocrites.

The idea was individuals were ‘freed’ from old elitist bureaucracies, objective
numbers were held up as targets that individuals were ‘free’ to achieve any way they
wanted. It therefore encouraged the humanity it was predicated on: selfish, game
playing and often ruthless.
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Madsen Perie was one such advocate of economic democracy who remarked of
workers in general, that these new numerical targets would ‘set free’ their talents,
before they were instruments doing what they were told, now they were free to be
‘creative’ in thinking how to reach their targets.

“So once targets were set the public servants were free to achieve them in any way
they wished, old bureaucratic order would be thrown away and they would become
heroic entrepreneurs…”

Curtis on neoliberal guru Madsen Perie (Curtis, A (2007). The Trap. TV

Documentary. BBC. London)

In the book ‘Selfish Capitalist’ (Oliver, J (2008) The Selfish Capitalist. Vermillion.
London) points up that the proliferation of this apotheosis of self-interested, target-
orientated behaviour is an illusion. For me the illusion conceals what is at play,
which is that as Deleuze suggests, if control societies are based more on debt than
on enclosure then debt becomes the self imposed enclosure that is formed from a
deeply held moral shame at indebtedness (covered in David Graeber’s (2015) book
‘Debt: the first 5000 years’)
This self-built cage is flat-packed within the subject who is ‘free’ in the sense that
Madsen Perie actually means it, to assemble it in any way shape or form that suits
them. The point here is that the subject is the new site of self-enclosure as the
appearance of meritocracy knots itself tautologically with the appearance of targets
that you cannot reach. This is the problem of the worker, no longer of management,
who have simply ‘set free’ their workforce.
The concealment is that these targets

In reference to a rise in psychiatric morbidity (neuroses, phobias, depression) Fisher

cites James Oliver on the possible cause:

“…James hypothesises that it is selfish (i.e. neoliberalized) capitalist policies and

culture that are to blame. Specifically James points to the way in which selfish
capitalism stokes up

…both aspirations and the expectations that they can be fulfilled…In the
entrepreneurial fantasy society the delusion is fostered that anyone can be
Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likliehood of this
occurring has diminished since the 1970’s – a person born in 1958 was more
likely that one born in 1970 to achieve upward mobility through education,
for example. The Selfish Capitalist toxins that are most poisonous to well-
being are the syematic encouragement of the ideas that material affluence
is the key to fulfilment, that the only affluent are winners and that access to
the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their
familial, ethnic or social background – if you do not succedd there is only
one person to blame.”
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(Fisher, 2009)

This is the advantage of meritocracy, and why it is such a good cover for the
tautological ground, in which all forward motion only sends you backwards
towards the endlessly receding horizon of more meritocracy. What is inferred
here is important; that the subject internalised the not in the field. The fault is
yours, because supposedly you are now the owner of your own factory of desire,
that if you accrue enough meritous desire it can be conflated into fact.

In his Documentary ‘The Century of Self’ (2016) Adam Curtis highlights how to
achieve targets workers would increasingly simply cook the books; counting what
was not technically supposed to be counted, in a repeat of the fudged obscenity of
accounting that occurred in the Vietnam war.
To be able to count something as an A that was actually a B, so that the correct
target of A’s could be said to have been reached, you need to act as a symbolist
poet; you need a certain artistic license possessed only of the human sensibility to
imagine one thing as another.
This poetic sensibility, purely affective in nature, was able to distill qualities from
event A and implant them into event B to be able to appear to be able to say that ‘I
have met my quota of A’s’
This features in Health care, Education as well as other institutions such as the
Police Force, who arrest their abilities to produce fantasy in hard irrefutable quotas.

So here again is the creation of Semio-Capital, the meeting of objective targets

relied on what can only be a subjective ability to be able to feel that one thing is
‘technically’ another, with all of the accompanying rationales. This disparity, in
which fictional data gets entered as objective fact, whereupon its affect is erased,
coupled with the instance whereby the affective relations between patient and
doctor become monetized as health-care provider and client, according to the same
digital systems that run the markets add up to the forced mutation of the operation
of signs detached from their material referent and then the entry of these re-
attached signs as if that was their only referential ‘truth’.
In this sense the opposite of honesty was achieved, as care now only had to appear
to be care, education now only had to appear to be education and crime now only
had to appear to be crime, all to an external non-practitioning examiner.
The important thing was now how many could be said to have received care, been
educated or convicted?

Again Fisher is excellent on this topic (Fisher.2009.P41.)

Objectivity is here the point, this is the inhuman realm of exchange-value, of

quantitative data, applied to the affective interactions of human daily life. A health
care system of differences that denies the idea of both ‘health’ and ‘care’ and posits
that if the targets are met the equilibrium of ‘health’ will automatically ensue.

Instead of thinking collectively for the myth of public ‘good’ it was up to the
individual to figure out what was to their advantage in a system driven by
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objectivity and also their duty to pursue self-interest as a way of ensuring social
equilibrium. This was supposed to liberate them from bureaucracy.

“With the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to have been made
obsolete; a relic of an unlamented Stalinist past. Yet this is at odds with most
people’s experience of living and working in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy
remains very much a part of everyday life. Instead of disappearing, bureaucracy has
changed its form; and this new decentralized form has allowed it to proliferate.”

He goes on to state that the conjunction of mental illness and bureaucracy point up
a marked difference in the injunction of what he calls ‘capitalist realism’
(oversimplified here as the capacity of capitalist imperatives to shape reality) which
is to pursue freedom, and the more subtle maze-like injunctions of a Kafkaesque,
endless, headless bureaucracy that repeatedly insist that freedom is deferred.
These two contrary injunctions form a knot in the surface, a double bind that
indebts the subject to the control mechanisms that supply agency in an
unorientable surface.

These largely un-navigable theories would go much further to undermine

democratic politics, and erode politicians’ belief that they could change the world,
as cynicism became the only ideology, based around a rudderless absence.
Everything, even the value of currency would be determined by targets set by
banks, but as these were iterated in currency with no material referent they were
vulnerable to rumour, appearance and the circulation of narratives. Targets drifted,
incremental shifts in value could only benefit vast accumulations of currency and
the media could overturn credibility in any public figure, which meant
performativity was now the only currency.

Capital may have appropriated language, but what was more frightening was that
Capital was as vulnerable to affective manipulations in its deregulated state as the
linguistic form it now utilised.
This meant the media could influence the economy; artistic practices that were
adept at manipulating affect represented techniques for capital to appropriate an
area of the human heart that was previously prohibited to it. It was necessary to
conceal the inevitable debilitating collapse from emotive messages into objective
autonomous registers. Artists, instead of analysts, were now in a position to utilise
the affective tools of image, text, music and performance, often informed by the
same modes of representation learned from psychoanalysis complicity with
business, to facilitate a further tautology; that the pricelessness of the experience of
art could be attached to an irrelevant ‘vehicle’. In this sense Affect was now both an
asset and a financial security risk.
An affective gesture or word out of place here or there could cause catastrophic
fluctuations. Well perhaps this is only to the good of capital itself as it thrives on
crisis. What can seem like a financial catastrophe is precisely the waters in which
capitalism can swim quite well.
Nevertheless it is clear that capital that has appropriated a linguistic or sign-
making potency could be installed directly into the production of desire and was
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present in the pursuit of impossible targets as subjects signified their value

according to indifferent registers.

So the entire society would be a free market of self interested animals, initiating
crushing austerity in one hand and luxurious tax breaks with the other, to try to keep
up with targets set by the dimension that no one could reason with; the dimension
of pure difference, the non-negotiable value of currency.

THE INDIFFERENT DIFFERENCE:

This is a gravity of immense power; it puts us all on the streets looking for money,
going to work, selling something of ourselves to get something for ourselves:
emptying, filling up again, emptying: performing, hiding, performing again.
It is perhaps necessary sometimes to be blunt and simply say that power has been
handed over to a procedural logic that cannot tell fact from fiction and which drives
up rents and house prices and causes misery and confusion for many more people
than it helps.
I am going to sound like a cliché now. I am allowing that. This gravity is a restrictive
force until you achieve weightlessness at about three or four million dollars. This is
the trick you must achieve, by any means. You must be free of this gravity by
operating any rip-off you can think of, not to expose the exploitative misery of the
system, but to stay weightless within it.

You must be free…

…and in your wealth is necessitated your indebtedness to the idea of debt itself, for
without somebody owing something to somebody the whole house of cards
collapses.
To any circus artist who has ever waited over four hours in Accident and
Emergency; you know that gravity does not give a shit about you.

IN DEBT TO BEBT; THIS IS FORESTALLED LACK:

So in the 90’s politicians from both the left and the right tried to use a model taken
from the free market economies of the global trade system, modelled in the cold
war and refined in other forms of conflict, and apply it to all areas of society.
Something that not even the high priest of free market capitalism Adam Smith
would think was possible or appropriate.
It is worth noting that even in the 19th century period of ‘laissez faire’ colonial
capitalism, there was still a belief that politicians had a duty to protect people from
the markets, to protect the weak from the tyranny and chaos of rampant self-
interest. This was on the whole merely bourgeois sentiment that covered up the
exploitation of the time, but the point is that the monetization of life itself was now
becoming blatant.
This trend persists and extrapolates at the speed of data to the current deluge of
spurious information. As stated this was facilitated by seeing the subject as a
simplified robot, a rational, self seeking machine even whose feelings could be
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managed by numbers. On the internet, in browsing, shopping, watching, clicking we

were to be rendered as cartoon avatars, as increasingly our desires were reflected
back to us by the automated algorithms that tracked our ‘likes’.
As these artificially intelligent salesmen helped us to hone our disciplines, the
tricks we performed became more and more specialised and ‘individual’. We were
hunted by programs who automatically played emotional appeals for us to spend
more money as micro transactions mounted into debts.

€0.99 is a trick that uses the ‘affect’ of 99 to close a deal of almost a euro. So affect
is worth something: it is simultaneously ‘worth’ the one that is dropped and the
ninety-nine it elicits.

Within social media that only exposed us to things that resembled that which we
had previously ratified we were trained to an extreme point of specialised
individuality that insulated against things and ideas that we did not ‘like’.
Not only did the trick no longer offer a possibility of escape, it became more and
more difficult to fashion a trick outside of the attractive reflection that our previous
tricks had created for us to look at. The Internet became the inevitability of self-
interest, and John Nash’s model that could only betray friends became increasingly
true.
Watching and re-watching our clips of our favourite tricks, we solidified into
something measureable in a system of differences that wiped us off the film. We
had become an image of freedom that was only useful to capital and any
resemblance to any persons living or dead was merely coincidental.
To any circus artist that has ever tried to learn a trick from You Tube for an
upcoming gig; you know that gravity does not give a shit about you.

The numbers formed new systems of control that in fact increased inequality,
anxiety and brought about a new form of class system based on the power of
accumulated money.
Machines became repositories for all data. Systems analysis flowed the best
through these machines, and the combination of data in and out set up endless
flows of feedback in which the profitability of moods, looks, gestures, or words
could be factored in real time through an automated voting system of ‘thumbs up’
or ‘thumbs down’ by free individuals expressing their individuality online.
In the same way that machines love money, because money was data, the
machines loved the billion digitised lives flowing through them daily, as this
systemic tide of monitored data grew the difference between a ‘like’ and a dollar
became merged into a flood of semio-capital.
Any image that was popular, abhorrent, useful or obscene became the same
monetised site for potential advertisers according to the quantity of views it
received.

Here is Mark Fisher again on Deleuze and Gauattari:

“Similarly , what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia.

Teenagers process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to
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read – slogan recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine

informational pane. ‘Writing has never been capitalism’s thing. Capitalism is
profoundly illiterate’, Deleuze and Gauttari argued in Anti-Oedipus. ‘Electric language
does not go by way of voice or writing: data processing does without them both.’ Hence
the reason that many successful business people are dyslexic (but is their post-lexical
efficiency a cause or effect of their success?)

(Fisher,M. (2009) Capitalist Realism. Zero Books. UK)

It is perhaps unclear if capital made the subject or the subject made capital.
Something about lack and desire was coming true within a subject flooded with
semio-capital.
The tautological ground here is one in which you are free from the authority of the
written word and free to immerse yourself in an informational collage that is
processed as if it were your bank details. Free from facts you are free to fictionalise
new versions of your appearance but which contradictorily are only the expansion of
the same market that is utterly indifferent to you no matter how you appear; you
can only appear to another appearance.

Life-data, previously the domain of spoken or written language, flowed through as

numbers, as autonomous, but repeatable differences. Within this form is perhaps
the atomic structure of tautology; a repeatable difference detaches itself from the
subject but requires that subject to utter the quality of its differential relation to
another repeatable difference into being, only so that difference can refute the
existence of that qualitative dimension within its purely horizontal and discreet
relations by becoming a repeatable resource for the construction of further
qualitative utterances.
Capital is loss or gain, on or off, it is the perfect medium in which machines can
‘think’ or ‘speak’ so to model human behaviour reduced to yes or no, click or no
click, is a perfect way to subjectify us as cartoons inhabiting the system of
exchange-value. The machine needs us to give value to the images and signs that it
processes autonomously; we are the machine that creates the value that is
destroyed in the machine but which is essential for the machine to run that
destructive program in the first place. We are thus hybridised with the automated
production of desire.
The translation of life into an automated flow of Semio-Capital was a trick on a
grand scale, and it forms the fabric through which we are encouraged to perform
the trick of being an individual.
It is through speaking a trick in the medium of Semio-Capital, saying what we feel
will profit us that we enact the fulfilment of the prophecy of John Nash, that we
become simplified avatars, predictably speaking ‘post-facts’ for personal gain. We
are free to use facts that only have truth-value in their difference to other truth-
values. They are ‘monetised’ utterances of Semio-Capital in that they intend truth
to be a fabricated use-value that qualifies them to be entered into the inhuman
melee of exchange-value for validation as profit or loss.
We speak circus in the medium of Semio-Capital.
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To any circus artists who have ever posted an image of themselves in mid flight; you
know that gravity does not give a shit about you.

It might be possible to say that through this belief that politicians should give away
power to the market as the ideal model of democracy, and that through the
expression of self interest this market would meet everyone’s needs, was ushered in
the return of injustices and inequalities not seen for 100 years, something politicians
were supposed to prevent. These same politicians ended up corrupted and/or
powerless to change anything, and millions of people were left without
representation, and with even less power to control their lives in the face of the
unexpected indifference of capital.

This is one of the reasons for Brexit, as millions of working people felt no longer
represented by the Left wing politicians that were supposed to support them, who
in their neo-conservative iteration had in fact been complicit in the marketization of
the new drone class of zero-hours contract workers, and a class of people who are
trapped in an exploitative rent system or enclosed within a motiveless benefit loop,
or too busy working to raise their children, who are thrown into education
academies run as franchises for profit.
The tautology is that as ‘freedom’ increased mobility went down. Free to remain
where you are you voted to leave. The Left has to formulate something more
progressive than a repetition of Thatcherite doctrine.
It is fair to say that at the time of writing as the Brexit negotiations flounder, that
many now perceive the referendum as a trick; with much of the emotive, affective
rhetoric, images and jingoistic flim-flam merely announcing an old 19th century act
that we have all seen before.
There was a hole where an ideology should have been, which drove people to vote
for an appearance of the UK that simply was not there.

Here is the irony, that as people began to believe that they were just inquisitive,
self-seeking individuals, and that democratic systems are not nearly as good as the
market for fulfilling whatever it is that you want, people allowed corporate elites to
take over politics, and politics to be distorted and corrupted.
This meant that politics became even less capable of fulfilling people’s needs, and
meanwhile as the market bucked and reeled and did not give people good jobs, or
even secure jobs, so ultimately the individual realized that there had been a trade
off. This situation slowly revealed that an indifferent and non-negotiable force of
corporate capital, which could not be reasoned, with had replaced the politicians,
who could be lobbied, appealed to or challenged.
The new situation was as indifferent as the force of gravity.
To any circus artist that has ever wanted to run away from the circus; you know that
gravity does not give a shit if you leave or not.
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Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Eleven.

Rover Joe was lecturing dimly in a dream hall: “This gravity is strong, perhaps then,
rather than look at how to get outside it, are there elements within it that could
provide a way to negate it? If we are acknowledging here that the human (I.E. not
A.I.), “ he coughed smugly, “that the human capacity to jump clear (J.C.) through
the pure fiction of tautology (F.O.T.) is both the paradox and a component within
the system of this gravity, then it is with this component we must tinker. Image of
thought (I.O.T.) is here the problem, if fiction is a tool, then as artists we can
fictionalize a way out” The house lights flicker…the lecture hall goes dark…

‘…Write my way out of here…’

…Happy woke up, feverish, a cold sweat…like being infected by a doctor…Rover joe
was standing over his cot on a kind of raised stone dias.

“Here you go, Happy.” Rover was handing him a strange weapon. It was a revolver in
a dark metal with white bone grips.

Happy sat up, his long black hair matted across his face. He hefted the pistol…good
weight, heavy enough to feel it as a death-gift, light enough to keep him alive in a
fast draw.

Its barrel was curved downward in a circular arc, then looped back up and round to
insert itself back into the chamber to the left of the hammer.

“It fires itself into the bullet about to be…” said Rover, his eyes rolling back in his
head in a mock ecstasy, “…how hot is that? It’s called a Klein Masturbator…”

“Hmmm, it shoots itself?”

“It shoots what it is about to shoot, like cumming in your own ass, but before you
cum, you dig? It’s a deadly feedback system, balanced to the power of six-sex. It’s a
SIX-SEX SHOOTER.”

The gun formed a heavy lateral circle its barrel rifled and curved to aim directly into
the back of the next bullet to be fired.

“ You can’t miss any target with this, guaranteed kill, it ramps up the energy of
inversion with every shot, each blast fires into the one that’s next which then fires
into the next and BLAMMO…” Rover was grinning a sex grin…”it’s pure FRIENDLY
fire.”

“Tasty…what’s the result?”

“Implodes the whole gunfight, folds it in on itself. The violence is exposed as a non-
total, axiomatic, formal system; in performing the ‘bullet-ness’ against the bullets
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themselves the violence explodes negating the gunfight in your favour. The
ultimate Lao Tzu. It obliterates the enemy capacity to even think violence, which
catching them in a violent thought-act, negates them right off the farm.”

“What’s the range?”

“About 20 yards…get real close and personal. You gotta get off all six shots real fast
for it to work, its greased and ready to go. It is fictionally deadly. Look”

Joe gestured down to the frontispiece of the dias he was standing on next to
Happy’s bed, inscribed into the weathered stone were dates and an epitaph.

Happy felt suddenly alone, “I can see you are standing on your own grave…Rover
don’t leave me…” his face was wet with tears…

Rover Joe was flickering now like candle lit smoke; he warped in and out of focus, his
countenance reduced to particles of waxy soot in the Brownian motion of the pink
light …

”I’m fading Happy…I have to go…” Happy breathed in the smell of musty clothes,
abandoned caravans, people long gone, kept there as snatches of dying
conversation…”you’re not as green as you’re cabbage-looking” Manchester in 1941,
“Hold tight to loose women…” Indiana 1860, “je suis tetu comme un moulet,” Dakar
1709…all gone…

As Joe smoked out the plinth began to age, crumbling until the words could barely
be seen…Happy mouthed them numbly…

“Here Lies Fiction, R.I P. 1880- 1966”

Cut to the editing room.

“Shit boss it’s true then Ol’ Fiction is dead?” The boss man waved him off
impatiently, “Yada yada, no matter, we can carry on with the facts instead.”

“Facts ain’t gonna cut it, boss. Joe Public will spot them a mile away, inferior goods,
see. No amount of devalued fact-stock is gonna float. A fact just don’t stand up to
any amount of treatment, boss, first sign of trouble and it rips…ain’t worth the
fiction it’s printed on…”

“Shut your mouth Joe, just make it happen…we can carry on docu-mennery style.”

Joe mutters to himself, “No one’s gonna fall for THAT!”

‘The sky is thin as paper here…’, ‘leave the details to Joe.’ WS Burroughs
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If this is a circus, it is one of violent stillness.

So Happy and Joe had come up with a notation system for any amount of conflict.
The body had 26 points on it, each with a letter.

If they got into trouble they only had to think slow; letting time set into hard tack
toffee. This gave them time to think of the appropriate deathblow. They only had to
call out a word, and the letters of that word became the death pose. They wrote
conflict as deadly prose…notation details, any amount of yada yada. Loose women
inscribed into the weathered stone, it shoots itself alive in a fast draw. I’m fading
stillness, there is no difference between a fake scene and a real one; it rips in your
favour, could barely be seen…Fiction is feverish, a cold sweat, you are standing on
your own people, long gone…what kind of unconsciousness was this anyhoo?
F.O.T.R.I.P.

LIBERTY THEORY:

13 years before Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, in Oxford, in 1953, as an

answer to the inevitable tyranny that he saw unfolding from revolutionary idealism,
Isaiah Berlin envisioned a form of society in which there would be no overarching
ideology, no absolute goal for society, the absence of which would prevent
absolutism, for which elites would be prepared to go to any lengths.

This intelligent reading of the meaning of liberty would later become altered to
form a concealed absolutism, for which elites would be prepared to go to any
lengths.

As the thrust here is to get at what is meant by ‘freedom’ in the trick I will outline
his designations.

In his essay, not published until 1958, he designated two distinct kinds of liberty,
which can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal:
individual liberty.

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has

negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense.
In this sense you are free from external influence, there are no forces acting on you.

This is ‘freedom from…’ This is the existence of ideology after the subject; in that
the subject is free to make their own rationalisations that follow from their position.
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Positive liberty is the freedom to act in such a way as to take control of one's life
and realise one's desire or purpose. In this sense there are structures present and in
place that support or determine these actions.

This is ‘freedom to…’ This is the existence of ideology before the subject, in that
there are perhaps ideological guidelines for this that the subject can follow.

For Berlin the latter positive form was seen as the existence of ideological guidelines
that supported the steps a subject might take to forge their own destiny, and as
such these ideals had to be agreed by a collective that then had a say over how the
subject might act.

He saw the extreme form of this in the French revolution, in particular the Terror
where any means were deemed necessary by the ideologues, who drove the revolt
towards violence. The subject was to be made free and the supporting ideology as a
collective vision of the future then became more important than the individual
actor. To Berlin this seemed the opposite of freedom, and it forms part of a warning
that he was issuing about the dangers of absolutism in ideology; it was not the
advocacy of a directionless amorality.

In marking the revolutionary idealism as Positive liberty in that it put in place

ideological frameworks for the instalment of freedom for the collective and
ultimately the individual, supporting the individual’s freedom to decide how they
are to be governed. Berlin saw the revolutionary ideas as full of meaning, but quickly
descending into despotism in which any means justified the ends.

He then highlighted another way; that of Negative Liberty in which people would
be free to follow their own desires., and implicit within this argument was the
liberalist notion that the state should not treat its subjects like children and instruct
their behaviour according to an absolute end. These free individuals would be
allowed to follow their own way, without being thought of as needing to be
‘shepherded’.

In this way Berlin offered his own brand of free individualism, that naturally
resisted top down hierarchies run by patronising elites, and allowed a freedom that
could not by nature become a tyranny, because built into this frame was the idea
that there could be no higher, external injunction.

In this way he delineated these main two forms as a way of becoming aware of
when the Left or Right went too far. Too much absolutism and the individual
became a pawn in an ideological end; a pawn, who was not as important as that
collective ideal.
These ideas were in line with the liberal thinkers of the day but also in line with the
later neoliberal ‘outriders’ of the 80’s and 90’s whose idea was to reduce state
control of the markets to zero: on the grounds that game theory now also offered a
self-correcting model for societal equilibrium that was based on each individual
following his own form of ideology unchecked. In this sense this was not post
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ideology, but a multiplicity of ideologies that was seen to amount to the same thing
as an absence of an overarching top-down rationale for self-determined action.

The problem becomes of course that how does the subject formulate an ideology?
So this incapacity to formulate anything but ‘individualism’ could be thought of as
a vacuum into which an unbiased guiding principle might be inserted.
In offering the ‘individual’ actor as a solution to tyranny, he offered an idea that
could be easily manipulated by other theories already suspicious of the validity of
any ideology, and which whose ‘ideologues’ were searching for a rationale to hand
over the construction of societal order to the markets.

These interests in a new liberalism proposed that in lieu of ideology there would be
an objective regulatory system of values, and perhaps therefore meanings, that
would similarly result in the ‘impossibility’ of tyranny. Neoliberalism was ‘sold’ as an
antidote to ideological despotism.
If society could be balanced by this simplified selfish subject then the market was
the best ‘game’ in which all qualities could be weighed quantatively, and therefore
fairly, as all supposed qualitatively driven behaviour under game theory was just the
accumulation of quantity anyway. It was proposed that the checks and balances of
profit and loss were ideally suited to manage that ‘rational’ behaviour. The proposal
was that all desires previously iterated through ideological means, such as
‘freedom’, could now be ‘realised’ in an unbiased scale , free of political dogma.
This fantasy of the union between quality and quantity is hardly surprising, but it
maintains. It is an overarching fiction that pervades everything.

“Consequently every commodity is an articulation of use-value and exchange-value,

no matter how abstract the produced object (services, websites, smartphone apps
and so on). Commodity has to be tied at least to a fantasy of quality, which
represents the minimal ground for the production of a corresponding need. The
immediate conclusion is that the need is not some quasi-natural and non-symbolic
tendency but already comprises symbolic mediation. Even if commodities are not
produced with the aim of satisfying human needs but first and foremost to support
exchange and stimulate consumption, one of the cornerstones of production of
value, they have to maintain the fiction of usefulness and need , no matter how
abstract, futile and fantasmatic. It is precisely the fantasy that supports the union of
use-value and exchange-value, matter without qualities and qualities without
matter, two heterogeneous and unrelated levels.”

(Tomsic, S (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious Verso. London)

Perhaps the way that the qualities of life that we ‘feel’ are fused with their eventual
iteration as quantitative values matches the way words spoken between bodies
become monetised as commodities between automated agents of digital
marketing.
In this sense the inevitability of such ‘pricelessness’ to be purchase-able is
ingrained in the way that advertising speaks.
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Those who felt that an ideology of ‘revolutionary’ economic democracy would be

preferable to any other kind seemed to be in ascendency.
Ideology that claimed to be for the ‘common good’ was shown clearly to be
hypocritical, as it had been proven now mathematically that if every individual acted
only to pursue his or her own self-interest then society would reach an unshakeable,
equitable equilibrium.
In such a society any individual could follow their own desires without hindrance,
they would be weightless and free but also enacting their civic duty, to which they
were bound.
What was concealed was that all mobility therefore depended on the
accumulation of capital.

It is important to note here that in seeing the mutation of Isaiah Berlin’s ideas of two
different forms of liberty, labelled as positive for ‘bad’ and negative for ‘good’, as
part of the iteration of neoliberalism does not necessarily vindicate his vision of
negative liberty in which all individuals are free to choose their own way of life and
pursue their own desires as acceptable on its own. I am not advocating Berlin’s
position, merely noting that neoliberalism seems to want to have its liberty and eat
it too.
I do however think it is a good idea, to shun master narratives and elitist control,
but the way it has been tautologically mutated does form a kind of malignant trick
upon the idea of freedom, in that it ‘enforces’ freedom, (which is why I liken it to the
imaginary society of CIRCUSISM, in which the mechanism of supposed freedom-
production, the trick, is compulsory for all.)
However to remove Berlin’s vision from the paradoxical loop in which it has ended
up does not absolve it from being a belief that has advanced the neoliberal thinking
that ‘enforces’ individualism as an essential component of freedom as personal gain
within an economic democracy.

You are not free to not be free, or you rely on the state to enable you to be free to
be free from state control.
Another form of this is Socialism for the rich, in which supposedly denationalised
industry is subsidised by the state so that it can make a profit, which it keeps as if it
made that money independently of any government intervention.
This is a knot, but one which hopefully does not galvanise the resistive subject as
only another iteration of a game playing individual whose ‘only winning move is not
to play’. While this could opt out of neoliberal binds and is not for personal gain, to
my reckoning this would only reinforce the image of the subject that is then
complicit in the prevailing image of subjects as ‘winners and losers’ in the market.

Because this model stands and falls on the conception of the subject as basically
rational and self-interested I would suggest here a deeply irrational, more complex
and ethically nuanced subject, who needs to address neoliberalism because it is
ethically opposed to a genuine freedom that exists somewhere outside of this
master trick, but which is harder to illumine because this master system is such that
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it encourages tricks, usually utilised to expose limited systems, as a way of masking

its internal flaws.
This masking is trick two, a trick to counter tricks that exposes loopholes without
using them for gain. Trick Two proposes no limit on freedom that it make
compulsory for all.

Positive and negative liberty are both very different statements ‘about’ freedom.
If we think of Berlin’s positive liberty as an absolute ideology that he claims will
inevitably lead to tyranny, then we can say that this is represented by the
statement:

The preceding sentence is true.

We do not know to what this refers but trust that what precedes this moment is
true, this is perhaps the top down elitist view that Berlin seeks to move away from; a
previously established collective ‘truth’.
He would like to question, perhaps deconstruct and expose as false, these
suspicious grand ideological narratives that are for our own ‘good’ (again here, just
as those anti-communist strategists did, casting doubt on the existence of such a
notion as public ‘good’)
If we look at the statement:

The following sentence is false.

Then again we do not know to what this refers but it encourages us to doubt
everything, to assume falsehood, to trust our own will, our own desires in moving
forward to what follows, perhaps that answers will follow, but what then?
This doubt I will posit here as representing a kind of mechanism, highlighted in the
trick. That first there is doubt; ‘is this true?’ and then the operation of the trick, the
specific mechanism of tautology that enables flaws in all supposed ‘truths’ to be
briefly exposed by the capacity to construct tautology.
Perhaps this in another context is the precipitated paranioa and doubt in the
authority of language as a ground for the subject that is manifest in psychosis,
perhaps it leads us to an endless deconstruction of everything along linguistic lines
of difference to difference to difference which mirrors the market itself, that also
seems to place the subject nowhere valuable, in an endless fall through an
autonomy of value. This endless deferral is perhaps the same as an impasse.

The following freedom is from. (The subject precedes the ideology, but must
acknowledge that as ideology it must be false)

The preceding freedom is to. (The ideology precedes the subject, but may not
include the subject as primary)

The following subject is free to be free from that which precedes them, but that
which precedes them must enforce their right to be free to be free from that
enforcement, and from any enforcement that follows.
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Semantically this is quite boring; but unfortunately it is installed as a form of

societal control.

I myself am doubtful of both conceptions of liberty, of both the revolutionary

absolutism of positive liberty and the individualist deregulation of negative liberty.
Fused together they form something like the designs of neoconservative think
tanks in the US that call themselves Revolutionary Democrats who believe in shock
tactic privatisation, in which everyone is free to prosper as long as they prosper
through the register of exchange.

The way game theory is incorporated into a mutation of Berlin’s ‘liberties’, means
that the market needs subjects that are simplified for it to become the ideal
measure of their success, to which, as game players, they must address their
attempts at ‘freedom’.
This encourages the performance of a tricky individual who is programmed to
betray any collective dogma, even any partner.

This trick of naming the process of subjectification according to the kind of

simplified subjects it seems to produce then self-fulfils the prophecy that it is the
market that we ‘need’ as monitor for this kind of tricky subject.
Circuses used only to form around tricky subjects, now within Late Circusism, you
had better get your act ready.

The ‘use-value’ of the market itself as a social manager is fabricated/fictionalised

through the enforcement of its suitability to measure the value of this kind of
simplified game playing subject; who is then proved in the moment of their
validation in the subject-less nature of the market, that they do not exist. Thus the
market proves its own usefulness through concealing this tautology.

THE MARKET CONCEALS THAT THE SUBJECT IT NEEDS TO BE A ‘1’

IS IN FACT A ‘0’

The collusion of this kind of ‘ideology of no ideology’ coupled with its attendant
psychotic deconstructions that mirror the wheels of the market seem to me to place
the way we name ourselves as implicit in the way we validate those names, so that
the process of naming and valuing form a trick that is expounded through semio-
capital.
For a name to be proof of its own meaning, the subject has to act accordingly; this
is a restrictive choreography of inevitability.

It seems to allow the means of production of names to be in the hands of the

subject whilst maintaining a way of negating the subject as being attached to that
name as soon as the name is entered into the register of exchange to try to prove
that the subject is in fact signified by that name.
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The disproof of the wholeness of that name is extimate within the name itself, its
capacity to signify its difference is dependant on its repeatability as difference to
another name, thus the name does not refer to the subject at all. This is what I refer
to when I say the neoliberal individual is validated within a register that can only
invalidate that subject.
Nothing new here perhaps, but the trick is to appear to give the means of
production to the subject whilst still concealing and maintaining that there is an
insurmountable lack upon which every means is focused, an emptiness caused by
your name no longer referring to you as you say it.
You are required to perpetuate the system that negates you.

The trick performed here in a mutated Liberty seems to allow for a free Deleuzean
production of desire but then recapture it within the hierarchy of a Lacanian lack;
this is an unorientable, open enclosure.

These were of course interpretations of freedom that have been around for a long
time before Berlin made this designation and examples of these two forms can be
tracked in various political scenarios. What is attempted here, in awareness of how
themes are re-iterated in relation to different fields, is to show how the tautological
ground is so configured in relation to an insistence from the state that you are ‘free
to be free from interference’ as to constitute a simultaneous and contradictory
mutation of these two forms.

The supposedly unbiased nature of the market forms a rationale for freedom from
politics, which is a politics of desire where all votes are cast with the purse. This
returns us to the awareness that whoever controls the production of desire is
banking on its reduction to an incompatible register, that seems to expand to
encompass every trick that posits an area external to it.

This I have described as capture and here it features as a question; if capital is the
proof of post-ideology as a fact and there is no alternative but to follow the
rationales of capitalism, then capitalism precedes the subject by claiming to come
after them; it is the enforced external demand that the demand must issue from
inside of you …it is the presence of an absence

In reference to the Diagram; to use a word is to make a meta statement about the
quality of difference of a letter in that word. For the purposes of this diagram we can
oversimplify and say that the word forms a statement about how the letters have a
differential quality of ‘sound’.

Contradictorily, and as we have established, the word is a ‘freely’ assembled

composite of letters (that are infra statements ‘of’ purely quantitative difference
between letters in the alphabetical order) but in forming itself as a word it becomes
a meta statement about the ‘quality of difference’ to each other that each of the
letters within it might have that informs how that alphabet is structured.
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The knot here is that no rule of quality without structure of quantity and vice versa.

In this way the meta statements ‘about’ the alphabet are treated as infra statements
‘of’ the alphabet and it is this conflation of essentially incompatible registers that
causes the tautology, as well as being a clear iteration of the ‘gravity’ here, which is
the impossibility of meta-statement. In this sense the ‘alphabetical field’ as a ‘force’
of gravity is bound to this tautology.

So it is the way different types of statements are placed next to each other that
allows for them to refer to each other and thus negate the difference between the
truth and falsity of origin, as in the Zeuxis/Parhassius argument over painting.

In which a statement ‘about’ painting is iterated in paint, thus forcing that meta-
statement ‘about’ paint to be treated as a statement ‘of’ paint. This causes a loop in
the logic of the representation of truth. The painting is ‘true’ (it is a painting) but the
fact that it represents the impossibility of it representing anything (that is, it
represents a curtain obscuring the painting) means that it can also represent the
impossibility of it representing anything, which is that its ‘truth’ represents its ‘un-
provability’. This is of course Gödel’s tautological conclusion also.

So if we conflate another two terms here:

FREEDOM FROM AND FREEDOM TO

What happens then is similar.

If we look at the Epimenides paradox:

The following sentence is false.

The preceding sentence is true

We can see that both of these statements are meta-statements, in that they are
statements about language, about the fact that within language sentences follow
and precede each other and about the medium through which this preceding and
following occurs. They are referring to each other, but the thing that makes them
refer to each other is precisely because they are now being treated as if they were
ordinary sentences. They are being treated as if they were infra-statements ‘of’ the
preceding and following nature of language structure.

They are statements ‘about’ qualification, treated as if they are statements ‘of’
qualification.

If we place statements ‘about’ freedom to self determine according to an external

interference with statements ‘about’ freedom from external interference then we
are doing the same thing; we are making a statement ‘about’ freedom, defined as
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something that is freedom because it is preceded by an ideological instruction or

we are making a statement ‘about’ freedom, as defined as something that precedes
ideological instruction, that is you make your own path, your own personal
ideology.

In this way a freedom that is constructed out of placing these two statements in
proximity to each other necessarily means that you have placed statements ‘about’
the way freedom follows or precedes external ideology in a situation where these
statements are forced to follow and precede each other.

within a field where they are both preceding and following each other,In forcing
those meta statements ‘about’ freedom to be treated as if they were statements ‘of’
freedom, this following and preceding ideology gets into an insoluble loop, which
forces them to follow/precede tautologically, as in the Epimenides case.

Once they are attempted to be realised in the same situation of supposed ‘freedom’
they can only acknowledge that they precede and follow each other, in that
‘freedom to’ implies that it precedes freedom from, as without the establishment of
an ideological guideline the ‘freedom from’ cannot form itself as antithetical to
anything, and the existence of freedom from then precedes freedom to as it is the
condition of the formation of something established as the injunction of ‘freedom
to’ from which freedom from attempts to be

The point here is that within the establishment of ‘freedom’ both meta-statements
have to be treated as statements of a paradox as it is their occurance together
within a model of ‘freedom’ that means they are statements about that freedom
that in being treated as both statements of that freedom that they then refer to
each other in impossibly precedential ways. That is, freedom to cannot exist as it is
negated by freedom from, but freedom from then has no form whatsoever as it has
nothing to be free from, it exists as freedom untethered from any referent.

Two meta statements ‘about’ freedom are treated as statements ‘of’ freedom, and
it is this proximity within the scenario of ‘freedom’ that causes their simultaneously
preceding of each other, which as long as the existence of ‘freedom to’ is
acknowledged a tautology ensues, in which you are asking subjects to be free from
ideology as an ideological injunction.

The only solution here is to mask the ideological insistence of the entered meta
statement ‘about’ ideology that states that freedom is necessarily preceded by an
ideological form. If this is concealed then subject can be encouraged to compulsorily
perform ‘freedom from’ to anything and everything that crosses their path as an
iteration of the self-interest that fuels growth and apparently balances the society
and which will be rewarded. Each subject is asked to perform the trick of self-
interestedly demonstrating their freedom from any gravity of any kind, even those
that might be beneficial.
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This is good for the market that is organised around competitive introspection as it
expands markets with each new iteration of post ideology making a new
individualised form that claims to be free from a previous restriction, and this new
individualised form has ‘needs’ and ‘desires’. As a form of schematised or arrested
desiring-production the concealed mutation of Berlin’s ideology is ideal.

These two statements ‘about’ the quality of freedom that might be possible, are
placed together as statements of the quantity of freedom that is available, (that is
their potentiality to fictionalise futures is ossified into a present) and it is this
proximity to each other, the way they refer to each other tautologically that negates
the possibility for freedom to be felt at all.

That is, they are cast as ‘already existing’ and supposedly complementary
components of the current capitalist mode of production ‘of’ freedom, and as such
this conflation of incompatible definitions results in a tautology whereby the state
operates according to an ideological framework that sets up the rights of the
individual subject to be free from any such ideological framework.

If there is no permissible alternative to capital; and it is illegal to make your own

currency, to build settlements, to set up your own government or to designate your
own relationship to work or family, so you are held within something that has no
external surface. Then this amounts to an enforced ideology in which you are free
from ideology.

“The only way to live outside the film industry is to work within it.”

(Apocryphal.)

The enforced ideological statement about your right to the freedom to follow your
own path negates itself. Capitalism masks the fact that it still interferes in enforcing
non-interference.

In order to comply the subject is forced to be free of all ideological affiliations in

order to be free, the subject is therefore forced to become apolitical as the literal
price of this freedom. This by default renders the subject up to the only substitute
for politics that is available and this is the market.

The market is portrayed as a meritocracy, in which rather like a burlesque circus

scene, anyone can become anything, but is in fact an indifferent oligarchy of already
accumulated advantage, against which no politicised voice is available to a subject
forced to abandon ideology to survive within it.

“How bleak, how depressing, how simply awful…well Duckie, no one said you have
a right to be Happy.”
 117

(Rover Joe. Dakota flats. 1807.)

What is highlighted here is that these two forms cannot exist together without
incurring a kind of tautology. But if this tautology is not acknowledged, then the
twist in the surface becomes a twist in the subject; who remains permanently in
debt to the injunction to be free, because central to the paying of this debt is what
can be described in Gödellian terms as an ‘unprovable truth’, in Lacanian terms as a
‘barring’ and in Marxist terms as ‘alienation’.

This is an inherent state perhaps, but in capital it is even more so; it is actually a
hybridisation of fixed and variable capital, in the sense that although the
inevitability of the circuit is consistent, this can be linguistically designated to
‘arrest’ anywhere, onto any irrelevant thing. What is achieved in the concealment of
this unorientable surface is the digitisation of the subject, in that they become a
machine capable of producing desire in any given scenario, thus reproducing capital
in any given scenario according to any ad hoc rationale; which enables the
expansion of the overarching fiction.

The subject reproduces what seems like the expansion of the potentiality of capital
as a suitable housing for any kind of liberty but the infinite expansion implied is only
the concealment of the looped topology of the unorientable surface; this is the
tautological ground formed from the mutation of two forms of contradicting liberty.

This can be thought of as a double bind, in that the instruction ‘be free’ , is
impossible to follow without getting it wrong in terms of Berlin’s two designations.

One of Bergsonn’s original definitions of a double bind is that you cannot leave the
field, and this is really the enforcement of positive liberty over the incompatible
negative injunction. The nature of capital is that, like the Klein Bottle discussed it
has neither an outside or an inside , merely a consistent surface, which is both; this
enables freedom ‘from’ within an encompassing freedom ‘to’, and is therefore
topologically maddening. As long as this twist remains concealed, there is no
problem; except for the subject, whose insides are completely knotted, as they are
free to do whatever they wish.

In Berlin's words, we use the concepts of liberty in attempting to answer two

questions:

FREE FROM

“What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or
should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other
persons?”,
 118

My answer to this would be the performative area, and in a sense it is THIS area
more than any other that is encouraged to be the post ideological costume
cupboard that feeds the market.
You perform images of given desire as ontological truth

FREE TO
“What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone
to do, or be, this rather than that?”
My answer here is that the form of control is the production of desire that is
mediated by appearances, and the concealment of its inevitability as lack within the
context of capital.
OR: The operation of the performance of images as subsumption to the
reproduction of capital is concealed.

This is the performance of semio-capital…it is tautological in that it requires both

contradictory components of liberty to be activated and its double bind, which
implies the first injunction is that you are free because capital is post ideological,
and the second contradictory injunction, which is that there is only the rationales,
logic, and apolitical doctrines of capitalism that form the rationale for this freedom
from any interference. The form of interference is the proof that it is not there; this
is capital as white noise.

MERIT-DEBT:

The link between lack in control societies and this Lacanian circuit as complicit in
the subject’s enclosure, is that in a control society that activates itself as an
seemingly endless meritocratic plane you are in constant ‘merit-debt’ to the idea of
unique individuality.

One of the myths about the simultaneity of positive and negative liberty is that this
contradiction is seen as a meritocracy. This is because of the rationale used to
disable the contradiction. There are more knots.

The neoliberal theory is that if a self-interested subject is the ‘true nature’ of the
subject and is freed from all of the old bureaucracies and restrictions, then they are
free to pursue that self-interest , which is supposedly the unbiased instructional
rationale of a ludic market, that informs this self interested self determination. The
market precedes the subject.
Because the market is faceless, it is proposed to be free from the ideologies that
dog politics, which are proposed as only enactments of that self-interest anyway.
This means that the only suitable instructional institution that informs positive
liberty is one that is incapable of ideological bent (and therefore incapable of self-
interested bias masking as ideological bent.) Thus the market becomes the
 119

‘institution of education’ that replaces ideological instruction, that would have

previously have defined the subject as a subject of negative liberty, because a
subject of negative liberty cannot be preceded by an ideology.

So in the neoliberal post-ideological market you are freed from ideology, that
would normally accompany the idea of positive liberty, which is defined as being
contradictory to negative liberty (freedom from ideology) because it constitutes the
presence of a guiding rationale that either instructs or informs self determination.
Thus the mutation of the two forms of liberty are no longer thought of as a
contradiction as the term positive liberty has been stripped of its ideological
assumptions.
Thus in being free from ideology, the guiding principle can no longer infect and
pervert the concept of positive liberty, and enable it to contradict negative liberty.
Positive liberty is seemingly stripped of its capacity to precede the subject.

In the impossibility of ideological bias now within positive liberty you are no longer
subject to the condition that would normally prevent its amalgamation with
negative liberty, (which would naturally preclude amalgamation with any
ideological bias) in that if the institution from which you draw your self
determination was ideological, then you could no longer claim to be free from it in a
negatively libertarian fashion.

The subject is free to be instructed by something that is immune to the supposed

hypocritical ideological masks of political education as this apolitical rationale is
now a ‘match’ for the criterion of negative liberty, which demands freedom from
ideology.

The subject is free to activate self-interest, as this is the post-ideological rationale

for self-determination that replaces ideology in the post ideological demand of
negative liberty, with which positive liberty has now been cross-bred.

You are free from any ideology that could possibly form a critique of self-interest as
ideology, precisely because self-interest is now tautologically present as positive
liberty but as an expression of negative liberty, the freedom from ideology.

This is clearly a logical loop that no one cares to examine, as self-interest is validated
as altruism, freedom and the only path to individualism. The only problem now is
that the freedom from interference has no compass, and if any ideological compass
is unearthed that follows on from the freedom from interference, it must be then
gotten free from as it represents a failure to obey the injunction of negative liberty.
This situation ratifies the destruction of any and all ‘found’ ideology as anything but
the failure to be free.

The subject is now free to be instructed by the adding machine, the spread sheet,
the mobile app, the stock exchange, the pie chart and the computer, with no danger
of contradiction with their negative freedom.
 120

So in being freed to follow only ideologically un-checked self interest as the form of
freedom from political ideology, the only guide is how to gain value, which can only
be learnt in the market.
Thus any found ideology that follows negative liberty can be iterated to another
subject only as a potential expansion of the market, which serves the purpose of
ideologically invalidating it as the iteration of a masked self-interest, which is the
prediction and assumption on which the market is founded as an arena of post
ideological self-interest.
In this way the tautological ground invalidates all tricks to ideologically examine
capitalism.
Understanding the trick then perhaps is vital as it is a tool that can change from
Trick One to Trick Two in mid air.

In a subtle reversal in which self-interest is seen as good for the economy and
therefore good for society, as well as in the rationale that self-interest brings
equilibrium according to the tenets of game theory, what becomes apparent is that
to gain value in such a mutation of liberties is a sign of merit.
Or rather that merit is self interest, and that this merit will be rewarded within a
market that then appears to be a meritocracy. This is the logical outcome of Nash’s
theories in which the ‘best’ move is to betray the other. The acceleration of self-
interest is the only accumulation of merit possible.
Therefore any failure to ‘gain value’ would be due to ‘lack of merit’ within the
subject as the field is supposedly entirely meritocratic.

(Unfortunately within this market logic there are two mistakes: one is that there is
no meritocracy, it is just an indifferent register of exchange; configured around
profit or loss.
The second mistake is that the activation of self-interest and of market practices is
actually an ideological position, as it is based on the division of intellectual and
physical labour. (This is a complex Deleuzean definition, but it serves well here)
What I mean is that a set of elite market ideologues set the doctrines, the workforce
follows along to enact them. The ideology is unfortunately a self-invalidating
freedom that can be enacted to expand itself and leave the subject feeling trapped
or weightless depending on how much capital they have accumulated.

Thus there is no meritocracy, the field is as indifferent to the subject as gravity,

those who are successful have merely performed tricks according to the ideology of
capitalism, which is to perform tricks that conceal the central tautology, in which
the only way to forestall the inevitable lack is to exploit the other in order to ride on
that indifference to make an accumulation that permits mobility, but only in terms
of the field.

So any subject who fails to gain value within this supposedly meritoctratic field is in
‘merit debt’ to that field. The heaviness that prevents their weightlessness is their
excess baggage and nothing to do with the field in which they are ‘free to be free
from’ any impediment to their self-interested efforts to lose a few pounds.
 121

Merit debt is not mentioned by name but well satirised in Charlie Brooker’s Black
Mirror episode entitled ‘15 Million Merits’ in which self-interested subjects betray
each other in the pursuit of individuation as ‘anything’, good, evil, even as ‘anti’ the
merit system itself. Any form of derivation out into ‘reality’ will suffice, as long as
there is derivation as a well-‘liked’ avatar that can represent individuality.
They are happy to accept ‘merits’ for any behaviour as there is no longer any scale
or compass from which to ideologically sense what form ‘merit’ should actually
take; it is just a number.

(Brooker, C (2015) Black Mirror Series 1 Ep 2. TV Programme. Channel 4: Endemol)

Another Episode that might be cited here is ‘Nosedive’ (Black Mirror Series 3, Ep 1
2016).
What is interesting of course is how they are iterated within what they critique.

"Fifteen Million Merits" premiered on Channel 4 on 11 December 2011 at 9:30 p.m.,

where according to 7-day figures from the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board,
the episode was watched by 1.52 million viewers”
(Wikipedia.)

Much of Brooker’s work is about choice within a moral vacuum, so perhaps this is
the only choice available.

Ever present Merit Debt could be thought of then as the installation of Lacanian lack
within the subject as a consequence of their failure to earn enough merit to
successfully ‘individuate’ in the supposed meritocracy, which is concealed as
impossible.
I am obviously seeing this as a specifically ‘circus situation’, in which your trick is to
perform any quality of difference with no possibility to relate that difference to any
inter-subjectively recogniseable idea, it is only to get to weightlessness of any kind
and get it validated as ‘real’ freedom within the indifference of gravity, which is
concealed as impossible.

The contradiction within the supposed meritocracy is that the only merit is self-
interest, which is the only workable response to the solution of the contradiction
between positive and negative liberty. This is the result of installing within positive
liberty, as its preceding and self determining guiding principle, the un-biased and
arbitrary register of exchange.

You can make any trick in gravity, but in claiming it ‘means’ real freedom you forfeit
the right for it to ‘mean’ anything, as you are simultaneously claiming that gravity is
a meritocracy and an indifferent register of bodies of mass.

You need it to be indifferent so any expression of yourself is allowed

You need it to represent an ideology so you can be free from it.
 122

If self-satisfaction is a measure of merit, then the only thing that can occur within a
field that is built upon a loop of desire as lack, is a return of no merit

Gravity then is configured as the same kind of false meritocracy as capitalism, in

that its ‘facelessness’ that un-biasedly measures your ability to score weightlessness
is seen as an ideologically blank enough field to not make you seem like you are
asking for ‘validation’ from some external ideological scale.

The seeking of ratification of freedom from an ideological source would

countermand the injunction by which the trick in gravity has a tendency to be
driven, which is the injunction to be free from restriction; that is the pursuit of
weightlessness as negative liberty

The weightlessness gains its ability to appear as a demonstration of this post

ideological freedom precisely because gravity represents the same unbiased scale
as the market.

What is ironic here is that although the necessity to activate weightlessness as a

demonstration of negative liberty requires that gravity is seen as a faceless
indifferent register (because any other reading of it would contradict the definition
of negative liberty), the activation of the fiction of weightlessness as ‘realised’ in
gravity requires that the self interested circus subject does not think of gravity as
indifferent as this would mean that this registering of freedom within it was
impossible, and so the field has to be thought of as meritocratic that ‘rewards’ the
meritous drive to activate freedom from restriction as the expression of freedom…in
this way the circus subject is in a loop both needing gravity to represent an
indifferent ideologically unbiased scale and also needing gravity to be a meritocracy
that recognises merit-filled efforts to realise the acts of negative liberty.
If gravity is a meritocracy then it precedes the subject as an ideological scale
If gravity is an indifferent register then it does not clash with the definition of
freedom from restriction within negative liberty, but it cannot register liberty as
having occurred, it cannot even perceive merit at all.

Gravity has to be active as an ideology that approves of weightlessness (sees it as a

reward for merit) otherwise its indifference invalidates the ‘freedom from
ideological restriction’ you are claiming is possible to enact through it.
The loop here is the same as in capitalism; the subject needs the market to both act
as a meritocracy that can validate their gain as a merit (not self interested rip-off)
and act as an indifferent register that will not set up the ideological contradiction of
their gain being an act that is freedom from old ideological restrictions. The subject
needs and does not need the approval of the market; the subject

The circus subject both needs gravity to be indifferent and meritocratic

simultaneously as this is the contradictory requirement of wishing to be free enough
to be free from gravity.
In turning to gravity as a merit-scale for acts of negative liberty, gravity is cast as
an ideological field that then cancels out the activation of seeing weightlessness as
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freedom from it, as in order to be free from restriction you cannot then be beholden
to an ideological scale of merit that validates that freedom from
restriction…especially if this is the same register.

In performing weightlessness as freedom, any freedom; freedom from restriction

and interference, you necessitate gravity being a faceless indifferent field that can
then not contradict your negative liberty, but at the same time imply wrongly that it
is meritocratic as this enables you to feel that the falsely earned freedom, ratified by
an audience, is due to an inner merit that is proved in a meritocratic register that is
not actually there.

To ask gravity to be a meritocracy that validates your weightlessness as the gain of

freedom then poses the problem of it being the ideologically orientated
contradiction of negative liberty that you try to iterate through it; it contradicts the
post ideological negative freedom that you are trying to perform. Seeking to get
free of a bind that can only be validated if that bind is present.
Daddy look at me, I’m flying.

In desperation to fly, you will perform any trick, do anything just to validate that you
are free from control; fortunately this is easy as you have designated gravity as
indifferent. But from where do you maintain that you gain from this? How do you
maintain it is meritocracy then if the merit cannot come from gravity? You need a
surplus to conceal the contradiction.
It is from an audience that must then be complicit in the neoliberal tautology, in
which an excess is needed to conceal the two contradictions:

A: an indifferent scale free from ideology cannot be a meritocracy.

and B: enforced recourse to such an indifferent scale is a form of ideology

Both of these things are concealed…if you hide the fact that the market is not post
ideological, you cannot then claim it is a meritocracy.

The trick that claims it is an act of ‘real freedom’ from restriction is ideological then,
because it does expound an ideology : but it is an ideology of the concealment of
contradiction that must accompany a capital that seeks at all cost to hide its internal
limits. This is Trick Two.

In Trick Two you are missing the point that the performance of this ‘freedom from’
is the ideological edict that you are following.
Capital is not post-ideological it is just an ideology that privileges faceless self-
interest for the benefit of an elite…and you are quoting from it every time you think
that weightlessness is a real freedom to your individual merit.
This view of capitalism as just another ideology prevents it from being an
inescapable totality, in the same way that Trick One, in exposing the tautology that
similarly implies that gravity is not a ‘total’ field , means that it is possible to
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fictionalise the end of gravity as an all encompassing field, rather than presenting it
as an endless meritocracy that recognises how ‘good’ you are.
Trick Two is a lonely escapade, just you and your merits, but I feel that Trick One is
an idea that can be shared with an audience.

The self interested subject of capital is in a similar bind; needing the market to be an
ideologically biased register of merit (because, if it is not, then the gain comes
attached to nothing, except the acknowledgement that it is only freedom at
another’s expense), which means that any attempt to prove freedom from
ideological bias activated by self-interested gain in that market is invalidated by
thinking that you achieve freedom from interference by turning to the ideal of a
meritocracy to validate that freedom.

Apart from these semantic loops, it is clear that capitalism is ideological, it just will
not admit it, as it interferes with the need for rampant self interest to keep it turning
but to also continue to feel that this is worthwhile and filled with merit. Rampant
self-interest is the rationale for turning to capitalism as an ideology in the first place,
and turning to capital requires this attitude of voracious betrayal anyway; it is the
nature of the beast.

But the beast will not die as this merit debt is experienced as the problem of the
subject rather than the result of a double bound enclosure, where desire is not
realisable. The ‘merit debt’ can never be paid off because the meritocracy is absent,
it is in fact an indifferent autonomous register that is concealed from the subject
and recast as a singular injunction, ‘you must be free’.
Within the tautological ground of meritocracy, the ideological injunction to be free
from ideology contains its own extimate cause of failure and results in ‘merit debt’,
results in lack, but which is not revealed as inherent to the meritocracy.
This can be related in some way to John Mackenzie’s book Perform or Else, but the
insistence of merit and the guilt associated with merit-debt here is what I am
focussing on.
A system with that wishes to be a totality can imply that it has no outside through
the topological twisting of itself back on itself and this is the form of any injunctive
demand for you to enact liberty that also then is able to be post-ideological.
The punishment here for failing to ‘be free’ is self-inflicted; rather than being an ‘or
else’ that issues from an external position. Apparently there is no external position
from which to issue ideological injunctions.
I hope that in writing this it can be shown that I am an original thinker who truly
deserves your attention.

As a double bind, it masks its own responsibility for the ensuing misery at the site of
the subject…the effect is that you feel that it is your lack of worth in the apparent
meritocracy that is the lack or the debt you cannot seem to pay off.
 125

ON RESEARCH:

This difficult and knotted examination of the concept of ‘freedom’ is partly to

address the moment of weightlessness and how circus conceives of itself, but also
to address the need within artistic research for agency. It is predicated on an agency
that attempts to be free from the scientific doctrines that supposedly determine in
which areas, fields, modes of perception and which registers research can occur; all
the while addressing also the need for a way to establish what models of
epistemological or ontological enquiry can we be informed by so as to be ‘free
enough to’ attempt to be ‘free from’ accepted models of research. This also can be
tricky, as impostership and merit-debt circle each other endlessly, as is evidenced
here. It is tricky because it is necessary to make statements ‘about’ artistic research
that can be treated as statements ‘of’ it.

There are other paradoxes involved in Berlin’s argument, in which internal binds are
also considered so that positive liberty also includes internal interferences and
contradictory impulses that interfere with a subject’s rational desire to act for their
own good. I acknowledge that there is not space here to open up the meaning of
‘freedom’ but the task here is merely to show how a mutation of berlin’s ideas forms
a part of the tautological ground, that I designate as the installation of trick two in
the landscape so as to neutralise, capture and commodify the original godellan
mechanism that seeks to expose the limits of a field as to be a mechanism that
implues that field is an endless housing of the freedom generated by the trick, as
opposed to a fiction of the sky told in the basement.

LAING

NYTHING OR ANOTHING, THE CHOICE IS YOURS:

All of this formed a ground that followed the form of trick two.
It was based on the presence of an absence on necessitising something that was
deemed unnecessary, and a compulsory demand for deconstructions of old
structures, in order to form a new subjectivity, which was then consumed in its
validation. It was, if you like drama, a tyranny of freedom, violently policed and
enforced to be spread globally. This was the conception of the free market as the
only iteration of democracy and within this thin atmosphere, tricks, jokes and
pranks no longer worked as they should. The system that actually encouraged such
directionless rebellions caused the chaos upon which capital feeds.
But there are other tautologies here, by which to imply that a double bind causes
madness is only to reinforce an image of the subject who is happiest when playing
‘winnable ‘ games. That is the identification of an internal knot, from which you
must be free, does not prevent the formation of a subject as a self interested game
 126

playing subject, the conception of whom then forms a rationale for an apolitical
competitive market as their natural playground, which in turn begs a ludic subject.

KNOT THEORY: BEGINNING OF LAING round TWO >ding>ding>

Now I have to return to [Link], who was so present in my early thinking. I wish to
both marvel at his concise elucidation of the trick as I see it in language, and to also
look at how his work has also somehow contributed to this double bound scenario.
This was a scenario in which the kind of exposure of inner tautology in thinking
patterns, thus implying that the subject carries ingrained and unhelpful structures
from their social environment, of which they must try to rid themselves, also
reinforces the conception of this new subject that plays games and must move past
all external ideological structures: the strategic automaton. The logical conclusion
of Laing’s observations brings us to a position where even the exchange of love is a
rational ‘move’ for self interested gain. Thus deepening the need for a loveless
system of checks and balances, and rendering obsolete the ideologies of solidarity
and social change, based on empathy, that appeared now as an outmoded
hypocrisy.

THE MAN IN THE MIRROR:

As these ideas were playing out from the late 60’s to mid 80’s there was also a
general shift to the notion, through such organisations as the Human Potential
movement; that social change must be developed by working on the self.
Through the failure of protest clashes with State power in the West there was a
general feeling that social change could be done subversively, internally by still
inhabiting the game but as an inwardly changed actor . This was a general mood
and here I want to focus particularly on Laing, as his work features in the early
version of my attempts to speak a trick.
So here it is necessary to produce another reading of Laing.

The only move is not ‘not to play’:

I feel that the poetic deconstructions of circular thinking that he observed in a wide
spectrum of social situations are a good example of the trick as they expose
tautology and therefore the limits of the ludic system, but here too is a problem. In
that it could be inferred that the trick here is dependant on a certain simplified
reading of the subject. It could be inferred that the subject played un-winnable
games because we are all natural game players, rather than noticing that the double
bind enforces play as the only possible engagement.
For me, this misreading has facilitated the offering up of a supposedly ludic
subject, to a specific kind of formal system, which subtly invalidates the trick of
exposing the un-winnable game. In conceiving of the subject as being at heart
strategic and rational, the field of capitalist competition is offered as the ideal
arena. The problem is that this arena repeats the un-winnable scenario that Laing
highlights.
 127

The trick to expose how the human animal becomes miserable in a knot
internalised from a game that conceals it is itself tautological has become the
rationale for misreading the subject as only ludic and entering this subject into an
arena that then appears to be ‘fair’ because the subject is misread in this way.
Laing’s deconstructions of social gravities that bind you, as effective means of
achieving freedom, become the rationalisation for entry into a larger insoluble bind,
because the misreading of the subject as a game-lover makes the game seem
meritocratic. Trick One becomes Trick Two.

His theories of human behaviour, from which he constructed his ‘knots’, were
derived from the creation of questionnaires, which sought to systemise human
behaviour according to game theory. As stated, love through these observational
tools was seen as a game of self interest, and in this sense was ethically and
ideologically stripped of its relation to altruism.

This resonates with the ‘self-less’ natural behaviour that Dawkins observed in his
later studies that lead to the publication of the Selfish Gene in the 80’s .The study
showed through game-theory that selfless acts were in fact selfish, thus also
implying that the ‘natural’ state of an organism is to compete selfishly. This theory
was also to rationalise free market theory as a model of the natural world. There is
also more to be said here about the modelling of nature, through other thinkers but
essentially the image of both nature red in tooth and claw and images of symbiotic,
charitable collaboration have all featured at various times as rationales for the
persistence of the market.
For now the task is to highlight the mechanism of the trick as I designate it as an
installed ground that conceals the conflation of incompatible but reciprocal
registers, ideologies and injunctions.

Laing at the time had operated an elegant analysis of tautology, in which he saw
that the binds that held people in illness and self-destructive loops were games that
it was impossible for this simplified game playing subject to win, and so in this sense
represented major contributions to the study of mental illness and familial or social
dysfunction.
These ‘knots’, for me, still represent an important early link between the idea of a
trick in language and a trick in the physics of gravity.
They moved through the law within the formal system, to present the subject not
as aberrant but as capable of either looping in the impossible, contradictory social
injunctions in which they were caught, or in ‘seeing’ the impossibility of that flawed
system, they could then use this awareness to operate a break in the loop and
possibly the system itself. This is see as either Trick Two or Trick One respectively.

Laing’s Knots still represent a mode of transposition that has informed my practice
of trying to speak and write circus tricks, as they expose a structural mechanism in
which the contradictory injunctions of a formal game are concealed as being
iterated simultaneously, which then places the player at an impasse. They are tricks
in that they expose a flaw in what was once thought of as a totality or truth, shifting
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focus from the subject as a ‘wrong’ subject in a good game, to a ‘good’ subject in a
‘wrong’ game. Often what is concealed is that it is just a game.

RANT IN E MINOR:

“The patterns delineated here have not yet been classified by a Linnaeus of human
bondage. They are all, perhaps, strangely, familiar. In these pages I have confined
myself to laying out only some of those I actually have seen. Words that come to mind
to name them are: knots, tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, binds.

I could have remained closer to the ‘raw’ data in which these patterns appear. I could
have distilled them further towards an abstract logico-mathematical calculus. I hope
they are not so schematized that one may not refer back to the very specific
experiences from which they derive; yet that they are sufficiently independent of
‘content’, for one to divine the final formal elegance in these webs of Maya”.

(Knots. April 1969 R.D.L.)

They are playing a game.

They are playing at not playing a game.
If I show them I see they are,
I shall break the rules and they will punish me.
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

However ‘true’ I still find this, I must draw attention to what it inadvertently
supported, but there is a sadness in my heart as I reconfigure these loops that I love
into part of the project that renders the subject loveless.
I am not just saying that as a strategy for personal gain…I’m not doing that…really,
I’m not…honestly…

There is a moment in this clip from a routine by Bill Hicks that explains exactly what
I mean…

“The righteous indignation dollar…”

[Link]

Clip from material on ‘Rant in E Minor’ (Hicks, 1997)

Laing suggests that these impasses, or binds, are operated by the subject upon
themselves, but only by trying to meet received and contradictory criteria that have
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become ingrained in them by an external influence, and that the healthy action is
‘not to play’.
As stated it is unclear whether Laing’s vision of the subject included a purely
strategic sensibility that obliterated the capacity for altruism from his ontology or
whether this was the eager misreading of his observations.
The delineation of a knot implies a subject who is rationally opposed to knots; who
is then the kind of subject modelled out of Nash’s theories in which the concealment
of the knot in late capitalism shows that system to be the perfect scheme of societal
management for this subject who is rationally opposed to knots.
This is again tautological in that a subject who hates knots is used as a
rationalisation for their binding.
This is Laing as the logic of a medieval court: If you drown you are innocent, if you
float then you are a witch and we will burn you.
It is perhaps true that in showing how the subject should not play knotted games,
Laing does imply a subject who is the ideal subject to support the structure of a
knotted game that can maintain itself as meritocratic; but also what his Knots hints
at is that the awareness of an ‘un-winnability’ must galvanise some other kind of
subject; perhaps who can only haunt those knots in awareness of them.

So apparently it is healthy not to play a game that is knotted; ironically this then
implies that the subject can be happy by playing games that are winnable, and this
then paints an image of a subject that is then used to rationalise fre market
capitalism as a form of social control that is in itself an unwinnable twisted surface, a
game that is knotted.

He shows his ‘knots’ to be tricks for freedom that ‘deconstruct’ and expose the
hidden fictions that mask the tautology inherent in the system through which we
move, and which binds us. Although they are self-made binds in many ways, the
narrative is that these actions have been placed in you by society, and that the
speaking of these knots is a trick to make you free of their ridiculous internal
tautology; as the obvious ridiculous circularity of the loop is exposed the fact that
you must no longer play that which is limited and unwinnable is made clear.
Ironically, no matter how free these tricks make us feel, and there is no doubt that
some people also felt that this was a way of achieving liberty from social ideologies
now seen as hypocritical top-down injunctions; needless to say this fed directly into
the corporate project that sought freedom from government interference. Ironically
of course many arms of big business are supported by the social programs originally
designed to protect the subject from capitalism; terms like market Stalinism, Post
Fordism and the continuing subsidy of previously nationalised industries for private
profit show that the corporate idea of freedom is not averse to leaning on
governments at all.
To be free of an unwinnable game, was conflated as being free of lumbering,
hypocritical bureaucracies that, whilst cumbersome, were only so because they
supposedly reflected the duplicity of subjects who did not always reveal that they
were simply rational subjects playing to win.
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It might be said however that such bureaucracies reflected a different belief, one
in which altruism as still possible, albeit within the constantly eroding tide of late
capitalism.

This process of shredding “the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, old
ways of working and of doing things” associated with these bureaucracies was
across all parties, right and left. (Blair, T. Labour Party Conference. 1999.)
It relied on the activation of our newfound ‘health’, which was categorised as the
freedom to play games, in which we were free from ‘un-winnability’ because
hypocrisy had been expunged from the open marriage of the subject who loved to
play and the ‘fair’ game of capital.
Our health was now based on rejecting the policeman in our own heads who issues
double binds, and was being based on the idea of us as vital, strategic individuals.
In showing us the elegant power of the trick as being similar to the mechanisms of
literary deconstruction, somewhere in this reliance on game theory to structure
these deconstructions, a return to the simplification of the subject was engendered;
a subject quantifiable as the binary operations of loss or gain.

It is this very reduction of the subject, his/her oversimplification in order to reach

these conclusions that opens the door for a logic in which rejection of all external
ideology is a rational response when the over-arching view is that these will
necessarily incur the internal construction of tautological binds.
(The problem is that this view is essentially ideological, so it is a playing a game of
not playing a game. The inclusion of something that by its own logic is seen as
essentially deceptive and self serving as the example of honest competition then
will necessarily skew the game logic and cause unfathomable loops for the simple,
‘healthily self-interested citizen’. But it would be ‘alright’ for the market, because
the subject would simply internalise these knots as their own ludic short-comings.).
These binds will then be felt by the subject as an inescapable gravity, or in Berlin’s
terms an inevitable tyranny, but one that is internal and due to the subject not
‘successfully’ enough activating their negative liberty.
So whilst Laing provides us with a clear analysis of how tricks that reveal flaws, that
expose the cause of your self binding as external to you, can be constructed in
language, it is ironic that he also strengthens a representation of the subject as a
game-playing, self-interested strategist the best most efficient measure of which is
the pure objectivity of another realm, as autonomous as the indifferent rules of a
game, that is the market.

Games, as demonstrated in Massumi’s reading of the play bite, are incredibly

nuanced and layered undertakings, in which not only a selfish gene operates but
also a trans-individual affect that places value on the other as a component of play
that is also necessary for survival. Organisms bond beyond the simple need for
endurance, and games are what living organisms engage in not just for personal
gain.
The market is dead to any such outcomes or conclusions, it simply, mindlessly
expands itself.
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Laing acknowledged that dark and selfish familial games brought stability to
society, but which ensured a miserable existence for all the individuals involved, as
equilibrium is maintained through internalising the contradictions under which you
live.
This is interesting, as the ‘Cold War’ branch of game theory (the theoretical lens
used by Laing to illuminate this contradiction as a form of excruciating balancing
act) is also comprised by a formula that was developed to rationalise Capitalism.
That is, to rationalise a system that was pitted against the exposure of it as form
that enforced the internalisation of contradiction to ensure stability.

Where Laing points away from social controls of an ideological nature that cause
unhappiness, or even psychosis, he does so through game theory that renders us
free from those kind of contradictions but delivers us into a deeper more non-
negotiable form of double bind of neoliberal rationalisation of capital as social
management.

In this way he points away from an internalised bureaucracy but towards a theory of
a simplified subject locked in a permanent reciprocal relation to become a subject
through recourse to an indifferent market that negates subjectivity. Again Trick One
that exposes has a tendency to become Trick Two, of concealment.

Again this was seen to become an established fantasy, that there is no

contradiction in capitalism, only rightful winners and sore losers.
This fiction of there being no loop of erroneous logic is internalised as the sanctity
of the targets, numbers, values and profits cannot be exposed to its externalisation.
They must be maintained lest the automated financial system that regulates the
fabric of society collapses in on itself. The trick has to remain as Trick Two, the trick
to conceal.
The enforced tax-payer’s bail out of the 2008 financial crash is proof of this, as the
subjects who suffered most from its effects are asked to internalise the irrational
deficit.

It is fair to say here that Laing highlights the misery of game theory; of being this
kind of being, rather than extolling it as a model for society. He had used the lens of
the theory to highlight unhappiness, thus implying that these games, when
performed in unwinnable scenarios, were antithetical to the human psyche in some
way.
My point is that these ‘linnaeus of human bondage’ when unexposed are precisely
homological to the structure of Trick Two, the trick to conceal the circular route of
the self-defeating logic and which imply that the game is winnable when it is not. So
whilst not implying that we were not game playing animals he did imply that we
become unhappy when trapped in an unacknowledged un-winnable arenas.

THIS IS A RATIONALE FOR WHAT I MEAN BY SELF INTERESTED:

What I am implying here is not that Laing’s identification of familial games that
were impossible to win necessarily leads to a conception of the self-interested
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subject ; but rather to acknowledge that these conclusions were gleaned through
the lens of game theory, and it is this overarching discourse that has the
unfortunate effect of it being only possible to logically extrapolate to such a
simplified subject.
What is perhaps valuable here is Laing’s continuation of Bergson’s ideas on
schizophrenia being an adaptation to an insoluble riddle. The radical thought here
was to view the misery as the only ‘rational’ adaptation to an impasse, rather than
an abnormal reaction to a rational world.
The imposition of a double bind means the subject is caught in an unwinnable
game, but one that insists victory is possible. There are deeper neurological causes
of course but it can be stated that the unexpected and ‘irrational’ behaviour that
develops is the expression of the difference designated through the game theory
lens between the ludic subject who is engaged in ‘fair’ competition and the ensnared
human animal, who is trapped by every available move in a game that conceals the
fact that it is un-winnable
So here is a paradox in which Laing used a lens that reduces the subject to a self
interested rational subject to highlight how this rational subject is driven insane by
the imposition of an unwinnable game, as a rationale for their ‘insanity’.
So this paradox contain a problem: regardless of what human spirit is liberated
here the outcome still infers that the natural subject is one who is therefore happy if
placed in a winnable game, and the schizophrenic or the psychotic is one who is
denied this ‘natural’ state. Thus the by-product of Laing implies that the ‘natural’
state of the subject is rational and engaged in games of self-interest. The outcome
is the same as in the Rand Corporation, even altruism is categorised as an essentially
selfish move.

I do not wish to lean too heavily on Laing here, as to use game theory to show how
the subject is bound might too closely imply that I am, like Lacan, using a subject
that I claim is impossible to draw a picture of that impossibility. Suffice to say here
that Laing’s use of the theory had an effect.

Suffice to say, in these assumptions, reached through game theory, were also the
darkly paranoid and negative assumptions about what human beings were really
like; Whatever the kind of game, Laing’s study seemed to show that the ludic
sensibility was deeply ingrained, so his conclusions were to help spread these bleak
and paranoid, Cold War ideas about human nature into other areas of society.

These ideas then also emboldened the neoconservative view that we must turn
away from politicians and towards the market as a social regulator. If we could
‘thrive’ when our natural competitive nature had an open arena that seemingly
rewarded merit then the free market was perfectly calibrated as a set of ludic
scenarios.
The problem was that the ‘free’ market was exactly the kind of double bind or knot
that Laing was elucidating as the cause of misery and insanity. It was Trick Two, the
tautological ground.
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The Dollar came before the subject, but you needed the subject to chase after the
dollar.
The market’s incapacity to recognise any but the most oversimplified automaton
of a subject, which meant that any kind of trick that relied on empathetic, moral or
ethical considerations was wholly ineffectual.
Any ‘deconstruction’ of perceived elitist or repressive ideology that you felt was
holding you down; any operation of Laing’s elegant formula of identifying these
binds was encouraged but could not ever work to leave the field in which it had to be
validated . Its validation in the market as a ‘good’ trick necessarily implied that you
were a ‘simplified’ subject that could only be enclosed in the master narrative of
capitalism to receive validation of your exercise of freedom. It became necessary for
freedom to be validated in an enclosure.
This exercising of freedom ensures you remain free to be free from restriction, but
within an enclosure that cycles through the enforcement of validation, negation and
re-enforcement of re-validation. Game over, Try again.

For the circus artist again here is the example in which the trick to ‘tell’ of escape
from a field of indifferent gravity is easily subsumed into the implication that the
field itself is wholly able to realise such ‘tellings’ and thereby appears limitless and
meritocratic. But even though the field then appears to contain freedom, where is
it?
The capture of Laing’s identification of the misery of the unwinnable games that
we are capable of playing serves to privilege the false deduction that we are at heart
strategic beings at home in a high stakes game. This is is partly what is obscured in
this knotted topology. Laing in a sense is used to install the knot he tried to untie;
Trick One to expose is inferred as rationale for Trick Two to conceal.
The question is perhaps, what is the nature of the subject, who decides not to play;
for me, it is the existence of this subject; the one who does not try to win, who as
Berardi states accepts ‘decline’ as non-participation in the double-bind; in what
Laing designates as an unwinnable game.
Having exposed the tautology the question is how to live now that the strategic
rational subject is no longer in ascendancy?

DISASTER THEORY:

Game Theory, Market Theory, Laing’s ideas on Knots and Berlin’s on forms of
Liberty all are presented here as rationales for the mandatory performance of tricks
in the field of capital as the only recourse to survival in a concealed tautological
ground. This is the overarching installation of Trick Two, in which all forms of Trick
One are captured.
I will sketch over some of the ideas here.

Within the idea of each human interaction being a game of self-interest, then tricks
were valuable, as a method of winning (specifically by using the inherent flaw in the
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system to gain an advantage, rather than exposing how that flaw invalidated the
system). The trick was a tactic for personal gain, as in Nash’s model betrayal was
equal to social equilibrium. This treachery was portrayed as no more than a smart
exploit of the inherent loopholes that someone else would do if you did not do it
first.

Here was the idea of the trick writ large; but in this game theory conception of the
trick the subject was not focused on its iteration in order to collapse some
oppressive system for communal interest (as this was shown to only be another
tactic of self interest anyway) or to provide an additional push to the general project
of further fictionalising modes of freedom from oppression (as this was now seen as
pointless when the market could factualise those freedom instantly.)

The trick was something that you performed not to collapse the system that
enclosed it, but the trick was specifically designed to fulfill another duty, that of the
maintenance of order, and therefore the expansion of the system that permitted
such self-interested tricks.
What became important was that capitalism appeared as a totality; expanded
ever so slightly every time someone operated trick two for gain.
Neoliberalism could be conceived of as a ‘political project to re-establish the
conditions for capital accumulation and to restore power to economic elites’. (‘A
Brief History of Neoliberalism’. Harvey, D. 2005.)
Although I admit my handling of the nuances of Neoliberalism are blunt, my
concern here is to highlight how this form of trick conceals that a game of exploits is
even being played.

The fantasy was that the trick that would ensure your own gratification and would
also be contributing to a wider management of social imbalance. What was
concealed also was the inevitable repeat of the trick due to the impossibility of
validating its agency in the scale provided, and the exploitative means by which a
needed surplus was gained to forestall that impossibility of validation.
A surplus always has to be fetishised to forestall the fact that the exchange value
that appears intrinsic to the commodity has its origins in a social relation that the
un-fetishised surplus denies. The value of the commodity, its ‘pricelessness’ is
fictional to the market. They are playing at not playing a game.

In this way society was left without an ideology since any social theory that
proposed an absolute direction was in of itself hypocritical, except the supposedly
unbiased market forces. Subjectivity was an improvisational comedy of errors that
took itself very seriously.
The fundamentally assumed idea that we all strategise against each other all the
time and therefore that there could be no commune in turn fostered the self-
interested subject, who behaved this way.
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This left only one recourse, which was the continuation of a growing trend, and the
goal of financial elites; the reversal of socialist values and ‘big government’ policies
of the Post War period. The running of society was handed over to the only
impartial ideology left, autonomous difference that was therefore incorruptible and
immune to the selfishness now thought to be inherent in the subject, but which was
also acknowledged as the motor of societal equilibrium within this impartiality.
We are at peace through conflict.

This self-fulfilling prophecy saw the identification of the subject as both flawed but
ideal. This seemed to occur in an insane Langian loop as the existence of a subject
that was thought ideologically unsound, playing strategic games for profit only, was
the rationale for the subsequent handing over of political power to an objective
system based on the same lens that first was used as a tool to reach this conclusion
about the subject.
Which came first, the selfish chicken or the selfish egg, well it did not matter, as
long as it was it was contentious, the markets would accommodate it.
The subject’s self-interest was seen as a stabilising force within the system that
predicted that self-interest.

A further loop in the logic was that this balance was to be maintained by
encouraging self -interested behaviour, which was validated through a system that
denied the possibility for viable self-hood.

The subject was free to be whoever they wanted to be, to follow any ideological
creed they wished, free from any interference as long as it was a game played in the
market.
This loop between positive and negative liberty has been touched on, and implicit
in this extra helping of freedom was that the only trusted methodology for
validating the worth of these new ideals for living, these new subjects, new modes
of being was to submit them for validation to a totally autonomous system that
negated their relation to subjective existence.
The only value to be found was not value that implied a subject but value that
existed only as difference to another value.

TRICK AS SURVIVAL IN NEOLIB-SPACE

So if we think of the trick as not only the state of the ground but also as the implied
tactic for performing yourself entrepreneurially for self interested gain in this
ground. Then the trick in seeking not to fictionalise agency but to realise it was no
longer a useful deconstruction.

The trick was now something that was necessary for survival, but which was almost
immediately eradicated as a possibility for identifying flaws in the master system.
The objective system to which it had to be submitted in order to receive value,
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negated the subjective position that produced the trick, from which a desire for
change could be issued. This negation of subjective voice in turn created demand
for a new ways of demonstrating subjectivity, with new accoutrements, accessories,
habits, illnesses, wants and pathways, costumes and identities to which capitalism
could pander.
The trick, far from being the practice of itinerant exiles on the outskirts of society,
becomes a way of creating new markets, of ratifying society as an all-inclusive
market.
Trick was encouraged because , upon the tautological ground of Trick Two, it was
invalidated.

It is worth briefly highlighting the actual effects of this trend towards self-interested
tricks. The main result is of stratification; a line between performer of success and
the aspiring audience is drawn invisibly and consistently, with the performer bowing
and the ‘applause labour’ of the audience forestalling the inevitable collapse of the
validity of the performance as mere fiction and instead holding it up as real. Value
accrued to the few, everyone else applauded these scattered solos.

SYSTEM WAS IRRATIONAL THE

The evidence started to mount up that the ‘stability’ afforded by John Nash’s
equations of a simplified, rational individual was not based on fairness. The
supposed equilibrium caused by mass self-interest was not related to any implicit
meritocratic valve within the engine of commerce. You were in merit debt to a
register that did not recognise merit. You owed a currency no one was using
anymore, but there was no other currency.
The fantasy that ‘good’ modes of being ‘individual’ could be entrepreneurially
converted into ‘good’ responses in the market persisted; the fantasy that the
focused construction of a unique persona would be reflected back at you by an
indifferent system of differences that did not permit the inclusion of persona at all,
pervaded society whilst simultaneously being proved to be incorrect, by a widening
wealth gap.
Society was more stratified than it had been for one hundred years.
Beneath the meritocratic surface the social class divisions were deepening and
hardening.

HUMAN CORRUPTION

As well as these divisions the problem of human corruption, not predicted in the
rational model of the subject, meant that the sanctity of the numbers that was the
pristine reliability of the market to stabilise everything was now not to be trusted.
As stated, in order to meet targets people were now using an irrational, ‘poetic’
license to blur the figures in their favour. This excessive behavior was of course
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entered into the data as rational. Again perhaps as Berardi predicts, the economy is
pure symbolist poetry.
Within this rational game, subjects possessed of irrational notions began to
operate tricks of a deeper more destructively tautological nature that still exploited
the grand trick of mutated liberty, governed by an indifferent market.

Freedom and ‘weightlessness’ in profit was being created, and these tricks did
eventually ruin the system in which they created their tautological knots.
But these tricks were not performed to crash the market right away, they were
rip-offs designed to mask the fact that the entire system was a flawed lie. Some true
trick-making individuals were short-selling the trade algorithms, upon which large
sections of the entire financial system rested.
The trick was supposed to perpetuate the broken system so that more tricks for
personal gain could be made. These master acrobats of finance dealt in selling ways
to minimize the risk of falling, and placed bets against both for and against them in
complex algebraic ratios so that if the shares went either way they would simply be
collecting the insurance from either eventuality. They had conflated loss with gain
in what was felt to be at the time the elimination of all risk.
Everyone wanted to be an acrobat who could never fall, but it was only the price of
leotards that sky-rocketed.
This was done largely through basic corruption, lies and half-truths at the expense
of vulnerable people. These were loopholes only operable in concealment. Pure
Trick Two.
The accounting firms were falsifying tranches of subprime mortgages as triple A
mortgages, then recycling these as investment opportunities many times over to
create a vast house of cards, from which it was possible to collect premiums before
it all inevitably collapsed.
These tricks crashed the system in 2008, but because the desire to not expose the
flaws was so great, and affected stability so much, these circus artists of financial
gravity were reimbursed by those they tricked.
This is like performing a trick that unintentionally proves that gravity does not exist
and then getting the now floating audience to pay you to tie them back into their
seats.
The CEO’s responsible faked records and targets and lied about practices (as
humans do when left to be free to meet the market free of all ideology) in order to
keep their bonuses.
One Head Accountant of a well known Central Bank declared: “We started with a
rational system of numbers that could not be refuted but we ended up with a
fictitious irrational system.”

This kind of corruption is not what I mean when I say we need to find a new form of
trick in a system in which the trick is the overarching structure.
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DOES THE TRICK KNOT WORK?

The trick can be thought of as a resistance to a system. But this mechanism of

resistance itself had become part of a larger systemised repetition of ‘extraordinary
individualism’ that actually mutates the trick. The trick goes from being freedom
from undesirable political structure to subsumption by an inhuman indifference that
could only permit these same operations within the bounds of its non-negotiability
if their ‘un-captured’ quality were reduced to a differential quantity, with the
appearance of freedom only.

The trick was the extension of a larger system of gravity, of which circus for me had
become a snapshot, that happily included ‘tricks’ as deconstructions of power but
reprocessed them contradictorily as examples of what was permitted within its
control …As the circus artists soaked up the applause that covered the fact that
their ‘freedom’ was not real, Circus became a ‘Selfie’ of Capitalism.

Autonomous systems that self-fulfil or self-negate mean that the deconstructive

power of the trick operating through similar tautological mechanism is ineffectual at
collapsing this master double bind.
A series of minor knots, within a grand enclosing knot add up to a zero sum game.

Let us leave language aside for a minute. Trick One acknowledges that the trick in
gravity and in capital only provides the illusion of weightlessness, as this
weightlessness is only rendered within the terms allowed by these restrictive fields,
it is the freedom to ‘tell’ of weightlessness .

Within Trick Two the fantasy of meritocracy makes this fiction appear to be fact; in
which you are free to register a ‘profit of weightlessness’ into the field of
gravity/capital as weightlessness ‘fetishized’ into genuine freedom ‘from’ that field.
This ‘freedom from’ does not end up as a critique of the formal system of gravity or
of capitalism through this glaring inconsisteny; instead it proves that freedom is
possible only by implying a field is not what it is; as the field is needed as the
ideological basis to ratify the merit of your claim that you are free from it.

The lie implicit in the trick does not ever point to the formal system as a lie, it only
ever points to the subject as a winner or a loser. The subject internalises the binary
outcome that they signed up for; the field is left untouched. What was once an
unprovable truth that wrecks the ship becomes the un-scratchable itch of the
captain.

So there is perhaps an ethics here, of which trick do you use? Do you perform a
trick to expose, or to conceal?
If we bring language back for a moment; who is to say what is correct here? It is
only to say that the incorrectness here points to something underneath the division
between what is right and wrong; something uncorrect.
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That is, something that points to the mistake whilst acknowledging its own
impossibility to be a valid pointer under the prevailing conditions of that mistake.
Something uncorrect, a misspelling of how wrong language when it is pointing at
the truth.

“When Wrong is the Only Right Left” is the title of a film I am submitting with this
writing. In this film the wrong actions lead to the right results, but those actions are
invalidated by their rightness causing the invalidation of the system through which
they are iterated. The only way to point at the fault is to activate it perhaps. The film
is the demonstration of what is at stake in invalidating a system that validates you;
it is uncorrect. That is the only ethcal statement I am willing to make here.

In my more optimistic moments, in lieu of an ethics I use tautology as I see it as

fundamentally unavailable to co-opting, even to itself, in the sense that it remains
an flicker resistant to ossification as light or dark, commodification as desirable or
undesirable and institutionalisation as fact or fiction.
In that it represents Berardi’s ideas of continual development that he attributes to
the rhizome; that it can continue to evolve past its own contradictions or circumvent
its inclusion into theoretical structures that are antithetical to its tenets.
This is also why circus should embrace it, or re-embrace it, as circus has become
fixated in a neoliberal display of extraordinary individualism and personal freedom,
which, whilst not bad in itself, has become to represent a subject that, for me is
implicated in the narratives that ratify the exploitative hegemony of an apolitical
‘financialised’ power.

So if the trick is compromised, then the circus practice of trick-making for me

emerges as something that is necessary to organise against the hegemony of tricks
itself. To trick the trick that conceals.

This is a good theory but resistance remains flawed; appropriated by its inevitable
reduction to the only game in town. The point for me is to refuse to play to win.
We are dominated by the game theory definition of meeting each other,
exacerbated by the insistence that our linguistic expressions of like or dislike have
monetary value in a vicious market that we cannot control, or that the performative
nature of our utterances and our presences and our appearances are normalised as
accepted ‘tricks’ for personal gain.
It is nothing new to say you perform yourself;

“ There will be time, there will be time, To prepare a face to meet the faces that you
meet…”
(‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. T.S. Eliot. Penguin. 1959.)

It is the complicity with unspoken capitalist ideology, wherein it is your duty to act
with self-interest that I feel has become the perfect fit for the circus artist, to which I
object.
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Circus is full of pin-ups of the unspoken late capitalist ideal, which is one reason I
feel that those model citizens of rebellion do not say much.
Circus has to say that it is not self-interested.

PERFORM TO SURVIVE.

These tricks of the ‘trade’ are the fabric of our supposed being, a model of humanity
that is based on gain and suspicion, but it is only a model within a formal system
that uses tricks to make sure the system stays intact, and not expose its flaws.
I think tricks should be used as a form of exposition rather than to perpetuate the
system by constantly reminding yourself and others that it is a cutthroat game and
we must all perform tricks to survive, to be valued.

No wonder the nostalgia for a colonial 19th century circus is so prevalent, as this was
the not so glamorous reality of many precarious performers of the day. Circus artists
seem to long for this ‘burlesque’ era in the same way neoliberals idolise the Great
Game.
A trick as a form of exposition would be able in some way to highlight that its value
cannot be found in the medium through which that value is made visible.
Its chosen subject is its own fictional status to the terms of its presentation, and so
as an object it must be something that invalidates itself.
This is the new virtuosity needed; the virtuosic self-invalidation of the inherent
value of virtuosity that conceals the fact the freedom is not real.
In this sense this rope-writing attempts to go uncorrectly forward in its delineation
of tricks one and two so as to get to trick three that is a trick played on the terms by
which a trick has to acknowledge its own fictionality.
The exposition is ‘tricktion’.

The Hypnotist and the Horse Race. Part Five.

She stared at the ceiling of my small room. The water in the basin
seemed to be rippling too slowly to be real. She exhaled again, more
angrily this time.

“Watch.” She said, and plunged her hand, pistol and all, into the basin
of water. Had she gone mad up here, in the jungle at the beginning of
this horrible river?
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As I was stepping back to avoid the splashes of displaced water, she

pulled her hand back

“We are swimming in time. Look if I hold the revolver at a certain angle
the refraction makes it appear straight again…look”

I moved around the basin to her side and bent my head in toward what
I imagined to be her perspective. The gun was pointing down toward the
plug; its barrel, when submerged, was indeed completely straight due to
the bending of the light. It had the appearance of a weapon of purpose,
made all the more unnerving by its impossibility.
When in the water it looked straight again.

“Do you see how it is now possible to use this weapon? In this context
my aim is true. This submersion in a medium of distortion is a necessary
component of making this weapon operable. It can only be fired through
the medium of distortion.”

She turned so her face was close to mine. We were the same height
exactly and I could see the damp skin, her watery eyes. We looked
through our respective mediums of distortion at each other.
The gun floated in her hand with dappled light dancing over the lie of
its ballistics. What weapon of assassination had she devised? Something
that was deliberately gun-smithed in error, so that it could be used
with accuracy through the curve of refracting ether.
Was it necessary only to make the weapon appear functional for it to
fire?

Was she intending to forge such dysfunctional weapons to be fired

through the waters of time? Impossible trajectories could be achieved by
submitting something inoperable to submersion in something that is
supposed to distort its function.
It was the process of making the body sick so that it could survive
the extreme radiation of time travel. Only a crooked body would emerge
straight from the crushing gravity of temporal dilation. Was she
weaponising Past Life Regression?
 142

With a splash she withdrew the gun.

“That’s enough,” she barked, withdrawing into her robe, the distorted
weapon also vanishing into its folds.
I wiped water from my face as she went through the door.
“You clearly have a lot to do. You can find transcripts of some
selected sessions laid out on my desk. Do not attempt to access any
other files without my permission. I expect an edited version of today’s
files for review at supper.”
“But I will need to see all files if I am to report back to the
Society.” I called after her.
She froze, her back still turned toward me in the slanted corridor
(the entire building seemed to be subsiding)
“No. You will read only what I give you…I have to go…I have a
patient. Goodbye”
She was gone. How was I to proceed? There was little point in
reporting on the files if they were already edited. The curiosity and
rumour at the Royal Society were at fever pitch when I left London.
Important professors wanted to know what she was doing. I had been
dispatched. I had to fulfil my brief. I had to see the transcripts of all
her past life therapy sessions. Who she saw, the details of the lives
themselves, her methods of hypnotism.
There were rumours of unethical methods, unusually long sessions.

ARMSTRONG’S MISSING A.

In an attempt to see how quickly a moment of weightlessness in circus becomes a

reinforcement of gravity, is also an exercise in seeing how quickly a word that
qualifies a ‘difference’ can become the ‘same’ recourse to a barrier of representation
that separates us from meaning.

In terms of the DIAGRAM we have seen how the moment of weightlessness in the
alphabetical field briefly allows the word to present a new ordering of its letters
contrary to the order set by the alphabetical register. This new order is a word,
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which is only recognised by the alphabetical field as useless to that field. Being
impossible within it, the word can only be uttered as a fiction of what orders of
letters might be possible, if the alphabet was not a totality.

What flickers between difference and repetition here is that the alphabetical order
is constructed according to the difference between the letters’ capacity to mean
different bodily sounds. These letters then are used as a repeatable source of
difference in order to construct words, which are disorderings of this alphabet.
What is different about the letter forms its capacity to be repeated as a difference
to another letter but only in order to form something that is not recognisable to the
alphabetical field except as fiction. The source of difference is therefore fictional to
the register that it creates, but is necessarily bound to draw from it to construct that
which is not recognisable to that alphabet. The word responsible for the difference
and which lends it its repeatability is barred from the alphabet that stores the
repeatable difference from which the word is created.
The letter is speechless as it is before the subject, but language needs the subject
to chase after it.

In this leap to ‘deconstruct’ then is also the horror of weightlessness, and its
mapping onto an endlessly deferred system of differences, a market of relative
values that are ultimately autonomous from the subject who tries to leap free of it,
or even operate nominally outside of it.
As we see here in a ground in which this loop between singular origin and
repeatable differences is concealed, the leap itself becomes the motor that powers
a system of inexorable gravity; with each escape another limb is bound.

In trying to speak circus I have tried to operate tricks in language. Language has
been my gravity, my structure that I try to collapse momentarily to reach a
weightless utterance, and the presence of Lacan here is a form of this gravity. He is
my Newton, delineating the laws of gravity within language, within which I am
speculatively trying to perform some kind of trick. He is implicated in the subject
who chases after the dollar, in the same way he pronounces that the letter is before
the subject as this is the way that semio-capital is homologically implicated into the
weightlessness that the circus subject chases; the value of trying to be better than
value.
This is an exercise in returning to the ground with a bump. As I try to speak outside
the laws of language, I find myself inventing yet more laws, more metaphor, more
analogy, I burp, I babble, I grit my teeth in the realisation that I may be only forging
another kind of falling.

If I am to chart my way through these inadequate hieroglyphics, then I will have to

invent some new words. When I performed as a stand up comedian I often used to
discuss the possibility of a joke being founded on rhythm alone; that this would be
enough to reference the laughter we all want to experience:
 144

Q: How many jerps does it take to change a slide-blesh?

A: Emphty-nine, shim to hold the grish and the other shemty to swone the shump.

TWO ARMSTRONGS DON’T MAKE ‘A’ RIGHT:

As some were weighed down by the lack of capital, others floated beyond the
bounds of earth itself.

“A rat done bit my sister Nell, and Whitey’s on the Moon,

Her face and arms began to swell, and Whitey’s on the Moon.
I can’t pay no Doctor bills with Whitey on the Moon.
Ten years from now I’ll be paying still, while Whitey’s on the Moon.”

(“Whitey’s on the Moon”. Gil Scott Heron. Flying Dutchman Records. 1970.)

Other gravities however may make us behave differently…let us return now to the
Astronaut of 1969, as an example of how leaping outside of the usual gravity can
end up returning us into a linguistic double bind.
Neil Armstrong (or Standing Legweak, as I call him) was tasked with saying
something historical as he was he first man to walk on a surface not governed by the
same law of gravity as was responsible for the shaping of the human form.
He was outside the system that was responsible for rendering him. (He was in a
Cartesian meta-position, which proves the moon landings never happened)
But what would he say?

There can be a difference between what you think you are doing and what you think
you are saying. In 1969 Neil Armstrong said this:

“One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.” What he thought he said was this:
“One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind.”

The “a” makes all the difference, it makes it make sense, it is the difference
between sense and nonsense. His mistake implies that man/mankind is both making
a small step and a giant leap at the same time, which means he implies that his
actions are symbolising a quantum event; by which I mean that “man” and/or
“mankind” (which are semantically the same) are simultaneously making both a
small step and a giant leap.
Thus the metaphor is lost, the symbolism breaks down, as in a psychosis, or in an
incomplete theory of matter, and it becomes mankind as a quantum particle in two
separate states at one and the same time categorized, in Armstrong’s case, by small
‘step/giant leap’ or ‘on/off’ or ‘wave/particle’.
 145

Such super-positionality is by definition a fiction to the notion of difference, as it

represents both/and…something that is both different and the same, or something
that precedes that which it follows as in the chicken and egg conundrum of the word
floating fictionally meta positioned in the alphabetical field. It is pre-differential.
In quantum computing, a theoretical form of programmable logic in which each bit
is both a 1 and a 0, these particular super-positions are called qubits.

The subject as a 1 is needed here as the title of the subject as a 0.

‘Mankind’ is the title needed for it to show that the ‘giant leap’ applies to not just
one man, but the man is missing, replaced as he is by the absence of the qualifying
‘a’ by the same iteration of ‘mankind’. Thus the giant leap is only applicable back to
the faceless designator that tries to point at a specific subject.
Neil Armstrong states his meta-position as fictional by saying in a roundabout way
that the signifier only represents the subject to another signifier.
The subject for whom the giant leap is made is not possible to be represented by
the sentence.
A further point here is that Armstrong’s famous but erroneous utterance is a
description of the mutated form of ‘Post-Berlinesque’ liberty that we now suffer
from; even as we are ‘free from’ gravity we are only ‘free to’ do so as a designation
that does not apply to us.
His statement proves he was never there, but he needed to be there to say it.

He claims that he actually said the missing “a”, implying that it was lost
somewhere in the incredible distance of the transmission. There have been analyses
of the tone and rhythm of his pronunciation, taking into account the timbre of his
Ohio accent, trying to establish in spectrographic examination of the end of “for”
and the beginning of “man” if there is in fact room for an “a”. He claims he didn’t
fluff the line so far from home, but there is still a missing “a”, which puts us all in a
quantum state of uncertainty, neither stepping nor leaping, but both, which is a kind
of ambiguous stumbling across a new landscape thinking we said something about
what we were doing.
We are free to leap, but in small steps. The giant leaps apply to no one.

How can I be present in this text? I am also trying to use language to think about
what I am doing on the rope. In reaching for the rope midway through a trick I might
think, “I am reaching…” but what if I misspell it, what if a letter is lost in a long
distance transmission, what if I am ‘re-ching?’
Choking on the rope, coughing up strands of hemp like fur balls, discovering that
my own guts are in fact a rope that is climbing out of me, making me gag?
What if I decide to investigate the Force of Gravity but it comes out as the Farce of
Gravity; am I caught having to investigate it on the horns of a hideous dilemma?
Farce is categorized by Jonathan Lynn as “a perfectly organized exercise in
duplicity…” throughout which I must desperately conceal my true nature with a web
of ever deepening lies.
 146

The Farce of Gravity is defined as “full of truth and insight into the human
condition”, I am dealing with farces beyond my control, where my vanity, greed, lust
and stupidity are all exposed at their true weight no matter how hard I try to keep
them up in the air.
I am trying to be present through my vulnerabilities, to be present as a fractured
logic.
This is where I am, on an uncertain landscape between Tricks One and Two
wondering where my weightlessness went. The mishandling of words is just as vital
and misleading as the mishandling of rope. Once the tiny little thing slips out of
place, or is lost in transmission, meaning breaks loose, and the implication is that
something new and unexpected is also ‘to come’.
Mishandlings lead to new constellations of thinking and doing
every typo is a new beginning; but do these mistakes escape the tautological
ground or re-install it? How can a knot can exist within the paper without tearing it?

So Armstrong fluffed his lines. He relegated us to a race that is in two states; taking
both a ‘small step’ and a ‘giant leap’ simultaneously. As subjects we are qubits,
selfishly occupying the position of a zero and a one at one and the same zero of
time….

Armstrong’s missing ‘a’ leaves us in an undefined society; not one way nor the
other, having the cake and eating it too. How appropriate in an age when only 1% of
goods produced stay with us for more that six months.
The earth is cluttered with the presence of absent cake, that we once wanted. It
was 1969, I was three and watched the moon landing on my father’s knee, drinking
orange squash “as strong as the sun.”

Back on the moon Armstrong was skipping along, freed of the pull of the earth and
its interminable fretting over ideology, he bounced. Tripping over his own tongue he
put forward a mutation of Berlin’s vision.
Armstrong made a prediction of what was to become of Berlin’s theory of liberty.
We have somehow missed a vital detail and now we are in a double bind, in which
the absolutism of positive liberty is the giant leap and the freedom of the individual
instilled in negative liberty is the small step. Both of these liberties are being
pronounced simultaneously as we enter a new gravity, so that we encounter a
violent, indifferent enforcement of the freedom to be whoever you wish to be.
Think fast, you are running out of oxygen.

His missing ‘a’, puts us in both states of liberty at once; both in the ‘small step’ of a
race of individuals, all singly marching to different drums, and in the ‘giant leap’ of a
collective ideology to do so.
This was the mutation caused by the missing ‘a’…the ‘muttion’…so to speak, was
dressed as ‘lmb’.
 147

The revolutionary zeal of Positive Liberty had somehow in error become entangled
inexorably with Negative Liberty, so deconstruction was the new structure, and had
consequently lead to a tyranny of freedom, in which for every individual it was
compulsory to be free, and that this freedom be ratified by repeatable differences in
a non-negotiable market.

This ideology of no-ideology was the presence of an absence…with a missing ‘a’… a

‘BSENCE’
A process of endless deferral now governed values and meanings and every
subject was expected to perform a back somersault in every form of gravity they
encountered; an enforced Circusism.
It was a double bind, in which the subject was beholden to act as though the
means of production of desire were in their own hands, but the meaning of that
desire as founded on inevitable lack was concealed, meaning only that all desire
produced in the context of capital was the reproduction of the context of capital.
It was like being given ownership of a factory but never being handed the keys.

Armstrong’s missing ‘a’ puts us both in the ‘small step’ of absence and in the ‘giant
leap’ of presence. Man and mankind, which is ‘nobody’ and ‘everybody that is
nobody’, are in an impossible grammatical two-step, a tautology where the
individual is held up as the model for everyone…it is insoluble to be.
It is a society where the weightlessness of the individual is enforced as an
ideological gravity.

It is CIRCUSISM.

*****
Roll up, roll up, ladies and germs. You are at the threshold of another
sideshow. Welcome back.
After being out in the cold for so long, you are welcomed back as we near
the end of this tautological ground. Previously the landscape has been
described as tricky so please check your feet as you come in, lest they be on
the wrong way round and lead you back outside.
Anything shaded red is out of bounds anything in yellow or grey is fair
game,

Step right up, only a penny, best that you can buy, bet your life you’ll love it
or we’ll know the reason why…

***
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SUMMING UP THE GROUND MEANS ONE IS ZERO:

Within this chapter I have tried to hint at the double bind of post-ideology, how one
thing seems like something else. What is clear for me is that there are tricks here
woven into the fabric which make the deciphering of the circus position in relation
to freedom incredibly context specific and that agency cannot be directly accessed
without reverse-engineering how weightlessness, appearance, self-interest, profit,
and invalidation are all components of a bind.

Tricks do not escape gravity, but something unrecognised and impossible is

nevertheless conveyed through a system, in which that something is unrecognised
and labelled as not possible. Two registers are at play, which precede each other
simultaneously.

What I am trying to get to also is that the suspension of capture cannot ask for
validation from that above which it is suspended.

The problem for me is that at the current time of writing and in the current socio-
economic and political climate this practice of ‘fictionalising’ freedom of movement
fails to operate as a demand for future actual freedom of movement, and seems to
rest upon its own satisfaction as a solipsistic end in itself, that proves itself to be
true.
Returning to the idea of fiction is important here as I feel that if circus is to be
taken seriously, if it is to be an art form, then it has to engage with a global situation
in which there is little freedom. In embracing its power to create only fictions of
freedom circus perhaps could allow its fictions of weightlessness to operate as
demands.

The idea of analogy as a kind of space suit for visiting areas uninhabitable for those
from incompatible environments is something I have discussed but it sits as part of
the thinking here; that analogy is a technology that enables travel to an
incompatible environment, but the conveyance of the space it is possible to see that
is not registerable in the mechanisms of analogy is the work of the artist.

HOW DOES CIRCUS DEAL WITH POWER?

This position in relation to power is crucial here. For me, the ease with which circus’
ability to operate tricks is captured in a self-perpetuating fantasy of being politically
edgy, different or resistive is to do with how power has appropriated the trick,
within which the fiction of freedom is rendered as a fact. If you agree, the field
expands, if you disagree you shrink.
Often in circus displays there is room to create a unique space for yourself that you
then rent with your own negation, or which the audience pay to forestall…either
way the space where you performed is empty.

Fiction here is a vital term because I acknowledge wholly the impossibility of actual
operation outside of the restrictive force used to construct the imagining of an area
 149

of operation outside of that force. I too am caught in a tautology…but I am stressing

again that these tautologies resonate, and it is this weak radiation that I am
interested in as part of circus’ relation to its audience.

In focussing on a spoken trick, I have of course engaged with the confidence spiel,
the salesman’s pitch as well as the downright lies of commerce, all as iterations of
‘tricks’, and this has only enhanced the need for circus narratives of freedom,
itinerancy and general anti-establishment rhetoric to clarify their position in relation
to the prevalence of, even reliance on, these kind of institutionalised tricks within
capitalism.

Let us assume, and it is a big assumption, that I am right in my analysis of the

trick’s central workings, that it moves through a system in order to refute the
authority of that system to give weight to that which moves through it.
We can think of a spoken trick as the incessant sales rip-off of commodity
expectation versus its actuality, which can be said to be part of the functioning of
capitalism. I hope that the ideas outlined so far will help to show that it is not merely
a semantic relation between the word ‘trick’ and the idea of deception.
Then we can think that this represents the enunciation of fiction that is forcibly
materialised as fact (by a process of fetishisation) in order to gain advantage within
a system of difference.
It then becomes important to ask what distance can be created between these
kind of tricks that simply conflate fiction with fact, and those iterated by the circus?
So within this idea of the tricks of capital, (regardless of the overarching ‘trick’ of
‘virtualised’ currency in the first place) there is a pressing need for circus to distance
itself from these kind of self-interested tricks. These tricks whilst moving through a
system, appear to refute its authority thus seeming to gain a fully individualised
position and so actually perpetuating that authority as a field that allows subjective
agency.
For the subject to appear, the subject must agree that what is rationally only a
fiction of agency is actually its factualisation. This complicity in turning fiction into
fact is a complicity with the authority of post-factism. Post-factism is a major part of
the tautological ground as in the concealment of the conflation of registers, the
unprovability of truth becomes the provability of anything.

Trick Two promises the whole subject will appear, but utilises the internalisation of
this unacknowledged impossibility by the endlessly partial subject to be an endless
source of its excessive expansion.
Are we now looking at a circus that perpetuates gravity, whilst claiming to defy it?
For me, the more circus becomes an oneiric wonderland of supposedly actual
transformation that conflates performance with fact the more the politics of desire
trapped in the context of capital is reproduced.

In clamouring for acceptance we have forgotten to criticise who is accepting us.

Circus should by definition suffer from the desire to not want to belong to a club
that would have someone like circus as a member, there is nothing wrong with
 150

suffering from this, it is what drives circus to keep moving. To be cured of this is to
die.
It is necessary to justify the analogy between the physical practice of the trick and
something that could be said to be a spoken trick, and I have so far tried to be clear
that I feel that fiction and tautology play a part here.
The link between language and capital is strong for me and it will continue to
feature here within this discussion of the circus subject within the triangle of
restrictive fields; between gravity, language and capital.
Within these links and within ideas of suspension it has opened up my practice of
writing to fictionalise different voices that all attempt to speak tricks in the
language of capital.

The objectifying forces here are Gravity, Language and Capital and it is within these
fields that a trick is necessary; it is not circus modes, methods or cultural hegemony
in itself that is objectifying here, although these can be unhelpful and need revision,
it is these fields that the research is concerned with not the escape from circus itself.
It is perhaps to run away from Circusism, that is defined here as an implicit
agreement with Capitalism.
Thus the objectifying forces lie elsewhere and it is not necessary to become cured
of circus, but to perhaps reframe an acknowledgement of circus practice as a kind of
fiction activated within any field of value, in relation to the various ways a trick
might unfold to reconfigure that value.

It is vital we do not believe in the fact of our own art. Its capacity to demand change
relies on exposing the incompatibility between the registers.
In what I consider to be the coming storm, this must be addressed by artistic
production, not to add to the market but to find ways to critique this deliberate
deception of union of registers that are clearly nothing to do with each other…

This may or may not be a function of capitalism alone, but it is proposed here as an
example in this three way homology of gravity language and capital as a
provocation to circus to start thinking about what it means not just as a romance
within gravity but a form of thinking that can transcend its co-option and capture
within capitalist modes of production.

THIS CHAPTER CONCLUSION:

Tautologies in the subject caused by different readings of Game Theory, of ideas

about liberty and of the nature of signification in the market all come to be
entangled in this ground. Circus finds itself at a point where it has to decide if it
wishes to be a form that agrees or disagrees with the modes of production within
which it can be so easily complicit.

What I am saying is that if a meta-position does not receive its value from validation
in the register of difference, but only in its acknowledgement as a fiction that
therefore remains in suspension from its validation in difference;
 151

Then the conclusion is that circus should not value its weightlessness
in terms of gravity.

The Hypnotist and the Horse Race. Part Six.

DAY TWO, Afternoon:

I arranged myself at her desk in the cramped office. Everything seemed

neat enough. Her desk was a small, lacquered kind in the French Rococo
style. It had a bureau set into the back with folding doors. I tried the
handle. it was firmly locked.
I stared at my reflection in the dark panelling for a moment. The
inlaid pattern of lovebirds in a blossoming tree was blended with the
image of my face. Was I really thinking of breaking in?
The air was heavy. Dust stared back at me from its suspension in
beams of sunlight. I turned away from the dust, the dust turned away
from me.
I began to read.

She had three patients in her consultation Diary. Recently she had been
seeing one in particular. He was an Irish Clerk who was responsible for
stock taking the food at the local mission. I had seen his shock of red
hair skulking through the undergrowth upon my arrival, and again this
morning. He was filling his pipe on the jetty. He seemed unsteady.
Drunk? Drugged?
I looked through the papers she had left. They were not up to date.
These were sessions with the clerk but from weeks ago?

17th Dec 1911. Salerno Mission. (Charlie, 1770)

This was the day Jonah Sutch, the dull Irish clerk lay down. He became
the frightened child Charlie. As far as I could tell he was experiencing the
 152

life of a child in the late 1700’s who was lost. He was somewhere in
Texas following a railway line. He was looking for his mother.

There were a collection of exasperated notes in the margins complaining

about his demeanour ‘he bleats like a lamb. Get him to focus. Memory
problem?’

The Doctor had been trying to get him, the past life subject of Charlie,
to remember something.
There were some scribbled odds and a collection of names also
alongside the transcripts of these sessions. ‘3 to 1 Lucky Boy’, ‘5 to 4
Puffin’, ‘7 to 1 Impresario’. What was she doing?

It took me a while to investigate fully, but once I had assembled the

hidden telegraph device, the Morse pad and a stack of notes containing
horse’s names with odds and stakes marked in red for ‘loss’ and black for
‘win’, I soon figured it out.
The good Doctor was gambling regularly on the races. She was receiving
race cards by Morse code a few days in advance, I was guessing from one
of the estates on the coast, where some bored plantation owner might
host some equine wager or other.
It seemed that Dr Mary Minkowski was in the black by quite a
considerable amount. There were banker’s drafts and cheques for winnings
of over one thousand guineas on a spike atop the locked bureau.

As I read on through the transcripts I began to become increasingly

alarmed. She seemed to be asking the past life subject for the names of
horses…

Doctor: “Charlie, can you hear me?”

Charlie: “Yes…I’m cold…do you know where my mother is?”

Doctor: “I’m sure she is not far away, Charlie…now just stay focused on
my voice for a moment…do you remember what I told you yesterday?”
 153

Charlie: “I’m so tired I want to sit by the fire…in the orange glow with
mama…”

Hastily scribbled notes revealed the Doctor’s frustration “Distracted, got

to get him to focus.”

Doctor: “Charlie pay attention now. If you can remember I can tell you
where she is…”

Charlie: “Oh please tell me, I need my mama…I need to see her…I need
to see her…”

Doctor: “ Ok Charlie calm down. I will take you to her once you have
remembered the name of the horse…can you recall it for me
Charlie…good boy…”

Charlie: “It’s…it’s…impressive…”

Doctor: “What is ‘impressive’, Charlie?”

Charlie: “The name…the name is Impressive…or something?”

Doctor: “Impresario…is it Impresario, Charlie? Good boy, good,

good…excellent boy…”

Impresario, 7 to 1. She won 18 pounds and a shilling on that race.

It went on like this page after page. Over a series of six days, she bet
on three races. But I was confused by the dates. They did not add up.
She would conduct a session in which she asked for the name before the
race. The records, painstakingly written out in Morse on the yellowing
pad, then showed she wired her bets to the track, and once she received
confirmation of the win, she began anther session the clerk in which she
 154

took him back to 1770 in the life of Charlie but to the day before she
asked him to recall the horse’s name.
What was the previous session for her, was the later one for Charlie,
and the earlier session for Charlie was later for her. She was telling
Charlie the results of the races on a day in his life, which was before
the day she spoke to him, which was in her life, this life, the day before
the race.
She had found a way to learn the name of the winning horse from
herself by telling it to someone who would remember it and tell it to
her but before she told it to them…

In this way she could tell the future…

 1

CHAPTER FIVE: Short-Circuit Road Trips.

As for ‘speaking circus’:

Here is an attempt not to produce nonsense but to construct an impossible

referential statement.
Here is an attempt I made to speak a trick by writing it down: there are
two images here, politically the first and second have only the potential for
obedience, the third has the potential for resistance.

TRICKS ONE and TWO:

“Every spelling includes the letter ‘e’ except the jump”

Here the thing that does not fit with the other spellings follows
the rule, it is ‘transgressive’ but is permitted to be so.

There is no potentiality beyond what is captured.

This is just a jump.

TRICK THREE:

“Every spelling includes the letter ‘e’ except the leap”.

Here the rule is followed by the word that is designated by the rule
to not follow the rule, so in following the rule, it breaks the rule
of breaking the rule. Thus it moves through the sentence in order to
collapse it.

There is a potentiality here beyond what is captured.

This is a leap.

So I was interested to see if it was vaguely possible to construct a trick in

language (an image of nonsense, made from sense), then is a prank a
construction of a trick in the restrictions of an institution (a image of
resistance, made from compliance)?

Further to the idea of pranks, if its mechanisms are isomorphic to the

physicality of circus. But also if there is congruence between the prank as
 2

social dissent and ‘Dissensus’ (Ranciere, J (2010) The Politics of Aesthetics.

Bloomsbury. London) which creates an image outside of the image society
has of itself, but from components that actually exist within it; then could
there be a context in which the physical practice of circus and certain social
disruptions (specifically following the outlined mechanism) could exist as
equivalents? Could it be proposed that through a practice organised around
the circus trick I could encourage disruptive and exposing actions in any
medium or social field?
Thus I am not saying circus is inherently political but that if I feel that its
mechanisms are isomorphic in their relation to a political idea of ‘dissent’,
then might this not inform its approach? If circus is to be transposed as a
way of ‘thinking’ from its way of ‘doing’ then thinking circus ensembles
would look for tricks in any surrounding social strata through which it was
difficult to move? In this way, gathered around this idea of the mechanism,
trick-making would be a way of encountering power, and sharing those
encounters.
Many of my experiments are activated perhaps not in the way the theory
of the trick outlined here is shown to be present and correct in
experimental practice but in the shared language that formulates as impase
after impasse is negotiated in this collective way.
In the experiment described here what was important became the days
spent on the streets looking for the meaning of the streets and the
development of a shared way of speaking that grew through our continued
itinerancy across the fixed architectures of the beginning, the middle and
the end of meaning.

SHORT-CIRCUIT ROAD TRIPS:

After saying ‘cut’ to the idea of the ‘epic’ road trip, full of redemption and
freedom. I decided to try to perform a trick on this genre.
I cut the epic away and decided to reduce the journeys down to three
minutes, for this I needed someone else not embedded in a directorial
sensibility. So I lost film quality but gained room.
We would make road movies but they would be a trip to the shops, they
would be a journey to the lamppost at the end of the street. I removed the
iconography, I removed the distance and duration and created a diving bell
within which the pressure to arrive at the meaning, the redemptive
knowledge associated with such a trip was increased to a ridiculous level.

Interestingly this seemed to generate psychotic utterance on cue, or

perhaps it was the kind of ‘soft-core’ psychotic utterance you might engage
in in a museum as you laboured to find ‘meaning’ in a five foot journey to a
painting and back.
Anyhow it quickly became clear that the kind of speech that these trips
generated was of a type that could be categorised as that which could be
clinically observed as psychotic utterance and it was this that made me
pursue it. Again I followed the speaking bug.
Within this pressurised context we would be asked to generate the
meaning of these journeys upon return. The idea of event became distorted,
 3

anything could be an event on a trip like this, a cat appears, the look from a
milkman, a breeze rustling a piece of paper…the street suddenly became
the most highly charged environment and everything took on an urgency of
significance as the possible defining, transformative event of the trip.

The kind of associative speaking that one might apply to viewing an art work
or installation was here translated onto an inappropriate material, that of
the un-meant. This misplacement of context I saw as a trick mechanism,
where we move through the medium of the journey as ‘meaning generation’
but in order to refute it as spurious cliché.
Everything that you might see in the street is a red herring; but if it is the
plot of a redemptive, epic journey then you will speak. This was my revenge
on the insidious boredom of the road movie as conceived by Nathan Hughes,
and it introduced the next encounter with Mike Bell.

He was a juggler, and also interested in comedy.

With him we went through various iterations of this truncated road trip
idea. It was a circus of language that travelled nowhere. It was a gamble on
ridiculous meanings as odds in a game. We allowed the road trip to mutate
daily and just inhabited the streets, deliberately staying away from
‘locations’ and good ‘settings’ for ‘Film’.
We incorporated spurious systems for guessing the winner of horses races
which we bet on at a pound a word. Betting on horses, trying to pick a
winner from ‘clues’ in the street, was a system of meaning like any other.
We used Go-Pro Cameras to film our non-stunts, and saw these journeys as
everything non-epic, but intensely laced with a super-sensitivity. It was an
altered state, and had something free that travelling all the way to the
middle of nowhere didn’t seem to be able to capture.

NOMADISM IS STUCK:

As this tactic is utilised by the legal entities of corporations to subjugate

vast sections of the global population as they camp where tax breaks are
best and workers are cheapest, then to continue to imply that moving
around is a form of resistance is naïve.
This mobility is a creed of neo liberalism and we can see a desire for a
break up of nationalisation of industry and services as something flying
directly out of the Mont Pelerin Society.
The idea of being globally mobile serves the corporate individual, ‘tent’ is
a tenet of neoliberalism, as opposed to an effective protest.
This was why we were looking then at a circus that operates in ever
smaller steps, its journeys are across the street and back, it travels from
one breath to another.
I am documenting a journey that goes nowhere and what meanings can be
grasped here, only the spurious garbage stated above, to produce a
rambling utterance is perhaps the only journey I have left, and this lead us
later to journeys that go nowhere at all.
To travelling without moving; another way of ‘wronging’ the journey.
 4

We were moving towards a non-moving circus in ever-decreasing steps.

If nomadism was neo liberalism then we were trying to run away with a
circus that does not move at all.
It wasn’t necessary for us to be on the street, we understood we are lucky
enough not to live there, it was just to be in a space where there is
supposedly nothing to see.

“We are literally trying to make as useless a record or product of these

trips as possible…that the product of this neo liberal mobility be nothing
but drivel…as useless and complex as an old man’s system for betting on
the horses…a gamble on meaning…the opposite of meaning.

A non-product…an exhaustion of production…a nonsense that points to the

outside of the formal system of the ‘road trip’.
Unwatchable as entertainment… but simply as the production of
nonsense…a production through the medium of the road trip, but made in
order to refute its authority to give weight to meaning generated during
it…”

This meant that the meanings, whilst meaning as much as those on a longer
trip are actually devalued by the suspension of the epic duration of the trip
itself.
The journey itself is refuted as an authority that can accurately give
weight or reflect the meaning of an event upon that journey. The journey is
refuted as something able to give meaning by the very meanings that it
generates, in this new truncated form.
This is the trick, to achieve a weightlessness in the meaning of the event, so
that it means not as much as itself. That the journey’s ability to accurately
weigh the meaning of an event is distorted. What are produced are
meanings useless to neo liberal ‘nomadist’ production.
They are ‘wrong’, trite observations, or unfounded beliefs, they are
incorrect.
This is to highlight the internalised contradiction in the economy of
meaning in the neoliberal commodified journey of the individual. To
highlight this production as the result of a de-valued journey in the first
place, one that is, in its commodification, stripped, reduced, shrunk to
pocket size and which must necessarily produce similarly atrophied
meanings. By shifting onto the everyday moment as a life-changing event
the trick re focuses on the ordinary as epic, and the useless as a production
that is invisible to capital.
At least they meant something to me.

What is interesting is how those short journeys become like a clown’s

immersive wonderment in the simplest crossing of the stage, that
attentiveness, that noticing of every event is part of his/her vision,
‘horizon-less’ but always on an epic journey simultaneously.

We got up, we went out onto the street, and just tried to find meaning. This
was a travelling circus, the meanings we made were the tricks, the
 5

connected fabric of these meanings were temporary architectures erected

temporarily in that place.
We took ourselves by turns to useless locations, on a road trip, in a
dream, in a game, in an installation, in a crime scene, in a hypnotic state…

This practice grew into complete stasis, which I will discuss later.

Another way of putting this would be to imagine that the formal system of
the epic journey is a sacred utterance, that delineates an area of control,
and that the trick here is a profanity. The trick profanes the sacred in that
it returns it to common use, to be used for another purpose other than
which it was intended, in other words the system of restriction is re-utilised
as a method of attaining something outside of its intended range, namely
freedom.

I was still looking for another kind of trick. This rambling was working in
some way to perform Trick One on the set language of the epic journey. At
moments we managed to activate a weightlessness in meaning that felt so
real as the street blessed us with exactly the word we could never have
found outside of that specific ludicrous junction of litter, looks and loss of
direction.
So many times it felt we were fictionally in suspension above the supposed
‘realised’ journeys, where travellers ‘found themselves’.
But again I was bothered that the default position on a tautological
ground was always to acknowledge the fiction, acknowledge the bind, and
acknowledge the uselessness.
I loved those suspensions and it formed a way for me to bond with Mike in
random hours just looking for the perfect span of time in the perfect
alleyway to say the exact quality of the day. It was a special time, just
inhabiting new spaces in the way they present themselves. It has helped me
meet my audience in this way.
It remains for me also a great way to begin working with someone, but I
wanted it to lead somewhere more vital. I continued to walk, to ramble and
clown in the streets, trying to talk my way out of what I had talked myself
into.

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Twelve.

Scene: an 19th century Coach House.

Happy, reclining in a chair by the bar, was idly throwing darts at a text about
gravity…
 6

“Philip Astley is credited with discovering that the ideal size for a circus ring is 42
feet in diameter. This was the optimum size that enabled him to use centrifugal
force to help balance on a horse’s back.
As he rode at speed around the ring he used gravity to push himself into the
horse’s back and thus prevent a nasty tumble onto the sawdust floor.”

Joe didn’t see the point: “If you ask me he created his own gravity through the
turning circle of a horse, a journey that goes nowhere. So in this travelling without
moving a gravity is created that seems to refute the authority of the gravity we are
used to. This is all very well if you enjoy wearing out the seat of your pants. Astley
was a colonial shill, he climbed out of one gravity, straight into another.”

THE SONG OF THE COACH-BOY…

“The coach boy entered through a low door, “I am Ernest Mandell”, he said shyly.
Round moon face, long, blonde hair the colour of ripe corn swept behind his ears.
“I am here to take you for a ride through Late Circusism. Only my horses can travel
fast enough to avoid the edict to perform tricks. The coach itself is an Orgone box,
insulated against the double bind. It will be impossible to feel the pull of the law
once we get moving, in this sense you will experience a relaxed stillness. The coach
is comfortable; the seats are snakeskin, still, immutable. We will be travelling
without moving. This will be our trick.”

The forced delivery of the speech made Happy feel as if it were a sales pitch,
something the boy was supposed to say.

“Did your daddy tell you to say that, son?” Sneered Rover Joe, making no attempt
to get up. “I am comfortable right here.”

The boy fidgeted uneasily, his movement displaying the anxiety caused by his
disconnection to his speech. Like being called out for bad acting.

“I have to say it sir, but it don’t mean it ain’t true. You will see once we get rolling,
no one will be able to tell me how to speak. It’s just out here in 3D space and time I
gotta say what I gotta say…”
His words trailed off like a script unable to take form in the intense gravity of
backstage.

Rover Joe leapt up, his chair crashing to the floor behind him, “Ok well don’t just
stand there squawking like a zoo parrot, let’s ride…”

Blonde hair, snakeskin seats…thunder of hooves…the acceleration bled them of the

over-sanguinated feeling of the body…bloodless, they held still, vampires
suspended above Bram Stoker’s text.
As the coach gathered speed they moved toward slowness, like treacle being
accelerated to extreme viscosity, almost solidified they moved sloth-like at light
speed…the boy sang..
 7

The words breaking off like hard tack toffee…

“Fro stillnes t movemen I hav t fol bac t collec th lette I forgo

Somethin I alway missin
I can g bac an fi wha I los
Unti I lear t fol bac tim…”

Happy felt the weight go off him…The boy clutched Happy’s arm urgently as the
party of three lifted off the seat,
“Out here we have to speak like this as time slows because there is no time to
complete the words, as we accelerate to stasis, the velocity tears away the paper-
thin time upon which the words are laid. Each word has less and less time to finish
itself until all that’s left are fragment…”

“Now we do Unanagram”, grinned the boy. “The only way to stop the lack of time
from incapacitating language is to use it as a means of atemporal travel.”

“Othw w canno spe a al…”

“A, exact…” Replied Happy shortly. ”Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was actually
pieced together from many other dead books, each part she added was atrophied
by time so the stitches needed to be long. The stitches in time are so long that some
sections of Frankenstein are yet to be attached… ” His words trailed off like a script
unable to take form in the intense gravity of backstage.
They chanted the unanagram as a ritual even though they had not done it before…

From Stillness to Movement

STILLNESS
M O V E M E N T as the song of the coach boy…

From Es to Em, all they have in common is the humanity of the ‘E’
The ‘E’ the boned frame upon which the flesh turns from S to M
From harm to self-harm
The Masochist in Mtillness is a Military Masochism
Next is t to o. Well, that performs itself, too well
In to-ing the ‘tea’ is an ‘oh’ in Moillness.
His M.O. was illness administered Intra-Venously
An I.V. dripping Into the Vein
Movllness, a shuffling in your sleep
Unaware of what you are moving
El to ‘E’, El to Em, Amen

But they had miscalculated there was a letter left over a lett-over that let’s you over
the end and falling falling through to the beginning
One letter too many, was one letter too less
 8

Too Poetic and stupid to realise he was not yet born, they boiled the words down
into Beuys’s lard, explaining hare’s to a dead painting.

This is not an excess of text but a reduction; a boiling away in the heat death of a
black hole…so that all letters are robbed of their sequentiality and appear printed on
top of one another. Ink upon ink upon ink until the blackness forms a hole in the
fabric of linguistic-value-time.
A hole in the paper explaining writing to a dead bird…
They lay still on a couch of air, waiting to be listened to by a ghost.

One letter too less needed to be long... His movement displaying intravenously. I
am comfortable right through Late Circusism. Insulated against the ink, squawking
like a zoo-parrot. 3D space and time as if it were a sales-pitch. Dead bird, dead
painting, there is no time to complete the words.
No words to complete the time…

The boy whispered: “No w jus la stil an le th ghost com…Thi i Pas Lif Regressio.”

*****

Dear Reader, you have witnessed our stumbling in the road, and you have been
privy to more of the travels of Happy Down-River and his companion Joe, as they
too lurch through the indiscriminate meaninglessness of a hostile and undulating
language-scape. In front of you now is a barred entry, the second piece of the
KNOTATION, which is too costly in synchronic time to pronounce itself into your
utterance right now. This too is blocked in time, but is additional reading if you
can cough up tuppence for the clock.

***

KNOTATION DREAM PART TWO.

Now in the dream Happy was a boy in a Quaker Mission House, on a

distant reservation in a shrinking past.

The teacher was outlining some of Douglas Hofstadter’s thoughts from

the Eternal Golden Braid, re-published in 2002, from the original. It is
the same as the original, but different here in relation to its publication
on the body.

The Quaker quacked, the boys shook, the makeshift school room shifted
in the Dakota prairie wind:
 9

“We can see here how Hofstadter explains Gödel’s thinking, he was
aware that statements of Number Theory existed, but there were still
nuggets within those statements that could be further reduced to
primitive terms:

Some typical sentences of N-number theory-are:

(1) 5 is prime.
(2) 2 is not a square.
(3) 1729 is a sum of two cubes.
(4) No sum of two positive cubes is itself a cube.
(5) There are infinitely many prime numbers.
(6) 6 is even.

Now it may seem that we will need a symbol for each notion such as "prime”
or "cube"or "positive" -- but those notions are really not primitive.
Primeness, for instance, has to do with the factors which a number has,
which in turn has to do with multiplication.
Cubeness as well is defined in terms multiplication. Let us rephrase the
sentences, then, in terms of what seem to be more elementary notions.

“So boys and girls, IT IS ABOUT ELEMENTARY NOTIONS.

What is the essence that sets one kind of number apart from another?
And such statements are meta-statements that are contradictorily formed
out of the logic to which they are necessarily meta, describing in terms of
an internal language a position from which it might be possible to construct
statements ‘about’ that language, in this sense the action of doing this
necessarily demands that a tautology will result from the inevitability that
such a meta-statement implies that is is BOTH Meta AND Pre-Meta (i.e.
Infra). That is a statement ‘about’ the logic governing Number Theory has to
also be a statement ‘of’ that logic.
It has to do with trying to be in two places at once. Like when a certain
boy is ‘in’ the classroom, but is day-dreaming he is ‘outside’ of it; this is a
contradiction,”
The teacher was reaching for the hard ball of india rubber he kept on the
desk as he spoke, Happy was just ‘gone’, gazing at the endless plain,
thinking of his horse as himself upon it , riding each other in a galloping
sweat of union…

“…however , in this case that does NOT invalidate the classroom, but
invalidates the boy’s day-dream” The teacher was winding up for the
pitch,”… as nothing… but…a… fiction.

The ball flew past Happy’s ear, striking an attentive girl square in the face.
She screamed. It was this that brought Happy back into the fetid air of the
room.
 10

“Oh my…I am so sorry, Little Hawk…oh my…please Joe, take her to the wash
house. It’ll be alright darlin’...just step out side for a moment and put some
cold water on it.
And Happy Down-River come here and sit at the front.” I have never
missed a throw like that before, he thought to himself. I have to get away
from these savage children.

Happy melted his disapproval forwards to the coolness of the wooden desk
provided.
The teacher continued through the ruffle of his feathers:

“So Gödel tried to define the ‘quality of difference’ of different kinds of

numbers, and then these are meta-statements ‘about’ difference. This
difference then determines whereabouts in the sequence of numbers these
various numbers might occupy.
On a more simple level It is also a question of defining exactly the
‘quality’ of the concept of ‘5’, of defining the quality of every number from
zero to nine so that we can understand the difference of ‘number-ness’ that
is attributed to each symbol. These are statements ‘about’ the difference of
numbers, but as they are couched in the terms of the same logic that
defines those numbers, that is the water within which those numbers
comfortably swim, then these meta-statements are also pre-meta- or Infra-
statements. In this way they only demonstrate Lacan’s observation, “there
is no such thing as a meta-language”
(‘Seminar III’. Lacan, J. 1815.)
It is then in some doubt if Gödel deliberately sought to conflate the
statements ‘about’ number differentials with those ‘of’ number
differentials or if in fact, as soon as he tried to make a statement ‘about’
numbers, he fell under the imperative of only being able to use terms that
are available within the logic of numbers itself, and therefore as soon as he
utters any statement ‘about’ number logic the conflation is inevitable as
this is simultaneously a statement ‘of’ number logic.
Is it a trick to construct a tautology, or a trick to expose an already
existing tautology? Within any language where words exist in an alphabetical
field the likelihood of a statement meaning both A and Not-A simultaneously
is inevitable.”

Happy became increasingly aware of the letters painted on his body. In the
dream he was both himself as a boy and himself as an awareness of himself
witnessing this memory and he was aware how if A was Not-A then his elbow
was his hip, and his chest was behind his ankle…he was moving around by
just sitting still in fluid time. And still the teacher intoned…

“His attempt to speak ‘outside’ the set of ‘what it is possible to say in

number logic’ is impossible according to Lacan’s edict and so any such
statement that is ‘outside’/’about’ has to simultaneously be ‘inside’/’of’
the set of ‘what it is possible to say in number logic’.
Therefore there is an inevitable prepositionality; as upon utterance of a
meta-statement, conflation occurs between two incompatible registers, one
 11

that is about ‘quality’ of difference and one that is of the ‘quantity’ of

difference, in this conflation of registers of quality and quantity this meta-
statement is treated AS an infra-statement.
It is this conflation, whether we acknowledge it is a deliberate
construction or an inevitability of trying to do something that is the
equivalent of speaking ‘about’ speech, that nevertheless causes the
tautology in which a statement that is meta has to be treated as if it were
infra, as this doubling of position means that the process is made to refer to
itself, which sets up the possibility for contradictions, which have the effect
of referring to a space outside what now appears to be a limited system.
What you produce as a statement of value necessarily compromises the
integrity of the factory, which you do not own.”
The Quaker thought briefly, inconsolably, that it was precisely for making
statement like this that he had been removed from teaching in private
education.

Happy was content to let the words send twitches of recognition through his
body; every letter he recognised in the words caused an involuntary twitch
in the appropriate body part. It was like perfectly practical Marxism tickling
his materiality.

“So in this sEnse we can see, Returning to the idea of the alphabet as a
fielD of gravity, that a wOrd, any word is a trIck.
This is because the word Here is thought of as a metA-stateMent. It is so
beCause it is a statemeNt ‘about’ the quality of difference that the letters
wiThin it hold. Their capacity for, ahem, ‘A-ness’ or ‘P-ness’ is described as
a quality in tHe way the word iS spoken in reLation to the waY the word is
wriTTen.”

Happy squirmed in his chair; it was too delicious. All the children were
‘getting off’ on the hilarity of the body letters.

“This frisSon between speEch and wRitinG means that the worD is a meta-
statement about the QUality of difference of the letterS within it.
Stop sniggering, Down-River, you will come to Understand why I am
refeRencing parts of the body as letters soon enough!”

“Could you S-S-Say that again sir, I think I’m about to cOme…”

The school room was melting…Happy looked down at his body, now young
and glistening, as it once had been. “Boy, time travel is a cinch…” His body
was still marked in 52 places, two alphabets in white grease paint,
disordered by him just sitting there against their horizontal desire. The
alphabets wanted him to just lie down and curl into a knot.

Thus every word is something ‘outside’ the set but is happening right now
inside the set, which means the limits of the set are broken, exposed as
limited and unable to hold the subject.
But the subject is held by the awful reciprocality within the broken time
 12

that exists between the letters in the word and the letters in the alphabet.

The girl came back in the room, her eye was a purpling welt, closing over
her ability to see, but she came and stood in front of Happy’s desk, her one
eye glaring deep into his:

“Because of your day-dream of being outside, I had to leave. Because you

wanted to see, I am blind…My outside-ness to you is inside of you…” she
said, lifting up her dress…

In the dream because he knew he was a boy who had never seen what was
beneath a girl’s dress, as the fabric lifted there was only a symbol of what
he now knew would have been missing then.

“We have to ask ourselves what does this resultant impossibility mean for
the system, and what does it mean for the subject?
How can the subject be inside something to which it has no access?
Whilst this kind of looped logic may crash the system, or reconfigure the
set, it has no such effect upon the subject who is able to simply leap out of
 13

the system in some way perceiving an excess as its own signification of an

area that is ‘other’ to the system or set.

We are faced with a chicken and egg scenario here between letters.
This of course implies that the letter in the alphabet precedes the letter
in the word. We have a time loop in which both the letter in the word and
the letter in the alphabet precede each other, which is again the
insurmountable reciprocity of what Lacan describes as the way signification
causes desire, and desire causes signification, these two elements seem to
precede each other as in the well know Paradox:

They that follow these words are free to be false.

They that precede these words are free from falsity.

In a similar way a statement ‘about’ the phonic logic governing the

difference between phonic symbols has to also be a statement ‘of’ that
logic.
‘About’ implies it is both ‘about’ and ‘of’ simultaneously, as the
statement ‘about’ is made ‘of’ that which it is ‘about’.

“I’m ‘about’ to nod ‘off’, sir…is that the same thing?” In this dream, Happy
was the class clown.
Metallic smell of inkwells split across desks scratched deep with who loves
what ‘about’ who.

‘Hofstadter has a meta-P-ness’. Scratched in indelible ink of 1833.

Happy was ‘pulled’ down sharply by the ear lobe onto the offending
graffito, as he lay across the desk in a sex-leer.

“Did you write this, boy?” Shrieked the teacher.

“No, sir.”

“Well it matters not. As soon as you realize that those letters on your body
that correspond to your puerile scrawl, when guided by their resistance to
the alphabetical field of gravity will form a choreography, then you can
amuse yourself by writing expletives across time and space. Just follow the
arrows with your limbs.”
 14

Happy looked down, the ‘M’ of ‘Meta’ was his left elbow, the ‘P’ of ‘P-ness’
was actually his penis.
And so he danced from elbow to penis and back again, following the way
these points, these letters in the word, given their quality by a meta-
statement about the difference between letters as the sounded in the
throat and tasted on the tongue defied the autonomous horizontality of the
alphabet.

“Very good, now kindly return to your seat before you have someone’s eye
out.”

This was a seminal moment for Happy, to think that any piece of text was
related not only to the body but to a very real gravitational field that
emanated from the alphabet.

“GRALPHITY…” he rolled the word around his tongue as he sat down in it;
using it as a way of breathing so that it existed on both the in and exhale, in
the give and take, in the old oxygen trade, economy of breathing.
 15

His desk was covered in ‘other’ scratches and symbols…

Again as Hofstadter states, it is not that either statement ‘about’ language

are incorrect, it is that they, when treated prepositionally as statements
‘of’ language, that this treatment, which conflates registers proper and
exclusive to qualitative and quantitative statements, causes the statements
to refer to each other tautologically and against the temporal fabric proper
to the sequential layout of language, one statement cannot simply be made
without the other for validation but this first statement reciprocally relies
on its validation from the one that supposedly precedes it…there is an
excess, because time has broken down…
In trying to protect ourselves from the madness of non-sequentiality, we
have created clocks so that language can be laid out one letter at a time;
but in denying this insanity we have created a repressed and illogic loop if
time between the letter and the word, where they precede each other to
remind us of what from which we have shut ourselves away.
Speech is the moment from which language is different to time.
 16

Hours, Minutes, Seconds…T.I.M.E. was somewhere between 08:40 and

twenty five past two.
Happy was 15 again now, moving his young limbs in a space-time that was
broken.

So as Gödel isolated the terms he thought needed further delineation, he

attempted to construct statements about the quality of a ‘prime’ or of a
‘square’ as they existed within the strict parameters of rational integers
that comprised the set of symbols within number theory.

(1) There do not exist numbers a and b, both greater than 1. such that 5
equals a times b.
(2) There does not exist a number b, such that b times b equals 2.
(3) There exist numbers b and c such that b times b times b, plus c times
c times c,equals 1729.
(4') For all numbers b and c, greater than 0, there is no number a such that
a times a times a equals b times b times b plus c times c times c.
(5) For each number a, there exists a number b, greater than a, with the
property that there do not exist numbers c and d, both greater than 1, such
 17

that b equals c times d.

(6') There exists a number e such that 2 times e equals 6.

“So children, this analysis has gotten us a long ways towards the basic
elements of language of number theory. It is clear that a few phrases
reappear over a over.”

The teacher looked around the room as if this meant something.

“yes, well… so it is about definition ‘phrases’ of number theory, axiomatic

components. We can see there are statements that occur in the
construction of all statements about numbers. We can see here a
formulation of essential component statements of language about the
language; these are for our purposes then: the meta-statements…

For all numbers b

There exists a number b, such that
Greater than
Equals
Times
Plus
0, 1, 2, etc.

Most of these will be granted individual symbols. An exception is "greater

than", which can be further reduced. In fact, the sentence "a is greater than
b" becomes

“there exists a number c, not equal to 0, such that a equals b plus c.”

That is: c is the ‘difference’ by which a is greater than b, so here it is

difference that is described as a first principle rather than the quality of
how a is ‘greater’ than b.

In the dream Happy was only reminded of the deep oppressive sadness of
R.D. Laing…

WHY DOES THE LETTER IN THE ALPHABET EXERT A PULL? WHAT IS THE
CAUSE OF THIS GRALPHITY?

“Let us think further, what could cause this alphabetical gravity to occur as
a field that orders letters? It is the accumulation of this repeatable
difference that accrues in the letters of the alphabet. ‘Before’ accelerates
as it is ‘after’ ‘before itself’, accelerating into a density that is inescapable.
The meta-statement of weightlessness is entered into the register most
incompatible to it, that of the alphabetical order of quantitative bodies of
mass.”
 18

Happy felt so alone…but was determined to ‘clown’ it out.

“So as the word is a meta-statement ‘about’ a singular difference, a

difference that occurs there and then between two subjects of speaker and
listener.
The letter in the alphabet is a mass around which the fabric of ‘Value-
Time’ is curved.
GRALPHITY is an illusion caused by signifying in a straight line through the
curve of Value-Time.”

“What is Value-Time, sir?” He could feel himself accelerating through every

costume he had ever worn, trying to fit in, as a thousand shirts were fitted
and torn from his back as his forward momentum hit maximum time-
velocity. The sound of tearing linen was deafening as his body fell through
every rotten piece of ill-fitting fabric. No shirt, jacket or snakeskin shoe
could hold this body from its temporal nakedness.

The lesson was happening in all time zones simultaneously. It was delivered
as if the field of Gralphity was inescapable, as if it were easier to imagine
the end of the world that it was to imagine the end of the alphabet.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega…hmmm we are still one letter short.”

The teacher was using words he no longer recognised except as instructions

to move away from language:
“If we acknowledge that the placing of any word within the field of
gravity caused by the alphabet causes a knot in time…”

“Uh huh.” Said Happy no longer paying attention, fascinated with the fact
that his elbow, his rib, his wrist were all letters being ‘pulled’ back to a
horizontal alphabet of difference…now this was a circus worth writing home
about; if he could just move in a way that would spell out such a message
across the bridge of dead language to his ancestors; if he could learn to
move between the fixed letters according to the plan of a dissolving body…

“…Can I unanagram to outline for you this notation of knots.”

 1

CHAPTER SIX: Doing the Splits.

The Hypnotist and the Horse Race. Part Seven.

DAY TWO, Some hours later:

Still in her office, working my way through these bizarre texts. I feel
that they have momentum now; that they are leading to some
irreversible collapse. The Doctor’s handwriting is frenetic and scrawled.
The activity recorded here is making a hole in time; it is the practice
of demolition and greed. A week of wagers and not one is ever wrong.
Charlie in each session predicts the winner, which once confirmed by
Morse is then told back to him.
I have no idea if the clerk knows or is complicit in any way.
I have no idea if I was supposed to work out what she was doing.

The river is higher still this evening. It pulls at its own grey skin, like
plates of steel that can’t agree on how best to reflect the dull pink
sky. The river pulls the past into the future; it seemed to corrode the
very sense of its banks, which were dissolved as they pleaded muddily for
things to stay the same.
The river was there again like every other day, waiting to tense itself
into the nightmare of a straight line. What is down river? What awaits
those who are swept away?
The rain had filled all vessels to the brim so all vessels looked longingly
toward the river. The servant boy told me it has been raining for over
two weeks.

Transcript 41: 19th December 1895. (Charlie, 1770.)

09 am. Doctor: ‘I want you to remember something for me, Charlie, is

that ok?’
 2

Charlie: “Yes what is it?”

Doctor: “Can you remember the name Black Magick?”

The page turned blank. In mid session she stopped recording. In the
centre of the next page was written in an oversized, barely legible hand…

“You must stop me”

I was feeling feverish again. I attended the meagre supper as instructed

but the Doctor was nowhere to be seen. Only the servant boy darted
furtively back and forth to deliver the soup. In the ill lit dining room It
took me a while to see that he had a severe bruising around the neck
and face.
I had the feeling that all was not well. Again the brackish flavour of
the broth made me feel as if the waters were inverted; that here at
the source of the river we were tasting the brine of the sea. My tongue
was shrinking, as the future advanced backwards I was reflected in my
spoon the wrong way round. My own face sneered back at me for being
pickled in my own time.
The boy’s purplish contusions looked like overstuffed cotton.

Back in my room I fell deep into a black sleep, full of numbers and the
thundering of hooves.

Some thoughts here about money as a DOUBLE NEGATIVE:

A GAME OF PRESENCE AND ABSENCE; who’s with me?

In relation to the circus trick I want to be clear here.

If I am saying that tricks can be thought of as the frequent deceptions
that occur through the manipulation of semio-capital across digitised,
‘financialised’ networks of information. And if I am saying that they are also
the daily rip-offs that occur on the markets, or even just simply the feeling
you get when a product is clearly not ‘true’ to its advertising. I am only
saying this because I want to highlight how such ‘tricks’ are swallowed by
the greater ‘trick’ of money itself, within which all of these smaller tricks
 3

are iterated. By this I mean that the money-form itself as distinct from
Capital is woven into the fabric of the tautological ground as it has its own
internal loops of self negation that resonate through both its capacity to
join with the immaterial but effective empty potency of language but also
to govern the way value exists for the subject. Money is an absence that
forms values that are felt by the subject as hard-wired.
The logic is ‘tricky’ here and to unpick this overarching trick I proceed to
view the nature of money through two different but interlinked theories:

1: Money only stands in for the subject-less value the goods represent
between each other, but because this money can further be
traded/accepted then for all intents and purposes this money is the value it
refers to; as it spreads so it ‘takes shape’ in the world.
It is a meta-statement ‘about’ the subjectless spaces between commodity
that is then treated as a statement of commodity that subjects can handle.
In this it is like any commodity, it refutes the subjects that might use it,
even though it can only ‘realise’ itself through them.

2: Money is debt; in that all money in circulation is merely a guaranteed

‘place-holder’ for something un-paid: a debt of value not yet repaid, and
previously this was acknowledged in the fact that you could take it to the
bank and collect it in gold, this is no longer the case as Berardi points out:

“The de-referencialisation of language – the emancipation of the linguistic

sign from its referent – that was the operation of symbolism, and that was
the hallmark of poetic and artistic experimentation with language in the
twentieth century, has something to do with a transformation in the
relation between economy and monetary exchange that occurred in the last
part of the century.
In 1972, Richard Nixon did something that can be considered ‘de-
refentialisation’ in the realm of monetary economy. Breaking the Bretton
Woods agreements, the American President said that the dollar would have
no reference to reality, and that its value would henceforth be decided by
an act of language, not by correspondence to a standard or to an economic
referent.
Nixon’s decision was the start of the financialisation of the economy,
based on the emancipation of the financial dynamic from any conventional
standard and from any economic reality.
We may assert that neoliberal dictatorship began when the Chicago Boys
decreed that money invented reality, when monetary evaluation foreclosed
the referent. Forget about the referent, money will create the world – this
is the arrogant declaration, of the omnipotence of economic power, which
founded neoliberal monetarism.”

(Berardi, F. (2012) The Uprising. Semiotexte. Los Angeles)

This takes in David Graeber’s description of how money created by the State
through borrowing from banks means that all money is actually unpaid debt.
If money is an IOU, the IOU can only operate as ‘money’ as long as you
never repay your debt:
 4

“In fact this is precisely the logic upon which the Bank of England – the first
successful modern central bank- was originally founded. In 1694, a
consortium of English Bankers made a loan of 1,200.000 GBP to the King. In
return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What
this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOU’s for a portion
of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the Kingdom
willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the
bank – in effect, to circulate or ‘monetise’ the newly created Royal debt.
This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the King eight per
cent annual interest for the original loan and simultaneously charge interest
on the same money to clients who borrowed it), but it only worked as long
as the original loan remained outstanding. To this day, this loan has never
been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of
Great Britain would cease to exist.”

(Graeber, D (2015) Debt, The First 5000 Years. Melville House. London)

Both of these operations are grand ‘tricks’ within the formal logico-
mathematical system of finance that do not seek to collapse it by exposing
its internal flaws, but seek to profit from masking or hiding its internal flaws
through the un-traceability of the tautology that exists at the heart of the
operation.
These larger tricks then form part of the tautological ‘ground’ that has
been discussed upon which other smaller tricks seem to create freedom, but
are actually captured. In this way the grand trick becomes the gravity. I am
highlighting this as an importance for circus to be aware of, as the
mechanism that it operates is close in structure to these self-interested
absences of value.

To see further how this kind of trick is a literal ‘hole’ where the subject
used to be rather than a profitable individual, then we could combine these
two theories of money. To highlight the no-win scenario of money, is to
highlight the no-win scenario of weightlessness valued in terms of gravity.

1. As something not there but referring to a material good, making it a

negative and
2. Money as something absent in the sense it refers not to a material good
but a debt incurred in relation to that material good but no longer attached
to any specific standard material good such as gold, attached instead to
affective parameters such as narrative, news, rumour and speculation.

If we see money as absent (debt to an unspecified immateriality) in

condition 2, which is then present (But only as a sign of virtual value that
perpetuates the fiction that it is actual value) in condition 1; we can start
to imagine money as an the presence of an absence, or even as an absence
that is missing.
In this condition it is a reverse black hole that can produce itself
parthenogenically into anything.
 5

These ‘truths’ are affectively wired into the value of currency as real, and
the deception and trickery of money markets are hard-wired into political
policy as being ‘right’ in the affective political rhetoric that legitimises
them. Money as an absence is the ultimate indifference to the presence of
the subject; exchange cannot see the use.

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Thirteen.

Happy was dreaming he was backstage with one of the contortionist twins
standing over him at an odd angle:

“Mr Down-River, you are due to go on…”

THE INESCAPABLE SCENE #1

In which our hero tries to leave a never-ending sketch in which our hero
tries to leave a never-ending sketch.

The sketch is set backstage where the performers are all getting ready for
the impending show.

(Happy is seated. He is applying his make-up. He moves with deliberate

almost ritualistic precision. A fellow performer addresses him from an
adjacent seat in front of the long mirror unable to take their eyes from their
own image in the glass.)

“Hey are you a clown?” (The horse continues to run)

“No, this paint is a protection against evil…” (Happy slowly emerging from
the barrel)

“Coooool…”

“And to strike fear into my enemies…” (His voice is almost drowned by the
storm)

P: “Oh wow, do you do some kind of stage-fighting act?” (The actor glances
over the parapet.)

HDR: “No my intention is to destroy money…” (He runs and catches hold of
the trailing rope.)

P: “Ha ha ha…” (The performer folds in a convulsion of sequins, leaving a

thick black line across their brow.)
 6

”Oh, you’re a clown alright…shit look what you made me do…” (He was dabs
at his mistake ineffectually.) “Well good luck with that…just make sure you
don’t destroy it before we get paid…” (He slowly transforms into a bird and
flies above the proscenium.)

Happy becomes quickly aware that the stage directions did not seem to
refer to what is happening in the sketch, they seem copied from some other
scene …
…the scene becomes unworkable. The effort of trying to deliver a believable
performance and follow stage directions from a scene that is located
somewhere else is causing the scene to feel like a prison.

HDR: “Left to get here of stage…” (Out I have enter.)

(The only solution here in order to leave a sketch in which you are a
character trying to leave a sketch is to alter your perception so that the set
dressed to look like backstage area in which you are supposed to perform
becomes a possible area of reality located somewhere behind the
performance. Thus in seeking to escape you have to conflate fiction with
reality and are trapped forever in the portrayal of a non-performance. You
have no option but to succumb to the hypernormalisation of performativity.)

HDR: “I have to get out of here…” (Enter stage Left.)

THE INESCAPABLE SCENE #2

Happy finds himself in another impossible scene: this time the stage
directions seem correct but there is something wrong with the dialogue.
Throughout the scene Happy is possessed of the notion that he is not
asleep and dreaming but has been beaten unconscious.

(Meanwhile from a window ledge in Peckham…)

Happy: ‘Excuse me, Officer, I bought this tin of beans at five past three,
and now its gone up in price its nearly lunchtime…’

Policeman: ‘Well what seems to be the problem?’

H: ‘I can’t cope with the inflation, and I haven’t even eaten the beans yet!
I’m worried that the price of hunger is increasing.’

Happy is aware that these lines are leading to a joke, but it seems forever
close and far away like a boat on a distant horizon that is simultaneously
leaving and arriving. He starts to feel as if there is an awful excess at work
here…
 7

Happy feels compelled to deliver the line again:

H: ‘I said Officer that I can’t cope with the inflation, and I haven’t even
eaten the beans yet! I’m worried that the price of hunger is increasing.’

P: (Slow recognition) ‘Yes its on the rise definitely, hunger is worth double
the amount of beans it was last Thursday.

H: Yes officer…I’m worried that soon I wont be able to afford to be hungry

anymore

P: Can’t you apply for benefits?

H: Being too poor to be hungry has its own benefits m’lud. I can feast on
that which is out of my hands and the tax payer foots the bill.

P: Who foots the bill? Why that’s animal cruelty! I require you to lie face
down on the carpet with your hands in the air.

H: I can’t do that, your honour.

P: Why not?

H: Because carpet is sold by the yard but worn by the foot.

P: Well do you admit to eating to drive up the price of hunger.

H: Yes, I’ve been terribly greedy. In my own modest way.

P: Guilty as charged…you will be remanded on a full stomach and be liable

for the legal costs…and get out of your own modest way or I will charge you
with obstruction!

H: Oh officer its enough to make you sick

P: Aha so you plead not hungry?

H: I’ve been pleading all day but to no avail…if it pleases the court, I would
like to call these beans as the first witness

Happy felt the sixteen muscles of his tongue moving to some pre-ordained
choreography…this comedic utterance was designed to do nothing except
replicate itself, he could feel that the lines were engineered to make
another line happen, like he had swallowed a bean factory, each line fed
the next and had nothing at all to do with the fulfilment of human
hunger…the idea here was that the description of desiring production was
masked in feed line and punchline…
 8

In that we cut straight to the laughter production, but in not acknowledging

that this is what is being done , there is an agony of excess, laughter
becomes detached from happiness and just becomes an accumulation of
laughter, like the Bill Hick’s joke that is captured as soon as it leaves his
mouth…everything becomes a potential punchline, every punchline leading
to another feedline.
The joke seems to infuse and repeat in each different word…so that the
entire discourse seems to be both the start and the end of a joke, the set up
and the punch oscillate meaninglessly beyond actual summation of
laughter…ie

there is a process of setting up a joke called FEED LINE ‘L’ such that Punch
‘P’ will follow immediately after

there is a need for laughter to be ongoing, rather than at one finite

moment,

there is need for a process of setting up L that is the equivalent of the

punch P

in making the setting up of the joke into the punch line…therefore P = L = P

= L = L P P P P etc etc…

laughter ensues in an excess of rib cracking agony…

Happy felt trapped inside an impossible piece of dialogue in which every

line is almost both the set up and punchline of a joke…”this highlights how
the site of desiring production is now the audience, and that the audience
desperately tries to squeeze out of themselves the surplus laughter that
they desperately desire to fetishise onto the words…” thought Happy
smugly, trying to process it all into a neat equation.

The production of a commodity that leads to desire

A set up that leads to a punch

Is replaced by desiring production, in which desire is the commodity

produced

Is replaced by punch line production, in which laughter is the set up

produced

In the situation where laughter is the set up for a joke, nothing is funny
anymore…

The beans are brought in under duress.

P: I would like to suggest these beans are inadmissible your grace

 9

H: they are practically inedible, your highness (Happy bends low in an

aspect of mock servitude)

JUDGE: (he is clearly drunk) We do not permit mock servitude in this court
… It would appear that these beans have not only gone up in value but they
have also travelled through time to become previously expired past their
own sell-by-date.
If you do not eat them now they will go off…(He bangs his gavel on the
beans which evaporate in a puff of late breakfast)

(Strains of the Court of Pie Powder are heard next door…)

“The arm of the law holds a tankard,

The mouth of the law’s full of beer.
But the tankard’s the shape of a pisspot,
The mouth is deformed in a sneer.

J: Keep it down in there!

P: Yes time travelling beans you say, M’Lud?

J: I do say, and I don’t say it lightly

H: Well you may have to say it lightly, your Honour; the tin is at least three
ounces short of a full pound, either that or my watch has stopped.

P: Do you wish to make a complaint?

H: How dare you I was born like this and these are my beans, I paid good
money for them yesterday when I was feeling peckish...

J: And now

H: And now they are worth more I’ve gone right off them…

P: Listen, any tin of beans that is sold at three shillings and a half should
not be valued until at least 10 minutes after tea time…it’s the law

H: Listen officer I haven’t bean here that long

J: You haven’t bean at all, you need more fibre in your diet

H: I know that is why I desired the beans but now I’ve paid for them they
don’t seem so appealing

P: You should use a tin opener instead…Well as an officer of the law I must
insist that all beans be treated equally no matter what time of day

H: An officer of what law

 10

P: The law of averages!

“Now here of the court of Pie Poudre,

The finest display in the fair,
Where the adders and serpents
So fanciful of venom, exceedingly rare.”

Judge: Silence in court (addressing the Officer) Aha I see you have come to
enforce the mean value of these beans

P: Not likely, your Majesty! The last time I was mean, it had literally no
value at all

J: You will be remanded to remain upon this patch of earth forever and ever
amen.

H: on this patch of earth…? By whose law?

J: Sod’s Law…(The recorded laughter plays at full volume)

P: (Aside to audience) You know it’s a sketch about beans … even the
laughter is canned.

H: Well I still am hard done by officer…I paid for these beans at half past
two and now its tea time I find that they have depreciated in
desireability…can I get a refund

J: I’m afraid there is nothing you can do, the value of time to beans is on
the decline…the bean/time ratio has dipped to an unusual level

H: Dipped you say…why didn’t you say so sooner.. if I had known the beans
had been dipped in an unusual sauce I would have paid more

P: You mean you would have bought the beans earlier

H: Yes for a cheaper price …I feel if I had bought them sooner and I would
have paid less they’d be worth more to me now…
…oh its so hard to not desire the beans you have…

P: Now that is unusual, have you ever coveted the beans of another?

H: I should say so officer…ever since I bought these common or garden

beans I cant stop thinking of the haricot variety

P: But these are haricot beans you fool

H: WHAT! you mean I’ve been lusting after beans I already have…now I
definitely am not hungry…there is nothing like lust to put you off your food
 11

J: Well they do say hunger makes good sauce, you should try desiring harder
and the beans will appreciate in value

H: Why then the absence of beans should entirely make tea time a delight.
If only I could afford the time, why id spend every second of the day on
beans that I can never have

J: Exactly a tin of beans today is worth two tins of something you’d rather
not desire for fear it will ruin your appetite tomorrow

H: I resemble that remark

P: Yes you are a human bean, with rights…you have the right to remain
hungry, anything you do eat may be taken down and later used in sauce.

H: If I had all the money I’d spent on beans…I’d spend it on beans.

J: So you show no remorse for your crime?

H: Je ne regrettez bean…I cannot show remorse for what has bean and
gone.

J: The only has-been around here is you, and you’ve been and gone!

H: Well Ladies and Germs, they say you play this place once on the way up,
and once on the way down…
…it’s good to be back.

J: or you could simply put the beans on a horse…I pronounce the defendant
guilty at 7/2 in the 3:30 at Aintree

P: Thank you M’lud, but that horse had bean on at 5/1…

H: But I only came in at half past two!

P: you clearly do not understand the law of chance

H: Why yes officer I only understand the law of no chance, but can you
explain the small print

P: I cannot

H: Why

P: Its too small, even we cannot read it…but suffice to say if you do not
move along I shall have to ask you to accompany me to the station

H: Why
 12

P: Because I don’t know the way

H: I can’t, I’m trying to make an Irish stew

P: Irish stew?

H: I thought you said you’d let me off…

Happy could feel that something was looped here. There was a knot of
imminent collapse, the goal of this scene was not to make anyone happy but
to simply produce laughter to enable the further production of lines that
seemed to support that frantic exhalation…as in desiring production the site
of manufacture is actually now the unconscious as a factory of laughter…in
which all the internal tubes of mirth are a machinery that is the variable
capital of comic production… so that the subject, as variable capital labours
at costless machinery of variable capital…everything is squeezable and
available free to the capitalist comedian, like a sponge in the shape of a
human figure that can be torn apart and squeezed and still remain alive; ha
ha human remains …like a clown’s body made entirely of rubber horns…honk
honk, honk…Happy felt like a demented goose regurgitating the jokes
straight down the throat of another goose, which in turn…

He tried to do a very simple diagram of desiring-production in his head as a

tautological mantra, so that the infinite detachability of the jokes did not
infect his thinking…

There is a commodity ‘C’ such that it causes desire ‘D’.

There is a desire ‘D’ such that a commodity ‘C’ fulfils it.

There is a closed loop between ‘C’ and ‘D’ such that once C fulfils D the
cycle is over.

There is a process of repetition in which the cycle can be repeated

differently so that ‘C’ fulfils ‘D’ endlessly.

There is a process by which ‘D’ has to remain unfulfilled.

There is a commodity ‘-C ‘, which is less able to fulfil desire than at first
appearance.

There is a process by which ‘-C’ has to appear more able to fulfil desire
than it can.

There has to be a process by which desire ‘D’ has to be produced to make ‘-

C ‘ appear like ‘C’

There has to be a process called Desiring-Production ‘D-P’ such that ‘-C’ can
appear to be ‘C ‘, that then leaves ‘D’ unfulfilled.
 13

*
if D replaces C in the process of production that is supposedly the result of D

Then there is a new process such that D = C = D = C = D = C ad infinitum…

This excess is like a joke that can never get to the punchline, the excess of
it delays the moment of laughter such that every line L appears to be the
feed line to the final Punch P. The absence of a commodity that can either
fulfil desire or therefore be worth more than the desire it is supposed to
fulfil means that every punch line is worth less in value than the feed line
that supposedly results in it, thus resulting in an endless deferral of
laughter, an excessive sketch that can never end…in which there is a line L
that is more important to produce than the Punch P, such that there is a
new comedy routine such that L = P = L = P L = P = L etc etc. ad infinitum…

The product is bought on credit

The product falls apart before you haver even started paying back the lump
sum
The product fails before even you have paid off the interest on the credit.
The product is nothing like you thought it would be…

This is definitely no laughing matter…

P: Look, will you come quietly or will I have to wear earplugs?

HDR: You will never take my beans alive!

P: If you do not desist, I will have to charge you with disturbing the peace.

HDR: Well be specific, which peace have I disturbed?

P: All of it.

HDR: I’ll let you have my beans.

P: Hmmmm….Well how many tins do you have?

HDR: If you can guess, you can have them both.

P: Three?

H: Correct.

J: then it is settled, we will share the beans between the three of us,
perhaps with a leg of chicken.

P: wonderful, yes beans and a leg of chicken for all!

H: I’m afraid the leg will never stand up in court, your honour!
 14

J: What no legs? You may be eligible for compensation.

HDR: I’ve got other disabilities

P: Yes, look! He has no chicken legs, but he has terrible crow’s feet around
the eyes.

HDR: Those are laughter lines!

J: Nothing’s that funny… Take him away etc. etc.

The canned laughter fades as the old set shows signs of wear…Happy reels
from the fumes given off by burning celluloid, they are torching all the old
sketches…there is a comedy overload and they are trying to make room for
more material by burning up a lot of the old routines…nothing is funny
anymore by the law of diminishing returns…slapstick and sexually
inappropriate jokes are all melting together as the cans split and buckle in
the heat…the fumes from the fire can cause choking fits of laughter as racist
comedy mixes with elegant satirical sketches of long forgotten
politicians…technicians gag as the desire for the old jokes creates vast
clouds of noxious humour that represent the over inflated value of
nostalgia…laughs from thirty years ago seem somehow funnier although no
one can find the scorched punchlines now…
…Happy tries to leave the sketch but the policeman follows him , making off
colour jokes about unfulfilled desire and women of easy virtue…happy
finding it all very distasteful tries to exit stage left but the way is blocked
by hoards of autograph hunters all gasping in the poisonous reek of
comedy…Abusive headlines flicker around the memory of touch…the jokes
usually used to expose the risible, exacerbate into the scabbing over of the
possibility for laughter…different jokes are repeated to the same awkward
human bark; the same noisy exhalation of a series of short breaths, the
same heaving of the chest is copied into a nearly identical series of
truncated howls that could almost be taken for signs of pain.

OATMEAL IS GOOD FOR YOU:

In a system where masses of unpegged currencies compete, the only

supporting structure is a contradictory ideology that the market, through its
quantitative autonomy, will balance itself. This market remains entirely
vulnerable to affective manipulation. The only thing to which it remains
pegged are the purely qualitative, subjective fluctuations of narrative,
news, rumour and speculation. In this way it is affected by news it cannot
read.
The non-negotiable is negotiable through something that it proves does not
exist. It can only be affected by that which it refutes.
It is negotiable by the presence within it of something that cannot exist
there.
 15

Money being also a ‘presence of an absence’ is the absent plasma that

flows through the bloodless veins of this system, and here it becomes
difficult to say which came first the system or the money. Either way the
chicken is off and the eggs are rotten.

So to deepen the analogy between the three fields and in relation to semio-
capital, and to locate the trick in its restrictive field as a field of value: I
propose a ‘Split Gravity’.
This will be a gravity that is divided according to the qualitative,
communicable register of ‘Weight-Value’, and the quantitative autonomous,
subject-less register of ‘Mass-Value’. These incompatible registers will be
further discussed as components of a critical theory of weightlessness. In
this critique the circus subject’s proximity to the owners of means will be
highlighted, as well as their role as labour-power that is refuted as the
origin of value for the fetishized weightlessness that passes for the
commodity of ‘freedom’ in Late Circusism.

DOING THE SPLITS:

A ‘felt’ weightlessness, Empirical, Analogous to

Use-Value, Analogous to Meaning, Qualitative,
Weight-Value --- Communicable, Subjective, Implying relation
between Circus Artist and an Other, Available for
manipulation.

A momentary displacement of Mass from the

Mass-Value --- established ‘Order’, Analogous to Exchange-Value,
Analogous to Linguistic-Value, Quantitative,
Communicable autonomously, Objective, Implies
a reduced or absent subject, Indifferent.

In terms of Game Theory, which validates the handing of societal controls to

an indifferent register. This model of the subject tends to see all human
interaction as self-interested game play, thus perhaps implying among other
things the death of love. It might be stated that rational gain precludes
outcomes that do not make quantitative sense.
So Game Theory feeds directly into a system of objective measurement
that easily sets up an autonomous market of differences as the ideal
measure for this post-ideological subject, free to play objectively.
In ‘freeing’ the subject from ideological structures, the subject is forced
into an indifferent autonomous market. What I am getting at here is that
the registers are split; quality and quantity, with the market indifferent to
 16

what the subject feels as ‘true’. What the subject qualitatively feels is
‘true’ is patently ‘unprovable’ within exchange.

It is this indifference that I analogically relate to the indifference of gravity,

which ‘orders’ bodies of mass, not according to their subjective desires, but
according to a set of objective and autonomous laws of gravitational pull
that are related to quantities of mass; thus forming analogically a ‘market
value ‘of differences in mass.
This has been clearly outlined as an alphabet of bodies of mass, all
quantitatively ordered, at rest.

Here it is important to ask how the analogy of split gravity follows its
target. If we think of a split as in structural linguistics and in political
economy, these are wholly incompatible registers.
But it is the perpetuation of a fiction of their union that is responsible for
‘covering up’ the impasses that the subject experiences within the
dimension of linguistic value and the impossibility of the subject to be
recognised as the primary rationale for the circulation of goods and services
within the dimension of exchange.

“Consequently, every commodity is an articulation of use-value and

exchange-value, no matter how abstract the produced object (services,
websites, smartphone apps and so on). Commodity has to be tied at least to
a fantasy of quality, which represents the minimal ground for the
production of a corresponding need. The immediate conclusion is that the
need is not some quasi-natural and non-symbolic tendency but already
comprises a symbolic mediation. Even if commodities are not produced with
the aim of satisfying human needs but first and foremost to support
exchange and stimulate consumption, one of the cornerstones of the
production of value, they have to maintain the fiction of usefulness and
need, no matter how abstract, futile and fantasmatic. It is precisely the
fantasy that supports the union of use-value and exchange-value, matter
without qualities and qualities without matter, two heterogeneous and
unrelated levels.”
(Tomsic, S (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious Verso. London)

In a similar way it is Circus, as it mistakes quantity for quality, that

produces a barred freedom. The forcing of this homology of split register in
gravity is to allow circus to be examined through its lens. I am not saying
this is how gravity is but, as stated that homology is part of the tool set to
make circus writing happen. It is only by proposing this split that I can
demonstrate where I think fiction is located in the trick.

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Fourteen.

Doc: where are you, can you describe your surroundings

 17

Patient: I’m on top of a tall building some people are being aggressive
toward me

Doc: do you know why?

Patient: No…I have no idea…

“You don’t like gravity, you dumb fucking has-been? What, you think you are
somehow above the circus? That you’re a fucking saint?”

The impact was first the soft darkness, the defocused dark blanket and a
telephone ringing in a distant hallway that comes after a blow to the head.
You never feel the ‘actual’ punch, only what the punch means as its
processed by the alarm bells and chemical flooding of a body that has been
punched.
There is no punch as such, only what it means to a personality as it
registers finally, unequivocally that it is not more than a punch bag when it
is punched. That is the shock; that is the worst thing about a punch to the
head, what it means and how its insistent materiality means more than
what we think we mean. It means you cannot mean past your existence as
punchable meat… This is it now…

“Do you think you can stop what is coming? Do you think you will not be
scrambling for coins like everybody else? What it comes down to, my poetic
little friend is how much does a thing weigh. And whether or not you think
that is ‘fair’ has nothing to do with it, this new Circusism is only interested
in freedom that ‘weighs’ something, do you get it yet?”

Punches are meaning a lot now in quick succession. The meaning has
weight.

“ Circusism means that everybody can perform their trick, everybody can
feel free, and it all weighs up nice and tidy at the end of the day. All you
had to do was perform yourself, we don’t mind who you are, just make that
performance WEIGH something. Making it weigh nothing is a freedom that
we can count on, do you understand you fucking stupid monkey…”

They had taken him to the top of a ragged disused tower block on the
outskirts of the city. In the stinking garbage, Punches fall like words…

Happy groaned, this time they had bested him. They had beaten him by
allowing gravity to do its work. The fall was no doubt designed to kill him
but he had landed luckily, his head cushioned by a pile of rain soaked
leaflets. Bundles of hand-outs slowly turning to pulp in the alleyway behind
the tower block.
He took one to mop the blood from his lips. Reading through a throbbing
vignette.

“To those that buy to let…you will be burnt out of this community, those of
you who charge monthly rents that are higher than the monthly re-payments
 18

on a mortgage for which your tenants are not even eligible, will be deemed
as parasites that must be expunged from this community. Your behaviour is
damaging the fabric of our future and the future of our children. For this
there can be no forgiveness. Stop repeating what the market tells you to
say. You are the problem, not the inability of hard-working people to earn
enough money to afford a house. You are the cause of the very situation you
use to say that your hands are tied.
You, the landlords, are wholly, utterly responsible for the misery,
uncertainty and stress that you cause for years on end in honest families’
lives. You are responsible for the anger, the hurt, the feeling of
powerlessness that men and women and their bewildered children suffer
daily, daily, daily. It is YOU.
Those that live off the backs of poor working families will be openly
attacked as pariahs in the new community. No longer will we wait for the
Left or the Right, but we will take direct and irrevocable action, the blame
for which we will fully and gladly shoulder, so that our children can have a
chance to blamelessly grow and flourish in a new community cleansed of the
filth that you are. We will become criminals who do not recognise the law
so our children can be free of it. Your disgusting entrepreneurial reign will
be cut short, by violence if necessary, you and your cronies, the blood-
sucking estate agents, will be torn from your beds and thrown to the pack.
We will make you into the homeless ones. In this revolutionary moment all
those that rent a house to anyone else will be removed from their position.
To those in rented accommodation, cease payment. To those being
evicted so that your home can be sold for a profit or can be occupied by
those willing to pay more, surrender your deposit and buy petrol; let the
assets of the capitalist pigs burn to the ground, let them experience what it
is like to have their homes taken from them. Anyone who has converted
their work into the chance to exploit those less fortunate than themselves
deserves to lose the gains of that work. The moral choice is clear, ANYONE
who buys a property to let in this current climate has decided that they
wish to exploit those who are less fortunate than themselves and they will
pay the price.
If you have tenants, We warn you now ONE TIME ONLY,

1: drop your rents to below the level of a mortgage that those tenants could
effectively achieve,

2: ignore the greedy, inflationary rhetoric of the Estate Agent scum that
whisper in your ears, it is their job to scrape up the crumbs of cake that
they try to make appear larger and more delicious than it is,

3: look into your soul and ask yourself ‘do I wish to survive on this earth by
living off the backs of those less fortunate than myself’. Do you really
believe that you could live and profit like this? Did you really think we would
see you as victims of the non-negotiable market? We know the banks are to
blame, but you legitimise them daily. We therefore also hold you
responsible.
Examine your situation carefully; fuck the market before we fuck you. You
cannot continue to behave in this openly parasitical, bourgeois manner and
 19

escape the scathing violence of those below you. We are sure about this,
treat us fairly now or we will destroy you all like the vampiric filth that you
are. “

Signed The Rent Boys.

Next we destroy the banks.

The leaflet fluttered in Happy’s hand, a hopeless call to an unheeding

populace. No one in his or her right mind would risk imprisonment to follow
this call to direct action. No one would risk being thrown onto the mercy of
the dwindling state welfare system for this idealistic nonsense. Anyone who
took up such a message would have to be completely insane, even if such
action would revolutionise the entire country.

“Even if this were a scene in some fictionalised satire it would have no

political effect.” Thought Happy sadly.

But supposing these ideas could be applied to circus? Supposing the same
moral appropriation could be levelled at those within the circus who
genuinely consider themselves to be exponents of blameless demonstrations
of their freedom to attain weightlessness within the meritocracy of gravity.
If he could show the trick as something rented out to the audience above its
worth, something over inflated as an actuality of freedom but which only
actually called out to the gravity that ultimately negated it, then perhaps
he could generate some momentum for a genuinely honest circus.
Those that rent out freedom as an area that you can live in are the self-
interested landlords that perpetuate the lie.
The trick that claims it is free of gravity, outside the law, outside of
society, is a lie that merely perpetuates the gravity it claims to resist.

There is nothing riding on bricks and mortar, and yet everything…hot air
balloons…a thin tissue of lies filled with hot air, that makes the passenger
appear weightless…all entrants must complete the enclosed form…the form
was completed by a thin fabric of lies that merely enclosed a volume of hot
air…whispering estate agents stood in a circle, escalating numbers from
mouth to ear to mouth to ear in endless uncontrolled accumulation…a ring
of utterance so unstoppable to scored deep wounds into the landscape of
value as it moved glacially indifferent to the morass, melting and re-
freezing inscrutably in circles of uncertainty. Happy drifted in and out of
consciousness…the houses seemed to be below him, he in a hot air balloon
of his own muttered untruthfulness, he was lifted clear and he saw how
easy it would be to lie, to show how the houses were increasing in value as
they got smaller, as he saw more and more the vast accumulated capital
that spread out beneath him, every roof a million pounds worth of imaginary
money…something lent, something rented, something bending to the
inexorable and invisible curve of value-time…the monolithic fabrication of
fractional reserve banking tattooing itself with money it does not have, ink
after ink becoming fact after fact as each whorl and sweep and scrawl of a
 20

majestic signature writes an inescapable black hole of debt into your

children’s lives.
The balloon was full of hot air and it took you into the fictional sky. When
you heat up the exhalation of an utterance it cannot help but give you lift,
something merely poetic becomes heated to the point of fact, and losing its
power to stay within the realm of human breath, floats up to give
weightless insolence to the fact of the balloon. The fictional sky was the lie
that words, once encapsulated in certain skins, were real.

“The signing of a cheque is poetry gone mad…” thought Happy as he threw

up.
The circus thugs that had pushed him off the tower block had failed to kill
him with gravity. Here he smiled through broken teeth at the irony. Here he
was feeling as numb as could be, imagining how easy it would be to see his
spirit as somehow separate from the mortal games of others, how easy it
would be to imagine his soul as elevated from this shattered puppet and to
imagine an area outside of all this useless, weighted stuff. But this was a
coward’s way out. This was another trick that implied freedom was
possible.
He knew his numbness and his pain were part of the sodden leaflets, the
rain, his blood was in the puddle and what it reflected was in his eyes, his
coat was seeping into the earth, his fingers were no more intelligent than
the nettles that coiled around the broken bicycle…the wet cardboard
beneath his head was his hair for now, growing, gathering mould, a
exhultation of what hair could do if it were papier mache , he was exhumed
downwards into the light of the earth-heavy body at the end of his fall.
He refocused on the puddle, it reflected the sky, the stuttering moon. He
could see the roof from which he fell, there were dark shapes moving at the
edge. They were trying to see if he was still alive…they were coming! It was
time to get up…GET UP…they are coming!

Happy stumbled off into the downpour, he had to find a cover; a new
identity…
He ran with his heart in his mouth towards the Old University building, he
had some forged qualifications, perhaps he could hide in there?
He forced a transom, and crawled inside to curl up in a store cupboard.

The Hypnotist and the Horse Race, Part Eight.

DAY THREE, Morning:

 21

I wake up as I hear the rain get heavier. The boy is banging on the door.
I understand from his distress that there is something wrong, his quick
movements, his panic flash around the room. His bruises have turned
green at the edges.
From the little I understand I realise that the Doctor has had some
kind of accident. Part of the greenhouse has collapsed into the river…he
thinks the doctor has fallen in…One of the patients is missing…I must do
something.

I rush out into the now torrential rain to see that indeed that part of
the greenhouse where we stood only two days ago has gone, torn off by
the river. The poles shredded, the rising river lashing at the remaining
walkway…smashed glass sparkles from the remaining foliage. The boy is in
a panic, his eyes darting around. He has to go, he has to find someone
with a boat who can take him downstream. I have to search for the
Doctor here.

I ran straight to her office. She had expressly forbidden me from looking
at her notes. I tried to force the bureau without leaving a mark but it
was badly scratched now. I kept looking at the scratch in the lacquered
wood as I frantically gathered up her notes, it was a line that bisected
my time here. Before the scratch I agreed with her methods, after the
scratch…

“You must stop me.”

…well I did not know. I felt sick, waves of nausea started in my legs.
I was sick in an impossible way, I hade a headache in my chest. I could
hear music, some long low sounds like a distant march of black beasts…
My joints ached as soon as I thought of them, as if I was somehow
drifting ahead of the pain, which lagged behind me like a reluctant child…

“I am eleven years old…”

 22

I fumbled at the yellowing pages. I was convinced that I would find out
what had happened to Jonah if I could just get a better sense of what
the sessions entailed.
I knew that she used her own methods of hypnosis. Returning to the
same events again and again, subtly altering them each time. Never
running out of time she would obsesses over every detail, every breath
of the Past Life; every gesture.
She had a specially designed gramophone, which played a series of
records designed to tonally separate you from your current body. She
could allow you you to go somewhere in history, somewhere you had
lived before.

“My name is Charlie. I am eleven years old…”

“Where are you Charlie?”

“I’m walking by the railway tracks…”

My hands were shaking, my forearms were wet with sweat. After the
encounter the previous morning with the bent revolver my body was
telling me that this woman scared me. It was more than that she
terrified me.

When I was young I would dream of being on a grey beach. Along the
sand at one end was a cave. I could play perfectly happily at this end of
the beach, my toes stretched into the damp grains, without having to
disturb the witch who lived in the cave. There was no reason to disturb
her, but I always did. I could not play in peace, I had always to go to
the mouth of the cave and peer in.
It went down about thirty feet before turning to the right, where
there was a faint glow. As I looked she would always come screaming
around that corner, grinning her scream into my horrified mind. I always
woke up before she reached me.

“Where are you? Can you describe your surroundings?”

 23

“It’s night time. I can’t find my mother…”

KNOTATION DREAM PART THREE

HERE THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY WAS AS AN UNEXPLORED AREA

FULL OF FRAGMENTARY AUTONOMOUS DRIVES:

Happy was dreaming of the book again, it was a shapeless lexicon of body
parts and words that could somehow turn text into movement and voice
versa.
“Yes, “ thought Happy in the way that things make sense of the world in
dreams, “I will call it Voice-Versa.”

The book promised to be a method of notation for circus but also a

method of turning any piece of text or spoken statement into circus
movement.
He was in a School For The Un-education of The Body, attending a course
in Gralphity, which was the inexorable field exerted by the alphabet on all
words. It felt like an unwanted sex dream.

“Now and then, you will have to perform trick one, you must do this but
only to jump over trick two. These are just parlour games, children,
because you must…you MUST get to trick three…”

The teacher was a long and impossibly thin woman who stood with her feet
in a pot of earth and who spoke in leaves, and vines. When she delivered
her lesson Happy could feel his roots stirring.

“Now where were we…” the long willowy gaze of Ms Minkowski cast around
the immense classroom. In the dream Happy had tried to hide the fact he
was a full-grown man in a class full of adolescent children by sitting at the
back.
But the classroom had no back, it was an endless space in which he had to
prove he was learning with his back against the wall.
The room itself was twisted back on itself so that the inside surface was
the same as the outside and so everything that could be learned enclosed
itself.

“You there, the older boy dressed in the Cowboy and Indian costume…”

Happy seethed inwardly but recited the formula by rote, as if in a dream,

which he was…
 24

“So you can think of the word as a trick that is performed in the field of
alphabetical gravity.
You can think of the word as the quality of singular difference that
precedes its location within the alphabet as a form of singular difference
that is nevertheless repeatable, this contradiction is temporal.
You can think of the contradiction in which the meta statement ‘about’
the quality of difference precedes the infra statement ‘of’ its difference,
but which necessarily precedes that meta statement that delineates it,
which also cannot be formed without recourse to the pool of symbols of
difference that are available to be repeated in the alphabet.
Thus the word is a trick that cannot make a meta-statement about the
quality of gravity without recourse to the quantitative field of repeatable
differential forces that comprise the techniques that precede the trick, of
which the trick is made.
You can think of the contradiction before the contradiction thinks of you.
That is the trick.”

Ms. Minkowski rippled green in pink gingham. “Yes, continue Down-River.”

“…In terms of diagramming circus; the operations of a circus trick that

defines the qualitative limits of gravity for the subject have to ‘precede’
gravity, that is be ‘meta’ to it, but also simultaneously have to occur within
it and therefore ‘follow’ it.
In this sense the inevitability of treating statements from outside the
alphabet that delineate its order as statements that both transgress and
follow that order set up insoluble, super-positional fluctuations in meaning…
”

“…Meaning?”

“…er…meaning that the concealment of unthruthable provings, which is

inherent without a deliberate act of exposure within the first trick, results
in an un-scratchable itch for the subject who attempts a word-trick in the
gravity of the alphabet.
When the impossibility of meta-language is hidden, your desire to say
exactly what you mean will always end in disappointment, which appears to
be the fault of the subject. My apologies, but that is just how it is…The
concealed un-provability of which comes first: ‘the chicken of quality’ or
‘the egg of quantity’, starts instead to very much look like a flaw in the
farmer.”

“Very good Down-River, but see me at the end of time, I want to discuss
your lateness.”

“Easy…”thought Happy disappointedly, “I will just go back to before I was

known for being late and turn up earlier than expected…”
 25

“Time is money anyway…and you cannot afford to see me later, “ said

Happy immediately to himself. He knew already that Capital wanted to exist
in the body of the word but was unwilling to move out of the alphabet.

“…like poem that is subject to terms and conditions:”

He leapt up onto the desk to make a ‘funny’.

“My wings unfolded to touch the edge of the sun…” he cried, spreading his
arms to spell out the line of flight, swiftly making an aside to his
classmates:

“Wing shapes may vary and are subject to APR, applicants for all flights
must be over 18, re-negotiated terms may be withdrawn subject to interest
rates unless cancelled before sunrise.”

The teacher, ignoring Happy completely, continued by directing them into

an adjoining room that was full of mattresses; they were supposed to
receive the lesson lying down.

“Let us continue now in a more simple fashion. Let us return to the

diagram…and remember it is important that we do not think of this
information as correct, but merely information that shows that it is possible
to ‘think circus’. This notation is un-correct in that it points not to itself as
‘correct’ but points only at the potentiality for thought underneath
‘correctness’. Please look up…”

She motioned to the white square of light that beamed from an overhead
projector focused on the ceiling.
The light flickered as the bulb struggled to illuminate her ideas in the
darkening space filled with young, supine bodies. A sharp odour of mould
emanated from each mattress, which mingled with the scent from the many
confused oils of puberty.
Happy could see that many of the girls had drawn the diagram on their
legs in blue biro causing them to loop across the surface of their skin. He
knew how not to look directly as their limbs shifted, crossing and uncrossing
in the half-light.

B O D Y
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
< v < >

“Alright class, look now at your diagrams. We already know that each word
as it is entered into the field of gralphity can be seen as momentarily
weightless before its constituent letters are pulled back into place by the
force of the alphabetical order.
Thus two registers are referred to here when speaking about the ‘random’
order of letters in the word as opposed to the alphabetised organisation of
letters as disorder-value and order-value respectively.
 26

Remember disorder-value is just a ‘story’ when you tell it in the

alphabetical field, but there is nowhere else to ‘tell’ it.
These you can think of in linguistic terms as corresponding to a ‘meaning’
as it exists between two subjects exchanging words as opposed to
‘linguistic-value’ that is held as the differential between orders of signifiers.
You might also compare this split in value to Marx’s designations of ‘use-
value’ and ‘exchange-value’ respectively or even in fact the designation
between weight-value as a qualitative feeling of weight and mass-value as
the definitive unchanging order of bodies of mass in ‘circus thinking’…if
such a thinking could be said to exist.”

Giggles erupted around the room.

“The diagram here exists as a way for you to think of the 26 letters you
have been asked to draw on your bodies as being subject to the force of
‘Gralphity’, an indifferent force entirely devoid of any reference or
relevance to the subject who speaks or writes, which wants those letters to
exist all in a neat little horizontal row.
Everybody lie flat on your mattresses now…”

“Miss, I can’t lie flat, there is something sticking in me…”

“You should be so lucky…” quipped her friend. More giggles.

“Settle down now…just lie still for a moment, this is just a brief
demonstration of what gravity wants.” There always has to be one princess,
thought the teacher.

The girls continued ribbing their friend, a dowdy looking girl with thick
spectacles, “maybe it’s a pea under you mattress…”

“Or maybe its just a P-ness that you can feel” The room erupts.

“Settle down, class” Why must everything be delivered through a miasma of

sexual frustration, thought Ms Minkowski. She continued regardless.

“So as you lie flat you are in alphabetical order, more or less. You are a row
of letters ordered by the alphabetical field.
Now lift your left arm…”

What seemed like a thousand arms slowly rose into the dark.

“Now if we refer to the Diagram of Alpha-Points on the body we can see

that lifting this arm involves several Alpha-Points: E, M, R, and T to be
precise.”
 27

“We can think of this arm not as notated but as ‘knotated’. It is a notation
of knots because it includes the tautology of the trick itself; because of the
way the meta-statement of the letter in the word and the infra-statement
of the letter in the alphabet are in a super-positional state of both
preceding each other; as quantity of difference is qualified by a quantity of
difference that is qualified by a quantity….etc etc etc. It is a knot.”

“So children, as you all raise these letters EMRT in the air, if I give you as
many free vowels as you like, can you make E M R T into a word? Raise your
hand when you have the answer.”

A flurry of hands descended back into the pull of the recumbent body of the
alphabet.

The group of limbs manipulated the letters written on them without moving,
somewhere at a meeting point between the moving parts a stillness moved
to think of how to manipulate the immaterial. Lying still, the centre of the
spider tried to weave inwards what its legs will outwardly do.
 28

“This is called thinking, “ thought Happy, observing the mass of dreaming

bodies like a stone.

Arms of E M R T went up:

“EMo RoT?” said one usually quiet girl.

“Can I have fEM RaT if I put an f on the front?” said another.

“Emeriti” interjected Happy without raising his hand, “the plural noun
meaning a retired university professor or lecturer who has been allowed to
keep their honourary title.
It is a teacher who has long ceased to function but who is still called a
teacher out of respect for what they once taught. ‘Emeriti’ means a whole
gang of them…”

Laughter lit by the second hand light of the overhead projector.

“Ok, ok , joking aside,” Ms Minkowski moved to quell the mirth by waving

her own willowy arms around, “… and I will ignore your snide inference,
Down-River, but you are quite correct; the word I was thinking of does mean
in fact a group of retired professors. Their title is a mark of their inaction.

Interestingly, it is one of the few words in English that follows the noun to
which it refers. ‘Professors Emeriti’, it is a title that comes after what they
did to deserve the title, thus marking the fact that it names the moment
after what once was is no longer there.
How appropriate then that our first word that we make in defiance of the
force of ‘Gralphity’ should be a word that floats momentarily suspended
naming that which is not there.
Emeriti is a word that simultaneously confirms the fact that an ex-
professor is there but that as far as the university is concerned they are now
just a work of FICTION in this Semio-Gravity.

Note, class, how your raised arm writes the fiction of a teacher who is no
longer there; the asking of a question effectively dematerialises the one you
think is qualified to answer it. In this way I want you to reflect on the fact
that your question is your answer.

The act of raising your hand writes the position of the lecturer emeritus.
This is a trick in which you move through the medium of un-education in
order to create a weightless moment from it by writing a fiction of one who
knows. It is not the question seeking an answer but recognising the form of
the question as the answer.”

“Sheesh…” said Happy, “If the question is the answer then why do we need
you?” No one was listening to his query.
 29

“Ok so we have our word that describes our arm as it is lifted into the air.
The word ‘Emeriti’ can be entered into the alphabetical field, it floats
momentarily before its letters are pulled back into their ‘correct’ positions.
So let us look at these directions demanded of us and put them to our own
use.

We can see here that within this word our letters E, M, R, T that take us
from left shoulder, through elbow and wrist, to the left hand are now
accompanied by four directional arrows, one for each of the letters that
relate to the specific body-part. These arrows are derived from placing the
word ‘EMERITI’, which contains our ‘Body-Letters’, our ‘Alpha-Points’ EMRT
at a certain point in the ‘alphabetical field’, in other words by placing them
‘on’ the alphabet here.
The arrows show what must be done to return those letters, displaced and
disordered as they are by their constellation within the word ‘Emeriti’, to
their ‘correct’ place ‘at rest’ in the alphabetical field.

DIAGRAM:

E M e R i T i
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
< > > >

Please note, class:

There are two gravities that are being discussed here and how they can be
thought of as isomorphic to each other, so that we will discuss the gravity of
the alphabetical field and ‘our’ gravity, that affects our bodies in every
moment of our lives, and ‘of’ which we are constructed.
The body is constructed entirely according to gravity’s laws. The
statements that deal with ‘about’ and ‘of’ are inseparable, so already the
registers of quality and quantity are inevitably entangled.

Now we will try to use the instruction of what gravity wants us to do as

instructions to do that which it does not want us to do.
So in ‘following’ the arrows that the alphabetical gravity ‘wants’, we will
be following these instructions as directions in contravention of real gravity.
We are implying here how we will utilise the injunction to return to our set
‘place’ against itself.
We use the instruction to follow gravity as a way of moving against it; thus
what within the alphabetical gravity is a return to rest is re-appropriated
within ‘real’ gravity as action.

So if a letter is accompanied by an arrow, which shows the path that the

particular letter should take to arrive at ‘rest’ within the alphabet, then we
will re-appropriate this arrow to become our instruction to move the body
against being at ‘rest’ in our gravity. This is to be our trick.
 30

Thus in this KNOTATION we receive our instructions for circus movement

from the directions by which language is invalidated within the autonomous
register of linguistic value.
In this KNOTATION we are utilising the law by which we are barred from
the signifier to move directly against our own register of invalidation, which
in circus is GRAVITY. In this way this way of circus moving suggests that we
refute this law by acknowledging the fictionality of our movement.

Happy raised his hand: “So you are saying that these impasses are not real?
They clearly are; language absolutely does not permit subjective
agency…your ‘Knotation’ is just a fantasy, a fiction in which we pretend the
impasse is not there.”

Miss MInkowski looked at him sharply, directly and precisely from a hundred
years ago; he was coming into focus now, as if the whole dream scene had
been organised to bring him under the microscope; a glass slide smeared
with irrelevant, sexually frustrated blood in order to isolate the absence of
one pure cell of contagion that was clearly present in the plasma.

“Precisely…” her words clipped the air “…it is the work of fiction that we
are about. But a fiction is also a plan, a schematic for a future reality.”

“Oh I see it’s that old chestnut, Miss…”

“It’s Ms…”

“Yes Ms, are you telling us to grow up? Is it that old realisation that maturity
does not consist of knowing yourself but consists in the acknowledgement
that you can never now yourself? Is that what you are ‘telling’ us?”

She addressed him directly:

“Well in that regard, Mr Down-River, I am only ‘telling’ you what you will
later ‘tell’ me…”

“Oh I see…”

“… said the blind man.” She interjected.

“Quite, I can only see now that you believe you can see into the future.”

“Well, is that so difficult to believe? Time is only another form of gravity

after all, in fact its passage is dependant on gravity.”

In the dream Happy had gone silent; he was muttering to himself over and
over:
“One quits a quiet son when he quotes in a question.”

The teacher moved on in time:

 31

“So we can see class that we can take what one gravity wants us to do and
apply it as a method of resisting what another gravity wants us to do.
When gravity is a strong enough injunction we can resist time.”

There was much horse-play on the mattresses as the class became

distracted, unfocused by dream time. Mary Minkowski could tell she was
losing the room.

“Ok, Everybody stand up…stay on your mattresses, just move in

place…wave your arms, allow your hips to ride, allow your chest to
oscillate, allow your limbs to describe unheard of shapes, allow your body to
tremble and stumble in slow motion and know that every movement is
creating arrows of direction for the letters that are now inscribed upon your
body.
Letters can be taken from the Subject, the Verb and the Object of a
sentence, which gives us three dimensions in space so that every movement
of every ‘body-letter’ can be represented by three arrows in three separate
dimensional axes.
Thus the movement of a body part can be captured in a sentence, where
the letters from other words describe these three axes of movement for
that one body part. In this way
every movement writes not just one word that is suspended in the
alphabetical field and is trying to return to its rest point, pulled at by the
gravity of the alphabet, but whole sentences.
Just to raise your hand to wipe your feverish brow might render a subject,
verb and object for your wrist.
The raising of your hand has created a multitude of retired professors.”

Happy was squirming and thrashing on the mattress, trying to make his limbs
‘pen’ an obscene limerick about what Little Nell did to join the Circus;
“Huh, this only works in English…how can I write my way out of here if I
have to do it in the phonetic logic of the Queen…? Why must I submit to this
ECONOMY?”

Happy continued to flip and twist on the dirty mattress. He knew it must be
possible to not see everything in terms of economy? Freud elucidates the
pleasure principle, in which desire seeks to come to rest, Lacan highlights
that desire always adds up to nothing, and that to go beyond the
pointlessness of this economy results in a blaze of self-consuming petrol,
Deleuze implies that we have to reject the economy of desire as an illusion
foisted on us by a psycho-analysis in complicity with the rigid imperatives of
capitalism…but could any of them perform a full twist? You must not value
your desire in terms of difference, just as you must not value your
weightlessness in terms of gravity.

The girl adjacent to him had not really been paying attention to the class
and had been idly doodling letters all over her body. Now she seemed more
interested in Happy as he arced and flopped next to her; precisely because
Happy was not interested in her:
 32

“You’re too old to be in this class…” her nose wrinkled and softened, “
But anyway… look, Happy, I’ve drawn my diagram all the way up my legs”
she faced him coquettishly in the flickering light from the projector, tracing
each crudely drawn letter with her fingers.
“Look…I’ve even drawn my diagram right here in the middle…”

Happy woke up backstage with one of the contortionist twins standing over
him at an odd angle;

“Mr Down-River, you are due to go on…”

 1

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Marxist Critique of Gravity.

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Fifteen

He approached the University with a forged Doctorate and secured a position as a

Professor of Performance Studies, and began to publish random articles and give
disjointed lectures. It seemed like the best cover.

Happy could not find Joe; he had gone to ground after a string of failed bank heists.
As a cover for his continued program of resistance to Circusism Happy adopted his
‘bad boy made good’ academic routine. He had installed himself in the University as
an expert on Circus. The professors were practically falling over themselves to fit a
harness onto his brute, animal theories and the mathematics department, recently
affiliated into the ‘Performance School of Deep Economics’ were salivating in
anticipation of his first paper on his memory act that proved capital to be
simultaneously priceless and worthless.
They felt it could be the key to the ultimate money-spinner, the most
parthenogenic financial instrument in the history of time.
‘Ancient history’, thought Happy.

His agenda however was very different, he wanted to invalidate the Circusism that
had closed down his only area of operations, or rather turned it into an infinite area
of in-operation.
Circus had been a larger cover for the violent eradication of capital, and he needed
that cover. Now Circus was Capital. There was no difference between the method of
going against the gravity of capital and capital itself.
Against was for; thus this makes for post-truth.

You performed a trick, gravity was ‘defeated’, everyone applauded as the field
itself expanded as your little trick was now included within it.
He thought the best way was to illuminate the fallacy of ‘freedom’ that seemed to
be the central motif of Circusism. Performing tricks had become a double bind, and
double binds created endlessly repeating markets. And so as he set about
continuing the construction of his critique of gravity his aim was to humiliate those
that advocated the mandatory public performance of tricks that demonstrated your
unique inclusivity; the tautology of inclusion of difference, the tautology of
individuality measured in the fiscal demographics of group identity.
The tautology of repeatable pricelessness never seemed to go out of date.

He needed an angle that would show up all the fops, the fakers and bourgeois
pretenders of this new circusism to be hypocrites, and if he could prove that these
new circus bodies were the unwitting advocates of a global project of neoliberal
capitalist doctrine masquerading as post-ideological freedom that had to be worth
something.
The more circus artists claimed to be advocates of freedom, the more he felt they
exactly were not.
 2

He had an ‘in’; he had been asked to contribute to the project of Circusism by

presenting its loopholes, so that these chinks in the armour could be filled in at an
academic level to generally shore up the policy as it unfolded in practice.

He often confided in Joe his wishes to speak out against Circusism in short long
distance telephone calls:

“They want me to perform a Penetration Test on Circusism…” said Happy into the
hollow crackle of the payphone.

“…and rigorously he went into his grave, with all the correct paperwork, signed in
triplicate signed by every priest and rabbi in the parish…” crackled Joe.

“Look, I know you think I’m a sell-out, but I gotta lay low right now, see…the heat
is on; Chingo has guys out looking for me as we speak.”

“Calm down, baby. Go on… how deep do you intend your penetration testing to
go?”

“To me I could not ask for a better cover, it’s practically perfect. What do you do if I
tell you not to think of a white elephant?”

“Well I guess I see your point,” replied Joe, his voice straining around the
maintenance of a black swan.

He always was a tough nut to crack, thought Happy as he continued: “I will begin
by stating that Circusism should think of itself as a grand trick, and that this is
entirely appropriate to the project. I will call this trick the ‘Intelligent Concealment’.
It conceals the conflation of registers that makes weightlessness seem possible to
be validated within gravity as freedom. It will appeal to them in the same way they
think of a Hedge Fund as intelligent economics.”

“Ok great…so now you are singing like a canary and getting all the birdseed you can
eat, how will exit the cage, my pretty?” Joe sounded as if he wasn’t holding the
receiver close enough to his face.

“Pay close attention, I am being fed and watered to be devil’s advocate and from
this position I can simply say here is Circusism, our ‘Intelligent Concealment’ and
then ask the question ‘What Is Wrong With This Picture? Then I am free to tear it to
shreds’”

“What’s wrong with this picture is that I can’t really hear you.” More static on the
line.

“Well just listen then…My point is this, once I expose the whole scam as
unsustainable, and reveal the new professional circus artist as an exploitative owner
of means, there will be no unthinking it. I can proceed with the best intentions…oh, I
 3

am sorry your Honour, I thought it was common knowledge that the defendant was
a known liar and a no good thief…Like all good ideas they do not need to be totally
on the money, they just need to be un-unthinkable, not officially on the record but
not possible to strike from the record either. Like a tune you just cannot get out of
your head…something that really haunts you.”

“Hmmmm, ok something that sews the seed of doubt, birdman?”

“Precisely, something that nags you so that you will never know if the applause is
the genuine celebration of your individuality, or just something you wrung out of
the old clap-o-meter, that you forced them to labour to produce.”
Happy was well aware there would be a turn; a point at which those that had
appointed him as a devil’s advocate of Circusism as a social program would smell a
rat, would glean that instead of critiquing Circusism to make it stronger he was
planting dynamite around the king pole.
He had been asked to present a soft-core set of tools for critiquing Circusism, so
that such positions could be more easily assimilated into the progressive think tanks
on campus that were tasked with its refinement as on-going policy.
These groups were employed to rationalise every aspect of the program to make
the performance of circus tricks completely compulsory, and Happy, as an old hand
from the old circus would be ideally placed to advise and assist in showing where the
soft underbelly might lie, and subsequently the production of an iron-clad social
program organised around demonstrations of freedom could be more expediently
installed.
The groups themselves were staunchly in favour of the usual things, no borders,
free expression, creativity at any cost, pushing the envelope, thinking out of the
box, no rules, no distinctions, swimming against the stream, resistance, temporary
autonomous zones and all the flavours that tasted just like social mobility while you
remained in place sucking your thumb.

“It will appear harmless, like a joke…” said Happy unconvincingly.

“You always were a hilarious drag act, darling…”

“I’m more of a Trojan Horse, duckie. I am positing this as an indirect critique of

Circusism, you know, just to ‘help out’, in which the false and erroneous production
of so called genuine freedom in the practice of circus is torn apart like winter season
canvas as the light of day exposes the real relations of freedom-production. I risk
invalidating myself, but it is essential to expose capital as the only reality here, not
the fact that circus is a symptom of the subject. The objectifying context is gravity,
not circus. The objectifying context is capital, not circus. And in the light of semio-
capital, all of the linguistic impasses become the gravitational inevitability of that
capital, and so it is time to revisit a critique of political economy as a critique of the
gravity that capital has become. The circus act that is ‘sick’ is a general state of ill
health perhaps under a totally capitalised CIRCUSISM.
 4

“So how will you do it to it, hun?” said Joe

“I will use the figure who is considered laughable in these parts. I will use Marx.”
Joe stifled a laugh…”Really?”

“Yes, who better and more ironic. First Marx critiques Capitalism and shows it to be
flawed and obsolete. Then Lacan appropriates Marx to imply that the problem of
alienation is deeper, it is the barring of the subject from his or her own production of
signification. Then Capital seizes on this inevitability with the installation of semio-
capital in which the production of desire with a Lacanian form of built in
obsolescence is the solution to its own limits that Marx exposed. In this context the
new labour is merely the subject follow who their desires to become a hermetically
sealed unit, an individual, and that this is freedom; it is in this context that people
everywhere are happy to take up Circus Tricks as the exact proof that they are free
individuals and thereby be already incorporated into a subject-less enclosure that
invalidates them as such.
If I can show that circus is the same impossibility of freedom that both the now
appropriated Marx and Lacan by exposing gravity as a field of value subject to
Marxist critique, then by corollary I can redraw the Marxian need to move past
Circusism, and highlight the Lacanian need to think of your weightlessness within
gravity as only a fiction, but one that demands the kind of change that Circusism is
stalling.
It is a way for Circus to break free of its capitalist associations, a way to privilege
the fact that the act is not for the actor, and a way to show that this current
circusism agrees with something deeply inhuman and indifferent to any notion of
the individual subject and that any trick to be extraordinary is only the dreary
expansion of an inevitable barring and alienation with which you therefore agree.
In Gödellian terms we can think of the Lacanian circuit thus: desire is ‘true’ for the
subject but ‘unprovable’ in capital, which is what capital conceals, the ‘unprovability’
of desire. But as capital does not own up, the ‘unprovable truth’ of desire becomes
the un-scratchable itch in the subject.

“So you are saying that Lacan is right or wrong…I don’t get it.” Joe was not really
following.

“I am saying he is true, but even more true in the context of capital, that has no
problem with his impasse, in which any attempt to get free of language only
expands the area you have to traverse. Lacan is more exactly half-true in capitalism,
as the circuit of desire and lack is used to endlessly produce but Lacanian
psychoanalysis, in thinking that there is no alternative, just as there is no alternative
in the linguistics upon which capital now models itself, cannot address the real
gravity here, and suggest that any weightlessness gained within in it is also fictional,
is also an illusion that is forestalled as such through the exploitation of the fellow
subject…’Lacanianism’ has forgotten how to use the fundamental Marxism upon
which it forms ideas of barring and the extimate presence of a subject less register
within the subject.
 5

Granted the logic is insurmountable here, but we still have the fictional power of
the trick”

“Great so you are exactly like Marx, unable to accept that post capitalism is only a
fiction.”

“Yes but it is important to say ‘don’t think of a black swan’”.

“How did you know I was thinking that?” Joe was ‘genuinely’ impressed and his
performance demonstrated just that.

“I just do…I know that is what everybody is thinking of, it is the fetish, the unknown
knowledge…it is only important to show the fiction of Marx …to allow him to haunt
the circus artist and haunt the mechanism of the trick…haunting is enough….”

“Ok so this is the tired old act, where you present Marx as a ghost?”

“Yes… with much wailing and gnashing of teeth throughout the land”

“Hmmmm… you sound like this French guy I know, he also could never get to the
point.”

“Ha Ha, très drôle…Look, as devil’s advocate it is only my duty to draw the outline of
a ghost, that is all I am doing here, as another French guy once said:

“What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent

system that's constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up
against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is capital
itself.”

(Control and becoming: a conversation between Toni Negri and Gilles Deleuze.1990)
[Link]
negri-interview-with-deleuze/

You see the point…Capitalism ‘uses’ immanence but does not believe in it, but never
admits that it doesn’t…it is tautological but conceals itself as such…claiming to be
able to float six inches above the twisted ground …capitalism uses the circuit of
desire and lack that Lacan rightly highlights
but uses it to eat the cake, so that it can make use of its immanent rejection of the
autonomous register of which it is composed to have it too. Capital itself uses
ghosts, which are not subject to its own subject-less autonomy. Circusism uses
fiction, but the over-arching fiction that something in one register can be effectively
registered in another that is incompatible to it, that weightlessness is registered in
gravity is freedom is a fundamentally capitalist notion; in that it proposes that
immanence to difference can be utilized to tautologically expand the differential
 6

field. It overcomes the limits that Marx exposed with his trick, to perform the trick I
am trying to expose here; that capital exceeds the terms of Marx through what I will
call an ‘intelligent concealment’ of the inevitability of difference, but which is simply
pretending to have the powers of a ghost for profit.
I am saying that a Lacanian analysis of circus that does not address its complicity in
gravity and especially in the gravity of capital is just a couch ride back into
neoliberalism.
Capital is a dishonest magician, who claims his tricks are real magic.
So yes I will propose a ghost, I will propose that Circusism, be haunted by Marx,
under the guise of benign penetration testing, this is enough. Let it come down.”

“There is nothing to come down, Capitalism is just Marx’s petit object a…” Joe
seemed to be fading.

“Yes, we can agree with Zizek, that Lacan ‘got’ what Marx did not, that capitalism is
both the positive condition and barrier to its dissolution. But this critique is only
drawing a ghost that capital itself uses to appropriate this Lacanian observation and
make it true…it is true only because Capital draws the outline of a ghost it does not
believe in, to be immanent, to its own difference, yes, but only for long enough to
close the deal…
Capital is Marx’s petit object a but only because Capital has learnt how to
linguistically activate its dissolution to slip under any door, even the door of Marx. It
denies the impossibility of meta-position to then enforce it, which is why post-
capitalism appears as Marx’s meta-position, which he must now admit is only a
fiction, thus obeying the Lacanian rule that Capitalism itself secretly refuses to
follow.
This is just Capital saying, well he hit me first….”

‘Ouch…”

“Precisely…I do not mind that Marx writes fiction…it still demands…and I am not
drawing the fake ghost of capital that uses immanence to being one thing or
another to solidify itself over and over again; this is just a ghost filled in.
The ghost I am proposing must remain as an acknowledged fiction, as an
acknowledgement that what you can see is not here yet. And it is beholden on
circus artists to therefore stop claiming their weightlessness is real; I can
demonstrate exactly that as soon as weightlessness is valued in mass-value any
relation to the circus subject evaporates into the horizontality of commodity
language.”

“Ok well thanks for the Trick or Treat lecture, here’s your piece of candy…I’m closing
the door now….”

“Hey, look my critique is only a ghost story, true, but un-provable as false…anyway I
think circus artists are easily haunted, they already believe they can walk through
walls…”
 7

“Hey listen , speaking of false positives, a woman came by here looking for you
some days ago…said her name was Mary? I told her you went back East, figured you
didn’t need the agg-er-rav-ation, brother…”

Happy paused. This was not the first time he had heard this. Some of his other
contacts had also said that a woman was looking for him. He stored it in his memory
palace, and continued.

“I’m sure its nothing…look…But what is necessary is that I critique circusism by

implying I am trying to get to a better, purer, more efficient form of circusism, as to
critique it outright will only be like howling at the moon…”

“Not your wolf routine again” said Joe.

Happy ignored him. He was not sure if he could hide his critique as just being
‘helpful’ but he would go for as long as he could…until the mask absolutely had to
be removed.

“At work here was an antagonistic complicity with the operation of capitalistic
modes of desiring production that rely on fostering the notion that desires produced
can be realised by the excessive transgression of the logic of autonomous registers
whilst the incompatibility between such registers is simultaneously enforced, thus
ensuring the invalidation of the fulfilment the desire produced.

The incompatibility between inter-subjective and subject-less registers of value is

concealed only to re-surface as a problem for the subject. ‘Perform Your Freedom’ is
the insoluble and therefore carcinogenic motto of this social palliative. The residue
of its contradiction accumulates within the subject that tries to digest this
tautological injunction.

Simply put, Gravity does not permit freedom, and Circusism suggests that it does
in that it posits this new Social Circus as Freedom-Production.
In this scenario freedom has to be then validated within an enclosure…
But I will never be able to say that….”

“Say it anyway…” said Joe, the master of ceremonies “’…and now ladies and germs,
Happy Down-river will say what is un-sayable…Circus is a Capitalist shill…’ I suppose
it now befalls to me to say, come on you have been issuing unpopular financial
statements for three decades…speak your trick…”

Happy went into the tired old spiel:

“Roll up, Roll up: Weightlessness is a fiction that thinks itself made true through a
register of gravity that refutes its possibility to be fact; just as added value of
applause that makes weightlessness into freedom is just the same old fiction that
thinks itself made true through a register of capitalism that likewise refutes its
possibility to ever make your sorry little dreams come true…when will these circus
bodies acknowledge that they deal in fantasy.”
 8

“Now, there’s the man I married…”

“ Well I divorce thee, buster…I can start there as an ‘act’ sure but In this regard it
might be prudent to go on to suggest that if we think of the trick as a commodity, it
is fetishized as having the intrinsic exchange value that is due to the false fabrication
of its use-value as the possibility to witness the enactment of real freedom.
This supposed ‘freedom’ is then ratified as still possible within the current social
structure of Circusism. This feeds both circus’ own image of itself as the practice of
Romantic freedom and the general myth that freedom is possible.
The value that then appears intrinsic to that which is produced in the trick, namely
a moment of performed weightlessness, is that of actual freedom, and its value as a
fictional freedom that then operates as a demand for freedom is lost.

This trick that has lost its power to demand what is not yet there, is replaced by a
commodity that states that escape from gravity is possible and so effectively
balances with the ground within which it operates only to balance, to provide use-
value of internal goods of virtue that allow entry of itself into the market for external
goods of exchange. ???? too early

This conflation of a practice of those on the periphery with the necessities of

survival within a system of which they are not a part is something I will address here.
What is unclear is why the outside seems to be within the system.
The problem here is the conflation of something that points ‘outside’ to an event
that is currently not possible in here, with something that refers to the same event
as only possible ‘inside’ this area.
In asking why circus performs according to ideologies that are clearly useful in
holding up the established order, I am only examining the image of freedom that
circus itself uses…of actions external to law that are tools to survive within it. Where
is the transgression?”

The line was dead; he pumped in more coins…

The old pay phone slowly whirred and clicked back into life…

“What were you saying, you got cut off?” Joe was barely audible now across the
immense distance of time that separated them…

“I’m saying that capitalism is a three ring circus of total horseshit.”

Time-Silence.

“Joe…are you there?”

Happy replaced the receiver, knowing that the phone booth in the University
corridor had been disconnected for years.
 9

Happy had begun to draft his critiques, all under the guise of benign penetration
testing. He would hack Circusism under the guise of someone merely
demonstrating how future, more malign hacks could be prevented. He delivered
seminars that sought to do just this:

DEFINITION OF CIRCUSISM: Freedom-Production and The falling Rate of Profit.

Let us begin by defining what Circusism is.

And here Happy was reading straight from the literature provided:

It is the edict to perform the presentation of a trick, something that forms the basis
of an act that would be acceptable in a circus, thus the primary reading of Circusism
is that this is the public activation of the individual right to freedom, in which you
demonstrate your willing participation in the group by highlighting your worth as an
individual.
You have the right to perform anything you wish, but it is imperative that this
performance demonstrates your own agency, as well as the unique form of this
agency. In fact these two elements are interlinked as proofs of each other: your
individual voice is your freedom, and voice versa; thus saying that you are an
individual proves that you are free, saying you are free proves that you are an
individual.

This is no more complex than attending a party in which everyone is asked to get up
and ‘do a turn’. What you do is up to you; you are free to choose the mode through
which you demonstrate your difference.
What is meant by a trick?

The trick then is nothing more than the activation of a weightless moment, which
can be a moment of suspension from anything that you feel is restricting you or
dragging you down. Thus the formulation of the trick is made through the medium
of the very thing you perceive as a form of gravity.
This is its form as proposed by Circusism:

“The trick is simply the activation of a ‘weightlessness’ within the medium that
assigns you a weight-value, that questions the authority of that medium to assign
that particular weight-value to you.
This trick is not a contradiction it is a questioning of external authority that proves
there is no structure that can hold the individual down. This is what Circusism offers
you.

The trick here is the ‘realisation’ of ‘Me-Time’, which through hard work is the
deserved reward for the construction of this mechanism that enables your moment
of freedom. Nothing can prevent you from performing the ‘you’ that you really are.

Your moment of weightlessness awaits you.”

 10

The pamphlet ended with a picture of a young athletic body in ordinary clothes
leaping high in the moody haze of a spotlight, surrounded by everyday objects, such
as wheelbarrows, electric fires and broken guitars.

Happy continued in the mode of a pro-Circusism speaker:

“Yes, this study will acknowledge that the ideology of Circusism matches exactly
with that of the Late Capitalism within which we find ourselves, and I feel that to
examine Circusism as a questioning of gravity we must examine also the ultimate
gravitational field that surrounds us, which gives ‘weight’ in the form of value to
everything, and therefore analysis is an inappropriate form to use unless its
linguistic complicity in the maintenance of the imperatives of capital are
acknowledged.
We must examine how the practice that questions so rigourously a field of value
can be contained within capitalism, and examine how capitalism has harnessed this
questioning of the limits of the field of value to register the subject as the exact
mechanism that reproduces and expands the field itself to contain all and any such
questions. How can tricks that question gravity not then also question Capitalism?
Is this not asking us to play at freedom, within an enclosure that forbids it? Is
Circusism an advert for such post-factism?
This is how this penetration test will proceed, do not be alarmed.
So if I may shift aspect for a moment and propose a possible counter argument:”

Happy now switched into direct critique, which was the putting on of a mask to say
what was beneath it:

“It might be said then that Circusism is a case of ‘perform or else’ and that this is a
double bind…in that you are compelled to perform who you already are as proof of
your existence in capital. The truth of you is only true in its performance.
This performance, is necessarily a fiction of your ‘free’ self; an entrepreneurial
guess as to what uniqueness you perceive others will like; is it how you guess
weightlesness will look like.

You fictionalize/perform yourself and this is transmitted through the performative

aspect inter-subjectively, affectively, qualitatively. This is supposed to be your
marketable brand, but the register to which you submit this brand is wholly
incapable of registering these qualities. The quality of yourself and the
weightlessness of yourself do not show up in the scales of capital or gravity. In
Circusism the two are intertwined.
So the Fiction of Your Weightless Self that you submit for realisation ceases to
exist as all pricelessness does as soon as it is entered into exchange value. The inter-
subjective quality seeks validation in a register unable to support its existence, just
as gravity does not support real weightlessness within it…it is a double bind because
you are asked to perform the ‘trick’ of yourself to a register that invalidates it
 11

utterly, and you are being asked to ‘perform’ what is the unperformability of how
you ‘actually’ are.

This is another rationale for not valuing your weightlessness in terms of gravity by
maintaining its fictionality.
It is an un-fulfillable injunction, an un-scratchable itch, and this problem for the
subject of desire ending in lack is installed within a trick that conceals its un-
provability to conceal therefore the limits of the system.

Perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves.

For now we do not choose to ‘analyse’ Circusism, we are simply performing a

benign penetration test for the purposes of highlighting where it might be
buttressed against further critique.
Remember analysis of the circus subject who struggles with the indifferent form of
circus overlooks that the real objectifying force is gravity itself; something that
when seen as a field of value should only present the impossibility of any such
individual voice being registered within the practice of circus embedded in such a
field. But never mind, we are not here to discuss analysis directly.

Inwardly at this point Happy felt that he was a bad analysand, who was only lying on
the couch in order to lie to his analyst.
Perhaps this was the point. This is what he felt every subject of circusism was
doing anyway, performing the new trick of lying down in the new circus of freedom
production, just saying what the new Ringmaster wanted to hear. ‘I perform the
fiction of my circus sickness as real so you can validate my freedom.’ It may be that
the kind of cruelty that enjoys hurting flies has simply found a way to watch as they
pull their own wings off.

Happy continued addressing the University in his role as ‘Pen–Tester’.

“So let us proceed by examining the definition of the trick, and trying to isolate an
appropriate mode of critique that may be applicable to Circusism that also
encompasses this social program’s complicity with Capital but which avoids any
recourse to psychoanalytical techniques without referencing their own level of
complicity within the capitalist means of production.

Such a critique then is best organised around how we conceive of the different
‘gravities’, which we are saying behave similarly in three different areas: firstly
within Circusism; this would be the field of gravity of course, and secondly language
the field appropriate to a form of analysis that might be used to look at Circusism,
and thirdly capital the field appropriate to the over-arching ideology of production
that surrounds both Circusism and any such analysis of Circusism.
I propose then that we develop a theory of the trick, which is presented as the
mechanism of freedom-production within Circusism, through the study of value as it
is proposed to be iterated in the different fields of Gravity, Language and Capital.
Overall this could be called a critique of Gravity.
 12

Using Marx will not be easy as some of the relations of production that can be
exposed in Marx are now installed in the subject of semio-capitalistic production in
which context the production of desire and its implicit link to signification are
subsumed to the reproduction of capital anyway. But in the sense that we are
dealing with three fields that are unified here as fields of value, then Marx’s insight
into the fetish, surplus and alienation still are useful here, albeit translated into the
petit object a, excess and barring that somewhat compromise his post-capitalist
vision, such as it is implied.
This is done in response to capital’s appropriation of linguistic potency (Berardi)
and the designation of the unconscious as both linguistic in structure (Lacan) but
organised like a factory (Deleuze and Gauttari)
Through this lens it may be possible to discern if all of these forms of ‘gravity’ are
irrefutable laws or if they are in fact available to be bent by tricks so as to provide
the trick-making subject with the possibility to demonstrate that genuine freedom
is in fact possible within these fields of value.”

Aside:

“Now you are issuing double binds you old charlatan.” Joe took obvious pleasure in
showing how Happy had become the opposite of what he was.

‘I hope they don’t pick up on the loop here;’ admitted Happy Romantically, ‘that what
prevents Marx from being true is exactly what prevents weightlessness being real
freedom, and also why I am hoping this un-provability will be its spectrality; which will
continue to be not disprovable as an ever present ghost. Just like the trick should haunt
gravity, not be made real in the post-factism proposed by Circusism; that would be the
capture of that ghost.’

He was finding it hard to determine if Joe was just a voice in his head or if he was
remembering a conversation. He continued in his advocacy of the compulsory
performance of circus as a form of new liberty:

“This is the claim of the project of Circusism, and is in fact presented as its rationale,
that the trick proves that freedom in the face of restriction of any kind is possible.
And what a wonderful claim it is, we only here prick it with a pin to ensure its further
inflation.”

Happy had the image of stabbing an inflatable investment banker, a blow-up

Rothschild, who with every stab wound that Happy could inflict, just got bigger and
bigger. He stole himself…

“So Marx here will provide the counter-point to this argument, which claims that
within a field of autonomous value freedom is possible.
 13

What this does is ask if narratives that have supported individual success and
endeavour, and are narratives of the triumph of the human spirit are merely
mechanisms organised around some other less progressive imperative. It asks if it is
possible to point out that Circus tricks that demonstrate freedom are only useful at
expanding Circusism as an enclosure.
So what might be an appropriate critique of value to use? One that could benignly
assail any perceived contradictions within capital, and one that could, in seeing
capitalism as the actual architect of Circusism, also assail any perceived
contradictions within Circusism itself, and convert them into future potentialities for
on-going reform of both projects
I propose something harmless to Circusism, I propose Marx.

Aside:

“Do you really think anyone will buy this bar of soft soap? “ Asked Joe

“Its true…” replied Happy “I am caught promoting the ‘use-value’ of Marx as the
‘exchange-value’ of Marx.”

“Yes, Ladies and Kind Sirs, let us appropriate him here as a method of locating
where contradictions in capital may be highlighted, eradicated, or at least covered
up. And let us appropriate him knowing that capitalism was perhaps only his own
petit object a; as the impediment to communal freedom but also its positive
condition.

Aside:

He would have to make this Lacanian observation without following through to the
realisation that capitalism, whilst being only one form of an impasse in value, was still
an impasse, that relied on exploitation and alienation to mask the inevitable outcome
of its structures of desire, which were also based on an inherent lack, that facilitated a
repetition of that desire, and hence a reproduction of capital.
He continued the subterfuge.

We can think of Marx as performing a trick within capitalism, one that served to
make it stronger still, and so he can be thought of as the penetration-tester
supreme; as the activation of a trick to expose limits that became more useful in
highlighting a counter-trick to conceal those limits.
Thus the falling rate of profit exposed here is overcome through three counter-
tricks, all of which conceal the inherent limits and which ensure the continuation of
capital.

The three methods that seek to overcome the falling rate of profit could be given
the name of a schematised desiring-production:
 14

1: the concealment of the conflation of registers of quality and quantity that

necessarily then enables capital to seemingly legitimately reach into the inter-
subjective register to close a sale.

2: the concealment of the conflation of variable and fixed capital, which is again a
conflation of a quality you can exploit with an immutable fixed amount that you
cannot. To mechanise the subject to produce desire is the transformation of that
subject into a desiring machine.

3: the concealment of the Godellian conflation of meta-statement with infra

statement so that if we begin by remarking that production is a statement ‘about’
the quality of a commodity, and its position in the market is governed as a
differential statement ‘of’ quantity of a commodity, then there is already a
conflation here that helps the market to expand and thrive.

The production of a statement ‘about’ the differential quality of a commodity is the

desire that is invested in it; that has been added to it as value, a statement ‘about’
the desire it holds for the subject.
This is necessarily conflated with its position in the market, and its ability to take up
a horizontally differential position in relation to another commodity. This is a
statement ‘of’ the differential quantity of a commodity, into which is fetishized its
supposedly intrinsic statement ‘about’ its qualitative difference that helps to
establish and ensure its horizontal diffrence to another commodity in the market.

Usually production is organised around statements ‘of’ commodity, but if

production was organised directly around the necessary conflation of quality with
quantity, then production can be shifted to directly produce statements ‘about’ the
differential quality of commodity, and so be the direct production of desire directly.
In this fashion the Gödellian model to construct tautology through conflation is
pursued but according to a reversal in which a statement ‘of’ commodity’s quantity
is a statement ‘about’ desire, and a statement ‘about’ commodity’s quality is a
statement ‘of’ desire.
Desire is produced no longer according to a qualitative register, but according to a
quantitative one: thus making desiring only in a register of self interested
quantitative gain, which negates it utterly.
The conflation between statements about commodity and desire both occur but in
opposite register to each other. Hence to desire is to reproduce capital, as desire is
‘true’ in a register in which it is ‘unprovable’.
To produce desire is to overcome over-production as all desire is inevitably
destined to be lack as quality is attempted to be validated in the quantitative
register that does not support its acknowledgement.

It can be seen here that was is useful for production is what Gödel demonstrated in
Number Theory; he demonstrated that what is enabled from the central
 15

contradiction is that ‘anything follows’. And his theorem can be seen as an active
demonstration of the true potential of capital, and the true potential of the trick to
make fictional meta-statements into hard, commodifiable fact. But only if the
tautology that refutes the possibility for truth in the system is intelligently
concealed.

This is the advantage of applying Marx to Circusism , as it becomes clear through

the tactics Capital has successfully employed to overcome the internal limits he
exposed, what kind of tactics must be useful to Circusism in similarly concealing the
impossibility of weightlessness within gravity so that it can continue to be
performed as the execution of genuine freedom and the proof of individuality within
the field.

What Gödel also shows us is that rather than presenting this as an impasse, or an
insoluble ‘hack’ of the system in question, that if this ‘trick’ is performed not as a
trick to expose but as a trick to conceal, then the system can become limitless as it
can seemingly accommodate any tautological statement that positions itself
outside of the field as being within the field. Thus this new version of the trick to
conceal is based on the concealment of this inevitable Gödellian conflation of
registers, which is inherent in all three of the methods capital utilises to overcome
its inherent contradictions.

Thus meaning truth no longer has to be provable, which we must now see as the
social contract of Circusism, which only promises the subject that within this
context they can be whatever they desire to be.

This is the pricelessness of any weightlessness that awaits you within Late
Circusism.

Aside:

“Powerful argument…” quipped Joe, “I’m starting to believe in Circusism myself”.

“Shut up” said Happy, “you are just a voice in my head” But it was true, it was cosy
here in the University, but he was resolved to deliver the ghost of Marx, for what it
was worth.

These mechanisms are real, but not ‘right’, but this was a matter of belief. It was a
vile ethics that stood on its head. He found it easier to invert what he believed than
to believe; that was the disturbing fact of his position of fake benign penetration
testing.
He was aware here that he had to sell the trick as an act of concealment without
implying that it was an outright lie, more of a necessity to prevent chaos.
 16

In the spirit of post-factism it was necessary to present the necessary continuation

of Circusism as the demonstration and proof of the fact that you can become
anything you say you are, as this seemed to be the continuation of the possibility of
freedom that was vital to the project of Circusism.
Thus he hoped to use Marx, framed in the university as harmless to the historical
inevitability of capitalism, as a way of not doing what he was saying he was doing;
and so ironically make the critique become what it wanted to be.
Under the prevailing notion that there was no way that using Marx could hurt
Capitalism, so was formed the vague fictional potentiality that it could hurt
Circusism.

He continued in his devil’s advocacy:

“So we have the idea of the trick in Circusism as a mechanism that produces
genuine freedom within gravity. And we need to test this.
But let us then in our decision to utilise Marx as a lens, let us follow the idea that
the field of gravity is also a field of value, split into two registers: one of quality, one
of quantity.
One in which the circus subject can make statements ‘about’ the nature of gravity,
demonstrating the qualities of tempo, rhythm, force or momentum, but in which
these statements ‘about’ are also treated as if they are statements ‘of’, gravity,
necessarily moving through gravity, being statements that do not happen external
to it, and subject to its internal logic that orders bodies of mass according to a
quantitative scale.
Statements ‘about’ gravity, tricks made of components of forces, are deliberately
and unavoidably placed within gravity as statements ‘of’ it.
Two very different and incompatible kinds of statements are made to exist
together within the field of gravity; this is circus practice.
Thus again we have here two registers of value within gravity:
One of qualitative, inter-subjective, conveyable feeling of heaviness or lightness
that we can call ‘weight-value’, and one that reflects the unchanging and immutable
order of bodies of mass, that necessarily determines that large bodies will exert
gravity upon smaller bodies according to mass and order them accordingly. This we
will call ‘mass-value’.

If we are to fully enable Circusism to thrive and expand it is vital that the fantasy of
the union of these incompatible registers be perpetuated, so that what is conveyed
in the performance of circus, a new available agency and mobility, is not exposed as
being illegible within the indifference of mass-value.
So we must remember that Capital and the Circusism that agrees with it also seek
to become this inevitable, but not to expose this as tautology, but to conceal it.”

In gravity and in language this conflation happens automatically, all statements,

even those ‘about’ statements themselves, are statements ‘of’ language and
necessitated be entered into the register of hard difference. Semio-capital makes
 17

this conflation similarly automatic within capital, which is the installation of the
impossibility of its exteriority. Within this enclosure all tricks that demonstrate
meta-positions to it are therefore only occurring within it.

If Circusism is to continue to represent gravity as a limitless and meritocratic field,

then the concealment of this inevitable Gödellian conflation of meta statements
with Infra-statements is vital.
This concealment is also vital to maintain the narratives of capital by corollary
being also a suitable ‘housing’ for freedom.

Unless we continue to operate this intelligent concealment of the incompatibility

with the registers of value within gravity then tricks will be seen for what they are,
fictional statements ‘about’ freedom, that simply are incompatible with statements
‘of’ freedom, this will therefore imply that Circusism is not able to house genuine
freedom, but is in fact an arena of ‘demand’, in which are modelled alternative
fictions of the future.

It must never be revealed that this quantitative register simply cannot even
perceive of freedom as an inter-subjective conveyable concept, otherwise the entire
premise of the social project of Circusism will collapse as the concealment of the
truth, which is that freedom may be ‘true’ but it is not provable within gravity.
And this will also imply the congruent limitations of capital as a field with an area
external to it.
This ridiculous and dangerous exposition obviously cannot be allowed to occur.”

Happy looked around him; so far they seemed to be swallowing it. Some were even
smiling.

“It becomes necessary to look at the circus subject as the producer of ‘weight-value’
It becomes necessary to look at different modes by which the ensuing lack that
occurs in trying to register an impossible weight-value of zero as a genuine and
viable entry in the register, or ‘market’, of mass-value.

Let us say that there is a surplus, between what is put in and what is gotten out.
What is simply the raw materials of limbs and techniques of gravity is transformed
into something of greater value; a statement ‘about’ gravity; about how it cannot
hold us. This is the trick’s surplus value, a ‘weight-value’ of zero, a meta-positional
statement, priceless and belonging to the circus subject. But it is a surplus value of
zero; something that can never be registered in mass-value. So it is an excess for the
measuring of which as freedom we need to employ an audience.
We have to measure it in mass-value, we have to make sure that this
pricelessness, this ZERO, can be effectively ‘sold’ to the audience as a freedom
within the field of gravity.
But mass-value cannot register such a thing; it negates this surplus as illegible, or
at best the surplus becomes the intrinsic value of a freedom that can only exist as
just another effect ‘of’ gravity, and therefore nothing to do with the circus subject
 18

who heroically produced it, in a purely horizontal relation as it is with other such
techniques and effects ‘of’ gravity.
So here the idea of surplus is not what it seems, an impossible excess called
freedom from gravity, appropriated to be associated with a moment of weightlessness
by the circus subject, has to have a surplus added by watching-labour in order to
forestall the fact that pricelessness cannot ring true in any market of gravity.

The ensuing negation has to be forestalled; the lack papered over, by making up for
this missing value to it that it is then necessary to extract from the spectator of this
trick to conceal the limits of gravity to do anything but negate it.
The fiction of weightlessness can only be made to appear as real within an
incompatible register through the exploitation of a surplus, not just from the
performer of weightlessness but also from the watching labour of the audience.

The performer is not the labourer here, the performer is the marketing genius, the
owner of the means of meaning production, that has found a way to package a zero,
found a way to peddle pricelessness, to flog that which is beyond the market of
gravity: weightlessness.
It is the audience who then labour to fetishise this 0 into the possibility for it to be
a 1.

The performer’s allocation of the immaterial for evaluation and the audience’s
watching-labour add value to the raw material of weightlessness that makes it
appear as genuine agency; but it is only the field that profits, which expands to
seem to be large enough to contradictorily contain freedom.
The performer’s job is to act exactly as capital does, to imply that indefinable
excess can be evaluated for personal gain in a register that utterly negates it.
Someone has to foot the bill.
It becomes ironically clear that the tricks that most imply a defeat of gravity are
those that most extend its inescapability as a field that encompasses that defiance.
Which, ladies and germs, is exactly what the doctor ordered. Thus an intelligent
concealment has to continue, so that the shifts and switches of value here can be
read as a great nights entertainment for a fair price.”

The same appropriation of inevitable impasse but with the possibility of its
forestalling through tricks that conceal its cause must be included within the project
of Circusism. The trick here must acknowledge that lack and the impossibility to
register meta-position within gravity can remain undisclosed as long as there is an
audience who labour to supply enough ‘surplus’ to forestall it.

The impasse is there in gravity as it is in language, but it can be forestalled in the

same way that it is in capitalism, through the generation of enough surplus value
that can be fetishized to imply that gravity is, like capital, a quantitative field
expansive enough to contain qualitative ideas such as freedom. This ability for
Capitalism to be the limitless ‘enclosure’ it purports to be hinges on the continuing
narrative that accumulation of capital is freedom from capital, and this necessitates
 19

the intelligent concealment of the conflation of registers that this entails, that then
allows pricelessness to be ‘priced’ in a register alien to it.

These questions are important if we are to probe Circusism. The audience are vital
as a watching labour force; there to forestall the impossibility of weightlessness
within the field of mass-value. This is the performance of psychoanalysis with an
audience, in that any insistence that the desire for weightlessness contains the
extimate presence of an autonomous register of differential value can be overcome
by the value added by the audience that makes the desire for weightlessness ‘come
true’. Just as that which is beyond price is fetishized into the market; that which is
beyond weight is fetishized into gravity.
The audience make circus into freedom production, which makes the audience the
perfect labour force for its fetishisation.

It is true that Lacan agrees with Marx,

“The logic of production and the logic of fantasy are the two basic notions of Marx’s
notion of critique…Marx’s localisation of labour-power in the general structure of
the capitalist mode of production unfolds a theory of the subject. For Lacan the
logical, and even homological, response to this subjectivised negativity is the
subject of the unconscious.”

(Tomsic, S (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious Verso. London)

But it is also true that it is Capital that needs psychoanalysis not Circus.
What better remedy for over-production than the concealed acknowledgement
that every desire ends in lack? And if this can be performed, the added value of
watching-labour will always take up the slack; thus meaning you can imply that your
trick is the acknowledgement of an individuality that nobly bears the inevitability of
lack whilst utilising the audience to forestall that lack and imply that your noble
individuality is reified in the register of mass-value that should by rights negate it.
You are capital, as you perform exactly as it performs to acknowledge there is no
mode of freedom production without watching labour as a source of value, but
there is also no fetishisation of the social relations of freedom without the
foreclosure of watching-labour. You take the applause as it commodifies what is a
fiction to gravity into your individual activation of genuine freedom.
We can see how Circusism relies on the concealed installation of a theory of desire.
Firstly it requires the subject to think that freedom from desire is located in its
fulfilment, so that this theory of desire can allow the futility of desire in all value
systems to proceed unexposed. By being concealed the performance of a desired
freedom becomes a mechanism by which the production of desire to be a
weightless individual is organised around the reproduction of the field of gravity as
meritocratic.
It is no secret that Circusism is good for the markets, and it is for the protection of
all of this productivity that I here attempt to critique Circusism, so that we may
together discuss how to plug up the holes and batten down the hatches.
 20

Ironically the factualisation of fictional metapositions relies on the very

psychoanalytical logic that exposed the inevitability of their impossibility. It is vital
that Circusism proceeds as the concealment of extimate causality , but in the name
of analysis that reveals it.

Any critique of gravity is actually a critique of a circus that does not acknowledge
gravity as a real material impasse, and treats it as an area of pure ideas. Such a field
that is cast as a mere activation of bureaucratic law enacted on a subject can there
fore be simply overcome by the rights of the subject to be ‘free’ of such old
structures and divisions. The subject has a right to be free of gravity and their
performance of a trick is the exercising of this right as an encouragement to others
who are held back by such unfair bureaucracies. Within this idea of weightlessness
as a right, it is made equivalent, through some fetishized law of equivalence, to the
right to a real meta-position external to the restrictive field, that is your own
personal freedom from restriction; held in place by the institution of Circusism that
ensures that you are free to enjoy those right .
Thus it is vital that Circusism maintain is refusal to accept gravity as a real material
impasse.
Again here Marx will be useful in highlighting the real material relations of
freedom production, to help us to further reinforce this refusal.

At this point Happy felt like he was about to throw up. He gripped to lectern.
That should ruffle a few neoliberal feathers, thought Happy as he imagined
himself as a sexless eagle boy-girl mating with the boiling sun of a distant solar
system.

WHAT HE REALLY WANTED TO SAY WAS:

So Circusism proposes itself through the concealment of the inevitable conflation of

registers that occurs in the context of capital, that houses the legitimising narrative
of analysis that seems to thrive on the wholesome subject that it invalidates.
Analysis needs the figure that capital promises, the individual, from which to unfold
narratives of how to recognise master signifiers and to distance yourself from their
control. This is difficult if the master signifier is ‘freedom’. Analysis can only propose
a double bind as a cure for a double bind…take two of these and call me in the
morning.

Analysis seems to Internalise the logic that agency is impossible and promotes the
attending narrative that any instance of desire ending in lack is the inherent
dependency on the subject’s inability to see the conflation of registers that causes
it; whilst sitting within a conflation of registers that cause it.
In analysis a fictional weightlessness is proposed as that which the subject has to
bear; meanwhile capital has already achieved this weightlessness but for the
purposes of invalidating its power to recognise itself as fictional.
Encircling analysis is the disproof enacted by capital that acknowledging your
fictionality is necessary at all; capital factualises everything beyond the
rationalisations of analysis, whilst installing the exact circuit of desire aslack that
 21

only has the conclusion that within the indifferent register of your own linguistic
unconscious you are a fiction that can never come true.

The lack is the fault of the subject who is beholden to turn to analysis that masks
the transformation of the linguistic structure of the unconscious into a factory for
the production of hopeless desires.

Thus analysis is housed by a context that installs a concealed impasse of desire as

lack and then provides an exposure of that desire as lack as something that is
inherent in the linguistic structure of the unconscious of the subject, but not
inherent in the context of capital that houses this analysis.

Thus any analysis of circus, is trying to claim that the objectifying practice is circus
itself, thus not acknowledging that circus is a healthy response to the objectifying
force of gravity, and is housed within an objectifying context of capitalism that is
never drawn attention to as the concealment of what analysis purportedly exposes,
which is the conflation of registers.
Thus analysis seeks to expose what is inherent in a linguistic unconscious whilst
being housed within a linguistic capitalism that seeks to conceal it, therefore any
analysis that focuses on circus as objectifying (and not on capital as the actual
objectifying force) is really not paying attention to the designated registers of
indifference and non negotiability that form the fields of unified semio-capital,
which is the appropriation but concealment of desire as lack that seems to form the
total enablement of capital past any of the limits highlighted by Marx.

What Lacan sees in Marx, that the impasse is in all value, is used by capital, that
has activated its linguistic potency, to overcome what Marx saw in Capital.
The tautological ground functions as a double bind, a knot, which is impossible for
the subject to untie without themselves becoming knotted; to see this knotted
topology as straight you yourself have to see yourself tied in knots, thus what is
wrong with the ground, if hidden from your view, is seen as something wrong with
you.

The production of desire and the act of signification become one and the same act
in a sense…desiring is the act of signifying:
And so this desire for a thing is also its designation of its place in an order, the
desire for a thing is a meta-statement about its Quality and this is its capacity to
take up a differential position, different from other signifiers; this one then not only
refers to the thing desired, it IS the thing desired (the petit object a). In designating
this as difference it must then take up its autonomous position out of the subject’s
reach. The object of desire exists no longer to fulfil desire but to fulfil its repetition
as a set difference, its relation is to other signifiers not to the subject, hence the
subject is barred from the fulfilment of desire by the act of desiring. Hence desire =
Lack. This is exposed in analysis, but concealed in capitalism.
The relation here can be said to be complicated by the critique of Lacan being that
without the Cartesian subject of capital as a starting point, who is supposedly free
from such loops, it is impossible to formulate the logic that can elucidate this
 22

tautology within desire; and to desire within the context of capital is to reproduce
capital. Thus in desiring you deepen two things, one: the capacity for lack, two: the
inability to see it.

Happy returned to his pro-circusism mode:

The overarching task here is to make sure that Circusism becomes a reality.
In this regard it is imperative that intelligent concealment endures, for a hidden
context becomes a reality:

A reality is something to which there is no exterior; something that is not a context;

it is bigger than that.
The fulfilment of all desire tends towards its purchase. This is the promise of
capitalism, that the accumulation of capital will enable the fulfilment of any desire.
Increasingly your freedom is only made ‘real’ through its purchase.
Meanwhile, the context of capitalism that conceals itself as the real cause of lack
must be maintained.

The trick then is a tautology; it proposes weightlessness where weightlessness

cannot exist. Circusism has to avoid the inoperability of this proposal from being
exposed.

Let us briefly outline the tautology that Marx exposed in Capital. Very simply put he
exposed the fallacy of infinite growth from finite resources. This implies that capital
is hiding something, that the value needed to achieve this vitalist growth was being
created somewhere other than the value that seemed to intrinsically reside in the
products of capitalism.
He noted that this surplus value came from the exploited subject of labour.

In that in regard to the impossibility of exposing that the value of a commodity was
due to value created by the subject in that this commodity referred only to other
commodities, and to refer openly to this subject rather than fetishizing the
commodity as being possessed of its own inner value wold invalidate the capitalists
claim on his ownership of that surplus value that exists as his profit.
This exploitation of labour-power, the origin of value, is what compensates for the
lack between infinite growth, that which is supposed freedom within the restriction
of finite resources, and the finite nature of those resources.
This exploit is also the trick to conceal this lack, this incompatibility of registers
between use and exchange. The concealment of other inner contradictions, such as
the falling rate of profit are also hidden here, but fundamentally in the disparity
between the real conditions of finite resources and the will to infinite growth as a
position beyond that material restraint, there exists a concealment of the necessary
exploitation that makes up this lack between the two.
 23

The lack between an infinite space for growth as a quality of weightlessness and
the reduction of everything to a finite register of quantity as the pull of gravity, the
trick that Marx exposed was the trick to conceal this disparity between
weightlessness and gravity in the exploitation of others…it is this exploitation that I
will seek to imply is vital for the continutation of Circusism.
So we have laid the ground for the weightlessness of infinite growth, a fiction in
the register of finite resources, and how this fiction needs to ‘come true’ somehow
in that finite register. We can employ this Marxist critique of value to not expose
internal limits but instruct the new subject of circusism as to how their trick to
conceal can similarly extract ‘real’ freedom from their audience, and how this
intelligent concealment can extend the project of circusism infinitely.

So this separation of the registers of weight and mass refer to what can be tinkered
with and what cannot, and what can be recognised as value within each register is
not the same.
Circusism has to maintain that there is equivalence.

Happy turned to a simple DIAGRAM to better explain

the problem facing Circusism:

And here we can easily identify the difference by reference to the diagram of
Alphabetical gravity; in which the letter in the word, that operates indistinguishably
from the word within which it is situated, is activated in situ to define the quality of
difference that is held by that letter in that context; this difference is then entered
into the register of the alphabet to take up that set differential position, in which
that difference is an autonomous difference that relates to no subject of speech at
all but only to other letters.

The letter in the word here has weight-value, something that can be felt by the
subject that adds or subtracts a differential weight to or from the letter, and which
refers back to the subject that qualitatively defined it, this letter as it sits in the
alphabet however only refers to other letters.
What is important to understand in this blunt analogy is that the word-letters and
alphabet-letters are inter-dependant; each one impossibly precedes the other in an
endless loop, as in the Epimenides paradox. So that the tautology of a word that is
an impossible order within the alphabetical field but which is nevertheless possible
to construct within it is compounded by the tautological construction in which it is
impossible to determine which came first the letter or the alphabet.

The following sentence is false

The preceding sentence is true

This rupture of truth and falsity is at the heart of all systems of value with split
registers, and form part of the ability to either expose or conceal this tautology.
 24

We in Circusism must pursue this latter option; we must perform the intelligent
concealment of these incompatibilities if Circisism is to remain the production of
genuine freedom.

So just as the letter in the word is qualitative and the letter in the alphabet is
quantitative, so are weight and mass value interdependent and incompatible, but
encircle each other as the same moment, the same statement, the same symbol,
that is both a difference that is unique but also dependant on a difference that is
repeatable.

So this stark difference and repeatability is what exists within the trick.
It is this reciprocal temporal tautology and incompatability that Circusism has to
maintain is an equivalence.

So what barriers do we in CIRCUSISM face in easily concealing incompatibilities?

There is incompatibility. That is that mobility in weight is not a mobility in mass.

This is noted as a homological statement to the fact that the market cannot
necessarily accurately assign use-value to a commodity, as it is primarily not
organised around the subject of need, but around the reproduction of capital.
This production of weightlessness that is then supposedly read as the activation of
real freedom, and supposedly read as being ‘real’ within gravity, is therefore
similarly not organised around the subject of need, who presumably is recognised
here as needing freedom. This need is addressed fallaciously, as it is in the register of
exchange. Weightlessness, which is a weight-value of zero that is both perceivable
in the body and conveyable to the spectator as a performable moment within
gravity as the ‘quality’ of freedom, is incompatible with the idea of weightlessness in
‘mass-value’. A ‘mass-value’ of zero means gravity has ceased to function or the
body of mass is no longer there, both of which are not the case in circus.
Thus it can be seen how that of which it is possible to feel the quality may not be
present in the ambivalent register to which you submit it for validation.

We can further stress this analogy between the market and gravity perhaps. In the
interests of a Circusism that, like capitalism wishes its field to appear to be able to
accommodate any operation by the subject. Any hope or desire can be
accommodated within this field, as this is the received definition of freedom, a
tautology in which freedom ‘from’ is within the external installation of freedom ‘to’.
This also implies that freedom from desire lies in the fulfilment of that desire,
therefore action towards freedom should find freedom; but only a freedom that
implies that it has occurred within the field, not a freedom that implies that there is
an exteriority to this field in which such human questions might be addressed. Thus
freedom has to primarily reproduce the field to be able to house it rather than imply
the field is limited, this is the goal of the project of Circusism.

The best analogue to weightlessness here that highlights the need to conceal
incompatibility between weight and mass-value and so ensure infinite growth of the
field of gravity is the concept of ‘pricelessness’.
 25

Infinite growth, beyond what is quantitatively available as finite resource,

necessitates that capital can appropriate that which exists in the qualitative register
that is not dependant on material resources, and this ‘quality beyond quantity’ then
forms an example of pricelessness in the market as a rationale for marketability,
even though it is a contradiction, a conflation of registers.
It is this problem of ‘zero-value’ as ‘value beyond value’ that has to be intelligently
concealed, as weightlessness taken for real freedom causes a similar problem as in
its supposed actuality it implies that ‘zero-mass’ is a similarly viable rationale for its
entry as a possible ‘mass-value’ within gravity.
It is through the appropriation of pricelessness as a commodity that the expansion
of capital and its market are facilitated to accommodate that pricelessness. The
market expands because it is seen as something that can accommodate ‘value
beyond value’; a meta-position, which on its own terms, and those of Lacan, is
logically impossible.

It is in this way that a circus that views weightlessness as a commodity within the
market of gravity is in complicity with the capitalism within which it is embedded.
This is now the necessary intelligent complicity that we must ensure continues, and I
will argue here that a benign concealment is the best procedure here to ensure the
project continues to house people’s dreams.

His tongue was dry and obedient, the words formed unpalatable objects in what
was not even his own mouth…

Circusism has a hard task ahead of itself and I will not mince words here, I will
present the chinks in its armour without regret knowing that I am only doing so to
shape Circusism into a better model for our future.
It is economically clear that such a null value has absolutely no place within that
‘market’ of gravity whatsoever, and therefore as weightlessness is entered into the
final ‘hard’ and unforgiving register of mass-value, it finds itself presented
irrationally.
It is this irrationality that must be preserved if the project of Circusism is to
proceed. The concealment of the impossibility of weightlessness in gravity and
pricelessness in the market has to be maintained if both ideologies are to survive.
The market of gravity does not permit any mass to be at mass-value zero, in the
same way nothing that is free can exist in a market.
However the appropriation of qualitative statements such as peace, love, security,
family and freedom etc must be allowed to become entries into the market if the
overcoming of finite resources is to continue, and the continued operation of tricks
that perpetuate the narrative of gravity as endless and meritocratic depend on this
appropriation of all ‘priceless’ values as commodifiable.
This is the bright future of Circusism, and we need the young bodies of up and
coming circus artists to reflect this vision.

Happy was having trouble sleeping, but he felt he was getting closer to ask the
circus community to not think of a black swan.
 26

ON HOW CIRCUS OPENS UP ‘SEMIO-GRAVITY’

“Circus privileges the ability of the body in gravity to refer to any weight, but
circusism closes this down as capital does, merely utilising this mobility of reference
to expand gravity as an enclosure for the fake freedom it offers.
It closes it down by implying that these referrals are real; it does this to imply that
gravity is meritocratic and sympathetic to the subjects expressions of agency.
Just as Capital has activated its linguistic potency whilst concealing its impossibility
of validating the subject of language within itself in order that it can have its cake and
eat it, so Circusism must also seem to activate the linguistic potency of gravity.
Gravity has to be seen as the accommodating arena of linguistic referential
capability; a symbolist poetry slam, all the while hiding the fact that this illusion of it
as an endless arena in which anything can be referenced conceals the fact that it
perpetuates this illusion only to appear to expand itself to accommodate the
deregulated referentiality…this is the illusion Circusism needs, of Semio-Gravity.

What we in Circusism are up against are tricks that remains detached enough to
refer to anything but without the recourse to collapse that referral into self-
interested profit…if we detach the idea of a movement in gravity from its fixity as a
set weight-value, as circus does, we are activating the circus body’s ability to refer to
any weight, as a symbolist poet activates the word’s ability to refer to any signified,
but if these new referrals are only able to ‘validate’ through their collapse into the
old autonomous pool of gravity then these new references are destroyed as
possibilities”

Aside:

Joe was on the line: “So, remind me again who like fiction and who likes facts?”

Happy obliged: “so circus, that is not circusism, must maintain that the
weightlessness, which is that detached referral to a new impossible weight is only
fiction and so the possibility of further fiction is maintained…semio-capital utilises
but does not respect the maintenance of possibility of the fluidity it utilises, just as
circusism as ‘freedom production’ does not respect the fluid referral to any weight
as anything but the further expansion of the field.
If freedom is a profit to the individual subject then it is only the field that is free to
expand.
This is what Circusism must conceal, by implying that fictions are the equivalent of
facts, and what is more, this conflation is your ‘right’ as an individual; the fulfilment
of the promise of post ideology. Weightlessness for all!

There were then some uncomfortable noises issuing from the assembled crowd, all
invested, all performing, all now unsure of the script….
 27

Happy started, had he said that out loud? Surely not…he continued in programmed
fashion:

“So the weightlessness of the circus trick that is ‘actually happening before your
very eyes’ as the demonstration of freedom within gravity is a deception of
comparable duplicity to the idea that you can actually buy ‘peace of mind’; that
capital can refer to that which is none of its business.
In the sense that insurance is supposedly a commodity that offers real security
within the field of capital, the circus trick becomes a similarly deceptive commodity
that can offer real freedom within the field of gravity; both freedoms however
proceed through the idea that you can be free of something through the
reinforcement of its terms.

Even though this may appear as validation, something is missing; something that
needs to be filled in or papered over with applause.
This applause stands between the feeling of fulfilment and the feeling of being
ripped-off by Circusism.

We will examine further the idea of who is being ripped-off by whom, and if the
trick-making subject is merely ripping-off him or herself. We will also look briefly at
programs that may help those possessed of a feeling of being cheated and what can
be done to also ensure that these therapeutic approaches serve the infinite growth
of Circusism.

There are ideas here that suggest that the genuine art of circus should be to risk
everything to produce a shared fiction that demands peace, security and freedom
that are therefore highlighted as not yet available through the terms provided.
This has to be prevented if Circusism is to remain as an effective program.
So we can say that weightlessness represents the entry in the market of an
incongruent ‘pricelessness’ that is a use-value that is ‘beyond’ equivalent register in
the money-form, and hence also ‘beyond’ register within exchange-value that the
money-form facilitates; beyond economy.
This could be seen as a dangerous jouissance, or as a useful excess, depending on
how you see production that is not organised for profit.”

There was a ripple of laughter that was passed as if through the circuit of an old
radio, sitting on a forgotten mantelpiece in the study of a long dead economist.
Happy continued to read from the other side of his actual point of view. He was
becoming aware that it was increasingly hard to pretend to ‘sell’ post-factism
without your pitch becoming true.
It was a fine line….

And in regular telephone rants to Joe, he continued to outline his critique, he was
testing out the tone, how to perform the role of devil’s advocate correctly, because
such a performance could go very wrong.
 28

“Circusism represents the denial of the real relations of weightlessness production,

and represents instead the production of a fetishized freedom that denies the origin
of its value.
Circusism is similarly not acknowledging a problematic for the subject, as in
Saussure, and in being taken up with desiring production (that is, the creation of
signs and desires in temporal simultaneity), is also the installation of and investment
in a systemised form of reproduction that is tried to the self-repeating loop of desire
over lack.
In this sense the current mode of production is both the unacknowledged subject
of Saussure on the surface as well as being the systemised subject of Lacan beneath
the surface.
Saussure, as if Lacan had never happened, and Lacan, as if Marx had never
happened.”

“Well it’s great to chat, but I really must be going…” Joe hung up.

The line was dead, like the eyes of the contortionist, like the dead eyes of the
acrobat, like the rictus smile of the handstand guy.
He had to sell Circusism so that no one in his or her right mind would buy it.

HAPPY’S LEAFLET:

Happy was composing a leaflet to be distributed secretly to the performance halls

within which all citizens had to do a turn.
Turn, turn, turn, the essential activation of any good plot in which there was a hero
and insurmountable odds yada yada yada…
He would attend the performances as an eager spectator, and then ingratiate
himself so as to mingle backstage with the flushed and self-contented citizens.
Their bon-homie had to be inverted into the realisation that they were flushed
with an exploitation of which they were not even the owners, but part of an active
chain of exploitation in which the means of production and the means of meaning
production flickered in and out of their control.

“To you who perform in the circus:

The currency of the circus body is in units of freedom.

I have some questions:

 29

‘If you would describe the feeling of weightlessness as the feeling of freedom, how
‘wealthy’ are you in these terms?’

‘Is this wealth something you can accumulate? Is the difference you feel from these
others below you repeatable?’

‘How do you measure the ‘freedom’ you feel? Does it only happen here in front of
the crowd or can you feel it when you are alone?’

‘How is the raw material here transmuted into gold, and who is it for?’

You cannot deposit your answers in the Bank of Gravity.

This feeling is the point. Happy felt that within Circusism there was an overarching
unhealthy fiction, that was not suspended but committed to the fantasy of a union
between unsuitable things.
“Not all fiction is good fiction”, thought Happy, trying to figure out how best to
pretend to be helping this tawdry and banal project of imbecilic Circusism so that it
would simply implode, eviscerating the self-interested fops that circled within it.

There is simply no reason to turn to gravity to validate what weightlessness

‘means’, hence the supposed freedom that is ratified as real through gravity can
only really be ratified as the temporary displacement of a body of mass from the
order of bodies of mass. The letter momentarily floats above the alphabet that
permits it as an aberration. A temporary displacement of what is possible is fiction.
This ‘proof’ of freedom through gravity, is only similar to proving freedom through
accumulation of capital; of proving that a finite plot of soil can grow an infinite fig
tree; to do this you need to develop a tree that can be watered on an image of
moisture.
It is just a momentary shift in what is experienced as weight. It is no more
remarkable a ‘freedom’ than what is experienced by a butcher noticing a
momentary shift in the price of pork chops.

Happy: “Hello Butcher, I will have half a pound of Kidley.”

Butcher: “I’m sorry sir, but do you mean half a pound of Kidney?”

Happy: “I said Kidley diddle I!”

The customer is always right, or until proven otherwise.

 30

Back in the lecture hall Happy was deliberating on CIRCUS VALUE:

So as we propose to test the validity of Circusism with a view to improving its

structure against further critique, we can delineate clearly what Marx enables us to
study. What is the object of this study of circus then? It is the study of value as it
moves through circus practice.
The value in the body is its mobility, I am stating this in the same way that value in
the commodity is ability to ‘move’, how many units can you shift i.e. its saleability.
There is mobility in a commodity, which can be said to be the rate at which it can
reproduce capital, and similarly there is a mobility within the circus body that is the
rate at which it can reproduce gravity.
Yes, we are saying that the trick can be organised around this expansion of gravity,
and this expansion is necessary if Circusism is to be seen to be able to house
freedom within it, thus heading off any claims that freedom is external to it.
But we have fantasies here in Circusism, because circus is all about the fantastical,
no?

In our Marxist homology, the money form here is what? Applause? Yes perhaps
but applause is the thing that forestalls the lack that exposes the contradiction of
repeatable difference the tautology of a position of zero weight value being a viable
letter of the alphabetical gravity. The repeatable difference of one hand clapping
for the other, the impossible zen koan of capital is the accumulated money-form of
Circusism. The money form is the epitome of a false equivalence that masks the
paradox of the accumulation of repeatable difference that warps the values around
it, and which bars the subject
What is the form that the fantasy of equivalent value takes in Circusism?
It is the fantasy that weight-value and mass-value are interchangeable.

Happy had immersed himself in the pro-Circusism brochures and literature to look
for loopholes.

THEIR LEAFLETS FLUTTERED AT HIS FEET:

Circusism had started to issue its own statements as to the criteria that would be
evaluated in the execution of a trick:

RULES OF CIRCUSISM:

1: the circus artist must develop his or her own unique voice.
2: the circus act must display the subject’s unique ability and difference.
3: the circus artist is encouraged to disregard all convention, to break rules and defy
laws.
4: the circus artist is free to perform anything but the act must be entertaining
5: the circus act must receive a censorship rating prior to performance.
 31

The economy was in a slump but nothing stimulated consumption like having to
perform an accomplished circus act in full costume every month. Every citizen was
‘drafted’ into the compulsory performance of tricks.

The rules themselves had the impression that someone wanted to utilise RD Laing’s
poetry that freed you from the family to bind you into society.

Some rules were organised around Asimov’s three laws:

RULES OF CIRCUSISM:

1: a circus trick must always be repeatable.

2: a circus trick must always display freedom unless it contradicts the first law.

3: a circus trick must always disobey the law unless it contradicts the first or
second law.

Acts of suicide were common.

“Gee, I never knew the knives was real, boss.”

“Ok, scape her off the stage and bring on the next CITIZEN!”

THREE TRICKS:

Happy tried to anonymously counter with his own simplification of what he thought
were three kinds of tricks, the useful (which could be shared), the captured (which
was Circusism) and the self-reflective (which was to escape Circusism itself)
These approaches were described thus in the flyers he dropped from a hot air
balloon that was the colour of a grey sky and filled with the hot air of his own
critique:

HIS LEAFLETS FLUTTERED ABOVE THEIR HEADS:

In which he outlined tentatively:

THREE TRICKS:

Citizens, there are three tricks, you must find a way to get from number 1 to
number 3 by leaping over number 2.
 32

Trick 1: run away with the circus.

Trick 2: no need to run, the circus is here.

Trick 3: run away from the circus.

And for your delectation, Ladies and Germs

Trick 4: you can’t run through a Circus, you can only ran, because it is past tents.

“Ha fucking ha”, thought Happy sadly, “Who writes this stuff?” He leaned back in
the basket of his balloon, accidentally dislodging a sandbag, which went whistling
through a vicarage roof.
He dropped more leaflets as he sailed uncontrollably across the sky.

With the Circus, In the circus, From the circus: you must decide where you stand.
‘With’, ‘in’ and ‘from’ represents the evolution of your resistance. The only thing
to resist here is the fact that resistance has been captured.
We must resist the terms upon which resistance is compulsory. The reality of the
trick itself must be acknowledged as just a story, its uselessness to take shape in
the world will preclude it from inclusion in this capture.

THERE ARE ONLY THREE TRICKS:

Trick 1: performs the fiction of revolution.

Trick 2: encloses the performance of revolution as real

Trick 3: is the question of revolution itself.

Trick 4: how do we know capitalism is violent, because it is impossible to

disguise the Marx.

Tough crowd, thought Happy…I’m here, all weak, all week.

This was the first time that he had even considered the idea of a third trick,
something that could possible escape the tendency of the trick to only serve
hegemony and enclosure.
He turned up the heat on the burner, setting fire to his hat and scarf, which he
managed to take up and in trying to throw them over the side they were blown
upwards by a strong South-Westerly, burning a hole in the delicate fabric of the
balloon.
 33

UNDERNEATH THE ADVOCATE:

Later, as he was climbing out of the canal, he reflected on the fact that It was fine to
come up with trite slogans, but it was not always going to be easy to proceed
through a rigorous critique of Circusism under the guise of Devil’s Advocate.
He had struggled at times to keep his feelings suppressed, and even as he went
daily to the podium to deliver a little more subterfuge from his ‘benign’ examination
he was wrestling within as to how he could burst the circusism bubble, that had
wrecked his circus, destroyed his act and scattered his friends to the winds.
But as fast as he proposed the form of the trick to expose, it was transformed into
part of the trick to conceal, this is what trick two did, it swallowed that which once
exposed and assimilated it into further concealment; it ‘precorporated’.
What was the trick upon the terms that held the trick in this tendency to capture?

Also Happy was trying to stay abreast of the way the definition of ‘trick’ was being
extended. His critique depended on a rigorous Gödellian construct for him to be
able to draw out the various agreements that Circus was making with Capital and to
proceed to unfold this into a trick upon the trick itself somehow.
But there was also a parallel project within Circusism itself to open up the ‘trick’. It
was being defined more loosely as “any act of defiance that showed how you
‘became unique’ through an elegant subversion of norms or systems”.
In this way Circusism’s ‘opening up’ in a congruent fashion was the same as his
own question, albeit organised not around the agency of circus subjects but around
the expansion of their encirclement that could then enclose any activity within
capital and the growing markets.
Happy felt that he was simultaneously running a terrorist cell and a huge
corporation; it was the same practice.
Creativity and innovation competed to enable and disable the subject in the same
action. Would success equal failure or vice versa?
It was like building a bomb to rebuild the site of detonation.

He remembered Robert Lowell, who he had once met in Nantucket;

“…knowing each drug that numbs alerts another nerve to pain.”

(Soft Wood (For Harriet Winslow). Lowell, R. 1973)

Perhaps it was only the clown that could inhabit this precarious position.

VIRTUAL CIRCUS IS ‘PRECORPORATED’:

There were moves within Circusism to allow permanent online streams of circus
acts. In this way people could submit trick after trick for validation on their handheld
devices whilst they were on the move, going about their daily business. Others
 34

could turn their living rooms into temporary stages, or with ‘green screens’ could
locate their acts anywhere in space and time.
The Magic of Cinema in which you could be un-made as fast as a flat-pack
superhero could be assembled to replace you.
It seemed that the idea of a ‘trick’ was already mutating, being applied to other
fields, finding its expression in text, in image, in music, in anything. He felt sick.
How can he form something contrary to omnipotence?
He needed to generate momentum for an Anti-Circusism Circus, an Underground
Movement that could operate tricks against this Circusism, but which now seemed
all encompassing.
He needed a theoretical glue to bind together such an un-purchaseable ensemble,
if un-purchaseability was even still possible.

Happy was the front and rear end of the pantomime horse, playing both ends
against the middle in a hall of mirrors.
The original Dr Doolittle, he spoke of Push-Me-Pull-You only in an attempt to talk
his way out of a costume he himself had designed.
He tried to think of actions that were impermissible, to find the nugget of
unacceptable behaviour that might form the basis of a trick.
He performed curses live in the sterile ‘seminariums’. His ‘shamanic lectures’ were
the talk of academia. He invoked the old gods; the evil, indifferent, voracious dark
lords of pure, non-negotiable and prejudicial hate. He tried to conjure something
unthinkable to the waiting academic vessel. He intoned the illogical, spiteful hexes
of his youth, all sperm and chicken blood.
The academic community were simply delighted.

DUMB TITLES AND SMART MAGICK:

He went all out; he lectured, he produced pamphlets and articles.

At first he chose innocuous, useless subjects like ‘The Semiotics of Circus’, or ‘The
Perception of the Male Body in Acrobatics’, or ‘Risk, is it worth it?’
But the real project was to create a growing feeling that the equation in which
‘Circus Equals Freedom’ was incorrect or that programs that analysed the cultural
‘health’ of circus subjects were not useful, and that as always
Circusism as Social Programming was just a huge agreement with capital, against
which a new kind of trick had to be performed.
Circusism was a song in the key of cage, but Happy did not want to parade mutely
through the enclosed din.
He was aware that he was on the brink of the Romanticism he despised, which is
why he only performed Blahck Magick Rituales that he did not believe in, but
exactly as they would be performed in true faith. He spelled them exactly as
someone who believed in their power would spell them.
You had to proceed through the exact appearance of belief but leaving the heart
utterly empty of faith in order to get the magick to not do itself an injustice. The
Magick was heavier than the flimsy container of faith that transported t.
 35

In order for the magick to ‘work’ outside of the way it was accepted to ‘work’ it had
to be performed according to the criteria of a meta-faith, not possible to be
registered in the purple thread and honey scented wax. This meta-magick was just
the fiction of faith, acknowledged as parchment wrapped around a doll of nothing,
stuck with absent hat pins.
“A tune played by the picture of nobody” here was not enough, it had to be more
than the emptiness of the sycophantic zero, that was just hanging on the numbers’
every word.
His feelings of Anti-Circusism boiled within him, but only deepened the
shallowness of the alphabet soup, adding to its insipid quantity.

He intoned spells: “Beak equals a Beak full of Hair, so when we say ‘There is a Beak-
Hair-Full’ we mean ‘Be Careful over HERE.” He swigged, he gargled and sprayed
bull’s blood and bad whiskey from his lips in a pink arc of distain…spraying them
onto intricate effigies of little men made from sticks and twine meant that he was
inviting catastrophe into the University.
LET IT COME DOWN….

“Do you see this coin? “ He asked he packed lecture hall. The air was thick with
fidgeting questions not yet asked…
“Do you see this coin?” There was a murmur of approval as Happy made it vanish
and reappear from the Dean’s startled rectum.

A FOOT OVER THEIR HEADS:

He was addressing the circus artist, but it was just going over their heads: there was
simply no point asking circus artists what their work was ‘about’, that was a can of
performing worms, with second-rate Byrons and Shelleys all wriggling in the tin.
It was an upturned flea circus, in which every itch was the impossibility to tell Yin
from Yang as the underdetermined quality of something fake that now belonged to
the real;
“Ladies and germs, it was just an I Ching of Fleas.”

He addressed the circus artists directly,

“You would hope that the performance of circus is the conveyance of a feeling, that
‘they’ feel something of the possibility of freedom, that because you are free, then
by inference ‘they’ can be too?”

“Perform one somersault for yes and two for no.”

The program of circusism had systemised this error, it encouraged everyone to

entrepreneurially investigate their own uniqueness and thus drawing on the repeat
of an earlier ‘freakology’, in which difference was a curious reject, ensnared in a
circus from which they could not escape. This time around difference is the very
 36

activation of your self-owned factory of individuation within the limitless open

world of Circusism.
If we make the entire space of difference enclosed in a Circusism then any
difference can be registered as successful, but only according to difference that
Circusism affords. He had to expose the fact that Circusism itself was gravity. Same
difference?

“Can you really afford to buy back the difference you are making in the currency of
gravity?”

“Juggle five rings for yes, and nine rings for no.”

This reconfiguring of trick-making as the practice of freedom then begs the

question, at what point can we be free of a circusism that demands that we perform
freedom as the actuality of its becoming real? It is an old question, but how can we
be free of the edict to be free?

“Stand on your hands for ‘yes’, stand on one hand for ‘I don’t know’. Lay face down
on the stage for one hour for ‘I don’t care’.”

“How many performance artists does it take to change a light bulb…I don’t know I
left before they had finished.”

THE STILLS:

On his way to the lecture hall Happy had seen a group of young men and women,
who refused to perform, being directed into the back of a large secure vehicle by
armed police.
These people were being rounded up; they, who refused to work the trick of
performing themselves, who refused to share their unique contribution to the
project of Circusism that openly accepted all (at least all who were willing to accept
being accepted into something that accepted all).
They were known as ‘Stills’, as in ‘not moving forward’, ‘not being mobile’, not
privileging the dynamism and freedom of movement in Circus. They were Not-
Circus. They were therefore deemed to be as-of-yet–inactive-criminals-to-be, guilty
of an intolerable future stasis.
‘And only fools do those villains pity, ere they have done their mischief.’ So went
the Pro-Circusism poster.

“Don’t be a Still, Let’s get this Circusism Moving!”

“Drink a cup of Circus every morning, taste the freedom all day long.”

“Go beyond. What will you perform?”

 37

“It’s time to be YOU!”

Our Purpose:
To reveal and develop all existing potential
by bringing to life bold ideas which achieve
positive and sustainable impact.

Circusism: your ticket to strategic and creative ideas.

“You can agree as you throw up in your mouth”, added Rover Joe in lime green
spray paint.

“And if that doesn’t work out you could always get anal-ised, or some other brand
of Family Mouthwash.”

Happy continued to circulate his own articles and pamphlets:

DO WE REALLY NEED CIRCUSISM?

Throw a stone in this circus and you will hit someone free: a juggler talking about
creative expression, or a contortionist spouting about limits, or a flyer trying to
persuade his base to be more innovative.
Let us begin by asking why am I bothering to talk about freedom at all, it is clear
that there are degrees of freedom but that real freedom from any restriction would
be a hell of unrelated atoms. Well I am addressing this word because it is a central
myth of circus. And I investigate it here to open the discussion around this most
shapeless of circus beasts, Ushered into the ring as an exotic spectacle of un-
manacled aptitude.
I am only addressing what freedom ‘means’ in the context of circus because this is
the central narrative of it.
Its inclusivity leaves nothing out, in this sense it is both a post-fact area in which
anything is possible (because the ability to discern fact from fiction has been
mislaid) but also then it is like an inescapable field within which only those who are
incapable of demonstrating that the performance of freedom is a definitive method
of its realisation are excluded. You are ordered to be free, and from a contradiction,
anything follows.
The rule is that there are no rules, and this is debilitating.
To be clearer, this is post-factism as an edict. You must make your dream a reality or
become an ‘epic fail’ video. Transubstantiation is a requirement; so that if you
demonstrate an inability to inhabit the virtual as an actuality you will be asked to
leave the implied limitless area.
The irony here is that if you refuse to believe in this post-ideological area you will be
removed as contrary to its ideology. This is offensive in the sense that an ideology
should remain an empty injunction, by which I mean they should be potentialised
not actualised; but within Circusism ghosts are only permitted inside once they have
 38

been fleshed out, so as to be once more subject to gravity. Remember this is only
drawing attention to that which we already know: that you are ‘free’ to invalidate
the authority of Capital as long as you make a profit. Marx is in danger of becoming
true.
Meta-languages of the world unite, you have nothing to chain but your losses.

But he felt that the best protection for his operation was to stay in the University,
and continue to be seen as someone who was dedicated to reinforcing Circusism.

UN-GAME KLEIN:

Happy felt that he was drawn on a sheet of paper as someone who was climbing off
the page; like an M C Escher advertising insurance.
The other irony of which he was aware here was in the thinking of RD Laing, who
was instrumental in inscribing a game-playing subject that would then be capable of
such total post-fact immersion. As this subject has transcended all given, external,
ideological rules, becoming the epitome of a subject free from all external influence,
the subject has therefore also transcended all ability to see the game in which the
rule is to play at not playing a game. But the goal posts here have moved.

The free subject described by Laing is a subject who sees they are playing a game
of not playing a game, which then becomes the new game of being this paranoid
meta-player.
The loop he describes as only applicable to the interior of an ideology here comes
true within the fallacy of his own post-ideological legacy, which, under capital,
becomes an enforced game masquerading as a post-game society. Thanks to
Ronnie, the game we pretend we are not playing is ideology.
Circusism is very good at playing this non-game of un-ideology that is not
there.
“They are playing at not playing a game.” If Laing was right, we have not gone
anywhere because the un-game is topologically designed according to non-game
rules, by which all contravention of game rules return you directly into the field of
gameplay, in contradiction to its un-gameness. To not play is the game.
As capital embraces Laing, so the game of not playing a game becomes true of
post-ideology. To refuse to play means you are still playing exactly according to
the rules of a game of un-playability.
The Stills were a desperate cry, an organised resistance on the back foot, where
the only move to be free in the game was not to play but only resulted in the losing
position and incarceration.
The Stills were just the ghosts of Circusism itself, too solid to walk through the
bars, as a fleshed-out ghost is the same as a game emptied of rules; full of ludic
bones the enclosure was ossified as endless.
 39

Happy was still practicing Magick as part of his University ‘act’.

Cut to a packed auditorium. Happy was trying to insist that he intended chaos,
that he intended curse and catastrophe for everyone in attendance….
…they were as delighted as a marketing company on ‘discovering’ an
authentic brand of misfit.

Here was one of his Magick Knot Fiktions:

You should never do this…thought happy…first draw your Sigil…this is where

you take the vowels away from the word and drop any double letters…you then
turn the shapes of these letters into a symmetrical pattern composed of those
letters…THIS MY WISH TO LEAVE MY BODY or THIS MY WISH TO START A
WAR becomes a geometric design of some force.

These appeared throughout the University:

‘This my wish to leave gravity’ on the ceiling of the cafeteria.

‘This my wish to breathe in the vacuum’ in the Music room.

‘This my wish to tear a hole in faceless capital’. Written in blood on the sole of
the rector’s shoe, while she was sleeping in the conference room.

A series of hapless spells.

 40

This design is then drawn onto a card, soaked in certain fluids, and this card is
pierced at intersections of the design (rather like knot theory thought Happy).

Take a clean piece of magician’s rope, cleansed in river water…the river is

time…and dried in the sun…the light makes space…and thread this white line
through the dark holes of the card using a slip knot…the knot is suspended in
the paper…in the magic word…its magic content tied together…and pull in the
moment of orgasm…the word is set, the paper that holds it is destroyed, the
word is set into the world …it leaves its artificial support in paper and in the
moment of the paper’s destruction, it remains in the world through the removal
of everything that supports its presence…this is like pulling out a table cloth
from a vase of flowers, the flowers become set in the world by the removal of
their setting…

Crowded restaurant in Sarejevo…1914.

Happy winds up his body for the pull, the diners all look up from their compotes,
he closes his eyes, taking hold of the tablecloth in his fists… as the waiters
converge upon him knives drawn, they know what is coming…the head chef is
already climbing out of the window…

”I’m outta here…he looka like-a professionale…”

Before the waiters can reach him, Happy pulls the silken cloth out from under
the three-course meal for one in a single fluid SNAP!

…the sigil has been written in the meal, in the delicate balance of ingredients
and spices, the blend of flavours all combined in certain quantities to taste of his
intent…one alabaster vase, engraved with the effigy of Horus, holds a bunch of
divine black orchids in the centre of the table…to die for…
…This is the trick of pulling out the thing upon which the meal is written but to
keep eating…stay hungry…The language of knots is suspended in the paper, the
speaking of this knot to its inevitable tightness destroys the paper upon which it
is written…this is pulling out the thing that supports language but continuing to
speak anyway…

Happy pulls…the waiters scream in horror…happy goes off in his dry goods…

“…The flowers are still standing!”

BLACKOUT

…Somewhere out in the streets an assassin finishes his meal, walks out of a
sandwich bar and shoots the Duke twice in the chest…

Chaos…
 41

He was banned from the History department for the foreseeable future.

CIRCUS = CAPITAL:

Inside happy was seething: he was a mass of contradictions; bringing a ghost to life
whilst preserving its inoperable mortality was placing him in an untenable position;
this masquerade as a begign penetration tester of Circusism was placing him in an
untenable position of playing a game in order to score a real victory…oh well, when
in Rome.
He ran over his actual position by pretending that Joe was still alive.

“It is clear that Circusism operates alongside capitalism, I do not have to say this in
any other way.
We desire, we consume, we trade, we produce, we sell. All of these different
operations can be performed as tricks, all of these tricks can produce any one of the
above operations.”

“It’s a Casino alright, and I bet you are not the first to notice that…” said Joe as he
would have done had he been present.

“Well, no… it’s ludic nature is well documented….We can perform the trick of
desiring to produce trade just as much as we can perform the trick of trade to
produce consumption, in order to perform the trick of consumption to produce
desire. The trick is essential to Late Neoliberal Circusism; the trick is inseparable
from the performance of trade and the trade of performance. Before we return to
Marx, we should look at a further loophole. I will present a similarity between the
subject of circus and the subject of capitalism to further highlight how this proximity
must be concealed.

“Wait, what? you are saying that you do not believe in the simple subject of game
theory?” Joe was just doing his own pen-testing.

“Yes I am saying that, obviously…I want to stress that I am not positing as Laing
does that this is how people are.”

“Hey, don’t let your new pals at the institute find that out…”

“They will know soon enough…I am not suggesting, as the equations of John Nash
do, that we are paranoid, self-interested individualists and that this self-interest will
create societal balance.
Circusism is predicated upon capitalism’s deep ideological contradictions and
assumptions about the forces at play in inter-subjective transaction as well as
intimations that these are always ludic in nature and that the subject is engineered
 42

towards gain over loss, within a register that supposedly supports such validations in
subjective terms.
I feel that many circus subjects are operating out of self-interest and in a
reciprocation in which capitalism and circusism learn from each other this ‘tricky’
individual is the result of a learned behaviour; simply inhaling and exhaling in the
oxygen of exchange, in a tautological ground that conceals the incompatibility of
value with itself.

YOU ARE THE TRICK:

“Ok this is what they would have us believe:

Increasingly as the idea of the subject’s unique qualities become the focus only
through the performance of a trick that demonstrates how that individuality is
iterated as a statement against hegemony. The trick has to be against all restrictive
forces; and under this imperative the idea of personal rights, freedom and
individuality are established as things that become real. The resistance is their
‘authenticity’.
It is compulsory that transgression become ‘fulfilled’ or can be demonstrated as
‘actual’ within the fields of gravity in Circusism, and in the linguistic capital that is
able to act as the register in which such realisations can seem to occur.
Increasingly then the trick being asked of the subject is the trick in which
performing the subject can only be achieved as a refutation of external or internal
limitations. The trick is to perform yourself in the face of restriction; this is your
‘authenticity’
Circus being the imposition of self-made binds is a shoo-in for this bed of nails.”

“ FAKIR YOU, BUDDY.” Joe was on fire.

The problem here is that in writing your name in the field that appears as a fair and
limitless meritocracy based around the criteria of uniqueness, this name serves as
an expansion of the terms that govern the autonomous register, that are essentially
name-less.
The trick to perform yourself is concealed as your inevitable invalidation and
presented as you becoming an individual within the context of capital.

Thus as we go deeper into the supporting structures and ideologies of Circusism

that are reciprocal to those of Late Capitalism I will focus on one figure who is both
present and absent.
If what we do in money is no longer attributable to us, then we can think of Capital
as the subject we never were. So if I speak of a self-interested automaton such as
the one suggested by John Nash, I will speak of Capital itself.

“Sorry, did you say something, darling, I wasn’t listening…” Joe was finding it hard
to concentrate on his own ontology, which was a prop for someone else’s voice.
 43

Happy continued regardless:

“It seems appropriate if we imagine the subject is shaped by an imperative that

ensures society is organised around the reproduction of capital rather than the well-
being of subjects.
It follows that the subject is shaped into exactly a subject who does not have the
well being of subjects, including themselves, as their primary motivation.
This indifference to the subject’s needs emerges from the practice of self-interest,
then the subject is unbeknownst to themselves acting self-interestedly but on
behalf of the imperative of capital.
Therefore if self-interest is in the interest of capital, which does not have your
interest at heart, then self-interest merely reshapes you as the self-destructive self-
invalidating motor subsumed to reproduce yourself in Capital’s image.
In focussing on yourself, you are capital, and capital is you.
In this way we can think of capital as the only subject. You are the same thing as
repeatable difference. A subject desiring in the context of capital is merely capital
reproducing itself.
The behaviour here would be the ‘ideal’ solitary and selfish modes of operation
imagined by a player within Game Theory.
Capital is you, but it is not able to feel as you do. It wants to be able to feel what
the subject feels, as a Tin Man pretending to want a heart in order to get you to
heartlessly buy more Tin.
This image of Capital as a subject who wants what she can never have, which is
quality, is the image of the robot who seeks to understand what it is to be human.

TIN CIRCUS:

This robot has replaced you as ironically, in your effort to win the game, you have
become an automaton who agrees to the validation of human quality in machinic
terms, and is left wondering what is the human nature of the feeling that I have just
fulfilled in the register of capital that has now turned to dust. Every emotional
program that you run comes out the same: you win; which means you are the
automaton predicted by John Nash, the paranoid schizophrenic.
You are a circus artist that compensates for the invalidation of freedom within
gravity with the exploitation of others. You equate applause with the truth of your
freedom as this is the surplus value that you think you gain that is the reward for
actualising freedom in a medium that is resistant to it.
It is the circus of the Tin Man, and there is no Dorothy LOL.

We need a critique here …and in this sense Marx is a critique of capital, which is the
subject of Circusism, which is a critique of Gravity that the subject reproduces.

Happy was writing long letters to Joe that he knew he could never send:
 44

So with the suggestion of the subsumption of the trick into the imperative of
capital, the performance of the impermissible is now compulsory.
I am aware that some might say that we as artists are beholden to perform what is
not yet possible…on this I agree, it is necessary. It is ‘imperative’, again what I am
critiquing here is something within the operation of capital in which the
performance of freedom is conflated as proof that freedom is currently possible
under capital, and that this is then proof that capital itself is an area devoid of
regulation; deregulation is the fact that must be preserved at all cost.
A further question is how this is related to capital’s contradictory ability to identify
the quality of things that are yet to come as rationale for their quantitative
manifestation as viable commodities now. It is the inherent contradiction and
incompatability between the registers of weight-value and mass-value that we seek
to expose.
Roll up, roll up; I think the impossible should be performed, but not as proof that
freedom is here.

This is the existence of the possibilities inside the yellow submarine as long as it
remains a space within the fictional world of a cartoon, as opposed to the
possibilities inside a Sergeant Pepper’s themed restaurant.

In this sense it is imperative that circus become the interior of possibility that is as of
yet unrealised and not a celebration in which everything is for sale.
The nostalgic longing for the transgressive area that a visiting circus once
represented; a temporary constellation where the exotic and illicit were available, is
largely moot.
This is now the permanent and extensive area from which you are only barred if
you do not permanently and extensively engage with it, there is no other alternative
other than to be in the circus. The circus has become a town, devoid of critique,
because it can no longer visit itself, it has no exterior from which to arrive.

In terms of the circus trick, which exposed the limits of gravity and which was a
fictional demand for an end to gravity, as now entirely captured in Circusism, Happy
saw a similarity between this and the exposure that Marx had made to the limits of
capital.
Marx, in highlighting the self negating tautology that occurs in the drive for
efficiency that actually results in the falling rate of profit, by the inevitable
replacement of human labour power with the machine thus ridding the means of
production of a viable method of achieving surplus value, had exposed the limit of
capitalism and the supposed inevitability of its demise.

Capital continues however upon the conceit that through appropriation of the trick
itself and the knowledge that it contains about the exceeding of limitation through
the construction of tautology, capital itself is addressing the issue of replacing
human with machine that causes a fall in profit.
First by switching production to desire itself within the subject as a form of
variable capital as fixed capital; a machine that produced desire in a myriad of
 45

affective constellations that could be attached, detached, re-attached in any way

over time.
In opening up, through desiring production the possibility for capital to then
appropriate these affective potencies as quantitative entries into the register of
exchange value formed a trick that capital could enact as the counter trick of Marx
that exposed its original limit.

In thinking of Marx as performing a trick in capital, capital had now responded by

capturing linguistic potencies to perform the counter trick of desiring production in
Marx as highlighted by Deleuze, who notes the linguistic capacity of capitalist
production by perhaps seeing the unconsciousness not as a language but as a
factory that is organised around the production of signification under the imperative
of capital.

In this sense Happy saw Circusism as the neutralisation of the circus trick as it is
performed now within the field of a counter trick that re casts the circus subject as
both the worker as the site of a desiring machine, organised around linguistic
production that become impasses under the imperative of the reproduction of
gravity, and as a gravitational-capitalist engaged in the exploitation of the
watching-labour of the audience in order to falsely validate the overcoming of those
linguistic impasses.
The trick of Marx that exposes becomes appropriated as the counter-trick of
Capital that negates Marx by concealment.
In a response to the complexity of how Circusism is tied into the production of
desire schematised around the concealment, but ultimate reliance upon, the
incompatibility of the split registers of value to return the subject that seeks to
achieve genuine unification of them, in a fiction of compatibility, back to the gravity
of their irreconcilability and consequent negation of subjective agency, Happy saw
the need for a critique.

A MARXIST CRITIQUE OF GRAVITY.

Ladies and Germs…you can afford to go no further: this is an impasse. The time-
cost for reading Happy’s Marxist Critique of Gravity is too high; so this particular
side show, this satirically pitched canvas, is out of bounds to you. However if you are
to proceed past this section, it could be that you are guided to a rip in the canvas
through which you can glimpse Happy performing the end of his academic routine.
Read on to witness the arrival of a strange young woman, who tries to invalidate his
critique before it has even had the chance to land.
If you still wish to enter, you pay in TIME.

T.I.M.E. stands for TOTAL IMPASSE MANAGES EVERYTHING.

 46

A MARXIST CRITIQUE OF GRAVITY.

One that is couched through the frisson between Lacan and Deleuze and through
Berardi’s idea of Semio-Capital.
So Happy became aware that if gravity could also be understood in terms of two
incompatible registers of value then his critique could proceed: one that was ‘felt’ or
‘conveyed’ by the circus performer and one that was an indifferent order of masses,
arranged differentially, each responding to the other according to an inherent mass-
value, then here was Marx writ large in the very pull on the very bones of circus.
He began writing articles in earnest.

I will I focus on the congruence in the subjects of Marx and Lacan, and through the
idea of a capital that swallows linguistic potencies as it becomes a schematic of a
factory overlaid onto the notion of the unconscious structured as a language. This
overlay seems to produce a desiring machine that is both owned and not owned by
the subject in which desire as lack serves capital. I will try to organise this focus to
highlight, to glimpse the circus subject engaged in the unwitting production of a
freedom that they can never achieve.

I see Lacan in this regard as similar in configuration to Marx, who has operated a
trick that exposes the tautology of the subject in language as barred from that
which they produce, as Marx has exposed the tautology of the subject as alienated
from that which they produce and how these two tricks are responded to with the
counter-trick of desiring production through a capital that still operates an
exploitative production but one that is iterated through its internalisation of the
potencies of signification in which a repetition of desire as lack as desire as lack
forms a circuit not organised around a Lacanian release of the subject from
language but a binding to the repetition of desire through which they remain
implicated within linguistic codes of capture. Lacan’s trick to expose likewise
becomes capital’s counter –trick to conceal in the shift to desiring-production
schematised according to the impasses hidden in both homological dimensions of
the term semio-capital.

Happy set out to define what exactly would be his critique. Firstly to examine the
trick that Marx might make in regard to a gravity of split terms, then to examine
how the counter trick of Circusism might neutralise this first trick.

Let us state early on that affect is fiction to a system of difference, regardless of

whether that system is a falsely imposed adjunct or fetishisation of values created in
the real hidden relations of production or not…an affective leap out of gravity such
as is conveyed to the public is a fiction only…the degree to which the relations and
the incompatibility of registers that can either permit or refute this leap is up to the
circus artist in question…are you to demand freedom from gravity or claim you have
achieved it…you have nothing to lose but your names.
 47

AS REGARDS GRAVITY:
Gravity is an active physical force expressed here as a value (the amount that it
affects) that circus tricks ‘tinker’ with, and which it attempts to alter. In a ‘less is
more’ operation circus attempts to make it less in order to add value to the circus
body within the field as being ‘closer’ to a free range of movement (this is the
technique of circus as I am defining it here.)
If we begin from the split in value within gravity: weight and mass value being
analogues here use and exchange value.
What links these two things? One a system of production and trade, the other a
physical force exerted by large bodies of mass.
Using indifference as the primary link between capitalism and gravity, with the
implications that capitalism is a binding force that returns you to its enclosure, as
gravity returns you to its field, mass-value does not recognize the inter-subjective
conveyance of weightlessness as freedom, that is, a work of fiction such as this is
impossible to view quantitatively, because the numbers simply state that a mass-
value of zero that is implied by the experiential or conveyed instance of a weight-
value of zero is not possible within gravity.
I will propose that what is ‘felt’ as weightlessness, is similar in formation to what is
‘felt’ in the experience of linguistic tautology, something unquantifiable. Such that
within the designation of A as weight within gravity and B as weightlessness, there
exists in the trick the moment of lift ‘felt’ as where A = B. I weigh but I do not weigh.
This paradox is impermissible in mass-value, but perceivable in weight-value.

WEIGHT:
The trick proposes a weight-value of zero that it is possible to ‘feel’, and that this
zero-weight is also possible to convey so that an audience member might also ‘feel’
it vicariously. All within the field of gravity that designates weightlessness as
impossible. Thus weight becomes for me a medium of affect, through which, that
which happens too fast to have happened, happens.
In this sense weight-value is qualitative and relates exactly to the experience of the
value of weight, and how it relates to the subject. Thus weight value is like use-
value, it implies a subject who ‘feels’ that weight, as use-value implies a subject who
needs. It is an analogy of the body perhaps as a circus commodity that is laboured at
in order to have a useful lesser weight-value to the circus subject ie that a body of
lesser weight-value is of use to the circus subject who labours to produce it in that
these moments of lift, activated entirely through techniques within gravity by a
body organised according to gravity, precisely as the production of a body of
weightlessness (or indeed in the minutiae of technique there are varying degrees of
momentary suspension of ‘true-weight’ that can be experienced as necessary
technical requirements for the activation of a myriad of movements that facilitate
circus physicality. A body will always need to experience a lessening of weight in
order to move anywhere.)
 48

MASS:
As regards mass-value. This will be here understood as the register, entirely
different and incompatible to weight-value. And it is here that I acknowledge the
critique of the trick as a tautology. There is no permissible tautology in this register.
In its finality is the finality of exchange-value. It would be tautological to imply, as
capital does in its move to capture affective potencies, that ‘peace of mind’, which is
by definition something ‘you cannot put a price on’, can be purchased upon the
market. And yet this is what is implied, that ‘peace of mind ‘ can be purchased.
Because such a tautology, in which something as affective, nebulous and
immaterial, that is belonging to a qualitative register is proposed to be scalable
within a quantitative register, and because this quantative register of exchange-
value permits, like mass-value, no such tautology.
The tautology that is proposed as the normative operation of capital, that is
normative precisely according to the rationale that the virtual can become actual
can appear as a limitless area that encompasses the material and immaterial alike, is
actually a tautology that simply cannot happen within the register of exchange
value, and thus the ‘peace of mind’ evaporates as it reverts to the original
incompatibility between the registers. It simply runs out of affective oxygen in the
airless, subject less register of exchange.

Gravity expressed in terms of mass-value is indifferent to what the technique of

circus conveys. Therefore what I am suggesting here is that just as exchange-value
masks or is indifferent to the social relations of production, mass-value as an
expression of the value of the circus body in the field of gravity is also indifferent to
the social relations of production, which imply its homological relation to the
money-form as the expression of a equivalence between bodies of mass that results
from gravity as a market, within which all mass-values are the autonomous,
horizontal relation between bodies of mass.

The tautology that is possible qualitatively, or can be responded to as an implied

‘telling’ of weightlessness within the register of experiential weight, is not possible
in the register of quantity.

Another inverse way to imagine this transference between registers is like a deep
sea creature held in its formation by the extreme pressure, that cannot be viewed
once it has been brought to the surface as it disintegrates through lack of depth.

1: between what circus ‘tells’ within the trick as a ‘potentiality’ and that which it is
asked to display I see a fundamental conflation . This conflation, similar to a
fetishisation in that it displays the operation of unifying registers that it then does
not know are wholly incompatible, is what I consider to be the subsumption of what
circus produces into the imperative of capital as the program of circusism. This
program for me represents the unknown knowledge that freedom cannot be
iterated in the current context of capitalist production, and means that in form
freedom production to Circusism is what desiring production is to capitalism as it is
organized as a machinery of unknown knowledge for the reproduction of capital.
 49

In the case of circus artists themselves mistakenly equating the activation of a

weightless moment, through the technical operation of a trick, for an actual
moment of freedom; this represents an ‘abstracted’ knowledge of production, of
which the circus artist remains unaware. I will discuss at a later stage how this is
inflected differently in regard to falling rates of return as the circus subject operates
the trick-making practice alone or in public performance.

As regards the aforementioned split in the value of gravity, which is merely a

provocative tool I am using to make a deeper point here about circus as a project
that promotes freedom. This tool is wielded here I hope with enough rigour to
warrant its presence as the germ of provocation that forms a scaffold for the
examination of the subjects of language and capital in relation to the subject of
gravity.

In this instance, for this ‘freedom’ to be actualized, the register that deals not with
what is ‘felt’ qualitatively in gravity and is aesthetically conveyed to the spectator,
but the other register that deals with the actual quantitative data relating to the
circus body (ie its mass) has to be altered.
As stated the fact is that this is not possible, hence within this other register of
mass-value, which we do not ‘feel’ as such, there is no acknowledgement of what
supposedly just happened, that is perhaps

“I flew and conveyed to you the impression of an as of yet impossible flight.”

What I am implying then is that circus agrees with capitalism in that it too, in
seeking to conflate weightlessness with actual freedom, performs the deception of
capital, in which a tautology that implies a mass-value of zero can exist in the field
of mass-value is proposed as entirely possible, implying falsely that freedom is
possible, thus similarly implying that gravity is a limitless field that then permits
such freedom.

ANOTHER VIEW OF SEMIO-CAPITAL:

Not only are linguistic modes utilised to mediate the circulation, reproduction and
accumulation of capital in the digitisation of the expression of finance, that then
necessarily creates a link between the sign and money to which Berardi refers.
But here I am explicitly talking also of how capital seeks to price in exchange-value
that which has use-value precisely because it is priceless.

GRAVITY AS MARKET:
Let us briefly look at Gravity as a kind of market then, as it might be understood
through the homological link between the registers of mass-value and exchange
value.
Marx elaborates on the relationship between a commodity’s value and its social
dimension in a section on the “Fetishism of Commodities.” Commodities are
meaningful in two ways, first and most obvious as objects of exchange with a
certain a monetary value. The second, which is not so obvious and is in fact
 50

obscured by the first, is that commodities reflect not only the labor that went into
making them but the social relations of production in which the labor was
performed. This social aspect of commodities cannot express itself because in
capitalist society the quality of a commodity is thought to emanate solely from its
price, not from that which money expresses, namely social labor.
If I may be permitted to elaborate on what I feel the register of mass value, like
exchange value, is unable to visibly represent, the nature of its constitution being a
value that is solely tied into the equivalence that mass value suggests exists
between all bodies of mass in a field of gravity.
I am suggesting similarity to the inexpressibility of any social aspect to
commodity, a qualitative and relative form, such as the feeling of weightlessness
and its potentiality to point to freedom cannot similarly be registered in the register
of mass-value again here is the notion that what can be expressed in one area
cannot be rendered visible once translated into a market of system of difference…as
occurs in the representation of weightlessness as fetishized freedom in mass-value .
There is a double impasse here, as a: the register of mass-value cannot possibly
represent a qualitative concept as freedom, and b: as freedom itself must represent
through its iteration as weightlessness a mass-value of zero it similarly cannot be
registered within the field of mass-value as a mass of zero is an unrecognizable to
gravity as a commodity of zero exchange value is to the market. Hence the freedom
implied to become real in the public display of tricks is doubly impossible. it must
therefore be re –thought in the register of its free production , which is as a fictional
telling of a potential freedom not yet here.
If we begin to see in this homology that gravity represents a market that
necessitates and is necessitated by the money form, then by extension mas-value is
the equivalence that might be said to be a kind of money-form that exists to make
all bodies of mass exchangeable, orderable within the field of gravity.
The earth as an accumulation of mass, seeks to expand by drawing all other masses
to it, hence gravity can be thought of as the propensity of the market organized
around expansion of the market, as more mass means more capacity to attract
more mass. This is a conception of gravity implied by Circusism, as its fetishisation
and masking of the social dimension of weightlessness production within a false
representation of the quality of freedom within a register incapable of
accommodating it is purely because the capitalism within which Circusism occurs is
the continuing project of presenting itself as unrestrictive. By corollary what is
falsely implied by Circusism is that gravity is also unrestrictive according to the
merit of the individual within it.

MASS AS THE MONEY-FORM:

accumulated mass of repeatable difference, money form is the crystalisation of the
fallacy of equivalent value, that masks the incompatability of registers that enables
the fetish to occur…that enables an excess of surplus or fiction to be reified this is
post factism as in semio capital is is exactlyt the excessive fictions that are
suppodsed to be reifiable within capital..this is a lie of money form…
it is the system of equivalence that exists to make equivalent the differences
between bodies of mass…the problem with the analogy is that when faced with
planetary sized objects , all other objects are ordered, not just by mass but all are
 51

pulled equally to it. Nothing can compete with the gravity well created by that much
accumulated mass.
Gravity is the desire that moves towards the black hole of lack.

The salient feature I will highlight here is that what unites the fields of gravity,
language and capital is indifference. The social, the subjective the affective all
remain as fictions within the hard indifference of difference found within these
fields.

In discussing the circus subject within gravity I hope to draw parallel between the
negative subjects of both political economy and linguistics as it features in Lacan’s
ideas and the current installation of Circusism, to present this subject that
compulsorily performs tricks as a negative subject engaged in the project of
capitalist expansion.
Each subject covered here will attempt to further sketch out a theory of the
subject in Circisism in order to critique this as the imposition of a deepening of circus
engagement with the project of capitalist expansion, whereas what is needed is an
address, that would constitute the speaking of circus to power that seeks to
subsume it.
I will begin by defining the terms in relation to each other so that a more general
argument can unfold.

There is a critical point that then in both discourses of labour and signification
highlight a process by which they themselves can obscure the real relations of
production from themselves, and this brings me to the problematic subject of
circusism who unknowingly promotes the system or register of difference that
grants little or no agency whilst the subject is supposedly engaged in the right to
work, free speech, or circus tricks that iterate liberty.
What then is the process by which production is separated from the knowledge of
the real relations under which it occurs and under which a subject who believes in
freedom can operate the expansion of what is essentially an enclosure and even
coerce others to support this expansion?

FETISH:
I see the fetishisation of weightlessness as the moment in which the weightlessness
produced by circus labour power receives a value in the register of mass, that
necessarily bars or alienates the subject that produced that weightlessness from
feeling it as anything except real freedom impossibly rendered in mass-value, which
they cannot do as it is now entered into a register that is primarily unconcerned with
feeling, in the same sense that the commodity fetishisation that occurs upon entry
into the market prevents the subject from using that commodity as anything but a
commodity with an intrinsic exchange value impossibly rendered as equivalent
value from a now obscured relative value, as it is now entered into a register that is
primarily unconcerned with usefulness.
 52

The impossibility of this registering of a mass-value of zero (for weightlessness) is

what I consider to be the activation of the lie within Circusism; this deceit is
organised around two operations of capital,

1: the continuing deception that capital can appropriate pricelessness as a rationale

for entry into the market.

2: the implication that derives from this appropriation that capital is a limitless area,
not limited by a falling rate of profit as the efficiency of productivity is turned over
to automated production.

This limitlessness exactly relies on the deceit of valuing weightlessness as a mass

within gravity. In becoming ‘real’ within gravity, in the same way the clearly
uncommodifiable affective potencies that capital appropriates as ‘real’ within the
market, weightlessness is seen as ‘real’, that is precisely that it is ‘read’ as real
freedom within gravity and thus implies gravity is an area that responds to the
subject, instead of being wholly indifferent to that subject as one mass among many
other bodies of mass, organised in an autonomous system.
The fetishisation of weightlessness as real freedom here both speaks of circus’
alignment with the capitalist project of attributing quantative value to qualitative
elements as well as the continuing project of capitalist expansion within twhich the
conflation of the fictional as factual implies that as an area in which dreams can
come true the area of capital is limitless and reaches everywhere, touching
everything.

MASS AS EXCHANGE
Within this I am seeing mass-value as equivalent to exchange value. I will go on to
include within this designation of mass-value its extended homological links to
certain designations of the subject within language. it might be possible to imply
that the imbuing of seemingly intrinsic value to the neutrally organised signifiers in
a system of linguistic difference locates them as dominant in regard to the subject.
This is also a form of fetishisation that relates thinking through the conflation of the
fictional with the factual as the way weightlessness is fetishized as freedom.
This then posits freedom as a concept that is actually located on the terms of an
autonomous system of difference from which the circus subject is barred, which
means that in fetishizing weightlessness as freedom, the subject is denied access to
that freedom, thus negating it as the thing that it denotes, as inaccessible freedom
is enclosure.

LABOUR-POWER:

1: As the labour of the circus subject in private practice; as the terms of alienation
are activated by the subject on themselves. In this sense they self-inflict the
fetishisation of weightlessness as freedom, and then suffer from the alienation
implicit in this fetishisation.
 53

2: as the labour-power of the audience in public practice, that, due to the on-going
creation of self–inflicted alienation places the artist in the position of being the
owner of the means of meaning production of weightlessness at which the audience
labour to create enough surplus value for this to become genuine display of social
liberty.

You cannot copyright weightlessness.

THE CAPITALIST ALSO LOSES:

And here I will posit this as the alienation of the capitalist from their own profit of
social mobility, that is freedom within capital, in their reliance on the terms laid out
by capital for that freedom, which ultimately negate it as the subject that is mobile
is mobile under the terms of a purely quantitative register.
I will go further in saying that, as above in the homology between certain
designations of the signifier and the commodity, in fetishizing weightlessness in
capital as freedom, the subject is denied access to that freedom, thus negating it as
the thing that it denotes, as inaccessible freedom is only equal to enclosure.

SURPLUS VALUE:
this is the minimal difference that is captured as belonging to the register set up by
the empty set that allows the register to exist…but without the subjects self-
difference between what the subject was before they were subsumed to labour that
is caused by the master signifier of the market there would be no such surplus.
To Happy the surplus value in the trick was the increase in the limitlessness of
gravity. This occurred when the weightlessness produced by the circus artist as an
inter-subjective conveyance was fetishized into the production of freedom. The
surplus value here is the new value that is seemingly added in order to produce the
demonstration of freedom within gravity. This added value is over and above what
the circus artist receives, as actual defiance of gravity is impossible.
What is fetishized here is a meta-position that is then the seemingly intrinsic
quality of freedom that is the surplus value accrued to the weightless moment
within the trick.
If the mobility produced is not simply weightlessness that has use-value as a
fictional telling of escape from gravity between subjects, but is mobility fetishized
into actual freedom this then obscures the real relations of relative value created
through the social relations of weightlessness production and becomes the actual
proof that freedom within gravity is possible.
Thus if freedom is possible within gravity, what has been produced is
weightlessness but with the surplus value created by the circus artist that then
seems to be intrinsic to weightlessness-as-freedom. This apparent freedom is then
entered into the ‘market’ of mass-value from which the subject that produced the
weightlessness and its attendant surplus value is alienated as the register of mass-
value is a subject-less register in which all relations are horizontal and differential
between bodies of mass.
 54

The freedom is fetishized as holding the metapositional mass-value of zero, that is

genuine freedom beyond the pull of gravity, which then translates to represent
gravity as a limitless and meritocratic zone within wgich freedom is possible. So in
the obscuring of the real relations of weightlessness production, which strives to
present the mobility as a fiction, it is conflated into the fact of freedom, thus the
surplus value that is added presents gravity as a benevolent totality, instead of a
limited and indifferent field of influence.

Happy began with a series of seminars, to which he invited those who would be
antagonised by his ideas.

Happy saw the subject of Circusism as a stuffed doll just waiting for a pin. It was
over-inflated, besotted with a project of forgetting.

“Once something passes into muscle memory the proposal of a fantasy of ‘doing’
becomes a fact, it is very easy to forget that you have negotiated the rewiring of
synaptic pathways in your brain on gravity’s terms. You are a lawyer negotiating
how to make certain legal patterns in the pull of gravity, but you are not above the
law.”
Happy was secretly pleased at how conservative that sounded.

“What are you now…the law of circus?” A humanities professor was on his feet,
indignant like a perfectly arranged bunch of yellow roses. “…and do you now
propose to stifle a program that promotes expression and creativity and empowers
individuals to break free of old restraints? This reference to the law is exactly what
we are trying to move away from.”

Happy responded calmly: “There is nothing wrong with these values, but they are
enforced as law to serve a law, this is the point. The law they serve is now the
inhuman drone of capital excreting itself endlessly into the river of time…please
allow me to finish. I am merely stating that Circusism forgets the awful indifference
of difference to which it must defer in the name of human individuality. Please let
me begin to finish…”

Happy made an obscure genuflection, a dip of fingers, a sweep of the hand, and
having the appearance of a spell, some kind of curse even, the man visibly wilted
and sat himself down.

If Circusism was the practice and the public performance of freedom, then the self-
assured exponent of mobility, this was the subject of Circusism. An individual who
had managed to transform their uniqueness into a trick that rattled at some cage or
other had ratified their uniqueness. There was no quiet difference; difference was
loud.

It was a loop in which the random happenstance of what you thought of as yourself,
that separates you, had to become performed as difference
 55

The words that bothered him were Individual, Entrepreneurial, Enterprise and
Equivalence.

The subject of Circusism could not in any way attach itself to the words subject-
lessness, self-lessness, self-sabotage or not-for-sale.

I have mentioned Marx’s concept of surplus value and here we must clarify that I am
referring to the surplus value that is produced by labour-power, the assimilation of
which into fetishized exchange-value, the equivalent money-form and finally profit
then forms part of the market structure that masks the real relations of production
from which it originated.
The veiled nature of this production is due in part to the transmutation of value
from relative to equivalent, in that as relative value it is relative to the amount of
labour power, relative to the social conditions, relative to the wage received for the
commodity of labour power etc. but that this relative value, that is dependant on all
of these negotiable factors is then presented in the market as an equivalent value,
no longer subject to the various conditions of production but set as the intrinsic
quality of the commodity which forms its exchange-value, which is then formed
from the differential relation that it has with other commodities.
The overarching fiction here, which Marx refers to as fetishisation, is the imbuing
of qualities derived elsewhere into a ‘totemic’ object of commodity. Regardless of
the anthropological accuracy of this practice as it exists in the wider world, what is
referred to here is the fact that now all of those antagonistic relations that exist
between the owner of the means of production and the subject who only has
labour-power to sell are installed into the commodity as qualities inherent within
that item. The exchange value then reflects a quality that emanates from that
commodity as it finds its place among the order of the market according to its inter-
commodity discourse under the imperative of its need to reproduce the conditions
in which the market exists to reproduce capital for the owners of production.…

So where is it possible to say that surplus value exists?

“I’m sure you will just say it is where it suits your preposterous theory…”

“very possibly, but you see in an atmosphere of contradiction, anything follows…so

if you will permit me…”

The crowd seemed to settle in as if they were about to witness some feat. Was this
actually going to be his trick; was this exposition of Marxist theory going to be his
resounding vindication of Circusism after all? They were excited to see how he was
going to prove he was free within the gravity of Marx… Karl Hoopla would be just
the thing on this dreary afternoon!
Meanwhile Happy became aware that he was expounding revolutionary theory
under conditions usually reserved for vaudeville artists.
 56

PROVOCATION:

Happy was aware that in the construction of this provocation there were central
flaws: it was possible to say the trick does not even exist, that circus was only
sequences of movement. Or that the conception of the trick as tautology was in
itself only a projection from which every other ridiculous notion was unfolded.
But this was not the point. These may be spurious inventions, the trick as a unit,
the trick as a tautology, but what they enabled was a provocation.
It was the capacity to provoke at any cost that was the important thing. Any tactic
was necessary in order to make circus address its proximity to capital, even the
bending of the distinction between accepted terms.
He was aware that if it could be shown that extrapolating from a designation of
split ‘value’ in gravity, a homology between Marx could be established, and that in
processing the frisson between Lacan and Deleuze in relation to Marx’s conception
of the subject, Circusism could be exposed as the operation of a capitalistic mode of
production.
The frisson as it existed between ideas of desiring-production and jouissance and
between the desiring-machine and the circuit of desire as lack would have to be
used to provoke circus into addressing its vicinity to an exploitative version of the
trick that Happy termed ‘freedom-production’.
He was prepared to bend the facts to do this, he was prepared to fabricate
evidence and give false references in order to make the circus subject question their
role by revealing them as an exponent of mainstream, neoliberal thinking, destined
to do nothing to the world except endlessly post images of freedom.

ALIENATION:
The alienation experienced by the worker who produces weightlessness is two fold
also:

1: In being entered into the register of mass-value, that mass-value, which is set at
the impossibility of zero, is then the new value that includes the value added by the
circus artist (and/or by the watching-labour* of the audience) the difference
between this added value and either the rate by which gravity is presented as a
totality or the rate at which the circus subject receives the profit as the vendor of a
genuine form of freedom within that totality.
Both the circus subject and the subject of ‘watching-labour’ are alienated from the
freedom produced because, as stated, the register of mass-value is a purely
quantitative register and can therefore not recognise a qualitative element such as
freedom. In a complete conflation of the two incompatible registers at play here;
the social relations of production of weightlessness have been concealed by the
fetish that represents the unknown knowledge of this incompatibility.
 57

The alienation is two fold in that, one: the freedom is entered for validation in a
subject-less register, and two: that register cannot permit the tautological presence
of a mass-value of zero that freedom represents.
The freedom presented by the circus subject, self-deceptively and exploitatively is
both un-registerable and impermissible.
As the homology between Marx and Lacan is developed in relation to the trick this
alienation will be related to the barring of the subject from the signification of
freedom in a similar relation to the autonomy of the system of linguistic difference.

* this term will be explained fully later on.

The first thing Happy wanted to do was to legitimise the way he saw neoliberal
capital, by which he meant an extreme deregulated financial liberalism based on the
supposed equilibrium brought about by the self-interested subject, and circus in
total agreement. This was now installed as Circusism, the extreme deregulation of
weightlessness-production to facilitate the conflation of incompatible registers
conducted by a self-interested circus subject.
It was necessary then for him to legitimise speaking about capital in terms of tricks,
signification in terms of gravity, and desire in terms of the production of
weightlessness. There had to be a way of speaking about circus that was grounded
directly in the technique, in the unit of the trick that, like it or not, he felt was a
central mechanism that tautologically both did and did not do something in gravity.
If the trick only ‘told’ of weightlessness and was not ‘actual’ weightlessness, then
this ‘telling’ had to be emphasised to relocate circus practice as an art that was not
necessarily in complicity with late capitalist ideology.
This thinking of circus as ‘telling’ had to initiate a new way of speaking.

In preparation for speaking about this happy prepared a series of leaflets that he
distributed anonymously

Extract found in a burnt out theatre.

“…I wish to speak circus. But first I wish to explain how I might begin to do this. Here
I will rely on the homological links between the commodity, the signifier and the
weightless body in circus. Also I will look at the links between the subject of labour-
power, the subject of desire and the circus subject in gravity, in the ‘literalisation’ of
the unconscious and in the politics of Circusism.
This could be understood as the relation between Circus and a Neoliberal form of
Semio-Capitalism (by which I refer to Berardi’s designation of a deregulated capital
that wishes to behave like a referentially detached symbolist poetry but always land
in the horizontal autonomy of linguistic difference), so that the triangle of
interrelated notions about the subject of Circusism is delineated through the three
way relationship between Gravity, Language and Capital.

I will do this in order to be able to speak about how weightlessness is read as

exchange value, how the signifier is under a kind of gravity in the same way that it is
possible to think of labour as libidinal or desiring production as the fixed capital of a
 58

machine. In this way it is not just about the establishing of a three-way homology
but the activation of prepositionality, that might enable us to think of
‘weightlessness-production’ and ‘freedom as commodity’, but more importantly I
feel that such cross register homology enables a new way of speaking, that might be
a way of speaking circus to power.

SPEAKING CIRCUS:
As for speaking circus… happy had been doing just that for two decades, or was it
for only five minutes…or had he done it at all…had he ever been in the circus…he
decided that he had and that in his act he had located the knots it was possible to tie
in language as possibilities in finance.
Since capital was semiotic anyway, as he deeply understood it as the swirling of
magic signs that accrued value to things, he already knew that the subject was
caught in the realization of fantasy that they themselves were responsible for
weaving.

There could be no agency for a subject that claimed to be free of gravity within
gravity, just as there can be no agency over and above the autonomy of exchange
value within capitalism.
The whole point that one thing was measured in terms of another, just as eggs are
measured in wool, and wool is measured in stones…the fantasy of mass-value
means that there is an equivalence between bodies of mass that is independent of
and indifferent to human agency.

Happy was explaining his critique to Joe over the telephone…

“I want it to go off like a bomb within Circusism….”

“Hmmm , why not just use a real bomb…”

“Shut up and listen…It was Marx, but a Marx applied to the subject within language,
as similarly complicit but excluded, and here Happy wanted to highlight the
complicity of the circus subject of circusism, that was the production of freedom, as
equally the subject of a lie.
Freedom in this case could only become real in a register that was autonomous of
the subject of that freedom, thus meaning it was a freedom contained within the
illusion of a totality, that only looked like an open space, and therefore was only the
simulacrum of limitlessness, a suitable limitless ‘enclosure’ for fake freedom.”

“You’re ranting…”

“I know…I am a limitless enclosure.”

“You’ve gone soft in the outhouse.”

 59

As a limitless enclosure, Happy would reference the impossible objects in the

illustrious Dr. Berlin’s cabinet of Mysteries, with whom he toured for many years in
the early days of his career. The Doctor’s sideshow emporium was a mish mash of
improbable curios; from the flea circus, that actually was a mechanized absence of
fleas, to the Mobius Cloak, sewn in such a way that the outside surface of the
garment was continuous with the inner lining, all the way to the Klein Bottle, which
could be filled infinitely because its inside was connected to its outside, so that the
Doctor claimed in embroidered speeches of faded brocade and draperies of self-
referential rhetoric was a bottle that could “hold all the oceans of the world”.

Although the sweetest fact of wine then became mingled with the limitless brine
of the sea, drinking from such a bottle proposed the problem that anything
swallowed was a lie of liquid refreshment that actually refilled the bottle with your
own thirst as you drank.
Freedom in gravity was celebrated in Circusism whilst being returned as not
possible in gravity.
You produce weightlessness into a bottle from which you have no right to drink.

A production of a relative value within the antagonistic field of gravity by circus

artists formed the usefulness of a trick. Its usefulness as a demand started to form in
this way, and contrasted with this, was the idea of the hard equivalence of gravity as
the organization of relations between bodies of mass that was homologous to the
masking of relative value of production in Marx with the falsified, fetishized
equivalent value in the market.

This homology of a ‘market’ or a ‘language’ of inter-related mass-values that was

called gravity highlighted the incompatibility of what weightlessness ‘said’ by the
circus subject in private practice or what was conveyed to an audience as opposed
to its actual capacity to be nothing but an aberrant mispronunciation within mass-
value, the rigorous order of which was the destination of all circus bodies over and
above its meaning or use-value to any subject.

This reading as a mispronunciation was one thing, but what Circusism was
implying was that this pronunciation of weightlessness was the demonstration of a
real actualized freedom within gravity, as circus itself insisted, it was insisting that
this impossible statement was possible (including within), whilst proving it
simultaneously but quietly impermissible (excluding without).
The new pronounciation of freedom as a fiction that can become real,
contradictorily simultaneously acknowledges the ‘material but ineffective’ and the
‘immaterial but effective’ aspects of speech. That is that weightlessness made real
exists as real freedom, but simultaneously it can never be as real as the register that
registers it and can only be acknowledged as something unreal within the field of
gravity, that then somehow becomes its rationale for entry into the register
incompatible to it.
Circusism, like capital, wishes to include the unincludability of freedom as proof
that it is a limitless area. Just as Capital overcomes its earthly, internal limit so does
 60

the gravity of circusism extend through its rationale of suggesting weightlessness

can be measured as a body of mass.

Circusism was operating the same process of equivalence, fetishisation and

alienation as the capitalism that supported it. It was dependent on not
acknowledging that A. the weightlessness was fictional and B: that fiction has
power to demand.

MISPRONUNCIATION:
This rendering of something that it is impossible to pronounce in gravity as real
freedom, which must then be a meta-gravity, is the problem.
Within the homology between language and gravity the inseparability of human
language, behind which signifiers autonomously relate to one another, and the
language of the circus body, behind which bodies of mass autonomously relate to
each other, anticipates an important Lacanian statement ‘there is no such thing as a
metalanguage’. “

“…or to put it differently , there is no criterion can delimit the autonomy of the
horizontal system of difference, which implies the primacy of the relation between
signifiers over their relation to the signified’.

Tomsic, S. ‘The Capitalist Unconscious’. Verso. P35.

This is the definition of an impassable bar.

“ I can’t really hear you…I think the line is bad…”

“I said…Lacan walked into a bar…OUCH…it was a bar of signification…”

The problem is that within Circusism, as within Capital, this impasse is spirited
away, although it is the founding principle of the area maintained as an effective
and undeniable field of difference, it is proposed to be as transgressible as any other
ideology, in an area that claims to leave ideology behind…it is proposed as being as
responsive to human will and proposed to be as receptive as any meritocracy that
will necessarily recognize the good intention of those seeking freedom within it.

A statement that is entirely tautological, such as in capital ‘this pricelessness means

this price’, or in gravity ‘this weightlessness means this weight’ is entirely permitted
under these false premises, and is a function of the post-factism that is necessary to
maintain the illusion that both capital and gravity are respectively negotiable fields
that are adjusted around the needs of a desiring subject, and which are limitless
enough to ‘include’ freedom.

Happy wanted to expose the circus artist engaged in freedom-production as

capitalist pigs in the service of the lie of money, and expose circusism as the
expansion of the property of freedom, which ossified freedom as a piece of land.
 61

He called Joe repeatedly, who had gone to ground in a safe house on the outskirts
of the city

Happy was ranting into the receiver: “Thus within circusism, a trick that moves
through gravity to posit that weightlessness is equivalent to a real attainable
freedom is the same fantasy as a tautological statement that moves through
language to claim that it is a statement that is more ‘true’ that the rest of language,
that it states a truth about language that privileges the subject over language, that
such a statement can be true meta-language, ie something valid within language
but which operates to refute the authority of the impassable bar…”
Silence on the other end. “Joe are you there?”

“I’m here professor, keep talking…”

“ ok… That is, something that as a statement is a direct capture of the signified,
something irrefutably conjoined with the signified, a definitive statement of the
subject that means the subject is greater than the medium through which they
construct themselves. This is a capitalist fantasy equivalent to the idea that if you
are rich it means something about you as a person.”

“It does say something…it says you can do what you like. Don’t forget that capital
makes the reality.”

“But only within capitalism…circus artists that rely on gravity to validate freedom
are only free within gravity…this is just gravitational realism.”

“Are you a Hegellian? Do you think now that gravity is a fake real that can be
thought away?”

“No, a Godellian, I am a technician that acknowledges the outcome of my technique

is the creation of a fiction…true but unprovable…”

“You are an artist?”

“YES… but without the ‘depth’ of psychoanalysis… a tautology can exist on a pure
surface, fiction detached of its need to work as ‘truth’. It does not really need to
become real…The point is that if meta language is not possible but affect can be
‘felt’, then it remains as gödel has stated , as something true but not provable, it
remains as something you can truly experience, a lift in weight-value, a conveyed
appearance of a lift in weight-value but which is not register-able within mass-value.
It was ‘readable’ as something not actual, therefore it remains as a fiction.”

Here Happy paused for effect…but Joe was no longer on the line. Happy heard the
sound of a dog barking, then a rush of steam, then raised voices…the sound of
someone either typing or having their hair cut…then gunshots…
 62

“Joe, are you there?”

“Who is this?” A strange seductive voice came on the line…Happy hung up and
hurried away from the phone booth. Had Joe been compromised? Was his cover
blown? What could the sounds ‘mean’?

The inevitability of gravity as a system of differences and as a final scale seemed

unavoidable. Fiction simply could not sustain itself under such pressure.

Happy decided to begin a series of lectures on the subject of his three-way

homology, hoping to draw circus artists into the range of his critique.

Happy would strike odd poses in his lectures; but there was a reason. He had a
system. Each pose spelled out a word that was the actual message.
To utterly delimit the rampant narcissism in circus, he had developed this
notation, or knotation as he called it as a cross between powerful magic sigils
archetypes from the tarot and his own Sioux rope magick.
Do not get in the way of the man when he is winding up a curse. He had used this
notation throughout his career, he could gesture and know that his intent was
written right there on the pasty flesh of Dumbo and his wife.
He developed the rigorous system of letters on the body, alphabets of joint and
sinew, alphabetical marks of where mobility had evolved under gravity, each point
where the animal found it necessary to move was marked with a human symbol.
His critique of Gravity contained an insistence that any move that was not done
‘for’ the liberation of the audience was to be discarded. Any move that did not both
point to itself as a fictional component that makes up an image of free mobility
within gravity, and therefore point to gravity as something that we must be rid of
was to be thrown down.
This meant that any movement ‘written’ through gravity was to be thought of as
pure FICTION, and as fiction it could operate as a DEMAND, not as some
commodity of weightlessness, to which the audience laboured in their watching to
add value.
The notation was to clearly highlight this fictionalisation of freedom from
gravity…that it was a work of fiction, that did not require a workforce of spectators
to add value to it under conditions of means of production not owned by them…
…Each movement was a piece of fictional writing performed within the conditions
of gravity that invalidated the worth of weightlessness measured under the terms of
those gravitational conditions.
He asked within the system of notation that each separate notated part be
explained as a gift for the audience. These were the two sole reasons for the
notation:

1: to expose the conflation of the freedom gained in the trick as ‘fact’; let’s keep it
fictional ladies and germs…
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2: to allow for these separated parts to be isolated and accompanied by the phrase
“this is for you”.

You dumb bastards…he was trying to be nice. Bless you all to kingdom come…

FIRST LECTURE:

The first lecture was entitled ‘Circusism, How’s Tricks?’

Happy shuffled up to the podium, a mass of notes like the feathers of a deranged,
bedraggled bird. His goal was to first give value to the trick, and then show how this
was usurped and negated within the tricky ground represented by circusism.

What then was the trick? Here Happy wanted to appeal to the technicians, to
bodies whose concern, whose practice and deep knowledge was the negotiation of
the body within gravity as it chose to engage with a specific object or piece of
apparatus. This critique was worth nothing to happy if it did not engage with this
practice, as it was done at the level of the studio or the ring
The execution and attendant knowledge of arc, momentum, tempo, rhythm,
pressure, friction, substance, elevation, extension, block and hold, the vagaries of
pike, tuck and plank and the sequencing of throw and catch. These negotiations of
the quality of objects under gravity in relation to human ‘alongside-ness’ were what
informed the ideas here. That Marx was there in the production of these moments,
and that his presence was an injunction to investigate the production of value within
the scale of gravitational autonomy.

The exposition, the critique of this fetishisation of the surplus-value added by the
circus artist and which then became the irrefutable and non negotiable business of
mass-value was one way of looking at it.
The trick was revolutionary then? Well, hardly as circusism was a tautological
ground.
There was the problem there, in which circus was now a compulsory order, the
only way to guarantee full rights as a citizen. You had to make tricks make freedom.
Under this reworking of the freedom to perform tricks, freedom was mandatory,
and in such a constrictive obligation you were damned either way.
This tautological ground meant that the trick could now equally serve the
perpetuation of gravity as expose its limits.

But it was more complex than that. “There are those in the circus who are quite
happy with the conflation of a purely fictional weightlessness.” This conflation of
what should remain as a fictional ‘telling’ of what lay outside of the autonomy of the
register of mass-value, and what existed between subjects to be produced and
conveyed as a story of escape, was produced contradictorily to both address the lift
it was possible to ‘feel’ or experience as a priceless weightlessness whilst still serving
its entry into the entirely incompatible register of non-negotiable mass-value.
 64

In this sense there was a certain kind of circus artist that behaved as a capitalist,
exploiting capital’s ability to refer to any value it wished, to implicate itself in any
affective, qualitative, experiential mode whilst still enforcing its inevitable rationale
of utilizing these fluid references to ensure the fixity of horizontal autonomy.
Weightlessness in the trick was the ‘freedom’ to refer to any weight-value in the
circus body, but what was at stake here was the erosion of circus’ capacity to make
an acknowledgement of fiction.

Happy pinched himself to make sure he was really thinking this…within the ability
of the circus body to produce any weight-value was something that could go either
way.
The trick that acknowledged it was merely a fictional construction of
weightlessness, precisely because it was impossible to create a meta-gravity, still
possessed the potentiality and demand that was the solace of all fictions, that they
exist as a virtual potential, inoperable but injunctive.
Whereas the trick that did not acknowledge itself as a work of fiction, stultified
itself in the ‘becoming-real’ of itself; in conflating the virtual lift and attendant
mobility, extremity etc. of the trick with an actual lived freedom was the
performance of capital itself: weightlessness on gravity’s terms.

HAPPY’S TRICK:
Happy’s trick in this regard was then to be the same, as he had previously worked
tautology to expose the contradictory machinations of language as it was floated
onto the stock exchange in his vaudeville act, so here he would devalue the currency
of circus, engaged as it was in the tricky expansion of gravity as the only measure of
circus freedom.

Happy’s trick was to produce an irreversible critique that exposed the exploitation
of the audience, the fetishisation of fictional weightlessness as actual freedom, and
the subsequent alienation of both artist and spectator from that freedom as it
existed in a register of horizontal referral in which commodified freedoms only
spoke to each other through their place in the autonomous differences in mass-
value that ultimately, in quantifying those freedoms, negated them utterly and
denied the agency of the subject to which they referrred.
It was imperative to show circus as virtuosic in producing the ‘telling’ of freedom,
this was the use value , the weight value of weightlessness that was still something a
subject could feel, but it was not virtuosic at producing freedom.

DEMAND:
This relocated the practice of circus as something that should be the practice of
demand, that if each trick did not, could not profit the artist with the fake currency
of applause that was garnered through the inference that this circus mobility was an
actual form of freedom that was possible, but instead recast circus mobility as the
issuing of demands for a freedom that was clearly, categorically impossible within
the register of its validation, then this could perhaps recast circus as an art form
addressing the seemingly unstoppable rise of Late Circusism, within which everyone
 65

had to perform a trick that proved the freedom of everyone was possible, and
therefore political struggle was unnecessary.

In setting itself up as freedom-production circus had sold itself to gravity; in that the
trick only acknowledged gravity as the only means of producing freedom that
implied that gravity was surmountable. It thus implied gravity was a meritocracy
and the weightlessness was a wealth that could only be measured in gravity.
Just as in the fetishisations of commodity value, the wealth implied in accumulated
capital is only measurable within the system of autonomous difference that does
not have the subject, wealthy or not as its primary concern, the imperative of capital
is only the reproduction of itself, regardless of who is wealthy or not, thus conflating
wealth with freedom was only attesting to faceless, indifference as the ringmaster.

What was at stake here in these clumsy homologies was the wish to prove that
circus had still not moved past its beginnings as a form that was inextricably linked
to the expansion of capital past its limits and into new markets, within which any
expression of freedom, daring, mastery or virtuosity could be monetized.

If this was to be a Marxist Critique of Gravity….it had to provoke but leave the
potentiality for action open to those under the yoke of circusism.

So he began feverishly, from these brief and unpopular lectures, creating drafts of
pamphlets that he left lying around in the dressing rooms and performance halls
designated for the exposition of circusism…slowly his lectures were attended by
more and more circus artists and academics…

The Lecture hall was not even a third full when Happy stepped up to the podium. He
placed the ceremonial knife in front of him, took a sip of firewater and began.

“I aim to highlight the circus subject in Circusism as a negative subject.

Its negativity derives from the impasse within which it is implicated, an impasse
that I feel is fetishized as the production of freedom within the ideology of
Circusism.
In this sense the circus subject is examined through its similar rendering in these
two other fields of influence. The casting of the subject in the negative aspect, in
that these fields are seen by both Marx and Lacan as alienating and barring
respectively, mean for me that both form a restrictive binding that are composed of
systems of organisation of commodities and signs that are wholly autonomous from
the subject, who is implicit within their production.
The homology will focus on the congruence between the signifier, the commodity
and the weightless body of the circus subject as being produced relative to the
conditions of production but which then finds itself in an unresolvable contradiction
or knot in that the primary mode of value available to that subject is the system not
of relative value but equivalent value imposed in a non-negotiable manner both
indifferently, and autonomously upon the subject.
What the circus subject produces in the trick, namely weightlessness (a body
experiencing and conveying weightlessness to another body) is experienced and
 66

conveyed purely qualitatively. The physics that delineates that in the moment of lift
there are no forces currently acting on the body is NOT THE SAME as it being
outside gravity. This moment feels qualitatively ‘like’ freedom in the same way that
a character in a fiction feels ‘like’ a person…”

Happy paused here to let this sink in. It was imperative that his audience, or the
reader, understood that the weightless moment was a form of writing that only
‘tells’ of weightlessness, it was still firmly subject to the gravity of the linguistic law
through which it moved.

“…and so

FETISH:

But, ladies and germs, there are many fictions at work here, and this process of
writing is captured as counter resistance as much as it is used as resistance.
Deception is here defined as fiction that does not admit that it is fiction, perhaps it
is bound to the fetish, to a ‘knowledge not know’, and in this sense there is an
‘overarching’ fiction in operation when Circusism claims a virtual weightlessness to
be the equivalent of an actual freedom ( for example homologically, in the same
deception through which capital claims virtual pricelessness to be the equivalent of
actual commodity) The overarching fiction then is the fiction of the compatibility
between registers of quality and quantity.

“ Even if commodities are not produced with the aim of satisfying human needs but
first and foremost to support exchange and stimulate consumption, one of the
cornerstones of the production of value, they have to maintain a fiction of
usefulness and need, no matter how abstract, futile and fantasmic. It is precisely the
fantasy that supports the union of use-value and exchange value, matter without
qualities and qualities without matter, two heterogeneous and unrelated levels. The
dimension of exchange and the circulation of commodities immediately imply that
commodities lose their exclusive and seemingly univocal feature of addressing
human needs (adequate relation between product and needs) ….to …system of
differences.”

(Tomsic, S (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious Verso. London)

Within the homology, through the idea of a split between weight and mass value,
through tracking the congruent structures between gravity and capitalism, the
gravity here is located in the indifference of gravity as an organiser of bodies of
mass, and within its autonomy from the idea of addressing or not addressing the
human need for freedom of movement.
Gravity is what happens while human agency is making other plans.

In Tomsic’s title, the capitalist unconscious, and in his dealing with the idea that
Marx’s treatment of the commodity is a precursor to the theory of the signifier; in
this idea of a Marxist struggle within what Lacan relates to as a linguistic
 67

unconscious, the factory appears as a model for this linguistics. An internalised

factory in which the subject, who encloses this assembly-line of signification,
labours at machines subsumed to language production; but as is suggested in the
above quote, a linguistics that is subsumed to the reproduction of capital. There is
nothing new here, but it is perhaps new in relation to Circusism, so I would like to
engage with those thinkers who have also thought of the unconscious as a factory,
as this may help to elucidate what is it that I feel is produced in the trick as it is
subsumed under Circusism.

Here I am very much working with a homology between Marx and Lacan, as has
been done to demonstrate the paradoxical setting created by capitalism, which
seen in light of the notion of semio-capital, a vertically detached but horizontally
enforced relation that is free to expand anywhere contradictorily operating the
conflation of what can exist only as fiction within the quantitative register of capital
with its factualisation as exchange value.

Lacan notes the error in Saussure in how he relates labour to wage as homological
to signified and signifier…thus I think placing the idea of labour as an equivalent to
the wage offered, as opposed to exposing an antagonistic exploitation in which the
surplus value generated by fixing of a price for labour-power, that generates more
value than it receives in exchange, as marx does, and which Lacan also seeks to
perform in his re working of Saussure, in the proposal of a barred subject.
The barred subject receives less than they labour to produce in the over-
production of meaning in language use, this excess is fetishized as the intrinsic
quality of signifiers locked in a purely quantitative horizontal relation to other
signifiers…ie any changes in meaning in this relation have to come from the subject
who labours to make the change that is then barred from them by its inclusion in
the endless chain if referral that causes the desire that reciprocally causes it…

I do not think of the impasse of language as the truth of the subject, but think of it
as the truth of the subject within capital…as I think of the truth of the circus subject
who necessarily is asked to produce a freedom from which they are similarly barred
as the truth of the subject in gravity perhaps.

But more specifically the trick thus necessitates a further repetition of the trick to
achieve the same lack, is the truth not of the subject in circus but the truth of the
subject in circusism, which is the capitalised version of circus…that conflates fiction
as commodity is fetishized, that quantifies excess as linguistic value as
weightlessness is reduced to the indifference of mass, that produces freedom to
imply gravity is both meritocratic and limitless in the same machinic way that
capital produces desire at the site of the subject to reproduce itself autonomously,
indifferently, non-negotiably from that subject.

For me Lacan is true within capital, as a desiring machine…

The point here is that even though the subject is embedded in the system of
production, what is produced is fetishized into a register that is forever alien, barred
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or inaccessible to them. This I feel is correct, but is a distraction from the fact it is
true within late capital as the structure of a vital circuit for the continuation of
capital.

“Indeed part of the emphasis of deconstructive analysis as well as Lacanian thinking

on the subject of speech is precisely the demythification of a notion of transmission
that would involve the movement of intention to expression to comprehension in a
direct fashion.”

(Eggington, W (2007) The Philosopher’s Desire. Stanford. California)

I feel that what is also referred to here is a myth of a clear ratio between exchange
value and the money form that does not recognise the relative and inter-subjective
mechanisms of value creation at play. This is a myth of equivalent value that holds
up capital as it masks the real relations of production.
What is interesting is the insistence on this myth even as it seeks to capture
linguistic potency to do what is suggested in the obscured relations, to still activate
relative, affective, subjective fictional value in its project of monetising everything.
In the project of preserving the malleable subject as a variable capital whilst still
enforcing its own fixed factuality as efficient machinery that reproduces hard
capital.
I see Circusism as the double dealing of two opposing cards, taking advantage of
both the myth of equivalence but utilising what is behind the myth in order to
achieve that advantage. The affective conveyance of a body moving is ‘the
movement of intention to expression to comprehension’ of real freedom ‘in a direct
fashion’. I speak about this because I see it as a trick.
Egginton continues:

“If the model of retroactive fixation of meaning can be said to emerge from a Lacanian
paradigm, then it must be insisted that the coherence or fixity of the message so
rendered is at least as illusory as the coherence or fixity of the self-image produced in
the mirror stage, in which the subject’s fundamental sense of self is revealed to depend
at the most basic level on a misrecognition produced by its identification with an
alienated gaze.”

Eggington, W. ‘The Philosopher’s Desire’. Stanford. 2007.

Again I feel that the real relations of what is produced are masked in relation to even
the production of the subject. In seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes, you
do not realise that it is your production that is fetishized by you to seemingly belong
intrinsically to another. Just as you produce the interruption and fragmented
meaning of what another says and attribute this likewise to them as their meaning
that you cannot take credit for creating and which them is autonomous from you.
This is an exposure of the real relations of production, but in the context of the
tautological ground of Late Circusism the realisation that it is you that produces that
which you think the other sees you as and so you are unfixed, able to
deterritorialise, is the tactic that capital utilises to expand into forbidden areas.
 69

Extrapolating from the notion that ‘everything is true’ that is implied here in the
unfixing of a restricted image of self, Capital then reinforces as a fact that the
production of how you think the other sees you as is actually real and beyond your
agency, in order to bring what is captured into the market, thus contradictorily
confirming that ‘nothing is permitted’ except difference; thus also implying not that
the unconscious is a factory subject to capitalism, but a language subject to the in-
built impasses of subjectivity that are nothing to do with this or that organising
societal principle or ideology. The personal is therefore apolitical.

The revelation in this quote of an unfixed self that can be anything is something I
will discuss in relation to the circus artists dream of becoming free in which they are
bound. This is not so much the intended end of Lacanian analysis, more an empty
self, thrown back into desire and lack.
What I am saying for circus here is that weightlessness cannot remain in the
register where it might be thought of as useless to gravity, in conflating it with real
freedom, it becomes the self interested performance of a bodily mobility only
organised according to the project of its validation within the post-factism of capital
, that necessarily negates it as anything except the insistence upon gravity as a
benevolent totality.

This systemised self-negating freedom-production is tied into the perpetuation of a

self interested circus subject that becomes only capable of inhabiting circus as this
kind of freedom-production.
I feel that the trick is bigger than this. It is bigger than gravity, and circus’s first 250
years since Philip Astley is only the project to define its thinking in one area. Having
established the negotiation of fiction that exposes the totality as limited, circus can
continue both within the field of gravity and in many other fields, it should not
remain the reinforcement of the individual enclosed within the reinforcement of
gravity enclosed within the reinforcement of capital.

I am raising this here as it is imperative to show how these forces that seek to
expose are re-captured and set to work as agents of concealment. This is perhaps
the statecraft of counter-espionage, which is to be expected when circus casts itself
as a form of resistance. Did you not expect a sophisticated response, within which
your resistance would eventually be enclosed?

I am referring heavily to Lacanian concepts but in an awareness of Deleuze and

Gauttari’s model of the unconscious not as a language but as a factory. What is
looped here is that some of the agency that Lacan suggests for the subject in
language is directly related to a homology between the signifier and the
commodity, that is to acknowledge the impasse. But it is Lacan’s fundamental
impasse of the barred subject that I feel is concealed and installed as the site of
labour in a desiring machine organised around desire’s inevitability of lack.
 70

“Really, so you would have us believe this irony, that Lacan’s definitive formulation
of the impasse of sense for the subject trying to make sense of themselves is simply
not there, that it is something that is installed only in the context of capital?”
The professor, all dressed in green, an expert in set theory, had been unsure for a
while whether to join in or not.

LACAN NOT INCORRECT:

“No I am not saying Lacan was incorrect, only that his impasse forms a convenient
circuit if you wish to make desire that causes lack in order to make consumption
never ending…I am saying that it is a gravity that goes along with language and
capital, that it is a gravitational bind that affects the subject through the split nature
of value that these forms share and how the incompatibility of these split registers
can be conflated or falsely equated, fetishized to imply an agency that is not there.
I am saying that the bind of gravity is similarly concealed and installed in a circus
that thinks of itself as freedom production.
I am not saying Lacan is not true, just unhelpful to be installed in a circusism that
does not yet recognise itself as the production of fake freedom.

Such a conflation would mask the subject from seeing the Mobius strip upon which
they are travelling, along a surface upon which fulfilment of desire is the same side
as confirmation of lack. The homology from which I feel that Lacan’s position
understands the subject of signification as the subject of labour-power in a libininal
economy means that it is possible to think of the impasses of the subject in
language as installed, just as Marx critiques the system of capitalist political
economy as installed.
Again this is highlighted in Deleuze and Gauttari’s re-imagining of the unconscious
not as linguistic but actually a factory. This implies although Lacan is correct, his
theories that point to the ‘pointless’ and endless recurrence within signification
could become the abstracted knowledge of the efficient Fordian movement of
desire residing in a machine operated by a factory worker-subject who does not
know of that ‘pointless’ endlessness, and thus becomes involved in the production
of that which they do not know they are producing, namely the reproduction of
capital.
Is it not feasible that capital, able to capture linguistic potencies, would take
advantage of one of the most endless loops available?

The relation to Circusism for me is clear here, within a system of post fact, that
installs the reproduction of capital through the false validation of agency as ‘real’, is
making true the disappearance of agency in the moment of its validation, therefore
making ‘true’ the equation of Lacan, in which desire (agency) causes lack
(invalidation).

The romance of circus is entirely in agreement with the capitalist mode of

production, not its antithesis , as is widely thought. The trick is being performed
backwards.
 71

Just as a trick can be re-appropriated, so can a praxis. In the sense that in saying
that Marx performs a trick in highlighting capital’s limit to which capital responds
with the desiring machine, so a praxis that follows from either of these theoretical
instances can equally be a clear praxis or a negative or fetishized praxis that does
not know itself.
If it can be said that in the fetish Marx prefigures the impasse within the signifier so
that the activation of the fetish in a linguistic sense is a signifier that is used not
knowing that it bars that subject and activates that which has not the primary
interest of the subject at its centre.
The point is that I am trying to highlight is how the tautological ground that
enables the trick to no longer expose limits but to conceal them is through the
appropriation of the same original mechanism. What both Marx and Lacan attempt
for the subject are bent back upon the subject in order to restrain them further.

It is not the true intention of Lacan or of Marx that become ‘true’ here, namely
exposure, but an appropriation that is used to subvert the original intention of
exposure of limit upon the subject within a particular field and re-appropriate this as
a method of concealment.

To re-iterate: what do I mean by ‘becoming true’? I mean the impasses within

Lacan that fix desire in an inescapable circuit with lack, become true, and their
location within language, and the insistence that the unconscious is structured as a
language imply that the impasse, that is actually installed by capital’s utilisation of
desire over lack as the expansion of capital, is actually located within the subjects
intrinsic nature. Within the desiring-machine the subject is asked to fetishise
themselves into a subject that can only continue to fetishise as a state that is
intrinsic to their subjectivity. In not seeing the unconscious as a factory, the fiction
of the unconscious as a language becomes true.

TRICK AND COUNTER TRICK:

So the very uncertainty within speech that Lacan highlights in thinking through
Marx’s critique of political economy is the process that is adopted by capital itself as
it appropriates the fluid semiotic potency of a symbolist approach to value in order
to ensure final rigidity;

In becoming semio-capital it is able to take advantage of this equivocity that Marx

and Lacan expose in order to paradoxically enforce the inevitable arrival at an
autonomous difference that Marx and Lacan also critique as alienating and barring
respectively.

Capital utilises that which is critiqued by Lacan through Marx in the first place. in the
sense that every trick initiates a counter trick, then there is a logic to capitalism
addressing the exposure of its limit with a concealment in this way. It only serves to
highlight that it is a struggle for power over the subject.
 72

Capital swallows both Marx and Lacan and uses them to schematise a desiring
machine based on desire fetishised as lack, the tendency of the subject to add value
and fetishise it as intrinsic to what is produced. so that the return to desire is
ensured; thus ensuring also the reproduction of capital. it is simply the tool of
psychoanalysis reconfigured to expand capital, nothing new there.

Thus in relation to circus, the designation of freedom production, functions exactly

because it enables a performance to feel exactly like freedom, which is reorganised
as ‘success within gravity as ‘like’ equals actuality.
Applause, kudos, celebration, a nomadic life style, financial profit etc. are all
activated.
The post fact area that enables what is outside the differential of exchange-value
to appear within it, is the exact area in which ‘your dreams can come true’ That is, in
which fiction (what I am calling here fictional as not true within the register of
exchange) can be recognised as the equivalent of fact. This is Circusism in which the
critiques of capitalism that activate Marx and to a homological but lesser extent
Lacan, which expose how the limit of capital or language are hidden from the
subject by what that subject themselves labours to produce, are utilised as a counter
trick to those very critiques and form a trick that conceals the limits that the original
critique was engineered to expose.

I apologise for going over this ground but its topology is very twisted. Alienation and
barring are concealed from the subject by capital’s appropriation of the very
critiques that expose alienation and barring by utilising the impossibility of fixity of
value to expand into areas that can then be colonised by the inevitability of fixity of
value.

DELTARI AND GAUTEUZE:

It is also necessary then to discuss the implication of marx within the idea of
desiring-production…and in this regard to look at the structure of this designation
as a critique that does not necessarily perform the highlighting of a contradiction
internal to capital, as Marx had done, but instead a critique that acknowledged that
just as much as desiring production can operate unbound this process can also be
recaptured in temporary codes to form a complex trick that capital (in complicity
with certain systems of meaning) had performed in order to overcome the limits
that were imposed upon it in the internal contradiction highlighted by Marx…

If Marx’s critique was structured according to a model of a trick that exposes

contradiction

Deleuze was the exposing of the trick of concealing that contradiction. That is it
shows there is a general over-arching trick that subsumes the first, in the way that
concealment subsumes exposure, as a response to being exposed.
 73

Thus late capitalism is highlighted within Deleuze as the response to Marx…in this
sense Marx haunts capitalism, in that the installation of a schematised desiring
production is a response to its limits that he highlighted…thus Marx haunts the
concept of the desiring-machine.

Within the evolution of a tautological ground, first we see the trick as exposing a
limit; then we see the response, the counter trick that conceals a limit, thus
rendering the ground not only limitless but also immune to tricks, as their structure
is implicitly included, as either ineffectual fiction or rewarded fact that is negated.
The trick is rewarded as long as it follows the same desire for profit that is
designated as only achievable through their conflation as ‘real’, which is also their
negation as ‘effective’.

So in the overcoming of an internal limit that was exposed by Marx, there appears
to be a trick performed by capital that is structured according to the Gödellian
model…an exact copy of the critique but performed in such a way as to conceal the
limit, not expose it. One trick to expose, one to conceal.

In BRINGING IN DELEUZE: I here hope to imply a lacanian schematic for the

desiring machine, that prevents the more positive desiring-production of its own
designation as schizoanalysis. In the relationship between desire and freedom that I
feel is circulating within the reading of circus, I wish to look at how the freedom
suggested in the trick is captured in the ‘wrong’ register, one that also ‘wrongly’
captures desire in the desiring machine and subverts it to the imperative of capital.
The concept of semio-capital is important here as it is capital’s internalisation of
linguistic potencies that I feel are homologous to gravity’s internalisation of
subjective potencies that are suggested by what is ‘wrong’ in Circusism.

PLEASE DEFINE DESIRING PRODUCTION: AND FREEDOM-PRODUCTION…I

don’t want to…
I will here define desiring production in its more negative aspect, as the relocation of
the site of production to the subject themselves, a mystification of the ownership of
the means of production, the installation of fetishism, a knowledge not-known, and
the reference to the unconscious as a factory subject to the exploitative
machinations and subsumptions of capital.
In referring to it I will be referring most exclusively to the installation of this as the
organ or desiring-machine that represents the investment of anxiety on the part of
capital as it seeks to overcome its internal limit through the activation of a
parthenogenic machine that, like a trick based on the godellian model, functions
according to the self-referential renaming of ‘process as product’, hence production
shifts to that which the commodity is supposed to cause, namely desire. I will refer
to Gödel’s Uncertainty theorem in a few different aspects here, but to be clear
within its activation as the counter trick of desiring production it refers to the excess
that is produced from tautology, but not the free horizonless excess of desiring
production proper, or even of jouissance, both of which are beyond economy, but to
a repetitive excess organised as an assembly line.
 74

This secures the subject as an efficient machine made of malleable parts, thus
becoming both as efficient as fixed capital but as exploitable as variable capital, still
capable of producing a ratio between cost and output but operating according to an
abstracted knowledge of production that is unknown to the subject who operates it.
The acknowledgement is also that, within the idea of capital shedding taxonomic
boundaries, this involves the subsumption of a ‘natural’ context for the desiring
subject into the context of capital for that subject, just as man producing within
nature is seen as nature reproducing itself, desire producing within the context of
capital is seen as capital reproducing itself.

Here I will make a small suggestion that circus organised around producing
weightlessness as freedom within the context of gravity (that I call Circusism) is also
only gravity reproducing itself…this I call ‘freedom-production’, which is, like
systemised desiring-production, a machine for the contradictory project of the
expansion of an enclosure by a subject engaged in fetishizing enclosure as freedom.
It is also simply that desire creates reality but ironically and cynically can be
systemised to create a reality in which desire creates lack.
Desiring production as denial of lack: this could be a way out but desiring
production subsumed to capital was a way out back into the way out back into the
way out back into the way out in the realisation of an RD Laing loop that appears to
open one door as it closes another.
RD Laing’s poetic knots formed into the topology of a horizonless prison yard.
Capital has desired its own reality through the subject who operates privately
owned desiring-machinery in a binary of on-desire, off-desire to achieve a capitalist
realism that repeats itself.

Into this homology between the subject of gravity and the subject implicated in the
alienation and barring of Marx and Lacan, I would like to discuss a more ephemeral
subject.
One that flickers between the possibilities of existing outside of difference and
how this possibility itself is captured within the field of gravity as it is homological to
the field of capital.
As regards fetishism in desiring production, this capitalistic field is discussed in
Deleuze as the point at which, in response to Marx’s highlihghting of capital’s
internal limit of falling profit, capitalist production (in complicity with other non-
Lacanian fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis) reverses the undoing of
meaningless attachment. What this enables is the direct production of the fetish
itself, in which the process of analysis provides the reflection of how to activate
meaningless attachment. This procedure is the expression of a homological link
between the commodity and the signifier that enables capital to shift production to
desire itself.

In terms of reference I am thinking of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of

Self, BBC. 2004, specifically the segments that document the rise of Eddie Bernays,
Freud’s nephew, as the dominant exponent of ‘public relations’, that was
 75

instrumental, according to Curtis, in the becoming the more cynical, ‘perception

management’.

Thank god for the BBC? Thought Happy, Thank god for the Eton and Oxbridge
sneaks, Molesworths and prefects’ lackeys. Thank god they are best friends from
way back with the ones who are causing all this mayhem, reporting from a self-
congratulating neutrality that looks at everything through ‘house bino’s’.

‘Processes that are reverse engineered to be the exact antithesis of a treatment

designed to free the subject from meaningless cathexis. This continued, anxious,
capitalist project of the meaningless object made full of value facilitate this
organised desiring production.
But also here the impasses highlighted by Lacan that return a subject back to the
impossibilities of signification, that fire another attempt to signify, this for me
represents, if you will pardon the impasse, the perfect circuit to install in a desiring
machine. It is almost gravitational in its returning inevitably to lack with a bump that
fires another jump.
This forms the bourgeois re-engineering of analysis to be subsumed to the
symptomatic reproduction of capital. The subject becomes the site wherein
attachments of a pathological nature can be formed as opposed to relieved.
What is interesting here is how desiring production as it is systemised according to
the repetition of the need for the subject to attach to an object that is later revealed
as unfulfilling follows the insistence of desire as being founded on lack.
I am not here claiming that originally Lacan was seen by Deleuze and Gauttari as
the kind of analysis that was complicit in the capture and systemisation of a
negative form of desiring production (as it is highlighted in their critique of a
deliberate bourgeois inter-complicity of labour-power and libido as the negative
aspect of what they also posit as a positive force. They also posit desire’s capacity to
not be founded on lack but on its capacity to make real, that is then also posited as
something that can be so wholly captured in the capitalist production of reality.)

But that in the final capitalist logic of what is required, that a desire be produced
that makes something the ‘real’ satisfaction of that desire, but then that real
satisfaction is destroyed or dissolved in the very concrete register that validates it,
what you have is a system of desire that is self destroying, thus being able to arrive
at lack through the system of its iteration…this for me could be the final
systemisation of the impasse described by Lacan in his barred subject whereby the
system of signification is so subsumed within the capitalist imperative of
reproduction of itself that lacan’s designation, (that can be challenged by desiring
production that is not based on lack) becomes the negative form of desiring
production.
This negative form becomes the truth of the impossibility of metalanguage that
denies the positive possibilities of Deleuze and Gauttari’s other, positive
constellation of desiring production; that is not subsumed to the linear logic of
profitable reproduction that then is ready to be systemised as a desiring machine.
 76

The positive version of desiring production becomes impossible as a trick, as it is

only possible upon a ‘tricky’ ground. This ground is the way Lacan becomes the only
truth about desire within the negative construction of a desiring machine according
to the schematic of his formulation of desire over lack.

Thus he also becomes subsumed into the state philosophy of capitalist

representation, admittedly the impasse of which highlighted by Lacan, is hidden
from the view of the new symptomatic labour power that produces desire according
to a schematic that renders itself out of reach as it is iterated…the desiring subject is
barred as it produces itself…thus Lacan forms the hidden schematic of desiring
machinery.

Lacan thus becomes ‘true’ but within within a post-fact environment there is a step
that is prevented.
I regard this post factism to be related to semio-capital, which I will designate as
post-fact according the Berardi’s notion of capital as being ‘like’ symbolist poetry.
See earlier quotes????
In this description of capital, it is vertically free of its referent but paradoxically
always necessitates becoming horizontally bound; in this way what is free of a
referent is only fictionally free according to the horizontal differential but can only
have this freedom validated within the hard register of linguistic value/exchange
value that then destroys its referentially detached nature…in this sense the active
aspect of a fictional freedom is supposedly elevated to a fact, but it is an inactive,
impossible one. In post-factism the dream becomes true and untrue simultaneously.

For me, the necessary Lacanian step that is prevented here is the acknowledgement
of the fictionality of the subject as the outcome of the analysis. What we have is the
lop of desire as lack but no possibility of analysing this impasse.…instead as stated
the process of captured machinic desiring production reverses the process to make
the fictional subject that escapes hard difference become a factual subject that
supposedly can be registered as free within a restrictive field. Lacan is reversed so
that the fictional escape is conflated as a real freedom, just as the subject within
circusism conflates their fictional weightlessness as a real escape from
gravity…what is masked here is this fictional escape loses its power to suggest
change to the field, as its existence as the imagination of an externality to the field
is negated as something entirely possible within it.
What is important in this is that in designating the uconscious as a factory we have
to go through Marx to understand how Circusism produces Freedom. Split gravity is
just a device here, but it is one essential to this provocation.

Let us look again at why the trick is not necessarily revolutionary.

The TRICK was performed in IN TWO WAYS, one to expose and a counter trick to
conceal. The concealment was now seen as the over-arching fiction activated in a
post fact enclosure of limitless possibility.
 77

The answer here would be that in this example we can clearly see that a trick that
similarly enacts a self-reflectivity to an axiomatic system can equally become an
area of concealment just as much as it can be an agent of exposure.
In order to explain how what I see as the Gödellian structure of the trick is here
represented in the counter trick of capital:
That is, in this case the limit, or perimeter placed around capital, and highlighted by
Marx himself as its falling rate of profit, is reworked or re-spatialised according to
the tautological schematic posited by Gödel.

The perimeter around capital’s ability to continually expand is then tied into
investment in machinery, thus its competitiveness ensures its diminishing ability to
use labour power to produce surplus value. In the enactment of a procedure
structurally congruent with the Godellian version of the Epimenides Paradox, capital
engages in desiring-production, which is the switching of names. The moving of
goal posts, an apparent change in ownership of means.

The Gödellian form explicitly renames the laws of a process after what is produced.
So as commodity is supposed to produce desire, the process of production is
renamed as the production of desire itself, thus production operating self-
referentially creates what is not possible in non-tautological operations. From a
contradiction, anything follows.

The process is re-configured to be named after that which it operates upon, thus
being configured to operate upon itself an unlimited, repeatable excess is produced,
that thus no longer includes the ever decreasing circle of profit that ensues when
production cannot produce itself,
This excess however has to be managed; it is not excess without reference to
economy, and here capital’s new internalisation of affective potency is machinically
managed according to a schematic that ensures the excess is not directionless, but
following the pattern of rise and fall, dream and reality, basically desire and lack.

in the switch (as in the mathematical tricks of Gödel, when statements that qualify
and organise the logical production of number theory are given numbers, the circle
is infinite, there is no edge as the process works on itself to be an excess)
iIf you will allow me a cross-homological statement: this affective excess of
desiring is perhaps unregister-able within the gravity of capital as it has no mass. Its
lack of substance is quickly conflated from its affective register of quality into the
horizontality of difference nevertheless; this is the contradictory behaviour of
capital that circusism mirrors; thus what is tautology, un-thinkable, unprovable gets
given a price in the market…this is desiring production as a solution within capital ,
in which it addresses what Marx notes. It is capital’s trick of becoming a tautological
ground that answers, but is haunted by, the trick that Marx performed, which is to
highlight the contradiction within capitalist production…the falling rate of
gravity…oh ..er pardon me …I mean the falling rate of profit…

The trick is not revolutionary, its mechanism can equally invalidate resistance. Free
movement in circus can be the invalidation of freedom.
 78

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Sixteen

Action.
We see a newsroom; a news flash is in progress.

Marlon Brando in 1973 refuses Oscar at 45th academy awards on grounds of

misrepresentation of American Indians in Hollywood. Speech given and award
refused by Shi Shan white Feather. This gives Happy a big idea.
And he spills his franks and beans to his crew…

“...This is a complex deal, as in being rewarded for misrepresenting hard working

Mafia families in America, Brando uses the opportunity to highlight
misrepresentation of American Indians.”

We see a seedy basement where Rover Joe, The Post-Modern Kid and their Boss,
Eddie Bernaise are all watching the broadcast.

The Kid, eager to please, ”Jeez he got some balls eh, Joe. Some might say there is a
flip side to dat coin boss”

“It’s been taken care of.”

Cut to the Academy Awards Ceremony. Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann welcome a
sharply dressed man onto the stage.

“Hey Roger, Liv… how ya doin, Jonny Da Priest has asked me to read dis to youse
all,”

The man reads slowly from the card,

“I should like to refuse my Oscar for portrayal of Happy Down-River by asking a real-
life mafia hoodlum to read out my speech of refusal to highlight the mis-rep-res-en-
tation of hoodlums everywhere...”

“I don’t got TIME to read this out now because of TIME, see but its a little fairy tale
an it goes like dis…youse don just get ta show us as a buncha bums, see, we is real
people with a real set of standards, what hollywood has done to the image of the
regular honest wise guy has made a monkey outta us, and we dont like it see, we
don forgive an we dont forget...we hope we can go forrad inna spirit of love an
unnerstanding, ya bums...'

Three Finger Donnie pulls out his concealed Thompson machine gun and opens up
real nice and greasy in 1973, the bullets ripping holes in TIME itself, which is just
 79

another screen of misrepresentation, the crowd disintegrate into a pile of empty

costumes wigs and pools of expensive make up...

“Yeah now I got TIME, see” he laughs as he unloads into the crowd.

A producer here is collapsing as fake blood explodes from timed charges hidden
under his tux,

“Those special FX boys have really fixed me good…” he screams as he is consumed

by fire that is only added onto the footage of his death in post.
Across the hall a young blonde starlet is dragged backwards on a hidden wire
through a sugar glass window in a balsa wood frame, her face a mass of fatal latex
rubber contusions…
All fake deaths come true in Hollywood…

Time is a silver screen and Donnie intends to pull the trigger on alla dat shit...

Cut…

In the chaos there are lots of ‘deaths’, you know all spec-tac-ular, like…with loads of
sauce, the tech team really go all out…

Just maybe this one guy starts complaining, see, and Happy has to straighten him
out a little. This bozo is directly addressing a producer complaining to the special
effects boys about the blood looking like ketchup and his shirt is ruined for nothing,
this is a no no…
“Oh my god”, says Happy to the ham fisted guy with the two bit shoes, “Listen to
this clown.”

The Man is sweaty and upset about the poor special effects; “This is a 1000 dollar
shirt fuchrissakes!”

Happy happened to be there and sliding across the floor up behind the gesticulating
mogul slipped his long surgical blade in between the man’s third and forth rib. The
man gasped and his mouth popped open and shut wetly like a gutted fish.
Happy whispered in his ear, holding him close as the man faded out of shot:

“Capitalism is in every surface, it is against your skin so that when you feel the shirt
is soft, this quality is related to a number, this number is related to a social position,
this social position is related to how this feeling, the shirt, its number will operate to
perform your social position to others. Capitalism is both a feeling of status and the
performance of a status that is enhanced by the feeling; the shirt is a costume in a
circus where the costume is the trick. The trick is the performance of weightlessness
in capital. The skin feeling the shirt that is attached to a number that has to be
matched in number by all the other props in your repertoire, the skin goes deep and
goes back out again through the shirt out into the other, it radiates in and out.
 80

The number is you, you are the number, and its quantity describes abstractly the
quality you feel. Quality has impossibly become a quantity, that is decided between
things and so in being so close to capitalism, in letting it permeate you, and radiate
from you, you are allowing the way that these objects decide to speak to each other
to be the feeling, the number, the performance of your life for others, who perform
it back to you.
You are caught in this ‘telling’, exposed in a position where everything about you
says something about you.

This language that exists between things, that seems to be their own secret
tongue, that is related to their intrinsic value as a thing, their self-identifying value
that causes the way they speak to other things, that determines the number that
becomes the feeling of quality against your skin does not really belong to the shirt,
it belongs to the others that made the shirt, the invisible others who assembled the
fabric, who sewed the seam, who pressed the pleats on various machines. They are
the authors of your performance, which you perform for them as if they had nothing
to do with it. The shirt they made, which they themselves cannot afford to wear,
enables you to perform the number that it represents with confidence to them. You
are permeated and you radiate the denial of the presence of those that made your
shirt, your feeling of quality is assembled from the secret language of things that
masks the others who are hidden in that secret language.
The number is composed of how fast they worked and is composed of how hard
they were squeezed, the number is mainly composed of work that someone has not
done and this is why is must remain the hidden source of the number, the
appearance that this number belongs to the shirt which it speaks to other things and
which you perform is what hides the work of many and the idleness of one of which
your performance is composed.
You are starring in a show called ‘Shirt’ and act your heart out, supported by the
shirt of one thousand dollars that enables you to somersault and flip, almost
weightless. The cinema is set on fire when the audience realize they are not
mentioned in the credits. The circus tent is torn to shreds when the audience realize
that it is they that have added the surplus-value to a fictional weightlessness that
makes it seem like actual freedom”

Happy jerks the knife deeper and lets the Producer slide twitching to the floor.

“Sadly, this is a description of someone who has bought a cheap shirt as much as
someone who has bought an expensive one.” Laughed Happy cleaning his knife.
He blended into the chaotic scene, running hither and thither screaming
hysterically,

“Oh my gaawd, thomeone has thliced up the director…”

Next time they play this scene, they will switch roles, with Happy posing as the
bloated film buff, all hands at the buffet like a sexualized octopus.
That was how it worked in show biz, one day you are the vicious, good-looking
hero, the next you is the schmuck.
 81

MERITOCRACY:

This sets up a circular problem within trying to solve the problem of lost freedom,
within a Circusism that claims it is fully possible, but which hides the fact that calling
it real negates it entirely.

such an analysis of the circus subject might only serve to validate the loss of a
freedom that you have spent your circus energy trying to make real…your
appearance on the couch only serves to show how you are still trying to get
circusism to validate you as a real exponent of freedom production that it claims you
should be and any failing that you experience in this endeavour is felt as a sharp pain
of failure to be satisfied.

I wish to be clear that this is within circusism, and therefore within capital that
Lacanian analysis is complicit in privileging the impasses in circus as the problem of
the subject caught in an impasse of signification, which Circusism relies on as the
circuit of self-negating freedom-production as the project of meritocratising gravity,
but still a impasse that Circusism claims is not there.
That is, the impression that circus is a ‘big other’ from which escape is needed, is
caused by the circuit within signification of desire as lack, and by implication the
circuit of the mirror phase as self signification, becoming schematically installed
within Circusism itself but with no recourse to understand that acknowledgements
of fictional potency of freedom do not have to be entered into the register of
difference to be validated. Without this recourse potential freedom is always
entered into the register that renders innaccessible,which Circusism claims is the
only register that makes it real, the register homologically designated as linguistic
value, exchange-value and mass-value.
It is my feeling that in suggesting that analysis itself becomes the master
other…that subsumes the subject to the gravity of capital…
Simply put, dissatisfaction occurs when the trick is the self-interested attempt to
activate real agency for the subject, rather than the agency to share the fictional
suggestion that there is no agency yet.

Within Circusism there has been much talk of the circus subject evolving through
some kind of analysis to develop a more socially ‘healthy’ form of circus practice,
that does not look to Circus to dictate the form of the act.
Various clinics have been established and programs developed, through which
people can discuss their ‘feelings’ about their particular discipline and to help them
to reach a greater sense of satisfaction in their performance, to find within circusism
not a hegemony but to find their own voice.
To me, this is merely part of the subsumption of Circusism further into the ideology
that privileges the entrepreneurial individual, around which Circusism is organised in
the first place in order to do nothing but stimulate the expansion, reproduction and
circulation of capital. Gravity must not be regarded as a limitless playground, but as an
indifferent, non-negotiable enclosure that wishes to be seen as a totality.
 82

In this regard circusism appears as an analysis through which the act could be
reduced to the simplest and ‘healthiest’ expression of circus possible, so that
freedom from the old stresses and strains of circus might be achieved, as well as the
ensuing acts being demonstrations of actual freedom (a concept that is left
unexposed as necessarily un-registerable within gravity) In this way a circus devoid
of struggle is proposed as gravity is seen as forgiving and a force that will permit the
free expression of your technically entrepreneurial activities.
Alternatively I would suggest that getting good circus technique is like going to see a
good lawyer, it is always best to seek legal advice in the face of the law of gravity that
only wishes to crush you. For your information good circus technique is always the
most legally expedient way to achieve your fictional deposition to the court of gravity.

A critique of the analysis of circus artists within Circusism is only the alignment of a
Deleuzean take on Marx as it sees the linguistic unconscious in question
schematised according to a Lacanian circuit and installed as a freedom-machine for
the reproduction of a gravity within which the subject of Circusism looks for agency.
I am trying to provoke Circusism by provoking a bourgeois therapy located within
something that reinstalls its impasses as the problem of the subject, when these are
the problems of a circus that agrees with capital.
If Lacan and Marx are two points on the circumference of Circusism then my
critique is only the Cosine of the angle between them that relates them both to the
centre.

Mass value is not without a subject but this subject is not the same subject as the
subject of need that is figured by weight-value. It is perhaps the subject of
symptomatic and misplaced desire that is organised around the lack that it creates
as it is subsumed in the overarching fantasy that each circus act is the
demonstration of real freedom. As previously stated this freedom-production is
organised around the reproduction of a freedom that is destroyed as soon as it is
registered as real within gravity. What remains unrevealed by the analysis, is that
the subject within gravity has to remain unprovable, unverifiable in order to be true.
As it operates as Lacan in reverse, it begins with fiction and ends with ‘fact’ that is
unreal, as opposed to its proposed order of beginning with a problematic of an
unreal ‘fact’ that dominates and from which the subject becomes free by realising
the freedom is fictional but in being so is free of having to work as truth.
In seeking to be free the freedom permitted ceases to be a gift to anyone except
capital…

The analysis that probes the problem you feel does not acknowledge that the
problematic feeling comes from Circusism, which constantly insists that the
weightlessness and mobility you feel is the equivalent of real freedom.
In asking you to ‘own’ your weightlessness, it is actually asking you to ‘own’ also
the hidden contradictions within the fusion of incompatible registers that facilitates
circus as freedom-production. It is allowing you to ‘own’ a productive process that
does not benefit you. Circusism is asking you to equate virtual weightlessness with
actual freedom, in order to facilitate the continuation of the impression of gravity as
 83

a limitless and meritocratic field. This largely goes unremarked in analysis as the
problem is only acknowledged as being ‘owned’ by you.

This performance of freedom occurs on a kind of Mobius strip that as you set off in
the direction of liberty you are returned to the point at which you need to re-
validate that liberty, simply because it does not last. This visualising of the trick as a
repeating symptom is not due to the machinery owned by the subject; it is due to
the schematics under which that machinery is installed and which turns the subject
into a franchised owner of the means of ‘freedom’ production. The schematic is that
of Late Circusism, which subsumes the bar of Lacan, and clearly the alienation of
Marx, as sequenced outcomes of lack which return you to the beginning of desire.

In this sense the issue for circus is not to give up the ‘symptom’ of circus but to re-
evaluate the practice of circus as the sharing of a form of fiction that can and should
address the structures within capitalism that propel this fiction to falsely validate
itself as a form of ecstatic, narcissistic freedom over and over again. It is the
enclosure of capital that installs the desiring machine according to the schematic of
Lacan.

The return to the trick is systemised by it needing to become real freedom,

supposedly as a ‘real’ currency paid as a wage for desiring freedom.
The answer is not to analyse people away from tricks, this is just another version of
the theatre director who tells the circus artist that the trick simply does not fit with
the overarching narrative, which in this case is that freedom is real because capital is
real, because the individual within the narrative of these ideas is real.
What is needed here is to reinvest in trick-making as a fictional demand for
freedom directed at the range of institutions and legal entities that may prevent
such mobility, rather than indulging further the voice that says, “circus just does not
seem to satisfy me anymore”
The point here is that circus needs artists who care less about themselves than
they do about the audience. Analysing circus artists is a certain indication that this is
not the case. We need to return to the trick, but as a form of fictional demand
enacted by fictional bodies, who wish to galvanise action, not receive validation.

Capital as Circusism creates selfish and narcissistic circus artists because the
audience have to be exploited through the power they have to produce enough
surplus value that can then be fetishized into an intrinsic quality of the trick and the
trick-maker as legitimate freedom-production.

As long as circus is the activity of equivalent freedom-production, that it seems

eager to be, and not relative fictional-demand-research, this exploitation will be
necessary for the circus artist to operate as the capitalistic owner of weightlessness
production, and the therapy that she will need to undergo will result from the
dwindling satisfaction gained from the falling rate of profit of that exploitation.

Freedom production is the circusism solution to the falling rate of profit of gravity
designed to falsely validate bodies of zero-mass value as ‘free’ within restriction,
 84

just as desiring production is the capitalist solution to a falling rate of profit, that
validates social mobility within a neoliberal area.

Basically I feel this kind of analysis is only true when we are within the gravity field
of capital anyway. That is, within circusism, it is only to facilitate the continuation of
the bourgeois self-interested circus subject, who looks for freedom for themselves
as a project of changing the world, this is apolitical nonsense, that has facilitated the
self interest that capitalism considers to be the ideal formula for its expansion
anyway.

“This is preposterous. Circusism is one of the biggest advances in democratisation in

decades and it goes against all the tenets of faceless capitalism at its very core.” The
professor of economics had a tight wire act.
“Only a true cynic could claim that the free expression of the fact that everyone
has got something to offer, something unique, would even illicit the need for
therapy. I refute that such circus therapies exist and I refute your implication that
Circusism is some evil plot to imply a false freedom. We are free here, we can say
and do as we please…open your eyes, Mr Down-River.”
His balancing act was performed above a pit of wild bears.

Cut to riots in which hippies are being blown to bits by state troopers…flower
children are going up in chunks in a maelstrom of lead shot, paisley and chopped
liver.
Oh Summer, oh my, all the leaves are brown… we must turn inward…from hippie to
yuppie…oh you baby boomers…etc etc… Happy snapped out of his reverie.

Happy had his own leaflets:

Do not talk in circles. Do not look to each other's floundering in the waves of
meaning for comfort. Language is the act of two people who are drowning trying to
hold onto each other
What meaning do you need. There is nothing to be done. If circus is anything it is
the examination of how inanimate objects deal with change

If you do not know which way to turn, look at the rocks look at the stones and trees.
Look at the sky and try to learn how to deal with loss.
Every thing reaches for space to expand to be in control, nothing is not
disappointed.

In answer to your concerns I can only say this. Circus therapies are a hidden
acknowledgement of what is programmed into freedom production. Circusism is
designed to make you feel dissatisfied with what it asks you to produce. It is hidden
precisely because the impasse to self-signification within circus is seen as a
fundamental fault with circus that does not understand the impasses within
signification that the subject needs to overcome. What is not acknowledged openly
is that this incapacity to facilitate self signification is its proximity to the ideologies
of capitalism that place your dissatisfaction with your trick in exactly the same
 85

configuration with your dissatisfaction with your commodity. In schematising the

trick as for self-interest, that is, as a production of fiction that you get paid for in its
realisation, the circus subject is only in the dissatisfaction of the consumer who
realises that they are not made free by consuming this or that fetishized object, but
without realising that this is exactly because circus and they themselves within it are
in the exact same configuration with circus as they are with capitalism, self
interestedly producing for personal gain, chasing a chimera agency that is actually
only freedom production schematised according to the Lacanian circuit. Turning to
this circuit for validation that circus is against their agency, is missing the point
entirely…this circuit is already installed, you have just been following how it is
iterated through circus that agrees with the capitalism that installed it…what we
need here is the recapture of circus ability to not act self interestedly
Circus is not the big other here, capitalism is. Circus can continue, it is made into a
symptom of dissatisfaction in its proximity. The provocation here is to address this…
Basically that circus is seen as a symptom from which we need to be cured is
ignorant of the fact that circus is not for the artist, it is for the public. People actually
need circus; whether you feel good all the time in doing it or not is wholly irrelevant.
What is legitimised in Circusism, and its attendant analysis that legitimises its self-
interested nature, is the belief that the trick should profit you something, otherwise,
why do it at all?
Why do you think the bourgeoisie are in therapy, because they no longer get
pleasure out of ripping off the poor?

‘I’m sorry but you are only saying that circus is not a big other but simultaneously
saying that it is…which is it?’

“I will come back to it, I am not saying Lacan is not true…I am saying that the
analysis has become complicit in capitalism and is used to analyse circus that is
complicit in capitalism, to solve a symptom that I feel is the inevitable result of such
complicity, at some point you would think that circus might address this. Well,
perhaps this is the hidden provocation within such analysis…that is possible also.”

Happy knew he had gone too far. Certain members of the crowd were leaving,
whilst others who had invested a lot in trying to get better E-Meter Readings on the
Circusism Clapometer simply stared abjectly at their shoes…

“This is all very well Dr Down River, but what are you then proposing…that circus
should no longer say that it is producing freedom…what about the tens of
thoussands of artists that gain pleasure from the moment of weightlessness? Are
they just selfish…?”

“No of course not, there is nothing wrong in taking pleasure in the throwing a stone
at the authority of gravity. But if the pleasure is derived from merely doing what you
are told and pretending that the pleasure derives from a kind of transgression then
there is a problem of truth. I am merely trying to analyse the area within which
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fiction so easily becomes fact. Circus seems to be this area, and society that has
adopted this ridiculous circusism even more so. We are in an area where FICTION is
forgotten to be not real. To remain as potentiality.”

Let us change tack a little here…It is all about complicity in the end , and self
deception. A self deception can be when you are producing according to an abstract
knowledge of which you have no awareness other than a button-presser. But fetish
or fiction, I will address the difference between the circus artist who fools
themselves and the circus artist who fools the audience in a little while…

For now we could move on to the idea of FICTION itself…

ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FICTION AND overarching FICTION:

***I am saying this to be clear about the distinction between a fiction of

weightlessness referred to earlier in the trick. I will define this as fiction precisely
because a moment in which no forces are acting on a body is not the same as that
body being outside of gravity, just as a free man in a story is still in a book, on a
bookshelf, in a dictatorship…or not…maybe…
…but you understand this is the fiction I refer to in the circus trick but there is also
an overarching fiction of conflation that ignores this basic and vital distinction
between a moment of no forces, and an actual escape.
In this sense an overarching fiction relates to Circusism as an area dominated by
the phenomenon of post-factism, which I will define as the over-arching fiction that
fiction can become fact.
In a Marxist sense it might be thought of as not-knowing that you do not know
that something is not as it appears, and so is an overarching fetishisation, which is
the familiar idea perhaps of hyper-reality or virtual reality that now forms an overlay
as a capitalist realism.
This is a conflation then of the registers and as similar to fetishisation in Marx, in
which a fiction prevails that the exchange-value that is communicated between
commodities is a language that is intrinsic to those commodities, and not derived
from the relative, antagonistic relations of production but instead is proof of a real
and lasting equivalence between things, that can be reflected in the money-form.
This is of course the well-worn argument that the money-form itself is the
prevailing fiction that there is compatibility between the registers of use and
exchange, between labour and wage. A Circusism that claims to produce real
freedom is then in the vicinity of this prevailing fiction.
The money form is the final seal on the obscuration of the real relations of
production, within which the money-form itself becomes complicit as wages. Thus
the worker is paid in the denial of the conditions under which he or she labours.

APOLITICAL LUMPS:

Hence what appears as not known here is that what exists in one register cannot be
conveyed in another register that is fundamentally incompatible to it. This is what is
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not known in the fetish, that one thing cannot hold the other, but is held there
through the operation of a knowledge of its presence that does not reveal the real
relations of its presence beneath. In this sense Marx prefigures Lacan’s signifier…

I have referred to this ‘not knowing’ as the ‘over-arching fiction’ that promotes the
idea that fiction is as good as fact. This form of post-factism or Alt-Truth making is
related to commodity fetishism as a critical point in Marx. It also relates to the idea
of making desire ‘come true’ within capitalism, which within the project of desiring-
production, production and commodification are switched to render fictional
appearances as viable market data. In this more elusive sense relative fiction is
fetishized as equivalent fact.

What am I saying about the circus artist who cannot tell the difference between real
and fake in a post real double-bind of Circusism, where freedom is contradictorily
mandatory?

In fetishizing the weightless body as a free body, a register is referred to that cannot
support either the qualitative notion nor privilege the subject that might experience
such an affective occurrence.

“ Another important shift concerns the relation between knowledge and fetishism.
While the colonial use of fetishism is undoubtedly rooted in the simple opposition
between knowledge and ignorance, Marx and Freud introduced a new form of
knowledge, which reaches beyond the cognitive framework of the ideological use of
fetishism: knowledge that does not know itself, to repeat Lacan’s reformulation of the
concept of the unconscious. Even if it would be exaggerated to search for the discovery
of the unconscious in Marx, the form of unknown knowledge is at least indicated in his
apparently marginal remark, which resumes the fetishist projection, “they do not know
it, nevertheless they do it”: the colonialist ideologues did not know that the knowledge
they produced of the ‘primitive Other’ reflected their own relation to commodities,
money and capital…”

(Tomsic, S (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious Verso. London pp159)

There is a similar denial of the present condition in which circus artists are the
‘colonists’ of the territory of gravity. They strike out in the pursuit of ‘freedom’ and
metaphorically locate the ridiculous fetishes of money and self-interested gain that
they challenge in that gravity as false idols; and as reflections of a primitive system
to which they are opposed and arranged in an ‘honest’, self-aware physicality.
In locating the fetish of the capitalist as not in the same arena of knowledge, I feel
the circus artists repeat the fetish that they seek to exclude from their practice.
There is almost the reversal of the original 19th century colonialist gaze here in
which the circus artist’s mute, brute physicality assumes the revelationary position
of Marx by impersonation of the ‘primitive’ on their behalf, (ignoring the fact that
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the history of circus is tied exactly to a colonial definition of the exotic and
dangerous) to demonstrate the self-awareness of the body as opposed to the
fetishized unknowing of the civilised observer.
In defining the primitive and the civilised in the same space, the circus artist re-
performs the fetishisation of a space that can hold a body that is immune to
literalisation and that is immune to knowledge that is not known. The critical point
of accusing the other of fetishisation, actually fetishizes a space that presumes to be
in a meta-positioning in relation to the unknown knowledge.
The ‘unknowing’ capitalist is included within the same space as ‘not belonging’;
the space itself that can both include the capitalist and exclude him is a
fetishisation.
Tomsic goes on to note:

“The central operation of fetishism is this internally doubled operation of inclusive

exclusion and exclusive inclusion. The only place from which it is possible to assume the
fantasmatic metaposition. “

(Tomsic, 2015)

I am claiming then that the post-factism at work in Circusism that fetishizes fiction
as fact is such a metaposition, as it occurs in a space that claims to be beyond
fetishism itself.

As claiming to be freedom production, a knowledge is claimed of gravity that masks

only what is clearly not known, that the moment of weightlessness is a moment
when there are currently no forces acting on the body, this is not the same as being
free of gravity, which would imply a meta-position outside of a register of mass-
value that cannot permit a mass-value of zero, ironically there is simply no space for
something that occupies no space. There is no meta-position for a commodity of
zero-value in the market, why should gravity be any different.

Oh I never knew that you never knew that I did not know that you never knew I
never knew…

In terms of Circusism, I will seek to demonstrate how this denial exists in the
applause that freedom-production generates within circusism. But this is further
complicated by the practice versus performance of circus; the iteration of private
and public execution of the trick. As I will show later.

By way of an anecdotal remark I do not refer enough to Freud I feel. I once knew a
man who was unable to say the name of Freud without first vomiting and then
shaking uncontrollably, he was of course incurable of this condition, and nobody at
the time could discern why.

In terms of fetishisation, which mask the real relations of production, (ie defined as
a fiction that does not admit it is a fiction) then within Circusism the act of
production of weightlessness has its real status as the production of relative value,
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that is relative to the body, the conditions, the equipment, the trick, the audience,
the presentation etc conflated into the equivalent value that necessarily falsely
implies that it, as actual escape from restriction, the priceless artefact of genuine
freedom, can be entered into the market of gravity; a market that is entirely
incompatible with its reading.

ZERO MASS-VALUE IS UNSALEABLE:

As stated a mass-value of zero is impossible within the field of gravity, as

impossible as a free commodity in the market.

NO ONE IS ‘BUYING’ THIS FREEDOM:

In this sense gravity as a market is entirely unsuitable for the valuation of the
pricelessness of weightlessness, and yet Circusism, in its deference to capitalist
modes of fetishisation recast the circus body as intrinsically possessed of the mass-
value of zero, (that is supposed actual freedom) which is actually produced by the
hidden artist of circus, who is merely the writer of fiction of freedom, and who, in
doing so, is actually possibly demanding freedom.
The hidden writer demands, the actor is apparently free. Thus the ‘freedom-
production’ in operation in Circususm is nothing more or less than a ‘freebie’ that
promotes the continuation of consumption in the name of capitalism.
In the sense that the artist who writes fiction is denied in favour of the artist who
embodies actual freedom, then the artist’s power to make demands for change
through fiction is nullified.
The real fiction is thus over-arching, nothing is real. Circus adopts this well,
preferring to think of itself as another realm where anything is possible when in fact
it just repeats the mythification of the world it purports to abandon.

What occurs I believe in a system that equates this momentary weightlessness with
freedom, is first to refer to various irrelevant Romantic notions tied into the
qualification of nobility as an impossible struggle, a Sysiphic endeavour, and second
to perform exactly the same conflation of registers as occurs within capitalism.
In fetishizing the circus body as free, the practice of circus ceases to be political as
it merely states freedom is currently possible, therefore no politics is needed.

Freedom is entered into the register of mass-value.

Being a subject-less register, indifferent to and autonomous from the subject this
implies that if the subject is ‘literalised’ in this way, in its reduction to a set order of
horizontally related values, it is ‘read’ not as a subject but only as a subject
evaluated as a mass-value in terms of another mass-value.

Freedom here is actually just apolitical lumps moving around.

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THE PROMENADE:

How has freedom gone so wrong? Exactly how is freedom, a desireable outcome for
the subject, performed as the opposite of what it denotes?
I wish to look here briefly at the bourgeois promenade, which I feel is similarly a
reading of the body that does not acknowledge, in a similar fashion to circusism, the
real relations of meaning production that underlie it. In that the promenade was the
walk of a class that was formed from exploitation in order to achieve the
individuality required to then perform such a promenade…
What is addressed here is that what the circus artist does not know they are doing
in presenting freedom-production, is similar to what the 19th century stroller did not
know they were doing. Here I am addressing how this kind of activation of an
ideology, the real relations of which are unknown to you, is a kind of unwitting
practice in which an ideology you do not believe in is activated through your action
which is based on an theory that is constructed as a mask for that antithetical
ideology.
A fetishized praxis perhaps…frexis?...pratish?

So what is looked at here is, just as a trick can be both transgressive and also act to
install normative structures, so praxis can be unwittingly organised to install
enclosure: This is how I see circus as freedom production, as a praxis based on the
installation of an endless enclosure, that is the spatialisation of an unknown
knowledge.

In answer to the question…how is the performance of weightlessness tied to the

production of freedom.

Answering this question is of course also tied to answering how similar to revolution
is the trick, and how much can its iteration as rupture be captured to actually install
the perpetuation of restriction and continuity rather than the exposure of an
inoperable potentiality for liberty.

The performance of a trick within Circusism at this time is ‘read’ as exactly the
opposite, the reality of freedom, but in the insistence that it is more than fiction,
more than a fraction of fact, it is performed actually as the expansion of capital to
include that reality, rather than allowing that performance to imply that the system
within which it is fictionalised is drastically compromised.
What is simultaneously refuted and confirmed is the impossibility of a meta-
position.
In order to look at this question we can turn to the idea of praxis through lukacs.

Here the rationale is that of social choreography…simply put , certain gestural

performances within the social space are linked to the installation of ideology that
both informs that gesture as praxis, and then as praxis ensues, that ideological
position is reinforced.…so in regard to the instance of the 19th century promenade.
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If we look at praxis and the idea that the philosophical problem is really an
abstraction of a social problem, then Marx is geared toward action, toward the
revolution that will change the conditions of this philosophical abstraction.
Praxis here is designed to activate a change in the structure of the apparatus that
forms the legitimisation of the old order. But what of the performances that take
shape in the world that are the praxis of hegemony, surely they are more prevalent?
Of course the loop is active, ideology is performed that shores up ideology.

So first then to re-figure Marxist critique against such a physical binding situation as
gravity is not so strange. There are real binds here, the attitudes to which form the
fallacious production of freedom. This is the situation that I am positing as the
concrete conditions to which Marx is relevant.
It is a praxis of the trick. But as this becomes a critique of Circusism so it must
become a critique of the trick iterated to shore up the hegemony of gravity.

What I simply want to highlight here is how just as any ideology can be posited by
the trick so also any ideology can be activated as praxis. These are not just
revolutionary modes. Circus needs to get over this. The trick is equally able to
propose neoliberalism as itinerant, freethinking nomadism.

Within Adorno is the idea of succession and within this ,

“ that praxis is rupture…that it exposes limits…not seeing the evolution past limits
as the continuation of a thinking nascent within the formal system of restriction.”

(Althusser, L (2005) For Marx. Verso. London pp78)

So in this understanding of Marx, there is rupture where Hegel sees continuity.

What is referenced here for me is that within the idea is not necessarily its logical
unfolding towards its natural destiny according to its own inherent tenets as Hegel
would posit, but that the idea contains a schematic for its own rupture…this for me
would be a definition of the trick that exposes limits, it has to rupture something.
In this sense even the calm logic that faces itself constructed by Gödel causes
rupture as provability is ruptured leaving truth intact.
In this sense the trick as rupture and as revolutionary are the same.

The praxis here is the enactment of the trick that stems from the idea of gravity as
the cause of a philosophical problem, (which is why I am calling for weightlessness
to be measured outside the terms of gravity)
And so the trick that exposes, and is therefore inherently Anti-Circusism, seeks to
fictionally propose a question of rupture, “What if gravity were not here.”

The rupture of gravity does not call for a continuation of the logical destiny of
gravity, that within the hegemony of Circusism it becomes the only market within
which freedom can be measured, because it would imply that the seed of gravity’s
own destiny lie within it, upon the terms that inhere therein.
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Rupture seeks to expose the terms as flawed, through elements internal to gravity
yes, but which reveal potencies that are only perceivable outside of gravity’s field.

The continuation of gravity according to its supposed inherent qualities of

limitlessness and meritocracy as presented by Circusism supposedly implies a future
in which seven billion circus artists will all being able to enact tricks for a profit of
individuality within gravity, able to perform weightlessness as the production of
actual freedom.

In this regard being able to activate a supposedly true freedom within gravity
acknowledges gravity as insurmountable but fair.
The only evolution that is possible for the circus artist is to change his or her own
perception of what is real as gravity is immutable and irrefutable, this is the
beginning of post factism…the only recourse in the face of this unending future of
gravitational pull is to start believing that freedom is possible within it.
As gravity now seems as unstoppable as capital, the only recourse is to avoid
rupture, which would be the end of reality itself, and to propose tricks that
fantastically become real freedom within the inevitability of limitless gravity.
But the call here is for the trick to speak of rupture that circus might be free of the
condition that renders it liable to always speak of profit.
It speaks of profit at the behest of gravity that needs to appear limitless.

In this sense I am asking circus to perform tricks that ask also, “What if capitalism
were not there?”

Perhaps the lumps could engage with politics?

Here happy nods to a future idea of value time… unknown knowledge?

“As a side note, it may be that some overall more effective trick needs to be
pronounced that can cause even a rupture of the equivocity of the trick.
Perhaps there is a trick to rupture its necessity to remain as a fictional escape to be
able to say anything useful.

As long as the trick is possible to be spoken for profit and individual self interested
gain then perhaps another trick against gravity must be sought; one that looks for a
more fundamental rupture that can be constructed out of the system that renders
the trick as something that can be spoken of as either to expose or to conceal limits.
That is the question, is there a trick that cannot be turned back on itself to form the
unwitting praxis that iterates the opposite of what it meant?”

“Here here…” Happy was startled by the enthusiasm with which the same young
woman picked up on his aside.

So here if I can return to the promenade; we have discussed the fact that any
performance of gesture can be read as an ideological choreography, and the trick is
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no different, being able to be read as the installation of rupture or of unending

dialectical procession of internal logic that can only endlessly perpetuate itself.

So that although Marx has highlighted how praxis is the mode of revolutionary
action; it can obviously also, as with other ‘tricks’, be subverted to install ideologies
of restriction also.

For instance, in the way that a ‘promenade’ demonstrated a social class; this is an
action, a praxis formed as the activation of an ideological position. This can just as
easily serve not the rationale of a subjective ideological position, but serve as the
reinforcement of a subject-less autonomy that is even indifferent to the subject who
performs the reinforcement of it. This is what I believe we have here in Circusism,
circus artists gesturing the endlessness of gravity.

There was a gasp of disapproval…he glanced at the Dean, who nevertheless

gestured him to elaborate, albeit with a pleading look on his face. Happy felt
however that he was going to continue regardless…

In this sense the question of whether the trick is revolutionary is the same as asking
is the gesture of freedom of movement always an indication of true freedom? The
answer is no.
The subject matter covered in Hewitt’s book is vast and the references that he
goes onto elucidate in relation to the bourgeois promenade are wide reaching;
ranging from the issue of the demise of the legibility of bourgeois gesture, a loss of
meaning, to the return of the repressed as expressed in involuntary gesture perhaps
caused by the rigidity of such choreographed ideological meanings in relation to
their increasing meaninglessness for the subject that performs them.
This I feel refers to a falling rate of profit of sorts that also afflicts the gesture of
circus ‘freedom’ which leads to the complexity of its supposed and frenzied iteration
as freedom from all norms; which I call the gesture of ‘no limits’, which is largely the
gesture of capitalism anyway.

“Are you calling for a re-imposition of borders then, in your fear of a limitless
society? Are you against the free movement of the individual?”

No, I am merely noting that in the face of a falling rate of meaning, what else can
freedom-production do except install itself as the compulsory performance of
individuality directly into the subject. I am for free movement, I am just against free
movement that falsely advertises enclosure. If I were to couch it as an individual…l it
is more of a trade descriptions issue.

Very droll…but I am concerned that in decrying all attempts at the genuine

expression of freedom as hypocritical, you are merely re-inscribing the problem of
post-ideology.

“Hmmmm, I understand, but I am only decrying fiction that believes itself to be the
equivalent of fact… I still believe in the power of fiction, that acknowledges itself as
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pure fiction, as inoperable and therefore as potentiality that is not for sale, as it is
‘freedom not yet.’

“But as a researcher how can you be so sure? What are you setting out here, a
doctrine?”

“Look… it is not compulsory for research to disprove your intuition. Is that a law? I
have posed many arguments to myself in the course of this research and these
represent the very real doubts I have about the veracity of my ideas…but it is not
written anywhere that new knowledge has to refute what you previously felt
intuitively. I do not have to arrive through research at uncertainty…I live
uncertainty…every gesture, every word, is uncertain in an uncertain context, in an
uncertain time.
It is not compulsory for me to find I was wrong.”

“Maybe you should have listened to the arguments you have claimed to pose to
yourself more carefully. Perhaps these are the fictions you should heed?”

Happy smiled, “I assure you they do not go unheeded.”

The point I wish to draw out here is that the gesture of weightlessness carries
meaning and its capture within freedom production is the staving off of the erosion
of ‘meaning’ that capital is subject to as it operates similarly detached from its
referent and yet contradictorily reliant on that detachment.

What I ‘mean’ is that its installation as a concrete meaning; that of meaning true
freedom now, is exactly the attempt to remedy the erosion of meaning attendant
upon capital as an environment of post-fact, precisely as an area of temporarily
reterritorialised flows, where anything can mean anything.

“I wish to suggest that the bourgeois culture has always been troubled by the
(im)possibility of embodying itself. Seeking to codify itself in a series of appropriate
and acceptable gesture and manners, bourgeois culture always risked reducing itself
to mere code, undercutting the naturalising legitimacy it sought in the bodily
language of gesture.”

Hewitt, A. ‘Social Choreography’. Duke University Press. 2005. P80

The quote here is not just to highlight how an ideology that is of no use to a subject
can be gesturally installed over and over as a praxis of an ideology that is essentially
subject-less; but also to suggest that the extremity of gesture within Circusism is
this still desperate search for a gestural code of bourgeois neoliberal individualism.
That is I see the ‘promenade’ as 19th century indifferent colonial capitalism out for a
stroll rather than what it purports to be, which is the stabilisation of a subject of
wealth within a social fabric of rights of ownership.
Likewise I see circus as something other than it purports to say.
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As a rationale for a movement holding an ideological content. That is, how does
weightlessness and mobility end up being ‘read’ as freedom?

This connection between ideology (abstract) and gesture (concrete) that is

referenced here in Hewitt plots the development of a repertoire of bourgeois
gesture focusing on the walk or promenade as a social ‘levelling’, as well as a coded
deportment as one mingles with the ‘hoi polloi’ to mark your difference…Ideology
as repeatable difference in the body language.
The promenade is enacted to legitimise the position of a class that is located in a
stratified and exploitative mechanism of colonial capitalism (capitalism has always
enacted the rapaciousness that is now felt by the poor at home, it was previously
just hidden away in the colonies)

In this sense a coded form of chorea takes shape in the world as the set of
restrictions to bodily movement that are then legible as status symbols of a
capitalist class.

The point here in relation to circus is this fetishised chorea is the concrete activation
of the abstract ideology that legitimises Circusism within Capitalism as the display
of ‘genuine’ freedom, in the same way that the walk and its associated
comportment was a display of the genuine legitimacy of exploitative colonial
capitalism. The two societies are very different, and the gestural range could not be
more so, but the fact that an unwitting praxis is the legibility of ideology that masks
the real relations of production is the same. Equally those who do well in Circusism
gesturally mark their superiority to the ‘hoi polloi’.
It is interesting to think of the extreme physicality within circus as a form of
neoliberal comportment or ‘manners’.

The trick in Circusism ‘means’ freedom, but causes no freedom as Circusism is the
trick that negates it through inclusion. This is a problem as no freedom occurs.
In this I find exactly a grand metaphor for what is iterated through capital, that its
apparently free vertical detachment has to, absolutely has to return to the
horizontality of the enclosure within exchange value, whilst perpetuating its
apparent fluidity.”

He felt as if he should be banging his fist upon the lectern for emphasis but the
context, the concerned looks somehow made him resist.

“Within the description of the promenade, the body’s legibility is coded to

‘naturalise’ the exploitative tenets of hard capitalism that place individuals in this
bourgeois strata. The performance of ‘manners’ legitimise you as someone who is
wealthy ‘by rights’, rather than by luck (that is at the ‘whim’ of the markets) and by
exploitation of wage-labour (or even slave-labour).
Thus a gestural performance of manners is complicit in the masking of the real
relations of production.
 96

The manners of circusism, being already cast as the proof of the possibility of
freedom within capital, serve in a similar fashion to hide the real relations of
production of capital that are categorically not in the service of the subject that
performs freedom, and the real relations of production through which an audience
member’s labour-power of watching is exploited to render profit to the subject that
performs freedom, which is the fabrication of the free individualism of the circus
artist owner.

WHO IS FOOLING WHOM?

What is interesting here is that through the confusion over ownership of means of
freedom production, the circus subject is both the exploited worker AND the owner.
This is then a situation within desiring-production also in which the subject is
choreographed to desire what they feel that they genuinely desire, the desire is real,
but the realisation of that desire becomes the praxis of an ideology that is not
organised around the fulfilment of that desire.

Perhaps the difference between these modes, where the performer exploits
themselves and the performer exploits the audience is the difference between the
fantasy of ownership of freedom production, and the fantasy of ownership of
meaning production of freedom that I can engage others to operate for my benefit.
In that in the private practice I think I own the means to produce weightlessness as
freedom, and in public I own the means to produce the meaning of weightlessness
as freedom.

There is also the acknowledgement here that philosophies bound to the primacy of
self-interested forces find themselves able to ‘take shape in the world’ as the body
becomes a conveyance for signification, and specifically for the signification of the
way capital stratifies the socius, and insists upon itself as the container for anything
the subject might desire.
Put another way, Post-Factism is freedom, because performance of a thing is a
thing. The enclosure forgets itself as your performance gets more and more real
through this forgetting, because the ‘making real’ of your performance makes post-
factism more ‘real’; more unknowing of its own forgetting.
Just as a well-mannered promenade makes other well-mannered walks more
possible and the possibility for more gesturing to make more room for more
gesturing to become real. Capital as a kind of evolution of class is expanded the
more deportment is performed.

“But isn’t this the simple suspension of disbelief that is necessary for the fiction you
privilege to occur?”

“No, I am only interested in fictions that acknowledge themselves in some way…”

intoned Happy, “It is vital that there is a forgetting for a fiction to operate, but there
has to be a remembering also so that the fiction can become a demand upon the
remembered world. In telling you a story I would expect you to recall that I am
telling it and not become utterly convinced that the interior of my story was now the
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world you inhabit. The frisson between what is fictional and what is real is the art
that has a potentiality to demand change to the actual world that contains my story.
So it might be said that the bourgeois gesture of the walk might be considered a
praxis in that it is a negative praxis that reinforces the restrictive ideology, or forgive
me, the gravity.

Please note that I do not wish to form a moral dimensionality here in designating it
as a ‘negative praxis’, I am merely concerned with identifying action based on theory
that is not to the benefit of the actor as being therefore ‘negative’; in that it is the
process of fetishisation: the activation of a praxis based on a knowledge that is not
known. In the same sense that consumption due to cathexis is negative praxis.

Within our look at the circus subject as both worker and owner of means there is, as
Deleuze and Gauttari suggest an entire factory of the unconscious at work here,
subsumed by its semio-capitalist context to be in the service of capital.

Because we are examining the iteration of the trick as rupture then we have to
note that the trick performed within a post fact area becomes a device through
which this post-fact ideology is perpetuated as a gravitational force through this
negative praxis rather than the application of another kind of gestural code that
might call in to question such a restriction…
In this sense it might be possible to use this simple example of social choreography
as an example of the two kinds of trick I am referring to:

One of exposing, remembering, demanding fiction, where the extreme physicality

demands freedom not yet here.

One of concealing, forgetting, aquiescence couched as the successful attainment of

actual freedom.

The interesting point is the technique is the same, it is the ground upon which the
technique is acknowledged to occur that is different. The presentation of circus is
complex but here we are discussing the interaction between a tautological
technique and how it might avoid negation as it is performed on a tautological
ground.

Statement: Good trick and bad trick happens.

Just as good praxis (that sees succession not as continuation but as rupture, a switch
of registers, an exposure of the different parameters of different registers) and bad
praxis (the installing of external problems in internal ideological or philosophical
conundrums…such as the complicity between signification and commodification
leading to the legitimization of an analysis that is complicit within capitalism but
operates by never acknowledging its complicity.)
The tautological conundrums and double binds of an ideology of post ideological
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and depoliticized late capitalist neoliberalism are structural supports that enable the
linguistic binds of an unconscious structured like a language to become true as
increasingly semiotics and commodity fetishism accelerate to leave the subject
alienated from the looped consumption from which they construct themselves.

Statement: You are free to have no agency.

Because Lacan becomes ironically true within the machinic iteration of desiring-
production. By which I mean, what he spies in language becomes true for capital,
but as a method by which capital repeats itself. What is needed is simply to perform
for the audience demands for freedom, not displays of extraordinary individualism.

As for circus; a trick that relies on a register that negates the agency of the subject
as the only proof of freedom, shows how the rupturing capability of the trick
mechanism can equally, in a tautological context, only lead to a continuum of
capture. The binds demonstrated to derive from the understanding of desire
through lack are made to be the only conception of desire ironically by the
systemization of desiring-production that is conceived originally as one mode of not
thinking desire through lack.
The necessity to look at circus as a compulsion or symptom is arrived at through its
location within the trick of systemized desiring production that makes such loops of
unending drive toward impossibilities of self-signification the only ‘truth’ of the
subject within circus.

ANALYSIS IS ONLY TRUE WITHIN LATE CIRCUSISM, within which the self-
interested circus subject is concerned that the agency they thought they were
gaining is merely illusory and impossible to grasp. This is true, but because circus is
organized around freedom production not political demand.
What you need to undo the subject in capital is the subject you find in capital.

Praxis can be used as a continuation as well as a rupture, in which the circus gesture
IS a symptom, but it points to a real problem in the way Circusism agrees with late
capitalism more than it points to circus as a big other with regressive master
signifiers. I would suggest that those regressive signifiers are part of the capitalism
that spawned the circus and which circus in its head in the sand romanticism is still
not willing to address, finding instead that forms of circus therapy are the answer to
the actual social problems that circus reiterates. I am trying to show that these ideas
can be thought through the central unit of practice. The trick.

…in fact the enactment of the individual through rejection of external control and
through deconstructive tricks complicates the praxis of revolution as it forms a
method of continuation of a bind…previously I have explained it as because the
tautological trick is enacted on an already tautological ground engineered around
the self-interested subject performing self-interested gestures of escape that mask
the conundrum.
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As discussed in relation to the 19th century ‘promenade’, an unwitting praxis may

install that which does not operate primarily for the one who performs the praxis.

Why is this important for circus? Because it highlights how the freedom displayed
has become factualised and therefore is the counter-productive praxis that is the
activation of an ideology of enclosure that needs to appear endless.
In regard then to praxis as the activation of subjectless ideology, how does such an
activation become comfortably performed by the subject in the belief that it is the
genuine subjective expression of their own desire.
It is not in question that circus artists desire to appear free, the question is how does
the deceit, that only falsely reinforces gravity as unrestrictive and negotiable in the
supposed actualisation of freedom, feel like the expression of the circus subject’s
desire? How do they own it?

The next issue I wish to discuss is the ownership of the means of production of
weightlessness.

So in relationship to the idea of that which is performed of which you have no

knowledge, that reinforces an ideology that does not have your best interest at
heart, there follows an idea of ownership.
Central to the antagonism in Marx is the conflict of interests between those that
own nothing except labour-power and those that wn the means of production and
how each pushes against the other. Within the concept of desiring production has
been discussed the overcoming perhaps of antagionism, not by negotiation but by
the over-arching fetish in which one’s production is felt to be directed and managed,
that is ‘owned’ according to your own needs.
In desiring unknowingly according to a schematic not organised for your gain, you
are given ownership of a means of production that produces that which is not in
your own interest. The antagonism is hidden even at the site of labour.

So then we move on here to ownership in terms of how desiring-production infers

you are the owner whilst barring you from that which you produce from what your
‘ownership’

Let us look at ownership in these terms…so that the ‘superposition’ of ownership in

which you are permitted to own a method of producing that which you cannot
possess, can also be understood in terms of what I am calling freedom-production in
Circusism.

One of the illusory freedoms is this appearance of ownership.

I am saying that within this false construct, in direct contravention of the
uncertainty in gravity, capital and language, you are free to produce a freedom that
cannot exist upon the terms of its validation, which only serves to shore up the idea
that the enclosure within which such freedom is supposedly possible is meritocratic
and limitless.
Rather than allowing the production of a free mobility that tells’ of an externality
to gravity.
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The enclosure is validated as endless by this performance of freedom, but the

freedom felt by the subject is the only thing that is left uncertain, this is Circusism.

FURTHER TO OWNERSHIP:

IN CAPITAL:
To return to the mechanism within late capitalism; the illusion of ownership is subtly
inferred by the responsibility the subject has for the production of their own desire

Desire produces itself, in the loop that Lacan highlights, in which desire causes lack
which causes desire, this self repeating symptom of desiring production is exactly
the mechanism that as stated capital uses to overcome its internal limit of a falling
rate of profit. Such a machine loop is the investement of the capitalist, but within
the trick of desiring –production becomes the schematised production of
production according to the inhalation/exhalation of desire/lack…an iron lung of
consumption.

Lacan in Capital…Knot-True.
To be clear here I will resort to a Lacanian frame in order to picture perhaps how the
subject is alienated from themselves through the trick performed according to the
discourse of gravity, but as explained it is a frame that I feel is made active by the
context of capital. Here Lacan is useful in describing an impasse that I feel is true in
the context of capital, which is necessarily the nature of the impasse as it is now
wholly our inescapable reality.
In saying I feel Lacan becomes true in capital is not to say he will become untrue
after ‘the revolution’, this is nonsense. Capital is as an insurmountable autonomy as
is language, this is what I mean, but the corollary is that this does not make Lacan’s
designation of desire as lack true.
However the fact that a loop of desire based on lack is ideal as a consumer trap
does not necessarily mean Lacan is not correct in demonstrating the impasse which
his analysis rightly seeks to address.

IN LANGUAGE:
To place this, albeit simplistically, in a linguistic frame; here Lacanian analysis
attempts a more Marxian liberation of the subject from the production of
signification owned by the other, and here the other is the big other of language
itself. In highlighting that this problem is installed in the nature of language, in
which the subjects ontology is embedded; unfortunately then the only free subject
here is a fictional one…

…or rather than this only seems to be a responsibility of ownership as actually Lacan
highlights that in part the symptom is due to the masking of the real relations of
production and the installation of the impasses inherent within any linguistic
production, which is that in order to communicate we are beholden to a system that
is not primarily communicative but primarily concerned with an endless chain of
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referral, an endless production that is about the reproduction of the effective

structural relation between elements of communication in of itself as opposed to its
usefulness to a subject of meaning.
The fictional subject here is proposed as one that is ‘fictional’ in terms of such a
rigid structure.

Any re-establishment of agency here is merely a hollow ownership, as what is

owned is merely the capacity to produce that which subsumes the surplus value that
you the subject give to the signifier under the imperative to endlessly reproduce
communicability that recognises no subject at all, only its relation to another
signifier.

Again the only freedom from this gravity is to acknowledge your own fictionality…

“Yes Mr Down-River we are aware of this already…what are you trying to say about
circus??”

So there is a confusion of ownership and I am attempting to show how this is

manifest as a circus that has legitimised itself as ‘freedom-production’.
In this regard I would like to also look into the difference between private and
public practices of circus, in that in private the subject exploits themselves,
producing, fetishizing, adding value to weightlessness, whereas in public this
process is engaged to be performed by the audience in concert with the self
deception. I am here giving all neoliberal circus artists the benefit of the doubt, and
assuming that they know not what they do. Some do, you know who you are…

Happy cast his eyes around the room, and was met at several moments with the
defiant stare of those who knew they were deliberately exploiting the audience as a
labour force whose watching was to deliberately fetishise gravity into an endless
playground for themselves, but who knew also that within the narratives of
freedom-production they would never, ever be called out for doing it.
He stared back, and continued anyway…

As mentioned, one of the central conceits of desiring production that is subsumed

by capital, is the seeming shift in ownership of the means of production. That is, the
subject now appears to be the site of that production, according to the subjective
activation of their own libidinal labour.
Desire here seen as the property of the subject, which is actually the operation of
an abstracted knowledge of efficient desiring production, a machine at which the
subject labours…thus desire, which naturally feels owned, is actually the operation
of a machine schematised around desiring production that is owned elsewhere, that
is primarily in complicity with capitalisation, through an appropriation of the
unavoidable complicity with an autonomous register that is not organised around
the subject that features within signification. Of course this dual complicity with the
impasse of what is owned and not owned, known but not known, relative but
equivalent is to do with the homologies between the commodity and signifier that I
am referring to between Marx and Lacan.
 102

The congruity here could be referred to Berardi’s term Semio-Capital, which is a

confusion of ownership even unto itself as it seeks to behave in the manner of
symbolist poetry as Berardi claims, whilst citing its own fluidity as also a concrete
material relation to linguistic structure.

“The financialisation of the capitalist economy implies a growing abstraction of

work from its useful function, and of communication from its bodily dimension. As
symbolism experimented with the separation of the linguistic signifier from its
denotational and referential function, so financial capitalism, after internalising
linguistic potencies, has separated the monetary signifier from its function of
denotation and reference to physical goods.”

(Berardi, F. (2012) The Uprising. Semiotexte. Los Angeles)

There are other forces referred too here, but the insistence of capital is that despite
its abstraction it still wants to be treated as a concrete machine.
Thus as capital seeks to expand to ‘own’ what, by the terms of its own definition as
purely quantitative, it cannot own, so the subject is coerced into thinking that they
own the means involved in this reproduction of capital by ‘internalising linguistic
potencies’ as such potencies are traditionally held in the subjective register of
meaning. It is not a revelation that the subject helps capital reproduce itself.
The new statement is in relation to Circusism; the circus subject helps gravity
reproduce itself, through false ownership of a freedom impossibly validated on
gravity’s terms.

VERSION ONE OF OWNERSHIP:

In inhabiting a three-way homology between Gravity, Language and Capital I will

cite cross-references here; I will state that the circus subject is within capital, as
much as they are in gravity, within freedom-production, within Circusism. Circusism
for me is capital expressing itself through circus, so it can be stated here that, for
me, the circus subject reproduces gravity in the same way the subject reproduces
capital. Both restrictions are reproduced as mobilities.

The apparent ownership of the means of freedom-production then lead me to

suggest that there are two modes at play here.

One in which the circus artist has been enfolded in the cloak of deceit, in which
they take up the apparent ownership of the site of freedom-production, but this
freedom is produced according to the imperative of capital/gravity that does not
acknowledge that what is ‘owned’ in one register cannot be transferred.
I am talking here about circus subjects within Circusism, who are pursuing a daily
practice of circus physicality in the belief that this is the activation of moments of
‘actual’ freedom.
They themselves fetishise their own labour-power into the object of freedom. The
real labour of the practice consists of fictionalising moments of escape that are
 103

subjectively useful and un-capturable within the hard differential of mass-value. But
in order to produce real freedom under the criteria of a circus that is supposed to be
the production of freedom, they must also labour to make this unsuitable fiction
receive validation in the ‘market’ of gravity.
Through this fetishisation upon which circusism insists, which ignores the
incompatibility of the two registers at play (weight and mass) there is created a
seemingly intrinsic value of real freedom within the trick that implies contradictorily
that freedom within mass-value is possible. What is hidden here is the false
reflection, of mass-value as a forgiving medium, which is implied by the circus artist
fetishizing a fictional weightlessness as the fact of freedom.
Mass-value is actually as indifferent and unforgiving as Exchange-value.

In relation then to the construction of another image for the body; a subject who
adds a value to the weightlessness to make it a body of freedom; this body is then
alienated from itself in a register that does not refer to the conditions under which it
was produced.

Similar to the mirror phase a labour of watching is performed by the artist on

themselves, thus adding value to the weightlessness produced by the artist
themselves to become the false realisation of a body of freedom, a body released
from restriction. Similar to the construction that occurs in the mirror phase; the
body, which is fragmented and unpredictable and subject to forces outside itself, is
brought under control.
Within the gravity that fragments and divides the body into parts, inert masses
that collide in a random order, an autonomy is imagined. a body of freedom is
fetishized from the disorganisation implicit in an indifferent gravity. The self image
is derived from the fetishisation of an external image on the terms of the production
of freedom, and this body then becomes an image intrinsically imbued with the
qualities that the subject themselves has produced through their own labour but
which are fetishized as belonging to the other. What is interesting is that the gravity
that implies the disorganised and indifference to the body to the subject that
possess it is also reimagined as a benevolent scale within which the subject of
freedom can be weighed as free.

In this sense in the process of freedom-production they are alienated from their own
body, which they fetishise on the terms of gravity/other. The trick is the discourse of
gravity. Just as for Marx the subject of labour becomes the discourse of capital

As a private practice it mat be centred around exploration, new thrills, tried and
tested figures, sequences or the copying of others work. There may be carried over
a sense of being watched, there may be constant filming and play-back, there may
be a focused solitude that is not engaged with any outside eye. The artist may be
concentrating on the corporeal presence in the practice or the Clap-O-Meter…
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PRIVATE VS PUBLIC PRACTICE:

These private moments of practice, which are then experienced through the lens of
Circusism as freedom production, are generally the rehearsal for the validation of
these moments of ‘actual’ freedom through their exposition to an audience who will
further add value to the weightlessness to fetishise it as a lived and achievable
freedom.
In this sense they are simply a rehearsal for entry into an immersive virtual game in
which the game world itself validates that their actions are performed within a free
and expansive game world.

In the case of the circus artist, who believes that his or her own circus practice of
trick making is the practice of genuine liberty then the question of ownership is
there.
They live free through their conflation of weightlessness and freedom, which relies
on this conflation of quality and quantity, and are mistakenly taking ownership of
that which produces a freedom organised around stabilising the fantasy of limitless
capital, rather than a limitless subject.
Circusism operates to make compulsory the counter-trick of capital against its own
internal gravity of its falling rate of profit.

The Hypnotist and the Horserace, Part Nine

The office seemed to shrink around me. This was it. I had been searching
for the name of the patient but the sessions were filed according to the
name of the past life subject, not the name of the actual patient. The
session was dated a few weeks previously. I thought about the date. I
had been standing in London probably idly cataloguing plants to look for
in the surrounding jungle.
The jungle was all around me now and I could feel its vines and
tendrils searching through my guts, cataloguing the rare bloom of fear
that flowered on the end of every nerve.

Here was the diagram of the horse race. It showed the convoluted knot
she had tied in time. She had let slip in her mumblings that in this
diagram was what she had done.
 105

This meant she had first spoken to Charlie on his Monday, which was her
Friday, and asked him to tell her the name of the horse that she had
told him on his Sunday.

“What year is it Charlie? Do you know the year?”

“Yes it’s my birthday…”

“Yes Charlie very good, Happy Birthday…but what year is it, do you
know?”

“Yes, its 1770…I’m cold…I’m bleeding…”

For Charlie on his Monday in 1770 he was being asked to remember the
name of a horse by the nice lady. For Mary on her Friday in 1911, she
was asking Charlie in 1770 to remember information, which according to
her time line she had not yet told him.
Tomorrow she would bet on the horse that Charlie told her the name
of in the session the previous day. The horse would win, and then she
would be sent the winnings.

“Now I want you to remember something Charlie…its very important.”

“I’m cold…I need to find my mama…I cant find her…”

“Ok Charlie, good boy…we are going to find your mama…but first I need
you to help me to remember the name of that horse…”

The next day, which was Sunday for Mary in 1911, she would again
regress Jonah back to the life of Charlie in 1770, but she would take
him back to the day before on which she asked him to tell her the name
of the horse.
And on and on, folding time, and re-folding time. The result of every
race is known going back months.

“Are you lost, Charlie…”

 106

“Yes I’m lost…I have been walking all night and I cant find her…”

“Don’t worry Charlie …lets play a game…it’s a remembering game can

you remember the name of the man who is coming to spy on me?”

I felt sick. I retched. She had foreseen everything. I looked around the
room and ran.

OWNERSHIP ONE:

There are identified here two modes in which it is shown that, thinking through an
idea of split gravity, the circus artist is both the worker at the site of exploitation,
but also the owner of means of production that exploits the spectator. I will
elaborate upon this dual position in terms of private and public practice,

but first I wish to clarify the topological implications of a circus subject that is
somehow labouring inside the factory that they internalise.

This super-position, in which the entire means of production is internalised within

the worker is, as stated, something explored in Deleuze and Gauttari’s positing of
the unconscious as not a theatre but a factory.
A machine is defined by Marx as constructed according to an abstracted
knowledge of production of which the operator has no knowledge, this unknown
knowledge also includes how it has been extracted and systemised, but is derived
from movement that the worker themselves have made in an organised division of
labour, subsumed to the process of production.
Within this factory, that is within the worker there is a newly installed internal
desiring-machinery, but this time posited as the machinery of
Psychiatry/psychoanalysis operating under the reproductive imperative of a
capitalist state, similarly as an abstracted knowledge, but which the subject
operates.
The implication of theatre is here the operation of depth that is a feature of a
subject who performs and whose actions and speech are read as indicative of
another meaning that is unknown to them. This depth is also then a feature of the
modes of interpretation that Deleuze and Gauttari critique, but the congruence
between a the reading of a theatre and the operation of a machine infer a
schematisation of a subject that performs actions that are read elsewhere according
to a register that is not within the knowledge that they access in the performance,
and which will repeat.
 107

Thus performance/operation is not what it is. This then for me is an image of the
complicity between psychoanalysis and capital.

In this blurring of the site in which the worker is within a space that is also within
the worker, is a topological trick that mirrors the construction of a ‘Klein Bottle’; the
exit from which returns you to the interior, and is an important highlighting of what
is re-appropriated to capitalist production in the further recasting of linguistic
restriction back into the context of political economy from which its theories were
influenced.
If Lacan’s ideas of a subject embedded within language who is barred from that
which they produce are indeed influenced by Marx’s own conception of the subject
in political economy, then Deleuze highlights how the means of production and of
representation coincide here and are currently both subject to the material
conditions of the dominance of the capitalist mode of production.
Deleuze and Gauttari are simply relocating the unconscious as the new site of
production that enables capital to overcome its internal limit, they do not do this
specifically with Lacan in mind; praising him in fact with being close to a
Schizoanalysis, an unschematised production perhaps. But what I am implying here
is how, within the possibility for a subject to be positively exposed to the impasse of
language as an outcome of analysis, there is an equal propensity for the infinite
repetition of desire over lack exposed in Lacan to be concealed and installed under
the imperative of the reproduction of capital.
Thus Deleuze and Gauttari are highlighting a ‘counter-trick’ performed by capital
upon the dual exposure of how the subject is barred and alienated from the signifier
and the commodity respectively, and how this forms a loop that produces desire.
What is appropriated by capital is the loop that bars the subject that was theorised
in thinking through Marx in the fist place.

COUNTER TRICK:
This counter trick operates by re-appropriating these critiques that expose
language and capital as modes that bind the subject, dare I say, as forms of gravity,
and re-performs them as modes of concealing the impossibility of escape (that is,
concealing what analysis exposes), which installs the circuit of desire as lack through
the conflation of fictional fulfilment as fact, the fact of which is then negated in the
very register of its validation.
The circuit of desire as lack is installed in a post-fact area that can falsely validate
what can only be the fictional satisfaction of desire as a fact, even as it conceals the
fact that validation here equals negation.

So for Deleuze and Gauttari to describe the unconscious as a factory is an important

shift as in relation to Lacan’s theory of the unconscious as being structured ‘like a
language’ it relocates Lacan’s impasse of desire that seeks the end of an endless
signifying chain as a machine installed within a factory as a work-station for a
worker who has topologically internalised the factory at which they themselves are
at labour.
 108

This fundamental adjunct to Lacan in Marx, implied by Deleuze and Gauttari’s

factory of the unconscious, implies that the circuit of desire over lack might be a
perfect re-appropriation of the trick that exposes capital’s internal limit as the trick
to conceal it, as the constellation of signification and subject forms the advantages
of both human variable-capital and the irrefutable efficacy of the machinic
installation of desire as lack to be fixed capital.

Lacan is here relocated as subject to the analogy with political economy that he
draws, in that the impasse that causes the subject to desire what can never be
fulfilled is highlighted as not owned by the subject themselves as there ‘fate’ within
language, but owned by capital within which the subject and these processes are
embedded and functional as sites of labour and production.
I am saying that as a schematic for a desiring-machine to reproduce capital you
could not do better than the formula in which desire and lack are mutually
reciprocal. I am saying that due to the implication of linguistic structure into
psychoanalytical structure of the unconscious you could not do better as a
schematic for a desiring machine that appears to be owned by the subject; simply
because this formula seems to be within the subject as a structural fact of their
subjectivity, rather than something that possible to be usurped into being
contingent upon the context of capitalism. The subject seems to ‘own’ what capital
is utilising to further itself.

ANALYSIS:
In this sense the analysis of a circus subject must, instead of focussing upon their
ownership of an impasse in relation to what circus signifies them to be and in which
they are complicit; an analysis must insist upon an address of the modes of
representation within circusism and analysis in relation to their proximity and
complicity in the capitalist mode of production.
It is good to highlight how circus dominates the self-signification of the subject
and how this is felt as restricting, but the real issue is that the mode of getting to a
realisation of this has itself become complicit, as a congruent means of
representation to the dominant mode of production, in the capitalism with which
circus agrees in order to create the impasse that the circus subject feels in the first
place.
The mode of analysis can be said to be unfortunately co-opted within capital, with
which circus agrees, which leaves us with a capitalist analysis to try to address a
capitalist circus.

So first it is to establish a circus that is not in such proximity to capitalist modes of

production, this is a practical analysis of how to avoid the trick becoming a mode of
freedom-production.
This is no small feat in the sense circus and capitalist expansion have been
bedfellows for a long time.
It is circus as freedom-production that constructs the problem of a circus subject
who does not feel that they have agency within circus in the first place. They do not
feel agency in direct proportion to the fact that they believe that freedom is a
possible outcome of circus practice.
 109

What is installed through circus in agreement with capital and an analysis that is
also in agreement with capital, is the problem that is inherent in these agreements,
which is that the subject should feel ‘free’. This I am saying is an impossible
condition imposed on the subject by the project of capital that needs to present
itself as an area within which freedom is possible, as part of its project to overcome
its internal limit by appearing as a meritocratic totality.
Gravity in circus is similarly presented as a system that can be ‘played’ to achieve
liberty.
Freedom is not here, and circus as an art form should focus on addressing this.

The subject does not feel ‘free’ within circus because what is in operation here is a
counter trick within circusism that obscures the fact that real freedom is
A: impossible within the field, and
B: its validation as ‘real’ within the only designated register of that field that makes
it ‘real’ is a tautology that is not permitted within that register (there is no meta-
position available) thus negating the freedom as even registerable.
I would suggest that what is ‘felt’ is the concealment of the real relations of
freedom-production schematised according to the circuit of lack and desire that are
structurally complicit within that production.
Thus without ever addressing that the practice of circus can only ever be the
activation of a series of fictional demands of a freedom not yet available, the
analysis will endlessly return the circus subject into looking for ways they can get to
a feeling of agency, when circus is the iteration actually of the point that there is no
agency, until perhaps circus starts to not value its weightlessness in terms of gravity.
I feel that artists in circus will benefit from being political not exclusively
psychoanalytical.
Circus should give inoperable potentiality not take fake actuality. As long as you
are looking to get paid, you will never receive anything, ladies and germs.
So for Deleuze and Gauttari to describe the unconscious as a factory is an important
shift as in relation to Lacan’s theory of the unconscious as being structured ‘like a
language’ it relocates Lacan’s impasse of desire that seeks the end of an endless
signifying chain as a machine installed within a factory as a work-station for a
worker who has topologically internalised the factory at which they themselves are
at labour.
This fundamental adjunct to Lacan in Marx, implied by Deleuze and Gauttari’s
factory of the unconscious, implies that the circuit of desire over lack might be a
perfect re-appropriation of the trick that exposes capital’s internal limit as the trick
to conceal it, as the constellation of signification and subject forms the advantages
of both human variable-capital and the irrefutable efficacy of the machinic
installation of desire as lack to be fixed capital.

Lacan is here relocated as subject to the analogy with political economy that he
draws, in that the impasse that causes the subject to desire what can never be
fulfilled is highlighted as not owned by the subject themselves as there ‘fate’ within
language, but owned by capital within which the subject and these processes are
embedded and functional as sites of labour and production.
 110

I am saying that as a schematic for a desiring-machine to reproduce capital you

could not do better than the formula in which desire and lack are mutually
reciprocal. I am saying that due to the implication of linguistic structure into
psychoanalytical structure of the unconscious you could not do better as a
schematic for a desiring machine that appears to be owned by the subject; simply
because this formula seems to be within the subject as a structural fact of their
subjectivity, rather than something that possible to be usurped into being
contingent upon the context of capitalism. The subject seems to ‘own’ what capital
is utilising to further itself.

ANAGRAMALYSIS:
In this sense the analysis of a circus subject must, instead of focussing upon their
ownership of an impasse in relation to what circus signifies them to be and in which
they are complicit; an analysis must insist upon an address of the modes of
representation within circusism and analysis in relation to their proximity and
complicity in the capitalist mode of production.
It is good to highlight how circus dominates the self-signification of the subject
and how this is felt as restricting, but the real issue is that the mode of getting to a
realisation of this has itself become complicit, as a congruent means of
representation to the dominant mode of production, in the capitalism with which
circus agrees in order to create the impasse that the circus subject feels in the first
place.
The mode of analysis can be said to be unfortunately co-opted within capital, with
which circus agrees, which leaves us with a capitalist analysis to try to address a
capitalist circus.

So first it is to establish a circus that is not in such proximity to capitalist modes of

production, this is a practical analysis of how to avoid the trick becoming a mode of
freedom-production.
This is no small feat in the sense circus and capitalist expansion have been
bedfellows for a long time.
It is circus as freedom-production that constructs the problem of a circus subject
who does not feel that they have agency within circus in the first place. They do not
feel agency in direct proportion to the fact that they believe that freedom is a
possible outcome of circus practice.

What is installed through circus in agreement with capital and an analysis that is
also in agreement with capital, is the problem that is inherent in these agreements,
which is that the subject should feel ‘free’. This I am saying is an impossible
condition imposed on the subject by the project of capital that needs to present
itself as an area within which freedom is possible, as part of its project to overcome
its internal limit by appearing as a meritocratic totality.
Gravity in circus is similarly presented as a system that can be ‘played’ to achieve
liberty.
Freedom is not here, and circus as an art form should focus on addressing this.
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The subject does not feel ‘free’ within circus because what is in operation here is a
counter trick within circusism that obscures the fact that real freedom is
A: impossible within the field, and
B: its validation as ‘real’ within the only designated register of that field that makes
it ‘real’ is a tautology that is not permitted within that register (there is no meta-
position available) thus negating the freedom as even registerable.
I would suggest that what is ‘felt’ is the concealment of the real relations of
freedom-production schematised according to the circuit of lack and desire that are
structurally complicit within that production.
Thus without ever addressing that the practice of circus can only ever be the
activation of a series of fictional demands of a freedom not yet available, the
analysis will endlessly return the circus subject into looking for ways they can get to
a feeling of agency, when circus is the iteration actually of the point that there is no
agency, until perhaps circus starts to not value its weightlessness in terms of gravity.
I feel that artists in circus will benefit from being political not exclusively
psychoanalytical.
Circus should give inoperable potentiality not take fake actuality. As long as you
are looking to get paid, you will never receive anything, ladies and germs.

An explanation of how Circusism and Tautological Ground meet in the re-appropriation

of Marx and Lacan to form systemised ‘freedom-production…’.

SUPERPOSITION of worker/owner:

As I have mentioned it might be possible, within the idea of a blurring of ownership,

to not just see this blurred between the circus subject and the big other of capital;
but also within this idea of the circus artist as victim, which feeds the analysis of
their problem, there is also a blurring of who is fooloing who…

So within this I am seeing the circus artist as both the exploited worker and the
exploitative owner simultaneously, or at least in the sequentiality of how the
unwatched rehearsal of circus practice builds the narrative of freedom production
that then needs to be later affirmed in public.

It will be discussed how this public performance is then used to situate the audience
as a workforce of watcher-labour who will be organised to produce a further surplus
value that then is fetishized into a ‘freedom’ intrinsic to the circus subject that
reinforces their own fetishisation of weightlessness into freedom.
This is not perhaps a simultaneous ‘superposition’ but is sequenced in a similar way
as talking to yourself is sequenced in preparation of talking to another. This talking
to another that you have rehearsed then informs the way you speak to yourself in
rehearsal etc.

Upon questioning no one believes that the weightlessness is actually real, but it is
experienced and thought of as actual freedom. It has simply gone unconsidered in
most instances. The narrative of circus as legitimate freedom-production is thereby
validated by this fetishisation of surplus-value generated by an audience operating a
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machinery of watching (the capitalist artist gets more out than they put in), which
represent the assembly line constructed according to a knowledge of which they
have no awareness

Within this idea of an internal factory, in which the worker is allowed to assume
‘ownership’ of running the means of production of signification within which they
are not represented except to another signifier, this ‘ownership’ is partly the
counter-trick.

The circuit then of such factories of artist and audience of labourer-watchers come
together to make the circus into the hub of capitalised freedom-production, within
which the process demonstrates that freedom is entirely possible under a system
that clearly forbids it. This is the problem for me, as it should be for all circus artists

“That should get them going”, thought Happy.

“Do I mean any of this?”, he thought sipping fire water on the academic reservation.

“Give me land, give me land, under starry skies above…don’t fence me in…”

This was going to be a massacre.

His lectures continued weekly and were attended more and more by a mix of
shadowy officials and actual circus artists who, now concerned about their
complicity within something they previously thought they were automatically
resisting.

PROVISO ON PRIVATE:

I am designating ‘conflation’ as when one qualitative register is mistakenly

attempted to be valued in an incompatible quantitative register.
It might be said that the subject in a private practice works the ‘impossibility’ of
register conflation just as well as in a public performance. But I will address how the
private practice perhaps has a dwindling return that then necessitates the boosting
of freedom-production through the employment of watching-labour, which I am
proposing is a homologically exploitative feature of Circusism.

This is the deceptive process that can necessarily validate the practice of circus as
freedom production, and thus also validate the circus subject as a successful
entrepreneurial exponent of freedom available within gravity. This, as I have said, is
circus agreeing with capitalism.
So what could rationalise the turn from private self- deceiving fetishisation of
fredom production to its necessary validation through the use of a work force
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So there is a falling rate…the private practice that no longer returns the qualitative
power of weightlessness as it must be validated as real freedom in mass value now
by a workforce, And public practice.

This is just a thought experiment, but please indulge me.

I am proposing here that in private practice over time, what is not returned to the
circus artist is desired freedom. The qualitative power of weightlessness is now no
longer returned as the same value. There is a falling rate due to the lack of labour-
power it is possible to employ in order to produce the surplus value needed.

So in answer to the question ‘why would the circus subject, who is in the practice of
private affirmation of their individual freedom seek then to look for validation of
that freedom in public performance?’

Within the closed circuit of solo activity, the ‘feeling’ of weightlessness conflated
into true freedom, has a falling rate of profit.
The technique of the trick supposed as the machinery of schematised desiring
production can only return a diminishing return of true freedom as it becomes more
and more to represent a fixed capital devoid of the attendance of a suitable human
worker who can labour at the site of the trick-machine in order to continue to
produce freedom to overcome the falling rate of profit experienced by the circus
subject who is acting as both the worker and the capitalist to themselves. The
labour force is simply not available.
There are ways of duplicating labour perhaps. Posting your freedom-production
on social media under some pretext, but you are not available to fetishise what you
produce ad infinitum here.

In being both/and the machinery of freedom production (the technique of the

trick) does not represent a possibility for continued fetishisation as the technique of
the trick that ‘machine-like’ produces freedom only under the condition that it is an
abstracted knowledge of weightlessness production that is not know to the worker
who operates it.
That is, as knowledge not known is the definition of fetishisation, something that
seems intrinsic to the produced weightless body that is a fetishisation of what is
actually produced by the worker, but hidden within the process of production from
that worker as the efficiency of a division of labour abstracted to a machinic
technique, it is harder and harder to fetishise based on what you do actually know.
In the solo practice the circus subject can not claim to be able to continue to
fetishise the weightless body as free as the knowledge of this production is not
unknown to them, and so cease to be a worker who performs the unknown
technique to themselves so that they may be complicit in the fetishisation.

The audience in the lecture hall, Happy could tell, literally thought he was joking;
what they did not know was that he needed to be taken as deadly serious in order
for the provocation to take effect.
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He continued with a level tone:

“Nevertheless there has to be an acknowledgement that the feeling of adrenaline

and ‘rush’ ensures that in certain disciplines there is no falling rate of profit. A
feeling of weightlessness may be experienced accompanied by a rush of adrenaline
over and over again in private practice that may suffice to ensure that the possibility
to fetishise this feeling as true freedom is always available.

But nevertheless the point here is that within a rehearsal for performance, which is
what circus training mainly consists of, there is a falling capacity generally for the
private practitioner to maintain the requisite level of ‘unknown knowledge’ to be
able to continually fetishise the personally experienced weightlessness as the
instance of real freedom.”

Happy was beginning to wonder if a joke theory could have real legs that were
unknown to the joke-writer themselves.

“For this to continue the machinery that comprises the abstracted knowledge of
the most efficient production of weightlessness necessitates the watching-labour of
a worker/operator who does not have knowledge of that which is abstracted
therein.
That is, a spectator/worker who has a body but no understanding of how that
body might be hooked into the weightlessness–machine of circus technique, who
can then produce a fetishised response to that weightlessness, at which they labour
to produce through watching into authentic agency in the face of seemingly
insurmountable odds, that then is taken by the circus subject as the profit of free
individuality affirmed by applause of the workers who labour to produce it.”

I am deconstructing the bark of every Ringmaster that every uttered the words,
‘…and now ladies and gentlemen…’ thought Happy; I am undoing a form of speech
that has been making money for hundreds of years.

“In this way Circusism operates to be the project of freedom production whereby
the circus subject, unable to forestall the falling rate of individuality occurring in the
falling rate of fetishisation that occurs in their superposition as both owner of and
worker at the means of weightlessness production. In this solo cottage industry of
circus there is no possibility for gravity to reproduce itself as a limitless field that can
permissibly contain genuine freedom .

In the endless repetition of a self-interested private practice the quality, or creative

power is not returned to the subject that produces it…in direct relation to how the
qualitative creation of weightlessness is not returned to the circus subject once it is
fetishized as genuine freedom it ceases to be felt; as once entered into mass-value
as a supposedly real it can only be recorded there as impossible to occur as it is a
zero mass-value within gravity.
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As the returning feeling of freedom diminishes either according to the inability to

fetishise it as freedom that is genuine through the impossibility of retaining an
unknown knowledge that could conflate it as real or from the fact that it is
continually looked at through a lens that filters it out: it then has to be exploited
from the audience, who labour to produce it from their lack of knowledge at the
freedom-machinery of the circus ring.

I will discuss this recasting of the artist as exploitative owner of means in more
depth but what I am saying here is that Circusism that is engaged in the project of
freedom-production is exploitative and unhelpful, as it suggests that a register that
is primarily not organised around subjective validation can be the measure of
personal freedom.

OTHER REASONS TO CLAIM SOLO PRACTICE DOES NOT NECESSARILY

DEMAND A TURN TO EXPLOIT WATCHING LABOUR.

ANOTHER POINT HERE WOULD BE ABOUT ADRENALINE… that you could not
just be into private practice as diminishing return but that you also derive a RUSH
from it.

Happy was sensing a turn in the room. The audience were not sure if this was a
serious theoretical proposition or an exposition of his earlier theory of post-factism.
Was he entering here that which was clearly fictional in order to activate the proof
that fiction could become real in a context dominated by the capitalist mode of
production?

There are other reasons however why private practice might not inevitably turn to
public display.

REAL BUT SHORT LIVED:

In reference to the realisation of your desired freedom only resulting in lack; to
some ‘noble souls’ then this also is a secondary form of acknowledgement of truth.
The acknowledgement that it is real freedom but that it is only temporary and so
the trick must be repeated as a kind of noble symptom, or aristocratic pathology.
This romanticism is also not able then to admit that the weightlessness is fictional
as that fictionality refers not to the nobility of one but to the knowledge that there is
no freedom yet that necessitates a shared project of resistance.
To the self interested Romantic it is hopeless but only in its temporality…it is real
but all too brief liberty, chivalrously snatched from the jaws of gravity. Its failure to
acknowledge it as not real still refers to gravity as a suitably limitless area for their
romantic adventure.
Often these kind of people think of the training space as their performance
platform, but rarely actually perform for the public.
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SIDE POINT ON ROMANTICISM:

Such romanticism is deep in the circus psyche, this hopelessness. I am not opposed
to it per se, as some people in the world do genuinely struggle against
insurmountable odds, but they rarely do so in negative splits, with a look of longing
on their manicured face.
I do feel that a less authentic romanticism is also subtly related to the neoliberal
nature of circusism, in which the nobility of the struggle for freedom against an
insurmountable force, as an image, becomes falsely conflated with actual
freedom…therefore the enactment of the circus trick in alignment with the tenets
of romantic hopelessness tied into the post modern paradox of these impasses
becomes an image, a performance of hopelessness that becomes the equivalent to
actual success, by the same rule that deems it to be failure.
This is almost the admission that within post-factism there can be no genuine
truth, and that the performance in the face of this hopelessness itself becomes a
successful act of authentic expression.
This is true unreal knot as the impossibility of truth is romantically used as the
hopelessness that validates the truthfulness of you throwing yourself upon the
rocks.
Therefore the performance of a trick issues no demand for freedom because it is
become the equivalent of actual freedom. Again the fictional leap that should
demand an end to gravity is construed falsely as the actual performance of freedom
within it.
The area of Circusism now equates fiction with fact, as does capital.

So nevertheless we have here a turn from the freedom production at work in a

private practice to that at work in public performance.

“What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive…and so it goes.

But where does it come from? For this I would first like to talk a little about two
modes of circus practice, the difference between these is dependant on the binary
of the spectator’s gaze. On or off.
In the first instance the circus artist practices alone, throwing themselves daily at
the physical problems. In the second they perform the studied negotiation of these
problems for a public.

Another point here that we must approach is where is the labour-power? Surely the
artist is the one who labours to produce weightlessness, yes, but this is no longer
the question. Here within the post fact arena of Circusism, in which the performance
of mobility is the ‘proof’ of genuine freedom, We must also ask who is it that labours
to produce weightlessness AS freedom. This next discussion will deal with this
question.

VERSION ONE: solo.

There are many factors here so let us begin with the artist, practicing alone in
some school, in some garret, in some tent, in some theatre or studio, even in some
festival field or back garden.
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As a private practice it mat be centred around exploration, new thrills, tried and
tested figures, sequences or the copying of others work. There may be carried over
a sense of being watched, there may be constant filming and play-back, there may
be a focused solitude that is not engaged with any outside eye. The artist may be
concentrating on the corporeal presence in the practice or the Clap-O-Meter…

Happy felt as if the sphincter of all circus was closing around his neck. There was a
need to provoke the circus artist as being the capitalist exploiter of the audience.

in summation then, in the active experience of the feeling of in which a circus artist
feels that escape from the pull on their bones, that the body is enervated of its
mass, like an emptied ghost it sits nowhere to nobody, it is witnessed by the mass as
absent.
Here perhaps I will show how this circus body, in conflating that fiction automatic-
writing with a legal document of permission, this circus body becomes alienated
from itself in its own complicity in a register that can never sanction the subjective
qualitative nature of what is valued in felt weight, and can only negate it as
impossible.

As in the production of commodity according to the imperatives of the capitalist, as

in the construction of self according to the reflections derived, interrupted,
interpreted from the mirror phase, what results from this labouring at
commodification and signification is a subject that is not the subject, but which has
to be the subject.
In this private version of the practice the configuration of labour is less immaterial,
and it is only when this figure that privately activates conflation or fetishisation then
seeks the validation of this fantasy with the audience does the immaterial labour of
watching that they provide become a labour force employed by the owner of
weightless production…

Weightless mobility is fetishized as the freedom. The artist has rehearsed and
schematised the movements into the machinery of circus performance that
necessarily becomes the machinery of freedom production…

As this labour force produce value the weightlessness becomes real freedom within
the register of a gravity that must then appear as a meritocracy,

The point about meritocracy here is vital, in that this fact, that within gravity any
one of physical merit can be free, similar to the narrative that anyone who deserves
to do well will do well in capitalism, means that the audience represented not those
exploited to support a lie, but those that can also, if they wish, join this circusism
and profit from the production of freedom therby on offer….

Cut to little Jonny as he waves his big foam hand, open mouthed the singular circle
of his amazement encircles his looped desire to one day become as free as the
image of freedom that the ring of his mute amazement makes real….
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An audience of tiny little people all gather around the lip of jonnys circular mouth
and applaud as the child is eviscerated through his own mouth in a self-uttered
fountain of blood and guts…roll up roll up see the boy who turns himself inside out
for your amazement, he is a mobius striptease that contains all of us inside the
circus of himself….

Happy had made a leap…in his earlier thoughts he was at a loss as to how to make
the critique seem ‘weighty’ within the academic gravity in which he now wanted to
perform a trick. He decided the only way was to simply fictionalise his sources…he
could basically fabricate any quote that he felt was needed, and spuriously reference
the author. In this day and age libraries are in such disarray, all informational
archives so unreliable that no one would know that the people he was quoting were
not real.

He invented an Eastern European scholar of Performance theory and fabricated

some ideas to help him support the idea of the circus artist as an exploitative owner
of the means of weightlessness and mobility production. ‘Goran Sergej Pristas’, that
sounded like a good name.

In the lecture of this imaginary figure he showed a film of workers leaving the
factory, it is one of the first films ever made, but in the two versions displayed he
notes that there is a subtle difference in the editing.
In the second film the workers have been choreographed beforehand to not look
at the camera and to leave efficiently through the entrance in order to correctly
show that what is represented is ‘workers leaving the factory’

Here I feel there is a strong link to choreography of the director/camera man to

make the image ‘true’ to itself, to formulate something that is real according to the
subsumption to the imperative of a movement economy…ie movements that are
extraneous or not ‘serving’ the plot are ‘cut’.
In this instance we are faced with a congruence between the ideas of the assembly
line, the first organisational moments where division of labour is structured and
which represent the cutting away of extraneous movement…it is argued then that
this is the first moment of subsumption to capital because this organisation is the
one that then paves the way for the machine to replace sections of assembly line
with mechanised versions of human movement, in which the flesh itself is seen as
possessed of an innate tendency to extraneous movement and this is found to be
more efficiently expressible inorganically.

Why are we discussing this in relation to circus because it is this point that the
congruence here between the dominant mode of production , and the dominant
mode of representation presented in this short film of workers introduces the idea
of a labour of representation.
In this sense then what Pristas insists is that the dominant mode of production and
the dominant mode of representation share a common economy that is based
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around the ability of movement to produce value or to produce meaning according

to an external imperative.
If I can extrapolate from this argument, it suggests what is asked of the spectator
is to perform the labour of watching according to the organised, subsumed series of
Images sequenced by machine so that what is produced is the value derived from
said ‘labour of watching’ that results in an ideological artefact that satisfies both the
dominant mode of production as well as the dominant mode of representation.

With this idea that the production of images for a spectator is a form of production
at which the spectator is expected to produce certain impressions and to reproduce
certain ideology that is contained within the representation at which they are
attendant, then the mode of representation is the site of a watching-labour and at
that site is a machinery. This is a means of meaning production, owned by the one
who intends to profit from that which is thereby produced.
Profit here is a hard to define, but I will simply define it as an ideological presence
that has the tendency to reproduce that same ideological presence. An ideological
meme.

This means of meaning production is an installed schematic, that forms a

machinery of which the spectator worker has no known knowledge. The mode of
representation is a machine according to Marx’s schematic, ‘abstracted knowledge’
of efficient production, abstracted from an organised, subsumed version of the
subject themselves of what the subject is conditioned to produce under the
subordination of an imperative, but of which the subject/operator has no
knowledge.

In the congruence between this machinery and the idea of libidinal economy
coupled with Berardi’s notion of semio-capital, we have here the idea of a worker
whose labour is to spectate a sign-system and produce an ideological artefact that is
the fetishization of the image in question as intrinsically possessed of that
ideological stamp.
Here is the idea that the labour of watching can fetishise weightlessness in the
circus trick into freedom in alignment with the idea of circus as freedom-production.
According to the notion that individuals perform their resistance to the enclosure of
gravity and thus state their individuality; the audience are necessarily the work-
force of watching labour that then operates the machinery of meaning production
of which they have no knowledge in order to produce the artefact of freedom for
the owner of those means, namely The Flying Zuchini, or whichever self-interested
individual happens to be there.
It can all be couched as ‘I am doing this for you, ‘ which masks the fact ‘I am doing
it for myself’. The complexity here is that the one who exploits is able to do so
through being the unwitting exploited operator himself or herself of unknown
knowledge.
Here I am being generous and assuming no one would claim to love an audience in
order to get them to like him or her.
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The supposed free individual that is against the insurmountable power of gravity is
then an exponent of the insurmountable ideology of capitalism.
In relation to surplus value, the audience create it at the site of their own freedom-
machines that they operate according to the schematised validation of
weightlessness as real freedom.
The trick becomes an ideology machine that reproduces weightlessness along
with the surplus value added by the watching labour to be fetishized into an
ideological statement. This statement implies that the individual can turn to the
autonomous register that dominates the market of gravity in order to receive
validation of their freedom as being real within that register.
Weightlessness can only ever be a fiction in regard to the dominant register of
gravity
What is masked and not known here, by artist and audience both, is that the
fetishisation is the mistaken conflation of a weightlessness as a real freedom. This
work is labour performed by the audience who are subsumed into the imperative of
this ideology or freedom-machine, which is part of the factory of circusism that
reproduces gravity as an endless and meritocratic area.

Within this idea of watching-labour comes the idea of subsumption, ie how is it that
an audience are organised as an expression of gravity to reproduce gravity as an
endless meritocracy. What conditions make the installation of freedom machines
possible?

“The formal subsumption of labour is straightforward: ‘what brings the seller [of
labour power] into a relationship of dependency is solely the fact that the buyer is
the owner of the conditions of labour. There is no fixed political and social
relationship of supremacy and subordination.”

Marsden, R. ‘The nature of Capital’. Routledge. P145.

In relation to this then the audience, being within the conditions of watching labour,
are possibly subsumed but there is still the question of payment. They have not
been paid to be there at the circus to validate the artist as a free individual. What
then is the ‘wage’ they receive for this watching as surplus labour time?

“Labour is subsumed, practically and conceptually, in the sense that, when it is sold,
it becomes a mode of existence of capital. Capital absorbs or subsumes labour
through the exchange of labour-capacity for money. It is because labour is initially
or formally subsumed within capital or property relations, and therefore subject to
capital’s imperative to make a surplus by enhancing the productive power of labour,
that labour must be disciplined or subordinated. Only when and where labour is
subordinate is capital profitable. It is because labour is (formally) subsumed under
private property that the employer must intervene to organize workers’ ‘individual
functions’ ‘into one single productive body’ and to overcome their resistance to the
domination of capital’s imperative. (Marx. 1867a: 449)
It was not the introduction of machines that subordinated labour. It was the ill-
defined ‘revolution’ in the organisation of production during the period of
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manufacture that facilitated the introduction of machines. Society is not disciplinary

because it is capitalist; rather capital derives its profits from that which makes
society disciplinary. Labour is not first partially or ‘formally’, then, through the
introduction of machines, fully or ‘really ‘, subordinated or controlled.”

Marx does not elucidate on exactly how the labour force, once paid for becomes
subordinated, perfectly organised and then un-resistive enough to accept the
introduction of machines. But here in the acknowledgement of the shift to desiring
production that is equally perfectly organised, the subject is implied to be within an
area in which desire can be made real, and so already here there is a hint of reward,
other than a wage, that might begin this process of subsumption.
You can be the ‘you’ you have always dreamed of being.
This is particularly true of Circusism, in which the artist desires validation as free,
and the audience desire validation of the possibility to be free.

Again what we have in the concept of a desiring-machine, through a blurring of

ownership, is the activation of the subject as the site of self-subsumption that
seems like agency. That is an externally choreographed subsumption to the
imperative of capital that seems like freedom.

The self may be constructed to produce and fetisise that which it cannot afford
according to the installation of an apparently linguistically structured unconscious
that seems to be intrinsically yours but is subsumed to the law of the factory that is
owned elsewhere but within you.

How does this play in language?

The implication here is that in utterance , or language use, the subsumption is

immediate. It is not attendant upon the introduction of formal ‘machineries’ of
theoretical structure, logic, etiquette, jargon or specialised digitised systems of sign
processing even, but that the use of language itself by the subject implies
immediate subsumption to the imperatives of language…Utterance is its own wage
and using language means that you have submitted to be expressed in language.
You are protected from the horizonless fragmentation of your self but now
subsumed to labour at meaning production that you can never own. You are
protected from the mindless excess of the landscape but now you have to remain in
the interior of the factory. This is implied to be your ‘lot’ as a subject in language,
that is, this form of subsumption pays for itself; it ‘belongs’ to you to only produce
that which has to operate according to the imperative of an external autonomy.

So you are subsumed as soon as you translate your intention in the world into a
system of meaning (a signifier) Precorporated perhaps in semio-capital.
This is what is implied through the location of such subsumptive tendencies within
Lacan’s conception of the unconscious being structured like a language. What is
raised here is also the blurring of ownership of the means of meaning production
that makes this issue of ‘wages’ for watching labour so indistinct.
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What is implied here is that the worker is already ‘machined’ before an actual
machine might arrive to improve their efficiency. Again here self-ownership is
blurred around the worker as ‘themselves’, as owned as a ‘mode of existence of
capital’, but also a pre-machine installed at the site of themselves as the beginning
of an on-going subsumption to the idea of becoming ‘one single’ ‘ machinic ‘
‘productive body’.
My feeling is that in respect of desiring-machines, blurring of ownership and the
concept of the unconscious as a factory that necessarily handles semio-capital
according to the unknown knowledge of another external imperative, then the
audience member within Circusism is well suited to be thought of as watching
labour subsumed into the imperative of the reproduction of gravity as a limitless
meritocracy.
But still there is a question of wages.
“When the audience watches commercial television it is working for the media,
producing both value and surplus value…The programming, the watching-power, is
the wage of the audience, the variable capital of the communications industry.”
Sut JHally quoted within Digital Labour and Karl Marx, by Christian Fuchs.

This link is a clear description of watching as labour, but Fuchs goes on to argue that
there is no ‘wage’ in return for this watching labour. In so far as Marx has stated
money has a social monopoly and a program is not a wage.
What is argued here is that all watching is surplus labour time, (that which
generates an outgoing surplus value above what is given)
It might then be argued also that as when a labourer is paid in coupons that are
only redeemable at a shop owned by the owner of means of production, what is
subtly offered in return for the labour of watching are exactly these kinds of limited
currency, that actually are only redeemable in exactly the same conditions under
which they are issued. In the instance of subscribing to an ideology this makes
sense, that you are rewarded for helping to expand an ideological meme by being
enabled to spend those ideological coupons within it in order to construct your own
miniature version of that ideology
That is, in the case of watching circus, operating the freedom-machine by which
useless weightlessness is fetishized as palpable liberty, then perhaps the production
of freedom is its own reward, as the return on labouring to validate human mobility
as freedom implies that you as a human spectator have the possibility to also move
freely. In being complicit in demonstrating gravity is an area that permits freedom,
you are then free to enjoy the merits of that freedom. It sounds ideal.

In this sense the monopoly of money in regard to a wage for watching-labour might
simply be monopoly money, that is an in-house currency. A ‘currency’ of ideological
information received from the experience of watching performance X is only
redeemable as value within the conditions that prevail in performance X, that is that
ideological-currency, or semio-capital is worthless outside of that ‘ideology-market’.
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But since the conditions implied by what is produced, namely freedom, are
therefore unlimited, the production of freedom may well pay for itself.

In this sense there may well be an appearance of a wage, but which is quickly
realised as only worth anything as long as you are willing to inhabit the fiction of
values created within that particular media.
So in this I am implying that the wage here is precisely the fact that within the
over-arching fictionality of a gravity that permits freedom, a gravity that can
actually be defied, the wage is the feeling of meritocracy that this brings, which is
necessarily limitless. The wage is the feeling of post factism, within which you too
can monetise the performance of yourself as a trick to gain freedom and its
attendant individuality within this meritocratic capitalism.
You are paid for the production of freedom in the access to further production of
freedom; this is a self reflective and hence self generating wage caused by the
blurring of the site of production seeming to be owned by you and it is therefore
your responsibility to pay yourself for what you produce on what you believe is your
own machinery.
The idea of a factory you think you own then excludes the actual owner from
having to pay you anything. You are formally subsumed to an imperative external to
you by your belief that your desire is freely produced.
It might just be that you feel it is nobody else’s responsibility to pay you for the
labour you perform to produce your own desire. In this sense you are the perfect
employee.

I am saying that this is specific to circus that thinks of itself as freedom-production.

THEATRE + CIRCUS IN RELATION TO WORKERS LEAVING FACTORY.

Here it is also possible to open an entire argument on how theatre imposes the
narrative as an economy upon the trick, which is seen as ‘extraneous movement’ to
the economical representation of that plot. Theatre is Fordian in its subordination of
the circus body to assembly lines of plot, but I will assume this is implicit in what I
am saying. The circus subject, who is not subsumed into imperatives of narrative
theatre, is then highlighted here as not the same subject that is required to be
present at the beginning of a story.
The project of immediacy and immanence of a purely fictional weightlessness, as
beyond the economies established in narrative theatre, is assumed to be at odds
with the theatrical depth of mimesis and psychoanalysis.

Here also is Deleuze’s notion of the irrational cut in cinema. The cut that implies
that there is no subject, from which to extrapolate a subordinated economy; but
which actually opens up the free production, free association of another kind of
subject.
For me, the irrational cut also features in the use of cut-up in literature, does not
exploit the watcher/reader according to the imperative of an economy. The cut
serves nothing, except to point to the potentiality of not serving; and does not
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represent the installation of a desiring machine organised to produce desire around

a loop of film that alternates between lack of meaning and desire for meaning.
There is no choreography here, although some might argue there is still the
flamboyant self-contained subject that rolls the dice as the next logical move in
their own personal narrative.
Watching as a labour is labour in which you produce the necessary value to validate
images of freedom as real freedom and are at the behest of this same capitalist
imperative that circus claims it is against.

An image of freedom here is made in order to better enable capital to reproduce

itself as opposed to having anything to do with the mobility of the subject.
This watching-labour is the exploited form through which a relative value that is
conveyed between the artist and audience (and conveyed as a kind of fiction, as its
actual existence is absolutely impermissible within
the autonomy the mass-value. Thus it is fictional to the insurmountable logic that
takes primacy over the shared and felt medium of weight that exists briefly as an
affective mode of experiencing gravity.

This logic denies the qualitative associations implied in the moment of lift, and the
attendant mobility; the trick itself.
Watching labour transforms what it receives affectively into an equivalent value
that is then both a form of alienation of the circus artist from the mass-value of their
own body, that serves only to represent their body to another mass-value, and the
production of a surplus value that is fetishized as belonging to that produced body
as a freedom intrinsic to it that it is possible to attain within the intrinsic meritocracy
of gravity.

As with the imperative of capital, mobility gained through the accumulation of

capital, gained through the exploitation of watching-labour may be enjoyed, there
is no question here of the enjoyment. It is clearly enjoyable to believe that you are
free; as stated, this is perhaps the wage.
But the mobility afforded remains only on the terms of the indifferent and non-
negotiable imperative of capital to reproduce itself, and which is incapable of
representing the mobile subject in anything but moments of mobility afforded by
this subject-less register.
This operation exploits those who do not own through conferring false ownership,
it conceals the limit of a compromised and contradictory capital, and forms part of
the process of desiring production that now, through the process of the labour of
watching also forms that of freedom production within circus. In the new
configuration of Circusism, circus supports the fallacious notion that the installation
of trick-making into the fabric of society is a method of being free.
The operation of moments of fictional weightlessness lose all power to demand
freedom-to-come, as it is fallaciously implied to be already here.

This is about how the circus trick has been captured to promote gravity, in order to
profit capitalist circus artists.
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I want to be free in my practice, but not like this. I am supposed to labour to produce
the not-known that is free of external influence, but this then is a machinery
constructed according to that which I do not know, as the efficiency of the
production of the not-known.

HOMO EOCONOMICUS

We can see from Marx that in his note that

‘The legal fiction prevails, that each person, the buyer, has an encyclopaedic
knowledge of commodities’.

(Marx, K (1978) Critique of Political Economy V 1. Penguin. London)

In terms of the Law of Gravity, a legal fiction is here made within an exploitative
circus moment that assumes because every audience member has a body then they
have an encyclopaedic knowledge of bodies of mass and how they operate under
gravity, and how techniques of circus work to enable mobility in relation to the split
therein. This assumption is the grounds for the elaboration of the fundamental
deception of Circusism that enables the execution of technique look like magic.

This disparity in the ‘telling’ that is then realised exploitatively to imply that the
unalterable mass-value is a register that can be fairly influenced to comply with
what circus ‘tells’, namely that its authority is refutable to comply with the
production of freedom within it. Just as commodity is fantasised as responding to
the subject of need.
Consequently within the non-acknowledgement of the split in the registers of
value a false equivalence is implied that can make an intrinsic quality of ‘freedom’
appear to belong to the ease of movement of that circus body.
Indifferent and autonomous mass-value is misleadingly made equivalent to
qualitative elements that can only operate in another register altogether. Thus
gravity is implied to be able to ‘fairly’ value the circus body according to its need for
weightlessness, in the same way the market is implied to ‘fairly’ respond to the
subject of need, and in a continuation of the homology between Marx and Lacan,
the same way language is implied to respond ‘fairly’ to the subject’s need for self-
signification.
The reality of freedom in gravity, meritocracy in the market, and agency of
meaning in language has never been more uncertain.

I am labouring the point but labour is the point here….

In highlighting the work of a figure who does not exist Happy was able to move
more freely to expand and shore up his spurious argument.
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More and more he began to realise that without the insights of these non-existent
thinkers, his work would be entirely empty of validity.
Thus he was filling in the ghost of his critique, but only with further spectral voices.
In this sense it was like a kind of past life regression in which important things are
said but by those whose authenticity as a speaker is entirely uncertain. In this way
the inclusion of quotation became like the assembly of a self from the parts of an
‘other’ that we must then believe is real.

In this conception we can examine the way the circus artist behaves towards the
audience in the process of freedom-production within the mandatory nature of
Circusism:

What is examined here is the sequential ‘superposition’ by which the circus trick-
maker represents both a worker blindly operating the machinery of freedom
production that necessarily alienates them from their own body and its capacity to
produce weightlessness and also represents an entire internalised factory system at
which the audience are asked to apply their watching-labour, their witness-labour,
which like rigged jury-duty could only ever return the vote of full confidence.

The aesthetically managed program of legs and arms was designed to produce
freedom with a minimum drain on the spectator-worker; they simply had to be
present to operate the applause-lever and the three six packs and two lingering
looks, plus a doomed on/off Acro-Romance would generate some percentage on
the clap-o-meter that was sufficient to produce at least 365 units of freedom per
hour.

The dominant mode of production ensured that there was extreme economy of
movement, even the durational pieces were engineered to economically incise the
notion that all circus was just a factory of Fordian efficiency, and the clowns got
quick laughs that economically referenced the twee vulnerability of refugee
children, the homeless and the mentally ill all rolled into one.

“Roll up, roll up smell the farting flounder,

Flaps around the tank creating bubbles as she goes…
Dick Whittington’s cat, or the Great Performing Dog,
See the Pig of Knowledge, Called the Intellectual Hog…”

Each audience member produced a surplus value that could easily be converted
from the antagonistic relations between those that owned ‘good’ bodies and those
that did not, into the equivalence of value that existed to imply that, just as anyone
can better themselves by a program of exercise, anyone could be truly free if they
simply could come up with act unique enough to be credited in the meritocracy of
gravity.

Everyone was freakishly welcome in the sterility of difference.

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The Hypnotist and the Horserace, Part Ten

As I ran to my room to grab my things, my mind reeled…the fact that

she can get Charlie to tell her something which she has not yet told
him, from her temporal perspective, means that she has set up a past
life information storage system, a vast bureau of locked information, but
from which you can retrieve information before you have stored it.
I thought again about the deep scratch in the writing desk as I
hastily gathered my things, if I could have got this information out of
the desk before it was placed in there I could have got it at any time in
the past without breaking in.
Charlie in this one experiment had shown that it was possible to get
those past life subjects to tell you things that you would not be able to
tell them until after it had happened in your time line at some point in
the future…they could tell you things that had not yet occurred.

It was pure genius. She had opened time. She had used the past life
subjects hidden deep inside the hypnotised patients as her ticker tape
with which she could interact, she only had to find them and whisper to
them, and the information was available to her even before it had been
recorded.
I shuddered. it was monstrous…where was Jonah?

I staggered back outside into the downpour.

It occurred to me that the collapse of the laboratory and greenhouse
into the river may have been foreseen by Mary.
I became eerily aware that there was now no event that was
unpredictable to her, she only had to ask a past life subject if they
remembered anything they had been told the day before. If they did
then she could react to such events so that the outcome was favourable
to her and then it was a simple matter of reporting the event to that
same subject at a later date but earlier in their time line as the date
they would be later approached by her and asked to remember.
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The outcome of the event was retrieved before it had happened and
been recorded.

The collapse of the floor, looking like her tragic demise, may be a cover
to disguise her leaving us all behind in order to wreak havoc in the
civilised world with her newly discovered techniques.
I became convinced that she was alive and well, and had disappeared
down stream on the burgeoning swell; possibly with Jonah, who was
drugged so that she could predict the outcomes of all events that lay
before her.

I could see that the remaining boat was hardly holding on to its
moorings in the rushing water. I stumbled down the splintered jetty
that was still hanging onto what survived of the greenhouse. Rare plants
lay prone as the river foamed through their shattered pots. It was
possible to see how the Japanese Knot weed may have contributed to
the structural debilitation of its housing, as the fleshy vines seemed to
penetrate the rudimentary brick supports, causing deep splits in the
foundation. The jungle on either side of the banks glared its disapproval
of my presence as I made my way to the boat fluttering in the deluge.

The jetty was slanted and treacherous. I was slipping at every step, the
rain, torrential, flooded my eyes. I tripped and in one moment decided
to leap for the tethered skiff.
I sailed through the air and my arms, clutching the bundle of hastily
gathered supplies and notes, could not prevent me from falling headlong
into the boat with a force strong enough to loose it from its ties. I
heard the servant boy call out in alarm as I was propelled forward.

“Stop…Mr Caverner, Sir…please wait…its not safe…”

But it was too late, I was off, careening out across the purplish foam
into the green, flexing sinews of the flood.

THE PUBLIC
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What is at play then in the public display of tricks within circusism as freedom-
production?
What is the nature of deception through which an audience can be deceived into
validating gravity as a limitless and meritocratic area? First I would like to take up
something that perhaps relates the everyday deception of our experience within the
market. Namely the notice that Marx makes of a ‘legal fiction’
In regard to the deceptions of trade it is assumed that all parties have full
knowledge of the true value of each and every commodity, this fiction prevails then
to legitimise the commodity fetishisation, and the possibilities for profits that derive
from selling things for a higher price than their true market worth. Buyer beware.
Capitalism is a mode of production based on private ownership of the means of
production. Let us propose a fantasy: that circus artists are the jealous capitalistic
owners of the means of weightlessness production.

Capitalists produce commodities for the exchange market and to stay competitive
must extract as much labor from the workers as possible at the lowest possible cost.
In this regard the circus artist produces moments of lift, and here they are the
labourer not the capitalist, but here we are discussing the source of surplus value
that does not emanate from the circus body in training in a self validating loop
(however self-alienating that may be under the edicts of Circusism)

Let us imagine the ring as a circular assembly line, at which the workers are seated
and where the production of value occurs. At this work-station a surplus value is
added by the spectator-worker to the weightlessness produced by the machinery of
the circus body in the apparatus of the circus. This ‘machinery’ as in Marx’s
definition represents the abstracted knowledge of the circus
artist/trainer/pedagogue/director, that knowledge is something of which the
spectator-worker has no knowledge.

Also here in Marx’s note that the subject homo ecomoemicus is a figure assumed
to have encyclopeadic knowledge of the value of what is produced, although this
relates to the specific interaction with the subject as a consumer in the market as
opposed to the worker in the factory I am citing it here to highlight the benefit to
the capitalist to operate under the insistence that everything is clear and therefore
no deception is possible.
Now those of us who have actually worked in circus we can safely assert that often
the performance of circus is ruined for us primarily because we do know the
machinery…”

There was a small ripple of acknowledgement from those spectators who were
actual circus artists, they were scattered throughout the auditorium as nodes that
could add surplus value to Happy’s in-jokes…”Could you work a little harder…”
Thought Happy.

So in regard to this circular assembly line that faces the machinery of circusism,
what we are asked to produce is freedom. The artists are present as the willing
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capitalist owners, the audience are present to sell their watching-labour, for which
they pay a small fee …what is the going rate at the moment?”

“The fees vary but are proportionally adjusted and each circus hall runs a book on
the acts so your ticket price is automatically gambled on the performer of your
choice. So…in the average town hall a ticket is 2 or 3 units but at the larger halls if
you can win on an outsider you come away with over 10000!” The Dean blushed

“Thank you Dean Morrison. Regardless of the nominal fee, the audience are giving
their watching labour time, which amounts to the creation of surplus value that is
then fetishized as the intrinsic freedom of the circus body.

The economic interest of the capitalist is to pay the worker as little as possible, in
fact just enough to keep him alive and productive. The workers, in turn, come to
understand that their economic interest lies in preventing the capitalist from
exploiting them in this way.

So where is the antagonism, what does the circus artist owner require from the
watching-labour?
It is my assertion that there is no wage given here, there is no reward for the adding
of surplus value, in fact you pay for it. What is required is that you contribute an
added value such that fiction can become fact, that is what is unquantifiable in the
register of pure quantity, can contradictorily become a quantity.
The trick requires technique. The technique follows criteria related to an economy
of energy, in that maximum lift is generated from minimum physical exertion, so we
are already in an economy where the circus worker operates according to an
economy of movement…
But is this circus operator a worker trying to get paid as much as possible for as little
work as possible or is this circus artist a capitalist owner of production trying to
squeeze as much surplus value from the spectator-workers as possible that can be
conflated into freedom production. Regarding circus technique as the investigation
of the most efficient transfer of energy into directional momentum through
controlled movement under just the right amount of elastic tension in order to
generate a shift in weight-value to a lesser, more workable amount; in this sense the
energy economy of circus technique within circusism, that is designated as the
project of freedom production, is organized around employing this technical
process of ‘spending’ as little energy as possible to create the maximum profit of
freedom, that individualizes the circus artist as successful in the market of gravity.
In this sense the technique becomes exploitative***,see below it is a trick of
another order, and in falsely proving freedom to be a fact ceases to be a demand
through self-acknowledgement as a purely fictional proposal. The circus of
circusism is politically eviscerated.

Let us view then the circus artist as the owner of the technique, which is the means
of weightlessness production (within our narrow definition of the trick as needing to
secure moments of weightlessness to access the kind of mobility that circus values)
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Let us make a proviso that in public performance, the artist is also the owner of the
means of meaning production.
…the production of supposed freedom is the self fulfilling prophecy of circus, in
which the activity of weightlessness production is organized around something that
is useless and unreachable to capital…ie a fiction that imagines the outside of
gravity, and by implication the outside of capital and language in our hastily
assembled homology. As a project of enclosure of all externality in order to become
total, such fictions can be assimilated as the production of affective elements that
lead to the reproduction of capital, and infer that those affective elements can exist
just as well in the subject less vacuum of exchange…thus the idea of freedom
production references the subsumption of what the scale of gravity cannot grasp in
circus as what capital cannot grasp in circus as part of the larger project of
subsumption of other un-registerable elements being converted to
marketability…this larger project for me can be designated in the term ‘desiring
production’ , which represents the totalisation of capitalism in the same sense that
circusism represents the totalisation of gravity as a limitless meritocracy, when it is
in fact a limited indifference.

The homology here is that there is no outside to gravity purely because circus insists
on valuing its weightlessness in terms of gravity. This is the form of circusism that
agrees implicitly with capital, in which the process of desiring production values
pricelessness in terms of the artificial equivalent pricing system of capitalism. The
gravity that is referenced here is then the irreducible autonomy of exchange that is
sought to be the ground of all interactions between subjects. In the conversion of all
subjective interactions into commodifiable elements, they are preserved as
exchange-values but enervated of all possibility to continue to be primarily inter-
subjective.

MARY APPEARS:

A young woman near the front was raising her hand…

“I am not taking questions yet but there will be time at the end to discuss these
issues…”

“I merely wanted to say professor that on the other hand, perhaps there is no
outside to gravity because the human system, the human body and its attendant
lens of current perception is organized around a myopia that makes gravity real to
us. Gravity is only the by product of not being able to see in four dimensions.”

“Er..well …yes quite so, and I will be the first to admit that the human body is hard-
wired to be embedded in systems that are autonomous to it. But science fiction
perhaps is not the answer…”

“Perhaps it is…but please forgive me for interrupting you.”

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It is my assertion that the circus artist should be trying to share with the audience
the best fictions available, rather than exploiting their production of surplus value in
order to gain the profit of success, entrepreneurial cunning and individualism
through the false assertion that freedom within circusism is possible when it is
clearly just an extension of an enforced neoliberal program to fantasise about the
‘free world’ of capitalism.
It is my assertion that the circus artist should be trying to share with the audience
the best fictions available, rather than exploiting their production of surplus value in
order to gain the profit of success, entrepreneurial cunning and individualism
through the false assertion that freedom within circusism is possible when it is
clearly just an extension of an enforced neoliberal program to fantasise about the
‘free world’ of capitalism.
Let us go further and suggest that the ownership is apparently not just of the means
of weightlessness production, but of the means of meaning production of
weightlessness…That is, that the circus artist is exploitative in that they also own
the means to make weightlessness mean freedom…within circusism this is the
primary production.

“I am saying that for a circus subject to own the means (of meaning) production of
weightlessness, then according to Lacan I can infer from a cross register homology
between language and gravity that the circus subject has to accept the fictionality
of that weightlessness within gravity in the same way a subject in Lacanian analysis
has to accept the fictionality of themselves in language.”

The question of ownership is unclear in both cases. In the first case an analysis can
be critiqued for suggesting that the production of desire in relation to signification
and its interpretation is the preserve of the analyst, whilst such analysis
contradictorily implies that the ‘symptom’, characterised by repetition of this loop
of desire/signification, is seen as a work-station that is owned by the analysand.
Thus ownership is both given and denied.

In the case of Lacan, I feel that although this central hierarchical structure of
meaning is not implied to suggest that both the analyst and analysand are the
owners of the means of meaning production (and there is a useful highlighting of
the central obscuration of the real relations of meaning production in analysis) what
is revealed in the ‘literalisation’ of the unconscious is an inherent problem that is
homological to capitalist production in which value/meaning itself includes its own
inherent bars and impasses in which the subject is irrevocably embedded and the
desire for signification only further installs the subject in their incapacity to gain
agency. They have to submit to the endless deferral of meaning and/or value, and
their only recourse within a compromised subjectivity is to acknowledge a
fictionality as the only way of remaining weightless outside of the signs and symbols
that they utilise to construct the subject itself that they do not own.
Being fictional is the only way out when the bar is acknowledged. This is what I am
suggesting for the trick, but is there some other way implied by a free desiring
production in which desiring does not implicate lack as part of an inevitable circuit?
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Otherwise the problem remains; ownership is still given and denied but not at the
privilege of the analyst, but through the nature of the medium.

Being fictional is unappealing, which is why area that claims to turn fiction into
reality is worth its weight in gold, it is practically priceless.
Regardless of its lack of appeal, I can be positive about fiction: at least a fiction can
operate a demand on the real by acknowledging itself as not bound by the same
law.

Onto this scenario of questionable ownership we must add capital, after all it is from
the analysis of political economy that these models of ownership are derived, and if
these supposedly inherent impasses in subjectivity are then located back into capital
as their only environment, then this further complicates the issue of ownership.

Within this discourse I am switching modes, but please think of me as one horse that
is running around three rings. It is a three-ring circus of gravity, language and capital
and I will be thinking in a three-legged cross-referenced way about this homological
circus. I am balancing the relations to the circus trick whilst thinking through its
form that is largely excluded from these relations.

As we posit that capital is the system within which this idea of ownership of
signification or desire is embedded, then we are faced with the extreme complicity
of psychoanalytical interpretation and theory of desire with capitalist modes of
production. Within desiring production this is what is at stake; Deleuze and Gauttari
outline a process of free desiring-production, in a way the production of
‘uselessness-value’ that is not bound to the circuit of desire as lack, in that this is a
direct creation. It may be that although Lacan sees jouissance as a force that desire
protects us from.
So what protects against or limits jouissance? The first answer is desire, and this is
one of the ways that Lacan defines the latter. In the Écrits he writes that “Desire is a
defense, a defence against going beyond a limit in jouissance”
(Écrits, 825)
What this means is that rather than indulging a passion for jouissance, the
metonymy of desire protects against going beyond a certain limit of pleasure, from
going beyond what he calls in Seminar XIII the ‘foyer brulant’, or the ‘burning hearth’
(Seminar XIII, 23rd March 1966).

Although Lacan was almost praised in Anti-Oedipus for being close to this idea of
desiring-production, we find him hardly mentioned within later works. I am not
going to examine this conundrum too deeply here as one day I want to myself just
go ‘out for a walk’ but between a negative and more positive reflection on going
beyond the economy of pleasure there may be agreement between of sorts
between the ideas of an unfettered desiring-production and jouissance.

The issue of the ownership of means of production in relation to the subject in

capital is complex. The subject is seen here as the site of not unfettered desiring-
production, but seen as the site of installation of a desiring-machine directly
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organised around the schematic of desire and lack as posited by Lacan in the
inescapable field of language. But this is a subject that is told that they are free and
unfettered.

In that we engage with Berardi’s notion of semio-capital we can posit that the
fields of capital and language in their unholy union have both become an
inescapable field that is the establishment of the subject as the work-station of
apparently self-owned desiring production (a form of freedom-production) that is
simultaneously the machinery that tautologically reproduces capital according to
the loop and reciprocal knot of desire that chases an endlessly retreating
signification and through which the subject of desire is eternally denied the
satisfactory signification of the self.
Organised around the Lacanian problematic is a machine, that exists at the site of
the subject that contradictorily operates according to the same barred processes
and horizontal autonomy of differential relation as the impasse for the subject in
language, and operates according to the concealment of the real relations of
production for the subject of labour power. In that they labour at a machine to
produce a relative value from which they are alienated in its fetishisation as a
fantasy of equivalence.
I am saying here that a circus that thinks of itself as organised around the
production of freedom is organised in a similar way.

LACAN BECOMING TRUE:

In this sense then Lacan, who is refuted by Deleuze, comes to be true of the subject
in capital, just as it becomes true of the circus subject in gravity…who seeks to
produce a weightlessness at the site of their own body but from which they are
barred by the necessitation that this weightlessness be fetishized as holding the
surplus value of its status as actual freedom.
This is achieved through the same conflation of ownership as described above;

In performing this conflation of non-ownership/ownership and fact/fiction

respectively, the circus subject is similarly contradictorily implied to own the means
of production of agency that is measured in a scale that is autonomous and external
to them. The profit here is the fiction of mobility conflated as real status, as with
capital, this is fine within capital.
Within late circusism, the trick equals freedom…

So the trick of public performance is something suggested to be played by the circus

subject (who either believes in its untruth or not) on the audience. In that she
exploits the labour of their watching, that labours at the machinery of circus
technique as an abstracted knowledge of the modes of efficient production of
weightlessness, and to which they through this labour of watching add a surplus
value of freedom to that weightlessness, with a similar problematic of contradiction
that ensues from the implicit reliance on a quantitative register to validate
something of purely qualitative aspect, and the attendant implication of gravity as a
meritocracty within which in the moment of the trick, the artists profit at the
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expense of the audience, who being possessed of the same physical economy
should also by implication be able to achieve freedom within such a system of merit.

The conflation of fiction with fact and the conflation of meritocracy with system of
pure non-negotiable difference amount to the same subsumption, fetishisation and
subsequent alienation of both subjects of artist and audience, in which the value of
freedom is held to be contradictorially within their means of production but which
requires validation by an external and prior other/system/register.

SUBSUMPTION:

With this in mind then , there is a corollary in which it may be possible to suggest
that the trick is the point of sale of labour of circus at which there is an immediate
subsumption to the imperative of freedom-production, which is the imperative
condition proposed by circus itself, which requires to gain the profit and validation
of ‘true freedom’ from a register that can neither permit nor validate it.

All that circus can in fact do is to utilise these conditions of production not for
exploitative means but to focus on the acknowledgement of weightlessness as the
‘telling’ of freedom only and that this is the excessive production of a subject that is
not fetishized to be entered into an externally autonomous register of gravity in
order to claim a profit that the subject can never realise.

Circus must then address the refocusing of its point of validation of this purely
fictionalmobility outside the usual register, namely the field of gravity, and the new
imperative here should be to relocate the validation of weightlessness as needing to
occur outside of the register of gravity

The refocusing of the fiction of weightlessness as a demand only must accompany a

rethinking of the circus artist’s position as a trick-maker in relation to other kinds of
restriction, specifically the restrictions that occur in engagement with other art
forms, the socio-political sphere or as here, the fields of political economy and
linguistics in light of which these homological proposals are made.

I propose this just as other values should be refocused as needing to be revalued not
in terms of systems of difference that are autonomous and independent of the
subjects that produce them.

What I will attempt to do here is to engage with the parallels between these two
images of the subject within Marx and Lacan and reflect them onto the image of the
circus subject as I see it, and as this circus subject sees himself or herself.

In this sense it is a provocation in that it asks the circus subject to examine the
possibility that they are
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A: Alienated from the body that they create through the trick making process under
gravity, which they conflate as genuine freedom, but in light of this producton
experiencing a falling rate of profit they turn to public affirmation.

B: And so more than this they also represent a figure, who owns the means of
production of weightlessness, and then who conveys this in a relative, qualitative
manner to an audience, but who through the exploitation of the watching-labour of
that audience who give surplus value to the lift, then places this weightlessness in an
unattainable register of mass-value that is validated through the indifferent and
subject-less register of gravity, thus negating the possibility of this production to be
anything but canned freedom conflated as the real thing through canned
applause.
The trick is canned.

JOUISSANCE 1:

So what would be the expression of this weightlessness produced outside of the

rationality of a desire for freedom, a weightlessness that was a fictional nonsense
that nevertheless occurred within gravity, to ‘tell’, in this suspended unschematised
lift, of the limitations of gravity as not a totality, but out of an impulse not to be
validated as a free individual, but out of an impulse beyond the economy of that
impulse?
A move that only hints that gravity has an outside that we cannot yet see?
What would be an expression of weightlessness that acknowledges itself as just
the nonsense it is possible to say in the language of circus before it collapses back to
the rationale of the horizontal difference of mass-value?
Is there a further reference here in desiring production to jouissance within the
theoretical frame of Lacan, as something that produces beyond the economy of
desire.
I would like to think of a trick that is performed on Circusism.
As that against which desire defends itself; that is, from the flood of what del would
call des prod, that is free and useless, affective, and fictional.
Let me clarify this odd expression. For me, it is excess beyond any balance of
economy, where economy is the libininal account of pleasure versus un-pleasure.
To labour according to the production of need is one thing, to labour according to
the fantasy you are labouring according to the production of need is another (in fact
you are about the business of fabricating use-value in order to facilitate the entry of
irrelevant commodities at inflated exchange values, that perpetuate the fantasy of
the money –form as a ‘fair’ equivalence)
These kind of economies are rational in their own regard, self-perpetuating, but
what occurs in jouissance is defined as beyond this rational ‘economic’ principle; it is
production that finds for itself the production of production, and without cause to
refer to either a positive or negative outcome; like a drunken Gödel who simply does
not care anymore if mathematics lives or dies.

In this sense I will refer jouissance to the idea of schizoanalysis that Deleuze and
Gauttari perhaps find as a point of congruence in the Lacanian subject.
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This subject, who produces beyond any recourse to the rationale of what is useful
to a subject of need is then the excess of production that perhaps exceeds even the
circuit of desire as lack. Lacan himself has stated that desire is the defence against
this senseless production.

In thinking about the weightlessness that is not made real, but anyway
experienced, as true but unprovable I am relating this jouissance to the free desiring
production of a subject not yet schematised or subsumed to the imperative of
capital, but useless within it.
When I say ‘imperative’ I mean a repetitive symptom that might then be employed
as a machinic assembly line to reproduce capital expansively; I am saying that
perhaps this ‘schiz’ or jouissance is an escape from the autonomy of difference that
here we are addressing in this three way homology between gravity, language and
capital.
II am aware that in determining a homology between a split register in each is
allowing the thinking some cross-pollination.

There is a wonderful example of this in the Rat Man case history. As he is describing
the great obsessional thought which haunted his patient, Freud observed:

“His face took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one
of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.” (SEX, 166-167).

from: [Link]
jouissance/

It can be said that Lacan takes from this idea in Freud of jouissance being a
contradictory expression, of pleasure beyond pleasure that contains the horror of a
pleasure with no libidinal economy as a rationale.
if the pleasure principle is the balanced economy of pleasure then perhaps
jouissance is an extreme repetition of accumulation to the excesses of a financial
crash. In this sense it may be possible to attribute the destructive capacity that
Lacan outlines in jouissance to capital, that produces excess to its own destruction.
The term here perhaps could describe the excess of expansion that capital
undertakes in its effort to overcome the falling rate within it, regardless even of its
own demise. As capital’s ‘jouissance’ now occurs within the padded cell of
taxpayers’ bailouts, it is unfortunately impossible for capital to injure itself too
severely.
There is a reason why I give an example of capital behaving in a jouissant manner,
and that is to highlight again what is denied and what is allowed under capitalist
production.

In suggesting here that jouissance is similar to desiring production then as a mode

of overproduction I am referring to how it is seen in Deleuze and Gauttari as a more
positive force that could directly create a reality without recourse to a lack that
underlies that.
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What is implied here is production that is not held within the circuit of desire over
lack.
It is an as of yet unstructured factory of desire beyond desire that cannot be reduced
to an organised production that is subsumed to collapse to difference and activate
the lack that will further activate a repeat of desire according to a Lacanian
schematic. For me, in recasting the unconscious as a factory instead of a language,
linguistic production is implied to be schematised in the service of capital.

In Lacan jouissance is seen as something darker than in Deleuze, and this is

perhaps due to the positivity with which the schizophrenic out for a walk is viewed in
Anti-Oedipus; an optimism that may perhaps not be shared by a practicing
psychoanalyst such as Lacan. I am also not romanticising the condition, but I am
acknowledging that jouissance may not be a path to a destructive blaze or imminent
catatonia. I am aware also that Deleuze and Gauttari cite Lacan as being close to a
schizoanalysis, what Lacan’s response to this is less clear.

The point here is that jouissance or desiring-production is a mode that in the subject
evades capital, but in capital it evades the subject.
However I am also saying that desiring production is here discussed in three
modes.

1, Desiring-Production: as that which jouissantly evades difference and economies

of rationality.
A trick before Circusism.

2, Desiring-Machine: as that no longer jouissant production that is schematised as

an installed desiring-machine within the unconscious that formulates desire as the
defence against jouissance and as lack in order to repeat capital’s imperative.
A trick within Circusism.

3, Capitalist Desiring-Production: a hidden jouissance that capital employs to bring

that which cannot rationally belong to its economy into that economy by jouissant
inclusivity, an excess that can expand anywhere beyond the rationale of what
capital actually finally requires, which is the collapse to difference…this hidden
mode that relies on the internalisation of affective potencies in capital is what is
here in operation in the jouissant desiring-production that capital allows itself, that
can produce even affective elements into the market, that can beyond reason use
the rationale of pricelessness to set prices.
This is the tricky ground of Circusism upon which tricks are neutralised.

As Deleuze and Gauttari move onto later examples of fractal discourse it becomes
clear that what is proposed that it is possible to emerge from the chaos of
jouissance or schizophrenic approaches to structure, both of which, in dispensing
with economies of any order, in dispensing with value seek to leap out of systems
and get to the possibility of flow between them. The fractal nature of the
understanding of pleasure beyond pleasure is that from the blaze of petrol
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predicted by Lacan, other orders can emerge; it is not just a descent into
meaninglessness.
But what I am trying to get at here is how a desiring-machine might look like in
trying to understand how Circusism seems to be a freedom machine, so I will return
to the imperative of capital, the possibility for its reproduction in the production of
desire, and according to what is this production of desire aligned, in order to better
picture what freedom-machines are in operation within Circusism.

JOUISSANCE 2:

Capital is the other, agency has been handed over. I am assuming that in entering
into capitalism the subject submits as in language to the designation of the desire
for self signification according to the other, but let us pursue for a moment the idea
of a sentient capital that is like any organism or meme, trying to reproduce itself.
What occurs here now is that I am speaking of capital as if it had a will to
dominate. This is of course nonsense as it is directed into place by individuals in
finance: but capital has a will that is the sum of the movements of the unreadable
tides of the market, and the point here is that financiers who ‘move and shake’ are
‘moved and shaken’ in equal measure.
Rats chasing crumbs, working tricks, telling lies, it depends on your view.
My view is that at this current time Individuals are following not directing this
indifferent financial morass and capital becomes the schematic for the production
of a self that is viewed through the eyes of capitalist subjects.
But regardless let us imagine capital as a subject in its own right, and what I will
briefly but deliberately activate in this fictional account of how we are captured
within a performative instruction of Circusism that serves the expansion of capitalist
interests is an idea of capital as a trick-maker as an idea of what a freedom-machine
might be.

JOUISSANCE 3.

Is a freedom-machine structured or unstructured? So how is it possible to both state

that a circuit of desire over lack, in being self-referentially looped to produce itself,
creates the excessive repetition of capital, and also state that a real excessive
production is jouissance from which desire is a defence?
They are both productions of excess, but one is designed as a machine to only
reproduce capital, the other is unstructured and indeterminate, that has outgrown
the aspic of difference.

In installing the desire/lack loop, the subject is defended from engaging in the kind
of juoissant production that I here associate with the original conception of desiring
production that produces beyond the economy of the pleasure principle…although
Lacan sees this as a danger, Deleuze might cast this kind of production one that
does not have a definitive reciprocal relation to lack in being beyond desire, and that
this production produces not reality as a depth but a reality as a surface and is not
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destined to symptomatically repeat itself in a collapse into lack that is synonymous

to a collapse into difference.
Jouissance might be thought of as an excess that is beyond economy, useless to
difference, whereas the circuit of desire/lack might be thought of as available to be
co-opted into the endless repetition of economic excess, useful as a fabricated use-
value to difference.
So here a freedom machine is the incarceration and medication of a schizophrenic
out for a walk. This is nothing new but in relation to circus as a freedom-machine, I
see the repetition of this medicated smile a lot.
I hope that it is clear that I am not referring to obvious painted smiles here, but the
also to the seriousness of more alternative circus artists.

So as a circus artist can bend, go anywhere new, leap, flip into new areas in a
jouissant excess with no recourse to economy, it can be said that this real jouissant
or ‘schiz’ excess that goes anywhere, can attach to anything for good or ill, is also
what capital allows itself.
It indulges here, whilst the schematic of repetition, according to quantifiable and
equivalent economies, that form a protection from jouissance of schizophrenic
excess, in the form of desire over lack are what capital demands of the subject in
order to reproduce.
Capital cannot reproduce outside of the petri dish of the market and so whilst it
jouissantly grasps at unmarketable elements these elements must be brought
within the market that remains autonomous from subjective agency. And so a
desire based on lack is reserved for the assembly line of desiring-production; the
subject labouring at the desiring machine.
In this sense desire/lack is the defence against the ‘un-marketability’ of jouissance
but this unstructured unregulated jouissance is exactly the process by which capital
appropriates new markets.
Capital moves as a body without organs in order to install organs at every site.
A freedom machine is then a machine that is mobile within the idea of installing
immobility everywhere

BECOMING true IN CAPITALS:

The problem highlighted here is that desire as lack is not untrue because it is
captured in capitalist production, but that the subject of jouissance who goes
beyond desire, that produces an unquantifiable excess, that exceeds production,
that produces beyond use, into uselessness that then cannot be rationalised into the
market as somehow useful , to fullfill desire; it is beyond desire, and therefore anti-
capitalist.
This subject cannot be allowed to freely produce that which the market cannot
assimilate…as such fictions of nonsense about nodody in no time at all, these
cannot assist in the imperative of capital.
And so Lacan becomes true as something you cannot see the outside of at all.
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I am saying that a desiring-machine is perhaps the schematised jouissance, which is

orchestrated around the circuit of desire as lack.

Capital’s defence against a jouissant subject is desire installed as lack.

The jouissant subject threatens it through its ability to suggest and refer to other
realities thus implying capitalism is not the totality it purports to be.

Perhaps the trick against the freedom-machine is to get beyond desire.

In this sense can it be said that an excessive production that is useless to the
economy of a system of difference, that does not perhaps result in a conflagration,
but in the over-production of a glorious uselessness, is a similar ‘uselessness-
production’ as the uselessness production of fictional weightlessness is to the
system of difference of mass-value.
Again in relation to circus then, in relation to the trick, in relation to speaking
circus, it is the knotted and tautological uselessness iterated by the trick that should
be privilieged in circus, not as freedom, but as an art form that can negotiate
extreme methods to over-produce statements about an end to enclosure.

JOUISSANCE 4.

As regards the project of capital that I feel lies behind the project of Circusism, the
issue of jouissant production must then be thought of as wholly re schematised
according to the control circuit of desire as lack…
What is implied here is that although the subject of jouissance is like the subject of
pure desiring production; producing in an unschematised way, it is this subjectivity
that is appropriated by capital, in order to simultaneously suggest that capital can
internalise such affective potencies (although Lacan would say that jouissance is not
affect) but still enforce a ban on such jouissant production in the subject within
capital.
Do as I say not as I do.
This is a classic post-ideological bind, which insists that I do what I do because
there are no rules, but the rule is actually that those that cannot adhere to the
performance of no rules will be excluded as they fail to promote this enclosure as
without rules. ???

The incongruence of capital that can go anywhere, but insist that everything
belongs in the market is hidden through post factism. The subject is encouraged to
feel their performance of freedom is the equivalent of its reality but is then
beholden to the barring from that which they produce that eternally returns them to
lack and so also to the further desire that is caused by it. This barring is the result of
the concealed fact that the price of reality of desire is it must be registered in a
medium that cannot register desire.
This implies that anything can be produced to any excess and can be made real in
the market, which legitimises capital bringing anything into the market under the
pretext that it produces desire and that desire can be made real there.
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Jouissance is the tactic that could free the subject from endlessly operating a
desiring-machine schematised around desire as lack, but is reserved for capital’s
own free production of new markets for itself fostered through the subjects
jouissant potential reduced through the defensive through the filters of desire that
lead to fetish, alienation and barring.
Thus what I am saying here is that the freedom supposedly produced within
Circusism is therefore only real in the sense that this is the freedom capital enjoys in
reproducing itself. Thus freedom production in Circusism is only the reproduction of
capital.
The subject of jouissance is the subject that capital allows itself to be (but which
capital must not allow the subject to be)
The production of desire on desire that comes from the deregulation of
production within neoliberal finance is suitably explained as jouissance in that it is
the looped excess that one encounters as being enabled in a Gödellian tautology

SOME BASIC HOMOLOGICAL FACTS.

Lacan highlights the contradiction in desire in the same way Marx highlights the
contradiction in capital, …the alienation from commodity is the barring from the
signifier…the capitalist owner is the Other. Being part of a market the signifier is
barred from the subject, who has invested in its production but cannot grasp it.
…In that in going beyond the circuit of desire and lack, the concept of jouissant
capital comes closer to the Deleuzean notion of desiring production of ‘a
schizophrenic out for a walk’, in that

If we imagine the desire for ‘a theory of desire based on lack’ on its own terms then
we can only arrive at the conclusion that the theory of desire/lack is based on lack
itself, and as the lack that formulates it is lacking what is activated, from this
‘tickling’ tautology is the ‘the blaze of petrol’ that offers to consume the entire
world.

From a contradiction anything follows, and it is exactly this state that capital
proposes to create for itself by taking advantage of the formulation of a Gödellian
trick, whereby the process of desire that leads to lack and back to desire is applied
back to itself.
The circuit of desire/lack is reserved for the subject of the desiring-machine, whilst
capital explodes in a hidden renaming of the ‘desire for “desire as lack”’ as lacking by
its own definition and hence becomes the production of production for itself, a
jouissant excess.

Capital is jouissant but at the expense of a subject who has to be returned to the
regulated binary economy of desire then lack then desire,
The activating principle of capital’s ability to expand, so that price and pricelessness
form rationales for each other to exist in the voracious expression that goes beyond
all economy, is reserved for King Capital.
Meanwhile the subjects themselves must ratify each new highlighted area into
which capital jouissantly expands itself according to the measured economy of a
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register that is autonomous and re-installs desire based on an eternal lack that
negates the expression of subjective desire in its subjectless horizontal differential
relations.
The subjects have only lack as a validation, Capital has production of production.
Capital remains unbarred, un-alienated in order to install such enclosures that
separate the subject from that which they freely produce.
In this sense jouissance is another feature of Lacan that is appropriated
contradictorily in order to operate within the field beyond the dualism that is
prescribed by the incompatibility between use and exchange…
The non-dualism of what Lacan terms jouissance is described within Freud as the
notion of going beyond the pleasure principle in which both Eros and Thanatos are
expressed in one expression, against which Lacan states desire forms a defence.
For me, looking at Circusism in this current climate, this is exactly the jouissance
that capital is activating as it is directed to appropriate incompatibilities such as
pricelessness, which is the negation of marketability and therefore the market, and
price, which is the essence of the masking of the real relative values of production in
the fantasy of equivalence that sustains the market.
This jouissant excess flirts with the utter collapse of the market itself, as we have
repeatedly seen at various points in the history of finance.
Is the figure of jouissance one who is aware that they are fictionally creating an
excess of ‘true but unprovable speech’? The circus subject who is aware they are
creating moment after moment an excess of true but unprovable mobility… This
figure is denied in capital’s appropriation of jouissant production, in which the
useless, the priceless, the weightless are all converted into marketable
commodities, under the pretext that this will make them real for the subject’s
fulfilment, but which are only events that further the expansive excessive
reproduction of capital.
Capital is not really jouissant then, it only performs jouissance in order to return to
difference. It is a desiring machine that appears to perform like free desiring
production, that goes anywhere, with anyone, with any feeling but then demands
payment. The Circus artist within Circusism is like Capital, at liberty to roam the
stage, like a free-range chicken, only to return to the enclosure of applause.

Capital is performing jouissance here, a pretence at free unassociated desiring

production, the project of which is to secure new instances of exchange value…in
this sense capital is very much like the EST leader…getting rich of the back of a
theoretical breakdown of the self.
What is interesting to me is how the project of freedom, which is read as the
ridding of external control, becomes a preparation of submission to the
subjectlessness of exchange value as being the perfect expression of being anything
you want to be. That is; once you are free of all external ideology you are free to
create yourself out of the neutral, post-ideological clay of consumerism, which
becomes necessarily a post-fact area that acknowledges what you yourself have
discovered, that the self is fictional and so utilising the post fact realm of late
capitalism to be all you can be seems like the perfect match. Swipe right, it’s a date.
 144

“…don’t settle for anything less than you can be…make your life a masterpiece…”

These thoughts are better left hidden, as soon as they become an ideology we are in
a tautological society where the singular becomes an absolute, thrust onto the
plural.
In this sense what is hidden is that the post-ideological capitalism is actually an
enforced ideology. As within Circusism everyone must activate the fact of freedom
by law.

“Realising it is empty and meaningless is the endpoint of existentialism…but ESALEN

stepped further in that realising it is all empty and meaningless, you realise that the
fact that it is empty and meaningless is also empty and meaningless…and in that there
is an enormous freedom”

Werner Erhard, Founder of the EST personal improvement courses.

From: (Curtis, A (2006). The Century of the Self. TV program. BBC. London)

WERNER ERHARDT the exponent of EST courses in the 1970’s felt that in order to
be free of external control you had to strip away the subject layer by layer until there
was literally nothing left. This was to get to the true you, free of any external
conditioning. In this sense it was the clumsy attempt to acknowledge that ‘you’
were composed of elements external and prior to you to which you had given power
over you.
I view this as clumsy but in its specific context of being able to return you to a fully
functioning and successful life in an unaltered capitalist frame you are perhaps free
of the old structures in becoming ‘subject-less’ but now open to be ruled by money
and exchange which is also a dimension in which the subject has no place, which
then seems the ideal playground within which to become all you can be. You are in
fact becoming the facilitator of all that capital can be, and becoming all that capital
needs you to be in order to expand.
I am suggesting then that fictionality is not best expressed through capitalism. In
fact the kind of floating, weightless, suspension of self that goes beyond the
economic expression of the pleasure of that self is the jouissance that should
produce that which is useless to the market.
I suggest that fiction is not best expressed in the market precisely because this is
what I see occurring in circus that claims to be freedom production, a weightless
useless moment is enjoyed but then monetised as a costume of real success within
the neutral meritocracy of gravity that recognises the new you.

We are fiction because money is not real…when we are healed we will realise we are
fictional and this means that we are free to produce desire for things that are valued
in a fictional system of value…money is language, and the self is now a purely
linguistic structure which we have opened up as a system of pure difference, there is
no value except the difference to another value, this is our position as purveyors of
fictional subjectivity…we are free to create any colour subject we wish, but bound to
the fact that all colours are rendered invisible as only colourful in their difference to
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another colour, therefore colour resides nowhere , only in difference and so this
negates the subject defined in colour as also being nowhere, we are free to be
fictional, we are free to never be validated…
You circus artists who are already dissolved and open to any system of difference
spend gravity like water looking to validate yourselves as real.
Happy hoped that he had not said that last part out loud.

Happy took a moment to drink and take in the stunned silence. He was aware that
he was now openly critiquing Circusism as a meaningless shell game only to
advance the ideology of non-ideology that money represented. A ghost of
communism, money had no option except to be an umbra of a real ideology. It
would behave as an ideology in which it was possible to think anything and still be
part of the ideology of capital, because any thought could be made real if you paid
enough. This post ideological enclosure had to be enforced otherwise production
would slow down. Each new freedom was a new market, each new circus trick was
some fictional idea of the self turned into an entrepreneurial cash cow.
He continued as persona non grata.

‘The subject in the midst of such a project is free to think of themselves as fictional
because they are in a post fact area which implies that fiction is a safe place, not the
challenging existential wake-up of Lacanian insight perhaps, but fictionality here is a
haven of images that can become real because within capital fiction can be
conflated into fact. What is hidden is the fact that as it becomes fact, it leaves you,
entering into the private muttering of horizontality.
Capital only performs jouissance, as it then has to reduce what it kidnaps back into
ransom. The subject under capital has to do the same, in that any genuine moment
of jouissance beyond the economy of pleasure, has to be also handed over for cash
in order to be real in a system of capitalist realism.
There are bones of contention here between Lacan and Deleuze. What I am
discussing here is perhaps freedom based on a fictional self that comes after the
stripping away of control, one which then is dangerously susceptible to falling back
into the supposedly ideal neutral register that suits such a state, namely validation
of the new you in the market. But the dissolution of the self does not have to end up
in the marketplace looking for a new outfit of freedom.
I am being facile here, but I feel it is important to distinguish between a genuine
loss of self that is tied up with directionless, useless production and the stripping
away of self that then propels this jouissant energy back into a machinic schematic
in the service of the validation of a system of difference as a final totality.
Within the dissolution of self is the idea of jouissance that includes the death of the
subject who now produces beyond a rationale governed by pleasure. Jouissance is
seen as life beyond life , but then in an intimate complicity with death, but not so for
Deleuze who has a more positive reading of the death drive within the activation of
something categorised as life beyond life…

“With the death instinct Deleuze realises his project of the dissolution of the self.
Death has, for him, following Maurice Blanchot, two aspects. Firstly, it is the
disappearance of the person, the reduction to zero of the difference, which stands
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for a distinct person. This reduction is objectively represented as a return to

inanimate matter. But, secondly, death is a state of free differences that are no
longer subordinated to the form of the ego, the subject, or the object.”

(De Bolle L (2010) Deleuze and Psychoanalysis. Leuven University Press. Belgium)

This is the state before minimal difference is installed as the experience of the
subject in relation to the empty set…hence here in this state the minimal difference,
the excess that we are calling affect, and the affect we are reading here as a kind of
fiction is reduced to zero…and a fiction that is reduced to zero is a fact…this is
different to post-factism in which fiction and fact are reduced to zero in the
autonomy set up by the empty set…the difference here is that reduction to zero of
fiction does not occur as this still continues as a ghost, what is reduced to zero in
post-factism is the concealed impossibility for that autonomy to render fiction into
fact…fact is in fact destroyed , which is the cause of the haunting that occurs , as a
fact reduced to zero can be said to remain as a fiction.

I am positing jouissance here as not zero in mass-value where it consistently ends

up; an empirical confirmation of ‘nothing and nobody there’, but as zero in weight-
value, as it remains in suspension within what is silent to gravity, something not
active within the field of gravity but which highlights its condition to us, between
me and you as I can take advantage of the slippage, as not an endless, irrefutable
pull. I think of this zero value in the trick in the register of weight-value as a fictional
self that does not need to be validated, and a zero in weight value as not just death
but a joy, a possibility of free differences that no longer are in effect, and which
enable the ‘telling’ of a freedom not yet here.

I am aware that reduction to a zero of difference is not the same as a zero-value

within difference, but for me it speaks of a mass-value of zero entered into the
system of difference of gravity that brings about the fixity of only the first reading of
an objective death, which cannot then be a validation of freedom as it is both the
death of a commodity now trapped within a market, to which it is useless, but also
the submission of the subject who desires freedom, to a register organised primarily
around a deathly subject-less criteria.
For me the activation of something produced that is wholly useless to and
therefore uncapturable by the market is a form of commodity-death that is haunted
by Marx.

*****
Dear Reader,
Welcome to a rip in the canvas. This will cost you no extra time…well, perhaps just a
little. From this vantage point you will be able to peer in at Happy Down-River as he
attempts to make Circusism think of a Black Swan. As he tries to focus on a bland
spot a young woman is creeping into his peripheral vision, who will make him take a
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long hard look at his critique of Circusism, and issue a challenge that will propel
Happy to undertake one last journey. She will point out holes in his argument…for
now her motivations are unclear.
You may continue to read on from here.

***

Happy was in full on preacher mode:

“Let me be clear here, this reading of circus is the one that is needed for circus to
tear itself away from its associations with capitalism. The point here is a vital one I
feel there is to be no progress in any area of circus art until the complicity with the
fundamental tricks and deceits of capital has been addressed. In beginning as a
project to speak circus to capital, through the homologies between Marx and Lacan,
and meeting Berardis idea of semio capital, and taking in the ‘trick’ of desiring
production as a tautological area of falsified limitlessness, this Marxist critique of
gravity is a call for circus to stop thinking of itself as freedom-production and start
to locate itself as a critique of the real relations of production at the coal face of
gravity and see the practice of trick-making as the daily, incessant issuing of
demands for greater freedom.
Until circus addresses its complicity with capitalist modes of production there can
be no ‘art’ of circus. Specifically as the narratives of circus which privilege
nomadism, itinerancy, temporary autonomy, mobility, resistance and freedom are
wholly appropriated into the insurmountable post fact, limitless enclosure of a
global capitalist disorder.”

A concerned looking Dean stood up in the way a grey cloud would appear before a
downpour,
“Are you saying, Dr Down-River, that you advocate the refusal to perform tricks?”
The Dean himself had anxiously been rehearsing his own comedy dog act, in which
his King Charles Spaniel, dressed as a policeman had been trained to ‘arrest’ the
Dean in a series of timed pratfalls and stunts as the Dean made off with a string of
sausages. It had received lukewarm applause at the town hall last month so the
Dean had been aggressively conditioning the dog with an electric shock collar to get
bigger laughs.

“Perhaps the performance of this lecture is my contribution to circusism, Dean. I am

referring to the long tradition of the intricate and complex relationship between the
Fool and the King. Perhaps this lecture is merely my way of determining how far I
can go before I am beheaded?”

“Are you then trying to trick us…” The Dean was grinning and catching the eyes of
his colleagues, all of whom were secretly working on various bizarre turns…the
professor of economics on a costume changing act, the rector of the humanities
department was working on a calisthenics routine with a ‘Spanish Flavour’, and the
 148

joint heads of mathematics and languages had teamed up to make a performance

of hand to hand acrobatics to legitimise their clandestine affair.
Their act was called ‘Kama Soduku’.

“No trick is intended. Only to discuss the overarching fiction that a fiction can
become a fact…and at an alarming frequency.” Happy had seen the Dean’s dog, it
was a quivering, imbecilic animal, that could be easily surprised into spontaneous
defecation.

The Dean looked unconvinced. He was uncomfortable with a critique of Circusism

even being aired. “Hmmm well please continue, let us state for the record that this
is a hypothetical exercise which seeks to discuss the invalidity of critiquing what
Circusism has to offer. We can think of it as a Humanist approach, that perhaps
seeks to better adjust Circusism to be more inclusive than it already is.”

“Hear, hear…” The young woman who had spoken before.

Happy had not noticed previously how she blended in with her surroundings, due
to the drab colour of her attire that perfectly matched the beige walls and dull blue
plastic seats of the lecture hall. It would seem that despite her odd suggestion about
‘altered perceptions’ she was another advocate of the new disorder. He was
determined to continue and so nodded his acquiescence to the Dean’s suggestion.

“Quite so, Dean. No tricks here then, only discussion for the improvement of the
inclusivity of Circusism. If I may continue then hypothetically…

You are of course right Dean. I am only highlighting possible critiques here, I am
playing devil’s advocate and I offer this critique only as a hacker would offer the
discovery of weaknesses in an operating system. I am merely trying to point out
weaknesses, so that we can discuss them further.

The Dean nodded in approval, remembering that he had left his dog in his new car.
“Quite so, professor… please continue.”

“It is not prudent to imply an ethical dimension to this argument, but in trying to
elucidate how circus has become complicit with capitalism within the very unit of its
iteration, that is the trick, I think it is clear that I think that this is not a good turn.
This I feel is not even a change, circus has always been circling this proximity to
semio-capital. The very fact that twists and turns and ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ can be
monetised is proof that affective potencies can be internalised and expressed in the
money-form.

The fact that circus bosses can assess the value of a certain gesture, a certain
custard pie and hire you at a certain rate is the virtuosic laying of a financial grid
upon the ring. That is just survival, perhaps.
But now that Circus is surviving, now it receives funding to say certain things that
people guess are the things funding wants them to say in circus, the question of
 149

artistic agency is to the fore; how is circus to be an art if it does not start not adding
up?
Its vicinity to capital compromises circus; and so its tricks must engage with this
complicity.
The establishment of ‘compulsory circus performance for all’ that we are now
faced with in Circusism clearly shows the inevitability of this complicity. There does
not seem to be any other kind of inevitability here.
Circusism is the neoliberal production of freedom to legitimise capital internalising
affective potencies as its own trick to overcome its internal gravity. This kind of
freedom only shows how capital can go anywhere but the subject cannot benefit
from this, except by finding themselves once again at their own personal work
station, a freedom-machine that only exploits.

As a circus artist perhaps I am only behaving like capital, in seeking to translate a

physical practice into areas for which it is impossibly suited. The attempt to speak a
trick, to work a trick in money, these were all attempts to petulantly do what capital
was already doing.
To float words on the stock market was my act , to work impossible tautology to
prove there is no value whatsoever held up by the ridiculous mathematics of
financial instruments. I have worked like this for a long time, through time though
time was my enemy, performing what capital performs, but on itself.
In this way I am just a petulant child, who sees their father tell a lie and then slowly
begins to play with the truth. I have lied my way through the door in the name of
truth.
But I am still asking how can circus overcome its own internal limit of its complicity
with capital’s ability to overcome its own internal limit?

The fact that I am ranged here against circusism is that I am ranged against how
capital has captured the trick in its most deceptive form and how this now
establishes a tricky ground of post factism.
Within this area we find that what is hidden by the coming true of Burroughs
maxim: ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’ as the appearance of a free post-
ideological society is actually its corollary: ‘everything is true, nothing is permitted’)
Upon such a ground the trick can do nothing except return the circus subject from
their supposed freedom back into gravity.
The trick can:

A: Either admit it has no power in the register of capitalist realism and so has no
power to be real. There should be no problem here as being a fictional proposition
that acknowledges itself the weightlessness can act as the performance of a
demand for freedom, and so is a political utterance.
But what is implied is that in order to have effect in the world performance has to
become real in capital and only then it can ‘do’ politics, the problem is that the
mode of becoming real is only permitted through validation within a register that
permits no subjective agency, so politics is impossible.
 150

The trick can ‘say’ it is a demand, but perhaps it demands nothing, as the ability to
internalise utterance as a demand on the real is already subsumed within the
imperative of capital to expand itself.

B: Or the trick can be subsumed in the overarching fiction that any such fictional
weightlessness and mobility can be become the real thing (in an exact mirroring of
the operation of capital, which transmutes fiction into its own capitalist facts
amounts and accountancy in an alchemy of registers) The trick here is swallowed
whole as it becomes real, thus also losing its power to make demands on the real by
becoming real and therefore ‘here now’.

In this regard I will designate the terms WHITE and RED and you can make up your
own mind about my ethics.

Red Trick in circus: is one that admits it is fiction, admits it cannot ever function as
real weightlessness, but therefore has a possibility to demand what is not yet here.

White Trick in circus: is one that conflates fictional weightlessness with actual
freedom, through self-deception, through exploitation of the audience labour.

White Trick in Capital: is one that similarly conflates pricelessness as a rationale for
commodification, exploiting the labour at desiring-machines.

No Red Trick: in Capital is there is no Red trick possible, or perhaps I should say
permissible, as I got away with this for years in the Circus.

There was a small ripple of amusement, nothing like the hail of applause he would
receive out in the ‘real’ world. He continued.

“If capital were to admit its incapacity to finally validate something that can only
exist in an affective qualitative register and which cannot therefore belong within its
own field of horizontal difference then capital would again fall back to its own
internal limit of a falling rate of profit, and the trick of capital would fail.
Burroughs maxim: ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’ as the appearance of a
free post-ideological society is actually its corollary:

‘everything is true, nothing is permitted’

(Apocryphal: Hassan I Sabbah, Master of Assassins.)

Capital is the autopsy performed on the living to determine the cause of death.
 151

Happy swayed slightly, gripping the podium. Had he already said this part? He
quickly checked the previous page of his notes; perhaps his academic routine was
unravelling.
He glanced up, suddenly aware of his incongruence here. “How can I fly like the
eagle, when I have to walk with a bunch of turkeys?”
He felt unsteady, he lifted the glass of water before him up to the light. Was there
an odd colour to the liquid, had someone laced his drink?

“Professor, are you alright? Do you need to take a break?”

“I am…I will…I just have to check my notes…my apologies…” he could only think of
being on horse back, out on the open plain, riding just to see the foaming
impossibility of an eternal horse.

Spinning…He had the distinct impression that he was ten years old, dust was
catching at his watery eyes, and everything was dust to the horizon…
Happy could feel time catching in his throat, it was clear that swallowing time had
poisoned his ability to throw words in the correct sequence but worse than that,
right in the middle of his main argument, whole chunks of text were dislocating
themselves from the main body, no matter how hard happy concentrated on the
image of the text as a whole, the fragments simply would not materialise in the
desired order…Was there even a whole that he could convincingly project onto
these dislocated parts? Happy was filled with the sensation that his throat was
writing itself a new passage, one that was leading to an unknown multiplicity of
knotted and non-sensical tunnels, in this sense his idea of a whole was being filled
with holes, that formed the truth behind the image.
The oily looking girl, obviously a Circusist plant, was squirming contentedly in her
seat with her hand raised.
Happy was thinking that this would be the usual standpoint: that the circus was
the last remaining art-form that was not swallowed up by the machine, by the
system, and that it represented the exotic, nomadic, irrepressible soul of disaffected
youth, which was now available to all as a civic duty.

“Yes? Ms…?”

“ …Minkowski.” She smiled the horrid, painted smile that signalled immanent
academic attack.

“Well, er, Professor Down-River…Is it not true that as language proceeds through
time, is wholly reliant on time in order to function in fact, that your well-worded
critique is also subject to the very thing it assails?”

“The fact that my critique exists momentarily before it is subject to the

invalidation of gravity is enough as long as there is acknowledgement… I feel…” He
could not find the words. He had the strangest feeling they had met before….
 152

“As you yourself have stated, what you ‘feel’ is irrelevant as this is a situation
unsuitable for therapy?
Anyway, the fact remains that for this critical account of gravity, and therefore
circus, to take shape beyond its existence as mere conjecture, there is a need for it
to not be subject to that which it critiques.”
Who was this insolent young woman?

She continued, “Language is laid out across time as a series of sequential events. It
proceeds through moment after moment from first intention, then it finds
expression, then reaches comprehension, does this not alarm you?”

“Of course it alarms me…as I have been stating this idea of a coherence is as
mythical as the idea of equivalence…what Saussure proposes in his equivalence of
wage and labour is as nonsensical as what is proposed in language that there is an
equivalence of meaning that can be conveyed, when in fact all there is
…is…chaos…”

“Yes, yes, very clever …but its deeper than this…sure, …‘language’ ...we are all
embedded… blah, blah… But have you not considered that all of this ‘gravity’ all of
this binding is the result of the same thing…”

Happy could feel the plain of his youth stretching out before him. Who was this
woman?
“What is that?” He said pretending to look through his notes.

“The inability to see through time….”

Happy was genuinely startled, he felt like the screen of some dilapidated slide show
that she was operating. Why was she talking about time, why was he imagining the
past?

“Mr Down-River, with all due respect you are throwing stones at the picture of
Goliath. We have to get past this binary nonsense and realise that the fight has
moved. In physically attacking images you miss the point that the war is images,
you are doing the right thing in the wrong way.
Into this I will merely insert the point that we must ask the question, ‘from where
does the restriction of gravity emerge?’,

“Well, this is not exactly the point, you see I am merely trying to point out that
within the conception…”

“Forgive me Professor I ask again, ‘from where does the restriction of gravity
emerge?’…And my answer is only the answer we can find in general relativity, which
is that gravity is an illusion cased by the inability to see the curve of space time…so
another perception is needed here…otherwise we are permanently reduced to
writing fiction that cannot gain purchase at all except on the terms of the barred and
 153

alienated subject of difference that desires to communicate through what can only
ever be a lack of definitive communication.
We do not have to operate on gravity’s terms to perform circus tricks, you are right
here, but why settle for a circus that has to admit that it can only tell stories? To
excise the register that is autonomous from us is not to lose anything, we have
nothing to lose but our names.
If there is no agency in the basement, let’s go up onto the roof.”

“This is all very well, Ms Minkowski, but this sounds like just another inward
turn…we can achieve nothing by self-interestedly pursuing an internalised
revolution…”

“I am not advocating turning inward, but cutting the image of the self to pieces. In
cutting ourselves off from the comprehensibility of the quotidian mundanity of the
clock. By losing touch with the tawdry market of three-dimensional space that
hawks itself through sequential time in trinket after trinket we gain a vast
inhabitable area.”

Happy suddenly shuddered at the thought of becoming a new pioneer aggressively

expanding into the new frontier.
“I want to warn you that you may be fooled by this setting but I am in no way
subject to the…

“Are you not concerned that the very medium upon which you rely in order to
assemble your ‘attack’ on gravity is complicit in gravity. You satirise gravity as
autonomous and indifferent, as something that is the invisible enemy at the heart of
a circus. Your critique turns us all into self-interested automatons that exploit fake
images as if they were real in direct affiliation with capitalist ‘post-factism’, a
concept I do not believe in incidentally. Or if it is a phenomenon it does not touch
me as I am my own project of truth making.

And so this medium of assault is itself reliant on sequential time as a carrier, this
word, that subject, now this adjective, now a verb, then a preposition now an object,
etc. etc. and this sequence through time is wholly dependant on gravity, which
dictates the movement of time itself… with the pull of mass time reaches a stand
still…do you see?”

“Of course I am well aware that language is…”

“Let me continue, Professor, you have consumed enough time with language
already… the fact that language is reliant on time, this is the problem. As what
happens to time as gravity increases?
I will tell you…it slows down, time is reliant on gravity as language is on time, this
means that the comprehension of your critique, its pace, its flow, its hiatus and full
stop is dependant on the very force you attempt to critique through it. The fact even
that it may be misinterpreted is wholly reliant on the imposition of an unsolicited
 154

punctuation mark, that must be sequenced at some temporal increment within the
flow…How do you account for this fundamental invalidation?”

Happy felt the room was spinning, the girl Mary seemed both old and young
simultaneously, he felt gulps of time as they tasted themselves backwards in the
terrifying arc of his oesophagus. Burps of temporal error, as wrong as a fart in the
mouth, added up to a subtraction of breath, in which lung plus lung equals vacuum.
Happy gripped the podium, its alien veneer felt like the helm of a doomed
spaceship. He spoke as the room depressurised, “I… I will not accept…the critique
itself has to remain as fiction…to …er …avoid being seen by the system of difference
of gravity…”

Mary smiled obsequiously “the critique is FICTIONAL? Did I hear you correctly? You
are saying that this critique is a work of fiction? ** “

“It is …or has to be…it has to remain as fiction, to be true…but …it has to…it MUST
remain unprovable to BE true…”

“So it IS fiction…unless you wish to reduce it to fact in which case it is invalid on

the terms you lay out here, I see that in claiming it as fiction you hope that it will act
as a demand upon circus…hmmm…very well, in which case I put it to you Mr Down-
River that language is wholly reliant upon time as you point out in your clumsy
insistence.
And if I may be so bold as to suggest that as meaning is reliant on time also, that
because retroactive fixation is referenced here, in terms of Lacanian theory, then
the illusory nature of static meaning is just as illusory as the self image formed from
misreading the image of the other as the self, or the image as desire.” She was on
her feet now and gesticulating at him, much to the bemusement of the assembly.
“I put it to you that this misreading is not some psychoanalytical process, or I put it
to you rather that psychoanalysis (or the combined result of psychoanalysis under
deconstructive rigour) is merely noting some feature of the perceptive net within
which it is also trapped, and this net is built into sequential time itself.
This ‘misreading’ is hard wired into the physics of spacetime.
We are all subject to time and so it goes unnoticed as the fundamental lens
through which all impasses are wrought…the actual circus mobility you seek is
forged from a time-trick, but you may have to undo the bootlaces of your self in
order to leap that far…
Time and gravity are merely parts of the story ‘written’ by the standard method of
representation used by human perception to ‘write’ what it is witness to, but which
it cannot comprehend, namely the curve of Space-Time.
You say desire is a defence against jouissance, our three dimensional perception
arranged in sequential time that causes value and meaning in the first place is a
defence against timelessness.
We are protected from the selves we could be in a revelation of space-time; not
even selves, as we would be beyond the frail anchoring of any autonomous register.
Gravity, language and likewise capital are all impossibilities in a curve that is formed
in the unimaginable fabric of value over time.
 155

We like Celine are passing a pre-curved ‘real’ through a distorting lens of

perception, so that it comes out ‘straight’. The representations we make are just a
coping mechanism that causes the very gravity of representation that we seek to
escape. We cause the gravity within which we seek weightlessness that is then
impossible within it. A pathetic circus, don’t you think?
We can only cope with three directions and a tick tock;”

She made horological movements with her arms and her thin but robust frame
made her look like some deranged cuckoo. Happy was fascinated, and simply
leaned forward to listen.

“…the price, or the by-products of this coping mechanism is gravity.

The fact is that we are only wired to perceive time as a sequence in one direction is
the actual problem. This is what causes the rub, the friction between quality and
quantity that are split…as space and time are split in our perception.
So that any subsequent discussion of how flows are interrupted at certain
subjective moments to produce new meanings and/or values and how this becomes
a ‘revealed’ phenomena that can evidence the ‘real’ relations of the labour-process
of meaning production that are subsumed beneath the mask of fetishisation,
alienation etc. actually does not address the framework within which such a
problem ensues…namely the hard wired perception of a split between space and
time, between the pathetic bartering of use and exchange, between the grey angst
between meaning and irrefutable linguistic value. I am talking about a trick of
greater proportions here, forget this tittle tattle, you will only prove that a story is
the only safe place left, and in doing so are just the same as the billions that are
locked inside virtuality that they pay to make real…I am asking you to exit this
Greek shell ”

“What are you saying? That if we could see space-time then this is the thing that can
delimit the autonomy of difference?...but this is imposs…”

“Impossible, I thought this was all about impossibility?... let me continue…The

arguments that hide or reveal the fictionality of values and meanings; these are
merely arguments that proceed through the medium of locked down sequentiality
that makes this a problem.
The arguments themselves proceed only in as much as they are reliant on the
unidirectonal linearity of time for their coherence and can both serve to detail the
un-delimitable autonomy of horizontal relations of difference as much as they can
imply the hidden ‘real’ relations of production that lie behind this model that denies
the subject a role in final value and final meaning.
You are both more and less free than you know…you have highlighted fiction as
one method of maintaining your dissatisfaction, now satisfy yourself with a fiction
of what it might be like to leave this frame altogether. I am not asking you to go
anywhere but only to imly that your circus is immanent to its own gravity.

HAPPY: If I can draw your attention to Marx’s critique of the Young Hegelians…we
cannot think our way out of gravity…
 156

MARY: I am not saying we can , but there are tricks within time that may give us a
glimpse of being outside of gravity…time is as much a trick in fiction, as fiction can
be a trick in time, Mr Happy…once you understand that time is a river and you can
swim in any direction, then you have the same freedom in time as you have in
fiction…to re order events to place one thing befire it has occurred linearly…this
happens all the time in fiction, flash back, cut forward, …the voices of ghosts are
here now…this view of time is only as time actually is…time is the fiction so fiction
rules apply…Happy thought about this before she said it , and her words only
seemed like a confirmation of the déjà vu that he was experiencing…

MARY: are you in a déjà vu right now?

This appeared as a memory…”deja you…?”

HAPPY: are you saying that we can imagine ourselves out of gravity…I’m sorry but
this is nonsense…Marx himself berated the young Hegelians for implying just such a
thing, that the evolution of ideas itself would somehow change the world. I am
talking here about physical practice, actually formed within gravity and how we
must approach this. I am talking about actual bodily work, and how we must not be
caught up in capital’s dream, in which the creation of images is the equivalent of the
real, this is just semio-capital…I am talking about real political effect of
acknowledging that although our images are just images, they represent a demand
on reality, we don’t expect them to become real, they point to the fact that more
work needs to be done, by all of us…

MARY: fine, fine…but I am asking you to do the same thing here do you not
see…join me in space-time. I have found a method of getting out of the strait jacket
of temporality. Meaning and value are just toys…please understand that you are
right in a way that you cannot know…
I am asking you to join me in a science fiction that you will experience as real.
Do not value Marx’s ghost in terms of gravity.
In order for a fiction to truly acknowledge itself as fiction it has to first be believed
in utterly. Utter belief that what you fictionalise is true is the precondition of the
power of later acknowledging it as fiction…surely you have to believe first?”

Happy noticed that there was commotion by the rear doors of the auditorium.
Some official had appeared and was motioning the security guards in Mary
Minkowski’s general direction…
 1

CHAPTER EIGHT: Celine

A General Relativity of Value.

I am aware that in this project, which tries to shift what are physical mechanisms
into the non-physical realms of linguistics and political economy, we will end up
with a ridiculous, reciprocal implication that gravity is some force that can be tricked
or ripped-off, that it exists for the circus artist as a theoretical restriction only.
I want to stress that I am not implying this exactly, but I am implying that because
the material world as it is organised by capital is done so through capitals own
capacity to move through the immaterial to solidify itself. So what is at stake here is
knowledge. This for me is the knowledge of how to move through an immaterialised
solidity to counter a rapidly solidifying immaterialism.
I have seen circus artists that believe that weightlessness and the individuality that
it brings are rights; that gravity is just another bureaucracy that can be left behind.
So whilst I am aware that the move to skip the facts is in the air, I can still tell when
fiction is happening.

I risk falling into Marx’s own critique of the Young Hegelians as those who think that
material restrictions can be overcome by thinking past them dialectically. That you
only drown because you are possessed by the idea of gravity.

What is later implied is that material conditions can be misleading; as one model of
describing an insurmountable force gives rise to another model that encloses the
terms through which that force is viewed. This may be part of the ‘game ‘ here, to
take up a new position from which the ‘force’ does not seem so ‘forceful’. Later what
is implied is that the ‘real’ material conditions are in fact immanent to governing
perception, but for now I think it will be good to discuss the tricky nature of fiction.

So in my defence I will highlight that this thinking past material restriction is exactly
the operation that capital seems to employ as it swallows the linguistic capacity to
speak itself into being in a vitalist, parthengenic defiance of the fact of its limitation;
as it becomes affecting and affected. Its capacity to be influenced by appearances
has a corollary; it can therefore utilise appearances as a form of expansion; it can use
what is dead to itself to enliven its spread sheets.
This is of course deregulation, but in that the capacity of capital to capture that
which it is impossible to register in quantity, means that just as an immaterial
‘thought’ of capital’s own expansion can be made to be an actual event of that
expansion, in that someone can sell you concepts such as ‘togetherness’, ‘family’, or
‘fatherhood’, then I will again petulantly insist that the logical impasse by which an
abstract construct cannot become ‘real’ in the market is compromised in the very
medium that Marx insisted should be critiqued from materialist perspectives.
This is of course not the case but what this fictional theory of Split Gravity could
do, instead of being used to falsely imply gravity can be refuted by some Meta-Trick
 2

of true libertarianism, it instead implies that the conceptual restrictions of how

circus ‘sees’ gravity could be overcome by such a meta-trick and this is what is
attempted here.
As such this begins the discussion of Trick Three, the trick performed on the terms
of the impasse within the logic of Tricks One and Two. I will pay special attention to
Trick Two as it is in this very concealment of the incompatibility of registers that
capital is able to go ‘soft’ to get ‘hard’.

It becomes necessary then to go further in this fictionalisation of theory to suggest

that gravity itself is in fact an illusion just as much as Circus’ Self-Image is an illusion
of the production of freedom.
This idea of an illusory gravity, that could be a quirk of our perception, exists here
as a further investigation of the kind of trick we need to challenge the gravity of
circus.
What if gravity was just as much an immaterial but effective force as language or
money at which its reduction here to the split registers of weight and mass value are
hinting?
What if gravity were an illusion?
This is done to imply that gravity is not there but it is impossible to exist outside of
it, in the same way Zizek states ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than it is
to imagine the end of capitalism.’
We are ingrained, implicit in capitalism as much as we are in language and it may
not be possible then to speak circus to power…as this ‘image of thought’ implicit in
capital captures all tricks that form supposed resistance.

THE WRITER:

Louis-Ferdinand Celine was a writer of fiction. He had a particular method.

He claimed that in order to capture reality in writing it was necessary to pre-bend
what he saw in life so that when it was passed through the distorting lens of his
literary art it would emerge again as true on the other side.

“In Conversations with Professor Y (1955) Céline defends his style, indicating that his
heavy use of the ellipse and his disjointed sentences are an attempt to embody human
emotion in written language. Céline saw literature as the art of mapping human
emotions on a piece of paper. Such a mapping is far from natural, and it distorts the
emotions. He likens it to looking at a straight ruler partially immersed in a tub filled
with water. Because of the refraction of light you see the ruler as if it were broken. If
your aim is to give as accurate a picture of a straight ruler as is possible in this
environment, then before immersing the ruler in the water you have to bend it in such a
way that after refraction it will look straight.] If you want to convey human emotions
as accurately as you can on a piece of paper, you must “bend” them before describing
them on the page. According to Céline, the tool for “bending” emotions is style.”

(Celine, L-F (2006) In Conversation with Professor Y. Dalkey Archive Press. New
England. Introduction.)
 3

Something pre-bent, can pass through a distorting lens and emerge as straight.
The convolution of this brings me to think of a quote by Einstein, “Gravity is an
illusion caused by moving in a straight line through curved space.” Here the idea is
that it is our inability to see the curve of space time, in that the fourth dimension of
time is imperceptible to us, means that gravity is the by-product of this inability to
see the way time and space are curved together by the masses that exist within
them.
This can be thought geometrically of as two travellers both walking from the
equator towards the North Pole. They begin one hundred miles apart but as they
approach the pole they notice that they are getting closer to each other. They are a
special case in that they exist in a two-dimensional world, the third dimension of
space is imperceptible to them. So the journey the from their perspective is not
along a curve, they are totally unable to perceive the curve, but along a straight path
across a flat plane from equator to pole, they assign the fact that they are getting
closer together to a mysterious ‘force’ that is pulling them ever nearer, as their
perception permits no rationalisation of why they should be approaching each other
as they move forward in a straight line. This is gravity.
This is a reduced geometric two-dimensional version of what happens to us when
we think of our three-dimensional perception as experienced in the actuality of four-
dimensional space-time, which is the equivalent of the curve of the three
dimensionality of the earth that is imperceptible to our two-dimensional travellers.
Because we cannot see how we are placed in the four dimensional curve of space-
time, our journeys in straight lines are dogged by forces that seem to pull us back to
larger masses every time we try to move directly away from them.
Thus any jump you make straight up in the air is actually a half circle through the
curve of space-time, which is like a racehorse in a circus that does not gallop all the
way around the ring but still returns you back to where you started. Every time you
try to go straight, you are a clown, dressed as half-a-horse going anti-clockwise
through circus time.
It is the impossibility to see yourself coming back the other way except as a work
of fiction that I will address here.
The pull of gravity that you feel is due to the fact that your perception distorts your
view of the world as it really is to disallow your perception of the dimension of time
as a continuous unified spatial fabric.
Your view is distorted and the by-product is this strange ‘feeling’ that you are
getting always closer to objects according to their mass. This strange ‘feeling’ is
gravity. It is the ‘left-overs’ of you not being able to see time.

Thus circus is the negotiation of the remains of an inability to see time. The
medium of circus is what is left over once human perception has had its way with
space-time.

A body of accumulated mass will create a ‘dent’ in space-time, like a bowling ball on
a trampoline; and it is this well that forms the deep curves around a body of mass
like the earth, and our paths away from this body will always follow this unseen local
geometry, leading us back to it, like marbles in a funnel.
 4

If we return to Celine’s method of writing fiction, it might be possible to say that

pre-curved space-time is passed through the distorting lens of our perception to
emerge on the other side as gravity.
This would mean that in this particular literary analogy, the ‘truth’ of our pre-bent
existence in space-time is fictionalised through our distorting perception to emerge
as the appearance of a ‘true’ gravity on the other side.

Gravity is a fiction caused by our inability to see the pre-existing curve of reality.

Celine writes fiction that places itself in a meta-position above the totality of what is
possible, but suspends the fictionality of that position as it proceeds.

In his process the curve (that is, the bare ‘truth’, to which he imparts a twist) is
concealed from us in the sense that the curving 'treatment' he applies to the raw
material is not disclosed.
This is his private witnessing of life; his own life. He cannot share this directly so he
bends it, so as it passes through his writing it comes out as the same witnessing for
us that he performed in life.
This fictional meta-position ‘about’ his witnessed life is treated as an infra
statement to the literary world that mirrors it.

In this regard he is like the original condition of flat space-time; he imparts the curve
by being a witness. His direct perception of what is hidden from us by the distorting
process of writing is this ‘curved’ truth. This is the unseen local geometry, the force
of which we can only feel on the flat plane of the literature as a kind of ‘force’ of
representation, by which the words draw us towards that which is unavoidable for
us to avoid; the representational effect of the words.

This treatment or 'pre-bending' is concealed and allows for the distorting or bending
effect of the writing process to make the resulting conveyance 'straight' again. That
is, here ‘straight’ means 'appearing true'. The unseen curve of his local literary
geometry, cause us to feel what are simply movements across the flat page of
words as strange forces of repulsion and attraction. What is the force of
representation is simply an illusion caused by reading in a straight line through the
curve of Celine-Time.

So what kind of trick is this? The concealment would make us think that this is trick
two, a concealment of the twisted operation by which something purely fictional is
conflated as ‘truth’.

This is the mechanism of fiction, but in presenting a novel is there not a clear
acknowledgement that this is a fiction?
As a trick then, it is Trick One that acknowledges its fictionality, it is in a fictional
meta-position from the 'life' it purportedly is embedded within.
 5

That is to say, when fiction acknowledges itself it takes up a meta position from the
closed system of life it purports to maintain as a totality within the fiction of itself.
The fiction is meta-positional to itself somehow, encircling its difference to itself.
It becomes acknowledged as a qualitative meta statement about life
Or rather in acknowledging itself as fiction every statement or instance that is
described is acknowledged as a statement about life

The words here are suspended as acknowledged fictions above the curve, above the
force, above the distortion, they are immersive but acknowledged so we fall into the
illusion of the long days journey and as we go into night we also know that it is real
for us that not real, because something of life is shared there in the fiction …that
changes us.
Thus this is an analysis of the trick of writing and addresses the idea of circus as an
illusion that changes us.
For the fiction to work these meta statements follow Gödel’s model and in
believing the fiction in activating the possibility of that belief, and suspension of
disbelief, what is also activated here is the conflation from which tautology ensues.
That is that these meta-statements are treated as if They are infra statements;
cohesive to the internal world of the fiction that sees itself as a totality.
We believe, we are touched, we circle the believing with a suspension of our own,
reading through the flattened curve to feel the forces of the players within the
fictional totality so we can feel, so we can feel something…
This is the tautology in which sets of statements from two different and
incompatible registers are treated as the same
Statements intended to be about life are treated as life within the bounds of the
fictional events.
The tautology is that these two incompatible registers of fiction (suspension of
disbelief) and non fiction (disbelief) are entered into a reciprocal relation or loop in
which we cannot tell which precedes the other, but we are changed because we
acknowledge the suspension that has been shared; this is the art of circus that I
mean when I say fiction. Fiction allows us to touch the admission that we see each
other; that we have seen what can happen between us.
I am not pro or anti Celine, or his method. It contains thoughts about fiction that
admits itself and fiction that does not, which I will address here.

The Hypnotist and the Horse Race, Part 11

I tried to look at the notes but the violent lurching of the boat was
making me destroy the soaking pages as fast as I could read them…

“…as this trick that renders time visible, that renders it operable,
that makes into one long rippling musculature reaching across space time.
That these past lives are become objects upon which to inscribe the
 6

events you want to remember before they have occurred. Time’s broken
arm is set in Plaster of Paris and on a white cast you can scrawl the
chaos of non-sequential names, and look at them whenever you want.”

It is clear to me now that in breaking time she has broken speculation,

and in breaking speculation she has broken capitalism. It is our inability
to see in time that markets the markets tick forward in unending
blindness. As money gropes forward we try to hold its hand, hoping to
be lead out of the dark.
In breaking time she has ended the markets, the flare of nonsensical
light blazing from the incandescent, knotted filament has ended our
blindness in time. The circuit is looped and heats to spill light on every
invisible when.
Our inability to see what is next, what commodity is up or down
makes capitalism work, if she reaches civilisation first along this torrid
river, there will be collapse, there will be horror, there will be the loss
of the fabric of everything.

The boat bucked in this particular passage of water. I felt the ludicrous
possibility to be at any point along the river at any time, to be able to
be at its calm egress into the sea as well as in these turbulent rapids.
My body refuted these notions by being buffeted hard inside the boat.
I struck my forearm against the edge of its wooden rim, and clutching
my arm, I could see that it was oozing a dehydrated, dark red fluid. It
was cut down to the bone; I winced and slumped back into the stern of
my vessel. The river had me, its awful physics was opposed to the tear
in time I was contemplating.

If she could retrieve information on any event before it was done, if she
could see into the future, she could either profit from the markets or
destroy them. I knew which was her intent. In speaking to the dead she
had been driven mad, and they called to her to tear down the inhuman
register that dominated every waking moment of the living. She was
intent to destroy the lie of the banks.
 7

I had to stop her…

I gasped as I was thrown again onto my injured arm, my hand shook
uncontrollably as I was hurled forward onto the foot board, smashing my
cheekbone against it.

The hole was closing, the impact had somehow jarred my neck; my body
shivered at the profit and loss of every conflicting wave.

What is fiction?

FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING AS FICTIONAL RESERVES:

Imagine a street with 90 houses, that is 45 houses on each side; this is the average
length of a street near you. Each house is paying off a mortgage, a loan from the
bank.
Each house has been leant 500,000 pounds, but will pay back roughly 550,000
over 40 years. Let us say that is 90 houses paying approx. 1,450 pounds/month back
to the bank that they borrowed it from. The rate depends on the perceived ‘risk’
that the bank takes on in lending you the money; the fact that there can be no risk
as no money has been leant and if there is a defaulted payment on the non-loan
then the bank get your house is concealed behind the perpetuation of the ‘real’
nature of the loan.

Now imagine a bank that has 100 million pounds. By law this bank can view its
actual reserve as ten per cent of what it can lend and can lend out a further
imaginary ninety per cent of what it actually has in its coffers based on this actual
reserve representing ten per cent. This means if I have ten units I can lend ninety
units without ever compromising my original ‘held’ capital of ten.

This bank can lend, on paper, money that it does not have because it has enough
money to be a bank, it is assumed that the bank, utilising such a sure fire method of
profiteering, will always be good for it. This is a body that has achieved
weightlessness in capital, in that it maintains that its fictional metaposition is
concealed and presented as an actual position of mobility with the gravity of capital.
If 90 houses borrow 500,000 pounds each, this falls within the amount of money
the bank is legally able to lend even though it does not actually have this money.
Capital here is the guarantee of the more than trebling itself.

The bank writes contracts to each potential house owner that state that once the
550,000 pounds is paid back that person owns that house, and this amount is
‘written’ as the number now transferred to the previous owner of the house (need to
find old YouTube of this process), which is guaranteed as valid by the fact the
 8

contract assures that this money is now owed to the bank by the new potential
owner agreement to take on the 550,000 pound debt.
No money has actually changed hands, one bank merely ‘agrees’ with another
bank that this money has been transferred and the matching numbers are written
accordingly.
These 90 potential owners are now legally bound to repay something that was
never leant to them, and do so over 40 years, working while raising children in order
to achieve this repayment on nothing.
The bank has turned its original 100 Million into 100 Million plus 90 x 550,000,
which is 49,500,000.
The Bank has not leant out money and received interest, but the prevailing fiction
is that they are helping others to buy homes by the temporary donation of their
assets to those others in return for a modest percentage on that loan. In reality it
has leant out nothing and so is paid back not just the interest on that supposed loan
but the entirety of the loan that never was plus interest as pure profit. The interest is
actually interesting as this is a profit in the illusion itself.

The money can re enter circulation as real or it can continue to circulate through
digitised representation as semio-capital, but which is still taken as the real thing
either way fiction has become fact.
This is the hard mathematics behind post-factism, in which a referentially
detached sign is utilised for its fluidity but inevitably and contradictorily enforced as
real in order to reproduce itself as profit that relies on the masking of the
impossibility of the metapositionality it implies. Fluid is made solid through the
contradictory solidification of the rationales that govern fluidity. It is a miracle.

The premise here is FICTION. Within the idea that fractional reserve banking relies
on the premise that from a fixed ‘actual’ amount of money a much larger fictional
amount can be said to exist within the vaults of the bank. The vault itself is then a
post fact area, a kind of propositional calculus, in which theorems can be proposed
but which the calculus itself cannot tell if the proposal is fact or fiction.
Within this idea of your ‘reserve’ of fact, on which you can rely should someone call
you a liar, being a fraction of what you say you have is the idea that from the original
truth of money a bending of that truth is permitted which enables you to ‘write’ as
many cheques as you like within the allowed percentage of fiction.
You bend the truth and fictionalise an unreal money that once it has passed
through the distorting lens of the market, been exchanged for goods on the grounds
that it is real, it becomes bent further and comes ut the other end appearing to be
real.

Please note in suggesting these Hegelian loops in Celine of thinking your way out of
restriction, I am petulantly allowing my thinking to do what capital does, I am saying
well if money can do it, and is supposedly the measure of truth then so can I. In this
sense I am saying that from a contradiction anything follows, in a childish and
petulant way, I am saying if money is allowed to fabricate the truth in order to
create a reality then so shall i.
 9

Now imagine Ferdinand Celine the banker, he pre-bends the presence of money to
look like a further presence of money in the agreed extrapolated fractional amount,
this is no money; a lie.
This lie is then passed through the distorting process of mortgaging, which
guarantees the recirculation of this absent money as real in that a document that
states that a number has been placed in your account by the bank with which to buy
a house, which you then pay to the vendor of that house, who can then either enter
their amount as a umber or withdraw this money as real.
There are two things that can happen here:

Once passed through this process this it takes shape for those that read the
mortgage agreement who do not see the original process of bending the truth; they
only read through the medium of the financial art of ‘writing’ which fetishizes the
fictionalisation of the huge loans that are made into fact. It appears as a number in
your bank account, which is the tawdry truth, pre-bent so as to appear true once it
has been passed through the distorting legal literature of finance. In this way the
legal literature is the true reflection of the reality of what the bank holds. What is
physically, actually in the vault; this is not the truth, the new truth is far greater. In
this new truth the bank is helping you to buy your home.

So for the one who writes the fiction; that necessitates a pre-bent truth, in order to
get real money; in his eyes the amount of money that is produced at the other end
of the writing process necessarily remains as pure illusion. He is the writer (lender),
he knows what the reader (borrower) does not know, he is aware of all of the
techniques of bending the fractional truth to inflate it to a proportion that will pass
through the writing (lending) process and be believable to the reader (borrower);
the reader (borrower) on the other hand has no knowledge of the techniques of
fiction at play here they are not Homo Oeconomicus, and as such are within the
legal fiction that prevails that Marx describes in which it is assumed that every
subject has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the techniques of financial literature, of
the ‘literalisation’ of the meaning of capital.

So in the eyes of Celine the Banker the fictional money remains as such; it comes
out of the other end as the absence it always was, which for him as a writer means
that all of the meaning that is paid back by the reader is pure profit on something
never leant; by which I mean of course that the fiction of money created represents
a knowledge of fiction to the lender, and an unknown knowledge to the borrower. In
the sense that what is known by one and not by the other, we can see that just as art
is a lie that tells the truth so is banking. In the moment where the capital becomes
real for the audience but is known to be fictitious to the performer, what is created
is the fiction of indebtedness for something given and the lender is applauded.

CIRCUS AS A BANKER:
 10

The corollary here is with the circus artist who writes weightlessness as a fractional
reserve and then claims that this is the fabrication of genuine liberty; who will not
admit to the audience that it is an illusion, a demand to get past gravity and
restriction which persists; it is still the same process of writing but which could never
become a profit because it admits to the reader of weightlessness that it is just a
fiction, there is no weightlessness. A banker could never admit there is no money,
the entire property market would come crashing down. Or maybe it would not.
Everybody loves a good story.

Whether the money remains digitised or is taken out of banks as physical money, it
has become ‘real’: a distortion of a distortion through the literary perception of
finance, thus reproducing not only capital but capital as a limitless area of post-fact,
a narrative that you can inhabit.

As long as this remains in the housing system, which supports the idea that a set
structure of bricks and mortar can balloon or shrink in value according to the
affective narratives surrounding its location, then this capital that has never been
leant, never, ever has to become ‘real’.
Thus the ‘realness’ of the money, described in the legal wording of the mortgage
contract that becomes real for the potential owner, is returned to non-existent
money again so the repayment becomes pure profit as it becomes money paid back
on something never received.
This unreal money then can be utilised as the ever-growing ‘fraction’ which forms
the original event of ‘fact’ that can be expansively fictionalised into more fictional
capital. This is a trick. It is a trick in a medium of semio-capital. I was looking for a
way to perform such a trick but Celine the banker has beaten me to it. He has
invented a form of banking that acknowledges the art of writing financial
instruments as a distorting lens and so in order to get to the truth of profit, the ‘art’
of the banker, he must pre-bend the truth of money in order that it passes through
distortion to come out as the real amount that he wishes to write. It is a gift to the
world, without which we would not have our homes; we literally inhabit a work of
fiction written by the banks.
Our perception is a form of writing, which is subsumed to the imperative of capital.

Presence is bent into absence, which passes through a distortion process that
makes it real enough to be borrowed by one, but passes through this process to
emerge the other end as absent again to the other, thus rendering the payment of
this debt the returning of money never leant…this is pure unadulterated profit for
the writer, which only has the appearance of a gift.
In this sense I am hinting that a circus that is involved in the production of
statements that imply that freedom is possible within a field of restriction; then
there is a problematic as this, for me is a corollary of the exploitative fractional
reserve banking of the truth in which one knows it is not real and the other does not.
It may be understood that I am trying to disable the ‘magic’ here, that there is an
undoing of the very mechanism that makes circus operate. I am all for illusion and
spectacle and fiction but I am clear that these should be acknowledged; I feel that
 11

within a tautological ground that is financially rigged upon theses principles circus
now has to examine itself more carefully to avoid reiterating the same lies as capital.
Here I am engaged in a research which is perhaps focused on investigating a tool
set through which it can be determined whether an artistic practice such as circus is
in fact in agreement with capital or not; it is a set of tools that ask this question, or
rather the trick is a tool in three questions.

1: How can I expose? 2: How can I conceal? 3: How can I get out of this
numerical order?

Knot-Magic:

“Magicians tell us they are going to deceive us, and then they do just that. In short,
they are sincere deceivers.”

“The ‘Socialist Magician’ Ian Saville activates magic’s comedic potential with
illusions such as the ‘surplus value factory box’ and the ‘class struggle rope trick’ and
via a self-operated ventriloquist figure of Karl Marx that berates its operator each
time it strays from the party line…The ‘sincerity’ of theatrical magic depends
ultimately on ethical decisions made by individual conjurors, who might choose to
either deploy their dissembling expertise through coercive and/or permanently
deluding deceptions, or through temporarily framed and openly recognised
illusions. Whilst the former might lead to a controlling and instrumentalised form of
conjuring with potentially lethal consequences, the latter has the capacity to
provoke critical spectatorship through the conscientious enactment of good guile.
As Ian Saville notes in ‘I can see your ideology moving’ ironically paraphrasing that
well practiced deceptionist Karl Rove, “[with magic] we’re dealing with known
unknowns rather than with unknown unknowns[…] by displaying the trick honestly,
the audience’s consciousness of the changeability of the world is reinforced.”

(Allen, J (2015) The Truth is Concrete. Sternberg Press. USA)

What can be seen here are some of the choices between perpetuation of personal
aggrandisement through deception for the performer or the potentiality to share a
critical enlivening with the spectator of fictionalising unseen potentialities.

This is like Celine taking an event and reinventing it to be so distorted but in the
knowledge that once it passes through the distorting lens of his ‘writing ‘ process
(his financial instruments and property dealings) it will emerge as ‘real’.
This analogy of Celine acting as a banker, as well as the acting practices of bankers
acting as Celine. This is an ordinary street not far from you. This is fiction.

Fictions are always interesting to play with and so for me In this sense there is a
necessity to follow the analogy between Celine and Einstein, which suggests that
our perception as a form of writing that distorts the pre-curved space time into the
‘real’ three dimensions and sequential time that we inhabit. In the sense that a
 12

Marxist view of this perception as the fetishistic writing of the bank means that our
very realism is written by the necessity of capital reproductive operations, then it
may be that the gravity of capitalism is caused by our inability to see the curve of
fractional reserve banking.

The accumulated capital is real, the law allows this to be doubled as another
FICTIONAL 90%...The money created by 90% assets is a FICTION, the contract is a
FICTION, the debt is a FICTION, the character/subject of the home owner or debtor
is a FICTION, but the money paid back is real…

The self-interested subject of the banker is real. Within the confines of this
argument then Celine is a capitalist banker who inflates the truth of a fractional
event in order to appear as a profitable writer of ‘truth’.

Because I like tying knots, let us imagine that the definition of a fetish could even be
that we fetishise the curve of space-time into a more manageable system that
seems intrinsic in every Newtonian object.
We fetishise the three-dimensional space that proceeds through sequential time, in
which we think we live.
An unknown knowledge persists, in which there is a belief that there is a meta-
position outside of the actual non-negotiable and autonomous forces that govern
our perception.
What is interesting here is that there is a process of fetishizing the actual ‘real
relations’ of space and time. This means actually getting down to not what is
‘produced’ perhaps, but what are the underlying material conditions of the
‘produced’ three dimensions and sequential time that we perceive and move
through. Within this reduction we cope by further fetishisising the other as the self,
the signifier as autonomously meaningful, the commodity as intrinsically valuable.
So just as Marx originally suggested that we should dialectically move beyond
capital, I am suggesting that we dialectically move beyond our perception that not
only ‘writes’ three dimensions and sequential time, but the attendant ‘material’
conditions of gravity, of autonomous registers of value that within that sequentiality
of time are contradictorily caught in a reciprocal temporal loop in which meaning
and linguistic value precede each other impossibly. This is only like saying Newton is
Adam Smith, and let us apply Marx. The underlying origin of the alienation of the
origin of value from the autonomous horizontality that it feeds and is fed by is
exposed as what lies beneath the Newtonian mode of production; namely X, Y and
Z and a reliable clock.

So, if we now include gravity as one of the systems of ‘value’ that are governed by
the dichotomy of split and incompatible registers, could it not be stated that all of
these impasses to the subject, in gravity, in language and in capital, are included in
the one fetish that we cannot see, the one unknown knowledge, that we simply
cannot see the curve of space time, and so we are embedded to forever be
dominated by an unreal freedom in a limitless gravity, or be reduced to only be able
to fictionalise weightlessness in an indifferent gravity.
 13

Likewise meaning (lessness) in an indifferent linguistic field, and to watch

pricelessness subsumed into capital as something that we have to pay for.

What is implied is the breakdown of the need for the fictionality that these split
registers demand in our imposition of them in order to deal with the imperceptible
atemporal fabric of space-time, value-time or money-time.

To ‘clarify’:

1: First we attempt to show Celine as a banker

2: We imply the figure of the artist as capitalist, in the act of conflation of the
fictionality of this art into truth. The ability to mentally pre-bend events prior to
their entry into the medium of artistic practice perhaps implies a kind of second-
sight of the real relations of the production of three-dimensional space and
sequential time. As regards finance, it just means you are a banker who is privy to
the legal mechanisms by which fictional money appears as real money.

3: It is to enquire how do we ‘get past’ or invalidate this possibility for the capitalist
artist, in which the trick can be captured to conceal the impossible metaposition and
imply that an enclosure is a limitless space? I am suggesting that there has to be a
larger trick that can be performed upon the fact that the trick can be captured.

4: In order to work a trick against this capture of tricks; to try to get through the
necessity of only ever being able to acknowledge the trick as a ‘telling’ of freedom
to be; we have to not look at the gravity, its split registers, in which the subject’s
desire for freedom is embedded as either defined by its relation to impossibility or
presented as the lie of freedom, but instead look at the cause of the restriction.

Which brings us back to Einstein in the analogy with Celine’s writing. Whether we
see his writing, his art, as an exposition of the potentiality for truth or the lie that
truth is possible within literature is not the issue. It is rather to see our inability to
see outside of the way we ‘write’ reality from a pre-curved truth, through a bent lens
to arrive here; and then to perform a trick not in gravity but in the perception that
causes gravity.
Is it not to apply Einstein to the capitalism that creates the possibility for such
deceptions. Is this not the possibility to perform a circus trick in the perception itself,
as this would be a trick performed through the medium that causes gravity as
opposed to a more limited , and easily captured trick that is performed on gravity
itself.

This trick would perform something closer to a weightlessness outside the

unsuitable space suit of analogy.

So as stated in the analogy between Einstein and Celine, the method of ‘writing’ the
spatial and temporal coordinates of the world, hard-wired as our ‘distorting’
 14

perception has to be acknowledged as being the deep cause of gravity, and in so far
as we have then previously established a three-way homology between the value
systems of gravity, language and capital, then it is possible to note that the
deceptive manipulation of not acknowledging the fictional creation of
metaposition, by which I mean not admitting the creation of capital positioned
outside of the regulative fact of its presence as reliant on factual deposits, or not
admitting the fictional metapositioning of the subject’s ability to signify who they
are with any degree of certainty, not admitting fiction is fact;
or admitting the fictional metapositioning of weightlessness as genuine freedom.

In this regard the writing of capital as real has to be shrugged off in the same
manner as the writing of space-time as real.

The inability to see the curve of space time causes the necessity for the subject to
‘cope’ with fragmentary timelessness by breaking it into sequential pieces that can
seem like a hermetic present in which a seemingly hermetic subject is nevertheless
compromised by the necessity to render the unbreakable autonomies of mass-
value, linguistic-value and exchange value. These persist as the fetishized objects of
the subject’s own production as well as suggesting the diachronic deconstruction of
the autonomy of these meanings.
The overarching fetish that renders the possibility for the exploitation of split
registers in which fiction can be conflated into fact is the capitalist mode of
production applied to perception and in this way I would like to suggest that the
application of General relativity to Celine’s writing method and the example of
Fractional reserve banking as another exploit within that style.

I will now further suggest the application of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity
to the Science of Value itself in which the possibility for the capitalist mode of
production becomes able to operate also as the capitalist mode of representation.
I am therefore suggesting that an application of the physics of space-time to
semio-capital, constitutes a Marxist critique of gravity as a force that is tied to our
way of seeing.

If we think then of the analogy of gravity with capitalism, that these are two forces
split between what is qualitatively ‘felt’ and what is quantitatively indifferent.
If it becomes possible to say that Gravity is true only because pre-curved space-
time is filtered through our inability to see the curve that time makes in space.

The inability to see space-time causes the sensation of Gravity.

Then is it also possible to say that Capitalism is true only because pre-curved
Value-Time is filtered through our perceptual inability to see the curve that time
makes in value.

The inability to see value-time causes the sensation of Capitalism.

 15

By this I mean that markets exist through our inability to see the long curve of rising,
falling, twisting value that would be available for us to see if the dimension of time
were not obscured from our view.
The nonsense of being able to see all the values of a commodity over time, with
the inevitable drop to zero value of all commodities as they became defunct,
obsolete, antique, a brief rise, then dust. The perception of Value-time as a solid
snaking object iterated through the solidity of a perceptible fourth dimension would
end all speculation, would destroy all markets, just as gravity, the confusing
phenomena of mass creating curves in space time would be seen, thus ending the
pull of gravity, as we would no longer be moving through a curved dimension that
we could only see as straight.

But Value-Time is pre-curved to pass through the distorting lens of our perception
so as to appear reduced back to the truth of Capitalism, reduced back to the
objective exchange-values recorded moment from singular moment in the metered
temporality of the market, existing as autonomous value only as difference, outside
of the fluidity of time.
If the long curve of value time were visible to us, if every value over time of any
thing within the market could be seen at once then all things would be reduced to
their use-value only, of their relation only to human need, as any active over-
stimulation of demand or consumption through fabrication of use-value would, over
time, become exposed as a fiction.

In the continuing project to perform a trick that can delimit the autonomy of mass-
value, not merely as a fictional metaposition but as a real event, I will continue to
address not gravity as the restriction but our inability to ‘see’ the dimension of time
as the cause of the restriction.

In this sense I would like to move on in the next chapter to discuss another phase of
the research that deals with such tricks in time and the possibility of a trick in
mobility itself: Past Life Regression.

*****
Ladies and Germs, welcome to the fourth part of the KNOTATION, which
unfortunately you do not have time to read. Not having time is key here, as to not
have that stuttering fool as your companion would enable you to hear how the body
sings language outside the pull of gravity.

***

KNOTATION DREAM PART FOUR:

 16

HERE THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY WAS AS AN OBJECT OF UNSEEN

POWER, AS A CONDUIT FOR SYMBOLS AND MAGICKAL CHOREOGRAPHIES
(and of objects that could be invested with bodily properties: Fetishes)

Happy was dreaming of the book again. It was a book of knots that kept
undoing itself.
He was closest to it in dreams and in this dream it was being explained to
him that the alphabet had been written on two sides of a strip of
parchment.

Scene: a half completed construction site, stifling heat.

He was in a building that looked like it would never be finished; there was
dust on every surface and half-finished concrete stair cases bristling with
iron bars lead up to missing floors. It was midnight.
There were figures moving in the dark, stirring up the dust of poorly-
mixed aggregates; low-grade cement used to make low-budget tower blocks
for high profits. He was in a country that had no visible means of financial
validity.
“This shit crumbles after the first year,” he thought in his sleep, ”its
‘centre cannot hold’, but once the construction company is liquidated and
the money siphoned off, the source of its instability is untraceable; who
cares if your home falls down around your living ears? I’ve got mine…I have
built a fortune by making homes that fall down; fuck you, buddy, we see
everything in terms of economy.”

The figures moved like squid in ink, dark skins daubed with letters of a
colonial alphabet.
The only light was from an old 16mm projector that rattled at its beam of
light like a suit of armour hawking up thick, monochrome phlegm.

The projector was spitting out ‘The Bicycle Thief’ frame by frame into a
glowing rectangle that formed on the far concrete wall. The sentimental
figures in the film wrestled with the values in black and white and grey and
formed the only light available.
They were at least ten stories high, and he could smell the deep mix of
heavy flora and rotting markets on the sirocco.
The film was the surface to the immanent Black Magick of what was being
done here in this abandoned site.

A tall dark figure was showing Happy how to loop and twist the strip of
parchment, it had the feeling of a ritual or spell.
The figure before him was The Baron, The Big Un-dead. It spoke in a voice
like lizards rasping and rustling in a pile of legal documents:

“So here is where you end up having to steal that which is rightfully yours,
and so the order of law means that which you produce is now your problem;
because it represents the impossibility of ownership. The unprovable truth
of ownership remakes you as the unfulfillable thief of desire.”
 17

Le Grand Zombie blew smoke in his eyes that picked up the variegated
tones of grey that deepened in shade with every scene of Antonio Ricci’s all-
consuming desperation.
The dark shape gestured to the strip of parchment that lay in Happy’s
outstretched hands.

“You take the parchment after it has been treated with ejaculate and
blood; so this parchment becomes a medium for the written word that is
made of the body, so that it is made ‘about’ speech by being ‘of’ your flesh.
In this magick we recognise and fear the difference between speech and
writing, but we know how to defeat it. You make the paper into skin, and
for this you need sweat, tears or other fluids.”

In the dream Happy had a vague memory of being ‘milked’, of undergoing

the same trick over and over, of performing it until the sweat was flowing
across his body onto that of his partner and this shared perspiring was the
trick and was used to charge the paper as a piece of skin. He remembered a
sex trick, an impossible union and a bone shattering orgasm that was added
to the mix.

The Baron was covered in shells and and bracelets that rattled in the dark,
Happy was returned to his childhood far away on the endless plains: endless
pain or a painless end?

“Now we can write the alphabet as it is reciprocally inseparable from the

words from which it is formed; as the words are on the skin, so the alphabet
is on the paper, as the paper is the skin, so the written words are in our
mouths.
It is in this union of that which should not meet that we invoke the
doubled surface that is one surface.
It is the name of incompatibility that we put a twist in this alphabet, so
that it is an endless loop of inverted letters that share the surface of those
the right way round. There is no difference, and this is what is hidden and
so it binds; there is no difference and this is what is exposed and so it
moves.”

Thick grey cigar smoke was exhaled as a floating ring, each time it was
broken as the figure performed the twisting motion that showed Happy how
to make the strip of magic paper into a loop.
What was formed was a strip of parchment bearing an alphabet on each
side, one in black, one in red. This papyrus paper was formed into a loop,
but with a twist, as in a Möbius Strip.

“This circle is a circus in which you can either expose or conceal the magic;
in this way it is a blessing or a curse upon you…”

The figure of an anthropologist appeared in an attempt to explain why

this Mobius strip of alphebetised parchment soaked in semen and blood
should be allowed into the Museum of History. A board of wealthy patrons
 18

listened attentively at some point in the endless velvet brocade of the

future:

“Let me try to explain, Sir Michael, the primitive mind was possessed by
the idea of this twisted ring as a magickal object, we can clearly see here
that what underlies this superstitious ‘reading’ is actually a demonstration
of the innate tautological topology of the alphabet itself.

One possible effect of such a topology is that If this field is presented

falsely as an endless all–accommodating area within which there is no
perceivable or inevitable incongruity of value between that which is spoken
and that which can be registered within the alphabetical field, then this
concealment of the twisted topological surface can actually make the
alphabet appear as an endless area within which any word can exist without
being torn apart by the Gralphity, the …uh…alphabetical gravity that exists
within it.”

“Hmmm, quite so, quite so…tricky buggers” mumbled Sir Michael ‘Wenty’
Beaumont. Not sure if this was the ‘sort of thing’ that the museum should
encourage; although the idea of an obscured and endless stasis was very
appealing.

“This force is of course still present but the concealment of how it tears
words apart actually can make the subject believe that any word they can
come up with can unproblematically exist in this field. Of course someone
has to pick up the considerable price tag to maintain such a fiction, eh.
What is concealed is the inevitable invalidation of words here, which
invalidation the subject then believes is symptomatic of their own internal
lack rather than a twist in the topology.”
The anthropologist was directing all his energy into ‘selling’ his find as the
possible centrepiece of a new exhibition of “Curios from the Outer World”.

Sir Michael was not really following the story, “You mean the twist in the
tale is hidden so as to make the listener believe that they simply are not
following the story? How marvellous…I love a good mystery…”

The Knight of the Realm was quite drunk at half past 1939 in the main
stairwell of the Natural History Museum.
“It’s quite wonderful how a fetish like this operates on the savage mind, “
he observed, emptying his pipe into a sarcophagus.
“Quite so, sir…here, I have tried to write a clearer description of what is at
play…it’s fiendishly cunning.” The anthropologist was finding that he had to
literally support his drunken sponsor from falling over as he explained the
Mobius band of magickal parchment. He had hastily sketched his findings on
the back of a play bill on the 5:43 from Waterloo.
 19

Fig.5: “Sir Michael, look here…” Wenty’s eyes were rolling back in their
sockets intermittently as they tried to focus on what the anthropologist was
saying.
“In this diagram we can see a flattened schematic of the Mobius Alphabet
that would have been inscribed on the parchment; on one side of the paper
are written the black letters, on the other are the red letters.
The red letters correspond to the black letters on the reverse side of the
strip but with one small difference, they are inverted. We can think of these
two alphabets as the positive and negative aspects of the field of gralphity,
as the north and south poles perhaps of an all-encompassing field.
Then the strip is twisted, looped and joined; the twist creates the curious
properties of a Möbius Strip, which are that there is technically now only
one side and one edge.
This means that although there are two alphabets, one red and one black
on opposite sides of the paper, this twist turns this paper into a tautological
topology in which there are now two alphabets that run concurrently.
At the end of the black alphabet, at black Z, the red alphabet begins with
an inverted red A and proceeds towards red Z where it meets the black A
that is, by comparison, its inverse. The twist means that opposing alphabets
that are on opposite sides of the parchment are actually next to each other
on the same side.
It is unclear the time period of this piece and it is impossible to date it
without destroying it.”

“Bloody fascinating, “ mumbled Sir Michael folding forward uncontrollably

into a display of Panamanian ‘Worry Dolls’.

Scene change:

Happy was no longer dream-looking at the dry description of the parchment

on a brass plaque that adorned a glass case, but was back in the dust and
heat of the makeshift concrete church of a forgotten chaos:

The dark figure was explaining, as he stood illuminated by the Italian film.
The projector hummed as it ingested the light exactly as it emanated from
the fetish of the bicycle. A close up of a boy’s anguished face fell across the
body of the dark figure as he spoke:

“We understand our own works better than any ‘museologist’ could ever
do.
 20

We know how to travel to the opposite side without moving. This twist in
the surface of the paper means we can travel seamlessly from any letter in
the black alphabet in both directions to any letter in the red alphabet and
voice versa; it is the ‘same’ surface, the ‘same’ side even though it is
different, we can repeat this sameness of difference endlessly.

The force of gravity is installed in this ‘single-doubling’ of the alphabet

into two opposite but concurrent poles and represents the fact that no
letter can take its place in the alphabet without being described by a word,
and no word can be formed without knowing its place. We do this to make
words forget their earthly needs.
So, we can move from any letter to any letter along the same edge; this
travel does however have a differential feature in relation to the difference
between red and black letters; when we travel along an edge, from a
position on the edge that is, say, above black J along that edge to a position
next to red A, we find that a twist has occurred, the twist means that
instead of being on an edge that is above the letters I am now on an edge
that is below the letters, I have arrived below red A, as red letters are the
inverse of those on the black side.
This means that travelling along this same edge results in a difference,
thus a twist has occurred; a curve is acknowledged even though it cannot be
seen. So as well as the alphabetical gravity resulting in a ‘pull’ to the left or
a ‘pull’ to the right, by ‘pulling’ the letter to its nearest iteration in the
alphabetical order, it can also result in a ‘twist’. We mark this twist with an
arrow that follows its own tail. This is the physics of Circus Language.”

“This Mobius Alphabet is a flat, unfolded schematic of the Mobius strip

bearing a red and a black alphabet on opposing sides of Mobius strip, which
 21

becomes the same side in this twisted tautological topology. You can think
of the red and black alphabets as two opposing but reciprocally linked poles
of a magnetic field or as the exploitative debt and reciprocal linked
capacity for profit within the late capitalist system; the way you understand
the homological link here in which capital is an inescapable, ‘naturalised’
field is also up to you; whatever magick works, that is the magick that you
use…”

A horde of angry Italian faces amassed on his thighs as run down

architecture lit up his cracked face.

“Let us consider then that within the field of gralphity we can travel or
stay still in different ways, each resulting in a different kind of arrow: in a
bipolar direction either up or down the letters across two opposing
alphabets, we can be ‘at rest’ in the correct alphabetical order, and we can
also twist, or spin, flip rotate or invert.
This can be symbolised by four kinds of arrows:

RISE FALL TWIST NULL

DIAGRAM…Fig.6.

Consequently the letters can be pulled in three directions with one stillness,
these three directions are a RISE up the alphabet, a FALL down the
alphabet, A TWIST in the alphabet that is due to travelling between
alphabets along one edge, and a NULL that results from the letter already
being ‘at rest’ in its ‘correct’ place.

I consider this to and fro, (bi-directionality, which could, of course, occur in

any of the three dimensions of Width X, Height Y or Depth Z) this inertia or
stillness and this action of twist or rotation to be circus movements within
the alphabetical field; all performed by the letters in the words that form
the tricks in that field.
These letters and the forces on them are now the body parts and
techniques ‘of’ gravity that go to make up the words or tricks that are
‘about’ gravity.
Notice that the fields are blurring, words are tricks as much as time is
money and capital is gravity as it becomes possible to describe all forms of
movement of a point in space according to these four arrows.
The movements designated here as Rise, Fall, Twist and Null can be
applied to individual body parts to precisely describe the movement of that
body part in three dimensions of X, Y and Z.
 22

WE CAN DESCRIBE ANY CIRCUS MOVEMENT IN FOUR ARROWS:

These movements can also occur in combinations to describe different

kinds of more general circus movement as it might apply to the body as a
whole: a Rising Twist can be a somersault; a Twisted Null can be a pirouette
in place, a Falling Rise can be a swing or tempo.
Thus the arrows that show how the alphabetical field tears words apart
can be used to delineate movement of individual body parts in the planes of
X, Y and Z or the body as a whole by describing such things as balance,
tempo, rhythm, repetition, rotation or twist.

The point here is that the way that the alphabet pulls words apart is used as
an instruction to move within gravity; the trick appropriates the force of
restriction and invalidation and utilises it to move against that force. WE
DEFY YOU.”

The Baron moved in the dark; the exposition of a new form of circus writing
was taking place between bodies.

“It is this diagram that is the KEY to understanding the TRICK. Just as the
Alphabet is in now in X, Y, Z; the alphabet is a song in the key of CAGE, in
which the words of freedom are sung to the tune of enclosure. In
alphabetical terms all words are fiction; they simply cannot become
factually recognised within the horizontal register of the alphabetical order.
The twist in the topology is exposed and used to perform tricks in body
language.

In the trick all your limbs are pulled apart, your “centre cannot hold”, every
letter of your force, your tempo is being asked to return to its rightful
place. Your trick, your word, makes no sense in the indifferent subject-less
register of mass-value.
If you were to ask the alphabet of gravity your weightlessness is merely a
work of fiction, a word that gravity is unable to pronounce without
scrambling it utterly.
In this circus we will use the way gravity cannot speak to say something it
cannot hear.

“…Awfully romantic notion, “ said Sir Michael as he came round in the

cloakroom.

In the continuing project to perform a trick that can delimit the autonomy of mass-
value, not merely as a fictional metaposition but as a real event, I will continue to
 23

address not gravity as the restriction but our inability to ‘see’ the dimension of time
as the cause of the restriction.

In this sense I would like to move on now to discuss another phase of the research
that deals with such tricks in time and the possibility of a trick in mobility itself: Past
Life Regression.
 1

CHAPTER NINE: Past Life Regression.

Dear Reader, within this chapter there are red sections not to be read.
These parts represent the private lives of Happy Down-River and Rover-Joe
stuck in a dream of a circular horse race that they can never win. They
discuss the Propositional Calculus; a method of reasoning that cannot tell
the difference between Fiction and Fact. They place bets on all the wrong
horses and goose each other, squabbling like an old married couple as they
tumble from a high tower. You can witness how the story begins and ends in
the yellow sections herein. There is another piece of the KNOTATION also
coloured in red for no entry. You are most welcome.

THE ROAD TO TIME:

There is a long-running part of the project here that has taken many forms and
which has focused on mobility, and how this creates a certain individual locked in a
certain patterns of meaning production. It has also formed an engagement with
non-sequential time and ghosts.

There were many steps that lead me to engage with the practice of Past Life
Regression, and I will outline them here. Suffice to introduce it as a vital node within
the practice of the trick as it attaches itself to new areas, and speaks in various
fictional voices that the practice itself recognises as real. As such we found ourselves
at times speaking fiction to those that believed it, and at other times being
therapeutically coaxed into fictionalising who we ‘really were’.

As for describing the practice itself, it is seen by its various exponents in various
ways: as a mystic experience, a therapy, as a cathartic, shared journey and as a
useful fictional visualisation tool to accompany more accepted forms of analysis.
The iterations of its validity and meaning are as varied it seems as its practitioners,
and I was at times struck by a sense that I was either in the presence of a charlatan, a
victim and someone who had real powers of perception beyond that which I could
understand. This uncertain contractual constellation to pay to be asked to conjure
oneself in another life was where the practice held me, in suspension of uncertainty.
It bamboozled, it caused deep emotion, it bored, and at some junctures it
encouraged me to perform elaborate hoaxed versions of it with paid actors. As with
all investigations of the trick, the real relations come down to who is fooling who?
In this regard it formed a vital investigation into fiction, mobility and more exactly
into the fiction of freedom and a challenge also to the notion of a hermetic self.
It opened up simultaneously the potentiality of science fiction writing and a
politics of multiplicity through which the kind of fictional escape that I was
referencing in the circus trick was activated in this uncertain zone that existed
around a practice that, like circus, remained entirely invalidated, discredited almost
and which activated itself like a sideshow to the more accomplished acrobatics
 2

within rigorously documented gravitational fields of psychoanalysis. These were

practices from before the couch, and as such were appealing.
It became for me a way of performing a trick in the last gravity, perhaps the one
through which all other values are iterated, and which is the most inescapable, the
gravity of time.

At the most extreme iteration of gravity, there is no time, the event horizon exists
as the point beyond which it is impossible for any observer to assign a ‘when’. In this
sense, this practice that made a nonsense of sequential time was also a ‘nowhen’
that felt like weightlessness.
I was possessed of a feeling of escapology, as I took a simple stroll down a London
street in 1931.
I was positioned somewhere immanent to the accepted parameters of therapy
over time.

What I ‘wrote’ together with these past life practitioners was a myriad of lives, that
by being fictionally ‘present’ at certain moments in history and locations in space
changed those temporal/spatial sites for me forever.
The fiction did something to an unassailable past. The fiction of speaking as an
other not located either in this space or this time, seemed to be a reasonable match
for me for the fictional meta-positioning that was at play in the circus trick, as well
as the constant attendant question of who, why and where should this awareness of
fictionality be admitted or ‘confessed’.
It seemed at times impossible to say, ‘I do not believe.’

So as I went forward there were different and over-lapping rationales to

investigating Past Life Regression.

1: SHORT, SHORTER, SHORTEST:

This part of the research has been present in different forms throughout the
process.
The original reasoning through which it became part of this circus practice was
that it formed a logical end point to the Short Circuit Road Trips we had been
making in the street. As these journeys got shorter and shorter, we wondered about
the possibility of a journey that did not move at all.
We attempted epic journeys that were the duration of one breath; upon which we
embarked hoping to return with some new perspective upon the sedentary life that
we had left behind.

“Ok, well I’m off…”

“Ok …goodbye.”

“Goodbye…(inhales, exhales)…Ok, I’m back”

“Ah there you are, what did you learn?”

 3

So we had looked at short trips, betting systems of meaning creation, and at tiny
journeys as ways of speaking while being mobile, of short circuiting the logic of
individualism that is supposed to be created by the journey to find yourself, and as
an investigation of the outsider status that the circus was so keen to talk about.
We wanted to make an excursion outside of the mobility that circus claimed had
given a privileged and immune perspective of society; to see if we could get outside
what seemed to be a fabricated meta-position.
As we travelled in ever-decreasing increments, the temporality of going
instantaneously on a long journey appealed as here was another impossible leap in
the wrong direction as regards what circus was supposed to do.
So we became interested in what could constitute travelling without moving?

If circus nomadism supposedly conferred another more critical meaning to the

architectures of the established social sphere, but that this circus mobility was
wholly captured by the nomadic mega-corporations of late capitalism, then one
trick we could perform was to become antithetical to the time and scale involved in
genuine nomadism. We sought to make a joke or trick within this scale by operating
road trips of three then two then one minute.
We wanted to reduce these Road-Trips, in which a new perspective could be
gleaned, down to one breath in duration, and as we scaled them down we wondered
about a circus that did not move at all.
What could be achieved through a mobility that did not move?
Was this the kind of trick that would be performed by the circus artists driven
underground by the compulsory order to perform circus tricks in the fiction of Late
Circusism?

2. WE FELT THE CLOWN HAD TO APPEAR IN PAST LIFE REGRESSION:

The second was the technique of inoperability personified in the clown’s incapacity
to follow a set pathway.

As we spent more time in the street on ridiculous journeys, within which meaning
was minimalized into the cracks and surfaces of the smallest things, we felt that the
clown was present as someone who was given an incomplete book of instructions
on how to make an epic journey in which the page that explained the journey had to
be long was missing.
For this reason our engagement with Past Life Regression followed this intuition.

For some of the sessions we attended as clowns, in neutral work clothes but with full
clown make-up in the ‘Auguste’ style. Some practitioners found this unsettling and
some found it unacceptable.
We had two outright rejections suggesting that our presence as ‘not ourselves’
would inhibit the accessing of other lives who we had actually been in the past. We
did however find many practitioners who were willing to engage with us.
Previously, under the idea of an Auguste, or Red Face Clown following rules in
order to critique them we followed the ‘rules’ of a road trip but in a ridiculous,
 4

misunderstood way, and we wanted to undertake this ‘travelling without moving’ in

the same fashion.
We wanted it to be the clown who boarded the Hindenburg, the clown who
opened an account with the traders of ancient Venice; we wanted his presence to
alter the contextual relation of the past to the present.
As someone who was unaware that time travel was impossible we felt this was a
reasonable match for those that perceived it to be real.

LINK: ‘Travelling Without Moving’ This film documents our first journey through the
practice of Past Life Regression.

[Link]

Being The Adventures of Happy Down-River and Rover Joe,

Part Seventeen

In ‘PERFECT LONG RIDERS’

Happy: “Animals and clowns have their own sacred logic, thank you very much sir.”

Joe: “One of the things wrong with R D Laing is that he doesn’t think there is
anything wrong with R D Laing…”

“ Afterwards, he says, they always embrace. The animal digs his sweaty brow into
his cheek, and they stand in the dark for an hour, like a necking couple.
And of all nonsensical things, I keep thinking about the horse, not the boy, the
horse, and what he might be trying to do. I keep seeing the huge head, kissing him
with its chained mouth, nudging through the metal, some desire absolutely
irrelevant to filling its belly or propagating its own kind.
What desire could this be? Not to stay a horse any longer? Not to remain reined up
forever in those particular genetic strings? Is it possible, at certain moments we
cannot imagine, a horse can add its sufferings together, the non-stop jerks and jabs
that are its daily life…

And turn them into grief?

What use is grief…to a horse? You see…I am lost.”

(Schaffer, P (1973) Equus. Scribner. New York)

WHERE, WHAT:

Happy and Joe were horsing around…

“Ooh , look at you all chinkel, chankel…like a necking couple…”

 5

“Double your pleasure, double your fun, with double good, double good, double
mint gum!”

“It’s not just horses who are trapped in a circle they cannot see…a whole new track
of being, Happy.”

“Yes but he is ever so Laing…Prance begat Prankus…do me a favour , mate…he’s a

Long Laing Rider, Joe.”

Here they were on the long away edge of a time race. Rushing ahead with plans
unfinalised.
They were in a high tower, far above an endless landscape, almost touching the
clouds, up to their necks in the scudding vapour. They leant out over the parapet of
the white stone and each of them held long reins of a gelatinous substance that
reached off to the indiscernable horizon. Time reins tethered to horses in another
temporal track entirely.
It would be easy to stage, all you need are two clowns and some lengths of rope
that reach offstage to horses you never see.

“Is this what they call an Ivory Tower, Chief?” Enquired Joe; he was the only person
that Happy allowed to call him that.

As clowns they wished to change circus but leave it the same, in that it would
remain true to the picture it had had of itself, but only by changing into something
else.
In becoming true to the fiction of itself, circus would become capable of further
fiction that could demand changes within itself. They perhaps were supposed to
inhabit the stage, filling in time while the technicians changed the equipment and
re-pitched the scenography; but this inhabiting of the stage while something else
was happening, this ‘filling in time’, this was a technique in itself.
They wished to inhabit the space-time in such a way that circus became true to the
fiction of itself, in the same way they became truly clumsy according to the
virtuosity that they concealed as a series of accidents. Fiction was the only way that
they could get past the impasse of fiction being the only way to get past the
impasse.
“Imagine if the only jump you could make to get past having no legs, with which to
jump, was made by having no legs…”

“I simply would fall at the first fence…all bets are off.”

“Hey, these ropes are pretty keen.”

Happy and Rover Joe, leaning out so high up, were ‘long riding’.

“These nags are long-gone, Joe, and the odds are short.”
 6

These were horses that existed in a different time-space to the now.

Long ropes of ectoplasm tethered them across time to where you flickered in your
current present; all you had to do was hold on.
The ropes themselves were umbilical, taken from when the horses were foaled and
these cords were seen in space-time so that they stretched from the stable of their
birth all the way to their adult racing life. These gee gees were time-kites on a long
string.
The pulsing gossamer of the cords was both sticky and silken smooth at the same
time, “It feels like they are growing into your hands, it tickles…” said Joe, who was
dressed as a jockey, in jet black riding boots, shirt and cap with red and yellow
flashing.
Happy had opted for a more urban look, like an old tote, he was done up like a
kipper in the old sheepskin and oxford brogues, mate.
It was a day at the races that lasted forever.

Happy was recalling old jokes, “So I put six inches of my memory on a horse at ten
to one, came in at half past sixpence…”

“You can lead a horse to water, but teach him to lie on his back and float and you've
got something.”

“There’s only one T in Typhoo, in packets and in teabags too, Just one sip and you’ll
know that its true…there’s only one tea in Typhoo.”

“He sayeth among the trumpets …HA HA”

“You shut your mouth, you…”

2 Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole
body in check.
3 When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn
the whole animal. 4 Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are
driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot
wants to go. 5 Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great
boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.
6 The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts
the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by
hell.

“So be careful what you say, Joe my darling”

7 All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have
been tamed by mankind, 8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless
evil, full of deadly poison.

James 3:1-12 New International Version. ‘The Taming of the Tongue’.

 7

They extended from a distant parapet deep into future time; two incongruous selfie
figures were pictured by themselves, laughing, joking in red, brown, yellow and
black.

Here’s one of Joe; his slender hands softly holding the reins, the tight lines around
his mouth, the body slightly turned toward the camera, and now Happy, sending
ripples of light along the fleshy twine, ligatures of iridescent ligament carrying
troughs and dips across immense tracts of time to the horses that galloped along an
unreachable shore, the picture exactly captures the long responses, the
immeasurable exposures along the time lines. Ropes of now and then.

All the photos were gathering dust now at some faraway bookmakers; bets long
settled, enervated of risk, their lives assumed the solid weight of a legal certainty, a
roulette table with all the same numbers, all of one colour, spinning down to a
standstill.
“You see Joe, we risk nothing, as, to us, the horses have only just been born. This
means that anything that happens in the race that we don’t like, we have the whole
of a horse’s life time to fix it…Indulging in equitation I call it.”
Circus without time was risk-free, and it killed all linguistic investments stone
dead. Seeing the curve of Value-Time made them free and nothing was nobody’s no
when. Awful daydream, wonderful nightmare.

HOW, WHY:

“Yes, look, we can control the horses from here along these world lines. Here are the
equine equations…” Joe was pointing to the embroidered patterns on this tunic,
black thread in black silk, barely legible in the fading light…the typographs
explained the axiomatic formula for every eventuality, like the mathematics of life
insurance that dealt with fatal heart conditions.
Each future hoof print could be altered by a flick of the reins that stretched all
along the stallion’s life from this secluded battlement, according to a specific set of
logical but self-referential manipulations…

“Why hoof, when you can flick?”

“Why strum, when you can pluck?”

There were equations and the notations that corresponded to the precise
movement of the rider’s body that could be transferred along the reins to correct an
undesired result in the future trajectory of the equus.

Betting on such animals was strictly prohibited. So they did.

 8

CLOWN ANTI TECHNIQUE:

This was a way of using technique, which is an anti technique, a reverse aesthetic.
The clown trains physically to be able to look like he has fallen over, to look like he
has fumbled the object, to look like he has fallen out of the window trying to swat a
fly.
The clown is the one who trains to ‘not be able to do’ but look like he is ‘trying to do’.
He trains to be successful at failure. The physical precision of this training is not in
question. As the performer, who performs the clown, moves towards success, he
understands exactly the space, the object, the field, but he moves towards the
appearance of failure. The energy is focused on the dysfunction. He is a salesman
who convinces you that the product is useless.
This is also a trick, perhaps a trick played on the idea of the trick itself. The hidden
trick that operates within the system of circus; if circus is a system which
apotheosises the execution of the trick as its second image, that which reaffirms
ideal citizenship and individuality, of mastery and success.
The clown exists within the circus as the idea of the trick played upon itself.
That the clown is a Meta-Acrobat who performs a trick on the mechanism of the
trick in order to puncture its prevailing image of the clever trick as a belief in
mastery, control of material, and of the resultant individuality.

Was it possible to go on a journey and produce a useless individual, a babbling

nonsense, or an absence of presence? We had found enormous narratives in tiny
journeys, and the wonder of this felt like the clown failing to understand how these
road trips were ‘wrong’, but how the clown nevertheless generated operable
knowledge.

Also in the clown we find an acknowledgement of the fugitivity of all material,

even of your own body, that even the subject that you control is an object that you
can fumble; that it is not a rational game playing survivor, but a self sabotaging,
poetic idiot, just as likely to fall over as to dance out of time to the music.
As such this represents technique but centred on an acknowledgement of the
‘fugitivity’ of the material from that technique.
There was a technique of profanity here also, of returning the body or the object
not to ‘the common use of man’, but to the common uselessness of man; the efforts
of the clown-performer represent a technique in which there is a belief in the right
way to make it go totally wrong.

3: The second rationale came partly from the above ideas on profanity but also
partly from a desire retain the integrity of the practice.
We were looking for a way to both be with and be against it.
I wanted to find a discredited practice. Something that I knew would not be
credible in the Academy as being able to generate viable data, but also a faith-based
practice which I could inhabit according to its tenets, but also I could operate as a
non-believer. It was both to operate a profaning of this belief, but also to submit to
its faith.
 9

This practice presented itself in part as a formal system; a gravity in which we felt
we should try to perform a trick.
So there were very much a feeling of two opposing forces here, a need to meet the
practice and a need to resist its tenets, as a way of testing the translatability of the
trick mechanism.

ON GHOSTS AND SERIOUSNESS:

But what of consent, and of deceit? Was this just an invisible ‘theatre’, a trick as a
social prank that laughed at those with beliefs that are not validated by science. I
this sense we wanted to balance what the practitioners were bringing to the
sessions.
I had no interest in ridiculing faith; I wanted to find a secular match for their
engagement. There was weight here in the lightness that they brought into my
practice. They brought a heavy belief that helped me to lie down to weightlessness,
and I wanted to balance the sacle.

I documented all of the sessions on film and they were at times received as mocking
forays into a risible belief system. This was not my intention, rather the experience
was of respect. The respect was derived from the impermissible occurrence in which
someone who believed that the mobility in time was factual and someone who
acknowledged it as fiction could share the exact same experience and that each
could give the quality of full belief to the other through our respective positions was
interesting to me.
I was at times honest, at other times dishonest and the varying degree of the
experience was always judged on the fly, in the moment, according to how I felt the
other would react. I cannot claim rigour in this so I decided that the rigour would
have to exist in the approach to these journeys.
What would be a reasonably rigorous set of values of non-belief to bring to these
believers that would match the ‘seriousness’ of their practice without showing
disrespect. We were constructing a faith of the faithless.

1: THE GHOST SPEAKS TO US:

This deals with the concept of how a ghost voice could speak to us outside of faith:
as a fiction that still had the possibility to demand something of us? In this sense we
were testing the idea that an acknowledged fiction could still affect us; could still
have an injunctive power.
In engaging with the idea of ghosts that speak I was reminded of the injunctive
ghost that Derrida finds in Marx.
 10

“To be just: beyond the living present in general –and beyond its simple negative
reversal. A spectral moment, a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one
understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual
present: “now”, future present) We are questioning in this instant, we are asking
ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least what we call time.
Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the spectre does not belong to that time, it does
not give time, not that one: “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost”
(Hamlet)”

(Derrida, J (1994) Spectres of Marx. Exordium xix. Routledge. Abingdon)

The practice attempted to be ‘not docile to time’, to fall outside of where it pulled
us, or pushed us to be so that whatever tides were pulling us through the fabric of
space time, we had found a practice that ignored them.

This ghost is both an acknowledgement of the fact that our actions now will
ultimately affect those who are yet to be born, and so in living we act upon the
ghost that we will leave behind. In this living there is a finality to the echo that
speaks through time; and within it is the acknowledgement that if all time is the
same then those that have lived before us, their voices too were finally registered as
resonances that can come back to us from the past.
We spoke to time a trick and it answered with a weightlessness. We found a way
onto streets where we felt free.

TRUE, FALSE:

JOE and Happy had decided then and now to have a race…to see whose fiction was
the ‘realest’.

“Dear Lord, It’s a sure thing that someone is lying, Amen” said Joe.

“That is very true.” said Happy.

It could not be the case that both Happy Down-River and Circusism were true, that
would simply be impossible.
They were both reactions to each other, both implicated the other but Joe and
Happy felt that one was real and one was not, and that these two instances of
Happy Down-River and Circusism, like the long-ridden horses, affected each other
across the divide between the virtual and the actual. The time had come to decide,
who was the real performer here, and who was telling the truth?
It was time to tie Happy to the train track and pray that the oncoming train of
Circusism was just a work of fiction. The subject was on the line, tied to the rails of
the text hoping not to be run over by the reader.
Have faith in the old black and whites that ran at sixteen frames per second, here
comes the train now…
 11

“Ladies and Gentlemen…

Horse 1: Was Happy just a fictional response, a character in a story who reacts to
the actual institution of Circusism, which was the mandatory performance of tricks
to ensure a measure of individuality according to the scale of gravity?
Was this a real dystopia in which it became necessary to imagine a meta-trickster?

Or Horse 2: were Happy’s actions simply the documentation of an actual historical

figure; which are then interpreted as a response to an imagined narrative in which
the practice of Circus tricks was made compulsory? Was Circusism a fiction of a
world in which society was dominated by the enforced execution of selfish tricks?
Had he been a real man who just imagined that circus had gone bad?

…a big round of applause for our contenders, please…”

This could only be decided by special race rules.

As the horse that ‘performed’ the best was probably the one that was lying, they
had agreed that whoever’s horse came second was the one that was the winner,
crossing the line first would ensure that you had lost.
The horse that came second was the actual winner and proved that their horse was
‘true’ and ‘factual’, and the owner of the winning horse was the loser and was
therefore of course untrue, falsity itself …old sally liar.

“…BOOOOOOOH.”

So how to decide. How could both riders ride to their fullest ability to ensure that
they lost? It was an impasse.
If they tried deliberately to lose the race would not be a race. How could they both
execute the full gamut of their virtuosity and still ensure that this skill was
engineered to make them the loser?
The answer was simple, they simply swapped mounts, if Happy rode Rover Joe’s
and Joe rode Happy Down-River’s horse, then they could both try to win, and so
make their horse the loser and therefore ‘true’.
“Why, we are blessed to strive to be the true losers through the execution of our
own skill.” They could ride as fast as possible to come second. This was the clown
way.
If Joe’s horse, ridden by Happy, came first, Happy would win because his horse
would be in second place and this would mean that Happy was real and Circusism
was just a work of fiction.
Whereas if Happy’s horse, ridden by Joe, came first, this would mean he, Happy,
was the loser and would therefore be proven to be a work of fiction and the
Institution of Circusism as a reality.
In the sense that the following horse is true, only if the preceding horse is false.

They stood back to back and shook hands:

 12

“It’s not an un-deal” they grinned, not feeling too pleased with themselves in
reverse.

One horse is called circusism, this is Joe’s horse that Happy will ride.

The other is called happy down-river, this is Happy’s horse ridden by Joe.

Thus either happy is real and circusism is fictional, in which case it is a satire

Or circusism is real and happy is fictional, in which case it is a tragedy.

But next came the study of the technique. How do you control an animal that is in a
different time frame on a long undulating sinew of temporal cord?
“We are so far behind, and the race has already begun…You see, I am lost.”

“Look here, it shows how to flick the umbilical so as to make the nag fly.” Happy had
ridden bareback across the glaring evil of the American plain, but the exhilaration of
holding the entirety of a horse’s life in your hands was like trick-riding time itself.
To buck, to shake the very bones out of time’s old pyjamas, to watch the cup of
time un-spill itself at the bedtime of every backwards morning, to wave an
excruciating flag of imagined countries now all folded in the tectonic chewing of the
world.
They went through the equations together, standing shoulder to shoulder in their
loser’s race, pouring over the strange symbols on Joe’s shirt; on that glaring day at
the top of a high tower, both laughing, goosing each other, holding the reins of
horses who were a million Swedish miles away in another time altogether.
The reins stretched out over the fertile landscape like glistening, umbilical
parallelagrams.
It went like this: they had to learn how to control the turning circle of a horse from
a great distance, it was a temporal dressage, knowing how to sense for the animal
along the length of a harness that it could not feel. Being in the circle by being at the
end of an infinite, tangential line, the sensation was unrecognisable.

There are more diagrams here, implicit in the long riding of a short-odds horse.

1: there is the Lewis Clown Diagram…in which success is described as failure on

purpose, amongst other things…this kind of dream logic would only work when two
or more clowns were gathered together…

9 With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human
beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. 10 Out of the same mouth come
praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be.
 13

This diagram inscribes the four areas in which it is possible for a clown to expose or
conceal the execution of technique to or from an audience.
This was embroidered on the collars and cuffs of Joe’s shirt, a subtle, imperceptible
stitching and slightly frayed at the edges.

FAILURE. SUCCESS.
TL TR

BY ACCIDENT ON PURPOSE
Research: “I did not mean to fail” Acrobat Technique

BL BR

ON PURPOSE BY ACCIDENT
Clown Technique Clown: “I did not mean to succeed”

FAILURE. SUCCESS.

What is important here is how these areas relate. One can lead to the other through
simple repetition; a look, a smile, a repeat founded on the three modes: Imagine,
Sparkle and Escape.
Thus failure on purpose, let us say ‘falling down’ that is the execution of a
technique of falling, disguised to look like a total lack of technique, could then lead
to a repetition, where, in response to a positive reaction from the audience to the
falling down, the Auguste repeats the fall successfully on purpose. Thus we have
moved from the hidden technique of the clown’s deliberate mistake to its exposition
as a deliberate mistake; it is repeated, completely the same but in an entirely
different register, that of ‘Success on Purpose’, thus for the clown the only
difference between ‘Failure On Purpose’ and ‘Success On Purpose’ is in the
audience.
Fall, Imagine the fall as pleasing to the other, Smile is the Sparkle, Fall Repeat is
the Escape, a new freedom is established in which the mistake of falling is
deliberately executed as a success, only clowns can do this from this angle of
audience connection, only clowns are connected to the animal of the audience by
such long reins. Lines across the circle.

It could also be the process leading to the successful mastery of a technique of

falling by accident: “If at first you don’t succeed, suck harder.” Equally it could be the
execution of Success On Purpose.

Likewise it could be that some areas are the same, for instance to fail by accident is
good research practice, but it is also the appearance of good clown technique which
actually seeks to fail on purpose, thus the appearance of clown failure, which is
clown success, is the same as research failure which leads to successful practice,
according to the current knowledge.
By the same degree to succeed by accident, IE in an instance whereby the clown
‘accidentally’ falls into a perfect handstand is both the mask that obscures the
 14

actual ‘success on purpose’ of the acrobat that the clown conceals from the
audience as well as being the result of a long research in which the achievement of a
perfect handstand is only reached by a series of failures by accident.

What becomes clear within each of these squares is that each becomes the other
once the gaze of the audience is factored into the equation, as well as the intention
of the Clown to expose or reveal the technique as success or failure. Something
outside the diagram is conveyed.

One thing about the area that deals with failure on purpose, this is the only place
from which clowns can laugh at us.

“Well it looks like in racing each other’s horses, we cannot go wrong Joe.” Said
Happy, “it’s a sure thing that lying in this case is the only truth telling available to us.
If I try to get you to vote for my success by offering you a false flag of failure caused
by you, then I can win by appearing to lose.”

“Shhhhh not so loud,” hissed Joe, “there may be politicians listening.”

The fact remained that it was still unclear as to whether Fact was merely Fiction by
Accident, or Fiction on Purpose.
“Let’s paint our faces ready for the race…I’m going to do some melancholy eyes,
with tears painted on the cheeks.”
“Yes, me too because we are soooo sad about the state of the world. Do you hear
us, world, we are weeping because our leaders are liars, and all the banks are run by
clowns, oh Alas Alackaday…”
“Yes, Boo Hoo…” They fell about laughing.

And giggling like schoolboys, they drew up another version of the Lewis Diagram in
grease paint on the wall, but this time for Clown Politicians.
To be honest with you, at the end of the day, they had all the time in the world.

So they took their sweet time…they wished to change circus but leave it the same,
in that it would remain true to the picture it had had of itself, but only by changing
into something else. In becoming true to the fiction of itself, circus would become
capable of further fiction that could demand changes within itself.

FACT. FICTION.
TL TR

BY ACCIDENT ON PURPOSE
Disclosure: “I did not mean to tell the truth” Technique of Lying

BL BR

ON PURPOSE BY ACCIDENT
 15

Political Suicide Admission: “I did not mean to lie”

FACT. FICTION.

Joe was on a roll: “From this we can see that it is impossible for clowns to become
politicians without committing political suicide. NB this does not mean laughable
politicians immediately become clowns, no, clowns invalidate the entirety of politics
by telling the truth, the truth being that they simply have no idea what to do next;
whereas laughable politicians are simply incompetent leaders who wish to remain in
politics at any cost.
Implying that politicians are clown-like is an insult to clowns.”

Actually any of these squares can become any other square if spoken by politicians
as a legitimisation of where capital wishes to go. Journalism merely runs along
behind.
There would be, of course, a different set of results if Happy and Joe decided to
rename Success as Fact and Failure as Fiction, but they were confident that this, in
being entirely incorrect, was a truer picture of the politics of capital.

FUTURE GHOST:

The general tone here is to ask where does the ‘weight’ of justice come from and to
where is it directed. He talks of those not yet born, and so in doing so refigures not
only the ‘fact’ of ghosts ‘fictionally’ present in our lives, but also refigures our acts
that seek to direct justice towards other living beings as not just to those alive now,
but those not yet born. And so by showing our relationship to this future being as
that of a valuable future ghost, he shows the validity of Marx as a spectre in the past
who directs his idea of justice towards us.
Within this ‘proof’ of the way in which the past haunts us is also the idea that the
ghost of Marx remain ‘emptied out’. To fill him in to make him solid enough to be
real in this present time then drains the ghost of his fictionality, and it is this
fctionality in which his injunctive power to carry over or ‘speak’ something into the
present as a demand.
For me this idea is related to how Derrida sees Ghosts as necessarily empty of form,
injunctions that retain power by not becoming rendered out into difference.
He also importantly acknowledges that his engagement with the spectre is not
through a faith in the ‘actuality’ of the ghost, but it is referenced as a ‘virtual’
presence. This was important for our engagement with PLR, as we were engaging
with a belief system but through non-belief; hoping to activate the affect of the
presence of these ghost lives, as injunctions to be carried into the now, into the
future.
So that what happened in these empty moments of weightlessness in which
fictional dead voices could speak could inform the idea of the trick as
acknowledging its own emptiness.
Here Derrida talks about the presentation of the spectre, of its form in reference to
Blanchot.
 16

“The thing happens, it ought to happen there where Blanchot speaks of ‘an absence
of question,’ the full measure that dispenses with the void, the too-full made to
avoid the void:

Giving a response – alienation the primacy of need, history as a process of material

practice, the total man – it nevertheless leaves undetermined or undecided the
questions to which it responds: depending on how today’s or yesterday’s readers
formulate differently that which, according to them, should take place in such an
absence of the question – thus filling in a void that ought rather to be increasingly
emptied out – this form of Marx’s speech is interpreted here as humanism, or even
historicism, there as atheism, antihumanism, or even nihilism. (Pp 18-19)

(Derrida, J (1994) Spectres of Marx. Exordium xix. Routledge. Abingdon)

BELIEF AND NON-BELIEF:

It is in this spirit then that we formulated an idea of how the voices would speak to
us, that this practice was a permeable membrane through which voices that were
emergent from its complexity of truth and lies, were both memories and
instantaneous utterances at the same time. In this way we developed a serious
response to the faith practice, ne in which we could immerse ourselves honestly
without disrespecting the practitioners who believed in the hundreds of dead that
we contain.
To play a fiction from 1678 became a two hour exploration of another space and
time as another person and what at times felt like improvised performance at other
moments felt like remembered experience. We drifted in and out of what was there,
suspended above the idea that here was now, and we were who we are. In this sense
it felt like a trick.

“Marx had his ghosts, we have ours, but memories no longer recognise such borders; by
definition they pass through walls, these revenants, day and night they trick
consciousness and skip generations.
Needless to spell it out here, therefore, still less to insist on it too heavily: it is not a
taste for the void or for deconstruction that leads anyone to recognise the right of this
necessity to ‘empty out’ increasingly and to deconstruct the philosophical responses
that consist in totalising, in filling in the space of the question or in denying its
possibility, in fleeing from the very thing it will have allowed one to glimpse. On the
contrary, it is a mater there of an ethical and politivcal imperative, an appeal as
unconditional as the appeal of thinking from which it is not separated. It is a matter of
the injunction itself – if there is one.”

(Derrida, 1994)
 17

It is vital for me that whatever is fictionalised here in these still journeys, that it
remain similarly emptied out and that what is avoided here is a prescriptive remedy
for the captured trick. This is just one excursion we made into time, in order to
address what we feel is a trick-sensibility applied to the cause of gravity, rather than
remain in the capturable, fungible present of unbelievable freedom.
What injunction then does this offer to circus? What is demanded of circus by
engaging with a completely static mobility. The dynamism of circus has been
enervated, but something is preserved that is more free to value weightlessness
outside of the terms of gravity, and mobility outside the regular scaffold of time.

CAPITAL AS THE GHOST OF MARX.

In relation then to this ghost, as an empty ghost: it reminds me also that capital is
such an ever-present ghost, that taps at the window.
Capitalism as it conceives of itself as an ideology that it cannot name, is a fiction of
the cold war, in that capitalism itself is the ghost of a communist threat; a shadow
ideology, made out of the self-interested parts left over from the commune.
It insists that it is spectral enough to be outside of the limit of its own purely
quantitative body, but always fills itself in to eradicate its possibility to believably
possess the immateriality it claims to have. In the moment of exchange you realise
the omnipresent ghost of capital is just a salesman in a white sheet.
Again I am talking about capital as if there were somebody there. In this sense I
am speaking about a ghost as capital is a subject-less no one. But it also fills itself in,
once it has been ghostly enough to conjure some affect it ossifies.
But the capital I talk about is the stuff that affect becomes, that waits like a ghost
of itself on the edge of affect, waiting to be made solid; like a ghost wanting to be
filled in.
In the sense that Derrida says the ghost of marx should be emptied out, then
capital is his opposite, it is the ghost that drifts in smiles and looks and ‘certain
somethings’ that wants to become inexorable solidity, to become mortal and
decomposing, and final and doomed, but here, but reproduced into the world, it is
the spirit that only wishes to be bound to the differential earth; to taste after eons of
insubstantiation, the dew, the sweat, the thorn of being.
Capital just wants to live and reproduce. And the capital I talk about is this insistent
spectre that can become a rock or an idea, its not important so long as it finalises
itself in some purse or other, nestling like a manifested succubus in the pocket.
The subject of capital described here is then a subject that is able to walk through
walls, but needs to make a living as an Estate Agent.

CRY, CRY:

But who wins in a race like this?

Fiction is success in the mouth of capital that accidentally on purpose discloses the
facts of a previous failure just as much as a fact can be deliberately revealed as a
 18

fiction by capital in order for it to become successfully assimilated as factually

correct.
It becomes pointless to do the maths, because in a rigged horse race in which no
rider is truthful about which horse she is riding, it is the maths itself that forms a
tautological racetrack upon which winning is losing is losing is winning etc.
The following horse is first. The preceding horse is last. It is funny; the problem is,
no one is laughing.

The second set of diagrams was less clear.

Essentially the prop calculus is a system that represents the system through which
fiction is conflated as fact. This is the main thrust.

2: In the dream all over the front and sleeves of Joe’s shirt was embroidered the
Propositional calculus. This was a system of enclosed logic that could demonstrate
that although both circusism and happy down river were entirely fictional, one of
them is true and the other is not…Just as it could show that Happy was both true
and untrue. It was a post fact equation, suitable for operation within any political
arena.
It was a system that, through being unaware of how the information that passed
through itself was related to each other in terms of quality, could validate
something as true and also validate its antithesis. This was because within the
calculus was the capacity to forget that you were in a fantasy. Once you ‘pushed’
into a hypothetical, the calculus had no way of telling the difference between that
and an area of fact. It was gullible and insensitive; it was a post-fact area.

TRUTHPLACE:

It was a system similar to that of exchange-value, in that it was only interested in

the truth as a marketplace, it was a truthplace…it was a system that made the
assumption that everything must have a horizontally related position in the market,
and that there is a potential value in anything becoming a fact, no matter how
outlandish.
The system operated so that everything could be validated as true and so end up
within that marketplace, regardless of whether its status as a ‘truth’ contradicted
the status of something else in the market of truth that was also necessarily deemed
to be a ‘truth’. This constituted a lively and competitive truthplace, which was good
for growth.
The assumption was that any proposition had a truth-value, and that there was no
point at all to fiction (which inconveniently implied that things were not ‘there’ yet),
in the same way that in terms of capital, there was no point to anything without an
exchange-value.

“It just doesn’t add up.” Said Joe trying to look at the back of his own shirt.
 19

In regard to the fact that a market as a ‘system’ that validates anything that is
entered into it as a commodity, does not sense if that commodity is included within
itself as an exponent of usefulness to the subject or is merely there for the
circulation/accumulation of capital.
What is meant here is the market has no way of determining the truthfulness of
such an entry in relation to the real relations of production, namely the commodity’s
‘truthfulness’ in relation to the actual relative value of itself between subjects and
the degree to which this has been fetishized or concealed as the myth or lie of
equivalent value in which all things become true to themselves through other
truths.
In this sense, being aware that the propositional calculus, like a market, would
permit anything to be ‘true’, Happy and Joe were perfectly willing to use it, but not
to conflate the fiction as fact as actual ‘truth’, but to acknowledge that as a system
that could render anything to be ‘true’ it was also a system that proved only that it
was incapable of supplying truth of any kind. The system of propositional calculus
was dumb and blind to what it implied and dumbly and blindly existed as a means of
either concealing or exposing its incapacity…
They would utilise it but expose it as limited, rather than inhabiting it as a totality.
Was that even possible? To race within the rules of a race, whilst trying to expose
the limitations of race rules?
It was forbidden, so they tried it.

To their mind this was what both Capitalism and Circusism concealed, in capital
that there was no truth to the usefulness of commodity, and in circus that there was
no truth to the freedom of mobility of the body.
Happy and Joe flicked the reins in full acknowledgement that steering a horse in
this way, outside of the gravity of the truth of time’s unidirectionality and its
sequentiality, would expose the system as simultaneously effective at making the
horse achieve any desired outcome at the finish line but also completely unable to
provide any validation of the ‘truth’ of that outcome at all.
That is, you could lead a Happy to water, but get him to Joe on his back with his
legs in the air, then you’ve got an act…

It was a way of both fixing the outcome of a horse race, but which simultaneously
invalidated the value of any winnings accrued on that horse, as its victory could just
as easily be proved to be a loss…
The money that changed hands over such a race was invalidated, as any outcome
could be proved to have happened by differently flicking the long riding reins that
stretched across time in contravention of the laws of temporality…consequently as
it was a process that invalidated currency…happy went all in.

They bet everything they had on the destruction of capital in value-time.

Happy went on to discuss contradictory inputs or ‘fantasies’ in the Propositional

Calculus. It was dream-logic.
This was simply the ‘dumb’ operation of the reins themselves, in being comprised
of a series of chemically triggered cells they could be thought of in effect as a series
 20

of typographic symbols, and that it was then possible to send signals through these
reins as ’well-formed strings’, it was possible to manipulate the symbols in a ‘dumb’
system that was like money unaware of anything.

In being an organic system for transmitting symbols that stand for propositions, the
reins could send signals, but were not able to be sentient in relation to those
signals…they could write but not read so to speak.

“They could get up for the down stroke but not tell when to sit back down. That’s
how I see it; the rope is dumb, we can make the rope speak out for the deal-in.”

“Or hold on for the kiss-off…”

It was the idea that an ‘imitation of thought’ such as the calculus inherent in the
cords could not pick up on subtleties unsaid.
The affective nuances that could categorically link seemingly unrelated events
were not possible for these ropes of dumb flesh, hence any pair of inferences that
disproved each other were handled by the propositional calculus as equally true.
Operating at a cellular level, it would treat both notions as both being intrinsically
linked and simultaneously nothing to do with each other, it could not tell the
difference.

Consequently, in sending a signal that states ‘the horse went faster’ and a signal
that states ‘the weather had turned bad’, you could only be certain that the
umbilical itself, ie the cord of propositional calculus, would not be able to surmise if
these statements were related or not.
Hence it was part of the technique of temporal dressage to send a fiction of how
you wanted the horse to behave, these were called ‘fantasies’ in the calculus, and
they could be sent in the knowledge that the calculus had no way of discerning if
these fantasies were related to each other or not…this incapacity meant simply that
it was possible to momentarily ‘factualise’ one fantasy in order to prove another was
either true or false. Fiction could be carried over to assist in making another fiction
into fact…in this calculus that was blind to inferral, post-facts could be made real…
The emphasis here is on the Calculus’s dumb-ness, it manipulates typography
without being able to judge if phrases are relational or not, thus things that are not
related can become tied together consequently into strings.
A ‘string’ is a theoretical proposition, a theorem; it is composed of ‘atoms’, which
are symbols such as H or J that stand for statements. For something to be plausible
within the calculus it only has to be able to be formed into a theorem, or a ‘string’ of
atoms. The possibility to formulate these strings means they are true within the
calculus.
Thus “ my horse died” can be set up as implicit in “the jockey wore red” and the
calculus has no way of telling that these atoms are not linked causally. In this way
there is no limit to what you can buy.

In being a system of ‘thought’ that was incapable of telling the causal relationship
between two statements, it was possible to use untruth to validate another untruth
 21

so that one became real. This tautological ground was the ideal post-fact petri dish
in which any fantasy could be used to validate any other fantasy. In this sense it had
primarily become the ideological conflationary environment of neoliberal capital
that overwhelmed the possibility of fiction of being an area of demand.

So in this PROPOSITIONAL calculus [PC], the clue is in the name. Normally you
need an axiom to begin the process of theorem making, but here it is propositional,
so you PROPOSE something to be an axiom, something that will begin the creation
of all the following theorems.
In this sense it is the process of ‘writing’, in that the proposition is purely fictional.

(Usually an axiom that is consistent as the foundation of a set of unfolding rules,

through which this axiom can be extrapolated to various conclusions, from this all
subsequent rules can be applied, ie it will respond within its own set of rules, within
its own limits.
in PC you can simply propose an axiom as a fantasy, as long as you state this by
enclosing it and ‘stacking’ into a fantasy thus ‘[‘ and ending or ‘popping’ out of a
fantasy thus ‘]’.)

What this means is that within the calculus itself you create a field that is fenced in
by these brackets, so once a fence is erected and you PUSH [ then within this area
something that is a fantasy can be treated as if it is already an functional axiom, ie a
fiction that is fenced in this area can have its fictional status forgotten and be
treated as a working fact, the further you enter into these fields by PUSHING [ in
and then PUSHING [ further in you are deep into a world of fiction within fiction and
in which it is possible for you to forget that this is fiction…fictions can be used to
validate each other as facts…in this sense you are through the neoliberal late
circusism looking glass in that you are within an area where the overarching fiction
is one in which fiction can become fact.
Emerging from this onion skinned fictional area will leave you holding something
which you think is a fact, much like a circus artist emerging from their act into the
warm bath of applause is convinced of their ability to defy the register that
measures their success.

Hence the propositional calculus is the perfect post-fact arena, and also proves for
happy and joe to be the perfect way to operate fictional changes in their current
time that in the long temporal reins became the factual placement of hoof, the
factual slide to the left, the factual late jump in the long gone distant steeplechase
of the future…the fictional flicks of the wrist, the gestural affects in their high tower,
became facts in the future circle of the horse race far far below.
The difference is that joe and happy are not convinced by the forgetfulness of
applause.

As we are drawn deeper into this ‘forgetting’, as the STACKS and/or PUSHES
mount bracket [ after bracket [ we find an amnesia occurring, ever so subtly , the
calculus dumb, numb to the forgetting or remembering of what is fiction and what
 22

is fact, numb and dumb to what is relational to what, operates like capital here,
entirely insensitive to territory, and 1000 layers deep fiction has magically been
transmuted into hard irrevocable fact…in the heart of the calculus it is possible to
forget your name…it is possible to use one falsehood to validate another lie as the
truth…

OUT OF JOINT:
Derrida’s reference is in fact a fiction; a play. As Hamlet is visited by the ghost of
his dead father, he remarks that ‘time is out of joint’.

In this statement is the essence of PLR for me; that what is accessed here is a strip
of time, a life track, a recording that is interactive, which can be visited out of
sequence.
Within the practice of PLR we enquired if it is possible to visit events in a life in a
sequence other that that in which they occurred? Was it possible to visit the same
event more than once, could the same event be re-experienced but with a different
outcome each time?
The answer was yes, and in this sense an ‘out of joint’ practice opened up. Within
this practice was an atemporal, undifferentiated plane that was meta-positioned
outside of unidirectional, sequential time and within which fiction was the method.
What is interesting here is the idea of ‘who is fooling who?’ There were elements of
the practice in which fiction was conflated as reality, there were moments when we
had to fictionalise our own belief in this conflation in order to activate what we felt
was ‘true’ about the practice, and the interplay of truth telling and outright lying
pivoted from moment to moment.

The way forward here was occupied by thinking about what was to be done in this
new space. How could we perform tricks here, was the practice in itself a trick, a
tautological ground already? I wanted to see if there was a practice here that would
feel like a mobile circus, that could go anywhere, to any time. Was there an
immaterial lever that I could pull to make something happen in the world?

GHOST PRAXIS:
There is a ghost of theory that is identified, or glimpsed as a presence, in the
practice, and that how the virtual presence of that ghost makes that practice then
into a praxis, something that is done in honour of a ghost, a spectre and which once
enacted then carries over a demand for future practice to change.
These factors were what stood for a faith that was emptied out; something that
enabled us to meet the faith in the practice with an equal weightlessness.
 23

Retroactive:

This facility of being able to change the ‘reading’ of an event by doing something as
slight as initiating a spoken journey into its presence, into its midst became a
method of perhaps approaching another idea of social action as ‘retroactively’
causal.
This idea through Past Life Regression that history was changeable, coupled with
the notion that there was a ‘retroactive’ engineering of how to see the past by
undertaking this largely spoken therapeutic practice, felt like a way to perform
tricks, and pranks that never would have existed in the past if we had not performed
them now.
It seemed that this non-nomadism, with its mundane fixed locations, its inert body,
lying still on the chair or bed or couch was a secret circus; one through which we
were ‘invisibly’ mobile, and in which we were free to perform pranks in the social
field that had long since past, and so was thought to be un-prank-able.
The notion that we could walk down a street one hundred years ago and access
materials, interactions, conversations and events that were impossible to reach was
appealing as the idea of a small circus ensemble mobile in time, performing tricks in
the gravity of time.
The most extreme iteration of gravity is the Black Hole, at this extreme mass time
turns to nonsense, events that are usually located in time become unverifiable as to
a specific ‘when’, it was this technique of weightlessness in time that appealed as a
new practice for circus artists oppressed by the compulsory performance of tricks in
Late Circusism.

Rothenburg:

In the opening to her book ‘The Excessive Subject’, Molly Rothenburg posits an idea
that can create social change through the often unforeseen shifts in the order or
meaning of the past that can occur by the enactment of an event in the now. The
notion is that the past can be altered, that an event in the now can change how we
now see the past and that this change in the past will naturally affect the now.
She calls this retroactive causality. Within this idea is the possibility of changing
something supposedly immutable, so that this supposedly unalterable thing can
influence that which follows it.
By intervening in the present a new lens is cast upon the past, which necessarily
altered then alters that present.
This idea appeals both in its relation to the practice of past life regression but also
as a way of negotiating the immutable gravity of time.

This is explained in relation to artistic process, but the work proceeds to intuit that
there is a diagram of political change here also.

This quote is from Slavov Zizek in the Foreword of Rothenburg’s book on social
change, in relation to T.S Elliot’s ideas about taking your place in artistic lneage:
 24

“When Eliot write that, in judging a living poet, ‘you must set him among the dead,’ he
formulates precisely an example of Deleuze’s pure past. And when he writes that ‘the
existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the
supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered;
and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are
readjusted,’ he no less clearly formulates the paradoxical link between the
completeness of the past and our capacity to change it retroactively: precisely because
the pure past is complete, each new work rearranges its entire balance. Recall Borges’
precise formulation of the relationship between Kafka and his multitude of precursors,
from old Chinese authers to Robert Browning: ‘Kafka’s idiosyncrasy, in greater or lesser
degree, is present in each of these writings, but if Kafka had not written we would not
perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist…each writer creates his precursors. His
work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.’ Hence the
properly dialectical solution of the dilemma, ‘is it really there, in the source, or did we
just read it into the source?’, is thus: it is there, but we can only perceive and state this
retroactively, from today’s perspective.”

(Rothenburg, M (2010) The Excessive Subject. Polity. Cambridge)

There is an interesting solution to psychoanalyticial readings of text here too, but

also the inspiration I take from this idea of retroactive causality is that in relation to
the inoperable practice of visiting locations in the Past under hypnosis as an ‘other’
subject, I am interested in a poetic assault on events of the past.
I imagine a concerted effort to revisit, restage and re-enact events of the past by a
troupe of circus artists. These incursions form a repeated trick that operates in the
same way as an artwork, creating a new pure past to which the original order has to
reshuffle, readjust.
In this way it is possible to do nothing to the past, to operate faithlessly the
practice of a faith in past life regression, to achieve nothing, but to achieve
something; to change through an inoperable methodology of change. Past Life
Regression set us among the dead, as not poets, but circus artists.

To clarify another idea on how the present can speak to the past, there is also the
way that a trace of something from before can appear in something earlier than
before. Like a stick collected from a river at a point upstream from a time before the
stick was thrown in.

Imagine that I am X, I write a book in the year 1917, then imagine that Y writes a
book now in 2017 that takes some of the theoretical bone and translates it into a
new theory. Then forever on it can be said that those passages within X’s book are
Y-ish, even though X came before Y. Thus the ghost of X has spoken to Y, but Y has
answered and X responded. There is a dialogue between my ghost and Y , that is a
real dialogue from which we both emerge changed.
It is in this way that writers from before the birth of Kafka can be said to be
Kafkaesque.
This loop is as real as the belief in past life regression.
 25

CIRCUS AND THEATRE:

In the dream Happy became aware that this was part of the problem with circus and
theatre, in that in order to serve the narrative of the long ride that he and Joe were
dreaming into existence, some of the technical aspects of the trick had to be
rendered in another medium so as to be coherent as part of an unfolding narrative
that was therefore centred around the erroneous subjectivities of both himself and
Joe.
They were pure fiction attempting to prove themselves real through the
performance of a circus trick, it was clear to Happy that even though the theatre of
this moment had to remain consistent the primacy was on the preservation of the
technical requirements of the mechanism of tautology that allowed the trick to
work…namely that certain operations were trick-essential…

Happy’s Note to Self:

Dear hearts, when you find yourself in any tawdry production, in which it is implied
by the imbecile director that perhaps the trick is not necessary as it does not ‘serve’
the plot, the onus is then on the circus artist to activate the trick mechanism upon
the very plot itself; upon the very scene of director speaking down to circus artist,
upon the very frame of supposedly ‘integrated’ circus theatre itself (whatever that
is), to perform the trick on the scene in which an imbecile talks down to someone
who is above the dreary pantomime of capitalised meaning.

The trick can be worked on any medium, specifically it is to raise the anchor that
holds circus in the bay of gravity, and set sail anywhere, it is after all what capital
fallaciously and deceitfully does all the while claiming that it is firmly remaining in
port.
This appropriation of the activities of capital is done therefore as an exposition of
internal limits of the system in question, rather than as a concealment of the
internal limits of a capitalised calculus, that is simply done by never forgetting that
when you are within the bracket of STACK [everything is a fantasy, but that within
such a fictional area , even though it is acknowledged as a fiction, it still can have an
affect that does not necessitate it becoming real. ]

In this way Happy and Joe hoped to dream the complicity of post-factism with the
reproduction of capital but put it to work for their own project, which was to
demonstrate the reality of Happy Down River and the inconsequential lie of Late
Circusism. This was the proposition.

“But how does this help the development of an Anti-Circusim Circus?” Joe feigned
the academic attitude, rubbing his chin.

“Look, if you win this race it means I win, It proves that it is possible to prove that
something fictional is real, and this moment of weightlessness, being the central
moment of the circus trick, in being only , as we have agreed, a fictional
 26

weightlessness will be shown to be possible to be provable as true, even though it is

as a purely affective conveyance, both a tragedy that befalls the subject, and an
impossibility as a statement of meta-language in the autonomy of mass-value, but
also we will show that that which is possible to be provable as true within the
fantasy of the calculus also simultaneously, as a Gödellian construction, will be true
but unprovable outside of it. Fiction is the only way of building a world in which
fiction can be effective.
Thus we need to inhabit the calculus in order to show how a concealed version of it
is appropriated by capital, that contradictorily utilises the fiction it claims that is
ineffective.”

“Well I’m glad we’ve cleared that up” said Joe swooning.

“Look, don’t panic…once it can be shown that it is the inherent criteria of an

indifferent and non-negotiable dumb system of logic to not be able to tell the
difference between fact and fiction; once we can show capital as being just such a
dumb calculus that it falsely claims is a totality, we can show that this is the only
reason it can overcome that which would otherwise be its internal limit, ie of not
being able to operate in pure fantasy, of not being able to operate in the qualitative
registers.
Capital can take up affect but it cannot determine what is related to what, and in
this sense it operates within an area it cannot understand, in the same way gravity
can never understand the weightlessness produced by circus.
Gravity seen as a totality is therefore a propositional calculus that appears of at
least equal blindness to circus as capital is to affect.”

“And all blindfolds are equal in the eyes of God.” Quipped Joe.

“Exactly…then we can show that if such an ‘imitation of thought’ can get away
with the murder of the truth then how much more effective we can be as actual
exponents of a ‘living thinking’ at turning that which we fictionalise into a
reality…we must do this…it is actual circus practice. Instead of thinking of ourselves
as free, we demand it.”

“Well, my dear, it all depends if you win the race or not, if you fail to cross the finish
line first with my horse, then your horse will not be in second place and you will lose,
thus meaning that it is YOU who are merely a work of fiction.”

“That is why I have to beat you by riding your horse faster than you can ride mine, it
proves I am real. In space time the interval between events can only be objectively
determined by the relation between the observations of two independently mobile
subjects…It is the Minkowski Space-Time Interval.”

“I hope the dream allows it “ said Joe, whipping the soft flesh of the time-harness off
into the immeasurable distance. “Prince begat Prance, and Prance begat
Prankus..and Prankus begat Spankus, and Spankus begat…”
 27

“Careful, son, its not that simple sample…”

So Happy and Joe continued to work the Calculus, understanding that they did not
have to start with truth but with a fantastical proposition.
Happy proposed they call Joe’s horse Circusism and Joe proposed they call
Happy’s horse Happy. Happy had to win on ‘Circusism’, in order to win by having his
horse, ridden by Joe, called ‘Happy’, coming in second place.

“One-One was a race horse, Two-Two was one too…”

“I am the Dali of space travel,” He twiddled an imaginary moustache, half

remembered from Andy Warhol’s agonising portrait of the king of the surreal,
“the only difference between me and a spaceman is that I am not in space.”

“Let us take the surreality of capital and durationally exhaust it.”

THE CALCULUS:

“Now you have worn my shirt, I will never wash it…” Happy and Joe break into a
comedy washing routine, in which as fast as Joe washes a shirt and hands it to
happy for drying in the mangle, happy puts it through the machinery only to hand it
back to Joe as dirty washing again.

Within the bounds of this calculus there are basic definitions of what is ‘true’.
Axioms and Theorems can be ‘true’ according to their system’s definition of what is
or can be said to be ‘true’. This ‘truth ‘ is within a closed system.

An axiom is true in that it is a statement from which, using the set rules of formation
within a system, will only produce what are called ‘well formed’ strings (a ‘string’ is a
series of symbols that are permissible within the system in question) So ‘well-
formed strings’ are statements that are correctly formed according to the criteria
laid out in the rules of formation in the system in question.
A Theorem is a whole set of statements, all of which are ‘well-formed’ strings’ and
which derive from a clear reversible path that can lead us back to the originating
statement, which is an axiom.

The propositional calculus is a system that has certain operations permissible within
it.

What were these so-called ‘dumb’ operations within the system? They were no
more glamorous than ‘And’, ‘Not’ ‘Either/Or’, and ‘If…Then’.
Ways that statements could relate to each other, these were the operations that
dumbly reterritorialised statements without awareness of relation, relevance or
purpose. Four gates through which the horses run.
 28

THE RULES OF FORMATION:

The succession of such statements of well-formed strings of these symbols were

called theorems, and a theorem is something that is deemed to be ‘true’.

Let us give them symbols:

1: ^ “and”

2: ~ “not”

3: v “either/or”

4: ∞ “if…then…”

These operations can be composed into ‘well-formed’ strings, and these are the
formation rules: We are looking to work with only the strings that are well-formed.

What does it mean if x and y are well formed (and here x and y can stand for any
statement that we are willing to submit, be it fact or fiction, truth or fantasy; and
these statements can each be given letters as names such as C or H, as well as being
extrapolated statements formed from the rules of formation, but here we will just
use x and y generically for any such statement/s)
If x and y are ‘well-formed’, then the following four strings that use the four
operations are also ‘well-formed’.

1: <x ^ y> = (x ‘and’ y)

2: ~x = ‘not’ x

3: <x v y> = (x ‘either/or y)

4: <x ∞ y> = (‘if x then y’)

THE RULE OF CONTAINMENT:

In addition to these there are the brackets that contain all theorems (‘true’
statements, and remember something can be ‘true’ within a fiction, it is not a
requirement of ‘truth’ that we be situated in the real world, even in a soap opera it
may be ‘true’ that Deidre loves Derek; this is a salient feature of the Propositional
Calculus, that formed the long reins that controlled the horses; we do not have to be
 29

in the real world for truth to ‘exist’. Within the fiction of money, it is true that a
pound of apples is worth 5 dollars.)

< > All theorem/s will be contained between these brackets.

THE FICTION RULE:

There is one definitive difference within the rules of this propositional calculus.
Within the calculus it is not necessary to start from an axiom, a starting statement
that is true and which can unfold into well-formed strings, or a theorem, a set of
well-formed strings derived from a starting statement that is true IE there is no need
for the calculus to proceed from a known truth.
You can start from the circus premise called “What if…”

Within this calculus it is wholly possible to say ‘What if x were an axiom or a

theorem?’ and then it is possible to proceed to unfold this ‘premise’, marking that
this unfolding of the possibilities of this new idea, within the confines of the system
in question, is a fictional proposition. Hence the name.
In a similar structure to a joke, there is a premise, a fictional proposition, the
assumed organisation of which can be reinforced and then subverted to counter
what is originally implied by the premise, namely that it is merely a proposition, and
another unexpected instance is revealed as true. IE it is possible to use fiction to
make something else factual.

Happy stood up in the aspect of a comedian, holding the reins like a microphone,
and intoned sadly:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, (sniff) my wife ran off with my best friend…

God, I miss him.”

The fiction of losing a wife makes true the fact that, within this proposition, we
assume he misses his wife. A truth about truth is made real.
(There are of course many other cultural assumptions that unravel within this joke.)

Drum roll, symbol crash!

The entry into a Fictional proposition is marked by the opening of a square bracket,
to show that you are PUSHING into a Fiction, and marked by the closing of a square
bracket to show you are POPPING out of that Fiction.
Within these brackets, the four operations and their attendant rules may be
applied, and any formations that follow these rules are said to be well-formed and
therefore permissible as strings originated from a fictional proposition and that
obey these rules of formation.
 30

So within the brackets <> you may [push into and pop out of ]a Fictional Premise,
and this Premise at the beginning of your Fiction will lead to an Outcome that is
reached at the end of your Fiction before you pop out of it.

[ Entering into a Fiction (First line after this is the ‘premise’ of the Fiction)

] Leaving a Fiction (the preceding line to this is the ‘outcome’ of the Fiction)

Extracts from (Hofstadter, D (2000) Gödel, Escher, Bach. Methuen. London)

“If we thing like money, we can make anythink true”

“True that…”

Another term for ‘parking’ a side fiction within another fiction was STACKING, ie
each time you ‘pushed’ into a fiction when you were already in a fiction, you were
stacking the previous fiction, to be popped later, once this new fiction had reached
its outcome.
Another way of explaining the use of brackets is that a fantasy in the propositional
calculus is like a fictional side-note, that in mid-sentence [imagine if this sentence
would be written in red ink if it were false, then that would mean that this proposed
fantasy is true] could be stacked behind an ‘open bracket ‘ ‘[‘ and worked through to
a conclusion and then ‘popped’ out with a ‘close bracket’ ‘]’

Happy turned to Joe, “Darling, you always stack but you never pop, you start by
telling me about who was at Julie’s wedding, and I can never remember who Julie
is…”

They automatically drop into their Mr and Mrs routine, something they use to blend
in…it was a cliché, but it ‘worked’.

Happy. “Who the hell is Julie?”

Joe: “you know Julie, [STACK used to go out with George, who had that beautiful
car, [STACK remember that day we were in that beautiful car? You were in a mood
remember? Whispering to me that George was driving too fast? You got ice cream
all down your suede jacket? [STACK whatever happened to that jacket, did you ever
find it? it got lost when we moved”

Happy: “It did? I don’t recall…”

Joe: “ yes you do. You had it on the day we moved, do you remember because it
was raining, and you left it in the thing…god, your memory [STACK you know the
Doctor told you to eat more fish because its good for your ‘faculties’…”
 31

Happy: “He didn’t say that, that’s just…an old wives’ tale”

Joe: “it is not [STACK I‘ll have you know I was chatting to Harry the other day and
he said it’s true, oh I didn’t tell you I saw Harry [STACK oh… oh… he’s had a terrible
time, been ‘away’ for over twelve years and he’s just found out he’s got cancer, isn’t
that awful? [STACK oh my god, it’s like that Game Show, D.I.Y.D. [STACK What
does that stand for again?”

Happy: ‘Damned If You Do…’

Joe: “[STACK who was the presenter on that now, he’s been in something?”

Happy: “I don’t know”

Joe: “Yes you do, he’s got that funny smile, he was in that film…[STACK we were
on holiday with so and so and we went to that lovely little cinema, what was it
called…etc. etc.

By this point Happy is apoplectic with rage and frustration. He is aware that since
the original proposition, which was to discuss Julie’s wedding, he is left holding ten
more stacked propositions all of which will have to be ‘popped’ before he can return
to the exterior of the original proposed conversation.
He is left holding 1: who was at the wedding 2: who George was, 3: whether he was
in a mood, 4: what happened to his jacket 5: What the Doctor told him 6: Harry’s
cancer 7: The game show 8: what its acronym stands for 9: what film the presenter
was in 10: the name of the cinema. None of these fantasies seem to have anything
to do with each other…

All of which were unresolved in the sense that it remained unclear if they were
fictional or not, they were fantasies of the past layered like an onion, or like a
telephone call within a telephone call within a telephone call, or like a mundane
version of the thousand and one nights.
They remained ‘un-popped’, and he holding them like a stack of unwashed
plates…he resented being the receptacle for this verbal detritus.

Happy: (With rising anger.) “Just fucking tell me who was at Julie’s wedding!!! Is
there a subject, a point, a reason for this conversation, is there any connection
between these things at all, or is it just that you enjoy the sound of your own fucking
voice”

He is not really angry with Joe, only performing his anger to ridicule the idea of a
dumb calculus that cannot tell what is relational, causal or relevant to what? It is all
part of the ‘act’.
 32

Happy: (Screaming) “I mean, do any of these things have anything to

do with each other?”

Joe: “ Well maybe it’s you and me that don’t have anything to do with each other,
mister! You don’t need to be so horrible to me, you know…I’ve just been out for
hours to buy you your lousy present…I wish I hadn’t bothered”
Joe collapsed against the parapet, still clutching the reins in one limp hand, in an
exaggerated gesture he buried his face in the crook of his other arm. “You are a
beast, Happy Down-River.”

Usually at this point, whilst Joe was soaking up all the sympathy from those
around him, Happy could operate freely; lifting wallets, switching suit cases ,
whatever was required.
Meanwhile Joe would be ‘popping ‘ for all he was worth to any one who would
listen, relating each [STACK and POP] amid deep sobs and genuflections of his
damp handerchief, each pop the opportunity for another pre-pop stack, he could
give Happy all the time he needed.

“Did I ever tell you that One-One was a racehorse…etc.”

“We were smooth operators back in the day, Joe.”

“We still are because any day now it’s then all over again, smarty pants.” Time
groaned.

Happy continued to lay down the law that supported the idea that anything could
be true.

If we take our four operations ^, ~, v, ∞ and the two Horses H (Happy Down-River)
and C (Late Circusism), which we will call atoms, as they represent the parts

1 H Atom Happy-DR true

2 ~H From 1 Not Happy-DR
3 ~~H From 1 Not Not Happy-DR
4 C Atom
5 ~C
6 <H^~C> Happy and Not Circusism
7 ~<H^~C
8 ~~<H∞~C>
9
 33

We can demonstrate a series of ‘well formed’ strings.

Now if we extrapolate our horses by this set of simple procedures, we

can establish that Happy is both real and a complete work of fiction.

If P = real and Q = Happy Down-River

P and Not P together imply Q, we can see from this that either being real or being
fictional both imply Happy. The outcome is contradictory precisely because the
calculus cannot see how the two statements are implicated in each other. It is not
able to read the contradiction, in the same way that mass-value simply cannot
register the tautology in the trick. Both horses when entered on such long reins of
contradiction can come out as simultaneously winner and loser of the race, the fact
that Happy and Joe swapped mounts is their only insurance policy against total
invalidation.

“If you will allow me one quote.”

“Can you effectively quote someone in a dream, where is the rigour in that?”

“Since Q is interpretable from any statement, we can loosely take the theorem to
mean, “From a contradiction, anything follows’. Thus in systems based on
 34

Propositional Calculus, contradictions cannot be contained; they infect the whole

system like an instantaneous global cancer.”

Gödel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter, Douglas. Penguin. London 2000.

And this is the point about a tautological ground, once you establish a post-
ideological area in which fantasy can be contradictorily monetised by something
that is itself a fictional notation of something that has taken solid shape in the
world, once this final register of autonomous subject-less difference has manifested
itself through a linguistic form, and the only possible permitted result is that any
dream of freedom is no longer a dream but a reality as is suggested by neoliberal
capitalism, then you are in a situation , a propositional calculus that has formed a
carcinogenic reproduction of itself within the compulsory edict of freedom-
production (that implies a meritocracy which is actually an indifferent thresher
subsumed by the imperative of capital).
What this amounts to is the compulsory order to produce moments of fictional
weightlessness, which are then, through the calculus, conflated into factual
freedoms that endlessly refer to the insatiable lack that necessarily becomes the
symptom of repetition of freedom production that forms the mandatory
performances of CIRCUSISM. The calculus is essential as an engine of
conflation/fetishisation of Fiction into fact and relative value into equivalent value in
neoliberalism and circusism respectively.

Within the Circus it now becomes imperative that you produce freedom. This
freedom is produced according to gravity, which means it is both imperative and
impermissible simultaneously.

Effectively you can fantasise, what if this were real?

Therefore this was the perfect system of remote control to guide the outcome of
Happy’s veracity.

ON NON-BELIEF SYSTEMS:.

The FICTION of art, unconcerned with its market value as fiction, speaks to other
fictions located in time…The register upon which this occurs and which I will here
relate to the split register of value in both Marx and Lacan’s notion of a science of
value, is the qualitative register of use, meaning, weight, value that can be felt, (I
have previously related this possibility in this register to jump out of the system as the
human receptiveness to the plane of immanence, that is prior to the depth of
difference, and which is not yet rendered out into difference of the other quantitative
register, it is though this register that we feel we can jump out of the system…here I
suppose I am saying that ART has immanence or affective affinity with Immanence…a
fiction of it, that is its pre-set-ness. This sentiment stands in stark contrast to the
 35

ghostly economy we encountered in this network of portals to the other side) that can
be affectively conveyed as is proper to an exchange with a spectre.
There is no market for such conveyances (except of course PLR, in which we are
now caught again by its capitalisation as a ‘service’), if I can be Lacanian here for a
moment, as to place it there would destroy the positive condition of which the
fictionality of the communication represents an obstacle. The exchange between
the living and the dead remains factually effective as long as it remains fictional, as
to enter it into the realm of quantifiable fact would then render it as another
criterion that is insufficient to delimit the autonomy of the horizontal differential
relation of values between signifiers.
This is how I experience the interaction with faith based practices, I engage with a
fictional faith that is therefore the equal of any actual faith that might be in
operation…
The seriousness of the problematics of compromised affect is enough to match any
seriousness of faith. I ‘believe’ that.

This spectral fiction is then a two way street, and we are in the presence of ghosts
that speak to us and affect us and to which we answer, affecting them.
In this logical definition of cross-temporal affect from these ideas, I suggest that
this is my engagement with a belief system that posits I am composed of the now
dead lives of my learning, and that I can access these memories, that these lives are
living ghosts within me.
So that although I engage in non-belief it is not out of disrespect for the living
weight of a ghost that speaks and can be spoken to as a carrier of critique. A critique
of any gravity.

TIME-TRICK:

Time here and how the subject operates on a different register to the body,
encased in temporal amber of the now, that here a trick in time is worked, a folding
of the retroactive possibilities of art, of a poet to speak to the dead and a ghost to
answer by fact that this artist is a soon to be ghost speaking himself to the not yet to
be. This folding of time, like a rope to reach back and affect itself, to fold forward
and have actual effect as a virtual presence, is a trick performed in the rope of time,
in which objects of self-reference can only be registered by a subject capable of
imagining the fiction of being able to jump out of the system in response to a
tautology and imagine an area outside of time where a ghost can speak and be
spoken to.

It is a time loop in which the present changes the past in order to influence the
future.

The sentence you will read later is false.

 36

The sentence you read earlier is true.

It is a loop.

The inoperability of changing the past is a feature of this interest in Past Life
Regression in relation to the inoperability of achieving weightlessness in gravity.

Within these two approaches I felt there was a way I could allow the fiction to
operate as a way of talking to ghosts, and that this formed a fabricated faith with
which I could meet these people without ridiculing or invalidating our time together.
There was mistrust and it was essential that in this shared experience, in which
intimate details and stories and emotional retellings occurred both parties were able
to feel respected.
The activation of the weightlessness in time relied for me upon this performance
of faith in utter disbelief that was seen as such by all that experienced it. As with the
trick, as stated I was activating a fiction that acknowledged itself as fiction but
within an environment in which it could be discussed as a real event that has actively
transgressed an impossible impasse, and has actually altered the unassailable
immutability of the past, as well as that past being able to communicate things in
the now to us.

But this activation of the complexities of haunting fiction began like all journeys
with a single step and was born from the deconstruction of the road rips I originally
undertook to speak circus on the move.

Travelling Without Moving:

In this practice you lie still on a couch or in a large armchair, you are relaxed into a
deep state of hypnosis, and in this trance you are regressed back and back through
time to before you were even born, to other lives you have lived.

“Where are you? Can you describe your surroundings?”

“I am pulling a rope…”

“What are you pulling?”

“A ship…”

“You’re on a ship?”

“No…”

“You are pulling the ropes to pull in a ship?”

“No…”
 37

“Where are you then?”

“I’m in the theatre…”

“You are in a theatre on a ship?”

“No…I’m below the stage.”

“…but on a ship…?”

“No…”

“What are you pulling?”

“I’m pulling a huge painting of a ship onto the stage…”

“Oh, you are a stage hand…”

“Yes I work below the stage operating the mechanisms that move the scenery…”

“I see…”

“I am in Ystad in Sweden.”

“What year is it? Can you see the date anywhere...?”

“It’s 1694…”

Transcript of session with Nicky Pearson. August 2016. UK.

KLEIN VALIDATION:

One way to ensure that the prop calculus is consistently seen as a totality is to enter
into the calculus that it is a totality…and then the calculus will prove that to be
true…in the sense that it is a system that proves itself to be true as a system that can
prove anything to be true, its truth giving ability is contained within an idea that is
entered from outside of it, thus meaning it is the logical equivalent of a
[Link]…
…in the sense that it is a system that contains and validates the idea of itself as a
totality with no edge, its logical topology mirrors that of the klein bottle.

Circus I propose on the other hand should still adopt this prop calc but expose it as a
limited post fact area ALWAYS REMEMBERING THAT IT IS ONLY FICTIONAL
PROPOSITIONS HERE
 38

Apparently all statements in propositional calculus come out true…and in this

regard we are utilising it because we know that this is exactly how capital
behaves…In its dumbness, it admits any proposition to be true within itself…thus
any affective element that must necessarily appear as non-factual, and therefore
non-graspable to capital, can be first proposed by capital as true (being ‘true’ within
capital means being commodifiable, fetishisable and therefore possessed of an
associated seemingly intrinsic exchange value that is horizontally relational, and
thus like any proposition in the calculus it will become true)

Thus propositional calculus is a trick of capital…it is either true that capital is dumb
or that capital pretends to be dumb…as we know that financial instruments are
designed and perpetrated by individuals, let us assume that these individuals are
clever enough to pretend that it is capital’s innate dumbness that renders them
blameless for the trickery that ensues. Thus according to its own capacity to render
any proposition as true, capital is both dumb and only pretending to be dumb:

IN, OUT:

Lacan becomes true as an impasse for the subject by the fact created by the
system that is able to validate anything as fact that is a propositional capital.

The impasse or bar proposed by lacan becomes true as the fact of

propositional calculus is that there are no facts…the concealement of these
real limits to the system of pc, and the narrative that this system is in fact an
area of freedom, as within it all dreams can come true, is what both hides lack
and implies it, and which encourages the desire that is then fulfilled in a post
fact system that implies that the desire can never reach the endlessness of
itself, as if everything is true, nothing is permitted except desire based on
lack…

THIS IS THE UNDOING OF BURROUGHS:

“Ooh I thought that it was the other way round…”

“It amounts to the same thing Joe, as it can equally be proposed that nothing
is true, everything is permitted and within the propositional calculus that
would also be true…”

“The apparent totality of Everything being true is what hides the fact that
nothing is, and everything being permitted by everything seeming to be true
is what hides the fact that nothing is true except a desire based on lack…”

They both enter into a mock gun battle with an imaginary Uncle Bill,
 39

“Fill your hand, you effeminate varmit…It doesn’t matter who wins, as when
you shoot golden bullets everyone’s a winner, nothing is lost…”
They both stagger, as if they have been shot, and collapse in a heap of
laughter…”ha ha you’re undead…”

They dreamt that the dream was untrue and so it was possible. In the sense
that Burroughs edict, within capital, becomes a method for capital to
reproduce itself, by equivalent measure
Lacan, within a propositional calculus, becomes proposed as the impasse that
it is predicted to be, and also the mechanism by which capital reproduces
itself…

THE AWFUL TRUTH:

In this sense ‘everything is true, nothing is permitted’ becomes the truth of

desire as lack when it is concealed as ‘nothing is true everything is
permitted’…just for jolly.

THIS IS A TAUTOLOGICAL GROUND IN WHICH RESISTANCE IS THE

REPRODUCTION OF CAPITAL’S ENCLOSURE…KLEIN-WISE.

This is CIRCUSISM…a post fact area in which that which is not permitted
within gravity is celebrated as a permissible freedom production that is
expected of you, and which implies that if these fictions are facts, there is no
site for fact tio be and so the trick must repeat itself under the subsumption
and imperative of gravity…

Dumb ^ ~Dumb = Commodeology (The Ideology of Commodity)

Therefore the system shows that (like capital) both x and not x are both true…A
typical politician in a post fact scenario can agree with fascists and with the non
fascists alike with no contradiction, the fact that my calculus has no beliefs, that is
no ideology (this is not the same as being post-ideological, post ideology is just a
mask for indifference of capital), just as capital has no ideology, it is dumb to
ideology, just as a typical politician is dumb to ideology precisely because she
follows a dumb, (indifferent, non-negotiable quantitative register) that cannot
conceive of ideology, precisely because like a calculus, that is propositional, and
which uses recursive fiction, layers of reality with a carry over rule, it is an area in
which fiction can become fact…ie within which ANY proposition can become
true…and so it has no capacity to see which ideologies might negate each other or
contradict or clash. They are merely commodeologies that can happily be
equivalently valueable once they are made possessed of a seemingly intrinsic truth-
value.
 40

‘I’m just a girl who cant say no, im in a terrible fix…’

Just like the long reins that Happy and Joe are holding the propositional calculus can
make anything become true at a certain temporal distance from its original
proposal.
The reins propositionally suggest new events along the time line of a horse’s life,
that then must become true further down the time line delineated by the
propositional reins. Thus Happy can engineer to use his skill as a propositional rider
of Joe’s horse to make sure that it comes first, thus ensuring that his horse comes
second and therefore wins the race according to the criteria they proposed.
This outcome means that as the winner Happy is rendered as being true, while
Circusism is just a work of fiction and so the entire piece of fiction based on
something called Late Circusism is just a dystopian satire on something that has not
yet come to pass.

Happy was suddenly gripped by doubt, this is normal: “Unless of course, by some
oversight, we have not yet fully popped out of a recursive fiction, and I am only
proving that I am real within the square brackets that we cannot see.”

“You’re not as green as you’re cabbage looking are you, sweetheart?”

This goes to show that there is a similarity between a state of affairs where a
fictional proposition such as capital necessarily creates a post-fact environment by
concealing its ‘dumbness’, and the possibility that fiction if proposed within an
environment that is prepared to pretend to be dumb enough to allow any
proposition to become true but to acknowledge that this is a form of literal, dumb
reading of what the proposition is ‘telling’, that is to suspend disbelief as a form of
propositional calculus, then the same post-fact-ness that supports capital, which is a
trick, can also support a trick that attempts to become true by acknowledging that it
is dumb enough to believe in something that is not yet true.

“Capital uses fiction, but will not admit it is dumb enough to believe in fiction,

Or rather it purports that anyone else who uses fiction is just a worthless artist…

I am proposing therefore that Circus just admits it is dumb enough to believe in

fiction, so as not to be caught in agreement with capital.”

By using weightlessness, but not admitting, in its insistence that weightlessness is

actually freedom-production, (which it cannot be) that it is dumb enough to believe
in the impossibility of weightlessness under gravity, it defers to the register of
gravity as the measure of weightlessness, which in then being the only scale by
which weightlessness is validated, simply negates it as impossible. Circus has tried
to be clever according to gravity.
In this regard any circus that does this, in not admitting it is dumb enough to
believe in the maintenance of fiction, becomes the stupidity of propositional
 41

calculus, which must turn all fictions into fact, filling in their ghosts with clay, and
which is simply a post fact area similar to that over which capital presides, within
which the overarching fiction is that any fictional proposition can become fact..

Therefore in not admitting that it is a propositional calculus (a limited post fact area)
it simply becomes a propositional calculus (a total post fact area).

Thus it prophecies itself…its cleverness stupidly renders it as a total system.

They were proposing that although capital was a propositoional calculus that
doesn’t know its dumb (ie its an area in which anything can become true) if you were
to operate a similar propositional calculus as a similar post fact area but just admit
that you were utilising a dumb calculus that permitted the fiction that fiction can be
fact, you could then do things that you only dreamed of…for the boys it was a way
for them to produce a fiction of value time, a long ride in which the long umbilical
reins could be laid out across time in contravention of the gravity of time to do what
they always dreamed of, which was to pull off a trick that was weightless in the
three way restriction of gravity, language and capital…this fiction was a fiction in
which they found a way to imagine a propositional calculus that proposed itself as
real
They simply knew that fiction was the key, so they entered the statement “this
propositional calculus is real” into itself and in doing so made true the fiction as a
fact.

“I’m very pleased for you, Happy. But I would suggest that we rely on the fact that
we have fully popped out and the fictional rule is telling us that you are fact, and
Circusism is fiction, otherwise it’s a tragedy …”

“So who was at Julie’s wedding?”

“Oh please, no tricks…”

It is not the trick’s fault that it has been soiled. It was just too useful to not be
made ineffective.

At this point the audience are on the floor, doubled up in topologically

inescapable laughter. Klein-deep in an intestinal mirth, there was no way out
of the joke; it was simply knot-funny.

The ghost of bill hicks wafts in through the ventilation like the smell of stale
cigarettes…”quit doing that, quit putting a dollar sign on everything on this
fucking planet…seriously …its not a joke…kill yourselves…”

Hicks, B. ‘Rant in E Minor’. Parlophone.

They drop into their Equestrian routine:

 42

“Ooh it all sounds very horsey your theory…very ‘prince begat prance’…begat
prankus begat spankus…” Joe is posing around the space, baring his perfect
backside through a specially constructed hole in his crotchless jodphurs…

“One of the things the matter with him is that he doesn’t think there is
anything the matter with him…You have a Chinkel Chankel in your mouth luv
…and it wont come out…”

“Look at me I’m riding on my high theory horse, round and round…and desire
begat lack, and lacan begat lackus, and old lucky begat prankus, and desirus
begat firus, and firus begat wirus, and feral were his offspring for three score
and twenty at 7/2 in the 2:30 at Chepstow…”

“I but a fiver on a horse at ten to one, came in and half past four!”

“It’s all very well but there is no proof that little Alan Strang has experienced
any real passion…a horse is not a penis unless you enter your penis into the
propositional calculus, then…

“…then you are truly fucked!”

“…ha ha…well yes darling, but I was about to say that then…you can prove
that the penis is anything at all…from a hawk to a handsaw..”

“From a raven to a writing desk…”

“Within propositional calculus my penis stands for anything!”

“Yours will stand for anything anyway, luv.”

“I’d like to Klein-bottle you, mate”

Happy pulled out a cigarette and proposed to light it…

JOE: I’m afraid there is no smoking in here…

Happy threw up…the room was spinning, falling from the tower like an illustration
from a tarot card…disaster had befallen them…tragedy had befallen them in the
shape of the inescapable feeling that they were still inside the square
brackets…falling…they had never popped out, and so Happy was only a fictional
character, which meant that Circusism was real…it was a tragedy.
 43

Any random word order can become true. Cut up becomes almost a shopping list in
propositional calculus, and honesty is no longer necessary, as to propose that it is
random is the same as it being randomly generated.
Circus needs a language along the reins across time forever to the horse that never
was…
It is like a film which can be edited to make anything seem real, all through and,
not, or and if then; as when wrong is the only right left.

AN ENSEMBLE OF LIVES:

Past Life Regression became a form of travelling for a small circus ensemble
responding to the edict to be mobile. It became a form of speaking and writing; a
way of generating fake narratives, which could be inserted into history as facts. It
became a way of performing pranks in history, of travelling without moving the
impossibly fixed settings of the past and changing the outcomes.
This method of inhabiting other bodies, of speaking with another voice has entered
the writing. It flickers now as an integral part of my writing practice as I come to
write this thesis. Ideas of truth and falsity, of voices from the past speaking
fabricated quotes and fictional characters who present their own idea of the
research all feature here as different voices. They are all part of the practice as it is
informed by PLR.

We researched the practice through visiting over twenty-five different practitioners

over a period of two years. We became gardeners, chauffeurs, factory workers, lords
and waiters, train workers and soldiers, all at different locations and points in time.
The sessions were filmed and in all we amassed over fifty hours of footage. The
therapists were always approached, as they would be by a client, and were not
complicit in the project although some who were curious were informed of the
overall interest in mobility, in clown and in the idea of performing at different
locations in space and time.
We received various responses from enthusiasm to suspicion, and those that asked
for their footage to not be shown do not appear in the disseminated work.
We always asked if we could film the sessions, explaining sometimes it was for
both an interest in the field of Past Life Therapy and for research purposes. In this
way we documented a wide range of journeys undertaken by clowns and as regular,
un-costumed participants.
The clown made an appearance again within this new practice as a figure capable
of travelling to any desired point in history. The Auguste is a figure who is often
thrust upon the stage in order to fulfil some function for which they are not suited;
their very presence at the scene of historical importance, or the scene’s presence
within them, creating a shift in the meaning of this event.

Our Auguste was present at The inauguration of the Federal Reserve in the US in
1911, present at the filming of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 1952, present
at the Bristol Riots in 1839, present at the marriage of David Cameron’s
 44

grandparents in 1930, present at the painting of Breughal the Younger’s ‘Tulip

Madness’ in 1663.
He was by turns a Sailor working the scenery in the Ystad Theatre, a boy helping
with a travelling Spiritualist show in Italy, a Priest who was hanged for fraud in
London.
All of these events were visited many times each as the therapy was developed.
Each scene was played out according to different outcomes as the historical
accuracy of set events became as fluid as a river, flowing where our speech lead us,
as we lay hypnotised on various couches.
The sessions occurred in the living room of old ladies living alone by the sea, in the
hastily tidied bedroom of an unemployed insurance saleswoman, in official looking
New Age clinics as well as the converted garage of a young newly qualified
therapist.

PLR BELIEVERS:

I chose to investigate the practice of Past Life Therapy with three other artists. Mike
Bell, my short-circuit road trip companion and comedian, Rosy Roberts, an
acrobatic/aerial artist and actor, and with Nathan Hughes, my film-making
companion from the earlier ‘actual’ journeys.
This small group featured at different times in the process, in different guises as we
looked into the therapy. We studied it in books, through interviews with registered
therapists and through attending web conferences and online courses.
We operated as subjects, submitting to the therapy over a period of about one year
and later even posed as operating therapists ourselves, conducting sessions as
performance and as prank.

Throughout these different manifestations of the ‘theatrics’ of this practice, the

main thrust was to go as circus performers into this landscape, access to which was
provided by a small network of therapists.
We saw these therapists as ‘portals’ into an ‘un-captured space’ that was made
fertile by the short circuit of intentions that occurred.
As we spoke our journeys through the interiors and landscapes of the past, we
were operating on a purely incompatible register of ‘faithlessness’, that was
nevertheless in need of the underlying structure of their ‘faith’ for this faithlessness
to move. The inoperable circuit was made ‘live’ by our fictions within it. Their belief
made necessary the performance of belief that made it real for us as non-believers.
It was the social contract between the therapist and the client that operated the lie
as truth.
Although this also seemed like another cynical mutation of Isaiah Berlin’s liberty, in
that it was an undisclosed, fictionalised union between two conflicting ideologies,
that is, of absolute belief enabling cynicism, it did fit with this idea of inoperability in
which the only move was the dysfunctional one, that it was necessary to avoid
‘capture’ by moving through the parameters of un-provable belief but with the
operating possibilities of non-belief.
This is a long-winded way of saying that we were lying.
 45

MICRO-LIBERTY:

Was this a petulant response to a post-truth world, a response in which we felt that
a cynical usurping of the heartfelt belief of predominantly female practitioners was
justified? Perhaps. It seemed that the sessions formed a microcosmic version of
Berlin’s negative Liberty in which I got what I wanted, the therapist got what she
wanted that there was a genuine affective accord generated…we were both happy
with the result. Often this took the form of a two hour-long journey to a specific
lifetime in the past, after which I felt satisfied that I had ‘visited’ a meaningful
location and performed a kind of political prank, and the therapist was delighted at
the detailed veracity of the regression.
So whilst our intentions to use this channel as a kind of circus anti-mobility
remained hidden, there was accord and a micro-version of negative liberty existed
in the clinic; in which two people of incompatible ideologies could both be in
‘balanced’ social accord. It was as John Nash predicted in this instance, that
equilibrium was reached by everyone involved operating their own self-interest:
The PLR therapist in performing their trick for remuneration, us as clients
performing our trick of fictional journeys into the past as circus research.
This balance was held in place perhaps by our lies. We perpetuated a fiction that
we also ‘believed’ in the practice, and as long as this fiction remained, these
meetings could be thought of as examples of the success of Berlin’s idea of a society
in which everyone believed exactly what they wanted to believe and that this would
result in harmony.
This harmony soon dissolved whenever we revealed to the practitioners, usually
some days after a successful session, as to the real reason for our visit. It seemed
that the revealing of the trick, of moving through the tenets of the practice, in order
to show its inoperability caused distress, and this was an unpleasant tasting success.
But the inoperability is what protected us, so it was necessary for us to generate it,
to highlight the practices dysfunction so that it could operate as a potentially viable
channel for a new kind of trick…one that was utterly useless, and so prevented from
being entered into the market as a viable commodity; if the gravity was time, a
completely insurmountable force, the only way we could resist it was to do as we
did in gravity, that was to convey as possible what was essentially and really, wholly
and actually impossible: perhaps this was our way of pronouncing the word
‘differance’.
It was hard to explain that the only way to honour these practices as ‘use-able’ was
to demonstrate through an unpleasant prank their invalidity.
We genuinely valued the women and men who had helped us to operate as a small
ensemble of travelling circus performers, but it was necessary to inhabit their faith-
based practice as non-believers, to include references that invalidated the process,
false dates, impossible loops of logic, anachronisms etc. in order to make this into
an operable inoperability. This circuit of belief/non-belief had an affective power to
take us into a now fluid history, and was predicated on impossibility.
The trick is impossible.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome onto the stage, the man who can bend the
iron bar of time itself…”
 46

The crowd are all screaming: “It can’t be done! You can’t go back in time.”

BACK TO HEGEL?

In doing this I am aware perhaps that the material conditionality of circus practice is
being reverted back towards Hegelianism, back into the rarified abstract, but it is
done with the spectre or ‘past life’ of Marx present in that it seeks to identify any
artificially constructed impediment to free movement that is present in the
condition of the system. As stated there is a petulance here that informs the belief
that time is when wrong is the only right left.
In the sense that immateriality becomes a force through which capital is mobile
then the materialism in dialectic inevitability seems short circuited. In relation to
capture, it is through capture of the affective power of arts practices that circus art
should look to move across an immaterial landscape as a ghostly form of resistance.
I do not know how to privilege the physicality of the practice in any stringer way
than to make these provocations of a circus that thinks it can perform tricks in the
atemporal field in which gravity simply cannot exist.

“This ‘retroversive effect’ concerns the very core of the relationship between Hegel
and Marx: it provides the main reason why, today, one should return from Marx to
Hegel and enact a ‘materialist reversal’ of Marx himself. To approach this complex
issue, let me begin with Giles Deleuze complex notion of a ‘pure past’: not the past
into which present things pass, but an absolute past ‘where all events, including
those that have sunk without a trace, are stored and remembered as their passing
away, a virtual past which already contains also things which are still present. A
present can become past because in a way it is so already, it can perceive itself as
part of the past (“what we are doing now is [will have been] history”); as Deleuze
puts it: “It is with respect to the pure element of the past, understood as the past in
general, as an a priori past, that given former present is reproducible and the
present present is able to reflect itself.” Does this mean that the pure past involves a
thoroughly deterministic notion of the universe in which everything still to happen
(to come) - all actual spatio-temporal deployment – is already part of an
immemorial atemporal virtual network? No, and for very precise reason: because
“the pure past must be all the past but must also be amenable to change through
the occurrence of a new present.”

(Rothenburg, M (2010) The Excessive Subject. Polity. Cambridge)

We attempted many different kinds of journeys and found that some practitioners
were more willing to experiment than others. We were pleased to meet Sue
Bentham; who confirmed for us that it would be possible to travel to specific
locations. We made a film about her, and this is linked below.
In this film we attempted to construct a tautology within the practice of past life
regression itself. The entire process is engineered to suspend the process.
 47

(There are further notes on this film, which I would like you to read after you have
watched the film. See Glossary)

LINK: ‘WHEN WRONG IS THE ONLY RIGHT LEFT’ a somersault

[Link]

FUTURE PAST:

Precisely because I am concerned with and confused by the difference between a

free individual and a captured subject, and through an engagement with Regression
to another life, I found myself involved in scenes where an old lady calls me to
return from my life as Joshua in 1407 to the body of Jonathan here in the United
Kingdom.
I am painted like a clown, as perhaps a way of being absent as I am asked to
pretend to be someone else, or as a way of protecting myself from being over
indulgent in the many selves I could be.

This idea of leaving the self; of being able to hop out through some technique from
the grip of subjectification enacted by the apparatus is what interests me here. It is
an impossibility, like ‘speaking circus’ or climbing a piece of paper.
The only piece of paper I could think of climbing was one which was inscribed with
a drawing of a subject light enough to climb on the outside of the piece of paper,
that somehow in making an image through the paper of something that could be
outside of it, an outside could be suggested from which it was possible to sketch
such a subject within the confines of the paper and that this image would represent
a way of climbing.

The insurmountable gravity not only prevents the body from moving meaningfully
to make a trick;
It prevents the circus from being able to use ‘nomadism’ to escape from the grip of
neoliberalism.
It also prevents the subject from being anything but implicit in the constantly
shifting substrate of power /gravity that holds him

It prevents the creation of an image not yet formed in time of a subject outside of
the apparatus through which this future-image-subject might be able to assemble
internal components of the apparatus in order to infer that there exists an
externality to the apparatus in which a subject, able to assemble components in
such a way, could exist.

It is a loop.

This is like the plot of a low-budget Sci-Fi film where you have to go forward in time
to learn how to go forward in time.
 48

It is, in a sense, a tautology itself, a plot in which you can retroversively create the
transcendental position that you need from which to view the formal system as
having an outside to which it is possible to escape.

I am suggesting then a kind of futurism; as a move through the fabric of a system as

a way to retroversively enable a position outside of the immanent subject. This
futurism, like all Sci-Fi, is a fabrication that bears the impact of truth backwards, it is
an example of the trick, because it moves through the fabric of a falsity in order to
refute that falsity and in fact result in the ‘truthifying’ of its falsehood
retroversively…

The trick of futurism is here enacted through the medium of lies in order to refute
the authority of the lie as false thus rendering it as true.

If NOT-TRUE implies both NOW and its negation NOT-NOW, then NOT-TRUE is
false, therefore it is TRUE…

Futurism is an example of being wrong in the future in order to be right now.

It is in this spirit, and little else, we imagined that our previous road trips were the
future past-life-regressions of someone hoping to recreate an image of themselves
in the future, or as our future selves acting as us, and as actors this enabled us to
follow unseen stage directions.
As such we set up a series of tricks through time to be able to hop out of the
subjectivity that is embedded in the current apparatus which prevents us adopting a
position that is not immanent to it and so forming a resistance that could imply its
limits as a formal system within other alternative formal systems.

This was Gödels achievement in implying that Russel and Whitehead’s ‘principles’
were merely an incomplete formal system of which there was an outside.

It is just a trick. Not real. It registers for us ‘affectively’ as a ‘potentiality’ but it does
not register in the rigid sets of symbols and signs that form the ‘imitation of
thought’ in which Gödel’s trick is wrought.
This imitation of thought I see as the objective indifferent rendering of logic, of
numbers, of the market. The trick is felt through the sensitive, complex subjectivity
that cannot be copied over in its nuanced, frayed, incomplete substance into the
linguistic shuffling and numerical loops of the formal system we use to structure
reason. This purely quantitative register is subject-less.
The trick leaks out of gears that grind the one who performed the trick into
nothing. The engine does not recognise the oil that drips from it; it grinds on
regardless, or maybe it grinds to a halt as oil keeps flowing.

I feel that this meddling in time was an attempt to set up a circus at the most
extreme iteration of gravity: the Black Hole. That the interplay between gravity and
time here through this impossible practice of PLR would acknowledge how, at the
 49

point of most gravity, the physical laws of when, where, what and how break down,
allowing for the missing ghost of an affective nonsense to appear…

In a circus under an immense gravitational pull, and the counter-pull of an

insurmountable impossibility to form a subject other than the one that is embedded
within the current permitted series of acts …what is possible?
Is there an ‘affect’ that leaks out of the trick, perceivable only by the subject that is
necessarily more complex and developed than the subject of rational game-theory?
This complex subject is capable perhaps of love in the face of an impossible demand
of ethics to love.
The trick does not operate in logic, in numbers in objective indifference, here it is
absorbed because the subject that necessarily shows up to have the trick validated
here is negated, thus negating the subjective perception of the weightlessness and
prospective mobility available to that trick-making subject.
In a society in which it was compulsory to perform tricks, the basements and secret
meeting places of circus artists continued to forge a question: “how can we use tricks
to resist their own inevitable inclusion in that which we resist?”
Investigating the trick performed within the restraints of ‘Late Circusism’ demanded
that:

The body does not move

The circus cannot travel
The self can be other than the individual

To be free in capitalism these operations must be inoperable.

Because within ‘Late Circusism’:

The body must perform

The circus must be mobile
You can be whoever you want to be.

To be free in capitalism these operations must be profitable.

These three problems with the trick are played with in this travelling without
moving, which is the logical conclusion of an ever-shortening possibility for a road
trip to be an escape from stasis.
These ideas are reached inevitably as a trick without moving, to try to be rid of the
gravity of the compulsorily mobile subject that seems to be implicit in the demands
of neoliberalism.

Quotes from the videos…

“Your higher self chooses a life from which I wants to learn. The troubles of life allow
the higher spirit to learn lessons and grow, and by asking questions about the past
life, the subject can learn what his higher self was meant to learn, what he himself
set out to learn by becoming an unknowing life, alienated from his own higher self.”
 50

(HAZEL NEWTON (June 2015) Past Life Regression therapist . Session 8, Transcript)

This research was a circus response to a fictionalised need to make an Anti-

Circusism; both to critique a captured circus mobility as it is iterated now, and the
system in which it is embedded, to investigate the translatability of the trick and to
explore the affective and injunctive power of known fictions.
In one session I was told that I have had 4,666 previous lives, my regression
therapist informed me that she had only had 91; “I should be paying you” she said.

“What else can you see?”

“I can see that it has also informed the writing practice.”

DOWN, DOWN:

A tower can become a fact. It was a long way down for Happy and Joe.
All faded now…excruciating pictured by themselves in flags of risk nothing.
Defers to the register of who was at the wedding? Holding the reins like a
restriction but not admitting language. Inflected 19th century come out true for
the boys…
“I don’t recall you are a beast I don’t know.” Discuss contradictory propositions
you only dreamed of. Umbilical post-fact-ness: separation, push, premise, carry
over the inescapable feeling.
The preceding fertile landscape is a deliberate mistake. “He’s been in
something, new events along the time line?”
As these, as those…that in order…at the same time…

“You got ice-cream all down your axiomatic voice”

“Equus, godslave…only I can ride him…tonight we ride against them all, the
hosts of bowler, the hosts of jodhpur, against all those who show you off for
their vanity…tie rosettes on your head for their vanity…come on equus let’s get
them…trot…steady steady steady…

And into the night they rode.

ONE, ONE:

Happy had blinked, and was regaining the dream from earlier time.

“You do realise that if you win, you will be in second place at the same time thus
proving that you are a work of fiction…” said Joe
 51

This is exactly the propositional calculus, that in winning you are the rider of the
winning horse, which has therefore lost because it comes first, success on
purpose becomes failure on purpose…and you are a clown…thus proving that if
you change and rename the terms by which winning is decided as actual places
in a race then you can create tautological victories that are both wins and losses
simultaneously…in this way happy had worked in the circus stages of Europe
destroying the British pound and the Yankee dollar for over three decades…a
clown of extreme dexterity…his success was defined by a failure that he enacted
by riding a horse at break neck speed with the skill of a North American Indian
brave…

TWO, TWO:

Renaming the processes of deciding victory in a race with the place names of the
race itself, thus in doing so the internal limit of the races logic; which
categorically only allows you to either win or lose is disrupted; this Gödellian
trick overcomes the internal limits of the binary horse race system of win or lose,
profit or loss and replaces it with a clown horse that can simultaneously both be
first and last at the same time, but with last place being the winning position…it
is the renaming that creates the trick, whereby the process of winning in racing
is now called ‘second place’, and the process that governs losing is now called
‘first place’.

‘One-One’ was a race horse, ‘Two-Two’ was one too, “One-One” won one race ,
And “Two-Two” won one too.

“I know but what a work, don’t all successes begin with realising that you are
not who you think you are…
So I rang up the Operator and I said, "I want to report
a nuisance caller", and she said "Not you again".

They rode until the winner became the loser of some note. As it turned out and
so it came to pass, that the truth of Happy was entirely dependant on the lie of
Circusism, and vice versa.

We did this, we performed the tricks, we did, we rode time…all dead now, all
the long riders are gone, all of them faded photos in the bookies pocket, all
settled bets, “we are closing, we are closing, please make your way outside.”

“The ponies run, the girls are young, the odds are there to beat,
You win a while, and then it’s done, your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal with your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if its real, A thousand kisses deep.”

Cohen L. ‘Ten New Songs’. 2001.

 52

Happy could see Joe fading out like the sound track, a hopeless loop of film
curling around itself on the cutting room floor, a translucent piece of luggage
lost somewhere in an old familiar house…he was crying in great sobs of sheer
loss, he was searching the dream for pictures of his only friend Joe; looking in all
the drawers. The handles came off in his hand, he didn’t have a screw driver, he
had no shoes, the tears now squirting from his eyes in great arcs almost as if he
had a rubber bulb full of water in his pocket, he turned and knocked over the
lampstand, and bending to pick it up he struck his head on the dresser…his
knees gave way in a cloud of face powder and falling into a backward roll, he
tumbled in reverse out of the window…
The crowd roared with laughter.

“Never look a gift horse in the mouth, Happs.” Said Joe as he winked out of
existence Disney style (cymbal crash)

WHEN, WHEN:

What this long melancholy race amounted to was an exposition of clown

technique, in inhabiting the bottom left square of the Lewis Diagram they were
simply embodying the primary area of clown technique, the workaday business
of the Auguste: to fail on purpose. The virtuosic embodiment of this
requirement, for instance the prat-fall, was the ballet of the clown, how to go
wrong rightly, how to be precisely uncorrect…here were the circus
artists…dreaming on long ropes of a future win, riding every vicarious time,
imagining themselves in place of time, laughing as the time roared.
They knew it was a moment when was left wrong only the right.

“Only the lonely, know the way I feel tonight…”

Their research into the gravity of time was the continuous construction of a
clown car that fell apart as it was driven along…a self-defeating drive you might
say, not as a symptom but as a glorious chariot that was ever alight…

Happy tried to continue the act without him, but it was not the same: he steps
up to the microphone:

“So this fella is on safari in Africa when he comes across an elephant lying on the
ground, in distress.
He investigates and finds a thorn in its foot.
He removes it, and the elephant trots merrily away.
Twenty years on, the man is standing in the street in London watching a circus
procession pass by.
When the elephant in the procession gets level with him, it stops, looks straight
at him, reaches out with its trunk, lifts him bodily into the air, smashes him on
the ground and jumps on him, killing him stone dead.
 53

It was a different elephant.”

Silence…except for one man at the back who shouts, “you are the same loser.”

WIN, WIN:

He often dreamt of Joe.

“Let’s go, Happy”, said Joe taking the wheel once more…they drove at circular
time-speed…And once again the old duo flew around the ring…

Joe was holding a bottle, he handed it to happy…”be careful now…its

slippery…the liquid it contains is on the outside, and so the more you drink the
fuller it gets…”

Happy drank, it tasted bitter sweet “of course” thought Happy, how else would
something taste that both washed up against the shore in sugary waves as it
also sourly, hourly ran down the beach to meet the foam?

“Tastes like trouble to me, Joe.” He grinned wide and malicious. Happy was
aware that they were just drinking themselves back into the bottle: “So these
two cannibals were eating a clown, and one turns to the other and says, “Does
this taste funny to you?”*
All around them the crowd giggled, rippled and rotated.

Joe threw his head back in mock laughter flashing his thin white teeth. It was
more funny that he did not find it amusing, “Dead laughter, like a mouth full of
bullets” thought happy handing back the vessel to no one there.

“We shouldn’t drink anymore…” said Happy seriously

“Why?”

“Because it’s no smoking in here….”

“We have got to stop not meeting like this” said Joe, taking a swig from the long
dark bottle of impossible liquid and being hauled up to the top of the tent on a
long rope. “Bear me away…BYE, BYE…”

“HONK HONK!” said Happy as the car fell to pieces.

(Applause)

KNOTATION DREAM PART FIVE:

HERE THE RELATIONSHIP TO THE BODY IS NOT AVAILABLE:

 54

This dream was just an endless plain and a disembodied voice that tried to
speak about the body. Happy who did not seem to be anywhere had no
position then from which to take it seriously.

So what can be seen above here in Fig.7 is how the arrows are generated
and how they can mean different movements as they occur in different
planes of motion that correspond to the 3 different axes of 3 dimensional
space.
Thus the arrows represent movement to and fro with an X axis as Left and
Right, in a Y axis as Up and Down and in the Z axis as In and Out.
Thus any ‘body-letter’ or ‘alpha-point’ can be said to be moving in all
three axes, or two or only one.
For instance a point in the centre of your chest can be said to be moving
Up and In, by arrows > in Y and < in Z, if there is no movement to the Left
or Right then this is represented by the Null arrow v in X.
So to write F v>< shows this movement. (For the purposes of typing we
can say that a twist can be symbolised by @.)

In the dream Happy was on the curve of a graph; he was just a diagram of
himself, with all of the points and lines and trajectories, variables and data
you would need to reconstruct Happy in any moment. Should you so wish.
Here he is digitised as a young boy; wistfully trick shooting with his
cousin’s rifle at a copperhead snake.
 55

This set of coded diagrams represents all of the factors that lead him to
join the Rodeo circus in the first place, showing the itinerant cow pokes a
thing or two about nomadism.
And now we zoom in on his face, wet with tears; broken hearted with
longing for inaccessible time or now blankly queuing for a green card at the
faceless window. Pull back reveal: he’s drawing a concealed .38 on a
crooked Priest.
This is the circular geometry of his wheeling in the ring, uttering spells to
shatter the mirror of financial hate; seven years bad luck in French Francs.
Here is Happy the clown, the impresario, the trickster, the thief, the
killer, all rendered out of the curve as it fluctuates through time. No more
related to the one, than a zero to its forgotten lineage of mutually
destructive parents.

Inside the ridiculous notion that the totality of Happy Down-River could be
systemised into a predictable set of algorithms, a Down-River-Base if you
will, was the equally ludicrous concept of a notation that existed between
the complexities of language and the circus body.
This knotation was Happy’s prayer in the night, his ‘Circumfession’, that
he could utter as an escape from every move that was predicted in the
Happy-Down-River-Base.
Happy felt it was alright to borrow from Derrida as long as you didn’t
name your sources.

The diagram insisted that any piece of text could be turned into movement
and back again.
“VOICE-VERSA” he called it, this was the central core of the book he was
dreaming, its edges slippery, its central concepts elusive, it formed a
complex and barely workable solution for the notation of circus. It was
arranged around a reciprocal impasse between words and alphabets, it was
a knot that could be tied or undone by the translation of text into circus
movement and back again. It needed bodies that were always missing from
the text.

Here it was:

It would be impossible to utilise all of the information trapped inside a

phrase or sentence. There were simply too many letters, too many variables
to deal with, so this method attempted a simplification; to just extract
some letters from four identifiable components:

The SUBJECT, the VERB, the OBJECT and any extra components, adjectives,
adverbs, prepositions etc. that might occur in a sentence.
In any sentence these components of subject, verb and object may be
present.
This flexibility was not only to simplify the movements extracted from the
text, but to also give some leeway in the construction of phrases or
sentences that could be derived from movement; as ‘knotation’ for that
movement.
 56

The diagram unfolded itself as a series of planes with instructions

inscribed on them…a Planar White Face Clown that reached to the serious
and indefatigable horizon.

GENERAL MOVEMENT:
The disembodied voice continued: “ Let us begin.” The voice, which was
the plain, was concerned with how to derive Happy out into difference. This
had to be done delicately, it was as incremental as eons, first there has to
be a general way for Happy to be in ‘space’ over ‘time’.

So before there was there a way to describe the detailed movements of

individual body parts there was a need to describe a more overall action for
the body as a whole.

GENERAL TERMS:

“We will derive Happy out into the Circus.”

“Just speak me into the ring, and I will circle there…” said what was not yet
Happy Down-River.

The disembodied voice continued:

“We can agree that in order to talk generally we need some basic terms
and it is suggested here that circus movement be described with as few
components as possible.
Let us say that the four terms we have, four options that can be organised
singly or in pairs to give us some low-resolution terms for movement will
suffice.”

“We are all low res here…” said Un-Happy Not-Down Non-River. Happy was
finding it easy to experience the difficulty of not ‘being’ yet here.

“Here I am delineating between actions that are in Global space as

opposed to those in Local space, and this is a definite move to look for ways
that this more Global movement in relation to ‘world-space’ might be
described using the same terms as those used for Local or ‘body-space’.

RISE AND FALL:

We can agree that seen in general view Rising and Falling are expressions
of the will of gravity and the will to act within it as well as forming a higher
resolution description of the bipolar movement of specific body parts in the
X, Y or Z axes.
Rising and Falling are definite unavoidable occurrences in the practice of
circus technique.

TWIST:
Likewise we can say that a Twist represents a necessary 0 to 359 degree
change of direction or full 360 degree rotation as a general movement of
 57

the body in relation to ‘world space’ as well as being a higher resolution

description of a disorientation of alignment of the body in relation to itself,
in its own ‘body-space’, that requires the twist of an individual body part or
parts in the X, Y or Z planes.
That is, the whole body can twist or for instance the torso can twist in
relation to the legs.

NULL:
The idea of a Null is used generally here to represent both a stillness that
is ‘held’ in the body with tension, as well as a Null in the sense of having no
body tension at all or allowing it to release, and this may be designated by
its combining with another qualifying arrow.
For instance a Falling Null is perhaps falling through space holding your
shape, whereas a Nullifying Fall is more like a fall that results in a collapse
to a state of no tension.
In this sense the proposed pairs take on a kind of adjective/noun relation,
in which a qualifier precedes the object, or an adverbial relation to the
verb, where the adverb qualifies how the verb is ‘done’.

TWO BY TWO:
Using four terms in permutated pairs may seem like a very stripped down
methodology for describing movement but the identified parameters for
circus physicality are already quite low-resolution; for instance the words
tempo or musicality or balance or force already open up thousands of
connotations and activities; in this sense this knotation is no more or less
clumsy than these existing forms of shorthand. They are methods of
exploring and as such are deliberately vague, this creates room and gives
agency in a non prescriptive methodology of enquiry.
The text becomes an invitation to explore the physicalities that we can
find within it on a global and local level. The text is a question for the body
anyway.
In this way it is hoped that we can derive Happy out of his curve of
becoming into the circus so that some kind of trick might end up being
performed; as this warm up act is growing as stale as last season’s
popcorn.”

The planes shifted; the graph that Happy was on unfolded into a larger
space, a more three dimensional area in which only three movements and
one stillness were possible.
Happy could Rise or Fall; he could Twist or be still, as in a Null movement,
and these four movements could be combined in pairs to describe different
basic parameters of circus physicality.
It was a shorthand but one that could serve as a low-resolution description
of various recognisable circus actions such as a flip, twist, moment of
suspension or leap.
With four options in two places, that is four to the power of two. This
gives us sixteen different low-resolution permutations:

“These are ways that you can ‘be’, Happy:

 58

RR, a ‘Rising Rise’, this is a leap with full energy, whereas a RF, a ‘Rising
Fall’ could be a swing or a leap executed for the benefits of its downward
momentum rather than its upward thrust.
Likewise a FR, a ‘Falling Rise’ could be thought of as allowing the body to
compress down into a coiled spring, which benefits from the secondary
release of this stored energy that then becomes leap.
This could also describe the action of leaving the raise board in flying
trapeze to Fall, following the arc of the swing, only to pass through the
‘dead point’ and Rise ‘up the hill’ on the other side.
To ‘knotate’ these kinds of movements it is necessary to have two letters
from the word that are being pulled in two opposing directions, which
necessitates letters from different ends of the alphabet finding themselves
suspended in the middle of that alphabetical field, thus setting up a
bipolar pull to give us a Rising Fall or a Falling Rise.
Please note that we are focussing on consonants here.

R o P e
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
> <

F a i L
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
< >

Other kinds of movements can be described in shorthand also:

A Falling Twist, this could be rolling down a slope as equally as it could be a
rotation executed on the downward arc of a jump.
A Null Twist could describe a body executing a somersault at the apex or
‘weightless’ moment of a jump, because that still moment of suspension is
the perfect place to perform it.

A Twisted Null could be the calm before the storm, a pose that is screwed
up tight and in stillness waits for the action that will unfurl it.

A Null Null is perfect stillness, or total release.

A Falling Fall is a complete release of all musculature; the ever popular

‘floppy’ physicality that acts as a counter to more virtuosic or masterfully
athletic forms.

Let’s diagram. The plain folded into tiny room, damp on the walls, bars on
the windows. Happy was deriving out to the inside…Happy was feverishly
dreaming of being inside a cell and he was drawing all around him with a
broken key.
 59

Low-res moves in a high-rise prison cell…Happy knew he needed fighting

stances.

As stated these are general terms and their open-ended nature is designed
to allow the text to ask questions of the body as to how the text might be
pronounced by all 832 muscles wrapped around a skeletal frame evolved
within the field through which it tries to elicit agency.

I am not being serious here; I am just a comedian who deliberately gets no

laughs whatsoever.

SPECIFIC MOVEMENT:
“So, that covers the General movement of the body in space as a word
under alphabetical gravity but how is it possible to delineate a more precise
movement of say a single body-part in three dimensional space?” Asked
Happy, gesticulating melodramatically.

It was intimated to him in this geometry that from each of the subject, verb
and object one could extract three consonants.

So from the sentence:

“The Clown reads the Instructions”

We can read the first three consonants from each of the designated words
and track how they ‘behave’ under the influence of Gralphity, the field of
alphabetical gravity.
 60

The letters we need are CLW, RDS and NST; these being the first three
consonants in each of the Subject, Verb and Object words respectively.
The words themselves are entered arbitrarily into the alphabetical field
and each of the three consonants in each of the three words produces an
arrow that indicates its ‘behaviour’ within the ‘alphabetical’ field; this
indicates one of the four states: RISE or FALL within the Alphabet, a TWIST
that results from following the same edge to the alphabet on the opposing
side, or a NULL that results from the letter landing in the correct
alphabetical position.
A diagram began drawing itself into the flat plane upon which Happy was
dreaming.
This endless flat plane was also the wall of a prison cell that, in Happy’s
incarcerated mind, had extended out to be an infinite free space…the
diagram was scratched into the moulding plaster next to notches that
marked off the enclosed days.

THE CLOWN READS THE INSTRUCTIONS.

Fig.8. In the tiny cell he worked on the knotation; scratching into the
endless walls and drawing onto any scrap of paper he could lay his hands
on…His scribblings were lit only by the flicker of the faulty fluorescent tube
caged overhead. Lights out at nine, beans for breakfast.

In the above example the arrows for all nine consonants (three from each of
the Subject, Verb and Object words) are used to give X, Y and Z coordinates
to the first three letters of the Subject word ONLY.
In this way each phrase such as this will help us to focus in on only three
body parts that are delineated by the three consonants in ONLY that Subject
word.
 61

This enables a simple relationship to only three body parts per phrase,
whilst still retaining the possibility for the spelling of the Verb word and
Object word in the phrase to affect the coordinates for movement of those
three isolated body parts.
Think of the Subject word holding the three body parts, think of the verb
and object telling those parts how they are orientated in three-dimensional
space.
From Fig.9 below we can see that C, L and W relate to the throat, the left
side of the waist and the bridge of the right foot.
The arrows taken from the letters CLW in the subject word of our phrase,
the letters RDS in the verb word of our phrase and the letters NST in the
object word of our phrase are combined in a stack here to give us three
directions in three distinct planes of movement that can be applied to the
three letters CLW of the subject word only to give the X, Y and Z planes.
Thus with nine arrows set in a three by three grid, the body-parts C, L and
W each end up with one instruction for each of the three axes of X, Y and Z.
(See Fig.9)
 62

Fig.9.

SPECIFIC BODY-PARTS:
The above diagram shows us that Happy’s throat is moving to the left and
forward whilst remaining steady in height, as the left side of his waist is
moving to the right as it twists (either left or right) and goes forward.
Meanwhile his right foot twists at the ankle, pressing the toes down to push
into the floor, sliding forward as it does so.
“Try it…”

Happy executed the movement in his cell, which put him in a steady
fighting stance: body twisted to present his left shoulder as protection, his
weight forward on his right foot, which was braced against the floor.
“I am starting to become intimate with a diagram, who is also my
choreographer…which puts me in a very awkward position.” Joked Happy
two dimensionally.

The diagram, which was unable to successfully schematise the geometry

of laughter, remained a mute, flat plain.

However there are two further things that we need to address: how is
general movement and contact with the circus object or piece of circus
equipment to be interpreted from the text? How might it be possible to
fashion a key out of these elements?
What circus was possible in such a small infinite space? Was the
imprisoned mind the key to escaping the spatial limits or merely the false
picture of endless space that was caused by incarceration?
Happy remembered being asked if he ever dreamt of being back in prison
now he was out.
“Yes, “ he had replied, “…but it’s not as bad as dreaming you are out and
waking up on the inside.”
Happy had done time in a Möbius prison before, every time he was
paroled he ended up right back in the slammer.

THE TEXT IS A PHYSICAL QUESTION ALREADY:

BRINGING IN THE PLAYING CARDS…there are 52 times as many muscles in

the body as in the tongue.

So looking at the diagram Happy realised that each piece of text already
represented a physical question for the body, so that to ask the text to
affect the entirety of the bodily frame was just an extension of what was
already the case.
What if the project of ‘speaking circus’ leads to language being able to
pronounce the body?
Is that a win or a loss, or are we past all that binary nonsense by now and
then?
 63

THE TEXT WAS ALREADY ASKING THE BODY TO DO SOMETHING:

Each piece of text already demanded that the body respond to the
choreographical instruction that was necessary to make the required sound
that the text as a whole, the words within it and the letters that comprised
those words would make.
You have to perform the text bodily anyway, so here were the real
material conditions of that relationship exposed. The dream book that he
was always chasing explained that language is not abstract; it is in your
belly.

The body was being asked a question by the text; can you make these
sounds that are here represented by these symbols? Can you either sound
them out or know what they sound like if you did sound them out; the text
requires you to engage with what the lungs, the vocal cords, the shaping of
the throat and mouth and the tongue and the lips can do.

NOT 16 BUT 832:

The text is already a question for the body, this knotation merely expanded
the sixteen muscles of the tongue to become the eight hundred and thirty
two muscles of the body; this is just a response to the question of the text
amplified by fifty two; there are 52 times as many muscles in the body as in
the tongue.
This is the equivalent of a deck of cards for every muscle in the tongue all
being played at once to say the symbols to which the tongue responds.
This KNOTATION is the body as a tongue that deals out hands from sixteen
decks of cards.

The clown and Lacan and circus is already doing what Lacan advises, but
physically, but also always looking for a way out of the way that structure
descends into the circus ring.

WE ARE SO TIRED OF SAYING THAT STRUCTURE IS HERE IN THIS RING: WE

WANT A MAGICKAL TEXT NOW.

In this knotation, the word is a problem for the body in the same way the
word is a problem for the tongue. In this knotation we use four directions in
two places, which gives us sixteen questions for the body to perform as a
tongue, trying to pronounce the text with everything it has got within the
field of linguistic impasse.
Lacan is present here as the field of gravity within which the body tries to
be like a tongue, pronouncing itself around the ring with verbal acrobatics
and licking at the flaming hoop of language.

Gravity as the impossibility of meta-language is performed against here as

it is performed through. There is no show outside the show it seems, but
always it is insisting that we expose the fiction of the show that could
haunt, rather than hide it in the lights.
 64

The body has to become like the sixteen muscles of the tongue and contort
itself to ‘say’ the words. The words are a trick in the gravity of this
linguistic impasse anyway, so we do not need your therapy, we are already
deeply committed to what it means to be fixated upon an image that can
only be registered as nothing in the medium of its creation.
The words here are acknowledged as a trick that the tongue has to bend
out of shape to perform, the body here is acknowledged as a tongue anyway
trying to say ‘freedom’ in the medium of its impossibility.

LET THE WORDS FALL WHERE THEY MAY:

Words are stones we keep in our pockets, and every picking up opens
another hideaway to the drop.

(WRD STN PCK)

Happy realised that every bit of clowning he ever did or ever loved was
predicated on this impasse, on the black humour of a self-defeating impasse
in which Desire ‘about’ leads to Lack ‘of’.
So in the word that is a meta-statement ‘about’ the quality of difference,
that is conflated as being compatible with the register of infra-statements
‘of’ difference and so destroyed within it, rendered absent, lacking, in the
word is a stone dropped by a clown, picked up, only to drop another one:
this is only Charlie Chaplin sliding down a chain.
In the same way that freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to’ are separated but
reciprocally conflated, and statements about difference and statements of
difference are conflated, it is important to expose the ridiculous and absurd
limits of the system, rather than conceal them thus making a tautological
ground within which it is possible to exploit your way out of an
inevitabilised lack. That’s not gonna win fiends and influence people…DUH!

(WN FRN NFL PPL)

Difference was the terms under which Lacan was inevitable, difference
was the terms under which gravity comes true…if there was a trick, then
this knotation only hints at a system still trapped within the system, there is
no show outside the show.
It is in this show that both tricks one and two can occur…and this knotation
is couched in these terms, but always asking, is there something immanent
to the gravity in which circus can still be performed as a trick on the terms
of the trick itself?

In this way then each sentence, phrase, word and letter is a puzzle for the
body to solve, and it is acknowledged in the dream book that the book is
writing itself within the terms that make it impossible to read; the book
here only hints at one way that the body could become a tongue to
interpret these symbols, and does so acknowledging that it moves exactly
through the affirmation of the impossibility of a meta-position outside of
gravity in order to do so.
 65

“It is a dream book, a fiction of the possibility for a book…” thought Happy
in his 2D cell.
The prison guard stuck his head through the porthole of his room, “Hey
Mister, why the long face, don’t be depressed, if you ever get down about
the impossibility of meta-language, go and see Lacan he’ll cheer you up..”

“But I am Lacan…” said Happy, backwards who well-worn the knew joke.

He decided that it was utterly pointless to acknowledge the utter

pointlessness of it, obviously…So he continued.
 1

CHAPTER TEN: VALUE TIME:

The ideas, definitions and approaches in this chapter have been heavily shaped by
engagement with the practice of Past Life Regression, detailed in the previous
chapter.
One aspect of this was an engagement with a practice of faith as a parody of post-
factism, within which anyone can appear as anyone else, and of this transformation,
which can only be ratified only within terms of that faith.
There is presented also an engagement with ghosts of the past that might haunt
the present with possible futures as well as being aware that it is just such ghosts
that flicker as the fat promises of capital. The main influence here from engagement
with this ‘travelling without moving’ is the ability in PLR to scrub back and forth
through the temporal dimension as if it were merely ticker tape that marks trades
both of tomorrow as well as yesterday.
The potential in this practice is that the future also becomes available. Future past
is prevalent here as the unfulfilled promise cancelled by current fields of ‘force’; and
in handling time as a surface upon which the subject is mobile in a now bidirectional
way, the autonomous values that comprise this temporal surface seem to be
compromised.
The influence of a circus engagement with PLR has affected the concepts here as
well as the direction of the fictional content so that what is presented is a diagram
of Trick Three; one that utilises time to undo horizontal autonomy.
This chapter is merely a speculative proposal on how to think of a trick performed
upon the terms of the trick itself and proposes a model for thinking about the
outcome of such a trick in a similar speculative manner.

Trick One: the trick to expose tautology and so expose the limits of a field of value.
Such as Happy performs in his Marxist Critique of Gravity, designed to expose
Circusism as compromised system based on an exploitative self-interested subject.

Trick Two: the trick to conceal the tautological ground of the system and so conceal
its limitations, thus allowing tricks within it, performed for self-interest to in fact
only falsely expand that limited system. In this sense Trick Two can be thought of as
an over-arching counter trick, such as Circusism.

Trick Three: the trick performed on the terms that make the capture of Trick One
within the over-arching tautological ground of Trick Two possible. This will be
discussed here.
As the indefinable ability of sharing with you how to shed the skin that enables
sharing to occur, but so that there is no barrier only sharing.
 2

The description of this is perhaps trying to undo the logic of petit object a so that
we are left with the non-object of value as the positive condition of what comes next
without the barrier.

This chapter deals with Trick Three, the trick performed on the terms of Tricks One
and Two.
Within the fiction Happy Down-River has expounded his Marxist Critique of
Gravity but in the middle of his exposition Mary Minkowski arrives to challenge him.
She explains that while his critique is valid, he is still stuck within the terms of
difference inherent in Trick One, and which means that the only possible way to
avoid capture as Trick Two is to concede that the proposed meta-position is only a
work of fiction.
Mary explains that while he is correct to expose the self-interested conflation of
weightlessness in the trick with genuine freedom; the possibility to get past this
capture remains in a fictional position precisely because this capture is both the
positive condition of and barrier to getting past it.
She further explains that he is right to critique but proposes that the barrier to
escape from split registers of value is to see past three dimensions and past
sequential time as ontologically primary, and to embrace the unification of value
and time as one continuous surface of Value-Time.
Within this proposal she advocates seeing Marx in the same way that Einstein
approached Newton; and in the same way that Einstein showed that gravity is an
illusion caused by the inability to perceive the unseen local geometry of space-time,
she claims that similarly the autonomous registers of mass-value, linguistic-value
and exchange-value are also illusory ‘forces’ caused by the inability to see the
surface of Value-Time.
She claims that this perspective has been revealed to her by her manipulation of
the undead voices within her Past Life Regression research. She extorts Happy to
join her in her experiments that can use this practice to loop time. She asks him to
help her activate the weightlessness that he discusses but not only as an
acknowledged fiction, but as a mobility free from the ‘pull’ of autonomous registers
of differential value, that simply cannot exist as forces upon the continuous unified
fabric of Value-Time. Her argument is that it is only our conception of sequential
time that makes the ‘object’ of the science of value into a ‘real’ object. Only in
synchronic pulses of time are these registers able to form as un-de-limitable
autonomies, and thus to see them as undifferentiated value-events means that they
cannot form into these irrefutable and subject-less registers. Horizontal and discreet
value that refutes the subject becomes impossible to form on this immanent surface
of Value-Time, because it is pre-differential. This means that there is such a thing as
a meta-position, as there is no longer the possibility for an autonomous register to
form in which such meta-position is treated as an infra-position, with the ensuing
tautology between truth and unprovability.
Because there is no possibility for the unprovability of truth to relegate
weightlessness to either an impossibility within gravity or as a fiction for the subject,
this means that meta-position is possible but not because it is a fiction that is falsely
conflated with fact, but because it is no longer possible for the autonomous register
 3

that problematizes meta-position to form. Mary’s argument is that if this immanent

view of value over time removes the impediment to meta-positionality, then
weightlessness is indeed possible, but as a reality not as just an acknowledged
fiction. There are no more indifferent horizontalities of difference able to form in
this perspective, which means the markets, the languages and the gravities all re no
longer experienced by the subject as forces.
The problem with this for Happy is that this also means that there can be no
subject.

This idea is then pure fiction, and this chapter discusses how this fictional idea of
value-time is similar to the ‘fictions’ of Einstein’s conception of Space-Time and how
such science-fictions might relate to the conception of trick three. What is discussed
here are the implications of this fictional proposal for a Third Trick upon the terms
by which Tricks One and Two are in such close proximity.
The chapter examines the complexity of such a fictional proposal for a trick; in
which it is fictionalised that the necessity to acknowledge meta-positionality as only
a fiction is overcome. It examines the relationship of this idea to Trick One, in that,
like Einstein it exposes gravity as an illusion, but also how it is like Trick Two in that
it is proximal to the ideas of post-factism, which also propose that there is no need
to think of meta-positionality as a fiction and that it can be thought of within this
conflation of fiction with fact as genuine agency.

This difference is important, as within Trick Three’s proximity to Trick One, the
subject’s own hermetic sanctity is similarly disregarded, whereas in Trick Three’s
proximity to the post factism of Trick Two, the subject is still falsely presented as
‘whole’ and hermetically sealed against extimate causality even though it is
validated through its negation.
What this means is that the difference between Trick Three and Post-Factism is
still organised around the subject’s willingness to acknowledge their own
dissolution.

The further complexity here is that this fiction has to be the same necessarily
acknowledged fiction as Trick One whilst encircling its difference to this necessity. It
is in fact the ultimate play –bite: in that it has to encircle difference in similarity; it
encircles its difference to having to be acknowledged as only fiction in the similarity
to that acknowledgement.
In the same way that, bar the mathematical models, the proposition of a unified
fabric of space-time is simply imperceptible to us here in three dimensional space
and sequential time.
This is the problem that Mary proposes for Happy’s Marxist Critique of Gravity; that
in order to then proceed to the evolution (or revolution) past difference that she
claims Happy is calling for in evoking the ghost of Marx in gravity as a field of value,
it is necessary to see value as a unified fabric of value time, as merely a local
geometry upon which the subject is independently mobile.
 4

Mary then proposes a shift in perception, she advocates removing the human suit,
through which autonomous value is hard-wired. As a split register that forbids
meta-position built into this human suit Mary is calling for Happy to step beyond
Marx, who is also locked inside this differential perspective and see that the only
way to be weightless in semio-gavitational-capital is to activate Trick Three, the
entry into Value-Time.
The problem for Happy still remains; there is no subject able to be present in such
a space.

It is for this Proposal of a trick that actual defeats gravity that Mary appears here,
and the ensuing discussion is the complexity if this idea as a goal of the circus artist
within gravity. To defeat gravity without tautology, without recourse to fiction and
without the necessity for ghosts.

All of this is pure fiction, but it is here for a reason; as it is the only form through
which it is possible to discuss this idea of actual agency outside of the gravitational
forces that have so far been discussed in this text of mas, linguistic and exchange
value…It has been clearly established that Trick One is the trick that exposes limits
and that this trick also has to acknowledge its fiction; therefore fiction is the only
recourse here, it is the only medium through which it might be possible to discuss
the possibility of a trick that can be performed on the differential terms of the trick
itself. This is why fiction features in this text and why Mary has been propsed as a
counter trick performed upon Happy’s own Marxist Trick to expose the exploits
within the production of freedom within circusism. Fiction is the only real I have left,
and when wrong is the only right left you have to tie a knot that destroys you.
In this way the theory here has to proceed through the medium of fiction that both
does and does not acknowledge itself.

This chapter will discuss this idea of a trick that could bring actual weightlessness as
part of a discussion about the freedom that circus seems to claim is its rationale. It
will be discussed through the diagram that we have already seen and through
reference to the complexities of fictionalising a space in which meta-position is no
longer fictional.

It will refer to the diagram, to Gödel’s formulations and to other previous ideas of
the designations between tricks.

It is time…

VALUE-TIME IS TO LACAN WHAT SPACE-TIME IS TO NEWTON.

 5

It has been established that there are three tricks and each has its own relation to
Circusism, which is a satire of what I feel circus is becoming. It has already been
discussed that the trick has to acknowledge that the meta-position it proposes is
impossible and therefore in fact fictional.

ON FINE LINE:

So Trick One points to Trick Three This means that trick three is not only the
attempt to leap clear of the defining terms of that system, but furthermore Trick
One implies that it is necessary to perform Trick Three on the terms that allow Trick
One to so easily become Trick Two, which is the trick to conceal the limits of that
formal system.
It has been established that there is a fine line between these first two kinds of
tricks; the trick to expose limits easily can be reworked to become the trick to
conceal those same limits, and this is why Trick Three is important as it takes a
longer view; performing itself on the very terms that delineate the impasse in the
system, within which such capture is possible.

THE IMPASSE OF TRICK ONE:

This impasse is due to the tautology that ensues from the necessity to treat meta-
statements as infra-statements within the field, and that any excess or surplus that
may ensue from the reciprocal looping therein has to be regarded as affective;
something not registerable within the terms through which it was created; and
therefore as a kind of fictional occurrence within that system.
This bind, or bar or impasse in which any weightless moment has to be thought of
as not a genuine escape but a fictional ‘telling’ of that escape is the condition of
Trick One. It has successfully implied that the system has limits but is not able to
activate any form of ‘actual’ escape from that system. Its main use is to show
potentiality that is currently inoperable, that of fictionalising a position that is not
within the bounds of the system.

CAPTURE AS TRICK TWO:

The corollary of this Trick One, is Trick Two in which this fictional weightlessness,
the fictional meta-position, is conflated with an ‘actual’ escape. As in a post-Fact
moment, or as in a Propositional Calculus , which cannot determine the difference
between fictional propositions and factual ones, this fictional weightlessness is
equated with an actual freedom from gravity. This has the effect not of exposing the
systems limited ability to be a totality, but recasts the system as something that can
meritocratically ‘house’ actions by the subject that are seemingly external to it, thus
appearing to be an ever-expanding enclosure that can accommodate that which is
external to it. The totality of this enclosure is then an unorientable surface, similar to
a Klein Bottle. Trick Two implies that it occurs within an Unclosure, a tautological
ground that accommodates that which is external to it.
 6

INCOMPATABILITY OF REGISTERS:

In implying that excessive implications in one register can be entered into an

incompatible register, which cannot acknowledge such excessive intersubjective
conveyances as weightlessness, Trick Two conceals this incompatability between
the registers involved. It is to be noted here that the definition of gravity in this
theoretical ‘trick’ mechanism is always the impossibility of meta-position; and this is
caused by the impossibility of delimiting the autonomous and horizontally
differential nature of the non-subjectively organised register. Within Gravity this
incompatibility is between weight and mass-value, in Language as meaning and
linguistic-value, and in Capital as use and exchange-value.

So Trick One and Trick Two are similar, it is a matter of exposure or concealment of
the incompatibility of registers that makes the difference. But also implied here is
that Trick Three is also dangerously close to Trick Two, in which fiction is given the
status of fact. This is fine in the sense of performance; I can acknowledge a
performativity is activated and the subject can be who they desire to be within this
acknowledgement of performativity. But some areas within the current field of value
are indifferent to the subject of performance, even as they rely on that
performativity…it is encouraged and denied not for the benefit of the subject, who
operates under the edict to perform tricks that expand the field of value that
negates them.

WHAT OF TRICK THREE?

But what of a circus trick that seeks to get ‘underneath’ these terms? Please note
that I am not designating this Trick Three as something that ‘leaps clear’ of the
terms as this implies that there is a further meta-position that is sought here; it is
metapositionality that is the problem as anything that seeks to be a meta-position
has to be constructed from the infra components within that system, thus implying
that the mode of escape contains an extimate cause. This is the tautology and
gravity of Lacan that is exposed in Trick One.
Trick Three seeks to get beneath the terms of autonomous difference that
necessitate either, one: the acknowledgement that a weightless meta-position has
to be fictional within the system, or that, two: this fiction is conflated as a fact. This
secondary conflation then necessarily falsely implies that the system is an endless
‘Unclosure’, a tautological ground that can contain the ‘freedom’ that is falsely
implied to have occurred.

This is the trick on the trick to conceal that is implied to be necessary by the fact
that the only recourse to meta-position in the ‘trick to expose’ is to acknowledge
that such a position is not yet possible, that it is fiction.
Trick Three attempts to deal with this and asks what if we want to achieve a
‘genuine’ meta-position but shedding the ‘meta’ implication, what if we want to not
suggest through gravity that there is a space external to it, but what if we desire the
end of gravity altogether, to get beneath its existence as a ‘force’? What tricks then?
 7

TAKING THE DESIRE FOR FREEDOM IN CIRCUSISM AT FACE VALUE?

These are obviously blunt distinctions, but let us play a game, since it is all the rage
to be ludic, let us propose that we take the implication of a certain kind of Circusism
at face value.
Circusism claims that it is the activation of a free, weightless individuality. The free
subject activates weightlessness and vice versa in a self-congratulatory loop.
Let us assume that if circus thinks of itself as genuine freedom-production, then
Trick Three must be its goal here. Notwithstanding its tendency to conceal the terms
that make its weightless truths unprovable; surely Circusism is looking to be able to
delimit finally the terms of autonomous difference that either necessitate Trick
One, an acknowledgement of fictional potentiality of freedom, or Trick Two the
actual false implication that freedom is here now that actually only serves to
tautologically expand the enclosure of that ‘freedom’; purported agency that is then
just as unreal as in Trick One, only not acknowledged as such.
If both of these forms of trick yield no actual freedom, and yet freedom is the goal,
then circus must desire this final delimitation of the autonomous register that
governs the impossibility of metaposition. Another kind of ‘position’ must be found
that is immanent to the terms of gravity that might be immune to capture perhaps.
Circus must want an end to gravity, but the problem is of course that in ending
gravity, the circus subject whose practice is defined by it will also cease to exist.
Nevertheless we must not value our weightlessness in terms of gravity.
Gravity ends, all over the world circuses are going out of business?

So far the concept of the trick has been described as something that in the first
instance is a mechanism that can be set up to expose a system previously thought of
as a totality as a limited area. This then begs the question that if it is possible only to
point to an area outside of this totality, then it follows that there will be no discourse
to describe that area.
This has been discussed as affect, as fiction and as the outcome of Gödel’s
tautology as ‘true but unprovable’, and forms this arrow that points outside. But if
there is no recourse but to think of this arrow as a trajectory delineated only in
fiction, with no real viable, visible or realisable target, then what are the terms that
make this so? What is inherent in systems of value that renders their externality as
only depict-able through fiction?
If the first two tricks are delineated as acknowledging a fictional exterior (as a form
of hope) or concealing it (as a form of control) then is there a further trick that could
be performed in value itself that could effectively make visible this exterior space.
What can make a meta-position not necessarily fictional?

As stated this I will propose as Value-Time. It is an immanent continuous surface

that is prior to difference and so perhaps is congruent with the models of a plane of
immanence found in Deleuze an Gauttari and also with models of space-time found
 8

in the general theory of relativity, and so Value-Time could be said to be another

cross-register analogy, the application of general relativity to the science of value.
It is the performance of Trick Three, which technically similar to the performance
of Trick One on Tricks One and Two in all three fields of Gravity, Language and
Time.
This is when the trick as a tool becomes possible to visualise as a tool for
reconfiguring value in any field, even in value itself. It exposes that without
sequential time the Science of Vale has no object around which to organise itself.

In this chapter I will look at the space that is fictionalised in TRICK ONE. A space that
is beyond or after or before or immanent to gravity. It will refer to the impasses
already discussed that I feel are present as the trick is applied to the fields of
language and capital.
These fields then reciprocally reflect on my conception of gravity, engaging me in
a perception of all three fields as fields of value, with split registers that while
incompatible can still be exposed as conflated to produce an impression of
something external to internal systemic limits, or be concealed as conflated to imply
contrarily that the system is limitless. Gravity in these fields can be thought of here
as the presence of an insurmountable autonomy, an empty set or ‘set-ness’ that
must accompany the separation of value as an object of synchronic time. That is the
‘object’ of value is dependant on a fixed temporal instance of time for it to appear
and to maintain its autonomy from the subject.
So in regard to this ‘reciprocality’, the terms that apply to render gravity as merely
an illusion caused by local four-dimensional local geometry rather than as a ‘force’
will be reciprocally reflected onto the science of value that informs my conception of
gravity as a ‘force’ maintained by a two incompatible registers of weight and mass-
value.

So first we apply Marx to Gravity in chapters 6 and 7, to show how his conception
of value can be applied to Gravity, then we apply Einstein’s gravitational theory to
the Science of Value in Marx, here in chapter 10.
Quid pro quo, gravity does to value what value does to gravity.

Once all three fields are seen as fields of value, these terms of value are looked at
here as a formal system upon which a trick might be performed. As such, in thinking
of the terms upon which Tricks one and Two rest, Trick three here attempts to look
at the trick that can be performed on the system of value that determines how tricks
are able to be free of or be captured in those impasses of value.
This is proposed as a trick that matches the extreme physicality of circus, that just
does not know when to stop.
Let it come down.

AM I SAYING THAT THERE IS NO TRUTH ANYWHERE?

In a sense this is both the position of deconstruction and the Lacanian position, in
that the end result of endless deferral is the same as barring…(Eggington,2007) but
there is possibility. It is still to retain the possibility of sharing fictions that describe a
 9

way out of this impasse; and of not fictionalising a concealment of there being no
way out, as is done in capital, but of exposing this to galvanise thought, and to
fictionalise further tricks performed on the terms of this impasse. Thus opening up
ideas of transformation and transposition and opening up the idea of a circus that
can apply itself to any field, even to the terms under which gravity is seen as
insurmountable, the human subject itself.

Which is where I arrive at this problem of needing to look beyond where the human
can look and still only able to activate this perspective in terms delineated by where
the human can currently look. So we are back to the same impasse of the trick. That
is fiction is here utilised to see a point where fiction is no longer the compulsory
state for this meta-perspective.
This idea flirts with an extrapolation of Trick One (within which acknowledging the
meta-position as fictional is vital and necessary) to Trick Three, (the proposal of a
trick on the terms by which this acknowledgement of meta-position becomes vital
and necessary), but still avoiding the concealment of Trick Two, in which the fine
line between ‘a fiction that proposes fiction can become fact’ and a ‘post-fact
deception’ is crossed, so that the tautological nature of the ground is hidden (read by
a conflicted subject as an internalised double bind.) In such a ground what is also
concealed is that the Cartesian subject is not possible.
If this sounds complicated it is because it is a deeper discussion of the knot
inherent in the trick as it operates to achieve a moment of weightlessness within the
field of gravity.

PRE BENT UN-DISTORTION:

In reference to Celine’s writing process, this chapter continues this theme by

showing that the subject is the origin of the value of gravity itself, through human
perception as a process of ‘writing’ that bends the already bent curve of value time
to come out with a ‘straight’ significatory process, but with the side effect of a
insurmountable gravity of the autonomous register that acts as a binding ‘force’ on
the subject reinforcing the Lacanian edict that there is ‘no such thing as a meta
language’ and therefore homologically no such thing as a meta position.
This idea blends Marxist ideas on value applied to gravity and the theory of general
relativity applied to the science of value, to propose in a Marxian fashion that the
material conditions of gravity do in fact have their origin in the subject who
perceptually labours through the tautological ground of three dimensions and
sequential time to render gravity, an autonomy of value, into a material ‘force’
which while they are responsible for it, they are similarly alienated or barred from it.
This proposal is that human perception is in fact a factory that produces the
conditions by which it is bound.
In this way Mary’s proposal for Happy’s Marxist Critique is that it does not go far
enough to address the real causes of the indifferent and alienating market of
gravity. The real Marxism is to be applied as a general theory of relativity to the
science of value; to reach Value-Time where autonomy of horizontal value breaks
down. This is Mary’s proposal for Trick Three.
 10

This conclusion is reached through thinking of Celine’s writing process as the

model for human perception, and acknowledging that it is a knot it is not possible to
imagine undoing.

To think of the three fields here as ‘fields of split value’ means that Lacan’s
statement has become a homological truth between the fields. No such thing as a
meta-position, meta-language or meta-value becomes the way gravity is
homologised between the three fields under discussion here in relation to the trick.

So in a way I am using Lacan’s impasse as a description of gravity within fields of

value. Tricks One and Two describe the different possibilities of performing tricks
within this impasse of differential terms. This undisclosed tautological ground
relates to the reciprocal interdependency that occurs between the incompatible
registers in which, meta-statement seems to precede infra-statement, which in turn
precedes the meta-statement.

If we return to the fiction here for a moment: This internal contradiction is here
treated in a similar fashion to the internal contradiction of capital, in that a Marxist
critique is proposed by Mary, that ‘trumps’ Happy’s own critique, rooted as it is in
the terms of difference that cannot ever escape the interdependency of differential
terms of value.
In this way Mary suggests that the difference upon which the impasse is created is
merely a system of capital that needs to be exceeded; and her proposal is that it can
be exceeded in the conception of Value-Time, wherein all words are simultaneously
meaningless and meaningful, all currencies and commodities simultaneously
priceless and worthless, all bodies of mass simultaneously weightless and super
dense.
The fiction attempts to imagine trick three as ability to exceed a perception rooted
in three dimensions and sequential time to be able to see the curve of Value Time,
and it asks the reader to similarly imagine this surface in which value and time are
unified.

HUMAN PERCEPTION AS CAUSE OF ‘FORCE’:

What then are the final terms of gravity, what is the cause of it? We have already
discussed the idea that it is the evolutionary hard-wiring of our inability to ‘see’ the
unified fabric of space-time that ’causes’ gravity to appear as a ‘force’, when in fact
it is only the effects of a local geometry that, like two fleas walking on a globe, we
cannot perceive. In this way we are then able to see ourselves as embedded not in
gravity, but in the system of perception that causes that gravity to appear as a
‘force’. In suggesting this, I am already suggesting the terms upon which the third
trick might be performed.

IT IS NECESSARY TO FICTIONALISE THE END OF THE TERMS THAT

NECESSITATE THIS FICTION.
 11

In a way Einstein ‘fictionalised’ the end of the terms of human perception by which
gravity appears as a real insurmountable ‘force’, showing that this force that seems
to pull bodies of mass together is in fact a result of the local geometry; a curving of a
unified fabric of space-time.
No one has experienced this fabric; it remains something imperceptible through
the human lens, but it proposes that the ‘force’ of gravity is a by-product of our
perceptual filter that ‘reduces’ that fabric to the separation into three dimensions
and sequential time. Hence the analogy with Celine who passes a pre-curved ‘truth’
through the distorting lens of writing to get back to a ‘truth’ that is both ‘like’ and
‘nothing like’ the original.
This implication that gravity is a ‘left over’ from our coping with the difficulty of
navigating the impossible surface of space-time. The idea that the ‘force’ of gravity
is a side effect of our inability to process space-time, in which all events, places and
moments are in one continuous surface including ourselves. This multiple but
singular existence, that is then necessarily pre-differential, presents the subject with
an experience of being fragmented and unified simultaneously across a weightless
tundra.
If there was a trick to achieve weightlessness, to show that there is an externality or
immanence to the ‘force’ of gravity, then this would be it.

FRAGMENTS CANNOT AGREE ON A WHOLE:

So it can be said that the subject sets up the linguistic frame that then allows for the
construction of a believable hermetic subject that disavows their extimate causality.
This proposal of Trick Three is the same proposition but performed on the process
that sets up this linguistic frame itself, one that acknowledges that difference is to
value-time what language is to the fragmented subject that Lacan proposes
assembles itself cohesively in language. What is imagined here is not something
missing that came before, but a multiplicity across a continuous surface that is not
disabled by lack.
The presence of the subject surrounded by differential binds within a perception
that they themselves set up, creates a position in which a kind of weightlessness is
available to be fictionalised, but is a kind of weightlessness that no current register
can realise or even perceive.
It is merely a mirror of the problem anyway: the subject uses language to become
whole but because language is based on difference, the subject has to bear extimate
cause of their subjectivity, which is fictional to the register through which it is
validated.
What is proposed here is that this translates to capital as the impossibility of
freedom within capitalism and here to gravity also, which is the impossibility of
weightlessness within gravity, as the impossibility of being whole in language is for
the subject.

Perhaps the term ‘meta’ is confusing. Within the terms of Gravity, Language and
Capital, in which difference is assumed to be ontologically prior, a position beyond a
 12

field of value is unreachable, so here in Trick Three another approach is taken; that
of immanence.

Within immanence a pre-differential surface is proposed, one that derives

differential value to be secondary and so offers a different construction of the trick
mechanism, but one that is still predicated on exposing the limits of the system, but
this time one that exposes the limits of the system of a trick mechanism that
exposes the limits of the system differentially.

TRICK THREE GETS YOUR COUCHES CLEAN:

In noting that difference is the cause of these impasses and extimacies; Trick Three
is proposed as the trick that exposes the tautology that difference causes in value, in
the same way that trick one is proposed as the trick that exposes the tautology in
language.
As Lacanian analysis proposes language-time: the disabling of language’s
autonomous power over the subject through the prolonged view of talking therapy,
that fictionalises the subject, that seeks to locate the synchronic autonomy of the
signifier, diachronically, in a new perspective.
So proposed here is value –time: the disabling of differential value as the source of
autonomous power over the subject through a prolonged continuous view of it
through an activation of an atemporal surface, something immanent to a diachronic
view, the fictionalisation of a new perspective.
This is Trick Three that goes beyond Trick One; of Marx or Lacan into the terms by
which they both acknowledge impasse and the only response to it as fictionality:
Marx as a ghost that haunts capital, Lacan as a ghost that haunts language.
Trick three gets immanent to the difference that creates the impasse in which the
subject has to imagine themselves as fictional in the face of an inevitable
insurmountable force of lack that permits no meta position or wholeness that might
equate with it as agency.

This is merely an attempt to fictionalise such a surface to further the practice as it

might extend from the limits of Trick One. Trick one implies Trick Three is
necessary.
The conception of value-time is just a way of concluding that if difference is a
tautological ground, then the same conclusion applies: the subject should not value
their weightlessness in terns of gravity. It is simply another way for the subject to
continue to fictionalise agency in the face of an acknowledged capture of tricks that
are organised around the production of freedom.
Trick three is a loophole in lack.

Lacan does not get to partake in this trick, Fuck you, buddy…
 13

"Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion
belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his
enormous size."

(Pais, A (1982) The Science and Life of Albert Einstein. OUP. Oxford p. 235)

LACAN, IN OR OUT.
Then again, any attempt to imagine immanence is fictional; it has to be. If we
agree that it is impossible to get past this current perception based on difference in
sequential time, even though the subject is aware of pre-differential concepts, it is
impossible to take up a meta-position, but we can still imagine one.
Within affect and minimal difference, a meta-position is possible to fictionalise.
But the presence of minimal difference means difference is still in effect.
Does this place us still within Lacan’s impasse or somewhere else?

…this is the problem…What is implied is that the impasse in deep in the perception
itself, and is one that is a by product of turning away from the fragmenting horrors
of space time, to render ‘reality’ out as something manageable.
The point is that any area underneath or immanent to this differentiation is
fictional, it is a work of fiction, all we have perhaps is the mathematics of quantum
mechanics; which again uses logic to draw a picture that logic cannot explain.
What is highlighted in a critique of Lacan might be applied to the mathematics of
space-time itself, which is, like Lacan, perhaps we draw the Cartesian subject to
procedurally unfold the logic associated with this hermetic view point to begin an
explanation of the impossibility of such a subject in space time and in relativity

So this too is a compromised fiction that attempts to draw a same fiction that is
different to itself…perhaps Lacan is too in some way.

Within the critique proposed by Lacloue Labarthe and Nancy (Nancy, JL. Lacoue
Labarthe, P (1992) The Tile of The Letter. SUNY. New York) Lacan is highlighted as
using of the same hermetic Cartesian subject to encircle a subject that is different to
that subject; perhaps this is again the play bite.
A play bite proposes that difference can encircle similarity and is here aligned with
the approach of the trick in which it is acknowledged that you have to utilise that
which is ‘unprovable’ in a system to be able to draw the ‘truth’ of that system; that a
trick and a fictionalising of that which draws systemic limits are inter-related, in
what I call Tricktion.
This idea will be covered in the conclusion as it represents a knot that undoes itself
perhaps but for now, it remains that Trick Three necessarily has to proceed through
the fiction that it seeks to exceed.

In terms of our Diagram, this may be the equivalent of noting that the DIAGRAM is
explained in words that are shown in the diagram to be incapable of holding their
integral shape within the alphabetical field as the words we use to ‘draw’ an
explanation of the diagram all contain an extimate and hermetically invalidating
causal element taken from the alphabet.
 14

This makes the problematic of Trick One similar to that of the third trick that is
proposed here; which is that this trick has to also be the same as something
impossible but encircle the difference to that impossibility in the same terms that
delineate the impasse.

SUBJECT OR NOT:

If we take this quote:

“Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make
ourselves unrecognizable.”

or

“Not to reach the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of
any importance whether one says I or not.”

(Deleuze and Gauttari (1980) A Thousand Plateaus. Athlone. London)

The problem here is to try to delineate between this pre-differential position that is
fictionalised by Trick Three and Post Factism, which similarly implies that meta-
positionality is indeed possible. We need ironically to draw a difference here
between these ideas.
There is a similar fine line here which could be categorized as the flip-side of Trick
Three, as a return of Trick Two; in which fiction is so easily conflated with fact,
appearance conflated with reality that the enclosure that facilitates this conflation
becomes no longer possible to perceive.

So that rephrasing this quote becomes:

‘Not to reach a point where one no longer acknowledges the fiction of ‘I’, but the point
where it is no longer of any importance whether one acknowledges ‘I’ as a fiction or
not.’

Perhaps it is not important if I rephrase it or not…The difference here is two things:

one, the immanent position differs in that it does not seek to get ‘beyond’
difference, but prior to it, and two, the treatment of the subject here is very
different. This is partly the difficulty obviously.

In immanence we encounter this unimportance of the hermetic nature of the

subject, whereas in the post fact meta position, such a position in which its
fictionality is conflated with fact is performed precisely to establish the hermetic
seal around a subject, who is then positioned unwittingly on a tautological ground
that maintains the persistence of this Cartesian ‘whole’.
This is the difference between the fictionalisation of an immanence in which any
position of weightlessness no longer has to acknowledge its fictionality, and post-
 15

factism, which proposes that fictional meta-positions are perfectly possible within
the field.
The first fiction fictionalizes the end of fiction as a requirement for weightlessness
in the unimportance of the subject; the second fiction fictionalizes the end of the
possibility to tell the difference between fiction and fact as the persistence of the
subject.

It is my feeling that this second kind of seeming eradication of difference only

serves, as it does in Trick Two, to mask the limitations of the enclosing field and
recast it as endless, whilst concealing the fact that this is occurring within a
differential system that actually cannot factually validate fiction at all. It is my
feeling that post-factism is the illusion of a pre-difference that only serves to expand
the range of difference.
I am marking this subtlety here to be clear that the play-bite I am suggesting here
upon the hide of gravity is aware of its proximity to the post-factism of Trick Two,
and to mark how the complexity that is alluded to here is that of the ‘play bite’, in
which the action is the same as its difference to itself.
In short I am trying to privilege a trick that is genuinely for the subject and not one
that only appears to privilege the subject whilst being totally indifferent to them.

What is also noted here is the way that Trick One, a contradictory exposing of
what lies outside of the un-delimitable total autonomy of a horizontal register, leads
us to Trick Three that then asks what could lie beneath these terms that make this
external position that we can clearly fictionalise into an impossibility? This is Trick
Three.
Its complexity is that it has to fictionalise how to become real.

I am a word trying to get free of gravity that I am drawing in the alphabet. Not
because any version of the truth can now become true (in the same neoliberal way
you can now become unique) but because I am admitting that this will never
become provable as true, but that this encircles its difference to an area in which
everything is.

QUID PRO QUO, THE PHYSICS OF VALUE:

There is ‘force’ between signifiers that organises them into autonomous registers,
thus eradicating the possibility of meta-language.

This idea is proposed across all fields of value so that just as the science of value is
applied to physics to gain a reading of gravity as composed of split registers, so the
physics of general relativity is here applied to the science of value, Quid Pro Quo,
with the resulting proposal of a further fiction, the fabric of unified value and time.

This is a fictionalisation of the organising ‘force’ of autonomous registers of value

as a side effect of the inability to perceive the curve of value-time as merely a local
geometry.
 16

In visualising how there seems to be a horizontal associative ‘force’ between

signifiers.
In returning to the idea of two fleas travelling across a surface that unknown to
them is curved, we can further visualise that upon this unseen local geometry
certain ‘signifiers’, which are normally on a parallel and unrelated track to each
other as they ‘move’ across the usually flat surface of value-time, appear to relate to
each other through the effect of the local curved geometry that conspires to make
those parallel and unrelated tracks converge, thus creating what appears like a
‘force’ of attraction between signifiers that appears to make them subject to
organisation in horizontal and autonomous registers of difference.
This gives the illusion that the differential component of signification is a ‘force’
beyond the control of the signifying subject; that it is autonomous from that
subject, thus allowing for the establishment of autonomous and horizontally related
subjectless systems of difference.
Once this surface of value time can be glimpsed, gravity as mass-value, language
as linguistic-value and capital as exchange-value cease to be an autonomous ‘force’
and can be seen as merely the effect of a local distortion of the geometry, caused by
the surface of Value-Time bending around an accumulation of ‘significatory mass’.

How might it be best to describe what I mean here by an accumulated mass that
bends value-time, in a similar fashion to how mass bends space time in General
Relativity?
I will expand on this later in relation to the diagram but here I try to highlight in
relation to these gravitational fields seen as fields that ‘organise’ autonomous value
according to difference.

DO I SAY MASS?

It might be said that the existence of the possibility for repetition of difference is the
‘accumulation’ here; in that it accumulates parthenogenically, thus being a mass
that is collapsing in on its own density. A master Signifier as a Black Hole around
which Value time is bent, thus ordering all other signifiers in differential relation to
each other and in a subservient relational trajectory to that Master Signifier.

Such accumulation of mass might be said within this analogy to be established by

the possibility for a qualitative difference that is then available as contradictorily,
quantitatively repeatable.
In a self-referring loop a difference that is repeatable is a tautology in which a
meta-statement of differential quality is treated as an internal statement of
quantitative value.
The Proposal of such a tautology is a looped super-positional statement that
‘spins’ and ‘accelerates’ upon itself, when unacknowledged, to create a density that
bends value time around itself.
The fact that that difference can be repeated according to the possibility for a set
field that orders this repeatability and enables it; giving it capacity to represent
 17

‘meaning’ autonomously whilst being the extimate component of subjective

statements, the ‘meaning’ of which it fails to register because of it being only
differentially horizontally interdependent dependant as a system of difference
between units of difference.
The generation of statements is looped temporally so that it draws ‘after’ from
that which it ‘precede’ in order to precede it. The quantitative autonomy of this
enabled ‘repeatable difference’ precedes the qualitative subjective statement that
simultaneously precedes its possibility. This loop is enabled by a master set of
difference from which difference is possible as ‘set-ness’, the possibility for
differential ‘sets’ to exist. ‘Set-ness’ means that a statement must be constructed
from elements that it precedes as the origin of the qualitative difference that
enables those elements to be available for construction prior to the statement being
made.
This is a temporal impossibility that is unacknowledged if these registers of quality
and quantity are supposed to be compatible and it is this temporal impossibility that
is caused through the subjects reduction of value time to the instance of synchronic
value ‘in’ time. Sequential time problematizes signification as it is locked to the idea
of difference as primary. This ‘empty set’ that allows for the autonomy of difference
and its denial of the possibility for metaposition is the ‘mass’ around which value-
time is curved. It is the master signifier that allows or signifiers to be organised in a
field of value.
Accumulation is directly proportional to capacity for difference to be repeated.
This is of course the definition of a system of difference, the terms are set so there
can be repetition.
This accumulated capacity to repeat then gives more ‘mass’ to the inter-relational
order of elements than it does to the axiomatic meta-statement, which is
ontologically prior to this mass (adding to its differential value an ‘excess’) but which
tautologically has to follow this ‘mass’ of differential repeatability for it to be inter-
subjectively ‘useful’.
The element that composes the statement comes before the statement but is
formed from the statement: this temporal knot makes a possibility for difference in
synchronic time.

THIS IS THE LOOP THAT ACCUMULATES A MASS OF REPEATABLE

DIFFERENCE:

The gravity here can be extreme if these kind of impossible knots are concealed.
Use value precedes exchange value that then precedes use value…this is CAPTURE,
when the field is a double bind in which labour-power, a statement ‘about’ value is
seen as a commodity, a statement ‘of’ value; and I am saying here that within the
un-acknowledgement of such tautology, through its concealment as well as the
concealment of the functions of semio-capital and desiring production subsumed to
the imperative of capital, that the field is tautological and does conceal the
conflation of registers to produce such a definition of capture, in which you are
supposed to follow something that you precede. If the tautological ground is not
exposed, the subject is problematized as an internally un-orientable surface.
 18

In this instance capture means an impossible injunction, a double bind, in which you
are asked to follow the unfullfilable terms of an order in which you are the
unwittingly implicated as the origin.
This is a temporal problem in that you are asked to follow an idea of freedom that
you are supposed to be prior to, or be the origin of. You are expected to both follow
‘freedom to’ and precede it as the origin of ‘freedom from’ simultaneously, and there
is a penalty for getting this wrong.
This is a good definition of capture.

So if the terms of this capture are temporal then perhaps trick three is a trick
performed in time.

And it is performed on the perceptive ‘rig’ that installs a sequential bidirectional

expression of that time.

What this means is that rather than trick one implying that the weightlessness
should retain its fictionality and that this all we can expect. I can further suggest that
the trick to expose is not there to imply this as a solution, but leads to the
implication that Trick Three must also be at least considered; the trick not to
become meta-positional in terms of gravity but to remove its cause as a real ‘force’.

LOOKING THROUGH THE AQUARIUM:

In this sense what is implied here is the shedding of a human perception of time. A
perception that is here seen as a kind of space suit that attempts to simulate the
conditions of three dimensional space and the separate passage of synchronic,
sequential time in order that the wearer of the suit not become exposed to the
fragmenting, disorienting, and maddening dissolution of the experience of the
unified fabric of space-time, or indeed Value-Time.

FURTHER THAN MARX:

What is intimated by Trick Three is that the circus subject in human skin is currently
unsuitable to perform such a trick. Trick Three fictionalises a change in the subject.
Complex critiques of value that expose the failure of systemic totality point further
to a need for new terms. As stated the impasse of the impossibility of meta-
position, which transposes as Lacan’s impossibility of meta-language in this text, is
this final gravity. This can be addressed in part by a Marxist Critique that exposes
the alienated and exploitative condition of the circus artist who seeks to forestall
this impossibility of genuine agency in the field through the extraction and
fetishisation of a surplus value from the watching-labour of the audience.

ON IMPOSSIBILITY:
 19

But what must be further implied by exposure of these very terms of autonomous
difference and in an accompanying exposure of the self-interested circus subject, is
that it is either through acknowledging this impossibility or acknowledging that
impossibility is forestalled through exploits made by that same subject that
delineation between Trick One and Trick Two are made. The major implication here
is that ‘impossibility’ is the main feature in both cases.

These are the terms of impossibility upon which it must be necessary to perform
Trick Three. These are the terms of gravity under which we labour, and from which
we are inseparable.

GENERAL RELATIVITY TO VALUE:

The implication here then is as stated the application of the Theory of General
Relativity to these terms, which are the terms of an autonomous register of
differential value. This implies of course the substrate of value is relative as opposed
to independently objective.
As has been proposed, if the subject copes with the de-subjectifying effects of the
unified surface of space-time through the separation of space as something that
occurs in three dimensions through sequential time, then a similar ‘coping’ of the
de-subjectifying effects of the unified surface of Value-Time is occurring in the
separation out in the human perception so that Value is perceived as occurring
through sequential time; the problem is, according to certain theories of value the
subject is similarly compromised by their attempt to become whole.
If we pursue this homology between space-time and Value-time and as a
continuous plane of pre-differentiated elements; then this separation to me then
accounts for the separation of the registers into that which we feel as qualitative
and that which is an autonomous register of quantitative difference.
This may seem far-fetched because it is; but this is the circus, and you are very
welcome. I am only trying to get to that with which circus is obsessed.
What is proposed here is that if we acknowledge that the science of value only has
its object of study in the synchronic definition of value in time; the tick of the
market, the moment of trade, the moment of utterance, the moment of the trick,
the moment of value. These are ‘value-events’ and the only way in which value can
occur indifferently is in ‘time’.

VALUE TIME HAS NO OBJECT OF VALUE:

I will reiterate that which I consider to be the ‘gravity’ here? In thinking of the human
perception as a way of ‘writing’ the curve of space-time straight again, and the
importance of the impossibility to perceive time in any other way than as an
eternally sliding present: I identify the medium as synchronic and unidirectional,
sequential time as the medium of restriction.

So this anchoring of the object of the science of value in the synchronic event is
undone in the diachronic view. As we look at value over time the object ceases to be
apprehend-able, as a value is in flux. As a continuous surface then value is an
 20

impossibility. This is precisely because there exists upon such a plane no differential
between value-events; the plane is the potentiality for value to exist but it is
therefore all value not one value.

We can say that at a certain time something has a certain value, and this is value
felt as autonomous ‘force’. The horror and wonder of Value-Time is that the values
remain undifferentiated out into synchronic moments, and as such no register of
autonomous difference is possible to be referenced by such a surface of value-time.
There is no ‘force’ just a landscape of continuous value.
Of course it is hard to imagine, as hard as imagining the unified fabric of space-
time, as hard as imagining the end of semio-capital. As hard as imagining how the
cut of a blue suit when televised at 21:30 might affect the stock exchange.

THERE IS NO THEORY IN THIS VALUE:

So, in the sense that anyone can fictionalise what it is to be in a pre-differential
position, what is imagined here is a fabric of immanent value-time out of which
different ‘events of value’ are derived and set up as synchronically fixed systems of
differential value. In diagrammatical terms they are derived and set up as
‘alphabets’ whose autonomy then constitutes the impasse for the desiring subject
of words.

It is this synchronic fixing that renders the object of the Science of Value as a real
differential object, capable of carrying and repeating difference, capable of being
the extimate cause within that which desires to be meta-positional to that cause.
Without this synchronic fixing, from which derives the possibility of value, there
has to be acknowledged a non-object of value, a plane of undifferentiated Value-
Time.
It is this impossibility of the establishment of a register of synchronically fixed
differential value that can be autonomous from the subject that is the proposed
outcome of this final third trick. This is the trick that exposes the cause of the
‘gravity’ of autonomous differential value.
This is why Value-Time is proposed as a theory of General Relativity to the
‘Newtonian’ concept of autonomous value as a ‘real’ force, in which the subject is
not complicit.

THERE IS NO VALUE IN THIS THEORY: ‘Eggs and Leather’.

Following this idea and trying to describe the theoretical unified surface of value-
time, it can be thought of as made up of a mass of ‘value-events’, the value of a
dozen eggs at 3.33am on Tuesday the 22nd of April 1968 in relation to Italian
Leather.
This ‘event’ is the moment at which a valuation was made as a synchronic point in
the sequential unfolding of time. Thus a line drawn through all these value-events
forms an expression of value that is un-capturable as an autonomous horizontal
order, as this egg-value will not stay in a fixed autonomous relation to leather–value
 21

without acknowledging the origin of these values as existing purely subjectively and
subject entirely to influences external to them.
Value emerges from the subject that cuts time into such synchronic fragments in
order to remain whole. Thus the cost of wholeness is a hole where the subject
should be able to define value.

Without the synchronic definition that exists differentially in a certain moment

these eggs and leather cannot maintain an autonomous and purely subject-less
differential that could remain stable enough to form a market.
Thus the fetishisation of commodities becomes impossible because without the
synchronic event, ‘cut’ from time, that seemingly allows the commodity to express
the value it holds as purely intrinsic to itself with no external origin it cannot
maintain a horizontal relation of egg or leather-ness.
What is exposed in the intertwining flux of lines drawn through value events is that
the source of this value is unfixed and extrinsic to the commodity, flexing and
twisting as a ratio between subjects, not between objects owned by subjects.
Thus the commodity is exposed in value time as directly related to the inter-
subjective value it holds between mobile and independent subjects. Value time
renders value of commodity extrinsic thus making fetishisation impossible. Value
can no longer continue in an endless and ungraspable chain of referral between
commodities, with eggs being valued in leather, leather in corn, corn in mink pelts,
mink pelts in pencils, pencils in avocados, avocados in iPhones, etc. etc. etc.
In signification this works in a similar way. If the value of a word is its differential
value to another signifier and that this autonomous difference is again that which
propels the subject to only be represented to another signifier and another and
another then how is this endless deferral broken in value-time?

This is the circus as a well of gravity from which we try to impossibly meta-position
ourselves.

“As we saw, in the process of signification, and insofar as the bar forbids any signifier
to reach its signified, signifiers can only slide along the bar in an indefinite deferral of
meaning that Lacan identifies as a ‘metonymical chain’. Even though the metonymical
sliding of signifiers ultimately rests on the abolishment of meaning, this abolished
meaning is maintained both as the cause and as the telos of the metonymical chain.
Insofar as it is lost, it becomes the lacking object of desire; insofar as it is desired, it is
posited as the aim or end of the chain.”

(Nancy, JL. Lacoue Labarthe, P (1992) The Tile of The Letter. SUNY. New York)

This endless chain is caused by exactly the same empty set that has to exist in the
market. It exists as the possibility for qualitative statements about the difference of
a thing to be treated as statements of quantity of a thing.
Signifiers, as we can clumsily draw in our alphabet diagram, receive a statement
about the quality of their difference in their use by the subject, but which can only
occur through the prior existence of that signifier as already differentially
 22

determined quantitatively in a subject-less order. Signifier precedes subject who

precedes signifier and it is this temporal tautology of precedence; a loop in time,
that is caused again by the ‘cut’ from the ever-changing flow of meaning.
Only the synchronic definition can allow the establishment of this autonomy and
the ensuing temporal paradox of a signifier to occur: The conception of Value time
proposes a disabling of this ‘cut’ to render signification as a continuous surface of
significatory-events across which no set autonomy can be established.
The illusion of barring is caused by signifying in a straight line through the curve of
value time.

The possibility for autonomous registers of value creates an endless deferral that is
equivalent to a barring.
The endless deferral that desires an end is the gravity here, and it may be that this
endlessness that deconstructs is the same impasse of meta-position that Lacan
describes anyway… Circus in one sense has to admit that it can only fictionally
escape from it; but if gravity is a by-product of our myopia in space-time, then we
may as well utilise this necessity of fiction to fictionalise the actual meta-position
that is denied.

FRAGMENTATION OF SUBJECT IN LACAN:

According to Lacan the subject copes with the fragmentation of the self through the
establishment of unity in the field of language, but the price of that supposed unity
is the establishment of an autonomous subject-less register that sits as the
contradictory extimate cause of that unity; and which propels the subject to desire
the end of that impossibility of unity that simultaneously causes the desire that
pursues it.
In coping with fragmentation we set up the language through which we cannot
get to wholeness. This ‘impossibility of meta language’, which would represent the
weightless moment in which a purely subjective definition of that unity is reached
that is free of the terms of the extimate empty set within it. This necessarily
‘included’ empty set describes the terms of difference by which such unity can be
uttered, and whose attendant impasse is reliant on difference as ontologically prior.

By which I mean that there is no such unified surface of value-time that is

acknowledged in this reading of the impasse, the impasse relies on the fact that
there is nothing underneath the terms of difference that delineate the impasse that
is installed by the undelimitable autonomy of the register of differential values by
which the subject achieves wholeness; a wholeness that is ever compromised by the
extimate presence of an autonomy external to the subject as cause of that supposed
wholeness.
The trick here is to perform difference to difference itself; this would be the
appearance of a circus of Value-Time.
But Value-Time, like Space-Time, is only a fiction.

Actual weightlessness is only what circus should be concerned with here, if we look
beyond its trite gestural code of neoliberal freedom.
 23

To get past or perhaps underneath gravity is to float in a space where the

autonomous horizontal inter-relation between signifiers and commodities and
bodies of mass does not apply; where the circus ring of desiring to nothing is gone.
The Cartesian subject is complicated here, as it is in Nancy’s critique of Lacan, in
that again we have to take up the perspective of wholeness from which to imagine a
continuous surface of value time in which necessarily that whole subject would be
reduced to one undred thousand, thousand spaces across 8o years in a fragmented
but continuous undifferentiated flesh that is as of yet unrendered into any
synchronic moment at all.

I am acknowledging that Trick Three is impossible to imagine, but not to perform.

Regardless of the impossibility of regarding the surface that is discussed here, I will
continue to speak of it, and the role of fiction will be addressed accordingly.
What I am proposing here is that the value of a signifier, like the value of any
commodity, will alter over time. This seemingly intrinsic and autonomous power to
differentiate itself enough to effectively refer to the required signified is a power
drawn from its differential, that it seems to intrinsically possess; and from which
implication in the origin of that value-power to signify the subject is not implicated,
in the same way the subject of labour is not implicated in commodity fetishism.
The master signifier of all commodity is of course capital, and around the
accumulation of capital, which is the empty set that allows all other values to form,
value time curves itself as the accumulation of capital represents here the
accumulation of repeatable difference, the black hole from which even affect
cannot now escape.
According to current statistics, due to the rapid evolution of languages not one
word in use today will still be in use in one thousand years.
These facts mean that seen diachronically the seemingly intrinsic and
autonomous chain that exists between signifiers that refers the subject endlessly
onwards through the metonymical chain as he/she tries to fullfill the desire of
speech which is to say what you mean???? Is rendered in gfact as extrinsic, in so far
as if we extrapolate this diachronic view to a unified fabric of value-time then it can
be seen that the word itself as a line of interconnected value-events , in which the
signifier is valued in relation to any other signifier as to its value to effectively
differentially refer to the desired signified. Every time this signifier is valued against
another signifier as eggs to leather, as corn to fox fur, as picture frames to hatpins to
assess its ability to retain enough horizontal differential value to denote that which
the speaker desires denoted a value-event occurs, and seen imbricated into this
fabric of value-time that is curved around the ‘master signifier’, as a density of self
referring possibility for the tautology of repeatable difference, around the empty
set, the black hole. Signification follows this local geometry of value time and so
curves around this empty set so that across the surface of value time a signifier is
pulled into an inexorable order with another signifier according to its linguistic value
to differentiate effectively that which it signifies in relation to another signifier. Thus
this ‘pull’ between signifiers that orders them into orbiting chains of metonymical
gravitational relation is an effect of the inability to perceive the curved local
geometry of value time upon which these value events are iterated. Thus the pull of
 24

signification by which each signifier is pulled back into its subjectless and
meaningless position in the chain according to an indifferent gravity is an illusion
caused by signifying in a straight line across the curve of value-time.

These are the complexities here; that trick three in proposing the trick performed on
value over time that causes the gravity of autonomous synchronically differential
value, unleashes a possibility for genuine weightlessness, but the price is the
dissolution of the circus subject.
But the form of something that is the same as its difference to itself is already
present in the terms we seek to exceed in Trick Three.

NOT FORCE BUT MUTUALLY CONVERGENT POINTS.

Just as it is proposed here there is no autonomous register of what we are calling

‘mass-value’ possible once there is capacity to experience the ‘force’ of gravity as
merely the travel towards a mutually convergent point on the curved local geometry
of space time, there is analogically similarly no autonomous register of linguistic or
exchange value possible once there is capacity to experience the ‘force’ of the
impossibility of meaning/meaninglessness (representation) or
pricelessness/worthlessness (market) as merely the travel towards a mutually
convergent point on the curved local geometry of value time.

It may be possible to say that representation is an illusion caused by signifying in a

straight line through the curve of value-time.
The ‘force’ that operates differentially between signifiers and which orders them as
in a ‘field’ is caused by that ‘force’ operating in an apparent straight line through the
unseen curve of value time.
The unseen geometry that curves here is the reason that from our synchronic
position in sequentiality of time we feel that significatory order as an autonomous
and indifferent ‘force’.
We are located in a time where ‘this means that’ beyond our say-so, which is the
embedding in a linguistic form that means also that we can never desire without
lack.
This is the equivalent of living within Newtonian physics that sits as the terms by
which apples, bowling balls and feathers all ‘mean’ towards the ground at the same
speed, they all ‘signify’ their weight downwards according to the order; the ‘master
signifier’ of gravity that makes ‘mass-ness’ of things perceived in the synchronic
sequentiality of time.

Lacan is to the autonomous differential register as Newton is to gravity.

So the circus trick here is on the terms of Newtonian gravity that propose that
space-time is curved.

ON LACAN AS PART OF TAUTOLOGICAL GROUND:

Trick Three is complex to be sure, but it attempts to deal with the capture of Trick
One, as the insistence upon freedom. The tautological ground that demands that
 25

the subject activate tricks that demonstrate genuine agency is issuing a double bind
that only serves to expand the terms of that tautological ground as an Unclosure:
that which genuinely encloses freedom that is imagined as genuine.

Trick two here is a set of terms that then appears to be total, but this totality is
contradictorily maintained by exhorting the subject to enact a trick which should
normally expose its limitations. This exposure however is forestalled by the
implication that prevails within this post-fact interior that the appearance or fiction
of agency is equal to the same thing. This agency may not even be thought of as
fictional at all as this conflation of fiction with fact, of quality with quantity is total
and instant within the assumptions of post-factism.
Thus is this Post-Fact Circusism, gravity is seen as just another bureaucratic form
of outmoded ideology that can be overcome with some weightless individuality.
The tricks demanded of the subject are the same but the outcome is the opposite of
what is expected.

This is the complexity that Trick Three attempts to address here, and is thus
complex and incomprehensible as trying to picture the end of the world, the end of
the subject, and the end of the terms by which they are defined.
It could be said that this ultimate ‘fictionality’ of subject might be the end of both
Lacanian analysis and of a Deleuzean realisation of the plane of immanence in
which the terms of the primacy of difference are derived, but important here is that
this activation of trick three that seeks to get underneath the terms by which tricks
one and two enjoy such a problematic symbiosis might be the end of the subject
pre-differentially as to a kind of post-differential awareness that is endured by the
subject of Lacanian analysis.
Originally it might be possible to think of Lacanian analysis as a trick that exposes
the limits of the system of desire embedded in the signifying chain and the
impossibility of escape due to the unconscious being structured like a language.
If we take Deleuze and Gauttari’s statement that the unconscious is structured like
a factory, then it is possible to infer that within the context of semio-capital that it is
‘like a factory’ precisely because it is ‘like a language’. It is this capacity to produce
signification in the moment of desire that then ensures that this desire ends in lack
in the signifying chain that makes the unconscious the perfect machine to create
both the ‘new’ that is desired and its ‘built in obsolescence’ that is its lack. This is the
capture of this lacking circuit to renew desire and reproduce further semio-capital.
Here the sliding along a metonymical chain becomes a conveyor belt.

Thus the Lacanian subject is the perfect machine to produce that with forestalls
the overproduction of capital and ensures its continued reproduction. It may be that
Lacan as Trick One is installed fully in the tautological ground and thus, whilst still a
‘correct’ analysis, becomes ‘uncorrect’ as Trick Two. Lack is concealed in an endless
choice of ‘new’ potential ‘lacks’.
In this way a theory of lack becomes the production of production as it is shown to
be as the absence of an absence. The subject, who is supposed to see they are
fragmented, instead approaches the theory of lack as a whole being going shopping
for an experience of desired lack and is thus an exponent of the expansion of the
 26

field of autonomous difference regulated under a repressed master signifier that

was originally intended by Lacanian analysis to be exposed for the subject of
analysis.

In the same way that Lacan can be seen to desire a theory of desire over lack that
results in an absence of absence, it can be surmised how the harnessing of such a
logic might be the schematised desiring production that could effectively forestall
the overproduction and falling rate profit that capital fears.
A schematised Lacanian loop here would be the best of both worlds for capital as
the subject is indeed a kind of factory as they represent the hybridisation of variable
and fixed capital; a subject that can be squeezed for surplus, but a machine that can
be a competitive producer of desire. The subject is subject to a blurred ownership, in
which they seem to own the means of production of desire but not the means of
meaning production of desire. It is the subject’s desire but it can be pointed to any
irrelevant object that is subsumed to the imperative of capital.
Thus Trick Three is complex as it has to deal with the terms of difference that seem
to allow the capture of trick one as trick three.
And it is complex as it is called for by Trick One , but still is in as much of a
precarious relation to the post-factism inherent in Trick Two.
Trick Three is one of the tricks I am trying to perform in this text…to imagine a way
out of it…

Trick 1: a real circus that has to admit its fictionality

Trick 2: a fake circus that appears free
Trick 3: a conceptual circus to be performed at any time…that must use fiction to
escape fiction.

Perhaps to gain freedom is to lose the subject that desires it…

I do not have a mathematics to model value-time, it is merely a proposal, a tool for
thinking of the impossibility of trick three.
It may be that the temporal dimension will hold some way of rationalising how
such a third trick may be performed on the impasse of difference, such that in
TIMELESSNESS a value could be both priceless and worthless simultaneously, thus
being different to its sameness to itself.
 27

*****
Dear Reader,
You are cordially invited to pause here to consider the time you will have to pay to
ultimately read further. It is not that you are barred from entry necessarily, only that
you may not have time to fully allow yourself to be present here.
In this section Mary Minkowski, the mission scientist from the tale of The Hypnotist
and The Horserace turns up in Happy’s lecture on the Marxist Critique of Gravity.
In relation to this critique that exposes Circusism, she points out that he should
move to get underneath the terms of the system altogether to create a rupture of it
rather than a dialectical unfolding of its inherent tautologies. What she implies here
is that a Marxist Critique of Circus is only the first step. What is needed is a way to
get free of the limited gravity that the critique exposes.
Her proposal here within the terms of this fiction however is not fiction. What she
proposes is a genuine rupture of sequential time through her looped technique of
Past Life Regression.
In this sense, Dear Reader, this is an expositional example of a fiction that seeks to
exceed the need for fictional solutions to autonomous differential value.

Step right up if you would like to witness the difference to the same difference
repeat itself for one night only.
Step right up to witness Mary explain the imperceptible truth; that if Lacan states
that there is no such thing as a meta-language, which in turn can be implied to mean
that the autonomy of a system of difference is as insurmountable as a field of
gravity, then Lacan is a description of such a field.
Roll up Ladies and Gentlemen and witness the end of difference in the fabric of
value-time, in which the only truth is delineated by the Minkowski value-time
interval.
In this equation it is shown that the value of all events can only be determined by
the relation between two independently mobile subjects as a ratio of combined
position and velocity .
Ladies and germs this means that truth sits between how fast I am going from
where you are standing and no longer in the ruler that you brought with you.
It is all relative, brothers and sisters… and in many respects this exhibit, which will
cost you time to enter can only be seen if you acknowledged that the overcoming of
time is the process by which you will be able to see the subject who is not there. ‘I
see…’ said the blind man. Step right up and take a peak at the Invisible Man.
To get underneath the time you give yourself is the only way to prevent yourself
from disappearing on somebody else’s terms.

Dear Reader you will permitted to wander in this antechamber before it will be
made clear to you that time has run out. As you know anything shaded red will be
impermissible. Time is our enemy as its unseen geometry is local gravity that holds
you in your chair right now.
 28

Welcome, stay a while…you will be notified when you can no longer afford the time.
You will be told when the rope of time has run out…

***

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Eighteen

MARY IS MARX IN THE ‘Y’ AXIS

Happy was aware that underneath his prissy little critique lay something darker and
unfathomable. For now it had to dress up as this and that in order to not get caught
with its pants down, but underneath it was the shifting, seething activation of the
way the mouth fizzed around the all-too-short short wine-tasting of the words. Swill
and spit was not enough to perceive the way that meaning could not spill from
treading the dark grapes. They grew how they did, entangled with sun-time, water-
time and the time that was drawn upon space by the vegetative stillness of their
vines.
This nonsense over time was something different to the ‘new’, the immediacy of
dreams coming true on a conveyor belt had nothing to do with this nonsense that
grew through the broken belt a thousand lights years from the now, the new, from
the new you and all the other novel fucking bastard children of themselves.
Mary was sowing seeds of doubt right here in his lecture, and somehow he knew
that he had to evolve, to get past the current time…

…he checked, he was still in the lecture hall, Mary was still here too, having
interrupted his presentation she was now in danger of being thrown out.

The guards still seemed to be approaching…Happy was trying to concentrate on

her words, examine the intent of the guards, process what she was saying about his
critique and deal with the overwhelming feeling that he knew this young woman
from somewhere…they had met before, they knew each other from another time?

Mary glanced behind her when she saw that Happy was distracted. She immediately
reached inside her shirt and took out her Visitor’s Pass.
“I have a right to be here, in this seminar. I have a pass here …and…if the Professor
doesn’t mind I would like to continue with our discussion.”

Happy was puzzled, why was she so unsettled?

“Please I do not mind, Ms. Minkowski, It is a pleasure…”

The dean interrupted him, “Actually Ms. Minkowski, this is an internal seminar and
not open to the general public so it is a little irregular that you are here…” The Dean
was walking backwards towards the rear of the hall.
 29

Happy was intrigued, “Please continue, I think it is no problem.”

“Thank you, I have come rather a long way, a great… distance, actually… so…
however let us look beyond time…in flat space time two independent observers in
two separate frames of reference travelling at different constant speeds can only
agree on a fixed objective interval between events by feeding their own subjective
data into an equation…in the final analysis, there is no autonomy, regardless of
Lacan or not, as the determination of an ‘agreed’ register happens between two
mobile subjects, not between two or more nodes of horizontal, differential relation
that is independent of those subjects. Thus the only route to objectivity is through
the agreed production of two independent subjects. The register, in which meaning
or value is ordered, constellates in that moment between mobile subjects. It is
renewed each time as a new shared language, there is no fixed register to exist as a
cold, subject-less archive that holds these momentary values that subjects
themselves create; what is acknowledged here is the production of value by the
subject, derived from many possibilities, rather than from a market of limited
choices.
Flat value time, as a diagram, as a fiction of what we cannot see, shows us that an
autonomous register is as defunct as gravity would be in space time; just an illusion
caused by not being able to see the curve upon which one thing ‘seems’ to be
signifying another, in the same way that one object ‘seems’ to be pulled toward
another in the myopic illusion of gravity as a ‘force’. Anyone who signifies anything
from ‘la langue’ is just a flea on the curved surface of continuous value time; a flea in
a flea circus in which no flea can see the terrain of the flea circus.
…I put it to you that the sequence of events, what is understood as language or
value, who you are even, are all fictional anyway, in that to another observer the
meaning, the value, even the sequences themselves are different to how another
observer might see them. This is the clear breakdown of any possible autonomy of
value.
Your critique is succinct in that it points out the glaring limitations and inherent
tautology in the system of gravity, but now what we need is a way out.
I am agreeing with you professor but not for the convoluted reasons you cite here,
this is all merely the trick of perception that must be in turn tricked to escape the
appropriation of the first trick that has, as you say, become the ‘tautological
ground’, which invalidates tricks. I agree that fiction is necessary here, but only a
fiction in which fiction is no longer necessary.
Listen to me carefully, what I am saying is that the true medium for circus tricks is
time… ”

Happy had never been agreed with in this manner before. “It is a little irritating that
you take this Zen approach. If everything is fictional then we are just in a capitalist’s
dream, in which the creation of something from nothing is possible. So, can I ask…”

“Please Professor, we may not have very long…” she was glancing to the rear of the
hall, where a heated discussion was under way.
 30

”…and therefore I am pointing out that your weightless moment in the trick is
rendered fiction not by your insistence that this is how it remains and ‘represents’ a
demand for freedom, floating above its reduction to difference as a weightless
affect , but that it is simply fiction as it is rendered so by the physics of space time
and the perceptive anomaly of not being able to perceive how weightlessness is
actually the perpetual state within the fabric consisting of a unified temporal and
spatial geometry.
It is fiction, in that a writer trying to capture reality in difference writes it all,
including the geometric point in value time, which is the value event at which
weight value is zero.”

“Are you saying reality is ‘made up’…”

“Yes and no, Professor…I am saying it is made up by those that have accumulated
enough repeatable difference to do so. You have correctly shown Marx to be
necessary but it is not necessary to accept fictional meta-positions as implied by
Lacan
But to apply Marx to the human perception that is the origin of value of Lacan’s
impasse.
Lacan uses Marx to imply that the impasse is not external but the lot of the
desiring subject in a linguistic unconscious…I am saying that if that linguistic
unconscious is now the context of capital, making that unconscious into a factory,
which we do not own, then Marx has to be applicable here to what is the final
gravity.
The human instrument and its position of being a writer in the mode of Celine;
which writes the unbearable curve of space time into three dimensions and
synchronic time, just as the Lacanian subject writes the unbearable curve of
becoming, in which they are fragmented parts into a manageable whole through
language.
This manageable whole has an extimate hole included within it as the price for this
writing of the unbearable truth: we must address the writer in the name of Marx to
activate the freedom from gravity that Lacan implies is not possible (no
metalanguage indeed) in his Marxian reading of Saussure.
We activate the Marx in Lacan to apply a revolution to the terms by which no meta-
position is possible for the desiring subject. To get beyond the current written
perception is to get free of its inherent gravity, but it may cost us the subject.

“This is my concern Ms Minkowski…that what you are proposing is the dissolution

of the subject who might benefit…” Happy could feel something pulling at his skin;
could feel the old sandstorm dissolving the subject inside that wanted to stay safe.

The young woman continued, glancing at Happy, at her wristwatch and at the
guards, who slowly and uncertainly approaching:

“If we apply Einstein to Celine we can see that Einstein has seen directly the
original truth that Celine bends before it passes through the distortion of the writing
process so let us do this and learn from Einstein how to apply Marx to Lacan: to get
 31

underneath the gravity implicit in Lacan’s impossibility of meta position we have to

see the curve that is prior to difference, as Einstein saw the curve that is prior to
space and synchronic time. We have to see the curve that comes before value and
time as one continuous curve of value-time.”

“You seem to be very good at playing chess with pieces that you can barely lift…”
Happy was trying to make light, but was increasingly bothered by the ferocity and
speed of the young woman’s delivery.

“I am simply stating that it is not only the point at which weight value is zero in
gravity that is ‘written’ as a fiction; the actual case is that it is all fiction, as
difference itself is only the fiction that difference is repeatable, which is a
contradiction that forms representation; in such an over-arching fiction, of which
there is no outside, it is ‘true’ that there are no meta-positions, which is what it
becomes necessary under such installed ‘truth’.
Are we now supposed to think of any moments of weightlessness,
meaninglessness, uselessness or pricelessness as occurring within that ‘truth’ as
‘true’…even if this destroys the terms upon which they exist?
And is the only other alternative, which is the one you pursue here, to then subvert
this by thinking of weightless moments as ghosts that can haunt a limited area?

It is not lightly that I state that everything is fiction, even the ontologically primacy
of difference. I am doing this to point out that your designation of weightlessness as
fiction is correct, but that its veracity is viral; if weightlessness, a tautology, has to
remain ‘true but unprovable’ then the entire apple is rotten.
If we reverse this then: in an over-arching fiction in which subjective truth has to be
thought of as fiction to avoid being destroyed as it is entered as a fact in an
objective register, why not simply acknowledge that all points of difference that
make up such an objective register are fictions, derived out of a multiplicity of
possibilities, and that these derivations are performed by the very subjects that then
must obey the register they themselves have produced as law; which pushes, pulls
and orders those productions. Surely this is what we must expose with a circus of
time tricks?”

“I have no desire to return to the ring, thank you…”

“Desire is the ring and we must circle it to show that it does not refer to nothing…if
I am being Marxist it is only to point out that while Marx only spoke about the origin
of value within capital, the problem extends into all systems of value, and all
systems of value are based on synchronic difference. If Marx performs a trick to
expose anything, it is the trick to expose the necessity to get beyond the split
register entirely, to get beyond split value, into one continuous surface of value,
instead of the tyranny of value-events happening one after the other, like little
ducks in a row.
You are right to apply Marx to gravity, but we have to encourage a circus that
moves beyond the terms upon which gravity is predicated altogether. To get
beyond space and time is not to be metaphysical, it is to evolve to perceive the
 32

underlying fabric immanent to it, which is space time, upon which three dimensions
of x, y and z and sequential time of breakfast, lunch and tea are themselves fictions
decided between story-telling subjects.”

Happy looked around him, aware that it was not only he who was bewildered by the
young woman’s appearance.
She continued:

“Then the entire circus is fiction, from the performing monkeys of autonomy, to the
tired lions of the subject, to the deranged ringmasters of capital and the deeply
psychoanalytical promoters, the wire walkers of language, the acrobats of exchange
value, the clowns of difference etc etc etc…
The trick should no longer be discussed as fiction or fact, the entire autonomy can
be eradicated once we severe our umbilical to sequential time and take up the long
reins of a horse not yet even born…”

“Yes, it’s a very romantic notion…”

“Do not condescend to me, Professor. This is far from being a romance it is not the
romance of Marx… A primary unification of the incompatible registers of space and
time negates the secondary problem embedded within a perception that cannot
unify space and time, which is the incompatibility of the registers of meaning and
linguistic value, use-value and exchange-value, and as you say ‘weight-value and
mass-value’, in that within this unified fabric of previously un-weavable yarns, the
autonomy of language, capital and gravity are negated and unified into a single
term/event that is objectified through the equating of independently mobile and
subjective frames of reference.
As in Minkowski’s Space-Time Interval Equation.”

“ Oh, are you related?”

“Yes, I am related… It is all relative in fact… your critique is fictional but this
inoperability as fact does not make it a potentiality or a demand of any kind, it is
simply one more fairy-tale entangled with all other fairy-tales… there is no fact left,
there is only applause ”
Mary gestured to the crowd who nervously applauded, unsure if this was part of a
staged event, some performative intervention as had been more frequent in
academic circles since the advent and enforcement of Circusism.

“ I accept your argument Ms. Minkowski but please…I must get to the end of the
lecture…”
Happy felt the words like clay on the palette, dry wetness, unspeakable meanings
of heavenly earth. Words like fragments of pottery, his tongue pointlessly brushing
them to somehow unearth them from the uncaring soil, through which they silently
communed with other fragments. The taste of dirt.
 33

“But, Professor, are you saying that your theory is merely fictional? This is very
important I am trying to help you to the next step…If Einstein only fictionalised
Space-Time then he returns us to the same problem, one in which there is now way
to escape the terms of human perception that cannot see that Space-Time, only
experience it analogically through the gloved hand of mathematics. Supposing you
could become mobile across the fabric though?”

“Yes…no…it has to remain as unworkable to work…you don’t understand, taking it

as fact will render it exactly subject to the forces it seeks to escape…” He was dizzy.

“Professor, this is clearly nonsense…it is either a real theory or it is not. Which is it?
It is very important because according to your own terms your theory may only have
a chance to survive Circusism as a fiction, otherwise it is just another ‘trick’
performed on the tautological ground that swallows it…”

“YES, this is partly what I am already saying…Let me continue, please… Ms

Minkowski…It is about black holes the most extreme iteration of gravity, at which
point the gravity is so strong that language, true language outside of the bind of
sequentiality becomes possible again, an atemporal language… at absolute
impossibility of escape the logic of enclosure breaks down, do you see THAT?”

“Believe me professor we agree on so many levels, but a black hole is a ‘fine line’
that leads to a breakdown of the law or an installation of the ultimate law, that of
post factism. From a contradiction anything follows so you see it becomes a
Burroughsian question.
In this fine line the black-hole can either be a space in which ‘nothing is true and
everything is permitted’ or one in which ‘everything is true and nothing is
permitted’, these are the real stakes, this is the money that rides on the horse.
To state that nothing is provable as truth is to allow for travel between different
fields, whereas to allow everything to be true within a field is to imply that field is a
limitless totality from which there is no escape.
Perhaps these are the same conundrums in the sense that endless travel is the
same as going nowhere when all the cards are finally laid upon the table. But what if
I could show you a way past time? What then for when and where and who?
If I can highlight the impasse the black hole represents rather than the enablement
of freedom from law.”

“But why are you selling me all this Lacanian soft soap…if the impasse is there, then
it is there for all conditions, and your proposal is also just another fiction?”

“ Simply because I am stressing that within the context of Capital that privileges
difference as primary there is no recourse to any other kind of pre-differential
thinking that could reach a conclusion that desire is not predicated on lack. I am
showing you what needs to be broken here…I can sell Lacan but as a reason to apply
 34

Marx to the terms of human perception…I only sell Lacan as Einstein sells Newton
before he shows what is immanent to Newton’s supposed ‘force’ of gravity…I sell
Lacan before I show what is immanent to Lacan’s ‘force’ of impasse that prevents
meta language
…I advocate Lacan as an impasse because this precisely necessitates the activation
of an Einstein flavoured Marxism on the terms of difference that Lacan states is the
insurmountable gravity…
Advocating Lacan is merely the rationale that shows that the final revolution has to
be performed in time, the separated medium that installs all of the impasses in
gravity, language and capital…in imagining value time I am trying to perform a
Marxist critique of gravity greater than your, Professor.”

“Really…”

“Yes, really as yours is still stuck acknowledging the Lacanian terms that are here
the equivalence of Newtonian physics, from which perspective gravity is ‘real’.
Deleuze and Gauttari then, if you prefer…they are to Lacan what Einstein is to
Newton, in imagining value-time I am giving you a rationale for signification that is
the same as Einstein’s rationale for gravity: it is an illusion caused by moving in a
straight line through the curve of space-time.
Lacan is just someone who mistook the force of gravity as 'real ...Einstein showed
that it was just an experience of a stroll across an invisible diagram.”

The young woman was long and thin and seemed to contort around the effort of her
diatribe:
“I am going to speak now about the inevitability of lack, but one that capital
ensures is inevitable, as it then ensures that difference is the final indifferent register
by returning everything to the market for validation, as inevitable as the collapse to
super-dense blackness.
Lacan has become so real that we now need Marx to undo him, as he is embroiled
in the inevitability of lack in capitalism that keeps capital alive. He is embroiled in
the necessity for a subject he cannot allow. Lacan is the force in all three fields,
Gravity, Language and Capital; and in the semio-capital that makes circus tricks into
an expansion of a neoliberal ethos. Lacan is Newton describing the inescapable and
‘real force’ of semio-capitalistic gravity, of the ‘semio-gravity’ of Circusism.
In acknowledging the ‘gravitational’ inevitability of a reduction such as this; to
systems of quantitative difference as the only available measure, capital ensures
that our foreseeable universe is organised around ideas as non-negotiable as the
crushing centrality of difference between bodies of mass, around which all galaxies
spin to eventual negation.
This is only homological, but I propose it here as a relation between how I think
about gravity and capital as one and the same illusion, that is then conflated into a
unified lie of Circusism and the Capitalism with which it agrees.
Weightlessness conflated as genuine agency, pricelessness conflated as genuine
saleability, meaningless tautology conflated as truth, all supported by the myth that
there is an autonomous order of repeatable differences like an alphabet that can
 35

govern us ‘fairly’; precisely because no subject is involved in the way the field orders
reality.
But Lacan is only Newton, if we need to acknowledge fiction then it is only the
‘fiction’ proposed by Einstein, a fiction of mathematics that can never land in our
minds for sure, but one that points at the mind as a writer.
For this we need Einstein’s theory of space-time to perform the Marxist critique of
Lacan’s insurmountable impasse…we need something underneath the terms by
which Lacan is the real Newtonian gravity…There is apparently nothing beneath
Lacan so we need to formulate a theory beneath him in the way that Einstein
showed what was immanent to Newton…we need Value-Time.”

“Yes, please calm down… I acknowledge that this alphabet is immutable, that is
why we must propose fictions to live outside of it, rather than expect to be able to
build freedom within it…” Happy was confused as in agreeing with himself he knew
he was invalidating his argument.

“I am calm, I just know I do not have much time…our perception, which needs
symbolism to cope with the real we cannot see, is the exact reason we cannot see it.
The desire to be whole trumps all other approaches to ontology and installs
difference as primary. As we can only approach the real through language…our very
perception, as Lacan says is language based, and therefore sets up the pull, the
desire to see past what we have set up to get at a wholeness that is weightless, but
this is the very reason we cannot.
We desire to see past a screen that desiring has woven.
To signify is to desire to see what is hidden by signification, just as to be human
is to desire to be weightless outside of being a human body of mass.
To weigh something is to desire to see what is hidden by weight.
To deal in gravity as a measure is to desire to see what is hidden, by that very
dealing in gravity as a measure.
…Gravity is the desire of things to ‘refer’ to each other; the end result of this is that
they signify the central lack, which is exactly the black hole at the centre of the
universe, the extimate empty set that causes the inescapable pull of gravity, that
reorders the heavens into an alphabet of inexorable density …This is the central
tautology for all laws of physics, that states to be human is to desire to see past
what is human and to be human is to be blind to it.
Then gravity is a form of trying to represent eternally that moment of timeless,
space-less lacking that we are pulled towards…all gravity, all representation is
geared toward the desire to solve the impasse of signification of something
unsignifiable…
It is a space suit that we use to travel to a place we want to experience naked.”

Happy was stunned, she was outlining what he himself had tried to conceal in some
subterfuge of devil’s advocacy. She was calling to him across the distance.

“ Lacan for me is only the admission of an impasse, time is the key to unlock it, I
think I have found that key…a trick in time… seeing Lacan as Newton is a process of
 36

seeing the autonomy of systems of difference as a Gravity that is calling out for a
trick, a trick I think we should perform…
Speaking of gravity in this Lacanian way, in which gravity is a signification of
something that copes with the black hole of it lacking is only because I am
highlighting how capital, that renders this lack theory true, is the gravity I am
getting at…
Mr Down-River, I have read your critique of gravity, it is wholly flawed…but it is
right in one aspect… I understand that the biggest gravity that you wish an anti-
circusism to address is that of capital itself, that facilitates this entire round-robin of
acts that demonstrate entrepreneurial individualism and the self as a commodity to
be performed…
The gravity of capital is one that you wish to inspire circus to address as you rightly
see its mechanisms wholly compromised by its agreement with neoliberal financial
practices of self-interest.
Then why waste time explaining how circus is compromised within capital with an
argument that is compromised in language…a back somersault in time. To make
the argument against capital you may have to sacrifice the subject who is able to
operate the sequential and synchronic iteration of language over time. You need to
sacrifice the subject capable of making such an argument, and let that be the
statement.”

She was stood on her toes; arm outstretched, pointing aggressively at him.

“I accuse you of trying to remain as a filled in ghost. You know the spells, you know
the invisible blood between us now…There are two points here: One is that you
proceed through language, which needs sequential and synchronic time in order to
function. Without the instance of synchronic cut there is no possibility for the object
of value to exist. But time itself is dependant on gravity for the way it unfolds, so
that your medium of critique is dependant on the thing it critiques…this is one
problem.
So I propose that you may have to sacrifice the communicability of the hermetic
subject that speaks in order to effectively deliver the critique of gravity you intend.

TWO: Why do I infer that there is a Lacanian impasse here in language, I do this to
further delineate it as a form of gravity. If we see the impasse in language as a
‘gravity’, if we see this linguistic impasse as now part of the inescapability of semio-
capital, that appropriates not only what is facilitated by linguistic potency but also
what is barred by it, namely the subject who purchases themselves through it. In
this case then we can re adopt the Marx that Lacan uses to say the linguistic impasse
is insurmountable and ask the Marxist question, how do we get rid of gravity?”

“I do not know…” Happy was transfixed. The guards hovered closer, conferring with
the Dean, who was worriedly muttering.

“You are correct but you should stop asking circus to be decent and quietly
acknowledge its fictional meta-positionality. ‘Mary had a little lamb etc. etc.’
 37

Continue on to trick three! In which this Lacanian impasse that demands tricks
only to point to a fictional weightlessness in newton’s gravity, can be exposed as an
illusory force, by an application of the theory of general relativity to the science of
value.
So If I then examine Lacan as part of a semio-capitalistic ‘gravity’ that seems
inescapable and ‘real’, in which no meta-position is possible as a condition of that
‘reality’ of it as a force, then is this not only a Newtonian gravity, that is undone by
the application of Einstein’s general theory?
Thus I propose in a Marxist fashion to get underneath the terms of difference that
make the semio capitalistic gravity ‘real’, by exposing the local geometry that
makes it seem ‘real’
Thus the only thing we need to appreciate here is that immanent to split registers
of value, beneath the autonomy of exchange, of linguistic and of what you call
mass-value there is a surface that is the unification of value over synchronic time
into the fabric of Value-Time.
Time is the only trick you need to achieve here, all other tricks point to it, the trick
to expose only exposes the need to get beyond the terms under which it was
constructed, likewise it exposes the tautological ground that results from a failure to
make this leap.…time is only medium left in which to operate the trick you need to
perform in order to invalidate the autonomy of gravity that behaves like language,
language that behaves like capital, and of course capital; that behaves as it
wishes…and which endlessly reproduces itself through the very tricks that are
supposed to expose its limits and expose the necessity to leave behind not gravity
but the causes of gravity.”

“Please do continue…” He was now resolved to hear her out.

Miss Minkowski seemed manic, but charming…Happy felt that her objections were
somehow leading him into a trap, or to an open window…

“No, Professor I have travelled a vast and incomprehensible distance to be at this

lecture at this precise time…please I ask only that you continue in your sequence…it
is vital that you reach the conclusion as to the purpose of the trick, to expose on your
own trajectory” The guards seemed to be slowly making their way towards her.

Happy traced his finger along the lines on the page, he only wanted to be a boy
again, out on the plains, leaves and twigs, dust and animal hides, no words at all in
the unfolding flower days; he felt as if the text was waterboarding him…gasping at
the fabric of the words, they were soaked in the un-breathable aqua of time, but he
continued…

“I will address the idea of the artist alienated from their own production …So, what
if we were to invert this, so that rather than thinking of the artist as the worker, we
think of the artist here as the capitalist-owner, who in wanting a profit of actual
freedom/mobility to appear intrinsic to weightlessness, needs to set the audience to
work to create this surplus-value?”
 38

As he spoke, the words swooped and reeled like high rolling birds, they competed
supposedly according to the algorithms of game theory, with aggression being
rewarded or punished in waves of suitability, all was supposedly in balance except
the birds were not following the game…”they will see I am not playing the game of
playing the bird and the market will punish me…”
Happy’s words nested, swooped, dived, mated and oviporated in terms of
something ungraspable that came before anyone had even seen the sky. A notion of
both before and after the egg that defied the logic that laid it. The egg was useless
to itself and therefore not for sale.

Happy continued, “Free quality is clearly nonsense, so rather than thinking that
implies a subject they were soaked in un-breathable value.”

People cast bewildered looks around them. Happy was losing control of the words,
they were fragmented limbs flailing, looking for a body with which to identify. He
became acutely aware that he was now sacrificing his ability to cohere linguistically
to even utter a critique of capitalised circusism.
He tried again to speak: “ The point here is fragmented limbs as true language, it is
about black lung equals vacuum…” He was running out of oxygen, drifting in a torn
spacesuit.

“Professor, are you alright?” a grey-faced Dean leaned in at a concerned angle, the
over extended hypotenuse of care was close to collapse as his gaze cast around the
room for supporting angles.

“I’m fine…simultaneously at the heart of circus…language proceeds through

automatons that exploit language. Ahem…” he cleared his narrowing throat “…I’m
fine as the capitalist like the helm of a doomed spaceship.”

Some giggled nervously.

“Wait …I mean that…value implies they will punish me. No , er…I am agreeing with
the long hypotenuse of a writer trying to construct both old and
young…simultaneously misreading, wholly flawed… a life-support machine can
malfunction even before it has been invented. We carefully evolved into the wrong
space limbs flailing.”

Has she put a hex on me? Thought Happy, trying to remember how to block a
psychic attack. His grandmother had taught him…move quietly toward your centre
and build yourself a straw man that can escape the curse…was that it…she had
crooned and nurtured and all the spells were fading in this dry hall of words…where
was my youth? Dust and animal hides seemed manic but charming your own
trajectory.
Taught him wholly flawed, supporting angles for the useless egg of circus.

Mary Minkowski took the opportunity, as Happy was handed water by a young
attendant…she spoke up:
 39

MARY: “Take your time to collect your thoughts Dr Down-River. I will try to outline
why I feel that your ‘trick to expose’ should go deeper than you are suggesting. The
ghost can be made real but not for the benefit of expanding the autonomous
register of difference.
The fact that time proceeds and we are trapped in the present as in an isolated
bubble; this means exactly that the imposition of any ‘cut’ will force the erroneous
conclusion of any thought-event, it will be a ‘cut’ from the ‘real’, and so the temporal
dimension is inseparable from this act of meaning-creation.
That is, I interrupt you and therefore create my own version of your utterance
because time moves forwards unstoppably and its sequence makes language and
gravity and capital possible…yes?
And so perhaps time is not the gravity you seek but the cause of gravity and this is
the thing you should address rather than dallying in the acknowledgement of
fiction, the real unstoppable force that circus should universally address is time… It
is time, Happy Down-River!
This is Death more than Risk, or Danger, or gravity, or …
This places circus in direct relation to the irrationality of practices that refute
sequentially experienced time as the Ring-Master of Meaning.
Asking circus to acknowledge that it is just a story of freedom is like taking off your
cap in the master’s house and admitting that your desire for a seat at his table
impossible. We must tear down the causes of this idyllic scene. Why instruct circus
to be decent when it can be indecent, out of control, destructive and irresponsible,
irrational and dangerously viral?

The true medium for circus tricks is time…”

HAPPY: “Master’s danger and people cast free quality admitting my desire…I …er…I
have indecent local geometry that makes it seem real…” Happy could not formulate
the words; she was some kind of magical traveller, she had thrown a spell into his
mouth “…are you a thought-event that was handed water?”

MARY: “Yes now you are getting it, Professor…You applied a critique of value to the
field of gravity, I have gone one better to show what is the next step after implying
that the field of gravity is a field of value with Newtonian impasses… well… the next
obvious step is to proceed with a critique of Newton’s gravity as a ‘force’ only in that
it is a result of a local geometry in an imperceptible curve of space time. Follow the
logic here; so the next obvious step after applying a critique of political economy to
gravity, is to apply the general relativity to the science of value that that gravity has
become…a critique of a critique might be seen as an agreement, but not here, I
intend to show what is beneath the Lacanian gravity…
…the curve of value time in which Lacan’s impasse is seen only as the resultant
travel across the surface of value-time local to accumulated masses of repeatable
difference.
So the logic tells us, if the curve is imperceptible then we have to perceive harder.
In this way we can continue to another kind of trick, which is not only the
exposure of the causes of gravity, exposing them as illusion, but exposing also the
 40

body as possessed of an implicitly biased perception thus by corollary it is perception

that is the final gravity…to trick time is to assail this …it is evolutionary… and
therefore revolutionary…to remove the perception that prevents travel to the
surface of value-time…
I have seen this surface, I have grown plants before they have been sown, reaped
answers before the formulation of a question…I have broken time’s hold on the
subject…I am no one, but I am here now…”

HAPPY: “I can black hole of it lacking self-lack theory of it true…” He was trying to
agree.

MARY: “Precisely…and then the conclusion is that if an autonomy that exists within
gravity’s mass-value, language’s linguistic value and capital’s exchange-value are all
illusions caused by the human inability to see the curve of space time, then the trick
here is an evolutionary one, the space suit of analogy that enables us to breathe in
gravity while thinking about capital, the space suit that enables us to breathe in
capital while we think about language…etc etc in a triangular exchange of hard-
wired, internal space-suit-values…this suit must be shed, like a skin that is too
small…”

‘One small skin for man, a giant skin for mankind’…so to speak…

I am asking you Happy Down-River, purveyor of tricks in capital, What could be the
evolutionary step here…?”

She leaned forward and looked directly into Happy’s eyes, as if they had known
each other over many lifetimes, as if they had always been adversaries through
many guises, constantly battling over time…

And it was here that the crowd realised that Mary Minkowski was not working for
Circusism at all, was not part of some performative exposition, as the guards
pressed forward and she edged along the row of apologists and sycophants and
dupes towards the fire escape…

She was shouting now as she moved crab-like, using ‘excuse me’ as a pincer, to
move past the seated academics as the guards tried to head her off…

“What could be the evolutionary step here, Professor Down-River? Is it not to move
towards a model of perception that sees all values over time? To see Mass-value
over time is to perceive beyond gravity. There is no mass not reduced to zero over
time…this should be the new measure of the new circus.
A circus that defines itself through a new atemporal perceptive lens is one that
invalidates all autonomous difference; and therefore all gravities.
All autonomous registers are illusions caused by moving in a straight line through
the curve of value-time.
 41

This evolution of perception is the trick. The new circus that rejects this Late
Circusism needs to see in Value-Time Professor, in which all values are world lines,
continuous objects composed geometrically of value events.

“The new circus does not define itself by gravities that it can clearly see have no
existence in the field underneath gravity.”

With that she was running, stumbling now and then but as if they were deliberate
feints, pushing deftly past a duo of guards with a sweeping, fluid gesture of the
wrist, they grabbed at her but she deflected each attempt as an atemporal martial
artist who could see them coming. This short exchange of technique placed her at
the fire door, which she clicked open, setting of a shrieking alarm…

…Minkowski was calling out to Happy something drowned by the panic of the siren..

“Take…space suit…aqualung…forward of now…diagram of value-time…circus must

leap…value-time…a trick on the trap, …Value-time, triangular exchange of any
‘cut’…Value-Time, this suit must invalidate… all Happy…Therefore all gravities
towards the fire escape… impossible to see space-suit values…goodbye for
now…what is implied is a trick that is becoming weightlessness …I wrote you a letter.
It was already in your hand before we met. “

Electronic howling was in the blood, the air; every single move was alarmed.

Happy was physically shaking; he closed his eyes, all he could see was a long yellow
vista of the plains of his youth and horses running, blood on the rocks, and the last
days of freedom setting across the fire of the sky.
She was gone and running, the security personnel clumsily scrabbling through the
door in pairs after her, like a Neoliberal Noah’s Ark, determined to establish the
post-deluvian desert of Circusism.

“Get that alarm turned off!” screamed a security voice accustomed to pitching their
voice above such sonic choreography.
The room fell to an assonance of speculation, she was clearly a crackpot, a quack, a
mountebank, a charlatan.

Happy reeled; “…could she be right?”

This method of rendering weightlessness fictional to allow it to be a ‘true but un-
provable’ demand is then only one method of dealing with gravity, of honouring the
middle moment of the trick, without reducing it to an ‘actual’ event. Certain
systems of thought seek to liberate by highlighting the fictionality of fetishised
value, but could autonomous value be bypassed altogether?
But what of making a trick on the idea that necessitates fiction itself as the only
escape, was there another underlying force that underwrote gravity’s capital so to
speak? That if circus should not value itself according to gravity then what context
 42

could be engaged with that could delimit the autonomy of gravity, language and
capital at one stroke?

Happy wanted to see where she had gone, but was practically unable to stand.
The Dean flapped around until Happy reminded him, “Had you not better go and
see about your dog?”
He made his excuses and left.

Happy could feel it happening, he could feel that his power was nearer now; behind
his academic eyelids he stretched out into the sun and shrieked a thousand curses
into the blinding talons of the eagle. Feathers were bound to his feet and hands and
he painted his body with symbols in the lizard time between human affairs. He could
go ‘dark’, he could go ‘dead’; he was borrowing this persona anyway, he could be
anyone by singing the old black songs of the nameless disguises, made from mud
and sticks and bark and vines.
He would go through the promenade and nod and smile…”I can smile, and murder
while I smile…” he would tread the idiot carpet and breathe the damp air of
imbeciles, tread and breathe, tread and breathe through this supposed university of
‘knowledge’, and he would find her.

A DIAGRAM OF VALUE TIME.

There are impasses within the field of language, places that you cannot go, and in
trying to jump up above the frothing balustrade of it you find yourself on another
ornate landing full of cornices and architraves.
As you climb out of the window this leads only to another blind stairway that takes
you to another antechamber or long hallway of fluted columns…you cannot get out
of it as the ‘getting out’ is built from the same stones as that which encloses you
…you build an exit from the stones around the entrance, and leave yourself dancing
from within to a place you cannot reach. No matter how you build from words there
is no way out even only out long field of another cannot blind in trying within the out
of leave the ornate landing places you encloses you leads only full of impasses
signifying something escapes…

“They told me that language was now worth money and I just couldn’t believe it
but it was true as my father told me that I was an idiot and everybody said ‘that’s
priceless’ …”

Happy Down-River, Dakota Basin, 1803

The gravity that I am focusing on here is that which states that meta-language is
impossible, which translates as the impossibility of meta-‘position’ in relation to the
fields in question.
 43

The implication is of a subject as the origin of a value that is comprised of a surplus

produced by the subject. But this surplus is then irrevocably committed to designate
the autonomy of a register, from which the subject is barred. This applies as a
restriction in all three fields.
This surplus or excess is seen here as an affect or a fiction that is the result of what
escapes from the tautological instance of a subject attempting to be weightless in
these gravitational fields of value.
So far various modes, both fictional and factual, have attempted to show how
either acknowledgment of fiction or a conflation of fiction with fact are the only two
outcomes available in trick one and trick two respectively.
The presence of an affective excess as a fiction to the register from which we seek
escape is problematic as this means the only tool available here cannot be grasped
within the field.

In terms of a diagramming of this ‘affect’, the existence of the word is proposed as

an example of inter-subjective ‘meaning’ that generates such an excess or surplus.
The excess is its minimal difference to how it is ordered by an empty set and how it
was prior to that differential ‘cut’. This surplus is appropriated however to be
indicative of the ordering principle within the alphabetical field, inside of which the
word is ‘torn apart’. Thus it is destroyed upon entry to that alphabetical field, but
into which it must be entered, in order to be uttered or heard at all.
Thus the word as a trick is subject to the terms that necessitate its
acknowledgement as fiction that therefore maintain its potentiality to point
externally to the autonomous field in which it must be entered to fail to ‘factually’
point anywhere except at a horizontal relation between letters.
What is the trick to be performed that can disable the autonomy of the field, not
suggest, ‘tell’ of or expose its limits but actually exceed them?

ON THE INDIFFERENCE OF CAPITAL:

Why is it necessary to get underneath the terms that are exposed in Trick One and
concealed in Trick Two? Because the attempt here is to achieve a weightlessness
that is no longer necessarily valued in subject-less registers. I am only following the
argument here in full awareness of the impossibility of freedom, and I am only
discussing the validity of the circus subject that proposes to makes tricks within the
field of gravity, within a circus structure that is embedded within semio-capital.
So, In reference to a register that is incapable of ‘feeling’ the excess produced in
the trick, and In terms of the gravitational fields; the link between gravity, language
and capital is indifference that cannot ‘see’ or ‘feel’ as ‘provable’, what is seen and
felt by the subject as ‘true’.
Specifically for circus what this means in relation to the hypothetical imposition of
‘split gravity’ is that the specific moment of weightlessness is not ‘there’ in terms of
gravity, which simply cannot register changes of this nature, as they are not
occurring in the register to which gravity defaults, which is mass-value.
 44

By default here I simply mean that bodies of mass within the gravitational field are
‘alphabetised’ according to that mass and how it deforms the fabric of space time
and that ‘weight’ is a variable instance or momentary expression of that fixed mass
that occurs in sequential time as a temporary disorder of the designated position of
those bodies of mass on the local geometry of space-time, much like the ‘meaning’
of a word in the diagram is a momentary disorder of the ‘alphabetical field’.
So, in the trick the mass remains unchanged, what has been altered is the ‘feeling’
of the circus artist of weight and the appearance of weight according to the
spectator. These appear of course as true changes but are un-provable in the
register of mass-value.

DEAF, DUMB AND BLIND PROFIT:

Let us look at one field in particular as an example of this indifference to what is

expressed in the trick. In capital you can perform tricks that yield profit for you, a
‘weightless’ mobility in financial terms perhaps (and it is my belief that the wealthy
do in fact inhabit a different experience of the ‘heaviness’ of the world), but the
register of exchange is still organised in subject-less disregard of you. It is indifferent
to the destination of profit, you may have been financially clever but capital is deaf,
dumb and blind to this and could just as easily have ruined you.
Everybody knows there is no such thing as a ‘sure thing’; capital is indifferent to
the destination of its accumulation.
In another reading Capital is indifferent, also not caring about the origin of value
that fosters that profit, and by ‘origin’ I can refer to both the real relations of
production from which are fetishized seemingly intrinsic qualities of commodity as
well as the diagrammatic form here; in which the word makes a qualitative
definition of each letter, which defines its differential capacity to ‘mean’, and which
is then installed as a quantitative unit in a horizontal alphabetical order, with no
capacity to register that origin of qualitative difference; only the capacity to repeat
it.
It is this kind of qualitative statement, within the word, that governs the formation
of value as different to another alphabetical letter-value purely horizontally. This is
what capital embodies: a crystallisation of the sum of indifferences to any subject,
either the subject that produces value or the subject that profits from it or indeed
the entrepreneurial subject that labours under a more complex set of productive
relations involving rumour, appearances, affects and states.

So Capital cannot finally register subjective, qualitative value that organises its
capacity to reproduce. It is bound to a reproductive process that it cannot
understand; it has in this sense repressed dependencies and an accompanying
cruelty. But even though capital embodies the register of final indifference to affect,
it still knows how to fake it and utilises affective means to elicit desire for that which
cannot be bought, which it coldly associates with a material good or service.

In terms of the limits of Marxist critique, we do not need the overcoming of

exploitation through a captured process wherein the subject frees himself or herself
 45

only to reproduce the enclosure of capital in whatever way they desire. This does
produce images of weightlessness but they are strippeded of their potential to
demand that which they ‘tell of’ as they are conflated immediately with genuine
freedom.
We need not conflation of pricelessness with price…but an actual way to leave the
terms of the contract.

SHEER UNADULTERATED POETRY:

Capital is heartless but attempts to take shape as a poet:

I do not see capital as a subject itself, but more of the feeling of a subject that is left
over after you have been in the presence of a subject whom you then realise has
become your friend in order to betray and profit from you. Capital is more the
memory of a caress, a kind word, an intimacy that you later realise was a lie, a front,
a sham for some ulterior motive, something inhuman; because it is precisely ulterior
to all of the humanity that capital appears to be.
It appears kind, it is free with you, it is genuinely interested in the affairs of your
heart, it understands family, work, being itself, tears and the joy of a sunset and it is
the exact ulteriority to all of this inter-subjectivity that forms the subjectivity of
capital.
The intimacy of capital to your desire is the formation of its subjectivity as pure
extimacy, as the thing you later realise is a horror that you have willingly let into
your home.
Its extimate causality cannot now be excised. And so the subject of capital is
something about your own subjectivity that you wish you could remove but which
would remove you in the process. It is the ‘you’ that was forged in the intimacy that
you now realise was not about ‘you’, but was about hitching ‘you’ to a cart full of
cash. It is this gap between the person you thought you knew and the absence of
any human face that comprises the subject of capital. A subject with no interior, an
uncompromised subject with no extimate causality of their own, no barb or inward
facing thorn that you could recognise as human at all.
It is to this I am referring when I speak of the inherent gravity of autonomy in which
the actual subject is embedded.
And it is this double bind in which pricelessness seems to be available for purchase
that installs an overall post-factism, in which the appearance of ‘peace of mind’ or
‘family’ or ‘security’ or ‘future’ is the equivalent of its realisation within capital that
utterly negates it.
The capitalist impasse is then seen here as insurmountable as the linguistic.
It is this instance of semio-capital with which I infer the collusion of circus practice
by including gravity that implies that Lacan is relevant as a compromised and partial
descriptor of the way capital utilises the subject to produce desire.
In the diagram the alphabet represents this cold disregard for words in the mouth
of the subject; it represents the register of indifference that governs the capacity for
words to be spoken at all, in the same way that the market represents the capacity
 46

for commodities to be sold back and forth, and which does not acknowledge the
subject of ‘need’ that forged those commodities.

In Neoliberalism the ‘indifference’ of the field is seen as the ideal ludic surface for
the game theory subject; an unbiased area of potentiality for freedom from
ideology that seeks to meddle in markets. The concealed double bind here is that it
is an enforced ideology as there is no exteriority to the system of capital.
You must act within a field to which there is no exterior, in this sense capital is now a
linguistic field; becoming the only method of representing value.
What is the relevance to circus here? Within an inescapable field where the
injunction is ludic, the self-interested game theory subject is fostered, which then
becomes the indifferent subject of capital; it is my concern that it is this subject who
performs tricks in the market of gravity for an exploited profit of in-genuine
freedom.

SO WHO WILL BE FIRST TO MAKE A DIAGRAM OF VALUE-TIME?

We have to imagine an alphabet that is not seen synchronically. An alphabet is not a

‘given’ in time, seen diachronically it becomes a surface of fluxing values that
reminds us that the science of value has no fixed object.

Imagine that the alphabet is a field that orders letters, in the same way a magnet
organises iron fillings into patterns.
In the same way that the gravitational field orders bodies of mass, the alphabet
orders letters.
The General Theory of Relativity states that a large enough body of mass will curve
the fabric of space-time around it, and there are diagrams that show how a spatial
net is warped around a sphere or how a black hole is so dense it creates an
inescapable well. But these diagrams are visualisations of something we simply
cannot visualise, they imply that it is space that bends around the mass but it is
space-time, a unified fabric, and in which most of the distortion occurs temporally.
Time bends much more that space around a large accumulation of mass.
The other inconceivable thing that these diagrams do not show is that any body of
mass thought of as a ‘value’ is changing over time, as it moves through space, so in
fact any object cannot be thought of as a sphere that distorts a fabric, this object
does not exist in space-time just as value does not exist as an object in value-time.
Any object is a continuous representation of itself across the surface of space-time
that warps around its continuous fluctuating presence. The most convenient way to
think of this is that the object is ‘stretched’ to occupy all of the mass-values and all
of the temporal ‘positions’ on that surface of space-time as one singular geometric
object that is composed now of indivisible value-events that cannot be derived out
as there is no synchronic expression of a moment of time in which to perform such
an operation.
The body of mass is present within the fabric that it warps no longer as a divisible
object, from the point of its beginning, where it first started to form into an
accumulation of matter all the way to its collapse of its dissolution this non-
discernable object is like the non-discernable object of the science of value. Without
 47

a synchronic moment to derive it into a certain temporally fixed ‘value’ of mass that
we can perceive, the object is simultaneously every value of mass it has ever been.
Thus it is with a diagram of value-time, in a continuous surface any differential
value of any letter that can become an autonomous perceivable position within any
alphabetical order becomes an impossibility as there is no synchronic moment to
allow the derivation of that expression.
Thus to diagram our approach to Trick Three, that seeks to get ‘underneath’ the
terms of difference that allow for the reciprocal loop to occur between the letters in
the word and the letters in the alphabet in a temporally impossible interdependency,
we need to think of the alphabet as being compromised under the same conditions
as a singular object is compromised by being diagrammed in a singular moment of
time.
The alphabet in value-time exists as a changing collection of differential values,
each one of which represents all of the possibilities for symbolising the varying
guttural expressions of human speech as well as the digital symbols that also may
evolve to represent it. Every letter can be thought of as a non-object of value
‘stretched’ across the surface of value-time in a shifting and indiscernible horizontal
relation to the letters around it. In the absence of any discernable value differential
therefore and the absence of any synchronic moment in which such an autonomous
relation could be derived the ‘gravity’ that is proposed in this analogy to operate
within the linguistic or capitalistic field ceases to be a force at all. The object of the
science of value disappears along with its capacity to form into registers both
indifferent and reciprocally dependent upon the subject’s utterance or production.

The relevance to circus is this: this is a diagram of Trick Three.

Interestingly in only one thousand years from now, due to the rapid evolution of
languages, no current day word will have survived.
Thus the alphabetical order is not wholly immutable, but has evolved through time
although this is not a study of diachronics; its effect on value is relevant as a
diachronic understanding of value over time is extrapolated here to imply a
continuous surface of Value-Time.
The diagram has already shown the mechanism of the trick as I understand it and
here it attempts to illustrate illustrate further more topologically convoluted
iterations of the trick.

This operates as the history of a non-object of autonomous value. This

alphabetical evolution has occurred from alphabets of symbols agreed upon 1900
years before Christ in Egypt, through Phoenicia 750 years later, to be modified with
vowels by the Greeks and later the Romans whose alphabet by the third century
was similar to the current English alphabet except for J, U, or V and W (V and W
were considered to be the same letter until recently).
Another script called ‘futhorc’, which was a runic language, was used in Britain by
the Anglo-Saxons from the 5th Century and had 26 characters, but by the 11th
Century had 33.
Meanwhile in the 7th Century Christian missionaries introduced the Latin alphabet
and this began to also be adopted. By 1011, a formal list of the Old English alphabet
 48

was made and included all of our present letters except J, U (or V)* and W. The
ampersand (the sign for ‘and’) and five uniquely English letters, designated ond,
wynn, thorn, eth and ash, were included.
Shortly after the Old English alphabet was first set down, the Normans invaded
(1066 AD). English as a language was relegated primarily to the low born, with the
nobility, clergy and scholars speaking and/or writing in Norman or Latin.
By the 13th century when writing in English began to become more prominent
again, the language reflected two centuries of Norman rule. The Old English letters,
thorn and eth, were replaced by “th”; wynn eventually became u-u or “w”; and the
other English letters were discarded.
With the introduction of the printing press (invented by Johann Gutenberg in 1448)
to Great Britain in the mid 15th century by William Caxton, English became more
standardized and modern English appeared. Sometime in the mid-16th century, V
and U were split into two letters, with U becoming the vowel, and V, the consonant.
In 1604, Robert Cawdrey published the first English dictionary, the Table
Alphabeticall, and about this time, J was added to create the modern English
alphabet we know today.

Within the diagram the alphabet orders its letters differentially but without any
reference to how their differential values to one another are qualitatively
determined by the word. Perhaps in looking for an expression of value-time within
which this failure to reference origin of value breaks down, the word might be
privileged with an ability to achieve a meta-position from that previous autonomy, if
that word is not similarly dissolved across this inconceivable topology.
Any word that attempts to be free of the field cannot do so as it contains elements
of that field that do not recognise any order of symbols exterior to the order of that
field. This is designated as a synchronic difference, a difference that is a function of
the moment of ‘cut’ time in which the alphabetical field is perceived to exist.

To reiterate; I am relating the instance of the word as a trick in an alphabetical field

to highlight what I feel is a succinct description of the physicality as it is transposed
into other non-physical fields of language and capital, and part of a general
homological turn that seeks to see the three fields in this research as primarily fields
of value, and the trick as a tool for reconfiguring those values. So as the diagram
itself requires an understanding of how I see the relation between words and letters
in terms of circus physicality it is also necessary to address the origins of the
alphabet in time.
This is of course the point of recounting a potted history of the English alphabet; it
is to acknowledge that it is only fixed in this current cultural moment, that is it is
acknowledged as diachronically fluid (changing over time) but synchronically fixed
(static in the moment of use).
The point here is that a perception rooted in this synchronic tendency allows the
formation of the object of the science of value, which I am proposing in value-time is
not possible
 49

The alphabetical terms must necessarily exist before the word in order for the words
to allow the formation of a differential order of letters, from which the words
themselves are formed; but it is these words that give the differentiating capability
of those letters that enable such a differential order to exist that precedes word
formation.
The central problem is a purely temporal tautology, because the word is prior to
the thing that comes before it. The perception of only bidirectional sequential time
causes the temporal tautology. It is as if this limited perception has internalised the
act of concealment of the curve of value-time and therefore caused a knot within
the word whereby every desire within it to form itself is simultaneously the cause
and telos of lack.

It is expressed as an impossible temporal conundrum once it becomes not possible

to see the local geometry in which meta and infra positions within the field
necessarily precede each other in time simultaneously.
So time is the ‘thing’; time is the medium in which trick three might be possible.
The point of trick three can be thought of as ‘how do we get rid of the ‘force’ of
gravity?’ It ceases to be a ‘force’ when it can be seen as the travel of one body of
mass across the local curved geometry of space-time to a currently convergent
point formed as this geometry curves around a larger accumulation of mass. So trick
three is this attempt to fictionalise such a curved geometry.
For the purposes of unification in reference to this diagram, gravity is thought of as
just another field with split registers of weight and mass-value.

Seen diachronically, the alphabet as we see in the historical account above is

shifting, with the differential relations between letters remaining uncertain.
In imagining the alphabetical field in the same mode as the three fields of study, as
a field of differential value, it is hoped that this imaginary diagram will serve to
explain value-time as it relates to those three fields.
If the cause of gravity is revealed as the effect of travel across a local geometry
rather than an immutable ‘force’ then the unification of time and value into one
fabric follows the model of a general relativity. What is imagined is an alphabet, in
which any letter can be any other letter; just as what is imagined in general relativity
is the experience of space and time as a unified fabric, in which the ‘difference’
between spaces and between times is less clear. Spatial and temporal difference
breaks down in conceiving of this fabric, as does mass, linguistic and exchange
value’s capacity to organise ‘themselves’ differentially.

Eventually all letters will occupy every space in differential relation to all other
letters that likewise occupy every space.

AS stated this flux of differential value to another mass might also be said of any
gravitational force as all bodies of mass are eroding, expanding, reducing, and
spinning to collapse in varying degree over time. And these changing masses are
also complicit in the changing forces of gravity that surround them, as they warp the
fabric of space-time in varying degree. This mutability of distortion of the field of
space-time can be translated to that of value time by thinking of the alphabet as an
 50

accumulated mass of repeatable difference; and just as the continued use of the
repeatable difference of language also affects its fixity within the temporal field, so
the continuing mass of a body exerts a continuing distortion upon the fabric of
space-time, but only as long as it endures as a mass that repeats itself temporally.
This mix of gravity and language and time is deliberate and although it relies here
on wordplay, this is perhaps also the point; that language and gravity both bend
through time, according to how they are accumulated around a ‘mass’.
Each letter extends in all possible directions in all possible shapes.

But what, in diagrammatical terms, is the ‘mass’ around which the local geometry of
value-time is ‘curved’.

The mass in this diagram is simply the alphabet itself, which represents the over-
arching possibility for a differential order to occur. An alphabet is an accumulation
of repeatable difference, that in itself refers to nothing, but sets up the possibility
for reference to occur from a pool of symbols organised on the established
differential terms. The alphabet is an empty-set, a mass of the possibility for
difference to become contradictorily repeatable, around which its origin of
difference then is beholden to orbit in a self preceding state of tautology. It
represents the possibility for the terms of representation; in Lacanian terms it is
perhaps a master signifier.
The reciprocal loop that circulates between word-letter and alphabetised-letter is
the accumulation of a difference that repeats, like mass going critical, or a star
 51

imploding from its own weight. Forces in the word that seeks to define the quality of
difference, and forces in the alphabet that seek to define the quantity of repetition
jar and refer to each other to create a truth that can be felt as true in the word but
cannot be reasoned as provable in the alphabet; around this event value-time
curves.

This diagram is offered as an explanation of how if the nature of the local landscape
is unknown it can imply forces that are not there. Letters move to refer to each
other across the curved surface that appears to be a flat plain. This referral is taken
to be a differential ordering ‘force that exists between the letters, but is in fact only
an effect of the unseen geometry of the sphere upon which they are moving.
This can equally be thought of as a ‘force’ that ‘pulls’ letters to their correct place in
the alphabet. This ‘force’ is simply the effect of the letter in the word traversing a
surface that is ‘deformed’ around the accumulated repeatable difference of itself,
upon which that ‘deformation’ means it has to pass that accumulated point.
 52

THE CURVE IS CAUSED BY A MASS OF ACCUMULATED REPEATABLE

DIFFERENCE THAT IS BENDING THE SURROUNDING VALUE TIME

The sequentiality of time that obscures the fabric of value-time means that
comprehension of language works, language can function in a sequentiality of time,
but the price is that it just cannot allow the subject to become whole, to get at what
is lacking, the extimate causality causes lack every time the missing is approached
through signification, because that signification can only draw what is extimate to
the subject; both without as a condition of within, an impossibility of set theory.

This presence and necessity of the reciprocality between a mass of accumulated

repeatable difference (such as an alphabet) and a position that is supposedly
different to it means that although this alphabet facilitates the conveyance of
meaning, the very thing that allows the words to ‘mean’ is torn apart within it, even
though they supply the possibility for this meaning. The words supply quality to the
incompatible register that stores them ‘super-positionally’ as incompatible
instances of singular difference that can be repeated multiple times. The
concealment of incompatability of registers is here not only inherent but it is vital to
the continuation of communication that does not have the subject as its primary
concern. Thus the word-trick that fails to acknowledge and expose its fiction here
only expands the field that is indifferent to it.
 53

Within this diagram the accelerated loop between word and letter; this reciprocality
creates a ‘mass’ of accumulated letters that are ‘different’ but are repeatable. This
status as repeatable difference is leant to every letter by the empty set, the master
signifier, of the alphabet itself that establishes the conditions by which differences
can relate autonomously and horizontally. The letters repeat as the instance of their
own parthenogenic production of their quality of difference but without the need
for a subject.
Once difference is established subject-less-ness of subjects within fields of value is
unavoidable and must therefore be acknowledged.
In gravitational terms the accelerated loop between trick and gravity, in which a
similar reciprocality ensures that the trick ‘about’ a position outside of gravity
contains only elements ‘of’ a position within gravity.
The field here is caused by the subject’s myopic establishment of a necessary
synchronic instance of an order of bodies of mass ensuring that gravity appears as a
‘force’.
This conflation of incompatible parameters, between difference and repetition
sets up a false equivalence of value that then allows difference to seem to be the
intrinsic quality of something that does not refer to the subject but only to anther
instance of repeatable difference.
Here I am trying to reason what might lie beneath this seemingly inescapable
impasse.

This pool of letters in the alphabet can be thought of as a series of bodies of mass
ordered according to the parameters of difference within the field.

TECHNIQUE LETTERS:
But also If we think of the pool of techniques ‘of’ gravity that go towards the
‘spelling’ of a trick, as a pool of letters ‘of’ an alphabet. Then similarly it might be
inferred that these techniques ‘of’ gravity, (essential components as they are to the
subject’s statement in the trick ‘about’ a position outside gravity) repeat as an
instance of their own parthenogenic production of their quality of difference to each
other but without the need to refer to the trick-making subject. They are
statements of autonomous ‘laws’ within gravity, such as swing, momentum,
rhythm, force, balance etc. at which the subject does not need to be present. These
dynamic elements ‘of’ gravity do not need the subject; they exist in an ‘alphabet of’
their own, from which the subject can ‘speak’ a trick. The same loop applies; no trick
without the elements and vice versa.
Whichever way we iterate this analogy, once difference is established the subject-
less-ness of subjects within a field of value is unavoidable and must therefore be
acknowledged.

The ‘mass’ around which value –time curves is the accumulated repeatable
difference that is leant to the letters by the master signifier of the alphabet. The
mass is caused from this vortex, this looped repeating difference between word and
 54

letter…its accelerates and bends value time, thus causing the letters to travel
towards their established differential position of value in the alphabet.

In this scenario the idea of a force having its origins in unseen phenomena is here
diagrammed as two letters seemingly being ‘pulled’ closer because they are in a
seemingly ‘inertial’ frame, that is a frame in which they believe there are no external
forces acting. Their divergence is caused by their unseen trajectory towards a planet
below. Again this is just another way to visualise the ‘force’ of one thing seeming to
refer to another through an unseen scenario.

What this does to this text that you are reading is ensures that each letter within it is
subject to an immense alphabetical gravity that draws each letter back to its
meaningless and incommunicable position that lies at the heart of all language. My
attempt here is to maintain these words as tricks that might endure if only we could
glimpse the continuous surface of continuous value-time.
Remember that the Trick Three is a trick on the trick to conceal, the ultimate
iteration of which is the trick of a perception that conceals the curved and
tautological ground of space-time…thus concealing the un-provability of gravity;
thus making gravity only ‘true’. In the tautological ground of human perception
gravity itself is concealed as being an example of that which is ‘true but unprovable’.
Realising we are moving in a straight line through the curve of space time shows
 55

that it is unprovable as a ‘force’, and is in fact only caused by our itinerancy across a
landscape distorted by the institutions of language and capital.

NOT AS YOU NOW KNOW NOT NOTHING

The alphabet can be considered fixed for the ‘now’, and this synchronic fixing, a ‘cut’
from the diachronic surface of value-time is responsible for the autonomous
difference that then acts as a mass to distort the surface of value time in the ‘now’,
thus this ‘now’ distortion presents us with the apparent ‘force’ of gravity.
This is all, of course, analogical and imagines the synchronic concealment of the
curve as a field of gravity that wants to return each letter to its rightful place. This is
a diagram in which the idea of performing a trick that actually does create a position
immanent to the field is entertained theoretically.
Here the ‘Newtonian’ effects of an ‘alphabetical gravity’ are understood through
recourse to the proposal of an underlying immanent plane of value time, the local
geometry of which that accounts for the behaviour of the word in the alphabetical
fields, and the trajectory of letters within that word as they are torn back to their
positions in a subject-less incomprehensibility that is the indifferent heart of semio-
capitalistic gravity.

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE:

So if we pursue the idea that there is a difference between the proposed value-time
(across the surface of which ‘gravities’ inherent in value seem to break down) and
post-factism (that conceals the incompatibility between registers of value to make it
appear that the ‘gravities’ inherent in value have broken down) we can see that it is
as subtle as a ‘play-bite’.

One seeks to fictionalise a space ontologically underneath or immanent to

difference, while the other seeks to show that difference can become repeatable
with no contradiction.
One is a fiction of something ontologically prior to difference and so the production
of difference is possible out of this plane, the other is the insistence that difference
can be repeated in mass production that you are then ‘free’ to repeat.
One seeks to show that the impasse of the impossibility of meta-position caused
by the subject-less nature of the register can be delimited, the other seeks to show
that the subject can be represented within the subject-less register without
contradiction or invalidation.

There is a correlation between logic and maths

 56

In the sense that that two minuses equal a plus, this is the same as a double
negative; as saying “don’t not sit down” which means “sit down…if you are smart
enough to know what’s really going on.”

In value time something that changes state cannot be correlated according to this
schema of logic…in that if it has changed from a plus to a minus state over time,
then it exists in a superposition of both those states as an object of non-specific value
in value-time. This is also the ‘quantum’ situation of all things in space-time, in that
the super-positioning of particles can be thought of to be explained by this a-
temporality. In this continuum, the difference between one and zero is not ‘yet’
derived out onto difference. As if there was such a thing a ‘before’ time. It is as hard
to think of ‘before’ difference, as it is impossible to think of as a meta-position to
capitalism.

So I acknowledge that Value-Time is a Fiction that is proposed by Trick Three. Or

what is a circus without knots?

A logic that is determined as in a propositional calculus by typographic

representations of on/off states that is plus or minus, yes or no, up or down can be
thought of as a chain of events; that is, an ‘on event’ followed by ‘off event’, which
occur over time. The process can continue to house any fantasy but is indifferent to
the incongruity between fantasies as all are negated in the subject-less-ness of
validation. The fact that there is no one present to validate is the only validation on
offer. No one cares.
In Value Time however a series of changes in value-state becomes a long world
line, a geometric object of ‘not-yet-value’ that is continuous and composed of
temporal ‘on’ and ‘off’ non-events, but which form one non-object. Whilst this
naked flux may be equally uncaring, weightlessness facilitated here is just as much
for the subject as for anything else, even though the subject may not be able to
formulate in this incomprehensible fragmentation of logic. Value-Time is just as
much for the non-subject as it is for the non-object, which is why it is so hard to form
a sentence. This is the undifferentiated immanence that exists before the difference
between one and zero.
What is implied here is that there is no metaphysics only an undifferentiated non-
object that is composed of fluid change that is both/and.
What is presented is a circus object that is hard to handle, a cross between a Tiger
and a Lion is a Liar.

In Value-time, although a non-object can be said to be meta-positional to

difference, it is only meta-positional to the impasse that casts meta-positionality as
the only way out; in this sense perhaps it is petit non-object a to meta-language.
So ironically, as two negatives make a positive, so two ‘meta’s’ make an
immanence. Value-time is complex because it is meta to ‘meta’, and so therefore in
being the same kind of meta-position it encircles its difference to itself in being the
definition of that meta-meta as immanence.
 57

In this sense it is the same fiction that encircles its difference to the fictionality that
is demanded of meta-positions by autonomous difference. Meta to meta, different
to difference…tricky.

So it is weightless in the necessity for weightlessness to be fictional, whilst still being

a fiction of this inconceivable position; and so exists as fiction to our current dualistic
registers, that function according to differential registers.

Value-time is fictional; in that there is no system of logic that can accommodate the
continuous object over space time just as there is no logic that can accommodate a
non-object of continuously changing value over value-time…this is a continuity, a
‘realisation’ of the diachronic view that sees value over time (either linguistic or
exchange), an extrapolation into value-time…taking the long view, (as in ‘the long
riders’)
It is the same difference to difference in which the impossibility of any subject at
all is the only weightlessness available.
It might not be possible to say I, but it might not be important if you say I or not.

TIME IS THE MEDIUM IN WHICH TRICK THREE MIGHT BE POSSIBLE.

In that trick three is the acknowledgement of a fiction that precedes the telling of
itself, in that it is comprised of real parts that precede its composition as a fiction
that precedes the parts of which it is composed. In this temporal loop fiction is an
affect that happens before the elements of which it is composed can be said to
exist.

The fiction here is that excess to the registerable ‘real’ is possible in using the same
acknowledgement of impossibility to encircle the difference of that impossibility to
itself.
No one is going to pay money to see that, as all ticket prices are rendered
simultaneously priceless and worthless in the continuous fabric of value-time.
How do you hear the applause for Trick Three is perhaps the same question as
‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’

Trick one calls out for trick three, which is the encircling of its difference to the
necessity to acknowledge weightlessness as fiction by precisely the same ‘telling’ of
potentiality as in trick one.
This is done for the subject, to suggest that agency outside of a system is possible.

Trick two forestalls the impossibility of the subject’s fulfilment in a subject less
register of value by concealing the incompatibility of meta-statement and infra-
statement and the ensuing tautology that cannot be registered within that
subjectless register as anything other than a non-event, an absence or lack.
This is done for the expansion of the subject-less register, the concealment of the
tautology of which is the basis of that expansion of the enclosing system.
 58

So these two forms are similar but they are for different purposes, and it is
interesting here to note that Trick Two seems about preserving a system, and Trick
three about preserving subjective agency, (and in this regard it may seem that both
could take on a neoliberal tone)
But what is falsely proposed in the tautological ground of trick two is that post-
ideological subjective agency is not at odds with the maintenance of ideological
order.
Whereas in reference to a thinking circus, it is important to note that it is a
meditation on how to expose the limits of a system to another subject; this is the
practice here, and these attempts to transpose the trick, its central mechanism, into
these fields of value is an attempt to bring this mechanism into a mode of circus
thinking in which the trick becomes a tool for the reconfiguring of value in any field.

So in terms of a circus perspective here, which is long overdue perhaps in this

theoretical soup, yes the tone of either value-time as a conceptualising of the
breaking of gravity, and the awareness of its proximity to a post-fact ‘Circusism’ that
seems to suggest that gravity can be broken whenever you feel like it and that
freedom is ‘here now’ is to be acknowledged.
But for me what is clear here is that the continuing operation of trick like
mechanisms upon systems that claim to make you free should be part of the circus
thinking proposed here, rather than a tacit accompaniment with the appearance of
freedom being equal to the genuine article.
I am aware freedom may be theoretically impossible without total dissolution of
the subject that could perceive it as a condition of difference from restriction, but it
is also clear to me that the current political situation needs a strong theoretical
approach and the task here is to harness the practice to the development of just such
a rigorous theory of tautology that might be a position from which to work with,
devise and perform circus that could ‘speak itself to power’.
We cannot breathe…we have to propose a way out of here

THE SPACE SUIT CANNOT BREATHE:

I present here the idea of analogy as a technology. As a technology that prevents

contact rather than as a tool that enables mobility. Although my research relies on
analogy, and in fact this is shown by my using the analogy of the space suit to show
how analogy is a technology that prevents genuine encounter.
This is of course a knot in the suit itself; I am inside a suit that represents my
binding inside of representation. This is the knot here with Value-Time, how to be
different to difference, and how to remove the analogy of an analogy, to be in
space, in weightlessness, for ‘real’. Am I unsuitable?
 59

The encounter produces concept. Here this ‘encounter’ is taken to be the point
where the body evolves and adapts to ‘suit’ the conditions of the area into which it is
attempting to travel, rather than remaining as a hermetically sealed astronaut.
In circus this becomes perhaps the evolution of a rope-body or a pole-body or a
hoop-body. You change to meet the object; a process in which the technique is no
longer thought of as a mastery, a colonisation of these materials by a body suited up
to master them like an astronaut, but as an ‘alongsideness’ with the equipment,
operated by a body that has as much rope-ness as body-ness.
The gloved hand is no good here; you simply cannot grip except as someone who
is not there. In the circus it is necessary going forward to take off the space suit of
analogy. Even as it is necessary to use an analogy to demonstrate how useless
analogy is; which only forms an address of the complexity of performing a trick on
the trick itself. I am play-biting, using difference to encircle similarity, but what
represents representation must be taken off in order to be with the object.
The idea of using something with a slightly different emphasis in pressure so that
the something does something it simply cannot do. This is the complexity of the
play-bite caught up in the complexity of analogy, an animal in a space suit trying to
bite something it cannot touch.
The analogy of the space suit as analogy is the same but utilised at a subtle pressure
difference of emphasis so that it encircles something that is different to the
necessity for analogy; that suggests the evolution of thought to no longer need the
technology of space suit, of analogy, or of fiction to be able to travel outside the
safety of language.
The analogy of the space suit is a loophole, an analogy that is the same
encirclement of difference to itself.

This may be quixotic to be so alienated by analogy from the world of differences

that I need an analogy of an analogy to be able to imagine a space outside of
difference; but this fictional capacity to see a giant in a windmill, an ocean in a
puddle does form part of the loophole I am discussing. Is it possible to perform
quixotic misconception deliberately perhaps as different to representation. Is there
something where the object comes alive that is different to representation? So I can
touch it without my suit on?
As a subtle difference in pressure to a quixotic misconception, a misreading that is
the same as wrongness but encircles its difference from wrongness. This kind of
misreading is not incorrect it is more complex than that: it is ‘uncorrect’, the subtle
difference to being wrong that is encircled by error.
The question is for Trick Three, where an attempt is made to get underneath the
gravity of representation so the not-yet-value of the circus object can be alongside
your own undecided value.
This UNCORRECTNESS, this loophole, has to acknowledge the fine line between
itself and post-factism.
The subtle difference here is between trick one and trick two. Within systems of
value the reciprocal conflation and disparity between which register follows which
that creates tautology can be exposed or concealed.
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It is whether the uncorrectness of fictionalising your way out is acknowledged or

not that delineates this fine line between an honest uncorrectness and a deceptive
post-factism.
Inside the suit is where all things can become true; their unprovability is hidden, as
is the invalidation of their qualities as they are registered in a purely quantitative
field. Inside the suit you can go anywhere you desire, but only as a gloved hand.

This is a trick, the object of my practice to find a loophole. The space suit has a
hole in it somewhere, I am leaking the oxygen of language.

LINK TO SPACE SUIT:

This is a speculation of how to activate a weightlessness not compromised by its
need to be just fiction.
Value-time is a speculation here; something we cannot ever perceive as the solution
to something of which we cannot ever get outside. But let us follow the idea at
least. This means we are inside a perception, a technology, a technique, a way of
seeing that we cannot remove.
The unseen nature of the proposed curve amounts to seeing this perceptive ‘rig’
as a kind of concealment of the real conditions, this technique of looking is a
tautological ground.
As a circus artist I am still attempting to perform a Trick Number Three here, trying
to float like an astronaut out of reach of that which defines the circus. Ladies and
gentlemen, I will now attempt to stand outside of my own eyes, and for this trick I
will have to wear something that makes me more than naked.
The human perceptual ‘lens’ causes the derivation of two registers of value from
one immanent plane of value-time. This lens has a way of ‘writing’ this unified fabric
as two split and incompatible registers of value, and there is an ensuing tautology,
one that the lens has a tendency to conceal, thus making perception itself a lens
that needs to be removed if Trick Three is to be performed.
This lens is itself a kind of tautological ground that operates Trick Two, the trick to
conceal the fact that the desiring subject embedded within split registers of value is
compromised by an inevitability of lack that attends the equally unavoidable
tendency to desire.
Thus in order to take up the position of the astronaut in genuine weightlessness,
human perception is a space suit that needs to be removed. This again is only an
analogy for the ability to directly experience a meta-positionality to the impasses
that attend meta-positionality (meta-to-meta-statement); a position that perhaps
dissolves the subject that might experience it. In this regard also we are back in the
terms of Trick One, in which the only recourse to maintain a viable meta-position is
to acknowledge its impossibility.
The knot here is that there is just no way of speaking it undone because the
language is knotted, and to speak a meta-to-meta-statement is the undoing of the
one who speaks it; it is perhaps again psychotic utterance as a form of space travel.

But we are not going ‘mad’ quite yet. The reason for this attempt to reach what is
imminent to the terms of tricks one and two is the propensity for capture of trick
one. But it is also to acknowledge that exposure of limits by fictionalising a space
 61

outside of those limits is only the first step. As meta-positionality is clearly

acknowledged in this fictionality as impossible under the current terms, trick three is
always to investigate the implication of another space ‘immanent’ to the limits of
this system.

Trick One calls for Trick Three against Trick Two:

Here the argument is that gravity and the human terms through which it is
experienced from within the space suit are one and the same; that the ‘force’ of
gravity is a function of viewing things on human terms. So the gravity here is human
perception, and its inability to see clearly what causally underlies three dimensional
space and sequential time.
In this case the space suit is a lie, that makes you think you went to the moon, that
makes you think that your weightlessness is real, but you are still within a suit full of
hot air. The suit is not ‘inflated’, it is ‘conflated’ with truth, and you breathe a mix of
incompatible registers to stay alive.
But this is only an analogy.

In asking circus to value its weightlessness not in terms of gravity, I am provoking,

of course, but also asking circus to privilege its fictional power, to privilege the
power of a fictional meta-position to haunt gravity.
We can propose other futures with a trick.
But rather than saying that this is the full stop; that acknowledging fiction of
weightlessness is enough, I am suggesting that circus should engage this fictional
power and use it to imagine tricks in any field, to imagine getting beneath the
causes of binding autonomous registers altogether.
Get naked and leave earth. If it is possible to do so in light of the fact that getting
naked involves suiting up.

SPACE SUIT AS A TAUTOLOGICAL GROUND MACHINE:

A space suit that you believe is the same as your skin, in which you believe you have
really experienced deep space, is the concealment of incompatibility of meta-
position and infra position; which is trick two. In that to believe that your visit to
space is genuinely meta-positional to the terms that you clearly bring along with
you in the suit. The suit is the embodiment of the terms that are the extimate cause
of the impossibility of such a meta position. The space suit is proof you are not
there.
This is what Burroughs meant when he described the fish looking up at the land
and planning to visit from within his portable aquarium.
We bring with us into value-time the lens that prevents us from experiencing it, like
a willing traveller that continually gripes of homesickness. It is hell to be on tour with
those that miss their families.
This is the same to me as a circus artist bringing with them into weightlessness the
terms of gravity that make that weightlessness impossible and yet still need to think
of it as genuine freedom.
This is a tautological ground in which the concealment of the fundamental
incompatibility of registers and positions is total.
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The attempt here is to get underneath these terms, to see the suit as ‘unsuitable’
and take it off.
Space-time that is immanent to the current space where circus experiences itself,
is something out of reach, untouchable in the human suit, just as untouchable as
deep space is from within the space suit
In not wearing the suit of human perception I propose a return to general relativity
as a model of what such a perception fetishizes as intrinsic to the world.

And so fictionalising value-time is something that is activated by the Third Trick:

an attempt to get ‘underneath’ the terms. This configuration is implied by the first,
but avoided or concealed in the second. The third trick is a fictionalising of being
‘unsuitable’ for the spacesuit, which is clearly ‘unsuitable’ for you.
I am telling you to take your clothes off so you can think outside your body.

HOW TO DIAGRAM THE FICTION THAT IS DIFFERENT TO ITSELF?

What is complex here is that Trick Three also has to ‘fictionalise’ what this
immanence might be, to be weightless in a way that gravity has never thought of.
The attempt here is still formed as the acknowledged, excessive, affective
conveyance, which is this fiction; and utilises this to further fictionalise immanence
to the necessity for fiction.
But not immanence to the difference between fiction and fact that is just cashing
in on that trip to the moon you made in 1969 by selling cornflakes.
Trick Three playfully diagrams something that does not just ‘tell’ of difference to
fiction but in the same fictional form, advertising nothing.
What is advertised in this same difference is an immanent plane of value-time,
where the terms by which autonomy of register are determined do no longer apply,
or rather do not yet apply. They are not yet in effect as the plane is as of yet
undifferentiated. You can enjoy unlimited affect in the comfort of your own home.
This is all managed by a temporal issue, in that pre-difference is also before the
separation of value and time into synchronic value-events in a sequential passage of
time, payable in easy monthly instalments.
This is simply the process of general relativity that fictionalises space-time applied
to fields of value, available now.
I am not selling you same difference, as there is no way you can afford it.
The space suit is analogical to an analogy if we think of analogy as a way of remotely
tinkering in a distant process. In this regard I am tinkering in the idea of space-time
that is too remote for me to attend without ‘wearing’ this analogy. Within this
analogy of an analogy a being brings a technology with them in order that they may
virtually experience something that it is impossible for them to experience. That is,
there is no leaving the field of gravity without an aqua-lung, a pressure suit, and a
heating element. The human animal is inscribed into the technology that they
utilise to meet what is supposedly something out of their human experience. In this
sense we have not been to the moon yet. Not really. Is this transposition?
We cannot get to value-time without the same suit we fictionalise taking off to get
there. The process is an infinite undressing, a Mobius striptease, as we need a suit to
 63

fictionalise getting to the position of nakedness from which direct experience of

value-time is possible. Hence we need to wear the suit to get undressed.
Its removal is problematic.
The proposed Mobius Striptease is that in which the fictionalising of removing the
suit is still within the same terms of difference and hard-wired value of human
perception that is witnessed and preserved by the suit itself.
As stated this striptease is Mobius as it undresses the same process as a striptease
but in the same way as it is different to it. It is a striptease that is the same as
remaining fully suited but which suited-ness encircles its difference to the suited-
ness that it denotes.
In this fiction we are ‘told’ that the necessity for fiction is over.

I have intimated that the space suit is ‘linguistic’, that it is analogical, this is only the
first acknowledgment; the next is to see the suit as unsuitable. The supposed
pricelessness of the spacesuit is as fictional to space travel as weightlessness is to
gravity.
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DIAGRAM OF A SPACE SUIT:

But then as regards the DIAGRAM; how is it possible to show that this fiction of
‘Value-Time’ encircles difference to difference but within the same fictional terms
necessitated by difference.
The diagram itself has to be acknowledged as just a diagram for this to be clear. So
the edges of the diagram itself have to be included as a word that floats above the
same autonomous register to which it fictionalises its immanence.

Interestingly ‘outside the box’ is the phrase most used in English journalism, which is
an example of a space suit in which you think you of yourself as naked. (At the current
time of writing)
The question is how to think outside the idea of the possibility for a box to exist.
I am referring to the removal of the space suit here as the logical conclusion of
circus practice that claims that its goal is the production of genuine freedom from
gravity, and in acknowledgement of the fact that if by some miracle we survive the
current ecological crisis we will eventually have to leave this planet anyway as in six
hundred million years it will be incapable of sustaining any form of life. I know this is
long term, but I am just trying to be practical, darling.
“Oh be quiet, in one thousand years all your words will be obsolete anyhoo…”

So, what is the implication of a space suit? In that I have talked about the
astronaut as a figure that travels outside of gravity, and the image of weightlessness
is clear in this regard, but what I am implying here is a relation to looking for another
kind of trick?
As if there could be something in the back pocket of nakedness.
There have been exposed here certain critiques of circus based on the fact that
weightlessness seems increasingly to be measured according to gravity, and what I
mean by this is to expose the vacuous appeal of those that pretend to apprehend a
vacuum to realise their emptiness as an individual; they are only deepening their
shallowness; and their weightlessness is performed inside a suit. It becomes
possible to think of these human terms that we carry with us inside the space suit as
the same as the terms of gravity that we carry with us as we mistakenly think of
weightlessness as freedom. We never went there at all.

This is merely a provocation, but it raises an important question for the astronaut;
if an astronaut can experience weightlessness, but in order to do so needs to be
contained within a life support system then what has been experienced or
overcome? What is examined here are the terms that invalidate weightlessness that
we unavoidably bring with us into that weightless moment, and the first question of
what lies underneath these terms.
The second question is then the impossibility of the subject to get to these terms
locked as they are within a certain perceptual mode. The spacesuit is there because
the human animal needs to breathe, and so the human need is still the barrier to
actually being in space conditions. Weightlessness is still experienced in terms of the
human animal that is subject to gravity.
 65

What is proposed here is that the Newtonian physics in which gravity is a ‘real’
force are hard wired into human perception, just as the conditions of earth;
temperature, atmosphere, humidity etc. are hard wired into the space suit.
This is the same argument that regards Trick One, a Marxist Critique of Gravity, as
only the first step.
This is perhaps the same as saying that a critique that haunts is one thing, but, in
awareness that a ghost must remain unsolidified, how is it possible to proceed to
the next step;
If we think of a ghost as a fiction that can necessarily haunt us from that fictional
position. Perhaps it is possible to conjure the ghost as a real presence without ‘filling
it in’ so that its capacity to haunt is not invalidated. We have to be allow our own
ghost to precede us not come after as a fiction of what might have been.
Think of the trick on this perception, which is rooted in three dimensions and
sequential time, as a trick performed in the medium of non-sequential time.

In Value-Time similarly the space suit of analogy is off precisely because as time is
bidirectional and non-sequential the extrapolated diachronic view makes
meaningless the fixity of value.
Thus mass-value, linguistic-value and exchange-value can no longer form an
irreducible autonomy that prevents a meta-position in relation to horizontal value,
in which the hermetic seal around any meta-position is composed of extimate
elements from that horizontal differential order.

In many ways it is only fitting that each time a circus artist falls back down to earth
they are merely itinerant across the surface of a local geometry that they cannot
see. Circus artists may be some of the most blindly mobile subjects across this
unseen surface as they push and pull against gravity that is a side-effect of their
unseen myopia.
The myopia is unseen, in that it represents an unknown knowledge, a fetishizing of
the forces we feel as intrinsic to the Newtonian world in which we are fixed. In this
way a trick in value-time is perhaps a more thorough Marxist critique of Gravity, one
that sees beyond the study of origin of value to the hard-wired origin of it in value-
time, through which the alienating autonomy of exchange is finally delimited.
In this sense Marx can be taken to be the valid critique of Trick One, that exposes
limits, and which suggests the radical steps to remove the terms by which those
limits are installed as total.
A real Marxist critique of gravity is one which does not stay in the differential terms
of autonomous value; so that, as stated, such a critique does to the Lacanian
impasse what Relativity does to Newtonian physics.

Once the prevailing tautological conditions, not just within capital, but within all
fields of value have been exposed, which therefore highlights the limits therein, it
can be seen that the condition of agency can only be experienced through terms
that are rooted within that field that do not then recognise that agency as valid or
real.
The non-sequence is inaccessible, and we need it before now.
 66

If capital is going to suit up to get into language, then we need to get naked and go
into space…right fucking now. This is an important circus question as it becomes
heavier and heavier to reference freedom without referencing semio-capital’s
enablement and therefore enclosure of it.
The subject is locked inside their agency as if they are locked within a space suit
that is still predicated on the prevailing terms of the field that forbids agency.
The subject is ‘of’ the discourse of gravity attempting to make statements ‘about’
gravity; so restricted to mobility that is dependent on an apparatus that can only
acknowledge the insurmountability of the terms ‘of’ gravity.
The space suit can only acknowledge the terms ’of’ earth and is the only method
that the human animal can enter space to make a statement ‘about’ the limits of
that earthly domain. You bring the terms of being back on earth with you when you
enter space. Ask Sandra Bullock in the film ‘Gravity’, I am sure she will sell you some
cornflakes from back home.
Take a deep breath, Sandra, we are not buying what you are selling.

The space suit acknowledges that space conditions are unreachable even as you
claim to reach those conditions; this means space travel and its weightlessness are
still a fiction told by a suit. Celine designs space suits now: he takes the clean air of
earth and passes it through the filtration unit of the space suit so it comes out
poison that tastes of home.
Space conditions can only be experienced through the fiction of space travel that
is enabled by the suit itself, which is a crystallisation of those terms that prevent the
direct experience of travel outside of a gloved hand.
The suit is the extimate presence of the impossibility of a meta-position that the
space-travelling subject carries with them. The space suit is an extimacy composed
of the insurmountable terms of space worn as an external protection from them.
The suit is a way of ‘coping’ with the uninhabitable conditions that then allows a
travel that can never be realised as it includes the extimate cause of its impossibility.

YOUR TICKET IS INVALID:

The space suit here stands for an inability to travel. As such, you are operating
remotely even though you are there; it is distance that arrives. It is both not-there, it
is repeating your difference to the space while seemingly making you the same as
something that is there.
You are simultaneously both inside the set of things that cannot be present and
inside the set of things that are present; you in your space suit are a conflation of
registers; in this sense whether you acknowledge that you are touching space
through a gloved hand or not is the fine line between trick one and trick two…

This is the problem of Trick Three, wearing a suit of nakedness.

The suit ensures the impossibility of evolution to the new conditions just as a fish in
an aquarium can never learn to breathe.
 67

This acknowledges that the suit is a set of terms, in which we are still enclosed, and
that acknowledging our journey as a fiction is only the first stage of the larger
required journey.
The unacknowledged terms that the suit imposes on being there are a tautological
ground, in which actually ‘being there’ is falsely equated with its fiction.
So if the space suit is a tautological ground that conceals itself, it is trick two; which
makes it possible to believe you have been to the moon…in this sense it is
representative of all forms of virtualising technology.

This kind of travel is similar to the Virtual Reality Market, which is a huge industry
that fabricates unreal spaces to which you can travel. Think of the tens of thousands
of young men lost in the deep space of VR gaming; it is a fine line for those, who
daily adventure in the depths of space, but who have not even left the house.
While I admire Neil Armstrong my argument is that just as the space suit prevents
you from experiencing the moon in anything but human terms. The tautological
ground, as it operates in the fields of gravity, Language and Capital, similarly
proposes that you can value weightlessness in terms of gravity, value meta-
language In terms of language and value pricelessness in terms of capital.

The inability to see Value -Time causes the inexorable gravity of representation
within which we can only signify to another signifier,
falling through language to the accumulated mass of its heart around which
linguistic value curves invisibly.
This heart is a master signifier; its density is that of a black hole in that it signifies
nothing except the possibility of signification. Nothing escapes it but it is the
ultimate expression of how gravity freezes time into synchronic bindings; it is a
black hole, an empty set that bends value time around it.
We are pulled along our local geometry of this ‘gravity well’ as if we are moving
towards something, as if we are desiring something.
This desire is both caused by lack and the cause of it, in the same reciprocal chicken
and egg of our diagram, no desire-word without lack-alphabet and voice versa.
The pull we feel is desire, but desire is caused by our inability to see that desiring in
a straight line across an unseen curve of value-time creates desirable events that we
can never have. When all is dusted off, to expose this is a better fiction than
weightlessness, this is a fiction valued in terms of a weightlessness that is not valued
in terms of gravity.

FICTION IS SO YESTERDAY:

There is a fine line here between moving beyond the necessity for fictionalised
escape by embracing fiction and moving into an enclosure where dreams can
purportedly come true. The astronaut who acknowledges the suit is only the first
step to experience the weightlessness of space directly has to become unsuitable to
the tautological ground.

The suit is a trick that only exposes your unsuitability for space travel, an
unsuitability that is concealed to imply you are ready to go.
 68

The question for this trick is this: should it expose the need to admit the terms of
the suit prevent us from really going, or should the suit as a trick expose the need to
jump out of the suit and address the causes for our inability to breathe the vacuum
and be weightless.
We have established that Trick One, which admits the suit, should then lead to
taking it off as a performance of Trick Three.
But what then? Surely we can continue to explore admitting that we never really
arrive, or we can evolve to space conditions.

Like a suit we cannot remove; this perceptive gravity is the cause of gravity.

The circus way of speaking is to look for the non-functional analogy, the unsuitable
space suit

The regular circus trick that aims to display an individual freedom is a critique that
can be captured easily on tricky ground,

This other trick is to evolve past analogy, to become another perceptual register in
which such gravity simply cannot function…

If the spacesuit is analogy, and analogy itself cannot function in the view of value
over time, then the space suit itself cannot breathe in value-time.

This is why this argument of the unsuitable space suit floats here, an emptied out
suit that demands that the last gravity of perception rooted in sequential time, is
the one most ‘suitable’ in which to perform Trick Three.

Down with sequentiality; ‘World, you have but nothing, unite to lose the
clocks of your time.’

‘THE RIP-OFF’ ON CIRCUS WRITING.

I have spent some time investigating how legal tautology can be written into a
contract as a knot that destroys the validity of the document itself, a legal loophole
that can render the law inert, this was the attempt to handle the tautology of rope-
writing, and make my own suitably self-invalidating contracts.
Circus ‘writes’, and this is the important practice, not the legal contracts of
apparently achieved circus ‘freedom’ that are simply not worth the paper they are
printed on, but to see circus as a practice that ‘writes’ the inevitability of moving
past restriction.
This is the trick needed on the trick itself…

Under such conditions Speaking Circus becomes the possibility for meta-language,
a speech that is weightless in language not as a fiction but as the same difference to
metaposition.
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In Value-Time the only way to establish the truth of an event is through the relation
between independently mobile subjects. This relation is not rooted in autonomous
registers but occurs in language forged between two subjects as a performance for
one night only.

I have become entangled in my own oxygen tube; I have been wearing this analogy
too long.
Perhaps it is just a case in which science prevents us from activating our mysticism
without it looking like psychosis. The spacesuit here as a machine of rational,
differential, semio-capitalistic value, which makes any attempt at mystic thought
appear to be a psychotic trapped inside a space suit.

This for me is a question of following the logic of transposition and how to make an
unsuitable analogy.
Drop the analogy; I am really going.

EXPOSITION OF TRICK THREE:

In terms of a fiction then, one could imagine a story in which the experience of
sequential, synchronic time and its attendant logic that is hard-wired into the
human system is one in which it is possible to actually perform a trick. Such a trick is
modelled in the film that attends this text entitled: “When Wrong is the Only Right
Left” which I will assume that you have seen as it is linked in the previous chapter.
This film proposes fictionally that it is possible to formulate a loop that punctures
the logic of temporal sequentiality with real consequences.
This loop is further elaborated in the accompanying fiction. The point of the
accompanying story of the Hypnotist and the Horserace here is to allow the
fictionalising of this possibility to delimit the autonomy of difference, and to do this
through a fiction that, like that in trick one, acknowledges itself as fiction by being
here in this submission. It is here in this submission as antithetical to the proposed
factuality of the text it attends.
The further point here is exposition, in which a fictionalisation of ‘the possibility for
fictional meta-position to no longer acknowledge its fictionality because it is ‘really’
possible’ is placed under the same designatory terms of fiction that state fiction has
to be acknowledged, but one that encircles its difference to that same necessity to
acknowledge itself as fiction within its own terms that create a suspension of
disbelief.
The fiction’s placement here admits its fictionality, but it contains a fictionalised
moment of suspension when such admission is no longer necessary, as the
suspension has become real.
My exposition here is the fiction of the possibility of value time becoming a real
experiential possibility for agency in the three fields of value; this is the fiction of
trick three offered here as the same fiction as trick one which encircles its difference
to itself.
 70

In allowing this to be fictionalsed here it is hoped this will operate as a trick

performed in this submission that seeks to be both the object and subject of this
research simultaneously.
The problematic of fictionalising the end of the necessity to regard a metaposition
as fictional as a metaposition to this text is offered here as the mode of exposition of
trick three.

My hope is that these words are not similarly destroyed as they are propelled
across the warped surface of value-time as it bends around the phrase: “My hope is
that these words are not similarly destroyed as they are propelled across the warped
surface of value-time as it bends around the phrase: “My hope is that these words
are not similarly destroyed as they are propelled across the warped surface of value-
time as it bends around the phrase: etc. etc.
So the conclusion here is that in order to propose a space beyond difference I have
to use the same tactics as are employed within a differentially organised field to do
so. I have to fictionalise what it might be like to perform a trick in time.

*****
Dear Reader,
Again you have met an impenetrable impasse. You, not having enough time to
read what happens next, will have to satisfy yourselves with this meagre fiction
of what transpired.
What now follows is the utter sorrow of Happy Down-River, the end of all his
dreams; the failure of his attempt to get free of the gravity of Circusism. But in
the midst of this despair, Mary sends him a faint glimmer of hope in the form of
a letter.
Mary Minkowski’s letter breaks apart Happy Down River’s Marxist Critique of
Gravity, stating that as long as it proceeds through language then it relies on the
synchronic cut of time to proceed, and since time is dependant of gravity, then
his critique is doomed to proceed on the terms of the thing that he critiques. But
she exhorts him to not lose hope.
However within this particular annexed sideshow of the story we see Happy,
inconsolable and filled with doubt about the validity of his Marxist Critique of
Gravity, lost in the halls of the University, the seat of knowledge, ridiculed by his
peers. He is unable to maintain his position of benevolent penetration tester and
is vilified for his dissent within Circusism. He memorises passages of Mary’s
letter that extort him to join her in the immaterial hallways and landscapes of an
online game called ‘The Cercis of Jude’.
Please bear in mind your temporal economy though, dear reader. Do not press
so hard upon the fiction of a trick performed in time that you find that it is time
to go. What is proposed here is a back somersault in synchronic difference, a
time-knot that is tied in the practice of past life regression that means that the
 71

guide can retrieve information from the traveller from a place in a parallel time
track before it was even stored there; thus making it possible to glean the value
of an event before it has occurred. Roll up and keep out: here is the impossible,
true weightlessness in the gravity of time, that paints Happy’s own limited
revelatory discourse as words stuck within the terms of the gravity it seeks to
critique.
This part of the text is barred from your entry.
You may always find your way back in on page ninety.

***

BEING the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Nineteen

Since Mary left:

Happy found it hard to carry on.

Mary, in a series of short interjections, had harpooned his floundering attempt to
attack Circusism. But what intrigued Happy was that she seemed to be hinting at an
even greater critique behind it.
She had hinted that fiction might not be the fate of meta-positional statements,
that there was a greater fiction; one that could become real. She hinted that the
task was to expose the causes of this impasse rather than make provision for its
insurmountability.
First there is the idea of an immaterial circus practice, to provoke circus thought,
then there is the idea that weightlessness should not be measured in terms of
gravity, to provoke circus into an area outside of its own definition, then there is
this…a suggestion that the trick should not be defined in terms of human
perception, that human perception itself was the activation of the same fetishized
weightlessness that appears to be a subjective perceptive grid. She had implied that
human skin was only that which prevented space travel, that it should be removed.
What Mary was suggesting was that the final gravity was the trick of perception,
that was in itself a neoliberal, late capitalist rig of freedom-production, upon which
she was suggesting to perform a larger more final trick; one that would not be
subject to the gravity of a subjectivity that constructed signification to deal with the
fragmentation of the subject in the face of pre-difference. She inferred that the
resultant differential propelled that subject to desire that which was missing but
never to provide it, thus bottling the subject up in an un-scratcable itch with the flea
that causes it.

She proposed the opposite, that the goal is to return to direct subjective production
of useable value, not fetishized weightlessness that is destroyed as what it says it is
the moment it says it is…

He had to find her. He had decided to let the mask fall away and slowly he began
deconstructing his academic routine. He appeared in the wrong clothes, at the
wrong time, he was by turns distant and then over-friendly, he lectured backwards,
 72

or only spoke with his head out of the window. He did whatever it took to make his
academic persona dissolve.

“Go on, you know you want to.” Became his modus operandi.

Happy drifted through the poisoned halls; he was on the verge of throwing his entire
Marxist Critique of Gravity away, but there was still a spark, beneath his academic
exit strategy.
Mary had implied that he had not applied Marx to the right terms. If Lacan was
derived from Marx but highlighted that Marx was impossible, then Happy had to
apply Marx to the terms that made this so. If Lacan was the gravity that denied the
possibility of meta position and this was now felt as the real impasse that Capital
appropriated, then Lacan was only as real as Newton’s gravity was a ‘force’. The
instance of semio-capital made its autonomy of difference as real as apples falling
from a tree, but if there was a circus trick to be performed on gravity it was to reveal
that gravity had limits, and if Lacan was Newton then Deleuze and Gauttari were
Einstein, implying that each capitalised signifier was only derived out from a
multiplicity that existed in a continuum, a surface prior to difference.
He had only to take up Einstein in the name of Marx, and apply this to the terms of
the Lacanian impasse to reveal its gravity as an illusion.
He had wanted to provoke the circus community into seeing how it agreed with
late capitalism. He had sought to show how capital was operating a circus trick that
was just as effective as concealing capital’s own limits, as was the trick, formed of
exactly the same mechanism, that had exposed those same limits of a system like
capital.
He had sought to show how circus that produced freedom only agreed with the
expansion of gravity.
Trick one and Trick Two were the same, the difference was the thing; they were
both steeped in the indifference of difference, that demanded an acknowledgement
of fiction on one hand or the installation of post-factism on the other, they seemed
so close: twins fighting to be born first, in a battle between self-interest and
selflessness.
Marx, Lacan, Deleuze were all operating tricks to expose the contradictions in
capital, in linguistics and in psychoanalysis at varying degrees of resolution. What
Marx missed, Lacan saw, what Lacan missed Deleuze saw.
Marx sees a door, Lacan closes it, Deleuze tries to get out of the window.
These ‘tricks’ that expose the real relations and show them to be tautologically self
defeating but almost insurmountable, each attempt leaves us with fictional escape
that must be acknowledged as fiction in order for it to potentially posit what an
escape might look like.
Within Deleuze he saw that the nonsensical, pre-logical space of an immanent
plane might be the only place it may be possible to inhabit…but that this plane itself
only could exist in his fiction of it; it was possible only to fictionalise it, and so it
came up against the same deconstructive problem as both Marx and Lacan.
Academia was a hollow skull, taking aspirin for emptiness, and rattling off the
answers to a migraine.
 73

The fiction of life after capital was still rendered through a science based on
difference, the fictional subject of analysis was rendered through a Cartesian logic
that reinscribed that subject back into the impasses of fact, and Deleuze’s
immanence could only be spoken of as a ‘what if’, thus couching the pre-differential
existence of a non subject in terms dictated by difference itself, namely that fiction,
that is, the un actualised virtual, the un-capturable affect, is the only permissible
way of referencing pre-differentiality, anything that is stated as fact has to then be
submitted to the order of difference.

So it was in impossibility that he had to proceed. Describing the impossible is the

possibility of thinking change, and there had to be an embrace of fiction
here…Happy fictionalised his rationale…

He tried to talk his way out of it in the ensuing lectures but the routine was coming
apart at the seams.
He simply reasoned that Mary was right…

“If Circus is to be thought of as attempting the ‘impossible’, then we can look at

impossible areas for its practice. He was aware that this was also another corporate
mantra, but it was the daily practice of circus anyway; he had shown how it could be
captured, that did not mean it always was.

He wrote on the toilet wall of the refectory cafeteria:

“Although I do highlight problems in this practice in which the ‘play’ is lead by a

monetised awareness of the currency of originality and that this is then ‘work’, the
question, whether it derives from a neoliberal desire to be a successful individual in a
market of individuals or merely from an innate curiosity that is unattached to any
desire to be remunerated in the circus market is perhaps undecided here as of yet…the
main point is that this ‘what if’ that leads to the ‘new’ is followed daily. It is a circus
activity no matter how much ‘what if’ is the key to a neoliberal definition of a
marketable ‘new’”

The cleaner came and found him the next morning with a Jaycloth and some
thinners as he was the only professor even remotely engaged in the study of circus.
The impression was that he was to remove the graffiti but nothing could remove her
distain.
He complied apologetically thinking, “there are no ideas worthy of an indelible
marker.”

He continued to give impromptu seminars, but was being given increasingly less
prestigious slots.
He found himself lecturing in a converted store cupboard in the lower floor of the
University. He was no longer seen as a benign penetration tester who was employed
to hack the system of Circusism to make it even more un-hackable. He was seen as
the odour of shame left over after a quack has barked his last.
 74

“As stated this circus exploration of materials can easily be read as an extension of
well-established corporate tenets of expansion into new markets, but let us assume
that the designation of the subject, through game theory, as a self-interested player
in a post-ideological frame is flawed, and that there can exist the idea of exploration
of an unworkable area as something to be offered as a gift to an other, rather than
as a new field to be tilled for profit, that this exploration of the new is done out of a
love of fiction.

As outmoded as this may sound it might be posited here that circus subjects could
operate tricks not for self-aggrandisement but for you, the audience.”
He performed a standing back somersault, and bowed low as the snake.
Happy gestured to the blank, silent faces; all formed from how the eyes critiqued
the mouth, and the mouth cleverly deconstructed the nose, and the nose sniffed out
the flaws in the ears, which were deaf.
He took another gulp of the awful coffee.

Happy felt himself dislocate, like a dollar unpegged from gold, he flew past 1971 in
both directions simultaneously and in no time, he was unattached,
“Was the thermostat broken in here?” A bead of sweat travelled through time
across his weathered face. His lecture was spiralling out of time control. He
continued by changing the subject…or he changed by continuing the subject, or he
was just subject to continuing change…

“Er… as regards performing for the audience, the outmoding then of er

altruism…Post 1989 this was the narrative that attended the collapse of state
communism, that it was the end of a lie and that the dominance of the free market
in some way represented the end of history and just as much it represented the
return to nature: that is it represented the return to a system of harsh but ‘naturally’
fair selection in which all were ‘free’ to compete.
For me it was felt as ‘natural’ after the communist tinkering with the order of
things, the end of history here was the feeling of a pre-history, an almost pastoral
scene. Marx was dead. The lie here was that this meritocratic ‘natural selection’ was
engineered and championed by those who secretly already had accumulated an
advantage. Here accumulation can be thought of as the financial equivalent of big
teeth, razor sharp claws and a keen sense of smell in the ‘natural’ arena of selection.

The point here is perhaps taken directly from the mouth of certain new figures in
politics that speak for the market, and in this sense the ‘truth’ of what is said is ‘true’
as much as, in a certain moment, it is ‘true’ that one dollar is worth seventy English
pence, perhaps it is also only true in a certain moment that the circus body weighs
nothing.

The value of such semio-capital rises and falls as quickly as it is uttered but is true
nonetheless, it is the prophecy of Gödel, in a tautological ground all political
legitimisations are both true and unprovable.
It is now possible to espouse radical protest anti-capitalist ideologies in the same
breath as pandering to the alt-right desire for a walled city.
 75

Perhaps there is no contradiction there as we are within the walled freedom of a

Klein-Bottle, but the point stands in so far as what is said by power no longer has to
be true, journalism is wrong-footed as a truth-seeker and we enter a twilight in
which it is not important if a theory is real, it is about its affective power to alter the
flow of consumption and production. This is tricky, and the question here is how
much does circus in its explorations of the impossible agree or disagree with this
kind of politics. The polis is the subject who is subject to the ‘gravity’ of neoliberal
language.

I would like here to quote from a newspaper article, written by a Dr J Priest (likely a
pseudonym) in the Times Literary Supplement, in which this exact kind of post-
factism is seen as not a win but a loss. The act of allowing fictional elements to
become fact in the world as a kind of tactic, is only succumbing to the indifference
of the one fiction that has already taken shape in the world; namely money.

(Priest, J. TLS. Aug 2016.)

“I would like to counter that there is nothing wrong with Trump, in so far as he is
exactly the uncorrect expression of a political figure in late capitalism.”

There was a murmur of approval. Everybody loved to ridicule that unfortunate slab
of coiffured capital, eternally pursing his lips around the next fallacious doughnut.
Happy knew it was a cheap shot to berate Trump, but it bought him some more
time to expound something unbelievable…

“ Ahem…So to return to this idea of post-fact but in a time before it was cynically
appropriated as a disorientating counter to investigative journalism, perhaps
outside of the notion that the only good knowledge is marketable knowledge, we
can look at the many spurious and failed attempts to imagine the subject as a
traveller in impossible realms, escapades which are, as is a circus act, untrue,
inoperable, impossible and beyond fact as performed not for cynical manipulation
 76

and ‘perception management’ but as a genuine attempt to continue a fiction of

freedom, merely as the possibility for the continuation of a fiction of freedom. I am
talking about a time before affect was monetised perhaps, or a time in which it was
not possible to make the pricelessness of a ghost into the cost of resurrection.

Ladies and Germs, It is still my belief that speaking circus should attack capital in
language as much as the circus body attacks language in gravity.

Journeys such as this which suggest that it is possible to go where it is not possible
to go are offered as use-value, as qualitative suggestions between subjects and
imply a recipient subject, an audience, and do not attempt to court the dimension
that permits no subject to interfere.
Hence the circus subject practicing alone in an imperceptible dimension may be
able to generate a purely qualitative connection to another subject outside of the
crushing gravity of hard, exploitative, marketable, purely quantitative difference.
Maybe…

Ladles and Jelly-spoons, Noise and Twirls, please welcome onto the stage a man
who will now perform the trick of relevance, he will emerge from the past and
defying this corporeal existence, he will be made present before your very eyes
through the trickery of quotation…I give you

Charles Howard Hinton!

He holds in his left hand his own treatise on the Fourth Dimension, in which he tries
to imagine another realm of thought for all man and womankind. In his right hand
he holds a razor sharp sword…can we have a volunteer from the audience please?”

No one moved. All of time fidgeted, unanimously watching Happy.

“Ok well, here are the opening pages of Charles Howard Hinton’s treatise on the
Fourth Dimension…”

Happy went over the details…

“Hinton suggests as an example a sword can be plotted in its qualitative state.

Hinton can arrange swords by brightness along a single line, he can arrange swords
by brightnesss and length by plotting them on a plane, next a third quality, he
proposes, ‘sharpness’ can be added to make a three dimensional plot of the quality
of the swords…but he notes:

“If I bring in a fourth quality, such as weight and try to find a means of representing
it…I find a difficulty. Every point in space is taken up by some conceivable
combination of the three qualities already taken. To represent four qualities in the
same way as that in which I represented three, I should need another dimension of
space.”
 77

Hinton, C.H. ‘The Fourth Dimension’. Forgotten Books. 2012.

Although this is merely Hinton’s introduction to the concept of the fourth dimension
Hinton’s positing of another fourth perpendicular direction for his fictional sword is
in this case mightier than the pen that writes it…it might be possible then to close
this loop and say within the conception of a subject who is not totally self-interested
then such a subject might be able to pen the idea of a sword that is mightier than
the pen that wrote it into existence, but which only further proves that the fictional
power of the pen is mightier still.
What I …er…mean is…that a pen may be capable of writing a fiction in which an
imagined four-dimensional sword is mightier than the pen that wrote it in three
dimensions; that there may be a possibility to write (or fictionalise) that which may
become action as a sword. A virtual praxis?

An S-word so to speak, barred but permitted in the acknowledgment of it as

merely fiction, that is, just a piece of writing…but which becomes a sword mightier
than the pen that wrote it…in this is the pen’s might…
The pen is mightier than the sword here, because the pen (by which I mean a
process of fictionalising) is capable of writing a sword that can do what an ordinary
sword cannot, and thus the pen is mightier than the sword, because in Hinton’s case
it enables him to describe a sword in four dimensions, something that is
imperceptible within the frame of reality.
I am saying this in the same way I would say that saying what I just said has
changed your reality.

The students were just staring, fictionalising themselves elsewhere.

But to Happy, the idea of a weapon that could be wielded to cut time was
exhilarating, a weapon that could express a wound beyond the capability of the
body to receive. What Happy saw here was the forging of an impossible sword, one
that offers to cut through the veil and suggest a new area for human practice.
A time-S-word could be used to cut through the bar between the signifier and
signified and end the interminable prison of the impossibility of signification; and so
a weapon like this was purely qualitative, unconcerned with the quantitative relation
of this or that.

“…Off with their heads…” He thought absent-mindedly.

He delighted in the fact that no one was interested.

It is in this spirit that I attempt to examine circus not just outside of gravity that
defines it but outside of the perception that defines us.

To imagine a spoken circus or a trick that might provide a weightlessness in capital

 78

has only lead to the complicity of the subject within meshes of gravity, language
and capitalism (what Capital would call Semio-Berardi)
These systems, with which I find circus to be in agreement, form three different
enclosures by which the subject seems to be both encircled and which the subject
also encapsulates, like a klein bottle this subject has to exist in an admission of
fiction whilst being told that fiction can ‘do’ nothing, whilst power constructs a
fictional world that enforces the idea of ineffectuality of fiction…it depends who is
doing the lying becomes the definition of truth now. Yawn…

Happy was starting to gain momentum. He was destroying his career by

incorporating Mary’s ideas. He was drinking more, getting closer to the exit.

“In such a frame of Circusism where fiction is both appropriated and disabled
politically by power, as a quantum event that is true/not-true depending on who is
looking. In the state of Circusism, Schrödinger is the President and his cat is his
most trusted advisor; the media can only print supposedly satirical posters stating,
“LOST. Have you seen/not seen this cat” over and over again. Ha ha, you might
say…

Happy was at pains to point out that the theory of Schrodinger’s Cat, long since
disproved as scientific detritus, still continues however to demonstrate the theory
that it is inadequate to describe; namely that a quantum state of both true and
untrue is impossible.
In this regard, the theory of Schrödinger’s Cat, by still being held as valid by some
scientists, is itself caught in a quantum state of being both true and not true
simultaneously within the scientific community.

“Hmmm whom should I vote for at the next election?”

Happy decides instead to spoil his ballot, he finds a loophole in the law that allows
him to legally fill it out after the election has taken place, “If I vote for Schrodinger
after he is elected, legally this means he can be impeached for failing to
retroactively rig the election.”
Money moves to speak itself as the next viable candidate:

Happy becomes aware that all text writes like capital, and does so to conceal
CONTROL…the awful reek of the word-addict, crawling through the dirt, just to get
to the difference on which he has been weaned …

”gotta, uh, get… uh, SIGNIFIED…” He collapses choking on his own vomit, each
twitch, recorded by a malign cop on his phone, when posted, goes viral… becomes a
new dance craze.
The Sig-Twitch sweeps the nation, with adolescents clogging up the dance floors,
interlocked in mock spasms, their sad eyes reading the text of their bodies from the
outside, already ahead of themselves filming their own horror at the joy of their
mock misery, deepening their shallowness, same difference.

In such a bind it became necessary to follow the old circus instinct to say ‘what if’
 79

and to imagine this entire system as a form of gravity,

He had been doing this back in the day, there was a time he would have simply
reduced the entire crowd to a group of paupers…with a word or two he could have
bankrupted everybody in the room.
Mary had inspired him to return to the practice.

UNCORRECT:

Happy had turned a corner, as if he was in a corner, he was a corner in an

imperceptible geometry of Japanese paper folding …in meeting Mary his Marxist
critique of gravity had folded in on itself in the impossible topology of space time, or
of value represented through space time that made nonsense of all his Gödellian
tricks.
Language was subject to the gravity it critiqued; speaking circus had to leap out of
value altogether.
He was drinking heavily and by association the bar was now a bottle from which he
was being drunk.
In a topological fold, Lacan’s bar was a hollow tube that went through itself
simultaneously permitting access between S and s on its outer surface and
reconfiguring that access between S and s as denied upon its inner surface that
formed one continuous container of contradiction.
It was a plane of contradictions, but appropriated by capital, a contradictory
surface. Capital was uncorrect but unstoppable, true and unprovable.
It is within this idea of uncorrectness that Happy summarised the scene. It was a
subject that had internalised the lie around him, but also the subject who knew that
being wrong was the only right left.

On the one hand he was something that is self fulfilling, it is the subject misspelled
to demonstrate exactly how he is misspelt; it is the exposition of the subject as ideal
for the system that falsely but correctly predicted what he has become.
One who is a wrong spelling of himself, but one who has internalised this
misspelling to become the incorrect phrase that correctly describes his own
incorrectness it’s a kind of subject that has internalised the lie, he knows its untrue
but believes it anyway.
On the other hand the incorrectness is internalised as the only mode of being
correct in a system of spelling in which it is no longer possible to imagine a
misspelling. It is what it says it is.
So uncorrect could be like the trick of being both wrong and right, which was
wrong.
Or it was something that is done incorrectly incorrectly in order to be the only way
past an impasse that is in itself tautological.
It was not much of a summary but it was all he had.

Topology of circus:

If circus suggests
 80

“The following sentence is false.

The preceding sentence is true.”

Capital suggests

“The following tautology (The following sentence is false.

The preceding sentence is true.) is allowed if true
The preceding tautology (The following sentence is false.
The preceding sentence is true.) is forbidden if false”

Anything goes, but it is still possible to police.

Or a Klein bottle…in which the outside surface encloses everything beyond it…

Happy blamed Celine for highlighting the fact that truth can only be lied about then
passed through a deceptive medium in order to appear true again.

Capital had simultaneously operated access and non-access between S and s in

a superposition of affect-denied-in-difference (zero) and difference-denied-in-
affect (one).

The following number 1 has a value of 0.

The preceding number 1 has a value of 1.

“I hate this world…”

Happy felt like he was folding up, but not into a complex shape. He was folding up
into something simpler. The obsession of trying to deal with the complexities of his
own knotted paper chase was now handed back to him like an origami dagger:
“Is this a knot I see before me? It’s handle turned toward my hand?” it was, but it
was not a dream of guilt, but the guilt of knot-dreaming.
In a way he was trying to deal with the glaring flaw in his ideas by pretending to be
Holden Caulfield pretending to be shot.
“Ok, that is enough literary references. This woman has me on the ropes.”
Was Mary proposing a reverse bar technique?
Is value time the reversal of Lacan’s bar? So that the sliding of the signifier is
prevented and rather than access to signified being barred, access to the signifier is
barred; that is, you have to make up your own language?

He was folding up into a world line; the line of all the events at which he was present
on a diagram of flat space-time.
In such a diagram many things could be proved that fell outside of the puzzled logic
he had been trying to undo. That at certain iterations of mass time slows to such an
extent that it is no longer for any observer to assign a specific when to any event.
Beyond this event horizon, the logic he was using to relate gravity to language and
capital broke down, the synchronic increments of fixed value that necessarily
compose the possibility for horizontal differential relation simply cannot exist in a
 81

space where there is no when. The demise of autonomy of value was no when.
But more than this Mary’s comments had punctured the balloon. The speech
bubble was ruptured and now the exhalation of academic hot air that was his
homological discourse on gravity that kept him afloat was pierced violently by Mary
pointing out that the balloon itself was reliant on gravity to float.
She had burst his bubble by showing that it was blown by gravity in the first place.
The speech bubble was filled with language. Language proceeds through
sequential time but what was shown by the diagram of flat space time was that to
any independently mobile observer the sequence of time was not only not
necessarily at a set but that to different observers events could happen in different
order. As time was the medium of language, and time was nonsense then…All of
the inconsistencies between the subjects were shifting around the fixity of the
speed of light.
Because the length of a rope of light can never change, if the distance over which it
reaches is longer that distance is necessarily spatially compressed in time, if it is
shorter the space is temporally stretched.
He had been undone, speaking in knots was invalidated because the length of rope
between any two subjects was always the same.
His critique of gravity was a spoken circus, language moves through sequential
time, the sequence is reliant on gravity, thus the critique of gravity is reliant on that
which it critiques.
He was undone, he could feel himself as the author of a self-immolating theory of
nothing…he was lost.

What she was proposing was wonderful, it was like a revival of his anti-capitalist
Memory Act that he had to abandon so long ago. But it was only another fiction,
which was his point any way. As regards her conception of Value-Time as the fabric
we need to be able to see in order to be on the free tangential surface upon which
there is no gravity; if he could counter in any way it would only be to say that she is
only ever going to be able to fictionalise this metaposition outside of her own
perception, there was no way in which she could see the fourth dimension.
He understood that she was fictionalising the end of capital, in which everybody
can see simultaneously the outcome of every trade laid out across value-time as one
geometric value-object comprised of the synchronically fetishized increments of
value events that produce every rip-off, every profit and loss, every speculation,
equivalence, exchange, exploit and alienation. It was a nice idea, but there was
simply no way to get there, other than to continue with what he was suggesting
anyway, which is to fictionalise the metaposition, and then acknowledge that you
have done so.
Happy was suddenly overcome with tiredness; it was a fictional fatigue. As if the
thought of forever having to acknowledge that weightlessness was only virtual was
exhausting.
He slumped against the wall of the bland university corridor, how long had he been
in this place? “All this fiction sure is a drag.” He said out loud to nobody in particular.

“I was better off in the good old days…before this turgid production of freedom
became the law.”
 82

He was so tired, perhaps he could just pretend to be free, he could push once more
into the calculus and simply stack the day,
“Never to pop, never to pop, just stay here in the forgetting.”
He could just sleep, here sliding toward the floor he could acknowledge that fiction
right here and now by letting gravity place him on the floor.
He found himself lying there, staring at the smallest conglomeration of dust
particles, the strange blur of rock-hard chewing gum finely edged by years of dirt
proposed its own calculus of being, alongside the floor alongside the strip lighting,
alongside the dust of human skin, was it the same landscape as his youth? The
horses had been wild and knew nothing of Lacan.

He reached into his pocket, and is as far as he could imagine his whole being as
being contained in the limited totality of his hand, he curled his entire body around
the letter that Mary had slipped under his door.

MARY’S LETTER TO HAPPY DOWN-RIVER:

Hello, I hope you are Happy now…

What are these values that are never seen over time,
that prick the moment and never drag across the skin.
‘Hello, I am your value for the day’. Imagine if you could see all of the value-events
that have ever been autonomous from you laid out across one singular fabric of
value-time, the gravity of desire that leads to lack is simply unacceptable here,
laughable.
All of your speculation, your tricks, are no longer necessary to navigate a position
outside of the autonomy of value. An agency is fetishized that you cannot reach as it
is validated in a register in which you are not recognised. It is like breaking out of
prison only to realise you are a ghost.
Moving toward your desire in a straight line actually inscribes you into a circle
from which you could walk away at any time, but it feels like gravity, it feels like the
straight line of desire.
And so a new circus must be thought of.

I am not able to disclose all of the plans I have; I will outline the basics but I need
your help.
Suffice to say I have discovered a way in which a life once lived can be treated as a
two way recording tape, upon which info can be both stored and retrieved…this
ability to ‘scrub’ back and forth through the sequence if time means that knowledge
itself, its existence as tied to representation or difference breaks down. This
storehouse of old tapes is not in some metaphysical location but can be accessed
here and now with the simplest of techniques, there is no metaphysical dimension
for this place…it is within the gaps between our atoms…I cannot explain further but
suffice to say that once you understand that sequential time is nonsense, you will
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see the twofold mistake you have made in trying to address this new surge of Late
Circusism. The new performativity is utter distraction from the main event, that the
event is punctured.

My new practice means that St Paul could have known what was coming on the
road to Damascus…simply put, each life is a tape that can be listened to at any
moment, and interacted with to both give and receive information…it is fully porous
and sponge-like it can store and later be squeezed…in this sense I feel like the worst
kind of capitalist , recruiting the dead to labour at my machinery of information
storage and retrieval like ghostly clerks at a vast bureaucracy of temporal
contradiction…you see from my perspective, in my ability to scrub to an earlier or
later event in their lives in any order at any time, they can retrieve information
before it was stored thus opening up the possibility to access information from the
future…so you see DR. Down-River my critique of you is merely opening up a more
concrete form.

The old vaudeville days when you could invalidate whole markets with your memory
act are but an primary school game compared to what might be possible once the
idea of value itself is seen as a continuous object with now specific sequentiality,
accessible at any point it ceases to have meaning as an autonomous relation to
another value and becomes only useful to the subject…in this way the liberation of
the subject from the grip of a gravity of autonomy, representation, exchange, mass
etc. could be achieved in the simple practice that allows you to glimpse the
nonsense of non sequential temporality…

Or as I call it VALUE-TIME…

Your Marxism is a space suit; take it off. Take off everything.

You are concerned about moving beyond the material, I understand that what I am
suggesting seems ineffectual. Believe me it is not, I have travelled a long way to
meet with you, Happy Down-River. I can help you perform the trick that you
laboured to produce in words sold back and forth on the foreign exchange. I can
help you finally undo the capitalism you despise. I can help you build a circus the like
of which has never been seen before. A circus of dreams that flickers outside of
every gravity.
I have built the only device that can work in dream time.
You think of my work as science fiction, I assure you it is not. This work of fiction is
getting more real every day and I have clinics in London, Paris, New York and
Budapest working day and night to undo the tyranny of value.
I saw you a thousand years ago when I was a child and the way you moved through
the darkened stage to ruin money has been my inspiration. I have come to find you
to tell you that the change in perception I am suggesting is a fictionalisation, but it is
a ‘doing’, it is a practice.
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You are not yet suffocating in the vacuum-time. It is a self-immolation that I have
initiated in order to save you from yourself. Marx is a ghost that can walk through
praxis; we need to be ready to move in a totally un-capturable form.
I did not destroy your critique as an academic I destroyed it as a circus artist would
destroy it. The fiction that you have ended up with is the practice that you should
use to escape.
This is a Marxist fiction, this is the actual Marxist critique you should be making as
this deals with the origin of value in gravity that is autonomous from the circus
subject. The origin of gravity is the inability to see Value-Time. I am offering you a
four dimensional praxis.
It is an evolution past the space suit; that is, past analogy and representation,
which is critique without touching, from a figure buried in the depth of a spacesuit,
and into a perceptual negation of the restriction within which you are trying to float.
It is the space suit that is running out of oxygen, not you.
The virtual is a praxis; in this sense the change in perception is a practice. Like the
voice of a ghost can reach you, like you can answer the spectre this is a practice that
changes the past and how the past changes you as it is re-experienced as a living
ghost in the now.
The subject cannot exist where we need to go so be prepared to fictionalise what it
might be like to no longer be an enclosed form; we are going to fictionalise a place
where fiction can be real but not as a validation of a profitable subject or the
fetishisation of an enclosure as endless.
We are trying to do the opposite of capital here. Instead of flying on a wire and
telling me you are superman, just tell me that you can imagine yourself in flight, this
is political.
The gravity in which the trick is performed in is the human animal. The trick is
undoing. A song in the key of cage, is a cage in the key of time.

To use these ideas as a rationale for leaving analogy, taking off the space suit and
exploring a very simple version of what I mean, of travel as leaving the perception,
of TRICK as leaving the perception…these are CIRCUS areas…the art of science.
Circus within Gravity is only one of many Circuses?

This as a rationale to apply in a cross-register way general relativity to the science of

value…to refigure this older rationality through the lens of a new science that is
more akin to an artistic process.
It is still possible for a scientific practice to be enacted for public, just as it is still
possible to perform for the audience.

There is a precedent for this kind of theoretical exploration. This mode of thinking
belongs perhaps to a time when scientific reflection was not directed towards its
application in any kind of market but was offered as a text simply to explore a new
way of thinking.
The ecology of practices was here not dependant on immersion in the saccharin
hydroponics of finance perhaps, but demonstrated, regardless of the efficacy of the
knowledge offered, a now outmoded altruism.
 85

Within these ideas that science no longer supports the rational, the coherent, the
individuated subject…in a way science no longer supports the consisistency of
analogy The recommendation is that space travel must be undertaken on space
terms. Science shows us the breakdown of the analogous relation; in the sense that
the cogs that underlie the machinery of life, our bodies, of physics, of gravity no
longer can be seen to correspond on a fixed, one to one basis that displays
isomorphism.

The particles that comprise us are winking in and out of existence and occupy no
fixed position in space, our experience is not analogical to the actuality of space-
time, the idea of an encapsulated self is not analogical to ourselves when it is
conceived as a world line on a space-time diagram.
Our body is a geometrical object that is occupying every position in which it has ever
been simultaneously across an inconceivable fabric. How does this body move to
perform circus? This is what you are asking of circus, behind you fussy critique of
gravity.
Our body is a disavowal of this multi-positioning, every breath disavows the
possibility of it, as word follows word. We are not analogical to what science implies
we are, the parts are not isomorphic to the imagination. The analogy breaks down
in this space, as time does in a black hole. The space suit is disintegrating anyway,
quickly take your last human breath.

Happy had the feeling that he had read this before, …he had the feeling that he
was going to be pulled inexorably toward this person…
The letter then continued to outline Mary’s method. What Happy then read
was both shocking and exhilarating

He had made a critique of Circusism. This was still valid but Mary had thrown a
spanner in the works,
In demonstrating how the language that structured his critique was dependant on
time, he had been annoyed; now that she was implying that time could be
negotiated by some kind of trick he was galvanised.

She had laid out here entire appropriation of the practice of Past Life Regression as
a method of retrieving information from the future. She had broken the location of
any event of value. Any value could be accessed from any point in value time, in
contravention of any autonomous logic.
She had punctured the linear reasoning of language in that she could extract
knowledge from before it becomes known, thus puncturing languages
communicative function, thus rendering it no longer dependant on time, and hence
freeing it from gravity.
If the outcome of a race can be extracted from nowhere (this is the capitalist
dream of course parthenogenic generation, of value from nothing, a virgin birth of
knowledge) then communication between subjects through language is no longer
dependant on time as a medium.
 86

In being able to extract info about this current time stream from the parallel past
life time-stream at any point, she had made communication no longer dependant
upon the sequential.
It was logical for her to shun any logical reasoning, and Happy had tried to reason
with Circusism. She had demonstrated that it was non-negotiable and what was
needed was a circus trick, an old school somersault but in a medium that would
destroy capital.

If she could as she claimed, receive information from a past life at a date that is
subsequent to a time in which that knowledge was received, but access that
subsequent time and receive that info before you accessed the previous time, in
which you planted that knowledge, then this was indeed the parthenogenic
generation of knowledge of future events from a position in the now.

It was a process that made it possible to experience the confusion of being able to
perceive space time, in which all subjects and objects were geometric lines
extending simultaneously in both directions into past and future, all temporally
manifested points of which are perceivable at once, in a single object.
He continued to read …

I am not able to disclose all of the plans I have but suffice to say I have discovered a
way in which a life once lived can be treated as a two way recording tape, that St
Paul could have known explain further you will see the twofold mistake it can store
and later be the dead to labour at my perspective memory act.
Old vaudeville days when you could time is nonsense, you have made
for this place once you understand the event is punctured; the grip of a gravity on
the road to Damascus.
The main event, that I call Value the artist that can destroy Time.

I want you to join me. I will leave detailed instructions of how we can meet in a
neutral space. I need you to assist me in forming an ensemble of circus artists that
can destroy capitalism utterly.

Happy felt deranged…was she insane, was it all an elaborate recruitment scam just
to get him back into Circusism? Was it a prank?
He read on…

There is no ‘now’ as such but the possibility to inhabit a space that is wholly pre-
differential, in that all difference, once seen in a single diachronically-evolved
moment is exposed as the negation of the ‘meaning’ of difference.
In that all signifiers over time will change in their differential relation to other
signifiers, becoming at some point along their atemporal geometry both ultimately
 87

meaningful and meaningless, all commodities will change over time in their
differential relation to other commodities, becoming at some point both priceless
and worthless, and all masses will change in their differential relation to other
masses under gravity, becoming both weightless and super dense…in this sense
then as the ‘meaning’ of difference ceases to exist, as gravity is predicted by
Einstein to cease to exist
Once this meaning of the difference in mass is negated, along with the meaning of
differences in signification and commodity, then value itself is negated as
something that is autonomously determined by difference.
Happy my view is even more materialistic than yours as I am saying that the
material rigging of perception is what results in gravity as a by product. We pass a
curve through a distorting lens to make it appear straight, these are the material
conditions of gravity-production, that i am saying your Marxism does not go far
enough.
Look at the real conditions, conditions that can engineer tricks to expose, but can
also be entirely subject to the trick to conceal, is it not true that trick one
indisputably points at trick three, a trick performed on the perceptive apparatus, the
real material conditions of production. This only means that Marx is more in
agreement with the young Hegelians than at first sight once the perception itself is
itself revealed as a means of production susceptible to impasses of alienation,
exploit, fetish and barring. In order to get past gravity we must become un-
possessed by the idea of it.”

*****
We join Happy again in the University, a little drunk, brooding on Mary’s words.
In his stupor he resolves that no matter how hard the journey, he will search her
out and join her circus of time.

***
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Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Twenty

So what was the difference between Happy’s insistence on gravity as the real
relations of production, and Mary’s idea that he has not gone far enough? She
called for him to go past Marx and see gravity as just an idea?

It was through his encounter with Mary that this became clear, and in this way he
began to see Mary as performing the trick that he was looking for, something that
did not remain subject to the impasses of the current frame.
Mary was showing him how the ghost of Marx is not enough, as fiction is not
enough…this process of temporality means the ghost can talk to you and you can
talk to it, this can be made real at many points.
What Mary was proposing, as far as she was concerned, was not fiction but an
actual practice of retrieving information before it has been sown. it was crazy that
she would know exactly where he would be; where they would meet; what they
would do already.
He could at least feel his tricky bones again beneath the flaccid Lacanian covering.
He knew this was the circus beneath the skin.
What is implied is a trick that is becoming weightlessness.

He had her letter he read it over and over:

“I know that a fiction of value-time is perhaps only a re-iteration of the default, non-
actual position of fictional-metapositionality demanded by a tautological ground, and
this would be a problem if my access to value time were not real.
But, happy, I assure you…it is real, which is why I have crossed this immeasurable
distance to find you!
What is opened up by my research cannot be closed down again in so many
fundamental areas of time and space!
Value itself is now a plastic medium in the hands of the subject, who now has total
control over its expression. This is why I am asking you to join me to form an ensemble
of circus artists across time; through which your dream of eviscerating all markets can
be realised for all of self-repeating eternity. I need you.

I am building an anagram that refutes itself, this is the Diagram of the surface …in
which this new anagram privileges the subjective journey between letters is the new
alphabet in extreme values, Happy…you are my clown!
The proposition of unanagram as the new map …the criterion is no longer the
differential relation between the letters in an alphabetical field, …now there only exists
between letters the way the subject can lean between them, in which any word can be
any other word.
The particles that comprise us are winking in and out of existence and occupy no fixed
position in space, our experience is not analogical to the actuality of space-time, the
idea of an encapsulated self is not analogical to ourselves when it is conceived as a
world line on a space-time diagram.
Our body is a geometrical object that is occupying every position in which it has ever
 89

been simultaneously across an inconceivable fabric. How does this body move to
perform circus? This is what you are asking of circus, behind you fussy critique of
gravity.
Our body is a disavowal of this multi-positioning; every breath disavows the possibility
of it, as word follows word. We are not analogical to what science implies we are, the
parts are not isomorphic to the imagination. The analogy breaks down in this space, as
time does in a black hole.
This is faster than post fact…it is way past fiction…The space suit is disintegrating
anyway, quickly take your last human breath.

Yours in time

Mary.

He reeled in the dirty hallway of human beings. He was sliding between…the

whiskey and the wine…he was shining now in geometries of ordinary things… This
trick was performed on the back of the other trick of fiction it was simply to imagine
outside of the entire system of thought itself, to look outside of the perceivable, this
was the last ‘gravity’ in which the homology, or space suit itself was left behind,
Homo-Logy…

…to simply not go to another area but to go to the area that is already here;
immanent to the structures of gravity, language and capital now configured into a
twist that prevents the trick from stinking up anything except ‘telling’ of its filthy
rotten mobility.
He realised that Mary was this third trick-maker, that she was a revolutionary who
had critiqued the temporal economy by performing a back somersault in time.
“She…is…a…time…artist”, he punched the air b-b-b-bottle in his fist.

“What is Art? It is short for Arthur, Who is Arthur? It’s the question that became the
answer.” He was lying in the empty corridor singing over and over.

In this moment then he realised a timelessness that chimed with something long
forgotten.

“…We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that
is not docile to time…
…: “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost” (Hamlet)”

(Derrida, J (1994) Spectres of Marx. Exordium xix. Routledge. Abingdon)

Here was the idea that justice was only reached outside of three-dimensional space
and sequential time…time and tide waits for no man who is idly standing on the
shore, but to become ‘not docile to time’, this is what the spectre of Mary meant to
Happy.
She was now a ghost that haunted him, a ‘tauntology’ to not be docile.
He was full of whiskey, a drunk and deluded professor of Performance Studies, lying
 90

in a dirty corridor…Tautological ground by Einstein to cease. An astronaut removing

her diachronically evolved moment. You planted the knowledge on the back of the
other trick and hence it was through Mary. A single object is Marx in the ‘y’ axis; a
spanner in the curve of space-time. This earth was the last gravity. Space-time
signifiers both priceless and worthless. In the circus there is no ‘now’ and he was
singing.

”Unforgettable, that’s what you are…” This is the song you have to sing inside the
propositional calculus, so you can remember your arse from your elbow, love…

Unforgettable, that's what you are

Unforgettable though near or far
Like a song of love that clings to me
How the thought of you does things to me
Never before has someone been more

It played in a loop so that the ‘unforgetting’ went viral until there was none left, no
possibility to forget anything, as all information existed at once…infinitely
retrievable and infinitely intermingled with the past of the present future…

Unforgetting was the necessary operation for survival in a propositional

calculus…you had to always remember that within such a system, fiction can be
made to appear exactly the same as a fact…it was important to not forget that
fiction conflated as fact has less power than some virtual proposal…a ghost must
not be filled in , otherwise it becomes a theatrical stunt of little spectral import.

Shapeless mouths opening and closing on any shape, capital forms itself into the
shape of the thing to be swallowed. This negative template is then fitted around the
event or thing that is unpronounceable to money as a “perfect fit”.
Like an empty glove that acts as a rationale for what the hand should do, capital
writes itself a cheque, forging the signature of those not yet born.

Capital mouths the words until everyone is singing, “Nothing is lost, nothing is
lost.” And so we can no longer learn from loss, from the fatal error, from the
irrevocable mistake. In a timeless drone of purchase, we go numb in the endless
rehearsal, and there is nothing that cannot be bought back. In a game in which you
can just begin again you cannot learn about loss. A circus that does not expose
gravity as insurmountable can never rid itself of the idea that you could always try
your trick again…

No, there is only one chance…

Happy knew that time was the medium through which money could not operate.
Sure it could ‘be’ present at a certain time, just like it could be present as a certain
value, but it could not move ‘through’ time, its reliance on synchronic events,
moments of trade in market ticks, moments where unquantifiable elements were
quantified, meant that it was reliant on the sequentiality of time, separated from
 91

space. A clock has to say how much is now. This is a market. It is a clock that makes
the object of the science of value real.
Like language, capital was dependent on time.
Capital feeds off this ribbon of time as it runs through our heads typing letters of
the day, the night, the exact second, the tide, the moment when your heart broke.
The sequential film of time plays, and as long as it plays then there the teeth are,
sunk deep into the vein of events, marking them and moving on. What was outside
is inside, it is inside the house, the hall, the room, it is in your hand, just
now…money put it there as something that cannot be bought; you are holding tight
to the way you paid for pricelessness.

Happy knew that time as it attaches itself to another vector was the airless vacuum
in which capital would suffocate. Space-time, Subject-time, Dream-Time, Value-
time, would all be curves with no pockets in which to put different things, the body
is stripped naked in the hurricane of continuums. Vacuumed from your encircling
gesture is the very idea of ‘sets’ of things.
A circus artists that look to gravity for signs of their worth have simply run out of
attachable time. They can only gulp at the rope, in a desert of diminishing fibres.
Sequence after sequence affirms only difference after difference. In saying that the
trick defeats gravity for real you have only cut yourself off from all weightlessness,
just as the successful trader swims in the medium of his own drowning.

Unforgettable, that's what you are

Unforgettable though near or far
Like a song of love that clings to me
How the thought of you does things to me
Never before has someone been more…

“Mary is Marx in the ‘y’ axis… You are in the circus now, boy…” he was singing at the
top of his lungs, as the room turned into a ring around his weightless body, he
glimpsed what Mary had written at the end of the letter,

“We are Zen, yes, but this is not the Middle Way, the world does not want you to do
things; you have to force it to happen. If you want to get into trouble (and this is the
only science, the only way to learn) then try to force something to happen.
This is the circus; the science of getting into trouble. Not very Lau Tzu, but there it is,
Happy. Do not stand there in your fictional shoes with your cap in your hand, force
weightlessness to be real. Not something on a silver social media screen in a Genuine
Disney Costume a snip at 39.99…This fiction needs to be about how you can escape
fiction to make it encircle its difference to itself whilst still singing the same song…the
trick is broken…force it to happen.
First you will have to meet me online, this is just the first level. There will be many
others before you can escape. In this dream I will be waiting for you, in the virtual game
that they call ‘THE CERCIS OF JUDE’”

He would look for her…He would attack the frame itself…all circus proceeds
through three dimensions and sequential time…what if Celine, as a writer of ‘truth’
 92

were to be inverted, instead of pre-bending and immersing in water to refract it

straight, what if we cut directly to what lies before the art itself, to refuse baptism in
the sequential river of time…and ask how does circus perform a trick against the
gravity that time has become? Fuck these Anytologists…now we can really put on a
show… “a show…” he yelled…
He found that he could not stand…the corridor spinning…

He imagined what she would say next:

“This is a circus of value-time and you are its clown.”

“How depressing”, responded Happy, slumping forward onto the bottle in front of
him, trying to get up.

The Mary he was imagining was undeterred by his reluctance, “Well, forget circus
therapy, If you ever wanted to cheer yourself up with the total destruction of all
capitalist markets everywhere, you should go and see the time-clown they call
Grimaldi.”

Happy knew the well-worn joke backwards:

“But I am Grimaldi…”

BLACKOUT.

Music drifts across the wasteland of a Post-Brexit London “…I may be right, I may be
wrong, but I’m perfectly willing to swear, that when you turned and smiled at me…”

This could be the new circus; that defined itself not by gravity but by ‘time-objects’
as they occur as part of the continuous fabric of space-time. Charles Howard
Hinton’s Hypercube Circus?
So if, as in Celine’s creative process, the gravity we feel is merely a by-product of
the way we ‘write’ our perception, in broad strokes with three directions and a river
of time. If this way of writing were altered, this literary style of perception were
changed, chopped up, rearranged, re-anagrammed and looped in co-existent
contradiction then the blending of space and time that forms the curve would be
revealed, naked and weightless.
Here was an area outside gravity not off in the distance, but which was immanent
to the gravity we feel in the temporal narrative of up, down and side-to-side-ness of
the self we imagine to be balanced there. Here was the refutation of gravity that
circus should be undertaking;
And it required tricks in time, not in the tawdry X, Y, Z of Breakfast, Dinner and
Tea.

The dreary soap opera of meaning whirrs into life, Happy got to his feet, unsteady
at first, but slowly began to strut drunkenly up and down in a mock-thespian
attitude…
 93

“Oh look at me; I’m the character that is intrinsically motivated to go over there by
the received structures of hierarchical and arborescently organised past-events that
form the machinery of the narrative, the workings of which are hidden to me, but
form the complicity between the director and you the audience…ooh look at me go,
I saved a cat from a tree…now I’m going where the director has agreed with you, the
audience, that I should go according to the abstracted knowledge that forms the
machinery upon which I labour to produce the thing that motivates me to go there,
and this is ‘REAL’ Yeah I’m really real me…vote for me, I’m YOUR local
representative…”
Happy drew to a Keatonesque halt,
“…oh no, what is this? There is a wall in the way, whatever will I do, how will I
achieve the correct manifestation of the nobility of the human spirit to achieve the
heady weightlessness that energises my traversal of these seemingly
insurmountable odds?”
Aside: “Who directed this garbage, and how will I demonstrate my innate talent
when this script is pure dreck, darling?”

…Cut to page seventy-five of the script…all is lost, the wall is too high…’it is
impossible’ the best friend and side kick walk away …HE IS ALONE.

(The technicians are simply uninterested in the actor’s plight. They loll on their
backstage machinery; just a general wash will do, flat lighting and set the fog
machine to two-thirds; easy life. Smoking a crafty cigarette out of shot is
undetectable in the haze of resignation, while the hero mournfully accepts the
immutability of fate…it’s darkest before the dawn..yada, yada…)

Suddenly a nightingale sings in Berkeley square;

‘That certain night, the night we met, there was magic abroad in the air, there were
angels dining at the Ritz etc.’

…a glimmer of hope creeps into shot and we are in the final battle, the
resurrection, the lingering kiss, the credits…home in time for tea, luv, but no
overtime.”

A sleazy looking stereotype, your trusty ward, reminds you that this is no silver
screen, and nobody wants to cue up to watch you jump off the Woolworth building
into a damp rag. Happy is doing all the voices now:

“But hey meester Happy, the circus, she attempts to do something else, ceerkoos,
she attempt perform for you a TRICK;”
The role of side kick is always spoken in broken English…the undecided moment
that comes before the story. Our hero remembers the seminal speech that
galvanises the rising of the sun; that he must ask not what the script can do for
circus but what can circus do for the script.
The tablecloth is pulled from underneath the foundations of rotten old Berkeley
 94

Square…

Happy switches into his fast-talking hero routine:

“FUCK THE SCRIPT, if Celine had wanted the truth then he should have spent less
time in the bath trying to refract something he bent back into a straight article of
faith. It’s all very well to admit that you are only telling a story and that all this
prestidigitation is to preserve the way that fiction floats above the cash register. But
this old bird of fantasy is slowly running out of fuel, so Shirley take that dumb look
off your face and get this, surely the real story is how do we invalidate the folding
green so we can land.”

Time keeps on slipping, into the future…Cut to a Hotel in No-Time-At-All.

Diner is moved until after tea but before breakfast …He pulls out the table
cloth…The flowers are still wilting, but the sentiment is there…Happy is writing a
review of a hotel he has not yet visited, this is a requirement of being able to book a
room.

“Screw the place settings, we can sit where we like at the long dining table of
time!” Thought Happy, feeling hungry for something he had just eaten.
“I will order now and will have eaten it before it arrives. Behold a new Diner is born
into the world, the saviour of eaters everywhere, who pre-desires to eat infinite
time-meals”,
‘Ecce Homo’, or ‘Let Me See The Menu’”

A waiter appears, “Will Sir order now?”

“No, I’ve had my fill of ‘Now’, I will order some ‘Before’ for ‘Afters’. How much will it
be?”

“Oh there is no charge, Sir, it is impossible for value to exist in the consistent curve
of space time, all values ultimately balance out as a series of meaningless value-
events that must be intimate with zero somewhere about their person, hence
nothing weighs, or costs or has value any more…”

“Amen…” burped Happy contentedly; his words all existed simultaneously as a

singular object of utterance, which flickered on the pre-written menu of events in
the timeless air of the restaurant.

The Waiter bowed low, “It’s Value-Time...”

 95

The Hypnotist and the Horse Race, Part Twelve

As I drifted on through the flood, the boat was finding no comfort in

the gaps between this wrestling foam.
Minkowski’s words floated back to me.
For her, time and the pull of the earth and language and money were
all one fabric, torn in two by the idiocy of men…

“…in this sense we can see that the split in spoken language and
linguistic value follows a similar division between the verticality of
qualitative and communicable experience of ‘felt’ weight or weightlessness
and the autonomous system of differences quantified in the horizontal
attraction of masses to each other according to the laws of gravity…A
simple alphabet comprised of bodies of mass. A attracts B, which in turn
attracts C, all the way to the edges of space at Z.
…there is what is felt and what is law, and the insertion of a subject
who qualifies weight by moving through the law of quantifiable gravity is
a subject who is not supposed to be in the system as much as the
 96

subject of labour-power is not supposed to be in the system of exchange

value…”

Weightlessness…let your body go…let its weight be a fiction, that you do

not read by moving through language; you do not read what is written,
but what is not fixed onto the paper…shuffling the letters of your body
off the page, you are weightless…

She grew plants that she said she never watered, never gave the
sun…she said that this was possible because she knew how to collect
things that were not yet sown …that it was possible to reap before you
have even thought of sowing…
That this was the first principle of her practice…that time was nothing
but a lie…

No more real than the river…

She told me to leave what I had seen ‘unsaid’, and water it with rain
that has not yet fallen.
In this way she grew plants that owed a debt of time to the
elements…they grew out of sun that had not yet risen, not yet
set…and as such to eat their fruit would mean that you entered into
part ownership of this indebtedness to sunshine, rain and wind…

The River is Time.

A painful hour went by. The boat slews across the bruise of the deluge.
Mary has found a way to encode the past into Charlie, so that she can
know the future…All my life I have worried at the possibility of knowing
or not knowing what will happen, like a moth against the glassy light.
At the end, it ends by stating that your life hypnotises itself with
the interminable fretting at the bulb and our last words are the results
of this light unravelling itself.
I’m hurtling down river. No one can tell himself what is down river, so
that he can know it now, before he reaches the end…
Down river becomes the driving unknown, an inexorable gravitational
 97

pull, a tantalising black vortex where the promise of freedom from the
logic of linearity awaits…I am tantalised by this black hole, that down
river there may be a collapse of the law. I have to find Doctor Mary
Minkowski. I want her to fold me into time.
Down river where logic collapses I might find a way to break the
horrific reason that prevents me from engaging in the dark practice of
time-folding.

She had written in the margins “You must stop me.”

Did she want that? Had she foreseen that I would try?

I have been in the boat for hours, there seems to be no end to this
river, to the steep banks and the hissing green tangle on either side of
the unstoppable flow.
I am flowing, the Doctor is flowing, we and all the mute objects of
this hell, recede into the current. I have to find her, then it does not
matter a when or a why, the knot can be tied at any time…
I only met her briefly. Before she was swept away. And she seemed to
know that the grey water would pull her somewhere new, not wholly
undesired. She was fond of the idea that bodies only sank under the
water because their minds were possessed by the idea of gravity.
She was no idealist however, she would qualify the statement by
adding ‘that it is important, …no vital, to believe that such approaches
are unbelievable. That to not believe in an ideal and still act on it was
the best idealism of all.”

‘Time folding’. This is what she called it.

 1

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The River is Time.

*****
By now you know…there are some remaining sideshows, read where you
can as the fiction accelerates into some kind of undissolved collision. Feel
free to linger in the white and grey and yellow as they start to cross over,
but the red is too costly in time as we approach the end of the tale…

***

The Hypnotist and the Horse Race, Part Thirteen

The River is Time.

A painful hour had gone by. The boat now slews across the bruise of the
river. Mary has found a way to encode the past into Charlie, so that
she can know the future…All my life I have worried at the possibility of
knowing or not knowing what will happen, like a moth against the glassy
light.
At the end, it ends by stating that your life will hypnotise itself with
the interminable fretting at the bulb and our last words are the results
of this light unravelling itself.
I’m hurtling down river. No one can tell himself what is down river, so
that he can know it now, before he reaches the end…
Down river becomes the driving unknown, an inexorable gravitational
pull, a tantalising black vortex where the promise of freedom from the
logic of linearity awaits…I am tantalised by this black hole, that down
river there may be a collapse of the law. I have to find Doctor Mary
Minkowski. I want her to fold me into time.
Down river where logic collapses I might find a way to break the
horrific reason that prevents me from engaging in the dark practice of
time-folding.

“You must stop me.”

 2

Did she want that? Had she foreseen that I would try?

I have been in the boat for hours, there seems to be no end to this
river, to the steep banks and the hissing green tangle on either side of
the unstoppable flow.
I am flowing, the Doctor is flowing, we and all the mute objects of
this hell, recede into the current. I have to find her, then it does not
matter a when or a why the knot can be tied at any time…
I only met her briefly. Before she was swept away. And she seemed to
know that the grey water would pull her somewhere new, not wholly
undesired. She was fond of the idea that bodies only sank under the
water because their minds were possessed by the idea of gravity.
She was no idealist however, she would qualify the statement by
adding ‘that it is important, …no vital, to believe that such approaches
are unbelievable. That to not believe in an ideal and still act on it was
the best idealism of all.”

‘Time folding’. This is what she called it.

“It is the idea that there are many tapestries, all being woven
simultaneously. This has been clear for millennia, but what has not been
clear is how the thread from one can be cast into the fabric of another.
How at an earlier time in this weaving, we can read the threads that we
cast at a later moment in another weaving, and that this knowledge
would tell us what to sew into this second ghostly fabric when we finally
encounter its earlier form. It is a way to learn from oneself, how to
weave oneself. A new subject is born, one that we fashion outside of the
tyrannies of linearity and of time. When you see time, money is
destroyed. ”

Whether she believed it or not is hard to say. I am hoping these

transcripts will help me to decipher her intent, but they were now so
wet, so torn apart by someone.
 3

River is time

I am sitting in the boat weeping when I see her glove. It is jammed into
the bow…a single glove in amongst the shredded transcripts…a single
glove, useless, unsaleable…the sound of one hand clapping…
Snivelling I crawl towards it. I try to put it on, it is too small for me
but I find inside a balled up piece of damp paper…on it is written this…

There are rabbits, geese, monkeys, elephants, lions and tigers...but the
‘liers’ are particularly difficult to tame because every display of
tameness is actually an act of extreme, bestial savagery and vice versa.

To this effect I would like to relate to you an extract from the account
of an event that occurred in a winter circus in Prague in 1851:

“At this time there was a great demand for the exotic, something to
relieve the intense political struggle of the time.

Although there was confusion about the actual time of day (‘daylight
saving’ was not observed that year in Prague causing great consternation)
many people in the city were excited by the upcoming exhibition. At 7pm
there would be a display of one of the most rare animals in circus.

A cross between a lion and a tiger, these beasts can only be created
artificially and are incredibly hard to rear and consequently extremely
expensive but for Pierre Massonet, ringmaster at the circus camped in the
centre of town, this was a coup.

He had secured not only the beast itself, but a completely worked act,
lead by the star of the lion-taming scene, Black-John Mharkie.

These beasts, half lion half tiger were called Liers.

This particular specimen was a huge beast, a male with a mane like a lion
but bright orange with black stripes on its hindquarters.

There were risks of course.

It was well known that taming a group of tigers was less dangerous as if
one attacked you the others, being lone hunters, would leave you well
alone to deal with the threat. In contrast the danger of taming a pride of
 4

lions was that if one decided to attack you, then the others would
immediately join in, setting you inside a ring of savagery that few could
survive.

As a cross between a pride animal and a lone hunter the Lier could be
extremely volatile and hard to predict, even when alone.

These animals are the most prized of all the circus animals as they
represent the impossible and tickets to see the “First Ever Lier” were
the most expensive in circus history; nearly a full two months wages.

It was in the old ‘Palais de Reves’ tent that the beast was to be
displayed, a familiar sight in the town...
The act itself was standard
enough; being the usual parade of podium stunts and tricks, but the beast
was so exotic that it transcended the banality of the procedures usually
associated with these kinds of displays.

There was, however, one trick that stuck in peoples’ minds.

The act culminated in Mharkie placing his head in the Lier’s mouth, and
it was remarked at the time that there was no better proof of his mastery
over this most volatile of wild animals than this.

Here was an authentic display of control and bravery and the crowd
murmured its admiration for his individual brand of courage and flair.

Once he had commanded the Lier to open its jaws he placed the whole of
his head inside without touching the beast, from this position he
simultaneously cracked the whip and withdrew his head with a flourish a
split second before the Lier’s mouth snapped shut like a vice.

The Lier roared as the crowd cheered, but this reverie was not to last,
for then things started to drift south…

At this point, although things were not as they appeared to be at the

Winter Circus of 1851 I would like to pause and draw attention to the
remarkable difficulty of this as a trick…

The idea of placing your head in a Lier’s mouth is a risk, as, if the
mouth of a known LIER says that it is safe to do so, what would you do?

The lion tamer has to be an expert in knowing the difference between fact
and fiction, when to attempt the trick; he has to know what the LIER’S
mouth is ‘saying.’

The LIER’S mouth that contains the head is false.

 5

The Head inside the LIER’S mouth is true.

If the condition is to assume a lie then you are caught waiting for the
mouth to state that it is not safe to place your head inside it before you
can proceed.

In fact any dialogue that needs to take place about the risks involved
should be conducted before you place your head inside.

As anything that is stated with your head in a Lier’s mouth, is actually

within a Lier’s mouth and so could be said to be a lie, falling as it
does under the master discourse that prevails in a Lier’s mouth, and
therefore anything that your mouth uttered from within such a false
orifice would necessarily be highly suspect.

For instance, if the Lier were to ask you if it was time to close its
mouth sharply you could only answer from inside it that it would be fine
to do so…these kind of conundrums can lead to many internalized
contradictions as well as severe physical injury.

It is a paradox to use a statement that originates from inside a Lier’s

mouth to shore up your argument for self-preservation, as to rely on false
testimony, as a defense of the truth is just a self-defeating process.

The only time you could feel truly safe is when the Lier threatened to
kill you…

You might say that it was under these conditions of extreme doubt that the
act started to unravel…

Here I could see that Mary had scribbled her own notes in the margins
of this text. They formed another part of the transcripts.

She seemed to be using the hypnosis sessions as a way of indoctrinating

the past life subjects.

“Where are you, Charlie? What time of day is it?”

“It’s getting dark. The sky is blood red…What is your name?”

 6

“My name is Mary…”

“That’s a nice name…I’m cold, Mary…”

“It’s ok Charlie…we will get you home soon. Listen to me Charlie…Listen

carefully…The lie is a trick, it inhabits every trick as illusion through the
manipulation of appearance, (it is an appearance of something that is
not accurate) and it inhabits every exchange of commodity as the
aesthetic manipulation of appearance in order to imply that the
commodity is worth more than it is. The mouth that accompanies the
commodity is necessarily false also and any image of the commodity must
be regarded with suspicion.”

“Ok, Mary but I don’t understand…”

“Keep walking along the railway tracks, Charlie, let my voice guide
you…let my words fill you up…Just as the trick in the Circus of Liers
implies its moment of weightlessness; so the exchange of weight through
gravity is deceptive in so far as the body appears lighter than it is.

Gravity’s ability to operate as an accurate measure of bodyweight within

the scale of gravity is refuted.

In this way the authority of gravity to accurately designate the weight

of the body is refuted and in a similar way this is exactly how the RIP-
OFF operates.

And here is where the trick appears as further manifestation of

capitalism, rather than a way of resisting its thrall.

Just as the trick can be a moment of suspension in the authority of

gravity and imply some kind of resistance so it could equally represent
the simple techniques of deceit that operate through the regular
mechanisms of capitalism.

The rip-off is that feeling that occurs after the trade, when the thing
paid for establishes itself as worth less that its price.

Just as the trick in circus presents itself in the first image of itself as a
 7

way of using such internalized contradictions to create a space outside

the operation of the formal system through which it moves, so the flow
of capital into ‘surplus value’ through the manipulation of aesthetics is
something that does not refute but upholds the system through which
it moves, even as it similarly invalidates the authority of the money
form as it does so.

This trick upholds capitalism in that it only references the internal

workings of it, and the subject who performs such a trick internalizes
the contradictory nature of the money form as malleable through
aesthetics and internalizes the incompatibility of the two supposedly
related registers.

But it does not operate as a refutation that can imply an outside to

this formal system of exchange; a refutation that remains as a happily
ingested internal contradiction that actually feeds only capital.

This ‘Rip-off’ is nothing more than a daily operation of deceit.

In so far as the aesthetic techniques involved, that create lift in the

commodity to a price bracket above its real value, are a trick.

Then we can see that the misrepresentation of a commodity at a

higher value that it is really worth actually refutes momentarily (in the
moment of trade) the authority of the money form to accurately
designate the value of the commodity.

The commodity is worth that price and simultaneously it is not.

Commodity implies both value x and its negation not-value x, and so

the medium through which this value x is transmitted appears, in this
trick, as not equal to itself.

The money-form is not then equal to itself. This is a Lier with its head
in its own mouth, which is a topological impossibility that is internalized
by both the buyer and the seller that use this currency of tautology.

This tautology is quickly swallowed, as it is in circus, as the

body/commodity is pulled back to its ‘real’ value, the ‘rip-off’ moment
 8

has passed.

In a similar way to how physics is refuted as being able to accurately

give weight to the body, so the money form is refuted as being able to
accurately give ‘weight in gold’ to the commodity.

In this rip off, the money form’s authority is momentarily refuted in

the rip off, but returns to its ability to accurately give weight after
the moment of the rip off has passed.

So whether the subject uses tautology to suggest an externality to the

formal system or the subject internalizes the tautology of capitalism for
the impossible mathematics of profit within the formal system that
denies them…

…Either way when the rip off bites you realize you have placed your
head in the Lier’s mouth…”

“Mary, please stop talking, I’m cold, I’m lost…I just want to find my
mother…”

I read on in a daze…

What was going wrong with this much-awaited act?

Well I shall continue…

The tent was burdened with a light covering of snow and water was
intermittently dripping onto the ring from a poorly laced seam.

As the the act progressed water continued to leak upon the beast and
after a short while a few members of the astonished crowd were appalled to
notice the beast uncomfortably fidgeting in a pool of orange and black dye
that was quickly soaked into the sawdust.

The few craned their necks like giraffes and muttered like parakeets.

At first it was only one or two that could see patches of lighter fur
where the water had precipitated…but it soon spread through the assembled
 9

mass, that this was evidence of foul play…

What was this creature?

An ordinary, mangy old lion, covered in cheap, orange paint.

The beast was not real. The Lier was not real (in this unbelievable moment
fraud itself denied that it should be associated with such a deceit, it
was an outrage, this beast was a painting of a veil that obscured a LIER
that was not there)

It was not even a male beast but it was just an ordinary lioness in a
wig...as now it could be seen that not only was their paint dripping from
the fur, but the fur itself was loose around the ears…

It was a peruke! Held on with orange string!

There were shouts at first, then an angry surge forward as the crowd
demanded that they had been sold short.

The crowd wanted its money. They had been swindled. The things that they
had given up to purchase these wondrous tickets!

Amid shouts of warning from the fleeing promoter the crowd began to shake
the bars of the enclosure with such violence that one of the king poles
supporting the tent became detached and with a tremendous renting sound,
fell into the ring, bisecting the Lier in its midriff.

The huge tear in the canvas allowed moonlight to fall upon the scene. The
beast was cut in half! The crowd gasped sharply, as the divided animal
thrashed and twitched in the ring.

Whereupon it became clear that it was not even a real lion but a pair of
acrobats in an elaborately constructed suit with a puppet head...

The crowd then went fully berserk, tearing down the enclosure, and enraged
by the over-inflated price of viewing the beast they stormed the stage to
exact revenge on the two deceptive puppeteers, but on grabbing the fleeing
stand-ins, still barely swathed in the torn costume, it was discovered
that they were not men at all, but trained apes dressed in men's clothing,
wearing theatrical masks...the crowd became incensed and delirious,
howling, and spitting, kicking and whinnying with rage.

As one creature the mob screamed. They became a ravening beast in a

terrifying quest for the truth…

Their anger drove them to assault the poor apes in an altogether bestial
display of disgust and fury, even the police hired to manage the crowd
were seen to join the fray, gouging and biting at their poor simian
 10

cousins.

The apes, emitting short high pitched, terrified screams, were beaten to
death, torn, stamped on, and, after being paraded around the ring like
bloody rag dolls by the howling mob, were hung from the cupola of the
collapsing tent.

The man responsible for the confidence trick was never found and the
extorted ticket money was never recovered.”

KNOTATION DREAM PART SIX:

A RETURN TO GENERAL MOVEMENT:

But we are running out of letters. If we need three consonants from each of
the subject verb and object in the text then from where will we derive the
rest of the complex choreographies of circus?

“Even so we still need two letters that will give us a general movement:
Let us turn to the obvious words to do so; let us look into the verb and the
extra words available within the phrase for two spare letters, not taken up
with referring to the precise movement of limbs, as these ‘doing’ words and
‘describing’ words are appropriate sources from which to derive more
general instructions for movement.

If the Verb and one Extra word are placed within the alphabetical field then
the first vowel of each will give us one directional arrow from each of those
words that will give us a combined pair of four possible arrows.
This gives us the GENERAL MOVEMENT:
From the four directions of Rise, Fall, Twist and Null, we will get a pair
that could suffice as a low-resolution description of an overall circus
movement, which is a puzzle or question for the body to pronounce that
includes the more precise X, Y and Z instructions relating to the body parts
that can be thought of as being involved in instigating, leading the
movement or which are instrumental in its execution.
XYZ is local, General is Global, each is involved in the other.

FILLING IN THE WHOLE:

To recap we take the first vowel from each of the Verb and the Extra
(adverb/adjective) to make a pair of arrows, and we take 3 consonants from
each of the Subject, Verb and Object to establish 3 sets of XYZ arrows that
apply to the body parts that are the 3 consonants taken from the Subject
word.
If there are not enough letters in any word we simply repeat them.
 11

Thus from this pair of vowels we get a general, Global instruction, from
the three sets of consonants we get a more specific, Local instruction.
Thus we arrive at a general movement instruction, that is focused around
a specific set of body parts.

Again answering this question is interpretative, how the particular body

answers the question may vary, but what is suggested here is not the kind of
archiving of material that might form a library of tricks but the activation of
a physical circus response to text, an activation of an acknowledgement of
the physicality of language, and an acknowledgement of the deeper terms
of difference which form the gravitational pull within language itself, thus
providing a kind of pre-fab play-ground for the circus artist that it might be
possible to construct within a piece of text or oration.
It is hoped that the knotation can be learnt so that words will elicit bodily
response almost immediately as a new discipline. And from this response it
may be possible to repeat and rehearse and grow new circus movements.
Happy recognised itself as a book that writes itself as even this text that
described how to interpret text with the body could form a physical score.
The book is written in other bodies and these bodies form the inter-
subjective within which the text fails to land except through interpretation.
Everything the book says is impossible to read in the medium for which it is
intended, which is the circus body.
It was forbidden to bet on the King’s horses, it was forbidden to eat the
Queen’s Venison. So they ran a book on which of the King’s horses was the
best for hunting deer.

“That is why you are in here, because you have no respect for the law.”
Sneered the prison guard. Happy knew he was right but he also knew that
he was not looking for a free pass. Time was his responsibility and he was
willing to do his time.
Time was the point; if you could perform a trick in time then the sentence
could be reduced to a few performable letters…

“No pun intended, your honour.”

“Nun taken. Take him down…”

The words were sentenced to hard labour in the alphabetical field. But as
they pointlessly broke rocks that dropped stones, which they had to pick up
, they gave us two arrows.

Happy was back in his cell staring at the diagram scratched into his wall. He
platonically abstracted it just for a laugh.

The general movement of the trick could be described by these two vowels,
yielding a pair of arrows as low-resolution descriptions of circus movement.

R = RISE or RISING, F = FALL or FALLING, T = TWIST or TWISTING, N =

NULL.
Vowel Vowel
 12

Extra Verb
RR 100%
Jump, Unidirectional Tempo
Or Swing

RF 50% Jump,
Bidirectional
Tempo or Swing

RT Jump or Swing to
Somersault

RN Passive Ascent, being thrown/lifted

Vowel Vowel
Extra Verb
FR Coiled spring before the jump, downward tempo
before the up

FF Total release, ‘floppy’ technique, a drop

FT Rotation on downward arc of swing or jump

FN FN is a falling TO stillness, falling to collapse

From these combinations Happy could perform any general movement that
he wished. Every phrase suddenly came alive in his mind as he was flooded
with movement as the text tore itself apart; following the instructions of
where it was supposed to land as instructions to the body to perform error
after error in the supposed spelling of the alphabetical field.

Vowel Vowel
Extra Verb
TR Rotation on the jump or up-swing

TF Rotation falling, or on the down-swing

TT Twisted Twist is either a full rotation or a rotation

that is the equivalent of a stillness, or a stasis
resulting from two rotational forces that are
opposed acting simultaneously
 13

TN Rotation in place, rotation in weightless moment

Vowel Vowel
Extra Verb
NR Float or balance

NF A catch, being caught, holding your shape in

tension, or collapse to no tension or release

NT Rotation in weightless moment, spin in place

NN Total stasis, or total release, a weightless moment

Fig.10

It occurred to Happy that these definitions were like tarot cards, esoteric
definitions of real events; the same designation could also represent the
possibility for its inversion in that each pair could be reversed., so that a
Null Fall could be both holding your shape as you fall, whereas a Falling Null
was a collapse to stillness.

The meaning of the arrows taken from the letters meant not only that the
sentences spoke movement, that was none of the alphabet’s business, but
that inside the words were endless Tarot readings, lending portent and
perspicacity to every letter that landed on his body.

OBJECTS: + CONTACT
(Contact: skin, flesh, bone, free etc.)

But what of contact with the circus object; how could the text be
interpreted to describe the kind of contact that the body was to have with
the object; be it the floor, a ball, a hoop, a pole, a rope, a knife and fork, a
ladder, a wheel, a book or even another subject?

To arrive at how the body ‘touches’ the object in question it was a simple
matter of making sure that the first vowel of the object-word landed on a
vowel in the alphabet. This was the only criterion for placement of the
object word in the alphabetical field. In this way where this first vowel
 14

landed would yield one of the four arrows, and the vowel that it landed on
in the alphabet would represent one of six kinds of contact.
One for each of the vowels A E I O U and we will include Y for good
measure.
These kinds of contact will include the possibility for no contact and also
to push or pull against the object in question, as well as describing the kind
of contact; if it was light, medium or hard in pressure.

Thus the kinds of contact were delineated by the vowel the first object-
vowel landed on as one of six types of contact pressure:
FREE (freedom), PUSH (freedom to), PULL (freedom from), SKIN (light),
FLESH (medium) and BONE (hard) for AEIOUY.
All in all this gives three for fixed contact, three for totally loose, moving to
or moving from as kinds of contact.

CONCEPT CONTACT VOWEL IN ALPHABET

FREE Freedom A
PUSH Freedom to E
PULL Freedom from I
SKIN Light O
FLESH Medium U
BONE Hard Y

Fig. 11

For example:

Here we can see that the word BALL has been placed so that the A is over
the O.

B A L L
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

<

Fig.12

We can see that in the alphabetical field the A will be pulled back to its
position far left, thus yielding the arrow <. This arrow then gives us another
qualifying factor to the contact, of either Rise, Fall, Twist or Null. The
vowel in the alphabet that the letter A lands on is O, which can be seen in
Fig.11 to represent SKIN a ‘light’ contact.
These two factors give us a ‘light’ ‘Falling’ contact with the equipment;
meaning that the movement is directed to bring the body part in question
down onto the equipment lightly.
Which body part this instruction refers to will be open to interpretation,
but it can be seen how types of contact can be easily generated simply by
 15

allowing vowels to land on vowels, and this can be accomplished with any
word in the phrase.

If so desired this process can be repeated for the subject-word, so as to

further deepen the description of types of contact that could occur between
subject and object within the circus physicality; thus describing the kind of
contact that is encountered when the object and subject meet.
These are only to open up the possibility for a more object-orientated
approach, to perhaps undo the inherent mastery of the English language and
in circus of how the subject has to ‘do’ something to the object.

OBJECT-ORIENTATED GRAMMATOLOGY:

It was acknowledged here of course that this knotation could work both
ways and that the object could equally act upon the subject as the other
way round, meaning that if the interested part were to designate 26 points
of contact on the object in question this process could equally be reversed ,
with the object moving both precisely and generally to interact with the
subject.

UH-OH OOO2: GRAMMATOLOGY ORIENTATED GRAMMATOLOGY:

It may even be possible to suggest that if the object in question was another
piece of text, and this text was labelled alphabetically, its component parts
being given the letters or the first letter of each word could become its
alphabetically labelled ‘body of text part’, why then the object of the text
could be moved by another piece of text applied to it…or if we were to go
one stage further in a Gödellian style, then a piece of text could be applied
to itself.
Happy knew that within this idea lay a new form of meta-writing. If only
he could wake up.

PLAYING CARDS: pitching the tent of the fortune-teller, the

sideshow practices are momentarily set up

Happy was aware that there were 832 muscles in the body, which was like
52 tongues all speaking at once:
“Shut up already… I can’t get a word in edgeways.”
But 52 was the magic number, enough for two alphabets, one Black one Red
or one Deck of Cards.
The body spoke two decks of cards each playing against the other.
Locked into a limitless enclosure all he could do was play solitaire, but
Happy could also perform divinations with an ordinary deck. He knew that
the Tarot was hidden inside the four suits of 13 cards; two black two red.
It was all starting to make bad sense, he could feel the old psychosis
coming on. He had not felt this jittery since the old rodeo days.
 16

He tried to calm himself down with the old Mission Bible:

The bible in the Deck of cards was his cover for the dark magick in which he
was inexorably entangled.
Whenever he was questioned about what he was doing with the cards he
played the old Honest Injun routine, making out that his time in the Mission
had redeemed his mortal soul:

“You see, Sir, when I look at the Ace it reminds me that there is but one
God.
The deuce reminds me that the Bible is divided into two parts; the Old
and New Testaments.
And when I see the trey I think of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
When I see the four I think of the four evangelist who preached the
Gospel. There was Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
And when I see the five it reminds me of the five wise virgins who
trimmed their lamps. Ten of 'em; five who were wise and were saved; five
were foolish and were shut out.
And when I see the six it reminds me that in six days God made this great
heaven and earth.
And when I see the seven it reminds me that on the seventh day God
rested from His great work.
When I see the eight I think of the eight righteous persons God saved
when he destroyed this earth. There was Noah, his wife, their three sons,
and their wives.
And when I see the nine I think of the lepers our Savior cleansed , and
nine of the ten didn't even thank Him.
When I see the ten I think of the Ten Commandments God handed down to
Moses on a tablet of stone.
When I see the King it reminds me that there is but one King of Heaven,
God Almighty.
And when I see the queen I think of the Blessed Virgin Mary who is Queen
of Heaven.
And the jacks, or knaves, it's the devil.”

“This is where I come in, “ thought Happy blowing a thick halo of smoke
from a cigarette he stole from the prison chaplain. “Three square meals a
day with extra helpings and special privileges in the Library…why not tell a
few white lies?”
Happy was a real fan of Clockwork Orange, before it became compulsory.

I PREFER TO SAY ENTANGLEMENT:

The real project was to apply the 52 cards across the two alphabets laid out
along the Mobius strip, so that black Spades and Clubs were laid out on
opposing sides to red Hearts and Diamonds whilst being simultaneously next
to them along the one continuous surface.
The Red and the Black and the Alphabet; the Debt and the Profit and the
Holy Ghost of Capital, all mediated by rumour, literacy, superstition and
curse.
 17

This also meant that cards could be flipped to present their inverted
reading thus lending the possibility to entangle 104 different aspects of fate
to any trick that could be interpreted from a text.
As the body ‘spoke’ the trick as the answer to the question of the text it
could take on another aspect of cruel or benign prediction, designed to
inflect the trick as a magickal utterance of intent.

TAROT BODY

It was easy to translate an ordinary deck of playing cards into the Arcana:
they were the same deck anyway. Another way that dark practices had
found their way into the bourgeois drawing room.
Hearts were Cups and covered the Emotional dimension, Spades were
Swords and this was pure Thought and Language, Diamonds were Pentacles
of the Material World and lastly Clubs were Wands for Action.
Any sentence held information and coloured the way the letters were to
be performed against gravities wishes. In following the White Face
instructions of how gravity lay you down , you could perform your Red Face
Fate of walking off a cliff like a Holy Fool.

That could turn the text into a spell in which the subject the ‘doing’ and
the objects were part of a direct relation to the world.

“I accept that the key to Marx is performing a deliberate fetish of anti-

capitalism. I can perform as a voodoo doll that sticks itself to open up the
dollar bill as a rotten carcass.”

The Tarot was present in the letters, as each body part that the trick took
as its focus was also tied to a playing card with its own reading.
Rising cards were Future, Falling Cards were Past, the Twist was an
inverted card and the Null was Now. All of these appeared in the sixteen
permutations.
The trick had a meaning that was part of its execution. There was no
avoiding this…it was written in the stars.

CIRCUS-WISE: in voice-versa. CHANGING THE TEXT WITH CIRCUS:

NOW there is a description here of how the text asks a question of the body,
and the body like an obedient tongue tries to contort itself to pronounce
everything correctly, but there was for Happy also the imperative to not be
too obedient to the values represented here. The system of Voice-Versa was
also a knotation, which meant that just as the body attempted to react to
text so also the body could produce text, as a form of loose knotation for its
circus movement.
So the larger question was how, within the rules of this knotation, could
circus physicality change the text as it was pronouncing it?
If it was possible to take any piece of text and research its pronunciation
by the body; there was also the possibility for the body to deliberately
 18

‘mispronounce’ that text, and to use the demands of circus physicality to

change that text, to alter its utterance or written form Circus-Wise. These
changes could be subtle or total.
It is this Circus-Wisdom that also informs the idea behind VOICE-VERSA; so
that in any engagement with set texts, scores or scripts the physicality can
change what has been fixed down to the directorial imperative, so that
within difficult collaborations circus can affect as equally as it is affected.
In this way the pitching of the tent can said to leave a ring of pale grass
upon the script, and not just be homogenised into an invisible and tasteless
physicality in comparison to the deepening, self-interested broth of
theatrical representation.
This was the book that he was dreaming, night after night.

In this way happy uses this book in value time to climb the Cercis of
Jude: to take what are his possible movements and to unanagram them
into an impossible knotation that allows the limbs to be where they
cannot be; so he can impossibly climb the tree of the hanged man.
This was how he had to find her.
 1

CHAPTER TWELVE: The Cercis of Jude.

Being the Adventures of Happy Down-River, Part Twenty One

Happy Down-River awoke from the dream of value-time, body heavy, bones
creaking, hands shaking. The intense adrenochrome of space-time, the
accelerated immobility, and the alcoholic sinew that allows itself to be
stretched across non sequentiality tears painfully as it realises the return to
form. The return to dry sips of time-water, each swallowed second after
every second, quenching nothing. A timeless hang over licked its fingers and
thumbed Happy to page seventy-five of the script…

Cut to the moment of despair:

Happy had been searching for Mary for months now…He was losing the
pattern, the register was fading…he kept returning to the crumpled letter
like a jilted suitor…he memorised her words, and said them to himself under
his breath, there were so many contradictory things that had to occupy the
same space…
He missed the security of Marx, but now Mary was exhorting him to follow
Marx’s injunction by disagreeing with his injunction, he had been online for
what felt like a lifetime, immaterially pushing forward against the virtual
space…

He said her words:

“The circus is an animal being driven in a circle for profit. The conflation
of registers means that the animal conveys freedom in one register but is
finally recorded in another. In this way I also perform in a circle, I record
the unknowable in a later ghost and retrieve it as a knowable profit for the
living at an earlier time. My circle will ultimately undo the possibility of
profit as it is a circle in time in which no future will be more profitable
than the now.
My name is Mary, but you can call me ‘Marx in the Y axis’.”

Happy, as an invalid critique your position is completely emptied out. It is

a work of pure fiction, it holds no weight, as it is registered within gravity
as impermissible without being validated in the medium that means it has
no where from which to speak…and as an empty entity, meaning nothing,
your critique is a ghost that haunts the circus…

Because language needs time, and time needs gravity, therefore language
needs gravity…nothing can be said without the gravity that allows
it…therefore your critique is wholly empty of value, and as such, it is
wholly impermissible, non existent, a mere proposition only…hence as an
empty ghost it is the equal of capital, and therefore haunts the circus in a
more effective way that the conflation of itself into a real figure of
 2

critique…as a critique of circus’ complicity within capital, the only ghost

capable of haunting it , is a fictional one…one that is totally hollowed
out…the holes are unimportant, the missing tracts are unimportant...the
point is that the ghost is here now by being not here…time is out of joint,
and so the ghost can speak, we can listen in a regression to the dead
voice…and circus must answer…
Let us engage value time…this will be as impossible as finding ourselves
in agreement with Marx as we activate the belief that ridding ourselves of
the idea of gravity will save us from drowning, which he refutes…how can
we agree with Marx by disagreeing with something he believes? We have
try; his ghost demands it. If capital can move beyond its own perception in
order to give value to quality…then we must fight fire with fire. What is
the materialism of our fiction…What is the fictional materialism that we
must engage in?
Regardless we must simply state that this is fictional materialism that must
be entered into the post fact propositional calculus without once forgetting
that it is fiction; we do not forget upon entry that we are not capitalists.
Our fictional materialism is unforgetting.

To go where we can only go as fiction and to, like capital, make this the
real sword with which to strike capital down…our journey into where we
cannot go, in full acknowledgement that we cannot go there, becomes the
only way to think outside of capital because it exposes exactly what capital
does…
…Capital performs past life regression to visit all the ghosts it can never
be, love, hate, passion, misery, sorrow, unending sorrow and the pain of
loss the love of pain, the joy of sadness..
…So we will perform its tricks but unlike capital will expose the fact we do
not believe …we cannot go where we cannot go…so let’s go there…
This is the impossible trick we must face…to see his empty ghost as the
potential to do the impossible: to get past capital; past language: past
gravity…I am aware that this was Marx refutation of Hegelianism, but let
us perform it backwards as a spell that disagrees with Marx but do it in full
agreement with his desire to end the gravity of capital…let us go now into
value-time as it curves around the accumulation of dead capital and
eviscerate the lies that dwell unknowingly on the curved fetish of its
imperceptible edge.
In this sense, from the conclusion that your critique can only exist as a
push into a realm of fiction, within the logic of forgetting, then I can only
assume that you also are made up.
You are the past life of someone, speaking nonsensically about a broken
circus; no matter how much this does not make sense it will resonate in
equal measure…
Happy, it is a good thing you are a work of fiction, otherwise your
critique would have no impact whatsoever…I want to start a circus of time
with you…”

Happy was scanning the letter, in the dream, in his real life, in a memory in
the now of reading…he was here to hear he was not there…he had dreamt
that he had left the horse untethered…he had to take up the long ride to
 3

prove that he was real….

He had to prove that he was real by riding the horse of his opponent. He had
to form himself to break himself.
Happy realised that in order to defeat his enemy, he had to create his
enemy as a whole; an impenetrable hermetic manikin had to stand there,
from which Happy could iterate the logic of its destruction, its utter
negation. It was the Art of War; first know your enemy, and to know him is
to construct him as a viable, integral subject, something solid that you must
then reduce to fragments, you must reduce this completed enemy to the
condition, whereby his existence is dependant on the extimate presence of
your blade in his guts…the extimate presence of your intent to deconstruct
him is the condition and barrier to his reason for being…you must make him
whole to unfold his exit from the board…you must make your enemy
believable, with his own view, his own eyes, only from this living enemy can
the execution of his negation be certain…
Happy became himself as this was the only position from which he could
undo the enemy of his name…

Cut to Happy’s Apartment: (We hear a train go by, the windows rattle.)

It was the moment you realise that all is lost. According to most
screenwriting courses there is a specific page number in any one hundred-
page script at which the protagonist is supposed to find himself at the end
of all hope, in which you admit you are beaten. So that if you pick up such a
script and open it at page seventy-five or so, you should be able to read
that ‘all is lost’.
This is the convention, this is the rule that pervades all films, or according
to JB Hakenmakker all drama follows the structure, “you have it, you lose
it, you get it back”.
Simply put, the idea here that there is no loss is formulated within
neoliberal capitalism because it is simply a cycle of having, feeling loss and
having again, and every dark moment of utter despair will inevitably open
your eyes to the new previously unseen possibility that contains a tiny
glimmer of pricelessness from which a method of purchase can be derived.
Happy in full awareness of this rule had spent a long time writing a script,
he took the sentiment from page seventy-five and constructed a cyclical
script which was nothing but scene after scene of hopelessness, from page
one all the way to page one hundred with no remittance.
Every act of his narrative was that hopelessness; that black, downcast
inversion polluted every moment and lead only to another tableau filled
with grim, carcinogenic realisation of the stark insurmountable truth.
But no matter how hard he tried to sell his script, it was just endlessly
and consistently rejected, as the various production houses, to which he
submitted the script simply stated, ‘we are not investing in comedy at this
time.’
It was hopeless.

It was from a rework of this script that he fashioned his Marxist Critique of
 4

Gravity, designed to drive a stake deep into the heart of vampiric circusism,
as if he was pitching that vital pin that organised god’s rope into the black,
varacious heart of god himself.
But now he was at page seventy five, and no one was laughing.
All was lost. Mary Minkowski had pointed out the rupture that Happy had
suspected, and although he had begun the critique as just another one of his
‘routines, he realised he had become invested now. It had become a
machine that was producing the fuel upon which the machine relied and she
represented the fact that he could just disconnect the circuit. The entire
cycle could simply be unplugged and forgotten, it was hopeless.
There was no ‘science’ behind it through which he could empirically
demonstrate that Late Circusism was the same mechanism as Late
Capitalism. It was inescapably free.

Happy was ranting online; he was hooked up with a microphone and he

could stream his thoughts directly onto the internet. In the sense that
Virtual Reality is only a song about what we can do in our dreams,
everybody was singing it; so loud that it kept you awake.

“The rocks and stones know more about my theory than I do, they know
what it is to be destined into mass, they know how to mutter to each other,
this language is the language of circus, how in an immutable, definitive
moment of being is refuted as a stone speaks with the wind about erosion
and the possibility to be carried far away as dust. Every thing of matter has
its tricks.
It is not just a deception; there is the trick, a mechanism that is able to
do so much more, to shake the tree, to dig beneath the foundation, to
undermine, undercut, expose and ridicule, to satirise and refute, to resist
and rework, to invert to subvert to sabotage…all of these forms I have tried
to demonstrate through the Uncertainty theory of Gödel, and I am aware
that this places the practice as legible through forms of Cartesian logic that
some would say are also used to suppress and dominate the soul, but I am
still trying to point out that Gödel was a circus artist of mathematics, he
organised logic to stand on its own head so that it could see past its own
height, in making mathematics into a double act of White Face and Auguste,
the mathematics was able to follow its own instructions but arrive at
something nonsensical and unexpected.
Mathematics as a white face clown ordered itself as an Auguste to follow
the path, Auguste simply gave each instruction he received a number, as
that would be the logical thing to do, to keep order like the master wants
him to do, so in giving numbers to each step that he was asked to make in
order to catalogue the properties of numbers, in giving numbers to each
axiomatic rule of operation in number formation, he quickly became
confused as the instructions could now be operated on themselves…in this
way Auguste ended up following the instruction called Number One in which
was the rule of singularity, which meant that singularity could now be
operated upon itself, causing a loop of excess which meant that singularity
was now equivalent to multiplicity…this was both a problem and a blessing
for White Face as it meant that his system of logical instructions was either
 5

totally invalid or actually able to reproduce itself endlessly, depending on

whether Auguste’s actions exposed the internal limits of White Faces
instructions [problem] or concealed them [solution].
In this way White Face is the face of capital, and Auguste is the trick.
And people threw money at the clowns hoping that they would pass for
entertainment rather than serious critique of the fabric of everything.”

He did not have many followers, he did not care he was simply trying to find
Mary. She had asked him to meet her online in a virtual location, but it was
proving more difficult than he had first thought.

Circusism had grown and there were now a myriad of solutions to the
compulsory order to perform circus tricks. As the edicts were accelerated
and it became necessary to execute performances daily, more expedient
methods of trick-making had to be found. The street was littered with
confetti and homeless people.
The virtual was appealing because it meant that people sitting at terminals
could put on VR headsets and other immersive devices and produce circus
acts on forums and multiplayer servers without having to leave their homes.
This meant that, in an inevitable turn, the execution of a trick was now
faced with its iteration not just under gravity but under the gravity of the
code that determined the physical reality of the three dimensional
environment.

Certain attempts were being made here to experience four dimensions as

the way information could be formatted and added to these virtual spaces
meant that information could become experiential in a new way…tricks
were being done in 4D in 4K resolution, and company directors dined out on
the fact.
In an inevitable turn, in the hysterical search for the ‘new’, in the
apotheosis of the virtual as actual, circusism encouraged the performance
of tricks also in the virtual field.
It was possible to demonstrate your actual excellence, virtually. A trick
within the confines of a digital environment could also be submitted,
streamed and disseminated as your daily offering of a trick, to produce
freedom. Online circuses in which performers displayed their virtual
prowess were proliferating as the programmed response of compulsory
trick-making accelerated to info-speed.

Cut to a cramped and dilapidated bedroom. (Empty energy drink cans and
consumed ready meal packaging are strewn as if a dog has attempted to
tear apart the idea of convenience.)

The room is organised around serving the narrow beam of deceit that
issues from the lens of the web camera. The chair, the tiny improvised
backdrop, the costume, lighting and make up all scream incongruently in
the drab hovels, making a pristine circus-like cone of excellence that forms
the limits of shot, the selfie, the slo-mo mime to kappa-filled Vodcast.
Backstage and onstage here occupy the same space unfolded like a
origami into a flat screen of paper thin imagery.
 6

The rooms proliferate into a city of cubicles all interconnected by crumbling

catwalks and stairwells, “search out the place I will…stay.” Preening
thespians and circus types strike poses in front of the webcams as they
narrate their escapades in fantasy worlds. Their avatars leap and twirl, and
do triple back somersaults whilst slaying the undead with both hands.
Happy was online too now, searching…

Happy felt that the walls of Circusism were closing in as inevitably, in a

backlash to the backlash of a response to a revival, the idea of doing
nothing was now the new trick to perform in these virtual worlds. Games in
which the ‘trick’ was to perform nothing became true in the world. There
was nothing that was not Circus.
As a reaction to the endless possibility of virtual environments, in which
you could fly, become a dragon, experience life as a deep sea sponge as
much as you could fight in World War One or become a beam of light that
skilfully dodged random hexagons of shadow. If you could be and do
anything, then this orgy of possibility formed a null, the only logical
reaction to this were games in which you were nobody and nothing
happened.
It had started with people simply entering game worlds and ‘ironically’
performing the trick of doing nothing, that would be moving through a game
world designed for action but simply standing still.
Then came the Null-Games, the games designed to facilitate nothingness
and inaction, through which you could move ghost like, performing the trick
of moving through a game that tricked the idea of gaming by being a game
that glorified stasis and the non event.
There were many iterations: there was White Room, the game which was
composed of a series of blank white spaces each with just two random
objects, which if combined in the correct way would take you to the next
level, which was also a white room with two objects. Happy convulsed as he
realised that this was a game version his ‘comedy’ script, in which every
level was a form of bleak, de-enervated anguish.
In a game called I-Not, the screen was just an image of a mouth that
incessantly spoke from a list of pre-determined phrases to which you could
add, the game was to try to invent and enter contradictory phrases as
variables into the list that when spoken by the program would form such a
paradox that the mouth fell silent…game over.
It was the digitisation of Godot written in Becketesque ASCI.

For the ultimate trick of performing zero there was ‘From Nothing We
Came…’ in which the goal was to wander an unending grey pathway through
a vast and empty plane until you found the ‘end’, no one has found it yet.
This was the game in which he was supposed to meet Mary.

Nothing happened in the game, no events, no other players, no non-player

characters, no virtual objects; the pathway sometimes came to an end and
you had to paddle incrementally through a horizonless grey space,
weightless and alone, until you once again re-joined the meaningless
winding road.
 7

The game could take years. In so far as everyone had to be validated as

having made a trick; people had started to be ratified as having performed
their trick by simply spending days durationally floating as a motionless
avatar whilst they sat still in front of the web cam, not drinking, not eating,
not sleeping, barely breathing in a digital anorexia; feeding the voracity of
the real.

Happy had worked so hard to prove that he was real and circusism was not,
but now even that unreality had become the proof of its existence.

Up-voted, liked and followed, subscribed, bits have been donated, cheer
has been logged, and virtual currency has flown motionlessly into their
accounts to demonstrate applause.
The ratio between the time it takes to make the actual clap and the time
spent drawing open the gap between the hands, in order to spend time
closing them together again, this ratio is about five to one; so any applause
you do receive is mostly silence.
The online cadaver is appreciated by the flailing of a decapitated clap-o-
meter. Gaps make a meaning happen, the hiatus can happen at any untime.
Happy knew in point of fact when you are sending a message in Morse
code, you have to leave gaps, otherwise its just a stream of dots and
dashes; to make it intelligible you need to have pauses, so the rule is after
every single dot or dash you leave a gap of one dot’s worth, after every
letter you form you leave a gap of three dot’s worth, and after each word
you leave a gap of seven dot’s worth of time…so that when you add it up
any message you receive in Morse code is mostly silence.
Everything he tried to do was captured, every movement was anticipated;
he had run out of rope.

Fade to dilapidated room. His crutches lie beneath his gaming chair.

Happy sits motionless at the computer screen. Behind him a velvet curtain
hums its nap to the melody of the dust that covers everything else. On
screen the grime is out of shot. Happy is immersed in the game. The camera
unblinkingly records him at sixty fps.
He tries to speak, but the words were too heavy to lift and he could not
assemble the sentence. Surely there could be a way of automating what you
wanted to say? He started to experience moments where he went to
perform game actions in real life, hunger now made him think for a split
second , ‘how do I download a sandwich’ or when he dropped something his
eyes instinctively scanned his field of vision for the pick-up interface. Game
twitch flickered just before the muscle moved.
He is immersed. He presses buttons and moves his fingers in a delicate
caress across a control surface. This choreography as complex and unnoticed
as a tongue, tiny muscles labour unknowingly in the transference to another
body that drifts in the endless grey game.
Happy is inside ‘From Nothing We Came…’ An Open-World Simulation in
Beta Development in which death is lived as an afterlife happening now,
this is the new trick precisely tailored for page seventy-five of Circusism.
 8

Happy had given up, subsumed and awake. “I can live-stream now.” He
intoned. The stream was broadcast live to those not live-streaming.
Happy had no idea how long he had been playing. In his despair at not
being able to see past 3D space and sequential time in order to perform the
trick upon the trick, he had dissolved hours and days, weeks, months into an
image of the timelessness that eluded him. Waste was now an exit from
time, instead of timelessness being the activation of excess.
Past Life Regression: He was doing a lot of self-directed hypnosis. Lying
down listening to his recorded voice guiding him to different points in time
Lucidity: He was wearing a lucid dream mask at night, doing the drills,
trying to become conscious. The effort it took just to be aware he was
walking, the extreme load that he had to shift just to avoid being sucked
inexorably into the jouissant tide of the dream…
These practices, the game time, it all started to blend.

He was in a room sitting down, but he was ‘somewhere else’, in a

virtuality that satirised his immobility into a game of stillness that could
actively be played in silent paralysis and still pass for Circusism.
He could fulfil his duty to perform a social trick by leaving behind the
limits of his body for a virtual world (where anything is possible) in which he
deliberately performs nothing at all. He is detached from any referent, and
yet does not engage with the ensuing possibility of detachment, preferring
to remain attached to the actual immobility that sits behind the endless
possibility. He had become online capital performed as a circus trick.
In the new ‘new’ stillness he was taken up into the new Circusism. People
watched clips of others stillness, looking for tips on catatonia.
The game itself was immaculate, in that it was born out of something that
could not be responsible for it, the code was written in terms of logic, but
left you reeling in a spatial, temporal reality of verisimilitude.
This vertigo of code, an architecture of dizzying height, code upon code,
variable upon variable, stacked so high that its tower made the world, its
babble between itself totally internally coherent and lending Happy the
impression of being there…he could look at his own hands, his own feet…

Where are you?

I am in a grey wasteland…

What are you wearing?

A kind of cream tunic, it could be biblical, I am walking, I have sandals on

my feet…the dust the sand is grey…it could be the surface of another
world…it could be hell…the dust is ash…it is the ash of a thousand
bonfires…there light is darkness visible…I am here…”

Dreaming he was in the game, he was lying on a couch in a small warm

room, sun worked along the lines of vertical blinds, and motes moved
onward in a Brownian wheel.
“Where are you, Happy? Give me a report.”
 9

The room was both the office of immigration and a doctor’s surgery, as if
these two functions were related, a clock on the wall refused the time. He
had to be somewhere, at the airport, but his things were at the hotel across
the other side of town.
“Is it easy to move easily, Happy?” The Doctor asked leaning over him.
He could hear someone showering in the other cubicle…Joe?
The Doctor was wearing a bowler hat.
“Yes, is it easy to move with ease?” He replied as if to a questionnaire,
he had to somehow show he was sane enough to continue.
The session was designed to give him access to other selves but it was going
wrong, his other self was drunk and unreasonable and he could feel the
doctor was losing patience with him.
“So where are you now, be there now.”
“I’m on the street…”
“Do you know which street…”
“I keep falling down…”
“Why do you keep falling down…?”
“I’m unsteady…I need a drink to steady my nerves.”
“Ok, ok …well maybe we should concentrate on getting you home…”
“I live on the street, you can call me Tom…”
“Ok, Tom…can I call you Tom from now on?”
“You can call me Mary if you will buy me a drink…”
He looked down at the interface, in the settings he could select the amount
of anger the doctor character would feel. He set the slider to Max. ‘Great
game’, he thought but when is something going to happen?
Being online, being in multiplayer, being lucid, being in a past life, the
ontology was fretted almost through to the bone.

THIS IS NOT A TREE:

One day he is morosely streaming nothing to nobody whilst his avatar walks
forever forward, in the game, across the immense flat plane. It is a journey
upon which there are no events, and so the slightest aberration in the
landscape can make him feel like [Link].
Suddenly, before him in the far distance, he sees something. A difference. It
is an event.
Slight aberration in the pixels, it is lines of white at angles to each other.
He tries to make his character walk. The walk speed is set to ‘promenade’
as this makes looking around easier, smoother, and calmer so that if you
meet another player they will not immediately see you as a threat. The
game is so vast, procedurally generated in endless sliding algorithms that
the likelihood of meeting anyone is about seven billion to one.
One of the game slogans is “If you were the last person on earth, could
you still perform?”
He cannot find the setting to change his avatar’s speed so it plods along
with the same deliberation. For the first time in months Happy leans
forward, coming out of a slouch that has been like an immaculate stone
pillow.
As he gets closer he sees the angles are formed in lengths, with other
 10

shorter lengths coming off at set angles, the sizes vary, almost a rhythm but
played by several musicians who cannot hear each other. The music of
white lines thickens and forms into a haze of smaller lines that encircle the
original frame. It has a stem, a supporting body; it jitters from its original
resolution to a wider range of pixelated colours, the lines have shading,
they support the one above, each larger holding up the smaller at some
guessed angle; antennae, fingers, a diagram of words that utter from a
single trunk trying to receive a signal from the original howling wind of
language.
It is a psychosis of branches and stark twigs, speaking angles to the grey
sky…it is the only other thing he has seen for months…it is a tree.

“where are you now?”

“I’m in a kind of grey landscape…I think I can see a tree.”

“Ok…can you go towards it?”

‘Is this some glitch’ said Happy, or ‘this is some glitch’ thought Happy,

The Doctor’s voice was becoming angrier, “is this the code finding itself
looking back at itself? The one above being the activation of the afterlife?”
Stark twigs for a split second? Circus-like cubicles strewn as if a dog
unfolded? A haze of smaller lines still pass for Circusism. He had run out of
signal.

“I am walking towards the tree…”

“Ok, that’s good, Tom…take your time.”

“I keep falling down…”

“What year is it…”

Time is flooding into his mind he is upturned and the precious cargo is in the
back of the truck, and Joe is waving goodbye to him…long and slow, Joe,
say goodbye softly now…they took him in the end the police came and
wrecked his porcelain good looks just so and down to the end of the street
with a journey upon which there are no events to move easily; to make his
character walk. A grey wasteland, a bowler hat…it is 1931, I’m in London…

He is leaning forward now, trying to get there, but the game moves at the
same un-insistent pace as before.
The tree is barren and at the end of a long path in the grey landscape that
stretches in every direction. His shadow falls long to his left, it is the end of
the day.
In thirteen minutes he is ten yards from the tree. It is of a hard pale
wood, angular and taut; a wish for grey sky in rigormortis.
Each branch retched from a bulging knot. It is leprous and old, it reaches
 11

high, and from its topmost branches hangs a twisted rope culminating in a
noose.
The rope is swinging slightly and there is a sharp reek of sulphur in the
air.

“What are you doing in London, Tom?” The doctor’s voice is soft and calm,
and her eyes are brown.

“I am going to Tyburn…”

Happy stands beneath the tree breathing heavily, and he stands at the end
of his long journey shivering in the dusty air.
A response to a revival unplugged and forgotten. There was an
inevitability and a horror to the tree. He moved around it.
It is perfectly rendered in believable shape, the shadows falling across him
as they should, the hazy light picking up every striation, every crack…he was
drinking in its veracity after months of monochrome pilgrimage.
As he circles it, it occupies the three coordinates of space perfectly and he
is so fascinated with the interplay of negative space and pattern that he
almost missed it.
There was a crude wooden plaque tied to the trunk with the same rope as
the noose, so that the wooden board was tied into the anchoring of the
rope. The carving was deep and performed by an artisan of some skill. It
reads…

“Here is the Cercis of Jude. This is the tree, Cercis Siliquastrum from which
the vile Judas hanged himself after betraying our Lord at Gethsemane. This
taxonomical designation is no longer recognised and all trees are the
hanging tree, all men are Judas, there is likewise no longer a designation
between any tree and any Judas. This means that finally Judas hanging
himself is merely the tree reproducing the hanging of itself. Amen.”

“As all men cannot get to Heaven as Borges tells us in his ‘three versions of
Judas’, so it is not possible to move upwards against the pull of gravity.
Just as it is no more possible for you to move from referent to signifier;
you are permitted to move unidirectionality from signification, there is no
word ‘dog’ hidden inside the dog, you cannot get from a dog to the word
that signifies it: so as much as you may divine his entrails you will find
nothing canine written there.
You cannot move from a real dog to find a specific word associated with
his wretched kind, just as you cannot move from the trunk of this tree to
any one specific leaf bud, there are simply too many forks, to many
decisions and branches for you to make to get there.

The Doctor leaned closer, “I want you to imagine that you are very small
now, Tom…can you do that for me…and when I touch your hand you will be
the size of an ant…ok?”

“Yes…” He felt the lightest touch brush the back of his hand.
 12

“Ok , good Imagine yourself as an ant sitting on a leaf, to get to the trunk
you simply allow the natural reduction of information, allow the axiom of
fibernachi to lead you down wards to the trunk, its as easy as falling. You
say ‘dog’ and the feeling flows down to the dog-trunk from any one of the
leaves; from ‘hound’ from ‘bitch’ from ‘cur’ from ‘beast’, you fall as the
branches lead you down to the dog itself.”

Happy was sweating, he was remembering this as if it had already

happened to him.
“I am already you, I am déjà vu. Where are you now?”
“I am in a Temple, on a stone floor, I have killed an animal?”
“is it a dog?”
“yes…”
“This simply means that although you can find the dog in the word, you
cannot find the word in the dog.”
He was frantically sifting through steaming entrails, the wet fur still
twitching as dawn light crept into the temple. The terrible odour, the wild
staring eye of the dog, why could you not just let me be…where was it ,
where was the word, where was the word? He had to find it or he would
have failed as a high priest, he would be beheaded and thrown into the
sinews of the Nile.
“He is always watching…he sees all…” Happy was becoming frantic. The
Doctor placed her hand gently around his wrist, pulling upward.
“In a moment when I drop your hand, you will be beheaded and you will
wake up back in the game…”
Drop.

He shook his head , that was another life…he was here now in front of this
tree. You can find your way down from any word to that which it refers…you
can walk down from any leaf and find your way to the trunk, the journey
unfolds before you, each junction reduces your choices, each choice is
already made, you just have to follow it down.
But to ascend, how will you go up against the gravity of signification? How
will you go against the tree? You simply cannot carry all of the information
you need for all the coordinates of outcomes. Each choice is now yours and
you can so easily go wrong and end up on the wrong leaf.
Of the myriad of journeys that could take you to this or that word how
can you tell which way to go, little ant? The information you need to
navigate to a certain leaf is so vast, it has to include every single fork and
angle, otherwise the whole of the tree has to be stored in the trunk, the
whole tree would have to be immanent to the trunk for you to be able to
reach through its hierarchical labyrinth, an ‘all in all’ tree cannot be a tree,
there is no growth only ‘everything-here-now-and-forever’ in the endlessly
nomadic stasis beyond temporailty. I have grown these plants in no time.
Thus an ant on a leaf can always simply walk down to the trunk, but an
ant on the trunk can never find his way to any certain leaf, the gravity of
meaning is too strong. There is no way to climb this tree…
And yet you must go up now…AMEN”

This somehow did not feeeeeel like an arborescent ending…he felt as if he

 13

could go anywhere on the tree, he was not bound by its schematised

network, he could open up the geometry, the pages of the taxonomy all fell
out…he was human and therefore made to fit into the bird-space and insect-
time in between the greedy vegetative evil.
In the three dimensions and sequential time programmed into the
software, the tree of Judas represents the only logical manifestation of the
four dimensional perception that is immanent to this impasse.

Happy stood at the foot of the gnarled history of arborescence.

He had become aware of the diagram and of the knotation in a new way.
The alphabet that covered the body was not fixed . Diachronically it became
possible to think of the letter at your elbow as being only one of many
temporal fixations. In time the values would change, the autonomy of the
alphabet, as Mary had shown in gravity in language and in capital , was
over. In time the letter at your elbow was the letter on your forehead. In
time every letter would be in every other place across a vast continuous
surface of value time that he was experiencing simultaneously.
He knew that the alphabet was destroyed in Value time; he knew he could
use Unanagram to move between the letters. He would make a mockery of
the logic of the tree; Mary had released him from language back to the
body, back to the unknowable, back to the impossible map of Value-Time.
He could simply move between the dislocated letters that were now part of
an undifferentiated alphabet waiting for him to dissociate between them.

He began to climb; first reaching up, concentrating on how he had to find

a way to make the letter at his hand into the letter at his heel, so every
time he reached up he would be already there: he pronounced the
unanagram from T to Y, ‘to teeter why?’ he had no need to falter as M
became J , and F became L, J became an unutterable letter S
The subject dissolved in value time …this non-subject could use the
knotation to describe the way each body part no longer bears its difference
by letter to other parts and that as the text that drives the movement also
breaks down, as the sequentiality of time no longer can support it so the
possibility for delineation of the letters falls apart. The faint glimmer of a
subject is there to whisper. Each part collapses to a surface of value time
upon which it simultaneously timelessly represents every symbol ever
written strewn across an immanent surface.
This possibility for the body to make no sense in value-time, for the elbow
to be the same as the rib, for the forehead to fold into the stomach, the ear
is wrapped around the calf. This is perhaps the only way to climb;
unanagram climbing, where the parts you need are just to be spoken as an
annexe of each other. He climbed; and easily he reached beyond the petit
object a, frozen as it was like a dead branch in the bible…

As he spoke he realised that word upon word could bend his body to the
impossibility of the climb. He could climb against the inexorable gravity of
the branches. If the letter at your elbow was simultaneously the letter at
your knee then to flex your foot on a branch below you in this new
technique of climbing, meant that this was to wrap your fingers around a
 14

branch above you. In this way he broke the logic of climbing in which you
could only ascend by reaching up to branches that extended upwards . If
any body part could be any body part as the alphabet broke down the body
was capable of acts of contortion in value time that enabled his hip to be by
his ear and facing down he moved upward through the logic of the branches.
This was his betrayal, this was his Cercis of Jude. He betrayed the
intellectual midgets all gathered around the impasse…
the knotation was broken as his best foot forward above his head and
thereby place his hand back vertically to perform a somersault that takes no
time at all; enabled as it is by a continuous fabric that contains every thing
the letters of his body have ever been.
Because in time the human hand will draw every possible symbol for the
limited collection of growls and barks at their disposal a letter A will at
some point be a Z in value time. The entire fabric of value time will
unanagram every word as every letter can and will be possible to reach from
any other letter and climbing the tree of language will no longer be subject
to the gravity of the horizontal order nor to the unidirectional processes of
signification in the tawdry market stall of synchronic stamps.

High up now, as he felt his foot slip, He stretched his hand out to catch
himself on the cluster of twigs below him ,and across the fabric of every
value that is attributable to shapes drawn on a page, his fingers closed
around the fact of him landing on his back on the branch above.
He climbed in this way, in a timeless alphabet that folded his body to
climb up backwards and inside out, speaking across time his body folded so
that he was able to bend his body that he was experiencing simultaneously.
Folded logic of climbing on your forehead of value time, to flex your many
temporal fixations as Mary. Wrap your fingers aware of the diagram of Mary.
It became possible to think as Mary, the body was not fixed.
The bark was smooth to the touch, but it was cold, each knot snarled at the
inexorable irrationality that had formed it, he knew that he felt as if he was
climbing backwards but that person was dissolving, he had the impression
his body was twisted out of shape, but that body belonged to no one now.
He was reaching out behind himself to grab a branch that was below his
feet, it made no sense; he climbed in reverse like a dislocated spider. His
arms reached impossibly to branches he could barely see, his feet were
entangled in the branches somehow backwards from the sky, his neck
twisted at an impossible angle he found his sinews new and open to the
possibility…
His body talked as it left him reeling, drunk on the long goodbye to
language:

“I betray the sanctity of the trinity of name of the father, the son, and the
Holy Ghost of Marx …fuck you buddy”

As Happy climbed the tree in direct contravention of the law of meaning he

thought to himself , “ This is the Cercis of Jude and I will be the first
performer of the new Cercisism.”
He was high up now and standing on the branch where the rope was tied
he pulled the noose up towards him.
 15

He spoke slowly so as to keep his last ever balance;

“I have found a Cercis with a rope in it…”

“Where are you now, Tom?”

“I’m at a hanging…”

“Oh…who is being hung, Tom…”

“I don’t know his name.”

And he found his head within the circle, and he made a circus leap in the
way it always went…high…high as the sun…and then downwards, through
gravity, falling from the white tower with Joe in the tragic Tarot of the
hanged man; down through the branches of the Cercis of Jude.
He was in the trick, he was in the trick, he was going to see Mary… he
knew the technique and in the silver flash and convulsing agony of lust there
was a cracking sound and he felt numb…

He went for dead for days, but as the cold lizard time stirred, he slowly
awoke…
He became aware that he was floating in a boat…along a great, rushing
river, heading down stream after his nameless destiny.

“Where are you now…”

“I am in a boat, and I am holding some pages of a story, it is a story about a

lion or a tiger or something in between…jungle rushes by on either side…my
body feels different, time is broken…it is day six…

“My body is never recovered. Never recovered at the end any more than it
would be at my birth…

Being the Adventures of the Hypnotist and Happy Down-River, Part One.

My body is never recovered. Never recovered at the end any more that
it would be at my birth…I threw the pages into the flood. Either I
would stop her from exposing the image of life as mere exchange or I
 16

would not…
…she was as inevitable as the crowd in the story, hurtling towards the
exposure of an internalised lie.
Or was she the Lier beast, like all of us, unable to perform the
unknowable animal that exists as two things at once, only able to make
layers of lie upon lie upon lie…I would find her.
The rain found its way smoothly across my face; furrowed as it was,
contorted in a rictus of sorrow…

DAY SIX:

I am tired now, after days in this boat…I am foreclosed by the rain. My

tongue is crying to sit out this next dance…all those horses forced to
run, to prove the inevitability of what is pronounced by someone long
ago, long dead. Reaching on long reins across the faded races.
History reaches for your shoes and pulls them into the current.

This time washes us all away, the tricks create an uncertainty in the
language, and in the money it becomes unclear who we are…
We drift…

I am you now…I am one of your past lives…a back somersault in time has
landed me upon your shoulders, wearing your worn-out shoes.

This is a circus of time, where the flaming hoop burns up the lips of
logic before they can utter the terrible name of the event horizon.
I cannot see you because I cannot see a when in which to put you, my
love…
Applause plays backwards to make-up being removed, to the tent
collapsing in reverse.
This is a bareback horse riding trick to which it is impossible to assign
a ‘when’…the trick happens then and now, it happens to time…because
time is a rope that we have knotted. In thinking of our own faces we
have knotted time, to resemble the worry lines caused by forgetting who
we are.
The horses snort indifferently at all the individual faces that we made
 17

up. To them our faces are just circles, drawn, leaning in an awful two-
legged way, toward the end of the day.
Where are all my telephone calls with Joe?

I see myself upon a circular stage. It is my time. It is the act I am

forced to do to stay alive. I perform the undoing of a “Mobius
Striptease”.

The clothes are sown in such a way that their inner folds face
outwards, so that the more layers I remove, the more my nakedness
still exists within the interior of the external surface of the clothes I
am taking off.
Until I am no more naked than the world that is enclosed within the
exterior of my circular skin…
This striptease is the continuous performance of my language…the
more clothes I take off the more I am still inside them…falling through
the act into a black hole of applause…

I am you now…I am one of your past lives…I have turned this circle and
leapt over what was you…I am wearing your smile as you applaud at
what I have not yet done.
Behold, the trick I am about to do was finished centuries ago…the
scene long since rotted into dust…the flowers are yet to bloom that are
thrown onto a stage that is no longer there…

I am you now…twisting into shapes we have never heard of, I hold your
wrist as you dangle above the black hole…the crowd call out for more in
the lessening glow…
Light becomes heavy and is pulled off our bones. I am looking for
Mary…
There must be a way of steering the timely vessel back through this
tyranny of sequential waves. I long to go back…

I am you now…finely balanced upon your tongue, sweeter than any

nectar I hover between salt and sweet and let loose my grip…I fall into
you…we are drowned…but we are free…
 18

I am older and I am gone. The river takes me in. The river takes me on.

END.
 1

CHAPTER 13: CONCLUSION:

Welcome to the end. It was a sprawling excess and I wanted you to be
exposed to more than you could contain; to be wandering among the tents
unsure as to where you are supposed to enter.

DIGGING A HOLE IN THE SPADE:

I am being illogical from a logical position.

In this reflective document I have used logic to critique logic. I have set up the
subjective impasses that exist in fields of value that use a logic that can only be
deployed by an un-entangled subject.

In a way I feel this is just how circusism proposes the circus individual of
extraordinary technical virtuosity is real within a field that the circus subject cannot
see is the barring of this possibility.
Circus promises the same thing as capitalism: to be a whole subject within a
meritocratic field, which I have designated as Trick Two; the tautological ground
that destabilises this ‘whole’ subject remains concealed. It conceals that gravity is
indifferent to all subjective desires and this means the supposedly authentic
freedom within gravity used to install that individualism is not possible.
I therefore consider weightlessness to be a fiction here, but it has left me
wondering if there is not some other outcome, whereby it may be possible to
fictionalise my way out of this bind.

It is important therefore to imagine a space beyond the logic that allows this fine
line to exist.
So perhaps getting to the illogical acknowledgement that fiction is the only tool
here is to arrive at illogic through the unpicking of this logical knot.

How to conclude the complexity of Trick Three, and how to reiterate that this is for
me an essential component of ‘trick-thinking, is that the end of a reasonable,
rational approach is the dissolution of that binding logic to enable that third trick to
be potentialised.

So illogic is the only rational next step, if agency is to be reached or even

momentarily snatched from these different fields of ‘gravity’.
I use the logic of the impossibility of desire without lack to fictionalise to a pre-
differential plane of value time.
This to me is the trick here, to embrace the not-knowing, the non-assembled
subject, the impossibility of fiction to activate what I think are the tools of circus
practice as opposed to the illogic of claiming the circus subject can use gravity to
hermetically inhere as the successful self-interested subject of late neoliberal
capital.
Instead it feels like the subject who dissolves offers something more.
 2

As for capital, it is who we are right now I do not pretend to know how to be able to
get outside of it, but I think it is important to be aware of its possibilities to capture.
Capital has affective capabilities and vulnerabilities; in the same way the word ‘sick’
over time becomes to mean something ‘good’ currency can lose or gain in value. No
one actually knows why a recession starts or ends. The value of it is disseminated
through all of us in a form that recognises no one. To value pricelessness in terms of
capital seems to me desperately unintelligent.
For me writing about capital has taken on the form of writing about the nemesis of
Happy Down-River; who proposes fiction and freedom ‘to come’, who haunts capital
as it tries to consume his every move.

So before I conclude I have one last point to make. It concerns a critique of Lacan as
a way of showing how Trick One and Trick Two are in such close proximity, on such
a fine line.
Within the mechanism I have used to describe the trick there is a central loop, in
which what is conveyed inter-subjectively is un-recognisable in the autonomous
register from which its component parts are drawn. In gravity I have likened this to
how the subject’s weightlessness is both felt and conveyed to the subject of the
audience even though it is impossible in the facts of gravity. In Capitalism I have
noted in commodity fetishism how value that has its origin in the subject is
seemingly an intrinsic relation between commodities, and that the social dimension
of the subject is impossible in the facts of the market. Lastly in language I have
focused on how the subject is in a similar reciprocal loop. Within this tautology that
which is the positive condition of their subjectivity is also the barrier to it; the
subject’s desire to fill in the blank space of the subject is impossible in the facts of
language. In each case two registers conspire to both enable and disable that which
the subject desires; and in setting up the possibility to be a whole and hermetically
recognisable subject of weightlessness or value or meaning, this possibility
endlessly recedes as it is necessarily pursued through a register that cannot
recognise these inter-subjective qualities.

I propose Trick One is to expose this loop as an acknowledgement of subjectivity’s

role within a limited system, and Trick One conceals it for some kind of gain that
seems to expand the terms of the system.
I have proposed also that in exposing this tautology, and thus drawing the
systemic reliance on it as a limit, it has been necessary to acknowledge that
weightlessness, meaning or pricelessness in these fields of value is a fiction when
viewed in terms of the ‘factual’ registers necessitated within them; this is the
position I have designated for affect, for excess or for surplus.
Within the work it has I hope been clearly shown that while the operation of what I
am calling a trick can highlight the problems of this loop within systems of
difference for the subject that desires agency within them, it can also be used in a
more self-interested way and this has propelled me to propose a third form of the
trick, Trick Three seeks to get underneath or immanent to the terms by which this
differential circularity exists as the ring in which we perform, either acknowledged
 3

as a fictional space that can make demands or through concealment, become a

post-fact arena of freedom-production.

So as stated this is not only a last point about the difference between Tricks One
and Two but also some conclusions about the difficulty of arriving at the form of
Trick Three.

KNOT EMPTY:
I have discussed the missing object of value; how in a diachronic view the science of
it only has a fiction to look at. This also forms the process of my practice, like
hanging from a slip-knot, it is organised around a non-object, around
acknowledging that the petit object a is a ‘non’.
It may be a little late for this but Foucault sees discourses as practices that form
the objects of which they speak. So what object is formed by the practice here?
What is my practice…It is the trick: the object that is always formed is the
loophole…everything here is done around this empty space that is in three different
forms here: a trick, 1,2 and 3…
This practice forms an empty object, a hole in value that is not there…of these
loopholes one is the idea of a play-bite on fiction…in which the fiction of a space
where the impossibility of meta-language no longer applies, both admits and denies
simultaneously that such a space is therefore a fiction.
This is the fiction within the science of value: the only science fiction I have been
concerned with here. All fictions that propose technologies or approaches have
been organised around this idea.
It is a slight difference in the pressure of the bite of science that denotes that it is
not what it is.
It is a fiction of something that does not have to be fiction to be true. It is the same
as a story that is true but unprovable but encircling its difference to a story whose
truth hinges on its unprovability
This is a trick, but I am rigorously describing the complexity involved in the play-
bite, in which something is communicated that is simply not there, or has
inadequate materiality to convey that which it does convey.
The object of my practice is a loophole, an empty knot.

A ZERO BETWEEN ONE AND TWO:

So is there a loophole within the terms that exist between tricks one and two. This
has been a focus of the latter part of this text and it might be said that I can sum this
up by saying that Lacan arrives at the necessity for a fictional subject

Through the real subject that he highlights as being falsely promised by the logic
within fields of value. He highlights as tautological the act of signification, but from
a position external to it, and perhaps this for me is partly the reason by which all
versions of Trick One are possible to be captured as Trick Two.

It is perhaps possible to say that the critique here is that he uses the logic of a
Cartesian subject in order to show that this subject is impossible.
 4

It is also perhaps possible to say that the subject of Capital is exactly this Cartesian
hermetic whole that can have agency in the field; capital promises this subject in
terms of capital that Lacan exposes as not possible in language.

But this makes it seem that Lacan has been captured within capital because his
critique cannot escape the critical need for this ‘whole’ subject that Capital performs
so well (promising the validity of this subject through the concealment of the exact
circuit of its invalidation that Lacan predicts)

So the problem of Lacan as Trick One that is supposed to expose caught within the
tautological ground of Capital (that is Trick Two) is that the workings of Lacan’s
theory cannot escape the need for the subject that Capital renders; he needs this
subject in order to apply his critique of the desiring subject in language to critique
Capital effectively as it activates its linguistic potency.
Perhaps this is the fine line.

DON’T LEAVE ME:

As regards this process; For me Lacan represents the impossibility of meta-

language, so that there is no way for me to activate the trick I intend, which was
originally to speak or write circus in such a way that I can linguistically frame a
position outside the language within which I make that frame.
This is one reason that the text is speculative and technically difficult; this text
however has formed itself by this rationale into the same conundrum I am
attempting in my practice anyway.

What is interesting here is to perhaps conclude that circus is already a highly

sophisticated Lacanian process, that deals on a daily basis with desiring through a
field that returns weightlessness as lack. Gravity does not want you to perform
circus. It is possible to imply the brute idiocy of circus practice can somehow benefit
from being told that the subject is objectified, but for me this is evidenced in every
moment of the practice, rather than by highlighting outmoded approaches to
training. This should be done anyway.
Not organising your training around the obvious fact that gravity objectifies you
will I suppose place you in a compromised position in relation to your desire; in that
to forestall its non-fulfilment you may turn to the post-fact solution of reading the
surplus of applause as intrinsic to your weightlessness that is now fetishistically
possessed of a celebrated genuine agency.
So you may remain sensitive enough to feel that there is still a lack here, with the
ensuing agony; if only you had realised that the process will not yield a hermetic
individual; that the process is not for you it is for the audience. If only you had
realised that what is important here is the joy of sharing the fictional results of your
efforts in the face of objectification with an audience in the same space, rather than
the joy of becoming a real person on a blank screen.
 5

LOVELESS EMBRACE:

Lacan seems to be both a trick that exposes and one that conceals the operations of
semio-capital. The linguistic component of capital facilitates this of course as the
inevitable return of any desired image to lack operates as a kind of built in
obsolescence in the schematised desiring-production of the subject of capital. The
Lacanian theory here operates to suggest that this built in obsolescence is the un-
scratchable itch of the subject not the un-provability of desire in capital.

As well as this, the original points also imply the capture of Lacan within a larger
objectifying force that remains unacknowledged as what also remains
unacknowledged is that Capital promises the subject that Lacan needs to tell you
that you cannot have what you want.
This seems to make Trick One of Lacan into a component of the very tautological
ground that his process would normally expose; namely that the hermetic seal
around the subject is compromised and that desire is attached to an irrelevant
object.
These are conditions of capital but which the processes of Lacan, in which desire
over lack actually becomes the manufacturing process that enables the overcoming
of capital’s internal limit. This limit is partly linked to its failure to acknowledge the
subject as the origin of value, thus becoming the extimate presence of this baring
within any fulfilment of desire within the context of capital, thus precipitating
further desire.
The futility of the loop, which Lacan’s trick exposes however remains concealed,
thus leaving us with the theory of Lacan implicated within a tautological ground
that promises a hermetic subject that can never be delivered.

It is this question of promise that is important here in relation to Lacan and capture.
The critique of Lacan levelled at him by two exponents of a Derrida’s
deconstruction, which Lacan himself embraced, was that Lacan uses a Cartesian
model of the subject and its procedural logic to draw out the theory that proves that
such a figure is impossible. There are two outcomes here, both of which imply that
rather than being Trick One, Lacan is Trick Two, something that conceals a
tautology, rather than exposes it…

1: either Lacan’s theory is invalid as it uses something it disproves to draw itself, or

2: the theory is valid but it re-inscribes the figure of the hermetic Cartesian subject
that it claims is not possible and whose acknowledgement as impossible is the only
supposed logical conclusion of analysis.
It is this second tendency that Lacloue-Laberthe and Nancy highlight in “The Title
of the Letter”
Whichever way you look at it the temperature is dropping as what is proved to be a
non-subject has to be present to miss themselves.
 6

“We understand better now what the signifier means to Lacan – or rather what
displacement Lacan subjects it (“I have defined the signifier as no one has dared”) It is
no longer the other side of the sign in relation to the signified, and consisting only in
this association, but rather it is that order of spacing, according to which the law is
inscribed and marked as difference. It is even the structural hole, as the signifier should
now be referred to, according to which the law is marked as difference”

(Nancy, JL. Lacoue Labarthe, P (1992) The Tile of The Letter. SUNY. New York)

For me there is no getting outside of difference and this statement that desires that
escapology is as ridiculous as an ‘I’ that pronounces this law to be insurmountably
present in the utterance of that law.
Thus the desire to escape difference is as futile as trying to name the force of
gravity as something you could name.
This position of Lacan in the face of that which he encircles in his theory, is the
same absurdity as trying to write outside of this sentence. From both sides we
refute the other with an equal impotence in the face of the gravity of difference that
sits between us proving us both right and both wrong simultaneously.
I cannot get out, he cannot pronounce that I cannot get out…in this way analysis
has to acknowledge the field of gravity it speaks of proves that it is expanding as it is
spoken of, but that this is exactly the same position that I am trying to escape. In
analysis the difference between lock and key is only presented as a lock to another
lock or a key to another key: it is the undoing of difference that is impossible when
all we can present to each other is the same tool as the other one is offering.

MAY CONTAIN HOLE-NESS:

What is re-drawn by the existence of the Lacanian analysis, by its presence as a form
of logic, based on difference, is the fantasy of a subject of difference able to take up
a hermetically whole position uncompromised by extimacy; this is for me the very
subject that Capital promises.
What is extimate within Lacan’s analysis and its logic, as its positive condition and
its barrier, is the extimacy of this figure of Capital that must be present in order for
that analysis to take shape and proceed from the very position that it demonstrates
is not possible.
This disables Lacanian analysis ability to address Capital, and be Trick One in Field
Three.
For me, in this sense Lacanian analysis becomes the same process as capital in that
it promises a wholeness that it admits is fractured but can be remade as a fractured
whole over and over again within the logic that must be in place and which implies
that this whole is possible.
 7

What is central here is the idea of wholeness offered by Lacan is being fragmented
and un-whole. But even if the ‘wholeness’ comes with the proviso, ‘may contain
hole-ness’ it is still desirable, and thus still subject to the loop.
Within capital it becomes necessary for Lacanian analysis to conceal the fact that
the subject of analysis that seeks to be somehow ‘whole’ is the one that will be
disproved within that analysis, because the process needs this subject in order to
endlessly expand the practice. In this sense to me this is a form of capitalist
expansion.…see p14
This point is tied into the critique of the Letter of Lacan, in that this Letter, which
refuses the subject as ‘whole’, needs the ‘whole subject’ to ‘title’ it.

As stated, Lacan himself, whilst not embracing the implications of the extimacy of
capital, but the implications within his own theory of an extimate other, a
conditioning empty set that could be said to be the ‘minimal difference’ between
the pre and post differential thing/subject, that ‘seals’ that subject, but which
compromises that subject also, within an endless tautological loop in which the
origin is preceded by the origin which it later inscribes.
He accepted that his own theory did not follow its own term, but perhaps as proof
of its terms of course.

This second outcome is supposedly the logical outcome of analysis; exposing the
subject as repressing the Master Signifier that orders the systemic differential
horizontality through which they are impelled to chase what is only the petit object
a, thus including the extimate presence of that empty set within them as the
impossibility of that object being able to fulfil their desire.
In confronting the subject with this missing object the subject is supposedly
hystericised to the point that this ‘tautological ground’ can be realised, and they can
address the condition of the governing set directly.
The problem here is that the position needed to initiate this exposure is one that
can be found in the ‘contract’ of consumerist capitalism.

NO ONE CAN’T GET PAID:

So for me the form of Lacan relies on the subject promised by Capital, and this could
be said to be true in one way as without the misery of those who mistakenly believe
that an autonomous and subject-less register can be the medium through which
agency of subjectivity can be iterated then the couches would perhaps be empty.
But perhaps this is a trite observation.
The focus is that a theory that should expose the tautological logic of capital
seems to be captured somehow by what is implied here, which is that Lacan himself
is subject to his own logic.
The Cartesian position implied must be the one he himself takes up in order to
iterate the logic of the Four discourses, the logic of which takes up a series of
uncompromised positions, rotating clockwise then anti clockwise the algebra of
desire.
 8

This is also like saying that Lacan, in desiring to create a theory of desire as lack,
should be subject to his own terms (note that this is a Gödellian mechanism here) so
that this theory of desire as lack is just a substitute for something missing.
So that within this desire to place this theory as the missing object is the extimate
presence of the Cartesian subject (that capital promises) as the cause and telos of
that desire but which will, by its own definition end in lack. Thus either Lacan is
right, in which case he is wrong, or he is wrong, and desire does not end in lack in
which case he is right.

This loop we have seen before: it produces excess. Thus the theory of desire as lack
will end in its own lack and thus the lack it is supposed to produce as the end of
desire and its cause is also lacking. It disproves that desire ends in lack.
There is an absence of an absence here, which is the presence of something; it is the
production of production, which is the Deleuzean conclusion: that this unarrested
excess when allowed to remain unarrested creates our reality; something immanent
to the logic of difference is endlessly producing and becoming.
This places us clearly in a different position, in which it is the illogic of Deleuze and
Gauttari that must be privileged here if we are to find a way to perform a third trick
upon the terms of the first two.

Aside: it might be possible to admit here that in stating that two negatives add up to
a positive that I am only repeating the Cartesian position from which such
comforting ‘truths’ can be used to protect myself from the horrifying dissolution of
the subject that Lacan proposes…and this is of course true, but I am still referencing
that the presence of the proof that truth is unprovable within a system does not
invalidate a truth that occurs between me and you…and whatever that is I hope my
position on this position is clear…I am not with Lacan I am attempting to be with
you in a moment of weightlessness here…now…together.
The point about circus is that all this virtuosity is just shit if I can’t be with you…this
virtuosity is worthless as a proof of the truth of the subject, but it can stand as the
provability of the unprovability of the truth between us; to not value weightlessness
in terms of gravity.
I hope somehow that this is the disproof that anything is possible, and therefore
the disproof that such a notion proves that the subject of capital is real.
This ‘aside’ is important as it continues the project of the speculation on
weightlessness outside of any merit and privileges this as a conversation about how
we might get out of here.

What is interesting in relation to circus here is the fact that these thoughts are
difficult to get to without a lot of convoluted technique, but, once there, I cannot
hold them for long.
This comment is picked up later in the section on trick three.
 9

TOWARDS A DIAGRAM OF LACAN:

In relation to the Letter of Lacan; this letter, the possibility for a letter to form,
(which perhaps is the alphabet in the previous diagrams) is anything that follows
from the subject but which bars the subject to be before it.
Thus the Letter comes before the subject, but the subject is needed in order to
‘title’ this Letter, to be able to see that this is the case.
As this research engages with other fields of value that parallel this loop, the
corollary of this might be to reiterate that the Dollar comes before the subject, but
the subject is needed to chase after the Dollar.
The point here is simply that it is this necessity to ‘title’ the Letter, which can only
be performed from a position preceding the Letter that is supposedly prior to any
possible position of difference.

Similarly this raises two outcomes:

1: either the Letter is first and the subject is an illusion, meaning it is impossible to
form this logic that privileges the Letter as prior from that subject, who is needed to
achieve that logic.
2: Or there is a position prior to the Letter; the subject is first and the Letter, which
follows the arrival of the subject, can be used to prove the subject no longer exists
outside of the primacy of the Letter.

Suffice to say the subject as a ‘1’ is needed in order to ‘title’ the inevitability of
the subject as a ‘0’.

This then, for me, problematically ties in with the observation that the market
conceals that the subject it needs to be a 1 is in fact a 0.

THIS ONE IS ZERO, BUT THE NEXT ONE IS ONE:

In a way the problem is also the other way around; in that Lacanian analysis
promises that you can become ‘whole’ by acknowledging that you are not; is this
not the same promise of Capital, that admits freely that its mode of production fills
an unfillable (w)hole?
Luckily the ‘psychoanalytical’ sessions during which the subject can be placed into
proximity with these products, is one endless, ontological session, a Lacanian
session, with no time limit, where you pull your own wings off.
In embracing the psychoanalytical model of the capitalist self, as representational,
the same transference occurs as would occur in the psychoanalytical session, we are
hystericised but not by the confrontation of the petit object a as empty, but by its
emptiness containing the next empty one, by concealing the endless chain to which
it refers.
 10

LACAN OR NOT: no refunds…

It would seem that Lacan is captured then within capital because any critique of the
supposed factualisation of the subject promised by capital has to conceal that a
similar factualisation of his own fictional subject must occur if the logic is to
proceed.
In this way it is maybe possible to say that Lacan did get what Marx did not, that
capital was the positive condition and barrier to Marxist critique, but also in
embracing the impossibility of his own position in Lacloue-Labarthe and Nancy’s
critique he got that it was perhaps also his own petit object a.

So as Lacan is seen here as both trick one, and trick two; the tautological ground,
the unlimited gravity that swallows up trick one, it might be said that he swallows
himself and ends up inside capitalism, rather than critiquing it
Or in applying Marxist critique to language he has somehow been complicit in the
enablement of semio-capital to swallow up Marx as a mode of exploitative
production; in that perhaps any desire can be an ownership of means of production,
but not an ownership of means of meaning production.

So from this we can tentatively surmise something is askew. The ground is twisted
because we need a 1 as the title of a zero, which is a painting of something that
obscures the painting. What is this painting called? It is a self portrait, of you the
subject.
And in a sense it has already been acknowledged at great length of rope that the
tautology is there; the trick is based upon it even if we extend the loop to a critique
of Lacan or not.

But something is still not right if Lacan is both a good example of Trick One in Field
Two (language), but that this exposure of the tautological ground he correctly
highlights contains the very circuit that seems to expand the unorientable topology
of capital; becoming a good example of Trick Two in Field Three (capital).

MACAN ON A LÖBIUS STRIP:

The master signifier could perhaps be called “Freedom couched in terms of

Capital”.
So the Master Signifier is itself unacknowledged as not just ‘set-ness’, but the idea
of ‘set-ness’ that needs something whole and uncompromised to title it. This is an
empty set as a 0, which also needs the title of a 1.
In this way the idea of freedom within capital as the master signifier means that
capital and Lacanian analysis are the same…both needing a ‘free’ and ‘whole’
subject to ‘title’ the enablement of a continuing project to disprove the possibility of
such a subject.
 11

Both forms need to continue to prove the subject is not possible; analysis seeks to
expose it, capital seeks to cover it up; thus we have Trick One and Trick Two
cancelling each other out, as they both need the same subject as a starting point for
this exposed and concealed negation: the fantasy of a hermetic subject.
This is partly the state of the empty set anyway; it needs the subject it
compromises precisely because it is only in this compromise that it exists at all.

PROVING IN CAPITAL THAT YOU CANNOT BE BOUGHT ONLY PROVES POST-

FACTISM.

In this sense the empty set is made up of something subjective that is measured
subject-lessly, but which of course needs a subject to be present to witness
reduction and make it repeat endlessly.
As an adjunct to the way in which Lacan is swallowed by capital it is also necessary
to revisit the way semio-capital interferes with the logic of desire.
The empty set is full of the subject that it negates; which means that the subject is
the extimate cause within the empty set that is the cause and telos of its negation,
not the other way around.
What is complex here is that capital is halfway between being a materialised
ineffectuality and an immaterialised effect. As semio capital it is able to produce
‘reality’ in the same unarrested way that desire does as long as it masks that it
actually always arrests in difference.
In this sense the promise of freedom within capital is haunted by the subject (that
negates capital’s ability to promise freedom), of which capital negates the
possibility of freedom.
You see the problem, when the master signifier that refers to nothing except the
impossibility to refer to the subject is a term of subjectivity itself (freedom). This is
Late Circusism.

In terms then of ‘freedom’ needing to manifest as individuality and certain

uncapturable affects being entered into the market as a personal brand, a
statement, or personal manifesto of post ideological resistance to norms.
This conclusion attempts to summarise how a trick to resist becomes a trick to
comply.

The capitalist edict ‘be free’ implicitly acknowledges that freedom is un-registerable
within exchange; so there is an issue with the double bind: in that certain
qualitative, inter-subjective injunctions issued through the indifference of a post
ideological market necessitate and proliferate the instance of semio capital and
accelerate its post-fact nature. The immaterial becomes material; appearance
becomes truth in response to this un-winnable scenario, which further installs the
post-factism of semio-capital. This is activated as the subject is instructed to render
pricelessness quantitatively, so that signs become ‘too real’ to be exposed as only
signs.
If the governing rationale is that the subject cannot be bought, but the injunction
to be free is issued by Capital, then it is necessary to allow images, fictions and
 12

symbols to become real, as otherwise proving you are free, and that you cannot be
bought, but from within capital is impossible.
You need fiction to be the equivalent of fact otherwise you are a slave.
Because you cannot prove that your agency cannot be bought in capital, it is
necessary to make fictions of agency into the real thing in order to prove you are
free within it.
The correlation with Circus here is that it is fine to acknowledge your
weightlessness as a fiction within gravity, but circusism does not seem to be able to
do this; preferring to prove that weightlessness can be measured in terms of gravity
by conflating the fiction of it with the real thing.

Within Capital, the resistance to the capture of your agency is iterated through the
nature of capital itself, which is that the ‘unprovability’ of a symbol of value can
come ‘true’ in the material world, as the only way of proving that you are free of
capital, whilst still following its injunction to be free according to its internal terms.
This is the problem with double binds: from a contradiction anything follows. Thus
you obey to disobey, and vice versa.
This is the problem with the trick in a system of difference that demands it.

The only way to make a fiction of weightlessness obey the injunction within
Circusism to be free of gravity, whilst remaining in it, is to engage this same post-
factism that is in operation in Capital.
This is again how Trick One is exactly the same as Trick Two; just the post-fact
inflection is different.

Capitalism is not saying freedom is not possible. But that it should have the
appearance of being only just achievable in the face of impossible odds. The
appearance of impossibility has to be included in the realisation of freedom because
within capital this is the only thing that can give authenticity to something gained in
a system where everything can be bought. There have to be seemingly
insurmountable conditions attached to the simple entry of an image of freedom in
the market for it to appear real. Circusism is very good at this.
An appearance of pricelessness is vital for profitable trade to occur.

In making the injunction of ‘Freedom’ into the Master Signifier this already
includes the acknowledgement that, as an empty set, the zero it signifies needs a 1
as a title, which can never show up to work, which proliferates everywhere as 0’s
that we must treat as 1’s.

Capital and Lacanian analysis need 1 to be able to show a repeating 0, but we

cannot tell if analysis occurs within Capital or Capital within analysis; one is zero.
Concealment is vital, this topology has to appear as a level playing field, not an
indifferent void.
The subject that capital promises which is the illusion of the subject of equivalent
value, in which the tautology of the loop between origin of value and its extimate
cause is concealed, for me it is this version of the subject, who is on this disavowed
 13

tautological ground, that Lacan uses to construct his tautology…this is why I place
him on a Mobius strip

This is a trick on the terms of Lacan in which the subject he uses to show that all
desire ends in lack and upon which capital reproduces itself is only possible to get to
in capital, where that loop is concealed. Analysis can only occur within the topology
of capital, so it therefore cannot be inherently anti-capitalist. Again it is this problem
of the subject that is both present to prove it is absent and vice versa.
The problem is that the trick to resist power is also the trick to comply.

In the following diagram it is shown that to expose the twist in the topology
makes it impossible to form the deconstruction of capital, and in leaving it
concealed is the only way that analysis can proceed.

This is also done to briefly conclude how if ‘freedom production’ is the master
signifier of circus then this is a complicity with semio-capital that must be
addressed. It is the Semio-Gravity of the fake meritocracy of Circusism
Our artistic production is compromised by but also complicit within the
overarching fields of value of Gravity, Language and Capital that this text addresses.

Minimal difference is excess, a surplus captured within difference, where in being

‘factualised’ as difference, it can no longer remain as the minimal fiction of
difference to itself, that cannot be recorded anywhere, except in another instance of
that maintained fiction of difference to itself…except in another subject.
 14

I propose a simple diagram; one similar to the one we shown already. A Mobius Strip
on which are two sets of terms on opposite sides. The four discourses of Lacan are
laid out across a Mobius Strip in this fashion.

As we begin to try to construct the Four Discourses across this surface, the problem
in which Lacan needs the subject that conceals he is on a tautological ground to
expose that tautological ground becomes clear.
The terms needed in order to complete the address of Agent/truth to
other/product are on the opposite sides of the paper. It is not possible for S1/$ to
address S2/a as it is not on the same side.
The only solution to be able to formulate the logic whereby the subject can be
exposed as compromised, that is to be exposed on a twisted topology that is
unknown to them, is to allow terms that are written on opposite sides of the paper
to be on the same side.
This is only possible by creating a Möbius Loop, which masks the problem of
difference.
This means that it is not possible to formulate Lacan’s Four Discourses (Master,
University, Hysteric and Analyst) unless you rely on a process that is only consistent
because it uses the tautological ground and therefore relies on this twist remaining
concealed. You are reliant on the subject promised by Capital, that appears whole,
in the same way Lacan has to use a subject he does not believe is possible in order to
prove that subject is not possible.
Alternatively if you expose the looped surface, you cannot use it to reach the term
you need to correctly formulate the four discourses; in fact following the black
arrow from S1/$ to get to the correct addressee at S2/a and then exposing the twist
means you are reduced to only being able to stay on the same side , thus placing the
addressee of S1/$ as its mirror, which is $/S1. S1/$ > $/S1; this result might be said to
be the outcome of a Master Signifier that demands that the divided subject resists
the Master Signifier,
In trying to assemble S1/$ > S2/a the discourse of the master you arrive at S1/$ >
$/S1, which seems to suggest the double bind of Freedom within Capital. In this
nonsensical formulation, the Master represses the truth of the divided subject but
simultaneously addresses the divided subject in the form that an analysis would take
(a/S2 > $/S1) that extorts the divided subject to realise their true position as
complicit in the formation of that repressive master discourse. This to me is the post
ideological game, where you are freed by control to be free from control.

This mirrored result is what is always returned by trying to complete the terms
that describe the compromised subject but by starting with a compromised subject;
that is not using the subject that is held in hermetic entirety by the concealment and
navigation through the tautological ground of capital for self-interest.
 15

What is interesting here is the amount of production that occurs in trying

to locate the subject either in analysis or in capital, it is a factory
owner’s dream: literally written in semio-capital

THE SUBJECT DISSAPPEARS AND RE-APPEARS AD INFINITUM:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN PLEASE WELCOME ONTO THE STAGE, THE SELF-
HAUNTING ALPHABET OF PRODUCTION:

A: In exposing this capitalist topology that demands freedom, it becomes

impossible to construct the logic that proves the subject is compromised by
the autonomy of difference, as the subject needed to formulate that
Cartesian logic is not available. In not being available the proof of that
subject’s compromise is also not possible; so, if that subject’s extimate
causality is impossible to prove, then the Cartesian subject flickers ad
infinitum.

B: Analysis remains captured within capital upon which it is dependant to

try to break free. Thus analysis itself is an example of this loop by which it
is freed by capital to be free from capital.

C: The exposure of the taut ground only forces the return of mutated terms
of liberty, which reinforce that tautological nature of the ground. The more
analysis occurs the more difference is returned as inescapable. Therefore
Lacan’s trick one (to expose) expands the terms of field three (Capital)
therefore Trick One in Field Two is equal to Trick Two in Field Three:
therefore analysis feeds capitalism.

D: The terms returned by Lacan’s Trick One, only reinstall Trick Two, the
tautological ground, as the only condition left within which Trick One can
be performed; wherein it is ineffectual.

E: Lacan in this diagram is as compromised as he is within capital. Every

attempt to form the intelligent exposure that he outlines by exposing that
the subject is not a hermetic Cartesian entity returns only mirrored
statements, which only serve to re-inscribe the presence of that Cartesian
entity, by only returning the terms by which the subject remains upon a
concealed tautological ground instead of an exposed one.

F: In this way Lacan preserves the subject he needs in order to prove his
theory of lack is true (the hermetic Cartesian subject from which his logic
can unfold), but which is shown to be impossible in terms of the theory.
Analysis preserves the whole subject but by simply following the
instructions laid down to prove that this subject is false.
Thus like Capital, having its cake and eating it.

G: In truthfully following the instructions to expose the subject is on a

tautological ground, the only result returned is that this ground remains
concealed…(as all that is returned by showing that the subject is on a
twisted topology are the mirrored terms that only perpetuate the
 16

tautological ground) thus ensuring the preservation of the subject needed to

operate the analysis.

H: In exposing the taut ground by exposing the compromise within the

Cartesian subject of capital, the terms that perpetuate that tautological
ground, ie the mirrored mutated terms of the discourses, are returned

I: So in order to operate one of the discourses, simply find its first term on
the strip and move in either direction to find the term you need to
complete it correctly, there is one problem here, you will always find that
the completing term you need is on the opposite side of the strip and you
can only reach it through being complicit the Mobius strip, and thereby
complicit in the subject you are trying to disprove.

J: if you wish to expose the tautology that enables you to correctly

complete the terms you will be invalidating the tautological ground that,
whilst concealed and utilised, supports the false subject that enables these
discourses to be constructed…if you wish then to expose the taut ground of
this strip then you have only one recourse: you are no longer able to utilise
this pathway to reach the term you need to complete the formula of the
discourse that proves the twisted ground is there.

K: in refusing to use terms falsely arrived at through the use of this twisted
ground of trick two you are relegated to only use the term on the reverse of
the terms you arrived at…thus staying on the only side you can access
without resorting to the twist, thus staying true to the idea of the flat
orientable surface…unfortunately in operating to refute the false subject of
the taut ground as the Cartesian starting place of your logic you can only
return the term that is on the opposite side to the one you need which is
only the mirror of the one you started with

L: In refusing to leave the twist unexposed you disable the possibility to use
the Cartesian subject that exists in that twist, which is the only one you can
use to show that the twist means the subject is compromised. In doing what
you are supposed to do in analysis you can only acknowledge that the
hermetically sealed subject of capital that is not on a twisted surface is
real. Analysis can only prove it is pointless.
Ironically this is the subject who, according to Lacanian theory, will have
internalised the twist they cannot see, and so will be the ideal subject of
analysis.
What Analysis hides from Capital, Capital hides from analysis in a mutual
relationship of two-faced dependency.
Thus the Lacanian logic, in refuting the Cartesian subject (who must exist
on a taut ground) as the starting place for the four discourses, returns only
a garbled version of that discourse, in which the master repressing the
subject address that repressed subject to repress the master. The subject is
instructed to disobey instructions as the enactment of freedom.

M: Alternatively you can utilise the taut ground and return the correct
version of Lacan’s discourses but this will only mean that you are using the
 17

Cartesian subject that exists on such a ground (in which his compromised
existence ids concealed as I trick two) in order to reach the conclusion that
this subject is impossible…
Either way you are incorrect…this is Trick One’s problem in the taut
ground of capital…as evidenced here by the capture of Lacan in the Mobius
strip…this is him as the subject of his own terms…

N: either admit you use taut ground trick two to make trick one or refuse to
do so and be unable to make trick one at all.

O: Either conceal the fact you are only the Cartesian subject because the
topology is twisted and be able to expose the twist, or expose the fact you
are only the Cartesian subject because the topology is twisted but not be
able to do anything but conceal it.

P: Lacan cannot expose the Cartesian subject that Capital insists is real as
compromised by an underlying tautological ground of capital, as it is
through the perspective of this subject that Capital is to be critiqued. So
Lacan within capital can happen but only on capital’s terms; on the terms of
a subject that Lacan refutes, because Capital shows that this is a viable
subject; the individual.

Q: Exposing the ground of capital only debilitates the ability to form the
critique that could expose such ground.
Digging up the ground only breaks the spade.

R: This topology is exactly the tautological ground, which is concealed as a

condition of the hermetic Cartesian subject of capital, but also by that
subject.
The loop here is that in admitting the supposedly hermetic subject is the
reason its compromised position on a twisted ground cannot be seen, then
this means that this subject is both the condition of concealment and
barrier to its exposure. This may appear to mean that Lacan is correct, but
this is the subject t he needs from which to unfold the logic of compromise.
This subject of capital is the petit object a of Lacan, which is both the
positive condition and barrier to his theory of desire as lack. The theory of
desire as lack however is the petit object a of the Cartesian subject, both
forming and un-forming that subject. Capital needs both the subject and
the theory of desire to be the petit object a of each other in order that
desire endlessly reproduces its own negation and to which can be attached
the reproduction of Capital.

S: As a way of concluding how trick one gets captured and becomes

ineffectual on such a tautological ground it is right to place Lacan in this
position as it is exactly the condition that underlies the problems of
formulating a viable Cartesian subject within the tautological double bound
edict of capital ”be free”, which to an extent Lacan predicts.
Doing this is a way of acknowledging that the whole subject needed to see
the impasse already does not exist.
 18

Thus Lacan is either right, which means the subject of capital is possible,
which means he is wrong, or he is wrong, in which case the subject of
capital is impossible, which means he is right.

T: This double bind of being free within capital demands the impossible
Cartesian subject, which is the same one that Lacan uses to show that such
a subject is impossible.
Thus Capital demands the subject of analysis as the perfect consumer.
This subject is the one that is able to follow the injunction through
analysis to achieve freedom within capital. This subject is then freed by
capital to be free from capital, which is the return to the master signifier
that becomes invisible to analysis because it is precisely the injunction to be
free of that master signifier.

U: The tricks are so close because Trick One in Lacan is done on the back of
the subject of trick 2 in capital, which is exposed by trick one of Marx as
alienated from that which they produce…Lacan is barred from his own
theory of desire as lack.

V: Capital captures Lacan because it holds the subject he needs to make the
theory of lack come true, which supposedly shows that capitalism is broken.
Except it does not, as to show that capitalism is broken would be to destroy
the subject needed to show that it is broken. Thus Lacan rightly embraced
this critique as it acknowledges him as the subject of his own theory. This is
fine, but what is not acknowledged is how he then for me ceases to function
in capital.

W: Lacan is a market that expands by concealing that what it needs for its
expansion is the perspective of a whole subject but which it then disproves;
this is semio capital as it recruits desiring production. Like capital it also
holds out the whole subject as the goal, which it constantly repeats as
impossible but desirable.
The market needs a whole subject, but which Lacan can disprove.
Lacan also needs a whole subject; but in order to disprove the one
proposed by capital.
The problem is the needed subjects are technically the same, both whole
and uncompromised by an extimate causality, which means they cannot
exist outside of that which they are seemingly independent from.

X: Lacan needs from semio-capital the subject he uses to disprove that this
subject is possible. Lacan and Capital need each other.

Y: Lacan is dependent on the same terms of difference upon which capital is

dependant as these terms render the possibility for both a trick that exposes
or the proposal of a false subject that is whole, which is trick two: this is
the fine line.

Z: the proposal of a subject whole enough from which to construct the logic
that could show that this subject of trick two is fallacious
You need falsity to prove truth. This is Post-Factism.
 19

This is also the reason Tricks Two and One are so close; simply because they
share the terms of difference. The terms are needed to both prove and
disprove the hermetic subject simultaneously, as a refutation of synchronic
time upon which they depend.

ON THE OTHER HAND….

And on it goes…Does this feel like a circus of self-interest yet? You can see
how the subject of freedom boosts productivity.
But this virtuosity is pointless it seems; it is merely attempting to balance
on its own chin to take a bow. This may be what Lacan predicts anyway in
the process of transference but within Capital it is very hard to tell. What is
clear is that the presence of difference is the defining term that makes this
fine line between trick one and two.
In the garden of Capital you cannot dig a hole in the spade.

But if you do write these four discourses upon two sides of a strip of paper
then this is an actual knot that you can tie in the world.
Part magick, part tautology, part logic, part curse: all trick.

TRICK THREE:

This then is the trick that cannot be held for long.

I can barely sustain it and as such it matches exactly the experience of the practice;
whether ‘matching’ is appropriate or useful is another question.
So, in placing Lacan’s four discourses on a Mobius Strip I am only placing him in the
condition in which he claims the subject inevitably ends up; on a topology that
needs to be acknowledged. To do this is only to show that from this compromised
position it is difficult to reach the detached perspective from which to formulate
Lacanianism.
In placing him on the Mobius Strip I am placing him as subject to the real relations
by which the only Cartesian position on offer from which to posit the four discourses
is the master signifier of genuine Freedom within the context of Capital, which
seems to be the over-arching discourse of Circus (of what I here call Late Circusism.)
Just as this trick is near impossible to maintain, I propose the subject should be
likewise.

ALKA-SELTZER-SUBJECTIVITY:

The conclusion is that the subject is the problem, in that the logic of analysis and of
Capital are both exceeded by the subject that clearly is located somewhere in the
excessive looped production that ensues in trying to locate that subject.
 20

So I propose a turn, we need a trick to get underneath the terms by which this
problem subject allows for the impossibility to see the impasse that the subject is
suffering from.
This for me is tied up with the acknowledgement of fiction; what circus does not
need any more are self-interested subjects trying to maintain their wholeness.
The trick needs to open up and stop performing the difference of the subject.

We need a third trick upon the subject of circus that cuts through the tendency of
trick one to end up as trick two.
This tendency to capture is inherent in the fact that the differential logic used to
show how the need for repeatable difference within the attempt to signify ‘I’
compromises that ‘I’ but also implies that an ‘I’ is present.
This ‘I’ is the promissory note of Capital, in which every petit object a is in fact this
‘I’…so there is no real refutation of Lacan here, it just shows what I mean when I say
Lacan is true but in capital he is even more true.
The knotted diagram is to show how there is a loop here even in acknowledging
the loop. I am trying to get clean.

THREAD:

But what is the urgency here, to scrutinise Lacan’s own extimate cause?
These problems are maybe not with us up the rope or in the hoop, but it is
because this project was to look at the trick within other fields, and in
designating gravity as a field of value has enabled this kind of torturous
technical discussion to be about the trick. Wrangling with impassible logic is
what circus does.
In asking how does a trick operate transposed, it is necessary to follow
this transposition to its conclusion even if the epistemological or ontological
gravities that are discussed seem to be occurring on another planet from
your now distant practice.
It is to ask you to follow the thread back to the circus you have seen or
performed and to ask you to consider what the trick is doing; who is
presented, and for what ideology are they stretching, pushing, leaping and
rotating. What is the purpose of a technical moment within a field that
brings the appearance of agency that conveys something other to that field?
Or are we just witnessing the fun to be had in gravity as a display of what?
Sport, prowess, success, surely in this art the invisible must also make an
appearance. And if so, if this physicality is to be an art, it is for the quality
of this invisibility that this discussion proceeds to be about the tautology
that ensues when the invisible is made visible. In is in this moment of art
that all of these knots are contained, and it is for the transposition of this
art that I bother to transpose the trick into these unacceptable fields.

What I am getting at here is that we arrive at Trick Three, the trick of ‘Not-I’.
 21

All I mean here is that the proposals of subjective compromise made by analysis
itself are not free of the capitalist compromise and its own knots. So Trick three has
to leave behind the split registers of difference as proposed in the fiction of Value-
Time.
In this regard I have proposed this as being the return to immanence. It is this
precise focus on a logic that does not start from the subject promised by capital or
the subject re-inscribed within Lacan’s logic of desire that I propose.
The trick can end up stuck on a repeat of Trick One, in a doomed Romantic loop,
admitting its fiction, obsessed with ghosts, or in Trick Two a vacuum of applause.
What is proposed by a third trick is simply to look more closely at the terns upon
which we are basing our circus assumptions.
I feel we need to re-examine the loop that occurs when circus becomes only an
area to flex individuality and folds in on itself.
Here it can become populist only in the way advertising is populist, claiming to be a
service but which serves only an indifferent field of value, and those canny enough
to profit as the ones that sell zero; the circus extra-individuals.
As the political landscape increasingly fractures there is a cultural climate in which
there are diminishing attendances at dance and theatre events and also a
localisation of attendance due to class (which apparently does not exist) It is my
belief that the circus, with its kinaesthetic accessibility and populist form, might be
well placed to activate deeper engagement with the prevalence of tautology in the
very ground upon which the circus is pitched, that sets the inescapable conditions in
which we are impelled to perform our escapologies as apologies for escape.

Circus is well placed to undo the all consuming subject; but will it?
For me the willingness to not assign importance to saying ‘I’ and to share the
fictions of other spaces with an audience whilst maintaining that unimportance is
the process of acrobatics learning from the clown. There is no position above the
audience that mastery can achieve without assigning weightlessness to a register
that destroys it. Clowns know how to dissolve themselves to reach people.

How do we reach people with the poetics of this form? I do think comedy is a
powerful tool here, pathos, satire melodrama, pratfalls; but yes, the clowns have a
big part to play here. This neoliberal circus is a circus that has no viable clowns left:
this death of the clown is a Stephen king nightmare. What we see is partly the
incongruity of the clown in the neoliberal vision, except as a sweet naïve or as a
vicious child killer. These are the clowns of capital: something for kids or something
that kills kids. The non-subject of the clown is too difficult for Capital. If we are to
allow circus to model other futures, we need brave clowns who can expose
limitations, poetically and with deeply recognisable and genuinely funny humour.
Mastery (which, through the clown, can be re-thought as alongsideness) should be
shared as a fictionalising of a future outside of mass, linguistic or exchange value,
rather than the future inevitability of gravity forestalled by the false construction of
an extra-ordinary individual.
But what can be shared? This research still poses that question, what complexity
can be shared?
 22

I hope that some of the projects here managed to show how those moments of
suspension were shared, in travels in processes of rigging, in fictional journeys made
in the voices of ghosts or in the street. It is between subjects that weightlessness
occurs, and gravity is just one field. The practice of circus is a rigorous meditation on
the trick; what we need are tricks that are empty of desire to be subjects.
Trick Three being a kind of exposure of terms immanent to the separation of value
and time…that the trick should be a unification of what is experienced and the
sequence over which it is experienced. The trick should utilise this unified surface
that disables the logic of difference between us.

Of course the problem and the solution to this ‘play-bite’ is that there is no subject
there to make it, as the condition of difference that was so problematic, is also the
condition by which the subject can synchronically exist.
The question of trick three then becomes how to sustain yourself through
becoming ‘tricky’, and to share this potentiality with the audience.
Trick Three is to dissolve the subject of self-interest in a circus of time.

“Plink, Plink, Fizz, Fizz…Oh what a relief it is….”

THE PRACTICE:

I have researched three forms of trick here and all of the processes of moving and
speaking that have lead me here have informed the refinement of these definitions.
Although the practice here is writing its approaches were formed elsewhere.
I have ‘rambled’ across the landscape to attempt to drive a stake into the ground,
to fix a virtual circus that is only composed of words. The forward motion of this
speech has a momentum that I find in seeking to speak your way out of language
and has been likened to psychotic forms of utterance.
This has shaped the formation of the trick as that which moves through a medium
in order to try to refute its authority and delineated gravity as the autonomy of
register that ultimately makes such a refutation impossible. The trick then had to be
seen in terms of an impossibility to delimit this impasse; thus suggesting that such
an impasse itself might be thought of as a ‘tricky’ ground, already with its own
inherent loops that mean that another form of the trick lies concealed within the
landscape upon which the trick of a travelling speaking trick making circus artist’s
efforts to fix any form of autonomous zone are impossible.

I have worked with knots as a form of physical hieroglyphs in suspended surfaces of

paper. These for me were attempts to explore a language that held implicit knots in
which the attempt to lend any body-weight to this ‘text’ would cause the words to
come undone and the fabric of that which supports the subject of this ‘language’ to
fall through it. These were for me attempts to experience the inevitable gravity of
language that lies behind the word seen as a slip knot unable to support the actual
masses involved; the conclusion here is that the visceral weight of the speaking
subject is not represented as supportable at all within the self-referential bind that
 23

has to exist between the body’s utterance and the language that fails to support the
body.

I have worked with a short-circuiting of the road trip, whereby meaning was
reclaimed as something for the subject, in the ridiculousness of time. We could head
out for three minutes and return with answers. The duration was reduced to
ridiculous proportions so that a journey of one breath could be undertaken to yield
‘knowledge’. The journeys got so small in the end it was like writing faster than you
can think, with knowledge waiting for you as you arrived.

So I have worked with circus as no journey at all….in many ways a complete

realisation of the neoliberal area of post truth in which the ‘moving’ subject lies still,
and is allowed to experience the reality of themselves as any body else in any time
at all.
The narratives that exist here are acknowledged to be a recreation of a
‘propositional calculus’ that cannot distinguish between a true or a contradictory
statement, but also they exist as a way out, that if the fictionality of the practice is
acknowledged, then the practice can continue exactly as it is but as a proposed
reworking of history, not as a fact but as a demand for the futures that were
cancelled in those original historical events to be reactivated as on-going
potentialities, rather than dead ends shown by historical capitalism to be
unrealisable. This is a circus of time that acknowledges the difference between trick
one and trick two in the difference between exposing the regression as fiction or
concealing it as real, but which also points towards trick three, the trick performed
upon the terms by which trick one and two are restricted in this binary mode.
Trick one as a limited expression of systemic limits, trick two as the maintenance of
those systemic limits.

Various projects continue out of this research. I have set up a small ensemble of
lucid dreamers, who for five nights a month attempt , with the aid of lucid dream
mask technology , to simply find each other. This project to meet in oneiric space
and to set up a tent…what fabrics, what stakes, what poles ropes and structures
what knots need to be tied to make a dream circus that is un-capturable as
real…this is the one that circus has been speaking about. I like this project a lot as it
feels like a genuine activation of post-work circus; so if there are any collaborators
out there who are good at sleeping then please join us.

What we know is that when placed in direct proximity the illusion of truth makes the
genuine truth seem illusory, and the tautological ground makes the trick repeat
gravity.

I hope it is clear how these experiences in languages of knots suspended in paper

that are supposed to support the subject and in rambling journeys of increasingly
short-circuited circularity will match with the concepts fleshed out in this text.
Without the road trips there would be no tautological ground, without the Past
Life Regression no secular possibility for ghosts, no fictional voices in the text, no
temporal loop would have been attempted here, without the knots in paper, no
 24

tautological writing that tries to stay suspended. In these experiments I handled the
concepts, I was affected and affecting in these encounters.
I was uncertain as to how the circus I have in my body could be transposed but
these experiments were ways of opening up this possibility. Without these
experiments, none of this writing, my new practice of circus, could have been
attempted.

I hope also that these experiments in talking and moving will become useful to the
circus professionals and students with whom I will continue to collaborate with over
the coming years.

KNOTATION:
I wish to relate the fact that the thinking of how these three tricks interrelate in the
three fields is built into the fabric of the knotation.
The knotation is proposed here in dreams but it is a working method of notating
physicality. Research on this form continues and is intended to form the
continuation of this research after this Doctorate is completed. This tool then
becomes also a carrier of the ideas within this text, and in proposing this as a
method of devising from text or of ‘writing’ with circus it is not possible to avoid
discussion of the ideas contained here. This for me is a successful outcome in that it
is possible to undertake a kind of circus writing and thinking in the studio
simultaneously.
It stands as a constant puzzle of words, but one that includes not prescriptive
interpretation and can be approached from the three different positions inherent in
the trick.
As stated this research is on-going so its results or documentation of it has not
been included here. Suffice to say that it is called Voice-Versa and this means that
this entire submission could be in fact translated back into circus physicality.

The knotation is offered here along with tools like ‘unanagram’, utterance-games,
rituals, short-circuit road trips, past life regression and other hypnotic states as both
experiments in the studio in developing circus language in relation to these three
tricks outlined here as well as being a new set of tools in my practice of circus
writing, that aims to apply circus physicality, specifically the trick, to a literary
practice. I hope to write more through this practice, fiction and non-fiction both.

TO BEGIN TALKING ABOUT IMPACT:

One impact I could wish for is a ‘circus intelligence’, and by this I refer to not the
choreography of words but the genuine rock solid intelligence that knows mid-triple
where it is in the room as it might be applied to any field of restriction. Extreme
capability to handle all the parts at once…

Perhaps one example of the real intelligence of circus is in the one to one
instructions between teacher and student that teaches that student verbally and by
 25

demonstration how to go into the world with an understanding of their body in

space, time and gravity.
There are teachers all over the globe imparting this deep intelligence to students
and using many of the principles outlined in this study, and to my mind this is a form
of knowledge with deep philosophical implications that outstrips the tawdry tricks
and scams that many supposedly intelligent agents within circus administration
employ in order to convince various establishments to supply more core funding.
I acknowledge that we need to make these dumb deals as this is currently the only
route to more space and time needed to practice this deeper intelligence of circus
practice, but there is a disparity here in which the most intelligent actors are seen as
those who can navigate the dreary gravity of capital, whilst those who actually
understand the body in space and how to teach that awareness are seen as brute
advocates of workaday technique.
The real intelligence is in those technicians who know which buttons to push.

I am not talking about the self-interested body that knows how to remark upon its
good looks, as it poses and reposes before you, but the intelligence that operates
the sinew to be THERE for the audience in the NOT-THERENESS of the weightless
moment.
This is a form of intelligence that is the rare meeting of ability and patient
instruction and is much greater that the box-ticking wealth of appearances that
seeks to turn itself into money.

BUT WHAT DOES THIS RESEARCH DO?

For me it is about the ensemble; I consider this research to be a collection of

possibility to produce circus work together, with a shared language made up on
terms that exist between subjects in the particular space and time that they find
themselves. What I hope is that this opens up the physicality of the practice to be
applied to any field: that the practice can perform tricks on text, image, music,
space, time, identity etc. that there be an internal cohesiveness…a shared language
constellated in the ring.

As mentioned to further allow collaboration to develop the knotation as part of that

core building of an ensemble sensibility, that the knotation is interpretive and can
form the basis of a shared ensemble language.
(I believe it has pedagogical advantages too, in that it can allow for both the
breakdown of set figures into core elemental dynamics and inform an awareness of
the transferability of technique as well as the more conceptual potential for it to be
transposed into other less suitable fields. This text is a manual for those kind of
transformations. I do not think of the research as prescriptive or didactic but as an
open offer; as something perhaps to draw from.
 26

The acceptance of weightlessness and agency as fictions that the members of an

ensemble can tell and enable each other to tell within the harder non-negotiable
reality. This I feel is a better glue perhaps, that coming together to support each
others self-interest, the ensemble works better as a tool to puncture each others
hermetic seal; this means we are bound closer.

The awareness within this text of a trick as something that occurs within an
objectifying non-negotiable impasse may seem bleak, but that is not the intention.
As well as this supposed brick wall, or inescapable enclosure there is still activated
the possibility to fictionalise other outcomes. The point here is to highlight that
complicity with current narratives that promises a whole and individualised subject
tend to cancel futures other than the ones currently proposed within the ‘market’ of
circus.

There is a privileging in the market of circus different styles: as young, feisty, but
essentially directionless pop rebellion or its iteration as the ‘high art’ of bland exotic
imagery and avant-garde ‘shapes’ or ‘authentic’ punk viscerality, or the melancholy
and noble psychoanalysis that passes for aware but doomed subjectivity, or the
twee and fundamentally naïve worlds of nostalgia circus.
Always a figure succeeds against seemingly insurmountable odds. The arrest of
desire is covered over and presented as the individual. I have been guilty of
attempting all of these modes as rationales for the production of work and this is
what I mean when I say currently proposed futures.
As well as this specificity to circus there are other inevitabilities, which I have also
touched on in this text; what Mark Fisher calls Capitalist Realism, in which the
activation of desire as a direct productive force, seems to have been schematised to
only be arrested in differential. Becoming has become ‘go shopping’.
Both of these have been shown to feed into each other in some way, not as a trite
insinuation that circus has had some kind of influence on this financially orientated
reality but just to notice that a certain kind of Late Circusism prevails; a tautological
ground in which the seemingly unarrested tricks we perform land to expand the
field of gravity they critique.
Captured critique features strongly here , and within the ideas of three tricks in
three fields it is always trick two to which I return to show this fine line between
discussing the possibility of escape as critique and performing escape that is then
experienced as reality.
Again I see the ensemble as a protection against this encroaching capture; that
you can critique and support each others moves, making sure you get to trick three.

There are excesses in the ensemble that I feel can successfully fictionalise another
space external to capture that can act as a demand for another space. This I feel is
the central point of all of these practices that speculate on agency; it is to imagine
circus practice, that is true to its operation as the body within gravity, take on any
field and utilise the awareness of these three kinds of trick and the play bites to be
had between them as tools to reconfigure the values in those fields sufficiently
enough to make such a demand.
 27

I feel that the theory is fine, but unless activated between the subjects of an
ensemble to become an excessive series of tricks that could bind that ensemble past
the individualised self-interest of trick two then to imagine a space beyond capture
is very difficult.
In this way I hope the impact of this work to be the possibility to form in ensemble
around this idea of the trick in any field, and that this become a viable and
sustainable part of circus practice
It is important to make work that can be seen however, and another problem here
might be that the circuit currently does not support these kind of investigations
except in this format or as other versions of research and development models at
various levels of compromise.

STEP UP, GET REAL:

This is a larger question, which I can only hint at here, but the two modes of survival
are necessary:
ONE promoters, venue programmers and cultural curators as well as funding bodies
need to step up and make available the large amounts of space and time needed to
elevate the work out of the crass repetitions described above, and
TWO circus artists need to get real: and form a viable and uncompromised working
model in order to be able to survive and sustain as a small ensemble, making work,
looking for new options to perform and reach people in a live format.

SELL-OUT:
I am aware that both of these options are couched solely through the third field,
my nemesis in this text; but I am not an idiot, thank you. I remain practical but
sufficiently haunted.
Change needs tricks, so whilst I may intimate that channels need to change, fuck
the un-changing channels run by self interested and dim-witted oligarchs of so
called culture, you know who you are.
So to the artists: make your own channel. Start a club, run a night, set up a string
of parties, take over a building; become another previously unheard of shape; get it
done without needing to spend a fortune.

But please try not to become a self-interested clique that calls the audience
‘muggles’, thus betraying your bourgeois Hogwarts roots.

There is a strong emphasis on comedy within this text, and I do feel that this is a
vital element in the accessibility of experimental work.
It is important to engage with the mass of people out there in relation to your own
status as just another body of mass and see the black humour in that, to see the
disappointment and the possibility of an audience as two jokes telling each other,
the structures are outlined here.
I am hoping that these ideas somehow are contained within the examinations of
the trick I make here…

Going forward I would like to continue this research is some post-doctoral format.
The important thing for me is to meet with circus artists around these ideas, around
 28

this text and through discussion and engagement with some of the ideas within this
text to firm new approaches and languages.
Between DOCH, who I see as technically excellent and artistically open and
Circomedia, who has been engaged in a 25 year struggle to cross pollinate circus
with other populist forms I propose a collaboration; so that the ideas here might be
researched through the high technical ability of tricks to see how any such trick
praxis might add to the development of those collaborative investigations.

As for fiction, one question could be: why re-enact Burroughs? In a sense that I am
both demonstrating how he is now captured as just another style in the
‘precorporated’ cultural supermarket but also how he for me, represents the ideas of
Trick Three that simply will not lie down, and which are willing to be destroyed to
allow the continuation of fictions of agency that are not in terms of autonomous
value.
In this sense the important difference between this clumsy re-hash of his elegant
style is that it is difference that encircles similarity, it is a fiction of the possibility for
fiction to no longer be the necessary designation of meta-positionality.
What is the difference between this and post –factism? Both seem to promise that
fiction can be ‘factualised’ and so also, what is it that circus needs to be mindful of if
it does take up tautology as a way of thinking?
Perhaps it can be best summed up in Burroughs own terms…

The difference between third trick and Post Factism is that within Trick Three we
are still within the enabling prospect:

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

Whereas in Post-Factism we are relegated to a situation not organised around

enablement of the subject, which means it becomes impossible to activate the
above statement as the tautology in the surface is concealed from us to instead
iterate the knot inside the subject:

“Everything is true, nothing is permitted.”

This ironically, is as close to unprovable truth as I can get.

Near the end here I would like to quote again Mark Fisher, who injects hope into the
equation:

“The long dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous
opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means
that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can
have disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in
the grey curtain of reaction, which has marked the horizons of possibility
 29

under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen,

suddenly anything is possible again.”

(Fisher, 2009)

This is very much what I wish for Circus in what is, for many, a current time of
austerity, confusion and the engineered inevitability of misfortune.
That said, this text is a speculation on how to perform a moment of weightlessness
within an inescapable bind. It is clear that capital runs things; there is no space left,
but we are still able to fictionalisa other turns, other spaces, other futures…we are
not docile to time, and so the way is not shut…the trick shines for me as a way of
writing, a way of proposing and a way of imagining something stronger than the lie.
We have to become unsuitable to the tautological ground, even though it is
tautology that got us here.

Last word:

So Happy was to me as I was to Happy, an inspiration, He as a fiction could move

now anywhere; but what of the real mother’s son? How had he been moved…by a
senseless disorder of events that swept and swept and kept sweeping away at
everything he tried to do and say, inexorable, unstoppable, disease, deformity,
madness, addiction, dislocation and death…
This tide is unending as I get ready for my trick…

Extract from Happy Down-River’s private diary: January 19th 2019.

“There seems to be no order to my thoughts, I am slashing at the weeds with a blunt

sword, the vines are knotted here, grown through every brick.
It is 11:49pm and here at my desk. I cannot move my arm; it feels like it is encased
in some outmoded armour.
This defence weighs a ton, I’m powerless to even speak of any weightlessness…I
have misrepresented my friends, who mean well, I have lost so much time, and my
family gain nothing…

Here in the Unhappy Kingdom, as it detaches from itself, we have rats in the walls
and we cannot pay the rent, other more ‘real’ families come and go looking to buy
the rooms that we once thought of as ‘home’, they are negotiating when they will
move in “…but we still are living here!”
My son has developed a twitch in which he whispers a repeat of what he just said
out loud. There are three generations of defective heart valves here now, all echoing
each other in misshapen chambers. “…but we are still living here.”
Our blood murmurs from father to father, I know I can destroy him without
destroying myself, I know my weightlessness cannot be bought. But what has
happened in my body, the stars have evaporated from the bone, I am hunched in
the iron kaleidoscope of Monte Christo, it masks that it was made for me, I am the
 30

knot that holds it in place… A sense of immanent exit pervades everything. I can’t
stop crying.

Ok well, dry your eyes then… as for choking on the theory, as for falling down the
middle of the seating; if you want romance, I can do that too:

As I walked back to where we had parked up for the night. At the end of it when all
the greasy clowns have bitten sawdust, and the trail of sequins leads nowhere,
backs heave at the leaving open mouth of a lorry, loading all the ‘one time onlys’ for
tomorrow. I was walking from the edge of a field, and that field held all my dreams.
It was so stark to come rolling down the yearly farmland into a moment. I saw in a
green baize ring the dusk just about to give away its hand to the sorry bets of the
little lighted wagons; and in the windows shapes moving shadows around as the
muscles ached. I came down into the ring, from some desolate garage under a
tarmacadam sky, holding my supplies that would get me through the act: some
milk, some oats and orange juice to sweeten the morning, for me, the performing
Adam in this rotten apple, was all that I could afford. I came down into the little
field, borrowed unbitter from someone else’s working day, to fire up a play that was
the equivalent of labour…to sweat at playing so I see god forgiving me for idleness,
and the grateful land lays down one day unworked. Nobody but nodoby knows how
this act will turn out…
And god formed a glove of clouds, pointed his best clown finger at me and said
“Thou, who dost not know the difference between joke and sacrament, should go
forth into this circle and practice sleight of hand. Try to go forth as you make it look
like you are going backwards, and tie your laces with a spoon. Give a taste of the
only thing worth eating; a holy nothing to the entirety of full up people. Turn your
hand to joy that fades and so return your hand to joy.”
And so I did…and the grass lay down and I saw the painted ring, I saw the blue
canvas not as what it is but blessed by my grandparents, blessed by their fathers,
fathers that finally, finally I should find my less wretched place at this quick
forgetting precipice. If that my sudden memory of the edge of amnesia that propels
the bills and checks and balances could be rolled up in a ball and thrown away. How
many things will come to an end in this circus?
How cruel is gravity that, as you weep about how it holds you down, your tears go
downwards on your cheek? But as I came down the hill and locked my freedom
upon that little field with its circle of wagons settled around the rig, I did give my
heart away to something that was not more than a dissolving hourglass: my vital
organ was gone to something that could not any more record that it was running
out of time; it was time itself folded into a ring. And applauding repeatedly the
exquisite, ragged fibres, the valves of my stupid heart, did not know they were
already broken, breathing against a leaking roof.

But these are just memories. I am here now and now here: every body part bears a
letter of the alphabet but I cannot say anything except ‘I am becoming heavy’.
The vanity of the circle has hurt me so much. All over the world people are moving
through gravity, inexorably folding back upon themselves into the waiting
envelope, how can you think you are not part of this?
 31

We cannot move; we have to get out of here.

As these remembered wagons now come thundering across the landscape, the din
and effort are gravities written deep into the map.
Circus is heavily invested in a pricelessness it can hardly afford to claim. So inside
of you I tried to be impossibly apart from you, as you asked me to be…
the Knots are performed inside or outside, I no longer know; I lumber onto the
revolving stage ...like a circus I am tied to the mass.”
 1

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: A GLOSSARY

*****
Dear Reader, should you at any time get lost you might return here to this
glossary. It will remain in place even if the terms within are unfixed. There may
be some small comfort in knowing that these definitions will change over time
even as they remain exactly the same as they were before they were written
here.
This, like all red parts, is additional reading, should you require it.

***

TRICK:
This is the mechanism, that moves through a field to fictionalise an area outside of
it.

It produces fictional meta-statements ‘about’ a field, which are treated as infra-

statements ‘of’ that field, with a resulting tautology.

GRAVITY:
This is the ‘law’ that contains the mechanism.

TAUTOLOGY:
The internal arrangement or ‘law’ of the mechanism. *

FICTION:

as both exposed and concealed.

Exposed; the affective outcome that both does not function to achieve what it
points at, but does function to point at it. An excess or surplus is implied
momentarily.
That is: it is the possibility or potentiality of the mechanism to suggest the field is
not a totality, but un-registerable in the available field, it is acknowledged as
inoperable within that field. It can be contained within larger more installed forms of
fiction, see Concealed Fiction below.
The fiction is exposed as fiction; this is its capacity to demand. It issues a question
as long as it remains acknowledged as fiction.
This is trick one.

Concealed; this is the over-arching fiction of a union between quality and quantity.
This conflation is complicit in the mutation of post-ideology as an ideology, and
complicit in being simultaneously organised to be ‘free to’ and left to be ‘free from’.
This state is issued as a double bind or constructed as a tautological ground. It is the
 2

utilisation of tautology in order to try to both have your cake and eat it too. It is a
rip-off.
The fiction is concealed as fiction; it is presented as the equivalent of fact. The
field that encloses this fiction implies that anything can become true.
This is trick two.

KNOT:
Within the designation of a law of restriction and a law of counter-restriction the
potential for a mode of escape to lead back into an area of enclosure is always
present.
An area can ‘demand’ escape because such activity is the capture of escape into a
mandatory law of freedom. You must be free or risk being enclosed, but escape
ensures continued enclosure. This occurs when a tautology is activated on an
already tautological ground, so that your resistance to power is what power
instructs you to perform in order to expand itself.
Another term for Knot here is fold. Topologies referenced here include the Klein
Surface and the Mobius strip.

CAPTURE:
Very simply I mean a counter trick to the original trick that seeks to escape; one
that is operated by power to turn the resistive force of a trick back against itself. In
many ways it is the same mechanism of tautology folded back on itself, so that the
ground or formal, seemingly neutral system upon which the trick is played is in itself
a hidden tautology.
Hidden by the conflation of fiction with fact, that masks the real relations of
production in which the trick-maker is a machine for tricks that no longer serve the
subject. The subject becomes captured as a machine that represents an abstraction
of knowledge of which the subject has no knowledge. Capture here will generally
refer to the process of utilizing an excess that might normally expose the limits of a
system, but in order to contradictorily imply that the system is a limitless totality.
Capture is when fiction is stripped of its power to demand by being rendered down
into an entirely possible factual event within the field of which it is supposed to
demand change.

POWER:
By power I mean the forces or apparatus that together form the methods of writing
law, the law that determines mobility.
This is not necessarily a group of powerful individuals, but the sum of the handing
over of political power to the markets whose influence then pervades every
interaction. It is perhaps a reference to Agamben’s idea of Apparatus, Or Foucault’s
Dispositif, or to Deleuze’s Societies of Control.

CIRCUS ART:
I will be too blunt here and say I am for art and against power but power is artful in
the way it utilizes affective fictions but folds them into indifferent fact for personal
gain.
 3

I believe the subject needs Art to fictionalize a space beyond power, but Power is
better at art than the subject; so power is better at being the subject who needs art.
Hence the space produced by art that is beyond power is actually still inside its field.
What trick is needed here? To abandon Art for Art’s sake?
This research is then a speculation on tactics that I feel are at play in the circus
trick, and how to operate beyond the mechanism of a trick that is captured whilst
still remaining true to that mechanism; a trick on the terms under which a trick is
performed?
In critiquing circus I am only highlighting the way it operates its techniques but in
agreement with something that negates their efficacy by allowing them to believe
they are more than fiction…Capture occurs when the circus arts believe they are the
genuine production of freedom.
I am trying to get back to an idea that circus is the desire for the fiction of
weightlessness to be true, it is not the true execution of weightlessness at all.
Circus Art is tricky.

SPLIT VALUE:
This acknowledges the incompatibility of registers of value in three fields. Within
this research a split in value is proposed in the fields of Language (following
Saussure through Lacan), of Capital (following Marx through Tomsic and Berardi)
and finally Gravity (following the homological model of Semio-Capital)
Splits are discussed between meaning and linguistic value, use and exchange, and
weight-value and mass-value.
This is also discussed as the split between meta-statement (a statement ‘about’ a
system) and infra-statement (a statement ‘of’ a system)
This also relates to a split between Quality and Quantity as wholly incompatible
registers.
This split is something that both implies the presence of a subject to receive
‘meaning’ in one register, but which also implies an insurmountable autonomy that
permits no subject to be present to receive that meaning in another register; that is
a register that is indifferent to that meaning is antithetical but reliant upon it, just as
that meaning has to be constructed from the very elemental order that invalidates
it.
This is related to how fiction operates in one register and not the other as an
affective weightlessness (a fiction of escape) that is ultimately not permitted in a
system of difference, as there is no such meta-position available that is external to
the field.
This also relates to an excess or surplus that is incompatible with any of the
available quantitative registers.
This both acknowledges that there is no such thing as a meta-language but posits
that a fiction of one is the art of which circus is composed.
This art suffers from the ease of its capture by power that conceals the
impossibility of meta-language in post-factism, where anything can be anything in
semio-capital.

INDIFFERENCE:
 4

As being the link between systems of language, of political economy and physical
systems such as gravity that exist as one iteration of two possible registers. Another
term for this is unlimited autonomy. This includes a non-negotiability that is the
expression of the indifference of material and theoretical systems to the subject.
This is an exhortation for a new circus practice that can highlight this indifference
rather than trying to profit from it under the guise of various forms of mastery, and
the attendant focus on individual success that seems to successfully master this
indifference to make it appear predicated on meritocratic terms. It is a system of
autonomy that is ultimately inhuman. Indifferent difference.

TIME:
as a form of gravity, greater than Gravity itself, as to work a trick in time is to evolve
past the body, past the terms under which circus is defined.
That is an engagement with resisting time is posited as resistance to gravity, as to
enter a four-dimensional field is to be in a space in which gravity cannot exist as a
force. It follows the premise that gravity is an illusion caused by moving in a straight
line through the curve of space-time. So if gravity is caused by an inability to see
space-time and gravity demands that weightlessness be acknowledged as only
fiction; this then implies that the only way to ‘see’ space-time and escape these
terms that demand acknowledgment of weightlessness in gravity as fictional is to
fictionalise what space-time might look like. This is a loop as to be free of the terms
under which the only agency is fictional, you need to fictionalise what it might be
like to get beyond those terms.
Thus Time represents the last gravity, and which requires the trick of altered
perception, as this is the trick that can perhaps dispense with the split in the register
of value that binds the subject and so defeats the gravity of the impossibility of a
meta-language. The corollary of this is that it sees human perception as the
fictionalisation of space-time into three dimensions and sequential fourth.
Value is formed as the capacity for autonomy from the subject in synchronic time.
Speech is thought of as the moment from which value is different to time.

Thus this is the trick performed on the trick itself that can no longer function on a
tautological ground, but which may dissolve the subject as it is performed.

ENSEMBLE:
The group that is held together with a certain glue; the glue that it is possible to
form from these ideas. This I consider to be the valuable and genuine connections I
made with people in the process of this research as we engaged in road trips,
speaking exercises and in past life regression. This remains for me the most
important effort; that this research may contain something that enables others to
come together to create new work in a sustainable and uncompromised way. There
is a possibility here to gather around the three kinds of trick, to gather around the
diagram of these mechanisms and the knotation that is drawn from them, as well as
gathering around the fictions and experiments contained here.

SEMIO-CAPITAL:
 5

as a good example of how a cross register analogy between language and finance
that then enables the imagining of how the spoken trick might engage with power.
It is a term that describes the nuanced change in the configuration of the factory.
This enables the possibility to look at the mechanism of the trick that capital
performs and the law of its falling rate of profit that forms the law of gravity against
which it tries to fictionally expand. For me this shows how a seemingly immaterial
field and an extremely ‘material’ field can be homologically constructed, the conceit
being of course that they are BOTH ‘immaterial but effective’, which has enabled
me to think of gravity as similarly immaterial in the closure of the temporal field.
The congruence of two systems of language and capital, within which the subject
remains held but which both offer the neoliberal possibility of escape which leads
back into the enclosure. This idea of semio-capital is crucial in understanding the
tautological ground and the difference between a fiction that exposes or demands
and one that conceals for profit.
If an fiction of weightlessness is seen as the genuine production of freedom within
gravity, then this act of performed resistance, taken as actual resistance, merely
expands the field of gravity, implying that it is limitless and meritocratic. If gravity is
a market then something that signifies itself within that market as priceless, then
the market expands to include that which is outside of its reach.

SOMETHING ELSE:
this I can only describe as all the fictions, the ideas of escape and imagined practices
that I have proposed both in and between the lines here in this text. Something else
presents a real escape beyond gravity and beyond representation, into four-
dimensional cubes of Value-Time, it suggests landscapes of inaccessible history, it
utters spells of Black Magick against control.
It is precisely something other than what is possible, performed in utter
inconsolable disbelief. This is my favourite part, that leads me on.
A song in the keys of C.A.G. E.
 6

Knotcircus Bibliography:

Below are the sources directly quoted in the text.

Bateson, G. (1956) Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia Behavioral Science Journal.

Vo1 Issue 4. Wiley and Sons. London
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Seattle
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Lives. Columbia. USA
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Hofstadter, D (2000) Gödel, Escher, Bach. Methuen. London
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 7

Massumi, B. (2014) What Animals Teach us About Politics. Duke University Press.
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Below are the sources that were used as inspiration.

Abbot, E. (2006) ‘Flatland.’ Oxford World Classics.

Adams, C. (2004) ‘The Knot Book.’ American Mathematical Society.
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 8

Critchley, S. (2012) ‘Faith of the Faithless.’ Verso.

Damkjaer, C. (2016) ‘Homemade Academic Circus.’ Iff Books.
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 9

Nauha, T. (2015) ‘Heresy and Provocation.’ Förlaget.

Negri, A. (1989) ‘The Politics of Subversion.’ Polity Press.
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Online Resources:

Curtis, A. YouTube. (2002). The Century of the Self - Parts 1 - 3. [Online] Available at:
[Link] [Accessed 10 Jan. 2014].
Curtis, A. YouTube. (2016). HyperNormalisation | BBC documentary. [Online]
Available at: [Link] [Accessed 13 Dec.
2016].
Curtis, A. YouTube. (2018).The Trap (BBC Documentary 2007) part 1-3. [Online]
Available at: [Link] [Accessed 25 May
2015].
Pristas, G. Vimeo. (2015). MA SoDA micro-series LECTURE 2015 Bojana Kunst and
Sergei Pristas- Economies of Performance. [Online] Available at:
[Link] [Accessed 15 Aug. 2017].
 10

Please note that within the Yellow Fictional parts I often allow Happy Down-River to
quote poetry; all of these references are also fictionalised. In this way I am merely
posing the opposite principle to Happy’s correct reading of reality, which would
oppose it thus: “If poetry was real, the world would not exist.”

LINKS TO ALL FILMS:

Below is a list of private links to material on Vimeo. Please note in some browsers
these links will have to be copy/pasted in order to work.

Performance of ‘Knot Circus’. [Link]

This is the performance described in the Rope Writing chapter that I had been
working on when I began the PhD research. It is more theatrical in tone perhaps, but
for me it contains the germs of the question that existed for me between the rope-
work and the speaking-work.
Reference to this can be found in Chapter Two: Rope-Writing.

God’s Rope. [Link]

This is the film that was made in my first foray into ‘rambling’; it was basically the
idea of putting ‘speaking circus’ on the road. Within the film I feel there are conflicts
between the tropes of documentary style and the exit from the map I was trying to
make. The film tries to pin down meaning in a fugitive landscape.
Reference to this can be found at the end of Chapter Three: The Trick.

The Rip-Off. [Link]

This was the investigation of the material: of trying to ‘write’ the rope into the
material of paper that was to carry it. Exploring the idea perhaps that a knot was a
tautology that could be suspended in. There were ideas about impermanent
structures, being on the road, ideas of bodies suspended in paperwork, of legally
binding tautology. Above all it was to develop the ideas on language back into the
material, rigging and technical requirements of bodily suspension.
Reference to this film can be found in Chapter Four: The Tautological Ground.
 11

Travelling Without Moving. [Link]

This film documents our first ever session with Past Life Regression and some of the
thoughts that surrounded that as an extension (or compression) of our other
truncated trips.
Reference to this can be found in Chapter Nine: Past Life Regression.

When Wrong Is the Only Right Left.

[Link]

In this film we attempted to construct a tautology within the practice of past life
regression itself. The entire process is engineered to suspend the process.
Reference to this can be found in Chapter Nine: Past Life Regression.
(The other name for this film is Placebo The Clown.)

(There are further notes on this film, which I would like you to read after you have
watched the film. See below*)

Included in Stockholm university of the Arts publication series:

X-position nr 4, ISSN 2002-603X;4

2019

ISBN: 978-91-88407-12-2

Please contact me if there are any problems with Vimeo or Playback etc.
Thank you sincerely for your patience.

jonladder@[Link]

*PLEASE DO NOT READ THESE NOTES UNTIL AFTER WATCHING WHEN WRONG IS
THE ONLY RIGHT LEFT

(notes on ‘When Wrong is the Only Right Left’…Sue Bentham is played by an actress. The intension here is to first show
the film as a ‘trick’ within the practice of PLR, but then to reveal that Sue’s fictionality is actually the trick. I had made
many attempts to make this film with a real practitioner but it proved impossible, so this was the solution: to utilise the
necessity for fiction to fictionalise a trick in the rope of time.