Theory has no transcendent guarantee; it can only be ‘proven’ by practice. But the proof doesn’t come from practice itself: it comes from the response to the practice. This response may well undercut the very essence or presuppositions of the theory. Thus proof and disproof are one and the same, and both come from elsewhere.
ADACTION
I'm considering replacing the term "Adaptation" with a neologism: "Adaction". This would approximately be a cross between adaptation and abduction. Like an abductive judgment that transforms the very subject of the judgment (as opposed to merely creating a new concept).
TIME
Maybe the primordial figure of time as such is adaptation: confronting an intrusion, making sense of it and creating a relationship with it. This always involves a shifting judgment. The intrusion is bad, but then it becomes good.
TO BE THRILLED
Something will take place and it will be a surprise. Things won't work out, and all of a sudden the coordinates according to which the situation was measured will no longer have meaning. This necessity - the necessary continuation of a flux of chaos with no basis, operating according to no rule - is the most thrilling thing there is, if we are only able to savor it
THE NEW
We just can't know what will appear. New things come from somewhere else, and they force a sort of reframing. The new de-sacralizes and de-absolutizes.
SINGULARITY
Only a singular subject can generate an abstract universality. In a similar way, only the wrong choice can open the door to a right choice. The interplay between the ideal, the material and temporality (and value) is viscous and complex. Somewhere Thomas Merton talks about humanity as a body of broken bones. We have to love it, tend to it and listen to it - even as it remains broken. And personally I must do this for myself - my own flaws, missteps, chronic misconceptions and fantasies are something to cherish, stir and milk for what they are worth
LOVE
Adaptation is love. Love is an approach beyond utilitarianism and beyond preconceptions. It is always oriented towards the particular, and it always sees paradoxical value in imperfection and disappointment. Love radiates from the heart that is breaking
NECESSARY FAILURE
Nothing works out, and nothing has worked out. Everything is broken. People who report a strong sense of spirituality tend to look back at the past and say, "I can see now that everything that seemed so terrible at the time was necessary - without all those hard knocks, I wouldn't be here right now, which is exactly where I want to be."
Strictly speaking this view is completely inane. But nevertheless we can define heaven in precisely these terms (cf. C.S. Lewis): from the perspective of holiness, the entire past is transformed and redeemed. This is possible because the past has no substance on its own, and human memory, narrative and affect are malleable and capable of self-transformation
New challenges and misfortunes can be approached in just the same way. This is the meaning of Adaptation
THE PAST
The past has no substance. A past that is unbearable can be transfigured
DOGMA
Adaptation is what separates Transcendental Qabala from religion, because it affirms a tentativeness of all dogma. Every idea is shot through with its own death. Prophecies are real, yet they carry seeds of evil.
Perhaps this is not so different from Shia Islam or Mormonism: there will be new prophets, and they will come with new laws that will overturn the old ones.
But for The Ark Work, the field of potential sources for new Gends is much wider. It includes not just music, art and science, but also evil. That which is adapted is not necessarily incorporated
VIDEO
I've been going through an old hard drive, where I discovered some videos I'd made between 2011-2013. First there's the Genesis Caul video, composed of footage I took of myself while composing the Transcendental Black Metal manifesto. Then there are several dialogues between different figures of the Ark Work: Reign Array, Kel Valhaal, Haelegen, and one whom I haven't thought about for a while named CERN. In 2013 I began learning computer animation, and made some videos of CGI characters overlaid upon video journal entries and rituals, with music. Anyway, I made some decisions I regret towards the end of 2013 - which I'm working on a way to articulate - and one of my regrets is that this series got cut off. I have to consider the video series as a failure - yet another failure in a series of exquisite failures - and treat them as such, as a sort of failure-material. They can't be taken away, yet the absence of a continuous series cannot be erased.
WHAT IS ADAPTATION
There are may ways to define it and to account for it, but one way or another, and perhaps in a way that ultimately outstrips all accounts and definitions, something new emerges. Something new emerges, and that which had seemed solid no longer seems solid. The new relativizes the axiom, the foundation, the horizon. Emerson was always thrilled about this - his essay on circles is his manifesto for the affirmation of becoming. But we have to consider that this new emergence is perhaps value-neutral. On the one hand, there is an ethics to not being reactionary, to being strong enough for it and so on. But, especially now, it is not so obvious that the sheer novelty that explodes preconceptions and mores and so on is not ultimately a torrent of auto-destruction. Or rather, it seems more likely that it is such a torrent. It was Nietzsche who saw this clearly first: man will translate himself back into nature and destroy himself. In 2016 there is a certain sense in returning to a more matter of fact, exoteric reading of Nietzsche as meaning what he actually says (as opposed to reading him through the lens of Klossowski and Deleuze and so on). That said - even though blind affirmation is perhaps not the appropriate attitude towards the emergence of the new, it does call for some kind of ethics of affirmation: not the facile affirmation of capitalist decadence but the quasi-Christian affirmation of suffering that transforms pain into gratitude and a new horizon of meaning. It is far too easy to mis-use the term "affirmation", which is, I think, used really in the latter sense by Nietzsche and Deleuze rather than the former, and to read them as meaning it in the former sense: being excited about new stuff. For that reason, I replace the term "affirmation" with one that is more neutral: adaptation.
THE DEATH DRIVE
Something always comes that was not expected. The artist's path is to make himself or herself worthy of contingencies at the personal level and also in social, cultural and political arenas