I haven’t posted anything philosophical here in months. This is partly because I’ve been so busy recording and preparing for the upcoming Liturgy tour and the live-action debut of Origin of the Alimonies, and it’s also because my philosophical energy has for the most part migrated to Twitter, YouTube and my new Discord server. But part of me is beginning to miss the quasi-privacy of this site. Not that it really is private - but I don’t get any immediate feedback on anything that I put up here, so it’s a very different experience from posting to twitter and quickly getting an account of who and how many are interested.
A result of not writing on this site is that I have also not been reading my old posts. Usually, when I choose to post something new, I start by reviewing the more recent of the posts on the feed to which I intend to add, if not all of them. This - I’m sort of just noticing now - is a crucial aspect of my relationship to this site. Without it, I wouldn’t remember what I’ve written. Time and time again, I’m inspired, fascinated and motivated by something that I’ve already written. It’s a bit like a catechism or like articles of faith. You just run them through your mind at regular intervals, and they influence your conscious awareness. You stop, and they stop.
The point I’m getting to is that I had nearly forgotten what I even mean by Majesty. Well no that’s still not the point. After reviewing this feed, I’m noticing first of all that Majesty is by far the least-crystallized of the Cardinals, and with good reason: it is to some degree a part-of-no-part with respect to the other three (Ascesis, Catharsis, Fervor), given that the other three so easily map onto religious discipline, scientific investigation and artistic creation, whereas it is not entirely clear what aspect of human (re)production Majesty is meant to refer to.
It’s something like politics, or building a community, or generating a quasi-autopoetic structure, but there’s just so much to it that these examples feel less adequate than examples of the other three Cardinals do. On the one hand, Majesty involves actual human beings, their fantasies, their drives, and their ability to form an assemblage together. It isn’t art, because it doesn’t pertain to any kind of new frontier for the imagination or the discharge or materialization of new forms; it isn’t science because there is no formula capturing something in the real, it isn’t religion in the ascetic sense because what I’m referring to there really refers to an inner journey.
But it also must pertain to the absolutely new. Like it must be a portal into radical becoming. I was reminded yesterday of this passage from Nick Land’s text: “Positive feedback is the elementary diagram for self-regenerating circuitry, cumulative interaction, auto-catalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organization, compressive series, deuterolearning, chain-reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenics. Such processes resist historical intelligibility, since they obsolesce every possible analogue for anticipated change. The future of runaway processes derides all precedent, even when deploying it as camouflage, and seeming to unfold within its parameters. Positive feedback replicates reproduction as a component function of its departure from the same”
What catches my eye the most is this notion of resisting historical intelligibility, obsolescing every analogue by definition. This is what Majesty does, at least at its highest potential: it changes things in a way that things have never changed before.
And the change happens ‘on its own’, as a reaction to the practice of faithful tending and contribution, to gardening. This - and I wrote this more or less in an earlier post - is the essence of grace. Originally my only online work was this site, which I began during a time that Liturgy wasn’t active. Now that there are all these other dimensions (new track and album releases, a film, a server, various social media platforms), it’s possible to spiral around and energize this with those and vice versa.
I’m currently especially interested in the introduction of new people to this structure having an inspiring effect, like for those few true kindred spirits out there who see this to make contact with the potential within themselves to do something similar. This is already very much happening, and it’s really my primary goal. I probably wrote somewhere else (and have forgotten) that I fairly recently discovered that Stephen Covey wrote a follow up book to The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which was called The Eighth Habit. The eight habit, the habit to complete them all, is simply using your authentic voice, and in doing so awakening others to their own. It sounds almost embarrassingly trite to put it in this way, but it is also the essence of, say, Fichte’s system. This type of resonance, perhaps the most beautiful thing that can happen in this world, is deeply occult, and deeply connected with the true essence of music, whatever that turns out to be.