The Heuristicon

Every day begins poorly for me these days, and this morning was particularly bad. Having spent a period of several hours completely inert near the floor of a room which had, in the span of my somnolence, rotated nearly halfway around the axis of the planet through the shadow of deep space, I awoke in an agitated state of mind, full of angst and dread, terrified by the recombinations which the world may have adopted during my respite. Meanwhile, the revenants of some nocturnal trepidation were still drifting through my intracranial sludge like abandoned frigates coursing unmanned into harbor, but the evanescence of morphean memory deprived me of any substantial recollection of my nighttime contretemps, and I was stranded with only the sour vestige of an unaffiliated sense of detachment and dismay. I considered the many merits of mancipating myself to my bed, of cloistering myself within the confines of my preternaturally darkened room and forfeiting the day before it began. There was something insurgent in me, though: in the first moments of every day, the macromolecular detritus of my brain’s soporific activity fleetingly maintains a kind of grandiose delirium in my brain, making the most baseless aspirations seem, in those staggering instants, utterly feasible. Indeed, there was a flickering moment not too long ago when it seemed like today might be the day that everything started to work out. With this in mind, with my eyes half open, with astronautical bravado, I heaved myself out of bed, staggered to the window, gripped the patibulary cord which dangled there, and hoisted up the blinds, exposing my retinas to the solar bombardment from above and the dependent informational overload of the world below in order to ascertain whether or not today was the day that, without me, the revolution had begun.

It had not. This is a blog about a revolution which is fictional, or else about a fiction which is revolutionary. After all, all revolutions start out as fictions of the way the world could be, conceived in the imaginations of the revolutionaries and acted out with that same crepuscular abandonment of reason which drags me to my window every morning. It follows naturally that the first step towards becoming a revolutionary is to come up with a theory of how to write. From the Magna Carta to the 95 Theses to the Declaration of Independence, all the salient points of history are nothing other than a constellation of documentation, and the sordid vicissitudes of violence and industry which have filled the space between one manuscript and the next are merely anthropology. Whether humanity is a web of mutually dependent identities, a situational expression of genetic codification, a teeming infection of matter, or whatever else, we’re all virtually drowning in an effluence of information which is rising without hope of ecology, and consciousness itself only floats on the surface of physical reality: we can only touch the perceptible symptoms of what’s really happening, and we inhabit the universe like impalpable specters rendered corporeal and vaguely volitional through some quirky quantum mechanical epiclesis.

The incongruity between a symbol and the thing which it represents is sometimes philosophically referred to as a heuristic, in that a heuristic is an index to an idea, pointing to it without being it. On the other hand, heuristics have also been used to describe a kind of apocryphal reversal of the scientific method, by which the traditional relationship of process and result are, somehow, switched. A heuristic suggests that data is the product of an analytic process, or that truth is an outcome associated with a system rather than with latent facts. Put another way, heuristics indicate that all stances exhibit verity, in that they reveal the mechanisms by which they’re produced, and in this sense, lies are as loaded with information as the forthrightness which merely exposes a credulous source. The idea of the heuristic is suitable to the polemics which will be laid out in this blog, in so much as I intend to describe a philosophy of confusion and confabulation which will ultimately propound a system of axiomatic reversals summarizing a general and prevalent complication of meaning and matter. The envisioned result is a Heuristicon, a kind of diabolic engine or pure process which will relentlessly remit unsanctified data, turning its symbols into the phenomena and their objects into media, heaping the most unlikely kinds of information upon the world and, in the process, contributing a critically massive element of entropy to the universe.

The first of these reversals pertains to the premise of revolution itself: this revolution is going to be the apodictic motive, not the result, of the polemics, ideologies, and programs which will flow out of it. This type of revolution is exculpated from the crude necessity of constant justification and from the interminable, reductive, generally vicious and subjective debates which inevitably arise in the face of these kinds of ontological challenges. The most essential revolution is thus a revolt against the very nature of consensual reality, an absolute rejection of the banal constraints which regulate the interrelationships and, indeed, the ownership of information, and which maintain the hegemony of the phenomenology of physics over the neutrality of data. It will be a revolution constructed out of words: language makes things in the world what they are, and the information, which is itself a name, comes into existence simultaneous to the event which it describes. Writers, with their ostensive authority of nomination, will be the brigadiers of this uprising, marshalling the language which they use to prefigure a general reversal in the universe.

I therefore propose a confederation of Fabulists, to institute the kind of revolution which will be expounded here in this blog and to inaugurate a new type of literature which treats text as a form of pure information, addressing writing not as a process but as the extrinsic creation of a process of which the document is a result. In this spirit, these several paragraphs here are not themselves to be received by the world as any sort of manifesto, but rather a scattered statement of the intention to produce, through some convoluted procedure, a declaration laying out the principles which, in being either embraced or trampled, will become Fabulism. Hereafter, with cosmonautical bombast, the Fabulists recuse themselves from the ardor of intending our entendres and meaning what we say, abdicating the burden of allegory and simile to the reading public and their tyrannical sense of democracy. Pushing a key, sliding a lever, turning a knob, we are going to sit back, and then we’ll watch the checkered scope of the planet as every piece on it flips from white to black: the Fabulist Uprising has begun.