Another Side of Experimental Unit
Polysemy and 'Pataphysics
Conceptual Emergency, Phantasmal Emergency
Experimental Unit has already been presented as an informal emergency response organization. We can bring discussion quickly to a meta-level by discussing the emergencies involved in how we conceptualize emergency response. The International Futures Forum has already helpfully provided us with the “Conceptual Emergency” concept.1 It is elaborated upon as follows:
The world we have created has outstripped our capacity to understand it. The scale of interconnectivity and interdependence has resulted in a step change in the complexity of the operating environment. These new conditions are raising fundamental questions about our competence in key areas of governance, economy, sustainability and consciousness. We are struggling as professionals and in our private lives to meet the demands they are placing on traditional models of organisation, understanding and action. The anchors of identity, morality, cultural coherence and social stability are unravelling and we are losing our bearings. This is a conceptual emergency.
We can enrich our understanding of such cognitive-affective states of emergency by considering the recent work of Ben Zweibelson. Zweibelson presents himself as a “philosopher of conflict” and serves as Director of the Strategic Innovation Group in the Space Force of “the United States of America.”
We can link “conceptual emergency” to Zweibelson’s work by introducing his concept of “phantasmal war.” In the XU context, of course, what is seen is that phantasmal war is a kind of “phantasmal emergency.” This concept can help us to enrich the “conceptual emergency” concept. Much of Zweibelson’s work is paywalled on his Medium account, but here is an elaboration of “phantasmal war” from the article “Emergence & Complexity Science Applied to Warfare,”2 helpfully republished by Archipelago3:
Thus far, readers have explored the overlapping concepts of emergence in complexity science, how complex systems do not permit principles or laws from one scale or realm to extend into others, and that modern militaries adhere to what is a Newtonian styled, natural science inspired frame for conceptualizing thought and action in war. These concepts converge so that the argument can be established for a phantasmal form of future war emerging today and over the coming decades. This phantasmal war construct requires entirely new theories, methods, models, and language concerning complex conflict, and while the phantasmal war frame might coexist with conventional and irregular war theories, none of these should retain the Newtonian styled ontological and epistemological beliefs currently unchallenged across the defense institutions worldwide. Such existing concepts might have limited value within certain highly conventional (perhaps total, high intensity or nuclear war conflicts between nation-states), they continue to show weak correlation to irregular warfare contexts and likely will be entirely irrelevant in most phantasmal war applications.
Zweibelson represents an intriguing and high-level target for recruitment into Experimental Unit, and likely already serves its operational purposes to a large extent by being an innovative voice within martial bureaucracies. Zweibelson has even at times referred to the limitations of not just previous approaches to warfighting, but the war-frame in general.
Zweibelson has released two major publications recently which are free to read as PDFs and hence will be included here. Beyond the Pale4 is a book-length work dedicated to questioning established military concepts and seeking to go beyond them. Reconceptualizing the Space Domain Beyond Historic Perspectives of Warfare5 is a paper-length intervention which specifically highlights the ways in which war (or, for XU, emergency response) enters a phase change in becoming celestial.
The very first sentence of this latter paper states the following:
War is an unavoidable manifestation of political, societal, and cultural disagreement that expresses in rationalized acts of organized violence.
From the XU perspective, this is a fine enough definition. It is important to see, though, that not all emergencies are of this form. An earthquake does not “disagree” with us. War is a kind of emergency, and it takes on an exceptional place because so many of the threats and limitations that we face come from our encounters with others of our “kind.”
Now, anthropoids enjoy a kind of hegemony over all other land animals, but there was a time when we were regularly prey. This was not “war” as we conceptualize it, but it was an emergency. Ditto for disease, even today. We conceptualize such struggles as wars, but this is a backwards formulation because the war frame has become so second nature for us. We are used to believing that “the problem” is that there are others who disagree.
The Relationship between Phantasmal Emergency and Public Worship
We can easily recast the “problem” of phantasmal emergency to the public worship context. So much of what is emergent for us in this time has to do with the practical necessity of maintaining multi-faith polities. In the past, religion has been a response to phantasmal emergency. The simulation of norm-internalization in general is a way of soothing the Other when it comes to the uncertainty of one’s own inner state and future behavior.
“Public worship” includes not only the demarcation and veneration of specific Gods or forces which are deified or made sacred in this setting them aside, but is present in mundane matters as well. What “public” means in this context for Experimental Unit has multiple sides.
On one hand, interventions which perform the task of worship in a novel way in public, that is, with a view toward visibility to all or as many as possible, are one of the main vectors of praxis available to XU or to any emergency response organization. On the other hand, almost anything can be construed as “public” in the sense that there is often an actual or imagined audience for any action. When we mutually validate some concept between us, we perform public worship. “Public” in this sense means having to do with the interconnectedness between ourselves and at least one “other.”
Drawing on “Other” Faiths
This expansive idea of what “public worship” means can be seen to draw on the Buddhist concept of Pratītyasamutpāda.6 Worship has everything to do with the recognition of interdependence.
Drawing this back to Zweibelson, Director Z grounds his understanding of “war” as following from “disagreement.” The view of disagreement from the standpoint of Pratītyasamutpāda holds that the multiple “sides” within a disagreement cannot be what they are without each other. Disagreement is the sources of emergency, but this emergency does not have to be, and in some sense cannot be satisfactorily responded to by simply taking one side of the disagreement and seeing its conquest of the other through.
Sticking with the Buddhist context in dialogue with the concept of war, we can evoke the sense of the Spiritual Warrior as described on Wikipedia7 and elaborated upon by Robert Brumet8. From Wikipedia:
The term spiritual warrior is used in Tibetan Buddhism for one who combats the universal enemy: self-ignorance (avidya), the ultimate source of suffering according to Buddhist philosophy. Different from other paths, which focus on individual salvation, the spiritual warrior's only complete and right practice is that which compassionately helps other beings with wisdom. This is the Bodhisattva ideal (the "Buddha-in-waiting"), the spiritual warrior who resolves to attain buddhahood in order to liberate others
Brument elaborates:
In the modern West, it might be difficult to make a positive connection between the warrior and what we usually consider as spirituality. But in the East, the warrior and the yogi have historically been much more compatible. In this context, the spiritual warrior is seen to be engaged in a battle with himself more than with an external enemy.
The word yogi is derived from the Sanskrit word union (yoke). A yogi is one who engages in spiritual practice for the purpose of experiencing union with the divine.
This interplay between the spiritual and the emergency of disagreement and kinetic force is highly generative. We see here a way of thinking about conflict beyond a “friend/enemy distinction” as inspired by Carl Schmitt.9 There is a rich discourse to be had here involving Hobbes10, Agamben11 and Tiqqun12 on civil war, a topic also addressed by Baudrillard13. We will return to this area of discourse in another article.
We can stick with spiritual/religious approaches, though, and connect the previous discussion of phantasmal war/emergency and the idea of "self-ignorance as enemy” with the notion of “greater Jihad” from within Islamic conceptions. The following selection derives from Norman Rothman’s essay “Jihad: Peaceful Applications for Society and the Individual.”14
Nonetheless, there are essential ways that jihad can be used for peaceful resolution of disputes. There are three ways: Sufism, the legal tradition, and the varieties of jihad. In theory, the purpose of jihad is to end structural violence. Jihad stems from Allah. Muslim traditions based on the writings of Mohammad require personal re-examination in terms of one’s potential for achieving peace and moral responsibility.
The concept is divided in respect to the direction (inner and outer) and method (violent and non-violent). There is greater Jihad defined as the individual’s inner struggle against personal weaknesses and inner evil. On the other hand lesser Jihad is fought against external enemies. Its purpose is to eliminate evil within the umma or community. The greater Jihad directs the lesser Jihad in both its objectives and conduct. As such, Jihad places war and violence in the moral realm, indicating that fighting has its limits.
The radical application of the concept Jihad has reversed the traditional priority of Jihad so that the basic purpose has been subordinated. An examination of Sufism, the legal heritage, and the classification of Jihad definitions demonstrate that in fact that Jihad can be used for peaceful conflict resolution. It will be shown that the popular identification of Jihad with militant force is misplaced.
Jihad is of course quite a connotatively laden term, though its association with diffuse, “non-state” actors is quite relevant here. What is most important, though, is the way that the “greater” Jihad is perceived to be the internal struggle to behave correctly.
Between the Buddhist and Islamic conceptions shared here, we can see a shared emphasis on an internal process, one which is in a way more important than the struggle against external “enemies.” We confront here, though, another emergency in that Buddhist and Islamic conceptions are to some extent different. They disagree.
Union, Unity, Unit
This entry will end off with some elaboration of lore related to the name “Experimental Unit.” For there is a reason why XU remains uncommitted in the sense that XU is not about perfecting any one given culture or loyalty. It is not about being a good Buddhist, or a good Muslim, or a good American. It is rather oriented toward being “good” in general, in the sense of “good” deriving from its original usage in the Proto-Germanic *gōda- meaning "fitting, suitable."15
With this in mind, it does us well to reflect on the conceptual emergency perceivable with respect to the term “unity.” “Union” is also referenced in the passage above by Brunet. What is “union with the divine”?
XU broadly speaking proceeds from an immanentist16 position with respect to the divine. See especially the interpretations of Ludus Amoris17 in Western mysticism Lila18 in Hinduism (and note that “lila” in German means “purple,” explaining in part XU’s usage of this color in its Orange/Grey/Purple color scheme).
With this is mind, we can turn to the words “Experimental Unit.” It is understood that this term arrived through the discourse of warfare. But what can we do with this fated terminology?
We note with interest the overlap between the “unit” and “unity.” In fact, “Experimental Unit” has another meaning, in the sense of a statistical unit.19 This usage refers to the unit which is being investigated by an experiment. We might run an experiment in a school, but are we ultimately comparing students, or classes, or grades, or even comparing schools to each other? The unit of account taken here is the “Experimental Unit.”
The ‘Pataphysical20 sense of “Experimental Unit” takes the standpoint of something like Lila or divine immanence. It is seen that the “Experimental Unit” within this game is precisely the apprently discreet conscious being, the “sentient being.” The sense in which this is intended is conveyed fairly well by the YouTube video “Sisyphusian Retrocausality”21 by Gerardo Praticò. In this sense “being you” is an Exper undertaken by “the Absolute,” whatever sort of unnameable thing we might posit in this place (see “the One” in Neoplatonism22).
The point to this sojourn is to say that the “unity” of self, or any constituted unit having to do with coordination, or the ground of being, etc., this unity is provisional and subject to experiment. As the “beings” that we are, we are sovereign (in Bataille’s sense23) and thus we can invest ourselves in this concept over here when it seems to facilitate the emergency response which seems at this time most fitting, and we are free to change this sense of investment at any time.
Experimental Unit is at once an “organization,” an ethical and phantasmal provocation, which is to work here and now; it is a hyperobject24 containing all the “good” acts throughout all time (the “shard of primitive communism, of the symbolic relation which sustains humanity beyond the economic, beyond the social” as described in my 2018 paper “Transcommunism in the Transpolitical Age”25); and it is another name for everything, for the unfathomable unity with which we experiment.