Journal #3

Stuff from the past week

I love this photo

Apologies for the abrupt shift to this ‘journal’ format instead of the longer, dryer and more tedious posts that I know my readers want & love. The reality is that, due to work pressures, I’m experiencing a terminal time crunch, but still feel compelled to write a little bit each day just to keep momentum up so this (plus the paid subscriber posts) is what you’re getting for now. My usual outlet for brief and random shit, my X Twitter account, is temporarily/indefinitely deactivated, so not gone forever, but who knows when it will come back.

-Ed

5/13/2025

Deep historical work—research, compiling or aggregating, evaluating, interpetting—takes time itself as its plane. History itself consists of time, it’s the time of events and experiences, of immense and tectonic processes, mediated through the particularity of social actors, class formations, organizations and observers. Time too defines the historical researcher (professional and amateur historian alike); the work unfolds within history, and so within a dynamic temporal structure, and it remains lodged in permanent negotiation with the gaps of duration between the moment of research and objects of study that preceded it.

History assumes itself universal—the modernist dream is ‘universal history’, the history of something called ‘civilization’—but there is never one history. “History comes at the end”—it emerges through the never-complete process of integrating discrete histories and historical trajectories that nevertheless bleed across into one another. Time likewise cannot be treated as singular. Speaking of time-as-such in the contemporary positivistic sense is the collapse of multiple temporalities into common abstraction.

Reinhart Koselleck wrote of this polyvalenced nature of time as“sediments”, a metaphor at once geological and spatial (the resonance with the Deleuzeguattarian notion of stratification—the arrangement of deterritorialized flows of matter into the gridwork of content, form and expression—is immediate). Historical time is layered and compressive, the singular and particular histories and durations grinding into one another to build the hardened stone edifices that modern historians take as singular. Sedimentation takes place at different velocities or speeds of time; certain histories move slow and others move quick, even if they are simultaneous.

History-as-sedimentation destabilizes the ease of the interpreter’s process. A given historical event may radiate up and down layers, draw its dimensions and the scope of its impact from multiple historical trajectories. Interpretation extends itself infinitely: one can cut away, always finding another layer of context to resituate the object. There is a leap from the real geology of historical space, the pressurized crusts produced through the grinding of continental plates, to the arcane political dramas of courts and bureaucracies to the delicate latticework of people’s dreams, their fears, traumas, hopes and conditioned desires.

The infinite character of historical interpretation can be carried over into textual analysis. This isn’t the freeform and utterly subjective act of postmodern ‘scrutiny’ of texts, but the concrete understanding that when the author of the text places words onto a page, the act always extends far beyond the conscious scope of action. The words and the architecture they build out are refracted through the violent torsions of the unconscious mind, they reflect the historical location—the sediments—where the author is positioned, they express the reality of their times and places. Syntactical structure braid disparate histories together, word choice registers the ambiguities of the traumas that eclipse neat historical division and the gaps—punctuation, stylistic anomalies, uneven points of reference—contain imploded universes of disheveled meaning that flicker like little signals.

A book is never limited by its 200, 300, 900 pages, and a letter never by its one or two pages. The impossible interpretative act pushes beyond those concrete limitations, with the aid of careful tools and methodology (which must alway be eventually brought to their breach), in order to open them up to the swirling external cosmos that are contained within. Words themselves function the same way: they are capable of being broken down into their most base and primordial roots and arranged in a constellation of associated meaning with their linguistic cousins. The structuring of language components into words conceals genealogical chasms, the wandering movement of thought itself.

As a side note, the digression is my favorite mechanism in writing, the meandering or dangling thread that probably doesn’t lead anywhere—but in reality there is no such thing as a digression. The digression is merely that partial opening, the overflow from one sediment to another, the leaky spot where the content cannot be contained in its box. It really never can.

5/14/2025

Speaking of historical time as sedimentation, the layering of strata upon strata and their mineral composites folding around one another, is the rendering time in terms of space. Time, insofar as we can grasp it, is calcification: “the metaphorical power of all images of time emerges initially from spatial visualizations”.

Modernity is defined by a delicate dialectic of time and space that never resolves itself into a neatly logical sequence. On the one hand there is, as Marx wrote, the “annihilation of space by time”, the pulverizing rush of the world itself compressing under the freight train of development—and on the other, the “spatialization of time”, time made orderly, measurable, stripped of its qualities and transmuted into pure quantities. Neither position liquidates the other, both fuel the other’s gyrations. Yet it is perhaps time’s spatialization that has the first—but by no means the last—laugh. It is atop the spatial apprehension of time that the modern world has erected itself.

Lewis Mumford wrote that it was “the clock, not the steam engine, that is the key-machine of the modern industrial age… a perfection to which other machines aspire”. Time, mediated through the clock, is expressed without qualities: it is empty and homogenous, broken down into quantifiable units designated by cardinal numbers and measured metrically. This is time made “abstract and formalized… indifferent to the events which it measures”. The clock, while cyclical (always resetting at 12 back down to 1), is at its base a number line—and the number line is a spatial construct.

(It was Kant himself, perhaps the first true philosopher of modernity, who noted that while “time has no shape”, it could only be glimpsed through its transformation into spatial representation: “We represent the time sequence by a line progressing to infinity, in which the manifold constitutes a series of one dimension only; and we reason from the properties of this line to all the properties of time”.)

For Mumford, the clock is the seed from which all modern industrial processes sprout, with the double effect of inducing means of productive rationalization and stripping life—in its organic and social dimensions—from the reign of quality:

The clock… is a piece of power-machinery whose “product” is minutes and seconds: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences… Abstract time became the new medium of existence. Organic functions themselves were regulated by it: one ate, not upon feeling hungry, but when prompted by the clock; one slept, not when one was tired, but when the clock sanctioned it… The gain in mechanical efficiency through co-ordination and through the closer articulation of the day’s events cannot be overestimated: while this increase cannot be measured in mere-horse power, one only has to imagine its absence to foresee the speedy disruption and eventual collapse of our entire society. The modern industrial regime could do without coal and iron and steam easier than it could without the clock.

It’s not far at all from here to the discussion of time and space in Lukacs:

…time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space. In this environment where time is transformed into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space, an environment at once the cause and effect of the scientifically and mechanically fragmented and specialised production of the object of labour, the subjects of labour must likewise be rationally fragmented.

5/15/2025

Every morning when I wake up and have a cup of coffee on the back porch, this little guy is hanging out on the steps leading to the side yard:

Jack the Cat likes to catch frogs down in the muddy little creek that runs behind the house, adjacent to the large tobacco field. He’ll carry them around with a look of stunned confusion on his face, unable to understand what prey he has bounced upon. The frogs will hang in his jaws, unprotesting, until he lets them go. But for whatever reason he leaves this particular frog alone.

5/17/2025

Last night Kentucky, evermore seeming like the universal destination of horrific and bizarre weather, was subjected to a battery of tornadoes. The two small towns of London and Somerset were hit the worst, and I think the state-wide death toll stands around 20.

I’m not familiar with London at all, but Somerset is fairly familiar. It’s an odd town with a bizarre history: awful crimes (beheadings, assassinations), an inundation with secret societies (multiple branches of Masonry have lodges there), and it has a general backdrop of psychosis and more than a little undertow of mysticism. I know some people who live there and run a sort of free-form folklore podcast about the region. They believe that the reason that the town is wrapped in this upside-down, surrealist fog is due to something called the “Kentucky anomaly”. That’s the name given by NASA an area, spanning southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee, where the earth’s magnetic field is disrupted and intensified. This is due to the unique magnetic properties of dense clusters of minerals buried in deep below the earth across the region—and Somerset sits at the center of this amorphous geo-magnetic disturbance.

Alexander Guterma, a globe-trotting conman who may or may not have played a role in the JFK assassination (and who may or may not have been a party to the smuggling of the legendary Yamashita’s Gold) hung out in Somerset for some time before in untimely death-by-plane crash in the late 1970s. He was there because of his interest in a local coal mine. This was part of a wider tapestry of mobsters, fraudsters, and intelligence-linked shadow-figures who descended upon the state and used the mining industry for a variety of purposes like tax evasion and money laundering. Gary Webb, years before he became renowned for dissecting the CIA-Contra-cocaine epidemic link, wrote a wonderful series of investigative articles on this exact situation (and fingered Guterma by name).

Another denizen of the greater Somerset area was Chuck Hayes. He was a pilot for the CIA back in the 1950s, where he first ran guns to Castro, then to the rebels fighting Castro. He much later became a ‘redneck scrap dealer’, living in the Kentucky backwoods, and landed his hands on surplus US government computers that contained copies of the infamous PROMIS software. It wasn’t by mistake: Hayes purported himself to be a member of the ‘Fifth Column’, a rogue group of CIA hackers who were blackmailing senators and other political figures who were holding vast sums of money in secret offshore accounts. Sound ludicrous? I wouldn’t be so sure. Dick Russell wrote a very fun article on Hayes, which ran in High Times back in 1997.

Anyways, over here in Hart County we had one or two tornado warnings. I don’t know if one actually touched down, but the alert came over the phone very late (the sirens cannot be heard at this house). I looked at the phone, and then accidentally drifted off to sleep.

5/18/2025

Koselleck, in an interview, defines his pluralistic conception of history in relation the position of Braudel and the rest of the Annales School:

One point is particularly important here, namely, that the concept of duration so frequently taken up in our field, Braudel’s longue durée, can lead to a significant misunderstanding, for duration is anything but static. Stasis is everywhere in nature as long as natural, nonhuman pre givens remain constant or change only very slowly, over a million years, as in natural history, or also over tens of thousands of years, as with the Ice Ages. But modes of actions that can be assessed in the short- and mid- term can hardly be defined as long- lasting. Rather, every duration implies repetition, that is, individual events encapsulate innumerable modes of behavior, mentalities, subjectivities, institutional regulations, and so on, which all depend upon being repeated. Repetition is itself also an action and an event; however it is an event that is not legible in terms of its singularity, but instead in terms of what repeats itself in the event and its singularity. It is hard to judge this in percentages, but I would venture that more than 50 percent of all events contain structures of repetition that in actu arise again and anew. The concept of duration is thus by all means also a mode of action that is singular in each case, but the summation of singularities contains repetitions that are very difficult to determine on the basis of source material because sources typically refer to singular events. And this calls for a kind of preconceptualization that, as far as I know, no historical writing [Histo rie] has sufficiently considered with regard to the empirical practice of the writing of history— by the way, this also includes me.

[…]

At first glance it would seem that actual history is more rightly char acterized by singularity, for individual, day- to- day processes intervene in the daily routine and political decision makers face new alternatives from one day to the next, and one can then derive disagreements and conflicts and their resolutions from these alternatives. But these singularities have an abundance of predispositions to repetition built into them that reach back centuries or half- centuries, chronologically speaking, and that form the conditions of any possible singularity. If everything were singular, one would fall into a black hole. One would not know the direction in which one should act if everything were new. And this gives rise to the question: what is it that actually repeats itself in order to make singularity possible? How many constraints or structures of repetition does one need (do we need) in order to be able to be innovative? This is the central, the theoretically central question that emerges in each and every political context.

Repetition has an ambigious and complex set of dimensions. Repetition is a series that provide a structuring base of historical life across time (in Marxian terms, repetition here would be bound to the system that reproduces itself beyond the agency of individual actors). From here, repetition is split from the singularity. For the historian, the repetition establishes the serial succession of order; the singularity can only be judged by how it breaks through the repetition: an event so distinct that it can be separated out and understood on its own grounds.

What’s important is that the rupture that is the singularity does not take place in the void: it breaks from within serial repetition as much as it breaks through it—the singularity, posited independently, nonetheless requires repetition as its actual ground. Every singularity contains within itself fragments of repetition, and never one line of repetition (because history is always plural): the singularity is intrinsically polyvocal. What this means is that repetition is always and already unstable, riven with internal imbalances and potentials lurking through rupture outwards like a great contingent explosion. It’s only in the aftermath that this contingency, woven from particles floating across time, is recoded retrospectively as necessity.

Rationalizing processes thrive atop repetition, they not only presuppose them but also set them in motion, they strive to make them iron-clad. The repetition that Koselleck is describing takes place on time-scales both immense and molecular, but the repetition of rationalizing forces seek to contain frenzied and divergent trajectories within a sealed universe of calculation and prediction. It hopes to discharge the imbalances and instability within each moment of the repetitive series. Singularity is an anathema to it.

There’s a quote from Lenin, supposedly hidden in his Philosophical Notebooks though I’ve never been able to locate it, that highlights precisely the seething instability and imbalance lurking in the heart of each moment that is capable of being repeated: “the unity (coincidence, identity, equivalence) of the contraries is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle between mutually-excluding contraries is absolute, as movement and development are also absolute”.

To say that the ‘struggle between mutually-excluding contraries is absolute’ is the ultimate inversion of modernist confidence: history become cover for the reality that the One is incapable of being One.