Ontological Intimacy, Depth and Deployment

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portrait of a mosquito on display at the 
Smithsonian Institution in Washington

Over at Knowledge Ecology Adam Robbert has responded to my recent post on the notion of ‘withdrawal’ by reframing the discussion with an important distinction. Adam writes,

“I would like to suggest that we can frame this discussion within two conceptions of withdrawal: absolute and contingent (the first associated with the work of Tim Morton and Graham Harman, the second with Michael and Levi Bryant).” [source]

I support Adam’s distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘contingent’ withdrawal. And I am willing to admit favour for a version of withdrawal consistent with a materialist understanding of contingency. I believe entities are withdrawn, but not in the sense Graham Harman and Tim Morton seem to advocate. I believe all actually existing entities are assemblages and events with material and organizational depth often exceeding the grasp and understanding of other entities - but which are nonetheless substantially accessible.

I want to highlight two assumptions embedded in these statements:

First, I want to make an important distinction between “grasp” and “understanding” which seems to go to the heart of Harman’s extension of Heidegger’s tool-story.

Understanding (as 'translation') is not equivalent to structural relation (“grasp”). Understanding is a 'second-order' emergent capacity of recursive biological memory, gesture and symbolic projection coded (abstracted) and afforded by interpersonal (cultural) networks. And the cognitive operations of 'understanding', classification and representation cannot possibly determine or “exhaust” the complexities of things encountered. Embodied symbolic apprehension is inherently non-equivalent and token. Therefore I agree with Harman that the incompleteness of understanding and symbolic representation renders our translative capacities partial and limited, and threfore entities 'withdraw' from each other epistemically.

Yet, without some type of 'access' to the encountered objects of our embodied experience - and therefore access generally between objects - abstraction, codification and semantic approximation (intelligibility per se) would not be possible. As I attempted to argue in my last post on this topic, cognitive apprehension is possible be-cause symbolic understanding and intentionality are not the only ways objects or assemblages relate. Entities also often relate in various non-intentional and non-symbolic (structural) ways at different scales of material extension and organization. Direct relation is both necessary and possible viz. the emanating, composite and substantial elements of any two (or more) entities that have casual influence on the structural arrangement or unique determining patterns of another. [*]

This can be folded into an appeal to the existence of obliteration and absorption events:

Steven Shaviro’s mosquito bite example (mentioned in my last post on withdrawal) is an example which demonstrates how human flesh obliterates the functional operation and substantiality of a mosquito's composite affective capacity. As Shaviro explains:

When the mosquito bites me, it only interacts with a few of my qualities (my skin, my blood, my body heat). And even when I murder the mosquito, I only encounter a few of its qualities... [I]n Bryant’s terms, it is precisely because the mosquito interacts with certain of my powers or capacities or local manifestations, and I interact with certain of its powers or capacities or local manifestations, that we must say that the mosquito and I do encounter one another and interact — this is precisely the way that two entities perceive one another and interact.

In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. The mosquito only apprehends particular aspects of me; but it is “me” as a complete object, rather than just those particular aspects or manifestations of me, that is changed by the encounter. To say that objects do not encounter one another, because they cannot entirely know one another, is to reduce ontology to epistemology, once again. [source]

human digestive process

For me the most striking case of direct encounter is animal digestion. Digestion is an absorption event where the material and organizational depth and unity (complexity) of an entity is directly encountered, disassembled and redistributed. Would an empirically informed critic argue that metabolic processes fail to directly penetrate the structure and capacity of the food animals ingest? I suggest not. And are those penetrating (affective) metabolic capacities integral to an animal's embodied and substantial composite powers? Indeed they are. Not only do animal bodies directly encounter, for example, an apple according to capacities essential to their continued operation, but animal bodies can also completely obliterate an apple’s compositional integrity by absorbing the apple's elements and potencies into its very own system. If such cases do not convince us of direct causal relation and ontological intimacy I’m not sure what could?

The take-away point here is that structural encounters are direct by virtue of their causal efficacy - the differential ability to affect the structure and composite powers or capacities of others - whereas the translations, apprehensions and phantasmic representations generated by epistemic encounters are necessarily “selective”, obscure and partial. That is to say, causality and relation are always direct but partial. The so-called “rift between essence and appearance” applies generally to symbolic operations but not necessarily to material relations and structural causality as such, because cognition, gesture, intentionality and conceptuality are different kinds of powers or capacities than  physical contact and embodied relation. And by conflating the limitations of cognition and representation (epistemology) with embodied experience and causality in general (ontology) the notion of "absolute withdrawal" fails to convince.

To return briefly to the examples above, if a mosquito lands on my arm and penetrates the structural integrity of my skin with his snout we can say the mosquito and I are in direct contact or relation. But we must also say that such contact is only partially because both of us are accessing only a limited portion of the other’s total 'depth' of being. The mosquito may be ingesting my blood but it is not penetrating the structural integrity of my spleen and other aspects of my being. And the mosquito may be resting on my arm with a portion of its extensive composition beneath my skin but I have no access to its internal organs or substantive depths. Our encounter is limited by the inherent organizational and material complexity of both mosquitos and I, and therefore by the availability or lack thereof of our components. And this is what I mean by 'withdrawal' or contingent depth.

The second assumption that needs to be upacked is my appeal to depth. The focus on depth in my orginal statement above is meant to call attention to an entity's uniquely "withdrawn" complex compositional assembly. Every 'object' or assemblage has a contingent and expressive potency particular to its material-energetic composition and capacities. The term 'potency' is offered here as a technical term in my discourse referring to the affective, embodied and expressive properties of individual assemblages. Thus individuality as temporal singularity is to me an object or assemblage's unique potency, in the sense that a giraffe has a particular potency, likewise with uranium and a collection of H2O molecules. "What can a body do?" Depends on its composite onto-specific potency. And it is in the direct but partial mingling of material-energetic assemblages where potencies of all sorts often relate, combine, collaborate, conflict, constrict, or otherwise affect, augment, amplify and generate the myriad of evolved ecologies and terrains.  

So I agree with Levi Bryant in that entities can only ever have “selective” access to each other based on each object’s particular (onto-specific) organizational and material-energetic depth, or endo-complexity. There will always be a certain degree of withdrawn substantiality in relations of contingent material objects/entities corresponding to the endo-complexity (depth) of any particular assemblage - just as there will always be some 'distance' between signifiers and objects of signification. While at the same time, I reject the notion that entities are absolutely withdrawn from each other.

As I argue above, entities can and do interact (penetrate, exchange, affect, obliterate, absorb, etc.) directly according to their unique structural compositions and expressive (sensual) substantiating properties - the same qualities that constitute the very fabric and flesh of their actual existence. And it is the primordial  accessibility and vulnerability (ontological intimacy) of elemental life which affords each and every affective and consequential event, encounter and relation. Which is to say, it must be the case that entities are capable of affecting each other directly and substantially, if only partially, lest the notion of causality become unintelligible and knowledge itself be rendered impossible.

As Adam writes,

“Michael’s concern here, as I read it, is that it makes no sense to experience and grapple with a relational, contingent world of affect whilst at the same time suggesting that this panoply of activity is the result of objects that do not touch–clearly all kinds of beings are crashing into one another everywhere! What a mess! So, if real entities everywhere are touching each other nowhere, than how is that anything is happening at all? And further, if it is the case that entities are withdrawn absolutely from one another then what possible sense of responsibility can we have towards such entities (a necessary question indeed)? Can we even be responsible to such entities?” [source]

The answer is, of course, that if objects ‘absolutely withdraw’ both causality and responsibility break down, leaving us with a cosmos full of alienation, Platonic caves and ineffectual vicars. But we don't inhabit that cosmos do we? Withdrawal is necessarily contingent, finite and never absolute.

Adam continues,

“In my understanding, Bryant is arguing not for an absolute withdrawal, but a contingent withdrawal wherein a real object is deployed in and through its relations, though never fully so in any specific set of relations. What does this amount to? It seems to me, if I am reading Bryant correctly, that this form of contingent withdrawal suggests not the absolute absence of the real object, but a real object always-already deployed amidst a “regime of attraction;” objects are withdrawn in the sense that they are irreducible to relations and contexts, but not fully departed from all relations and contexts.” [source]

This is how I read Levi as well. In fact, the more I try to grapple with Levi’s framework the more I find his conclusions consistent with my own. And, like Adam, I find my own ‘ecological’ sensibilities compatible with the process-relational thinking inherent in Levi’s notion of “regimes of attraction”.

However, I would like to push such conceptions of inter-being even further to try and conceptualize the creative nature of mutuality, co-manifestation, affordance and non-linear causality in an intimate and erotic wilderness of beings, exchanges, flows, depth and networks, rather than overemphasizing the role of the temporal agental powers of specifically withdrawn assemblages. It is the very nature of potent “deployments”, in all their temporal, spatial and material complexity and vulnerability that interests me the most about the cosmopolitics of contemporary life - as access and relation are not simply issues of theory, but of application and possible tactics. The onto-specific nature of contingency, 'deployment', and relation constitute a Wilderness of being, becomings and practice from within which all realties emerge.

In sum, I think the following point stands: ‘withdrawal’ is necessarily contingent and precarious as a result of the ubiquitous ontologically intimacy of this immanent material-energetic cosmos.

The End of Capitalism?

WOW. That is all I have to say about a recent post at Indecent Bazaar entitled, "The End of Capitalism". Therein the author lays bare the immediate political implications of trying to better understand the amazing complexity inherent to all social assemblages. The author (who are you?) calls upon important work done by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Manuel DeLanda.

I honestly could not articulate a better understanding of the multiplicity of social systems (and indeed all assemblages) at various scales, as well as the need for analytical specificity in terms of both general ontology and political practice.

Below is my favourite passage from the post, but please do go read the entire piece for yourself:

It is illegitimate and inaccurate to speak of capitalism in terms of a unifying entity (in the same way it would be to speak of the US as a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one) because such social descriptors erase and obscure differences. While feminists have long departed from “holistic expressions for social structure”, conceptions of capitalism as hegemonic, ubiquitous, systematic and so on are still prevalent and resilient. It follows from this virtually unquestioned view of capitalism as the dominant form of economy that noncapitalist and anti-capitalist sites come to inhabit the social margins in the realm of experiment (as recently illustrated over at Necessary Agitation). As J.K. Gibson-Graham contend: “it is the way capitalism has been ‘thought’ that has made it so difficult for people to imagine its supersession.” (There is little doubt that the archive of my blog unflatteringly reflects the same point). As the authors go on to argue, what needs to be fostered instead is a theory of “economic difference;” conditions under which the economy might be “less subject to definitional closure,” whose identity is not fixed or singular. The alternative of “theorizing economic difference, of supplanting the discourse of capitalist hegemony with a plurality and heterogeneity of economic forms” is akin to what Manuel DeLanda attempts in ‘Deleuze, Materialism and Politics’. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of double articulation (the selection of materials out of a wide set of possibilities—first articulation—and the arrangement of these loosely ordered materials into a more stable form—second articulation) with which to conceptualize the process through which material form and identity are generated, DeLanda extends this micro-macro distinction to strata operating at infinitely different scales (rather than only two levels of scale: ‘the molecular’ and ‘the molar’). According to DeLanda, “double articulation is, in its simplest version, the process of joining parts to yield a whole with properties of its own. Since most component parts are smaller than the whole they compose, the part-to-whole relation is a relation between small and large scales.” It would be a mistake, however, to treat the macro and micro as absolute scales. There are never only two scales operating in material or social processes: every entity that is perceived as an autonomous whole is itself populated by component parts, and those parts in turn have their own parts…. “A more adequate approach,” argues DeLanda, “would be to treat them as relative to a particular scale.” For this reason it is problematic to employ terms like ‘society as a whole’ in our theorizing, for the largest entities are every bit as singular and unique as the smallest. “In general, what needs to be excluded from a materialist social ontology are vague, reified terms like ‘society’ (or ‘the market’, ‘the state’, etc.) Only hacceities (individual singularities) operating at different spatio-temporal scales should be legitimate entities in this ontology.”

Yeah, I know, pretty damn awesome...

Riffing On Withdrawal: Difference, Embodiment and Access

In a duo of recent posts at Larval Subjects Levi Bryant takes up the notion of object “withdrawal” in earnest once again by addressing several of the most relevant questions percolating in the thoughts of many critics of object-oriented philosophies.

In these posts Levi not only clearly states the core problem I have with any object-oriented metaphysics but then goes on to skillfully differentiate his own understanding of “withdrawal” from Graham Harman’s by further articulating philosophical commitments consistent with a move towards integrating process-relational thinking with object-orientated investigations.

To begin with Levi states,

“It seems to me that one of the single greatest challenges that proponents of withdrawn objects face is this charge of proposing an empty metaphysical abstraction that makes no difference. I resolve to treat the object as withdrawn from all relations such that we have no access to it whatsoever (this is not, incidentally, my concept of withdrawal). In this way I seek to preserve the object form all erasure under relation. Yet in doing this, what has happened? Have I not won a Pyrrhic victory? Insofar as I’ve claimed that the object is withdrawn from all relation and access, I’m also led to the claim that nothing can be said of the object qua object because the object is withdrawn. As a consequence, the object becomes, at the level of concepts, an empty point. As thoroughly withdrawn, I am unable to say anything of the object. Any quality that I might attribute to its reality is necessarily a quality for me (in relation), and not a quality of the object itself. And this is true both metaphysically (in the non-pejorative sense) and epistemologically. It’s not just that the object is empty for me, the person seeking to know the object. No, it is also that the object is empty for any other object, because the real being of the object is withdrawn from each and every object, existing in a self-contained vacuum, unable to touch any other object.” [source]

This is precisely the crux. If objects, entities, assemblages, etc., are incapable of ‘touching’ or interacting or relating to each other is some sort of direct way there is absolutely no possibility of encountering the things-in-themselves, much less knowing anything substantial about them. As Levi puts it later in the post, “there’s just no way anyone can know anything about it and thus it makes no difference in our thought.” There has to be some sense in which entities make contact or they would never be able to communicate (in the broadest sense of that term). And I would even venture to add that any such world populated by inaccessible, vacuous, isolated objects could only be an alienated, underimplicated prison-house of pure/ideal and forever undetectable substances.

However, fortunately we do not live in such a world. We don’t have to search far to find the myriad of ways humans touch, penetrate, swap materials, propagate, interfere, incapacitate, augment and otherwise intervene upon each other’s substantiality (external and internal), as well as the integrity and constitutional operations of so many other organic and non-organic entities and assemblages. We live in a world with sex, germs and atomic fluctuations. We live in a world of chemical catalytics, metabolic processes, cellular mitosis, symbiotic relations, nuclear fission and co-evolutionary dynamics. Each assemblage of expressive materials enacts a dynamic, or what Levi calls a “regime of attraction”, unique to the wider ecology of flows, exchanges and influences in which particular assemblages are implicated. Our world is extensive, immanent, collaborative, distributed, intensive and enacted all the way down. These facts are as irreducible as any formal metaphysical caricature we might seek to project upon the world.

But the question remains: how best are we to describe and attempt to explain this mix and mingle (and mangle) of things, flows and relations? Is there one great set of signifiers that can explicate and then codify the nature of such a wilderness of being? I can’t imagine there would be since, as Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) remind us, all assemblages and contexts are unique and irreducible to either the processes or elements of which they are composed. Every actual entity is, I argue, a fully embodied material-energetic assemblage with an irreducible onto-specific expressivity, or “individuality” as such.

OOO is right to champion this “withdrawn” onto-specific potency as the flash-point where intensive differences are generated. It is with specific thresholds of actual assembly and organizational unity where causal affectivity takes on its particular character and function. That is to say, the distribution of “objects” and assemblages are difference per se; they are the ‘what’ that makes a difference, and they are the rhythmic punctuations that comprise the song of this cosmos.

However, where I think OOO goes too far (at least with Harman and Tim Morton) is where they assign absolute identities to such potent beings to an extent where there is an imposition of metaphysical boundaries that do not actually exist. Now, to be fair, the understanding of the term “object” varies greatly among the OOO enthusiasts – which, in effect, serves to stretch the term beyond any ordinary linguistic coherence. But what unites these thinkers is a willingness to advocate for the “complete” or “total” withdrawal of all objects/assemblages from each other and even from themselves. This radical boundary-making, I suggest, can only obscure the already complicated project of investigating BOTH the assembled efficacy and individuality of entities (their onto-specific potency, or 'being') and their fully implicated, material-energetic, processual, embedded and temporal relations (their 'becomings') simultaneously. I argue, counter-intuitively perhaps, that it is the onto-specific substantially of entities and assemblages that should caution us to avoid universally characterizing such complexities as “objects” or “relations – and talk more specifically about particular admixtures, alliances, complexes, distributed realities and the ecosystems they enact.

This call for attention to the particular composition of specific entities is echoed in Glen Fuller's recent comments here:

"[T]he composition of matter and energy are entirely compositional and contingent. As energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, then this or that composition of matter and energy is continually being transformed (ie entropy) since the beginning of the universe. The given composition of anything would therefore be a particular contingent composition of matter and energy." (emphasis added) [source]

As well as Jussi Parikka's questionings here:

"I guess OOP wants to treat everything as an object - across scales, genres and epistemological prejudices - and hence bring a certain flatness to the world - to treat humans and non-humans on equal footing, a project which I am in complete agreement with - but does this not risk paradoxically stripping entities, the world of specificity?" (emphasis added) [source]

So as I see it we have two serious sets of problems with OOO at this point: one cluster epistemological and the other ontological. First, as we said above, if all real entities are “totally withdrawn” and inaccessible (and to be encountered as “sensual objects” and only alluded to via metaphor) then, as Levi suggests, we cannot claim to have any real understanding of them. In comparison, however, the related ontological problem of “total withdrawal” is even worse: if we have no substantial, reliable or direct access to real objects then we can have no real affect on them – and thus causality itself breaks down in such an account. Even in Harman’s ingenious “vicar” system of causality the contradiction quickly becomes obvious in that even if we need vicars we must, in some sense, have direct access/contact to/with them. That is, for ontological realism to be intelligibly argued it must be argued that ontological intimacy must be the case. Both contact and access must be possible.

Consider, for example, the following argument from Steven Shaviro:

"[W]e do encounter objects all the time, the entire universe is composed of objects encountering other objects. The fact that these encounters do not involve the manifestation of all the powers or capacities of the objects in question does not mean that the objects are somehow failing to encounter one another, or that there needs to be a split between an object and its manifestations, as Bryant and Graham Harman both maintain. When a mosquito bites me, I am changed thereby, although this is only to a relatively minor (albeit irritating) degree. When I slap and kill the mosquito, it is changed so extensively as to be altogether obliterated. 

When the mosquito bites me, it only interacts with a few of my qualities (my skin, my blood, my body heat). And even when I murder the mosquito, I only encounter a few of its qualities... [I]n Bryant’s terms, it is precisely because the mosquito interacts with certain of my powers or capacities or local manifestations, and I interact with certain of its powers or capacities or local manifestations, that we must say that the mosquito and I do encounter one another and interact — this is precisely the way that two entities perceive one another and interact. 

In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. The mosquito only apprehends particular aspects of me; but it is “me” as a complete object, rather than just those particular aspects or manifestations of me, that is changed by the encounter. To say that objects do not encounter one another, because they cannot entirely know one another, is to reduce ontology to epistemology, once again. [source]

These twin objections to OOO obviously need to be developed further in order to approach academic persuasiveness. However let me go just a little further on the issue of “withdrawal” by suggesting that part of the reason OOO – at least as originally proposed by Graham Harman – continues to assign absolute identities to assemblages in general, despite the obvious objection from anyone with materialist sensibilities that all real “objects” mix, mingle and exchange determining influences, is because of a conflation of cognitive apprehension (epistemology) with structural relation (ontology). Harman graphs Husserl onto Leibniz by way of Heidegger.

In other words, my hunch is that part of the reason Harman and others overextend Heidegger’s hammer-story is that Harman (or is it Husserl?) fails to properly differentiate conceptuality (knowing) from embodied perception (experiencing). Harman seems to assume knowledge equals experience and thereby feels justified in extinguishing all traces of corporeal pre-phenomenological physicality – and its structural-relational quality - from the actual encounters of human objects/assemblages. This conflation of human multiplicity and the elimination of non-cognitive structural relation is then radicalized and projected back unto the physical universe at large. Harman seems to believe that if we or any other objects are incapable of knowing something in its "entirety" we are thus, by logical extension (or conflation), unable to directly encounter it. This completes Harman’s alchemical move of morphing inadequacy (of conceptuality) into inaccessibility, resulting in what I find to be an ultimately alienating discourse that erodes our reckonings of both causality and intelligibility. And this, I think, is a fatal mistake for any kind of realism.

My claims here, of course, remain to be supported with reference to specific passages found within Graham’s work. And I must stress that my intention here is NOT to tear down the house that Harman built. I have learned a tremendous amount from Harman, Morton and especially Levi Bryant. If fact, I consider myself a student of these gentlemen not their peers. But my statements above, as far as they are at all intelligible, reflect my attempt to work through what I think are the main logical inconsistencies and unfortunate rhetorical effects inherent to object-oriented theory.

Fincher's Tattoo

David Fincher's new film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo expresses a profound sense of female competence. Not only does Lisbeth Salander transform victimization she embodies the greatest virtues of the dark pathos of feminine power. If you haven't seen it you should go now. @brightabyss

#thegirlwiththedragontattoo

dispossessed

via Ashley Wood 

atmospheres unknown

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.”

- Henry David Thoreau

Letter From Orwell

A letter from George Orwell to his publisher as he was finishing 1984:

h/t mishearance

War Is a Racket

In 1935 retired U.S Army General Smedley D. Butler published a book entitled ‘War Is A Racket’ in which he lays bare the economic profiteering and commercial nature of publicly funded state warfare. In the book Butler was shockingly frank about his experience as a career military officer in the midst of a frenzy of wealthy elites clamoring to make profit from all sides of some of the earths most devastating conflicts.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

In an often cited quote from the book Butler says:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

Butler then summarizes the main points of his book in the following key passage:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

read the entire book: Here

Daniel Dennett - The Evolution of Purposes

Intro:

Before there was life on Earth, there were no purposes, no reasons. Things just happened. How could purposes emerge from such purposeless conditions? Looking back at the evolution of life on the planet, we can now see - if only dimly - the patterns that led to the exquisite functional organisations of matter that living forms exhibit. We human beings are the only living things that can represent these reasons, and comprehend them, but that does not make them illusory.

Recorded at the Carillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre at the University of Melbourne on 15 November 2011:

Ted Bundy 1989

One of the reasons this website has been 'dark' for weeks now is I have started a new project in my professional life related to psychiatric institutions and the policies and practices that animate them. As a result of this new challenge I have returned to the writings of Foucault, Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, but also to media and more popular writings on madness, abnormality and so-called psychotic individuals. I find my best work is done when it is informed by my indirect curiosities. Right now I'm trying to think the relations between flesh, fantasy, deviance, desire, compulsion, moral schema and social influence - and how these mix with institutional efforts to control and regulate the affairs of human life.

Below is an interview with Ted Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell, 1946-1989) the day before his execution on the electric chair, January 23, 1989, for the multiple kidnappings, rapes and murders of young women in the 1970s. Bundy was interviewed by (the self-righteous) Christian apologetic Dr. James Dobson from Raiford Prison in Starke, Florida.

Here Bundy talks at length of the influence of pornography, violent media and images on the evolution of his most deviant desires and murderous behaviours. It is a fascinating confession of a man who came to self-interprete his life through the lens of what seems to be a heightened moral sensibility.