THE EXPONENT
Andrew Bucksbarg

DEFINITIONS

The force defining a new global dominance is an acceleration, an expanding and consolidating system, a crystallizing, mobile and overriding force. This agency is the exponent that surfs waves of appropriation, growing in magnitude. The exponent is comprised of desiring systems that form an entity, which compresses the work of bodies and materials into virtual concentrations in a global trajectory. Corporate parties function under the dictum of exponential growth, forever reaching for more means of profitability and are thus folding into the exponent. Debts accrue interest, fat cells engorge and fill and horizontal cities sprawl outward. The exponent culminates as a state where its limitations are set only by the terminus of the sustaining sources, perhaps the death of the system.

This exponent, a self-serving and expansive system or system partial. folds back on itself and multiplies. The exponent is a cultivating storage device or container, which evolves in ever more complex and abstract ways. The accumulation and expansion of commodification and profitability. Its desire is to obtain and its limits are void.

Exponentialism leans upon the practice of limitless growth, a symmetrical, homogeneous growth function that contrasts with the ideology of component partials. The exponent is seen in capitalist structures of a global nature that capture, appropriate and incorporate diffuse, local systems. This corporate commodity culture threatens indigenous, local cultural diversity with its uniform cult of wealth and celebrity, the reality feedback engine and the glint of pure, drug-like pleasure. Modern cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles stretch in uniform sprawl across the landscape carved up by suburban development and freeways. Desiring systems are captured by the lure of acquisition and the process of pleasure.

The epitome and pervasiveness of this system is measure through its destructive muscling. The exponent must find means to overcome limitations. The ideology of empire is based on fundamental means of accumulation and appropriation, a basis of physical mass and proportion that expands in scale and contracts in materiality and capital. This is a global transformation no longer bounded by nation states, to quote Hardt and Negri, “What used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and post imperial.” Much discussion has formed around the expansion of the corporate body through the borderless sweep and reach of liberal democracy’s proposed “freedom on the march.” This function is like a network, where nodes can be taken out, but the mobility remains. The means of reformation materialize, strategic alliances form and spawn into finger-like outgrowths limited only by force or death. Farther reaching are the means of acquiring resources and the profit squeezed from an accelerating compression of materiality into the virtual or capital abstraction. Through this global consolidation that erases nation states beneath it, a graven image of empire metamorphoses.

Exponent methods of capital seeking may have changed from localized industrial production, to a specific militant agent and an enterprise of mobility- tactical forces spin out as necessary in unbounded capital permutations. The exponent consolidates social, political and economic practice into the canon of continuous accumulation.

The exponent compresses relations between materiality and abstraction. Monetary capital is a representation of the materiality of bodily and environmental resources and is expressed as code or virtual abstraction. Monies are pointers. We manipulate these representations, just as we utilize a computer’s interface, moving and manipulating pixels upon layers of variables or containers. Capital is something that exists and does not exist- abstraction, variability.

The spectacle of capital logic can itself generate more of itself. Money creates money, thus commanding more forms of materiality at an accelerated rate. The weight of the virtual increases dominion over the material. This is an ever-increasing oppression of an artifice system upon the limitations of materiality. The only limits to capital are ecological- socio-cultural-environmental. Living systems are the source material. Exponential consumption links population growth, the excess of the desiring systems to the life span of structures which will not contain the exponent.

The exponent produces and consumes desiring systems. Production produces consumption, consumption produces production. These replicant processes are fluid conditionals, both merging, separating and forming phase relationships. Pleasures as cycles of replication are embodied within the individual-social form from the logic of the process of motion from pleasure to non-pleasure to pleasure and so on. Systems of desire sprawl out from sustaining needs and are exponentially transfigured into channels of commodity.

DESIRING SYSTEMS - CYCLING PLEASURE

In the exponent, food is commodity, the ordinance of pleasure. Food is a capital project that functions in the creation and destruction of desiring systems. The basic corporeal relationship, a physiological and psychological response in the body, is retained in pleasure process. This is a corporeal apparatus, the mechanics of pleasure-to-nonpleasure cycling. The simple notion of sustaining life, through the acquisition of calories and nutrients, becomes subverted in the desiring system. One gets hungry in order to maintain bodily function, but one maintains hunger from the pleasure of process or the process of pleasure. Pleasure eating becomes capital, caloric intake accelerates and accumulates. Food drug pleasure forms in exponent desiring process. Eating is not sustaining life and maintaining health, but is the ordinance of pleasure in varying waveforms and frequency.

There is no direct relationship of the process of acquiring food- the production is abstracted. There is only desire-pleasure and the process to prescribe it. Corporate parties promote food as a pleasurable right, lifestyling desire. They sell the desire system and the pleasure structure. They form dependent relations of pleasure with individuals. These procedures are oppressive forces, expanding processes of extraction, processing and refinement that harmfully impact diverse, local human-environmental relations. What purpose does this pleasure product serve local culture, the environment, health and well-being? These are partials to the driving, accelerating and dominant force, a system a pure habitual, destructive pleasure immediacy.

Desiring systems are conceptual system-processes introduced by methodologies of the exponent. They are instructions that serve the ever-expanding growth. These meta-structures, what are the culture stylizations of corporations coalesce together in the exponent. Sustenance is modified and commodified in desiring systems into continuous supplement. Bodily and relational practices all become technologies of pleasure ideology-commodities of the exponent, unbounded by relational orders of sustainability. The exponent replaces culture that is component to local, indigenous difference with the uniform and unilateral. The forms of exponential gain proposed by competitive systems leaves us with the loss of the variable diversity of ideas, cultures, species and environments. The exponent is convinced of its evolution and progress through its expansion, but this expansion is the prime means of unsustainable relations, relations of dominance and cultural, environmental destruction via overextension and overuse.

DESIRING SYSTEMS - SPRAWL

Time is compressed in the exponent and space is expanded. The process in suburban sprawl is a radical land use transformation of materiality. Whole areas are bulldozed and reshaped to support large-scale housing developments. The landscape is modified to support these structures and their use needs. Indigenous waterways are converted to cement glad drainage systems. Indigenous vegetation is replaced with plants that have different soil and water needs, leading to vast, unsustainable requirements that impact relational systems, particularly those of developing nations or nations that are being developed upon, harvested for their complex species-environments.

The contemporary manifestation of the new horizontal city embodies exponential appropriation and accumulation. The automobile lifestyle and the suburban growth are both exponential symptoms. Big box shopping, strip malls and SUVs in horizontal cities like Phoenix and Houston link together in the appropriation of organic systems of difference, independent of the human condition. The goals that we enact upon the environments we inhabit are vastly different than the subtle systems that have evolved relationally over time. Time is compressed in the suburban sprawl’s radical transformation of the environment. The landscape is reshaped to support these structures and their use needs.

Do we interpret these sprawling techniques as systems of the exponent, self-organizing, independent entities or agents? Is there an emergent global force formed around alliances and strategies of the beneficiaries in dominant relationals.

This oppressive formation can be seen spatially in the sprawl architecture accomplishment. These new developments spawn miles of uniform fabrication that consolidate resources around capital growth. Time or an economic accident could send these areas into crime-ridden cinder block burdens making these automobile gated communities prisons.

OPPRESSIVE REGIMES - RELATIONALS OF DOMINANCE

Beneath the crystallization of the exponent, resistance runs counter, forcing it to modify, to change direction and directive if only creating an anomalous blip. Ecofeminists like Vandana Shiva see oppression is embodied in relations of humans and their environments and reproduced along the structures of society. Resource appropriation and land overuse are deeply connected to the forces that utilize a classist, homophobic, racist and sexist agenda upon bodies. Not only are system-environments like the horizontal city and pleasure process unsustainable, but their structural forms reinscribe the oppressive forces that created them. What Vandana Shiva calls monoculture, spoils and incorporates diverse, indigenous differentiated systems. These structures promote dominant relationals. We must worry about the extinction of species, as well as that of indigenous, socio-cultural forms- whole alternate modalities that are subverted under global exponentialism.

Long-term methodologies must consider pervasive ideals of the exponent and the systems of dominance that it requires in its appropriation and accumulation. Contrapuntal memes related to limitation, simplicity, sustainability and conservation from the likes of independent media, environmental activism and social justice group’s work to counter the systems logic of the exponent. Any advance must be a holistic approach based on local relations that form balanced solutions of longevity and a cultivation of new forms of desire systems. These solutions must perform upon scaffolding that respects local, plural and diverse components within a complex, differentiated global life-system that counters dominant relational forms.

Changing the habitual of the capital exponent into one of local, bounded, non-oppressive qualities embodying mutual contracts with living systems must begin both conceptually and practically. Humans, species and the living systems that sustain them bend beneath the oppressive, monolithic force of monetary abstraction their desiring systems. When a globalized force insists on continued expansion, its socio-cultural monopoly spits forth the political detritus of its making in the sprawling, churning mass of empire. The antidote lies in the meditation on simple needs and sustaining life, as opposed to cultivating spiraling modes of pleasure and their deferred expense. Pleasure could be exacted on a global scale with respect to subtle difference, plurality and living systems. Pleasure can be had from the satisfaction of prevention and the quality of life inhabited in the mutual existence of limitation.

The global agent or identification system of empire directly effects local, independent culture, what Vandana Shiva calls monoculture, destroys or incorporates these differentiated systems. This process has an impact on local systems that have formed mutually beneficial relations as macro-organizing systems, in other words there can be no separation in people, species and environments in a living system, each component has evolved over time a relational of space and physicality. The monoculture is an expression of the exponent effectively overusing and detrimentally changing the soil, the water table and indigenous species, under the guise of liberating the “third world” through a westernizing profit force.

The same dominant oppressive force that functions in the exponential consumption-production-consumption cycle has benefited from its historical use of groups of people and their environments. Capitalism’s founding ideology put forth by early theorist like John Locke, “Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left in it, he hath mixed his labor with it, joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.” This pioneering theory of appropriation was augmented by the acquisition of labor and resources extracted from slavery, indentured servitude, cheap immigrant work forces, sweatshops and impoverished, coerced nation states. Materials and space must be appropriated to wield the exponent engine and continue capital growth. Oil companies believe that they should be free to extract the resource from the land and buy and sell it on the free market, but what of the freedom of indigenous peoples to live their lives free from the destruction of their environments. The ideal to effect continual profit growth must find means to overcome the limitations on it in liberal and social democracies. The perceptions that the limitations on the free market have a negative impact on society fuel the continued justification of exponential growth.

Dominant relations form around bodies and environments and the structures that seek to extract these resources. Modes of thought and information practices may be manipulated, but the expense is paid in a material, embodied realm. Changing the habitual of the capital exponent into one of local, bounded, non-oppressive system through mutual contracts with living systems must begin both conceptually and practically. Humans, species and the living systems that sustain them bend beneath the oppressive, monolithic force of monetary abstraction their desiring systems. When a globalized force insists on continued expansion, its socio-cultural monopoly spits forth the political detritus of its making in the sprawling, churning mass of empire. The antidote lies in the meditation on simple needs, sustaining life, as opposed to cultivating modes of pleasure and their deferred expense. Pleasure could be exacted on a global scale with respect to subtle difference, plurality and living systems. Pleasure can be had from the satisfaction of prevention and the quality of life inhabited in harmonious, mutual existence.