Anglerfish as Social Relation

The anglerfish provides a model for a new social relation which is not reducible to that of the isolated loner. The luminous contraption is a pointedly social evolutionary development: when that first dorsal spine broke away and adapted to collect phosphorescent bacteria, the anglerfish was reaching out into the world, turning against the isolation of the roving hunter in favor of starting a light-based conversation (the marked eroticism of this image need not be elaborated upon here).

We are welcomed into the society of the hostess, the occasion-creator. The tempter/temptress. The performer. The puppetmaster. The attractor. The light is social- its solarity inspires a natural flurry/accretion of life around it. It speaks eloquent and dazzling lies beguilingly inscribed upon the black tapestry of the deep.

It arises not from concentration on only the anglerfish's subjecthood, but rather alternating between the roles of the anglerfish and its prey respectively, then stepping back to regard the whole dance. We take turns commanding the light and being commanded by the light. We take turns being clever hostess and spellbound dancer. We take turns calling out into the abyss and being beckoned from within the abyss. We take turns gleefully misleading and being willfully misled.

For us, the anglerfish gestures toward a world of devilish invitations whose nature is mischievously  ambiguous such that there is no choice but to surrender to being surprised or mystified. (Now you slowly understand that Society of the Anglerfish is not the organization whose writings you are presently reading, but rather the name of a concept whose implications we explore.)

Music for Anglerfish II

Recorded June 2025

T.R. - cowbell, voice

D.W. - guitar

De- and Re-cardinalation

The Benzingen-Veringendorf-Hochberg powerlines, heading off to the east.

I take notice of an inexact but persistent and loosely-present sense of cardinal direction. I struggle to escape the subtle yet constant influence this internal compass.

I enjoy holding the sense of the different orientations simultaneously and/or switching between them and attempting to "pause" at the moment of transition, as the landscape before me just begins to take on the hues of the new directionality.

Cut to The Deep: in the absence of light, no orientations are privileged above any others. The anglerfish notably chooses the orb instead of a beam as its vehicle of photic emission. Our species today is more comfortable with the beam's precise directionality, and unsettled by the orb which cannot provide a guiding gesture, but at the same time whose very vagueness is capable of awakening morbid curiosities. Perhaps we too can benefit from breaking out of conventions of orientation toward a more general and ambiguous conception of orientation, so that we might "get lost" in areas of treaded ground and thus discover them anew.

The Benzingen-Veringendorf-Hochberg powerlines, heading off to the north.

Toward The Cultivation of Mutancy | Part I

If we are to take the endeavor of abyssopelagic salvage seriously, we mustn't overlook the immediate fact that the Deep runs rampant with mutants, deviants, and botched creations of all kinds. In the Deep nature finds its optimal evolutionary laboratory, an experimental evolution wherein the notion of a species-level identity is constantly being challenged and re-sculpted by its constituent members. The mutants roam free along all spatial axes, testing and perfecting their homemade contraptions which have been honed in near-isolation and with great patience, resourcefulness, trial-and-error.

As the society hopes to demonstrate in further writings, the Deep constitutes a non-ecosystem wherethrough a neutral matrix provides a niche-less landscape for the happenstance, the exception, the unforeseen, the one-off. Although the Desert has served as a potent intermediary spatiality for human in non-polis orientation, the Deep in its ultimate inhospitality, darkness, and aquaticity is the sole spatiality that can teach true mutancy - that is, the full embodiment of the unpalatable/uncivilized (a new savagery) - with the necessary force yet aloofness of a good master.

Above sea level, humanity repeatedly displays its ineptitude to contend with non-territory (a re-territorializing fetish), observable in the history of inevitable absorption of localized counter-cultural and anti-cultural flows which demoralizes efforts to trace and mobilize along potential lines of flight. The creative-radical act undergoes vulgar integration through naming, situating, and codifying, sweeping out it any respect for its unique happenstantial dimensionality.

To be in touch with the Deep and its inhabitants is to (1) affirm mutancy as a vital attribute for creative living, and (2) identify methods toward the cultivation of mutancy, and (3) inhabit the becoming-mutant in individual and public life.

More on this theme to come.

Julien Torma

"It's not the light that's attracting me, but the darkness that's driving me on.

They bang on about the obvious, want to cover it in thick layers so as no longer to see the obscure, and, after pages of equations, finally get down to formulating 0 = 0.

I (and I state it with all necessary pride) like roads leading nowhere and featureless, pathless countrysides, I dissect the inevident, I grill the incidental, I relish the fortuitous, and, at the very end of my zig-zagging, I take pleasure in formulating, for example: Paul Claudel (or whatever you like) = Q."

"Our business is with sniffed-out complicities and the open secret, laughter refused although affected and earnestness treacherously encouraged, the savoring of the pure spectacle of imbecility in its triumphal necessity...

Our distinguishing signs: fake wit, the apt response inaptly timed, the joke that falls flat, conniving gravity, the lame pun, subtly clumsy bad taste..."

"Nobody has ever given me orders. If some have reckoned to do so (in the army), I never noticed it. I have no need to have a world that's in order. I have never given myself an order."

-Julien Torma

from 4 Dada Suicides [Atlas Anti-Classics]

Read/Download HERE

NOISE KICKER 001

NOISE KICKER

INSTALLMENT NO: 001

DATE: 03-JUL-25

LOCATION: NEUESTRASSE 9, TUEBINGEN, GERMANY

PLAYERS: T.R., D.W.

OBJECTS: FLAT METAL COLANDER & STRAINER, GRINDING DISC, COWBELL

[ LISTEN/DOWNLOAD MP3 HERE ]

Sonnenmensch III

It is through the ancient South American understanding of the concentric rings as aura that we can receive the full creative import of the Sonnenmensch. Like the Anglerfish, the Sonnenmensch is an apparatus of emanation, personification of solarity, embodiment of emissiveness.

This site bears visual resemblance to stone circles of Ilkley Moor, the princely grave at Magdalenenberg near Villingen-Schwenningen, petroglyphs at Walinynga (Cave Hill) in Australia, and many other sites around the world.

More to come.