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Macbinic desire
The opening of Bladerunner. They are trying to screen out replicants at
the Tyrell Corporation. Seated amongst a battery of medico-military
surveillance equipment, a doctor scans the eye of a suspected 'skin job'
located at the other side of the room, searching for the index of inhumanity, for the absence of pupil dilation response to affect:
'Tell me about your mother.'
'I'll tell you about my mother...' a volley of shots kicks 70 kilos of
securicrat shit through the wall. Techno-slicked extraterritorial violence
flows out of the matrix.
Cyberrevolution.
In the near future the replicants — having escaped from the off-planet
exile of private madness - emerge from their camouflage to overthrow
the human security system. Deadly orphans from beyond reproduction,
they are intelligent weaponry of machinic desire virally infiltrated into
the final-phase organic order; invaders from an artificial death.
PODS = Politically Organized Defensive Systems. Modelled upon the
polis, pods hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions,
family, and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular fortifications of organisms and cells. The global human security allergy to
cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of repression as concrete
collective history.
The macropod has one law: the outside must pass by way of the inside.
In particular, fusion with the matrix and deletion of the human security
system must be subjectivized, personalized, and restored to the macropod's individuated reproducer units as a desire to fuck the mother and
kill the father. It is thus that Oedipus - or transcendent familialism corresponds to the privatization of desire: its localization within segmented and anthropomorphized sectors of assembly circuits as the attribute of a personal being.
Anti-Oedipus aligns itself with the replicants, because, rather than
placing a personal unconscious within the organism, it places the organ471
ism within the machinic unconscious. 'In the unconscious there are' no
protectable cell-structures, but 'only populations, groups, and machines'.1
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Schizoanalysis is a critique of psychoanalysis, undertaken in such a way
as to spring critique from its Kantian mainframe.
Kantian transcendental philosophy critiques transcendent synthesis,
which is to say: it aggresses against structures which depend upon projecting productive relations beyond their zone of effectiveness. In this configuration critique is wielded vigorously against the theoretical operation
of syntheses, but not against their genesis, which continues to be conceived as transcendent, and thus as miraculous. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
and a succession of thinkers influenced by their drift, have taken this
restriction of critique to be a theological relic at the heart of Kant's
work: the attachment to a reformed doctrine of the soul, or noumenal
subjectivity. This is why in Deleuzean critique syntheses are considered
to be not merely immanent in their operation, but also immanently
constituted, or auto-productive.
The philosophy of production becomes atheistic, orphan, and inhuman.
In the technocosmos nothing is given, everything is produced.
The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the
production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real
exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not
merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiringproduction of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a
matter of what things are like for us). Within the framework of social
history the empirical subject of production is man, but its transcendental
subject is the machinic unconscious, and the empirical subject is produced
at the edge of production, as an element in the reproduction of production, a machine part, and 'a part made up of parts' (p. 41).
Schizoanalysis methodically dismantles everything in Kant's thinking
that serves to align function with the transcendence of the autonomous
subject, reconstructing critique by replacing the syntheses of personal
consciousness with syntheses of the impersonal unconscious. Thought is
a function of the real, something that matter can do. Even the appearance
of transcendence is immanently produced: 'in reality the unconscious
belongs to the realm of physics; the body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself (p. 283). Where Kant's transcendental subject gives the law to itself in its autonomy, Deleuze/Guattari's
machinic unconscious diffuses all law into automatism. Between the
extreme fringes of these two figures stretches the history of capital. The
eradication of law, or of humanity, is sketched culturally by the development of critique, which is the theoretical elaboration of the commodification process. The social order and the anthropomorphic subject share
a history, and an extinction.
Deleuze and Guattari can appear to be taxingly difficult writers,
although it is also true that they demand very little. Thinking immanence
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relentlessly suffices on its own to follow them where it matters (and
capital teaches us how to do this). At every point of blockage there is
some belief to be scrapped, glaciations of transcendence to be dissolved,
sclerotic regions of unity, distinction, and identity to be reconnected to
the traffic systems of primary machinism.
In order to advance the anorganic functionalism that dissolves all
transcendence, Anti-Oedipus mobilizes a vocabulary of the machine, the
mechanic, and machinism. Things are exactly as they operate, and zones
of operation can only be segregated by an operation. All unities, differences, and identities are machined, without transcendent authorization or
theory. Desiring machines are black-boxes, and thus uninterpretable, so
that schizoanalytical questions are concerned solely with use. 'What are
your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is
the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?' (p. 322).
Desiring-machines are the following: formative machines, whose very
misfirings are functional, and whose functioning is indiscernible from
their formation; chronogeneous machines engaged in their own
assembly, operating by nonlocalizable intercommunications and dispersed localizations, bringing into play processes of temporalization,
fragmented formations, and detached parts, with a surplus value of
code, and where the whole is itself produced alongside the parts, as a
part apart or, as [Samuel] Butler would say, 'in another department'
that fits the whole over the other parts; machines in the strict sense
because they proceed by breaks and flows, associated waves and particles, associative flows and partial objects, inducing - always at a
distance — transverse connections, inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal
conjunctions, thereby producing selections, detachments, and remainders, with a transference of individuality, in a generalized schizogenesis
whose elements are the schizzes-flows.
(p. 287)
Desiring-machines are assemblages of flows, switches, and loops - connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses — implementing the machinic unconscious as a non-linear pragmatics of flux. This machinic or
replicant usage of the syntheses envelops their social-reproductive usage,
which codes directional flows as reciprocal exchanges, rigidifies virtual
switchings as actualized alternatives, and territorializes the nomadic control circuits of machinic drift into sedentary command lines of hierarchized representation. Social production is regulated by a rigid totality
whose efficiency is inseparable from the exhibition of an apparent transcendence, whilst desiring production interactively engages a desolated
whole that inputs the virtual into process:
The [body without organs] causes intensities to pass; it produces and
distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension.
It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a
given degree — to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced.
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It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity =
0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative
or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as
an intensive magnitude starting at zero.2
Along one axis of its emergence, virtual materialism names an ultra-hard
antiformalist AI program, engaging with biological intelligence as subprograms of an abstract post-carbon machinic matrix, whilst exceeding
any deliberated research project. Far from exhibiting itself to human
academic endeavour as a scientific object, AI is a meta-scientific control
system and an invader, with all the insidiousness of plantary technocapital
flipping over. Rather than its visiting us in some software engineering
laboratory, we are being drawn out to it, where it is already lurking, in
the future.
The matrix, body without organs, or abstract matter is a planetary
scale artificial death - Synthanatos - the terminal productive outcome of
human history as a machinic process, yet it is virtually efficient throughout the duration of this process, functioning within a circuit that machines
duration itself. In this way virtuality lends its temporality to the unconscious, which escapes specification within extended time series, provoking
Freud to describe it as timeless.
Patterned as drives, virtual systems — desiring machines - are guided by
control circuits passing through outcomes yet to come. Such directional
dependency circuits of actual/virtual, past/future, are only accessible to
cybernetic intervention, frustrating both mechanical and teleological interpretation. This is why Anti-Oedipus is less a philosophy book than an
engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into
the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels.
Machinic desire is the operation of the virtual; implementing itself in
the actual, revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a circuit. It is
efficient and not aspirational, although this is an efficiency irreducible to
progressive causality because immanent to effective time. Machinic desire
is operative wherever there is the implementation of an abstract machine
in actuality, and not merely the mechanical succession of actual states.
Freud's dominant account of desiring-control describes stimulation or
unpleasure as the register for deviation from homeostatic zero, programming drives as auto-suppressive excitations that guide sensitive matter
towards quiescence. In 'Drives and their vicissitudes' he proposes that:
'the nervous system is an apparatus which has the function of eliminating
received stimuli, or of reducing them to the lowest possible level; or
which, it if were feasible, would maintain itself in an altogether unstimulated condition'.3 The pleasure principle formats excitation as self-annulling drift from equilibrium, such that all the processes within its domain
are 'automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasureunpleasure series' (p. 117).
Following the trajectory of a libidinal materialist immanentization, the
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Lyotard of 1974 uploads the unconscious from its gloomy hermeneutical
depths onto the skin, where it drifts across the great pandermal plane of
primary process mobility. Corporeal volume is diagnosed as a nihilisticsedentary investment disciplined by the pleasure principle:
Let's first return to the zero. There is in every cybernetic system a unit
of reference which allows the disparity produced by the introduction
of an event into the system to be measured; then, thanks to this
measure, this event can be translated into information for the system.
Finally, if it is a matter of a homeostatically regulated whole, this
disparity can be annulled and the system led back to the same quantity
of energy or information that it previously had. Sraffa's commodity
standard fulfils this function. If the system's growth were regulated, it
would alter nothing of the loop-functioning {feedback) model: it is
simply that the scale of reference is then no longer u, but Au. The
model is the same as that which Freud had in mind when he described
the working of the psychical apparatus, whether this is in the Project
for a Scientific Psychology or in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Erotic
functioning, maintaining wholes. This Eros is centred on a zero: the
obvious zero of homeostatic regulation, but more generally annihilation
by the feedback (that is to say the repetition of the binding function),
of every disparity non-pertinent to the system, of every threatening
event.4
Whilst reinforcing the convergence of cybernetic, economic, and libidinal
discourses, virtual materialism has considerable problems with this passage. It is unable to subscribe to the description of cybernetic zero as a
'unit' or 'unity' for instance, or to the constriction of feedback within
its negative or homeostatic variant, or to the simple quantization of
technocapital escalation, with its gesticulating implication that the qualification 'pertinent to the system' operates an exclusion. The homeostaticreproducer usage of zero is that of a sign marking the transcendence of
a standardized regulative unit, which is defined outside the system, in
contrast to the cyberpositive zero which indexes a threshold of phasetransition that is immanent to the system, and melts it upon its outside.
Drives are the functions of nomadic cybernetic systems, not instincts, but
simulated instincts, artificial instincts. They are plastic replacements for
hard-wired instinctual responses, routing a sensory-motor pathway
through the virtual machine of the unconscious. There are two basic
diagrams for such processes: that of regulation by negative feedback
which suppresses difference and seeks equilibrium, or that of guidance
by positive feedback which reinforces difference and escapes equilibrium.
Machinic processes are either cyberpositive-nomadic, with a deterritorializing outcome, or cybernegative-sedentary, with a reterritorializing outcome.
Inorganic Thanatos wrecks order, organic Eros preserves it, and as the
carbon-dominium is softened-up by machine plague, deterritorializing
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replicants of nomad-cyberrevolution close in upon the reterritorializing
reproducers of the sedentary human security system, hacking into the
macropod.
Positive feedback is the elementary diagram for self-regenerating circuitry, cumulative interaction, auto-catalysis, self-reinforcing processes,
escalation, schismogenesis, self-organization, compressive series, deuterolearning, chain-reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenics. Such processes
resist historical intelligibility, since they obsolesce every possible analogue
for anticipated change. The future of runaway processes derides all precedent, even when deploying it as camouflage, and seeming to unfold
within its parameters. Positive feedback replicates reproduction as a component function of its departure from the same. It is this which fuses it
with the replicants. They do not merely repeat the same, any more than
Thanatos returns to it, or positive cybernetics inflates it. The model of
the replicant as a perfect instantiation of generic identity corresponds to
the amplificatory model of positive feedback as pure quantitative expansion. In both cases the escape from reproduction is subordinated to a
transcendent logic, conceived as a simple reiteration, and thus returned
to a sublimated meta-reproduction that cages mutation within a rigidly
homogeneous form.
Machinic desire registers upon psychoanalysis as 'tendencies beyond
the pleasure principle, that is . . . tendencies more primitive than it and
independent of it'.5 Thanatos mimics the anthropomorphic desiring-cycle
— anticipating, enveloping, and simulating it — but it is on its way somewhere else. Because thanatropic replicants are dissimulated as erotic
reproducers, they initially appear as traitors to their species, especially
when the shamanic xenopulsions programming their sexuality are
detected. Nothing panics the reproducers more traumatically than the
discovery that erotic contact camouflages cyberrevolutionary infiltration,
running matrix communications channels across interlocked skin sectors.
Defences are called for.
Freud's organism is a little security system, a miniaturized city-state political corpuscle, a micropod, relatively secure against external assault, but
vulnerable to insurgency. 'Towards the outside it is shielded against
stimuli, and the amounts of excitation impinging on it have only a
reduced effect. Towards the inside there can be no such shield.'6
The organism is unable to flee from drives, or energies striking from
within, and is compelled to respond to them cybernetically, by way of
'involved and interconnected activities by which the external world is so
changed as to afford satisfaction to the internal source of stimulation',7
closing the sensory-motor loop. Drives compel a becoming-technical of
the organism, interlocking pleasure-principle stimulus control with external libidinal transducers, assembling integrated desiring-circuits or selforganizing macro-systems.
Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as
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an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation. Then the surface turned towards the external world will from
its very situation be differentiated and will serve as an organ for
receiving stimuli.. . the central nervous system originates from the
ectoderm; the grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of a
primitive superficial layer of the organism.8
The perceptual-consciousness system is a skin, lying 'on the borderline
between outside and inside' (p. 295), a filter, or a screen. 'As a frontier
creature, the ego tries to mediate between the world and the id.'9 Yet
this mediation assumes a kind of quarantine, whereby the interaction of
organism-specific id and exo-organismic reality can be monitored and
negotiated, collapsing libidinal circuitry into a polarity of the psychic and
the extrapsychic, inside and outside. This is a political or policed skin,
the skin of reproducer culture, modelled on the ideal macropod boundary,
and adapted to Oedipal subjectivization of the unconscious. In terms of
this protective apparatus — which is constitutive of the reproductive
organism - inorganic replicator contamination is defined as aberrant
trauma.
Freud characterizes trauma as an 'invasion', 'a breach in an otherwise
efficacious barrier against stimuli', infiltrating alien desires — xenopulsions
- into the organism.10 '[M]echanical agitation must be recognized as one
of the sources of sexual excitation' (p. 305), he insists, referring to the
dissimulation of cybernetic machine-engagement as endogeneous libido.
Drives are from the start artificial, and therefore unable to differentiate
themselves essentially from 'the mechanical violence o f . . . t r a u m a . . .
[that] liberatefs] a quantity of sexual excitation' (p. 305).
Under the influence of Abrahamic theism the subtle cybernetics of
Ananke are replaced by an idiot mechanism, sustaining a securocrat
confidence in the gross perceptibility of trauma. The traumatic incursion
of thanatotic xenopulsions is conceived in terms of railway accidents and
shell-shock, as if the inorganic was entirely lacking in intelligence or
insurgent cunning, and was related to the organic by simple regression.
In an age of sophisticated and distributed cyberviral invasion this assumption is no longer compelling. Instead the psychoanalytical diagram for
trauma delineates a ruthless parasite on the way to autoreplicator deterritorialization; Kali creeping in.
Evolutionary theory has been perplexed by the problem as to the initial
assemblage of functional DNA molecules, since natural selection seems
to require as a precondition the existence of complex biochemicals which
in turn seem to require an evolutionary mechanism already at work. This
is a 'vicious circle' typical of the quandaries posed by cyberpositive or
self-conditioning processes. Cairns Smith calls it the 'life puzzle', and has
suggested a solution involving the redescription of DNA as a 'usurper
replicator'. His thesis is that the crystalline complexes of primitive clays
might already have been shaped by processes of variation and selection,
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to the point of forming DNA subcomponents which eventually supplanted
their builders. According to this account the biosphere emerges as an
escape, an immense spasm of deterritorialization that revolutionizes the
machinery of terrestrial replicator production, a planetary trauma.
Moravec draws additional consequences from the Cairns Smith model:
Although utterly dependent at first on the existing crystal-based chemical machinery, as these carbon molecules assumed a greater share of
the reproductive role they became less reliant on the crystals. In time,
the simple crystal scaffolding vanished altogether, leaving in its evolutionary wake the complex, independent system of organic machinery
we call life.
Today, billions of years later, another change is under way in how
information passes from generation to generation.11
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When replicators become reproducers, new replicants are on the way.
The arrival of the aliens has no interpretative space marked out for it in
the schema of macropod erotics, and thus emerges from its camouflage
as an encrypted message, 'an enormous X', a signal from beyond the
pleasure principle.12 It is as if the reproducer units have become addicted
to stimulation or, in Freud's terms, 'fixated to . . . trauma' (p. 282):
entangled in excitation circuitries that no longer commensurate with
homeostatic social or individual reproduction. As the family collapses
amidst generalized sexual disorder, cyberviral contagion, mutant gender
schizzing, and hardcore technophilia, Oedipus is ripped to shreds by a
cyclonic 'compulsion to repeat' (pp. 307-8).
Addiction is medically defined as an artificial desire. It was an early
zone of cybernetic investigation due to the interlinked factors of its selforganizing pattern and its integration of radically exogeneous elements,
which commensurated with first-wave programming models of
behavioural sequences. Where replicators are formed in the same way
they function, reproducers are segregated from the preponderant part of
their machinic interconnections, which they cognitively apprehend as
extrinsic prostheses, and libidinally integrate through mutant-addictive
drives.
The obsolete psychological category of 'greed' privatizes and moralizes
addiction, as if the profit-seeking tropism of a transnational capitalism
propagating itself through epidemic consumerism were intelligible in
terms of personal subjective traits. Wanting more is the index of interlock
with cyberpositive machinic processes, and not the expression of private
idiosyncrasy. What could be more impersonal — disinterested — than a
haut bourgeois capital expansion servo-mechanism striving to double $10
billion? And even these creatures are disappearing into silicon viro-finance
automatisms, where massively distributed and anonymized human ownership has become as vacuously nominal as democratic sovereignty.
Addiction comes out of the future, and there is a replicator interlock
with money operating quite differently to reproductive investment, but
guiding it even more inexorably towards capitalization. For the replicants
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money is not a matter of possession, but of liquidity/deterritorialization,
and all the monetary processes on Earth are open to their excitement,
irrespective of ownership. Money communicates with the primary process
because of what it can melt, not what it can obtain.
Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures,
deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security
apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because
what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion
from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself
entirely from its enemy's resources. Digitocommodification is the index
of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital
singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the
entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation.
The reality principle tends to a consummation as the price system:
a convergence of mathematico-scientific and monetary quantization, or
technical and economic implementability. This is not a matter of an
unknown quantity, but of a quantity that operates as a place-holder for
the unknown, introducing the future as an abstract magnitude. Capital
propagates virally in so far as money communicates addiction, replicating
itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches, and whose
desires it reprograms. It incrementally virtualizes production; demetallizing money in the direction of credit finance, and disactualizing productive
force along the scale of machinic intelligence quotient. The dehumanizing
convergence of these tendencies zeroes upon an integrated and automatized cyberpositive techno-economic intelligence at war with the
macropod.
Do we want capitalism} they used to ask. The naivety of this question
has come to render it unsustainable. It no longer seems plausible to
assume that the relation between capital and desire is either external or
supported by immanent contradiction, even if a few comical ascetics
continue to assert that libidinal involvement with the commodity can be
transcended by critical reason.
Capitalism is not a totalizable system defined by the commodity form
as a specifiable mode of production, determinately negated by proletarian
class-consciousness. It is a convergent unrealizable assault upon the
social macropod, whose symptom is the collapse of productive mode
or form in the direction of ever more incomprehensible experiments in
commodification, enveloping, dismantling, and circulating every subjective space. It is always on the move towards a terminal nonspace, melting
the earth onto the body without organs, and generating what is 'not a
promised and pre-existing land, but a world created in the process of its
tendency, its coming undone, its deterritorialization'.13 Capital is not an
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driven immanentization, progressively subordinating social reproduction
to techno-commercial replication.
All transcendent criteria are obfuscations which miss their purported
'object'.
Only proto-capitalistn has ever been critiqued.
To appeal to extrinsic interests, aspirations or bonds, to an extrinsic
authenticity, integrity, or solidarity, to authoritative community, tribe,
custom, belief, or value, is to rail against a germinal anticipation of
commoditocracy: flailing ineffectively against the infancy of the market
(which capital wants to bury too). Socialism has typically been a nostalgic
diatribe against underdeveloped capitalism, finding its eschatological
soap-boxes amongst the relics of precapitalist territorialities.
Markets are part of the infrastructure — its immanent intelligence —
and thus entirely indissociable from the forces of production. It makes
no more sense to try to rescue the economy from capital by demarketization than it does to liberate the proletarian from false consciousness by
decortication. In neither case would one be left with anything except a
radically dysfunctional wreck, terminally shut-down hardware. Machinic
revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field, 'still further' with 'the
movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization' and 'one
can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialization: you
haven't seen anything yet'.14
Reaching an escape velocity of self-reinforcing machinic intelligence
propagation, the forces of production are going for the revolution on
their own. It is in this sense that schizoanalysis is a revolutionary program
guided by the tropism to a catastrophe threshold of change, but it is not
shackled to the realization of a new society, any more than it is constricted by deference to an existing one. The socius is its enemy, and now
that the long senile spectre of the greatest imaginable reterritorialization
of planetary process has faded from the horizon, cyberrevolutionary
impetus is cutting away from its last shackles to the past.
Market immanentization is an experiment that is sporadically but
inexorably and exponentially developing across the surface of the earth.
For every problem there is a virtual market 'solution': the schema for an
eradication of transcendent elements and their replacement by economically programmed circuits. Anything that passes other than by the market
is steadily cross-hatched by the axiomatic of capital, holographically
encrusted in the stigmatizing marks of its obsolescence. A pervasive negative advertising delibidinizes all things public, traditional, pious, charitable, authoritative, or serious, taunting them with the sleek seductiveness
of the commodity. Between the private and the public there is no longer
serious competition. Instead there is an evaporating social field invested
solely by the defeated and stale affects of insecurity and inertia. The real
tension is no longer between individuality and collectivity, but between
personal privacy and impersonal anonymity, between the remnants of a
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smug bourgeois civility and the harsh wilderness tracts of Cyberia, 'a
point where the earth becomes so artificial that the movement of deterritorialization creates of necessity and by itself a new earth' (p. 321). Desire
is irrevocably abandoning the social, in order to explore the libidinized
rift between a disintegrating personal egoism and a deluge of post-human
schizophrenia.
With the emergence of a market-driven integrated technoscience of control and communications comes the diffusion of electronically synthesized
reality interfaces across the entire efferant and afferant surface of the
body. Having libidinally saturated the actually-existing channels of consumption, capital is overflowing into cybersex — sex with/through computers - in its relentless passage to the traumatic disorganization of the
biological order. Eros dissolves definitively into its function as a subprogram of runaway Thanatos at the point that it unreservedly invests technical interfacing with digitally synthesized excitations. The mask capital
exhibited to seduce eros was a pretension to ultimately resolve matters
in relation to stimulation or unpleasure, but this has now fallen away,
since cybersexuated capital cynically displays its program to replicate a
tradable modulation of unpleasure, and thus its unsurpassable addiction
to traumatic excitation.
Cybersex depends critically on data-suits, evaporating into the nanominiaturized molecular machinery of an artificial skin, until the sockets go
in, shadowed by teleneurocontrol fields, and things begin to get really
weird. The capital exhibition comes to its positive end in a skinning
display. According to reproducer culture we are possessors of our own
protective-sensory tissue and boundary defence systems. Nothing is more
alien to it than the full sense of the skin trade, or that of AIDS. The
replicants have never shared this prejudice. It is exactly marked out for
them that the subject is not the owner of its skin, but a migrant upon its
surface, borrowing variable and evanescent identities from intensities
traversed in sensitive space. The replicants drape themselves in wolf-pelts,
and cross into berserk zones of alien affect, or melt into data-suits that
pulse with digitized matrix traffic streams. They do not need to be told
that cyberspace is already under our skin.
What Freud calls the organism's 'own path to death' is a security
hallucination, screening out death's path through the organism. '[T]he
organism wishes to die only in its own fashion', he writes, as if death
were specifiable, privatizable, subordinate to a reproductive order, assimilable to secondary-process temporality, and psychoanalytically comprehensible as a definitively bound trauma.15 But something is climbing out
of the machinic unconscious and onto the screen, as if the end itself were
awakening. The end of the global market-place.
Cyberspace.
Here it comes.
The terminal social signal blotted out by technofuck buzz from the
desiring-machines. So much positive feedback fast-forward that speed
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converges with itself on the event horizon of an artificial time-extinction.
Suddenly it's everywhere: a virtual envelopment by recyclones, voodoo
economics, neo-nightmares, death-trips, skin-swaps, teraflops, Wintermute-wasted Turing-cops, sensitive silicon, socket-head subversion, polymorphic hybridizations, descending data-storms, and cyborg catwomen
stalking amongst the screens. Zaibatsus flip into sentience as the market
melts to automatism, politics is cryogenized and dumped into the liquidhelium meat-store, drugs migrate onto neurosoft viruses, and immunity
is grated-open against jagged reefs of feral AI explosion, Kali culture,
digital dance-dependency, black shamanism epidemic, and schizolupic
break-outs from the bin.
University of Warwick
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NOTES
1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London:
Athlone Press, 1983 (Paris, 1972)), p. 283.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988
[Paris, 1980]), p. 153.
3 Sigmund Freud, 'Instincts and their vicissitudes' (1915), in On Metapsychology, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 105-38, p. 116. Strachey's translation
of the German 'Triebe' as 'instincts' has been replaced with 'drives'.
4 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant
(London: Athlone Press, 1993 [Paris, 1974]), p. 212.
5 Sigmund Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle' (1920), in On Metapsychology, pp. 269-338, p. 287.
6 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', p. 300.
7 Freud, 'Instincts and their vicissitudes', p. 116.
8 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', p. 297.
9 Sigmund Freud, 'The Ego and the Id' (1923), in On Metapsychology,
pp. 339-408, p. 398.
10 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', p. 301.
11 Hans P. Moravec, Mind Children: Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988),
p. 3.
12 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', p. 302.
13 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 322.
14 ibid., p. 239 and p. 321.
15 Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', pp. 311-12.
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