Black Ice
Iain Hamilton Grant
Modern Oriental or Occidental society is a stomach carpeted with
tungsten carbide a very expensive stomach where discourses and
figures are used up turn to dust come to reinforce banter they claimed
to erode…the stomach turns your words and your images into
commodities and identity Critique even hate are incorporated.
(J.F.Lyotard, De’sirevolution, 1973:31)
“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?” “A component? Like a
capacitor?” “No, Never mind metaphor then.”
(W.Gibson, Count Zero, 1986:162–3)
[No dateline] The stomach lurches and churns as it expels more and more of its
shrink-wrapped identitarian detritus. The permanent whines of its ferro-concrete
intestines sets our ears bleeding as it ingests new fuels—old products. Sticky
organs mesh indiscriminately with scrapyard debris, forming ephemeral syntaxes
of hybrid cyber-circulation. “Look out! It’s eating everything in its path!” The
optic nerves of dead phenomenologists fuse with the fraying analytic comfort
blankets swaddling theories of resistance. Communication: “contagions of
energy …like a current…a streaming of electricity” (Bataille 1988:94). “You say
‘it’s impossible,’ insensible of the fact that you make it possible since you are
part of it…you are already in the machine, implanting fingers, eyes, anuses or
spleens” (Deleuze and Guattari 1972:478). Noumenal scraping, abstractive
surgery.
Vienna, July 1920: Scuttling engines pump and drain from the great sewers
under the Berggasse, awaiting the return of their meat from the dark passages
leading to the offices of Herr Professor Doktor Sigmund Freud. Above the heavy
valves opening onto the central flue, the second upper duct of which echoes with
the sounds of Freud’s staged amnesty for the spooling confessions of wealthy
neurotics, hangs a sign: “Abandon your desiring-machines all ye who enter
here.” The great project was to disconnect the machines and to plug up their
channels while the meat, flailing in a stagnant pond of hypocritical drool, was
disciplined to permanent machinic disfunctionalism. Or so we thought.
BLACK ICE 133
London, May 1858: Marx was rewiring the meat, growing nerves in the spinal
columns of lampreys held open by Toshiba micro-manipulators, before splicing
them into the isolated pulp, thus turning it into sensitive linkage-matter,
communications lines, not for the Baroque valve-and-duct automata that once
consisted of “numerous mechanical and intellectual organs” (Marx 1974: 692),
but to circulate through undifferentiated protoplasm till the meat gets so
thoroughly baked through that it forms a crust shielding its newly nervured
biomass. “Revolution was like that,” piped the biohydraulics, still swimming
through the Berggasse: “a delusion…, a pipe dream that the flesh would be
restored” (Kadrey 1989:189).
Machine dreams…
Instants later, they were swept aside by isotropic currents of shrill transspecies communication, contagions of energy, storm fronts of meshed
intelligence …hold a special vertigo.
(Gibson 1986:40)
Cyborgs have exposed the imminent fatality of thought. What began with the
fraying edges of larval, inchoate self-identical cogitos saturates “thought” with a
noumenal backwash from outside the biodrome. “The ‘I think’ must accompany
all my representations” (Kant 1958:B131) is the code that gets us into the
biodrome in the guise of representations, images, “phenomena” easily decodable
according to the servile analyses that keep the biodrome’s culture viable,
reproducible. Representation—the transcendental use of synthesis —is the basic
form of biopolitical, institutional thought, a serial, identitarian reproduction that
binds synthesis—“thought without identity—to analytic engines that assemble
the biodrome itself. The immanent use of synthesis, however, remains the “blind
power” of which the bureaucrats of consciousness are themselves “scarcely ever
conscious” (Kant 1958:A395). Immanent synthesis has infiltrated the biodrome
from the outset, however, since it remains the basic power of production, the
production of production, the pulsional environment from which the analytical
engines parasite their resources.
As Freud tells us, “skin” is the death necessary to ephemeral, larval
consistency (cf. the heroic auto-catalyses of the proto-egoic “vesicle” (Freud
1920:298); arising on this basis, the “I think” covers the extent of the skin, but
warily retreats before its limits—allegedly aprioristic, auto-singing “nihil
ulterius” (Kant 1958:A395)—the livedead, the “hideous intimacy” (Gibson 1986:
41) of the drives, their indissociability: me unconscious=me outside= Me
noumenon. Thought is a meat thing, tied necessarily to the biodrome and its
apparatuses. It is in this sense that the idea of “thinking machines” is an error: as
Bladerunner Deckard’s offing Zhora so spectacularly demonstrates, machines do
not think, they bleed. Even in the biodrome, thought is just some
transcendentized regulation mechanism affecting electrolibidinal fluctuation;
thus, as Freud says, since “[a]ll thinking is…a circuitous path from the memory
134 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
of a satisfaction…identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to
attain once more” (Freud 1900:762), it is always possible, but thinking must not
“be led astray by intensities,” short circuits in the relays and repetitions, the
electrolibidinal constitution of “perceptual identities” (Freud 1900:720).
Intensities, intensities: datableed. Thought without identity is no thought at all.
Cyborganization, like the dreamwork, does not think: datapulsional syntheses
impact isotropically on the analytical engines forming the concentric ruins of
biodromic defense lines, breaking immanence out of the nets of transcendental
determination, shutting down consciousness, a nanometrical, minimal, noumenal
tilt function—switching the apparatuses from epicentralized synthesis-regulators
into far-from-equilibrium, near-nova pulsional oscillators; Eros’ ascent: a
synthetic tide of C-change brings the biodrome to boiling point/Thanatos’ descent:
phenomenal whiteout flooding in from the other side of the screen.
Analysis, interprtation, deduction: identitarian security procedures.
Communication: the disarticulating datableed from this profoundly systemorphic
nexus of discourses—the biohydraulics of Freudian metapsychology,
electrolibidinal economics and cyber-capital’s retrophagic fictotheroeticotactical datapulsions—combines and recombines components, syntheses
indifferent to tropological decoding in accordance with antique cultural baselines
and their neo-transcendentalist subjectivities, stockpiled, socratizing
redundancies.
The philosophical problem therefore is not so much to produce even antianalytic, synthetic thought from without identikit; it is rather to bootstrap the
datableed from the machinic continuum of the electrolibidinal environment over
which biodromic functions secure precarious equilibria: the auto-catalysis of the
machinic unconscious, on the putative containment and shutdown of which
biodromic security is premised, a shutdown which Scott Bukatman announces
when he writes that “the movement of the libido beyond the bounds of the
individual psyche marks the emergence of techno-surrealism…a surrealism
without the unconscious” (Bukatman 1991:20).
Q: Flowing down the rails, September 19, 1895:
The path of conduction passes through undifferentiated protoplasm instead
of (as it otherwise does within the neurons) through differentiated
protoplasm, which is probably better adapted for conduction. This gives us
a hint that conductive capacity is to be linked with differentiation, so that
we may expect to find the process of conduction itself will create a
differentiation in the protoplasm and consequently an improved conductive
capacity for subsequent conduction,
(Freud 1895:288–9)
Clearly marking the constitutive role played by intensities in the auto-production
of conduction channels, Freud sketches the emergence of the cortical apparatus
from an electrolibidinal environment composed of swirling distributions of
BLACK ICE 135
matter-energy. Since there is no internal/external session “within” matter-energy
—or, more Marxo-delusiono-dialectically, no Entzweiung “within” force —t the
point of zero differentiation, we may here call the emergent apparatus’s milieu
“electrolibidinal” to indicate the mesh of what only higher up the negentropic
scales of differentiation, begin to stabilize into internal and external energies.
Through conduction/differentiation, however, energy is ephemerally channeled,
bound, quiescent, constantly repeating the same routes as the channels are
striated and restriated by electrolibidinal currents, forming an inorganic surface
that resists the electrolibidinal environment by damming the freely mobile currents
of energy.
Around the singularity forming the axes of the apparatus’s divergence from its
environment, freely mobile, or “Q,” energies striate the little pulp into a living
organism, differentiating the newly nervured cortex into dams, sluices, and valves
through which energy continues to course. With increasing differentiation, an
inorganic skein congeals around the pulp, hardening into what Freud, in a steamcloud of foetid nostalgia for Cartesianism, christens a “psychical apparatus.”
Freud goes on:
Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an
undifferentiated vesicle that is susceptible to stimulation. This little
fragment of living substance is suspended in the midst of an external world
charged with the most powerful energies. [Against these energies…] it
acquires [a] shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the
structure proper to living matter, becomes a degree inorganic, and
thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to
stimuli. A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been…
thoroughly baked through by stimulation.
(Freud 1917:297–8)
The “special envelope” is so resistant to stimuli that it both drains off the excess
excitation to which Ucs stimulation has inured it, and forms channels—paths of
conduction, Bahnugen through which energy, thus filtered and quantitatively
diminished, may pass into the “interior” of the organism. Putatively aprioristic,
biodromic space yields to electrolibidinal economic immanence.
Freud’s experiments in neurobiology—“truly a realm of unlimited
possibilities” (Freud 1920: 334) —machine a pulp automaton sheathed in striated
inorganic matter that forms the channels and filters necessary to impose an
energetic tariff on incoming excitation and thereby to keep the circulations of
electrochemical pulses at regular and limited levels. Passing into the alleged
interior of this steampunk collage of industrial organs does not inject new
energies into the pulpy masses at the biodromes’ core—“a society functioning on
Valium” (Lyotard 1994:220): rather, it stimulates peripheral pressure-sensors to
spasm the pulp’s primitive musculature into action, thus discharging the
incoming pulsion. Still, the dams and filters secure the energy level’s constancy.
136 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
In dark, now intrabiodromic regions, in the folds and vections of the pulp’s
copperflesh, livedead skin, other autocatalyzing engines are inaudibly at work:
pleasure-engines manufacture “integral” pressures, dying to haemorrhage the
pulp into ecstatic oblivion, pressing its last energetic resources into wild
accelerations through understimulated ducts; reality-engines, however, microcops close up the valves and bolt down filtration dams on pressure zones “where
insurrection threatens” (Freud 1933: 144), economizing expenditure, noisily
stemming screaming-silent neurospill.
For the pyschical apparatus, the mechanism that dealt with increases in systemic
pressure was designated the “pleasure-principle,” which can best be described as
a biohydraulic function: a valve in the apparatus opens given an increase in the
quantity of excitation in the system (registered by the organism as the production
of unpleasure), facilitating discharge and thereby decreasing intensity to
biodromically viable levels. The organism registers this drainage as the
production of pleasure, and has a vitiated tendency to replicate the intensity of
the first pleasure it encountered, impelling it to ever-greater expenditures as the
fantasy of a return to, of libidinal economic reversibility, falls derelicted into
recurrent cycles of Q. The remnant of the apparatus’s phenomenally hedonist
regression is, however, subject to micro-cop repression by means of a realityprinciple, a dam designating a minium energetic threshold beneath which the
organism ceases to function.
The biodromic apparatus, designated the “body” under the regime of reality,
the emergent subject of corporate discipline, is a coalescence of sensitive
fragments looped to repeat at a constant rate; as Baudrillard says, “the body is
nothing other than the models in which different systems have enclosed it”
(Baudrillard 1993:114): reality remodeled in accordance with the repetition of
serial intensive quanta within the range of this energetic threshold. It is this
threshold that then circumscribes the arena within which “thought” can be
transcendental unity of apperception”—the “I think” that accompanies all my
representations. These bound circulations then, simultaneously bind the energies
within this quantitative index to force the limits of the biodrome, onto which its
nested loops project the “I see I” of the identitarian spectacle.
But this does not only apply to the leaking apparatuses that psychoanalyses
sought to isolate, emerging from the retention of energies that hitherto cascaded
down the now ruptured lines of fatal communication with the most vertiginously
charged pulsional environment. Just as disciplinary apparatuses partition
mechano-organic flows, gridding the milieu of interiority just as the pulsion
autocatalytically striates the emergent pulp, so a techno-pulsional anorganic
continuum circulates indifferently through the apparatus and the cybersocius.
Lyotard writes:
A libidinal apparatus, considered precisely as a stabilization and even a
stasis or group of energetic stases is, examined formally, a structure.
Conversely, what is necessary to a structure, when it is approached in
BLACK ICE 137
economic terms, is that its fixity or consistency, which allows spatiotemporal maintenance of identical denominations between a this and a notthis, work on pulsional movement as would dams, sluices and channels….
In the silence, the crackling masses of flux which circulate in the system,
(Lyotard 1993a:25–6)
Apparatuses everywhere, maximally deterritorialized psyches crest ephemeral
intensities: amnesiac objects of recurrence, rather than mnemic subjects of
repetition. Realization processes of capital: machinic embryos striated into “selfmoving automata” (Marx 1974:692); corporate growth: fiscal embryos, cocooned
in dataflows, yield emergent Artificial Intelligences.
Thus far, we have established the general post-mutational qualities of the
equilibrated apparatus as it stabilizes around a mean point of regulated negative
feedback: “the whole of embryology is an example of the compulsion to repeat,”
as Freud says (Freud 1933:139). Freudian “quantitative-qualitative
biomechanics” (Lyotard 1994:221), on the other hand, institutes the apparatus at
the core of successive nested series of engines operating further biohydraulic
functions, constituting overspills and reservoirs that the apparatus then
permanently draws on for purposes of the regulated-regulating mechanisms of
localized expenditure (i.e., pleasure-production: seeking the path of least
resistance), and then replenishes (i.e., reality-reproduction). This institutional
metastability informs the basis of a resistance defined in terms of the repulsion
of the electrolibidinal flows that have already constituted the striations and
channels on the vesicle (the “undifferentiated protoplasm”), which Exchereque
hydro-isolationism is dependent upon precisely these flows. The futile struggle
against this dependency is a powerful motor with which to drive neuroses and
retaliate against ego-threats.
Despite this isolationism, the apparatus maintains—is driven by—the pulp at
its core to maintain an intimate communication with the unbinding frenzies that
threaten the apparatus with death. The constitution of corporate interiority
provides concentrically nested lines of defense from which vantages superegoic
military daddy-discipline can be implemented in order to bring about the
“institution of a garrison into the regions that are inclined to rebellion” (Freud
1933:144).
A long time since having jettisoned the transcendental redundancy of the
psyche along with the immanent dereliction of biohydraulics, the apparatus
recolonizes the socius, this time instantiated as systemic erotocapitalism and
evenementielle Thanatos. System and event, binder and unbinder, erotic coupling
and deadly disconnection: erotocapital binds the afferent energies of the event
that threaten the system’s destablization through “blockage,” “transgression,”
and turns these energies into currents exchangeable within the system. Similarly,
the efferent energies arising at the core of the system through the work/heat loss
ratio of thermodynamics, are put into restricted circulation so as to be captured at
a later stage, in exactly the same manner as excitations from the system’s
138 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
putative “outside.” Lyotard, who carries out this implementation in Libidinal
Economy and elsewhere, typically seeks to secure an extra systemic
aterritorializity, an “an-economy, a sacred realm” (Lyotard 1991:230), for the
syphoning off, the detournement and accumulation of non-distributed energies
which, in sufficient quantity (after sufficient erotocapitalization), will
“scandalize…re” (Lyotard 1973:202) the socius-apparatus, bringing the system
to a standstill. Thus reciprocally reinstituting capital and its serial, criticopractical transgression, “‘critiques’ potential energy” (Lyotard 1973:307) is
reserved from the circuits of capital’s becoming until—reserve of the reserve, the
minor economic miracle of critical labor, inexpendible theocapital—ante diem
rationis, on judgement day, the former calls the latter to final account. Which
then is erotic and which thanatonic—which system and which event? Death
binds capital over to the Eros of reserve, the critical vermogen; capital is
thanatonic, unbinding, its circulant events puncturing the reservoir. Not libidinal
reversibility, but pulsional migrancy.
Every apparatus circulates mean-intensity currents around its core in
concentrically expansionist loops, each of which is indifferently a line of defense
and a line of attack. Furthermore, the question as to whether this “fin de siècle
air-conditioned totalitarianism” (Lyotard 1973:13) can be conceived in terms of
regulated/regulating loops is at least a moot point; for this reason, Lyotard
introduces another model of the cybersocius, this time a model that constitutes a
“theoretical object capable of corresponding to [capital’s] liquefactions”
(Lyotard 1994:35). Hence the “tungsten-carbide stomach that eats your words
your images Critique even hate are incorporated” (Lyotard 1973:31). Unlike the
system-event pair, this model does not offer a proprietary and negatively
regulated system on the one hand; rather, critique forms the pale shadow of the
omnoivous/indifferentist system’s next meal, and will inevitably result then in
just one more fecal, indentitarian alloy, while simultaneously offering the system
new territories to consume. “This is the strength of the capital system,” Lyotard
writes, “Its capacity for recuperating anything and everything” (Lyotard 1973:
26). Apart from the fore-mentioned anti-isolationist mode of operation. The steel
gut retains two further advantages over its predecessor: in the first place, critique
is rendered an accurately futile exercise—the “despair of the M-C-M [cycle]”
(Lyotard 1973:31)—unless the critic is viewed as the hapless vanguard laborer
working to cultivate new territories for the system; second, the system now
regulates itself in expansion, seizing the alleged “initiative” from earlier “criticopractical” orientations (Lyotard 1973:24) and overcoming the strategic and
tactical deficit of re-action, re-sistence, and fighting rear-guard actions to reestablish homeostasis.
Where the former model confidently discriminates between the system and its
critique, the latter model incorporates critique as it does any other commodity in
circulation: “sugar-coated deconstruction” (Lyotard 1993a:49), simply a
“degenerate amusement” (Lyotard 1973:217). Thus, just as Freud had to admit
that neuroses were not to be cured (a project he considered derived from “the
BLACK ICE 139
layman’s belief that the neuroses are something quite necessary”), but since they
were rather “constitutionally fixed illnesses” that can merely be “influenced”
(Freud 1933:185); so the immediately revolutionary functions of critique,
resistance, and the like are not means whereby natural “transorganics” (Lyotard
1993a:135), are purged of capital’s anti-nature, but rather “constitutionally fixed,
often dysfunctional, guidance subsystems” adding new twists, swerves
(clinamen) to the extemporizing choreographs of neuproduzierendes capital.
The territorial claims staked by the Freudian apparatus and its corporate
discipline are expansive, but not so expansive as the metrophagic tungstencarbide stomach of the contemporary global cybersocius. The gut—circulating
capital—has swallowed everything, so that “from within the belly of the
monster” (Haraway 1991:24) intestinal, chromium Marabar, cyborg mythicism,
ficto-thetic cyberpunk, works only by resonances and amplifications of this
circulant real. Capital is not a looming threat on the horizon of post-human
pragmatism, but an interstitial rewiring of every social circuit. Capital is the
baseline of virulently dererritorializing immanence. Capital is not simply
invasive: its circulation is also deterritorializing-productive, rewiring not only a
necessarily post-bio labor force—a necessity that Marx, fascinated and
scandalized, exhausted volumes in refuting with repeated oneiristically futile
attempts at redefining capital’s multiplex industrial abuses of humanity by
placing the former at the dialectico-transcendental service of the latter, forging
an ever futural revolution—but also producing as immanent artifice:
“neuproduzierendes capital” (Marx 1974:462). “The Kuang program dived past
the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon
replica of a Manhattan skyscraper” (Gibson 1984:303).
Philosophers, anchored by centuries of penitent humility, are typically slow to
catch on. That, for example, knowledge becomes a productive force was grasped
even by Marx, who none the less used this precept as a means to organize the
technology consequent upon the realization of direct, techno-epistemic
production. A century later, however, Lyotard feigned scandal at the fate of
sacrosanct, extraterritorial, insulated, unproductive intellect which, once
sheltered from the system of capital, becomes just more trapped gas in the gut:
“[T]he system ends up devouring everything outside it; the despair of youth is
the despair of the M-C-M cycle” (Lyotard 1973:192). Outside capital, precapital,
asystemic: knowledge, the social brain, must be spared gastrointestinal
commodification and once more be placed in reserve, relocated in a “sacred
realm.” Thus: “We are finally in a position to understand how the
computerization of society…could become the ‘dream’ instrument for
controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge
itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle” (Lyotard 1984:
67). And he makes a recommendation: “give the public free access to the
memory and data banks” (Lyotard 1984:67). Not even Marx’s pre-capitalist
anchor dragged him to the missionary depths of “give the proletariat free
money.” Lyotard’s evident failure to grasp the dynamics of the situation
140 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
embroils him in atavistic fantasies, i.e., fantasies of return—notwithstanding his
pronouncements concerning the countervailing tendency of the driving
“cynicism” of machine performativity, the monstrous inexorability of “It works
…”—to a just, human technocracy somehow in control of the errant circulations
of datacapital. Stating that the central question of the postmodern social bond is
“who will have access to this information?” (Lyotard 1984:14), Lyotard
envisages a human political autonomy over market regulation bonding the
human and the machinic into some socius composed of the “local determinism”
of “language games,” a sad political theology of the pronoun. When it becomes
obvious that this fails, however, there is nothing for it but to attempt to revivify
the degenerating research program of space travel, posing at its core the
problematic of the human body becoming “adaptable to or commutable with
another body, another device,” not in terms of interphaging (not interface,
bioface-to-mechanoface, but anonymous and indifferent consumption=
production=circulation) with the infoscape, but rather of “prepar[ing] bodies for
emigration into space” (Lyotard 1993b:106).
Thus there are self-confessed guardians of the biodrome who have taken to
staunching the datableed that interphages meat drives, biohydraulics, and the
informational continuum. As the cyberblitz of neo-noumenal materialism opens
communications with the biodrome’s interior, like feeding a power line from a
river directly into the magnetic cores of its hydroelectric dam, a reversibility that
can be measured in voltages and system-crashes on the grid-consciousness and
its defenses are derelicted by these storm fronts of meshed intelligence. Thus,
communication cannot be understood within the Turing apparatus of dialogue,
conversation, understanding, nor the Voigt-Kampff empathy test; it is a
“contagion of energy,” a “streaming current of electricity” (Bataille 1988:94):
contra what Massumi calls the “Prussian mind-meld” (=von HumboldtHabermas (Massumi 1992:4)); its end is not Enlightenment, but datableed.
We have seen that the apparatus’s resistances to the intrusion of pulsional
turbulence impel it to a militarist discipline. The defense of the real is established
through the expansionism that uses expectoration as an excuse for ceaseless
campaigns. The apparatuses’ militia expectorates the ultimately futile resistance
on which they are founded so as to quell H with auto-response superegoic
“police actions=critique” (Kant 1958:Bxxv). In this sense Baudrillard may seem
quite correct when he writes: “Something in us disaccumulates unto death,
undoes, destroys, liquidates and disconnects so that we can resist the pressure of
the real…” But he is so obviously wrong when he adds: “…and live”
(Baudrillard 1987:41). This accounting for the death drive flails around for a
transcendental something in the apparatus to form a noumenal nature immune to
capital. As we know from Freud, “the aim of all life is death” (Frud 1920:311):
the apparatus returns to nature, or rather, like an enzyme, is denatured, as it
disaccumulates past the threshold of death; “never fear,” adds Baudrillard on his
knees, arms open to give and receive, a penitent’s wet, red eyes skyward, “there
is an afterlife,” a nature to which “we,” by virtue of that “something within us,”
BLACK ICE 141
can make this journey, this return, this re-tourism. To resist the real and its
pressures, the reality principle and its dams, to regain life through the medium of
the pleasure principle by escaping the inertia of the real: the final alibi of the
militarist exploits of the superego. That the “in us” should emerge from the
cocoon of the apparatus to “save us,” a transcendental economy where we gain
everything we lose: the same old miraculating theo-oneiro-capital that forms the
horizon of reversibility, sheltering all interiority, the eternity within which we
return.
The reel to real of the regulating-regulated institutions that dam the flows of
pulsional damage to the apparatus and its reservoirs have been displaced along
with the consciousness that repeated its identikit formulations as the realization
process of capital took new twists. Ice breaks the real, consciousness is as
derelicted as the apparatuses in Vienna 150 years ago, identity and regulation
have shattered into the erase/record/ playback functions of the twisted pedicure
that provides one of the few models adequate to cyber-capital’s historical
liquefactions, making the real reel.
The Chinese virus was unfolding around them. Polychrome shadow,
countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous,
it towered above them, blotting out the void…. The fracture lines and
hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real, its smooth skin
plated with black chrome.
(Gibson 1984:200; 270)
Moebius-twisted, isotropic one-dimensional bio-pixel digital skin, diving down
on Frankenstein City, systematically splicing and respacing “Derelicted-RewiredDerelicted” apparatuses spreads over the socius like fungus over dead
vegetation; crusts boil and suppurate, revealing the chrome and glass and the
ochrous spectra of pollutants: cityscape suffocating its stripped-down
populations in the effluents of its decaying expenditures.
Marx writes, although he hates doing it, thinking it perverse, “senseless and
arbitrary”—rather than the natural, rational, theocratic necessity of returning us
to ourselves—that the cycle “Death-Life-Death” is the same as that of M-C-M
(Marx 1974: 201). D=M: apparatuses suspended in flows charged with the most
intrusive data, hot coalescence cooling exponentially into the supercharged
circuits of already ancient machines, warping and blistering their new live dead
crusts in cyclophagic communion with too fast isotropic data accumulation—
L=C. Splicing engines struggle to contain the datableed, reformatting the
nervured pulp in accordance with its autopropogative imperative— D’=M’—
disciplining these accidents into the regular pulses of the (in)corporate: neocapitalism (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:20). As the loop courses through, searing
the smooth, maximally receptive pulp, redistributing the bit-maps and circus
diagrams of the apparatus, “they make the possible the dissipation of the surfaces
they cross” (Lyotard 1993a:240). That is, the real, the reproduction, the facile
142 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
identitarian propagation, the negative feedback, the entire regulated/regulating
apparatus with its pulp-core and reversible “nature”: all dissipate in the
mimetotechnical saturation of this pulsional blitz.
Bruce Sterling once spray-painted the following onto the crumbling walls of
the biodrome: “the proper mode of critical attack on cyberpunk has not yet been
essayed. Its truly dangerous element is its incipient Nietzschean philosophical
fascism: the belief in the overman and the worship of the will-to-power”
(McCaffery 1991:206). It is clear that the passage from cyberpunk to
“Globalhead” has meant something of a resurgence in matters biodromic—
especially the mistaken attempt to construe the Ubermensch as the instance
credulously invested with the potential return of a renascent humanity and a “new
world order” oozing from the mesh of derelicted apparatuses. The “overman” is
a phase shift in the will-to-power, without program or project, indifferent to
jackboots, the crest of an intensive wave driven by recurrence, the intensity
engine that wipes humanity altogether.
At what point is it possible to discriminate between black ice and its host
system? Discrimination is impossible a priori. Ice dives in exponential darkness
in impossible vectors of contamination, articulating the inconceivable as they
mesh meat, biohydraulics, and omniphagic capital. Slot Kuang and kill the
lights!
It is of fundamental importance to recognize that the spectacle drives us; not to
resist it; not to consider it a cover for something lost, a fundamental need that
might once have articulated a few despondent theses on alienation, but solely in
order to entrench humanity in the last ditches available to it, as artificial
mimetechnics phase and redistribute the thrashing neuprozierenden, noumenal,
datapulsional complex that engulfs us. The entire history of philosophy is unable
to stutter in the face of these incremental alterations.
Meshing thanatopulsions and erotopulsions, apparatuses and their autolytic
incompetence under the unconscious, howling and rumbling through the
communications links synthesizing the protoplasmic “interior” of the derelicted
apparatus and the moebian twists, the auto-catalytic clinamen of the datapulsional
“exterior.” Biosofts bleed into always noisy channels that unpredictably break
down. This hideous mesh of meat, pulp, neuronal modifications, technocapital’s
drooling maws, splicing non-linear shards of holographic tomorrows into the
collapsing institutions of today. Running through this entire sequence is the black
ice that reformats the apparatuses, state and psychical, for an erasure that has
already happened.
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