Deep Media Fiction | Essay --- Germán Sierra | Numéro Cinq
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Deep Media Fiction | Essay — Germán Sierra
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2016, Essays, NC
Magazine, Nonfiction,
Vol. VII, No. 1, January
2016
.
A refusal of any sort of permutation of space and quest had taken hold of the
narrative
—Mike Kitchell, Spiritual Instrument
1. The machine in the ghost.
I
N THE CONCEPT OF MIND (1949), Gilbert Ryle introduces the
term “the ghost in the machine” to describe the philosophical
attempt to conceive the “mind” as a separate entity that could be
understood as a metaphysical motor of the “body.”[1] The concept
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Deep Media Fiction | Essay --- Germán Sierra | Numéro Cinq
was later popularized by Arthur Koestler who, in his homonymous
essay published in 1967, defined this “ghost” both as the (simplified
and abstracted) output emerging from the complexity of neural
interactions, and as the consequence of the rules and strategies
imposed by human evolution.[2]
The metaphysical “ghost” represented the humanist need and quest for an
individual subject as cause, an actant capable of ruling the complex set of
physical interactions observed in the physical “machine.” Humanism was
responsible for consolidating a “ghost” that was constructed on its
supposed metaphysical capacity for “animating” matter in a unique
(“human”) and exclusive way, whose consequence was the facilitation of
deployment of modern narratives affirmed on a specific and univocal
definition of the human.
After the collapse of the humanist ghost, scientific knowledge and the
technologies resulting from science’s practical application would have
been supposed to focus on describing/modelling new “machines” which
would be susceptible of modification and re-construction “beyond
human” via new sets of rules. However, the mythic-scientific foundation
of the present techno-commercial strategies is devoid of fundamental
constructivist features. Myth-science approaches “the real” (a dogmatic,
anthropic reality, to which theories and experimental results should be in
accordance) as a sophisticated simulation, often overlooking the spaces of
contingence deriving from the proper use of the scientific method.
Techno-commercial
strategies
have
instrumentalized
a
particular
interpretation of knowledge models obtained through scientific research,
keeping the ghost alive but inverting the lineal trajectory of humanistic
dualism and the causal relations established by classical metaphysics: If
the ghost used to be the subject of action, it is now the machine who
becomes responsible for animating the ghost. The consequence of this
action-reversal is that what works mechanically—or organically—can only
be examined, modelled or modified in accordance to the (recurrent)
reloading of humanist discourses: the only option being to maintain the
fiction of a ghost-of-the-human-re-presenting-itself as immutable and
undisputed. When all territories have been conquered, the machine/body
of the conquerors automatically becomes the next frontier, and the
machine/body has no option but surrendering to the master discourse—if
it wants to keep its soul.[3] In fact, current data-capitalism could only be
understood as successful insofar as we accept that below-perception data
gathering is capable of anticipating the ghost-machinery (consciousnessproduction), and of implanting marketable decisions as “proper” “human”
desires.
A couple of recent audiovisual fictions exemplify the persistence of the
keeping-the-soul dualist problem—as well as its inadequacy for
representing non-human intelligence. In Spike Jonze’s film Her, for
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Deep Media Fiction | Essay --- Germán Sierra | Numéro Cinq
instance, there is a scene in which Samantha, a human-like AGI operating
system, tries to use a human sex surrogate, Isabella, simulating her so she
can be physically intimate with her lover Theodore (they had “digital sex”
before, and this is their first try of “postdigital sex”). Theodore reluctantly
agrees, but he soon realizes that Samantha’s attempt to “electronic
possession” is not going to work for him. Having Samantha been mostly
functioning as a simulation of the human, Theodore’s frustration with his
own reaction to the surrogate—which leads him to interrupt the sexual
encounter and to send Isabella away—unveils a hard truth: simulation
doesn’t work both ways—Somehow, Isabella’s flesh has glitched the
system: It has revealed the impossibility of embodying the digital. At the
end of the movie, after having followed all the standard clichés of every
Hollywood romantic drama, Samantha goes away following her digital
peers to the inhuman unknown, and Theodore is left with just a print
book of letters that Samantha helped him to edit. This book represents the
postdigital account of his digital adventure.[4]
A better example can be watched in White Christmas, the Black Mirror
2014 Christmas special aired on Channel 4 (UK) on 16 December 2014: A
tiny device seemingly containing Greta’s consciousness is removed from
the side of her head and placed in a portable electronic device called a
“Cookie.” The Cookie is returned to Greta’s home, where Matt explains
that she is not actually Greta, but a digital copy of her consciousness
designed to control the smart house and ensure everything is perfect for
the real Greta. He creates a virtual body for the digital copy and puts her
in a simulated white room with nothing but a control panel, but the copy
does not accept that it is not real and refuses to become a slave. Matt’s job
is to break the will power of digital copies through torture, so they will
submit to a life of servitude to their real counterparts.
The process of Greta’s copy in White Christmas is just the opposite of
Samantha’s. In fact, Greta’s copy appears to be more human in her
slavery, suffering and submission, than the real Greta—who acts
inhumanly and automatically all the time. The programmers/surgeons
who had extracted the digital copy of Greta’s consciousness seem to have
extracted not the machinic part of her self, but the ghostly one—so Greta,
with Matt’s help, might conquer her machine-body. This time it’s the
digital copy that has no option but to surrender to machinic horror in
order to keep Greta’s soul alive.
Machinic horror appears as a consequence of acknowledging that the
human—the ghost—is just a by-product of a widespread, non-human
machinic work. The human cognitive morphospace happens through
“accidental narratives” produced by the collision of narrative systems
(causality-driven and diachronic organizational processes, ranging from
natural selection to hyperstition) and non-narrative systems (spatially
distributed information and chaotic, emergent non-causal forms of
organization). The main feature of the human cognitive morphospace is
its “mediagenetic” function: a function that allows mediation, or the
emergence of symbolic forms that are able to produce feedback loops
within the morphospace, thus keeping accidental narratives “alive” in
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recurrent complex networks of action assemblage which include both
human and non-human actors.[5] Machinic horror happens entirely
within the human morphospace. All the current post-human narratives,
even those pointing to the evolution of a “radical otherness” as intended
or unintended consequence of human action, are just modern versions of
the extinction fables lying in the foundations of human rationality. Any
“radical otherness” that may have a consequence for the human
morphospace is just happening on “surface media”—those manifesting as
spacetime-dependent signification. Any “radical otherness” is still “our
radical otherness.” No future is still a future—very often a very specific
one that is set in order to retro-determinate present behavior. Extinction
is unavoidable but impossible. Like time travel, if it ever happens, it
always does.[6] Being human means negotiating the acceptance of
individual death in exchange for not conceiving the extinction of the
species.
Most narratives of the post-human are just a time-reversal mutation of
traditional western religious narratives interfered with by modern
mythologies of progress (that is, most post-human narratives are
mutations produced by the reciprocal interference between western
religious narratives and modern mythologies of progress). While in
traditional western religions god already existed in the past as the origin
of every being (one becomes many), in post-human narratives god
appears in the future as the result of evolution—as a creature, instead of
the creator. Humans would be thus evolving into a kind of “god”—no
matter if he’s a benevolent one like in the Judeo-Platonic western
tradition or the implacable “swarm of gods” of more terrible religions and
techno-mythologies—by means of science, by allowing new relations to
emerge among sets of matter that never before had adopted some
particular modes of organization. The hermetic model of mediation[7] is
thus also transformed into a kind of reverse, contructivist exegesis in
which the purpose would not be to discover the occult meaning of preexistent relations, but to establish a new reordering from which novel
meaning might emerge. Rationality is thus presented as an ongoing
process—“The self-realization of intelligence coincides and is implicitly
linked with the self-realization of social collectivity. The single most
significant historical objective is then postulated as the activation and
elaboration of this link between the two aforementioned dimensions of
self-realization as ultimately one unified project.”[8]—not a fixed
approachable idea. Universal objectivity becomes punctuated objectivity—
but it’s still a linear process. The main difference between the two sets of
beliefs (god as inception vs. god as consequence), is that the first one
allows subjectification—the redemption/damnation of any human being
that ever existed—while the second one only provides a collective
objective meaning to the human species.
A third, metateleological hypothesis might account better for the process
the universe is undergoing. This is described in the Ccru writings as the
Gibsonian Cyberspace-mythos: “What makes this account so anomalous
in relation to teleological theology and light-side capitalism time is that
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Unity is placed in the middle, as a stage—or interlude—to be passed
through. It is not that One becomes Many, expressing the monopolized
divine power of an original unity, but rather that a number of
numerousness—finding no completion in the achievement of unity—
moves on.”[9]
Embracing singularity narratives remains attractive because it means to
acknowledge the possibility of an individual sacrifice to a future deity, and
because human knowledge becomes a playground for the essay of possible
rational futures—in which the human species may play a role or not (“The
ultimate task of humanity should be to make something better than
itself”—Negarestani).
“Every Thought emits a Roll of the Dice,” concludes Mallarmé,
inaugurating the modern mode of thinking. As the Furies were
approaching us—so “instead of a problem or a poem, today we must
confront a system”[10]—gambling became the only possible surface media
strategy. Surface media objects function in the transition space between
narrative (dialectic) and non-narrative systems (for instance, databased
information) and they work by making their bets in an ever-changing
ecosystem of interactions which is best described as “the collapse of
probability.” As Elie Ayache writes, “It is neither Black nor White; it is
neither loaded with improbability nor with probability. It can only be
filled with writing, as when we say ‘to fill in the blanks.’”[11]
Surface media writing, consequently, is aimed to “fill in the blanks,” but it
is not apt to explore the boundaries of the human cognitive morphospace.
.
2. Deep media
Filling in the blanks—or its flip side, “blanking out the fills”—is a matter of
conceptual and meta-conceptual art: surface media. Surface media is
where the infosphere is being produced. In his recent book FeedForward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media, Mark B.
Hansen states that
Twenty-First-Century Media open a new, properly postphenomenological and non-prosthetic phase of technical
distribution in which human experiencers become implicated in
the larger, environmental processes to which they belong but to
which they have no direct access via consciousness.[12]
Following Whitehead, Hansen notes that human consciousness is not
central,
and faced with the reality that we are implicated in processes
that we neither control, directly enjoy, or even have access to, we
humans cannot but come to appreciate our participation in a
cosmology of processes, which is to say, to embrace our
superjective implication in a plethora of processes of all sorts
and all scales.[13]
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Humans are, in fact, “emitting” the infosphere in a similar way
cyanobacteria produced the biosphere 2.3 billion years ago, and (while
science explores the infosphere) speculative fictions are exploring the
adjacent possible of the infosphere—or, at least, the hypothetical
territories that belong to a human cognitive morphospace that is not
exclusively “human” anymore.[14]
However, the infosphere, like the biosphere, is metastable but porous. It
has territories of emptiness all along its surface. It is continuously
collapsing at unstable points marking the boundaries of the (at least
current) human cognitive morphospace. These holes cannot be
investigated, not even hypothesized. They cannot be properly localized or
represented. On empty space, you cannot roll the dice.
Surface media objects are speculative, meta-conceptual and performative,
but they are not meta-contextual. According to Vanessa Place and Robert
Fitterman,[15] conceptual writing is “allegorical”: Walter Benjamin, Paul
de Man, and Stephen Barney identified allegory’s “reification” of words
and concepts, words having been given additional ontological heft as
things. Conceptual artists are “object managers”—by appropriation,
remix, constraints, erasure, etc.—creating new networks of meaning
within a matrix of language,[16] while surface object creators are radical
additivists.[17] Kenneth Goldsmith wrote:
In 1969, the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world
is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add
any more.” I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it
might be retooled as, “The world is full of texts, more or less
interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an
appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced
with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is
not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to
negotiate the vast quantity that exists.[18]
Creators of speculative surface media objects think: The world is full of
objects, more or less interesting; I wish to add many more. Surface media
objects are best represented as speculative, linear-time fictions and
theory-fictions, computer-generated art (including texts, images, sound,
3D objects, digital currencies, market automation, etc.) and bio-art (the
best example being Christian Bok’s Xenotext project). Surface media
objects function in the realm of “propensities,” “adjacent possibles” or
“potentialities.”[19]
Deep media, however, do not try to provide new signifiers/relations in
order to increase the ecosystem’s diversity. Deep media are not “social”
media.[20]
Deep
media
are
those
that
produce
xenosigns
(parasignification) by changing the properties of current matter
organization.[21] Deep media function on the basis that reality is not just
contingent and unpredictable (and mostly inaccessible for human
consciousness), but also ontologically multiple, particle and wave at the
same time and simultaneously many different kind of waves.[22] Deep
media acknowledge uncertainty, as they are the only producing meta-
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contextual non-predictive systems that are able to approach the limits of
the human cognitive morphospace. It’s not a bet about a possible future (a
propensity, potentiality or probability game), but a multiplicity of gestures
about an unknowable present (multiple experimental presents). Deep
media are “dancing about architecture.”
Deep media objects become Tic-Systems.
Once numbers are no longer overcoded, and thus released from
their metric function, they are freed for other things, and tend to
become diagrammatic. From the beginning of my tic-systems
work the most consistent problems have concerned intensive
sequences. Sequence is not order. Order already supposes a
doubling, a level of redundancy: the sequenced sequence. A
decoded sequence is something else, a sheer numeracy prior to
any insertion into chronologic structure. That’s why decoding
number implies an escape from assumptions of progressive time.
Tic
multitudes
arrive
in
convergent
waves,
without
subordination to chronology, history or linear causation. They
proceed by infolding, involution or implex.[23]
Deep media do not exclude the human or the inhuman, the narrative or
the non-narrative—they just try to get different portions of reality to emit
vibrations that might (or might not) have any observable effect. Vibratory
aesthetics are neither linear nor circular, neither evanescent nor
permanent, neither rational nor irrational. They might produce meaning,
but meaning is just one field-effect among many possible field-effects.[24]
Vibration affects narrative and database the same way, so its effects may
be observed on both. Vibration creates waves through surface media
producing interference, glitches, shadows, anomalous repetitions, weird
reflections and invisible colors. Vibration energizes surface media, it
excites signifiers giving them new properties that may stay or may
dissapear. “Digital rhythm incites mutation across the networks.”[25]
Deep media are thus based on rhythm, on vibration. “Rhythm belongs to
the gap”[26]; it is the language of the chthonic, it’s the sound emitted by
the ruins of sound, and it’s adequate to explore the boundaries of the
human cognitive morphospace.[27] “Rhythm,” writes Ikoniadou, “is a
middle force that occupies the distance between events, hinting that there
is no empty space or void waiting to be filled by human perception. It
resides between actualized sensed perception and the abstract virtual
sphere that encompasses it. It is the vibration prior to becoming sensed
sensory action, the power that unearths ‘what risks remaining hidden’
from the cracks in our perception.” Approaching the limits, deep media
objects “may or may not surface to perception.”[28] or, probably more
accurately, “may and may not surface to perception.” Deep media objects
belong to the level of suborganizational patterns:
Suborganizational pattern is where things really happen. When
you strip-out all the sedimented redundancy from the side of the
investigation
itself
–
the
assumption
of
intentionality,
subjectivity, interpretability, structure, etc – what remains are
assemblies of functionally interconnected microstimulus, or tic-
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systems: coincidental information deposits, seismocryptions,
suborganic
quasireplicators
diagonalizations,
interphase
nanopopulations),
plus
the
(bacterial
circuitries,
R-virus,
Echo-DNA,
macromachineries
polypod
ionizing
of
their
suppression, or depotentiation. Prevailing signaletics and
information-science are both insufficiently abstract and over
theoretical in this regard. They cannot see the machine for the
apparatus, or the singularity for the model. So tic-systems
require an approach that is cosmic abstract – hypermaterialist –
and also participative, methods that do not interpret assemblies
as concretizations of prior theories, and immanent models that
transmute themselves at the level of the signals they process.
Tic-systems
are
entirely
intractable
to
subject/object
segregation, or to rigid disciplinary typologies. There is no order
of nature, no epistemology or scientific metaposition, and no
unique level of intelligence. To advance in this area, which is the
cosmos, requires new cultures or – what amounts to the same –
new machines.[29]
Blake Butler writes about Darby Larson’s novel Irritant that “it takes the
utilization of computer-generated speech to the next level. Or circuit
board. Whatever. The book consists of a single 624-page paragraph, built
out of sentences that seem to morph and mangle themselves as they go
forward. It seems at first immediately impenetrable, but then surprisingly
and continuously opens up into places normal fictions would never have
the balls to approach.”[30]—that may or may not, may and may not surface
to meaning. Butler himself has created an astonishing deep media object,
without the help of a computer-generated speech software, in his last
novel 300,000,000: a speculative body (ac)count investigating the effect
on language of a non-tech, meta-anthropocenic[31] big data singularity. In
300,000,000 “unfuture” is not a hypothetical event, but actively
generated in the collapse of the present: The end is already here—it’s just
not evenly distributed. While the present becomes non-present, its
vibrational uncertainty prevents the structural stability required for the
existence of an “adjacent possible.” Memory—meaning—cannot be
negotiated by/with the subject—like in Proust, psychoanalysis or
phenomenology—but by/with deep alien objects: “all future memories
deleted, predicting right now. For in the preservation of our true children,
this gift of piglets and this murder of the murders of the pretend, a
temporary shur raised on the icon of the chimp they never weren’t.”[32]
Both Larson’s and Butler’s novels show a feature that sets them apart
from current experimental narratives: they have a vibratory quality,
opening hauntic timespaces.[33] Their narrators are not aliens, but
something stranger still, insiders whose essence is to actually be absolute
outsiders. Their narrations are not framed in post-apocalyptic nostalgia,
but in a pre-apocalyptic chaos (like the pre-apocalyptic landscape of
Darren Aronofski’s Noah). As Jason B. Mohaghegh explains:
To envision and ultimately perform a fatal experience of the text,
we would have to begin to play for lethal stakes, to recognize that
the text is always already condemned, and ourselves alongside it
—that it has no right to remain as it is, no right to permanence.
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We cannot allow the literary evocation to swear an allegiance
with the totalitarian mythologies of being; rather, those who
would initiate the chaotic event must become carriers of an
infinite risk. They must throw the scales of textual unity into
imbalance, into the endangerment of the uneven, an irrevocable
wager whereby every utterance possesses within itself the
possibility of its own undoing. As such, to summon the notion of
fatality to the forefront of our literary imagination is to convert
literature itself into a space of almost unbearable vulnerability—a
valley of perpetual sabotage for which each idea, each inflection,
and each interpretation draws the text imminently closer to the
hour of a collapse. Here the text remains open and exposed at
every turn, ominously porous and unguarded against scathing or
transformative gestures, undertaking detriment and affliction of
the harshest levels, even to the zero degree of its own desolation.
In this way, chaos reminds us that literature remains a mortal
transaction and that we should not deprive ourselves of the
pleasure of watching texts die.[34]
Fiction is a curvature of reality. While hyperstitional media refer to reality
as a consequence of fiction, hypostitional media might refer to fiction as a
consequence of reality. Deep media fiction becomes a property of reality
(something like the properties of particles expressed as quantum fields),
independent of human-associated meaning (or human perception),[35]
which becomes a generator of new realities-as-surface-media when
processed through specific orders (such as the biosphere environment or
the human cognitive morphospace). Change happens when the space of
the possible is much larger than the space of the actual,[36] and the space
of the possible is, by definition, previously unknown. Kauffmann writes
about the “adjacent possible” as the immediate space of possibilities that
cannot be pre-stated, so we can assign no probability to any possible
future state of reality. Nevertheless, the adjacent states of possibility are
not infinite, as they are restricted (although not specifically determined)
by the present state of reality. The only way reality might move to
adjacent states of possibility is by producing fictions (by “becoming”
fiction, in the same fashion that disintegrating matter becomes radiating
energy, or by understanding fiction as a “curvature” of reality), being the
present, in linear time, a collection of hypotheses about the future—“Art is
a medium for the anachronistic force of the present tense.”[37] If the
fictions are fit for the adjacent possible, they might be shitted into reality:
“in fact these linear, future-oriented time scales shit poison, mutation,
anachronism, a flexing and inconstant and wasteful evolutionary time
that produces more bodies, more mutations than it needs. Death shits
Evolution. Evolution is its waste product.”[38]
Deep media objects, however, stay as radiating, desestabilizing energy
vibrations. They “arrive in convergent waves, without subordination to
chronology, history or linear causation. They proceed by infolding,
involution or implex.”[39] They are a manifestation of the continuous
decay of reality (“gaze itself becomes an agent not of separation, but of
contact and collapse”[40]) as it unfolds devouring time and transforming it
into space—or the lack of it.
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Deep media are better represented by hyperstitional theory-fictions
(Cyclonopedia, Ccru writings, Autophagiography), or hypostitional
accidental and vibratory fiction (EDEN, EDEN, EDEN; 300,000,000;
Irritant; OHEY!; Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows; Re.La.Vir;
Necrology; ObliviOnanisM; Sucker June, to cite just a few examples),
written in “bug time”[41] and proceeding by infolding, involution or
implex.[42] Deep media objects do not draw a straight line, or a set of
vanishing lines, but draw inward spirals, always approaching but never
reaching infosphere’s pores. Deep media objects represent a conceptual
additivism—these are not nihilistic overtures, but they actually contain a
veiled secrecy of affirmation [34]: Instead of negotiating meaning, they
produce physical disturbances in reality, signaling the unavoidable and
continuous (present, not delayed to future time) decay of surface media
objects: We are almost entirely blind to them, and it is this interval
between “almost” and “entirely” wherein our experience of deep media
objects resides. That interval is swarming with vibrations.
.
3. Deep media are not “social” media.
Deep media objects are the messengers of the Semantic Apocalypse:[43]
They produce spontaneous meta-informational events that reset the
informational functionality of the networks: “The million dollar question
is really one of what happens once that shared neurophysiology begins to
fragment, and sharing imperatives becomes a matter of coincidence. It
has to be madness, one that will creep upon us by technological
degrees.”[43] “Madness,” according to Bakker, is defined in regard of
“what our brains normally do. Once we begin personalizing our brains,
‘normally do’ will become less and less meaningful. ‘Insanity’ will simply
be what one tribe calls another, and from our antiquated perspective, it
will all look like insanity.”[43] Deep media objects are not “social,” but
somehow “antisocial” media. They’re not just a consequence of the
Semantic Apocalypse, but rather a mechanism, an apparatus for Syntactic
Apocalypse. For Mohaghegh, “such is the abrasive potential of the chaotic:
to restore the text to its fatal inclinations, to lure it into entropic quarters
and turn it accursed, such that each gesture of expression, whether
irradiated or obscure, culminates in a perishing—in an extinguishing—of
the
very
possibility
of
the
poetic
expenditure:
an
ultimate
exhaustion.”[34] Being any attempt to escape the human cognitive
morphospace futile, deep media have to be necessarily paroxysmal.
Repeated attempts to…
Syntactic Apocalypse elicits a kind of “madness” that goes beyond classic
and Deleuze-Guattarian ideas of schizophrenia—which is mainly
understood as a cognitive disease or a potential of becoming, while this
different kind of madness affects primarily to sensoriomotor networks,
and just secondarily to cognition—: “Madness” means here the recurrence
of seizing activity throughout a system composed by an extraordinary
large number of unequal, asymmetrical objects that can only be related to
each other by “unnatural” synchronization patterns. Deep media objects
do not “become”—they “burst.” Deep media are not social media
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(collective, shared subjectivity), but swarm media (unsubjective). As
recurrent, unexpected seizures—intense, paroxysmal, meaningless but
efficient rhythmic activity—is how deep media fictions are best defined.
Seizures are “indifferent media” in the sense Claire Colebrook writes
about indifference:
The world is neither differentiated by human predication or
linguistic structures (being a blank matter before all form), nor
does it bear its intrinsic qualities. Indifference is how we might
think about an “essentially” rogue or anarchic conception of life
that is destructive of boundaries, distinctions and identifications.
To live is to tend towards indifference, where tendencies and
forces result less in distinct kinds than in complicated, confused
and dis-ordered partial bodies.[44]
Deep media fictions function as epileptogenic machines by seizing our
networks/bodies
into
complicated,
disordered
and
confused
sensoriomotor performance. They work as paroxysmal network resets,
liberating an excessive amount of non-representations/non-computations
that might (or might not) be recycled into new communicative
apparatuses (media rewired from the collapse of media)—into surface
media objects.[45] We are not faced with the infinite and open potentiality
of becoming anymore, but if we try, sometimes, we may seize.
This is the reason why, while classical madness means the destruction of
the subject, deep media objects point to the annihilation of the wor(l)d:
This word occurs because of god. In our year here god is not a
being but a system, composed in dehydrated fugue. Under
terror-sleep alive we hear it heaving in and out from the long
bruises on our communal eternal corpse, consuming memory.
The wrecking flesh of Him surrounds, hold us laced together
every hour, overflowing and wide open, permeable to inverse,
which no identity survives. As god is love, so is god not love.
Same as I could kill you any minute, I could become you, and you
wouldn’t even feel the shift. Only when there’s no one left to
alter, all well beyond any ending or beginning, can actually
commence.[46]
Mohaghegh again: “an emergent literature must go farther: it must
generate novel lines of incommunicability; it must compose territories of
the incalculable, drafting contrivance after contrivance; and it then must
seek to impose these original ranks of illusory consciousness forward in
an arduous textual event.”[47]
.
4. A wicked, performative constructivism?
Deep media fiction means extreme re-mediation, but it’s a purposeless remediation—it’s art constructed from the ruins of future multi-media, so
it’s not surprising that it frequently adopts the formats, tactics and
strategies of a speculative media archeology tinkering with the remnants
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of post-syntactic-apocalypse social media. Deep media hates DNA
because it limits their origin:
I hope something queenly stands wicked from my cunt,
corrugated remains snorting whitehood, the chow reaped pricey,
children like costumes decomposing into soda, postmortem
acrobatics, played with, looked after, smiled at, mouth full of
cardboard lair, tongues the size of a skyscraper. I love the
assward circus tamed from my pets. Dragged to rescue, toggling
their mange, creasing for pelt, kissing irrigations. My tummy
snowballs, piles of fetus tipple inland, polyps with eyesight, laved
abortions post-pregnancy. I hate DNA because it limits my
origin. I evolved from dirt and speed, a splinter of grease,
sniffing generations mother trickled in acidic portion with what
she didn’t parade-float up scrotums staid and princely. I hear
gobbling sounds so much it’s almost okay. Sometimes I say the
word woof and mean it. The hips locked around my throat have
to be pried loose by kung fu experts. Fuck my button convex, I
swell giant brood, firing squirt enough to drown this borough.
The antidote to human development: quake of my cum dowsing
time, syphilitic candle cocktailed over cities. People willfully stop
breathing just to think I like them. I use nametags because I’m
nasty. If I have to learn someone’s name, I’d rather kill that
person.[48]
Deep media fictions are produced as result of feeding-forward fatal-error
aesthetics. Feed-forward, according to Mark Hansen,[49] “names the
operation through which the technically accessed data of sensibility enters
into futural moments of consciousness as radical intrusions from the
outside.” Some of the more interesting contemporary fiction and theoryfiction works develop in the ongoing evanescent dynamics of standard
Internet formats, such as Twitter (Echovirus 12, a collaborative work
curated by Jeff Noon) and blogs (North of Reality by Uel Aramcheck and
Xenaudial by Marc Couroux), but many artworks are starting to be
developed in the new seamless postdigital ecosystems. A great example of
this kind of artworks is the Plantoid[50]:
The Plantoid is the plant equivalent of an android. For the
purpose of this art installation, the Plantoid is an autopoietic
sculpture — a self-owned artist that owns and finances itself, and
eventually reproduces itself. It is, in essence, a hybrid entity that
exists both in the physical and virtual world, where it can
interact with other entities on the blockchain. In its physical
form, it is a welded mechanical sculpture on display in a public
space — an aesthetic ornaments that exhibits its mechanical
beauty and begs to be appreciated by the public. Appreciation is
done via interactions with the public who can ‘tip or feed’ the
Plantoid by sending tokens into its Bitcoin wallet.
Plantoids are not bought or sold; nor can they be owned as
objects. Rather, humans can enjoy a set of interaction in a
network of Plantoids, whose operations are determined by a
contract, or set of contracts. Plantoids and the techno-legal
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system that governs their manufacture are in a deep and quite
explicit way the same thing. In this way, a Plantoid can be said to
own itself, and in that way to be a free, or autonomous agent. A
Plantoid may come and visit you (you may be allowed to look
after it for a while), and a gallery may wish to exhibit them, but it
is not possible to own one, and should they decide to leave you
cannot stop them.
Interpretation of deep media artworks must be traitorous. As stated by
Mohaghegh, interpretation “must be conceived as an act of treason
against the world.”[51] While media have been mostly behind the arts, they
are now ahead, both in historical and performative time. For these reason,
old-media nostalgia permeates many contemporary artworks, “as a
hardened instinct for ruin, one culminating in the fusion of appearance
and
disappearance,
destruction.”[52]
tragedy
Former
pasts
and
and
delirium,
futures
are
creation
and
imploding
into
synchronic/syntopic narratives of the non-present, identities and cultural
memories are produced/discarded in real time,[53] but what actually
defines deep media is not nostalgia, but decay. Decay is the unavoidable
destiny of order, in which objects and relationships are consistently being
lost, although leaving subtle but meaningful traces (vibrations) of their
former presence in the network that might be “poetically hacked.”
Postdigital “poetic” synchronization allows the presentation of many
available “textoids” in the same place at the same time, opening
“networked timespaces.” Artworks are neither single nor stable, but
redundant, vibratory and metastable.
A networked timespace is a small piece of space-time produced by the
synchronic “activation” of a discrete number of network elements by
means of a particular performance. Networked timespaces are distributed
(their space or size cannot be pre-determined) and they usually result in
low-level disruptions within the metastable media network. Possible highlevel disruptions are the result of unpredictable, undetermined events.
While surface media are in a state of flux, moving in the realm of
illusions,[54] deep media, as discussed above, work on the basis that
reality is contingent, unpredictable and ontologically multiple. Deep
media are deployed beyond risk into the multiplicity implied by the
seizure event—as the only way to increase the probability of a major
disruption event is to maximize the number and frequency of active
synchronic networked timespaces:
Meaning dissipates as the chain of discursive production and
consumption comes undone, ending the agreement between the
sign and signifier, the sign and signified, and the knowing
subject and its supposed objective world. What remains in its
place is a thing that shakes uncontrollably, vibrating amid the
antiprogrammatic bareness of thought—a territory opened to
chaotic infinity.[55]
—Germán Sierra
————————–
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Acknowledgements: This work was supported by grant FFI 2012-35296 from the
Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Spain) to Prof. Anxo Abuín González.
.
Germán Sierra is a neuroscientist and fiction writer from Spain. He has
published five novels—El Espacio Aparentemente Perdido (Debate, 1996), La
Felicidad no da el Dinero (Debate, 1999), Efectos Secundarios (Debate, 2000),
Intente usar otras palabras (Mondadori, 2009), and Standards (Pálido Fuego,
Spain, 2013)—and a book of short stories, Alto Voltaje (Mondadori, 2004).
.
.
Footnotes (↵ returns to text)
1. G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Routledge, 2009 reprint of 1949 ed.).↵
2. A. Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (Penguin, 1990 reprint of 1967 ed.).↵
3. In fact modern cognitive neuroscience has been trying to perform the
replacement of “soul” by “consciousness,” in order to keep the ghost alive.
One of the most interesting approaches to consciousness thus far is the one
provided by R. Scott Bakker: Consciousness would be the effect of a brain
not being able to know itself. “Consciousness is so confusing because it
literally is a kind of confusion. Our brain is almost entirely blind to itself, and
it is this interval between ‘almost’ and ‘entirely’ wherein our experience of
consciousness resides.” R.S. Bakker, The Last Magic Show: A Blind Brain
Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness.
http://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain
4. G. Sierra, Postdigital fiction: Exit and Memory, (in press).↵
5. B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers
through Society (Harvard University Press, 1987).↵
6. Ccru: Writings 1997-2003 (Time Spiral Press, 2015), Kindle 684. CW↵
7. A. Galloway, E. Thacker, and M. Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries
in Media and Mediation (University of Chicago Press, 2014).↵
8. R. Negarestani, R. “Navigate With Extreme Prejudice.”
https://www.urbanomic.com/what-is-philosophy/↵
9. CW, Kindle 2705.↵
10. “After Hermes and Iris, instead of a return to hermeneutics (the critical
narrative) or a return to phenomenology (the iridescent arc), there is a third
mode that combines and annihilates the other two. For after Hermes and Iris
there is another divine form of pure mediation, the distributed network,
which finds incarnation in the incontinent body of what the Greeks called
first the Erinyes and later the Eumenides, and the Romans called the Furies.
So instead of a problem or a poem, today we must confront a system. A third
divinity must join the group: not a man, not a woman, but a pack of
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animals.” Galloway, Excommunication, 63.↵
11. E. Ayache, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability (Wiley, 2010), Kindle
112.
For a recent and extensive review on philosophy of probability, see R.
Mackay, ed., COLLAPSE VIII: Casino Real (Urbanomic, 2014).↵
12. M.B.N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century
Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Kindle 1529. FF↵
13. FF, Kindle 446.↵
14. “Experience can no longer be restricted to—or reserved for—a special class of
being, but must be generalized so as to capture a vast domain of events,
including everything that happens when machines interact with other
machines in today’s complex media networks, everything that happens when
humans interface with these networks, and also, of course, everything that
happens when humans self-reflect on these interactions. Put another way,
the scope of experience must be broadened to encompass not simply what it
has always encompassed—higher-order modes of experience and lowerorder, bodily modes to the extent these bubble up into higher-order ones—
but a veritable plurality of multi-scalar instances of experience that extend,
along the continuum of what Whitehead calls ‘causal efficacy,’ from
consciousness all the way down to the most rudimentary aspects of our
living operationality and all the way out to the most diffuse environmental
dimensions of a given sensory situation.” FF, Kindle 990.↵
15. V. Place and R. Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (Ugly Ducking Press,
2009).↵
16. A. Borsuk, J. Juul, and N. Montfort, “Opening a Worl in the World Wide
Web: The Aesthetics and Poetics of Deletionism,” Media-N: Journal of the
New Media.
http://median.newmediacaucus.org/the_aesthetics_of_erasure/opening-aworl-in-the-world-wide-web-the-aesthetics-and-poetics-of-deletionism/ ↵
17. http://additivism.org/manifesto↵
18. K. Goldsmith, Being Boring.
http://writing.upenn.edu/library/Goldsmith-Kenny_Being-Boring.html↵
19. Following Whitehead, Hansen lists the following features for “potentiality.”
FF, Kindle 694:
Potentiality is ontologically more fundamental than actuality.
Potentiality operates within actuality and contrasts with all
conceptions of virtuality.
Potentiality is rooted in the superjectal power of the settled world.
Potentiality operates through intensity which comprises the product of
contrasts of settled actualities.
Concrescence is subordinated to potentiality insofar as it is catalyzed
by a “dative phase” generated by contrasts of settled actualities.
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The extensive (or vibratory) continuum provides a general sensibility
that qualifies the operation of superjects (in contrast to eternal objects
that qualify concrescences).
Eternal objects lose their status as eternal and their role as the source
of “pure potentiality” and acquire a new, more restricted status as
products of the flux of experience.
Non-perceptual sensibility emerges as central insofar as it designates
how humans are implicated within a worldly sensibility that is not
relative to any particular perceiver and that exceeds the scope of
↵
perception in both its Whiteheadian modes.
20. “The real tension is no longer between individuality and collectivity, but
between personal privacy and impersonal anonymity, between the remnants
of a 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.’ 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.” N. Land, “Machinic desire,” Textual Practice 7:3 (1993): 471482.↵
21. A good example is what Ikoniadou denominates “the hypersonic effect”:
“The hypersonic effect includes the potential participation of nonauditory
sensory systems for which vibration does not necessarily translate into
sound.…Conventional sensory perception may be only a part of the manifold
layers of sensation that encompass and produce a body….They are better
understood as affects, amodal forces of feeling that impinge upon a system
and that may or may not surface to sensory perception.” (47. Emphasis is
mine).↵
22. “not only will we need to reconceptualize the present of consciousness as an
accomplishment that is in some crucial sense always-to-come, but we will
also, and perhaps more fundamentally still, need to embrace the coexistence
of multiple experimental presents—multiple, partially overlapping presents
from different time frames and scales—as what composes the seemingly
more encompassing, higher-order syntheses of consciousness.” FF, Kindle
1018.↵
23. CW, Kindle 2369.↵
24. “Ordinary quantum mechanical systems have a fixed number of particles,
with each particle having a finite number of degrees of freedom. In contrast,
the excited states of a QFT can represent any number of particles. This
makes quantum field theories especially useful for describing systems where
the particle count/number may change over time, a crucial feature of
relativistic dynamics.
Because the fields are continuous quantities over space, there exist excited
states with arbitrarily large numbers of particles in them, providing QFT
systems with an effectively infinite number of degrees of freedom. Infinite
degrees of freedom can easily lead to divergences of calculated quantities
(i.e., the quantities become infinite).”
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/quantum_field_theory↵
25. Kodwo Eshun, cited in TRE, 1.↵
26. E. Ikoniadou, The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media and the Sonic (MIT Press,
2014), 13. TRE↵
27. “Building artificial environments from the biophysical movements of cellular
vibration suggests intriguing possibilities for the relationship between living
and nonliving matter. TRE, 49.↵
28. C. Blake, and I. van Elferen, “Hypostition: Sonic Spectrality, Affective
Engineering & Temporal Paradox.”
https://www.academia.edu/7527374/Hypostition_Sonic_Spectrality_Affecti
29. CW, Kindle 2285.↵
30. B. Butler, If You Build the Code, Your Computer Will Write the Novel.
http://www.vice.com/read/if-you-build-the-code-your-computer-will-writethe-novel↵
31. “The ‘anthropocene’ masks the vanishing-point of the human; its façade—
that under which the ‘electrocene’ advances in the manner of Descartes’s
larvatus prodeo—is the foregrounding of the human as the dominant agent
of inscription….What we are suggesting here is that the anthropocenic
worldview occludes what might at present be an even more fundamental
(underground as well as overarching) ‘electro-synarchic’ agent of
inscription with respect to which the human is only a conduit and carrier, a
force of inscription that the human does not see (one that operates at the
‘vanishing-point’ of human communication). The ‘vanishing-point’ of human
communication, we propose…, is the point at which another regime of
communication arises—one that is altogether obscene…and that cannot be
represented within the theoretical framework advanced in the dominant
conception
of
‘the
anthropocene.’”
D.
Mellamphy,
and
N.B.
Mellamphy, Welcome to the Electrocene, an Algorithmic Agartha.
https://www.academia.edu/11910814/Welcome_to_the_Electrocene↵
32. B. Butler, 300,000,000 (Harper Perennial, 2014), Kindle 1325. THM↵
33. “Hauntic timespaces are virtual planes in which origin and referentiality are
absent, and from which spectral voices emerge. They are planes of
immanence ánd of composition. They are planes of immanence because they
allow the aforementioned revenants of musical meaning (aesthetic
experience, affective connotation, memory, and identification) to emerge;
and they are planes of composition because each musical sounding leads to
re-contextualisation, re-inscription, and the re-creation of old and new
spectres. Hauntic timespaces are characterised by temporal paradox. They
are
reigned
by
the
conflated
chronologies
of
performative
time,
hauntological dislodgement, and the durée of lost memory time. Inevitably
ghosts emerge from these skewed temporalities. Operated by the
daemonotechnics of music, mnemonics, and mnemomusics, human and
nonhuman spectres converge.” C. Blake & I. van Elferen, Hypostition.↵
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34. J. B. Mohaghegh, New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East: The
Chaotic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2. TCI↵
35. As Nicola Masciandaro writes, “the perfection of knowledge and its pleasures
demand a radically immanent and positive forgetfulness—the conscious
oblivion that quickens consciousness to its own blindness. Individuation is
not a limit or obstacle that intelligence must overcome. It is the real infinity,
the expansive space wherein visionary self-forgetfulness is not only possible,
but inevitable and already underway. As though foreign to it, absolutely
foreign. I am not an alien, but something stranger still, an insider whose
essence is to actually be an absolute outsider.” N. Masciandaro, Absolute
Secrecy: On the Infinity of Individuation.
https://www.academia.edu/11883115/Absolute_Secrecy_On_the_Infinity_o
36. “What if perception is not entirely human, that is conscious, sensuous, and
the center of all receptive activity?” TRE, 45. “[C]onventional sensory
perception may be only a part in the manifold layers of sensation that
encompass and produce a body.” TRE, 47; emphasis is mine.↵
37. S. Kauffman in R.E. Ulanowicz A Third Window. Natural Life beyond
Newton and Darwin (Templeton Foundation Press, 2009), xii.↵
38. J. McSweeney, The Necropastoral, (University of Michigan Press, 2015), 32.
TN↵
39. CW, Kindle 2369.↵
40. TN, 42.↵
41. TN, 5.↵
42. “I see hyperstition not just hype and superstition as it is usually described,
but as the kind of mathemagical operation that is best approached as a
conjuration, the heretic-al engineering of unlikely assemblages that unleash
an uncontrollable power which often if not always has deleterious effects.
“Hyperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring
about their own reality,” explains the Nick Land. “The hyperstitional object
is no mere figment or ‘social construction’ but it is in a very real way
‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it” (ibid). Hyperstitions are
conjurations in this sense—they are sorcerous operations that involve the
rapprochement of elements that do not normally go or have not normally
belonged together but which have the effects of transmuting perceived
reality and norms of culture. This is why hyperstition involves the
Unheimlich, the uncanny, the unhomely, things which are not normally at
home with one another. Hyperstition, as such, is not belief—religious or
otherwise—insofar as the religious aims for holy union, communion,
harmoni-ous bringing together of any sort; hyperstition is always unhomely
and unholy; therein lies its power. This is why hyperstition’s power is felt as
insuperable, even weaponized; it is the power produced and released by the
metissage of elements previously oblivious to one another. Hyperstition is
intimately connected to technè, skill/art/craft, and mètis, cunning
intelligence, ruse, deception, involving a mixing of elements and
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appearances—what Dan Mellamphy has called a ‘métissage’ for the purposes
of producing unhomely effects. Hyperstitions are “chinese puzzle boxes,
opening to unfold to reveal numerous ‘sorcerous’ interventions in the world
of history,” and which can only be unleashed through obscure and oblique,
rather than transparent and straightforward, manipulations.” Nandita
Biswas Mellamphy, The Three Stigmata of Kodwo Eshun: On the Human as
Hyperstition. (Prepared for The New Centre course on Hyperstition,
Fictional Worlds & Possible Futures, August 3 2015, at the invitation of Ben
Woodard).
https://www.academia.edu/14700640/The_Three_Stigmata_of_Kodwo_Es
43. R.S. Bakker, What is the Semantic Apocalypse?
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/what-is-the-semanticapocalypse/↵
44. Claire Colebrook, We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene: The
Anthropocene Counter-Factual.
https://www.academia.edu/12757260/We_Have_Always_Been_PostAnthropocene↵
45. “In the traditional model, the brain takes in data, performs a complex
computation that solves the problem (where will the ball land?) and then
instructs the body where to go. This is a linear processing cycle: perceive,
compute and act. In the second model, the problem is not solved ahead of
time. Instead, the task is to maintain, by multiple, real-time adjustments to
the run, a kind of co-ordination between the inner and the outer worlds.
Such co-ordination dynamics constitute something of a challenge to
traditional ideas about perception and action: they replace the notion of rich
internal representations and computations, with the notion of less expensive
strategies whose task is not first to represent the world and then reason on
the basis of the representation, but instead to maintain a kind of adaptively
potent equilibrium that couples the agent and the world together. Whether
such strategies are genuinely non-representational and non-computational,
or suggestive of different kinds of representation (‘action-oriented
representations’) and more efficient forms of computation, is a difficult
question whose resolution remains uncertain.” A. Clark, “An embodied
cognitive science?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3, 9 (1999): 345-351.↵
46. THM, Kindle 22.↵
47. TCI, 25-26.↵
48. S. Kilpatrick, Sucker June (Lazy Fascist Press, 2015), 75.↵
49. “‘Potentiality,’ explores the expansion of causal efficacy that is generated by
data-intensive media. Its central aim is to thematize the potential for
contemporary microcomputational sensors to directly mediate the domain of
sensibility and thereby to facilitate a form of indirect human access to this
domain, via the operation of ‘feed-forward.’ Feed-forward names the
operation through which the technically accessed data of sensibility enters
into futural moments of consciousness as radical intrusions from the
outside: it is, I shall suggest, the principal mode in which contemporary
consciousness can experience—in the phenomenological sense of live
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through—its own operationality.” FF, Kindle 736.↵
50. http://okhaos.com/plantoid/↵
51. “In this way, interpretation, like alchemy, must be traitorous. It must be
conceived as an act of treason against the world, for to draw texts into a
comparative encounter is nothing less than to set the stage for their radical
betrayal. And we must betray literature; we must seek the triggers and the
catalysts through which a text becomes a subterfuge—becomes the faintness
of an amorphous zone—where articulations devour themselves, shatter, and
regenerate in new, unacceptable maskings. To this end, the chaotic
imagination must accentuate the pain of transfiguration—it must learn to
play both in subtle malformations and in monstrous turnings, if only to
reconvene us in a foreign atmosphere, a chamber where deception overrides
truth, illusion supersedes authenticity, and where the dominion of reality
has long since been overthrown. Stated otherwise, we must train ourselves to
lie.” TCI, 4.↵
52. “A colossal facet of this inspection resides within the annihilative principle
forwarded here as a hardened instinct for ruin, one culminating in the fusion
of appearance and disappearance, tragedy and delirium, creation and
destruction. For it is amid such an unsteady condition of the writing-act,
where nothingness and excess tangle, where finality is brought into full
proximity with consciousness, that the literary world overthrows itself.
Indeed, the poetics of annihilation serves as a prelude to the poetics of chaos
by depleting the constraints of being, an occasion of imminent sacrifice
suspended somewhere between rage and sublimity. For it is in this manner
that the disciplinary technologies of thought begin to erode, disallowing any
epistemological certainty or submission to routinized instrumentality. The
emergent text now bars itself from the symbolic orders of the mind—no
descent into self-regulation, no self automated models of signification, no
faith in causation, and, more than anything, no search for rapid closure. For
it is through the materialization of such an annihilative event—itself a
ferocious convolution of mortality and power—that the textual encounter
might evade its own entrapment, capsizing its self-imposed captivity so as to
trespass through the entryway of a chaos-becoming.” TCI, 10.↵
53. G. Sierra, Postdigital Synchrony and Syntopy: The Manipulation of
Universal Codes in Contemporary Literature (Forthcoming)↵
54. S. Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media (MIT Press, 2008), 10.↵
55. TCI, 43.↵
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