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, Desirevolution 1973: 31)
'Bobby do you know what a metaphor is?' 'A component? Like
a capacitor?'
'No. Never mind metaphor then'
(W Gibson, CountZero. 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 . . . Iike a
current . . . a streaming of electricity' (Bataille 1988: 94). 'You
say tit'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.
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-andduct
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
biobydraulics, still swimming through the 100 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 trans-spaces 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 of a satisfaction . . . to an 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 thenets of transcendental determination,
shutting down consciousness, a nanometrical, minimal
noumenal tilt function - switching the apparatuses hom
epicentralized synthesis-regulators into far-fromequilibrium,
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, interpretation, deduction: identitarian security
procedures.
Communication: the disarticulating datableed from this
profoundly systemorphic nexus of discourses - the
biobydraulics of Freudian metapsychology, electrolibidinal
economics and cyber-capital's retrophagic
fictotheroetico-tactical 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 anti-analytic, 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
autocatalysis 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
technosurrealism . . . 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 differentiation ir 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 matter-energy. Since there is no internal/external session
'within' matter-energy - or, more Marxodelusiono-dialectically, no Entzweiang ' within' force E - at 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 steam-cloud
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 susceptiblc to
stimulation. This little fragment of living substance is
suspcnded in thc midst of an cxtemal world charged with thc
most powerful energies [Against thcsc energies.. ] it acquires
[a] shield in this way its outermost surface ceases to have the
structure proper to living matter becomes to a dcgree
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, Bahougen
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 biodrome's 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.
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, micro-cops 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
bichydraulic function: a valve in the apparatus opens given an
increase in the quantity of ane 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 . thus libidinal economic reversibility,
falls derelicted into recurrent cycles of Q.
The remnant of the apparatus c, phenomenally hedonist
regression is, however, ~ _ subject to micro-cop repression by
means of a realilty principle, a dam designating a minium
energetic 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
biobydraulic functions, constituting overspills and reservoirs
that the apparatus then permanently draws on for purposes of
the regulated-regulating mechanisms of localized expenditure
(i.e., pleasureproduction: 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 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 . . . puncture' (Lyotard 1973: 202) the
socius-apparatus, bringing the system to a standstill.
Thus reciprocally reinstituting capital and its serial,
critico-practical 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
rahonis, 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 siecle
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
'critico-practical' orientations (Lyotard 1973: 24) and
overcoming the strategic and tactical deficit of re-action,
re-sistence, and fighting rear-guard actions to re-establish
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 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 antinature, 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
~mmanent 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,
technoepistemic 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
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 1 993b: 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 systemcrashes 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
Humboldt-Habermas (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' (Freud 1920: 31 1): the apparatus
returns to nature, or rather, like an enzyme, is denatured, as it
disaccumulates past the threshold of death; 'never fear,' adds
Baubrillard 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,'
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 CyDercapital's
historical liquefactions, making the real reel.
The Chinese virus was unfolding around them, Polychrome
shadow countless translucent layers shifting and recombining.
Proteam enormous it towered abo~e 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- Rewired-Derelicted' 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:
neo-capitalism (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 1 993a: 240).
That is, the real, the reproduction, the facile identitarian
propagation, the negative feedback, the entire
deregulated/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 ts incipient Nietzschean philosophical
fascism: the Deiief 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
engulis 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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