10 April 2019
Adjacent Dimensions
Alien Rhythms
Mainframe
There was only one thing that I didn't like. In the very back of the garage, near the canisters, I could see
something silvery. That hadn't been there before. Well, all right, so there was something silvery, we
couldn't go back now just because of that! I mean it didn't shine in any special way, just a little bit and in a
calm, even a gentle way. I got up, brushed myself off, and looked around. There were the trucks on the lot,
just like new. Even newer than they had been the last time I was here. And the gasoline truck, the poor
bastard was rusted through and ready to fall apart. I didn't like the looks of that tire. Its shadow wasn't
right. The sun was at our backs, yet its shadow was stretching towards us. Well, all right, it was far enough
away from us. It seemed OK, we could get on with our work. But what was the silvery thing shining back
there? Was it just my imagination? Now, the thing to do would be to light up, sit down quietly and think it
through—what’s the silver stuff above the canisters … why is the tire’s shadow like that? The Vulture
Burbridge told me something about the shadows, that they were weird but harmless. Something happens
here with the shadows. But what about that silver stuff? It looks just like a cobweb. What sort of spider
could have left it behind? I had never seen any bugs in the Zone.
—Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
What is the schema of the spider? The schema of the spider is its web, and its web is the way it occupies
space and time. … [T]ake the concept of a spider; the concept of a spider will include all of its anatomical
parts and even the physiological functions of the spider. Thus one will encounter that funny sort of organ
with which the spider makes its web. But can you deduce from it what we can now call the spatio-temporal
being, and the correspondence of the web with the concept of a spider, which is to say with the spider as
organism. It’s very curious because it varies enormously according to the species of spider. There are
cases of very extraordinary spiders that, when you mutilate one of their legs, which is nevertheless not
used for fabrication, make abnormal webs in relation to their own species, they make a pathological web.
What happened? As if a disturbance in space and time corresponded to the mutilation.
Abstract Horror
Apophenic Nightmare
Zone
Library
Abstract Machines
Nummificator
Plexplore
Syzygy
Ccru
Oeis
TX
Summon
Search
Archive
February (1)
April (1)
—Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Schema and Synthesis’, Lectures on Kant
September (1)
October (1)
September (2)
August (1)
April (1)
January (1)
June (2)
May (3)
▽
Interesting and
impressive
information,
definitely...
This blog offers a
great perspective on
the import...
Great insights on
the importance of
recycling scra...
Alienness — and the alienation that results from a confrontation with alienness — is the genesis of novelty and
change. Wherever one encounters the alien, a mutation or a transformation isn’t far behind. And yet, because
alienness involves an aspect of unknowability and unpredictability — an erasure of the familiar and the homely — it
is also one of the things in the world which makes us most afraid. We fear the different and the strange, yet we
require these things in order to evolve. This makes for a paradoxical affective relationship with the notions of
otherness and difference that alienness encompasses — a bizarre and complex orientation unifying dread and
desire. Already there is a kind of geometrical confusion in this: desire drives you forwards, while dread forces you
back. As Mark Fisher writes in The Weird and The Eerie, it’s not a simple case of ‘enjoy[ing] what scares us’. Rather,
‘it has … to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and
experience’, an affect that involves terror and distress, but isn’t wholly described by them.[0] Fisher’s invocation
of ‘the outside’ immediately brings into play the prefix ‘xeno-’, a denotation nominating what follows it as foreign
or alien — an ‘outsider’, someone or something that arrives from the outside.
Rebekah Sheldon offers the following extended etymology of the term alongside some of its contemporary
applications. Xeno—
Greek ξενο-, ξεν-, combining form of ξένος, a guest, stranger, foreigner, adj.foreign, strange; used in
various scientific and other terms including, e.g. peculiar accessories; cross-species disease; symbiosis
and parasitism; a snake genus; metamorphic mineral defacement or partial fusion; foreign rule;
disease vectors allowed to feed on pathogens in sterile laboratory environments; a type of diagnostic
comparison; cross-fertilisation; germline engineering and the products thereof; taking its origin from
outside the body, as in a disease or a tissue graft; glossolalia; emotional or sexual obsession with the
foreign; a gastropod mollusk; a kind of fish with spineless fins, scaleless skin, and a complex suckingdisk between the ventral fins; mineral deposits found at high temperatures; an inactive virus; an
armadillo; extraterrestrial life-forms or the study thereof ...
She concludes ‘[e]tymologically, xeno is trans. As graft, cut, intrusion, or excession, xeno names the movement
between, and the moving entity. It is the foreign and the foreigner, the unexpected outside, the unlike offspring,
the other within, the eruption of another meaning’.[1] Xeno- describes both a vector and an alteration: the
coincidence of transition and transformation. It thus involves a relationship between an inside and an outside,
divided (or linked) by a threshold which becomes the object of a crossing.
To better grasp this notion of outsideness that both Fisher and Sheldon call forth, it helps to understand what
constitutes the inside, or what Fisher designates as ‘standard perception, cognition and experience’.[2] He provides
a clue later in the book when he quotes from an enigmatic text first appearing the ‘Digital Hyperstition’ issue of the
Interesting and
impressive
information,
definitely...
We are Canberra’s
most trusted car
buyer, providin...
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’s infamous underground cyberzine, Abstract Culture, in 1999. The text, titled
‘The Templeton Episode’, narrates a strange experience undergone by an eccentric philosophy Professor named
Randolph Edmund Templeton. Professor Templeton is a scholar of Immanuel Kant, and while meditating, one dark
evening in his attic room, upon a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he has the unnerving sensation of not
being who he thinks he is, of a threshold being crossed. The feeling that something alien — something outside time
and space — threatens to invade, thus confirming Templeton’s hunch that Kant’s philosophy, although typically
taken to be a book about the limits of human ‘perception, cognition and experience’, if read correctly, in fact
functions as a ‘time-travelling manual’. In that moment, Templeton realises that he can use Kant's system ‘as a
guide for engineering time-synthesis’. And ‘the key’, it occurs to him, ‘is the secret of the schematism, which —
although "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul" — concerns only the unutterable Abomenon of the
Outside’.
According to Kant, our experience of the world is governed by conformity to strict cognitive, perceptual and
experiential rules. These rules give us objects, temporal succession (time experienced as a linear flow that moves
inexorably from T1 to T2 to T3) and spatial co-existence (there are consistent cartographic coordinates that exist
for everyone in the same universal space — Antarctica doesn’t disappear just because no one is perceiving it).
Human perception thus operates as an inbuilt clock and compass that systematise and universalise our experience,
guaranteeing that, even when separated by vast distances or great stretches of time, we humans think of ourselves
as inhabiting the same space, and the same historical timeline, and that this space and time function consistently
and predictably across the entirety of human experience. For us, time has only one dimension — that of a line —
and space has three.
These rules draw the bounds of the inside by constituting the edges of shared perceptual, cognitive and
experiential possibility for us as human beings. Consequently, there is a sameness that structures reality for us. Our
experience of the world is navigable and communicable because of this sameness. It determines our rhythmic
regime — a specifically anthropomorphic regime: linear time, simultaneous three-dimensional space, and
objecthood are its framing parameters — its tempo or its beat. Inside these parameters, diverse and idiosyncratic
rhythms unfold — but they never break the beat. Time remains linear; space, simultaneous. Consequently,
experience, at its most fundamental and unconscious level, is ordered, familiar, comfortable, and homely. Scaled
reassuringly to match our perceptual affordances.
It is not often that we come by experiences that threaten to disturb these patterns. Given the choice, most of us
would deliberately avoid them. ‘It makes sense’, writes Freud, that ‘repetition, the re-encountering of identity [or
sameness], is itself a source of pleasure’ — for pleasure, as Fisher helpfully glosses, ‘alway[s] refer[s] to previous
forms of satisfaction’ — it is defined by familiarity.[3] But what if this situation were inverted — the heterogeneity
and diversity that can be sustained by rhythm preceding the necessary homogeneity of the tempo? What if objects
didn’t work how you expected them to? What if the framing logic of time and space was different? What if the beat
was … eerie?
In his book, Fisher contrasts Freud’s unheimlich — the ‘uncanny’ or the ‘unhomely’ — with his own treatment of the
weird and the eerie. The unheimlich, he writes, ‘is about the strange within the familiar … it is haunted by an
outside which it circles around but can never fully acknowledge or affirm’. However, he continues: ‘[t]he weird and
the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside’.[4]
The weird and the eerie designate distinct affective tonalities related to ‘modes of perception’ or ‘modes of being’
proper to these zones of traffic, leakage, or porosity between the standardising pulse of the inside, and the
transformative rhythmicity of the outside. While the weird is related to ‘that which does not belong’ — bringing ‘to
the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled’ with it using known rules of
assimilation or intelligibility, the eerie describes the absence of a purposive agent where there should be one, just
as much as the presence of a purposive agent where there shouldn't be one. In the weird there is something extra
and unintelligible in what would otherwise be an ordinary scene — ‘an exorbitant presence, a teeming which
exceeds our capacity to represent it’; in the eerie there is a problem of misplaced action. ‘The eerie is
fundamentally tied up with questions of agency’, he writes, it clings most readily to ‘landscapes partially emptied
of the human’, where one is prompted to ask ‘What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What
kind of entity was involved? … What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?’ He identifies it with
particular acuteness in science fiction scenarios dealing with the inexplicable emptiness of outer space — and with
the implacability of terrestrial capitalism: ‘eerie impasse[s]’ arise ‘when mismatching modes of intelligence,
cognition and communication confront one another’. When brought into contact with an eerie outside agency,
‘“we” “ourselves” are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces’. Because both the
weird and eerie describe the ‘new’ in this radical way — an intrusion of alien outsideness — whether as the
operation of an eerie agency or of something in the environment which does not belong — they automatically
indicate the impossibility of knowledge and explanation: 'When knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears.'[5]
In a similar fashion to Fisher’s dismissal of the uncanny as subordinating alienness to familiarity — of merely
locating the strange within the greater frame of the familiar, of neutralising novelty in advance — Sheldon writes:
‘If the uncanny marks the hideous return as if new of what was always already known — the groundwork whose
repression allows the enclosure of a domestic interior, [the outsideness of] xeno is of its own order.’[6]
So what exactly would it mean to come into contact with this ‘order’ that is outside order? Where the weird and
the eerie reign, where the parameters that structure experience are open to wild and violent variations that efface
all knowability and predictability, that make every movement treacherous and charged with the ambiguity of desire
and dread, novelty and fate? What if moving forwards through space didn’t necessarily mean moving forwards in
time? What if ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’ were to lose their meaning entirely? What would it feel like to interface
with a spacetime — an alien rhythm — that does not follow any recognisable human pattern and whose agency
remains opaque? Who are these perverse creatures that would desire such a thing?
If you’re frequenting the right corners of the internet, you might be asked to tag yourself on a spectrum of alien
desire that looks something like this:
This chart, courtesy of 4Chan, is interesting for several reasons. First, it conceives alienness on a spectrum
devolving from traditional humanoid morphology to the wildly unfathomable monstrosity of ‘multidimensional
eldritch horrors’ in seven successive stages. Second, it figures this desire sexually — a suggestion which becomes
graphically more untenable via the usual human means as monstrosity increases. And third, it implies a distinct —
almost Orphic — threshold which, once crossed, offers no opportunity of return.
As the hypothetical object of one’s desire modulates across the spectrum from ‘humans’ to ‘unconventional nonhumanoids’, it correlates with certain intensities of xenophilia corresponding to an amplitude of sameness or
difference. Those for whom anything beyond general humanity, with perhaps a hint of lime-green skin, is
unappetising are designated as ‘Normies’, shading into the still dimorphically-sexed ‘Monster Girl Fan’ (or 'Monster
Boy Fan' — this, as is stated in the bottom left-hand corner, is the ‘female edition’) with the transition to the fairly
typical, traditional alien imaginary including ‘Greys’ and ‘Little Green Men’ — before emphatically crossing a
boundary at the point where the human face starts to lose its distinctness, a desire for ‘Teratomorphic Humanoids’
ominously classified as ‘Trapped with No Way Back’. ‘Open-Minded Alien Lovers’ have a penchant for increasingly
anomalous forms, moving from ‘Borderline Humanoids’ in which a retreating anthropomorphism is concretised in
the erasure of sex organs or the addition of various non-human appendages, to ‘Conventional Non-Humanoids’,
where it disappears completely in a chimerisation of insectoid, vegetal and machinic parts. At the furthest extreme
of weirdness one encounters the realm of ‘Unconventional Non-Humanoids’: dimensionally anomalous, of
‘indefinable shape’ — a situation of strange liminal plasticity in which it becomes ‘unclear where the body starts
and ends’. The corresponding subject position is that of the ‘True Xenophile’, one caught up in a desire of that
which exceeds even form itself.
An ambiguous joke posted on a related thread reads:
"Why are monstergirls better than a real woman?"
"Because the monster is on the outside."
Here ‘xeno-’ comes into its own. Strictly defined, a xeno-morph[ē] is something that is outside form. These aliens
are at the furthest end of the spectrum — a spectrum whose logic follows an explicitly anthropomorphic order —
because they overturn this order entirely. There is no eighth classification: form, past this point, is irrelevant. Alien
desire extinguishes itself with the dissolution of form into the conditions of form: the laws of space and time. These
extreme xenomorphs — formal outsiders — encapsulate something close to what weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft
gestures towards when he writes of his characters’ wishes ‘[t]o shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of
time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside.’[7]
What I want to suggest here, applying Fisher and Sheldon’s concepts of outsideness as something beyond the
fundamentally human rhythm of linear temporality and simultaneous, three-dimensional spatiality, to this spectrum
of alien desire, is that the truly alien, the most extreme and productive mutant edge of alienating difference, is
the alien understood as a space-time — a rhythm — a temporal cartography — an eerie beat —that operates in a
way that is wholly other to the standardised ‘perception, cognition and experience’ that spontaneously structures
reality for us humans. A ‘True Xenophile’ is a lover of alien rhythm.
This is a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker. The eponymous stalker is just about to enter the ‘Zone’
— a space in which physical laws do not seem to apply in the same way as they do in the outside world’ — or better
the inside world, for once they have crossed the border of the Zone, the stalker, and his customers, known only as
the ‘Writer’ and the ‘Physicist’, find themselves beholden to a spatio-temporal logic that is entirely different from
our own — a realm of extreme xenomorphia — the weird and eerie utternullity of an obscure and alien beat.
[8] Tarkovsky’s Stalker is just one particular treatment of what has now become a persistent theme in
contemporary science fiction — something we might call the ‘zone’ trope, first innovated by Arkady and Boris
Strugatsky (who also wrote the screenplay for Stalker) in their 1972 novel, Roadside Picnic. More recently,
invocations of the ‘zone’ can be found in M. John Harrison’s Nova Swing; Jeff Vandemeer’s Southern Reach
Trilogy — comprising the novels, Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance — and Alex Garland’s 2018 film
Annihilation, which is based loosely on the latter.[9]
These works speculate upon the appearance of a sudden, monumental, unexplained disturbance in
anthropomorphic spacetime known variously as ‘the Zone,
or 'the Shimmer’.
Across their borders, a — sometimes fatal — unpredictability reigns. Space and time no longer function following
intelligible human laws. Their rhythm is altogether inhuman. ‘Scale and perspective [are] impossible to
achieve.’[10] Decay sets in unnervingly quickly in Vandemeer’s Area X. In Roadside Picnic it only affects certain
objects, while for others, time seems to run in reverse. Compasses and watches are ineffectual. Gravity is
fractious. Radio waves, light waves and genetic information partake in inexplicable exchanges under a strange logic
of transversal refraction.
The environment changes suddenly and inexplicably, and cause-effect relations are indecipherable — if they even
apply at all. ‘You can’t get change less ordered’, remarks Ascheman, a specialist detective in the Saudade Site
Crime unit, to professional stalker and erstwhile site criminal, Vic Serotonin, a suspect in the case he has been
assigned to. ‘Look at it, so raw and meaningless! The wrong physics, they say, loose in the universe. Do you
understand that? I don’t.’[11]
In each of these texts, traffic into and out of the zone is monitored, policed and incompetently regulated by a local
military apparatus. Its prime targets are the stalkers — social outcasts of some kind or another — who harbour an
enigmatic attraction to the area. Risking their lives every time they cross the border, the stalkers survive by
smuggling definitionally ‘weird’ artefacts back to the ordinary world and selling them on the black market, or by
offering their services to tourists, who, for similarly arcane reasons, find themselves ensorcelled by the zone’s
strange allure — it is for this reason that the citizens of Saudade refer to Vic Serotonin as a ‘travel agent’. In
Vandermeer and Garland’s Annihilation, the figure of the stalker is replaced by the participants of a series of
secretive, experimental military expeditions: men and women deployed into the zone by a dysfunctional and
authoritarian martial organization known as the ‘Southern Reach’. In both the trilogy and the film, the first ten
expeditions are deemed failures, tallying a collective survivor count of zero. It is only with the eleventh and twelfth
expeditions that someone makes it back alive. The first of these is a soldier, the second a biologist. But whether or
not they can be said to have returned ‘intact’ remains an open question.
The stalkers make maps but they rarely prove useful, if not downright deceptive. In Tarkovsky’s zone, the
serpentine line is the shortest path, and all the stalkers know that one can never go back the way one came.
‘You’re saying we get out by going deeper in?’ confirms the physicist in Garland’s Annihilation.
The only way out is through. The travel agents in Nova Swing rely on nothing more determinate than chance to
make it across the event site’s coruscating border alive: ‘No one knew a dependable route through the aureole …
or, if they made it through, where they would end up inside. They weren’t even sure if inside/outside concepts had
meaning.’[12] ‘What’s outside the border when you’re inside it?’ asks a scientist at Southern Reach, ‘What is the
border when you’re inside it? What is the border when someone is outside it? Why can’t the person inside see the
person outside?’[13]
Does the world they have left even exist after they enter the zone? Intra-zone temporal logic is just as displaced in
comparison to the ordinary world as it is spatially. Time passes at an accelerated pace.
In Roadside Picnic, the zone reverses entropy, reanimating the dead buried long ago in an ancient cemetery that
has since become part of its territory, and offers an inexhaustible power supply in the perpetual motion machines
or 'spacell batteries' the stalkers retrieve from the debris to sell to the military and unscrupulous local
entrepreneurs. ‘[T]he spacells violate the first principle of thermodynamics, and the corpses, the second; that’s the
only difference.’[14] It yields up impossible objects — like Roadside Picnic’s ‘black sparks’ — ‘If you shine a light at
[one of these] bead[s], the light will be emitted after a pause, and the length of the pause depends on the weight
of the ball, its size, and a number of other parametres, while the frequency of the emitted light is always less than
the original frequency. What does this mean? Why? There’s an insane idea that these black sparks are actually vast
expanses of space — space with different properties from our own …’ — or the coveted ‘full empty’ retrieved by Red
Schuhart, at the cost of his best friend’s life.[15]
Yet perhaps the most unsettling feature of the Zone, the event site, Area X, and the Shimmer, is that they are
expanding — their alien rhythms comprising not only a new logic of space, time and objects … but an inhuman logic
of reproduction.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud posited the existence of two kinds of drives — a life drive and a death drive
— that would be explanatory for the history of evolution. In developing his theory, he drew on the work of
evolutionary biologist August Weismann. Weismann hypothesised that multicellular organisms were structured
around two distinct elements: the germ plasm — a primary biological continuity containing all hereditary genetic
information, and the soma plasm — comprising the individual bodies of organisms and their environments, linked
and divided by a threshold that would become known as the 'Weismann barrier' — a link because the organism is
determined unilaterally by the differences latent in the continuum of the germ plasm, and a division because the
unilateral nature of genetic expression — flowing from the germ plasm to the soma plasm — excludes the influence
of environmental changes feeding-back into the germ plasm from the soma plasm. Despite complicated
divergences, both Freud and Weismann's theories posit a similar structure: a primary, enduring, and undead outside
is related unilaterally to a secondary, ephemeral and temporary inside. In both, however, the primary force is
cumulative, straight-forwardly hereditary, and ultimately entropic.
The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, would take both Freud and Weismann's theories and alter them whilst
retaining the general structure of a primary, continuous outside related to a formally-constrained inside: the
prevailing operation is negentropic rather than entropic, virtual rather than possible, and the germ plasm evolves
topologically, through folds, rather than in a linear fashion. Evolution, following Deleuze, is transversal — a
cyberpozzed Weismannianism — in which the howling continuum of the biocosmic germline assembles series of
multiplicities. Not the straight line of single, taut, thread, but a pathological web. 'Am I confused when I remember,
or try to, the time before I was born?' wonders one of Vic Serotonin's zone-cursed clients.[16] It is something akin to
what Sheldon describes in her definition of 'xeno-' as 'cross-fertilisation' and 'germline engineering' via intrusion or
alliance with the outside. Or, as Luciana Parisi has put it,
[t]he forces that actually produce experience are for the most part without form or law. Thus, an
actual difference, conveying the contingency of experience, is constituted through a chance
In Roadside Picnic, objects inside the zone ‘multiply by division’ while the zone reproduces itself through vectors of
infiltration, mutation (the stalkers' children, like Red Schuhart's furry daughter, or Tarkovsky's stalker's lame child,
are 'no longer human') and contagion. Roadside Picnic's outlaw medic, known fondly, as 'The Butcher' rapidly
becomes famous as 'the first doctor on the planet to specialise in nonhuman illnesses of man', while the black
market economy ensures the circulation of the zone through the alien technologies (not only spacells, empties and
black sparks, but the 'hell slime', 'K-twenty-three' and 'white rings') smuggled by the stalkers beyond its heavily
guarded perimeter, so that 'all that used to be in the Zone will [finally] settle in the outside world'.[18] Nova Swing's
event site is notorious for its 'daughter code', a biodigital plague that disassembles its victims and rearranges them.
'Everything ran wild inside in him, as if his body was trying to be something else but had no plan: his organs
switched on and off at random, his bones didn't make platelets anymore. [It was] some hybrid virus which selfassembled in his cells from three or four kinds of RNA and a manufactured gene no one could identify.' [19]
The characters who find themselves inexplicably drawn to the zone — the expedition participants, the stalkers, the
travel agents, and their clientele — are collectively animated by a drive towards the unknown. Searching for the
very thing that breaks up their human rhythm, the source of their automatisms, and an indefinable dissolution
synonymous with a loss of the thing that maintains this restriction — the self. Memory ceases to function; names
evaporate in the zone. Those who enter it finish up by becoming something else, subject to invasion by exterior
forces. ‘You want to know what it’s like in there?’ asks seasoned stalker Emil Bonaventura of his protégé in Nova
Swing, ‘The fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something of it. Then guess what, it starts making
something of you.’[20]
Connection wrought through division.
Annihilation - Dr. Ventress At …
In the final book of Vandermeer's trilogy, standing in the ruined mirror lighthouse of the Lost Coast, a replica of the
lighthouse that seeded Area X — the two shores separated by a black stretch of sea — the biologist watches her
double approach her from the other side, transfixed by its 'glory and monstrosity', its 'many glowing eyes' — 'a living
constellation ripped from the night sky' ... :
In the multiplicity of that regard, she saw what [the eyes] saw. She saw herself, standing there,
looking down. She saw that the biologist now existed across locations and landscapes, those other
horizons gathering in a blurred and rising wave —
— there was connection.[21]
A cosmic love of, or alliance with, the xenomorph. The profound and annihilating sorcery of an alien rhythm.
Notes
Alien Rhythms was a talk given at ALL Club in Shanghai, March 2019.
[0] Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 8.
[1] Rebekah Sheldon, ‘XENO’, The Occulture, January 22, 2017, http://www.theocculture.net/xeno/.
[2] Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie, 8.
[3] Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Ontario: Broadview, 2011), 75; Fisher,
The Weird and the Eerie, 13.
[4] Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie, 10.
[5] Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie, 9; 10; 61; 11; 110; 115; 11; 62.
[6] Sheldon, ‘XENO’, http://www.theocculture.net/xeno/.
[7] H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in the Darkness.
[8] Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie, 125.
[9] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, trans., Olena Bormanshenko (London: Gollancz, 2012); Stalker, dir.
Andrei Tarkovsky (1979, Moscow, Dom Kino); M. John Harrison, Nova Swing, (London: Gollancz, 2006); Jeff
Vandermeer, Annihilation, (London: Fourth Estate, 2014); Jeff Vandermeer, Authority, (London: Fourth Estate,
2014); Jeff Vandermeer, Acceptance, (London: Fourth Estate, 2014); Annihilation, dir. Alex Garland (2018, US and
China, Paramount Pictures; International, Netflix). Massive thanks to @cockydooody who got me thinking about the
zones and introduced me Nova Swing.
[10] Harrison, Nova Swing, 163.
[11] Harrison, Nova Swing, 44.
[12] Harrison, Nova Swing, 115.
[13] Vandermeer, Acceptance, 42.
[14] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, 141.
[15] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, 137; 45.
[16] Harrison, Nova Swing, 75; 85.
[17] Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex (London: Continuum, 2004), 51.
[18] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, 69; 147; 138; 85.
[19] Harrison, Nova Swing, 114.
[20] Harrison, Nova Swing, 11.
[21] Vandermeer, Acceptance, 195. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004), 278.
Vandermeer, Acceptance, 6. Credit for the ending is due to Beau Deurwaarder, who made this connection first, and
who is always, somehow, on the same weird wave.
Posted by AI at 02:35
Labels: Aliens, Annihilation, Ccru, D&G, Deleuze, Desire, Doubles, H.P. Lovecraft, Kant, Mark
Fisher, Nova Swing, Outside, Rebekah Sheldon, Roadside Picnic, Stalker, Templeton, The Weird
and The Eerie, Xeno, Xenomorphs
No comments:
Post a Comment
To leave a comment, click the button below to sign in with Google.
SIGN IN WITH GOOGLE
Newer Post
Home
Older Post
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
Numerous Under One. Awesome Inc. theme. Powered by Blogger.