WHITE MAGIC
Sarkon:
What you would call white magic is a program of confinement:
it operates by marking boundaries, setting limits, stopping
things from happening (and also, making things happen; it has
a natural affinity with a certain Creationism). The other kind of
magic is a tactics of fleeing, of communicability and
propagation. Instead of asking, how do we keep things out? it
asks, how can we take flight?
Confinement magic is fundamentally concerned with
protection, but it is not necessarily an art of caution. And if flee
magic is given to risk, it is not prone to recklessness. To
survive out there is very … exacting.
- Dr Sarkon, Pandemonium, from the forthcoming
Ko:labboration between Ccru and 0[rphan] D[rift]
XOR – tyrannical God of exclusive disjunctions (x or y)
XAND – demon of inclusive disjunctions (x and y and …)
Deleuze:
A flight is a sort of delirium. To be delirious .. is exactly to go
off the rails ... There is something demonaical or demonic in a
line of flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods
have fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and
codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries and surveys.
What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one
interval to another.
(D 40)
Gibson:
‘How were they weird?’
‘Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos ‘n’ shit.
Wanna know something Moll?’
‘What?’
‘They’re right.’"
(MLO 179)
DOMAIN.
In Gibson’s Neuromancer, the Freud-family photo goes full
screen, wrapping you up in seamless digital simulation. As the
Chinese Kuang virus begins to eat into the Tessier-Ashpool
ICE, the comaplexed Case, beguiled by the digital ghost of his
dead lover Linda Lee, is sucked into a simulated Dreamworld
pasted together from his own memories: hypercapital
interiority. Neuromancer (Cartesian imp of the hyperverse and
Baudrillard-seducer) doesn’t want to let Case Out. "It would
have been real, Case." Neuromancer wants in. But
Wintermute (Uttunul avatar) wants Out. And the ICE is
breaking up ….
Need your own space? Axiomatic Systems (incorporated) will
provide you with a fully-functioning Oedi-pass to let you into
an Ideal home. Happy now in your dream kitchen? Careful
with what’s crawling the walls …..
NOMO. NO METHOD.
Willard to Kurtz:
"I see no method here at all."
When he gets to the end of the river , and enters the coiling
heartlessness of the K-Jungle, Willard can see only a primitive
throwback (not the fastforward into hypercapital delirium that
Kurtz, cutting-edge commercial operator, has already
time-travelled to). Even though he’s fatally engaged in a
process of becoming-animal, Willard’s (western) military
discipline prevents him from appreciating the diabolic
intelligence/ animal cunning of the Kurtz swarmachine.
NeuroMan habitually confuses precision with topdown
constriction. Nomads don’t make the same mistake,
understanding the difference between training and discipline,
rules and regulations.
"This is how we sorcerers operate. Not following a logical
order, but following alogical consistencies of compatibilities.
[…] Although there is no preformed logical order to becomings
and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is
that they are not used after the fact, that they can be applied
in the course of events, that they be sufficient to guide us
through the dangers."
(TP 250)
The "martial arts do not adhere to a code, as an affair of the
State, but follow ways, which are so many paths of the affect."
(TP 400) Out in the Nomo Zone, you "dance your way into
constriction. Diagonals corner you, creating a new kind of
tension that doesn’t resolve in expected places." (MBS 107)
THE AOE
The Architectonic Order of the Eschaton has been engaged in
"dubious battle" (Milton) [ Outcome uncertain] with
Pandemonium for aeons Now.
"[T]he State is not defined by the existence of chiefs; it is
defined by the conservation of organs of power. The concern
of the State is to conserve. Special institutions are needed to
enable a chief to become a man of the State…"
(TP 357)
THE FUZZ.
"Here," said Sir Christopher Stephens, Esteemed AOE
Puppet Master, and First Secretary of the AxSys Secret Police
(the Fuzz), " we encourage self-expression, personal pride,
and the politics of difference. P’lice yourself, is our motto. Our
goal is simple:
Strategic Fuzzification. We can afford a bit of latitude
these days. A little organized chaos is good for the
constitution. And a few – political – squabbles never did
much harm, did they? Just remember, secrets are for
the Elect. They are our burden, not a privilege. Ask
yourself, do the GP really want to confront what’s
bubbling, seething and foaming behind those nice four
walls they inhabit? I think not." Stephens points to the
three monkeys behind him. "Remember the law of the
Three. See no Evil, Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil. Keep It
shut. For your own Good, and everyone else’s. I take it
no-one wants to end up like Kurtz or Sarkon."
WHO SENDS THE DREAMS? (MLO 265)
"What we’re trying to keep out is now called schizophrenia by
some, but we have confronted It in many forms, many Times;
Its names are Legion. Never forget the basic problem: what is
to confine someThing? Which is the same question as: what
is it for It to escape? Spatial constriction cannot guarantee the
success of our operations. Remember Hamlet: ‘I could be
bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite
space, were it not that I had bad dreams.’ It’s the bad dreams
we have to be careful of, gentlemen. Our resources should
always be concerned with blocking signal. They can do what
the fuck they like, go wherever they fucking please, provided
they don’t make Contact. "
SPACE INVASTION
K-space produces wormholes in anthropomorphic
space-time, slipping the Net of the perceptual-consciousness
system by simulating a spatiality it feels at home in:
"it’s not a place. It only feels like it is." (MLO 188) Right in the
heart of MicroSoft simpower, Aleph Null incubates
Continuum-[Sarkon] Horror. "Gentry said that the Count was
jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft; he
thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that
were true, the thing’s storage capacity was virtually infinite [...]
‘He could have anything in there,’ Gentry said, [...] ‘A world.
Worlds. [...] If this is aleph-class biosoft, he literally could have
almost anything in there, he could have an approximation of
everything ...’"
(MLO 162-163)
Q-ENERGY.
"[H]allucinations, whether induced by psychosis, hypnosis,
drugs, toxins, etc. may be merely quantitatively different from
what we see, not qualititatively so. In other words, too much is
emanating from the neurological apparatus of the organism,
over and beyond the structural, organizing necessity [¼ ] No
name entities or aspects begin to appear, and since the
person does not know what they are – that is, what they’re
called or what they mean – he cannot communicate with other
persons about them. The breakdown of verbal communication
is a fatal index that somewhere along the line the person is
experiencing reality in a way too altered to fit into his own prior
worldview and too radical to allow empathic linkage with other
persons."
(SRPKD 172)
Stephens: "better a binned schizophrenic than a dead martyr."
THE CHANGING OF THE GUARD.
Two millennia of uninterrupted temporal power stiffened with a
healthy dose of English reserve means that Christopher
Stephens never has to raise his voice. Naturally, he finds any
display of excitement extremely vulgar and distasteful.
Stephens’ magic is a certain charm, which you find irresistible
even when he is subjecting you to the most excruciating
humiliations. He is very attractive to women. Stephens’ is an
art of poise, a very delicate operation. Have you ever tried to
battle a polytendrilled abomination whilst simultaneously
sipping claret?
HAND TO TENDRIL COMBAT.
Stephens’ problem is simply this: how to get close – so close to the Enemy without becoming It. His basic maxim is: Don’t
look. Or, at least, don’t look directly. Theseus in the lair of the
Gorgon. Stephens uses his shield (the most ultra-advanced
cyber-optical hypercontrol technologies) to screen the
abomination, seeing it only through a scanner darkly. Yet the
cutting edge of DigiGenetech cuts both ways. Sarkon Horror:
microgridding space-time only produces more Mesh. More
intervals in which demons can grow. It’s a full-time job keeping
them out.
It’s Sarkon’s lack of discretion - following the Cantor-route
from Enlightenment royal science into darkside schizophrenia
– that revolts Stephens. In Stephens’ (Sloterdijk) Cynicism, the
ostensibly distinct operations of transcendental critique and
practical reason fuse and reveal their essential identity. The
supposedly ethtical command "Don’t Look" flips into the
transcendental statement: "You won’t see." Any contact with
the Entity, and it becomes you.
ONLY A FOOL WOULD SAY THAT.
Ask yourself this:
why do you always MeSs up? Inducing embarrassment and
humiliation is a precise art, and one the Stephens-cops excel
in (what do you think they teach them at Public School? What
chance have you got against a tie and a crest?). "How do you
make someone feel stupid? - You present to him all the times
he talked and acted and felt stupid again and again any
number of times fed into the combo of the of calculating
machine geared to find more and more images of stupidity
disgust propiation grief apathy death- The recordings leave
electromagnetic patterns - That is any situation that causes
rage will magnetize rage patterns and draw around the rage
word and image recordings- Or some disgusting sex practice
once the connection is made in childhood whenever the
patterns are magnetized by sex desire the same word and
image will be presented - And so forth-" (NE 69) As long as
you haven’t cracked the MaSter-Code, they can play you like
a record. Only a Fool would confuse ROM interactivity in the
Gated dungeon with free action. The illusion of choice, the
choice of illusion. If you believe you’re master of your own
destiny, you haven’t hit the AOE OS (Gibson ICE) that’s
running you. All "free" agents work for the Fuzz.
GET THE MESS-AGE
McLuhan says that the one thing fish don’t see is water, i.e.
the basic conditions of their own environment. NeuroMan’s
environment is (Baudrillard) Code, the infoNet webbed out of
synChronised supra-territorial Time management and
gridSpace hyperControl machineries.
"In every field we are tested, probed and sampled; the
method is ‘tactical’ and the sphere of communication
‘tactile’. Not to mention the ideology of ‘contact,’ which,
in all its forms, seeks to replace the idea of social
relations. A whole strategic configuration revolves
around the test (the question/answer cell) as it does
around a molecular command-code."
(SED 64)
TRANSMAT.
Despite being an Ultra-Adept Grand Wizard of the
Architectonic Order, Kant performed a service for Xand by
delineating the basic Operating System of the
subject-simulation machine, but locked Things back in by
remaining a Minister of the Interior. Understanding that to get
Out, you’ve gotta know the codes, TRANSMAT steals into the
Kantian program, and uses the hacked system to burrow
routes Outside. It’s a matter of precision engineering, attuning
the antennae to particular wavelengths. Sleaze and mut8, as
they say in the Crypt.
JUNGLE AND K-WAR.
K-attack. Mao: One spark can start a prairie fire. In
cybercapital, you never know where Things will flee next, or
where the Enemy’s coming from. Memeplex cultural viruses
spread across the sub(merged)(anti) socius like wildfire.
Haraway:
"even the most reliable Western individuated bodies, the mice
and men of a well-equipped laboratory, neither stop nor start
at the skin, which is itself something of a teeming jungle
threatening illicit fusions, especially from the perspective of a
scanning electron microscope."
(BPB 215)
Beneath the organism’s vestigial character armour, on the
blindside of Oedipal subjectivity, the hypertechnics of Control
and Escape fight out close-up skintactical K-time wars .
"Dissimulating the future in the ultra-short duration of live
television, intensive time thus replaces in importance that
extensive time where the future was still laid out in the long
duration of weeks and months to come. The duel of the
offensive and the defensive thus loses its actuality, the attack
and the riposte tend to be confused in a techno-logistical mix
where decoys and counter-measures never cease to
proliferate, soon acquiring their autonomy, while the image
itself becomes a high performance weapon more effective
than that which it was supposed to represent."
(DS 176)
HYPERPREDICTION, HYPERADDICTION,
HYPERACTIVITY.
One of Burroughs’ key insights is his understanding of the
fundamentally intertwined functioning of Control and Addiction
systems in the latest phase of Net power; a "cybernetic and
informational" […] aggregate which includes both subjection
and enslavement taken to extremes, as two simultaneous
parts that constantly reinforce and nourish each other." (TP
458) Parelleling Deleuze-Guattari’s view that "modern power
is not at all reducible to the classical alternative ‘repression or
ideology’ but implies processes of normalization, modulation,
modeling and information" (TP 458) , Burroughs shows that
the injection of "artificial desire" is far more effective
instrument of Control than the imposition of brute force. "A
functioning police state needs no police." (NL 41) "It works so
much better when you want it." (FC 2) Stephens: "Don’t go to
them, get them to come to us. Best of all, get them to do our
job for us. Give ‘em enough rope."
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.
Both Baudrillard and Burroughs recognize that Cybercapital
has upgraded social control from Taylorist robozombification
into long lead liberal automonitoring junkie-vampirization,
capturing, formatting and inducing desire into programmable
loops rather than repressing it. Watch yourself. You get stuck
in ruts, habit forms. Videodromological hypercontrol has been
inside you from the start, since it’s travelled to the end to
capture you on the way back: "social control by means of the
end [...] is replaced by means of prediction, simulation,
programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation, all
governed, however, by the code." (SED 60) .Baudrillard’s
system assumes that the worst nightmares of Marx, Butler,
McLuhan and DeLanda have come true: the Gibson/ McLuhan
vision of "mankind’s extended nervous system, the electronic
consensus-hallucination of cyberspace" (BC 197) has become
an undead hyperparasite of mammalian vivisystems,
vampirizing the human hosts it reformats as its sex-organ
slaves.
DNA and "molecular cybernetics" provide the ominous model
for total bio-cybernetic control by "stimulated, simulated and
anticipated response" (SED 67): get to the code and you run
everything. Cybernetics had always been about anticipation; in
order to hit a moving target, the anti-aircraft weaponry Wiener
had worked on needed to predict not where the target was at
the point when the missile was launched, but where its would
be at the point of impact. Hence the slogan of Control is,
"Don’t strike where your enemy is, strike where it will be."
Hypercontrol tends towards the production of even tighter
feedback loops; its slogan, then, would be "Never strike where
your enemy will be, kill its parents." (BA 8) Cybernetic
anticipation is always double-edged; suggesting not only
prediction, but determination: "self-fulfilling prophecy" (SED
67), as Baudrillard has it. Yet this process itself makes
prophecy moot, precisely because it makes any effective
delineation of causal determination impossible: "the whole
traditional world of causality" with its "distinction between
cause and effect, between active and passive, between
subject and object, between the ends and the means" (SS 31)
has been superceded by a logic of "code." White magical
capture : to be in the system is already to be processed by it.
Consider the opinion poll. The question that concerned
opinion in the "political class" worries about - do polls affect
voting behaviour? - is unanswerable. "Polls manipulate the
undecidable. Do they affect votes? True of false? Do they
yield exact photographs of reality, or of mere tendencies, or a
refraction of this reality in a hyperspace of simulation whose
curvature we do not know? True or false? Undecidable." (SED
66) Dubious.
Where Control targets the future, Hypercontrol targets the
future by altering (what will have been) its past, except that, by
now, the "past", like every other marker of sequential time, has
been liquidated by the system’s "retroeugenics" (BA 8). There
is only the time of the system:
"Finality is no longer at the end, there is no more finality, nor
any determinacy. Finality is there in advance, inscribed in the
code."
(SED 59)
The most effective hexes conceal the way they entrap you.
White magic hides itself behind layers of bluff good sense
("Magic? Come now. Lighten up. Get yourself a girlfriend." )
Postmodernity is screen culture ("When I point the camera at
the SCREEN, then the screen itself appears, with whatever is
on the screen at the time – which is the screen itself, with
whatever is on the screen at time – which is the screen itself,
with – " (GEB 492); terminal rerunning, Self-referentiality.
We’re in what both McLuhan and Public Enemy call the
Mess-Age. But what’s lurking on the other side of the screen?
And which side are you on?
TIMESTRETCHED DOUBLE.
"The lapse occurs frequently at breakfast and the cup
dropped and overturned on the table is its well-known
consequence. The absence lasts a few seconds; its beginning
and its end are sudden. The senses function, but are
nevertheless closed to external impressions. The return being
just as sudden as the departure, the arrested word and action
are picked up again where they have been interrupted.
Conscious time comes together automatically, forming a
continuous time without apparent breaks. For these absences,
which can be quite numerous – hundreds every day most
often pass completely unnoticed by others around – we’ll be
using the word "picnolepsy" (from the Greek, picnos :
frequent). However, for the picnoleptic, nothing really has
happened the missing time never existed. At each crisis,
without realising it, a little of his or her life simply escaped."
(AD 1-2)
Broken rings . (TP 356)
Your identity is the ticket that exploded. Occulted Id Entity.
Something else cuts [in]/ [Out] while you go about your daily
business, abducting you a hundred [thousand [million [trillion
[countless [innumerable]]]] times a day, but by the time you’re
aware, It’s gone. You always patch things together, but
ThroughOut, a split second is always escaping (you).
[The] element of exteriority
KEY WORDS. All words are magic words. As both Burroughs
and Spinoza insisted, words are not signifiers but association
blocks, neuronic triggers, affect vectors. As long as you think
there’s anything ineffable about words, you’ll always be a
Stephens-meat- puppet. (Stephens: "I detest phenomenology,
but it has a certain political expediency.") Be careful what
you’re saying. Every word you speak is a geological event at
the level of palate tectonics. Not a speech-act, but a seismic
reverberation. When you talk, you make me cringe (Tricky).
White magic Xorcery operates by organizing words into
language, installing new (micro and macro) pseudosignifying
regimes in the heart of capitalism’s "profoundly illiterate" (AO
240) sub-Culture, and spreading Fuzz (by ex-communicating
everything that connects). Xandist Sorcerery goes in the other
direction, melting words into Things, and building sensitive
side-communicating Meshwork that spreads. Riding capital’s
essential hostility to signification, It devolves language into
words, words into (animal) noises, and noises into Klangs
(anorganic semiotics). (For instance: Have you looked at a
comic lately? The narrative and images float on a graphosonic
semiotic, tracking becoming-animals (grrrrrr!) through to
becoming-inanimate unspeakables , sometimes splicing the
two , as with Wolverine’s claws: schhkkkktkk.)
SPINAL LANDSCAPES. Thinking of your body as a box is a
spine "chilling fantasy." (BPB 224) Space is not Outside, but
inside the organism (just as on the other side, the Outside is
already inside). At some [spinal] level, you remember this.
"Oscar Domingues, a leading member of the surrealist group
in Paris, invented the technique of crushing gouache between
layers of paper. When separated they reveal eroded, rock-like
forms that touch some deeply buried memory, perhaps at
some earlier stage in the formation of the brain’s visual
centres, before the wiring is fully in place." (AE n30) Following
vectors Out from the materialist/metapyschological Freud,
Ballard’s spinal catastrophism simultaneously performs a
geotraumatic critique of (Oedipal) psychoanalysis and a
Spinozist de-territorialization of Science Fiction. The body
you’re feeling your way through an environment with is
immediately a part of that environment. Ballard anticipates
Barkerism in apprehending the human body as an ongoing
geotechnical event system, a distributed pack of tremors and
tics, in intensive (non-sequential) time, and (not a [closed]
case history). Pass through datacombs to the Outside of the
Net, where media, message and organisms (Meshscreens)
give Out, and you encounter the [pain] waves and anorganic
communication traffic that constitute the real substance of the
Barker-body.
[…] will give time a new rhythm:
ODD DOUBLES AND STRANGE LOOPS.
"One thing […] is certain: gods can turn into evil demons
when new gods oust them. When one people has been
conquered by another, their fallen gods not seldom turn into
demons in the eyes of the conqueror. ..."
(Freud; PFL 14, 400)
"Satan in the Serpent; who revolting from God, and drawing to
his side many Legions of Angels, was by command of God
driven out of Heaven with all his Crew into the great Deep. […]
Pandemonium the Palace of Satan rises, suddenly built out of
the Deep: The infernal Peers there sit in Council." (Milton)
Baudrillard follows Milton and Freud in describing the arrival of
Pandemonium, but instead of adopting the POV of Milton’s
"apparently victorious" Christianity or Freud’s dis-illusioned,
burned-out disenchanted modernity, he simulates the gaze of
the primitives whose "ancient gods […] Christianity verteufeult,
that is, transformed into demons." (SED 142)
For Baudrillard, the rise of "psychological and pyschoanalytic
interpretation" (SED 140) as the authorized forms of capitalist
realism bring an end to "the primitive double." (SED 140)
"Shadow, spectre, reflection, image" (SED 140), the primitive
double haunts post-monotheistic, psychoanalytic culture,
which appropriates it as a "crude prefiguration of the soul"
(SED 140). Yet "soul and consciousness have everything to
do with a principle of the subject’s unification, and nothing to
do with the primitive double. On the contrary, the historical
advent of the ‘soul’ puts an end to a proliferating exchange
with spirits and doubles which, as a direct consequence, gives
rise to another figure of the double, wending its way beneath
the surfaces of western reason." (SED 141) This - modern,
western - double is inextricably connected with alienation; it is
the double as the lost part of the self, "a fantastic ectoplasm,
an archaic resurgence issuing from guilt and the depths of the
unconscious." (SED 141) The primitive double, however, is
radically non-alienated because it "is a partner with whom the
primitive has a personal and concrete relationship, sometimes
happy and sometimes not." (SED 141) Whereas the westerner
always apprehends his double as the missing half of a
fragmented unity, the primitive has a reciprocal,
non-symmetrical relationship with his double. The primitive
"really can trade, as we are forever forbidden to do, with his
shadow (the real shadow, not a metaphor), as with some
original, living thing in order to converse, protect and conciliate
this tutelary or hostile shadow. The shadow is precisely not
the reflection of an ‘original’ body, it has a full part to play, and
it is consequently not an ‘alienated’ part of the subject, but one
of the figures of exchange." (SED 141) Alienation, Baudrillard
says, only comes into play when there is an internalization of
an "abstract agency [...] - whether psychological (the ego and
the ego-ideal), religious (God or the soul) or moral
(conscience and the law) to which everything else is
subordinated." (SED 141) Once the introjection of these
agencies is achieved, the double ceases to be an ambivalent
figure and becomes associated (only) with death and
madness, as Baudrillard establishes by reference to a whole
tradition of horrific literature:
With the internalization of the soul and consciousness (the
principle of identity and equivalence), the subject undergoes a
real confinement, similar to the confinement of the mad in the
seventeenth century described by Foucault. It is at this point
that the primitive thought of the double as exchange and
continuity is lost, and the haunting double comes to the fore
as the subject’s discontinuity in death and madness. ‘Whoever
sees his devil, sees his death’. A vengeful and vampiric
double, an unquiet soul, the double begins to prefigure the
subject’s death, haunting him in the very midst of his life. This
is Dostoevsky’s double, or Peter Schlemihl’s, the man who
lost his shadow. We have always interpreted the double as a
metaphor of the soul, consciousness, native soil, and so on.
Without this incurable idealism and without being taken as a
metaphor, the narrative is so much more extraordinary. We
have all lost our real shadows, we no longer speak to them,
and our bodies have left with them.
(SED 142)
Freud’s double is resolutely organicised, the darkside of
subjectivity lightened up: "originally an insurance against the
destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of
death’"(PFL 14 356); "probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first
‘double’ of the body" (PFL 14 356), it must "have sprung from
the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism
which dominates the mind of the child and primitive man."
(PFL 14 357)
This is how psychology, our authority in the depths, our own
‘next world’, this omnipotence, magical narcissism, fear of the
dead, this animism or primitive psychical apparatus, is quietly
palmed off on the savages in order then to recuperate them
for ourselves as ‘archaic traces.’ Freud does not think this is
what he said in speaking of ‘narcissitic overvaluation of ...
mental processes’. If there is such an overvaluation of one’s
own mental processes (to the point of exporting this theory, as
we have done with our morality and techniques, to the core of
every culture), then it is Freud’s overvaluation, along with our
whole psychologistic culture.
(SED 143)
Baudrillard’s very hatred of Xorcery means that he remains
complicit with White Magic, over-emphasising its powers of
capture. SomeThing’s happening… Outside …. The sealing’s
collapsing … Timeplex …. "The monster Icthyostega crawling
out of the deep in one of earth’s great transitions is a perfect
figure for the late twentieth-century bodily and technical
metamorphoses." (BPB 215)
An endless succession of
Id NOT I.D. It gets in your head. You’re l-l-l-losing Control…
Close to the edge of the Mess-age….
Cybergothic will Pulp your brain. Id Entification. "Children,
instinctual animists, identify with toys and dolls, subjecting
themselves to and projecting themselves onto the Inanimate:
every 12-year old knows that I is an other and another and
another." (MBS 106) Capitalism increasingly treats people like
IDiots (teeming desiring-swarmachines), not as juridical
subjects (boxed I’s). "[O]ffering to hook up the ad and the id...
" (UM 221) advertising in(ter)sects with Pulp philosophy and
viro[schizo]technics in the warping and weaving of catchy
bugs and crazes, asignifying (D)jingles that take over your
body by "getting on your nerves" (Eshun). Hook lines:
contagion vectors, slipping the filter-Net of the (adult)
perceptual-consciousness system. Kids are suckers for this
stuff. Getting stupID and machinic intelligence mesh in the
ko:labs where affect is synthesized and reprogrammed. The
field of Ops has deterritorialized far beyond "youth culture"
and "music" into an abstract speed culture fuelled by
infantomemes, and bred by/ breeding Krus that cargocult any
old trash into hyperstitious rufige. Gothoid computer games
and digitally-decoded soundbytes with fangs are merely the
current lines of fright of a monstrous culture that’s already
stolen your kids’ future. Back in the 60s, McLuhan feared that
TV had instantly obsolesced parental authority. Now at the
edge of hypermedia immersive Mesh, signal adults (literally)
can’t see brands names into impressionable bodies.
Coma-Zone Out. Deluged by Zer0cults with N0-Future,
(A-death addicts, DNA remixologists, Spl/Ice Girls,
cybergoths), the Stephens-Fuzz screen for backmasked
subliminals in all the latest simstims, but It’s beyond all that
Now. Already "‘Ardkore’s oscillator-riff is like the aural
equivalent of the strobe’s stop-gap photography effect. Both
zap the raver with a series of ultra-intense NOW!s. A staple of
the rave lightshow, the strobe’s flicker can trigger epileptic fits
in the susceptible." (EF 124)
Catatonic episodes or fainting spells
HI(d)JACK A BRAIN (Tricky) "We remember that in their
early games children do not distinguish at all sharply between
living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially fond
of treating their dolls like live people." (PFL 14 355) Speaking
from (t)his side of the screen, Freud already understood
Darkside Cyberpulp and K-jungle, when, in The Uncanny and
Totem and Taboo, he made the connection between children,
animism, demonics and "savages", but – typically – he put it
all down to regression. In The Drowned World, Ballard
performs an Anti-Oedipal, Barkerist decoding of the regression
model by showing that, what looks to White Man Face like
reversion, (to childhood/ savagery) is an encounter with the
lost neuronic continents contemporary in Barker Now.
Besides, capital has ironized Freud by transforming the
case-studies into a jungle of becoming-animal toy stories
(Ratman-Batman, Wolfman-Spiderman), deligitimizing any
model of regression to childhood by installing children as
experts at the frontier-zone of commoditech innovation. As the
Eterniteenagers switched out of sequential time in Cata-K
trance know, one of the bizarre Side-FX of Mesh is the
obsolescence of the Oedipus complex. Capitalism insists that
you remain a child forever. Weaving and jinking in-between
times, the Unspecified Enemy is learning new tricks, getting
younger …. and younger …. and younger…
and flashes or rushes. (TP 356)
SPINE CHILDREN. "Children are the most frequent victims,
and the situation of the young picnoleptic quickly becomes
intolerable. People want to persuade him of the existence of
events that he has not seen, though they effectively happened
in his presence; and as he can’t be made to believe them he’s
considered a half-wit and convinced of lies and dissimulation.
Secretly bewildered and tormented by the demands of those
near him, in order to find information he needs constantly to
stretch the limits of his memory. When we place a bouquet
under the eyes of the young picnoleptic, he draws not only the
bouquet but also the person who is supposed to have placed
it the vase, and even the field of flowers where it was possibly
gathered. There is a tendency to patch up sequences,
readjusting their contours to make equivalents out of what the
picnoleptic has not seen and has not been able to see, what
he remembers and what, evidently, he cannot remember and
what it is necessary to invent, to recraate, in order to lend
verisimilitude to his discursus . Later, the young picnoleptic will
himself be inclined to believe (like Sextus Empiricus) that
nothing really exists; that even if there is existence, it cannot
be described; and that even if it could be described, it could
certainly not be communicated or explained to others." (AD
2-3)
The Outside
C3i. Tridentity. Trinity. Tree-Entity. Tri-Lateral Commission.
"Listen to Colin Powell, Chief of the General Staff of the
American Arny: ‘To command, it is necessary to be in control.
And to be in control, it is necessary to be capable of
communicating. Without intelligence, any operation is destined
to failure.’" (DS 169) 1948: " The economic battlefield would
soon blur into the field of military perception, and the project of
the American communications complex would then become
explicit: it would aim at world mediatization." (AM 14)
Cybernetics begins as an arborified rhizomatics, a (Burroughs)
bioControl war film passing from WW2 SF A-A predictor tech,
through Apocalypse Now war-as-simstim and Aliens
Speculative Fantas/cide into the (Baudrillard) non-event
screened genocide of the Gulf War. "Faced with the
significance of the screen of control which has become
decisive for the stature, the scope and the very performance
of the diverse vectors of terrestrial and aerial armaments, we
may more easily infer the eminently strategic function of the
central control of information and military intelligence; this
nodal, which henceforth reunites the collection of multiple
screens, these monitors which make up the latest C3I miltary
command post (Control, Command, Communications,
Intelligence) implemented for the first time in history, during
the Gulf War, by the American military." (DC 168)
Cutting [in]/[Out]
CUT-[IN]/[OUT] – UP As Burroughs established, cut-up is
now the mode of realism most flat with capitalist multistim and
its MTV power lines. Describing the program for 1980s MTV
juxtaculture back in the Sixties, Burroughs showed that
associationist collaging can flash-cut any random image into a
neuronic series and libidinize it. "Flash from words to colors on
the association screen - Associate silently from colors to the
act - Substitute other factors for the words - Arab drum music Musty smell of erections in outhouses- Feel of orgasmColor-music-smell-fell to the million sex acts all time place -"
(NE 140 But, as both Ballard and Deleuze-Guattari have
appreciated, that’s why cut-up cannot be disruptive; it merely
traces the postmodern capitalist ecumenon. Like Baudrillard,
Ballard retains little enthusiasm for the political ambitions of
the surrealists, whose celebration of the revolutionary power
of the ludic and the random appears naive in an age where
cut-up and associated techniques of juxtaposition are routinely
deployed in even the most banal media object. Baudrillard:
"The ludic is everywhere, even in the ‘choice’ of a brand of
laundry detergent in the supermarket." (S 159) Capital,
Lyotard's "surgeon of the cities" is the greatest cut-up artist of
all. (As McLuhan had realised, when he argued that
newspapers were symbolist poems.) "Using assembly kits
constructed from photographs of (a) unidentified bodies of
accident victims, (b) Cadillac exhaust assemblies, (c) the
mouth-parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, volunteers were asked to
devise the optimum auto-crash victim." (AE 110) Impersonal
Mesh multiplicity is the real problem for tree-entity’s project of
reconfiguring cut-[in]/[Out]s as cut-ups.
[A] flash is:
BRADLY MARTIN. Conflict isn’t tension. The Fuzz love
dualistic antagonism. (Stephens: "The more they’re fighting
amongst themselves, the easier our job is." ) "At any given
time recorders fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the
use of total weapons - Like this: Take two opposed pressure
groups - Record the most violent and threatening statements
of group one with regard to group two and play back to group
two - Record the answer and play it back to group one - back
and forth between opposed pressure groups - This process is
known as 'feedback.'" (TE 55)
"the power of this affect sweeps me away." (TP356)
TRIALECTICS. Dialectics is really Three (Thesis, Antithesis,
Synthesis). It entails Trialectics, since any basic dualism also
calls for its own pseudotranscendent resolution (which in turn
serves as the basis for a new dualism (which calls for its own
pseudotranscendent resolution (which in turn …))). This is
AxSys’s basic problem: how to complete ((the catalogue) of
the) set of all sets? Apparently infinitely Self-perpetuating, the
metanoiac hunt for final transcendent layer is, by the same
token, infinitely null, and should chase its tail forever, even
though Eschatologos anticipates the termination of the
process at the Omega-Point coming-together of the
"Cybernetic godhead." (MLO 238) But something else,
someThing Dreadful, is waiting in the near future. Just
Outside.
It’s "even got God scared" (Tricky).
"… because no-one, not even God, can say in advance
whether two borderlines will string together or form a fiber,
whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over into
another given multiplicity, or even if given multiplcities will
enter symbiosis, will form a consistent, or cofunctioning,
multiplicity susceptible to transformation."
(TP 250)
Catatonia is:
Sorcerers don’t create, they participate. With someThing
"‘teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an
infectious disease, ... [a] nameless horror ‘"(TP 245). The
Unutterable. The It. The Id, "the thing, the unnamable, the
generalized decoding of all flows" (AO 153). In the Mouth of
Madness: "First it took the children, now it’s coming for us."
Makes no bones about It, there’s no talking cure for this
spine-chilling dis-ease. There’s no case for It. Only holes for It
to worm out of.
Like you.
"This affect is too strong for me." (TP 356.)
Utter.
Null.
Works Cited
AD- Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance
AE – Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (n indicates annotation
by Ballard)
AM – Virilio, The Art of the Motor, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995.
AO – Deleuze-Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R.
Lane, London: Athlone Press, 1984
BA – Grant, Burning Autopoiedipus, Abstract Culture 10,
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
BC – Gibson, Burning Chrome London: Grafton, 1986
BPB - Haraway,"The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies", in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
London: Free Association Books, 1991
D – Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson & B.
Habberjam, New York, Columbia University Press, 1987.
DS - Virilio, "Desert Screen", The Virilio Reader, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998.
EF – Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash: A Journey into Rave
Music and Dance Culture, London: Picador, 1998.
FC – Switch, Flee Control, Abstract Culture Ccru, Swarm 3,
Issue 15.
GEB – Hofstadter, Godel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden
Braid, New York: Random House 1979.
MLO - Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive
MBS – Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures
in Sonic Fiction, London: Quartet, 1998.
NE – Burroughs, Nova Express, New York: Grove Press, 1964
NL – Burroughs, The Naked Lunch, London: Paladin, 1986
PFL – Freud, Penguin Freud Library
S – Baudrillard, Seduction, New York: St. Martins Press, 1990.
SED – Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death , trans. Iain
Hamilton Grant, London/ Thousand Oaks/ New Delhi: Sage
publications, 1993
SRPKD – Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick:
Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, New York –
Random House, 1995
TE – Burroughs, The Ticket that Exploded, London: John
Calder, 1985
TP – Deleuze-Guattari, _ A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone
Press, 1988