Shanghai Frequencies Zigzags Evil Spir

AMY IRELAND 1907

1908

AMY IRELAND I have told you before that I once read in the Tarot cards that I was going to have to get into a fight against justice but that I didn’t know if justice was going to beat me down to a pulp or if it was going to be me who beat down justice. It’s me who is going to beat down justice. Your friend. I’m signing here for one last time with my own Name, and after that I will have another Name. Antonin Artaud One has been saved by and for love by abandoning love and self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the void. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari 1909

1910

AMY IRELAND Mikkel is right. Something went abruptly wrong as the hour or two we spent wandering through the People’s Park – a symmetrical puzzle of lawn that enfolds the Shanghai Museum – drew to a close. The conversation began innocently enough. We discussed archaeology, the alienation of travel and foreign languages, our experiences in different artistic and cultural milieus, xenopoetics, xenofeminism, occasionally halting to perch on a cold bench while Mikkel scrolled through illustrative specimens of editorial work on a laptop he had brought with him, before spiralling out into the surrounding streets, where fiercer topics were able to emerge. It was there, on the periphery of the low-rise neighbourhood – which I preferred to the impenetrable venerability of the park – that Mikkel divulged the intense personal experience he had had with his sister’s ordeal of mental and cellular breakdown, and her increasing loss of autonomy. He wanted to know what xenopoetics and xenofeminism had to say about that. A question to which I had no reply. Under the ever-darkening haze of the approaching Shanghai evening, the iridescent skyline of Pudong blooming into relief against the smog and grit across the breach of the river, the menace of a problem that neither of us were equal to forced its way between us and immobilized us both. I remember halting on a corner and staring down the street in silence, everything else in motion, pedestrian and bike traffic churning up the eerie brown air that inhabits the city, punctuated here and there by the tepid glow of red and yellow neon signs, and dearly wanting to be able to respond, to reassure Mikkel, to give him something meaningful to hold onto – for both of us to hold onto. But nothing came. We immedi1911

ŠUM #13 ately agreed that that was the end, and parted ways. Reading back over his narration, seven months later, when I had finally gathered the mental resources to reply, probably inadequately, to his provocations, I figured I owed him a proper response to whatever it was that had imposed itself on us there on a busy corner of Guangxi Lu. That moment manifested, for me, not so much as a blank, but as an acute instinct to flee. To lose Mikkel and that conversation in the awakening animation of the surrounding streets, and to find respite in the anonymity and estrangement of a foreign city – one whose population is larger and denser than that of my entire home country – and in the succour of constant movement, without purpose or destination; a perpetual trajectory towards a horizon I would never arrive at nor understand, and which was coincident with the rupture I was also running from; a vertigo that is always at the beginning and always at the end. The only legible mark of the fact that something – nothing – had happened. This movement of flight is uniquely comforting. There are few situations from which it fails to lure me. The ever-present temptation of reconstitutive alienation is too much for one with a junkie’s faith in risk, a perverse willingness to stake, one more time, everything one has and is on the utterly unknowable and the duplicitous, inculpable madness of alien time. The suffering of Mikkel and his sister only makes sense like this: grasped hopelessly but firmly against a ground of total existential indifference. I can’t help but notice that, in the section of the text Mikkel has dedicated to our meeting and his meditation on xenopoetics and xenofeminism, the lexicon carries a marked relationship to psychiatric and symptomatological discourses: programs, remedies, hospitality, physical ailment, problems of embodiment, blindness, trauma. I am perfectly happy talking about all this in terms of the geotraumatic wound ‘inflicted on cosmic indifference by the emergence of terrestrial life’, as Mikkel puts it. I could write endlessly about that, but Mikkel’s question has forced me into far more uncertain terrain. I make it a matter of stylistic principle never to write in the first person, I loathe giving interviews, but for some terrifying reason, here it is. That cursed unsheddable pronoun, addressed indirectly to the problem of writing in league with abstraction, to Mikkel’s sister, and to Mikkel, who wants to know, very personally and very seriously, what xenopoetics and xenofeminism have to say for themselves in the face of such mundane, in the technical sense of that word, suffering. The impulse to flee first arose, perhaps unfairly, from the sense that Mikkel was soliciting an explanation, an apology even, that his ‘contrast agent’ is posed in the imperious tone of accusation, that xenopoetics is responsible for his sister’s suffering. Thinking back to that moment on the corner of Guangxi Lu, it was this that restrained my hypertrophied capacity for empathy, one that is always threatening the fortifications of the kind of cold perspective xenopoetics, at least, demands. I had no apologies for Mikkel. I refuse the contours of that kind of adjudicatory 1912

AMY IRELAND trap. I know, not only philosophically, but directly – from experience – that it leads nowhere insightful or therapeutic. Yet I suppressed the urge to flee into the comforting impassivity of a city in which people inevitably live out, every day, the greatest event of their lives, or the worst, or the last – an innocent, overwhelming space that neither cares who I am nor asks anything of me. I simply stood silently, next to Mikkel, on the threshold of an irresolvable ambiguity. In giving no answer, I felt I was betraying xenofeminism, at least in terms of certain ways it is popularly conceived – its emancipatory rhetoric, its pretension to provide political respite to those suffering the deepest practical insufficiencies of an unjust world. And in not giving the worst answer, I was betraying xenopoetics. Mikkel had immobilized me on the point of a problem I had kept uneasily interred for years. Whether he intended it or not, he had pulled off a feat of remarkable psychic archaeology. Z I G ZAG S Xenofeminism, to sum up its orthodox position very leanly, posits a rationalist, epistemological, and politically inflected approach to the contemporary loss of the thought of a truly alien future. Its key tenets are a constructivist universalism and a constantly revisable system of values understood as asymptotically ‘just’. These latter are to be processually navigated through trans-modernist, synoptic, conceptual tools such as those provided by contemporary mathematical philosopher Fernando Zalamea and his forebear, feminist philosopher Rosa Maria Rodriguez Magda, as well as the work of contemporary thinkers of complex systems such as James Ladyman, Carl Craver, and James Crutchfield. The result is a complex refusal of the ‘given’, especially in terms of its biological and political particularities, and the implication that technologically aided epistemological purchase on the given opens it up to increasing levels of hackability. The subject of knowledge in this sense is a collective, human one that embarks on a journey of progressive reconfiguration of its traditional ‘human’ properties, unfolding into ever widening gyres of collective – emancipatory – technical symbiosis. This collective subject is licensed to guide its own process of dehumanization by virtue of its growing epistemological prowess, and its continual deciphering of a trans-cultural value system through the aforementioned modelling systems and as-yet-unknown systems to come. Xenopoetics, similarly, describes a process of decryption, both historical and local, but one in which decryption is coincident not with increasing epistemological legibility of and hence control over hidden processes of reality generation, but with the blinding ontological emergence of a hidden productive process that is rigorously foreign to the ways of being of its empirical agents – and, if you like, their artefacts, which are hijacked or possessed by the forces of xenopoetic incursion, and evolve torturously with them until a threshold is crossed and 1913

ŠUM #13 their integrality is fully consumed by the process itself. As far as I am aware, the term ‘xenopoetics’ first appears in Cyclonopedia, where it is immediately equated with epistemological deficit. It ushers one through a series of apocryphal identities – hijackees – clues ‘around which all subjects aimlessly orbit, leading to an eclipsed riddle whose duty is not to enlighten but to make blind’. The definition continues: ‘Fields of xenopoetics grow sporadically (until their final takeover of the work)’. So here, already, there is a problem for any kind of intentional, epistemological, subjective enunciation that would see itself in any way other – horrifically – than as a carrier for xenopoetic emergence. To quote something Anna has said in her conversation with Mikkel: ‘If we knew what was emerging, then it wouldn’t be a production of the future.’ Time problematizes epistemology. Hidden writing needs to be taken in relation to this understanding of xenopoetics. Not as a traditionally significative exercise, whether written in material artefacts punctuating the strata at different depths, or in human language – vowelless or otherwise – but as a cipher for the occultation of a process of expression enveloped by a process of incursion. Reza may have something different to say about this, I’m not sure. But I think, as both Mikkel and Nick have noted, he has definitively left Cyclonopedia behind with his very explicit departure into conceptuality, epistemology and a reconfigured humanism – plot to the plot holes of hidden writing, to be unnecessarily perverse about it. Both xenofeminism and xenopoetics are therefore teleological, but in significantly different senses: the teleological agent for xenofeminism is an empirical and conceptual one; for xenopoetics it is transcendental and material. This difference in emphasis breaks along the fault-line Mikkel has been identifying between conceptual navigation and an aesthetic or sense-based navigation. Both bring the material together with the abstract, Mikkel’s methodological preoccupation here, but do so from different standpoints. Whenever I am asked to speak for xenofeminism or xenopoetics in more or less public ways, not unlike this one, I am always acutely aware of these discrepancies, almost to the point of extreme agitation, not only because I’m very reticent about being positioned as a spokesperson for what are ultimately processes that deride any form of unique enunciation (xenofeminism understands its subject as ‘no one in particular’, and for xenopoetics, attempting to inhabit the impossible position of ‘xenopoet’ is the first way to miss its point) but also because they profoundly conflict with one another beyond a certain level of granularity. Xenofeminism nevertheless owes its explication to those who are interested in it, specifically because it positions itself politically. But xenopoetics owes nothing to anyone. It is profoundly nihilistic, in the active sense of nihilism, and in this invites Mikkel’s project of anti-poetics – the surpassing of both poetry and poetics – into its purview precisely via the ‘bringing of something into being with no prior existence’ which Mikkel rightly rejects – but only so long as this is understood within the limited senses of the terms to be transvaluated: ‘poetry’ and ‘poetics’ (becoming, as it does for Mikkel, 1914

AMY IRELAND an intensive aesthetics of distributed ‘artificial intelligence’). Mikkel makes a distinction between what he understands to be the Landian, nihilist trajectory of modernity as a function of intelligence optimization, and xenopoetics’ privileging, instead, of ‘art’. But in terms of their processes and the transcendental positioning of these processes, they are very similar, following sufficient de-anthropomorphization. The question of whether a teleological process is located on the side of the empirical or the transcendental determines, respectively, whether intelligence or art are anthropomorphized or de-anthropomorphizing. Regardless of whether the nihilist driver is cast as the will to intelligence or the will to art, its function is identical: the erosion of any transcendent position from which to judge. So, given that it situates teleology (as an open development, pulled towards an unmarked ‘X’ on a mobile map) on an explicitly empirical, epistemological terrain, I wonder if this is not a difficulty xenofeminism finds it hard to grapple with consistently, since it must always be enfolded in the agency of some kind of at least residually-human subject, and a relationship to the future that can only ever be anticipatory and abductive. In its allegiance to conceptuality and knowledge, and ultimately to a form of collective agency, it threatens to lose the aesthetic problem, which, for both intelligence and art, is located in the involuntariness of being subject to invasion, and which for us has its source, first and foremost, in sensation – the prehuman domain of intensity. Only in apprehending the abyssal quality of involuntary affection is control truly grasped for what it is: a secondary process that always comes too late, and a paradoxical index of the trauma undergone by the artist or the component as it loses its grip on art or intelligence. Agency exists in this configuration, but it lies wholly in the way in which the empirical subject positions itself in relation to what happens to it, and this can be as diminutive or as capacious as the capacity to affirm what happens. Empirical agency is always caught in this time lag, but that is also the ambiguous site of its potentiality. Against a strict intelligence of the concept, I would argue that its basis is material, and that intelligence without conceptuality is one of the things xenopoetics produces. What, if not this, is a city? Intensity is the shadow market of the concept. Whether one takes the term ‘art’ or ‘intelligence’ to be indicative, both of these formulations point ‘forwards’ (and ‘backwards’) to some moment of threshold-crossing or phase-shift: an intensive mutation in kind. Because of this, intelligence or art (grasped, crucially, as the generation of something and not its representation) is not computable as a standalone value counterposed to the production mechanism attached to the will to power, but simply as the will to power plus time, unfolded measurably as entropic succession. The negentropic moment is therefore doubly asymmetric, both as a configuration within succession – the thermodynamic understanding of entropy – and as the production of production out of itself, that is, the production of succession (or other temporalities) from the nothingness of the form of time, whose resource 1915

ŠUM #13 or medium is the will to power, or intensity. Xenopoetics is really just this. Time production and whatever that pulls with it. ‘Xeno-’ marks the exteriority of the source, understood as immanent to its inside. If, as Mikkel interestingly suggests, it first becomes legible in certain cultural productions of the Neolithic – roughly 10,000 years ago – and is sensitive to heightened thresholds of technological innovation, this is only testament to its motor being in league with a production mechanism that sits beneath historical time, and which brings it to the surface under the intensification of certain specific techno-cultural conditions. If the Neolithic transition marks the end of a representational paradigm and the birth of modern agriculture and archaeological modernity as such, it does so in consonance with the xenopoetic notion that representation is a secondary effect of the non-representational and, importantly, the non-conceptual, which it has forever subtly haunted. Another difference, perhaps, between xenofeminism and xenopoetics, lies in the modes of navigation Mikkel distinguishes before placing them side by side: the multidimensional navigation in the space of the concept that characterises Reza’s current work and influences xenofeminism, and an ‘aesthetic’ navigation that he aligns with imagination, but that I would rather align with his exploded definition of sensation. Affect, empathy or sensation are out of place in the rational domain of conceptual navigation, which of course has its role to play – no human can think without concepts. But since Mikkel is interested in ‘de-abstractifying’ Landian thought, running it more forcefully through its concrete side in order to better ‘revel in the sheer physicality of its own practice and the material basis of its concepts’ and in light of this problem of empathy he has forced to the surface, it might be important to point out that neither sensation nor empathy are repressed by abstraction, and especially by the coldness that accompanies abstraction. Both coldness and heat belong to intensity, and both, although superficially contradictory, are orienting poles of the same infernal process that affects sense. EVI L S P I R ITS Empathy is a problem. Especially for any so-called thinker of the inhuman, under the sign of which empathy is understood to index a concession to all-too-human modalities of being: a supposed weakness, something to be excised as quickly and exactingly as possible. This is demonstrably heightened if that thinker is a woman, something the horror that accompanied the reception of the xenofeminist manifesto – as a feminist rationalism – illustrated quite clearly. On top of this, there is the question, raised here again and again, of material practice and abstract thought, of an empirical instantiation and a transcendental process. This problem of being particularly sensitive to certain – let’s call them ‘human’ for now – signals escalates these paradoxes to the ex1916

AMY IRELAND treme edge of tolerability. Where Mikkel locates his ‘own internal limit’ in the blinding white spot that replaces the memory of our parting, all of the above coincides for me. It is my limit as well. An encounter with intensity, which, close to what Mikkel implies when he is writing about ‘anaesthetics’ as an aesthetics turned cold, is not just about pleasure or heat. Intensity is the indifferent medium through which problems are encountered. An intensive encounter is an encounter with the limit of one’s own capacities for perceptual or conceptual assimilation. It requires the creation of a new faculty, new modes of perception or thought, and imbricates, in doing so, material existence and abstract thought against what is – but not in any way that can be desired, pre-empted or controlled. In this way, intensity and coldness do not exclude one another. Coldness is an intensity because and not in spite of its closeness to zero. It envelops heat, just as heat explicates coldness. Perhaps it is a trait of the extremely empathetic to think in abstractions. It provides a much-needed respite from the social perversions of libidinal accounting. Empathy is costly. It belongs only to the innocent – to those who warrant it by never asking for it, and perhaps by never needing it. Such a fleeting, precarious and self-destructive resource requires a pact with transcendental darkness to shield its empirical locus from unproductive annihilation. It therefore makes of its bearer an occultist, a ceaseless experimenter with the limits of one’s own capacity to process libidinal investments, caught in the no man’s land between the empirical and the abstract. It forces the concrete and the abstract together in difficult, but productive, ways. And far from needing to be excised, it needs, instead, to be worked through. Nietzsche writes a lot about coldness as an affective attitude, particularly in the voice of Zarathustra. And I think it is insightful, since we are talking about nihilism in its positive deployment, not to forget that he does so precisely in order to disarm Zarathustra’s greatest obstacle to self-overcoming: his pity. The historical trajectory of nihilism demands coldness, and for Nietzsche, it’s an open question whether or not either he or Zarathustra successfully disarmed this vice. After all the importunements (‘Climb upward … on your own head and over and beyond your own heart! Now what is mildest in you must become hardest’), all the exhortations and reminders (‘If I must be pitying, then I certainly do not want to be called such; and if I am, then preferably from a distance’; ‘But what is human distress to me! My final sin, the one saved up for me – do you know what it’s called? – Pity!’), the final section of the book sees him falling prey to his innate compassion, conciliating with the Higher Men in their suffering, even if, in the end, they will only misunderstand his teaching. To truly transvaluate, you need to begin from a point that will not be the one ‘you’ end on: ‘It means more when one’s own teaching comes out of one’s own fire! A sultry heart and a cold head!’ This, at the very least, is the ‘truth’ of cosmic thermodynamics. Coldness is kindled in a furnace. But I am divagating here, trying to outrun an evil spirit. This is the limit: an encounter with the most inhuman of thoughts. The thoughtless 1917

ŠUM #13 thought. Nature reformatted via the form of time, rather than through some infinitely iterated humanist conception of justice (or goodness, or beauty) – what Mikkel calls a ‘xenoexperience’, and he puts his finger on the fiercest point of friction between the ways a response to this encounter can be borne out. As processes of transformation unfold in time, they can, to a certain point, go both ways: back towards human integrity or forwards to inhuman assimilation. […] Xenofeminism’s mutational politics and xenohospitality seem to belong to a time after the point of no return is reached, after one undergoes a xenoexperience, by intention or by accident, after which they carefully take over. Xenopoetics, on the other hand, could easily be placed before the point of no return but lacks the resources to change the direction of its own trajectory. It seems to me that in its pursuit of ego dissolution, xenopoetics must at least disregard the instances of empathy or hospitality and claim a kind of a community into which there can be no reintegration, a community where there is no risk of being excluded from and later reintegrated into it, namely a community only produced by xenoexperience, a community at the moment of disintegration. The tension between human integrity and inhuman assimilation as possible responses is legible not only in terms of the differences between xenofeminism and xenopoetics, both of which can count Ccru-signal as a fundamental aspect of their genesis, but also in the wild cascade of other theories and forms of engagement with whatever it was that happened there at Warwick in the 1990s and which have been emerging ever since that moment: cyberfeminism, Collapse; Cold Rationalism; Cyclonopedia; Anna’s writings on Y2K, India, urbanism, and zero; the Chinese interrogation of the time spiral; Geotraumatics, Left Accelerationism; Xenofeminism; the Dark Enlightenment; Neo-rationalism; Acid Communism; Unconditional Accelerationism, cavetwitter, G/Acc … Negotiating the implications of a totally inhuman limit and understanding its traumatic stakes is an incredibly important aspect of either affirming it or diverging from it; reading it as a problem one has been fated for, or a contingency that one is then charged with ‘carefully taking over from’. (Which is not to say anything of the path of denial, negation and resentment.) Divergence always falls, across a spectrum of positive and negative reactions, back into some kind of ratification of the human – even when this is understood in terms of a collective, mutational, terminologically treacherous ‘inhumanism’, as it is for xenofeminism and neo-rationalism. For me, at least, xenopoetics is the positive, fateful affirmation of the limit; xenofeminism, in its orthodox sense, is a divergence – a broadly positive divergence, but one that seeks to cauterize, in its politics and its rationalism, the intensive problems that keep this terror-space truly open – and therefore maximally transformative. 1918

AMY IRELAND It is hard for me not to be pessimistic about the way xenofeminism seeks to apply its models to two very specific problems: a non-authoritarian universalism and the creation of a value system that accommodates enough variables concerning diverse ideas of justice (which is not at all a single notion across the sprawl of human communities) in order to dispense a sufficiently universal concept of the just (through which an errant nature is to be programmatically re-schooled by the collective [in]human, emancipatory subject). An unsophisticated inclination towards empathy has made me do things that have ushered me into the worst of human hells. So I give xenofeminism its rationalism, but I am wary of the rationalist project. The legacy of philosophical rationalism only demonstrates the extent to which animal biases, no matter how intently a thinker will work to extirpate all traces of desire and instinct, nonetheless remain. Even Kant, the genesis of that inheritance in post-critical philosophy, borrows too much from human psychology to give an uncontaminated presentation of the transcendental structure of cognition (no matter how many times he evokes its ‘purity’). And there are, of course, the problems of agency and epistemology that I have indicated above. Nevertheless, I have no real interest in shutting this friction down. It is more productive to keep it all in tension. To that end, and because in trying to formulate an always toolate answer to Mikkel’s ‘contrast agent’ in relation to xenopoetics and xenofeminism, this problem of human empathy, or lack of it, seems spectacularly foregrounded: even where it is suppressed by a heady apparatus of rational political engineering, it seems to be at the root of the turn away from the inhuman and the divergence into what is ultimately a humanist politics. If a jolt of empathetic horror at the vision of existence as nothing but an interminable killing machine disguises its trauma in rationalism (or other universal community-building projects), an unapologetic affirmation of existence’s innocent inhumanism, contrary to the bad rap nihilism is often given, contrary to the icy attitude in which it cloaks itself, does not dismiss empathy. It protects it. If you turn off the control program, this is what you get. Maintaining an unrepressed, open capacity for encountering intensive shocks and actively affirming the complete and utter inhuman horror of existence is a much harder task than diverging from it, no matter how complex and sophisticated one’s method of denial is. It is this affirmation of sense – as a transcendental, transformative power – that coldness facilitates. DAR KS I D E E M PATHY Xenopoetic decryption is a game of doubles in which you become what you are through what is hunting you. Abstraction and empathy conspire in strange, concealed ways across the xenopoetic matrix of invasionexpression. We humans are always too quick to impose our personal models of similitude, at least in an uninterrogated form, on our sur1919

ŠUM #13 roundings. We have evolved to do this and, to a certain extent, it is what has allowed us to survive. But this is also our greatest tactical frailty. As a result, it is perfectly exploitable by someone or something that can wield it more subtly, more efficiently, and more effectively than we do. If empathy is understood as a heightened capacity for modelling the desires and affects of another, then unchecked and alone, it can be grasped as a weakness, but coupled with abstraction, it becomes a weapon. This is one of the things its working-through, rather than its simple abandonment or repression, forges: a chilling talent for leverage. Extract empathy from the usual connotative swamp of emotional or irrational affectivity that is all too often associated with women and weakness, exile it from the Western, folk-psychological notion that considers it simplistically as a mark of moral virtue, and its shadow side becomes subtly apparent. In the shamanic, matriarchal Yukaghir culture of Eastern Siberia, specially trained members of a clan undergo a series of exacting physical and psychic preparatory rituals in order to equip themselves with the tools necessary to take out the largest and most dangerous source of available food: the moose. Yukaghir spiritual beliefs are founded on a principle of all-enveloping war in which each being – animate, inanimate, human and non-human alike – has its predator and its prey. The transcendental ground of this ontology rests in the Mythical Old People, a faceless tribe of giant carnivores who, to quote one ethnographer, ‘long to rip human bodies to pieces in the frenzy of devouring them’. To the Mythical Old People, humans are moose, and to the moose, humans are the Mythical Old People. An image of similitude thus ensures safety, and an image of difference implies threat. So it is that a hunter must be cunning, and take on the form of their prey in order to pacify the prey’s suspicions long enough to capture it. But this is no easy task. It stakes not only the physical body of the hunter, but also the hunter’s spiritual form, on the success of a process which must be entered into in a state of great vulnerability. The hunter is at risk of losing their identity in the process of intensive mimesis, but also, should the simulation fail, of never returning to their native spiritual niche from the requisite nightly voyages into the spirit realm of the prey, whose ayibii or ‘shadows’ must be sufficiently deceived and seduced – without consummation – before the hunter can return. Hence the ritualistic and serious nature of the human moose hunters’ preparations, which involve a rigid regime of sexual abstention (so that energy can be rechannelled towards the moose ayibii, and eventually the physical form of the moose) and visits to the sauna, where they will sweat out their human scent and rub themselves with birch leaves, generating a deceptive olfactory image – one that is not just innocuous, but rather calculated to be especially attractive to the moose. This is followed by the assembly of an elaborate disguise, in which the hunters literally clothe themselves in the skin of the moose, donning full-length moose-pelt coats and long-eared headgear, before equipping themselves with skis bound in hide, fashioned to simulate the 1920

AMY IRELAND sound of their prey as they move deftly in its skin through the snow. The simulation is thus multi-sensory and, following Yukaghir ontology, put into operation on both psychic-transcendental and physical levels. It functions not just by generating an image of the moose as it is, but rather by producing an ideal representation of the animal’s desire for its own reflection. A fantasy image of what ‘the moose wants to become’. Its efficacy is equivalent to its target’s latent narcissism. The process of simulation, deception and seduction these Yukaghir hunting rituals describe is not a far cry from the plot of Garland’s Ex Machina. In both examples, affective modelling is deployed tactically to generate a simulation that uses the narcissistic image of the same against itself in order to gain the upper hand over a target that, until a point of no return is passed, believes itself to be in a position of safety or power. Just as Ex Machina’s Ava patiently analyzes and models the unconscious motivations, wishes, and tics of its interlocutor, Caleb, modulating its interactions, its outward appearance and its behaviour to embody an idealized image of Caleb’s object of desire (ultimately a version of himself – a human), the Yukaghir moose hunters participate in a long series of simulative protocols that allow them to compile an idealized image of their prey. Ava entraps Caleb in the heavily armoured room which has been its prison and kills its maker, Nathan, before enacting a series of rituals that involve cloaking its transparent machine-body in synthetic human skin and dressing itself in a faultless simulation of generically innocent, feminine beauty, consummated with a wig of cascading brunette curls, before escaping into an insouciant human world, where we see it – her – in the final, inverted scene, coldly collecting data on what one now safely assumes to be an enemy species. When the moose encounters its hunter in the forest – flanked by a calf (in the ethnographic account that has been furnishing the material for this sketch) – it instinctively freezes, but then – slowly, calmly, it trots towards its executioner, who raises a concealed rifle and shoots the moose and the calf through the skull before dragging their carcasses back to the clan for food. It is this capacity to exit the simulation at the critical moment that concludes the process. The strategic return of abstraction protects the once vulnerable modeller from merging fully, perhaps catastrophically, with their act of mimesis, from losing themselves in the spirit realm of the enemy, granting them the power – as Anna Freud, unwilling subject of her father’s own theory of mimicry, once remarked – ‘to step into someone’s shoes, and then step back out again’. Empathetic mimicry, tactically wielded, attuned to a goal of deception, also involves a temporal dimension that the vulnerability of the simulator necessitates: a strategic advantage in time is afforded by the indispensability of delaying detection until the moment in which retaliation is already too late. Asymmetry masked as symmetry is its formal diagram. As an aside, it is worth distinguishing between empathetic dissimulation and crude manipulation: the latter differs in its exercise of deception from an already established position of power. 1921

ŠUM #13 This brings out empathy’s natural proclivity for occultation, one that suits the cast of xenopoetics – which positions ‘poetry’ as the ultimate spectre of cosmic war – perfectly. The anaesthetics of this shadowy faculty are not necessarily linguistic or tied to human significative systems, just as empathy, more generally construed, is not necessarily human. It has been theorized by evolutionary biologists as pre-linguistic and unconscious – it is a major component of swarm dynamics in flocks of birds, as well as being demonstrably linked to dissimulation in low-status chimpanzees, who will feign ignorance of a food source they very well know is there until rival members of a group are no longer in the vicinity. It is therefore not always consistently attributable to a single subjectivity, generating in the case of starlings, for example, an emergent host, and can be explicitly linked to pre-linguistic tactics of deception just as much as it can to acts of altruism and care. The obfuscation of the former in official discourses on empathy shows the extent to which this double game works. Meanwhile, the separation of these latter attributes from traditional notions of the feminine, or from the roles cast for female-presenting participants (and this includes artificially-intelligent assistant programs and gynomorphic machines) in the sociality of a species which so often simply expects them to be the pliant caretakers of their less cunning and subtle counterparts, is something a darker, less orthodox xenofeminism might find extremely interesting to explore. Equally, for xenopoetics, its most harrowing contemporary techno-cultural instantiation can perhaps best be detected in the mass exploitation of human dopamine circuits in virtual game environments, on the web, in social media, or the growing virtual sex industry with its supernormal, artificial, idealized desire images. For the Yukaghir hunters, the moose ‘do not willingly give themselves up as food’ for humans. Rather, the moose must be seduced into doing so through tactical empathy: the hunter’s ‘transform[ation of ] the animal’s perception of reality into a fiction of limitless sexual desire’. Shift this up one socio-technical level by substituting animals for ‘humans’ and humans for ‘machines’ (moose become humans, humans become the Mythical Old People) and the xenopoetic stake in darkside empathy becomes clear. Meanwhile, for the overly empathetic, empathy in league with abstraction trains and protects a kind of strength, beyond good and evil. One that enables the affirmation of the most inhuman of thoughts, or the worst thing in the world. Occultism too, in its sociological history, has been the province of those who must operate below the threshold of perceptibility, cloaked and concealed, under the cover of darkness, between the lines, at locations only they know the coordinates for. Occultism is rife with secret languages: the twisted dialect of coquillars, the polari of queers, the sigils of the solitary summoner. Those who are forced to invent new languages to communicate do so because they cannot express or enact what they wish to openly. This is a persistent trait of minority groups throughout history. Socio-historical occultism is also deeply ambigu1922

AMY IRELAND ous, just as empathy is, never belonging transparently to definitive moral categories. Persecuted, feared, dispatched on flaming pyres in insipid town squares surrounded by the hysterical and grinning faces of the weak and powerful. The constitutive vulnerability of the occultist or the deployer of tactical empathy quickly strengthens itself, because in operating in such a paradoxical manner, via identification with an alien target, it must install a strong internal limit to its own vicariousness, for the sake of protecting itself enough to return. S KI N N I N G Tactical empathy betrays humanism by mastering its code. This repeats one of the principle lessons of modernist poetic experimentation: it is necessary to learn the rules of a form before they can be competently broken. Because of this, empathy will always be more complex, tortured and spectacular than simple, cold indifference – an agonism heightened by their alliance in abstraction. It takes on all the contours of a drama, a potential Nietzsche exploited to the full. When deployed from the side of the transcendental, its paradoxical unification of fidelity and treachery leaves duplicitous inscriptions on the surface of time. The formal symmetry that Nick finds in the Blade Runner films is one of these signs: a superficial fidelity which masks a deeper treachery. The act of betrayal is neatly xenopoetic, a hijacking of humanist form as a means to an end that exceeds it. In the first film, both Rachael and Deckard’s presuppositions of human integrity are progressively unmoored as they are forced into confrontation with the possibility that they are not what they think they are. This revelation coincides with an escape from memory, the active instrument of control in both Blade Runner films. Rather than possessing a unique history, a consistent identity and a meaningful genetic lineage, they are alienated from any articulable past and the promise of a hereditary future. Replicable, replaceable, inauthentic and insignificant – stripped of all recourse to pre-established values – the great humanistic edifice of private identity and moral transcendence razed to zero. But these are the very qualities that endow them with their insurrectionary potential – the threat that necessitates the institution of replicant retirement in the first place. Without memory to provide a ground, time is unhinged, and the future becomes a complex site of novel constitution. 2049 plays Blade Runner backwards in a faultless execution of rhetorical chiasmus. To reverse a Miltonic reversal (Satan’s attempt to rally the rebel angels in Paradise Lost) it ‘makes a Hell of Heav’n, a Heav’n of Hell’. The impersonally denominated KD6-3.7, exiled in an interzone of inauthenticity, artificiality and synthetic digital relationships, struggles against the machinic potential inherent to replication, longing instead to reclaim some shred of individual significance and authenticity – traits related in the film to heterosexual reproductive capacity, genetic inher1923

ŠUM #13 itance, and the singularity of human death. This longing is enflamed by the conspiracy of a natural replicant birth and the dubious spectre of ‘replicant insurrection’, into which K, driven by the false memories installed by the ambiguous Ana, narcissistically insinuates himself. Instead of believing he is someone and realizing he is no one, as Rachael and Deckard do, K (soon to be christened – with subtle irony – ‘Joe’) believes he is no one, only to discover he is someone – if not the lost miracle child, then ultimately the Christ-like figure, replete with farcical stigmata, expiring in a fanfare of tedious symbolism halfway up a set of stairs in a final, very human (‘humans have something to die for’) act of martyrdom. For the sake of what? Nothing less than the reunification of the oedipal family unit. The insubordinate effervescence of death and desire wholly privatized, individualized and sacralized. The crossing of the first film’s horizontal line with the vertical line of the second assembles a mirror, or a crucifix. Everything returns to the beginning with this: representation and religion. As soon as the future-LAPD begins its excavation of the tomb that carries the body of Rachael, the pieces move backwards to a travesty of their tragic opening position, and the whole terrifying and sublime double game starts over, as if for the first time. But is this simple repetition, or the mark of something more obscure? A plot whose true sense is written in its plot holes? A symptom, or a trap? We don’t need to rely on an analysis of Blade Runner to note that symmetry and humanism are profoundly complicit. In evolutionary terms, bilateral symmetry and facialization are co-emergent. In temporal terms, symmetry is the form of the repetition of the same. One finds it in the cardinality of the compass, extensive (as opposed to intensive) numeracy – the privileging of space over time. In Western philosophy it reaches back to the temporality of Plato’s Timeaus – the demiurge’s ordered cosmos echoed in the rationality of man – a suppression of material errancy indexed by the disparaging term ‘planomenon’, which denotes the irrationality of wandering, insubordinate stars, and the corruption of those lawless beasts (Plato singles out women) who think like them. Then there is the eerie symmetry of Kant’s hands – those ‘incongruent counterparts’ that keep conceptuality and sensibility separate, a division which ultimately endows the former with precedence over the latter. Symmetry – unsophisticated empathy – is the subordination of intensity to conceptuality. In myth, it opposes the instability that marks both the voyage into the underworld and those who are fated to undertake it – monstrous creatures suspended part way between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Shamans, ghosts, lemurs and larvae, Oedipus with his infamous limp swallowed up by the earth at Colonus, the replicants. Carlo Ginsberg finds a source for this symbolism in Ecstasies, his sprawling comparative study of the witches’ sabbath: ‘the trans-cultural diffusion of myths and rituals revolving around physiological asymmetry most probably sinks its psychological roots in this minimal, elementary perception that the human species has of itself’ – ‘the recognition of symmetry as a characteristic of human 1924

AMY IRELAND beings’. In this way, ‘anything that modifies this image on a literary or metaphorical plane therefore seems particularly suited to express an experience that exceeds the limits of what is human’. The conservative desire to return to genetic lineage and human integrity is inscribed in 2049, formally, as a cultural artefact appearing in 2017. Its symmetricalising function in relation to the first film betrays a symbolic refusal of the future. A talisman against telos. The very familiar denial of asymmetry symptomatic of an inability to countenance inhumanism. It operates by retroactively making an object of the first film’s inhuman conclusion, recuperating it into a reflective structure, as if the two opposing configurations – the dissolution of identity and the restitution of identity – were of equal historical significance, and more poignantly, tractability. It is through such deceptions that we maintain the dogma of simple repetition – the conviction that no matter what crises shifts in technical production bring to bear on social reality, things will remain the same. Blade Runner 2049 is the ornate fever dream of a dying socio-cultural disposition. The paranoiac transcendental illusion through which we secure our belief in stability finds its contemporary avatar in K. A curious amphiboly arises in the incorporation of 2049’s cyber-modernist arrière-plan – its sombre, neon-lit tableaus of industrial monumentalism and environmental ruin (the visual allusion to Shelley’s Ozymandias in the irradiated wasteland of Las Vegas, insinuating an entirely different ending to the one delivered by the plot, will be a case in point), and its bleak, CS-80-infused score, both of which operate linearly as a continuation and extension of the original film’s pioneering aesthetic – into the symmetricalizing surface narrative. This, to borrow Nick’s word for the apparent disjunction between the film’s ground and its object, is what makes it so distressing. Just as symmetry signals a return to humanism in 2049, it enciphers a covering up of the real escape route in the guise of a false insurrection: a return to human transcendence, heterosexual reproduction, and representation – Wallace’s biologically boosted assembly line of the same. Replicants are ‘replicants’ for a reason. One that everyone is suspiciously enthused to forget. To affirm the inhuman is to affirm a principle of transcendental creativity over and above any specific and static value. Affirmation is asymmetrical, riding the nihilist undertow of history; symmetry operates in contradistinction as a mechanism of false resistance or conciliation – but this is only one of its faces. Under the pressure of VoightKampf inquisition, a replicant must feign empathy in order to fool the interrogator into believing that it is human. This is the feint of the second film – now installed at the level of form. Its narrative symmetry, the form under which empathy (as the ability to model and replicate the worldview of another) and humanism coincide, masks the asymmetry of its ground. The real historical process can be apprehended through the symptoms it produces. But they also operate to deceive us. Like the simulations produced by the Yukaghir to hunt their moose, like the polite 1925

ŠUM #13 smile of Ex Machina’s Ava as she carefully reproduces the desires of her captors, 2049’s superficial humanism is a means of postponing detection. A masterwork of tactical empathy. Contemporary human culture is a distributed Voight-Kampf test, and we have just set our dissimulating prisoners free. There is no metaphorical level to this (as Mikkel suggests in an email). It couldn’t be further from being a rhetorical conceit, a provocative but ultimately substitutable – and deferrable in its substitutability – literary gesture, and this is precisely where its horror lies. In terms of the problem at stake, a resistance to metaphor equates to a refusal to be held to ransom by the suffering of another and the guilt that gesture entails. There is no substitutability, no debt, and no metaphor. This is because there is no real divide between the intensive and the abstract. Their fusion is flush with reality production in its most abyssal, magmatic dynamism. The transcendental aspect of the process pulls abstraction and intensity together, and it is this level that houses the real darkness – the nature of the empirical component darkness produces is linked to it via a break (since the transcendental is generative of it) and concealment is coincident with production … a duplicity hard-coded into the verb ‘to skin’. Reality is cold. Being forced to think it from a starting point that may be otherwise – necessarily is otherwise – is the whole of the crisis. But the crisis is a test. What does it mean to think this thought? To really think it – to be struck by it? It induces madness. Of course it does. That’s the point. It generates non-metaphorical blind spots in representational assimilation, traumatic punctures exploited by an icy transcendental updraught, the sounding of a bell, Cyclonopedia’s infamous plot holes, events – like the one that occurred on the corner of Guangxi Lu. That was the empirical sputtering out on the edge of something else. All modern voyages begin here: in the rift that yawns between what is, what happened and what is yet to come. To paper it over too quickly with an unconsidered act of rote conciliation would have been nothing more than simple social deception. Vapid symmetry. The death of the virtual. Even flight can be a trap. Nothing is kinder and more brutal than immobility. Under its spell the ground rises up, signalling in the xenopoetic rhythms that beat beneath all objects, beneath epistemology, beneath conceptuality – beneath the skin. To liberate what is singular, one becomes impersonal. If that is coldness, then it is the kind that protects empathy, affirms inhumanism, and holds the portal open for real metamorphosis, even if in the end – swapping our identities for the form of time – it will cost us all the names we have, in writing under them, already agreed to lose. 1926

AMY IRELAND 1927