black ice

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20030603173354/http://www.k-gothic.net:80/blackice.html black ice iain hamilton grant Modern Oriental or Occidental society is a stomach carpeted with tungsten carbide a very expensive stomach where discourses and figures are used up turn to dust come to reinforce banter they claimed to erode . . the stomach turns your words and your images into commodities and identity Critique even hate are incorporated. (J. F Lyotard, Desirevolution 1973: 31) 'Bobby do you know what a metaphor is?' 'A component? Like a capacitor?' 'No. Never mind metaphor then' (W Gibson, CountZero. 1986:162-3) [No dateline] The stomach lurches and churns as it expels more and more of its shrink-wrapped identitarian detritus. The permanent whines of its ferro-concrete intestines sets our ears bleeding as it ingests new fuels old products. Sticky organs mesh indiscriminately with scrapyard debris, forming ephemeral syntaxes of hybrid cyber-circulation. 'Look out! It's eating everything in its path!' The optic nerves of dead phenomenologists fuse with the fraying analytic comfort blankets swaddling theories of resistance. Communication: 'contagions of energy . . . Iike a current . . . a streaming of electricity' (Bataille 1988: 94). 'You say tit's impossible,' insensible of the fact that you make it possible since you are part of it . . . you are already in the machine, implanting fingers, eyes, anuses or spleens' (Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 478). Noumenal scraping, abstractive surgery. Vienna, July 1920: Scuttling engines pump and drain from the great sewers under the Berggasse, awaiting the return of their meat from the dark passages leading to the offices of Herr Professor Doktor Sigmund Freud. Above the heavy valves opening onto the central flue, the second upper duct of which echoes with the sounds of Freud's staged amnesty for the spooling confessions of wealthy neurotics, hangs a sign: 'Abandon your desiring-machines all ye who enter here.' The great project was to disconnect the machines and to plug up their channels while the meat, flailing in a stagnant pond of hypocritical

drool, was disciplined to permanent machinic disfunctionalism. Or so we thought. London, May 1858: Marx was rewiring the meat, growing nerves in the spinal columns of lampreys held open by Toshiba micro-manipulators, before splicing them into the isolated pulp, thus turning it into sensitive linkage-matter, communications lines, not for the Baroque valve-andduct automata that once consisted of 'numerous mechanical and intellectual organs' (Marx 1974: 692), but to circulate through undifferentiated protoplasm till the meat gets so thoroughly baked through that it forms a crust shielding its newly nervured biomass. 'Revolution was like that,' piped the biobydraulics, still swimming through the 100 Berggasse: 'a delusion . . ., a pipe dream that the flesh would be restored' (Kadrey 1989: 189). Machine dreams... Instants later they were swept aside by isotropic currents of shrill trans-spaces communication contagions of energy, storm fronts of meshed intelligence ... hold a special vertigo. (Gibson 1986: 40) Cyborgs have exposed the imminent fatality of thought. What began with the fraying edges of larval, inchoate self-identical cogitos saturates 'thought' with a noumenal backwash from outside the biodrome. 'The 'I think' must accompany all my representations' (Kant 1958: B131) is the code that gets us into the biodrome in the guise of representations, images, 'phenomena' easily decodable according to the servile analyses that keep the biodrome's culture viable, reproducible. Representation - the transcendental use of synthesis - is the basic form of biopolitical, institutional thought, a serial, identitarian reproduction that binds synthesis - 'thought without identity - to analytic engines that assemble the biodrome itself. The immanent use of synthesis, however, remains the 'blind power' of which the bureaucrats of consciousness are themselves 'scarcely ever conscious' (Kant 1958: A395). Immanent synthesis has infiltrated the biodrome from the outset, however, since it remains the basic power of production, the production of production, the pulsional environment from which the analytical engines parasite their resources. As Freud tells us, 'skin' is the death necessary to ephemeral, larval consistency (cf. the heroic auto-catalyses of the proto-egoic 'vesicle' (Freud 1920: 298); arising on this basis, the 'I think' covers the extent of the skin, but warily retreats before its limits - allegedly aprioristic, auto-singing '`nihil ulterius' (Kant 1958: A395) - the livedead, the 'hideous intimacy' (Gibson 1986: 41) of the drives, their indissociability: me unconscious = me outside = Me noumenon. Thought is a meat thing, tied necessarily to the biodrome and its apparatuses. It is in this sense that the idea of 'thinking machines' is

an error: as Bladerunner Deckard's offing Zhora so spectacularly demonstrates, machines do not think, they bleed. Even in the biodrome, thought is just some transcendentized regulation mechanism affecting electrolibidinal fluctuation; thus, as Freud says, since '[a]ll thinking is . . . a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction . . . to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more' (Freud 1900: 762), it is always possible, but thinking must not 'be led astray by intensities,' short circuits in the relays and repetitions, the electrolibidinal constitution of 'perceptual identities' (Freud 1900: 720). Intensities, intensities: datableed. Thought without identity is no thought at all. Cyborganization, like the dreamwork, does not think: datapulsional syntheses impact isotropically on the analytical engines forming the concentric ruins of biodromic defense lines, breaking immanence out of thenets of transcendental determination, shutting down consciousness, a nanometrical, minimal noumenal tilt function - switching the apparatuses hom epicentralized synthesisregulators into far-fromequilibrium, near-nova pulsional oscillators; Eros' ascent: a synthetic tide of C-change brings the biodrome to boiling point/Thanatos' descent: phenomenal whiteout flooding in from the other side of the screen. Analysis, interpretation, deduction: identitarian security procedures. Communication: the disarticulating datableed from this profoundly systemorphic nexus of discourses - the biobydraulics of Freudian metapsychology, electrolibidinal economics and cyber-capital's retrophagic fictotheroetico-tactical datapulsions - combines and recombines components, syntheses indifferent to tropological decoding in accordance with antique cultural baselines and their neo-transcendentalist subjectivities, stockpiled, socratizing redundancies. The philosophical problem therefore is not so much to produce even antianalytic, synthetic thought from without identikit; it is rather to bootstrap the datableed from the machinic continuum of the electrolibidinal environment over which biodromic functions secure precarious equilibria: the autocatalysis of the machinic unconscious, on the putative containment and shutdown of which biodromic security is premised, a shutdown which Scott Bukatman announces when he writes that 'the movement of the libido beyond the bounds of the individual psyche marks the emergence of technosurrealism . . . a surrealism without the unconscious' (Bukatman 1991: 20). Q: Flowing down the rails, September 19, 1895: The path of conduction passes through undifferentiated protoplasm instead of (as it otherwise does within the neurons) through differentiated protoplasm which is probably better adapted for conduction. This gives us a hint that conductive capacity is to be linked with differentiation, so that we may expect to find the process of conduction itself will create differentiation ir the protoplasm and consequently an improved conductive capacity for subsequent conduction (Freud 1895 288-9).

Clearly marking the constitutive role played by intensities in the autoproduction of conduction channels, Freud sketches the emergence of the cortical apparatus from an electrolibidinal environment composed of swirling distributions of matter-energy. Since there is no internal/external session 'within' matter-energy - or, more Marxodelusiono-dialectically, no Entzweiang 'within' force E - at the point of zero differentiation, we may here call the emergent apparatus's milieu 'electrolibidinal' to indicate the mesh of what only higher up the negentropic scales of differentiation, begin to stabilize into internal and external energies. Through conduction/differentiation, however, energy is ephemerally channeled, bound, quiescent, constantly repeating the same routes as the channels are striated and restriated by electrolibidinal currents, forming an inorganic surface that resists the electrolibidinal environment by damming the freely mobile currents of energy. Around the singularity forming the axes of the apparatus's divergence from its environment, freely mobile, or 'Q,' energies striate the little pulp into a living organism, differentiating the newly nervured cortex into dams, sluices, and valves through which energy continues to course. With increasing differentiation, an inorganic skein congeals around the pulp, hardening into what Freud, in a steam-cloud of foetid nostalgia for Cartesianism, christens a 'psychical apparatus.' Freud goes on: Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle that is susceptiblc to stimulation. This little fragment of living substance is suspcnded in thc midst of an cxtemal world charged with thc most powerful energies [Against thcsc energies.. ] it acquires [a] shield in this way its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter becomes to a dcgree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. A crust would thus be formed which would at last have been thoroughly baked through by stimulation. (Freud 1917 297-8) The 'special envelope' is so resistant to stimuli that it both drains off the excess excitation to which Ucs stimulation has inured it, and forms channels - paths of conduction, Bahougen through which energy, thus filtered and quantitatively diminished, may pass into the 'interior' of the organism. Putatively aprioristic, biodromic space yields to electrolibidinal economic immanence. Freud's experiments in neurobiology - 'truly a realm of unlimited possibilities' (Freud 1920: 334) - machine a pulp automaton sheathed in striated inorganic matter that forms the channels and filters necessary to impose an energetic tariff on incoming excitation and thereby to keep the circulations of electrochemical pulses at regular and limited levels. Passing into the alleged interior of this steampunk collage of industrial organs does not inject new energies into the pulpy masses at the biodrome's core - 'a society functioning on Valium' (Lyotard 1994: 220): rather, it stimulates peripheral pressure- sensors to spasm the pulp's

primitive musculature [ into action, thus discharging the incoming pulsion. Still, the dams and filters secure the energy level's constancy. In dark, now intrabiodromic regions, in the folds and vections of the pulp's copperflesh, livedead skin, other autocatalyzing engines are inaudibly at work: pleasure-engines manufacture 'integral' pressures, dying to haemorrhage the pulp into ecstatic oblivion, pressing its last energetic resources into wild accelerations through understimulated ducts; reality-engines, however, micro-cops close up the valves and bolt down filtration dams on pressure zones 'where insurrection threatens' (Freud 1933: 144), economizing expenditure, noisily stemming screaming-silent neurospill. For the pyschical apparatus, the mechanism that dealt with increases in systemic pressure was designated the 'pleasure-principle,' which can best be described as a bichydraulic function: a valve in the apparatus opens given an increase in the quantity of ane excitation in the system (registered by the organism as the production of unpleasure), facilitating _discharge and thereby decreasing intensity to biodromically viable levels. The organism registers this drainage as the production of pleasure, and has a vitiated tendency to replicate the intensity of the first pleasure it encountered, impelling it to ever-greater expenditures as the fantasy of a return to, of . thus libidinal economic reversibility, falls derelicted into recurrent cycles of Q. The remnant of the apparatus c, phenomenally hedonist regression is, however, ~ _ subject to micro-cop repression by means of a realilty principle, a dam designating a minium energetic corporate growth: fiscal embryos, cocooned in dataflows, yield emergent Artificial Intelligences. Thus far, we have established the general post-mutational qualities of the equilibrated apparatus as it stabilizes around a mean point of regulated negative feedback: 'the whole of embryology is an example of the compulsion to repeat,' as Freud says (Freud 1933: 139). Freudian 'quantitative-qualitative biomechanics' (Lyotard 1994: 221), on the other hand, institutes the apparatus at the core of successive nested series of engines operating further biobydraulic functions, constituting overspills and reservoirs that the apparatus then permanently draws on for purposes of the regulated-regulating mechanisms of localized expenditure (i.e., pleasureproduction: seeking the path of least resistance), and then replenishes (i.e., reality-reproduction). This institutional metastability informs the basis of a resistance defined in terms of the repulsion of the electrolibidinal flows that have already constituted the striations and channels on the vesicle (the 'undifferentiated protoplasm'), which Exchereque hydro-isolationism is dependent upon precisely these flows. The futile struggle against this dependency is a powerful motor with which to drive neuroses and retaliate against ego-threats. Despite this isolationism, the apparatus maintains - is driven by - the pulp at its core to maintain an intimate communication with the unbinding frenzies that threaten the apparatus with death.

The constitution of corporate interiority provides concentrically nested lines of defense from which vantages superegoic military daddy-discipline can be implemented in order to bring about the 'institution of a garrison into the regions that are inclined to rebellion' (Freud 1933: 144). A long time since having jettisoned the transcendental redundancy of the psyche along with the immanent dereliction of biohydraulics, the apparatus recolonizes the socius, this time instantiated as systemic erotocapitalism and evenementielle Thanatos. System and event, binder and unbinder, erotic coupling and deadly disconnection: erotocapital binds the afferent energies of the event that threaten the system's destablization through 'blockage,' 'transgression,' and turns these energies into currents exchangeable within the system. Similarly, the efferent energies arising at the core of the system through the work/heat loss ratio of thermodynamics, are put into restricted circulation so as to be captured at a later stage, in exactly the same manner as excitations from the system's putative 'outside.' Lyotard, who carries out this implementation in Libidinal Economy and elsewhere, typically seeks to secure an extra systemic aterritorializity, an 'an-economy, a sacred realm' (Lyotard 1991: 230), for the syphoning off, the detournement and accumulation of non-distributed energies which, in sufficient quantity (after sufficient erotocapitalization), will 'scandalize . . . puncture' (Lyotard 1973: 202) the socius-apparatus, bringing the system to a standstill. Thus reciprocally reinstituting capital and its serial, critico-practical transgression, 'critiques' potential energy' (Lyotard 1973: 307) is reserved from the circuits of capital's becoming until - reserve of the reserve, the minor economic miracle of critical labor, inexpendible theocapital - ante diem rahonis, on judgement day, the former calls the latter to final account. Which then is erotic and which thanatonic - which system and which event? Death binds capital over to the Eros of reserve, the critical vermogen; capital is thanatonic, unbinding, its circulant events puncturing the reservoir. Not libidinal reversibility, but pulsional migrancy. Every apparatus circulates mean-intensity currents around its core in concentrically expansionist loops, each of which is indifferently a line of defense and a line of attack. Furthermore, the question as to whether this 'fin de siecle air-conditioned totalitarianism' (Lyotard 1973: 13) can be conceived in terms of regulated/regulating loops is at least a moot point; for this reason, Lyotard introduces another model of the cybersocius, this time a model that constitutes a 'theoretical object capable of corresponding to [capital's] liquefactions' (Lyotard 1994: 35). Hence the 'tungsten-carbide stomach that eats your words your images Critique even hate are incorporated' (Lyotard 1973: 31). Unlike the system-event pair, this model does not offer a proprietary and negatively regulated system on the one hand; rather, critique forms the pale shadow of the omnoivous/indifferentist system's next meal, and will inevitably

result then in just one more fecal, indentitarian alloy, while simultaneously offering the system new territories to consume. 'This is the strength of the capital system,' Lyotard writes, 'Its capacity for recuperating anything and everything' (Lyotard 1973: 26). Apart from the fore-mentioned anti-isolationist mode of operation. The steel gut retains two further advantages over its predecessor: in the first place, critique is rendered an accurately futile exercise - the 'despair of the M-C-M [cycle]' (Lyotard 1973: 31) - unless the critic is viewed as the hapless vanguard laborer working to cultivate new territories for the system; second, the system now regulates itself in expansion, seizing the alleged 'initiative' from earlier 'criticopractical' orientations (Lyotard 1973: 24) and overcoming the strategic and tactical deficit of re-action, re-sistence, and fighting rear-guard actions to re-establish homeostasis. Where the former model confidently discriminates between the system and its critique, the latter model incorporates critique as it does any other commodity in circulation: 'sugar-coated deconstruction' (Lyotard 1993a: 49), simply a 'degenerate amusement' (Lyotard 1973: 217). Thus, just as Freud had to admit that neuroses were not to be cured (a project he considered derived from 'the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite necessary'), but since they were rather 'constitutionally fixed illnesses' that can merely be 'influenced' (Freud 1933: 185); so the immediately revolutionary functions of critique, resistance, and the like are not means whereby natural 'transorganics' (Lyotard 1993a: 135), are purged of capital's antinature, but rather 'constitutionally fixed, often dysfunctional, guidance subsystems' adding new twists, swerves (clinamen) to the extemporizing choreographs of neuproduzierendes capital. The territorial claims staked by the Freudian apparatus and its corporate discipline are expansive, but not so expansive as the metrophagic tungstencarbide stomach of the contemporary global cybersocius. The gut circulating capital - has swallowed everything, so that 'from within the belly of the monster' (Haraway 1991: 24) intestinal, chromium Marabar, cyborg mythicism, ficto-thetic cyberpunk, works only by resonances and amplifications of this circulant real. Capital is not a looming threat on the horizon of post-human pragmatism, but an interstitial rewiring of every social circuit. Capital is the baseline of virulently dererritorializing immanence. Capital is not simply invasive: its circulation is also deterritorializing-productive, rewiring not only a necessarily post-bio labor force - a necessity that Marx, fascinated and scandalized, exhausted volumes in refuting with repeated oneiristically futile attempts at redefining capital's multiplex industrial abuses of humanity by placing the former at the dialecticotranscendental service of the latter, forging an ever futural revolution but also producing as ~mmanent artifice: 'neuproduzierendes capital' (Marx 1974: 462). 'The Kuang program dived past the gleaming spires of a dozen identical towers of data, each one a blue neon replica of a Manhattan skyscraper'

(Gibson 1984: 303). Philosophers, anchored by centuries of penitent humility, are typically slow to catch on. That, for example, knowledge becomes a productive force was grasped even by Marx, who none the less used this precept as a means to organize the technology consequent upon the realization of direct, technoepistemic production. A century later, however, Lyotard feigned scandal at the fate of sacrosanct, extraterritorial, insulated, unproductive intellect which, once sheltered from the system of capital, becomes just more trapped gas in the gut: '[T]he system ends up devouring everything outside it; the despair of youth is the despair of the M-C-M cycle' (Lyotard 1973:192). Outside capital, precapital, asystemic: knowledge, the social brain, must be spared gastrointestinal commodification and once more be placed in reserve, relocated in a 'sacred realm.' Thus: 'We are finally in a position to understand how the computerization of society . . . could become the dream instrument for controlling and regulating the market system, extended to include knowledge itself and governed exclusively by the performativity principle' (Lyotard 1984: 67). And he makes a recommendation: 'give the public free access to the memory and data banks' (Lyotard 1984: 67). Not even Marx's pre-capitalist anchor dragged him to the missionary depths of 'give the proletariat free money.' Lyotard's evident failure to grasp the dynamics of the situation embroils him in atavistic fantasies, i.e., fantasies of return - notwithstanding his pronouncements concerning the countervailing tendency of the driving 'cynicism' of machine performativity, the monstrous inexorability of 'It works . . . ' - to a just, human technocracy somehow in control of the errant circulations of datacapital. Stating that the central question of the postmodern social bond is 'who will have access to this information?' (Lyotard 1984: 14), Lyotard envisages a human political autonomy over market regulation bonding the human and the machinic into some socius composed of the 'local determinism' of 'language games,' a sad political theology of the pronoun. When it becomes obvious that this fails, however, there is nothing for it but to attempt to revivify the degenerating research program of space travel, posing at its core the problematic of the human body becoming 'adaptable to or commutable with another body, another device,' not in terms of interphaging (not interface, bioface-to-mechanoface, but anonymous and indifferent consumption = production = circulation) with the infoscape, but rather of 'prepar[ing] bodies for emigration into space' (Lyotard 1 993b: 106). Thus there are self-confessed guardians of the biodrome who have taken to staunching the datableed that interphages meat drives, biohydraulics, and the informational continuum. As the cyberblitz of neo-noumenal materialism opens communications with the biodrome's interior, like feeding a power line from a river directly into the magnetic cores of its hydroelectric dam, a reversibility that can be measured in voltages and systemcrashes on the grid-consciousness and its defenses are derelicted by these storm fronts of meshed intelligence.

Thus, communication cannot be understood within the Turing apparatus of dialogue, conversation, understanding, nor the Voigt-Kampff empathy test; it is a 'contagion of energy,' a 'streaming current of electricity' (Bataille 1988: 94): contra what Massumi calls the 'Prussian mind-meld' ( = von Humboldt-Habermas (Massumi 1992: 4)); its end is not Enlightenment, but datableed. We have seen that the apparatus's resistances to the intrusion of pulsional turbulence impel it to a militarist discipline. The defense of the real is established through the expansionism that uses expectoration as an excuse for ceaseless campaigns.The apparatuses' militia expectorates the ultimately futile resistance on which they are founded so as to quell H with auto-response superegoic 'police actions = critique' (Kant 1958: Bxxv). In this sense Baudrillard may seem quite correct when he writes: 'Something in us disaccumulates unto death, undoes, destroys, liquidates and disconnects so that we can resist the pressure of the real . . . ' But he is so obviously wrong when he adds: '. . . and live' (Baudrillard 1987: 41). This accounting for the death drive flails around for a transcendental something in the apparatus to form a noumenal nature immune to capital. As we know from Freud, 'the aim of all life is death' (Frud 1920: 31 1): the apparatus returns to nature, or rather, like an enzyme, is denatured, as it disaccumulates past the threshold of death; 'never fear,' adds Baubrillard on his knees, arms open to give and receive, a penitent's wet, red eyes skyward, 'there is an afterlife,' a nature to which 'we,' by virtue of that 'something within us,' can make this journey, this return, this re-tourism. To resist the real and its pressures, the reality principle and its dams, to regain life through the medium of the pleasure principle by escaping the inertia of the real: the final alibi of the militarist exploits of the superego. That the 'in us' should emerge from the cocoon of the apparatus to 'save us,' a transcendental economy where we gain everything we lose: the same old miraculating theo- oneiro-capital that forms the horizon of reversibility, sheltering all interiority, the eternity within which we return. The reel to real of the regulating-regulated institutions that dam the flows of pulsional damage to the apparatus and its reservoirs have been displaced along with the consciousness that repeated its identikit formulations as the realization process of capital took new twists. Ice breaks the real, consciousness is as derelicted as the apparatuses in Vienna 150 years ago, identity and regulation have shattered into the erase/record/ playback functions of the twisted pedicure that provides one of the few models adequate to CyDercapital's historical liquefactions, making the real reel. The Chinese virus was unfolding around them, Polychrome shadow countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Proteam enormous it towered abo~e them, blotting out the void.... The fracture lines and hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real, its smooth skin plated with black chrome (Gibson 1984:200 270)

Moebius-twisted, isotropic one-dimensional bio-pixel digital skin, diving down on Frankenstein City, systematically splicing and respacing 'Derelicted- Rewired-Derelicted' apparatuses spreads over the socius like fungus over dead vegetation; crusts boil and suppurate, revealing the chrome and glass and the ochrous spectra of pollutants: cityscape suffocating its stripped-down populations in the effluents of its decaying expenditures. Marx writes, although he hates doing it, thinking it perverse, 'senseless and arbitrary' - rather , than the natural, rational, theocratic necessity of returning us to ourselves - that the cycle 'Death-Life- Death' is the same as that of M-C-M (Marx 1974: 201). D=M: apparatuses suspended in flows charged with the most intrusive data, hot coalescence cooling exponentially into the , supercharged circuits of already ancient machines, warping and blistering their new live dead crusts in cyclophagic communion with too fast isotropic data - accumulation - L=C. Splicing engines struggle to contain the datableed, reformatting the nervured pulp in accordance with its autopropogative imperative - 'D=M' disciplining these accidents into the regular ~ pulses of the (in)corporate: neo-capitalism (Deleuze , and Guattari 1988: 20). As the loop courses through, searing the smooth, maximally receptive pulp, redistributing the bit-maps and circus diagrams of the apparatus, 'they make the possible the dissipation of the surfaces they cross' (Lyotard 1 993a: 240). That is, the real, the reproduction, the facile identitarian propagation, the negative feedback, the entire deregulated/regulating apparatus with its pulp-core and reversible 'nature': all dissipate in the mimetotechnical saturation of this pulsional blitz. Bruce Sterling once spray-painted the ollowing onto the crumbling walls of the biodrome: 'the proper mode of critical attack on cyberpunk has not yet been essayed. Its truly dangerous element is ts incipient Nietzschean philosophical fascism: the Deiief in the overman and the worship of the will-to power' (McCaffery 1991: 206). It is clear that the passage from cyberpunk to 'Globalhead' has meant something of a resurgence in matters biodromic - especially the mistaken attempt to construe the Ubermensch as the instance credulously invested with the potential return of a renascent humanity and a 'new world order' oozing from the mesh of derelicted apparatuses. The 'overman' is a phase shift in the will-to-power, without program or project, indifferent to jackboots, the crest of an intensive wave driven by recurrence, the intensity engine that wipes humanity altogether. At what point is it possible to discriminate between black ice and its host system? Discrimination is impossible a priori. Ice dives in exponential darkness in impossible vectors of contamination, articulating the inconceivable as they mesh meat, biohydraulics, and omniphagic capital. Slot Kuang and kill the lights!

It is of fundamental importance to recognize that the spectacle drives us; not to resist it; not to consider it a cover for something lost, a fundamental need that might once have articulated a few despondent theses on alienation, but solely in order to entrench humanity in the last ditches available to it, as artificial mimetechnics phase and redistribute the thrashing neuprozierenden, noumenal, datapulsional complex that engulis us. The entire history of philosophy is unable to stutter in the face of these incremental alterations. Meshing thanatopulsions and erotopulsions, apparatuses and their autolytic incompetence under the unconscious, howling and rumbling through the communications links synthesizing the protoplasmic 'interior' of the derelicted apparatus and the moebian twists, the auto-catalytic clinamen of the datapulsional 'exterior.' Biosofts bleed into always noisy channels that unpredictably break down. This hideous mesh of meat, pulp, neuronal modifications, technocapital's drooling maws, splicing non-linear shards of holographic tomorrows into the collapsing institutions of today. Running through this entire sequence is the black ice that reformats the apparatuses, state and psychical, for an erasure that has already happened. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bataille, G. (1988) Inner Experience, trans. L. A. Boldt, New York: SUNY Press. Baudrillard, J. (1987) Forget Foucault/Forget Baudrillard, trans. N. Duiresne et a/, New York: Semiotext(e). -- (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I. H. Grant, London: Sage. Bukatman, S. (1991) Terminal Identity, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972) L'Anti-oedipe, Paris: Minuit. -- (1988)A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone. Freud, S. (1895) 'Project for a Scientific Psychology', in James Strachey (ed.), The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition (SE), 24 vols, London: Hogarth Press,1953-74, vol.1: 281 -397. -- (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams, in :, Angela Richards (ed.), The Pelican Freud Library (PFL), 15 vols, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973-84, vol. 4. -- (1917) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, PFL, vol.1. -- (1920) 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', vol.11: ~, 269-338. -- (1933) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, PFL, vol.2. Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer, London: Grafton.

-- (1986) Count Zero, London: Grafton. Haraway, D. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, New York: Routledge. Kadrey, R. (1989) Metrophage, London: Victor Gollancz. Kant, l. (1958) Cntique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith, London: Macmillan. Lyotard, J. F. (1973) Derive a parbr de Marx et Freud, Paris: UGE. -- (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. B. Massumi and G. Bennington, Manchester: Manchester University Press. -- (1991) Le,cons sur l'analytique du subhme, Paris: Galilee. -- (1993a) Libidinal Economy, trans. l. H. Grant, London: Athlone. -- (1993b) Political Writings, trans. B. Readings and K. P. Geiman, London: University College Press. -- (1994) Des dispositifs pulsionels, 3rd edn., Paris: Galilee. Marx, K. (1974) Grundrisse, trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Massumi, B. (1992) A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. McCaffery, L. (ed.) (1991) Storming the Reality Studio, Durham and London: Duke University Press.