S u i c i d e
a n d
S u r v i v a l
E c o n o m y
by Basilisk
An inter-dimensional line. Like all demonic machines, suicide comes
not as a solitary and single process with a certain function or a unique
genre suggesting 'the very end of Oneself' but as a horde, through the
rabid propagations and the aberrancy of functions, mechanisms and
compositions; a demonic worm (a line of vermiculation) spanning the zones
of spectacle, the sentimental cravings for martyrdom, wiping the other
through the extermination of self, performing the depth of the body, an
inverse or down-falling representation of Genesis (a representational
undoing process of Genesis), a turbo-dying process, a self-announcement,
a descent, mess engineering, etc. It puts its proliferating traces all over
paranoia, schizophrenia and beyond at the same and one time; deleting
functions of '/end' from its program: open functionality. Suicide has too
many faces to the point of a catastrophic vertigo (a facelessness) for one
who undergoes a self-immolation and the one who ludicrously tries to
convince and ensure himself of being just the audience of suicide of the
other and not another entity (event) engulfed by the whole panorama of sui
+ caedere, or a participant, an ally in suicide of the other. Suicide is not an
isolationist or a concentrative annihilation; it is a spreading one. To this
extent, Albert Camus’ critical concern of the only thing really worth writing
about is why we don't kill ourselves outright is also pregnant of a question
about suicide not as a single 'What?' (i.e. the very essence, wesen, or the
quiddity of suicide) as it is many (suicide is an inter-dimensional program
and does not have a single face with a single function to end or anything
else.) It is impossible to both define and trace suicide as a single, dead-end
process. It also brings the crucial question of suicide and the problem that
if suicide is worth of writing (committing) or not, if it is possible to be
written (committed) or not and the question that if through suicide one can
really kill oneself outright.
Overhealth. As a delusional momentum of the discussion, I launch my
words from the horizon of Survival Economy. What do we try to survive?
Against whom do we unleash our suicide? One can always say, "It does not
[ 1 ]
matter." Yes, it does not matter as long as we exploit and utilize suicide as
another instrument in and through the complex horizon and nexuses of
Survival Economy; as long as we slyly put it into the service of our
quotidian but ever-developing campaign for survival, a campaign far from
the survival-of-the-fittest, a campaign in which every one has already
crossed the end-line and is the champion, the fittest or no need to be
represented as the fittest. Or as a survivor (in suicide of the other?), we
turn the spectacle of survival against suicide by intelligently coding and
constructing a regime of signs which takes revenge (this survivalist terror
of anthropomorphic thought) of survival on suicide, dissimulating suicide as
a heroic martyrdom.
The most ironic and horrific situation which Man assumes as its
humanity: 'trying to survive and living’ in Life. It roars the irony of
humanity and the horror of life.
Zarathustra and his legion of magi were among the first people who
discovered and experienced the ultimate horror we try to survive. It is life
and its abomination, the unlife or the life-satan, what exactly does not
purge the ground or Survival Economy but knows nothing of survival: the
Mother of Abominations (call it Mistmare or Germinal Death [2].
The organizations all know (and are much familiar with) the ghastly
ocean of death as what sucks them and their becomings to itself (sucking
them dry through its unimaginable coldness); death is not a new or
shocking panorama opening gradually or suddenly before them. Jerking-off
over death and its horror, ] flattering with it and trying to be seduced by
death are what organizations and their survival economies do, experience
through their genesis (rising and running) and are grown with. However,
the horror of life pushes organizations and all nexuses of Survival Economy
to what they consider as the worst thing: anonymity, to be blackened, to be
ungrounded, and being brought to where all means of vision are messed
up; where you do not know where you are (not mentioning your
cryptogenic position to all chronologic horizons of past, present, future,
etc.), where you are not grounded but become an exhumationist [3] or an
ungrounding machine in strategic ways: Anonymous-until-Now or a descent
whose depth is not translated according to ground but a compositional
unground [4]; where you are always exhumed as the dead (with much
stress on the exhumation process and not the dead). Life is the unground
of overhealth; the immense and unbearable health, the richness it provides
for organizations or any surviving process -- from and through which they
assemble their 'live-ing' networks -- is the means of their debacle and
collapse not to death but an unground where everything blurs and smears,
turns into a compositional flow of mess, where everything is contamination,
a contagion, a strategy out of a catastrophic anonymity, where one is
anonymized before being introduced to death; one's death becomes a
faceless perversion through the abysmal compositions, anonymities and the
pandemonium of traces (base-fetishes), all fundamentally confounding any
proximity or remoteness to death. 'How far are you from Death?' is
recomposed in another horizon external to the theistic version of this
question: is death close enough to gnaw at your genital? Do you feel its
sticky wetness in your cavities? Where is death, after all?
Overhealth diagrams not only a strategy 'from without' plaguing
Survival Economy, but also rises as an autonomous bubbling (seething and
over-agitated) motor of Survival Economy, itself: When a line deviates from
the panoptic affordance (Umbrella System) of Survival Economy
temporarily or even does not satisfy the programs or objectives under
process, the rest of constituents and nexuses of survival network restore
more affordance, more health, more appropriation, more economical
nexuses, more wealth, that is to say, going deeper into the sphere of
subsistence, more survival, more living ... what we have here is not the
classic thermodynamic maintenance of equilibrium but pretending to reach
the balance while stealthily and cunningly restoring more health and
crossing the balance limit in a diabolic lust to save, to restore and
accumulate more wealth, more survival for a collapsing-into-now future
(For an exchangist of Survival Economy, genesis is all such a future and not
the beginning); like the fibroproliferation of a scar, this healing process of
the wound which deliriously pours more health into its ground while it has
already obstructed and recovered the wound -- every recovery carries a
meltdown within itself. Such a transgression of the balance limit by a
survival flood which is an uncommodity in Survival Economy eradicates
everything but survival, namely, 'survival overload’ which is the pestilential
unground of the entire surviving panorama ... this is the irony at work in
the nervous system of Survival Economy and all accumulative grids of
capitalist mega-networks. Survival is already a strategic suicide knitted by
the seething intensities of overhealth; this is why in the term of Camus,
suicide is already a redundancy.
Similarly, the suicide that Camus depicts (La Morte Heureuse) is
imprisoned within the sphere of survival-based utility and fecundity. Where
organizations and Survival Economy oscillate violently between advanced
tactics of escaping the overhealth catastrophe of life (a plague from
without) which tries to basically mess up any survival, and affirmation of
this overhealth through their frantic survival overload (seething from
within), suicide is either a pathetic apparatus for escaping the absolute
horror of life (Life is the unlife of the life-satan, the Mistmare.), a machine
smoothing all routes for the organization to escape what it always finds the
horror; or is the matter of redundancy. Here suicide becomes a tactical line
that inevitably is appropriated by the grund it traverses. This politically
survival-oriented suicide that Camus suggests is not of the interest; not
because it is imperfect but on the contrary it is a perfectionist approach to
survival and highly advanced modi operandi of organization engineering.
However, before nauseating spectacles of survival, even such a suicide is
revolutionary exciting and inhumanly turbulent. In Matrix Reloaded, we
encounter such a panorama in an extremely nauseating but also electrically
stimulating and thrilling degree. Everything not only wants to survive but
also amasses survival more than what is needed. From the plugged agents
of the Matrix to humans, to their domesticated instrumental machines (the
agents of Survival Economy); survival and subsistence are luxuriant things
one should accumulate to no end, the matters which exclude any 'price' for
themselves in an immolation of all the circuits through which the circulation
of survival, its consumption and complex hydraulic commerce navigate and
fecundate the ground of Survival Economy. The only exceptions are the
anonymous machines which are digging in inexorably and uncontrollably;
ungrounding Zion -- the last stronghold of anthropomorphism -- the
anonymous machines from which their instrumental machines have been
assembled. The water recycling machine of the city with its hunger for
recycling wealth, health and survival is a foregrounded parody of such
survival machines (the instrumental ones) trying to inoculate themselves
with anthropomorphic desire, transcendence and ground.
The base-artificiality of nameless machines makes them anonymous
to survival and its agents, diagramming them as machinic plagues of the
unlife (the life-satan). They are not coming to dismantle the organic milieu
hidden behind the instrumental machines but cracking and opening it up,
subverting the economical nexuses of its network with inter-dimensional
non-economical meshworks of base-communication; bumping artificial
anonymity to compositions; (re)designing and (re)composing the panorama
of survival as the mess engineering of a base-suicide. The machines do not
need to 'dig in’ or have the probing heads for passing the iron walls or
hacking defensive systems of the city; they are digging out (corpses?),
exhuming and unearthing: artificial earthing. This panorama of invasion is
totally a 'revenge of signs’ unleashed by Survival Economy; the anonymous
machines do not need to invade the city; they autonomously rise from the
instrumental machines (the machines overcoded by Survival Economy)
whose eventual suicide is inevitable. And instead of the probing heads they
were supposed to have for penetrating into the walls of Zion; their tails
appear as fluid (near to evaporation) distribution of probing heads
simulating a turbulent fluidity by which they gain a cryptogenic movement
(Leaving thousands of traces everywhere, not signifying but anonimizing
prints; messing the map). They unground spaces they traverse,
engineering the acephalous lines of war to the mouth of (un)life and its
base-artificiality, and finally what CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit)
diagrams as Abomenon: the Ground-Dementor or the Mother of
Abominations. The invasion scenery of machines is nothing but the
'awakening ritual’ of instrumental machines, strategically assembled
through Survival Economy, itself. This is an uprising.
Apart from the exhuming machines (at a metamorphic phase in the
movie, they were similar to tomb scavengers, an unnamable army of
arthropods unearthing a grave; an army made out of a shape-shifting
polyalloy) in Matrix Reloaded, there are also two survival anomalies which
engineer their own strategic suicides. Both agent Smith as a self-replicating
bug (an unplugged hole in the Matrix; a hole without its solid part?) and
Neo as a superhero (a Watchman) are the serious malfunctions (multiplying
functions) in Survival Economy or the very instances of overhealth i.e. the
suicidal machines pumping health as a fatal disorder or filth into the
wealth-tubes of Survival Economy. These are the possessed ones with the
infernal bodies of suicide or Death-Mess. Neo as a superhero is strangely on
the route of demonic infestations (there is something horribly wrong with
this guy.); his 'Superman thing' in spite of being a domesticated line of
flight (Hollywood-disciplined, sedimentary process, a grund fecundating or
irrigation system) has been basically cracked, infected and overwritten by
bugs, viruses, electrical surges and all lurkers in the system; his flight
descends as a cata-flight, or the 'dimensional-wrap' ability of a demon. His
kicks and punches are all the insectoid micro-tremors with the jerks and
movements composing the molecular sounds in space, in the form of
silence-infested noise, more reminding me of twitches and spasms of a
male insect being eaten alive by the female side after an intercourse; the
traces and prints of his meteororic movements in space open the cuttingedges of an n-plex blade unfolding its cuts, edges and metallic folds;
forging edges of a blade, this outlandish weapon of openness, of butchering
openness (openness not only as 'being open to’ but also the radical
butchery of being lacerated, cracked and laid open): his body is a twistable
blade. He (heit: it) is not exactly a swarm but an anomaly in the hive rising
as a vapor from the accumulated and recirculating 'survival' or 'health, a
surplus value which unaccountably operates as an exorbitant and
uneconomical flood which constantly and progressively precedes (in
intensity, speed, displaceability and amplitude) the sum-health currently in
circulation and dynamically accumulated. Superheroes are the malfunctions
of Survival Economy; they are the schizotrategic suicidal machines,
inseparable from each production process of paranoic industries and
cultures. The insomnia, the flight, the cutting-edges he bombards surfaces
with in an ultimate spatial blitzkrieg, all render him as a demon, this
multiplex of eyes and wings. Neo is an unsuspected abyss in matrix. In this
panorama, agent Smith more approaches the Baudrillardian landscape of
"the Hell of the Same" through the copy/multiple-pastes 'functions' which
despite the fact that they can only select Survival Economy as their
groundwork or glean themselves from its economic distributions, stubbornly
put themselves as pest-particles of the proliferation plague that as JeanJacques Lecercle pointed out, (proliferation) is a bedlam scouring the order
without remorse [5]. The Hell of the Same continuously quantifies survival
into unites (the unites of survival) until they spark a qualitative cataclysm
in which all traces of quantity and measures (metrons) are rendered off; a
space (more at raum and matrix than space as spatium) overloaded (whiteheated) by such a fever for quantification implodes (through a qualitative
collapse) and can no longer conduct any scale, metron, measure or
dimension by which quantities undergo mensuration or economical
distribution. Here, quantification as a consequence of metrons or the
animators of power becomes impossible. The Hell of the Same convulses as
a terrible fever (a glacial fever) or an aggressive worshipping of Survival
Economy and its liquidation (liquidation of survival and health) through
which Survival Economy tracks down the new surviving processes and
searches for more and heavier health compounds, inundating the survival
ground and hydraulically messing (neither exterminating nor releasing) the
threads of its previous economical repressions. Instrumental machines (and
not the anonymous ones) are digging in, scavenging mines for extracting
the Survival compounds with heavier-core atoms, irreproachably
propagating an atomic mess while working with the new heavy compounds
of survival and health which radiate madly as they flicker low.
'Survival overload' storms the matrix.
28 Days Later (Danny Boyle) is a survival project in another but
parallel landscape. The movie fits the Pulp-Bio-Horror (or even Survival
Horror) genre politics which illustrates the lines of viral insurrection putting
the free-market of survival in danger; but what actually happens is
promoting and intensifying survival methods and passion (we must not
formulate this passion as a subjective taste) for not only survival but also
optimization of Survival Economy. Politics of 'Survival Horror’ invites the
lines of viral disorders as a post-industrial scheme for replacing the once
industrious assembly bays of Survival Economy with something else.
Art-aud. Then where is a suicide disloyal to Survival Economy? Let me
open a parenthesis of thrill within the authorial space of this essay: (where
is the suicide that deluges me with shivers?):
In Begotten (the movie, directed by Elias Merhige), the God cuts
himself open with a razor blade, running into his Black&White entrails;
jerking, bending, twisting, coiling, convulsing, melting, jarring and wanking
off his innards while, for the first time, death-cruising his jelly-flesh,
stepping into the plateau of black matter. After being liquidated (sprouting
as a corpse), a masked woman lurches out of the shadows, inseminating
herself with the semen boiled out of the God's corpse. She gives birth to a
dwarfish creature rendered through a human body (Mutant Dead God).
Mutant Dead God is imminent to the Dead God and the God himself. The
Mutant Dead God is the only solution that God and masculinity could find to
introduce themselves to the rootless journey of becoming woman, by
becoming 'It', a mutated coldy or a cold and mutating 'He': IT, the ultimate
suicide. 'IT' insinuates the pestilential solution masculinity found (invented)
to mess up its closure, its rigidity, then, taking the flight of becoming
woman, the cata-flight of epidemic openness [6]. Only through becoming
It, masculinity and God can transplant themselves in the body of becoming
woman as 'prosthesis', A Good Meal' or 'it': 'He' can only affirm becoming
woman by becoming It, by becoming a prosthesis, a good meal. Mutant
Dead God is the ultimate Good Meal out of a necrophilic mess (coldies
engineering) that masculinity can undergo for wasting itself on Zero; to be
lacerated open at last; but how much semen the dead god can afford to
disseminate the 'mutant dead gods'? We could not see the mutant dead
god if the screen painted with semen to a desolated White or a luminous
white sparkling in colorless liquids ... a screen blanketed with whiteness
(Call it Moby Dick.) [7]
A theistic tragedy, the story of an exhausted god, end, pessimism and
even [death are not at issue here. The suicide of (dead) god (or He) is an
outset for the mutant-dead-god (or It): I hear the cavernous sound of
'mutant dead god' from the depths of the black&white throbbing member of
the masculinity itself; as a music for a more overexcited dance, the suicide.
Artaud and Schawrzkogler diagram or meet a similar suicide which god
commits not out of rage, or a desire for self-abolition through which he
seeks to theatrically perform his last onslaught or cosmic genocide with the
ending scream of "Look at me, you wretched bastards." (It is more like an
imbecile prank visualized in Hollywood's workshops.) but a strategic
affirmation of the Abomenon, the horror and the interphyletic /
interdimensional commotions of (un)life or Germinal Death and finally the
butchering plane of openness (being laid open); a non-representational
suicide which howls as a hubbub at the background of this horror or
unimaginable commotion, an accompaniment which nobody hears. More
accurately, nobody has the ears powerful enough to hear it.
One’s life is relatively a long foreplay for this femininely-patterned
orgasm, the non-transcendental suicide. To rhetorically diagram suicide,
one must finally realize, suicide fiercely challenges any transcendental
delineation of its multiplicity. Artaud's terms of the electrified body, body-
under-shock-therapy, Art-aud (the deadly creative body), "the screaming
body" (Stephen Barber) all summon the suiciding or fastforward body
through which the body's temporary frames (fixed by the mounted organs
as Artaud suggests) and positions crash into each other; forming an
unfocused body with a fastforward-flesh, a fastforward-dying process and a
fastforward-commotion through which everything is cinematically
unfocused, blurred, and (re-)composed as a flow of a frameless messy
stream spreading in multiple directions and moving according to its illogic
rates of speed through compositions which artificially engineer themselves,
through the abyss of suicide (where the body is re-ciphered and
redesigned). The terminal continuity of this body-stream retains a blurring
speed, dissolving the body not to a total purgation but a body-smear which
is smoothly absorbed into pestilential flows of mess (the terminally ill and
labyrinthine compositions) or engineers its own compositional space which
can be the host of new compositions; compositions within compositions
within compositions ad infinitum or that is to say Art-aud, the creative
mazing body that one can experience through suicide. The fastforwardbody or the suiciding body is first of all a dementor program for its
performer, the performer of the suicide (or in term of Schawrzkogler, the
aktionist). Here, one may warn about the ruthlessly subjective sphere of
the performer; no, this is not the subjective performer; it performs suicide
not through actualizing or practicing suicide by calling upon the suicidal
forces. This performer merely triggers potentialities (of Potenz) of the body
and its organs, their rates of speed and becomings, unleashing what is
already there, an autonomous machinery of different compositions that the
body envelopes for both survival and anti-survival. Thus performer here
cannot be individuated from the nonhuman space of the cataclysm that is
set free and comes to swallow the performer and its survival horizon,
devouring them with a creativity which shows no compassion for the
performer and the stage. In addition, suicide is a (re-)composition process
of the body in its full artificiality; in suicide, one can decoupage the body in
a cinematic anomaly where frames of the body escape the full body,
evaporate and become anonymous. This is why, in suicide, according to
Artaud, you become an engineer of a part of your own designing process
(Now, you can design your body more according to the interphyletic
wreckages of life rather than death.) "... [In suicide] life is for me no longer
an absurd accident whereby I think what I am told to think." [8] (Artaud)
Now, through suicide, you can intentionally and uneconomically participate
in life, communicate with it through engineering methods you always find
exciting; suicide is a demonic lust for (re-)composition and moreartificialization process of the body. In suicide, you give the body multiple
speeds, different rates of speed for different zones of the body. You invent
an artificial body from the supposedly natural 'full body' -- which is a stockpile for the commerce accumulation, sedentarization and circulation -- by
messing yourself up: returning to the body as a terminal composition close
to meltdown.
Should it be added, such a suicide is not a revenge (a reductionist
terror) on the organic body or an escape from its compulsory
accommodating horizon; it is a war beyond judgment and attached to the
organic body itself, on its ground that through suicide is exhumed
(ungrounded but not purged); it is an ill open-ended enhancement of the
body, delivering the body to its nonhuman side. This is why Stelarc is also
among the most creative performers of the real suicide, his 'Hollow Body’ is
an involuntary host for the storm of prostheses which emerge or come, not
merely life-support but also sinister machines from nowhere, opening the
potentiality of the body as an immense composition whose bonds know
nothing of negation: an epidemic body or suicide [9]. Suicide is an
affirmation gone mad. Like Artaud and Schawrzkogler, Stelarc has
discovered the fundamental interconnections between suicide, design and
composing process; and how they pervade each other to the point of
internal symbiosis.
Suicide or Death-Mess. Through the course of suicide, you become
irrelevant to the capitalist body of nature by strategically affirming it
(breaching its horizontal walls) and installing yourself as a security leakage
(a camouflage) over its economy, as an artificializing process. And here we
can realize the terminal friendship between suicide and 'technology and its
filaments'; cars, bullets, electricity, drugs, prostheses of all kinds, etc. all
highlight a thirst for the terminal artificialization of the body through suicide
or more precisely, terminal (re)composition of the body. This thirst for
artificializing and base-designing one’s body or horizon makes suicide as a
feeding (un)ground for technology and its tides of prostheses whose
machinery is engineering terminal compositions, overlapped entities,
anonymous composing processes and design anomalies. That is indeed
artificialization or even more-artificialization which is in question in suicide,
not a return to the capitalist space of nature. Once digging up suicide as an
artificializing process, there is no wonder that suicide is also a 'mess
engineering’, a process affirming all artificial (re-)compositions, designing
processes, inter-dimensionalities and the ground anomalies through which
nonhuman spaces are diagramed and human spaces if not become obsolete
but become inhuman; and out of which mess as an unthinkable
composition of a terminal crash between elements and their movements on
and through each other is engineered (Mess is the post-composition of
everything; it needs artificiality as the unground of its mutations and
becomings.)
In suicide, you cannot wipe yourself out; you can only make a mess
out of yourself; and this is why, suicide is all a mess spread over the sexual
hiccups, unfinished compositions of the body, never-ending suicide notes,
imperfectible desires, inharmonious body-arts, hasty movements, etc.
(which are consistent within themselves but appear incongruous). In
suicide, dying process is an affirming flow which spills into the mouth of
(un)life and its Abomenon. To this extent, "What part of the living matter
dies?" becomes one of the most horrific questions through the life / mess
affirming strategies of suicide.
Suicide is the diary of the incomplete (but not repressed) death, a
death-mess. Through suicide, the body is scattered here and there,
floating, lying, moving, oozing, propagating in life and mess to that extent
which even death cannot scavenge and collect all traces, flows and pieces
of this ever-suiciding body. This reminds of a criminal and demonic laughter
in which one yells: "Damn, I'm still alive"; and not only the body but also
one's existence becomes a toilet for the interfusing slops of life and death;
nothing can clean the streets, space and bodies from their sticky presence.
I tell myself: "If you are searching a total death in your suicide; then, go
somewhere else." By suicide I make my body, existence and becomings
disloyal.
In the term of suicide, think strategically. In the term of suicide, try to
invest your own synthetic artificial flavor.
I cannot write suicide; this is suicide that writes me.
I stop my discussion at this point and do not continue the Deleuzian
panorama of suicide which Ansell Pearson hints at in Germinal Life [10]:
when one's existence becomes a total burden made by age, misfortune,
sickness or artless and unexploitable pain; and I feel intimidated to trace
the plane of despair as an unground of suicide, a plane which is too
complex to be oversimplified as mere hopelessness.
Notes:
[1] For Michael Cross and Boris Mangold
[2] On Germinal Death, see: Reza Negarestani, "Death as a perversion: Openness and
Germinal Death", CTheory, Online. http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=396, 2003.
[3] "Exhumation (ex + humus: ground) or compositional ungrounding (even as
disinterring or digging up [the dead?]) is not a contemporizing or a cold and inhuman
modernizing operation over the things grounded (the dead?) but it is a process
introducing qualitative collapse into surfaces and their facial affordances (or the stratified
events) to crack them open not on the politico-economic chronosphere of Now but now as
where (and its labyrinths: artificial earth, strategy, etc.), the ungrounded(ing) depth. It is
a non-legalized process through which surfaces proliferate within each other. According to
the anthropomorphic (and especially the White) level of analysis, such a process, is
basically criminal (exhumation is all criminal.)" from Reza Negarestani, Cata-: remarks on
depth and darkness, Online. http://www.cold-me.net/, 2002.
[4] On compositional unground, see: Reza Negarestani, Cata-: remarks on depth and
darkness, Cold Me (www.cold-me.net).
[5] Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language, Nonsense,
Desire, La Salle: Open Court, 1985.
[6] On Epidemic Openness, see: Reza Negarestani, "Death as a perversion: Openness and
Germinal Death", CTheory, Online. http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=396, 2003.
[7] Reza Negarestani, A Good Meal, Online. http://www.cold-me.net/, 2002.
[8] Antonin Artaud, Anthology, ed. J. Hirschman, San Francisco: City Light Book, 1965.
[9] See Stelarc, Remarks on Hollow Body, Online. http://www.cold-me.net/, 2002.
[10] Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The difference and repetition of Deleuze, London
& New York: Routledge, 1999.