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