T h r o u g h t h e a n o n y m o u s h i s t o r i e s o f
c o r p s e a n d t h e H i s t o r y o f D e a t h
(An addendum to Decay)
by Basilisk
Posted by blue.beard:
I have a little trouble following your polysyllabic disertation, but imo, death
and decay can be studied from several different approaches.
Ecological:
Decay is the process of recycling those materials used by the former living. It
is in most part a colonization of the whole body by the bacteria in the gut,
helped enormously by maggots and other scavengers. The flies are, in turn
eaten by other animals and the food chain restarts its upward journey. In a
way, you could consider maggots to be the top of the food chain, and
conversely, the bottom. The wheel turns...
Practically:
Humans are omnivores, but we can't eat everything. The smell of decay is
not very pleasant for humans, because it is a sign of danger. Besides being
inedible, certain diseases can breed in a decaying cadaver. I imagine the
odor is quite stimulating to flys and beetles:)
Philosophically:
The primary impression of a cadaver (stimulating for some when fresh) is
that of total passivity Despite its human form, it is indifferent to any changes
in its environment, whether it is decay, weather, scavengers (animals or
insects) or necrophiles.
Death is also the ending of all goals or arguments. Once dead, one no
longers cares about unfinished projects, wars, loved ones, hated ones, etc.
I think that this is a simplified restatement of your post, but I'm not sure. In
any case, it is my personal view of the subject.
bb
Hi blue.beard,
First thanks a lot for your comments. Personally, I believe in what you
have stated here, up to some levels. However, this article (Decay) is
somewhat turns to another point of view; let me develop the lines of my
discussion(s) to make it more accessible and not bring that article (Decay)
under a direct surgical analysis. In fact, what I discussed in 'Decay' was a
summarized fraction of my project on power, life, and base-desire on the
one hand and on necrophilia, openness and necrocracy on the other,
accompanied by my ethnographic investigations. Hope this very brief reply
clarifies my discussions to some extent.
My project is started with the history of corpse management and
handling which returns to ancient Persia and Çatal Hüyük (7400 BCE) in
Anatolian plateau, also the rest of other civilizations at that time. I
discussed how the State has arranged all its goals to exterminate corpses,
to exploit the invisibility of death, abusing what as you stated, "the death
as the end of all arguments", so simulating death as a mega-fascism or a
non-relative close system with no entropy (and no negative pathology) that
no one can escape from like the State and its laws, like one's face and
despotic body; there is only two ways for reaction and the reaction should
be defined by these two: (1) coming to the State, Power and their horizons
that is to say configured by the territoriality and the ground through which
the State has been germinated ... (2) slipping to death, to be extinguished.
The State avoid wiping someone (or something) out by little agents
since little ones are always the quick ones, the wet ones, and transient
ones, coming and disappear quickly, somehow invisible to the State,
untraceable to the machines of investigation ... the little ones are traitors,
freaks, villains, the swarm of insects, the subterranean scavengers, wolves,
lies, virulence desire, Acephalous bodies, proliferating diagrams and bizarre
objects. The State cannot trust such nonhuman warmachines, so it
simulates its own dreadful device, a colossal and monolithic warmachine
that cannot be moved, stimulated or stirred, a non-segmentary Absolute.
The only problem that remains is how to extinguish and defeat all
resistances with such an autonomous warmachine which is not ballistic and
versatile at all; the solution lies in the dynamism of Power and its metrons
[1] (dimensions, judgments, architectural routs of motions). The dynamism
of power tries to level all blocks for one to be introduced into such an
immense ready-to-demolish arsenal ascribed to an unknown deity (father,
God, face, organic end, finis, ...). There is an extreme irony at play here
that power demolishes all blocks and put blocks concurrently to lead one
into the death simulated (the simulation of Death that is exterior to the
State) by the hands of the State, the simulated death through the
discourses of solidity. The State cannot communicate with Death unless it
simulates another death through its architectonic sphere; but even in the
case of the simulated death (its lap-pet), it behaves conservatively, full of
terror and aghast. The dynamism of Power (metron) configures one's every
second of life, thoughts, desires and steps (that is to say living:
subsistence) according to the position of this warmachine; a warmachine
which has been cleverly simulated by the State and Power; the transparent
surfaces of which are attached to the boundaries of the State, not at the
inside but floating in its horizon (The lethal spirit of the State is beyond its
frontiers.). The dynamism of power (metron) animates one to this
autonomous warmachine, to the simulated and architecturized death.
Before the obligatory presence of such a cunning dynamism and a workground which makes this dynamism possible (metrons and dimensionalities
of power) and an 'autonomous' warmachine (a death simulated through the
architectonic forces of solidity and the State), one becomes a fascist, a
politician of survival economy trying to survive and live in life, a laminar
flow of capital, an engineer of the State, a dimension of Power, metron, a
state-of-architecture and in the end, one "engineer[s] an apartheid of the
dead." [2], a "fascist myth" [3]. What an act of terror when one is wiped
out by such an immense arsenal: a twisted and inverse hecatomb.
Power and the State live as the pimps of death, but then again, the
death they have simulated -- death-raum, a de-contaminating room, a noninhabitable dwelling system -- to communicate with Death. At last, one
becomes the other: the State and Power appear (are simulated) as Death
(simulated through the architectonic forces of solidity) ... they can be the
end of all "arguments, loves and projects" and "no one cares": a centrifuge
with an infinite motion through which everything ceases to exist before it
comes to Death.
... the phantom death or the death-raum is a simulated architecture
of Death assembled by the State, Power and metrons.
I've discussed how in ancient Persia corpse was the Other of this
simulated death (a mal-death) and its demon was Druj- (a female name
from indic root: 'lie' and 'to Blacken' = Mother of Abominations); the
ultimate project of the Magi was to erase (sanitize) the corpse-fiend (DrujNasu) from all recesses of life ... Vidēvdād (Vendidad) or Zoroastrian's 'the
Book of the Law against Demons' has very strict instructions for making
one's thought, body, life, sexuality and desire clean, shimmering, visible
and traceable to the State and death (the simulated death), highlighting
the parsimonious art of 'living' (survival) on the satanic plateau of life with
a despotic attitude (P=1). The project of this influential Book was not
against Death but a contamination, a chaos or an unimaginable mess
through which everything becomes lie, a blackened Thing and a free-play
line of horror, everything becomes anonymous to the eyes of Power (P=1)
and the State, so the architecturized death by which they communicate
with the zero-dimensional Death. The ultimate spiritual triumph of the Magi
was trashing the corpses away and keeping death eternally under the
simulating and architectonic techniques of solidity. Everything should be
kept clean so in the end one can skip the fouling corpse and dives right into
the pure ocean of a death whose pimps are the State and Power. According
to Vendidad, villains cannot skip their corpses; they rot for a long time
before leaving this base-materialism to death. To purge this contamination
from all recesses of cosmos, they coined the word Khrafstrasnamed after
the noxious animals to eradicate anything invisible to their eyes, that can
cross their simulating death or turn it against the State itself, anything that
moves as a swarm (the turbulent body of horror) or has some relationships
with the rotting corpses, anything that does not care for the unbreakable
bonds between 'State and Power' and 'death' (simulated and architecturized
death) and their terrorized communication with the ungroundable Death,
anything that scavenges the architectural death, appearing as something
malignant to the State and its purity that is a model of the fascist (nonpathological) purity of their death [4] so to speak, wolves, insects, the
growing human nail, menstrual blood, rush of thoughts (the State needs
the consolidated ones), nomadic writings, turbulent motions, etc. [Compare
all these to the purity of the grounded death which is reflected on the
exploitations of racism and its claim for an ever-purging purity, compare all
these with the claims of purity: the exterminations of Jews and Gypsies by
the Nazi megadeath industry, the extermination of apostates by Muslims,
murdering criminals by those who claim they are the norms and the normal
ones, and then those who start to eliminate the normative lines because
they consider them normal, consequently garbage. There is also another
irony here, maybe the wildest one, all those who claim PURITY introduce
their preys into the absolute Purity of death on whose graveyards the State
has erected its own fragments and architectures of purity: the irony of
purity engineering (or collective-death-engineering).]
What really scares the State is not Death -- since it has invented its
own machine of regularized communication with Death, a machine which
manages intensities, an architecturized death (from now on I call it deathraum.) -- but contamination (epidemic openness), the desire for Death and
the catastrophic diseases infesting and infecting the State and Power in the
guise of versatile and ballistic swarms and micro-pests, the "little death
(s)" (Bataille) fused with the quick wets (the molecular fluids, untraceable
to the State and seeking to infest death-raum, making it epidemically
open): drooling mouths licking death ... soaking it in the nocturnal
emissions of mucus; is it a necro-philic [5] mess?
Persia was the first great civilization instituted the ultimate
warmachines to purge any base-communication (epidemic openness,
contamination, etc.) which deviates (to make pervert) and disorders all
exploitations of death-raum by the State and Power. The Greeks (and other
nations and monotheistic cultures) found the Persian methods of defleshing the human corpses and their decontaminating disciplines; they
applied their occidental modes of discipline to it; adding it a new
dimension: employing the quickand efficient essence of Persian techniques
through their own architectonic(architected and architecturizing) ethos.
'Sarcophagus' or what in Greek means 'the flesh-eating stone' -- used
by the Egyptians and Romans as a terra-cotta coffin -- is an accelerator to
purge the contamination of corpse within a localized radius, leaving only the
bones bleached by the sun, time and grave that is to say taking the only
inflexible, solid, white and immaculate parts of a corpse, the architectural
parts like the architectural essence of Power and the State: the Skeleton or
the metron of corpse.
The Greeks re-modified the Persian techniques as the architectural
warmachines against contamination and everything contaminating; fusing
Persian decontaminating methods with their cosmological schools of
thought and discipline of philosophy, science, art, politics and their
pantheon of gods.
Architected by death and architecting death, the State, as once
mentioned, finds Death a horror and the death it has architected (deathraum) a potential malfunction (or rather multi-functions) which must be
grounded and localized with the extreme precision and carefulness. This
obsessive anxiety that State suffers and concentrated on its own work
(death-raum) is not merely a paranoia but rather manifests what has been
discovered by the State: what communicates with Death through a
regulated communication is under the exposure of a contamination which is
always triggered by any openness to death, any communication with it;
death has an immense power for infesting and being infested. Death-raum
(the architected and architecturizing death) is under the constant danger of
this exposure, this pestilential openness. To this extent, the architectures of
death-raum are undergrounded and marginalized (the problem of
graveyards, morgues, etc. and the affairs around them) by the State or
surrounding architectures automatically. However, the State fails to detect
and intercept one point: that openness germinates strategy (multiplicity of
the contagious lines) as its opening and contagious agent; for Strategy is
always an opening force, a contagion which works by and through the
alliance and multiplying processes of the tactical lines, introducing every
communication to Zero by cryptogenically ciphering (cifre) it. The strategies
emerge from this communication (the communication of death-raum with
Death) as the pestilentially creative agents that the State can never
investigate or trace, the strategies which bring the State to a basecommunication with Death. This is why the architectures erected through
the State are the ungrounding strategies, the State comically feeds on
them, economizing them and employing them as de-contaminating spaces:
the compositions of its auto-collapse.
Architecture and Liveware: death-raum is a project for uprooting the
contaminations or localizing them. A project assembled by dimensions,
metrons and architectures. As Bataille has suggested, architecture and its
anomalous productions are the fearsome warmachines of the State and
Power, referring to an authority whether divine or human: tombs,
graveyards, churches, mosques, morgues, rows of corpses exposing before
the sun to be ossified, putting masks for getting rid of Druj-Nasu,
introducing one to metron, body disciplines, etc. However, at the same
time, all architectures are the creative self-exhuming machines and the
affirming (strategic and non-direct affirmation) compositions of softcollapse and implosion.
Then, don't a grave and the iconographic figure of Skeleton pimp out
the architecture of death that the State and Power simulate?
As I mentioned before, "What horrifies liveware and its warmachines
is not an empty tomb but a tomb, exhumed and messed up. Architectural
policy of liveware does not reject destruction or deconstruction but escapes
exhumation ... deflowering the face [6] (white wall / black hole [Deleuze]),
marring and mangling it ... by messing the surfaces, scratching ...
skinning ... burning ... eating ... turning to dust ... cutting into the core,
with bare hands, daggers and nails, enzymes ... saliva and breath ... shovel
and plow. Exhumation is all criminal and wicked but further and basically
polluting and infecting as it undergoes surface collision, necrotizing the
architecture, proliferating hot and cold surfaces into each other, letting the
cold evaporates and the hot be reeked up: Resurrection of the defiled body.
The cold cannot be reheated; it is messed up."
Exhumation ridicules the architecture of death designed by the State
and Power; it pops up as a strategy wherever death-raum is grounded, as
an ungrounding force through the compositions on which grund is consolidated.
Mehrdad Iravanian, the Iranian architect, suggested for studying
architecture you must investigate necrocracy; it's not enough, you should
practice the art of exhumation too.
Apart from the Greek approaches to the Persian decontaminating
techniques, there is also another influential approach, the Judeo-Christian
approach to the hyper-paranoid Persian discipline that later permeates
through the Islamic customs. Persians were the masters of an Osseologic
culture ... a corpse should be entered into a sophisticated and fully
industrialized array of the processes to be distilled as the bones or dry and
inflexible articulation of death-raum through the solid space of the State.
This is the heavy Osseologic (bone-culture) tradition that has influenced the
Judeo-Christian architecture, beliefs, politics and customs; and one can find
its mortifying and frenzied portray in the image of Valley of Dry Bones
(Ezekiel 37:1-14) which excludes the rotting softness of contamination and
all-includes and necessitates the white and articulative purity of the bones
as the prerequisite ground for the purity of the State, death and
monotheism. This image and all exhortations in Leviticus express and map
the origination of a great portion of the architectures assembled through
death-raum and the discourses of solidity: the tradition of entombing,
autopsy, human anatomy, death penalty, building graveyards and
catacombs, eschatology, ethnocentrism, body discipline, etc. However, as it
was mentioned, there is a security hole in every assemblage, the State and
Power put together through death-raum and the discourses of solidity. It is
the fatal destiny of all architectures which bring their security holes once
they are assembled by means of dimensions and metrons. The architectural
essence of graves and morgues that is supposed to be a decontaminating
architecture, localizing the vile body of corpse within a radius, and be a
bone-breeding factory thus satisfying the hunger of the State for purity and
groundness, turns to be a hang-out, a club for the necrophiles in which
they continue their base-contaminating dialectic with death-raum, bringing
it to a twisted openness; and the contamination gushes out in an immense
intensity. This is an instance of the strategies which are always at work
through the architectures of death-raum, ungrounding it restlessly and
unleashing their own brands of openness, base-communication and desire
for death which is germinated on the little-death(s).
The bones, too, are the strategic attractors for wetness of all kinds
(quick wets, fluids, mucous, semen, etc.); they always bear their own
necrophilic upheavals -- so catastrophic for the State and basically
unmanageable for metrons -- which lie in the characteristics, inclinations
and position of the bones themselves. Vendidad, therefore, warns about
pulverizing the bones during time in the special ossuaries named Ostodan
as a disintensification process for this necrophilic encounter. However, this
dust industry multiplies its own lines of strategy too, becoming an odorless
plague or a dry GAS (pest molecules?) composing itself as a pestilentially
creative warmachine, a true horror spreading the necrophilic lines and
epidemic openness (the lines of contagion, plagues and basecommunication) not only through sepulchral debauchery but also in and
through the architectures of culture, society, mind and anthropomorphic
desire as GAS (this pest-tsunami) [7] or the terminally fluid affirmation of
everything, a depth in which everything is a possession and a contagion,
enjoying an infinite proliferation on the virtual surfaces of Zero.
One of my projects (Through the Plague) is diagramming the
epidemic strategies hinted, ciphered or charted in the works of such writers
as Mowlavi (Rumi), Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, Sadegh Hedayat, Michaux,
Deleuze, Lyotard, Gabrielle Wittkop, Kathy Acker, Shelley Jackson, Pat
Cadigan, Richard Kalich (The Nihilesthete), Doug Rice, Kenji Siratori,
Cormac McCarthy, Pierre Guyotat, Nick Land (whose sole book is my only
recommendation to all Plaguers [8]) and many others who compose the
strategies of openness, collapse, affirmation, alliance and base-participation
both through paranoia and "schizotechnics" (Nick Land), through what they
diagram and the techniques of diagramming. However, there is an everwidening gap between my project and theirs; a difference beyond my
control as a novice, incubated in my cultural specificity and the Asiatic
complexity I live in, and plagued by the historical background I've clung to:
an ancient necroPHILIC country with an immense Thanatonic culture.
Best,
R.
Notes:
[1] For a brief delineation of metron, see Pestis Solidus at Maraka Project, endnote 3
[2] from The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Nick Land,
Routlege, P. 195 (Inconclusive communication)
[3] Ibid.
[4] What a grim purity that when it touches, it breeds itself.
[5] For a note on necrophilia, see Pestis Solidus
[6] ... the face of Christ and his Empty Tomb, the face of the Earth, the seduction of face,
the face of death and the Grim Reaper.
[7] For notes on GAS, see Pestis Solidus and Cata-