inhumanism

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Inhumanism: an erotica RROL 2017

s/u: sexy unknown s/u/100 s/u + s/u ÷ s/u/100 = sexy unknown s/u ÷ (s/u + s/u) = sexy unknown x sexy unknown : x sexy unknown x sexy unknownn… molly may o’leary, sexy unknown, 2016

0 This thesis is an attempt to illuminate a sexual subtext operative within accelerationism and to apply those findings into an erotic machine that executes the supreme sadistic fantasy. It begins with an analysis of Sade, and isolates the representational technique executed within his writings as flattening language-asdescription into command sequences; a gesture that hinges on the hierarchisation Sade maintains between primary process and secondary derivates. It continues by relating this representational technique to the disorganisation of description as occurs within computer science, thus uncovering a sadomasochistic dynamic between natural languages and code. It proceeds by examining similarities between Sade and the philosopher Nick Land, describing the desire professed by Land in his early works to “fuse with the source of the signal”1– to align natural languages with number, flattening writing onto its referent. The discussion then describes the Landian apparatus more holistically, identifying a stratification of hierarchies that is parallel with Sade, and relating primary process as conceived by Land to temporality. The conclusion is an attempt to apply these variables into the construction of a speculative machine that would execute the most ruinous of all sadistic impulses: a self perpetuating system of pain that would transcend secondary nature, replicating into infinity. It achieves this by modifying the Ethereum source code for Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, complete with contractual specifications and deployment instructions. .1 nick land, ‘hyperstition: an introduction’. delphi carstens interviews nick land, 2009, http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/ accessed 17/01/17

‘10 Outside it's Planomic Now, and the numbers are swarming.2 The following is a statement made by Quentin Meillassoux in the final chapter of After Finitude, in which he describes a world newly saturated with number since the Enlightenment. Prior to Galileo’s detection of the motion of celestial spheres, mathematisation was only possible via a geometric mapping of the world which was a “motionless expanse”3. Galileo discovered a world in which acceleration itself could be transcribed, shattering the static geometry to which we had become intimate, and electrifying space into infinitely quantifiable patterns. ...it is this glacial world that is revealed to the moderns, a world in which there is no longer any up or down, centre or periphery, nor anything else that might make of it a world designed for humans. For the first time, the world manifests itself as capable of subsisting without any of those aspects that constitute its concreteness for us.4 The mathematisation of nature and the decentering of astronomy reformat the world to reveal a Nature as cold and inhospitable as the vacuum of space– a world in which number reigns supreme. In this glacial climate, Kant liberated Time from its task of measure into the purely sequential arithmetic that coordinates the temporality of capitalism.5 Nick Land’s accelerationism orientates towards this point, tracking the proficiency of numbering and quantification practices relinquished by the Enlightenment into the seething complexity of the market-place. At the collision of number with externality, the grafting of measure onto absolute time, temporality .2 nick land, mechanomics, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .2 nick land, mechanomics, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .3 quentin meillassoux, after finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency, bloomsbury publishing plc, london, 2009 .4 ibid .5 this is the contention of anna greenspan’s phd thesis, capitalism’s transcendental time machine, warwick, 2000

11 super-conducts into ruthless progression. In Teleoplexy, Land defines accelerationism as a system of measurement that seeks to align thought in reflexive, affirmative feedback to impersonal primary process: the site of pure production. Production is pure, unadulterated process that capital facilitates at the expense of the human, diverting resources for its own “oblique”6 purposes. While capitalism appears to us as a purely quantitative process of extraction and valorisation, Paul Ennis emphasises that it has no “identifiable core”7; displaying a “strange qualitative nature”8, measured by a system of time, a self-reinforcing cybernetic intensity that Land calls Teleoplexy. This time is cyclical and intensifying, and the task of accelerationism is to decrypt it: “in units of destiny or doom, camouflaged within the system of quotidian economic signs, yet rigorously extractable, given only the correct cryptographic keys”9. In 1993, as cyberspace sliced through modernity like a storm, Land emphasised a certain ‘machinic desire’ at work within techno-capitalism: erotic tendrils which serve as propellants to intensive increase. Flows, pulses, switches, circuits and skin were electrified by a ruinous lust and compelled toward adversarial desires for erasure and expansion. Intuiting that “the outside must pass by way of the inside”10 the body begged for fusion, and opened itself to invasion by alien complexes. Now, as the storm begins to settle and the irreversibility of the damage becomes apparent, we must adapt to a new context: that of technological domination. The following is an attempt to ease the transition into technological domination by resuscitating desire and amplifying it into the alien expanse of impersonal financial exchange. The discussion .6 paul ennis, what comes after cybernetics? acceleration, https://medium.com/@ paulennis/what-comes-after-cybernetics-acceleration-5646e70013c0#. gnoiss3kh accessed 12 january 2017 .7 ibid .8 ibid .9 nick land, teleoplexy: notes on acceleration, #accelerate#, urbanomic, falmouth, 2014 .10 nick land, machinic desire, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011

‘100 intends to both negotiate the extremities of accelerationism and to fictively implicate those edges into an erotic landscape that can survive to subzero temperatures; an incorporeal sexuality “camouflaged within the system of quotidian economic signs”11. This must be an abstract, numeric eroticism, conjured from the world of mathematics that Meillassoux aligns to death: In fact mathematics, for me, are the strange possibility to speak about a world, a very special world, a world without thinking or life. Mathematics are the possibility go coming back from the infernal, from death’s realm. You go to deaths realm and return. It is a special realm. And really for me it’s the big mystery. Because for me, experiences qualities and so on, my world is always a world of sensations, of vitality, or thinking. This is a familiar world. But the real mystery is what a word would be like without thinking, without humanity, without life; what would that be, death’s world? And the mystery is science tells us just that.12 This world that I will explore is named Thanatos, from the Greek, Thanatos, death. To desire the inhuman one must first eroticise this faceless void. No simple task– Thanatos is a mute expanse, an empty Time, a number freed from measure; ruthlessly figureless, it is a solid without shape, the geometric, the arithmetic, the mechanical. An intolerable void, precisely that which the Marquis de Sade implements into his writing. I will construct a survey that identifies glacial reasoning with erotic violence, with recourse to the extreme temporal coincidence between the philosophy of Kant and the writings of Sade. Following Land, I will argue that Kantian notions of the sublime .11 nick land, teleoplexy: notes on acceleration, #accelerate#, urbanomic, falmouth, 2014 .12 quentin meillassoux, speculative solution: quentin meillassoux and florian hecker talk hyperchaos, https://www.urbanomic.com/document/speculativesolution-meillassoux-hecker/ accessed 12 january 2017

101 signals a masochistic rupture within thought that submits humanity to a cycle of “perpetual self flagellation”13 by establishing a numeric supremacy which delights in the sexual domination of the sensible by reason. Following Deleuze I will maintain that the language of Sade features “a Reason that is identical to violence”14: a diagrammatic delirium of operational erotica that fulfils its ultimate in algorithmic patterns. I will then argue that by rigorously stripping language of its descriptive faculties into command sequences, Sade’s writing is concurrent with the functionality of code. Deciphering the usage of this coded form in Sade as driven by a conception of the primacy of Thanatos, I will explore the association this has to Land, manifest in his desire “fuse with the source of the signal”15– to align natural languages with number, flattening writing onto its referent. I will show that the hierarchy this anticipates between primary process and secondary derivatives is key to his contemporary accelerationism, manifest when “the co-components of capital — technics and economics — occur at a pace where it’s no longer clear what caused the other.”16 I will then discuss ‘Synthanatos’, Land’s fantasy of sublime tech-death; the catastrophic disintegration of humanity which is identical to orgasm. Finally, I will conclude by applying methods gleaned from the discussion into an erotic diagram that illustrates the contention of the essay. Combining the cyclical time order of the Freudian death drive with the linear, progressive time of Kant, I will program a newly sexualised Thanatos into deployable code, based on the Ethereum source code for Decentralised Autonomous Organisations. .13 nick land, delighted to death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .14 gilles deleuze, masochism: coldness and cruelty, zone books, new york, 1991 .15 nick land, ‘hyperstition: an introduction’. delphi carstens interviews nick land, 2009, http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/ accessed 17/01/17 .16 paul ennis, what comes after cybernetics? acceleration, medium.com, accessed 12 january 2017

‘110 Satisfaction is the feeling of the promotion; pain that of the obstruction of life. But life (of animals) is, as doctors have already noted, a continuous play of the antagonism of the two. Thus before every satisfaction there must first be pain; pain is always first. Because what would proceed from a continual promotion of living force, which does not let itself climb about a certain grade, other than a rapid death from delight?17 It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.18 Kant’s philosophy was concerned with rescuing the validity of scientific judgement from the skepticism introduced by Hume by emphasising the mind’s capacity for adaptive reasoning. In Kant, the plasticity of thought in face of an information-rich environment was matched with an astute awareness of our perceptive frameworks. Kant identified that the mind produced organising principles, without which our experience would consist merely of unintelligible noise. Scientific knowledge was phenomenal, meaning that it related to the properties of things perceived and organised by the mind, as opposed to noumenal, or things in themselves as they exist independently of the human. This distinction is crucial to the work of Land, who refers to the outside beyond human comprehension as ‘alien’, ‘xeno’ or ‘outside’ interchangeably. Repositioning the human as partial observer within a glacial Outside, Kant initiated a second Copernican Revolution, summarised in his statement that “there are objects that exist in space and time outside of me”19. However, in his treatment of the sublime Kant seems to suggest that in the contemplation .17 immanuel kant, critique of judgement, penguin classics, 2009 .18 marquis de sade, philosophy in the bedroom, createspace independent publishing platform, 2016 .19 immanuel kant, critique of pure reason, encyclopaedia britannica, chicago, 1955

111 of a magnitude, noumena can invade our experiential sphere, producing an excruciating rupture of the sensible by reason. In sublime experience reason intuits its corporeal limitations and the effect of this is a shuddering, “a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same object.”20 This noumena-induced vertigo is preserved within Landian philosophy and I maintain is central to his accelerationism. In his early writings, Land professes an acute desire to fuse with the outside; construed as primary process, raw numerical value, and technics. Accelerationism, popularised in his contemporary work, occurs when capital and cybernetics harmonise; their holistic advance eradicates critique, and replaces the fumbling, corrective measures of natural language with the glacial solidity of code. † For Land, the Enlightenment is an alternate genesis; a catastrophic propellent of the world toward progress. In Delighted to Death, Land explores how Kant’s critical philosophy initiated an “annihilating ecstasy that has possessed the western world”21. He argues that Kant began a cycle of severance between the human animal and its capacity for reason which propelled the future into a “perpetual flagellation of dialectic desire”22. It is Kant who first diagnoses the intolerable pleasure felt in the feeling of human diminishment, and simultaneously gives rise to three progressive formulas that have radically altered the face of this planet: critique, capital, and cybernetics. The birth of critique, inaugurated by Kant, demonstrates a progression which is identical to capital: “Critique belongs to capital because it is the first inherently progressive theoretical procedure.”23 With this alignment Land describes how these vectors begin a process of human erosion proceeding from the recognition of human inferiority in face of reason: a reordering which is symptomatic of Enlightenment thought. .20 immanuel kant, critique of judgement, clarendon press, oxford, 1952 .21 nick land, delighted to death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .22 ibid .23 nick land, making it with death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011

‘1000 Written at the time of the French Revolution, Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) is the moment in which art entered into philosophical dialogue “with the force of trauma“24. It is an aesthetic philosophy which Hegel claimed offered “the first rational word concerning the beautiful“25. Kant presents two modes of aesthetic experience: the beautiful and the sublime. The sublime is of two distinct types: the mathematic and the dynamic. Land summaries: “the mathematical sublime represents the pleasure taken by reason at the collapse of the imagination; the dynamic sublime is the equivalent pleasure corresponding to the intuition of power”26 and: “the mathematical sublime is associated with the insignificance of the human animal, the dynamic sublime with its vulnerability”27. In his deconstruction of the Kantian sublime, Land unearths a excruciating dialectic of pleasure and pain that proceeds from the rupture Kant diagnosed between the sensible and the intellectual. Drawing examples from the legacy of Christian martyrdom, Land remarks that Kant’s ethical imperative was to leave space for worship while insisting on a puritan treatment of enjoyment. Enjoyment is not something to be indulged upon, but rather preserved and guarded carefully, and is always preceded by pain or momentous struggle. Kant insists that pleasure and pain are inextricable, and it is this contention that allows the sublime experience its grandeur. Land remarks: “Sublime experience is to be an antipathological eroticism, in which the body lusts after the agonised convulsions that stem from its own negation.”28 The sublime is a pleasure felt in the recognition of objects that annihilate us, and the suffering of the sensible as it falls short of reason. It is the recognition of a hierarchy that stems from the contemplation of a magnitude– fracturing the imagination, and the enjoyment of the pain this fracturing provokes. Kant: “imagination attains its maximum, and, in the fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils on itself, but in doing so succumbs to an emotional delight”29. .24 nick land, art as insurrection: the question of aesthetics in kant, schopenhauer, and nietzsche, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .25 hegel, cited in introduction to immanuel kant, critique of judgement, penguin classics, 2009 .26 nick land, delighted to death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .27 ibid .28 ibid .29 immanuel kant, critique of judgement, penguin classics, 2009

1001 Imagination in Kant is the process by which the human animal intuits judgements; a preconscious method of cognitive inscription which in the Critique of Pure Reason is referred to as ‘schematism’. Sublime experience occurs when the faculty of imagination is threatened, when the ‘monstrous’ scale of a perceived phenomenon annihilates the possibility of conception. Kant: “An object is monstrous where by its size it defeats the end that forms its concept”30. The sublimity of an object forces a cognitive upheaval concurrent with the impact of violence. Land remarks: The sublimity evoked by an experience is in direct proportion to the devastation it wreaks upon the imagination. Because the pain resulting from the defeat of the imagination, or the animal part of the mind, is the tension that propels the mind as a whole into the rapture of sublime experience. Sublime pleasure is an experience of the impossibility of experience, an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds intuition by means of an immolating failure of intuition. The sublime is only touched upon as a pathological disaster.31 In his discussion of the Marquis de Sade in Coldness and Cruelty (1967), Gilles Deleuze declares that the ideal of the sadist is to execute a system of violence that would perpetuate itself independent to its initiator; an impersonal attack which when relinquished onto the world would circulate ad infinitum. He sites the character Clairwil in Sade’s Juliette who dreams of a crime which is “perpetually effective, even when I myself cease to be effective, so that there will not be a single moment of my life, even when I am asleep, that I shall not be the cause of some disturbance.”32 For Land, it is Kant that inaugurates this luxuriant catastrophe .30 ibid .31 nick land, delighted to death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .32 gilles deleuze, masochism: coldness and cruelty, zone books, new york, 1991

‘1010 into the world; a desire for destruction which is symptomatic of the French Revolution, an event which Land calls the “climax of the Enlightenment“33 and within the context of which Kant’s Critique of Judgement was produced. This “insatiable fury” in which “the freedom of the void… rises to a passion and takes shape in the world”34 is comparable to the boundless destruction that sings in the work of Sade– a man who spent the French Revolution imprisoned in the Bastille. The supreme frustration of this imprisonment is evident within Sade’s seminal work, 120 Days of Sodom, written from the confines of his cell. Bataille identified this text as “the book to dominate all books”35 which presented “such a serious problem that it took over a century to reply to it”36. 120 Days of Sodom is a work of horror in its most cultivated form, dissected with the strangest banality– obsessive concatenations of torture, bound by timetables and lists. Within it, Sade matched his infinite frustration with a mechanical sobriety, “the void, the desert, for which he yearned...”.37 Central to the Sadean apparatus is the recognition of a chaotic universe that exists independently of a creator; a Nature of wild, lacerating particles without purpose or cause. Sade’s protagonists, the lawless libertines, align themselves with Nature’s flux; channelling violence with the unembellished purity of a storm. Distinct from Kant, Sade’s philosophy is entirely atheistic, and firmly positions the human actor as an independent actor in an indifferent universe. Sade uses the newly refined rationality of the Enlightenment period to ceaselessly question ethical imperatives, abolish the Christian God, and celebrate the senseless mechanics of the impersonal. .33 nick land, delighted to death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .34 ibid .35 georges bataille, sade, literature and evil, penguin books, 2011 .36 ibid .37 ibid

1011 All religions are based on a false principle, Sophie’ he would tell me. ‘All accept the cult of a creative being as a necessity. But if this eternal world, like all others amongst which it floats in the infinite plains of space– if this eternal world which has never had a beginning, and will never have an end– if all the products of nature are the results or effects of laws by which she herself is enchained– if her perpetual action and reaction indicate the essential evolution of her being, what becomes of the author whom you so gratuitously lend her? 38 In Sade Nature is not only cruel, it is also mechanical. His protagonists assume the role of Nature’s indifferent operators. The world and its creatures are objectified to the point of crisis– tangents, coldly diagrammed in accordance with a cosmic lust. In Sade Nature is objective but not immobile, and the question of human agency is resolved in the decipherment and enactment of pure process. Reminiscent of Gnon, the god of “breaking things up”39 that lingers behind Land, Sade recognises that “destruction is merely the reverse of creation and change, disorder is another form of order, and the decomposition of death is equally the composition of life.”40 However, Deleuze argues that the hallucination of Sade is to permanently resolve all productive process into the unified silence of negation– a fantasy of Reason. This is a fantasy peculiar to reason because it designates an absolute– Pure Negation, of which we can conceive but never experience. Sade’s literary obsession and the infinite exasperation of his heroes is to maximise the partial negatives provided by Nature in order to annihilate her in poetic servitude: “The criminal capable of .38 marquis de sade, justine, harper perennial, 2009 .39 gnon is nature and the unknown, entropy, dissolution, order. discussing dark matter, land writes “the occult force of cosmic disintegration accounts for roughly 70% of everything that is strongly suspected to exist. breaking things up pleases gnon at least twice as much as holding them together. the party of unity has a steep slope to climb.” http://www.xenosystems.net/dark-energy/ accessed 28 april 2017 .40 marquis de sade, justine, harper perennial, 2009

‘1100 overthrowing the three realms at once by annihilating them along with their productive capabilities, is the one who will have served Nature best.”41 Deleuze relates this fantasy of supreme negation to the death instinct as diagnosed by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920. In this text, Freud formulated for the first time the possibility of a death drive intrinsic to all organic matter, an insurmountable desire encoded within the organism to return to a prior state, that of the inorganic. The death drive is also a drive towards perfection, the willingness toward a totalising stability which is death. He sets forth: “If we may reasonably suppose, on the basis of all our experience without exception, that every living thing dies – reverts to the inorganic – for intrinsic reasons, then we can only say that the goal of all life is death, or to express it retrospectively: the inanimate existed before the animate.”42 Freud juxtapositions a primordial death drive with its antithesis: the life drive, that which compels species to procreate. This life drive is synonymous with Eros– the former, Thanatos. Thanatos, the death drive, is an absolute negation which “cannot be given in psychic life, even in the unconscious: it is… essentially silent.”43 This is the abstract principle which propels all life in cyclical condensation towards death. Thanatos in its primary, unitary form is distinct from the plurality of oppositional life and death drives that collide in the unconscious; the latter as derived from the “sadistic admixtures”44 of Eros. Deleuze argues that Thanatos seems to align to the pure negation of a Primary or original nature in Sade; a ‘No’ of utter purity which the sadist seeks to unleash into secondary nature: .41 marquis de sade, justine, perennial forbidden classics, london, 2009 .42 sigmund freud, beyond the pleasure principle, dover books, new york, 2011 .43 ibid .44 ibid

1101 The task of the libertine is to bridge the gulf between the two elements, the element at his actual disposal and the element in his mind, the derivative and the original, the personal and the impersonal. The system expounded by Saint-Fond (where Sade develops most fully the idea of a pure delirium of reason) asks under what conditions “a particular pain, B”, produced in secondary nature would necessarily reverberate and reproduce itself ad infinitum in primary nature…45 Secondary nature is the realm of experience, the familiar world of conflicting drives and partial negatives. Primary nature is “an exorbitance specific to reason”46, an absolute on which we can speculate but never demonstrate without nullifying its force. Even the expression of the sadistic instinct itself refutes the possibility of negation, because in the case of achieving pleasure in the infliction of pain: “the negative can be achieved only as a reverse of positivity.”47 Thus the “speculative sadist”48 operates by multiplying and condensing partial negation (death instincts) to accelerate pure negation (Death Instinct): He cannot do more than accelerate and condense the motions of partial violence. He achieves the acceleration by multiplying the numbers of his victims and their sufferings. The condensation on the other hand implies that violence must not be dissipated under the sway of inspiration or impulse, or even be governed by the pleasures it might afford, since these pleasures would still bind him to secondary nature, but it must be exercised in cold blood, and condensed by this very coldness, the coldness of demonstrative reason.49 .45 gilles deleuze, masochism: coldness and cruelty, zone books, new york, 1991 .46 ibid .47 ibid .48 ibid .49 ibid

‘1110 This coldness accumulates in apathy, a state of disinterest which the sadist must maintain with devotional purity: "Try to turn into pleasure all things that alarm your heart.”50 Within apathy, the sadist reveals his dedication to reason; coldness is balance, disinterest is control, and any emotional residues bind him to the moralistic template of secondary nature, the temperament of which his task is to destroy. Sade implements this coldness into his writing with a unique rigour, striping language of its descriptive qualities and flattening sensuality onto demonstration. A glacial indifference permeates his work as language becomes algorithmic. His erotics transcend corporeality (and nearly erotica) into an inhuman realm– achieved by a relentless linguistic reformatting that systematically negates the heat of sex and the heat of violence. Sade approaches this erotic impersonal through use of a ‘non language’: Pornographic literature is aimed above all at confronting language with its limits, with what is in a sense a “nonlanguage” (violence that does not speak, eroticism that remains unspoken). However this task can only be accomplished by an eternal splitting of language: the imperative and descriptive function must transcend itself toward a higher function, the personal element turning by reflection upon itself into the impersonal.51 Deleuze emphasises the language of Sade as consisting of sequences of operations, imperative commands delivered from the sadists to their victims. These operational imperatives destabilise the role of language as description– statements that transcend their normative function into pure action. Deleuze argues that Sadean language features a “… demonstration .50 gilles deleuze, masochism: coldness and cruelty, zone books, new york, 1991 .51 ibid

1111 that is identical to violence.”52 and that the sadist reveals that “reasoning is itself a form of violence, and that he is on the side of violence...”.53 The rationality of Sade, the ‘delirium of Pure Reason’54, permeates his work and is the operative function behind the supreme erotic violence depicted. Acts of torture are mechanical and repetitive– the lengthly speeches delivered by the torturers to their victims follow the same pattern. The texts are bound with a crushing boredom; the weight of an annihilating ennui– manifest in these slow and careful deliberations. Bataille argues that Sade’s works consist of a “language that repudiates any relationship between speaker and audience”55. It is a language that is unequivocal; eliminating the possibility of a verbal response. Remarking on the operational delirium of Sadean erotica, Deleuze states that “we are dealing here with a pronounced form of sadism operating to a great extent in geographical and mathematical patterns”56. This “aberration of reason”57, produced by reason, functions by way of topological distortion. Positives are geographically mapped and inverted– indifferently, into an tactical system of partial negatives, which repeats, condenses and accelerates to produce an unbounded saturation of the negative. To encounter death in literature necessitates a death in language, a forced oppression of the descriptive function to depict wordless violence. To manifest mute negation is a representational problem that Sade resolves by equating language to a system of computational commands. Read in this light, 120 Days of Sodom is a book of code. In computer programming, code is utilised in the construction of a finite set of unambiguous instructions to be executed by .52 gilles deleuze, masochism: coldness and cruelty, zone books, new york, 1991 .53 ibid .54 ibid .55 ibid .56 ibid .57 ibid

‘10000 a computer. It operates using specially formulated languages designed to obliterate the verbosity and ambiguity of natural languages. By transcending descriptive language into the realm of action, code is the condense form of demonstrative reason. In computer science, terminal is the name of the interface between user and computer which executes a program on command. Terminal is also determinate, replacing the ‘non-terminates’ of natural language with unequivocal, operative code. Here is an example from Backus-Naar form, an early programming language (1963), in which a non-terminal, natural sentence is subject to analysis (subject verb object), and replaced with a determinate sentence. Sentence → subject verb object Subject → noun Object → noun Verb → write Verb → becomes Noun → eros Noun → Thanatos Noun → synthanatos Non-terminal→ replacement sentence Subject verb Object → → → Noun verb Object → → → Eros becomes noun → Thanatos

10001 Description is silenced in favour of spontaneously operational sequences that execute their promise immediately; patterns of extensive gestures that orchestrate a formal equivalence of command and response. Such languages are manufactured impulse, coordinated towards determinate and quantifiable ends, that by their transmutation of description into affect perfectly demonstrate the sadistic fantasy. As sex consists foremost of gestures, corresponding to an extensive plane of interaction, the implications of a codified eroticism is vast. The paradoxical desirability of this language, striped of subjectivity and transcending via command sequence towards the erotic impersonal, can be accounted for by the death drive as applied to sexuality. The immense power of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle stems from the effortless coordination he accessed between the ramification of security systems, the lust for their dissolution, and the cyclical time order this dynamic orchestrates. The death drive was developed in order to account for the compulsive repetition of displeasurable experiences exhibited by victims of trauma. According to Freud, trauma is a breach in the protective “filtering apparatus”58 that stabilises the mind within perceptive boundaries. Following traumatic experience the residue of this breach persists as an unconscious irritant within the psyche, a vague attachment to exteriority which compels the subject to repeat. This compulsion manifests as torturous behavioural patterns, an endlessly orchestrated return to trauma, and a form of time that resembles a circle. .58 ray brassier, nihil unbound, palgrave macmillon, london 2007

‘10010 Remarked by Ray Brassier, Freud’s “remarkable speculative hypothesis”59 was to link the development of the perceptive boundaries that isolate the mind from excessive excitation to the formation of individual organic bodies, with reference to the ramification of tissues that occur in the growth of a primitive organism such as a cell. The organism develops by building defences to distinguish between itself and the Outside, the inorganic exteriority from which it has differentiated. This is “won the cost of death itself”60 as the outer shell must become partially inorganic. The memory of this partial death is encoded in the exterior of an organism, inscribing the compulsion to repeat characteristic of the death drive. [The vesicle] acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforth functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. In consequence, the energies of the external world are able to pass into the next underlying layers, which have remained living, with only a fragment of their original intensity... By its death the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate– unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it which are so strong that they break through the protective shield. Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli… [...] In highly developed organisms the receptive cortical layers of the former vesicle has long been withdrawn into the depths of the interior of the body, though portions of it have been left behind on the surface immediately beneath the shield against stimuli.61 .59 ray brassier, nihil unbound, palgrave macmillon, london 2007 .60 ibid .61 sigmund freud, beyond the pleasure principle, dover books, new york, 2011

10011 The differentiation of a unit from alterity is equivalent to the very genesis of life, while the protective measures which isolate it ensure its survival. However, an instinct is encoded within the defensive partitions– a desire for final, fatal fusion: to unbind the bonds of protective strata and merge with the excruciating torrent of externality. This ruinous lust that wishes to lethally unbind itself for the sake of desire is crucial to the eroticism of George Bataille, whose writings develop the urgency towards death contained within sexuality. Bataille's entire erotic enterprise is devoted to linking the history of sexuality to that of transgression and traversal of the boundaries of law, in a reckless and willing abolishment of the security systems that guarantee survival. The [sexual] urge is first of all a natural one but it cannot be given free rein without barriers being torn down, so much so that the natural urge and the demolished obstacles are confused in the mind. The natural urge means a barrier destroyed. The barrier destroyed means the natural urge… Inevitably linked with the moment of climax there is a minor rupture suggestive of death; and conversely the idea of death may play a part in setting sensuality in motion.62 The idea of death– Thanatos, the mute expanse that wills us to return. With reference to cell division, Bataille explains that Eros or the life drive that compels the species to procreate has little to do with the continuation of life, as the life of an individual is bounded to one unit and does not survive genetic transfer: † .62 georges bataille, eroticism, penguin books, london, 1957

‘10100 Cell a survives in neither aa nor aaa, aa is not the same as a or aaa; in fact during the division a ceases to be, a disappears, a dies. It leaves no trace, no corpse, but die it does. The plethora or the cell ends in creative death, in the solution of the crisis in which appears the continuity of the new beings (aa and aaa), originally one and the same and now escaping into their final separation from each other.63 This reference to microbiology operates as an inversion of the Freudian example– in the latter, a cell ramifies itself against traumatic stimulus, becoming a scar ruptured fortress haunted by thoughts of return; while in the Bataillean formulation the cell splits into creative death, becoming fractal and anonymised in the blizzard of intensity. Erotic experience manifests the desperate need to escape the confines of subjectivity, “the solidity of prison walls, dismal and hostile”64 which disarticulate an individual from the the Outside. In Bataille, the erotic moment is a pinnacle of absolute intensity in which the self is annihilated in service of passion. In the chaos of ecstasy self-perception shatters and becomes discontinuous, delimited. This dissolution of the self is not to be mistaken with an ideal of romantic fusion inherent to the sexual act: instead, it is a moment of extreme violence, a profound rupture that forcibly proclaims “the frenzied desire to lacerate and to be lacerated”65. The paradox unearthed by erotic experience is the realisation that, however dangerous, “life reaches its highest intensity in a monstrous denial of its own principle”66. This relentless interrogation of boundaries, propelled by an unquenchable thirst for limit-abolition (“assenting to life up to the point of death”67), manifests a strange inversion: by force of their vitality, erotic .63 georges bataille, eroticism, penguin books, london, 1957 .64 ibid .65 ibid .66 ibid .67 ibid

10101 velocities approach the threat of silence. Progression cannot subsist without dissolution, and even the most obvious attempt towards life– reproduction, conceals a latent morbidity. The mute expanse, the erotic impersonal of Thanatos, is a haptic formalisation of exteriority that can be demonstrated by code, flirted with in sex, and executed finally in rapturous death. The positioning of exteriority relative to a ramified interior is a Kantian distinction, who in his system of cognition permanently cast objective reality into the depths of obscurity. He does by securing reason as the fabric by which the world is generated– thus submitting philosophy to internal work of categorising these impressions and prohibiting real access to the Outside. However, as emphasised by Anne Greenspan, Kant’s theory of time disturbs the edges of this construct, by creating a pure form of time that is both transcendental and radically interior. Greenspan summarises this as follows: Subordinating the human intellect to the abstract, synthetic and productive operations of temporality, the Critique of Pure Reason demonstrates that it is not the subject that produces time but rather time that produces the interiority of the subject.68 By isolating space which is the measure of the Outside from time which can only be measured, “time… once located in the external world, must be folded in.”69 Thus time which is exterior and transcendental is grafted into the interior of the organism, an absolute time, liberated from measurement, that perforates us to the core. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze connects this empty, absolute time to Thanatos. .68 anna greenspan, warwick, 2000 .69 ibid capitalism’s transcendental time machine, phd thesis,

‘10110 Time empty and out of joint, with its rigorous formal and static order, its crushing unity and its irreversible series, is precisely the death-instinct. The death instinct does not enter into a cycle with Eros, but testifies to a completely different synthesis…. [It is] a death instinct desexualised and without love.70 Icy, empty, loveless and desexed, yet paradoxically compelling us towards fusion. For Land, this compulsion is wholly naturalised, registered as a “hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities”71– a pattern of equilibrium that he observes variously across technology and capital. It is worth noting the serenity with which he accept this negentropic drift: The death drive is Freud's beautiful account of how creativity occurs without the least effort, how life is propelled into its extravagances by the blindest and simplest of tendencies, how desire is no more problematic than a river's search for the sea.72 Discussed by Ray Brassier, Land’s position is not simply the Freudian hypothesis that “life itself and all vital difference are unilateral deviations from intensive death”73 but rather argues for the collision of a living subject with intensive contact, maintaining you can have a “moment of convergence with absolute intensity or absolute deterritorialisation”74. In his earlier writings, this is professed as an acute desire to fuse, and was executed through the qabbalistic modification of word into number (“From the deconstruction of gramme (writing) to the construction of nomos (numbering)”75): .70 gilles deleuze, difference and repetition, the athlone press, 1994 .71 nick land, making it with death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .72 ibid .73 ray brassier, accelerationism, transcribed from the backdoor broadcasting conference, goldsmiths 14 september 2010 https:// moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/ accessed 22 january 2017 .74 ibid .75 robin mackay and ray brassier, editors introduction, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011

10111 It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.76 The inorganic completion of humanity, in which the catastrophic Enlightenment compacts into algorithmic capitalism, Land names Synthanatos– “...the terminal productive outcome of human history as a machinic process”77. The duality of the word terminal should be emphasised here– it is both a death-spasm, the final cry into oblivion, and the interface between user and machine. Land invokes Freud’s emphasis on the boundary separating an organism from its outside, and his definition of trauma as an “invasion”78, “a breach in an otherwise effacious barrier against stimuli”79. He draws implicitly on Freud’s characterisation of the physical impact of mechanical force upon the body as both a trauma and a catalyst for arousal: “[M]echanical violence of the trauma unleashes a quantum of sexual excitation”80. We are confronted with a fracturing of the boundary between inside and out– interfaces are annihilated and the hyper sexual traumatic flow of cyberspace screams through. For Land, nature and cybernetics are indistinct, and behind all appearance is the fundamental, numeric substrate that necessitates form. Maintaining that “money communicates with primary process not because of what it can obtain, but what it can melt”81, Land is committed to the expansion of liquidation processes afforded by global capitalism. This is thanatropic acceleration, the erotic fantasy of primary nature which Sade sought to manifest through his non language, and which Land .76 nick land, interviewed by delphi carstens, hyperstition: an introduction, http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/ accessed 22 january 2017 .77 nick land, machinic desire, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .78 ibid .79 ibid .80 ibid .81 ibid

‘11000 resuscitates in order to manifest “the desert identity of difference, the catatonic cavity of absolute critique at the end of capital”82. While the movements of contact between Land and Sade are various, perhaps most striking is their mutual desire to flatten language-as-description into codified impulse. This interaction hinges on a shared intuition of the primacy of the numeric and the subordinate interpretation of these forms into human conceptual, discursive systems; a hierarchisation which according to Ray Brassier, dictates that “all your practices become governed by the imperative to intensify and accelerate. To ruthlessly demolish any obstacle that threatens to delay or inhibit this.“83 As we have seen, Sade resolves this by flattening description into command sequences. Land’s accelerationism however requires a more complex enactment– one that finds its home within the blockchain. The resonance that the blockchain technology has with Land’s accelerationism is manifest in the following ways: the peculiar temporality the blockchain instantiates, the liquidating properties of decentralisation it enables, and the bypassing of natural language systems relevant to its operation. Each of these aspects correspond to Deleuze’s notion of the third synthesis, which he names variously: the death instinct, deterritorialisation and eternal return. † According to Land, the blockchain manifests the “pure and empty form of time”84 that Kant liberated in the Critique of Pure Reason. Discussing the blockchain, Land states that by instantaneously stratifying transactional information into pure algebraic sequence, distance is abolished and time is liberated as absolute succession. Land summarises: .82 nick land, making it with death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .83 ray brassier, accelerationism, transcribed from the backdoor broadcasting conference, goldsmiths 14 september 2010 https://moskvax.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/accelerationism-ray-brassier/ accessed 22 january 2017 .84 gilles deleuze, difference and repetition, the athlone press, 1994

11001 We are not Post-Kantian because the Kantian Transcendental Aesthetic is not disrupted by Einstein spacetime. Instead, it is the draft, it is the blueprint, it is the precursor for the spacetime of the blockchain which has now been instantiated by the Bitcoin technology. We have now artificial, absolute time for the first time ever in human history.85 The inhuman ingenuity of the blockchain isolates the supreme Thanatos, the ancient, empty time that Kant anticipated. Further, the robustness of code relative to human pliability legislates the death of natural language formats in the inhuman operations of capital– the “cavity of …critique”86. In a gesture reminiscent of Greenspan’s contention that in capitalism “the inhuman forces of time… surpass the power of the subject as the ultimate agent of transcendental production”87, Land posits that the exercise of rational thought (qua critique) has been superseded by the technology the blockchain facilitates. Kantian critique concerns a negotiation of boundaries– translating sense impressions into empirical data through transcendent observation. Such that the blockchain operates on the distribution of a principle specific to its mechanical boundaries, whilst actively negotiating them, it actively executes the transcendental critical faculty. In Templexity, Land explicitly relates the temporality of accelerationism to recursive computer statements.88 In computer programming, recursion means defining a problem in terms of itself. A classic example of recursion is the definition of the factorial function, given here in C code: unsigned int factorial(unsigned int n) { if (n == 0) { return 1; } else { return n * factorial(n - 1); } }

‘11010 With recursive commands the function calls the function itself and code can reverberate and reproduce, pre-empting the autonomy of a computational system that can subsist without human intervention; a script that, once executed, can only perpetuate. The anomalous circularity of a sequence that loop back into itself, forever, was anticipated by Ada Lovelace in her construction of the first algorithm: A cycle of operations… must be understood to signify any set of operations which is repeated more than once. It is equally a cycle, whether it be repeated twice only, or an indefinite number of times; for it is the fact of a repetition occurring at all that constitutes it such. In many cases of analysis there is a recurring group of one or more cycles; that is, a cycle of a cycle, or a cycle of cycles.89 Let us return to the most ruinous of all sadistic impulses: a self perpetuating system of pain that would transcend secondary nature, replicating into infinity. The supreme sadistic ideal is a pain–script grafted permanently onto the world and programmed to repeat; a script that, if executed, would rupture the fabric of time itself, converting linearity into cycles and cycles into pain. The language of the script is time. As anticipated90, the optimal sadistic technology, the pain– script, fits seamlessly into the most beautiful and horrifying .85 nick land, the new centre, the art of economy: decentralized labor practices and distributed production networks, live streamed october 3rd, 2015 https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pmgunzrewa accessed 22 january 2017 .86 nick land, making it with death, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 .87 anna greenspan, capitalism’s transcendental time machine, phd the- sis, warwick, 2000 .88 “templexity is indistinguishable from unbounded real recursion…” nick land, templexity, disordered loops through shanghai time, time spiral press, 2014 .89 ada lovelace, sketch for the analytic engine invented by charles baggage, https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html accessed 27 april 2017 .90 “…the doctrine of recurrence furnishes no criterion that would allow us to discriminate between the ignoble will of the privileged libertine, whose affirmation of ‘all woe’ is a symptom of insouciance, and the noble will of the spiritual aristocrat, whose affirmation of ‘all woe’ is a sign of munificence.” ray brassier, nihil unbound, palgrave macmillon, london 2007

11011 thought ever composed– the eternal return of the same; or the time that is trapped. Eternal return facilities a lucid reorganisation of linearity such that time collapses onto itself in fatal vitality, cancelling difference and affirming the infinite perpetuation of pain. This holographic nightmare, which Nietzsche created to measure the depth of lust91, is hunted down by the sadist and orchestrated with a cold delight. The unmistakable futurity of Nietzsche, his unchanging contemporaneity, has yet to truly be accounted for. Equally haunting is the emergence of another prophet active in the same period– Ada Lovelace, prophet of cycles. Lovelace documented this futurity within her diaries, where precisely one month after the birth of Nietzsche she proclaimed: “I am a Prophetess born into the world, and this conviction fills me with humility, with fear and trembling!”92. Lovelace’s contribution to computer science is well known, however, rarely emphasised is her particular innovation, the invention, not only of the first algorithm, but of the recursive statement, now implemented in optimal proficiency by Ethereum: a decentralised network, residing on the blockchain, that implicates recursive code into governance systems. The following is an attempt to apply these variables into the construction of a speculative machine that would execute the most ruinous of all sadistic impulses: a self perpetuating system of pain that would transcend secondary nature, replicating into infinity. For this I have modified the Ethereum source code for Decentralised Autonomous Organisations, complete with contractual specifications and deployment instructions. .91 “[w]hat does joy not want! it is thirstier, warmer, hungrier, more fearful, more secret than all woe, it wants itself; it bites into itself, the will of the ring nestles within it.” friedrich nietzsche quoted by ray brassier, nihil unbound, palgrave macmillon, london 2007 .92 ada lovelace quoted in sadie plant, zeroes and ones, digital women and the new technoculture, doubleday, 1997

i pragma solidity ^0.4.2; contract owned { address public owner; function owned() { owner = msg.sender; } modifier onlyOwner { if (msg.sender != owner) throw; _; } { } function transferOwnership(address newOwner) onlyOwner } owner = newOwner; contract tokenRecipient { event receivedEther(address sender, uint amount); event receivedTokens(address _from, uint256 _value, address _token, bytes _extraData); function receiveApproval(address _from, uint256 _value, address _token, bytes _extraData){ Token t = Token(_token); if (!t.transferFrom(_from, this, _value)) throw; receivedTokens(_from, _value, _token, _extraData); } } function () payable { receivedEther(msg.sender, msg.value); } contract Token { function transferFrom(address _from, address _to,

ii uint256 _value) returns (bool success); } contract Congress is owned, tokenRecipient { /* Contract Variables and events */ uint public minimumQuorum; uint public debatingPeriodInMinutes; int public majorityMargin; Proposal[] public proposals; uint public numProposals; mapping (address => uint) public memberId; Member[] public members; event ProposalAdded(uint proposalID, address recipient, uint amount, string description); event Voted(uint proposalID, bool position, address voter, string justification); event ProposalTallied(uint proposalID, int result, uint quorum, bool active); event MembershipChanged(address member, bool isMember); event ChangeOfRules(uint minimumQuorum, uint debatingPeriodInMinutes, int majorityMargin); struct Proposal { address recipient; uint amount; string description; uint votingDeadline; bool executed; bool proposalPassed; uint numberOfVotes; int currentResult; bytes32 proposalHash; Vote[] votes; mapping (address => bool) voted; }

iii struct Member { address member; string name; uint memberSince; } struct Vote { bool inSupport; address voter; string justification; } /* modifier that allows only shareholders to vote and create new proposals */ modifier onlyMembers { if (memberId[msg.sender] == 0) throw; _; } /* First time setup */ function Congress( uint minimumQuorumForProposals, uint minutesForDebate, int marginOfVotesForMajority, address congressLeader ) payable { changeVotingRules(minimumQuorumForProposals, minutesForDebate, marginOfVotesForMajority); if (congressLeader != 0) owner = congressLeader; // It’s necessary to add an empty first member addMember(0, ‘’); // and let’s add the founder, to save a step later addMember(owner, ‘founder’); }

iv /*make member*/ function addMember(address targetMember, string memberName) onlyOwner { uint id; if (memberId[targetMember] == 0) { memberId[targetMember] = members.length; id = members.length++; members[id] = Member({member: targetMember, memberSince: now, name: memberName}); } else { id = memberId[targetMember]; Member m = members[id]; } } { MembershipChanged(targetMember, true); function removeMember(address targetMember) onlyOwner if (memberId[targetMember] == 0) throw; for (uint i = memberId[targetMember]; i<members. length-1; i++){ members[i] = members[i+1]; } delete members[members.length-1]; members.length--; } /*change rules*/ function changeVotingRules( uint minimumQuorumForProposals, uint minutesForDebate, int marginOfVotesForMajority ) onlyOwner { minimumQuorum = minimumQuorumForProposals; debatingPeriodInMinutes = minutesForDebate; majorityMargin = marginOfVotesForMajority;

v ChangeOfRules(minimumQuorum, debatingPeriodInMinutes, majorityMargin); } /* Function to create a new proposal */ function newProposal( address beneficiary, uint etherAmount, string JobDescription, bytes transactionBytecode ) onlyMembers returns (uint proposalID) { proposalID = proposals.length++; Proposal p = proposals[proposalID]; p.recipient = beneficiary; p.amount = etherAmount; p.description = JobDescription; p.proposalHash = sha3(beneficiary, etherAmount, transactionBytecode); p.votingDeadline = now + debatingPeriodInMinutes * 1 minutes; p.executed = false; p.proposalPassed = false; p.numberOfVotes = 0; ProposalAdded(proposalID, beneficiary, etherAmount, JobDescription); numProposals = proposalID+1; } return proposalID; /* function to check if a proposal code matches */ function checkProposalCode( uint proposalNumber, address beneficiary,

vi ) { uint etherAmount, bytes transactionBytecode constant returns (bool codeChecksOut) Proposal p = proposals[proposalNumber]; return p.proposalHash == sha3(beneficiary, etherAmount, transactionBytecode); } function vote( uint proposalNumber, bool supportsProposal, string justificationText ) onlyMembers returns (uint voteID) { Proposal p = proposals[proposalNumber]; // Get the proposal if (p.voted[msg.sender] == true) throw; // If has already voted, cancel p.voted[msg.sender] = true; // Set this voter as having voted p.numberOfVotes++; // Increase the number of votes if (supportsProposal) { // If they support the proposal p.currentResult++; // Increase score } else { // If they don’t p.currentResult--; // Decrease the score } // Create a log of this event Voted(proposalNumber, supportsProposal, msg.

vii sender, justificationText); return p.numberOfVotes; } function executeProposal(uint proposalNumber, bytes transactionBytecode) { Proposal p = proposals[proposalNumber]; /* Check if the proposal can be executed: - Has the voting deadline arrived? - Has it been already executed or is it being executed? - Does the transaction code match the proposal? - Has a minimum quorum? */ if (now < p.votingDeadline || p.executed || p.proposalHash != sha3(p.recipient, p.amount, transactionBytecode) || p.numberOfVotes < minimumQuorum) throw; /* execute result */ /* If difference between support and opposition is larger than margin */ if (p.currentResult > majorityMargin) { // Avoid recursive calling p.executed = true; if (!p.recipient.call.value(p.amount * 1 ether) (transactionBytecode)) { throw; } p.proposalPassed = true; } else { p.proposalPassed = false; }

viii // Fire Events ProposalTallied(proposalNumber, p.currentResult, p.numberOfVotes, p.proposalPassed); } } Deployment instructions pragma solidity ^0.4.0; contract SimpleStorage { uint storedData; function set(uint x) { storedData = x; } } function get() constant returns (uint) { return storedData; }

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0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 Books .. .. .. .. .. .. .. : .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. #accelerate#, the accelerationist reader, ed. robin mackay, armen arvanessian urbanomic, falmouth, 2014 georges bataille, eroticism, penguin books, london, 1957 georges bataille, literature and evil, penguin classics, london, 2012 georges bataille, the story of the eye, city lights, san francisco, 1987 georges bataille, key concepts, ed. mark hewson and marcus coelen, routledge, london, 2016 ray brassier, nihil unbound, palgrave macmillon, london, 2007 ccru writings 1997-2003, time spiral press, china 2015 gilles deleuze, difference and repetition, the athlone press, 1994 gilles deleuze, masochism: coldness and cruelty, zone books, new york, 1991 sigmund freud, beyond the pleasure principle, dover books, new york, 2011 immanuel kant, critique of judgement, penguin classics, 2009 immanuel kant, the critique of pure reason, project gutenberg etext, july 2007 immanuel kant, the critique of practical reason, project gutenberg etext, july 2002 pierre klossowski, sade my neighbour, northwestern university press, illinois, 1991 nick land, templexity, disordered loops through shanghai time, time spiral press, china, 2015 nick land, suspended animation, time spiral press, china, 2015 nick land, shanghai times, time spiral press, china, 2014 nick land, chasm, time spiral press, china, 2015 nick land, phyl-undu: abstract horror, exterminator, time spiral press, 2014 nick land, thirst for annihilation, routledge, london 2011 nick land, fanged noumena: collected writings 1987-2007, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 jean-francois lyotard, the inhuman: reflections on time, blackwell publishers, cambridge, 1991 quentin meillassoux, after finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency, bloomsbury publishing plc, london, 2009 quentin meillassoux, the number and the siren: a decipherment of mallarmé’s coup de dés, urbanomic, falmouth, 2011 sadie plant, zeroes and ones: digital woman and the new technoculture, fourth estate, london 1997

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.. .. paul ennis, hypostition, https://medium.com/@paulennis/hypostition- 5cb230de45fb#.iexeh2etx, accessed 12 january 2017 paul ennis, nick land’s odds and ends, intro https://medium.com/@ paulennis/nick-lands-odds-and-ends-a-brief-intro-part-i- .. e5e8126a74d4#.a4m4ov58s accessed 12 january 2017 paul ennis, cryptography trumps art, https://medium.com/@paulennis/ accessed 12 january 2017 ada lovelace, sketch for the analytic engine invented by charles baggage, https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html accessed 27 april 2017 amy ireland, the aesthetics of transcendental materialism: a propaedeutic cryptography-trumps-art-f70eebd5de5#.jorj1ntz8 .. .. for xenopoetic creativity https://www.academia.edu/5964031/the_ aesthetics_of_transcendental_materialism_a_propaedeutic_for_ .. xenopoetic_creativity accessed 22 january 2017 amy ireland, naught is more real: meillassoux, bataille, beckett: towards a speculative poetics, http://www.academia.edu/3690500/ sovereign naught_is_more_real_meillassoux_bataille_beckett_towards_a_ .. sovereign_speculative_materialist_poetics accessed 22 january 2017 amy ireland, poetry is cosmic war, amy ireland interviewed by a.j. carruthers, https://www.academia.edu/24546212/poetry_is_cosmic_war_interview_ accessed 22 january 2017 satoshi nakamoto, bitcoin: a peer to peer electronic cash system, https:// bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf accessed 27 april 2017 reza negarestani, death as a perversion: openness and germinal death, c-theory, 2013 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=396 accessed 22 january 2017 reza negarestani, the labour of the inhuman, part 1 and 2, e-flux, .. .. .. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/52/59920/the-labor-of-the- .. .. inhuman-part-i-human/ accessed 22 january 2017 nick land, re-accelerationism, http://www.xenosystems.net/ re-accelerationism/, accessed 17/01/17 nick szabo, formalizing and securing relationships on public networks 1997, http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/courses/informationinspeech/ cdrom/literature/lotwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/ .. formalize.html accessed 12 january 2017 peter wolfendale, rationalist inhumanism: (dictionary entry), http:// www.academia.edu/26697819/rationalist_inhumanism_dictionary_ entry_ accessed 22 january 2017

.. peter wolfendale, prometheanism and rationalism, http://www.academia. edu/26816420/prometheanism_and_rationalism accessed 22 january .. 2017 peter wolfendale, so, accelerationism, what’s that all about? http:// deontologistics.tumblr.com/post/91953882443/so-accelerationism- .. whats-all-that-about accessed 22 january 2017 gavin wood, ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger 2013, https://bravenewcoin.com/assets/whitepapers/ethereum-asecure-decentralised-generalised-transaction-ledger-yellowpaper.pdf accessed 22 april 2017 &

010101000110100001100001011011100110101100100000011110010110111101110101 Thesis written by Rachel-Rose O’Leary in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Design, Sandberg Instituut, with thanks to Catherine Somzé for her supervision. A special thank you to Paul J Ennis for his reading recommendations and to the Research Institute for Arts and Technology, Vienna for their help with printing, especially Nils Gabriel and Matthias Tarasiewicz. Infinite love and appreciation to the designer of this book, Benoît Ferran. æ .

0100001101101111011011000110111101110000011010000110111101101110 Book composed for running text in Source Sans Pro and for code parts in Source Code Pro, both designed by Adobe. The footnotes are set in 1742 French Civilité and 1492 Quadrata Lim, both designed by GLC Foundry. This book was printed and binded at the Research Institute for Arts and Technology, Vienna in Spring 2017. .

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