Digital Dismemberment: Twitter,
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Amy Ireland
He began to describe to me Chinese tortures that he had witnessed
in a Peking street. The victim, tied to a pole, was stripped with a
penknife piece by piece of all his flesh, except for his nerves and his
arteries and veins. The man became a kind of trellis made by bones,
nerves and blood vessels through which the sun could shine and the
flies could buzz. In that way the victim could live for several days.
Curzio Malaparte
We are not any more ‘out in the world’ than K-space is... On the
contrary.
Nick Land
With Twitter, textual form arrives at an unprecedented condition
of flux. The radicalilty of the scroll (whether revolutionising
textual transmission in ancient Egypt or threaded through a 1930s
Underwood carriage streaming out an endless flow of energetic,
jazz-intoned prose) is transferred seamlessly into this new interface.
Only here we have a scroll updated to capitalise on the possibilities
of hypertextuality: effectively nonlinear, mutant-positive, and fractally
engorged on retweets of retweets of retweets. The exemplars are the
bots, and of these, those that are algorithmically calibrated to search
for a particular term and then retweet every transmission in which this
term appears, in real time. I imagine two, locked in a loop, retweeting
each other’s retweets. Short-circuiting the scroll form in amourous,
negetropic deferral.
During its first exciting moments, Twitter appears as an open horizon for the accumulation of all sorts of gratifying information, from
breaking news to earthquake alerts, the latest crypto-currency investment advice, academic papers, political discussion, fashion tips, the
tireless babble of your favourite celebrity, text and glitch art, social
parody, activism, food photography, the list – and this is the point –
is seemingly interminable. Nevertheless, the illusion of accumulation
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inevitably breaks down and it does so in perfect correspondence with
the intensity of one’s Twitter habit. Accumulation cycles pathologically
into dispersion. This is not just the logic of Twitter, but the logic of
Capital disassembling the human.
The Twitter interface, arranging its 140-character-or-less missives
in a chronologically-monitored queue, manifests visually and cognitively as a series of incisions. What begins as a benign mode of textual
organisation quickly becomes applicable to human concentration. Its
twentieth century prototype can perhaps be found in the mechanical writing/torture machine from Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony.1
Both initiate a virulent machining of the human through text and both
tend towards a similar outcome in which the relentless numerical insistence of machinic agency ultimately succeeds in deleting the latter.
This occurs most viscerally in Kafka’s story as the organic body laid
across the mechanical structure of the writing apparatus progressively
disintegrates under the repetitive and unforgiving blows of its mechanised needle. But there is yet another, even more horrific archetype for
Twitter which, given the strip-like dispensation of information that
Twitter users have grown accustomed to, is even more suggestive: Leng
Tch’e – the death by a thousand cuts.
There are many accounts of this infamous Chinese torture, but
none acknowledges the ecstasy accompanying the conscious experience of one’s own dismemberment (I defy any seasoned Twitter fiend
to deny this) as keenly as that given by Georges Bataille. Bataille possessed a series of photographs depicting the torture of Fu Chou Li, a
young Chinese man accused of murdering a prince, as he is calmly
and meticulously sliced into pieces and eventually stripped of his
limbs by a royal executioner over a period of several days in a public square in 1905. According to Michel Surya, who provides the best
documentation of Bataille’s interest in the torture, the French philosopher was transfixed by the “indefinable expression” of the young
man, with his “hair on end and eyes rolled back”, reading this look as
joy – a “demented, ecstatic joy”.2 The images became an obsession for
Bataille and he referred to them frequently in his work: “The Chinese
executioner of my photo haunts me: there he is, busily cutting off his
victim’s leg at the knee…”; “The young and seductive Chinese man . .
. left to the work of the executioner, I loved him . . . I loved him with
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a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated
his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was
precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but
in order to ruin in me, that which is opposed to ruin.”3 So complete
was the conviction that a communion with that which lies outside the
domain of the thinkable lay in Fu Chou Li’s submission to Leng-Tch’e,
that Bataille declared in My Mother: “When I die I want it to be under
torture… I’d like to laugh when I go to my death. . . Hideous, crazed,
lined with blood, as beautiful as a wasp.”4
One might be tempted by the allusive potential of this portrait to
attribute a theological dimension to humanity’s excruciation in the
thrall of technocommercial capture (any good humanist would!) but
this is to erroneously suppose the possibility of future redemption. It
is more interesting to insist, along with Bataille, that the value of the
image lies in the utter banality of its circumstances. Here we have an
unimportant criminal receiving punishment for an idiot crime: allowing himself to be convinced by the illusion of ontological persistence
and unity. If anything, this is an image of God’s repudiation, and it
is forcibly one without any promise of recuperation. As Fu Chou Li
witnesses his own dismemberment the theological is replaced by a
combination of ecstasy and extreme horror, a glimpse onto that which
lies outside of any logic of identity and accumulation: pure loss, what
Bataille would come to designate as the sacred.5
Just as it is possible to recognise in Leng-Tch’e a state of unimaginable rapture in the body’s experience of itself coming to pieces whilst
still functioning, Twitter can be grasped as initiating a comparable
cogntive vertigo, dismantling one’s attention while the mind is still
conscious (and even complicit). Splayed across a web of algorithmic
processing, traditional human cognitive functionality wears ever thinner and something else – some alien transmission – begins to come
through.
As Reza Negarestani puts it in his short text on the Chinese torture,
the investment not in death alone, but in death via the artful butchery
of the human body, designates an ‘architectural approach’, a “technique
of dimensioning and architecting Death: letting the bones appear
while the body is still alive . . . That is not to say, narrating death on
the body but simulating death through dimensions and architectonic
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modes…”6 Twitter, like the death by a thousand cuts, is the dissolution
of architecture – violence enacted at the level of form and unity – and
a dissolving architecture – violence enacted through architectural
principles that are (and this is its special perversity) incommensurate
with the human, except, of course, in the moment of its demise. This
incommensurability partially derives from a scalar collusion between
Twitter’s micro-machining of reality and a cosmological perspective: it
is through the unprecedented spatio-temporal compression to which
Twitter subjects all that passes through it - ‘users’ and their information alike (if one wishes to make such an old fashioned distinction)
- that one finally glimpses the cosmic scale of the ruse. To set out from
A and, simply by pursuing a straight line, arrive not at B but instead,
at not A, is the basic contour of the joke. In this way the scroll, as we
follow it through literary history with the kind of blithe confidence
easily endowed in things of such innocuous origin, suddenly flips like
a Möbius strip and we find ourselves lost impossibly on the ‘other side’,
immersed in an inhuman logic. But there is potential here for communion… one has only to begin to desire the chiral blade glinting
restlessly in the dark.
As humanity dissolves into a Guyotat wet-mix of hands and
assholes, thighs and cunts, stomachs and heads, decoupling and recoupling in a writhing, interminable slurry, the circuits linking lust
and its gratification compress, desire intensifies, and the auto-stimulation of our own virtual dicing guides us towards rapture. The eyes
that Bataille couldn’t get enough of roll back in what is left of a head
and something slouches in from the outer edge of an ecstatic, rapidly
darkening field of vision.
What is left is to determine (or rather, to acknowledge what is
already being determined by the technocommercial voiding of our
concentration) is whether this counts for a ‘simulation’ of death (as
Negarestani has it), or the Real Thing.
1. Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony”, in Kafka’s Selected Stories (New York:
Norton, 2007).
2. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. by Krzysztof
Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002) 94. The Chinese
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term itself alludes to the slow ascension of a mountain.
3. Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (California: Lapis Press, 1988)
38; Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: State University Press,
1988) 120, 123.
4. Georges Bataille, My Mother trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London: Marion
Boyars, 1989) 89; Georges Bataille, Œuvres Complètes v. I (Paris: Gallimard,
1988) 139.
5. See Georges Bataille, Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1989) 206.
6. Reza Negarestani, Leng-Tch’e, no longer available online.