B l o o d
E l e c t r i c
A Review on Blood Electric by Kenji Siratori
by Basilisk
Blood Electric by Kenji Siratori, Creation Books, 2002
Kenji Siratori's Blood Electric like the most cryptogenic avantgarde texts retrieves new data and processes of text-composing
from the abyss of writing but unlike the other engineers of such
texts whose economy of their writings is secured within the organic
body of speculative articulations or the critico-manic's
verbigerations about the Text itself; it, intentionally, enciphers
(hollows out) a new artificial wiremesh on and through which the
text is non-wovenly rendered; this space, by the means of its
chemistry and composition, at the same time wastes away all
theoretical pseudo-fluxes or narrations which are recorded
(conserved and accumulated) into the text as the immediate
consequences (architectural symptoms) of the Text as textum or
an inter-weaving process of informational fibers; and implicates a
new workspace potential for the rise of the new communicative
lines, compositions and complexities or according to Nick Land,
"mess, toxic waste, genre disorder" and not difficulties [1]:
(a) What is Text (texere: to weave)?
Blood Electric (this Guinea Pig series of technology) has a bold
answer for this used stinking question: why should I think of a text
as a textum (an ever-weaving space)? Isn't a woven text more
suitable to be the material of my pants?
For becoming an "involuntary host" (Stelarc) for the fluid
compositions of communicative lines, Blood Electric installs its
entire textual-evaporation process on a deliberately artificial nonwoven text or more precisely a non-woven workspace.
(b) The Non-wovens (the non-woven workspaces)
The non-wovens do not obliterate the Platonic and Cartesian
grids which take roots in weaving / woven spaces (as what Deleuze
remarks on the weaving model as a paradigm of Plato's royal
science [2]) but their processes do not require conversion of the
fibers to yarn; they are rendered as the affirming spaces, while
keeping their own specific and technologically creative lineaments
which unleash fierce ungrounding forces. The non-woven
workspaces are engineered out of the non-woven fibroids (dis-)
corded by adhesion, friction or welds (and not inter-weaving),
bringing an intimacy between the fibers and filaments which does
not allow the activation energies of synthesis or interweaving
bonds pass but installs the zones of conductivity for any softening,
coiling or animorphic process such as mutation, vermiculation, etc;
and draws all qualitative motions to the molecular level. These
zones of high conductivity at the non-woven side of the (micro/
macro-)structure render the figuration and the text body gaseous
and cloudy; a glutinous smoke which sticks to what it explores and
rises from a flowing obsidian tar. The non-wovens are not papers;
they are the imminent / ambient labyrinths (with immediate and
cryptogenic constructions: anonymous-until-now) which are
composed by the hollowing-out processes between the fibers or
elements of the composition to no end, not for isolating the fibers
or flows of them or vacuumizing an interaction-free or a purged
white space between the lines, fibers, flows and filaments but
preparing a wild openness (strategic affirmation) for any incoming
compositional anomaly (every composition is a pestilential
anomaly; this is also one the creative diagrams one can explore in
Blood Electric.), multiplicity, proliferation, interaction, participation,
alliance and reinforcement of the compositional fibers. This
enciphered (Şafira: hollowed out) space is not, actually, empty and
blank; it is an architecture under the recurring bombardments of
the molecular composites and communicative lines of all kinds
which upon impact dissolve into anything rooted, making new
compositions within them ... compositions through compositions
through compositions, ad infintum ... such a vermiculation which
liquidates any core or pivotal trait (off-coring), engineers a
phantom flux with an anonymous construction which multifunctions as a pool of diversified(ing) binding forces facilitating
openness (being open and opened) of the non-woven as an avatar
of Depth [3]; it restricts no composition. Here, the non-woven
workspaces -- on which Blood Electric installs its writing process -correspond with the multi-functional meshwork of Stelarc's Hollow
Body [4]. Alan Sondheim, also, hints at the affinity flowing
between Blood Electric and Stelarc's performances.
Through the non-woven workspaces, as in (or through) the
gas-fluxes of information, signals, fibers, signs, words and bodies
in Blood Electric, the continuity (as of writing in Blood Electric) is
not supervised by the economy of the arrangements or the
compositional format, the layout and position or the movement of
each particle, line or structure according to itself and its
environment (the continuity of reading and writing in the interwoven texts) that is to say, affordance-based continuity but by the
certain characteristics of the non-woven workspaces, themselves:
the continuity is automatically engineered by the hollow and
affirming spaces (the inter-dimensional zones of high-conductivity
and phantom fluxes) between the lines, fibers, compositions or
structures (what really make the composition a non-woven
composition); you do not need to track one fiber to another to
forge the text (the traditional inter-woven textum) and keep its
consistency emphatically alive but you irresistibly 'jump
over' (mutate) the fibers or 'worming through' (vermiculate) the
hollow affirming space; which both are the two avatars of the same
process of gaseous, non-woven communication and openness. In
either case, jumping from a band of fibers to another band (or the
same band) or vermiculating, dimensions mutate to the
anonymous alliances, collisions and wreckages, that is to say,
mutating; as mutation is at the same time, the delirium of crossing
and jumping over or inside the dimensions and scavenging them to
no end. Mutation is affirming the dimensions by bumping them to
each other, introducing collapse to them and bringing the means of
their implosion and cataflight; it is affirmation by means of
strategic movements (terminal tactics: jumps, acephalic
movements, twitches, descents, katabasis, etc.) and not direct
tactical action or itineraries. To this point, the continuity of Blood
Electric is reached through mutations. This mutation is not only a
technologic-based mutation but also an ungrounding force which
appears as the politics and the speed economy of the technology
itself. "There is no mutation for humans other than mutation with
technology." (R. U. Sirius) [5]
Unlike Burroughsian texts which become techno-oriented
reports through the analytic encounters with technology (whether
on an anti-transcendental level or not), Blood Electric runs
technologic not by means of the contents, subject matters,
approval or condemnation of technology or the rest of the
referential and signifying processes but because of the direct
reciprocation with its structure and its entire writing workspace
which are, themselves, technologic phenomena (the non-wovens,
technologies of bringing new ungrounding forces, engineering new
carriers and vectors of pest, smoke engineering, death-coils,
electric cognition, off-coring, etc.).
Engaging with Blood Electric, one can find Kenji Siratori is a
mesh-warrior, he writes technology.
Notes:
[1] Land, Nick, No Future
[2] Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987
[3] On 'Depth, composition and unground', see: Cata[4] Stelarc's works are not isolationist, idealist or paranoiac approaches -- the
labels have been stuck to Stelarc's works, originated from the industrial-based
views on technology or semiological regulations of critics and psychologists -- to
body, space, communication and openness. On the contrary, they are the
ruthless communions of base-communication and openness which use
unconventional warfare through anonymous architectures and energy spaces.
On 'Hollow Body', see: Remarks on Hollow Body
[5] Negarestani, R., Homo.stasis, unpublished.