HOLES READER

HOLES INTO THE FUTURE Xenopoetics AND thinking beyond the HUMAN

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XENO Rebekah Sheldon Before a vowel xen-, repr. Greek ξενο-, ξεν-, combining form of ξένος a guest, stranger, foreigner, adj. foreign, strange; used in various scientific and other terms including, e.g. peculiar accessories; cross-species disease; symbiosis and parasitism; a snake genus; metamorphic mineral defacement or partial fusion; foreign rule; disease vectors allowed to feed on pathogens in sterile laboratory environments; a type of diagnostic comparison; crossfertilization; germline engineering and the products thereof; taking its origin from outside the body, as in a disease or a tissue graft; glossolalia; emotional or sexual obsession with the foreign; a gastropod mollusk; a kind of fish with spineless fins, scaleless skin, and a complex sucking-disk between the ventral fins; mineral deposits found at high temperatures; an inactive virus; an armadillo; extraterrestrial life forms or the study thereof Etymologically, XENO is trans. As graft, cut, intrusion, or excession, XENO names the movement between and the moving entity. It is the foreign and the foreigner, the unexpected outside, the unlike offspring, the other within, the eruption of another meaning. If the uncanny marks the hideous return as if new of what was always already known, the groundwork whose repression allows the enclosure of a domestic interior, XENO is of its own order. It is a foreign agent, speaking its own tongue, keyed to its own purposes. XENO may be incorporated, manipulated, solicited, seduced, and emplaced, but it would be a mistake to imagine that it is known. Snake, fish, mollusk, armadillo, heat changed rock, inactive virus, XENO slithers, swims, slides, infects, inhabits, holds up and withholds. It moves across; it infects as it moves; but it is not infected in turn. It generates transitions from which it itself is immune. It is trans-obdurate. Trans-obdurate, XENO neither fools nor colludes; XENO gifts. What then of XENO as method? To open to the outside, to work what is itself trans-obdurate, as method, is always also to welcome chaos and darkness. Chaos and darkness, though very often used as empty signifiers of defiant resistance, can be given quite precise specifications in this context, and ones that have little to do with the sort of masculinism that takes the autonomy of the willing individual as its ideal. XENO as method implies a horizon of action that cannot be determined at the outset. It is dark in the sense that it operates without the assurance of full knowledge and it is chaotic because it presumes that the force of the other is always wholly other. 3

ROADSIDE PICNIC ARkady & Boris Strugatsky We were off. The institute was on our right and the Plague Quarter on our left. We were traveling from pylon to pylon right down the middle of the street. It had been ages since the last time someone had walked or driven down this street. The asphalt was all cracked, and grass had grown in the cracks. But that was still our human grass. On the sidewalk on our left there was black bramble growing, and you could tell the boundaries of the Zone: the black growth ended at the curb as if it had been mown. The breeze seemed to have died down and I didn't hear anything bad. The only sound was the calm, sleepy hum of the motor. It was very sunny and it was hot. There was a haze over the garage. Everything seemed all right, the pylons sailed past, one after the other, Tender was quiet, Kirill was quiet. We got to Pylon 27; the metal sign had a red circle with the number 27 in it. Kirill looked at me, I nodded, and our boot stopped moving. [Then] I heard it. Trrr, trrr, trrr … Kirill looked over at me, jaws clenched, teeth bared. I motioned for him to be still. Over the pile of old refuse, over broken glass and rags, crawled a shimmering, a trembling, sort of like hot air at noon over a tin roof. It crossed over the hillock and moved on and on toward us, right next to the pylon; it hovered for a second over the road—or did I just imagine it?—and slithered into the field, behind the bushes and the rotten fences, back there toward the automobile graveyard. “Listen, Red," whispered Kirill, "why don't we jump over? Twenty yards up and then straight down, and we're right by the garage. Huh?" "Shut up, you jerk," I said. I pulled out a handful of nuts and bolts from my pocket. I held them in my palm and showed them to Kirill. "Do you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel? Studied it in school? Well, we're going to do it in reverse. Watch!" I threw the first nut. Not far, just like I wanted, about ten yards. The nut got there safely. "Did you see that?" "I saw it." "Now drive the boot at the lowest speed over to the nut and stop two feet away from it. Got it?" "Got it. Are you looking for graviconcentrates?" "I'm looking for what I should be looking for. Wait, I'll throw another one. Watch where it goes and don't take your eyes off it again." The second nut also went fine and landed next to the first one. 4

"Let's go." He started the boot. His face was calm and clear. Obviously he understood. They're all like that, the eggheads, the most important thing for them is to find a name for things. Until he had come up with a name, he was too pathetic to look at—a real idiot. But now that he had some label like graviconcentrate, he thought that he understood everything and life was a breeze. We passed the first nut, and the second, and a third. I threw a fourth nut. There was something wrong with its trajectory. I couldn't explain what was wrong, but I sensed that it wasn't right. I grabbed Kirill's hand. "Hold it," I said. "Don't move an inch." I picked up another one and threw it higher and further. There it was, the 'mosquito mange! The nut flew up normally and seemed to be dropping normally, but halfway down it was as if something pulled it to the side, and pulled it so hard that when it landed it disappeared into the clay. “Did you see that?" I whispered. "Only in the movies." He was straining to see and I was afraid he'd fall out of the boot. "Throw another one, huh?" It was funny and sad. One! As though one would be enough! Oh, science. So I threw eight more nuts and bolts until I knew the shape of this mange spot. To be honest, I could have gotten by with seven, but I threw one just for him smack into the middle, so that he could enjoy his graviconcentrate. It crashed into the clay like it was a ten-pound weight instead of a bolt. It crashed and left a hole in the clay. He grunted with pleasure. "OK," I said, "we had our fun, now let's go. Watch closely. I'm throwing out a pathfinder, don't take your eyes off it.” 5

INCOGNITUM HACTENUS KRISTEN ALVANSON On another page margin, it reads: ‘Xenopoetics has something to do with composing out of distorted materials. One page is missing, one or two lines are pseudonymously or anonymously quoted, one scene leaks from the future to the past, an object evades chronological sequences, a number turns into a cipher, everything looms as an accentuated clue around which all subjects aimlessly orbit, leading into an eclipsed riddle whose duty is not to enlighten but to make blind (aporos to the light). Fields of xenopoetics grow sporadically (until their final takeover of the work) around the regions overwhelming with a range of distortions from inauthenticity and corrupted authorship to structural holes (configurative bugs) and subterranean structures of hidden writing; xenopoetics does not necessarily insinuate adventurous modes of expression or prose.’ * This place continues to deteriorate. Hotels have their own approaches to time. 6

INCOGNITUM HACTENUS KRISTEN ALVANSON En otro margen de página se lee: 'La xenopoética tiene que ver con la composición a partir de materiales desfigurados. Una página que falta, una o dos líneas que son citadas de manera pseudónima o anónima, una escena que se filtra desde el futuro hacia el pasado, un objeto que elude las sucesiones cronológicas, un número que se convierte en código, todo toma la forma de una importante pista en torno a la cual todos los asuntos orbitan sin rumbo, una pista que desemboca en un acertijo redoblado cuyo cometido no es iluminar sino enceguecer (aporos de la luz). Campos de xenopoética crecen de manera esporádica (hasta su dominio final del trabajo) en las regiones abrumadas por un abanico de desfiguraciones que van desde la inautenticidad y de la autoría adulterada hasta agujeros estructurales (errores de configuración) y estructuras subterráneas de escritura oculta; la xenopoética no implica de manera forzosa modalidades audaces de expresión o de prosa.' * Este lugar sigue deteriorándose. Las habitaciones de hotel tienen sus propios criterios acerca del tiempo. 7

CYCLONOPEDIA: COMPLICITY WITH ANONYMOUS MATERIALS REZA NEGARESTANI Incognitum Hactenus — not known yet or nameless and without origin until now — is a mode of time in which the innermost monstrosities of the earth or ungraspable time scales can emerge according to the chronological time that belongs to the surface biosphere of the earth and its populations. Incognitum Hactenus is a double-dealing mode of time connecting abyssal time scales to our chronological time, thus exposing to us the horror of times beyond. In Incognitum Hactenus, you never know the pattern of emergence. Anything can happen for some weird reason; yet also, without any reason, nothing at all can happen. Things leak into each other according to a logic that does not belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chronological time. * Economical openness is a risk-feigning maneuver simulating communication with the Outside. Yet for such openness, the outside is nothing but an environment which has already been afforded as that which does not fundamentally endanger either the survival of the subject or its environing order. So that 'being open' is but the ultimate tactic of affordance, employed by the interfaces of the boundary with the outside. […Affordance presents itself as a preprogrammed openness, particularly on the inevitably secured plane of being open (as opposed to being opened). On the plane of ‘being open to’, organic survival can always interfere, appropriate the flow of xenosignals, economize participations or if necessary cut the communication before it is too late. Openness comes from the Outside, not the other way around. * The radical outside is delineated not by distance or region but by its exterior functionality of activity. The outside is impossible in terms of its possessability, yet it can be grasped by its affect space or openness, through which survival (as a restriction of affordability towards total openness) is both existentially possible and functionally impossible; aka (Un)Life. 8

* Love is incomplete burning. Love empties all possibilities of recovery. Falling in love is a one way ticket to the end of health. Barthes suggests that love is cyclic. This cycle strikes me not as love but flirtation, flirtation with survival. But love’s sole enthusiasm lies in consuming every possibility of falling in love again. The Love-Recovery cycle that Barthes maps in his works is of course Proustian but deeply resembles the ever refining self-fertilizing cycle of Aristotle (nothing must be wasted as it is needed in the next phase of the cycle, the next love, the next recovery from the last love). Love is only thinkable as one and only one tyrannical possibility: falling in love once and for all. * To become open or to experience the chemistry of openness is not possible through ‘opening yourself’ (a desire associated with boundary, capacity and survival economy which covers both you and your environment); but it can be affirmed by entrapping yourself within a strategic alignment with the outside, becoming a lure for its exterior forces. Radical openness can be invoked by becoming more of a target for the outside. In order to be opened by the outside rather than being economically open to the system’s environment one must seduce the exterior forces of the outside: You can erect yourself as a solid and molar volume, tightening boundaries around yourself, securing your horizon, sealing yourself off from any vulnerability … immersing yourself deeper into your human hygiene and becoming vigilant against outsiders. Through this excessive paranoia, rigorous closure and survivalist vigilance, one becomes ideal prey for the radical outside and its forces. 9

CICLONOPEDIA: COMPLICIDAD CON MATERIALES ANÓNIMOS REZA NEGARESTANI Incognitum Hactenus — aún no conocido, o sin nombre y sin origen hasta ahora- es una modalidad del tiempo en la que emergen la mayoría de las monstruosidades más íntimas y más recónditas de la tierra, las escalas temporales más incomprensibles, y ello de acuerdo a un tiempo cronológico que pertenece a la biosfera superficial y sus poblaciones. Incognitum Hactenus es una modalidad temporal propia de la duplicidad y que conecta abisales escalas temporales a nuestro tiempo cronólógico, exponiéndonos así al horror de tiempos que están más allá del nuestro. En Incognitum Hactenus nunca puedes estar seguro de la pauta de emergencia: todo puede ocurrir por alguna razón extraña, y también puede que nada ocurra, sin razón aparente. Las cosas se filtran unas en otras según una lógica que no nos pertenece y que no puede correlacionarse con nuestro tiempo cronológico. * El aperturismo económico es una maniobra de distracción que aparenta ser una arriesgada comunicación con el Afuera. Pero, para tal aperturismo, el afuera no es nada más que un ambiente que ya le ha resultado asequible, como es aquél que ni pone en peligro la supervivencia del sujeto ni la del orden de su entorno. Por lo tanto, "estar abierto" no es sino la táctica suprema de la affordance, táctica empleada por las interfaces del límite con el afuera. […] La affordance se presenta a sí misma como un aperturismo preprogramado, particularmente en el plano inevitablemente asegurado del ser abierto (en el sentido de que se opone al estar abierto). En el plano de ‘abrirse a’, la supervivencia orgánica siempre puede interferir, apropiarse del flujo de xeno-señales, economizar sus participaciones o, si fuera necesario, cortar la comunicación antes de que sea demasiado tarde. El aperturismo proviene del Afuera, y no al contrario. 10

* El Exterior radical se delinea no por la distancia o región sino por su funcionalidad exterior de actividad. El Exterior es imposible en términos de su poseeibilidad, aunque puede comprenderse por su espacio de afectos o aperturismo, mediante la cual la supervivencia (como una restricción o asequibilidad hacia el total aperturismo) es existencialmente posible a la vez que funcionalmente imposible, lo que también se conoce como la (No )Vida. * El amor es una combustión incompleta. El amor vacía todas las posibilidades de recuperarse. Enamorarse es un billete de ida al fin de la salud. Barthes sugiere que el amor es cíclico. Este ciclo me parece que no es amor sino coqueteo, coqueteo unido a supervivencia. El ciclo Amor-Recuperación que dibuja Barthes en sus obras es por supuesto proustiano, pero a su vez se parece mucho al ciclo de autofertilización de Aristóteles (nada debe malgastarse porque se necesitará en la próxima fase del ciclo, el próximo amor, la próxima recuperación del amor anterior). El amor es sólo pensable como una y solo una posibilidad tiránica: enamorarse de una vez por todas. * Volverse abierto o experimentar la química del aperturismo no es posible mediante un ‘abrirse a sí mismo’ (un deseo asociado con la economía del límite, de la capacidad y de la supervivencia que te cubre tanto a ti como a tu entorno), pero sí puede afirmarse si te dejas atrapar en un alineamiento estratégico con el afuera, convirtiéndote en un cebo para sus fuerzas exteriores. El aperturismo radical puede ser invocado siendo un objetivo para el afuera. Pero, para ser abierto por el afuera—en lugar de estar económicamente abierto al entorno del sistema—uno debe seducir a las fuerzas exteriores del afuera. Puedes autoerigirte como un volumen sólido y molar, tensando los límites a tu alrededor, asegurando tu horizonte, sellando cada una de tus vulnerabilidades ... sumergiéndote más a fondo en tu higiene humana y teniendo cuidado de todo outsider. Mediante esta paranoia excesiva, cierre riguroso y vigilancia supervivencialista, uno se convierte en la presa ideal para el afuera radical y sus fuerzas. 11

THE WEIRD AND THE EERIE MARK FISHER [T]he eerie is fundamentally to do with the outside, and here we can understand the outside in a straightforwardly empirical as well as a more abstract transcendental sense. A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? As we can see from these examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be posed in a psychoanalytic register—if we are not who we think we are, what are we? The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether. It is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie possesses. The eerie concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears. * There is no inside except as a folding of the outside. * Remarks that Freud makes in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (‘as a result of certain psychoanalytic discoveries, we are today in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms of thought’) indicated that he believed that the unconscious operated beyond what Kant called the ‘transcendental’ structures of time, space and causality which govern the perceptual-conscious system. […] The outside is not ‘empirically’ exterior; it is transcendentally exterior, i.e. it is not just a matter of something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond our ordinary experience and conception of space and time itself. 12

LO raro y lo espeluznante MARK FISHER [L]o espeluznante también está intrínsecamente ligado con lo exterior; y aquí podemos entender lo exterior de un modo netamente empírico, o bien en un sentido abstracto más trascendental. La sensación de lo espeluznante no suele emanar de espacios cerrados, domésticos y habitados; hallamos lo espeluznante con más facilidad en paisajes parcialmente desprovistos de lo humano. ¿Qué tuvo que suceder para causar aquellas ruinas, aquellas desaparición? ¿Qué tipo de entidad tuvo que ver con ello? ¿Qué clase de cosa fue la que emitió un grito tan espeluznante? Como podemos ver en estos ej emplos, lo espeluznante está ligado, fundamentalmente, a la naturaleza de lo que provocó la acción. ¿Qué clase de agente ha actuado? ¿Acaso existe? Estas cuestiones pueden plantearse a nivel psicoanalítico--si no somos lo que creemos ser, ¿qué somos en realidad? La perspectiva de lo espeluznante nos puede dar acceso a las fuerzas que rigen la realidad mundana, pero que suelen estar escondidas, del mismo modo que nos puede abrir las puertas de espacios que están más allá de la realidad mundana. Esta salida de lo corriente, esta huida más allá de los confines de aquello que normalmente consideramos realidad es lo que, en cierto modo, explica el atractivo particular que posee lo espeluznante. Lo espeluznante tiene que ver con lo desconocido; cuando descubrimos algo, desaparece. * No existe lo interior salvo como asimilación de lo exterior. * Algunos de los apuntes que hace Freud en «Más allá del principio del placer» («La tesis de Kant según la cual tiempo y espacio son formas necesarias de nuestro pensar puede someterse a revisión a la luz de ciertos conocimientos psicoanalíticos»), indicando que creía que el inconsciente actuaba más allá de lo que Kant llamó las estructuras «trascendentales» de tiempo, espacio y casualidad que rigen el sistema de conciencia perceptiva. […] Lo exterior no es «empíricamente» exterior, sino trascendentalmente exterior, es decir, no es que esté lejos en el espacio y en el tiempo, sino que está más allá de nuestra experiencia corriente y de nuestra concepción espaciotemporal. 13

THE TEMPLETON EPISODE CCRU Templeton has long asserted the impossibility of empirical time-travel. Since the ego is bound by its own nature to linear-sequentiality (he continues to insist) neither it nor the organism is ever transported through time. Nevertheless, he describes the Critique of Pure Reason as a time-travelling manual, although of 'another kind.' He uses Kant's system as a guide for engineering time-synthesis. The key is the secret of the Schematism, which although "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul" - concerns only the unutterable Abomenon of the Outside (Nihil Ulterius). In exteriority, where time works, that part of you which is most yourself has nothing in common with what you are. When Templeton fell into himself that day he found, instead of what he thought himself to be, the Thing (in itself (at zerointensity)). 14

On The Matrix sadie plant 'Woman' has, at best, been understood to be a deficient version of a humanity which is already male. In relation to homo sapiens, she is the foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without and the enemy within. Woman can do anything and everything except be herself. Indeed, she has no being, nor even one role; no voice of her own, and no desire. She marries into the family of man, but her outlaw status always remains. Woman is left without the senses of self and identity which accrue to the masculine. Denied the possibility of an agency which would allow her to transform herself, woman is left without the senses of self and identity which accrue to the masculine. How can Irigaray's women discover themselves when any conception of who they might be has already been decided in advance? How can she speak without becoming the only speaking subject conceivable to man? How can she be active when activity is defined as male? How can she design her own sexuality when even this has been defined by those for whom the phallus is the central core? The problem seems intractable. Feminist theory has tried every route, and found itself in every cul-de-sac. Struggles have been waged both with and against Marx, Freud, Lacan, Derrida ... sometimes in an effort to claim or reclaim some notion of identity, subjectivity and agency; sometimes to eschew it in the name of undecidability or jouissance. But always in relation to a sacrosanct conception of a male identity which women can either accept, adapt to, or refuse altogether. Only Irigaray - and even then, only in some of her works - begins to suggest that there really is no point in pursuing the masculine dream of self-control, self-identification, self-knowledge and selfdetermination. If 'any theory of the subject will always have been appropriated by the masculine' before the women can get close to it, only the destruction of this subject will suffice. [P]atriarchy is not a closed system, and can never be entirely secure. It too has an 'outside', from which it has 'in some way borrowed energy', as is clear from the fact that in spite of patriarchy's love of origins and sources, 'the origin of its [own] motive force remains, partially, unexplained, eluded' (lrigaray). It needs to contain and control what it understands as 'woman' and 'the feminine', but it cannot do without them: indeed, as its media, means of communication, reproduction and exchange, women are the very fabric of its culture, the material precondition of the world it controls. 15

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