Round One
In the blue corner Western Bodily Organization: WBO. A
male-ordering physiognomic force field that shudders to
maximum density in that other WBO, which is its abstract
machine, the World Boxing Organization.
Caught in the pull and tug of the WBO's disciplinary tractor
beam the male body is dragged through an ultramagnetic
origami of serial foldings, bent double in street scuffles, pulled
upright again in sweat soaked subterranean gyms, in road
running, in amateur bouts until, eventually, buckled under the
weights and belts of the prize fights, it emerges: the WBO.
Muscles have been dangerously dehydrated then ripped, skin
torn and stretched, bones repeatedly broken and reset,
organs are lifted and separated. "Bruised, battered and
scarred, but hard" a molar organism raises its aching right
arm aloft in obedience to the Judgements of God.
A body built around a pulsating command centre- that Joe
Louis' called 'heart and mind'- and fortified by metallic
musculature of cold-forged character armour. Duel of the Iron
Mike and Two-Ton Tony Galento, battling for Golden Gloves.
Sporting double-edged adamantium shells that both ruthlessly
isolate the male body in its lonely Being- seconds out: you're
going "solo like a Tyson bolo"- and rigorously obliterate any
stirring Becomings that could engineer a shift onto the plane
of intensity that is Deleuze & Guattari's Body Without Organs:
the BWO.
For Becoming do occasionally threaten to KO the WBO. But
there can be no Boxer Rebellion and any attempt to get on
the plane is battered into submission. The heavyweight fighter
Lou Nova rearranged his motor systems through chi
power-ups, macrobiotic diets and yogic meditation in order to
deliver a Cosmic Punch, but he was smashed down to meet
Earth's intolerant corpoReality principle by a punishing Joe
Louis' right hook. Muhammed Ali's famous shuffle too came
close to achieving a drum & bass synchronicity of speed and
slowness, to achieving a motion-blurred transversality that
would escape the sedimentary carbon plating of the WBO and
enter the nomadic silicon planing of the BWO. But the fluid
circulation of these effects was cruelly Hoover damned and
the incipient flows turned back to Clay. And Ali's attempt at
unnatural participation in a becoming-animal were similarly
blocked before they could precipitate a take-off of the plane of
consistency. Like a butterfly, like a bee. "There is always the
danger of finding yourself 'playing the animal'" . Playing
Oedipal domesticity. George Foreman: the Mummy; Sonny
Liston: the Bear. Playing at imitation and analogy.
"Becomings-animal continually run these dangers". You can
rope-a-dope as much as you like but the WBO will wear you
down, ring you in then ring you out- for the count.
But blocking the plan(e) to the BWO is not the WBO's only
danger. Beyond the WBO's disciplinary corpoReality principle,
squat a gloating Todestrieb or death drive, obscenely
beckoning with promises of neuronal scheering, vascular
disruption, the neuropathology of dementia pugilistica and
death itself. Boxer Arthur Cravan might have survived a
shuddering first-round Jack Johnson southpaw to the jaw, and
might have fervently embraced Dada but the Tode still got
him, breaking the placid surface of the Caribbean Sea to
upend his lonely rowing boat.
Perhaps the primary zone of destruction targeted by WBO
offers a clue to its secret. The WBO is a front-organisation for
Mind Inc. - a shady outfit run by Rene "Cherry Nose"
Descartes operating out of Holland. The WBO butchers its
subjects into Cartesian headcases for which the body is just
sos much remote-controlled meat to be "bruised, battered and
scarred". Max Schmeling, Hitler's "heads up" boxer was
exemplary", his body the WBO's pawn trying to check the
plane to he BWO.
Round Two
Bruce Lee was also a chess-player but he nearly avoided
being checked. For him T'ang-te, Wado-Ryu, Tae Kwon Do,
Shaolin Ch'un Fa, Shri-te, Kung Fu, Ju-Jitsu, Karate even
Filipino Eskrima and Southern Indian Silambam and
Kalaripayit were no different from WBO boxing. All "solidify
the fluid", all "arrest the flux" of the BWO, all promote "the
blind devotion to the systematic uselessness of routines that
lead nowhere". What was required was the "formlessness [to]
assume all forms", "no style [to] fit with all styles". What was
required was a rhizomatic openness which could turn the
sedimentary closures of WBO against itself: "to be like water
[to] penetrate and destroy rock". Shimmering in shattered
glass, smashing the mirrored cage. Free of traitorous hsing of
subjectification and free of treacherous i of signification: "No
form, no meaning". No hsing-I, no choking WBO, only the
cloaking imperceptibility of formlessness and
meaninglessness that announces the BWO. Bruce Lee, like
Deleuze's dancer, "already a sleepwalker, who will be taken
over by the movement that seems to summon him."(C2: 61)
But Bruce Lee awoke too soon and in resisting the
somnambulant intensity of the BWO stumbled back into the
WBO and all its dangers. Perhaps it was Hegel bellowing in
his ear that awoke him. After hammering out philosophy
master papers on The Phenomenology of Spirit and The
Science of Logic on his battered type-writer, Lee wiped the
sleep of becomings-animal from his eyes. Exit the little dragon
and enter instead Lee demanding his students be merely "like
a leopard" that they simply "emulate the beauty of a crane of
the ferocity of a tiger". "There is always the danger of finding
yourself 'playing an animal'". Fully alert now, instead of
accelerating the practice of Mushin or "no mind" to escape
velocity, he insisted that "the body always follow the mind",
that Jeet Kune DO was "an excellent discipline for the mind".
The external, dermal discipline of boxing was effortlessly
replaced by the internal chi control of JKD. "Disciplinary man
produced energy in discrete amounts, while control man
undulates, moving among a continuous range of different
orbits"(N: 180) The body is your lobster.
The rows of mirrors are now shattered in order to avoid
multiplicity, to leave the mindful individual alone with Yip Man
at the chessboard, alone with the push ups and the training,
alone with a gallery of sepia Oedipuses- the framed fathers,
the Sifus, Senseis, Asan: the Masters- alone with his
opponent in a game of death. The mortal kombat begins. In a
desperate flurry of moves wrenched from the Jeet Kune Do
grab bag, Lee attempts to force the WBO back and get on to
the plane of the BWO. The special technique of
shadow-boxing, nerve-destruction grips drawn from kali, two
kicks tot he knees from Southern wing chun, an elbow to the
groin from bak hoopai, rabbit punches to the neck, tiger claws
raking the face, tossing bombs from tae kwon do to the
kidneys. An exhausted kiai and his energy is spent. But JKD
now has its own form, its own meaning, its own rigidity.
The fist of fury is intercepted. The mirrors are now broken
Pat-Kwa charms. Broken and unable to protect Lee from the
forces of the WBO. A taste of blood from his finger tips, the
Big Boss WBO beckons. Electric flashes as the physiognomic
forcefield fluctuates then focuses its disruptive energy. Lee,
like Shang-Chi, the master of kung-fu, tears back the tapestry
of tao to reveal death staring back in the mirror of morality and
mortality.
Round Three
The year 2002 and the battle's still Wu. But now its amortal
kombat, a mindless detrimentalism engineered in the arcade
and the dancehall. Intensity achieved not by localising at the
origin of an effort that characterises the organism (WBO) but
by dissolving into the middle that is the virtual. Virtua fighter
materialises on the plane of consistency.
Who dares challenge the mighty Goro? Goro, Prince of Pain
and the final guardian of the WBO. Tearing at the joystick,
rattling the keys, adrenalised, libidinised, immediating.
Becoming-elemental with Sub-Zero's ninja icefield, with
Hydro's illogical water, with Thunder God Rayden's crackling
lightning, with Wynd and Rayne. Becoming-mineral with
demon sorcerer Shang Tsung and kicking like Kano, the
Black Dragon's most deadly assassin.
Becoming-imperceptible with Reptile and
becoming-invulnerable with Scorpion. "Specialise in
interstices" and enter the zone, the BWO.
It is not surprising that the plateau of continuous immanence
that is drum & bass conjugates with amortal kombat in its
dismantling of the organism's strata. Big up your chest, wind
up your waist. Limb by limb, the WBO is mashed up; the
European corpoReality principle disorganised and
detrimentalised. "Here comes the nice and easy tiger style",
"Snake Style", "The Crane". Not Ali's shuffle but the
hard-step: step, step, step, step, stepper. Keep moving, never
stop moving, motionless voyage, designification,
desubjectification, detrimentalism: grooveriding. "Breath
comes quicker, head nodding with the bass-line that hasn't
arrived yet. An imperceptible movement. Neck driven, wind
assisted" (J: 100). Body-popping, break-dancing, beyond the
Judgements of God and on the BWO.
Choose the sword or choose the ball. Amortal kombat:
diagonalise between the WBO's double strata bind of a
vertical anti-body that butchers the meat for the mind and a
horizontal armouring that folds and forges the body in an
origami of disintensification. Amortal kombat: detrimentalist
groove-riding.
Sampled:
C2: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
N: Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
J: Two Fingers and James T. Kirk, Junglist
+: Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Michael Jahn, Dragon, various Mortal Kombat Product.
No UFOs
"UFOs are a big part of the dance culture ... UFOs and dance
music are connected in a cosmic sense ... To think that we
are the only life-form in the universe is ridiculous. I'd say it
was encouraging to think there is something out there to
guide us through all this shit we're facing." Simon Ghahary,
Blue Room Released Records
"All this UFO / abduction stuff is nothing to do with me. I don't
go with that. I don't believe that people visit this planet at all.
I'm operating on the idea that we are completely on our own.
For me that is much darker and more exciting." Nico, No
U-Turn Records
Yet aliens are being bought by the mothership load. Frenzied
consumption has accelerated the Schwa image to
geo-synchronous commodity ubiquity. Here are clothing
companies Mishiko Koshino, Pose, Daniel Poole and Liquid
Sky competing to turn out the most Grey-related streetwear.
The perfect fashionable accompaniment? An Alien Workshop
skateboard, complete with appropriate logo. Here, on the
newsagent's top-shelf are arranged the relevant reading
matter: Encounters, X-Factor, Sightings, UFO and Spirit.
Here, too, is mainstream marketing effortlessly exploiting
Communion imagery to boost beer, car, mortgage and mobile
'phone sales. And here's Bill Barker - proud owner of the
Schwa copyright - accessorising with Alien Invasion Survival
Cards, xenon-coated Lost Time Detectors and a neat line in
Jungian archetypal analysis. On Schwa's web-site, Barker his very name semantically redolent with the carny and
phonetically resonant with the Überhuckster Colonel Tom energetically promotes a forthcoming techno compilation.
This last is a shrewd commercial move, for one of the most
vibrant markets for aliens has been established among the
consumers of techno or, more precisely, of trance. Taking
their referential cues from The Orb's prog-house excursion
"Blue Room" and Little Green Men's take on the Close
Encounters theme, a whole slew of UFOnic sonic product has
beamed down. Materialising on Grey-packaged vinyl like the
popular three volumes of "Space Techno" and on the output
of trance labels Blue Room Released or Organico with its
flying saucer logo. Leaving tell-tale carbon burns at venues
like Edinburgh's Beam Me Up, Salisbury's UFO Club or
London's famous Club Alien. Abducting trance-spotters on
dance-floors across Europe, the States and in isolated
outposts like Goa. The excellent dance magazine Eternity
even has a regular column devoted to UFOlogy. Such is the
level of symbolic saturation that Greys are ridiculed in Muzik's
'EBD' cartoon and one Brighton club has adopted a "No lost it
trancers ... No Schwa heads" policy.
The appropriation of communion alien imagery is hyped as
fast-forward thinking, as an attempt to escape the
tractor-beam of present-day Death Star secularism and
engage the warped drive of a millennial and extra-planetary
future. However, if drum and bass can be conjugated with the
anti-gravitational zones of intensity that emerge as
Afro-Futurism, then alien trance co-ordinates a dissipative,
land-locked territory that must be mapped as Anglo-Retroism.
This retroism runs its social software through four primary
programmes.
Programme One: the infantilism of loving the alien. This is not
a reference to Old Mother Ron Hubbard's nursery rhymes, the
bare-cupboard juvenilia of Dianetics and the tales of
off-worlders accessible only to Scientology's 'elite' Operating
Thetans. "You know about the Logos group?? ... Yes we
know the front men and women of this organisation but they
are no more that that ... a facade ... the operators are not
there" (Burroughs: 23). Nor is the infantilism that is being
attributed to parading to Grey a reference to one of America's
most successful UFO cults, led as it was by two individuals
who took the names Bo and Peep (Balch: 839 et seq.). No,
the infantilism refers to a still controversial explanation of
close encounters of the third kind (CE-IIIs) in terms of the
revivification of peri- and post-natal memories (Lawson 1982,
Lawson 1984, Lawson 1994).
The good doctor Alvin H. Lawson empties his pipe noisily
against the California State University commemorative
ashtray and draws a deep breath, this being a well-rehearsed
spiel, one he's used to delivering to hostile audiences. He
begins at a rush, the words tumbling over each other as he
asserts that while still clinically unsubstantiated, it would seem
reasonable to speculate that, from tactile self-exploration,
foetuses develop a distinct impression of their body and that,
further, this impression, like those during the birth process
itself, acquires the status of a memory accessible in later life.
Realising that he is proceeding too rapidly, Lawson measures
his pace and begins a catalogue of what, with a wink, he
describes as "surprising parallels" which, his confidence
suggests will leave us in no doubt about the connection
between CE-IIIs and infantilism. The dominant creature type
reported - familiar to readers of Communion or Betty
Andreasson's autobiography or recent trance club flyers bears remarkable resemblance to the six month old human
foetus: diminutive size, frail, disproportionately large head,
comparatively large eyes, webbed fingers and toes, pallid skin
colour, hairless, arms longer than legs, "und so weiter"
curtails the doctor with another of his winks, which are by now
beginning to irritate. And then there are the craft themselves,
he continues, unfolding a pen and ink drawing from a wallet
drawn from his frayed tweed jacket pocket. The traditional
UFO is "surprisingly parallel" (again the wink) to the typical
arrangement of the umbilical cord dangling from the placenta.
As for the tunnels and tubes that recur in abductees' reports
of the interior of the alien vessel to such an extent that the
hypnotist must distract the subject in order to prevent them
devoting all energies to their discussion, well these tunnels
are, according to Lawson, simply revivals of memories of the
cervix and its dilation. The time-loss which accompanies the
experiences of abduction, announces Lawson, with the
flamboyant air of a conjurer saving his best trick till last, can
be accounted for as a traumatic remembering of the amnesiac
effects of the hormone oxytocin which floods the womb as it
initiates contractions. Lawson, sensing he has a convert on
his hands, turns to the white board in an agitated manner, full
of analogies between UFO abductions and Amerindian
shamanic trances. As his voice drones on in the background,
punctuated by the squeak of his felt-tip, connections begin to
coalesce between the nodes of birth memory amnesia; the
hypnotic techniques purportedly employed by the Greys on
their abductees; the use of relaxed recall sessions by
counsellors to unearth repressed memories. Connections
between these and the supposedly mesmeric quality of trance
music embracing its dancers in its amniotic flows in the
wombic embrace of clubs like Return to the Source.
"Psychology returns us inevitably to our foetal condition,
sleeping gently in the womb" (Toop: 273) But its been one
wink too many and we have to turn to the second
programmatic retroism installed by alien trance. As we are
departing, Lawson manages to squeeze in one final remark:
the Birth Memory Hypothesis proposes that revivification is
propelled by trauma; not trauma incurred in a CE-III, but the
trauma incurred in confronting the spectre of fearful
uncertainty. It is this uncertainty which haunts the remaining
programmes.
Retro-programme Two - what Marx called "rural idiocy" - is
introduced by the evidence that CE-IIIs and UFORs are
mostly prevalent in rural areas. Is it accidental that both Bill
Barker of Schwa and Whitley Streiber, author of Communion,
have made much of their respective deliberate decisions to
leave behind the city? "I'm originally from Los Angeles ... I got
fed up with living in a huge city and came out to a small town.
I like it very much ... lots of desert" (Barker: 2). In parallel,
there's more than a whiff of back to nature anti-urbanism in
trance's contemporary configuration. Full-moon parties in the
desert or on the downs, miles away from the friction assumed
to characterise the metropolis. Distant, too, from the
neon-lights and sodium glow that, according to an anecdote in
Douglas Rushkoff's Cyberia, some trancers believe will
disorientate the landing instruments of passing saucers. It is
perhaps the Goa of the trance tourist's Orientalist imaginary
which most embodies this past-longing pastoralism. The
escapist, city shunning return to the country is the logical
accompaniment to out-of-it transcendence pursued by a
folkist, bass deprived, resolutely 'head' music with its falsetto
TB 303 sweeps, designed, according to one of its producers,
to "[take] your mind off into a dream" (Rocha: 35). "Evident
here is a nostalgia, or a yearning, to float free in a liquid world
of non-linear time" (Toop: 272). Such a bucolic nostalgia
marks a strong contrast with drum and bass' urbanist futurism.
No flight from the city there, but the lines of flight engineered
in the anarchitectural remix of the urban shakedown. "At this
moment, a guy called Henry Letts bursts into the room,
spilling words and ideas. Cyborgs crossing the Westway into
Hammersmith ... Council estate kids wired for electronic
revolutions ... The need for new fibres ... New networks"
(Howe: 46) The city accelerated bio-geographically in the
pneumatic precipitation of diagonal intensities that is the
seismic shock delivered at high-velocity by in-car stereo
systems and cranked up headphones. Not the arid Calfornia
desert or some desolate field in Oxfordshire, nor the city as
terror incognito of the pastoralist's imagination but the city as
concretised jungle infested with potent potentialities.
Rather than being "the ultimate 'Other'" as suggested on
Schwa's web-site, it is the determinedly humanoid form
attributed to the ETs around which the third programmatic
retroism revolves. In the definitional scaling down
necessitated by popularisation and commodification of the
Greys, some of the pixel sharpness of the original reports may
have been blurred, but even in the high-res. versions, the
details of leathery skin or the occasional genital ambiguity
cannot disguise the rigorously anthromorphous non-perversity
in operation. Bubble-headed starchildren as the 'secret'
exposed at the end of the galaxy. None of the unsettling
inhuman becoming of an acephalous Predator / avatar
shimmering in the unceasing motility of a chameleon field, its
purposes forever enigmatic; just identification with the human,
that dinosaur trapped in the tar-pit of history. And it's not just
identity with the human at work in the being-Grey that peaks
in trance culture, but identity with its most Jurassic
manifestation, the White Male.
"A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in
for a black hole. Clown head, moon-white mime ... Holy
Shroud" (Deleuze and Guattari: 167).The Schwa face, what a
horror. "Or take the face: we think faces have to be made,
and not all societies have to make faces, but some need to. In
what situations does this happen, and why?" (Deleuze: 26)
Not only is it Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's contention
that attachment to the white wall / black hole system of the
face constitutes an additional form of infantilism but, further,
that the system itself has operated for two millennia as a
racist apparatus of signification and subjection. "If the face is
in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White
Man, then the first deviances ... are racial ... They must be
Christianised, in other words, facialised. European racism"
(Deleuze and Guattari: 178). A recent cover of Eternity
graphically dramatised this Schwa-Christ holey alliance with
Jesus and disciple Greys in robed "communion". As drum and
bass's facelessness engineers impersonal and experimental
probe-heads, we locate trance's typical visage: face too Grey
- the Cali smiley - marked out by ratty beards, UV-sensitive
paints and moored down by reterritorialising piercings, arms
aloft in cruciform appeal to the heavens. With surreptitious
silicon switching threatening to eclipse the carbon-based
life-form, and its white male form already occluded in the
future's moving shadow, being abducted by the comfortingly
humanoid Schwa must appear a path out of the post-human
penumbra.
Down this path, scuttling along in the footsteps of the human
comes alien trance/infantilism's fourth programmatic retroism,
the nostalgia for control, purpose, meaning and destiny. "Oh,
is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? Or is it just
20,000 people standing in a field ... And tell me when the
spaceship lands, 'cos all this has got to mean something",
Cocker wheedles in Sorted for E's and Wiz. Trance's hip
gnosis precisely promises "meaning something" in the druidic
delivery of transcendence, and the return of meaningful
projects and the possibility of control. These eschatological
and Acquarian pretensions of trance - currently being
prosthetisised as therapeutic technologies by the latest
counsellor gurus, joshing their patients with Shamanic
dancing's 'primal' healing qualities - sit down easily next to the
Schwa mythos and its investment in the bankrupt notion that
there can still be plans directed from above. Whether that is
the above of the orbiting saucers - piloted by Aliens or Aryans
-, or of the 'secret' Area 51, or of deep inside the Cartesian
headcase. "Are we ready for global contact with ET's or even
ultradimensional beings? Frankly, I can't answer that
question. But I can say that there is a process and central to
that process is what we choose for ourselves as individuals ...
The rest follows naturally" (Coleman: 51). In the nostalgia for
control and purpose, another bond in the Schwa-Christ holey
alliance is revealed. "The alien messiah serves to resolve
these problems, at least imaginatively, to replace despair with
hope and purpose, to provide resolution in a world where
solution seems impossible ... Meaningless lives find meaning.
Old men are granted immortality. A boy gains a friend. A
grief-stricken widow is consoled. Nuclear war is avoided ...
Underlying the motif of the alien messiah is the mythos of the
Christian messiah." (Ruppersberg,: 32 - 34)
Anglo-Retroism programmes regressive trance/infantilism
against the sub-bass materialism of Afro-Futurism: rural idiocy
against inner city A-Life; the Christianised visage made to
Grey against imperceptible facelessness; conspiracies and
meaningful plans against the immanent potentialities of dread
out of control.
Brand Schwa: you're retro. Trance Europe Express: you've
been derailed by snowcrash. No UFOs.
Works Cited:
Balch, Robert W. and David Taylor "Seekers and Saucers:
The Role of the Cultic Milieu in Joining a UFO Cult" American
Behavioural Scientist 20 (6), July / August 1977
Barker, Bill E-mail interview published on the Schwa
Abducted news-list Mar 13, 1995 (abducted@ schwa.org)
Burroughs, William The Ticket that Exploded (London:
Paladin, 1985)
Coleman, Tim "Are 'We' Ready for 'Them'" Eternity 2 (11)
Deleuze, Gilles Negotiations (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995)
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus
(London: Athlone, 1988)
Howe, Rupert "Groovers on Manoeuvres" 22 Muzik March
1997
Lawson, Alvin H. "A Testable Hypothesis for the Origins of
Fallacious Abduction Reports: Birth Trauma
Imagery in CE-IIIs" Frontiers of Science May / June 1982
Lawson, Alvin H. "Perinatal Imagery in UFO Abduction
Reports" The Journal of Psychiatry 12 (2), Fall 1984
Lawson, Alvin H. "Comment on 'Misidentified Flying Objects?
An integrated psychodynamic perspective on near-death
experiences and UFO abductions'" Journal of Near Death
Studies 12 (4), Summer 1994
Rocha, Camilo "In Order to Trance" 6 Muzik October 1995
Ruppersberg, Hugh "The Alien Messiah" in ed. Annette Kuhn
Alien Zone (London: Verso, 1992)
Toop, David Oceans of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound
and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent's Tail, 1995)