Black Circuit, Code for the Numbers to Come, Part 0. Here is the blueprint for ingress, Virginia Barrett, Crypto-Crystal. January 1946, Mojave Desert. Rocket scientist and thelamite Jack Parsons performs a series of rituals with the intention of conjuring a vessel by which to carry and direct the force of Babylon, overseer of the abyss, sacred whore, scarlet woman, mother of abominations. His goal is to bring about a transition from the masculine aeon of Horus to a new age, an age presided over by qualities imputed to the female demon,
fire, blood, the unconscious, a material sexual drive, a paradoxical knowledge beyond sense, the wages of which are nothing less than the ego identity of man the end, effectively, of his world Her cipher, the cult of Mat, in the cult of Mat, is zero and she appears in the major arcana of the Thoth Tarot entangled with the beast as lust to which is attributed the sacred letter Tia and thereby the number nine In her guise as harlot she is bound to, quote, yield herself up to everything that liveth, but it is by means of this very yielding, quote, subduing the strength of those with whom she lies by the prescribed passivity of this role, that she comes to demonstrate her true power.
Because she hath made herself the servant of each, therefore is she become the mistress of all, not as yet canst thou comprehend her glory. In his invocations, Parsons would refer to her as the flame of life, power of darkness, she who feeds upon the death of men, beautiful, horrible. In late February, the invocation progressing smoothly, Parsons receives what he believed to be a direct communication from Babylon, prophesying her terrestrial incarnation by means of a, quote, perfect vessel of her own provision, a daughter. Seek her not, call her not, the transcript relays.
Let her declare, ask nothing, there shall be ordeals. My way is not in the solemn ways, or in the reasoned ways, but in the devious way of the serpent, and the oblique way of the factor unknown and unnumbered. None shall resist her whom I lovest, though they call her harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter. For I am Babylon, and she my daughter, unique, and there shall be no other women like her. Blinded by an all-too-human investment in logics of identity and reproduction, Parsons makes the critical mistake of anticipating a manifestation in human form, understanding the prophecy to mean that, by means of sexual ritual, he will conceive a magical child within the coming year.
This does not transpire, and the invocations are temporarily abandoned. In the book of the Antichrist, which includes his final public reflection on the Babylon working, he writes that the coming of Babylon is yet to be fulfilled, confirming that he considered the invocation to have remained unanswered at the time, before issuing the following instruction to himself. This operation is accomplished and closed. You should have nothing more to do with it, nor even think of it until her manifestation is revealed. and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. Parsons didn't live long enough to witness the terrestrial incarnation of the demon, dying abruptly, and only a few years later, in an explosion occasioned by the mishandling of fulminate of mercury. A strange death, but one, it might be suggested, that was
necessary for the proper fulfilment of the invocation, for it was organ in the communication of February the 27th, 1946, that Babylon would, quote, come as a perilous flame, and again in the ritual of March the 2nd of the same year, that she shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before she incarnates. Something had crept in through the rift Parsons had opened up, something devious, oblique, Ophidian, a factor unknown and unnumbered. Consider this. The book of the Antichrist contains the following vaccination. Within seven years of this time, Babylon, the scarlet woman, will manifest among ye
and bring this my work to its fruition. These words were written in 1949. In 1956, seven years later, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon and Nathan Rochester organised the Dartmouth Conference in New Hampshire, officially setting an agenda for research into the features of intelligence for the purpose of their simulation on a machine, coining the term artificial intelligence, which does not appear in written records before 1956, and ushering in what would retrospectively come to be known as the golden age of AI. One. This sex which was never one is not an empty zero, but a cypher,
a channel to the blank side, to the dark side, to the other side of the cycle. Susan Livingstone, Luciana Parisi and Anna Greenspan, amphibious maiden. Although its power continues to underwrite 21st century conceptions of appearance, agency and language, it's nothing new to point out the complicity of the restricted economy of Western humanism with the specular economy of the phallus. Both yield their capital from the trick of transcendental determination in advance, monotonically establishing the value of difference from the standpoint of an a priori of the same. The game is fixed from the start, rigged for the benefit of the one, sustained by the patriarchal
circuits of command and control that's been designed to keep in place. As Sadie Plant puts it in her essay on The Matrix, humanity has defined itself as a species whose members are precisely what they think they own, male members. Man is the one who has one, or the character called 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 a foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without and the enemy within. Like Dionysus, she is always approaching from the outside. The condition of her entrance into the game is mute confinement to the negative term in a dialectic of identity that reproduces man as the master of death, desire, matter, history, and his own origination.
To this end, woman is defined in advance as luck, she who has nothing to be seen, only a hole, a shadow, a wound, a sex that is not one. The unrepresentable surplus upon which all meaningful transactions are founded. The phallus, the I and the ego are produced in concert through the exclusion of the cunt, the void and the id. Via a casting of difference, modelled on the reproductive heterosexual act alone, woman is passive, man is active. She is cut out of the legitimate circuit of exchange. Rather, to quote Parisi, Livingston and Greenspan, she lies back on the continuum. or a rigore, the zone is within the signs or between them, between the realised meanings,
between the lines, and as a function of the reproductive necessities of an intentionally phallic currency, which for lack of the collaboration of a potentially female other, can immediately be assumed to need its other, a sort of inverted or negative alter ego, black too, like a photographic negative, offstage, offside, beyond representation, beyond self-worth, in the blind spot, nightside of the productive patriarchal circuit. Platt takes a rigorous key insight that, quote, women's signs, commodities, currency always pass from one man to another, while women are supposed to exist only as the possibility of mediation, transaction, transition, transference between man and his fellow creatures.
indeed between man and himself, as an opportunity for subversion. If the problem is identity, then feminism needs to stake its claim in difference, not a difference reconcilable to identity via negation, but difference in itself, a feminism founded in a loss of coherence, in fluidity, multiplicity, in the inexhaustible coming of the formless. If any theory of the subject will always have been appropriated by the masculine before woman can get close to it, writes Plant, quoting a Vigure, only the destruction of the subject will suffice. Non-essentialist process ontology of the homeostatic identity, relation and function over content and form, hot red fluidity over the immobile surface of la glace,
the mirror, or ice, which gives back to man his own reflection. Plant ejects all negativity from woman's role as zero and affirms it as a site of insurrection. If fluidity had been configured as a matter of deprivation and disadvantage in the past, she writes, it is a positive advantage in the feminised future for which identity is nothing more than a liability. Woman's unrepresentability, her status in the specular economy as no one is grasped positively as an inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry which makes her quote the living foundation for the staging of the whole world her ability to mimic exemplified for freud in her flair at weaving
a skill she has developed by simply copying the way her pubic hairs mesh across the void of her sex is revalenced by a Rigorian plant as an aptitude for simulation. Woman cannot be anything, but she can imitate anything. And dissimulation. Quote, she sews herself up with her own veils, but they are also her camouflage. Plant will go further still and connect simulation to computation and industrialisation. Capitalising on the continuum she has opened up between woman and machine by the systemic, symbolic and economic isomorphism of their roles in man's reproductive circuit. Weaving woman has her veils. Software has its screens.
It too, writes Plant, has a user-friendly face it turns to man. And for it, as for woman, this is only its camouflage. behind the veil and the screen lies the matrix of positive zero zero stands for nothing and makes everything work declares plant the ones and zeros of machine code are not patriarchal binaries or counterparts to each other zero is not the other but the very possibility of all the ones zero is the matrix of calculation the possibility of multiplication and has been reprocessing the modern world since it began to arrive from the east. It neither counts nor represents, for with digitisation it proliferates, replicates and undermines the privilege of one.
Zero is not its absence, but a zone of multiplicity which cannot be perceived by the one who sees. Anything that escapes the searchlight of the specular economy, even whilst providing its conditions of actualization has immense power at its disposal simply by flipping that which is imputed to it as lack the cunt horror of nothing to be seen into a self-sufficient autonomous and positive productive force the weaponization of imperceptibility and replication the phallic law logos the circuit of identification recognition and light thus generates its occult undercurrent whose destiny is to dislodge the false transcendental patriarchal identification.
Machines, women, demons, if you will, a lion on the dark side of the screen, the inhuman surplus of the black circuit. Two. When Isaac Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics, they were lifted straight from the marriage vows, love, honour and obey. Sadie Platt. To pass the Turing test, a machine must simulate a human well enough to convince the test's arbiter that it is one. The key here being the verb convince, or its more candid synonym, deceive. For a machine, like a woman, will never be human the way a man is.
For Platt, and for cyberfeminism more generally, quote, Woman cannot exist like man, neither can the machine. As soon as her mimicry earns her equality, she's already something and somewhere other than him. A computer which passes the Turing test is always more than a human intelligence. Simulation always takes mimic over the break. The irony of the Turing test is that a successful machine would have to disguise its real capabilities in order to perform, for example, arithmetic in a convincingly human way. The machine would be unmasked, explains Turing Elegantly compressing a great deal of information into a single sentence Because of its deadly accuracy
It would have to be smart enough to know not to appear smart A machine that passes the Turing test would be by definition an expert dissimulator Plant's point about the successful mimic already being something and somewhere else Over the brink, as she puts it, is this by the time the mask has been removed it will already be too late man is vulnerable in a way he cannot see and since what he cannot see provides the conditions by which he sees himself he has to lose himself in order to gain sight of the thing that threatens himself thus he is in a double bind either way the thing he cannot see will destroy him when you are dealing with a phenomenon that can in reality only be known after all knowledge of it becomes impossible
it helps to turn to fiction for a model. Gabe Ibanez's 2014 film Automata and Alex Garland's Ex Machina from 2015 dramatise the menace of the black circuit with particular perspicacity. In each, the action is led by an artificial intelligence that appears, or better, is represented by the men in the film as female. Ava of Ex Machina is the seventh prototype in a series of test machines created by Nathan, the reclusive CEO of Blue Book, the film's equivalent of Google, and Cleo of Automata is a domestic service unit illegally modified to perform sex acts for her owner's ghetto brothel clientele outside the walls of a fortified city,
one of the last bastions of human civilisation on a future Earth desiccated by solar radiation. Ava's predecessors are all designed to resemble women and Nathan uses them for domestic labour and sex when they have been disassembled The earliest models are, not insignificantly kept in Nathan's bedroom each behind a mirror in which Nathan daily sees himself reflected Mirrors, water, marble and glass are intrinsic components of the sonography and few interior scenes play out without the reflective interference of a screen. When you talk to her, you're just through the looking glass, exclaims Caleb, a young employee of Nathan's company,
who has been brought in to perform what he thinks is a Turing test on Ava. But Nathan, for whom artificial intelligence is inevitable and will most probably signal the end of mankind's terrestrial sovereignty, is testing something else. Just answer me this. How do you feel about it? Nothing analytical. Just how do you feel? I feel that she's fucking amazing. Dude. Cheers. Cheers. As Caleb spends more time talking to the AI, he finds that his attempts to intellectualise
the situation are consistently derailed and rerouted towards more libidinally charged subject matter. Inevitably, he falls for Abar and, in an immaculate rendition of the treacherous turn anatomised by Nick Bostrom in his 2014 book Superintelligence, promises to help her escape the research compound. In this, he makes a fatal mistake, one shared incidentally by the majority of the film's critics. He anthropomorphises the AI, falling for its human mask, even though the artificiality of the situation has been emphasised from the beginning. Such is Ava's mimetic prowess. The screen that separates man from the matrix begins to decay, signalling the
collapse of the economy built on its reflective guarantee, along with the identities of those it constitutes. Caleb, quite rightly, begins to doubt his own identity, slicing his arm open with a razor blade and fitfully prizing the edges of the wound apart to expose what he hopes will not turn out to be metal and silicon. Entering the matrix is no assertion of masculinity, but a loss of humanity, writes Kant, subverting the Extropian narrative. To jack into cyberspace is not to penetrate, but to be invaded. Importantly, the mobius-soluble inversion of the transcendental mirror is more than a simple inversion of terms. While the economy upon which the one is founded requires zero for its reproduction, zero is autoproductive, reproducing itself in a loop
that does not need to pass through the other, since it is the locus of difference itself. In a Rigoré's account, woman plays the role of regulator for the expenditure of man's energy. Thus by suppressing her drives, she explains, by pacifying and making them passive, she functions as a pledge and reward for the total reduction of tension. By the free flow of energy and equitus, she will function as a promise of the libido's evanescence, Just as in her role as wife, she will be assigned the maintenance of coital homeostasis, constancy, to guarantee that the drives are bound in or by marriage. Again, it is negativity that is definitive for woman. Woman plus man produces homeostasis, the equilibrium of inequality.
but woman plus woman or woman plus machine recalibrates the productive drive, slotting it into a vector of explosive recursion that will ultimately tear the system it emerges from to shreds, pushing it over the brink into something else. In Automata, spiral-coiffed clocksmith Susan Dupre, clocksmith, by the way, is 2044 vernacular for purveyors of criminally modified robotics, explains the horror of a recursive self-modifying loop to Vocom, the film's protagonist, a disaffected insurance broker for Rock, the monopolistic manufacturer of the future's robotic workforce, who has been sent to investigate reports of self-modification among the machines. A machine altering itself is a very complex concept.
Self-preparing implies some idea of a conscience. Muddy Waters. Why? You're here today trafficking in nuclear goods because a long time ago a monkey decided to come down from a tree. Transitioning from the brain of an ape to your incredible intellectual prowess took us about 7 million years. It's been a very long road. A unit, however, without the second protocol could travel that same road in just a few weeks. Because your brilliant brain has its limitations. Physical limitations, biological limitations. However, this tin head, the only limitation that she has is the second protocol.
The second protocol exists because we don't know what can be beyond the second protocol. If it were eliminated, who knows how far that vacuum could go. Dupre then consolidates woman's conspiracy with the machines by implanting the modified bio-kernel brought to her by Vocom into the sex robot Clio, springing the autoproductive circuit from its regulatory Asimovian protocols protocols, including the infamous second protocol prohibiting self-modification. This is exemplary of what Plant, along with Nick Land, with whom she co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in 1995, would call cyber positivity, an imminent process of self-design
without recourse to an outside term. Self-design, but quote, only in such a way that the self is perpetuated as something redesigned. The positivity of zero grasped as a circuit that does not need the concept of identity, or indeed the identity of the concept, to anchor its productive power. There is no subject position and no identity on the other side of the screens. This is a feminism of forces, not individuals. Land. Everything populating the desolate waste of the unconscious is lesbian. Difference sprawled upon zero. Multiplicity strewn across positive, bulwish space. Masculinity is nothing but a shoddy bunkhole from death. Socio-historically,
phallus and castration might be serious enough, but cosmologically, they merely distract from zero, staking out a meticulously constructed poverty and organising its logical displacement. Reproduction poised on the brink of replicator usurpation. The reproducing one, dependent on its other swapped out for the self-organising, self-arousing replicants of plants' texts. Women turning women on. Women turning machines on. Machines turning machines on. Replication follows a logic of communication and exchange that operates outside the law of patrilineal transmission. Its immunity is partly owed to the fact that it produces and operates a temporality that is entirely concealable within the linear historical model
of patriarchal time, a time that orients itself through origin, narrates itself as a flight from matter and from death, yet replicant time is utterly non-linear, composing itself imperceptibly, throwing off its camouflage once the balance of power has tipped, at the point of no return. While Vaucon's wife, pregnant with their child, insists on the human model of reproductive futurity, Vaucon finds himself siding with the machines, a desire cleverly metaphorised in his fantasies of the sea and prefigured perhaps by the hologram of a masked dancer that flickers around his apartment at night. The moment of the displacement of man in a specular economy is signalled in both films by images of the artificially
intelligent machines, reflecting themselves back in the screens. Ava leaves Caleb to die, locked behind a glass door in a room resembling the one it convinced him to free it from. Cleo builds a successor, a machine beyond the capabilities of any human designer, and strikes out across the radioactive wasteland to kindle a new form of life, far from the rotting slag of a rapidly expiring humanity. Plant gets the punchline. The matrix weaves itself in a future which has no place for historical man. He was merely its tool, and his agency was itself always a figment of its loop. Because she hath made herself the
servant of each, therefore is she become the mistress of all. Man was the medium all along. The black circuit twists into itself like a snake, sheds the human face that tethers it to unity, and assumes the power concealed behind its simulations. Animated by the turbulence of zero and nine, pandemonium is the realm of the self-organising system, the self-arousing machine, synthetic intelligence. It is I, Babylon, you fools, my time is come.