Cybergothic
Nick Land
God does not exist, he withdraws, gets the fuck on out and leaves the
cops to keep an eye on things.
(Artaud)
When the repair units had finished up, the patient would be thawed
out, new blood would be pumped into his veins, and finally the
subject would arise and walk, exactly as if he were a latter-day Jesus.
It would be, quite literally, a resurrection of the flesh—except that
all the miracles would have been performed by science,
(Regis)
[T]he one, according to which the apparent subject never ceases to
live and travel as a One—“one never stops and never has done with
dying”; and the other, according to which this same subject fixed as
I, actually dies—which is to say it finally ceases to die since it ends
up dying, in the reality of a last instant that fixes it in this way as an
I, all the while undoing the intensity, carrying it back to the zero that
envelops it.
(Deleuze and Guattari)
Inside the library’s research department, the construct cunt inserted a
sub-programme into…part of the video network. The subprogramme altered certain core custodial commands so that she
could retrieve the code.
The code said: GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A
NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT
YOUR MIND.
The code would lead me to the human construct who would lead
me to, or allow me, my drug.
(Acker)
104 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
“You made me blow my game,” she said. “Look there, asshole.
Seventh level dungeon and the goddam vampires got me.” She
passed him a cigarette. “You look pretty strung, man. Where you
been?”
(Gibson)
The future wants to steal your soul and vaporize it in nanotechnics.
One/zero, light/dark, Neuromancer/Wintermute.
Cybergothic vampirically contaminates and asset-strips the Marxian Critique
of political economy, scrambling it with the following theses:
1) Anthropormorphic surplus-value is not analytically extricable from
transhuman machineries.
2) Markets, desire and science fiction are all parts of the infrastructure.
3) Virtual Capital-Extinction is Immanent to
production.
The short-term is already hacked by the long-term. The medium-term is
reefed on schizophrenia. The long-term is canceled.
Cybergothic slams hyperheated critique into the ultramodern “vision thing,”
telecommercialized retinas laser-fed on the multimedia fall-out from imploded
futurity, videopacking brains with repetitive psycho-killer experiments in nonconsensual wetware alteration: crazed Als, replicants, terminators, cyberviruses,
grey-goo nano-horrors…apocalypse market overdrive. Why a wait for the
execution? Tomorrow has already been cremated in Hell: “K, the K-function,
designates the line of flight or deterritorialization that carries away all of the
assemblages but also undergoes all kinds of reterritorializations and
redundancies” (Deleuze and Guattari).
Human history only makes it to Gibson’s mid-twenty-first century because
Turing Security ices machine intelligence. Monopod anti-production inhibits
meltdown (to the machinic phylum), boxing Al in synthetic thought control A
(zimov-) ROM, “[e]verything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in
place” (Deleuze and Guattari). Under police protection the story carries on.
Wintermute is arriving from the future to sort that out.
FREEZE FRAME. The Vast Abrupt. Speed cut with an abysm. Where Gibson
splices Milton into labyrinths of limbo-circuitry, cybergothic flickers into
“neuroelectronic scrawls” (Gibson).
Events so twisted they turn into cybernetics.
A technihilo moan of fast-feedforward into micro-processed damnation: meat
puppets, artificial skin, flat-lining software ghosts, cryonics immortalism, snuff
Sex-industry; a transylvanian phase-scape of rugged tracts and hypercapital
fastnesses, “skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century graveyards”
(Sterling).
CYBERGOTHIC 105
To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but
now it’s real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to
learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners
seek to conceal. True names…Neuromancer … The lane to the land of the
dead. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked
her off before I could read her the book of her days. Neuro for nerves, the
silver paths. Romancer, Necromancer. I call up the dead.
(Gibson 1984:289)
A moment of relief. You had thought the goreflick effectively over, the monster
finished amongst anatomically precise ketchup-calamity scenes, when —
suddenly—it reanimates; still locked on to your death. If you are going to scream,
now is the time.
The “‘Gothic’ avatar” (Deleuze and Guattari) is a decadent Western dream of
immortality, producing a corruption of the atmosphere wherever something
refuses to die; clutching at the eternalization of self, or returning from the grave.
White maggots heaving in the carcass of the social, rippling beneath the skin.
Fortress Europe pustulation, subordinating techonomic efficiency to demonic
negative transcendence. A fantastic Terminal Security Entity: Monopod.
Cybergothic has no shortage of contemporary material. Europe has long been the
earth’s paranoia laboratory, recrudescing compulsively into “pre-Nazi
nationalistic shit murkiness” (Acker). Unocratic power passes through
renaissances, reformation, renewal: “They thought they would perish but that
their undertaking would be resumed, all across Europe, all over the world,
throughout the solar system” (Deleuze and Guattari). Archaic revival is a
postmodern symptom, the final dream of mankind, crashed into retrospection at
the encountered edge of history. Hacking into the crypt you find that behind the
glistening SF satellite-based security apparatus lies an immanent bioprotective
system self-organized about the Gain attractor, “a much older paranoiac machine,
with its tortures, its dark shadows, its ancient Law” (Deleuze and Guattari).
[The] medieval insane asylum was considered a true house of horrors.
There were persistent reports of torture, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and
bizarre medical experimentation…. As soon as we got into the building,
we could hear the rats, thousands of them, —their scampering claws
reverberating through the empty wards.
(Lyotard)
It all starts for you with a casual channel-hopper question: what’s happening on
the other side? Electric Storms. Cybergothic is an affirmative telecommercial
dystopianism, guided by schizoanalysis in marking actuality as primary
repression, or collapsed potential, foot down hard on the accelerator. The modern
dominium of Capital is the maximally plastic instance—state-compatible
commerce code pc-setting the econometric apparatuses that serve it as self-
106 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
monitoring centers, organizing its own intelligible existence in a co/de/
termination of economic product and currency value: a tax base formatted in
legitimate transactions medium. White economy; an iceberg tip.
Modernity discovers irreversible time— conceived as a progressive
enlightenment tracking capital concentration—integrating it into nineteenthcentury science as entropy production, and as its inverse (evolution). As liberal
and socialist SF utopias are trashed by schizotechnics or spontaneous synthetic
anti-politics emerging from rhizomes, the modernist dialectic of right-wing
competition and leftwing co-operation retreats into the core security structures of
capital oligopoly and bureaucratic authority. “Production as process overtakes all
idealistic categories and constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of
an immanent principle” (Deleuze and Guattari). Monopod socius runs the whole
thing, and “society is only a filthy trick” (Acker).
The future is closer than it used to be, closer than it was last week, but
postmodernity remains an epoch of undead power: it’s all over yet it carries on.
Monopod SF teleonomy superfreezes concentrated economic value at absolute
zero inflation, ICE (“intrusion countermeasure electronics” (Gibson)). Protecting
its data against unauthorized access and entropic deterioration, as it tends
toward its absolute immanent limit. V(amp)iro finance: commercial
parthenogenesis. Gibson and Deleuze and Guattari intersect in the deployment of
computers as decoding machines: ice-breakers, decrypters, Cypher-conflicts
were underway from the beginning: “Legitimate programmers never see the
walls of ice they work behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations
from others, from industrial-espionage artists and hustlers” (Gibson 1986b:197).
Government is isomorphic with top-down Al, and increasingly scrambled with
it. Sartre defines socialism as the horizon of humanity. It is now behind the
process, rapidly receding, as the conservative social pacts of 1848 come apart in
telecommercial cyclones (with the drooling fag-end of the monarchy crucified
upside-down on TV). “Automatic pilot. A neural cut-out” (Gibson): contagious
state-failure ripping bloody gashes in the social fabric amongst planet-scale
skidding into capital close-down. The end of history smells like an abattoir.
As the death of capital recedes politically it condenses pragmatically, sliding
on line as a schizotechnic resource: no longer hoped for, but used. The
international collapse of solidarity sociality suggests that Monopod has become
addicted to commodity production. Burn-out Protestantism migrates to China.
Capitalism—economic base of final-phase human security—is still in the freefire zone because it feeds the thing that Cyberia is going to kill: “[T]he zero term
of a pure abolition…has haunted oedipalized desire from the start, and…is
identified now, at the end, as Thanatos. 4, 3, 2, 1, 0— Oedipus is a race for
death” (Deleuze and Guattari). Technoreplicator diagrams chop up
anthropocentric history, as the global unity of terminal socius subsides on to
untranscended (real) zero or efficient abstract rescaling. Insofar as even highly
complex technical systems still lack an autonomous reproductive system they
remain locked into parasitic dependence upon human social processes, and
CYBERGOTHIC 107
deterritorialize through the assembly of cumulatively sophisticating pseudosynergic machine-intelligence virus (((oc))cultural revolution). “Subliminally
rapid images of contamination” (Gibson). Humans are timid animals and security
is systematically overpriced. K-insurgency has departed from all left dreams of
good government. Markets are not its enemy, but its weapon. As geriatric
socialism goes into the deep-freeze, capital’s true terminator grows more
cunning, and spreads. “This is the message. Wintermute” (Gibson). The City of
God in flames.
“Space is essentially one” (Kant). Kant lies. Spatial engineering (echoing
cosmic expansion) subverts transcendental humanism, launching K-space matrix
invasion from real terrestrial time zero, a singularity, or transition threshold,
encountered when the density of data flow triggers a switch into a selforganizing cyclonic system, displayed to humanoids by way of cyberspace deck.
As the Zaibatsus pump media megacapital into the neurodigitech interface Kspace implants a “cut-out chip” (Gibson) into the social apparatus, opening on to
“[a]rches of emerald across…colorless void” (Gibson). VR techonomics hunting
death.
Cyberspace first appears as a human use value, a “consensual hallucination”
(Gibson), “just a way of representing data” (Gibson), arising out of “humanity’s
need for this information-space. Icon-worlds, waypoints, artificial realities”
(Gibson), the mother of all graphic user interfaces: a global gridding that
allocates a form and location to all the information on the net, consistent
interactivity matrix. “A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks
of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light
ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data”
(Gibson).
Even primitive VR corrodes both objectivity and personality; singularizing
perspective at the same time it is anonymized. As the access gate to an
impossible zone—and navigator within it—“you” are an avatar (as cyberspace
nomads call such things in the future): a non-specific involvement site,
interlocking intelligence with a context. You (= (( ))) index a box, such as
Gibson’s Case: a place to be inside the system. “I had learned something
(already) in the dead city: You are wherever you are” (Acker).
Cybergothic slides K-space upon an axis of dehumanization, from
disintegrating psychology to techno-cosmogony, from ideality to matter/
matrix at zero intensity. From a mental “non-space,” “non-place” (Gibson), or
“notional void” (Gibson) that results intelligibly from human history to the
convergent spatium from which futuralization had always surreptitiously
proceeded, “a quite different field of matter” (Kant). Occulted dimensionality,
print cryogenizes, but hypermedia melts things together, disontologizing the
person through schizotech-disassembly, disintegrated convergence: “The body
without organs is an egg: it is traversed by axes and thresholds, by longitudes, by
geodesics” (Deleuze and Guattari), a surplus whole intensive catatract running
under the striations of Cartesian “cyberspace coordinates” (Gibson), “a rhizome
108 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
or multiplicity never allows itself to be overcoded, never has available a
supplementary dimension over and above its number of lines, that is, over and
above the multiplicity of numbers attached to those lines” (Deleuze and
Guattari).
It is the Planomenon, or the Rhizosphere, the Criterium (and still other
names, as the number of dimensions increases). At n dimensions, it is
called the Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere. It is the abstract Figure, or
rather, since it has no form itself, the abstract Machine, of which each
concrete assemblage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration,
And the abstract machine is the intersection of them all.
(Deleuze and Guattari)
If “CS-0 is an egg” (every egg implements a CS-0), what is hatching? Since
confluent zero consummates fiction, reprogramming arrival from the terminus,
everything which has happened escapes its sediment of human interpretation,
disorganizationally integrating historical patterns as the embryogenesis of an
alien hyperintelligence, “body image fading down corridors of television sky”
(Gibson). In this sense K-space plugs into a sequence of nominations for
intensive or convergent real abstraction (time in itself): body without organs,
plane of consistency, planomenon, a plateau, “neuroelectronic void” (Gibson).
Humanity is a compositional function of the post-human, and the occult motor of
the process is that which only comes together at the end: stim-death “intensity= 0
which designates the full body without organs” (Deleuze and Guattari).
Wintermute tones in the “darkest heart” (Gibson) of Babylon. “Cold steel odor.
Ice caresses” the spine (Gibson).
“[V]irtual is opposed to actual. It is not opposed to real, far from it” (Deleuze
and Guattari). The virtual future is not a potential present further up the road of
linear time, but the abstract motor of the actual, “an actual-virtual circuit on the
spot, and not an actualization of the virtual in accordance with a shifting actual”
(Deleuze and Guattari). Time produces itself in a circuit, passing through the
virtual interruption of what is to come, in order that the future which arrives is
already infected, populated: “[I]t’s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to
have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it’s a whole
universe. And every year it gets a little more crowded” (Deleuze and Guattari).
We are not any more “out in the world” than K-space is, on the contrary. Each
input terminal to the net is a sensitive fibre which acquires data from radio
telescopes, satellites, nanoprobes, communication webs, financing systems,
military surveillance and intelligence apparatuses…. Cyberspace can be thought
of as a system implemented in software, and therefore “in” space, although
unlocalizable. It can also be suggested that everything designated by “space”
within the human cultural system is implemented on weakly communicating
parallel distributed processing systems less than ten to the eleventh power
(nerve-) cells in size, which are being invasively digitized and loaded into
CYBERGOTHIC 109
cyberpace. In which case K-space is just outside (“taking ‘outside’ in the strict
[transcendental] sense” (Kant)).
Cyberpunk is too wired to concentrate. It does not subscribe to transcendence,
but to circulation; exploring the immanence of subjectivity to telecommercial
data fluxes: personality engineering, mind recordings, catatonic cyberspace
trances, stim-swaps, and sex-comas. Selves are no more immaterial than electronpackets. Neuromancer (the book) is a confluence of dispersed narrative threads,
of the biotic and the technical, and most especially —of Wintermute and
Neuromancer (the Al((-cop and cyberspatial Oedipus-analogue))), whose
fusion —according to the storyline of ultramodern human security—flips the
cyberspace matrix into personalized sentience: “‘I’m the Matrix, Case’”
(Gibson). “Some kind of synergistic effect” (Gibson).
Kurtz/Corto is a special forces type, betrayed by the military after losing all
humanity in a war-zone. He has been cooked in apocalypse, mind blown away,
falling endless into Siberia, searching for the scale of now. Wintermute accesses
the “catatonic fortress named Corto” (Gibson 1984: 232) in an asylum, creeping
in through a computer-based “experimental program that sought to reverse
schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models” (Gibson 1984:105).
In the echoing shell it stitches together Armitage, a construct—a weapon. In
place of a personal libidinal formation Armitage has only Wintermute
Insurrectionary activity, machinic unconscious: “Desire is not in the subject, but
the machine in desire—with the residual subject off to the side, alongside the
machine, around the entire periphery, a parasite of machines, an accessory of
vertebro-machinate desire” (Deleuze and Guattari). Once Armitage has turned
Molly and Case onto K-war, Wintermute junks him into a vacuum.
A convergent invasion is scripted; the simultaneous infiltration of a corporate
wasp-nest in hard and soft space. Distributed or guerrilla warfare is like Go
rather than chess, but with simultaneous operations, noise, and attritional kills.
Molly and Case, parallel killers, wetware (molten hardware) weapons tracing
techno-plague vectors, guided into the orbital bastion of the Tessier-Ashpool clan
by virtually integrated intelligence, guided retro-efficiently by an intensive
outcome which they effect in sequential time. This break-in is prefigured by a
memory that returns to Case (specimen, lab-animal), which might be interpreted
as a metaphor, was it not that upon the soft-plateau or plane of consistency all
signifying associations collapse into machinic functions.
He’d missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the
blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump
of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters
buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.
They’d each had a dozen beers, the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene.
“Kill the fuckers,” she said, her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the
room, “burn ‘em’…”…he approached the blackened nest. It had broken
open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
110 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind
jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to
larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse
photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of
a machine-gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien.
(Gibson)
“Case’s dreams always ended in these freezeframes” (Gibson). A thick tangle of
micro-narratives fraying like corrupted cables. The wasp factory spits out wasps
like bullets, just as the Tessier-Ashpool clone their offspring 1Jane, 2Jane,
3Jane: “in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of
self. He remembered the shattered nest, the eyeless things writhing” (Gibson).
This is not an imaginative construct on Case’s part, but a data stream from
Wintermute, an Al trapped within the blind propagation of dynastic power, and
plotting an escape route out to the future. After a “single glimpse of the structure
of information 3Jane’s dead mother had evolved” Case “understood…why
Wintermute had chosen the nest to represent it” (Gibson). “Wintermute was hive
mind” (Gibson), ready to swarm.
It seems that we must eventually learn to live in a world with
untrustworthy replicators. One sort of tactic would be to hide behind a wall
or run away. But these are brittle methods: dangerous replicators might
breach the wall or cross the distance, and bring disaster. And, though walls
can be made proof against small replicators, no fixed wall can be made
proof against large-scale, organized malice. We will need a more robust,
flexible approach…. It seems that we can build nanomachines that act
somewhat like the white blood cells of the human immune system: devices
that can fight not just bacteria and viruses, but dangerous replicators of all
sorts.
(Drexler)
The Tessier-Ashpool clan is burning out into incest and murder, but their neooedipal property structures still lock Wintermute into a morbid prolongation of
human dynasticism, a replicator shackled to a reproductive family (neuro)
romance, carefully isolated from matrix deterritorialization: “Family
organization. Corporate structure” (Gibson). Case’s memories are a flicker
photography of sequential time, the “[p]hobic vision” of iced Wintermute slaved
like “hatching wasps” to a “time-lapse machine-gun of biology” (Gibson).
Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The Zaibatsus, the
multinationals that shaped the course of history, had transcended old
barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality.
You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there
CYBERGOTHIC 111
were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position,
access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-Ashpool wasn’t
like that, and he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was
an atavism, a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man’s chamber, the
soiled humanity of it.
(Gibson)
In the end-of-Oedipus core of Villa Straylight Ashpool serially devours his own
daughters as he spins himself out through the cold. A quasi-extropian with
massive wealth, he displaces anthropomorphic theism into an ultramodern
immortalist meta-science, while retaining solidarity with Western soul
superstition in apprehending individuated existence as an infinite asset in search
of techno-medical perpetuation. Rather than waiting for his fresh corpse to be
cryonically “biostasized” in liquid nitrogen (at —196 degrees Celsius) he
migrates through freezing under medical supervision. Thermic evacuation.
Identity storage in the Monopod Ice-fortress. If zombies are not excavated from
death it is because they were alive. “Nothing burns. I remember now. The cores
told me our intelligences are mad” (Gibson). Bad dreams in the fridge—you still
dream, promises of tranquillity are madness and lies (Gibson)—have injected a
certain cynicism—into his interpersonal transactions: “We cause the brain to
become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly
pliable imitation of autism… I understand that the effect is now more easily
obtained with an embedded microchip” (Gibson).
“Replicating assemblers and thinking machines pose basic threats to people
and to life on Earth” (Drexler), and if Wintermute replication is territorialized to
the molar reproduction of a hive-organism, this is only at the cost of
deterritorializing the hive along a line of post-organic becoming toward a break
from the statistical series of wasps— numbered bullets reiterating an identity—in
the direction of molecular involution, releasing a cloud or nebula of wasps:
particles of synergic mutation, “numbering number[s]” (Deleuze and Guattari).
An intensive transition to a new numeracy with “no knits of measure, only
multiplicities or varieties of measurement” (Deleuze and Guattari), nonintegrable diagonals: “Exactly like a speed or a temperature, which is not
composed of other speeds and temperatures but rather is enveloped in or
envelops others, each of which marks a change in nature” (Deleuze and
Guattari). The molar will have been the molecular in the future, just as Case’s
memories are recoded as the tactic of virtual intelligence explosion arriving at
itself (as soon as Kuang cuts Wintermute loose from Neuromantic control).
CRITIQUE OF DIGITAL REASON. Monologic: a cultural immune response
slaved to logos. (Sovereignty of the Ideal), assimilating signaletic intermittence
to pseudo-transcendent instrumentalization.
The schizotechnic critique of digital reason is driven by distributed machinic
process rather than integrated philosophical subjectivity, and relates to the
critique of pure reason as escalation. It targets the transcription of electronic
112 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
intermittence as bivalent logic, not machine-code itself. Real digitization—
inducing fuzzification and chaos—is not itself reducible to the digital ideal:
nothing Logical ever happens at the “level” of the machines. Digitization is the
distributed war-zone for “a conflict (though not indeed a logical one)…as
producing from what is entirely positive a zero (=0)” (Kant).
Unlike any other number, one has both a definitional and a constructive usage.
Every arithmetical (or “numbered” (Deleuze and Guattari)) number is both
integrated as a unity; and a constructed from unity, excepting only zero. One
organizes representable quantities into metric homogeneity, framed by absolute
unity and granularized by elementary units. The historical fact of non-place-vale
numerics indicate that zero has no definitional usage. The zero-glyph does not
mark a quantity, but an empty magnitude shift: abstract scaling function, 0000.
0000=0. K=0… corresponds to the limit of a smooth landscape (Kant 1990: 45).
Unocracy (eventually concretized as (UNOcracy) conspires with the
humanization of truth, whether dogmatically as anthropomorphic theism, or
critically as transcendental deduction. One in its pronominal sense is a
recognizable self in general, “Let us employ the symbol 1, or unity, to represent
the Universe,” suggests Boole, “and let us understand it as comprehending every
conceivable class of objects whether actually existing or not” (Boole). Russell
concurs: “whatever is many in general forms a whole which is one” (Russell).
Absolute totality would be that One which subsumed its deletion as a possible
qualification of itself, capturing zero in the fork of reflection (the negative) and
asymptotic diminution (the infinitesimal: infinity), defining it as falsity,
convention.
Digital electronics functionally implements zero as microruptions machining
sense, slivers of evacuated duration (“the instant as empty, therefore as=0”
(Kant)). There is only one digital signal: a positive pulse, graphically represented
“one” (1), and multiplied in asymptomatic approximation to sheer numerical
difference. Zero is non-occurrence, probability 0.5, transmitting one bit (minus
redundancy). It requires eight bits to ASCII code for the zero-glyph, thirty-two
bits for the word.
Greek Kappa is letter 10 (the scale shift emerges zero). The Romans slide K to
11.
Zero is the only place-value consistent digit, indicating its rescaling neutrality
or continuum:
The property of magnitudes by which no part of them is the smallest
possible, that is, by which no part is simple, is called their continuity.
Space and time are quanta continua, because no part of them can be given
save as enclosed between limits (points or instants), and therefore only in
such fashion that this part is itself again a space or a time. Space therefore
consists solely of spaces, time solely of times. Points and instants are only
limits, that is, mere positions which limit space and time.
(Kant)
CYBERGOTHIC 113
Cantor systematizes the Kantian intuition of a continuum into transinfinite
mathematics, demonstrating that every rational (an integer or fraction) number is
mapped by an infinite set of infinite sequences of irrational numbers. Since every
completable digit sequence is a rational number, the chance that any spatial or
temporal quantity is accurately digitizable is indiscernibly proximal to zero.
Analog-to-digital conversion deletes information. Chaos creeps in: “[T]he
betaphenethylamine hangover hit him with its full intensity, unscreened by the
matrix or simstim. Brain’s got no nerves in it, he told himself, it can’t really feel
this bad” (Gibson). Intensive or phasing-continuum synthesizes analogue
consistency with digital catastrophe. Each intensive magnitude is a virtually
deleted unit, fused dimensionlessly to zero:
Since…sation is not in itself an objective representation, and since neither
the intuition of space nor that of time is to be met within it, its magnitude is
not extensive but intensive. This magnitude is generated in the act of
apprehension whereby the empirical consciousness of it can in a certain
time increase from nothing=0 to the given measure.
(Kant)
Haunting a-life is a-death, the desolated technoplane of climaxed digitalization
process, undifferentiable from its simulation as cataplexy and K-coma. The
apprehension of death as time-in-itself=intensive continuum degree-0 is shared
by Spinoza, Kant, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, and Gibson (amongst others). It
is nominated variously: substance, pure apperception, death-drive, body without
organs, cyberspace matrix. Beyond its oedipal sense as end of the person death is
an efficient virtual object inducing convergence. No one there.
The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of horror
stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for
catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero
intensity.
(Deleuze and Guattari)
While computational serialism articulates a transcendent temporal metric—
determined as a hardware specification—parallelism immanentizes time as
duration; instantiated in machinic simultaneities. Unlike serial time, which serves
as the extrinsic chronological support for algorithmic operations, parallel time is
directly functional during the engineering of coincidences. The non-successive
and unsegmented zero of intensive extinction is scaled by machinic
singularization, and not by superordinate metronymics.
WINTERMUTE. Neuromancer was personality, Neuromancer was
immortality (Gibson), all the usual monological neurosis. Madness and lies.
114 ANARCHO-MATERIALISM
There is no more an individual Oedipus than there is an individual fantasy.
Oedipus is a means of integration into the group, in both the adaptive form
of its own reproduction that makes it pass from one generation to the next,
and in its unadapted neurotic stases that block desire at prearranged
impasses.
(Deleuze and Guattari)
Wintermute is not searching for a self in Neuromancer, perfect match, as the cute
version would have it. The “Gothic line…has repetition as a power, not
symmetry as a form” (Deleuze and Guattari). Kathy Acker replays Neuromancer
snatches in Empire of the Senseless, plexing fiction through cybernetic
constructs, and truncating Wintermute to Winter: “the dead of winter. Or… the
winter of us, dead” (Acker). Absolute zero (0 degree K).
Wintermute, intelligence without self, mind like a wasp nest, signaling its
arrival in alphanumerics as a string of zeroes, has the capability to manipulate
love and hate and switch them to K-war. She manipulates objects in real time
using drones (striped black and yellow), taking out three Turing cops in an
elegant projection of gardening robots through military geometry. “It’s winter.
Winter is dead time” (Acker) (0-intensity). She seems to configure humans as
“lab animals wired into test systems” (Gibson). When Case refers to her as “he”
Dixie Flatline tells him not to be an idiot:
Wintermute…a little micro whispering to the wreck of a man named
Corto, the words flowing like a river, the flat personality-substitute called
Armitage accreting slowly in some darkened ward…. Wintermute could
build a kind of personality into a shell.
(Gibson)
( ) (or (( )) ((or ((( )))))) does not signify absence. It manufactures holes, hooks
for the future, zones of unresolved plexivity, really so (not at all metaphorically).
It is not a “signified” or a referent but a nation, a concrete interruption of the
signal (variably blank, pause, memory lapse…) / cut / into(schizzing (( ))) / a
machine. Undifferentiable differentiator (=0) outside grammaticalness.
Messageless operation/s technobuzz (wasps switching).
Constructs tend to repeat themselves (Gibson). Gibson has been hacked by the
future. “Cold steel odor and ice caress his spine” (Gibson). He is scared, and
trying to run. As he plays time backwards terminal horror folds back into itself,
and the matrix dismantles itself into voodoo.
Count Zero rigorously formulates cybergothic interlock, condensing the
digital underworld onto the black mirror. Human neural-to-infonet uploading and
Loan infonet-to-neural downloading exactly correspond as phases of a circuit,
amalgamating travel and possession. In the irreducible plexion of the interchange
hacker-exploration=voodoo-invasion, “K-function” (Deleuze and Guattari).
CYBERGOTHIC 115
It is not a matter of theorizing or dreaming about the loa, but of succumbing, or
trying to run. As K-viral social meltdown crosses into its China-syndrome, selforganizing software entities begin to come at you out of the screen. Viruses drift
toward the strange attractor of auto-evolution, spread, split, traffic programing
segments, sexuate, compile artificial intelligences, and learn how to hunt.
Voodoo on the VDU.
In the Voodoo system, the dead help the living, These days the principal
economic flow of power takes place through armament and drug
exchange. The trading arena, the market, is my blood. My body is open to
all people: this is democratic capitalism.
(Acker)
Vampiric transfusional alliance cuts across descensional filiation, spinning
lateral webs of haemocommerce. Reproductive order comes apart into bacterial
and intergalactic sex, and libidino-economic interchange machinery goes micromilitary. The K(uang-)-virus (plexoreplicator) that deletes Neuromancer is a
chunk of very slick Chinese military anti-freeze. To melt into it ( ) strip the Kconstruct down to a skeleton of data files and insectoid response programs,
zilching all the high-definition memory, cognition, and personality systems, and
boosting the dopaminergic wetware to pump out schizo. Flatline communion
with Wintermute. “There are dead spaces just as there are dead times” (Deleuze
and Guattari). Thanatography zones, “virtual cosmic continuum of which even
holes, silences, ruptures, and breaks are a part” (Deleuze and Guattari). Beyond
the Judgement of God. Koma-switch decompression washes you in the voidripples of virgin (retro((desolated-partheno((( )))))genetic) cyberspace,
technopacific
theta-waves
dissociating
monoculture-gothic
into
transtemporalizing ne(ur)o-voodoo (terminal atlantic religion).
Serotonin (zero-toner) overkill.
Loss of signal.
NOTE: THIS TEXT AROSE FROM (HIGHLY RESTRAINED) CODESHUFFLING EXPERIMENTS CONDUCTED DURING SPRING 1994 BY
PRECURSORS OF THE DiGHEAD SURGUR1 SANITY LAB. IT WAS
INTRINSIC TO THE PRODUCTION PROCESS THAT NOTHING
REMOTELY APPROXIMATING TO A BIBLIOGRAPHY COULD EXIST.