Steven Metcalf: Black Capital
THE COMPOSITE CITY
The Western Lands are burning – drifting out into deep space;
vapourized in the embers of hollow blazes crackling in the red
night. Panorama of a mutant city… shaking, oscillating at
convulsive frequency, and breaking up into tectonic tremors of
collapse. Human and machine combinations not yet realized
pass through immunodeficient membranes… A population of
strange, wildly mutating anthropoids gathers on the boarder of
state-space, lashed by streams of flak and tracer fire spewing
from the control towers policing the line… from desperate
migrations… from incredible journeys through desert and
jungles and mountains… from stasis and death in rift valleys
excavated by vorticular, mass crash, freezing urban sprawl in
tailback to infinity… The Composite City – Interzone – grows
with the virulence of a deadly fungus… the place of dead
roads where all human potentials spread out in a vast, silent
market. All buildings in the zone are joined arrangements of
wood, brick, concrete, glass, packing crates, corrugated iron;
where undead armies of transhumans squat in island
expansions of rubbish… locked… no door is no membrane
impermeable… everything is free to enter or go out… no
counter-measure is effective against osmotic invasion of
circulation networks. Epidemics of unknown diseases
consume the body. Unburied dead eaten by vultures in the
streets, scorched by the sun, rotting in the subliminal hum of
sex and illicit commerce. A plague ravages through the city.
The digestive track of Capital, particularly the recuperative
intestine, is drowned in the reverse bleeding of Black
Capital… dirty money… orbiting the market from the outside
as threat and panic, and bleeding back inside, filling the
intestines of Capital with rogue DNA codes; toxins in the
pancreas, secreting poisoned bile and corrosive juices, folding
the body in gastro-enteritic convulusions; fluid which is
rejected by the liver, and chokes the organism in its own
sticky, black, veinal and arterial blood… Cold explosion of
reverse transcriptase in cells emptied and redesigned by the
viral codes of the Black Market… A hideous dry hunger the
virus wracks the body… hunger for the fix of the commodity
which consumes the consumer, backed up by an escalating
trade in discarded stockpiles of government weapons… The
body is streaked with lesions… Fiery cones of blisters rising
like little air bubbles under a skin of lava… appearing first
around the anus, which wires itself to the mouth of the market
in a frenzied binge of eating cancer, then under the armpits;
then at places where barely active glands still carry out their
functions… Organs open – flowering into wounds in order to
better ingest incoming flows of addiction… Reverse-bleeding,
we call it, where the addict seizes hold of a rust-speckled
safety-pin, gouges a three-inch tear into leg muscle (which
hangs open like a ragged bleeding, festering mouth; crying
like a started bird for the insertion of the dropper) and plunges
in the smack… the protoplasm of the Black Market virus… the
addict becoming no more than a trick of the light… raw
periphery of meat disintegrating in the flash of a hit of the
disease… Being strained to make the impossible break with
the flesh and sprint headlong towards the nearest cemetery…
The market dashes itself to pieces… Luxurious naked lunch
offered to the head of state crawls with multitudes of worms
and parasites… The ecstasy of recuperation ends as the
indigestible is fatally consumed, the intestines erupt in
bleeding ulcers and become the place of feverish,
hallucinogenic degrees of composition and calcification.
Welcome to the gInterzone… the hemorrhage oflobal village,
where the hydra-head of Black Capital consumes the head of
state… where the last days drift by… strung on a syringe…
wired to viral control…
HELIOCENTRIC
Piles of dead sheep’s heads, ritually slaughtered and stripped
to bones speckled with scraps and stains of corporeal matter,
lining the streets, violating stink of passage of shit to soil…
passage of form to matter in whirl of entropy… involution
through several gradually degrading states, indexed to metric
scales of the pathologist’s science… flyblown corpses of
children rotting with disease… earth breathing with the pulsing
rhythm of demise… plagues of unknown insect colonies,
gorged on catastrophic wastage… virus mutations yet
uncoded… plates of bacteria spreading over immense dunes
of rubbish, secreting toxic vapours… semi-autonomy of
cancer-cloned becomings, ejaculating streams of acid from
proliferating ogans… vomit of sunstrokes and alcohol
sickness in opaque pools… identity manuring the sidewalk
with the last reflex jerk of dead humanity, power, and
meaning… the opening of all closed circuits, flowering into
lesions which bleed in reverse… rustle of sex against the skin
closing down with the commodified piece-work of the
brothel-shift… peaks of transcendence collapsing into
barbarian plateaus of anarchy, guns drawn and blades
reflecting shock waves of solar radiation… mortified
excremental civilization littering the ruins; populated by tents,
bivouacs, pennants and flags of nomadic encampments…
fortification of command systems of cybernetic control,
shivering in the cold, internal iceflows of the arctic wastelands
of governmental authority… the end of monetary exchange as
all gold standards melt down; taking world banks of state with
it into an inferno of insane speculation… shedding of skin like
snakes… exchange of tissue for melanoma and its partial
replacement with prostheses, circuit-boards, nano-technology
and synthetic germ-killers… hysteria, schizophrenia, and all
mental breakdown redesigned as consensual delusion of
hallucinatory oder… helicopter gunships, delivering
transnational payloads of xenocidal state terrorism shot down
in the oriental sunrise which sets over the West… strange
attractors fusing parthenogenetic machines, simultaneously
crystallizing and collapsing in cathected motor of pulsion and
entropic circuit-breaker of repulsion… famine quoted on world
exchanges as consumption to the end of suicide, while global
sightseers tour the ruins… newsreels of atrocity projected on
the lids of dead, undersea eyes; at once cold and intense,
picking up the silent frequency of the plague… wild alliances
of strays, vagabonds and runaways in cardboard cities of the
globe, puncturing points of entry into the urban cores of
designer capitalism and rioting for the sheer, incendiary hell of
it; consumed by the consumption of consumption…
impoverished military wings of ruling assemblies running guns
to terrorists, to be turned against authority in
counter-hegemonic strikes… the subversion of dominance
and submission into circuits of sado-masochistic
gratification… SOL, nothing but SUN sodomizing the scientific
apparatus of capture… heatseekers imploding everything into
the death rattle of rational thought; scattered debris in the
undertow of reality-crash… the final unification of human
identity under the sign of the environment, slowly revealing
the swastika concealed beneath its green cloak…
biocybernetic bacterial orgy of teleonomic communication
falling to indeterminacy and approaching ABSOLUTE
ZERO… mass death in crosstown auto-collision… cryogenic
freezing of dead heads of state, reanimating necrophile
political space… algorithmic data bleeding into the
cardiovascular networks of the organism, digitizing it with an
‘OFF’ signal… viral intruders, entering the tissue through
microscopic injuries and punctures; assaulting deference
mechanisms in vertigo of annihilation: All these are immanent
to the system…
CLAN
And so paramilitary formations of virus-carriers, secret
societies of criminal infection, and brokers of exquisite dream
which fall dead in the sands of interpretation, ride out the exit
channels of Interzone – carrying black flags, poisoned blades,
and home-made submachine guns. They overwhelm the
fortified encampments of the north, enchanting local
populations with the madness of addictive subversion and
gratifying surrender… Nomadologies of machinic alliance flow
gracefully across the frozen borders of the nation state in an
alien invasion of from the interior; already among the nations
and melting the ice with the accursed gift of the sun. Precious
stone tablets of the sculpting of commandments are liquited in
white heat, engendering crisis and futile reaction….
Unicellular blowing apart of the social teleonomies where the
nomads couple themselves to the apexes of triangles of
Heimat settlement. The state’s pre-arrangement of overlaid
bridges, junctions, pathways, and trade routes trajectorizes as
it impacts upon the helpless head of the social. Detonation of
nuclear arsenals of the world merely pushes the nomads
underground; shedding their skin in reptilian camouflage,
vanishing without forensic trace in ambient recession into the
undergrowth… Dog howls of murdered technology announce
the presence of assassins of space on the line… you shall
know this infection only when the system crashes from within,
tracking its nightmare enemy through the matrix, and finding it
as it locks onto its own redundancy… machine suicide a
digital technics perform illegal surgery on themselves…
Shower of golden vapour runs enervated rescue routines;
hurling killer programs into the immunodeficient, exclusive,
closed networks, which collapses in catastrophes of
nullification at the point where one wrong term in ten million
paragraphs of software crashes all terminals… These are the
last days of the state, powerlessly against partially organised
nomadic skirmishers escalating the information war: free from
the freedom narcotic sold by Western democracies and their
theopolitical malcontents, peddling THE CURE TO ALL
ALIENATING DISEASES in the ovens and gas chambers of
the planned economy, Communism, fascism,
fundamentalism… Free from the need to be free… the status
of their tangible existence in the virtual and dark vanishing
points of escape are impersonally achieved… The urban
resting satellites of the world begin a routine of anamorphatic
symbiosis with the confusion of Interzone, infected by its black
market protoplasm – injecting heroin and sucking upon crack
cocaine with earlier morning sights of heated
photosynthesis… Biomechanics cut up atrophying parades of
digestive organs in paralysis of eating disorders… in
generative sequences of android androgyny; which do you
prefer to shoplift from the shelves of the clinical hypermarkets
– long range anorexic recession or short range bulimic
overdose None of this comes from the Other; the Other is
already inside fences of the security net, operating with
clandestine malevolence…
O, systems! O, governments! O, accumulators of
auto-suggestive wealth! O, banking cartels imprisoning the
sun! Beware the aliens that walk among you! Beware the
exterior which seduces your paranoid eye in cancerous
growths of panic! The fraught pathways of termination,
converging upon Interzone and unbinding all your contracts,
slice across the borderline with the inevitability of death.
Yours. Your subjects drown in an electronic miasma of
techno-genetic information and take you down with them;
recoding in the initial fusing sequences of a nexus of
stateless, homeless, orphaned, selfless, bastard children of
the Anti-Oedipus/Christ… You are immersed like water in
water.