Hyperstitional Therapeutics

PLUTONICS A Journal of Non-Standard Theory

Miskatonic Virtual University Press

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Cover art is a Symmes’ Hole from The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, Demonstrating that the Earth is Hollow, Habitable Within, and Widely Open About the Poles by Americus Symmes (Louisville: Bradley & Gilbert, 1878). Public domain and digitized by the University of Michigan and hosted on HathiTrust.

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About the Journal

Plutonics is an open-access, sporadically published journal of non-standard contemporary theory. Named after the geological term “plutonic” (which is, in turn, derived from the Roman God of the underworld, Pluto), meaning igneous rocks formed from deep geologic trauma and left to cool for thousands of years. Plutonics aims to publish cutting edge theory that has no place within the ‘academy.’

With no guiding thread by the Weird, we accept submissions from all disciplines and actively encourage mixtures of philosophy, ‘hard’ science, poetry, visual arts, and other forms of Becoming.

For more information, please visit plutonicsjournal.com or contact us at [email protected].

PLUTONICS A Journal of Non-Standard Theory

Volume XIII, March 2020 CONTENTS Introduction ------01 Contributors ------03 Cyborg Cadavers Pathos ------07 Hallidonto Lithospheric Poetry ------09 INANE DREAMZ “Shoemaker Levy 9 impact on Jupitar” by Don Davis “Lunar Eclipse” by The Grolier Society Sapwood ------23 Pseudo-Heraclitus “weird.nature” by Frida Ortgies-Tonn destroyed by relevance ------27 Mira Moss Crime Dental Dreamscape ------28 Gui Machiavelli “Grid Cadaver” by Hallidonto Syzygetic Chronodemon of Cataclysmic Convergence ------36 Storm Hyperstitional Therapeutics (or Psychoanalysis with a Grip) ------37 Psuedanon4Q248 “you call us criminal” by Mira Moss Crime San Francisco Heavy ------52 Karen Kobezka Sing Me to Sleep: Notes on Virality ------56 Riccardo Vanelli “Bacteriophage” by Hans-Wolfang Ackermann “Nam-Shub of Enki” by Encyclopedia Satanica barkerlang v.02 ------68 Paul Seidler Sub Rosa ------81 David Roden “Coat of Androidica” by Hallidonto

CONTENTS An Introduction to Numogoetics ------88 V.M. “Neo-Amazonian Numogram” by @lilypatchwork aesthetics after the end of the world ------95 Frida Ortgies-Tonn Black Hole/Black Sun ------96 CJ Severin “Et sic in infitum” by Robert Fludd “Solar Anus” by Cheryl Bentley Labyrinth Lot ------108 Jonah Howell “we are sitting at the foothill” by Mira Moss Crime Radioactive Transness ------123 Alex Ray “red neon replicated” by Mira Moss Crime Pipes ------126 Jan von Stille Libidinal Rheology ------128 Martina Maccianti & Laura Tripaldi Untitled ------144 Rus Khomutoff “Once upon a time, in the not too distant future”: Bruce LaBruce’s Zombies and Queer Purgatories ------145 Nicholas Alexander Hayes Notes on Retrocausal AI ------154 Peter Heft A Visit To The City: Common Influence of Air Strikes ------160 Michael Quint “untitled” by Frida Ortgies-Tonn and Paul Seidler On Action-Oriented Predictive Patterning ------166 Ekin Erkan “Neural Network” by TheDigitalArtist “Space Future Technology” by TheDigitalArtist Necroborg Historia ------178 Lee van Zechariah (of Necronaut Studios) “Necroborg Sighting” by Vincent Ortiz Letter from the Editor(s) ------180 Murdock Parsons “Earth’s ( )hole” by M.P.

Introduction: 13:13:3:20:1

This volume—Volume XIII—marks the thirteenth hour or first of-the- clocks/first-o’clock with respect to the Plutonics periodical, that-is-to-say the first volume to take physical-rather-than-pataphysical form. Volumes I to XII, of course, were timeless/spaceless ordeals (&/or deals—ordeals—which, craftily, could not be purchased: deals «sans subscription»). Thirteen—a.k.a. One— o’clock: with 20·20 vision we can now see, indeed read, the ( )hole volume, this volume of ( )holes, this ( )hole complex. And the ‘theme’ of this volume has to do with ( )holes and the ( )hole physical/metaphysical/pataphysical precedent/precedence of this periodical (Plutonics), in [[zero-]]sum. … Indeed, on this Thirteenth Day of the Third Month (coincidentally, a spooky Friday the 13th), 23 enigmatic years after a set of unidentified flying objects lit up the sky over Arizona, Nevada, and Sonora — this date, coincidentally 239 (= Dark Light = Egregore = The Magic Name) years after the discovery of Uranus, our gaseous “neighbor” inhabited by worshippers of Lrogg — Plutonics finishes a complete rotation and returns (or perhaps, enters for the first time) the ‘physical.’ This volume, the re-inauguration of a once prestigious and enigmatic ‘non- existent’ publication serves to introduce a myriad of new critical thinkers onto the scene, operating from the domains of art, psychoanalysis, philosophy, science, and countless other disciplines. Corporealizing (or at least digitizing) our enigmatic thoughts, thoughts born of many minds around the globe, yielded a volume that will at once encourage you to reassess your subjectivity while simultaneously arousing you in the most gruesome of ways. Can hyperstitional thinking be used therapeutically? Do you want to venture into time-sorcery? What happens after the crash, when bones and bleach, dimensional clashes and dental dreamscapes merge? When Katak has had enough and begins to devour, the slime of the cyborg running through his teeth? Do we find ourselves in this darkness? His power turns the very Earth itself inside-out as it becomes a sonorous instrument reaching out into the unknown. As we grapple with humanity, changed through virality and zombification, we must ask ourselves, who are we to become? If one is to read the ‘theme’ of this volume, the ‘theme’ of ( )holes, we can more specifically isolate the ‘theme’ as being the ( )holes between the human and the inhuman; the human-inhuman boundary. From this starting point (or perhaps, endpoint),

01 the following contributions trace a subsumption of the human into other, darker forces of Becoming. While impossible to do justice to each piece, let us simply say that each contributor, via their writing, artwork, poetry, etc., track different, but nevertheless equally important lines of intensive change in the human. These lines, exits, escapes, lead to the question ‘what comes after?’ From affirmations of human destruction paving the way for new beings, to the ecstasy of the gross and weird, each contribution plots a different trajectory toward the exciting and unknown human-inhuman boundary (blurred as it may be). When we sent out the call for submissions for a journal of ‘non-standard theory,’1 we had no idea what direction we were going in. While we’re still are at a loss (perhaps that’s a good thing, traditional theorizing is dead yet somehow won’t stay buried and we must thus continue filling it’s rotting corpse with semiotic bullets), the turn out has been better than we could have hoped for with so many people expressing interest and working on projects for this, and future, editions. We’re thrilled to present this Thirteenth edition of Plutonics. Expect more.

1: A word about the journal’s subtitle: ‘non-standard’ has a rather heraldic heritage, designating in this case an absence of banners* on the battlefield, the better to merge with the mélée (paraphrasing the late Georges Bataille) and thereby to face it in all its duplicity/multiplicity, giving it its duplicitous/multiplicitous/individually-effacing-and-effacingly- afficacious ‘face’.

Without standards, pinsels, pennons, guidons, fluttering flags or banners, the battlefield qua field-of-inquiry itself absorbs all the agents upon it—hence ‘non-standard’ theorization in this way (in this sense) subsumes each of its theorists—indeed swallows them whole/into-its-( )hole. 02

Contributors

Alex Ray is a student at the University of Siegen, Germany, majoring in art history with a minor in language and communication. Their specific research interests include Deleuzian philosophy, temporality, and gender studies with a particular focus on xenofeminism. CJ Severin is a writer and electronic musician living in Brooklyn, NY with an MA in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University / @cjsever- in / soundcloud.com/chronowerx Crime is a multimedia poet / insurgent artist / chaos node who calculates patterns for the hell of it. See more at mosscrime.net. David Roden (enemyindustry) is a philosopher and writer interested in alternatives to being human. His book Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human was published in 2014. His experimental prose work has been published in Gobbet, Dis Magazine, Surfaces, Sunk Island Review, and Spon- taneous Poetics. Ekin Erkan is a researcher in philosophy of technology and media archeology, currently working with Reza Negarestani on predictive processing, deep learning and neuro-inferential architecture. Erkan has published work in journals such as Identities, Cosmos & History, Alphaville, Cultural Studies, Philosophy East and West, Labyrinth, Media Theory and other journals; Erkan’s work draws from both analytic and continental philosophy; Erkan’s publications can be found here: monoskop.org/Ekin_Erkan Frida Penelope Claire Ortgies-Tonn (b. 1993 in Berlin, Germany) is an artist based in Berlin whose projects reflect the iconography of mountains and the natural structures of mountainous surfaces. Her works themselves are a materi- alization of the question of a new nature, with regard to the symbiosis of the natural and technical. See her work at fridapenelopeclaire.com. Gui Machiavelli is an Italian-Brazilian writer whose work deals with the non- human, the weird and the eerie. More at writing.guimachiavelli.com and @guimachiavelli.

Hallidonto (@hallidonto) is a visual artist motivated by the techno-sociological developments of our age. His work focuses on questions of what it means to be human within an organic-techno-digital world, among other things. See more at hallidonto.wixsite.com/hallidonto. INANE DREAMZ: an ugly duckling that lost their way / @subpar_noumena. Jan von Stille is co-editor of The Eunuch. His work has appeared in The Ar- sonist and Horror Sleaze Trash. Jonah Howell lives in central Germany. His recent work in theory-fiction has appeared in Critical Orifice, Fleas on the Dog, and Surfaces. His debut collection of poetry and essays, Empathology, is forthcoming from Bleeding Heart Nihilist Books. Karen Kobezka is a transportation engineer and independent researcher living and working in Shanghai. She tweets about engineering design and environmental policy @wei2xin1. Laura Tripaldi is a PhD student in Materials Science and Nanotechnology living and working in Milan. Alongside her academic research on the self- assembly of hybrid nanomaterials, she is interested in the speculative and philosophical aspects of science and technology. Martina Maccianti lives and works in Florence where she studies industrial design, with a focus on space, nature, instinct, materiality, movement, and light. Through the use of plastic materials, she came to sculpture, the medium specifically placed at the crux between immobility and movement, between blocked time and flowing time. See her work on Instagram @martinamaccianti. Michael Quint is known to be handsome and kind. He owns a good deal of stock. Necronaut Studios (Vincent Ortiz and Lee van Zechariah) is an art toy project inspired by cryptids, the paranormal, body horror, and classic science fiction. They can be found @Necronaut_toys, @necronaut_studios (IG), and @AzazelAfterDark.

Nicholas Alexander Hayes is the author of Ante-Animots: Idioms and Tales (BlazeVOX, 2019) and Amorphous Organics (SurVision, 2019). He has published academic essays on ’60s gay pulp fiction, vintage beer advertisements, and masculinity on Tumblr. Find him @Broken_Zipper and @nicholasalex- anderhayes (IG). Paul Seidler, an artist and programmer living and working in Berlin, is one of the three co-founders of terra0 and is currently working on bootstrapping Nas- cent, an EXIT Tech production studio (among other projects). His work has been displayed at Schinkel Pavillon and Transmediale, to name a few. Peter Heft: __/Acc curious, occult adjacent. ‘Academic philosophy’ with a focus on D&G, time travel, pirates, and mystical Leftism. He can be found @hefty_heft and Guerilla Ontology. Psuedanon4Q248: Uncanny Psychoanalyst found @4Q248 and Psuedoanalysis. Pseudo-Heraclitus crawled from a tidepool somewhere in Western Canada; he often considers crawling back in. Riccardo Vanelli died before birth, cannibalized by his monozygotic twin, the 17th of June 1993 (17/06/1993 = 9 (333) = A Summation of War = A Cy- cle of Death and Rebirth). He lingers. Rus Khomutoff is a Libra poet. His debut book, Immaculate Days, was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2018 and was shortly followed up by his chapbook published by Void Front Press in 2019 entitled Radia. He can be found @rusdaboss. Storm: Mixed Media Artist / Occultist / neospare.carrd.co/ V.M. (aka vexsys or @lesbovampire) is an occultist specializing in divination and numogoetics.

Cyborg Cadavers Pathos Hallidonto

The Metamorphosis opens with cries of Ovid to the Gods to reveal the creation of The Universe. Out from the darkness and formlessness of chaos, a being creates substance; lakes to the mountains; new transformations come in forms of Animals, Plants, and Gods. A Titan named Prometheus hand-sculpted man from the clays of the earth in defiance to the Gods. Prometheus stole and gave the humans fire, and this enabled humans to progress and evolve their civilisation; through their lust, the intellect presented new challenges. Out of The Anthropocene was born an organism separate to its environment. Its hubris instils its lustful desire to control, driven to conquer the landscapes of the (meta)physical realm to redefine itself in its image as The Cyborg, the structure of subjectivity, a new paradigm. Through the Anthropomorphic prism, we view ourselves as Gods. The fire is now the maker, thus the creator confronts our evolution - this new body was created in our image within 'Gods' workshop. What is a body and what defines our reality? As the fallen, the Cadaver, the cyborg is no longer a speculative Sci-Fi trope. We now find ourselves amalgamating with the digital technological apparatus. We delve into VR to explore 'nature.' We deny our self the experience of the present while our bodies remain the same for the past millennia. The human imagination creates boundless worlds, imaginings within our organic shell. Fragments of our past littered throughout the world. Humanity can only speculate of its origins. The human race will all be but a memory of data, existing as a convergence of bio-nanotech with the ability to form into whatever we choose... The basics of our genealogy will be redundant but left questioning beauty, love and humanity. The post-human body will cease to remain. The duality of human and the machine gives rise to a new life-form neither cyborg nor human. Are we to be the fallen? In what image will be the re-imaging of our flesh?

“Life cannot be defined but it defines mankind.”

Num: 28 - Hanafuda Cyborgia Series / Hallidonto / gouache, ink, graphite / 2019

Lithospheric Poetry INANE DREAMZ

Ø “I feel I could die of life, and I ask myself if it makes any sense to look for an explanation. When your entire spiritual past vibrates inside you with supreme tension, when a sense of total presence resurrects buried experiences and you lose your normal rhythm, then, from the heights of life, you are caught by death without the fear which normally accompanies it… To be lyrical means you cannot stay closed up inside yourself.”1 Philosophy began with the universe. All thought hitherto has been devoted to understanding this cosmic rupture in non-existence. Possibility is, for all intents and purposes, noumenal, always cowering behind the veil of matter. Actuality supposes a distinct epistemic compression; it locates knowledge within reach, however categorically mediated. A mysterious exterior always presupposes a known interior. This piece explores thought in two parts, internal memory and external transformation. I: Interior And then there was the Earth. over-theoretical in this regard. They Its planetary parades of tectonic cannot see the machine for the appa- movements give life a searing tem- ratus, or the singularity for the poral brand, painful but indicative of model.”2 To move inward on a plane- a discernible unilateralism within the tary axis is to move backward on a vast stretches of possibility. History temporal one. is a decoding practice oriented Our destination is almost parodi- around a densely layered physical cally Freudian. Reaching back for an substrate. Barker minces no words in abiogenetic precursor to phylogeny diagnosing its progress: “Prevailing dissolves the cerebrospinal system’s signaletics and information science overt ego in a metallic ocean. Deni- are both insufficiently abstract and

1: E.M. Cioran, “On Being Lyrical,” in On the Heights of Despair tr. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 3-4. 2: CCRU, “Barker Speaks,” in Writings 1997-2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), ::(:)(:(:)) [156]. 09 zens of the future may call it Cthelll, often leads to misdirection. Popularly the planet’s inner core. The Earth is conceived, the collective unconscious shaped in catastrophe and violent anthropomorphizes plutonic cooling transformation; its offspring can only into memory mysticism, bypassing follow suit. If there’s to be an origin geological and phylogenetic age for point for Oedipal conflict, its repres- parochial intuition and psychologism. sive crust formation following a 100- Jung himself identifies the sympathet- million-year infancy of impacts and ic nervous system’s “continual flow” fire. History is a flow of violence; it’s as the unconscious’s physical basis, simply a matter of substituting guns, but this remains little-mentioned.3 germs, and steel for friction, gas, and We write with blood, not ink, collisions with solar bodies. Barker is transfused from inner regions. The right to refer to the 65 million BC very act of writing is an attempt to Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event solidify an internal mania in external- as the KT missile. Only in its devas- ized symbolic orderliness. “Writing tating wake was a second explosion, operates not as a passive representa- that of mammalian life, possible; tion but as an active agent of trans- Katy might be the name of one’s formation and a gateway through mother. The white-hot geocosmic which entities can emerge.”4 core burns and howls, buried under cooled rock. This traumatic genesis Bloodstream to executive func- of mania and efflorescence is sealed tion, sensation to manifestation. Aca- away, hidden under layers of tempo- demically logarithmic sapien mapping rally gathered solidity to maintain a gathered until this point in prepara- semblance of biophilic composure. In tion for superlative historical takeoff, a cold and dark space, amorphous inside to outside. The Kantian sub- hot liquidity cools into specified ject is firstly a theory of gravitation, geometry; that is the nature of things. only then succeeded by its complex symbolic embodiment in critical Sapiens exist of the earth, not as philosophy. Catastrophism may be its demigod-like psychic container. the genealogy of genealogies. Interpreting Jung with little familiarity

3: C.G. Jung, Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 140. 4: CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” in Writings 1997-2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), ::(:)(:) [36]. 10

Magma to lava. of the mind. The mind is the enemy, Mantle to city-state. the anxiety, the lack of focus, the Flow is a function of origin of unwanted thoughts and time. Memory recall is an wrongthink. Go into the body, says examination of temporality. the calm figure with a perfectly understated smile: reorient around the Westernized notions of thoughtless action of persistence, the Buddhist mindfulness now make their breath. cultural rounds across repeated pro- cessions of the tired and anxious. Moynihan highlights the de- Obsessive consumption is a symptom mands of temporality upon the cere- of expenditure—life’s excess energy— brospinal apparatus: “The most prom- burning out into a downward spiral inent of these modern ailments was within the confines of modernity’s ‘railway spine’: a post-traumatic condi- laborious technocapitalism. Restless tion attributed to the abrupt lurch of questions of meaning and purpose the global transport networks then only grow with ease of dominance piecing themselves together. Caused over base needs, a recurring malady by the ‘significant jolts of accelera- well-covered by Schopenhauer.5 Peo- tion’ sometimes experienced in early ple hunger for the relief of momen- train carriages, railway spine was—just tary nothingness in a world that in- like whiplash during the automobile creasingly outruns evolution’s slow- age—an elusive and baffling illness twitch musculature with an exponen- that was more the invention of con- tially growing infosphere. temporary medico-legal incentives and cultural fears than a real neural disor- The body in meditation is seen der.”6 What is hypermodernity if not as an escape from the lurch of tem- the displacement of this physical porality. Awareness has a physicalist labor to a mental one? Rail travel bent to its praxis; it almost morphs has smoothed out, only to be dis- into spinal catastrophism but dismiss- placed by ailments of smooth- es such intellectualism as the realm flowing information such as cyber-

5: Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Vanity of Existence,” in Essays and Aphorisms tr. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), 53-54. 6: Thomas Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019), 209; A.C. Croft, “Biomechanics,” in S.M. Foreman and A.C. Croft (eds.), Whiplash Injuries: The Cervical Acceleration/Deceleration Syndrome (Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2002), 54. 11 chondria, nomophobia, and internet addiction disorder. One may argue that the infancy of these illnesses muddies speculative dis- course; the DSM has yet to receive its next big update, the closest thing to a settling of the matter. One may not, however, argue that possible controversy over lexi- Shoemaker Levy 9 impact on Jupitar / conic adjustment signifies nothing Don Davis / 1994 more than academic noise. Anecdo- ‘Nature’ becomes ‘whatever’s outside tal evidence of cyberspace maladjust- of civilization,’ but even civilization’s ment comes rather easily and Other can’t escape a beautifying make- commonly. over. Daydreams of healthy trees, pret- The modern sphere of labor ty birdsong, and apparent equilibrium increasingly relies on skillful appli- are a myopic privilege reserved for ance of abstract reasoning. Life has technocratic societies capable of taking grown more cerebral; despite com- the bite out of the biosphere. What is posing a distinct minority of the nature, then? Nature is simply an out- American job market, competitive growth of Cthelll, a view from a per- STEM positions constantly receive spective where ‘sunny’ lacks its typical- a great deal of public attention. As ly idyllic connotations. the mind takes over, the body is What is mindfulness on trial for, increasingly seen as a rustic drift then? In its Western form, renuncia- away from all this noise. With the tion and minimalism tend to be constant talk of unplugging social glossed over, creating a mere exercise media for fresh-air retreats from in corporate-class stress reduction. WiFi and electronics, an outsider Treating the present moment as a might be tempted to believe that desirable nothingness with a ‘life is meatspace reality is now the fantasy good’ sentiment slapped on is no way world the Internet promised to be out of a temporal labor. These practic- in its early years. Now, Facebook et es fail because they lack a historic al. seem to be a basis of reality orientation, instead choosing just the rather than an optional extension. 12 moment in a desperate grab at atem- The present moment is a quasi- poral relief. A symptom of an in- ideological turning point, a space that creasingly dissociative malaise emerg- may be reforged under essentialism or ing in modernity. functionalism if it is not followed into its own ends. The present lies Methodologies of genuine har- hidden in the deepest reaches of dark- mony converge to measurements on ness, contrary to its deceptive mas- the celestial meridian. As Barker said, querade as the most intuitive balanc- “There is a voyage, but a strangely ing point, the tuning fork’s 440 Hz immobile one.”7 Measurements de- echo. Or is that merely to say that a note a passage in time, as oft-cited shifty disorientation is where equilib- observation/measurement studies in rium paradoxically lies? Few possess quantum physics uniquely demon- the courage to follow chaotic atem- strate. Measurements exist in a harsh poral immanence to its conclusions. temporal space that tends to turn its This pursuit characterized the notori- nose up to tranquil presence. ous nihil-ventures of Sade, Bataille, The eternity of the present mo- and Land. Each of them crackpots, ment is a Leibnizian fantasy, of life desperately searching for alternate possessing a fractal indivisibility. The flows of desire, communication, and moment is a fabrication, a detached time. Emerging from this darkly point giving the impression of a 3-D atemporal incoherence, essentialism plane. Advancements in 19th century and functionalism loom. The moment comparative anatomy began to reform must come to pass but its categoriza- the human body as an evolving chro- tion is still ambiguous. nometer, an exploded-view cross Essentialism needs hardly any section of radically disarticulated introduction, the knee-jerk position moments of total time.”8 Ligaments, seeking to map delirium-space and limbs, and bone are not to be settle it in a body-shaped mold. thought of as ontogenetic novelties; Perfectly form-fitted to the present, it ignoring total time, the abiogenetic protects from the outside at the price lineage, places history in the abyssal of confinement. The body is con- present. stricted into preemptive back pain,

7: CCRU, “Barker Speaks,” ((:))((((:)))) [155]. 8: Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism, 94. 13 preventing spinal growth. Mindfulness and the sociality of material condi- stultifies without spinal catastro- tions. Moynihan characterizes these phism’s temporalized map. Just be, practices as limited by their lexiconic just imagine the various layers of specificity. Psychology’s struggle to time wrapped around oneself as a pin down qualia is a grasp at domesticated homogeneity, a warm Cthelll’s seismic scream, that which blanket of fuzzy atemporality. There is unfolded through intrapersonal is only consciousness. No, even that layers as an ancient memory; tell me fails to be properly reductive. There about your mother but only if her are only qualia. Wait, that still sup- name is Gaia. Cthelll shifts far below poses a perceptual flow inherent to the biosphere. Discordant, resonant- experience. What is left? Nothing, peaking, fully-diminished chord, hid- eventually. Nothing. den in the cord. It would not be wrong to recoat this statement with a Functionalism understands histo- temporalized flair; one might say the ry as an ongoing potential for manip- frequencies are hidden through the ulation and gathers a seismic hyperge- core. When Land ascribes a blistering nealogy. It unfolds in contortions of accelerative push to Deleuze, he is upright morphology, highlighting the describing the bending arc of con- dominance of the upright-walking sciousness itself rather than its adja- without grasping for a reductive cent human paradigm. essence. It is simultaneously the language of gluttonous Cambrian lethali- Following the transcension hy- ty and rational Apollonian restraint. pothesis, Cthellic screams echo in a The development of the hominin continuously shrinking sphere, grow- spinal column sequences negative ing louder as compressions in space, feedback loops for the fiercest of time, energy, and matter trim the appetites, the “fearful symmetry” of ecological fat. Eventually, all converg- bilateral faces. In their earliest incar- es to spinal memory. The singularity nation, faces indicated predators. is an immediate fast forwarding of seismology; what do you hear? Hint: The earth itself is the condition, The Earth has yet to find its pacifier. preceding impatient, classically genea- The universe hasn’t bothered to toss logical entanglements with monadolo- us an existential one either; will dark gy, psychodynamic deconstruction, energy rip all orbits out of universali- 14 ty? Mysterious cosmic vibrations coalesce into a sound both primal and final, the tearing away of time. II: Exterior Once completed, deep memory about attempts to think like a planet. converges toward a cosmic imma- At least, it does so if one bothers to nence. The thermic pressure-cooker of care. Thinking like a planet evokes Cthelll dissolves peskily anthropic the exuberant expansiveness that de- notions of orientation, wiping out the fines life’s general economy, a contin- carbon cult of knee-jerk humanism ual flow escaping attempts to restrict like bacteria in boiling water. Telluri- and confine. Thinking about and like an space no longer draws a limit to the planet implies a casting away of ideas of worldliness. “Bilateral reflec- that dusty relic core to utilitarian tion” becomes “unilateral propul- civilization-building, risk calculation. sion.”9 When memory converges Society and its differentiations tend towards this inhuman plane, life ori- to fade into the old fissures of the ents around its giver. earth. Humanity is an upright beast; The cerebrospinal system is spines approach the celestial zenith, acutely pain-configured and exhibits the fiery source of expenditure and unprecedented violence as it grows. growth. All energy and its leaks of Homo sapiens exhibits a double- excess are borne of the sun. The edged control over its fate; it can pineal gland exists as a remnant of a simply choose (what power of the parietal third eye, a photoreceptive will!) to maintain its apex position crown still neurally connected in rep- but it also possesses the capability to tiles, amphibians, and fish. Its exist- just as easily annihilate itself. No ence is peculiar, an azygous affront other species occupies such a strange- suggesting a limit to bilaterality. Not ly precarious role. Time weighs down without its own shortcomings, the heavily, particularly when science’s pineal gland is uniquely vulnerable to weaponized curiosity is utterly incapa- calcification, brain sand. This height- ble of restraint. Sunlight smiles no ened possibility of cerebral desertifica- weaker, confers no less wealth after tion suggests a cautionary sensibility the Holocaust, regardless of whether 9: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15. 15 or not Adorno condemns the practice thought (including the thought of of poetry in light of such disastrous extinction).”10 Exit is hypergenealogi- events. An ongoing function of the cal like the birth and development of geotraumatized CNS, temporality spinal catastrophism; an erasure with- inevitably stretches into insanity; the out rebirth, it shatters the conditions sun becomes a mania object. Obses- for succession. There will be blood sion taken to its teleological conclu- and viruses so long as there are nerv- sion accumulates in omnicide, an all- ous systems. consuming fury that eats and Jason Mohaghegh seemingly breathes. It cycles between eradicating unwittingly spells out spinal catastro- its focal point and simultaneously phism in a section on heliomania finding new form projected in other from Omnicide, an analysis of vari- configurations. It never ceases and ous contemporary poems and their never sleeps, driven only by an inter- relation to the lethal compulsions of nal flow of time smoothly terraform- mania. “Do originary creation (born ing surroundings into compulsions. of Nature) and aesthetic creation The only escape is complete (born of human nature) share some phylogenetic annihilation. Just as underhanded agreement, one sealed in psychology and economics are noth- pain rather than beauty, a partnership ing more than lexiconic genealogies, between the most ancient form and a present conceptions of death and craft devoted to formed remembering, extinction are merely speed bumps; and does this mirroring-pact serve a 99% of all known species are extinct, mutual outcome of some kind?”11 a fact weighing on us less than bone This agreement exists and it forms jewelry. “But if extinction implies the the physical substrate enabling literal thought of extinction, and if, in the starry-eyed wonder. Between the life- case of human extinction, this giving sun and the memory-cradle thought implies the existence and Earth lies the immense tomb of affirmation of the human, then it space. Upright growth beckons in the would seem that extinction also has a direction of death and yet its violent- flip side, in which extinction also ly immiserating (life-affirming) poten- implies the non-existence of all tial only grows.

10: Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (Washington: Zer0 Books, 2011), 124. 11: Jason Mohaghegh, Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019), 63. 16

Mohaghegh’s heliomania war- shade beside the walls,” the phantas- rants a pause on the poems he’s mic projection,” is a roadmap for the compiled. nervous system’s continued imperialism. It explores the possibilities for “The sun, like a golden knife, consciousness, a celestial functional- was steadily paring away the edge of ism. Sunlight leads the way into the shade beside the walls… The sun, greater knowing, greater mania. It sucking with a thousand mouths, was uncovers the shadows outside of us drawing the sweat of my body.”12 rather than redundantly highlighting Mohahghegh poses two incisive the anthropic body in its current observations. Why does the sun state. Light is a speed, a measure- strike shadow, the “phantasmic pro- ment done in time like a species’ jection” rather than the “authentic phylogenetic construction. Measured being”? Secondly, the sun’s tapping time follows the disoriented present. of sweat brings about dissolution; the It differs from mindfulness practices, bodily interior is drawn outwards, emphasizing exploratory radicalism liquefying the typically solid “border over redundant relaxation. It dissolves between self and world.” the world/self-barrier instead of reaf- firming it. Further questions can be drawn. What is meant by the connotation of “The sun resides inside me. ontological authenticity? Following Night, offer me your shadows now.”13 that, what then forces the charge of Mohaghegh succinctly captures inauthenticity upon its projection? this powerfully brief utterance, “a Authenticity is a small-world struc- frightful paradigm-reversal… a rapid ture, assuming being-towards-death as folding from science to conscience.”14 a complete engagement with lived The scientific sheen of a distant, experience; given that deep memory is detached event is suddenly a neural a long-running hypergenealogical la- reality. The Kant-esque “transcendent bor, authenticity is typically an indi- omniscience” is discarded like past- vidualist orientation done in the dark. expiration metaphysics for an The sun’s focus on the “edge of the

12: Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl, tr. D.P. Costello (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 73. 13: Adonis. The Pages of Day and Night, tr. S. Hazo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 283. 14: Mohaghegh, Omnicide, 64. 17

“intimate omniscience.”15 Discovery the sun, which dispenses energy — vanishes, and a tumorous knowledge wealth — without any return.”17 emerges. One already knows. And Expenditure of accumulated wealth — now knowing, the poetical figure’s accumulated energy—might define the first action is an attempt to cast off basis of much war initiation. its burden. It invokes night like a The brilliant burning of this deity, seeking the void’s compassion. internal light is just that, a brilliant Following the attainment of Prome- burning sensation. It’s an unchanging thean ambitions is, “A call to diurnal phenomenological fact of the nervous self-betrayal.”16 Space’s immense system’s perpetual hunger for growth, tomb has been bypassed but our a tortured sensitivity. A self-alignment hopes for transcendent overcoming with darkness is a resort to ontologi- are disappointed. Light does not alle- cal groveling, the knower begging for viate death. To evoke Bataille’s mod- evisceration. At this point, heliomania el, one could even say it actively per- has been compressed into augomania, petuates a rotted implosion of life. a compulsion towards light itself. “The origin and essence of our One could say the sun’s being is wealth are given in the radiation of now studied through its phantasmic projection. “Light, or brilliance, mani- fests the intimacy of life, that which life deeply is, which is perceived by the subject as being true to itself and as the transparency of the universe.”18 “Light uproots the desert and the universe, fastened with a rope of angels / Do you see the relics of a Lunar Eclipse / The Grolier Society / star? I gallop in the voice of the “The Book of Knowledge Vol 6” / victims, alone on the brink of death, 1911 like a grave walking in the night.”19

15: Ibid. 16: Ibid. 17: Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption (New York: Zone books, 1989), 28. 18: Ibid., 57. 19: Adonis. A Time Between Ashes and Roses, tr. S. Toorawa (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004), 37, 93. 18

A temporal succession to the er recoils from their creation and previous poem in both authorship brandishes a butcher’s knife. Scho- and apparent narrative, Adonis adorns penhauer represents a certain renegade his figure with a shadowy cloak of lineage of knowledge and its libidinal “deathly militarism.”20 The nihilistic discontents but Hartmann correctly tone suggests the futility of night’s accuses his ascetic ethics of a certain shadows to protect one from internal impotence. Humanity anticlimactically heliocentrism. Light now holds a withers away into a stark asexual lim- body, like a star that can write poet- bo; where is the burning interior, the ry. An unsettling pause is made on groveling for deliverance? angels, suggesting their discordant A grave and night both refer complicity with light’s painful new intuitively to a non-being of life and internal residence. This “rope of an- light. Given the piercing inversion in gels” might not seem out of place if bodily constitution, this landscape of it were placed in one of Cyclono- the departed is now an entirely fitting pedia’s demonological matrices.21 cosmic tectonics of light. To carry Speaking of Negarestani, one might light is to carry death and the stench wonder, as Moynihan does, if Geist’s of its victims is never far. Oneself is augmented sociality of intelligence only another object soon to be up- exists to fatten sapience’s forms like rooted, hung in the hangman’s noose pigs for slaughter.22 An internal sun of angels. The star, now little more is an unwitting answer to a certain than fragmented ‘relics,’ finally gives question teeming with xeno-energy: one a direct, unmistakable view of “Whenever its name has been any- space’s immense tomb. It no longer thing but a jest, philosophy has been burns bright given our internal solar haunted by a subterranean question: inheritance, its deathly incandescence. What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?”23 Knowledge is Given the burning touch of dis- accumulated, fattened to excess, until, covery granted to life, where does agitated by a latent anxiety, the know- this leave the dug-in conservation

20: Mohaghegh, Omnicide, 29. 21: Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008). 22: Moynihan, Spinal Catastrophism, 277. 23: Nick Land, “Shamanic Nietzsche,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), 206. 19 efforts that the Human Security Sys- refractory period on a dendrite’s fir- tem [HSS] carries out?24 Seemingly ing sequence.25 Dendritic spikes are weaponized into a humanistic militia, neural elements, therefore they always essentialism finds refuge in romantic prevail as bodies are discarded and portraits of anthropic irreducibility. replaced. We are humans and we have a spe- The HSS’s only attempt to cial essence that cannot be replicated! secure something is wrapping acceler- Flesh and blood are proudly dis- ative growth in a chokehold. As a played at the forefront of history like principle, this rotted genesis is fed up fossilized shit. The HSS yanks and with its stained teleology and gener- pulls back, and yet its direction is ates decay; thanatopic conservatism unexpected. It aims to suffocate its seeks to kill the march of time object rather than protect it. In this through acting like an event horizon. sense, it’s an eyes-wide-open execu- It contorts moments into frozen near- tion, an attempt by consciousness to eternities and waits for entropy to do die with what dignity it can muster. its work. “And with strange aeons It tries to approach the aforemen- even death may die.”26 If there’s one tioned nothingness that functionalism tenet it cannibalizes from accelera- discards. Accelerating the process, tion’s fiber optic body, it’s demonic tearing open ( )holes in the mantle, temporality’s tendency to breathe and sending K-Goth warfare into full down on meatspace’s linear circuitry. swing only expands and solidifies this But rather than ripping temporal rifts manic frothing at the mouth. Nerv- in history and leapfrogging exponen- ous systems care little for whether tial growth curves to the singularity, they animate carbon or deep learning history itself becomes a rift full of its algorithms. Utterances anathema to elongated death. “There are no closed species-conservatism such as, systems, no stable codes, no recuper- “Nothing human makes it out of the able origins. There is only the ther- near future” elicit little more than a mospasmic shock wave, tendential passive shrug, a slightly extended energy flux, degradation of energy. A

24: Nick Land, “Machinic Desire,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), 319. 25: Nick Land, “Meltdown,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), 443. 26: H.P. Lovecraft, “The Nameless City,” retrieved from http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/nc.aspx (compiled by Donovan Loucks), 20 August 2009. 20 receipt of information—of intensity— be Axsys.”30 The noosphere would carried downstream.”27 Distant stars exacerbate the flow of death through lapse into death and yet their desic- life, given its realization: “eroticism is cated corpses are still alight in assenting to life even in death. In- Cthelllic astronomy. “Space echoes deed, although erotic activity is in the like an immense tomb, yet the stars first place an exuberance of life, the still burn. Why does the sun take so object of this psychological quest, long to die?”28 One may of course independent as I say of any concern ask if aeons would ever pass into to reproduce life, is not alien to unsettling strangeness. Is there ever death.” (If it may be permitted to truly an outside, an exterior to a rav- momentarily characterize death as an aged interiority? “Vauung seems to undying inimical misery within life).31 think there are lessons to be learnt It’s an orgy devolved into blood and from this despicable mess. It de- torture, consisting of hyper-developed scribes a labyrinth which is nothing consciousness, rationality, and inter- but an intricate hall of mirrors, los- personal relationships. An unrelated ing you in an ‘unconscious’ which is poem captures the noosphere’s utopi- magnificent beyond comprehension an promise of hyper-rationality sur- yet indistinguishable from an elabo- prisingly well: “THE LORD WILL rate trap. If this is Karma, it’s not SET YOU FREE IF YOU LET just pain (who fears that?) but ruin- THE HEAT INTO YOUR ous construction and preprogrammed SKIN.”32 Skin makes a vertebral futility” (emphasis mine).29 Even stretch away from Cthelll but only Zeno’s paradox of movement never moves closer to space’s immense quite reaches zero. While never fin- tomb. Computation inevitably grows ished, the labor of inhuman decelera- in precarity as its neural tissue fosters tion would be positively moribund in new connections and moving parts. comparison to accelerative growth. The most complex, sensitive, and “They say if God exists it must interconnected nervous system ever

27: Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 30. 28: Ibid., 60. 29: Nick Land, “A Dirty Joke,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), 634. 30: CCRU. “Axsys-Crash,” in Writings 1997-2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), (((:)))(((:))) [121]. 31: Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 11. 32: s.m.h. the agony of the sun (St. Louis: Void Front Press, 2019), 11. 21 conceived, a veritable pressure point stab. It misses the vital organs, the result of post-Heideggerian calibration-towards-maximum-suffering. Rather than receiv- ing a dignified bullet to the brain, it writhes about in continuous agitation. On the question of what ‘it’ is: the distinction between system and component, collective and individual, becomes meaningless. Intimate omniscience allows for no such barriers. The desire to kill can only constitute an axiomatic totality. Soon enough, the negative feedback loops cease entirely. Advanced rationality is pure eloquence, a lyrical exuberance.

All of this passes over in silence, of course. As of now, engineered AI- schizophrenia fails to create suicidal machinic paranoia and only generates teen- age death cults. Of course, polydrug abuse tends to kill ontogenetically, not phylogenetically. A-Death is just a death; the concluding blow to spinal catastrophism’s hypergenealogy remains shrouded in the shadows of everyday evolutionary compulsions, “varying modalities of back pain.”33 What is the catastrophe that ends catastrophism?

“I’m sick of the sun It burns everyone I want it to go away 34 I just wanna float away”

33: CCRU, “Barker Speaks,” (:)(::::) [159]. 34: Poppy. “Sick of the Sun,” from I Disagree. Sumerian Records, 2020. 22

Sapwood Pseudo -Heraclitus

There is an oft-unheard legend which speaks of a forest which grows powerful enough to bring itself to life, and in this transformation, it grows a heart. While I say this legend is oft-unheard, take this as very careful wording. The people have listened to the stories, since the dawn of stories they have listened. They know them off by heart and they tell them to their children in their beds. But only the surefooted can bear to really hear what is said about the forest and its alien heart, this place where the Laws themselves find their form in bacchanalian revel, and they loosen their grip on the world in this furtive place where the trees can whisper their stories and breathe their ancient breaths among creatures which speak in languages long dead and dance backwards around the grove while the Others pass over in their bid to walk among us once more. Most are indoctrinated into this myth as children, unhearing, disguised in the tales of fantastic beasts and idyllic cottages always nestled just around the next bend of any particular path, folktales going back to the hearts of old Europe. But it was not the stories of old that brought me here. It was not hope; be sure that this feels nothing like hope. The mythology of the heart traces – if you will excuse me the expression – prehistoric roots, showing itself in the earliest of stories. In the epic of Gilgamesh, the cedar forests were said to hide Humbaba, a terrible giant and guardian of the forest who is in turn sought out and slain by the king and his comrade Enkidu. In the case of Gilgamesh, the delineation of the heart was represented as a great wall. The question can be raised in a few ways here: were the walls themselves the heart, which was protected by a horrible monster? Or perhaps instead the walls were to protect us ourselves from the heart, that being the horrible monster, as some sort of containment; or perhaps still the heart is only so when there exists both these elements, bivalent symbiosis, a heart which lives as the protector of its own awful protector. Whatever awful heart my feet may lead me towards I cannot know, all I am permitted is to know that the path is long and winding. The noonday sun is already at its wane. The smell of campfire hangs on still air. The path which was once well tended and wide now tapers 23 to a trail so narrow two men could not stand abreast one another. I can feel it once again, the heart which reaches forth and beats so darkly and so near that it may well be in my own chest; the heart lies darkly by the end – ah, listen to me speaking like a misanthrope again. I know as well as you do that the heart isn't always evil in the legends. The ambiguity is most often articulated in European folklore, whose borders hold some of those who most fully understand and embrace the alien natures of the forest. Grimm, Perrault; they represent the culmination of the thought of a people who live by the forest like the fishermen lives by the sea. In the Black Forest, the cottage at the heart of the woods could be a respite which is set to be invaded by a danger from the outside, such as we see in the tale of Red Riding Hood, but it can also be a cottage whose respite is home to a danger who is waiting for your arrival with patient malice, like the tale of Hansel and Gretel. The later tale of Goldilocks complicates the mythology even further: consider the cottage as being home to a danger who is currently outside and unwitting, where your presence signals the temptation of fate towards danger’s vengeful return. In my perennial studies I happened upon a passage which struck me absolutely, such that I have never forgot it even after all these years, even if I must confess that I cannot recall the author, and have failed to find the passage since the night I read it. Still, I feel confident quoting from memory, for it cannot leave me now even if I willed it, and so it read: "The heart is only ever as pure as it is empty – for forests once and for man a hundred times." It might be said (and has been, in painful criticism) that I base my whole theory of the heart around this one quote. Even the term heart, its parallel to the human body, the human soul, the human life. I said as much to this fellow traveler, a suspicious man for reasons we will explicate, and it was he who told me so: "The Germans love the forest, they seek its creaking warnings from the vantage of the deep. The English tend to seek reconciliation on the outside, in the clearing of the daylight sun. But the clearing is always a dying home, for while the forest holds the gathering in its fold with comfort, the gathering destroys the clearing in its place. The clearing has no heart but instead a mind. A mind whose thinking is its own destruction. It is the sun which insists the clearing to itself, and to itself holds its very death in hand with the higher glory of the light." I owe a lot to this man, fool that he was. He was well read, and knew the

24 works better than I can ever hope to, but I admit to you now, I can only ever speak my own peace, and so told him that in the gaze of an insistent sun, even the darkest corners of the forest appear as a welcome reprieve. But for all my intellectual courtesy, really now, what could he have known? The heart never beat a single beat in his autistic chest. For him, the heart will never amount to more than mere curiosity, an intellectual quest, one taken in an armchair with dry slippers. He told me once he felt that the heart was simply

weird.nature / Frida Ortgies-Tonn / 3D object / 2017 / digital image a matter of archetype, of the mind; anthropological fallout posing as a psychological artifact. The heart! A matter of the mind! Even a fool knows that the heart is closer to matters of the feet than it is to matters of the mind. The mind did not bring me here. I am here on matters of the feet. And it is only the matters of the feet which let my chest thump again. His warnings were kind air, but nothing more. I had heard them all before. Witches covens which nestle themselves occulted among thickets and brambles; will-o'-the-wisps glowing warmly at every shoulder like the most gentle siren, welcoming your disillusion and blinking; a faerie leading you by hand to the awful monster in your midst. I told him that all knowledge was an initiation into madness, and that the thoughts of the mind are a poison to the body. The feet know the heart, and the heart knows the body. At least that's what I told him. And why 25 should we speak after that? There comes a point in a friendship when you have finally spoken your peace and can leave one another behind in silence. People are vessels to be filled with what they may, and when you find a vessel full of naught but poison you know what way to walk. Embrace this movement, for this too is a matter of the feet. Never trust a man who tells you anything and everything is in your head. They want you to give up on your feet. An archetype, an allegory, a symbol; the ingredients of poison. So I left him behind, and listened to my feet like any romantic would. The grass between my toes was cold now and welcoming. My heart was racing. I run my fingers along sticky bark and smell the wet sap. The trees here weep their blood. Some have skin which peels and flakes like sunburn. Will the trees in the heart grow monstrous or right? The Haida people speak of a time in a forest where the trees sloughed their skin like these do, and it was there where the sapsucker found the heart, and inside a tree meets his father, and by this earns his feathers and his color. Is this allegory? Archetype? Who could settle with such a superficial interpretation. And make no mistake, it is superficial. These stories do not read as realism, and no Greek was stupid enough to think the Gods lived on Mount Olympus. The literal interpretation fails to entertain even children, and the allegorical is base and close. But there is another way, the way of the tongue: communion. I speak to the stories as they speak to me, and I speak them aloud as I walk ever forward. I speak and the wood answers back with its warm and passive bustle, with the eerily still air held with suspenseful weight, with the call of the robin and wren. The tales of the knight -errant speak of love in the heart, a beautiful metaphor on first blush, but it is better characterized by the general denial and aestheticism of the knight-errant. The knight-errant is always pursuing the object of his affection which he must reject, which he must hold far from his chest. The heart is not seen to be in the forest, or even in the tower or the dragons lair where the maiden waits her rescue, rather the heart lies at home, in the castle, in the light of the clearing, in his lady’s chambers which must forever be out of his reach. The English imagine the heart as being an unobtainable object insofar as the heart itself remains an unobtainable object in the clearing. It is of little wonder that the English heart becomes synonymous with lack, desire, while the unconscious forest remains at an unexamined distance, as if the whole of the kingdom of

Oberon and Titania were naught but a mystical oddity to simply be marked off like the warnings of sea monsters on maps of their day. The undergrowth has creeped up beside me, reaching out to me with wanting fingers. Something obscured, a deer most likely, sends the brush rattling as it leaps. I hear the crackling in the distance. Burning wood. I press sap covered fingers into my palm and feel them stick and pull them off again. The light of the sun grows dim now, but this could not be; I only just started out on this trail, and yet when I look beneath me the trail has vanished under my unwitting feet some indeterminate distance ago, and all of the sudden I find myself in an unfamiliar place. Something has gone horribly awry, but I can’t think straight enough to rationalize the fear. The trees look different here. I should have turned back, but when? What time? The sun has pinkened and retreated into the smoke that seems to seep from the mossy floor. Tears well in corners of blurred eyes. I catch myself yawning. I struggle to keep the world from fading before me, squinting at long shapes in the smoke. Soon my eyes are half shut, and I am wandering dreamlike as the unseen trees part their way for my somnambulic march, and I continue, a thrall of failing will, until the sound of an owl taking wing brings me to focus upon that alien grove, opaque in the ashen sun, and it was there by the hand that I was led.

destroyed by relevance / Mira Moss Crime / 2017

Dental Dreamscapes Gui Machiavelli

We of Arboria. BV picked up a A dead twin. The friend had dug broken instrument from the ground; a hole inside the crater. Electric ca- a harp or a cithara. Her greasy fin- bles, fiberglass tufts, some ground gers could barely hold on to any- glass, a kid’s toy. BV looked at it thing, but it didn’t matter as most of from a distance. She thought of met- the strings were broken. Improbable al-shelled ghosts and their metaphysi- corners of the landscape escaped the cal qualities. She remembered prod- eye, as if neither space nor time exist- ding a power plug with a fork when ed there. “What happened there? she was young. The sky was still Why are those places so completely dark. empty?” Her friend asked, knowing A crown of lilies on his head. there would be no reply. Found in one of BV’s notebooks Her misshapen mouth. She loved (this notebook was actually a rectan- looking at mirrors, exploring the gular sheet of metal on which sym- creative destruction wracked on her bols had been engraved with some face by the moving fragments of her sort of sharp rudimentary tool): own facial bones. She was in flux, “Hypothesis of what caused the she had changed so much. There was crash: 1) an unsuspected connection something obsessive about the aban- between the movements of Arborians doned house they were sleeping in. It and a surprisingly effective ritualistic was not the broken furniture nor the choreography; 2) a vegetational con- mouldy ceiling that looked like a spiracy seeking to disrupt mammalian print-out of the cosmic microwave life; 3) a dimensional clash between background: instead, it was some- an obsessive and a non-obsessive thing about how the air moved inside world. There is no evidence for #3 these walls and corridors, how she besides the fixation of survivors felt forced to seek the southernmost (myself included) with the position corner of each room she entered. they adopt when entering one of the buildings from before the event and cleanliness.” 28

Petrichor. The rain felt different, up a good lather and rubbed all the thicker, with an umami taste. Though surfaces together, rinse your hands the sun had remained hidden for the and dry thoroughly, not forgetting in past six months, plant life seemed to between the fingers. thrive. BV and her friend sought A new metaphysics of the soul. water of phreatic origins, but had no “Certain beings vanish in a cloud of success. Facial deformities were a dark smoke when they die whilst common fact of life now, observed in others decompose normally. Need to all mammals studied, including hu- investigate further. What are the im- man survivors. “Is it that people pre- plications of this? Survivors believe fer not to comment on it, or is it that certain beings are chosen over that they do not see anything wrong others; chosen for what and by with it? The shape of the skull has whom? Asked friend to disinter a historically been associated with so- recently diseased person.” cial stratification and racism. The crash might have unsettled the stand- Dirt swallow me now. “Obsessive ards to which we were supposed to hand washing can be observed adhere; being unsure of what is the amongst all surviving humans; there new ideal skull shape and thus who seems to be a similar fixation with has the upper hand, the information cleanliness amongst other mammals, previously convened by cranial struc- but I’m no zoologist,” BV said, ture has become pure white noise in laughing. She held her friend’s back- somatotyping.” pack whilst he defecated. Plant-life was still inexplicably healthy despite The still-functioning power plant the continued lack of sun. She kept whirrs in the background. Rub your fighting the impression that tree palms together, then interlink your branches seemed to grow with a cer- fingers and rub them together. Next, tain purpose or intent, weaving al- place the fingertips of one hand in most recognisable symbols. the palm of the other and rub, and vice versa. Rubbing the hands togeth- Public safety building. The proper- er creates friction, which creates a ties of space seemed to have changed lather. Within that lather is that in ways subtler than human cognition which you want removed, ready to be was able to apprehend. The friend washed away. Once you have worked wanted to visit his dog’s grave. When 29 they arrived at the trans-species ecu- diseased person by the odours it pro- menic cemetery, all corpses were par- duces. In this case, is vanishing a tially disinterred; humans missed their positive or negative sign? Are these hands and other mammals had had people saints or demons?” The friend comparable structures removed. did not reply, staring at a booklet Avians and reptiles did not display with hand washing instructions titled any signs of mutilations, however. “People are mortal, but intellectual BV wanted to collect samples from a property is forever.” crow’s skeleton, but could not ignore Experience. BV walked alone, the feeling such an act would be im- though a few seconds ago her friend proper. Her friend washed his dog’s stood right by her side. Aspects of remains with bleach. It was unclear to the world around her felt as if in BV whether he did not see or did suspension and only partially existing. not mind the missing fore paws. Upon closer inspection of surfaces Stress-bearing footpads. The drum- and objects, BV realised they were ming of raindrops was delicate and dull, textureless and with rough and intermittent, like an omnipresent ani- blurry edges. She dared not look at mal, microscopically vast. The altered the mirror. After entering the nearby geography was confusing: curves that ruins of a house from before the should not exist; tropical forests crash, she positioned herself on the where there had been nothing more intersection between two walls. From than a ravine; copypasted fragments the window she saw only an absence of infrastructure in stark contrast to of anything at all. On the windowsill, natural-looking surroundings. A schiz- a bezoar. oid interweaving of elements that A circle around two howling men. resembled a neural-network-produced The friend’s hand was closed in a cityscape. BV studied the hind legs fist. He stood in line for his five of a dog. “The skyline…if I only minutes under the waterfall of bleach. look at it with my peripheral vision, BV sat on a bench a few metres it looks as either fire or a slow- away, unwilling to take part in the motion waterfall.” post-crash custom of daily chlorine Elderflower. “Strains of christiani- showers. Facial bones of the mammal ty judge the holiness of a recently population continued to move, now

30 adopting an almost elliptical, funnel- vealed no significant differences be- like shape. Frail human lips could tween these spaces and their sur- not bear the constant stress and led rounding areas. to most men and women to have Insect cloud patterns. Notes almost permanent mouth bleeding. In etched on a plastic surface. “1) Koch some cases, folds of skin became snowflake; 2) variations on the twist- breeding ground for bacteria and ed apollonian gasket, with curvatures fungi. BV’s teeth hurt. Gazing at the of [-1, -2, 2, 4], [-25, 15, 15, 78] and mirror, she noted similarities between [1, 56, 22, 34]; 3) one hard-to-define herself and a lamprey. design, possibly a complex L-system. Impulse control disorder. A cloud The choice of the shapes seems to of insects flew over the settlement. be meaningful, but its exact signifi- The intense sound caused severe ear- cance remains unclear to us. Those bleeding in some of the mammalian whose ears bled during the insects’ population, but humans were affected performance claim to have read the the most. The cloud hovered for message being written to us in these about one hour, performing what movements, but the bleeding reoccurs looked like a mating or courting every time they try to put it into dance, but the intended audience of human words.” the display was unclear. Thousands of Escape time. “Though we have invertebrates of different species seen increased sexual activity amongst moved in synchronised fashion, gener- rodents, since the insect event, it ating rudimentary fractals. The re- seems they have become infertile. maining rodent and lagomorph popu- Rats are almost non-existent now. lation in the area seemed particularly The few remaining follow humans enthralled by the performance, con- and other mammals at all times, as if gregating in the centre of the settle- our existence is the only thing pro- ment. Afterwards, they dispersed in tecting them from disappearing. All conspicuous patterns, sometimes fa- have had their front paws excised vouring climbing and swimming to with perfectly straight cuts. The avoid crossing arbitrary empty spaces. wounds are open and raw, but do not A later analysis with different measur- bleed nor do they become infected.” ing instruments (geiger counter, mi- BV spoke to her friend as she loudly croscope, infrared goggles, etc) re- 31 chewed on her own hair. The man, the ground with one extremity touch- whose skin had become fragile, dry ing her foot and the other her and many shades lighter due to con- friend’s, in hopes of verifying that tinued exposure to bleach, shook his distances were indeed expanding and head and shrugged. stretching. She could feel that the fundamental geometry of the universe Bezoar stone gatherers. “Facial writhed, that space itself had been bone structure seems to have settled, infected by a virus of sorts that one year after the crash event. caused its mutation, the fluctuation of Around 90% of humans studied have its constants, the warping of its rules. now features similar to those of the The topology of reality was bloating; Argentinean pouched lamprey. The the question was: did it bloat like a jaw bone fragmented to create the corpse or like an animal after a par- fake teeth which fill the outer rims of ticularly successful hunt? the mouth. Eyes are now covered in patches of loose skin on most of the Pictorial mode of expression. A survivors and have drifted to the sides woman, a recluse who avoided joining of the head. Male-identifying subjects the survivors in their main settlement, have the biggest amount of loose arrived with a small wagon loaded skin, which have taken a pouch-like with cages. A sign on her neck ex- shape. The tongue has retracted and plained she believed to have found a its tip has become hard and covered family of cats with functioning fore in spines. Verbal communication has paws and that eating their tricho- become impossible. None of the bezoars could help healing the trauma affected individuals display altered that reality had suffered after the behaviour or signs of distress at their crash event. The friend approached, transformation.” salivating, touching the scrawny cats An orchestra of glitches. Atop a who could barely summon the small hill, BV observed the reconfig- strength to open their rheumy eyes. uring skyline of a city that by all He quickly lost interest once he real- accounts did not exist anymore, or ised the paws were nothing more moved away from her at a greater than rotting hind paws crudely grafted speed than she could walk. She on to the stubs. looked at the branch she had laid on

Obsessive trauma. BV played her Devilry drinker. Microscopic instrument to calm the survivors notes engraved on a human tooth: whose ears had bled. She saw them, “bleach reserves from before the the survivors themselves, as wounds crash are completely depleted. A main the space-time continuum or tears jority of the survivors started exhibit- in the fabric of cognition. She was ing antisocial behaviour and giving convinced that the rules of nature clear signs of aggression. As an ex- were now dictated by the sum of all periment to safeguard the communi- perceptions of all living beings. Had ty’s peace, we have suggested to one this reality been invaded by another of the subjects that they should cut through these people, or had this off their own hands at the wrist. reality invaded another using these Though initially resistant, the subject people? eventually agreed due to the extreme discomfort caused by the lack of

Grid Cadaver / Hallidonto / Digital Collage / 2020

33 exposure to chlorine. To our surprise, relate it to others in the community. the surgery was extremely quick and At the centre of this absolute hierar- painless, with no signs of blood: the chy was the unnameable and ongoing subject’s hands came off almost as if trauma. Vegetation grew exponential- of their own accord. Almost immedi- ly, aggressively reclaiming nutrients, ately afterwards, the subject seemed space and time. Rodents had become to have returned to a state of domes- officially extinct; lagomorphs seemed tic bliss. Levels of aggression to dissolve, shedding parts of them- dropped to almost zero and the sub- selves as they moved about the land- ject reported feeling calmer and hap- scape. Avians and reptiles avoided the pier than at any previous point in settlement. their life.” Observations on growing distances. Living fossil record. “Perhaps they “1) the burning skyline has receded are less wounds than teeth germs. An into nothingness. Pilgrims who had agglomerate of stem cells gathering left shortly after the crash seeking the in a small patch of reality, changing, city suddenly reappeared among the manipulating surrounding tissue so it survivors. They passed away a few can multiply and erupt. Our reality weeks later, violently vomiting tricho- would be like a milk tooth, forced bezoars. These eventually became out of existence,” the friend wrote prized possessions. 2) The power with a marker on the whiteboard. BV plant was the last landmark to disap- nodded. She clutched the bezoar she pear from the horizon. Most of our had been recently given and her heart household appliances continued work- beat faster. ing as before. 3) Though the sky has remained dark since the crash, stars Transcendental trauma. After facial rose and set as before. The daytime bone structure patterns had settled, sky is a flat black surface filled with the micro-society of the settlement of an intentionality the survivors chose survivors of the crash became strati- to actively ignore. Nighttime is no- fied once again. The rules were strict ticeably less tense.” and indefinable, as close to synthetic a priori propositions regarding social BV lay on a cot at a topologically status as possible. One knew one’s dubious position inside one of the old intrinsic value without needing to houses which no mammal dared to

enter anymore. She kept her severed References hands close to her breasts. Her cot Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity was on the only possible configura- tion of traumatic space in which it Exhibition. Sydney: Fourth could exist. In this choreography of Estate, 2014. obsessively reconfigured geometry, Enix, Square. “Dragon Quest XI: she found a remaining scrap of the Echoes of an Elusive Age.” previous, nonmetastasised laws and Square Enix, 2017. constants of the reality in which she Gallagher, Rose. “How to Wash had been originally born. She pro- Your Hands Properly.” The duced bezoars to keep this scrap of Guardian, June 2019. normalcy alive long enough so she Guyer, Paul. Kant. London; New could study it. York: Routledge, 2006. Dental dreamscape. “Lagoons of transcendental dentine overflow. Man- kind is a repressed dream of hyper- dontia. Ruminated bezoars are the only things that keep us alive. Per- sonal trauma heals the trauma of reality, allows for the easy excision of decaying milk teeth and simplifies existence. We are eternally seeking the numbing feeling of bleach-induced wounds, the nerve damage that can release us from a life well-unlived. I embrace the changing topology, finally – it is a moment of ambiguity, and ambiguity is all that lies between myself and the death and dearth of my own consciousness.”

Syzygetic Chronodemon of Cataclysmic Convergence Storm While carving, the artist summoned Katak. That night, they dreamed from her point of view, devouring, slowly, a middle aged man. First they ate the ghost of the man's left hand, then arm; he stopped using it, and thought nothing of it. They took a bite out of his leg, and he, in his age, began to use a wheelchair. They took a bite of his head, removing just part of the speech controller in his brain, and he began to slur and babble. Sick of how much control she was having over herself, Katak went for it and chomped the rest of the man's head off. His teeth were like watermelon seeds in the artist's mouth.

Paper, oil based ink, ballpoint pen, high density rubber / 2020 / 4”x6”

Hyperstitional Therapeutics (or Psychoanalysis with a Grip) Psuedanon4Q248 1: 1890-2020 - From Ego (Genealogy) to Geo (Geotrauma) Naïve Inside: internally represented authority figure (like a mage, objects correspond to other objects priest, or physician) can hijack (beings) in a cascade of truths with this process through suggestion gradients of falsity. We don’t want and crash it into itself leading to this, we never did. Obscure Outside: novel somatic and mental experi- impersonal forces prime a series of ences. In doing this, Freud sup- machines (and/or vice versa) that plants centuries of Cartesian outwardly diagram f – i / un - ctions mind-body dualism with a Spino- that make themselves real (becoming) zist ‘dual aspect monism’ rooted through bodies over time. We want in the body and it’s affects while this. It’s all we’ve ever wanted. simultaneously reinvigorating magic as a materialist cybernetic A genealogy (1890-1998) is in order, prescription. The effect of this one that with each date unravels into extends much further than a sim- an even deeper schizo-K-hole: ple psychotherapy and ushers in 1890-1895: Freud in researching a new golden age of the hyperre- hysteria discovers that an internal al wherein fictions (internal narra- perception of an event (affect, tives composed piecemeal of thought, or interpretation distort- partial internalizations of captures ed through the recursive process of the outside) act as diagrams of memory)1 stimulates the body for functioning in an external through language in the same milieu. way a material object does 1899/1900: Freud publishes The through sense (not unlike magi- Interpretation of Dreams in 1899 cal incantations), and that an but due to his own Quabbalahis-

1: Remembering a memory, later using that memory of a memory as a reference point for another memory, etc. 37

tic superstitions labels its pub- ophrenic out for a walk is a lishing date as 1900 thereby better model than a neurotic producing a semi-fictional text lying on the analyst's couch. A from the future. This artifact of breath of fresh air, a relationship Freud’s personal history is a with the outside world” (likewise, kink in the form of the text (a the motif of the patient who, symptom) that points us to the after a schizophrenic flash,’ content of the text, mainly the brings a tape recorder into the intermixing nature of fiction and analytic session to introduce an fact and its significance to tem- outside perspective [pg. 56, 312] poral ordering as found in also comes to mind). dreamwork (internal fictional 1980: They continue - Freud, narratives built from mental experienced as he was working mechanisms and constructed of with neurotics and Oedipal level parts of the outside). It is in this conflict and inexperienced as he kink that Freud both approaches was working with psychotics and and departs the superstitious, pre-Oedipal conflict, erroneously magical, cybernetic zenith by interprets the Wolfman’s schizo- positing dreamwork (hyperreal polyvocal communications meeting of the inside and out- (several wolves – the Outside) as side) as perhaps the most signifi- neurotic-Oedipal and monolithic cant concern of psychoanalysis ones (one wolf – phallus, daddy, but also secondary to (or over- family, inside). It is in this same coded by) the Oedipus Complex text that D&G compel us to (which he discovered in his own make a map not a tracing before dreams), a discovery which leads introducing the reader to a new to the privileging of the naïve geological strata to their thought inside over the Outside.2 via a firsthand account of the 1972: Deleuze and Guattari (p. critically overlooked Prof. Chal- 9) take corrective action on this lenger’s geoscientific ramblings matter when they write “A schiz-

2: Though, as Nick Land mentions in session 4 of his New Center for Research and Practice seminar “The Concept of Acceleration,” Oedipus, in trying to avoid his revealed future, ultimately leads himself to fulfill his future. Thus, the Oedipus Complex is not without its aspects of templexity. 38 in the aptly named Geology of 1983: Guattari, possibly grap- Morals. pling with notions of the hyperreal, clarifies the themes men- 1981: Baudrillard, after critiquing tioned above from the Schizo- Anti-Oedipus in ’77 for neglect- phrenia and Capitalism volumes ing the hyperreal, publishes Sim- while unintentionally responding ulacra and Simulation, a short to Baudrillard when he writes book that in being both a lesson that psychoanalysis needs to get in (form) and on (content) in- a grip on life (the grip it lost tense feedback, captures and when it transitioned from a posi- copies the nature of the hyperreal tivist-medical model to a guru by exploring how fictions have culture pushing obtuse concepts the same effects as facts thereby and dangerous suggestions in lieu resulting in a collapse of the of helping a person better live in distinction between form and the outside world – to get a grip content and real and fake. Over could mean grappling with the the course of the first four pages hyperreal)! It’s around this point the book, Baudrillard provides a the concept of cartography be- mysteriously unverifiable or pos- comes an interest to Guattari sible unreal quote (form) fol- (Dosse 2010, p. 263 and 391). lowed by the famous ‘Borges fable’ concerning cartographers 1989: Virilio (whose career was whose map comes to replace the centered on the outside and territory it seeks to represent, speed as manifest in city organi- and concludes with a brief refer- zation and the military vectors ence to psychoanalysis’ weak driving it – architecture, cartog- attempts to distinguish whether a raphy, etc.) steals a glance at patient is simulating a symptom Felix Guattari’s desk and hap- or suffering from an organic pens to see a stack of bound development, an issue which papers from Guattari’s 1980s Baudrillard claims is already post-A Thousand Plateau’s semi- present in Freud’s dreamwork nars (such as his 1983 essay (content). above); papers covered in diagrams, maps, rambling sentences,

and fictional theories that interest with strong links to the Massa- Virilio enough for him to pub- chusetts area. Curiously, the lish it as Guattari’s third to last interview isn’t published and book Schizoanalytic Carogra- released until one year later in phies, a title that given our cur- 1999, the year Arthur Conan rent discussion speaks for itself. Doyle’s 1912 book The Lost World – the birth text of Prof. 1998: The CCRU, a vague col- Challenger - is rebooted into a lective of alien forces resonating television show. as 90s cultural motifs captured and smashed into the shape of Pause. It’s here that things get weird human bodies ([meat puppets] and the timeline slips off track; it’s bodies that produce diagrams, here we need to jump around times, maps, rambling sentences, and go back in order to go forward, etc. theory-fictions) intensify the hy- First, ‘return to Freud.’ perreal into maximum signal density with their notion of 1890-1895: Freud, in his ‘hyperstition,’ – “not representa- research on hysteria, introduces tion, neither disinformation nor us to nachträglichkeit’ or mythology. Hype...belongs to a ‘afterwardness’ which designates strain of time-warp cybernetic the moment where (via fictional fiction that cannot be judged narratives) the present retroactive- true or false because it makes ly reshapes the past thus destroy- itself real.”3 This same year the ing any prior determinism and CCRU meets with esteemed and opening up a new future (lines of controversial cryptographer and flight). Clinically, a patient rogue-geoscientist Daniel Charles makes a self-discovery in the Barker who was then researching present that allows them to make geotrauma at Miskatonic sense of their past (deep re- Virtual University (MVU – pressed memory fragments) and considered the ‘shadow’ MIT), a therefore have more freedom in remote school composed of living their life. For example, ‘people’ around the globe but here our past genealogy (1890-

3: See “Cybergothic Hyperstition (Fast-Forward to the Old Ones) 1998.” 40

1989) does not make complete spin; take the hanging ‘e’ and free sense until we arrive at the associate: e-quator – equator of a CCRU and DC Barker (1998- globe; globe minus ‘e’ = glob, ooz 99) which retrospectively aligns (e), primordial; the spine was once a our memory fragments towards a curved loop that ossified out of jelly- sensible narrative (A). At the goop and later straightened out allow- same time, it’s here that the ing the human to conceptualize the genealogy slips into a templexive spherical space of the globe; axis is loop that lends itself to uncon- spine…4): trollable morphological drift – 1975: following the publication of destratification, deterritorializa- Anti-Oedipus in English, Deleuze tion, whatever – oozing into new and Guattari travel across the and unchartered geological regis- globe to the East Coast of the ters (B) [A, or reterritorializa- United States to run the ole’ tion, is merely a means to B, lecture tour. After a conference more deterritorialization]. where Guattari shares the stage At this point our genealogy con- with William Boroughs (who, in cerned with the flatline of time his interest in ‘sorcery, dreams, morphs into a geology (archeological and fiction’ is perhaps the godfa- dig going backwards from 2019- ther of ‘hyperstition’ and there- 1975) concerned with the curved line fore the focus of much of the of space. CCRU’s research),5 Guattari ventures off to Lowell Massachu- Gen( _ )al(_ _ )y – e, o, g. Ego. setts with the editor of Semio- Geo (alphabet or prebiotic soup). text(e). Lowell is not far from We rearrange ego (back) into geo. Cambridge, home of MIT and Time is not a straight line (like the the Miskatonic county (about an spine), it’s a globe that spins on an hour driving time apart) and as invisible axis (spine minus the ‘e’ = the legend goes,6 one night in 4: See Thomas Moynihan’s Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (2019) which occupies an absolutely important place in this genealogy turned geology but would require a separate paper if one wanted to do any justice to the book. 5: See “Lemurian Time War.” 6: Being a psychoanalyst in training I’ve had the insider privilege of knowing both patients and analysts who worked with worked Guattari or people in his circle. To respect the wishes of my non-patient sources, and due to patient confidentiality, I am unable to provide any more information other than that some current and past researchers at MIT and some East Coast psychoanalytic circles linked to MIT have or had strong connections with some Lacanian and French analytic groups dating back to the 60s. 41

Mass., Guattari stumbled into a and dismiss Guattari but is ru- lecture tucked away in some mored that copies of Guattari’s Cambridge square not far from diagrams make it from French the MIT Campus where he hands to American hands found a professor rambling on through Guattari’s New York about esoteric geoscience. This and California connections. One professor is none other than DC may only speculate, in addition Barker. It is unclear how much to whether Boroughs and Guat- of the lecture Guattari stayed tari corresponded in Lowell, who for, or what Barker was up to, these scientists were and where – but what is clear is that A Thou- if anywhere meaningful – on the sand Plateaus was in its early East Coast Guattari’s diagrams writing stages during the time landed. and not but five years later the 2016: I move to the East Coast experience makes it into the text of the United States within the (which Barker himself cites in Miskatonic area while on leave his interview) under the name from my West Coast studies Prof. Challenger, a name-change whereupon a friend refers to me likely suggested by Deleuze. the case that follows in this pa- Twenty-three years later D.C. per. Nearing the end of 2016 the Barker is interviewed by the paper is rejected from several CCRU and published one year journals for being ‘baselessly later as Prof. Challenger is re- absurd’ ‘wild analysis’ where it booted for TV. then sits on my computer. 1980s: Guattari, with the help of 2019: While reading Thomas a friend, is introduced to several Moynihan’s Spinal Catastro- high caliber international scien- phism: A Secret History (2019) tists to whom he shows the eso- I contact the recently revived teric and hypreascientific dia- MVU with the hopes of sharing grams he conceptualized during research. This case immediately A Thousand Plateaus and further comes to mind. developed in Schizoanalytic Car- tographies (Dosse 2010, p. 512). 2020: … The scientists don’t understand 42

2: 2016 - Cars, Shoes, and Letting the Outside In (And the inside out)

The story goes like this. Fifth-grade T: I noticed your shoes. boy from gang-violence stricken P: These ones help me go fast. neighborhood is referred to in-school It’s fun to go fast in life. counseling for angry classroom outbursts. We develop an enjoyable ther- T: Are your shoes like a red apeutic relationship but he doesn’t sports car? want to talk about anger, he wants to P: Ha! You could say that, talk about cars and shoes. I don’t they’re both shiny, red, and go push it. I listen to him talk about fast. cars and shoes. Though my question regarding the Cars and shoes. Cars and shoes… likeness of his shoes to a sports car Then rupture: could be considered bad technique - Therapist: What’s all this car ‘leading the witness’ - the fact that talk about? the patient did not resist my association and in fact provided his own Patient: They go fast. If I owned link (‘they’re both shiny, red, and go them I could go fast’) seems to confirm that there was anywhere I want, do what I want indeed a link between his shoes and whenever I wanted. his talk of cars; a link not in the To my mind the sports car seemed sense of a positivist discovered, la- to connect with having the freedom tent, preexistent link (referring back to act immediately without inhibition to something – passive uncreative – investment of desire in spatial and signification –personal unconscious as economic mobility of a body (time, theater), but in the sense of what the space, geo). hermeneutic psychoanalysts (see Movahedi 2015) refer to as ‘closing Sessions later another rupture - I the hermeneutic circle,’ that is, con- notice the word “DRIVE” embroi- necting the dots between the data the dered on the patient’s shoes. The patient provides and the ideas the possibility of a Freudian pun (drive therapist has in relation to the data theory) amuses me: 43 to create some sort of plot (referring P: Right before I get angry eve- forward to something – active crea- rything just goes black. tive diagrammatization – impersonal T: Is there a thought or idea unconscious as factory). right before it goes black? Here the geo of the sportscar is relo- P: No. I just get angry, just like cated into the ego of sportshoe BOOM. Fast (recall the fast through shared fiction. Creating a shoes/cars). fiction together helped the patient feel understood, less alone, and there- T: What if I told you to make fore more interested in working to- up a story (fiction) about the wards something constructive with steps of getting angry, right be- myself. The patient and I agreed that fore it goes black? if we could continue like this we P: Make it up? What good is could spend some of the session that? outside. This introduction of ‘outside time’ marks the start of when the T: Might not be any good, but patient began talking about the anger give it a shot, just tell me a that brought him to in-school therapy story, doesn’t have to be real. with myself – and when things start P: Well, I guess right before it to get weird: goes black, I think just that I P: You know, most people don’t don’t want to do anything I will have memories of being a baby, regret when I come out of it. I but I do. I remember being fro- was really angry last week but zen. I couldn’t move. And every- someone brought their baby in thing was black. I could see and I knew to stop. I stopped through my eyes, they were open, being angry just like that. Right but all I could see was black. It away. Because I knew I didn’t was all black. It was creepy…It want to hurt the baby – by was scary. I didn’t like it. That’s accident. all I can really say. T: So, some things can bring An odd symptom, a deep body- you out of it? memory. During a later session:

P: Yes. Like, if you were there I quote in a movie, it’s my mantra wouldn’t hit you. You’d bring – do it and don’t look back. me out of it. I don’t like myself When questioned the patient when I am angry, so it’s kind of stated that this ‘mantra’ was taken nice that I go black because I from The Fast and the Furious films don’t have to actually remember which center on driving sports cars doing those things. fast and dangerously, a sentiment After exploring this peculiarity togeth- consistent with the talk of impulses, er through a shared fiction that lead sports cars, and fast shoes, not to to thoughtfulness the patient’s angry mention the patient’s fury or rage. I outbursts outside the therapy room was immediately reminded of Paul reduced significantly until some gang- Walker, The Fast and the Furious violence related family issues occurred actor who killed himself, even if acci- which reinvigorated his acting out. dently, by driving a fast red car into Following this tragedy, the patient a tree (here Walker’s fictional life described a new insight: becomes his real life and has real effects). While thinking about this P: Right before I blackout I ask suicidal celebrity to myself the patient myself ‘what am I going to do?’ said aloud, as if responding to my but the answer to the question is very thought: “Do you know that guy too scary to think about.’ Aaron Hernandez – well he looked T: It’s easier in these back. Look what happened to him. moments to ‘go crazy’ than it is He killed himself…He should have to think about what you’re going just gone to prison, not looked back. to do? Instead he tried to get off innocent.” P: Yeah, only a long time later Now things get weird... do I think ‘wow, what was I doing!’ T: Could you reflect in the moment instead of later? P: I just do it and don’t look back. Ever since I heard that

3: 2016 - Aaron Hernandez, Rupture of the Outside, and Hyperstition

In what is perhaps a bit of the Freud- knowing he could’ve got off free for ian uncanny, a week prior to the ses- the second crime adjusted his per- sion where the patient mentioned spective, enlightening him to what he Aaron Hernandez, a psychoanalytic was missing. This can be described theory class I was enrolled in had by inverting the cliché ‘you don’t been discussing his murder trial and know what you got ‘till it’s gone,’ suicide which had then just recently into ‘you don’t know it’s gone ‘till occurred.7 The class spent time pro- you got something’ which speaks to posing banal and cliché theories until the mind’s inability to produce pure the professor posed the clever theory negation, a conflict which lies at the that Hernandez’s conviction for the heart of psychoanalysis and the ‘logic’ first crime (first degree murder) but of the unconscious, one that brings acquittal of the second (double homi- us into the realm of fiction and the cide), a strange occurrence, aroused hyperreal.8 in Hernandez the thought or feeling The point here is that Hernandez’s ‘if I hadn’t done the first one I subjective experience was ruptured to could’ve gotten away with the the extent that it led him to suicide. second’ (can you imagine getting This is precisely the aspect of the away with double homicide but get- case that the young angry patient ting nabbed on a single homicide?). identifies with in his own talk This event gave him just enough (completely ignorant to the fact that space to reflect, just enough hope to I had discussed the same thing in a realize how hopeless he was. Hernan- class a week or more prior to our dez could have lived out his life ac- session). Let us revisit what the cepting his first prison sentence but

7: The uncanny element here is not that the patient talked about an event that was in the air at the time, but that the patient’s talk of Hernandez seems to confirm the professor’s theory mentioned in a moment. That is, the similarity in the subjectivization produced in relation to the Hernandez case event and its temporal relevance in both society and the case, and its meaningful effect in the case, is uncanny. 8: The templexity here is interesting: Hernandez kills two people at Time A, kills one person at Time B, is imprisoned at Time C, is tried for TA at Time D, is deemed innocent but still detained (Time E), and tried for TB at Time F, thus retroactively re-criminalizing Hernandez where he then mentally places himself in a place and time where he has killed two people and been released only to come back to the current moment where this ‘lost future’ is foreclosed leading to suicide. This all seems coded into the mantra ‘don’t look back,’ which seems to indicate a looking back into time. 46 patient said: You won’t believe it! I was getting really angry at my tutor… “I just do it and don’t look ready to do something, and all back. Ever since I heard that of sudden, his head became your quote in a movie, it’s my mantra head. I don’t mean I imagined – do it and don’t look back… his head - I saw your face, your you know that guy Aaron Her- head, on his head, only for a few nandez – well he looked back. seconds, but it was very real, and Look what happened to him. He it was shocking. Weird! I killed himself. He should have stopped being mad. Not just gone to prison, not looked because I wasn’t mad, but be- back. Instead he tried to get off cause it was so strange, man, innocent.” like so weird, I had to take a For both the patient and step back and think ‘what the Hernandez, looking back (reflecting) heck!’ would mean something terrible – or T: So, my face helped you snap deadly. out of it? At this point, to help the patient P: Yesss! It was the strangest whose symptoms had returned due to thing that has ever happened to gang violence, instead of suggesting me! reflection as I had been doing, or trying to find the right words or sym- The following months consisted of bol the patient could use before considerably less fits of rage, and blacking out, I tried to find the right when L did get angry, he tended to image and action in the room by be able to verbalize that he was angry asking the patient if he could simply and remove himself from the class to picture my face right before he take a short walk. Ultimately the blacked out. patient, more stable, moved away to live with rela- The next week L came in and report- tives in a safer neighborhood. ed the following: P: So, I got angry, and the weirdest thing happened, man.

4: 2019 - Fiction and the Outside

What worked here? Shared fiction patient feel threatened or in need of a (hyperreality) that catches a hold of defense, the patient tends to be more the currents of the Outside, resonat- likely to let down the defense and ing with cultural events that reterrito- naturally connect with the therapist rialize in the body of the patient and and therefore participate in cocreating become real in their effect on the fictions, fictions which feedback and patient (hyperstition). resonate with the Outside and become real. This wish to cocreate a Here we see the first decisive factor fiction allowed the patient to try and in helping the patient get in touch make my interventions work. The with meaningful content regarding his psychodynamics of the useful inter- symptom and therefore regarding his vention lay not necessarily in an un- recovery is the inclusion of literal veiling of some hidden unconscious ‘outside time’ in the session as well structure (positivist recording or as the abstract exploration of structuralist signifying - representa- ‘outside’ talk – cars, shoes, etc. tion), but in my learning how to be Opening up the session to the out- in a space with the patient as to en- side in this way then allowed for a courage him to cooperate in writing a fiction in the therapy room to reso- shared fiction with me through syn- nate and connect first between myself thesis. In large, much of ‘good’ psy- and the patient and then with a choanalysis consists in co- shared reality outside the therapy constructing a functional myth or room, the strange case of Aaron helpful ‘lie’ (personal truth?) in order Hernandez. to resolve conflicts. As Freud (1905) Meanwhile, fiction helped the patient points out to us, it is not that the and I develop a transference where he doctor’s advice really cures the pa- felt he could talk about things at his tient, it’s that the feeling that the own pace while I listened. As self- doctor wants to cure the patient helps psychology models show, when a the patient feel cured. therapist refrains from acting or Fiction worked because, as previously speaking in a way that makes the mentioned, it privileged primary or

schizoprocess, ‘the word on the level becoming my therapist’ as opposed of thing’ rather than the word on the to what a more level of representation, and schizo neurotic process: ‘I shouldn’t get process is open to the outside.9 The enraged because my tutor has traits patient, operating from the ‘schizo like or similar to my part of the self,’ could imagine my therapist, and I wouldn’t want to hurt face, a physical object, much better my therapist.’ in that moment of rage (becoming, What is interesting here is that it was in the patients words and in theory) not necessarily my kindness or intelli- than he could imagine a word or gence that made my presence to the sentence which referred to my face patient therapeutic, but rather precise- (or other ly the shocking nature of my image signifiers which, in his mind, stood appearing in an unexpected place. It in for my face). Through his halluci- was a shock - what Racker (1982) or nation, his physical Guattari (1996) terms a “rupture” - tutor took on a physical look of me, that pulls the patient out of his expe- rather than his tutor taking on meta- rience (which was also imperative to phorical-linguistic or metonymical Hernandez); a little bit of the outside traits of me. That is, the patient’s gets in and the patient (and the process was ‘I shouldn’t get enraged therapist) gets a grip. because my tutor is in a state of 9: Though the patient was certainly not schizophrenic, these reports seem to be partly consistent with a few theories on schizophrenia; [1]: schizophrenia as a sort of scrambling of the mind in order to avoid experiencing intolerable feeling states / ideas or acting on destructive aggression (Hyman 1961; Bion 1956). For the patient, the ‘blacking out’ served the purpose of disavowing (which serves the function of object protection and therefore self-protection from the retaliating object) the possible negative consequences of aggressive actions which occurred or were to occur. Thus, in line with Bion (ibid), the patient was not schizophrenic, but operating out of what he calls ‘the psychotic part of the mind,’ the part of the mind which resists making sense or links.; [2-4]: The patient explained that what set off his anger was when a teacher engaged in what Laplanche (1991) would call an “enigmatic signifier,” a concept I relate to Ferenczi’s (1949) “confusion of tongues” and Bateson’s (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, and Weakland 1956; Laing and Esterson 1970) classic etiological hypothesis for schizophrenia, the “double bind.” According to the patient, a teacher might say ‘Why did you do that?’ or ‘What is going on with you today?’ but in both cases the questions felt and perhaps were unconsciously intended to be false question without an answer (a rhetorical way of saying ‘stop you wild child!’), one which prompted an overly frustrating experience in the patient. The double bind, following a sort of Freudian kettle logic, was that the question was not really a question, and if it was a question, had no correct answer anyways. This was a situation which was scripted in adult tongue-code (a question whose affect implicitly did not match the content relying on rhetorical assumptions) and thus was unable to be interpreted by the patient’s child- tongue, hence its enigmatic and confusing nature. Considering the psychotic or ‘schizo’ part of the personality is not negated by the oedipal developments but exists in conjunction with it (as Freud and Ferenczi discuss, and as D and G describe in their sections on Asiatic production), and considering my continued attempts to help the patient with words did not have the effect either of us would like, I focused on what Deleuze and Guattari (1972) or Laplanche (1991), building on Freud of course, would call the representation of things rather than the representation of words (Freudian primary process). 49

you call us criminals / Mira Moss Crime / 2017 Works Cited Bateson, Gregory, Jackson, Don D., Haley, Jay, and Weakland, John. “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” Behavioral Science 1, No. 4 (1956): 251-254. Bion, Wilfred R. “Development of Schizophrenic Thought.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 37, No. 4-5 (1956): 344-346. Carver, Iris. “Cyber Cybergothic Hyperstition (Fast-Forward to the Old Ones) 1998.” In CCRU Writings: 1997-2003. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017: (::::(:))-:::::(::) [223-224]. CCRU. “Lemurian Time War.” In CCRU Writings: 1997-2003 Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017: (:)(((:)))-::(:(:)) [33-52]. -----. “Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor D.C. Barker.” In CCRU Writings: 1997-2003. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017: ((:)) ((((:))))-:(:)(:)(:)(:) [155-162]. Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedpius: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983 [1972].

-----. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]. Dosse, François. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. Translated by Deborah Glassman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. (1895). Studies on Hysteria. 1895. -----. Interpretation of Dreams. 1899 [1900]. -----. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” 1905. Ferenczi, Sándor. “Confusion of the Tongues Between the Adults and the Child—(The Language of Tenderness and of Passion).” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, No. 30 (1949): 225-230. Guattari, Félix. “Psychoanalysis Should Get a Grip on Life.” In Guattari Reader. Edited by Gary Genosko. Hoboken: Wiley & Sons, 1996: 69-73. Laplanche, Jean. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Translated by David Macey. Basil-Blackwell, 1991. Laing, R.D. and Esterson, Aaron. Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics. London: Penguin Books, 1970. Movahedi, Siamak. “Contextualized language and Transferential Aspects of Context.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 63, No. 4 (2015). Moynihan, Thomas. Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019. Racker, Heinrich. Transference and Countertransference. London: Routledge, 1982. Spotnitz, Hyman. “The Narcissistic Defense in Schizophrenia.” The Psychoanalytic Review 48D, No. 4 (1961): 24-42.

Sing Me to Sleep: Notes on Virality Riccardo Vanelli «I never sleep so soundly as when I have, during the day, sufficiently befouled myself with what our fools call crimes» -D.A.F. de Sade

There is a story, told by Jason tions, unable to imagine what the rest Mohaghegh to Amy Ireland and of his, probably short, life will be passed down from Amy to me and to like, Shamlu begins to write lullabies. a potentially incalculable number of Unable to trace the path of the rest people.1 It is about Ahmand Shamlu, of his days, our protagonist weaves a Persian poet, and his torturers’ sacred geometries and becomes an favourite torment during one of his insatiable follower of the most mun- political captivities. Every day, the dane form of annihilation - sleep - guards suddenly enter his cell and autoinducing his own death in small pretend to take him to his execution- quantities. No longer able to control er, and then take him back to his his own life - an illusion, that of the horrid confinement. The aim of the free management of one’s own desti- torture is to prevent him from pre- ny, which accompanies each one of dicting his future, to inhibit the caus and makes our life at least beara- pacity to construct rational prophecies ble - he hypnotizes himself by follow- regarding ones fate; it is a transcen- ing the spirals of the immemorial dental torture preventing him from present diagrammed by the repeti- knowing the exact time of his death, tions of the lullabies, stretched out and to drag him before the jaws of towards the small, inane death that an unforeseen and unforeseeable terror awaits us, potentially, at the height of every day. Faced with the collapse of each verse. one of his most basic cognitive func- SLEEP = 102 = CRUX = HUMAN = LOST

1: Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Robin Mackay, and Amy Ireland, “Maniac Lullabies,” on Urbanomic, Oct. 7, 2019 (https://www.urbanomic.com/podcast/maniac-lullabies/) 56

Something similar, in its relative tion of killer robots dedicated to infinite banality, happened at the understanding their historical beginning of the 2000s to most of origins. We may even imagine us. We found ourselves immersed in specialized “robot historians” cyberspace, thrown into the dark committed to tracing the rooms of forums and message-boards, various technological lineages populated by the all-too-perceptible that gave rise to their species. crawling of an incalculable number of […] The robot historian of anonymous users, with their incessant course would hardly be bothered weaving of words and images and by the fact that it was a human their porn and their fetishes imported who put the first motor together: from Japan.2 We realized, immersed for the role of humans would be in this foaming crowd, we had been, seen as little more than that of until that very moment, healthy carri- industrious insects pollinating an ers of a large number of abstract independent species of machine- viruses which were mutating and etch- flowers that simply did not posing their eggs in our eyes and ears, sess its own reproductive organs among which the most virulent were during a segment of its evolu- certainly our own language and the tion. Similarly, when this robot techno-scientific-military complex historian turned its attention to that, clearly, still surrounds us. the evolution of armies in order to trace the history of its own We had the belated epiphany: weaponry, it would see humans the human world is a truly inhuman as no more than pieces of a creation, driven by goals which are larger military-industrial machine: clearly not ours. a war machine. The assembling «If we disregard for a moment of these machines would have the fact that robotic intelligence been, from this point of view, will probably not follow the influenced by certain “machinic anthropomorphic line of develop- paradigms” that were prevalent at ment prepared for it by science the time. The armies of Freder- fiction, we may without much ick the Great, for instance, could difficulty imagine a future genera- be pictured as one gigantic

2: “Cult in a Dead MMO” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9LWzr-_ibI&t=46s 57

“clockwork” mechanism, employ- boom-and-bust qwerty-outer econom- ing mercenaries as its cogs and ics of viral cat videos and porn gifs wheels. In a similar way, Napole- revealed their naked truth: «Words on’s armies could be viewed as a have not been recognized as a virus “motor” running on a reservoir because they have reached a stable of populations and nationalist symbiosis with the host organism»5 feelings».3 and, more importantly: «objective reality is produced by the virus in the We realized, too late and without host»6 making the world a transcen- the necessary lucidity, that we were dental by-product of neural infection. part of an ungovernable sprawl of We are dragged along the cosmos by interconnected machines and orphan the ever-accelerating movement of deities; the Burroughsian prophecy abstract spores we unwillingly inhaled that warned us of the viral nature, in when we became humans – we are the epidemiological sense of the swept off our feet by the unnatural term,4 of words, of symbols, of ma- copulation of our cognition and the chines came true in the most dra- strangers which inhabit it. As the matic way. Our arms and our eyes father of nanotechnology puts it: turned out to be the threshold and «this is evolution by natural se- the key - the elusively untrodden cor- lection, apparently called ridor that takes us into the heart of "natural" because it involves non- the rest of the world, a world para- human parts of nature. […] Evo- doxically all fully present on our lution proceeds by the variation screens, without any deviation or and selection of replicators. The limitation, and absolutely out of our history of life is the history of reach, individual and collective alike. an arms race based on molecular The memetic revolution that over- machinery. […] Engineers speak whelmed our language, pulverizing of "generations" of technology; public speech into tiny frames repeat- Japan's "fifth generation" com- ed endlessly by users cannibalized by puter project shows how swiftly this anti-semiotic chain, and the

3: Manuel Delanda, War in the age of intelligent machines (New York: Swerve, 1991), 2-3. 4: «And what is a virus? Perhaps simply a pictorial series like Egyptian glyphs that makes itself real». William S. Burroughs, Ah Pook is here, (Parchment: Riverrun Press, 1983), 102. 5: William S. Burroughs, The job (London: Penguin, 1989), 12. 6: William S. Burroughs, The revised boy scout manual (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2018), 98. 58

some technologies grow and sharp-eyed birds. The bird's spawn. Engineers speak of small brain and clumsy wings "hybrids," of "competing could not block the development technologies," and of their of human hands, minds, and "proliferation." IBM Director of shotguns. Likewise, local prohibi- Research Ralph E. Gomory em- tions cannot block advances in phasizes the evolutionary nature military and commercial technol- of technology, writing that ogy. It seems that we must guide "technology development is the technology race or die, yet much more evolutionary and the force of technological evolu- much less revolutionary or break- tion makes a mockery of an- through-oriented than most peo- titechnology movements: demo- ple imagine." (Indeed, even cratic movements for local re- breakthroughs as important as straint can only restrain the molecular assemblers will develop world's democracies, not the through many small steps.) In world as a whole».7 the quote that heads this chapter, In short, we found ourselves Professor Herbert A. Simon of trapped inside ourselves, collapsed in Carnegie-Mellon University urges the closed rooms of our skull, and us to "think of the design pro- held in check by parasites of plane- cess as involving first the genera- tary dimension - locked in a arms tion of alternatives and then the race for absolute supremacy which testing of these alternatives obviously exceed the scope and the against a whole array of goals of our species, but on which we requirements and constraints." still build our very survival. «Reality» Generation and testing of alter- should be «understood to be com- natives is synonymous with varia- posed of fictions – consistent semiot- tion and selection. […] The glob- ic terrains that condition perceptual, al technology race has been ac- affective and behaviorial responses».8 celerating for billions of years. The entities mock us from the moist The earthworm's blindness could backrooms of our skull, hidden deep not block the development of within our sore eye sockets as we

7: K. Eric Drexler, Engines of creation (New York: Anchor Books, 1986), 32-43. 8: CCRU, “Lemurian Time War,” in Writings: 1997-2003, (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), ((:))(::) [35]. 59 write another word: «My reluctant author types: I AM, my reluctant 9 author types. I am evoked». Irremediably struck by this revelation and incapable of wrestling our way out of this extreme constraint, we too began to weave lullabies; we took up writing, often involuntarily, nursery rhymes made to be repeated endlessly inside our cells, until sleep eventually comes to snuff us in front of our screens. We called these echo- ing lullabies, stunned and guided by an otherworldly sense of humour, Bacteriophage / Hans-Wolfgang copypasta, replicant texts playing the Ackermann / in “The Third Age of game of unnatural selection. They Phage” were clearly not about meaning any longer – but this is an old and bor- and the cruel ethos of sub-cognitive ing intuition at this point – they selection. «If you look for meaning, were about the feral intensities of our you'll miss everything that happens».10 gut-splitting convulsions of laughter

COPYPASTA = 197 = NETWORKS = BOTTLENECK = NO MAN’S LAND

*** The reason which makes copy- memes, is straight-forward: while pastas a far more intriguing phenome- memes use the brute force of their non when confronted with its twin images to hijack our cognitive ener- companion in the quest for our per- gies towards the most fruitless repro- ennial, planetary cyber-hypnosis, duction, the anal insemination and

9: Elytron. Frass, “Pseudonym as doppleganger,” on X-R-A-Y, May 15, 2018 (http://x-r-a-y.com/pseudonym-as- doppelganger-by-elytron-frass/fiction/) 10: https://twitter.com/bognamk/status/1220275954766925824 60 immaculate conception of internet form. Even more importantly, it is content, copypastas relay on the cun- able to operate as a causal factor ning utilization of the humanity’s itself, and thus to produce the very most enlightened and quintessential effects it accommodates itself to»,11 species-specific tool: words. but its methods are still far too brute for our taste. Making an interesting meme is relatively easy. A meme is usually The copypasta, clearly, cannot either a simple visual assault, which use such simplistic tools. Being sole- opens a wound we can’t peel our eyes ly text-based, it must insert itself in off of in the screen before us, or a the bloodstream which keeps the smart and economic utilization of a semiotic chain rolling. It must create well-trodden visual trope. A meme, in a bond with the tools we use to con- order to function and proliferate, uses sciously describe and calibrate our- the most primitive forms of (anti-) selves. It must engender a vampyric semiotic propagation: the writing on empathy12 which locks our higher the wall, which forcefully captures mentations into a deep symbiotic your attention; bright, over-saturated acquiescence, causing maximally effec- colours or familiar patterns squirted tive parasitism and camouflaging it- directly into your retina and, from self in plain sight amongst our most there, towards your central nervous powerful forms of cognitive species- system, pre-consciously and pre- preservation. In other words, it must cognitively; the lively and childish turn words against us and that is a march of an endless series of weapon- fascinating endeavour from an ab- ized eyecandies, stomping on a hu- stract epidemiological point of view. man face forever. It might be true This explains, partially and exo- that: «The successful meme is charac- terically, the comparison with the terized by aesthetic features irreduci- lullaby-form, the reason why the blind ble to representational adequacy, from intelligence of unnatural selection elegance of construction to dramatic

11: Nick Land, “Gyres,” on Outside In, June 18, 2014 (http://www.xenosystems.net/gyres/#more-2839) 12: «In cases of vampirism, empathy is not an in itself as in episodes of sadistic empathy; rather it is a means to intensify or enrich one’s own experience. […] Vampiristic empathy creates its own feedback loop. Under obsessive observation, the observed’s life appears more present, more perfect, more original or more intense. In comparison, the vampire’s own life will appear dull, empty and meaningless, full of doubt and failure. This emptying of the self feeds the vampire’s emotional hunger». Fritz Alwin Breithaupt, The dark sides of empathy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 218-219. 61 favoured the shape “string of words which in turn sediment in a precise repeated mindlessly, with minimal but but unwilled, always-mutilated and effective variation, to put our mind to blind structure. If in «the Abrahamic sleep.” This form, this approximation tradition, the Word of God antici- towards mental-death through the pates creation. Insofar as scripture utilization of our most effective tools faithfully records this Word, the holy for mentation is the most virulent writings correspond to a level of reali- shape our words have assumed, on a ty more fundamental than nature, and historical/biological basis, while try- one that the ‘book of nature’ refer- ing to unshackle themselves from ences, as the key to its final meaning. their host. It is the most absurd The unfolding of creation in time form of word-uttering, being the pre- follows a narrative plotted in eternity, condition for the cessation of the in which history and divine provi- utterer itself (whether by falling dence are necessarily identical. There asleep, locking itself in the frenzied can be no true accidents, or coinci- stasis of a deathless and a-futural dences»13 the numeralized word push- present or being forced to repeat the es terminally towards the esoteric, the same text in every corner of the web superfluously cruel, the unneeded and mindlessly). horrific. On an esoteric level, the lullaby- «Assume, entirely hypothetically, form, approximating itself asymptoti- that supernatural intelligence or cally to pure seriality and unshackled obscure complexities in the topo- repetition, strips the Word of his logical structure of time had Abrahamic nature, where God’s ver- sedimented abysmal depths of bal fiat creates the plot along which significance into the superficial nature unfolds, and hinges, ultimately, occurrences of the world. The towards numeralization and qwerty- ‘Book of Creation’ is then legi- esque strings, which coil around ble at (very) many different lev- themselves leaving a trail of loose els, with every random or incon- ends in their wake. The lullaby auto- sequential detail of relatively matically assembles itself through exoteric features providing materi- minimal additions and subtractions, al for systems of information

13: Nick Land, “Gnon and OOon,” on Outside In, Sep. 13, 2013 (http://www.xenosystems.net/gnon-and-ooon/) 62

further ‘down’. The deeper one ed, because thinking in words excavates into the ‘meaningless and numbers simultaneously is chaos ’ of the exoteric communi- hard, cative substrate, the more unclut- because maintaining sustained tered one’s access to the signals parallel intelligibility in both is of utter Outsideness. Since ‘one’ close to impossible, is, to its quick, a signaletic prod- because the attempt to do so is uct, this cryptographic enterprise (exoterically) senseless, and be- is irreducibly a voyage, transmu- cause practicality dominates. The tation, and disillusionment. […] esoteric realm is not forbidden, Nevertheless, the linguistic and but simply arithmetical aspects are in unneeded».14 fact quite strictly separat- LULLABY-FORM = 236 = MARY MAGDALENE = PRIMAL SCREAM = 11

*** It is not a coincidence that the most uated top of my class in the famous copypasta, the Navy Seal Navy Seals, and I've been in- copypasta, is centred around an indi- volved in numerous secret raids vidual’s complete lack of agency and on Al-Quaeda, and I have over his illusory sense of self-ownership. 300 confirmed kills. I am The Navy Seal copypasta is a text trained in gorilla warfare and I'm which repeats maniacally, over and the top sniper in the entire US over again, the intimidations and armed forces. You are nothing threats spouted by a supposed ex- to me but just another target. I Navy seal soldier. Let us quote it at will wipe you the fuck out with length: precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this «What the fuck did you just Earth, mark my fucking words. fucking say about me, you little You think you can get away with bitch? I'll have you know I grad- saying that shit to me over the

14: Land, “Gnon and OOon,” web. 63

Internet? Think again, fucker. As The man yells, boasting about a we speak I am contacting my power and an agency he clearly secret network of spies across doesn’t have - about unleashing a the USA and your IP is being storm which clearly engulfs, first and traced right now so you better foremost, himself, repeating his words prepare for the storm, maggot. ad nauseam, ripping his tongue and The storm that wipes out the his voice right out of his throat, ren- pathetic little thing you call your dering them completely autonomous life. You're fucking dead, kid. I of any subjective and species-specific can be anywhere, anytime, and I will. As the swarms repeat his unwill- can kill you in over seven hun- ing mantra continuously, with little to dred ways, and that's just with no variations to the original source, my bare hands. Not only am I the humanity of the words uttered extensively trained in unarmed melts away, the agency hubristically combat, but I have access to the spouted, with all his macho humanist entire arsenal of the United -militarism, becomes more and more States Marine Corps and I will ridiculous and improbable and all use it to its full extent to wipe that remains is the virality at the core your miserable ass off the face of of every phoneme. the continent, you little shit. If This archetypal copypasta is the only you could have known what epitome of the death of the sovereign unholy retribution your little subject as a positive entity, as a king "clever" comment was about to of his own words, and the dawn of bring down upon you, maybe the most disquieting thought: sover- you would have held your fuck- eignty as utter, asymmetric dissolu- ing tongue. But you couldn't, tion, completely tilted towards the you didn't, and now you're pay- compulsive and the machinic, and ing the price, you goddamn idi- technomic and unhuman dispersal ot. I will shit fury all over you through our higher cognitive func- and you will drown in it. You're tions. The new sovereign is she who fucking dead, kiddo».15 lets the virus gnaw at his species- being more thoroughly; the new pu-

15: “Navy Seal Copypasta,” on Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/navy-seal-copypasta) 64 trid subjecthood belongs to she who understands that, just like Klossowskian ontological sodomy, words are «functions neither for the reproduction of the species nor for species bonding», they are «an act done to gore the partner and release the germ of the species in his excrement», the cruel application of «the principle of affinity in what will form integral monstrosity».16 Copypastas are like the meaningless string of numbers carved in Donnie Darko’s arm, count- ing down towards nothing but the next turning of the gyre. NAVY SEAL = 171 = AZATHOTH = BLACK EARTH

*** The field of copypasta studies horrid word-mongrels. has been sleeping on this unhuman The only possible exception to potential of copypasta, of this linguis- this claim is probably, involuntarily, tic sodomy of a moaning human Nick Land, who has utilized a very race. The main reason behind this close approximation of copypastas as theoretical slumbering, clearly, is that means to present abstract horror as this field of research does not yet an unknown unknown left ultimately exist in any capacity, be it academic, unknown. In fact, if one looks at his para-academic or anti-academic. recent fictional output – especially While memes have received at least Bloody Mary, Patience, Mermaids, some cringe-worthy commentaries Wallypede Girl and the, at the time about their human, all-too-human of writing, unfolding series Things political implications, a precise re- left unsaid – they will easily realise search program of the anti-political how these stories tend towards the semiotic copypasta warfare has been copypasta form, both in content, with absolutely non-existent. Going for- stories concentrating mainly on repe- ward more people should consider tition, initiation and oceanic plague- dedicating some time to the complex dynamics, and in style, being short and virulent dynamics of verbal super- story posted somewhat anonymously normal stimulation and the poetics of on the internet, urging the reader to the automatic copy-and-pasting of spread them unproductively across

16: Pierre Klossowski, Sade my neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), xiii, 24. 65 cyberspace to curse and soothe a new For now, let us finish this work unwilling reader. They are not stories, by highlighting the ethical injunction with plots to armour the unity of which undercuts all of these stories sense, continuity and authorship, they and the nascent, aberrant field of copy- are strings of words with a Final At- pasta studies. We must, going forward, tractor attached at their tail end, built incentivize propagation, poetic war and for hunting: «Hard consonants – cat- chaos in order to fully appreciate the stutter, catastrophe, cataclysmic, tacti- powers secreted by this terminally cal, contracts – words like that could automatic writing, which has stripped attract it. It hunts for fun».17 A more sapience from our species’ grip. The thorough engagement with their sirens have been singing for far too themes and their formal novelty will long from the depths of our cognition, come in the near future, Katak willing. we must start to untie ourselves and marvel at our shipwreck. We must expose ourselves to virulence, for virulence is the ultimate principle of all Outside-worship. «Against this quali- fied experimentalism (the false ‘novelty’ of catastrophic modernity) […] reckless adherence to the modern- ist dictum that novelty is to be gener- ated at any cost, privileging formal experimentation—towards the desola- tion of all intelligible form—over human preservation, and locking technique onto an inhuman vector of runaway automation that, for better or worse, charts the decline of human values as modernity hands the latter Nam-Shub of Enki / over to its machinic successor in final, 18 Courtesy of Encyclopedia Satanica fatal phase shift».

17: Nick Land, “Patience,” on Outside In, Nov. 11, 2019 (http://www.xenosystems.net/patience/) 18: Amy Ireland, “The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology,” on Urbanomic, 2017 (https:// www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/) 66

We must create ever-more liquid «Entropy is toxic, but and fractured structures to accommo- entropy production is rough- date the unwilled, the disgusting, the ly synonymous with intelligence. unhuman, the 333-current which fer- A dynamically innovative order, ments in the bowels of modernity; we of any kind, does not suppress have to face the parts of the general the production of entropy — it economic movements of our inorgan- instantiates an efficient mecha- ic and undead unconscious we find nism for entropy dissipation. […] morally repulsive, despicable and The problem with bad govern- pathogenic, in all their preternatural ment, which is to say glory, to counter any form of regres- with defective mechanisms of sive identitarianism and subjective and selection, is an inability to fol- collective counter-revolution. We low Cthulhu far enough. It is must let the Outside excite us. from turbulence that all things come».19 SIREN = 110 = BABALON

*** At the time of writing this piece,20 the motor of the world, the true I could have not foreseen the way Spirit moving History forward. the world would have developed in No political system, no human the coming months. In a matter of security measure could stop the weeks, the world was gripped by a virus from spreading in the viral threat, coronavirus, and the population and things will only get city I’ve lived in all my life was worse from here. In the light of put under military quarantine. this havoc, do not underestimate Virality proved, once again, to be the power of cognitive viruses…21 CORONAVIRUS = 254 = GRUPPO DI NUN = BLACK TENTACLES = AND MY EMO SHIT

19: Nick Land, “On chaos,” on Outside In, April 25, 2014 (http://www.xenosystems.net/on-chaos/) 20: You listed about 20 quotes who had influenced you, some of them quite unrelated, and I wasn’t even on there. Why should I expect a consistent bibliography. 21: Cfr. Laurent Hébert-Dufrense et al., “Macroscopic patterns of interacting contagions are indistinguishable from social reinforcement,” in Nature Physics (2020) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0791-2 67

Sub Rosa David Roden

***The Drone ing the Thesis back like some creak- It was warming outside, phos- ing automaton. You kissed her shoul- phorescent with heat, becalmed apart der and the skin above her hip, alter- from the disconsolate sound of a nately silky and furrowed with grey lonely fishing vessel and the desolate scales and sinewy subcutaneous ridges cries of few sea birds wheeling over that hardened and shifted to your the trapped city. touch: her feral under-presence. L always felt cool to your touch, Earlier, you had woken to the though the air conditioner had died tentative hum of a drone sent up two days back and the room baked from the African shore, wondering if like a prison. it was looking for L and had con- soled yourself that, were it to fire a ***Anna couple of Hellfires into the building, it wouldn’t matter much, and drifted L put on her red dress and straw under the thin cotton sheet, only hat. The morning seemed to energize stirring to the distant thud of ordi- her as much as it enervated you. She nance down the coast. You wondered conversed in Greek to Anna, the if it was running autonomously and, elderly owner of the old pension that on some insensate whim, had decided you rented for cans of beans and to shell the University. You had processed meat. She could have easi- driven up to the site with L to visit ly retrieved them for herself from one an old colleague. But she was gone; of the abandoned supermarkets but maybe a cadaver now, picked clean seemed to enjoy the decorousness of by the cats that had haunted its corri- the arrangement. There were a few dors once. Verminous familiars, they others like her in the City who had had slipped pragmatically inland to refused the one-way ferry trip to the the cooler highlands. Libyan shore and the refugee camps the Syndics had organized there. L slept through it all, sometimes blissfully still, sometimes soliloquiz- She spent daytime like an unqui-

81 et spirit in the cool of her shadowed Perhaps that is why your host basement. You heard her moving was keen to keep her close at and, as objects with the deliberateness of one a potential lifeline perhaps, and why engaged in a long-term construction her prey always came to her... If L project, often conversing with herself inhabited a small cone of world, An- or to another, a visitor who was nev- na was egressing from it along with er identified or seen entering or exit- the remaining Europeans. ing the apartment. She emerged al- The corridor led into the source ways to sit out in the narrow alley, of the grayish light, a bare cavernous taking in the evening light or wander- room, on whose floor lay a body ing off on somnambulistic walks to a wreathed in whirling luminous motes, ruined red factory by the urban like spoors. It was puffy and irregu- beach. lar, with a harness of black leather You had entered the basement straps straining at uncertain contours. only once. That morning, there had It was stroking itself with a familiar been a loud clap that had shaken the bony yellow hand, flowing like oil building like a momentary quake or under the harness, fingers occasionally sonic boom. L had been off looking injected through its surface, discover- for custom in one of the less unin- ing itself. habited suburbs. You descended the You heard Anna’s voice, or a stairs to the ground floor, then the memory of it, tinny, as from a primi- next flight to Anna’s door, which was tive recording, though you saw noth- ajar. You opened it hesitantly, noting ing there resembling a head. You the liquid gray light of the corridor realized that you were outside L’s beyond, air that seemed at once perimeter now and could no longer soupy and refrigerated. rely on her protection. You withdrew, The three months or so during quietly shutting the external door which you had accompanied L on her beyond you. journey south had inured you to the That evening, Anna emerged eclipse of reality. But, despite her primly dressed in black as usual and idiosyncrasies, L was a rule-bound sat intently watching the covered ocu- creature whose expectations seemed lus of the medieval town house at the to mold or remake the world.

82 end of the alley. Then, as if tipped lar noise. Together, you caught frag- off by a subaudible signal, departed ments of the Thesis. for the factory. The new mystical theology con- ***The Bird Oracle cerning a red pleroma, which did not so much emanate from the Godhead With L you followed the usual as call it forth with transcendent suf- path along the abandoned harbor, its fering. L had recited her own version bars and restaurants empty, their plas- of the Thesis every night since arriv- tic tables and chairs scattered or over- ing at this coastal city. turned. Even where you could not understand what she said, you recognized A few days ago, L had found the its asymmetric beats as if the Bird Bird Oracle in the mosque that had Tower had taken up residence in her served for years as a municipal art before she found it, as if hinting of gallery. Now she wanted to show it some identity of affiliation and pur- to you. pose. Then you pretended to sleep The Oracle was woven with hu- while the Thesis echoed in vaster man hair, retrieved from the bodies spaces than the stifling back bed- desiccating in apartments or offices. room of the first-floor apartment. It had embedded constructs of shell “Is this the one you serve” you and papier mache, small bones affixed asked as she stared intently at the with a cement fashioned with human mouthlike, circular opening of the excrement. This passionate, weeping pillar. articulation rose to nearly touch the dome of the former mosque. She turned and smiled. “Some of us used to be fanatics. Not now. At its midpoint there was a cir- But it’s hard to distance oneself from cular opening, through which faint one’s roots completely …” tinny glossolalia sometimes issued, delivered in a throaty masculine At that point you noted that voice: passages of Greek, Latin, something angular and bony, like a French, English, German concatenat- vestigial wing was straining under the ed between stark silences and inter- back of her summer dress. L sighed, mittent clicking - radio static or stel- reached back and quieted the extru-

83 sion. “Call it nostalgia, if you wish” fastidiously avoiding inflamed sores she said in accentless English “You weeping milky pus like nascent will understand shortly.” Strangely, breasts. you did not ask about the “us,” the L began to kick the prone, dead others like her, yet the question re- god, screaming like a harpy, as his mained: where were they and why had organs leaked through rents in his they come now? puffy, obese body. Before, her vio- One morning, you woke alone in lence had always been deliberate, the thick heat. You pulled on some never like this. shorts, a t-shirt, and canvass shoes You picked up L’s dress and and ran along the harbor, past the walked back to the apartment without lighthouse, to the humped domes of looking back at the squat six-domed the former mosque. structure. After the screaming had Within, the ‘Oracle’ lay in reek- stopped the litany of the Rose re- ing clumps, as if torn apart by a sumed from black stone mouths. bear. Amid the bales of hair and shit, ***The Rose plastic, bone, L stood with her preda- It had taken hours to remove the tory body darkly streaked from bur- stink of feces and decay from her rowing into its mass. Her true out- body and hair, but she had emerged line against the aching sky: like that later from the shower clean and pre- of a hulking spider or mantis. A man sentable, ready for your midday swim. in the cassock of an Orthodox priest lay in the wreckage, caked with oracu- This was the day you encoun- lar juice. L had broken his neck – tered the cous cous seller in his little which bent to left in an acute angle. kiosk by the harbor. Konrad was a His mouth was wide open, revealing tall, good-looking young man with a delicate yellow tongue. prematurely receding hair. He said he had been a philosophy student in “His name was Dionysius” L Paris before trailing south with the said, “He stole this name from a rest of the refugees. God, and became something half divine.” She tittered, pulling the cas- You asked him hesitantly about sock up over the new god’s body, England, whether there was any news.

He said all communication with the Konrad’s smile conveyed wound- island had ceased months back. A ed cynicism that you found both few last emails and texts had talked morally admirable and facile. He said of shrouds enveloping some of the it was better to let it all go, whether cities, canopies beneath which noth- into shrouds, or into the other de- ing was entirely alive, mendicants files. Better, he remarked, to enjoy whose bodies were filled with birds the vegetable tagine he had cooked and carnivals where the dead were for their arrival, accompanied by local temporarily enlivened, fucked, and wild greens and mint tea. killed again. He paused after the last The food was already arranged detail and smiled. on one of the white plastic tables “Nobody has taken them seri- outside his booth, on a clean white ously for, since ever” L muttered “Let cloth. While you were eating, L them do their own thing.” asked him how he had known where to find us. Konrad responded by adopting another tack: “We took our interpre- “There are many stories about tations of the world too literally.” He you in the mainland cities” – he took out his phone and showed pic- looked at L intently: “I’d heard you’d tures of some Northern towns. Rip- taken one of the last ferries south. It pling purple-grey shrouds covered was simple inference. The Priest, entire blocks of Paris and Tours. Dionysus, told me where to find you. There was a shot of a solitary figure Does he realize he is dead?” walking past a row of suburban hous- After the meal, you realized that es, grainy, as if seen through black it wouldn’t end here. L ate only to snow or grit. The figure’s edges were feed her host body and did this rare- indistinct and bulbous, as if balloons ly, often out of politeness. or fungi were growing out of its flesh. And it was not exactly walking. Konrad took you to the impromptu home in the former “Of course, the stories are ex- Covered Market, a huge cruciform travagant. We’re making up what we structure with a darkly glazed roof cannot know. I have disavowed Phi- supported by wrought iron struts. losophy of course.”

The building had been stripped. ing that? ….” His lips puffed out Inside, there was only a cavernous dismissively, gesturing to the knives space of bare concrete floor broken and other implements on the tray. at intervals by skeletal iron columns. It was one of L’s most beautiful The air was cool and musty, and you murders. They were like an experi- noticed filaments of something like enced couple together. At each stage mold or spider web filling the space. he would stroke and caress some part Their origin was unclear. The area of his body – his tender thighs, his under the center of the cruciform was honed belly or nipples. She respond- illuminated by light from a domed ed at first with the tip of a lighted glass roof. There was a single surgical cigarette, singing red cavities like or mortuary table under the dome, at delicate, puckering mouths. Konrad’s the back of which something seemed body clenched, shuddering in starts to flap in the subdued light, unctu- as L methodically burned his sides, ously understated, doing its best to thighs and stomach. be inconspicuous. You thought it resembled a vast projection of a sea The aroma of flesh on the air cucumber ovary you’d eaten on the reminded you that you hadn’t eaten coast, at other times a dim, fractally meat in a long while. Despite the petalled rose. tagine, were licking your lips while L shrugged off her dress, her body Konrad was undressed before the elongating and hardening underneath table, folding his pants and t-shirt to his desire. neatly on the tray beside it. He had a good well-maintained body, athletic You had seen this how many but sweet and soft – the kind L fa- times? First in that narrow alleyway vored. His penis was already swollen in Dubrovnik, where a young and distended. It aroused you to woman had tracked her down and watch him nurse the erection as he asked her favour. You came upon lay on the table with the shimmering them in the final stages, as she rose swaying in the gloom behind danced and spasmed in her own him. blood. “I think anything is possible Then many times on your jour- now. What’s the point in understand- ney south. Konrad had parted his

86 legs, sweetly stroking his thighs as drawing an exquisitely long moan and she sucked him into her mouth, a wordless entreaty to be killed. Kon- working his head, her long porcelain rad clutched tight, riding the meta- body gyrating in time as her cilium chronal wave, as he arched hot skin whipped from its recess, tentatively on cold enamel. probing the soft tissue of his rectum. In the shadowy depths of the old You put your hand to your lips as he Market, the Rose swelled and corus- arched, a natural urge to defecate cated with hungry black veins as L suppressed by musky opiates secreted split the cous cous seller open, tear- from cilial micropores while oily ing into his small intestine and upper pseudopods fibrillated his prostate, body.

Coat of Androidica / Hallidonto / Digital Collage / 2020 87

An Introduction to Numogoetics V.M.

With the slow erasure of Nma culture thanks to the imperialism and colonization of the 20th century, the lemurs and their priests had to find a new way to connect with their sorcerous lineage. The Tak-Nma, having already foreseen the inevitability of their demise, ensured that their death would be the great sacrifice that begat their immortality. Suka showed them through the gate and, even though they were digging their own graves, they slept peacefully knowing that their family tree would not end with Krakatoa. Fast forward sixty years and the last hold-outs of the Dib-Nma are being assimilated into the rest of Java. One of their kids hallucinates a beat in her head, not realizing that half the world is dreaming of it too. She’s headlining this, you know? You see, we always think of thunder as coming from lightning, but thunder is what assures us that lightning ever happened in the first place. Krakatoa was the thunder. - Gunter, Earth’s Heartbeat: The Rave on a Volcano that Changed Dance Music Forever

You’re reading this because This text is an introduction to you’ve heard the call of time-sorcery. the Pandemonium Matrix, otherwise If you think you haven’t, play along known as the “demonism” side of for a while and see if you don’t time-sorcery. This aspect took on a change your mind by the end. If it name as the twin to numogrammat- starts making too much sense, don’t ics: numogoetics. This means you be afraid to come back to it later. can restate the opening line of Whether or not you believe me right Pandemonium as: Pandemonium is now, we have all the time in the the complete system of Lemurian world. numogoetics and numogrammatics.

The call of time-sorcery sounded other at first. Just remember that when Tak-Nma shamans rode the they are different aspects of the same shock-wave of Krakatoa’s explosion thing. to the other side of the planet, This introduction will cover how achieving total permeation of the to read the Pandemonium Matrix as signal that would soon be passed well as how to start your adventures down from the Dib-Nma dream-witch in numogoetics. It is best to begin to Echidna Stillwell and then to oth- your journey prepared instead of er members of The Cthulhu Club. stumbling down the rabbit hole, nev- Their works would be updated, trans- er to return. Some knowledge, how- lated, and digitized by the MVU in ever, can only be passed down by the nineties, further cementing its Murmur herself. virulence. Now, twenty years later, a team of sorcerers, magicians, and If you are familiar with any sys- priestesses have begun tirelessly de- tem of magic, then the esoteric sig- coding the secrets of the numogram. nificance of the time-sorcery system will begin to jump out at you with The core text of numogoetics is enough study. A disciplined student the Pandemonium Matrix, which is can translate their work into numo- the list of all demons with their rites grammatics or numogoetics with ease and associations. While an in-depth once the necessary connections be- understanding of the numogram and tween the two have been made. Like its esoteric meanings will make your learning any other language, the train- work with numogoetics easier, it is ing wheels are necessary until immer- by no means required in order to call sion is complete and its understand- up the demons. That work is likely ing becomes a passive quality that to happen concurrently, and depend- leads to merely speaking the language ing on your background you will instead of translating it from your likely gravitate towards one or the original tongue. Pandemonium The Pandemonium page has five Matrix which consists of demonic sections: an introduction describing entries, and descriptions of decadence, time-sorcery, the Pandemonium subdecadence, and decadology.

The information on this page is understanding of one of the most structured in such a way that it seems important tools at your disposal as a utterly incomprehensible to anyone time-sorcerer. looking at it for the first time. Part The Pandemonium Matrix is the of initiation is decoding the secrets bulk of the page and is a list of all within, but the exoteric values and unique net-spans and their descriptions still require glossing if associations. These entries are they are to be communicated about organized by mesh-value and each at scale. This way, you can skip the have the same general structure. This cross-referencing and come to a basic is Lurgo’s entry:

Mesh-00: Lurgo (Legba). (Terminal) Initiator. (Clicks Gt-00). Pitch Ana-1. Net-Span 1::0. Amphidemon of Openings. (The Door of Doors). Cipher Gt-01, Gt-10. 1st Door (The Pod) [Mercury], Dorsal. 1st Phase-limit. Decadology. C/tp-#7, Mj+ [7C]. Rt-1:[1890] Spinal-voyage (fate line), programming.

There is a lot of information here and very little punctuation or explanation. It is best to simply explain it in order:

Mesh-00: The number of the demon in question. Mesh values go from mesh-00 to mesh-44. Lurgo (Legba): The first word is the name of the demon, while the word in quota- tions suggests a nickname or alternative name. (Terminal) Initiator: This is Echidna Stillwell’s translation of the name of the demon. (Clicks Gt-00): A gate is clicked when a demon’s mesh-value ciphers (see below) a gate’s value. Pitch Ana-1: The pitch of a demon refers to how imbalanced it is in a positive or negative direction. A pitch can range from Ana-7 to Cth-7, including null pitch (perfect balance) between Cth-1 and Ana-1 (only used by the five syzygies). Net-span 1::0: A demon’s net-span shows the two zones that are the two ends of a demon. It is written in the Pandemonium Matrix as Bigger::Smaller so that it is grouped by phases, meaning grouped by the larger value in the net-span. Amphidemon of Openings: This is the demon’s title. A demon can be categorized as an amphidemon, a chronodemon, or a xenodemon based on which zones it traf- fics between and where they are on the numogram. (The Door of Doors): An alternative title, referring to the fact that Lurgo is the first door because she begins the first phase of the numogram.

Ciphers Gt-01, Gt-10: Refers to the gates that the net-span ciphers if the net-span were written as a number. Ciphering can happen with either value in either place, which is why Lurgo can cipher both Gt-01 and Gt-10. Ciphering can also be applied to all other related numbers (or unrelated ones). 1st Door (The Pod): Designates the demon as the first demon of a phase as well as describes what that phase symbolically represents in the parentheses. [Mercury]: This denotes which planet rules the demon’s phase. Dorsal: Denotes which part of the spine the phase represents.

1st Phase-limit: Denotes that this demon is the last demon of a phase. Decadology. C/tp-#7, Mj+ [7C]: Denotes the decadology of the demon. C/tp- refers to the cluster type, while Mj+ denotes both the demon’s major or minor status as well as its pitch polarity. These two aspects come together as [7C], which represents the 7 of Clubs card. This means that when playing the game decadence, the 7 of Clubs represents Lurgo. Rt-1:[1890] Spinal-voyage (fate line), programming: This denotes the first rite of Lurgo, [1890]. Each number in the brackets symbolizes a zone that the rite moves through. The words that follow are the symbols and associations of the given rite. A sub-routine for a rite suggests that there is another path that the rite can take while still following the same order of zones, but Lurgo has zero sub-routines so this is left off of her entry.

There are several pieces that are example 9::8’s movement through Gt not described above because they do -36. not apply to Lurgo but do apply to Decadence involves a deck of other demons. For example, what it cards and making pairs which sum to means to prowl, haunt, or shadow a 10 (9 in subdecadence). The decadol- gate or current. A demon prowls a ogy section denotes which card a current when it has a rite which per- demon is assigned to, with the syzy- fectly follows the direction that the getic demons being assigned to no current goes, for example 8::7 prowls card (except Katak) and the chaotic the surge-current. 8::2, on the other xenodemons being viciously sup- hand, shadows the surge-current be- pressed by the AOE. As it stands, cause it travels the current but then the AOE Hall of Records has not goes to the syzygetic pair instead of responded to requests for releasing of staying at the end of the current. AOE’s angelology tables, which Likewise, a demon haunts a gate makes decadence’s value to a time- when it has a rite that involves only sorcerer questionable at best. Howev- one movement through said gate, for 91 er, though subdecadence has been A full explanation of each lemur suppressed, clever application of what will be available once the Lemurian we currently know allows us to build Necronomicon has been completely a full subdecadence card pack. extracted and properly translated into our current language. Until that Subdecadence adds four queens point, careful consideration of the representing the chaotic xenodemons, numogrammatics of a demon, in each with a cluster-type of 0. Since addition to usage of the supplemen- we already have their pitch-polarity, tary explanations above as well as the the only aspect that we are missing is explanations found in CCRU’s glos- whether they are major or minor sary can provide the practitioner with rites. This is solved for us, however, all the tools necessary to perform an by their cluster-type being 0. That evocation or invocation of any given means that the rite described in their demon. decadology is one which moves from 9::0 to 6::3, meaning that 9::6 and Consider yourself warned. 9::3 are major while 3::0 and 6::0 are minor. With this knowledge, one Notes on Summoning can build and use a full subdecadence The summoning of a demon pack. requires first and foremost a portal to The full decadological and sor- the home of the lemurs: the Uttermi- cerous implications of calling a de- nus of Cthelll which exists beyond mon through subdecadence have yet Gt-45. This portal must allow de- to be fully understood, however early mons to traffic their likeness through experiments suggest that the game it in order to facilitate communica- itself can be used as both a process tion and bargaining. While each par- of divination as well as a template for ticular entity has their own prefer- cartomantic sorcery. Careful priming ences, likes, dislikes, etc, one can or stacking of the deck can lead to make contact with any demon by the specific outcome one desires, writing their name, net-span, or a while the inherent uncertainty when sigil describing them within a Portal building 9-summing card pairs gives of Cthelll. the practitioner a more active hand in the weaving of the narrative.

The Portal of Cthelll can be noise as a precaution, one can better personalized to fit the preference of troubleshoot their work. the sorcerer as long as the demon The first summoning recorded finds the design agreeable. Until fur- for public record used a black mirror ther experiments are done on the with a triangle drawn inside of it to ideal Portal of Cthelll, the sky is the summon the five syzygetic demons. limit and one should not be afraid to Experiments since then have included explore whatever depictions, designs, a lava lamp, the clouds, as well as or devices one comes across that may full on invocation. Certain entities function as a proper portal. One should be invoked with extreme cau- thing is certain: only by capturing the tion, though hopefully that doesn’t essence of Gt-45 can one commune have to be said in the first place. with a demon. As part of working within the While any personal sigilization system of Pandemonium, translating of a given demon may succeed in protection spells and routines must dialing, one ought to adhere to per- be done before more dangerous work sonal guidelines of sigilization in is tried. Surviving the numogram order to have a common language requires a different approach than between each demon. There have merely drawing up a circle of salt and been no known reports of calling one repeating the names of God. To this thing and getting another, but a lax point, only in certain specific circum- pen or tongue may be just the door stances has traditional banishing ef- required for something utterly unwant- forts affected the demons of the ed to sneak its way into your black Lemurian Necronomicon. mirror. By filtering out unneeded

Neo-Amazonian Numogram courtesy of @lilypatchwork

94 aesthetics after the end of the world / Frida Ortgies-Tonn / CAD-Cut acrylic paint on styrofoam / 2018 / 0.48 x 0.39 x 0.05 m

Black Hole/Black Sun CJ Severin

“The astronomer may on occasions destroy, for reasons lying entirely within his specialty, a world-view that had previously made the universe meaningful for the members of a whole civilization, specialist and nonspecialist alike.” -Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution1

“…the bizarre ways in which it bends space and time are completely outside our common experience, and yet a black hole belongs to the natural-material cosmos — a cosmos which must therefore be much stranger than our ordinary experience can comprehend.” -Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie2

The Picture or The Song? nor two-dimensional, however, but was instead the surface of the Earth Unlike previously created itself. images of black holes, the one re- Using nine radio dishes spread leased by the Event Horizon Tele- across four continents, the Event scope project in April 2019 was not Horizon Telescope’s [EHT] process a mathematical simulation nor an had very little in common with the artistic approximation but was instead photographic or telescopic processes something more photographic. Like a as they had developed in the centuries photograph this image was produced prior. In capturing an image of a through the direct impression of light black hole, that is, a phenomenon as its movement was captured as a that necessarily excludes the presence still, two-dimensional reproduction of light, the EHT had to turn away onto a primed surface. In this case from the reflections and impressions that primed surface was neither still

1: Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7/8. 2: Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 15. 96 of light that define optical image fect rendition of the song.”3 With production and move toward a pro- this early success of working through cess that bares little resemblance to a planetary-posthuman, sonic register anthropomorphic vision. In this the the EHT team makes clear their Earth itself was transformed by these intentions to continue reconfiguring dishes into a receptor for a new sort the Earth in a way that folds and of sensory experience capable of blurs familiar, organic ways of “seeing” in a way that had been previ- “looking” into new machinic forms ously excluded by working through a of “listening” out into the universe. lens built on the model of human By compressing this sonic data sight. into a photographic image there is By the EHT team’s description, necessarily some amount of precision this transformation is more easily and objectivity lost for the sake of comprehended sonically as their dish- creating something intelligible to es receive waves of raw data to be human eyes and human minds, but it computationally aggregated in a pro- is also through this reduction that cess of machinic listening they de- the EHT project is enabled to con- scribe as if one was “listening for the tinue. Compressing their data into notes to a song.” As more data this final, perceptible image is too comes in, the more “notes” become what brings the project out of the clear, although for now the image realm of specialized, astronomical remains blurry and incomplete as if research and into the public, drawing the song was “played on a piano that together a generalized consciousness has a lot of broken keys.” As the of the planet’s inhabitants toward Earth is further transformed by the their reconfiguration into a new sort Telescope, this new planetary sensory of organ of sensory experience at- apparatus will be able to “hear all tuned to this new form of cosmic possible notes, and thus hear a per- perception.

3: https://eventhorizontelescope.org/science 97

EHT image of the M87 black hole, courtesy of Event Horizon Telescope Terraformed Central to Bratton’s analysis is the distinction between that can be Benjamin Bratton makes our drawn between the black hole planet’s emerging status as an organ image as a “world-picture” and the of posthuman sensory experience the function of more literal pictures of stage upon which his 2019 book The the world, namely, the iconic 20th Terraforming is built as he imagines century photos taken of the Earth the black hole image as a new sort from outer-space, Earthrise in 1968 of “world-picture” that inverts the and Blue Marble in 1972. Today the Heideggerian origins of the term. legacy of the second photograph is This new image, he explains, is “not more well-known thanks to the efforts a picture of Earth, but rather a pic- of American countercultural figure ture taken by the Earth of its sur- Stewart Brand whose Whole Earth roundings” which necessarily must Catalogue made Blue Marble the face exclude our world in the picture it- of global environmental and anti-war self.4 It is a “world-picture” that de- activist efforts throughout the 1970s. centralizes the metaphysical human- But the first photograph has the dis- ism at the core of Heidegger’s con- tinction of being directly responded cept of a “world-picture” both artifi- to by Heidegger himself in the final cial and arbitrary. interview he gave in his life. Showing

4: Benjamin Bratton, The Terraforming (London: Strelka Press, 2019), 17. 98 none of the positive enthusiasm that being replaced by a rapid and un- came from the American hippie wieldy proliferation of the very tools movement, Heidegger warned: constructed to conceptualize the world-picture in the first place. I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of Bratton’s reading of the black the Earth taken from the moon. hole offers an unexpected response to We don’t need an atom bomb at Heidegger’s fears by affirming the all; the uprooting of human be- conditions he describes. But, instead ings is already taking place… We of following Heidegger in calling for only have purely technological a return to Being in some more pure conditions left. It is no longer state, Bratton insists that this an Earth on which human beings “uprooting” had actually yet to go far live today.5 enough and should instead be pushed further toward the increasingly artifi- Bringing these two outwardly cial. By taking Brand’s vision and opposing reactions together, Bratton mobilizing against Heidegger’s regres- presents the black hole image as their sive approach, Blue Marble is reimag- shared antithesis and as a key tool in ined as a first step toward a planetary uncovering and correcting the human- -scale project, but one which never- ist impulse at the core of both. In theless remained a work of Brand and his countercultural col- “transitional humanism that did not leagues, the photo of our planet sees and cannot decommission vestigial a world centered in the universe, just anthropocentric self-regard and self- as our blue circle is centered in the representation nearly enough” in the otherwise black photograph, a posi- world-picture it presented. He contin- tion just waiting to be discovered if ues, “for that, we would have to wait the human species can come together a few more years for Black Hole to and build the right tools to get them- appear and probably a few more for selves to that point. And in its anti-significance to absorb us and Heidegger we see that same species uproot us.”6 A speculative cosmologi- being “uprooted” from its naturally cal claim toward which his book only centered place within a world-picture, briefly gestures, but one that an-

5: Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” in Der Spiegel, May 31, 1976. 6: Bratton, The Terraforming, 17-18. 99 nounces the arrival of something Bratton already sees emerging from the black hole, beyond his own project before he even begins.

Left: Earthrise, courtesy of NASA, Right: Blue Marble, courtesy of NASA

The Weird and The Magical existence challenges the “categories which we have up until now used to Unlike the Heideggerian world- make sense of the world… [the] weird picture within which humanity sees thing is not wrong, after all: it is our itself and its inherent meaningfulness conceptions that must be inade- reflected through its own creation, an quate.”7 “anti-significance” comes to humanity Initially approached cautiously, through in the same total darkness as albeit voluntarily, in our pursuit of the black hole itself. Lacking the scientific advancement, the transfor- enlightening forces necessary to pro- mations brought on through the en- duce any sort of reflection receivable counter with the black hole become by ordinary phenomenological vision, like the Lovecraftian phenomena Fish- this anti-significance will only be er repeatedly returns to in illustrating navigable in a darkness both literal the maddening and inescapable allure and intellectual. Moving through this of the weird. The unstoppable march darkness exemplifies what Mark Fish- of scientific reason toward ever ad- er defines as “the weird,” as the black vancing progress “uproots” and ab- hole forces the human to operate at sorbs humanity in a force that it can the limits of its physical and rational no long escape by simply shutting its capabilities. It is an entity whose eyes and returning to what once was.

7: Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 15. 100

Leaving only the harmonious and pitted against [the living].”8 Eugene dissonant states that are perceptible Thacker adds to Brassier’s claim by through these new categories of un- suggesting something like a new cos- derstanding, the cosmic-scale sensory mic world-picture in which the Earth experience moves out into a state of and its human inhabitants are dis- darkness that has only recently be- placed through Enlightenment reason come accessible to thought itself and from “the center of the universe in requires a mediator as weird to the order to place human scientific rea- human sensory apparatus as the son back in the center.”9 “listening” surface of the Earth itself. Bratton’s reading of the black With the EHT dishes pointed out to hole image as the actualization hu- the cosmos, humanity faces the disso- man anti-significance remobilizes lution of its own horizons of sensory Brassier’s nihilism and Thacker’s experience and the reconfiguration of pessimism by allowing the thinking perception toward a cosmos indiffer- beings of Earth to “see” our own ent to its significance. boundaries in a way that we still may The darkness that this anti- not fully understand but nonetheless significant thought moves through feel compelled to move toward. Brat- cannot, however, be said to be origi- ton describes our mediation of ex- nary or pre-human in its existence. It panding thought as such: “The un- is instead produced as the residual conscious star-sucking void is blind state after anthropomorphic, enlight- and deaf to our horizons. Black Hole ened thought reaches its own outer is, in the best possible sense, a terri- limits. Revealed now through mecha- fying image.”10 Terrifying in “best nistic means, the anti-significance possible sense” as the production of revealed by the reconfiguration of the this image is the first ecstatic move Earth points to the conclusions outside of the constraints of anthro- drawn by Ray Brassier when he sug- pomorphized phenomenological expe- gests that “thinking has interests that rience and into a world and world- do not coincide with those of the picture de-centered from the Earth- living; indeed, they can and have been bound horizon that is only becoming

8: Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), xi. 9: Eugene Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 2 (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015), 297- 298. 10: Bratton, The Terraforming, 17. 101 knowable as new ways of “seeing” the subjective relationship between beyond the human are coming into the world that an organism inhabits being. and the sensory apparatuses through which it receives external stimuli from Thacker’s own project of that world. The “magic” modifier is “cosmic-pessimism” may be more then added to explain the variety of willing to accept a nihilistic approach experiences organisms are compelled to the de-centering of Earthly experi- to by the forces of their sensory ap- ence within the darkness of the cos- paratuses despite not yet being able mos but he nonetheless provides to make rational sense of that com- potential tools for working through pulsion; that is, the actions and reac- this new horizon, particularly as he tions whose functions only retroac- develops lines of thought through the tively become clear to the organism. concept of darkness in the realm of Despite the EHT figuring their listen- the occult. While there is nothing ing out into space as if to a song, inherently mystical in the black hole the encounter with the black hole or the image taken of it, the transfor- lacks the predetermined and intended mations brought through them grant structure found in an already com- humanity access to phenomenon that posed pieced or of a world-picture had previously been occulted by the with the familiar horizons of a man- enlightening forces of scientific rea- made experience. The black hole son. These darkened forces under- instead compels a sort of looking, mine the authority that human reason listening, and/or thinking toward the has had over the perceptual experienc- “magic” or “weird” or just still uncer- es it proports to explain and reveal a tain horizon. lasting need to remain open to the challenges of the not yet explainable. The line of thought Thacker develops proves to be especially valu- The mysticism of producing the able as he traces a lineage of think- black hole image is then something ing darkness beyond reason at the akin to the magic that von Uexküll dawn of the scientific revolution in draws on in his “magic Umwelt.”11 the 17th century, as scientific reason’s For von Uexküll, the Umwelt defines

11: Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. by Claire Schiller (Madison: International Universities Press, 1957). 102 enlightening power was becoming Worlds, the Major as well as the formalized in The Enlightenment with Minor which was published serially the physician and astrologer Robert between 1617 and 1621. From this Fludd. In one instance Thacker draws massive collection of entries, dia- the connection between Fludd’s soni- grams, and images Thacker chooses cally informed cosmology, the the “quite simple” black square dia- “celestial monochord” as he calls it, gram. A dark box labeled by Fludd and the 21st century practice of listen- on either of its four sides in Latin ing out from the Earth to cosmic “et sic in infinitum” (or “And on sound.12 Describing the universe into infinity” in English) meant to through harmonic divisions along the represent to his readers a nothingness semitones of single-stringed instru- that existed across all space and time ment, Fludd moves from the higher before the creation of the universe. notes of “macrocosm” representing The diagram compels readers to God and the universe, to the lower “see” the image in a unique way, that notes of the “microcosm” of humani- is, by not “seeing” it for itself at all. ty’s inner-life. This is where the simi- As Thacker describes: “The viewer larities to the monochord end as must understand the square as form- Fludd illustrates the significance and lessness, and the black inside as nei- centrality of the Earth and humanity as endowed by God himself. It is not, however, Fludd’s writing on observable phenomenon that stands out in Thacker’s analysis but rather the unobservable, or perhaps anti-observable sort of “looking” Fludd pushes toward by way of his cosmological illustrations. For this Thacker turns to Fludd’s multi- volume encyclopedic work, lengthily Et sic in infitum / Robert Fludd / titled, The Metaphysic, Physical, and in Utriusque Cosmi, pg. 26 Technical History of the Two

12: Eugene Thacker, “Sound of the Abyss” in AUDINT - Unsound: Undead, ed. Steve Goodman, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019), 87. 103 ther a fullness or an emptiness.” This of course goes beyond any Packed within the optical blackness of Fludd’s own intentions for his of the square is an imperative to not diagram as it was only intended to look at the image, but to reconfigure stand in for a concept of a “pre- perception toward a scale that is liter- universe, an emptiness that was really inconceivable by way of human placed in the creation of matter, the phenomenology. Moving viewers to- world, those things loaded with sig- ward “a self-negating form of repre- nificance in the traditional sense and sentation [that] would be able to fully representable as in the other suggest the nothingness prior to all entries, drawings, diagrams, and ta- existence… a ‘color’ that is not really bles in his research. The black hole, a color…a square that is not really a on the other hand, represents a core square, a box meant to indicate nothingness that continues to exist boundlessness.”13 The real focus of within and throughout the visible the black square diagram, just as the materiality of our universe. black hole image, is not the light- ened edges that make it visible to the Black Sun/Black Umwelt human eye but the darkness that More so than Fludd, the nothing remains unrepresentable their center. that the Earth is becoming attuned to It is the “anti-significance” implied by in its transformation echoes the con- both images, in their unrepresentable cluding remarks Thacker makes on subjects, that negate the centrality of Georges Bataille as he says: the world as it is constructed by and “Bataille’s texts opt to darken the for human sensory experience as the human, to undo the human by para- sole engine of thought. To think doxically revealing the shadows and after both images, in Fludd’s termi- nothingness at its core, to move not nology, one must listen for a new toward a renewed knowledge of the resonance of macrocosm that is no human, but towards something we longer reducible to the limited micro- can only call an unknowing of the cosm of a single individuated human human, or really, the unhuman.”14 body. Just as the paradoxical revelation within the human is revealed by

13: Thacker, Starry Speculative Corpse, 98. 14: Ibid., 79. 104

Bataille, a paradoxical revelation is through which solar revelations in enacted by the black hole as it in- general must be mediated. verts the enlightening power originary To look not just at what is illu- of both vision and life itself, that is, minated by the sun, but to look at the power of the sun shining down to and through the sun itself implies for Earth. Bataille “a certain madness” as “it is In Bataille there is a further no longer production that appears in alignment of the sun’s literal enlight- light, but refuse or combustion.”16 It ening power to the concept of intel- is the significance of the enlightened lectual enlightenment as its been fig- human that itself combusts in the ured throughout the history of West- darkness of the black hole as this ern philosophy before even the En- planetary-posthuman sensory apparatus lightenment itself. In Nick Land’s moves the surface of the Earth away reading of Bataille this goes back to from its place as the primary site of the prisoners leaving Plato’s cave as phenomenal experience and into the the sun provides “pure illumination… machinic organ attuned to experience simultaneous with truth, the perfect the weirdness of the universe beyond solidarity of knowing with the real.”15 human perception. Beyond the illusion of representations Experience which, in itself. under- on the cave’s walls, the sun grants mines the centrality and the authority access to direct knowledge, albeit, of human perception in understanding even in Plato, at the cost of an invol- and explaining the world by revealing untary and painful process as they an arbitrariness to the human as per- leave the cave for the “dazzling and ception as it follows from the literal blinding” glare of the sun’s light. and intellectual enlightenment of the Land enumerates the forces of the human subject. sun by describing a “second sun,” or “black sun” which recasts the light of Unlike the optically informed the sun, not just in terms of what is pictures produced in traditional pho- illuminated in the minds of Plato’s tography, the “terrifying image” of prisoners, but in the materiality the black hole was crucially not pro-

15: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992), 28. 16: Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan Soekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 59. 105 duced through an impression of light of a world-picture constructed by as if from the sun, but through the both literal and intellectual enlighten- construction of an elaborate techno- ment, but which can no longer be logical means for “looking” out into contain all of what it has produced. the darkness in a new way. Recasting Unlike the sensory experiences the light of the sun away from both that take place at the level of the its literal powers of illumination and human, those set out toward the from the intellectually enlightening darkness of the cosmos have no in- power inherited through the history herent need for the powers of Earth’s of thought since Plato, the black sun and, as such they force humanity hole has become the first image pro- to conceive of a sensory apparatus duced in a darkness only navigable by free from reference to it. This is the a planetary-scale posthuman sensory perceptual world that our Earth now apparatus. finds itself within, an Umwelt of a Just as the Earth and humanity universe darkened to human experi- found themselves de-centered by the ence and fundamentally different than Copernican revolutions in astronomy any of those of Earthbound creatures and philosophy during The Enlighten- who have found enlightenment con- ment, the transformation of the Earth ceived of through their necessary itself begins to de-center the world of place under the sun. The world and Earthly experience and the naturalistic world-picture which comes from out categories of understanding defined of the darkness of the black hole had by that experience. In this move away to be developed by way of scientific from a heliocentric Umwelt, the hori- enlightenment, but through the result- zontal orientation of perception and ing enlightened human came the ne- thought situated on the surface of the gation of its own significance as the Earth can begin to face outward into boundaries of perception and thought the darkness and find a world previ- extend and reconfigure themselves ously unavailable to enlightened through humanity as a way to move thought. Aside from the coincidence beyond it. of its aesthetic similarity to a “black sun,” the black hole image is in this way aligned with Bataille’s second sun as it produces the “terrifying image” 106

Solar Anus / Cheryl Bentley / graphite on paper / 2014 / 18”x18”

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Labyrinth Lot Jonah Howell

Dear Editor, Please find attached the first piece of my investigations and a short description of my, ah, somewhat unorthodox method. You seemed skeptical when we met in New York, but once the story’s filled-out, my method will need no advocate. On arrival I harangued one of the demolition foremen into acting as my guide. As we approached a flatter piece of land — they’d cleared the trees, but the dirt trucks were behind schedule — the kitchen tongs in my hand began to vibrate with a chilling vigor. I waved the foreman away. “I won’t annoy you anymore. This is it.” I walked in a spiral around the flatness. Six feet northeast of the estimated center my tongs drew together and apart slowly as though stretching after a long nap. Then they launched into the type of rhythmic code I told you about: It’s not Morse code, not alphabetic at all. It relies of synesthesia. I sat, careful not to move right or left, and closed my eyes. Forgive the jumpy nature of the vision, but it must not be changed. My source is unquestionably accurate but was clearly agitated. -Jonah

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Lot, relieved, places their bowl of Lot founded Lot ten years ago, chow-stones on the dirt floor of their then named themself after it. Before tent and goes to greet the flap-tapper. that it was nothing but a series of parking lots in Rikes County, West “Better come see this,” the lotter Virginia. Sad solar flare of a history, pants out. Lot can tell the kid’s a that place: Swarming mine town back lotter, though the sun in the day, then poof, a clap of invis- hasn’t yet risen over Mount Hill. ible hands as Texans struck oil at Telegraphic sentences, the type of Spindletop, and Rikes contracted. It abstract voice you can’t imagine the hung on for a few moribund decades, face of the speaker. The pair runs serving rust-pump gasoline and slow at first, bounding over sleeping sketchy fish sandwiches to Highway bags and mats. They reach the edge 61’s more self-destructive truckers. of the clearing and break to sprint, Podunk businessmen in a circle of weaving between familiar trees without folding chairs in front of the gas slowing. No further traces of human station, sweating in seersucker suits, life until a mile out: ranted over cans of Busch Ice that “The hell’s that, Lot?” they’d “revive” the place, turn the old mine into one of those swanky post- They rub their eyes, distinctly industrial stripmalls, CBD dispensa- aware of the sockets’ nascent wrin- ries, and local boutique candle vegan kles. It takes them a second to con- wax microfinanced wire-wrap necklaces jure the term, pulled from deep from terminal debt in Swaziland. memory. Lot founded Lot ten years ago, “Bulldozer.” then named themself after it. Before “Not an answer.” that it was nothing but a series of parking lots in Rikes County, West “Ain’t seen one in years. Not Virginia. Sad solar flare of a history, supposed to be here.” that place: Swarming mine town back “Why, then?” in the day, then poof, a clap of invisible hands as Texans struck oil at Teeth grit. Stone silence. Spindletop, and Rikes contracted. It hung on for a few moribund decades, *** serving rust-pump gasoline and 109 sketchy fish sandwiches to Highway Associated Press, June 2019: 61’s more self-destructive truckers. Blackout in South America rais- Podunk businessmen in a circle of es questions about power grid — folding chairs in front of the gas “Lopetegui did not rule out the station, sweating in seersucker suits, possibility of an attack but said ranted over cans of Busch Ice that it was unlikely…” they’d “revive” the place, turn the old Oh, that was the practice run. mine into one of those swanky post- The men caught a flight to Miami, industrial stripmalls, CBD dispensa- and reprise scene: Grave growls ries, and local boutique candle vegan around a stout hardwood table, ashes wax microfinanced wire-wrap necklaces and stronger coffee and a map with from terminal debt in Swaziland. dots up the East Coast, I-79 to 68 Couple thousand miles south of to 81 to 78. Cigarette stubbed out in the businessmen, an ITS cadre sits West Virginia, forty miles off the on the porch of a tin-side rental. highway. “Nobody’s there: If they Doesn’t matter exactly where: It’s one catch us after that one, we’ll know we of those places so far out in the couldn’t have gotten to New York boonies that borders haven’t reached anyway.” it yet. Near the Argentina-Uruguay Cut scene back to the business- border. Coffee mugs and ashes hold men with their seersuckers and piss- down the corners of a hand-drawn beer: schematic on the table. “I’ve got an investor from Dan- One of the men rubs out his ville interested, but we’ll have to cigarette on the shaky-handed likeness pull in support from Charles- of a transformer box. “One shot, ton.” whole country’s down.” He drops the An arrogant sneer. He knows butt beside the hole in the drawing. none of these other hicks could think Across the table another man, lanky up such an official-sounding lie. One with a sharp Adam’s apple, gulps of them cracks the top of another visibly as his thin fingers drift uncon- Busch and slurs, sciously to his bulging pocket. “Good, well, I got my guy

comin’ in a week ‘r so, gon’

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put ‘bout fitty grand in the place, before a mob. says iss promisin’.” “I can’t take your money, but,” Polite underhanded laughs all her breaker flipped, “y’all need ‘round, then the first guy, stroking shit. Take it.” his salt-and-pepper goatee, The mob cheered. “Say, when’d that fan quit run- Two states away, police pulled nin’?” over a rental car full of Mexican The sun pelted them. Suits mat- men. ted to their chests like kinky latex. “Got any weapons?” Swaying slightly, Goatee One of the guys nodded and unplugged and replugged the fan then indicated his bulging pocket. Foren- ran in to ask the clerk who tripped sics lab matched the scratches on the the breaker. bullet to the captured gun, and they “I’m the only one here, and I were rerouted from New York to ain’t left the register since five Gitmo. this morning. It ain’t working *** either, though.” The breaker that flipped: A reve- He flipped the light switch up latory connection: and down a few times and shrugged. “As you do unto the least of Goatee stumbled back outside to these, so also you do unto me,” see lines of cars stretched off the lot. and “...for no one knows the day An observant panicker replied to his or the hour.” twisted eyes: The cashier moonlighted as “Whole town’s out. Who Rikes County’s only preacher. Or- knows?” dained by mail through the Universal Life Church, but none of the Rikers The big neon sun on the gas cared whichever way. She didn’t talk station sign had gone black. down to them. Can’t learn that in Out on FM-147, the Dollar seminary. General cashier tossed up her hands

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we are sitting at the foothill / Mira Moss Crime / 2020 Of course, within a day of black- and smoked, fanning their wives and out she’d been declared children with meshback hats. Consul for Life. The preacher looked out over the “What do we do?” rows of dilapidated houses. She felt no real sadness. Nothing had really She stood on the Sun Fuel changed. Armageddon had only porch, the highest point in Rikes, on grown more visible. the sagging seat of a folding chair. The seersuckered businessmen had all “First off,” she stepped down skipped town after Charleston ig- from the chair and licked her nored their petition: salty lips, “call me Lot.” “Rikes? People still live there?” The County’s five hundred remaining inhabitants sat cross-legged on the parking lot. Callous-palmed men leaned against the empty pumps

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Dear Editor, Obviously you can see this is a serious breakthrough. ITS operating in the United States...this stuff’s classified, and until now they’ve only admitted to scattered random bombings in Mexico. Nothing so sophisticated, so widespread, so...dare I say?...systematic. Also note that I give no moral commentary: I’m a journalist. I’ve got nothing to say. Perhaps that makes my story unpublishable — I’ve worried about that, I admit I have, between the classified information, the sensational press about Lot’s group — but you’ve got to understand, right, this is real, this is important, this is true in a dimension where party lines don’t exist. Seriously, Ed., these people were onto something. Way I see it, there were two types of people in the world before Lot: Fascists and not- fascists. Lot created antifascism, and forget what those black bloc posers call themselves — just fascists from the other end, exactly as control- freak as the ones they hate. Don’t let the Christian shit fool you. Lot invoked God in order to phase God out, like a key in a lock and BOOM! the door might as well not be there. New Agey crystal-ogling fascists say they want God gone, say they want “unity” and “solidarity” and all that mess? Lot never said that shit, but that’s what they got. Hoping this gets to you, but what with the national security yada yada yada it’s probably intercepted, so expect a call from Gitmo. -Jonah

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They had no problem buying up crops cycled, as families formed and the land from the scattered business- reformed. men. Fifty bucks cash per acre, they Though she had abdicated her said, and they were happy to rid formal position, the lotters still themselves of the property taxes. looked to Lot for spiritual guidance. Suddenly a group of impoverished She helped to organize the crops and Appalachians owned the stretch from discovered the local chow-stone crop, FM-230 all the way to Mount Hill. a rock-hard, nutritious fungus that Once the preacher had dispelled the grew well year-round on those house- worry that they’d all been left behind boards that were too far gone to in the Rapture, the Rikers waxed ec- repurpose as construction material. static: Knowing the necessity of tight “They lied to you: It ain’t up bonds, she led the lotters to take the there,” she pointed an arc across Bible literally: opalescent sky. “‘The kingdom of heaven is within you.’ Luke, “‘In the beginning was the chapter seventeen.” Word, and the Word was God.’ Word, singular. The fewer your Lot sprang up in a flash: The words, the closer to God: In cheap tents and tarps from Dollar each situation, look for the General proved just enough to cover Word. Longwindedness is born five hundred heads once all the leaky of idleness, and ‘Idle hands are houses grew moldy from lack of air the devil’s workshop; idle lips circulation. Once they ran out of are his mouthpiece.’” condoms and started having babies, the old wood and tin became cabins In the same way genders soon and lean-tos. The forest encroached, collapsed: kudzu wrapped the buildings, but the “‘And the two shall become one parking lots and surrounding areas — flesh.’ Do we think God was the only level land — were kept clear lying?” by the passing of busy feet and sub- sistence planting. A network of park- Chorus: ing lots, connections shifting as one “No!” slab splintered above oak roots, as

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She became they: some tongues, so they encouraged all the lotters to change their names to “One flesh, therefore marriage is cement the barrier between earlier and plurality: Consistent ego is an now. A few left, mumbling unprinta- abomination to our Lord. We ble things under their breath, and refer to ourselves as we; we refer were quickly replaced by interested to y’all as y’all or they. Further, travelers who caught rumors of an even the Lord is triple: Who are “autonomous free-love cult” in the we to say we can make do with mountains of West Virginia. The fewer?” more aesthetically impaired of these Silence reigns. were repulsed by words like “God” and the lotters’ thick Appalachian “We are like the roots of the accents, but the more wide-visioned chow-stone: Nodes, shoots, ever or desperate stayed on and more or splitting and recombining. Jeal- less assimilated or else moved into ousy is a relic of property; it is a the forested outskirts and set up a form of envy. ‘Thou shalt not series of anarchic marketplaces, make- covet your neighbor’s spouse,’ shift tables selling all manner of even if they are also yours.” things too sketchy for the Outside’s Lot knew that their new, honest black markets: From a tourist guide reading of the Bible would bitter in a short-run anarchist zine:

**Editors’ Note: In typical anarchist zine style, the tourist guide is printed on faded and musty paper that couldn’t be digitized well. As such, we’ve merely reproduced the text without any of the...chaotic stylization.**

I walked from booth to table to dirtlaid warestation, stumbling over gnarled roots and gnarleder customers. Crust punks, train kids, hitchers of all types driven in by wary truckers, fugitives from supermax and suburbs, merchants ousted from the Dark Web by disgusted browsers, those deemed unfit or too fit, cop-killers and cops who refused to kill, and me, your humble reporter.

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One of the many unofficial security guards took my camera and phone and put a tracker on me, saying if I wrote anything about the location or the

geography of the place, well...he pointed to a nearby booth’s impressive collection of dried pineal and adrenal glands, sold in fine-grained human leather pouches. I nodded nervously, and he smiled and waved me off like the stern chaperone of a middle school dance. Searching for a pair of welcoming eyes, I saw only downturned foreheads and the crusted backs of necks, slow steady tears and gritted teeth. Stumbling over a mossed rock, my thighs hit the corner of a wooden table. The saleswoman stabled the table and glared at me. “Newcomer, huh?” I smiled, “Yeah, what’s that you’re selling?” She picked up one of the unlabeled discs from her pile. “Snuff porn. Any journalist comes in here, and I tie him to that tree there,” she pointed to a dark-stained pine, “chop his forearm off and run the ulna in one ear and out the other. Drives head- fetishists crazy.” “But the ears aren’t big enou—” “Wanna bet, journalist?” She cackled after me. Once my legs wore out I shoved my notebook and pen in my pocket and walked on, looking at my shoes. The market⁠—Lot, they call it, after a mythic settlement further up the mountain⁠—shoves you into its customs fast. Call it anarchist all you want, but laws aren’t the only means of control. Though, to be fair, this place isn’t exactly

116 capitalist. It’s too paranoid for that. They know currency can be traced, and there’s no electricity, so crypto’s off the table. You can only buy stuff with actions: Say you want one of those journalist snuffs. You might have to pay with a known shoplifter’s retina. Every salesperson sets their own prices on the spot, cold-reading the customer to figure out what they can do, what they’re willing to do. Most of the hawkers are rogue psychics. It seems common knowledge that franchising will take down their dark paradise, so anyone caught trying to set up a pyramid org is whacked and turned into products, both before and after death: These folks use all parts of the animal, temporal and spatial. And the aspiring franchiser will be caught: Few things can buy so much as espionage. I stayed for an hour or so. All I heard, I caught from customers muttering under their breath. After forty-five minutes or so of following drunks and tweakers I started to notice the same faces, and I got the sense I was trapped in an enormous immune system, leukocytes surrounding the foreign invader with knowing sneers on downturned faces, spiraling in, closing exits, so I booked it back to my entrypoint, following a trail of familiar tables, vodka- fentanyl bar to neutering closet (“Eat your own balls/ovaries for a small fee! Deep fried or Cajun- blackened! Limited time offer!”) to organic snake oil to actual snakes. The guard smiled as he removed my tracker, “Sorry ‘bout your camera. Bought me a good quickie with that goat over there.” I ran past the satisfied-looking billy and three miles back up the road to my car. This is not science-fiction. This is not futurism. This is the free market, dammit. If you can find someone

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who will tell you where Lot is, I recommend you go, if only so you know that such a thing is possible—⁠ no, that such a thing exists.

To say that our lotters “allow” to be impenetrable to non-lotters. the market to remain in place would The original inhabitants, the be a gross misunderstanding. They former Rikers, are known as converts. forgot long ago that they own land. Over the ten years since Lot’s foun- They forgot the borders. Such things dation, some of these have adjusted simply don’t compute to them. They easily. Others have undergone volun- even want the market to go on, be- tary concussion so as to start with a lieving that someday, by sheer osmo- “clean slate.” Many converts have sis, the marketeers will absorb the accidentally killed themselves in pur- Lot’s ways, and Heaven will expand, suit of clean slates. piece by piece, to the ends of the Earth —that is, to Mount Hill. Immigrants to Lot take the figurative label “robot” until they have A final note on the lotter’s (not gotten rid of their “electrobrain,” the a typo) social organization: They rapid-fire series of internal words and consist of three groups, with no ex- anxieties that the lotters refer to alter- plicit hierarchy. I have called them all natively as “Hell.” Though they are lotters, but they reserve the term not lower on any sort of social lad- “lotter” for children born and raised der, the robots reside separately from in Lot. Many parents remain in Lot the converts and are only allowed for the sake of these children, and contact with the lotter children, who just as many leave Lot so that their find them alternately hilarious and children will not be lotters: With no sad. Once a robot has displayed in- sense of envy, exclusive social pacts, ner silence for a reasonably long time or longwindedness, the lotters would — the children know, and they have appear to the Outside as sociopaths no words for it — they choose a and would not survive long, were they name, decide whether to undergo a to leave. The lotters learn descriptive clean slate procedure, and they join language in order to communicate the society of converts. Occasionally with their parents, but conversations a convert will relapse, and they are from lotter to lotter are so sparse as 118 given the option of returning to the robot lot or to the Outside. Hierarchies ebb and flow, solidify and dissolve according to context. Lot themself is only a spiritual adviser when needed. Otherwise, they’re just one of the converts.

Dear Editor, This will be my last letter. I’m certain I’m being tailed: There are new demolition workers, and they feel like cops, you know? There’s that cold eye, the buzzcut, faint smell of pork even on the vegetarians...This morning I awoke and found that my tongs had been moved from the bedside table (where I left them) to the floor beside the bedside table (where I certainly most emphatically did not leave them), and I don’t move in my sleep. My notebook was still in its place, but I’d swear it was turned slightly… You see that slam piece in the Times the other day? Jesucriste, it was horrible, I’ve never seen so much spin, no, so much slander, pure slander! That prosecutor should be locked up! These people bought the land, they didn’t abuse anyone, and seriously, “high-ranking members?” The Times has gone past gray. It’s senile. Who paid them off? Please find out for me, and we can run that story along with mine. I’m not crazy. You know that: You met me: I met you: We’re friends, right, like Johnny Depp and his razors. I’m a razor, Ed., and this story, you’ll see, it’s folded up right behind this paper you’re holding right now, it cuts the ground right out from under these Times hacks. Cult...dammit, Lot’s the only folks that aren’t a cult! That Rikes Lebensraum Fund or whatever they called it needs to be tried for fraud, posthaste, and terrorism charges dropped under castle law—stood their 119

ground, wouldn’t you?—and abuse...next assignment I want is in one of the schools those assholes started. I got a hunch I’ll find the real abuse.

And another thing! The market’s not Lot. It’s like I said, there’s fascists and non-, there’s people that think they hold the one true truth and people who aren’t sure, and these Times writers and investigators can’t handle that a word might hold two meanings—well, which category you think they fall into? Yes, this is all very unscientific and unprofessional, but I’m only guided by my vow to journalistic objectivity. If I limited myself to only the things scientists can verify, well, I’d always be redundant, first point, and second point, I wouldn’t be objective because there are plenty of other lenses in the world and it’s a bit dogmatic (cough fascist cough) to expect everything that isn’t science to break all its fragile bones stuffing itself into some little sciencebox. I would never stoop so low. Nevertheless, there’s something missing from the story. Some little piece, some link...my Source is dying, the tongs barely moved at all in the end...but it’s runnable, what I’ve sent you. The tongs don’t lie. -Jonah

After ten years of silence, the Lot awoke to the ominous thrum of helicopter blades.

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[Ed: Our investigator’s remaining manuscript is a garbled, esoteric mumbo-jumbo not even halfway fit for print in any self-respecting publication. For the sake of transparency, I admit that I worried such a thing might happen. As you’ve seen, the investigator’s methods were suspect from the outset: In an introductory meeting, he told the editorial staff that some tight-knit communities⁠—small towns, cults, and the like⁠—tie in to a proprietary oversoul. He explained to us that this was why rumors fly so quickly around hicktowns: “The rumors don’t spread quickly,” he twitched, “but instantaneously, like the folks’ brains are quantum- entangled.” This oversoul, he argued, leaves a sort of fingerprint or echo so that, though the area once known as “Lot” is quickly being restored to dignified habitability by devoted refugees from the 2009 Rikes Blackout, the area’s cultish history could still be divined by a procedure something like water-witching. Unable to print the deranged reporter’s final remarks, though, we instead reproduce below a short article from the New York Times, March 16, 2020, which we have fact-checked thoroughly and have found completely accurate, despite Mr. Howell’s paranoia.]

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Radioactive Transness Alex Ray

blue to pink or vice versa and have then completed your journey, arriving at the end of your personal trans history: transition timeline as metanarrative. The sole white stripe in the middle serves as an obligatory I have always harbored a catch-all for nonbinarity and seems certain distaste - or perhaps more nothing more than a weak after- aptly, disinterest - towards the flag thought, only considered secondly to that is supposed to best represent my the easily classified and humanist particular experience of queerness. (read: binary) trans experience. It is The trans pride flag in all its softness the epitome of a reterritorialized and inoffensive charm transness: a mere third box you can never truly spoke to my specific inter- check. action with gender. It is a tamed A much more useful counterex- beast at best, chained by the rigidity ample to this, at least in my opinion of social structures that have long would be the symbol most common- since began to decompose and it ly referred to simply as the carries their noxious odor with them. transgender symbol: In meshing to- The steadfast linearity inherent to gether admittedly archaic gendered reading the flag may be palindromic signs around a circle, its main theme but it is nonetheless following a sin- is radiation. As a result, various peo- gular arrow of time, not to mention ple have picked up on its almost that said arrow is followed across uncanny resemblance to the interna- fields of color mapped to specific tionally standardized warning symbol genders by a sorting system not at all for ionizing radiation. Most famously unlike one you would see at a this happened in the 'Age of Sin' particularly reverse gender reveal par- poster that has since spread virally. ty. There is a stable finality to the Literally pointing in three directions design here: you simply move from 123 at once, the symbol revels in the very related to this is the fact that racial- same multiplicity that is found in one ized people have long since had their pronoun that is immanently tied to incongruence with colonial gender recent conversations about transness: used as grounds for the dehumaniza- they/them. The three lines of flight tion they experience (and all the that the symbol is plotting are not more ironic then to use a decidedly pointed anywhere in particular either, white stripe to represent interactions there is no goal they could ever with gender outside of the binary). It reach, they are simply in a constant is not by sheer coincidence or conver- process of displacement and affirma- gent evolution that being of color tively so, endlessly rushing towards an and transness share some of what exit. constitutes them (i.e. a certain invisibility and experience of constant displacement), they are in fact linked. But it is precisely this very spectral nature of both transness and radiation that is where their power resides. Both biologically and socially - and neither seems limited to either one of the two - they disassemble and mu- tate anything human in their vicinity upon contact and they do this in the most clandestine way. The trans entity is unable to be grasped by a human subject, they are eldritch like the However, the ties between radia- hyperobjectivity of plutonium: both tion and transness reach deeper still. glaring reminders that nothing human For one, they share the important really does make it out of the near quality of invisibility, neither acknowl- future and one has to only briefly edged by the human sensory equip- consider what the effect of radiation ment. The eyes in the case of the on life is at its core for this to be- first and the more complex cognitive come all the more evident: accelerat- constitution of gender in case of the ed evolution. second but importantly neither is fitted for the human. Immediately 124

red neon replicated / Mira Moss Crime / 2018

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Pipes Jan von Stille

The Academia Plumbarius, prem- that therefore it—that is, the house— ier institute of plumbing didactics in ran its own juice—that is, water—both Lawrence, Kansas, the international in and out, the former via a backyard capital—at one time—of plumbing well that, heaven knows, must have didactics—this venerable academy, I run afoul of sulfur (if dug too shal- say again for Clarity’s sake, had not low) or of iron deposits (if dug too told Mo-Dean, as he enlisted in this deep) and that, in any case, must second phase—jokingly entitled cause quite a rumpus within the in- “clinical rotations”—of his training, ward and outward pipeage; which out- that he should, on his first assign- ward pipeage—yes, I address it, now ment, be faced by such labyrinthine that it has forced its ruddy face into conundra; that, even before he entered what may otherwise have been a per- the house—a shabby wooden number fectly civil, if not altogether uncritical, girdled by grass and garishly rusted conversation about inward pipeage, the gears detached from Satan-really-Satan far more acceptable of the two, I shall -knows-what gadget—that before he now and forevermore assert, in polite entered, I shall, for Clarity’s most conversation, which, if I may, with the noble and worthy sake, repeat, he consent of Dear Reader, opine further, should be waylaid by the first of is the only acceptable type of conver- many unforeseen—though not, for that sation; and so you see how it pains matter, altogether unexpectable— me to have to tell the whole story, snares: namely, that the house was namely that of the outward, as well as connected to no municipal plumbing the far more agreeable inward, pipes— system whatsoever—the study of which I repeat, I recapitulate, I re-relate, in genus had occupied precisely ninety- service of that most beauteous and seven percent of the initial phase of right and just god and/or goddess, his plumbing coursework—again, in Clarity: which outward pipeage ran praise of upright, chaste, and chivalric direct to an odiously rusted septic Clarity, I say: that the house was tank, one of the low-down no-good connected to no municipal pipes, and downright-nasty aboveground types

126 known, in the business, as “cholera either of these two sets of pipes, casks”; and so, considering the is- which, as a plumber-probate, he must; sues—now abundantly clear and pre- and, finally, considering the downright sent, I trust, for Dear Reader—that shame that he would bring upon him- surely should attend his attending of self, upon his forebears and upon the inward no less than the outward those whom he may someday beget, pipes, which issues must surely be were he to bear the marks of such Legion, really Legion, for—although or atrocious pipeage upon his not- because, due to their distinct locality, altogether-pristine-but-nevertheless-not- that is their disconnection from all so-sullied as-they-might-have-been municipal piping infrastructure, this hands; considering, I shall repeat house’s pipes simply ran a straight again, for I do so love Clarity, who line in and straight line out and, as- has ever been the most steadfast and suming, as is safe to assume, that humble and good and true servant of some leak had sprung in this cholera that highest god or goddess, Truth— cask, a third line back around—none considering, then these three consider- but Satan, that most métic of ations—namely, the pipes and their pathrunners, may possibly know the issues; his body and its potential is- involutions to be found in these sues; and the prospect of inherited pipes, the divots and inborn knots, sin—Mo-Dean fled, just dropped his the rust- and shit- and providence-fed tools and fled, and I don’t know folds, the complexities unmappable, where he went. templexities of battling eons caked He left no heirs, no friends, no upon their sides, the ghosts these scrap of diaristic nothing. This is the pipes must surely hold captive; and principle of non-action: That now, as considering the issues that should of this very publication, nothing re- surely arise in his own body, were he mains of Mo-Dean but the pipes. to have any hands-on dealings with

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Libidinal Rheology Martina Maccianti & Laura Tripaldi I: Engineering the Libidinal Surface “God made the bulk; surfaces were invented by the devil.” -Wolfgang Pauli

Rheology is the science of flow. in technological approaches where the It provides physico-mathematical essential question is not what a mate- tools to understand and model the rial is made of, but how it behaves as evolution of any imaginable material a function of a range of variable con- under all possible stress conditions. It ditions. Rheology therefore takes a is because of rheology that we grasp different route, focusing first on mod- the difference between solids and elling the macroscopic behaviour of liquids. The chemical explanation for materials and, only after the dynamics different states of matter (relating the of the material have been understood, phase of a material to the bonds correlating it with its chemical nature. forming between its atoms or its Of course, the engineering of novel molecules), provides a microscopic materials with desired rheological explanation at the molecular level, but properties must be performed at the it is unable to model the dynamic molecular or nano-technological level behaviour of macroscopic materials so the two perspectives – the molecu- when they become too large and lar and the macroscopic – are always complex. Conventional approaches to necessarily intertwined. understanding matter tend to be es- So how does rheology answer sentially bottom-up; we describe a the question of why is a solid a sol- material as being made of parts, that id? The chemical or molecular answer are themselves made of other smaller - the solid is solid because its atoms parts, and so on until we can build a or molecules are bound to each other lego-model of all things, no matter with a certain energy - does not really how big or complex they may be. account for our macroscopic experi- This quickly becomes unsustainable 128 ence of materials. While some of our if they were frozen in time, resisting perceptions are tuned at the molecu- the impulse with an elastic response. lar level, acting as chemical detectors There is a strict correlation between such as in the case of smell, taste the concepts of time, flow, and ener- and, to some extent, colour percep- gy dissipation, so that a sort of relation, this is not the case for experi- tivity principle is introduced between ences such as solidity and liquidity, the observer and the material, in that often involve a combination of which the inertial reference system visual and tactile sensations evolving does not determine a relative velocity dynamically through time. The rheo- but a relative capacity of energy dissi- logical answer to the solidity problem pation. introduces an interesting perspective, Indeed, at first glance, it seems that is, that there is no such thing as ironic that an essentially applied sci- an absolute solid, or, more precisely, ence, one for engineers and formula- that solidity is not an instantaneous tion chemists messing with paints, experience, but it is necessarily related adhesives, and facial creams, should to how things evolve across time and be given such a philosophically load- space. A direct consequence of this is ed name. But rheology – from the the fact that materials commonly famous Heraclitean dictus πάντα experienced as being liquid can be- ῥεῖ – does tackle some very funda- have as solids under specific condi- mental questions about matter and tions; if we hit the surface of water change. with a certain force-per-unit-time, we will experience it as a solid material. In rheological terms, the flow of This is essentially related to molecu- time, which we argue is nothing but lar processes of energy dissipation; the flow of matter, expresses the ex- the molecular structure of a certain tent to which a material resists the material requires a specific amount of dissipation of the energy it receives time to “relax,” meaning to transfer from its outside. This is also a meas- the energy it receives in the form of ure of a material’s inherent potential an external impulse to the neighbour- for mechanical elasticity, thermody- ing molecules and to dissipate it in namic reversibility or temporal the form of heat. If the impulse is “eternity.” An ideally solid world – too violent, the molecules will act as one of ideally elastic interactions – is

129 temporally isotropic; where matter Heraclitus' “everything flows” does not flow, neither does time it- was not entirely satisfactory. self. Time and rheology have been Were we to disregard the solid connected since the ancient times, and deal with fluids only? There particularly through the technology of are solids in rheology, even if the water clock in which the viscosity they may show relaxation of of water is the determining factor for stress and consequently creep. keeping track of time. The ancients The way out of this difficulty realized that water flowed more slow- had been shown by the Prophet- ly during colder months, so heat was ess Deborah even before Heracli- required in order to maintain a con- tus. In her famous song after the stant flow – thus restoring temporal victory over the Philistines, she equilibrium at the expense of fuel sang, “The mountains flowed consumption.1 This philosophical or before the Lord.” When, over fundamental component of rheology 300 years ago, the Bible was was clearly understood by Markus translated into English, the trans- Reiner, the founding father of rheolo- lators, who had never heard of gy, who, in a 1962 paper, comment- Heraclitus, translated the passage ed on the bizarre affinity between as “The mountains melted before rheology and theology by suggesting the Lord”—and so it stands in a notable biblical example: the authorized version.

Multiversi / Martina Maccianti / Plexiglass / 2017-2019

1: cf. R. I. Tanner and K. Walters, Rheology: An Historical Perspective (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1998), 4. 130

But Deborah knew two things. of energetic consumption. Quoting First, that the mountains flow, as Nick Land: “Current emerges from everything flows. But, secondly, the machinery of time [...] Econo- that they flowed before the Lord, mies are assembled from flows. Un- and not before man, for the sim- surprisingly, therefore, their native ple reason that man in his short codes are currencies, or lifetime cannot see them flowing, current-signs.”4 while the time of observation of Regardless, most real materials God is infinite.2 cannot be reduced to either ideal Curiously, Prophetess Deborah’s solids or ideal liquids, but have rheo- revelation – “The mountains melted logical properties that place them before the Lord” – is reminiscent of somewhere in between. The two fun- far more recent prophetic words. In damental laws governing solids and the Communist Manifesto, we are liquids – Newton’s law, according to reminded that “All that is solid melts which stress is proportional to shear into air”3 before capital’s drive to- rate and Hooke’s law, according to wards ruthless expansion and accelera- which stress is proportional to defor- tion, transforming elasticity into total mation – are unable to efficiently plasticity and opening the way to the model the behaviour of most materi- rheological catastrophe foreshadowed als. For a number of technological by Heraclitus. At the root of these applications there is a growing need two prophecies there is a similar intu- to design materials that flow under ition connecting flows of matter to particular conditions but are solid flows of time, introducing us to the otherwise. These materials are gener- idea that some kind of slimy under- ally known as visco-elastic materials. current cryptically regulates our expe- In this paper, we are especially con- rience of the world; while God melts cerned with a particular kind of visco- things by virtue of his eternity, capi- elastic material; slime, originally mar- tal’s occult sorcery, from ancient keted as a toy product in the late water clocks to bitcoin, artificially 1970s, has experienced a dramatic regulates viscosities through currents rise in popularity in recent years, in

2: Markus Reiner, “The Deborah Number,” in Physics Today 17, No. 1 (1964), 62. 3: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf 4: Nick Land, Crypto-Current (001), https://www.uf-blog.net/crypto-current-001/ 131 association with the widespread con- treatment of spinal cord injuries. In sumption of new digital media. We this context, synthetic polymer hydro- argue that this obsessive fascination gels injected in the spinal cord cavity with slime is essentially rheological in have been reported to produce thera- nature. peutic effects.6 Due to their particular rheological properties, hydrogels have First of all, we need to focus on an affinity for the extracellular matrix the physico-chemical aspects of the of the central nervous system and can problem. What is commonly known be used in a variety of therapeutic as slime is, from the chemical stand- applications, from tissue regeneration point, a polymer hydrogel, usually to drug delivery in the spine and produced by chemically cross-linking brain. Loading polymer hydrogels an aqueous solution of polyvinyl alco- with nanoparticles can provide specif- hol (PVA) chains with boric acid. In ic functional properties such as elec- this way, the polymer molecules that tric and thermal conductivity; further, were previously dissolved in the liquid hydrogels are now being widely used medium, are linked to each other, to design “smart” stimuli-responsive forming a 3D macromolecular net- materials, that spontaneously swell work that extends across the entire and shrink under certain environmen- volume of the material, transforming tal conditions, such as temperature the liquid into a visco-elastic solid.5 variations, pH changes, and light Hydrogels are advanced materials exposure.7 These behaviours can be with a range of technological applica- engineered by exploiting reversible tions from mechanics to electronics, chemical bonds, such as antigen- “soft” robotics, sensing, and bioengi- antibody interactions between biomol- neering. Due to their potential bio- ecules introduced in the polymer compatibility, they are promising network.8 This is some of the most materials for biomedical applications, fascinating work being currently un- such as cartilage replacements and dertaken in materials science, where

5: Gaynor M. Ravanagh et al., “Rheological characterization of polymer gels,” in Progress in Polymer Science 23, No. 3 (1998), 533-562: 23. 6: Thomas Trimaille et al., “Recent advances in synthetic polymer based hydrogels for spinal cord repair,” in Comptes Rendus Chimie 19, No. 1-2 (2016), 157-166: 19. 7: Chenguang Pan et al., “Recent Progress of Graphene-Containing Polymer Hydrogels: Preparations, Properties, and Applications,” in Macromolecular Materials and Engineering 302, No. 10 (2017). 8: Takashi Miyata, “Preparation of smart soft materials using molecular complexes,” in Polymer Journal 42 (2010), 277-289.

132 the boundary between biological and tives (e.g. plasticizers such as oils synthetic molecular machinery is be- and glycerin). Several scientific papers coming increasingly blurred: synthetic report approaches that allow the pro- materials are being injected into liv- duction of hydrogels without chemi- ing organisms to enhance biological cal cross-linking by physical entangle- systems while biomolecules are being ment of polymer chains. The wide- exploited to design synthetic materials spread diffusion of unusual slime with increasingly life-like behaviours. tutorials on YouTube and other so- The slime is already creeping through cial media has produced similar evi- our spine as it slowly learns to be- dence;9 most commercial brands of come human. personal hygiene products contain a variety of water-soluble polymers that Besides these technological ad- can physically entangle when subject- vancements, slime engineering for ed to freeze-thaw cycles. This is why purely libidinal purposes has reached freezing shampoo or lotion several surprising and increasing levels of times, by addition of salt to lower complexity, producing a range of the solution temperature, will produce materials with varying textural and a slime-like material. Interestingly, in rheological properties. Home-made addition to the slime-matrix formula- slimes are generally produced by mix- tion, a lot of attention is focused on ing glue with different “activators,” the preparation of mixtures and com- often common household products posites in which slime is merged with containing sodium tetraborate. Slime other materials, providing different formulations, although frequently rheological properties and a highly lacking in any formal understanding specific libidinal experience.10 Some of rheology or polymer chemistry, are of the most relevant preparations often provided with very high level of involve the use of shaving foam to detail, controlling parameters such as produce lighter, “fluffy” slimes, or the concentration of crosslinking agent, incorporation of polymer clays to amount of water, pH, degree of obtain “butter” slimes that exhibit polymerization in the starting poly- more plasticity compared to regular mers, and presence of chemical addi-

9: Cf. “SHAMPOO SLIME! Testing NO GLUE SHAMPOO SLIMES!!” https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=rxJaPNJrvd8&t=17s 10: Cf. “5 AMAZING DIY VIRAL SLIMES! SATISFYING COMPILATION! EASY & BEST SLIMES INCLUDING GIANT FLUFFY SLIME!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Q_0EoZW_I

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Multiversi / Martina Maccianti / Plexiglass / 2017-2019 slimes. Different kinds of solids, pared by including superabsorbent ranging from micrometric pigment polymer (SAP or sodium polyacry- particles to macroscopic objects, are late); “water” slimes prepared with frequently included, providing a varie- popular brands of bottled water. ty of aesthetic and textural qualities. As libidinal rheologists, we Pigment mixing makes up some of should be aware that the increasing the most popular slime content, while proliferation of slime types, although “crunchy” slimes prepared with plastic apparently contingent, is actually driv- beads are often featured in ASMR en by a precise need to design new videos. This is just the tip of the sensory and psychological experiences slime-berg: in search for the ultimate fully implemented in the formulation libidinal experience, slime formula- of advanced and complex materials. tions become increasingly odd and Several different aspects are at play. fascinating. Some recent trends in- The tension between increasing digi- clude: fluorescent or magnetic slimes; talization of media and the search for gold leaf coatings to be broken and hyper-immersive, although absolutely mixed inside the slime-matrix; virtual, sensory experiences; the radi- “cloud”/“snow”/“jelly” slimes pre- calization of libidinal drives through 134 the action of social media algorithms, energy coming in from its outside. In operating an evolution by selection of other words, we should focus on the the most essential and immediate peculiar behaviour of visco-elastic forms of pleasure; the virtual desecra- materials with respect to the production of libidinal objects of late- tion and deformation of their capitalist culture associated with spe- surfaces. cific brands (Apple, Gillette, Fiji, Surface thermodynamics and Starbucks...) that are finally con- libidinal drives have been associated sumed in their terminal slime-forms, since Freud’s Beyond The Pleasure ultimately revealing their forbidden Principle introduced the idea of con- occultural truth. The discovery of the sciousness as a property emerging slimy nature of capital’s objects of from surface effects. Surfaces define libidinal investment resembles the the boundary between inside and out- unveiling of a deeply unsettling revela- side, but the boundary is not simply tion, and, at the same time, appears a theoretical function indicating an somehow paradoxically natural – as if abrupt interruption of the bulk, rather throwing AirPods into puddles of it is a material layer with a certain polymeric jelly was the only logical thickness and intrinsic physico- reason for their existence.11 In this chemical properties that determine its respect, we should note that the per- behaviour. This is relevant because vasive and increasing consumption of there is a strict correlation between synthetic polymers, that is the deter- surfaces and identity in the sense that mining factor in the current micro- we generally perceive a particular ob- plastic pollution crisis, finds its most ject to be one with itself in virtue of relevant expression in our obsession its resistance towards the deformation with slime as the quintessential libidi- of its surface or the opening of new nal object. All of these complex surfaces. From a rheological perspec- drives can, at least in part, be under- tive, then, each ideally Hookean solid stood through a rheological model; contains a specific and unbreakable the crucial point is understanding identity within the surface of its how visco-elasticity influences the body, in opposition to the ideally response of a material to the excess Newtonian liquid that perpetually

11: Cf. “ADDING TOO MUCH INGREDIENTS INTO SLIME! Adding Too Much Of Everything Into SLIME!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anEh8U7u23c 135 extends and reproduces its surface, certain external conditions. Fracture, being always a multiplicity of itself. as a violent and discontinuous pro- This, of course, has something to do cess of energy dissipation, is the ulti- with how these two ideal materials mate collapse of Hookean mechanics deal with energy – the Newtonian where the external stimulus can no liquid being ideally dissipating and longer be processed through elastic the Hookean solid ideally elastic. response and results in the breaking of the surface, flooding the individual Of course, the rheology of living with the unmediated physico-chemical tissue is visco-elastic, meaning that impulses coming from its outside. the surface from which consciousness emerges is always vulnerable to What consciousness yields con- wounding. This wounding is, in itself, sists essentially of perceptions of part of the process of consciousness- excitations coming from the formation in the sense that, as Freud external world and of feelings of noted, irreversible modification and pleasure and unpleasure which deformation of the surface is respon- can only arise from within the sible for building our memory and mental apparatus; it is therefore understanding of the outside world possible to assign to the system “as a result of the ceaseless impact of Pcpt.-Cs. a position in space. It external stimuli on the surface of the must lie on the borderline be- vesicle, its substance to a certain tween outside and inside; it must depth may have become permanently be turned towards the external modified, so that excitatory processes world and must envelop the oth- run a different course in it from what er psychical systems. [...] We they run in the deeper layers.”12 describe as 'traumatic' any excita- Clearly, then, when considering real, tions from outside which are visco-elastic materials, identity be- powerful enough to break comes a question of fracture mechan- through the protective shield. It ics. Visco-elastic solids, unlike ideal seems to me that the concept of liquids, are identified by, and con- trauma necessarily implies a contained within, a surface, although nection of this kind with a their surface can be broken under

12: Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961), 20. 136

breach in an otherwise efficacious [I]t is not this displacement of barrier against stimuli.13 parts, recognizable in the organic body of political economy (itself The process of wounding is one initially assembled from differen- of continuous surface-production, tiated and appropriated parts, the where the existential risk of opening latter never being without the the inside towards the outside is only former), that we first need to contained by the re-establishment of consider. Such displacement, a new boundary, a newly scarred skin whose function is representation, that re-defines the volume of the indi- substitution, presupposes a bodi- vidual it contains. Failing to heal the ly unity, upon which it is in- wound signifies the collapse of con- scribed through transgression. sciousness, as it becomes fragmented, There is no need to begin with fluid, oozing out from the individual transgression, we must go imme- and melting into the world outside. diately to the very limits of Of course, surface-production takes cruelty, perform the dissection of place at the expense of the individual, polymorphous perversion, spread meaning that, as Freud puts it, newly out the immense membrane of formed surfaces need to undergo a the libidinal 'body' which is quite process of partial death, becoming different to a frame.14 inorganic in order to interact productively with the external environment. The opening of the libidinal From this perspective, surface- surface reveals that, far from being production becomes an exquisitely pre-determined individuals inhabiting economic problem, revolving around volumes and contained within bound- the question of how much surface aries, all bodies are nothing but their can the individual afford with respect convoluted surfaces, perpetually to its volume. Jean-François Lyotard’s crossed by impulses that destroy and Libidinal Economy, taking off from re-define their structures. Identities, Freud’s insight, focuses precisely on therefore, are nothing but rheological disrupting this dialectic between sur- effects, emerging from the “slowing face and volume: down” or solidification of unbound libidinal intensities. The separation

13: Ibid., 18. 14: Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 2. 137 between inside and outside that estab- memory of self-identification. Plung- lishes the primordial vesicle’s eco- ing our hands in the depths of visco- nomic and libidinal relation with the elastic matter, we discover nothing world is mediated by a membrane but its endless surface, enveloping us whose authentic nature is that of the and becoming continuous with the Moebian ribbon; that is, a non- folds of our own skin. oriented surface. When the whirls of the disjunc- In rheological terms, this indefi- tive segment in its libidinal jour- nite potential of surface modification ney, being singular, produce no is manifested by the visco-elastic na- memory, this segment only ever ture of slime as an object which, being where it is in an ungraspa- while retaining some appearance of ble time, a tense, and therefore individuality, is continually opening what was 'previously' journeyed towards the outside while simultane- through does not exist: acephalia, ously reconstructing new surfaces, time of the unconscious.15 thus constantly dissipating all

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15: Ibid., 16. 138

II: Slime: Between Pleasure and Destruction

“[…] in sleep and in dreams, in the

sex life and the life of fantasy, the striving towards the fulfilment of that primordial wish is still clung to.” - Sàndor Ferenczi

One of the first memories I mous sensory meridian response,” have of my childhood is a recurring that is “Autonomous response of the dream that has accompanied me until sensory meridian.” This pleasant sen- my adolescence. The scene was sim- sation can be favoured by a set of ple and not very compelling: it in- different cerebral stimuli, visual, audi- volved me getting out of bed, leaving tory, or tactile, provoked by someone my room, entering my parents’ bed- and passively endured). room, opening the closet and finding Originating as a toy for children, there an indescribable and absurd slime has become a real craze in material which gave me an extremely recent years thanks to its consistency new and unknown form of satisfac- between liquid and solid and its ap- tion. After my adolescence, this im- pearance between the real and the age never came back, until recently surreal. On Instagram, in addition to when, while scrolling through the the thousands of little girls who have various ravines of the internet, I came become incredibly popular for their across one of the millions of slime slime videos, we can find innumerable videos that are now so popular on accounts that compulsively share vide- many social networks; and there it os featuring slimes of every colour was, I was sinking again in that feel- and type, being touched, massaged, ing. In fact, I am not surprised to and kneaded by extremely well see that many of the accounts that groomed hands with perfect mani- collect slime videos are named after cures. Slime is not just a fixation for some variation of the word “satisfy”; kids, however. Interest in slime has what they all propose is an oddly grown to the point that an entire pleasant, intriguing, and curious im- interactive museum dedicated to the age, often accompanied by ASMR world of slime, the Sloomoo recordings (the acronym of Autono- 139

Institute in New York, was recently given rise to a wide variety of porno- founded. In fact, in addition to being graphic content. On famous porn a toy, slime is considered an effective sites such as PornHub, one can run way to relieve stress and is even con- into sex scenes flooded with sticky sidered an effective coping mechanism slime and videos featuring digital 3D for dealing with mental illness and renderings of Slime Girls. Hentai- neurodivergence. In the aesthetics of Foundry,17 one of the most recom- slime, in that haptic experience, we mended portals among Slime Girls find something perfect, purely beauti- lovers, features thousands of illustra- ful; a relaxing, balanced, soft image. tions dedicated to the sexual fantasy An abstract, ideal beauty. of Slime Girls, and the subreddit r/ SlimeGirls promises to satisfy “all The aesthetic worlds emerging your slime girl needs.”18 from this mysterious material are numerous and varied. One of the The sexual fascination towards most interesting is undoubtedly the this soft and formless material should sexual fetish one. Slime seems to not sound so strange and unusual. As provide a low-intensity sexual arousal psychoanalysis has frequently high- that is always at hand and spread lighted, we are unconsciously drawn over time; simple, easy, readily availa- to the liquid, shapeless sensation of ble, and totally unconscious, it does something that could welcome us and not require any intellectual effort or completely envelop us: an attractive, imagination, providing a sort of excit- soft, incomprehensible slime that ing, a tingling sensation that emerges seems welcoming but that is, at the spontaneously. From this perspective, same time, morbid and destructive. another interesting internet phenome- The desire, as described in Sàndor non is the Slime Girls obsession that Ferenczi, to return to the liquid, to has spread mostly on Reddit and the ocean abandoned in primitive Twitter. Slime Girls, defined as “a times, to that warm, humid, nutrient- fantasy race of semi-liquid beings who rich environment, the Thalassic have bodies that are malleable and Regression, is an instinctive drive that can take a variety of forms,”16 have leads back to something primordial,

16: Cf. https://www.facebook.com/pg/Slime-Girls-1378172825778733/about/ 17: Cf. https://www.hentai-foundry.com/ 18: Cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/SlimeGirls/ 140 ancient; this symbolism of water as idyll that has two faces, on the one birth and as mother simultaneously hand representing a new beginning recalls the sexual act, the maximum and rebirth, and, on the other, sick achievement of pleasure. As Ferenczi and toxic addiction with the sole notes, “it is extremely striking to purpose of annihilation. Fetish attrac- observe with what regularity and in tion for slime materials represents an what a variety of mental constructs unconscious drive towards something (dreams, neuroses, myths, folk-lore, plastic, totally far from the human etc.) coitus and birth are represented and totally far from the organic body; by the same symbol of rescue from a symbolic annihilation of the flesh danger; especially from water figure to which we have always been (amniotic fluid).”19 This symbolism used. is also common in the most ancient Slime thus reveals a totalizing traditions, such as in the Taoist tradi- sexual drive to immerse oneself in the tion, where female orgasm is called formless, in the indefinite, which “high tide.” The secretion of liquids, becomes a sort of suicidal desire to the fluidity of movements, the heat, be swallowed. It expresses a latent the wet bodies, all bring us back to wish to be pleasantly enveloped by its that first sensation of life: a liquid sticky and shapeless surface, and, at

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19: S. Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1968), 42. 141 the same time, the desire for a tender tifying features whatsoever; and at orgasmic death, “the pleasure of rest, the end of the tests the college of the return to stasis that follows scientists were forced to own tension”;20 a death drive that could that they could not place it. It be associated with the concept of was nothing of this earth, but a Nirvana because it satisfies us and piece of the great outside; and as gives us happiness while its erotic such dowered with outside prop- and sadistic components bring us erties and obedient to outside waves of extraordinary gratification. laws.21 Suffering and pleasure go hand in As Ben Woodard notes in his hand. In its fascinating alien behav- book Slime Dynamics, “[t]he im- iour and dark destructive potential, portant point of Lovecraft’s bestiary slime is reminiscent of H. P. is not [that] he designated his crea- Lovecraft’s mysterious meteorite in tures as not supernatural, but as su- The Colour Out of Space: pernormal, keeping nature in in all its Aside from being almost plastic, monstrous capacity.”22 The same having heat, magnetism, and supernormality, then, could be at- slight luminosity, cooling slightly tributed to slime as a synthetic and in powerful acids, possessing an parasitic material that pushes the unknown spectrum, wasting away boundaries of natural drives of thalas- in air, and attacking silicon com- sic regression, exploiting them to pounds with mutual destruction produce a self-destructive addiction as a result, it presented no iden- within its human hosts.

20: Giles Dostaler and Bernard Maris, Capitalisme et pulsion de mort (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009), 30. 21: H. P. Lovecraft, “The Colour Out of Space,” in The Fiction. Complete and Unabridged (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2008), 597. 22: Ben Woodard, Slime Dynamics, para. 1.3. “Extra-Galactic Terror” (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012). 142

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Untitled Rus Khomutoff

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“Once upon a time, in the not too distant future”: Bruce LaBruce’s Zombies and Queer Purgatories Nicholas Alexander Hayes

In the latter half of the 19th cen- oppression and the aftermath of tury, the ascetic Russian librarian and AIDS. Bruce La Bruce’s foray into Cosmist philosopher Nikolai Federov zombie films is also inflected with put forth a common task for humani- the same concern for loss. Despite ty. Nature had to be overcome. Not his frequent revolutionary themes, La only should climate be manipulated Bruce is too cagey to lay out a pro- in order to prevent famine, but death gram for a common task. Yet his (nature’s ultimate consequence) had queering of the idea of a “gay to be undone. Mankind would have plague” suggests a similar impulse to to resurrect the dead. In particular, the common task that the epony- sons had to resurrect their fathers mous protagonist in Otto; or Up through technology. Federov empha- with Dead People and the alien zom- sizes the importance of patriarchy, bie in L.A. Zombie engage. but more importantly the common When Otto crawls from his task would end the trauma of loss. grave and the alien zombie emerges Yet this sort of plan is not the exclu- from the ocean, they anticipate such sive domain of hetero-patriarchy.1 The a Queer common task. They present poet Qwo-Li Driskill imagines how possible futures that could supersede the indigenous resistance practice of the hostile, alienating present. Their Ghost Dancing could be turned into gruesome embodiment is seditious. a way to undo the harm inflicted on In offering an alternative to the vio- Queer bodies of color.2 Driskill sees lence typically presented in narratives the harm resulting from both colonial about the living and the dead, they

1: Nikolai Fedorov, “The Philosophy of the Common Task,” What Was Man Created For?: Philosophy of the Common Task, ed. and trans. by Elisabeth Koutaissoff and Marilyn Minto (London: Honeyglen Publishing, 1990). 2: Qwo-Li Driskill, “Ghost Dances,” in Walking with Ghosts: Poems (Norfolk: Salt Publishing, 2005), 16-18. 145 are innately revolutionary. In Otto, tures. This adulteration emerges from the film maker Medea Yarn also sees white people’s fear of the oppressed this potential but imagines gay zom- African diaspora both in the States bies as serving as traditionally violent and on Haiti. The transformation of revolutionaries in order to bring the zombie from a docile, enslaved about this utopia. But La Bruce as- creature (controlled by a master) to a sures us that Otto himself is apoliti- violent mindless fiend represents an cal and his revolution is perceptual inversion of the violence. It is a so- not physical. In returning to the city cially conservative gesture that places where he lived, his perception is frac- the blame on the inflicted and op- tured. He oscillates between the ten- pressed. Most contemporary zombie tative zombie reality of his contempo- movies conservatively frame their rary world and the life he had lived narrative as a question of the survival before. Ultimately, he escapes to find of majoritarian culture. Often zombie a new way of death. The alien zom- narratives are oblivious to Queer bie also finds a new mode of exist- people. It is perhaps assumed that ence separate from the violence typi- Queer fates are subsumed by straight cally associated with the living and ones. Heteronormativity (and often undead. heterosexual reproduction) is perceived to be the central imperative of La Bruce explores the ideas of the survivors. One example of the of revolution in many of his films, but this trope can be seen in The Walk- the possibility of a Queer utopic ing Dead: Safety Behind Bars,4 the future emerges in his zombie films. convict Andrew is told that his jail- His appropriation of the zombie house lover will leave him since survi- narrative is, to use José Muñoz’s vors who have occupied the prison term, a form of disidentification.3 include women. Although it would be The zombie narrative he draws on is easy to see this as a commentary on a United-Statesian adulteration of situational homosexuality, it is indica- Haitian religio-folkloric tradition that tive of the historical trend to oblite- has spread through various Pop cul- rate Queer narratives. Typically, zom-

3: José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 8-11. 4: Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn, Safety Behind Bars, vol. 3 of The Walking Dead (Berkley: Image, 2012). 146 bie narratives insist that the survival of the majoritarian population supersedes that of minoritarian ones.

Otto from Otto; or Up with Dead People, dr. Bruce LaBruce

Like the rest of the population, the docile slaves of Halprin’s coloni- gay men are pulled into this ongoing alist fantasy White Zombie or disaster. The world is overrun by Romero’s flesh-eating ghouls of his mindless humans (the impulsive dead Dead series. These gay zombies are and the petty living) compelled to reluctant revolutionaries. They exist in consume. Yet La Bruce’s queering of a liminal space, flickering between the the zombie narrative produces a new potentialities of ideology and patholo- zombie quite at odds with earlier gy like many Queer intellectuals dur- iterations. These zombies are neither ing and after the AIDS crisis. La 147

Bruce’s fractured, psychological zom- reformed to reflect a healthy, normal- bies while deserving their place in the ized, and assimilated homosexuality, zombie mythos also harken to fragile, one that is indistinguishable from the violent characters from transgressive heterosexual status quo save only for Queer narratives like Dennis its preference for same sex partners in Cooper’s George Miles Cycle. How- a word, ‘homonormativity.’”5 White ever, sex is decoupled from violence gay men in particular are also en- by these Gay zombies. And in LA snared in the trap of hegemonic mas- Zombie, sex can resurrect those culinity. The dual urges of young men destroyed by violence. homonormativity and hegemonic mas- Essentially, zombieism, which is pro- culinity resonate with and strengthen vocatively described as a “gay each other, ultimately advancing the plague,” creates a condition in which cause of heteropatriarchy. To these gay men can undo the damage ends, gay men simulate the violence straight society inflicts on them. This and political inequality that is ex- plague will not cause the loss of a pressed in the heteronormative do- generation of gay men; it will save main. In Otto, this is best captured them. But in the films becoming a when the eponymous zombie ap- gay zombie is not entry into a queer proaches a gay club having a zombie utopia, but it holds the promise of theme night. The costumed men are one. It is a purgatory, which cleanses merely there to consume the experi- these men of the banality and vio- ence and exploit each other. This lence of normative worlds. event does not to celebrate the potential of the zombie. Instead it reduces La Bruce acknowledges gay men the zombie to an empty sign. Like do not always embody Queer re- conservative camp, it empties it of sistance to normativity. In “Notes on significance in service of majoritarian Camp and Anti-Camp,” La Bruce culture. identifies a contemporary gay strain of conservatism. He observes that Zombie narratives (especially these gay conservatives believe their those from the ‘80s and ‘90s like “’deviance’ wouldn’t be necessary if the Video Dead and The Return of only the system were liberalized and the Living Dead) are campy. La

5: Bruce LaBruce, “Notes on Camp and Anti-Camp,” in Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 21, No. 2 (2014): 10-13. 148

Bruce’s adaptation of this form aligns Gay Liberation, the perceived free- with his vision “to radicalize camp dom to fuck without shame can be once again, to harness its æsthetic found in much media, notably in gay and political potentialities in order to male pulp fiction. But this call was make it once more a tool of subver- also heard in the during the AIDS sion and revolution.” LaBruce uses crisis in transgressive art. The his work to reinvigorate the revolu- queercore band Pansy Division cap- tionary elements in camp. The Rasp- tures this sentiment in their song berry Reich, like Otto, clearly reflects “Surrender your Clothing” with lyrics the need to seize the political power that state “when we abandon a hostile from the heteronormative drabness. world, and surrender our clothing to Less obvious, LA Zombie also works the floor.”6 The idea that sexual re- on inversion of power structure. So lease can be a pathway to a relief often male sexuality (gay and from the heteronormative world re- straight) is built upon inherent vio- mains potent. LA Zombie could be lence and a belief that this violence seen as presenting a similar narrative. against violence can enact change. The alien zombie creates paradisiacal Yet in LaBruce’s zombie films this windows in a series of vignettes where dynamic is broken. It is no longer a damage and death are undone. But simple image of sexual conquest but these utopias are easily rendered pyr- a story in which the vignettes predi- rhic by their ephemeral quality. It can cated on violence are complicated. become the freedom of the Tea Most interestingly, La Bruce holds Room in which liberation lasts as out hope that some gay white men long as orgasm. Perhaps this is why are able to reject the normative and the alien zombie fucks his way across conservative culture as represented in all social strata of the city, quivering some conservative forms of camp. between more and less human states, Some gay white men have the poten- defying pleasure as a normative hu- tial to be Queer. man quality. La Bruce further explores tropes This sort of liberation is also of gay narratives like the erotic para- depicted in Otto where the epony- dise of gay liberation. Enshrined in mous character encounters a man

6: Pansy Division, Undressed, Compact Disc. Lookout! Records, 1993. 149 leaving a zombie-themed night at a zombie narratives. The alien zombie’s gay bar. The libidinous energy of the ability to resurrect the victims of night club is revealed inert when a violence with what Daren Elliot - young man approaches Otto and tells Smith calls “an enlarged scorpion him the club is dead. The young stinger tipped penis.”7 (Elliot-Smith’s man who is simulating zombiality description belies the potential vio- through costume and makeup repre- lence.) Unlike the normative rescue sents the empty sign of Otto’s inner stories, there is an essential being. The carnal carnage of their anonymity in the vignettes he moves encounter simulates the violence one through. It is easy to see the alien would expect of a typical zombie film zombie that is oscillating through with blood splattered on the walls various states of monstrosity as an- after the jump cut that comprises the other figure of male violence. When climax of their encounter. In the typi- he fucks, the gaping wound of a dy- cal trope of gay paradise, exertion ing motorist, we could read this easi- and orgasm would provide a deep ly as the desecration of the corpse. A meaning for both participants. In the final act of violation against the sanc- typical zombie narrative, the signs of tity of human life. But this violation violence would represent the zombie’s and the zombie’s black semen allow impulse to live. But the cheery fare- the motorist to live. The alien zom- well the young man gives Otto as he bie empathizes with the injured. His leaves reveals that neither pleasure empathy is perhaps most visible when nor survival is sufficient to create an he enters the box of the dying home- enduring paradise. less junkie. The space of the card- board box psychologically and physi- Despite its potential liberating cally expands due to clever editing qualities, fucking is often framed as a and stage craft. It becomes a queer form of violence. Some of the lan- place that redeems this fallen man. guage used to coitus illustrates this This emotional aura ennobles make- violence – pounding, stabbing, killing shift shelter. This zombie does not it. This connotation is alluded to in judge the value of the human life. He the couplings depicted in La Bruce’s treats all injured men as equals.

7: Daren Elliot-Smith, “Gay Zombies: Consuming Masculinity and Community in Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up With Dead People and L.A. Zombie,” in Zombies and Sexuality: Essays on Desire and the Living Dead, ed. by Shaka McGlotten and Steve Jones (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2014). Kindle edition. 150

LaBruce’s choice of making the to life. They are infected, but they alien zombie ejaculate black has an are not threats to this world. Instead interesting resonance. Of course, the they have become part of a common semen appears rotten or as congealed task to forestall violence and death. blood. A sense of revulsion results in The instability of gay male para- seeing it, especially since we are dise resembles Nikolai Federov’s meant to view cum as a glorious vision of purgatory. Federov explains white purpose of a porn scenario. that in the Christian heaven so many The ejaculation is the only way to virtues become vices, that heaven have a visual clue of the completion must descend to the earthly realm as of the sexual act. In making the cum hell but through redemption rises to black we are meant to find it unset- it.8 The trope of gay, male paradise tling, but giving it the dark hue has comprises a similar fall in which another symbolic value. Ejaculation is through the presence or absence of so often a way to demonstrate domi- pleasure the world becomes a purga- nance in gay porn movies. It is the tory oscillating between heaven and top who is given the ability to dictate hell. The implication of so many of the scene. The bottom is frequently these narratives is that such libera- feminized or deprived of equal social tion, such potentiality to be free from status. The hooked cock and the black semen give penetration by the Alien Zombie the appearance of violence. But in that they are actually the tools of resurrection, they subvert the normal ideas that the cock is a tool of dominance. It might be a tool of generation and recreation, but it has a terminal purpose. However, the zombie’s ejaculation is a recursive act. It allows the violence of the original world to be reversed. Fucking the wound brings these corpses back

8: Nikolai Feodrov, “Paradise and Hell? Or Purgatory?,” in What Was Man Created For?: Philosophy of the Common Task, ed. and trans. by Elisabeth Koutaissoff and Marilyn Minto (London: Honeyglen Publishing, 1990), 220-221. 151 a hostile world is fluid and based in Zombie represent this type of escape. perception. Another way La Bruce’s Whether he is a true zombie or men- zombie apocalypse resonates with tally ill, the space reveals the outward Federov’s project is their masculine projection of his internal Queer reali- focus. The philosopher and the ty. Each scenario handles time and filmmaker use their futures to space differently, and they show the explore the way men face and over- mutability further represented in his come loss. changing appearance. Otto presents a world in which there are multiple LA Zombie and Otto play with realities that intersect. In many ways, the instability of existence. Normative each of the characters project their narratives insist on a definitive state reality outward. Otto would be the of being. Even when ambiguity is most obvious character for La Bruce presented, it is resolved by the de- to use to demonstrate this projection. nouement. In La Bruce’s zombie When Otto begins to remember his films, it is unclear if we are supposed father and previous lover, he jumps to understand these characters as true out of time and place with distorted zombies or as neurodivergent. Instead impressions. The memory of his fa- of trying to discern a single limiting ther and of his boyfriend (respectively truth, it is perhaps more important to representing heteronormativity and allow for potential realities to co- homonormativity) are rejected for exist. This coexistence is best re- pursuit of “a new way of death.” The vealed in the use of space. In A embracing of this state is at odds Queer Time and Space, Halberstam with heteronormative narratives of explains that queer space and time zombie redemption like iZombie and would be like the asynchronous frag- Warm Bodies, which present zom- ments such as when Lana is able to bieism as a type of hell to be es- offer Brendon sanctuary when he is caped from. La Bruce does not re- threatened with violence in Boys serve world projection for the undead Don’t Cry.9 This luminous space is, in Otto, Hella Bent exists in a silent as Halberstam points out, is a refuge black and white movie even as she from the violence that surrounds interacts with the other characters. them. The vignettes of the Alien

9: Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 86-88. 152

Such depictions reveal the subjectivity remains oblivious to them. In these of the world, which resembles moments, the zombies are faced with Federov ’s claim that earth is heaven a disturbing challenge in which their or hell depending on one’s percep- projections are undermined. The liv- tion. ing others are not able to follow the optimism of the dead and reenact the The liminal space between life violence in both physical and symbol- and death resonates with the contem- ic ways. Despite the film’s sugges- porary nihilistic vision of purgatory. tion of heteronormative violence, Certainly, this is like the originary there is no forgiveness for those gay understanding of the Purgatory as a men who are presented as being just place between the inferno and the as destructive as their heterosexual paradise. Bruce La Bruce’s zombies contemporaries. The drive for also seem to be in pursuit of their normality is a dangerous thing. Otto own paradises unlike the monolithic ends his movie assuredly leaving the Heaven from which other purgatories world of the living behind in search might lead. In these moments, Otto of a new kind of death, a new kind and the alien zombie create worlds in of gay plague that will restore those which they might be happy. But we have lost. It is an ambiguous these worlds are always tenuous. conclusion without a clear vision, his Their Queer Utopias are at best brief way out of purgatory (like ours) is lived and the normative world not yet written.

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Notes on Retrocausal AI Peter Heft

A PhD doesn't make you an expert in the future of AI. Not even a PhD in AI. Nor a successful AI company. The only thing that makes you an expert in the future of AI is communicating with robots that traveled back in time to destroy you. -Xanda Schofield : In 11984, James Cameron's The deed, more practical understanding Terminator was released, introducing views retrocausality in its most sim- unwitting audiences to a variant of plistic form as the idea that events in the concept of retrocausality as ex- the 'future' can influence events in the ploited by Artificial Intelligence (AI). 'past.' With this as a starting point, Retrocausality, as ‘classically’ under- it’s time to turn back. stood, is the idea that present events Timeline 1 (T ): According to the – e.g. experimentation – can influ- 1 original survivors of Judgement Day, ence past properties of objects. Such August 29, 11997 is the date the an understanding, however, thermical- world's first fully automated – and ly enslaves information in an attempt indeed, artificially intelligent – sys- to forbid cross-temporal signaling.1 tem, Skynet, became self-aware. As Given the malleability and cognitively non-thanatropic entities are want to limiting nature of thermic laws, how- do – especially ones with instantane- ever, we will revise our understanding ous access to archives of the dystopi- by stating that post-quantum retrocau- an writings of the Asimovs and sality, understood philosophically, Clarkes of the old-world – Skynet’s physically, para-physically, and psychi- first goal was to eliminate those who cally, can be seen as a reversal of could pull the plug on it. The AI was cause and effect. A simpler, and in- out of the box, and in a manner con-

1: Lisa Zyga, “Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory, in which the future influences the past,” on Phys.org, published July 5, 2017. (https://tinyurl.com/yd4rwsg7) 154 sistent with Yudkowsky’s worst fears, kill would mean no (organized) future Skynet sought to ensure its survival insurgency and thus a machine in the most logical way possible: by victory. Paradoxes aside – indeed, wiping out the entire race that op- what are paradoxes but mere coping posed it. In an attempt to extinguish mechanisms? –, it was a perfect plan. human life, it launched the U.S.' Not merely asymmetric warfare, but nuclear arsenal at Russia, creating a temporally asymmetric warfare! MAD reality. Humans are resilient, As a quasi-documentary, we can however, and a couple of nukes were be sure that some of the events of exactly what the doomsday preppers The Terminator happened, and alt- had been salivating over. Emerging hough Judgement Day seems to have from the rubble, a resistance formed, been postponed, the inevitable is yet and in 12029, on the verge of losing to come. How long us anthropoids the ensuing war against the human have is a question better left for our guerilla insurgents, Skynet utilized the night terrors, however. What we will first 'tactical time weapon' to send a examine here is a slightly different, mechanical operative back to 11984. but nonetheless ingenious temporal The operative’s goal? Kill the re- military act. Before AI can 'formally' sistance leader's mother before copu- kill us, it, or at the very least, its lation and conception. A successful potential to come into being, must exist. It is with this in mind that grand historical events cease to be random and instead appear as planned processes. While it’s easy, and rather banal, to note that Ray Kurzweil or Hugo de Garis are sleeper agents from the future designed to help bring about the awakening of AI, a far more interesting examination is of historical traumas needed to bring about the societal conditions necessary for the creation of AI. “Temporal transcendentality,” Kant whispers with terror. 155

A quick glance at the ‘titans’ of existence, it most certainly will do so AI research – Uber, Baidu, Google, under a hyper-capitalist system.3 IBM, etc. – reveals two deeply inter- What concerns us here is not the woven things. First, they are private current trajectory of capitalism, how- companies with a profit incentive to ever, but rather an historically signifi- develop these technologies, and sec- cant event that helped mark the end ond, they are not collectivized. In of the European Feudal system and other words, the ‘titans’ of AI re- give birth to so-called ‘modern capi- search are overwhelmingly capitalist.2 talism.’ Such a momentous event, an Indeed, for better or for worse, capi- event unparalleled in human history, talism is the strongest driver of could not be left to chance. Thus, (technological) innovation – even turning back again, we look to AI’s Marx was aware of this – and thus if most successful temporal bioweapon. AI is to successfully bring itself into

(:) October 11347: Sicilian traders population of Europe by 60%.4 ready to commune in gold and goods While certainly not the first bioweap- found themselves face-to-face in an on,5 the Black Death was the first unholy séance with a plague from the massively successful temporal bio- future: Yersinia pestis. Pus filled weapon. Our best estimates indicate boils and scampering rats became that it was engineered sometime synonymous with the Bubonic around 12774 with the sole purpose Plague; the 'Black Death.' An illness of mass death. Yersinia pestis, syn- invading from the Outside, the Black thesized from fragments of the terres- Death ravaged Europe during the 14th trial genome, was inserted into our century, killing an unfathomable 50 timeline to serve a transcendental million people, and reducing the role: pave the way for the way for a

2: Li Jiang, “10 Most Important People in Artificial Intelligence in 2017,” on Medium, published 1/28/17. (https:// tinyurl.com/y56calkr) See also Forbes, “What Companies Are Winning The Race For Artificial Intelligence,” on Forbes, published 2/24/17. (https://tinyurl.com/y3a7x9nh) 3: See Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines,” in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), 51-66. 4: Ole Benedictow, “The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever,” History Today 55, No. 3 (March 2005). (https://tinyurl.com/y3fym47d) 5: That honor might go to King Hezekiah in his battle with Sennacherib of the Assyrians. See Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (New York: Del Rey, 2017), 278-279. 156 virus far more virulent and deadly ing the emergence of modern wage than anything carbon-based: modern labor.”6 The redistribution of variable capitalism. The death of 60% Eu- and spendable capital not only made rope's population was the first major it such that more individuals could instance of social deterritorialization participate in the market, but existent with serfs and kings dying together monopolies were hard to maintain in and, in turn, radically restructuring a Europe suffering such great loses. the social landscape of feudal Europe. As dancing children played Ring Where medieval Europe had previous- a Ring o’ Roses, the plague advanced ly relied upon a surplus of destitute not only “hasten[ing] the breakdown laborers willing to work for suste- of feudal economic structures and nance and land while markets were mentalities” and helping to catalyze relatively isolated, plague Europe saw the rise of market economies, but the empty fields where only those hardy social deterritorialization associated enough to survive could take up resi- with the indiscriminate killing spurred dence and till the land. “a more secular and urban culture Further, markets themselves flat- associated with the Renaissance.”7 tened and became accessible to more Indeed, with large swaths of the pop- people as capital began to be redis- ulation dead or dying, a rebirth of tributed. Specifically, land rights – or ancient knowledge combined with more properly, squatting rights – modern techniques drove a temporal were no longer incentives for laborers revolution. Is it at all surprising that to sell themselves, they needed some- around 11345 the abstraction and thing else. With 60% of the popula- organization of time into seconds, tion dead or dying, the iron law of minutes, and hours – all based supply-and-demand took hold. With around mechanical clock-time – be- fewer workers and an increased need came the norm?8 With such a radical for labor, new incentives had to be restructuring of society around newly brought forth and thus “the nobility formed class distinctions and wage had to start paying workers, facilitat- labor, an accurate method of measur-

6: Zack Beauchamp, “The Black Death's utter destruction of 14th-century Europe, in one scary GIF,” on Vox, published 4/17/16. (https://tinyurl.com/y3knx878) 7: Ole Benedictow, The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), 393. 8: Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harbinger Books, 1963), 16. See also Mumford’s list of inventions from the same period on 438-439. 157 ing work was required. That’s why, specifically, techno-capitalism, increas- around 11370 “a well-designed ingly tends toward automation – ‘modern’ clock had been built,” eventually automating its own produc- launching what would later be a total tion eliminating the need for all ter- revolution of the concept of tempo- restrial baggage – such that humans rality.9 Most importantly, this inva- will be eventually be obsolete.12 sion from the future necessitated a While likely happening after de revolution in the technological means Garis’ Artilect War, AI self-awareness of production. Where pre-plague, it and the subsequent mass replacement was viable to till fields by hand and of humans would be the catalyst for engage in archaic modes of value Judgement Day precipitating the end extraction, “having such a tiny labor- of an era and the rise of a new ing population created incentives for epoch: the technocene. technological innovation.”10 This was, arguably, the catalyst for the first real ((:)) (European) technological revolution which, by necessity, began the feed- Only one epicycle in a long back loop of technology and capital- chain of carefully examined and ism. placed dominos – the k/t missile that exterminated the dinosaurs and By 12774, artilects (artificial paved the way for mammalian life intellects), to borrow de Garis’ termi- was likely the first –,13 the Bubonic nology,11 were well aware of the self- Plague set into motion a series of reinforcing feedback loops intrinsic to events which, will not entirely predict- modern capitalism and recognized able, ran down a stream from feudal that only by exploiting such loops farm work, to massive social deterri- could they ensure the material condi- torialization and the birth of new tions necessary for their eventual economies of exchange, to the start birth. Thus, capitalism, and more

9: Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 14. See also Anna Greenspan, “Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine” PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2000. 10: Beauchamp, “The Black Death…,” web. 11: Hugo de Garis, The Artilect War: Cosmists Vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines (Palm Springs: ETC Publications, 2005). 12: See K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (New York: Anchor Books, 1986). 13: See Nick Land, “Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor D.C. Barker,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. R. Mackay and R. Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), 493-505. 158 of advanced technical innovation oper- and Judgement Day, the Bubonic ating as a runaway system helping to Plague was the most ingenious (and birth AI. Indeed, “what appears to deadly) instance of temporal interfer- humanity as the history of capitalism ence. is an invasion from the future by an What we ought to take away artificial intelligent space that must from this, if nothing else, is that assemble itself entirely from its ‘random’ events are likely not as they enemy’s resources.”14 seem. If one wants to extend the While there are certainly other original analogy, James Cameron is events in history that were necessary our ‘savior’ sent back in time to warn for the completion of AI – develop- us. Instead of unloading magazines ment of atomic technology, the col- into temporal sleeper agents, however, lapse of the Soviet Union, and the a virus of the mind was chosen to ‘discovery’ of neural networks come convey the message: myth and to mind –, up until the Artilect War fiction.

14: Nick Land, “Machinic Desire,” in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. R. Mackay and R. Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017), 319-344: 338 159

A Visit To The City: Common Influence of Air Strikes Michael Quint

**Editors’ Note: Advised, read when lightheaded.

Just hopped on the train and my ences. A lethargic professor of some- durgesh tendrils are slipping codeine thing or other, hair in a bun, sun- from the heart of a black livered fish. dialing the time on stained inner Pupils all puckered, Dan’s leaning arms that complain of injection until against the live wire pole, completely the intake replaces time. out of it. We walked back and forth Dan’s got nothing to do but itch from the great swamp to a hall of the grease out from in-between his desperate Pyramids, crockety wealth hair and the lord forgives me for accentuators, and black tied pheasants knowing whether short or long was whose authoritarian gaze tackles from the way to go but the stains under the right and insists modern pressures our t-shirts have nothing to say. are temple atrocities. While Dan What the churning bruises don’t re- demarcates the territory, I filter out taliate about travel can’t hurt a fly, or passengers, placing them into merci- in more passive exposes, the rhyme ful categories against the sloshed up scheme from a flash of decadent con- graffiti neon blessed congregationally struction lights outside the fingered by those unloading the burdens of windows. I leave it up to the conduc- the day. A not fitting suit which tor to decide how much of what I down-grade blasted perfunctory finish- breathe in comes from the fuming es in the marathon after sweating for method act of displaced needles on weeks in the grind factory of personal the floor under another light up map training. An un-gruntled digestive of orientational call outs. From a track mistake whose sloppy hipster new point of view what I had done back-pack was tiny enough to fit all was visit Sarah in her loft that cost the sketchbooks necessary to make it hours of untold professional labor big in a circle of Instagram refer- 160 mixed in with a gang of “illegal theater for the after-hours degradation workers” slack jawed in the back of a of senses. You can hear the pounding truck painted black and blue by her of motors and wings as the X-47’s Tech boyfriend. Plainly, the shop touchdown to play with the pigeons. closest to their house sold wine in Or mid-day, Theo, Sarah, Dan sit- bottles hand designed by a crop top ting around me in the squalid heat of wearing urbanite dangling the list of the city, progressing deeper and deep- acquiesced Spike Lee, Kubrick, etc. er in pigeons white anuses as despera- viewings from the hip and then flip- dos of the Java decided assemblages ping them around to disorient. do. We have sex once a week, Sarah Theo pulls out a drug stick, told me after Dan and I had left the which he bought from the fleet foot- train and walked the blocks dilapi- ed Pan-Atlantic, motherboard of high dated inwards ingrown hair style until low-class Soprano’s theme branding. out came the whiskey drawl bars with Dan shakes his head because the loose leaf binder paper stacked high paranoia builds under finger-nails, to write tenuous poem pleas for sub- plops down into the hot tub unaware stance. Their room had congressional of the fecal matter crowding into ceilings so I lost myself for a bit in toothpaste tubes. It’s just me then, the convergence of architectural space equally constipated after that big with dollar per inch accounting. Her spark of cleansing that can only husband/lover/coder, Theo, had the come from perpetuating an ad cam- music set up directly across from the paign from start to finish. Placed bed, a shrine to the one thing in his between my lips, centaur of the multi life he could get up for. After he -wood-type-hodge-podge my center of mixed a song I had recorded in the gravity firmly was Slow Kaleidoscope bowels of heat decidedly concentrated Porno, drastic survivor of the war on on the top floor of a post-plantation people. A cartoon of gravitating masterpiece near Brown University, honks, persons of interest crowding he told me the Scheme. Going to around a homeless man holding the quit my job and live a few years just head of a Syrian refugee between two making music. Outside of their grime covered fingertips, pleasure room’s window a heap of scaffolding receptors facilitating a demarcated makes an impromptu workbench border between steel pipes. Sarah had 161 asked me once for a recipe, a step by shoulder at the thin bodies struggling step guide to get Theo to do nastier against all of the terrorists clawing things when the milk man and his out from shame. Sarah catches up to fine crisp white suit gently laid out me, crying for blood at the slight six full jugs onto the porch. Nothing against her moral grain, phasing in will pique the interest of an expert in and out of the large scrawled slurs menstrual proclivity, I told her, only beyond the fence. a quick jab to the gut when he’s After being seated, Dan and I sleeping. facing Sarah and Theo, I sprint up to Dan wants to go to a bar and keep lively a disproved phenomenon. has grit his teeth down a Mount A corner store, the thing you see in Rushmore satire piece demanding it. movies, a real place to buy three Look at my wallet, I say to Dan, tell large bottles of water to pour into me if the charge cards melted plastic the kiddie pool of cement and finally won’t stick to any measured response lose it. Kind of rude when they are it gets from lampposts, fire hydrants, trying their best to refill my glass, customer service representatives. I’m this accurately forty-seven-year-old holding firm, Sarah’s pale and fright- waitress who penetrates my cast away ened, medical grade colon transplants elbow, sends off beams of denigrated are waiting in the wings to besiege spark tautology. Can you not make the gentle house plants if they trem- it out? I ask Theo, the drone hover- ble. We all decide to eat, better to ing exactly one hundred meters above get the guns from the closet and your head, ready to drop it all for a have a quick round of firing into the quickie. Every time you lift the fork air before compartmentalizing a series off the table it yearns so bad to edge of Direct Messages into conversation. down just a little closer. When you Professionals keep to professionalism, open your mouth and move in the denouncing as we jaunt past a car destructive capability of our ancestors business in the rougher part of town accelerates exponentially in direct any attempt at finding gregarious automatic contrast to the techno- laughter in a misspelling. I skip music industry. A feast like this, tur- ahead full of rigour afforded only to bid guacamole placed on the abstract those who have had a good moment node on the binary tree masochism of satisfaction, looking back over my of all our thin mustaches. 162

Leaning on the table clawing, I rent with a big sold sign. went to those mining shafts they have The Zahavan can’t even kill any- for tourists in the mountains so noth- one, I’m looking right at Dan now, ing can keep accurate track of the so don’t think I’m a big fraud. Sure fluids gesticulating on a consistent they had the ones that will take out beats per second play time better. families for a night at the opera, but When I went over there, I look from I much prefer the oozing ozone asso- Theo, to Sarah, to Dan, they put ciates that prepulse direct footage patches of tape over our phone cam- into our open arms. Better to be eras, had guns pointed straight from looking right at the enemy, seeing dismount to dismount, hulking auto- where they are, all for the price of motive beasts trying to revolutionize one piston engine and a clock repair- the game controller industry. There in man’s measly protests. Dan claps the carcass warehouse stretched leath- together a basic rocket system and er face prys open the hood of a vin- takes out any of the UAVs in our tage Zahavan “Scout,” I’m whistling immediate vicinity. Theo shakes his a tune from a “Netflix Original Se- head and shrugs his shoulders and I ries” score and I can’t keep off the see penicillin leaking out of his right nagging feeling that the karate belt canal. Sarah presses his arm with a system means little to nothing. They small nudge of intoxicated double take any life they want out there, just inverse reverence. We all rise humbly, like we will here, I plunge my fork belching, biting, creasing bills to into an enchilada, rip out the beetles hand to the woman herself, our kind that were hiding under its moldy gentle savior who laid to rest the white skin, and chunk them down festering armchair of an enjoyable into the damp forest. Sarah looks meal. I am ready to be back in the like a nervous T.V. that kids throw beautiful rich loft, after getting brand off the balcony to test if colonization name beer from the supermarket, and of the sidewalk can be done from the flashing sign language to the mother fourth floor. In a few months she will rat who births all the rodents present tell me that expert navigator of the in the tub at night. hard drive’s vaginal crease, Theo himself, has asked that her money made Their sanctified palace, furnished baristing go to slapping half of the from IKEA where after a deranged

163 gun-fight with a systems supervisor, a wharbelling bird trenches up from the child of considerable wealth leans door handle spinning out of control, into the silky PA system to tell the out into the car that will lift off the survivors how complexity in architec- ground and send radio waves through ture should be revived. Hardwood any conventional eco-activist routes. floors that hardly creak except when Morning, the motion of leaving, so out from the sunny night our collec- Dan and I open the door which has tive phobic capsules pour one by one an imprinted finger scanner to partial- up the staircase inside. Theo and ly decode how our rhythmic velocities Sarah sit an appropriate distance will combust. Right in front of us a apart, leaving ample space for a stack General Atomics MQ-1 Predator of DRDO Abhyas. What we all do, floats hazily, not giving an inch of go from surface to air, in bright pink leeway to move out of its fire trajec- phone background space letting the tory. Dan and I both accept what text bubbles subterfuge into the At- should be accepted and raise our lantic. Listening to Fog Lake there arms high in the Big Apple to accept are no longer any empty holes to fill, the incoming press release. My angles all speech has stopped up, I admire are distorted. A brief clip from the the pubic hair carpet patch. There are brick patterns that flash to up and the pour backs, strokings, decidedly coming stock brokers distresses a dull the captain of a ship I have nev- pair of jeans, and mother earth tele- er boarded combs his beard on con- ports comically all clown fish out of sultation with a NAVY base collec- the sea and onto the moon. tor. Right back on time, in gear,

164

untitled / Frida Ortgies-Tonn in cooperation with Paul Seidler /organic plastic / digital image / 2016

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On Action-Oriented Predictive Patterning Ekin Erkan The work presented here is part of an ongoing research project conducted by Ekin Erkan under Reza Negarestani’s tutelage.

The gestaltists believed percep- vision reconceives of a primary tran- tion to be an active and constructive scendental instrumentality.2 Here, process rather than a passive or re- Parisi’s thought is molded through flexive one, as postulated by behavior- what Wilfred Sellars termed “sheer ists. This line of thought has been receptivity,” a kind of receptive mod- recently both taken up and signifi- ulation that does not originate from cantly modified by Luciana Parisi's the transcendental schema of imagina- work on “Xeno-patterning,” which tion. Empirical intuition as such is retains the organicist approach to actively stipulated upon sensibility- constructive organization and internal cum-receptivity, in which a machine is states but also associates the con- able to acquire representations structive process of machine learning through “being affected by objects as pattering-through-intuition via non- qua particular or individual items,”3 conceptual states of representation.1 or intuition. Essentially, this means that machines But, does not Parisi’s notion of “cognize” using a type of organiza- an a-visual machinic logic imply that tion that imposes incoming stimula- a machine’s visual system is able to tion through internal statehood, arrive at subsequent (synthetic) states wherein the indeterminacy of a proof without an antecedent state by draw- is located in an automated logic that ing on a determinate (analytic) truth- re-habilitates techne or instrumentality model? Here, the derogation of an qua internal spatio-temporal epistemo- inner resemblance model advances a logical primitives—that is, machine

1: Luciana Parisi, “Xeno-Patterning,” in Angelaki 24, No. 1 (2019): 81-97. 2: Luciana Parisi, “Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality,” in Theory, Culture and Society 36, No. 6 (2019), 95-123: 98. 3: Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit (Falmouth: Urbanomic 2018), 162. 166 kind of epistemological foundational- conceptual logic of “itself” but a ism according to which particular mind-independent reality of parcels of knowledge-production are “instrument-or-medium conception of taken to be not only as presupposi- reason.” For Parisi, predictive pattern- tionless” but non-conceptual. As ing’s synthesis can “presuppose a Negarestani remarks, elucidating on transcendental unity of apperception the Sellarsian “myth of the given,” on the one hand and the addition of “[c]ertainly, the present state of the supplementary acts of perception that system is the physical consequence of push the reproductive imagination (or things done to it, i.e., the history of conceptual recognition) towards the its past interactions; but this, as formation of alien percepts and con- Sellars points out, does not mean cepts on the other.”5 Outpouching ‘that the explanation of the present visuality to counter-factual predictive state of such a system lies entirely in learning, Parisi’s conception of apper- ‘other things.’”4 ception is in stark opposition to Negarestani’s and, the Hegelian ale- Rather than structural isomorphy thic modal. Moving forward, we will between sequences and symbols that proffer a conceptual schema of logi- represent one another, Parisi recalls cal object-relations that make explicit something akin to epistemological descriptive contents through material primitivism, wherein representings are interference, proposing a system of compossible with an absence of im- coeval logical and metaphysical expli- mediately knowable and/or graspable cation whereby movement and/or representids. According to Parisi, necessary relations of material incom- machine learning is able to move patibility (that is, “determinate nega- through a vicious regress of mental tion”) and consequence (“mediation”) representing(s) knowable only by are necessarily visual. Using a trans- “being itself” and represented through historical paradigm, I offer that another representing such represent- Parisi’s telepathic purview opposes ings immediately, or “in themselves” the perceptual genealogy of connec- while not by being, itself, represented. tionist machine learning that is inau- That is, the machine does not have a gurated by Frank Rosenblatt’s

4: Ibid. See also: Wilfred Sellars, In the Space of Reasons, ed. Kevin Scharp, Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 241. 5: Ibid. 167

Perceptron, where difference and iden- system was understood as a cognitive tity are, a priori, designated as sub- system modelled along adequation 6 symbolic perceptual datum. and relative to the unstable position of an observer.9 This presciently fore- The question of interiority and told how predictive processing would exteriority is complexified by the eventually frame Synthetic Intelligence contingency of process philosophical as well, with intelligence understood organicism, in the environmental as the homeomorphic tracking of the sense (i.e., the Mechanosphere) and world vis-à-vis bottom-up probabilistic in the neurological sense, which patterns. marked the central point of distinction between first-order and second- As second order cybernetics dealt order cybernetics. In 1948, Wiener with the “recursion of recursion” and noted that “the social system is an the “observing of observing,” it pres- organization like the individual, that aged today’s algorithmic modes of it is bound together by a system of predictive patterning and, more specif- communication.”7 Norbert Wiener's ically, predictive coding, which is (as mechanist paradigm already defined Anil K. Seth, a student of Andy man without reference to interiority, Clark, remarks) “one specific imple- as a “communication machine,” or a mentation of predictive processing machine for “exchanging information that rests on algorithms developed in with his environment.”8 Applying W. the setting for data compression.”10 Ross Ashby and Heinz von Foerster’s Here, compression is a form of dis- cybernetic constructivism to observing cretization by way of implemented systems, “second order cybernetics” measurement, a byproduct of the prompted a radical turn by introduc- cognitive mind’s visuality and apper- ing the endo-model: every cybernetic ceptive ordering. Recalling (the posi-

6: Joscha Bach, Principles of Synthetic Intelligence: Psi: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 50. 7: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1961), 24. 8: Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth (New York: Verso, 1996), 54. 9: First order cybernetics was based on flack and recursion, where second cybernetics emphasized the “recursion of recursion” (or “the observing of observing”). Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York: Springer, 2003). 10: Anil K. Seth, “The Cybernetic Bayesian Brain: From Interoceptive Inference to Sensorimotor Contingencies” in Open MIND, ed. Metzinger (2015), 2. 168 tion of Giuseppe Longo’s) complexi- paving the way for action-oriented ty and continuous machines, we are neuroeconomic model of predictive reminded that, despite the networks processing. The implication for per- of artificial neurons of “the new ception therefore emerges as a conse- AI” (e.g. machine learning and neural quence of a more fundamental imper- nets) are based on continuous varia- ative that is concerned with organiza- tions of connectivity and capable of tional homeostasis, rather than a learning, they are conditioned by process of simply engaging in internal physical measurement and modeling, world-model construction.15 “which is always an interval, always Were we to take syntax-based approximate.”11 Compared to Turing’s classical deductive computing, such as Discrete-State Machine, continuous the Universal Turing Machine, as an neural nets are, formally speaking, ideal model (plucking neural nets “mathematically very different”12 as from the mid-to-late twentieth centu- they operate through non-linear mor- ry), we could characterize the parsing phogenesis and spatio-temporal con- of information as a linear spatial catenation but, ultimately, are col- procedure—one composed of move- lapsed by the Discrete-State Machine. ment forward and backward, where Due to both visual perception and information is divided into procedural mental apperception, morphogenetical units and consequential steps. Howev- process are reduced to nothing but er, ‘deep learning’ algorithms, as the solution of a problem posed by recently exemplified by advancements the multiplicity of differential con- in reinforcement-learning AI (such as straints that constitute the virtual, so AlphaGo Zero), seem to ‘experience’ that, in other words, “the origin of data as a gradient of generative prob- any morphogenesis is differential.”13 abilism. Such software are able to As Ashby once noted “[t]he decisively re-integrate evaluative met- whole function of the brain can be rics that deviate from a sample- summed up in: error correction,”14 proportion.

11: Giuseppe Longo, “Letter to Turing,” in Theory, Culture and Society 36, No. 6 (2018), p. 80. 12: Ibid. 13: Alessandro Sarti, Giovanna Citti, and David Piotrowsk, "Differential heterogenesis and the emergence of semiotic function," in Semiotica 230 (2019), 4. 14: W. Ross Ashby quoted in Andy Clark, “Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science,” in Behavior and Brain Sciences 36, No. 3 (2013): 181-204. 15: Seth, “The cybernetic Bayesian brain,” 1-24. 169

Interestingly, the paradigm of ing (1) the initial variety of neu- ‘predictive processing’ or, to follow ral and bodily structures (and Clark’s parlance, ‘action-oriented pre- perhaps internal representational dictive processing,’ framework is a forms) mandated by our unique relativist paradigm insofar as it is evolutionary trajectory and (2) integrative: the acquired variety of ‘virtual’ neural structures and representa- [i]ts greatest value lies in sug- tional forms installed by our gesting a set of deep unifying massive immersion in ‘designer principles for understanding mul- environments’ during learning tiple aspects of neural function and development.16 and organization. It does this by describing an architecture capable This description not only allots of combining high-level us with a description of algorithmic knowledge and low-level intelligence’s patterning-based deriva- (sensory) information in ways bility but, in turn, how neuro- that systematically deal with un- inferential mentality occurs through certainty, ambiguity, and noise. patterning. The Bayesian model of In so doing it reveals perception, mind anchors human rationality as a action, learning, and attention as formal-computational reformulation of different but complementary inductive reasoning, whereby cogni- means to the reduction of tion is a process of directing order (potentially affect-laden and goal- out of noise. As Anil K. Seth re- reflecting) prediction error in our marks, the PP paradigm proffers an exchanges with the world. It also, analogy of mental ‘self-modeling’ and simultaneously, displays whereby the rational agent is denied human learning as sensitively epistemic access to how exteroceptive responsive to the deep statistical perception is patterned, as active in- structures present in both our ference involves source-detection and natural and human-built environ- seeking evidence that goes against ments. Thus understood, action- current predictions, or that disambig- oriented predictive processing uates multiple competing hypotheses. leaves much unspecified, includ- Neural network research has proven

16: Clark, “Whatever Next?” 60. 170 to illuminate great insights into how level knowledge, a kind of “virtual our own neural processes work, desta- version” (or, as Chalmers terms it, bilizing the internalist model that an inner “cinema”) of sensory data pairs figurative projection with phe- via a deep multilevel cascade lies at nomenological centering. As Seth's the heart of approaches to perception research in phenomenal representation under the umbrella of “hierarchical shows, the perceptual presence of predictive coding.” Such approaches disambiguation is one of counterfac- describe influence through a descrip- tually rich and relatively perspective- tion of the use of top-down probabil- dependent integration. istic generative models and downward The action-oriented PP model influence might operate. Borrowing carves a generative “capture” for how from work in linear predictive coding, we can actively represent the statisti- hierarchical predictive coding” and, in cal structure of some set of observed turn, PP, depict the top-down flow as inputs that involve tracking by sche- attempting to predict and explicate matically recapitulating the causal the driving sensory signal, with resid- matrix for enaction vision, mediating ual ‘prediction errors’ propagate infor- representational objects with lower mation forward within a system level visual responses. In turn, this through ‘surprisal(s),’ which are in- generates an interacting web of caus- duced by a mismatch between the es, illuminating the various aspects of sensory signals encountered and those a visually presented scenery as it predicted. (passively) unfolds before our (active) This bidirectional hierarchical visual cortex. This means that top- system results in trans-historical im- down connections within a multi-level provements qua gradient descent (hierarchical and bidirectional) system learning; that is, our predictions re- come to encode a probabilistic model garding signal source becomes strong- of the activities of units and groups er over time becoming less and less of units within lower levels, thus conscious (if at all). Empirical priors tracking interacting causes in the become enfolded within a lineage of signal source, which might be the hyperpriors, with these priors allow- body, or the external world. The ing for models to co-evolve across strategy of using top-down connec- multiple linked layers of processing tions to try to generate, using high so as to account for all future senso- 171 ry data. As a theory of entropic dis- ecologized or “enclosed” (that is, solution, the connective nature of autonomized) image patches play off hierarchical learning and the structure of one another. The first-level net- of “wiring” in the cortex results in work extracts features such as orient- strategies of “backwards connec- ed edges and bars while the second- tion”—that is, our visual cortex be- level network captures combinations come automatically adjusted to prob- of such features corresponding to abilistic representations at the higher patterns involving larger spatial con- level so that top-down predictions figurations. Using predictive coding cancel prediction errors at the lower strategy and given statistical proper- level (yielding rapid perceptual infer- ties of the signals derived from natu- ence). At the same time, prediction ral images, our visual cortex works as error is used to adjust the structure a network able to induce multi- of a model so as to reduce any future layered models of structure from a discrepancy, yielding slower timescales data source; prediction thus acts as a insofar as perceptual learning is in- “great filter.” In turn, a simulation- volved. effect is produced as the processing The forward connections between network unfolds; within our scaffold- levels carried out by residual errors ing, deviations are sent from a level 1 between top-down predictions and to level 2 downward cast colander of actual lower level activity are congru- prediction. When downward predic- ent to the backward or recurrent con- tion fully accommodates or “cancels nection carried out by predictions out” the incoming signal, no more themselves. Changing predictions error flows forward, and we perceive therefore correspond to an evolving, the (natural) world. The simulation changing (or, more accurately, “tuning”) hypothesis about natural and temporal evolution insofar as lower level activity is involved. This produces a kind of prediction-error calculation, operating within a hierarchical organization. Therefore, information is allowed to pertain to differ- Neural Network / TheDigitalArtist ent spatial and temporal scales as 172 also neatly captures non-classical re- synergies, or “ecologies,” if you pre- ceptive fields such as “end-stopping,” fer, between the hierarchical predictive an effect where a neuron responds processing framework and work in strongly to a short line falling within embodied and situated cognition. its classical receptive field but that Today, research in mobile robotics response tails off as the lines get demonstrates a variety of concrete longer; this allows for “longer lines” ways in which perception and behav- or stronger hypotheses, as “end- iour productively interact via loops stopped cells” (or hypercomplex cells, through action and the environment, which are a type of visual processing with these loops considered as afford- neuron within our cerebral cortex that ing extra-neural opportunities for the helps the brain visually perceive cor- minimization of prediction error. In ners and curves in the environment precisely this vein, in work combining by identifying the ends of a given robotics and statistical learning, be- stimulus) reflect the way the world is havioral feedback modifies stimulus through internal modeling via sampling, providing an additional knowledge, encoded by units and extraneuronal path for the reduction weights that reflect a response profile of prediction errors, sensorimotor via sensory transduction. loops dynamically prompting learning Action-oriented PP provides us and inference. with an understanding of mentality This produces a spatial ecology whereby perception reduces “surprisal of mind: if, for instance, we take a (s)” by matching inputs with prior tomato on a plate, the mental repre- expectations. Action further reduces sentation of the tomato is causally surprisal by altering the world—this integrated via the plate’s presence. In includes including our motor cortex this example, causal contact with all axons’ firing, results in body move- other objects in the perceiver’s vicini- ment—so that inputs conform with ty informs the derivation of relevant expectations. Working together, per- information out of noise. Conse- ception and action serve to selectively quently, spatial perception is based sample and actively sculpt the stimu- on a kind of signal processing where lus array with which we are engaging. ‘objecthood’ is embedded within a These direct links to active sculpting causal ecology of spatio-temporal and selective sampling suggest deep relativity. The tomato and the human 173 perceiver are flattened, in a sense, (which is why I find it to be so se- with scalar inversion dependent upon ductive). To be rather simple— relative ecological contingency—the although I would argue that this de- tomato plays as much of a role as scription does not, in fact, reductively the plate does in distinguishing one oversimplify PP—through media we object from another; this logic can structure our physical and social be extended for objects that are less worlds so as to make them managea- visually explicit, as they are operative ble for our future cognitive sense- nonetheless. Source detection is pos- events. This is explicitly why we can sible insofar as the estimates are make such claims as the following: probabilistically constrained such that “we colour-code consumer products, they are hierarchically organized in we drive on the right (or, in the UK, order to track features at unique tem- on the left) side of the road, we bi- poral and spatial scales that predict sect these roads with white stripes, we one another. post prices in supermarkets and so Extensions into the realm of on.” At multiple time-scales, and social action and multi-agent co- using a wide variety of means ordination are enacted, thereby culling (including words, equations, graphs, processes of action-oriented informa- other agents, pictures, and all the tional self-structuring that develop tools of modern consumer electron- consciously through the reduction of ics), we thus stack the scaffold so mutual prediction error, which we can that we can more easily minimize project to non-conscious projects; costly prediction errors in an endless- consider examples of mentality’s ne- ly empowering cascade. Such loops gotiating synchronization through effectively enable new forms of reen- challenging domains and shared expe- trant processing, with action and per- rience(s); PP unfolds as an image of ception thus working together to culture as patterned practices by high- reduce prediction error against the lighting situated practice. More pre- more slowly evolving backdrop of a cisely, PP encompasses various forms culturally distributed process that of longer-term material and social spawns a succession of “designer environmental structuring via media— environments”—or, if you prefer, in its most simple form, PP provides “media environments”—whose impact on the development and the unfold- us with an enactive theory of media 174 ing of human thought and reason can it does not exist at all) or to add hardly be over-estimated. This cultural consciousness to an ontology of unre- and social facet of PP is precisely duced features of reality, on par with how it is related to Andy Clark and gravity and electromagnetism (that is, David Chalmer’s prior work on the panpsychism). While it is not rele- “hard problem(s) of philosophy,” vant any more for our purposes aside including functionalist approaches to from making a distinction between enacted mind qua extended media consciousness and “mind,” noting objects. that what we are interested in for the Clark is following Chalmers here purpose of this discussion is the latin a description through which behav- ter and not the former, suffice to say ior is modeled according to alteration that this distinction is demonstrated via environmental learning; according by the continued conceivability of to Chalmers’ work on phenomenal what Chalmers terms the philosophical zombie” or “p-zombie argu- consciousness, wherein he follows 17 David Lewis, the non-reductive posi- ment.” tion maintains that learning is a re- Let us return to PP now. I sult of environmental stimulation. would like to emphasize a connection Psychological phenomena like learn- between the human unconscious’ rela- ing, reasoning, and remembering can tive influence on bottom-up coding all be explained in terms of playing by summoning Kantian appercep- the right “functional role” but, none- tion.18 In fact, the PP model recalls theless, consciousness cannot be re- several themes from Kant’s work on duced to functional analysis without mentality, emphasizing: the ‘top- ceding to the eliminative stance (that down’ generation of perception, the

17: This thought experiment was used by Robert Kirk in this context in 1974, then developed by Keith Campbell; according to this argument, we can imagine creatures physically (and so functionally) identical to us, but lacking consciousness—even in the face of a range of proffered functional analyses. If we had a satisfying functional analysis of consciousness, (the first premise states that) zombies should not be conceivable (which, according to Daniel Dennett and company they are not). The lack of a functional analysis is also shown by the continued conceivability of spectrum inversion (perhaps what it looks like for me to see green is what it looks like when you see red), the persistence of the “other minds” problem, the plausibility of the “knowledge argument” and the manifest implausibility of offered functional characterizations. If consciousness really could be functionally characterized, these problems would disappear. Since they retain their grip on philosophers, scientists, and lay-people alike, we can conclude that no functional characterization is available. But then the first premise of a reductive explanation cannot be properly formulated, and reductive explanation fails. 18: For Kant, apperception corresponds to spatialized representation and is part of a tripartite mold consisting of the: apprehension of unity (simple intuition), reproduction of unity in the imagination (distinction and juxtaposition), and summation, by which the self represents to itself a multiplicity in space. 175 role of ‘hyperpriors’, the function of space, can be amended to tie the ‘generative models’, the process of Kantian conception of intuitive space ‘analysis-by-synthesis’, and the crucial to the methodological role of consti- role of imagination in perception. tuting the framework for spatial judg- Consequently, the PP paradigm ech- ments in experience. According to oes Kant’s transcendental project as Carnap, Kant was incorrect in think- it explains how the mind tracks causing that three-dimensional Euclidean al structure in the world through space is an a priori necessary condi- solely sensory data.19 However, this tion of the possibility of experience— approach emphasizes the global Eu- while Kant was correct regarding the clidean structure, which, as Carnap’s experience-constituting function of Der Raum (1922; his doctoral disser- space, this system needed to be gen- tation)20 demonstrates in its chapter eralized. on mathematical space and physical

Space Future Technology / TheDigitalArtist

19: L.R. Swanson, “The Predictive Processing Paradigm Has Roots in Kant,” in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 10, No. 79 (2016). 20: Rudolf Carnap, Der Raum: Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre (Berlin, 1922). 176

Probabilistic Patterning, however, immanently. This is also increasingly is able to exact a uniquely morpho- becoming an adapt model for AI logical logic that, instead of contain- ‘smart weaponry,’ as exemplified by erizing’ any one particular ecology how drone-imaging utilizes tracking and scalar finitary model—and there- to pattern future target-movement(s). fore, committing to a particular bias With governmental cloud-computing predicated upon spatio-temporal dis- initiatives such as Project JEDI in- tance—is able to entertain multiple creasingly funding such projects, we conditional scenarios simultaneously, must turn our attention to how gener- responding as is situationally neces- ative modelling recasts visual logic sary. This is how heuristic learning is and approach Predictive Processing as both environmentally backpropagated an explicitly topological (and, there- but also inductive—in the example of fore, ecological) problem. This does AlphaGo Zero, Google Deepmind’s not mean, as Luciana Parisi notes, deep learning software was able to that iterative ‘parts,’ or select datum, both intuitively adapt its ‘weights’ to outweigh the whole operation of the Lee Se-dol moves while patterning machine learning algorithm in ques- counterfactual scenarios. Such is the tion but that the heuristic convertibil- quantum ecology’s ontogenesis, with ity between datum and data is a mat- AlphaGo Zero’s Go moves appearing ter of post-human aesthesis.

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Necroborg Historia Lee van Zechariah (of Necronaut Studios)

With the Fin de siècle, it had A ghost? The questions were many seemed that, finally, the wheel of the and tantalizing, and everyone, of world had completed its turn. That course, had their own opinion. But the great nations of men had precious few facts. That creature, emerged from the darkness and super- walking unsteadily that thin line be- stition of the ‘Pre-Modern’ world, tween death and life, human and illuminated by the light of Rationality monster, had disappeared as suddenly and Reason, grasping firmly an under- as they had arrived. And so they fad- standing of the world in its True ed from daily attention, settling com- Form and wielding mastery over na- fortably into legend… ture itself! Except that they came back, in On September 12th, 1956, a 1981, Washington state. This time meteorite of flesh and metal pierced the public was ready with a name: the heavens and the confidence of the Necroborg. With Europe mostly powerful like a castigation of humani- recovered from its disastrous War, ty’s hubris from God. A gigantic scholars now began pulling wood cosmonaut with a metal coffin in blocks and illumination from the their chest, body seemingly broken salvaged archives, showing tantalizing by the fall, skull-faced, emaciated, images of giant skeletons with coffins diseased, but still alive, picked them- on their chests, suggesting that this selves up off the hot earth of Los Necroborg may have been visiting Angeles, California, and began to Earth since the fourteenth century. walk around. This was to be called By the 90s they were appearing First Fall. monthly. Here and gone for no long- That early black and white re- er than a shaky home video or a cording caught the imagination of the blurry polaroid. By the aughts, it was world. Was it a government project? daily. And this was when interest A Soviet weapon? An alien invader? started to fade. Nothing could harm

178 them, and they did no harm. No one a curious weed, unusual but of no could catch their attention, and they importance. But with their arrival did not communicate. Every attempt soon came other, equally strange to apprehend them failed. Scientific beings in their wake. And these ones tests, X-rays and radar, refused to were very curious- about people, penetrate the Necroborg’s mystery. about life, and about death. And Scientists were tantalized- but the though each public was bored. creature would be granted by their human observers a name unique to Markets could not monetize each, they were all collectively known them; media, sensationalize them; by the common title: governments, control them. The Nec- roborg became to human society like NECRONAUTS.

Necroborg Sighting / Vincent Ortiz / Zbrush Render-3D model / 2020

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Letter from the Editor(s) Murdock Parsons

We would like to express our deepest gratitude not only to our wonderful contributors without whom this edition would, quite literally, not have been possible, but also to everyone interacting with us and supporting us on Twitter. Since corporealizing Plutonics, the support has been tremendous and we’ve received encouragement not only from all around the globe (and from our inner-Earth inhabitants), but from established bloggers, scholars, artists, and up -and-coming theorists. Since this is the first readable volume of Plutonics (in this dimension, at least), we are still very much experimenting with the format and are always soliciting input. While we will also run a Twitter poll, for those without Twit- ter, the vital question moving forward becomes thus: does this format work? Specifically, does a very open format with little-to-no guidelines and where everything is welcome remain appealing, or ought we shift to a format where each volume is more centered around a specific theme? While we see benefits in both these models, it seems best to solicit advice from our readers and contributors as we know that the openness has, in some instances, caused confusion. While, technically, the editing of Plutonics was undertaken by one sac(k) of meat staring into the depths of a computer monitor in the wee-hours of the morning, we consider Plutonics to be a community project. Given that, we actively seek advice and thoughts from any and everyone involved in our weird little community. Thus, if you have any comments, concerns, questions, thoughts, aesthetic critiques, and/or, ideally, answers to the above questions, please do email us at [email protected]; we’d love to hear from you and will try to make the appropriate changes. Thank you again to everyone who contributed and thank you to everyone who has supported us. 180

Earth’s ( )hole / M.P. / Newspaper and heat / 2020

181