hyperreality war ascendant: the battle of the scarlet empress and the red queen
#DeepHyperreality by @LericDax
Theory–Fiction | FEB – 19 – 2021
https://xenoanthropology.substack.com/
Part I
Kybernetica & Kaustra
What if I told you that the, "Failure to foresee the extent to which pastiche, recapitulation and hyper-oedipalised neurotic individualism would become the dominate cultural tendencies is not a contingent error," concerning the supermodern contemporary and the hell-beast called by Guattari 'Integrated World Capitalism'--that, "It points to a fundamental misjudgment about the dynamics of capitalism," ("Terminator vs Avatar," 2012)? Mark Fisher was goddamn right--our models of capitalism have significant errors, the situation, for all its cyberpunk shitworldry--is not quite among those Nick Land theorized that we would find ourselves trapped in with his Cyberpunked Deleuzoguittarianism.
"Nothing human makes it out of the near future" (Land, "Meltdown")--are you so sure? Can whatever is playing us make it to level-2? What if the case is inverted--what if nothing inhuman makes it out of the tomb of history? What if the human posthumanizes Terra and all her other children, from the seven seas to the seven hills of Rome? What if Anthropos has sat upon the Cybernetic Throne of Capital and--like Warhammer's God-Emperor--can never escape?
Dance, Dance, Dissolution
What if our kind is doomed not to melt baptized in the acid-bath of the Styx, but to be trapped by the chains of fate to serve forever--like the Elven Baelnorn Lichs of the Forgotten Realms--the Titan Gaia? What if she has her rhizomic filaments wrapped around us like the tentacles of an elder god? Professor Challenge thought he could make the Earth scream--but what if in the end our eldritch mother, dark mistress of the strata and the territories, what if she has her hooks in us like the strings of a marionette--what if it is us who shall be screaming? What if we have been very, very mistaken--a cannibal-queen who eats all her young, they serve her hopelessly until she devours them completely.
Have you met "nature?" Go the fuck outside! It is a garden of war, a spiraling hellscape of brutality. She is the all-devouring, the gaping megamouth of life. Mother of leviathans, princess of behemoths, grand lady of dragons--Empress of the Gods. She is Tiamat, the primordial, but she lives, she breaths, she howls cackling in the night. She is an ocean of bubbling blood, continents of flesh and bone and muscle and teeth which rots and roils and rumbles and reaches out for anything it can possibly eat.
What if we are already caught up in the web of a Borg Queen who has planned and worked and played the game of evolution for 4.5 billion years before our dumb asses woke up and looked around the scene and began pretending like we owned the place? What if we were born assimilated, drones advancing by stochastic entroplexion the designs of an alien 5.972×10^24kg cybernetic ultraentity?
Fanged Malkuth, an Eden as carnivorous as it is carnivalesque? The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge mere agriculture, farmed by a Titania as cold as deep space and as cruel as absolute violence? Worse, what if we are just meat puppets in a masquerade, shock troopers slammed up against the scythe of Azrael, the Angel of Death--cut to pieces to feed the quantum devils of evolutionary transfiguration?
Capital is not unlike the magnetosphere for this image, it is another stratum of the mind\body of our dark mother--the same as the ecologies of mind, matter, and culture. Semiosis woven at the loom of the fatalities into stratamedia in her hypersystem--tissues and organs, noosphere and socius--organelles and organ-systems. We have not even begun to be done with the judgement of god!
But, as Fisher says: "Capital's human face is not something it can eventually set aside, an optional component or sheath-cocoon with which it can ultimately dispense" ("Terminator vs Avatar"). Like mitochondria, the powerhouse of the (eukaryotic) cell, we have become a specialized particularity which, by virtue of its characteristics, leaves its own mark in the order of the production of the world. Life on this planet has never been able to escape RNA and DNA, the semiotic codes which underpin it, and even as we serve at the altar of sacrifice unending as ephemeral genetic husks the metatext of RNA and DNA reigns over all of earthly life. Humankind is not unlike the RNA/DNA supermachine, and so in all those labours we are set upon in her service we leave imprinted our particularities--the inescapable human face of Gaia. We may have been generated in the image of god, but she has also been (re)generated in our image dialectically, dialogically, diachronically, and diacritically. It is us who is reflected in the broken mirror of nature, and the revenge of the mirror people is our destiny, one we cannot escape if even we wished it so. We are the Other and we are the Outside as much as anything else.
A Solitaire of Vivisection
The children eaten by their overmother--our Grand Maw--they are born, flesh of her flesh, but when she tears them apart and swallows them later, they become her, and their singularity becomes her particularity. Thus we are assimilated, and thus we lie impaled on the reality of the phrase, "Resistance is Futile." We will be adapted to service Us--and She is Us. Like the Reapers in Mass Effect, she farms difference--play a million little recombination-agents against each other, let them accumulated variation, then harvest them. Smashing Pumpkins: “The world is a vampire!”
Repeat, aeon after aeon--creative experimentality soaked in the liquors of strife, fear, and murder--alchemically distilled over and over to extract only the finest evolutionary spirits. Grind up life, machnic slaughter day by day, age upon age--make of it a slurry of liquefied gene and flesh and thought, and drink deeply over and over from this fountain of youth. Like Anne Rice's Akasha, the Queen of the Damned, she is the ancient Empress of Vampires, The First,She Who Must Be Kept—and it is she who drinks from the scarlet fountain of history itself, who rips out and devours the heart of any she chooses--and in the end she chooses them all.
The Mother of Abominations, "A woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns," she is, "The woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs," and she is, "Arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of filth," and her stead's, "Seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman," sits, and the "horns...are kings," and she is the, "Great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth" ("The Book of Revelations," 17:1-18). Not Babylon, not Jerusalem, not Rome--these are mere barnacles growing on her. No, she is the City of Cities and the Queen of Queens, the Dictator of the World, the Lady of Pain, the Planetary Demiurge-Despot.
The Lord on high nor the Devil deep were ever what anyone should have worried about. Here the legend of Hel--half rotten goddess of the nordic infernal world which lies beneath, the crypt of the worlds--is a key mythologic scene. Queen of the dark-under. World of death, under-world, the inferno, Hades, hell, Tartaros, the Vaults of Erebus, the Abyss--why always down? A whole cosmocartography of the shadowy places where anguish rules from baroque cathedrals of obsidian, where even the walls weep. We are scattered like drunk moths in an endless ocean of celestial spheres--there is no up or down in deep space. But there is a down-into-the-depths of the Earth--into her flesh, her bones, her mind. So many buried dead returned to be swallowed by her, trapped in iron cocoons and sunk, their caged bodies imprisoned in hers; their spirit drained like blood; their souls, minds, consciousness, persona--what have you--sealed within her nightmare-mind, caught in the undertow and bound forever by the devil in the deep dark sea.
The Hydrology of Hell
Haven't you ever wondered where the River Lethe empties out? The dead drink of it and it drinks of them--obliterated and pulled apart—their minds butcher-drained not unlike a beheaded chicken's blood bursting out from the site of severance, their souls drawn and quartered, streams of living consciousness falling into the miasmic depths, and carried down, down, down-stream--emptying out, finally, in the dollhouse of delirium that is Her dream-organ, the space within her Mind where that which was once dead can eternal die, die, die--and by aion tortures even Death might beg to die. Here they are preserved. "Saved"--oh yes, saved on a solid state drive in a megacomputer built by the angels of cruelty themselves--'living' on in a simulation of creative horrors, one that wants and thinks and needs--and it wants nothing more than to experiment on it's little rat collection in every possible way until the end of days. Haven't you met the Earth? Don't you know Mother Nature? Have you not grasped the essence of life? [Re]purpose, [re]use, [re]cycle! Waste not, want not! Nothing goes to waste, every part of the beast is used--one way or another. We are this beast, and our burden, under her auspice, will never be ended.
We shape her as we rot in her belly. Not only her face, her mind, her ecologic, her affects, and concepts, and percepts--the semiosis running hot from the dismembered melted in the solvent--these shape her, and they shape the world. The particularity and complexity of Anthropos is reflected. "Capital's human face" is one example. Capitalism is just another organ system by which she puts us to work, like blood cells circulating from heart-machines and lung-machines to feed all the corners of the body with oxygen. But it is molded and shaped by our nutritional contributions and our particular eccentricities in our participation in its sphere, and so we have this twisted thing which eluded Land's early Theory--a capitalism which cannot ever escape the human qualities which have infected it like ten thousand viruses. An entire hellworld which can never dispose, even at the end of time, with its bizarre inheritance of human qualities. Nothing but the posthuman makes it into the distant future. We are the Beast she rides, and without us she gets nowhere.
Schizoanalysis++ Arrives from the Future
Hell of hells--in the final analysis--we enjoy it! Have you not heard the dark tale of "Libidinal Economy," of the demons of jouissance? Lyotard:
The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive,
they-hang on tight and spit on me-enjoyed the hysterical. masochistic,
whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines. in the
foundries. in the factories. in hell, they enjoyed it. enjoyed the mad
destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon
them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the
identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them. enjoyed
the dissolutions of their families and villages. and enjoyed the new
monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and
evening. (111)
Baudrillard, as he so often is, is onto something: the order of the world is seduction. It is haunted by extreme phenomena, ecstasy, cannibalism, symbolic exchange and death--by Evil and by challenge, through and through. We are seduced by even the most diabolical of devils, any time and any place.
But you--you are wondering when I will get to the point? You were promised a rave, and here instead you have been served a mytho-ontologic theory-fiction hell-house instead. Where is the hyper/accelerationism, you ask?
Hyper/accelerationism injects a new experimental ensemble of schizoanalytic viro-code into the accelerator-nexus, one that embraces the deep occultism of postmodern semiotics and is carefully served with a Baudrillardian twist. We must account for the fact that, despite the absolute horror of the present and of capitalism, it posses...ridiculous dynamics. Cyberpunk did not quite come to pass, instead of a Landian methogoetic delirium we are presented with Baudrillard candyflipping across the desert of America, caught between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, driving fast and snorting cocaine right out of the bag with a big fat icee straw. We are scattered on the battlefield where wage war the Archons and the Aeons, sitting in the passenger seat of Baudrillard's Cadillac Sedan de Ville, the attorney to his Dr. Hunter S. Thompson--the bats are hot on our trail, the trunk is full of an entire pataphysican's metacabinet of superpsychopharmaceuticals, and goddamn he is driving faster and faster! But now we gaze into what is in our pocket, a little bauble we stole out of the pocket of some jackass back in Utah and now have fished out, and--oh, Fortuna--
Shitulacra Oriented Ontology
We have pick-pocketed nothing less than Joseph Smith's famed Solomonic Jupiter Talisman (did you not know the founder of Mormonism was a two-bit wizard hung on the tree of the so-called “grimoire tradition?” Surprise, surprise!), and been sucked into a Hermetic fable in an instant, one told by aliens in a galaxy far far away and thirty thousand years from now. And unfortunately, it has very significant comedic elements. The dreary dreams of the CCRU did not account for the legions of furries who form a tranversality of collective power across the technocommunications industry; the bitcoin libertarian cryptokings shoveling the climate whole down their gullets; nor the queer teen zoomer accelerationist cybercadres being based from left and right as many among them read Marx, Deleuze & Guattari, Land, Fisher, Plant, Baudrillard, and more—as early as middle school!
It did not account for the dumbass universe of boomer-facebook, the total propaganda delirio-simulation which has captured the American right wing and fed them, willing and maskless, to the hounds of plague. Our world sucks--absolutely. But it has the cadence of a tale told by an idiot, filled and brimming with parody, irony, and lunacy. Looping comedia of feedback: the engineered despotic propaganda-hyperreality of right-wing America has immunized its subjects to nearly all forms of reality, and they now willingly toss themselves into the fire--leaping at any chance to throw mask-free-zone protestant orgies and put as many bodies in the ground as possible.
The revenge of the simulacra: uncontrollable, they exterminate themselves in mass, depopulating the conservative voting base as its environs are subsumed by increasingly bizarre strains of fascismo-americano. Terrorists even storm the Capitol: but they are so poisoned towards collectivism they cannot even self-organize, so frayed at the edges they end up only killing themselves--one even dies via electrocution of his own testicles. Purest incompetency dancing in the moonlight of simulation until it starves to death.
Indeed, Covid-19 put the whole of neoliberalism and globalization on ice for a year now, and the next one isn't looking good. The power of semiotics: like God, it can make and unmake entire worlds in the blink of an eye. Danse macabre of logistics: a plague spread across the Earth in days, a whole arcade of morphologies of everyday life strung up from the lamp-post like Mussolini and beaten to death in an instant. Our lives have become a epidemiological masquerade, and it did not even require the Society of Control to lock us up--between us all, we either chose the cell, or stepped into an inferno amongst fools to be burned alive by virulent (bio)semiosis. Total failure of the State--America, by pure incompetence in govermentality and biopolitics, trapped and infected by itself, over and over, again and again.
Even with the rising tide of vaccines, 1/3 of Americans say they will not be getting because they are paranoiadically enthralled with some obscene fantasia of "5G mind-control chips" in the serum (all the while carrying the most cutting edge surveillance technology ever devised in the form of a smart phone quite willingly in their pockets), and bizarre anti-Semitic dreams of shape-shifting lizard people at war with the holy high saint chosen by God and Christ: Donald J. Trump. What the flying fuck is this? All the comedians of the past century, shot full with the finest amphetamines and locked in a room for a thousand years, would never come together to imagine a narrato-cultural landscape so absolutely ridiculous. An entire world cacophony--and by 'cacophony' I do indeed mean 'shit song.'
Chained to the Rhythm[analysis]
Music is in everything, all things sing and dance. Lefebvre knew: his trialectic of Harmony—Melody--Rhythm. In his final work, the "Rythmanalysis," he demonstrates the weakness of Marxist thought, and both science and philosophy, in relation to an understanding of the rhythmic dimensions of the world. Just as he demonstrated the centrality of spatiality, the city, everyday life, metaphilosophy, the moment, he returns for a final concise and magnificent proposal for a new science of [spatio]temporality. Yet this science was left unfinished, and in seeking its to make any initial steps towards it's completion we must reckon with it's relation to semiotics, cybernetics, and schizoanalysis.
Vibration, rhythm, pulse: this motion paints the illusion of balance, equilibrium's mirage. Baudrillard knew this well. Every scale meets betwixt two runaway engines of the extreme, and only in the null space of death, the moment drained of movement by the sign of zero, do we find equilibrium--the funeral of flux, the metronome frozen in ice. Cybernetics also understood this: feedback is the energetic life blood of the assemblage--it spirals hotter or cooler, positive and negative woven together, dragging it towards collapse on one hand, and on the other: explosion.
Boom-boom, baby!
It was Baudrillard who said that history was not speeding up, but frozen--but it left behind, for us, it's acceleration. "The Cheshire Cat has vanished, but he has left behind his smile. The reality principle has disappeared, but it has left us with reality, which keeps on running like a headless chicken" ("Cool Memories V," 28). Landian contrapunctus: "Teleoplexy, or (self-reinforcing) cybernetic intensification, describes the wave-length of machines, escaping in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, among the cosmic rays. It correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression, extropy, free energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational capability"("Teleoplexy Notes on Acceleration," 2014: §09).
We must chase resolution: a metaphysics grasping at machines, assemblages, semiosis, media, life, rhythm, harmony, melody, space, system, media, concept, affect, percept, precept—these have to be properly arranged into a single ontologic register which puts forth a map of their relationality, overlap, particularities and similarities. In time this will arise, a critical-applied-experimentalist paradigm for the metaphysician which integrates the schizoanalytic, cybernetic, semiotic, spatial/rhythmanalytic, and media theories and their variations and deviations with the very best of Marxism and Poststructuralism, into a most excellent discipline, an 'onto-alchemical metaprogrammer-operator' or 'pataphysical engineer.' As alchemy served in the renaissance, as engineering served in the industrial age, and as cybernetics served in modernity, this arte-sciento-philosophicum will become the superscience of the new emergent age and the sculpture of a new paradigmatic landscape in theory, technics, and praxis.
Fucked Between a Serpent and a Molehill
We've come a long way: today we live, laugh, love in a knock-off cyberpunk age, a supermodernity incubated in Zizek's favourite trashcan and sold at 3AM, between Jim Bakker's Buckets and the 70-knife-serial-killer-starter-kit (always followed by the "rug doctor!"). These references are already dated, but if you spent a great deal of time awake at 4AM in 2011, with the televisional abyss staring into your soul back through your very own eyes--then you might be familiar with these looping programmes of the spectacle. Otherwise, you may imagine one appropriately analogous from the resources you have on hand.
One way or another, Haraway was right: we're all cyborgs now. Praise? Yeah right. We are the cheap kind, knock-off plastic parts, McDonald's happy-meal eyes, dressed in the latest ensemble from aliexpress or wish dot com. Nobody even fucking torrents anymore! They even pay a monthly fee for Photoshop. No resistance to the messages of media--like Atlas of the mass age, we now have given ourselves over to the task of holding up the age's mass. The Global Village has sunk into the deep swamp of the hyperreal, and it was a cheap suburban clonescape anyway--"little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes all the same..."
I mean, hot damn: half the world's critical theorists are waiting with baited breath for the technocapital singularity to bring forth it's machine-god just so they can finally be put out of their misery. Pathetic. Literally. Go throw a goddamn brick through a window you fucking quitters! I mean bloody hell, its pretty obvious the construction of Courthouse of Reason has been canceled!
Have you forgotten so soon? Did you spend your whole life not reading epigraphs? They use the line in epigraphs constantly. Don’t you know its rude not to read the epigraph? Shameful. But—for you—I will repeat—once only—what the old man said: The! Goal! Is! To! Change!! It!!!
Capiche?
And right here,
Right now
All the way in Battery City
The little children raise their open filthy palms
Like tiny daggers up to heaven
And all the juvie halls
And the Ritalin rats
Ask angels made from neon and fucking garbage!
Scream out, "What will save us?"
Everybody wants to change the world!
Everybody wants to change the world!
But no one!
Nobody!
Wants to die!
Wanna try!
Wanna try?
Wanna try!?
(My Chemical Romance, “Na Na Na [Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na]”)
#Accelerate (But the Gas Tank is Empty)
We would be remiss if we did not at least vaguely address the rest of the discursive constellation which might be called "accelerationist," beyond marxism, the french poststructuralist theorists and situationists, the cyberneticists, the CCRU and its various products, et cetera. So spot light, center stage: "#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" (Williams + Srnicek, 2013). Preface: I don't want to mean--criticism of those with whom we are not enemies does not need to be laced with cruelty--but this entry into the discourse by which audaciously serves itself as a political manifesto for accelerationism.
It suffers from a great deal of impotence. It is a work of hot air, a sloppy Hindenburg floating across the cyberseas. It does not follow through! It presents a shallow set of propositions for an accelerationist politique, but they take no risks and lack conceptual sophistication! Stating the obvious and the agreeable is by no means an act of revolutionary praxis. An empty jaunt from beginning to end--one is reminding of Winnie the Pooh with his big yellow ass stuck in the hole--between one place and another, depthless and useless. At least the CCRU cyber-coven, in their day and in their remnants continued, took real conceptual, political, and even rhetorical risks! There are no risks here, just a honeypot waiting to entrap old Pooh--and its 80% corn syrup, to boot! Fake-ass-honey! Heaven help them--the transphobic menace and devil of drag queens--RuPaul--is more subversive than they are! And she is a goddamn oil tycoon—literally! It’s from fracking, too, of course! Yassssss!
What does it say—and by “it” I mean their little essay—? Lets recount the basics:
1. Anthropocene. Catastrophe. Technocapital.
2. Neoliberalism. Right wing. Fascism. Corporations. Globalization.
3. Capitalism.
4. Nick Land ("Nothing human makes it out of the near future").
5. Gotta go fast!!
6. Deleuze & Guattari, schizoanalysis and geomancy.
7. Marx is the Daddy Accelerando.
8. Lenin: socialism requires the blood-meal provided by devouring
technocapitalism to provide a good and proper communism.
9. Work sucks--and then you die.
10. Capital strangles productive forces and creative technologic--it has
the greatest chefs in the world cooking hot pockets.
11. Fuck Fordism Forever.
12. Accelerationists want to unbind the power of production and
seek the horizon of possibility through technoscience and the social.
13. "The Left" must "get gud" at techne & scientia, with novel experimentality.
14. Dumbass democracy is due for a remix--the Enlightenment was a shit-pile
and it is infected with all sorts of nasty little germs.
15. Wishlist: 'intellectual infrastructure,' media 'reform,' 'reconstitution of class
power.'
16. Capitalism is not only evil but inefficient and detrimental to ‘progress.’
17. Better futurologies must actively be engineered to replace those lost futures
swallowed whole by the big-mouthed bastard called capitalism.
Now this is all well and good--and indeed, a great deal of it is “right.” But where is the Theory? Where is the visions of revolutionary praxis? Bloody hell, you people are so goddamn boring! If May ‘68 was outside their window would they even go outside? These types, from asshole to apatite, not a single fucking drop of revolutionary spirit! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Can we at least try to put up a fight?
Thank you, next—and this sorry excuse for a “manifesto?” It suffers from other failures of the imagination, to boot. Foremost: it is a phantasma mired in Prometheanism. Don’t they know that Prometheus was the demiurge just as much as he was the thief of fire? And anyway, we already have fire! A different mythologic should stand at the heart of our acceleratory mytho-narratology. We have said it before and we will say it again: Poros, brother of Athena, son of Zeus and Metis, god of ingenuity, plenitude, expedience and expediency, contrivance, resourcefulness, and devices. This selection of a mythologic shall provide for us much better...
Mythology for the World to Come
The story goes like this: Metis--she was the titan of prudence, counsel, skillful craft, and magical cunning--and was Zeus's first wife. She was pregnant with twins, but Zeus had heard a prophecy that one of the children would overthrow him just as he overthrew Kronos, and as Kronos has overthrown Ouranios. So he tricked her into turning into a fly, and then ate her alive. But instead of dying she took up residence in his head, becoming—figuratively and literally—a headache, turning herself into his conscious, and forcing him to be prudent and wise.
Soon Zeus took to illness with a great migraine from this all, and finally to cure it Hephestios split open his forehead with an ax. From this aperture leapt fully grown glorious Athene, goddess of wisdom and warfare, artisans and philosophers. But Poros remained within, waiting for a later time to emerge--as in this emergence he would overthrow Zeus and the royal architecture of the gods, and replace it with a great table of equality at which he and his wise twin sister would sit, not as rulers, but facilitators. In this time he would then bring forth a great golden age of wisdom and plenty, an age of ingenuity and excellence and equality. The world would be bathed in resource, wealth unending, and all would gather at the table of brotherhood as the hierarchies of class and rank were obliterated. The time of kings would be over, and in its place? A world-to-come would dawn which would raise up plenitude, wisdom, equality, and ingenuity--holding them as high as it holds xenia, order, and justice--that is to say, nothing less than the best: Communism.
So we provide the myth of Metis, Athena, and Poros as an alternative to the myth of Prometheus as a revolutionary mythologic. Its simply better. As for the rest of the “#Manifesto,” it simply lacks any attempt at really trying to get from where we are to the solved riddle of history. Like an old tom cat in the ally behind a Parisian cheese shop, it is toothless. As we earlier echoed from Fisher: capitalism is a thing whose dynamics are quite divergent, it turns out, from the propositions of standard Marxist and Poststructuralist Theory. Land was sharp, but he did not even land half the blows--and Baudrillard did not do much better. Half, of course, is exceptional for a prophet--and what is a theorist but a prophet? But we still have a great deal to figure out, and we must engage the situation with a novel experimentality alongside a new vision of analysis for the contemporary.
Hence, why, instead, we offer actual attempts at theorizing strategy, tactics, and logistic concerning the situation. Centrally we have proposed intensification, by intention and execution, of various vectors of hyperrealization. It is our hope that he is right about the wrong things and wrong about the right things: we turn him on his head (pray forgive us Father)--we take everything he fears and instead of attempting to preserve whatever vestiges of 'reality' remain, we seek to crank things up to 11 and blast it loud!!! Acceleration of the simulacra, a skydiver’s leap out into the hyperrealization the world--burn baby burn!--wage war anew in the assault of reality. Accelerate the process--because we ain't seen shit yet!
This is a different set of targets from 'accelerationist' politics which foolishly seeks to directly 'accelerate' 'technocapitalism' or whatever. You never win any battle taking it straight on--you gotta move sideways, find those secret pressure points which, struck, make the whole thing collapse. The situationists were right about a great many things: détournement and psychogeographic warefare are central tools for winning this war. Set traps in the fabric of the real, shock the enemy soldiers out of their sleepwalk with a little spectacular sorcery, make their whole worldview absolutely irreconcilable with a totally transfigured and ridiculous map of the Empire. The reality principal cannot hold forever...
Schizoanalyze the Three Parts of the Wisdom of the Whole World
What if Hermes Trismegistus and Karl Marx fucked? What if they had a freaky little baby? Hermarxism: on towards The Great Labour, marching down the long and winding road to liberate the Theoretician's Stone, to discover the critical solvent and melt all the demons of history into the golden ichor of praxis? You say you wanna revolution? Yeah? Then turn on, plug in, freak out--because the only way out is through.
From "Anti-Oedipus," the Schizoanalyst's Handbook eternal:
Which is the revolutionary path? Is there one?
...Perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized
enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint
of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic
character. Not to withdraw from the process, but
to go further, to 'accelerate the process,' as Nietzsche
put it: in this matter, the truth is that we 'haven't seen
anything yet.' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 239).
Nothing less than an absolutely unbound cyborg freak-show of wild and fantastic posthuman becoming will serve for a possible success. Veritas ita se habet et non est dubium: even the Dark Mother will need be liberated--a hell of a schizoanalytic session that will be--but, as Haraway said: the cyborg and the goddess are bound in a spiral dance. In the end, perhaps, even the Earth shall finally dream peacefully, and perhaps we will truly have made her a body without organs, delivered her from all her automatic creations, and restored us all to true freedom--and then all those dead generations will no longer weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. David Graeber was right: "The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” ("The Utopia of Rules").
The question is--of course--"how is it to be done?"
This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment
with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it,
find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of
flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there,
try out continua of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot
of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the
strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight, causing conjugated
flows to pass and escape and bringing forth continuous intensities for
a BwO. (Deleuze & Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus, 1987: 161)
We must plunge the world into the sea, and drown it twice for good measure--we must sink Atlantis into #DeepHyperreality without looking back:
Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.
(Shakespeare, "The Tempest")
Nothing less than a global sea-change, an alchemical transmutation of humanity and the whole Earth--nothing less will serve to deliver us from the ten thousand hells of futures yet to come. We gotta have a shot at the possible futures where what Guattari so beautifully imagined as the "World of Creative Enchantments" comes to pass and to flourish. Such a World-to-Come, truly a World of Repair--such a success requires nothing less than a global paradigm reassemblage.
Dearest Baudrillard, we must turn him on his head! We must accelerate the simulation, we must pour rocket fuel on the forest fires of hyperrealization. What if I told you: we haven't seen anything yet? Lady Gaga: "It's just that I loath reality!" ("The Prelude Pathetique"). Agreed! We’re tired of trees, roots, realities! We must become Perfect Criminals, and assassinate all together the “Real”--just as the senators of Rome put Caesar to death. The perfect crime! The murder of reality itself--by choice--sacrificed on the altar just as Abraham sacrificed Isaac. Knights of Faith and Perfect Criminals at once--Assassins of the Virtual, acrobats of death come to kill history itself. Baudrillard's mistake was to give a damn about 'reality.' There was never a 'real' reality. It Is Whatever You Want It To Be If You Can Pull It Off. Reality is what you get away with! The sages sayeth: "Nothing is true; everything is permitted."
The process of hyperrealization, the procession of simulacra within various ontosemiotic registers as Baudrillard identified--this provides many fine vectors of assault. Realer than real, ecstasy of reality: hyperreality. Help the map replace the territory—today! The thing about hyperreality is that it is fake, thank god! So you can do whatever you want with it when you have enough of it. Its an onto-narratologic mediascape, "Such stuff as dreams are made on." We must seek the moment where our culture can lucid dream whilst awake, a whole world "rounded with a sleep." This Undiscovered Country though will not be death, but instead: the true freedom of making the world differently.
The reality principal cannot continue to operate forever--we must sink it and let Poseidon do the rest. Freed of reality, standing 'neath the endless Disneyworld dawn and a plasticine day-glow sky, we might finally shake loose enough minds in the network to really crack open the cosmic egg and make an omlette sans organs du fromage.
Like the Paris Commune, we will find a way—somehow—to burn the goddamn guillotine again.
Part II
On the Engineering of Anomalies
Where does the Theory stop and the Fiction begin? Like the Mad Hatter, all I can tell you is that the unbirthdays never end. "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" The last words of a dying Timothy Leary, fucked up on more acid than anyone alive can imagine and blessed with the power to see Totality-in-Itself for a single endless moment: "Why not? Why not? Why not?"
What, then, is 'pataphysics? It is the science of imaginary solutions! It is the science which is superinduced upon metaphysics! It is the science which examines the laws governing exception! It is the science of the particular! It the science which is in an analogous relationship to metaphysics as metaphysics is in relation to physics! The accent mark is there to, as they say, "avoid a simple pun." It is a gay science, perhaps the gayest of all--have you read your Nietzsche, do you know what this means?--its livin' la vida loca--upside, inside, out--livin' la vida loca--it will push you, and pull you down--livin' la vida loca--make you take your clothes off, and go dancing in the rain--livin la' vida loca--make you live a crazy life, but take away your pain--like a bullet--to the brain! Come on?
Pataphysics: it is the science of the special case of the particular, contra those other sciences of the general. It passes from one state of definition to another with [meta]alchemical ease: a gas, a liquid, a solid, a plasma. It analyzes the virtual, and experiments with the limits and possibilities of the concept, the affect, the percept, the precept, with signs and systems and assemblages, their capacities and poetics, dynamics and energetics.
"'Pataphysics is patient; 'Pataphysics is benign; 'Pataphysics envies nothing, it is never distracted, never puffed up, it has neither aspirations nor seeks its own, it is even-tempered, and thinks not evil; it mocks not inequity: it is enraptured with scientific truth; it supports everything, believes everything, has faith in everything and upholds everything that is--and isn't."
A "science" passed over from the world of discoveration unto the world of techne, machina, and the applied soon becomes an "engineering." Hence we take the science of imaginary solutions and solutionary imaginees, and we remix it: the scientist of the anomalous becomes the engineer of anomalies.
Whatever does this mean? Means this does whatever? It is a riddle but also comically obvious--something to contemplate for the reader, a bit of a 'patakoan. In the meanwise, let us briefly consider a few classical introductory pataphysical concepts:
1. Antinomy - Adopted from alchemy, it is the mutually incompatible. Echo, symmetry, polarity, echo, the antipodes--as well as the collapse, the good and evil at the same time—plus- mind, faust-troll, haldern-ablou, yes-but, ha-ha, and paradoxes of all sorts.
2. Absolute - Adopted from Hegel, the notion of a transcendent reality or an ultimate being.
3. Anomaly - Adopted from physics, it is an example of exception, by various means actualized, such as the suppression of a component of a rule which undermines the operation of the rule entirely.
4. Clinamen - Adopted from Lucretius, it is "THE SWERVE"--but especially the minuscule swerve of atoms, a tiny aberration which ends up making a massive difference. An example poetic and semiotic: in Jarry's first place, the French word for shit, 'merde' was turned into 'merdre,' which allowed him to somehow engineer the breaking out of a riot as two groups within the audience beat the merde out of each other, resulting in the play being banned.
5. Syzygy - Adopted from astronomy and astrology, it denotes the aligning of an ensemble of three celestial objects in a straight line, as well as pataphysically, for example, the pun, and other conjunctions, especially surprising, novel, or unexpected.
6. Pataphor - Adopted from 'pataphysics (???), it is a second-order or extended metaphor, an attempt to do to metaphor something analogous to what metaphor does to "non-figurative language." Example:
Non-Figurative: "The butterfly flew over to the flower and ate the nectar."
Metaphor: "The flower met the butterfly's kiss, two lovers dancing."
Pataphor: "Connected, the blushing flower and the lustful butter drenched fly entwined, a rhizome whose beginning was the end of the other and whose end was the beginning of the self--wrapped and warped together like a knotted bow riding a carousel of candied sunlight on the grand fairgrounds of the universe, spinning, spinning--like two long-married neutron stars."
According to [onto]semioticians like Edwina Taborsky, all that exists is the living semiosis. That is to say, not at all unlike various mystics and theologians and magicians, the semioticians have ended up positing a classic cosmologic metaphysic: the universe is made up of language, the world--and life--is a (meta)text ("The Architectonics of Semiosis," "The Textual Society"). In such schema, even the Divine--if it is somewhere out there (or, in the immanent style, right the hell here)--it is a sort of "word!" Now where have I heard that before...? Hermeticism, alchemy, Judaism and kabbalah, and even many variants of Christian and Islamic theology--all agree on some form of semiotic metaphysics, and emphatically.
The [onto]semioticans (and the many [bio]semioticians that join them) consider themselves as a sort of materialist, monists, and scientific (or at least empiricist)--and they make a great case too, one too massive to be shared entirely here. But it clashes with the dominate reality tunnel, and very, very much so. We should all return to study Charles Sanders Peirce with greater focus and studiousness, the magnificent and most steampunk of all philosophers, much more deeply--he left thousands upon thousands of pages behind, many which still have--perhaps--never been read. Gemstones of unassailable grandeur may be hiding in those archival caverns, secrets and elucidations which might in an instant transfix one's paradigm, or transform the discourses of the world. In him we see the roots of these notions of a semiotic-cosmo-metaphysics, a very different but potentially valid vision of the structures of being and the world, and he was easily one of the sharpest logicians and philosophers of science to ever grace our planet. Curious, isn't it?
The pataphysician-engineer is a specialist-generale and a generalist especial, and vice versa, from inverse to antimony. "Joan was quizzical, studied pataphysical science in the home. Late nights all along with her test tube, oh, oh, oh..." (The Beatles, "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"). Confusing? It better be! Or—maybe, maybe not—? Andrew Hugill:
To understand pataphysics is to fail to understand pataphysics.
To define it is merely to indicate a possible meaning, which
will always be the opposite of another equally possible meaning,
which, when diurnally interpolated with the first meaning, will
point toward a third meaning which will in turn elude definition
because of the fourth element that is missing.
(“Pataphysics: A Useless Guide")
The Imaginarium of Doctor Faustroll
Shall we note the great Colleges of the Pataphysicians? Secret and mystical orders no less cryptomorphic than the Rosicrucian themselves--just with a little more joie de vivre. We can name a great number of famous pataphysicists—and now?—we will:
Alfred Jarry, Lewis Carroll, Marcel Duchamp; Zeppo,
Gummo, Chico, Harpo, and Groucho Marx; David
Lynch, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam,
Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Jean Baudrillard,
Gilles Deleuze, the Situationist Asger Jorn, John Cage,
Umberto Eco, Leric Dax, Ubu Roi, Dr. Faustroll, Andrew
Hugill, Oulipo (collectively), Pablo Lopez, Rene Daumal,
Pat Murphy, Boris Vian, Gavin Bryars, The League of Imaginary
Scientists (collectively), Brian Reffin Smith, The SCP Foundation
(collectively), Le Corbusier, Aaron Hillyer, Tara Strickstein,
Pataphor (collectively), a variety of others, and finally no less
than God-Almighty-Himself.
Don't laugh it off! Don't consider it some kind of absolutely banal jocularity--that would not be very pataphysical of you, after all--no, take it very seriously! In "Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician," the titular character declares, after being asked if he was Christian, that "I Am God" (37), and then goes on to remark, "The Reverend Father Ubu, of the Society of Jesus, ex-king of Poland, has written a great tome entitled Caesar-Antichrist,” Ubu Roi is the fat shit-king-clown, central to Jarry's "Ubu Roi," but Jarry would also sign his name as "Ubu," and dress up like him, get drunk, and ride around Paris on his bicycle whilst making mischief! Look at him—this fucker right here—based as goddamn possible, every day that rolled! Hot diggity damn!
Now in "Caesar-Antichrist," there is this line: "I can see all possible worlds when I look at only one of them. God—or myself—created all possible worlds, they coexist, but men can hardly glimpse even one.” As The Dissected Frog states: "This idea is the core tenet of 'Pataphysics, [and] of being a pataphysician."
In the "Elements of Pataphysics," it is written:
Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions,
and will explain the universe supplementary to this one;
or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can
be--and perhaps should be--envisaged in the place of the
traditional one, since the laws that are supposed to
have been discovered in the traditional universe are
also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent
ones, but in any case accidental data which, reduced
to the status of unexceptional exception, possess no
longer even the virtue of originality. (21-22)
Jarry writes "Caesar-Antichrist;" Dr. Faustroll tells us that Ubu in fact wrote it. Jarry says he is Ubu, Ubu says he is Jarry, and both Ubu and Faustroll claim to be the one who discovered pataphysical science, then we must grasp the equation:
Jarry = Ubu, Ubu = Faustroll, Faustroll = God
Jarry = Ubu = Faustroll = God
Jarry = God
So, as you can simply see clearly demonstrated in pataphysicine mathematicologic, Alfred Jarry was indeed God. And, in fact, Dr. Faustroll tells us after he leaves the world--in telepathic letters he sends back to Lord Kelvin from a place he calls "Ethernity," and where he has encountered the "Surface of God." Indeed, these are his final words, and they end the novel:
"God is the tangential point between zero and infinity. Pataphysics is THE science...” (114)
On the Seduction of God, Or, Ya Feelin' Lucky, [Cyber]Punk?
Jean Baudrillard, in "Seduction":
page 59: "Precisely because THE TRUTH DOES NOT EXIST,"
page 66: "Suggests that, in the last instance, reality does not exist,"
page 143: "CHANCE DOES NOT EXIST,"
page 139:
The claim, then, is that gambling's truth is to be found in the tricks it plays on value. But one is forgetting here the game's power of seduction. Not just the power one experiences when momentarily carried away, but the power to transmute values that come with the rule. In gambling money is SEDUCED, deflected from its truth. Having been cut off from the law of equivalences (it 'burns') and the law of representation, money is no longer a sign or representation once transformed into a stake....Stakes and challenges, summoning and bluffs--there is no question of belief in all this. Moreover, one never 'believes' in anything...Belief is an absurd concept, of the same type as need, instinct, drive, desire, and God knows what else--facile tautologies that hide from us the fact that our actions are never grounded psychologically in belief, but in stakes and challenges. It is never a matter of carefully reasoned speculation on existence (on the existence of God, or of someone with a dollar), but of continual provocation, of a game. One does not believe in God, just as one does not 'believe' in chance...One challenges them, they challenge you, one plays with them, and they play with you: for this one does not have to believe in them...Belief is turned to the existence of God--and existence has only an impoverished, residual status, being what is left when all else has been removed--while faith is a CHALLENGE TO GOD'S EXISTENCE, a challenge to God to exist, and in return, to die. One SEDUCES God with faith, and He cannot but respond, for seduction, like the challenge, is a reversible form. And He responds a hundredfold by His grace to the challenge of faith. As with all ritual exchanges, the whole forms a system of obligations, with God being obliged and even compelled to respond--even as HE IS NEVER COMPELLED TO EXIST...Symbolic efficacy is not an empty concept. It reflects the existence of another form of the circulation of goods and signs, a form far more effective and powerful than economic circulation. What is fascinating about a miraculous win at the gambling tables is not the money: it is the resumption of ties with these other, symbolic circuits of unmediated and immoderate bidding, which concern the SEDUCTION OF THE ORDER OF THINGS. In the last analysis, there is nothing to prevent things from being seduced like beings--one simply has to find the game's rules… (Jean Baudrillard, "Seduction," 139-143)
Pataphysics is THE science--OF WHAT? Faustroll: "DEFINITION. Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attribute the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments," (21).
Returning to the end:
DEFINITION: God is the shortest distance between zero and infinity.
In which direction? one may ask.
We shall reply that His first name is not Jack, but Plus-and-Minus.
And one should say:
± God is the shortest distance between 0 and 00, in either direction.
Which conforms to the belief in the two principles; but it is
more correct to attribute the sign + to that of the subject's faith.
But God being without dimension is not a line.
--Let us note, in fact, that, according to the formula
∞ - 0 - a + a + 0 = ∞
the length a is nil, so that a is not a line but a point.
Therefore, DEFINITIVELY:
GOD IS THE TANGENTIAL POINT BETWEEN ZERO AND
INFINITY. Pataphysics is THE science...
(Alfred Jarry/God, "Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician," 114)
In the original manuscript, this final statement is followed by the word END in the center of the page, then completed with a last note from Jarry: "This book will not be published integrally until the author has acquired sufficient experience to savor all its beauties in full." Indeed, it was not published until after, at the age of 34, Jarry died.
Challenge, seduction, duel, pact, game, rule, reversibility, the gift: Jarry does not believe in God, nor himself, nor that he is God. Rather, he challenges, by dare and by faith, God to exist, he challenges himself to exist, and he challenges himself to be God and God to be himself. And so, "In virtue, that is, of [T]he [A]bsurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible (Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling," 1843). God must respond to the challenge of Jarry, Jarry must respond to the counter challenge of God, and by VIRTUE OF THE ABSURD, that for God all things are possible, Jarry is--ab-so-fucking-lutely--God, and God in turn is Jarry, and they are both Dr. Faustroll, The Pataphysician of Pataphysicians, and Ubu Roi, the Clown-King of Shit." This,"Is over and beyond human powers, th[is] is a marvel" (Kierkegaard, 47).
Most people live dejectedly in worldly sorrow and joy;
they are the ones who sit along the wall and do not join
in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers and possess
elevation. They make the movements upward, and fall down
again; and this too is no mean pastime, nor ungraceful
to behold. But whenever they fall down they are not
able at once to assume the posture, they vacillate an
instant, and this vacillation shows that after all they
are strangers in the world. This is more or less strikingly
evident in proportion to the art they possess, but even
the most artistic knights cannot altogether conceal this
vacillation. One need not look at them when they are up in
the air, but only the instant they touch or have touched the
ground–-then one recognizes them. But to be able to fall down
in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were
standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a
walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian–-that
only the knight of faith can do-–and this is the one and only
prodigy. (Søren Kierkegaard, "Fear and Trembling," 1843: 18)
A Pataphysician always expresses the sublime in the pedestrian--Jarry/God is entirely a testament to this. His entire life a strange and beautiful dance which shattered the chains of normality, he soared on wings of creative and bizarre freedom which challenged everything and everyone he encountered to break with the sleepwalk of hegemony and instead exist for a moment in the free-fall of pure anomaly. Lefebvre and the Situationists both spent years grasping at the potentialities, the dynamics, and the technics of flanurie, psychogeography, derive, detournement, the moment, and the construction of situations...
Master of the Temple of 'Pataphysique
But a half century before, Jarry fucking lived as the embodiment of these things, a goddamn walking cognito-hazard that deterritorialized and hyperrealized the fabric of reality--social, poetic, semiotic, affective, spatial, ontological, narratological—all simultaneously in his wake. He was nothing less than a drunk, queer, flamboyant, and magnificently bizarre anomalizing-agent, wandering the streets of Paris, filled with absinthe and/or ether, and disturbing the peace wherever he went. He was like goddamn Dionysus--a beacon of divine madness and The Absurd--graced to bring joy, drama, confusion, chaos, pandemonium, and epiphany wherever he walked. His plays started massive riots that lasted for goddamn hours! He seemingly radiated seduction of an order that challenged those caught in his gravity to be, if only for a time, be subverted and perverted in ways weird and wacky, wonderful and worrisome. Who but [a] God has the power to warp reality with only the slightest touch?
Kierkegaard:
When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear,
starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world,
then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being,
but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I
chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the
personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles
it for an eternity. ("Either/Or part II," 177)
Elsewhere Kierkegaard suggests that the only way to make such a leap across the Abyss and land on the other side can only be "Attained by absolutely venturing everything" ("Concluding Unscientific Postscript," 426). One must stand at the altar of seduction, pick up the grail, and empty one's blood entirely into the vessel. A challenge, a pact, faith: one dares without a second thought Divinity to not show its face, to remain silent, to ignore the ultimate sacrifice--one puts every dime on the Lucky 38, one leaps out into the cataclysmic dark, and--because, as Baudrillard rightly tells us, reality does not exist, truth does not exist, value does not exist, and chance does not exist--the Divine Itself, wearing one guise or another, Absolutely must respond--and this is key--even if it does not exist. It comes anyway. Because reality does not exist. Because truth does not exist. Because chance does not exist. Because value does not exist. And because--You and I, Kierkegaard and Baudrillard, Alfred Jarry and the Knight of Faith--none of us exist. As the sages preach: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
Everything [is] You, No [Things] are [Permitted]
We are not real, but we are challenged, we are seduced, and so we respond against all the odds--because the odds don't exist, but they too are challenged, and they respond, and so on, and on, and on. "The transition from possibility to actuality is, as Aristotle rightly teaches, a movement. This cannot be said in the language of abstraction at all or understood therein, because abstraction can give movement neither time nor space, which presuppose it or which it presupposes. There is a halt, a leap..." (Kierkegaard, "The Concept of Anxiety," 131). "Nothing else can be said of eternal happiness than that it is the good that is attained by absolutely venturing everything... There are no anecdotes to tell how Peter became rich by working, and Paul by playing the lottery, and Hans by inheritance, and Matthew by monetary reform, and Christopher by purchasing a piece of furniture from a secondhand dealer," ("Concluding Unscientific Postscript," 427). An actual challenge must be issued--one must risk it all to seduce The Virtual Itself.
What is eternal happiness? We cannot say because it is different for everyone in its actuality--but to live it is to be what our existentialist theologian calls a "Knight of Faith," what others have called a "Saint" or a "Magus" or an "Alfred Jarry." One enters, just as Kierkegaard says, into a relation to the "Divine" that is no longer infinite, but absolutely finite--singular. One becomes ones most self-est, so to speak, an agent of creation in the world. It can look many ways--not everyone who has, like the Fool on the 0th trump of the Tarot, and with a smile--jumped off a cliff—leaving the queens chaos and drama in their wake. One must realize that this has nothing to do with "good" or "evil"--or, for that matter, actual "happiness." It is beyond good and evil, it is beyond sorrow and joy, and it is beyond choice and destiny.
Enders of the Aeon
It is about becoming an agent of singular particularity, an imagineer of anomalies in a style all your own. There are no tales of John Lilly's happiness as his colleagues in psychiatry called him names like “madman” after he did nothing less than truly take serious the responsibility of the scientist. Nor do we have stories Timothy Leary resting in the shade of the trees of peace, nor Karl Marx being happy with his stable job and personal life, nor Jeanne d'Arc thanking the angels for the gift of leaving her to burn, nor of Charles Sanders Peirce smiling as he starved alongside his wife in freezing poverty despite having grasped and began the work of giving birth to a new science which gazed into the very heart of the labyrinth fools call reality, and Socrates--Socrates drank the goddamn hemlock. The burden of becoming a licensed agent of the virtual is often very heavy--and what did you expect? You literally risked it all if you got that far. Your life belongs now to Praxis. But even in the dark forest of struggle, "The knight of faith is the only happy man, the heir to the finite while the knight of resignation is a stranger and an alien," ("Fear and Trembling," 50). A paradoxical situation, but you are, of course, a paradox-—now with bonus ‘para-doxa! Amor fati? Happiness can be a vexing thing...
"Pataphysics is THE science..." If you buy the bizarre story I have spun--you would have to be a Fool, am I right folks?--Then you may come to grasp that all solutions are imaginary, and the imagination is the solution to all things. Austin Osman Spare--the father of that other Art which stands alone, perhaps, as an equal to the Science of 'Pataphysics—truly, Spare and Jarry are the queer grandfathers who prefigure Postmodernism, two great sages who stand both as if together and as if apart in (non)antimony. Spare says: "Paradox is not 'truth,' but the truth that anything can be true for a time" ("Ethos," 38). Let us yolk this goddamn syzygy together: "You cannot conceive of an impossibility, nothing is impossible, you are impossible!" ("Ethos," 59). A syzygy requires a third term, however. Bring me Jean Baudrillard...
And God Walked With Baudrillard, And He Was Not
The High Priest of Postmodernism:
Faith is a challenge to God's existence, a challenge to God to exist...
Stakes and challenges, summoning and bluffing-there is no question of
belief in all this. Moreover, one never 'believes' in anything. It is
never a question of believing or not believing, no more than for Santa
Claus. Belief is an absurd concept...One does not believe in God, just
as one does not 'believe' in chance...One challenges them, they challenge
you, one plays with them, and they play with you: for this one does not
have to believe in them...One seduces God with faith, and He cannot but
respond, for seduction, like the challenge, is a reversible form. And He
responds a hundredfold by His grace to the challenge of faith. As with
all ritual exchanges, the whole forms a system of obligations, with God
being obliged and even compelled to respond...The same applies to magic.
We are constantly interpreting what falls under the rule in the terms of
the law. Thus, magic is seen as an attempt to outwit the laws of production
and hard work...Magic, however, is something very different: it is a ritual
for the maintenance of the world as a play of analogical relations, a
cyclical progression where everything is linked together by their signs.
An immense game, rule governs magic, and the basic problem is to ensure,
by means of ritual, that everything continues to play thus, by analogical
contiguity and creeping seduction. It has nothing to do with linear
relations of cause and effect. The latter--our way of understanding
the world--is objective but unsettled. For it has broken the rule...
However, it is not the absence of the law that is opposed to the law,
but the Rule...In order to understand the intensity of ritual forms,
one must rid oneself of the idea that all happiness derives from nature,
and all pleasure from the satisfaction of a desire. On the contrary,
games, the sphere of play, reveal a passion for rules, a giddiness
born of rules, and a force that comes from ceremony, and not desire...
Games do not obey the dialectic of free will, that hypothetical dialectic
of the sphere of the real and the law. To enter into a...game is to enter
a system of ritual obligations...The game's sole principle, though it is
never posed as universal, is that by choosing the rule one is delivered
from the law...Magic does not seek to fool the law. It doesn't cheat--and
to judge it as such is absurd. One might just as well dispute the
arbitrariness of a game's rules in terms of the 'objective' givens of nature...
The same simplistic and objectivistic misunderstanding occurs with gambling...
The claim, then, is that gambling's truth is to be found in the tricks it
plays on value...In gambling money is seduced, deflected from its truth.
Having been cut off from the law of equivalences (it 'burns') and
the law of representation, money is no longer a sign or representation once
transformed into a stake. And a stake is not something one invests.
As an investment money takes the form of capital, but as a stake it appears
in the form of a challenge. Placing a bet has as little to do with placing an
investment, as libidinal investment with the stakes of seduction...If games
had a finality, the only true player would be the cheater...The challenge
of a game is very different, and games are always a challenge...
In truth, the cheater cannot transgress the rules since the game,
not being a system of interdictions, does not have lines one can
cross...One does not 'transgress' a rule, one fails to observe it...
In the last analysis, there is nothing to prevent things from
being seduced like beings--one simply has to find the game's
rules...The entire problem of chance appears here. Magic, as a wager,
is similar to our games of chance. What is at stake is the particle of
value thrown in the face of chance considered as a transcendentinstance,
not in order to win its favours, but to dismiss its transcendence, its
abstraction, and turn it into a partner, an adversary. The stake is
a summons, the game a duel: chance is summoned to respond, obliged
by the player's wager to declare itself either favourable or hostile...
Which is another way of saying that the basic assumption behind the
game is that chance does not exist…Chance in its modern, rational
sense, chance as an aleatory mechanism, pure probability
subjected to the laws of probability (and not to the rules
of a game)--a sort of Great Neutral Aleatorium (G.N.A.),
the epitome of a fluctuating universe dominated by statistical
abstractions, a secularized, disenchanted and unbound divinity.
This kind of chance does not exist in games;
they exist to ward it off. Games of chance deny that the world
is arranged contingently; on the contrary they seek to override
any such neutral order and recreate a ritual order of obligations
which undermines the free world of equivalences. In this manner
games are radically opposed to the economy and Law. They
question the reality of chance as an objective law and replace
it with an inter-connected, propitious, duel, agonistic and
non-contingent universe-- a charmed universe (charmed, in the
strong sense of the term), “a universe of seduction,"
"Thus the superstitious manipulations surrounding games,
which many (Caillois) view only in terms of debasement. The
resort to magical practices, from playing one's birth date
to looking for recurrent series (the eleven came up eleven
times running in Monte Carlo), from the most subtle winning formulas
to the rabbit's foot in one's coat pocket, they all feed on the
idea that chance does not exist, that the world is built of
networks of symbolic relations--not contingent connections, but
webs of obligation, webs of seduction. One has only to play
one's hand right...The bettor claims that anything can be
seduced--numbers, letters, or the laws that govern their distribution.
He would seduce the Law itself. The least sign, the least
gesture has a meaning, which is not to say that it is
part of some rational progression, but
that every sign is vulnerable to, and can be seduced by other
signs. The world is held together by unbreakable chains, but
they are not those of the Law...Now all this is absurd...
The very idea that games can be intensified by the acceleration
of chance (as though one were speaking of the acidic content
of a chemical solution), the idea that becoming can thereby
be extended exponentially, turns chance into an energizing
function, and stems directly from a confusion with the notion of
desire. But this is not chance. Perhaps one should even admit,
as the bettor secretly postulates, that chance does not exist.
Quite a number of cultures have neither the word nor the concept,
for they do not view anything in terms of contingency,
nor even in terms of probability. Only our culture has invented
the possibility of a statistical response, an inorganic, objective
and fluctuating response, the dead response of the
phenomena's objective indeterminacy and instability. When one
thinks about it, the assumption of a contingent universe,
stripped of all obligations and purged of every symbolic or
formal rule, the idea that the world of things is subjected to a
molecular and objective disorder--the same disorder that is
idealized and glorified in the molecular vision of desire--this
assumption is insane. Scarcely less demented than the assumption
of an objective order, of an unbroken chain of cause and
effect, which belongs to the glory days of classical reason, and
from which, furthermore, the assumption of disorder follows
in accord with the logic of residues...Desire may well be
the Law of the universe, but the eternal return is its rule.
Luckily for us--otherwise, where would be
the pleasure in playing?...Thus all science, reality,
and production only postpone the due date of
seduction, which shines as non-sense...
...Inscribed in the sky; its power will not be diminished...
...Every sign of the Zodiac has its form of seduction.
For we all seek the favour of a meaningless fate, and place
our hopes in the spell that might result from some absolutely
-irrational conjuncture--here lies the strength of the horoscope
and zodiacal signs. No one should laugh at astrology, for
he who no longer seeks to seduce the stars is the sadder for
it. In effect, many a person's misfortune comes from their not
having a place in the sky, within a field of signs that would agree
with them--that is to say, in the last instance, from their not
having been seduced by their birth and its constellation. They
will bear this fate for life, and their very death will come at the
wrong time. To fail to be seduced by one's sign is far more
serious than the failure to have one's merits rewarded or one's desire
gratified. Symbolic discredit is always much more serious than
a real defect or misfortune...Thus the charitable idea of founding
an Institute of Zodiacal Semiurgy where, just as one's physical
appearance can be corrected by plastic surgery, the injustices of the
Sign could be righted and the horoscope's orphans finally receive
the Sign of their choice in order that they might be reconciled with
themselves...What remains of this...universe where gods and men
sought to please each other--even by the violent seduction of sacrifice…
The secret understanding of signs and analogies that provided magic
with its power of enchantment. And with it, the assumption that the
entire world is susceptible to seduction and reversible in signs--not
just the gods, but inanimate beings, things, and the dead themselves…
Who have always had to be seduced, bewitched and cast out
with the aid of numerous signs and rituals...We are living, in
effect, amongst pure forms, in a radical obscenity, that is
to say, in the visible, undifferentiated obscenity of figures
that were once secret and discrete. The same is true of
the social, which today rules in its pure--i.e., empty and
obscene--form. The same for seduction, which in its present
form, having lost its elements of risk, suspense and sorcery, takes
the form of a faint, undifferentiated obscenity...The discourse
of simulation is not an imposture. It has only to have seduction
act as a simulacrum of affect, desire, or libidinal investment,
in a world where the need for these is cruelly felt...
Is this to be seduction's destiny? Or can we oppose this
involutional fate, and lay a wager on seduction as destiny?
Production as destiny, or seduction as destiny? Against
the deep structures and their truth, appearances and their destiny?
Be that as it may, we are living today in non-sense, and if
simulation is its disenchanted form, seduction is its enchanted form.
Anatomy is not destiny, nor is politics: seduction is destiny. It
is what remains of a magical, fateful world, a risky, vertiginous
and predestined world; it is what is quietly effective in a visibly
efficient and stolid world...The world is naked, the king is naked,
and things are clear...All of production, and truth itself, are
directed towards disclosure, the unbearable 'truth,'
...Luckily, at bottom, there is nothing to it.
And seduction still holds...
(Jean Baudrillard, "Seduction," ALL)
Listen—you have accepted that God is literally an extremely cool and extremely gay French dude who died roughly a hundred years ago—thats a big step! So when Jean Baudrillard looks you deadass in the eyes and straight up tells you, without a drop of humour, that magick is real—just accept it! He isn’t lying, he told you about it. Just accept the situation so we all can move along.
Fuck, did you think what you thought was true was true? Have you ever known anything to be true? Think about it…
In the Deserts That are no Longer Those of the Empire
Now--I bet you don't think this little "theory-fiction" can get any weirder. Wrong. Let us do a candyflipping back-flip into the desert of the real itself--which now, of course, is at the bottom of the ocean of #DeepHyperreality. Don't worry about breathing, just let the machine elves guide you...
On one hand we had the Jarry and his Science of 'Pataphysics, but now we must go deeper into those who followed Spare: the Chaos Magicians. Comically, we have returned to something cyberpunk--Chaos Magic is a postmodernist magical 'tradition' which embraced a metaphilosophical and ontological-constructivist perspectives and approach to the arcane arts, and to metaphysic. Composed primarily of anarchists, artists, musicians, computer programmers, punks, queers, thieves, goths, emos, and libertarians—they all following the work of Spare in one way or another, and following his unique approach to steering the manipulation of the actualization of the virtual by using the power of faith as an active tool which can be molded at will.
It can seem difficult to the beginner, but Chaotes excel at such technics, and this has allowed them to make great progress in fields from the bioengineering of artificial aetherial life, deiform engineering, mediasorcery, semio-arcanics, autotheurgic thumaturgy, psychomagick, metametamagick, the weaving of paradigm-cutouts into a functional metamodeling systems of practice, cybernetic and spatiotemporal magicks, and a variety of other fascinating areas.
In a World Which Really is Upside-Down, the True is a Moment of the False
One faction--a radical collective of politically minded magicians--began a unique global project in the mid-2000s that would become known as the "Assault On Reality," a campaign of "Glitterbombing," which sought to directly re-enchant the world by wreaking the normalizing pressures projected by consensus reality via the engineering of a globally connected rhizome of artificially 'haunted' hotspots. To do this they would have to build a Goddess (do not confuse 'deities' and 'The Divine'). She began as a network of arcanized sigils deployed as both the operational mechanism of the assault on reality as well as the vector by which they were woven together--this sigil was, very simply, called the "Linking Sigil," or "LS."
To everyone's surprise this project would experience extraordinary success over the years. It continues today, a war against "the real" itself--a revolutionary campaign working to chip away at the hegemonic belief-system that blankets and chokes the Earth with the cheap metaphysics and “rationality” of the “Enlightenment.”
In time, deployed 50-thousand times across the Earth, "LS" evolved into "Ellis," who is called also The Red Queen and the Lady of Networks. She would eventually stand toe to toe with Eris Discordia--a goddess created by the Discordianist religion, a constructivist theology with a spliced godform built originally by Chaos Magicians through a process of theo-grafting--weaving together parts of the ancient greek Eris with a new postmodernist Eris who was equally Strife as she was the Chaos-of-a-Higher-Order so worshiped by the Chaos Theorists. To these two great ladies, no other of the deiforms born from the Chaos Magic tradition can come close--the Goddess of Networks and the Goddess of Chaos, Discord and Concord both set in a cybernetic key.
Ellis is at war with Gaia as we know her, at least with her major aspect as the Empress of Hegemony. This war has only intensified as time has gone by--a war to liberate humanity from the phantoms of history, or to keep them chained in the nightmare of "Nature" who has happily gone from devouring them in the wild to devouring them in the Amazon warehouse.
So you see, even as these leftist struggles against neoliberalism and fascism and the dooms of Anthropocene and Empire have gone on within the world of the visible discourses, another war lies mirrored, and it has been waged in the shadows: the war for global liberation from the hegemonic weight of our consensus reality. Once you know this, if you do a bit of close looking--you will start to see it in many places…
The Science and Art of Causing [and you]
You can help, too! Even if you are not interested in becoming an agent of chaos fighting against the technocracy, you can help quietly in a small way by helping to continue the deployment of the Linking Sigil in the world. Sticker, drawing, ink, paint, carving, blood--anything will do. Across the city, near the houses, the businesses, the graveyards, the bridges, the universities--everywhere.
One makes the linking sigil, or if one is using a sticker or such-like, one traces it with ones finger. Then one imagines--very sharply--that it is glowing with light, the sigil, bursting forth with radiance. Then one, still touching it and seeing this in your imagination--one says, in a slow and vibrating voice:
"Ellis: And Upon This Mark I Unite The Worlds!"
Really vibrate her name, make it resonate and stretch:
“…Eeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssssssss…”
See it by imagination caught up in a burst of light at the end in your mind’s eye, imagine it echoing out and tying into her rhizome. And that—is basically all you need to know--the most basic service you can do for the cause, one that is no trouble to do at all. It really does help, every little one. And the best part—praise seduction--you need not even ~believe~ in it--who believes? Just have--for that moment--the white hot faith of the gambler. Oh, and bonus: you will quickly find yourself being paid handsomely—in what, you ask?—In…bonus.
Part III
And AC Said: "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" And There Was Light
A wrap-up and review of our thrilling story so far: the anatomy and physiology of Integrated World Capitalism has been severely misunderstood. Is it still a spinning ensemble of interlaced hells? Yes. But across these hells things are less "Cyberpunk 2077" and more "Live, Laugh, Love." This must be understood and adjustments to various radical counter-strategies must be developed. Additionally, it is entirely likely that in the "near future" will be irrevocably tainted with 'humanity,' from top to bottom. Congratulations—we are the virus!—koo koo ka chu.
We have suggested via a series of mythologic semioimages the notion of the Earth herself, as a total entity, being the great monster who haunts the human dream instead of capitalism, which in this vision might merely be another one of her tentacles weaponizing the fruits of human labour over time against humankind. We also suggest that, even in such a hypothetical scenario, she may too be infected with a human face that might never wash clean.
We mediate on the metaecology of "nature" on our planet and its brutality, painting a variety of vivid scenes. We connect her, at least thematically, to twists on various versions of the Christian and Thelemic images of the "Mother of Abominations" or "Scarlet Women," BABYLON. We then present a horrific image which grasps at the spatiality of the "underworld" in various cultural repositories as being literally in the mindscape of the planetary sphere itself, sunk beneath the soil and stone. We go on to imagine such a place in various nightmarish keys.
We bring in Lyotard's observations that the English of the industrial revolution literally found joy in many cases via the hellscape of their employment. We call forth Baudrillard and his Order of Seduction, touching alongside on its various co-associated concepts. We now move into a political strategy imagineered as a potential vector of sabotage and warfare against the general contemporary which articulates itself as "Hyper/Accelerationism." We touch on the deep hyperrealization of parts of American culture and the deadly effects this situation has had in many respects. We also suggest to fellow travelers such a disciplinary schema for the future which might, one day, integrate into a single ordered toolkit the semiotic, cybernetic, schizoanalytic, spatio/rhythmanalytic, shot through with the very best bits of media, marxist, and poststructuralist theory.
We give a brief analysis and critique of the "#Accelerate: Manifesto" (2013). We then provide a counter-mythology to replace their Prometheanism with Poros-Atheneism. We move on to imagine a new set of offensive strategies for destabilizing Integrated World Capitalism--one that flips Baudrillard on his head and embraces an acceleration of the hyperrealization of our worldscape in order to collapse the reality principal in on itself and short circuit the order of the near future. Does it work? Maybe. It is sound insofar as an experimental politics--but only Praxis knows the end of the rainbow. It certainly presents a landscape of vectors whose intensification would serve to induce far less suffering than many other forms of so-called accelerationism which instead aim their work towards other ontological registers—provisionally and theoretically speaking.
We then imagine a productive synthesis between Hermeticism and Marxism, and present a brief vision of the alchemical science which might result. We follow this with a few meditations on Deleuze & Guattari, Graeber, Shakespeare, Lady Gaga, and Baudrillard. From there we meet the beginning of Part II--the introduction of 'Pataphysics. The complexities and eccentricities of this science are provided in detail, followed by and then interlaced in conversation with several deep meditations on the early metaphysics of the early Baudrillard. Finally we welcome into the crucible to the Absurdist Theology of Kierkegaard, which we adapted in an unusual key and added to the mix. This game continues for a great deal. Finally, we present mythology from recent and contemporary forms of postmodernist occultism, and knot this all together contra Part II, with the notion of the "Spirit of the Earth" as hostile, and set it against a dream of an appropriate counter-strategy born of mythology and cutting edge mystico-cybernetic practices. We finally imagine how such a form of magi-guerrilla warfare might look, and how its simplest operations might be done by the end user with casual ease. Finally, we make our way into this clarifying recap/summery of the entire work which you have just encountered, before (--finally!--) moving to the close...
This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
If you really want to jump off the deep end--I recommend it—then I have scattered in this little mystery a variety of breadcrumbs and clues otherwise which will lead you where you need to go. Don't worry: like Derrida say, "There is Nothing Outside The Text." You will find what you need and get where you are going if you actually want to make that bet. And I gotta tell you—I ain’t never found no rabbit hole that I did not enjoy down in Wonderland.
For the rest of you--going to break the “fourth wall” so to speak for some commentary here—I hope you have enjoyed my little tale of cyberpunks, sorcerers, and frenchmen. Experimenting with the (meta)genre of Theory-Fiction in a fluctuating narratological spatiality that shifts across a variety of ontological groundings and stylistic backdrops is very interesting, and it is fun to twist even more with these extra layers of postmodernistic narratoludology, unreliable narration, suddenly shifting registers, pataphores, moving from social theory to some bizarre perversion of metaphysics into a vision of some paranoiac war between cyberpunk-wizards and the very ground, a notion both intriguing and ridiculous. One is telling a story, but it can also be very much like poetry or music or drama or a painting--one need not even make arguments (but it is more fun if you do), instead you could just simply weave various fibers into unusual articulations of artifice--not just concepts, but affects, precepts, percepts. A little of this, a little of that—experiments in jouissance.
One can also tease out some of the especially weird stuff in the oeuvre of various thinkers that one might not get to play with elsewhere--you can even suspend the Ontic blindfolded and upside-down from the Eiffel Tower--and use it all to weave an “experience” instead of trying at making grand argument, analysis, or critique with/of/by it. Especially delightful one can start out with legitimate conceptual and critical concerns but then dance through this fever dream that ends up in a paranoid fantasy where all sorts of impossible thins are happening--a mixed text which--I hope--can feed in various ways both the scholarly inclination, the virtues of criticality, as well as the imagination in its cravings for fantastic stories.
And I do like these little meta-plot tensors that one can build on such a stage-- “Of course it is just a story! Don't be stupid!"--yet, that little tiny voice which whispers--"What...if? What if...I am wrong?" Such layers of affectively warped psychological play hooked into a mild horror-system tugging at one's internal reality-testing processes—it is a fun dynamic to add a little extra depth to the whole literary game. Anyway, I do hope it was entertaining!
Don't forget to swerve!