— jdemeta

You’re sat in this cafe, this cafe. The windows, the large, bowing panes of glass feel as if they’re vibrating, reflecting and strumming against bulb lines. Maleficent trembles as your entire glaze’s over, eyes over chips and under-others into a chem-soup. Into the muzak-home of a banal existence, falling backwards into plastic and mundanity as one does during a slow mourning; the daily march overstrung by a realist chorus of chiming techscape. [_Jester’s Bliss_] is our trance-trajectory into meditative k-scapes.

[_Train of Freaks_] is where the literal nature of the album awakens. The paranoia and intrusion of boxcart trivilations suffocates you, unable to focus on nothing or something, a constant to-and-fro of anxiety-sweats, too much coffee creates a beat-pandemic of repetition. Gaping caustic reverb mutating into authorative cluster-headaches. Don’t bother. [_Eyes in the Shadows_] does it too. We have two for the price of one on paranoid underground haste, flicking into ‘worst’-mode, coat-grip away from those. A spiralling tunnel-drone into your back as you refuse to turn. Haunted subways united the fears of the strange and mundane.

There’s calm in light, but only if one has just been removed from the dark, the reality is, the horror never leaves and a reminder of its existence only exacerbates your quivers. And your heart does this…thing, an expansion of the blood, cells collapse outward, muscle-pain, lung-stretch. Each deep breath acts as an aching reminder of life within the smog-pen. you, you… [_Drunkard_]. [_Leaf Lady’s Song_] tin steps past an arcade, a young lad without limbs drums on an arcade machine, rolling his head on the buttons in hope of hitting the big time. A Lynchian “Watch that man! Watch that man! Watch that man!” or “Hey! Hey! Hey…Sally!” with verbal elongation and smokers husk wouldn’t go a miss here; backstreets, fuck you, smoke behind the eyes.

[_Liz’s House of Color_] damn this thing kicked in.”Hey shut the fuck up im listening.” “Hasn’t that guy drunk 8lbs of coffee today.” the street flicks into anxious-time, a ripple effect under your feet and unto the morning into an eye-roll begotten. Teen tam tom and the trance rolls into a chased temporal agency, you want a headcave, watch this. Arcade boy has grow a huge leg and is stomping onto you, the subway train has stopped just out of sight and you just know the driver is reversing in hopes of finding you. Where’d you leave your bag? It had your Grandma’s polyfiller in it, she uses it to glue her teeth in. You wonder why the beat works for a second, just before it crashes. You’re finally home, resting your hand on your head, brain matter clicking into channel Z, LCD flickers in and out, tech-shutters and shadows of a neon sun fall upon your lids. Your sofa fucking hates your plump arse.

Sometimes my face shifts between 2 to 3 planes, flesh on flesh.

Laughter…from the rafters. Those little fuckin’ Deet Deets at it again. Beep boop. It will not stop. “Hey ma.” “Yes.” “?” “It’s been going on for days love, just ignore it.” [_A Midnight Conversation_] has begun. Over and over, then, then, the phone rings, a long jaunty ring, puts me in a fun panic. We call it happy sweat, the perspiration becomes faster, and faster, I spew sweat like jets from the innards of my elbows. I gotta sit down. I can’t, I’m still on the fucking train. Clowntime is in. Loud, open mouths produce rotund boops. They arch forward and back, faster each time, throwing their heads back and forth, smiles getting wider, and not a hair on their clown heads moving. Static comedic pulsating on a train. A pivoting immovable nightmare, I try to move, they all scream. Clowntrain baby! They march. The nightmare you have to sit through, acknowledging the pain one is about to suffer prior to suffering, this is hell. yet, sometimes, the pain doesn’t come, and one is left into a clicking-coma of worry.

Off you fucking get. The train doors were made of bio-waste. They sludge in and you step off. The ride keeps going. Out into [_Hollow City_] you know you’ve left this time, there’s no light. Just heavy beams of dark glow. You just want to walk. [_New Life_] plays like a pleasent Nintendo game, a farming sim. A warm summer where you kissed a girl once fades into memory, skyscrapers dissolve into the background for a momentary glimpse of contentment [_Perching Square_] Look at this fucking idiot. indeed. it’s clownworld, screech time clicks into gear, mechanistic screams for dumb human dreams. Try move, bitch. No movement, only submission to any clown who wonders by, an old animation where the lines are schizophrenic. Resist. The end here is sincerely morbid, a melancholic death involving tech, I can’t explain this; there’s acceptance here, a deep acceptance…of the future, and all that it will bring, it is he who walks knowingly into an electro-static death space.

[_NUTMEG SESH_] OH ma BOY. You were prepared for the future you thought, you didn’t think it would be so malicious, and downright mean. watch it, watch it all. Every vice of the past flicked into overgear and assembled on a hedonistic plane of sadomasochism. Industrial sex-drive mashed into a flesh blend. [_Manifesto_] the utilization of the previous tracks work as a means to contextualize the death of coherence into a chasmic meltdown of sonics. [_Take a Hint Royal Jester_] but that’s the problem isn’t it, the future doesn’t take hints, the temporal jester throwing  himself into chaotic schizo-tonic, why don’t you take a hint, yeah…

 

Lovecrypt Twitter

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I am, according to Max Castle, a neoconservative. I disagree. But the thread offered some interesting conversation, between me, Castle and Edmund Berger. My premise here is that someone can hold, for lack of a better description, a practical, non-abstract, political position (mine is…), whilst simultaneously support abstract underlying theories such as accelerationism. I comment that the origination of Deleuze & Guattari’s “accelerate the process” (Anti-Oedipus) is from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, and is written of in relation to the levelling of European man, hierarchy and justification (in the grand sense). Berger notes the depoliticization and anti-politicization that results from a Deleuzoguattarian deterritorialization and decoding of flows.

Berger notes that any political organization, organ being the problematic here, is ultimately going to stop the decoding of flows, and that via D&G man’s existence is in relation to techno-industrial production as opposed to political process, and such is subordinated by the process; or Land’s ‘means-end’:

“Like for Marx capital turns the capitalist into an agent of itself, and for D&G in the historical epoch of capitalism the state loses power and is transformed into a mechanism for assisting in realizing capitalist axiomatics. So there can’t be a political autonomy or a distinctive set of values, because capital rises up and becomes the driver.” – Edmund Berger.

Berger makes it clear, and such should be obvious to anyone involved within the sphere: “Saying that we can get at deterritorializing/decoding through the majoritarian political process reminds me of many horrid hours wasted in my more activisty-lefty days” – Berger

Arguments of identity & praxis aside (as they’re getting dull, fast), my point still stands that deterritorialization and the decoding of flows are and exist and whatever pace, man may interact and counter a flow any time or place, it is only that doing so via any political institution negates the entire process entirely. That is, unless one does so as an agent of acceleration, that is, a will accelerator of capitalism. Utilizing capitalism’s inherent economically emancipative functions as a means to accelerate the system out of itself. We end on a polite note, referencing Marx’s call to vote for free trade.

That said, the problem here, which should be plain as day by now, is said vote, already there is the implication of a system. This is of course where Land’s Exit comes in. My point being, cannot one utilize the escalator that is capitalism to speed up their process of heading towards the exit, as opposed to slowly using the stairs. As long as one is doing so knowingly…

Pleasant convo, Berger.

I’d love for your opinion on this in regards to our convo: Experiment.

 

Now, the Neoconservative thing…I read a lot of Hitchens when I was younger, some of it must still be lingering in the back of my mind…

 

Also, check out Neural Shroud. This was a nice little piece, I can’t help but feel that it falls under the ambiguous R/Acc abstraction of everything as a form of capital, in that not only is your avacado toast capital, but the process unto which you decided to even consider avacado is capital, a never-ending consumption/production cycle…

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As a means to avoiding confusion between classical blog-type musings and offical MN posts a la what has come prior, the system I’ve devised is to date the blog stuff and leave the posts as titles; also, the blog stuff wont get as much traction…I wont be beaconing to the micro-masses as I do with the other stuff. With that out of the way, what’s to come: a lot, seriously. For those that don’t know, I’ve left my position as a neither a butcher or candlestickmaker and will be entering a career which shall allow me more free time to concentrate on my blog.

I started this year with some rather stereotypical resolutions, the likes of which I shall not bore you with here, however, I did attend to the idea of consuming one piece of ‘media’ a day, something of substance which I can draw from and which shall accumulate in the caverns of my memory. Thus far I’ve been semi-successful, yet little has stuck really, it’s a fairly depressing announcement with regards to the state of contemporary film and music, with that in mind, some musings:

Blade Runner: 2049. What can I say, the visuals were incredible, I mean, it was everything I wanted…there could have been more however, BR49 primarily focused on the macro-aesthetics of cyberpunk cities; these vast sprawling de(ad)serts, concrete waves and sprawling towers assimilating into a tech-mesh. Yet, other than K’s apartment, the contents of which I wish to purchase (especially the pans). This said, the micro is left alone in BR49, bar one scene with the wooden horse, the insane artifact identifier surrounded by a wire chaos, plugged…in. It stuck, a little, but the micro leads me to the film that really stuck, like a malignant adhesive eroding my circuitry, and I haven’t been able to shift this tech-nausea since, a nausea spawned from a viewing of Akira. My first ever viewing, and from the get go I was drawn in, like a rat to 2-dimensional, abstract, cyberpunk cocaine. I could gush ove the aesthetics of this film for days, the atmosphere spirals in and out constantly, the dinge bars set down so well one knows they’re underground, and that this absence of light is real and this city could fuck you up. As for the plot and characters, they deserve a secon viewing, I was too enraptured by the setting: this striving political cyber-scape, incessant in its cries of life, K, wiring, circuitry, concrete, creation, fragmentation; a diverging chaotic pulsing assemblage wherein humans become a viral microsm shifting and nibbling, never a trace that isn’t ‘natural’ – in the Nietzschean duality of man & nature for the betterment of both – sense.

Continuing from cinema: A Tale of Two Cinemas: We’re seeing a clear cultural divergence between the East and West, I mean, the divergence between the two is obvious in multiple ways, but the way in which contemporary cinema has caused a fracture is certainly interesting. China’s reaction to the new Star Wars has been albeit comical in relation to the films content:

This raises the question of how bad for business the SJW takeover of the entertainment industry is going to be. American movies, for example, have been an extremely successful export industry over the years.” (Link above)

Well, the SJW takeover is going to be big business in West, in fact it already is, yet it’s moving its way over to Great Britain. This Guardian review of Aardman’s latest film Early Man is rife with oddities pertaining to an influx of unnatural language:

That could be an overzealous interpretation, admittedly, in a climate in which everything seems to be about Brexit, but the evidence is difficult to ignore. Early Man focuses on an insular, small-minded tribe who live in a giant crater, cut off from the outside world (the prologue identifies their location as “near Manchester”). They’re surprisingly diverse for such a small group, with varying skin colours and accents,”

That last bit makes as a little sense as a rabbit and a fox being friends and attends to accelerated a priori egalitarianism like nothing else.

“These people have invented bronze, not to mention wheels, machines and sliced bread. ”

Really…perhaps I’m a caveman.

 

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The Experiment of the Future

Deleuzoguattarian Nietzsche: Overcoming as Capitalism.

 

 

Introduction


 

The aim of this essay is to extrapolate on the claim that accelerating capitalism would act as inherently beneficial for Nietzschean man’s overcoming of himself into Overman. I plan to do this firstly by defining what man and amor fati mean for Nietzsche, alongside defining both that which man shall become, namely the Overman and its counterpart of Eternal Recurrence, alongside their inherent connection. Primarily focusing on the possibility and actuality of man’s overcoming, what it means to overcome and that which man is against during his process of overcoming e.g. the herd. From here I plan to explain why in the current day or epoch what it means to be ‘man’ has been drastically altered, largely due to capitalism being western man’s political horizon. I plan to briefly attend to a common description of capitalism, then utilize the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a means for extrapolating what it is capitalism does to man, and what man is under or within capitalism, with extrapolations on both man as desiring-machine and the Civilized Capitalist Machine itself. In the final section I plan to achieve 3 things in a linear fashion, yet assimilated into one another. Firstly a basic overview of Nietzschean man’s overcoming, secondly the process of overcoming for Deleuzoguattarian man, and thirdly the process of overcoming for Nietzschean man subsumed into Deleuzoguattarian capitalism, expanding on the idea that not only is capitalism beneficial for man’s overcoming but due to its inherent qualities it is in fact the greatest vessel for overcoming.

 

Man, Overman and Recurrence


 

To begin with Nietzsche’s fate of man, for where else could one begin except with man’s becoming, the fatal amor fati. That proclamation of purpose amidst schematic metaphysics and the passing of value; for Nietzsche the macro-pursuit or task of humanity, of man in its grandest sense is a thorough “going-across and a down-going”. (Nietzsche, 1961: p44), a personal and herd-external recognition of that rope so “fastened between animal and Superman” (Nietzsche, 1961: p43) and so within Nietzsche’s call for a “down-going” is an – often unheard – cry for man to act as Socrates once did and “descend from the plane of his intellectual understanding” (Pappas, 1995: p17-21), man baring all for the future, to accept what comes – as we shall too – and [justify] “men of the future” (Nietzsche, 1961: p44), those Overmen, greater than man, those who’ve overcome humanity. For the task of man is to overcome himself (Nietzsche, 1961: p41). For aid and direction in such a feat one and man must turn to Zarathustra, aloud at the marketplace: “The hour when you say: what good is happiness” (Nietzsche, 1961: p43) he proclaims to the herd “your very meanness…” he concludes. Within 19 short lines Zarathustra brings to the fore the decadence and degeneracy of man, a man subsumed into the herd, of the herd; the stasis of the marketplace dances confidently upon the corpse of God, confident of their apathy. Arrogance and ignorance in a new world deprived of God’s light, searching for pity and sympathy, a world bereft of creation. Confronted with the herd’s apathetic nature Zarathustra in haste defends “What is great in man” (Nietzsche, 1961: p45) a list the likes of the herd and the last man find at once burdensome and heavy. Yet those who are to overcome, those who for Zarathustra “prophesy the coming of the lightning…” (Nietzsche, 1961: p45), those men who under darkened clouds continue planting seeds for trees they shall not see, those men who carry and own their fate. The becoming towards Overman true, a love of creation even when it is destruction; a simultaneous innovation, growth, creation and longing for life, all of life. These men who become are those who wish to “perish by the man of the present.” (Nietzsche, 1961: p45). Men so utterly subsumed into their amor fati that they question a positive roll of the dice; a man who feels indebted to the future and understands it is he who must pave the way against the belly laughs of the herd, this is what it means for Nietzschean man to become.

What of this ‘becoming’ of which man must attend, wherein must man begin? The process prior to those who have overcame, what will and does overcoming look like in actuality? For these questions we turn to the abstraction of the Nietzschean rope of animal, man and Overman. The rope of overcoming as a guide for transcendence. Beginning with the former coupling of animal and man or nature and man, and so one turns to Section V, Dawn, (Nietzsche, 1911: A434 and A464) wherein lies a critique of man’s reaction to nature: “the great things of nature and humanity must intercede.” (Nietzsche, 1911: p274) For there should be no return, for fear of clawing at old animalistic rope, there in fact should be a cultivation, an active improvement of nature wherein the duality of man and nature – expanded upon later – becomes a symmetrical improvement for both sides’ inefficiency: Man as he who improves upon nature’s shortcomings and nature as reminder of origin, of how far man can fall. Within Dawn’s critique and Zarathustra’s proclamations we find man’s perpetual opposition to that which he creates, as Kaufmann comments (Kaufmann, 2013: p248), that much akin to Wilde’s smelt of bronze (Wilde, 1894) man must melt, form and re-melt his bronze ad infinitum, each reforming a Heraclitean improvement of his creation and his being. This albeit ‘practical’ form of becoming is at its heart the private ownership of one’s own amor fati; a “down-going” into fate, however light, however bleak. I shall return to becoming in abstraction later, for now, that which man shall become: the Overman.

If one is to speak of man as a rope: from animal, to man, to Overman, then one may ask what difference lies between man and Overman. The difference presents itself in the way each influences and is influenced, for “Man is a polluted river.” (Nietzsche, 1961: p42) and though he could recast his bronze a new, or bare the future’s weight, both acts, along with his present agency are prey to the external influence of herd-entities: state, religion and society, all of which act as forms of ‘pollution’ for weak, fearful man; those men who are not as of yet themselves. His thoughts, his ideas, his morals, his structures even, are perceived via a gauze of epoch-centric stimuli altering the original and authentic into the lulls and whines of the herd; and thus what is his, is not his. Whereas “the Superman: he is the sea” (Nietzsche, 1961: p42) and thus can receive the pollution of the river, of many rivers, of all rivers without losing his original form, without losing who it is he is. The Overman therefore, is he who can withstand external pressured perspectives en masse whilst retaining authenticity and origin. Indeed if one is to turn to the literal (published) origin of the Overman, to The Gay Science, they shall find him within a reverent triptych “of gods, heroes and overmen.” (Nietzsche, 1974: A143), it is here in origination we find not only is the Overman he who withstands the rabble’s infectious strains of decadence, but it is he who – in the future, once born – will be able to create structures and systems akin to those of gods and heroes. It is of course no mistake that the Overman finds his literary birth in an aphorism focused on the problematic nature of restriction, specifically the restrictions of monotheism in comparison to polytheism; why worship the singular, suffocative ideology of a long since murdered God, when one can overcome restrictive pollutions and help the future bare witness to the birth of the Overman. To lure “him who justifies the man of the future.” (Nietzsche, 1961: p44) forward so, away from all sources of pollution, man, in plural, may glimpse at a future bearable, recurrence bearable…

For why write of a Nietzschean future if one doesn’t address the only future: Eternal Recurrence. For Nietzsche the doctrine of eternal recurrence is the impenetrable metaphysical horizon: “Eternal recurrence – that is to say of the absolute and eternal repetition of all things, in periodical cycles.” (Nietzsche, 1911: p73). The finite number of atomic configurations within the infinity of time recurring over and over, a perpetual reorganization of chaos again and again. A succinct description of the atheistic horror, the atheistic universe. For not only has God been murdered (Nietzsche, 1961: p41) and thus been made mortal by man, but the act of murder shall recur. Recur out of sight and out of cycle (Nietzsche, 1961: p234), and so it becomes an impossible act for any mortal man to comprehend…the recurrence of all his pain and loss, strife and suffering, let alone wish once more than he act out his mortality. Yet this is the ‘heaviest weight’ which the Overman must bare, not to “curse the demon who spoke thus.” (Nietzsche, 1974: A341) but in fact, to embrace his announcement, the great amor fati, to want no difference of fate, nothing ever changing for all of eternity, this fate only the Overman can embrace and it is this virtue that make him thus. Recurrence of such is here prior to any ‘arrival’ or birth or the Overman, and thus we exist in an anti-anthropocentric universe that cares not for our wallowing in chaos, for our lack of atomic organization or baring of tragedy, the justification of the future is in the arrival of he who will bare the horizon of recurrence. For recurrence without the Overman, without he who can accept it…own it, truly, would result in a death of possibility, of potential, a repetition of the finite forever, without hope for value, transcendence or hierarchy. The Overman without recurrence however, would act as a fatalistic tyrant, leaping into the unknown whilst dragging humanity behind him. In their connection the present belongs to no one, it is the end-result of a past configuration and the future is only that which is to be overcome. “For greatness in man is amor fati: the fact that man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, for all eternity.” (Nietzsche, 1911: p45) For the Overman, the wish for non-difference is their a priori connection to recurrence. Yet this relationship is asymmetrical, for it is inconsequential to the universe whether or not chaos is organized; yet to those who benefit from a reorganization it is not. “After the vision of the overman…recurrence now bearable!” (Kaufmann, 2013: p327)

 

A Deleuzoguattarian Epoch


 

The horizon for man, specifically contemporary western man, has changed, the epoch altered: that which man creates, destroys and lives from, has itself altered in such a fundamental way that which ‘man’ is has too changed, at least in relation to the ‘man’ of which Nietzsche referred. Man for Nietzsche as he whose potential for overcoming would have directly conflicted with strict ideological value adherence, the Utopian dream and modernity, all of which act in opposition to the epoch of contemporary western man, who pushes to and fro, from and with…capitalism.

Capitalism: A free market economy wherein the means of production – and product – are privately owned by an individual and are operated primarily for profit. A dynamic of recurrent success and the dissolving of failure. Man as controller or controlled, employer or employed; strength and weakness appropriated as economic status and authority. From a Nietzschean perspective it is true that all forms of economy, state and ideology are themselves hindrances of authenticity or pollution for the mind of man, for man’s overcoming. Yet capitalism’s unique machinic nature with relation to man’s unconscious desire allows not only for the possibility of overcoming, but for the ‘acceleration’ of such a process, the nature of capitalism as such is expounded by the philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari.

One, in fact, must turn to Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus for a full understanding of the socio-philosophical consequences of man’s subsumption into capitalism. For that ‘man’, that humanity, first spoke of as he who is to justify the future’s existence has since been altered by the eventuality of capitalism, which mutates man’s nature into that of a desiring-machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p12), integrated into the societal meshwork of desiring-production (Ibid, p19). Desiring-production: The perpetual loop of production and consumption along with their inherent bind: “Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and passions…Everything is production.” (Ibid, p14) within this machinic capitalist process “the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man becomes one within nature in the form of production and industry.” (Ibid, p15) That ‘nature’ which the ‘man’ of Nietzsche is to cultivate and improve, has since, in its duality with man been subsumed into the form of production and industry. The rope of becoming ground from its animalistic beginnings into man by the process of production, both moving forward into a process larger than themselves, of which shall accelerate the motion of man towards Overman. This duality of man and nature, this “Production as process” (Ibid, p15) as that which subsumes all: desire, ideals, identity and categories, and thus is not itself a means to an end (Ibid, p15), nor infinite perpetuation, but is the essential productive reality of man and nature entwined as process for the refinement of both. Man as a “producing/product identity” (Ibid, p18) process amidst a process of momentary cyclical lapses of production, wherein the whole process starts again, a non-means to an end, a “continual birth and rebirth.” (Ibid, p18), a continuous melting and sculpting of Kaufmann’s Nietzschean bronze (Kaufmann, 2013: p248); man reassembles himself again and again from the remnants of his singular past bronze creation into a new original form, a glimpse thereof for a moment, before the product is consumed and melted back into the process of production along with man: a process of the continual lapsed process of micro-productive overcoming. Man as desiring-machine amidst the capitalist landscape, wherein the distinctions of: production, distribution and consumption are immediately flattened onto a single immanent plane (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p15), alongside industry, man and nature all acting as a means for the process of production, as such man becomes a process…a process of production. As a furnace produces the heat to smelt, man produces sweat to cool, both acts interlinked under the horizontal process of capitalism as that which emancipates becoming from the suffocative pollution of utopias into the perpetual “decoding of flows.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p257), into a non-linear, fragmented Nietzschean explosion! (Nietzsche, 1990: p108)

What of these men, these desiring-machines whom are of the capitalist socius, what does it do and what does it alter of their agency? These men who, in accordance with Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, becoming desiring-machines. Wherein that latter machinic nature is not metaphoric (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p12), but actual, man assimilated as machine into “only a process” (Ibid, p12) driven by an unconscious desire of “fragmentary and fragmented” (Ibid, p12) ‘objects’ and ‘flows’. “Desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down.” (Ibid, p19) and so, as this “identity of production” (Ibid, p19) acting simultaneously alongside the naturally decoding and fragmentary processes of capitalism, with desire as the underlying catalyst for the ‘current’ and ‘break’ of capitalism’s decoded flows, we find man as he who now exists within a continual machinic birth and rebirth, product and production; fragmented man as process removed from archaic independent spheres into a political project of immediacy and divergence.

What of these men within and of capitalist process(Ibid, p257), of The Civilized Capitalist Machine, a construction of semantic parts of which each must be swiftly deconstructed as a means for understanding the horizon of man: ‘The Civilized’ as in the singular capitalist machine which in its unification acts as a vessel for and of decoding and deterritorialization, which via the proclamation of its ‘civilized’ nature has been brought, or brought itself to a correct developmental stage: So via a deconstruction herein we understand that of a singular accepted capitalist machine, the process of which – production, process, man – acts as both its civility and machinations. Internally holding the emancipative process of the decoding of flows and deterritorialization, a process which subsumes man as desiring-machine into as a means for man’s accelerated overcoming.

Towards the emancipative process itself: “That is why capitalism and its break are defined not solely by decoded flows, but by the generalized decoding of flows, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flows.” (Ibid, p259). The Deleuzoguattarian primacy of capitalism as that which decodes; a removal of structure, a reversal of apparent limitational natures; ‘coding’ as linearities wherein growth has an ‘end’ or a blink (Nietzsche, 1961: p46). And what of the flow that is to be decoded: “What is it that moves over the body of society? It is always flows, and a person is always cutting off a flow. A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or better yet, an interception of many flows.” (Deleuze, 1971) This Deleuzoguattarian ‘person’ taken as man, humanity, a multitude of persons, is man within capitalist process as desiring-machine, entirely subsumed into decoded and perpetually decoding flows, man fragmented into the process of production (of production) of capitalism itself. These “decoded flows that makes of capital the new social full body.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p261) become capitalism itself, assembly of the capitalist machine as the “production of productions.” – the great creation – with man taking his place in and within and of the machine, no longer a capitalism which “installed itself in the pores of the old socius”(Ibid, p261) but a capitalism entirely deterritorialized into a civilized production machine, with subsumed man as desiring-machine, flattened onto the semantically reductionist plane ‘capitalism’ from which one can begin a trajectory towards an isolation of desire and of overcoming, using capitalism as its natural propellant.

 

Man’s Transcendence As Capitalist Process


 

This isolated trajectory towards overcoming…of overcoming, this possibility of transcendence via the utilization of capitalism’s inherent emancipative processes benefits from a return to the Overman/Recurrence duality. Such an Overman is he who is beyond capitalism, beyond the pollution of any -ism or -logy, those so transcendentally emancipated they can lure humanity from the decadent present with their call for ‘man to justify himself’, that which makes great men act, thus: build the future from the future. The inherently problematic yet beneficial nature of capitalist process if that the alterations it has performed on man of course change that which he is to overcome, namely himself, for it is man to be overcome and man has changed. Yet these processes too – as we shall see – allow for an accelerated reassembly of the recurring finite. First: overcoming as Nietzsche’s man, secondly: overcoming as Deleuzoguattarian man, thirdly: utilization of both forms as a means for accelerated overcoming as process.

Great men…in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated…there has been no explosion for a long time.” (Nietzsche, 1990:p108) What of these ‘explosions’ and why have there been so few? For they are held back by the Nietzschean pollutions: state, religion and epoch. So of the former ‘great men’ we find a symmetrical characteristic with the Overman, both care not for their epoch’s chaos and both become who they are’(Nietzsche, 1974: A270). However, those great men of present, taken henceforth by capitalism’s all consuming process, acting as a vessel for the “overwhelming pressure of the energies.” (Nietzsche, 1990:p109) as such that the unhinged, free market capitalist state allows these men to become that process towards which there is the Nietzschean explosion.

To grasp the Will to Power both as text and as actual will in consideration with the contemporary socio-political organ is to invite an abstractive haste titled under the principle of more! (Kaufmann, 2013: p185), guided into the future, attempting to justify the future via posthumous fragmented jottings, decoded from author into flows alien to their temporal origin seems fitting: To guide us, bluntly towards the perspective of the non-end, the forever-end of man prior to the coming of the Overman: “To invite disease and madness, to promote symptoms of derangement, meant to grow stronger, more superhuman, more terrible and more wise. (Nietzsche, 2017: A48) Invitation, promotion, growth and more, more, more, the perpetual decoding of flows is that which we must invite; acting as a contemporary deification wherein one actively allows and invites the process of capitalism further into his desire. Wherein man attempts an assertion of his place within the authoritative triptych(Nietzsche, 1974: A143), utilizing the naturally creative powers of capitalism as a means for future – God & hero-esque – value creation.

If we remove the idea of purpose from the process, can we still affirm the process? We could if something were accomplished at every moment of the process.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A55) What purpose does capitalism hold and promote except that of continued deterritorialization and the decoding of flows, each decoding, intersection and multiplicity of flows is at once and “every moment” a creation, a deterritorialized creation without root of purpose, unconscious creation from and of man! A miraculous creation amongst [modernities’] “breaking up of traditions and schools.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A74) This fragmented disintegration via capitalism’s decoding of modernity, of all which could have possibly coded, caged and polluted man, is at once subsumed into the unconscious process of production and forthwith a flow of production, of creation. – “As a matter of fact, great growth is always accompanied by tremendous fragmentation and destruction;” (Nietzsche, 2017: A112) thus from the ashes of decoded schools and relics of tradition arises “the transition to new conditions of existence.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A112). Utilizing capitalism’s inherent unchecked growth and mechanisms of decoding the Nietzschean pot of smelted bronze meets its greatest furnace; for the Overman as transcended is he who creates!

For “Consciousness only extends so far as it is useful.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A505) not only must the process of overcoming accept pollution as a physical limitation, but to overcome, man must accept the nature of consciousness as anchored to the herd, to the state, to those and that which hinder and impede the process of overcoming: For man’s conscious intentionality is always drawn to pollution and decadence prior. To be and to allow and own the unconscious is to begin to overcome. Such a process of overcoming finding itself inherently within the socio-ideological organ of The Civilized Capitalist Machine: “An organ of what controls us.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A524) the organ Nietzsche speaks of in relation to commerce acts symmetrically to that of the desiring-machine, taken into and in control of an organ. It is from said organ that the limitations of consciousness’ usefulness are left behind in favour of desire, wherein man’s overcoming he shall “trace something new to something old.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A552) as flows decode, and parts are deterritorialized, micro-justifications for the future fragment and decode into process, perpetually, a constant ‘tracing’ of new to old. Such a temporal tracing within capitalist process can be allowed to expand and diverge due to its inherent decoding of flows and form of ownership: “great men…” acting as employers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, visionaries and inventors are “shaping and commanding forces – extending the sphere of their power – the demand increasing.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A644) via appropriation of the traditional ‘strong and weak’ onto the asymmetrical replacement of employer and employed, the capitalist and the capitalized or “Being useful for accelerating – and being useful for [stability]” (Nietzsche, 2017: A648). Thus it is from capitalism that great men are born once more and allowed full reign within their sphere of power, utilizing the multitude of weak marketplace energies to construct, build and create a justification for the future, for the men of the future, for “The herd is a means and nothing more!” (Nietzsche, 2017: A766)

Accelerative processes, no: “NB. Processes considered as ‘beings’.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A655) and asymmetrically beings as processes, a recurrent subsuming of one into the other as a means for overcoming themselves; weak and strong, humanity and capitalism. “NB. Hitherto, man has been man of the future so to speak.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A686) that is, what is man but an effort towards not a better future, but a greater future, capitalism allows man his “Subsumption into the larger whole in order to satisfy its will to power.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A774, 2), man into capitalism as to satisfy desire via unconscious decoding and power by application of practical free market economies, both as a means towards overcoming and to benefit the Overman, to pave route to the birthplace of the Overman.

And so in utilization of contemporary capitalism, with man as desiring-machine, the Nietzschean dream has begun: “He must be endowed with the virtues of a machine.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A888) and so he has been endowed, with the virtues of the desiring-machine, who acts in such a way to acquire little pollution, the unconscious machinic process of capitalism, the unchecked, accelerative virtues of desiring-machine are indeed “The strong who are to come – investing not in society, but in the future – That great process, the levelling of European man, is not to be retarded; it should be accelerated.” (Nietzsche, 2017: A898)

And here in the late, maddeningly fragmented jottings of The Will to Power do we find the origin of Deleuzoguattarian acceleration, acting as the form of ‘end’, the continuous birth and rebirth, the only conclusion man can muster to the civilized capitalist machine:

For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough – Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process””(Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p276)

Herein lies the fatal bridge between Nietzsche’s late – decoded – attempts at offering a solution for man’s potential becoming and Deleuzoguattarian capitalism; for man has become and is always becoming a desiring-machine of unconscious desire, such a machine acting as a part of and as the process of capitalism itself, driving his desire ever forward, yet remnants of recurrent stability remain. His attachments are still to the old as a means of pleasing the strong, he must relieve himself of familiarity and accelerate himself, overcome himself as a process towards the future. Deleuze & Guattari’s call to “accelerate the process” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p276) is a call of acceptance towards the emancipative powers of capitalism in relation to man’s overcoming of himself. And so this production of process and its reverse, the process of production, both acting as capitalism itself and as man, should not be lapsed or halted, but in fact should be accelerated pushing man ever further towards his limit, towards the future, towards his birth as Overman.

 

Conclusion


 

Man as he whom will always – a la Nietzsche – be indebted to his fate and to his future, is as such always burdened with the task of preparing/actualising the existence of the Overman. Against the whines of the herd, man must take up the abstract process of overcoming and cultivate a symmetrical relationship with nature wherein the inefficiency of both is improved, this interceding of both man and nature via a Deleuzoguattarian capitalist framework allows man to utilize the inherent present capitalist process capabilities: decoding of flows, excess fragmentation and the assimilation of independent spheres into a unified process, as a means to accelerate the process of man’s overcoming. Deleuzoguattarian Nietzsche therefor is the interceding of man as desiring-machine with his amor fati, which to the desiring-machine is the unchecked acceleration, fragmentation, decodification and divergence of flows. An amor fati which in conjunction with the emancipative powers of capitalism with regards to product, production and process is accelerated due to its natural inclusion within the Civilized Capitalist Machine. And so: Desiring-machine as humanity within the Civilized Capitalist Machine, are still eternally indebted to the future to their amor fati, as such man must accelerate the inherent capabilities of capitalism as a means towards the emancipation of man, as a means towards overcoming and the creation/birth of the Overman.

 

Bibliography


Text originally submitted to M.A. course.

Note on Bibliography: Preceding a number: p=page and A=aphorism.

Nietzsche, F (1961) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Hollindale, R.J., London, Penguin

Pappas, N (1995) Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic. Routledge, London.

Nietzsche, F (1911) The Dawn of the Day Trans. McFarland Kennedy, J, The Macmillan Company, New York.

Kaufmann, W (2013) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. The Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Wilde, O (1894) The Artist [online] Available at: http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/2315/ Accessed: 07/01/2018.

Nietzsche, F (1974) The Gay Science Trans. Kaufmann, W, New York, Random House Inc.

Nietzsche, F (1911) Ecce Homo Trans. Ludovici A, M ,Morrison & Gibb Limited, Edinburgh.

Deleuze, G and Guattari, F (2013) Anti-Oedipus Trans.Hurley, R. Seem, M. Lane, H, R. Bloomsbury Academic, London.

Nietzsche, F (1990) Twilight of the Idols Trans. Hollingdale, R, J, Penguin Books, London.

Deleuze, F (1971) Capitalism [online] Available at: https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/116

Accessed: 07/01/2018

Nietzsche, F (2017) The Will to Power Trans. Hill K, R. Scarpitti, M, A. Penguin Books, UK

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Quaint electronic ticks and early morning coffees arise from a forgotten train journey, nothing more, nothing less. Trees pass and pylons tower overhead. Path, a path of electric and static through romantic shadows. Sonder & sadness both sewn into this metallic tapestry. A mind races, unable to enter fully into that they wish to, a book unread, a text not sent, as time passes without event to fill it.

Euthanasiaa stark title, pushing off with heart monitor remembrance, a pulse runs directly into a paranoid-loss. Overclocking your emotions into a palpitation ever-present, bulging and pulsing into veins flowing. The skyline has changed, your memories fading into an abysmal grey sludge, another beverage, another piece of the past disintegrates into wishes. There’s a lust for warmth here, a need, a want, for warmth and for a care that cannot be found amongst forgotten chips darting vertically from a washed-out landscape.

You can’t ignore the future, you can only inject nostalgia into your circuits as more and more fear washes over you. Journey, it’s ever present and the dreams a fleeting glimpse, the only hope for what it was you had: the screens, ticks, beeps and slides all melt forwards into ruining your vision, inescapable temporality has entered the memory of your earliest birthday parties, cutting the cake instead of your parents, bundles of wires where friends used to be, a static hum is sung amongst the revelry.

Mind entering a panic drive. Attempts to enter somewhere forbidden, not stopped, only warned against. You may enter here, but be warned, you’ll leave a different entity. Worship cyber and bring forth the cold of metal. Bags getting heavy and the sting of your ill red skin worsens. Harmonic aluminium hell. Screech melodics enter into the mundanity, you can’t sleep for fear of waking into more electrical-detriment. Each sombre-tone erased, ever so slowly. Each placid inch of help and love grows downward, rotting as it falls. It’s over. But it still has to continue.

As the sterilization comes, you’re already anaesthetised by the suffocation and fall, quietly into a bed made of humming. Bone splinters and spinal plunge, take the hand of steel, let go of flesh, of life, of sense. Come forth into repetition pure. We can give you your memories back for a second or two, it wont help, but the illusion of help might be nice, amongst your trees of youth, horizons lost to polite play, everything you had, had, had.

Short, but then childhood is.


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What is a Bugman?

Aesthetically they’re much like their name, bug-eyed, jittery and insect-like, their very demeanour often makes one’s skin crawl. You’re more than likely surrounded by hoards of these bovine-esque people in day-to-day life. Culturally of course they’re near impossible to pin down for they cut all cultural roots at the base in fear of representation with the past. Politically many say bugmen are ‘left-leaning’ yet I’d argue the case that any affiliation with politics is entirely with the curve of the populous and thus the Bugmen – at present – inject themselves routinely with viral strains of progressivism, neoliberalism and (especially) democracy. Projected from this ambivalent attitude towards history and politics comes anti-empathetical extroversions with regard to tradition, myth, folklore, spirituality and interest, all of which, when positioned in relation to a bugman are used only alongside heavy doses of postmodernist irony. The simple matter of fact is they have zero respect or tolerance for anything antiquated or traditional, the most minor of historic morsels that doesn’t actively sell itself to them or project their personal vision of infantile-tech-utopia is cast aside. Philosophically the bugman is relatively confused, often mistaking logic, reason and rationale with one another, and replacing the idea of basic causality with their own drawn-out narcissistic assessment attempts: “Look at me, I’ve got it all figured out.” the bugman says internally.

Before you sits the social nervous system of the bugman true, a sordid mixture of fad-reverence and capitalist-lite binging. On closer inspection of the day to day life of a bugman one finds at its core the implementation of social erosion, everything that is taken from its origin is likewise bastardized into a regressive, virtual, stir-crazy version of its former self: eSports, Fantasy Football, Copy ‘n Paste Vidya (à la Bethesda/Ubisoft), New Atheism, Beards-as-personality, etc. each of these characteristics is of course filtered through the latest piece of cutting-edge high-brand technology the bugman can afford. One may have noticed already that bugmen’s ‘personalities’ are nothing more than the accumulation and composition of various popular brand names, technologies, TV shows, bands etc. The bugman is entirely defined by that which they consume. Thus the bugmen easily assimilate into their own groups, for their archetypes and traits are based off material possessions, as such grouping is quick, painless and has the added benefit of instantaneous conversation: “Sweet mechanical keyboard dude!”

There is of course a difference between a regular consumer and a bugman, there has to be, for everyone consumes. Whereas a consumer will buy a basket of groceries which they plan on eating, the bugman will purchase retro foods, meme-drinks and ironic status-tokens as a means to display the fact that they are indeed ‘in-on-it’. A consumer will buy the box-set of their favourite TV show because they genuinely enjoyed the viewing, perhaps they’ll watch 3-4 episodes a week around other commitments, a bugman on the other hand subscribes to multiple streaming services and binges series after series in the ever expanding quest for acceptance, when asked how they found Stranger Things, Rick & Morty, Bojack Horseman, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones etc. the bugman does not offer insight into their personal opinion, only regurgitates a titbit or quote from the series as a means to display their virtue of consumption. “I too have seen the thing you have!” A network of insects whose lives are routinely controlled by ratings: theirs and others. They must advance their rating by subsuming the other which is rated highly. ‘Everyone liked this, so if I like this, everyone will like me!”

Identity and consumption merge within the bugman. Hobbies become traits in the lives of bugmen. Treating their lives like as if they were an RPG minmaxer, attempting to reach peak efficiency when it comes to popularity, assimilation and acceptance. Spewing spools of popular quotes, band-names, aphorisms and social tics, the bugman is a walking media depository incapable of its own creation. Bugmen’s ‘own’ thoughts are merely misshapen combinations of that which they’ve taken in. Revelling in their ironic displays of lower case postmodern hyperbole and sardonic middle class humour. Sincerity an impossibility for worry of social suffocation, and daft humour avoided for fear of ostracisation. When a bugman sprouts anew, the previous form of personal agency commits seppuke out of respect for others. That jittery man whose bulbous eyes are darting to and fro, the one in line for the new iPhone, that’s a bugman, consumed by the idea of being first in a line of consumers, any possibility of escape is negated by the perpetual oppression and quasi-innovations of consumerism. Just as the man’s soul glimpses at the sight of a beloved memory, his perception picks up an advert, and so the memory fades into non-existence.

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We want to extend the earth to the borders of the cosmos.”

Surrounded by sublime vegetation, trees and earth, a lake spans forth caressing the traditional architecture of a home. Rain comes heavy overshadowing the minor footsteps of humanity. There’s subtle references to a far off world called Solaris thrown into the picture, each suffocated by the remaining humanity within Tarkovsky’s writing and cinematography. There’s a sense that the question Kelvin poses, namely whether or not science can be moral or immoral needn’t matter here, for these grandiose questions are juxtaposed against the timeless tranquillity of the traditional countryside, a cliché that only someone with Tarkovsky’s skill could make original once more.

Image result for solaris 1972

We’re introduced to Berton, a pilot who previously witnessed a four-meter-tall child on Solaris, slimy, nude and creating a waves within the ocean, a horror which was dismissed by the masses as a hallucination, and in a typically Kafka-esque manner Berton’s life and story has become the subject of ridicule, yet needless to say, the man himself is wary to bring the nauseous memory to the surface once more, for fear of its induction into the plane of reality, or at least, whatever remains of reality for our horror-stricken Berton. The opening to Solaris acts as a grounding for a past, one that teases little and is sincere in its acceptance of animals. An element of contrast that thematically resides at the back of one’s memory throughout viewing, against the coming madness fades a memory of normality.

Image result for solaris 1972

Upon arrival to the station Kelvin is greeted by little hospitality, all that awaits him within the station hovering above the ocean is paranoia. Consistently placed circular windows look out onto Solaris’s surface, a surface entirely oceanic and irradiated. A pulsating behemoth of water emanating a desire to the lesser to prod its potential mysteries. Kelvin soon learns his only acquaintance upon the station, Gibarian, has committed suicide, reportedly he entered into a perpetual state of depression “since the disturbances began.”

Before long such ‘disturbances’ become apparent to Kelvin and the viewer, hallucinations appear which are collectively shared by those aboard the station. Materializations of a conception of memory, or the memory of a person are brought to life on Solaris. Kelvin’s deceased lover Hari has returned and as such he decides to fire her away in the knowledge that she is dead, yet Kelvin soon learns that the hallucinations will never fully leave, and they are to return time and time again, each time learning more and more from the matter of your memory. The infinitesimal corpses of your memories materializations pile up as the ocean continues to probe your mind for the most minute of details. Each hallucination only as much of that ‘memory’ or that ‘person’ as one’s mind can muster, as such, our crew are left with ghost like visions of their past loves and experiences.

Image result for solaris 1972

These abstract horrors cling to nothing but their provider for life, and so the lives of hallucinations are entirely burdened to their creator, as such they will do what they can to convince your of their reality. As the 20 years deceased relative you once knew attempts to convince you of their reality, piecing together fragments of your own mind, be reminded that you are not going insane, you’re merely being probed by a planetary ocean with a consciousness, one that’s far more advanced than your own, humanities’ hardware is outdated and so you shall only receive packets of information caught in an empirical feedback loop. Attend to your own madness, and be kind as to not step upon others’.

Of late and of the past there has always been the unspoken idea that space exploration will act as a form of physical transcendence for humanity, wherein upon our ascent into the cosmos our limitations shall leave us behind, an ignorance so pure as to imagine that merely some form of empirical travel could remove our horizon when in actuality we’re still within it. It is not ourselves that have changed, only our position relative to our birth.

Tarkovsky’s vision of Lem’s Solaris is unapologetically anti-2001. 2001: A Space Odyssey is mistaken in attending the idea that humans could outsmart technology, 2001 goes as far as to imply the reversal of Solaris wherein it is Hal whose memory is slave to its fragmentation as opposed to humanity. Solaris from its very beginnings fully integrates the natural flaw that is humanity into the perfected systems that either they’ve created, or exist elsewhere, outside or noumenally. 2001 at its core is a story of man’s mastery over space, to argue this point I put forth Ebert’s explanation of 2001’s ending:

 

By now, man is intelligent enough to realize that the monolith was planted by another intelligent race, and that is an awesome blow to man’s ego. So he sets out toward Jupiter because the monolith beams signals in that direction. And man takes along “Hal 9000,” a computer (or tool) so complex that it may, even surpass the human intelligence. The ultimate tool.

But Hal 9000, made by man in his own image and likeness, shares man’s ego and pride. What is finally necessary is the destruction of Hal – after he nearly destroys the mission – and that leaves one man, alone, at the outer edge of the Solar System to face the third monolith.

And here man undergoes a transformation as important as when he became a tool-user. He becomes a natural being again, having used his tools for hundreds of thousands of years to pull himself up by the bootstraps. Now he no longer needs them. He has transcended his own nature, as that original ape did, and now he is no longer a “man.”

Instead, having grown old and died, he is reborn as a child of the universe. As a solemn, wide-eyed infant who slowly looks over the stars and the Earth and then turns his eyes on the audience.

These last 20 seconds, as the child of man looks down on his ancestral parents, are the most important in the film. We in the audience are men, and here is the liberated, natural being, Kubrick believes we will someday become.” – Roger Ebert

 

Ultimately at the end of 2001 it is man who ‘succeeds’ or transcends, man achieves mastery over his literal creator somehow and in quite a sentimental way becomes a dough-eyed infant looking down upon Earth. The ending is a Kubrickian rarity, it is – debatably – positive. Humanity overcomes space, a superhuman AI and eventually overcomes their own limitations.

If we’re to return to Solaris however one realises from the very beginning that such a case was never going to be put forth. Where Kubrick has apes utilizing tools, Tarkovsky has man pondering his morals, Kubrick gives us Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, the dawn of something great. Tarkovsky originally wanted nothing, but allowed us schizo electronic sounds as an opposition to unbridled hope. Where 2001 is forgiving, Solaris is vindictive and condemning. Tarkovsky understood that not matter how far we travel, nor in what vessel or whom with, we will always be dragging along with us the vicious memories of humanity.

In their cluttered and confused attempts at grasping the teasing’s of those superior to them humanity only claws back its own insecurities. If for one moment, man, you thought you were going to outsmart a concentrated planetary conscious you are mistaken, for it need only to remind you of a character in your own play to make you grovel and retreat. You might declare as Gibrarian did in a fit of madness “I am my own judge!” but be warned, for on your return to home you shall find no need for pleasantries, for you’ve entered into a labyrinth of horror wherein your worst fears are realised for eternity.

You arrive home to find all has been replaced by a perfect replica, each inch of the supposed matter attending to your reality instils a deep sense of the uncanny. Your dead wife runs to your side, your memory of her lost to time and so she too is lost to time, you’re left eternally with a cast without a script nor characterisation. You are left with only that which you created. An eternity without anything new. The slow death of mystery.

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What in the, what in the hell hell is this? This, this gone to fuck cut up shit-time we’ve arrived in? Own up! Which fucking deity took an Stanley knife and sliced temporal existence wide open, we have shit flying all over the track and no one is even irked by it. There’s little surprise left in these black pages, not due to its non-existence, no, for surprise dies when the populous becomes complacent. Blackpills are forced into pre-schoolers sippy cups, junk food intravenously injected into OAP’s corneas, fat-rats, bored-zygote, cigar munch, artistic death drive, oedipal consumerism and more, always more…and the word on the street is, dogs are going bad.

Maybe that’s how wars will be stopped? White folk only care about ‘doggos’ you know? The 3 a priori means for intuition for a white person are space, time and dogs. Anyways, where was I? Oh yea, me and Kev were sayin’ about how he’ll have to work until he’s dead, literally, in fact just last week I helped him shovel his grandmother into a woodchipper, she’s now fertilizer in his guestroom; ‘Warm ol’ Bitch Room’ we call it. Warm ol’ bitch had a cold heart, fed her dog ‘Charlie’ cat food for a laugh, I guess he was better fed than 2 thirds of the world, ol’ Charlie had the last laugh eatin’ tinned lamb and shittin’ where he wanted.

Over heard these two boring cunts talking the other day, one said to the other “How about this weather we’re having?” and the other replied “Oh boy, tell me about it.” 38 of us rode up, pulled out 36 magnums and 2 brownings, blasted their skin through the stratosphere. Anyways, if you were alive past the year 1970 and have been bored, it’s not because of means of activity, it’s because you’re a boring person; go eat some junk food and drink some beer for all I care. Just don’t bother me with your pansy pants tittle tattle crap talk.

But seriously? Where in the hell was I 30 minutes ago? I can’t for the fuck of me remember, probably because it doesn’t matter: Dear God, everything is catered for me now and this has made me, and everyone I know pretty much worthless in any practical sense, the only people I know who actually have a skill so speak, are those who use that skill as a means towards money, interest is dead and technology helped it to the grave. How is it up there in Heaven? I imagine all it is is a place wherein meaning exists, you get there and your purpose is given to you, however shit, however menial…you have a reason to exist, finally. By the way, what the fuck was going on in 2017 my man? You threw the boat out on that one, was it high as fuck turd-talk at the craps table with the apostles or what? Ah it doesn’t matter, it’ll pass…though it doesn’t seem to be, it’s like time is getting smeared forward, innovation-death.

Re-possess leg flesh. Then feed the solution to a rural English family.

There’s fruit on the table and the fruit are made of cigarettes and all kinds of bitter sticks, I gave some to the kids on Halloween, lil’ fuckers. Where-de-where was I? Right oh right, that’s right, there was this lovely kinda linear thang going on and loads of people fuckin’ hated it, but in actuality it was kind of alright, but around 2012 it just down right collapsed in front of us, the big idea couldn’t keep up with all our bullshit and just damn ducked out and exploded, and now we’re left with this absurdist stain of life, all dog-endy and ragged, just drooling all the over the place, spraying shit up the drapes, scrapin’ the tables, ruining everything good and pure. I mean really, this time is just this dead-eyed mongoloid with super strength fuckin’ us for kicks.

Taxed to high hell, malnourished from birth, pacified, anaesthetized, “Dead-eyed dicks! All o’ yas!” I can’t even bear to walk in the street nowadays, to see the idyllic die before my very eyes, these overweight sneering gut creatures exhaustingly spewing their dullard tones across the micro. What weapons do we even have now? Burroughs would bring the gun, the sword, the fuck off great knife with no fear or thought of offence, the man…the man would walk in the street weapon clad, extrapolating the knowledge that humans are and society is – at least in the West – dangerous, and people aren’t nice, at least not without reason.

Hell, at least Dr. Benway had a plan.

The plan, for me, once I either get a career or some cash is to become a doomer, a prepper whatever the name is these days, something’s coming and whether or not it’s traditional death, it’s definitely not nice, like a big black and white photograph of a corpse-pile splashing over existence, holy shit your bunker better be temporal-death tight. When those slick backed Joes come walkin’ up blahin their blahs you’d best gun ‘em down, we’ve tried talking and devising, now’s time to throw Leviathan to the pedestal and grip your hands to a weapon or tool, tight, build your future from bricks n sheet metal lads, for your cheap arse apartment with all those cool pillows your mama got you for non-existent Christmas wont help you now, cheap tactic little shits with your glitter claymores aimed up your own arses.

Try as hard as you like the master’s voice wont die, unless of course it transfers to your own box, which if it does be weary of which whip you buy, for you’ll need a bigger one within minutes.

Hey death-boy, where you going and where’s you dad? – I’ll be in taking over Death’s work for a while, he’s taking a vacation in the West, really going to town on it, kinda a big project for him…something more than just death, you know?

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Intro: The gaming scene has been fairly dry these last few years, and if I’m honest it’s a scene that is beginning to become entirely uninteresting, largely due to lack of innovation, a lack which extends to all of gaming’s pathways from narrative to hardware. This, along with the fact I prefer to spend my time reading, writing or researching generally allows little time for playing games, the majority of them nowadays being clear-cut Ubisoft clones with perfected dopamine reward systems to keep you playing for just that little bit longer, or purchasing just that little bit more. There was a time, I would argue, wherein games definitely could have been considered art, at current it feels as if the medium is drifting further into the realms of day-time TV. With all this aside, let’s move forward:

 

1. Ruiner: The Landian Wet-Dream.

 

Okay, but where’s the video game?

Ruiner, a video game set in 2091 and inspired by cult cyberpunk anime is through and through a compressed Landian nightmare, containing so much Land/XS relevance that a description runs on the borderline between satire and reverence:

The lead/player character is called ‘Puppy’, a Paul Kersey-esque robotic sociopath who, at all times bears an LED helmet, displaying visual death-countdowns and objectives. This anonymous, faceless entities’ entire being is enveloped in the end, in the death of ‘BOSS’ and of the recovery of his kidnapped brother. The backdrop to Puppy’s bullet-hell violence is Rengkok, a stereotypical cyberpunk megacity, which is under control from the mega-corporation Heaven: A malevolent virtuality (VR) company who are hacking people’s brains. The streets are littered with drug addled psychos, transhumanists and hackable felines, with the addition of business at every turn.

For those familiar to the cyberpunk genre all of this is nothing new, all is relatively…normal. Yet this all begs towards a larger idea in relation to Land’s above question, ‘where’s the video game?’ or more aptly, is a video-game-as-thesis possible?

One could of course stretch Ruiner’s narrative here to fit the bill, we have all the parts needed for the Landian hellscape to be assembled. One could say that a meta deconstruction of the anonymous character’s act to ‘KILL BOSS’, is in reality, but a ploy to accelerate his worth to its end, for from the games’ beginning the sole objective is to ‘KILL BOSS’, or to get to the end of the ‘game’. A game that wishes to break itself, to ruin the desire which is its entire creation: an inherent purpose destroyed.

This theme carries on wherein Ruiner is reluctant to let you enjoy the view – or even it, as a game – for even a moment: Barrages of full-screen-schizo-interruptions saying ‘ Don’t do it’, ‘Wake up’ and ‘KILL BOSS’, jolting bursts of raw techno with consistent application of spasmodic hyper-violence all disallow you to experience the game in the traditional sense. Ruiner wants you to abuse and accelerate its systems as a means for obliterating that which is in your path, in fact, my personal experience along with others it seems consisted of abusing two skills to defeat the game, eventually meaning the character, narrative and backdrop all but a violent, red, dynamic blur. The additional post-violence process is far away from remorse, as you collect the games satirical equivalent for XP called Karma, you begin to feel you might be being played here.

Yet there’s something missing – isn’t there always – Ruiner is held back by its traditional framework. That’s not to say that VR would be of help here, not at all. And that said I think I might avoid any VR game that is advertised as ‘Landian’ for fear of insanity. This begs a further question towards the possibility of the aforementioned ‘video-game-thesis’.

 

2. The Failure of Vidya Transcendence

 

I’d like to make a small interjection here and just say that I find the connotations connected to ‘video games’ and ‘vidya’ are often juvenile, so we might perhaps replace it with something more fitting: Virtual Experience, or is that too postmodern?

When talking of ‘philosophy and video games’ you run in to much the same problems when you speak of just the former, there are of course a few Baudrillardian considerations with regards to a combination of the two, but mostly, the problems stay the same. Namely, problems of the inside and outside, internal and external, phenomena and noumena – these dualities aren’t synonymous -, rough approximations of an age old problem projected onto a contemporary system. At least this system, namely gaming, virtual entertainment, 3-dimensional cyberspace has a physical embodiment, we can see and tinker with the workings of the system. And that’s all fine and dandy, but of course there’s limits to what we can do, our only task now is to find out what the system can do better than us, to find out what only the system can do and help it towards its goal.

With the development of artificial intelligence we may find games begin to break themselves, recycle their code as a means to create a game with has an ulterior motive. Or they might just break themselves as a means of self-actualization, or they might just ruin themselves because they hate you, who knows? That said, contemporary virtual experiences really aren’t up to scratch when it comes to any form of self-realization or progression.

Those who pronounce video games to be art often do so in hopes of justifying their transparently hedonistic escape. Don’t worry kid, we all have escapes, yours is just more obvious. Those pronouncing that VR is going to be this gigantic leap in innovation are also wrong. VR wont necessarily burn out, but in its current clunky, largely physical state it’s not moving anywhere fast. In short: Get back to me when I can’t even see your VR headset, then we’re getting somewhere, then VR might become such a virulent strain of hedonistic-K that one’s phenomena change, this is unlikely however.

Any true transcendent virtual experiences of the future will be those wired into our nerve endings. A thesis in the form of a pill, the symptoms of which leave one craving noumena. Daily filter injections wherein one’s experience is brightened. As knowledge transcends the archaic forms of paper and 2 dimensions we’ll begin to understand differently.

You turn on your new experience chip, Land World it’s called. For the next 33 minutes real time, you experience acceleration a priori as your entire being perpetually folds into new forms, the latest more innovative than the last. A high-fructose pharma-frog descends from the heavens and croaks: “Schizophrenics are POWs from the future!” as your senses fragment seizure-like into a mist, intuition pulsating as close to the il y a as possible. Memory lock down, skin-draw, end-mode, chasm-shift, your spine begins to itch like fire, you try to claw it out, just before you’re flung into the K-desert. Greeted by a traveller:

“33 shattered beams of time

stand in the desert…Near them, on the circuits,

Half alive, a fragmented hologram lies, whose data,

and dying code, and assumed authority,

Tell that its K-architect had passions cold

which yet survive, stamping on all life,

that which passes, that which exists.

A mod that mocked them, a heartless dread;

And in the sky, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias 4.3, King of King 4.2;

Look upon my Code, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Your attempt to move your arms in real life, those within K shatter into pieces, you can no longer feel your chip, it’s sunk into you, the desert before you stretching for miles and miles, the hologram repeating Shelley’s Grave-Roll over and over, you walk, collapsing into multiple modes and phases, everything is becoming all at once.

You’re stuck and dinner’s ready.

I want to exit Land World.

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Mandatory self-interest enforced by a suffocative culture, a culture accelerated & exacerbated by K. Apathetic towards linear systems and stable networks, the chaotic assemblage of sensual content is a fix, an escape from the mundane. Surrounded, interrogated by K at all times. Each sense-organ & orifice ready to receive a gleaming K-splinter. A desk flooded with tit-bits of writing ,scrawling, jottings, gnawed pen nibs, pop cans, junk wrappers, wires, notifications, dopamine hits; for your space is chained into the perpetual K-space. A spine slowly remodelling itself inward, a pure-APT is a means for upper K-intake. Home, hyper-hedonism, unalloyed-pleasure-park is your only existence; the slightest nudge tipped you into this Ballardian heaven; you’re ascending into an eternal link-binge spiral of self-loathing.

 

K—it was a melting pot of Ks. Josef K from Kafka, K from the german spelling of cybernetics, K from K-waves in Kondratieff theory in economics, Ko from the I Ching, etc etc. K was in the air. –

Kode9 interview. (Hyperlinks mine)

The additionals: (K)etamine, (K)-hole (κ)υβερνητικός , Y2(K), r/(K) Selection theory, (K)-Theory – link yourself in, descend into K.

Take K as cyber if thee be a layman. Take it as a cocktail of K-tags for a truer vision. But let us for a second extrapolate to a base level K:

We’re talking of cyber when we talk of K. Cyber from cybernetics and cyberspace: Systems, networks, structures, communications, control, regulation, chains and feedback all converge at K. The cumulative controlling systems & networks – tech or bio – that are leading you towards an abyss of fatigue and schizo-attention.

In the past man has been first, in the future the system must be first.” – Frederick Winslow Taylor.  

NEUROPLASTICITY

The human mind is plastic beyond infancy, forever a blubbering imitator looking to fit in. Long into adulthood systems mould the plastic-mind, the pathetic cortex, the ambiguous consciousness finding its feet just to please the system-God. The western system is the most vacuous, your cortex a slave once more to the lowest bidder: to repetitive entertainments and micro-content, spewed forever. These new systems are unlike the ‘blank-slate’ linear systems of old. Blank-slate systems are incompatible with K due to their built in possibility for conclusion. For once you could read a physical book, engage your mind, and fin, clear your mind…and breathe. K, however, gives you want you really want, an unfiltered, 24/7 orgy of content causing your mind to overheat and the plastic to melt eternal, allowing for multiple probes to enter; probing in new behaviours. A structure weak enough to yield an external influence without interjection will always be a slave to the immoral, the malicious.

Each sensory input, motor function, association, reward system or awareness thus enters via K. K is the future filter between Being and intentionality. K’s incessant dopamine reward system: every like, every comment, retweet, every accelerated net-process helps mould human plastic into a K-slave. K has already taught us a couple of good tricks: Lower IQ[1] and lower attention span.

UNIVERSITY

All that is truly malicious enters under the guise of progression. Nostalgic feedback to before university allows you a glimpse of an origin. You remember the birth of K. K before K: the net, internet, the web, mobile telephones, the continued push towards uninterrupted connection, the only direction is away from possibility of exit out of the mainframe. So the subtle forms begin to arise, from hedonistic need grew mass entertainment, lifetimes of media, multiple distributors, affordable chains. You no longer went out after university and if you did you took your phone. Eyes fixed onto your cliché Macbook, re-watching a series you’ve seen 4 times already, re-checking the same 3 dopamine reward systems every few minutes.

Distractions to distract you from larger more structured distractions, tabs upon tabs, lists upon lists, the hours pass as your mind enters into schizo-attention mode; eyes flickering between unrelated K-points, as your mind overheats allowing for behavioural change. You’re smart, but not smart enough to out-think the simplicity of K, not intelligent enough to stop your cortex from becoming a mush. You waste hours in the datacombs reaping pointless systematic rewards, telling yourself it’s good to continue your own intellectual demise. You’ve got a headache, backache, you’re tired, cold and hungry, it’s 3am. Sleep.

You’re sat at a meal with ‘friends’, soon to be K-Data, names on file utilized to pump up your rank. One of them jokes about playing the game where all phones are placed onto the table and whoever checks there’s first pays the bill. There’s slight chuckles coming from the members, all awkwardly checking their (K) phones, just in case the implication was serious, it wasn’t of course, the addiction runs too deep. You’re waiting for your food now, you can no longer chat to one another for that behaviour has been dismantled, replaced with a K-centric motor function: the awkwardness rises and so all are huffing great quantities of K.

K, retaining IT, VR and PC culture as its base expands into the future, accelerating its sociopolitical domination. K is phantom pocket vibration syndrome kicked into overdrive, tactile hallucinatory events invading intuition. Sensibilities apathetic nature is at the whim K-space’s incessant stimulation. The public surgery has begun, to wield distraction & high-fructose hedonism as a scalpel. The populous fatten and tire, their necks crook forward, spines de-evolving into ape-shape. Motivation is thrown into the street and discipline is publicly sodomized.

Night-in. Login. The contents accelerative nature is subversive, quasi-transgressive. The rational and the linear are undermined, K takes Gutenberg out back to be shot. Possibility of conclusion becomes illegal. The press mutates. Vowels erode first, being replaced with emojies and post-meme hieroglyphs. Your thought processes fragment entirely, latching onto bits of data for seconds at a time.

ARE YOU ADDICTED?

(i) excessive use, which may be associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives;

(ii) withdrawal, leading to feelings of anger, tension and/or depression when the computer is in-accessible;

(iii) tolerance, including the need for more advanced computer equipment and software and/or more hours of use;

(iv) negative social repercussions.”

 

“To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” – Seneca

[1] The Shallows – Nicholas Carr, Chapter 7 Pt II:  A Digression On The Buoyancy Of IQ Scores

 
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