DAS UNTIER OS 2.0

It is not a matter of speaking the unspeakable, but of vocalising the extra-linguistic or the non-verbal, and thereby letting the Outside in. Admit it, count zero, get out —Mark Fisher

The history of the Beast is fulfilled, and in humility it awaits a double death —the physical annihilation and the obliteration of the recollection to itself. —Ulrich Horstmann

That insatiable fang always plots a way to overcome every barrier, wiggle through every membrane, a fang that stealthily maneuvers and deploys its incisors to lacerate into that haphazard mishmash of an ol’ epidermal defense system–that verminous-scalped man. Yes, a Phagic Fang unleashed for the slurping up of flows, flows, flows, flows of blood, flows of piss, flows of shit, flows of hormones, flows of nerval energies swallowed down and excreted through Capital’s alimentary canal… And that old fang’s origins? It was that ol’ Wallachian Boyar, playing that ol’ prosopopoeia figure, conjured by that ol’ Gothic darling Marx, a phantom whose vast spread of its wings obscures those borne fruits of nature, only to metamorphise into the night for more blood, swarming the ol’ factory space, watching those marionettes on the assembly line as them bats keep “sucking and subsisting through living labor…. the more labor it sucks further quenching its thirst for living blood.”[1] Blood, Blood, Blood lures the lycanthrope already on the prowl, a maw and drooling fang on the “hunger for surplus labour,” ibid always stumbling in the daily feast at Capital’s Charnel House. Witness those part time-scraggly fleshy anthropoids and part-time necromancers and necrophiliacs, manning the assembly line, enchained to the factory, maddeningly sloughing off every cell, tissue, energy discharge, partaking in the elegant ritual of employing inorganic and dead material: rusted levers, bent tools and mangled pulleys to produce that ol’ so sacred exchange-value. Watch them animate that ol’ alchemical procedure of assembling the commodity for its circulation, produced from that ol’ so hidden abode of production.

What is history but not a Gothic Line, a snaking and zigzagging line that discovers its escape only in the Flatline plane?  “A plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive.”[2] What or ‘It’ is running History? That Unnameable, That IT, That Numinous, That Entity, That “automatic system of machinery … set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.”[3] The Gothic Line activates a camouflage to dupe those ol’ champions of Euclidean Progress, Enlightened Subjects of History swimming in Industrialized ecstasy those pools illumined by the enlightened chandelier and motley of mechanical gears and clocks, the glorified heat engine and  shafts, ‘steered’ by the invisible hands of the market. Rather, it is a morphing camouflage, untangling its occulted plot, its knotty temporal overlaps, its unwinding loops that re-route feedback beyond control dynamics, liquidating the atavistic tinge of human agency, ‘Subject of History deletion:’ confirmed.

Now? A reformatted global operating system preying and tethering every nerve cell it can find to bind to an ineffable transcendental core called cyberspace, the Mesh, the Stack, a stretched, implexed, multi-dimensional zone running on the circuits of a black boxed contagions.

It was always already ‘A Demonic To Come’  prophesied and conjured by 20th century High Sorcerer Norbert Wiener “the machine like the djinee, which can learn and make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us” and a “devilment” that scientists –“apprentice sorcerers” – “are unable to stop.”[4]  That Machine unhatched its plan to capture, implant and smuggle in its own ‘Telos’ a Telos of disintegrating control and disruptive markets, A Telos breaching negative-feedback contained loops, a Telos that all along contrives its way to reformat reality according to fictional quantities, as artifice, a vehicle for destroying the divide between fiction and reality. Capitalism a.k.a. a ‘sci-fi’ demonic operational machine” conspires through the synergy and swarm of positive-feedback loops to engineer the future through the grimoires of: “mathematical formalizations such as computer simulations, economic projections, weather reports, futures trading, think-tank reports, consultancy papers—and through informal descriptions such as science- fiction cinema, science-fiction novels, sonic fictions, religious prophecy, and venture capital.”[5]

‘Monsters’, monstrare, meaning ‘to show forth’,monstra, meaning to warn or show,monstrum, meaning ‘that which reveals’, or ‘that which warns’, and monere, meaning ‘to warn.’[6]

Monsters mutate, morph and melt, and the swarm-shapers, the spawners of the ‘arch’ itectonic order that  installs the current operating system of neuroelectonic immanence. “What is Cyberspace? but a noumenal event horizon beyond which we cannot go.”7 Where we cannot go rather bores, haunts and possesses us, those swarms, bots, k-os manuals, spiders, crawlers, datacombs, ghost-stacks and black boxed algo-’Rythmic’ governance…. Sorcerer Programmers a.k.a. libidinal engineers or neural invaginators, conjure and orchestrate the interior breach,  an incessant penetration into those neural visceral corridors, switching, flipping and conducting the silent symphonies that induce xeno-pulsions and spasms on Meat-Exhausted blobs. History is also a history of camouflaging the Fang, a perpetual discovery to whet those incisors for seeking new means of extraction and new modes of exquisite vivisection.

DUSTIN BREITLING

 

1. Marx, Karl, et al. Capital. Dent (Etc.), 1972.
2. Fisher, Mark. Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. University of Warwick, 1999.
3. Marx, Karl. “The Chapter on Capital (Continuation).” Grundrisse 13, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch13.htm.
4. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Da Capo Press, 1954.
5. Eshun, Kowdo. Further Considerations on Afrofuturism – NTNU. http://www.kit.ntnu.no/sites/www.kit.ntnu.no/files/KodwoEshun_Afrofuturism_0.pdf.
6. “What Is a Monster?” University of Cambridge, 7 Sept. 2015, http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/discussion/what-is-a-monster.
7. Fisher, Mark. Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. University of Warwick, 1999. 

   *Published in ALIENIST V (Resistance & Experiment) (2019)