ALIENIST 9

ALIENIST magazine #9 (December 2020): THIRD WAVEDownload

ALIENISM REDUX / ICONOCLASM / ABORTED ACTS OF DISSENT / M’AIDEZ! MAYDAY! / CATASTROPHE PRAXIS / ON THE ENTROPEMENT OF COVID-19 / ASOMOS / CORRECTIONS / CYBERGOTHIC / HEGALIEN / DIFFICULT TIMES / THE CONTOURS OF OBJECTIVE REALITY / BETWEEN TWO WORLDS / BASURA / DEAR INTERIOR MINISTRY / MARTIAN / ACTION / DUST / THE PINOCCHIAN / ÉHÇBODYREPRODUCTION / BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS / ILLUMINATIONS

M’AIDEZ! MAYDAY!

A colloquium on panic, alarm, protest & social plague-pathologies in the resurrection of the myth of the benevolent corporate-state & the theoretic manufacture of a “new communist” species-solidarity as the subject of renascent post-history. Yet the ongoing “health crisis,” like a mirror held up to the Anthropocene, has not only put the architectures of social power under an epochal strain: it has suspended the very idea of the last instance, the very logic of appeal, & the romance of the social contract. Humanity’s self-proclaimed right to exist has had its last shreds of mystique reduced to a procurement problem. Political theatre has become a theatre of the plague: inertia, perversity, irrationalism, grotesque displays of hope & apocalyptic abandon, all laid side-by-side on the same metaphorical pyre. A controlled hysteria has given way to the hysteria of control. If the virus threatens to enact a revolution, it’s because every revolution is already an inside job. The plague is not an alien force that arrived from elsewhere: it was always already here. If the tremor of its mutations has delivered a shock to social response-mechanisms, this is because they themselves were the convulsive product of a viral corporate-state apparatus: their paroxysms have merely provided an affective arena for an ever-enlarging spectacle of enforced austerity, precarisation & enclosure. This alien-within, having infected the tissues of the social body, now instantiates a quarantine-politics of temporal dislocation – the virus that must be “lived with” in the open-ended present so as to be permitted the promise of a future “cure.” How does pandemic time interrelate within the current xenocapitalist imaginary & how will it extrapolate in the future war over the New Normal? What are the modes of negentropic mutation that will turn the present eco-cultural malaise into the next ideological commodity growth concept? And what means can be evolved to sabotage it?