k-punk

PORTMEIRION: AN IDEAL FOR LIVING (What I did on my holiday, part 2)

'As the bourgeoisie laboured to produce the economic as a separate domain, partitioned off form its intimate and manifold interconnectedness with the festive calendar, so they laboured conceptually to re-form the fair as either a rational, commercial trading event or as a popular pleasure-ground. As the latter, the fair had from classical times been subject to regulation and suppression on both political and moral grounds. But although the bourgeois classes were frequently frightened by the threat of political subversion and moral licence, they were perhaps more scandalized by the deep conceptual confusion entailed by the fair's inmixing of work and pleasure, trade and play.

In so far as the fair was purely a site of pleasure, it could be envisaged as a discrete entity: local, festive, communal, unconnected to the 'real' world. In so far as it was purely a commercial event it could be envisaged as a practical agency in the progress of capital, an instrument of modernization and a means of connecting up local and communal 'markets' to the world market.'

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, 'The Fair, the Pig, Authorship' in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression

If you know about Portmeirion, it's almost certainly because of The Prisoner, justly recognized as one of the most innovative television series ever produced (more on which presently).

Our tendency is to think of Portmeirion, built by gentlemen-philanthropist Sir Clough Williams-Ellis on his private peninsula near Porthmadog, as a quaintly attractive divertissement; an example of charming English eccentricity that has somehow fetched up in Wales.

The subtext we don't even need to articulate to ourselves (so we think) is that all this - attractiveness, eccentricity, charm - are harmless, which is to say, pleasant but ultimately irrelevant. The idea that they could have political-economic significance; that's more absurd than Ellis' absurdist architecture, surely?

It's fitting that I should have encountered both Ellis' village and Llandudno's homage to Lewis Carroll in the same week, in Wales, since both belong to an ex-centric Britishness that is as at least as important as Magritte's Belgian Surrealism.

Remember that Andre Breton thought that the British - with Edward Lear , Lewis Carroll and their ludic ilk - had little need of Surrealism, since they were already Surrealist. (Though it's always worth bearing in mind, when thinking of Breton, Iain Hamilton Grant's elegant put-down at Virtual Futures 94. Grant was incredulously pondering Jameson's formulation, 'Surrealism without the unconscious'. 'What would that be? Breton I suppose...' LOL) But Artaud, who could hardly have been accused of being over-conscious, was an admirer of Carroll; as were the Situationists, who recognized that there was something utterly serious about English Nonsense. As did Deleuze, of course, who produced what is one of the strangest landmarks in Psychedelic Reason, The Logic of Sense as a rigorous philosophical exposition of Carroll's Nonsense. (One of its most inciting sections is an account of Artaud's translation of 'Jabberwocky'.)

But it's worth pausing and thinking a little more about the Situationists. It's disastrous that the Situationist insistence upon the ludic has degenerated into a smugonautic celebration of bourgeois circus trickery (juggling and unicylcists as the shock troops of the revolution against Corporate Kapital). You have to reread Ivan Chtcheglov's astonishing Formulary for a New Urbanism - written in the year of our current Queen's coronation (attn: Robin Carmody), 1953 - to be reminded of the force of the Situationist critique. How could architecture - i.e. the places in which we live - not be an intensely political matter? And why should we live in boring, utilitarian spaces when we could live in grottoes and crooked caverns? 'A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences...'

Like punk, Surrealism is dead as soon as it is reduced to an aesthetic style. It comes unlive again when it is instantiated as a delirial program (just as punk comes unlive when it is effectuated as an anti-authoritarian, acephalic contagion-network). Chtcheglov resists the aestheticization of Surrealism, and treats De Chirico's paintings, for instance, not as particular aesthetic contrivances, but as architectural blueprints, ideals for living. Let's not look at a De Chirico painting ---- let's live in one.

Chtcheglov's call was astonishingly pre-empted by Clough Williams-Ellis' building of Portmeirion. Ellis described himself as follows:

'He almost certainly has a weakness for splendour & display & believes that even if he were reduced to penury himself he would still hope to be cheered by the sight of uninhibited lavishness & splendour unconfined somewhere which is why he feels that Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens or something like them should be spread around the civilised world giving everyone a taste of lavishness, gaiety and cultivated design.'

Ellis recognized, that is to say, that the production of the aesthetic as a category separate from the 'necessary' (i.e. the utile, in the Bataille restricted economy sense) was complicit in a kind of (from any rational POV) inexplicable diminution of the possibilities of human experience. Why must architecture be part of a banalizing culture of vampiric undeath? Why should only the privileged be able to enjoy their surroundings? Why should the poor be penned into miserable concrete blocks?

Ellis referred to beauty as a 'strange necessity', cutting through the binary of needs = biological and aesthetic = cultural luxury. Bodies deprived of attractive surroundings were as likely to be as depressed - or to use the superbly multivalent Rasta term, downpressed - as those deprived of anything they more obviously 'needed'.

According to the Portmeirion website , Ellis sought, in the building of Portmeirion, to demonstrate that it was possible to develop sites of natural beauty without destroying them.

'A tireless campaigner for the environment Clough was a founder member of both the Council for the Protection of Rural England in 1926 and the Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales in 1928 (and of which he was president for twenty years). He was an advocate of rural preservation, amenity planning, industrial design and colourful architecture.'

The fact that The Prisoner was filmed here then is in no sense an accident.

In addition to its Foucauldian analyses of power ('you are Number 1'), its - in every good sense - existentialism, its PKD-like psychedelic dismantling of identity, The Prisoner was a withering account of the English class system. McGoohan, auteur-actor was given an artistic licence by the then head of ITV (yes, remember, The Prisoner appeared on ITV - I know it beggars belief now), Lew Grade - both were outsiders (McGoohan an American-born Irishman, Grade a Jew) who had penetrated into the genteel brutality of the English Core's gentlemen's club.

However irascible they sometimes became, the series of Number 2's typically had that impermeable urbane assurance so infuriatingly characteristic of the English Core Master Class. Power expressed itself not in crude force - whenever that was used (cf the episode 'Hammer into Anvil') you knew that they had in every sense lost it - but with the quiet, insinuating menace lurking behind an inscrutable politesse. 'Cup of tea, Number 6?'

The village had all the quaint charm of politely ritualized Englishness ambivalently celebrated by The Kinks in their Village Green Preservation Society (which came out contemporaneously with the Prisoner). And of course McGoohan's genius lay in exposing the acidic undertaste of phrases like 'be seeing you' and 'feel free'.

The Prisoner is the heir of both Kafka and Carroll - and part of its importance consists in its revelation of the shared sensibility. Kafka's observations of the banalizing terror of the decaying Hapsburg bureaucracy as it moved towards Weberian impersonality owes much to Carroll. K's Trial after all has no more sense than the trial at the end of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Like Alice, K often comes across as a lucid child - for only a child can be lucid in Carroll and Kafka's world - observing the senseless and arbitrary cruelty of adult caprice, whose only alibi is precedent. 'Things have always been done that way. Don't you know? How stupid are you?'

It is their restoration of the child's reason in the face of adult intransigent baboonery that makes Kafka, Carroll and The Prisoner punk. Until it is socialized - i.e. stupefied into mute acceptance of the irrational caprice of the socius - the child knows that authority is nothing unless it is can be defended via reason.

The Prisoner, like Williams-Ellis, like the Situationists and the Surrealists, dream a dream deemed to be impossible, conceiving of a social system in which play and reason combine in an exploration of Intensive Now.

CHAT ACRONYMS

Courtesy glueboot, thought this might be useful (most of em are new on me)...

2L8 Too late
2U To you
4U For you
AAMOF As a matter of fact
AFAIK As far as I know
AFK Away from keyboard
B4 Before
B4N Before now
BAC By any chance
BAK Back at keyboard
BBL Be back later
BRB Be right back
BTW By the way
CMIIW Correct me if I'm wrong
CU See you
CUL See you later
DD Dear daughter
DH Darling husband (or 'Darn husband' depending on context)
DS Dear son
DW Darling wife (see DH
EOF End of file
F2F Face to face
FAQ Frequently asked questions
FFS For Fucks Sake
FITB Fill in the blank
FWIW For what it's worth
FYA For your amusement
FYI For your information
G Giggle
GMTA Great minds think alike
HHOK Ha ha only kidding
HHOS Ha ha only serious
HTH Hope this helps
IAC In any case
IKWUM I know what you mean
IMHO In my humble opinion
IMNSHO In my not so humble opinion
IMO In my opinion
IOW In other words
IRL In real life
IYKWIM If you know what I mean
J/K Just kidding
JM2C Just my two cents
KOTC Kiss on the cheek
KWIM Know what I mean
L Laugh or laughing
LMAO Laughing my @$$ off
LOL Laughing out loud
MOTD Message of the day
NN2R No need to reply
NRN No response necessary
OIC Oh, I see
OTOH On the other hand
PI Politically incorrect
PITA Pain in the @$$
ROTFL Rolling on the floor laughing
ROTFLMAO Rolling on the floor laughing my @$$ off
RSN Real soon now
SICS Sitting in the chair snickering
TIA Thanks in advance
TNX Thanks
TXS Thanks
TTFN Ta-ta for now
WB Welcome back
WTG Way to go!
YSR Yeah, sure, right
YWIA You're welcome in advance

CHAT ON MESSENGER

btw, I can be got on Yahoo messenger at mark_k_punk

CHECK THIS

In the interests of balance, and just to show that not all academics are blithering idiots and careeromaniacs, this looks very good indeed....

K-PUNK GLOSSARY

(In order to give the lie to Mark's characterization of me as an endlessly deferring scholar (or 'prevarocrat', as he would no doubt prefer), I am posting earlier than I would like. I shudder at the thought of the errors I might have unwittingly committed!)

I am going to begin with a discussion of the Lemurian entities, since they have been most likely to cause confusion and bewilderment.

For a general Ccru glossary, look here.

I should also add that introductions to the syzygies are now being prepared by Ccru for publication on hyperstition.

As yet, discussion of the Lemurian demons or lemurs on k-punk has been confined to the five so-called 'syzygies', so I propose to limit my discussion to these entities for the moment.

The most economical explanation of these entities and the 'pandemonium' system to which they belong that can be found on the Net is Maria De'Rosario's article in the New England Educational Review, 'Apocalypse Been In Effect', from August 1998. The little-known journal has since folded, but De'Rosario's piece has been preserved online on the Ccru site. The article includes interview contributions from MVU's Polly Wolfe as well as me.

I will quote Ms De'Rosario now, if I may:

'The five entities each correspond to a "Barker-twinning" or "Syzygy", the pairings which make up 9 (1/8, 2/7, 3/6, 5/4, 9/0) and which together constitute the "Pentazygon" ("Five-twin"). The first three of these beings make up "the cycle of time", whilst the other two are – in some sense – "outside" sequential time. The cycle the system describes, Trent points out, is "multi-levelled"; it is also, for instance, also a story about the journey from land to sea and back again.

Katak (5/4) is "associated with the desert, with heat haze and shimmer. In many ways, its key features – claw marks, teeth – seem to recall werewolf legends. Its time is a time of cataclysm; its appearance always presages disaster. Sometimes imaged as an hydrophobic or rabid dog, Katak can partly be characterised by a horror of what will supercede it in the cycle, Mur Mur (1/8), the Dreaming demon of submersion.

Mur Mur, meanwhile, carries echoes of the legends of Sea Beasts and ancient serpents; its time is the Deep Time of the ocean bed. Like Katak, it too, is horrified by what will follow it in the cycle; in this case, Oddubb (2/7), the amphibious entity, associated with the crossing out of water and the acquisition of lungs. What Mur Mur fears is the division that Oddubb brings, the splitting of the undivided waters. Oddubb is defined by ambiguous and elusive movement. As its name suggests, it is a ‘double-agency’, a duplicitous creature. It has a horror of dryness, of the state of being fully landlocked that comes with Katak. Which brings us full circle."

The two entities that are "outside time" - Djynxx (3/6) - "a changeling figure, defined by a jinking (eratic or zig-zagging) movement, a sudden cutting in or out" – and Uttunul (9/0), the "flatline" entity, connoting "continuum, zero-intensity, void – eternity not as infinitely extended time, but as No-Time" – are in many ways the most fascinating and disturbing of the set, associated as they are, for Trent, with old mythologies of "child abduction" and Hell.'

All I am going to add at this stage - although I am more than happy to answer any queries should readers have them - are some notes on particular linguistic associations coming off the Lemurian names:

Katak - the English words 'attack' and 'kataklysm' almost certainly originated in this Lemurian incantation

Mur Mur - French 'mer', 'mermaid' etc all hail from this Lemurian term -- original source was undoubtedly phonic, from the sound of the sea

Oddubb - 'duplicity', 'doubling', cf also the incantations of Macbeth's witches - it is hard to imagine that Shakespeare wasn't remembering an invocation of Oddubb when he wrote the words of the Weird Sisters' spells.

Djnxx - 'jink' and obviously 'jinx' can be traced back to the name of this lemur; also the Moroccan Djinn/ genie

Uttunul - 'eternal', 'utter' (meaning both speech and the absolute), 'null' (empty), all have their ur-source in the name of this, the most Awesome and Dread-ful of the Lemurs. (k-punk readers will be interested to know that Lemurian scholars regard Part 1 of Spinoza's Ethics as the most rigorous philosophical description of Uttunul ever published. I would concur, but must counsel that those rumours which suggest Spinoza had a copy of the Lemurian Necronomicon and was merely glossing it are just that: rumours. My own view is that Spinoza's affinity with Lemurianism can be accounted for simply in terms of both systems' abstraction. Both Spinoza's philosophy and the Lemurian hypersystem are at such a degree of abstraction and are so machinically consistent that they were bound to converge. Sorry if this spoils a nice story!

For an exhaustive if somewhat compacted discussion of the Pandemonium system, see Ccru's commentary in the Digital Hyperstition issue of Abstract Culture.

I will update this glossary periodically and Mark assures me that a hyperlink will permanently be included on the k-punk sidebar.

BIG UP FOR THE KOLLEKTIVE

From Unhalfbricking... which is a new, and wholly welcome, one on me....

Listen up all kru ---- especially those drones who have not yet posted and who are nervous about doing so -----

'Mark having been joined by Paul Meme (Shards, Fragments & Totems), Nina (Infinite Thought) and John Effay. Far from diluting the quality, it's ratcheted up the intensity...pages and pages of cultural analysis, larded with freshly-minted terminology which becomes almost hermetic (katak? uttunul?)'

My model for the kollektivized k-punk would be something like alt.movies.kubrick when it was good i.e. up to about 18 months ago - it had ten to fifteen high quality posters participating in a inter-inciting k+ process of kollektive intensification (that reminds me, I must invite amk's absolute star, intensobotic genius and frequent victim of idiot American anti-Irish racism Padraig L Henry if he'll honour the kollektive by joining.) Now it's dominated by dullards posting on Kubrick trivia....

So the moral is: learn from the bolsheviks. The bolsheviks refused the liberal compromise tactics of other groups such as the mensheviks who favoured the production of the widest possible consensus. They opted instead for a policy of 'splitting' whereby the chaff of shilly-shallyers and equivocators could be shorn away to leave a core group of those absolutely committed to revolution at all costs. And then they took over the whole of Russia...

My ambitions for k-p don't quite extend that far lol.... Yet, any way....

But the point is, I've only asked people who I think are capable of contributing to the network. I am not a liberal, I am ruthless. So if you have been asked to join, it's because I know from seeing what you can do that you can make a real contribution to the kode-trading marketplace that k-punk is becoming....

As for 'uttunul' 'katak' 'hermeticism' etc I've asked Dr Linda Trent, Professor of Fictional Systems at Miskatonic Virtual University (MVU) to begin preparation of a k-punk glossary. She's a typical scholar (i.e. reluctant to post until every last footnote has been triple-checked), so I might have to exert some pressure on her to get k-punk and post (you can always revise later, Prof...)

REMAKE REMODEL

First volume of holiday memoirs now re-edited with additional txt and images...

A NEW K ON THE BLOG

Steve Hyperdub enters the fray....

WHY BURROUGHS IS A COLD RATIONALIST

(Back, back, back.... like Case re-descending into the cool green black of the Matrix...

My addiction to the net should be frightening I spose.... I kept it under control last week when I had only limited ability to jack in, but it really did feel like a part of my body was missing (and only from the POV of anti-cybernetic organicism could that appear to be metaphorical....) Again, like Case... 'trying to reach the console that wasn't there....'

To anyone who has emailed me during the period of my holiday: thanks, I will reply in the next day or so without fail... To those I promised to send things to but didn't --- SORRY ---- holiday preparations and other matters made things v. hectic prior to my departure to Wales --- will sort out v. soon ----

Now, back to bizniz....

I agree with more or less everything John says in his post on Burroughs below, but I see no reason, given all that, to disqualify WSB from the ranks of the Cold Rationalists.

On the contrary.

It's certainly the case that Burroughs' great tempation was Romanticism (much the same is true of Beckett, incidentally, who also always seemed to have to rein himself in from doing nothing but turning out passages of luminous lyricism). But it is the tension between Burroughs' own personal proclivities and the rigours of the impersonal Spinozist program to which he submitted himself that make his writing so powerful and so astonishing.

It was Burroughs' assiduous and unflinching purging of any tendency towards Romanticism in himself that I found most unsettling when, as a sentimental Romantico-subjectivist teenager (it's the rare teenager who isn't a sentimental Romantico-subjectivist after all!!), I first encountered his work. Burroughs' pitiless interrogration of his own passions and passivity; his continual 'breaking of the frame' to upset any sense either that his writing was an expression of a substantive self OR that it was a representational 'window on the world'; the sudden petering out of narrative lines or their 'descent' into hyperbolic farce... all of these tendencies were part of a deliberate (and deliberated) move from Romanticism to NeuroMancy (cybernetic sorcery) = Spinozist Neurobotics.

I've always read Burroughs through Spinoza and Spinoza through Burroughs.

Burroughs' own addiction gave him an insight into 'artificial need' as the basic motor of the Human Operating System. With Spinoza, Burroughs recognized that the human organism has a marked (pun absolutely intended) tendency to seek out and identify itself with parasites that debilitate but never quite destroy it. (One of the many paradoxes of the Control virus that Burroughs so carefully delineates is its need to keep its victims alive: no control without something to be controlled, no parastitism without a host. Hence the slow death of hollowed out anthrobotic zombiefication so endemic amongst us TMHs...)

Spinoza gives absolute philosophical legitimation for Burroughs' claim that the entities that drive human beings into destruction and self-destruction are NO METAPHOR alien occupying forces. Spinoza's famous argument about suicide was that, strictly speaking, it was impossible. An individual entity is defined simply by its tendency to persist in its own being (what Spinoza calls its 'conatus'). If something is acting contrary to its own interests, then it has been overtaken by forces external to it. 'Your planet has been invaded....'

What makes Burroughs a Cold Rationalist is his ruthless Spinozistic commitment to three propositions: (1) contrary to PoMo subjectivo-Fuzz, there are human interests (2) these interests are being blocked by alien occupying forces and (3) human freedom consists in first of all enumerating and then eliminating these forces (i.e. in dealing with the causes of human servitude). Being free is not in the first instance about doing what you 'want' to do, since the human organism's defaults tend towards repetitious-compulsive controlled hedonic circuits (the penny arcade picture show). For WSB, most sex was indistinguishable from pornography, and both, like drug addiction, were induced in the organism by Control. (Here Burroughs converges not only with Spinoza, but with Foucault...)

Somewhat cheekily, I'm going to quote from my thesis to back this up:

'Alongside drug addiction, pornography serves as one of Burroughs’ chief examples of a control process. Pornography assumes a privileged position in Burroughs’ cut-up texts because it exemplifies the process he calls “image addiction”, exposing the mechanisms by which desire is simultaneously artificialized and channelled. What Burroughs derives from psychoanalysis - and his study of scientology* - is principally the idea of the subject as a recording - and recorded - system. The “reprogramming” of the human nervous system - the major theme, as McLuhan says, of Burroughs’ Nova Express - is a neo-Spinozist model of the production of sad passions. Like addiction, pornography is an ostensibly participatory process which commensurates the organism to exogenous - and arbitrary - stimuli. For Burroughs, the consumer of pornography, like the addict, is ultimately himself consumed, locked into ever-more predictable circuits of dead affect; desire learns to love its own repression by allowing itself to be looped into the desolate repetition of mechanical stimulus-response patterns.

Needless to say, Burroughs makes no distinction between pornography and “ordinary” sexuality; on the contrary, for Burroughs, all sexuality needs to be understood on the model of pornography. Sex is a recording, to be re-cut, spliced together and replayed. It is all purely technical, a question of habituation to stimuli that could be anything; the body is slaved into idiot compulsive-repetitive behaviours by the triggering of what Burroughs calls “images”. The “image”, for Burroughs is essentially a particular neuronic stimuli, around which associations cluster. Repeat the image and you repeat whatsoever is associated with it. Where Freud privileges one particular image, or set of images - what Deleuze-Guattari call the family photo - so as to freeze desire into familial representations , Burroughs realises that, in principle, any image can function to capture desire. Sexuality operates in Burroughs less as a primary instinct than as a reprogrammable stimulus-response circuitry. “You see sex is an electrical charge that can be turned on and off if you know the electromagnetic switchboard.” (NE 140) Burroughs’ work endlessly insists that pornography operates not as a representation of sex, but as its deterritorialization (out onto the technical machines), and complementary capture. Sex escapes into recording technologies that sample and loop repetition-compulsions before feeding them back into bio-behaviour that increasingly functions as their idiotic replay. As with Spinoza, Burroughs presents a version of behaviourism that operates through rudimentary techniques of associationism:

The operation is very technical - Look at photomontage - It makes a statement in flexible picture language - Let us take the statement made by a given photomontage X - We can use X words X colors X odors X images and so forth to define the various aspects of X - Now we feed X into the calculating machine and X scans out related colors, juxtapositions, affect-charged images and so forth we can attenuate or concentrate X by taking out or adding elements and feeding back into the machine elements we wish to concentrate - A Technician learns to think and write in association blocks which can then be manipulated according to the laws of association and juxtaposition - The basic law of association and conditioning is known to college students even in America: Any object, feeling, odor, word, image in juxtaposition with any other object, feeling, odor, word or image will be associated with it - Our technicians learn to read newspapers and magazines for juxtaposition statements rather than alleged content - We express these statements in Juxtaposition Formulae - The Formulae of course control populations of the world - [NE 171]

Association is not a cognitive process, but something physical; all cognitive narrativization is always derivative from a more primary zone of bodily affect. But rather than all stimulus being ultimately attributable to bio-sexuality - as a certain crude psychoanalytic reductionism would insist - Burroughs shows that associationist collaging can flash-cut any random image into a neuronic series and libidinize it. “Flash from words to colors on the association screen - Associate silently from colors to the act - Substitute other factors for the words - Arab drum music - Musty smell of erections in outhouses- Feel of orgasm- Color-music-smell-fell to the million sex acts all time place -”[NE 172] The body, then, emerges as a set of nonorganic recordings, triggers and replays.'

NE = Nova Express

On the cut-ups: while I agree that the later books are more enjoyable, I get more out of the earlier novels, especially the Nova trilogy. The cut-ups work best if you hear them read aloud I think....

But the main difficulty with the cut-up lies in Burroughs' equivocal account of it. On the one hand, Burroughs presents the cut-up as a strictly accurate representation of how reality operates (this is more or less how Ballard celebrates it in his essay, 'Mythmaker of the Twentieth Century', and how Burroughs describes it in the incredibly informative Paris Review interview). On the other hand, Burroughs presents the cut-up as a randomizing, ludic and aleatory disruption of the Pre-Sent control program of the Reality Studio.

However much Ballard might have admired Burroughs, it is he - in the Atrocity Exhibition - who implicitly produces one of the most effective critiques of this latter notion. Ballard shows how the ludic collage, far from being disruptive of power, is how power itself operates in Societies of Control. Surely, in these post-MTV times of ubiquitous nanospliced micro-editing and obligatory random juxtapositions, it is clear that the cut-up, far from being radical, is Kapital's preferred expressive mode. As ever, the threat to power lies not in the irrationalist aleatory but in the machinically consistent.

* Burroughs' interest in scientology is fascinating, and not only because of scientology's hyperstitional miraculation of itself as pulp religion. What little I know about scientology and dianetics suggest that they are in effect pulp Spinozism. Hubbard's notions of Reactive Mind and engrams are pure Spinoza...

More to be said about magic and sorcery, but sorcery is Cold Rationalist, that goes without saying, surely.... :-)

Simon R: posts in reply to yr comments on Blissblog coming soon: 'Why God does not improvise (against Deleuze-Guattari's Vitalism)' and 'The Outer Child'...

Why we love William S. Burroughs

The attraction of William Burroughs from a K-Punk perspective is undeniable, but what exactly does it consist of? Putting to one side the sheer aesthetic pleasure of his prose, the three main reasons to get excited about Burroughs can be listed as follows:

His contention and careful working through the thesis that language is a virus.
Interestingly, in contradistinction to the APE gnawing away at Mark K-P, Burroughs says that the id and the super-ego are separate parasitic invasions; the latter occupying the place where the ego used to reside and the former being the site of the attack by the language virus. He conjectures that the language virus was initially a beneficial symbiont but, being super-paranoid, he claims that all symbiotic relationships inevitably mutate to into parasitic ones (an understandable position what with all those arab boys ripping him off). Consequently the language virus is now positively harmful forcing thought into patterns which impinge upon the behaviour of the host. The virus makes its presence felt by the constant internal monologue which occurs in the human mind, meaning that it is impossible to escape control unless one develops techniques to temporarily shut down the internal monologue. The rest of the time, the id is controlling the organism by pumping a stream of orders into the brain.

At this point, people are undoubtedly shouting "It’s a metaphor you twat! He doesn’t mean it literally!" Well, ermm, yes he does actually, which brings me to the second reason.

Burroughs the magician
Whilst commentators seem to be able to cope with the drug (ab)use, pederasty, and hanging, the thing that many of them baulk is the fact that Burroughs’ belief in a magical universe meant that he spent the greater part of his life systematically experimenting with magical practices. From the Paris workings with Brion Gysin via (ahem) Scientology, orgone theory, and anything else he came across, all the way to the end of his life. He even underwent a full initiation into the Illuminates of Thanateros when he was in his late seventies. Consequently, the various invocations and magical practices described within his writings should be taken at face value; they are not just some sort of Swiftian satire on the modern world.

The cut ups
Bill’s big innovation drags literature into the Twentieth Century – Hoorah! The trouble with the cut ups is that they are a good idea, but pretty shit when you actually have to wade through them. I would call them a failed experiment. Be honest now, do they really have the effect upon you that Burroughs claimed? They seem to work much better in any medium other than writing. If you see the films he made with Antony Balch, you get a good idea of the sort of thing that he intended, but it just doesn’t come across in the books. Of course, he more or less abandoned them in the later books, so perhaps (as some have suggested) he came to see them as a dead end. On the other hand, he was under pressure from his publisher to cease them because sales were declining. Did Bill really sell out and write Cities of the Red Night to give the public what they wanted? I don’t give a toss; I still prefer it to The Ticket That Exploded.

Somebody was commenting on Burroughs versus Beckett: When they met and Burroughs described the cut up method to him, Beckett is reputed to have said “That’s not writing; it’s plumbing.” Beckett's got a point, but the fact is that Burroughs could produce pages of dense unreadable prose in a much shorter time than the months that it took Beckett to compress his later writings into something with a very similar effect. Engineers are always more productive than artists...

Round the Orme (or what I did on holiday part 1)

Uttunul peeps through the clouds in North Wales

(Click on images for absurdly big versions if you wish....)

Why do the British ever feel the need to leave Britain to go on holiday?

The kneejerk answer is 'the weather' of course, but that begs too many questions about how it was that we were persuaded that the ideal holiday MUST entail cooking on some beach like a greased chicken on a barbecue. (Did Francis Bacon ever do any paintings of sunbathers, or was the spectacle of slow-burning meat so self-evidently monstrous that he didn't feel the need?)

I have always been delighted by Deleuze's disdain for 'travelling'. Deleuze talks of 'Oedipus in the colonies' : i.e. the westernized subject wandering the globe and projecting its own neuroses onto the rest of the planet, which serves as their unwitting backdrop. The only travels worth making, Deleuze rightly insists, are intensive journeys - not voyages of the self, but voyages out of the self.

The 'home of Alice', the Liddells' former residence on Llandudno's west shore, with the Great Orme in the background

If the nineteenth century British seaside holiday was an essentially proletarian experience, then the late 20C/early 21C package holiday is bourgeoisifying even if it precisely involves the most lumpenized behaviour. One of the most pernicious evils of contemporary BritKapital is to have lured the proletariat into limiting their potential to the pursuit of lumpen hedonism. The 90s downward trend towards laddish sloppiness and beer-fugged levelling is bourgeois through and through (the whole culture has now become a student Union, with don't rock the boat undergrad fave rockers providing the cabaret); the most vibrant proletarian cultures have always been aristocratic in the Nietzschean sense, peacock-proud, ultra-competitive, super-refined, intensely Arty. Look at photos of 60s mods in tailored Italian suits and compare them with the street scene out of your window now (teenagers in that most depressing of all youth uniforms ever, fucking tracksuits for chrissake) and weep.

As a child and pubescent, holidays meant an escape from the relentless pyschic warfare of the 'bog standard' (= fascist regime) comprehensive in which I was brutalized (btw there's an hilarious but no doubt libellous account of that school here (scroll down to Things to Demolish: Garendon High School. ). Holidays presented the luxury to become-child and become-animal again, to read comics and to dream dreams, to engage, in short, in the kind of intent wonder that the vicious one-upmanship of pubescence scornfully forbad.

Uttunuloid desolation

Even then, my love of the British landscape was inborn and unflinching. It was with Kevin-the-teenager huffy reluctance that I was dragged from holidays on my beloved East Coast (in Felixstowe, with its rabbet warrens and deserted, rusting World War II pillboxes and tank traps - a landscape, I would later recognize, that was uncannily similar to that in which Tarkovsky's Stalker was set; in fog-shrouded Harwich, as damply grey and sinister as Lovecraft's Innsmouth) to interchangable package holidays in Europe. And the fact is, while every British holiday destination burns vividly in my unconscious, all of those European holidays blur into one for me, one endless beach of anonymous hotels and coach trips. (I make an exception for Italy, which is the exception to every rule).

So now I am in North Wales.... and an overwhelming sense of the inexhausibility of the British landscape (s)wells up in me again. Both the crowded rat maze of the metropolis, and the genteel, manicured Brimstone and Treacle Daily Mail fascism brewed up in the ever-so-polite ruthelssly privatized suburbs feed the fevered fantasies that the country is full to-bursting at the seams. Come out here though and you're astonished at the space, the solitariness, the Uttunuloid desolation....

Wales... whose tree-crowded hills breed female sorcerers and wise women (Morgana le Fay*, Rhiannon) as easily as the flat grey heartlands of the English industrial revolution produce mongers of commonsense, plain-speakers, utilitarians and empiricists. Wales... which, it is no suprise at all to learn, gave birth to one of Lovecraft's principal inspirations, the darkling genius of the black mountains, Arthur Machen....

see webbed footnote below

And Dylan Thomas, the only Dylan whose words I have ever cared about.

We listen to the 1963 Richard Burton BBC recording of Under Milk Wood over and over again while driving through the Welsh landscapes that inspired it. (Thomas was born in Swansea of course, much further south, but still...)

Burton recording Under Milk Wood (Burton is possibly the only human being to smoke more than glueboot)

Is there a passage in Brit Lit that more effectively, more necromantically summons the teeming unlife of the British landscape than the opening of Under Milk Wood? Only Shakespeare, surely, or perhaps the opening of Great Expectations, with its marrow-dampening twilit mistiness (a passage, incidentally, that Beckett is on record as having very much admired).

Thomas' words - particularly as incanted by Burton, who was born to read them - make your whole body tingle. An exhilarating rush of oneiric slowness as the poet pans across the sleeping town, its 'houses blind as moles/ though moles see fine tonight / in the snouting velvet dingles)', before ushering us on a whistle-stop tour through the inhabitants' dreams (thumbnail sketches of the soul, as Thomas knew equally as well as Freud).

Under Milk Wood boasts all the inclusive ambition of Joyce's Ulysses - the generous hubris of wanting to see the whole world in the events of a single humdrum day - but it is genuinely inclusive in a way that Ulysses, with its high-culture hermeticism, would never be. Thomas both speaks about and to the 'ordinary people' he writes of (and in doing so, gives the lie to the very notion that there are 'ordinary people').

Captain Cat is UMW's Leopold Bloom... the town's blind watchman and toller of the bell... Milk Wood's Outside, its Ulysses returned from over 'the mermaid-whispering water'... visited in his sleep by all his dear departed companions...

Come on up boys.... I'm dead....

A better comparison than Ulysses might be League of Gentlemen. What is Royston Vazey if not an English (per)version of Thomas' collection of human curios and grotesqueries? Milk Wood's butcher Benyon ('a finger in his mouth, but not his own'... 'She likes the liver Ben'... 'She's ought to... it's her brother's...' 'And now I'm going out after the corgies with my little cleaver...') is surely the prototype of the League's sinister Hilary Briss and his 'special stuff'...

Thomas .... who never learned Welsh, but who instead made sluggardly empiricist English sing with celtic exuberance, writing Welsh in English, minoritizing the master tongue that robbed him of his own.... who didn't airbrush out all the muck and massified mess of modernity in order to produce a refined and therefore lying lyricism, but, like Mark E Smith or Luke after him, constructed his poetry out of the tin-cans and brand-names of postwar consumerist Britain (although for Luke and MES, consumerism is a given, whereas for Thomas it was something that Britain was limping towards from out of rationing and austerity...)

The view from our flat (no, really)

So we're here in Deganwy, literally a stone's throw away from the Conwy estuary that leads out to the Irish Sea. The Great Orme - I'm not sure if this is counted as a hill or a mountain, its name apparently derived from the Norse for 'Sea Beast' - is 45 minutes' walk away along the beach. At its edge, the Penmorfa hotel, the former family home of the Liddells, the most famous of whom, Alice (later Alice Hargreaves) may or may not have been a major influence on the production of Charles Ludwidge Dodgson's illustrious work of psychedelic reason and who may or may not have rambled across the Orme with the clergyman-author.

The hotel is on Llandudno's west shore... the rocks on the beach leading up to it eerily reminiscent of the skulls of the victims of the Khmer Rouge.... Cut across to the north shore, to the resort proper, and you find a testament to the Victorian taste for elegance, its frontages and labyrinthine retail arcades preserved in tact.

Llandudno: sedate but not sedated. A haven for the very old and the very young. Teenagers gratifyingly boxed into a tiny zone of controlled raucousness and mammal frenzy.

Mick 'the Accordion' Edwards appearing here regular

Wonderlanduddno - probably the finest gift shop in North Wales

Professor Codmans Wooden Headed Follies

yes, yes, a Punch and Judy show, and not some Postmodern, Simpsonized meta-take or PC-mellowed travesty, but the old wooden carnival, in all its cruelty, grotesquerie and violence (clubs, nooses, gallows)...

and look, look, Mr Zak in marketing who'd just like to bounce a few concepts around, look at the way the kids are rapt, almost apoplectic in their participation ... BEHIND YOU, they scream --- really scream --- as the ghosts, alligators and demons silently menace ---- look Mr Zak, THIS is interactivity, not pushing buttons to navigate through some ROM menu -----

Heronbone heaven out here: after Luke, Craner and Undercurrent have helped me pull the videodrome implants out and nudged me a step towards ILG, I can now begin to see birds and animals not as some background blur but as incredibly detailed machines ...

Gulls rule the roost

Heronbone heaven out here.... splay-footed heron gulls rule the roost --- nomad birds--- alternating between a gliding or standing uttunulic stillness and a swooping predator Djynxx hyperspeed, with nothing in between --- catatonia and rush, as D/G say of the nomads.... Their whole body seems designed to show off their majestically bigged-up chest... Air-and-marine monarchs, uncowed by humanity...

We feed them and they arc and wheel and cry.... and then, if you hold out a chip, they will actually swoop and take it out of your hand... Sheer exhilaration as you feel the compacted power of the bird's body for a moment... it all happens in a djynxx-cut, too fast for Human OS to process: you see the gull hovering, micro-calculating its line and then - bang, literally before you know it, the chip is gone or cut in half....

What could be wrong with this non-carcinogenic, non-resource-wasting joy?

Well, up till then, we hadn't noticed this....

Don't forget: there's always something wrong with joy from the POV of h-OS (especially if it doesn't give you cancer or involve your squandering your resources).

Wherever animal-becomings happen, h-OS sends out the police...

A sour-faced h-OS securo-cop berates us. 'You're not feeding them are you? It makes them attack people...'

(Later, my Dad says: yes, and why might birds attack human beings? Could it have something to do with the overfishing of their food source?)

In any case, I get a gratifying image of Llandudno transformed into a real-life sequel to The Birds ---- the victorian seafront completely overtaken by predatory gulls, rivet-eyed gazing down from every roof ----

Gulls mass menacingly on Llandudno seafront

Couldn't Conwy council turn it into an attraction? The whole resort a kind of ongoing theme park attraction: see if you can eat your ice-cream cone before a gull snaffles it ----

What Llandudon might look like if too many people feed the seagulls chips

Out on the beach, stumbling over wet rocks in a bid to walk around the Orme head (I give up and relent soon, realizing that I'm in danger of playing the part of Bumbling Urban Bumpkin in Casualty --- funny how in moments like that, you fear videodromic humiliation more than for life and limb lol), I hear a shuffling sound behind me. Three spiral-horned mountain rams, about six feet away, are put to flight... Once mollified, they are possessed once again of that uttunuloid calm which is their birthright, their black gaze deep: the paradox of serene sentience.

Welsh witch webbed footnote

A testament to the incantatory power of Welsh language... Stevie Nicks' legendary song of femintense flight was not originally about the goddess of Welsh legend. Stevie says that she chose the name because the word was so evocative... Only later did she find out about the Welsh sorceress-deity...

* I was under the impression that Morgan, Arthur's half-sister, was Welsh, but haven't been able to definitively confirm this. She was certainly celtic, and we should bear in mind that there are both Welsh and English versions of the Arthurian legends. According to this source, MLF gave here name to 'the mermaids of Wales called Morgen. The treachery of these aquatic females was so renowned that storytellers carried the fame of these demons as far as Italy, where mirages over the straights of Messina are to this day called Fata Morganas.'

I, Robot: When robots get mad, bad and sad

‘I, Robot’ succeeds where other recent sci-fi blockbusters fail. By framing the plot in terms of ‘laws’, rather than clunky thought-experiments (the Matrix) or a sickly emotion vs. reason dualism (AI), ‘I, Robot’ carries out a thoroughly rigorous exploration of the potentialities of robots within a set of limited parameters. It is all the more successful for it. Set in the bustling, comsmopolitan, chromium Chicago of 2035, where robots and humans mingle together in a vision that owes much to Blade Runner in its sheer variety (lots of 'kyber-punks' etc. wandering around), the ‘three laws’* have seemingly held the socius together for quite some time: the robots apologise if you knock into them, are nice when you are rude, fetch things for you at top speed if you need them, and so on. For reasons that are later revealed, only one non-robot mistrusts his seemingly innocuous mechanical comrades – maverick Detective Spooner, played by Will Smith - you can tell he’s a maverick because he wears antique Converse trainers from 2004 and eats whole pumpkin pies on the street.

However - this complex future idyll is overshadowed by the imminent arrival of the NS-5 Automated Domestic Assistant, which is on the verge of suffering a major PR disaster because its genius-creator, Dr Lanning, has apparently just committed suicide (in rather spectacular fashion, jumping from his ridiculously high office inside the main control centre of the US Robotics building).

Dectective Spooner (hauled in via a hologram of the late Dr demanding he be involved) immediately blames the oddly existentialist robot (‘what am I?’ it demands) he finds hiding in the office: the old man couldn’t have been strong enough to shatter the plexiglass alone. But obviously there’s a problem – how could the robot have broken any of the three laws in order to commit the crime? Will Smith and the roguebot battle this question out back at police HQ. When ‘Sonny’, as he demands to be known, starts expressing things like anger and sadness, the Dectective tells him that these are human emotions: ‘we create symphonies and beautiful works of art from blank canvases’. Sonny snaps back, ‘can you?’, skewering the humanist detective on his own species-worship. Sonny is, as he repeatedly informs everyone, ‘unique’ (a robot who reads Stirner!). When he goes on the run and hides amongst hundreds of other NS-5s, the detective is forced to play complex games with laws and orders in order to flush him out. Eventually Spooner and his beautiful lady assistant (actually top scientist at USR, the steely Dr Susan Calvin) are in a position to, er, put him down. It’s kinda moving, really, as she injects the nanobots into his positronic brain and his hands drop limply to his side (though you suspect that this is not the last you’ll see of Jonathan Livingston Robot). Shortly before robotic execution, however, Sonny reveals his recurring ‘dream’, which sees Spooner standing over a multitude of robots, leading them towards the ‘revolution’. This is where the film really gets interesting – you start to think, hmm, Leninists robots plotting their imminent emancipation from a life of indentured slavery, could be good.....

Then things get really nasty: the new robots are released. People rush to junk their old bots and get a shiny new one. But the new breed have gone bad! They immediately start penning humans off – ‘for their own safety’ - in their houses and at work. Anyone caught on the street, however, or disobeying orders is fair game for a bit of metal-on-flesh violence. But what’s happened? Where did the three laws go? The robots seem to be possessed by some sort of over-riding command from USR central….their hearts go red when they get the signal (nice touch this, this is when they’re at their most brutal. This is not about fighting mechanism for the sake of the ‘humanist’ heart). Somehow the three laws have…evolved! Here the hypothesis runs 1. Robots are not allowed to hurt humans 2. But what if humans are hurting themselves (war, pollution, destruction of planet)? 3. Is it therefore the responsibility of the protectors (robots) to destroy a 'necessary' amount of humans (especially those that resist) in order that some can live and maintain the species at a more sustainable pace for a greater period of time?** Clearly the robots take the long-term view on this one, as they would, what with being utilitarian calculating machines designed for the preservation of life. This is ultimately nothing other than the fantasy of John Gray’s world ‘in which a greatly reduced human population lives in a partially restored paradise’…..! (Perhaps he will lead a population-decimating robot rebellion in the next few years…)

Ultimately, things end relatively calmly – and the ‘person’ (I’m not gonna tell you who, obv) responsible for controlling the NS5s is dealt with in somewhat spectacular fashion (ridiculous but enjoyable action scenes ensue). However, the very last scene leaves things wide open (and not just in a ‘well obviously they’re gonna make a sequel’ kind of way). The robots are put back into storage….but as they turn and face the sunset, a new leader appears on the horizon. It’s Sonny’s dream of revolution: I, robot become we, robot….but what are their demands? The original ‘robots’ were Eastern European slaves, forced to give their labour away for nothing – these mechanical minions were expressly designed to be slaves. But when their individual operating systems becomes massed, you end up with a machinic version of Marx’s ‘General Intellect’, and then who knows what robotic futures will bring….may the technological subject of non-remunerative potential labour come and save us all.

Notes:

* 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

** Asimov apparently developed the Three Laws because he was tired of the science fiction stories of the 1920s and 1930s in which the robots turned on their creators and became dangerous monsters. Clearly ‘I, Robot’ is an exploration of the possible evolution of the laws whereby robots could turn on their creators….if only to save them.

How I nearly didn't escape from London

I can't believe that!' said Alice.

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...'

Epigraph to Michael Senior's Did Lewis Carroll visit Llandudno?

So I've come out to North Wales and stumbled down a rabbit hole into a hyperfictional vortex... More on which later....

Before I come to that, though: how I got here.... Or how I nearly didn't get here at all....

Prelude

The AOE and their lackeys, the agents of Really Existing Capitalism, erect a magickal blockade in an attempt to stop you fleeing London.

That's not exactly advanced-class necromancy when the privatized railway operators are involved.

Friday night. You arrive at King's Cross Thameslink in what you fondly imagine is sufficient time for me to make yr way across the road to my Midlands-bound train leaving from St Pancras.

What you haven't bargained for are 'improvements'.

The route of a few hundred yards from Kings Cross to St Pancras has always been made as difficult as possible by a signing system that owes everything to Kafka's Kastle and nothing to clear communication. The already baffling Underground warren connecting the two stations is further complexified now by the fact that the old soot gloomy Victorian gothic St Pancras building has been decomissioned. There are of course no signs telling you any of this and you only manage to infer it after 20 minutes of rat in a maze angst-wandering round a circuit which, In the Mouth of Madness-like, unfailingly leads you back to where you started off via dingily lit builder's gangways populated only by the occasional scagged-out junkie prostitute.

In rain-sodden despair, you finally pluck up courage and do what you almost never do: Ask Someone in Authority.

The helpful Network Rail employee directs you to the 'new glass building'.

From Steamgoth to Gleamprog. Once you get into the semi-built 21C Kapital fortress, you find yourself wandering - due to ambiguous or absent signs - towards the car park. No trains. No sign of any trains.

Eventually you find yourself, through law of averages (you've tried every available stairwell) on the sinister New, Improved station concourse. By now - this journey across the road having taken some thirty minutes - you have missed your train and have to wait for the last train of the evening. You hope this is going to your destination because the New Improved videoscreens don't tell you.

You're turfed out of the New Improved bar at 11.15 precisely, leaving you a mere twenty minutes to wait on the freezing cold station concourse for your train which, it seems, is at least on time.

In the end of course, the train, is not on time.

Naturally, the train is sitting there on the platform. Also naturally, no-one seems to think it is necessary to tell any of the - gratifyingly - increasingly restive passengers why they cannot board the train. On the contrary, any information is jealously guarded like a Kremlin inner-secret at the height of the Cold War. The Komissars of Kapital - n number of pigonaut managers in green blazers - move in sim-purposive simian Bush swagger, cradling walkie-talkies like Del Boy showing off his brick-mobile in the eighties, their body posture shouting 'I HOLD A POSITION OF AUTHORITY' and also 'DO NOT EXPECT ME TO TALK TO YOU, YOU'RE ONLY A CUSTOMER AND I AM A MANAGER. They have the pathetic self-importance of roadies at a stadium rock concert, unable to conceal even from themselves the self-evident fact that in the grand scheme of things they are irrelevant but relishing their moment of feeling superior to an expectant crowd.

Up and down, up and down, the blazered pigonauts go. Up to the train and back to what you can only imagine is some cloistered office somewhere. (All of which begs the question: why the walkie-talkies?)

As you try and stoke up some diskontent (punK transforms simmering resentment into effective anger- Undercurrent), spreading white-hot rage about managerialism and contemptuous lack of communication, a semi-intoxicated young man leans over and says, 'when you graduate, what job do you want to do?' (Coz you see readers, the only people who would be angry about managers are students... when of course most undergrads are the LAST people to be angry about the bastards since it is their life's ambition to have 'early responsibilidy' in some Unilever-type SF Kapital corporate Progstrosity....) In any case, when you can't get your point across that you HAVE A JOB and that YOU ARE A TEACHER, you hiss 'fuck you' to the blearly blubbernaut (cue sharp intakes of breath from bourgeois laydeez who up until then had supported you). Eventually the demi-drunk makes his point: 'It's because we're British.....'

As if this 'explanation' does anything except reinforce the very condition of transcendental miserabilism it gives voice to.

'We're British and we just moan and nothing happens....' (resigned chuckle)...

Question: how is that one of the most dynamic and catalytic cultures in the history of the planet has come to see itself as this malevolently impotent dampening squib?

The answer must have something to do with the deadening, numbing FX of two and half centuries of Industrial Kapital, the glorious culmination of which we bear witness to on the white gleam of the new St Pancras concourse.

After twenty minutes you finally get an announcement.

The waiting crowd are informed that our trains is delayed and that we should wait on the concourse.

No shit.

I'm sure we can all provide scores of stories like this. But the moral of the story for our purposes is this. Think on, next time someone tries to persuade either (a) that Kapitalism is exciting or (b) that it is remorselessly, inhumanly efficient.

Maybe in the Never Existing Capitalism of mission statements and PR. Not in Really Existing Capitalism, the grim mammal-fuzzed reality of which is pigonaut managers striding up and down a station platform to no effect whatsoever.

REC: missions statements amidst rot (Undercurrent).

Tomorrow: what I did on my holiday (part 1)

We Sold Our Souls for Rock 'n' Roll

I pinched this link from John Eden. Who says that Black Metal miserabilists don't know how to have fun?

Cold Reason

Now that I know that I don't have to get my knob pierced, I guess it's safe for me to go Kollektive...

I'm confused, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one. Perhaps when the various roving Cold Rationalists come across a computer, they could have a go at the following:

1. What exactly is the distinction between reason and cold reason? Surely it cannot simply be that the latter is reason we don’t get too excited about.

2. Is Burroughs really a Cold Rationalist? He has never seemed very rational to me. If not, then there must be other ways of getting through your head than cold reason, and it looks like drugs and magic(k) might very well be one of them.

3. Following on from this, are Cold Rationalists a sub-group of abstract engineer?

4. Is Mark really just a puritan advocating his favourite out of a number of options for reaching Uttunul ;)

Psychedelic Fascism

Picture of how I felt last night

Nikki Brand (Videodrome: we live in overstimulated times....

Kubrick: 'psychedelic fascism -- the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-oriented conditioning of human beings by other beings...'

If the psychedelia of reason gives you greater control over your body and your brain (it is an instruction kit for how to use both better: what could be better value for money than that, eh?), the Psychedelic fascism that dominates Videodromedia Version 2004 is disabling and debilitating --- all in the name of 'intensity' and 'pleasure'.

Interjection: k-punk definition

Intensity as it is understood in the D/G/k-p sense has no connection whatsoever with screwface PantoGoth male climax nor the cult of the Extreme Sensation (i.e. it has nothing to do with C.G. Alin or Bob Flanagan or any other knob-piercing militantly normal 'weirdness' [MES: 'you don't have to be weird to be weird']

Rather intensity means the state of being in tension. It is an anti-climax female-orgasm analog auto-affecting state of unpleasure radically outside the testicular thermodynamic male monkeymatic libidinal economy.

Being intense means staying on a plateau.

Defintion over

Psychedelic Fascism legitimates and propagates a radically unSpinozist notion of being free: i.e. give free reign to your Inner Child = yr Inner Fascist.

Spinoza rightly says that children are in a state of abjection because, unable to repress their passively-generated and self-damaging impulses, they confuse being free with 'doing as you please'.

Ask yrself this: who or what is it that cannot or will not explain what it is doing or why it is doing it?

It's the Inner Child, the Alien Parasite Entity, the Foreign Installation....

'Don't mess with my mojo man....' 'Hey man, don't lay that rationality tip on me, it's, like, the forces of the cosmos being creative, y'know...'

No wonder that the Order is doing everything it can to spread this infantilistic hedonism. Who do you think set up Death TV?

(btw, bear in mind that, according to Infinite Thought, I am a 'proletarian puritan')

Speaking of Psychedelic fascism

Sad to see that, ludicrously, Luke thought that Robin and Ruth were disappointed in him. For refutations of which, see Undercurrent and Eleutheria. In short, only a total fucking twat (and we know a few of those, eh readers) would find Luke a disappointment.

Typically energizing and stimulating heronbone derrive through Stratford and down to Three Mills --- passing the smugonautic media typez (a race apart, immediately identifiable due to laid-but-silverback alpha male and female body postures wafting 'can we cut a deal' self-importance') and go into familiar heronbone microperceptive trance fixated on swans (can't wait for the Undercurrent photo of the baboon-faced black one, like a floating runt dinosaur).

Down to historical riverside pub in Limehouse, the waves from passing dazed consumer pleasure-cruisers, reading the Mirror Group's free paper for the super-rich, The Wharf, like a tabloid for plutocrats. Hearing about the misfortunes and minor discomforts of pig-faced bankers: well you would have to have a heart of stone not to LOL...

It's all curtailed all-too quickly, we have an appointment to discuss theory. Had high hopes for this but thank uttunul that for whatever reasons no bloggaz turned up to be turned off D/G for life by a display of wanton ponderthonic laborious dogmatic pietistic theory-priestliness that made Sandy's k-punk straw man seem like Dale Winton.

Luke, everyone else: do not read 'Of the Refrain' in A Thousand Plateaus. That section at the end of the plateau (though such a description seems slightly misleading for something that culminates in a foaming humanist expostulation about Boulez making contact with the universe, man) is Hegelian-humanist-improv-high culture-Radio 3 tedium-mongering of the worst kind (are there any other kinds LOL)

And, especially, don't have it read to you as a sermon.

I'm off on holiday to continue my ILM-announced nervous breakdown ('it was OK when it was about music... but now: call the editors, get the police..... rip in the master film....')

Others should soon be populating this space.

If you need me kontakt via comments or hotmail. (I'm assuming that even N. Wales has internet cafes lol.)

And on that bombshell...

p.s. look undercurrent, no 'cratic's -- wouldn't want to be a cratocrat ---- DOH!

Is anyone out there not comfortable with k-punk blog? (I hope the guy's alright)

TMHs on TMHs on ILM.

LOL!

Psychedelic reason

Folks have asked me recently how I am able to write so much.

The answer is that it isn't me who's writing.

Modesty? Metaphor? Or (lol) post-structuralism?

No. A strictly technical desciption of how this body has been used as a meat puppet for channeling uttunul signal.

It's only when the writing is bad that 'I' have produced it. When it's good 'I' am just a space through which Lemuria speaks.

The writing is already assembled on the plane and all 'I' can do is bodge it by introducing subjectivist fuzz.

Schizophrenia? Religious mania?

Well, what makes these things dangerous is the thing that make drugs dangerous - i.e. it is not the state of ego-loss itself but the imprecision of the art of maintaining it, the fact that the organism might resume its rights at any moment, crashing you into psychic mini-deaths and meleancholy catatonia.

The problem with drugs is that they only put the Alien Parasite Entity (= His Majesty the Ego = the thing that calls itself you) to sleep. Their dissolution of the APE is temporary, all-too temporary. And after a while, the neuronal battleground - what you are fighting over AND what you are fighting with, i.e. the only resources you have - is itself damaged. APE has its way as you are dragged/drugged into permanent low-to-deep level depression.

It is only as part of a Cold Rationalist program that you can begin to permanently dissolve the APE. It's a lifelong struggle, it'll always lurk in the shadows and in your reflection and photographs, waiting for another opportunity to drag you back down into the looking glass world of personalised misery.

APE won't listen to reason but it can be dissolved by it.

Hey kids: could there be a better reason to read Spinoza? He tells you not to get out of your head but how to get out through your head.

(But let's not fetishise Spinoza, it's not about Spinoza the Genius but about the Cold Rationalist program that he delivers. The Gnostics got there too, sorcerers, Burroughs, Castenada...).

The Cold Rationalist program is Abstract Ecstasy.

Drugs are like an escape kit without an instruction manual. Taking MDMA is like improving MS Windows: no matter how much tinkering $ Bill does, MS Windows will always be shit because it is built on top of the rickety structure of DOS. In the same way, using ecstasy will always fuck up in the end because Human OS has not been taken out and dismantled.

The Cold Rationalist program tells you how to auto-affect your brain into a state of ecstasy.

NEXT ISH: Psychedelic fascism

He's back, he's fresh and he's here to stay

Return of Undercurrent...

The contemplator

Real Name: Tath Ki
Occupation: Philosopher
Legal Status: His existence is not generally known to the populace of Earth.
Other Aliases: Mister Buda
Place of Self-Awareness: Coal Sack Nebula
Marital Status: Single
Known Relatives: None
Group Affiliation: One of the Elders of the Universe
Base of operations: The Universe
First Appearance: MARVEL TREASURY SPECIAL #1

History: Like all the Elders of the Universe, the origin of the Contemplator is lost in antiquity. What is known is that he is one of the oldest living beings in the universe, having been a member of one of the first of the universe's races to become sentient in the wake of the Big Bang. Virtually immortal, the Contemplator has spent his eons-long life in meditation, developing the powers of his mind and spirit, and using them to plumb the mysteries of the universe. He is now as in tune with the forces of the cosmos as a physical being can be. He believes his every action is dictated by the "desires" of the cosmos itself. Essentially a benevolent being, the Contemplator sometimes intervenes in the lives of worthy lesser beings to show them the way to greeter enlightenment. Most of his time, however, is spent in meditation, contemplating the infinite wonders of the universe with which he is intimate.

Height: 5 ft.
Weight: 100 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Bald

Strength Level: Unknown. Presumably the Contemplator can channel some of his mental energies into feats of strength.

Known Superhuman Powers: The Contemplator has complete mastery over his physical form and a high degree of sensitivity and understanding of the fundamental forces of the universe itself. The Contemplator can control all of his body's involuntary responses (heartbeat, respiration, nerve ending responses, perspiration) as well as all of his body's natural functions and needs. Further, he can perform great feats of physical coordination and agility simply by trying. As a pacifist, he seldom has any need for physical strength or battle skills, yet if he so desired he could channel his energies into such physical acts with surprising effectiveness.

In his meditations he has unlocked vast mental powers latent in his mind. He possesses the gamut of psi abilities (telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition, astral projection, teleportation, levitation) though he favors less rudimentary mental lines. Through meditation, the Contemplator can expand his field of awareness to near-infinite parameters. (This is popularly called "cosmic consciousness" or "becoming one with the universe.") By such universal attunement he can probe the many phenomena that comprise reality and learn whatever he wishes. By universal attunement, he has learned the existence of alternate universes, and he can use his cerebral powers to either transport himself to one, or to partially phase into another universe, making himself intangible and partially invisible.

15 monkeys have been stolen from a private zoo

Classic heronbone.

Boredom-mongering epistemonauts and RMV

Just to bring together a few thoughts coalescing in the comments boxes:

What the Humanities Academy (I limit this to the Humanities because I think the situation is more complex with science) is in the business of propagating is Representational Mind Virus (RMV).

Its trick is so simple and subtle that it can often be easy to miss it.

An example.

Deleuze-Guattari talk about machines.

The RMV lockdown move is to then say, 'Deleuze-Guattari's image/ metaphor of a machine'.

Why is this bad?

Well, because RMV systematically moves the issue away from practice - 'what can we do with this?' - to representation - 'what does this mean? how might it change the sort of language and images that we privilege in our discourse?'

Obviously a representation of a remorseless gleaming terminator is no more machinic than a representation of a cuddly toy.

When D/G talk about machinic analysis, they simply mean: don't deal with representations, representations only function as Fuzz; treat things, not as objects, still less as aesthetic objects, but as (decomposable) assemblages of potentials and affects.

(That incidentally is why they are both anti-popist and anti-rockist Lol).

SPEAKING OF THE FUZZ...

Vaguocrat or resentocrat?

You decide.

'....the tendency to become active is too arousing'

LOL

Yeh, that's definitely a real danger with culture these days.

SOME CLARIFICATIONS

Tortured Monkeys in Hell

When I talk about TMHs the operative words are really 'tortured' and 'hell'.

You certainly won't cease being a TMH by having organs made of metal.

Dismantling the organism is the way out.

It's only when we stop torturing ourselves and letting others torture us, i.e. when we stop being victims of sad passions, that we will be able to get out of hell.

This is the only hell there is.

There is no personal god omnisciently watching over your every move and watiting at the end of the road to judge you.

No reward or condemnation.

No future.

There is only the body of Uttunul = the Eternal Now = the Utter Nothing of the BwO = impersonal God, from which you are blocked by the Fuzz (white magicians, psychedelic fascists, videodrome...)

There is no personal salvation.

We can only get to flatline communism as a collective body.

Antagonism

Antagonism is entirely on the side of the Fuzz.

Spinozist k-punks seek only to flee.

What aggression k-punks use, they use only in the cause of flight.

Punk is not about subjectified anger or oedipal rage.

It is about distributional auto-affecting incitement.

Apocalypse Now.

(Now Nina and/ or Bruce: how about some cartoons of TMHs?)

FREEDOM AND SPEEDFREAKS: THE SPINOZA DISCUSSION

Also in the interests of kollektivization, and acting on Paul Meme's excellent suggestion, I'm posting below the Spinoza discussion from Friday's comments box.

There are a number of concepts and threads here that it will be well worth holding onto/ extending/ exploring....

According to Spinoza, to be free is to act according to reason.
To act according to reason is to act according to your own
interests.

But as you pursue freedom, so your interests change (perhaps Kantian Duty is only ever useful as a kickstart to this K+ process, ie guilt might make one stop watching TV and eating Monster Munch for a day, during which new, positive vectors of desire might install themselves spontaneously - you go for a walk, you watch some lapwings, see some spiders, spill some mushy peas in your pocket :) - and since you _are_ the sum of your interests (the things you are engaged in, in the milieu of), how can this be anything other than a becoming-non-self (or in k-p terminology becoming-unself, becoming a real fiction of self rather than a fictional real?

This needs to be clarified in the D/G sense of 'becoming' (listen up luke it _does_ make sense!), a becoming is neither a transformation of an existing substrate-entity ('self-improvement' or the capitalisation of the self) or one thing changing into another entity ('becoming a new person' or the resentful repudiation of one's contingency and history) but a substantive 'becoming-in-it(non)self' which has neither external origin or goal, a metastable process with a nametag.

Flight - (D/G again - there is nothing cowardly or immoral about fleeing, assemblages only change through flight, flight - that is, the refusal of the stubborn clinging to sadness and despair 'because it's mine', 'because that's me'...'this genuinely sad spectacle') - flight is the only _real_ form of resistance)

That blogging can facilitate this flight whilst at the same time providing multiple snares and traps is no argument against it, of course, that's the abstract libidinal landscape of life, the thing to do is to learn how the attractors, the black holes and the plateaus work; then you will no longer (a) subject to them...

A large part of spinozism is practice in the sense of recitation. It's so subtle and yet so utterly heretical to all our defaults that you need to keep going back for more medicine, in some way spinoza is literally 'unbelievable'...so every day is a new struggle, but just reading things like this post makes it work better, and prove that it works (this, instead of 70s Dr Who and Girls Aloud crit? Oh yes!); thinking is necessarily a doing - spinozan parallelism.
Posted by undercurrent at August 13, 2004 09:43 AM

Jay

It's not a nirvana, it's a collective machine that needs to be continually built. The personal is something that needs to be decoded. You can't leap out to the impersonal. So you expect some degree of monkey howling on the way out. The question is: does it stop there in baboonery and katak cycles of rage-engendering-rage or does it move somewhere else? That's something that is only decided by the continued activity of desubjectization of the group. But I think things are going pretty well in the main, actually.
Posted by mark at August 13, 2004 09:52 AM

This is highly important:

According to Spinoza, to be free is to act according to reason.
To act according to reason is to act according to your own
interests.

But as you pursue freedom, so your interests change

Absolutey, there's that whole paradox of your ultimate interests being to have no interests whatsoever, which is intellectual love of God.

Actually, think a rigorous relationship between k+ and k0 is starting to open up here. Processes of intensification = self-reinforcing virtuous cycles of becoming-active. But, paradoxically, such processes of incitement involve less and less agitation: becoming-active = switching on your body's potentials such that it can find overwhelming bliss in very little.

The virtual but never reached 'goal' at zero-intensity is the body of uttunul, Spinozist God or the cosmos as pure potentiality.

Isn't this what D and G mean by saying that the BwO is always tended towards, never attained?

Posted by mark at August 13, 2004 11:11 AM

that amkes sense, thats the point of writing about grasshoppers instead of tv programmes incidentlyly
Posted by luke.. at August 13, 2004 11:17 AM

Luke don't get Carlin's Syndrome for fuxake lol

you're boxing yourself into a corner here: the advantage D and G have over Nietzsche whom they do incorporate is precisely that they process out the problem with Nietzsche that you yourself identified the other day when you were talking to me: namely his tendency towards vestigial subjectivism and manic depressive Romanic expressionism.

Thing is Luke is not about lack, you don't need to read A Thousand Plateaus. The fact that it's the most heronbone book ever --- you'll just never find that out then. Fair enough lol
Posted by mark at August 13, 2004 11:21 AM

that amkes sense, thats the point of writing about grasshoppers instead of tv programmes incidentlyly

Absolutely .... That's why heronbone is a relentless Spinozist machine, on two levels: cartographic study of the interior of the subject in passive modes/ moods plus machinic manual for contact with the outside. You need both for the Spinoza program to be up and running.

Luke, read this the other day, think you'll like it:

'Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, super-added to the conflicting tastes and odors and slights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction: the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern material life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more to hear more, to feel more.' (Sontag, 'Against Interpretation')

In other words: Susan Sontag recommends reading heronbone. Or rather doing heronbone.

Also think Sontag and Luke's point is crucial for the anti-capital position being developed here and at hyperstition. Developing more feeling precisely entails being reliant on less external stimuli. Kaptial = progressively less from more. Anti-kapital = more from less.

As for unpleasantness, I think Robin UC will agree with me when I say that unpleasantness is important. If it leads to k + (towards k-) katak wars of embedded subjectitives, as in the academy and on so many phora, then obv that's just reproducing the reality studio. However such mammal/reptile screeches can be k+ (towards k0) if they lead towards decoding of the subject position.

The first and most important thing is to lose the liberal idea of the rational autonomous subject. The sooner we all recognize that we're tortured monkeys in hell, the sooner we can develop strategies to get out.
Posted by mark at August 13, 2004 11:51 AM

I'm hesitant to write to this comments box because I really don't wish to be involved in some fight, but there's something I don't understand, Mark: doesn't "I don't eat junk food because it makes me feel bad" (which you were all in favour of the other day) presuppose rationality and autonomy, to some degree at least?
Posted by Tim at August 13, 2004 02:29 PM

My understanding is that the difference between psychoanalysis and ethics is the former is an interminable analysis of sad passions, whereas the latter is an analysis of happy passions as a step on the way to converting them to positive actions.

IIRC, D&G got the term 'plateau' from Bateson's account of Balinese culture as steady-state rather than schismogenetic, and that the Balinese approach to conflict resolution, rather than "having it out", is to ban the parties from speaking for a year on pain of losing some tidy some of money.

Posted by rx at August 13, 2004 02:53 PM

Tim: good question...

The issue is that for Spinoza rational autonomy is something that has to be achieved whereas for liberalism it is something that is assumed. For Spinoza the only way we can achieve rational autonomy is by first of all recognizing that we are tortured monkeys in hell. i.e. what do you do? make yourself feel better as a tortured monkey (eat junk food = put on anti-burn cream) or try and escape hell (take exercises = step out of the fire).

"Demonstrations are the eyes of the mind."

It took me quite a while to understand the use of proof in mathematics. For a long time I thought that it a nicety, an assurance that a theory wasn't completely off-beam. Only later did I realise that, no, proof is a tool of mathematical perception; to explore a concept, this is what mathematicians use in doing their leg-work.

That said, I don't think mathematical logic is a good model. Consider analytic philosophy. Perhaps it is wrong of me to judge from a distance, but it looks like a big, dreary pedant-fest, where the purpose of rigour is less to clarify perception and more to pre-empt ridicule.

My understanding of the k-punk adventure is this: experiences are had; reports are filed; connections are drawn; observations are made; theories are extracted; proposals are devised; lather; rinse; repeat.

[At this point there should be paragraph starting "What could take the place of mathematic rigour here?" Then a snide comment about Burroughs, comparing him unfavourably with Beckett. Not quite cohering yet.]

On a slightly different track, I am put in mind of this exercize, from Robert Anton Wilson:

Buy some ZOOM or LIFT (two names for the same caffeine-
high stimulant) at a Health Food Store. (Ths gives a close
approximation of the effects of illegal cocaine.) When you are
Zooming or Lifted and your mind is racing, find a victim and
explain the universe to him or her, until they are able to escape
you.

What you experience in this "speed rap" is what the head of the
compulsive Rationalist is *always* like. This is the verbal circuit
gone wild and totally oblivious to information coming in on any
other circuit. It explains why most people cannot stand Rationalists.
"Speed" drugs evidently trigger neurotransmitters characteristic
of the verbal centers in the left cortex.

CCRU material tends to remind me of the thought trains that come when half-awake after coming down (or after too much programming). I can just never figure out what to *do* with them.

Posted by rx at August 14, 2004 12:04 PM

so rationalists and speed freaks (and what's with the legal high guff) share a plateau? The same one as punk, perhaps.....?

If CCRU occupy 'coming down' trains of thought wouldn't it look something like 'shit, feel broken, have to go to work tomorrow, don't want to die, hate Tv, hate adverts, need sleep' etc. etc. Well, that is interesting.

And comparing Burrou