John Russell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eternity. Eternity is forever.

Sunlight. Sunlight is pure. A clarifying essence, invisible and disembodied. We feel its warmth as we emerge, bloody, from the darkness, straining upwards to the abstraction of the light. Towards eternal sameness and unity, and the transcendent perfection of Truth, Beauty, God and Pure Form. Away from 'animal horizontality,' and the deceptions of the body (the dirt of contingency). Upwards to the hygenic verticality of civilisation ('appropriating the vegetal erection'). So that workers appear 'ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts...' (Bataille, 'Pinneal Eye', 1930). And do not forget, anyway, that now our modern technology is made of sunshine, 'all light and clean ... nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum'. And these machines 'are eminently portable, mobile'. A featherlite curse and 'a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore'. Because people are 'nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque'. Cyborgs, on the other hand, are 'ether, quintessence' (Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto, 1985/91).

Dragonfly. The dragonfly moves its wings in the sun. A bio-drone Generic Orange, Version III, emerging from remote cybernation, its sensors adjusting to the light - recalibrating. These models were developed over fifty years ago, as a surveillance, monitoring and remote data collection resourse. They are now semi-autonomous, open-source and, according to anecdotal account, self replicating. 'A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction'. Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto (1985/91).

Squirrels. Squirrels live trivial and pain-filled lives. They are characterised as either verminous creatures (tree rats) or cute but harmless cartoon characters like Chip and Dale. But imagine a scene where a squirrel's nest is attacked by a snake, where the 'poor innocent squirrel sitting beside its nest with its children is compelled, step by step, reluctantly, battling with itself and lamenting, to approach the wide, open jaws of the serpent and consciously throw itself into them'. To satiate the snake's hunger and save its offspring. Or perhaps, just to not have to watch the slaughter? This idea is 'revolting and attrocious'. (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 1818).

Haze. Irigaray's writing and ideas have been regularly criticised as (biologically) essentialist and heteronormative. These criticisms were particularly strong through the 1980 and 90s. For instance, as Judith Butler's asks, with reference to Irigaray's ideas: 'Do we want to say that sexual difference understood as masculine/feminine is the paradigmatic interval of difference? I would say no' (Diacritics 28/1, 1998). For an overview of these criticisms, see Whitford, Luce Irigaray, 1991, 9-25 or Grosz, 2011, 88-112. Recent commentators (for instance Grosz and Rebecca Hill) have however reaffirmed the problematic but dynamic politicality of Irigaray's emphasis on 'sexual difference', as 'strategic' and/or transformative in her proposal of 'at least two' (see later). At the recent 'Technofeminism' roundtable, at the ICA, London, Haraway's cyberfeminism was cited as a crucial influence, along with Sadie Plant, but also criticised as 'naievely utopian'. It was pointed out that the emphasis on 'disembodied flow' doesn't work with the politics of race, class, sexuality etc. 90's cyberfeminism was described as being overexcited with the potentials of virtual reality and cyber space, as a way of moving through and across. On the other hand, the ironic dimension of Haraway's writing was flagged up in relation to her parody of the military-industrial-technoscience complex. The term technofeminism was coined to distinguish Xenofeminism and related contemporary discources from these earlier examples. Technofeminism Now, panel discussion, ICA, London, 17 June 2015.

Butterfly. Butterflies ... yes ... this butterfly is non-synthetic - a Giant Swallowtail, or similar, although perhaps a mutated version. But the flowers are generic bio-synth Pink, Series XI, self-transforming/replicating and transmission positive.

The Bee. Bzzzzz! Bzzzz. The bee is not just a metaphor. As Lisa Guenther writes, it is 'a force that motivates and sustains the circulation of pleasure between male and female localizations that only become meaningful through their specific modes of communication or relation'. Sexual difference 'does not inhere in any one of these bodies as a stable essence, nor as a rhythm proper to that kind or shape of body, but is rather distributed through different body parts at different times, depending on the specific social and sexual configurations of the encounter'. Therefore the bee 'does not “represent” anyone or anything, but rather maps out patterns of exchange among sexually specific parts […]'. Guenther, ‘Other Fecundities,' 36.

Flowers. Flowers are perverts, or they could be ... you know, they have that potential ... to corrupt, or debase or contaminate. But then all life does. And flowers are bi-sexual, hemaphrodite, dual-sex, and/or, unisexual; and maybe with complex variations depending on co-evolutionary circumstanes, collaborations with insects, animals and the elements ... and other err strategies for pollination/decemination. Obviously within this context there can be no 'higher law regulating the circulation of 'male' stamen and 'female' carpel, that (for instance) favors heterosexuality over homosexuality or bisexuality or whatever. 'Sexually specific “parts” are not fixed in their essence, but rather are specified in ever-shifting configurations in relation to the other(s) with whom pleasure is shared, such that fingers, mouths, beauty marks, or any other part of the body may be eroticized.’ (Guenther, ‘Other Fecundities,' 36). [...].' Deleuze (and Guattari) are not fans of bisexuality because they suggest it contains and reinforces the molar entities of 'male' and 'female', holding in place a binary framework of two basic and diametrically opposed sexual orientations. But maybe they are confusing it with androgyny.

Meat. In 2013 a shopper was caught masturbating in Sainsbury’s meat aisle in Newcastle-under-Lyme, in Staffordshire and was subsequently banned from every supermarket in the UK. Eugenio Freitas, 49, a married father-of-four, was recorded on CCTV pleasuring himself through his trousers for ten minutes. A court heard how Mr Freitas had ‘fully intended to go shopping on July 8 but became overwhelmed by his excessive sexual drive’. The bright red meat tipped him over the edge (Metro, 12 December, 2013).

The bee. The bee has its sexed specificity 'outside of itself in the flowers', and the flowers 'have their sexuality, or the force of their interrelation, outside of themselves in the bee'. Our challenge, then, 'is not “to be two,” but rather to think duality in the midst of multiplicity and to trace the effects of pleasurable exchange through our relationships, our social structures, and our philosophical concepts.’ (Guenther, ‘Other Fecundities,' 37-8). Obviously now there are bees with multiple sexual organs.

Mommy and Daddy. Biological sex ... you know ... that is not to say that biological sex, or sexual difference, does not exist 'or does not count as 'real' ... however you define that ... but rather that it does not mean anything without the 'continually shifting patterns of exchange between bodies'. There are no 'real essences' but rather only the 'multiplicity of bodily drives, and the encounters with alterity that they engender'. These 'fertilize the meaning of sexual duality; and likewise, the duality of the sexes orients and stabilizes, without thereby restricting, the circulation of multiple drives’. (Guenther, ‘Other Fecundities,' 37-8).

Parasite. Anything that takes over another organism and exploits it can be described as a parasite. For instance, capitalists are parasites on the working classes and parasitic fungi manipulate the bodies and behaviour of insect hosts, including ants, dragonflies, cockroaches, butterflies, moths, wasps and bees. In 2046, scientists discovered that these neuro-chemical operations can be repurposed to facilitate mobility and functionality in certain examples of severe nervous-system damage, stroke or trauma. In evolutionary terms most things have to inhabit something which already exists in order to become something else.

Baptism. If you havent been baptised then you are probably going to hell. Its as straightforward as that. There is no excuse really. ‘The process of baptism is very simple. You begin by standing, sitting, or kneeling in some water. Another Christian then lowers you under the water and then brings you back up out of the water. You could also literally call this “immersion.” Because some faiths sprinkle water on people instead of immersing them, the obvious question is whether this is OK. […]It is interesting that nowhere in the Bible does anything but “immersion” take place. That is, baptism is always by immersion. This makes sense if you realize that “baptize” is a transliteration of the original Greek word baptism (baptizo), to immerse, to submerge. In turn, baptizo comes from the root word baptw (bapto), a term used in the first century for immersing a garment first into bleach and then into dye, both cleansing and changing the color of the cloth. (Note its similarity to baptism's cleansing of sin and becoming a new person through Christ.) Stated another way, when you process cloth to change its color, you are said to “baptize” it. If sprinkling of any kind was to be practiced, a different Greek word would have been used, but it was not’. (Clarifyingchristianity.com, 'What Is Baptism? Why should I get wet, and what does the Bible say about it?').

Reality. Reality is the realm of the 'real', where things are real. 'Ferocious reality' refers, for instance, to where someone really gets killed in a film, or gets their throat cut on Youtube, or an animal 'actually' gets shot, like a horse in a cowboy film, or five horses in the Hobbit movie (2015). Or where a sea turtle gets dismembered and a monkey beheaded in Canibal Holocaust, 1979. Whereas the human characters die only in the film, the turtle and monkey die both in the film (as a character in the narrative) and indexically in the world, as a real animal that we see - dying in the service of the fiction - exceeding and rupturing the narrative codes that communicate and structure it (Sobchack, Inscribing Ethical Space: 245-7). If this is flipped around, we might concider how fictional figures and objects exceed or transform the structuring of events in the real world. For instance, Ray Brassier, in a recent discussion on JG Ballard’s short story, “The Voices of Time”, described the disjunction between adaptation for the future and being in the present: Ballard’s story revolves around an apocalypse, as all the time in the universe comes to an end; in response, a number of animals begin undergoing strange morphological changes, rapidly evolving to meet a future rushing towards them (a spider that weaves its own neural net outside of its body, a toad with a lead shell, an anemone that hears light). Brassier regards these examples of what he calls the 'future’s maladaptation to the present' (Brassier, EXPO 1). As Linda Stupart and Tom Dillon write science Fiction 'is important because it allows us to imagine a present that is different from ours, where the future calls to us in the here and now'. On the other hand, perfect future utopias are not much use as these 'hold no real ground in the present. A utopia cannot call to action, cannot herald the struggle needed in the now'. (Stupart and Dillon, ‘For the future struggle: what is science fiction?’, 2015).

Death. Death. At all times the tongue of death is looking for corpses in the workplaces, hospitals and and fold up cots of the living. As we claw and scrabble desperately at the limit of our final oblivion. But the absolute fact of Death has now been unseated ... weakened. It has been de-linked from its absolute historical/theological association with the definition, or lived experience of, what it is to be human and the fact of mortality. Since 2070 (and the last acurate census) life spans are averaging out at about 230 years minimum, in ARCWEB territories. And these spans are already 'infinitely' longer for deep space operatives who have undergone slo-mo bio-molecular upgrade to facilitate long-haul flight operation. As Benedict Singleton predicted in 2013, with reference to Nikolai Fedorov’s vision: 'The whole task of social organization would alter: beginning with the creation of synthetic wombs, and later entire synthetic bodies, the task of producing and organizing human society would exceed its impulsive origins and be replaced by a rationalist schema of collective direction control; efforts to prolong life to the point of immortality, a completed project of medicine, would be entwined into this transformation of basic human functions, finding its ultimate filial duty in the eventual recreation of every human being who ever lived'. Benedict Singleton, ‘Maximum Jailbreak’, 2013. Fedorov's final proposal (of reanimation) might not be so easy, or even perhaps desirable. What about the slaughtered, the oppressed, in what state of mind will they return? Are they going to be just neutral. Like ... great I'm alive again. OK ... lets forget about the past and get on with Utopia? Or do they have thoughts of vengeance, of reparation, flowing through their minds. Like the dogs at the end of the Hunger Games. Or the dead army in Lord of the Rings. At this time CWEB has expressed no designs on reanimation in this way.

Worm. The worm is the collective agent of oblivion - multiple hungering mouths of erasure. As Nicola Masciandaro writes 'The worm stands, for not standing, for anything. The way of the worm stands in its hunger. Avoid at once the error of reducing the worm to its hunger, as if it were merely a hungering thing. Despite the interesting ontology that would entail [...] understand that worm is prior to its hunger: worms, comma, hungering . . . Not prior in the negative direction of being the subject of hunger, as if the worm would say I hunger therefore I am. Prior in the positive direction of being the agent of hunger itself, pure and infinite hunger'. (Nicola Masciandaro, 'WormSign' 2011).

Turtle. Turtles are prehistoric creatures. A recalibrated cyborg turtle moves through deep space like a pre-Cambrian dream or prophesy, with nightmare flashbacks to the horror of the Before Days imprinted on the dark void. As Schopenhauer writes imagine a field covered with white skeletons, like some archaic battlefield: '...the skeletons of large turtles five feet long, three feet broad, and of equal height. These turtles come this way from the sea, in order to lay their eggs, and are then seized by wild dogs (Canis rutilans), with their united strength, these dogs lay them on their backs, tear open their lower armour, the small scales of the body, the small scales of the belly, and devour them alive. But then a tiger often pounces on the dogs. Now all this misery is repeated thousands and thousands of times, year in year out. For this then, are those turtles born. For what offence must they suffer this agony? What is the point of this whole scene of horror? The only answer is the will-to-life thus objectifies itself'. (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 1818).

ARCWEB. The status of ARCWEB is unclear. Emerging as a constellation of trajectories or forces following the dissolution of the Old World nation state structure, including the breakdown of the planetary climatic system, collapsing economic paradigms, terminal resource depletion, mass starvation, and new hot and cold wars. And the subsequent attempt to counter these events with the paralyzing death-spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of social welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating wages. The Starvation Wars marked the final collapse or ‘dead hole’ as it has been called. And ARCWEB grew out the hollowed out corpse of transnational corporate capitalism like a fungi, embracing and repurposing advanced cybernetic technologies, communications infrastructures, social networks, big data analytics, advanced genetic mapping procedures and non-equilibrium economic models. Developing as a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to 'distributed horizontal forms of sociality'. (See Williams & Srnicek, 'Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics', 2013).

Posthuman. As Sonya O'Neil wrote in 2021, 'How can we talk of the post human, when in this age, some people are not even treated as 'human'?' But then again how can you dream of semi-fictional angels unless you have your mouth full of mud and flesh. Or like the totally 'uncritical' celebration of hybridity and superficial flattening of dualisms.. Like Suhail Malik explains to us, ‘This tendentious, primarily phantasmatic appropriation of technoscientific development as ‘cyborgian’ precludes a technically precise and fully inventive understanding of organico-machinic integration in favour of asserting what has been going on in well-meaning left-liberal circles for some time anyway. It is a complacent reduction of the actuality of the organico-machinic nexus, dulling it into politically comprehensible and polite terms.’ Malik, ‘Whatever Happened To The Cyborg Manifesto?', 2001.

Brain transplant. A brain transplant is where you take the brain out of one body and put it in another (usually from one head to another head). In the early 21st century eminent surgeons suggested that the experience might be 'worse than death'. For instance, in 2015 Dr Hunt Batjer said: 'I would not wish this on anyone'. The suggestion was that there might be a HELL awaiting anyone who tried to escape the pre-ordained horror of Death. These fears proved unfounded and transplant procedure is now routine. (Crew, ‘World’s first head transplant', 2015.

Consciousness. Usually concidered singular. Like the 'I' of much pre-21st C philosophical discourse. Within the context of contemporary bio-engineering, it is now not uncommon that a single (or several) human consciousnesses can be dispersed across multiple bodies. For instance, as Head Gallery describe, in 2095, Fabian Fanelli-Amir 'chose reptilian re-con transformation' and after undergoing 'high-tech cerebral miniaturization through which whole sections of his brain had to be digitized, the doctors still could not fit Fabian into fewer than seven lizards. And to accomplish this, communication and motor skills had to be shared out amongst the group. Fanelli-Amir’s consciousness was translated into a multi-part division of labour. This served, according to the writers at Art Thrust and Grey Room, as a rigorous critique of subjecthood and a radical exploration of collaborative practice'. Head Gallery,' OPEN UP THIS IS A PUSSY PUSSY, 2095. The added irony here is that in the 20th century it was routinely suggested that articificial consciousness was impossible beyond 'lizard brain' level.

Starvation. This is where you die from lack of food. The Starvation Wars or STARVWARS were viewed as either a horrific humanitarian disaster; a final desperate act of genocide by faltering nation states; or a necessary and rational cull of underdeveloped, unproductive and starving populations who were spilling out like vermin into the more prosperous regions of the world. 'War' may not be the correct word here. As General Davis-Moralles famously described it ' ... it was like shooting fucking fish in a barrel'.

Nature. Nature is sunshine in the trees, or in your hair. Or like the ants on the ground, or the birds in the sky, or the bacteria crawling across their claws. If ‘Life’ (via Darwin, via Irigaray, via Grosz) is ‘the ongoing exploration of, and experimentation with the forms of bodily activity that living things are capable of undertaking’ and if LIFE is a 'parasite on matter' (33) in that it extends or unfolds existing material tendencies, not as vitalism but as 'matter extended into the virtual'. And if in this configuration 'matter is life compressed into dormancy', so that 'life erupts from (and transforms) the material conditions that enable matter to “remember” (the simplest organic cell)'. Then this is the expression of ‘freedom to’ not ‘freedom from’, not Bare Nature figured as stasis or base survival but (also) as experimentation. As Darwin puzzles, there is no requirement for birdsong to be THAT beautiful, for mating dances to be that complex - only as the expression of an 'animal aesthetics' and freedom from. And, in the same way, there can be no stable or eternal image of Nature and no correct way nature should be. As the xenofeminists write: 'If nature is unjust, change nature!' [...] Yes, or speed it up through technology. ‘Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology–the sooner it is exorcised, the better’. Remember we are rational intellects and it is our ethical imperitive to transform the world. Remember: ‘You’re not exploited or oppressed because you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited…” (Laboria Cuboniks, XENOFEMINISM. A Politics for Alienation, 2015). And no one said this wasn't going to be violent.

Thermodynamics. 'Just as all animal life may be viewed as a struggle for the energy embodied in plant material and animal flesh so all human life may be viewed as a struggle for the labor energy embodied in the goods that satisfy human needs. The surplus energy of the worker is extracted by the capitalist.' (White, The science of culture, 1949).

Pigs. In 2015, Lord Ashcroft alledged in his book Call me Dave that David Cameron touched a dead pig's head with his penis as his initiation into the Piers Gaveston Society when he was studying at Oxford University in the 1980s.

Difference. Do theories of difference have any viability or force? Many commentators see this as an 'easy' form of intellectual pseudo-radicality, where a 'concern for an exaggerated subjectivity, identity politics, anti-empirical theories of power, an obsession with “difference” – all serve to deplete the radical tradition of its potency'. (Smulewicz-Zucker and Thompson, 'The Treason of Intellectual Radicalism,' 2015). Sob :)

At least two. Not just 'two' but at least two ... its the at least thats crucial ... as a as ‘a strategic move' to open up multiplicity: 'In order to get multiplicity we must have first at least two’. As opposed to the ONE of patriarchy - coded from birth – the structure of SAME and different from the same, where 'difference' is only ever difference-from-the-same. Irigaray claimed in 1984, that 'a revolution in thought and ethics was needed' if the work of sexual difference is to take place. 'We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic.' (Luce Irigaray, Ethics, 6). And she was correct as we can now understand from our contemporary perspective at the end of the 22nd century. As Elizabeth Grosz prophesized, this was not simply ‘the project of restoring female subjectivity or femininity to where it should belong, in the position of an adequate and respected partner of man the subject. Rather, her project is much broader, for it aims at destabilizing the ways in which we understand the world, and reformulation of the real that brings with it a transformation of the ways in which we understand epistemology, ethics, and politics’ (Grosz, 'Becoming Undone', 2011). Irigaray's pitch was therefore ontological.

Beheading. The man who beheaded a woman in a supermarket first stole a knife from the supermarket then afterwards carried her head out into the street and telling passers-by: 'This is my treasure'. (Tom Worden, ‘Why was he on the streets?', 2011).

Vegetarian. OK. OK. We have to remember here that Hitler was a vegetarian who loved animals. So, you know ... vegetarians arent always nice people. In fact, he wasnt a vegetarian. But he did have a dog. Or he may have. But whatever, you understand ... Nazism developed from early 20th century German Nature and ruralist organisations as a distortion of German Romanticism, something like that. And the sentimentalised public horror at cruelty to animals (even though we eat them) obscures or screens our, or their, systematic oppression of huge populations of humans. (Craven, ‘We Weep For African Lions ...', 29 July 2015).

Angels. Angels can circulate 'as mediators of that which has not yet happened, of what is still going to happen, of what is on the horizon'. But also as the prophesy of the already 'happening,'. Across and/as the interval, the place inbetween, a place of difference. ‘…yet for lovers to love each other, between them there must be Love’, (Irigaray, Ethics, 1985: 15 & 30). That is, as opposed to (for instance) Aristotle's concept of place (and therefore being) as constituted by the boundary between a body and the other body it is surrounded by, fetus in womb, fish in an aquarium, or woman as ‘place’ (for man), ontologically, morphologically, for the child, and the penis. The womb as an un-closed container and so on.

But rather thinking of the boundary as an actual thing, as a substance, physically (mucus) and also ontologically (interval). Mucus as a conductive material between two things, such as is required for them to remain different but coexist, and more importantly communicate. We see this in mucus (and other fluids, for instance saliva) as fundamental to exchange between bodies, of the absorption of food, oxygen through thelungs and sexual reproduction.  The mucus membranes and their equivalent are points at which our bodies exchange matter with what is not our body.  For instance the phrase 'the mucus serves love, respiration and song' - the spoken voice requires saliva to occur - physical relation becoming social. (Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference,1985: 111).

Wonder. Wonder here should be dissociated from the experience of 'radical bewilderment,' as the juxta-position of the abnormal or 'absurd' with the normal, which points us back to the 'same' or the 'normal' (and only temporarily disorientates our bourgeois sensibilities). 'Wonder', in Irigaray’s (re) reading of René Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul, is the essential element lacking in people’s modern understanding of the passions. Wonder provides the appetite to appreciate the other without preconceived knowledge, and wonder inspires a sort of reverence. As Irigaray puts it, wonder is 'the opening of a new space-time' and 'a mobilization of new energies' (Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 1985: 75). This distinction between desire and wonder is critical for Irigaray, specifically with respect to how the other's difference becomes manifested and affects the valency of relation. Lack points to alienation; it is read negatively, as a repeatedly missed satisfaction. On the other hand, as the Xenofeminists propose, biological and ontological alienation can be seen as ‘liberating vectors’ (connected to ‘the emancipatory potential of technology’). We are all alienated 'but have we ever been otherwise?' It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the filth of immediacy (Laboria Cuboniks, XENOFEMINISM. A Politics for Alienation, 2015).

Virtue. In De Sade's book Justine, the virtuous Justine encounters on her path a variety of paedophiles, sadists, serial killers, misers and sexual perverts. All the while she remains true to her ideals. In the end she is struck by a bolt of lightning as though even the Almighty is bored by her patient suffering and relentless virtue: ‘the lightning entered her right breast, found the heart, and after having consumed her chest and face, burst out through her belly’. The “éclat de foudre” (thunder-bolt) that ruptures the window of the room, instantly killing Justine, is connected to the verb foutre (to fuck) that dominates every other moment of the Justine narratives and connects God and fucking. (De Sade, Justine, 1791).

Ideas. A culture laced through with metaphors and fictions that we’ve forgotten are metaphors and think are Truth or IDEASwhich underpin the structuring of what we say and think and ‘mean’. On the other hand we must not give up on rationalism. Like he Xenofeminist Manifesto states: 'To claim that reason or rationality is ‘by nature’ a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat […] Reason, like information, wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom'.

Divine/Aesthetics. This is also a proposal for an aesthetics or poetics. Through Irigaray's idea of the ‘sensible transcendental’ as a productive exchange (or, in her words, copula) between spirituality and carnality. In this case 'it is important to pay attention to the manner in which her words situate the sensible transcendental within an arena of seduction'. the way her writing 'eroticizes spirituality', imbuing it with 'the poetry of lovers'. Her language is 'laden with images of fecundity, fruitfulness, multiplicity, sensation, and the body as they navigate the abstract terrain of philosophical discourse'.

Her words and ideas 'seduce philosophy with their sensuality, marking it with a poetry that unfolds spirituality through exquisite sensation'. Startling combinations of words re-align old oppositions. She divides terms to show their multiplicity, and 'unfolds the divine within the carnal'. In addition, the 'words she chooses evoke ecstasy, doing so with an eroticism and an immanence that spiritualizes between the “lips” of a new poetics. This poetics is meant to actualize female morphology in language, suggesting as possible what is thought impossible and always speaking the spirit as flesh and the flesh as transcendent'. (Tilghman, 'The Flesh Made Word ...').

Poetry. What we need now is poetry. As the young Nietzsche writes: “The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, like some fantastic impossibility of a poet's imagination: it seeks to be the very opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and must for this very reason cast aside the false finery of that supposed reality of the cultured man.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 1872.


Works cited

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Ray Brassier, EXPO 1: NEW YORK, MoMA PS1, 19 July 2013. →

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White, Leslie A. The science of culture. New York: Grove Press 1949: 362-393.

Whitford, Margaret. Luce Irigaray. Philosophy in the Feminine, Routledge: London, 1991.

Williams, Alex and Nick Srnicek, Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013), www.criticallegalthinking.com→

Worden, Tom. ‘Why was he on the streets? The 'prophet of God' who decapitated British woman in Tenerife was a violent character known for attacking passers-by’ MAILONLINE, 14 May 2011 →

 

Dragonfly poised diagonal-slanted
'Cross fingered spike,
Iridescent wings backlit
Green and blue -
Speckled honey-dew.
Tech-implants
And glinting bio-antennae glide

Across the slide.
CarLEee the squirrel
Scans the morning haze.

Inhaling lush pine smells
And tracking the movement
Of a butterfly.

Across,
Close by,
A bee
Moves between the flowers.

In the distance
The silhouette of the city
Shimmers.
CarLEee remembers growing up there
With Mom and Poppo
Many years ago.


The jokes and the talking
When her father turned up
In the evening
After school.
Watching TV, soft beds,
Laughter. And Love.

He was one of the first trialists
Of wasp parasite technology
And it saved his life.
For a while.

But after the relapse
CarlEee
Watched him,
Paralysed,
Silenced in his bed.
Day after day.



And then his Mother brought
The Born Again Christians
To his bedside.
And one asked
'David would you like to be baptised?'

This ferocious reality
Draws our attention
To the relation between
The diagram and the REAL
Where ideas exceed their
Representational regimes
And tumble into
A fictional space of desire.

David minimally moved his head
And blinked,
So they baptised him there
With water from the electric kettle.
And for an hour,
Miraculously,
He was his old self.
He spoke freely,
Even rang a few friends,
But then reverted back.
Mute. Silent.
He died 3 months later
But Happy
They said.

CarlEee works for ARCWEB
Para-spatial Communications.


Since 2085
Rodent and reptilian
Body structure,
Musculature and skeleton
Have been identified
As the ideal anatomical-model
For extra-terrestial operations.
The sophistication
Of contemporary
Brain miniturisation
And transplant surgery
Means that
Human relocation
Into smaller species
Is now routine.

Generation 4, cross-species
Biofused, triple data-slit
And digital vision.
Squirrel skull and body
With lizard legs.

CarlEee sits sipping coffee.
195 years old.
Forty-five body allocations
Since the Starvation Wars of 87

In the Starvewars
Many people died.
In this last fight with Nature
'NATURE LOST, NATURE WON'
As the ARCWEB slogan goes

The process of value extraction
In the capitalist structure is one whereby
Surplus value was sucked upwards
From the multiple to the increasingly few,
Like a tree sucks up water.

Later,
Walking
In the shine,
Along the Boule'o'vard,
With DarzZZ,
A Flower-head
Seedcase-mackeral hybrid -
Shoal active.
They are in love.

Accelerated difference technology.
Is key to the development
Of the Southern Territories
Hand in hand with the shift to
An ideology of ‘At least two’.
As the underpinning
Of the transformation
Of Philosophy, science and politics.

CarLEee loves the trees.
She prefers to be vegetarian.
Although she was Mink in one move.
But nowadays,
Larger predator models are anyway
Subject to control legislation.



Angel tech
Enables bodies to move
Back and forth
Across the Interval


In the experience
(and function)
of wonder.



CarlEee lives in a protected copse -
Carnivor-controlled.
There are non-combo species
In the copse as well,
To help preserve the ‘feel’ of the place -
Woodchucks and birds,
But fitted with passification-tech.

All the saved in paradise
Can look down on the suffering
Through the glass floor of heaven,
As part of their reward
For being virtuous
In their lives.
And I guess all the people in Hell
Can look up
And see the righteous
looking down at them
And laughing.

There are still factions
Arguing for 'continuity'.
For instance,
In 2194
President Paul 'BoBo' Davies
Described the ideology
Of the North-West Territories
As a kind of eternal aesthetics,
Where beauty is a sensed
But impossible harmony,
Proved, in part, by its difference
From the terror of chaos,
Of the world
(Sensed in the sublime -
As difference from the same)
But controlled by our concentration
On IDEAS.
Like freedom (laughter).



A contract between
The individual (abstract)
And the multiple (abstract).
Preserving individual choice
While chaining it to the ‘collective’
And the ‘divine’.

CarLEee’s neighbor
Is called Jalled Hemmings
An accountant
Who works at CCCCCX.
He is a tree spider/gorilla.

As night falls
All the flowers
In the forest
Open out
And spurt out long streams of golden piss,
Catching in the dappled light
And falling to the forest floor.
Mirror-mapping the stars,
Where rivulets join with other rivulets,
Until there was a golden stream of piss
And then a sheet of gold beneath,
Moving below the trees as a new aesthetics.
And as a complex algorithmic skein,
Bubbling and with vapours rising
And at points
Strange geometric shapes appear.