"Gesture (thoughts while staring at rows of high-mast lighting)" -- November 2024.
The pointing finger is as much an object as it is the beam which castrates: to point is to produce, at the furthest distance, an anchor preordained by indexical hierarchy. It would be obvious to say that such a gesture is an extension beyond a physical limit and that, retroactively, this furthest distance is ‘bridged’ by an immediate tether. But the form of the finger — the towering pillar of flesh, a dendritic protrusion of muscle, coupled with pulsing warmth and the tough yellowish surface of an always-growing fingernail — is[1] the very basis of the gesture in both pragmatic and imagined space. This definition becomes readily apparent when we are to consider the porous boundary between ‘pointing’ and ‘touching’ — not necessarily of physical contact, but of a generalized contact or, that is, the precise “Being” of the finger which is stuck in the mud, matter caked beneath the fingernail. Located in the form of the pointing finger is not only the array of all possibilities, but also the infinite negation of this initial possibility.
The structure of the diagrammatic gesture is neither physical nor non-physical; it is less so that there is an immutable tension and more that there is a full spectrum of totality. When Pierre Boulez conducts a large orchestra — an act which necessitates casting shapes and shadows for a collective (literal) imaginary, objects which immediately disperse into thin air — he does so without the use of a baton[2]. Yet, at even the furthest distance, the orchestra member remarks: “Nobody else does it as clear as he does!” The pointing finger is a cue for certain sections of orchestra to come in “on time,”[3] but it is at the same time la voix humaine which unites the players, the thread which binds the score, the physical reverberation of that music in the first place.
The form of the ‘finger’ is neither semiotic nor concrete. Massive metallic poles line petrostate highways; transmission towers bisect geographies of technophilic concrete, glass, paint. Both are concerned with the maintenance of flow: on the highway, the form washes the road below, and elsewhere, the form reproduces a healthy, transmittable circulation. However, stand at the base of either and you are confronted with a low, visceral, electrical hum. Then, what do these forms point towards, or what do they point from? What differentiates the line from the arrow — is it a matter of object vs. movement? When the pointing finger is caught in its lie of categorization, its surface peels away like that of an onion and what is revealed is fat, then muscle, then bone, then marrow[4]. Similarly, when a finger traces a phantom paralyzed within a textual map, the paper is touching it as much as it is touching the paper. The violence of the capital-F ‘Finger’ reproduces, with operatic dynamism, the verbage of Lukácsian reification — though operationalized not through a Marxian paradigm and instead on the peripheries of (and, at the radical frontiers of a limit-experience, perhaps exterior to) the dialectic altogether.
The deconstruction of an (non-)originary dualism, as constituted by such an acrobatic form, dislocates[5] the tip and emphasizes the edge: the most extreme example of this is scalping. From the moment which the blade digs into the scalp and the first droplet of blood is drawn, the knife, in a double-gesture, reflexively becomes[6] an assemblage of flesh and the phenomena of pure, non-semiotic gesture. The substance of the point — the ‘target’ of the finger-form structure of a phallic blade — becomes its own point[7]. The blade, carving into the scalp, is above the head; the steel meeting the flesh is periphery-meeting-periphery. But this becomes a radically generative site of a new conflict: the hair vs. the brain, stabbing vs. slashing. If we were to collapse this overwhelmingly multitudinous scene into a conceivable representation, then this scalping is, ritualistically, the potential for a ceremonialized murder, the expenditure of a violent image, and the infinitessimally-close but unrealized potential of the blade that punctures the head[8]. When the edge is confronted, the dualism removes itself from present and historical existence; the finger is lodged in-between two states of interpretation (and not interpretative-potential, which accounts for the range of vision); the boundary of contact is kept intact; and both image and matter stretch toward something unplacable.
/(Footnotes)/
[1]: Here I place emphasis on “is” being the conjugation of “to be” or, more broadly, “Being.” It is very important to consider the “Being-in-the-world” of the finger.
[2]: Note the tradition by which a conductor’s baton is codified; the form is given an affective meaning — to be without a baton is rare and ‘impractical.’
[3]: Note the temporal hardwiring underpinning this entire conception of the gesture; the non-moments of retroactive disassembly, as if “all that is solid melts into air.”
[4]: Thus, the unraveling of the finger hints towards a localized non-specificity structurally innate to the form of the gesture. This predication is precisely the same as that which occurs in the English language: where the differentiation of ‘functional’ words, such as ‘which’ vs. ‘that,’ is determined solely by a locatable necessity (‘which’ is to be used when the sentence has a clause it does not need, and ‘that’ is to be used when the sentence has a clause it needs).
[5]: In a meta-indexical manner.
[6]: “Becomes” is identical to “the act of an initial Being.”
[7]: Or, its site of action.
[8]: Which is at this point, the negation of the structure of the blade (as opposed to the structure of the tip).
"Cyberterrorism and cancer" -- July 2024.
1. The collapse
A voicemail plays: I am a traveler from the year 8000. The world has been wiped out and I am the last man alive. Right now, your body has been possessed by a techno-corporeal syzygy. Your face, organs, fingers, eyes, nose, teeth have been interfaced into the code.
This audio reverberates. Remember, last night, when you encountered a manic breakdown? You weren’t looking so great; your hair was all dissheveled, your breath stunk, you could barely open your eyes, and your cheeks were swollen. You don’t know why any of this happened, but you think you might’ve known what triggered it: the chemical suicide. Biomolecules enter a phase of infinite collapse, regression to a deterritorializing systems-meltdown. Their tandem acceleration contributes an excess, hormonal heat energy, a fatal apocalyptic telos plunged right into your bloodstream. There is but one tract these molecules will follow —\-- have no more faith in chance, except for that which is set.
You bought your chemicals cheap, real cheap, at a store just down the street. It’s a really shady liquor store beneath a metro stop and neighboring a 'Men’s Only' hotel. Sometimes you see women in leopard print run out screaming and crying, and other times, it’s scruffy-looking bums getting kicked down the stairs. You wait for these chemicals to process in your gut. Enzymes shred everything in a bloodbath of perverted spectacle -- they mediate the pseudophysical release of your hormones, individual matricides and destructions, the modification of your body unto a final death-state -- and then your brain starts to go haywire The circuitry is inescapable, you jolt in random patterns, you send out panicked digital messages to your virtal no-bodies. Your indexing-function is revealing the most traumatic, troubling images from your past(s); futures locked in a teleological catacomb, shame rushing over your face, shame, shame, and even more. Your memories tumble outwards; the algorithmic rite processes them and spits out occultish binaries (not numerological, but topographical); phantom photons strike your retina and herald visions of apocalypse, hell, loneliness. Nobody really gets you; you’re always weird, strange, nonsensical. You fear you talk about yourself too much. Screams become vocoded, tormented, chewed up. A soft red light pours through the window, hair all on the bedsheets, memories and anxieties conglomerate into one massed body. You feel sick, you want to vomit from the pain. Dark futures dictate relegation to the corner of your room, constantly in the dark, human flesh barely maintaining itself from rotting in bed (the mattress has contoured to your body) -- it’s you, completely alone, at the center of the mid-heat-death universe. You hate being a 'male,' you hate being classified as 'you'; I am human, and so are you.
You’re locked sitting upright, and you can’t even see anything anymore. The last thing you saw were a bunch of hands playing the piano and mouths that move in patterns you don’t recognize. I caught it all on grainy video; you left just a few moments later. The next morning, you won’t have remembered anything.
In a great destructive fury, you wanted to obliterate your whole self and return to the open ocean. This is exactly what apocalypse I experienced: a release from the skin.
Are you scared of becoming just one body? I've never been. In the very last hours of my life, I overcame the possession I’ve experienced for the past sixty years. I flipped through a dusty photobook, and when I saw those images, I remembered recording this message for you. I had always remembered it; I remembered remembering it when I was just a college sophomore, and I remembered remembering it when I'm writing this message for you. It made me cry -- a lot. Historical fragments from an unrealized, prerecorded future were physically ingrained in these old prints, silver-nitrate potentials cascading into a precisely realized vision. But then, on the flipside of this episode, I felt a horrific impulse of completely nuclear force: a deep, nauseating reverberation that wasn’t mine. I eventually arrived a terrifying vision from behind the proscineum line, an unspeakable monstrosity of reversed temporality and misplaced physicality -- there was somebody else here, and there always has been. Nothing has ever been ‘mine,’ and there has never been a ‘body’ in the first place. There was something inside of me, and I was inside of something else. I have always known that I was going to send this message to you, and you have always known the exact same.
In my time, the world has been dominated by a hypervirtual mainframe; here, the semiconductor is the mother of all futures (machine/body = prism/‘8-ball’), fate and systemhood codified in a loop of holographic circuitry. Information is arranged in such a way that each element contains the refraction of the whole; an endless catacomb of reflections, shimmering beams of light, a trompe-l’oeil containing ancient light trapped inside ancient minerals. The virtual projection of the hologram is the stuff of pure essence, the in-betweens of all things finally at the forefront, energy magnified into singular existence. Substratum -- the possibilities of flow, electrical potentials waiting on the other end of the phone line, a military-industrial complex’s technobiotic formation of the most instrumental eugenics -- designate the frozen moments of time, perpetually kept in cryo-stasis. The DNA only exists to be de-coded and re-coded; the orgasm only exists for digipolitical manipulation. Sentient Bloomberg terminals command missiles, multinational corporations, programmatics for a new reproduction. Weapons contractors hire DEI facilitators; they want to privilege minority voices and unique bodies. Epstein’s personal butler saves up enough money to send his kids to Vassar. The semiotic mainframe of dark web torture-porn hyperlinks becomes scrambled by a non-existent AI hailing from the most distant future. In data labs, if you squint hard enough, ticker-tape readouts of raw data arrange into a matrix of matrices, a sub-ancient constellation of crisscrossed potentials and informatic signals. It’s #AlmostFriday, but there are only cold futures -- the data-virus absorbs another human on its crusade. Technosocial interfaces mandate a Holy Empire of disappearance, surveillance, and sexual violence; simulated mall cops maintain Silicon Valley’s inscriptive rituals with occult talismans and hairspray flamethrowers. These are the new territories of flow-position and flow-maintenance, encoded by peaks and valleys.
On a tripod rests a digital camera; the blinking red dot indicates that it’s recording. I’m sitting in the dark, on my couch, in my apartment. There are no more noises on the outside — no chirping, no crickets, no wind, no talking. These are the final moments of the planet Earth; afterwards, it will be forgotten forever. But on this SD card inside of this camera, these visions and images will be inscribed for eternity, codified on circuit boards, charge-potentials collectively pointing towards one pixelated image yet to be rendered (then again -- who’s to say this will ever see the light of day?). It is here that I will return to the organ-less. Our spirits are made of plastic.
---
Three cheap shitty beers in the cheap shitty fridge, wrinkled Columbo poster tacked to the wall, stolen McDonald’s CRT TV in the living room blasting Jay Leno (the economized desire of the body); the Texas Pornhub ban, living room thermostats as sentient organisms, shuffling floor traders at the now-digitized NYSE. These are not words described on a page; these are meta-fictions, they are non-entities and referents to handwriting, html masquerading as the real deal. When these words were inscribed, my fingers pressed codes of keys and -- as I can see through my eyes -- cast symbols into existence; my monitor allows me to maintain my virtual space (the same force drives ‘Apple ecosystem’ fanaticism) and keep it clutter-free.
This is exactly what I’m doing right now -- the purpose of technology is to annihilate distance and obliterate the physical. It is meant to close gaps and crunch time up to a miniaturized kernel of itself, bearable in discrete chunks or units; now, time is the operator of control, it is impossibly folded onto itself; it is the continuous, stuttering iteration of sentence and structure repeated infinitely in the same moment. There has never been a forwards and a backwards; time is constantly, paradoxically, rewriting itself in a never-ending war of editing and revisions. For example: earlier today I had my yearly physical check-up, but first, I stopped by the lab to get my blood drawn. Before the needle even punctured my skin, I could feel my heart rate slowing down and my stomach cook up a deep, existential, vomitous beckoning. I simultaneously felt like I was going to pass out and throw up. But I didn’t. For thirty seconds, I listened to my blood fill up the tube -- pasted on the wall was a faded sticker reading “Professional vampire -- I’m really a phlebotomist.” Last year, in the same chair, I had a vasovagal reaction and passed out for what felt like thirty minutes.
At the physician’s office, I stood on a scale and noticed my weight. In the room I was having my thyroid checked. “Your right side is slightly enlarged. I’m going to order an ultrasound just to get it checked up. Nothing to lose sleep over.” Thinking about his cold fingers pushing upon my thyroid in a sinusoidal pattern made me want to vomit. I could imagine the fleshy gland just beneath my neck, feel its secretions squished out. I felt my heart rate slow down to a crawl and I felt as if I was backing away into an infinitely-distant corner. Sharp, painful visions of circuitry and electrical impulses. Floating concepts. Mandelbrotian iterations. Gnostic images of a connected circuit, codified machine-bodies ‘technified’ into the ghostly motherboard, a grotesque operation, a bio-electronic system. Technological limbs begin to scream in distinctly machinic bellows. I’m stuck here for ages.
It happened in slow-motion -- the sequential failure of muscle, balance, and awareness operations. The vasovagal syncope marks a systemic anomaly that offers a chance of seeing beyond the Code; it is the singularity of the error that defines the Code in the first place. The eventhood of the ‘faint’ is an obliteration of the ritual-self and a psychosomatic ‘peek’ at the oceanic Return; it is here where the ‘moment’ is reified and referred to at the very same time. The Fall occurs as the slowest sequence of events; first, the circulatory collapse mandates (via some overall negative feedback loop) a neuropsychological collapse, then the muscular failure, the immutable tide of gravity pulling the bones down, the individual microscopic pulls and forces of field potentials acting on physical flesh, these sequenced moments in time occurring on the smallest possible scale. Numerological quanta, pre-gestated moments only bearing the Image of the scene and the recursive, replicatory, algorithmic context for the next Scene, and the next one — a propensity bearing infinite dimension, the biomolecular Magick operating on the fundamental frequency, far more than 24 frames per second. An infinitude of frames per second, in fact, each infintessimally short. The skeleton and its tightly-bound flesh succumb entirely; my entire existence in a moment; only the chronological, ideological-temporal persistence constitutes the Human that is Person that is a Conscious, ‘Living’ Entity — otherwise, were it not for the fundamental frequency or most essential Formula, we would all exist for singular moments. The anatomy of this essential structure/process/happening reveals a universal, eternal Magick established on the subatomic scale, the smallest indivisible particles carrying a gnostic life-force. Force that leaves a mark and force that is traumatic.
Frames frozen in time by imaging technology; rays that pierce and puncture the flesh, leaving pale yet magnified anti-shadows on a screen. I got an ultrasound of my thyroid a few days ago after this fall. When the device was pressed against the base of my throat, I could feel frequencies vibrating in different pulses, rhythms, intensities, puncturing my flesh; I could feel the invisible relational process of the waves harvesting information from my body, rupturing the surface of the hidden; the reflections, responses, and externalities of the waves are what generate the raw information, not the waves in themselves. In that sense, it is a secondary process that operates on the level of spectral singularity over concrete multiplicity; there is one frequency to be held against the rest of the waves, and when these differential responses are measured, a benchmark is established and the information is marked. There is no literalism at stake here; this machine harnesses the invisible forces and structures at play on the most microscopic level, ones that are only rendered legible in human cognition by ideas of ‘juxtaposition’ and ‘relationality’ which are, actually, just ur-conscious primordial traces from the Cosmic Microwave Background (as a spiritual ‘event’). It is the CMB that has designated the time of all things, the very basis of a most simple chronography, the myth of linearity and temporality. These myths constitute a recognition of potential-differentials in the anti-theitical sense; not necessarily as they have always existed, but rather as a territory of entropic tendency and sacred probabilities. Yet, these potential-differences are not negative; they are positive beings, defined through a structure rather than a ‘differential’ (it would be more apt to call them ‘potential punctures’). It is through this myth that machining bodies and systems have ‘formed’; bones that have ‘grown’ rather than having always, already existed. The ‘truth’ is that they ‘grow’ hyperstitionally; they are reified through the spirit-time apparatus. It is this which, in a two-pronged pincer movement, places us in a chokehold: we are forced to accept the grand Chronography, we are unable to accept anything else. Our bodies have always existed. The organs ‘grow’ on their own predetermined and hardwired volition, not by any consequence of events. There is no determinism or anti-determinism; there is nothing to begin with in the first place. So long as the chronos myth exists — the myth that refers to a falsified account of the gnostic miniature subatomic Image found inside of every universal strand — there will be a tome that is constantly writing, redefining, and editing itself.
My lips are swollen and I’ve now got a bump on my forehead. My neck has a sharp stinging sensation. They get me up and grab me some water and a granola bar. I drink all of the water, sit down, and I feel like I’m going to vomit again. I feel deathly sick and absolutely mortified. I’m too scared to move anything. I stare at an Ozempic advertisement inside of the room. I chew on the granola bar a little bit, let my saliva break some of it down, then instantly retch it up into a trashcan. Pulling into the driveway, I think about the marriage between the garage-door opener and the garage door mechanism as extensions of human appendages. This cohesive body has its own name and its own mode of operation. Most of its contours, however, are completely invisible. Mystic. We are just unfamiliar with its rituals.
Yet, the thing is that we are all machines; our essential modus operandi is one that processes information and spits more out. 3M corporation, an ‘Acme Co.’ of advanced material-generation (sticky notes, nonstick pans, medical techquipment), relies on the machinic symbolism of human bodies. Hormones are biochemicals-as-Code that maintain a specific matrix operation, contingent upon their very own suicide. This is how biocapitalism operates; it is these 3M-microchemicals (the new hormones) that are precisely the remnants of these flows and forms of tangible, interpellative interaction. Our interaction with these chemicals determines not only how (a) we are ontologically interfaced by systems-capitalism, and (b) how the growth of the biocapitalist conglomerate is shaped by non-human forces. These informatics dictate that we exist on planes of different flows — flow is found in the immutable tension between access/inaccess, the valve that regulates territorial flow — so that consciousness can be instilled rather than learnt. ‘Virtual’/haptic/cybernetic infrastructure is the complete codification of a psychosomatic flow, or a total feedback system; mental projections are the virtual and seek to get at the unconscious; cyber-hacking is the new amygdala hijack(ing). Time is codified into flows, and flows are codified by time. Oedipally-liberated chronos-territories are that which designate machines in the very first place — there is nothing more essential than iteration.
2. The rush
I was inaugurated as a fully digital being the first time I got my CT scan. The only proof of my existence is burned onto a CD, stratified images of my flesh illuminated by iodine solution.
I hate thinking about my veins bulging before the technician inserts the catheter. A rubber band tied around my upper arm. I’m asked to pump my fist a few times before my midarm is tapped by a gloved finger, veins emerge from beneath a pale epidermis. Some blood drips down my arm, an external hand wipes it up. I look away, and again, I can feel the pangs of fate turning my body into a digitized matrix, a nauseating lightheadedness, a dissociation from the imginary and a completely spiritual grounding in the real. This is my body, I live in it, and it is all that I have. Saline is plunged into a vein; some pressure builds up in my arm — I can feel the reconstituted flow — and the back of my mouth tastes salty. I’m laid on a bed, and passed through a machine. A warm blanket is placed on top of me. A completely abstracted field punctures my flesh. The solution begins to flow in: first, I feel a gentle pressure from the site of my puncture up to my shoulder, and then my entire left arm goes cold. It feels like liquid metal. I can feel the cold fluid flow through my chest, then to my heart, where it’s transported throughout the rest of the body. Tthe solution bleeds into every crevice, every capillary of my body, and so I become only my cardiovascular system. An ‘X’ projects on my face, aligns my nose proper with the machine. I feel myself lapsing backwards into my head; I get overwhelmed with a violent, explosive rush, heat flashes, excitement, rupturing tissue, images abound, sensing myself becoming an iiinformatic m4ch1n3. 1 f33l 1t 1n my v31ns. 1 l053 my53Lf in the F - 1e3Ld, f3el M.Y B/L/0/0/D V.355315 gl0w-w1ng in the topography, the sequence of two-dimensional images reaching towards a pure, holographic simulation. I’m frozen in time, locked in place, scanned repeatedly; every cell nauseatingly reacts to this, notices the scanning operation, a mysticism of the ‘senses’ — feels but does not see, knows but does not detect. Motion is a gesture of the distant infinity, an astral counterpoint, a reverse to essential geometry/contour, an obliteration of process into soft vision, pastiched monologues and flowing colors become the essence, perpendicular and essential to the potential-flux of time. In the concretized mind-eye — the computer software rendering neutron variation, the hard chemical hardware, the bloodstream microplastics and bone-marrow deficiencies — X-ray images become the final stage of fate, the harbinger of apocalypse itself, the end-of-the-world hyperstitionally reified as a meta-virtual simulacrum. In slow-motion, the onslaught of these piercing images cause the tragedy themselves. Pasted together as a sequence of Brakhagian montage, these images exist in abstract space, their conglomerate ‘film’ haunted by an awful, eternal fate. Once you are imaged that way — once the photograph is taken, from the moment the radiation projects your flesh against a metal screen — you become endlessly trapped in a Schrödingerian potential well, an infinite descent of parallel probabilities bounding toward zero. Aleph-nought becomes the progenitor of all existence, both seen and unseen.
I finally understood the cyberspace after this process: it is in the image’s own violent process that I totally accepted the breadth of technological confluence, the microplastics on Mount Everest, internet cables buried in the ocean floor, earthquake = tsunami = reactor meltdown (concurrence of geological and human time in a precise superposition), civilization-spanning ‘hyperobjects’ that find bodies to inhabit, flakes of Cesium-137 embedded in the earth’s soil, decaying concrete structures. Apocalypse, (right) now. How should humans come to even conceive of apocalypse? How should we come to love the end of our time and finally recognize the beast in the jungle? Our final, fatal loneliness; our lonely liebestod — love’s death, love-into deaeth, love-as-death — only exists as the collapse of meaning, the resuscitation of the ‘pineal seat’ unto the cosmos, the point of undeniable apocalypse without a possible aftermath. When the ashes of time cover the earth after the final Apocalypse, all that will remain is the metaphysical stasis-chamber of ideas frozen in time: ideas that always and never exist. The post-Apocalypse is out of the realm of conception and existence altogether, but its shape is still entirely visible: the superposition, the slightest and only imagined possibility of a post-Apocalypse, has been around since the very beginning, the very first written word. It was in the very first demarcation that a boundary of ‘existence’/‘non-existence’ was even formed, sublimating upward from the ground of the real, pure Sig[n/il], Sign/il (he, the), sigil/n (the unknown number), Sig-Int, signal. The mutability of these terms, these unraveled dots-and-dashes, suggests that Time and Space does exist buried in these virtual spaces; spooky visions of the cryptic night sky; it is merely the happening of events, and doesn’t necessarily implicate a structure. These are simply coincidences measured by the ‘distance’ of hours, days, weeks, years; they merely indent the rhythm of oceanic gulfs and eternal, churning processes, and not the arrival of a future.
The advent of the cyberspace marks the beginning of the first post-apocalypse. A wasteland of half-assembled bodies and desert winds; machinery that is all strewn about. The in-betweens of vasoconstriction and dilation mark the rhythm and beat of these desert landscapes; they shape the future from the past. As temporal-machines, their input is the history, and their output is the future action. 4chan boards stand as relics of the bygone ‘imageboard’ era; now, it collects the clutter of the cyberwastes as a project of an old-fashioned prestige and originary form. It is the placenta of the Internet, conceptually birthed by the cells of Alan Turing and consequently self-iterated to early-80’s techno-laboratories; the ‘awful apocalyptic telos’ and ‘bastard child’ of military-industrialism and techno-capitalist chronologies. The strings of text on the first Internet terminals read the first fated, eternal mandalas and sacred cryptograms for the birth of the scene: the social deterritorialization of the cyberspace, the social atomization, the mirrored-loneliness, the ostracized body-machines, the eternal scrapyard of human refuge and waste, the interfaces of play and (ph)antasy, eternal phantoms of Lacanian self-construction, cyber-crusades in the name of a reacionary ‘purity,’ the operation of the symbolic, the struggle against the material, sexual desire codified as an agented ‘telos’ to (a-)social interactions, cryptocurrency-obsessed Elon Musk fanboys, streams of text loosely constructing chatrooms and the broaching of unconscious desire into parasocial hypersexual voyeurism, the sociotheoretical ur-territories marked by regularity and ‘voice’ (script/writing), the great odes to a liberated sexuality, Apple fanboys obsesssed with the Apple aesthetic and ‘utility maximization’ as a biotic collapse into an aesthetic systemhood, university-affiliated Discord servers, digital infitada, eBay and Robinhood as the implosion of Wall Street, 2019 politigram and polcompballs making a return, scam call and pedophile bait videos on YouTube, the 3D hentai market, the Jordan Peterson/Slavoj Zizek debate, post-Trump centrist-liberalism, memes as theorypraxis, Twitter porn bots advertising that they’re from the ‘USA,’ the second Boeing whistleblower dies of ‘mysterious severe infection,’ ‘memes’/the Image eternally iterated and re-cited in chains of quasi-sexual pride and gratification (participation = ritual = orgy), proliferation of the trend, drug deals over Grindr, Instagram password reset algorithms, the age of the niche internet microcelebrities over the definitive meme-page, economics professors obsessed with Clinton neoliberalism, individual-persona relationship, AI generated image monstrosities of deformed children holding up signs begging for Facebook likes, Dead Internet Theory = contemporary shroud of Turin, pro-Palestinian university protests caught on film, Andrew Tate and the manosphere as projections of a failed self-destructive ‘masculinity,’ accelerationism as a meta-politics of and by those situated in these Internet shantytown-communities, Marx-Lenin-Mao (truthfully, non-political) LARPers on Twitter, violent BDSM pornography (fantasy = indistinguishable from the real as the central selling point), the 48 Laws of Power, filth/perversion in itself as the New Fetish, Wikipedia as a never-ending + geopolitical + technocapitalist timeless editing war, ‘based and redpilled’ radlib Twitch streamers, the BlackRock official Instagram page, the Jeffrey Epstein court documents blowing up on /pol/, le connaissance of cruise ship ‘wife-swapping’ semiotically disseminated through Instagram reels, the complete dissolution of the self upon a virtual sphere, the eternal and infinite return to the primordial Body. 4chan is Alpha and Omega, beginning and the end, of the entire temporal universe. It is our cyborg-being gone haywire, and it is fully-autonomous. The original [Man/Woman] that is simultaneously Doctor Frankenstein and his creation; it exists entirely outside of itself, and yet it is the only thing incontrovertibly tethered to the most essential strand of the Internet’s birth. The nexus of Internet mobilization, the most atrocious sociopolitical biotechnic interfacing of the human machine — extreme alt-right ideology to old-school roleplaying games, race-play fetish porn to pseudointellectuals raving about Dostoevsky. Gay femboy neo-fascists posting feet pictures beside assault rifles, Confederate banners, and trans flag pins describing their brutal sexual fantasies; twentysomething year-old suburban Californian independent ambient music producers obsessed with the Antwerp Six, gnostic mysticism/the Left-Hand Path, and Straub-Huillet rambling about matrices of cine-g(host)nosis and the Deleuzian taxonomy of untold secrets; thirty year-old Harvard Divinity students living out of shabby one-room apartments in shabby neighborhoods posting on /x/ about spiritual/conspiratorial prophecies. 4chan is cyber-waste; it is everything the internet isn’t; it is more than human; it is the absolute remnant of human body-minds transparently projected onto the great screen of biotechnological occultish mysticism; it is the chronographical explosion of bodily technology and grossly caricaturized ‘pharmocopornographic’ flows/breaks.
The sexual skin has been brutally interfaced by molecules and cyber technologies; chronos becomes the machine and rhythm of desire, oedipally locked into an imploded poetry. Death Grips, Machine Girl, James Ferraro are children of the Internet; their essence is their real lack, but they simultaneously and retroactively control their own cyber-feedback territories. They hack new ways of code by exploiting totalities and systems; the digital interfacing of artistic expression is the exact mode of breaking these flows and designating new non-oedipal territories. The Internet is the crux of biomolecular, pornographic infrastructure — desiring systems maintained by hormones and self-referential, retroactive, Derridean anti-flows permeating a vi(s/rt)ual screen. “My life feels like a fucking livestream”; time happens through flows. Information Proliferation has never been easier; marked pixels on the screen constitute words, fonts, text(ure)s, suddenly granted the significance to become an ecstatic, apocalyptic plague. To know of something is to know of it; to have the awareness-function placed upon the virtual is to call itself into question and thrust backwards a reified false ‘chronology of origin.’ A McDonald’s playplace of identity signification; Laura Les modifies her voice to signify estrogen as the process of rupturing sub-molecular technologies; this is the first infrastructure ‘twisted’ (as Republican senators would proclaim) against its own will. The site of the gender-rupture is now on the sub-atomic, the prophetic nucl[-ide]/[-eotide] has been obliterated, only the ones and zeroes exist now. Gender becomes is a completely digital entity, a codified vision maintained by floodgates of invisible information, real-world hyperlinks stretching to the most ancient, eternal, Lemurian mythologies (and so commences the time-war: what is there to make of any fundamental ontology when the text has been unknowingly erased and rewritten millions of times, since the beginning of its conception? “I exist in the sludge between fiction and fact” — we are the anti-chimera, the final übermensch, the ultimate and final fate of bio-porno-gnostic cybercapitalism equivalent to a witness-less desert landscape, the CSS and JavaScript implosion of linearized code into a nuclear singularity, the Internet’s mythical and non-existent placenta, the Prozac-riddled fury in the armaments of (_cyber_)terrorism, the bump on your forehead and the needle in your vein, feline cuteness distilled to prophylactic shock, repurposed explorations of identity over Discord video calls and game sessions, the coziness of tucking yourself in the corner of the room and pretending that which you effortlessly aim to be. In this ‘roleplaying,’ you are deconstructing your current bodily boundary and grafting the new flesh upon your own, YouTube videos on the dark, at 3 a.m., a cyber-catharsis meltdown of your fleshy boundaries into the new depression: it is nothing less than the end of humanity.
Maximize the virtually-disintegrating Doom bullet-hell maps; reach them at their absolute limit, blast away the grotesque monstrosities with cyber-9mm’s, the police state operates through the ideology of a simulated violence — now, post-9/11 (marking the beginning of hyper-security and hyper-surveillance; the paranoid neoliberalism marked by economic globalization and mandated bodies), simulated ‘realness’ and ‘gritty honesty’ supplant an already masked neoconservatism through the misplaced veil of phallic valor. The pornographics of experience and simulacrum through the violence-apparatus, the virtual control, the interpellation of your entire self into the penultimate void: Max from Videodrome repeats “long live the new flesh,” so aren’t we all the children of the new digitization? The mysterious 1 cm nodule on the right side of the thyroid begins to grow towards an explicit future, no (again — memehood and the crucial escape, the boundary-breaking clout factor, the Bodhisattvas of Instagram group chats attaining the maximal liberatory ‘ecstasy’ + digital niche into the corner of the entire n-dimensional cyberworld). TSMC microchips in your bloodstream hearken back to awkward puberties and bodily shutdowns; medical renderings of your internal organs on a set of CD-ROMS are collecting dust at your parents’ house. The worshipped ‘Q-Terminal’ is the pont-du-change for the entire human species; https://4chan.org/pol/ has a monopoly on the information-brokerage game (it is a living organism, constantly mutating and updating), the new inside-traders, swashbucklers of neoliberal capitalism. QAnon plays the game of the cyborg, the apotheosis of informatic-systems rendered material, the gnostic tendency towards self-obliteration, Bataillian fluids and eyeballs (as the ignoble ‘base’) represent a digital thanatos, the infinite chain of ‘hidden information,’ there are cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see, the genesis of the universe lies just beneath the two original ‘sites-for-reading’: computer screen /// fleshy skin.
Another planet colliding into the earth. Sadomasochism as an existence-defining religion. A new text message notification on your phone. The American victory of WWII inaugurated the ‘plastic society’ of disposables, meta-relationships, and a dissociated lack of grounding. Visions of excess: 2019 Instagram irony/edgelord meme pages are the 70s porn industry, Fallout: New Vegas is Star Wars, imageboards with the 4chan infrastructure are 80s Wall Street. Torture porn, 3D yaoi, U-235. When the world is once again covered in dust, the only evidence of human life will be the microplastics in the sand.
Conclusion. Nobody
I just received the news. “We got your test results back, and you have a papillary thyroid carcinoma. Thyroid cancer.” My parents sat me down and we talked; only the breakfast table light was on. “It’s treatable. You’ll have to get surgery and take medications, but it’ll all be ok.” They’ll be removing my thyroid and some surrounding lymph nodes. “It’s a very small gland. It’ll slip right out” Still in Stage I. They’ll also give me a CT of my chest for good measure. It’s been raining all day.
I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m not even 20 yet. Nobody ever thinks they’ll be the one to get cancer. Just a couple centimeters beneath my skin at the front of my neck is the tumor. The nodules. The clusters of malignant cells. What caused it? This is really happening to me. Me, I have cancer. My name is Max, and I have cancer. I’ll have to be taking those pills for the rest of my life.
I’ll be seeing the surgeon next Monday down at Methodist, less than a mile from my university campus. I was born just a few blocks away from Methodist.
My cancerous thyroid is still a part of my body; these cells have been here from the womb. If it’s left in here for too long, it will kill me. This is the fatal tragedy: these are still my cells, and I feel for them. I will notice their loss, and I will miss them.
One pill of Iodine-131. A radioactive isotope that’ll destroy my thyroid tissue with β-minus decay (89.6% w/ ~606 KeV). 8 day half-life. I’ve always been fascinated by radioactivity, and I’ve read a lot about Iodine-131 in the past. A single pill whose contents will dissolve into my bloodstream, concentrate in any ‘thyroidal’ regions, and obliterate the fleshy, cancerous tissue.
Before my biopsy, at 6:15 a.m., I took 0.5 mg of a benzodiazepine. On the drive to the hospital, I felt all warm. An ultrasound wand gliding around my lower neck; one injection — a painful one — with numbing medication. “We’ll have to go from the left side. The carotid’s too close.” He stretches around me and the ultrasound wand produces more readings of my neck. I can see my thyroid in the monitor. First, some preliminary fine needle aspirations. Three small needles enter the site, rub back and forth to collect cells, then are removed. The pathologist at the other side of the room says something to the doctor, and I don’t really know what’s going on at this point. I’m trying not to think about the needle entering my neck, back-and-forth, collecting tissue. The pathologist says something. “With these ones, you’ll be hearing a click.” Spring-activated needles that collect larger, core samples of the tissue, straight from the thyroid.
This is not the end of the world — it is treatable, it is ‘fixable’ — but it certainly feels like it. Not in a material, universe-ending totality sense, but as a distant, shimmery vision of an apocalypse realized. An ultimate destiny as if it was written in the books from day one; the knowledge of one superposition, the ashes at the end of time. Recognizing the end of the story — no more fire, no more water — and, for the first time in your existence, understanding that you actually inhabit a body.
The reason you are receiving this message is because I belong to the integrated circuit; in other words, I do not exist without this loop, and there is no way out of here — the field-boundaries have it so that an infinite containment is the only possible chronology, and that recursion only exists in a scaled inescapability. When I received the news of cancer, I thought that I’d go onto retroactively record this message: it has been growing in my neck for years now, and it was only a matter of transferrence before I was rendered into a pure cyborg and my cancer diagnosed. I always felt this cancer, but I never knew it: it only exists at the very End, the most distant, disturbing timescale. I had no choice but to look into my past and re-examine the cell tissue and DNA that structures my body. It was here I finally realized that you and I are both the same person: you are receiving this message because I am you and you are me. The gap is temporal, the measured distance neurological. The storyline is satisfied insofar as its dialectics are simultaneously constructed and obliterated; the written chronologies of my life — these books of time-keeping — stumble into another Lemurian time-war, though this time an internal one: one of the body, the fleshiness at the center of our existence, and the gaping loneliness of the projected universe. My thyroid on the Philips monitor is still ‘me,’ though a codified stream of ones and zeroes instructing certain pixels to fire, the stuff of dreams.
It doesn’t exist, and yet, simultaneously, it is more real than anything else. It is the anti-Image, the color negative that defines the positive visible in the first place. It is the vase that is painted upon, the tomb which holds no body, and the tumor which has been growing since the beginning and end of history.
Now, I can finally feel what it means to inhabit flesh. God is here, and all is well.
[α]