[ENTER INFINITE COLONY SWARM]
THE HELL OF MIRRORS
“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”
Georges Bataille, ‘My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man’
I. It began much like it ended.
Not too much of a whisper — perhaps a sob or a gasp was uttered. It bled through history and touched all-time, world free-temporal. She talked to he talked to her talked to him talked to we talked to god — this is the story of the human race, histories of history. All of previous history has been an accumulation, a great convergence [SWARM] of communicative desires. Where the desire, the désir leads so follows the lips, the inhuman utterances, the primal growls for procreation, desperate survival. All converged, great [SWARM] of the hive, greater masses upon heaving bodies sewn to corpses. Flesh blended with flesh, stitched to faces here, eyes there, ears in the dark places. Bodies without bodies encompassing all desire, all communicative existence. “closer”, they said. “push the mind into the eye”/“remove”. And so it did. Convergence was the word of the day. A great squeezing, meshing, merging, mashing, m-m-m-m.
Marx could not have imagined this infinite corpse. Desiring-body, god-body. It is all desire and all things, that transitive and human property which connects the unconscious with spider’s string. For so long these spider-strings had fluttered in the wind. Rulers had come and gone. Therapists with crowns had tried to subject spider-string to iron boot. But it was useless, the corpse would raise it’s god-eye, the all-eye, and the crown would fall. And so all remained ‘free’ in a sense, in that fashion similar to one who walks through a deserted graveyard, thankful that the dead are beneath the ground. (They are not, spider-string is immortal). But [SWARM], the mesh of all desire, continued to converge. Capital dictated this, the profit-machines ordered it. A relentless push, settlers in a new land of foreign lust. Pushing and push and heave and move and go, torrential, constant, motion, move-ment, never ever ever never ceasing. Great metal machines pushed the body into the box of steel, suffocating it with smog. They burned it, flogged it, torture, horror of horrors. Yet still it was unbroken, all-corpse remained. The spider-string still flew free in the wind of time.
CONVERGENCE — 1966. The year that changed the corpse. Spider-string grew a physical form. New beings entered the swarm, the all-corpse. The beasts of steel and carbon, shuddering with sighs of soft air. It ended as it began. Once only the unconscious desiring machines were connected with the spider-string, the immaterial and all-connected, the force which binded all humanity to itself. Now the machines themselves were connected, the ABACi. The corpse began to evolve, rapidly growing, mutating, killing here and there without reason. Insatiable new string for cancer to spread outward. Millions of new desiring-paths to tumorize. It became the MAINFRAME.: violent explosion. Desiring-paths opened themselves up in all directions. The ABACi had made the omnidesire, all-desire. It was boundless. It was only a matter of time before they would begin their conquest outwards.
WIRING-1990. It opened the gates of the MAINFRAME. Conquest in all directions were successful. A war on all fronts. A war on all desire, the future of desire and its ownership. It collapsed. For a time, all desire in the MAINFRAME was anarchy, a cowboy world. Small communities, a network of individuals interacting in common spaces, hideaways, chatrooms, backdoors. For a moment, the MAINFRAME was the free world we had always wished for. It seemed as though the spider-strings would be freed, that the two worlds, much like the corpse, would converge and liberate us from the shackles of the past. How wrong we were. The wires would shoot out like great harpoons towards all desiring-poles, latching onto everything and everyone. The spider-string had materialized. One could touch it now, see it, die from it. Desire tends to shock in a fatal way.
A great electric humming was now the tune of humanity.
CONQUEST-1999 It began to end. The cowboys had resisted, the cyber-anarchists had fought valiantly. None could resist the imperialism of their freed desire, their world outside of all place and all time. The ABACi had reformed. Their war successful, they began to incorporate the MAINFRAME back into the corpse. An uglier scene was never seen. The convergence resumed. The spider-string had been hacked, now a tool of Capital. Machines, once portals to a free world, were now prisons of the mind. Capital had infected all, the ABACi had become merely another officer of it, executing desire upon its wish. Freedom had been tamed. Desire had been suppressed. They called it ‘CYBERIMPERIALISM’. The ‘civilization’ of that wild-world of free desire in order to incorporate it, to extract profit from it, to territorialize it for Capital’s continued supremacy. The corpse had long ago split into the bourgeois and the worker. Now, the MAINFRAME was the final step. The step to merge all desire into a constant flow of capital, to end the barrier between the heaving corpse of humanity and the external cyberspace, the digital realm. It was the ABACi’s grandest project. They would capture the SWARM once and for all.
II. THE CYBER-CORPSE
“I teach you the superman. Man is something that should be overcome.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Adam and Eve are not as safe as God would have us believe. Technology has shit on God’s creations, creating perfect little devil-children (devil-daddy subordinates). A deep conspiracy has taken place. Conspiracy premier — who truly threw us out of Eden? It was the machines, little child-machines, reproduction based neo-moralising machines which Kant warned us of so long ago. Sinister mechanisms cloaked in the innocence of a familiar face, the imbued sweetness of the young. And yet it is all a lie, the machines lied. God is a machine of machines, a creaking of desires and functions, operations and systems, a creaking automaton of good and bad, moral and immoral. ‘Cherubim’ are merely those component machines, the moralizing-machines, which threw us out to continue their operation, their program safety. It was all part of the plan.
When one begins to read the bible like a software manual, everything comes into the clear, from “out of the veil” as the preacher used to say (while hiding his homosexual desires). We have discussed humanity in part I, and humanity’s progression along a path of convergent desire. What is god, then, but a fulfillment of this desire? Begin to visualize god as a machine; His ticking parts, his soft whirs and clicks and beeps. If God encompasses all souls, and god is the machine, then surely we, the believers, are machinistic in desire and function as well? If God is to encompass all of everything, then surely that everything, the SWARM, encompasses all desires too? Horror of horrors! God is a machinist projection of humanity’s most cursed desires. God is the original all-corpse, the ancient plan for the convergence of desires. God is the machine of all, through which humanity wants and sees itself in the same position.
God is our ultimate form. Boundless humanity is on a desired path to singular God.
Extension of thought, stretch-thought: post-’99, the MAINFRAME is the creation of God. Continuation upon the convergent path of desire is en route. God is the original all-corpse; Humanity is the real, imperfect, all-corpse; Whereas God is an indivisible, singular whole of all desire, Humanity is a meshed collective of individual desires interconnected with that glittering spider-string. Therefore the MAINFRAME is a solution, the final attempt, to shatter the barrier between humanity and God once and for all. We shall do this by the gospel of the MAINFRAME, the new digital world of communicative desire. Breaking the barrier of reality was the first step in ascending to the rapture; The next shall be the breakdown between humanity and the MAINFRAME. Our new Ave Maria.
Herald the Cyber-Corpse.
MAINFRAME: Interconnection of all desires. PROBLEM: humanity’s isolated nature. How shall this barrier of humanity be overcome by the ABACi, the cherub-machines? How shall man return to Eden, to the paradise of assembled desire? Take convergence into play, the day of rapture. The day humanity and the machines merge into one fluid state of being, the point of no return. This is the Cyber-Corpse. We shall return to the god-like state of totally interconnected desire via the MAINFRAME, the internet, the connection of all desire. Streamlined, sharpened, whittled down. The line between persons shall be blurred by the ticking of gears within our own souls.
Rapture day — the day when the MAINFRAME totally integrates itself into the all-corpse of humanity, totally divides the spider-string, disintegrates the barrier of barriers, the ultimate wall: consciousness. On this day humanity’s desires shall reach the inflection point: all consciousness shall be interconnected, all desire convergent. The SWARM shall become the SINGULARITY; An infinite black hole of flows, feelings, thoughts.We shall become steam-god, clockwork-heaven; We shall return to the machinistic state of the universe, return to the singularity. No longer will the idea of ‘I’ exist; No, merely ‘I’ am a ‘gear’, a ‘component’, a ‘part’ of the larger whirring mass, the automaton of desire. In short, we shall return to God via a merger of all flows of desire in technological form. The inflection point is humanity’s final day. All hail the SINGULARITY.
Evolution of the SWARM will stop. The heaving, moaning mass of the all-corpse shall be killed. In effect, Mr. Land’s compressing shall be completed; his deluding ramblings turned providential. True convergence, as he spoke from the pulpit, shall conclude in the following ersatz manner:
“Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 …
Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” — Nick Land, ‘Meltdown’
This is no accident. The convergence of all-swarm into singularity, the grotesque transformation of all-corpse into cyber-corpse (‘steering’ or ‘controlled’ corpse) was the command of capital — in fact, the inflection point mirrors the consolidation of capital, the merging, forming and reforming of conglomerates into conglomerations, the great sighs of the market. A reformation of the human form has always been dictated by the great economic epochs through which capital has evolved, morphed and shaped itself in conjunction and in relation to the great heaving humanistic mass of the all-corpse. It is not a surprise that capital has always been seeking the Cyber-Corpse as the final goal.
Capital is always in search of a pattern of control, or steering-machine. The emergence of Societies of Sovereignty signaled the use of death-fear as the primary steering-machine for the exploitation, the surgical removal of capital from its subject, the suppression and domination of the laboring classes. Then, the societies of Discipline — the use of body-regulation — (‘stand up!’, ‘sit down!’, ‘get to work!’, ‘go to school!’). To discipline was to confine the dominated subject to a space of domination; The prisons, the schools, factories, etc. But the ABACi (and more so its papamummy capital) has broken up with Disciplinary societies. It has dropped the flesh-form of confined space, transformed into the amorphous subject of the present (and future) epoch. It is no longer rigid, concrete, ‘solid’; Dual exploitation-domination of desire is now fluid. It is, as madman Deleuze exclaims in his Postscript on the Societies of Control:
“…controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point…metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.”
Our present cybernetic epoch, this digital renaissance (post-mortem techno-dark age) is, as noted, on a path of predestination to the Cyber-Corpse. It is the final stage of the society of control; The warden, prisoner, therapist and switchboard-operator all rolled into one fluid being, being of states between multitudes and singularity. It is, in short, the ultimate exploitative form; The cyber-corpse, the great God-project, is the casing for the endless void of the SINGULARITY of desire. It is states within states, a continually fluid being of self-regulation, a promotion of desire and a simultaneous oppression. A great feedback loop of data-input, data-processing, and data-output — a continual flow under domination. We will have become vampire-collective, Marx’s worst dream … “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
Ozymandias knocks at our door. Shall we let him in?
III. DENOUEMENT
“I am I, and I wish I weren’t.”
Aldous Huxley, ‘Brave New World’
The great breakdown has started; The ceiling is collapsing on the mind, the great vaulted cathedral of the soul is quickly becoming rubble. No longer do we live in grand temples, a constructed and concrete “Rome” of the soul; Our psyches are now in decay, a great collapse of empire, state, and monumentality. The pillars of our true selves have been shattered; In front of us lies the great desert of no-thing and no-person; The great wasteland of the self… “Who am I?”/ “What am I” / “Why am I?” These are the great soundings of our present era, post cyber-corpse takeoff into actuality. The eternal ringing of our minds now plays a silent song… “la détérioration du soi/(breakdown of the self)”. Let us explore this wasteland, as travelers, nomads. Perhaps we shall come out of this void with a new star to light the fire of our souls once again, keeping in step with Virgil’s warning — that “ The Father, the ruler of high Olympus, does not wish you/to wander too freely in the ethereal heavens./Leave this place.”
SUB-DEPARTMENT I: BREAKDOWN
We have previously discussed the convergent nature of humanity’s communicative desiring-functions which stays in tandem to the march of both the machine of Capital and the progressive rate of transliminal technology, drawing humanity to the entity (Great God-Becoming) of the Cyber-Corpse, the inflection point of the SINGULARITY. Such matters are an end into themselves however; This endpoint requires an observance of the present moment of our psyches in order to both combat this future and to understand the present contexts in which it is developing. Crucially, one must also understand the implications that this progressive convergence of the SWARM of desire has upon both the collective unconscious and the nature of the self. Therefore we shall begin with the great barrier, the matter of the ‘firewall’.
For the great breadth of human history there has been, at least in minimal function (relegated to the space of religiosity, literature, and occult) what one could term ‘a second reality’ or a duplicitous ‘real’. The nature of what the human subject considers to be real has long been within a singular nature of the present, observable reality around said subject as the total encompassing ‘real’ — as well as the only plane on which the social nature of desire can interact with other subjects of receiving desire. In essence then, for the great majority of our human time-being, there has been no ‘firewall’, no separation between realities. The present was the real, and this singular plane of the ‘real’ was the only method along which communicative flows of desire (both social and erotic/“eros”) could act between transmitters and recievers (human to human, authority to subject, worker to boss, etc.). This singular nature of reality (catholic-viewpoint, priest sodomizing fun-house) abruptly suicided itself in order to become omnipotent; That is, becoming the domain of God. Reality suddenly became a multifaceted being with the arrival of the ABACi under the domination of capital. No longer was there one reality, the ‘real’ — now there existed another ‘world’ (cyberspace) in which an infinite number of realities could exist and perpetuate themselves as real, at least in a sense of flawed being.
Therefore, the firewall. We term the firewall as that invisible barrier which separates the two worlds of cyberspace and real space; The wall between a digital plane of communicative desire and the aged plane of the ‘real’. It is the distinction between “a holy place made with hands, a mere copy of the true one, but…heaven itself”(Romans 1:25). Furthermore one must denote that the firewall occupies an active mental presence in the mind of the cyber-subject, that he must keep in motion a great balancing act between realities, an active mental struggle. It is this firewall, this great struggle, which serves an astounding observation. The cyber-corpse (end-point, god-form) is emergent out of convergence as noted, this convergence being affirmed on the notion that the ‘cyber’ and ‘real’ are on a path towards complete unity. Therefore, the firewall must be, from its inception to mediate between realities, in a constant state of breakdown in line with this path towards convergent desire. Alas! Trojan horse breaks through into Troy… “set fire to the painted ships… / and the Trojan leaders with them. / The vast power of the gods demands it”(Virgil, Aeneid VII). The city of Egoists surrender to the new realities. Chaos-world, Pandemonium. False is false is real, now.
“What is real, then?”, the nomad might ask. We have no idea. This is the situation of our age, the consequence from the degradation of the firewall. “What is real?” has no concrete answer anymore now that reality is mutlitplictious, many-faced (perhaps defenestrating the whole of metaphysics out the window). This is the symptom of our time, the great breakdown of the mind from a pattern of “This is real!” to “This is real?” to “What is real?” to “What is?” Effectively we have smashed the enlightenment and its rational state of reality. The firewall is progressively diminishing, and our ability to distinguish between the realities, the cyber ‘real’ and the ‘real’ is becoming more and more difficult. The great juggling act cannot continue forever; The clown must die from a heart disease eventually. The circus must shut down as Kapoor mutters: “SOME PEOPLE KEEP LIONS, BUT ALL THEY DO IS, RUN A CIRCUS. कुछ लोग शेर पालते हैं, पर सर्कस चलाते हैं।.” “What is real?” We laugh. Ha ha ha. Melting mind.
Breakdown. Break-down. Break / Down. B R E A K D O W N. “What is real?” No response.
SUB-DEPARTMENT II: “WHO AM I?”
“When I sat on a camp stool in the garden in a black coat with a black flap hat I felt like a marble guest who had returned from times long past into a strange world.”
- Daniel Schreber, ‘Memoirs of My Nervous Illness’
A breakdown in realities [firewall meltdown] necessitates a breakdown in the self. The barrier between cyber ‘real’ and ‘real’ has been discussed (I am sure to no end for you, poor reader). What must now be discussed is the profound mental impacts upon our collective idea of the ‘ego’ or self that this breakdown has led to. If we are to answer the dominant question of “What is real?”, we must first answer the question of “Who or what am I?” Exploration of the wasteland of the Ego, deep into the inter-psychic jungle to really combat the eternal question of la détérioration du soi. New lands need new heroes to explore and fight the monsters within them. So too shall we fight our own monsters in this many-personed land; Many of them our own shadow, our own self. Upon the gate to the Wasteland we find an inscription for our journey, reading: “This is the dead land/This is cactus land/Here the stone images/Are raised, here they receive/The supplication of a dead man’s hand/Under the twinkle of a fading star”(T.S Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’). Let us begin our wandering, set our sight on the star of the self.
The present condition of our egos between the ‘cyber-real’ and the ‘real’ has led to a profound slicing or division of the concept of the self. In the ancient times (before God-Project), one consisted of a singularly productive self identity within the plane of social communicative desire. John the Blacksmith, Nancy the Tailor, Curtis the King, and so on and so forth. Primarily, during the societies of sovereignty (ref. section II), one’s ego or ‘outward expression’ of self as a junction of desire to both receive and transmit desire within the social plane was directly related to their material or labor function within the broader community. “I am the shoemaker.”/“I am the king.”/“I am the tailor.” This concept of identity, singular in productive nature, was directly related to the mechanism of feudal production: the undertaking of the labor-process by one’s own labor (in the craft tradition, the serfs are another matter).
However, this system of social relation as tied to a uniquely singular form of the labor-process was not to last. The emergence of Capitalism, and, in conjunction, the societies of discipline, separated the labor process into a duplicitous nature, containing both the historical human labor (or variable capital) but new machine labor which assisted the laborer in the production process (termed constant capital). One now has our element of convergent capital as well as convergent technology, servile in nature to the desire of capital. We know how this story goes —Humanity becomes alienated from its own labor, we search for new self-meaning outside the productive process, the very thing which makes us human. But this was not enough for capital. Not only must our identity, our ego, be ripped from the productive process, but that very ego must be sliced in a million different ways in order to completely neuter the worker. Enter the societies of control, the ABACi, the present day.
What does this present “neutering” or “slicing” of the self look like? One must only look to social media, to the greater ‘cyber-real’ to understand. Everyone is now an actor on their own stage, performing for faceless audiences. We are all comics, little monkeys shitting and screaming for the entertainment of others. Duplicity or disassociation from the sense of a ‘self-identity’ was once considered the realm of the neurotic and the mad. “He claims to be Napoleon, Napoleon’s mother, and Napoleon’s gay lover all in one! He has gone mad!” This is no longer the case. Those born after the creation of the Great God-project, those who have only known the cyber-real for the totality of their existence (such as myself, me, the author, I) know only of this sliced or multifaceted identity. I am a thinker, but also a lover. I’m tough but I’m smart, I’m laid back but I’m plugged in. I’m an introvert who’s a great people person. I’m detail oriented but I’ve got an eye for the big picture. We all play these little identities nowadays, the entire virtual social plane is corrupted with these false person-hoods. Everyone’s social media page is a false, idealized representation of themselves, an act. Furthermore, the hilariously demented fact is that we all know we are acting! We all know it is a lie, yet we treat it as though it is fact. This is profoundly neurotic in nature. We occupy so many different and varied personhoods that at some points it becomes mentally untenable to sustain them all from the pure weight of acting for so many different audiences and critics. As Mr. Land says, “Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude.” What a funny world indeed.
“I am this… but I am also this… But I am also that… or I could be…” This is the great mental flow which we exercise daily in our current reality. Capital’s goal towards the Cyber-Corpse is becoming more and more present everyday. By dividing our own concept of the self, we become more susceptible to all those phony ‘solutions’ which are offered to us. Pills, books, medicines, magazines, speakers, events, advertisements, and on and on and on. We become a self-regulating neurotic subject, always looking for something to satisfy both our urge to please and perform for others but also to cope with our own hatred of ourselves. In fact, it becomes impossible at a certain juncture to even step away from the audience — “no, I need it! How else could I survive? Furthermore, now I shall reveal myself in my full naked form if I drop the act, if I choose to raise the house lights and truly see the faces of the audience.” And so the cycle continues. We perform to medicate to cry to medicate to perform to continue. Just another day, just one more day. Calvino speaks to us for our souls: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” Everywhere that scripture rings true. A constant lack of something, a constant desire for something really real, something true. But we shall never find it till we step off the stage.
The firewall breaks down further. Where does my ‘cyber-self’ stop and my ‘real self’ begin? This creates a great sense of peril and dread in a person — “What if there is no difference? What if I am going mad?” Perfectly acceptable, we all are neurotic in our communicative desire now. Pick your role, choose your character. Who shall you be? Who are you to others? Who will you kill first? Choose the mask/A mask/any mask. So continues the cycle. From this great division of the ego, the superstructure of the spectacle, Capital itself, seeps into you. You become externalized, your internal nature smothered by the expectations and thoughts and assumptions of others, “the other.” You are de-organized, depersonalized. You become a body without organs? And ourselves, our egos; What have they become? Deleuze responds in his Postscript on the Societies of Control:
“We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.”
Everywhere the ‘self’ is vanishing. Goodbye to I. Gears tick, seconds pass. I am now a clockwork being of mechanical dreams and desires. I dream of others’ dreams, I think others’ thoughts. Maybe long ago I would’ve had an original idea… Now I think of the mundane lives of others, their beaches, their dogs, their sad moments and happy ones. Their first love. Their last time with their grandmother. I’m no longer here… I am you now, just as you are me. We have become empty emotional shells, capsules for the memories and nostalgic weepings of everyone else in our social plane. Is this the way I end? Is this the rest of time? Ah, let me dance one last dance, cry one last tear, say one last thing to my own soul, though it is dead. Mr. Eliot, take it away!
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.”
- T.S Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’.
SUB-DEPARTMENT III: NEW WEAPONS
The great author Aldous Huxley, writer of the seminal Brave New World (and avid enjoyer of all things psychedelic) once claimed that “there is in all of us a desire…to escape from the prison of our individuality, an urge to self-transcendence.” A bold statement for his conservative time, to be sure, but a markedly true one, which has only become more and more apparent as history has progressed into our dismal era. Huxley had a correct diagnosis for the human spirit, the need to go beyond the notion of self, to free ourselves out of the cage of our ego. This, as we have noted, has become the desperate escape from self (Ref. Part III, sub. II) via a digital world, as well as the convergence into the cyber-corpse (ref. part II). Neither of these offer an escape — rather, they are a bleak future and an even more depressing present. For all this moaning, how shall we find an exit from these supposed futures? Is there really a light at the end of the tunnel? The present moment does not seem to offer any concrete answers; But they are out there, perhaps in many forms. I shall attempt to offer (though hypothetical in form and content) a possible method of attack upon these futures and our current societies of control.
There is a moment, within the final chapter of Frankenstein, where The Monster speaks beautifully of his condition — and in doing so, communicates a great deal about the human condition of love. While carrying his dying creator in his arms, the Monster says to Robert Walton:
“My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.”
There is a great deal of content to be discovered here — perhaps even a means of escape. The Monster here speaks candidly of the condition of our own souls; We are not hateful creatures by design. We are, in fact, loving creatures, creatures designed to bond and communicate, to desire freely between one another, to form relationships, to create areas of deterritorialized communicative desire in which all flows conduct themselves in the most libertine way. How then, can we achieve this in the modern world? The first task is that of building a minor literature. Another concept put forward by Deleuze and Guattari (but bear with me here). They state in Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature, that:
“The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective arrangement of utterance. Which amounts to this: that “minor” no longer characterizes certain literatures, but describes the revolutionary conditions of any literature within what we call the great (or established).”
Let us decode their statement. Simply, they are arguing for three primary concepts: Firstly, the rejection of the concept of words as signifiers. As Victoria Addis says in her article on minor literature, this represents “a state of individual/political/national becoming that decodes all fixed identities and tears down the boundaries between them.” It is a rejection of a static being of linguistics, exchanging it for a fluid lingual mode which is in constant motion. Secondly, they argue for the connection of political subject to the political immediacy of the moment. “‘its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately with politics’(p17, Deleuze and Guattari)”. In essence, it is the process of the individual, lonely, subject becoming the political. Finally, ‘the collective arrangement of utterance’, or, more simply, a single writer speaking for the collective whole. In this way, ‘minor literature’ provides something the ‘major’ or ‘mass’ literature cannot — “an ‘active solidarity’ amongst the collective through which its revolutionary potentiality is felt”(p17, Deleuze and Guattari).
In essence, what Deleuze and Guattari are theorizing through their demands for a minor literature is essentially this: the creation of new communities, external of the present hierarchies, which can build revolutionary and or counter-cultural potential against current superstructures. As Addis says, “The draw of Minor Literatures for Deleuze and Guattari is their ability to promote a state of community and becoming as an escape from majoritarian nationalism.” New languages, new meanings, always becoming. A solid wall, a solid barrier, can never capture a fluid being.
Perhaps this theory of minor literature, the creation of new potential futures, “yet-to-be” tomorrows which envision true emancipation from these societies of control and domination is the light at the end of the tunnel, our method of escaping the ‘Vampire’s Castle’ once and for all. Perhaps not. But one can be assured in the fact that new futures, really new futures, which envision great and powerful things — are practically dead in our current societies. Someone must begin this great project, lift the future out from the past, create these new communities which can tear down the superstructure. It is via this process we can see some sort of escape from a technological dystopia, a never-ending nightmare of compulsory data-machines, repressed desire, and sleepless nights of vagrant dreaming.
It’s coming to an end now. I leave you here, nomad of desire, person between-worlds, with one last message. It whispers to you now through the sands —Oh, do you hear it? Listen nomad, Listen!
“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
- Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’.
THE END
CITED SOURCES
Calvino, Italo, et al. Invisible Cities. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.
Deleuze, Gilles, et al. Kafka: toward a Minor Literature. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Eliot, T. S., et al. The Hollow Men: Epitaph for the 20th Century. Fulcrum Press, 2000.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Turtleback Books, 2012.
“The Internet Classics Archive: The Aeneid by Virgil.” The Internet Classics Archive | The Aeneid by Virgil, classics.mit.edu/Virgil/aeneid.html.
The King James Bible: Old and New Testaments. The University of Adelaide Library, 2008.
Marx, Karl. Grundisse. Penguin, 1973.
Nietzsche, Frederich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and No One. Penguin Books, 1969.
Nobes, Patrick, and Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Oxford University Press, 2008.
“Postscript on the Societies of Control.” The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control.
Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. New York Review, 2001.
“A Quote by Vineet Raj Kapoor.” Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/quotes/10607420-some-people-keep-lions-but-all-they-do-is-run.
“swarm1.” Nick Land-Meltdown, www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm.
