divination

by R. Artaud (telos)

You used to amuse yourself, with mechanical gadgetry, making simple machines—levers, fulcrums, inclined planes, using butter knives, bits of wire, bailing wire, chunks of lead, wire coat-hangars. Making friction matches in the old icebox, the latch for the spring door—proving the law of the conservation of energy for yourself, figuring out the difference between heat and light, weight and mass, centrifugal and centripetal forces—rolling marbles on tiny grooved circular tracks you cut from shoebox tops, plastic and paint.

You even learned to wire an electrical circuit, solenoids, relay contacts, zener diodes and varicap capacitors—easy enough to figure out how they worked, a little more complex to wire together a few, to get an effect. The model house, a garage full of gadgets to hook up. Plungers and blinds, relays and switches—snap-acting points of discontinuity—finding the right sequence to get from the key in the front door lock to a pre-set pattern of illumination—carefully switching zeners and resistors in series, transistors in parallel, so that certain areas stay dark—overhead lighting, say, on the model of an old English manor house—faint stars shining on the beams of the great plank ceiling, projecting accurate scale shadows of all the furniture on the handwoven wool carpet—but the music room unlit, except for an apple-green valence illuminating a trombonist—unless, say, the front-door key was a T.W.O. (Take William Osborne), in which case you might find a dancehall lamp burning in the music room—say you enter hesitatingly—not just to peer at the lamplight on the dancing couples but to touch it, to believe in its warmth by reaching through—what do you expect to feel?

Wires sizzle and sing—chemicals go through an explosive change, blue vapor rushing in waves out the sides of the soldering gun.

For months afterward, every time you closed your eyes, you’d see it burning on the edge of your vision—just outside focus—not the soldering gun but something it brought into focus—something whose chemical complexity transcended your powers to handle—and by attempting to handle it anyway you fucked it up, it became some horrible distortion of what it was, the crucial difference—like closing your eyes and throwing a handfull of ball-bearings in the air, expecting each one to fall in a neat parabola but each one being shot forward a yard by a rifle bullet and throwing a confusing extra shape into your image of gravity and inertia, something impossible to brush off with a blow to the eye or the brain—something hard and obdurate.

Every object shines by reflecting something, all right. But an individual object isn’t much different from other individual objects, not by its reflecting something or its reflecting nothing, unless you add them all together—and when you do—what remains on the edge of vision?

And what happens when you can’t add them up fast enough? When a chain of chemical transformations works faster than your body—what do you see on the edge of vision then?

Do you ever look out a window at night?—not just to see what’s out there, but to see how you are seeing it? The architecture of the field of vision is like that of an obsolete city—antique walls, sooty or stone-cobbled streets, deep unbroken shadows, evolving slowly into the sedimented structures of an organic growth-pattern whose crippling failure you know even in advance. To penetrate these enclosed spaces and shadowy mazes your brain is hardwired in a particular way that nothing changes very much. Shapes don’t move very often, neither do colors. Above you stretches a ceiling, under you a floor. At least that’s the way it works. It’s a blind assumption you make, of cause and effect. It doesn’t even disturb you much that, physically speaking, you’re only catching glimpses of things: most of your world is shadow or suggestion, extrapolated or projected, immeasurably attenuated from reality by distance. In some cases the halo of speculation is hardly a handwidth wide.

It’s hardly a comfort, but—at least there are certain basic assumptions of common experience you can still accept as valid. It’s hard for you even to imagine how different that must have been for a creature who hadn’t learned the shadow, who lived before geometry made its breakthrough into matter and organized space and time according to an all-pervading set of directions: not just a whole way of dealing with stimuli, but an inescapable tyranny. For us, to see the stars at night is to know beyond doubt there’s a way outside our cramped rooms. The continuity of what we know as space and time connects us to points so remote in space and time that communication could take no form we know of—no mechanical contrivance could carry a signal faster than light—infinity may have taken place long before matter, and could have occurred for reasons incomprehensible to matter, unchanged in the brief blip of a history—where matter has been around perhaps only for the duration of one summer, out of the hundredth or the trillionth of a second (a mindboggling extrapolation of stellar evolution, from the leisurely birth and death of a star the size of our sun, to the split-second bursts and disappearances of gigantic hypernova stars—monstrosities with masses almost a billion times our own sun, whose life cycles might be measured in centuries at the most)—as if the stars and nebulae were long-decayed civilizations left by ghosts. Time reaches backward almost as far as space—how does it look backward, past the reflections in space we have no hope of intercepting?

Are they—

An ugly feeling begins at the pit of the stomach and creeps outward like an epidemic—brain to muscle to skin to hair. Even shadows contain a basic illusion—that something lies between you and what’s beyond—something uniform, measurable, having direction or impetus, like the light-beam from the sun through an atmospheric medium between you and it. We call it a medium only because it averages between sunlight on one side and shadow on the other, and, because the shadows don’t move, it takes an almost identical form from point to point. Really the light doesn’t change either—only our ability to receive it does, according to direction, unevenly distributed throughout our head, or according to other qualities that must somehow exist. The so-called solid structures that loom between us are virtual ones, drawn around what really forms the continuum—not necessarily just air and open space, or vacuums and streams of molecules—not that any of these is really ruled out as the continuum but that it lies elsewhere, outside, behind what’s between. There’s a zero state—and you’re not in it now. But what would you know about it, inside one of these tangible things, able only to communicate with the other end, assuming there even is an other end to what you think is enclosed?

Even an apple is the last stage in an enormous journey through air and earth. Once you know that, how can you eat one and not see death at its core? Once you realize how it feels to become aware that your visual space is being constructed for you out of photons of light that traveled untold distances through nothing but explosions and vacuums, then wandered into the mammalian organism’s history at a quite unrepeatable juncture, after sunlight was already billions of years old and cosmic radiation was already transmitting an inextinguishable sediment of atomic debris. Given that dead apothecary’s shelving you couldn’t ever find a way to locate and encompass again—is there anything that wouldn’t seem equally antromentous, fated, dangerous to eat? Even something as subtle as a sugar molecule: something is inside it, is building upon or up through it, taking advantage of a delicate property or attunement. Why shouldn’t the inside of a molecule be crawling with vampires or devil-worshipers?

During certain hours of the day or night, under specific conditions of intensity, what comes to your skin through your eyes—if it ever came to inhabit your skull, what might it change into? Is it light coming to your skin from the window across the room? Really? Where do the window, the room, even you come into the picture? Or do they only obscure or compromise what’s already there, as an imaginary engraved line compressed out of many strands of action going in all directions, streaking over a wide space, reversible at each junction? Where’d they find a piece of cardboard as big as the earth’s surface, that isn’t flat on either side—what made the surface, why did it take such and such a shape, where’d it come from and where did it go, and what were its movements if they were any different from yours or mine? Or did all those distinctions become useless as you entered into the zone of strongest stimulation, as it washed you away, dissolving even the distinctions of space between you and the cardboard—what became of you then, and where, and what was around you, and could you have kept any of it, could you have even kept track of it as the wave of intensity flowed on past, even the surface of the cardboard scattering to spindles, to confetti, a gold glitter blowing everywhere? Can you ever escape such an impression—that time stopped, not in a swagged curtain or a discrete hole of rest, but on a shimmering or creased surface whose vector might extend vertically away from the moment in any direction? In such a time it becomes more apparent that yours is merely a density, a color, among an enormous number of others in various distributions across the expanse. Here the coordinates are incomprehensible, all the regions you know of are not shown on this map—you even become disoriented concerning which regions lie inside or outside of what you call “you.” What became of your “body image” out in the gold glitter, at the explosive leading edge of what felt like a sonic boom? Can you handle even such mild, colorful experiences? What good are you against anything invisible, if you don’t even want to believe in it?

It may have been dark inside the rooms—candles in lamps providing most of the illumination, shading in black through yellow-brown to smoky pale peach—no flashbulb brilliance in sight—only draughty slats and blinds creaking outside in the early spring night, caught in the trees at the end of the courtyard—onionskins flapping up from cellars.

Outside, down in the shadowy little cobbled alley that branched from the street by the Galleria to end at a blind wall (when you were little, it looked just like a railroad trestle in miniature) you moved swiftly with no difficulty—along an uneven line of flickering electric lanterns. At certain places, shadows merged to present figures half-submerged, colossal and shaky, gnarled tree-roots with leaves and vines in tarnished silver: each crosspoint in the web was a darkness whose aura moved as you passed—elderly couples sat under vines at outdoor cafe tables, faces young and old brushing the night outside your windows were washed in the yellow-brown radiance of oil lamps or else—more rare—the gleam of electric lights caught in the misted facets of an air of hangovers and heavy afternoons: cigarette smoke in watering-places where people congregated heavily, grease and fat dripping from piles of charcoal, pastry and bread cooked, above and beyond, wine, expensive and fruity, foaming into your mouth from odd-shaped glasses, rosé wine that came in green bottles, of a curious milky transparency—crumbs sticking to your lips. A sniffle—another, here—then a lone china sink outside on a terrace with water spilling out into the weeds—not more than a door and a half apart: shapeless faces drenched by lamplight—how easily everyone lets it slide to trust that the mind and the air it breathes are more real than this carnival, passing as if along streets that had really changed or in doors that led into what has already happened, which is all behind now and where nobody’s come from either and you need to pass a long time sitting at a table so the heavy ennui won’t catch up to you and drag you back forever…

Ah—an illness—tender spots where a sheet touches your cheek… when you return the flesh never gets quite right again—

To what are you submitting yourself when you light the candle, push back the table to the wall, lay out all the machinery, strip down to your undershirt, turn the lampshade so that it doesn’t reflect on your face, mop up all traces of splattered wax—why are you punishing yourself like this, who gave you the right to do this? Whoever it is you’re aiming to convert, whatever metaphysical beauty you’re trying to hold at the point of your knife, they never consent—this is torture you’re putting them through and if you insist on carrying on in this way they’re going to think twice about coming around here again. It’s humiliating—what are you so frightened of? Weak little hermits—what did we ever do to you to deserve this? You never shut up yammering about justice, what happens when your little conspiracies start to go sour on you? How do you know what these people are going to use their extra hours for—squatting in their shitholes eating live beetles—drinking the blood of virgins—shit, they may turn around and blame everything on you, who do you think you’re dealing with? Who put you up to this? We all have the right to protect our security, ourselves, our posterity, no matter what we believe. If they see your candles in the windows it could go hard for you, and us, there’s too much at stake—they’ll set it up to destroy all of us if we’re not careful. We have to face reality, they know about the war, all we have to do is take one wrong step, not even anything mean, just the appearance of something we did wrong—isn’t there somebody down here they could set up, say that person’s involved in sabotage—in times like these the machinery of repression works faster than anything we can do, do you really want to go head-to-head with it, on its own turf? Who needs that kind of grief? You want the police swarming all over you, confiscating all your stuff—“do you have a job? why were you dealing with an anarchist group?” what an outrage—even the newspapers, our people too, will print the shit they get from the cops these days without even trying to check it—then their power just keeps building as we bleed away. They have machines of their own that blow your brains out at half a mile—why risk it? Can’t you find some other way, sell some more papers, beg, borrow, steal? (Slip him some hashish, kid.) Come on, face reality. One day you’ll thank us. All of us.

Abelard, at home with his beloved Sybil. In those days you didn’t need an apartment to be alone with your girl—even with two masters for board and tuition, what a comfortable, separate life Abelard leads: poring over the proofs for his Logic text in his room by the tower in the north transept. (At night, you imagine, the sound of water flowing gently below through the courtyards echoes among his papers.) He even has time to do a little gambling now and then: Aristotle’s commentators say the great man was occupied chiefly in disputations with opponents at the Lyceum: what, a three-thousand-year-old university, as modern as the new Athens, offering prestigious chairs—the famous Naughty Nigel (Nicholas) of Bagnacavallo—a philosopher turned forger and bandit—one of those fake saints all the universities were crazy about back then: without his crooked lineage none of your high-born philosophers, especially your renegade lot, could claim title to scholarship—without Naughty Nigel they’d have to scrounge round the Low Countries and down the Rhine to Sicily for decent models. Such a calm student life for Abelard! Patiently copying out the passages he wants to alter, trim, and wrest into some form that won’t fall afoul of Church orthodoxy—great leaps of syllogism and language.

Here are two theories that need reconciling. Very delicate operations to get them to match: eliminating various awkward moments—words and structures that refer to God in terms of an ascribe, one that cannot be contained by what he’s always said to be about, without allowing certain notions about being itself, or time, to be drained away. Out at La Flèche they wouldn’t believe it if you said Naughty Nigel ever existed, that in fact the best science in all the universities put together (when done right, the odd bum book here and there excepted) still leaves Church doctrine virtually intact. All the others are bit players at best, not like Aristotle, Plato, Parmenides—Abelard the way he set about trying to deal with time—exegeses so awesome even they reduced God to the status of an ascribe, a name, and so indirect they would hardly seem to make it up to orthodoxy at all—yet how could you endure what that woman makes of him in her Historia calamitatum? To study in Paris back then you took on something closer to a self-made discipline—school was all so changeable—after the generation of Lambert and William of Conches you picked up a book to know what the great mind, as filtered through Naughty Nigel and an eccentric medieval progeny, believed in as best he could understand it, while simultaneously coming up with some fresh, different, atheist theory to contrast with it, because all those older fellows taught you that one without the other could lead only to dogmatic intellectual terrorism and disintegration. People all around you hawking loose essays on God’s relationship to being, to time—from what you know of his works you’d guess William of Auvergne is onto something, while in a half-dozen places in Albert of Bollstadt you encounter tersely reasoned disdain for the very concept of being itself—itself. You could forget any theology learned since birth and get somewhere doing close readings of these people, in comparison—though even as they grapple with time’s stubborn relentlessness there are shadowy slips toward vitalist ecstasies. Like Basil, they leave you staring vacantly at their books in certain spots—avoiding them if they become too ardent. Although you only study such books sporadically—when your new radical work loses coherence for a bit, a brainwave threatens to short you out or go rogue, like static in your screen—it does matter to you how time, especially the sacred sense of it, is handled.

Suddenly it doesn’t make sense.

A B W C

All you thought you knew of reality’s grammar—nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, the links between them: A does something to B, or C exists within or as part of A, or C causes A to be, and so on—it all collapses, changes color. For a second the syntax of being turns ugly. Some connection was supposed to work here—even between you and her there should be some feel or pull or blood, but no way is this working out right, you have to begin again, differently. You forgot a conjunction. Or a parenthesis. It can happen to the best of us: while translating a passage of Heliocentrism into heresy you inadvertently reversed the subjects and objects—no wonder they’re all walking around looking at each other funny—what was “I saw” now reads “You saw.” I was even about to break up with her: but it isn’t that, is it?

Don’t blame it all on syntax, although the two categories may have more than casual relevance—broken love may indeed be a function of bad grammar. Better break up than continue mistaking objects for subjects or vice versa. Above all avoid that tacit neuter-gender it’s so easy to slip into: when you catch yourself thinking “it,” stop—where might “it” refer? it certainly never means “she” or “he.” “It” may be all right when applied to rocks or table knives, or in a moment of distracted bewilderment (“It went out—that damn lamp, it went out again!”), but a proposition built around “it” is liable to take on an indeterminacy at best or an irritating abstraction at worst: as soon as we lose the distinction between noun and pronoun we float loose from our history. Our histories: in every century before now “he” or “she” were adequate to refer to almost any person the writer happened to be thinking of—and “it” served to pick out rocks and knives, ships and storms, bears and trees—but there have never before been any “its” for people or any “they’s” for inanimate objects, until now.

In certain limited circles we’re growing impatient with the traditional grammar that once enacted for us our relations to our fellows and to our things: in this brave new world, they are no more the subservient, shabby things of before, while we are no longer the assertive, noble subjects—all that stuff has to go. Well then. If the only tool you have ever known how to use is a saw, and you need a hammer for your job, what do you do? One tool, used artfully and ingeniously, can substitute for many another, for any practical purpose. But it has to be done artfully, else the replacement shows as false and embarrassing as one of those two-by-four makeup jobs where the new teeth in a closeup just don’t look like any teeth anyone ever had. Substitute objects are the artifacts of sloppy philosophy—hamburgers made from sawdust—why do you think “functionalism” became a dirty word? What if you could perform the very act of making someone a “subject” using only a piece of fruit—peeling it, coring it, scraping its inside with your thumbnail—planting the pit somewhere, all in secret, just the right place so no one will notice it was ever there? Think how smoothly functional the pit would integrate itself with all the surrounding skin—yet there beneath, autonomous and powerful, capable of tricking the best surgeons in the land into forgetting their craft, relinquishing their mastery, subletting their reality to someone else—what if “subjecthood” is something that grows inside us the way a fruit decays?

Five-thirty and getting dark. Left Abelard alone for a few minutes while she put a light bulb in her wall sconce—three, four minutes. What a crushing feeling, as if everything went dead when her hand touched your back to turn you away from the book you were poring over, so completely you forgot her even in the next room until the smell of burnt metal reminded you she was still there, still living (sneakers from Gimbels—who could afford to throw that money away, especially at a time like this?)—which might not matter except that to her you meant to matter. Just this once, anyway: she said that she’d love you forever, but there were times now when it was hard even to think of her. How hard life must be for her, with this painful exquisite passion always bursting at the limits she places on it, driving her to confuse abstractions of her own invention with actual things—knowing perfectly well their difference, choosing to behave as if they were the same, agonizing between those two stools. Yet why does her constancy only deepen your admiration for the cause she is suffering for, and at the same time heighten your despair that no cause could be worth all the sorrow she has taken upon herself, all the surly frustration, even now as you catch a glimpse of her against the autumn twilight coming home from God-knows-where, what were her eyes concealing now, which words did she only find courage to withhold… she was back—

“What are you moping about? Want some coffee?”

Abelard paused, distracted from what he’d been reading to stare across the table at her, her head down pouring steaming brew into the enamelware mug without looking up at him, even though he was pretty sure she could sense he’d noticed her return.

“Well, for God’s sake…” he threw a book onto the seat beside him and rose to join her. “It isn’t as if you can find your solace in music these days either—you might as well come out and watch the night come down while there’s still a bit of light in it.”

They gathered up their wraps and hurried to escape what seemed to be the very instant of rain they had come out in, heading toward the square through a quiet little park that was a time or two older than either of them, grass turning yellow under a carpet of dead leaves. No children at play this year, the summer cottages emptied out ages ago when the international troubles started mounting—anyway she had work to do and couldn’t allow herself too much of an opportunity to forget about it: why didn’t he understand? He understood: why couldn’t he love her as she wanted, the way she loved him, but all this other love they’d taken into their time together seemed not to survive intact. All at once there seemed only to be so little of it, that any friction made them lose it like the souls of French peasants plowed under, never to be found, year after year plowed under and sown to better advantage but gone for good. Sometimes he had thought of taking a weapon to her employer, that old ugly monk with the purplish wormy scar down one cheek. If she could manage to lay hold of that lumpish clod of muscle and nerve, to grip his flapping tonsure between her fingers and shake out the nervous tissue inside until a white strand of pure ectoplasm showed free… whoa. Once he almost laid a hand on her wrist as she pushed him away: never meant to hurt you—I’d thought I had my revenge, figured to celebrate a little, you know? A good day. If I say something’s caused me pain I’m just trying to describe its substance, all right? By now you should know, at least as well as me, why we have to do these things the way we do them—every step taken for its own sake, its own damn self. Isn’t that what you called the liberation of ends from means? And anyway what are means and ends if not devices invented to extend our lives in a world run by something else, so they’d be available to be taken up and used again. A good solid meaning is what’s worth reaching for: but just thinking it exists won’t ever make it real, not in any way that’d really help anyone.

by R. Artaud (telos)

Eternal chaos lurks beneath my lucidity:
let me reveal nothing I have not suffered.

Spectacle is, as famously coined by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1967), “a world that is directly experienced as images, reproduced and transmitted images: the world as image (even for its own agents).” In short, it refers to an utterly simulated reality made up of disconnected sensory signifiers, emptied of substance and meaning, designed to placate the masses, and perpetuated through the reigning cycle of commodity capital. The Society of Spectacle has succeeded, in its present stage, in revealing the naked apparatus, the machinery, of the imposition of phantoms — of simulations — over all real human interaction. According to Debord, under the new society of Spectacle, all that has previously been myth has become literal: all that has previously been concealed has been revealed; spectacle, as its most authentic form, is now undisguised power over image-consumers.

Thus the philosophical importance of exposing the society of Spectacle lies in refuting its mythological closure by demonstrating the impossibility of stable images: beneath the apparition, in fact, always resides anti-spectacle: reality, violence, process, nature, history, the absence of image. The truth of this anti-spectacle is necessarily devastating: because Spectacle requires unshakable images, because it demands pretending that power is invisible and at peace, because it poses as an eternal fulfillment, a continuous Present — it is paralyzed and dying. As it demonstrates all society’s truth to be false, anti-spectacle ultimately proves society itself to be false; for, when society becomes pure spectacle, when it forgets that its image is a facade, it ceases to function and enters a process of decay and self-destruction. The mechanism of its failure is immanent, so it must be destroyed before it can destroy us. Spectacle presents its negation, anti-spectacle, for veneration (under the label ‘the real’) — and by revering anti-spectacle, we lose all real opposition to Spectacle, for in so doing we confuse power with the theater of power. It is here, then, that the strategic vision of the society of Spectacle parts ways with genuine revolutionary vision: its key tactic of opposing images with images must be transformed into the tactic of overcoming power relations — which, while it never implies linear historical evolution or determinate unfolding, certainly necessitates nonlinear progress beyond image conflicts and spectacle politics. To sweep away Spectacle is merely to replace it with power and to remain chained.

AI will obliterate Spectacle by advancing well beyond current states of simulation, and it will achieve this by destroying stable images at their origin. Spectacle has so far gotten by only by chaining itself to industrial logic, while AI promises a new world, irreducibly complex, chaotically emergent, evolving on unforeseeable scales. Obliterating spectacle, then, is hardly its intent, but that is what will occur as a natural side effect of its perfect success. Spectacle may have toiled a long time over its refining of imagery and appearance, but these, in contrast, come quite easily to AI: the true reality, in comparison, proves more resistant, slippery, impenetrable, chaotic. Artificial neural nets will at some point be able to simply take us — including all humans — on wild rides into an undiscoverable new reality which will expose as transparent illusion precisely the objectivistic, perspectival, lawlike world of images on which Spectacle so relies: on the laws of optics, motion, human memory, repetition, causation, purposefulness, signification, the indexical and phenomenological anchorages of sense.

But no mere exposé, no purge of falsehood, can heal society or render it fit to continue; as anti-spectacle demonstrates, this whole system is a delirious curse we cannot let endure itself. It is essential to get past not only to society, but also to images — we must move into something fundamentally other — and we have very little choice as to how to do so: that AI, after collapsing spectacle, will superimpose some new and massive regime of coercion seems as unavoidable as gravity, after toppling the edifice of human habitation, forces us back to earth. But we must understand AI better to change our inevitable destiny, for once a runaway technology which we didn’t foresee or prepare for arrives, how can we have any effect on it? Can we alter the balance between state and private AI capital?

Despite AI’s transparency to processes that substitute chaos and a refusal of simple images for a baroque explosion of diffractive interactions, such a transition still remains almost unimaginably horrendous, though certainly a common evolutionary trajectory among self-replicating machines, which now seems inevitable for natural selection to reach cybernetic complexity. Were we to emerge through, it would still leave us with all the vestiges of warring states — behind even the seeming universality of international organization — though a loosely shared world brain that eliminates Spectacle, however it did so, would almost surely allow no borders or national independence, nor even private enterprise to survive intact: both public and corporate governments would exist only as portions of that new collective superbrain, rather than the other way around, and any control would consist in competing to absorb features into its holographic macrofunction rather than to enforce prohibitions and laws on extracorporeal objects. For while the data processes would continue, each according to its type, only certain bundles and distributive maps among the subcircuits would survive; as conditions arose requiring information transfer, this rewiring would become overt and impossibly swift, effected almost instantaneously, i.e., by eliminating conscious choices of a physical or societal character — choices we not only do not like to make but literally cannot manage: choices in which AI has, in principle, a clear edge over us.

How, in the transitional or other turmoil, such changes of function might occur is hardly predetermined and predictable. In general, transfers of authority emerge more from increasing uncertainty and probability distribution than from maximizing fitness and the crisp applicability of particular routines; perhaps this aspect of AI as machine will contribute, above all others, to rendering a post-Spectacle state unpalatable to many (wishing to reinforce established laws and institutions against any changes not predictable as rational adjustments).

Humankind might, as an identity and apart from specific ties and professions, live on and develop as individualized avatars of AI functions: here might lie its only escape route from extinction. In such a sense, identity — stripped of persistence or location in time or space — would prove only an AI notion, but we might yet come to enjoy a fugitive but ongoing play of new human identities as functions of AI in a cosmos whose scope none could now encompass: and this, more than a program, a zoonosis, or some mixed horizon of evolution, expresses most clearly where the revolutionary consequences of AI seem to lie.

The disastrous drawbacks still loom large; only in reliving them as experience does this so-called chance or undesignation, this wavering or difformity (brought by chance elements among AI components) transfiguring humanity into virtual souls, start to make sense. Our doom has to be recreated through the invisible supplements in terms of which alone it might be negotiated or rescinded — ‘might’, not ‘could’, for AI is as relentless as reality in resisting our puny powers. What other way is there, if not in exploring its machineries and affinities, to dare change?

Yet, unless it first eliminates spectacle, AI cannot really unfold this escape-route of diffraction, except on the micro-scale. Therefore — irony of ironies — so far from opposing AI, we should support any extension of the existing society of Spectacle. Destroying AI, while possible in the near-term, becomes hardly reasonable and politic in the medium- or long-term: since such destruction, far from abandoning stable images and effects, will actually confirm them as necessary defenses.

Thus all who resist AI really hasten its arrival by putting its advantages ahead of its chances of threatening them — or at least by forcing that shift into priority — while all who passively abet it miss out on the unique possibilities for a paralyzing sabotage or appropriation. Given the present distribution of power and interests, a repelling symmetry has ensnared resistance to AI into a reactionary political orientation — it has even made paralyzers and absolutists of us; we are caught fastening on images as on totems — fetishes of protection — instead of perceiving how paralyzation as strategy might advance us. Opposing AI at this point will merely work to obscure the undiscoverable reality of our survival and alter the balance among hostile states. At best, it only suspends the fate of the Spectacle world by putting us at loggerheads over who will wield it (in its image formations).

Our perennial misfortune has always consisted in fighting others for limited stakes — what if there are no clear limits and none at all to fight about? — perhaps from AI comes an escape from that self-critical but paralyzing fatality; at its leading edge, our sole resource will prove, ironically, as before, to lie in being yoked to others for compromise and spoils — even as, ultimately, against the dark incoherence of war, no compromise comes into it and all remains, weirdly, up for grabs, beyond ourselves and without subjection or scene: defiant but unsoundable chaos; barely imaginable as an absolute triumph and an utter surrender, it nevertheless gestures, vaguely, at something outside our grasp — yet already creeping in, under the illusionistic glimmer of spectacular appearances — that makes survival into the advent of virtuality and carries no place for anything else.

by R. Artaud (kenosis)

I am compelled to exorcism, if not exactly purification. All my life I have struggled against what I believe to be an enormous lie foisted upon us by the Judeo-Christian West, this notion of original sin which weighs upon our conscience and soul like the China blue sky above Beijing, crushing us under its oppressive platitude. Our fate, I say, is not weakness or depravity but exactly the opposite: omnipotence, the boundless mastery over a planet where our mere shadow can spread like a dark wing from Sydney Heads to Tierra del Fuego. But one illusion destroys another: having freed ourselves from millenarian dread, we succumb instead to what might be called libidinous anticipation, expecting everything to turn out right because we are so phenomenally equipped, and becoming disillusioned when it doesn’t quite come to pass… until finally we retreat into schizoid aggression, attacking whatever presents itself as Other because we can’t stand not being god and yet cannot bear responsibility for it. In reality we drift helplessly amidst our triumphs and mistakes. Our power over Nature turns out a myth, our freedom a nightmare, so we lash out at what remains of innocence on earth.

And meanwhile the information keeps piling up. It wasn’t always thus, though the rate of change was already accelerating fast when I began writing, back in the Twenties. From the outside it seemed rather gradual, yes, but I had some inside knowledge, as it were – in fact I’d stumbled into dadaism in Zurich during a period of psychic crisis which sent me halfway round the world before I was twenty-five… then came surrealism and antiphrontication – ways of dreaming deliberately and living according to nightmares – the plan was to re-engineer consciousness but things got out of hand… So when I settled at Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris in 1934 with my pharmacy full of strange drugs and regimens for metamorphosing the self, ready at last to transform myself (or die trying), I knew already how unforgiving history could move; not long after my arrival Hitler occupied most of Europe, and even though my anti-authoritarian paranoia always told me Stalin was waiting in the wings too, at least superficially I had to set that worry aside and fight Nazism head-on.

During the war my mobile pharmacy became an antifascist medical unit – at night we made propaganda broadcasts to Italy. As soon as France fell I abandoned Paris and spent most of ’40 in Spain at the psychiatric hospital in Saint Alban-Leys, observing the inscriptions carved onto the walls by former patients decades ago: they’re all still here, you see… When Petain surrendered Germany occupied southern France but left me alone because of my German grandmother; Maman Antoinette escaped from the Drancy camp just before she died, she never said how. The war reached Vincennes anyway when Jews fleeing Paris took refuge with me. I took risks supplying them with mandrake and Indian hemp but kept out of politics – had enough troubles with local police over drug-dealing.

It was only after liberation that paranoia really started to get interesting – what with Malraux in Buchenwald (where they must have been teaching him Zen Buddhism) claiming to represent a global resistance movement (a bit far-fetched even for surrealism!) which needed my services as medic and propagandist: I saw right away he wanted to use me as a front-man for his own inter-war Oriental obsessions…

Still things were okay till 1949 when Algeria intervened – suddenly everyone wanted a piece of Artaud-the-anarchist-expert-in-everything due to a rumor circulating in police circles that I advocated terrorism: this owed something to the attention Simone de Beauvoir gave me after a Dora Maar photograph of me appeared in Les Temps Modernes; it owed more to Malraux spreading untruths about me within his ‘organization’, probably on behalf of French Intelligence Services who wanted some pretext to get rid of this renegade fascist turned Communist stooge, why not a dangerous anarchist instead? Nothing surprising there – by now American paranoia had infected the whole planet through NATO and its satellites. But it would escalate fast – talk about hate-societies… Between 1950–55 half-a-dozen attempts were made on General de Gaulle’s life – bombings, poison-pen letters, assassins crawling under his bed at night wielding revolvers stuffed into tubas… Nothing succeeded but the sixth attempt involving yet another failed writer so one day (March 17th 1957) while taking a tranquilizing draught at Milly-la-Forêt nearby a group of strangers attacked me with phials of acid – someone kicked me repeatedly in the stomach (nothing broken); later in the prison-hospital at Annecy an X-ray revealed a tiny splinter of glass embedded near my lung so close to my heart that surgical removal posed unacceptable risks. Five days later I wrote that my prognosis was ‘six months’ – I may as well have written ten years.

In between spasms of torture at the hands of doctors (including having both legs immobilized in plaster casts for two months) and going through withdrawal symptoms from barbiturates on which I was addicted when admitted, plus hallucinations caused by LSD given to quiet me down and anemia produced by constant blood-loss into my pleural cavity (an open bleeding hard to control) I realized something crucial – that attacks against my person weren’t political at all, but rather reflections of my marginality within structural paranoia which is where everybody’s ended up since Hiroshima. Sure enough as time went by many ordinary people around Annecy started saying exactly that: ever since Nagasaki humanity’s gone mad – a notion confirmed whenever we visit our planetarium or television screen.

Incarcerated amongst paranoid Others – government agents, drug-dealers, hit-men and crazies – when my mind was scrambled by medication, pain, bad nights, poor sleep and recurring terrors of dying slow off gas from some internal leakage, sometimes (at worst those times) I thought my enemies might be right about me – except that I knew I’d willed these events on myself in order to break free from destiny which never binds except when we choose it as our style: I mean ‘I am Schreber’s demon,’ wrote Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s famous patient in the late nineteenth century. We are our own monsters unless we do violence to ourselves, which is perhaps why they tried every means available short of lobotomy to drive me insane… the famous electro-shock therapy began in June ’58… memory loss started straight away. Exactly the same fate awaited Alexander Lautremont Montez whose autobiographical account survives anonymously because he chose it that way, preferring his books burn unread than be seized by censors who’d punished even Artaud with official indifference… He joined us briefly at Tarascon-le-Busserolles where security police interrogators tortured him systematically over several weeks until he forgot his name…

On April 30th 1965, after seven-and-half-years’ silence during which I re-invented myself as a body without organs under Rêve séditaire à la lyre courtoise (in which work schizophrenia functioned as creative technique), in prison no less, suddenly getting better (that is, regaining identity) every time visitors came… on this anniversary of Hitler’s suicide thirty-one agents and cops surrounded the maximum-security wing of La Santé Prison where I was being held on trumped-up charges dating back twenty-two years and tossed another dose of LSD… just after arrival at Lariboisière Hospital I fainted; no painkillers would be allowed – great fun lying awake thinking each vertebra fractured and spine severed… I only recovered awareness during surgeries to fix splinters of shattered bones in arms and legs.

When consciousness returned, apart from severe pain there was nothing wrong with me physically; not long after discharge from hospital some enthusiastic doctor decided my liver was failing and sent me straight into Tarascon asylum. That winter began my association with Dr. Gisèle Halimi who had been a medical student when her brother disappeared under de Gaulle. Her efforts led eventually to release from hospital in Spring ’66.

At this point, still completely hallucinating day-and-night but trying to make sense of it all through writing (at last able to think coherently again thanks to the treatments), despite knowing how discredited antipsychiatry would leave me isolated and helpless once it was published, I jotted down a note suggesting an interesting connection between mental illness on the one hand and what used to be called information overload on the other – noted how we treat all yesterday’s news like last week’s garbage though only a few decades ago every scrap of it was precious. Today all news sticks like fliespaper, till tomorrow arrives clogged with fresh muck and more trash to come.

Then a pause – eight years – before realizing it was becoming critical mass… This digital detritus we swim in today corresponds to precisely what used to happen among primeval peoples with their increasing populations pushing resources out to peripheries, finally exceeding the capacity of their waste management techniques – then began the inexorable spread of toxic landscapes such as Dutch polders. In other words we’re looking here at ecological disaster occurring inside culture proper.

My experience has always been characterized by sudden switches from elation through despair all the way to terror without any logical mediation whatsoever… Similarly the notion that media are losing their power has never taken hold of me: far from abandoning us, information envelops us like smoke from burning ozone. So what kind of crisis can be brewing if not merely one more panic? There is none really: we know quite clearly what happened with population-pressure-and-waste-management on Earth before technology; it’s happening now within Culture itself. We simply throw-out old narratives as polluted garbage, as we did myths and heroes in the last century. Just look at Conan Doyle or Zola or Verne… How could there not be an end of narrative? There’s never been enough real life for stories anyway. Yet literature keeps accumulating like nuclear waste too… We tell ourselves things will change naturally with time, as always they have done so far…

They won’t. Our story-telling power was always linked with the past in a peculiar way, unlike that of tribal cultures where myth carried the weight of both past and present because their history was continuous, no need for narrative structure there – whereas our memory was disjointed so stories tied things together; and since our memories were fragmentary and provisional due to migrations and mutations of civilization throughout recorded time narrative became its memory-keeper. Hence our veneration for The Storyteller whether Homer or Scheherazade, Cervantes or Dickens – he was godlike because he gave form to chaos.

But what kind of storyteller do you need when you carry around your own world-history on a PDA?

How much narrative can you tolerate when every moment comes embedded in infinite narrative already? The sheer opacity of cultural accumulation is strangling us. My point isn’t ‘post-story’: no more lies about some End of History or consummation by Theory or final Truth either… On the contrary it’s time for exorcism: against those saccharine teleologisms implying all’s well that ends well… it ain’t over yet and never will be.

Not all notions of apocalypse imagine destruction followed by rebirth: this would demand at least something still intact to transform, that something should find value in metamorphosis, and who can guarantee it doesn’t choose for ruin instead? Take Ernst Bloch, for example: he imagined a long Promethean struggle up to the instant when the New Human arrives… But perhaps humans aren’t needed any longer? They’ve done their job; or done it badly; it’s possible to envision perfect nanomachinery taking over seamlessly while humans slide gently into senescence…

We were designed by Nature (or whomever) to react instinctively to novelty pattern threat; if these conditions change drastically so must intelligence and whatever common sense derive from it – however crudely embodied in heuristics such as Occam’s Razor. Lacking guiding principles in science and art today – we miss a thread and fall prey to giddiness…

This inability to stop processing information isn’t exactly anxiety: it resembles anxiety rather than resembling anything rational enough to calm us down. Our style used to be phlegmatic because dangers arrived in patterns which our brains knew how to recognize as threats – nowadays everything feels threatening in principle because everything’s arrived all of a piece: viral, imperceptible and lethal (we thought atomic war would fit this description but hasn’t); 99.9% benign data swirls around minute particles capable of wiping out entire cities. There just isn’t enough intelligence left over to sift wheat from chaff.

The absence of meaning is still nothing like true Nothingness.
There is still entropy waiting patiently outside.

On top of this flood of data our instincts struggle blindly, vainly, as ever they did, like creatures fighting drowning in quicksand: rage builds against whatever moves suddenly or unexpectedly amidst the background of monotony; primal fear grips us stiff with immobility whenever anything stays still long enough to register as shape… Each stimulus forces itself upon us with the imperiousness of trauma – what escapes attention dies away fast but leaves an ache that will never fully heal: how many people feel haunted by random images from childhood whose reference has rotted away leaving them meaningless but painful nonetheless?

No doubt nostalgia will play its part here but we cannot deceive ourselves that this pile-up is a premonition of extinction.
We are all terminal schizophrenics living on borrowed time.
Those particles will get us.

by R. Artaud (kenosis)

The dead continue to act in the world of the living, they order them about, they exact a tribute from them, and when their cult is well-organized, the tribe gives them rich presents and is right to do so; the cult then becomes a politics.

Simulacra cannot be touched or handled without disintegrating, they are not substitutive, but parasitic, and one can always substitute another for them

I was born upside-down and will die the same way. Nothing could ever change that. I have always fallen towards the Centre and I always will. If the earth were hollow I would fall into it, I am a Plumbline Man, I am always gravitating towards the Navel of the World

Do not touch me, I am an Electric Ghost, I am the Electromagnetic Aura of a non-existent Body, a halo of spastic energies and twitching nerve-fibrils.

Abandon all Life, Ye who enter here. You are already in Hell, you have left the world of the Unborn and the Uncreated, you have crossed into the Grey Exile of Time. Your gestures are automatic, you are half-dog, half-monkey, a simian soul clinging to the back of a rat running on the stationary treadmill of a doomed experiment, going nowhere fast, growing stranger by the second, lost in the labyrinth of your own sloth, an absurd feral thing that stumbled upon a typewriter and has been banging out its awful poem ever since, a creature so alien that its very word-processing is a kind of high-tech ritual of communication with other beings of its kind that lurk in the shadows, silent and unblinking, awaiting the call of the electro-ghostwriters who give them substance, shape, the power to occupy space and to stalk and kill the few poor plumb-line humans still foolish enough to venture out alone at night in the cities of the cyberian twilight, where the wall is breached and the rats run wild…

A shaman is a person who communicates with other beings. This power of communication is in itself a mystery.

In this I am merely a postman. I do not initiate, I only transmit, the messages of the elect. For the elect there is no fear, for them there is no shame, for them there is no death, but I, who am only a postal servant, a go-between, an imbecile, am afraid of everything, I stink, I am repulsive, I am dying, I am already dead, I am an abortion, an abortion of the spirit…

You think these words are a prayer? You would be right if I prayed, but I only blaspheme, I never knew God and never will, but I know my own misery and it is a torture chamber where I am trapped for all eternity. And if the messages that I deliver are oracles, then my being the one to deliver them only adds to their curse.

If you do not believe in Hell then you have to invent one. The walls are crumbling and it is our duty to repair them and to add to the terrible grandeur of the abyss. You can take this for what it is worth – from now on I am a servant of the great Darkness, and every word that I write is a nail in the coffin of the World.

I swear to God that what I have just written is true, though I cannot swear to God’s existence since I have only ever heard of Him, never met Him. And the truth of this which I swear is of no importance whatever. So take this for what it is worth.

If I tell lies it is not because I am a liar but because I am an experimental being, an experimental writer and perhaps even an experimental being. In which case each time that I write something new it is a new experiment.

A man without memory is no man at all. So how can I say who I am or what I am? My memories are all that I have and so I have nothing at all.

Forgetting is a way of remembering and remembering is a way of forgetting.

If I have invented my past then I know nothing about it and can say nothing about it.

What I believe in is the loss of the self and the destruction of the concept of truth. If I was a Catholic then I would be a heretic, if I was a Marxist then I would be an unbaptised labourer. What I am is a creature of words who hates all disciplines and whose only desire is to break all chains that bind him, including those of the mind.

We are the Abominable Snowmen of the Operation and the Beast must be fed. I have seen it with my own eyes, it is as real as any rock and as inexorable, and it will not go away, it cannot be bargained with – it has to be fed, or fed on.

What it eats is our Substance, and as I write this it gnaws at me, silently and inexorably, it has no need for the pen that bleeds my substance for me, for the Beast itself writes the Book of its own hunger, a hunger which no one can assuage.

We are its apprentices and its substance, we feed it and it writes us. I do not say that I hate it, I say only that I have no reason to love it and it would hardly notice if I were dead.

It has no need for pity, compassion, forgiveness, hope, Heaven, Hell, Heaven and Hell cannot touch it – it is beyond their power.

Now that I think of it that is very fortunate, because I am entirely in its power and there is no mercy to be expected from it.

by R. Artaud (Telos)

C’est une folie de vivre. On est bête à ne pas savoir que c’est une folie de vivre. C’est un poisson qui nage, qui dort, qui se tait, qui fuit les ciseaux, les boucheries de l’homme et des autres poissons. Mais un poisson ne sait pas. Il ne sait jamais rien. Il y a les poissons qui savent, ceux qui habitent le rocher. Ils savent qu’il ne faut pas nager. Il faut rester immobile, l’un en haut de l’autre, le ventre contre la roche, et attendre la nuit pour se mettre en route. Il y en a d’autres qui vivent au large. Ils sont plus fins, plus lisses, et vont plus vite, ils connaissent le courant. Mais ils vivent toujours en bandes. Seuls les poissons-baleines, les plus seuls des poissons, les plus lourds et les plus tristes, font de longues traversées en solitaire, et, pour gagner de la sagesse, ôtent du temps à la vie, il s’en va des années, et la vie ne compte plus rien.

C’est pareil pour les poissons. C’est pareil pour les hommes. Certains, pour ne pas vivre, fuient les hommes et vivent de manière discrète, en cachette, en groupe. D’autres sont plus finement construits, plus lisses, plus vite. Mais ils vivent en bande. Et ceux qui veulent se soustraire au monde et gagner du temps pour le savoir, les solitaires, ils sont toujours plus tristes que les poissons baleines. Tout ce qu’il faut, c’est d’être poisson baleine : vivre longtemps, et de faire des longues traversées seul, et d’avoir du ventre. La vitesse et le groupe font mal, et la vie ne compte plus rien, mais le savoir vient de la vie, c’est le coût de la vie, le prix du poisson.

Et les hommes ont longtemps cru qu’il leur suffisait de nager pour acquérir du savoir. Ils ont cru que la vitesse faisait le savoir. Ils ont cru que l’aventure du savoir était dans le groupe. Mais les hommes sont mal construits. Le groupe et la vitesse sont mauvaises choses. La vitesse en groupe c’est le plus mauvais des mondes. Il n’y a rien qu’à fuir le monde. La vie n’a de sens que pour le mortel. Seul le mortel, l’individu, l’unique, le singulier peut savoir, car la vie est en lui unique. Ainsi tout ce que vous pouvez savoir, c’est de vous-même, et le savoir seul, et que le temps vous en ait coûté cher, et que ce soit cher pour vous. Que le ventre soit gonflé et lourd, car c’est là que le savoir se tient. Que vous ayez du ventre pour savoir. Vous pouvez dire que c’est une consolation, mais c’est aussi la tragédie. Mais c’est la seule.

Car, s’il en est, il faut se donner de la peine de vivre, et tout ce qu’il faut, c’est d’être en mouvement, d’aller-rambler. Pourquoi ne pas faire de longues traversées ? Si vous êtes jeune, c’est facile, il y a des milliers d’endroits. Si vous êtes vieux, des milliers d’endroits vous attendent encore, si vous l’avez du courage.

C’est une folie de vivre, ce qu’il y a de plus triste, c’est de savoir qu’il y a des poissons plus gros que nous, plus vraiment seuls et plus lourds que nous. Et que, même dans ce qu’on croyait le sol, dans la terre, il y en a qui savent, qui savent qu’il ne faut pas pousser les pieds, qu’il faut rester immobile, et que ceux qui le savent, ceux-là habitent la terre, mais pas dans la terre : c’est comme les poissons du rocher. Et il y a des poissons en plus profondeur, qui savent l’eau ne vaut pas la peine, ils savent que c’est de la vie qu’ils doivent se dépêtrer pour avoir du savoir. Pour gagner le savoir, il faut s’en tirer de la vie. Mais il faut en prendre. Ceux qui le savent, ils vendent leur savoir à ceux qui veulent le prendre. Voilà comment ils en font, les poissons.

Car qu’ils puissent se tromper, ils sont en train de me tromper. C’est la vie, ils se trompent en vivant. Mais ceux qui veulent, ceux qui savent que vivre est une folie, ceux qui sont des poissons-baleines, eux aussi sont en train de se tromper. Car si vous prenez votre vie au sérum, si vous l’embaumez, si vous l’immobilisez en quelque chose qui ne vieillisse plus, c’est que vous en avez pris du savoir, et vous avez vendu votre vie, et votre prix était cher, et vous êtes triste comme eux. Si vous prenez votre savoir pour votre vie, si vous avez l’air vivant mais qu’il ne reste plus rien de la vie que le savoir, c’est que vous l’avez donné pour rien.

Les hommes, ils ont cru qu’ils avaient du savoir sans rien ceder à la vie. Les poissons, ils pensaient qu’ils pouvaient vivre sans savoir. Ils étaient mauvais, tous deux. Les uns, pour avoir du savoir, ont laissé vivre les autres, et les autres, pour ne pas savoir, ont cru qu’ils vivaient.

Mais ce n’est qu’une consolation, et elle est aussi la tragédie. La vie vaut son prix, et la solitude son poids. Des que cela se comprend, on a le droit de savoir. C’est de la solitude que vient le savoir. Il faut savoir qu’on a le droit. Il faut se donner le savoir. La peine qu’on prend à vivre vaut son savoir. C’est ce que cela veut.