#Šum12

[anarchist-caravan]

“ In the prologue of Gary Shipley’s 2017 novel Warewolff! , the narrator states that he began to hear “one thing’s voice, and from that voice a portrait of itself—of itself made up with other things. It was learning to talk by shaping the stories of its victims.” Later on, the radically alien narrator describes the world he encounters: “Just stuff that isn’t me. And I do not feel like stuff. I feel like this endless faceless seeing. I’m a seamless tracking shot without arms or legs. It’s like I’m blind or have locked-in syndrome when I don’t.” David Roden compares Shipley’s work to Hans Bellmer’s anagrammatic dolls, because :

both have no axioms or rules beyond the hazards of its dispersal. It is its own entirely misleading portrait. It has no people or worlds, only disjointed clones, plucky carcasses and scripts we mistook as our lives. Yet despite this ontological poverty, we can read Warewolff! Something happens, even if we do not understand what. Its dispersal is the horror of biomorphism: a condition somewhat akin to life that, like Shipley’s alien, “discloses its arrangements” through our language centers. And this is the condition of unbinding: we are spoken by something; we pass into something without even the assurance that our hunger is our own.

The Thing does not just come from another world, but from another time: pre-human time, well before“shared time life regression” became a possibility. It does not speak to us. It’s not speaking us. Our hunger is dismissed. The Thing is a transduction mechanism, a system for translating itself into itself across different language-forms, impelled by an ananthropic rather than inhuman drive. The inhuman or posthuman are necessarily defined from human existence; they’re translations from the human into some otherness. Their hyperplasticity is a quantitative increase in plastic force. But The Thing does not actually care about humanity, technology or intelligence. Intelligence becomes completely irrelevant when it freely navigates through living forms, encountering cognition as just another edible formal feature. Purely immanentized “living”, it dismisses thinking because “thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter”. It is what Meillassoux would define as a “contradictory entity”, which 

is always-already whatever it is not: /…/ the introduction of a contradictory entity into being would  result in the implosion of the very idea of determination—of being such and such, of being this rather than that. Such an entity would be tantamount to a “black hole of differences”, into which all alterity would be irremediably swallowed up, since the being-other of this entity would be obliged, simply by virtue of being other than it, not to be ot her than it. 

Accordingly, real contradiction can in no way be identified with the thesis of universal becoming, for in becoming, things must be this, then other than this; they are, then they are not. This does not involve any contradiction, since the entity is never simultaneously this and its opposite, existent and non-existent. A really illogical entity consists rather in the systematic destruction of the minimal conditions for all becoming—it suppresses the dimension of alterity required for the deployment of any process whatsoever, liquidating it in the formless being which must  always already be what it is not.

Aesthetic metaplasticity is evil aesthetics: it is the appropriation of any empty anthropological form to hide the inhuman amorphousness, the reformulation of the cogito “less in terms of an I think and more in terms of an It lives”. As Mark Fisher concedes, “it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization”. Metaplastic works, such as those by Gary Shipley, Kenji Siratori, Jake Reber and Mike Corrao, explore cultural deterritorialization through contingent abstraction. They’re made of entities which are not only hyperplastic—able to transform themselves into anything existent—but metaplastic: able to morph into anything non-existent, or to counter-morph anything existent. They’re full of bodies that, rather than anticipate an age of cyborgs, enhanced humanoids and intelligent machines, “announce the end of being”, full of “objects that announce the end of meaning”, of “elements that whorl each of their parts containing the end of the cosmos”. In those artworks we find “something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying, without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God /…/ It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.”  

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GERMÁN SIERRA - Metaplasticity - Šum12

[anarchist-caravan]

And if your lover is in no particular place? Our bodies today are spread over a number of apps, each limb tended to by another wireless device, a piece of a body on the phone, a recording of a body on a website. A disembodied voice on your lover’s smart watch. The body needs to be pieced together like a puzzle across all of our appliances. Stimulation comes from everywhere, each street brimming with erotic possibilities if seen through an app that scans the metropolis for willing partners, human or machine. Coitus is never the only way to experience it; in fact, we are talking here about the erotic superposition of bodies, cities, and tools. Longdistance relationships are normalised on volatile markets, where working commitments take precedence over romantic needs and our true loyalty is, in the end, to our own pleasure and fulfilment, and to capital. A growing number of women in monogamous longdistance relationships live like nuns, experiencing erotics from the outside, disembodied and spectral rather than with a flesh-and-blood partner. Some prefer technical erotics and await the arrival of sex robots. Machines spread our phantom bodies over the globe, opening it up to titillation, annihilation, de-subjectification, livestreaming us. Sexuality needs to adapt. Paul Virilio was enraged by this kind of erotics allowed by remote-control tools, writing that --what was till now still “vital”, copulation, suddenly becomes optional, turning into the practice of remote-control masturbation /…/ [Current] innovations /…/ have actually managed to interrupt coitus, to short-circuit conjugal relations between opposite sexes, with the aid of biocybernetic (teledildonics) accoutrements using sensoreffectors distributed over the genital organs. -- Old-school Freudian paranoia? If coitus and ejaculation, the disposal of possible life inside someone who has the power to actually make it, are the only thing that allows men to get on with their lives without obsessing about death, the withdrawing of this option calls for a proper meltdown. In a psychoanalytic reading, men, themselves not able to give life, are forever reduced to hysterically wanting to deposit it into women, who can reverse death and therefore give some order to chaos. But our bodies are becoming detached from their reproductive function, oriented towards remote pleasures and pains rather than procreation. This is why in Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire , Luciana Parisi welcomes ways of thinking about sexuality beyond human sexual reproduction, beyond the obsession with renewal and the fear of death, and towards a paradigm of sexuality where humans are just one cog in the machine of erotics. Bacteria, technologies, humans, all splitting themselves, scattering themselves in the information age, re-defining  erotics to mean dissolution. // What is our inhuman determinant today, the one that dissolves us according to its own plans? It’s the market itself. Parisi’s optimism around distributed sex contrasts with contemporary takes on networked, fluid societies ordered by the inhuman logic of the economy that has no regard for human needs (or lives). Some say this fluidity has become an even tighter form of control than the old, hierarchical model of God presiding over the affairs of men. Of many ways in which we’d expected the “cyberspace” to revolutionise sexuality, apps like Tinder augment the physical space, providing an available lover at your fingertips. As Solange Manche writes, this is not about freeing people from social conventions, but synchronising them with the erotic pulse of the economy:                                                                          --If my only desire, and thus my whole being [under neoliberalism], is to be an efficient employee, I have to move with the rhythm of capital accumulation. I have to become liquid myself if I am to mobilize for capital. I have to always be available and always ready to respond to the fluctuations of the market. Tinder, then, allows me to function as the perfect employee in a liquid market. I can choose to have sex at moments that do not hamper me [as a worker].-- Capital, an inhuman determination from the outside, although (maybe) started by us, produces alien erotic effects in our bodies. We could imagine that teledildonics could become a way to validate the fact that volatile markets often draw couples apart, making it the new normal that we do not have “body to body” encounters with our lovers. “What’s the problem if you can have sex with them online?” your boss asks, annoyed when you try to negotiate a contract that would let you move your partner to a new place of work. In this way, long-reach teledildonics could be to long-distance relationships what mindfulness workshops are to precarious contracts. You can now prioritise being a good worker without worrying about choosing a job over the relationship—in the end, you can still enjoy wireless intimacy with your lover. ----                                                                                                                                       But the real potential of teledildonics is not as mediators of our increasingly fraught relationships with other humans. Thus far, the markets re-route human desire within detached, scattered, fluid but still recognisable forms. We’re one leg in, one leg out. But how long until capital truly has the remote, until what humans had started ends up somewhere that they could not have predicted? What if these signals could be automated or activated by a different than human intelligence? How many times do you need to have sex with a machine to stop caring who its operator is and start caring for the machine itself? In 2019, another Faustyna waits for the input. Her lover is not Jesus. Her lover is capital, making her body volatile, fluid, scattered across remote control devices. “With Him I go to work, with Him I go for recreation, with Him I suffer, with Him I rejoice; I live in Him and He in me. I am never alone, because He is my constant companion. He is present to me at every moment.” Something else is making love to all of us now.

Bogna Konior - DETERMINATION FROM THE OUTSIDE: STIGMATA, TELEDILDONICS AND REMOTE CYBERSEX -