Hi blue.beard,

First thanks a lot for your comments. Personally, I believe in what you have stated here, up to some levels. However, this article (Decay) is somewhat turns to another point of view; let me develop the lines of my discussion(s) to make it more accessible and not bring that article (Decay) under a direct surgical analysis. In fact, what I discussed in 'Decay' was a summarized fraction of my project on power, life, and base-desire on the one hand and on necrophilia, openness and necrocracy on the other, accompanied by my ethnographic investigations. Hope this very brief reply clarifies my discussions to some extent.

My project is started with the history of corpse management and handling which returns to ancient Persia and Çatal Hüyük (7400 BCE) in Anatolian plateau, also the rest of other civilizations at that time. I discussed how the State has arranged all its goals to exterminate corpses, to exploit the invisibility of death, abusing what as you stated, "the death as the end of all arguments", so simulating death as a mega-fascism or a non-relative close system with no entropy (and no negative pathology) that no one can escape from like the State and its laws, like one's face and despotic body; there is only two ways for reaction and the reaction should be defined by these two: (1) coming to the State, Power and their horizons that is to say configured by the territoriality and the ground through which the State has been germinated ... (2) slipping to death, to be extinguished.

The State avoid wiping someone (or something) out by little agents since little ones are always the quick ones, the wet ones, and transient ones, coming and disappear quickly, somehow invisible to the State, untraceable to the machines of investigation ... the little ones are traitors, freaks, villains, the swarm of insects, the subterranean scavengers, wolves, lies, virulence desire, Acephalous bodies, proliferating diagrams and bizarre objects. The State cannot trust such nonhuman warmachines, so it simulates its own dreadful device, a colossal and monolithic warmachine that cannot be moved, stimulated or stirred, a non-segmentary Absolute. The only problem that remains is how to extinguish and defeat all resistances with such an autonomous warmachine which is not ballistic and versatile at all; the solution lies in the dynamism of Power and its metrons [1] (dimensions, judgments, architectural routs of motions). The dynamism of power tries to level all blocks for one to be introduced into such an immense ready-to-demolish arsenal ascribed to an unknown deity (father, God, face, organic end, finis, ...). There is an extreme irony at play here that power demolishes all blocks and put blocks concurrently to lead one into the death simulated (the simulation of Death that is exterior to the State) by the hands of the State, the simulated death through the discourses of solidity. The State cannot communicate with Death unless it simulates another death through its architectonic sphere; but even in the case of the simulated death (its lap-pet), it behaves conservatively, full of terror and aghast. The dynamism of Power (metron) configures one's every second of life, thoughts, desires and steps (that is to say living: subsistence) according to the position of this warmachine; a warmachine which has been cleverly simulated by the State and Power; the transparent surfaces of which are attached to the boundaries of the State, not at the inside but floating in its horizon (The lethal spirit of the State is beyond its frontiers.). The dynamism of power (metron) animates one to this autonomous warmachine, to the simulated and architecturized death. Before the obligatory presence of such a cunning dynamism and a work-ground which makes this dynamism possible (metrons and dimensionalities of power) and an 'autonomous' warmachine (a death simulated through the architectonic forces of solidity and the State), one becomes a fascist, a politician of survival economy trying to survive and live in life, a laminar flow of capital, an engineer of the State, a dimension of Power, metron, a state-of-architecture and in the end, one "engineer[s] an apartheid of the dead." [2], a "fascist myth" [3]. What an act of terror when one is wiped out by such an immense arsenal: a twisted and inverse hecatomb.

Power and the State live as the pimps of death, but then again, the death they have simulated -- death-raum, a de-contaminating room, a non-inhabitable dwelling system -- to communicate with Death. At last, one becomes the other: the State and Power appear (are simulated) as Death (simulated through the architectonic forces of solidity) ... they can be the end of all "arguments, loves and projects" and "no one cares": a centrifuge with an infinite motion through which everything ceases to exist before it comes to Death.

... the phantom death or the death-raum is a simulated architecture of Death assembled by the State, Power and metrons.

I've discussed how in ancient Persia corpse was the Other of this simulated death (a mal-death) and its demon was Druj- (a female name from indic root: 'lie' and 'to Blacken' = Mother of Abominations); the ultimate project of the Magi was to erase (sanitize) the corpse-fiend (Druj-Nasu) from all recesses of life ... Vidēvdād (Vendidad) or Zoroastrian's 'the Book of the Law against Demons' has very strict instructions for making one's thought, body, life, sexuality and desire clean, shimmering, visible and traceable to the State and death (the simulated death), highlighting the parsimonious art of 'living' (survival) on the satanic plateau of life with a despotic attitude (P=1). The project of this influential Book was not against Death but a contamination, a chaos or an unimaginable mess through which everything becomes lie, a blackened Thing and a free-play line of horror, everything becomes anonymous to the eyes of Power (P=1) and the State, so the architecturized death by which they communicate with the zero-dimensional Death. The ultimate spiritual triumph of the Magi was trashing the corpses away and keeping death eternally under the simulating and architectonic techniques of solidity. Everything should be kept clean so in the end one can skip the fouling corpse and dives right into the pure ocean of a death whose pimps are the State and Power. According to Vendidad, villains cannot skip their corpses; they rot for a long time before leaving this base-materialism to death. To purge this contamination from all recesses of cosmos, they coined the word Khrafstrasnamed after the noxious animals to eradicate anything invisible to their eyes, that can cross their simulating death or turn it against the State itself, anything that moves as a swarm (the turbulent body of horror) or has some relationships with the rotting corpses, anything that does not care for the unbreakable bonds between 'State and Power' and 'death' (simulated and architecturized death) and their terrorized communication with the ungroundable Death, anything that scavenges the architectural death, appearing as something malignant to the State and its purity that is a model of the fascist (non-pathological) purity of their death [4] so to speak, wolves, insects, the growing human nail, menstrual blood, rush of thoughts (the State needs the consolidated ones), nomadic writings, turbulent motions, etc. [Compare all these to the purity of the grounded death which is reflected on the exploitations of racism and its claim for an ever-purging purity, compare all these with the claims of purity: the exterminations of Jews and Gypsies by the Nazi megadeath industry, the extermination of apostates by Muslims, murdering criminals by those who claim they are the norms and the normal ones, and then those who start to eliminate the normative lines because they consider them normal, consequently garbage. There is also another irony here, maybe the wildest one, all those who claim PURITY introduce their preys into the absolute Purity of death on whose graveyards the State has erected its own fragments and architectures of purity: the irony of purity engineering (or collective-death-engineering).]

What really scares the State is not Death -- since it has invented its own machine of regularized communication with Death, a machine which manages intensities, an architecturized death (from now on I call it death-raum.) -- but contamination (epidemic openness), the desire for Death and the catastrophic diseases infesting and infecting the State and Power in the guise of versatile and ballistic swarms and micro-pests, the "little death(s)" (Bataille) fused with the quick wets (the molecular fluids, untraceable to the State and seeking to infest death-raum, making it epidemically open): drooling mouths licking death ... soaking it in the nocturnal emissions of mucus; is it a necro-philic [5] mess?

Persia was the first great civilization instituted the ultimate warmachines to purge any base-communication (epidemic openness, contamination, etc.) which deviates (to make pervert) and disorders all exploitations of death-raum by the State and Power. The Greeks (and other nations and monotheistic cultures) found the Persian methods of de-fleshing the human corpses and their decontaminating disciplines; they applied their occidental modes of discipline to it; adding it a new dimension: employing the quickand efficient essence of Persian techniques through their own architectonic(architected and architecturizing) ethos.

'Sarcophagus' or what in Greek means 'the flesh-eating stone' -- used by the Egyptians and Romans as a terra-cotta coffin -- is an accelerator to purge the contamination of corpse within a localized radius, leaving only the bones bleached by the sun, time and grave that is to say taking the only inflexible, solid, white and immaculate parts of a corpse, the architectural parts like the architectural essence of Power and the State: the Skeleton or the metron of corpse.

The Greeks re-modified the Persian techniques as the architectural warmachines against contamination and everything contaminating; fusing Persian decontaminating methods with their cosmological schools of thought and discipline of philosophy, science, art, politics and their pantheon of gods.

Architected by death and architecting death, the State, as once mentioned, finds Death a horror and the death it has architected (death-raum) a potential malfunction (or rather multi-functions) which must be grounded and localized with the extreme precision and carefulness. This obsessive anxiety that State suffers and concentrated on its own work (death-raum) is not merely a paranoia but rather manifests what has been discovered by the State: what communicates with Death through a regulated communication is under the exposure of a contamination which is always triggered by any openness to death, any communication with it; death has an immense power for infesting and being infested. Death-raum (the architected and architecturizing death) is under the constant danger of this exposure, this pestilential openness. To this extent, the architectures of death-raum are undergrounded and marginalized (the problem of graveyards, morgues, etc. and the affairs around them) by the State or surrounding architectures automatically. However, the State fails to detect and intercept one point: that openness germinates strategy (multiplicity of the contagious lines) as its opening and contagious agent; for Strategy is always an opening force, a contagion which works by and through the alliance and multiplying processes of the tactical lines, introducing every communication to Zero by cryptogenically ciphering (cifre) it. The strategies emerge from this communication (the communication of death-raum with Death) as the pestilentially creative agents that the State can never investigate or trace, the strategies which bring the State to a base-communication with Death. This is why the architectures erected through the State are the ungrounding strategies, the State comically feeds on them, economizing them and employing them as de-contaminating spaces: the compositions of its auto-collapse.

Architecture and Liveware: death-raum is a project for uprooting the contaminations or localizing them. A project assembled by dimensions, metrons and architectures. As Bataille has suggested, architecture and its anomalous productions are the fearsome warmachines of the State and Power, referring to an authority whether divine or human: tombs, graveyards, churches, mosques, morgues, rows of corpses exposing before the sun to be ossified, putting masks for getting rid of Druj-Nasu, introducing one to metron, body disciplines, etc. However, at the same time, all architectures are the creative self-exhuming machines and the affirming (strategic and non-direct affirmation) compositions of soft-collapse and implosion.

Then, don't a grave and the iconographic figure of Skeleton pimp out the architecture of death that the State and Power simulate?

As I mentioned before, "What horrifies liveware and its warmachines is not an empty tomb but a tomb, exhumed and messed up. Architectural policy of liveware does not reject destruction or deconstruction but escapes exhumation ... deflowering the face [6] (white wall / black hole [Deleuze]), marring and mangling it ... by messing the surfaces, scratching ... skinning ... burning ... eating ... turning to dust ... cutting into the core, with bare hands, daggers and nails, enzymes ... saliva and breath ... shovel and plow. Exhumation is all criminal and wicked but further and basically polluting and infecting as it undergoes surface collision, necrotizing the architecture, proliferating hot and cold surfaces into each other, letting the cold evaporates and the hot be reeked up: Resurrection of the defiled body. The cold cannot be reheated; it is messed up."

Exhumation ridicules the architecture of death designed by the State and Power; it pops up as a strategy wherever death-raum is grounded, as an ungrounding force through the compositions on which grund is con-solidated.

Mehrdad Iravanian, the Iranian architect, suggested for studying architecture you must investigate necrocracy; it's not enough, you should practice the art of exhumation too.

Apart from the Greek approaches to the Persian decontaminating techniques, there is also another influential approach, the Judeo-Christian approach to the hyper-paranoid Persian discipline that later permeates through the Islamic customs. Persians were the masters of an Osseologic culture ... a corpse should be entered into a sophisticated and fully industrialized array of the processes to be distilled as the bones or dry and inflexible articulation of death-raum through the solid space of the State. This is the heavy Osseologic (bone-culture) tradition that has influenced the Judeo-Christian architecture, beliefs, politics and customs; and one can find its mortifying and frenzied portray in the image of Valley of Dry Bones(Ezekiel 37:1-14) which excludes the rotting softness of contamination and all-includes and necessitates the white and articulative purity of the bones as the prerequisite ground for the purity of the State, death and monotheism. This image and all exhortations in Leviticus express and map the origination of a great portion of the architectures assembled through death-raum and the discourses of solidity: the tradition of entombing, autopsy, human anatomy, death penalty, building graveyards and catacombs, eschatology, ethnocentrism, body discipline, etc. However, as it was mentioned, there is a security hole in every assemblage, the State and Power put together through death-raum and the discourses of solidity. It is the fatal destiny of all architectures which bring their security holes once they are assembled by means of dimensions and metrons. The architectural essence of graves and morgues that is supposed to be a decontaminating architecture, localizing the vile body of corpse within a radius, and be a bone-breeding factory thus satisfying the hunger of the State for purity and groundness, turns to be a hang-out, a club for the necrophiles in which they continue their base-contaminating dialectic with death-raum, bringing it to a twisted openness; and the contamination gushes out in an immense intensity. This is an instance of the strategies which are always at work through the architectures of death-raum, ungrounding it restlessly and unleashing their own brands of openness, base-communication and desire for death which is germinated on the little-death(s).

The bones, too, are the strategic attractors for wetness of all kinds (quick wets, fluids, mucous, semen, etc.); they always bear their own necrophilic upheavals -- so catastrophic for the State and basically unmanageable for metrons -- which lie in the characteristics, inclinations and position of the bones themselves. Vendidad, therefore, warns about pulverizing the bones during time in the special ossuaries named Ostodan as a disintensification process for this necrophilic encounter. However, this dust industry multiplies its own lines of strategy too, becoming an odorless plague or a dry GAS (pest molecules?) composing itself as a pestilentially creative warmachine, a true horror spreading the necrophilic lines and epidemic openness (the lines of contagion, plagues and base-communication) not only through sepulchral debauchery but also in and through the architectures of culture, society, mind and anthropomorphic desire as GAS (this pest-tsunami) [7] or the terminally fluid affirmation of everything, a depth in which everything is a possession and a contagion, enjoying an infinite proliferation on the virtual surfaces of Zero.

One of my projects (Through the Plague) is diagramming the epidemic strategies hinted, ciphered or charted in the works of such writers as Mowlavi (Rumi), Nietzsche, Bataille, Artaud, Sadegh Hedayat, Michaux, Deleuze, Lyotard, Gabrielle Wittkop, Kathy Acker, Shelley Jackson, Pat Cadigan, Richard Kalich (The Nihilesthete), Doug Rice, Kenji Siratori, Cormac McCarthy, Pierre Guyotat, Nick Land (whose sole book is my only recommendation to all Plaguers [8]) and many others who compose the strategies of openness, collapse, affirmation, alliance and base-participation both through paranoia and "schizotechnics" (Nick Land), through what they diagram and the techniques of diagramming. However, there is an ever-widening gap between my project and theirs; a difference beyond my control as a novice, incubated in my cultural specificity and the Asiatic complexity I live in, and plagued by the historical background I've clung to: an ancient necroPHILIC country with an immense Thanatonic culture.

Best,

R.