Suicide and Survival Economy [1]
by Basilisk
An inter-dimensional line. Like all demonic machines, suicide comes not as a
solitary and single process with a certain function or a unique genre suggesting
'the very end of Oneself' but as a horde, through the rabid propagations and the
aberrancy of functions, mechanisms and compositions; a demonic worm (a line of
vermiculation) spanning the zones of spectacle, the sentimental cravings for
martyrdom, wiping the other through the extermination of self, performing the
depth of the body, an inverse or down-falling representation of Genesis (a
representational undoing process of Genesis), a turbo-dying process, a
self-announcement, a descent, mess engineering, etc. It puts its proliferating
traces all over paranoia, schizophrenia and beyond at the same and one time;
deleting functions of '/end' from its program: open functionality. Suicide has
too many faces to the point of a catastrophic vertigo (a facelessness) for one
who undergoes a self-immolation and the one who ludicrously tries to convince
and ensure himself of being just the audience of suicide of the other and not
another entity (event) engulfed by the whole panorama of sui + caedere, or a
participant, an ally in suicide of the other. Suicide is not an isolationist or
a concentrative annihilation; it is a spreading one. To this extent, Albert
Camus’ critical concern of the only thing really worth writing about is why we
don't kill ourselves outright is also pregnant of a question about suicide not
as a single 'What?' (i.e. the very essence, wesen, or the quiddity of suicide)
as it is many (suicide is an inter-dimensional program and does not have a
single face with a single function to end or anything else.) It is impossible to
both define and trace suicide as a single, dead-end process. It also brings the
crucial question of suicide and the problem that if suicide is worth of writing
(committing) or not, if it is possible to be written (committed) or not and the
question that if through suicide one can really kill oneself outright.
Overhealth. As a delusional momentum of the discussion, I launch my words from
the horizon of Survival Economy. What do we try to survive? Against whom do we
unleash our suicide? One can always say, "It does not matter." Yes, it does not
matter as long as we exploit and utilize suicide as another instrument in and
through the complex horizon and nexuses of Survival Economy; as long as we slyly
put it into the service of our quotidian but ever-developing campaign for
survival, a campaign far from the survival-of-the-fittest, a campaign in which
every one has already crossed the end-line and is the champion, the fittest or
no need to be represented as the fittest. Or as a survivor (in suicide of the
other?), we turn the spectacle of survival against suicide by intelligently
coding and constructing a regime of signs which takes revenge (this survivalist
terror of anthropomorphic thought) of survival on suicide, dissimulating suicide
as a heroic martyrdom.
The most ironic and horrific situation which Man assumes as its humanity:
'trying to survive and living’ in Life. It roars the irony of humanity and the
horror of life.
Zarathustra and his legion of magi were among the first people who discovered
and experienced the ultimate horror we try to survive. It is life and its
abomination, the unlife or the life-satan, what exactly does not purge the
ground or Survival Economy but knows nothing of survival: the Mother of
Abominations (call it Mistmare or Germinal Death [2].
The organizations all know (and are much familiar with) the ghastly ocean of
death as what sucks them and their becomings to itself (sucking them dry through
its unimaginable coldness); death is not a new or shocking panorama opening
gradually or suddenly before them. Jerking-off over death and its horror, ]
flattering with it and trying to be seduced by death are what organizations and
their survival economies do, experience through their genesis (rising and
running) and are grown with. However, the horror of life pushes organizations
and all nexuses of Survival Economy to what they consider as the worst thing:
anonymity, to be blackened, to be ungrounded, and being brought to where all
means of vision are messed up; where you do not know where you are (not
mentioning your cryptogenic position to all chronologic horizons of past,
present, future, etc.), where you are not grounded but become an exhumationist
[3] or an ungrounding machine in strategic ways: Anonymous-until-Now or a
descent whose depth is not translated according to ground but a compositional
unground [4]; where you are always exhumed as the dead (with much stress on the
exhumation process and not the dead). Life is the unground of overhealth; the
immense and unbearable health, the richness it provides for organizations or any
surviving process -- from and through which they assemble their 'live-ing'
networks -- is the means of their debacle and collapse not to death but an
unground where everything blurs and smears, turns into a compositional flow of
mess, where everything is contamination, a contagion, a strategy out of a
catastrophic anonymity, where one is anonymized before being introduced to
death; one's death becomes a faceless perversion through the abysmal
compositions, anonymities and the pandemonium of traces (base-fetishes), all
fundamentally confounding any proximity or remoteness to death. 'How far are you
from Death?' is recomposed in another horizon external to the theistic version
of this question: is death close enough to gnaw at your genital? Do you feel its
sticky wetness in your cavities? Where is death, after all?
Overhealth diagrams not only a strategy 'from without' plaguing Survival
Economy, but also rises as an autonomous bubbling (seething and over-agitated)
motor of Survival Economy, itself: When a line deviates from the panoptic
affordance (Umbrella System) of Survival Economy temporarily or even does not
satisfy the programs or objectives under process, the rest of constituents and
nexuses of survival network restore more affordance, more health, more
appropriation, more economical nexuses, more wealth, that is to say, going
deeper into the sphere of subsistence, more survival, more living ... what we
have here is not the classic thermodynamic maintenance of equilibrium but
pretending to reach the balance while stealthily and cunningly restoring more
health and crossing the balance limit in a diabolic lust to save, to restore and
accumulate more wealth, more survival for a collapsing-into-now future (For an
exchangist of Survival Economy, genesis is all such a future and not the
beginning); like the fibroproliferation of a scar, this healing process of the
wound which deliriously pours more health into its ground while it has already
obstructed and recovered the wound -- every recovery carries a meltdown within
itself. Such a transgression of the balance limit by a survival flood which is
an uncommodity in Survival Economy eradicates everything but survival, namely,
'survival overload’ which is the pestilential unground of the entire surviving
panorama ... this is the irony at work in the nervous system of Survival Economy
and all accumulative grids of capitalist mega-networks. Survival is already a
strategic suicide knitted by the seething intensities of overhealth; this is why
in the term of Camus, suicide is already a redundancy.
Similarly, the suicide that Camus depicts (La Morte Heureuse) is imprisoned
within the sphere of survival-based utility and fecundity. Where organizations
and Survival Economy oscillate violently between advanced tactics of escaping
the overhealth catastrophe of life (a plague from without) which tries to
basically mess up any survival, and affirmation of this overhealth through their
frantic survival overload (seething from within), suicide is either a pathetic
apparatus for escaping the absolute horror of life (Life is the unlife of the
life-satan, the Mistmare.), a machine smoothing all routes for the organization
to escape what it always finds the horror; or is the matter of redundancy. Here
suicide becomes a tactical line that inevitably is appropriated by the grund it
traverses. This politically survival-oriented suicide that Camus suggests is not
of the interest; not because it is imperfect but on the contrary it is a
perfectionist approach to survival and highly advanced modi operandi of
organization engineering. However, before nauseating spectacles of survival,
even such a suicide is revolutionary exciting and inhumanly turbulent. In Matrix
Reloaded, we encounter such a panorama in an extremely nauseating but also
electrically stimulating and thrilling degree. Everything not only wants to
survive but also amasses survival more than what is needed. From the plugged
agents of the Matrix to humans, to their domesticated instrumental machines (the
agents of Survival Economy); survival and subsistence are luxuriant things one
should accumulate to no end, the matters which exclude any 'price' for
themselves in an immolation of all the circuits through which the circulation of
survival, its consumption and complex hydraulic commerce navigate and fecundate
the ground of Survival Economy. The only exceptions are the anonymous machines
which are digging in inexorably and uncontrollably; ungrounding Zion -- the last
stronghold of anthropomorphism -- the anonymous machines from which their
instrumental machines have been assembled. The water recycling machine of the
city with its hunger for recycling wealth, health and survival is a foregrounded
parody of such survival machines (the instrumental ones) trying to inoculate
themselves with anthropomorphic desire, transcendence and ground.
The base-artificiality of nameless machines makes them anonymous to survival and
its agents, diagramming them as machinic plagues of the unlife (the life-satan).
They are not coming to dismantle the organic milieu hidden behind the
instrumental machines but cracking and opening it up, subverting the economical
nexuses of its network with inter-dimensional non-economical meshworks of
base-communication; bumping artificial anonymity to compositions; (re)designing
and (re)composing the panorama of survival as the mess engineering of a
base-suicide. The machines do not need to 'dig in’ or have the probing heads for
passing the iron walls or hacking defensive systems of the city; they are
digging out (corpses?), exhuming and unearthing: artificial earthing. This
panorama of invasion is totally a 'revenge of signs’ unleashed by Survival
Economy; the anonymous machines do not need to invade the city; they
autonomously rise from the instrumental machines (the machines overcoded by
Survival Economy) whose eventual suicide is inevitable. And instead of the
probing heads they were supposed to have for penetrating into the walls of Zion;
their tails appear as fluid (near to evaporation) distribution of probing heads
simulating a turbulent fluidity by which they gain a cryptogenic movement
(Leaving thousands of traces everywhere, not signifying but anonimizing prints;
messing the map). They unground spaces they traverse, engineering the acephalous
lines of war to the mouth of (un)life and its base-artificiality, and finally
what CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) diagrams as Abomenon: the
Ground-Dementor or the Mother of Abominations. The invasion scenery of machines
is nothing but the 'awakening ritual’ of instrumental machines, strategically
assembled through Survival Economy, itself. This is an uprising.
Apart from the exhuming machines (at a metamorphic phase in the movie, they were
similar to tomb scavengers, an unnamable army of arthropods unearthing a grave;
an army made out of a shape-shifting polyalloy) in Matrix Reloaded, there are
also two survival anomalies which engineer their own strategic suicides. Both
agent Smith as a self-replicating bug (an unplugged hole in the Matrix; a hole
without its solid part?) and Neo as a superhero (a Watchman) are the serious
malfunctions (multiplying functions) in Survival Economy or the very instances
of overhealth i.e. the suicidal machines pumping health as a fatal disorder or
filth into the wealth-tubes of Survival Economy. These are the possessed ones
with the infernal bodies of suicide or Death-Mess. Neo as a superhero is
strangely on the route of demonic infestations (there is something horribly
wrong with this guy.); his 'Superman thing' in spite of being a domesticated
line of flight (Hollywood-disciplined, sedimentary process, a grund fecundating
or irrigation system) has been basically cracked, infected and overwritten by
bugs, viruses, electrical surges and all lurkers in the system; his flight
descends as a cata-flight, or the 'dimensional-wrap' ability of a demon. His
kicks and punches are all the insectoid micro-tremors with the jerks and
movements composing the molecular sounds in space, in the form of
silence-infested noise, more reminding me of twitches and spasms of a male
insect being eaten alive by the female side after an intercourse; the traces and
prints of his meteororic movements in space open the cutting-edges of an n-plex
blade unfolding its cuts, edges and metallic folds; forging edges of a blade,
this outlandish weapon of openness, of butchering openness (openness not only as
'being open to’ but also the radical butchery of being lacerated, cracked and
laid open): his body is a twistable blade. He (heit: it) is not exactly a swarm
but an anomaly in the hive rising as a vapor from the accumulated and
recirculating 'survival' or 'health, a surplus value which unaccountably
operates as an exorbitant and uneconomical flood which constantly and
progressively precedes (in intensity, speed, displaceability and amplitude) the
sum-health currently in circulation and dynamically accumulated. Superheroes are
the malfunctions of Survival Economy; they are the schizotrategic suicidal
machines, inseparable from each production process of paranoic industries and
cultures. The insomnia, the flight, the cutting-edges he bombards surfaces with
in an ultimate spatial blitzkrieg, all render him as a demon, this multiplex of
eyes and wings. Neo is an unsuspected abyss in matrix. In this panorama, agent
Smith more approaches the Baudrillardian landscape of "the Hell of the Same"
through the copy/multiple-pastes 'functions' which despite the fact that they
can only select Survival Economy as their groundwork or glean themselves from
its economic distributions, stubbornly put themselves as pest-particles of the
proliferation plague that as Jean-Jacques Lecercle pointed out, (proliferation)
is a bedlam scouring the order without remorse [5]. The Hell of the Same
continuously quantifies survival into unites (the unites of survival) until they
spark a qualitative cataclysm in which all traces of quantity and measures
(metrons) are rendered off; a space (more at raum and matrix than space as
spatium) overloaded (white-heated) by such a fever for quantification implodes
(through a qualitative collapse) and can no longer conduct any scale, metron,
measure or dimension by which quantities undergo mensuration or economical
distribution. Here, quantification as a consequence of metrons or the animators
of power becomes impossible. The Hell of the Same convulses as a terrible fever
(a glacial fever) or an aggressive worshipping of Survival Economy and its
liquidation (liquidation of survival and health) through which Survival Economy
tracks down the new surviving processes and searches for more and heavier health
compounds, inundating the survival ground and hydraulically messing (neither
exterminating nor releasing) the threads of its previous economical repressions.
Instrumental machines (and not the anonymous ones) are digging in, scavenging
mines for extracting the Survival compounds with heavier-core atoms,
irreproachably propagating an atomic mess while working with the new heavy
compounds of survival and health which radiate madly as they flicker low.
'Survival overload' storms the matrix.
28 Days Later (Danny Boyle) is a survival project in another but parallel
landscape. The movie fits the Pulp-Bio-Horror (or even Survival Horror) genre
politics which illustrates the lines of viral insurrection putting the
free-market of survival in danger; but what actually happens is promoting and
intensifying survival methods and passion (we must not formulate this passion as
a subjective taste) for not only survival but also optimization of Survival
Economy. Politics of 'Survival Horror’ invites the lines of viral disorders as a
post-industrial scheme for replacing the once industrious assembly bays of
Survival Economy with something else.
Art-aud. Then where is a suicide disloyal to Survival Economy? Let me open a
parenthesis of thrill within the authorial space of this essay: (where is the
suicide that deluges me with shivers?):
In Begotten (the movie, directed by Elias Merhige), the God cuts himself open
with a razor blade, running into his Black&White entrails; jerking, bending,
twisting, coiling, convulsing, melting, jarring and wanking off his innards
while, for the first time, death-cruising his jelly-flesh, stepping into the
plateau of black matter. After being liquidated (sprouting as a corpse), a
masked woman lurches out of the shadows, inseminating herself with the semen
boiled out of the God's corpse. She gives birth to a dwarfish creature rendered
through a human body (Mutant Dead God). Mutant Dead God is imminent to the Dead
God and the God himself. The Mutant Dead God is the only solution that God and
masculinity could find to introduce themselves to the rootless journey of
becoming woman, by becoming 'It', a mutated coldy or a cold and mutating 'He':
IT, the ultimate suicide. 'IT' insinuates the pestilential solution masculinity
found (invented) to mess up its closure, its rigidity, then, taking the flight
of becoming woman, the cata-flight of epidemic openness [6]. Only through
becoming It, masculinity and God can transplant themselves in the body of
becoming woman as 'prosthesis', A Good Meal' or 'it': 'He' can only affirm
becoming woman by becoming It, by becoming a prosthesis, a good meal. Mutant
Dead God is the ultimate Good Meal out of a necrophilic mess (coldies
engineering) that masculinity can undergo for wasting itself on Zero; to be
lacerated open at last; but how much semen the dead god can afford to
disseminate the 'mutant dead gods'? We could not see the mutant dead god if the
screen painted with semen to a desolated White or a luminous white sparkling in
colorless liquids ... a screen blanketed with whiteness (Call it Moby Dick.) [7]
A theistic tragedy, the story of an exhausted god, end, pessimism and even [death
are not at issue here. The suicide of (dead) god (or He) is an outset for the
mutant-dead-god (or It): I hear the cavernous sound of 'mutant dead god' from
the depths of the black&white throbbing member of the masculinity itself; as a
music for a more overexcited dance, the suicide. Artaud and Schawrzkogler
diagram or meet a similar suicide which god commits not out of rage, or a desire
for self-abolition through which he seeks to theatrically perform his last
onslaught or cosmic genocide with the ending scream of "Look at me, you wretched
bastards." (It is more like an imbecile prank visualized in Hollywood's
workshops.) but a strategic affirmation of the Abomenon, the horror and the
interphyletic / interdimensional commotions of (un)life or Germinal Death and
finally the butchering plane of openness (being laid open); a
non-representational suicide which howls as a hubbub at the background of this
horror or unimaginable commotion, an accompaniment which nobody hears. More
accurately, nobody has the ears powerful enough to hear it.
One’s life is relatively a long foreplay for this femininely-patterned orgasm,
the non-transcendental suicide. To rhetorically diagram suicide, one must
finally realize, suicide fiercely challenges any transcendental delineation of
its multiplicity. Artaud's terms of the electrified body,
body-under-shock-therapy, Art-aud (the deadly creative body), "the screaming
body" (Stephen Barber) all summon the suiciding or fastforward body through
which the body's temporary frames (fixed by the mounted organs as Artaud
suggests) and positions crash into each other; forming an unfocused body with a
fastforward-flesh, a fastforward-dying process and a fastforward-commotion
through which everything is cinematically unfocused, blurred, and (re-)composed
as a flow of a frameless messy stream spreading in multiple directions and
moving according to its illogic rates of speed through compositions which
artificially engineer themselves, through the abyss of suicide (where the body
is re-ciphered and redesigned). The terminal continuity of this body-stream
retains a blurring speed, dissolving the body not to a total purgation but a
body-smear which is smoothly absorbed into pestilential flows of mess (the
terminally ill and labyrinthine compositions) or engineers its own compositional
space which can be the host of new compositions; compositions within
compositions within compositions ad infinitum or that is to say Art-aud, the
creative mazing body that one can experience through suicide. The
fastforward-body or the suiciding body is first of all a dementor program for
its performer, the performer of the suicide (or in term of Schawrzkogler, the
aktionist). Here, one may warn about the ruthlessly subjective sphere of the
performer; no, this is not the subjective performer; it performs suicide not
through actualizing or practicing suicide by calling upon the suicidal forces.
This performer merely triggers potentialities (of Potenz) of the body and its
organs, their rates of speed and becomings, unleashing what is already there, an
autonomous machinery of different compositions that the body envelopes for both
survival and anti-survival. Thus performer here cannot be individuated from the
nonhuman space of the cataclysm that is set free and comes to swallow the
performer and its survival horizon, devouring them with a creativity which shows
no compassion for the performer and the stage. In addition, suicide is a
(re-)composition process of the body in its full artificiality; in suicide, one
can decoupage the body in a cinematic anomaly where frames of the body escape
the full body, evaporate and become anonymous. This is why, in suicide,
according to Artaud, you become an engineer of a part of your own designing
process (Now, you can design your body more according to the interphyletic
wreckages of life rather than death.) "... [In suicide] life is for me no longer
an absurd accident whereby I think what I am told to think." [8] (Artaud) Now,
through suicide, you can intentionally and uneconomically participate in life,
communicate with it through engineering methods you always find exciting;
suicide is a demonic lust for (re-)composition and more-artificialization
process of the body. In suicide, you give the body multiple speeds, different
rates of speed for different zones of the body. You invent an artificial body
from the supposedly natural 'full body' -- which is a stock-pile for the
commerce accumulation, sedentarization and circulation -- by messing yourself
up: returning to the body as a terminal composition close to meltdown.
Should it be added, such a suicide is not a revenge (a reductionist terror) on
the organic body or an escape from its compulsory accommodating horizon; it is a
war beyond judgment and attached to the organic body itself, on its ground that
through suicide is exhumed (ungrounded but not purged); it is an ill open-ended
enhancement of the body, delivering the body to its nonhuman side. This is why
Stelarc is also among the most creative performers of the real suicide, his
'Hollow Body’ is an involuntary host for the storm of prostheses which emerge or
come, not merely life-support but also sinister machines from nowhere, opening
the potentiality of the body as an immense composition whose bonds know nothing
of negation: an epidemic body or suicide [9]. Suicide is an affirmation gone
mad. Like Artaud and Schawrzkogler, Stelarc has discovered the fundamental
interconnections between suicide, design and composing process; and how they
pervade each other to the point of internal symbiosis.
Suicide or Death-Mess. Through the course of suicide, you become irrelevant to
the capitalist body of nature by strategically affirming it (breaching its
horizontal walls) and installing yourself as a security leakage (a camouflage)
over its economy, as an artificializing process. And here we can realize the
terminal friendship between suicide and 'technology and its filaments'; cars,
bullets, electricity, drugs, prostheses of all kinds, etc. all highlight a
thirst for the terminal artificialization of the body through suicide or more
precisely, terminal (re)composition of the body. This thirst for artificializing
and base-designing one’s body or horizon makes suicide as a feeding (un)ground
for technology and its tides of prostheses whose machinery is engineering
terminal compositions, overlapped entities, anonymous composing processes and
design anomalies. That is indeed artificialization or even
more-artificialization which is in question in suicide, not a return to the
capitalist space of nature. Once digging up suicide as an artificializing
process, there is no wonder that suicide is also a 'mess engineering’, a process
affirming all artificial (re-)compositions, designing processes,
inter-dimensionalities and the ground anomalies through which nonhuman spaces
are diagramed and human spaces if not become obsolete but become inhuman; and
out of which mess as an unthinkable composition of a terminal crash between
elements and their movements on and through each other is engineered (Mess is
the post-composition of everything; it needs artificiality as the unground of
its mutations and becomings.)
In suicide, you cannot wipe yourself out; you can only make a mess out of
yourself; and this is why, suicide is all a mess spread over the sexual hiccups,
unfinished compositions of the body, never-ending suicide notes, imperfectible
desires, inharmonious body-arts, hasty movements, etc. (which are consistent
within themselves but appear incongruous). In suicide, dying process is an
affirming flow which spills into the mouth of (un)life and its Abomenon. To this
extent, "What part of the living matter dies?" becomes one of the most horrific
questions through the life / mess affirming strategies of suicide.
Suicide is the diary of the incomplete (but not repressed) death, a death-mess.
Through suicide, the body is scattered here and there, floating, lying, moving,
oozing, propagating in life and mess to that extent which even death cannot
scavenge and collect all traces, flows and pieces of this ever-suiciding body.
This reminds of a criminal and demonic laughter in which one yells: "Damn, I'm
still alive"; and not only the body but also one's existence becomes a toilet
for the interfusing slops of life and death; nothing can clean the streets,
space and bodies from their sticky presence. I tell myself: "If you are
searching a total death in your suicide; then, go somewhere else." By suicide I
make my body, existence and becomings disloyal.
In the term of suicide, think strategically. In the term of suicide, try to
invest your own synthetic artificial flavor.
I cannot write suicide; this is suicide that writes me.
I stop my discussion at this point and do not continue the Deleuzian panorama of
suicide which Ansell Pearson hints at in Germinal Life [10]: when one's
existence becomes a total burden made by age, misfortune, sickness or artless
and unexploitable pain; and I feel intimidated to trace the plane of despair as
an unground of suicide, a plane which is too complex to be oversimplified as
mere hopelessness.
Notes:
[1] For Michael Cross and Boris Mangold
[2] On Germinal Death, see: Reza Negarestani, "Death as a perversion: Openness
and Germinal Death", CTheory, Online.
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=396, 2003.
[3] "Exhumation (ex + humus: ground) or compositional ungrounding (even as
disinterring or digging up [the dead?]) is not a contemporizing or a cold and
inhuman modernizing operation over the things grounded (the dead?) but it is a
process introducing qualitative collapse into surfaces and their facial
affordances (or the stratified events) to crack them open not on the
politico-economic chronosphere of Now but now as where (and its labyrinths:
artificial earth, strategy, etc.), the ungrounded(ing) depth. It is a
non-legalized process through which surfaces proliferate within each other.
According to the anthropomorphic (and especially the White) level of analysis,
such a process, is basically criminal (exhumation is all criminal.)" from Reza
Negarestani, Cata-: remarks on depth and darkness, Online.
http://www.cold-me.net/, 2002.
[4] On compositional unground, see: Reza Negarestani, Cata-: remarks on depth
and darkness, Cold Me (www.cold-me.net).
[5] Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-Glass: Language,
Nonsense, Desire, La Salle: Open Court, 1985.
[6] On Epidemic Openness, see: Reza Negarestani, "Death as a perversion:
Openness and Germinal Death", CTheory, Online.
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=396, 2003.
[7] Reza Negarestani, A Good Meal, Online. http://www.cold-me.net/, 2002.
[8] Antonin Artaud, Anthology, ed. J. Hirschman, San Francisco: City Light Book,
1965.
[9] See Stelarc, Remarks on Hollow Body, Online. http://www.cold-me.net/, 2002.
[10] Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The difference and repetition of
Deleuze, London & New York: Routledge, 1999.
* * * *