Posted on September 18, 2005 at 00:37:29.
How to Build Your Own Homemade Textual War Machine
By M Satai
HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN HOMEMADE TEXTUAL WAR MACHINE
WRITING IS AN ACT OF TERROR OR IT’S NOTHING AT ALL.
…for we are no longer interested in writing for the State-run institutions, for the supermarkets, academies, and bestseller racks. We’ve no desire to write for the commercial profit-run enterprises that feed an unending appetite for the humanist fairy-tale. We are striking against all notions of verbal communication as a medium of entertainment or enlightenment or education.
We are no longer in communication with people with whom we’ve nothing in common, (and we are in commonality with no-one, WE ARE THE CATATONIC) who we find to be incommunicable like a disease we cant catch. --we are immune to your understanding.
We defy appropriation: we don’t want to belong to the storytelling tradition.
THE COMPUTER SCREEN IS NOT THE CAMPFIRE!
We attack mercilessly on all fronts—a poison, a virus, a chaotic aggregrate of malignant cells.
To the State-novel we oppose a homemade textual assemblage as war-machine.
State-novel:
1. 250-500 pages
2. Plot
3. Linear
4. Stable viewpoint
5. Humanistic
6. Beginning, middle, end
7. Accountable characters
8. A likeable character, narrator, or viewpoint the reader can identify with
9. A text that seeks the reader’s complicity
10. A work that can be assigned a commercial value—a text that is published with some expectation of profit.
11. Fixed author
Textual War-Machine:
1. 111 pages
2. Random, fragmented, discontinued
3. Time-travel
4. Variable viewpoint
5. Anti-humanistic
6. No beginning, no end: a piece taken randomly from anywhere in-between
7. Characters that appear and/or disappear without reason, a chorus of ghosts, a structure haunted by disembodied voices
8. A challenging, unlikeable, alienating narrator or viewpoint no one can identify with.
9. A text that attacks the reader and repulses the reader.
10. An assemblage with absolutely no commercial value (aggressively non-commercial)—a text that can only be given away free if anyone is expected to read it: AND THEY ARE NOT EXPECTED TO READ IT.
11. Anonymous, no fixed author, an opportunistic collaboration, as in grafitti.
12. A project that may be abandoned at any moment…
It is not merely a matter of destroying all sympathy and empathy in the literary arts but of the concentration of a hatred for human communication that burns so intensely it streaks towards earth like a death-comet from the most alien section of space…it’s a matter of punishing, brutalizing, disgusting your readers, of keeping them out of the test-grounds where your apocalyptic war-machine is being assembled.
There is no communication but acres of barbed wire and a warning: ACHTUNG! KEEP OUT!
If you stumble upon what we write understand: its meant to annhilate understanding. It’s the scorched earth of the blast-off site.
Ground zero.
Pornacalypse.
Nothing will grow from this ground.
“If we’re interested in writing at all anymore, it’s only in the way you’d beat someone to death with a chunk of concrete.” –M. Satai