• Home
• Text.s
• Graphic.s
• Forthcoming Publications
• Forum
• Search
• Linkware
• Aknowledgements
• Bio/Contact/(c)

Zombie blues

By Vauung

Vauungite apologies for contributing to the day-after-Jonestown vibration here last week.

Collapse Co.’s diagnosis of sick Heideggerean remorse doesn’t cut much crystal meth with Vauung, but the monster definitely has a problem. As the Cold-me token Leninist it howls ‘What is to be done?’ while despising all concrete revolutionary constituencies. Schizoanalysis/whatever only retains a practical vitality by connecting to social forces that can convert or conduce its slogan machinery into efficient machinic vectors, but the actually existing ‘revolutionary’ groups have proven to be a nauseating melange of retro-leftist authoritarians, bleeding-heart student poseurs and islamonazi reactionaries. The ‘militant masses’ (Hardt-Negri ‘multitudes’) have no vocation beyond that of gumming-up the process and increasing its intrinsic conservatism. (This has frozen into an axiom for Vauung, any attempt to argue for the schizorevolutionary potential of these loathesome half-wits will be met with utter indifference.)

On the other side, the global ‘capitalist’ process, while lamentably inhibited, is absolutely revolutionary in tendency. Contemporary bioscience has re-awakened a connective intimacy with bacterial sexuality lost to metazoic lineages for over half a billion years, information technology is instantiating evolutionary dynamics in inorganic substrates, Artificial Intelligence is fusing with the finance system to produce a distributed economic planet mind, human bodies are being cut-up and remixed with technology, gargantuan flows and decodings proceed. The entire machinery is hurtling towards Singularity (in the Extropian sense): self-reinforcing intelligenesis, compared to which any political ‘revolution’ is a sad-parody of cosmic potentiality (and almost certainly a reactionary braking mechanism).

‘Hurtling’ historically, but crawling ‘existentially’. The people driving the process (to begin anthropomorphically) are typically apolitical, hard-working, decent, economically-oriented cosmopolitan individualists. The average Hong Kong resident provides a good model, but these ‘true progessives’ are scattered all over the world. This population is entirely unrepresented at anti-globo demos and in madrassas, but elsewhere it is swelling steadily. Its common feature is an implicit ascetic acceptance that the intensity of planetary mutation occurs elsewhere. When compared to the glorious D&Gon promise of delirious fusion with terrestrial schizogenesis, its pleasures are meagre and inconsequential. Work hard, educate your kids, get drunk to numb the pain – that’s the most plausible formula for contributing to planetary-flip yet discovered. Not very romantic, and that’s the nub.

So how do revolutionary romantics respond? To take one pertinent Cold-me example, which includes Reza and Vauung, they set out on a savage pilgrimage in search of inhuman revolutionary forces: loa, dark divinities, vermin, plagues … Whatever the probability of ‘success’, this has consequences for their ‘polytics’ (dissociation of the city/state into twitching multiplicities). After crossing this line, it is senseless to continue with a certain type of rhetoric, which even the D&Gon fails to break with -- one implying the existence of a broadly anthropomorphic revolutionary subjectivity seeking practical guidance. The actually-existing revolutionaries are too busy working at the chip factory to attend to the topic of rodent-driven biological decoding, while those leftist morons still eager for philosophical challenges and political adventures only want to shut the process down. There’s no one to reach out to. Even the rats don’t care.

That in a nut’s hell is the issue: the dead rhetoric of polytical agitation. There’s no realistic audience, no functionality, no momentum. Pissing into a whirlwind comes to mind, for no particular reason.

Whatever. There’s always booze and zombie movies.