Posted on September 17, 2005 at 22:59:09.
Depeupleur: She-It
By RN
Another piece from my joint project (Empire It) with M Satai, I post it here for feedback, suggestions, brutal critiques, etc before publishing it. Of course, it is my answer to M Satai and is followed by a superbly exciting answer from him. Thank you all.
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You hinted at 'it pronoun' in your discussion about Schwarzennegger playing as Terminator; although I do not consider 'It' as something singular, monolithic or castrated but it is interesting to me that you are approaching a non-masculine and at the same time somehow an unfeminineable (She-less but not external to femininity) trait for Schwarzennegger's robotic architecture through liquidating it in 'It', the ungrounded or blind solid descending into an irreparable anonymity. Paranoid analyses already have criticized this rigid-appearing and supposedly monolithic body in Terminator series as an instance of masculine technosphere which institutionalizes all flows of techno-capitalism through the same old body of masculinity which has been paranoiacally bolstered up by multiple skeletons and trellises. The similar critiques have been ascribed to Moravec's works too. Unfortunately, such analyses not only suffer a kind of observational empiricism (merely criticizing the shells and in this case the metallic carapace of Schwarzennegger and its masculine audio-waves) interfused with and recoded by a new political vocabulary mostly bound to a part of postmodern theory but also undergo an extremely dangerous domestication and concealment, assembling a new political working-ground of survival. Such retro-industrial laminar streams of analyses through a grounded future simultaneously pushes us into a merely survival-oriented paralysis in which we cannot realize the emergency of investigating 'the germination of new entities or new networks of power'; such approaches and critiques cover themselves with a new survival-based shelter which is not actually the heavily architected courtyard of Academy but a liquid architecture of micro-institutions and reengineered organizations which ruthlessly serve the circulatory bulimia of solidity; a shelter which politically empowers itself through an atypical victimization (victim-complex) of its whole body, then, slyly managing to build up and procure the fierce devictimization processes from the nodes of power which no one should criticize; a set of processes forming a new sophisticated crypto-fascism, both creative and artless.
The rise of new anonymous entities, affinities with the nonhuman side especially the non-organic milieus, its prosthetic lineaments all compile 'It' as an attractive space through which all the wild lines of becoming and mutation can convolute and traverse. Whenever we want to discuss 'It', we encounter a lack of ascription, attribute and self. We, you, they, he, she, I and their properties (us, yours, etc.) always refer to the survival units whose vicinity is grounded on survival economy and their connections are distributed through affordance; each one is configured as an environment for the other, patrolling its survival. Nothing can survive through this nonvolumetric ground except polices of survival, the supporters of cop-land, the survivalist agents. Aside from this survival dictatorship, they try to elude 'It' as a contamination. The openness of 'It' is non-environmental but pestilentially interdimensional; for 'It', collapse is bumped to all traces of inside and outside. Prosthesis as an avatar of 'It' also challenges the analyses which criticize the 'invasion panorama' — or where prosthesis infiltrates the body -- revealing the roots of such critiques which are basically Cartesian and are concentrated on the survival-oriented affordance of outside and inside. Through the non-environmental openness of 'It' so the expanse of prosthesis, plug-in is already a plug-out. There is no prosthesis out of the bodily space; it only leaps out of the body to revisit the body on a new line, through a new composition: prosthesis is recomposed to a field of new prostheses as it traverses the body. The paranoid analyses on prosthesis always presuppose that an entity cannot function on a particular position occupied by another entity unless it replaces the entity which subsists on that position; this 'overlap principle' or more accurately the overlap impossibility has been founded as the groundwork of paranoid analyses eulogizing the prostheses which are supposedly out of the bodily space and condemning those (prosthesis), supposedly, working through the bodily space that is to say, as soon as a prosthesis pops up through the body (or overlap the entity), it is considered criminal and introduced as a traumatic installation through the body set to demolishing its entire assemblage on all levels. These overlap-oriented critiques are still fanatically loyal to the despotic cartographies of the body through which the body can only be created through Genesis (be grounded) and cannot affirm other entities without purgation of itself or the others, a paranoic body always full of fear of being replaced, deleted and permanently interrupted by the approaching entities or the bodies (See Matrix): A fully domesticated body always thinking of prosthesis as a life-supporting apparatus (enhancing the survival regime or interjecting therapeutic courses or anatomic diets into the body) or a thing that replaces body as soon as it emerges through the body.
Prosthesis triggers new entities by participation; it does not replace but participates; invigorates and inspires the body to germinate more prosthesis (from its compositional depth), to be more prosthetised and spread until the collapse of its conductive (characteristic) surfaces; sticking to body as an ungrounding (exhumationist) agent sabotaging the affordance-based connections of the surfaces by whose distributions, working-grounds and metrons the body's ultimate openness is optimized and regulated as being open to its environment and every movement is fecundated though survival economy a great part of which is the affordance of system and environment. Prosthesis is, once again, the question of where or a molecular and an unimaginable intimacy and proximity like the panorama of possession (a multiplying closeness); prosthesis is a molecular and an ultimately spatial sabotage in the ground network of survival economy.
Prosthesis is where 'It' is experienced. The prosthetic body is the body of an epidemic move, an imperfectible space whose openness lies in the rise of new prostheses; running not as a strange attractor for the prostheses it does not have but an unground which germinates and facilitates the undying need of new interdimensional entities, prostheses, bodies, etc. The prosthetic body ('of becoming it') is not host for the upcoming prostheses; it is a germinating space of prostheses.
'It' is neither a liberal pronoun (an open system) nor an isolating closure but a cryptogenic openness seeks the infection and the contamination of the other and itself; its openness is strategically wargasmic (wolfish for devouring one's closure and dimensional meltdown); in the sense of prosthesis -- this instance of hunting openness -- being open means to be transplanted and be prosthetised: contamination, an incapacitation for all the monolithic and autarkic lines trying to survive through the grounding processes: What is surviving in the term of Unground? -- a total suicide, spasmodic but unstoppable.
The openness of prosthesis makes it impossible to be analyzed but renders its experience epidemically ineluctable and certain; in the expanse of prosthesis, the prosthesis can only be experienced and not be reasoned. Experience executes and breeds itself as a prosthesis or more precisely, a prosthetic body while researching 'It' as its unground; experience incites a total concupiscence for 'It'.
'It' is a depeupleur. 'It' is where openness can only be experienced as an epidemic; it is not zero but a workspace constructed on it, a suicide: an infinite descent.
You once mentioned a similar view point on transsexuals, fake girls, trash queens, etc. ... that all are the avatars or the prosthetic bodies of 'It' and all at once, the strategic suicidal machines ... this impressed me as a panorama of 'becoming it' which traverses 'becoming woman'; although it is anonymous to 'She' but pestilentially communicates with it.