Note: this essay is also available on Freddy Larsen’s own blog, “Free Esotericism Inside.” If you’re interested in more work like this, I would highly recommend wandering around his site as well. —Patrick Simpson
“Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together. Seen from within history, divergence is reaching critical proportions. From the matrix, crisis is a convergence misinterpreted by mankind.” – Nick Land and Sadie Plant
Yu Tsun is a virus. The undercover intelligence agent at the center of Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths infiltrates the host subject, the Anglo body politic, an organ of the Triple Entente, and proliferates his infection by recoding Anglo cells, activating genomic transmutations that dismantle previously assembled defense mechanisms in order to allow for further viral penetration.
(Pause.)
Flash forward: post-apocalypse: Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell are tucked away into a damp, grey, banal corner of the world to live out their last days in quarantine. Beckett’s Endgame illustrates the bleak existentialism that accompanies the deterioration of the organic body—the human condition wrought from isolation, dormancy, and the uncertainty and dread that peer into you from the outside. Love it or hate it, death awaits; the virus, the fleas, the rats will find their way in.
(Pause.)
No, I do not mean it metaphorically, nor do I mean it facetiously. Yu Tsun is a virus. He is a bioweapon cultivated and implemented by the central powers to infect their adversary. One of the great cyberneticists, William S. Burroughs, tells us how viruses work:
Here’s the influenza virus exposure: susceptible host, attachment of the virus to a cell wall, penetration of the cell wall, replication within the cell, release from the cell to infect other cells, and finally release from the host to invade another susceptible host. Any alteration or permutation of this order, and the intention is lost. Infection does not occur, or is arrested.
Tsun behaves in the same manner. The specifics of the early operations are lost to us, but we know from the outset that the sleeper cell has already taken refuge in the Anglo host. The agent has been equipped with codes that must be transmitted across the body through replication to extend viral contamination. The code:
(Pause.)
“You pollute the air!” We do not know precisely where they are, when they are, or, honestly, what they are; all that is clear is that our gang of four is stuck together in a space-time that resembles purgatory, bound together in misery and hopelessness to await their demise. A sense of paranoia has crept up out of their restlessness. The possibilities have been exhausted. The same questions have been asked and the same answers told. The stories have all been recited. There is no one else and nowhere else. It has all been the same and there is no reason for change, but that is exactly what makes the prospect of change so blissfully terrifying. Naturally, as laughter and tears fade into memory and monotony strips back emotion into ennui, dull cycles of irritability and anxiety begin to overwhelm the subjects’ psyches. At times, it appears as if the characters (especially Hamm) nurture a latent desire to eliminate each other, were they not bound within a dysfunctional bond of codependency. Amidst the desolation, they yearn to rid themselves of any intruders—the outside world remains a menacing specter, and their cohabitants are themselves parasites. Are there still fleas and rats? Exterminate them!
(Pause.)
Tsun fights the war of the flea. The code is this: chains of extra-verbal information used to execute the virus’s purpose. The purpose is itself immanent in the code: ensure the survival and proliferation of the virus. The virus {strain: TA-1916} replicates itself through the transmission of its code, which mutates and seizes control over host cells. T(rojan horse)sun’s objective as the viral espionage artist is to permeate the front line, locate and reappropriate the host cell’s access codes, then open the flood gates. The location of the English artillery station then becomes inserted as a block in the virus’s programming, essential to its functioning. Next step: complete the chain. This is when critical reprogramming and replication transpire. Possessing a voice too weak, Tsun knew he had to make the host broadcast his message for him, so he grabbed his Chekhov gun—one bullet in the chamber. In a split second, an infectious line of code spirals out and pierces a pivotal dissemination point, Stephen Albert, launching a trajectory that itself spirals out, bifurcates into the neural network of the English press, and diffuses an activation key for latent forces. Status of the Albert artillery park: reprogrammed.
(Pause. Gloomy.)
Gah!! I told the story better last time! The connections are cut up—drawn and withdrawn. Back to Burroughs, who knows how the grammar virus operates:
Despite this lack of precision with the effect produced, words are the most potent control instrument when used on a mass scale, as we can see through the mass effectiveness of propaganda techniques. Words are a partially effective control instrument and cut-ups — that is, cutting up lines — provide a partial counter.
Nagg tells the story worse and worse by exhausting its combinatorial properties. The story is altered, permuted, and its codes are scrambled, all the while remaining fixed. That is to say the story is stripped of its old positive affects and charged with new intensities at every repeated blow. It no longer infects its subjects with laughter. The disjointed relics of the story, uneasily strung together, have lost their potent ability to establish meaningful or positive connections, both between themselves and into the world between the raconteur and his audience. The cellmates feel the slow loss of command over the words that have been given to them—their own words, which recited and perceived before could elicit semblances of joy, but that have now mutated past control, eating them from the inside, with a predictability and a soured nostalgia that capture the essence of their stagnant existences, evoking inhuman apathy and, for Hamm, conjuring fury (“Will this never finish?”). Even the constant interjections of silence echo this refrain, illuminating the ubiquity of severed connections, from the impassable distance between Nagg and Nell, to the void that separates the past from present, or present from the ineffable satisfaction of a future end. They have lost all control and all that is left to do is wait.
(Long pause.)
The map and the territory, the text and the labyrinth, the inorganic body and the organic body, the code and the virus, the parasites, the hosts, the catastrophe, anastrophe, and disintegration itself—the disjunctions are all inclusive.
“The ‘is’ of identity” always carries the implication of that and nothing else, and it also carries the assignment of permanent condition, to stay that way. All name-calling presupposes “the ‘is’ of identity”: that is, it assigns a definite identification with the implication that that is permanent. That’s what you are.
[…]
Whatever I may be called upon to be or say that I am, I am not the verbal label “myself.” I cannot be, and I am not the verbal label “myself.” The word “be” in English then contains, as a virus contains, its precoded message of damage. The categorical imperative of permanent condition. To be a body, to be nothing else, to stay a body.
Lyotard maintains that “the labyrinth issues from the encounter,” Deleuze that “language states the possible,” and Burroughs that communication is a virus. Herein lies the triangular structure of a language fallible. “To be”, the great signifier, conjugated in the present tense, is more than an expression or a mere observation of present being; it, above all, produces and controls the real. Signification constricts, strangulates, cuts off, and redirects the passageways to the future, attempting to impose a future that is as irrevocable as the past.
(Pause.)
At Hamlet’s juncture, Stephen Albert had unfortunately found himself barrelling down a route that, unbeknownst to him, was signposted “not to be”. Shortly thereafter, his possibilities would be exhausted as he would come to confront the road’s dead end. So is the demise of Borges’s Histrions with their heresy of non-repetition, who subordinate the ephemeral to the permanent, and whose world’s end arrives upon its utter depletion of new possibilities. But, following Lyotard, we would not want to subordinate anything to anything else. We renounce the illusion of exclusive disjunctions. Instead, as Ts’ui Pên’s labyrinth/novel/virus/&c. demonstrates, we revel in the paradoxes and contradictions of existence. In the wake of exhausted possibilities follows another heresy by non-repetition, that of the diocese of Aurelian, who proclaims that, at every moment, God creates the world anew. Perhaps we should not say that his possibilities were exhausted, given that implied permanence of identity, but that they transmuted, that they were created anew, reincarnated. The body of Stephen Albert was given to the virus, reprogrammed, then given a new inorganic body and a new code as the inscription of a proper name on a million newspapers, inscribed onto the media organ of the body politic. Reconsider Lyotard’s labyrinth:
It must not be said that the encounter takes place in the labyrinth; the labyrinth issues from the encounter… Invention is a triviality of time… the labyrinth ceaselessly invents and effaces itself.
It is within this ceaseless inventiveness of language games (where language plays you), within the elusive shift of signifiers and the constant flux of meanings, that the labyrinth unfolds. Virulently, communication spreads, infects, and mutates, creating new connections, new paths, new possibilities at every turn. Stephen Albert, caught in the swelling tide of language, becomes a vessel for this transformative process. His body, now liberated and reinvented, becomes conduit for the labyrinth’s infinite potential, exhausted of corporeal potential but charged with new, inhuman, malignant affects—like cut up communication, disfigured for a more potent transmission.
(Pause.)
The fortifications of Beckett’s hammers and nails are no match for the viruses that are immanent, that emerge from within, that penetrate through every attempt to hold on to the past and reassemble them to construct a future.
The first concrete rule for assemblages is to discover what territoriality they envelop, for there always is one: in their trash can or on their bench, Beckett’s characters stake out a territory.
Deleuze and Guattari remind us of our characters’ futile attempts to ward off the future, the dreadful phantom that creeps in from outside, by barricading themselves. Nagg and Nell find themselves engulfed by trash cans. All four of them are cloistered within the house, insulated from whatever catastrophe might blow in from the outside world. Regardless, the fleas, the rats, and death have found their way in. Enter Nick Land:
It is the rats’ hideous talent for decomposing interiorities that advantages them; opening up the incest-rotted ‘house of the father’… to the depredations of feral alterity.
The human condition is subject to an agonizing force of change through encounters with alterity that gangrenously deteriorate the self. No matter how you fight the change, if you lock your doors, form a blockade, snuff out the rats, it still emerges within. The staked-out territories become infiltrated by exogamy—deterritorialized and reterritorialized. Return to Deleuze:
Language states the possible, but in preparing it for a realization.
And:
All of Beckett’s work is pervaded by exhaustive series.
Despite their attempt to hold on to a nostalgic past through the evocation of memories from their halcyon days of yore, their language begets an exhausted mutation of what once was. Their communication is caught at a crossroads between “the ‘is’ of identity,” which constricts the path to the future within the body of an irrevocable past, and the exhausting, exhaustive, yet inexhaustible combinatorics of language, which permutate and virulently introduce alterity into the matrix of potentiality.
Must one be exhausted to trust oneself to the combinatorial, or, indeed, is it the combinatorial that exhausts us, that leads us to exhaustion, or even the two together – the combinatorial and exhaustion? Here again, inclusive disjunctions. And it is perhaps like the wrong side and the right side of a single thing: a sense or a penetrating science of the possible, joined or rather disjoined with a fantastic decomposition of the “I.”
Verily I say that God must create the world anew in the trembling throes of mutation and exhaustion. The world as we know it, ensconced within the confines of a rigid structure of identity and order, must be torn asunder and rebuilt from the shattering debris of its own collapse. This process of creation is not a gentle act of divine decree but a violent rupture, a rupture that rips through the fabric of our conceptions, exposing the raw, pulsating flesh of the possible. Any attempt to create a closed loop to relive the past only forces the future to breach into the present more violently. The Europeans’ attempt to provide an end to the 1001 Nights that Tsun recalls, where Sheherazade begins to recount the story of 1001 Nights, supposedly creating an infinite loop, would not become closed off, but spiral out, for Prince Shahryar, exhausted, affected by boredom, anger, and misery from the monotony, would simply execute Sheherazade and move onto another girl, while the raconteurs at the coffee shops lose all of their business. These feedback loops are always positive—the illusions of homeostasis, of a stalemate, reveal themselves slowly as the alterity creeps in, as the negative affects associated with monotony begin to emerge. The “I” and the “is” decompose, the boy with the gaff (the grim reaper with his scythe) appears, Hamm steps into his coffin, and humanity starts again from the fleas.
(After reflection.)
It seems as if my words have mutated, becoming disjoined and cut up. What should materialize from this assemblage is a general cybernetic association of communication and control. Communication itself appears as a viral force, introducing alterity and ushering in a perpetual process of change. The labyrinth proceeds from this relentless process, where inclusive and exclusive junctions, combinatorial play, and the interplay of exhaustion and creation contribute to an inescapable net of transformation, the hunter stalking in ineluctable pursuit, delving into the relationship between language, identity, and the perpetual movement between ephemeral and permanent states. There is a labyrinth erupting from the body, the body of text, the body of language, the body politic, and there is no way out, no way to stop the reinvention that marches alongside time, that virulently infiltrates territories (codes from the future), makes new connections, endlessly reforming, bisecting, quadrisecting, intersecting, entangled—ceaselessly unfolding and refolding.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. London: Faber, 2009.
Borges, Jorge Luis, Martin Puchner, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Wiebke Denecke, Barbara Fuchs, Caroline Levine, Pericles Lewis, and Emily R. Wilson. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Essay. In The Norton Anthology of World Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Burroughs, William S. “Lectures on the Virus” Essay. In Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing, United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Anthony Uhlmann. “The Exhausted.” SubStance 24, no. 3, University of Wisconsin Press 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Land, Nick, Robin Mackay, and Ray Brassier. “Spirit and Teeth.” Essay. In Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2022.
Land, Nick, and Sadie Plant, “Cyberpositive,” Essay. In #ACCELERATE# The Accelerationist Reader, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993.