[NetBehaviour] Technodrome (fwd) long but should be of interest here
Alan Sondheim
sondheim at panix.com
Sun Oct 9 16:10:06 CEST 2005
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2005 13:53:17 +0900
From: siratori kenji <kenjisiratori at hotmail.co.jp>
To: sondheim at panix.com
Subject: Technodrome
Technodrome (A Review on Kenji SiratoriÃÔ writings)
Reza Negarestani Writing machines from remote territories. Following the
publication of Blood Electric (Creation Books, 2002), Kenji Siratori, the
cyberpunk Japanese writer perhaps pioneered a movement among all non-English
speaking writers whose languages are radically dissociated from the dominant
Latin-Anglo-Franco-German linguistic germ-line on the one hand and are
enthusiastically seeking to contribute to the diversification of the English
language whose centrality has already been sabotaged in the wake of emerging
cyber-societies on the other hand. In Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature,
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the French philosophers suggest that a minor
literature does not belong to a minor language but a major dominant language in
which one from another language (less central) writes, automatically sweeping
the characteristics of the major language across new territories of linguistic
anomalies; the writer becomes an insurgent, a restless itinerant head between
his or her own language and the major language. Deleuze and GuattariÃÔ most
prominent examples are Kafka as a Czech writing in German, Beckett writing in
French and even English as an originally Irish writer. However Deleuze and
GuattariÃÔ examples mainly remain within the dominant European languages with
analogous structures, alphabets and phonetic systems. Now we are witnessing the
emergence of writers from radically different cultures and languages within the
English language without any prior linguistic domestication. They reinvent
their infernal writing machines in English as the most dominant language Ëand
consequently prone to becoming a hegemonic linguistic empire Ëundermining its
centrality and violently turning it into a dark pool of diversification and
anomalies. As in the case of Siratori, all exclusively Japanese stylistic
movements bleed into the English language, infesting it with Japanese
slang-style, unremitting and impossible to be appropriated pandemonium of
sounds, syntactic structures and flows of words. For SiratoriÃÔ
neuro/cyber-punk projects, this transition from Japanese Ëas a radically
different language Ëto English is without exaggeration similar to translating
a violent and fully Japanese videogame (including its machine codes, bugs, and
repetitive architectures) to literature, the English literature.
Å(B://I torture the blood electric molecule/::bondage-script/of the human
body Ëthe medium of gene=TV Ëboy-roid nervous system that was murdered
savagely>The masses of flesh that accelerated DOWNLOAD>>burn up the miracle of
the assassin that was sent back out to kill in the blood stream of the
zirconium acidHUMAN beast<<like a surgeon with the hands of God>>//Ç[1]
For an English reader, the result may look like an extreme techno-poetic
performance, a techno-noir counterpart of works written by Antonin Artaud, Tel
Quel poets and the Quebecian poet, Fernand Ouellette (Le Soleil sous la mort)
whose poems envelope rabies from the end of the world. The following text is a
hurried exploration of the anomalies triggered by SiratoriÃÔ Japanese writing
machines and techniques within not only the English language but also text as a
woven space (textum), appropriated for narration, authorial hegemony and mere
economical communications which automatically repress all manifestations of
excess ***
Text as a technologic performance. Kenji Siratori's techno-vortical texts
(Blood Electric, Human Worms, Smart-d, Headcode, etc.) similar to the most
cryptogenic progressive writings exhume utterly original processes of
text-composing but unlike other engineers of such texts whose economy of their
writings is secured within the organic body of spectacular interwoven plots or
critico-manicÃÔ verbigerations about the Text itself, Kenji SiratoriÃÔ writings
deliberately, encipher (hollows out) a new artificial wiremesh on and through
which the text is non-wovenly rendered, convoluted and recomposed continuously.
The structure of SiratoriÃÔ texts is the polymorphic structure of wiremesh
(wireframe) in digital graphic and modeling; on one plane (2D), it is a
perforated space constituted of wires or dynamic filaments, a trellis-like
structure identical to the function of text as textum (a woven mesh) and
trellis for supporting all the signifying processes at work, lines of
narration, modulations, semiotic planes, etc. But in SiratoriÃÔ writing, this
dynamic trellis or wiremesh has not been rendered yet with a texture, it evades
the hegemonic nature of text(ure) which turns a polymorphic surface to a
restricted superficial entity appropriated for accumulation, projection,
signifying and economical communication (thus essentially conservative). On the
other plane (3D), the wiremesh is an entity occurring in several distinct forms
at one time: a volume, a surface, a soft exoskeleton which facilitates movement
rather than restricting it (as in the case of the authority that an internal
skeletal structure imposes on a moving body), a holy space and an autonomous
convoluting line which relentlessly recomposes itself in space. The wire-mesh
space of SiratoriÃÔ writings, by means of its spatial anomaly and composition,
at the same time wastes away all theoretical pseudo-fluxes or lines of
narration (SiratoriÃÔ textual maelstrom supports nothing external to itself)
and evades an organizational formation which is frugally conserved and
accumulated through the text to be economically distributed on orthodox uniform
planes as plot lines, channel regimes for transferring the directorship of the
Author and security systems which protect the repressive wholeness of the text.
In terms of SiratoriÃÔ writing, text as an architecture (even a progressive
one) is an egocentric disease which should not be purged but bombarded, stormed
and infested by new enraged plagues; it should be turned into a xeno-bacterial
hive out of which an autophagic text is born. The hegemonic Voice (call it the
voice of pharaoh, father, author, God) lurking in all texts and the
bureaucratic structure of plot is the immediate consequence (an architectural
symptom) of Text as textum (woven space) or an inter-weaving process of
informational fibers. But SiratoriÃÔ wire-mesh writings (similar to a videogame
full of bugs and programming glitches) engineer a new workspace potential for
the rise of the new lines of communication, compositions and complexities. Ū
suck the disillusionment-module of the murder-protocol data=mutant processing
organ to the nightmare-script that was send back out the era respiration-byte
of her abolition world-codemaniacs emotional replicant
technojunkiesÃDNA=channel acid ****the surrender-sites of the ...Ç[2]
What is Text (texere: to weave)?
SiratoriÃÔ hazardous textual experiments (the Guinea Pig series of technology)
have a counter-question for this rancid interrogation: why should I think of a
text as a textum (an ever-weaving space)? Isn't a woven text more suitable to
fabricate a toilet tissue?
For becoming an "involuntary host" (Stelarc) for the fluid compositions and
lines of communication, SiratoriÃÔ wire-mesh writings deliberately immerse
themselves into the artificial non-woven spaces or more precisely, text not as
woven structure but a non-woven space.
The Non-wovens (the non-woven text)
The non-wovens obliterate the Platonic and Cartesian textual grids which root
in weaving techniques and woven spaces (following Deleuze and Guattari
ÃÔ remarks on the weaving model as a paradigm of Plato's Royal Science [3]);
their composition do not require the regulatory conversion of fibers to yarn
and orderly woven threads. The non-woven texts are engineered or made out of
the non-woven fibroids (dis-)corded and composed by adhesion, friction, welds
and artificial nexuses (and not inter-weaving), all bringing a particular
intimacy between the fibers and filaments which does not allow the activation
energies of synthesis or interweaving bonds pass but installs zones of
conductivity for potentially limitless lines of communication and animorphic
processes which constantly keep the text (as a non-woven space) under
mutations, vermiculations, irreversible metamorphoses and paroxysms, flushing
the text to utterly alien zones where the text itself Ëstripped from its
lines of narrations, plots and authorial voices Ëis programmed for an
unthinkable ÁÑerformanceÃwhich can pebblize everything into shapes of inhuman
perfection (of which SiratoriÃÔ writings are overwhelmed).
Non-woven texts can also be delineated by their super-conductivity, passing
traffic zones of data smoothly from one point to another without notice and
with minimum entropy (a process which is usually blocked by the regulated
striated space of the woven texts); as in the case of SiratoriÃÔ writing, this
characteristic renders the body of the text cloudy and gaseous as it is always
ready to fly, departing from the gravitational pull which binds it to
literature or even poetry, all genre establishments.
Another manifest characteristic of SiratoriÃÔ texts is their wild openness and
hollowing out processes working on all layers of the writing. Despite the
nonstop unremitting prose style which relentlessly regenerates itself
machanically, the text is constituted of a compositional structure which can be
restlessly reinforced by new compositions, new text-pieces, data-flows and
textual fibers. SiratoriÃÔ texts are compositional anomalies (every composition
is a pestilential anomaly) marked by terminal multiplications, structural
proliferations, self-scarring processes and reinforcements of new textual
compositions. This feature turns SiratoriÃÔ texts to ciphers (¥§afira: hollowed
out) or cored-out spaces Ënot empty and blank Ëanarchitectural bodies under
the blitzkrieg of textual compositions and lines of writing which are embedded
into anything already rooted in the text, making new compositions within them
... compositions within compositions within compositions, ad infintum (a pool
of diversified(ing) textual possibilities; non-woven spaces are the avatars of
Depth as the Abyss). SiratoriÃÔ texts auto-liquidate their cores and
constructions (by which they can be identified as literature, poetry, graffiti,
data-logs, etc.), engineering labyrinthine hollow spaces which do not restrict
the emergence of textual compositions or lines of writing. Here, the non-woven
spaces Ëthrough which SiratoriÃÔ writings recompose themselves Ë
correspond with StelarcÃÔ multi-functional entity, Hollow Body, ÅÂn involuntary
host for alien agenciesÇ[4]. Alan Sondheim, too, hints at the affinity
between Blood Electric and Stelarc's performances.
In SiratoriÃÔ writings, one does not need to track one textual fiber to another
to forge the text and simulate a sense of narration (the symptom of the
traditional inter-woven text) and emphatically keep the text consistent by
moving systematically on textual threads; quite contrary, one has to
irresistibly 'jump over' (mutate) the textual fibers or ÁÅig through'
(vermiculate) the holey space of SiratoriÃÔ wire-mesh writing. Jumping or
crawling (two modes of reading or engagement with SiratoriÃÔ texts), in either
case, the reader experiences collisions, mutations and contagious vectors which
form the very body of SiratoriÃÔ works. Mutation is the delirium of crossing
and jumping over dimensions and forging dynamic lines without a trace; mutation
transgresses dimensions by bumping them to each other, introducing collapse to
them and sabotaging them with implosion. Mutation is a terminal tactic
constituted of epidemic jumps (identical to the rat flea), acephalic movements,
twitches, descents and trackless steps; the dynamic continuity it maintains is
not based on the tyrannical logic of woven-spaces (textum), restricting
dimensions or the illusional continuity that the voice of the Author
counterfeits. To this extent, SiratoriÃÔ texts all flow through an anomalous
continuity which is engineered by the terminal dynamism and delirium of
mutations emerging from the text as a non-woven space. Mutation is not only a
tactical movement for escaping the tyranny of woven-spaces, their gravitational
pull and sedentary formations but also the intrinsic dynamism of the technology
itself. ŵhere is no mutation for humans other than mutation with
technology.Ç(R.U. Sirius) [5]
Unlike Burroughsian texts which become techno-oriented reports through the
analytic encounters with technology (whether on an anti-transcendental level or
not), SiratoriÃÔ works run technologic not by means of their contents, subject
matters, defending or criticizing technology but because of the direct
reciprocation with their machinic structures and entire writing-spaces which
are, themselves, technologic phenomena (the non-wovens, wire-mesh writings,
mutations, enciphering and escape from the architectural regimes of writing in
general).
Å/I murder her hydromaniac brain circuit::it is invaded by the hologram=body
fluid that a data=mutant outputs to body-OMOTYA of the ultra=machine universe
of the Cadaver City::the mass of flesh-module of the parasite drone that
inaugurated mimic mode::searching for grotesque proteins in the subterranean
anus world of a succubus cemetery//Ç[6]
Engaging with such texts as Blood Electric, Human Worms and Smart-d, one can
regard Kenji Siratori as a mech-warrior, a neuro-programmer not a writer in a
conventional sense; he writes (programs) the text as technology.
Notes:
[1] Kenji Siratori, Blood Electric, Creation Books, 2002, p. 107.
[2] Kenji Siratori, HUMAN-WORMS, iUniverse, 2004, p. 92.
[3] Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
[4] From an interview with Stelarc in, Homo-stasis, ed. Reza Negarestani
(unpublished). Also see: Stelarc, Remarks on Hollow Body, Online, Available
HTTP: http://www.cold-me.net/text/hollow.html.
[5] From an interview with R.U. Sirius in Homo-stasis, ed. Reza Negarestani,
(unpublished).
[6] Kenji Siratori, Blood Electric, Creation Books, 2002, p. 138.
Reza Negarestani, Iranian theorist and writer; He has extensively participated
in online theoretical projects since 2000. He is also the co-founder and
contributor of Hyperstition (http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/), a
research group developed through the synthesis of Cybernetic Culture Research
Unit (CCRU) and his online theoretic project, Cold Me
(http://www.cold-me.net/).
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