[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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