bio digital sublime

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Bio, Digital, Sublime

Govinda Dickman, July 2009

PART 1 - ETHICS (CENTRE) - APORIA

What I am about to write is a response to, a sort of sublimation of, my experience of the BiodigitalLives workshop. It describes or results from the aesthetic effect of the day upon me, and thus reflects

my understanding of the events and themes of the day. This is my truth; I must at least tryto take

responsibility for my subjectivity, lay bare my weaknesses and predilections, and perhaps mitigate my

aporias

Events such as this workshop are to me a form of hell; a hell very much of my own making, I hasten to

add. Their public nature causes in me a sort of egological convulsion, a furious and stressful

oscillation between egocentric and holocentric compulsion, between introversion and extroversion,

between pride and shame. The fact that I possess a degree of objectivity about the phenomenon does

not seem sufficient to dissolve the problem, and I find I am perpetually reconstituting myself for

whatever Gaze I fancy I am facing now, and now, and now... I inevitably spend the day lying andboasting and criticizing myself and generally feeling more and more a fool and a fraud, more and more

ephemeral, more and more uncertain of my existence as a coherent (id)entity.

I wonder why I do it. I am resistant throughout, and it does not feel like my own agency, my own

desire, driving me forward: I amcompelledby resistance. I suspect that many of my colleagues feeltensions similar or related, but this does not seem sufficient to stop me regarding them, and relating to

them, through the egocentric lens of this neurosis: as competition, as gate-keepers, as safe-harbour or

as threat.

I say egocentric, and so it is, for it is the projection of the egologically constituted Other onto others,

and of the neurosis some call Self onto subjectivity. However, it is a paradoxical sort of egotism if one

takes more than a passing glance at it: Certainly, it is my capacityfor fear and desire that hounds me

through this space we call culture, but are these my fears and desires? If this is egocentrism, it is astrangely holological(or at least holoverted) egocentrism: An ego with no I, perpetually reconfiguringitself, re-identifying itself in Self and in Other.

I imagine that Judith Butler, Foucault, Lacan, or indeed Bourdieu, would believe they understood,

though Im not sure I would earn their sympathy: They are all justifiably suspicious of the repressed

libidinal subtext to history, and of the historical divisions of power which that repression elides. I am

not the first new boy in school with too much to prove, who grew up to become a new something else

with too much to prove, driven by a sublimated libidinal/existential desire to develop the perfect

habitus for the perfect habitat, to please and succeed and fit in and stand out and obey and transgress

and-

Neurotic world-views such as mine are corporeal manifestations of a patriarchal hegemony so old it

has become invisible to those whom it engulfs: it is the air that we breathe. I am the social agent whose

desire polices the panoptic structures ofsocialpower. My culturally entrained orthopaedic habitus is aperformative manifestation of the ideological binarisms that are characteristic of hegemony, and I am

part of the machine by which a very specific brand of human desire sublimates (or sublimes) the World

into culture. Corporeality is communication, embededness, referentiality; culture is systematisation,

sublimation, abjection, a phallocentric projection upon the World that creates both habitus and habitat.

I am sorry if it offends the organisers and delegates of this workshop to be cast as agents or gatekeepers

of the phallico-panoptic cultural phenomenon called power. They in no way merit that description, nor

deserve the burden of the projection1. I admit, I am disclosing this to get it off my chest. I am trying to

explain something away, to abdicate responsibility for the fact that, during this workshop, someone

told me that,

1Especially since the stereotypical antagonists in the anti-heros tale are always an abject embodiment of Death, which they are

expected to perform as other, and which, in performing, they allow the Self to Other.


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in more or less full awareness of the fact that they can have absolutely no idea what the ramifications

of such an act would be,

they had chosen to release into the earth 100Lof a hormone that is used in microscopic quantities bya planet-sized network of bacterial organisms to communicate amongst themselves

and I did not shudder.

I didnt even notice my atoms screaming. Far

from howling, as every iota of me now wishes to,

WHAT?! (could possibly informa gesture

so profligate,

so grotesquely,

so apocalyptically,

so sublimely human?) I

instead

grinned in craven admiration of my own reflection

It was only the day after, as the glamour of the space and that face and that blue dress began to

dissolve, that I realised how completely had my habitual terror of the field sublimated my subjectivity

into unconditional love forit. Awe of power transmuted into over-determined identification with it. Iremember with a wince my parting words to the artist whose personal sublimation (in the Kantian and

alchemical senses) this act symbolises:

I love your work!


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PART 2 - ETHICS (CIRCUMFERENCE) - PARADOX

The term objective, in its common usage, implies a sort of freedom from, or power over, subjectivity. Itis a phallocentric fantasy that both arose from and gave birth to the insight that there is a distinction to

be made between what is, and what a phenomenologically constituted egoic Subject is likely toperceive. It rhetorically invokes an absolute real that exists independently of subjective predilection,

and typically claims some sort of privileged access to same. It will be the tacit argument of all thatfollows, that objectivity is, at best, a misleading and inevitably hypocritical over-statement of what

normally turns out to be yet another modality of subjectivity. At worst, it is one of the thousand faces

of an inflationary and evolutionary cultural phantasm that ceaselessly produces both heavens and hells

for (indeed of) the subjectivities that it chains to its dreams.

I am not the first to say these things. Many in their ways have been hypnotised or haunted by the fact

that reality is an oxymoron, an irresolvable syllogistic paradox, a voluptuous chaos that both is and

isnt, and which appears to an impossible myriad of beings as an impossible myriad of things. Many

branches of cultural theory, for instance, inhere in some version of the observation that what most

people construe as real is a phantasmatic cyclorama, a false horizon upon which the agents of various

Histories have crucified so many bodies, including their own. This type of analysis is crucial because

it unveils the matrix of violence that is horizonal in all culturally constituted objects, including the

subjectivities that have been constituted as Subjects. Perhaps the time has come, though, toacknowledge that this type of unveiling too often performs elisions of its own: Aporia, perspectival

blindness, is an ineluctable component of subjectivity. While cultural criticism remains transfixed by

the articulations of powerwithin our culturally and phenomenologically constituted world, we fail toimagine other, more important things about that world, chief amongst which is that the mandala of

culture is also always embedded within a materially immanent but phenomenologically transcendentalmatrix, which (following convention) I am going to call The World.

The World is the matrix of all worlds, all cultures, and all matrices. The World is a complex of inter-

related systems in ceaseless dialogue with each other, a mandala of mandalas, a circle whose centre is

everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It is not our planet, though our planet makes a

pretty good example of its activity, in that it is a complex of interdependent systems that exist only in

contingent relation to each other, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. The World is thus the

many and the one

We forget at our peril, that Reality really exists. Yet, you would swear from the evidence of our words

and actions that we actually believe that the virtual is real, and that the digital phantasmagoria called

History is the matrix of being itself. In the realm of the virtual, the real has become the ubiquitoussymbol without referent, which can sublime (see Sublime2) or sublimate (see Sublime3) anything,

make anything its sign. The natural sciences are amongst the guilty, for the claims which support their

objective metaphysics are more devious than theistic or political ideologies, and the passions which

give their real its substance are more subtle.

How can we imagine the Real, when only the imaginary is real to us?

I invoke the global first person plural in full awareness of the impossible plurality of persons, ideas and

practices it must encompass. We is a dangerous conflation that I have learned to mistrust, for it

rhetorically effaces (or performatively represses) the reality of our experience in numerous ways. At

least, it elides or underscores the often violent and certainly ubiquitous iterations of difference and

distance between historically constructed selves and their others, which is all we have ever known.

I use it because several wes are beginning to realize that the dominant we, the we whose desire hasscarred and abjected the face presented to us by the World, really does need to develop an ethics (and

therefore an aesthetics, and a poetics, and a politics, and-) which will bring us into harmony with the

ineluctable conditions of our being. We need to learn how to imagine the Real. We need to learn to

recognize non-human agency not only as the instrumental embodiment of non-human desire within

culture (i.e. as part of human cybernetics), but also as an acknowledgment ofcultures agency within,

or immanence to, the trancendental super-system of the World.

It seems that most now believe, or at least act and argue as though they believe, that the best that we

may expect of sentient beings is that they will ceaselessly seek happiness; moreover, due to what


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appears to be an inbuilt - or fundamental - aggression, desire and ignorance, they will do this whether it

benefits others or not. Antagonism, competition, strife: these are the constants of the reality

perceived/construed by the egocentric weltanschaaung. This observation is the basis of the stoically

antagonistic ethical systems typical of the alienated individualism that characterizes post-

Enlightenment ideologies (e.g. the utopian ideal of a material meritocracy that underpins democracy

and liberalism) individuals will seek the best for themselves, and any realistic ethical system must

be based upon this ineluctable fact.

The exact constitution of the selves whose interests are being sought remains conveniently

undiscussed, and upon closer inspection of these ideologies, one discovers variously neurotic

(paranoid, denialistic, fantasistic, materialistic, nihilistic) responses to its basic nonexistence. In

practice, the basic condition of subjectivity (individuated intersubjectivity) is often conflated with

fantasistic over-determinations of individual agency, resulting in ideological excrescences like

Fascism, but in truth its implicit in the construction of identity, and informs every aspect of the

encultured habitus, from percept to performance.

However, the primacy of the individual in western thought has also produced a very laudable project to

reframe the Vedic principle ofahimsa (non-violence; un-harm) as the logical basis of ethical

deliberation, and to prove that if the only realistic approach to ethics seems to be the principal of

enlightened self-interest, then this is best exemplified by ahimsa, or non-injury. This is no mean feat;the ideal of non-violence is, on some levels, simply incompatible with the principle of antagonism

On some levels In its pure or ideal form, ahimsa means unconditional or universal love, but thereare many ahimsas in Vedic and Buddhist practice. For instance, it is a philosophical toy, used in

Buddhist and Hindu scholasticism because non-violence is a beautifully intractable problem -

ontologically/epistemologically, metaphysically, logically and pragmatically; its a stone which

students are given to chew in order to wear their teeth down, not so much because it leads to

compassion which it may but because it is the acme of aporia

Ahimsa is also the direct experience of compassion itself; in Vedic mysticism, it is a highly honoured

meditative absorption, an achievement hard won by a mystic hero. In Buddhist tantric practice it is

considered useful but dangerous, obstructive, egological; but it is also one of the characteristics, or

adornments, of enlightened being, where it is balanced by calm abiding (shamatha, or equanimity) andsimplicity (Dzogchen, or present, fresh wakefulness).

"Egolessness does not mean that nothing exists, as some have thought, a kind of nihilism.

Instead, it means that you can let go of your habitual patterns and then when you let go, you

genuinely let go. You do not re-create or rebuild another shell immediately afterward. Once you

let go, you do not just start all over again. Egolessness is having the trust to not rebuild again at

all and experiencing the psychological healthiness and freshness that goes with not rebuilding.

The truth of egolessness can only be experienced fully through meditation practice. (Chgyam

Trungpa Rinpoche, 2008)

Both in the East and the West, ahimsa is considered within/through an agonistic-egoistic framework,

because it is a dream that arises from that framework. Therefore, it is often described as an attitude,

and is expressed/inculcated in idioms like do no unnecessary harm, where necessity means whateveris necessary for self-preservation. This is an approach sufficient to the end, but only once the

paradigms ofenlightenment, self, and interesthave shifted to accommodate the insight that no selfexists in a vacuum. The enlightened self-interest of a holocentric subjectivity (Firestones cosmic

consciousness, Buddhisms egolessness or mandalic consciousness, Shamanisms reality)

configures a completely different attitudinal habitus, from the habitual comportment of attitude,

perception and action which this ideology currently sustains.

Ill say it bluntly: The marketplace renders reality redundant, for it renders all truths into marketing

slogans. Whilst it is coincidentally quite accurate to define ahimsa as enlightened self-interest, the

fact that this appears to be the only way to sell ahimsa to the alienated subjectivity of a consumerofideology is a grotesque and tragic irony: It results in the devious and hypocritical conflation of techne

and episteme, of truth and power, that characterizes the simultaneous and incompatible appeals to

reality and to desire that typify sales-type discourse. The path to enlightenment becomes the very


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essence of an empty rhetoric.

Here, in defiance of this abysmal observation, is what I believe is the true attitudinal habitus of ahimsa,

the spontaneous or natural world-view of enlightened holocentric subjectivity:

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness, inner, outer, and secret.

May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, inner, outer, and secret.

May all beings find and never lose the great happiness that manifests as perfect enjoyment, perfect

compassion and perfect awareness, and which arises with the recognition and acceptance of their truenature, the one in the many and the many in the one.

May all beings discover equanimity and so abide in harmony with themselves and with each other, free

from the delusions implicit in difference, distance and denial (or oceanic oneness and oblivion, for thatmatter...)


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PART 3 AESTHETICS / RHETORICS

Bio1 - From Greekbios (course of) human life. The sense, I learn from Wikipedia, is extended inmodern scientific language to mean organic life, but of course it has also been argued in various ways

that the epistemological term inevitably retains shades of the anthropocentricism of its etymological

root. For example, the metaphysical frameworks of holistic eco-ideologies like Gaia Theory or

Shamanism could be said to challenge the central ontological a priori of the field of study known asbiology, on the grounds of a coded anthropocentrism: they both in their way throw into doubt the

notion of the discrete biological entity, and so dissolve the object of biologys Gaze.

I think it is possible to argue that organic life in its current usage means (but fails to signify) what

(some) human beings call organic and what (those) humans call life. Being a culturally specific

categorical term, can it possibly refer to a universally or objectively determinable biotic category? On

the contrary, I would argue that the characteristics that qualify certain phenomena as living things (as

living, and as things) are artefacts of an historically constructed and logocentric-egological Gaze. The

categorical nature of the word externally objectifies life in an instrumentalist, technocentric, proto-

egoic manner: Bio is a tool, a technique to give those who use it power over a life they obliviate inthe very act of naming.

As Patrick Crogan (2009) has pointed out, all techne is pharmakon, and all pharmakon is both poisonand cure. The key point here is notthat materialistic languages are natural or unnatural, true orfalse, bad or good, or even ours or theirs. The key point is that they, like all languages, are

techniques: tools, that create and substruct those categories in the first place. Techniques are alwayspoetic as well as mimetic.

In fact, mimesis and poesis seem ineluctably entwined prior to technique, certainly prior to language,

because beings, logological or otherwise, tend to regard as real rather arbitrarily delineated

phenomenal composites of the truly existing World and their Desire, and to relate to these phenomenal

conflations as independently existing things. As Latour and Stiegler, and others in their way, haveobserved with varying degrees of wryness: Reality, when all is said and done, is the absolute sincerity,

the givenness, the always-already-thereness of what appears.

The specific techniquewhich materialistic language represents, or the metatechnique that marshalls itsmyriad techniques, is that ofegologicallylogocentricconflation: Words are tags human beings give tocomplex composites of internal and external human phenomena. In logocentric subjectivities, in

anyone who uses any language in any modality whatsoever, the word will always precede, define and

obliterate the thing. Logocentrism and egocentrism are identical or at least identifiable with one

another because Logos gathers together into instrumental Objects, the myriad phenomena dancing

across the boundary of inner and outer. In this sense, Logos is the boundary between inner and outer,and all its children reflect their heritage: Language performatively iterates the divide, and implies

(entails, both structurally and pragmatically) a phenomenological Subject, a being-in-time-space-and-

being, whom Freudians and anti-Freudians alike now call Self.

Reduction, systematization, rarification, repression, externalization: materialization and aporia

Regarded as a mode of simulation, material languages are simulacric because, even as they allow

phenomena a species of immanence, they veil behind aporia two inescapable conditions of that

immanence:

There is no such thing as a thing: All phenomena are phenomenal conflations of other phenomena, and

this process recedes infinitely in Time, Space and Being. On some level we must know this, because

we participate directly in it, but we are somehow ignorant of our knowing. Few people develop

experiential, conceptual or intuitive access to the infinitely interdependent and retroactively projective

nature of their phenomena, and on the whole it seems we will continue to relate to our fantasies as

though they were real. Nave logocentrism and ineluctable egocentrism place us at odds with the reality

of reality, and so we experience our rare insights into it as anxiety, sublimity, vertigo, madness I am

coming to believe that each name we ascribe is a kind of violence, for in the act of naming we prostrate

the universe before an atom, often with tragic or violent consequence.

There is nothing but things: Whilst it is verifiably true of any given phenomenon of human beingthat


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it is in essencea dream conjured up by hope, fear and ignorance, nonetheless it is not final truth ofbeing itself that things are illusory. Nihilism in all its forms is deluded: Whilst the essence may be

pure illusion, the substance has never been anything less than real, real, real

Or, as Nagarjuna states it so much more eloquently and economically in his Treatise on the

Fundamentals of the Middle Path:

Neither from itself nor from another,Nor from both,Nor without a cause,Does anything whatever, anywhere arise

From the Mlamadhyamaka-krik of Nagarjuna

Bio is a mote (or a beam) in a hungry eye, and although humans are technically included within the

predicative category bio, it actually serves to alienate us from the World. It is symptomatic of anideologically pervasive ontological error, a culturally constituted aporia of apocalyptic magnitude

and critical immanence.

The a priori, or tacit metaphysical assumption, of objective and categorical language is that objects

exist and that they fit into predicative categories: theyre materialistic languages and the generaltendency of theirlogos is to materialise, or substantialise, to fix or distill a worldfrom the unknowablechaos that is World. Merely one example amongst many, the epistemological jargon of modern

science attempts to systematically objectify the phenomena of human experience in such a way that

humans can use or manipulate them, i.e. according to a programmaticlogic, and thus tending toward

an instrumental logos.

It is important to remember that the categoriality of the word bio epitomises the patriarchal and

Eurocentric chauvinisms, the predilections and blindnesses of those who coined (sic) it as a term. This

unconscious chauvinism is for the most part true even of uses that are ostensibly radically at odds with

the dominant ideologies, especially in the many meanings it has found beyond the scientific

community: it is also widely used in many non-scientific and non-patriarchal contemporary cultures

(see Bio2), in each of which it is a highly nuanced human toolthat plays its small role in the myriad

strategies of social agents seeking capital in the uniquely (and exclusively) human fields of theircultures.

When we consider that much of its cultural capital derives from the mythological glamour, the aura of

Truth it derives from its place in the western scientific epistemological lexis, the anthropocentricism of

the prefix bio-is more than mere archeological oddity: it is pure irony! The veiled conflation ofinstrumental knowledge (power) and truth (reality) that underpins this mythology is exemplary of the

manner in which the aforementioned ontological error manifests: as an alienated and manipulative

weltanschauungthat is notshared by all humans, but which has finally led allhumanity, and most ofthe species with whom we share the world, to their abyss.

Who are the agents in this process? Whose sublimated desire sublimates reality, and sublimes the real?

Whose aporia can now manifest only as apocalypse? Aporia is the gateway to what is repressed, butwhat exactly has been repressed? The repressed cannot manifest for subjectivity as itself, but neither

can it not appear; by its very nature it is the ubiquitous invisible, the absence-which-must-remain-

absent in order for everything else to appear. We are seeking the elephant in the parlour of

logocentrism, the ghost in the machine of language. What is it that lurks behind the veil of the

profound and the profane?

The cause and essence of the aporic impasse, which has always faced and, indeed, fuelledthe quest for

knowledge (or God, or nature, or freedom, or equality, or whatever), is the ineluctable egocentrism of

the heroic archetype, and the paradox of self-actualisation, which the hero is a futile attempt to embody

or perform. In another guise, aporia is the sublime (see Sublime1,2,3), for the same Gaze that seeks andproduces human awe, seeks and produces human truth. In yet another guise, it is History, the digital

and the virtual, for they too are material projections of human desire.


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Bio2 Bioeconomics; Bioethics; bioterrorism; bionics; bionomics; biological washing powder;

bioblocks; biocare; biocults; biozoid; biozombie; bio/organic; biopower; biopolitics; fair-trade; free-

trade; eco-; echo

[analog; real; meatspace; bio; HereNow]

[digital; virtual; cyberspace; digital; NowHere]

Simulacrum : Shadows casting each other

Suddenly everything is bio-this and bio-that. What does it mean? It means nature. What does that

mean? It means the end. Death is subtext in every application of the words we use to mean Life.

Could this proliferation of references to life and nature be a herald ofchange then?

Perhaps a logofungus whose spores have always lain dormant as potential, flourishing now on the

dying tree, or sprouting in the rotting rhizome, of human language? Note the way it consumes the lexis

word by word biolexis there goes another Or, perhaps, a new branch, a fresh potato, the first

signs that an aspect of reality for which humans have had no language, is finally becoming visible to

us?


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Bio3 Abbreviation ofbiography, (written) record of (human) life. The modes of biography thatremain the dominant paradigm for both the form and content of most contemporary biographic

practices, descend from the many-but-somehow-one oral history traditions of Europe, and retain some

kinship with the songs of Self and Glory by which patriarchal nations and empires have always

constituted the mirrors into which they wished to Gaze. Yet, no matter how cleverly or sweetly the

hegemons bards sought to charm a single history, a single memory, from the chaos of reality, the

nature of things is that other histories never ceased being inscribed in other media, for and by other(and Other) audiences. The truth is secretly scratched into walls by the wind itself until they turn to

dust, or passed between bodies in blows and glances until they are sublimed, or held in the ecosphere

as silence, silence, silence, noise

Certainly, in its literary mode, all biography seems still to be some or other form of hero/antihero

narrative: eulogy, panegyric, even the invective, the denunciation, the phillipic... The ideologically

constructed Individual is (again, and again) actuated in creative contention with some aspect of Their

Selves or Their World; this is the theme par excellance of the various biographical genres (e.g. the everpopular psychological approach, which allows us inside the mind of the protagonist, whether they be

heroic embodiment of some cultural ideal, or villainous epitome of all we should fear and despise. Or

the historico-political and socio-historical accounts, which ask us to consider what our (sic) world

would be like without the influence exerted upon it by the hero...)

The hegemonic history is not, however the only form of biographic practice common to humans, and

the stories of our lives are told and retold in many modes, in many contexts and for many reasons. Two

common biographic practices are gossip and the projection of ideological or instrumental stereotypes,onto others and ourselves: e.g. Banks use a very specific genre of biographic data to profile

prospective clients; clubs use a very specific set of performative and demographic indices to delineate

their boundaries of inclusion and exclusion; screen-writers use action to establish characters;

subjectivities use memories to construct selves. Biography is, literally, ubiquitous...

Post-modernity implies a proliferation of biographic media, media where human lives may leave

readable traces. This is most especially due to the ubiquity of the self-referential, archival and panoptic

technoscape, the feature of postmodernity called pervasive media (Dovey et al). The bizarreephemerality of digitality / technicity, which masks and alters the relationship between substance and

desire, also contributes in various ways to the biographic nature of the times and spaces we occupy (seeDigital1,2). Virtuality and digitality further imply a veiled intensification of demand upon analog

resources, and an unheeded amplification of the biography we inscribe upon/resonate within/draw

from the ecosphere.

We have been in ceaseless dialogue with the World beyond our dreams, but until now we have failed to

hear its voices; it has been reading our biography with great interest, and, just recently, the ecosphere

began to increase the volume of its critique


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Bio4 Abbreviation ofbiography, (written) record of (human) life.

In the beginning there was the World, and it was (and still is) real. In the beginning there was the

World, and it was (and always will be) both many and one.

Amongst the many and from the one, there appeared clever apes, and amongst these apes appeared

some who knew the many, but did not know the one. These apes were deluded: they thought thingsexisted independently of the World and each other, despite the ubiquitous evidence to the contrary. It

wasnt the deluded apes fault; the World came as both terrible shock and precious gift to the naked

bipeds, and from the first their capacity for knowing was bound up with their instinct for survival.

They didnt know what they didnt know, because what they knew, they knew only through fear and

desire

and how could they know this? It is hard to catch a glimpse of ones own eyes in the act of seeing,

and impossible to see what ones gaze eludes or elides; something of the world and something of the

ape was always invisible to them.

However, whilst the things that the deluded apes knew only ever existed as those things in the

perception of the frightened, desirous, knowing apes, they always had substance in, and ramifications

for, the World. Even though the apes were crazy and the World was invisible to them, nonethelessboth they and it were real: It was only a matter of time before the feedback they received from realitycaused some of them to dimly intuit that there had to be a huge difference between what they knew,

and what was.

The World waited, but few intuited the truth and fewer still understood their intuition: it is no small

thing to realize and accept that being and existence are not identical, that neither you nor your world

exist in anything like the form you imagine, without losing sight of the fact that they do exist. Instead

of inducing a cosmocentric weltanschauung that was more in accord with reality, the insight frightened

most of them into various forms of nihilism or materialism, into denial or hope, into trying to make

what they knew more real. And so began the egocentric project to reify or secure the forms of human

desire, which some call technological. Some, fewer, were inspired to know more about reality, but no-one knew where to begin seeking and so most often this epistemologicalproject was merely a coded

version of the project of reification, oftechne. The knowledge it produced merely compounded theapes egocentrism, and hence increased their alienation from the World.

Ironically, it often did so precisely because it afforded them an immense amount of material powerwithin the World, and so the apparatus of human desire began to expand into (and appear as) thehuman territories of Time, Space, and Being. Although it began life as an accretion of techniques for

dealing with the exigencies of a harsh existence, this apparatus would evolve symbiotically with the

apes, until they would fuse into a cybernetic proto-being that was neither one nor many; not human nor

tool, nor both, nor neither. This being was a biodigital habitat, a landscape part dream and part World,

but only the dream was immanent to the humans, and the World was relegated to the horizon, where it

became the ubiquitous absence, the cacophonous silence, the Void into which the humans howled their

terrors and their joys...

In order to expand its dreaming, its interests in the corporeal territories of the World, and in order to

colonise its memories and annex its wealths, the apparatus developed many powerful tools, one of

which was language. Symbolic language was one amongst many techniques developed by humans for

communicating data between beings, and it arrived rather late on the scene by most accounts. Other

modalities of communication precede it, beginning with our material immanence in the World.

Mimesis, singing and shouting, threatening and gifting, stroking and striking, seeing and ignoring...

Humans were, from the beginning, one and many. They were a technocorporeal network of

information processing nodes, just like any other family. Like all such networks (or mandalas), they

began sane, insofar as they were primarily and indeed primordially constituted to interact with the

World, to generate and respond to feedback from both the centre (the within) and the circumference

(the without) of the mandala of human consciousness. Language and the uses to which it was put,

together induced a kind of logocentric schizophrenia, which in turn resulted in a slow degeneration of

the Words umbilical connection to the World. Even as it facilitated co-operation in complex human

projects like raids, buildings, clans, nations, gods, and identities, logos delineated and sustained boththe humans and the landscape in which those projects were enacted. It allowed both data and bodies to


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be linked and deployed to certain ends or aims, but those ends and aims were all toward Logos itself,

for in its pure form it is nothing other than Other: Logos arises from and sustains the matrix of human

desire.

Thus, language was used to communicate human desire, and with it the clever apes whose

logocentrically/egocentrically constituted desire/fear/knowing had made them aggressive, active and

(pro)creative, encouraged the clever apes and other beings whose holocentrically/cosmocentricallyconstituted desire/fear/knowing had made them passive, reactive and conservative, to regard

themselves as something called primitive, and their enslavement or destruction as progress...

Unfortunately, only apes and certain other creatures could learn language, and so the egocentric apes

still had to resort to other means of making their desire known to the World, with which they

ceaselessly but unconsciously strove for union, and from which they ceaselessly but unconsciously

fled. What was not destroyed, was sublimated to the maintenance and service of the apparatus by

which the aggressive apes hoped to make their desire real, even as it began to manifest as their worst

nightmares.

The apparatus (human:tool) was the illusory matrix or substance of the humanworld. The realmatrix

or substance of the humanworld, of course, could only be the World itself, but no-one seemed to realize

this, nor that they were inextricably a part of it. Though illusory, the apparatus had massivesubstantial extension in the World and meant, in a tragically and invisibly realsense, the digitisation,or material sublimation, of the World into the landscape of human desire.

The dreams consumed the World, and after a while its voice could not be heard at all from within the

apparatus, except in the groans of the abject. Soon, nobody would be able to tell whether it was the

humans dreaming, or the machine...

For thousands of years the cybernetic apparatus evolved, becoming finally the self-referential network

some called western culture. The apparatus was self-referential because it was hypnotized by the

miraculous feedback it called wealth, which it mistakenly interpreted as introgenic phenomena, or as

manna from heaven. When the steadily growing howl of the World reached the level of shriek, the

apparatus was forced to acknowledge the extrogenic source of its power.

It was only when the World began to convulse in an attempt to rid itself of the insane cybernetic

apparatus which the apes had inadvertently become, that any of them began to understand that,

although their dreamworld, never existed per se because it was merely a spectral form that appeared

in the matrix of the apparatus - neither had they ever been anything other than relentlessly,

destructively real

There are other biographies, other subjectivities, other witnesses whose discours is drowned out by this

account, and whose silences resonate throughout this histoire

Its all a question of medium


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Bio5 A confession; the silent prefix that should always have been appended to the term digital. Thereis no such thing as pure digital, and no longer is there any pure bio; there is only biodigital. The

digital is material, both in that it consists in a matrix that is decidedly and expensively analog, and inthat virtual entities have material agency. Bio5 is therefore also and irrevocably Digital1.

Digital1 A confession; the noisy suffix that should always have been appended to the term bio, if onlyin acknowledgement of the material matrix of human fantasy. By eliding this reference, the digital

attempts to deny its umbilical reliance upon the World, and effectively becomes the closed loop of

virtuality. In virtuality, language ceases to be mimetic and becomes instead poetic and finally

autopoetic, and so the virtual constructs the real and elides the World, the really Real.

Ontology displaces reality; simulacrum replaces epistemology. The code is the entity.


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Digital2 The conventional use of the term digitalis simulacric, and the digital it denotes is a virtualentity that can exist as itself only within the corporeal matrix of culture. It is simulacric not only

because it fails to simulate reality without distorting it, but also because both its substance and essence

are veiled. Its substance, of course, is the World, which is the ubiquitous repressed. Its essence is that

it is aconstruct. The virtual-digital is also always the manual-digital, the ephemeral fabric that doinghands make from the invisible substance.

The virtual and the real are both simulacra that reflect and compose each other until they resolve into

one: the actual, the immanent, which obliterates the truly Real, the World. The same can be said of thedialectics that bind and divide the digital and the analog, and which mask both their true nature (their

substances and essences) and their identicality.

Digital-virtual entities include: Identities, geographies, histories, ideologies, mythologies,

epistemologies, ontologies etc. ad infinitum

The precise mechanism of the simulacric activity of all modalities and media of digitality is this:

Digital cybernetics filter data according to a tri-state logic: All phenomena are divided into three main

categories of feedback. Two of these categories are immanent to the individual nodes, the

subjectivities that compose a cybernetwork: Yes and No / On and Off / Inner and Outer / Self andOther etc. The third category is Neither, and it is has only a limited immanence to the bi-state digital

nodes, to whom it appears as Noise, as the horizon, as time and space.

Noise is not inaudible to the network as a whole, although it is a product of the way that it Listens,

and so all cybernetic systems have a tendency to regard Noise as redundancy, as internal feedback. Its

inaudibility is its pure incomprehensibility, which is indivisible from its lack of relevance to the desires

of which the cybernetics are an articulation.

Noise and feedback can be introgenic, in that both Noise and Feedback can originate from within the

virtual, or they can be extrogenic, in that they can be data about or from the World. Occasionally

Noise coalesces into a new cyberlogical object, a new Yes or a new No, and perhaps this slow

processing of Noise into Forms is what cybernetic systems are meantto do, insofar as it seems to be

one of their inevitable characteristics.

Noise:

The haunting silence of the repressed

The pulsing of the mothers heart

The intractable transgressions of the obedient

Thunder in the horizon


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Sublime1 - ORIGIN late 16th cent. (in the sense dignified, aloof): from Latin sublimis, from sub- upto+ a second element perhaps related to limen threshold, limus oblique.

The Kantian sublime and its many children, both legitimate and otherwise. By which I mean, the

aesthetic and ideological discourses that arose either in (initially) imitation or (latterly) refutation of the

idea that the sublimeis best characterised as the aesthetic effect of God, or as Kant puts it, of that

which is absolutely great. The Romantics idealised it as an experience of the boundlessness ofcreation, or of transcendent beauty not innate in forms, but in truth, as other more cynical philosophers

point out, the sublime can be experienced in the intensely ugly, the abject, and the ridiculous.

Aesthetes pursue the sublime in the extreme and the awesome, addicted to the bliss afforded by their

own neuropharmacopaeia (Fear! Awe! Transport!) and hypnotised by the paradoxical notion that what

they glimpse in the sudden ecstasis of sublime experience, the veiled centrifuge, is identical with what

lies behind the aporia created by egocentrism. It manifests as ecstasis, as a blissful feeling of

egolessness that is in fact the very apex of egotism.

It is most tangible in the superlative, but it is horizonally present in allexperience, no matter howbanal. In fact, in a vital sense, the sublime is the secret face of the banal: Psychoanalytic and post-

structuralist phenomenologists have argued that the true aesthetic centrifuge the thing whose effect

is sublime affect is none other than Death, and there is much wisdom in this observation: Thesublime denotes an encounter with the teleological essence of things, not their substance.

The sublime is the encounter with encounter itself, and like all pharmacopic techniques, it is both

poison and cure.


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Sublime2 Alchemical term, meaning to cause a solid to become a gas without passing through the

liquid state. It connotes rarification, or product of a metamorphic process whereby something loses its

substance but ostensibly is not destroyed. Digitisation, performative sublimation, sacrifice, murder,

obedience, fantasy and symbolism are all sublimative processes in this nuance.

Desire is sublimated into History, which sublimes Reality and sublimates Desire.


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Sublime3- Sublimation (in the Freudian sense) makes a sublime ephemeral (super-ego) of the material

gross (id). I dont much like Freuds ontology, precisely because of the conflative and chauvinistic

we it rhetorically establishes. Indeed, I rejected it outright when I first encountered it, and found it

frustrating that his models dominated so much occidental thinking, and informed such frightening

epistemological practices. Its value only became apparent to me when a kind friend pointed out that

Freuds psychological taxonomy could be regarded, not as a universally applicable ontology, but as a

confessional:

This is not a dispassionately composed map of the primordial human psyche; it is an impassioned and

neurotic critique of a culturally entrained and historically specific complex of neuroses called Europe.

That said, let us consider exactly what is sublimated and what is sublimed in the making of a Self. Do

not rush, even though you know the answer. Savour it wordlessly for as long as you are able, for it is

diminished by every epithet. It has no centre, and no circumference, and it is real, real, real

bio digital sublime

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