the conversations

The Entertrainment Consultancy

“In utilising the audio-visual-spatial ability it is possible to affect a trance through which the cognitive restructuring takes place, leading to almost infinite modes of perception and expression. However, it is important to work with human nature rather than against it, and to practice patience, discipline and trial and error.”— Danica Klossner, New Frontiers in the Practice of Psychology

I was attempting to write the definitive article when some kinda energy association happened. Must’ve been my carnivorous soul recalibrating the diagnostic entrances.

The Entertrainment Consultancy had formed a general consensus that gave superficial material power to the survival of functions via the use value of the names of things but not their meanings. The tyranny of the obvious had made organic substance, being, thought and objects serve the separate illusions of free choice. People and things were representations of functions rather than vessels of imagination.

Time was distorted. In the reflection zone, artificial parallels were engendered between communications, making them appear to correlate with each other to the extent that they matched almost exactly and therefore cancelled each other out.

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No Signal

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“The best way to kill a snake is to set a lethal trap.” — Barber Coleman, Into the Outback, a Survival Guide for the Adventurous

The tyranny of chatterers and tattletales had to be overthrown. But even anti-narrative had to have a narrator. The language of transaction was disingenuous, so the problem’s solution would have to be the same as that of the non-self.

In this episode, after a meeting with unity, misrule, phantasmagoria, and various anomalous artefacts, we would be met with a seer whose un-knowledge would finally unravel the confusion engendered by the sign of “no signal”.

While the Social Bureaucrat Party distributed indicators of generally accepted behaviour, the Identity Study confirmed terra firma as the prime location—not ideology, and far less consciousness. Those who claimed they were changing the paradigm and disrupting the status quo were the Party apparatchiks and FreeDomination’s corporate flunkies. So, Nas knew his escape from the factory-prison was bound to be imminent. (more…)

At the Zero-Core

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“Without touching each other we lay on the quilt and watched the dawn. The blissfulness I felt might overwhelm me. Nothing I could say would be with words.” — Rick Lindsay, The Lapis Daybook

When the impulse occurred to write sensibly there was always a certain risk involved because many people tended to look at writing as if it were information or a set of instructions. This was before the discovery of its unknown properties when writing was co-opted by narrative.

Maybe freedom was a carrot or an apple, but its most sacred duty was to trust the truth of fiction which is the spinal fluid of poetry. There was plenitude and substance at the Zero-Core, deep underground, where deadly impermanence was reversed by the negative theology of the anti-narrative.

In the following passages are recounted days and nights that flourished in the wonder of uncontrolled joy. (more…)

Joy & Play, Uncontrolled

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“I have always felt driven to write about how our co-existence as a species is vital. We should recognise all the ways we can enhance and celebrate it. But at the same time, I find myself to be quite implacable. All I desire is contradictory and fantastical. The strange and quixotic, the uncertain: that’s where my real passions lie.” — Francis Hernández, Natural Receptors, Interviews with Karl Gruber, 1979-93

All narrative was false narrative. This was the antidote. This was anti-narrative.

Attempting to assess the numerical correspondences between comings and goings in the library scholarly prejudice had the nasty habit of interfering with the calculation.

On the night of the Sabbath volumes of the classics had been incinerated, and the revolutionary texts reinstated. Weaponised play had become the disorder of the day.

“There hasn’t been a mistake.”

The totalising urge of the orthodoxy was shown up for what it was: a macabre desire to protect the mythical object of the utensil.

“$120,000? How much would it be for the human?” (more…)

Night of the Sabbath

“Technology proceeds by technique. In business, medicine, entertainment and so on, technologies are set in motion through the improvement of order and economic calculation and by the effort of advancing technique.” — Valerie Gaspari, Decree and Petition

The blot thickened. As the black letter was raised up to the light the invisible ink read like a key to the attic. The Cipher Agent utilised a predictive reasoning originally developed in the 1950s by the Italian mafia. She had been assigned the gruesome task of investigating the historiography of the decomposing bodies which littered the cult’s compound. But first they would have to be re-located.

“How you settling in? Everything okay?”

When the psychotherapist asked Nas what his favourite Reality TV shows were his mind went blank: white noise. (more…)

The Removal of the Logos

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“Preconceived ideas and buzzwords are represented by hypnotic devices for the cognition of purpose which coerces and fixes the senses of things and the connotations of actions within the narrow limits of closed and absolute systems of rationalization.” — Julianne Fortuin, Cognitive Markets

As the subjective world impressed itself Nas found himself unimpressed. It was as though he had been afforded the privilege of that special allotment known as “inner space” as a sanctuary or consolation away from the intimations of power. But it was all so unconvincing. The more he contemplated the nature of subjectivity it showed itself up time and time again as fictitious, as did power.

While floating in the algorithmic floatation sphere it became apparent that no-one could ever hope to achieve much with algorithms, except maybe in non-fiction stories calculated to ground the self-narrativising subject into the ground, which might have been of some use or other, but it was either a quarter past six in the evening or the morning and already the cloudless sky was as still and clear as day. (more…)

Fiction is Stranger than Truth

“We live in Utopia amongst the shells of the un-dead, / Unseen behind the veils of empire’s walls. / The emperors kill for pleasure and spoils of war bring them bread, / But we have made the laws that bring their fall.” — Gordon Pearce-Lonsdale, Collected Poems, 1924-1977

Technocrats in smart rooms were asleep and dreaming in barcodes and serial numbers, arguing that the end of history and the end of society had brought more effective securitization and a more sustainable repackaging of the consumerist catastrophe with their branding schemes: FreeDomination, Leaphonine, Equipole, etc.

Those kinds of intellectual gymnastics recalled the triteness of that well-known 1960s Pop Art collage by Feigenbaum of the revisionist Joseph Stalin in 1942 as a Buddha with armalite rifles sprouting from his handlebar moustache.

Branding was what used to be done to slaves and livestock but now there were prized consumers to think about, more worthy jobs, enhanced revenue streams and much improved documentation. Also, convenient social applications that would eradicate needless barriers to communication. (more…)

Equipole

“I am not dead because I was never born. I did not live, and I never died. I am the living death that resides at the center of the world.” — Master Qiang Myeong-Suk, The Unvanquished

If the language of the “novel” was to function at optimal level, this alone would be insufficient proof that words are sounds represented by artificial symbols rather than units of communication.

They could be both, Nasrul figured. Words were noises, grunts and tribal signs that masqueraded as communication and this meant that they must be under the control of certain shady operators for the prophet. Naturally, this implied that another form of justice would have to be enacted so that the illusion of power would be removed from the repressive order of the written and spoken. (more…)

Surrender to the Movement, Eros

“I am a nuisance / I am a pest / When it comes to the worst / I am the best / I am the reason / You can’t reply / Cause the answer you’d give / I would deny” – Naii Chatak, Whoreticulture

Edward did not believe the anti-narrative. It was hogwash. Yet something about the novelty of it all appealed to his mustard and puce-green intelligence as it fed into a crude notion about timelessness he’d earlier toyed with and discarded, so he decided to investigate further. He comforted himself in the knowledge that this was comforting.

Suddenly, there was joy in birdsong and the approach of Spring. He squirted a lemon onto a dish of plaice, fell on the couch and surveilled his reading materials…

The Rules of Literature (more…)

Enter the Great Unknown

“By dint of its literal form, a symbol is a representation of a symbol and other than what it is said to indicate.” — Fadia Bulus, Untold Signs

The chequered floor of the Freemasons gleamed with triple action Flash in the evening around 9 o’clock after a maid scoured the room.

“This way lies paranoia. This way you either know too much or too little. I want someone to haunt me.”

The narrativising subject surveilled its reading materials: “The more I read, the less I know.” (more…)

How to Break Algorithms

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“Under the rule of the algorithm, all modes of cognition and communication are manipulated, categorised and quantified to promote the dominant ideology of financialization. There is currently no parallel or alternative system to undermine or replace it.” — Yakim Janović, Dystopia Ltd

Art was pregnant with artificial intelligence. But intelligence had always been artificial anyway, despite its humanity.

The seven sensors raised their ugly heads. They’d been trans-mutated by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, but the rationalist purveyors of ideology served education. (more…)

The Image is Dead

“As contradictions may be considered true and false at once, those closest to fiction usually tend to be the more precise, fiction being the prima mobile encompassing all that is factual in the naming of images and ideas.” — Mileva Martin, Clandestine Misdemeanors

To you the image was not dead. You saw literal forms in colours and structures as if their designs were of matchless purity. But the imagistic reproduction of a humanistic aesthetic profile which you fancied had social or political meaning was null and void.

The image was dead but to you the image was not dead.
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Paradise is Where I Am

“The accretion of delusions engendered by the myths of capital and labor imposes a diabolical doctrine of competition and respectability which amplifies commodification to no end.” — Eugénie Villiers, The Meta-Psyche of Capital and Labor

On a bright cold day in April, in a land where everybody forgot technology equalled control, machine personae deepfaked the human category. It was not self-evident.

Their realness going forward pixel by pixel, bystanders began to take on the appearance of houses. Little fortresses were shielded against the elements. In the shelter of wayward appetites, structures of organic / machinic toil — produce — were couched in fabric, offset against buildings observing each other in the environment in queues and lanes and clusters. Plots of land divided into units each attached to different pairs of hands.

“Is identity the same as character?” wondered N.

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Datasexual Supernature

“To the poet, philosophy is pure emotionalism, poignancy for its own sake. To the poet, philosophy is cause to weep for no reason.” —Alberto Lopez, In Pursuit of Zosimos

Nasrul knew the game was rigged. He was from a brutal background and had seen the aestheticisation of mainstream corporate values for what they were. Information had become a parody of itself. What was it saying? What did it mean? N was not inclined to be moved by any bullshit information.

N discovered a representation reduced to a vague feeling. Its meaning would have no further implication except in a fictional sense. So, any statement made by someone or other without factuality would not imply anything more than the meaning ascribed to it. Factual interpretation was unnecessary as it was all too often anathema to reasonable action.

“I don’t think you’ve ever been equal to another human being.”

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All Information is Bullshit

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it says here / read this / it says there / is a definite / sign / look / for the unambiguous / we’re fired up / on noise / we’re deciphered / auto-mobile / we have knowledge / where the word / says so / it says it there / no error — Diarmuid G. McKernan, Voice of Noise, from Bleeding Lines ‘77

Those who identified with Nasrul saw him as an adventurer willing to transgress accepted modes of the rationale of communication. He showed them that the ground of his being was a banquet laid out before them at which all present were consumed by the privilege of free choice, not granted automatically, nevertheless available to the sentient creatures should they so choose.

In their story, N was an anti-hero conqueror of other planets, an astonishingly gifted yet terribly flawed individual. He had appetites he would satisfy but not be controlled by. He would put them to use to advance his ambitions ruthlessly. He was not a man to make a snap judgement. (more…)

To Hell with Protocol

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“The primary model for human relations in consumer society is the ‘contactless’ tap or swipe.” — Milda Tinguali, The Consumer Vortex

Nasrul awoke to the news that the town square had been firebombed and the area cordoned off by military police. Interferences and disturbances had become commonplace in the last few days of the dying of the embers of the empire of the senses.

There were those who said there was a panicked, frenzied grasping for the familiarity of undying chaos and slaughter.

The electricity supply ran out, making it impossible to uphold data transfer rates in another region where the in-communicability of the known impressed itself, rendering members of the general populace speechless, while some stared into space for hours on end, only pausing to eat. Without servility and submission to enterprise, there was nothing left for anyone to speak about, nothing to communicate. (more…)