logos

Carnal Synthetics

“Art is no longer an individual social statement, even less the total act of expression of a qualified representative of a culture, but an indiscriminate development towards that which was previously taboo: the irrational propagation of synergistic alignments consolidated between the non-exclusive spirit of imagination, cosmic mystery and the unknown.” — Hortense Varner, Violent Beauty, Art at the End of Time

Traditions were under threat. Patriots wanted a day of reckoning, a crackdown, and the intervention of their Antichrist. Embracing the topics as set by the paradigm shifters, the monetisable personality was relentless. It had no moral backbone, but at underground assemblies everywhere speech was free to be perverse and inexplicable, against everything that was sacrosanct.

After fixing up the hit-pieces for the Professor to be trashed as an abomination, Anikulapo-Kuti inspected the emblems at close range. Having breached security at the bio-surveillance office at Idolator he traced the path of their instrument in the correct order, and while it seemed the emblems might pander to or patronise both the dominant and competing narratives, this served to signify they might have the power to smash the meta-narrative.

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The Apparatus

“The Phenomena Inquiry Team (PIT) was an elite committee of scientists formed in 2016. They touted themselves as ‘dedicated to innovative research in the fields of biochemistry and neuroscience’ but were selling body parts to billionaires on the black market for alternative medicine.” — Ralph Lambrecht, Arkhaiologos, Ancient Science in Modern Times

The dictatorship of the factual was rule by the obvious. To attach power or control to facts was to submit to the obvious.

The ventriloquist was undone. The voice said murder and the sale of weaponry were incompatible with Art so the ventriloquist believed they would be doomed to peddling the methods of killing forever. They installed a mock funeral after pretending to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. A mysterious young woman arrived uninvited wearing a leather jacket with alchemical insignia on the back.

Everything commonplace had become commonplace.

Lakshmi turned over again and finally got some sleep in the motel.

It was said that there was nothing new under the sun so it was the personal responsibility of every citizen to recycle the past to save the future.

“Remember Summer ‘05? I blossomed like a flower. I’d overcome knowledge.”

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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

_logos

“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…)

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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