pseudoscience

The Liar’s Kiss

“The wireless, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, all these marvelous inventions are indeed, as you put it, ‘re-inventing the human being’. But I say that if this most fundamental of truths displeases you so, there is no choice: your interpretation of this truth will be rejected. You claim to live without these things but the free society requires the freedom of science to pursue its goals.” — Prescott Conrad (in conversation with Roland Windsor-Young, 1942), The Free Society, Radio Broadcasts, 1940-1963

At 873 Emerald Way, Nasrul was found to be all the stranger for his fiction. After he left the premises and walked into a bar on the corner, amongst some small business owners, landlords, local shop keepers, and some of the office staff from FreeDomination, he drank seven shots of tequila then went back to 873 Emerald Way.

With the help of a convenient dispenser I was compelled to document these events.

Criminal gangs were getting through a loophole, stealing DNA and trading in clones of celebs, politicos and other VIPs. The Entertrainment Consultancy demanded it, although they never would admit to it. The Society of Watchers was placing its faith in the big-time illusions of the big game psy-op and seeking out some new attention seekers. Compulsive viewing had become compulsory.

I joined the Counter-Intuitive Literature Investigation Team (C-ILIT) as a sleeping partner, in the hope of an irrational explanation for the anomalous content of these outpourings. If I could not be described as a function then I was a plain tonal pattern that signified a stereotype. In the context of commerce, I was a set of perceived characteristics to be qualified in accordance with historical tropes. Otherwise, I was a business card for a psychic reader.

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The Kill-Freak Syndicate!

“The philosophers’ inventive theories of time and money directed and guided the managerial class towards the ways by which they could change the world to suit themselves.” — Steven Simpson, Blinded by Science

In the old mansion house in the swamplands where the cops would never find him, the occupant paced the dining room. Anikulapo-Kuti was possessed of an unusual, chaotic intelligence. Dinner was at seven.

Psycho-gulls ate from the pre-conscious archives and regurgitated scones and tea in the afternoon. Fearful they were not, yet with fear and terror were they deplored as they cut a finger slicing a side of beef or cracked an Arabian plate.

Description lost out to prescription. Pushed with a haste that could only be stalled by informational products, marvellous new vices were engineered in leaps and bounds and spread abroad by the forces of evil.

Poverty Inc moved into new territories, solving problems with a new spin on an old dogma, promises of betterment, a way to bridge the gap. Condescending to point at a picture of a pauper in a cloth cap holding a noose round the neck of a woman accused of witchcraft, and pointing out the barbarism, the faulty metaphor was recycled against a backdrop of leisurely hours spent haranguing the natives about how lucky they were to till the soil.

“Turn the ghost up in here.”

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Situation Normal: All Fucked Up

“The only triumph the bureaucrats can claim for their invention of the cost of identity is the truth in their assertion that no synchronal force is binding. But their victory is hollow. Neither sleep nor death offer any escape.” — Stravo Kellarman, Enemies of Life

I dedicated my research to infinity and infinity for finite ends. My job was to unlock and enchant, delight, and unburden, and return the feedback loops to mystery. Like a botanist of the slightest gesture, I would exact the cause, and unravel and blossom.

In a fevered orison at night I confessed nothing written here was binding. Nothing written here would apply two weeks later, but for the duration of the sampling of this voice the reader became both ventriloquist and oracle. Captivated by the synthesiser, the name of our fad would be “Histrionic”. Our words were sung from behind the sofa. We resided there with the racoons and coyotes, like ambassadors of scorn, prevailing over the followers, non-ironic and fake, hypnotised by the synthesiser: supersonic, electronic, perfunctory.

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The Dictatorship of the Factual

“If there is to be any basis for solidarity, much more intensity is required. Firstly, to salvage and revitalise, and then to acquire full comprehension of the cohesive energy that binds the different elements our mistaken beliefs have disconnected from the primal origin. And then to synchronise that energy with the alienated environment in which it was lost.” — Nadezhda Kharitonov, Alien Republic

I was sent from the future. Any verbal object was a tool of the imagination. I was writing from within the essence of things, but the centre would not hold, so I related the following…

Nasrul was consenting and often anecdotal. He was aware that his collaboration with the author was in both their interests. Nevertheless, in making the golden choice, he was denying the cost of life or death and leaving behind the need to survive as a character. He had no belief in evaluation or development and had abandoned the mental effort to grasp the fact of time some time ago. None of this entailed withdrawal or disinterest. On the contrary, it enabled a fuller penetration and excavation of the great unknown.

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Beacon & Vessel

“Allow me the pleasure of your destruction.” — Agapios Stojanov, Bonds

The world inhabited by Nasrul was one in which the rationales of quantification and categorisation were dominant throughout all forms of human action and interaction. His life was experienced by its readers both within and outside this novel, but less via his character than his status as transmitter of the novel’s primary superstitions, yet his absence as a coherent character and his mysterious presence as an anomalous cipher meant that the novel had no conceptual form. Rather than possessing a core integral message as a communicating vessel, whatever was communicated was unknown / anomalous.

One accurate impression that was conveyed was of N as the last man standing. The one who best portrayed N was YOU, but YOU could not realistically expect to fulfil all the requirements of the main character by recourse to facts.

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The Big Homunculus

“I see its eyes as they move in its head and on to me. I feel it looking at me. I feel that it apprehends the very nature of my being and at the same time transmits its own. I move, but I cannot move from its sight. Happily, I am transfixed.” — Jodi Stroman, Gimmicks

The new era had unleashed a new evil: the birth of the Big Homunculus. As the buzzword left the mouth of the Reality TV presenter it was quickly absorbed into the brains of the watchers. Some concern was shown for a rabbit hole that lead to the tomb of established law and order. Later in the day, the buzzword was rediscovered on the floor of the interrogation room, scrawled on repeat prescription.

The cybernetic fantasy had become the template for a new kind of unreality. Pseudoscience had brought the human population into unerring compliance with the social body. Society’s gods were factual data that were fabricated, re-constructed and replicated by the available machines. Automation provided freedom of expression under the rule of the economy. There would be no need to compete for survival because the thing called society would be ruled over by the majority and finally reach TOTAL DEMOCRACY.

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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…)

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…)

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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