"The first philosophies furnished power with its formal structure. More precisely speaking, 'metaphysics' designates the apparatus whose actuation requires a principle: associating words, things, and actions. At the time of the Turning Point, when presence as ultimate identity turns into presence as irreducible difference, its actuation appears to be without principle."
-Reiner Schürmann, "What is to be made of the end of metaphysics?"
* This text was the document written for the foundation of the SASC, the Society for the Advancement of Criminal Science. The SASC is a non-profit dedicated to the anonymous collection, classification, and diffusion of all knowledge-powers useful to anti-imperial war machines.
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At the beginning there was the vision, on some floor or other of one of those sinister glass beehives of the tertiary sector; an endless vision through the panopticized space, of dozens of seated bodies, in line, distributed according to a modular kind of logic; dozens of bodies apparently without any life to them, separated by thin glass walls, tapping away on their computers. In this vision, in turn, there was a revelation of the brutally political character of this forced immobilization of bodies. And the obvious but paradoxical fact of these bodies being all the more immobile as their mental functions were activated, captivated, mobilized, as they bustled and responded in real time to the fluctuations of the information flows crossing the screens. We went with this vision, taking what we'd found in it, and we spread it around at an exposition at the MoMA in New York, where enthusiastic cyberneticians, freshly converted to making artistic excuses, had resolved to present to the public all their apparatuses for neutralization and normalization by work that they'd come up with for the future. The exposition was called Workspheres: they were demonstrating how an iMac can transform work, which itself had become as superfluous as it was intolerable, into leisure; how a "convivial" environment can make the average Bloom more disposed towards coping with the most desolate existence and can maximize his social output; or how PEOPLE might arrange things in such a way as to ensure that said Bloom's tendencies towards anxiety could be done away with once all the parameters of his physiology, his habits and his character had been integrated into his personalized workspace. From the concurrence of these "visions" one got the feeling that PEOPLE had finally managed to produce minds, and to produce bodies as waste, as inert and cumbersome masses, the condition for - but above all the obstacle to - the progress of purely cerebral processes. The chair, the desk, the computer: it could all become just part of an apparatus. A search-and-seizure of production. A methodical enterprise for attenuating all forms-of-life. Jünger spoke of a kind of "spiritualization of the world," but in not necessarily so flattering a sense.
We can imagine another beginning, another genesis. This time, at the beginning, there was an inconvenience; an annoyance linked to the general spread of surveillance machinery in the shops, specifically to the anti-theft gates. There was a slight anxiety at the moment one passed through them, not knowing whether they were going to go off or not, whether we'd be picked out of the anonymous flow of consumers as "an undesirable customer," as "thieves." And so there was the annoyance - who knows, maybe the resentment? - of getting yelled at once in a while, and the clear foreknowledge that these apparatuses indeed had for some time now actually been working. That the task of surveillance, for example, was more and more exclusively confided to a mass of watchmen who knew what to look for, because they themselves were former thieves. Who in all their gestures were merely walking human apparatuses.
Now let's imagine a really improbable kind of genesis for the sake of the most incredulous. Here the starting point would be the question of determinity, the fact that there is, unavoidably, predetermination; but that this inevitability could also take on the sense of a formidable freedom: playing with the determinations. An inflationist subversion of cybernetic control.
All in all, at the beginning there was nothing. Nothing but the refusal to innocently play along with any of the games that PEOPLE had planned to manipulate us with.
And - who knows? - the
FIERCE
desire to perhaps
dizzy a few of them.