sphaleotas

Artists Only

Aficionados of “Britain’s most exciting young philosopher” are at a loss to explain Robert O’Toole’s recent allusion to a work unlisted in any current bibliography.

Entirely understandable since, driven from the shelves by religious right-wingers and class-war anarchists alike, and described by the Guardian newspaper as “sinister”, ****collapse would seem an unlikely outlet for the thoughts of Professor Keith Ansell-Pearson.

It’s therefore an honour to present the essay, correctly attributed for the first time in almost a decade.

philosophical tales from rhi-zom-mania

They told me it was alive. I didn’t care myself one way or the other, alive or dead. I needed more signal less noise <which ever way you viewed it, it would always be the same, eternally, without trace or race, it was there, it had always been there>. Difference without a difference, it was bad, sick, savaged, left to the dogs, abandoned and aborted, unclassifiable Geschlect. You couldn’t touch it, hold it, or see it, but there was no mistaking its total overwhelming presence. Its aching, pulsating abscess, its pathos of distance, soothed you, drawing you in, then repelling and casting you out. You just couldn’t define this thing which determined every movement you made. It was movement. But if it was, how could it ever be? And, as I say, it and I were just there, like a foetus connected to a placenta, as interdependent as a frog and a bicycle. It was growth in and for itself. I was a forever mutating mute, merging with this thing, now submerging, then emerging, once again going under, diving down to the shallow surfaces in a bottomless ocean of TimeSpace discontinuum. In the bright white light of the night, where all cows are becoming-blacker than black, I stuttered and stammered my way into the nothingness of something I knew not what, then or now.

Black/white/black/white/black/white/black/white, WHITE! the trite shite of a master dialectician spinning yarns of the dance with the lethal weapon called das Negativ. Try and catch him out or just turn the other cheek, unimpressed, distracted, moving on elsewhere with unfeigned ignorance. It was not death that I sought. Rightly or wrongly, death I perceived as just another modality or being-there, when I wanted to be here, there, and everywhere all at once and for all eternity (not just one eternity but all). I had time for nothing else. I’d made my wager and it was all or Nichts. And I wanted the latter. I craved it more fervently and drunkenly than life - or death - itself. I was looking for the whiteness of the darkest black, for the blackness of the whitest white. You could say I was trekking after pure lndifferenz, impossible differentiation. And then things begin to crack, to crack wide open. I’d found an egg. And it was.

Where - just where - am I?, you politely but insouciantly ask. Well, let’s try again, but this time with an opaque vision and irresolvable riddle. Don’t look for clues cos I’ve covered my tracks. You can sniff your own ass if you want ass to sniff. There’s no going back for me, so don’t bother with the search party. Let me agonize in war. It’s not a little to ask, is it? The way I circle it, it was like this, same as it ever was, as it ever WAS. Let me try and speak of this and that. I realize I might doubling up on itself, but where I am that means nothing. Here everyone is not just multiplying and going forth but - well, let me leave it to your imaginations. I would have taken a detour if I hadn’t lost my way.

As I recall it (but do I recall anything anymore, or am I just inventing the time of my {re} birth, just like I always did? same it ever was), it was just a normal day in an abnormal sort of way. Yeah, piling layer or paradox upon layer of paradox. I awoke, as per non-usual, about midday. Nothing insignificant about that, you might think. But that’s where you’d be right. All passages were clear after a delirious night of intravenous joyriding sex. My ass-machine had been sodomized by another ass-machine. She called herself Big Ben, not without some basis in ur-reality. It was then - you remember then don’t you? - that I decided it was time for me to get interactive. I could no longer lead this sedentary, upright way of life, which kept me fixated on a solely anal existence. Time to get rhizominid. Time to crawl on all four hundred and forty-fours. Could there be such a time? Was there ever not such a time? I needed to overturn, to see from all angles, to become TOTALLY perspectival. O.K., you guessed right, so I wanted to be God. Wouldn’t you? But a God with a difference: an interesting, blind, pig-ignorant, clueless God! A God who was so high after his big bang with the UR (the ‘es war’ preceding the origin of the universe wiseguy), that all he could contemplate was the perpetual repetition of the first three minutes (and what a first fucking three minutes es war!). Can you imagine a life carelessly devoted to maintaining a healthy disequilibrium of disordered chaos? Blow your brains out Einstein, you ain’t seen nuffin’ yet! (and das Nichts has been missing for some time now). We are talking of a lifetime commitment (and we are talking of a long life here), yeah, a real labour of hate and war. Johnny Random was my first point of contact with the world of interactivity. He introduced me to the rhizoids, who were having fun defying the law of contradiction by sprouting forth here, there, and everywhere. I brought with me as a peace-offering some liquor and drugs, catching Johnny cavorting with the sex-machine. He said he’d introduce me to the big ES later and I could have one in my ear if I cleaned it out (I forgot, sorry, I should have told you already: I’ve only got the one ear, and yeah, you guessed, it’s seated on the middle of my stomach, exactly where my belly-button should be. It’s kinda crucial to who I am. My ear, you might say, has become what it is and always was - my belly-button, the great unthought of occidental metaphysics). Johnny treated me, at least to begin with, as if I was some voluntarist-retard, willing this, wishing that, craving whatever took my fancy. He soon unfolded me and put me on the windy and expansive. It was a road to inter-active oblivion. Shoot the arrow of TimeSpace discontinuum - yea, there was only one way to go and that was in all directions at one and the same time. Believe me, it took no time at all.

The negative had laboured me until I was fucked dry. I couldn’t take any more, I wanted, more or less, to take less. I deluded myself if I thought I was making a great moral decision - more or less? Hardly my greatest weight. The necessity of a sublime force, where you can no longer distinguish between what’s good for you and what’s bad for you, between what you need and what you desire, compelled me. I knew it was time to move oben und aus. Countdown to final ejaculation. How can I define the moment of transportation? It wasn’t that I leaped into the unknown, or took some fatal-foetal plunge. I was coming out everywhere. I was penetrating nowhere, my tail wagging and my head nodding and bobbing against the hard, crusty, shell. Let me in/out. Yeah, it was just some weird sin. Catching the groove at the right moment. I had waited long enough, and now I would wait no more. I lost all sense of direction, and I was just there - drifting, floating, cruising, riding high on a wave of space, surfing on a wave of sound, beyond noise, beyond time, beyond fantasy. This was no dream-death world. The extra-ordinary became an everyday reality, and I was hooked. I was the fish who wanted to be caught, caught hook, line and sinker. Don’t throw me back into the water you bastard. Have the courage of your convictions and rip me open, rip me to shreds. No time to get squeamish. It wasn’t as if I had a body to hold onto. All the excrement had left my body, and I was delirious on hot shit. I wasn’t body anymore (or less), I was embodied. I was as embedded in a web of inter-active jack-knives as you could possibly hope and pray to get. They were stitching me up somethin’ johnny rotten. You couldn’t map things out in this spaced out non-space. Things were kinda unplugged, and yet there were wires every goddamn place you looked. There was little point posting directions. Which way is yours leech? Never did the admittance “there is no way” have more force. Back to the womb or straight to the tomb. My advice is take no shortcuts but traverse the limit of whatever road you’re on. If you come to the end, push on further. Mommy and daddy have long been gone, bags packing, with no forgiveness and a bad conscience so big it will burst their brains apart. I was innocent - as innocent as this moment now. If you tried to steer yourself, pretending to be some kind of big chief cybernetic-juggernaut, you quickly discovered that trying to draw a map of where you were going (ha - you weren’t going anywhere, not even there either), or where you had come from, was like pointing a compass into a black hole (not that back there I ever got the chance to test this out for myself). You were sucked and you kept on sucking. Suck, suck. I wanna be your dog, you softly screamed out until you were so full with SUCK-SOCKING energy, you begged for no mercy but only the cruelty of repetition. Yea, Ja bitte baby again and again. Like a drag queen, bending my way across the straight and narrow, wayward on the windy winding passage to nowhere, I had to accept the brute, god-forsaken, immoral fact that the contours of this space revealed themselves to you after it was too late. Yea, the Da-sein of this spaced-out space was a real bitch. You could sweat, panic, scream, shout, stomp your feet like a good-old jackboot retro-arborescent. You could critique your pure practical reason but it didn’t do you no good. Better to surrender. The dice is cast immer und wieder. It’s time to wisen up punk, I said to myself. It wasn’t a question of going this way or that way. No looking back, no re-tracing of steps made, no edging one’s bets forward. Throw caution to the wind, time to get lemming baby. Directionality became meaningless in this nonlinear ‘environment’, but even this notion became problematic for me. A distinction between outside and inside, Welt and Umwelt, no longer made topographical sense. I was there - and there - and then not there even when I was clearly and opaquely there. Like a rhizoid routing without roots. I was routing rootlessness itself, tracking the rhizoid aesthetic of existence. Boundless, timeless, I was there, and then not there - once again, and again. Ja bitte. Danke danke. Put it like this - I was going all over the place but nowhere in particular. I couldn’t ever tell you where I am now - at this instant in time (ha ha what a bad philosophical joke that is).

Knocking at the door was the uncanniest, but most welcome, of guests. You guessed it - it was the dark precursor. Things would never be the same again for me. But just to make sure, let me do it one more time, and another time, and another. Unto the breach and down into the dudgeons, lying with the rabbits and dogs, my death lies between her thighs, her cool fingers which close my eyes. It’s time to get senseless, time - as it has always been and always will be (I am yours forever cyberbaby) - to slip into unconsciousness with another küss. Küsse, Küsse, riding on a K-wave. I can hear the drums rolling, clouds part for me, they’re playing the goat-song. Incipit Johnny Random and the rhizoids, it’s time for my execution (neatly disguised as an ‘initiation into the myriad ways of die blondie-beasties’). I relent, I let go and then I begin to tumble, to spiral, to cascade, and ‘now’ (the Jetztpunkt punk which sends me into delirious trophied paroxysms of laughter, a laughter beyond shame, beyond pity, beyond hinter, unter und über, über und aus). I am absolutely nowhere, so nowhere that I’m fucking nowhere, aimless and formless, a true Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck if you want to get neo with me (or is it me with you?). I was becoming-monster. This willing nothingness, if truth be told (and should we philosophers, we divers of the bottomless depths, not tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help us almighty what the fuck’s your name?), is a joyride. Riding joy (ultimate joy) - let that be the motto of this highway in nowhere special, just very very einmalig. Let me take my prisoners, release no-one, least of all the Gelassenheiterkeiters. It’s time, oh yes it’s NO-TIME anymore...out of joint, out of mind, out, her-aus und hin-aus, ass-out, in-ass, ran out, run time, play-time, play me again and again. The no-time to dance, time-to-sing, time-to-chant. Accept and I will return no-time again. Only a god can save us, they said. Well, here I was! Ewigkeit sing-song - mantra mania me - I sing my ode to joy -

Keith Ansell-Pearson, ‘philosophical tales from rhi-zom-mania’, ****collapse, 1 (1994), 6-8.

Posted by sphaleotas at May 23, 2004 02:34 PM