Bio, Digital, Sublime

Govinda Dickman, July 2009

PART 1 - ETHICS (CENTRE) - APORIA

What I am about to write is a response to, a sort of sublimation of, my experience of the Biodigital
Lives workshop. It describes or results from the “aesthetic effect” of the day upon me, and thus reflects
my understanding of the events and themes of the day. This is my truth; I must at least try to take
responsibility for my subjectivity, lay bare my weaknesses and predilections, and perhaps mitigate my
aporias…

Events such as this workshop are to me a form of hell; a hell very much of my own making, I hasten to
add. Their public nature causes in me a sort of egological convulsion, a furious and stressful
oscillation between egocentric and holocentric compulsion, between introversion and extroversion,
between pride and shame. The fact that I possess a degree of objectivity about the phenomenon does
not seem sufficient to dissolve the problem, and I find I am perpetually reconstituting myself for
whatever Gaze I fancy I am facing now, and now, and now... I inevitably spend the day lying and
boasting and criticizing myself and generally feeling more and more a fool and a fraud, more and more
ephemeral, more and more uncertain of my existence as a coherent (id)entity.

I wonder why I do it. I am resistant throughout, and it does not feel like my own agency, my own
desire, driving me forward: I am compelled by resistance. I suspect that many of my colleagues feel
tensions similar or related, but this does not seem sufficient to stop me regarding them, and relating to
them, through the egocentric lens of this neurosis: as competition, as gate-keepers, as safe-harbour or
as threat.

I say egocentric, and so it is, for it is the projection of the egologically constituted Other onto others,
and of the neurosis some call Self onto subjectivity. However, it is a paradoxical sort of egotism if one
takes more than a passing glance at it: Certainly, it is my capacity for fear and desire that hounds me
through this space we call culture, but are these my fears and desires? If this is egocentrism, it is a
strangely holological (or at least holoverted) egocentrism: An ego with no I, perpetually reconfiguring
itself, re-identifying itself in Self and in Other.

I imagine that Judith Butler, Foucault, Lacan, or indeed Bourdieu, would believe they understood,
though I’m not sure I would earn their sympathy: They are all justifiably suspicious of the repressed
libidinal subtext to history, and of the historical divisions of power which that repression elides. I am
not the first new boy in school with too much to prove, who grew up to become a new something else
with too much to prove, driven by a sublimated libidinal/existential desire to develop the perfect
habitus for the perfect habitat, to please and succeed and fit in and stand out and obey and transgress
and-

Neurotic world-views such as mine are corporeal manifestations of a patriarchal hegemony so old it
has become invisible to those whom it engulfs: it is the air that we breathe. I am the social agent whose
desire polices the panoptic structures of social power. My culturally entrained orthopaedic habitus is a
performative manifestation of the ideological binarisms that are characteristic of hegemony, and I am
part of the machine by which a very specific brand of human desire sublimates (or sublimes) the World
into culture. Corporeality is communication, embededness, referentiality; culture is systematisation,
sublimation, abjection, a phallocentric projection upon the World that creates both habitus and habitat.

I am sorry if it offends the organisers and delegates of this workshop to be cast as agents or gatekeepers
of the phallico-panoptic cultural phenomenon called power. They in no way merit that description, nor
deserve the burden of the projection1. I admit, I am disclosing this to get it off my chest. I am trying to
explain something away, to abdicate responsibility for the fact that, during this workshop, someone
told me that,

1
Especially since the stereotypical antagonists in the anti-hero’s tale are always an abject embodiment of Death, which they are
expected to perform as other, and which, in performing, they allow the Self to Other.
in more or less full awareness of the fact that they can have absolutely no idea what the ramifications
of such an act would be,

they had chosen to release into the earth 100µL of a hormone that is used in microscopic quantities by
a planet-sized network of bacterial organisms “to communicate amongst themselves”

and I did not shudder.

I didn’t even notice my atoms screaming. Far

from howling, as every iota of me now wishes to,
WHAT?! (could possibly inform
a gesture
so profligate,
so grotesquely,
so apocalyptically,
so sublimely human?) I
instead
grinned in craven admiration of my own reflection…

It was only the day after, as the glamour of the space and that face and that blue dress began to
dissolve, that I realised how completely had my habitual terror of the field sublimated my subjectivity
into unconditional love for it. Awe of power transmuted into over-determined identification with it. I
remember with a wince my parting words to the artist whose personal sublimation (in the Kantian and
alchemical senses) this act symbolises:

“I love your work!”

PART 2 - ETHICS (CIRCUMFERENCE) - PARADOX

The term objective, in its common usage, implies a sort of freedom from, or power over, subjectivity. It
is a phallocentric fantasy that both arose from and gave birth to the insight that there is a distinction to
be made between what is, and what a phenomenologically constituted egoic Subject is likely to
perceive. It rhetorically invokes an absolute real that exists independently of subjective predilection,
and typically claims some sort of privileged access to same. It will be the tacit argument of all that
follows, that objectivity is, at best, a misleading and inevitably hypocritical over-statement of what
normally turns out to be yet another modality of subjectivity. At worst, it is one of the thousand faces
of an inflationary and evolutionary cultural phantasm that ceaselessly produces both heavens and hells
for (indeed of) the subjectivities that it chains to its dreams.

I am not the first to say these things. Many in their ways have been hypnotised or haunted by the fact
that “reality” is an oxymoron, an irresolvable syllogistic paradox, a voluptuous chaos that both is and
isn’t, and which appears to an impossible myriad of beings as an impossible myriad of things. Many
branches of cultural theory, for instance, inhere in some version of the observation that what most
people construe as “real” is a phantasmatic cyclorama, a false horizon upon which the agents of various
Histories have crucified so many bodies, including their own. This type of analysis is crucial because
it unveils the matrix of violence that is horizonal in all culturally constituted objects, including the
subjectivities that have been constituted as Subjects. Perhaps the time has come, though, to
acknowledge that this type of unveiling too often performs elisions of its own: Aporia, perspectival
blindness, is an ineluctable component of subjectivity. While cultural criticism remains transfixed by
the articulations of power within our culturally and phenomenologically constituted world, we fail to
imagine other, more important things about that world, chief amongst which is that the mandala of
culture is also always embedded within a materially immanent but phenomenologically transcendental
matrix, which (following convention) I am going to call The World.

The World is the matrix of all worlds, all cultures, and all matrices. The World is a complex of inter-
related systems in ceaseless dialogue with each other, a mandala of mandalas, a circle whose centre is
everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. It is not our planet, though our planet makes a
pretty good example of its activity, in that it is a complex of interdependent systems that exist only in
contingent relation to each other, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. The World is thus the
many and the one…

We forget at our peril, that Reality really exists. Yet, you would swear from the evidence of our words
and actions that we actually believe that the virtual is real, and that the digital phantasmagoria called
History is the matrix of being itself. In the realm of the virtual, the “real” has become the ubiquitous
symbol without referent, which can sublime (see Sublime2) or sublimate (see Sublime3) anything,
make anything its sign. The natural sciences are amongst the guilty, for the claims which support their
“objective metaphysics” are more devious than theistic or political ideologies, and the passions which
give their “real” its substance are more subtle.

How can we imagine the Real, when only the imaginary is real to us?

I invoke the global first person plural in full awareness of the impossible plurality of persons, ideas and
practices it must encompass. “We” is a dangerous conflation that I have learned to mistrust, for it
rhetorically effaces (or performatively represses) the reality of our experience in numerous ways. At
least, it elides or underscores the often violent and certainly ubiquitous iterations of difference and
distance between historically constructed selves and their others, which is all we have ever known.

I use it because several we’s are beginning to realize that the dominant we, the we whose desire has
scarred and abjected the face presented to us by the World, really does need to develop an ethics (and
therefore an aesthetics, and a poetics, and a politics, and-…) which will bring us into harmony with the
ineluctable conditions of our being. We need to learn how to imagine the Real. We need to learn to
recognize non-human agency not only as the instrumental embodiment of “non-human desire” within
culture (i.e. as part of human cybernetics), but also as an acknowledgment of culture’s agency within,
or immanence to, the trancendental super-system of the World.

It seems that most now believe, or at least act and argue as though they believe, that the best that we
may expect of sentient beings is that they will ceaselessly seek happiness; moreover, due to what
appears to be an inbuilt - or fundamental - aggression, desire and ignorance, they will do this whether it
benefits others or not. Antagonism, competition, strife: these are the constants of the reality
perceived/construed by the egocentric weltanschaaung. This observation is the basis of the stoically
antagonistic ethical systems typical of the alienated individualism that characterizes post-
Enlightenment ideologies (e.g. the utopian ideal of a material meritocracy that underpins democracy
and liberalism) – individuals will seek the best for themselves, and any “realistic” ethical system must
be based upon this ineluctable fact.

The exact constitution of the selves whose interests are being sought remains conveniently
undiscussed, and upon closer inspection of these ideologies, one discovers variously neurotic
(paranoid, denialistic, fantasistic, materialistic, nihilistic) responses to its basic nonexistence. In
practice, the “basic condition” of subjectivity (individuated intersubjectivity) is often conflated with
fantasistic over-determinations of individual agency, resulting in ideological excrescences like
Fascism, but in truth its implicit in the construction of identity, and informs every aspect of the
encultured habitus, from percept to performance.

However, the primacy of the individual in western thought has also produced a very laudable project to
reframe the Vedic principle of ahimsa (non-violence; un-harm) as the logical basis of ethical
deliberation, and to prove that if the only realistic approach to ethics seems to be the principal of
enlightened self-interest, then this is best exemplified by ahimsa, or non-injury. This is no mean feat;
the ideal of non-violence is, on some levels, simply incompatible with the principle of antagonism…

On some levels… In its pure or ideal form, ahimsa means unconditional or universal love, but there
are many ‘ahimsas’ in Vedic and Buddhist practice. For instance, it is a philosophical toy, used in
Buddhist and Hindu scholasticism because non-violence is a beautifully intractable problem -
ontologically/epistemologically, metaphysically, logically and pragmatically; it’s a stone which
students are given to chew in order to wear their teeth down, not so much because it leads to
compassion – which it may – but because it is the acme of aporia…

Ahimsa is also the direct experience of compassion itself; in Vedic mysticism, it is a highly honoured
meditative absorption, an achievement hard won by a mystic hero. In Buddhist tantric practice it is
considered useful but dangerous, obstructive, egological; but it is also one of the characteristics, or
adornments, of enlightened being, where it is balanced by calm abiding (shamatha, or equanimity) and
simplicity (Dzogchen, or “present, fresh wakefulness”).

"Egolessness” does not mean that nothing exists, as some have thought, a kind of nihilism.
Instead, it means that you can let go of your habitual patterns and then when you let go, you
genuinely let go. You do not re-create or rebuild another shell immediately afterward. Once you
let go, you do not just start all over again. Egolessness is having the trust to not rebuild again at
all and experiencing the psychological healthiness and freshness that goes with not rebuilding.
The truth of egolessness can only be experienced fully through meditation practice. (Chőgyam
Trungpa Rinpoche, 2008)

Both in the East and the West, ahimsa is considered within/through an agonistic-egoistic framework,
because it is a dream that arises from that framework. Therefore, it is often described as an attitude,
and is expressed/inculcated in idioms like “do no unnecessary harm”, where necessity means whatever
is necessary for self-preservation. This is an approach sufficient to the end, but only once the
paradigms of enlightenment, self, and interest have shifted to accommodate the insight that no self
exists in a vacuum. The enlightened self-interest of a holocentric subjectivity (Firestone’s “cosmic
consciousness”, Buddhism’s “egolessness” or mandalic consciousness, Shamanism’s “reality”)
configures a completely different attitudinal habitus, from the habitual comportment of attitude,
perception and action which this ideology currently sustains.

I’ll say it bluntly: The marketplace renders reality redundant, for it renders all truths into marketing
slogans. Whilst it is coincidentally quite accurate to define ahimsa as “enlightened self-interest”, the
fact that this appears to be the only way to sell ahimsa to the alienated subjectivity of a consumer of
ideology is a grotesque and tragic irony: It results in the devious and hypocritical conflation of techne
and episteme, of truth and power, that characterizes the simultaneous and incompatible appeals to
reality and to desire that typify sales-type discourse. The path to enlightenment becomes the very
essence of an empty rhetoric.

Here, in defiance of this abysmal observation, is what I believe is the true attitudinal habitus of ahimsa,
the “spontaneous” or “natural” world-view of enlightened holocentric subjectivity:

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness, inner, outer, and secret.

May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, inner, outer, and secret.

May all beings find and never lose the great happiness that manifests as perfect enjoyment, perfect
compassion and perfect awareness, and which arises with the recognition and acceptance of their true
nature, the one in the many and the many in the one.

May all beings discover equanimity and so abide in harmony with themselves and with each other, free
from the delusions implicit in difference, distance and denial (or oceanic oneness and oblivion, for that
matter...)
PART 3 – AESTHETICS / RHETORICS

Bio1 - From Greek bios ‘(course of) human life’. The sense, I learn from Wikipedia, “is extended in
modern scientific language to mean organic life”, but of course it has also been argued in various ways
that the epistemological term inevitably retains shades of the anthropocentricism of its etymological
root. For example, the metaphysical frameworks of holistic eco-ideologies like Gaia Theory or
Shamanism could be said to challenge the central ontological a priori of the field of study known as
biology, on the grounds of a coded anthropocentrism: they both in their way throw into doubt the
notion of the discrete biological entity, and so dissolve the object of biology’s Gaze.

I think it is possible to argue that “organic life” in its current usage means (but fails to signify) “what
(some) human beings call organic and what (those) humans call life”. Being a culturally specific
categorical term, can it possibly refer to a universally or objectively determinable biotic category? On
the contrary, I would argue that the characteristics that qualify certain phenomena as living things (as
living, and as things) are artefacts of an historically constructed and logocentric-egological Gaze. The
categorical nature of the word externally objectifies life in an instrumentalist, technocentric, proto-
egoic manner: Bio is a tool, a technique to give those who use it power over a “life” they obliviate in
the very act of naming.

As Patrick Crogan (2009) has pointed out, all techne is pharmakon, and all pharmakon is both poison
and cure. The key point here is not that materialistic languages are “natural” or “unnatural”, “true” or
“false”, “bad” or “good”, or even “ours” or “theirs”. The key point is that they, like all languages, are
techniques: tools, that create and substruct those categories in the first place. Techniques are always
poetic as well as mimetic.

In fact, mimesis and poesis seem ineluctably entwined “prior” to technique, certainly prior to language,
because beings, logological or otherwise, tend to “regard” as “real” rather arbitrarily delineated
phenomenal composites of the truly existing World and their Desire, and to relate to these phenomenal
conflations as independently existing things. As Latour and Stiegler, and others in their way, have
observed with varying degrees of wryness: Reality, when all is said and done, is the absolute sincerity,
the givenness, the always-already-thereness of what appears.

The specific technique which materialistic language represents, or the metatechnique that marshalls its
myriad techniques, is that of egologically logocentric conflation: Words are tags human beings give to
complex composites of internal and external human phenomena. In logocentric subjectivities, in
anyone who uses any language in any modality whatsoever, the word will always precede, define and
obliterate the thing. Logocentrism and egocentrism are identical or at least identifiable with one
another because Logos gathers together into instrumental Objects, the myriad phenomena dancing
across the boundary of inner and outer. In this sense, Logos is the boundary between inner and outer,
and all its children reflect their heritage: Language performatively iterates the divide, and implies
(entails, both structurally and pragmatically) a phenomenological Subject, a being-in-time-space-and-
being, whom Freudians and anti-Freudians alike now call Self.

Reduction, systematization, rarification, repression, externalization: materialization and aporia…

Regarded as a mode of simulation, material languages are simulacric because, even as they allow
phenomena a species of immanence, they veil behind aporia two inescapable conditions of that
immanence:

There is no such thing as a thing: All phenomena are phenomenal conflations of other phenomena, and
this process recedes infinitely in Time, Space and Being. On some level we must know this, because
we participate directly in it, but we are somehow ignorant of our knowing. Few people develop
experiential, conceptual or intuitive access to the infinitely interdependent and retroactively projective
nature of their phenomena, and on the whole it seems we will continue to relate to our fantasies as
though they were real. Naïve logocentrism and ineluctable egocentrism place us at odds with the reality
of reality, and so we experience our rare insights into it as anxiety, sublimity, vertigo, madness… I am
coming to believe that each name we ascribe is a kind of violence, for in the act of naming we prostrate
the universe before an atom, often with tragic or violent consequence.

There is nothing but things: Whilst it is verifiably true of any given phenomenon of human being that
it is in essence a dream conjured up by hope, fear and ignorance, nonetheless it is not final truth of
being itself that “things are illusory”. Nihilism in all its forms is deluded: Whilst the essence may be
pure illusion, the substance has never been anything less than real, real, real…

Or, as Nagarjuna states it so much more eloquently and economically in his Treatise on the
Fundamentals of the Middle Path:

Neither from itself nor from another,

Nor from both,
Nor without a cause,
Does anything whatever, anywhere arise
From the Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā of Nagarjuna

Bio is a mote (or a beam) in a hungry eye, and although “humans” are technically included within the
predicative category “bio”, it actually serves to alienate us from the World. It is symptomatic of an
ideologically pervasive “ontological error”, a culturally constituted aporia of apocalyptic magnitude
and critical immanence.

The a priori, or tacit metaphysical assumption, of objective and categorical language is that objects
exist and that they fit into predicative categories: they’re materialistic languages and the general
tendency of their logos is to materialise, or substantialise, to fix or distill a world from the unknowable
chaos that is World. Merely one example amongst many, the epistemological jargon of modern
science attempts to systematically objectify the phenomena of human experience in such a way that
humans can use or manipulate them, i.e. according to a programmatic logic, and thus tending toward
an instrumental logos.

It is important to remember that the categoriality of the word “bio” epitomises the patriarchal and
Eurocentric chauvinisms, the predilections and blindnesses of those who coined (sic) it as a term. This
unconscious chauvinism is for the most part true even of uses that are ostensibly radically at odds with
the dominant ideologies, especially in the many meanings it has found beyond the scientific
community: it is also widely used in many non-scientific and non-patriarchal contemporary cultures
(see Bio2), in each of which it is a highly nuanced human tool that plays its small role in the myriad
strategies of social agents seeking capital in the uniquely (and exclusively) human fields of their
cultures.

When we consider that much of its cultural capital derives from the mythological glamour, the aura of
Truth it derives from its place in the western scientific epistemological lexis, the anthropocentricism of
the prefix ‘bio-’ is more than mere archeological oddity: it is pure irony! The veiled conflation of
instrumental knowledge (power) and truth (reality) that underpins this mythology is exemplary of the
manner in which the aforementioned “ontological error” manifests: as an alienated and manipulative
weltanschauung that is not shared by all humans, but which has finally led all humanity, and most of
the species with whom we share the world, to their abyss.

Who are the agents in this process? Whose sublimated desire sublimates reality, and sublimes the real?
Whose aporia can now manifest only as apocalypse? Aporia is the gateway to what is repressed, but
what exactly has been repressed? The repressed cannot manifest for subjectivity as itself, but neither
can it not appear; by its very nature it is the ubiquitous invisible, the absence-which-must-remain-
absent in order for everything else to appear. We are seeking the elephant in the parlour of
logocentrism, the ghost in the machine of language. What is it that lurks behind the veil of the
profound and the profane?

The cause and essence of the aporic impasse, which has always faced and, indeed, fuelled the quest for
knowledge (or God, or nature, or freedom, or equality, or whatever), is the ineluctable egocentrism of
the heroic archetype, and the paradox of self-actualisation, which the hero is a futile attempt to embody
or perform. In another guise, aporia is the sublime (see Sublime1,2,3), for the same Gaze that seeks and
produces human awe, seeks and produces human truth. In yet another guise, it is History, the digital
and the virtual, for they too are material projections of human desire.
Bio2 – Bioeconomics; Bioethics; bioterrorism; bionics; bionomics; biological washing powder;
bioblocks; biocare; biocults; biozoid; biozombie; bio/organic; biopower; biopolitics; fair-trade; free-
trade; eco-; echo…

[analog; real; meatspace; bio; HereNow]

[digital; virtual; cyberspace; digital; NowHere]
Simulacrum : Shadows casting each other…

Suddenly everything is bio-this and bio-that. What does it mean? It means “nature”. What does that
mean? It means “the end”. Death is subtext in every application of the words we use to mean Life.
Could this proliferation of references to life and nature be a herald of change then?

Perhaps a logofungus whose spores have always lain dormant as potential, flourishing now on the
dying tree, or sprouting in the rotting rhizome, of human language? Note the way it consumes the lexis
word by word… biolexis… there goes another… Or, perhaps, a new branch, a fresh potato, the first
signs that an aspect of reality for which humans have had no language, is finally becoming visible to
us?
Bio3 – Abbreviation of biography, ‘(written) record of (human) life’. The modes of biography that
remain the dominant paradigm for both the form and content of most contemporary biographic
practices, descend from the many-but-somehow-one oral history traditions of Europe, and retain some
kinship with the songs of Self and Glory by which patriarchal nations and empires have always
constituted the mirrors into which they wished to Gaze. Yet, no matter how cleverly or sweetly the
hegemons’ bards sought to charm a single history, a single memory, from the chaos of reality, the
nature of things is that other histories never ceased being inscribed in other media, for and by other
(and Other) audiences. The truth is secretly scratched into walls by the wind itself until they turn to
dust, or passed between bodies in blows and glances until they are sublimed, or held in the ecosphere
as silence, silence, silence, noise…

Certainly, in its literary mode, all biography seems still to be some or other form of hero/antihero
narrative: eulogy, panegyric, even the invective, the denunciation, the phillipic... The ideologically
constructed Individual is (again, and again) actuated in creative contention with some aspect of Their
Selves or Their World; this is the theme par excellance of the various biographical genres (e.g. the ever
popular psychological approach, which “allows us inside the mind” of the protagonist, whether they be
heroic embodiment of some cultural ideal, or villainous epitome of all we should fear and despise. Or
the historico-political and socio-historical accounts, which ask us to consider what our (sic) world
would be like without the influence exerted upon it by the hero...)

The hegemonic history is not, however the only form of biographic practice common to humans, and
the stories of our lives are told and retold in many modes, in many contexts and for many reasons. Two
common ‘biographic’ practices are gossip and the projection of ideological or instrumental stereotypes,
onto others and ourselves: e.g. Banks use a very specific genre of biographic data to ‘profile’
prospective clients; clubs use a very specific set of performative and demographic indices to delineate
their boundaries of inclusion and exclusion; screen-writers use action to establish characters;
subjectivities use memories to construct selves. Biography is, literally, ubiquitous...

Post-modernity implies a proliferation of “biographic” media, media where human lives may leave
readable traces. This is most especially due to the ubiquity of the self-referential, archival and panoptic
technoscape, the feature of postmodernity called pervasive media (Dovey et al). The bizarre
ephemerality of digitality / technicity, which masks and alters the relationship between substance and
desire, also contributes in various ways to the biographic nature of the times and spaces we occupy (see
Digital1,2). Virtuality and digitality further imply a veiled intensification of demand upon analog
resources, and an unheeded amplification of the “biography” we inscribe upon/resonate within/draw
from the ecosphere.

We have been in ceaseless dialogue with the World beyond our dreams, but until now we have failed to
hear its voices; it has been reading our biography with great interest, and, just recently, the ecosphere
began to increase the volume of its critique…
Bio4 – Abbreviation of biography, ‘(written) record of (human) life’.

In the beginning there was the World, and it was (and still is) real. In the beginning there was the
World, and it was (and always will be) both many and one.

Amongst the many and from the one, there appeared clever apes, and amongst these apes appeared
some who knew the many, but did not know the one. These apes were deluded: they thought things
existed independently of the World and each other, despite the ubiquitous evidence to the contrary. It
wasn’t the deluded apes’ fault; the World came as both terrible shock and precious gift to the naked
bipeds, and from the first their capacity for knowing was bound up with their instinct for survival.
They didn’t know what they didn’t know, because what they knew, they knew only through fear and
desire…

…and how could they know this? It is hard to catch a glimpse of one’s own eyes in the act of seeing,
and impossible to see what one’s gaze eludes or elides; something of the world and something of the
ape was always invisible to them.

However, whilst the things that the deluded apes knew only ever existed as those things in the
perception of the frightened, desirous, knowing apes, they always had substance in, and ramifications
for, the World. Even though the apes were crazy and the World was invisible to them, nonetheless
both they and it were real: It was only a matter of time before the feedback they received from reality
caused some of them to dimly intuit that there had to be a huge difference between what they knew,
and what was.

The World waited, but few intuited the truth and fewer still understood their intuition: it is no small
thing to realize and accept that being and existence are not identical, that neither you nor your world
exist in anything like the form you imagine, without losing sight of the fact that they do exist. Instead
of inducing a cosmocentric weltanschauung that was more in accord with reality, the insight frightened
most of them into various forms of nihilism or materialism, into denial or hope, into trying to make
what they knew more real. And so began the egocentric project to reify or secure the forms of human
desire, which some call technological. Some, fewer, were inspired to know more about reality, but no-
one knew where to begin seeking and so most often this epistemological project was merely a coded
version of the project of reification, of techne. The knowledge it produced merely compounded the
apes’ egocentrism, and hence increased their alienation from the World.

Ironically, it often did so precisely because it afforded them an immense amount of material power
within the World, and so the apparatus of human desire began to expand into (and appear as) the
human territories of Time, Space, and Being. Although it began life as an accretion of techniques for
dealing with the exigencies of a harsh existence, this apparatus would evolve symbiotically with the
apes, until they would fuse into a cybernetic proto-being that was neither one nor many; not human nor
tool, nor both, nor neither. This being was a biodigital habitat, a landscape part dream and part World,
but only the dream was immanent to the humans, and the World was relegated to the horizon, where it
became the ubiquitous absence, the cacophonous silence, the Void into which the humans howled their
terrors and their joys...

In order to expand its dreaming, its interests in the corporeal territories of the World, and in order to
colonise its memories and annex its wealths, the apparatus developed many powerful tools, one of
which was language. Symbolic language was one amongst many techniques developed by humans for
communicating data between beings, and it arrived rather late on the scene by most accounts. Other
modalities of “communication” precede it, beginning with our material immanence in the World.
Mimesis, singing and shouting, threatening and gifting, stroking and striking, seeing and ignoring...
Humans were, from the beginning, one and many. They were a technocorporeal network of
information processing nodes, just like any other family. Like all such networks (or mandalas), they
began sane, insofar as they were primarily and indeed primordially constituted to interact with the
World, to generate and respond to feedback from both the centre (the within) and the circumference
(the without) of the mandala of human consciousness. Language and the uses to which it was put,
together induced a kind of logocentric schizophrenia, which in turn resulted in a slow degeneration of
the Word’s umbilical connection to the World. Even as it facilitated co-operation in complex human
projects like raids, buildings, clans, nations, gods, and identities, logos delineated and sustained both
the humans and the landscape in which those projects were enacted. It allowed both data and bodies to
be linked and deployed to certain ends or aims, but those ends and aims were all toward Logos itself,
for in its pure form it is nothing other than Other: Logos arises from and sustains the matrix of human
desire.

Thus, language was used to communicate human desire, and with it the clever apes whose
logocentrically/egocentrically constituted desire/fear/knowing had made them aggressive, active and
(pro)creative, encouraged the clever apes and other beings whose holocentrically/cosmocentrically
constituted desire/fear/knowing had made them passive, reactive and conservative, to regard
themselves as something called “primitive”, and their enslavement or destruction as “progress”...

Unfortunately, only apes and certain other creatures could learn language, and so the egocentric apes
still had to resort to other means of making their desire known to the World, with which they
ceaselessly but unconsciously strove for union, and from which they ceaselessly but unconsciously
fled. What was not destroyed, was sublimated to the maintenance and service of the apparatus by
which the aggressive apes hoped to make their desire real, even as it began to manifest as their worst
nightmares.

The apparatus (human:tool) was the illusory matrix or substance of the humanworld. The real matrix
or substance of the humanworld, of course, could only be the World itself, but no-one seemed to realize
this, nor that they were inextricably a part of it. Though illusory, the apparatus had massive
substantial extension in the World and meant, in a tragically and invisibly real sense, the digitisation,
or material sublimation, of the World into the landscape of human desire.

The dreams consumed the World, and after a while its voice could not be heard at all from within the
apparatus, except in the groans of the abject. Soon, nobody would be able to tell whether it was the
humans dreaming, or the machine...

For thousands of years the cybernetic apparatus evolved, becoming finally the self-referential network
some called “western culture”. The apparatus was self-referential because it was hypnotized by the
miraculous feedback it called “wealth”, which it mistakenly interpreted as introgenic phenomena, or as
manna from heaven. When the steadily growing howl of the World reached the level of shriek, the
apparatus was forced to acknowledge the extrogenic source of its power.

It was only when the World began to convulse in an attempt to rid itself of the insane cybernetic
apparatus which the apes had inadvertently become, that any of them began to understand that,
although their dreamworld, never existed per se – because it was merely a spectral form that appeared
in the matrix of the apparatus - neither had they ever been anything other than relentlessly,
destructively real…

There are other biographies, other subjectivities, other witnesses whose discours is drowned out by this
account, and whose silences resonate throughout this histoire…

It’s all a question of medium…

Bio5 – A confession; the silent prefix that should always have been appended to the term digital. There
is no such thing as pure digital, and no longer is there any pure bio; there is only biodigital. The
digital is material, both in that it consists in a matrix that is decidedly and expensively analog, and in
that virtual entities have material agency. Bio5 is therefore also and irrevocably Digital1.

Digital1 – A confession; the noisy suffix that should always have been appended to the term bio, if only
in acknowledgement of the material matrix of human fantasy. By eliding this reference, the digital
attempts to deny its umbilical reliance upon the World, and effectively becomes the closed loop of
virtuality. In virtuality, language ceases to be mimetic and becomes instead poetic and finally
autopoetic, and so the virtual constructs the real and elides the World, the really Real.

Ontology displaces reality; simulacrum replaces epistemology. The code is the entity.
Digital2 – The conventional use of the term digital is simulacric, and the digital it denotes is a virtual
entity that can exist as itself only within the corporeal matrix of culture. It is simulacric not only
because it fails to simulate reality without distorting it, but also because both its substance and essence
are veiled. Its substance, of course, is the World, which is the ubiquitous repressed. Its essence is that
it is a construct. The virtual-digital is also always the manual-digital, the ephemeral fabric that doing
hands make from the invisible substance.

The virtual and the real are both simulacra that reflect and compose each other until they resolve into
one: the actual, the immanent, which obliterates the truly Real, the World. The same can be said of the
dialectics that bind and divide the digital and the analog, and which mask both their true nature (their
substances and essences) and their identicality.

Digital-virtual entities include: Identities, geographies, histories, ideologies, mythologies,

epistemologies, ontologies etc. ad infinitum

The precise mechanism of the simulacric activity of all modalities and media of digitality is this:

Digital cybernetics filter data according to a tri-state logic: All phenomena are divided into three main
categories of feedback. Two of these categories are immanent to the individual nodes, the
subjectivities that compose a cybernetwork: Yes and No / On and Off / Inner and Outer / Self and
Other etc. The third category is Neither, and it is has only a limited immanence to the bi-state digital
nodes, to whom it appears as Noise, as the horizon, as time and space.

Noise is not “inaudible” to the network as a whole, although it is a product of the way that it Listens,
and so all cybernetic systems have a tendency to regard Noise as redundancy, as internal feedback. Its
inaudibility is its pure incomprehensibility, which is indivisible from its lack of relevance to the desires
of which the cybernetics are an articulation.

Noise and feedback can be introgenic, in that both Noise and Feedback can originate from within the
virtual, or they can be extrogenic, in that they can be data about or from the World. Occasionally
Noise coalesces into a new cyberlogical object, a new Yes or a new No, and perhaps this slow
processing of Noise into Forms is what cybernetic systems are meant to do, insofar as it seems to be
one of their inevitable characteristics.

Noise:

The haunting silence of the repressed…

The pulsing of the mother’s heart…

The intractable transgressions of the obedient…

Thunder in the horizon…

Sublime1 - ORIGIN late 16th cent. (in the sense dignified, aloof ): from Latin sublimis, from sub- ‘up
to’ + a second element perhaps related to limen ‘threshold,’ limus ‘oblique.’

The Kantian sublime and its many children, both legitimate and otherwise. By which I mean, the
aesthetic and ideological discourses that arose either in (initially) imitation or (latterly) refutation of the
idea that the sublime is best characterised as “the aesthetic effect of God”, or as Kant puts it, of “that
which is absolutely great”. The Romantics idealised it as an experience of the boundlessness of
creation, or of transcendent beauty not innate in forms, but in truth, as other more cynical philosopher’s
point out, the sublime can be experienced in the intensely ugly, the abject, and the ridiculous.

Aesthetes pursue the sublime in the extreme and the awesome, addicted to the bliss afforded by their
own neuropharmacopaeia (Fear! Awe! Transport!) and hypnotised by the paradoxical notion that what
they glimpse in the sudden ecstasis of sublime experience, the veiled centrifuge, is identical with what
lies behind the aporia created by egocentrism. It manifests as ecstasis, as a blissful feeling of
egolessness that is in fact the very apex of egotism.

It is most tangible in the superlative, but it is horizonally present in all experience, no matter how
banal. In fact, in a vital sense, the sublime is the secret face of the banal: Psychoanalytic and post-
structuralist phenomenologists have argued that the true aesthetic centrifuge – the “thing” whose effect
is sublime affect – is none other than Death, and there is much wisdom in this observation: The
sublime denotes an encounter with the teleological essence of things, not their substance.

The sublime is the encounter with encounter itself, and like all pharmacopic techniques, it is both
poison and cure.
Sublime2 – Alchemical term, meaning to cause a solid to become a gas without passing through the
liquid state. It connotes rarification, or product of a metamorphic process whereby something “loses its
substance” but ostensibly is not destroyed. Digitisation, performative sublimation, sacrifice, murder,
obedience, fantasy and symbolism are all sublimative processes in this nuance.

Desire is sublimated into History, which sublimes Reality and sublimates Desire.
Sublime3 - Sublimation (in the Freudian sense) makes a sublime ephemeral (super-ego) of the material
gross (id). I don’t much like Freud’s ontology, precisely because of the conflative and chauvinistic
“we” it rhetorically establishes. Indeed, I rejected it outright when I first encountered it, and found it
frustrating that his models dominated so much occidental thinking, and informed such frightening
epistemological practices. It’s value only became apparent to me when a kind friend pointed out that
Freud’s psychological taxonomy could be regarded, not as a universally applicable ontology, but as a
confessional:

This is not a dispassionately composed map of the primordial human psyche; it is an impassioned and
neurotic critique of a culturally entrained and historically specific complex of neuroses called Europe.

That said, let us consider exactly what is sublimated and what is sublimed in the making of a Self. Do
not rush, even though you know the answer. Savour it wordlessly for as long as you are able, for it is
diminished by every epithet. It has no centre, and no circumference, and it is real, real, real…