MATERIALIST DOT NET

current ex-lover turned me onto bataille a year ago with a gnomic reference never unpacked, to the 'solar anus'. following a lead on violence and excess today, I picked him up for the first time and what do I find?

'Sacrifice restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane. Servile use has made a thing (an object) of that which, in a deep sense, is of the same nature as the subject, is in a relation of intimate participation with the subject.'

sacrifice as the brutal antithesis of commodification! west side!! hado-RYU-ken!!

economies of excess are go. the link between unsacrificeable life and the living animal commodity is just over the next hill. between agamben and bataille I'm not sure which of them would be taking it up the [solar] anus, but it's an unholy conjunction and I'm loving every sweaty grinding second of it. forget the book, I'm turning my thesis into a performance art piece.

otherwise, getting up in time for lunch, go for long coffee walks that take up the entire day, laugh my way through analyses of sacred violence, start writing in the evening, listen to faaar too much nightwish [I can't help it! it's loud and operatic and finnish!] and generally, slip into a kind of go-lucky self-contained frame akin to playful nihilism. hell, I've even started enjoying theory again - a sure sign of a sickly stunted lifeforce when I don't. spring and the city-wide rise in oxygenating plant metabolism has something to do with it, as does the luxuriant extension of daylight. and the thankfully inevitable disappearing of the past under the horizon, like a foreign land cheerfully abandoned.

ok, some points lining the periphery of an indistinct shape that might turn into an idea.

1. expelled from both human and divine law, the 'sacred man' of Agamben is subject to neither homicide nor sacrifice. he can be freely killed but not offered to the gods. this is the double ban of sovereign power, by which his life is produced as 'bare'.

2. there used to be extensive reindeer sacrifice cults, on the varanger peninsula as elsewhere. sacrificial reindeer boneyards still lie more or less undiscovered in the inland, according to some locals. today, obviously, reindeer are not sacrificed. still, practices of respect towards the dead animal are remembered, if only folklorically. if you don't suck the marrow from the bones, the cows won't lick their young ones [ie., the herd will perish].

3. reindeer are, however, killed industrially. which is to say, they are killed out of sight, impersonally, with machines, by people that have no relationship to them, even of ownership. does this have anything to do with, or is it in any way analogous to, the inapplicability of 'homicide' to the 'sacred man'? it might: agamben illustrates the 'bare life' using among other things the musilman of the concentration camps. the subjection of life to the coordinates of industrial processing seems, somehow, not unrelated to its 'bareness'.

4. relative to the french revolution and the shifting medical episteme, foucault says that desacralization of the corpse enabled autopsies to be performed. today, at the end of the production line, reindeer bodies are effectively autopsied by the inspecting veterinarian: bodies are opened, palpated, cut, incised, tasted even, seeking indicators of pathology or abuse that bespeak structural or epidemological conditions which in life affected the individual animal, and which therefore continue to affect the population of which it formed a part. effectively, en route to the supermarket, reindeer bodies become for a brief time biopolitical 'texts' that can be and are made to speak of population-wide conditions relevant to statist management policy [epidemics, systemic animal welfare abuse etc.]. does this being subject to an autopsy-analogue have anything to do with a 'desacralization'?

that is, I am currently playing around with a tenuous constellation of ideas that may link sacredness and sacrifice into the argument about industrialization and industrial management. mostly this is for my own personal aesthetic reasons, as a thin little thread in the background. people scoffed at folkloric stuff and referred me to the district library ['yeah, check out Vorren 1951, he wrote about that I think...'].

on a related note, I'd love to make a play on 'pastoral power' and pastoralism. but really, now: that'd just be stupid...

long, brilliant, perfectly useless weekend: drifting around london mostly in the sign of two acute and rather lovely females, plus a couple of brief intersects with others. much enjoyable. psychic camden woman confirms yet again my quasi-messianic future, as well as uncertainty as to whether my three significant life partners will arrive sequentially, or all at once. cheeky. also abandoned the heart-shaped pink t-shirt in favour of a cheap zeta-grade punisher rip-off, stylised white skull on black, acquired from a dingy chinese man in a side-street stall. all in all, rather good. back in college now; for god's sake, some sleep...

college is vacant, termtime over. the last few days walkways all over the place have resonated with the steady sound of rolling suitcase wheels. taxis always waiting at the gates, to take people to the airport. the dining room is deserted, only a few small clusters of people. strangely, I swear I have seen new faces appear too, sailing through the shared spaces of the place; ghosts of the termtime watch-shift.

somehow, though it should make little difference, the absence of people is quietly thrilling. a veil of pleasant spaciousness has descended over everything. typing out some notes on homo sacer in the empty common room, way past midnight, tall windows on the dark outside, with a stack of small disposable plastic coffee cups from the machine and illegibly scrawled sheets of notes all over the impractical little white table, it is possible to feel like one owns the place.

going through the jotted margins of old chapter 4 drafts today, on 'the logic of the slaughterhouse', to look for forgotten ideas. this non sequiteur made me laugh: 'thought experiment - a disassembly line for kittens. why not?' [the point being that animal life is anything but intrinsically 'bare', as Agamben seems to claim]. wondering whether it'd be too irreverent to expand on that in a footnote. also uncovered a deeply suggestive root network linking Latour's notions of 'blackbox' and 'inscription device'; a quasi-marxian Taussig-style mapping of the 'fetish'; Carol Adams' 'structure of the absent referent'; and Foucault's 'heterotopia'. all of it culminating in the bud of Agamben's space/'state of exception', which opens up for a discussion in the subsequent two chapters - on stunning techniques and welfare management - about the regulated state of the industrial exception, and the 'excepted' life of reindeer. chapter four may just become the central rhizomic cluster of the thesis yet.

no honestly, 'tis all very exciting. honestly.

a lost fragment from my past came to me quite vividly today, I believe it was my first deep infatuation. I must have been four or five, kindergarten: its 'object' was a girl, elisabeth, younger sister of a boy that became a close friend some ten years later. we were inseparable: my mother referred to her as my hjertevenninne ['friend of the heart', a somewhat dated norwegian expression]. I remember what we did together only dimly: we played, I guess, goofed around, talked in the manner of children. I think I remember how being with her made me feel, the echo of it at least. correction: I don't remember at all. distinctly however, I do remember the intolerable absence, the loss on days when she didn't turn up for kindergarten. intense. and more vividly, the sense of betrayal, the sheer dull fury when one day she found another playmate, a younger girl, and sided with her in an argument [guess we must both have been kind of precocious. we could read and were talking about the planets of the solar system and other stuff from illustrated encyclopedias...] I stalked off and hid in a dark sandpit under one of the slides for hours. eventually one of the play-aunties found out where I was from one of the other kids, and managed to parlay me out from my hiding place. for a long time afterwards I was distraught and wouldn't talk. years later, when I was in the third grade and the younger girl started in the first grade, I really disliked her. rannveig. I always thought she looked like a monkey.

[psychoanalyst: *coughs discretely* erm... so what do you think is interesting about this?

don't you see? it suddenly pushes back the dates. there is a continuity here that far predates any sexual attachment. intensely attached, darkly brooding at the age of bloody five! what the hell am I actually looking for?

psychoanalyst: you know, you really should get out more.]

haddaway: [barges in, desperate, bare-chested, gold medallions] "What is love? Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more."

yogi bhajan: [mysteriously] "No one can explain love because love is ecstasy."

pope benedict XVI: [nodding sagely over in the armchair] "Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God."

rainer maria rilke: [depressed, staring down into his absinthe] "Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."

pope benedict XVI: [frowning] "Love is not merely a sentiment."

aleister crowley: [stoned in the corner, drawing evil murals] "Love is the Law."

bono: [drunk, enthusiastic] "Love is the higher law!"

aleister crowley: [raising an eyebrow] "Love under Will."

matt groening: [a bit exasperated] "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."

[silence. everyone ponders why that last statement seems particularly apposite.]

[suddenly:]

loveisgreat.com: [in the comment box] "True Love gives you a feeling of being complete!"

everyone: FUCK YOU, FILTHY SPAMBOT SCUM!!!

gorged like a meat balloon and drunk as a skunk. spent the day making coffee, decorating tables, bringing in the dirty dishes with a lovely little old anthropologist lady and the estonian, finished off at the restaurant having a three-hour conversation about fieldwork, ghosts, NGOs with a perfect anthro couple, welded together since eternity, did fieldwork together in the amazon and now do bits of work in the UN system. she is remote, italian and absolutely gorgeous, him scottish, bearded and taciturn. beautiful people, of the poster recruitment-drive type.

favorite fieldwork anecdote of the day [man, say what I may, anthropologists do some fucking cool dinnertable conversations]: the french missionaries in the amazon who 'insistently, steadfastly' refused to adapt to native ways. cue white-bread sandwiches with mayonnaise and canned chicken liver pate flown in from france, in a leaf-roofed hut in the steaming jungle basin. beds were necessary, as were outdoor latrines built as close as possible to the house. most of all though, they needed electric light at night. only savages sit in the dark. their house, the house of god, was therefore full of insects attracted by the artificial light. because it was full of insects, it was also swarming with the enormous tarantulas that fed on them: hairy silent monsters bigger than an outstretched hand, capable of leaping several feet through the air and killing children; beasts that would stalk and crawl along the walls, over tables and carpets, plump down on the table with dull thuds from the nest overhead, right down in the chicken liver and mayonnaise sandwiches. apparently, efforts to missionize and bring people to the house of god were generally unsuccesful.

volunteered myself today for coffee-making service at a SPRI conference on siberian indigenes versus the oil and gas industry, monday and tuesday. given that I regularly handle intensities of caffeine that would shrivel up a horse through five inches of lead at a distance of 10 steps, discussions should at the very least be animated. in return, I get a meal at an iranian restaurant with said delegates, come nightfall and peace on monday. truth is, I done it mostly to have a socially coherent excuse for avoiding a coincident conference on failure, organised and chaired by, among others, ex-liaison. two possible projections of interactional parameters: pointlessly awkward, or indifferent as an oiled pebble. likely the latter. either way, glargh. simply everyone is going to this, and while I was planning to say I'd drop it because I needed to have a nap, buy a new t-shirt or watch the people walking doggies in the park, this makes for less raised eyebrows.

evening bar raid at darwin college brought two small pleasures. one, reaching the conversational limit of an allegedly unfazeable "bestiality? I have no problem with that" free spirit. strangely early it came, too. "so what's a good length then?". "well, depends on the girl doesn't it..." "that's what I mean. what's a good length for you?" bizarrely, that was the point of non-disclosure. not sure what that says, but I guess libertinage is easier to sustain in the impersonal mode. two, a very enjoyable conversation about the first imaginary record from an imaginary band that some guys I know are setting up [yes, they're all in their early thirties, in settled relationships, with stable future trajectories. figure that]. none of them knows how to play an instrument or read notation, so the options are rather circumscribed. I suggested 12 tracks of silence, recorded at different bitrates to get silences of different quality: good silences, poor silences, even awkward or perfect silences. kind of [john] cagey, but the idea of issuing key tracks as singles with industrial, disco and 12" remixes kind of makes up for it. for added texture, one might go around recording ridiculously overspecified silences, to generate ornate track titles in the vein of hirst's 'the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living'. [one track title they had already decided on is suggestively called 'the invisible wanker'. very rear window]. other possibilities are prolific. I volunteered to be supporting non-vocalist.

just ploughed through 300 entries to manually delete invasive little chunks of "hey sorry I missed the party" and "your site amaizing [sic]!", still only half-aways through the purge. rgh. rather than force javascript, I removed the URL entry-box in the comments template. see if that helps.

here, profoundly slow and meaningless day tinkering with chapter 4, which until yesterday I thought was about industrialization of reindeer slaughter, but as I just realized is actually about the structured spatial mapping of exceptions, the possibility of disengaging sovereign power from agamben's analysis of the camp, the unexceptional exception, and the clincher: can a non-juridical regime produce something like bare life in a state of exception, or do I need to call this 'thing' something else? whew. be still my beating heart.

off now to a football-club in north cambridge for some minimalist techno. a 40-minute iPodized walk in the interplanetary cold might do some good. so will evading the college-wide end-of-term disco event ["you can perform in front of your friends with karaoke, and enjoy classic music ranging from Cheese to RnB". or strangle yourself with the speaker-cords...] which descends upon us tonight draped in the vestments of religious irish nationalism.

I fucking hate comment spammers. scumbag parasite lackeys of digital capitalism. fuck you "melissa"! what the hell do I care if you think I have a "professional and well-designed site"?! twitching corpsewhite little maggot sucking bandwidth in the linings of the meme-pool guts... die in a pool of your own pus and suck shit forever in hell, you viral commodity-slut! a pox on all your kin, rotten little digital bit-whore! I hate you "melissa"!

on the subject, I am thinking of enabling a comment protection system that requires javascript to be enabled in order to comment. spambots don't implement javascript very well, apparently. would this cause problems for any regular commenters? [flats, I'd say this applies mostly to you. and you guys in the french/norwegian posse. you other lurkers, I know you're there. don't be shy.]

woke in a rested and combative mood today, after a somewhat strange dream. during a catastrophic famine, villagers from one coastal hamlet refused to help another village, on the other side of a mountain. many therefore died from starvation. years later, the first village suffered under a famine of its own. villagers nevertheless arrived from the second village, crossing the mountain with bagpipes and loaves of bread, fainting from exhaustion at the doorsteps, asking only for ale to go with their dark brown bread.  the dream could be read as a timely but cryptic response to a question I was formulating last night, about payment and repayment, though I'll be damned if I know quite how it should be read. beyond the fact that it clearly vacuates the lex talionis. payments in kind, for payments unkind? beh.

anyway. by early afternoon, an infernally waxing monolateral headache and a seminar on states of exception in the war on terror had their effect, the conquering lion folded into maudlin kitten and slunked back to college. now, intending to wreak some solitary havoc among the networkers at a "tutorial drinks-and-nibbles" party in the common room [god, just the name makes my kidneys twitch] before I fold into a deep chair, a philippino vampire movie, bed and the anticipatory prospect of bright future mornings to come, ripe with adventure.

many years ago, ten or more, I came across a reference to a mystical ideal that spoke to me. randomly, I think it was in a novel by david zindell, 'the broken god'. the ideal was embodied in the somewhat paradoxical figure of a renunciant that confronted with the totality of existence, was capable of unconditionally affirming everything. that is, say yes to the entire universe, to all the dark crooks and nannies of its flawed, bleeding, crazy, painful, messed-up glory. the idea came through the filter of a vague and westernized take on hindu asceticism. at the time, the idea also seemed to me to mirror nietzsche's notion of amor fati, the affirmation of love for one's own infinitely recurring fate in the face of the ewige wiederkehr des gleichen, the 'eternal recurrence' [I'd put a link in for this concept but frankly, I didn't find an exegesis worth linking to online... as I remember from my days as an aspiring philologist, everyone seems to be very confused by this particular doctrine.]

I mention this now not only because I'm trying to develop conceptual palliatives to deal with this deep-seated feeling that things [and me] are fucked up and off-balance, and that an important but undefinable something has taken a really wrong turn and is caught in the barbed wire of ultimate reality. rather, I remembered this because my mind drifted to one of the mildly curious things that happened in the direct aftermath of my first-level reiki initiation.

it was rather curious, actually. reclining on a pillow while waiting for the next batch of initiates to finish the procedure, I noticed something like a voice in me. not in my head, rather in an open and unclenched space full of light, somewhere near the pit of my belly. the voice/feeling was going 'yes! yes! yes! yes!'. not in a hedonistic way, but in a more general sense. something like 'bring it on! I can take it! I want more!'. it lasted for a while, coming almost in spasms, radiating through my insides. felt like I was gasping this out, internally, almost crying. intense, curious, quite pleasurable. [with it I think came a sense of release, partial completion, bubble bursting to the surface. something that had been suppressed finally articulating, maybe?]. on some level, part of me was asking the universe to turn up the heat and bring on the shit, I wanted it. the overall sense was fundamental, an affirmation of everything that happened so far, and of all the things that were yet to come. all was good, all to be digested.

more curiously perhaps, three weeks later I stumbled unexpectedly, initially almost unwillingly, into my most intense affair so far by far, a crazy visceral thing that touched my soul and which, to be honest, seems to have unhinged it to a degree so disproportional it suggests that actually, the hook got caught and I'm not trying to pull onboard a nice shiny cod but rather my entire seabed, by its own hair to boot.

on some level therefore, I guess I shouldn't complain about the parameters of this aftermath I am inhabiting. I was asking for it. also, i can discern how all this will make me better, stronger, more capable, autonomous and generous in the future. as my hoodoo mama used to say, 'dirty psychic laundry don't wash itself, boy, be glad if someone pulls it out of the closet for you'. still, cultivated sense of ontological gratefulness or not, it is all a bit of a hassle.

shitty fucking day. broken and terrible sleep, dreams heavy with ex-liaison. woke mentally uncoordinated, sheets soaked in sweat, to a fever and a raw throatful of pulsing pain. miserable, ill, disoriented, burdened with pointless melancholia and a headache to drive the decapitated into despair. man. three cartons of fruit-juice, a walk in the finger-numbing cold and a packet of almond cakes have done little to abate the hegemony of overall shitness.

who am I? 'monarch of my own skin', says hakim bey. the present climate of glass-clear cold lays siege to this fragile monarchy the moment it ambulates out the door, like a horde of ice-giants hammering away at the house of the first little pig. currently the king, therefore, has a cold, a sandpaper throat and a hookworm cough.

the other day I woke up with a randomly rekindled interest in sigillisation, a la austin osman spare. that is, the practice of generating magickally charged glyphs to execute change in the objective world. idea that takes me back years, to a time when I would in all earnestness go to considerable lengths to acquire books like this, located after years of questing in a tiny bookstore in brighton back in the mid-90s. now, in the age of digitally mediated dissemination, it is of course at everyone's fingertips. [though I love love love the fact that amazon classes the... text as 'health, family and lifestyle'].

indulging the somewhat arcane impulse, I secured the peterson edition of the lesser clavicle of solomon, which is being digitally disseminated by hippolyta and her cohort as I type. the first part, the goetia, contains the seals and descriptions of 72 spirits bound by solomon. fun party game: which goetian sigil would you rather have engraved on your forehead, and why? feel free to use the somewhat sanitised crowley variants, if preferable.