Two Tides

LL and I were at breakfast, early into the 10am range in the Industrial School’s second floor cafeteria, right on the lip of the skypillar. We laughed and talked over plastic trays, consuming without eating, our pancakes and sausages. We hadn’t aged a day. Business was going smoothly as usual in the calm of late June. Both of us were artists now, taking new paths that had forked together and brought us here. The other two were tugging at the sides. Neither of us paid much attention.

Perhaps I preferred it, but that doesn’t blunt the disappointment of wandering the library in solitude. It was raining hard and driving, the storms fading in and out in irregular intervals, wet grey bursts against the brick walls and brown carpeting as I studied these scrolls. I left some senses of time back there, but made it out eventually, with only a little of someone else’s money wasted.

LL and I drove down the hill, enmired in deep, humorous conversation that neither of us could grasp direct words of. We exhaled a cloud together, an effervescent grey mist that hung still to bathe us, a connection beyond any ability to convey exact wordage. We were on business, of some kind, coming down the hill from the Facility’s long glass and drywall corridors, abstractions in briefcases clicking heels down off-white ramps and beige lobbies. The truck - or it might have been my car - drove itself, with me at the wheel, in routes we both knew well by heart. We disembarked at the White Park, still in joy, holding hands, in spirit, if not physically. Weighing almost nothing in a clear blue sky that opened up right to the heavens, the sun shown onto us before the statue, golden love empowering us before the white concrete, performing to the core of the brutalist curves.

My wife and I had left that morning, in deep conversation to think out the problems of the day as we kept a brisk pace of speech through the tangled web of the interior city. In the lineage of LL, I couldn’t help but see her face as we considered the possibilities and options. Memory and alien artefacts were stacked up as a library, as a labyrinth, a city of nothing but alleys and fire escapes and rooftop bridges. We darted across, holding hands, securing a bond, energies and tensions coiling around our joined wrists. Someone had been impersonating her, some ungodly Matriarch ensnaring and seducing, from some unholy lineage that threw LL so far out in the first place. LL was long gone now, but it was taking everything to resist the wickedness of the Matriarch from influencing our carefully rambling path.

Several weeks ago, a messenger was shot dead. The briefcase was still cuffed to his wrist and that’s what set it off - the diseased hordes couldn’t resist and he fell face first in a downtown puddle, the shots still echoing around the forty story canyon as the crowd retreated back into hell’s darkness.

My wife and I overlooked the strands of winds, twin tidal currents blowing across the endless ocean of dunes. We sipped our coffee, sitting cross legged atop the smooth stone tower, watching the paths blow together, past the same horizon to radically different ends of the beyond. We were about to fly and one was in our direction. It was the one I had chosen when I chose her over the Matriarch, it was one I had been on with her before it all started.

He hung from the ceiling fan, swaying in lazy circles, feet tracing paths of sigils and rituals copied verbatim from whatever sourcebook he had read last. He was going to meet her, she who had been so loyal. Past him, the wind whipped through the open windows of the apartment - free to move with his soul out of the way.

Water and wind cut away the banks of the canyon, rocks smoothed out to make our path as we flew along her wind. Kali danced in a million tiny iterations with each pass, particles torn away to the tune of our mantras. The mother would guide us down time, the great Way carved out of sand and stone.

The Nature of Dreaming

Innovating from the Freudian techniques of dream-study, the Surrealists fully realized and utilized the nature of dreaming. Obsessed with trance-states, the surrealists operated by shuttering the normal preceptory inputs of art, painting from no models and in no rational or learned state. This allowed their artistic processes and thoughts to operate freely in the Ganzfeld-Space (named for the infamous effect) of closed eyes, of a mind closed to think within itself, just as the mind does in sleep. This closing creates a closed space, temporally and spatially, that can be seen in the titles of many surrealist works, which take on proper nouns or definitive ideas with little relation to the painting itself, the thought or idea mutated in the realm of pure thought. In doing so, not only was the nature of dreams uncovered and explored (as pure, abstraction and thought), but recognized for its full potential, as a space for productive thought to occur, operating in pure philosophical abstraction.

The recognition of this as spatial (Ganzfeld Space) is shown in thought-narratives since - the 1960s LSD narratives emphasize setting and scenario, the entire ritual of the drug enveloping and containing the trip. Similarly, Yume Nikki and its spinoffs all take place in a similarly confined space in which the portal exists where the world of thought can then be entered. In doing so, a space can be constructed with which to deal with thought more directly than typical.

Within this space firmly established, thought is then directed. Thought is not an abstract entity capable of operating in isolation but a force which must be granted channels to move through. This function is fulfilled by what informs the boundaries of Ganzfeld Space, the discourse that is the space. In dreams and hallucinations, it’s the memory, generating from the past various linguistic paths down which to flow. Elsewhere this function is explicitly performed by various open ended texts, such as the Tarot, Zodiac, or Bible, a type of discourse fully explored in The Thousand and One Nights, with the stories being pitched as a method of reform, the language being a method by which to lead thought.

The text produced then produces a question of its makeup - the discourse’s text-production forms a text alongside the text produced from the discourse (the interpretation). There is no end to this question. This is an endless spiral of text-formation, beginning from the original source, with the Ganzfeld-Space able to create infinitely many texts. It is through this that Ganzfeld Space, such as in dreams or open-texts such as Tarot or the Bible hold value - not as a text in itself, but as a discourse, with which to generate texts from.

The Warrior

For quite some time, physics grappled poorly with the problems of turbulence. Its nature couldn’t be pinned down, with one motion creating an infinitely many more motions, the substance shifted into complete unpredictability in short order. This is the general pattern that occurs when multiple dynamic objects are placed in close proximity, their motions all being able to influence each other’s, thereby creating exponentially many possibilities.

The battle scenario in its primitive form, carries the same chaotic dynamics as turbulence. Such was the impetus for the development of organization of armed forces, tactics and strategies.  With some stake in creating a specific outcome, leaders developed their own methods of attempting to organize this from within, making their actors follow a singular Way with which to tame the chaos of the environment they were plunging into.

This created a prison for the warrior, as such formations required state capture of the war machine. The warrior’s impulse, that of the primitive and nomadic, is an impulse unified with this chaos, desiring the chaos as a fire to immerse oneself in. The warrior impulse is that which resists even the organization of sides, desiring ultimately the singular self against the violence of pure turbulence. It is for this reason that the purest expressions of a state’s captured war-machines are always when those machines are let loose without constraint, immersed within the enemy to become feral. Such is the purpose behind creating groups such as the American military’s Tiger Force.

The warrior is therefore fundamentally down a mystic path, desiring this meditative state of the turbulence, before capture. The warrior’s ascendance is reflected in this, with ranks of military and sports hierarchy increasing the importance of the individual, being compared alongside less and less equals as promotion increase, defined more and more as a singular person. The state however is always lagging in doing this harnessing. The warrior moves on with motions of their own, with the state’s Way being only a feeble and fleeting attempt to capture.

Dissolution

 

As far back the SNCC expelling whites from its ranks and through today when the popular racial debates are characterized by axiomatic essentialism, the left and the right have been moving in a helical spiral towards the same end. The left’s conception of race is based upon a certain type of essentialism, an ontology of a person where the individual is imbued with an eternal, immutable characteristic, their race, which separates them on a different plane of personhood with others by marking out the basic shape of them as a human. This basic concept is of course, packaged in leftist morality, which is unable to see it clearly in its objectivity-based blindness - of course people are on different planes, but all these planes are subsumed under the general leftist cosmology, where all people are still liberal subjects in the grand drama of christian morality.The contemporary right has done the work of the left for them. Lacking the proper upbringing into the left-liberal religion, the right has been taught this framework of race as eternally-othering ontology, without assuming it beneath the religion of leftism. As a result, the right has made the same arguments, only from the different side. Whereas the left takes for granted this framework and then uses it as a way to channel the religion of suffering and guilt, the right takes this framework as a point of investigation with which to begin thought, eventually creating a drama in which these great objects of white and black are in eternal war, something both sides are enthusiastic to participate in as the objects they make themselves into are teleologically destined for such conflict.

That this has been exploding alongside the internet is no accident, increased communication causing this viral ontological idea to spread, infecting individuals and making them into a transmitter, fragmenting and dividing individuals as they become infected by the viral spread, an idea that recreates their person into a race-object. This spreading is facilitated by the infinitely many transmission vectors due to an exponentially increasing amount of points of contact between individuals. Like a disease, fragmentation spreads. An individual infected is one lost, forever stuck in a flow based solely on their ontology, newly given, thereby disintegrating them.

The roots of this of course go back centuries, with the idea of racial ontology being the founding text of the settling of America. What this reveals as it destroys the ability of America to have a unified Way, a national identity, is the abomination of America. America is too large, geographically and in its diversity. The idea that such an amount of people who have a singular nation is absurd, as anyone who overviews the diversity now encompassed by former Roman territory would know. This notion of the nation, that one could be constructed on anything as ridiculous as the fantastical utopias of 18th century Englishmen who read too much Locke & Rousseau & Co, goes back to the radical tearing-apart of the world undertaken by the rationalists, who split the human apart from their surroundings in order to create the individual, the same one now susceptible to dissolution-viruses, and no surprise, such men were often the original creators of our modern strain of the dissolution-virus, with the invention of the racial caste systems of Imperialism. We look back upon this time, with only a faint, yet denied, ability to grasp what was taken from us. As Ezra Pound said of Confucianism, the world before the individual is a wholistic one (“interacting strains and tensions”), portrayed in the cosmological drawings of mystic artists, the world of the firmament and heavens. Such wholeness is also evident in the widespread in various invisible forces - witchcraft, fairies, religion, local deities, and all other manner of things emerge as a result of a worldview where the world is interlinked and wholistic, cultural flows moving to fill in the gaps of directly experienced knowledge.

Attempts to undo this rupture have been made since it first swept across the world, the Völkisch trends of the German Romanticists and Hippies, the American fascination with an image of the utilitarian lives of the Old West.. Lately, Xi Jingping’s China has instituted a social credit system in order to increase harmony and cohesion, attempting to artificially create a popular morality, hoping some form of greater Way could follow. It’s impossible for this to work of course. The rupture is permanent. The Yugas operate in only one direction, requiring the terminal end of the Kali Yuga in order for it to begin again as a cycle. The end of wholeness is something that can be never attained again, we can only attempt to make something akin to it in the wasteland before us.

A Commentary on E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy

Structure

E.Y.E is structured with an underworld/overworld, outside/inside binary. For all their differences, the federal police, E.Y.E, and looters are in combat on the same plane of existence, frequently able to double cross and make deals with one another, speaking the same language and using the same weaponry. This is not so with the meta-streumonic force (bluntly named for the outside of the text itself, meta + StreumOn)  which is tellingly, never absent from any map, despite there being maps totally devoid of any non-metastreumonic enemies. The meta-streumonic force enters from an outside, wrecking damage equally on all forces, in one instance measured by the simple percentage - 70%. These map onto the over and under dichotomy, drawing that the overworld is an enclosed space through which the underworld can penetrate or enter. The progression of the game is done through this schematic as well. The player is forcibly entered into the game from the outside (metastreumonic) realm, through the drama of the artefact and the white wolf - the white wolf as the player entering reality codependant with Rimanah creating it through his hypnosis. The gameplay is then trapped in this enclosed overworld, after the initial entry through the mysterious portal, the “cycles of guilt” play out where the player moves through the dramas of the police, E.Y.E, and looters. Only after exploring three possible paths through this, does the player realize the three gates to exit into the underworld again. The player is then able to finally exit the game - the final labyrinth leading to closure of the story, in reunification and summarization of the original traumas that burst the story open. The player-character having been reconciled thus allows the player to exit into the outside by leaving the game, all of their work completed.

Terminal Alienation

With 70% of humanity killed by the outside’s forcible entry into the world, humanity has been made isolated and alone. This great hollowing out of the human population is however only part of the reason of the degradation of humanity, the rest of that being due to the death of all ties binding civilization together. The world in E.Y.E has been made perfect, labor reduced to machines so impersonal they operate in closed buildings without windows or entrances. Roads are empty of cars, scarce few people are found in the streets, yet the world is obviously able to run - corporations still function and produce, with nearly every weapon having one of many brandings. Lining the streets are various businesses, entirely consumer-based, with storefronts and advertisements all being related to buying something or going somewhere. All of this is linked to the only humanity not affiliated with either the Federal Police or E.Y.E, the masses of the looters, the truly chaotic faction of the game, the underworld of the police’s overworld. The looters, while using identical models, are conceived of with the most diversity, with a great deal of strange NPC encounters being peaceful looters tucked away in various corners of the map, with looters having conflicting games and past dealings, being fleshed out fully within the world. The evidence of the lifestyle of these looters can be seen all over in traversing the game - bars, apartments, trashcan fires, the maps are filled with small pockets of life carved out by the looters. The urban and industrial landscapes run on their own, the processes of production and labor operating with no more human involvement than nature’s production for hunter-gatherers. The terminal alienation in E.Y.E is terminal because it has brought the state of being for human society full circle, the machines of industry so fully autonomous that humanity has gone back to primitive modes of living. The cities are moved through in the same fashion as the wilderness and consumption occurs in the same way. E.Y.E envisions alienation accelerated to its furthest conclusion where individuals are alienated not only from their labor but also the entire economic apparatus, thereby alienating individuals to a completely feral state, separate and alone within a hostile urban wilderness just as primitive humans were in the hostile uncivilized Earth.

Gnostic Archeology

Through the overworld/underworld structure, E.Y.E uses a gnostic cosmology. Time is cyclical in a way which is separate from the spiritual - as opposed to spiritual epochs determining life below, such as the Yugas, cycles operate as a prison, the material overworld imagined as “cycles of guilt”. The gameplay is largely focused on methods of escape from this, piercing through the cyclical prison into the Metastreumonic force. The story of the game is obsessed with archaeological investigations - the Mentor ending brings one to the ruins of an ancient settlement, buried underground, to find the long lost master and learn arcane secrets. Explicit digsites appear multiple times on Mars, opening the way to the temple beneath the surface. The finale of each of the cyclical endings is a digsite deep below the temple where one enters a portal. The image of a digsite is visually demonstrating here, the hole in the ground opening to the underworld/outside. This shows what is also being done in the general ascendance of the character as they continue through the game, with the pinnacle of the in-game research being, tellingly, “Streumonic Complementarity” - merging and accepting the meta-streumonic force into oneself into order to achieve freedom from the overworld, breaking back into the outside after emerging into the core of the inside.

The Meaning of Money

In the Marxian Labor Theory of Value, money functions in transactions as a stand-in for another, real transaction between two entities. One monetary amount, the price, defined through the formula C’ = (c + v) + s, is then met with an equivalent monetary amount, describing, in indirect lineage, the same amount of labor as the final C’ set as the price. The same occurs in gold standard currencies, where money on both ends stand in for a real transaction of true value. In these models, and to a fully abstracted sense in fiat currency, money functions as language, through the way its meaning is constructed. Money’s meaning is always absent, declared in some way by another. Each number affixed to the variables in Marx’s language is fixed in some way by money in a closed loop, with the guarantee of money’s value being backed by something having value by the pure virtue of it being worth money. Money therefore is always absent, just as firm meaning is in language, its meaning created by something elsewhere in an endless chain.

Twice has the same event occurred. In 1928 and in 2018, Wall Street and Silicon Valley respectively, were questioned over their audacity by a confused and out of touch Congress, pressing them on predetermined narratives against an industry rapidly spiraling out of their control. In the former, gambling, the latter, censorship, in both, the elderly state apparatus reacted with confusion, channeled into aggression, raging against the rapidly escaping movements of the counter-states in question. In both, the entities questioned were the newest wealth-holders in the nation, pseudo-states, vertical institutions that grew up rapidly in order to ensure and spread out tentacular lines of communication. In the 1920s, Wall Street’s familial dynasties grew in size in order to begin the long movement continuing today of American currency as the ultimate backbone of international finance, in the latter, HTTP-based websites emerged to take advantage of the brand new telecommunications technology. For Wall Street, this was the beginning of a saga currently being repeated with Silicon Valley. As the US Dollar has become the currency backing the entire planet, the state-like familial institutions set up to set this into motion were outdated, first by pan-atlantic technocratic groups such as the IMF, World Bank, and United Nations, and later by new ideas of corporate structure pioneered in the 1980s, when dynastic structures dissolved into complex instruments and occult corporate entities. This was the child eating the parents, the communicative liquids of the American Dollar returning to dissolve the vertical structures that birthed it, the air dissolving the solid that birthed it as it eclipsed the original vision of its creators.

An individual in possession of wealth is not in possession of wealth, but in control of it. Money operates as communication, one of the most effective, with greater quantities equating to more powerful speech. When a transaction occurs, money’s only role is to give the will of one side a voice sufficiently powerful to move whatever it wants to move. Money is is not an object, but a force, a tool of power and control.

First Law

“(...) Europe's Original Sin — the latest name for that is Modern Analysis (...)”
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

In the beginning, humanity was undifferentiated and, for the purposes of this text, agendered. Living as herders and nomads on the lush earth, an original act of evil was done which caused the primordial differentiation. This event, in Ancient Mesopotamia believed to be an act of climate change, forced the creation of men. These men (as a position, not referring always to biological gender), were the ones who coerced the people around them to developing agricultural society in order to withstand the new environment they had found themselves in. Anthropomorphizing this original event, the men make it into an unknowable founding event, an opaque patriarchal signifier, such as a pantheon of gods. The men who performed the original act of coercion in response then simultaneously submit themselves to this patriarchal signifier and then use this patriarchal signifier to develop a means by which to submit the other-men, that being the individuals who had to be coerced by the men, working and conquered enemy peoples. To perform this function, the Law is created from the patriarchal signifier, the God.

Law comes into being in order to not only speak in the name of this patriarchal signifier, but to prevent the uprising of another God to take the place of the God which the law speaks for, the God of any Other-Man: underclass, the mass of people coerced to being enclosed as well as the enemy not under the control of the single signifier. Revolutionary action and warfare are one in the same here, competing patriarchal authorities asserting themselves, the once-oppressed fighting for the throne of the enclosers to commit the enclosing themselves. This is the goal whether consciously or not, with Catholicism and Leftism as keen modern examples with which to pry apart the mechanics of law, due to their purity of being solely laws, and not having been “corrupted” with any of the feminine sedimentations or additions a law acquires once it’s been put into place and made superstructural.

To specifically analyze the nature of the patriarchal law, the greatest examples are those already mentioned, the “non-hierarchical” revolutionary ideologies of the modern and ancient worlds, Catholicism and the Enlightenment (Liberalism & Leftism). When the law seeks to assert its God, the decrees of that God predate anything found by the Law as it stretches into the world. This is evident in both Catholic and Leftist moralism with regard to women’s sexuality, where particular traits are already identified pre-existing the judgement and then looked for in the judgement, doing nothing more than rewriting the text of the judged into the text of the law. The film rating system of the United States and the “content warnings” of leftist internet culture follow these identical guidelines. At the core of both is a God to which they serve, the proponents being his servants, seeking to flatten the world beneath him. The flattening is evident in the universalism of all peoples, as immortal souls in Catholicism, or, in Enlightenment thinking where the urge for scientific progress, universal theories of all people and all things. Those who speak for the law have the entire world pre-existing, already enclosed. The world is simply a troublesome entity which must be in some way tamed, conquered, policed, in order to conform to Eden within the God. Such is shown in the way leftists talk about the sublime object of “fascism” and the way Catholic moralists speak of women’s sexuality.

To further compare the greatest legalisms of history, the language of sin is the same in both, where some concept of exclusion is the ultimate curse. In Catholicism, Hell is defined in the Augustinian sense, by exclusion, where Hell and sin are only that which is excluded from God. When Leftists curse peoples in the same way it’s through “cancellation”, the language of that word drawing the same schematic as the exclusion model of sin in Catholicism. Both Catholicism and Leftism claim to be ultimately liberatory, yet the enclosed bubble in which they exist is an ever-shrinking sphere, reduced by endless purges and disputes as the outside is made to include more and more until only me, myself, the one true believer remains, as a result of this bubble having a terminal velocity, towards the sublime Father-God - in Catholicism, the god of the jews, in Leftism, a true utopia-on-Earth, a society without hierarchy, without division, without any bumps or ridges, as smooth and pure as Heaven itself, an idea Marx himself knew to be sublime in his warning against utopianism.

The conflict of ideologies is a conflict between fathers. Between a Pagan warcouncil and a Roman civilizer, both have the same mechanics: under them, all humans are universalized to a pre-existing text which all of the Earth must be conformed to, even if by force. Both are seeking to make this conforming happen by their spreading out, and the only conquest is who will succeed, the Barbarian Chief or Charlemagne the Butcher. Which law wins ultimately matters little, with the victims changing slightly and the exact laws changing, but the mechanics remaining identical.

The Hero

For the masculine imagination, life is an unending struggle of the self and the enemy, wherein one has devotion to their own father, constantly under threat and attack from whatever outside has been constructed. The male pathology is this eternal struggle, an attempt to “fix” the world, to make it match the pre-existing text which is of the Fathers. The male eternally desires a return to the Father and the most intelligent men, those who fully recognize their own nature, return to the Father in mysticism and annihilation, the destruction of the world and the mind in meditation and warfare. Recognizing that what is true to him is something which is forever separate from the world, and recognizing that this something is an animalistic, edenic state, he seeks to both purge the world from himself, and destroy the world. Such is the instinct of Codreanu’s legionnaires and Mishima Yukio’s ritual suicide, where he first proved to himself the impurity of the world in his gesture at a coup, before sacrificing himself to his own ideals in his seppuku backstage.

The masculine is not alone however and his inventions of society creates a new class of people, birthed from what he has created. The father has his offspring, which is woman. Woman is the peoples who are birthed into the society already created, part of the established order, and live off it as parasites and secondary producers, the sucking hole into which the resources of the males kept in slavery produce and gather, taking them to the metropolis for the effete craftsmen to shape, for the women to wear as baubles, for the children to consume, for the aristocrats and creatives to make into works of opulent art, all of these individuals are women. It is here that the masculinization process is so vital to those who are easily capable of degenerating themselves to become masculine again (ie, those people who are not born biologically female, homosexual, transgender, etc), where organizations like the military and sporting step in, to help men achieve their desires to become animal, to find not only the Father, but the wellspring from which the Father emerged, the unconscious and animal.

The role of women, is something which he could not live without and is something which naturally emerges from any societal organization at all. Women emerge in order to make the society exists at all, as women are that which puts people together. From the masculine animal, goes inputs, into some machinery which is female, that machinery being the linguistic, cultural, technological, secondary production which creates the vast mediatory apparatuses that make society work. Woman is a political position, one which is the position of language, art, culture, technology, etc, all of that which only emerges when there is a surplus created by an enslaved masculine-animal.

Men are therefore in a constant state of fear towards women. Not only are women themselves the mysterious thing that the masculine inputs into, that the masculine’s father inputs into, but women, by being communicative have no special allegiance to the father that is not forced or coerced in some way. Additionally, being in an alien plane of linguistic production, women are constantly mutating and evolving, changing and moving beyond what men are or what men can control. To the father, women are eternally in danger of being traitorous, if not already traitorous, as their betrayal is the very living of women, through the creation of art and culture which mutate and deviate beyond the father.

It is from this fear that men’s identity is built upon attempting to return to the Father by recommitting his sins. The purity of the Father is sublime and can only be found by perpetual action. In recent years, fantasies have exploded of a return to Modernism, a glorification of the perceived years of the Father in the Revolutions and World Wars when Men of Action could make their mark. Masculinity requires this, Action, a narrative from the Father (the Epic, the Myth) with which to guide his actions free of any feminine thoughts or emotions, in order to continually be within the sublime Father.

Language and Gender

Contained within “the individual” is a double-exposure of two persons, with opposed and codependent relationships to each other. The subject of the individual, that which is internal to themselves, a reality of POV that exists only for the individual, and the object of the individual, their existence in the eyes of all others. Both of these are constructed by the other, but are impossible to be met, the latter being a matter of an object in context and the former being the internal experience one has.

The bifurcation between these two occurs as communication develops. Language creates the individual by separating them from the real, instead putting them solely within their own ego by being capable of constructing a linguistic world (the subject) from experience. Language, as a cruel virus, is incestuous, coupling with itself through these dynamics and thus emerges the relations between people through language. As language is only native to the subject speaking, everything is objectified by every other, as the fundamental basis of social experience.

Language is thus possessed of mutagenic powers, abilities to speak to itself, to create entities beyond humanity which are the true products of humanity - not people, but entities, into which the person’s subject plugs in and their object is created.

The emergence of language, the evolution of this new linguistic-creature is something that few understand the extreme strangeness of. The base reality of nature has never been life. An aberration birthed the mere fact of living creatures on Earth and as an aberration against entropy, life continues. As such, the substratum of nature is suffering and death, with cycles of endless decline and repeating extinctions, with life consisting of disease, starvation, and above all, constant fear and violence. Against this, humanity committed an aberration, where this suffering was harnessed and controlled towards specific ends in the forms of coercion required to make agriculture, where the ruling class channeled the basic suffering into a profit-producing social order. In doing so, there then emerged secondary producers, who took the materials created by the underclass and made them into a linguistic superstructure: culture, art, etc. Through these artisans, scribes, and literati, emerges femininity and womanhood, as the gender purely based on secondary production, on technology and culture, the gender which must be constructed through the artistic project of “beauty” - the women’s restroom sign requiring an additional set of shapes upon the default to be known as female. It is this that is the feminine, the Superstructual peoples emerging from the Base that are created in one stroke as the entirety of civilization. Women therefore are created by Civilization, Men are only differentiated as such through it.

Back to the Steppes

 

In Counter-Strike’s Gun Game/Arms Race mode, war machines are, through the technologies and frameworks of contemporary conflict, returned to and then transformed by the steppe. The isolated players or teams operate against each other nomadically, moving freely through the map, mediated between each other only by their own technologies and movements. Unlike the state capture of the regular game mode, where the war machines operate beneath the capture of politically charged narratives (IDF defusing bombs planted by Palestinians, FBI rescuing hostage office workers held by Anarchists) and their ability to operate being constrained by their ability to operate in these narratives (financially and the direction of their actions) the more free form gamemodes use the purely nomadic logic of death match. As the player moves through the map, interacting through war with the other machines, they morph and change, the weapons held by the player changing as the player levels up. Victory is achieved through the one who most effectively gives into this corruption, the one who is molded the most to the war, getting a kill with the apex weapon, most distant from their native SMG.

This appears as the greatest and deepest expression of a trend that’s gained extreme prominence in recent years, expressed today in Battle Royale games. There’s been a steep uptrend in recent years towards these game modes, Minecraft Hunger Games to PUBG to Fortnite, the war machine has gone above and beyond in prominence, with the Battle Royale even conforming to the steppe in the minor details, small pockets of resource allocation and large open fields on which battle is done. In all of these, the logic of the state-captured war machine is breaking down, as machines are made to emerge distant from the scenarios which caused their capture in the first place.

War machines emerging after state capture occurs this way in terrorism within the civilized world. The state captured war machine as the primary expression of the war machine slips away steadily as the state is no longer constituted through the existence of the war machine as in a contested territory or expanding empire. With the war machine acting as the way to secure the state against contests to its existence, the war machine was able to allow itself to be captured by being the means through which the state was able to constitute itself, thereby forming a codependant relationship. With these relationships solidified in many parts of the world, the state secured by means of itself and its military being yoked to the stability of the state and not the constitutor of the state (the NATO nation state as opposed to the expanding empire, the borders determined by impotent treaties as opposed to endless conflict), the war machines begin to die off within the state and emerge independently just as they did originally.

Such is reflected not only in the art of these cultures, steadily producing violent works moving more and more towards solitary war, waged against equally solitary enemies on the open wilderness of the stratified urban landscape, cities no more unreal or anti-human than the forest or plains. The same occurs politically and apolitically, with terrorism and mass shootings replicating the dynamic, war machines being broken down to the individual level, where the pseudo-state of a cell or sect has now scattered to the singular lone wolf, the trajectory from Tom Metzger to Brenton Tarrant.