Masseuse Capitalism

In the explosion of 9/11 Pynchon writes of proprietary dust falling down, synthetic spores of drywall and steel as the vertical monuments of the 1980s come collapsing. Contrary to a more standard reading of D&G, it’s important to recognize the verticality, even in temporary fashion. In order for a rhizomatic system to be affixed by language (ie, to be written at all) it has to be in some way captured, made into a vertical structure. Words do not change, thus being their eternal instability, and the fact of their being the only thing that is capable of being at all (indeed, language is itself, the realm of creating-being from the becoming of the rest), therefore to make words on anything is to make becoming into being in some capacity. It’s in this way that we get the fungal structure of things, in contrast to a more stricter notion of a rhizome. Capitalism pushed out from its becoming, the being of monuments, the fruiting bodies from mycelium to temporarily create an affixation-point around which to analyze and read the organism. The destruction of the twin towers was the castration of the phallic dream that created this. The enlightened kings, those empowered by pseudo-monarchical symbols, were torn down by force, without their fundamental nature being destroyed. Their phallic verticality was destroyed, while the economic movements from which they emerged remain, beyond any possibility of their grasping them - the becoming begets temporary being, not the other way around. Such is the rise and fall of centralization schemes. The system invigorates itself via a humble servant who supercharges the centralized infrastructure (the monarch) until that very infrastructure produces flows of its own, dissolving away the power of the monarch (the scattered nobility) - the monument of New York’s gaudy power destroyed by the shadowed movements along the oil-based lifeform of 21st century economic mycelium.

While a great author, Murakami has only ever written one novel (in several dozen different editions). His essays notwithstanding, his novels share the same fascination: an everyman goes through some strange “portal” event and comes into a world very much like our own, but with a different clockwork behind the scenes, making the watchface (that is, reality as it appears) different than it was before. In 1Q84, it’s two moons in the sky, corresponding to the strange fairy creatures that now exist. In Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it’s his wife going missing and the internal emptiness of people. In Kafka on the Shore, it’s the fantasy world after trauma, a shattered glass reflection after the death of the father, the atomic bomb falling. In all of these, the protagonist spends the majority of their time navigating the clockwork of this new set of machines via the help of someone shown as being hyper-integrated or hyper-competent. Often smooth, clean, professional - physical appearance delineates morality while the function remains the same. Ushikawa appears multiple times, acting as the jaw-clamper, bringing the worst scourgings of the alien machine down upon the protagonist, carefully and steadily. Masseuses appear again and again, manipulating occult flows of the body in order to bring about various transformations. The process the protagonist must go through is always one of sculpting, to come out the other end. The journey is a journey of submission, submission to higher powers in order to let the mechanisms of an alternate, more powerful world remake him into a higher being, gaining something he was unaware of having lost in the normal world.

“Strands and tensions” as Pound describes the world, the phrasing appears reformulated to say the same again and again. Accumulation of qualities, flows, becomings… What’s important from all of it is the same. The world exists as a singular substratum across which differentiations occur by varying degree, in the sense of the ocean’s currents differentiate via temperature and direction. Murakami only encounters the clock at the level of the outsider-looking-in, his protagonists. The building up of his protagonists occurs via the same mechanical interaction with this vast ocean of everything as the creation of economic monuments. Systems come together by manipulation, the Mycelium Ocean twists and flows, and from it fruiting bodies. The corporation rises as the organizing system for economic flows to create the American petrochemical infrastructure. The fruiting body rots, dissolves back into nitrogen and carbon, the soil continues on, newly invigorated as its spores sail the wind, the bellies of animals, down streams and creeks. The masseuse, the magician sits in her perfectly kept office, laying our protagonist down. His being is dismantled under her gaze, she plucks the strands, pulls, pushes, re-arranges his flows. He awakens, his being now forever shifted. He sees it as clockwork, though trusts undeniably what has happened.