The Capital of Words

The refrain against so-called “rent seeking” always goes the same - I’m sure in the early years, when the development of written language took place there was the cry - but is this really necessary? After all, we can speak perfectly well to each other, why introduce an intermediary? And further before, writers of the pure and original will often state a case to the dawn of language itself, as some obscuring illusion that separates one from the real. A famous anecdote, Jean-Paul Sartre seething at the foot of a tree-stump - but how do I really know who you are?

The real is a concept emerging itself from alienation. The concept of there being some interior missed is one only constructed by a remove from that interior, and to be more radical, is a concept constructed by the very interior. The interior, the “real” is not the thing lost in the move to language, but the thing created for language. By constructing the notion of the real, one withdraws into the private, secondary space of language, by that very distance, speech is born. Hence the purpose of “Truth”, the ever important concept, emerges only as something that one is distanced from. The removal, the separation of oneself from the real is the act of language, to forever dance around, separate, and build second-order systems of reference-to, something that is instantly perceived at the moment of experience.

Language is always superstructural by this, secondary and above. It then mutates, develops orders of itself that then refer to the underlying previous. Written language first emerges as a set of pictograms, numerical dashes, evolving in complexity, as a tool of the leisured and ruling class, calculating economic, military, or mythic matters. It then fell, from its initial minority adoption, its infrastructure descended upon the below until the situation today where literacy is the norm in almost all of the world.

Information networks grow by this mechanism. Speech is interesting, far moreso than the “real”, as it has the potential for unlimited growth. While experience is monodirectional and single-moment, speech is infinite. One human can transmit to another, who can then uptake, reinterpret, pass on or change the message, across each node - each individual. This is the human capacity - to combine, interpret, morph - to create. That the power of “good and evil” was what got Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of the Real is no coincidence. The divide, to appraise, is to invent language, to steal the power that was solely the province of God, as the originator of the “real”.

And so - civilization - brought about by this process of accumulating greater and greater levels of abstractions. Abstractions are fascinating in their ability to talk beyond their supposed direct reference, to talk to each other without any “truthful” reference to the “real”. An abstraction is capable of dealing with itself, as language will always refer to other language, which in turn, will only construct further and further accumulations of language as the ever-growing garden continues to be watered and fertilized by every speaker and writer.

And so too, was capitalism born, as early as civilization was itself. In one of the early issues of American Affairs, an article was published on so-called “grey money”, referring to these anonymous entities, private equity firms, hedge funds, investment groups, that controlled such an outsize portion of the world’s ownership. This is not an accident. Not out of any nefarious accumulation, from an earlier era when economics was more “real”, but out of how capitalism has functioned, always. Capitalism too, didn’t originate alien from some evil wizard or out of any exceptional new era when the steam engine was invented, as many of our contemporary thinkers will say on the question of theodicy, but out of this same process. Abstractions, formulated atop material things. In language, the narrative is more direct, with that of a sole individual first philosopher who decided to abstract the real from the experienced, but identical in economics. Material manipulation, the things of the world processed, harvested, yoked, sculpted, emerged via the same social-linguistic abstraction - now via the abstraction of money or trade, which we foolishly single out as separate from other identical forms of the process of abstraction via social-communicative relations between people. The grey-money often spoken of in anger is nothing new in this regard. Economics in itself, is nothing more than another emergent system, a fruiting body from the mycelium of language, identical to the internet, art, or etiquette.

Arena Nomads

The strange thing about Counter-Strike is that you can strip yourself almost bare - pressing G to fling everything into the air, falling to the ground as an entity, stripping the character to nothing but the knife. In D&G’s Treatise on Nomadology, a section towards the end deals with this concept, that of the assemblage made by weaponry. As opposed to tools, which form an assemblage as part of a larger apparatus of work, where the tool, the product, the raw, the labor relation, etc, all form one machine, the weapon forms a self-contained machine, which operates on the pure principle of its own projection upon the world.

This then creates an interesting situation for the player, where they find their interaction with the world dynamically transformed by their movement through various systems. In Counter-Strike it’s economic, the strategy of full-buy, eco, and pistol rounds making an element of strategy where the player’s assemblage is transformed by their ability to perform within the game. Performance as a pistol is rewarded with SMGs and armor, or with full rifle, etc. In Quake, the environment forms the basis of this strategic manipulation. Duels take place in a game of timing and area control - with all things that make up the player, health, armor, and weapons, being accessed only by moving through certain points on the map, the game becomes one of optimizing self-transformation by controlling the items scattered through the game.

In RTS games, these machines are deployed in the same manner as the formal military does under state capture. The individual soldiers are made into units of a larger mass, deployed towards various goals, often economic. The meta-game of Starcraft is built around colonial accumulation, the one civilian structure being the true heart of the game. One’s army is mere protection as one seeks to continually build more bases and their attendant worker units, in order to continually expand on and on forward. The enemy is an obstacle to be overcome and accidentally win, the strategic goals of war fading behind the tactical goals of economics.

Valorant has gained popularity recently, using Riot’s skill in 5v5 pseudo-gacha multiplayer experiences, adapting the Counter-Strike format to the class based one. They try, but can’t quite recreate it, and the basis of that is in the foundations. The class system is itself an ecclesiastical one. Whereas the strategy game refines the weapon-assemblage into a piece, manipulated by the player in their role as the totally-controlling state, the class based game is an ecclesiastical recreation of the nomad experience of Quake and CS. In Team Fortress 2 or Valorant, the player is defined by their relationship to a supertext of roles, roles chosen before the game even begins, the class/character select screen being presented at the start of every round. Here, we have predestination of course, but more than that, we have the affixation of peoples so common to institutional languages. The Pyro and Heavy are signs which one molds oneself to in order to fill opportunities descended from Heaven, roles coded in latin, the AK47 and the M4A4 are coded in the vernacular, tools that form a unity with the player.

Team Fortress 2 players have plenty of ecclesiastical concepts of duty around this. The Pyro is often a contentious place for its difficulty in fitting into these traditional schemes. Most duties in classes are sourced from their purpose in directly seizing the game’s objectives. If a certain pious subset of the playerbase were to get their way, the game would be minus the Sniper, Spy, and Pyro entirely - perceived as being either useless or individualistic hallmarks of players from a lesser, more nomadic class of game. Mains of these classes are often forced to prove themselves, the Py-Bro as a sort of gimped-medic that exists to help the Engineer, or the endless walls of text produced by Sniper and Spy mains regarding their usefulness to the team. All of this is besides the point - the basis fo the matter is that the three outsider classes will never be accepted - after all, their playstyles all reflect something dissonant to the substance of the game, the brutish repetition of labor towards objectives that makes up the coveted worship of the Church’s preset castes.

Call of Duty and Counter-Strike make for an interesting comparison of the opposite. Call of Duty gives weapons in a proletarian fashion, one simply works at the “grind” and is rewarded. Weapons are chosen at the beginning of the game, earned from working through a progression ladder that’s climbed via rote repetition of the game. What Call of Duty offers is a fantasy, a commodified, structured, fantasy of the martial competition of games which offer a weapon assemblage dynamic to the player’s worth within the game. Counter-Strike on the other hand, is the aristocracy of the wilderness. Weapons are bought from kill-rewards, ones heightened for risk taking, for working as a team, for taking on extremes such as using worse weapons to achieve greater results. It’s telling then that the Call of Duty community is obsessed with imaginary systems of rules to increase “fairness”. The gamer wants a system, a perfect machine they can slot their vitality into that will deliver them up the chain flawlessly. Call of Duty players are known then for their hate for anything beyond, micro-communities of different playstyles endlessly accusing the other of pseudo-cheating for winning or gaining “unfair” advantages. For Counter-Strike, playstyle fights are always punching down, an extension of the rigid selection systems in place already. The most mocked are not rivals to the various ways to grind the latter, but those who play badly, off the highway down dead-end sideroads, the Tec-9 and P90 spammers. 

Ultimate Practice

A recurring theme in science fiction or fantasy is the genre trope of a more advanced race with some form of noosphere above them, a telepathic network by which they all communicate and achieve harmony with each other. This works in both directions, the Zerg version of an alternate, insectoid strain in evolution where a humanity-possessing species came into being in the form of hiveminded raw biology, and the Protoss version, where an advanced species has turned into the biological priests of a technological superstructure that supersedes them completely.

The Terran counter-example here of courses uses typical anthropoignorance, where authors forget that they themselves are an organism in total continuity with their technology. Humanity has all of this in spades, with the electricity, written or spoken language, economic systems, etc, making up the same function as the magically simplified psychic systems of the other two races. The idea that humanity does not have the same thing in themselves is from the twofold error of only interpreting the things of the other as being othered in their conception (ie, a Protoss would experience all things of the world not as “X” but as “Protoss-X”), thus making a sort of objectification of all things done equally by all species into only unique to them. This error occurs as an inverse of the error of self-conception in individualistic humans, wherein one cannot perceive oneself as being anything other than an individual floating in a sort of absurd vacuum, not as a part of the larger systems - the classic shock and awe of freshman year debates on free will.

The concept of “total war” was rediscovered just as it was being lost when war, inevitably, emerged under the same laws it had always followed. Previously, war was never considered sovereign beyond the regular state of things, as some separate theatre of political pomp, until the great era of separations after industry began to take over. Several ideological processes undergirded the enlightenment, the most important of which was secularization - not the process of making the sacred no longer that, but apposite - making the profane ecclesiastical. The nation-state emerged as a consolidation of the King’s superstructural central authority, growing to a whole system of superstructural orders emanating from the central authority, across the land, drawing firm national borders, stratifying power, enclosing land into legally ordered plots, etc. All of this was to construct a similar order to that of the church, a discourse which determines the map of the territory. In doing so, the map and territory were brought into sharp focus in a way never done before, where now the consciousness of oneself as territory made an alienating effect. The various movements of legal counter-facts around the world, the Russians who proclaim themselves Soviets, the Germans who proclaim themselves Imperial, the Americans who proclaim themselves Revolutionary, etc, there’s a concept of two selves, the legal fiction of the self and the actual self. There is some truth to this - the self as a part of the state’s discourse is a part of the map, while the actual ego is a part of the territory - forming just that dissonance, often bleeding over when associations are made with others as territory itself, seen in the American tendency to obsessively construct their opponents as “establishment”.

Total War then, was a new concept, as it brought into sharp focus a reunification after the cleft, where map and territory were made complete again. The functions of state had their discourses reduced to the raw systems of political-economy that the state has always functioned as, people found themselves reduced to their place in the truer discourses of self, ethnicity, language, gender, religion, where nation didn’t suffice. It was in the second world war when the last gasps of this were felt by Westerners, when all sides of the war returned to the fact of combat that modern states so often shun - that civilians are no less a part of the thing you’re attempting to inflict damage upon than the so-called “military”, that the difference between the two is of fleeting context.

In later “wars”, though I feel that’s too weighty a word for what often occurred, when a colonial galavanting collided with quasi-genocide, such as in American Vietnam or Soviet Afghanistan, there was a conflict often between the false husks of humans at the top, those unable to comprehend anything but their bishopric, the generals and intelligence agents, would balk in horror as war emerged on a tactical level, for the Kurtz and Balalaikas of the world. Their “country” abandoned them, because what else would it do? They descended through history into war, while their country only wanted intelligence gathering and police action. It was they alone who truly committed war and they were punished for it, as war was never what was wanted.

As long as the Geneva Convention is followed, war is not. After all, what is that, but the empty words of a select few nations, all in alliance with each other? A war is a game of force to make political-economic goals realized. For the upholders of empty documents and moralities, distinctions between civilian and military casualties, between justified and unjustified force - war, when it comes, as it always does, as a rending season of evil that descends and passes every few generations, will come like the Italians experienced the French invasion in the late 15th century, where the hardened brutality of soldiers trained in war met the empty pomp and theatrics of soldiers trained in parades and duels.

Treasures of Jade and Philosopher-Stone

Most intimate to the player is the season of Spring - the world forms, often in a lush green, rarely overgrown or frozen or desiccated, resplendent and peaceful. Monsters form naturally as if from the Earth, sometimes literally, as nightfalls and the darkness of the caves below the grassy firmament rise upwards to attack the player. The Season of Wood, presided over by the Azure Dragon, the color of life, in freshly growing plants and jade, in creepers. The form of life opposite the player from this is the Testificate form, villagers and illagers making an immediately accessible conflict of species known. Their architecture is similar, above-ground overworld structures with social hierarchies implied in the construction, often made of wood and nearby materials. Agriculture grows as it does in the spring season of sowing, cut wood, sheep’s wool, bales of wheat, small gardens of vegetables forming the architectural foundation for their lives. They engage in war in a primitive way, one group living in peace and the other marching out in an innocent, savage way. They live as early civilizations never burdened with language, carrying mutely on the functions of organization like children at play.

The Vermilion Bird presides over fire, the stifling heat of summertime produced not by the fact of summer, but by passion - the heat and life of motion excited in the manner of aroused bodies, plants growing far outpace of their bounds, jungles abounding in even Northern climates for a brief window of months. The pig was once mistakenly made with its Y and Z values inverted, creating the mutation for the creeper. The pig provides the linkage into the Nether, a realm of timeless violence. Flesh of the pig, the lesser form of the human, takes on a humanoid form, where man uncovers savagery. The lava makes a haze like a bloody meridian, one has to descend, living off thrown gold and wild swings of the sword. All of it’s consensual, as where else does a lust for life lead one? Destruction occurs after-the-fact of great exertion of vitality, the empire expanding so fast and joyously entire continents are burned in ecstasy - Nero’s famous lyre being only an imperial ethos turned inwards. Destruction is a whirlwind of ecstasy as it spins out from the self and strikes everyone else, as the one inside is laughing. The nether and its inhabitants are in pain, but fire laughs. Fire is passion ignited, like sexual arousal or a lusting anger.

Autumn, the season of metal. When frost creeps in at the edges and borders of the explosive life of summertime and the world silences to prepare for the long season of winter. Death comes inevitably and bodies must return to the base matter, reduced to the leaden soil of Saturn in absolute darkness, in order to be the raw matter of the next season of rebirth. Not that this is much solace of course, as the creeping chill of autumn is nothing but terrifying and only leads to terminus for all suffering it. As the player digs and builds into the world, they uncover more and more ruins. The first proper structure added was the dungeon, a single room, made of mossed-over, long crumbled stone, with treasures and mindless flesh breeding inside it. After this, came the abandoned mineshafts and strongholds - more remnants, old buildings, long rotted and now populated only by death, metallic cutting edges and falling orange leaves, turning to brown and then soil on the ground. It’s said that the White Tiger only appears when absolute peace and virtue reigns over the land - after all, once the peak is reached, the only direction to go is down.

The Black Turtle rests at North, presiding over the darkness of water and winter. Look down from your boat, into the ocean, see the chthonic depths below. It turns to darkness quickly, as you sink, even more black than night, until the depths become so crushing... We imagine shadow to have the quality of water, as we go further into an abandoned building we “sink” and the darkness is supposed to envelop, swallow, consume us. None of this happens of course, but we can’t help but feel it. Maybe there is some memory, of the water the ocean is an eternal gradation downwards, like winter deepening colder and colder, layers of ice encasing, stilling, preservation at depths. The Guardians of the Ocean Monument make their primary goal to protect the Monument itself, to act as its namesake, still beneath the water. Mining is slow beneath water and the player is further impeded by being at risk of drowning while they cast a fatigue effect. Some question if the Guardians are alive at all, or if they’re some form of stone automaton, a life-form made akin to a golem of non-cellular matter. The ocean is a terminal point for those living in it, wide basins of existence distinct from the rest of the world beyond itself, a preserved world that slows until a deathly stillness. Towards the surface, ghosts rise and dolphins attempt to help the player scram from this kingdom of unlife.

Transcendence happens in stages. A few artefacts that we all know come into possession, the Totem of Unlife, the Heart of the Sea, etc - but what truly is the final prize of the game? Transcendence. Alchemy’s pursuit of the same in all places speaks to the same need, the one magic fulfills, to transcend the mundane limits. The Yellow Dragon of the Center, the one presiding over Earth, occupying the 0,0,0 position in the diagram of the five classical elements. A black dragon rests at the base of the game, activating the credit sequence, when The End is “freed”. This is only a pretender, after all, is the author anything but a function? Transcendence - maybe you taste it when the dragon bursts into 65 levels - the dragon sure thought it had done so, before you came along. Maybe you taste it in borderline creative mode Elytra flying, cheating death with a totem, breathing underwater. In these moments - and they are moments, never fully inhabited, but passing peaks of experiences - you become the author, the Yellow Dragon. But only ever a taste, a brief visit to the throne, before the revolution unseats you and you’re forced to once again claw down the gates and break into the palace in the endless cycle of struggle for those brief, timeless instants where you are the Earth, the center, the Emperor...

Human Organisms

Like the rings of a tree, architecture stratifies in strange ways to form a neat timeline of people and place. An American small town, the downstreets of the main come up towards the tail of the gilded age, the Old West-ish main nestled between a two story canyon. Extending beyond are the post-war boom years, when the nostalgic childhood homes spring up on wide-squared grids of streets, each plot of two car garage going on in sequence until it just sort of... ends. Far enough into the Sisyphean black hole of uncovering their timeline and you’ll find old ownerships, old locations, packed-up and sold farms and businesses, that dot the landscape beyond the borders, a demand fired once and never again. Maybe children find the old field, or hunters down an old logging road and there’s a large square hole in the ground where the foundation of a farmstead used to be dug, in a five acre rectangular clearcut being taken over by shrubby trees and tall grasses. The forest too, young and brambly, even further journeys afield beyond the tangle of two lane highways and small outpost-towns dotting the colonial interior being required to escape the five o’clock shadow land shaved and cleared day after year after decade.

For the children of these towns, video games descended as if from Heaven. In 1979, few except the hardliners of DT Suzuki’s bastard societies could even find Japan on a map, and those who could scarcely could without making a crack referring to Pearl Harbor. By 1990, Japan was a promised land. They still couldn’t find it on a map, but they knew it was some fairyworld, where technology (in this context meaning toys) were “years ahead” whatever that means.

Meanwhile in Japan, that aforementioned technology was developing a world of its own. In LaMarre’s The Anime Ecology, he puts forward the thesis analyzing the narratology of what was exported to the west as “anime” - a truer descriptor than exists in Japan, for the wide umbrella of a certain form of media that developed as an expression of technology itself. As consumer electronics grew an entire interlinked world of devices and appliances, so too did media grow to include it. What happened at the arcade connected to the television, to the DVD, to the internet, to the home game console, to the plastic merchandise, and from this there grew a genre native to this tangled web of mediums, that of the broad world of otakudom. 

Another decade later and this culture began to slowly trickle across the Pacific ocean into America. First through the usual pan-pacific channels, video pirating networks catching signals in San Francisco (Otaku no Video took care to find one), snippets of conversations in Hawaiian bars with the loneliest member of a company outing, and then backchanneling around the Ring of Fire’s Japantowns, via the internet. The connection to Japan is incidental, anime could have emerged from any nation in the world, had that nation been the pioneers of the ecology LaMarre identified. It was thus via the rhizomatic spread of this network of devices and appliances over the globe, that a peak of saturation was reached where the things native to the network become memetic upon it. Otaku culture was uprooted and planted in the now firm soil of online, where it was only a matter of time for it to propagate to the now very deeply dug Earth of the United States. Christopher Poole copied the source code for the imageboard and the rest...

In a strange way, you can track the spread of techno-media by what is loved and where. Media often comes secondary in popular consumption, to the technology available for it. Media after all is only good as long as there’s a digital slot for it to plug into. Many histories could be written here, the deeply buried fungus of post-Soviet Source Engine culture, the last video store in the world, where a fat teenager dances to nightcore in raccoon eye 2007 makeup, the Bay area pseudo-cultures of media, its fandoms, and its discourses...

Architecture and subject are unified in this dance between each other, where they mold each other into a complementary organism. Like a termite mound or ant colony, footsteps make “elephant paths”, where the concrete is skipped in favor of a shortcut through the dirt. At the same time, behavior adapts to environment, as is written about with the brutalist redesigns of college campuses often being in order to engineer social environments away from any social interactions and towards a sort of collected-solitude among the students. 

Things that are built always come after the fact of their causes - to look around and see the stock exchanges crop up around maritime western Europe, you would find yourself already under the well-dawned sunlight of capitalism. Processes form fruiting bodies, akin to mycelium, from their actions beneath the surface. The human subjects within this substratum simply cause the emergence of the fruiting bodies, the architectural manifestations of their already-present actions.

The city makes itself known as an organism in this sense. A history can be drawn of every settlement, of the flows which birthed it, as process confluenced upon a single point to create the thing now standing, the brick and mortar like tracks in the grass, concrete markers of what the patterns were, what shape they took, what was done here.

It’s then in further evolution that the next generation subjects exist within. The feudal castle gave birth to the haunted house and we found an empty-space to channel our dead and demonic. The downtown gave birth to a generation of flight, emptiness, and then return as those now suburbanized returned to make the metropolitan center fitting to their folksy sensibilities and commercial economic life. The historical record, the skeletons of now-dried up riverbeds are then terraformed by each subsequent generation of floods to make a process of accumulation - one that can be seen in the term in Ancient Near Eastern archaeology (perhaps others, but I’ve only studied ANE) - “tell”, referring to the layers of civilization past that lies beneath the streets of every city living or dead in the region, buildings and streets almost always retaining the exact locations as old with each fine layer of compacted detritus.

It’s these tells, like rings of a tree, that give the story of a place. The story of an organism, of a wide flat plain eroded into glacially shifting canyons by the ever-changing floods raging down from the mountaintops.

Lightning in a Bottle

Snow is falling, gentle fat flakes from a white haze of sky onto the gentle ebb and swell of hills rising from the intercontinental tundra. The sky is northwards forever. I look up into it in reflection, sipping black coffee before the great window-wall of the building. Jutting from the ground, the facility emerges from permafrost jagged and glass-like. All black, except for the square end of the shard that opens up to a great glass wall, where light pours in from the north over the snow and sun, into the brut office constructed for me. 

Preservation is a watchword of the day. I’m all alone on a highway, six months previous, listening to the radio. I was where the hosts are rounding about to months ago, not that I would be allowed to speak of it. I pull into a gas station where soggy paper blows across the winter slush to my feet, crunching under the salt and sand, my own lips touching cold metal with a instant guilty bite as my tongue touches refrigerated cold. I finish it halfway back into the city. Research trips are always unpleasant, hoping to get a good nap in under the city lights to wash the taste of the nation’s white-primitives out of my mouth.

There’s an email to attend to once I get back to the office. Helvetica, 12 point, as is standard. Some place use arial, not that anyone except I can tell the difference, cultured deeply as I am into those little advantages not afforded lightly. I get another sip of coffee, looking over the carefully typed paragraph, somewhat between a memo and an order. Preservation, preservation. Information as well, keeping it safe though is talked about far more than gathering it these days. In my apartment I have an image of a dozen or so men in outdoor gear standing in some distant location, smiling, holding their equipment. It’s all obsolete now, the few suckers who get shanghai’d down to the south pole, the last frontiers where it hasn’t all been mapped out like the rest, at such a pace to busy entire buildings in cataloguing it.

I was once taken on a trip to see my friend, northeast of the city, where the money lives. He was old, not even American despite being here for generations to monolinguality, buttoned down in a banker’s suit. The structure was underground, inside a sort of Versace golden recreation of a hellenic villa, windowless, marbled stone, polished reflective on all side of me. Here there was only ink black and every shade of gold between yellow and brown. Security was immense, men were standing guard equipped in the way of soldiers outfitted fresh every six months, on the cutting edge of laser-rimmed eyes piercing me as I was led past a flank of submachine guns into vaults, vaults within vaults that he could only show me on a computer screen on a mahogany desk that itself was buried deep as though it were as precious as the interior’s contents.

We produce ninety-eight degrees of heat every second we live. In abstract, we produce exponentially more. I browse the halls of a server dungeon, glassy sheer surfaces in a winning battle of their heat against the super-frozen water pumping through their veins. I sit in a plane and look down upon the world where smog coats the city palpably, a fog thicker than fog, heat islands and car exhausts pumping out radiating waves of our heat into space. If there is life on the moon, we’re like a lover to them, burning to the touch, nestle up against us in the cold night, lord knows we’re putting off enough heat to forget the big empty beyond.

Heat destroys energy, practically speaking. Not truthfully of course, energy cannot be destroyed, but it’s obvious what’s meant. After heating, it spirals off, careening through the void to nothingness, until we eventually hit the terminal cold, where all is still particles floating isolate in nothing. I think about it often. My body radiates heat beneath my quarterzip into the arctic air and I think about it, the permafrost melting and all I see... that Windows XP screensaver, the one that simulates flying through space with white dots on a black background? I can’t stop watching the center. We use a proprietary linux build here, but I can’t stop looking into the face of terminus.

When I’m home, in a minimally appointed home, snow is falling outside, in gentle crystalline flakes. Every one is a unique sparkle of art that shows brilliant under a microscope. Every one hits my upper-floor downtown window and melts from the radiance of heat inside my apartment. The pattern is destroyed and the energy is lost to the void. I sit in an Ikea couch and watch the city blurred as my vision focuses on the window, only a scant reflection of the dim lights I have burning at this time of night. My computer is vibrating along the floor across the carpet. The heat can be heard in the walls. I look to my Rothko and back to the window. I am alone.

Travis & Bubbles Buried in The Jungle

A spectre floats over a niche online community, a lost work desired. Lost media is strange in this same way always, the very absence of the thing at the center of all discourse being the function of it, producing desire through a quest to search for it. Such often produces narratives of memory from it, spurning out its own niche of psychologically identified tales, such as shown in the Candle Cove fiction.

In particular, I’d like to make a case study of Go For a Punch or Saki Sanobashi, an either fictitious or so obscure as to practically fictitious eroguro anime from the pre-internet years of otakudom. Supposedly a lost short animated film that was found by a 4chan user on the Tor internet, it depicts schoolgirls trapped in a bathroom - nine of them, one with a white hime cut -   killing themselves after some drama occurs which drives them to suicide by methods such as braining themselves on the plumbing fixtures.

Its eluded its searchers since it was rumored to exist, to the point of developing schisms as the conflicting desires of the search go in different directions. Fanart is produced, making the thing exist if not as a VHS tape from the 1980s, then as a product of a search for the absent.

Eroguro typically works from the premise of Saki Sanobashi. Girls are divorced from the usual purity associated - the main character identified as having the anti-subtle hairstyle of a white hime cut - and left to be brutally torn open in the raw desert. The bathroom is never found, the parents withheld from the girls, searching, hoping to find them. The bathroom now forms a pocket of the wilderness, knives and animalism taking hold of the girls as their bodies become primary once again.

Quite a bit of pornography works on this basic storyline, of the Id’s total triumph. Pornography first begins with an exaggerated performance - the acting of porn isn’t so much a fault as it is the purpose, a foundational act to what occurs, where armor is rendered into metal bikinis and plumbers into greasy dago studs, performance being raised to a hyperreal intensity of itself. The gendered performances are embodied more fully than normally possible, by constructing a hypergender above and beyond the typical performance. A man becomes Delaney’s Hogg, his usual affirmations of the raw and brutal nature of manhood raised to the extremes of the concept. A woman becomes a whore, her costumes remade into slutty recreations of the old mask, more vibrant, colorful, flashier, showing more skin. A third gender is constructed often as well, in the strange space where it’s always implied in normal life. What is simply a weak man normally becomes a sissy and a cuckold, a lesbian becomes one of the boys in her musculature and possible hermaphroditism.

Hypertrophy is of course never neutral. The particular line taken can vary wildly depending on what is seen as the particular components to be hypertrophied in this process known often as “corruption”. Some darken the skin, plumpen the lips, exaggerate the curves and muscles and genitals, add tattoos, destroy the body or mutate it beyond human form, colonize it with insects or wicked technology... all of these paths being taken depending on the interpretation of what the performance is before the corruption begins. The interpretation of the nurse, as an play of matronly love, or as a play of disciplinary control, or etc, will all set up different pieces to become hypertrophied in the making-sexual of the performance.

The process of making-sexual is always alien to the performance itself, as my language thus far has been implying. Yet its always done as a deeper seed of life than the performance itself, a warring triumph of the id over the superego. No wonder then, that defeat is so often eroticized, in the ancient storyline of the feral barbarians overtaking the virginal feminine of the superegoic interior.

And this giving-in process, forms the basis of becoming-sexual, wherein the Id is made to reign over the Superego, the Ego - imagine the drama stylized in the cuckold drama. The weak young man, dressed in the finest uniforms of his place in the world, is shown for what he is - nothing more than a paper tiger. The feminine he courts decides to abandon him and open the door for the feral unknowable, the Freudian correspondence speaking for itself.

The first Death Grips album is steeped in the 1960s. Aside from a few mentions of items like MDMA, samples from surf rock or the first Pink Floyd album underly lyrics regarding a primitivization of the self. The speaker becomes like the man running in the desert in the Beware video, the naked and ungroomed man posing for the cover art. No shock, as the drama of the decade was through the shattering of an illusion of a superegoic order. Without an underlying material reality, the pretending that God wasn’t dead in the barbiturate haze of the post-war era ended with dual attempts, to either continue up and up and ascend to a new plane of consciousness, or to descend, to become feral as Tiger Force in Vietnam, Charles Manson in the desert, the revelers at Altamont and Woodstock and the Summer of Love.

Eroguro provides an interesting confluence in bringing together libido into one act, both sex and violence unified to work upon the body in question. The young girls in Saki Sanobashi, performing purity in their serafuku and traditional hairstyles, have their being worked upon from within. All violence is self inflicted as part of the situation, where the bathroom acts as the greater mechanism of making them become-sexual, the self being hypertrophied in its expense of energy, the act of braining oneself on a faucet no different in function from ahegao’ing while psychotically riding an ugly bastard’s cock.

The question then of desire and its origin is one that’s lead into a maddeningly simple aphorism. Hypertrophy occurs by that within being awakened to overcome the carefully fragile systems above itself, like Agent Orange soaking into organic material and overdriving it to grow itself dead. The identification of desire with the wilderness, as something exogenous to the self constructed in early life, and yet unignorable as being infinitely more primal than it, dovetails - desire is nonconsensual and yet will always be a source of some of the truest embodiments of the self.