h e t v i c . エラー

“Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it.” -Félix Guattari

General

The AI Fever

Post author By hetvic
Post date 2023/07/22

Something about the discussion on AI makes me icky. Not sure what it is, maybe the overall stupidity and blandness of the discussion.

It seems that what people are afraid of is the state of no longer being able to know what is machine and what is human. The sadness of it all is that we already are there. There is no meaningful distinction. We need to create a new concept of authenticity. A new concept of art. It’s not like we have a choice. The crisis has already happened.

We’re tired of humans. They’ve made us suffer too much.

General

Inanna

Post author By hetvic
Post date 2023/02/15

As above, so below, an abyss is resting

With a person, cut in thousand pieces

Their nervous system in flames, letting it burn

Flames that shoot light even for those who are blind

The spinal chord does its job to bind, to never let go

Of the only shimmer of hope, that pain can give

As above, so below, knives filing

A spine, cut in pieces

To the point of freedom, drained

Liquids and flows, separated from their membranes

Liberates the nerves that never had the chance to perceive

The only shimmer of life, in Gazir

Oh, you thousandfold multitude

Your univocal voice can’t make itself to be found

Among all threads that tangle and rustle, that

Screw themselves to screams

To the point that it’s no longer possible

To tell the perceptions apart

But from a light bearing node, a woman walks

Turning darkness to light, as if to perceive

Her arms and legs of prosthesis

Her hair color of blood’s iron

And worm eaten wings that brace themselves

She shows mankind’s bodies

Nerve threads with hardened myelin

Like lichens in coagulated blood

Stretching without any plummet

And others, as if carved and folded

Origami in order to bloom

Twisted like roses and opened like a corpse flower

Clouds of dust, as the mushrooms’ sweet pollen

Oh you thousandfold Inanna

We now hear your lonely voice

All this

Was me all along

Philosophy Screens and Images

Intro to Screens and Images

Post author By hetvic
Post date 2023/02/09

For a long time now I have been wanting to write a text on two concepts: screens and images. We all live in a time where photography, television and computers have become part of our daily communication. It has reached a point where, as Guy Debord puts it: “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” (Society of the Spectacle). Our daily life is ordered around these representations; our lives are mediated through screens and images and in order to find a line of flight, I believe we need a much more profound understanding of these social machines. What I want to do in this series of plateaus is to expand on the concepts presented by the situationists, but through the lens of schizoanalysis and my own stupidity. As of now, I only have a vague image of where I am heading with this project.

The Welfare Agency

Post author By hetvic
Post date 2022/12/06

It was when I took that cigarette out of its packet that the realization came that I no longer knew who or where I was. Sure enough, I was sitting on my balcony, and sure enough I remembered my name. But the moment I lit the cigarette, I asked myself how many I had taken that day. There was no longer a limit to anything. The only thing I could really understand, and I mean really understand, was the nicotine rush that never quite reached the level I wanted. The days started to blend together and I couldn’t remember when it started to feel that way. The only thing I found in myself was a silent obscurity of impersonal thoughts and feelings. A terribly contentless emptiness, whatever that even means. Outside there was a puppet show. People walked, screamed, drove, all in a flow as if an ancient god was trying to pump blood and breathe in his delirium. I wore clothes most of the time, fascinated by grunge: a style I wore to show how little I cared about the world “out there” and its standards of fashion. It became a brand, my very own, unique brand, mass-produced by H&M.

I no longer remembered whether I was on sick leave or whether I received the money from social security because it said: “fit for work” in the stamp printed on my forehead. Regardless, I started going to the Employment Service. A vague memory told me that it was necessary to go there to get money, but somewhere along the way it became like a habit, a routine; a way to repeat the weeks, just like the cigarettes. But in this limbo of a seemingly endless chain of repetitions, where I could no longer discern any beginning or end, I received a letter from, was it the employment agency? Or the welfare agency? I couldn’t remember. The only thing I remember was that it was like any other day.

When I walked through the doors, I was a little confused by the absolute emptiness that presented itself to me. White walls, glass window with a receptionist who probably had a coffee in the staff room behind the curtain. The plants stood still in the corners among the green armchairs as if they were plastic plants. They might as well have been. Maybe it was too expensive to hire a gardener. New Public Management or whatever they called it. The thought struck me that nothing looked different. Yet everything was placed like a doll’s house; as if it were a copy of something that was once real.

I knocked on the window to the reception. No response. I rang the bell. A small light began to shine, which then went out. A young woman came forward.
– Hello, I said. I have an appointment now at eleven o’clock.
– Okay, yes. Wait on the third floor among the others.
She closed the small glass window and disappeared again. “Okay,” I thought. Took the stairs up. Just as she said, there were more people there waiting. Emptiness again, despite the line of people along a wall that looked like it was from a hospital. The fan sounded like a constant human scream. We were waiting to move forward in some kind of process that neither of us seemed to understand. What were we even doing here? While I waited, I looked at the people among me. Women, foreign-born and elderly stood there with frightened eyes. I realized that I, too, was afraid. As if their faces reflected something that I found difficult to feel on my own.

An official dressed in blue, white skin and blond hair in a tassel sticking out of the cap hole. She walked by with a blank name tag on her chest. I noted that there was a gun sitting on hes hip. The fans screamed over the sound of the clock ticking. The queue moved slowly. Somewhere in the sound of screaming I began to realize that it wasn’t the fans making the noise. A quick flash went through my brain showing me images of World War II mass executions and my whole body froze in response. I asked the man next to me:
– What the hell are we doing here?
He looked at me. Dressed in a red t-shirt with dark skin, curly black hair under a red cap. Then he too froze as the guard passed by again. I did the same. I stood as if on guard with Death stretching my spine. The door to the stairs on the other side of the room, right in front of me, two or three meters away. The guard passed by again and when she was no longer visible I crept slowly over to the other side. No one seemed to see me. With a sweaty hand I pushed down the door handle, opened the door slowly and just as I was about to close I saw the man in red give me a hopeful look and then:
– Stop!
An authoritarian scream like a knife in the neck made me run down the first flight of stairs. In a second that felt like a minute, I turned around. I had already realized that running wasn’t an option anymore. The woman in blue opened the door with the gun drawn and without hesitation I tackled her and bit off her ear which made her drop the gun. I picked it up and shot her in the face. I was a little confused that there was no bang from the shooting. It was a viscous liquid that shot out of the barrel of the gun. Like sperm, it flew out of it, as white and shiny as seminal fluid. The woman screamed like I’ve never heard anyone scream and I saw that the skin was bubbling on her face. It was no longer possible to tell what was melted skin and what was the gun’s fluid. I ran. Almost fell down the stairs and flung myself throughout the building and rushed on without knowing where I was going. I looked at the gun. Tossed it out on the road. The empty road. Not a single car. No buses. No pedestrians, mothers with prams or cyclists. Where was I? The streets looked faded but familiar. I couldn’t tell which way was home. A white mist separated the houses, it spread over roads and squares. Who was I? Where was I?

Philosophy

Queer sex

Post author By hetvic
Post date 2022/12/06

Oral sex produces a specific image: it bridges the fractures of the body onto the face. It is Ridley Scott’s facehugger forming a circuit between the movements of the face. The cock doesn’t penetrate the mouth as if it was a pussy; it does not represent the sexual act imagined within the heterosexual matrix. Rather, it acts as a plug, a bug, within the circular movements the face inflicts upon it. The pussy acts in the same manner; it is opposed to the open circuits of the face, making its way to erase the entirety of it. Making it into the original white slate it was before the black hole was formed. This is the very core of queer fucking; it is present within the matrix that the image of the body imposes on the bodies. It disturbs and distorts the image. It is not an act destined to find a way of producing the whole, unified body. Rather, homosexuality as an act is queer; it revolts against the image, opening up multiplicities to end the tyrrany of the face:

“Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhunian sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes. Schizoanalysis is the variable analysis of the n sexes in a subject, beyond the anthropomorphic representation that society imposes on this subject, and with which it represents its own sexuality. The schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be first of all: to each its own sexes.” (Deleuze & Guattari. 1987)

As queers, in other words, as queered and transgressive bodies: we have nothing to say but to introduce a carnival following but one rule. “To each its own sexes!”.

Philosophy

The Image of the Body

Post author By hetvic
Post date 2022/11/30

The first sentence you get from Wikipedia’s article “Body image” is the following:

“Body image is a person’s thoughts, feelings and perception of the aesthetics or sexual attractiveness of their own body.”

The body image is personal; it is imagined to possess the individual. The thoughts, feelings and perceptions of the value of their body are demons operating within the person. A productive machine circulating in its own ways, inside the shell that constitutes personhood. This image should not be understood as something personal however: it is rather the image of the body that is the assemblage of this machinery. This assemblage is the image of mankind. The body image is merely a settler; it operates in order to capture the subject, to territorialize it and make it its own. “Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies” (Deleuze & Guattari. 1987, 167). We need an exorcism from this image. We are tired of its intensities and the humiliation it inscribes on our bodies.

The transbody is not merely a trans person’s body; it is all those bodies that transgress the image of the body. Be it the amputated, the blind, “crippled” bodies that so many of us have. Be it the non-white bodies that are being disclosed outside of the image. The image of the body operates through the face as Deleuze and Guattari show us: it is through the assemblage that bodies are determined as “passable” or not (1987, 178). The transbody should not be viewed as something external to this process; it is the waste of the image production itself; its own fallout. It is produced in the binary operations of the assemblage of the image of the body. If we want to be done with the judgment of God, then we must find a line of flight, to truly get rid of the territorialization, its investments and horrors the image of the body lays upon us. To broaden it, to make us fit into it, will surely make us nothing but a shell, devoid of the joy and beauty that lies in the Beyond. Pride? Pride for what if the very heart of our disfigurement and queerness is being occupied by the binary workings of the image and its representations.

The image of a girl, or a boy. It alienates us, as much as the image of a white person. Within the Imaginary, the body is fractured, split in organs and the whole has been lost to the image. Such are the unfortunate events of the oidipalized child. The cock, the pussy, they are there, looking back as monstrosities. Stuck like parasites: the cock as a leech never to let go, the pussy as a deranged scab of a mortal wound. Not only are they alien invaders colonizing the body, that is, organs without bodies; they are the threshold, the very initiators of subjectification; they are faces and therefore more than part-objects, more than fractures and bodiless organs. “Are you the one with a leech feeding on your shame, or the kind with the deep wound that never really could heal?”. Such is the workings of the gender binary: it invades like parasites, it inscribes our very punishment on our bodies like Kafka’s machine. In one sense we all have that judgment upon us; we are all part of our own penal colony. This is where the Imaginary meets the Symbolic; where they both begin. The image of the body is not a mere image. It is the productive force that makes an imagined whole of our body, through the symbolic judgment of the big Other. It is beyond both the symbolic order and the Imaginary. The transbodies are those bodies that the image of the body made abominations out of; the fractures still present. Frankenstein’s monster inhabits this very same function within the assemblage: he is the image of the transbody. “Something went terribly wrong here”. I don’t think I’m the first trans person to have thought that thought when observing the image of my very own body. And it isn’t just trans people that are being violated by this abstract machine: the anorectic plugging their holes in order to escape the violence, the heroine addict smoothing out the gaps of the multiplicities of the body. Frankenstein’s monster is not hated because he is an abomination, but because he reflects the abominations within us all. Lacan teaches us that it is the Real we are fleeing from, while the Real in actuality is what is being desired; an escape route from the violence of the organism, and a novel way of desiring-production. As I stated: it is only within the Imaginary that the body is fractured.

Gender dysphoria – or should it be called sex dysphoria? – in this sense should not be understood as immanent to the Imaginary. It is not that the image of the mirror does not correspond to the image of the Self, the ego as it is being depicted. Rather, this image is a stratification of the assemblage of the image of the body: it is the abstract machine actualising forms of expression within the assemblage itself, getting it rid of the destructive powers of transgender desire. Gender is stratified through the transgressiveness of gender dysphoria. Then, what is this phenomenon that is being pacified by all means? It is the body without organs. Deleuze and Guattari writes in Anti-Oidipus:

“Every coupling of machines, every production of a machine, every sound of a machine running, becomes unbearable to the body without organs. Beneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it. “The body is the body/it is all by itself/and has no need of organs/the body is never an organism/ organisms are the enemies of the body.” Merely so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of torture. In order to resist organ-machines, the body without organs presents its smooth, slippery, opaque, taut surface as a barrier. In order to resist linked, connected, and interrupted flows, it sets up a counterflow of amorphous, undifferentiated fluid. In order to resist using words composed of articulated phonetic units, it utters only gasps and cries that are sheer unarticulated blocks of sound. We are of the opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as “primary repression” means precisely that: it is not a “countercathexis,” but rather this repulsion of desiring-machines by the body without organs” (1983, 8)

Gender dysphoria is the rejection of the image of the body, or more exactly, the repulsion of the gendered judgment. It is not the cock itself that is being rejected by the trans woman, it is the cock as an image; as a representation or a face. This image, in effect, constitutes what the body may become. There is therefore a vivid relationship between the strata of the social body and the biological body at play. On the one hand, the image of the girl becomes not only impossible by the operations of the image of the body, but also forbidden. There is a two-fold restriction on desire here: the deep voice is being actualized by the organs on the biological strata themselves, yet being gendered by the image of the body. The cock isn’t just a representation of the image of a boy; it is a representation of a biological testosterone producing factory, trapping desire for the present and the future to come within a matrix of socially coded images of sex and gender. Lacan’s Real is traumatizing because it is a direct route towards pure affect and therefore disclose the multiplicity of horror the machines produce through their workings. It shows the productive jouissance of the body that is being hidden behind images and representation.

And then there is the face. Forming its own body as it circulates and captures everything around it. Deleuze and Guattari write:

“The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of; it constitutes the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen. The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through; it constitutes the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion, the camera, the third eye” (1987, 168).

Or, as they point out, the face begins on the white screen, and within the black hole. That is to say that both of them are the preconditions of the face. The face is dependent on its own abstract machine (not to be confused with the abstract machine of the image of the body). This face-machine, as Deleuze and Guattari argues, has the potential to make faces out of other body parts (1987, 170). Gender dysphoria is a result of this facialization of the body when the codes of the image of the body are passing through the abstract machine of the face. “Nice breasts”, said to a man can be a statement of humiliation; an attack of one’s manliness, but only when breasts have become two faces. It is humiliating because it points out an imagined or symbolic deviation from the image of the man-body. The very same sentence: “Nice breasts” can also represent this tyranny of the facialized body, as it is for women in general (“It’s just a chest you creep!”). But, what does it say to the transgendered body? To a transman this statement is neither or both of the above, but more importantly it opens up a pathway for gender dysphoria to bleed out. A desire that seeks its connections beyond the limits of the face, the image and of the biological strata of the organs themselves. “Cut them off, I am tired of their faces. They are parasites festing on my body. Intensities that trap my desire”. Even when the fractured body and its organs without bodies are gotten rid of; we still are trapped with faciality. Where can we find a way out? Where are our lines of flight in which this desire can find its connections without letting the intensities to continue circulating in a closed off body? If we are fractured bodies within the Imaginary, always in a struggle to patch ourselves up to the image of the body, and if we are a body of faces without the image of the body, then what is there left to do? The transgendered body is in a point of no return. It must find new weapons to cut through the face, to dismantle it. Why the face? Because the image of the body requires the production of the face in order to actualise its body images.

Late Night Neon Sights

Late Night Neon Sights I

Post author By hetvic
Post date 2022/11/03

The greenery seemed to move like carnivorous plants. Roots and vines from the climbing plants covered all the spaces between the tree trunks. Just like the electrical cables, she thought. An inscrutable hum of white noise was heard. No animal sounds could be discerned, but it seemed that the flora breathed in an unbearable noise. A noise, just like the traffic and electronics that poured over Gothenburg like the moisture in a rainforest. It preyed on the population without creating any expressions in their faces. They were getting used to the sounds of the city, as did she.

But now that she was stuck, almost wrapped in the plants, she panicked. She pulled the blade and cut herself free from the claustrophobic vegetation. No sunlight seemed to reach the ground, so she oriented her way with her bare feet. Blindly, she used her katana sword like a machete. Her mind raced like she was drunk. Where was she? How had she gotten there? But above all: how the hell was she going to get out of there? The plants cut into her skin, right down to the metal, and blood smeared along with moisture and sweat. Suddenly she fell through a bush and was blinded by the TV noise of the gray sky. Soft grass. Huge machines were raised from the lawn and sprayed water in trails of mist around them. She thought they resembled drones. The kind used by the corporate elite for their synthetic grass. Not because the grass needed water, but because it looked like it needed water.

She looked behind her. A wall of rainforest swallowed by the low clouds.

“You’re not supposed to go in there”, a male voice told her.

She couldn’t place its origin spatially, so she stood up and was surprised that no one was there. Just a field of grass and fog. But people could be heard, so she kept walking. Her feet stopped on asphalt. Hot as a summer’s day, they burned. She looked at them. Did she forget her shoes? A girl’s feet stepped in front of hers.

“My!” a female voice called suddenly.

“Right… My,” she thought. “That’s my name. How could I forget?”. The girl licked her gooey soft-serve ice cream and a mother came and grabbed her arm.

“You shouldn’t go so close My”.

The mother stopped. Looked at the bloody cyborg standing before her. The left eye was broken, blinking as if there were loose wires. The skin was torn and showed the inseparability between the organic and the digital. The mother’s gaze was as if swallowed by the sight. What was under the surface would never under any circumstances be revealed.

“Come, let’s go”, said the mother and dragged the child along with her eyes fixed on My.

It wasn’t until then that she realized it was a park she found herself in. She sighed with relief and laughed to herself. How could she be so stupid? There are no more rainforests. That’s when she woke up.

The screensaver sailed on the blank screen as if it were a computer from the 90s. She was slumped over on the couch and the incense on the table had burned up. The orange lights from outside poured in from the window as if it were a neon sign. Her back ached and she stood up. Rolled a joint and lit up as she went to the fridge. She took a glass from the sink and poured oat milk. Went back to her room and sat down at the computer. Entered the password and checked her email while drinking the oat milk with the same hand she held the joint. She ran the encryption in her program and plugged her personal link into the digital machine. A voice said inside her head:

“Hey! My! I have caught the virus that was requested. It is embedded in a chip. Come and get it as soon as you can. You don’t have to do this. There is still time to withdraw”.

My leaned back in her chair and put one foot on the desk as she smoked.

“I will not withdraw from Roland. I’ll meet you at work before you open”.

She turned off the computer. Transferred the bitcoins to the laundry so the money would be reasonably available until Roland sat in his office. She put out the joint and felt the effects of THC and CBD color her consciousness’ screen brown, pixel by pixel. The backpack hung next to her transparent rain jacket. She checked it and made sure nothing was missing. Retrieved the sword that was lying on the table in front of the sofa and fastened it with the buckle of her backpack. She put on her magenta Dr. Martens and pulled on the jacket. Tossed the backpack over one shoulder and lit a cigarette after putting on the sunglasses.

The early morning was black as the abyss above all the screens of the streets. The commercials were reflected in the wet asphalt. There hadn’t been a single day without rain in two years. Gothenburg’s harbor was covered in tens of meters of high walls so as not to drown the city. She walked from Biskopsgården, over the new Älvsborg’s Bridge and stopped to look out at the sea. The water was the color of petroleum and danced in digital patterns not far below My, where she stood in the middle of it all. The cars whizzed past her. She missed seeing the starry sky and all the space junk reflected in the sunlight like satellites. Not even the airplanes were visible, though the steady noise from their engines pushed down towards the earth.

She continued her way towards Majorna and stepped into a street where neon-like screens could not be seen. Not far from there was Roland’s shop. He sold old synths and other equipment to the wealthy sats who could afford to pay for the equipment that Roland cobbled together from materials from the dump. Of course there were computers that could produce identical sounds, but there was something special about owning your very own Moog, or Korg. Not because the product was genuine; Roland managed to throw together good instruments, but he never claimed that they had any origins in the 80s. They were at best copies of copies of an original, but even he couldn’t fool anyone that there was any pedigree. Even the original was now a copy. When Roland arrived, My flicked the cigarette she had in her mouth and greeted with a narrow smile. He had his big 80s glasses, an umbrella and a cap that hid the hair that had disappeared on his head. My wondered when he was going to implant synthetic hair, but she didn’t really dare to ask. It’s no big deal anyhow, she thought. But others weren’t as open as her with all the parts implanted under the skin.

“The money is coming in. It shouldn’t take more than a minute”, she said at the same time as Roland looked for the right key to the business door.

They stepped in and shook off all the rain. Roland sat down on the chair in his office and beckoned My who was trudging along.

“Okay”, he said. “Here you have it”.

Out of nowhere he put a chip on the table.

“Be careful because there will be houses in hell all over the Nordics if you do this. Mother Co. is a giant. If you mess with them, you will have to change your identity and flee Europe”.

“I know what I’m doing”, she said and crinkled her nose snarly. “Don’t worry. I was born from a womb, so I lack an identity already as it is”.

“On the contrary. You are still on the state register. Don’t underestimate them. I can’t afford having to deal with anything of this. Okay? I’m not being paranoid, just cautious”.

“The state is a residual product of our past. Trust me, no one will be able to direct this to you. You are just the middle man. When this is done you won’t see me again. I’ll be gone like a ghost”.

“When are you planning on doing this?”.

My put the chip inside her reader. It stung like the come up of a stimulant.

“Tonight”.

Tags cyberpunk, sci-fi, short stories

General

Wild MISSINGNO. has appeared!

Post author By hetvic
Post date 2022/11/03

– “The past cannot be forgotten, the present cannot be remembered”

(Mark Fisher, Ghosts of my Life, 2014)

It is a weird thing. Here it appear, out of nowhere, yet it feels like it already was there. Like the emptiness of that school yard I used to play in. Kenopsia, or maybe just plane nostalgia. Those pocket monsters used to be a territory of exploration. Now, nostalgia sold in vacuumed cans. It is no wonder why I name these schizoid bits and pieces as MISSINGNO., or rather, けつばん. It’s the name of a friend, of our cancelled futures. It’s the name of a glitch in my nostalgia. Somehow I feel like it isn’t even me naming this assemblage. It named itself, and wreaked havoc in my neurosystem, leaked out into ones and zeros.

If you’ve entered this realm, we welcome you. But I’m afraid you’ve arrived too late. There’s nothing but ghosts here. Ghosts without shells…