[Reader-list] Extinguishing Superman - by Rahel Aima

[cashmeeri]

AUTHOR's NOTE:
 
" ...... i now disagree slightly with the deindividuation as ultimate end goal. Also needs to be emphasised that fascism= 'dressing up' in the superman/ubermensch guise, and that an 'actual' superman retains variances/multiplicities vs fascistic flattening of difference.  with deindividuation/extitutionality as ostensible end goal though, superman too must be killed."
 
 
 
Extinguishing Superman - by Rahel Aima
 
In the beginning was the language, and the language was gravity.  Before the beginning was infinite violence.  When violence met language, there was conflict; at once collision and collusion. Conflict became a reproductive space of exchange, and atomisation became the original sin. We learnt what evil was, and it was the One.  

Gravity meanwhile was inscribed into (celestial) bodies, becoming the first legal contract between them.  So it is that particles collide to produce fragmented planets and people, in an exchange of violent energy.  Humans similarly collide to exchange pleasantries, and sometimes bodily fluids.  On the level of language, morphemes collide to exchange ejaculations of speed and to reproduce meaning.  In the eighteenth century, these forms might have been approached through money, character and root (Deleuze 1988).

 Yet this beginning is simply the beginning of the rational, instinctual Man-form, and its subsequent trajectory through time and space.  Following Nietzsche (1968), the universe itself is a monster of energy without beginning, without end, not expanding but constantly transforming, in an infinite play of forces, and waves of forces which work like concepts to create embodied affects. Violence is this monstrous energy. 

 The universe is like the Hindu Trimurti, a compound form of the eternally self creating Brahma, the mediating preserver, Vishnu, and the eternally self destroying Shiva.  It may otherwise be thought of in terms of the tripartite symbol of Aum, whose three letters represent the primordial vibration of the universe.  Each letter corresponds to a state of existence, from the lower curve’s waking consciousness to the dream state’s suspended consciousness to the upper curve’s unconsciousness or deep sleep – A-U-M respectively.  The spot meanwhile is the absolute consciousness that hovers over the semicircle of the maya, sometimes conceived as the illusion of duality. As humans we exist in this illusory fold of maya, which both preserves and reproduces our world through conflict. Unlike the equivalent violence, the spot does not collide with the other cosmic forces.  And although illustrative, the symbol is no longer experienced in the absolute:
 matereality has killed it along with the gods.

Our own material world is like an atomised pomegran(i)te, and we exist as six billion unitary seeds in it, bounded by State membranes. At its core is a well of viscous rage; as with the Spanish term for pomegranate, granada, it holds explosive potential. Like the pomegranate, it is in constant tension of cracking open, as tec(h)tonic plates and demographics create frictions and fictions alike.   This world is fragile and Earth is a victim; sometimes it fights back through 'natural' disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that reveal its innermost violent urges.   Global war-ming may be seen as the most advanced stage of this struggle, fought not only through the Earth's material fabric, but through the atmosphere itself. As humans within this world, we may meanwhile either ossify into institutions, or decompose into death, after which nothing happens. 

Bataille suggests, “the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form” (1985:5).  Even as air is the atmospheric parody of water, human is the atmospheric parody of animal, and sexual desire is the instinctual parody of violence.  War then becomes a parody of the initial monstrous violence, now evaporated into the atmosphere.  And as humans, we ourselves are war.  This sphere of war looks to have a maximal surface area, not unlike the cortex of the brain, replete with striated folds of ‘peace’.  The State inseminates this sphere through the language of legality, similarly parodying violence through its own appropriations of war and peace.  In military terminology, it is the ‘theatre of conflict’ where violence once again meets language, and is at once both a performative stage and a gynecological operating theatre.  

The language of war thus becomes an almost viral vaccination.  It infects humans to breed cultures of conflict that create microfascisms and affects of dis-ease.  At the same time, it retains a seductive possibility to inflame the mass tissue, and to consume the organs of both the State and the human.  Crucially, “the body without organs is not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has blown apart the organism and its organisation” (Deleuze and Guattari:30). How then can we die without dying, and repopulate our bodies with multiplicities without recapitating God? 

Perhaps we can redesignate our instinctual procedures of satisfaction, transforming them into the disorganised forms of ‘ex-tincts’ and ‘ex-titutions’.  The ex-titution will work as an intensified multiplicity of pores, spots and black holes, bounded not by walls or language, but by permeable membranes which replace collision with a free flow of concepts. Ex-tincts will become these hypergravitational black holes, dissolving any boundaries between internal and external forces to return to the initial violence.  We will ourselves become constellations of ex-titutions through the parodic instinct closest to the base violence: desire. For as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “whenever someone makes love, really makes love, that person constitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people” (2004:30). 

Yet ours is a world that cannot be loved to the point of death (Bataille 1985:179).  If, following Larkin, all life is slow dying (decaying), then we must necessarily look to the language of disaster to speed up the process.  Indeed, the disaster “does not dissuade us from dying; it invites us – escaping the time where it is always too late – to endure inopportune death, with no relation to anything save the disaster as return” (Blanchot 1980:4).  The disaster is a rhizomatic Superfold where “literature merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity” to uncover a “strange language within language” (Deleuze 1988:131).  Duende is this knowledge of disaster, as seeded through creative production.  Perhaps it will even herald Nietzsche’s eternal return to the pre-primordial violence. 

We are bookended by the disaster – as long as it functions, the human does not yet, and anymore, exist.  How then can we initiate the disaster; how can we move beyond the form of the man to become the superman?  How, essentially, can we be beings without being ‘human beings’? 

In discussing ‘the pack’, Canetti notes that the unitary Man-form came about through incorporating “into himself, by transformations, all the animals he knew” (1984:108).  The more perfect his parodic folding was, the intenser his awareness of their numbers, and he felt what it was to be many.  If man thus symbolically imprisons life in this way, the superman must work to free life, perhaps by radically redistributing its organs as a first step towards becoming an intensified ex-titution.  The superman is indeed in control of all resources, whether organic, animal or mineral.  In the realm of forces, it is  even “in charge of the being of language (that formless, mute, unsignifying region where language can find its freedom even from whatever it has to say” (Deleuze 1964:132).  We have in actuality already dressed up as superman in the past, building fascist concentration camps that annihilate the human through the denial of speech.

Within fascism, the theatre of conflict becomes a theatre of dominance, creating a cycle where ownership is possession is destruction.  It is underwritten by a singular force of control – to dominate a woman, army, or land becomes one and the same consumptive action.  Yet this control is not only external, but becomes inscribed into the fascist to reorder both instincts and organs through ritualistic repetition.  It is especially seen in Theweleit’s accounts of the Freikorps, where sexual desire is reassigned to function simply for the pure joy of violent destruction.  The telos of domination thus becomes not reproductive exchange, but a rationalized orgiastic annihilation.  

Fascinatingly, even as the prohibitive layers of language and amnesia are sloughed off to reveal the inner pool of violence, the Freikorps find themselves almost silenced by their violent acts. So it is that one of them is found to compare the undressing of a woman to getting a shot in the lungs.  What might have been a loss of breath is literalised in their writing as an imagined self destruction. Perhaps they heed Blanchot’s caution that “it is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or silence (1980:4).

Yet if superman is a fascist, we must kill him too.

And if brutal inhumanity is not enough, what lies beyond superman?  This is to say, what new form will emerge that is neither God nor man nor superman?  Concentration camps might (be) the closest that western civilization has come to dehumanisation through language.  Atomic bombs meanwhile might be the closest it has come to total destruction.  One day a graviton bomb might be built that will destroy language by folding it in on itself. Until then, however, there will be “no explosion except a book” (Blanchot 1980:7), whose only critique can be “an ontology for the annihilation of human beings” (Deleuze 1988:130).  This ‘book’ need not necessarily be a printed and bound book, but may be any kind of creative bomb.  It must however hold plasmatic potential as conceptualised by Sergei Eisenstein, in its “rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form” (1989:24).

Eisenstein sees this ‘plasmaticness’ as best embodied within fire, with its constant reinvention, expenditure and colourful consumption of forms.  Crucially, fire is even eroticized in its mysterious allure and attractiveness which served to lead to a onetime designation of pyromania as a crime of a sexual nature.  Yet like fascistic acts, it is consumptive and needs a constant refueling. The new bomb will burn not on the carbon of lifeforms or the silicon of dying stars, but will instead dip into an inner well of violence to write with both lactic acid and duende.   At the same time, it must necessarily be outside State appropriation to become unconsumable. It must function like Disney’s films, which, for Eistensten, do not expose sunspots, but “themselves act like reflections of sunrays and spots across the screen of the earth” (1989:9).  These spots might be thought of as ex-tincts, and the screen as the disorganised face of the
 intensified ex-titution that we will become.

This creative bomb will serve as the final weapon to cut –or perhaps blow – off superman’s rationalising head to become becoming itself, in the ex-titution of Bataille’s Acéphale (1985).  For in escaping from its head, “(s)he has found beyond himself not God, who is the prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition’. The Acéphale thus breaks the dualistic confines of the illusory maya to become part of the universal Trimurti multiplicity.  (S)he is, “in the same eruption Birth and Death. (S)he is not a man.  (S)he is not a god either. (S)he is not me but (s)he is more than me”.  We are ferociously religious and religiously ferocious, and discover ourselves in him, “in other words as a monster” (Bataille). When human we exist in relation to everything else through the forces of gravity and language, but having escaped from this primordial prison, we are finally irrational, ex-tinctual and free.
 


REFERENCE LIST

Bataille, Georges 
1985 The Solar Anus, The Practice of Joy before Death, The Sacred Conspiracy. Visions of Excess Selected Writings 1927-1939.  University of Minnesota Press

Blanchot, Maurice
1980 The Writing of the Disaster.  University of Nebraska Press.

Canetti, Elias
1984 Crowds and Power. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Deleuze, Giles
1988 On the Death of Man and Superman. Foucault. University of Minnesota Press. 
2004 Instincts and Institutions. Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974.  Semiotext(e)

Deleuze, Giles and Guattari, Felix
1987 1914: One or Several Wolves  A Thousand Plateaus Schrizophrenia and Capitalism.  University of Minnesota Press.

Eisenstein, Sergei
1985 Eisenstein On Disney. Heinemann

Phillip Larkin
1964 Nothing to be said. The Whitsun Weddings.  Random House.

Friedrich Nietzsche
1968 The Will to Power. Vintage Books.

Serres, Michel
1995 The Natural Contract.  University of Michigan Press

Theweleit, Klaus
1987 Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. University of Minnesota