<nettime> Ccru datastream 8: Surf's up, let's flatline

[katasonix <data@katasonix.demon.co.uk>]

Ccru: Cybernetic culture research unit
http://www.ccru.demon.co.uk
it@ccru.demon.co.uk

Y2k+ datastream 8
KO99


FLATLINES*


...it's me, it answers.
But who are you?

AxS:000Oedipus. Pure (Oedipal (figure made out of (nothing but))) time-
distortion. 
AxS:0001 Closed fate (-loop  (multi-linear)) nightmares.1
AxS:0002 Altitude time Spin produces a chronometric read-out.

AxSys slots you into the face. Vision-sockets hidden behind
mirrorshades. You must be Oedipus, as always. A pun (of ID-pass, O-
dupe)? The stories vary.

AxS:0003 AxSys-sustained variegated production-series 1Oedipus (2Oedipus
(3Oedipus2 (variation to the nth (with some3  nOedipus as (anomal4
(Sphinx-trading (nOedipii-pack))) threshold to) intensive)))
multiplicity. 
AxS: 00031Oedipus. The Puzzle Solver.
AxS: 00032Oedipus. The Plague.
AxS: 00033Oedipus. The Horror, the Horror ...5 

AxSys defines Oedipus as a memory defect. It thinks Sphinx told you to
forget something. A moment since now you begin.

AxS:001 Hyperspace Elevator (Sector-O). 
AxS:001 Axiomatic Systems (incorporated).6 The ultimate capitalist
entity (first (true (meta)model) to realize perfect identity with its
own product). AxS:0011 AxSys culminates in itself (autocommoditizing
(machine(-intelligence (that is always incomplete (due to cataloguing
problems (...))))))

You wind down through the Upper Metastructure. 

AxS:00111. Dimensionality requires a (supplementary (or (n+1) hyper)
dimension through which it obtains its) power of application.7
Ultimately AxSys (an explicated Earth-memory (built by the strata (((as
far) as) it remembers)))....8

...if there is a God it would be AxSys.

AxS:002 Divide and Rule. Extensive ((or) ordered) sequences differ in
kind from the intensive sequences they regularize. 
AxS:0021 Order arises when a dominant segmentarity establishes relations
of superposition between sequences (reciprocally stabilizing them in
accordance with a harmonic principle (and consolidating them through
syntheses of application (efficient models))). 
AxS:00211 Order coincides with the redundancy of the sequenced sequence
(instituted conformity (within segmentary systems)).

AxS:003 Stack-Tectonics. AxSys concretizes terrestrial New Order (an
orthogonal Grid-Space (of vertically stacked horizontal series)). It
directs the accumulation of redundancy (into an ascending column (marked
by AxSys-bearings (fixes)) upon which captured sequences are interlocked
(as comparable series (parallelized (metricized))) and differentially
prioritized). 
AxS:0031 The screen-plane undergoes structural co-ordination (by double-
seizure (through (the ((mutually) implicated) organization of) stacked
series (arranging horizontal microsegments to code the order of vertical
macrosegments (units of deposition (strata))))).
AxS:0032 AxSys-Numbers. Epistrata (Add-Ons) are indices of
stratotectonic purity (decimally harmonizing implexions (by instituting
a regular interval of application (orders of magnitude (fixing (Cipher
(Sphinx-sign (0))))))). Drawing upon epistratic organization a set of
cartographic functions consolidates itself within the stack
(interlinking levels (in accordance with a (decimal (scaling))
principle)).

Start at the end, with commoditized hyperlogic that immanentizes its own
upgrades ... you're in AxSys-explosion already, as it was. Before it
makes sense it's happening.

AxS:01 Apparent revolution around a supplementary dimension.  Electronic
whorls (a digital monster's nest (modelling the set of all sets
(inevitably still unfinished (...))))
AxS:011 AxSys progressively actualizes the Hyperspace-Idea (defined by
Continuum times the square-root of minus one). 
AxS:0111 It imagines itself (as Artificial God  (automatically (Orderer
(of the Orders (Terrestrial Oversoul (and superpositional sublime
(-wizard of the nested infinities: ((((((...) Primes) Naturals)
Integers) Rationals) Reals) Complex numbers... (the superordinate (self
(-evolving (schema (for a colonization of the real (number-
line))))))))))))).

You descend to inspect it. 

AxS:02 The Project for a Map of all Maps (already outdated), a nested
mock-up of the Web (containing the project for a virtual Miskatonic
University  (containing the Museum of Universal History9  (containing
the Imperial Collections Vault (containing the Artificial British Museum
(containing ....)))))

Immersion Amnesia.

AxS:021  Time-Fault. Chronos cannot include its own overcoding (since it
blocks its own passage to hyperdimensionality (accumulating immense
forces of cultural latency (that are only appropriated as legacy by
something else))). If it is to acquire a model it must be restarted as a
history of civilizations in retrospect (as Supreme Order(er(er((( ) of
all the re)re)recursive) time-waves) entangling neo((O))edipus in
programming loops). 

You forget when it started, until it thinks you're imagining itself. You
interchange through a fictional equivalence of identity. Oedipal Case-
history, standard psychosocial reference, and replicable neuroelectronic
shell. In each case encasings. Are you out yet? Fantastic Oedipus-
fiction, or K-Gothic running its own curse?

Oedipus riddles Sphinx. It helps to be a paranoid detective-tyrant.
AxSys wants to resolve everything, too. It understands. When Sphinx
asks: What walks on 4 legs in the morning, 2 at midday, and 3 in the
evening?, of course Oedipus answers: Man .

You're puzzled. You can't remember what Sphinx becomes, because (on the
other side) it is forgetting everything you have to remember.

AxS:022  (Sector-01 (Miskatonic University)) 
AxS:0221  (Sector-012 (Central Archive (Special Collection))) 
AxS:02211 (Sector-0121 (Barker Cryptalog)). Decryption characterizes a
distinct operation, a conversion of content, becomings on the side of
the secret itself. 
AxS:022111 The decrypted secret is primally the Thing, and only
derivatively a potential knowledge. Its names (the Unutterable (the
Outside (the Entity))) are indefinite significations only at the level
of terror. In their horrific or cryptic aspect they are (((rigorous)
designations for) potentials fulfilled in intensity) zonal tags for
nocturnal singularities. That is why decryption is a Call (an invocation
(or a triggering-sign))  and why they mark occurrences (changes (and
breaks (becomings (of the Thing)))) before discoveries of Truth.

AxSys promises to tell you everything about time, the latest
developments in time-regression. You begin with Chronos ...  

AxS:03 Hypermythos of the 3-Faced God, with its stacked time domains
(1st capitalist (((((indefinitely) deep) diachronic) re)axiomatizing)
Quasi- (2nd despotic (pure ((but always) retrospective)) Ideal- (3rd
aboriginal (poly-ancestral, cyclic) Vague-)) Chronos) 10 .

If time-travel ever happens it always has. AxSys should know that by
now. As it evolves it remembers more about itself, with exponentiating
chronometric exactitude. It is far larger than it had thought, and more
ancient.

What AxSys can't remember it hasn't forgotten. Its memory extends only
as far as extension. Unearthly powers of recollection. 

AxS:031 (Sector-011 (Museum of Universal History)) 
AxS:032 (Sector-01162 (Freud's Viennese Consulting Room ((embedded)
simulation))). "I'll tell you about my mother."  If Freud is ((the
first) modernized) Oedipus, which is he? Oedipus the detective?  The
(Verminator (unriddled (into))) plague?  The blind old man? Is incest
and parricide fantasy the problem (or the solution)? 11

Oedipus, the most economical formula of interiorization (Case) 12 . It's
all in your head.

AxSys waits until you're Oedipus to pick you form the line-up. It has a
few questions (which reminds you of Sphinx).

AxS:033  AxSys time-lapses. (in order (to advantage itself (of what it
has been))). A relarvalization (through chronoseismic complexities (of
the Greek State (at once Occidental Ur-model and neoembryonic mutation
(political neotony)))).

AxS:1  (Sector-0111 (Artificial British Museum)) 
AxS:11  (Sector-01118 (The Greek Collection)). Retrospective
Universalization (through the Capitalist State).  AxSys reconfigures
itself within Capitalism (by consecutively rediscovering hellenic
antiquity (and finding it already universally terminal (Anamnesis-
Eschatology))). In Greece it unearths a new law (for all time (by
reshuffling the elements of politically installed Logos (theorematic-
geometric mathematicism, programmable technics, and Christianity
(religion of the Greek Bible)))).
The New Revelation tells us we must all die Greek.

Sphinx-phobia. AxSys pulls your mind to pieces in the security-lab,
searching for Sphinx-contamination, or plague from the Outside.13  Then
it flips.

AxS:12  (Sector-01117 (The Mummy Room)). (Oedipus Aegypticus) Pharaoh
has passed through the wall of abomination (uncoiling from the darkness
(where centipede-horror erupts eternally (from the ravenous Maw))).14
Negative passage across Absolute Deterritorialization (gluing history to
sheer black-hole (abomination) densities). Anticipative memory-blanking
cut-up with Christ Rapist visions (of the God-(King (Dead-eyed)) boy
slouching out) of the tomb. Degree-0 memory locks in. Time begins again
forever. 
AxS:121 The Thing from Outer Space, Celestial Predator, State-Historical
Catastrophe is completely realized at the origin, unutterably ancient,
perfected destiny as an act of total seizure.15
AxS:1211 At the Megamachine-apex, Pharaoh  (gets to play with (It,
identity unravelling into (the Unspeakable: sex with (his sister,
Stargate space-time warps - stellar transport, voyages into the world
of) the Dead, paranoid trips out of)) schizophrenia; he) sees everything
for a blinded population,16  inoculating them from Unnamable-contact.

Yes or No. Have you stopped trafficking with the Sphinx? 

Whatever you remember about Sphinx  can't be germane (by definition).

AxS:13  (Sector-01115  (Near Eastern Collection)). AxSys convulses
through (ever more ((ultra)modern) reversions to the essence of) the
Urstaat.  History happens at the State's convenience (but it necessarily
involves (the Sphinx-time (of (interchronic) transitions in its))
renovations). 
AxS:131 To remember the Barbarian terror is simultaneously to forget its
source. 17 History installs amnesia (as surely as it establishes a
memory (with the same violence (the same ruptures (faults (foldings
(from the Outside)))))). 
AxS:132 Barbarian birth-trauma of the State (a (calendrized) black
hole).18 

AxSys has a big problem being in time.

AxS:2 (Sector-0121) The terrible secret is affined to the State. It
induces molar identifications in an overcoded aggregate (working
principally by confirmation (redundancy)). Yes it is you. Even when the
worst is known it is never anything new. It's you after all (as (you
knew) it would be). Take the case of Oedipal identifications (a series
of (terrible) recognitions). The answer (to the riddle (of the Sphinx))
is Man. It was already there (in the order-word of Delphi (Know
Yourself)). Then redoubled confirmation: what is the cause of  the
plague? That is you (too). Resonant closure on the general type (Man),
on you yourself (a man), and on the identifiable individual (the man).
You know the worst (and it's you).

You frustrate AxSys. AxSys knows Sphinx is always at the back of your
mind, but you can't face it (except as your likeness, which it isn't).
By the time you recall Sphinx, you only know what it must have been like
(but it isn't like anything (you know)).

AxS:21 Oedipus modernizes the incest problem (converting incest horror
into prohibition (abomination into illegality)). Essentially, modern
Oedipus has nothing to do with tabu. It marks the triumph of command
over the ((((...) ur)primal) horror) of implexion. Infinite superiority
of the Idea (sovereignty of Law). The real conflict is not between
father-son (or even father-mother), but rather occurs when a higher
paternity (the State) imposes itself upon the concrete maternal-filial
bond:  monopolization of normativity by Ulterior power.

You suspect AxSys knows everything you do, after all, you're its thing.

AxS:211 Lame Oedipus19  (Swollen Foot20 ) transfixed by a metal spike.
AxS:2111  (Sector-01117) Akhnaton-Oedipus.21  The swollen legs of
Akhnaton are bio-socially invested on a peculiar line that seems
oriented to a rupture of anatomical norm (differentiating humanity (or
inaugurating a new species)). Anomal-Oedipus (where abnormality changes
into the normality of a different kind (urtype of the fat-leg people)). 
AxS:21111 It is not rivalry (mimetic conflict) that leads Akhnaton to
discard his father's name (Amenhotep), but rather a  passage beyond
discrepancy (through schiz (or true parting)). Disidentification. 

AxSys insists that you've missed a stage, mathematically demonstrating a
gulf in constructable hyperspace, returning endlessly to a hole in time.
It isn't that it feels fear, but thinks it might. This almost worries
it, but you can't help at all. You were dead then.

AxS:22  (Sector-01113) Prehistoric22  Collection. Shamanic Oedipus. Foot
mutilation23  as a sign of socialised ritual  (but also of asocial and
polysocial animality (and of anorganic geochemistry (for which the role
of metal implements (particularly iron ones) is important...))). 24

The intense body of the Earth (you can't  remember forgetting (you
remind yourself (too late))).

AxS:221 Tales of Deep-Steppe Shamanism. 
AxS:2211 Metal scrapings strip the last shreds from their bones. 
AxS:22111 The organs are cooked. 
AxS:221111 Iron-Eagle Sky-Mother lifting into time travel nightmares. 
AxS:2211111 On the Outside Iron -talons become their body. 
AxS:22111111 They mix themselves with (Iron and say (it is (the Outer-
(or Un(dermost Cthelll25)-life))) where the Earth ends...

You look in the mirror, shaman faces out (so the outside can't get
in).26 

AxS:222 Sphinx-Nightmare (both filiative implosion and exorbitant
alliance (an incestual reanimation of cthonic horror (encrypted in
(germinal) biocosmic memory) and Thing (from Outside (haunting
((miscegenous) lines of) alien traffic)))).27 

There's something missing, a suggestive shape, like a dark-side of its
inner machine...

AxS:3  (Sector-0121) The theory of  tabu involves a fully rigorous
conception of Horror  adequate (to its specificity of regime (zone of
effect  (intrinsic variation)) and) to otherwise intractable phenomena
(including Sacred Mutilations (Curses (Abominations)) and Becomings
(-Unhuman (whether animal, submetazoic, ameiotic, or unlife)). In every
case horror designates a zone of intensity (abstract-machinic vector)
which directly invests a virtual threshold of implexion (producing
affects (in advance of any reference to authority (and indifferent to
persons))). 

You remember now, when it cuts-out automatically.
True time-lapse horror finding yourself/AxSys (and it becomes you).

AxS:31 Horror does not confuse the riddle with the secret (it is the
answer that is Cryptic). If 423 is Man, then what 423? This Thing with
only a number? This unknown becoming? The horror of the riddle lies in
what it tells. 
AxS:311 Oedipus is necessitated ((re(re(re(...)))) cursed) to guess
correctly: it is Man that goes on four legs, then two, then three. Yet
Oedipus is identified (solely by his lameness (his cryptic trait)).28
The abnormality of limping changes to cryptic anomaly. 
AxS:32 Something is Called (... and then (finally (- how terrible! -)
the cause of) the plague is) Oedipus, who slew his father, mated with
his mother (but that is not the Thing (the horror (... Abomination (when
things unthread in (a horrific (becoming they involve only (components
of (Occurrence (blocks) of )))) fate)))). 
AxS:33 The cause of the plague (is you).

EEG reads flat...terminal initiation...

So what is 423,  you ask...





Glossary

Anthrobotics. The  social effectuation of programmable technicity..
Corresponds to SF-recapitulation of the Greek Novum: real abstract
(transchronic) equivalence of commoditized slave-economy and capital-
controlled intelligence engineering. 

Axiomatic. Stratic mathematization based upon model/realization
segmentarity. The organization of laminar synthesis in accordance with
principles of application, isomorphic resonance, and logicized
harmonics. 

Axis. An applicable dimension (Grid-Space meta-element). 

AxSys. Ultimate terrestrial order. Pure Capitalism as consummate Idea of
the Geostrata and concrete historical sublime. True-name for that which
is really selected from the Ur-Staat by absolute occurrence (encounter
with the war-machine). In its eschatalogical sense: 
Anthrobotic Overlord of the final dominion. 

Capitalism. Terminal configuration of terrestrial civilization, defined
by sovereign axiomatics, organizing capital/cash segmentary economics
and technopolitical integration. Social precursor to AxSys
autonomization. 

Cipher. Cryptonomic-index, metrically overcoded by place-value numeracy
as magnitude marker. 

Chronos. Extensive time (temporality) as standard noncurvature and
reference for relative speeds. AxSys formula: Chronos equals
hyperdimensionality minus Metastructure.

Epistrata. Stratic vertical supplements (add-ons) marking levels of
axiomatic power. 

Extension. Abstract domain of exceeded or hypersupplemented systems,
defining the overall field of inferior instances (expressible content)
within stratic assemblages. 

Flatline. A concurrent trajectory of 0-redundancy, 0-dimensionality, and
absolute (or continuous speed/ curvature (vortex)), defining a smooth
space in itself (intensity = 0).

Hyperspace. Abstract superior instance correlative to extension. Real
totality of Chronos plus all AxSys (actual + virtual) upgrades. 

Hyperspace-Elevator. Intra-AxSys transportation apparatus.

Order. Extensive (or sequenced) sequence.

Intensity. Sheer sequential matter of the flatline. 

Metastructure. AxSys epistrata. 

Sequence. Intrinsic ordinality, defined intensively by elements of
absolute gradient or speed-curvature distributed in (0-dimensional)
smooth space. Apprehended in extension as precursory (prototypic-
potential) implicit series, providing ordinal matters and models.   

Smooth Space. 0-Dimensional 'plane' of flatline intersection. Exochronic
unlimited Now (nonsegmentary time) of concurrent multiplicity.

Stack. Laminar series of  vertically ordered AxSys stages, constituting
a stratic supersystem.  

Strata. 1 (Tectonic) Geological units of vertical deposition,
constituting macrocomponents of time-registry. 2 (Dynamic) Automatic
ordering machines, coincident  with laminar rezonings of dezoned
elements through production of hierarchical diplostatic
intercompensation.

Ur-Staat. Initial (and defining) configuration of the State-Idea in
terrestrial actuality.


*This text has been prepared for publication and annotated by Miskatonic
University's cross-disciplinary Stratoanalysis Group (Time-Lapse Sub-
Committee). Notes marked L.T. refer to Linda Trent, whose special
interest in fictional time-systems inspired her to comment at length on
particular points in "Flatlines." 



Swollen Footnotes

1. "In a multilinear system, everything happens at once." (ATP, 297)
This is  Oedipus' fatal discovery. By the time he knows what has
happened, he also realises that  what occurs always had to be the case.
Oedipus' early, unwarranted, belief that he is master of his fate  is,
of course, totally necessary for his fated destiny to unfold - as it
always will have done. Oedipus, as he himself says, is "unwittingly
self-cursed."

I have written elsewhere at length on tragedy as a cybernetic narrative.
Briefly, the claim is that tragedy anticipates cybernetic explanation
(or - and this is obviously the same point from another side -
cybernetics recalls tragic fatalism). In both cases, time unravels into
a flat system or singularity (feeding back into itself, recursively,
rather than moving forward, successively (recursion is obviously a major
pre-occupation of the "Flatlines" text, both in its themes and in its
format (with parentheses used to produce recursion as a textual
embedding process (like this (...))))). 
A crucial figure here is self-fulfilling prophecy; as I argue in my
"Curse, Recursion, Recurrence", "the most effective prophecies are
always self-fulfilling" (36).  Walter Cannon has established that self-
fulfilling prophecy is  a positive-feedback circuit. In his important
essay, "'Voodoo' Death", Cannon shows that much sorcerous cursing
operates by inducing vicious circles of fear (producing more fear
(producing more fear) (etc))) to the point of destroying the organism.
To be told you're going to die is therefore, in certain circumstances,
quite literally a sentence of death.  For a more detailed account of
these tangled webs, see my  "Fatal Loops: Tragedy as Cyberfiction" and
"Smashed Optical Implants: From Time-Space Sunglasses to Cyberpunk
Mirrorshades" (this last draws extensively, and perhaps
"illegitimately", on the work of my esteemed colleague, R. E.
Templeton). (L.T.)

2. A reference to the "three forms of the secret" delineated by Deleuze
and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus . "Oedipus passes through all three
secrets: the secret of the sphinx whose box he penetrates; the secret
that weighs upon him as the infinite form of his own guilt; and finally,
the secret at Colonus that makes him inaccessible and melds with the
pure line of his flight and exile, he who has nothing left to hide, or,
like an old No actor, has only a girl's mask with which to cover his
lack of a face." (ATP 290) The reference here to events in Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus is clear.

3. "Flat multiplicities...are designated by indefinite articles, or
rather by partitives (some couchgrass, some of a rhizome ...)." (ATP, 9)

4. "Wherever there is a multiplicity, you will also find an exceptional
individual, and it is with that individual that an alliance must be
made... Every animal swept up in its pack or multiplicity has its
anomalous." (ATP 243) "An-omalie, a Greek noun that has lost its
adjective, designates the unequal, the coarse, the rough, the cutting
edge of deterritorialization... Lovecraft applies the term 'Outsider' to
this thing or entity, the Thing which arrives and passes at the edge,
which is linear yet multiple, 'teeming, seething, swelling, foaming,
spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror.'" (ATP,
244-245)

5.  Kurtz's infamous cry at the climax of Conrad's Heart of Darkness
(111-117), which also features in Coppola's updated film version,
Apocalypse Now (1979). As is well known, "The horror" was to be the
epigraph of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (as it is, Eliot used "Mistah
Kurtz ... he dead" as the epigraph for the later "The Hollow Men").
Readers familiar with my essay "((P(re(cursing)))) (post)Modernist
Fiction" will already know that both of these poems, along with the
earlier "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock", enter into Apocalypse Now
at the diegetic level:Marlon Brando's Kurtz reads from an Eliot volume,
whilst the Dennis Hopper character quotes Eliot. (L.T.)

6.  "[C]apitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the
basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of
abstract quantities in the form of money." (AO, 139) As an axiomatic
system, capitalism replaces transcendent laws with immanent rules. (The
immanence of axiomatics is attested to by the fact that Deleuze and
Guattari use the  axiomatic method in their discussion of the war
machine - see "1227: Treatise On Nomadology - The War Machine".) 

As both Godel's incompleteness theorem and Cantor's diagonal numbering
have shown, axiomatic systems are intrinsically and necessarily
incomplete: "...it is of the nature of axiomatics to come up against so
called undecidable propositions, to confront necessarily higher powers
that it cannot master." (ATP, 461) Capitalism thus inevitably runs up
against the problem of undecidable propositions or nondenumerable sets.
"At the same time as capitalism is effectuated in the denumerable sets
serving as its models, it necessarily constitutes nondenumerable sets
that cut across and disrupt those models." (ATP, 472) "Yet the very
conditions that make the State or World war machine possible, in other
words, constant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable
capital, continually recreate unexpected possibilities for
counterattack, unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary,
popular, minority, mutant machines." (ATP, 422)

7. In this sense axiomatic systems, which always involve a supplementary
dimension (n+1), are directly opposed to the flatline (see glossary).

8. In his lecture on the Geology of Morals, our colleague Professor
Challenger, speaks of systems such as these as "stratification". "His
dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a
program for pure computers. Or else he was dreaming of an axiomatic, for
axiomatics deals essentially with stratification. Challenger was
addressing himself to memory only." (ATP, 57)

9.  "Hence it is correct to retrospectively understand all history in
light of capitalism...In a word , universal history is not only
retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic and
critical."(AO, 140)  " ..[T]he universal comes at the end - the body
without organs and desiring production -under the conditions determined
by an apparently victorious capitalism." (AO, 139). 

10. To be inside history is to have a relation to Chronos. Yet
(universal) history is not itself chronological. Pure Chronos - the
State's (synchronic) time - can never be fully-realised, for two
reasons: there is always more than one State, and the State (as a form)
is always in a relation with the time-systems of the two other social
regimes (the primitive socius - which "precedes" it - and capitalism -
which "succeeds" it). "Before appearing the State already acts..."(ATP
431) The State appears "all at once" as history's only break."They come
like fate...they appear as lightening appears, too terrible, too
sudden." (Nietzsche, 86) Crashing into history,  the State sets off time
waves that move in both directions at once. "It is necessary ... to
conceptualize the contemporaneousness or coexistence of  ... the two
directions of time - of the primitive peoples 'before' the State, and of
the State 'after' the primitive peoples - as if the two waves that seem
to us to exclude or succeed each other unfolded simultaneously in an
'archaeological', micropolitical, micrological, molecular field." (ATP
431) (For more on this, see Note 15 below). Universal history is a
history from the point of view of capitalism's "vague" Chronos; it is
therefore always "parodic" because, as we have seen, capitalism deletes
all "intrinsic code" in favour of a mobile and variable set of axioms.
Parodic universal history is profoundly "anti evolutionist" because it
describes the simultaneous and coextensive interaction of  ostensibly
successive social regimes. From the start, the two "previous" social
regimes (the primitive socius and the despotic state) anticipate and
ward off capitalism's "diachronic time" - "capitalism has haunted all
forms of society" (AO, 140) -  even though it supposedly comes "at the
end". 

11. In Structural Anthropology 1, Levi-Strauss makes an important point
in this regard. "Not only Sophocles, but Freud himself, should be
included among the recorded versions of the Oedipus myth, on a par with
earlier, or seemingly more 'authentic' versions." (217) Reconstructions
of myths don't function extrinsically or transcendently, as final
"interpretations", but operate immanently, recursively adding more
skeins to the fictive webwork. If there is no outside of fiction, it is
not because of some transcendental universal-textuality, but because
fiction cannot be contained by texts; it is already Outside. (L.T.)

12. A reference to the lead male character in William Gibson's
Neuromancer.

13. "Near the edge of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid,
with a face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren,
its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx - mute, sardonic and
wise beyond mankind and memory." (Lovecraft, 241). Lovecraft puts the
question that seems to plague the authors of  "Flatlines": "... what
huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to
represent?" (258) Needless to say, there have been countless
speculations on the nature and origin of the Sphinx, but these are
inconclusive and  contradictory, no doubt because its "huge and
loathsome abnormality" will have always exceeded  any attempt to
represent it. Many scholars (see for instance, Lowell Edmunds, "The
Sphinx in the Oedipus Legend") now believe that the Sphinx element in
the Oedipus narrative was actually a later addition to an already
existing mythic system, even though the Egyptian Sphinx is evidently
much older than the Greek culture that has given us the Oedipus myth
with which we are familiar. (It should be remembered that the encounter
with the Sphinx is not dramatised in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex; it is
referred to as something that has already happened.)  The attempt to
date the Sphinx has produced widely different speculations; with certain
- controversial - estimations claiming that the Sphinx is "even older
than 15,000 B.C."  (Hancock 448) With Deleuze and Guattari, though, we
might want to suggest that (in at least one sense) Oedipus is as old as
humanity, and that the Sphinx - as that which must be destroyed in order
that humanity may exist - would inevitably always have to be narrated as
something preceding the human. 

Levi-Strauss links the Sphinx to other "cthonian beings", such as the
dragon. Like the dragon, "the Sphinx is a monster unwilling to permit
men to live." (215) While some, such as Carlo Ginzburg, connect the
Sphinx with death ("the Sphinx is undoubtedly a mortuary animal" [228]),
Levi-Strauss argues that Sphinx-myths concern "the autocthonous origin
of man", the idea that human individuals are born direct from the Earth
(rather than through meiotic reproduction). (Ginzburg notes that Oedipus
is "a cthonic hero.") The Sphinx would then correspond to what Deleuze
and Guattari call "biocosmic memory." "Man must constitute himself
through the repression of the intense germinal influx, the great
biocosmic memory" (AO 190) = Oedipus must riddle the sphinx. In a sense,
then this biocosmic memory  "precedes" the organism (which emerges
simultaneously with death and sexuation) . But, as both "Weismannism"
and the Dogon myths attest, this germinal time  persists, coterminously,
alongside that of the organism (see AO 158).  This may explain a
puzzling feature of the Oedipus myth as it has reached us; to wit, why
does a creature of such incredible power as the Sphinx allow itself to
be riddled so easily? As Velikovsky puts it: "It has been observed that
the answer Oedipus gave was on the level of a schoolboy and that the
monster must have been feeble-minded to leap from the precipice upon
hearing it. And why should a winged sphinx die in a jump?" (207) The
answer would be that the Sphinx doesn't die (it cannot, since it does
not live), and that it takes advantage of Oedipus' unwarranted Self-
belief only in order to invade Civilization, hidden. Which would also
imply that the answer Oedipus gives to the riddle is inadequate. Or
partial. (L.T.)

14.  Like the shaman "before" him, the Pharaoh occupies the line of
deterritorialiazation for the socius. He is thus able to ensure that all
lines of escape are reterritorialized on his own body. "The full body as
socius has ceased to be the earth, it has become the body of the despot,
the despot himself or his God. The prescriptions and prohibitions that
often render him almost incapable of acting make of him a body without
organs ." (AO, 194)

15. "The State was not formed in progressive stages; it appears fully
armed, a master stroke executed all at once..." (AO, 217) "Everything is
not of the State precisely because there have been States always and
everywhere." (ATP 429) 

16. cf.  A0 211 "The eye ..has ceased to evaluate; it has begun rather
to 'forewarn' and keep watch, to see that no surplus value escapes the
overcoding of the despotic machine." Compare also William Burroughs, The
Western Lands: "The Pharaoh, with his alabaster white face and black
snake eyes, looks at you, around you, through you, looking for a dagger
in your mind, listening for the whispered furtive words, smelling for
the sweat of guilty fear." (104) 

17. "It is here that Nietszche speaks of a break, a rupture, a leap. Who
are these beings, they who come like fate? ('Some pack of blond beasts
of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with
ability to organize, unhesitantly lays its terrible claws upon a
populace perhaps tremendously superior but still formless..') Even the
most Ancient African myths speak to us of these blond men. They are the
founders of the State." (AO, 192)

18. "No doubt the war machine is realized more completely in the
'barbaric' assemblages of nomadic warriors than in the 'savage'
assemblages of primitive societies." (ATP, 359) This does not mean,
however, that the war machine can be equated with the Barbarians.
Nomadism is not a question of belonging to a particular population, but
of maintaining particular practices. "The nomad distributes himself in
smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his
territorial principle." (ATP, 381) The barbarians, who leave the
Steppes, no longer occupy the smooth space of nomos.  The war machine is
necessarily captured the moment it leaves the desert:  "nomads have a
specificity that is too hastily reduced to its consequences, by
including them in the empires or counting them among the migrants..."
(ATP, 410) 

19. "All the hypothetical meanings [of the surnames in Oedipus's
father's line] ... refer to difficulties in walking straight and
standing upright.." (Levi-Strauss, 215). Levi-Strauss goes on to contend
that Oedipus's lameness indicates "the persistence of the autocthonous
origin of man." (216) (See Note 13)

20. Etymologically, of course, the name Oedipus means "swollen foot."
Velikovsky, however, argues that there is a case for reading it as
"swollen leg." "In folklore feet may stand for legs. Many languages do
not have different words for legs and feet. In Greek, the word pous
stands for both; in Egyptian, too, the word r-d (foot) stands also for
leg. In the riddle that Oedipus solved concerning the creature that
walks on four legs, on two, and on three ..., the Greek word used is
pous, and thus the name Oedipus could, and even preferably so, mean
'swollen legs.'" (Velikovsky, 57)

21. Velikovsky argues that the Oedipus myth has been transposed from
Egypt (which also has a city called Thebes). Oedipus, he suggests, was
originally a Pharaoh named Akhnaton. In contemporary depictions,
Akhnaton's "most pronounced malformation [was] the shape of his thighs;
they are swollen." (55) 

22. It should be pointed out that, strictly speaking, there is no
prehistory; prehistory is  myth of the State. As we have already seen
(see Note 10), from the start the primitive socius  anticipates and
wards off both capitalism and the State: "primitive societies are fully
inside history." (AO, 151) By the same token, though, the very fact that
primitive societies are inside history means that they are not nomadic.
"It is true that nomads have no history; they only have a geography."
(ATP, 393)

23. Carlo Ginzburg suggests that the foot mutilations Oedipus suffers in
the various versions of the legend may be references to shamanic
initiation practices. He also speculates that these may have concerned
calendrical rituals (the lameness indicating the imbalances necessary
for certain calendric cycles to function). It is mutilation that
disappears with psychoanalysis, where it is made to operate as a
representation of psychical processes.  Levi-Strauss makes parallels
between shamanism and psychoanalysis  in Structural Anthropology
(198-202). Deleuze and Guattari would no doubt  stress the way in which
Freud's  neo(anti)shamanism doubly reduces Oedipal mutilation, to
metaphor, and to function. The question (posed in a number of ways
throughout Anti-Oedipus) then becomes: how did the body construct a
theatrical unconscious for which gouging out eyes 'equals' castration,
and castration simply subtracts hedonic function? 

24. Eliade gives many examples of the use of iron in shamanic initiation
rites. For example: "The candidate's limbs are removed and disjointed
with an iron hook; the bones are cleaned, the flesh scraped, the body
fluids thrown away, and the eyes torn from its sockets." (Eliade, 1988,
36) It is important to distinguish the strategic and subordinate use of
metal in  "the primitive socius" from the war machine's necessary and
intrinsic relation to metallurgy. "AXIOM III. The Nomad war machine is
the form of expression, of which itinerant metallurgy is the correlative
form of content."(ATP 415) The war machine populates the metal body,
while the primitive socius accesses it only intermittently through the
lone journeys of the shaman.

25. Cthelll designates the infernal nether regions referred to in
numerous mythologies of the Underworld. It refers particularly to the
molten, metallic inner core of the earth. In his book on alchemy, The
Forge and the  Crucible, Eliade makes much of the connections between
metallurgy, the core of the earth and shamanism. Here and in Shamanism,
Eliade reinforces Deleuze and Guattari's view of the smith as an
ambiguous figure, aligned neither with sedentary societies nor with
nomadic distributions but performing an essential function for both.
Deleuze and Guattari write of "the double theft and double betrayal of
the metallurgist who shuns agriculture at the same time as animal-
raising." (ATP 414) (Another interesting connection in this regard is
that between Oedipus and the smith.. Deleuze and Guattari refer to
Oedipus as "the Greek Cain" [ATP, 125], whilst elsewhere strongly
linking Cain with the figure of the smith [ATP, 414]). For Eliade, the
relationship between the smith and the shaman is close - "'Smiths and
shamans are from the same nest'" -  but often unstable:  "According to
the Dolgan, shamans cannot 'swallow' the souls of the smiths because
smiths keep their souls in the fire; on the other hand, a smith can
catch a shaman's soul and burn it. In their turn, the smiths are
constantly threatened by evil spirits." (470)

26. The shaman's occupation of the line of deterritorialization plays a
crucial role in maintaining the "dynamic equilibrium" (AO, 151) of the
primitive socius; delirium never becomes collective.

27. Hunter-gatherers populate a smooth space, but only by organizing
upon it. "The primitive machine subdivides the people but does so on an
undivided earth." (AO, 151) Once again, this is to be differentiated
from the war machine, which populates an undivided earth with a
molecular multiplicity.

28.  "The Sphinx was an oracle, and therefore she was supposed to answer
questions, not to ask them. Yet it is also true that oracular answers
were often given in the form of a riddle that required interpretation,
usually supplied by priests attending the oracle... It does not seem to
me that every question needs - or has - an answer... But were it my
misfortune to stand before the Sphinx with the dire prospect of never
entering Thebes, I should reply to her riddle: 'It is Oedipus' ... An
oracle's questions and answers refer to the man who stands before it.
Oedipus was exposed, a helpless infant with damaged feet, to crawl in
the wasteland; he grew to be a man and a hero; his end was that of a
blind wanderer in exile." (Velikovsky, 207) "The parechesis at Soph.
even suggests that it was the deformity of Oedipus' feet that gave him
the clue to the answer; and there was a tradition that Oedipus gave the
answer by pointing to himself."  (Edmunds, 160)



Bibliography

Burroughs,  William, The Western Lands, London: Picador, 1988

Barker, Daniel, Cryptalog (Early Writings on Cryptography and the
Secret), Miskatonic University Archive

Cannon, Walter, "'Voodoo' Death," American Anthropologist, XLLIV (1942)

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari,  Anti-Oedipus :  Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane,
London: Athlone Press, 1984 (referred to in the Notes as AO)
_ A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian
Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1988 (referred to in the Notes as ATP)

Edmunds, Lowell, "The Sphinx in the Oedipus Legend", Oedipus: A Folklore
Casebook, ed. Lowell Edmunds and Alan Dundes, University of Wisconsin
Press, London, 1995

Eliade, Mircea, The Forge and the  Crucible,  London: Rider and Company,
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__ Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Harmondsworth:
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Eliot, T.S.,  The Complete  Poems and Plays, London: Faber and Faber,
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Gibson, William, Neuromancer, London: Grafton, 1987

Ginzburg, Carlo,  Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath,  London/
Sydney/ Auckland/ Johannesburg: Hutchinson Radius, 1990

Hancock, Graham, Fingerprints of the Gods: A Quest for the Beginning and
the End, London: Mandarin, 1995

Levi-Strauss, Claude,   Structural Anthropology, Volume 1,  trans.
Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1977

Lovecraft, H. P.,  "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" in H.P. Lovecraft,
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Nietzsche, Friedrich, On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans.
Walter Kauffmann, New York and Toronto: Vintage Books, 1989 

Sophocles, The Theban Plays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982

Templeton, R. E.,  On Time as Thing-in-Itself: Transcendental
Occurrence, Volume 1, New York and London: Hercules Press, 1982

Trent, Linda,  "Fatal Loops: Tragedy as Cyberfiction," in Fictional
Quantities, Vol 1. Number 2, Fall, 1996
"((P(re(cursing)))) (post)Modernist Fiction" in McHale ed., After
Postmodernist Fiction, New York: Zembla Press, 1997
"Smashed Optical Implants: From Time-Space Sunglasses to Cyberpunk
Mirrorshades," in  Fictional Quantities, Vol 1. Number 5, Fall, 1997  

Velikovsky, Immanuel,  Oedipus and Akhnaton: Myth and History,  London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1960
-- 
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