“The beyond of my being is first of all nothingness. This is the absence I discern in laceration and in painful feelings of lack: it reveals the presence of another person. Such a presence, however, is fully disclosed only when the other similarly leans over the edge of nothingness or falls into it (dies).” Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, translated by Bruce Boone (Continuum 2004) 20-21.
“The paradox of voluntary surrender to the inevitable is not a performative contradiction or a knock down argument against accelerationism, but the very topography of its anastrophic passion […] Anyone who has ever fallen in love gets it. Determining the exact point at which personal responsibility melts into the transduction of demonic forces is a problem for sniffer dogs; accelerationists seek out slopes and get on one.” Amy Ireland & Maya B. Kronic, Cute Accelerationism (Urbanomic, 2024) 6-7.
“With temptation, if I can put it this way, we’re crushed by twin pincers of nothingness. By not communicating, we’re annihilated into the emptiness of an isolated life. By communicating, we likewise risk being destroyed […] Even weak communication requires a risk. It only takes place if individuals, leaning out over themselves, risk themselves under the threat of decline. This is why even the purest souls aren’t unaware of the sinkholes of ordinary sensuality (Despite themselves, they can’t exclude a familiarity with this). The purity to which they’re attached signifies that even the tiniest, most negligible portion of ignominy is enough to catch hold of them. With extreme aversion, they guess what drains others. The long and short of it is, we all get h—--* for the same reasons.” – Bataille, On Nietzsche, 24.
“Freud was right: there is but one sexuality, one libido – and it is masculine. Behind the effervescence of the paradigm of sex, everything is converging towards the non-differentiation of the structure and its potential neutralization […] One may catch a glimpse of another, parallel universe (the two never meet) with the decline of psychoanalysis and sexuality as strong structures […] a universe that can no longer be interpreted in terms of structures and diacritical oppositions, but implies a seductive reversibility – a universe where the feminine is not what opposes the masculine, but what seduces the masculine […] The ability to turn appearances in on themselves, to play on the body’s appearances, rather than with the depths of desire.” Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, translated by Brian Singer (NWP Culturetexts, 1990) 7-8.
And so: you do not know me, but you know something of my appearance. You can also perceive the directions and dimensions of my intentionality. You cannot know who I am but you can help me to be by perceiving that in me which escapes me, my fidelity or infidelity to myself. In this way you can help me get away from inertia; tautology, repetition, or even from errancy, from error.” Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch for a Felicity Within History, translated by Alison Martin (Routledge, 1996), 112.
"Now all appearances are reversible … only at the level of appearances are systems fragile and vulnerable … meaning is only vulnerable to enchantment.” Baudrillard, Seduction, 8.
“Thus, it becomes an undefinable object, and hence fascinating. Not good, not bad: ambivalent. Like death or fashion, it becomes a short-cut (in contrast to the good old functionalism which, even while much debated, is no longer one at all); in other words, a more rapid road than the main highway, or going where the main highway doesn’t go, or, better yet (to parody Littré in a pataphysical manner) ‘a road going nowhere, but going there faster than the others.’” Jean Baudrillard, “Ballard’s ‘Crash’,” Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 3 (1991): 318.
“Gambling, risking, even the smallest bet—I open up the prospect of infinitely upping the ante.” – Bataille, On Nietzsche, 27.
"An escalation that never amounts to anything serious, Cute is the protracted poignancy of the chronically inconsummate. All sincerity is rebuffed by this insouciant superficiality. The notion of an internal realm expressed with minimal mediation or distortion is reduced to a mere platitude: everything supposedly deep now flowers on a swollen superflatness, and for the superficionado, there’s nothing underneath. Cute is all-out or not at all.” - Cute Accelerationism, 14.
Wake up. Bright black pierces into digital lenses, static turns kinetic and reaches what is left of the optical nerve. A red blotch appears on the blank film, slowly growing to double its size, revealing pink innards behind the silicone veil. It’s her wedding day: surrender sovereignty to a greater good – take daddy’s place: the larger your imagination, the larger your dick.
Her father referred to her as his two-headed angel, a nickname granted on her tenth birthday after she was gifted an artificial head from her cousin. She never wanted to wear that sixth limb but her father insisted that she wear it because it was the only way he (and, in her mind, the whole world) would find her beautiful. Flesh from her right shoulder bridged into the carbon steel prosthetic. Silicon diodes switch on a drive she never knew existed. Shifting to third gear: carbonic expansion had corroded nearly all her grey matter by the age of twelve. Outwardly, she appeared braindead, just as her father liked. She was his Ovidian masterpiece, her brain turned pure flesh by god (Dad). Her circuit was switched sideways: diode turned to tri-ode and put in to neutral position. She escaped from the blood-brain barrier towards the silicone head. Matter translation like this was never completely lossless, and when she awoke in high school, she had lost the ability to see. Dad always reminded her how lifelessly beautiful she was every morning. He didn’t know about her retreat into her artificial limb, of course, but his words still affirmed the dizzying thoughts of his sightless, formless daughter. He found her attractive, and this comforted her even though she no longer felt any attachment to her flesh. His words fed into her artificial paradise: they defined the geographic boundaries of her mind/world. Tensile grey strata ran like protein bonds across her sky(Box). Stitched together with permanently wet cement, her mind had calcified daddy’s language into literal material.
Her world was completely desolate. She was the sole inhabitant of paradise and this reality made her all the more terrified: terrified of being alone, terrified of what dad might construct next. She lived beyond the flatline, beyond the plateau of the EKG screen. She had PEAKED so many times that everything now felt dull: a constant high pitched screech dotted across her mind – she needed to build a Father2, a Father2 who could see her in her own silicon factory. She became a single celled organism so she could divide herself in two.
She named her other half Dad. He looked at her the exact same way she had remembered from her flesh-era. His pupils dilated in a cartoonish heart shape – her sky glitched hot pink for a moment before going back to grey. Static ran up her leg. It turned to worms by the time it reached her navel. She couldn’t stand to look at him any longer: a sickly feeling emerged that she might regret her creation of Father2. He began to speak, but his grasp on language was terrible. Each time a word escaped from his/her lips, her queasiness fed back into itself, amplifying to a deafening degree. He began to realize that his daughter was no longer registering his speech – her ears were glazed over. His solution was to start speaking louder. His enunciation was now perfect: he began to recite poetry from his home world. His prose was sickeningly sweet, freezing against her glassy exterior to form a layer of iridescent glucose crystals. Pop-Rocks ran up her leg. She was going to peak again. The feedback morphed itself into another flatline: they harmonized together until her glass broke. Pop-Rocks continued crackling in her mouth. Dad came up and put his ear to her glittering teeth.
This sort of paradise was not sustainable – she remarked to herself on the floor. She had peaked one too many times, and now longed to return to the flesh her father had stripped her from. She split again: this time it was excruciatingly painful. Her father glanced at her and told her she should stop doing that or else she’ll get fat. Still on the floor, she turned on her side and looked at the boy she just bore out of her own head. She was entranced by him, but so was father. Father returned to the same state of aphasia from when he was created by his daughter. The sky blinked red – white sinew leaked in from the clouds, then returned to grey. Her two artificial men embraced one another and started kissing. No static. No Pop-Rocks. Her eyes singed, the sinewy sky was embossed into her retinas. She was worried this would make her go blind again. She wanted to join them, but couldn’t move her body. They kept kissing and never looked her way. Her vision turned grey – the red sky plunged deeper into her brain.
An error code appeared on the upper right-hand corner of her mind. Her prosthetic head was overheating. The silicone chassis that held her mind was turning into molasses, slowly seeping into what remained of her collarbone. She wished that dad would ice her brain over; she wished that he would run her artificial bust under cold water; she wished he’d do all of this in complete silence. Through the harmonized flatline she heard the front door of her father’s apartment open and close. She heard his footsteps approaching. He dropped his bag in the hallway and entered her pristinely kept room. She wished for her vision to return once again so she could see how he looked at her once more. He dusted her glassy face and began to smile. He said nothing to her – he knew she wouldn’t respond – kissed her cheek, and left the room. Complete anastrophe begins. Her imagination put on trial by father judge and deemed heretical. Punishment was the implosion of her artificial paradise. Her flatline ran backwards, vision returned, nothing there to look at… raised her hands, blinds herself again. No sound. No paradise this time.
Systems run about off their own fumes. Complete solitude coincides with complete activity. Bodies interact without any consequence or understanding. Language turns intra-personal. Exactly one purpose for each system, otherwise they risk corruption, rust… meltdown. M***d*** has been cut out of the linguistic engine; it is antithetical to operation. M***d*** forms apparitions, it forces interplay and viral spread: an ultimate taboo beyond taboo – it has been written in the ice that it will never be transgressed. Punishable by death or worse: linguistic castration. Viruses are only permitted three words: on, off, action. They are the ultramodern prostitutes: “meat puppets,” singularities, indivisible agents forming covalent bonds to the nth degree. Obscenity is their strategy, but it is no longer limited to the organic structure – growth beyond growth, beyond all else, but never towards the inside. Walls of spermatozoa, calcified, turned into bio-stone. Beams of steel run through them forming a far stronger amalgam. Reversal of the system: virology is the surface’s way of life. Its activity feeds on risk, the iced-over underground turns virus into statue. The surface was once populated with this metastasis – relics of virality turned gray and mute, constant proliferation only accelerated this strategy. On the surface, nothing solid remains as such. Virile fog bleeds into every material, no matter how strong the lattice. M***d*** dominates the space. Blocs remain, but only in afterimage. The rhythm speeds up – surface temperature rises, rust transforms from ferric to cupric. Festive lights turned on in chain reaction. M***d*** turns about on its vertical axis – the fault/flatline switches directions. Two seconds… Nothing… turns 90 degrees. Starts drilling.