RADIO FREE BARBELITH: February 2012

Sunday, February 26, 2012

The Invisibles 1.10 - Season of Ghouls (February 26 - March 3)

[The Invisibles: Apocalypstick, pg 32 - 57]

Back-matter from The Invisibles 1.10

Thursday, February 23, 2012

A Swarm of Readers

A THOUSAND THRESHOLDS

Behead yourself! Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing!

- Rumi

The mechanisms of identification frustrated, the reader beheaded - one has no option left but to SWARM, to infest the text. Parallel (and perpendicular) venues of entry are sought. Instead of pushing the reader back into the distanced point of view of the objective and omniscient Scientist-Godhead-Reader ("the Third Person" - reeks of moralism, doesn't it?), The Invisibles presents a plenum of perspectives. The Third Person, the omniscient & featureless God-Sphere, is already present within The Invisibles, as BARBELITH. The position is occupied, outered and made explicitly alien and inaccessible. In place of a single satellite-probe circumambulating the work, the reader is injected as a swarm of autonomous nano-probes, suffusing the flesh and coursing through the blood of the world. Denied the position of privilege, he must shift and slide through whichever points of vantage that are presented and accessible.

HIS MASK AND SUIT OF FLAYED HUMAN SKIN

Life in the late 20th century is a supermarket stocked with appealing self-images. Why not shop instead of hanging around outside, trying to maintain a cool, "detached" attitude?

- Grant Morrison

Characters themselves mimic the flow of reading - entering nested realities from a higher level (gods and demons entering our world, operatives traveling back in time, magicians negotiating with cultural operating systems), always willingly and willfully reducing themselves, taking on the grammar of a system, the dynamics of dominance and submission, the sadomasochism of drama, in order to interact within it. Bernard Suits, in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, defines a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles". To play a game is to put on its rituals, to operate within its boundaries, to enter a virtual reality. Reading is a game.

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

- Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Double Oh Nothing

THIS THOROUGHLY UNPLEASANT YOUNG MAN

A monk once asked Ummon, "What is the Buddha?" Ummon answered thus: "A dried shit-stick!"

The Invisibles tosses you into the maelstrom, the clamorous sea of a world hungry for bodies. Pulled swirling into this vortex, the reader seeks the support of a familiar flotation device: the Protagonist, the Everyman, fiction's life raft. The protagonist is a form of insulation between the reader and the fictive reality, a mechanism of orientation, a ficto-symbolic body simulation through which the reader inhabits the text in a proscribed manner. Your fingers brush against him in the noisome clamour, and as you try to grasp his position as center of a heroic narrative, to cling tightly to the buoyant force of his "journey" and let yourself be carried passively along a well-worn trail of growth, you come across an issue.

He is a shithead.

Your hands slip.

I WANT TO BE BURIED IN A WHITE COFFIN

We have been led to think of virtual realities as something on the screen of a computer, or presented through a headset, but that's an electronic virtual reality. The primary technology for the building of virtual realities is language. Once you start talking about race pride, loyalty, our destiny, our God, our mission, it's like building virtual realities; and people begin to treat these things as though they had the substantiality of real objects, and to build their lives as though these things are real.

- Terence McKenna

Hero and Anti-Hero collide and annihilate each other in a burst of hot white light.

Narrative is a technology. Story frames time and space according to certain rules and rubrics, providing a sense of perspective and progress. As a technology it is also a distinct argument, a rhetoric shaped by boundaries or rules defining what is meaningful and what is not within its discourse. Within this discourse, actions in accordance with rules, or rituals, generate readable and substantial meaning. Outside of this discourse is the realm of the meaningless and the unknowable. Interplay between these realms, between symbolic life and symbolic death, is fruitful. The Invisibles aims to push, pull, shatter, recast, dissolve and transcend these boundaries. It is a probe injected into the environment of narrative, as you are a player injected into the game of The Invisibles.

AND YOU'LL NEVER FUCKING UNDERSTAND ME

It’s ragged at the edges but you can play any of 300 characters, some more involving than others. It’s a thriller, it’s a romance, it’s a tragedy, it’s a porno, it’s neo-modernist kitchen sink science fiction that you catch, like a cold.

The Invisibles is a virtual reality that is shaken, not stirred.