SOFT SUBVERSIONS 1. On Machinic Junk

Day 4,014, 17:32 • Published in USA USA • by Pfenix Quinn
SOFT SUBVERSIONS



1. On Machinic Junk


Enlarge the definition of drugs. All mechanisms provide a machinic subjectivity. Everything that contributes to a sensation of belonging to something, or that contributes to the sensation of forgetting oneself, are drugs.

Machinic drugs have surface visibility. Cross-country skiing. Piloting ultra-light motorized vehicles. Rock music. Music videos. What matters is how it all works together.

See Jack make the best of a pseudo-archaic structure. Either he gets on machinic dope or watches his society dissolve into dust. Remakes his traditions into a feudal territoriality. Terror-TOR-reality. Perpetuates the alienated condition of women. Gets absorbed into the repetitive work of machines.

See Jane structure her universe and order her emotions with the proliferation and disorder of machines. But hang on to her archaic references. Crazy for machines. A machinic kind of buzz.

They climb the Himalayas to get high.



Doping is not a metaphor. Repeated pain and "engaging" activities incite endorphins, which are harder than morphine. Self intoxification. Anorexics are drug addicts. Bad faith. You fool yourself by promising to stop. Anorexia is a form of doping.

So is sado-masochism. Or any exclusive passion that induces endorphin bursts. Turn yourself on with rock-and-roll, with fatigue, with lack of sleep, with knocking your head against the floor. Excitement. Cold repetitive movements. Strenuous work. Sports. Fear.

Skiing down a vertical slope transforms notions of personality. Make yourself be, incarnating yourself. The ground of existential images becomes blurred.

Social representations of doping are out of phase with each other. An intense buzz radically eludes individual consciousness. A biological transformation with only a vague need, but an intense experience.

Drug machines generate collective euphoria. Or oppressive gregariousness.

A minor buzz is another personal reterritorialization by totally artificial means. Come home exhausted. Spent another draining day. Turn on the television. Mindlessly browse the internet. Play a stupid game.


Contemporary doping phenomena are ambiguous. Accessed via repetition, stupidly. The monomania of pinball, of eRepublik. Yet the intervention of machinic junk is never futile, never innocent.

Machinic Eros. A teenager commits suicide simply by contemplating high school. Millions of guys practice golf swings in unison. Workers give up vacations.

Or. Elsewhere. Machinic dope favors a return to the individual, but is indispensable to the subjective stabilization of post-industrial societies in times of intense global competition and ecological collapse. Without the payoff, you have nothing.

Molecular machinic subjectivity fosters creativity. After the collapse of any meaningful opposition movements, that's all that's Left. When society can't tolerate its own intensity, doping loses its dynamism too. It must integrate with what seems to be unproductive outlets.

Americans are the champion dopers. We have thousands of ways to do it. Russians are nostalgic for the old dope of Stalinism. Machinic subjectivity fuels Silicon Valley.

Europeans are not cool; they are molar. Hardly any institutions there leave space for processes of machinic proliferation. There is tradition, the anti-dope. A bad start. Doping there belongs to a private club, as a refuge. When the buzz aborts, if it fails, the whole thing implodes. Such critical thresholds don't bring out a social project. It is necessary to make oneself exist "within" the process.

Plenty of buzzes cause much pain when their outmodedness becomes apparent.



Subjective formations concocted by dopings can either get things moving again, or kill them slowly over a low flame.

Behind all of this are the possibilities for creation. For changes of life. For scientific, economic and even aesthetic revolutions.

It is now new horizons, or nothing.

Within the grasp of the immense undertakings to stratify and serialize our societies, subjective formations are roaming about, capable of getting the power of the process going again, promoting mutant singularities and interesting new minorities.

Visibily doped sectors shouldn't merely be the defenses of acqiured territories; residual crystals of machinic dope can penetrate the entire planet. Reanimate it. Relaunch it.

Open it up before it bursts.