Zombie revolution

Junkie-zombification

“I knew Armstrong was doping, I knew they were all

doping. I hated that fucker, not for cheating at the

sport I love; no I hated the man for lying about it. I

hated having to get fucked only to recite the same

mantra: better men than him are doping and he’s beating

them, ergo: the fucker is doped. This point usually if

ever arrived before I found a corner and passed out…for

me Vinokurov was a cyclist, when faced with certain

defeat in the ‘Tour’ this man filled himself with

everything he could lay his hands on, he beat the field

comprehensively, was inevitably tested and just as

inevitably failed and was stripped of his accolades and

banned. There was no doubt he would be tested…he did it

anyway. Why? Because he knew the truth of the Tour was

not that one should not dope; it was not to be caught.

For him and all those riding with/against him his victory

in that race was not merely valid…it was heroic.”

Ps. Possibly Vinokourov’s achievement is the explication

of the ‘actual nature’ of the race. The dark truth that

could neither be spoken nor even revealed; aside from

those moments when, an individual exposes themselves; to

what is perceived by society as a degradation. These

anomalous individuals (whether wittingly or un-wittingly)

allow for the existence of an un-illumined competition.

This is not a ‘dark race’ consisted of the denial of

blood exchange, E.P.O or steroids; no the ‘illuminated’

(overt) race is that which knowingly participates in the

event. An event that is not only a form of spectacular

capitalism (sponsorship, wheel deals and regional cheese

and wine showcases), but also, the ‘chromatic black’,

that the consumer cannot integrate into their ontology.

This particular event demands men must exceed human

physical limits, but they must do so without the

methodology becoming known, they must evade the eye that

does not wish to see…but as the eyes increase so too does

the notion of a light that penetrates to the core of the

race. This illumination is illusion, parallax: painted

shadows; whose nature is only perceived at the expense of

those elements deemed responsible for the deception. To

carry the metaphor close to absurdity: the viewer stares

with admonishment at the painted shadow and chastises the

individual who exposed the nature of the deception. But

the darkness is born of light and as such is the

necessary product of the demands we openly make.

In doing so they are subject to, what is in effect a

life-time ban from the normative field of human

relations. This is the ‘junkie-subject’, which perfectly

articulates the actuality of a positively defined

subject, through the apparatus of a society predicated on

both negative freedom and the accumulation of excess. The

disposal of capital, in a sublime moment of self-

immolation (sacrifice); beyond the control of both the

state machinery and the Oedipal structures of the reduced

familial affiliations. These represent a threat through

an explicatory mechanism; that denies both the

fundamental capitalist necessity of preservation,

maintenance and growth and the illusory freedom upon

which the society is predicated. The ‘junkie-subject’ in

extremis dissolves the veneer of sociality in an

aggressive cycle of acquisition and destruction, a

severing of even the most adamant societal bonds.

This is the basic premise of this essay, simply put, the

madman and the junkie both articulate a subject/state

relationship, that lays bare the repressive nature of

present socio-medical regimes. This dysfunctional

interaction is in part rooted in the attempt to create a

radically reduced subject and in part the congenitally

social nature of the ‘illness’. As the subject-designates

madman/junkie are encounters with the limits of social

freedom, and it relation to a body, it enables the

demarcation of an ontological architecture of this

repression. The zombie-subject is the possible product of

this encounter; it is the final subsuming of energetic

intensity as manifest in its most violent form. This

violence is however seldom externalised without the

friction of its motion through the social matrix. The

volatility of both states attests to an encounter with a

fundamental, elemental energy; the neutralising of these

errant elements is instructive on a broader level, as it

is the final contingency of the repressive market-state

against its populace.

Under this hypothesis the zombie is not an ‘other’ that

is contained within the boundaries of a capital

production machine. It is rather the ‘product’ of that

very machine, the rise of the enlightenment in tangent

with the imperial projects of Western Europe. Projects

that would bring to the fore radical and mutable notions

of otherness, in addition to the expansion of a wealth

producing class. One without stake in wealth production.

It thus provides the necessary velocity to an idea of

internal/external other and the accompanying apocalyptic

visions of societal breakdown. The junkie subject is not

‘zombie’ per se; rather it is the mal formed state

structure in its application of non-mutable subject

designates that creates the zombie subject: restricted to

striated spaces and interrupted flows. Desiring functions

are reduced to morally and economically palatable ‘cures’

these fix the subject into a state of sublimated desire

and regimes of confessional auditoriums. The perversity

of the treatment of individuals classified into either of

the sub-strata that constitute the junkie/madman; is that

they are reflexive responses to a situation born of the

social apparatus itself. And in turn the malady that is

sought to be treated is itself a tactical response to the

status of the contemporary subject, the enunciator and

the explicator. For if we examine the subject junkie on a

purely ontological level; they are totally emblematic of

the consuming motion of contemporary capital,

acquisition, filiation through desire as necessity, the

fundamental dissonance arises from the sacrificial final

moment. The alimentary, vascular disposal undermines

market orthodoxies of retention and trade off, that aim

to diminish loss and protect surplus. Through an internal

reflex it is still possible to expose the dimension that

seeks to subsume all exogamic lines of flight into a

properly coded mechanism for the production of surplus as

profit. The sustainable conflict, the undeclared

asymmetrical battlefield are all ultimately rooted in the

dissociative moment. Unable to create, the state/market

machine fabricates and synthesises. The banal progeny of

the contemporary market machine has no effective

opposition for the moment; political movements tend to

challenge capitalism within its own terms. In these

conditions it is possibly worth considering those

positions proceeding from Georges Bataille’s notion of a

‘destructive surplus’, that is: the ultimate aim of

capital accumulation. The subjects examined here

articulate ‘sacrificial functionalities’. The first

through an enunciation of an alternate or adjacent

reality, the latter through both an explication of the

fatuous nature of those ‘rules’ that we perceive to

govern our paradigmatic economy; while representing in

and of itself a persistent sacrifice of surplus in

opposition to the dominant injunctions of the socious .

Whereas the junkie-subject proceeds via an explicatory

motion the madman in his/her numerous manifestations

forces upon contemporary capitalist society an alternate

cosmology through the enunciation of a separate sensorial

realm, a non-materialist-materialism, the inculcated

‘lack’ is in this case evaded and an entirely alternate

code is produced While I will be drawing on their

collaborative work in this essay; the more specific

sphere of this work is the reactions elicited by both

subjects; the junkie and the madman. As well as the

possible methodologies suggested by such reflexive

resistance in the face of an increasingly aggressive

combinatory apparatus of state, capital and medical

capture.

Taking in the first instant the junkie-subject (J-S) I

will attempt to elucidate the action of the persistent

material repetition and its affect on the subject through

the primary diagram (FIGURE 1 and 2). An attempted

integration of both: Henri Bergson’s cone of memory and

Benedict Spinoza’s three levels of knowledge (see diagram

below). The action illustrated may bear some relation to

the traumatised subject and the persistent re-entry into

the lower levels of knowledge/memory (namely those more

closely associated with the material plane and its

contingent ‘rationality’). Though as mentioned above the

mode of operation of the optimised J-S is their

explicatory function. In truth the largest single factor

in the emancipation of the immanent junkie-subject is the

uncoupling of desire from its phantasmagorical compound

forms. That is to say the complex assemblages often

reduced to key signifiers and familiar tropes.

Unfortunately it is this very clarity of the nature of

desire that is the primary target of most treatment

regimes. They seek to reinstall the bricolage of licit

fetish, rather than explore a possible existence lacking

in lack, while shorn of excess.

However the necessity assumed by both the J.S and the

madman constitutes a machinic desire, the nature of which

must be transformed into the illusory non-desiring

subject; the static fixed non-mad, non-junkie. That is

the destruction of urgent imperative desiring function

and the institution of an illuminated naked subject; it

is no coincidence that therapeutic regimes are grounded

in a confessional declaration. This is the acceptance of

a positive designation, which is the repressed desiring

machine. The violence implicit within such a designation

lies not only in its imposition of subject-hood, but also

in its exclusion/exile of the nascent subject from the

productive flows of excess, desire and destruction into a

contradictory paradigm of pure lack. Put simply, the

price paid is the fusing of the subject to a purely

negative assessment of their prior ‘condition’, non-

being/non-becoming. As an ossified sterility predicated

on the non-validity of all prior co-ordinates, the

subject is chained to what is an explicit and permanent

designation. That no productive outcomes are acknowledged

by the dominant hegemonic structure; alludes to the

fraudulent nature of its premise. The nature of the lie

is that the ‘dysfunction’ is a mechanism of a binary

subject: light and dark, sane or insane, clean or

unclean. This dyad can only function once the subject is

primarily bound in an oppositional relation to a

rendering of society as a single coherent normality, from

which they have excluded themselves, and to which they

must seek return. This societal norm is at the crux of

the creation of the zombie subject, the zombie occurs as

product of the dominant social machinery and not through

accidental contagion. It is distinct from the excessive

desiring machine of the drug addict, in that the abject

honesty of unitary desire has been shown to incompatible

with social norms. The lie of this position is obvious to

all but the most blinkered. To state the obvious: since

the agrarian revolution, the species has become

progressively specialised. Each economic evolution has

led to a greater and greater refinement of the repetitive

action, the singular motion. Indeed it is the very

edifice of a society of structured component units that

madman and junkie moments disrupt. As for the singular

obsessive pursuit at the cost of wider society, it is so

intrinsic to contemporary capitalism to be not worth

pointing out. So it is that an energetic intensity is

denied, precisely because it suffuses the human project.

So it is those who explicitly manifest these underlying

functions that are excluded from its vital flow. The

nature of this fundamental untruth that is ultimately

untenable to the psyche of the subject. It can only be

absorbed through the assimilation of a static simulated

subjectivity. All or nothing. Black or white. Heaven or

hell. The adoption of such a reduced state of being, in a

perverse manner mimics the singular dimension of the

energetic junkie, but has no impetuous other than the

simulation of ‘normality’.

But is there a further possibility, that of a ‘negative

materialism’, that Nick Land articulates in his text on

Bataille -“Need is never given, it must be constructed

out of luxuriance. The primordial task of life is not to

produce or survive, but to consume the clogging floods of

riches—of energy—pouring down upon it.” (Land, 1992, 23)

A progenitive mandate predicated on the desire

transformed into necessity that defines the junkie-

subject? The sacrificial propensities of the subject are

anathema to the retentive imposition of capital; the in-

built obsolescence and need for constant growth are

baldly denied. While the social/state matrix all too

often refers to the ‘waste’ represented by these

energetic-junkie subjects. Though this is also a familiar

self-referential term: to be ‘wasted’ is to achieve the

momentary para-transcendent aim at the heart of the

junkie project. Let’s consider for a brief moment the

context of this latter waste. To ‘lay waste’ has a long

etymological pedigree; a chivalric necessity in addition

to a squandering of substance or disintegration of a

body. So how are we to read the wasting action of the

junkie-subject in the present acquisitive-capitalist

paradigm? I propose that the prior waste is only one

possible functionality of this subject, and that the

wilful disposal/destruction/dispersion/dissipation may be

perceived as both an attack on the ultimate terrain of

capital exploitation…the body.

The Traumatised Nation

If we are to assume the cone of memory ascends to a

collective memory; that is a memory shared by concentric

rings emanating from the subject, out towards a shared

history; by what order does it proceed? As subject,

family, tribe, nation, language, humanity, animal and

universe? And if we have a shared history/memory at which

point do the traumas of those memories preceding us join

into our own traumatic moments? Secondly do bands/rings/

strata of trauma act as boundaries to our memory? Are we

bound by these coils, routed around the cone, as

commuters about the circumference of our own psyche?

Furthermore what are the Crimes against the collective?

What warrants zombification in the context of our

contemporary ‘desiring machine’? Which are crimes that

are truly transgressive in the eyes of the dominant

machinery and are exactly those that straddle the

entirety of the social machine. These totalising forces

of desire are not simply a drive but an aggressive

intermediary (stripped of all pretence and shorn of the

banal platitudinous justifications that are endemic to

the contemporary ultra-communicative paradigm).

One possibility is that of undermining “The deliberate

creation of lack as a function of the market economy…”

that as Deleuze and Guattari point out”…is the art of the

dominant class.” (Deleuze 2012, 28). The strategies by

which this is achieved are in both cases dependent on a

certain disregard for the perceived parameters within

which the consumer/contributor to the capitalist economy

operates. The refusal to adhere to the limits of

expenditure in all senses of the word may lead to the

collapse of the sustaining matrix of the individual but

quite possibly also to the generation of a “supra-man”;

who does not simply: “Will a self…” to “…become self”

(Stack 1983, 321) but rather perceives a self liberated

from the plethora of simulated pseudo-desires.

Furthermore market forces are key in the generation of

this subject designation; the moral tyranny at the heart

of supposed societal freedom is exposed at the interface

of capital productivity and reflective social modalities.

The medicalised subject is created when the oppressive

market forces exceed the individual’s ability to self

sustain. Though the simple facilitation of the desire

is by far the most logical solution, the options given

are either: face the extreme hyper-capitalist economy of

the illicit market or accept the fixed designation of the

state medical machine and exist on sublimated curatives,

dispensed according to a moral logic that locks the

subject into a puritan realm of stultification and

interrupted flow. The product of this process can never

again be an individuated desiring-machine, the excessive

dimension of their desire must be standardised and

structured. No longer is it capable of autonomous action;

prevented from any restructuring, explication,

consumption or contagion.

The notion of return that we find imposed on ’the

subjects ‘ is in all truth the most violent aspect of the

aspirant inoculation, that is: the enforced attempt to

traverse ones own traumatic moment and find what exactly?

It is important to state that the return I refer to here,

is not a Deleuzian repetition (Empty-time) or a cyclic

motion, familiar to among others: Vedic texts. It is the

re-socialisation to a pre-traumatic moment; the ‘clean’

of the J.S is just that: ex-nihilo. A denial of the

contingencies that accompany and augment the chemical

initiate; but also a denial of the surrounding matrix

that has validated existence up to the point that the J.S

is assigned their new designation. A designation beyond

the spacio-temporal reality bestowed on the subject-

patient. They, unlike any other ‘service-users’ in the

contemporary state-medical structure must be habilitated

to the void, an erasure of all but the most appropriate

and banal functionality. The ontological impossibility of

productivity from this tabula rasa is not overlooked, and

so it is that identities predicated on an initial failure

(the original sin as extra-dimensional transgression:

‘when I was fucked up: I did A. or B’ are carried with

the subject; though they no longer form any part of their

positive existence. They are in an almost comical manner

committed to the dark side of the junkie dyad. These

subjects then are simultaneously ‘not-guilty’ for

transgressions committed whilst in a prior ‘moment’. But

are condemned by that moment to the subsequent hyper-

lack, of the vacuum in which their ‘clean’ subject-hood

will be created.

So the question arises: how does this particular model of

re-integration differ from the integrating of the ‘non-

normalised subject’ (namely the subject that has not

transgressed the perceived sociological boundaries) into

the socious, once they have ceased to function within

those limits? And can a collective body actually be

subject to the same matrix of symptoms as those

individuals within it? To an extent the question seems

absurd; either it can be taken for granted that the

pathology of a society can be traced in those who

constitute it (top down so to speak) or the mass

psychology of a group may come to constitute the

psychological make-up of any single subject. Do the

multiplicities that make up the ontology of the one,

equate the limitations and permutations of the many?

Within small communities this is taken for granted but at

what point do we delimit the composites of a community to

cease to find reflection in the single individual? And

for that matter; if we assume contagion or the action of

‘rational’ communicable symptoms, then the drawing of

arbitrary ‘zones of affect’ seems as quixotic as the

generation of single historical narratives that exclude

those participants subsequently elected agency in later

revisionary moments. Without recourse to a collective

unconscious a bottom-up model of psycho-affective

pathology, mutating momentary micro-conscience is

possible or rather we may analyse the whole through the

motions of its most mobile; that is mutable parts.

The only cure for such social maladies: the unspeakable

fixing of mobile/transversal intensity into static

defined subject. This is locked into a binary oscillation

of atrophic polarity and desire then re-routed into the

positive designation of ‘normality’. Though for all that

the structuring/suturing machine cannot but expose its

own impossibility, in seeking to ‘catalogue’ singularity,

the singularity of categorisation exposes what was to be

repressed initially. To often the self fulfilling

prophecy created by the machinery, that is: resultant

from an aggressive socialisation of those subjects

without the requisite logic, applied routinely to those

treatable sections of the socious deemed worthy

(compassion, facilitation) or (without hyperbole

humanity), is the locking into criminal affiliations or

extreme acts of rupture/violence, in one case is

necessitated by the radical free-market, in the other is

as much the product of the perception of the public

combined with those rare occasions when the emancipated

subject manifests the worst fears/hysteria of the binding

state-medical machine. The ‘rational’ violence

perpetrated on and by the larger part of humanity is far

greater in both magnitude and frequency need only to be

pointed out, in order to demonstrate the fatuous argument

that violence is somehow rooted in the subjects discussed

here. I neither wish to denigrate those

affiliations/bands and random acts of violence, I simply

wish to point out that they are as often an impact of the

cure as a symptom of the ‘illness’ of the ‘junkie’ and

‘mad’ subject

The Junkie Subject

Figure 1:A=mobile limit reduction: memory ofmemoryB=action of reduced moment: diminishing limitC=return to moment of perceived joyP.T.S.D

The superimposition of the Spinozist levels of knowledge

onto the Bergsonian cone of memory, gives a physical

diagnoistic apparatus through which to examine the

‘junkie’ repetition, and its implications for the

capitalist machine’s ontology as regards to the dark

necessity and traumatic repetition. Bergson’s cone and it

base level also provide an external temporal dimension.

In these diagrams I have assumed a linear progression of

time across this plane (the plane in this case also forms

the first Spinosist material plane). One could say that

the apex point of this pendulum into the cone leads to a

reverse view of the modal state of being. That is the

subject-junkie actuates the modal plane through the plane

of connections that is she/he is the counter subject:

seeking neither the approval nor sustenance that is the

essential motif of the capital economy (as bound to the

compromising matrix of family/law/descent).

The three levels of knowledge as Deleuze defines them

are:

1. Material “…an infinity of extrinsic parts of which I

have inadequate perceptions.so that the fist kind of

knowledge corresponds to this first dimension of

individuality” (Deleuze 1988, 95). In this diagram

this lowest level also corresponds to Bergson’s

plain of matter upon which ‘rests’ the cone of

memory.

2. Relations, or more specifically their “composition

and decomposition” (Deleuze 1988, 106).

3. Essences. This in many ways is the most complex

and for our purposes only partially useful form of

knowledge: “The third kind of knowledge, or

intuitive knowledge, is that which surpasses

relations and their compositions and their

decompositions. This knowledge of essences, which

goes further than relations since it attains the

essence that expresses itself in relations, the

essence on which relations depend.” (Deleuze 1988,

121).

The use of addictive narcotics in the junkie subject,

have a double articulation whereby the subject is both

linked irretrievable to both the plane of materiality and

to a particular; lower level of the Bergsonian cone of

memory. The access point is correlative to the plane of

matter. That is to say as the experiential cone grows the

subject re-enters at the same point, the expansion of the

cone however ensures the distance between the subject and

the initial moment of joy expands symmetrically. All

supplements function in a similar manner (that is

repetition simply increases the experiential distance

between subject and transcendence through the supplement.

The necessity of the substance rapidly overtakes its

ability to provide force/velocity, but it has nonetheless

imparted to the subject the knowledge that the plane of

matter is reducible to a single fictive moment.

Figure 2

As the old junkie knows; they will never again attain the

‘joy in the thing’, but they also know that all joy born

of the purely material is illusion. All happiness that

can be bought is imperfect, tainted and baseless. This

knowledge of the fraudulent nature of matter-based

transcendence; that is the limitation of capitalist

society’s promissory note, cannot be unlearned. The class

dimension to the problem of those now initiated into a

world of matter without meaning can be starkly seen in

the alternative existences open to them. In one condition

the supplement is simply supplied and an alternate basis

for life is found, happiness/joy pursued elsewhere; for

it is a basic lesson that bread brings joy to the

starving not the stuffed. But for the individual

designated ‘worker’ the knowledge that work for gain is

ultimately empty; the threat to the social continuum is

such that a series of violent narratives of loss and

ostracism await for they now function on alternate

temporal planes, are progenitors of random filiations and

articulate sacrificial counter-capital relations, they

cannot be reabsorbed, instead they must become

static/ossified.

Ultimately the lack of ‘contribution’ on the part of the

subject-junkie maybe the rebellion of one staked to the

plane of matter or more specifically the material itself;

the bitter pill of those from whose eyes the scales have

fallen; but worse for the happy continuation of

capitalism, the plane of matter is no longer a zone

whereby the fulfilment of joy has any triadic

relationship with trade, citizenship and the state

(coincidentally the period of heroin addiction is said to

be on average around ten years…though the ostracised in

ancient Greece retained social position. Perhaps then for

our purpose pharmakoi is of more relevance, or the

pharmacies for subject-junkie, subject-mad…ask Derrida?)

the incessant demand of the subject-junkie while easily

sated is ultimately demarcated to an internal-exterior, a

place of exile/exclusion/execution all within the ‘city

walls’ but below the status of slave…as the subject-

junkie is supposed beyond use value.

For if: “wealth changes meaning according to the

advantage we expect from it…It is the individual who sees

that the meaning of wealth in contemporary capitalist

culture may exists beyond symmetrical generation of

experience. Over time repetition leads to the cyclic

motion: memory of memory. Insurrection through the simple

non-acquiescence to value relations or inherited value

structures: These minor games, like golf and guided

tourist packages, feeble literature and lifeless

philosophies, amount to an immense abdication, reflecting

a sad humanity which prefers work to death. These heads

which have macerated all the world’s tasks have rare

leaps of pride, but universal consent influences them:

one is a supreme value, which is that is useless is to be

condemned: play through its useless, must be reduced to a

minor function of relaxation” (Bataille 1951, 117-18).

As the initial movement may well have generated a para-

transcendent moment the subject over time begins to

apprehend the action into the cone that is away from the

plane of matter as being simply a movement of the plane

of matter. The exact nature of this articulation requires

the superimposition of a number of theories (as an

articulation on the classic Spinozist plane of matter

does not adequately explain the ‘believed’ transcendence;

though there is without doubt a derive into the upper

levels of knowledge, the only excessive plane accessed is

accessed through purely biological functions. Greater

knowledge is gained but this is essentially insight into

functions on the plane of matter. Unlike the

hallucinogenic moment; that may re-locate the subjects’

conscious self and provide the necessary trajectory to

expand knowledge on a multi-dimensional level, the nature

of knowledge gained by the junkie-subject is an undoing

of the reward/pleasure matrix. This is not to be

disregarded, as the disassociation of pleasure from

multiple zones of desire to a singular physical

supplement, explicates completely the illusory structures

of reward, desire and self interest that are the root

function of contemporary capitalism. This is a structural

function of capital exchange when it meets psychological

and physical necessity, the multiple strategies employed

by the state machine as regards treatment and cure expose

the limits of the market driven society’s compassionate

function whilst articulating as illusory relationship

between capital exchange and social/familial/tribal

cohesion (capitalism as agonist to the fundamental

functioning of human social relations).

As the ‘junkie’ subject becomes manifest it is vital to

realise the co-ordinating action that binds them to the

plane of matter is the socious, akin to the treatment of

the psychotic-visionary. For the dominant psycho-social

tendency it is not a mis-diagnosis that leads to both

conditions being dealt with by the medico-judicial

establishment, given the privileged knowledge obtained by

the subject is in itself located beyond the functions of

the plane of matter whereas in the first instance the

junkie subject has apprehended the flaw in the relation

between time/labour/pleasure and perpetuation that is the

fundamental necessity of any capital based society, this

applied even within those proto-communist societies of

the last century; where the junkie subject was considered

anti-social or in extremis counter revolutionary. As seen

in the Soviet Union the ‘‘systematic abuse of

psychiatry’’, (Plante 2013,110) was used to condemn not a

sickness but a political and social reprisal administered

in the form of ‘’sluggish schizophrenia’’, (Plante

2013,110). “Under such extreme circumstances, dissent (so

diagnosed) may, in fact, be the sane response to an

insane society’’(Plante 2013,110).

All that is requisite for this repeated action, which is

the action of the socious that generates this replicable

subjectivity, is an annunciation on the part of the

matrix surrounding the subject. This annunciation

excludes the subject to the periphery whilst binding them

to the system and so a potentially aggressively

subversive moment. And thus is transmogrified into the

banal repetitive ‘bound subject’ of subject–junkie and

subject-madman. Those same relations are similarly

exposed in the state machine’s encounter with the

‘Madman’, but here it is due not simply to the disruptive

nature of the subject but the explicatory/annunciatory

implications of the symptom.

It can be caused first through an annunciation of an

alternate or adjacent reality and an explication of the

fatuous nature of those ‘rules’ that we perceive to

govern our paradigmatic economy; while representing in

and of itself a persistent sacrifice of surplus in

opposition to the dominant injunctions of the socious.

Though both of these are in our present condition

considered nothing less than cardinal sins; the perverse

actuality of explication and annunciation becoming

intrinsically oppositional to a ‘moral standardisation’

negatively defined and ultimately bereft of any

progenitive-transcendent force (puissance), can only

indicate the suspension of any a priori subject-hood,

beyond the assertion of the subject as non-compliant

anti-patient, destructive-producer. Having been found

‘guilty’ the annunciator/explicator is subject to the

chemical-zombification: the final product? The re-

producing subject, subject-zombie: treated and cured to

normality. The protest implicit in the multiple refusals

is nullified in a matrix of functionality so specific as

to lock the protestant into a self-hood distinct and

final. This may sound contradictory as regards to the

subject-junkie; given a willing chemical dependence, but

as my father once said: “it is not having heroin that is

the problem…it is ‘not’ having heroin: that is the

problem”. The persistent desire to find ‘morally

acceptable’ substitute chemical/medical and

detoxification regimes with which to treat the subject,

expose the junkie to the panoply of ‘cures’ that often

guarantee persistent and catastrophic dependence to not

only the cure but the designation.

Junkie clinic

So why conflate these subjects? What binds the subjects

discussed? Or possibly a more pertinent question is: what

divides the junkie and madman? Both are at their root

rational responses to irrational impositions. On the one

hand; the limit of an injunction to enjoy and on the

other, the boundary of an illusory psychic freedom. Both

describe the limits of control over the internal space of

the body. The puritanical restraint always accompanies

the permissive allusion. The proviso placed on self-

exploration is ‘don’t go too far. But the literal

interpretation is the essence of the word; euphemisms are

the machinery of repression and domination. The

authoritative interpretation mutates in order to distance

the individual from the volatile multiplicity. Hemmed in

by dogmatic half-truth the junkie and madman pick at

stitches, releasing the vital flow, even at the expense

of their own existence. And though the terrain may vary,

the cure is more often than not, the division from

proximal networks. Quarantine is followed by the grouping

together of the toothless and penitent: “The artificial

schizophrenic found in mental institutions: a limp rag

forced into autistic behaviour”, (Deleuze/Guattari 2012,

15) The substance as substantive; is an articulation for

hindsight, not an epidemiology of the present. The only

extremity of experience is that communicated, as

contagion; Zen monks favour direct communication beyond

scripture, on occasion with a stick “I hit you 36 times”.

So the search for rational structure and the creation of

encyclopaedic diagnostics ultimately result in the

creation of chemical arrays, capable of replicating

dribbling, murmuring passivity and evangelical self-

loathing. The energetic dis-order is replaced with

stultified routine.

After the experiment is concluded… The derive through the

extremities of self-exploration; the price paid for this

apostasy is laid out in ‘Junkie’ not ‘Naked Lunch’.

Burroughs here allows the energetic flight of the subject

to ‘cut-up’ the whole. In not pursuing an overtly radical

operation, the prussic vitality of the punctured and

scarred survivor, the elastic resilience of the ‘lifer’

scratches a palimpsest for the initiate. Encodes a

timeless manual for the aspirant.

There seems very little validation of the hermetic

agoraphobia of the ‘institute’. The renunciation that is

the primary obligation denies any possible retention of

knowledge, hard won; through whichever strategy employed.

The militant cure, being the final stop for those unable

or unwilling to continue the terrifying dance with the

corrosive patriarchal structures, dominating the material

life of the energetic-junkie. Within the confines of the

institute the key tropes are ceaselessly reinforced and

validated, as with the academy a dominant discourse can

only be overcome by increment. The status quo is

maintained through the inability of the patients to

challenge the diagnosis and treatment, as their condition

is in large part imposed on them by an authority totality

ignorant of the ‘reality’ that they inhabit.

How far can one travel for the price of sanity (the

sanitary), as to evolutions re-volutions; the junkie

subject offers a final safety net…the necessity for ‘the

thing’; (the stuff, the gear, the brown, the white, the

green, the blue, the supplement). Ill disciplined or ill,

the logic is not madness, but the rationale of the

exchequer, or the clinic. Where else but on this

continent could the discourse embrace the threads of the

state, the clinic, the market and the mortal?

The transcendence acquired is almost dichotomous by

current diagnostics: one being absolute mind the other

being absolute material: the breaking of the bond between

state-self and self-self (do we equate the oedipal state

as state within state?). Once deployed against either

subject the state-medical machine seeks first to root out

the disease and then apply the appropriate medication in

order to cure said disease, here the problem arises; for

the medical model can only treat on a material level it

cannot ‘undo’ knowledge acquired, this knowledge is

experiential and, in large part incommunicable. The

physical dimensions of a psychic necessity confound

professionals operating within boundaries that they

perceive to be objective. The wards of these institutions

are defined by a breakdown in the possibility of

dialogue, rather than a simple absence of discourse.

Progressive regimes have given way to vast programmes of

medication. Sanctuary has been forfeited for cure. Many

advances in the field were born of a particular openness

on the part of the clinic/doctor/worker; specifically a

break with the processional logic, dominant within the

socious. But as numerous pressures are exerted on an

increasingly ‘depoliticised’ therapeutic area; the

willingness of those in power to examine the validity of

radically altered ontologies diminishes.

On Normalisation

To find the transgressive moment perceived by the broader

society as regards these exemplar marginal groups, is to

expose the radical threat posed by both ‘conditions’ and

the implications for contemporary society. Annunciation

(Madman) and explication (Junkie). For the junkie in a

state of chemical dependence and a psychotic break are

not simply the radically altered behavioural norms, as

regards those broad norms of the majority structure, but

rather the explicatory implications of such ‘maladies’

for the dominant hegemonic majority are in a distinct

manner untenable to the structural integrity of a

repressive sociality predicated on whichever ‘Royal lie’

encodes the society. Be it equality and a shared destiny

in the 20th century communist experiments or the equality

of opportunity in the capitalist/post-capitalist society.

A question occurs at this juncture: is any transcendent

moment contained within the life/work/functioning of

William S. Burroughs, or is he actually approaching an

ultimate expression of the orientalism that still

sustains the vigorous exploratory momentum within the

oeuvre of Battaille? Is Burroughs’ the final extent of

the search for the new continent (Terra Incognita as in

Nabakov rather than Ptolomy), the realm beyond the world

outside? Had Burroughs finally discovered the peculiar

continent that would satiate a frustrated imperialism (or

possibly an incomplete revolution). Jaques Vache had

concluded the search for the final Hiedeggarian (or

Liebnitzian?) island, but to those remaining the

frustrating sublimation of experience and the terrifying

nature of deaths dominion (what is more the opportunity

for youthful, tragic, romantic obliteration belay the

comprehension of the act, the simple death of youth had

little radical emancipatory potential after half a

century of massacre.) By this time even Georges had

concluded that: the “value judgment, which is contrary

not only to tradition but to the character of play of the

risk of assumed death, war has rapidly evolved toward a

form of work: henceforth war is a type of work analogous

to others, submitted to the work ethic, which is

constraint” (Bataille 1951, 117-18).

What was required was the continuous moment of repetition

and tragedy, the remedy explored to its final reach for

the toxic cure. This is the ‘reality’ for the initiate

the prescription is in it excessive dimensions

transformed into a traversable expanse; and obsession of

reverse alchemy. Could Rome’s lead pipes have led to a

nation predicated on conquest and cruelty? And while the

British empirical demand that pewter production governed

by ‘The Worshipful Company of Pewterers’ ensuring the cup

was not toxic, the rum that filled it often was. Lead

being the chosen material used in the production of

‘spirits’. Not to mention that ‘hatters where mad’ and

those suffering ‘The Pox’ were treated with mercury. What

relationship is there then between sanity and supplement,

alchemy and the state?

The dominant discourse as regards broad brush mental

illness of the type described, are socio-economic and

neuro-genetic; and all treatment regimens proceed from a

dysfunctional subject and aim to re-normalise the

individual through a variety of methodologies. What is of

interest, and indeed what binds these conditions together

is the norm to which it is claimed a return is

desirous/possible. But if we consider the reverse this

hypothesis that the subjects are already conforming to an

alternative norm, then the question of what they are

being returned to, allows access into the underlying and

fascistic peculiarities of the ‘treatment’ of the

subject-mad and subject-junkie. It may be necessary at

this point to justify associating these multiple states

of being at all; given they manifest differences in their

pathology. The simple fact is: that this is not

metaphorically a study of the patient, but rather it is

an analysis of the doctor/socious/state through the

patient. And as such I make no apologies for the

compressing of what are radically differing states of

being/becoming, I further hope that the reader will

apprehend that this is not in the strictest sense the

discourse of the academy, nor is it that of the purely

neurotic. Having found the analytic capabilities of

academic discourse to be limited, at the extremities of

subject in relation to the dominant diagnostic machinery,

the most rational approach would seem to be the

occupation of the intersection between the academy and

the neurotic. In so doing it is hoped that we may

apprehend more clearly the point at which the individual

is shorn of their place within the coherent social order

and assigned an alternate identity and so become

exclusively subject to a process the declared end of

which is re-normalisation.

Such can be seen in the size of the U.S manual of

diagnostic psychiatry, which has increased in size

exponentially edition on edition. One reading of this is

that as drug companies desire to re-licence their

products in a private health-care system, the conditions

of mental distress that may be experienced must be

expanded to facilitate the prescribing of more drugs, it

has been claimed that: Of the authors who selected and

defined the DSM-IV psychiatric disorders, roughly half

have had financial relationships with the pharmaceutical

industry at one time (Gosgrove 2014). To justify this and

also to demonstrate an increased validity in purely

substantial terms the latest volume runs to 947 pages.

Another reading however is that the increasing size is

reflective of a ‘distress’ within the diagnostic

machinery, and a resultant regression to vast arrays of

possible explanations for the inexplicable. Confounded

repeatedly the diagnostic-machinery has undertaken the

task of negatively defining a ‘normal’ subject. The

problem being that no one actually conforms to the

optimal model; this is not an issue for pharmaceutical

companies, but it does pose a distinct issue for those

ministered to by the alchemical-psychiatric agencies

defining the new nation. I mention this as an extreme

example, the result of; not only a dysfunctional

relationship between capital and mental coherence, but

also a demonstration that at the interface of the two, an

increasingly liminal subject being generated, this may be

offset to some degree by advances in the field of

cognitive behavioural and neuro-linguistic fields; but

the fact remains that the underlying reality for western

medicine as a whole is that of a disconnect between the

physical and psychical. Does this herald an age of hyper-

advanced ‘mind-leeches’? Or more promisingly a point of

shared mental crisis with all the attendant radical

transformative potential such a breakdown would entail.

To elucidate: if the margins for normality become so

reduced that a whole society considers itself

disconnected from itself, is it possible to emancipate

that society from its own self conception?

Inaccessible exteriority

The problematizing of drug use as it stands is the result

of moral patriarchal structure imposed on an effect of

moral patriarchal structure. Junkie is simply a stage in

the development of an oppositional un-subject. It is not

a termination, but an evolution through the overcoding

necessity of desire for accumulation and atrophy, to a

willing abrogation of excess accumulation. Having

breached the circuit between neuro-chemical pleasure and

any illusory manifestations of the state-market-machine.

Pleasure in any excessive dimension, it is not the

terrain of the market. The market can only reduce

components in the process of desiring, to commodities.

The state can only prevent the excessive commodification;

that is facilitate joy beyond the commodity, but once the

market occupies the state machine, there is no terrain

beyond the commodity. Everything is given its

authenticity through market tropes. The state simply

seeks to facilitate the smoothest transition from object

of desire to commodity, as the market is authenticator it

is also perceived to be moral arbiter and barometer. We

approach the abyss. The market now moves to occupy all

outlying machines, illicit economies, creative economies,

emotional economies. The dark economy so becomes the

increasingly toxic residue that evades the tentacular

market machine. A valid projection of this process is the

cultural demarcation of terrains, recently seen in the

art market. The producers and innovators are not the

drivers of the narrative, instead it is the parasitic

market-interface that is the true validator of discourse.

Producers begin to seek validation in much the same way

as the state. The market now occupies its own critique,

with ubiquity comes invisibility. It is only in the

marginal discourse of the dark market and black market

that a stable coherent critique remains, as the desired

modality of capitalism is criminality, this is the flaw

in the machine: as it occupies more and more areas of

volatility and turns them to ‘legitimate’ markets, it is

constantly seeking the border of its own legality,

casting an envious eye over the remnant taboos as a

father eyeing his daughter, this hybrid-market-state-

market requires the obscene opposition of the socious to

function. It mutilates itself in the absence of fresh

markets. The repressive matrix depicted by Deleuze and

Guattari is in truth the violent oscillation, between the

pragmatic exigencies of wealth extraction and

accumulation and the abject volatility inherent to pure

acquisition.

So the radical explicatory vectors, sketched by the

immanent junkie through the social matrix are ruptures in

the Other of the Other. Neither the diagnostic mechanism

nor the machinery of treatment has any relation to the

subject of the ‘treatment’. The return to normality is in

itself the imposition of a hugely simplistic identity on

an energetic entity. The ‘treatment’ of society’s

excluded junkie machine explicates the impossible and

irrational core of the occupied patriarchal social/state

machinery. The outcome is a set of prohibitions against

the most vital (if violent) forces within the individual.

An accelerating vector cannot be decelerated until it has

achieved a terminal velocity. Until such time it may be

re-directed, fractured or refracted (whereby the vector

in question is broken into constituent categories. Each,

with their own set of diagnostic certainties,

associations and dichotomous-antagonisms). The refusal to

acknowledge any positive force within the trajectory of

the junkie or madman, taken in tandem with the denial of

the parallel traits endemic to the social matrix, drive

the subject toward state of abject dislocation. The

puritanical dogma is rapidly extending towards a reading

of such conditions, frighteningly close to original sin.

It seems the desired outcome is for the cured subject to

see the destructive force of their own libidinous excess,

then to realise that there is an indefinable difference

between their own behaviour and socially stable modes of

consumption. And while it may seem confusing that

identical behaviour is, in its ‘proper context’ socially

acceptable, for the perpetually marginal ossified junkie-

zombie, the price paid for their transgression will be to

spend eternity ‘day-walking’; ceaselessly servicing the

paternal machinery of retention and accumulation. In an

age of technological unemployment the shambling fixed

subject, must disavow any knowledge of the true nature of

the parasitic state-market machine.

Until the moment of interior crisis/desire erupts onto

the ontic plane, and begins to impact, infect or

dismantle the consistent procession of social

interactions. The ideation of shared social norm is

negatively defined, illusory and contingent (it is

substantially the non-product of the mass of trans social

interactions), the generation of this subject occurs at

the intersections of subjectivities as they apprehend

themselves and as such; the normative subject is

impossible and in itself constituted by the aspirant

socious’s desires within bounds perceived to transcend

the very plane of their production. The subject-junkie

may indeed have chosen to replicate the perception of

these optimised norms within a separate marginal matrix,

but the unstable nature of such networks codifies a set

of precautionary measures and betrayals that ultimately

invalidate the structure and lead back to the repetition

of actual-normative social functioning along hyper-

capitalised lines; the domain of the dominated strategy.

Self-exclusion, repetitive abrogation and abortion are

part of the coercive strategies employed by the socious

on the subject. Repentance and total immersion are the

only strategies available.

In the end it is to Deleuze inside Foucault that we turn

for a question to the answer, strategies of engagement

and or rebellion. Do we find: “An anonymous life that

shows up only when it clashes with power, argues with it,

and what Foucault called ‘the lives of infamous men’

(Foucault 1979, 76), whom he asked us to admire by virtue

of ‘their misfortune, rage or uncertain madness?’’

(Foucault 1979, 78).

References

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