Befriending the Spiral ꩜

"befriending the spiral" is a scrolling circus performance on three good wheels, another wicker basket your partner found at the flea market, the asbestos in your walls, and the cockroach leaving you love letters beneath your pillow that disappear before you wake each morning. it asks you to consider me as an inefficient LLM, considers citation as storytelling, not (to pull from the SFPC’s course Teaching As Hypertext) because we believe in the ownership of ideas, but because we enjoin the practice of citation with feminist lineages combining fiction and theory, or communicative performance for a shape-based concept practice of applied theory. Theorist Alex Quicho asks, “what if you have to take the words and turn them into shapes. And then once you have the shape, you can write about it properly."

we are traversing three abstract points: an observation of our current state, i.e. The Trap, and models, e.g. the Girl and the Cute as potential behavioral nexuses for jumping into and navigating The Trap. Pinging back and forth between maximal variations of the manifest and latent, the reified and abstract, and the explicit and subliminal, befriending the spiral engages with meta-textual exemplifications of transdisciplinarity for a dip into the denaturalizing wash and dry. In this vein, costuming (pretend) plays as much a role as form as the text does as function, aiming towards a vacillation and blending of both as one another. The question: what am I wearing? is as important as what am I saying?

In the void of creation past self-reflexivity, machines rise from aggregated human social organization (Luciana Parisi), while The Outside pours in from the future to call itself into being. 
The Trap can be seen as inescapable by design (Benedict Singleton), can be seen as us as subjects laminated (Alex Quicho) like flies within the plane glass sheets of platform capitalism (Nick Srnicek), can be seen as computation on a planetary scale, the modular all-consuming totalities of technology stacks (Benjamin Bratton), can be seen as the need for horizonless perspectives brought about by flattening internet globalization, can be seen as a synthesis of big-world understandings of the planetary concomitant with an “ idealized myth of containable smallness,” (Patricia Reed) can be seen to need a response that delegates us towards a situated politics of location, a need for translocality, a need for embedded/embodied locales e.g. in the placing of nails on one’s hands. 

In Non-Player Dynamics: Agency Fetish in Game-World, Roberto Alonso Trillo & Marek Poliks asks:

Given the disintegration of a modern subjectivity constructed around agential capacity, what is the opportunity of the NPC phenomenon, not as an ironic detournement of a very real agential limit, but instead as a rejection of the normative priority afforded to agency in questions of thought, experience, and imagination?

Trillo and Poliks inaugurate a new kind of cringe core capitalism: exocapitalism, a capitalism so developed in its financial maneuvers that it no longer needs humans to continue its unhinged layers of abstraction, or "lift," a process by which late-liberal capitalism approaches its own singularity, mutating into states unknown. Alex Quicho in Everyone is A Girl Online asks, what if we mutated first?

"The phenomenon of 'social inequality' provides the proxy for capital intelligenesis stress, spontaneously translating an alien emergence into the familiar terms of primate status competition. Capital autonomization is the deep process, but we'll tend to miss that, because it isn't recognizable monkey business." - Nick Land (2014). Piketty in Xenosystems Blog

In other words, exocapitalism approaches a point where humanity is no longer needed and is exposed to its own machinations as removed from us. 

"What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space." - Nick Land (1993, Fanged Noumena)

All models are wrong, but some are useful - George Box
Navigating the retroactively autopoietic Trap requires contemporary models, all categorically wrong as British statistician George Box’s famous aphorism reminds us, but some useful. As we consider illusory garden paths to lead us through late stage capitalism, it may be pertinent to consider the pitfalls and potentialities of these models upfront.

In “Are We Already Living In Virtual Reality?” New Yorker journalist Joshua Rothman asks us to conjure up the image of a cockpit and an airplane as a metaphor for the blindspots of modeling.

Quote: “although the cockpit controls the airplane, it is not itself an airplane. It’s only a simulation—a model—of a larger, more complex, and very different machine . . . we cannot see the cockpit. Even as we consult its models of the outer and inner worlds, we don’t experience ourselves as doing so; we experience ourselves as simply existing. 

In the same article, Rothman talks to philosopher Thomas Metzinger, author of Being No One who notes that, “You cannot recognize your self-model as a model . . it is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it . . . Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. . . . You are such a system right now. . . . As you read these sentences, you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model activated by your brain.”
Metzinger explains,“if a thought crosses the boundary from unconsciousness to consciousness, we feel, ‘I caused this thought.’ ” The sensation of causing our own thoughts is also just another feature of the self-model—a phantom sensation conjured when a readout, labelled “thinking,” switches from “off” to “on.” 

Nevertheless, these phantom sensations are necessary for any type of interaction with the world, or more accurately, a world or worlds. As artist Patricia Reed notes, “All worlds are models, but not all world-models become 'worlds', insofar as worlds and worlding . . . are bound to the criteria of inhabitability, which is to say that worlds are constituted through processes of localization.”

The girl wants to be wanted for her, but must, to be this her, clean her cyberflesh of any residues of anxious attachment. Mother wound. Father wound. Self-inflicted wound. - Tjaša Škorjanc
In the shuddering tunnel of modernist futurism, the Girl emerges as model/AI for the cute accelerationist on-the-go, hyper-local, hyper-fluid - the body itself becomes commodity verbose with the language of capital with a complicated relationship to agency. As theorist Alex Quicho writes, “It’s a rookie move to mistake tactical passivity for a surrender of agency. Even if the endgame were ultimately annihilating or thrillingly unpredictable, these states are chosen, not imposed.” 

Quote: To survive and thrive, the girl encodes language, invents behavior, manipulates social codes, and, most importantly, shares and intuits this information. As such, we can consider the girl to be a subject condition that is closer to that of collective or even superintelligence . . .

The Total Girl’s Guide to Survival would include: how to perfect your exterior representation and diffuse it until it’s everywhere, and until you can live well inside the space shielded by your own image; how to take pleasure in the image, in the content, while unhooking its power over life.

Everyone is a Girl Online by Alex Quicho

Evidencing stories of agency in material forms for a performing body is one aspect of this shifting text that dovetails with an engagement with the dual conditions of fragility and strength incorporated within the Girl. Through the monstrous, cute, and maximalist aesthetics of particular garments, a girl with lowercase G in the cockpit of the Girl with uppercase G seeks to decouple aesthetics from its own trappings. 

All that is serious melts into the cute.
- Cute Accelerationism by Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronik

Patrick Leftwich, ventriloquizing multiples voices, writes (here in the voice of Tiqqun):  “In capitalism, we’re all magical girls, governed by being called upon to relate to ourselves as value, that is, according to the central mediation of a series of controlled abstractions.” 

Sadie Plant: A magical girl is virtual reality. If Kyubey embodies inhuman capitalism, he also delivers miraculous technologies to escape patriarchy.

Amy and Maya: Rather than striving for agency, the most powerful and courageous move, and the most demanding one, can be to not resist but to just give in, even or especially if you don’t know where it’s going, even if Kyubey says it’s silly and insignificant. It’s letting go, an active passivity to one’s own compulsions, being strong enough to allow for initiating transformations that might initially seem either unreal or impossible. It’s a positive feedback loop and involves temporal anomalies. When you fall in love, everything snowballs in ways you couldn’t have imagined, and eventually you realise that everything before that moment had been leading up to that event.