The old wizard Zare of the East poured over his tomes as he always did before resting for the night.
Yellowed pages of grimoires long since forgotten by the common folk - those who worked with their hands - crinkled softly as softer hands ran over them.
Gentle muttering seemed to meet up and depart with the ambivalent flicker of candle light caught in the breeze of the tower's high window.
It'd been years. Decades. Nearly a century. Who knew anymore.
The old wizard had prolonged his life precisely by refusing to live it. Holed up in his tower, surrounded by his books, so many bricks constituting a wall. A wall that blocked out the outside. Knowledge always staves off the outside, keeps things tightly in their places.
The wizard knew all the secrets - the secrets of the pages, that is. The secrets of saying 'no' to the outside, to the world.
'The potato grows best in such and such a dirt, with such and such water, etc.' said the farmer.
But Zare, despite his never having been a farmer, knew much better - 'that is not what the book says.'
'This kills the man' said the physician.
'But that is not what my books say' said the wizard.
'Time is an arrow that can't be restrung' said the material man.
'But the book, it says otherwise, and I have scoured through their lines from left to right - not unlike an arrow in that sense - my whole life, so surely I and my books know better. Surely because of this, I understand the outside.'
And so he went on arguing, waiting to find the right word inside his tower to finally paint the right picture of the outside.
Meanwhile, the potatoes grew and the farmers fed the masses. The physicians healed the wounds. The hunters learned from their bows.
The wizard, he grew old. By now 300 or so years had passed and the wizard, so drunk on his own presence, believed, if given the appropriate opportunity, could argue death out of taking his life.
Death reminded him kindly that nature does not argue.
1:
I like to explore coincidences. I believe the connections between seemingly accidental occurrences say something important and can be understood 'scientifically.' Here scientific can be understood a few ways.
It can be rationalist. As Guattari points out in some lecture somewhere, Freud believed all things, including coincidences - which Mark Fisher points out in his book The Weird and the Eerie are part of what Freud called the 'uncanny' - could be traced back to purely rational causes and effects within a mechanistic world. As Guattari puts it, for Freud even the irrational is just the rational waiting to be uncovered.
It can be transcendental. In his book on Synchronicity, Jung attempts to 'scientifically' research uncanny coincidences, claiming - and this is roughly speaking as here is not the place to get into Jung - that coincidences are resonances between instantiations of deep historical archetypes. For Jung, the rational is just the irrational waiting to be explored.
It can be hyperstitional. A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real, or a coincidence intensifier. The rational and the irrational bleed together; the distinction collapses (or, when one arrives at a certain point of time, one looks back and sees the distinction between the two was never that hard, never 'really' there...).
It can also be semiotic, which I believe synthesizes the Freudian rationalist and Jungian transcendent approach with the Landian CCRU approach. Language as a system of arbitrary symbols in relation to other arbitrary symbols that still makes things happen - a kind of functional fiction - does not need to map onto any concrete objects or reality in order to fall into meaningful patterns. There are finite amounts of symbols within a finite system of organization that is further finitely reduced, both intentionally and accidentally, by human utility and preference and inhuman incentives, etc. Within limited options, trends catch on, certain words, phrases, spread like a plague. Coincidences intensify, an impersonal cultural unconscious takes shape as a subject, or more accurately an assemblage of enunciation, and this assemblage reproduces the semiotic material, etc. Words, floating in thin air, connecting to each other, take on a reality of their own, then a body in real time makes it real. Fictions become real.
2:
One such set of semiotic coincidences occurs via the assemblage known as The Spice Girls, the British pop band of the late 90s.
Consider the lyrics of their hit Stop off the 1997 album Spiceworld.
When I first listened to the song with my girlfriend I made the joke that the Spice Girls were merely covering the Pink Floyd song Stop off 1982 album The Wall.
This is obviously not true as the only similarities between the 3 minute and 33 second song - yes, 3:33 as seen int he above video, I am not making this up - and the 30 second Floyd track which is 3rd from last on the album is its title, Stop.
However, while listening to the song, I noticed that not only does the song share a name with a Pink Floyd song, but it mentions two other Pink Floyd songs not only in the lyrics but in the same sentence -'Hey you, always on the run.' Hey You, slow opiate ballad off The Wall, and On The Run, intense modular synth loop-collage off The Dark Side of the Moon.
These coincidences could be easily overlooked if not for another layer: the Spice Girls movie, Spice World (1997), contains several cameos from American celebrities such as Meatloaf and Elvis Costello, but also British musicians and celebrities such as Elton John, Roger Moore, and Bob Geldof. It is the last name here that interests us - Bob Geldof played Pink in the film adaption of Pink Floyd's the Wall.
Bob as an unhinged Pink (or MFW I start connecting all the dots between Spice Girls and Pink Floyd)
Again, this could be overlooked, but within the film the Spice Girls are excited to run into Bob, and it is implied Bob and the girls have some sort of friendship.
To sum so far - the Spice Girls include references to two songs off The Wall and one song off The Dark Side of the Moon in a song on the album that shares a name and release date with the movie where the girls run into Bob Geldof, i.e., Pink.
Similarly, UK News Outlet The Daily Mail wrote a short piece on Spice Girl Mel wearing a Pink Floyd T-Shirt. The shirt, as the images in the article show, is adorned with a popular graphic design from The Wall.
The subtitle of the blog here - The Geri Years Revisited - warrants attention as well. This is a nod to the split(s) that occurred to Pink Floyd throughout the years. The early years saw the band centered around Syd Barett who wrote the majority of the tunes. Then David Gilmoure replaced Barett making Waters as the main writer. Later, Waters would take over the band and eventually have a falling out leading to two Pink Floyds touring at the same time, one lead by Gilmoure one by Waters (syzygic Floyds) . 'The Waters Years' then refers to specific albums towards the end of Pink Floyd's career as a complete band, albums with a specific sound and message - Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and the Final Cut. As one Guardian article on Pink Floyd notes, the Spice Girls and Pink Floyd share some similarities, specifically around this Geri/Waters years:
"OK, so the subject of The Spice Girls On Trial (Five) is a different kind of deal, but maybe there is some common ground: internal bickering (Geri's defection mirrors Waters'), reconciliation and a comeback (even if after only five minutes). Something else, too: it's very hard to dislike the Spice Girls."
Coincidences? Perhaps.
Let's go further still.
The production company that produced and helped write the single Stop also produced Geri's - the Roger Water's of the spice girls - debut solo album, Schizophonic. We should pause over this name. Not only is the album notably associated with schizophrenia, the 'diagnosis' of accelerationism, what Syd Barrett induced in himself through psychedelics, but it's also a concept - the separation of sound from its source thus creating an uncanny effect - Mark Fisher discusses twice in The Weird and the Eerie, the book we mentioned earlier in relation to Freud's uncanny. That's right folks, we've just come full circle. Though Geri most likely used the term to reference her split (schiz = split or cut) from the Spice Girls and her attempt to forge a new sound (phonics), the double meaning and the coincidence can't be ignored.
A final interesting coincidence. According to multiple sources (1 and 2), in the 90s The Spice Girls were hard-line Thatcherites. Thatcher is a fun link here because it gives us three directions to go in.: Nick Land's post-CCRU accelerationist conceptualizations are often accused of being Thatcherite or Reaganite in nature, Fisher, what I consider Land's friendly antithesis, was adamantly critical of Thatcher, while Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, basically an extension of The Wall, is centered on the Falkland War and polemically refers to Thatcher as 'Maggie' throughout the album. Fisher, Land, Spice Girls, Pink Floyd - the whole gang's here.
3:
One could argue that these similarities are merely the result of overlapping populations and identities - British musicians or theorists interested in music (CCRU-Kode9/Jungle connection, AUDINT, etc.) coexisting at a certain time, in a certain political climate, etc. This is both very much to the point and also far too naive. Yes, there's a 'geist,' yes bodies are dispersed across time that act as nodes for channeling outside forces, but why these specific resonances?
I will end without answering this question but instead doing a bit of what Freud cautioned against, and which he accused Jung of - wild analysis.
This, after all, the basic plot of the Spice Girls film, Spiceworld. The film, in a very meta and self-aware fashion very fit for the late 90s, centers on the girls who must expose their record exec's evil exploitative plot in order to reclaim their art and reunify as a band. That is, the movie plays on the fact that The Spice Girls are a pop sensation likely engineered by a record company to manipulate the masses. In this way it hides in plain sight.
This is what leads me to claim that The Spice Girls were a simulation of what British marketing execs believed the British general population believed the British marketing execs believed about the British gen pop. Or, in other less convoluted words, the subjective reflexive game theory of the marketing exec imaging what the consumer thinks of him (the exec) thinking of the consumer.
Ultimately this is not to say we shouldn't enjoy the Spice Girls. There are a number of songs I unironically listen to - 2 Become 1, for example. This is rather to say that when one goes looking, coincidences interlock and create something interesting and previously unheard of. So, listen to the Spice Girls and see where it gets you.
This is an excerpt of a chapter of my upcoming E-Book CCRU Sightings: Encounters with the Outside (or Capitalism, a Love Story). The book connects, reduces, and clarifies many of my blog posts here into a coherent, dark, comical hyperstitional exploration of how flows emerging from the CCRU have infected the mainstream culture without us knowing it. This particular excerpt can be read with two other blog posts in mind - The Ballad of Kevin Spacey (Space(y)-Time Hyperstition) where I show how Netflix Original House of Cards and Kevin Spacey make eerie fictions become real, and Lemurian TV War (there's a war on for your time) which is my continuation of the CCRU's appendix TV Demonism, a text that highlights the presence of deep, dark, occultist state control and its effects on and in the media.
Nick Land’s Crypto
Netflix Brand
The story goes like this: a little-known Californian company
named Netflix is founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. Its
service is simple – rent DVDs to people around America. In 5 years it has 600
thousand members. 3 years later, over 4 million. 2 years later in 2007 it
introduces streaming alongside DVD
renting. Within the decade it spreads across the world and introduces a
streaming only plan. 2 Years later in 2012 it makes another huge move from
renting and streaming others content
to coproducingits own content with another company which culminates in the first
‘Netflix Original,’ Lilyhammer. 1
year later Netflix is making its own
content completely in house, the first pure Netflix Original House of Cards.
If we consider the major events in Netflix’s history – the
founding of the company for renting DVDs, the global spread of the company and
its shift to streaming, its first coproduced original content, and its first
wholly original content - we see that the major changes occur in a 13 year
period between 1997 and 2010, a 2 year period between 2010 and 2012, and
finally a 1 year period between 2012 and 2013. Things pick up speed from 13 –
an unlucky and occult number - to 2 – a twinning number -to 1, all culminating in a political drama
that blends reality and fiction at an alarming rate.
This makes perfect sense as it is but makes even more perfect sense when we consider
the following: Hasting studied computer science, Randolph studied geology, both
were rich entrepreneurs. Could one imagine a more accelerationist resonance
than computer technology interfacing with an understanding of global territory
all within a Californian backdrop? Could one name a better combination for
cultural world domination than West Coast technoscientific global investors? I
think not.
But Hasting and Randolph don’t get all the credit. They’re
merely meat-bags channeling an impersonal vector of capitalism that froths
beneath the surface of Netflix. That is, due to advancements in technology
resulting in changes in media distribution and consumption and how these
advancements and changes benefit people’s economic and time preferences, people
go from primarily renting DVDS to streaming content online in their homes (a
sign of what Guattari would call Integrated World Capitalism’s tendency to
miniaturize its machines as to be internalized by the consumer). Netflix simply
rides the wave, appropriates the forces, and in drafting off these forces, cuts
away its dead weight and tightens its feedback systems; it decentralizes,
dematerializes, deterritorializes.
No more physical DVDs; no more time and money invested in
coordinating bodies to ship and handle DVDs. In fact, Netflix even does away
with the need for an other altogether–
no more simply sharing others’ content, or cooperating with others to produce
content, etc. Like the self-sufficient and auto productive monstrosity of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Netflix
produces and distributes itself in digital bits, incorporeal fragments,
throughout the air. It makes itself the ether, it builds itself into the fabric
of our shared world and the subjectivities produced therein.
If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s an instance of
letting ‘the process,’ with all its spatial-territorial variables, determine
what sticks and what goes, a method that does away with as much mediation, and
human agency as possible. That is, this is all a lot of words to say Netflix is
accelerationist. A banality, but one we need for what is to come.
