Pink Automaton of the Panapocalypse

Stuart Moulthrop

At the beginning there will have been speed.
Derrida

And just where do we think we're going so fast? Back to the crux of the future, or rather back to initial conditions, to the point where the tracks diverged: Germany, 1945. Here is the man called Enzian, Nguarorerue of the Schwarzkommando, driving his Wehrmacht motorcycle through the perimeter of Jamf Ölfabriken Werke AG. It is a border crossing of high significance, transit to another order of being, a new world order. Can we call this apocalypse? An unveiling of some sort, anyway...

...there floods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refinery... is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to be switched on. . . modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing




that was never hostile, but part of a plan both sides sides? had always agreed on. . .

In Enzian's blasted factory we behold an objective correlative for the postindustrial regime what else would you expect from an "ex-refinery?" fortunes (in every sense) of war. It is a case of recursion, the processing plant itself taken down and processed by another, more violent System: factory refactored, refinery redefined. We can call this domain of changes by the name Thomas Pynchon gives it: Paranoia, land of the numimous and the liminal, where every appearance hints at "other orders behind the visible." These aren't ruins around us, they are tropes and fetishes of the new postindustrial design, laid out according to the Articles of Immachination: "Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror." Symmetry and reciprocation do not obtain here, not even in the reassuring binary of a We-They entente. Who are "we?" not simply paranoids in this case, but dwellers in paranoia, a more sophisticated state of being. Complexity and Terror rule the moment. That much should be clear to Enzian, a black man who still wears the uniform of a racist Aryan state. He is given to us as the dark, secret fantasy child of the west's deathkingdom. To ride with him is to approach a limit, to reach a point at which ideas of the opposite collapse. "Sides" converge to other geometries, conditions of latency, connections awaiting consummation. Meanwhile Enzian and his people pass along the tenuous interface between delusive polarities, Allied and Axis, East and West, Africa and Europe. To Enzian it's all a problem in hermeneutics...

...say we are supposed to be the Kabbalists out here, say that's our real Destiny, to be the scholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to be picked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it's all squeezed limp of its last drop... well we assumed natürlich! that this holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising, dead, the blazing, the great one... our Torah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it enchanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness. . .

Enchanted, seduced... abandoned? Who are the Preterite here and who the Elect? Where are we going so fast, rattling along on Enzian's motorbike? What is this darkness ahead, and all around us? it is the shadow of the Text, the real Text. And that would be? well, the Rocket; the ruined refinery; the book called Gravity's Rainbow or (is true name?)Mindless Pleasures; it is the prophecy of Enzian; the life of Tyrone Slothrop; the unwritten autobiography of Leni Pökler; it is the grand critique of western technoculture, its narrative constructions and its mode of information. Assuming that any of these are distinctions you observe, for the Text is all these things and more, not excluding Apocalypse, Revelation, the End of the World As We Know It. We venture into the Text as Kabbalists, scholar-magicians, everloving fans of the logos. But we bring along a sense of limits, of the imminent or immanent end, not of World but of Word, or of logocentric dominion. Limits incite transgression, borders are for slipping over. For our purposes the Text is a limen across which we may move from mere secular history into novus ordo saeculorum, a vastly different coordinate system, perhaps a Paranoid System...

But if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it... if what the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes... [then] the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exactly in space and time, each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight's wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy Text. . .

Paranoid Systems of History: plot, subplot, metaplot, integrating (in)to the network of all plots, the grand hypertextual edifice of paranoia, where everything is connected. And it is! Not so far away, somewhere over the Rainbow on the American end of an intercontinental arc, our colleague Jack Gladney tells his class in Advanced Nazism: "All plots tend to move deathward. ...We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot." Dire narratology indeed, but as the speaker goes on to ask himself, is it true? "Why did I say it? What does it mean?" All good questions. Must we assume that in relentlessly encoding the holy Text we are slouching toward our own, and our species' death? True, the text-Werke is born of destructive processes. Technology is violence, science a scision. Does this heritage prefigure an ultimate systems crash, a state of incurable information, a collision with chaos or "Infocalypse?" Or do other possibilities offer themselves? What if we cannot have our Apocalypse now? Suppose we find a new anthem to sing, one that omits the bombs bursting in air? To learn the answers to these questions we must know more about the Text around us. What exactly is it? Or as Enzian frames the question...

If it is in working order, what is it meant to do?

Things To Do With The Text: Only connect... See which explosions fail to come... Break down and scatter... Wave and radiate... Find a way back from the future... Punctuate the Late Age of Print... Provide the moving difference its Engine... Design anything that way and have it work... Conduct your mystory... Take your word, thief... Hack the brainstem... Say you want a revolution... Match minds... Change your head... Dial up the god within... Keep believing it, shit-for-brains... Stop worrying, feel fine, love apocalypse... Now everybody...

Well, this is stimulant talk here, yes Enzian's been stuffing down Nazi surplus Pervitins these days like popcorn at the movies....

At the beginning there will have been speed... a-and yes, we have always been at the movies...