"The parasite invents something new. It intercepts energy and pays for it with information. It intercepts roast beef and pays for it with stories. These would be two ways of writing the new contract. The parasite establishes an agreement that is unfair, at least in terms of previous accounting methods; it constructs a new balance sheet. It expresses a logic that was considered irrational until now, it expresses a new epistemology, another theory of equilibrium." [Michel Serres, Le Parasite]
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high on the list of treasured failures from post-world-war 20C counterculture is the intentional community. premised on utopian visions of off-grid living, self-modulating enterprise, whole foods and congregational sex, it promised much, but in practice delivered mixed, if not disappointing results. the need for consistent and organized hard labour amidst the whine and roses coupled with the shifting tides of an ideologically-derived motive base made for an often ineffectual admixture of committed actors and free-loading pimps. harnessed profit-lust and capitalist frenzy never seemed more absent and wanting when compared to the imperfect responsiveness of the cagey human, now in groove to the beat of a diffident, me-generation drummer. mercantile fascists, one recalls, did nothing but a standout job, erecting the utilitarian precisions that got the trains to run on time and the sterile, flavourless fruit of globalization to even the most isolated bodega. the bar had been set. unfortunately the meta-committees of peace and love frequently collapsed under the stress of besting it, let alone achieving comparable marks.
we're now fortunate enough to be on the other side looking back at these earnest circuses of old just as 21C humanitarian anarchists, militant pacifists, shamanic revolutionaries and mystic prank alchemists prepare for a new round of disengagement from status quo delineations...
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the fatal flaw in the social experiments of the 60s and 70s was the angle of ascent. we don't have time to reconstruct new empires or create novel infrastructures and protocols for either the urban or rural logistic. we only have time to subvert existing stages toward ends never intended by the complex which built them, that putrefying, zombified interest that seeks complete cultural and metaphysical suppression of human flowering.
part of the problem fifty years ago was naivete, the irresistible urge to invert the agenda, nevermind its sheer impossibility of scale. trying to establish new harmonious nuance with habitat while at the same time seeking to bend the natural order to suit mere survival slowly eroded a modern frame of reference accustomed to the politics of leisure, personal psychological space, and plentiful assets for the construction and furtherance of art and romantic love. amid the biodynamics, psychotropics, and clannish dramaturgies, the engines of parts and labour ground to a halt.
thusly, it's become hyper relevant to review the technology of the conceptual parasite, purge it of its negative connotations, recognize the genius of its posits and its indispensable, enduring contributions to the play.
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"Precisely what is a parasite? It is an operator that interrupts a system of exchange. The abusive guest partakes of the host's meal, consumes food, and gives only words, conversation, in return. The biological parasite enters an organism's body and absorbs substances meant for the host organism. Noise occurs between two positions in an informational circuit and disrupts messages exchanged between them (noise or static in informational theory in English is translated as parasite in French). Thus the parasite first presents itself in a negative guise; it is viewed as a malfunction, an error, or a noise within a given system. Its appearance elicits a strategy of exclusion. Epistemologically, the system appears as primary, and the parasite as an unhappy addition that it would be best to expel. Such an approach, however, misses the fact that the parasite, like the demon and the third man, is an integral part of the system. By experiencing a perturbation and subsequently integrating it, the system passes from a simple to a more complex stage. Thus, by virtue of its power to perturb, the parasite ultimately constitutes, like the clinamen and the demon, the condition of the possibility of the system. In this way the parasite attests from within the order the primacy of disorder; it produces by way of disorder a more complex order." [Josué V. Harari, David F. Bell, Journal a plusieurs voies]
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THE ARTIST AND THE MYSTIC:
ULTIMATE PARASITIC HEARTWHORES WHO DARE
the artist injects themselves betwixt input and output, penetrating the equation formulae responsible for the industry-centric, consumerist pap of contemporary lifelessness, sucking up systemic resources like siphoned-off corpuscles, ready to apply the grid's own energy units towards a perpetual sunrise of anarchy and indulgence for the purpose of self-other-object confrontations and expanded knowing. the enlightened parasite relieves society of its monopoly board pieces and shits out a freedom of expression that knows no borders, the very liberation most feared by game enforcers everywhere. this disturbance which art, love, and nature magic creates is the sine qua non currency of exchange. it lends the parasite their righteousness of affect, even while the system's recursive propagation loops are irretrievably broken in the encounter and left bleeding for all to enjoy. such is the genius of parasitic reconnoitering.
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"At the origin of human relations one finds the irreversible logic of exchange without return: always take, never give back. And behind this anthropology, the parasite. In its absence, a homogenous stasis of balanced exchanges existed, characterized by the perfect reversibility of all processes - paradise, without time or history. However, the parasite violates the system of exchange by taking without returning; it introduces an element of irreversibility and thus marks the commencement of duration, history, and social organization. The parasite exchanges paradise for a problematic of beginnings, namely, the beginnings of human relations." [Josué V. Harari, David F. Bell, Journal a plusieurs voies]
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at the intersection of intentional communities, bey's temporary and permanent autonomous zones, and the anarchical parasite feeding and thriving on systems of corruption, is the mobile autonomous zone. like the pop-up, its technologically fluent and tapped into matrix on its own terms. it can make use of the transience of disposable objects and infrastructures to make things happen in geopolitical spaces of either short or long durations. it can harness the productivity and goal-directedness of organizations and communities within ultimately unstable, modulating and differential habitation patterns. its net of connectivity is diffuse, permeable, tensile, adaptable, and extremely portable. it outputs product in transit, while nesting and resting, while eating and fucking. it transacts its exchanges on sidewalks, in backrooms, in boardrooms, on air and wifi waves. it grows its food in backyards, in abandoned fields, in pails and boxes, on rooftops, and along highway medians. it showcases its objects and events directly, obtusely and in an unstoppable flow. it buys what it needs and creates channels for progressive micro and macrobusinesses when it can't share in new networks of common-philosophy mainframes.
FORECAST
we'll build new homes in old houses and new houses from old roads. we'll augur in new formats for the stewardship of the land and the commons of the people. we'll dismantle power ideologies not through the tired corporations of war, but by unhinging the ideas upon which power narrowly rests. we'll expose the conventions of current thinking for the mirages they are and apply new, more open lenses to the faculties of this animate, living earth. there will be universities in freak coffeeshops and adopted art ghettos and the reclamation of all libraries, all laboratories, all chaingang wisdoms. we'll divorce science and militia by coming between them with our hot blooded and wise inamoratas. machine medicine will die with the dishonoured corporate model and be replaced by multivalent humanist enterprise. we'll perform singly, in duos, in small troupes and large swaths of unified people. we'll come to embrace our differentiations and learn to work with adversarial dynamics. we'll fall in love differently, make love differently, define our bonds in new sun-glinted metals and wildly mutated body fluids. we'll enjoy a shared ground built on the journey not the destination. we'll eat better, more slowly, and more often at the group table. we'll take work and play out of their boxes and graduate ourselves from such silly distinctions. we'll discover that weapons are but ideas; that without maintaining-cause-ideas, armaments and internecine violence can't continue to exist, and that ideas are a whole lot easier to deconstruct than bombs.
yeah, the e-volution won't be televised. but that's because it's ready to go viral. kick it.
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