Hackers

I finally attempted to watch Fatal Attraction, after talking about it for weeks, as if it were the final piece I needed to understand Aase Berg's Hackers (tr. Johannes Göransson). As if I needed to watch this to engage Berg's lineage, her feminism, her need to be inside that which she needs to destroy. Well, I couldn't access the movie online.

Whatever, let there be lost (deformed) in translation--I already carry my bastardizing horoscope of English letters with me wherever I go--of Berg's history: Fatal Attraction, Titanic, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Chelsea Manning, Valerie Solanos, Natascha Kampusch, Teeth, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Hackers, The X-Files (and various others listed at the end of the book). 

I do not want to center the hermeneutics of Hackers--I want something like performance. If I can say that. If performance is when a form comes into its own. If the form of this book is the indistinction between parasite and host. If the form of this book is a hermaphroditic block-chain--which is to say that poetic-political inquiry does not presuppose the ordinary experience of abuse, of capture, of violence, things which we have known pre-philosophy, but that poesis is able to articulate that which is inarticulable.This book is the reality of surviving. 

That hermeneutics point too close to a sovereign subject, whereas the interdependence between parasite and host comes into form in Bergs language--her reiterations and reverberations, across each of the eight sections of Hackers, renew their contradictions, renewing their mytho-historical possibilities of survival. In the phenomenological terms of Judith Butler, flesh is the interconnective tissue between bodies. 

We are set up with a question: "Tabula rasa-- / the set table / razed under / its own weight" (7). Is a clean slate possible--can we begin without any preconceived ideas? Or, better, as we animate our aspiration for a new beginning, is Berg's imperative that we are not breaking from the past, but wrestling with it?

Feminist intervention of table talk, a modality of oral history passed in plain sight--in the home, over the telephone, in the workplace--center histories of reproductive labor, as they sustain the drive for accumulation, which Tithi Bhattacharya studies as social reproductive theory. In Hacker's, the little black box, the device installed in an airplane, is a rosetta stone for strategic intervention to social oppression, as it relates directly to economic exploitation. We search for this survival guide, in the wreckage of an airplane, the symbol of a global capital economy. A plane--the lives, the material--is a small price to pay for a global capital economy to squash an episteme. 

Berg's language is an embodied practice, "The glossy and smooth / parasite in my glow-in-the-dark self-image" (77). It is a specter riding the information speedways: highways, "cosmic vastness" reduced to a circuitry of "Motor / Men's bellowing", an arena of trade on the back of aesthetics of survival: "glowing space-fly casts flitting silhouettes" (21). There are histories of species and earth that have existed long before the arrival of Berg, histories of embodied episteme (which has been killed off, re: Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch) "frothing insane gallop" (59). 

Berg's calibration of embodiment, which flows from my "muzzle-snout" with each uttered neologism staggered though, brings to life this interconnective tissue and its "Red Lightning District" of survival (161, 143). History, and historical possibility, resolve into "rushing / G-force of rushing air"--as she says, "what is called freedom is a frozen freedom." What I call my body is a sensation of my body not being exclusively my own.