HOLES

INTO
THE
FUTURE
Xenopoetics
AND
thinking
beyond the
HUMAN
2
XENO
Rebekah Sheldon
Before a vowel xen-, repr. Greek ξενο-, ξεν-, combining form of ξένος a
guest, stranger, foreigner, adj. foreign, strange; used in various scientific and
other terms including, e.g. peculiar accessories; cross-species disease;
symbiosis and parasitism; a snake genus; metamorphic mineral defacement
or partial fusion; foreign rule; disease vectors allowed to feed on pathogens in
sterile laboratory environments; a type of diagnostic comparison; cross-
fertilization; germline engineering and the products thereof; taking its origin
from outside the body, as in a disease or a tissue graft; glossolalia; emotional
or sexual obsession with the foreign; a gastropod mollusk; a kind of fish with
spineless fins, scaleless skin, and a complex sucking-disk between the
ventral fins; mineral deposits found at high temperatures; an inactive virus; an
armadillo; extraterrestrial life forms or the study thereof

Etymologically, XENO is trans. As graft, cut, intrusion, or excession, XENO

names the movement between and the moving entity. It is the foreign and the
foreigner, the unexpected outside, the unlike offspring, the other within, the
eruption of another meaning. If the uncanny marks the hideous return as if
new of what was always already known, the groundwork whose repression
allows the enclosure of a domestic interior, XENO is of its own order. It is a
foreign agent, speaking its own tongue, keyed to its own purposes. XENO
may be incorporated, manipulated, solicited, seduced, and emplaced, but it
would be a mistake to imagine that it is known. Snake, fish, mollusk,
armadillo, heat changed rock, inactive virus, XENO slithers, swims, slides,
infects, inhabits, holds up and withholds. It moves across; it infects as it
moves; but it is not infected in turn. It generates transitions from which it itself
is immune. It is trans-obdurate.

Trans-obdurate, XENO neither fools nor colludes; XENO gifts. What then of
XENO as method?

To open to the outside, to work what is itself trans-obdurate, as method, is

always also to welcome chaos and darkness. Chaos and darkness, though
very often used as empty signifiers of defiant resistance, can be given quite
precise specifications in this context, and ones that have little to do with the
sort of masculinism that takes the autonomy of the willing individual as its
ideal. XENO as method implies a horizon of action that cannot be determined
at the outset. It is dark in the sense that it operates without the assurance of
full knowledge and it is chaotic because it presumes that the force of the
other is always wholly other.

3
ROADSIDE PICNIC
ARkady & Boris Strugatsky
We were off. The institute was on our right and the Plague Quarter on our left.
We were traveling from pylon to pylon right down the middle of the street. It
had been ages since the last time someone had walked or driven down this
street. The asphalt was all cracked, and grass had grown in the cracks. But
that was still our human grass. On the sidewalk on our left there was black
bramble growing, and you could tell the boundaries of the Zone: the black
growth ended at the curb as if it had been mown.

The breeze seemed to have died down and I didn't hear anything bad. The
only sound was the calm, sleepy hum of the motor. It was very sunny and it
was hot. There was a haze over the garage. Everything seemed all right, the
pylons sailed past, one after the other, Tender was quiet, Kirill was quiet. We
got to Pylon 27; the metal sign had a red circle with the number 27 in it. Kirill
looked at me, I nodded, and our boot stopped moving.

[Then] I heard it. Trrr, trrr, trrr … Kirill looked over at me, jaws clenched, teeth
bared. I motioned for him to be still.

Over the pile of old refuse, over broken glass and rags, crawled a
shimmering, a trembling, sort of like hot air at noon over a tin roof. It crossed
over the hillock and moved on and on toward us, right next to the pylon; it
hovered for a second over the road—or did I just imagine it?—and slithered
into the field, behind the bushes and the rotten fences, back there toward the
automobile graveyard.

“Listen, Red," whispered Kirill, "why don't we jump over? Twenty yards up
and then straight down, and we're right by the garage. Huh?"
"Shut up, you jerk," I said.
I pulled out a handful of nuts and bolts from my pocket. I held them in my
palm and showed them to Kirill.
"Do you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel? Studied it in school? Well,
we're going to do it in reverse. Watch!" I threw the first nut. Not far, just like I
wanted, about ten yards. The nut got there safely. "Did you see that?"
"I saw it."
"Now drive the boot at the lowest speed over to the nut and stop two feet
away from it. Got it?"
"Got it. Are you looking for graviconcentrates?"
"I'm looking for what I should be looking for. Wait, I'll throw another one.
Watch where it goes and don't take your eyes off it again."
The second nut also went fine and landed next to the first one.
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"Let's go."
He started the boot. His face was calm and clear. Obviously he understood.
They're all like that, the eggheads, the most important thing for them is to find
a name for things. Until he had come up with a name, he was too pathetic to
look at—a real idiot. But now that he had some label like graviconcentrate, he
thought that he understood everything and life was a breeze.
We passed the first nut, and the second, and a third.
I threw a fourth nut. There was something wrong with its trajectory. I couldn't
explain what was wrong, but I sensed that it wasn't right. I grabbed Kirill's
hand.
"Hold it," I said. "Don't move an inch."
I picked up another one and threw it higher and further. There it was, the
'mosquito mange! The nut flew up normally and seemed to be dropping
normally, but halfway down it was as if something pulled it to the side, and
pulled it so hard that when it landed it disappeared into the clay.
“Did you see that?" I whispered.
"Only in the movies." He was straining to see and I was afraid he'd fall out of
the boot. "Throw another one, huh?"
It was funny and sad. One! As though one would be enough! Oh, science. So
I threw eight more nuts and bolts until I knew the shape of this mange spot.
To be honest, I could have gotten by with seven, but I threw one just for him
smack into the middle, so that he could enjoy his graviconcentrate. It crashed
into the clay like it was a ten-pound weight instead of a bolt. It crashed and
left a hole in the clay. He grunted with pleasure.
"OK," I said, "we had our fun, now let's go. Watch closely. I'm throwing out a
pathfinder, don't take your eyes off it.”

5
INCOGNITUM HACTENUS
KRISTEN ALVANSON
On another page margin, it reads: ‘Xenopoetics has something to do with
composing out of distorted materials. One page is missing, one or two lines
are pseudonymously or anonymously quoted, one scene leaks from the
future to the past, an object evades chronological sequences, a number turns
into a cipher, everything looms as an accentuated clue around which all
subjects aimlessly orbit, leading into an eclipsed riddle whose duty is not to
enlighten but to make blind (aporos to the light). Fields of xenopoetics grow
sporadically (until their final takeover of the work) around the regions
overwhelming with a range of distortions from inauthenticity and corrupted
authorship to structural holes (configurative bugs) and subterranean
structures of hidden writing; xenopoetics does not necessarily insinuate
adventurous modes of expression or prose.’

This place continues to deteriorate. Hotels have their own approaches to

time.

6
INCOGNITUM HACTENUS
KRISTEN ALVANSON
En otro margen de página se lee: 'La xenopoética tiene que ver con la
composición a partir de materiales desfigurados. Una página que falta, una o
dos líneas que son citadas de manera pseudónima o anónima, una escena
que se filtra desde el futuro hacia el pasado, un objeto que elude las
sucesiones cronológicas, un número que se convierte en código, todo toma
la forma de una importante pista en torno a la cual todos los asuntos orbitan
sin rumbo, una pista que desemboca en un acertijo redoblado cuyo cometido
no es iluminar sino enceguecer (aporos de la luz). Campos de xenopoética
crecen de manera esporádica (hasta su dominio final del trabajo) en las
regiones abrumadas por un abanico de desfiguraciones que van desde la
inautenticidad y de la autoría adulterada hasta agujeros estructurales
(errores de configuración) y estructuras subterráneas de escritura oculta; la
xenopoética no implica de manera forzosa modalidades audaces de
expresión o de prosa.'

Este lugar sigue deteriorándose. Las habitaciones de hotel tienen sus

propios criterios acerca del tiempo.

7
CYCLONOPEDIA: COMPLICITY WITH
ANONYMOUS MATERIALS
REZA NEGARESTANI
Incognitum Hactenus — not known yet or nameless and without origin until
now — is a mode of time in which the innermost monstrosities of the earth or
ungraspable time scales can emerge according to the chronological time that
belongs to the surface biosphere of the earth and its populations. Incognitum
Hactenus is a double-dealing mode of time connecting abyssal time scales to
our chronological time, thus exposing to us the horror of times beyond.

In Incognitum Hactenus, you never know the pattern of emergence. Anything

can happen for some weird reason; yet also, without any reason, nothing at
all can happen. Things leak into each other according to a logic that does not
belong to us and cannot be correlated to our chronological time.

Economical openness is a risk-feigning maneuver simulating communication

with the Outside. Yet for such openness, the outside is nothing but an
environment which has already been afforded as that which does not
fundamentally endanger either the survival of the subject or its environing
order. So that 'being open' is but the ultimate tactic of affordance, employed
by the interfaces of the boundary with the outside. […Affordance presents
itself as a preprogrammed openness, particularly on the inevitably secured
plane of being open (as opposed to being opened). On the plane of ‘being
open to’, organic survival can always interfere, appropriate the flow of xeno-
signals, economize participations or if necessary cut the communication
before it is too late.

Openness comes from the Outside, not the other way around.

The radical outside is delineated not by distance or region but by its exterior
functionality of activity. The outside is impossible in terms of its possessability,
yet it can be grasped by its affect space or openness, through which survival
(as a restriction of affordability towards total openness) is both existentially
possible and functionally impossible; aka (Un)Life.

8
*

Love is incomplete burning. Love empties all possibilities of recovery. Falling

in love is a one way ticket to the end of health. Barthes suggests that love is
cyclic. This cycle strikes me not as love but flirtation, flirtation with survival.
But love’s sole enthusiasm lies in consuming every possibility of falling in love
again. The Love-Recovery cycle that Barthes maps in his works is of course
Proustian but deeply resembles the ever refining self-fertilizing cycle of
Aristotle (nothing must be wasted as it is needed in the next phase of the
cycle, the next love, the next recovery from the last love). Love is only
thinkable as one and only one tyrannical possibility: falling in love once and
for all.

To become open or to experience the chemistry of openness is not possible

through ‘opening yourself’ (a desire associated with boundary, capacity and
survival economy which covers both you and your environment); but it can be
affirmed by entrapping yourself within a strategic alignment with the outside,
becoming a lure for its exterior forces. Radical openness can be invoked by
becoming more of a target for the outside. In order to be opened by the
outside rather than being economically open to the system’s environment one
must seduce the exterior forces of the outside: You can erect yourself as a
solid and molar volume, tightening boundaries around yourself, securing your
horizon, sealing yourself off from any vulnerability … immersing yourself
deeper into your human hygiene and becoming vigilant against outsiders.
Through this excessive paranoia, rigorous closure and survivalist vigilance,
one becomes ideal prey for the radical outside and its forces.

9
CICLONOPEDIA: COMPLICIDAD CON
MATERIALES ANÓNIMOS
REZA NEGARESTANI
Incognitum Hactenus — aún no conocido, o sin nombre y sin origen hasta
ahora- es una modalidad del tiempo en la que emergen la mayoría de las
monstruosidades más íntimas y más recónditas de la tierra, las escalas
temporales más incomprensibles, y ello de acuerdo a un tiempo cronológico
que pertenece a la biosfera superficial y sus poblaciones. Incognitum
Hactenus es una modalidad temporal propia de la duplicidad y que conecta
abisales escalas temporales a nuestro tiempo cronólógico, exponiéndonos
así al horror de tiempos que están más allá del nuestro.

En Incognitum Hactenus nunca puedes estar seguro de la pauta de

emergencia: todo puede ocurrir por alguna razón extraña, y también puede
que nada ocurra, sin razón aparente. Las cosas se filtran unas en otras
según una lógica que no nos pertenece y que no puede correlacionarse con
nuestro tiempo cronológico.

El aperturismo económico es una maniobra de distracción que aparenta ser

una arriesgada comunicación con el Afuera. Pero, para tal aperturismo, el
afuera no es nada más que un ambiente que ya le ha resultado asequible,
como es aquél que ni pone en peligro la supervivencia del sujeto ni la del
orden de su entorno. Por lo tanto, "estar abierto" no es sino la táctica
suprema de la affordance, táctica empleada por las interfaces del límite con
el afuera. […] La affordance se presenta a sí misma como un aperturismo
preprogramado, particularmente en el plano inevitablemente asegurado del
ser abierto (en el sentido de que se opone al estar abierto). En el plano de
‘abrirse a’, la supervivencia orgánica siempre puede interferir, apropiarse del
flujo de xeno-señales, economizar sus participaciones o, si fuera necesario,
cortar la comunicación antes de que sea demasiado tarde.

El aperturismo proviene del Afuera, y no al contrario.

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*

El Exterior radical se delinea no por la distancia o región sino por su

funcionalidad exterior de actividad. El Exterior es imposible en términos de su
poseeibilidad, aunque puede comprenderse por su espacio de afectos o
aperturismo, mediante la cual la supervivencia (como una restricción o
asequibilidad hacia el total aperturismo) es existencialmente posible a la vez
que funcionalmente imposible, lo que también se conoce como la (No )Vida.

El amor es una combustión incompleta. El amor vacía todas las posibilidades

de recuperarse. Enamorarse es un billete de ida al fin de la salud. Barthes
sugiere que el amor es cíclico. Este ciclo me parece que no es amor sino
coqueteo, coqueteo unido a supervivencia. El ciclo Amor-Recuperación que
dibuja Barthes en sus obras es por supuesto proustiano, pero a su vez se
parece mucho al ciclo de autofertilización de Aristóteles (nada debe
malgastarse porque se necesitará en la próxima fase del ciclo, el próximo
amor, la próxima recuperación del amor anterior). El amor es sólo pensable
como una y solo una posibilidad tiránica: enamorarse de una vez por todas.

Volverse abierto o experimentar la química del aperturismo no es posible

mediante un ‘abrirse a sí mismo’ (un deseo asociado con la economía del
límite, de la capacidad y de la supervivencia que te cubre tanto a ti como a tu
entorno), pero sí puede afirmarse si te dejas atrapar en un alineamiento
estratégico con el afuera, convirtiéndote en un cebo para sus fuerzas
exteriores. El aperturismo radical puede ser invocado siendo un objetivo para
el afuera. Pero, para ser abierto por el afuera—en lugar de estar
económicamente abierto al entorno del sistema—uno debe seducir a las
fuerzas exteriores del afuera. Puedes autoerigirte como un volumen sólido y
molar, tensando los límites a tu alrededor, asegurando tu horizonte, sellando
cada una de tus vulnerabilidades ... sumergiéndote más a fondo en tu
higiene humana y teniendo cuidado de todo outsider. Mediante esta paranoia
excesiva, cierre riguroso y vigilancia supervivencialista, uno se convierte en
la presa ideal para el afuera radical y sus fuerzas.

11
THE WEIRD AND THE EERIE
MARK FISHER
[T]he eerie is fundamentally to do with the outside, and here we can
understand the outside in a straightforwardly empirical as well as a more
abstract transcendental sense. A sense of the eerie seldom clings to
enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in
landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these
ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of
thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? As we can see from these
examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What
kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all? These questions can be
posed in a psychoanalytic register—if we are not who we think we are, what
are we?

The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern
mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us
access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether. It is this release from
the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for
reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie
possesses.

The eerie concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie
disappears.

There is no inside except as a folding of the outside.

Remarks that Freud makes in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (‘as a result of
certain psychoanalytic discoveries, we are today in a position to embark on a
discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms
of thought’) indicated that he believed that the unconscious operated beyond
what Kant called the ‘transcendental’ structures of time, space and causality
which govern the perceptual-conscious system. […] The outside is not
‘empirically’ exterior; it is transcendentally exterior, i.e. it is not just a matter of
something being distant in space and time, but of something which is beyond
our ordinary experience and conception of space and time itself.

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LO raro y lo espeluznante
MARK FISHER
[L]o espeluznante también está intrínsecamente ligado con lo exterior; y aquí
podemos entender lo exterior de un modo netamente empírico, o bien en un
sentido abstracto más trascendental. La sensación de lo espeluznante no
suele emanar de espacios cerrados, domésticos y habitados; hallamos lo
espeluznante con más facilidad en paisajes parcialmente desprovistos de lo
humano. ¿Qué tuvo que suceder para causar aquellas ruinas, aquellas
desaparición? ¿Qué tipo de entidad tuvo que ver con ello? ¿Qué clase de
cosa fue la que emitió un grito tan espeluznante? Como podemos ver en
estos ej emplos, lo espeluznante está ligado, fundamentalmente, a la
naturaleza de lo que provocó la acción. ¿Qué clase de agente ha actuado?
¿Acaso existe? Estas cuestiones pueden plantearse a nivel psicoanalítico--si
no somos lo que creemos ser, ¿qué somos en realidad?

La perspectiva de lo espeluznante nos puede dar acceso a las fuerzas que

rigen la realidad mundana, pero que suelen estar escondidas, del mismo
modo que nos puede abrir las puertas de espacios que están más allá de la
realidad mundana. Esta salida de lo corriente, esta huida más allá de los
confines de aquello que normalmente consideramos realidad es lo que, en
cierto modo, explica el atractivo particular que posee lo espeluznante.

Lo espeluznante tiene que ver con lo desconocido; cuando descubrimos

algo, desaparece.

No existe lo interior salvo como asimilación de lo exterior.

Algunos de los apuntes que hace Freud en «Más allá del principio del
placer» («La tesis de Kant según la cual tiempo y espacio son formas
necesarias de nuestro pensar puede someterse a revisión a la luz de ciertos
conocimientos psicoanalíticos»), indicando que creía que el inconsciente
actuaba más allá de lo que Kant llamó las estructuras «trascendentales» de
tiempo, espacio y casualidad que rigen el sistema de conciencia perceptiva.
[…] Lo exterior no es «empíricamente» exterior, sino trascendentalmente
exterior, es decir, no es que esté lejos en el espacio y en el tiempo, sino que
está más allá de nuestra experiencia corriente y de nuestra concepción
espaciotemporal.

13
THE TEMPLETON EPISODE
CCRU

Templeton has long asserted the impossibility of empirical time-travel. Since

the ego is bound by its own nature to linear-sequentiality (he continues to
insist) neither it nor the organism is ever transported through time.
Nevertheless, he describes the Critique of Pure Reason as a time-travelling
manual, although of 'another kind.' He uses Kant's system as a guide for
engineering time-synthesis. The key is the secret of the Schematism, which -
although "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul" - concerns only
the unutterable Abomenon of the Outside (Nihil Ulterius). In exteriority, where
time works, that part of you which is most yourself has nothing in common
with what you are. When Templeton fell into himself that day he found,
instead of what he thought himself to be, the Thing (in itself (at zero-
intensity)).

14
On The Matrix
sadie plant
'Woman' has, at best, been understood to be a deficient version of a
humanity which is already male. In relation to homo sapiens, she is the
foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without and the enemy
within. Woman can do anything and everything except be herself. Indeed,
she has no being, nor even one role; no voice of her own, and no desire. She
marries into the family of man, but her outlaw status always remains.

Woman is left without the senses of self and identity which accrue to the
masculine. Denied the possibility of an agency which would allow her to
transform herself, woman is left without the senses of self and identity which
accrue to the masculine.

How can Irigaray's women discover themselves when any conception of who
they might be has already been decided in advance? How can she speak
without becoming the only speaking subject conceivable to man? How can
she be active when activity is defined as male? How can she design her own
sexuality when even this has been defined by those for whom the phallus is
the central core?

The problem seems intractable. Feminist theory has tried every route, and
found itself in every cul-de-sac. Struggles have been waged both with and
against Marx, Freud, Lacan, Derrida ... sometimes in an effort to claim or
reclaim some notion of identity, subjectivity and agency; sometimes to
eschew it in the name of undecidability or jouissance. But always in relation
to a sacrosanct conception of a male identity which women can either accept,
adapt to, or refuse altogether. Only Irigaray - and even then, only in some of
her works - begins to suggest that there really is no point in pursuing the
masculine dream of self-control, self-identification, self-knowledge and self-
determination. If 'any theory of the subject will always have been
appropriated by the masculine' before the women can get close to it, only the
destruction of this subject will suffice.

[P]atriarchy is not a closed system, and can never be entirely secure. It too
has an 'outside', from which it has 'in some way borrowed energy', as is clear
from the fact that in spite of patriarchy's love of origins and sources, 'the
origin of its [own] motive force remains, partially, unexplained,
eluded' (lrigaray). It needs to contain and control what it understands as
'woman' and 'the feminine', but it cannot do without them: indeed, as its
media, means of communication, reproduction and exchange, women are the
very fabric of its culture, the material precondition of the world it controls.
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