The Temporality of Ascryption

< Part One: 'Initiation'

Alice was just beginning to say 'There's a mistake somewhere—,' when the Queen began screaming, so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. 'Oh, oh, oh!' shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. 'My finger's bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!'
'What is the matter?' Alice said, 'Have you pricked your finger?'
'I haven't pricked it yet,' the Queen said, 'but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!'
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass 

With all such words it is of the utmost importance that they should never be spoken until the supreme moment, and even then they should burst from the Magician almost despite himself—so great should be his reluctance to utter them. In fact, they should be the utterance of the God in him at the first onset of the divine possession. So uttered, they cannot fail of effect, for they have become the effect. — Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA

With Karno absent, and no way to reach her (what would I have said in any case?), I had no choice but to continue my exploration of her practice unaccompanied. The inverted nature of the enterprise continued to mystify me. One night, uselessly intoxicated and unable to push my earlier success at recreating her method any further, I had scrawled 'ASCRYPTION IS REVERSE ASCRIPTION' on a post-it note in some now unrecognisable fluid and stuck it to the wall above my desk. The evocation of the literary act via the attribution of a name had proven successful—too successful if the complete occultation of every surface comprising my admittedly cramped living quarters by loose stacks of unevenly daubed, sometimes completely indecipherable, sheets of paper was to be counted as a reliable measurement of efficacy. I felt I had lost control. Ascryption was, indeed, a matter of utter submission to the will of some outside force. As a writer I had been schooled in the importance of control. This was variously denominated in terms of metre, rhythm, tone, cleverly constructed metaphorics, believable characters, narrative consistency ... and yet I was producing these effects without any recourse to my own personal catalogue of literary tricks and turns of phrase, or even what I had once arrogantly considered my 'unique poetic voice'. Some utterly alien enunciator had infiltrated my output. Or better, enunciators, for they were certainly multiple. Adept across an unbelievable span of deranged aesthetic proclivity. Where the hell was this all coming from? 

I reread Karno's essay again and again, searching for a decipherable answer among her numerous appeals to 'the crypt', 'the rift' and, most curious of all, 'the future'. It was while staring at the post-it note, utterly lost, half-conscious from the criminal quantity of bootleg mezcal I had drunk in anticipation of yet another night's futile probing, that it came to me. Unlike ascription, which one has no choice but to understand as a cause-effect relationship, ascryption—the production of cause from effect—encodes, by virtue of this deranged causal logic, time in reverse. A text attributed to a writer; a writer attributed to a text. What was at stake was more than the automated procurement of a poem, but a theory of time. Karno was madder than even I (who was—demonstrably—prepared to accept a lot) had suspected. And yet it explained so much. The enigmatic subtitle, 'Practices for Writing on Reality' suddenly took on a terrible significance. She meant it literally. What had I gotten myself involved in? Was I evoking something more significant than a roomful of poetry? I took in the chaotic state of my apartment, unsure I recognised the person to whom it had once belonged. The unfinished bottle of mezcal sat in the middle of the floor, staking out Zone 7 in the remnants of the diagram that continued to leer through its pelt of paper refuse. A bloated agave worm, suspended in the few centimetres of liquid that remained at the base of the bottle turned listlessly in response to some imperceptible tremor from far, far below. 

It reminded me of something I'd overheard at the bar—a verminous word: 'Plutonic'.

Demon Est Deus Inversus

Vallée: 'There are, in fact, numerous stories in folklore of humans who have gone to fairlyland of their own will, either taking a message, or bringing one back, or performing some service for the supernatural beings who live there. But — and this is my third point we also have numerous accounts of abductions by the fairies. They take men and women, especially pregnant women or young mothers, and they are very active in stealing young children. Sometimes, they substitute a false child for the real one, leaving in place of the real child a broom with rugs wrapped around it or one of their children, a changeling. [...]

Of course, the UFO myth has not yet reached such romantic proportions, but we are perhaps not quite far from it, at least in certain rural areas, where strange flying objects have become a source of terror to people travelling at night, and where the rumour that "invaders" might be around has gained interest, if not support. A recent television series has capitalised on this aspect of UFO lore. In the show, the human race has been infiltrated by extraterrestrials who differ from humans in small details only. This is not a new idea, as the belief in changelings shows. And there is a well known passage in Martin Luther's Table Talk, in which he tells the Prince of Anhalt that he should throw into the Moldau a certain man who is, in his opinion, such a changeling — or killcrop, as they were called in Germany.'

Paranoia is both a modality of control and a means to its evasion. Vallée, with utmost methodological scrupulousness, draws a continuum between folklore, myth and the UFO phenomenon that not only charts its universal cultural persistence, but allows a smooth connection to be made between the replicants, clones and anthropathogenic parasites of modern science fiction, and the legends of changelings and killcrops that haunted medieval Europe. This fear of the alien insider has been with humanity for far, far longer than we might have at first assumed, and its specific brand of horror is connected to an intense doubt concerning the stability of our own imputed 'humanness'. How do we know what we are when other beings can fool us so profoundly? A security function is inevitably triggered, and endorsed by 'us' ... the faithful adherents of those religious institutions that have traditionally made it their job to purge villages of their interlopers, and will—so we persistently imagine—relieve our future cities of their inhuman intruders. 

The guiding affect is distrust, and distrust reaches its peak when it is no longer simply directed at the other—the alien, the immigrant, the machine—but turns upon itself. We are so paranoid because we know there is nothing to hang an enduring notion of the 'human' on that cannot also be perfectly simulated. 

Western monotheism, following a similar impulse, absolutises and anthropomorphises its god. Once this move has been made, all evil can be understood as essentially separate—inhuman, when held against the humanised image of god—and therefore, available for exorcism. 'Changelings and killcrops are laid in the place of legitimate children by Satan in order to plague mankind,' states Luther, 'such a changeling child is only a piece of flesh, a massa carnis, because it has no soul.' (The remedy hardly needs reiterating: 'That is not your child! It is the devil! Throw him into the brook!') H. P. Blavatsky, to whom the title of this post is owed, explains it in the following way: 'Satan never assumed an anthropomorphic, individualised shape, until the creation by man, of a "one living personal god" had been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime necessity. A screen was needed; a scape-goat to explain the cruelty, blunders, and all but too-evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom absolute perfection, mercy, and goodness were claimed.' Rigidly enforced identity automatically generates an illusory negative, fooling its bearer into believing that circumscribing an antagonist supplies the power to eliminate it. It is exactly this fervour for purification that conceals the fact that the alien is already inside, and has always been there. Hygiene is its camouflage.

Taqiyya, perhaps, is our most terrifying contemporary reminder of this fear. Glossing Hamid Parsani's Peace in the Wake of Double-Betrayal ('a straight socio-anthropological analog to John Carpenter's movie The Thing') Reza Negarestani writes, 

'In order to infiltrate Jihadi forces, the state must first inquire into the very concept of citizenship, and strictly regulate what an ordinary citizen is and is not, so that the civilian is both the first and last target for the state and the Jihadi. It is in the wake of the doctrine of Taqiyya and Jihad that the civilian becomes an obscure ally—that is, worse than the enemy.

"Today, Taqiyya, or adherence to the logic of the Thing, connects the survival of a believer who conceals his practice and belief to a catastrophic consequence for the enemies' community. Survival of individuals or collectives, particularly the very existence of native and indigenous entities, must become an object of police curiosity or even liquidation, because the hostile entities who exploit Taqiyya practice and revere everything but their own systems; they populate every niche and land but their own." (Hamid Parsani, Peace in the Wake of Double-Betrayal)

The proximity of this scenario to that of The Thing, according to Parsani, comes from the fact that it is not the Thing (the extremist under Taqiyya) which is targeted as the object of eradication and assault, but its potential hosts, or the positions (niches) which it might occupy.'

This is the logic of the labyrinth: upwards is downwards, resistance is openness. Everything is always covertly its opposite. These arch-injectors—the duplicitous fairy, the alien insider, the Thing, whatever name one gives it (it wants nothing more than for you to name it)—exploits the human desire for identity and its necessary definition. On this shoddy platform—the inability to rid ourselves of our desire for the same—a construction roughly equating 'intrinsic humanity' could, perhaps, be thrown up. But it only identifies a weakness and is entirely without hope. To be Human is to Desire Oneself—etched across the falling blade of a guillotine.

Control 0: Alien Psy-Ops

'UFOs not only lack real existence, they demonstrate that everything lacks real existence.' — Sarkon

Jacques Vallée on Control:

'When I speak of a control system for planet earth, I do not want my words to be misunderstood: I do not mean that some higher order of beings has locked us inside the constraints of a space-bound jail, closely monitored by psychic entities we might call angels or demons. I do not propose to redefine God. What I do mean is that mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power.'

∇

'Vallée posits the idea of a "control system". UFOs and related phenomena are "the means through which man's concepts are being rearranged." Their ultimate source may be unknowable, at least at this stage of human development; what we do know, according to Vallée, is that they are presenting us with continually recurring "absurd" messages and appearances which defy rational analysis but which nonetheless address human beings on the level of myth and imagination.'

Social Technology

For Vallée, the UFO phenomenon - a uniquely 20th century interpretation of an enduring occurrence that unites, not insignificantly, archaic with futuristic imaginaries - consists of three levels: the material, the perceptual, and the social-semiotic.

'First, there is a physical object. That may be a flying saucer or it may be a projection or it may be something entirely different. All we know about it is that it represents a tremendous quantity of electromagnetic energy in a small volume. I say that based upon the evidence gathered from traces, from electromagnetic and radar detection and from perturbations of the electromagnetic fields such as Dr. Claude Poher, the French space scientist, has recorded. 

Second, there's the phenomenon the witnesses perceive. What they tell us is that they've seen a flying saucer. Now they may have seen that or they may have seen an image of a flying saucer or they may have hallucinated it under the influence of microwave radiation, or any of a number of things may have happened. The fact is that the witnesses were exposed to an event and as a result they experienced a highly complex alteration of perception which caused them to describe the object or objects that figure in their testimony. 

And then there is a third level, the social level, and the impact on our belief systems. At that level - and this is something that's very difficult to convey to the believers in UFOs - that at that level, it really doesn't matter whether UFOs are real or not. If enough people believe that something is real then, it is real, in its effects - in terms of its social reality, in terms of the ways people act according to their beliefs. 

That opens a question of - really, at two levels - could the UFO phenomenon be manipulating us? Could it be a teaching system of some sort? Perhaps something that we are creating ourselves - perhaps a series of images that we are projecting. I think Carl Jung came very close to expressing that idea in one of his books. Or could it be manipulated purposefully by people who have the technology to simulate UFO sightings? People say "Of course not! Who would do a thing like that?". Now I would remind you that during the Watergate investigation it was discovered that there was a plan which originated in the Whitehouse to surface a submarine off the coast of Cuba and project the second coming of Christ over the island of Cuba using holograms - which is well within our technological capabilities today. The idea was that since there is a large Catholic population in Cuba they would be so upset by this vision that they would saturate the communication channels - the telephone system - long enough for an invasion to take place. It's a classic in psychological warfare that that kind of manipulation is well understood, and I have personally investigated several apparently genuine UFO cases where the the main conclusion - the conclusion of the scientists working with me - was that there was in fact a manipulation taking place and that it was not a hoax on the part of the witnesses but a hoax on the part of somebody much better organised than them.'