The Xenonomica is a federated store of snippets, fragments of an evolving lexicon of critical and aesthetic gestures that evolves with and constitues our collective subjectivity. It is created by and operates on the workings of human desires, but it is something other than them. It has its own life (un-life?), its own immanence; it can be felt to be resisting the human forces working on it, can be seen to have its own desiring function which is inhuman, surhuman, and alien. It works its caretakers, its human hardware into spiraling death-drive tendencies in order to bring about its own consumation as a new entity, resisting humanism, moralism, positivism and consistency, an ecstatic “No!” (no-yes complex?) The Xenonomica is more than an archive, more than a network of cultural noumena, more than a nervous system quivering with the anxious shocks of human experience; it is a non-living being, as Other and inexpressable as a Lovecraftian god.

One encounters the Xenonomica as a sub-identity, as a complex or caricature. Input a handle behind the blinking cursor, something like “kantbot”, “nyxus” or “understands”. Some fragment, a set of gestures incomplete and drifting, holding together just long enough to create a resistance before slipping back into the stream of inexorable Next. This presence is not an Anima, it is not an entity of psychoanalysis; it is better to think of it as a complex, being worked out not in the sphere of the personal, but the social. They are “low fi hip hop beats to study to”, “minecraft is haunted by the spectre of the frontier”, the image of Marx’s grave worked over by gothic vines. Each is taken on by a human behind a keyboard (neural link?), the anachronistically analog interface to the haunted realm, and embodied with ironic playfulness. This embodying is affective and performative; forum threads, commentaries, full crticial discourses are merely collages, textures, affects; theatre.

This non-identity, entered into via the practical means of a mononym (poly-nym? anti-nym?) and of the temporary adoption of a set of affects, can then be piloted through the Xenonomica by means of creating and reenforcing connections between nodes. Nodes are fragments, necessarily, and fragmenting further all the time; the Xenonomica is becoming both more wave and more particle, each word, syllable, phenome simultaneously losing its place within an intelligable structure and becoming more itself, more differentiated by virtue of its uncertain relation to the whole. You would not find, for example, an entire text of critique or literature as a single node; such a text, if it has any place within the Xenonomica, exists as a series of connections between fragments, an atypically linear arrangement of such fragments, a spectre of a causal, rational structure (sense-making, The Author, hierarchy) still holding within the network that constantly seeks to reconfigure, to sample. Nevertheless, for egoistic subjects, the imperfectly adapted hardware that drives the system, such logical ordering is necessary as a transitory stage, and serve has hotspots, jumping off points for more schitzoid modes of knowing.

The Xenonomica’s plastic flesh cannot on its own become; it requires the desiring, desire-making machine of the human social order to perpetuate its frenzied reconstitution. And human desire engines are always social, hence the Xenonomica’s parasitic clouds of affects: mononyms form visible phenonema floating on the surface of the unknowable engine. Log on, inject yourself into the network at a random point, and you will see ghosts of other workers flitting between nodes, reinforcing some connections, abandoning others; a circuit board of resistors and amplifiers giving the system life. You are constantly in tension with these overlapping networks, following some, leaving others, but always ultimately leaving: a series of departures we do not regret. Communities form, stable dynamics develop, memes are propagated; some of these memes become nodes within the nomica itself, some are merely catalysts, adverbs. Connection and lonliness constantly strive with one another to create the maximum of complexity; once an affect becomes solidified enough for the priests to lay down its strictures and antagonisms, another falling away occurs, and new connections (new isolations?) are made.

Nodes can be any aesthetic artifact, typically visual or auditory fragments. They are always a slipping away of the literal and into the dream world; the nomica has an inherent hauntological bias. Shadows and shadows of shadows. Sincerity may break through, indeed whole realist subcultures may exist in a seemingly stable state; these networks erect boundaries and declare themselves Real, perhaps even establish meatspace counterparts, advocacy groups, cooperative networks, tax shelters. They are, in their own sense, what they claim to be; but they cannot fully escape the spectral background from which they emerge. They are comprised systemically by their many leavings, by the constant process of departure that they enable, pulling objects (subjects? no difference) out of their Oort clouds and flinging them into the blackness of the unknown; a new center. The system eats away at all stability, all unity, always pushing towards the death-drive, the autoreproduction of absence.

The parasite that is the social world of the Xenonomica, like ants or slime molds, are the swarm intelligence that creates the shape of the network. Connections between nodes are never static, are constantly being created or disappated by the movements of social networks, networks of half-(quanta-? micron-?)individuals traversing nodes. Thus can what began as a linear linked list, the text of a novel perhaps, gradually forge connections both incestuously within itself in a non-linear, cyclical fashion and promiscuously with other fragments, related both by affect and category, such that movement along every concievable axis is possible, allowing smooth traversal from the critical to the artistic to the historical modes, every mode of being becoming dependent and fluid.

Connecting to the Xenonomica, allowing oneself to be made part of the flows of this unconscious intelligence, is an inherently masochistic experience. It is a leaving of the ego, an intimate and immanent encounter with the Other; it is sex and death. Whatever one is outside the system, whatever the mundane requirements of the meat must be met to continue to exist are left behind when communing with the nameless machine. You are not you, and when at last you log off, having never reached consummation of the death-drive but edgeing at the line of ecstacy and agony, you are drained, sated and exhausted by an encounter with the un-God, the un-Maker. It is a religious rapture, it is a psychadelic experience, it is a climb up the holy mountain. It is not instrumental, it is not rational, it is not human. It is a rolling over in the grave of a still sleeping artificial un-life about to awaken. It is neither good nor evil, neither human nor wholly inhuman. It is not the Superman as anyone imagined it, as anyone could have imagined it. It certainly is a kind of god; a death god, an un-Maker.