Code Puke

Nietzsche says George Sand was “a Milche cow with a fine smile”, which was a euphemism for academic. The cow is a beast distinguished for its lengthy and elaborate digestion process, going from one stomach to the next, with stomach digesting distinct grades of vomit. Where an academic digestion may have been going on too long, the barf-threshold works as an interruption, a decision to puke instead of carrying on the digestion. Puking interrupts the pining of the dyspeptic who cannot finish with anything.

Information was endlessly consumed, but there’s a cynical realization of it’s low nutrient value, and centuries of information consumption gets vomited out. What is vomited is not just all the boring books and newspapers, but the entire manner that was proscribed for literary consumption. There is a realization that one has been taught to enjoy information in the wrong way. Behavior was proscribed for consuming “news”, an elaborate complex of hermeneutic equipment informs the way one reads and thinks. Code puke is the symptomatic return of failed literacy which reverses or counter-actualizes the prescribed modes of reading. This is a general perversion of literacy. The bourgeois are taught to “digest” information. They are suppose to digest it (academicize it) until it becomes a little shit-gift that they can sell to somebody else. The digestion of information is the bourgeois process that aims at producing knowledge commodities, as though they were refining tar sands. But, by puking undigested information back up, then we are no longer exchanging lousy finished commodities (barrels of oil), but rather something generative and fertile (barrels of puke). The puke paradigm augments the capacity to enjoy and exchange information by reversing the customs of literary consumption.

Code puke forces economics to accelerate to hundreds of abstract models a minute, forgoing critical digestion in favor of flights into alien metaphysics. There was a revolution in physical science during world war two, with the invention of the Monte Carlo machine by John von Neumann. This apparatus replays a simulation again and again with changing variables, searching for remarkable patterns and correspondences in the most abstract dimensions. Its time to appropriate the Monte Carlo machine, this apparatus of science, for a literary economics: to run rapid simulations that needn’t be digested.

Code puke circulates as abstract economic potential, a raw productive power of information economy. This annexes the discipline of economics to the realm of literary fantasy. In this dimension everyone arranges their own markets on an interior personal level. The economy now concerns the most obscure aspect of a person which their most intimate companions may never grasp, the most personal enclaves of aesthetic reverie. The economic object is the object petite a, the knowledge commodity, which corresponds to the peculiar gap in subjectivity, the most unlikely thing to have ecumenical value. This infinitely complex topology of the abstract Thing produces a rhythm that opens the caves of desire. This topology is an economics of the inside, the oikei-nomos returning home to roost after centuries of exile as a public science. The economy of the phantasm is at work at the deepest recesses of the people. Code puke excites the object-cause of desire, and that annexes the symptom to the private. The luxury-trap captures the phantasm into the private – the radical privatization of fantasy.

Puke writes failure into the code — the failure of digestion, the failure of manners — and this puts code under the spell of the death drive. It’s important to identify the orders of real composure which must be kept at all costs. The pragmatics of composure is a matter for high-order cybernetics. “High-order” means that a system has learned to energize by staging it’s own symbolic failure. The symbolic, that phase where real cuts are represented, becomes autonomous when it takes failure into its own hands, when it learns how to invigorate itself through the simulation of demise. It learns to submit itself to the forced movement of the death drive and gets strangely disfigured by its speculative identification with the imaginary. The luxury commodity is an ersatz real, a dynamic counter-actualization of real events, a copy that accedes to grandeur through its broken artifice. Code puke is the broken shards of the imaginary symbolic.