Invisible Cells and Vanishing Masses

INVISIBLE CELLS AND VANISHING MASSES is co-authored by Roger Taylor and the avatar, Rumpledsilkskin. They write: 'Part of our subject matter is to give serious treatment to the notion of "getting out of it", another part concerns who is to get out. The inevitabilities of the poor are the factum, the starting point. What does Bear the surfboard-maker in Big Wednesday say as the surf heroes ride the unprecedented? "Oh! I'm just the garbage man." Generally the poor are addressed to improve them, educate them, edify them, empower them, sensitise them, quiet them, control them. These are strategems for creating illusions of change. So it is argued, the rich are going to have to overcome hell of a hump to get into heaven, whereas queuing garbage men are the last made first. For this illusory privilege they are exhorted to love those who trespass against them. "Getting out of it" is defence and escape, and virtuality is one of the forms of "getting out of it". Socially developed and controlled forms of virtuality are generally commodified, but commodified entertainment is bootlegged like booze and has its non-commodified forms like poteen and alpine eau de vie. And, of course, the objects of art can be appropriated for any purpose whatsoever, just as art has appropriated the objects of not art as objects of art.

This philosophical journey begun a long time ago, whichever moment it was when it began, is now to be completed in the cells of this book. There was no way for us to have envisaged this precise ending at the outset, despite a determination to arrive where we are. The destination is virtuality and class and underclass and escape. The possibilities of virtuality have multiplied since we started our kind of life. Those possibilities are part and parcel of the aspirations of self-consciousness and autonomy, and all these particles including the aspirations were all interwoven, even if unrecognised, in the embryonic vision. And so, our kind of life, our sentence, starts by revisiting and reflecting on various stopping points on the journey, as well as striking out across a vast territory still uncrossed. Following will not be easy, it will not be an instant thing, and the subject matter is irreducibly difficult. For escape none of this is necessary, but for the defence of escape it may well be, certainly nothing "out there" goes half far enough.

There is a collectiveness to vanishing, a shared conspiracy. This is a global, empirical scepticism. The alternative worlds that are turned to and created take both individual and collective forms. There is nothing solipsistic about mass disappearance. Moreover, vanishing is always double-edged. Spasmodically the masses reappear. Suddenly they are in the streets pointing. The excesses of the existing order do not go unnoticed. Or they reappear as heroes to fulfil their own fantasies. But the masses will never again sacrifice a generation or two for a future that never comes. The masses are playing the long game now. The masses are playing games.'

INVISIBLE CELLS AND VANISHING MASSES is a work of straight philosophy (workshop cells) and philosophical fictions (recreational cells). It addresses such topics as Art as Commodity, the As If, Virtuality, Virtual Reality, Freedom and Consciousness, Determinism (philosophical, neuro-physiological, genetic), Materialism, Pluralism and Truth, Post-Modernism, Moral and Political Theory and the Philosophy of Escape. It waves a flag of conceptual revolution in the face of received sense but, at the same time, it rests with the ordinary and the unnoticed.