Outsanity: on escaping the self

An edited exerpt from Post-Self

We are all perpetually holding ourselves together. Our breath, our blood, our food, our spit, our shit, our thoughts, our attention—all tightly held, all the time. Then at death, we let it all out, oozing at once into the earth and gasping at last into the ether.

What if we let it slip before then? What if we were able to let ourselves loose and be as free as we can be? What if we got lost somewhere out there beyond ourselves? If it’s all going down, why aren’t we trying to push ourselves as far out as we can? If we try to hold ourselves together as we watch our world fall apart, we’re holding ourselves back for nothing.

If this sounds like despair, it probably should. The more we realize about our place in the world, the worse that place seems to get. Much has been written about the mainstreaming of pessimism as a philosophy, thanks especially to Rustin Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) in season one of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective television series. Gary J. Shipley writes of the show, “The end has already happened, and all Rustin Cohle and Marty Hart [Woody Harrelson] can do is arrange the bodies in a pattern that makes them look less like bodies, more like things that might have existed in bodies, if those bodies hadn’t been born human.” This resignation is evident not only in this show but in many others, a malaise seeping into our minds through our media.

The second season of the show continues the gloom of the first. Though, as Ian Bogost points out, where Cohle got lost in his own head, the characters in season two get lost out in the world. The physician and psychoanalyst Dr. John C. Lilly distinguished between what he called “insanity” and “outsanity.” Insanity is “your life inside yourself.” Outsanity is the chaos of the world, the cruelty of other people. Dr. Lilly used isolation tanks and psychedelics to explore his mind, leaving his body behind. Sometimes we get lost in our heads. Sometimes we get lost in the world.

As the Earth sustains less and less life, and the life that is left is susceptible to more and more hostile viruses and disease, our physical forms are vulnerable. Growing up under the shadow of the cold war, the end seemed far away, like a mushroom cloud in the distance. The apocalyptic rhetoric of Y2K, the direct attacks of 9/11, and the Mayan calendar collapse of 2012 all brought eschatology ever closer, to mindsets and media outlets everywhere. Given the hostility of the global climate and the polarity of the political climate, as well as increasingly frequent mass shootings, it now feels like the end is lurking right outside the door, a killer with a knife at the ready. If we are to protect ourselves, we must move beyond our selves.

One of the many methods used in futures studies is called environmental scanning. “All futurists do environmental scanning,” write Theodore J. Gordon and Jerome C. Glenn, “some are more organized and systematic, all try to distinguish among what is constant, what changes, and what constantly changes.” The process, which includes several distant early warning techniques, from expert panels, literature reviews, internet searches, and conference monitoring, helps inform the pursuits of issues management and strategic planning. According to William Renfro, president of the Issues Management Association, issues management consists of four stages: identifying potential future issues, researching the background and potential impacts of these issues, evaluating issues competing for a corporation or nation’s operations, and developing appropriate strategies for these operations.

Science fiction stories and horror movies are other places we look to “see” the future. Simulations and speculations are much more fun and much safer than the real things. Spaceships, AI, robots, cyberspace—these all exist in some form in the real world, but the widespread perception of these contrivances comes from fiction. “In the context of SF,” Adam Roberts writes, “this reification works most potently on the interconnected levels of representation of technology and the technologies of reproduction.” At varying levels, we look to science fiction and horror to show us the potential directions technology is going and the ways it will affect our lives. These speculative trajectories show us what’s possible, even if it’s just by showing us what’s not.

The art critic Harold Rosenberg argued that the culture of any society is the debris of past cultures, that any current culture is the fallout of the former, more so than a cohesive system itself. When we describe something as ahead of its time, sometimes that means it took a long time to find an audience, but it could be that it was predicting a possible future. In my writing I explore scenarios that may not include living on this planet and some that may not include living at all. In order to explore the space after and beyond ourselves, we will employ ideas and artifacts from heavy metal music to science fiction and horror films: the dark debris of recent systems, the prescient, predictive, and prophetic pieces of the past. One possible escape is found in mechanized sound, starting with the heaviest metal of England.

Justin K. Broadrick’s best-known band, Godflesh, emerged in the late 1980s from the cold concrete of Birmingham, the same oppressive environment that spawned metal pioneers Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. Godflesh’s first full-length record, Streetcleaner, provides an apocalyptic soundtrack to the world from which it came. Streetcleaner plods along at the pace of some giant factory, guitars and bass pummeling to the sound of machines. The overall sound is simply crushing. With the creeping nihilism of nine tons of radioactive sludge, Godflesh grinds and growls through the flaws and floes of humanity. Chapter One of my book Post-Self establishes the sound of the end and launches us into the remaining themes of this book. Like Godflesh’s music, this book is about the space beyond the bounds of the human body and the end of life itself.

Though the name “Godflesh” carries many connotations, one reading is that the body is all-powerful, a true master, no matter the host. “The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived,” wrote the anthropologist Mary Douglas.

The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression.

The book delves into such definitions of the body, seeking a broad view, with a watchful eye for a way around these restrictions. Possible escape routes from our corporeal constraints include machines, rapture, drugs, and death. Post-Self includes a chapter on each, concluding with a look at the end of our existence, a glimpse of a future without us.

Turbulent Bloodlines

As cyberculture became culture at large, the body anxieties of the original cyberpunks slowly seeped into the everyday. Often viewed as a threat to human livelihood, mechanization promises freedom from our frail bodies. Some imagine a very deliberate merging, postulating an uploading of human consciousness into the contrivances themselves. If we can build a better body and inhabit it instead of this one, why not?

If we can’t live here, perhaps there’s somewhere else out there or some other form we might take. Maybe we’ll get beamed up and away, saved from our own destruction by angels or aliens. “The shedding of our borrowed human bodies may be required in order to take up our new bodies belonging to the next world,” read a Heaven’s Gate poster from 1994. “If you want to leave with us, you must be willing to lose everything of this world in order to have life in the next. Cling to this world and you’ll surely die.”

The cover image of Streetcleaner is a shot from Ken Russell’s 1980 movie Altered States. The film follows a scientist attempting to escape his body through his mind, using sensory-deprivation tanks and hallucinogens. It closely parallels the early work of sensory-deprivation and dolphin intelligence researcher Dr. John C. Lilly. Exploring the extremes of neurophysiology, biophysics, and electronics, Lilly experimented on himself with isolation tanks and ketamine.

If life is not an option, then we can escape in death. Serial killers, school shooters, mass murderers, suicide bombers, terrorists, world leaders—if the flesh is their god, they are devoted to destroying it. The last resort of escape from the human body is to snuff out the consciousness inside. Eugene Thacker writes,

There are times when the stupidity of our species is so suffocating that even extinction will not suffice. Then I understand, if only briefly, the other motive for suicide: the need—the desperate need—to be rid of other people.

So, finally, we’re all doomed anyway. Wiping us from this world would relieve all of the tensions of the flesh and bring the ultimate, final brutality. Ghost hunting in a world spent spinning, Post-Self reads humanity its last rites and hangs around after we’re gone, spectral spectators, as if we were able to fulfill the lifelong dream of attending our own funeral.

Let us let go and light out for parts known and unknown, within and without. Let’s escape our bodies, wandering and lost. If the only way out is through, then we’re each already on our way.

…read on in Post-Self: Journeys Beyond the Human Body, by Roy Christopher, available now from Repeater Books.

Everyone is looking for a way out.

Throughout history, the physical body has often been seen as a prison, as something to be escaped by any means necessary: technology, mechanization, drugs and sensory deprivation, rapture, or even death. Taking in horror movies, heavy metal, philosophy, science fiction, and cybernetics, Post-Self is an exploration of the ways that human beings have sought to make this escape, to transcend the limits of the human body, to find a way out.

As the physical world continues to collapse around us, and we are faced with a particularly 21st-century kind of dread and dehumanization, Post-Self asks what this escape from our bodies might look like, and what it might mean for the future of civilisation.

“Through the lenses of Godflesh, J.G. Ballard, UFO phenomena, psychedelics, serial killings, and so much else, Christopher investigates humanity’s growing inclination to escape our bodies, to escape our species, to escape life itself.”

B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space

“In his trademark breezy yet precise style, Christopher discusses everything from stimoceivers to Southland Tales, everyone from Henry Lee Lucas to Brummbear, and all without ever losing sight of his central points of reference: our all too malleable somatic limits and Godflesh’s Streetcleaner.”

Gary J. Shipley, author of Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying With Baudrillard

“Roy Christopher’s book is a thought-provoking and delightful crucible of film, music, and the best kind of speculative.”

Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch and Strange Frequencies