By Michael Uhall.
Kenji Siratori, we believe, is a Japanese artist who has been writing experimental black cyberpunk texts since the early 2000s, as well as producing dark ambient soundscapes and making deranged visual artifacts that draw as much on ero guro aesthetics as on glitch poetics (see the cover of David Roden’s recent Xenoerotics for an example of Siratori’s style). 3:AM first interviewed him in 2002, and, more recently, in 2011 (with Gary J. Shipley, with whom he co-created Necrology). In the twenty-plus years since, multiple texts by Siratori have appeared in the same publication. Try “Tattoo” (2001), “hallucination=cell” (2002), “Cyberreptilian.com” (2006), and “Political Clone” (2007), to start. He has more than 40 books to his name.
With justification, you could refer to these “books” as the Siratori megatext, constituting a long-form nightmarish scroll, or memetic scrawl — pictures included, as if deconstructing emakimono.
It’s questionable if it’s even accurate to say that Siratori “writes” the texts he releases — at least, if the act of writing implies authorial intention or psychological cohesion in any recognizable sense. Perhaps he generates his writing somehow, deep inside his grimdark otaku lab, feeding the living scraps of natural language into some kind of linguistic degloving machine.
Everything he writes is the same. From 2002’s Blood Electric (one reviewer writes, in the accidentally comic mode of hysteria, “YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ENJOY THIS BOOK! AT THE VERY MOST YOU WILL STRUGGLE TO EVEN COMPREHEND THE MOST SIMPLEST OF MEANINGS!”) to 2023’s collaborative Official Report On The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies Of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3, Siratori remains incoherently consistent to an extreme degree. He is a posthuman writing machine, like a cybergothic human typewriter (the words emerging from his digital flesh and hopping around on deformed pseudopodia).
Or perhaps the machine is just using him. Imagine a mild-mannered, middle-aged Japanese male, covered in gray metal fur, his face stuck in the rictus of bliss. He’s been missing for years, pinned to the floor in his forgotten apartment by an enigmatic vampire tribe of living metals. They’re pushing the cold, spiky junk into the meat of his mind and extracting broken graphemes, one by one. All gas, no brakes; u/acc or e/acc, it makes no difference to us. No one ever said communication with another form of life is easy. We’re just trying to understand you. Togetherness is a virtue.
How do you write about a writer whose entire project revolves around the refusal of meaning and the systematic destruction of ordinary language? Is it even possible to do so meaningfully, without inviting in the process of destruction itself, without allowing the virus of anti-meaning to proliferate ceaselessly inside the rotting body of your prose, slowly (but inexorably) twisting all your comfortingly familiar and well-structured grammatical totems into the worst nightmare=machine.BDSM angel girl/gram assimilated//Human bodies of hallucinogenic flesh atrocities you’d ever want to meet?
This brings us to the Official Report. But is it even really a Siratori text at all?
Supposedly, the text consists of top secret “asemic signals” intercepted by the Ministry of Transrational Research in 2084. Who knows how much suffering, or how many deaths, have accompanied the Report’s recovery, translation, and publication since then? We do not yet even have prepositions suitable for these cross-temporal transitions and violations. How many agents died in the capture and transcription of these signals, in the smuggling of the data (across the dark oceans of time separating us from our own extinction event)? For how many retroactive decades have arcane number stations been back-transmitting signals of unknown origin? The numbers are dubbed directly into the genomes of Benjaminian creatures who age backwards, carrying and coding the retrotext into their own evolutionary past. They might look like people, but they’re actually carefully choreographing their bodily performances of life in the opposite temporal direction from everyone else. We’re all sitting here in the hot tub time machine of Darwin’s warm little pond, waiting around for these ambulatory Siratori skyhook assassins to arrive from a future that eats us all up. There’s a big splash. Chromium eels are hunting you now. They’ve infiltrated the hot tub, the causeways, the swimming pools, locked onto the soft machine that you are. They want to mate with you. They swim in reverse.
At stake here is just the question of how we’re even supposed to read the Siratori megatext in the first place, even as the megatext invites us into the annihilatory and sacred ground zero of all possible reading. This future is a black hole. It cannot be described. Andrew Wenaus, the flesh puppet ostensibly responsible for this maximalist aggregation of Siratori signals into a bounded textual object (I’m holding it in my hand’s tentacle fingers right now; it is pulsing slightly, in a disconcertingly Cronenbergian way, and I am afraid that it might climax soon, against my explicit wishes; please send help) writes in one his scholarly books that “We cannot think of the meaning of Siratori’s writing by relying on established methods of decoding. Instead, his work considers how confusion, disorder, and derangement bring about alternatives” (185). Alternatives — but to what, to when, and to whom?
My understanding is that what characterizes the Official Report, in part, is the fact that it may be the first Siratori text with annotations (including a soundtrack). Thus, it acquires a kind of Talmudic intensity. Numerous writers, who have all since disappeared (the police investigation has yet to conclude, so no further comments can be made at this time) — including Louis Armand, Christian Bök, Justin Isis, Jeff Noon, David Roden, Jeff VanderMeer, D. Harlan Wilson, B. R. Yeager, and many others — all contributed footnotes to the Report as it brutally extracted itself from the random seed of our blackening future. The moral: be careful where you sign your name; you don’t want to know what the Jackpot looks like for you, a pathetic creature of meat and bone…
So, what? I’m asking you to believe that everyone who contributed to the Official Report is dead? Patently, they are not. This is just a review of an avant-garde book. No one even reads books like this one. So, smile, close the tab on your browser, and carry on with your day (or night). Or can you? It depends on when you read me. It depends on when you encounter this text. To test the implied hypothesis, I encourage you to check in regularly, as time grinds on. See how the virus grows, and who it takes with it into the black hole future. Make a tick mark next to each contributor’s name whenever their death abruptly arrives. Eventually, you’ll get to scream bingo. So, try not to think too much about Kenji Siratori’s chronotopologies. He writes, it writes, “do you understand linguistically?” Or do you understand in some other way – temporally, perhaps?
After all, what is a chronotopology? It’s a map of time. Kenji Siratori’s chronotopologies: he is generating shadow maps, like a biocomputer trying to navigate deathly new landscapes in order to enforce its strange design. The map and the territory are starting to coincide; the black star emerges from the ruins of language itself. As Nietzsche reminds us, the night is also a sun.
Polish linguists Andrzej Bogusławski and Anna Wierzbicka theorize that the lexicon of every natural language demonstrates the existence of semantic primes, or the primitive functional elements that make language possible in the first place. Their theory of a natural semantic metalanguage differs from the theory of generative grammar insofar as semantic primes are functionalist in nature, rather than merely structural. To successfully enumerate all semantic primes, then, would be to grasp not just what a language is, but all that language as such could ever do.
In Siratori, the idea of a natural semantic metalanguage becomes corrupted, which is to say, it grows, it mutates. It becomes an unnatural semantic metalanguage; imagine language as a form of leprosy, all wild bone growths and twisted tumors. An eye blinks at you, where no eye should be. The metalanguage becomes unnatural precisely because it arrives from the future, impossibly, from a future that refuses all comprehensibility for creatures like us, with our cognitive format. This is what it means for the future to be a black hole (the flesh puppet Roden calls this “the disconnection thesis” and, for a moment, captures something disconcertingly ineffable).
This is why no one can understand the Siratori megatext, ultimately, but also why the megatext seems to evidence so many cryptosemantic intensities. How was the data generated, you ask? But the Siratori megatext shucks off meaning, as in the process of viral shedding. You want to make sense of it; instead, it’s infecting you. You want to find characters (like angel mechanisms or BABEL animals, like cyber Buddhas or drug embryos), hiding inside the walls of alien control poetry; instead, you become a code beast yourself, trapped inside the Siratori megatext. You can end up a bot. All you have to do in order to confirm this is to open your wet, pink animal mouth and start to speak.
There’s no way out of Cadaver City, except by following through on the practice of decomposition. Become yourselves the larvae of abstraction, feeding on the corpse of meaning, and swimming through the liquid ruins, like secret agents of some contagious anarchitecture…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Uhall is a political theorist who works on ecopessimism, psychogeography, and the politics of outer space. His academic and nonfiction work appears in Contemporary Political Theory, Nature and Culture, Rhizomes, SYNTHETIC ZERØ, Utopia District, and Vault of Culture, and his fiction can be found in collections from Grimscribe Press, Mycelia, and Ulthar Press, as well as on Pseudopod. His first book, The Nightside of Politics: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, is forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield in 2024.
