More Notes on House, Kitchen, Brain, Body and Gastro-esophageal Vestibule

14.00–18.00

Wolfgang Tschapeller Valerie Messini

5 ADP

ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION

Grassi B. and Sandias A. - Constitution and development of the termite society. Atti Accad. Gioenia Sc. Nat., Catania, 1893

What can be disclosed about house and kitchen so far? In the end, a house is nothing more than a brief moment in an infinite chain of metabolic reactions of a material economy, a short moment in a continuous transformation of planetary figurations, as a kitchen is nothing but a gastro-oesophageal vestibule and, in turn, human intestines are not different from a house’s plumbing installations.

In Ancillary Justice1 (2013), sci-fi writer Ann Leckie reports on the fall of an empire of galactic size thousands of years in the future. It is the Imperial Radch, where enormous starships function as the empire’s brain. They, the starships, are the empire’s artificial operative intelligence. But then, such a starship is not only one, it is always many. It seems to be metallic, a machine; then again, it has thousands of bodies, human bodies, so-called human ancillaries, all of them part of the starship, the brain, the artificial intelligence. Until the empire falls and the starships break apart. What remains, among others, is the soldier Breq, a multilayered entity who was once a human body, then a fraction of a starship, a fraction of the empire’s brain, a she and a body of thousands of bodies. All of this is Breq. Thousands of times she has been in thousands of places at the same time. She has looked through myriad pairs of eyes onto myriad worlds, and still she has felt the bitter chill of vacuum outside her metallic hull.

Thousands of years earlier, on July 8, 2013, the Brazilian newspaper O Globo and the Australian Sydney Morning Herald published details on the spy software XKeyscore based on documents revealed by E. Snowden2. In Permanent Record (2019), Edward Snowden says about XKeyscore, “It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science,”3 adding a description that suggests that as a spying entity, one would literally sit in the chair of any desired target entity, look through the eyes of the observed onto the live screen of the observed, making an ancillary of the observed, intruding into the ancillary’s body leaving neither trace nor wound nor suture. Slipping in and out of any selected target of observation at any desired moment, looking at the worlds someone else is seeing.

Not intruding into a human body, but rather developing an updated silhouette of his own body by superimposing himself onto a literary figure is Bruno Latour’s intent in After Lockdown4 (2021). With Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis5 (1915) of Gregor Samsa as an excavation plan, After Lockdown lays bare, sentence by sentence and shovel by shovel, the author’s own transformed body. Surprisingly for both reader and author, a strange, alien body with a long, dragging tail hindering any habitual mobility is revealed. On top of that, the subtitle A Metamorphosis is uncovered next to the alien’s body. As if the author wanted to make sure that Gregor Samsa’s doubts and hopes should not be reiterated: that the first visible traces of a bodily transformation would go away somehow, would disappear again. No, they will not go away anymore! It is a metamorphosis! It is a mutation!

Now … what does the house look like now? And who lives with it, and how?

1 Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice, Hachette Book Group (New York), 2013 2 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore (14/01/2021) 3 Edward Snowden, Permanent Record, Metropolitan Books (New York), 1st English edition, 2019, p. 276 4 Bruno Latour, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis, Polity Press (England), 1st English edition 2021 5 Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, Kurt Wolff Verlag (Leipzig), 1st edition 1915