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THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!

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SOLARITY OF WAR

Black Hole Sun

Apocalypse comes to the civilized world as the literal reading of the word implies (ἀποκαλύπτω, unfolding, revelation, disclosure) and gives birth to the world after as a baptism.

The first movement is what causes the fascination among modern people with the end. Political idealists are always obsessed with final fulfillment at the grand end, in echo of the Revelation of Saint John, a great cataclysm where the clouds part and the hand of God descends to right all wrongs and make-true all things of the world. Judgement in the Marseilles deck demonstrates, an angel’s trumpet sounding over the people of the world knelt in prayer as the Heavens descend, celestial beings making clear the truth of all noumena, to right wrongs and reward those who yoked themselves to the proper path. The apocalypse marks the world QED, bringing to an end all diversions of phenomena, as the world of noumena viscerally descends.

In this track, nuclear apocalypse is a horrid thing for eschatologists. In Subterranean Animism’s storyline, the sun-god Yatagarasu is consumed by the common Hell-Crow, Reiuji Utsuho. She then gains the powers not of the sun, but of nuclear energy. The sun is transmogrified from the transcendent God to a common technology. Beyond death, God has been consumed and harnassed in an act of necromancy.

This movement works in several acts. It’s telling that the impetus behind the consumption of the Yatagarasu, were the scheming industrialists atop the mountain. Ever greedy for faith, they told the common crow Utsuho to consume it, hoping they could harness the power through her for their own ends.

They failed of course, and she went mad with power. This, seen when Reimu/Marisa fight her in-game, is the first strike - fission. The weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an inverse of the solar action, where the device splits apart unstable, complex elements, then shatters them in a release of energy. This act of destruction is the Fall of Lucifer, Prometheus. The fire of the God-Sun, atomic fusion, has been taken down to its most chthonic residence and inverted.

The second act is seen in the final spellcard cast by Utsuho. With her left hand, inverted, she points hellishly - Subterranean Sun. Cold war nuclear weapons developed a step further, using the original anti-sun to create artificial suns. A smaller fission device would spark off a fusion device - this is the mechanism behind the much larger weapons tested by the United States and Soviet Union, such as Castle Bravo and Tsar Bomba. An inverted left hand sign, rising from the depths of the Earth, the true fire of God, the atomic fusion of the sun, is recreated with inversion and then rises as an imitation from the depths. When the game has finished, Utsuho hasn’t just consumed the Sun, she absorbed and recreated the Sun from below.

This anti-sun beneath the Earth is the same mechanism behind the weapons which in New Vegas fall upon the desert and bring about the wasteland. The weapons harnassed go beyond destructions of reality, anti-suns, but imitation-suns, where the sun’s fusion power is recreated in miniature scale to form the explosion itself. The bombs fall as an inversion, where Heaven is recreated then loosed as a false copy of the apocalypse upon Earth.

And like the framing would suggest, this false copy begets no end times, no coming of Jesus, no perfection of all narratives - just devastation, and then life goes on. There is no God anymore, God is a technology. With that technology unleashed violently, the apocalypse happened, only to debunk itself. In the nuclear holocaust, eschatology was destroyed, and humanity went on, living corpses shambling about after The End.

This is the setting of the world after a nuclear apocalypse. A world without Heaven, a world of the living dead shambling about in the desert after what was supposed to be the End.

The Ultimate Practice, The Ultimate Practitioner

The Judge in Blood Meridian speaks of War as a thing to itself, the ultimate practice, pre-existing and extra-existing the humans who practice and deal with it.

Each time the player commits violence, they’re awarded with experience for the very act of combat. The combat is not an end to any means, except the exercise of a skill, that intrinsically provides reward. New Vegas in doing this, establishes in the way many video games do, the original division of action, pre-existing the later division of labor, that of language and the world.

Tools are a neutral third that constructs the two categories before and after it. The tool itself functions as a middle ground - akin to a battlefield - of transmission occurs that alienates the ego from the real. Tools functions as the meeting ground through which the two meet each other, the ego mediating experience driven by the world or the world experiencing manipulations driven by the ego. Each tool is a channeling, a manipulation of a flow through the middle network of channels. The old saying, “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, reveals this, demonstrating the discourse of usage and interpretation created from the middle ground of the hammer.

The flows which travel up and down between these two, Heaven of the ego and Earth of the real, is what is gained in experience points in New Vegas by the act of combat, and through countless other games - Suda51 most elegantly described it across his work as “blood”, which acts as a fluid quantity derived from all actions and used to further participate in the tools given to the player. Blood feeds the shedding of more blood, enhancing the tools used to draw it from the world. The tools of violence are an Ouroborous at the center of the game.

Thus originates the nomad, imagined in New Vegas as the Fiends, by Bowie as the Diamond Dogs, the wolves of 1914: One or Several Wolves. Each of these are populated by particles, scattered across the wasteland, to roam freely with no end except movement in itself, in constant pursuit of blood. What does emerge for them is the form of their assemblage, the nomad-chariot shown by the four Fiend leaders, defined by the assemblage made with their tool of choice in engaging with blood.

That the Fiends trade in narcotics is no coincidence, accessing chemically the nomadic mode towards blood, the drug experience being a particular forcing of experience that becomes an end to itself, just as their raping and pillaging acts as an end to itself.

From all of this, the basic human is born. Civilization to some extent continued - language, and by extension, tools, persisted, humanity, as mentioned previously, never truly dying out, just grievously wounded. Yet all more surface than the usage of tools was burned away, creating the cellular being, the nomad, existing in ceaseless motion to blood.

Structures are wiped out, and with the annihilation of the organs, the plasma and cellular matter flows out freely across the landscape. Such is the state of humanity after the dust settles on the first bombs falling. The first proper song of Diamond Dogs details the state of humanity as shown by Fiends and Raiders, savage people of a purely biological nature. They regress to the most basic social structures, always resting precariously on the border of animal-life as they live solely on the rules of their own bodies. Chems, violence, sex, make for a truly unalienated life, a person as a machine existing to slot into various feral purposes, pleasure, victory, reproduction, etc.

This is the cellular human, a being reduced to a single-celled logic of a few receptors gobbing out across the desert, looking for the small morsels that slot into each one. The wilderness where they contest each other in proximity then becomes the primordial soup of emergent orders.

Caesar remarks of the savages he encountered when he was sent East with the Followers, of their progression to rediscovering social order from the wasteland, before he came and gave higher order to the tribes. Cells come together and cooperate to the point of codependence - which sets off a cascading effect in itself, new organisms are formed by being negated from the first, enemies and allies.

The tribe creates an animal, a body of cells unified to a single purpose, with differing orders of work and position to fit into each other’s needs. The animal evolves over time, as the mutual cohesion of the group is forged together, eventually electing the sovereign from it. Caesar fulfilled this role, the lucky catalyst for the first of the countless small tribes to elect their sovereign that unified the beginning of a proper human - the social body now having a head atop it.

This transformation doesn’t however, occur through the leader, but through the leader’s command of language above and beyond the former concerns of the savage. Caesar remarks he taught them weapons repair, total war, gave them flags and names, showed them maneuvers, etc. Directly mentioning “old books”, and contrasting his own knowledge with that of the “backwards savages”, Caesar delivers more bluntly what he does in his creating the Legion. More than force, he brings language to the wasteland, his own throne centralizing flows into a coherent enough order to start furrowing tracks into the ground, reconstructing.

The legion is the greatest tool ever unleashed upon the wasteland as the first proper nation. The neutral middle created by each tool now becomes communal, with the tool being abstracted beyond a single user, and eternal, as the tool becomes a floating third above and beyond any active input. Around it, blooms civilization as humans are both yoked to its Ego (the Marxian Base, where labor feeds the nation) and its Real (superstructure, where the nation develops orders of interpretation upon the world).

To be animal is to come together in mutual cooperation, but to be human is to be capable of moving upwards and beyond, creating orders of language, flows of resource, that outlast the life of any one cell. The body is able to gain a certain antifragility by nature of the skull being evolved, the head now capable of centralizing all organization of the body below it, the throne atop the organism acting as a rock of permanent fixing. When a tribal is killed, a wound is made, while when a legionary is killed, a wound is made and healed. The tribal’s role was as an individual acting in collaboration with others, and their loss is the loss of someone, irreplaceable as souls are. The loss of a single legionary is only the vacancy of a position, quickly healed

In all these processes of election of the sovereign, the cellular human never vanishes, it’s only sublimated by having itself remade into assemblages, where every energetic output is plugged into social machines, those things which make up the substance of the “greater” that emerges from the sum of parts.

One of the quests deals with this directly. The three families of New Vegas, are separated from their former peers in the fiends and assorted raider gangs, by their affiliation with Mr. House and the structure he created for them. Each of the societies, except perhaps the Chairmen, is always teetering on the brink. The appetites remain identical and fulfilled, the White Gloves recoursing into cannibalism, the Omertas dealing in sex and narcotics. Decay is threatened here, by the recourse always to blood.

Deeper than the NCR, than Mr. House, is an ocean underground, of that animal passion. This is the disintegration occurring when cells give in to the subterranean urges, breaking clean from their assemblages as the pull of the base flow is stronger, dissolving attachments and bonds. The Fiends sit outside Vegas and NCR territory as a permanent reminder, the image of humanity sinking, of social orders dissolving - and how easily they dissolve - of humanity, as it was reduced to after the bomb, and of its nature below all attempts to recivilize.

It’s Caesar’s strength and weakness, that his engine of state capture are so predicated on these base urges. His armies are engines of the wasteland, capturing the tribal human and giving its animal instincts in as raw a form as possible, a sublimation-path to follow.

In doing so of course, the Legion by its proximity to dissolving agents is the least stable as a social order. Its death will be, as predicted, becoming stretched too thin and infighting - quickly dissolving back into the hateful waste that it emerged from, its members scattered to continue on as before.

Such is the civilizational dilemma posed by the Candidate, of the Sweet Thing triptych.

The Candidate functions both as sovereign and revolutionary, the perfect embodiment of the state as its sword - the tool that creates and dismantles in equal measure. Violence functions here as ink, the neutral force which lays down tracks of civilization. The Candidate offers to both dissolve and create civilization - welcoming hope as he welcomes in revolution, both equivalent via the discourse of blood.

The Candidate here acts as the lobster in 10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals. Territorialization and Reterritorialization in two pincers. The Candidate as the lobster has two claws, both from the same cephalothorax. This force of articulation is what’s primarily at question in New Vegas. Violence, or war, are sovereign blood, the cellular-nomadic existence’s tool-nature. Political orders rise and fall, technology accumulates and scatters, but blood remains neutral, a medium of transmission for the lobster.

The lobster is fed experience every time the player pulls the trigger. The lobster, violence, extra-exists the humanity participating in it, the civilizations it founds and destroys.

The course of the game is to either territorialize or reterritorialize, but all possibilities are held in the player’s hands. The end title cards exist in a deck, shuffled, but always present, each moment pre-existing from the beginning. The question has any number of answers, but in the act of the question, every answer is contained already. One temporal route is one shuffling and laying out of the deck, but this is an infinite action. The only thing that remains real is the act of the question and the deck itself, the acts of the lobster.

Red Sun Over Paradise

In him broods already a taste for mindless violence - the Lobster, the Courier, the Judge - exist as the only thing remaining when the dust settles. The noise of the desert is constant, as empires rise and fall war remains, the sun rising and falling each day over the desert.

The sun is violence and attains its power as a sign from violence. The other story of a captured god - the Canaanite interpretation of lightning that gave birth to Yahweh and eventually “I Am That I Am” - is the same, a violence so heavenly that it must exist as the sign-that-is, God, in other terms. Yet at any scale, this sublimity exists. Violence in all its forms - ecstasy, pain, death - for both perpetrator and victim - is that which is. Violence cannot be made linguistic or lesser, it cannot be brought down to Earth or made to signify anything except itself. It acts as a sign that solely is - it can be used within another context, justifications and goals in war acting like rituals before God, but in itself, it cannot be made lesser. It’s through this action that the idea of God comes into being from the sun - the sun is the greatest violence, a floating sign, like an eternal war that we have no choice but to affix ourselves in orbit around.

The human recreation of the sun is the ultimate development of war. As God is to religion, violence is to war. It’s here that the first hints of nuclear energy emerge - not in the developments of modern science, but in the first exile from Eden. Humanity fell due to arrogance, taking on and absorbing the power of God for themselves - in exactly the same way as Utsuho consumed the Yatagarasu. Stepping forth onto the wilderness is the Candidate, possessed with violence once reserved for the sun.

Contrasted from the sun above, the Candidate forms a dual-orbit. Mankind consumed the violence of God and thus gave birth to God in every last soul. Each soul has the potential to become God at the point of a knife or gun, and the religion of war emerges to bring this beyond simple chaos into mass, organized form.

It’s here that the twin twines of war emerge - development and practice. Atomic weapons emerge as a long line of continuation as humans create, not as engineers or tinkers, but as in the powers of God, by creating new life. As Deleuze and Guattari wrote in 1227: Treatise on Nomadology- The War Machine, a weapon and its user form a new organism, a new life created by the stolen solar power of God. Each weapon-assemblage is a new birth from mankind’s godhood, sent forth to practice its nature on the wilderness.

War is the arena of worship where each assemblage practices its nature. The rifleman, the charioteer, the centaurs consuming the corpses of Brother of Steel members in the irradiated hole. That creatures emerge from radiation morphed and distorted into weapon-assemblages is the perfect metaphor for this, where the most literal example of recreating the solar godhood gives birth to creatures from itself as the first creation once did.

The Aztecs fed the sun with heartblood, the sun drips red and vile over the wasteland where the Kid and the Judge cross. In the irradiated Mojave, Utsuho’s subterranean suns form as much a backdrop to ceaseless violence as the sun hanging perpetually above the wasteland. This is the face of war that never changes as the ending narration states, the face of the sun.

Bibliography
Judgement - the Tarot of Marseilles
Revelation - King James Version
Touhou Chireiden ~ Subterranean Animism - Team Shanghai Alice
Fallout: New Vegas - Obsidian
CONELRAD 640-1240 - CIVIL DEFENSE RADIO mod for F:NV, Casum
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Killer is Dead - Grasshopper Manufacture
A Thousand Plateaus - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Diamond Dogs - David Bowie
100 Suns - Michael Light
After the Law, Nick Land
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - Platinum Games