HEATHROW:THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY OF PARANOIA.

“In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference" Giorgio Agamben.

"Of many shifts , blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates, one who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods." Chalked on the roadside were words lifted from a Homeric hymn to Hermes.

Heathrow is a tangle of paranoia, to traverse the perimeter is to dodge clusters of armed coppers. We edge beneath the razor wire of a forlorn camp , a guarded non space mutating into a contemporary locus of struggle. Middle England just this side of the fence, clinging to heritage and hanging baskets,, no site clothes/work boots, no third runway daubed on George cross banners, who do yOU align yourself with? Immigration removal centres, privatised prisons, they're not keen, they don't want them coming in, and they don’t like unhealthy proles holidaying in Spain much either.
Terrorism, a word almost drained of its psychotic cravings by the anodyne platitudes mouthed on ABC lurks in the infrastructure. Does anyone really believe in it? Conspiracy theories abound, there’s a retreat into the escapism of fantasy lands, the irrational.

The three magpies, relic of the 70’s, nothing really changed, a saccharine rendition of’silent night’ on the juke box, it’s August. We’re ignored for a long time and when I get my tea it’s lukewarm and the little cup only half full, its like tea you get from a flask. Its Monday afternoon so there’s just us and a couple of baggage handlers. We leave the faux heritage of this Edwardian tudor and head for the patio bar which is actually some tables and a fence and a car park then the airport. It’s an out of time zone, where people come to have clandestine encounters, a few drinks before a dash to the Renaissance hotel. Its a place of undertable powder slipping and hawkers peddling stuff off the luggage truck. You get it now, or its on its way to the auction house in Tooting love. Julie’s had everything in here, mainly perfume and stuff, specially since the ban on hand luggage and liquids, some nice stuff, expensive, all sorts really. Julie grew up in Bradford, she used to be married to a biker, she had tattoos and loved the allegiance of belonging to a tribe. Then there was feuding and he got nasty and she swapped her council house in Bradford for a flat in Hounslow, it was a clean break,a fresh start..,here in this transit zone everyone was just passing through, she could just disappear. It was her and the Polish and the Somalians and Sikhs and everyone, loads of Polish everywhere, all the pubs and shops turning Polish now. Used to be that a lot of the pubs closed and turned into boring stuff like burglar alarm fitting businesses cos the Asians didn’t really use them so much but now the Poles are bringing them back to life.
The three magpies is alright, she’s been working there three years. Strangely, for a transit zone you get your regulars, blokes from the airport. Then there’s lads from nearby up on a weekend, mainly for the karaoke and late licence, airport meant it was easy to get one, funny hours people work and us with no neighbours to annoy. Outside this strictly controlled zone we had this little pocket that was almost operating outside the law. We had all sorts going on, a lot of young ones off their heads but the old bill never looking in.

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WE WILL MAKE YOU BETTER (PART 2)

I always look in skips. There are a lot of them around here. The Victorian terraces are being reconverted, gutted, as owner/occupiers move in. New plaster getting slapped on, walls repointed. The cheap shit of the ‘70’s and ‘80’s that furnished peoples’ needs when these places were all divided into bedsits and flats ends up dumped. No one has carpets these days either.

You can find furniture, clothes, electrical goods. I used to have a mate who would just go around picking out the copper wire. He’d spend hours stripping the insulation off it, and then take it down to the scrap and weigh it in for a few quid. It was a living, of sorts.

It was half hidden by a board, and some shreds of grim wallpaper – stripes in pink and lilac, with convoluted flowers. It looked like a strange glove in pale yellowish leather. One that was designed to look like a hand, but with holes where the fingernails would be. I thought it was pretty unusual, so I grabbed it; but the board was on top so I had to lift that enough so I could pull it out from underneath. I saw that the glove was a long one, over elbow length. Holding up the board with one hand, I pulled the whole thing out with the other. The glove came out. It wasn’t a glove. There was the glove part that turned into a tube, and the rest of whatever it was wadded into a mass, screwed up, squashed, and covered in plaster dust. I tried shaking the dust off it, then took some of the wallpaper and laid that down in the road next to the skip. I smoothed it out on that, starting at the glove end. The material very fine; wrinkled, but not brittle. I thought that it was some weird sort of garment, and was really impressed at how there was no visible stitching. The glove turned into a tube that seemed to be made to go over the shoulder, but it seemed to have been in a fire. It was charred at the top of the shoulder and across, from under the armpit, leaving a just a circular flap. The edges were brittle, and burnt black, brown scorch marks went across. I was thinking it must have been some sort of expensive fetish wear, being made so well; like an upmarket version of the glove vets put on when they stick their hands up cow’s arses. I was also thinking of the scenario that led to this expensive sex apparel getting burned. Then I stopped. It had a nipple. A scorch mark ran across it, but it was there. Pale tan, with the small nub of flesh in the middle (this had been dried by the fire so it had the translucency and the texture of a dog chew). I looked again, the thing had pores. The “glove” part had lines on the palm, life line, love line.

It lay there in the gutter, against the lurid wallpaper, like a used condom, or a discarded sock, or any of the other things that usually littered the pavements around there. I left it. Someone else could find it, or call the police, or whatever they wanted to do. I left it there and went home to wash my hands until they were sore.

I’ve seen a few others since then. Screwed up, and left against walls with dead leaves and empty crisp packets. Drooping from yellow skips amongst old doors and floorboards, and those shitty white laminate wardrobes with the gold plastic handles that used to be everywhere, as the old houses around get their shiny new facelift. No one has called the police.

TO BE CONTINUED...

WE WILL MAKE YOU BETTER

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WE ARE BAD

You are bad too. Our bodies are on the verge of being paced under a new order. A new battleground is emerging and the front lines are your subcutaneous fat and mucous membranes. We will be cyborgs, machines of loving grace, able to boot up and download every wish. Making bliss states our normal waking consciousness, becoming the bionic angel.

Donna Harraway urges a new sense of realization about our cyborg condition, recognizing the new daily sphere of human-machine interface not only as a product of power relations but also as a potential site for contesting and redefining those relations. She proposes cyborgization as an imaginative myth and resource for women who are socialized away from technology and yet are most often the principal victims of it.

But we must be aware, haven’t they always wanted what’s best for us?
What is being promised to us are the limitless dreams of technology, the ultimate fulfilment of our desires. But while access to our virtual desires have already been halted with the entrance fee of Linden dollars, military progress has developed a fully integrated second order cyborg.

The unstoppable rise of elective plastic surgery is breaking down the psychological boundaries of our bodies, and once we open up ourselves, arch our backs and thrust our sagging flesh further towards the knife there will be no going back. Capitalism will invade and take control over our flesh, our synapses, our optic nerve, our auditory senses, our pancreas, our rectum and our pituitary.

The body is on the verge of being placed under new management, and like all exterior
cultural phenomenon,it will be made to function instrumentally so that it may better fulfill the imperatives of pancapitalism (production, consumption, and order). Currently, pancapitalist power vectors’ attempts to inscribe these imperatives directly onto the code of the flesh are initiating a new wave of eugenics. Under this new bio-regime, physical perfection will be defined by an individual’s ability to separate he/rself from nonrational motivation and emergent desires, thus increasing he/r potential devotion to varieties of political-economic service to perpetuate the pancapitalist dynasty.

We will become post-human but not as we meant it. We are Bad, and they are currently making us better.