A Machine for Magical Girls

A videogame about war, sacrifice, capitalism and pigs. A manga about war, sacrifice, love and magical girls.

This piece is a sort of add-on with some further thoughts to the previous piece, The Joy Man, you don’t need to read it, but some of the more detailed Aztec-Bataille stuff I won’t be repeating.

And, although I oft apologise for this, but allow me another “tweet that inspired this article”:

Here, I want to talk about probably the best demonstration of this and the examples are rather weird so I ask for patience. The pair is the videogame Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and the Japanese manga Anti-World Magical Girl Tsubame (also known as Magical Girl Tsubame: I will (not) save the world). Might seem a weird mix, but between lore dumps and an E-Celeb video coming out and in time with me reading some extra Bataille, it all slots together. Cactus-fruit-flags and all of that.

See, on the face of it, they both have a sort of Bataille-sacrifice taste: one indulging in a little Aztec imagery, the other nationalist symbols; They both play with a sort of interaction with the future and the nature of war; One takes the entirety that sacrificing the sons will stop the war, while one is sacrificing a nation’s children to stop a war and absorb negative emotions. One of them premises on a way of making war-without-a-war and the other is war-is-the-end.

They’ll makes Pigs/Magical Girls of us all!

Except where Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs fails, is that it gets caught up in two things: Grief, which is fair and Capitalism, which I am less lenient on. I don’t think it deliberately intends to either, it just seeps through - in that lazy-but-educated liberal way that I wouldn’t want to label Marxist. Oh isn’t it funny that Mandus had to work hard to convince the working class to get trapped, because they are so much more aware of being exploited than the politicians? Oh, didn’t you know that war and capital go together and you’re all pigs to slaughter? Not to say these aren’t valid ideas, but it almost comes off as a sort of disgusted feeling towards the Aztecs and betrays its own imagery.

Pigs In Zen

See, the labour, the servitude, the objectification is found within The Accursed Share and in the Acephale is all still there. Not quite in the same Marxist way, concerned closer with “things”, or “thingness” which I went into in The Joy Man in regards to the Dealer in Buckshot Roulette. The world of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, however, conflates the servitude into which labour is contracted and then re-sold to the worker as a sort of positive expenditure of energy with a wider concept of different types of economies, and higher economies in which the thing (not thing) is elevated outside of the system.  This conflation is seen primarily with the restraint on vitae and the vitae economy  – the very thing that powers the fusion of the manpigs – and the sort of outsideness, outside influence and madness inherent in what makes the Aztecs and the Machine (in game) demand sacrifices. The contractedness, closer to a Deleuzian style, means everything of which one does has to be for some sort of transaction, and one can never truly go beyond the locked in economy – the physical labour market of a pig slaughterhouse and producing meat. Labour is labour, but the act of “chaining” and “contracting” still exists within a person (such as Lacan’s desire) but this distinction is now getting into the realm of Zizek, and that’s for the magical girls later. This unchaining, this madness for Bataille – and Deleuze especially in cases like Nietzsche – is not done on a raw labour level but a metaphysical, mystical “outside” layer too. Same in which the early forms of Manpigs who were laboured, fell into the “outside” dimensions. There could be a way here then to re-unite capitalism and the “chaining” of these manpigs to “reality” but that’s not really “capitalism”, then.

It’s just a raw form of labour, coding, programming, contracting. There’s no growth, there’s no real anything in terms economic movement. The manpig themselves are always on the verge of being a catastrophic non-use of metaphysical labour, and the accursed share of those politicians used in the manpig-creation-process are not “wasted”, their labour is just changed. The indistinctness from both the workers and the politicians in the manpig (you never know whether it was a dock worker or a politician that made either a Tesla (high functioning) or a Wretch (low functioning) Pigman), removes a sort of class-revolution, it’s humanity as a whole, a new tribe. If anything it probably shares some flavours of Accelerationism but it’s closer to something like Samuel Butler’s trilogy The Book of Machines.

This loops us back to Bataille actually, because the last page of the trilogy offers us exactly the difference, and the within war economy of consumption versus the without militarism economy of conquest that A Machine For Pigs conflates in its capitalism-critique undertones:

“Among themselves the machines will war eternally, but they will still require man as the being through whose agency the struggle will be principally conducted. In point of fact there is no occasion for anxiety about the future happiness of man so long as he continues to be in any way profitable to the machines; he may become the inferior race, but he will be infinitely better off than he is now. Is it not then both absurd and unreasonable to be envious of our benefactors?”¹

What reflects all of this, and what perhaps bums me about this is that you can sell the player this madness. it’s a horror game at a time of London where humans were battery-farmed for either war or factories. Just take it though, without the capital. How insane, and brutal, the idea of sacrificing a child to chaos to stop the oncoming war, not knowing that war itself was the fuel. All of the criticisms of Bataille, a re-unification of "consummation" and "consommation” in a grieving man’s madness, the blurred lines of mis-reading Aztec imagery and Nietzschean will all comes to fruition, it would be cutting to the player, to sell them this and then give them the apocalypse of the manpigs pulling kids about in the streets. While it probably wouldn’t be a perfect academic argumentative critique, it works for selling you the protagonist. Sell them Mandus’s choice with that choice – death by living machine and metamorphosed into a pig or death by the skin falling off by nuclear radiation dressed like Xipe Totec. Horror-horror, you can do that with games, you can sell them a character. I know we live in a world where people don’t seem to be able to play again if it isn’t literallyme.png but horror is a way you can mix the profane and the sacred. Play with the familial bonds without showing bear-sex or incest. Burn your kids. Player, ‘lest the salamanders shed their skin.

The Cyborg-Pig-Human and Magical-Human-Cyborg

Anti-World Magical Girl Tsubame, has a different take on this. See it started with a mind-virus causing people to go mad and a girl who was immune to it. However, instead of being the bizarre world of the cure-girl being a McGuffin everyone has a personal claim to, like The Last Of Us, Kokoro agrees to the experiments, agrees to make the cure, and then after everyone’s cured, war breaks out. The energy expended in the original virus run, seemingly needed to go somewhere else; so Kokoro becomes Koko - the virus is turned into a biological weapon. In response, the world created anti-Koko weapons, and all of this is under the guise of “doing the killing saves others”. Except, in Anti-World Magical Girl Tsubame energy doesn’t just sit there, there’s an economy that needs to be upheld and as the Kokos get consumed. Viruses, being sacrificed by other people’s mechanical weapons turns any sort of human-sacrifice away from anything human at all.

The original girl Kokoro, with the last of her humanity named “regret” then loses her sense of self and vanishes. What remains is empty, death-driven, no-self clone of viruses. An optimised, rationalised version of perhaps the most perfect Joy-In-The-Face-Of-Death person. And so, now there is a world of energy – no sacrifice, just emotions and viruses spilling up and over, humans have averted the outside economy once more! This is over flowing, recreating Cruelty Squad on the streets; empty, ceaseless, violence spilling over. J♡P♡N had to protect their own, be the arbiters of love for humanity, not this violence.

What begets this, is a new kind of sacrificial war, the kids were dressed up in mythic symbols (Magical Girl) and made sure to absorb that excess energy and then to die. We have returned to Aztecs! Huzzah! Throw the bodies of the cyborgs down the streets and let the viruses burst like crackling in the fire! Yet, the remains of the virus clones, in all their happy loss of self, free from any morals, free from anything else but their own death have lost what makes them human. They can only stand still and infect and die. A demonstration of why Bataille says you cannot just verbally initiate yourself into the mysticism or the madness by reciting a tantra. They are the perfect consumption for war, but they have no mysticism. You can deprive them of all meaning of anything that is an intellectual or moral, but one must have joy, or love. There has to be movement for this “apotheosis of the flesh and of alcohol as well as the trance states of mysticism”².  This is why they had to re-invent the girls, make them Magical Girls too. To give motivation, to give a mythology, to touch the mysticism that gives the fire of a person’s soul and body it’s fuel. To make them love.

To give praise to the writers of Machine for Pigs, Mandus is both sides of this. Pre the game, as he gives his kids to the Machine, he is crippled but not emasculated by the fear of tomorrow. In his own “tragic jubilation” he creates the machine, he builds the slaughter house, in fear of war, in fear of tomorrow, in the face of death he goes beyond all of London. Then, when the player takes control, and pours over him their morality, intelligence, their fear and horror expected of the game – the now – and fear of death (and losing) he becomes paralysed. So all he can do is watch, and eventually turn off the machine, but it does not solve the manpig apocalypse outside, nothing changed, capitalism still rolled on. World War 1 and 2 still came and went. Mandus becomes weak when the player vomits themselves over him, and that’s what it is – regurgitation. Regurgitate all your a-priori knowledge of the previous game, of the notion of “game” itself, and you drive Mandus a empty, boring, impotent place. This is why I make the argument that we should’ve had a profane Mandus, the same way Japan in Anti-World Magical Girl Tsubame had just done an atrocity, because Japan did end the world war, did move things forward. A satirical image of Hegel as a magical girl gleefully cheering as the virus eats the brains of magical girls and manpig.

This mixture of facing down the Bataille’s joy of death, some fall to organic-rationalism, some fall to mechanical-mysticism. These two examples are so great because ultimately what splits this line is.

Capital.

Machine-Man-Pig-Man

Yet, the manpigs lose their charm with this Mandus, with this selling. If anything. They fall into servitude. They shy away from obscenities in the light and fire, they bow their heads in servitude of their tasks. Their consumption in energy, allows them to root themselves in our world, to not slip too far into the other side, into mysticism. Two alive souls, consumed with excess vitae and turned together into the ultimate robot. Orgone energy, not from the metal-lined boxes, but from the consumption. Manpigs are created under the mechanical Hegel, created under the lactation of a mother’s milk from his own breasts and within, all of human spirit is machined, rationalised, turned into a unit. Logically drunk down in monads, but not once does this touch the machines themselves, not once are these fusions of cyborg or any sort of Landian techno-thumping artificial intelligence. A retvrn to old school occultism, drunk on the phenomenology of spirit as Mandus gives him a jester hat and tells him that the spirit is the juice of the meat that that feeds chaos and prevents the sun god from abandoning his throne. Just as Kokoro abandoned her place and vanished, leaving her notions in the sky – stored “hearts” of harmless energy but never expelled – and abandoning her duty.

Manpigs are organic, in every which way, so organic that they slip up into the noumena, out of grasp for a human because they are that within the most purest distilled form, but they are rationalised, logicised, unitised. Their labour still ties to their worth, Leibniz’s logic is slathered over them like the triumphant saliva dripping over a dying prey. Opposite of the cyborg quantum girls. Cold to touch, never seen by the real-register, nothing but pure mechanical optimisation of human emotion into consumption. They have frills, and chains and nuclear weapons but they are never organic, never in nature of the planet, there’s a reason why the magical girls survive a loop through history and the world, while in their overwhelming energy the manpigs keep falling out of the real-register.

Is it weird to say that this gap, this rationalisation is down to capital? But no, and there’s something different there. A reverse accelerationism, a primitivism almost, but it’s not even calling the past more primitive, but more mystical, but not in the nostalgia sense, but something beyond. The miracle way out of the military-industrial complex and new found markets of capitalism and machine. To return back to the time of Aztecs, but then feed that to the machine. Feed the sacrifices and the machine together. Create a faster, better rationalised, machine-driven meta-humans, except not done with the future and AI, but vitae! It is not the nihilism and coldness of Anti-World Magical Girl Tsubame but a different, mystical, backwards accelerationism. Still locked into labour. Still locked into capital.

The joy in the face of death in one, is cold, mechanical, quantum, and filled with symbolic imageries of love and sacrifice.

The joy in the face of death in the other is that maybe we will not breathe mustard gas, but the fumes of a new Anthropocene.

But you, you the player, you had to interfere. You had to feed Mandus’s mind with projections about capitalism, and sacrifice, what is sacred and profane.

AINOALL in Anti-World Magical Girl Tsubame, simply says it is, what it is. An atrocity is an atrocity but it ticks the world over. That’s why Tsubame’s the Anti-World Magical Girl.

L♡ve Ap♡calypse

Let’s get a little faschy, for a moment. You know, I’ve had something weirdly chewing around ever since I saw a Nick Land tweet about South Korea and autism. Eventually, when you rationalise so hard the machine optimises to autism. Consuming anything that is symbolic, while also socialising it, so erotic-ness becomes vague bimbo-fied symbols of “sex” without actually being erotic. You get hyper optimised machine made sexy bodies on television when you’ll end up falling in love with some mediocre but cute 5/10 who smiled at you at a Starbucks drive through. This sort of happens in Tsubame but with the concept of “love” as the indirect abstraction and “love” boiled down to “motivation for someone/thing/tribe”. I can see here someone posting that one Zizek meme, that was once posted in a Tsubame thread:

The thing is, in this autism-like scrubbing of anything between the lines, this rationalism cannot be horny. Cannot desire-drive for the apocalypse. The cyborg girls are not given a direct thirst for annihilation but a rationalistic look of “love” boiled down to “protect this” as if love and even with how  “J♡P♡N” is renamed as just a brand-sign-value has nothing to do with love or desire. Kokoro does not say that love is her last remaining human quality but regret – and this regret is love – but it’s not the love that’s being symbolised by her government. It’s not even “transcendent” secular rationalism, because it doesn’t have the actual history, gaze, and social embeddings inside of it. The AINOs and the Quantum Girls are purely neutral, they look down upon the world and simply react. Would you call this love? For Bataille, yes, and maybe the psychoanalysis people will talk about Lacan and how the centre of it all is love. But I think there’s a different type of love. Two actually. One is the rationalistic, cold love of the Quantum Magical Girls who are motivated by love-emotion, and there to expel energy and keep the cycle of the world together. Then however, is the love of Koko and perhaps Tsubame.

The latter is a love of humanity, and to love humanity in the Kokoro way is also to destroy itself in a sense. As Kokoro leaves humanity, holding onto regret as her one last piece of humanity, she finds herself, entirely human and entirely in love. To destroy her entire self with the virus and then only to live, as an object to the masses. The autism inherent in the machine and capitalism can never truly love humanity in this way, for it would have to self-destruct, it would have to have something external to set it free:

“In the course of the ecstatic vision the object is finally revealed... as catastrophe, but neither as God nor as nothingness... the object that love, incapable of freeing itself except by external means, demands in order to give voice to the cry of lacerated existence”³

As such, Kokoro is cut apart, her immune system, her body, is torn apart and replicated in small chunks, even though she lives. Even though she plays no part as the direct Biological Weapon Koko, she’s still a part of it. She hides away now, turned into the real. The last remaining virus, Koko whose entire sense of self has been obliterated and she only knows nothing but love creates natural disasters. Humans who do not protect and love her friends – the sacrificial magical girls – they become deadly notions, end of the world catastrophes. There’s no more sacrificing, no more economy, no more accursed share of magical girls. So now catastrophe of the rationalisation of overwhelming love now overflows into real-catastrophes. And that is how Tsubame and co help fight the notions;  “The impossibility of being satisfied in love is a guide for the leap to fulfilment at the same time as being the nullification of all possible illusion.” And in their fulfilment for the deadly notions expend their energy but also find peace and actual love.

But this, all of this, cannot be horny for the apocalypse. They love wholly, and beyond poverty. They do not take or understand Lacan’s tongue in cheap loving not yourself, or loving an image of a person. They simply are the core energy of love. The thirst for love that not even the AINO machines with all the magic AI quantum power machines can never rationalise. It must be met with human-focused love and mysticism.

Anyway I think this is what the one /x/ post on a 4chan Tsubame thread was getting at:

1. This clip was taken from the #Accelerate (mit.edu) book, for extra funsies and connections

2. The Practice of Joy in the Face of Death (Acéphale 5, 1939)

3. The Sacred Conspiracy. P.38