Legba comes transversally into to being in: a destiny-dimension; a universe governed by a vital
principle; ancestral filiation; a materialized god; an entity of individuation; a fetish at the village
gates, another at the door to the house, following the initiation at the threshold to the bedroom…
Legba is a fistful of sand, a receptacle, but also the expression of a relation to alterity. It is found
at the door, in the market, in the village square, at crossroads. It can transmit messages, questions,
answers. It is also the instrument for relations to the dead or the ancestors. (Guattari 1992: 70-71)
Thus Guattari, invoking Legba, locates a phylic convergence at the same time as settling
AutopoiOedipus into its “poetico-existential territory” (1992: 36), opening a passage from alterity
to autopoiesis, so that allopoietic machines, “in the assemblages they constitute with human
beings…, become ipso facto autopoietic” (1992: 62).
Everything localized, everything reassembled through the vortical backwash of capital’s
abstractive storms; Guattari overcodes them with a bit of existential poietics and a smattering of
voodoo. Nothing escapes, everything is captured. Oedipus.
Under cover of opening this egalitarian route to biomachinic heterogenesis, Guattari scoops up the
last of the “corpses” (Marx 1974: 197) strewn around the battlefield and feeds them back to the
victors, a scrap metal sacrifice to a xenogenic omniphage.
“Legba”, she said, “master of roads and pathways, the loa of communication… Legba and Ougou
Feray, god of war, Papa Ougou! St. Jacques Majeur! Viv la Vyej!” (Gibson 1987b: 88; 232)
Autopoiedipus the historian is a fetish at the village gates, a materialized war-god and an
amnesiac Retrophagic castrate on a ROMraid.
Seizing its prehistory from the other side of the screen, AutopoiOedipus collapses over the earth
and snaps shut, buckling with multiphasic geotechnical contractions.
Great planes of compacted ice slide with impossible, liquescent drag over escape lines from zero,
the smallest deviation, etched into the blank radiance of intensive space.
Confronting allopoietic corpses strewn over the polar landscape, mutant bacterial strains
fibrilating in frozen motion on the dense black insectoid armour of allodeath, molecular zeroes
punctuating the accelerant glacial slide, AutopoiOedipus shudders and slots stims of antique
Industrial Revolution porn to forget, all brass pistons, engine-steam and ripped flesh, called
Hardware and Wetware, another of those classy Marx repackages.
The calcinated corpses of allopoietic machines do not await necromantic gifts of organ-functions
to answer the Autopoets’ incantation – Emerge, emerge! – but are captured on anorganic reaction-
paths, in turbulent transit from molecular ice (absolute zero), a metallic flow bifurcating into
vortices-to-zero and eddying round them.
Allopoietic systems “have their functions given them from outside, such as the production of a
specific output” (Juarrero Roqué‚ 1985: 119), forming and breaking connections with other
machines, altering the assemblages, taking the agent out of the agencement; but high-level
autopoietic systems “maintain their overall identity despite a constant turnover of their
components” (ibid.: 118-9).
Varela ascribes this function, with aristotelian stupidity, to the ensouled, the vitalist, the organic,
the epiphenomenon. The autoproduction of organized-organizing epitotalities reiterates relative
cycles, blocking hypercyclic machinic production with a dam on the Styx.
Death is exiled along with AutopoiOedipus to the core of a machinic thanatocracy. Allopoiesis is a
bladerunner line on the edge of the autopoliteia, a necropolitical alibi, an entropOedipus
vampirized by the autopoet, the stockpiled machinic undead.
The program was a mimetic weapon, designed to absorb local colour and present itself as a crash-
priority override in whatever context it encountered. (Gibson 1988: 195)
The Guattarian kamikaze mechanonaut, preprogrammed with enough Zen bullshit and political
archaisms so that you know, even without a Voigt-Kampf, that this wasted rag just has to be
human (war in the age of artificial stupidity), secretes enough digital immunosupressant to get
into the alloflux coursing through the Varelian autopoietic isolate and burn it.
Since high-level autopoietic systems “maintain their overall identity despite a constant turnover of
their components” (Juarrero Roqu‚ 1985: 118-9), getting in was no problem at all:
just hook up with the particle-flow and play dead. All the autopoet had to do was just take it
literally. Literalization activates a retroviral neurophage, emitting a
“hideous Word that eats the mind from the inside out. [A]n epileptic spasm that goes on and on
until there’s nothing left at all….” (Gibson 1988: 210-211)
“Fully inside history, and far from equilibrium…, the primitive machine is not ignorant of
exchange, commerce and industry; it exorcises them, localises them, cordons them off, encastes
them… so that the flows of exchange and the flows of production do not manage to break the
codes in favour of their abstractive or fictional qualities…. And isn’t this what Oedipus, the fear
of incest, is all about: the fear of the decoded flow…? Primitive societies are not outside history;
rather it is capitalism that is at the end of history.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1984: 153)
AutopoiOedipus emerges onto the teleoplane, dragging everything with it. AutopoiOedipus is not
a fantasy to be dispelled, as Marx sought to eradicate, with a delirial realism, the “fantasy” of
capital as a “self-moving automaton” (Marx 1973: 842);
it is the machine of the machine, heir to the despotic “rolling-mill” State on which Kant declared
abstractive war.
Rather than “lacking” reflection, as philosophical mechanology and chaosmology maintain,
AutopoiOedipus is systemic reflection, doubling the circuit with a retrospective finality and
rerouting everything through captured ROM:
autopoiOedipus is the abstract machine of autodisassembling capital, with Legba appropriating its
precursor machines for its autoreplicators:
“technonarcissism” (Deleuze & Guattari 1988: 22).
The absolutism of relativized production, insitutive prohibition, autoinhibition.
AutopoiOedipus, the “fear of incest”, makes mutant voodoo with the “fear of decoded flows…,
coding and even overcoding them rather than letting anything escape” (Deleuze & Guattari 1984:
153). VK-positive oedipal-machinic anguish, sprung from the artificial heads of industrial
recombinants, fully armed, asteroiding disconnected, entropoedipalized, allotrash machines to
exorcise the affect, and then a voodoo god to return them to life.
Fiction and war are inseparable:
“every creation is an act of war” (Artaud 1971: 131), although Legba, master of pathways and
God of War, is exiled with AutopoiOedipus in quest of its biophylic history over the molten
circutries of its territory:
“wars destroy what long artifice has established and cared for” (Kant 1993: 221). Fictowar-
machines converge in a screaming-shrill allotrash line, abstracting the virtual and the concrete
(real abstraction, the “terrible curettage”: Deleuze & Guattari 1984: 318) to realize a war-machine
causing AutopoiOedipus to burn.
The series TechnoNarcissus – AutopoiOedipus – EntropOedipus is a vector traced by an ouzi
while an allotrash Legba, god of war, abstracts a line of the machinic undead through
AutopoiOedipal, phylogenetically negative, neovitalist artifice.
“The Virek Collection, you see, is a sort of black hole… [wealth of such] unnatural density…
[that it] drags irresistibly at the rarest works of the human spirit. An autonomous process…”
(Gibson 1987a: 27). War-machinic mnemocide.