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Subject: METASTASIS: genetics and ideology
From: matt@axia.DEmon.co.UK (Matthew Fuller)
Date: 19 Aug 1997 22:27:06 +0200

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METASTASIS: genetics and ideology

Matthew Fuller
matt@axia.demon.co.uk


Cancer is the runaway growth of cells and as such is the most truly
spontaneous upsurge of creativity that a human being is capable of.
Cancer is the threat to western society and comes from a completely
unexpected quarter: the body - the terrain most ensnared by the
authoritarian net - nature has taken it upon itself to supersede the
present order.
Revolutionary proletarians should therefore encourage the growth of
cancer in their bodies. We must fight against the capitalist recuperation
of the creative cell. Don't let the rich get it all.
Cancer is a betrayal from within. Cells which were hitherto
"law-abiding citizens" change their properties, begin to divide and grow
without reference to the needs of the organism, invade adjacent normal
tissues, and may even spread to other parts of the body and form equally
lawless secondary deposits (metastases). These anarchic centres may be set
up in almost any organ. (They provide the exception to the generalisation
about the inverse relationships between differentiation and the power to
divide). It is one of the characteristics of the growth of cancer cells
that the normal cells which turn to malignancy tend to lose their
differentiation. the faster they grow and divide the more primitive they
become.

The System gives with one hand and snatches back with the other.

Of course in this world, the best of all possible worlds, we are offered
the chance to induce cancer, if we buy the correct products; cigarettes;
cars; nuclear power systems. The measurement of creative possibility in
terms of the power to purchase results in a fetishisation, not of the
unconsciously desired state of encanceration, but of its symbolic
replacement.
However not only does the system provide, it also takes away. In
amazing feats of raw blackmail; with billboards, magazine articles and
advertisements placed by organisations with such overtly colonistic names
as the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. The ruling hegemony produces in
workers the fear that if they do not part with enough money (collectively
with millions) to keep thousands of highly paid specialists in their
accustomed luxury laboratories then one in ten to one in three (figures
vary) of them will experience, not the truly joyful biochemical liberation
inherent in us all, but be smitten down with a mythic evil second not even
to the demons of their more ancient mystifications - in such a way has the
proletariat been seduced by its own sterilisation.


Health: the body fragmented

By turning Law into a permanent Fun Run capital pushes every proletarian
into the front line of their own repression. The capitalist propagation of
'health' can be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the
universal category of society as a whole. Proletarians with the merest
amount of revolutionary consciousness will realise that in a world that
really is topsy turvy the moment of purest health is the moment of death.
Only in this context does the alienation produced by health assume decisive
importance for the objective evolution of society and the stance adopted by
the people towards it. Health is the technical realisation of cellular
creativity exiled into a beyond: it is separation perfected within the
interior of a parson. The proletarian is displaced from her own body
inhabiting instead a model which functions with perfect replication but not
with process. Health is the reactionary conditioning that has its ancestry
in the total programmed repetition of Pavlov. This most surely marks the
departure from capitalism as something outside of the body, a structural
relationship between separate cell masses, into that of a field which,
slipped in between pores, insinuates a new terrain, the body politic
materialised. However refracted, reflected and segmented the body may be
within the prevailing conditions of production and consumption's hall of
mirrors these relations are now trapped within something that escapes their
logic. The projected unification of society in the amniotic fluid of
separation serves only to increase the autonomization of its vital cellular
fabric.

The response of the Left

Even when such establishment figures as John Wayne manage to
overcome the generations of condition mangling their bodies, by a suitable
exposure to radiation in a nuclear testing site, the laughing hyenas of the
traditional left hoot with derision. That The Duke himself was able to
achieve this ultimate of revolutionary praxis without any significant
ideological shift points to this as being the most potent, and in the long
term only viable, agent of change. Unable through rigid orthodoxy to
accept the genetic directives for even their own internal liberation they
seek instead to strangle this rupturing feast with a bureaucracy that
unless entirely mechanised contains the hidden flower of freedom. The
health policies of all the present and would-be cellular Gestapo reveal
only different straps of the same straining truss.
The primary event in the encanceration of a cell is a mutation
within a normal somatic cell, the gene or genes affected are those which
are directly or indirectly responsible for cell division. Cancer has to be
the result of such a mutation. The transmission of the cell to the ecstasy
of revolutionary transfiguration is therefore only possible in the most
normal of conditions. The reactionary nature of those who attempt to build
a revolution is in direct proportion to the extent of their abnormal
fervour.

What is to be done

As a first step towards freedom the proletariat should seize the means of
cancer production. A nuclear power station under the control of the
international working class would be able to develop a fair share of
radioactive isotopes for all. That the spirit of 1917 still lives on in
Russia should be clear to all after the historic liberation of thousands of
revolutionary isotopes by the workers of Chernobyl. Critical theory must
contaminate with its own language. The tongues of theoreticians must
realise their inherent carcinogeneity. A hermeneutics of revolutionary
genetics must be formed in order to formulate the immediate and spontaneous
encanceration of the proletarian body.

The Future

This text, and its inevitable victorious climaxing of the class struggle
undoubtedly marks a crucial breakthrough in human understanding. However
this co-carcinogenesis is only a preliminary stage. The creation of cancer
must eventually be released from any form of mediation whatsoever. Cancer
is the purest form of maverick creativity present on this planet.
Speculation has been made as to whether the brains of all animal life are
not merely the degenerated remains of once glorious tumours, atrophied into
cruel parodies after thousands of years of the historical descent into
capitalism. The eventual forms of our liberation will only become apparent
as genetic imperatives combine with the practical possibilities we create
for them. Released from bondage who knows the extent of the full beauty of
the blossom. Forward the independent creative cell.





Text originally published in LEISURE 3, Cardiff, 1991