Why Harassment Architecture and Marquis de Sade Are Boring
Thoughts on Excess and the Thirst for Immediacy
I previously wrote about BAP, Marquis de Sade, and nature. One of the things that interested me about Bronze Age Mindset was its appeal to nature in an effort to arrive at some sort of immediate meaning. I suggested that BAP’s dreams of being an object and his description of advanced sensors that observe without interference parallel Sade’s libertines’ desire for unmediated pleasure. In both Bronze Age Mindset and Sade, there’s a fascinating wrestle with a fundamental limit (a limit, I would add, that I am currently persuaded is insuperable and whose very insuperable-ness indexes the central cleavage between those who are “progressive” and those who aren’t).
This fundamental limit features prominently in Mike Ma’s Harassment Architecture. Reading Ma's book, I couldn’t help but feel there was just...too much. Many parts, it seems to me, don’t actually contribute to the book as a whole, and this too-much-ness is one of the book’s most Sadean features. One of the most notable characteristics of Sade’s writing is how boring it is. The extravagant amounts of sex and violence do nothing to make reading Sade any less of a slog. Sade’s books reveal how enough repetition can make anything tedious.
Harassment Architecture suffers from a similar problem. Unlike Sade, however, Ma acknowledges this feature. One acknowledgment is in the second warning at the beginning of the book (“If you came here expecting coherent plot or structure, you bought or stole the wrong book”); another is in the two notes included from the editor (“Extremely off-topic. I know it’s your book but come on. Read the first paragraph and read the last one. Jesus Christ, man…” and “Nobody fucking cares. Get back to the other stuff” [27, 72; emphasis in original]). But Ma’s most explicit attempt to mitigate the excesses of his book is the first warning:
For your enhanced reading experience, I have marked chapters and pieces I value most. It’s for those people who don’t read entire books. Or those people who don’t give a shit about everything I say. Or for those who are coming back for more. They are denoted by a tiny “x” following chapter titles
Marking chapters that are most valued by the author is an interesting move. The fragmentary nature of Harassment Architecture lends itself to this approach (and might even be necessary given our screen depleted attention spans). At the same time, this suggests that Ma himself considers some parts to not contribute to the book as a whole. It’s revealing that to exclude the chapters without a tiny “x” would reduce the length of Harassment Architecture from roughly 150 pages to less than 40 pages. To my mind, this indicates that the book could have been better curated.
There is also, of course, a shared affinity for destruction in Ma and Sade. Consider, for example, the following passage from the chapter “Why We Hurt” (a chapter marked by a tiny “x,” which was likely my favorite):
There is zero chance of compromise — the modern world must be burned deeper than just ground level, but down into the system of underground holes and nests. There is zero chance of dialing back the damage. Everything has to burn now, right now. The longer we take to end it, the more that future generations are subjected to. There is no sucking the venom out, there is no amputation, there is only submersing in fire. (126; my emphasis)
At one level, a straightforward comparison with Sade can be made here. The above passage echoes many statements that can be found throughout Philosophy in the Bedroom such as:
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE—Do you know, Dominance, that by means of this system you are going to be led to prove that totally to extinguish the human race would be nothing but to render Nature a service?
DALMANCE—Who doubts of it, Madame? (230-31; my emphasis)
Both Ma and Sade’s libertines are set on destruction (and both happen to see this destruction as serving nature; as Sade puts it somewhere: “Destruction, hence, like creation is one of the mandates of Nature”). But beyond this similarity of content (destruction), there’s a similarity of form (the how of this destruction). It’s not just that Ma desires destruction, but more importantly the way in which this desire for destruction is shaped that brings him close to Sade. What strikes me as formally Saddean is how Ma desires to burn deeper than just ground level—to reduce things to less than nothing. What would the reduction of something to less than nothing be? Blanchot’s notion of “transcendental negation” again comes to mind here. It’s as though the destruction of mere substance is not enough; for the destruction to be complete, it must reach beyond, to that by which the (destroyed) substance is apprehended or made sense of.
Ma’s desire compliments BAP’s dream of being an object, which I considered in my previous post. If in BAP there’s a desire to arrive at sight as pure substance and observe without interference (which is to say to observe without being part of the observation, or to be perversely—as his pseudonym would seem to call attention to—exempt from the process of observing), Harassment Architecture gives shape to this same desire but in inverted form: instead of BAP’s absolute substance, Ma is after more-than-substance. Together, BAP and Ma disclose the two sides of a thirst for (im)mediacy.
I would suggest that this desire drives Ma—like Sade—to prattle on so much. Consider how Sade’s libertines believe religious and cultural laws to be nullified by nature, yet insofar as Sade’s libertines must continually repeat that these laws and values are nullified by nature, they demonstrate just how immune (the) “Law” is. In trying to “say it all” and get beyond that by which substance is made sense of and embrace pure, unmediated nature, Sade’s libertines continually fail to do just this. This very failure to arrive at pure, unmediated nature drives the libertines to keep talking about (arriving at) pure, unmediated nature. This is in part why there’s so much repetition in Sade’s writing—and why his books are so boring. Harassment Architecture is full of similar vapid repetitions (albeit with more guns and less fucking). It’s no coincidence that many of the chapters not marked with an “x” are repetitions of strikingly similar violent fantasies. These excessive fantasies (excessive first in the sense of the fantasies’ content and second in their very inclusion in the book) appear as a necessary residue of an attempt to “say it all,” simultaneously pushing Ma to continue writing (this being excessive in the second sense) and preventing him from achieving the excess of his desire (this being excessive in the first sense of burning deeper than just ground level).