ABSTRACT
Bureaucratic logic and the modern state develop historically within and around the same areas of central and northern Europe. Their force is in their synergism, in the emergence of a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Yet this synergism also pulls the state and its infrastructures into vectors of unease, tension, contradiction, rupture. The other vector, of the logic and aesthetics of the emotions of holism, swells from within embodiment – of people together in place through time – deeply texturing the sensuous existence of the state. The people sensuously dreaming the national dominates. The cyborg state is itself the chiasm, the crossover of these forces of presence and absence, the lineal hardness of cybernetic self-knowledge twisting together with the emotionalism of selves melting together through self-sacrifice. The twisting cyborg state veers into cybernetic over-control, needing, arousing, yet fearing the emotions of the national, themselves veering towards the out-of-control.
