ABSTRACT
London, May 1858: Marx was rewiring the meat, growing nerves in the spinal columns of lampreys held open by Toshiba micro-manipulators, before splicing them into the isolated pulp, thus turning it into sensitive linkage-matter, communications lines, not for the Baroque valve-and-duct automata that once consisted of “numerous mechanical and intellectual organs” (Marx 1974: 692), but to circulate through undifferentiated protoplasm till the meat gets so thoroughly baked through that it forms a crust shielding its newly nervured biomass. “Revolution was like that,” piped the biohydraulics, still swimming through the Berggasse: “a delusion…, a pipe dream that the flesh would be restored” (Kadrey 1989:189).
