You feel a shiver down your spine so you look behind. But it’s already too late, there’s nothing there. Whatever it was, it came and went. It’s touched you already. Had it not, you wouldn’t have felt a thing. You keep on looking, though: left, right, up, down, inwards, outwards. Directionless by the end of it.

There’s a back you can’t see. It is the spine. Always behind you, moving you, (un)thinking each impulse ahead of you all while unthinkable in itself. It is plugged directly into the brain, the moving non-thinking brain, letting you think you’re the big boss in charge of it all, but by the time you’ve given it an order, it has already executed it, your cognition is merely the recording of its action. It is the backend of the program you think you’re running, working you how it pleases, it has pre-coded all the answers to your inputs and executed them by now. The <you> I’m addressing is both its product and alibi, both plural and singular, we are in the same boat after all, and as the currents beneath it form into a whirlpool, this shabby raft we’ve fashioned ourselves, the HMS Present, becomes akin to the hallucinated landmass of the future we’ve set sail for. 

The spine is also a clock and calendar (you can get a first hint of this by its serialized vertebral structure). Not keeping the time but creating it and dispersing it within your body – a time machine. What it ticks as the executive branch of the unthinking brain, you’ve been taught to call a second. Circadian rhythms keep you tied to chronic time, ultimately creating the loose compound named [you].  “Chronos: the time of measure that situates things and persons, develops a form, and determines a subject” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 262). The spine is not a metaphor, it is physically and materially present, it moves you as encoder and decoder of all electrical intensities traversing the body. Its relation to history is metonymic, it stays behind but you can’t turn towards it. It defines the limits and capacity of movement concerning temporal production that happens both inside and outside the body. Time is being imposed from behind. “To be inside history is to have a relation with Chronos. Yet (universal) history is not itself chronological” (CCRU 2017: 107). 

We are inside history – a cell that becomes smaller and smaller as it gets more cluttered, the past accumulating (like) capital and forming a system predicated on infinite growth of growth. Time is indeed money: “an axiomatic of abstract quantities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 139). Burroughs understood time as “not a human invention but a prison” (Burroughs 1987: 31), yet the prison is located within the incarcerated body, formulating a Mobius-strip bondage operating on an undecidable backwards-forwards distinction from an undecidable inwards-outwards position. Burroughs’ awareness of his bondage does not facilitate an escape. He describes the architecture of the penitentiary from within, through a language that is first and foremost temporal in nature, associating the inception of the time prison with the split of Madagascar from Africa as he sees “The People of the Cleft, formulated by chaos and accelerated time, flash through sixty million years to the split” (31). 

Geological historians have contested the figure of sixty million years because it has been taken to describe Chronos as is and not the formation of its infrastructure. The number sixty is not a measurement but a model, not a variable but a function. The sixty seconds of the minute, the sixty minutes of the hour, concentric segments extending into a telescopic pylon. The vertebrae and the rings on a tree stump are essentially the same structure – extended or collapsed, time distributed physically across the bodies, the round face of the clock which flattens and binds it all. But as disparate temporalities overlap and trace a plane, fault lines appear for “In a multilinear system, everything happens at once: the line breaks free of the point as origin; the diagonal breaks free of the vertical and the horizontal as coordinates” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 297). 

This breaking free, however, is not an escape but a false flag and a PSYOP, a pretense for a violent reterritorialization in which all time-lines collapse upon each other, not becoming entangled but reinforcing each other as in a braid, forming a thicker, more rigid structure in which linearity becomes a pretext for simultaneity. Instead of stepping into aeonic temporality: “the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early” (262), Chronos ultimately bridges all divisions and does not allow anything to float. It appropriates the simultaneous too-late and too-early into its own mechanic rigidity risking destruction.

What is now behind you is not the past per se, but the pre-coding of its (re)emergence, the events themselves appear to have passed because of them no longer being recognized as present, their absence from the sensorium, whereas in fact they are recorded in the virtual, permanently awaiting the right input that facilitates their import – the no longer of cognition is not the no longer of existence, but the no longer of actuality. For Derrida the specter is something that „cannot be fully present: it has no being in itself but marks a relation to what is no longer or not yet.” (Hagglund 2008: 82) Be that as it may, if the specter has no material being, what is no longer does; the no longer is the ghost’s ectoplasm in the form of spinal fluid – not data in its internal and external storages but the highway that facilitates its movement. This is not a question of memory, which can be re-cognized and re-presented, meaning taking it from an assumed behind position and putting it in front of the senses; the only real behindness is that which can only be such – the act of coding a function into the body whose activation is dependent on the recognition of something which is stored in aggregate and carried along. Memory is a set of variables, an archive of viable inputs, the reaction to it is the backend hardcoded output, yet that output is the remixed expression of that very memory. 

The functioning of spinal temporality appears as dysfunction, working as a seemingly oxymoronic coupling of paralysis and convulsion. It is paralytic because through oversaturation it is incapable of progressing and keeping its pretension of linearity, the aggregate proliferates itself as it keeps cancerously registering the same outputs. At the same time it is convulsive because it can’t stop doing it, it keeps ticking faster and faster, continuously overwriting itself while retaining traces as “in any cumulative circuit, stimulated by its own output, and therefore self-propelled, acceleration is normal behavior” (Land 2014: 511). In Fisher’s work on hauntology, drawing on Jameson, he talks of eternal decades, be it an eternal 60s, 80s or 30s, which are constantly and continuously re-instantiated.  The past is fragmentally individuated and plugged into the feedback circuit, as every cell can be traced as the output of another. The present and the future can only be experienced as memories – muscle memory activating reflex nostalgia on a societal level. “Unprecedented” has become the favorite word of every news anchor yet everything they talk about is eerily familiar including the deployment of the term. What is new is the acceleration of the emergence of precedents.  

The past becomes simultaneous with itself. We have 30s fascists and 80s yuppies, coke and cigarettes are popular again, a new space race but this time corporate and bereft of exploratory ambitions. As the satellite replaces the shuttle, the universe collapses into a hermetic closed self-stimulating circuit and the cosmos is cancelled. Baudrillard asserts that “our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view” (Baudrillard 1995: 10). But the past has come to colonize every form of expression as it keeps (re)creating itself. The stockpile exceeds the world. The past exceeds history. The world is a living museum curated by capital on the principle of nostalgia at its most fascistic. And it’s all for sale in the gift shop.

Entry #3 in Tractates Cryptica Scriptura: “He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed” (Dick, 1981: 257). The [He] of Christianity, the [they] of paranoid schizophrenia, the [you] of this text are all the same structure, simultaneously singular and multiple, a familiar Other who is always another. In Dick’s epiphany or delirium (in the spectral distinction between the two) he understood that time does not pass, but accumulates and emerges – history as a collection of (spatial) differences, of materially dense empty spaces. In entry #36 he states “We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another” (263). For Dick, the [it] that thinks is the transcendental Brain or Mind which is and exceeds the world, but I argue it belongs to the list of pronouns enumerated above, a compound both loose and dense, static convulsive accelerating Chronos perceived in individuated form. It only thinks inasmuch as it is and constantly becomes its own thoughts and knowledge.

In Dysphoria Mundi, Preciado states that “Time is not what it used to be. Time is becoming other. Time is othering” (2025: 65). It is indeed so for it has inhabited us, every person peopled by h/Histories, filling the empty space at the core of each, the pour-soi reserved for otherness. But it does not leave, it coagulates in there, becoming ever denser while remaining an emptiness. Intentionality degree 0, turn any direction to see the same ever more saturated still image seared onto the retina as your eyes are rolled so far into their sockets the optic nerve might snap, spine convulsing in a futile search for a different landscape. The growing pressure in this cluttered chamber makes it mere thermodynamic fact that “the [time] we thought we had inherited as a preserved block of history has been broken, has caught fire, is burning” (66). 

“When a system reaches its own limits and becomes saturated, a reversal is produced” (Baudrillard, 82). Implosion is due. Both temporal and spatial extensibility become impossible as the past slingshots into our backs from within and rushes ahead of us. The walls are closing in. How close do they have to get before the room becomes a coffin, too tight to turn, leaving just enough room for convulsions? As your back slams spasmodically into the wall behind, the sound it makes is an echoless ticking. You come to the realization that’s all it’s ever been.