The Thing’ s metaplasticity does not open spaces of possibilities, but closes them into the empty exile of its anarchical trajectivity. It does not explore morphospaces, but capriciously interrupts the flux of becoming and thus blocks the possibility of a morphospace. It fixes a totalitarian plane of consistence by acting as the definitive attractor—or black hole—for any possible or impossible form, opening a portal into a speculative universe where chaos-time and ordered forms coexist folded in quantum simultaneity. Since The Thing exists, all existing and non-existing forms are submitted to it. The Thing works as an un-forming device, imposing a radical openness that creates an abstract fugue-state, a final exit from form that “evades language, reshapes subjectivity, and, finally, establishes itself as that most familiar thing—the body”. The abstraction of a form is a formula—etymologically, a minor form. In our case, it is an alchemical recipe for contingent transmutation, for abject creation of a body. Clay or mud are not suitable feedstock for flesh. Every flesh-creating machine requires a bloody sacrifice: information is not enough. The humans in the film react to The Thing as they would to a common contagious disease, applying the same principle of geographic quarantine that, for millennia, has seemed adequate to prevent the expansion of plague outbursts. Yet The Thing does not behave as a typical infectious or parasitic agent. It hides into everybody’s nowhere. Perhaps it would be better to see it as an esolang “doing life in a way it has never been done before”, , trying to re-allocate life “to the sole thing that knows how to use it effectively, to the Shoggoth-summoning regenerative anomalization of fate, to the runaway becoming of such infinite plasticity that nature warps and dissolves before it. To The Thing . To Capitalism.”
GERMÁN SIERRA