Well thanks very much for joining us both those who have come out into the bleak cold of Plymouth and those joining us on the live stream. Yeah I wish all of you could be here sharing the mulled wine with us. My name's Robin and I'm the founder of the publishing house Urbanomic which was founded in 2007 and we have been publishing since then contemporary philosophy and preferentially philosophy that interfaces with other disciplines and other practices, art, fiction, music, non-academic philosophy. We're unaffiliated with any institution
and if I could sum up in one phrase the principle behind Urbanomic it would be probably if anyone else would publish it then we probably wouldn't and we've managed to build up an audience that kind of spans all of these different disciplines and therefore that's enabled us to keep on publishing some very weird books over the years. And hopefully to give a platform to writers and thinkers who otherwise wouldn't necessarily get their work out into the world. That's certainly the reason why I feel like it's worthwhile to continue doing this.
Urbanomics has been based in Falmouth in Cornwall for most of its life. We came to Plymouth during the lockdown and since we came here I've really been searching for somewhere that we could do some events and open up some kind of dialogue in the city so I'd like to give a big thanks to cast contemporary arts for allowing us to have this space down here in the dungeon below the gallery and thanks to our fellow studio holders down here for agreeing to let us experiment with the space and thanks also to Jean-Paul who did the majority of the work transforming this space which was basically just a huge storage shed a few months ago. So it's really nice to be here and to welcome people
into the space and I hope this will be the first event of many. With me is Amy Ireland, my co-editor and colleague at Urbanomic. I'm going to hand over to her for most of this evening because she has spent a long time editing and writing a very thorough afterword to the book that we're here to talk about, The Long-Awaited Revolutionary Demonology by the collective Gruppo du Nun. First published by Editions Nero in Rome in 2020, big shout out to Nero. On Nero's website, the Gruppo du Nun is described as a collective of psycho-activists aiming to organise forms of a cult resistance to the hetero-patriarchal dogma, promoting an alternative form of ceremonial
magic based on a non-dual love for the entropic disintegration of the cosmos. The group themselves, since these writings were produced, have disintegrated. We spent a great deal of time trying to persuade some of them to join us this evening, hopefully successfully. We'll find out later. Now, this is a book that speaks, since it's a collective, speaks in multiple voices, and it speaks about many different things. It includes analysis of contemporary culture from 21st century horror movies to trap music to Italian neorealism to black metal.
It delves knowledgeably into the deep history of magical theory and practice. It addresses modernity and modern philosophy, the Gothic and the accelerationist. It enters into chemistry, thermodynamics, the sun, paganism, barbarianism, worms and saints. But if I was to introduce it, in terms of my personal response and my response as an editor, which to a certain extent is the same thing because I feel like in order to commit to publishing something, it has to produce a compelling response in me personally. I would say that it's a book of great passion.
What I immediately sensed when I read these texts was that beneath them there is a real pain pain and desperation that each one of these texts was something that actually needed to be written but at the same time had to be forced out into the world. They are a lived response to a real problem with real personal consequences for the authors, I think. It's not a collection of dispassionable distanced scholarly essays but a series of brilliantly calibrated howls so that then asks
me or prompts me to ask what is it that makes it possible for a group of individuals to experience and distill this kind of urgency into writing and that's the question that resonates throughout the book for me and also reminded me of episodes in my own life when I was involved with collective projects. Hence the decision to produce the book in a way as a companion volume to our earlier publication of the writings of the CCRU, Cybernetic Cultural Research Unit. What one senses is something happened. Something happened to these people.
These are their working notes, working papers in which they developed the concepts that they needed in order to feel their way out of an impossible existential problem. but it's also something like a crime scene, an aftermath, a place that something tore through in the blink of an eye, leaving its enigmatic mark on everything that remains. Secondly, the theoretical principles that the Grupo de Nun develop have a universal scope. They're hugely ambitious philosophically but they're also deeply attached to their place of origin whether it's the suburbs of Rome or the
desolate sun-baked countryside of southern Italy the writings throughout the book vibrate with the immemorial and the modern history of Italy with both the Mediterranean climate and the political climate of the country an ailing European country let's say in the 21st century which, like most countries in Europe, is still shell-shocked and traumatized by the 20th century. Moreover, Italy has a history that makes it difficult to talk about magic. Now, philosophical thinkers have often denigrated magic as a type of obscurantism that lends itself all too easily to political instrumentalization.
And in Italy, magic has been intertwined with the history of fascism, real fascism, in particular in the person of Giulia Sivola, whose esoteric collective, the Gruppo di Ur, is ironically subverted in the name of the group, Gruppo di Nun. and as Amy discusses in her afterword to return to the magical tradition therefore in Italy in this context is an extremely risky and powerful gesture but these writings are also rich with specific detail and mood of the climates that produce them whether it's the techno parties around Rome
and the magical properties of the GRA ring road around the city or the parched villages of the south. And after Amy's talk, we're going to watch a couple of films that V.M. mentions in his piece Solarization, where he coins the term Italian Southern Gothic. It's about as far away from the grey northern European climes that we're experiencing now, as you can get. so although this is a book that depicts in some senses a dark world view it's born not of resignation but of a fierce struggle the struggle I think that is the lot of
all 21st century youth in so far as they resist the gravitational pull of depression and spurn the false empowerment of fascistic thinking that promises stability, a return to tradition, or access to the great source of the world, or the great secret. As Amy explains in her afterword, this is why, despite, or perhaps because of the risks involved, the magical tradition for Grupo de Nun is a pertinent battleground upon which this struggle can be played out, a history whose conceptual resources can be rethought and renewed. Because magic has often been understood as involving the imposition of one's intent or one's inner will on the outside world,
the Grupo de Nun radically subvert this. They turn magic outside in. the specific form of coldness and darkness of the Grupo de Nun's world view owes in large part to their interest in the principles of thermodynamics as a model which, as Amy is going to explain already throws into question some of the most fundamental dogmas of the magical tradition and of course thermodynamics promises nothing like a power of the individual, no kind of key to eternity, no means for the control of reality that magic has often been understood to involve. The laws of thermodynamics
only promise is that everything, apparently stable, apparently solid, apparently permanent, is fated to crumble and fall. To follow the gnosis of entropy that the Grupo de Nun open up, love for the entropic disintegration of the cosmos, therefore involves very precisely a passion, a passivity or a passibility to that which passes and must pass. In this book you will find many references to mystics and saints who endured the most unimaginable mental and physical ordeals, but in undergoing these experiences discovered an unspeakable spiritual ascension.
You will also find references explicit and between the lines to masochism. You may not find hope, but what the Grupo de Nun offer, I think, to those able to hear it is a message of solidarity with those for whom the present moment in history induces an existential pain that none of the traditional religious or secular discourses succeed in addressing and which the cheap magic of online crypto-fascisms of all kinds preys on with its promises of self-improvement, gains in power, sexual reproductive success
or triumph of the will. What revolutionary demonology brings together is a canon of cultural resources, a series of spiritual exercises and an epistemological orientation which don't offer a salve for this pain or attempt to overcome it by appealing to ideas of power, control or maturity. Instead, the Grupo de Nun discovers joy and freedom in opening up to the darkest, coldest undercurrents of existence. This love turns magic outside in and it's not for those who want to be saved
or who need to feel like they've triumphed. What it proposes is a discipline for those born into the suburban mediocrity of a decaying Western world, into fallen empires, obsolete ideas, cultural wastelands and online swamps. Those who, when they gaze within, to find the sovereign individual, the responsible reproducer of the social, The soldier of progress, the upholder of ideals, the aspirational self that they are meant to embody, find only a void. Its love is for those who have already felt the chill touch of the outside within,
and are determined to let go, rigorously, with passion and discipline, in order to continue the struggle. I'm now going to pass over to Amy, who's going to talk about the relationship between the Grupo de Nun's work and thermodynamics. Speaking of thermodynamics, I'm just going to close the door and try to keep the space warm, since it's zero degrees outside. Can you, if I speak this loud, can you hear me with the blow heater on at the back? So should we turn it back on to keep you guys warm? It's not on at the moment.
Yeah, do you want to like just test that out? Just, it can get pretty cold in here if there's... So can you hear me if I speak like this? Alright, cool. Do you want to swap spaces for what's in the light? I might read off here so I can see what I'm looking at. Okay. I took on the task of writing the preface to this book and it expanded and expanded and expanded over about a year as I tried to write it over and over again and couldn't quite get a grip
on it because I realized retroactively it was dealing with a whole suite of problems and issues that were actually really close to my heart and to my experiences over the last few years including the suicide of a young friend at the start of 2021 to whom the the afterword is dedicated but what I've done here is really like take all of that personal and emotional material and distill out what is really an abstract philosophical argument about what the texts in this book collectively are saying.
In a way, it's kind of, I feel like it can be a little bit treacherous of the book because it almost systematizes it in order to say here is something that you can call the philosophy of the Grupo de Nun. But the book itself is so much more diverse and rough and full of different conflicting ideas. but I think in general for me this is the premise that it all hangs on and it has to do with an obsession with thermodynamics okay so I've got this talk quoting climb the blade to the Morgoth heart
of the universal death drive the thermodynamic heresy of the group de Nunn. We're in the midst of an occult war. On one side, the hierarchical, heteropatriarchal humanist hegemony of the doctrines of the right-hand path. On the other, an anti-humanist, anti-authoritarian, queer, insurrectionary demonology that the group de Nunn invoke in the name of the left-hand path. For those who are not familiar with these two denominations, right-hand path and left-hand path are traditional terms in the context of the Hermetic Kabbalah, or the Hermetic tradition, in Western magic. And although exactly what they signify is often the
topic of fierce debate, they're generally understood as denoting an orthodox white magic, coded in the dualistic terms of the Hermetic tradition as active, masculine, and mental, and an unorthodox subterranean black magic coded as passive, feminine, and material, respectively. The members of the group Aidenun nevertheless employ this terminology in a very specific way, one that avoids positing the relationship between the right-hand path and the left-hand path as a dualism, because binary distinctions and the dualistic thinking that produces them, they maintain, are deeply ingrained as an aspect of the right-hand path's approach to reality, and therefore part of the very complex that they, as allies of the left-hand path, want to undermine.
In a text called Dogma, they brazenly call out the crypto-humanist pretensions of hundreds of years of magical thinking. The doctrine of the right-hand path, which encompasses the entirety of the Western Hermetic tradition, is a theory of self-deification The goal of any practitioner of the right-hand path, whether this is openly avowed or not, is to achieve eternal life, to take control of the material world, and become God although this goal of self-deification is often framed in radically different ways including for example being labeled as an inhumanism in doctrines such as the magical idealism of the 20th century fascist occultist julius avola it almost unanimously defines the
telos of magical practice in the western tradition from the rosicrucians to the masons the hermetic order of the golden dawn to thelema satanism to chaos magic The members of the Grupe de Nun, who, unlike a lot of occultists, have a very positive attitude towards science as a discipline that is deeply connected to the occult and which enchants rather than disenchants the world, set out to analyse this tendency in a systematic and scientific way. Comparing esoteric doctrines to scientific theories, we might say that each doctrine builds around its dogmas a model of reality made up of axioms and connections, which allows a certain vision of the cosmos to sustain and expand itself.
As in physics, there is no hermetic theory of everything. Each esoteric doctrine leaves a loose thread, an open circle. Each one forgets something, more or less consciously. More precisely, as is the case with the sciences, no model should claim to be exact or complete. Rather, each one satisfies a specific human need for understanding and control. For centuries, all practices of ceremonial magic, including the most explicitly dark and sinister ones, have been based on the same assumptions and have referred back to the same model of reality. self-deification is a dogma that necessitates a specific model of reality to legitimate it
as a valid possibility and magic is all about models of reality you could even say in a certain sense that magic is the theory of reality production so it's a model whose contingency has to then be forgotten in order for the doctrine to function as a universal and and ineluctable truth. It's therefore far more likely to be an accurate portrait of our mundane and very human need to feel significant and in control in a sometimes senseless, chaotic, and disorienting world than it is of the deep machinations of the cosmos. According to the Grupo de Nunn, at the heart of the model of reality that supports this goal of self-deification lies one very attractive and powerful
idea. The most important among the concepts upon which the Western Hermetic tradition is based is equilibrium. That there is a perpetual symmetry in the cosmos which the individual man God could always be at the center of. The universe described by this doctrine is a perfectly reversible perpetual motion machine in which everything is preserved. Only in this way can the initiate achieve eternal life. Anyone who's at least a little bit familiar with the Western Hermetic tradition will recognize the importance that equilibrium, balance, symmetry, and hence reversibility play in its doctrines. Here's two key examples. The Hermetic maxim,
as above, so below, generally interpreted as declaring a correspondence between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the universe, and the hermetic diagram of the tree of life, which depicts the production of the universe from a single point of immaterial consciousness and which is generally read as a map that can be traversed in reverse by the magical practitioner seeking enlightenment and ultimately unification with this immaterial source. for the gripe o'da none the flagrant anthropocentrism anthropocentrism of this long-standing claim that the structure of the universe reflects the structure of the human in its working is self-serving and highly dubious nevertheless as humans the reason for our obsession
is simple we live in a thermodynamic universe and in a thermodynamic universe equilibrium equals order and the conservation of this order. This is the first law of thermodynamics. It's the foundation of our survival as organisms. We can explain our attachment to the concept of equilibrium in accordance with our nature as limited living systems. We require an internal order to be maintained to guarantee our survival and the functioning of our machines. However, the second law of thermodynamics, which they refer to as the ultimate prophecy of doom channeled by science, tells us that this order is always only temporary.
Not only is it not possible to convert energy without losing it as background noise into the universe, Everything that happens, every phenomenon that takes place in any corner of the cosmos, is a process in disequilibrium. Everything rushes in a specific direction. Nothing is reversible. In order to maintain itself in time, a system must constantly consume new energy from outside of itself, which increases the overall amount of entropy in the universe, a process that will continue inexorably until the heat death of the universe. To quote the Groupe de Nune, with each sacrifice, the desert advances. A system in perfect equilibrium would therefore have to be totally self-sufficient, but this is impossible.
Nothing in the universe is capable of continuously matching the energy that it consumes with an equal amount of created energy. The cyber-feminist theorist Sadie Plant, who is among one of the Groupe de Nune's frequent references, explains it like this. systems cannot stop interacting with the world which lies outside of themselves otherwise they would not be dynamic or alive by the same token it is precisely these engagements which ensure that homeostasis perfect balance or equilibrium is only ever an ideal perfect equilibrium like a perpetual motion machine is a myth yet it is a myth that supplies the goal of self-deification with the framework that it needs to appear viable. Since equilibrium
is what allows identity to persist through time, it's the thing that must be idealized if immortality is to be imaginable. The hallucination of the right hand essentially consists in the idea that a constant equilibrium can be established within aggregated structures, preventing their necessary dissolution and cancelling the thermodynamic cost of their existence. To relinquish this fiction for the would-be gods of the right-hand path would mean acknowledging personal finitude and insignificance in the cosmos, two facts that the Western magical tradition as a whole seems to have been designed to repress. in stark contrast to this the gripper de nun aimed to present us with a cosmology
a pantheon a magical practice and even perhaps an ethics based on not just an acceptance of but a deeply ecstatic love for disequilibrium and dissolution understood as the fundamental forces of the cosmos. A guarantee that no arrangement of power or authority will last forever. Even when this means accepting our displacement as humans from the centre of reality. Far from the inert, lifeless cosmos of balance, equilibrium, symmetry and reversibility, the reality that is affirmed by the Grupo de Nun is one in which order descends into chaos, light fades into darkness and no structure is eternal.
The sanctification of equilibrium by the right-hand path is also played out in the resolution of two opposed terms, usually a dualistic pair articulated via the mundane sexual dimorphism and obligatory heterosexuality specific to human reproduction that is pervasive throughout the Western magical tradition and always forms the basis for its accounts of cosmogenesis. Yet, at the same time, this dualism is always resolved in favour of the aspect that is coded as male. The Gripper to Nun call this cosmological sexism. Another example of the strange insistence that the deep operations of reality must reflect the contingencies of the human organism.
gender is not only a set of more or less reasonable social rules but it is elevated to an inescapable axiom underlying reality that poses polarization as a boundary condition for the existence of the universe throughout revolutionary demonology we're treated to account after account of cosmogenesis in which some ancient feminized chthonic monster representing fecund but unmolded matter is inseminated, dismembered, or otherwise shaped by some form giving masculine, quote, solar deities syncretized with the figure of the king, drawn from the history of Western magic. In the account of the production of the universe depicted in the Tree of Life,
everything unfolds in degrees of increasing debasement from a rarefied masculine consciousness to a concrete and mundane feminine matter. And it's this realm of unruly materiality that must be overcome by the magical practitioner as they complete this journey in reverse, ascending to the masculine immateriality from which everything originally descended. The group had to encounter this persistent heteropatriarchal use of duality in two principal ways, and their occult system. And it's with a brief illustration of these two ways that I'm going to conclude. so first to return to the tree of life and its hierarchical organization of reality from consciousness to matter the group had an uncounter the dualism and the doctrinal supremacy of the
emanationist hierarchy reinforced in the diagram of the tree of life with a tri-triangular seal a quote decapitated reconfiguration of the original decimal structure from which the highest sephirah, kether, the crown, the seat of self or divinity, has been removed. Once emancipated from the tyranny of this immortal sovereign, sorry, with this immaterial and immortal sovereign, a second diagram can be discerned within the ruins of the tree of life. The remaining nine sephirah, arranged in three sets of three, compose three triangles of evocation, the triangle being the shape traditionally used for summoning demons or other entities. Which when deployed in concert
with the group editor nuns ritual text with which the book opens, every worm trampled is a star, functions as an evocation of the dismembered mother Tiamat, one of the feminized chthonic monsters dismembered by a male deity in the act that created the cosmos, but now decoupled from masculine power that is supposed to mold her flesh into form and therefore an avatar of quote non-heterosexual or non-conforming womanhood of the woman who evades the reproductive patriarchal order refusing to take on her role as great mother and dialectical counterpart to male consciousness as you can imagine there's a whole series of ramifications that arises from this restructuring of the narrative of cosmic creation along models of non-heterosexual and non-reproductive desire.
But I'll leave you to read the book and discover them for yourselves. Second, the model of reality that relies on equilibrium and symmetry cannot be countered by a simple inversion, the kind that's typically used to resist or change the meaning of a symbol in occult traditions, like turning a cross upside down or reversing an invocation to reverse its operation. This is because, quote, a system endowed with total symmetry remains, by definition, identical to itself, whichever way it is turned. Instead, the chief tactic that they employ in the war against the symmetrical hegemony of the right-hand path
is non-reciprocal inversion. These are inversions based on asymmetry that unveil a repressed substrate of an existing regime rather than inaugurating a substitute regime that's equivalent in status but opposed in content to the original. In the case of the idealized equilibrium of self-deification, the repressed substrate is entropy, dissolution as the primary force of the universe that must be denied for a system to posit itself as self-sufficient and eternal. Entropy is not the opposite of equilibrium, but its condition of possibility. And for the Grupo de Nun, it is the universe's expression of love for its creations.
They write, love is the thermodynamic property of bodies that attracts them to their death. this is a love that's not balanced by an opposing force such as the again active masculine will of say bellema but a quote overflowing force that cannot be trapped in a balanced duality the love that we refer to is rooted instead in a rejection of the idea of a path of salvation is opposed to the dogma of conservation and manifests itself as a radical opening of the individual towards the darkness outside. Above and below do not reflect each other. Below the human world of stable identities churns an abyssal world of dissolution and darkness but also recombination
and release. As the group written on write in a text describing the path to what they call the highest form of gnosis. Beneath the surface of this world, you discovered the mechanisms of massacre and enjoyment. You climbed the blade to the Morgoth heart of the universal death drive. The group had a nun disbanded only a short time after the period of intense and sustained collaborative effort that furnished the texts in this book. But before having succumbed to the entropy that they love so fiercely, they succeeded in their aim of tracing a path toward an alternative esotericism, questioning the fundamental premises of the Western magical tradition,
reconceiving the way that difference and reciprocity are understood within its doctrines, and offering a model of cosmogenesis that's based on an entirely different logic to that of the reproductive heterosexual desire that has for centuries inhibited the ability of magical practitioners to really and truly traffic with the outside. In the wake of this work, strange new occultisms based on alternative models of desire are given space to flourish, queer, alien, inorganic, bound by love that knows nothing of subjects or objects, only in entropy, a hunger so tremendous that it will not be sated until it has devoured time itself.
That's it. Okay, so that's my kind of philosophical breakdown of the premises that fuel this book, but it is by no means indicative of the breadth of content in its pages. Thanks. We're going to take questions in the room if there are any. and from the livestream while we see if we can make contact with C.K. I believe is here somewhere. Any questions in the room? Not for me.
yeah perhaps at the beginning you talked about with the works of the CCIU perhaps do you want to comment on is there a thematic range or how do you get a standard temporally is it an expansion of or is it a development of this project how these two works coexist together there are lots of references to the writings of the sea CRU in the work and also to individual members of the CCRU, Mark Fisher has quoted a lot, Sadie Platt Nick Land but there's also I think I wouldn't say that it's a continuation or an
expansion or even necessarily an inheritance of the work that they're doing but it is undertaken in a similar spirit and the way that they start from a diagram is similar to what CCRU do with their discovery of the numagram. So this looking at the way that this history of occult diagrams, specifically the tree of life, which is also something that the numagrams in direct dialogue with organize reality and describe its functioning, its temporal regimes, how it was created. So they sort of take that in spirit and think about it but with their particular set of interests in mind so there is a lot of
there are several there's one essay that's very specifically about the diagram of the tree of life but they they talk a lot about Kabbalah they talk about Kabbalah as a cybernetic machine and all of this is like very influenced by the work CCRD did so I guess I'd put it like that it's sort of to the spirit of society, but it's not directly extending it or using the same characters or tropes. Anyone else? Yeah, there's more questions left. This is probably a pretty student semester. What do you mean by magic?
trying to shoot fireballs and stuff? D&D magic? I don't think there's nothing about any of this. No, magic is, it's referred to in, so like, I guess the kind of like names that I dropped in the talk were like the Hermetic Kabbalah, so like the magic that has come from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegestus. I'm not 100% sure of like the exact history of all of this, but this is where the inscription as above so below which is a transliteration of what it is originally um i think it's i think it's in arabic actually um well there's an arabic version of it i mean you can look all this up online pretty easily if you look up um hermetic tradition
so hermetic is in hermes um and this set of beliefs gets sort of handed down through traditions like the Knights of the Templar Knights, the Rosicrucians, the British, I think the British group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who William Butler Yeats was a member of. A lot of his, people don't necessarily know this, but a lot of his poetry and writing was connected to a whole occult theory of history and reality that he had developed with his wife. The Masons are also, they have like a similar, like I think they owe a lot to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Rosicretians.
Even like Mystic Kabbalah, but that's kind of like its own, there's like a lot of dialogue with like Hebraic traditions as well as Catholic traditions in this book. but they don't, I mean there's like a massive massive body of scholarship on like Hebraic, Talmudic interpretation of like numbers and diagrams and that tradition but they do crossover. That kind of is inherited by people like Alistair Crowley British magician who put a K, I think it was him, who put a K on the end of magic he was interesting, he was quite like iconoclastic and subversive in his own way and kind of that got fed into certain like new age traditions in like California through
importations of Thelma which was his magic to America and then you get stuff like chaos magic and these more contemporary sort of post-modern forms of magic but a lot of them are following at some point like the same strands of ideas which is where this critique of the right hand path comes from um so i mean yeah like you can probably find i mean you can look this stuff up on wikipedia even but like what you get in like sort of contemporary dnd magic and like you know card games like magic the gathering and stuff i think it's kind of sometimes there's references if you know the symbols and like the kind of works sometimes you'll like come across references
and stuff like that but it's it's kind of like more I guess its own kind of literary genre world of its own so yeah Simon on the live stream is asking about whether there's connection to the type of magic that is adopted by figures of the counterculture like William Burroughs with the use of the cut-up which also seems to be related to entropy taking bounded ordered systems and carrying out some kind of operation on them to reveal some underlying layer or to recombine them in some way which I think also connects with the
question of you know when we say magic we mean in some sense bending of reality to our will in a way that doesn't conform to the usual I don't know mechanistic practical relation to the world right and in that sense in the contemporary scene what group had a nun doing is also to be related to the kind of online pseudo magic of self-improvement the pickup artists Jordan Peterson all these people are producing a type of magical thinking as
as much as it might be based in a kind of rhetoric of science. They're engaged in telling people that they can bend reality to their will through a certain form of thinking in a certain type of worldview. So, yeah, I don't know if you have anything to say on that question of Burroughs. I don't think he's mentioned as such. The Burroughs is one God universe, he's mentioned. Yeah, that's right. And Burroughs is obviously kind of in the mix of influences, but they're not performing themselves any of these, like they're not treating textual production and culture in the way that Burrows is as something that they are attempting to intervene in cybernetically. I think that
yeah they're more concerned with the strain of magic that comes out of Ebola and this Italian background I think that they have to be concerned with but yeah I don't know I think there's probably a few ways that you could go with that um i'm just trying to like imagine i'm simon and how i'd read the book um i don't know maybe i just let simon do that for himself but yeah jim is also asking is there a relationship with the idea of autopoiesis here in that a headless tree of life is a recursive
process of creation rather than an uncaused cause so it's not a kind of ex nihilo origin Yeah, I think so. I think the main point that they have about, about autopoiesis, and also just like, they're not against negantropy, and they're not against, like a cybernetic system or organism maintaining itself. what they're against is the myth that that can be done in perpetuity and that it is based on a total isolated self-sufficiency. There always has to be this relationship with the outside of the system that is neglected. But yeah, I mean, I don't know who the person who asked that question is basing it on one
of the essays, because there's an essay that deals with the Kabbalah as a cybernetic, recursive cybernetic self-producing organism. Any other questions? I just wondered where the demonology came in. You didn't mention demons. Yeah, so what, in my reading and how I discuss it in the afterword, the way that they understand the demonic is this outside of the human that cannot be subsumed into this reflective symmetrical structure. And for them, a lot of it is to do with materiality. So the demonic and what they're in dialogue with
is this capacity of matter and the material world, not thinking of demons as spiritual entities, to intervene in your, or in reality, against your will. And this is, kind of turns into an ethics through the practice of masochism in the book. Masochism. Yeah, so masochism in a way, kind of like realizing that there are forces that are running through you and that are able to intervene, that aren't going to bend to your magical will. And being able to go with that, even enjoy it,
is one of the things that they talk about in terms of technology. One other thing? The centre of Plymouth is based on the cabaletry of life. Is it? Yeah. If you check out Abercrombie's initial plan for the remaking of the centre, it's pretty much impossible not to see that that's what it is. He was a student of feng shui, another mystical system, in the 1920s. So although I don't think it was ever made explicit, I think when you look at the two things, it's very hard to see that he wasn't thinking that way.
And at the moment, they're going to rip down all that they're planning. You see, the council wants to take down all the trees that were part of that plan and put in a much more sort of organised, flat sort of space. Are you talking about that strip down the middle where there's these kind of spiral sort of worlds? Yeah, they are mile away, yeah. Right, yeah, I actually have looked at that a couple of times and being like, there is something going on there, but I haven't tried and sat down. Can you get the plans for that in the library? Can you see the blueprints? If you go online and ask for Abercrombie, you know, just look at Abercrombie, you know plan for Plymouth it will send this multi-coloured shape of design which was the initial conceptualization for it i'm just interested to see what happens there when
you know i was into you know this whole thing of equilibrium and then the entropic and a disintegration yeah at the moment they're trying i think to restore the equilibrium because the trees have got out of control. They say that the trees are unwell and things like that. Yeah, it's going to be a big flat strip of lawn. Not quite that, but it's a much more ordered space. Yeah. And I'm interested to see whether they're able to restore an equilibrium or whether actually this attempt to restore it will actually create even greater fragmentation. Architecture, in a way, can be seen as a kind of ritual. I mean so there's a piece in revolutionary demonology about Rome and the Gra
who designed by an architect whose name has the same initials but it's a huge circle that surrounds Rome kind of like a protective circle but there's all of this understanding of it as part of a ritual that he was in the process of manifesting through Billings' highway so I mean I think it's quite possible that there's a whole tradition of architects performing rituals through architecture. But thank you for telling me that. That is a really cool thing to know. Could you say more, Rebecca's asking, about what you see as the implications of the demonological ethics you just described for queer feminist thought?
I think I'd to give to give the kind of answer that I want to be able to give to that question I think I need to sit down and think about it like how I would phrase it there's definitely they talk a little bit in the beginning about the feminization of culture and see this, like, in terms of the way that forces are coded by the Western magical tradition, so active forces being masculine, passive forces being feminine, they see, or they invoke a kind of shift to an acceptance of passivity
and try to undermine this myth of control based on masculine activity of the will and all of its cognates in magical traditions. So it would be something, I suppose I'd say, that it's kind of an ethics... I mean, I do talk about this in terms of masochism a little bit too in the afterword, but I think it's probably something... I'd take it along those lines. It's an ethics of anti-mastery, of letting go and learning to go with matter. You talk about Klaus Delavate's work on male fantasies,
fantasies which specifically studies the kind of repressive dynamics of the psyche of the Nazis right which is all based around not letting go at the same time as this this kind of intense undercurrent of desire to let go uh is it some could we maybe like talk about this in terms of the contemporary situation of the glycoculture wars around gender, where there's a kind of panicked response which doesn't want to see the kind of ontology of gender, this kind of solid structure of gender fall apart,
that doesn't want to see people following desires that it regards as perverse, heterodox, damaging to the reproduction of the social, and which, you know, in a very definite way wants to not let go. And on the other side, this kind of apparently uncontrollable kind of flow of difference differentiation mixing cross currents producing all of these kind of sub genres of gender in a sense the repressive side wants to say
if you let go if you follow desire then all this can possibly lead to is disintegration and a kind of flowing away from anything that can possibly produce any type of social structure is there a way to draw out of this kind of theoretical position that Rupo de Nun produce an alternative way of thinking about how letting go can be a creative and joyful task for humanity I think you just answered the question
in a way that's it like that's um if you if you put all of that like if you try to fortify yourself against uh this like dissolution that just is constantly rearranging the world uh you know in a ways the thermodynamic arrow of time is synonymous with time um you end up getting stuck in this absolute inertia which is sort of fighting losing battle against the forces beating down the gates from outside and it becomes destructive in its own way to oneself and to others. You know, and the study of the Freikortsmen who became the Nazis is a classic example of that. And the Grippity Nun's kind of point is that if you, it's scary, like how do you,
how do you hold yourself in free fall when you don't know where you're going and you're not grounded anymore but their point is that you always discover another world in that state and that there is always in the world that we're in another world hidden inside it one which is what the demonology is able to like invoke what you're trying to connect with um i mean they have they have various tropes throughout the book that talk about unveiling this other world solarization is one that we'll see just kind of bleeding into like the film screenings is another one of these ways of discovering a different world inside the world that we're in. It's this kind of counterintuitive thing of like if you let go instead of falling apart
and losing everything you find a new thing. This is really getting to the absolutely fundamental point that this is to do with death and darkness. But death doesn't mean extinction. Death means change that you cannot control. and what we're seeing in the world today is absolute catatonic fear of young people in particular giving themselves up to change that they can't control and that their elders can't control and that's basically what it means to invoke a demon is that you're letting something in that you that is going to transform you and change you and that you can't control and that's
kind of what's at the root of the ethics of the group of none is to overcome that fear yeah and to know that only through that kind of change that you can't control only through the process of death can you participate in a kind of i don't want to say authentic way but participate in the material reality in a way in which you're not constantly trying to hold it back, trying to rigidify yourself against it and trying to maintain equilibrium. Yeah, non-reciprocal inversion is the release of a repressed substrate,
not swapping it for a different form of control. So that was just a kind of extension of trying to answer Rebecca's question. Yeah, thanks Rebecca, that was a really good question. I've got to think about that for another year. And hi to everyone else in the chat. Hi to Luis Escalante, who's an old PlaguePod regular. Should we talk to CK? Well, I've been trying to contact the... I've been trying to contact the grupo, and we're not having much success. So I think what we'll do is we'll move on to the films, and we'll see if we can talk to them. It's going to seem like this is all fictional,