Hyperstition & The New Weird I (Session 2)

Go ahead. All right. Hello, everyone. Hi. Hi, Ben. Hey, Ben. Hey, Tony. All right. So the basic plan for today is I'm going to talk about the preface of Cyclinopedia and Parsani. And then once we get to the hard numbers stuff, I'm going to give it to Lendl, and he'll explain everything perfectly clearly. And I'll be off the hook.

And then we'll have some discussion, hopefully. and then Tony's going to go over the Doherty piece and then we'll discuss some more hopefully again and we can move into the Good Meal stuff if there's time and interest for that as well so hopefully that sounds okay okay so so hopefully everyone got hopefully everyone did the reading at least part of the reading So the preface of this book of Cyclonopedia is fairly strange because it's written by Kristen Alvinson,

who is, for many people know, is Reza's wife, and they met in some kind of strange circumstances, which I assume aren't as strange as the preface makes them out to be, but who knows. So the preface plays with this found text motif which is pretty popular in weird fiction but here it's slightly different because it's theory fiction it's a very fictional text and what that means as opposed to weird fiction is something we can talk about So Cyclonimpedia is a preface the preface is by Kristen Albinson, the text

which is supposedly the found manuscript that she later publishes is itself has parts of Haman Parsani's Defacing Ancient Persia which is a non-existent text but also within the text are discussions by the character Reza with figures who are not identified, some of these of which are, of course, conversations taken from the hyperstition blog, or Cold Me, and reworked slightly. And some of those characters, at least one of them is Nick Land, which kind of puts, again, a weird twist to everything. And within the text, there's a dialogue

between the character of Kristen and the character of Reza in the footnotes, which again brings up whether the text itself was written, whether the author saw, so whether the character Reza saw the text, the manuscript that the character Kristen found after or before she published it, even though it was actually published by Reza, the person, supposedly. So again, it's just this constant. loopy weirdness. So...

And of course, some more weirdness is added to this, and that the character of Parsani, who in some ways embodies perhaps the stranger theories which Reza might want to talk about in his own voice, the character has taken on somewhat of a life of his own outside of the text. In May of 2013, I think, an interview, Parsani, or someone claiming to be Parsani, did an interview online. I don't know if anyone actually knows who that was, if that was in fact Reza or someone just claiming to be, claiming to have, someone who claimed to have contacted Reza to get to Barsani. So part of this, I think, part of the interest here

is it's not, you know, this kind of playfulness is fairly standard and well-known in history of literature. There's, you know, even going back to something like Cervantes, right, there's this kind of text within a text within a text. and sort of found materials, which supposedly add, you know, are generally seen to add some kind of authenticity outside of the text, right? The idea that a text that is claimed to be real is inserted into the other text, which gives it some kind of, you know, it's supposed to, like, extend the suspension of disbelief or something to that effect. Oh yeah, that is the interview. Yeah, thanks. But I think in the case of Cyclonopedia and what connects to the themes of the course,

I think it's not just, it tries to do a little more than this kind of authorial kind of playfulness. Or it's not just the kind of found text to add some different kind of form of literary legitimacy. Partly because a theme of Cyclonopedia, which you see right away, you see in the first parts of the first chapter, is this idea that stories or narratives are not necessarily, aren't, you know, don't function as causes in the way we normally understand them. That, you know, stories, that the sort of line between narration and, you know, servicing or being at the whim of these anonymous materials

becomes more and more indistinguishable. so while something seems like a creative play or this kind of ongoing twistiness of what's real and what's fake and look at all these kinds of spirals and spirals and nests and within nests and within nests the things we can create at the same time the whole text and even especially in the theories of Parsani talk about this idea that this is actually just and that it's more and more complex attempts to try and narrate how materials are actually creating us, or actually directing us in a way. So instead of the fact that look at how, you know, it's not so much look at how clever we can be with text within text, but text within a text within text are actually an

attempt to model the depth of complicity. And, you know, this very much, this comes up right away in terms of, you know, Parsani saying how the Middle East is this kind of living entity, that oil itself goes through these attempts, these narrative creations to try and lure us to the Middle East to extract it and free it from the Earth. This is kind of petropolitics that they talk about. So I think that's mostly what I wanted to say about that. Hopefully that made some amount of sense. Yes? No? Maybe. No, it was pretty good. Great.

Okay, so I think with that we'll let Lendl go into the pneumogram and mathematical aspect of this kind of... Yeah, I don't know. These paths, pathfinding and numbers. Okay, cool. Can we put up the image because it'll help? Hi everyone, by the way. Yeah. Hi everyone. Hey. So I'm going to be mainly speaking about the CCRU version because I'll talk about the modification that Reza makes, but Reza makes a slight modification to it and I think it's

It's not as consistent as the CCRU one, and I'll explain why after you can see it. It just helps if it's in front of people so that I don't have to abstractly... You don't have to hold zone 7 and zone 2 in your mind and then transit from zone 7 and 2 to 5 and 4 and then transit to 1 and 8 and somehow make the jump to 9 and 0 and get lost lost getting back to... Yeah, I'm going forward right now, I'm going to show my screen and we see it now. Cool, tiny. Can we make that bigger and all? Yeah.

Okay. So the bottom one is... I'm missing one. Oh, yeah. I think that's I think that's all right. The little numbers that are hard to see, whoa. Now it's Amy instead. Okay, just what you do is click on the box that says me, that says organizers, and then it will become white around me. Yeah. And then it will keep that screen on the whole time while you talk. Sorry. Okay. and just jump in if you need me to stop, slow down clarify, reiterate anything like that so basically I was going to invoke the numagram

because there's this kind of chant that you say no more undivided outside one for you life is drowning Nomo, numerous under one I guess I might as well do it You part through depths swirling Nomo, half hidden within one You submerge all forgetting Twice exceeding one You bear earth convulsing Four Nomo, ultimate redoubled one For you breath is dying Nomo Whisperer of the dead Sinking one, you twin Nomo Hunger of the earth Bearing twice your twin No more feeder of the shadows Double one entwining No more shifter of the deep

Still one in your twinning And finally nine No more holy without one Swallowing all you twin So that's just the way that they invoke this And Land recently on the 18th of November Said that in the end This is a quote In the end there's only one map of cosmic order Worthy of unconditional trust and he meant the pneumogram. Okay, so basically all it is is it's basic arithmetic. So if you can add the numbers from 0 through 9, you can get this structure. And so the first process is the twinning process

or zygovanism or 9-sum twinning. So basically you just pair numbers that equal 9 from all the single digits. So 0 and 9 become twinned, 8 and 1, 7 and 2, 4 and 5, and 3 and 6. Now what that does when you pair them is when you subtract the bigger number from the smaller number, you get a channel. Interesting. Someone's reading. It's okay, you get a channel between the pairs. Sorry. So that's what those big arrows are. So 9 subtracts 0, you get 9, which is why that arrow goes to 9.

8 and 1, you get 7. So that's how that's organized. It's just simply subtracting the bigger number from the smaller number. Again, they call these channels or primary flows. Now those secondary channels, sorry not channels, those secondary flows, those are calculated basically by triangle numbers and all that means is, so it's easy to start with the number If you look at the top, number three, there's a path shooting out of it with the number

six. That number is generated by just adding three plus two plus one, so you get six. So if you do that with four, you do four plus three plus two plus one equals ten. And then any time you have two digits, you decimally reduce this. and this is a practice that goes back to Gematria, and there's like a lot of papers by Crowley and stuff on this. Or basically, if you have any number that's not a single digit, you just add all the digits together until you have only one left. This is why if you look around the one, around the zone of one,

You see 10 pointing towards it, but you also see 28 pointing towards it. That's because 2 and 8 equals 10. 10, 1, and 0. So you get 1. So once you've done all those processes, you get all of these arrows. You have all this kind of laid out. The CCRU treated this as a time map. All of these. And again, this is just basic arithmetic. they haven't imposed any rules that aren't there already in number yet. I say yet because when it starts getting into language, then you're sort of over-coding it, but at the same time, the whole, I guess, one of the main kind of thrusts behind this

was to try and decouple the arbitrary attributions of numerology from what numbers can do on their own. Is that all cool so far? I like going at snail pace. Say that again, Tony? I can follow you. So, yes, come here. Can you just, Lendl, I always get confused. The channels are the big currents that you get between a syzygy number. So you might have to check my terminology. I'm just trying to get the names. The currents are the big ones, so I don't know if I said this properly. The currents are the big ones, the channels are the small ones. Okay, so the path from 7 and 2 to 5 is a current, and the path from 4 to 1 is a channel.

Yeah, which is just a terminological difference. I mean, that's the words that they use. Thanks. So now, on top of all this, what there is is there's this necronomicon or kind of, what's it, pandemonium matrix or the book of dead names, which basically, so there's ten zones, sorry, zero through nine. zones are those big circles so what the pandemonium matrix or an economic on for the CCRU does is charts every single path from one zone to another so 0 to 9 0 to 8 0 to 1 0 to 7 etc there's 45 in total and they number

0, 0, mesh 0, 0 to mesh 44. And this is where all the demons come out. This is where... I mean, Nick Land once said that... I think it might have just been in a Skype conversation, but he said that at the time of the CCRU, they were just trying to unfold what this meant, what all the different paths meant, what does it mean when you go from 1 to 8 and then come back to 1. Like, how can you code that if this is a time circuit, if this is a map of time, what does it mean to do that? So apparently the CCRU were trying to unfold what this diagram of time meant. And you should know that the top region, the 3 and 6, is known as the warp or what's outside of time.

Because basically once you get there, you're stuck there. if you look there's no arrow coming outside like back into the middle the middle is known as the time circuit and then the same deal with the bottom except this one's called outer time because there is one line between it so it's sort of those moments when time ceases very briefly which Kant didn't like it's called outer time yeah the bottom is outer time or plex folds of time. Plex, okay. You could think of the little arrows as time anomalies or glitches or those kinds of things. At least that's the way that they sometimes talk about it.

Now, remember I said that demons are, you know, there's 45 of them and it's just any pathway from one zone to another. So, if a pathway goes from the time circuit, which is the central region, so 451827, to one of the outside ones, and there's 24 ways of doing that, it's called an amphidemon. I mean, obviously because it's both simultaneously outside time and inside time, or it's the way outside time, or it's the way when you're outside time to get back into time. The ordering doesn't actually matter for them. So whether or not a demon's going from inside time to outside or from outside time to inside, it's the same demon because it's the same path. A chronodemon is a demon that's within the time circuit, and then a

xenodemon are just demons that are denizens of the outer gulf. They're just 0 to 9, 0 nine, zero to three, zero to six, or nine to three, nine to six. Now, is that sufficiently confusing? Or rather like super schematic? Because I mean, that's basically just how it functions. I didn't say anything about how they've used it or... Yeah, I think maybe do explain a little bit about how they use the demons in analysis. Amy might have something as well. I'm sure Amy does. I saw her pop on so I didn't know what she was. Also, I mean, they made their own version of the tarot called sub-decadence.

So decadence meaning... Decadence is the way that they describe both the original tree... I mean, this might resemble the tree of life to you. They came up with this kind of hyperstitional story that the tree of life is a blasphemy of this diagram. Obviously, because you have to say that if you want to be all hyperstitional on you. But what they're trying to kind of put forward with that is that the tree of life, which goes from one in the bottom to ten at the top, basically is hermetically redundant or culturally redundant because when you get to the top, you get one and zero, which could

be reduced to one so you have an extra node and the CCRU were like oh this is bogus why are we imposing this redundancy when it doesn't need to be there so they got rid of that and then supplanted that with zero to make it a little bit more culturally consistent and at least consistent with mathematics. Now Crowley wasn't stupid he was kind of I keep I'm saying Crowley because he was sort of the 19th and 20th centuries most systematized cultural practitioner. There are plenty of others, but he tried to synthesize the most knowledge from projective geometry, which was the mathematics that he knew at the time,

to the I Ching. Supposedly he was the first one to translate the I Ching to English, even Even though he didn't speak Chinese, he just got someone who spoke Chinese and said, what does this say? What does this say? What does this say? What does this say? And eventually got a translation out of it. So I don't know, he just kind of mapped his whole system of Thoth onto his version of the Tree of Life, which I'm sure you're familiar with that diagram. Just like 10 sephiro. If you're not, then very easy. Google's just, if you write Tree of Life, you'll get zillions of them. And it's very hard to tell the difference between Corollies and others. You'll just know that Corollies has the Hebrew symbol

Tzadi in a different position than most, but don't worry, that's too occult to need to know. You don't need to know that. Anyway, so, where was I? Could I ask a question? Yeah, go. It might take you a little... Like, could... Are you able to explain, like, its relation to, like, Barker's, like, Tix Z notation that Hyperstition's talking about, or is that too far? Yeah, for sure. I mean, Barker used the Decimal Labyrinth, because I think he was... I forget who exactly trained him. I think basically Stillwell trained Barker, and Stillwell is the one who discovered the numagram.

And by discover, I mean, I say discover because, again, like I said, it's just all the dynamics are inherent within number itself. So long as you can add, you can kind of find these internal pathways. So Stillwell was the one who kind of first did these loops and figured out these loops and trained Barker. Now Barker's tixenotation is, I mean, that's a way of encoding prime numbers into a different notation system so that potentially a possibility of finding patterns might come out. So it's kind of like recode in order to decode differently, to put it in a slogan.

I mean, and this happens very consistently within the CCRU, this sort of process of recoding to decode differently. I mean, in some sense, you could say that the pneumogram is a recoding of the tree of life in a much more consistent manner. This is like the non-hypercitional version. But a recoding of the tree of life in a much more consistent fashion in order to decode the dynamics within the tree of life more consistently, or at least potentially get new insights that way. Tixenotition is a lot more complicated. It's whether or not... Because there's no patterns within prime numbers.

That's the difficulty. and the number system that we use isn't coded on prime numbers, although every number can be decomposed into prime numbers. So our number system 0 through 9 adds a whole bunch of confusion to prime numbers that doesn't need to be there, and tick xenotation gets rid of a lot of that confusion. but it adds more confusion because you can't just look at a tick z-notated prime number and know what it means in our system you have to continuously translate back which is the problem and difficulty now I said that Reza's system is slightly different but for Reza you might have to pull it up one more time

so the the numagram for the CCRU there's a connection between two and three because two plus one equals three for Reza he does this kind of convoluted trick where if you apparently if you take seven and code it in its Hebrew version and then perform Anglossic Kabbalah oh Amy has a picture of Reza's if you get the Hebrew version of seven the number written out, and then perform Anglastic Kabbalah on it, which means every letter receives a numerical value. You add all the numerical values, and you get a

number out of it. It then equals three. So for Reza, seven connects with three via this completely other...the reason why I don't like it is he's switching from just what numbers do by themselves to what numbers and letters and different linguistic systems do just to make one different term, which I don't think is that... I mean, why not? But this is where treason comes in, treason. So treason for Reza is you do both decadence, which I said is like a 10-based tree of life thing, and sub-decadence, which is a 9-based pneumogram thing. treason or trizon is when you do both simultaneously.

So you take both paths. Now for the seven thing, for Reza, in some sense that's his his like kind of little treason onto the numagram. I've been talking for way too long. But, so what is his advantage then for adding this? It's just a Well, I mean well So I haven't actually gone through the demons to see what it would change, but it would mean that any path that includes seven and three in it, which just means, so if you just take seven and three, you can go seven to two to three in the CCRU system,

because any Syzygy is automatically connected. Syzygy is any twin. So you can go from 7 to 2 to 3 in the original system, but in his you would go from 2 to 7 and then to 3. I don't know what that changes exactly, but it would slightly alter what the demon's capable of doing. I can't say much about the demons because there's 45 of them, and if I kind of emphasize one over another, there's fear that the others will get jealous. I actually put the a section from the digital hyperstition abstract dynamics, abstract cultures publication in the classroom last week and that has a list of

it's got the whole mesh in it so it's got all of the demons from 00 to 44 so if you want to go with the demons if you're curious about the demons yeah it lists them all and tells you what their powers are It also tells you their paths. And by paths I mean a demon to span, let's just say from 9 to 6, that's one demon, and then all the ways of getting from 9 to 6 will be outlined inside the description of the demon. The hint there is that there's none. There's no way of getting from six to nine.

Is that cool? Is there any questions about that? Clarifications, anything whatsoever? Wait, so you said treason or treason is when decadence and sub-decadence intermingle, So the 10 system, the decadence with the 9-some system, but I thought there was like a cross-section element, you know? There was like a feedback spiral. It's when you take both simultaneously. Oh, okay. Got it. Oh, so that's the... Oh, like, that's why it's like double-dealing and things like that. Like... Okay. Go ahead. So each vector, one of the vectors is decadence and the other is sub?

I'm not sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I don't think Reza talks about it in terms of sub decadence and decadence, but that's the CCRU terminology for a 10-base system and a 9-base system, and the 10-base system is the traditional, like, western esoteric line, which they are kind of reorganizing with their own system. I love this tornado image. Yeah, I mean, that basically is sub-decadence and decadence folding in on themselves. So it wouldn't be the Barker spiral, because the Barker spiral would just be decadence. Or am I wrong?

I can't remember exactly what the Barker spiral is about. I mean, Amy knows more about spirals than I do. Anyway, continue. You're doing great. I'd have to look that up to double check. From my understanding, Barker used mainly sub-decadence. He wasn't so interested in decadence because, I mean, basically decadence comes from, having this kind of Western esoteric tradition stemming from, like, you know, like classical Kabbalah, kind of since the 17th century or so, if not before. So it's just this, like, passed on traditional, like, very normative way of going through, even though it's, like, esoteric, it's a very normative way of going through magic.

and it's based on just this tradition that's passed down not from inherent structures that are already there right so although things like mercury and sulfur and salt are mobilized within the system these are just overcoated over time and continuously overcoated and then those overcoatings are what's passed whereas the numogram is actually a highly undercoded system because it's trying to strip any kind of numerological interpretation so like that one means unity or that two

means coupling like they're trying to get rid of that and then just start from the mathematics and so they take out irrationals and fractions just to try to, like, get to base sequencing, like, as basic as well. Yeah, exactly. And addition is the only... is the logical progression of emergence or whatever, or unfolding. Yeah, I mean, just because it comes from counting. Yeah. Cool. Right, and clocks count, computers count, so if you want to figure out what's, you know, count time wave zero or whatever, or you just need to count. Sweet. Sorry, I lost my connection there,

so I'm a little... We just... That question was... It was just about... What was your question? Did you repeat it? I guess I asked about whether the Trizen spiral related to the Barker spiral directly, or if the fusion of decadence to subdecadence, I don't know, whatever. I guess there might be a difference because of Reza's sequencing, but then I just asked about why irrationals and fractions aren't involved, and Lendl explained clearly that

just simple counting addition was the goal, sequencing. Okay, I apologize. I'm sorry that I had to make everybody go through it twice. I just wanted to catch up. Any other questions or anything? Or did I miss something? There's probably like some glaring thing. Katak around the corner. I don't know. I like when we have this discussion about the logic of addition. And I like the... Because we assigned the Doherty text. I like the quote when she's quoting... When she's talking about the Deleuzean logic. She says, like...

Instead, this is a click logic of the Internet that generates an endless bearish of associations with possible significance, but no final resolution. This was the Deleuzean logic of and, and, and, and. The cyber-free association. and then she's talking about this is when she's talking about being in a paranoid state reading it and she's saying that it was a cyber free association she's on the couch and she's being schizoanalyzed by Cyclinopidia so I don't know I like this logic of the logic of addition being never ending and sort of like these things as well maybe except it's digitally reduced

so you still even though you can add, add, add, add, add it still kind of makes these symmetries with single digits in the end at least for their system yeah because like on themselves or like fold into themselves because of this reduction okay fair so this over coding fear that like definitely Deleuze and Guattari had as well but that occupied the CCRU and then of course Nick and Reza so would you equivalent the you know Middle Eastern

language bar bar thing with that same primal sequencing I think it gets tricky when you start so one of the things Reza did do and I didn't mention was that he so there are anglossic cabala kind of ways of mapping the numagram that they were trying to test out where I mean if you have a word in it you know you can perform gematria on it and get a specific number, then that number obviously relates to the zone on the tree of life. Sorry, on the numagram and the tree of life, but the numagram, that's what I should say.

What Reza did is he did the same thing for Farsi letters, and the interesting thing for Farsi is that apparently, I mean, I'm not, I don't know Farsi, but I think the Farsi Farsi letters can be broken down into three sets of nine, so it actually works very well with Zygovanism and all this nine twinning and nine being the kind of combination point for all of these systems. In terms of doing the kind of Gematria work or the numerical work with numbers, Rez's system is a lot more consistent because of Farsi. So it becomes really interesting with that inflection, especially given what I said about

him having an extra line based on words and not based on just numbers. So it could be his kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, like, hey, look, my system's more consistent with words than yours, but I'm not sure, you know. Albow to the eye of Nick Land. Are there any other questions for Lenzo? Anything at all? I mean, there's obviously, there's also links to the I Ching, but those are way too complicated to go into. teaching is a six-fold binary system which adds up to 64.

It has a lot to do with digital numeracy. I guess one last question, just because I'm curious. So the adding up of each letter, like A being 10, and C being 13. And AQ. Right, so yeah, yeah, the AQ thing. So I know that works in the glossary, like it's organized by those numbers, but did they see or do you think there's some...I guess I don't understand the numificator at the end of the day. I guess I find really interesting coincidences, but is that all...I don't know.

I don't know exactly what I'm asking, but if you could tell me more about how these words are...like, you know, take nine and then 78, 15, 6, how they thought you could break down words for some more genuine... The way I take that and there's like most of this stuff is all kind of operating on a system of unbelief so you're not supposed to believe in any of these things as the operating mode. However if you take that decode to recode differently or decode to uncode differently however you want to put that procedure.

And if you take that in mind, then having a way of coding words that's consistent, that you do on multiple words, and then finding these kinds of catelines, you know, you can in some, I mean, like, it's a way of performing cataphysics so that you can sort of connect all these underground pathways that have resonance with consistently, with your consistent operation. And then can trigger sort of like poetic engagements or at least mental adjacencies, which might produce multiple adjacencies or might intensify all your coincidences and enable a kind of hyperstition.

or it may not you might try and link all these words and then notice they're not Kabbalistically working out which then it's up to you to be like well fuck that or to say like well if you tweak this spelling here and you do this here then it starts resonating so you know it's like completely arbitrary in some sense however that arbitrariness doesn't like default it to nonsense. I mean like numbers are, numbers and letters are completely arbitrary, but they've been, you know, used so systematically over time that, and in such a way that they're not just based on some kind of weirdo bias.

You know, we don't use one because one, you know, because we have some kind of mystical idea of what one should look like. We just use it as some kind of, you know, notation system to get us into these formal logics which can launch us out. And that doesn't mean launch us out into some kind of metaphysical terrain that we can then find the reality of. I just mean that it can, like in an unbelief sort of way, it can code things that we can then see dynamic structures within. Does that make sense? That definitely makes sense. I added up Cyclonopedia before this just for fun and it was pretty much exactly the amount of pages in the book. Perfect. Great. Yeah, just don't forget to practice your cataphysics.

Never do. So do other people who haven't talked yet have questions? Or want to discuss maybe how... you know, what they think of the number systems, especially in terms of writing or in terms of the kind of relationship between found texts or anonymous materials, what the relationship is maybe between anonymity and found and arbitrariness or not. Do people see a kind of useful playfulness in this kind of stuff, or more or less,

or something else? Somebody say something? I can respond, but I don't want to be... I want to leave it open for other people. I'd love to hear what other people thought about the number system. Or just the random, kind of like, brackets equals some number and brackets. Even if you think it's bullshit, you can say that. I mean... Well, but that's true, but remember that another definition of hyperstition is treating your bullshit seriously. Yeah, I know.

That one comes from Eldritch Priest. Is that in his book on... Or is that in which book? Is it in his book? Yeah, Boring Formless Nonsense. The whole third part is hyperstition. Right. I'm not sure if it's a giant hyperstition or just using hyperstition. It's kind of hard to tell. What is this relation with hyperstition and noise, you think? Nonsense, noise. This is an open question for anybody to answer. I actually wrote a paper on this like two years ago but I can't remember anything that

I said in it. I'll try to I'll let you guys talk and I'll try to remember what I said I have a question Lendl, at one point you mentioned, hi I'm Eleanor sorry, can you hear me? am I audible? okay good, sorry at one point you mentioned and I'm looking at the white numagram on the black background you mentioned getting back from the warp and the plex into the time circuit is my terminology correct? Yep. How does that happen?

Because I'm looking at these and all I'm seeing are arrows pointing into them and then circling around and there doesn't seem to be any exit or is that only something that these sort of outer beings that you were mentioning can do or like what yeah yeah no I hear you so basically what a demon is or how they construe demons is as a span so a demon would live across let's say one of three and six or nine and zero and like you're talking about the amphidemons so they would live between these zones and the zones within the time circuit. So they occupy the entire span

between. So I know I was talking about going from the outside in or from the inside out, and that's just a way of thinking about how this demon might actually operate. Because we're not necessarily these demons although they can occupy us. You know, but the specific trajectories, you're right, would generally within the system go if you were to put in order from inside the time circuit to the outside because there's no arrow going back. Do you know what I mean? So the demon occupies this whole region, yet there is some kind of trajectory within the demon itself. So that the span...

What was one example of the span that you gave? We'll just take any number and any other number and you get an example of a span. Okay, I see, I see. Okay, and that, so it's, so instead of using these specific channels or currents, it's the, it's the, the imminence of the blank space that's in between them or something? It's the whole trajectory from one zone to another. Okay. Thanks. If you want one example, I guess you can...

One of them's called... What should I go with? I guess Chaki. There's one called Chaki, which is combustion, and it's 6 to 4 or 4 to 6. that's T-C-H-A-K-K-I in case you're wondering it's demon 19 I'm sorry other demons but for that one I'm going to look at mine so there's do we have the yeah I'm going to get it right now there we go we have this version it's okay this one's cool thanks Amy can everyone see that If you click Amy, then I guess you can see it.

But so Chaki, like I said, is six to four. So the CCRU outlines three ways of doing that, with two of them having sub-roots. So you can go... One's called Quenching Accidents or Apprenticesmiths. And you go from four to one to eight to seven to two to three and to six. And there's one sub root. Because there's one way of going... Like there's a double root. There's a channel as well as a current to do that one. The other way of doing that is you go from four to five, then to one to eight to seven to two to three to six. This one's called Mappings Between Incompatible Time Systems.

So it actually contains mappings within it. And it's the Heraclidian Fire Cycle. They have all these strange names. I mean, the names are kind of to try and invoke the concepts that are behind these demons, right? And then the other way of doing it is you just go from 4 to 5 and then straight to 6. And that one they're calling Conflagrations or Shrieking Darya Spontaneous Combustion. So like that's just an example of how they start coding these beements and there's no other paths. There's no other ways of getting from four to six if you take all the arrows and stuff like that. So like if you look at their kind of like at their pandemonium matrix which Amy posted

to tell you I think or she uploaded somewhere, you'll see all the listings and you'll see all the paths written out. Do you have a follow-up, Eleanor? Or no? Was that okay, Eleanor? I'm good. Thanks. So I guess we can talk about either the Doherty text, or we can move on to talking about GoodMeal.

There are no other questions about sort of the numbering system, how it relates to hyperstition. It is hyperstition. OK. Good meal then, Ben? Wendell? Amy? Maybe? Chris? Chris, you said you just did your thesis on Cyclonopedia, right? Yeah, for a modern literature program, which made it a little tricky at times.

Definitely didn't dive too much into the pneumogram and had a certain audience in mind. But what about radical openness as we see it in a good meal? Is that it? How's that in your opinion? I mean, of course, that was towards my conclusion. It's so interesting how, you know, openness is stated as impossibility. You know, you can't be open to being opened by. So there's kind of a paradox in making yourself a good meal if you're willing it, you know, if you're open to the possibility of being feasted upon.

So I guess I suggested that like the, what was it, not the Cults of Druze, but like those that read the Vendidad, Lovecraft's disciples and his own, you know, whole vision was kind of constrained by the fact that he tried to create create or allocate specific avatars of the outside no matter how I don't know capable of infiltrating or abducting they were so in the end it's to me I think I am the Z crowd thing

the the germ cell becomes an attack on itself and and those readings like on a PD as well because out of context of the book you you could maybe try to make yourself a good meal but I guess I suggested I suggested what did I suggest well yeah so he says you know the cults of Druges maintained all of life is horrific so they were like actually a part of the outsider embodying it or capable filtering it into you know the birth of

Western civilization or whatever or Zoroastrianism or Islam but I guess that one of my main conclusions was that the Cthulhu mythos and the Venedad reach contiguity with the outside but can't collude and thus Cyclinopédia itself is reaching contiguity we can't pollute. Those are just some thoughts, but I don't know. Here's a sentence. Any text that entangles to the outside can help but suggest a technique for gaining familiarity with that outside. So I think it's a really cool subverting meta-fiction.

That part is in a good meal. That quote you just read? That's something I wrote. actually it's on it was in response to something in a good deal okay um but yeah no those are just some thoughts and well thank you so they did what it was so like what are your what are your blog what are you what are the questions you're kind of negotiating here that you're still thinking about? Well, I mean... If you were to continue. If I were to continue... Specifically... Sorry, sorry, one more thing. Specifically, like, within this, like,

concept of radical openness or, like, the political, like, tactical, strategical elements of it. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I would say it's an interesting conundrum because, like, you know, we all want to be prepared for the unexpected. You know, unbelief could be, is a useful perspective, but I think Reza's trying to, you know, attack the possibility of the reader coming away from the book having familiarity with these other systems failing

or even associating themselves with the Z crowd or something. But I'm not completely sure about that yet. I do think it's very interesting, though, that he does take the turn to the cults of Druj kind of permeating or extrapolating into Islam at large as something that can accept apocalypse. I think that's a very interesting hyperstition, Islamic apocalypticism, because, like, in a sense, well, of course, it's not his belief. Persani's concept of Islamic apocalypticism is, like, in a sense, it's like, if you were the last, I don't know,

if you were the last one living on Earth and you could think that thought, then that would be it. You know, it's like an all-inclusive high precision if it allowed itself to be. I think it's an interesting history. Do you want to call it that? Yes, the history of the universe. backwards. Does anybody have a response to this project that he worked on? and the political openness in general. Ben, this is a lot to do with the work that you do, obviously.

Like a lot of the writing I've read on you. This is a very important concept. So maybe you can talk, like, a little bit about, I don't know, the importance of this second chant, this, like, so not only being open to, but being open by. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm curious what other people think about the radical openness in general, because it's something that a lot of people have resisted. I know when the text, soon after the text came out, a lot of people really took issue with it. I know, I remember some Deleuzians in particular really took issue with the sort of radical openness

since it's, I mean, in a lot of ways I think it takes aim at, because, you know, he talks very directly about the relationship between openness and becoming. and one of the most one of the lines he says he talks about terminating grotesque domestication and he kind of makes it clear that one of the ways you can be domesticated is one of the most dangerous ways is this idea that you're always being open the idea that you are open to anything anything goes, anything's fine, great which of course he critiques as being this affordance that I'm open to you to the extent that I can afford you, which really means it's a... You know, it's a...

It's tolerance. It's like self-tolerance. Yeah, it's a tolerance that masks itself as deeply, deeply rooted or that claims to be, you know... It's like a tolerance that has to be, but that I affirm at the same time, where he's kind of, where I think Raz's claim in that section is that, you know, you can't affirm, you know, right, openness is constructed, and at the same time, anything that radical would sort of happen to you, and you can have to react to it in a way. because otherwise if you're just open to you're already, you're editing out what things can, you know

the things that you can even perceive as different but because you claim that you are open that your being is openness, then you're in no danger of being called out you know, on pretending to be open it's a very strange kind of it's a strange move, but I think it's particularly, I think it's one of the more political kind of thrust of the book I mean, besides the kind of non-spacterialist bits Go ahead Yeah, I mean it's like an entire economical openness it's like an entire critique of like the post-modern

idea of like Derrida's hospitality, right, but also like a batting of Western liberalism is this idea of like, affordance. Yeah. And what being open to actually means. I mean, it's like, it becomes very, it's like his most political, it's the most political he gets, I think that's very interesting. But, of course, then he brings in the second, the epidemic openness, and then, of course, This is no longer political matter, right? This is politics. It's a lot. Mm-hmm. I mean, does anybody have any... I mean, for me, like, one of the things that really was interesting

was when he's talking about the uses of affirmation and the first level of openness being open to is the tactical element of affirmation. and this is like following a logic of capacity and then he follows a second being laid open by being butchered is the affirmative strategy so I didn't like he's obviously making a political move here but I just wanted to know if anybody had any thoughts on it because for me this is interesting yeah it's fascinating sorry I was just going to say I think there's three layers almost there's the problem of the open world

the drive to be open minded and then there's the drive to be open there's knowing that one should be butchered open and then still trying to remain open to that being opened by I think the next tier of openness is probably non-linguistic. I don't know. I don't know how to put it. And so, yeah, I think, yeah, it is directly geopolitical and a big critique of the West at large, but then it becomes something almost mystical, I think. But I'm not sure. Eleanor, did you have something to say as well?

Yeah, I have a slightly different question. I'll then you were using the word domestication I think at some point I'm resa towards the end uses the cation and Chris I think you were talking about I'm in that really nice sense that you read I'm gaining familiarity or something familiarity and probably this quote you I'm are these all different words for the same thing are you each talking about slightly different aspects of this kind of... I'm not sure if this is part of the affirmation or openness itself or what. Yeah, I mean, the part I quoted is on page 200 when he says grotesque domestication.

Because I think partly there, it's sort of, it's the, it's like tendencies which, you know, appear to be completely anti-structural or completely experimental or radical, but when it's always done in the same way, right? when it's radicalness from a position by which that form of radicalness isn't under question ever, then it's sort of the most dangerous kind of closeness, right? Because it's always, it's being, to the extent I can afford to keep being open to things that don't threaten the way I want to be open. So I don't know, Chris, if you want to say if that's similar to what you were, what you mentioned. Yeah, no, I think that's totally it.

I mean, just this idea of openness is an impossibility to rationalize or prepare for. But I also think that, you know, that's what Lovecraft's stories do so well, and that's, like, why his characters get so freaked out, and this idea of people reading The Vendor Dead, you know, which is a real thing. and seeing these demons as like ways to you know it's the same thing as like going to see begotten or like some horror film being like I can handle this this isn't you know I think at a certain point his text itself is arguing that

he can't I don't know that familiarity is an impossibility in that the outside doesn't have a language that fits within a schema but I don't know yeah I mean the other thing I think I would say was there was a there was a couple points back in I think it was 2008 and I was trying to I was trying to get Reza to admit like what all his influences were in writing the book and he just of course constantly refused me and I kept I harassed him for probably a year, I think, before he finally said the only philosopher that matters for Cyclonopedia is C.S. Peirce.

Hmm. Mathesician. Which is kind of funny, but the one... And, you know, of course, he's probably being a jerk a little bit. He wants me to sort of figure it out yourself, kind of. but I think the one really strong truth to that is the idea that if there is an outside or there is a continuum or there is some it's not a totality of things but if there's some materiality or the outside writ large you can never say oh there it is and you can't just bring it into your own language or your own discourse and say, okay, there, I've got it.

And he says this in the Good Meal section, where he says, you know, exteriority is an act. The idea that to talk about demons, or this massive outsideness, or this, you know, beyond, beyond, or whatever you want to talk about, that very notion has to be constructed. It's only ever going through the motions that one experiences something like the outside, not because, you know, oh, it's that weird-looking frog demon, or whatever that goes from, you know, like this number to this number. It's like I've come up with some way of experiencing this kind of continuum, this expanse, this move. And these kinds of things are everywhere. But, you know, when you slap 10,000 weird things together, maybe you get something that indexes something you didn't have before.

So it's kind of something that's, in one way, I think that's where Purse is a big, he is a big force in the book, even though he seems like he wouldn't be for a lot of ways. Yeah, so he says, like, very similar to, like, what you're expressing. Like, Reza says, like, what the outside is. He says you have a function, not distance, rather than distance, right? So, I mean, you could think of perhaps, like, the function or of experiencing the function as, like, a person diagram or something. I don't know. It's interesting that it plays that out, but it's using Purse as an example of pragmatics

or something. What about this insider that's crept in, like not just Kthell or Oil, but how do you guys feel about that discourse of maybe the outside expanding from within in this piece? Anyone? For me it's always very confusing. It seems to be like you have to go so far deep inside We reach the outsider and the insider and the outsider. It's like a reversing of formal topologies, which is interesting.

Very confusing. The intensive operative of horror from within. Yeah, I mean, he defines it all over the place, right? I mean, throughout the whole book, there's always a new definition. I can point out to Landian precursors for these ideas. of the radical openness and the alien insider, which may or may not be useful. But it lands characterization of modernity, or basically like the Kant capital complex, modernity and critical philosophy, is this idea of inhibited synthesis or trying to appropriate an outside

by always specifying the relation of that appropriation in advance. So it's, you know, another way of thinking about affordance. And there's a good little bit in one of his really early essays, Can't Capital and the Prohibition of Incest, where he writes about the Enlightenment in relation to this idea of affordance. I'll read a little section out from Phang Numenau. It's on page 64, if you guys have got the book. So, modernity is appropriate. It lives in a profound but uneasy relationship to an outside that both attracts and repels it, a relation that it precariously resolves within itself on the basis of exploitation

or interaction from a position of unilateral mastery. The paradox of enlightenment, then, is an attempt to fix a stable relation with what is radically other, since insofar as the other is rigidly positioned within a relation, it is no longer fully other. If before encountering otherness, we already know what its relation to us will be, we have obliterated it in advance, and this brutal denial is the effective implication of the thought of the a priori, since if our certainties come to us without reference to otherness, we have always already torn out the tongue of alterity before entering into a relationship with it." And he goes on to kind of talk about the relationship with this sort of imperialist, modernist inclination

to the Kantian a priori synthetic knowledge. And then in regards to the alien insider idea, I think this is something that comes through Freud for land and then probably perhaps Reza kind of takes it out from there but there's been you probably know this essay really well there's that early Ian Hamilton Grant essay called Black Ice where he talks about I think it's like a cut up essay he talks about this notion which I'm still trying to figure out actually so I can't explain it to you guys particularly clearly but it's in this Ian Hamilton Grant essay and also in Land's Machinic Desire is another kind of good spot for it But this idea that, Freud's idea that stimulus enters the organism from the outside through the skin and the sensory organs.

And the kind of model of the organism that Freud puts forth is this homeostatic model trying to regulate everything, return everything to equilibrium. So every time it receives some kind of shocking stimulus from outside, it's got some mechanism already in place to kind of equal it out. but there's a kind of weak spot in this system when the shock comes from within and he kind of talks about it in terms of desire and hooks that up to kind of a history of the philosophy of desire but I can't really explain it any more than that without going and doing a bunch of reading and remembering but those two essays that Ian Hamilton grants Black Ice

which is still online somewhere I can probably look it up and post a link to it and land machining desire, I think, are where this idea of the alien insider arrives through Freud and Lyotard as well, as a kind of way around the security of the organism, the security of receiving stimulus through the outside. I'll try and find the link for you guys. Yeah, I have a PDF of it for sure. I don't know where it is online, but... Catherine, did you have something to say? Were you going to say something? Not really, just kind of to say that my, probably my favourite bit, I guess my favourite bit

obviously on a video but that kind of pre-empts parts of A Good Meal is Excursus 6 about demons, and demon possession, and just the importance of overkill, and how that relates to being a good meal, I suppose. Yeah, so to possess a strong man is certainly enough to flaunt the demon's power, but all the better if it possesses a child or old woman to signify the outsideness of the demon through which overkill and power is generated. So yeah, I don't What page is that?

It's page 118 and 119 Well like the demon and the Lovecraftian outsiders avatars of the outside or yeah flow throughout it that's a really fun part I thought too but it's interesting how he resurrects these demons you know it's like hard to find a good translation of the Vendidad and see if Druge means blackening it's interesting how he constructs mythology, or I don't know.

Does anyone know how legit or how valid the interpretation is with these demons? I don't know. I guess in this hyperstition, it's just going to be a mixture of fiction. I know there's a lot. I don't know. It would be interesting if somebody actually went through and did that research. I have not. I have not found anybody that has. Yeah, I could not find a good vendor to add. Lundual, have you? No. I don't speak Farsi.

No, maybe. Well, you should work on that. On it. Top job. I don't know. I know that at least within the old Abstract Dynamics archive before a lot of it went down, I don't know how much is still there, but there were definitely links from Reza to these vast, vast, vast websites with basically whole demonologies of Islamic... It was like Islamic demonology and stuff like that. I don't know how many of these websites still exist

or how many of these pages are still up, but I remember cycling through a whole bunch of these things. So whether or not it's legit, who knows, but there were huge websites that he was linking to and at least reading through for kind of information on these demons. To my knowledge, he does know what he's talking about in terms of these demons. And then adding to the mythology. Yeah. But who knows? Ben does. Anything...

Are you familiar with that black... with the Black Ice... the grind piece, Ben? Or no? Just a little bit more about... I don't... I don't know that one very well, because it's his earlier stuff. Because it was sort of before he... I think it's one of his earlier texts. It is interesting, though, that he... I mean, Ian was a... Because Ian was a student of land, and he actually had him for his master's and his dissertation, which I don't know how he can do that and continue to exist as a person. But what's interesting is that that is...

that how he kind of... how he kind of got from... I saw the link between continental and... and even like analytic philosophy, and how he kind of saw the relationship between kind of desire and prohibition in these themes, and like logic, and how he sort of proceeded to follow land in certain ways, is that it was from reading Leotard and from translating Leotard. and specifically it was the concept of of categories, of things that are that are, you know, like repetitions but they're not repetitions in that they just mean the same thing they're like solidifications of a repetition of meaning

so it's kind of an interesting theme and it's very much a sort of it's a mythological term largely that certain, you know, gods religious figures are understood in terms of categories. Like, they are what they are, but that means that they're more than what they are. And it's kind of links to this sort of libidinal kind of materialism in terms of language and myth, all the way back to Kant and Prohibition and Incest and these kinds of themes. So, you know, how ideas and how myths and narratives are already material in a sense because they have this kind of powerful redundancy

once they're put into action. And it very much kind of makes Ian sort of part of this. You know, early on, I guess, part of this similar kind of questions in part of the CCRU. It's still there in... Oh, thanks, Landl. And it's still there in Res's work as well. All right. For those, I mean, one thing that we were kind of discussing a little bit beforehand was that it was like its relation with the inhuman. If you want to talk about sort of newer Reza stuff.

Oh, nice. Thanks, Lyndon. Yeah, I mean, does anyone have... I mean, I think that's kind of a theme we've brought up a bit already in terms of how inhuman are numbers, how inhuman is language, and what does that even mean to say that they're inhuman. Again, it's that idea that are they using us more than we're using them, Are humans just meat bags to hold stories and numbers in them for the sake of time and

just reproduce them efficiently? You get that kind of weird feeling, that kind of strange inhumanness encyclopedia, whereas the Onrez's recent work, it's a far more functional and directed form of inhumanness. It's an inhuman project of self-alienation for the sake of the future, I guess would be one way to put it. But I mean, what do people think about that? Like how inhuman is? Can anything that's a human tool in terms of number or story be considered inhuman or is considered inhuman itself just a way for us to,

feel better or worse about using it. Anybody? I'll start picking on people. I mean, like, I always thought just to jump in a little bit. When Reza says, because he seems to say in his new work, you know, liberate the thing that liberates itself from you. And in some sense, that formulation sounds like preparing yourself to become a good meal. You know, like, I actually...

I don't think he's strayed too far away from this radical openness thing. I think you were saying this, Ben. That, um... Like, although he's kind of... coding a lot of what he's doing in terms of this like, you know, random access memory sort of account of functionalism. You can kind of see threads of this radical openness still operating. Because, I mean, how do you liberate the thing that's liberating itself from you and still... Sorry, Amy, yeah, random access memory is just my... inability to cease punning. But I don't know, does that make sense?

That that sounds like radical openness, or does that not sound like radical openness? Yeah, I think it does. I just wonder how much of it is... I mean, one question is, what's, you know, does how he perceive agency change from that sort of work in terms of, you know, complicity, right? Complicity is the kind of theme. Complicity with forces that you only access by constructing them as opposed to, you know, treating yourself as a sort of trajectory that you then kind of have to unfold through kind of pragmatic means. I mean, I guess, is there a difference there or not? is it more difference in tone

or is it actually a sort of emphasis on how you know how we perceive freedom basically freedom and how things are created how much control we have over it or not I guess is the question whether it's fictional or not or political or what have you I guess there's also this thought in the this recent stuff of like the socialized, you're this, no matter what, you're this socialized entity. Mm-hmm. Everything you do, it, like, impinges on everyone else and is kind of constructed on everyone that's within your kind of inferential matrix and things like that. Yeah. Which, to my

mind, is sort of a mapping of hyperstition and stuff like that, but I think you were talking about that last week, like, how social does hyperstition need to be in order to gain traction? But maybe that's just me kind of projecting his old stuff into his new stuff and saying where did this writer go? I'm trying to think. I mean, the genre he's writing in now is... Does anybody have anything to put in? Well, it's just amazing how precise and explicit his new writing is and how, like, my experience

with reading Cyclinopédia is like, you know, some kind of tuning mechanism. I would develop my own responses to it, and it would fine-tune my reaction. He never gives you these definitions, but he vacillates between strategies so frequently. It's interesting now that he still carries that, you know, I guess passion for the outside, but is directing it towards more ethical, rational, I don't know, conditions by which to improve humanity or something. I don't know. It was unexpected for me.

Let's not forget that. I mean, even radical openness plays the ethos of, I mean, in the way that he operates, the difference between the medical and the epidemic is that it sort of plays the game. It accommodates the affordance, but it's sort of, at the same time, it's objective from within. So maybe it's, I don't know, maybe he's also found, I don't know, I'm trying to think of that might work, how I might sort of argue for this new sort of way of writing, way of thinking. Well, it's just shocking at first. You read a title like Labor of the Inhuman on E-Flux

last winter, and like, you didn't. It just sounds evil. It's like, ooh, inhuman evil. But it's like such a truly humanistic project. It's pretty remarkable, I don't know. I mean, it's sort of an inverse move of land in a way. You know, land started out as an academic and then went crazy and ran off to Shanghai And Reza kind of started out crazy, and now has become like a rational thinker. So it's like there's always a question of like, well, but how rational is it?

It's like there's a suspicion of hyperstition about the whole thing. It just kind of adds to it a lot, I think, actually. well it's interesting how everyone describes cyclinopedia as delusian landian and like at first like i couldn't you know of course i thought land and braza could have co-written it or whatever but it's amazing how you start to realize that it's very much like a condensation and subversion of lands or even in cyclinopedia i think but very hard to parse at times

in a way I see it as the perfect post-Landian text in that you can't write I mean Reza was obviously really highly or hugely influenced by the CCIU and everything that was going on on the hyperstition blog before writing Cyclinopedia. And when I sort of think about how do you write about Nick Land, you can't write, you can't approach his work in any kind of like academic fashion. The same way that he kind of complained about postmodernist academics writing about Bataille in First for Annihilation,

this idea that you can't write on Bataille, you have to write through him. where you have to become Bataille, where you have to completely dismantle yourself in order to do it. And I think that Reza, in a way, does the ultimate post-Landian work. I mean, he kind of takes all of Lanth's philosophy, completely metabolises the numagram, all the spiral diagrammatics, and re-does it using the kind of methodology of the CCRU, but does it better. He's like the kind of ostentatious student that outdoes the master in a way. And the fact that no one really knew whether Reza was a real person for a while

and everyone was completely confused about who actually had written the book, all this kind of stuff, really just was, I suppose, is a kind of crowning achievement of doing land better than land does. Which, you know, could be questioned now, considering what land's been doing lately. I don't know exactly how to finalise an interpretation on that, but it's a good rival methodology. But I think Cyclinopédia is maybe even an exorcism of land stuff, but he basically does the ultimate text on land's work. no one never needs to ride on land again really alright I'll shut up now he only mentions him once right when he like paraphrases

for the porous quote I don't remember but I mean even stylistically he's kind of absorbed the style in a way runs himself into land style I think there's quotes from hyperstition discussions or called me discussions that were land but it's like in there's like x or z I think in one of the sections but yeah like that's that might be as much as he appears as like an entity but he's not even identified as such. So it's even...

It sort of fits, right? It's appropriate. He's the insider. Pulling it open. And Reza's the good meal that he's eating, right? Yeah, same way Land gets the ballot by Vitae. But that's like I wrote in the comment, that's Land pre-2007. Because all the shit that he's been writing now, which is, you know, the most hyper Nietzsche has ever been. But that's a different story.

It's a story for another class. Or perhaps this one if it's this quiet. What did you guys think when you read Good Meal? Did you approach it philosophically? Did you approach it like you're reading a weird fiction novel? or any sort of experience in doing either or. Really, anything before we kick a dead horse at this chapter.

I don't want to overdo it. Sorry, are you asking how we read A Good Meal specifically? or second video? Well, I mean, more the whole... Just saying that, yeah. Sorry? So the book or the chapter itself. Okay. So either the whole book, if you've read the whole book. Okay, well, either way, the answer is just really slowly. Yeah. Yeah. I generally find that I read each sentence trying to read it in a fiction way and then

gain a sense of it, inevitably don't fully understand it, and then try to read it as a theory, I guess. Okay Because the reason I ask is I'm just interested in like how do people go about reading a high-presentational text For instance And Eleanor, how about you? How did you sort of approach? um more as when i because i was reading the pdfs first and then i found cycl because i don't have

a full copy of cyclonopedia but then i found it on scribd so i started rereading it and when i so the first reading of a good meal and um uh kristin's preface um i read those more as like a I'm so ready to go first and then went back to the preface and then started the book over I'm and so I read a good meal first more as just how I would read critical theory or philosophy or whatever so very much like focusing more on I'm less on its fictionality and war on what it

you know what was what was trying what was being argued about ontology or whatever just trying to figure it out and then when I was reading the preface I just went wait what and had this moment where I was just like was I reading that entirely wrong who's Parsani and that's where I found the that's when I found the interview because I started googling everything and going, wait, what am I reading? What is going on here? And then started rereading the book from the beginning with a much sort of closer eye then to the combination of the two

and the fictionality of its structure, I guess. I don't know. I'm not really saying that correctly. but no with a but with a much more kind of the word that's it's it's like amuse amusement isn't really what I'm going for because that kind of has much to light of a tone but but with an eye to what you were talking earlier Ben maybe I don't remember who was saying this, but the sort of serious play that's going on. So you found it much more of an enjoyable reading after you read the preface

and kind of were framed to read it differently? Well, I found it enjoyable when I was first reading A Good Meal, but I felt kind of bad about doing that. Like, am I supposed to find this fun or am I supposed to be taking this super seriously? But, you know, there's all these, well, for one thing, I don't know if this was the case with every version of this PDF, but the capital G kept being replaced with C, so I would get the dead cod is devouring things, which, you know. Okay. I mean, when we're talking about things turning into corpses in order to... I don't... What's that? I can't remember what that

exact image is, but the idea of dead and reeking fish just becomes that much more kind of delightful. I don't know. I'm sort of like... Trying to bring it back to sort of like what we can think about, like, with what, how Ben introduced the first session when he was talking about sort of how weird fiction starts out with any appeal. This is, I'm quoting Ben, obviously, in the first session, that it starts out as any appeal to subjectivity.

and so one where you are the character oriented towards the outside. I mean, this characterization obviously is working in psychopathy as well. So trying to make me think about it. Like, I know Eleanor, you study weird fiction, and Catherine, you write. you're experimenting, incorporating, and writing. So if you sort of approach this as sort of a... Or how would you hold up the two together? Or how do you relate the two? Since I quoted you,

if you have something to follow up on. Sorry. Sorry, I'm now reading the... I know. It's alright, it's fine. The two being what? Weird fiction and hyperstition? Or... Yeah, maybe. This is a hyperstitional text, right? And we have a weird fiction genre. But they're sort of both appealing to this character oriented towards the outside, where you're immediately drawn to a subjectivity. I mean, obviously, the Middle East itself is sentient. It is live with Reza. Sidebar thing. Anyways.

Assholes. I'll be pressing John's sidebar with sidemestation. Well, I mean... After a while in this room break from just constantly quoting, so it's good actually. Yes, sorry for if I was talking too much earlier. I haven't been in a philosophy classroom in a long time. And sorry for not introducing myself. Hello. But sorry, what was the last question? I was trying to say hold on, I have to hide the sidebar

I was just trying to say like Ben in the first session, which you missed Ben sort of like gets up the frame for like why we're trying to put Hyperstition and then Reza and doing weird fiction readings at the same time and he's kind of promoting that like he's just kind of talking about like what the new weird and he sets up the first thing that he, oh, it still comes up. He says, any appeal to subjectivity, you immediately start with any appeal to subjectivity and one where your character is always oriented towards the outside, where any subjectivity is embodied. Am I misquoting you by stretching you to say, like,

any subjectivity is sort of embodied in itself in a character? Could we think about it like how Reza has Middle East as sentient as a lie? In a real sense, he's talking about it being sentient. Yeah, I mean, again, it's sort of like what's the figure, or what's the center of agency? I was talking to, when Lundell and I were going back and forth about the difference between this and his newer work, And it partly has to do with, you know, what's, you know, when someone creates a fictional text or is creating a world, right?

Sort of how, you know, one question is how parasitic is a created world on the real world, whatever that might mean. you know, so much of creating a fictional world or creating a world is parasitic upon, chooses to be parasitic in particular ways, like it's you know, it's like our world but with this addition of entities, or it's like or it's not like our world, it's totally its own world and so it's, you know, sort of up to whoever the character or whoever's navigating it the reader or and or the characters to figure out what the consistency of that of that created world is. So, I mean,

again, I think it keeps coming back to this theme in Cyclinopedia about if the Middle East is alive, if the kind of blob, the kind of mass of petrochemicals is using us to free it. This idea that we are, this kind of Lovecraftian theme of outside forces are affecting us. okay, you know, you can create stories about outside forces affecting you. And then what have you done? Like, you've added to the outside forces affecting you by creating a story about outside forces affecting you, right? So it's like you've, you know, and so is that an act of freedom? It's like, well, the word freedom or agency kind of isn't right there, right? It's sort of what's the difference between creating something and following the consequences of something

that you may or may not have created? it. You know, I think that's the kind of, I think that's one of the tensions that weird fiction invokes, and that theory fiction invokes too in a slightly different way, just because it announces its parasitic upon theory worlds, and not just real and fictional worlds, if that makes sense to anyone, or to myself, after I've now just said it. I don't know. The theory worlds part, what do you mean? So Doherty actually says that like, I like Doherty's in the non-edipal networks in Leopard Creativity, as like the page nine of the PDF, she's talking about how, I mean, how it's,

this is exactly like sort of a hyperstition definition, but she says there is an experiential theorizing of contemporary capitalist military-industrial media complex here that enacts its critique beyond text, beyond representational writing, and moves with tera-fractal stealth into lib reality. So, in this sense, what is this different than Reza's theory world? The theory world is actually influencing the lib's reality in her sort of interpretation of this, right? Or how does the theory world play out inside of the hyperstition definition of fictions making themselves real?

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know what the definition between theory, you know, to call something theory fiction, what does that mean? I mean, it's fiction that uses theory as a resource, but that doesn't necessarily make a claim whether theory then counts as a form of fiction or if it's still announcing its separation, saying that there's theory, which is not just influencing the fiction, but actually appears in it. so you know like Parsani appearing in Cyclinopedia he's a fictional theorist his theory is a sort of touch point to talk about entities so it's like here's a text

that's a cut up of theory and fiction and that uses fictional theorists to talk about stories that didn't happen as if they're real events in a book that claims to be a mix of theory and fiction. So it's like, okay, you know, what's... Not only do we have to distinguish which is theory and which is fiction, but also, sorry to interrupt, but also, like, it's largely about the fictions that should enter theory. You know, it's like a barrage or a battery of potentially very destructive theories, but not all of them. and as Kate Marshall says in her piece, like theory fiction might be redundant. Like, you know, one theory can be fabrication

and one fiction can be hoping at the actual, or striving for the actual. So it's, theory fiction is, it's a problematic definition for me, but I'm not sure. Dirty calls it noise fiction But of course I mean As you already said He's not real I didn't I actually thought that Kristen was fake Until I heard the beginning of this talk Well I saw I saw that Reza had her as a friend

on Facebook and I was like god damn it, are you taking this to this level? But of course yeah so it's amazing when you put your readers in a place of such indiscernible how you leap to create fictions yourself you know yeah I mean the other interesting thing is too is you know once people playing hyperstitional games, right? And the one interesting thing is the characters, the sort of heroes of hyperstition. There's these characters that are fictional entities. You know, sort of fictional entities which...

That's a good one. Sorry. Which, it's interesting because it's like a character in, you know, it's a character in a novel that gets picked up by another author. Right? which happens with Lovecraft all the time or happens with figures that get picked up and reused. But with hyperstition, it's interesting because it's almost more tempting because it's not like you're filling the backstory or putting this character into different situations and whatnot, but you're actually making them even more real because you're giving them more connections. And it's in a weird way by taking up someone else's already made thing, you're actually potentially doing more with it than creating your own because it being more connected makes it more real.

Kind of just a funny anecdote and to connect to the next section. Because, you know, next session we're talking with Jeff Vandermeer and talking about his work. And I actually found out about Jeff Vandermeer because of Reza. Because Reza said that Jeff Vandermeer was looking for anonymously written pieces of fiction for one of his collections. so I wrote one and then claimed that it was, and then it references Maximilian Crabb who's one of the hyperstitional characters so it's like, you know, you kind of like laugh to yourself when you do these kinds of things but it's the kind of added it's the twist, right it's the kind of added twist to plotting in hyperstition that makes it so interesting, I think fun

you should post that text that you're talking about, if you can Yeah, I have to find it. It's probably in my email somewhere. If you can find it. Yeah, I'll look for it right now. But someone else should say something, because I'm talking too much. I was just going to agree that I was in the same boat as Chris in terms of not realizing that, or even considering that Kristen might be real until this session. But also, until doing this course, it seemed to me like hyperstition,

the theory was made up for the benefit of the book, rather than the other way around. but of course it kind of doesn't matter which way around it but just alright so this course introduced you to the whole history of the Hyperstition blog and all that yeah because when I first read its description in Psychonopedia I went of course that would be a really useful thing to invent for the purposes of introducing it here and kind of I guess you should just hope that we're not in on it either.

Not telling. Wait, we're not in on it? Lando? I'm keeping that ambiguous. That's the whole anethics thing, right? Yep. Yeah, which I wish we had Tristan here because we could have brought up that question. But he's not here today. I have one more question for Lendl. It seems that, like, with the pneumogram and in Encyclopedia, it raises rendition. There's a strong, like, asymptotic trend, even in the concepts.

I was wondering if you had anything to say about that. You'd have to tell me a bit more as to how you're seeing the pneumogram as asymptotic. Well, I mean, so one tonight. It definitely is, but... Well, I guess, okay, so the number, the addition thing isn't, but I feel like throughout the book there's several trends of, you know, increasing contiguity with the outside that seem to me to be, like, directly asymptotic, but I was just asking if you saw that in the arithmetic or if that's just a conceptual thing

that I am bringing to the table and it's my own thing. I don't think numbers are inherently asymptotic, especially if you just have the sequence 0 through 9. I mean, what you have there is you have two limit cases, which are 0 and 9, and then kind of everything in between, and it just so happens that 0 and 9 are sysegetically linked but I'm just saying that they're paired but like there's nothing that's inherently a progression towards a limit point that you can't get towards which would be asymptoticity right whereas like a good meal and that kind of thing that definitely functions that way because

you can't bring yourself to that outside, right? So you can kind of approach the limit point where you, in some sense, seduce the outside, but it's really up to the outside to open you into these unaffordable regions which, you know, might be at your peril, I don't know, but you can only approach that. So that's how I don't see asymptoticity, if that's even a word, occurring within the pneumogram, but I definitely see it occurring, like you were saying, in several places within cyclinopedia. Any kind of limit aspect is kind of like even like the thanotropic vector is in some sense

already asymptotic because you're tending towards death, and when death happens, you are no longer. so in some sense you can only approach it without ceasing to be. Does that make sense? Is he frozen? He's a pretty good statue if he's not. I think Chris has been having Wi-Fi problems. He keeps dropping in and out. Okay. Did that make sense to anyone else? It's your whole explanation. It made sense to me. I liked what you said about the thanotrophic vector and how you can never be consummated

because it extinguishes you in the moment that it consummates you. Yeah, exactly. It consumes you. It always has these two ways of...it's always going both ways, right? always moving towards a peer activity and relations with everything and then once you reach the limit point you're sort of you're completely butchered. Yeah, there's only so long you can be filleted open before you're no longer, is one way of putting it. You know, it takes at least a thousand cuts, right?

Thousand CODs. At least, yeah, at least the COD conversations really going very vibrant. I think so. I mean, I guess, like, according to Spinoza, we're all COD. We're all just modes of COD. I mean one of the cool things about puns just for me to like insert something random into this is that like the kind of lexical similarity between cod and god

which allowed the OCR to fuck up in your version of the PDF is in some sense this sort of like both xenopoetic and outside in vector where like you know like it's kind of within language there was for some reason this this like mapping which is totally arbitrary but because it's there you can then tweak and you know it leads these regions of you know like punning intelligence and things like that that accidentally becomes almost intelligent commentary I mean There's someone on Tumblr does this series where she is tracking all of the places the OCR screws up modern and turns it into modem.

so the modem man and it becomes this it's mostly just silly but in some places it becomes a very interesting alternate reading of what's otherwise a pretty staid treatise on modernity or something but it's like oh well now we're talking about social media totally accidentally no Can you tell me who that was? The modem? I can send you, yeah, let me find the links to that tag, because it's pretty funny. I mean, it's also, like, for example, all the bad etymologies that Heidegger does is because of exactly this,

because he sees these homophonic structures and goes, that must be the root. And then he follows these really bad etymologies just because the words sound the same, but it's because language itself is kind of... In a similar sense, that number has this inherent kind of logic. The sounds of language, the kind of lexical writing systems of language have these inherent logics that can be exploited if they want to. to, you know, positive or negative livalence cybernetic ends, but it's all interesting. Yeah, Moe has, like, that interesting, like, project that he did about the theory of the ungrill

where you can put, where you can just, it's basically like a game where you just put whatever word you want and it changes the entire, it changes the words, of the subject and the object of the point of critique, and then you can read the theory of the, like, so you make your critical theory of anything, potentially. What was the theory of the un-girl? No, the theory of the un-girl, it was, like, the tikkun. Oh, tikkun, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Mohamed Salimi, he actually created, like, this online project where you can go in and just change, like, the... You can change the subject object of critique, and then it will add those into the entire PDF and give you the entire document, but it will change for what you want.

Which are the Mad Libs, right? It's a Mad Lib for... It's fun, actually. a model or carlman misled your best friend I believe we're sort of wrapping up here. I mean, we have like 15 minutes, so if anybody has any last things they want to say, or I recommend reading Eleanor's blog.

She did a post for a week, so read it and respond to it. I don't know if you want to say anything about the post, Eleanor, or because it had a lot to do with, I mean, your post had a lot to do with what Ben was first talking about. We didn't really break out enough with discussion on sort of the thumb text. You picked up on that before. Yeah, I can if... Here's the link to my hastily made Tumblr just to post this because for whatever reason I was having trouble copy-pasting that much text and I don't even know. I'm but basically for the the entire conversation at the first session I kept thinking about I'm start Thomas is the end of mister why day I don't know if anybody is

read that but she writes the use I don't know if they're exactly theory fictions but I would like to think that they are but I oscillate back and forth between thinking that they're really smarter than they seem and that they're actually just as wanting to be smart but not quite getting there as they seem but this one is about this graduate student writing her dissertation on thought experiments who finds a book that if you read it you'll die and of course she reads it because who among us wouldn't and then it becomes this like weird like part sort of conspiracy novel There's this base. It's basically the new sphere, but she calls it the troposphere, and it's this video game

It's pretty much like a video game UI that she can access when she takes this like It's like a homeopathic remedy and then she can Astral a project into other people's bodies. It's very and then sort of time travel and it becomes The End, in her note, in her author's note, she says that she was worried that the end would make it a shaggy god story. So again, a transposition of letters. I don't know that it doesn't. but basically the whole sort of like interesting suggestion

of this novel is that some people can think and that's what this quote is sort of about that perhaps if the world is a simulation some people can think in machine code and that allows them to change the laws of the universe and so but whenever something like that happens, it always has been. So that's where relativity comes in, that relativity was thought into existence, but at the point at which it was thought into existence, it had always existed, which is probably the most interesting idea within this novel, which is enjoyable.

but then so at the end when I was thinking about this and its relation, you know, what possible relation could this have to Cyclonopedia what I was thinking kind of at the end is that ultimately there's not there are threats within this novel and the threats are coming from outside but because of the way that thought is conceived within this novel, everything that is outside is ultimately just back inside. And that the only, the sort of end point is a garden that promises neither change nor creation,

but comfort and erasure. So basically their identities, they die, but they end up in the garden in the troposphere. And so it's salvation of a sort, but it's entirely self-controlled, and that seemed to me to be kind of antithetical to everything that was happening in A Good Meal. What is the author again of this? Scarlett Thomas. Scarlett Thomas. Sounds good. She has another book called Popco, which is about toy manufacturing and code breaking. You said this...

that you're talking about is that once you think it, once you said, once you think it, at that point, that you think it ultimately is real or it becomes real? Sounds very much like Trent, where Trent says. Go ahead. That it has always been real. Sorry, I missed that last part. What, who says? It sounds a lot like what Linda Trent says in the Hyperspishion blog as well. She says a very similar thing. I'd have to go back and find the quote. But I'll post it as a response to your thing. Great, thank you. She says something along the same lines.

If you remember back to the first session when we were trying to comprehend this sort of time traveling, I was trying to think of it in its terms. But I'll post it. Any last comments before we depart? Yeah, I was just going to say if we're talking about related fictions or pieces of fiction, all I could think about really when reading Cyclonopedia and these readings was His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. I don't know if anyone's read it. No, but please put it in the sidebar for us. Yeah, it's basically, there's a lot of ideas in it about sort of dust as external consciousness

and having to make yourself open to receiving sort of dust, but dust is also dark matter and that kind of thing. Weirdly, so it sounds a lot like Eugene Decker's latest. Yeah, I think it's really related to that as well, to In the Rost of this Planet. Okay, it's dark materials. Has anybody else read this or not? Yeah, it's The Golden Compass slash Northern Lights is the UK title, right? The Subtle Knife and the Amber Spyglass. Is that the third one? Yeah.

They made a movie of the first one that was... Yeah, nobody watched that. It's terrible. Okay. Would you watch a Cyclonopedia film? Yeah. But if there were a Cyclonopedia film, it would have to be based on I don't ask me what page it's on but there's a footnote that just says consider directing a film based on two different books at the same time I don't know what other book you could possibly combine with like on a video it would be an interesting film well that would be the the inverse of

oh man it's a wow this was going to be a great joke until I forgot the title. But it's based on the... Oh, God. Well, I'll get that out. The encyclopedia. Nice to meet all you guys virtually. You too. You too. Thank you. Yeah, same. All right, so if there's no future questions, I guess the next session is with Jeff Vandermeer.

So we're going to be mostly reading Annihilation and sort of try to get through as much as you can or pick a part that you like the most. about this in context of what we're sort of doing. He is familiar with Reza, so we could have some sort of leeway into the next session. It'll actually be pretty good. And if you have any sort of threads or questions, please post them on the classroom. Or if you can do what Eleanor did as well, write a blog post, or write and just post it on threads. And yeah, I think the card thing loosened people up a little bit.

So it looks like a lot of card won't open up like that. Just a question. It kind of doesn't really need asking, but it's totally acceptable then, just the blog can be based on anything that kind of struck you or any direction you want to take? Yeah, I think one of the things that we can do, I mean, we're kind of experimentally having these discussions to sort of pull apart concepts that interest all of us in random directions, and then take it with you and sort of...I really want to know how it relates to everybody's work, so I don't think we have to follow any sort of, like, thread, but I I think we're all doing different, interesting work. And so really, anything that might have struck you,

you can go off on a tangent. I mean, talk about the Philip Pullman novel and how it relates, or if you want to talk about early or new Reserwork, The Inhuman, Vaticanus, whatever. But I mean, so you can, so if you want to post sometime, What it hopefully will do is lead into the discussion for the next session so we can bring it and everybody can kind of work with it and we can work out ideas together. So that's what I see the blog post is doing, hopefully. Okay, great. And where can we put them, like, as in where can we link to them, I guess? Just on the platform? Yeah, if you do your own blog post, you can just put it on the, just put it as a thread.

You can actually add a link and just add the link there. And then we can comment on it there, or we can comment on the blog. Great. So really, if you're working out any sort of ideas or anything, feel free to just like, you know, write up a quick blog, post it, and we can all kind of work with each other. Great. No problem. Are there any other questions before we end? Ben? Do I have the final words? No. No, I don't think I have anything smart to say. All right. Same as usual. May Cod be with you? Yeah, Codspeed. Yeah, Codspeed.

Bye, everyone.