Amy Ireland Darkside Empathy Shanghai Frequencies

. Okay. Hi everyone.

speaking of unanticipated interruptions before, this is the second time that I'm going to try and do this. Hopefully it's working, let me know if something's going wrong. So I began basically thanking Mikkel for starting this whole thing. It took me in a completely different direction to where I thought I would end up with it, and possibly him as well, I'm not sure. That's kind of the point of the whole piece, or it turned out to be in the end, that when you find yourself going somewhere you never plan to go or expected to go, you know that something important happened, something like a singularity or an event that

comes out of nowhere, which one can only then try and become equal to, because it's impossible to take back or to undo. So from the start with this project I was in a position of response. Mikul had asked me to respond to the essay that he was writing, and it was a kind of sort of four-way collaboration between him sort of barking it off, me responding. There are two interviews that Mickles conducted with Anna Greenspan and Nick Lime, born in Shanghai a few years ago, the make-up of the book. The thing was that I sort of soon found out

that this notion of response that I was involved in was only going to become more profound. And it was not going to remain something so simple as providing a rhetorical response to chemical's provocation. It ended up becoming a problem of ontological response as well, which opens up a whole series of ethical questions around passivity, activity, fate, and agency. Questions like what part of our experience as human beings can we truly call active? what can we control and determine conceptually? What's the role of knowledge in this? And what parts of our experience are necessarily passive, things we can only respond to thanks to

the structure of reality, which as I maintain in the piece is always open to absolute contingency, everyday singularities that rearrange the world because of our fundamental entrapment in the near temporal synthesis. Or to put it another way, an intrinsic aspect of the future makes it impossible to model fully, for there will always be something that we cannot know, cannot control, and we'll only be in a position to respond to. That said, and this is the argument of my part of the text, the way that we respond One extreme example from George Bataille is that of the prisoner who grins at his executioner

just moments before his death. Or from Jason Babak Mahagek who told me this story in 2017, long before I first met Miku in China, of the Iranian poet Ahmad Shanlu, who was imprisoned during the revolution and forced to undergo daily mock executions as a means of breaking down his psyche, never being quite sure if this would be his last moment on Earth or not. And Lou had very little agency in this situation. But what he did in response, Jason tells it, was quite amazing. He wrote lullabies on the walls of his cell with the only thing he had was own blood. Haunting, terrifying lullabies. And the lullabies already are really dark, but only form.

Eventually the guards came afraid of him, and their sadness in the way. Mock executions stopped. Some of them even began to help Sharmu smuggle his writings out of the prison. I find it incredible sucker in this story. As long as we don't submit to the very humanist temptation to overstate our own agency, accept the chaos of existence, and discover all kinds of productive, fortifying, and even hematops-free possibilities in the cracks of our own experience, no matter how small they might be. The text also deals with empathy, especially the role of empathy in philosophies of the

inhuman, which are often dismissive, and in feminism, of which it's often lauded as specifically feminine capacity, represented as if it was some kind of remedy to particularly a person's brought about by its opposite, masculine aggression and competition. Reactionary thought simply takes up the scheme or avert it, empathy is a feminine weakness. It links to so-called feminine irrationality, which makes women unsuitable for certain social roles. An interesting example of such an account of reality plays out in the far future, described in Leo Sitchin's Forest. Anyway, this novel was very much in the back of my mind while I was writing this section on empathy, because I wanted to kind of refute his intrinsic understanding of empathy as

feminine and weak. So I wanted to develop an account of empathy here that consists of both of these prominent characterisations, while at the same time emphasising its importance for both feminism and dehumanism. In this respect I examine how empathy can relate to xenophoetics, which is one of the calls Objects of Interrogation in the book. I wanted to develop a theory of what I've been calling dark side empathy after a paper by Niels Boobank and a rebrand whose case studies I use in text. Oxide empathy is neither virtuous nor weak. Rather, it provides a kind of fortification that allows one for whether the ontological pressure we are subjected to by time. So I'm going to read a few excerpts

from my section of Shanghai Frequencies. Together they deal with the notion of unanticipated trajectories with a status of empathy and being struck by an event and having to respond. So this is the opening of my part, but into some context. Mikula's right. Something went abruptly wrong. It's the hour or two we spent wandering through the People's Park, a symmetrical puzzle of lawn that informs the Shanghai Museum, due to a close. The conversation began innocently enough.

We discussed archaeology, the alienation of travel and foreign languages. Our experiences in different artistic and cultural news, xenophoetics, xenofeminism, occasionally halting to perch on a cold bench while Mickles scrolled through illustrative specimen for your work on a laptop he'd brought with him, for spiralling out into the surrounding streets, where fiercer topics were able to emerge. It was there, on the periphery of the low-rise neighbourhood, which I prefer to the impenetrable venerability of the park, Mikkel divulged the intense personal experience he'd had with his sister's ordeal of mental and cellular breakdown and her increasing loss of autonomy. I wanted to know what xenopoetics and xenofeminism had to say about that.

A question to which I had no reply. Under the ever-darkening haze of the approaching Shanghai evening, the iridescent skyline of Pudong, booming into relief because the smog and grit across the breach of the river, menace of a problem that neither of us were equal to forced its way between us and immobilised us both. i remember halting on the corner and staring down the street in silence everything else was in motion pedestrian and black traffic fredding up the eerie brown air that inhabits the city fluctuated here and there by the tepid glow of red and yellow neon signs and dearly wanting to be able to respond, reassure Mikko, give him something meaningful to hold on to, for both of us to hold on to.

But nothing came. We immediately agreed that that was the end, and parted ways. Reading back over his narration seven months later, when I had finally gathered the mental resources to reply, and will be inadequately to his provocations, I figured I owed him a proper response to whatever it was that had imposed itself on us there on a busy corner of Guan Xi Lu. That moment manifested for me not so much as a plank, but as an acute instinct to flee. The lusnical and that conversation in the awakening animation of the surrounding streets, the fine respite in the anonymity and estrangement of a foreign city, one whose population is larger and denser than my entire home country,

and in the sucker of constant movement, without purpose or destination, a perpetual trajectory towards the horizon I would never arrive at, nor understand, and which was coincident with the rupture I was also running from, a vertigo that is always at the beginning and always at the end. The only legible mark of the fact that something, nothing, had happened. This movement of flight is uniquely comforting. There are few situations from which it fails to lure me. The ever-present temptation of reconstitutive alienation is too much for one with a junkie's faith in risk, risk, a perverse willingness to stake one more time everything one has and is on the

utterly unknowable and the duplicitous, inculpable madness of alien time. The suffering of Mikkel and his sister only makes sense like this, grasped hopelessly but firmly against a ground of total existential indivisible. Empathy is a problem. Especially for any so-called thinker of the inhuman, under the sign of which empathy is understood, it indexes a concession to all two human modalities of the being. A supposed weakness, something to be excised as quickly and as exactingly as possible. It is demonstrably heightened if that thinker is a woman, something the

horror that accompanied the reception of the Xeno-Feminist Manifesto as a feminist rationalism is illustrated quite clearly. On top of this is the question raised here again and again in the text of material practice and abstract thought of an empirical instantiation and a transcendental process. The problem of being particularly sensitive to certain let's call them human for now, signals, escalates these paradoxes to the extreme edge of tolerability. When Mikkel locates his own internal limit, the blinding white spot replaces the memory of our parting. All of the above coincides for me. That's my limit as well. An encounter with intensity, which, close to what Mikkel replies when he's writing about anaesthetics as an

aesthetics turn cold, is not just about pleasure or hate. Intensity is the indifferent medium through which problems are encountered. Intensive encounter is an encounter with the limit of one's own capacities for perceptual or conceptual assimilation. It requires the creation of a new faculty, new modes of perceptional thought, and imbricates, in doing so, material existence and abstract thought against what is, but not in any way that can be desired, preempted, or controlled. In this way, intensity and coldness do not exclude one more. Coldness is an intensity because and not in spite of its closeness to zero. It develops heat, as does heat explicates coldness.

Perhaps it is a trait of the extremely empathetic thinking abstractions. It provides a much-needed respite from the social perversions of forbidden accounting. Empathy is costly. It belongs only to the innocent, those who warrant it by never asking for it, and perhaps never needing it. Such a fleeting, precarious and self-destructive resource requires a pact with transcendental darkness to shield its empirical locus from unproductive annihilation. Therefore makes of its vera an occultist, A ceaseless experimenter with the limits of one's own capacity to process libidinal investments, caught in the no-man's land between the empirical and the abstract. It forces the concrete and the abstract together in difficult and productive ways.

And far from needing to be excised, it needs, instead, to be worked through. Nietzsche writes a lot about coldness as an effective attitude, particularly in the voice of Zarathustra. i think it's insightful since we're talking about nihilism and positive deployment not to forget that he does so precisely in order to disarm zarathustra's greatest obstacle for self-overcoming The historical trajectory of nihilism demands coldness, and for Nietzsche it is an open question whether or not he, or Zarathustra, successfully disarmed this vice. After all the importunement, climb upwards on your own head and over and beyond your own heart, now what is mildest in you must become hardest.

All the exultations are reminders. If I must be pitying, I certainly do not want to be called such, and if I am, preferably from a distance. What is human distress to me? My final sin, the one saved up for me. Do you know what it is called? Pity. The final section of the book, as spoke Zarathustra, sees him falling prey to his innate compassion, conciliating with the higher men and their suffering even if in the end they will only misunderstand his teaching truly transvaluate need to begin from a point that will not be the one you end up on quoting Zarathustra again

it means more when one's own teaching comes out of one's own fire a sultry heart and a cold head This is at least the truth of cosmic homodynamics. Coldness is kindled in fairness. Blackside empathy. The neopoetic decryption is a game of doubles in which you become what you are through what is hunting you. Extraction and empathy conspire in strange, concealed ways across the xenopoietic matrix of invasion expression. Humans are always too quick to impose our personal modes of similitude, at least in

an uninterrogated form, on our surroundings. We have evolved to do this, and to a certain extent, is what has allowed us to survive. This is also our greatest tactical frailty. as a result it is perfectly exploitable as someone or something that can wield it more subtly or efficiently and more effectively than we do if empathy is understood as a heightened capacity for modelling the desires and affects of another then unchecked and alone it can be grasped as a weakness and coupled with abstraction it becomes a weapon This is one of the things it's working through, rather than its simple abandonment or oppression forges.

A chilling talent for leverage. Extract empathy from the usual connotative swamp of emotional and irrational affectivity that's all too often associated with women and weakness. Exile it from Western folk psychological positions that consider it simplistically as a mark of moral virtue. Its shadow side becomes subtly apparent. The shamanic, matriarchal Yukakir culture of eastern Siberia. Specially trained members of a clan undergo a series of exacting physical and psychic preparatory rituals in order to equip themselves with the tools necessary to take out the largest and most dangerous source of available food. Mousse.

Yukakir's spiritual beliefs are founded on a principle of an all-enveloping war, in which each being, animate, inanimate, human and non-human alike, has its predator and its prey. The transcendental ground of this ontology rests in the mythical old people, a faceless tribe of giant carnivores who, quote one ethnographer, long to rip human bodies to pieces in the frenzy of devouring them. The mythical old people, humans are moose, and the moose, and to the moose, humans of the mythical old people. An image of similitude thus ensures safety and an image of difference implies threat. So it is that a hunter must be cunning

to take on the form of their prey in order to pacify the prey's suspicions long enough to capture it. This is no easy task. It takes not only the physical body of the hunter but also the hunter's spiritual form. success of a process which must be entered into a state of great vulnerability the hunter at risk of losing their identity in the process of intensive mnemesis also should the simulation fail never turning to their native spiritual niche for the requisite nightly voyages into the spirit realm of the prey, the ayabi, or shadows, must be sufficiently deceived and seduced without consummation before the hunter can return.

Hence the ritualistic and serious nature of the human moose hunter's preparations, to involve a rigid regime of sexual abstention, so that energy can be re-channelled towards the moose ayabi, and eventually the physical form of the moose, and visits to the sauna where they will sweat out their human scent and rub themselves with perch leaves generating a deceptive olfactory image one that's not just innocuous but rather calculated to be especially attractive to the moose This is followed by the assembly of an elaborate disguise, in which the hunters literally clothe themselves in the skin of the moose, in full-length moose-pelt coats and long-eared headgear, before equipping themselves with skis bound in hide. Fashion can simulate the sound of their prey, for they move deftly in its skin through the

snow. The simulation is thus multi-sensory, and following Yukigir ontology, into operation on both psychic transcendental and physical levels. It functions not just by generating an image of the moose as it is, but rather by producing an ideal representation of the animal's desire for its own reflection, a fantasy image of what the moose wants to become. The defecacy is equivalent to its target's latent narcissism. When the moose encounters its hunter in the forest, flanked by a calf in the ethnographic

account that's been furnishing the material for this sketch, it instinctively freezes and slowly, calmly, it trots towards its executioner, who raises a concealed rifle, who shoots the moose and the calf through the skull before dragging their carcasses back to the clan for food. It's this capacity to exit the simulation at the critical moment that concludes the process. The strategic return of abstraction detects the once-vulnerable modeler emerging fully, perhaps catastrophically, with their act of mimesis, losing themselves in the spirit realm of the enemy, and granting them the power that Anna Freud, unwilling subject of her father's own theory of mimicry, once remarked,

step into someone's shoes and then step back out again. Empathetic mimicry, tactically wielded, attuned to a goal of deception, also involves a temporal dimension that the vulnerability of the simulator necessitates. A strategic advantage in time is afforded by the indispensability of delaying detection until the moment in which retaliation is already too late. Asymmetry masked, and asymmetry is a formal diagram. As an aside, it's worth distinguishing between empathetic stimulation and crude manipulation, the latter differs in its exercise of deception from an already established position of power. This brings out empathy's natural proclivity for occultation, one that suits the cast of

xenopoetics, which positions poetry of the ultimate spectre of cosmic war perfectly. anesthetics of this shadowy faculty are not necessarily linguistic applied to human significative systems this is empathy, modernly construed not necessarily human it's been theorised by evolutionary biologists as pre-linguistic and unconscious the major component of swarm dynamics in flocks of birds as well as being demonstrably linked to dissimulation in low-status chimpanzees who will feign ignorance of a food source very well known as there, until rival members of the group in a longer than identity. Therefore not always consistently attributable to a single subjectivity,

generating instead an emergent host, but can be explicitly linked pre-linguistic tact to deception just as much as it can to acts of altruism and care. Obfuscation of the former in official discourses on empathy shows the extent to which this double game works. Meanwhile, the separation of these latter attributes from the traditional notions of the feminine, or from roles cast for female presenting participants, this includes artificially intelligent assistant programs and gynomorphic machines. The sociality of a species which so often simply expects them to be the pliant caretakers of their less cunning and subtle counterparts. This is something that a darker, less orthodox xenofeminism might find interesting to explore.

Equally physiopoetics, its most harrowing contemporary technocultural instantiation can perhaps best be detected in the mass exploitation of human dopamine circuits in virtual game environments, on the web, in social media, or in the growing virtual sex industry with its supernormal, artificial, idealised desire images. The Yukagir hunters, moose, quote, not willingly give themselves up as food for humans. Rather, the moose must be seduced into doing so through tactical empathy. The hunters, quote, transformation of the animal's perception of reality to a fiction of limitless sexual desire. Shift this up one socio-technical level by substituting animals for humans and humans for machines.

and the xenopoetic stake in dark side empathy becomes clear. Meanwhile, for the overly empathetic, like me, empathy in league with abstraction trains and protects a kind of strength, non-good and evil, that enables the affirmation of the most inhuman of thought, or the worst thing in the world. For apocalypse now. Occultism too, in its sociological history, has been the province of those who must operate low the threshold of perceptibility, cloaked and concealed, under the cover of darkness,

between the lines, at locations they only know the coordinates for. Occultism is rife with secret languages, a twisted dialect of the cocky eyes, a larry of queers, sigils of the solitary summoner. Those who are forced to invent new languages to communicate do so because they cannot express or enact what they wish to openly. This is a persistent trait of minority groups throughout history. Votio-historical occultism is also deeply ambiguous, just as empathy is. never belonging transparently to definitive moral categories persecuted, feared, dispatched on flaming pyres and insipid town squares surrounded by the hysterical and grinning faces of the weak and powerful

institutive vulnerability of the occultist or the deployer of tactical empathy quickly strengthens itself because in operating in such a paradoxical manner by our identification with an alien target it must install a strong internal limit its own vicariousness for the sake of protecting itself enough for a turn. To the close there's no metaphorical level to this that Bickel suggests to me in an email. It couldn't be further familiar in rhetorical conceit a productive but ultimately substitutable and preferable in its substitutability to our gesture.

This is precisely where I to horror lies. In terms of the problem at stake, a resistance to metaphor equates to a refusal to be held to ransom for the suffering of another and the guilt that gesture entailed. There's no substitutability, no debt, and no metaphor. This is because there's no real divide between the intensive and the abstract. The fusion is flushed with reality production in its most abysmal, magmatic animism. The transcendental aspect of the process pulls abstraction and intensity together. This is the level that houses the real darkness. The nature of the empirical component darkness produces is linked to it via a break,

as the transcendental is generative of it and concealment is coincident with production. Reality is cold. I'm forced to think it from a starting point that maybe otherwise, necessarily is otherwise, is the whole of the crisis. The crisis is a test. What does it mean to think this thought? To really think it? To be struck by it? It induces madness. Of course it does. That's the point. It generates non-metaphorical blind spots in representational assimilation. Dramatic punctures exploited by an icy transcendental updraft. The sounding of a bell.

Cyclonopédia's infamous plot holes, events, like the one that occurred on the corner of Guangxi Lu. What was the empirical sputtering out on the edge of something else? all modern voyages begin here in the rift that yawns between what is what happened and what is yet to come to paper it over too quickly with an unconsidered act of rote conciliation would have been nothing more than simple social deception rapid symmetry the death of the virtual Even flight can be a trap. Nothing is kinder and more brutal than immobility. Under its spell, the ground rises up, signalling in the xenopoetic rhythms that meet beneath all

objects, beneath epistemology, beneath conceptuality, beneath the skin. To liberate what is singular, becomes impersonal. If that is coldness, it's the kind that protects empathy, affirms inhumanism, and holds the portal open for real metamorphosis, even if, in the end, swapping our identities for the form of time. It will cost us all the names we have in writing under them, already agreed, believed. Thanks, I'll hand it back over to you guys and wait to see if you have any questions to type for you.

Oh, no. I'm going to do it. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

There is no real divide between the intensive and the abstract. The fusion is flush with reality production at the most abyss of dynamism. That's the last bit of production. Pools. Destruction. That's a quote from the piece, so, um, does the question relate to the quote?

I think maybe, I'm going to assume maybe what is intended is to ask what it means. Okay. Symmetry is the subordination of intensity and conceptuality. If you can describe how abstraction and intensity work as opposed to conceptuality. Okay, good question. Something that I kind of deal with in the text, in another part

of the text, when I'm talking a little bit about the differences between xenopoetics and xenofeminism, which I find the minimal amount of people who know about both conflated a lot and I think they're very different. I think the thing that really divides them is perhaps something like this, how they understand the role of transcendental and its relationship relationship to conceptuality. The kind of sketch that I've been giving here, and the sections that I've read to you, which kind of eliminate the tension that runs throughout the piece between those two different points of view, is heavily on the side of understanding

intensity as part of the abstract, intensity in itself, then is explicated or expressed in individuation with an extensity attached to it. And that conceptualization and any kind of form of thought always has to take place in that secondary level of reality where intensity is explicated through extensity. There's no such thing as pure intensity in individuated reality. It's always covered over or camouflaged or made up inside extensity.

So, I mean, like, that gives a really interesting definition of abstraction, or more, I suppose, more just a clear definition of abstraction, one of these Kant abstractions, which is the kind of material that I'm reading and was very influential to me while I was writing this stuff. He says, abstractions contain two components, one part that is given in representation. and the other part which isn't. So this idea of intensity being an abstraction is perfectly encapsulated in that. It's got one part inside the transcendental, or is the transcendental, and the other part is this expressed,

extensivised aspect of intensity, which gives us time, which gives us linear time. So everything that exists in linear time, human experience, of course, concepts, language is always secondary it's already individuated so my kind of argument here is that taking xenofeminism and also neorationalism and these kind of other ideas that were very influential on xenofeminism as the kind of alternative to that it's very much about I think conceptuality first, it's modeled for changing the future and for being able to intervene in realities

as a logical and for neo-rationalism's concept. It understands this as having a sort of transcendental status. And I think it's interesting that as you actually get deeper and deeper into the kind of claims that neorationalism has to make about the universe, you end up basically a model of symmetrical time. So you have to get rid of the whole idea of living in time, of the extensivization of intensity. It also gives you entropy. That alternative point of view, which is the one that I'm understanding here as an opoetic, needs to rely on. So you've got to kind of,

this sort of strange version where you have, for neo-rationalism and xenofeminism, you have epistemology and conceptuality being seen as primary, and this is being set up with a premise of symmetrical time. Whereas in Xenopoetics, and also... Blurs, can't... There's a thing in the chat that's mentioning Nick Land. Land definitely falls under this as well. He's in the book, I guess, as you guys know, so... kind of in dialogue with all of this, requires the premise of linear time. Time is always

unfolding before us. And this is what modifies the primary status of epistemology, because if you can't, if the future is always open to total contingency, even though it's not always showing that directly. Sometimes it takes a while for something strange to happen. It's always there as a potential, which means that you can't ever create a full model of the future based on what's happened before, even using probabilistic models, because there's this total, utter possibility of everything changing suddenly. You can't take conceptuality

and epistemology as your premise. You have to start with an ontological description of the world. That's the kind of tension, I guess, that the piece is inhabiting. And I end up, I suppose, through personal experiences that...Nickel's personal experiences that he relates to me in the piece, and through my own personal experiences, which I don't talk about in the piece, but which were very much there while I was writing it, ended up kind of leading me through. I don't know, I hope that answers your question.

Thank you. Is this at all related to Meosu's hyperchaos? No, not directly. Meosu arrives at the concept of hyperchaos out of rigorous rational deduction.

And although it does present a notion of total contingency, I think it's quite different from the, I suppose, DeLuzzo landing one that I'm talking about in this piece. I think that's probably, without really kind of thinking about it super deeply, the main difference is that it's definitely a rationalist theory of contingency, which is also like, you know, incredibly cool and shows how rationalism can really do weird stuff. I think like in the tradition of Leibniz, taking the kind of rational premises to their absolute end gets you in really strange places. But no, it's definitely not a rationalist theory.

it sees that as repressing or covering over more real intensive aspects of a libidinomic period. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Okay, bye everyone.

Thanks to all of the organizers, to Andre and Andre, Marco, Miroslav for doing the moderating at the last minute and everyone here who was invoked in setting up funding and fighting group stuff and thanks everyone. I wish I could see you all. Bye. Thank you.