Hyperstition & The New Weird I (Session 4)

All right, hello and welcome to our final session on Hypercision and New Weird. Today we have some really interesting guests and we're going to be discussing True Detective, Thomas Legati, pessimism, a whole bunch of things, and then this, we're mostly coming also from this True Detection series, which is also a symposium, which we have the pleasure of having many people that are actually published in this book with us. So I think it will be a very interesting conversation. So I think how we will mostly go through this is we have a few people who have prepared

some things to say about this topic and what they're interested in, and we'll kind of let them run continuously through. And then I think we'll open it for discussion at the end. And anybody else that has anything prepared or finds any sort of resonance with past sessions can join in. So I'd like to introduce that we have. I'm sorry. Alina, I don't have your vibe here. I wanted to introduce you as well. Can I get it off of your website? I should have done this earlier, I'm sorry. Could I get it off of your website? Melodromatic Research? Oh. Alina? Because Alina joined us, I wanted to get hers as well. I'm sorry. Apologize.

OK, well, I will just. Alina Popo. Are you friends? Yeah, it's, yeah. The Italian one. Okay. So, she will be coming in and talking a little bit with us. And then our invited guest, we have Nicola. He's professor of English at the Brooklyn College, CUNY, and specialist in medieval literature. I'm going to read your bio because I think it's important. Some principal themes of his work are mysticism, commentary, and decapitation. His recent publications, he has Dark Nights of the Universe, co-authored with Daniel Cusciera

Barber, Daniel Barber, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thatcher. And they were two in one and one in two, and they're co-edited with Eugene Decker and Schism. And currently, he's got current upcoming projects, Star of Being, which is a book on this Vassalia. And I believe this is a little dated, because Sufficient Unto the Day is published, correct? Yeah. And Sufficient Unto the Day, a collection of essays against worry, and this is actually out currently. And yeah, he blogs out the way, so if you want to check it out. So I want to welcome both of our guests today. And thank you. Thanks for having us.

Thank you. And then, yeah, pass it to Ben just for a brief few words, maybe. And then, so, in addition to that, we'll have Ida, who everyone I think in the room knows. And we'll be talking about true detection and black metal theory along with Cuiva and Catherine. We're both former students of VITAs and do black metal theory and relationship to fan fiction and yeah, right? I think that's what Jan talked about.

And then I guess we'll have discussion. Yeah, I was going to say we can move the seminar to the end. Okay. All right. So then, yeah, after that we'll have discussion. So, I think that's the plan. So, should we start? Yeah, I think we can jump right in. Okay. So, first is... Yeah. Did you want me to go first? If you don't mind, I mean... Yeah, I can go first.

I was going to just talk a little bit about black metal theory. I thought there'd be more people who haven't heard of it in the session, so hopefully it's not kind of too basic for you guys. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about True Detective and black metal theory. Okay. So, the imagery in Tree Detective is undeniably black metal in its bleak landscapes, ritualistic pagan sacrifices, occasional scenes of intense violence and many instances of creepy trees. Probably the scene that could be considered the most black metal in its imagery comes at the end of episode 2. As Rust and Marty arrive at a burnt out church in the middle of a barn field against a backdrop of abandoned industrial buildings,

Rust steps out of the car and stops to look at a formation of birds in the sky. This swarm of birds form a spiral which lingers for just an instant over Rust's head. This scene is important to black metal for three reasons. reasons, church burning swarms and spirals are specifically a swarm spiral outside a burnt-out church. As Scott Wilson explains in his essay Musica Musa, which is published in Melanchology, flies, in particular swarms of flies or insects, are an important trope of black metal. The pervasive buzzing of a horde of flies or bees is the sound of black metal guitars, a droning background home. For Wilson, flies are related to the metaphysical problem bound out with how, in relation to the principle of the one or one god, evil

possesses the question of the duality of the multiple. Swarm behaviour in birds holds a similar problem, many moving as one, creating a halo of flies, or in this case a spiral of birds over the head of the metal head, or rust in this case. Spirals too are important to black metal theory, specifically the work of Thacker and his exploration of magic sights and magic circles in his book In the Dust of this Planet. For Thacker, the spiral represents a magic circle that has decayed or disappeared, a subtractive magic circle which is spiraling out of control. While magic circles traditionally keep the magic contained and separate from the real world, spirals allow or cause a blurring of the boundaries, a magic circle where the magic is unconfined,

where the boundaries blur and the centre of the circle is everywhere. For Thakur, the spiral is equivalent to thought itself, and if we want to relate this to hyperstition, I guess you can take the quote from the Lamarurian Time Wars Spirals, unlike closed loops, always have loose ends. This allows them to spread, making them contagious and unpredictable. The spirals swarm over Rust's head foreshadows the later swirling black holes seen by Rust at the center of the fort in episode 8, which we can also consider a magic site. And so we can say the spiral has spread following Russ's thoughts as he investigates from one magic site to another. Church burnings are also important in discussions of black metal, purely because they were a regular occurrence during the reign of second wave Norwegian black metal.

These church burnings were linked by the press to satanic activity in Norway. However, according to Varg Vikarnas of Bersham, the churches that were targeted were once built on old pagan holy or magic sites. According to Varg, on the burning of one church, the Christian stone cross was built in the midst of the circle, actually breaking it up. Members of the black metal scene at the time did very little to dissuade the rumours of Satanism as, according to Varg, some of them enjoyed the attention and reputation that came with being viewed as a Satanist. Similarly in True Detection, though the viewer is never explicitly told of the motivations behind the church burning, it is interesting to note

that it too is seen as a satanic act, even when in both cases the reason is more likely based in pagan ideology. It's also interesting to note that while the originators of black Black Metal were not Satanists, Black Metal did become intrinsically linked with Satanism in the way that new bands thought Black Metal was satanic due to the myth spread by the media, and so created music and shows based on satanic beliefs and practices, which I think is probably a little bit hyperstitional, I'm not sure. Also important to True Detective and Black Metal is the use of masks or alter egos. In True Detective there are various mentions of masks being worn by the mysterious cult, references to Carcosa and the Yellow King.

According to Varg, masks of any kind, even paint or veil, used to be used and are still used by Norwegians to connect to ancient gods or goddesses, to enable the wearer not just to see the spirit world but to become such spirits or gods themselves, as he says, a physical manifestation of gods on earth. This is what Varg calls pretend to make real. For Varg, the use of corpse paint in black metal is a sorcerer's mask, able to bring what is dead back to life to make real what is not real. Corpse paint is important in black metal in the creation of black metal personas such as dead from mayhem or frost from satyrcom. In Dominic Fox's book Cold

world he describes black metal personas as a deliberate freezing of the world fixing it within a terminal image in order that its frostbitten surface may be shattered by anonymous and human forces rising from the death of itself these operations must be understood as spiritual exercises as forms of emotional fasting intended to release the soul from its worldly attachments such exercises are purely narcissistic and self-serving if they do not release the soul for new worldly commitments. So you can argue with this, I think, that black metal personas can be seen as hyperstitional. As they say on the hyperstition blog, this is how the practice of hyperstition operates.

To affect a positive destruction of identity. Hyperstition puppets allow you to think things that you do not agree with, to follow a line to places that you wouldn't necessarily want to go. By this logic, the creation of black metal personas, like for example Frost, is a way to go beyond the human, to create an almost inhuman carrier defined by what it conveys. It can carry the thought or agenda further than its human creator ever could. In the case of Frost, he says, adding to the plurality of darkness and grimness that Satyr can create, Darkness with a capital D. So just to conclude, I think you can probably say maybe that Rust also practices this vision of the world in True Detective,

in that he holds a fixed view of the world. So when he comes to the final showdown in The Old Stones, and he's told to take off his mask, it seems like a command for him to face his true self. In that scene he is literally butchered, cut open, you can relate that to the Nagaristani quote. So beneath another opening through which we can see what first appears to be an endless void and then later when rust is lying, dying underneath, it's a view into the expanse of the cosmos. So, according to Juliet Forshaw, metal albums always end with a death or imply dead of the narrator.

Though Rust obviously doesn't die, he certainly has a near-death experience and experiences a rebirth. Then in the final scene of the show, once reborn, he cries under the stars, which is kind of a callback to that deleted scene that I posted, or that Tony posted, where the preacher says, in the end we will find ourselves at the beginning and at last we will know ourselves and our true face will be in his light. So that's all I have. Super, thank you. That was great. Really good connections to the hyperstition that you made right there. I think maybe what we should do is move through all the talks

and then we can talk about them as a whole. That's what I mean, everybody. But yeah, you made a lot of really, really great points there. So thank you. So, Katherine, maybe? Yeah. Yeah, no problem. Everyone can hear me and everything? OK, great. So I'm going to talk about nonfiction, a little bit about true detective, but not as much. So first of all, I'm just going to talk about the connections I've seen with sound fiction in texts we've already covered, and in her position generally.

So initially, the first class in the Lemurian Time War, that could easily be classed, I think, as real person sound fiction of William Burroughs. And obviously real person fan fiction is the basis of a lot of historical fiction. So it's making history, real history work in the service of your new fiction. And generally fan fiction is making other fiction work for the service of your new fiction. Another similarity, fan activity, is like hyperstition in that they're both, I feel that they're both based on this kind of unbelief, right?

In the case of fanfiction, it allows writers to simultaneously venerate and subvert their source text. Yeah, so, because obviously unbelief has, I feel that it manifests in a similar way to belief but allows for kind of sacrilege I suppose. So further to that, just to recap, so I covered this in the essay in True Detection, but I make the parallel between hidden writing and fanfiction as Agnes Gerestein puts it. I'm not going to go into that again but I I guess it's most clearly exemplified by these two quotes, this from Psychonopedia, that

a plot hole conveys the activities of a subsurface life. And then this quote from Sheena Pugh from her book The Democratic Genre, fan fiction happens in the gaps between canon, the unexplored or insufficiently explored territory. I guess I have a sentence, it's not really attached to anything, but I suppose it's to do with authors and I guess anger about fanfiction, which is, if you build a house with secret doors don't be surprised when you find rumors behind them. So this hole in a city of holes in things and in plots, it seems to be central to both

the new weird and also to hyperstition. In the case of hyperstition, the opening occurs, the opening between, or the gap between the creator and their creation, or the hyperstitional carrier, is a symptom of collective production, right? Which, so that allows the carrier to go further than their creator, to think different things. But I think that these gaps and openings can also be created by intertextuality, by invoking other fictions that intersect with yours. When you put fictions to work at the service of a new fiction, you don't know what you're going to bring with it. Probably the most obvious example of this is the use of

King in Yellow in True Detective. So because on the one hand obviously Pislotto used the King in Yellow intentionally and he has this to say about it. Nope, don't have it here, sorry one second. Everything in True Detective is composed of questionable narratives, in from Cole's view that identity is just a story we tell ourselves, to the stories about manhood that Hart tells about himself, to the not always truthful story they tell the detectives investigating them. So it made sense, to me at least, to allude to an external narrative that is supposed to create insanity." But it's clear that by invoking The King in Yellow, he got more than he bargained for,

it altered the audience interpretation of where the story was going, and I think it ultimately fractured and created holes in Drew the Detective that other people could fill, and I'll get into that a little bit later. Just as a side note, one of the texts I kind of investigated but didn't make it into the final essay was a fanfiction called The Reign of the King in Yellow, which was a crossover fanfiction not involving True Detective but involving The King in Yellow, the Cthulhu Mythos, and the book Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

in this, which involves angels and demons, in this, this demon finds a copy of the play The King in Yellow in the bookshop, and basically him finding it creates a universe where the play and not the book about the play exists. Ultimately this new universe even overrides the existence of God and instead of God the old ones present and only the author of The King in Yellow can revert things, not revert things but make it so that the book that he picked up was not the play. So I suppose what I'm saying is that invoking The King in Yellow creates multiple universes or fractures fictional universes. And it's another thing that creates

gap between Nick Vizzolatto and True Detective. So I guess it leads to one question, which is what is the relationship, if there is one, or what are the possible relationships between intertextuality and hyperstition? I'm going to talk about the video of the Tenth Sermon, Because I think that that could easily be viewed as a footnote to True Detective, because it doesn't... Yeah, it's obviously a footnote. This quote about footnotes from Marissa is pretty good.

I don't have the name of the book for now, it's in the essay, I'll get back to it. so I'll just go into this for a second. The footnote is a typical example of a structure that can be seen as both uni and multi-cursal. So uni-cursal would be a spiral, and multi-cursal is a maze. It creates a bivium, or choice of expansion, but should we decide to take this path, reading the footnote, the footnote itself turns us back to the main track immediately afterward. Perhaps a footnoted text can be described as multi-cursal on the micro level, and uni-cursal on the macro level. So that's interesting as well because of the idea of the spiral not being closed and, you know, as I point out, it's another entry into the text.

But what's really interesting about the Tenth Sermon as a footnote is, well, I think it makes Russ look like a really rubbish detective because he's not noticing that the preacher is saying everything that he's saying and he's calling him an idiot at the same time. It's interesting it ties into Jeff's stuff, Jeff's annotations, because with the new annotation thing that he's brought out, those new annotations subvert the original text and add something. There's an instance in the second book where background characters repeat some dialogue from the first book, and that's the kind of thing that the Tenth Sermon is doing.

But crucially, even though the Tenth Sermon just reinforces the ideas already in True Detective, it points to all the instances where that's not being done, where things are going on in the background that are potential entrances into the text. So crucially, okay, so finally this all kind of leads down to, with regards to hyperstition and fanfiction, the potential power of fanfiction to hijack or collectivize texts or characters after their creation and remobilize them as hyperstitional carriers. Because obviously the work of fanfiction takes characters away from where they originally intended to go,

which is the definition of hyperstitional carriers and hyperstitional puppets as far as I can see. Yeah. And then, I don't know where these fit in, I think they fit in the same place. I have written here, Russ Cole's power as a weapon of anti-natalism is proved by Glenn Beck calling for a counterattack. That's what I have here. Yeah, that's what I have. So I guess my questions are about intertextuality and hijacking or collectivizing texts after the fact to create hyper-ditional carriers. Okay, thank you. Thanks.

Yeah, I hope maybe with that, with the intertextuality part, we can maybe get into a little bit of discussion about commentary later on. I mean, specifically, when she's talking about intertextuality, I was thinking a lot about that public seminar that you gave on commentary on paraacademia, which is kind of interesting. Oh, yeah. Let's see if I can remember what I said. But yeah, I think there is obviously a connection. I mean, I think there'll be a lot to say about commentary on intertextuality and then and then some more. We'll do our last. Maybe you want to say just a few words, Lydia?

Me? Yep. Sure, I'll just lead out into Nicola. I'm kind of glad Catherine brought up the point about... Catherine, can you just correct me if I'm wrong on this? Your last comment was, Ruskull's power as a carrier of antinatalism is proven by Glenn Beck's... Can you correct that quote? I said, Ruskull's power as a weapon of antinatalism, carrier is equally valid, is proved by Glenn Beck calling for a counterattack against pessimists and nihilists ideologies. Yeah, perfect, perfect, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, because I really didn't have anything in response or to lead out from your notes

on intertextuality. But I think the point that Tony made there in relation to Nicola's project more broadly is certainly valid, and Nicola can pick up on that. But this is, I think, what you just said there is really pertinent to my kind of concerns, Where I'm sort of confused at the moment, so really I'm leading out by way of a question that I'm going to ask Nicola, is about the, if at all there is a confliction in Ligotti's account of, in Ligotti's book, his first non-fiction book, which TD is based on, which of course is the conspiracy against the human race between antinatalism and post-humanism. So basically the book opens up with a quote, a Buddhist Sanskrit quote, which is on, if

everyone is kind of aware of this quote, it's on page 5, so after the front matter, there's two epigraphs that open up the book, and the second one is a Buddhist Sanskrit that says, look at your body, a painted puppet, a poor toy, of jointed parts ready to collapse, a disease and suffering thing with a head full of false imagining so in the between the beginning and the end of the quote between look at your body and he points to an existential and an epistemic loss which at the end with a head full of false imagining so this is the sort of existential and epistemic loss that underlies negative theology which of course Nicola is a leading proponent and this would be where I'd say the connection obviously I've co-edited the volume with Nicola, which is inspired in part by Nick Cazolotto's show

and inspired in part by Thomas Ligotti's work, which the show itself is based on. And Nicola's work is pertinent, of course, to the volume because of its relationship to Ligotti's thought through this quote. And my own personal investment then in Nicola's work is outlined in my contribution to the volume, which takes up this theme of negative theology or mystical loss in relation to antinatalism. And I sort of twist this antinatalism around the figure of the first sleuth or detective, you know, I sort of trace it from Oedipus, and of course you find this antinatalism in a Sophochus Oedipus Rex in the fourth century BC in the quote, not to be born is best.

my traces through the first detective in the tradition, which of course is Oedipus, but then I map it more historically through the figure of the medieval true knight, which is Nicola's genre again, through Sir Thomas Mallory's Lancelot-e-Larque, and I relate that through Ligotti's own account, through the Qatar heresy, to Pizzolatto's figure of Rutherford in True Detective. And I suppose my question leading into Nicola now is, is there a difference in the mystical tradition between post-humanism and antinatalism? I've got the thoughts on myself, but then I was reading a text today that myself and Alina both read, and it's called Flesh and Consciousness, George Bataille and the Dionysian.

and it talks about it talks about Bataille's post-humanism in relation to Nietzsche and specifically one quote kind of gets it across in Nietzsche in his Will to Power where Nietzsche says perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body in the long run in the long run it is not a question of man at all he is to be overcome and what made me think that this was super pertinent is because of course when Ligotti wrote the conspiracy against the human race and a lot of us didn't know this at the time when we were editing the book, certainly I didn't and Paul didn't, was that Lugati himself, when he wrote this first non-fiction of his, he was really sick. His body was really sick, and he was actually wearing a colostomy bag, like the guy couldn't shit for himself. And this really made him go, you know, this is just life, it's not worth living.

And he talks about this extensively in a number of interviews, but one in particular, which really sort of seems to be antagonistic with this quote from Nita, where Nita says, perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body. In the long run it's not a question of man at all, so it's not an epistemic question, therefore, but an existential question. So there seems to be a fracture there between the existential and the epistemic, which mysticism, as far as I can see, does not see it as both epistemic and existential. Maybe you can talk about that, Nicola. Maybe. Is it my turn now? Yeah. No. Yeah, it is. That's my lead-in question.

It is? Okay. Super. I'm writing it down as I speak. Your two questions, one about the epistemic existential split and the other about post-humanism versus antinatalism. Yeah, yeah. So maybe they're analogous or correlative questions. Let me just start with Edith's question and then work my way back to the thoughts that I had about this mass of questions and topics. I think in medieval mysticism we can generalize post-humanism equals antinatalism, particularly

for Eckhart, the struggle against birth, the negation of birth, is the assertion of a post-human self. So it's not like this morning I read I think an exemplary passage from Eckhart where he talks about when one returns to one's divine essence. He says, When I enter the ground, the bottom, the river, and the fount of the Godhead, none will ask me whence I came or where I have been. So mysticism is ordered towards the return to a ground which one never left.

So this is a pre-human ground. and it's also a post, in a sense, a post-theological ground. Eckhart continues, No one missed me, for their god unbecomes. I think it's a good passage because it also connects maybe with the sort of anti-god stance of black metal theory, of black metal. Okay, so to my understanding, post-humanism equals antinatalism for medieval mysticism. I hope that is a clear enough answer. The thoughts

that I had in general, in reaction to everything, and also just in general in preparation for this in the back of my head concerned the relationship between mysticism, the weird, individuation and hyperstition. And really I'm trying to think in my mind the intersection between the concepts of the weird, of hyperstition and individuation, which has been a central, I guess, obsession of my thinking or whatever. the horror of individuation. So presumably you guys have already talked about the origin of the concept of the weird,

but I'm not sure, so you know it's an Anglo-Saxon word that originally means sort of that which happens, or that which becomes. So in a way the weird is aligned with givenness. It's a sort of inexorable givenness, but it's not to be thought of as destinal. It's not something that's given necessarily from an outside. It's something that is the givenness of the way things actually happen, right? So weird is sort of created in its own event, and I think it's a particularly appropriate concept for a battle space experience, right? So the weird is what is the way things go

down in this absolutely unpredictable fashion, but it's also, it's sort of instantly final, everything is instantly final in the space of weirdness. The connection, you can make an easy connection between weirdness and individuation through the scholastic understanding of individuation as a con creatum, as a feature of entities which escapes the divine power. God makes things, but He doesn't, and He may primarily intend the individual, but the making of them itself makes the individual, right? Like it's something, it's the making, it's the aspect of the made which is only made

in the making. It's outside the intention. It's outside the material, it's outside the intention, it's outside everything that goes into making the thing. So in a way, individuation is also like a battle space phenomenon. It's kind of like the way things happen, the way things go down. And it has this sort of absolute arbitrariness that I've discussed in terms of this radical asymmetry that the event of oneself defines. So that's pretty easy. It's pretty easy and commonsensical to understand this link between weirdness and individuation. What could be more weird than the fact that one is, and the fact that one is oneself?

Now, what's interesting about hyperstition, in fact, hyperstition is brought into this dialogue for me, is that hyperstition seems to be like a proactive givenness. It seems to be a concept, an idea, which is like, actually the givenness is not a power that comes to us from the outside, it's actually something that is given to things. can enact givenness, can produce it, can instantiate it, right, can not just produce via labor, via participation in nature or whatever, but hyperstition means you can actually engage

the sort of ungrounded creative power of a sort of outside space. So I think hyperstition is really a kind of art of individuation, or it holds that sense. And so we can relate it then also to individuation, right, to the phenomenon of individuation, the fact that we are individuated. Hyperstition is like the mask. It is like the, in order to be somebody, in order to be something, to be someone, in order to exist, one has to not be someone.

One has to be a fiction. One has to not be oneself. So, and then we can even reverse it further and think, well, that individuation actually, from the mystical perspective, is like a destruction of identity. To be born is to be destroyed. To be born is to be unmade. So I think there's, you know, I haven't charted it out precisely, but I think there is this really deep kind of intersection between these terms. So let So let me stop there, because that was kind of a rush of associative thoughts. I haven't prepared anything really for this seminar, but at least that's a start.

There's one of the things I'd like to say maybe about the mask. Mask and hyperstition are sort of great. There's a great metaphorical possibility there. You know, the mask becomes your face, and so forth. So that was another thought that I didn't get to. Okay, let me stop, and then maybe we can proceed with some questions or whatever else the dialogue wants to do. Okay. Would you like to follow up on that, then? Since you asked a question? Oh, me? Oh, no idea. Oh, either. Okay. Yeah.

Oh, well, no, it's interesting because I kind of touched on this in week one, because I was talking about it exactly the way you spoke about it there in relation to the events that you outline in the text that you have on black metal in the Journal of Cultural Research about the sort of hyperstitional events that made black metal theory. Oh, okay. and also in Black Metal Beyond the Darkness, the same scenario of weird, wired, hyperstitional events that happen around various Black Metal Theory symposiums. Maybe that would be a way to provide some concrete examples or something that I, you know,

bring it down to factual earth, so to speak. One thing that... Sorry, go ahead. No, no, you go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say more generally, just take a step back, like the book we're talking about, the True Detective volume, Black Metal Theory, these are all kinds of spontaneous operations of premature, almost preemptive canonization. Commentary does exercise this hyperstitional power in a sense, insofar as it can authorize, and I's, you know, magnifying, intensifying objects that are just sort of, they're already

there, but they're, you know, and they have a future, but there's something interesting that happens when you don't wait for them, when you step in too quickly, and I think that the spirit of these projects is, like, you know, it happened actually with Paul Ennis becoming so excited about True Detective and I hadn't even watched I had maybe watched one episode it was just me saying let's do a seminar on True Detective it was only the third episode had appeared and I didn't really have any sort of deep commitment to the show, it was just like obviously this is a perfect thing to just write about for the hell of it and just kind of almost like Catherine, I think, has said at one point in her talk

that the possibility that black metal theory has actually influenced the development of black metal. It's like there's this kind of commentarial fantasy that the Glossator would then, you know, create this tradition, you know, from the future, so to speak. It's like a future that arrives too quickly Or something Yeah, so not to take it too far off And we can, if this is too far off Let me know, but there's The singer of liturgy, like he has his own Manifesto, which is Kind of almost The opposite of a lot of this There's transcendental black metal Theory, have you read this?

Yeah, sure, yeah So you guys are probably all all of you guys when it comes to black metal theory are actually way more inclined than I am. So, I don't know, because in a sense he creates the entire atmospherics about his band, about his element beforehand, setting it out beforehand in the manifesto. So in a way he's actually doing it in the reverse. Well actually, Tony, he talks about it in terms of an artwork, and actually it's an interesting point that you bring it up. Like he's published, Nicola published him in the first Black Metal Theory volume and hosted him in the first Black Metal Theory symposium, but he does actually talk about, he uses the word artwork.

So it's like an arc, the way you look at the hits on a blog increasing on, you know, if you look at the back screen or the host screen of a blog and you see the arc. Basically he names, it's a hyperstitional thing, it's called an arc work. So he sees all his work as an arc work. So where, like Nicola said, he prematurely predicts that it will go up in this arc, that the hits will go up or whatever. You know, you're thinking sort of internet generation here, like completely based on this idea of an arc. To bring it back, he talks about, sorry to interrupt, I'm sorry. No, no, go for it. He talks about the difference between blast beats and burst beats, right?

And the arc in itself is that burst beat, the arc of intensities, whereas the blast is more like atmosphere. And I picked up a lot about the atmosphere. Paul Ennis' essay in the True Detection and picking up on Atmosphere X and Magadhi's work, and talking about it in relation to cosmic pessimism and stuff. So these are my three things that are kind of going, like, that I'm picking up on right now. But, yeah, this arc work, I like this. It's very nice. But it seems like he's positioning Transcendental Black Metal. The Transcendental is the affirmative.

He has a very Nietzschean element of the negation. At some points I don't really...I was wondering if...I basically asked the question if people can maybe say more to it, so let me in on where he stands, as opposed to perhaps the majority of stuff we've been talking about throughout the seminars. Like how is he in relation to perhaps, we're talking about all these things of horror fiction? I don't know, he's actually writing for the serial killer volume at the moment, so it'll be interesting to see what he comes out with in relation to the horror aspect, but I don't know, to be honest, I mean I really dig his whole arc work thing, and I completely see

how you relate it to Pizzolatto's term of psychospherics, you know, the mapping of psychology and atmospherics, It totally works with the artwork and with hyper-precision as well. But in terms of black metal, I've sort of studied the transcendental thing, and I personally can't make head or tail of it maybe with all the time. Well, maybe we could just draw back for a second and say that there's this liturgy black metal theory, the manifesto thing, it sort of replays the same kind of eternal question about pessimism, is it affirmative or negative? It has to be negative, and yet pessimists are smiling and

happy and cracking jokes. And pessimism as on the one hand branching into nihilism and on the other hand it's the Nietzschean negation of the negation. I think that seems to be a, would be a sort of a, maybe a fresh way of looking at both liturgy and then also making sense of liturgy in this context. He specifically talks, I mean, so a lot of times he's talking about transcendone versus the hyperborean, correct? Like, he opposes nihilism to affirmation. And also the blasphemy to the versepeat, these are his dualisms, right? With the hyperbolic nihilism, you have the infinite, and with the transcendent, you have the purely finite.

Yeah, he's a Blakeian kind of dude, and he wants to sort of seize the next mutation of black metal. But of course, it's not working. It's not liturgy itself. It's not the band is going to be like it. but I think to sort of take his stance at its best it's just an articulation of what's already present in black metal but that can't be spoken because it's not black metal to actually say it you said something that the weird is final so final is that final in that sense that it's finite

or that or what that happens it's something that occurs right I'm trying to see okay okay my understanding yeah yeah I mean my understanding of the weird is that it's a it's this finality which is within all things that it's the chaining of all things to themselves in this absolutely unaccountable way but that that is only one side of what Lucretius calls the Klinomen, or this spontaneity, or this whim element. It's like the fact that things are fixed to how they happen, to the way they

happen, the fact that this is this world and not another one, the fact that one is oneself and not somebody else, all of the fact that everything is enchained, so absolutely enchained, you know, what's weird about that weirdness is that it also is the very sort of blood of spontaneity, right? And that's, I guess that's what I'm, you know, in the medieval framework there is this almost a kind of a sacred bond between the creature who is absolutely stuck being himself and the divinity, which is beyond creatureliness, absolutely free, but is also equally stuck

being the absolute. So there's this, in this play between the infinite and the finite, the medium of the play between the infinite and the finite is like the weird. It is the principle of individuation. And I think a good author on this, I mean, somebody who gets this is Giorgio Agamben when he talks about halos. and, you know, union with God or with truth or with reality is a matter of the sort of apotheosis of individuation. It's the becoming perfection is strangely dependent upon this absolute limitation,

absolutely unaccountable, unforeseeable limitation. It's like in the battle version, it would be like glory in battle is possible only through this chaos that renders glory, you know, like not meritocratic or whatever. It's just that day. It's the way it happened. And that is what produces the glory. If I try to make another connection, sorry if that was obscure, but weird is such an Anglo-Saxon sort of concept

that I keep going back to this archaic sense of it. But that's not the modern sense, I guess. I think it was still a good response. Especially with hyperstition and the call to the old ones. And even hyperstitional time, you get archaic, comes back all the time. The text that I linked to last week links directly to what Nicola just spoke about Nicola's Anglo-Saxon, bringing it back to the Anglo-Saxon thing, the reconstruction for us on Heavy Metal's original song is Nicola talks about Black Metal's aesthetics

of inevitability, and he talks about this in relation to the Anglo-Saxon concept of the weird, or wired, which I see plays out in Black Metal's, you know, musically in Black Metal in this sort of aesthetics of inevitability, this build-up that you get in Black Metal songs. Yeah. Yeah. I think that links it very nicely. Yes, it does. Thank you. Does anybody else have any comments or questions? Kind of on the inevitability train to take it then to, like, the Ligati. It kind of struck me when he's talking about, like, determinism

and kind of the impossibility, you know, to reject free will. I wonder how much of that might be, you know, a result to the worlds we've created for ourselves through, like, language. I was trying to find I found the piece like the Soviet psychologist Luria anyone familiar with his work? he interviewed illiterate people and tried to get them you're familiar with it? no no, no, okay

Well, you know, he would ask them questions like, all right, here's a piece of wood, a hatchet, a saw, and a hand drill, which doesn't belong? And they'd be like, they all belong because you use all the tools with the wood. And they'd be like, okay, how about this? Here's a kid and three adult men. Which one doesn't belong? And they'd be like, well, you can't take the kid away from the adults because what's going to happen to the kid? And so, yeah, I think, you know, so the activity, you know, of reading and words, you know, does things to the way we think. And, you know, the words we use does waste of the way we think.

And so I guess, like, you know, specifically, and I guess even with the, you know, kind of the project of hyperstition, the project of black metal, it seems to be kind of, you know, trying to, you know, create a connection to, like, or at least this is a very, not full understanding, but maybe you're anti-theology kind of like recreating a mysticism that isn't dependent

on things that we've all kind of agreed to be fictions. That's a great way to put it. And I would just affirm the fact that mysticism has always, sort of always already been there. I mean, mysticism is the vector of spirituality which insists upon the real. It insists that belief is don't believe in God, because that will you'll be sure to not find God if you believe in God. Don't believe in some reality, some absolute or whatever. person truth. You have to, and in a way it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter what it

is, it doesn't matter what the ultimate that, you know, what is real. What matters is that you strive for, you know, lovingly strive for union with it, that you don't believe in yourself. That's really the way I understand it. Mysticism is the refusal of belief in yourself. So that's why it has to be anti-religious in the sense of a refusal of the believer, because the believer is another identity. So yeah, exactly. I forgot the terms that was last used, but it was a belief without fiction

or something like that. I would add something at this point if you... Sorry, here it's very late, like 2am and I'm a big... I have to say I have problems to concentrate, but it's very interesting because I mean, one of the things that that's stuck into my head lately. It's a hyperstitional practice using rather other national fictions, or fictions that are, I mean, outside the usual circulation. And there is this

science fiction story in a interesting call there is no garden the class was the the kind of I mean it was supposed to be a propaganda anyway well only me it's published in the in the communist you then it's so I think it's a home I think it was a Russian initiative yeah it's translated in Romania well And there is this story of Ilya Varshavsky, a Russian writer, about a scientist who really wants to prove that there is no God.

But he has all the data. He has studied everything. He knows everything about the period, about, you know, like all the Bible, when Jesus appeared, like everything, like all the history. So he goes back in time. So he's totally, you know, a person who doesn't believe. An unbeliever, I don't know. And he goes back, goes into this time machine. And he wants to meet, I mean, he wants to prove that there is no Jesus to meet, you know. And he meets everybody, the apostles, and starts inquiring about this man, and starts

saying about him, like, everything that he knows, and he's like this, and he will do this, and he sees that. And then, by the way, I'm going to leave a little space, because of course he keeps Are you not hearing me? No, I am. I think I am echoing a little. It's a little broken. Oh, okay. Let me switch it. Maybe not, no? That's better, yeah. Is it better? I don't know because I have problems when my computer crashed. So I'm on the phone. Yeah, so the end of it.

But did you get the story up to here? Yeah, yeah. We did. Good. Yeah. So he goes there and because he has these clothes that are, you know, the materials are quite new so he got kind of, you know, it's kind of a slapstick. falls into a lake and starts because he says he had his men put on water and anyway he he falls into this lake and starts floating because of the material out of which his food was made so and then and so everybody you know believes he's jesus i mean actually he becomes jesus you know because he's so knowledgeable, you know, in his disbelief. And he studied, you know, this fiction so well.

I mean, it's a fiction, but he knows everything about everything. And so he goes back to time, and actually he becomes Jesus. I mean, they don't believe that there is a Jesus. I mean, they are sure, everybody is sure that he's Jesus. It would be like the monolith, like something else. appears but I mean it somehow this is how Jesus is you know this is also the twist of the story in Facebook you know you try to prove that you try so you go back in time and you become you become him so anyway yeah this is I mean I think this is a very good example you know of superstition

working not on the plane of unbelief and not on the plane of hyper-belief but on the plane of hyper-disbelief. Perfect. That is exactly like the Eckhart where he says, no one missed me for their God unbecomes. No one missed me. You get back, but it's a time travel version of that. Perfect. Could you cite, could you give in the, oh you're on your phone, but at some point I want to get that cited. I cannot write, Ilya Varshavsky, I can give you afterwards. I was looking for it in English, but I haven't, it's called the hysteresis or whatever you

pronounce it, loop, the hysteresis loop. Yeah, I will give you to it. Actually, I think if there is no English translation, maybe I should translate a story and add it to the hyperstition archives. But there's a similar logic in True Detective, just to make a connection, right? Like, Cole is the true believer because he has the least faith, he has the most intense connection to the thing about the crucifixion. He contemplates the moment in the garden. There was a comment previous about how,

you know, he's the preacher. The sermon is actually, you know, cosmic pessimism and so forth. So it's just, there's a link there. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, there certainly is. I was thinking about some discussion we had a while ago about being, I mean, somehow being a detective of one's own, in a way, like one's own detective, I mean, that you somehow, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's also one, you know, I mean, that's, there is a theological version of that, that process theology is that the universe is a God's detection of his own being. you know, it's a solving of a riddle. It's a who am I? Like why, you know, it's the what generates being, what generates the universe and so forth is this is a question about what's going on. That's interesting maybe

for because we lost Selena right after she said yeah, and then she popped out. Oh, yeah. Now she's back. Sorry, I know. Maybe she switched. I have problems. Or it's just some superstitional practice I'm doing. No, I'm just, you know, it's a constant. I just made a quick connection between detection and like process theology the idea of the universe as a play but really detection as a cosmological process so to speak you know that

that being is actually produced out of out of a trying to figure out what's going on out of a Yeah, on this line I wanted to articulate something. So that's a very similar thing. Christ is actually, in the story, Jesus is actually manifested by me trying to disprove or detect, you know. But also the connection between the, like, the spiral and the, and the, and the fear and the German verdant, like the becoming. Oh, because, oh, yeah. Yeah, I think, yeah, a good connection between... It's the same word. Yeah, weird, weird, veer. Yeah, weird kind of...

...and a twist, and somehow keeping the loose end of the spiral, as it's... Uh-huh. Yeah, I think there is... Along with veer, you have Lucretius, right, which you mentioned already, but the swerve, the cloning, the swerve, veer. And what was the question about intertextuality? That seems like another sort of in the same constellation. The question was a very basic question. What is the relationship between intertextuality and hyperstition, or what effect does hyperstition

have on related texts, I suppose, or linked texts? Okay, so, yeah. I don't have an immediate answer to that question, but one thing is that intertextuality is certainly related to what I was talking about is the con creatum, the individuation as the happening-ness of things. Just as the intertextual is something that is emergent out of the text, right, or out of text. So that's one piece of the puzzle.

But the question is hyperstition and intertextuality. Does anybody have a... It does seem to relate to the question about commentary and the kind of, you know, this move of rendering, you know, commentary is that which renders a text intertextual, right? That's one of commentary's primary jobs, so to speak. It says this is not just a text, it's a text within a text or a text with another text next to it. So maybe that's how I would answer the question. Also, I guess to chime in and to kind of dovetail off what you're saying also,

intertextuality also kind of, I don't know, is contingent upon coincidences as well, which is very, this idea of like this, of hyperstitional sort of analysis is the mapping of these sort of coincidental approaches. I mean, what true detection does a lot is, perhaps B, I mean, there's a lot of coincidences between what Metzinger and you hear about, let's see around, and Ligati, all of these, I mean, that's an entire work of intertextuality, all talking about, all talking about, all problematizing, basically, epistemology through to detective, which is like very, like, it's an interesting use of intertextuality.

and there's many, I think there's sort of many coincident elements, not only just throughout reading the essays, but also between, I think, the sessions that we've had. And just the way this sort of seminar has been going, which is based on, like, going on, like, just basically putting things together based on what we feel is coincidences and stuff. It's very mildly prepared, and we all come together and throw a bunch of things together. I think we have very interesting conversations. that we take away. So maybe part of, I mean, to go back to the question about intertextuality, maybe there's this idea of intertextuality as a kind of actual, purely actual context, which is, which to invest in it,

to acknowledge it, to recognize it, places one in a kind of antagonism with context. as discursively and narratively produced in society, right? And the hyperstitional, sort of the desire of hyperstition seems to be, on the one hand, for the creation of context, but it's a decontextual context. context. Context is sapped of hierarchical and ontological sort of structure, right? So the intertextual is a place where you have this kind of happenstance, coincidental, you

know, the context of pure proximity and of approximation and of response, right? And I I think that's... Anyway, I'm just trying to flesh out this distinction a little bit. But context seems to be an important idea, right? And even Pizzolatto, I would say, has in a sense refused his own contexts. I mean, so much is predictable about the show and about its influences and about everything. It's like immediately recognizable to a whole, to all the Paul Ennis' in the world. It's like, you know, they have an immediate crush on Russ Cole because he like, you know, delivers exactly what they want.

It's completely wrapped. And at the same time, Pizzolatto obviously is like, well, you know, it's not an implementation of a context. It's just a kind of movement that is also at war with context. Anyway, I've said too much already, but somebody else say something. No, it's just funny that context would be like context. Like con artists have context. Like... Yeah. Yeah. Also with. Con means with. Yeah, I know, but I was thinking of giving it another twist.

Yeah, but I think this brings up an interesting thing, because if I'm going to be completely objective about it, like you, Nicola, talk about this in two of your texts about black metal theory, where you talk about intertextuality in relation to the essential principle of medieval exegesis, which, you know, in opposition to say criticism as a mode of analysis and interpretation of a text, what this adds, the relational principle, is problematic involvement with the text, you know, context, which generally is underpoured by some sort of love or what you talked about there as pure proximity, you know, a sort of a total investment in it, like, you know, in relation to TV, the way you talked about it there, you know, I mean, it's what makes

fan fiction, you know, Catherine was asking what makes, you know, what's the, you know, I think it's this problematic investment with the text, something that you can't rationalise, this love or context. And it's also, I think that's a really good formulation, yeah. And it's also, I mean, in terms of the affect or whatever, it's like it's, you know, predicated almost on a desire to get too close, to be too close, you know, to like read too closely and to also invert the sort of love of inverse magnitudes, right, to find the greatest in the smallest, right, just like the, and this is also a principle of the sacred, right.

like the relics of the saints are more precious, the smaller they are, the chip of bone and that sort of thing. So commentary has this sacralizing function, and fan fiction has that kind of, obviously, that same kind of disposition. right we love this too much we go too far with this object we believe too much we in a sense we explode contexts in our love of this thing

I also think about maybe also with reference to intertextuality the intertextuality that you don't necessarily mean, I guess, as a writer or something. So Reza talks about a lot with the complicity with anonymous materials, that the artist can no longer be singular. The artwork is always exposed to contingency itself. So there's the symposium and collection on medium contingency also, which might expose some things here. It's not directly talking about intertextuality,

it's slightly translating. But I'm wondering. Yeah, I suppose when I said intertextuality, I wasn't saying explicitly intentional intertextuality, you know, convergences of texts in the edit or not, you know, affect the interpretation of that text, so that's, I suppose, disgusting. So, yeah, no, I definitely think that intertextuality is a good thing with the amount of materials, like, obviously. Yeah. But have you read this, have you read anything from the medium contingency, this

No, it happened, sorry. What is this? It's a simplicity that Urbanomic published, but the whole point is thinking of contemporary art context, but it's about thinking how artists are now approaching producing artworks when they know that they're exposed to all of these different game of text role elements or the detail itself. It's kind of also coming from influence from Reza's. Kind of like upper creativity, but a little bit more contemporary art. Hey, maybe Ben could speak to that. We haven't heard from Ben,

and I'm starting to wonder what he's thinking, because he probably has a more perceptive understanding of what the actual question on the table is. He always lasts before he comes in. Since raises. I wanted to drop Ben to speak on, just before I got cut off there, but I was hoping that Ben would speak on, before I got cut off, you were talking about hyperdysmalief Alina, And I wanted Ben to talk about his contribution to the volume in relation to hyper disbelief and hyperstition. Just about that notion of Nietzsche's naysayer being the yaysayer, really,

and the work of pessimism in relation to hyper disbelief. And now she's gone. We are all going. One thing I wanted to say about intertextuality is partly like the found text, which we talked about the second week. Because it's interesting how intertextuality is positioned differently in terms of the found text, you know, the fact that, you know, the book that the found text is in, the whole found text,

which makes up 90% or more of the book, is, you know, claimed to be real but lost. And so what the book actually is outside the found text is, you know, the author's statement is just basically that says, what follows is a found text. So it's like the whole book, and you have a story that's comprised of a found text. It's basically one giant footnote. The whole found text is just this information that you might find interesting in a weird way. Whereas with hyperstition, it's kind of the other way around in that it also claims that there's lost information that should be discovered, but instead of saying

what follows is true it just acts like it's true and to the proliferation of linkages and connections that it claims indirectly that what it's talking about is real it's kind of a weird it's like they both are kind of trying to make something real but in a very different way and I just think that's kind of interesting in terms of commentary and you know, it's like the you know, the second example is kind of like is sort of a commentary model hyperstition is very much just kind of you know, it's like a commentary on a book that's been lost, right? It's like what hyperstition kind of

amounts to, whereas the found text is like it's not been lost, you just haven't heard about it so it's an interesting kind of play in terms of Yeah, and the found text tradition in the West, I mean, it goes back to alchemy itself. So alchemical texts often deploy this fiction being the translation or the footnote to the one surviving but now lost text. So there's a connection there between found text, hyperstition, and the desire for this

fundamental transformation. Or whatever Land calls the positive destruction of identity, hyperstition as this means of going beyond the given. In mysticism, it's pseudo-Dionysus, it's the hyperstitional master. I mean, all of Western mysticism is in many ways founded around, you know, the cornerstone is founded around this fraud, right, of this author who writes himself into apostolic tradition

and destroys and creates an identity in the same move. But anyway, that's another whole subject. But just to hit that note, right, that this found text element in weird fiction, in gothic fiction, in fantasy, is a continuation of an actual medieval serious practice, so to speak. Like an ascetic practice. I'm wondering if

if he wants to come on, if he wants to come on and oh there's a second one for there's a second one for and there's two I don't know Ben, do you have any, I mean, you were, was there any other, like, points that were brought up that you maybe wanted to comment on? Or, no, she's back, so can you finish that question for Ben? What part did you get to? I would start maybe. Okay, so I just wanted to ask Ben, I wanted to bring it back to the conversation on

hyperstition as hyper disbelief that Alina was talking about. Alina and Nicola ended up sort of concluding with this notion of hyper disbelief. And I wanted to relate that to Nietzsche's notion of the naysayer as the yaysayer, which is one interpretation of Russ Cole, and also something that Vincent Nealon and Ben Woodard take up in the volume, True Detectives, with this idea of the labour of the pessimist. And I wondered if Ben could talk a bit about that, about hyper disbelief and the labour of the pessimist. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's partly, I mean, it's interesting because a lot of the,

you know, a lot of the text in the collection and a lot of those stuff that's written, A lot of stuff that comes out in terms of disbelief, and belief is how that relates to epistemological or epistemic questions in particular. and it's interesting to me in terms of whether it's hyper disbelief or belief or whatever the model is in terms of doing hyperstition or whatever is to what extent are you taking into account your own position as an actor as well as an epistemological agent I mean even with Helena's example The idea is that the guy who travels back in time doesn't take into account what his own trip back in time might do.

So there's a weird, he has this kind of hyper disbelief based on the information he has. But he doesn't apply the disbelief to his own, like the effect he would have being there. Well, that's why he becomes the ultimate believer. I mean, he's completely trapped. he completely translates what he's trying to disprove right so it's kind of I guess the kind of question is then you know at what point can you apply the disbelief to your own capacity to disbelieve and still do hyperstition or still comment or whatever because it's there's some you know that's kind of a it's like a there's not really a good sense of that I think in that

especially this comes up with Nietzsche too when he's always talking about whenever Nietzsche's being kind of bombastic or whatever, you know, or man being a thing to be overcome. It's kind of like you always get the sense that he'll be there for the overcoming, you know? Like, you'll just party for him, and everything will be swell. And I'm always like, well, like, you're, you know, you're quarantining yourself in a strange way there. so it's sort of like if you accept that you're it's kind of a question of you have to accept that hyperstitians could destroy you yeah you could plan on destroying you believe in them enough

to carry them out but not so much that you erase your own actions in doing them so it's sort of like you can disbelieve in them but you have to act as if you believe in them, but as far as yourself is concerned, you have to disbelieve in their inability to affect you. So am I right? That sounds like Alan Moore's Deeper Vendetta seemed like a brilliant example just there. Anyone else getting that? I'm sorry, say it again. What's that? Alan Moore's Deeper Vendetta. It's just in relation to what Ben just said, the perfect trajectory. V, does that know V? So he believes in this enough to sort of destroy himself, so it's

this creation, it's like, he's not like, you know, sitting around to sort of be there to witness it, but destroys himself in the creation of this, you know, overman, if you like. Anyone else know the graphic novel enough to comment? Well you bring up V for Vendetta and I want to talk about masks and Guy Fawkes is like a high-persistial image. Yeah, exactly, yeah, and it lives on. That's the whole trajectory of the novel, you know, in this character V where he destroys himself. It's this perfect sort of visual trajectory of what Ben just said there, like of not sticking around. relies on him actually having to die, which he does, in order for this sort of overman

situation to happen. Now we see the mask in protesting and... Exactly. Yeah. So it's completely hyper-pricing. Yeah. Pyfox is one of the best hyper-pricing images. Sorry, go ahead, Beckett. But in some ways, like, Moore's graphic novel was destroyed by the film. You know, like... Why do you... You know, Alan Moore hates all movies that are made about his original works, just like out of hand, and now, you know, the film circulates to, you know, I don't know how many times magnitude than the graphic novel ever did.

and anonymous probably more than be prevented of the film. Yeah, but I mean, I don't know if, I mean, I, like, I'm aware of, I'm aware of Alan Moore's position about his films or whatever, but I mean, he is, you know, he's inherently a weirdo anyway. He's always kind of disgruntled or whatever. I don't mean, I don't know if that's like a good interpretation of a weirdo, but he's just always kind of disgruntled anyway. So certainly, I mean, there's a lot of interpretations of his films that I don't, or adaptations of his films or his graphic novels that I don't like, but I was actually quite happy with that one.

I don't know if I'd directly relate to Anonymous's or anyone else's taking up of the mask of the, if I directly relate it to the film, because as far as I know, that the rapid level in itself is like a huge success. That's just, I mean, that's just a fun. Well, to me, there seems to be one little moral lesson here in play, which is, you know, generally from the philosopher privileges, there's a philosophical privilege of non-belief, right? Belief is naive, non-belief is the prudent stance. but it seems that we're playing with the notion that one has to be equally careful about not believing.

Be careful about what you don't believe in kind of idea. You have to be equally careful. Maybe even more, you have to be more careful. Anybody can, any idiot can be safe to not believe. That's easy. you have to be careful really careful about what you don't believe in do you follow I think that's the lesson of the you know the one who's disproving wants to disprove Jesus or whatever becoming Jesus it's almost like the joke's on him ultimately God's having a good laugh over that one it brings us back to the question It's a perfect

scenario. You know, God doesn't exist until somebody was stupid enough to try to disprove his existence. Anyway, I'm just playing around. No, it's fine. I think it's relevant. I was just being quiet to see if anybody wanted to pick up from there. More play. I mean, so, for me, like, I guess one question is, like,

In a lot of the essays, we talk a lot about Rust having a lot of synesthetic experience, so I wanted to just sort of throw out the ideas of synesthesia in relation to type of precision, or in black metal theory as well. or because this comes up like in right in the first essay with Shipley and then also with, I think it comes a lot with the atmospherics, even in the nonsense essay. So this is sort of like he has this bad taste in his mouth,

like the aluminum taste, right? this eventually brings them to connect with the detection at the end. Ah. Mm-hmm. This is just one general thing I had that really struck me. And maybe perhaps Ben, you would know something about this. If there's anybody in the hyperstitional world talking about synesthesia, I think sometimes, like, I think like the turning speculation people do in relation to sound. Trying to connect back to our first talk maybe with Black Metal 3.

It might die. It might die. It's okay. Take it back. Well, okay, so the synesthetic version of black metal theory is that it's a contamination of thinking and music. So the idea that one can think beyond context by messing up the senses, by approaching the the color of a sound and so forth. I mean, that's kind of... There's something intuitive and natural about that. It's like paying attention to what cannot be

in order to understand, you know, what is. But I don't remember the... Where is the synesthesia in True Detective? You said the aluminum... True Detective, the collection. It comes up in, typically, when he's talking about the ninth solution to the locked room, which is doors and windows. And he calls this the smell of a psychosphere. Comes back up again. Can I not be talking? I have to look through my notes real quickly. Well, it's in Rust's, you know, infamous, you know, happy vision at the end about a warm, black. Subsidium. like a warm, you know, like that's the kind of synesthetic, there's a synesthetic logic

there. Yeah, it's specifically... Or when he does, he basically, in the series, like whenever he encounters, you know, the sort of real crime scene, you know, or whenever Earl Childers is near, he sort of tastes, he gets his taste of aluminum in his mouth. So at the very end, in the last episode, he says, I get that taste of aluminum and ash again. And it's when he's nearing the crime scene, so he kind of knows he's near the scene of the crime whenever he gets his taste in his mates. So it's that mixture, you know, that confusion of senses that you were just talking about that you do get in black metal theory as well. And, yeah, it's really in the collection.

It's just addressed by Paul and by Gary. in their essays. But I don't really know how it relates to hyperstation other than maybe through black metal as you just said, Nicola. But isn't this related to a plane of potentiality or like Percy's firstness? I mean, this kind of non-cognitive experience of pure determinacy of something that is that you cannot track down. I mean, because it's not as... I mean, because we were talking about this... the action and, you know, like,

all the here and nowness of this action of, you know, which is like secondness, like a reaction, like something group, like... which relates to the plane of this hyperstitional practice, which is based on something that is happening. And as you said, whenever it happens, it becomes final. I don't know how this helped the discussion, but I was also thinking that this is very much like a secondness or actuality. or and how

you know how because it's a kind of big all you know into what's anyway real but potential at this whole there you know I'm that's it and then it's imminent and imminent I'm I think it's a potential time as well, of the kind of how Nick Lentz's hype phase outside time. which relates in a way to this kind of potentiality or something.

Yeah, I mean, to me, it's just that your comment, Elena, raises that the idea of circumspection is like, you know, the detective is to be circumspect, which means to think around, to walk around to see what you can't see it directly, you only see it from... It's a perception that is on the margin of perception. And the connection to hyperstition for me is that hyperstition on the one hand is defined as a power like, oh you can do this, cool, let's be hyperstitional, let's affect reality through our fictions or whatever, but it's also that hyperstition seems to have this circumspective will that by creating fictions let's try to

feel ourselves towards somewhere or towards something that we could not otherwise. Hyperstition is the mode of agency which is not in a world where you cannot act upon the world. You can't act upon it through sort of causal forces, right, but you can produce a world, you can produce truths through this kind of, it's like circumspectual action, I think that's what I'm trying to say. So in a way it's like also interfacial, you can't really, you know, don't have a medium, like how do you act upon an environment which you cannot access through

a medium, right? You work through fictions, but the point is that that is also an epistemological drive. It's sort of like let's try to feel the parameters of this space that we find ourselves in by, it's like a theatre space, you know, where you kind of produce the awareness of the world through the production of a theatre space. And that's a kind of circumspection, that's the link I'm trying to make between circumspection, which is the mode of detection and hyperstition. Yeah, I guess also, like for me it's synesthesia is known to be like in a lot of the cognitive

science texts or the thought and language texts when they're looking into synesthesia for like windows and like the... Some people were looking into it for like the creation of the beginnings of theories of language and whatnot, but you have the fusing of these modalities, much like a metaphor, obviously, but there's—what's important about it is the hyper-connectivity between like number and color or tone and smell and like, I mean, perhaps this is just an intuitive part of like—perhaps this is one intuitive part of why the numerology in hypercision like ends up perhaps working. However, synesthesia is not a common thing between all people,

although it is a real perception, right? It's not... See, I think... Yeah, I think... I mean, I think synesthesia is a real phenomenon, but I think the interest in synesthesia is itself synesthetic. As far as it's like you're trying to... You know, what you're really interested in is just the fact, the medium that synesthesia itself attests to. It's not so much that, you know, like grasping synesthesia is not really the problem of synesthesia. The problem of synesthesia is that it attests to this, I mean, I would think of it as like an analogy would be like a screen. the screenic dimension of reality

according to which everything is juxtaposed, everything is joined, everything is fused, everything is sort of comparably next to each other. So synesthesia is... is... is... I mean, it's a little bit like laughter. It's a little bit like what Bataille says about laughter, You know, like laughter is the problem of laughter. The answer to the question of what makes us laugh is that we don't know what makes us laugh. And it's the same thing with synesthesia. Like synesthesia is a kind of analog to laughter. Like it's this thing that it's this incommensurable kind of relation.

So that's why I think it's sort of the medium of, you know, kind of connects to the idea of what is the medium of circumspection? What is the space? What is the screen of reality? You know, what is it that's there upon which you can make connections between things in the first place? The connections themselves are always fairly arbitrary, like why is blue number four or whatever? You know, it's like whatever. Who cares? Nobody really cares about what the actual links are. What's deeply interesting is that the fact that there already is this space in which a link exists. This is what I meant with the first. Yeah, right. I mean, first is actually the perfect person to bring in.

Yeah, like the primary layer. I don't know, like before, you know, you kind of split into, you know, that is a color and that is a sound. Like, you know, there is this example in the course, like the high-pitched sound of a trumpet, which is the same as a very intense, deep red, you know. Like, there is a sensation, and it's even hard to explain because it's non-cognitive. It's something that you, yeah, you feel in a way. And that's, yeah, I think it connects here also with Elia Ayash's medium of contingency and the way you connect with the event

because anyway, firstness is the plane of indeterminacy. So it's like, as you said, Nicola, with the medium of... Yeah, I think Perse is super helpful for thinking through this question of synesthesia, obviously. Not that I'm the right person to talk about first. Well, somebody here is. It's not me. I just did it like in... I just became... Instantly. I can definitely see it relating to the level of firstness in Perse, the signs of firstness. I'm trying to come up with a better response.

It's something I need to think a little bit more about. It's interesting. Do you know, or is this just a relation you're making, but you don't know that anybody's worked on a person's anesthesia in the past? I'm sure, right? What are you asking? Anybody, I guess, or more directed towards you since you brought it. If you know if there is any direct... No, I don't. It just occurred in my mind. I mean, it was an idea from your description. I mean, it struck me as being connected. I didn't... Okay.

We have a comment from Catherine as well. potentially Russ's visions are examples of openness to invasion by quote, ungrounded creative power of outside space, unquote, to use Nicola's word, since their origin is not him. Nicola, can you read that? Can you see that comment in the chat? Do you see the chat? Oh. Now I'm going there. Whose comment? Catherine's comment? Catherine's comment, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the basic picture that we have, that there is...

I mean, we have to distinguish between the content of the synesthetic message, so to speak, which I think, in my mind, is kind of irrelevant. It's not that aluminum gives you the clue to the crime, although it might lead you down some hole or path that would lead to a revelation of the criminal. But what's important is just this, is like the unground principle, it's just the index of a connection. So I mean according to this logic connections are not important because of what they say, but because of their, because the event of the connection itself, you know, is a window onto firstness so to speak, it's

a window onto that inchoate dimension which is mysteriously intelligible before representation. If I'm reading correctly, I think that's the direction of Catherine Foyle. What's interesting is that he tastes aluminum. He could taste anything. It doesn't matter. It's just, it's not the what. It's the that he tastes anything is what... And again, like, the that versus the what, I think, distinction is important, because

That is a contentless phenomenon. That something is. It's a sort of contentlessness and acontextuality and contentlessness to that synesthetic experience. It could be anything. Just like you could fall in love with anyone, right? It's just anybody, you see them and boom. Like, it requires some qualities or some content. And yet it's not independent of those things.

It's just... Anyway, so you know what I'm saying. I think that's Catherine. So yes, yes to Catherine Foyle. Yeah, thank you so much. Okay. Okay. Because they're using, what you're saying is it's before representation with person to personness and also this sort of like ungrounded creative power of the outside coming, I mean Shipley talks about it as a window or a door and also like there's a lot of like in the synesthetic work I've read in cognitive, well, in my past reading on it, in the cognitive field, although it is not a cognitive phenomenon,

people are using it as a window or a door into thinking about perception, thinking about thought, thinking about language. Like, so, like, I think all of these things, yeah, I'm saying basically, or they're all touching upon this similar idea. But perhaps Ben would disagree that the synesthetic function of hyperstition, I'm not sure. Sometimes his quietness makes me feel like he knows more. He does. It's all a mask. He does. Believe it.

Impersonation. His silence is an index of all that we do not know. Yeah. Lies. All lies. I mean, it's not uncommon that, like, the majority of people that are, like, if you have temporal temporal lobe epilepsy, you're actually more inclined to experience anesthesia. And the sort of temporal lobe epilepsy is sort of like a mixture of different, a whole conglomerate of different feelings, thoughts, experiences that feel completely foreign to you from the outside.

And you have these hallucinations, voices, music, people's smells, all these things sort of combine and have different modalities. They always said it's sort of like, when they're talking about it, they're always talking about it as this sort of aura or a warning. There's always these warnings before an apolithic attack. Right, that's the aura. Before you have the attack, these experiences happen. So in relation to the True Detective series, which brings up, again, focusing a lot on Paul's essay, but with the atmospherics and the synesthesia and Shipley's relating it to the smell of the psychosphere.

But the only thing I really can't speak to is basically directly to I-Crisis, and I was trying to see if I can pull something out, but still nothing. Are there any other points or topics that we wanted to bring up? Because we talked a lot about the... We talked a lot in the last sessions about trying to talk about ethics beyond anthropocentrism or ethics beyond the human, and a hell of a lot of text in this collection are all trying to discuss topics

after the self or after thinking selfhood, personhood, and these things. So I thought maybe we'd want to revisit this concept of ethics that we've been talking about a lot. I see a cat, right? Yeah. That's a dog. Oh, a dog. Yeah, it is a dog. Oh, a dog, yeah. Yeah. They brought rabians for the non-human ethics, too. RUB! Oh. Oh, gee. Look at you. Baby! Chihuahua!

She's a chihuahua. Don't be the chihuahua. OK, that's not relevant to the seminar. You're playing. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get back, how to make it. Non-human ethics. So, I mean, like, what does it, like when Chip Lee says, like, what does it mean for a pessimist? What does it mean to be a pessimist that persists?

I mean, Ben also has interesting things in his essay I think we could bring up on this, and I mean, even Nicola, you sort of kind of touched about when you were talking about maybe it was belief in unbelief or something, and you were just talking about the concept of love, which makes me think of an ethics, like sort of beyond thinking of the self, right? Sort of something. Sure, I mean, ethics is about becoming, and I mean, ethics itself cannot be anthropocentric.

I don't think there's an ethics that... How can there be an ethics that's anthropocentric? I don't understand how you could marry the ethics to the human. and ethics is by definition about becoming more other alter than what one is. Okay, I guess what I'm thinking of... And through nature, you know, ethics is becoming what you are, but what you are is something other than human. But anyway, that's just the first reaction to the question itself. I mean, it doesn't answer the thing about how it relates to True Detective and so forth.

But for sure, I mean, my own general orientation is that it's ethics in the mystical sense is grounded in this absolute refusal, which is refusal of oneself, a refusal of the limitations of human nature. And I take this as totally natural, totally, you know, it's totally a natural desire. It's a totally normal and natural and boring process. Hey Nicola, can I just jump in there? It's not some extreme, you know, all or nothing project, it's just, it's like

Lara Well said, I mean to be human is itself a mystical experience. Nicola? Yeah? Can I jump in to ask you a question? Of course, please do, because, yeah. Well, just because when I raised this last week, well, it was raised last week, and I said that I didn't understand how ethics could actually be a human project because, or anything but a human project, sorry. because, for example, I knew Levinas a lot in your writing. You know, there's that famous instance when Levinas, who's sort of the great thinker of ethics, talks about meeting a dog in a concentration camp,

and he can't extend the notion of ethics to the dog. You know this instance? Derrida talks about it. Sure. I know that passage, yeah. Yeah, so that's problematic for me. So, I mean, we had a conversation then kind of based out of that and we talked about it with Paul extensively at the weekend as well. And I think he was kind of in his kind of thinking was, well, once that the problem was that there's always this, you know, attempt to think an ethics of the non-human from a a human point of view, when actually what we need to do is just sort of stop thinking from a human point of view, which I see where that relates to your understanding of ethics

in a mystical sense as a total disbelief in the self, so it can never be from a point of view of the self, but then there's a breakdown between that conversation and the conversation that Levinas has in that passage. Maybe you could talk about that. Okay, well for me, yeah, bringing that up raises the importance of making the distinction between ethics and morality. In my understanding of ethics, ethics is in a way, it's essentially amoral, because it's hypermoral. Ethics is hypermorality. is like where the distinction between good and evil sort of meets the necessity to brush

your teeth in order not to get cavities. Ethics is like taking care of being. It's actually... Ethics is the management of the becoming of being and of entities and so forth. So anyway, that's a general point, that ethics is obviously about the good, but it's about the good in a way that refuses, that must go beyond good and evil, because it's too invested in the real, in the actual. Ethics is what actually concerns what actually happens, how you really feel, how you really

are, the kind of person you really are, not values. So, and that's the mystical framework tradition that's spirituality, right? Spirituality is a concern paying attention to what's actually going on in your mind, in your heart, in the look on your face, the actual, and so that's ethics. I mean, that's the bread and butter of ethics in a sense. So anyway, it just seems like the question about ethics was maybe first posed in terms of an ethics, a value system

or something, but ethics is not about values, it's about habits, it's about the direction, it's about the ability to direct becoming, it's about the volition behind the direction of becoming. That's how I understand ethics. But maybe I'm just not aware of that. I don't know. Okay. So when you say the volition, to me that sounds very Delusian Bergsonian when he's talking about laying down an ethics of musicality, laying down the rhythms of life or something.

Yeah, ethics is individual striving to become good, but it has to be the striving itself, it has to abandon goodness. It has to abandon the idea of its own goodness. In order to become, it's just like an athlete, you can't just become a good athlete by trying to enact good athleteness or whatever, you have to sort of strive through all the mess of the whole thing. That's why I think ethics is sort of beyond good and evil in that way. I know you're telling you enough. But that's not the ethics that people want to discuss. That's not the ethics that people actually want to debate about, you know.

He's also very Spinozian, I mean obviously Deleuze has this conception of it. Who does? Deleuze, I mean because somebody said… Deleuze, yeah, because he's an eminentist, yeah exactly. we go to the... In a way, we cannot know not what a body can do, but what good is. Well, exactly. It also starts in the position that the good is already given, that it's already there.

That would be also like the medieval pre-modern perspective. It's already established. It's not a project of humanity to create the good fulfill it or whatever. It's already given. What matters is your ability to put yourself into relationship to that thing. Yeah, I mean you have a great quote in your contribution, Nicola, when you're talking about Levinas and you're talking about escape. Oh, right, that they love us, you know. Yeah, maybe to be cheesy, but I'll quote you here. You say, like, here is where the need to escape, to get out of myself, is no longer conceivably my need.

It's already so close to being something universally free from myself that to entertain is too dangerous, too threatening to escape, per se, in the singular sense it holds to me. Here is the threshold of a greater, neither human nor inhuman, internal outdoors, It's the boundary of the limitless unlocked prison route, whereupon almost everyone really plans to stay inside. Where you keep planning your, or worse, our escape via designs, perforce designed to prevent you from actually escaping. I thought this is quite, this to me was, I mean, very interesting. You're not directly talking about it. Like, you're not directly speaking to what we're saying, but you're—

No, there's a definite connection, yeah. Well, ethics is about escape. It's about escape, yeah. Yeah, that's the tedious. But in ethics for perhaps Spinoza is about— I mean, it always brings it back to Canoptes, right? The my desire. So, yeah, I guess these were sort of the questions we were throwing around. I guess we still can't answer them after four sessions completely, but I think we have a better idea of it. I mean, perhaps you don't want to answer to this, Ben, but, like, you talk a lot about, in the tree detection, you talk a lot about Seneca and the Stoicism.

And before I brought up athletics, I'm thinking the early image of the, I don't know, the priesthood critics, the need and stoic thought, with athletics and ethics, tolerance. It ties to the self-destruction implied in the Stoic ethics, which is the Seneca line that it ends with. Where the original line is it's criminal to live by robbery, but it's not criminal to die by robbery. you sort of like

you know, the ethic yeah, ethics is comprised of the sort of series of acts you take, because you want to do something, because you want to, you know you're being something that's only that you are what you have to be in order to keep doing, you know that follow a particular path, whether it's in any other sense, yeah, it's not like ethical in a good and evil sense it's an imperative, right, it's kind of ethics as following an imperative to whatever end that entails. So it's more like Nicola was saying, that's the athleticism, it's more about discipline than about trying to figure out what's good or bad outside of particular practices. You can never be divorced from, or even thought, it can never be properly thought

outside the actual doing of it. That's the conundrum of ethics. because it is also what you're already doing even if you're acting ethically or inethically everything you do is inethics because it's creating a future for you and a reality and a present reality as well so for you much like when Deleuze is reading Spinoza and he's talking about ontology is ethics, is that similar to what you would extend? I, yeah, I guess there's a connection there. I mean, I normally just sort of, you know, I go for the etymology, I go for, like, the

root meaning of the word, so ethics is, like, related to hexis and habit. Ethos means also habit. It's, the ethical is the habitual, positively or negatively, which is, brings it in line with evolutionary processes and everything in the natural world that goes to condition the becoming of forms, but it also applies to mental bodies as well, intellect and other levels of being. You know, a good or bad habit, I guess, if we were to bring it specifically to individuation,

or sort of you were talking about it's not, you were talking about individuation, that it's not, we're not talking about the factory, we're not talking about allo-athletic systems, we're talking about auto-polysis, right? It's not sort of like the parts put into what makes me, but sort of that the systems themselves are sort of, they evolve and adapt. I'm trying to see where habit sort of fits in there in an autopilotic system. Also, where does it fit in with dysontology as well? That's my question. You know, I get totally what Nicole and Ben just said in relation to habit, but if you're going to relate it to ontology, and Nicole is going to sit with that,

then I want to know how it's related to dysontology and dysontological thinking, and how that relates to apophaticism. Feel free to just choose. Pick one. This question is fine. Well, there's no greater habit than being oneself. You know, you'll print any headlines, any possible headlines in order to remain. yourself is just a never-ending stream of I statements, a la Vernon Howard, so that's the work, the habit. And I think that's the, in terms of the traditional understanding of habit, then that's the idea of the habit of habit, why do we, or love of the familiar,

what is that, it's that force, the force of habit itself, which is the habit of habit in a sense is the, you could say, is this Ur habit of being oneself. So anyway, that's one, maybe that's one part of the puzzle, you know. But that also, you know, Hegel has a thing about death is the habit of life, which I think connects there, because there's this weird way in which a habit is actually, there's a telos of a habit towards its own decay, you know, so that's why I was interested in the relationship between habit and decay, and decay as thinking, and thinking of habit not as a building process but as a decay process.

And I think ethics has to do with this wielding of the habitual force in the interest of positive decay or what Nland calls positive destruction of identity. It's a sort of unwinding versus winding process. But I don't know about the apophatic, the relationship between apophasis. I didn't quite understand, Ida, where you were, what was the link there that you were trying to create? Oh, she's gone again. She's not happy with that. How perfectly apathetic of her to just go into darkness at the moment.

Anyway. I mean, at this point, it's 840, which means it's super late for Alina and everybody else, actually. Yeah, everybody except me. And not me, and not Beckett, not Ben. Half of us. Usually it is for me, but I'm on a different side of the world today. But I mean, there are a whole bunch of questions, I think, that we opened up that we can. I mean, I would say we could start some sort of conversation happening outside of this session. And maybe if some things have interest, we can keep poking at it.

Maybe we can get to the epithetic in a side conversation later on. Also, we should, like I want to, more about this, the black middle thing and the issue type decision, because that came up a lot throughout the seminar. I'm just sort of, I guess, to bring the up, I'm wrapping up, I think, because it's 840 here, which means it's super late for you guys. So I don't want to keep anybody too much. So I guess I would put this, at this point, I would just open it up to anybody has any last minute comments or questions, things that they wanted to maybe bring up, questions that we could defer to having

in future conversation. Yeah, comments about the seminar, anything. We exhaust everybody. I think there was a lot of interesting relation here with this last session that I think there's a lot we can really pull apart. Things we couldn't really get to in the entire seminar, if I was to think of the entire seminar. But I think Ben and I want to attempt to do in

in a follow-up session we're going to try to do between in March and April on Saturdays. We're going to do another section called Fictional Worlds and Possible Futures, and we're going to do more of the readings of the new versions that we didn't get to in the syllabus and spend a lot of time doing the readings, maybe even trying to do our own writings. And if there's really, like, we could, if people were interested in doing a second session, we could definitely extend and work in this idea of black metal theory and I think incorporate it into a lot of syllabus.

But I was just wondering how everybody sort of felt about, I mean, like, we're pulling a lot of different threads in each session. So I'm opening up for comments about the seminar as a whole, or comments for Nicola, that we want to sort of get last minutes while we have them. And then we can do sort of a wrap up. Oh, I have to say briefly that it was a lot of fun to play around with all these ideas and stir them in a pot, so to speak. And I think it—I don't know how representative this session is of the whole seminar, but but it seems to be a worthwhile way to spend one's time.

Just like stirring, you know, you don't know what, whatever, but things need to be stirred, and so this is like a cauldron stirring session. That's nice. Hyper theory for sure. Yeah, you know, nobody really knows. There's nothing quite on the table. There's something on it. It's not in the table. It's all in the pot. That's the difference. It's like a pot seminar where you just...a cauldron seminar. Yeah. So I kind of like that idea. Yeah, I think this is very representative. Thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure. Oh, thank you for coming. It was very new. This was like, I think...I sort of predicted in the last session that it would be more conversational,

but this is our most conversational, I think, the most back and forth, which is nice. And I kind of like the format that we can, I don't know how everybody else feels, but I like this format of kind of just being, everybody coming with their own sort of ideas on the topic and not really constraining what we're going to talk about before we show up, like nobody really ever knows. That's kind of fun. But maybe people don't like that format. So just. MALE SPEAKER 1 Yeah. OK. No other comments, questions? All right.

We'll end the section, and then we can.