Formalizing the Subject (Session 4)

Hello and welcome to the new Center for Research and Practice, formalizing the subject Dialectics and Cybernetics in CAE for the Analyze and CCRU. This is session four with Danielle Cessolotto. Danielle, please take it away. Thank you. So welcome everybody. Nice to see you again. Before anything before we get started with our with our matter uh it we uh i want to go very quickly through a rerun of just who is presenting on what week and who's responding on what week so um just because i think we might have had some scheduling sort of like uh troubles so if you can

just very quickly i'll go like each of you one by one and i'll just ask you uh and you can tell me so I can have, write this down very quickly. So just give me one second. So Alexei, you are scheduled to present in theory for next week, right? Am I correct? I'm presenting week seven. You're presenting week seven, okay. And- Oh, sorry. Yes, week seven, week seven. Week seven, okay. Eric, you had a Q&A, but you have, I think, another set schedule for later? No, I had responded in the second session and the presentation in last session.

Yeah, you're right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for my meetings. Federico, did you figure it out? Yeah, I wrote it down here on the PDF, session five on October 19th on Matter as Machinic Process. So that's next week. Great. And that's it, right? You don't have enough or you also have a response? Oh, I have the response. Let me check. I wrote it down here as well. In session seven, November 2nd. Cool. Valentin? Can you please give me one minute until I find the syllabus and remember? Sure, sure, sure. What about you, Jack?

you jack i am presenting next week so we have a double dipper on week five because federico's presenting next week as well right i think i think i first saw that because federico asked me at the end so there's one week where we have two people yeah i think that was the plan from the beginning okay good um and then that's it right as far as no response or anything alan i actually have no idea but but i remember i was like presenting in a week that there was already like someone else presenting so like a double

So I guess people that don't remember I'm gonna go back and look over the archives and I'll I'll make a printout of the presenters and the respondents for each week for the people that don't remember. Okay okay so so far we have all right Sasha? I'm supposed to be presenting today. Okay and did you have any other a response a week? Yes, I'm supposed to be responding on the last week. The one week week 8. Okay. Jared? So I was also assigned to speak on week 8

to present. You're presenting on week 8? Yeah, that was at the very end. After everything else had been assigned. And are you no response? No responding? No, that was like everything else we had thought had been taken. So they just, Jamie suggested that I go week eight. Okay. Okay. Stefano? For me, it's week six. Week six. Yes. In two weeks. Great. And no response? No. Okay. George? I'm not signed up yet. Is there a free week that I could jump onto? Cool. What was that?

No, he's just being Larelli and don't worry about him. No, this is not what I'm doing. I have two. Oh, no, okay. Did you say my name? Yeah. What is the question? I already did my presentation. I'm responding. What week am I responding, Jamie? Here, okay. We'll figure it out. Yeah, I'll send you the readout for who's presenting. I've been checking the first class, and I believe Pekin is responding today officially. Because I've been checking before then. Who's speaking right now? It's Alexei. I've been checking who's responding today, and I believe Pekin is today,

who's the main responding. I'm responding today? I think so. I watched the recording from the first session when I was confused. That's what I got. So, but Iken, you don't remember having to respond today, I gather. I thought that I was the week after next week. In fact, the week that we just reviewed and someone said there's no responder for that one. I thought that was mine. However, I can respond for today. I mean, I have some ideas. I mean, I think we have plenty going on today. I guess Sasha is presented today. Can I respond the last thing that someone said there's no responder for? I mean, we'll figure this out later.

Okay. Hernan? Yeah. Hernan? Yes. Yeah, what's up? Yes, I have a response on week six and presentation seven. Okay, so seven and six. Okay, great. And then Daryl, that's all we have? I mean, you presented last week. Yeah. I presented. I can do a response on the sixth if that works. Well, Hernani is, I think, responding on the sixth. Okay, I thought there was some obligation to respond. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, as far as we know, what we'll have to do is once we sort out exactly, because something's happened. I don't know what exactly happened, that there's some weird cross contamination here.

So what we'll do is once we get this cleared up, we can figure out if there's a gap somewhere and we'll figure out what's the best time for you to respond if that's okay. Does that work? Okay, if it's mandatory, I'll do the sixth. Okay, great. cool cool cool cool cool let me just excuse me I heard something have we found a responder for next week because I think I was supposed to do that so far I have Jack presenting or Jack no is that responding or presenting Jack I am presenting next presenting right exactly that's what i had you under week five okay um okay then i'm responding

so so so no no i mean i think wow yeah we're gonna have to work this out because uh two presentations and a response is is heavy why don't we why don't we do this in the in the facebook chat group or three well we'll do this after this session yeah we'll do it after the session because because if not we're going to spend too much time yeah yeah let's just keep going okay All right. So sorry about that. We'll figure this out as soon as we can. So we have a long list of readings to go through. And to start with, what I wanted to make sure we did is, so I actually spoke to Ray Brassier just to get myself a little more information about the historical composition and the development of the CCRU.

as a unit and how it unfolded in time. He actually wrote to me this morning, earlier, and an email detailing some stuff, some corrections to what I said in the first session, and I guess some information is going to be pertinent to us just to think of the historical unfolding. So without further ado, let me just project this very quickly. You guys are seeing the slideshow? Yes. Great, thank you. So the first thing, so the CCRU was formed in 1995 in Warwick when Sadie Planned moved from Birmingham. And by 1996, really, Planned's involvement was reduced and then she left.

They, you know, planned and land broke intellectually and personally, apparently. And this left the CCRU under land's direction. And it was no longer at that point sponsored by the philosophy department of Warwick. At first it was. Now, then between the years 1996 and 1997, the CCRU was officially composed by, well, directed by land. And then Mark Fisher was there, Susanne Livingstone, Anna Greenspan, Robin McKay, Steve Goodman, and Luciano Parisi. Robin left Warwick and the CCRU in 1997 And then the others remained and still made up the core of it Until the early 2000s when Mark Fisher also left And according to Ray, when Mark left around 2003

As a result of growing distance with Lance Views And specifically his politics That was sort of the end of the CCRU as a functioning unit Ray Brassier and Ian Graham were never members of the CCRU although both, Land directed both of their PhD thesis and obviously Brassier's work is being heavily influenced by Land's work. And neither was Vandal Delanda even though he was actually quite influential. And Simon Critchell apparently was never part of it even though he's commented on Land's work and the CCRU here and there. So that's just to clean up the slate. So after 2003 the CCRU ceased to be a kind of physical unit with people involved associated with the university and it migrated progressively into an incoet online production in the blocks predominantly you know the hyperstition

block uh probably and at this point one finds all kinds of online participations by anonymous uh people and also people that we know now like reza mark was still sort of chipping in there and others um but you know at this point because it's no longer really an institutional thing more like collective intellectual project, questions of membership become fussy. So you can actually ask whether Cyclonopedia is a CCRU work properly, or is it merely inspired by the CCRU? I mean, clearly draws from its lore and it uses its concepts and its terminology. But at this point, what is in CCRU, I guess, becomes much more difficult to adjudicate. But this is just to

this lay to correct any any kind of confusions it's a good thing you know people tend to be a little bit they give you divergent stories about this stuff sometimes I know well it can it can please can you mute your your your I can unmute okay cool thank you yeah but yeah so what I was saying is that this warm machines audio which hopefully you all got the link to which I think I'm none was very kind to notice that it had been posted also includes a little bit of background information about the early days so what I wonder when I first want to do is like give a little bit more more more information about the origins

of the project and then move slowly towards the text that we are dealing with today. So in the first communique, we have another sort of genealogy of events that the CCRU sort of traces out as the most important ones that led to this kind of collective production. So, quote, CCRU retro chronically triggers itself from October 1995 using the UK University as its temporary inhabited, Warwick, of course. Its emergence is sequenced and accelerated by a series of singularities, Barker's thresholds, and we'll talk about what that is. So the Virtual Futures Conferences in the spring of 1994, 1995, 1996,

the Orphan Drift Cyber Positive Book from 1995, the Collapse Journal 1995, 1996, the Afrofutures Event from February 1996, the Kale Labs Breakbeat Experimentation Zone, the Vyrotechnics event from 1997, and the Switch Orphan Drift collaboration. I don't think the CCG thing is here, but I suppose that's also part of the, you know, Orphan Drift, like, collab, whenever that took place. Regardless, so already in the years, in the immediate years before 1995, I mean, in 1994 specifically, Sadie Plant and Nick Land had found a particular synergy in kind of a common

repudiation to what they perceived as the postmodern rot of their intellectual culture. And this was a kind of diagnosis that they both shared of a kind of practical and theoretical impasse, which was ultimately the result of a lingering kind of humanism, a pious humanism within the academy and, you know, in political left political practice. And this was simultaneously expressed in a kind of fatalist ambivalence with regards to capitalism on the one hand and relativistic textualist devotion in the side of theory. So I've spoken to you, I spoke in the first session. Remember, I was saying how it was that both of them, you know, rallied against kind of

this kind of cultural studies, hegemonic conception of, you know, philosophy as simply sort of watered down into a kind of negotiation between different sort of like cultural positions and so on. And both plant and land were extremely hostile to this idea. And we'll see exactly what, how they try to like articulate a response to this. One short question. One short question. Yeah. Does anyone know if one can get the hands on PDFs or something of this collapsed journal from 1995 and 1969? I haven't. Oh. You have those?

No, no. I heard a yes there. Who answered? I can. I have them. Yes. You want them in print? You want them in print, not digital versions. You want print. Well, I want anything. So print. Yes. Yeah, the PDFs are all over. Well, maybe I shouldn't say that here. But you can get the PDF. Yeah, I mean, it's very easy to be found. Okay. Okay, great. I mean, I would love to have them. I can't encourage anything, but you can find them online. Great. So if anyone can maybe post links in the chat here in the site or in the Facebook chat, that would be great. I mean I was looking for the cyber positive book which I've seen and I've looked at it but it's no longer easily

found you can buy it for an eBay and so on but it's pretty expensive at this point yeah I saw a copy it was terrible it had like fungi all over it was like hell no I'm not gonna buy that oh that's what it was like when they published it though was that it had fungus on it when they published it It's not a time thing. All right. So, very, so, hopefully you also had a chance to look at cyber positive. Well, not cyber positive, sorry, but the cybernetic culture and swarm machines text. But I want to talk a little bit about cyber positive, which is really their first collaborative work, which is a kind of prelude to the CCRU.

and here is where for the first time you have this uh development of a new kind of temporal model which uh both land and uh and plant called anastrophic as opposed to catastrophic so this is a temporality in which quote one thinks about not the past coming apart but the future coming together and this is basically a way to conceive of how it is that this kind of futural inhuman intelligence pools itself together under the model of what Lant still thinks and calls concentric ways. And we'll get a chance to talk a little bit about this once we start looking more closely at the concepts involved here. But this is an idea that basically builds from what Nick had been already developing

in his own work, of course, which is the idea which is indebted to Deleuze and Guattari's machinic ontology, specifically the one developed in Antioedipus, that capitalism and critique, capitalism as a mode of production and critique as a mode of thinking, constitute this kind of cross-exciting coeval poles of a kind of cosmic historical subject, which basically transforms the Schopenhauerian will and the Freudian death drive into a kind of cosmic subject of history, a thanatropic subject of history. So the idea is that, and we'll talk more about this particular, you know, thanatropism that lingers in the C.E.U.'s project, and which they completely turn into a

whole mythology. It's pretty interesting how they do this. But here's a quote, or one of the quotes that I want to read. It's, rotted by digital contagions, modernity is falling to bits. Lenin, Mussolini and Roosevelt concluded modern humanism by exhausting the possibilities of economic planning. Runaway capitalism has broken through all the social control mechanisms accessing inconceivable alienations. Capital clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming abstract positive feedback, organizing itself. Turbulent finance drifts across the global network. This is a thesis that animates Land's work since time's immemorial at this point, and which, of course, finds itself reiterated in the cybernetic, in the consumption of cybernetic

practice that the CCRU endorses. Now, a first historical point here to note is that it's interesting that the CCRU likewise emerges as a kind of reaction to the perceived negative effects of a post-Heideggerian legacy in the academy and intellectual culture, much like the Cahiers in this regard, right? Which you might remember, Zizek said, or said it concentrated everything that could not be filed under deconstruction at one point, but which we saw also begins with a kind of overt rejection of Sartrean existentialism and phenomenology in the post-war French context, right? What Badiou then calls philosophies of consciousness, which are the hires of Bergson, right?

And here is a quote from Land and Plants of Cyberpositive, which explicitly draws this kind of anti-Heideggerian agenda. To what could we wish to return? Heidegger completed the degeneration of authenticity into stenoidal neurosis. Being died in the Fuhrer bunker, and purity belongs entirely to the cops. The capitalist metropolis is mutating beyond all nostalgia. If the schizoid children of modernity are alienated, it is not as survivors from a pastoral past, but as explorers of an impending post-humanity. So again, you know, try to dissolve this kind of Heideggerian nostalgia for the lost origins and completely eradicate it in this kind of futurist, you know, sublimation.

now what we will see however is that unlike the care of course uh the the ccru pushes this kind of anti-humanist agenda quite a bit further and it diagnoses that even you know those philosophies of the concept as foucault would call them right that even they show a deeper affinity to humanism in their attempts to rehabilitate the dialectics of scientific rationality and revolutionary practice. So even against actually Deleuze and Guattari's appraisal, who, as you know, their machinic ontology nevertheless wants to leave room for emancipatory practice, a kind of emancipatory political practice. And even the Lacanian anti-philosophical anti-humanism

for the CCRU and for land would appear as still over-lating with humanist prejudices. even when they avow like you know the valences of formalization so everything like the logic of the signifier the emphasis on structure that's already too much for them so what they will try to instead unearth is a kind of blind machining process which is only tractable in at a level that underwrites all language discourse and as we will see even structure so even the category of structure and organization and discourse becomes uh you know this humanist uh you know residue

basically so here's a quote from a from a from a making it with death by land in which he explicitly takes this kind of attack on the structuralist legacy of you know uh of of lacania psychoanalysis and its relationship to Freud. And I think this text from, it's called Making It With Death. It's a very, very well-known text, but it really touches upon the kind of break with the Lacanian structuralist conception of psychoanalysis and its embrace of schizoanalysis. It is worth asking firstly, is Freud ever really engaged in Antioedipus? Is it not rather Lacan who had already transformed the jungle wilderness at the heart of psychoanalysis into a structuralist parking lot before proceeding to analyze Guattari for seven years, who programs the supposed anti-Freudianism

of the book? Of course, Oedipus is a peculiarly nauseating Viennese nursery pap, but where is Oedipus in Beyond the Pleasure Principle? A question which could be asked of the majority of Freud's texts. It is Lacan who insists on Oedipalizing the four-dog game, in the general process of oedipalizing desire to its foundations, ripping all the energy, hydraulics, pathology, and shock out of Freud, and substituting lack, the pathos of identity, and Heideggerian pomposity, whilst deepening the role of the phallus and trivializing desire into the cringing aspiration to be loved. There is a neurotic and conformist stratum in Freud, of course, but it floats upon the impersonal flows of desire that erupt out of traumatized nature. Where are the flows in Lacan?

Where would one be less likely to find anything that flows than the gnarled post-Ossurian fetish of the signifier that dominates his text? Deleuze and Guattari's estimation of Lacan as a schizophrenizing tendency in psychoanalysis is the most absurd contention of the work. By 1980, it has ceased to be a joke. That's a very, very violent sort of and strict. So even Deleuze and Guattari, who are, you know, whose schizoanalytical program is overtly positioned against Lacan's structural psychoanalysis, are nevertheless looking at it as a kind of schizophrenic, schizophrenizing tendency. But Len wants to say, no, that's ridiculous. There's nothing there that we want to deal with, basically.

Now, the kind of assault on humanist culture that the CCRU would articulate as a response to all things humanism is, of course, articulated in the name of this thing they call cybernetic culture. And this is both a new mode of thinking and a new mode of agency that is concentrated in the practice of what they call hyperstation. And we're going to talk about this in more detail when we get to this, specifically with Lemurian Time War, where is where the concept is most fleshed out. But cybernetic culture, of course, leads you first to think about, well, how is cybernetics, first of all, to be understood here, right?

So cybernetic culture against humanist culture. Well, what is cybernetics? And in this text, cyber positive, what we see is that cybernetics is not understood in its Winerian sense, which Land and Plan describe as still being modernist inspired, as the signs of communication and control within which positive feedback is stabilized. But rather, the model of cybernetics that land and plant and then the CCRU take over is one in which positive feedback directed processes provide something like a formal model for capital, techno-capitalist runaway.

And this heuristics of self-amplifying techno-capitalist production becomes completely impervious to the dialectics of sociality or progress, which are precisely what guide what the CCRU calls, and Nick Glenn called the human security system. So basically, cyber positivity is a cybernetic model, which takes positive feedback as the self-amplifying diagram of techno capitalist history. And this historicity that attracts this functional self-amplifying diagram, which is just the history of techno-capitalism, is completely intractable and unmitigated.

It's not possible to mitigate it or to inhibit it by any kind of human intervention anymore. It is precisely a kind of runaway process that slips away from the human and takes production and intelligence to an inhuman, post-human scenario. Just a question before we read the long quote. um let's see i i uh i know the distinction between first order and second order cybernetics and i don't know i don't know much about them but as far as my knowledge is concerned that is that second order cybernetics tend to be more epistemologically constructivist whereas

like first order cybernetics is like a kind of naive realist like okay we are really describing processes that are going on and second or it's like okay um it's like oh we need to um it's just a constructed environment it's never a realist environment and i wanted to ask uh what relation this uh cyber positive model of of cybernetics has to these two kinds of cybernetics you know i hadn't thought of it but but my hunch would be and anybody who who has any ideas on this please feel free to jump in um what i would think is that they would think okay our conception is something like a third definition because it's neither and i think maybe this will become a

little bit clearer once we get into the uh lemurian time war where there is a clear distinction between with regards to the concept of hyperstition um how does that they distinguish uh what the what cybernetic culture does in terms of a distinction between sorry between representative realism, textualist idealism, and then hyperstition. So to the extent that the hyperstition coincides with a cybernetic model, it would have to be something that is neither naively directly realist, right, in the first sense of cybernetics that you just mentioned, but which is also not understood as a kind of pure practice or epistemological or ideal creation either. So there would have

to be a kind of third way where cybernetics is something like again hyperstitional practice namely involving the production of virtual potentials which become automated and become real in time or something like that but i actually don't know i mean they they do not uh map their own conception of cybernetics to to the classical sort of theory in any more substantive sense than the one that i just mentioned um so hopefully that'll have to do for now but but but maybe when we get to that part with hyperstition, which really cashes out what this means, right, this will become clearer. In any case, let's take a look at this quote. This is the quote where we get this. Weiner is one of the great modernists, defining cybernetics as the science of communication

and control, a tool for human dominion over nature and history, a defense against the cyber pathology of markets. His propaganda against positive feedback quantizing, sorry, positive feedback quantizing it as amplification within an invariable metric has been highly influential, establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future. There is no space in such a theory for anything truly cyber positive, subtle, or intelligent beyond the objectivity required for human comprehension. The modern human security system might even have appeared within Winner's subliminal insight that everything cyber positive is an enemy of mankind evolving out of work on weaponry guidance systems his way was an attempt his was an attempt sorry to enslave cybernetics

to a general defense technology against alien invasion cybernetics was itself kept under control under a control that was not itself cybernetics it is as if his thinking were guided by a blind tropism of evasion away from another deeper runaway process from a techniques losing control and a communication with the outside of man and that's a that's a really uh you know interesting way to to frame this kind of like heretical version of of cyber positivity that that they want to say it's kind of like once again you know remember when when when somebody like badu came over and said, okay, you're subordinating science to the logic of the signifier. Similarly, here

comes, you know, Landon says, well, here you're subordinating cybernetics to this kind of a stabilization homeostatic humanist agenda, which restrains its truly nihilistic and inhuman potentials, right? So this is the final quote that I want to give from this first foundational text, which is, in the final phase of human history, markets and techniques cross into interactive runaway, triggering chaos culture as a rapid response unit and converging on designer drugs with increasing speed and sophistication, sampling, remixing, anonymous and inhuman sound, woman become cyborg and taken into insanity, whiteware splices with techno. I mean, that's, that's so like typical of this period, right? Like this stuff. Now that the first text that the

cybernetic culture research unit produced was called cybernetic culture. And this was actually published in 1996. And it's very interesting because what it does is it, at its core, proposes a periodization that builds from Deleuze and Guattari's own extension of Foucault's distinction between disciplinary societies or societies of disciplinary power and societies of control, which Deleuze was very fond of that distinction. And it sort of formalizes this and includes it or incorporates it within a cybernetic framework or genealogy. Also drawn from a wide variety of registers, right? Like Leotard's Libidinal Economy, the scatological cyberpunk

fiction, specifically the work of Ian MacDonald, and obviously Deleuze and Guattari's Schizoanalysis. So here is the periodization which they trace in this text. So phase one is what they named the sovereign mode, which is identified mechanistically or cybernetically with the structure of clocks and levers. Now, they do not actually explain why it is that each of these structures sort of correspond to the specific mode of power or control or whatever. Well, not control, but power. But we can sort of try to flesh it out as we go along. So, okay, just let me go through this like as quickly phase two is what they call the disciplinary mode which

they associate with thermodynamic machines at phase three and this is really where things started getting a little interesting is what you have control mode or what would correspond to societies of control and this corresponds historically to the emergence of typewriters computers and automated industrial technology and what the CCRU writes here is that cybernetics emerges at a kind of tail end of this third phase, but it is first dominated precisely by this kind of Wienerian conception of negative feedback as a kind of process which is still about regulation or homeostasis. And what happens precisely in the transition between phase three and phase four

is this transition in the conception of cybernetics from a negative feedback control model to a positive feedback runaway model. So here's the quote. Cybernetics emerges at the end of history, terminal of phase three, dedicated to the avoidance of excessive inflow, excitement, the reduction in the machine of the effects of movements from towards the outside. A tool in man's age-old quest to avoid being dragged away by the currents. Feedback stayed negative, And the whole earth was a dynamic, self-regulating, homeostatic system. And here's a little jab that they throw at Lacan. Again, the real isn't impossible.

It is just increasingly artificial. You need a synthesis. And for that, you've got a synthesizer. Not the old kind, the musical instrument, but something to channel your group through. A thought synthesizer, functioning to make thought travel. So this, of course, synthetic production of thinking is what occurs precisely as positive feedback machines or positive feedback, you know, cybernetics cross excites capitalism and industrial technology so that the production of artificial intelligence finally dislodges itself from human sapiens, from organic human sapiens. and, you know, again, takes off in this kind of escalating runaway process.

That's the core thesis here. So what you get is in this genealogy, a progressive breaking down of closed systems by introducing ever more dynamic, let's say, structures or functional dynamics, right, from something that is completely circular and closed and that exerts a kind of direct input to something that's more diluted in time that already exhibits sort of adaptive capabilities to a kind of completely automated self-reinforcing process, which is, of course, at the very tail end, a positive feedback machine that simply amplifies itself. It's a kind of self-amplifying diagram, if you will. And he actually, Land Ellsworth calls capital, techno-capitalism, precisely as that,

self-amplifying or self-reinforcing cybernetics, positive feedback cybernetics. Here's the cybernetic culture appears at phase four as a faceless counter invasion from outside human history, flipping cybernetics out beyond the organism and reprocessing the other three phases as thresholds in the becoming of synthetic intelligence. And again, the real isn't impossible, it's just increasingly artificial.

So, again, there's this perpetual sort of reminder that, or separation between any kind of, for, I think one of the things that the CCRU tries to thematize or tries to avoid at all costs is this kind of rhetoric that is common to Lacan and as much as to Heidegger, which is the idea of the real as something that is somehow, you know, again, against representation, outside of knowledge, outside of, you know, something that's mystical in the impossible and so on but rather than simply saying oh it's this kind of mystical otherness with a capital o what they want to say is no it's perfectly intelligible in the sense of something that is uh subject to synthetic production sure it is not uh it's not

an epistemic category the real is not something for philosophers or for humans to know about or to narrativize or anything like that. But nevertheless, it is perfectly understanding. The real is something that's subject to intervention, to practice, right? Which is why you can see there at the end of the day, there's this kind of practice's conception of cybernetic culture. It's something you do, which precisely is a kind of practice that resists any kind of humanist reinterpretation or reincorporation into the order of sense or hermeneutic retrieval. um the other text that that is inaugural the second text that we read which is war machines which comes with this little audio like mix and so on is it's almost reads like a companion piece

to lance meltdown if you've ever read that which is of course lance probably most famous text and here you get a kind of unique case where sadie plant's own sort of work uh comes very much into the fore, specifically her engagement with situationism. I mean, those of you who know City Plan's work might know that, you know, one of her big projects was to try to interpret the situationist phenomenon or movement in the wake of postmodernity. In fact, her first book, I think, was precisely a study of this. And I've only read parts of it. But what she tries to do with with the CCRU in this text is how it is that they can sort of read situationism apart from

the kind of dialectical attempt to read it back into a humanist register. So this text has this very strange moment or attempt to read situation as politics as a kind of anti-politics precisely, Not as a political movement, you know, which is woven into an agenda, an organization, you know, anything like that, but as a kind of proto-inhuman cybernetic practice in the social field. And it's, of course, this is one of the things that would first fall out from after Planned would leave and Len takes over. there would be nothing left of this kind of attempt to reconcile situation as with with

with progressive sort of uh emancipatory revolutionary action or cybernetic practice but here's a relevant quote um the situation is of course they have neither history nor its end neither memory nor apocalypse neither accidents nor plans nor lines nor points no infinite loops no forward plans and no spontaneous combustion but careful engineering's out of sight out of mind imperceptible mutations waiting in the wings just off stage the politicians called them revolutionaries make them persons with faces and names coded these meshes of contagious matters into acceptable human forms but they were always tactical machines natives of the future hacking into the past trading places swapping codes endless replications of micro situations

engineered without sources or ends flocks are always flying in the faces highest of activity behind the screens. And so in separating cybernetic practice and cybernetic culture from politics, they also very clearly separate themselves from philosophy. And within this, including the order of the signifier, as much as any kind of political goal or any kind of teleology. And here's the relevant quote. Debt white metaphysics keeps asking the wrong question. What does it mean? Well, the machines get on with working. Linguistic integrity is a thing of the past and vernacular cybernetics signifies nothing. Politics is a spectacular failure.

And the spectacle is all that's keeping politics alive. The spectacle here, of course, in its traditional sort of situations. Things aren't happening in the field of vision, but are flowing on a blind, mute, de-territorialized socius. The impersonal is apolitical. No community, no dialectics, no plans for an alternative state. So that's pretty much as clean as you can get, right? And in this text, they, I mean, you know, obviously the CCRU, one of their favorite it thinks to do is to to write these kind of crazy genealogies which are always sort of spirals into the inhuman future that is already within us but which is also you know sort of escalating as we

as we speak and as we do and this one is like i'm not going to go through this because it would take too long but you know it basically converges in 1996 as the kind of emergence of course this is when the text is written, uh, as the Babylonian age in which humanity kind of dissolves in techno capitalist singularity or something like that. And here they describe, you know, how jungle is this kind of like, you know, alien practice that is precisely, um, you know, a kind of anti-dialectical, not even artistic form, I would say at this point, but a kind of cybernetic practice that's completely, uh, divorced from anything on there's like a lot of comments in the chat i just want to make sure that i'm not uh they're mostly links to the oh yes but i have

a question about the relation um you just said okay the ccru divorced themselves from philosophy altogether and because they thought okay philosophy has somehow in itself uh this humanist uh yeah presupposition yeah and as far as i understood it and my question then is if uh they if they think okay uh delus and gotari themselves did not go far enough and uh do they think that the listen gotari are themselves still philosophers and yeah yes that's that's maybe my question because we know this okay in delus and gotari you have capital is always d

and re-territorialization and the CCIU strips all re-territorialization away and yeah how these points relate to one another that's actually no that's a really good question uh well you might know this but so Land really likes and he's the one he's the one person that loves Antioedipus and doesn't like uh you know a thousand plateaus whereas normally people generally crap on Antioedipus they they think it's the worst book that that they listen you know they themselves they don't like it too much but so he thinks that when you know uh in anti-edipus de los and guattari described this kind of uh you know capital as this kind of cosmic subject bloating the account of the death breath precisely that's that was their most lucid anti-humanist insight

and then when they try to like sort of adjudicate or mitigate the the account of de-territorialization uh in in a thousand plateaus to to back to the interest of social emancipatory agency so you know you shouldn't de-territorialize too quickly uh so on so forth that's for for for land that was for land uh a clear relapse so a clear lingering relapse so what what what um what the CCRU tries to do and land before, before them was try to sort of like liquidate or pulverize this residual vitalism that lingered in the core of Deleuze and Guattari's machinic

ontology. And in fact, this is the interesting thing. They wouldn't even call it an ontology anymore. Now, you know, so, so, so there's this kind of now sharp separation between philosophy and cybernetics here or cybernetic culture or whatever you want to call it because one of the things that we're going to see is that once they start building a whole mythology around it a whole hyperstitional lore one of the things is that philosophy emerges as a side product at least in its platonic dialectical form emerges as the history of philosophy is just a side product of the Atlantean tradition, right? Of the architectonic order of the eschaton. So, so, so yeah. So it's a kind of radical anti-philosophy, right?

But of course you have to, you know, they still so much of Deleuze and Guattari's quote unquote intensive, you know, ontology of intensive multiplicity, which is Deleuze 101 remains at this, at the core of this, that it's almost like you want to have your cake you need it again you know time and time again again anti-philosophy is within the genre of philosophy at the end even if the ccru is also you know crossbred with like this aberrant kind of fiction and everything else that we know so we'll get to this will become crystallized so a very quick quote here um the past is past Left behind in a museum case of Oedipal mummies belching dust and warnings of revolutionary heritage, the eternally deferred eschatologies of the left are consigned to the white trash can of the future and leave a present tense with synthetic possibilities.

Between the vertical of retrospective sedimentation and the horizontal of never coming contradictory crises, Jungle finds a diagonal that frees the ossified relics of the dialectic. So, give me one second. I think there's a couple more comments, just making sure that there's nothing here. Swarm Machines wasn't on the list at all. Okay. Yes, War Machine wasn't on the list. I sent an email though this week with the links to this saying that you should take a look. Okay, okay. Then I overlooked that. Yeah. Here's the interesting thing. So now we're getting into the text. So the communique

one and two, which are kind of definitional pieces, as you know, the collected writings edition has these different sort of sections, which are really, really well organized, I think, actually. And here is where the CCRU overtly engages in a series of definitions. And cybernetic culture is defined completely, like imminently here. And this is the way they define it. So cybernetic culture is defined imminently as the mode of propagation characterizing flat productive collectivities. Such flatness whose intensive quanta are CCR units, haha, right, and or barkers involves one, coincidence of product and process, two, counter chronic arrival from machinic

virtuality, and three, absolute impersonality, ahistoricity, and extraterritoriality. Now these three characterizations are crucial, but they won't make sense until we get a little further down. The first thing is, of course, what is this Barker business? And as you know, this has to do with the elaboration of a kind of weird sort of heretical formalism, which is basically what Barker calls tech systems, right? And tech systems are, on the one hand, a form of writing a particular it's a kind of rewriting of Deleuze and Guattari's and Deleuze's intensive ontology of intensive multiplicity into a kind of what they call sigonovism which is basically like a whole

reinterpretation of the decimal system in terms of what they call like what's it called nine twinnings so two two numbers that add up to nine I mean we don't have to worry of that about that now because that comes later when we start we start talking about barker but what you need to remember is that at this point is that barker of course barker units or the work of daniel barker is the kind of fictional hyperstitional uh agent who formalizes the science or not the science but the kind of quote-unquote cybernetic model for this kind of uh yeah for for this kind of like virtual creation that is hyperstition and cybernetic cultural practice. So coincidence

of product and process, that's just the idea of a flat ontology that does not admit of a distinction between mind and body or ideal and material. It's a kind of completely flat ontology in which there is, which abides to the ideal of ontological univocity, right? They will call it a hyper materialism later right two it's counter chronic arrival for machining virtuality counter chronic meaning that it again it serves to to think not of uh it serves to think about about the convergence of the future this kind of like arrival from the future into the past which is not simply the chronological time that uh you phenomenologically experience as the passage from the present into

the future and the receding of the present into the past right of course this all has to do with how it is that there's a kind of fissure into our conceptions of temporality and that will become the core of this entire mythology and three absolute impersonality a historicity and extraterritoriality so that's clear enough uh i would say a flat ontology a rupture with chronological time and a complete ahistorical and impersonal inhuman register. And here in this is where you see finally what what I was telling you before since week one where they very clearly demarcate their own practice as a rejection to the kind of culture of cultural studies and academic leftism

that had become dominant. So this quote is really condensing of a kind it's almost like a manifesto, an annoyed manifesto. Many members of the CCRU had fled cultural studies disgusted by its authoritarian prejudices, its love of ideology, and pompous desire to represent the other or speak on behalf of the oppressed. To us, it never seemed that the real articulacy of the left academic elites was in any way superior to the modes of popular cultural expression, which were either art or treated as raw material to be probed for a true ideological meaning by white middle-class intellectuals. CCRU has tried to connect and cross-intensify with peripheral cultural processes. Darkside digital audio, cyberpunk, neo-Lemurian sorcery, numbo jumbo,

Afrofuturism, Indo-futurism, Sino-futurism. It seeks to think, theorize, and produce with rather than about or even worse for them. We think everything interesting happens on the periphery outside the standard modes of developed existence. CCRU engages with peripheral cultures, not because they are downtrodden or oppressed, but because they include the most intense tendencies to social flatness, swarming, populating the future and contagious positive innovation, hatching the decisive stimuli for the systematic mutation of global cybernetic culture right and i think that um everything that comes out of both the kia and the ccru which we're going to be seeing in the

weeks to come if there's like one common ground that they both share and what makes it interesting to read them together is this kind of just common commonly shared just exhaustion and deploration of everything that had become absorbed under the banner of like cultural studies or you know just like let's say mainstream left liberal leftist politics or anything like that even in its most sort of like quote-unquote uh sanitized form right or especially in those forms and here is where they uh traced their a list of influences that that of course include much of the stuff we have already been talking about, but let's just go through these very quickly. So Deleuze and Guattari's two volume, two capitalism and schizophrenia volumes with their virtual

materialism, assault on the privilege of representation, anti-evolutionism, and implacable hostility to the state. Fernand Braudel's rigorous differentiation and even opposition between capitalism and the market economy with pro-market anti-capitalism functioning as a guiding slogan. William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy which spreads voodoo into the digital economy demonstrating with the cyberspace matrix how a fictional concept makes itself real obviously this is the very definition of hyperstition Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis novels for their tentacled aliens gene traffic and decoded sex Lynn Margolis's bacterial microbiology for outlining the world of destratified life

H.P. Lovecraft's gothic obsessions with time anomaly, sacred horror of teeming, bubbling, foaming multiplicities. We're currently enthralled by the work of Jacques Vallée and its extraordinarily sophisticated path to hyperstition through the UFO phenomena. CCRU is working on a cyber-gadic unonfiction, to steal a term from Steve Beard, which interconnects the history of computing and AI research with UFO phenomena, alien abduction, false memory and cover-ups, secret societies, and esoteric religion, among other things.

And of course, this kind of conspiratorial side to it, this kind of like attempt to overtly appropriate, you know, conspiracy theoretical fiction or writing into a hyperstitional practice that weaponizes fiction by crossbreeding it with both philosophy and, you know, this kind of like massive cyber gothic. Lore is what high precision is going to be all about and what's going to draw the particular CCRU Mode of production a short question. Can you go back to the Yes, yes, I was wondering about

Here for finance, Pugel rigorous differentiation and even opposition between capitalism and the market economy economy, pro-market anti-capitalism. I've heard the name Phanon Baudret before, I haven't read anything of him. I know that DeLanda's Markets and Anti-Markets is from 1996 and that maybe there this could be influential too, but this was quite disorienting because we always hear from the CCIU that okay, pro-capitalism or pro-capital and pro-positive cybernet, it's basically uh it's not a normative stance towards it but uh this sounds pretty okay what uh how does that fit in here anti-capitalist like so so so what i would so the way i think of it is

at this stage so now land wouldn't make that opposition so once we read some of the stuff like from the accelerationist canon that lands more recent tax this distinction between market and capitalism sort of becomes, dissolves. At this stage, however, there is still the idea that market in the sense of an abstract diagram that's this kind of self-amplifying dynamics can be subtracted from capitalism, understood still as a mode of production within human history, which is, for example, dominated under the form of wage labor, right? Which consists, of course, paradigmatically industrial technology that takes its cue from the Industrial Revolution, blah, blah, blah.

So the idea is that here, like Bradel, insofar as market is a kind of just abstraction of value and of production, it can be subtracted from the specific way in which it's actualizing human history under the capitalist mode of production. So what I suppose the CCRU is flirting with at this point is the idea of these self-amplifying dynamics, techno-capital dynamics or techno-industrial dynamics, becoming dislodged from the dynamics of wage, labor, and capital proper. Now, I don't think Land will continue thinking this for very long after. He certainly doesn't think so anymore.

Can I make a comment here too? I think it might be machinic desire. I can't remember exactly which essay, but Land makes the comment that the only capitalism that has ever been critiqued is a sort of a bastard, like primitive capitalism that isn't necessarily when they speak of capital and capitalism in this sort of Delusian imminent sense. right they're not talking about the same thing so um they definitely are making a distinction between like a historical capitalism and then an accelerationist ethos of capital right and i think that you especially see this in early ccru stuff before you know land sort of evolution over time

where he's there's much more of this distinction between historical capitalism the in the sort of practice of capitalist institutions. There's a big shift there. Right. Or rather, the distinction would be historical capitalism in the sense of its concrete modes or forms of instantiation in human history, as we know it, and then the abstract diagram of capitalism as our self-reinforcing mechanism, which could be, in theory, subtracted or abstracted from its concrete instantiations. And what you're saying is completely right. What Lange wants to do is to say it would be a mistake to confuse the diagram, the cybernetic diagram, as it were, with the thing itself.

Because capitalism in itself is not equivalent to anything, you know, to any human formation or event. It coincides with it in history, of course. It emerges within human history and so on. But just like capital sheds off from its abstract notion of value, attachment to any particular commodity, so eventually the production process of capitalism can dispense from human labor altogether. can dispense and that this is precisely what occurs with uh with the process of automation and not just automation in the sense of industrial technology but the automation of intelligence the

self-production of intelligence uh so that is exactly what what he thinks is the most promising or a radical contention from anti-edipus from chapter four from anti-edipus uh which they would which Deleuze and Guattari would later sort of turn their backs on. But after this, so yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And thank you to draw attention to that. Let's see. Daniel, one more question? Yeah, absolutely. Could you, I didn't see it in the text we read this week, but what is their relation to mathematics then? because mathematics seems to be equally a proto-inhuman practice.

Right. So that's a good question. Now, at different points during the CCRU, what they will say is that they will oppose, let's say, standard mathematics or institutionalized mathematics, i.e. the mathematics that you will learn in the academy, from these kind of heretical forms of quote-unquote numeracies or formal paradigms. So a good example here is cybernetics, right? Like we already saw, for example, how they try to, they think that cybernetics, of course, is the science of excitement, of intensity, of circuitries, of pure functional dynamics, heuristics deprived from any kind of subjective overtones or humanist overtones. But in practice,

in its institutional, you know, envelopment, it's still sort of, you know, regulated under a homeostatic paradigm that privileges negative feedback as opposed to positive. Similarly, they think that basically science as a whole and mathematics as a whole within academic cohorts is always sort of stabilized or conservative, or it harbors a conservative element to it. So this is why they progressively look toward different forms of occultist, non-standard numeracies, they call them, right? So everything from like the Barker tick systems to the Kabbalah to you name it, right? All these different weird, completely off the charts, non-standard forms of formalization.

Because one of the things that they want to do is they want to not only escape the clutches of philosophy and politics, as we have already seen, but also scientific interpretation or scientific institutionalization. Those are fairly impoverished mathematical ideas. I agree and one of the things I think that actually today after the CCRU sort of falls apart land now maybe with a little bit less uh eccentricity sort of has is now looking rather at game theory for example is looking within the resources of physics to explain his account of convergent waves uh he's obviously looking at the bitcoin technology more closely and so on and so

forth and he actually looks at contemporary philosophy of science and so on like you know when he his work on on time is mediated by you know uh this very very important uh by paleson's work on poncaire and einstein so what i think that the the this stage in the ccru's dependence on these kind of non-standard numeracies and and modes of formalization is uh goes away progressively right and and and he sort of becomes a little bit more sensitive to the resources of actual mathematics and sciences specifically game theory um and we'll see actually some of that when we when we read like the stuff to come okay now i keep calling this

mythological practice because that's really what it is we'll talk a little bit about this but here is the first definition of what they name digital hyperstition and this is really at the core the core of cybernetic cultural practice digital hyperstition is always wide sorry it's already widespread hiding within popular numerical cultures calendars currency systems sorcerers numbo jumbo etc and here's this is actually a very relevant quote to what we were just talking It uses number systems for transcultural communication and cosmic exploration, exploiting their intrinsic tendency to explode centralized, unified, and logically overcoded master narratives and reality models to generate sorcerous coincidences and draw cosmic maps.

So by logically over-coded master narratives and reality models, they would understand not only philosophical metanarratives or political metanarratives, but I presume also scientific institutionalized forms of formalization or scientific practice that sort of shed off or bar out any kind of possibility for hyperstitial practice. But again, this is all very laxly defined. And here we get finally the definition of hyperstition, as we've already read. It's a process or a practice whereby, quote unquote, fictions make themselves real. In the sense that hyperstition constructs these virtual potentials that become progressively

actualized in history. So it's kind of like an engine for the creation of virtual agents or virtual potentials. Now, just shortly, can we maybe shortly draw out, it seems that the Deleuzean opposition between virtual and actual seems to be very important here. Yes, it is. Can we maybe summarize what this opposition comes down to? Yes. So this is probably the most important aspect of the Deleuze-Guatturian ontology and Deleuze's ontology already since difference or repetition that becomes recoded in this register. So I'm sure those of you who are even vaguely familiar with Deleuze know that the central duality as a word that animates his ontology is that between the virtual and the actual.

The virtual is the domain of what he calls pure intensity or difference in itself. It's a domain of pre-individual singularities or what is also called attractors, which is formalized in mathematics and within, you know, kind of throughout different models, but predominantly through the differential calculus and through post-Euclidean geometries as a kind of face space populated with attractors in which there are these pure differential potentials. that become actualized in the sense of that they have specific trajectories or become or acquire specific expressions that are another way of speaking about how it is that something completely virtual or immaterial become a spatiotemporally individuated.

In other words, how it is that these singularities, which merely capture again potentials, material potentials in an abstract system, in a phase space, become concretely incarnate in space and time. So actualization is the process whereby, this is how Deleuze describes it originally in Difference and Repetition, this kind of domain of virtual multiplicity, which is kind of immaterial, it's just a domain of pure multiplicity, of pure intensities, of pure differences, become concretely individuated or concretized in discrete bodies and discrete individual bodies in space and time. So the virtual is, again, a pre-individual reservoir of potentials that become concretized through a particular agency.

And the agency that Deleuze identifies as the carrier of individuation or actualization is what he called a larval subject. But this was still a very biocentric model in difference in repetition. Later in Deleuze and Guattarese's machinic ontology, hold on, there's a question here. Okay, this is, I think, something related to the... Okay, so in the Los and Guatturis' ontology that they develop in Antioedipus and A Thousand Plateaus and also in What is Philosophy, this whole idea that there is this larval subject which acts by virtue, which is a kind of like a gimped transcendental Kantian subject that does not, that synthesizes matter or the virtual domain of intensity, not by subsuming aesthetic,

the sensory manifold of the aesthetic under a concept, but rather directly synthesizes the aesthetic manifold. That's what Deleuze proposes in difference in repetition. That goes away. That was still too overlaid with a kind of biocentric vitalism. So what you get in Deleuze and Guattari's machinic ontology is a kind of self-synthesizing plane of imminence where you have this thing they call the body without organs or the plane of pure intensity or difference, which is the virtual. And this becomes a self-catalyzed, self-catalytic space of actualization. In other words, the field, the plane of imminence or the body without organs, as they call it, synthesizes itself without the

need of a supplementary agency or subject that carries out aesthetic contractions. But what the CCRU tries to do is try to say that it is possible to construct these immaterial virtual entities or subjects, right? Namely, you know, what in the lore that they develop in their mythology are the demons and the agents of the AOE, the institutions that, you know, again, the XSIS program the architectonic order of the eschaton lemurian culture the enma you name it all these uh characters or these uh you know creatures which are of course insofar as they are not

actualized in space and time like my energy drink is they remain fictions they are virtual in this pure sense in which like for example uh you know a capital is virtual in the sense that you know it doesn't need to correspond to a bill or a coin. It's a purely immaterial sort of like quantity that nevertheless has real effects on the world. And the whole point is hyperstitional practice produces these fictions as these virtual potentials, which can be weaponized and used in order to create these rifts, this historical effects or these rifts in history. So we'll actually get to see how there is this kind of strange loop in hyperstition because hyperstition produces the conditions for its own intelligibility as a hyperstitional practice.

It's a weird sort of loop whereby you create a series of fictions within which the very practice of hyperstition is inscribed as a kind of subversive practice within history. So hyperstition is an instance, is required in order to narrativize, to make sense of what hyperstition does. It builds the conditions for its own historicization. And we'll see how this happens specifically when we get to Lemurian time one. Okay, thanks. That was incredibly helpful. Hopefully, I mean, the ontology bits are obviously very jargony and wonky.

and we would get we would need to get deeper into the delizion guachari ontology but and we can do that if we need to in more detail um or i can give you references for further reading if you need that but but what i wanted to say is that here's another sort of like a general diagnosis right which is that the ccru is really what it's doing is that it's taken to a kind of limit a gesture that becomes common in anti-humanist philosophy, which is to dislodge subjectivity from the human psyche and even from the organic and to bloat it into an impersonal motor of history. And this is something that already characterizes Land's own philosophical reading

of history, reading of philosophical history, sorry. So the genealogy that sprawls out of Schopenhauer, and, you know, which of course, you know, the Schopenhauerian will is this kind of emblem of an impersonal, unconscious force or causal, you know, efficacy that subtends deliberative cognition, Kantian rationality, or practical rationality. Similarly, Freud's death drive, right, which is, of course, this kind of model of how it is that the organic reroute is is kind of a that organic life and everything that you know the organism sort of thinks in its preservative dimension is nothing but a covertly uh encoded roundabout way in which the inorganic

sort of in which the organic tries to return to the inorganic right that that subtends any kind of survivalist instinct lands in human AI, which assembles itself from the future, right? It's also this kind of cosmic motor of history, but tiles solar fanatropism in which the sun becomes this cosmic subject and so on and so forth. But what, so what the CCRU does is it does this, it repeats this gesture, but of like bloating the subject from this human centric level into a kind of cosmic subject, but rather than just identifying this one great cosmic subject, it constructs an entire mythology of such subjects, right? And these are embedded in this grandiose narrative,

which is replete with agencies and which results in this writing that is unclassifiable, really. It's, again, theory fiction is the best we can do, I suppose. But it's no longer just like capital, the cosmic subject of history, or death is the cosmic subject of history. There are all these competing agencies, and there's an actual struggle or narrative to be woven. Now, Justin Morrison's letter, and I will stop in very short notice for the presentation today. Actually, this is a good place to stop, I think, for the presentation, because it's a good middle point and I've been talking for quite some time. Yeah, just a second, let me just turn on my screen and I'll be ready in a sec.

Perfect. How do I turn on the screen? Yeah, I suppose you can see my screen. Yes. Yeah, it's just the first picture to start. So yeah, you can still see the presentation, can you? Yes. So, yeah, to begin with, while listening to Daniel, I realized that I understood fiction

completely wrong, and I understood hyperstition completely wrong, but I suppose what might been interesting is to maybe misread this Cesareo archive. So I start with the high precision and as we have spoke about, so Cesareo define it as fiction that makes itself real. And so I kind of realize that roughly this text was written 20 years ago, but also there is this weird sense reading Caesareau texts is it's like although I to be honest I don't really

understand all the philosophical concepts behind this, there is this feeling of coming home and this is why I spent some time wondering why it it feels familiar, and then I realized that we are, in our reality, regularly encounter this heterogeneous combination of fictions which make themselves real. And so I tried to look at those fictions and kind of tried to maybe come back to find again again these political implications in CSRU which they themselves prefer not to

discuss. And so one of the fictions is that which makes itself real is the fiction of terrorism and I look at this in a really specific example of Russian politics and so I would like to start with like pretty far pretty as far as CCRU is actually so I start with the first Chechnya war and and it's it's 90s and there were like two wars in Chechnya and during which the civilians were mainly profiled as terrorists.

And so like in 1995, these texts were thrown down from like in one of the places in Chechnya, they were thrown down from a helicopter. I will now read this out loud. Chisni residents. It's my translation, so it might not be perfect. The whole Chisni is watching you. How come the gang, preparing for nothing other than your destruction, appeared in your village without your consent? One shoot from Chisni will cause a fire towards the whole village. Do you remember how many troubles were brought by a Zanit weapon in front of a hospital?

Tens of innocent people died while the bandits who shot the plane left. You have to immediately knock the bandits out of Shali. If the worst happens, great troubles await the residence of Shali. There is little time left. Temporary Council of the Chechen Republic. So what's interesting, why I show this text is it produces, like this very text produces an alternative reality in which people who live in this place are labeled as terrorists. and also it manipulates in a very hyperstitial manner, as I understand. It manipulates time,

like as I understood from the Lemurian Time War, although they describe this time as a spiral, I understand it more as a kind of the matter is a very like manipulatable matter. And so in a similar manner, this time as manipulatable matter appears in here because they basically say this time is made faster and it's kind of squashed.

So, and it is also important to say that this whole situation of profiling people with terrorists, as terrorists, it never went away. and I'm not seeing the text, the messenger. So it never went away and it still left traces. And another theoretical example is, another theoretical framework is kind of important here, is the framework of set the colonialism, which is really useful for understanding Russian colonialism.

And I think that hyperstition in the way in creating this terrorist subject operates on both levels. So like as I've shown, it operates on the level of war, but it also operates on the level of the state and the way it creates a terrorist community. And also it not only creates it but by torturing people it kind of makes this fiction real so

the fiction becomes real through tortures and trials and thus leaves these very marks in the history and also transforms time. Time is transformed in a similar manner as it is, and yeah now you see this description of the network case and time is transformed in a similar, is transformed with violence in a similar manner as Octavia Butler describes it but not in Xenogenesis, but I suppose in Kindred, because in Kindred their protagonist travels through

time when unbearable violence happens to her and thus this time becomes a spiral and she travels from past, like the time that is past for her to the time that is present for her. And so that's basically the violence creates this spiral. And also in the Lemurian time war, this very spiral appears. I suppose I speak a bit too fast and I will be really happy to answer the question.

But also I think that hyperstition can be both thought as the practice of those of power and the practice that can come from below. And also it is interesting that as far as I have understood in the Caesarean text, they speak of hyperstition as magic. And there is another example of this person. This is Shaman from Yakutsk. What he basically says is he said that he started walking from Yakutsk all the way to Kremlin

to abolish Putin. But he does this and at some point people started to join him and to kind of participate in this process. So, but he basically this, his very idea to assign himself as a shaman is, it is fully fictional, but slowly his fiction of kind of creating, of going to war and creating this community of warriors around himself was,

slowly making itself real. It is a really weird thing to observe along the news cycle, I would be honest. But his vision of this future of him being a warrior, surrounded by other whereas it is slowly starting to populate the present. And for instance, he got to prison and people came out to protest for him to get out of prison and slowly that in one of the cities of Russia

it slowly turned into a really massive protest the process and thus his fiction of being a shaman was slowly, I suppose, making itself real. Yeah, I've been really sure, but I would be really happy to answer the questions if understand how to open this again. Yeah, so yeah, Alexei. Free, yeah, I... Are you okay? I think... Yeah, I was looking at the questions, yeah.

Okay, so I didn't see that somebody asked anything. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me say a couple of things that pertain to what you just described. So you're absolutely right that, you know, so hyperstition is something that obviously does not just begin to occur when you have something like digital culture, right? It's something that to the extent that fictions make themselves real, I mean, money is the paradigm case. I mean, capital, right? What is it? It's a, you know, abstract thing that nevertheless has real effects. It's a fictional entity that you invent money, blah, blah, blah. And it nevertheless has real effects. And you can, people have tried to tap the concept of hyperstition back to things like fake news, memes, all kinds of stuff, right?

And one thing that is clear is that hyperstition can be used by both or is used by both the conservative powers that be on the one hand and also those that, you know, the Lemurian ones, the suburbian ones. So obviously the AOE has its very own practice of hyperstition, right? The one God universe, right? And so on and so forth. All its mechanisms of control are based on a particular kind of hyperstitional practice. So hyperstition is not by default subversive. And that's an interesting thing because what you can say is that, let's say if Marx gives the mechanisms for something like ideological critique and then Foucault gives us the means

for something like a critique of biopower then hyperstition can be used I suppose as a lever also for something like a critique of how to call it not techno power but something like I mean, I don't know the term, but the way in which it's not necessarily bodies that become, you know, sort of redistributed and so on and so forth, but these virtual potentials precisely, how it is that virtual agencies can have real effects, as it were, or become weaponized in a particular social space for a specific purpose. Now, I gather that insofar as the CCRU does not

conceive of its own hyperstitional practice and Lemurian time sorcery is not a political practice in any way, it would be not political in any traditional sense. But the conservative AOE appropriation of this, the Atlantean appropriation of this is where you have political sort of a political use or something like that. Who's responding? Alexei is responding. Alexei. Okay, can you jump in? Yeah. So for me what I thought is I could find the such explanation of

hyperstition is that example with shaman is that it really has the parallel to that monarch paranoia and especially in that sense that Russian, this hyperstition has kind of tendency or sentiment towards teleological aspiration. So maybe a little bit more purpose rather than cause. and for example with Chechnya war that's how the reality which is like a magic war it becomes pretty much like a regular war like this magic here is devoid of its supernatural condition and then, okay. Yeah? Yeah, I kind of wanted you to elaborate a bit more

about the magic around it. Just, yeah, I just didn't really understand yet. I don't know what they can elaborate more. There's one thing though. The magic, there's a distinction between magic and sorcery. There's Atlantean white magic. So magic on the side of the AoE and then sorcery on the side of Lemuria. So magic is the sanitized version, the political conservative version, and then there's sorcery, which is the cool metal version, right?

The one for the cool. I wanted to also kind of pose the question about hyperstition and how it overlaps with performativity, especially if we talk about like with these cases, how the body, so to To me, it overlaps with this new material. While hyperstition is about this, yeah, it overlaps pretty much with performativity for me. And while performativity lacks a little bit this time dimension, but it also deconstructs

the object subject binary and subject also, or object here also, apprains this performance element. And yeah, I wanted to hear your opinions about this. I had a, I mean mine or Sasha's? We have just got, we kind of started discussing it. This, I would also be interested what Daniel would say. Because like, I kind of think that with this, the difference between hyperstition and performativity, it lies in this, like the hyperstition as we have noticed

is more interested in magic and in all of those. all of those. It is much more speculative, I would say, but yeah, I kind of feel that this is the main difference, I suppose, Daniel. I mean, that's a good question about performativity insofar as, I mean, obviously, hyperstition has a performative dimension or effect or it is performatively enacted because it's a practice. Because performativity also produces this kind of discourse as practice what it names. Does it echo hyperstition? Yeah I mean it does it definitely

does. What I'm trying to think is well so is hyperstition a subset of performative practices in this regard um i think it would be right it would be a peculiar subset of perform of practices of performativity that um hold on eric said something but isn't performativity still in the symbolic dimension where it's hyperstition well that's that's exactly what i was about to say that that performativity insofar as it's still organized around a something like a you know semiotic or semantic order right you perform an act that brings about its desired effects where you have a kind of clear teleology or something like that uh or a narrative structure hyperstition

operates as a purely sub-semanic at a purely sub-semanic level but i think this is not true i mean i think this is them wanting again to have their cake you need it because despite all their rhetorical, you know, diatribes against all things narrative, all things hermeneutics, all things philosophy, politics, you name it. When they describe the conflict between Atlantis and Lemuria, the AOE and, you know, the Enma and you name it, et cetera, et cetera, this is still, this is highly narrativized, obviously. It's highly intelligible as a form of struggle between agencies that is temporally projected or specific. And therefore, hyperstition is also a practice that has a clear teleological use in the sense that those proponents of digital hyperstition

that are the hires of the Lemurian time sorcery are doing it precisely as counterinsurgency, or I'm sorry, as an insurgency, as a counter chronological sort of insurgency against the AOE practice, right? I mean, that's what they say it does. So how are you to understand the category of subversion outside of any, okay, I understand it's not a human, It's not woven to the dreams of social utility and emancipation, but that's still a normative category, right? Subversion is still a normative, deliberative category. so it seems to me that in order for it to be a consistent practice where you can say that

hyperstition has nothing to do with intentionality and discursivity and so on you would need to do something like it's this kind of same problem that but you had himself when he was trying to say well science is imminent it's an empty formalism and then there's ideology which is the discursive you know, superstructure. Well, in this case, you have something similar where presumably this is a practice that's completely inhuman. It doesn't require or depend on language or anything like this, but it does, right? It clearly does insofar as we're reading words and texts and sentences in English. And all of this is like a characterology and a narrative, you know so um it's one of those things that i think it's the perpetual gauntlet of those who

glorify formalization whether in the name of mathematics logic of the signifier or cybernetics you name it that want to get completely rid from intentionality discursivity the effect that you get is that your own practice becomes unintelligible as a doing right in other words hyperstitional practice no longer makes any sense in in relationship to and as a defiance of philosophy because in order to say this what i am doing is not that because so and so you're already in you're already playing the game you're already engaged in a kind of deliberative act of subversion

against a discursive order. So how can you do that even? How can you make intelligible that practice without reactivating the entire network of normative and intentional concepts that presumably you can completely dispense of, right? So I think that's a good place at a common limit point from both of the trajectories that we're looking at. Just a short comment. I don't know if most of you know, there is a new strain of acceleration is thought on the blogs since like, I don't know, 2014, 15 or so, called unconditional acceleration.

acceleration. Yes, it's UAC and they take very, very much from LAND and the CCIU and I once discussed with a UAC, I'm more the left accelerationist person with a UAC person on Twitter and they said like the LAC accusation towards LAND and so on is always, oh, you're putting ontology before epistemology, basically. You're basically somehow dogmatic and how can you do that without epistemology and normativity? And the person replied to me that the UAC camp doesn't even think in these terms of ontology and epistemology or normative, but they use terms

orthogonality versus anti-orthogonality. And I don't know if this helps anybody here, Daniel, if you know something about that, but... I do. I do. I mean... Yeah, okay. I do. Let's not talk about that right now because it will actually be a topic in the future. Okay, but maybe we can come back to this. Yeah, but just to make it relevant, I mean, it is exactly in the same turf. And that debate, the debate about the place of normativity intentionality, whether you can eliminate it, whether you can actually successfully claim to alight epistemic categories, whether in fact you can even claim to disavow, regardless of whether you prioritize ontology or epistemology,

whether you can completely trivialize philosophical, your own status as promoting a philosophical position. That is precisely the question that comes out of this mess, right? This dual mess. And what we'll see is that both on the end of practicism and on the end of hyper-rationalism, that is, again, these two vectors of inhumanist or anti-humanist thinking face the same exact problem, which is, and I think that's the way to understand the place of Kant in this mess, how it is that we need to go back to Kant in a way, and that Kant becomes important, right? We'll see this in the weeks to come, and I definitely think you touched upon maybe the most essential methodological problem or issue that defines the

the heritage of these two think tanks so i think that's crucial absolutely um allow me to like move forward a little bit i want to definitely i mean i was expecting today to not to not be able to go to through all the stuff so that's totally fine because next week we have actually all the time to devote to the to the to the major lower so we'll probably be talking more about the aoe embarker and all that alongside the whole lemurian pandemonium stuff and the numagram but i just want to say a few more things about especially like Lemurian Time War which is really the I think probably the most important programmatic text that the CCRU produces in its collection. So maybe just one was I'm sorry just one more comment for next week. Can we go next week into

the idea that capital is like the material instance of critique that critique isn't longer on the ideal in the ideal sense on the concept level but okay critique is actually happening and yeah that would be really cool because i think that's key that is that is that that will we will talk about that next week and also when we when we read uh lance helioplexy which is an essay in which he reorganizes this thesis in a new terminological framework. And I think that, yeah, you'll, we'll see a lot of this. Perfect. We will definitely talk about this. Hold on. Let me share. Are you guys seeing the, the, the Justin Morrison's letter, the slideshow?

yes yes thank you so i'm not going to spend too much time on on discussing uh justin morrison's delirium obviously because that's it's written in a way to make us feel cringy uh what's what's interesting here is a few things that that that pertain to the to the larger lore of the ccru which is how it is that you know through her involvement she starts having these dreams and then she sees herself in this cave and she's presented to a bunch of weird hieroglyphs in the wall which is of course a way to say that she went to the Vault of Murmurs which is the place where Echidna Stilwell

made first the discovery of the pneumogram and Justin Morrison hears the Nomo chant which is another, I mean you can hear what it is, it's pretty silly but it's in the collections. So here is the quote. Each of the dreams took place in an immense desolate cavern. I felt I was drugged or restrained or both. Either way, I could not move. The cavern was very dark, lit only by candles, and I could see almost nothing apart from row after row of symbols chalked into the walls. This was unnerving enough, but what still terrorized me when I awoke from the dreams were the horrible sounds that resonated in the cavern. There was a disconcerting continuous chanting, but worse than that, a deep moaning that seemed to issue from the

throat of some vast unearthly creature. That vast unearthly creature is, of course, Nomos, right, whose name is number, the mega aquatic monstrosity from Mu. So we'll get a little bit into that because it's kind of part of the lore of how it is that Miskatonic Virtual University becomes congealed from the work of Echidna Stilwell and, of course, Peter Visparov, who was Captain Peter Visparov, who used to work in NASA. I'm sorry, who used to work in World War II. And then Echidna Stilwell and he have this correspondence.

they're both very much interested in Lovecraftian mythology, but obviously also very much in boroughs and specifically in studying the legacy and the reality of the Enma tribes, which are the Lemurian tribes that persist in Eastern Sumatra. Now, we'll get into all of that in two courses. This is where shit gets insane, right? Just like playing Looney Tunes. But it's, okay. So there's an interesting theoretical point to keep in mind, which becomes really elaborated and programmatized in Lemurian time work in this Justin Morrison text, which does that hyperstition tries to avoid on the one hand falling into pure conspiratorial lunacy and this kind of quotidian gesture of erasing hyperstitional possibility or practice.

So what they demand or the third way out, the way out of just simply believing something that's batshit insane and accepting the possibility that hyperstition is something that occurs in the world, that virtual agencies have real effects and make themselves real, requires what they call an attitude of positive unbelief. which is, I guess, their way to challenge the idea that they are doing some kind of philosophical system, right? So the idea is here you engage in a pure practice of construction. You construct, you know, hyperstitional construction of virtual potentials, which, and you manipulate these fictions to bring about real effects, but you don't need to believe in anything in particular or have an ontological commitment to anything.

You can just, as a word, suspend the fabric of belief and just keep doing what you're doing. You know, kind of like what Zizek says is the definition of ideology today. You know, you keep doing it, but you don't believe it. You don't believe it, but you still do it. And here's the quote. To attempt to refute such narratives, conspiracy narratives, is to be drawn into a tedious double game. One either has to embrace an arbitrary and outrageous cosmic plot in which everything is being run by the Jews, Masons, Illuminati, CIA, Microsoft, Satan, CCRU, or alternatively advocate submission to the most mundane construction of quotidian reality, dismissing the hyperstitial chaos that operates beyond screens, cosmological dark matter and dark energy, virtual, imperceptible, unknown.

this is why atheism is usually so boring both conspiracy and common sense the normal reality script depend on the dialectical side of the double game on reflective twins belief and disbelief because disbelief is merely the negative complement of belief cancellation of the provocation this into disintensification neutralizing the stimuli providing a metabolic yon break in the double game. Unbelief escapes all this by building a plane of potentiality upon which the annihilation of judgment converges with real cosmic indeterminacy. So the idea here is this is tapping this back to the cybernetic model. Remember that everything that is considered to be

quote-unquote part of this normal reality script obeys a cybernetic model of homeostasis or negative feedback right cancellation of provocation decent intensification suppression of flight or escape and what they were saying is this this is precisely what is also philosophically corresponding to what Kant conceives under the framework of judgment judgment is the subordination of of intuition right under a concept in which you have precisely this kind of representational fit between object and subject this this perfect representational match which is knowledge or cognition but the ccru here is is suggesting that it's not only enough to uh puncture the idea that

there is this representational core to cognition, right? But that even that it's negative form of postmodern unbelief or skepticism or, you know, ambivalence, whatever you want to call it, plays its part in the same dynamic. It's just as up first. It's still included in the dynamics of of the will, of intentions, and so on. So the only thing that we'll do is to suspend belief altogether, not to bracket belief in the phenomenological sense in which you, for example, stop believing in what natural science tells you, but you engage in a constructive practice in which you don't have to believe or not believe or disbelieve in what you're doing.

All that matters is its effects, not its epistemological or ontological status. So this is another way to cash out the anti-philosophical dimension of the project. So with this, we get to Lemurian Time War, which is, I think, again, the most important text in the CCRU. And this lays the basis for both its theoretical, quote-unquote, system, as well as its basic mythological background. uh and and the way that i read this or the way i read it the first time at least was as like them you know repeating this this this uh locution is a mad black borgesian fable um if you are any of you are familiar with borges uh jorge luis's borges's text tlone ucbar orbius tertius it almost reads like a direct precursor to this text in which

you everything begins in a library and a discovery of this apocryphal text which leads to the discovery of these sort of like secret societies or organizations which are running the show and which uh describe a society a world in which a particular philosophical system holds uh a complete you know it re-articulates their sense of space and time completely right in the case of of Borgesitz, Berkeley's idealism, and Schopenhauer, in the case of the CCRU, it is this basic rift between the Atlantean and Lemurian forces, right? And this is where the Lemurian practice of time sorcery,

which is the direct sort of operation that results from digital hyperstition becomes explicitly formulated. now there's there's more stuff happening in the chat so let me just take a quick look here just ignore it just ignore it oh yeah i i i was reading while i was reading access i i also remembered uh borges famous uh the library of babel right yes of course of course that's another i mean and actually if If you read Nick Land's recent novel, Chasm, you will find that exact story be rewritten in a cyberpunk-y, cyber-goth, AI dystopian mode.

Highly recommend it. It's terrible, but it's fun. Anyway, let's go through the motions of the basic story here. right? So we hear of the CCRU being disclosed into this information by a certain William Kay, who is of course acquainted with Peter Vysparov in the Vysparov Library. And the entire fable of Lemurian Time War concerns the status and the story of William Burroughs's writing of the ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, which was of course presumably transcribed by a certain Captain Mission in 1700 AD. So this indicates a kind of time rift. How is it that

Captain Mission could have transcribed a text in 1700 AD that would only be written in 1987 by William Burroughs, right? And then of course, what we will learn later is that William Burroughs himself has had the memory of having written the ghost lemurs of Madagascar before he did. So he has a memory of something that hasn't happened yet. And what we are going to be sort of suggested implicitly, this is one of the thesis, is that rather than thinking of Burroughs and Mission as two different people sort of separated in time, they are sort of the same agent in this kind of time rift distributed across time, right? but this gets like thicker as it moves along this text moves between this kind of uh

strange theory fictional recounting of burroughs and in relationship to the discovery by k.m visperoff and visperoff trying to make sense of it and on the other hand a kind of almost philosophical explicitation of certain base concepts that you get right uh so here is where we get the definition of hyperstition and also the introduction to the working so apparently the the very coinage of hyperstition is what is promoted promoted by the cthulhu club and i'll tell you just what this is so hyperstition is the production and actualization of virtual agencies which are also called viruses insofar as they are self-propagating inorganic potentials

that make themselves real, and they're promoted by the Cthulhu Club. And here's the quote, what is a virus and what is a virus? Perhaps simply a pictorial series like Egyptian glyphs that makes itself real. Fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions, consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, effective, and behavioral responses. So the Cthulhu Club and the foundation of the Mycostonic Virtual University is basically the result of a series, well, the Cthulhu Club was already being carried by Peter Vysparov, and it was around a Lovecraftian reading group, but then after

corresponding with echidna stillwell they basically come to this uh sort of agreement to to talk further and to sort of organize themselves and this is the origins of both the cthulhu club and then this kind of micastonic virtual university right so we don't have to get into that too too much uh what we what we know is that of course uh vizporov was working in world war ii he was appointed as a secret agency official to try during the war of the pacific against japan where they were trying to manipulate or use to do what they called cultural manipulation where they would try to basically influence natives to destroy to send like the local

populations, Japanese populations, into disarray. And Echidna Stilwell, who is an ethnographer who studies the Enma, takes issue with the way in which the American government was weaponizing this sorcerous practices of the Enma towards military ends and so on, which she thought was aberrant but both this this far off and and echidna still will begin to correspond about their experiences of the time rifts that result from this sorcerous practices um it's pretty crazy i didn't make you read that because it was a little too much already but take a look at it if you can it's pretty fun regardless so what so this virus that is like a kind of a jichung glyph

that makes itself real blah blah blah but the next step is to simply separate hyperstition from this kind of like pomo textualist delirium that simply says you know oh reality is made of words or fictions everything is like a text you know and this is what leads to this basic tripartite distinction between three positions or practices so here is where hyperstition is distinguished from the two modes of belief and unbelief that articulate the philosophical imaginary. So first you have what they call representative realism. And representative realism is basically the idea that being is already, already individuated. That is to say,

reality is already there and therefore the job of thinking i.e. philosophy is to reflect or represent or to reflect upon what is given to itself rather than producing so the idea is here's there's already a closed reality right that is completely already determined and then thinking just reflects upon it of course this this will have very very much to do with uh what we will see as the AOE and the one God universe in particular. Then you have textualist idealism, which really is like the obverse of representative realism, which promulgates the postmodern, I should say disbelief, claiming that mind-independent reality is impossible or

non-existent, and that all that exists are texts or ideas or something like that, right? This is just like textualist idealism at its purest or most crass form. And what hyperstition, and hyperstition is then distinguished from these two positions because it pragmatically accepts degrees that reality comes in degrees, that there are degrees of realities that range between pure virtual potentials, which are not actual, to actualities for fiction viral production. So the real is neither a fully actualized set of spatiotemporal bodies for the mind to reflect upon, nor a pure system of virtual representations, but rather is this spectrum that ranges from purely

semiotic virtual potentials and actual incarnate effects in the world. And what hyperstition does is rather than belief in, you know, semiotic fictions or actual reality, it suspends belief and it simply manipulates or engages in a creative practice where they engender these virtual potentials and weaponize them by bringing them into actual, to have actual effects, right? So here's the essential quote. Far from constituting a subversion of representative realism, the postmodern celebration of the text without a referent merely consummates a process that representative realism had initiated. Representative realism severs writing from any active function,

surrendering it to the role of reflecting, not intervening in the world. It is a short step to a dimension of pristine textuality in which the existence of a world independent of discourse is denied altogether for practitioners of hyperstition differentiating between degrees of realization is crucial so that's the essential philosophical sort of like typology i suppose that that we're getting here uh let me check the the chat very quickly just to make sure danielle can these two first points be related to what sellers name the disenchantment of reason and the disillusionment I think that's random, right? That's not sellers. And I think, yeah, I mean, I think, well,

yes, but I would have to work through it a little bit. I mean, it can definitely be connected, but I think that actually, yeah, I mean, he would say disillusionment with reason would correspond to this like postmodern ambivalence or disappointment, even though he does agree with the genealogical undercutting of rationality. So one question, would you say that the attitude and method of science fits, like a priori, that science a priori proceeds to one, according to one of these sets of beliefs or sets of attitudes? No, no. Okay. No, no. I think this is a philosophical typology or a distinction between,

I think that science could, you could do the same scientific practice and interpret it in terms of representative realism or textualist idealism, right? You can be, in other words, the same practice can be subject to two different philosophical interpretations, right? Okay. So that science just doesn't bother with these philosophical assumptions. it's not or if it if it does it it gets to choose right okay right um and we'll actually talk a little bit more about that in a little bit so here we get to this kind of one god universe right so the god the one god universe which is the the supreme not just religious after uh like off offspring but of course it's the way in which atlantean forces uh engage in their own kind of

hyperstitional production by precisely creating this kind of monotheistic closed reality which is immunized from any kind of insurgent or forces coming from the outside so what we are told is the one god universe emerges in the context of sort of suppressing the kind of plurilegious and pluritheistic conception of the universe as populated by a variety of mythological agencies. And what it does is it tries to reduce the world into a kind of form of representative realism in which any other program or any other agency becomes internalized within its own mythology

as a kind of evil or falsity or something that is to be eradicated within itself, right? Satan, evil, false, you know, pure opinion or something, whatever you want. So they produce fictions that refuse their own fictional status. So the One God Universe, you know, claims to be the only game in town, and any other alternative fiction or hyperstitional practice becomes incorporated into its own narrative as what is precisely to be dismissed as a merely as a quote-unquote merely fictional reality so it does so this is a very interesting thing because it reminded me when i was rereading

this of the account that uh miller gives of repression right because remember repression miller was uh was uh re-inscribed in terms of the relationship between virtual and actual by saying that it is an operation by virtue of which the the operation becomes invisible to its effects so that you just actually observe the effects and take them as totalized as realized and that's precisely the labor of the imaginary remember that that occurs as a result of suteur so here we get something very similar except that it is it is it is a pathologized as this particular historical lineage the one god universe does something like the repression of hyperstitional

production so it's a virtual production that suppresses its own conditions of production it makes it invisible so that it presents itself as pure reality as a purely imaginary totalized reality. And of course, this is not only religion, we're going to soon find out, but it's also philosophy. So this is where philosophy is going to be localized. This only becomes clear once we get to the different orders of radiations in the AOE, right? Where philosophy becomes revealed as the fourth sphere in the AOE. But I mean, I don't know what we'll get there today, but we're definitely getting there. So here's the quote. Diagrams, maps, sets of abstract relations, tactical gambits are as real in a fiction, about a fiction, about a fiction, as they are encountered

raw. But subjecting such semiotic contraband to multiple embeddings allows a traffic in materials for decoding dominant reality that would otherwise be prescribed. Rather than acting as transcendental screens blocking out contact between itself and the world, the fiction acts as a Chinese box, a container for sorcerous interventions in the world. The frame is both used for concealment and broken. The fictions potentiate changes in reality. Hyperstitional agitation produces a positive unbelief, a provisionalizing of any reality frame in the name of pragmatic engagement rather than epistemological hesitation the one god universe

feeds unbelief i think this is probably the most important re uh like formulation of the practicist uh you know theory that underlies the ccru this this last bit uh hyperstitional agitation produces a positive unbelief, provisionalizing of any reality frame in the name of pragmatic engagement rather than epistemological hesitation. That is as formulaic as we get. So then we get the whole rift, right? The whole rift account in which what we are told basically is that time, and time is specifically understood as chronological time, but also in its manifold disturbances functions as not only a form of intuition as it is of course

for Kant an invariant form of experience that characterizes all cognitive sapient and sentient creatures but it is it is given here as a kind of transcendental prison that is to say it's an instrument of control which is equivalent structurally to the agency of the EGU to the Oh, Gio, sorry, the one God universe. So basically the idea here is, it's not only that time is transcendentally constructive or constitutive of your sensory experience as it was for Kant, that much is true, but that there is a possibility of a counter insurgency or an insurgency against this transcendental prison. Lemurian culture, digital hyperstition,

cybernetic culture, whatever you want to call it, is precisely an attempt to unravel this kind of chronological status quo, right? Or this transcendental prison unraveling or evincing rifts in the order of time. So here is the essential quote where we first get an equation of time with chronology. And second, we get the insinuation of the possibility of a rift or a break or, you know, cleavage that destroys or sends this whole order into whack. The presumption of chronological time is written into the organism at the most basic level, descriptive into its unconsciously

performed habituated behaviors. Time is that which ends. Time is limited time experienced by a sentient creature, sentient of time, that is making adjustments to time in terms of what Krasinski calls neuromuscular intention behavior with respect to the environment as a whole. A plant turns toward the sun. Nocturnal animal stirs at sunset. Shit, piss, move, eat, fuck, die. Why does control need humans? Control needs time. Control needs human time. Control needs your hit, piss, pain, orgasm, death. Power operates most effectively not by persuading the conscious

mind, but by delimiting in advance what it is possible to experience. By formatting the most basic biological processes of the organism in terms of temporality, control ensures that all human experience is of and in time. That is why time is a prison for humans. Man was born in time. He lives and dies in time. Wherever he goes, he takes time with him and imposes time. So the idea is that time and chronology is required for teleology, and teleology is required for organization and control. for how it is that organisms, for example, carry out their routines. They're just like, you know,

absolute cyclical behaviors, right? The plant moving towards the sun, the nocturnal animal staring at the nets, you know, your bodily sort of movements. This kind of like redundancy of behavior is what is precisely enabled by a kind of chronological system, which is also a circular system, right? In which there is a kind of clear linearity by virtue of which you fulfill a task that is ahead of yourself by organizing your resources in the present, but also by virtue of which you repeat an action and expect the same result time and time again. So chronology and contemporality is a way in which behavior becomes stabilized or in any case uh generalized hold on

let me let me check the chat room just in case actually uh federico about that bolzmanian uh question or or insight i really recommend you to take a look at the second chapter of neck lance the thirst for annihilation because their land is already in the business of trying to tap this into Boltzmann's philosophy of science so that's just like a quick suggestion so here's here's the the then the Lemurian thing which is that in 1987 which is of course also you know this this kind of like fateful year in which the time rift occurs of tapping back to the 1700s uh Boros is when he

comes in touch with the history of the lemurs the prosinian ancestors which stand against the robotic order of the centipedes which is also the uh the order of the lobster as as uh land says elsewhere and they describe the lemurs as kind of atemporal beings beings before time if that makes any sense or outside of time their way of thinking and feeling is basically different from hours, not oriented toward time and sequence and causality. They find these concepts repugnant and difficult to understand. The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar opens out onto the rift, the split between the wild, the timeless, the free, and the tame, the time-bound, the tethered. As one side of

the rift drifted into enchanted, timeless innocence, and the other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war, exploitation, and slavery. Of course, these two ends of the spectrum coinciding with the AOE and or Atlantis and Lemuria, of course, right? So needless to say, I'm not going to repeat because I think it's abundantly clear, right? Where are the stakes lie here? So here I just said, I repeated a little bit about the formation of the Cthulhu Club and the story of Vian Ma and so on and so forth. But here's where, you know, because obviously Peter Vysparov is at the core of this, and one of the things that they engage with is they want to understand, this is what they get from Lovecraft Gothic horror,

is that it reveals, according to them, how there are these kind of cosmic agencies. In other words, how non-human cultural factors affect large-scale historical developments. And so the kind of order, the AOE, which is the Atlantean hegemony of order and control that follows from not the Lemurian, like trajectory, but from the centipedes that borrows abhorred. They obtained, this is where the magic comes in. They maintained the power of what they called Atlantean white magic, a kind of elite conspiracy which they said had secretly controlled the planet for millennia. They claimed to traffic with demons who had told them many secrets drawn from a Lemurian tradition of time

sorcery that contained within itself everything that was and will be. Lemuria was supposedly an ancient sorcerous culture populated by non-human beings. So in the contemporary context, Atlantis is revealed, of course, as the architectonic order of the eschaton, which are still at war with Lemurian tendencies or have been at war with Lemurian tendencies since before time, and is actually a war over time, with the AoE controlling time or being like the harbingers of time and the lemurs concentrating this kind of like rifting possibilities which are counter chronological right and here is where uh i i hear i try to like uh bring a these two uh quotes from

who's pulling your strings and the vault of murmurs together we don't have to worry about this right now but here is the discovery of the pneumogram the pandemonium matrix right which is i told you echidna stillwell in one of her sort of uh not visions but apparitions or transportations or you know when she becomes subject to the rift it's transported to the vault of murmurs just like justine morrison and this is where she finds the pneumogram uh it's a beautiful uh passage which you can read for yourselves uh later but it's it's cool and there's one more detail i want to i want to talk about before we'll talk about barker and the aoe in more detail next week but there's a reference here in this in lemurian time war to the temple templeton episode and uh

the professor randolph templeton is is also another member of the mescatonic virtual university and he was the one who toppled accidentally into a means for time travel he was the one who actually made contact with the outside and he did so specifically by realizing that there was something hidden in Kantian philosophy in the critique of pure reason that was something like a manual for time travel. And he takes this back into the doctrine of the schematism, which is what Kant describes in the transcendental analytic as a secret doctrine of the soul.

Now, so why is this? So for those of you who were in last semester in the seminar that we taught, we read this whole saga that unfolds from the Kantian account of the transcendental imagination. And I'm not going to get into this right now because we don't have time, but long story short, the schematism is this kind of unique account in Kant's philosophy at the very outset of the critique of pure reason that tries to explain how it is that before there is something like conceptual subsumption under judgment, there is already a way in which the forms of space and time become organized for the transcendental subject. Now, this mode of organization, this schematic

organization, we are told by Kant, is algorithmic, is purely computational or machinic, automated, it's unconscious. It is not something that the subject does deliberately by thinking through linguistically or conceptually or reflexively. It is something that is completely automated, but which directly produces the forms of space and time, and which allows the subject to track objects in its environment before it thinks or subordinates them conceptually. And this unconscious mechanism for Kant was completely intractable or invisible to philosophy. It was

a secret art of the soul, which was inaccessible to us. But one of the things that the science of cybernetics and computer science and information science has done is help us understand how it is that these forms of intuition are actively produced in their abstract, purely algorithmic, i.e. non-discursive structure. So one of the things that we're going to see that Professor Templeton presumably is going to do is that he's going to realize how it is that it is possible to unravel or to unearth the secret art of the soul, this pure algorithmic logic that organizes

our experience of time i are forms of intuition and therefore our experience so this is a an interesting here's the quote and then i'll show you that i mean this is a there's a cool little bit of lore here that that i'll that i'll explain before we call it a day but nevertheless he kant describes the critique of pure reason as a time traveling i'm sorry uh templeton describes the critique of pure reason as a time traveling manual although of another kind. He uses Kant's system as a guide for engineering time synthesis. The key is the secret of the ischematism, which although an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, concerns only the unutterable abominant of the outside. Nihil ulterior is, in exteriority,

where time works, that part of you, which is most yourself, has nothing in common with what you are. What Templeton fell into himself, when Templeton fell into himself that day, he found, instead of what he thought himself to be, the thing in itself at zero intensity, it was perhaps or necessarily that continuous hyperbody, the lurker at the threshold, which H.P. Lovecraft names Yok-Sothoth. Now, what does this mean? This idea that in exteriority where time works, that part of you, which is most yourself, has nothing to do with what you are. Well, what's interesting is that the schematism precedes the discrete reflexive constitution of a subject and an object in representation.

It already allows the subject to track an object in its environment, but this occurs before you have any sense of self, any reflexive, self-conscious sense of identity, right? So there is this strange thing, which is the most intimate constitutive was in time mentioned as inner sense, not outer. Yes, but remember here they're not talking about outer in the sense of space as outer sense. Here they're talking about the abominable outside, which is precisely what is not even within the, under the form of space. So the form of outer sense, Hernan, is space. Objects, extended physical bodies in space and time.

But here the absolute outside is more like the noumenon, right? The continuous hyperbody or the pre-individuated thing in itself. because here's where they're trying to like bring together like Deleuze does that you know fold the noumenol exterior into the aesthetic manifold in other words the pre-individuated field of sensibility which is just the the form of time the pure form of time is absolute outsideness before there's anything like objectivation under space in the forms of space. So here the outside is not outer sense or space. It is the noumenon, not considered as a

thing, but as zero intensity or rather as the in itself of zero intensity, right? A continuous hyperbody, right? The body without organs. Yeah, yeah. You can ask a very brief question. oh but because before you ask it just let me let me just show this slide very quickly this is the in the temple to templeton episode you see templeton has this uh depiction that a copy of this of this portrait or profile of khan who is being devoured by duroboros and here here's the quote let me just read this very quickly it now seems that this complex image long accepted as a portrait of Kant constitutes a disturbing monogram with its own chronological

predicament. As if in mockery of stable framing, the picture is surrounded by strange loop coilings of Ouroboros, the cosmic snake who traces a figure of eight and a Moibian eternity by endlessly swallowing itself. Suspended from its lower jaw is a cryptic device of intricately balanced circles and stars, ancient symbols of the AoE. Above the serpent's head, a facsimile of Kant is etched in profile, the face fixed in amiable, if distant expression. What was it, though, that hid behind the death mask, where it cut off, below and behind the jaw, false ear and double hairline? What was this peculiarly formless body, shadowy neck flush, and suggestion of a cervical fin? As he stared, and hideously remembered, Templeton felt as though he knew. You know, that which lurked behind the

image of Kant as the order, the close order of representation as the abominable outside. I love that part. That's a, that's so badass. It's just so cool. I'm sorry. This is like the funnest thing ever. Yes, please ask the question. Well, I'm going to go a bit off topic, but it's about Anders J. Amart's book about unleashing the numagram. Would you recommend it to understand the numagram? It's cool. It works to a certain degree. It's like very... It's unfinished, right? It's a fucking mess, actually. The last part, it's filled with annotations and notes, but it's really helpful for some points, especially the early stages of the numagram construction. I really recommend it. I actually tried to get in touch with him,

and I couldn't. All right. Are we good? Just a short comment. As far as I know, in the course on the CCIU, Vincent Le also explains the pneumogram. I don't know how good he is in doing so. I don't understand it, but they are just, yeah, if you want to know. Is that course uploaded as well? I would like to see that. Yes, there are two links. One is Unknown Lands, which is just a course taught completely about land, from his dissertation to his CCIU stuff.

and the second course is um invaders from the future this is on cciu it starts with the work of the cciu and goes basically to where we will finish to like uh left right accelerationism xenofeminism also uh luciana parisi and they are both great course uh courses maybe not curses but yeah well i'll take a look definitely for next session because i i myself have like i don't know what the hell is going on with the numagram i can make sense of the first two levels but then as soon as we get to the gates and channels and the way that the demons traffic between them i'm pretty lost there i know amy ireland is very good with this they don't let you through the gates danielle they don't let me through the gates through the pillars of hercules right

that's what they say um all right well i gotta get going guys uh pleasure we will uh jamie are you there yes yes cool so let's uh re record like let's make clear on the schedule the the presentation schedule via email i really need to jump out right now but um and i'll email that out to everyone i'll do a write-up um with the dates the presenters and the respondents phenomenal okay well thank you everybody uh pleasure and see you around yes thank you everyone