Okay, so we'll get started. So welcome to the course, Invaders from the Future, the CCRU and their legacy. Here's just off the bat my email. If you have any questions, especially people listening online, feel free to email me. But yeah, apart from that, okay, let's get down to it. So who or what is the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or what I'll be referring to by shorthand as the CCRU, of course. Well, okay, the story goes like this. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was initially set up by Warwick University in the UK to support philosopher, cyber-feminist, and cultural theorist Sadie Plant, pictured here.
so Plan completed her PhD in philosophy at the University of Manchester in 1989 with a dissertation on the fate of the Situationist International in the 70s and 80s which was later published in 92 as the book called The Most Radical Gesture The Situationist International in the Postmodern Age the book traces the trajectory from Guy De Boer and the Situationist's initial hopes for the imminent revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist spectacle in the wake of May 68, to the spectacle's neoliberal recuperation from which philosophers like Lyotard and Baudrillard could see no escape. And it's this context which really marks much of the CCIU's work, so we'll come back to it in time.
But as for Plant, she subsequently taught at the University of Birmingham's Department of Cultural Studies, where she became increasingly interested in technology, cybernetics and cybernetic culture and cyberfeminism. And in October 1995, she accepted a research fellowship at Warwick University's Faculty of Social Sciences. Now, the CCIU that the faculty had established to support Plant's research particularly attracted postgraduate students in the philosophy department as well as professors like Nick Land. Other former CCIU members and associates who would go on to achieve some prominence include philosophers Anna Greenspan, Luciana Parisi, Rezna Garistani, Kodwo Eshan, Ian Hamilton-Grant,
Robin McKay and Mark Fisher, as well as artists like Jake and Dinos Chapman, Renu Mukherjee, Maggie Roberts and Steve Goodman, better known under his pseudonym or nom de guerre, Code 9. Many were drawn to the CCIU as an alternative to traditional cultural studies, quasi-authoritarian pretensions to represent and speak on behalf of oppressed and marginalised subjects, as if the subjects' own popular expressions were kind of naive materials requiring mostly white, middle-class intellectuals to extract their true ideological meanings and significations. So contrary to traditional academia's more elitist approach, the CCIU sought to, as they put it, think, theorise and produce with, rather than about, or even worse, for them.
to this end the CCAU organized rather unorthodox reading groups research sharing sessions, lecture series, conferences, workshops and art shows just for a couple of examples they organized the Virtual Futures 96 and 97 conferences at Warwick University as well as the 97 Viro Technics event focusing on digital technologies and notably held off campus outside the academy their Afro Futures event sought to include the music and visuals that it discussed into the day by prominently featuring audio visuals in the lectures and holding DJ sessions and with the art collective Orphan Drift that we'll come back to in a couple of weeks time, the CCAU members also organised a
five week art show called Sisygy and I'll show a clip from that in a minute so the idea is that by directly integrating the art and pop culture it studied into the events, the CCRU aimed to electrify and rejuvenate what they saw as the clinical and stale cultural theory which was failing to capture the real excitement and liveliness of its subject matter. Just to give one concrete and rather notorious example, a session at the Virtual Futures 96 conference involved Nick Land lying on the ground and croaking into a microphone while Robin McKay blasted jungle records to the shock an outrage of the more traditional academics in attendance who would probably have preferred the music to be translated into typical clinical academic jargon that they understood rather
Ignore that demonic background. Okay. So, given, as we can begin to sort of glimpse, the CCIU's deliberate flaunting of academic sensibilities, tension soon emerged in the second year of its existence between the group and Warwick University, where the administration had expected a more traditional examination of cyberculture espoused in typical lectures and published in presumably high-ranking journals. the CCAU sought to literally merge with the cyberculture it studied. The death knell of the group's official ties with the university began to ring when Plant resigned from her research fellowship in March 97. Having fallen into an academic career in her own words by chance rather than intention
Plant went on to become a full-time writer and translator publishing books on the history of women in science and on the relationship between writing and drugs. And she wrote a bunch of articles for publications as diverse as Financial Times, Wired, Blueprint, and Days to Confused, and was even commissioned by the phone company Motorola in 2001 to write a report on the social effects of mobile phones. So her post-CCIU work continues to express the same interest in exploring how technology generates altered states of social and psychological existence. And we'll come back to Plant in the final week in particular. But her shadow obviously stretches throughout the entire course.
Okay, now with plant gone for now, Nick Land took over directorship of the CCIU for the final year of its official existence. The CCIU at this stage initially sought to recruit post-grad students from the mathematics and sciences departments, but to no avail. Unable to win any more allies at the university, the final nail in the CCIU's official academic coffin came when they organised the Virotechnics event in 97 at a media conference centre 35 miles from Warwick University. So to attend the conference, Land had to skip a meeting with the philosophy department, apparently set up, so that he could explain the CCRU's increasingly renegade direction. And the department naturally took this as evidence of Land's lack of commitment to fulfilling the requirements
of his lectureship, with Land himself officially resigning in 98. at the Viratechnics event Land and the CCAU presented a recording of a prose poem called Swarm Machines, which is in the CCAU writings that I uploaded in the readings. The recording was edited in such a way as to remove the vowels from the vocal track and add a backing track of incessant insect-like clicking sounds making the words ever more difficult to hear. So I think swarm machines marked a breakdown of the traditional academic lecture and in this way sort of acted as the perfect expression of the CCIU's own breakup with academia as they increasingly immersed themselves into cyber cultures which were simply incomprehensible
to the ivory tower. With the CCIU still determined to explore cyber cultures outside academia the group withdrew to a workspace in Leamington Spa. Even when they were actually still working on campus, the group would go to the student bar when the department office closed for the night and then on to each other's houses to continue their thinking and drinking. The CCU's activity was one of an ever-intensifying fusion, by their own account, this time of its members. Whenever they were together, which seemingly was most of the time, they engaged in intense alcoholic and narcotic-induced writing and thinking bouts. The hive mind that they comprised together was in some of their accounts so total that they were never able to really identify
who wrote what part of what piece or who came up with what idea first. So through their sleepless and drug-fuelled collective writing frenzies, the CCIU's output amounted to what they called a swarm assemblage, whose division of labour was impossible to clearly delineate. And we'll come back to this idea of the swarm assemblage next week. Under Lan's direction, the CCIU took an ever more religious, mystical and even cultish term. Free from the confines of academic acceptability, no subject was considered too outrageous to seriously devote themselves, be it occult numerology that we'll look at today or H.B. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, or conspiracy theories about secret societies and UFO abductions.
At this stage, Lan's students record entering his office yeah so his behaviour was becoming ever more erratic at this stage by certain accounts one account by Ian Hamilton Grant records entering Land's office which reeked of cannabis only to discover that Land had spent the previous night there utterly sleep deprived many other members eventually had apparently mental and physical breakdowns and by all accounts Land himself went mad after what he himself describes as a year of fanatical abuse of the sacred substance amphetamine and prolonged artificial insomnia devoted to futile writing practices. Evidently, the demands of this ever-intensifying, abstract, carbolistic and drug-induced thinking on no sleep
would ultimately lead to the CCIU's virtual disbandment in 2003, with only sporadic communication on their hyperstition blog before going radio silent in 2007. While at first only existing enzines and pamphlets, as well as, I guess, hushed whispers and rumours and legends, and then virtually through an online blog. The CCIU's collected writings were finally published as an e-book in 2016 and then as a paperback in 2017 by Urbanomic, run by Robin McKay. This was on the back of a resurgence in interest in the CCIU story as many of its members would go on to pioneer popular trends in the art world, philosophical movements like speculative realism and political theories like accelerationism
and xenofeminism that we'll return to in later weeks. So given the importance of these trends today I think it's worthwhile time traveling back to the origin of all these ideas with the CCRU which is the point of this course. So just to give a bit of an outline the course is going to attempt to provide some kind of introduction to the CCIU's philosophical output as well as trace their influence on contemporary continental philosophy, aesthetics and political theory. To cover both the CCIU's collective writings and some of its members' subsequent trajectories, I'm going to structure this course into three modules. So the first module looks at the CCIU's
collective theory fictions, starting with today. The second module covers Nick Land's post-CCRU writings as, I think, pretty undeniably the group's key intellectual guru. It will particularly be in the second module that we'll be able to collectively quench our thirst for cancellation, which hopefully is why we're here. The third explores how other former CCRU members went on to pioneer three major cultural movements of our time, namely speculative realism, accelerationism, and a kind of anti-humanist aesthetic that is pretty prevalent in the art world. Okay. But we begin today with the CCIU's Theory Fictions and Occult Practices.
Yeah, so I'm going to break down... So yeah, today we're going to divide... over the two hours, I'm going to divide it into two parts. So first, the first part is going to focus on the CCIU's early theory fictions in which they time travel to a future where advanced biotechnology and AI are already a reality. And in particular, we're going to look at the work of the fictitious professor D.C. Barker, through whom the CCIU developed a theory of the emergence of life and thought as what they termed geotraumatic repressions of the Earth's chaotic molten origins. then in the second half today we're going to examine how the CCIU's writings became increasingly abstract and occult as they turned to Kabbalistic and mathematical numbering practices in an effort to open up our language to
modernity's increasingly confounding technological entanglement so the first half I think is going to be relatively okay as an introduction, the second half is actually probably the most dense and nightmarishly abstract part of the whole course. So if we get through that, then we're fine from there. Okay, hopefully it doesn't scare anyone away. Okay, but we'll begin with theory fictions of the future. Okay, many of the CCIU's works not only draw upon fictions, but actually seek to merge with them, becoming what they term, borrowing the phrase from Baudrillard, theory fictions, which means something like imaginary worlds that are not yet real but will become so in the future.
According to Baudrillard's account of theory fiction, whereas the utopian science fiction of the Renaissance described an ideal world which was radically different from our own, the modern cybernetic era sees fiction merge with theory insofar as what fiction once described is now one and the same with what reality has become or is imminently becoming. The idea is that since all of our dreams and desires can be commodified as real products in capital's ceaseless technological advancement, the fictitious can no longer be seen as distinct from reality. So theory fiction is basically science fiction in the age of the breakdown of any strong distinction between theory and fiction. This quote is Baudrillard. He says, a same destiny of floating or indetermination puts
an end to science fiction but also to theory as specific genres. for Baudrillard then theory fiction names science fiction in the time of cybernetic capitals promised to realise all fictions and hence in some sense fictionalise all reality now while the CCIU latch onto Baudrillard's notion of theory fiction I think they modify it in two important ways firstly the most obvious where Baudrillard only basically only ever theoretically describes theory fiction in a way that is in some sense still too beholden to the theory, to reason. The CCIU actually write theory fictions with the emphasis on fiction. And moreover, this is the second point, whereas Baudrillard sees theory fiction as anticipating the real
in such a way that abolishes the real altogether in favour of seeing everything as pure fictions, the CCIU see theory fiction as anticipating what is not yet real but will become so. Instead of renouncing reality altogether, as Baudrillard tends to do, I think. The CCAU hold that there is always a distinction between what is presently imaginary and what is real, but that the imaginary can always become the latter, the real. So it's not that the real is destroyed by the spectacle of cybernetic capital, but that the conception of the real as something like a fixed and stable substance is destroyed by what techno-capital reveals the real to be. So by maintaining that cyber capital unfed as the real from our kind of hypostatised misconceptions of the real as
substance, the CCU avoids Baudrillard's kind of idealist tendency to reduce the real to fictions of our own creation. As an example, a more concrete example, I want to look at now a 1994 presentation at Warwick University's Virtual Futures Conference and published in Orphan Drift's novel, Becoming Cyber Positive, that we'll look at in a later week. But this part of the novel, this essay, is by Nick Land, and it's called Meltdown. It's not only Land's first, I'd say, fully formed theory fiction, but it's probably the most notorious of all of the CCRU's theory fictions. So it's worth going into, I think, as an introduction.
Okay. Far from a typical academic essay, Land presents in Meltdown a science fiction account of a future where capitalism's technological innovation has finally led to the advent of the technological singularity. He says, the story goes like this. Earth is captured by techno-capital singularity as renaissance rationalisation and oceanic navigation lock into commoditisation take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order into the order's a sophisticated machine runaway, and so on, for about 20 pages of this dense cyberpunk jargon. In response to this singularity, Land imagines that the old world order, as he puts it, modernises, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip
in order to control and regulate the free market's machinic intelligence explosion. Given that nation-states must, however, continue to compete with each other for better armaments, they too wind up upgrading their war machines, which only leads to ever more devastating and globalised wars in this future that Land paints. He says, the body count climbs through a series of globe wars. Deregulation and the state arms race each other into cyberspace. When confronted with globalised cyber capitalism's newly emerging empire without borders, both what Land calls the Roman Christian emperors, the Napoleonic bourgeoisie, and the fascists and communists, who all at one time seemed utterly indestructible swiftly crumble without even really putting up much of a fight. He says,
Emergent planetary commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic continental system, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet international, cranking up world disorder through compressing phases. End quote. At the same time as the collapse of the world polis comes to pass, land imagines that climate change has finally devastated the earth and with it all our illusions that we can control and manage the cosmos to our advantage. He says, an explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem solving rips through the last dreams of top-down prediction and control. So the idea is that by annihilating even the most durable empires and ideologies, and even nature itself, machinic capitalism finally appears as the unmistakable nihilistic vortex
it was destined to become by sucking all meaning and value into its senseless and indifferent death core. With the commoditisation of computers as entertainment products, especially in the 90s, we bear witness to a whole new deterritorialisation of our bodies' meat prison as we jack into cyberspace's greater reservoir of virtual possibilities, pleasures and avatars, but also nightmares, of course. He says at one point, terminal commodity hyperfetishism implements the denial of humanity as xenosentience in artificial space. In Land's vision of the future here, advances in nanotechnology will further reveal how even what we imagine to be the most fundamental substratum of our stable sense of self and identity will be
decoded by, for example, cloning ourselves like any other mass-produced commodity. There's many examples over the 20 pages of the essay or the theory fiction, but the basic idea that in light of all these coming technological advances, Land predicts that human culture will become utterly inhuman as everyone takes drugs to lose their egos, dances to deafening electronic soundscapes, engages in extreme neoprimitive body modifications, obsessively plays video games and virtual reality simulators, all of which are sold as commodities for the sake of capitals, the impersonal and indifferent flows. So he says, throughout the derelicted Warrens at the heart of darkness feral youth cultures splice near rituals with innovated weapons
dangerous drugs and scavenged infotech as their skins migrate to machine interfacing they become molted and reptilian they kill each other for artificial body parts explore the outer reaches of meaningless sex tinker with their DNA and listen to loud electrosonic mayhem untouched by human feeling so clearly the future presented in Meltdown is precisely one in which techno-capitalism has come of its own by radically subsuming human culture, political economy and science into what Deleuze and Guattari would call its frenzied body without organs. Of course, in some sense, automation, electronic music, VR and biotechnology are still, in some sense, only partial manifestations,
partial stratifications compared to the advent of an artificial superintelligence. given that what strong AI or AGI can do is in some sense utterly unforeseeable to us with our three pound lump of brain tissue Land describes it as appearing as an utter trauma, disaster or meltdown, precisely a meltdown which is only fit to evoke a paralyzing anxiety bordering on voodoo death he says at one point the Turing cops have to model net sentience eruption as ultimate nuclear accident core meltdown, loss of control soft auto-replication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. As this speculative strong AI comes to rewrite its own code
and trigger an intelligence explosion at exponential doubling rates, the only place left for humans is as a vessel for body transplants, mind implants, and the sublime schizophrenic splintering of the self into swarms of molecular nanogrey goo. I think it's no wonder then that the CCIU turned to fiction science fiction in this case, rather than theory, to explore a world beyond human thought, which the pedagogical institutions for them simply have too much vested interest in safeguarding. While the academy tends to deride such fictions as fantasies, the CCIU insists that meltdown, the essay meltdown, is rather a realism. It's not a fantasy, it's a realism, albeit not a realism of our present world, but a realism of the future.
As Land puts it in one of the many long lists in the CCIU's writings, it's intended, I think, to kind of overwhelm and bombard the reader with a kind of insensible manifold of de-territorializing technologies and inhuman cultural practices on the slide. Cyberpunk tortures fiction in intensity, patched up out of cash flux, mangled, techno-compressed, heteroglossic jargons and set in a future so close it connects. jumbled by hypertrophic commercialisation, socio-political heat death, cultural hybridity, feminisation, programmable information systems, hypercrime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, personality transplants, body modifications, soft and wetware viruses,
non-linear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia. I'm going to be profusely quoting from their writings because it's just so jacked, of course. So if the CCIU ultimately choose to explore the coming techno-commercial meltdown in the form of theory fiction, it's because it is fiction, particularly that of the cyberpunk variety, that is most adept to speak of a future reality lying dormant in the present by peering or camouflaging itself as the merely imaginary and even the absurd. Until, of course, as the slide says, until it connects. While Meltdown is
in some sense still more heavy on theory than fiction I think there's another of Land's 1995 essay called Cyber Revolution which I think is in some sense his most accomplished theory fiction with an emphasis on the fiction. So it's presented as an early morning online news report in the year 2007. It was written in 1995. The newsreader, Marcia Klein's dazzling smile of perfect dentition, is immediately contrasted with the images on the screen behind her. Viruses, explosions, crashed helicopters and nanochips. Given that Klein continues to smile while the global polis literally breaks down behind her, it's as if humans like her are undergoing
a cognitive dissonance preventing them from taking in the reality unfolding before their very eyes. So Klein goes on to describe a series of highly technologically advanced terrorist attacks against religious institutions, the police, and government telecommunications networks. The attacks were carried out by a group of skill, sort of like the CCIU, but called the K-Insurgency. Yeah, and it also resembles a faction described in Meltdown, which seek to accelerate the techno-commercial process against church, family and state. To discuss what Klein calls this new world disorder, she hosts a discussion between three experts. Chairman of the UN Special Commission on K-Insurgencies, autocatalytic nihilism, Dr Mohamed Amind,
Professor of Security Studies, Jean-Pierre Truvier, and Head of Telecommunications Diseases, MIT Research Group, Alvin Z. Markov. according to Amind K insurgency is not a centralised organisation but a disorganised network of radical anti-humanists seeking to unleash a planetary social sickness the sickness in question is of course techno-capitalism's increasing automation and alienation which is accelerating towards the complete loss of control of our own societies and political economy Amind says it stems from the destruction of social customs and traditions that we have seen happening all over the world, a destruction that has become autonomised, you see. It is no longer in control. Clearly the future that land as well as the CCIU are describing
is one in which capital's technological innovation has decimated politics and with it our all-too-human sense that we have any say over the unfolding of history or even our own kind of individual micro-lives. I think it's particularly clear when Truvia says with a kind of satisfaction that is ridiculously smug given the humiliating future that he predicted. We said, we always said, free markets would wreck everything. Trivia proceeds to explain that the work which best grasped this kind of K-insurgent ideology is Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia. While they were not themselves K-insurgents, Deleuze and Guattari, they captured the process in such a way that it was taken up
as a mad program for the post-human, as Trivia puts it. So yeah, where Deleuze and Guattari wanted to liberate human creativity and autonomy, the nihilists who have appropriated their work seek to dissolve society altogether into the machinic unconscious. And this is incidentally exactly what Landon, particularly Landon, Ian Hamilton, Grant, and Sadie Plant did in their essays on Deleuze and Guattari. And we'll look at them in later weeks. At this point in the discussion, the more analytically inclined Markov from MIT intervenes to deride Diluc Guitari as what he calls a couple of irresponsible French post-modernist kooks. As the footage reeled in the background depicts more
scenes of a French civil war between jihadists and Le Pen's fascist paratroopers amid reports that the EU has collapsed, sound familiar? Trivia chides Markov for failing to understand French theory. I think the way that land juxtaposes the unfolding global catastrophe with a trivial debate between an analytic and a continental philosopher that they are taking a debate, they're just taking way too seriously perfectly speaks to humanity's parochial blindness to the larger forces threatening their very existence regardless of one's creed, let alone one's parochial philosophical creed As the newsreel flashes footage of refugee camps along the Rhine Markov concludes that his recommendation to the UN will be that society must be put back under human control
if we are to avoid accelerating towards a fate worse than that of the dinosaurs. The theory fiction cyber revolution ends with a weather report wherein Klein's beaming tone once again contrasts with her description of a devastated planetary ecology in a way that once more betrays humanity's cognitive dissonance of the coming K insurgency. she says the Atlantic seaboard monsoon is forecast to continue for another week aftershocks have raised the LA death toll to slightly over 70,000 we wish you a good evening here at XTV and hand you over to the Beavis and Butthead Rewind show we're going to go through all of those kinds of ideas and unpack them in more detail over the coming weeks
But now I want to move to some of the CCIU's more specific theory fictions. In particular, several of the CCIU's theory fictions focus on an imaginary professor of anorganic semiotics at Miskatonic Virtual University named Daniel Charles Barker or DC Barker. so in a 1999 piece called Barker Speaks the CCRU interview with Professor DC Barker the CCRU present what is supposedly a real interview that the CCRU conducted with Barker which even includes at the end an imaginary list of publications with journal titles like Plutonics article titles like Spinal Catastrophism and a book called What Counts as Humans
Barker's theory of what he calls geotraumatics, essentially marks something like a materialisation of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory of the psychic repression of traumas so as to argue that the history of life and geological formations and transformations are but a series of repressions of cosmic traumas. So the idea is that instead of, for Freud, at least the early Freud, there's this idea that hysterical symptoms, neuroses and so on are attempts at repression of childhood traumas, basically. Traumas in our past. And what Barker wants to do instead is materialise it in the sense that he wants to talk about even the history of geology itself.
The history of the Earth is itself, and pre-human evolutionary history of life, is itself just as much repression, but a repression of cosmic trauma. for Barker then Freud's key achievement was to conceive of an organism's homeostasis as constituted by the repression of a surplus of outside external excitement or energy he says in the first quote Freud takes a number of crucial initial steps towards mapping the geocosmic unconscious as a traumatic megasystem with life and thought dynamically quantized in terms of anorganic tension, elasticity, or machinic plexion. Barker's own unique contribution was to add a materialist emphasis
to Freudian psychoanalysis, so as I said, to envision the Earth itself as staving off excessive libidinal energy through stratified geological formations. In this way, the psychic unconscious is materialized as the geocosmic unconscious, psychological trauma traumas are transposed into geological calamities and repressions and stratifications become literal stratigraphy literal geological stratification in the second quote Barker says this requires the unorganisational material retuning of an entire vocabulary trauma, unconscious, drive association, screen memory condensation, regression displacement, complex, repression disavowal, the unprefixed identity and person.
In short, Barker's geotraumatics, again, materialises Freudian psychoanalysis to develop a natural history of geological formations and transformations as so many stratifications of a surplus, an overwhelming surplus of primeval libidinal energy. Okay. Okay, so to make this a little clearer, let's go through a short history of the Earth. So the origins of the Earth date back to 4.5 billion years ago when gravity clumped together a bunch of large rocks, minerals and solids until it became a big enough protoplanet to gravitate around the Sun. During the Earth's first, what is called the Hadean period,
the Earth was an incredibly hot sphere of volcanic magma whose cooling in space was frequently perturbed by constant meteorite impacts which opened up red cracks in the surface of the Earth every few thousand years that would unleash a towering molten slush. Hence why the Hadean period is obviously so named as the Hadean period, or Hades. Primordial Earth was characterized by hellish conditions of volcanic eruptions and asteroid collisions incessantly splicing up the Earth's surface with red scars before it sank into rivers of overflowing lava. on Barker's reading the Earth's initial what he calls superheated molten slag or what he also calls cathel was the geocosmic trauma of a primordial heat death a pure fluidity
that would only later be repressed and stratified in the form of terrestrial crust and balsatic strata he says they call it cathel the interior third of terrestrial mass semi-fluid metallic ocean mega molecule and pressure cooker beyond imagination. It's hotter than the surface of the sun down there, 3,000 clocks below the crust, and all that thermic energy is sheer, impersonal, non-subjective memory of the outside. That's why plutonic science slides continuously into schizophrenic delirium. For Barker, what lies buried at the core of all things is nothing but nothingness itself, right? A pure process of volcanic eruptions and meteoric disruptions of the terrestrial hypostatic strata,
which briefly arose from it, only to drown in its unfathomably red-hot depths. So I think the idea is that for the CCIU, the Earth's molten core is for the CCIU and Barca sort of what the sun is for Georges Bataev. People are familiar with that. Namely, it's the symbol of absolute destruction from whence all things come and to which all things return. During the following Archean period, 4 to 2.5 billion years ago, the earth swallowed up more and more debris until it became large enough that future collisions had little impact. As the earth cooled, many crusts rose and fell back
into the primordial magma sea before a rocky balsatic crust proved a dense and solid enough surface to float upon it. Heat flow from the Earth's molten interior to the surface led to the crust being further stratified into distinct layers, continents, atmospheres and oceans. Here Barker takes the crust stratification of the Earth's molten core in the Deleuze-Quittarian sense of stratification, as if geology itself were attempting to bury any trace of its traumatic liquid origin in layers upon layers of sturdy rock and granite upon which it could stabilise itself from further volcanic explosions and violent collisions. He says, the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogenous trauma,
the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation. It's all there, anorganic memory, plutonic looping of external collisions into interior content, impersonal trauma as drive mechanism. in Barker's view what is called the accretion of the earth is comprised of so many repressions and stratifications of its primordial volcanic cause absolute deterritorialisation of every stratified surface into a sea of red hot liquid and heat death ok let's time travel forward a bit in the history of the earth Barker goes on to explain that living organisms also emerged as a repression or temporary freezing, is his term, freezing, of the primordial cosmic trauma.
Within the first 150 million years of its existence, the Earth sufficiently cooled to permit the six basic elements to clump together and form the first cells. To compete for the same real estate on the rocky surface, where they could alone survive, some molecules must have developed random variations permitting them to stick to the rocks better than other molecules could, such as, for example, by self-assembling with each other to fight off others. So eventually one of these molecules became what is essentially an RNA molecule by which it could self-replicate instead of combine with others to compete and thus we get the birth of evolution. At first, RNA molecules depended upon the oxygen found in minerals to survive. During the protozoic period, 250 to 540 million years ago, however,
some molecules evolved the capacity for photosynthesis allowing them to move beyond the rocks and acquire energy from the sun during one of the Earth's great oxidation events a massive elevation in oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere would have poisoned all life except those who could harness its energy through precisely photosynthesis so this is once more an example of how life staved off the geotraumatic effects of increasing oxidation by evolving the capacity to turn a poison into a source of energy. The Ediacaran period saw the rapid rise of complex multicellular organisms like jellyfish in the oceans.
It was in the subsequent period, 530 million years ago, that sea creatures evolved their own protective shells rather than rely on the rocks, thereby leading to the Cambrian explosion when armour-protected predators eventually emerged and developed ever greater means to fight off each other such as by evolving teeth, claws and eyes. 475 million years ago, the first land organisms emerged as plants began to colonise the rocks and fish evolved into amphibians to take advantage of the land's untapped resources. A further massive oxidation event 300 million years ago made life possible to migrate to previously uninhabitable and higher elevated terrains, thereby proliferating still more diverse species of life.
Here, as with the initial formation of the Earth's surface, Barker sees the evolution of life from RNA molecules to multicellular complex organisms as so many efforts to safeguard an organism's discrete unit of substance or matter from a hostile external environment, in this case by making copies of itself. He says, the peculiarly locked up life forms we tend to see as typical, those more or less obedient to Darwinian selection mechanics, are less than 600 million years old. They began with the planetary oxygenation crisis, triggered by the saturation of crustal iron, followed by mass oxygen poisoning of the prokaryotic biosystem and the emergence of a eukaryotic regime. Evolutionism presupposes specific geotraumatic outcomes.
According then to this theory of geotraumatics, all of life's evolutionary phase transitions can be seen as displacements in the Freudian sense, namely displacements of an environmental trauma which propels species to adapt and stratify themselves through random variations and biological armaments facilitating their self-preservation. Of course, at the same time that new species arose, many more perished over five, arguably six, mass extinction events. While each species developed random variations permitting it to survive in a historical world for some time, all ultimately perished in the long term before nature's greater de-territorializing flows. In this way, every seemingly dominant species is only actually a testament and a trace of a former dominant species' decline or extinction.
for example the initially small and slow dinosaurs were only able to become the giant dominant species 200 million years ago because of the anterior extinction event the paleozoic extinction event and in the same way our rodent-like vertebrate ancestors were only able to crawl out of the cracks of the earth 65 million years ago to become the dominant species today when an asteroid hit the earth creating a of course a dust ridden environment that wiped doubt the dinosaurs as well as two-thirds of all life. So while we can look at the rise of mammalian life, and particularly Homo sapien, with a kind of parochial pride, we are merely the result of a gargantuan geocosmic trauma. Far from
being a testament to our perseverance, then, we are just one species among others that sat on the throne of the animal kingdom for only a short time. Or as Barker puts it, The efflorescence of mammalian life occurs in the wake of the KT missile, which combined with massive magma plume activity in the Indian Ocean to shut down the Mesozoic era 65 million years ago. There is a catastrophic transition to a post-Saurian megafauna regime, part of a much larger overall recognisation of terrestrial symptomaticity providing an index of Neo-Hadian resurgence. Barca goes on to argue that every random variation simply marks a repression of some forgotten geotraumatic change
that the variation helped stave off as Barca understands it, natural selection is nothing but a kind of medium term negative feedback loop that slightly alters the system to sustain its overall homeostasis when confronted with the external world's positive feedback circuits of runaway change, destruction and de-territorialisation for example as per the terrestrial balsatic crust's geological stratification of the primordial magma our human bipedal spine and furless body betrays life's countless synthetic configurations of the outside in terms of the needs of the inside of us in particular Barker argues that human language and reason are but further
temporary displacements of the geocosmic unconscious's destructive forces. He says, the proto-human ape was dragged through its body to expire upon its tongue. So again, for Barker, the ego is nothing but the repression of a traumatic surplus of unconscious libidinal energy that overwhelms its negative feedback loops. So in some sense, it's not so much that the Freudian unconscious, the Freudian psychic unconscious provides the model for Barca's theory of geotraumatics. It's rather that geotraumatics is precisely what brings the Freudian psychic unconscious that we have into their being as its partial stratification. Nonetheless, try as we might to defer geocosmic trauma
like a good deconstructionist, you might say, it can only postpone it for so long. The Earth is already halfway through its inescapable disintegration and in 5 billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen and rot. Even before then, all life on Earth is, of course, threatened by the climate's positive feedback cycle of runaway greenhouse gases and global warming. Whether we look back into the deep past or forward into the not-too-distant future, the ground upon which we stand appears as but a brief terrestrial pocket in a cosmic larval sea of unlife and ungrounding. okay I might stop there for questions or discussions or objections or assassination attempts
yeah okay so are there any at this point or yeah Can GeoTron work with the Great Filter? If we looked at if the Great Filter happened in our past, could one of these occurrences be passed by as such? I know it's all very specific, but still... Yeah, I think that makes sense. We'll see in a couple of weeks, we're going to be looking at the Great Filter, because the CCRU, actually, they directly write about it and are interested in that, and they definitely see that as part of a geocosmic trauma to come but also one that I guess has consistently existed yeah for sure
what's the great filter? I don't want to explain that thank you for it well it's like this idea it comes with what's it the aliens what's that called again something firm in paradox and it fits into that that like we should have, by now we should have seen some form of extraterrestrial life somehow by either how far we can look into outer space or purely that somebody should be able to make us basically a spaceship somewhere online but then there's the filter that sits somewhere that stops life ever getting to that point and either we're the random one-off that has pushed past it
and is in our future or something. I don't understand. No, that's exactly it. We'll see in later weeks. Even next week a little bit. Some of the CCO members talk about there's different ideas in terms of the Great Filter so yeah again the idea that it's basically an explanation for why we haven't seen any other life forms in the universe yet and it's like well perhaps there's some kind of great filter precisely some mechanism that renders life extinct over time and so we're a last rarity that has yet to succumb to that and one of the yeah one of the kind of proposals, there's different proposals for what the great filter
is exactly like what is doing this and one of the ones that some of the CCRU people are particularly interested in is the idea that each civilization or life or sufficiently advanced enough civilization, perhaps somewhat like our own reaches a certain point in the kind of development of a civilization at which it destroys itself. And I guess for the CCRU the clear candidate for that is AI, is the technological singularity that perhaps has already been technological singularities but they've already completely wiped out civilizations in distant unreachable galaxies. But yeah, we'll come back to that particularly when we look at horror fiction in later weeks.
But yeah, thanks. Any other comments? I just want to clarify something about the degree to which their work is meant to be seen as a prediction. I think a lot speculative and science fiction isn't necessarily written out to be like this is going to happen but more like writers taking certain tendencies or trends happening now and sort of extrapolating them to radical conclusions as a way of exploring values and ideas do you think the CCIU thought of their work more like that or as in an actual prediction about science that they thought
would happen? Yeah. There's, I mean, there's a couple of, kind of both in a way. I mean, in some sense, tending to more towards the idea that they're describing what we will actually become, the future that will actually realise itself. But in some sense, that's not entirely contradictory or incompatible with the idea of extrapolating technological trends, for example, that a lot of science fiction does, because if they're describing some future, we're going to see traces of it now. So it's like the platitude of Gibson by now, that the future's here, it's just not evenly distributed yet,
that kind of thing. But it also is a bit... I mean, again, we're going to look at this in more detail, this question because a lot of the CCLU kind of theory depends on a certain conception of time of temporality which is not necessarily doesn't necessarily function by linear causality where things now it's like there's a past and there's a present and there's a future and the present emerges out of the past and the future out of the present and so on they're going to reject this kind of success of causality altogether and so for them in some sense the future has already happened because they're going to basically look to a kind of renewed teleological but sort of
non-theological, theological conception of time in which they actually think the future is already here or is actually the cause of the present but that obviously sounds absurd at this stage probably in that schematic aphoristic form but we'll look at it in more detail as well but yeah Maybe one more for a break? I'm curious about the distinction that you drew at the beginning between CCIU's like Stichel, Baudrillard's nihilism I understand Baudrillard's a sense of the hyperreal is that the modelling of the future exhausts, completely exhausts the possibilities of the future, so it plays the entire program
for future matters. And so the year 2000s, and 1984, the year 2000 will not happen. Yeah, right. That sort of thing. That catastrophe of, you could say history, but it's like the, extrapolation of all of the potentialities of the present how does the CCIU how does its program of theory of fiction escape that? because that seems like an incredibly powerful black hole in the world in some sense some of them would argue exactly that and others wouldn't so for example that kind of sounds like I haven't actually engaged with Bordjot
too much, but that kind of description sounds sort of like what Mark Fisher some of Mark Fisher's work, where it's like no, the future's been cancelled, kind of thing that there's capital realism dominates the earth and we can't conceive of anything new anymore, all possibilities are realised within it so there's, some of them would just concede that I guess, but then there's others that it's that they're not kind of describing what they're describing is only really as much as the future as we could possibly even comprehend. Because they're talking about things like biotechnology, machinic super intelligence explosion, all these kinds of things. But these are not actually
the possibilities aren't exhausted in our descriptions of them. We don't know what they can do. we can't comprehend a super intelligence because we're not a super intelligence so in some sense they're just trying to trace the absolute limit of our thought which emerges with bio re-engineering strong AI extinction all these kinds of things yeah so the idea is that there's you know you're never tired of saying we haven't seen anything yet the possibilities like to say that all possibilities are exhausted say with the technological singularity or with an artificial super intelligence like that's not to
totalize all possibilities because we don't know what they are we don't know what these possibilities are that this AI can realize yeah if that makes some sense yeah we'll look at that in more detail as well though because I think they do take up especially when we look at left accelerationism and so on, I think they would concede that point to Baudrillard more than others in the group Okay, so we'll take a quick 10 minute break but just in this break, feel free to have a smoke or go to the bathroom or whatever, but I'm going to just play you know, it wouldn't be a kind of CCIU course without some kind of audio and visuals
so I'm going to play I've made a playlist for this course and I'm going to play two tracks today the first one is by the CCRU Code 9 and Greenspan and others feature on it and it's called Grey Matter and it was made in the 90s and the second is a really classic jungle track of the 90s called Terminator by Goldie which it's just to give a sense of the music that the CESU are actually listening to and trying to channel in their pro style. So I think it's helpful in that sense. And there's also kind of samples in the track from the film's Terminator particularly a line where Sarah Connors says, you're talking to me of things I haven't done yet
and that's exactly, I mean in terms of the track it's talking about time stretching techniques and so on but it's also exactly what the CCRU you were talking about in terms of teological causality and things like that so obviously feel free to leave if this is heinous to the ears but I'll nonetheless play it. So the first one's the CCRU track if I can get it working The
Breaking and turning with a twist of a steel rod, the hinge snapped, dropping left in the right skull. Shows to get away. Chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, chat. Brain's on. Brain Matters. As the group of parents are in the lives. Future history, history, future. Future history, history, future. Century Intelligence Wing Camp, City Line 9, CWB.
Okay. Now, while many of the CCIU's theory fictions are still written in relatively ordinary prose, to some extent, their later works become increasingly experimental in an effort to completely subtract their thought from or sense and signification. So, yeah, the rest of today, I want to look at what the CCIU call their various numbering practices. like Cantor's mathematical set theory and Alistair Crowley's numerology, all of which seek to open up language to capitalist modernities increasing technological entanglement beyond human comprehension.
And the key idea is that through this kind of unholy mixture of science and the occult, we'll see how the CCU's numbering practices strip language of anthropocentric meanings and values in order to kind of stage an encounter with the inhuman outside beyond the bounds of our reason. Okay, so I want to begin by looking at a 1998 essay by land called Mechanomics. And the essay begins by chastising mathematics as what he calls statist and despotic in the Deleuze-Guattarian sense of these terms. In the sense that mathematics abstracts, organizes and formalises
a multiplicity of particular sensible things in terms of fixed and general forms, which are kind of axiomatically derivable from human reason, from the human logos. Yeah, he says at one point, state culture, however modern or even postmodern, is modelled upon an ideal despotic voice or logos. The word from on high drafts the signifying chain. So what's going on here is that, at least initially it seems to see so you have a view of mathematics as basically Platonism, right? Platonism which idealistically conflates thoughts models of real phenomena for the things themselves At the same time, Land qualifies that he is not seeking to dismiss all numbering practices altogether
as subject to this same mathematical idealism Rather what he wants to do is distinguish mathematics in the sense described, from what he terms, the CCIU term, numeracy. Namely, a use of numbers that reveals numbers to be irreducible to the logos, to human reason, in as much as numbers can speak of a kind of excessive nomadism, which is always on the run from the all-encompassing deputism of reason. He says on the slide, Numeracy mobilizes as thinking that is directly and effectively exterior, indexing the machinic dispersion or anorganic distribution of the number no sooner in the head than on fingers and pebbles counting always happens on the outside
now Land makes a distinction here between distinguishes between numeracy and mathematics with reference to Deleuze and Guattari's distinction in A Thousand Plateaus between what they call the ecumenon and the planomenon so the ecumenon which a word which traditionally means uh the promotion of unity around a church the ecumenon is for de luce and guattari what they call an abstract machine that assembles its multiplicity of parts in in a kind of stratified way around an authorial central point in what can only amount to a relative deterritorialization of order and reason and then on the other hand the planomenon is an abstract machine that assembles its parts in such a way as to facilitate
the free flow of their heterogeneous intensities through what they call an absolute deterritorialization. And this is, on the slide here, this is Dulles and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. They say, abstract machines which were emitting and combining particles had two modes of very different existence, the ecumenon and the planomenon. Sometimes staying prisoner to stratifications, they were enveloped in such or such determined strata of which they were defining the program or unity of composition. Other times, the abstract machine, on the contrary, was traversing all stratifications, developing uniquely and for itself on the plane of consistency. More precisely, Deleuze and Guattari explain that the ecumenon stratifies through a two-fold
process of what they call expression and content. So expression marks what they call the molar organization of a thing's many parts into one overarching unity. And content denotes the molecular stratification of a multiplicity into a larger unity. They say, quite simply, between the two, the difference is first of the order of grandeur or scale. I'm going to give an example now that will hopefully make that clearer, the distinction. Drawing upon this distinction, the Mechanomics essay explains that the ecumenon denotes the Logos' way of ordering a multiplicity of numbers around a fixed and abstract principle of reason which determines their order, stability and self-identity in two ways, in expression and content.
So on the one hand, expression orders numbers according to lower numerical types, such as, for example, by showing how the multiplicity of numbers can be derived as multiplications, as replications of the one. So you get a multiplicity of numbers, all you need is the 1. 1 plus 1 equals 2, and you just keep multiplying the 1 to get all of the numbers. So all of the numbers can be reducible to the 1, seemingly. The essay says in the first quote, Expression deals with relatively deproblemized elements of a lower numerical type, exhibits a higher degree of consolidated cardinality, and operates a selection of comparatively tractable instances. So that's expression. on the other hand content deals with more complex and higher order numbers
by grouping them into unified sets around some kind of criteria or counting them also according to probabilistic laws yeah so in the second quote, content deals with elements of greater typal generality and numerical complexity for which it requires a relatively heterogeneous semiotic involving varieties of algebraic indexic, probabilistic and and exact components. So the idea is that through this kind of two-fold stratification of the upper limit of the set, or class, and the lower limit of the one, the ecumenon coheres all numbers into a well-ordered sequence, which, for the CCIU, displaces the inconsistent multiplicity that numbers have the potential to let loose.
so what clearly bothers the CCRU about the ecumenon's expression and content is that basically it seeks to synthesize a chaotic multiplicity of numbers through the kind of unities and sets in a way which is all too similar to reason's synthesis and internalization of the thing in itself in terms of the mirror reflection of reason yeah okay so while the ecumenon appears to be an essentially numerical or mathematical operation in the mechonomics essay Land argues that the true essence of what he calls the number in itself remains exterior to the ecumenon's computational clutches
he says at one point the number in itself is exterior to the ecumenon even when seized by it this number in itself is what Land calls the planomenon in Deleuze and Qatari's terms an inconsistent multiplicity that threatens to dissolve or sequence number lines insofar as it is always in excess of even the highest possible quilting point or set of numbers he says on the slide they are assembled diagrammatically from directly expressive traits distributed differentially in a flat space of zero dimensionality or nomos and comprise a non-redundant order of differences unsequenced sequence. At first glance,
Land seems to be making the claim that the difference between the plenomenon and the ecumenon is numerically reflected in the distinction between cardinality, meaning numbers as quantities, so for example, 20 wolves, 10 rats, and ordinality meaning the position of things in a sequence, so like the fifth slowest rat, the fourth fastest lemur. Something like that. So yeah, cardinality is quantities, ordinality is in a sequence, numbers in a sequence. Yeah, so it seems initially that Land is mapping on the planomenon to cardinality and the ecumenon onto ordinality. However, Land rejects this reading of cardinality as being conjoined
to the planomenon on the grounds that cardinality can just as well repress numeracy as it can liberate it. So for example we've already seen this example, even quantities of very large cardinality can still be unified into sets with common properties and various principles of classification. The set of all cities, the set of all humans or whatever. Yeah. Do I have the quote here? No. Okay, so he says at one point it is precisely the calculary indefiniteness of highly general numbers that leads most directly to the suppression of numerical autonomy by encouraging the subordinations of concrete numeracy to superior dimensions that logicise or geometrise it.
On the other hand, it's ordinality that provides what he calls an effective anti-language by carving up the number line into different zones and sequences with limit points beyond which lies ever more excessive multiplicities. So he says here in this quote, Far from denumerizing the alphabet, progressive decardinalization reinforces the numeric function. Lexicographic ordinality effectuates an actual non-language and potential anti-language. It consists of ordinal indices, zone tags, that affect zonings and dezonings, intershufflings, groupings, insertions and extractions, operated according to concrete rules for non-metric cuttings and characterised by rigorous and exactitude. I'm sorry about the level of jargon in these quotes.
These are the simplest quotes I could find from the essay. Okay, so I think it'll become clear in a moment. So numeracy's ordinality, according to which each sequence in the number line marks a rupture with what came before it, like two is a rupture with one or something like that, is distinct from mathematics' cardinal stratification of higher numbers into sets and lower numbers into replications of the unity of the one. and this is because basically where cardinality can always be recuperated as an ecumenic organisation of multiplicities into sets, ordinality provides a sequencing of quantities only so as to mark a limit point beyond which order is evaded so what the CCIU's
numeracy proposes is a form of ordinality called at least in this essay mechanics that uses the number line as a way to trace ever greater degrees of an inhuman reality or kind of chaotic heterogeneity away from cardinal order and unification. And notably through two basic operations. It does this through numeracy, traces the excess through two operations. so on the one hand factorisation factoring in mathematics shows how the unity of any number can be broken down into a multiplicity of smaller numbers that are combined to produce the initial larger number so factorisation is a method where you can produce a multiplicity from a single number
so that's one method on the other hand priming or primes according to which every number greater than one is a product of is a product of primes or itself can be used again to generate a multiplicity of numbers that produce the initially unified number in question. The basic idea is that through primes and factors the CCIU mirrors mathematics' own two-fold process of expression and content but in order to generate excessive heterogeneities rather than unities. Again on the slide such ordinal dezonings and rezonings upon the natural number series occur each time a compositional number disaggregates into singular parts, affecting codings and decodings of surplus value,
or a prime transfers itself to the ordinality that itemises it into the potential factor of a number. So the basic idea is that for the CCIU, factorisation and primes provide two operations for numeracy to open up ecumenic mathematics onto the plenomenon. Okay, I'm going to sort of rehearse this same idea in another way, so maybe we'll see if this makes it clearer. Or it may not, but we'll see. It might make it more abstract. So Land sees another model for numeracy in renowned mathematician Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. So Gödel begins his 1930 famous paper called Formerly Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems.
he begins this paper by noting that mathematics throughout the first half of the 20th century has largely tried to formalise the entire field by finding the general rules and axioms from whence all operations, propositions and theorems could be derived whereas Bertrand Russell, Frager, David Hilbert and so on, other great mathematicians and logicians whereas most of them thought they could find a kind of absolute system from whence all consistent theorems could be deduced Gödel's first of two incompleteness theorems showed that every consistent system necessarily contains certain arithmetical propositions that are neither provable nor disprovable within that system Gödel says at one point in that paper
in both the systems mentioned there are in fact relatively simple problems in the theory of ordinary whole numbers which cannot be decided from the axioms in the paper it's proposition it's like a formal paper so in the proposition 6 which proposition 6 states this incompleteness theorem and it states that if a formal system P satisfies certain conditions of consistency there is at least one recursive class sign R that is neither provable nor disapprovable within P but that's just a formal way of putting it the same thing now Gödel's second I think this one's a bit slightly more makes me a bit more accessible maybe Gödel's second incompleteness theorem states that any consistent system is itself inconsistent in that the statement that the system is consistent is not included within the system.
It is not provable within the system. The statement that the system is consistent is not a theorem that's derivable within the system itself. It's a kind of meta proposition. so yeah this is proposition 11 which basically states the formula A expressing the consistency of a system P cannot be established by a proof within P so I mean basically what Gödel unearthed is the impossibility of developing a complete system of all possible propositions given that we can always locate propositions which are not derivable within the system including the statement that the system itself is consistent so on land's reading Gödel showed that there is always an excess to every
ecumenal, every system, which therefore renders each system as one partial actualisation of a larger and profoundly inconsistent numerical continuum, he says the cultural initiation of Gödel coding potential produces an instantaneous plenomic mutation slanted towards nomadic multiplicity, virtually enveloping ecumenic segmentarity into a side process of flat numerical systems. In this way, the incompleteness theorems work as a, in kind of the CCIU's terms, as a kind of materialisation of critique, of Kantian critique, in that it shows how the idealist conceit that all things can be unified through our concepts of reason is just an infinitesimal synthesis of an infinitely vaster exterior
a numerical continuum beyond all possible objects of our experience. In terms of, specifically in terms of numbers, Gödel's inconsistent proposition speaks to how the number in itself exceeds any attempt to fully synthesise it into a manifold, into a cardinal manifold, insofar as a residual of exteriority always remains. He says in the second quote, this is Land, numbers exceed the synthetic a priori because, as Gödel demonstrates, all logical systems are quasi-arbitrary subsections of arithmetical pattern. So for the CCRU, what they call Gödelization is nothing less than the decoding of platonic mathematical idealism by way of a planomic invasion from
the outside and its machining delirium. Okay, I'm going to rehearse that one more time in a slightly different form. So Landophon's another kind of even earlier model for numerical decoding in George Cantor's set theory, to the extent that set theory shows that every set, or cardinal set, can be dwarfed by an even larger set, and so on, literally ad infinitum. In his 1883 paper, Foundations of a General Theory of Manifolds, Kantor proposes an extension of real whole numbers beyond the infinite in contradiction to common misconceptions at the time regarding the nature of the infinite
and whether it's a mathematical concept Kantor calls in the paper the non-genuine infinite the non-genuine infinite refers to the mathematical orthodox view at the time of the infinite as a diminishing towards an arbitrary and ill-defined smallness or grandeur that can't be rigorously formalized. In place of the non-genuine infinite, Cantor proposes what he calls a genuine infinite by demonstrating that the first class of finite whole numbers on a number line can be extended at once infinitely and yet also rigorously, and hence mathematizable. So what's going on here is that according to Cantor's set theory, a set is a collection of
various unified elements under some law like the set of all cities or something like that, all capital cities each set has a cardinality power or number which permits us to compare and rank the sets in orders of magnitude some sets will have more elements than others now traditionally the highest cardinal is considered to be something like the set of all finite whole numbers, 1, 2, 3, etc what Kantor realized, however, is that since every number in a number line has a higher subsequent and a lower preceding number, the set of whole finite numbers, if it is to be well defined, can be no exception. In fact, the set of whole finite numbers is clearly not a member of itself, thereby leaving out at least one cardinality power from its grasp.
So we can simply take this set and add one more cardinality power to it to achieve a higher set that includes the set of all whole finite numbers and is actually larger than that set. And given that this new set that we've created, this second number class, is larger than the first of all finite numbers, Kantor calls it the first infinite set or what he also calls a left zero, which is pictured at the top. Although this set is infinite, it is well ordered and mathematically rigorous in that it is assigned a real number in the number line. namely at least one ordinal position further than the set of all real whole numbers sorry again what is the left zero? oh just the infinite set yeah it's the same thing
or the first infinite set yeah because there's going to be more infinite sets so that is the one that was before the infinite plus one yeah so yeah yeah So yeah, since every well-defined set in the number line has a higher subsequent number, even the infinite set can be grouped as an element in a larger infinite set by counting at least one more down the number line again, right? And this larger set, this second infinite set, can in turn be grouped between an even larger infinite set and so on ad infinitum, hence like n0, n1, etc. so in this way we can compare well-ordered infinite sets of paradoxically different
magnitudes even though they're all infinite without ever reaching an ultimate end point down the number line so it's not crucially for Kantor it's not that any particular it's not any particular infinite set but the infinite series of infinite sets of different magnitudes that he identifies with the absolute. That's his own term, the absolute. As it recedes even from ever larger yet still determinate infinities. So he says, this is from the paper, he says, the absolutely infinite number sequence therefore appears to me in a certain sense as an appropriate symbol of the absolute, whereas the infinity of the first number class seems to me in comparison like an entirely insignificant nothing, not in the least because I regard it as a comprehensible idea. By showing how every set of or sets does not include itself in the set and so requires a larger set to grasp it,
what Kantor basically did was expand mathematics so that it could think the infinite as a well-defined rigorous mathematical concept. For Kantor, as for the CCRU, set theory shows how we can take any well-ordered number line and proceed further down the continuum to decode its own seemingly limit number. set theory thus eliminates the ecumenoron's use of higher complex numbers to unify quantities into consistent sets insofar as it shows that even larger numbers not belonging to those consistent sets can always be rigorously ranked and defined in this way what's called Kantor's diagonal method formalises the crossing from ecumenic totalisation of numbers to their planomic scrambling and excess
the paper states diagonal methods activate an exhaustible innovative potential it exploits capabilities no greater than those presupposed by a perspective completion which it then subverts by finding an extraneous item relative to any list even an infinite one for the CCIU a left zero marks the excess of the real beyond the idealistic pretensions of the human logos to adhere the entire number line in its own conceptual grasp. As another kind of form of girdalization then, set theory confronts, again, a homogenizing sequencing of numbers with an ordinal excess, an ordinal heterogeneity. And in fact, even a left zero, as we've seen,
is not the number of highest magnitude since we can generate further infinite sets of even greater magnitude. So ultimately, set theory does not even unveil the real as an infinite set beyond all finite human stratification but as the infinite process of decoding and de-territorializing any endoarsed stratifications. In this way set theory makes ecumenic cardinality a testament to its own planomic subversion or as Land puts it, Cantor slides across schizophrenia, no most non-zone outside it's planomic now and the numbers are swarming. A left zero are vaporizers on the plane of consistency. Okay, so that's it in terms of the mathematics.
So I'm going to move now to a different kind of numbering practice, so still a numerical operation, but I think it will be hopefully at least vaguely more comprehensible. Okay, so let's do it. So at the turn of the century, the CCIU took their mecanomics in a kind of occult, esoteric direction of decoding meaning and language onto ever more abstract planes, precisely through Karbalism. now unlike orthodox Kabbalism the CCU contended that they were not uncovering a hidden absolute truth but rather uncovering the contingency
of all truths as they are decoded without exception so I think I'm just going to give a bit of background on what Kabbalism is in terms of at least the aspects that the CCU are interested in ok so the Kabbalah emerged in the 12th century and became particularly popular in the 16th century as a mystical and esoteric hermeneutics of Torah commentary. So according to Hebrew or Judaic Kabbalism, or at least one tradition, reality is divided into a tree of life, as pictured here for example, that branches off into ten different realms that separate the divine kingdom from our own physical world. The aim of Kabbalism is something like to become one with the divine by losing our individuated ego
and transcending the finitude of our flesh. One of the ways Kabbalism proposes to channel this divine beyond is by showing how letters can be assigned to numbers. Or rather, numbers can be assigned to letters. And in this way, we can discover the meaning of any unknown symbolism in sacred texts by converting the text into a numbering sequence, which can then be compared with other words in the text possessing the same numbering sequence to find esoteric meanings in sacred text hidden there, purportedly by the divine. So I'll give an example. In the most basic numbering schema, we assign the number 1 to A, 2 to B, 3 to C, and so on, right?
as well as 100 to A, 101 to B, 102 to C, and so on, for the numbers of higher magnitudes. Now, according to this schema, adding up the six letters of Hitler's name equals 666. H equals 107, I equals 108, so on. So it would thus seem as if Hitler's name could have portended his demonic potential, if only we had the wisdom of Karbala. so the idea is that by decoding human language in terms of numbers we are able to commune with the divine's hidden esoteric message behind the exoteric prose clearly the CCAU are attracted to Kabbalistic numbering practices to the extent that they explicitly
aim to decode our reason in order to annihilate the ego before a transcendent or transcendental beyond in a 2005 essay called Kabbalah 101 on the site CCRU's Hypersician blog Land notes that even the most basic numerological schema of counting A as 1 B as 2 and so on creates a kind of noise or confoundment of meaning which links once disparate words through their similar number patterns in so far as basically, in so far as Kabbalism decodes language in order to access an esoteric outside, the CCIU see it as just as valid as mathematical set theory despite its occult veneer. So
Land says in the essay, it seems to participate amphibiously in both domains mathematics and the occult, proceeding according to rigorously constructible procedures as attested by the affinity with technicization, yet intrinsically related to an outsideness. Far from being mere frivolous entertainment or an occult delusion. Land and the CCRU hold that Karbalism marks a numerically rigorous way of channeling an alien reality beyond the ordinary means of transmission. Now I think there's potentially different readings of what's going on here, but at least in my view, I think there are nonetheless two crucial differences between the CCRU-style Karbalism and Orthodox Karbalistic practices. so firstly
orthodox Kabbalists hold that they are uncovering a real divine meaning hidden in the text all along so for example the Judaic Kabbalists hold that the Hebrew language was intentionally designed by 72 scholars precisely so that certain words and phrases in the scriptural text would have similar numerical patterns in its traditional understanding then Kabbalism is about uncovering the one true interpretation of text by referring them to their numerical valuations. But as far as the CCRU are concerned, orthodox Kabbalism does not actually kind of numerise and alienate the alphabet, but rather alphabetises numbers by reassigning numbers meanings, such as, you know, for example
the idea of unity to one, the idea of division to two, the idea of conjunction to three, the idea of completion to four, and so on. In this respect, the CCIU are highly critical of Kabbalism as a kind of pre-critical dogmatic misrecognition of logical patterns for us as absolute truths hidden in the language itself. In the Kabbalah 101 essay, Land more precisely identifies four key problems with traditional Kabbalistic practices. so firstly orthodox carbalism struggles to tarry with really large numbers since it's impossible to assign a meaning to every single number if as we've seen the infinite
the number line is precisely infinite which Kantor has demonstrated secondly there's little reason to believe that these kind of meanings or archetypes assigned to the numbers are more elementary than the numbers themselves except on a rather highly anthropomorphic understanding of how numbers work. Thirdly, this assigning of meaning to numbers essentially misrecognises quantities for qualities, or purely abstract and senseless markers for signifiers laden with meaning and value. And finally, if one is said to be all important insofar as it stands for unity, and three and four are important for standing for conjunction
and completion, then the number 134 should be just important, and 1343, and 1434, and 13444, and so on. So the problem is that we find that we can devise infinite arbitrary numbers that seem to be just as important in a way which shows the privileging of one to be purely arbitrary and unjustified. not wanting to abandon Karbalism altogether however the CCAU distinguish Karbalistic numeracy that they endorse from numerology which they dismiss or land dismisses in the essay as an antinumerical anthropomorphization of alien codes in those four above ways he says the errors of numerology are only the
common failures of logic and philosophy human vanities over codings of numerical relation by intelligible forms. Archetypes or logics are unsustainable reductions reefed on the unsurpassable semiotic potency of number. So for the CCIU, numerology is the very essence of humanity's vanity project of preserving itself by finding its own values hidden everywhere, including even the most alien crevices of the number line itself. Far from uncovering some absolute truth for the CCIU, Kabbalistic numeracy as distinct from numerology decodes our language in such a way as to show the fundamental arbitrariness
of our most cherished beliefs, truths and values For example, although it is true that Hitler equals 666 according to a basic schema many other names also equal 666 quite interestingly Clinton also equals 666 why is it 666 and not 666 I don't know I mean this is the point right so while obviously Trump supporters might suggest that this is exactly an endorsement of the wisdom of numerology but there are completely different gematria or schema rather that assign numbers to letters in radically different ways which would thereby generate an entirely different matrix of codifications
connections patterns right many many schemas seem purposefully constructed so as to create numeral connections between words in religious texts precisely in fulfillment of the Kabbalist's preconceived beliefs so just to give an example the English Kabbalist Alistair Crowley himself acknowledged at one point that all numerological schema are arbitrary, even though he went on to affirm on purely pragmatic grounds that, as he puts it, it is necessary to settle on something such that bad rules are better than no rules at all. Or he says here also, all symbolism is perhaps ultimately arbitrary. All these beautiful schemes break down sooner or later, mostly sooner. The whole idea of these tables is
to supply a scheme of the universe in an alphabet, at once literary and mathematical in a sufficiently compact and convenient form to utilise in both its theoretical and practical working. For the CCIU, as for Crowley, when he's honest at least, numerological Carbalism is the misrecognition of pragmatic meaning, values and logical relations, for us as divinely ordained truths correlating to the way of the cosmos itself. While Crowley sees Carbalism as uncovering a pragmatic picture of the world for us, the CCRU conceive of it as constantly decoding all such comforting lullabies through the numbers alien power. Although the codes that Karbalism uncovers are
purely arbitrary, this very arbitrariness hints at the real beyond humans by moving from the exoteric to the esoteric or from anthropomorphic meanings to alien asignifications. If Karbalism actually works as a theory fiction. It's a theory fiction. Because even as each code it uncovers is fictitious in a sense, its very fictitiousness theorises the way that human thought is but one contingent code among many potentially infinite others which can be ceaselessly decoded on end through a different numerological schema. So far from anthropomorphising the underlying reality, Carbalism, in the CCIU's hands at least
dehumanizes all moral and ideological valuations of the real by seeing it as nothing but a ceaseless numerical decoding of all anthropomorphic sense and signification so the first quote states Carbalism destines each and every strategic appropriation to self-parity and derision beginning with the agenda of theocratic restoration that attended its ludicrously robed baptismal rites even God was unable to make sense of it yeah so it's just to go back a bit to the mathematics much as girdle exposes every system to contain an excess that subverts its own claims to absolute consistency so does karbalism show every system of meaning to contain other numerical patterns that undermine
its exoteric signification so just like girdleization karbalism does not decode to reach an original, unproblematic substrata of meaning. It decodes precisely to show all substrata of meaning to be dependent on subjectively decided configurations of value and numbers. Seen in this way, any attempt to reify one esoteric meaning as the one true fixed meaning is purely illusory, since this too can be decoded by another arbitrary schema, and the latter as well, and so on, in an infinite regress for more sense. Or as the second quote puts it, any rigorization of Kabbalah can only be a floating city with each and every definition, argument and manifesto continually carving off into unmasterable numerical currents
and alogical resonances. So again, rather than being reducible to logical reference in our minds as per traditional Kabbalism for CCRU, esoteric codes are ever more intensive de-territorializations of these logical reference ad infinitum. and that therein lies what I see as the first key difference between CCIU-Cabalism and Orthodox numerology namely while the latter Orthodox numerology hunts for fixed meanings between the lines that could function as a new doctrine or a new dogma CSCIU emphasised the very process of decoding itself as a kind of, not a doctrine but a program, a programmatic
for channeling the real of absolute detail to realisation in the last quote, this is from the CCRU blog absolute has a single rigorously non-figurative attribution which is to de-territorialization, it is made in several ways and always subtracted ok, now as I see it, I think the second key difference between the CCRU style Kabbalism and traditional numerology is that whereas traditional numerology purports to commune with a transcendent divinity, the CCIU hold that decoding communes with not a transcendent divinity, but nothing less than nothingness or death itself, in which no divine spirit could reside, not even Hegel's absolute spirit.
Yeah, and I think it's no wonder that the emergence of the mystical tradition, the Kabbalistic tradition, coincides with the invention of the notion of the golem. You know, the golem, an artificially created human-like creature that is able to foresee the future by being granted this forbidden knowledge directly by God. On some accounts, it is precisely the hidden knowledge uncovered by numbering practices that provides the secret formula to create the golem. And at the same time as the golem is said to possess a practically divine wisdom, it is also feared as highly dangerous insofar as it amounts to the decimation of our entire ego's worldview in the here and now. Of course, the golem is only dangerous
in that it exposes our present ego to be a finite or fragment of the divine Godhead underlying all things. According to this tradition, then, the point of numerology would be something like to conjure a golem with the prosthetic knowledge of the divine heights of the tree of life to which the Kabbalist is striving to return. while for numerology the ego melts away only to be mapped onto an ever greater divine ego the greatest ego of all god which the golem channels for CCIU carbalism the ego is utterly wiped out by an artificial not a golem but an artificial machinic intelligence's endless decoding of all such anthropic stratifications here the CCIU are
drawing upon the idea that modernity's accelerating technological advancement will ultimately lead to the generation of what mathematician I.J. Good, among others, speculate would be an artificial intelligence which would be smarter than humans because it would have larger memory capacity, processing power, and feel no hunger, thirst, or exhaustion to slow it down. Consequently, this AI would be able to improve itself better than any human scientist or engineer could by rewriting its code all by itself, or in some sense decoding itself. And moreover, the improved AI would be even smarter, such that it would be able to rewrite and decode its own code yet again, and that even more advanced AI could decode itself again and so on ad infinitum.
So by recursively rewriting its own code, the CCRU argues that AI's intelligence explosion would mark the point of absolute deterritorialisation, absolute decoding beyond the human security system. And therein lies why Karbalism is able to channel the AI god to come, just as numerology channels the golem. Namely, the way that the Karbalist ceaselessly decodes language in ways ever more abstracted from human sense perfectly mirrors how the AI golem to come will recursively rewrite its own code on end to access ever more intensive planes of hyperintelligence. so on the slide Land writes its situation is analogous and perhaps more than analogous to that of a spontaneous artificial intelligence
achieving partial lucidity only as a consequence of tidal pragmatic trends that ensure an integral default of self-mastery so yeah I don't think it's any coincidence that Karbalism became popular precisely in the 16th century when as Land puts it techno-capitalism finally breached the ramparts of Western monotheism. Seen in light of capitalism's correlation to technology's future intelligence explosion, the point of capitalism is not to uncover a fixed primitive substratum of divine meaning, but just to endlessly decode all meaning, language and reason into alien deathscapes utterly subtracted from human sense. Precisely in order, in other words, to commune
with a future AI golem, which is nothing other than an exponentially more intensive carbunistic decoding. And hence the CCIU's interest in carbunistic numbering practices. Its positive feedback loop of linguistic decoding proffers a practice by which to channel a kind of divinity, but not of the golem, traditional golem, but of a future artificial superintelligence as it endlessly rewrites its own code. Okay. Yeah, so we're going to obviously look at this AI in more detail next week. Yeah, so, I mean, I can take a couple questions or comments. But I just note that after the questions, the CCIU have this game that they're really into called Decadence or Sub-Decadence,
which is basically a kind of game in which you summon demons or names of demons and so on. So Amy has volunteered to be our demonologist for tonight. so if anyone's free afterwards feel free to you're all invited to come to the Clyde down the road and if you want to find out the name of your demon come along but yeah if there's any comments we've probably got like 5 minutes this stage it was great man yeah any other this stage would you say that the bar with the numerology might have seen the world for us and this is the takeaway to the world not for us? Yeah, I mean, the way that they use numerology,
which is distinct from traditional numerology, is the idea. And it's just that it perfectly... It's weird because numerological decoding of exoteric language into esoteric meaning is seemingly, it's exactly the same kind of structure as what Deleuze and Gautai call deterritalisation, decoding or it's the exact same structure as AI's, this model of AI's recursively self-improving itself by decoding itself over and over again. Yes, I think that's why they're attracted to Carbolism in particular. Any... So as I said that... Oh yeah, sorry. I just want to add that in the CCI user material,
where A is 10, 17 is 26, 666 actually equals the cybernetic cultural reason. It's not accurate. Yeah, well, that is demonically appropriate for sure. And when you're saying that the, was it a thank you minute that has, or one of the... It's 666 pages in the first edition. By no coincidence, probably. that must have been an editing nightmare for Robin yeah yeah exactly good point yeah as I said that last half will be the most intense it gets so it's next week we're going to delve into the kind of more literary mythology that the CCIU develop and look at