NCCP 700-1016 Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality Session VIII

Hello and welcome to the final session of Quernomics, Path Dependency and Semiotic Fatality with Nick Land. Here he is. Can you hear me, Nick? Yes, yes. I sort of suddenly lost video quality, but I don't think anything disastrous has happened. Can you still hear me? Yeah, you're loud and clear. OK, that's great. OK, hi, everybody. Congratulations on getting this far to making it

to this point in things. So obviously, this is our last session. And I'm assuming a lot of what we might want to do this time is kind of wrap up discussion on all kinds of things that have occurred from either of the two modules. But I want to introduce one new element. I'm not sure it will be new to everybody. but I think it's a necessary piece of semi-autic machinery to throw into the mix, really. and it addresses the question if QWERTY is a kind of spontaneously organized

massively distributed cultural communication um how do we start uh getting a solid sense upon the the code that we're dealing with if we if there's any i know the word communication is is something that from the delers and quatari side is a is a problematic term but but if if we're in a mode if a kind of preliminary cryptographic mode and we're dealing with some kind of alien signal how do we start in some systematic way processing that signal and how it works and um the the let me just make a

crucial link here which is I hope everyone has seen Amy's diagram it's it wasn't it's not I think available on the actual NCI and P site but I've got I've been sticking it up all over the place it's I've when I did my own uf blog announcement of the course I put it up there quite large I hope it's legible I don't to be honest I don't think I think once you get what it's what it's saying you it's not that it needs to be read more than seen but it's important to

understand what it is that you are actually seeing in this diagram and this This is really my attractor for this early first part of the session, just to try and get across what this diagram is doing, why it's important, why it has, I think, the claim to be the fundamental and authoritative diagrammatic, I'll say, representation of what QAnomics is about in this sense that we've been exploring in the second module.

Obviously, the first module, I don't think you would need this. It would seem extravagant and bizarre and perhaps a little disturbing to have this diagram introduced when dealing with the history of typewriting machines and the lock-in of the QWERTY keyboard. But I think when we're at the stage we are now, and we're actually trying to, rather than talk about the lock-in of some kind of distribution in general of which QWERTY is simply an entirely arbitrary example when we're moving beyond that and say well given that this is what we've got how to actually work diagram becomes absolutely

crucial and um at the risk of boring everybody I think um I'll go back to things that I've said a lot in various different times and just apply it in this starting with the fact here in fact I won't I won't stop there I'll take one step further back and I'll and I'll read a section from the Geology of Morals if that's okay and which we'll come back to and this comes late in the in the essay and it's talking after having

done itself primarily with the strata it starts to talk about the outside of the strata in a slightly more focused way and and it's this is on page 70 of my addition the plane of consistency retains just enough of the strata extract from them variables that operate on the plane of consistency as its own functions the plane of consistency or plenomenon is in no way an undifferentiated aggregate of unformed matters but neither is it a chaos of formed matters of every kind so yeah i'll go back over it rather than trying to

gloss it as well as we read it it is true that on the plane of consistency where there are no longer forms or substances content or expression respective and relative deterritorializations but beneath the forms and substances of the strata the plane of consistency or the abstract machine constructs continuums of intensity their their emphasis there it creates continuity for intensities that it extracts from different forms and substances beneath contents expressions the plane of consistency or the abstract machine emits and combines particle signs that set the most asignifying of signs to functioning in the most de-territorialized particles beneath relative movements the plane of consistency or the abstract machine performs conjunctions of flows of

of deterritorialization that transform the respective indexes into absolute values. The only intensities known to the strata are discontinuous, bound up in forms and substances. The only particles are divided into particles of contents and articles of expression. The only deterritorized flows are disjointed and neutralized. Continuum of intensities combined emission of particles or particle science conjunction of de-territorialized flows these are the three factors proper to the plane of consistency they are brought about by the abstract machine and are constitutive of de-stratification so I don't think that this discourse is easily tractable it I think I think it's

demanding but I think it's possible to make some progress with it and I think it's very deeply connected with our problem or our task in this in this module especially of the course so how do we go about systematically engaging this material I mean simultaneously the text that I've just read and our problem of the what is the actual semiotic the code of the of the of the QWERTY apocalypse and as I'm sure people might predict or

anticipate my inclination immediately is to treat it as a critical problem in the in the in the traditional sense and to um move towards a solution through the construction of a diagonalization matrix and I want to say straight away that I think um de-stratification and diagonalization i'm going to treat as being basically synonymous so how so how does does this very abstract critical apparatus um um operate in the in

the context that we now find ourselves well i think perhaps surprisingly there's an extremely cogent way that this of the problem of QWERTY into a piece of critical machinery, into critique or immanentization can take place. And that involves a series of translation exercises which I think were especially touching upon last week.

The clue is a connection between the fracturing, breaking of intensities on the one hand, and consistency in ordering between the two systems that we have available. which is to say that if you're going to transmit a model of broken intensity with the implicit coding resources that we have in QWERTY, given the fact that the alphabet exists as a precursor,

and therefore we have this double semiotic system implicit, is that if any semiotic assemblage is not consistently ordered in the two systems, then it is actually communicating a specific breakage of intensity. so if we were going to do our diagonalization matrix it would not be I think extremely difficult we have we have of course I'm going to

treat it minimalistically which I think is always helpful and is in the best philosophical tradition of this problem so we have our grid of of um four cells two by two that grid is set by the fact that we have consistent and inconsistent pairs of signs in both the alphabetical and the qwerty arrangement so any particular it's if it's Again in the sake of simplicity, I don't think we lose anything Methodically in doing this because things can then be built up systematically from this basis if you break

things down to the combinatoric atoms You can pair each character with each of the other characters and So you have a total possibility Possibility if we're taking the whole of the alpha new mix series, it's a total of 1260 pairs of characters and if we're just if we're just dealing with the alphabetical section it's 650 pairs and There there might be reasons to take either these but I think that the is not affected particularly by that decision

as long as it's made clearly. And each of those pairs of characters is going to fit into a cell in our 2x2 grid. It's going to actually be alphabetically ordered or disordered and in the QWERTY arrangement it's also going to be ordered and disordered. So any particular combination of characters is going to either be disordered in both, alphabetically but disordered in QWERTY, disordered in QWERTY but disordered alphabetically, or ordered both in QWERTY and alphabetically.

I'm going to just provide another little link here. which I think might be it's unclear what this would be without the context that I've just given but maybe in this context if it's clear so the content of this is encoded comprehensively within amy's diagram um it's it's i think and i'm saying this without huge confidence i'm not sure

what's at stake in this anyway so i'm not gonna agonize i think it's complete um i've tried to be systematic about it and one of the interesting things in trying to complete this this um of the question the complete set of letter groups which are do not involve repeated elements that are consistent in both the alphabetically and in quality and it's a surprisingly small set that's not just two letter groups that's the that's the complete set of all groups it

obviously falls off quite fast because to be a three letter combination to be consistent is obviously much more demanding than for two better group to be consistent and as you get longer that becomes more and more constraining so just to get back to what our what our diagonalization matrix looks like this if we're just doing it with two letter combinations we have a list in each of the four cells I'm gonna take it and this might be something people

would want to argue about but I'm gonna take it just again out of the critical tradition that the first cell elements that are disordered both in the alphabet and in QWERTY can be basically discarded you know it's this is the this is the cell that I think corresponds in the Kantian system to analytic a posteriori judgments that they're just it's just there for the sake of conceptual completion but they but it has no content it's a it's this kind of null the null cell in the

in the system the the ones that are i think interesting for us coming out of the strata is that the ordered in one but disordered in the other, the two cells like that, that again, if we're using just a Kantian analogy, correspond to the traditional judgments of analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori judgments. those are the pincers that those are the strata those that is the vocabulary the combinatorial

elements of fractured intensities of discontinuous fractured intensities and what you find in the final cell, the diagonal line on this table, are what Deleuze and Guattari refer to in this thing emphatically as we've seen as continuums of intensity. They are consistent in both dimensions. So they extract from the strata, they extract from systems of discontinuous intensity um um a this uh double consistency that means that they um

are outside the pincers they don't break into structures of content and expression forms and substances codes or particles all of this all of this stratic articulation is so So Amy's diagram, you can see this is a diagrammatic representation of exactly the same conceptual system that we've just been talking in philosophical and in sort of paralinguistic terms because

can any any continuum of intensity we know from Deleuze and Guattari's writings if not from elsewhere is going to be a consistent series of envelopments that that's every intensity when you have a when you have a conjunction of intensity it is always a relation of envelopment and and and and um are therefore these uh these sets these continuums that have that are divided internally by thresholds and that when

you cross these these thresholds it internal to the intensity um there is a change of nature from from one state to another within a continuous quantitative access with quantitative obviously in the intensive sense a quantity being that which cannot divide without changing in nature as opposed to the stratic sense of quantity where it's opposed to quality and quantification in the strata index is always a machine of homogenization standardization regularization that allows that allows units to be

aggregated without changing the nature of the system considered so on the diagram we can see any consistent series of envelopments that happen on that correspond to a in the um in the diagonal box of of our um diagonalization matrix and they will correspond to a term in a dictionary of consistent alpha quotient consistent terms all three of those things are all interchangeable and inter translatable so actually my

inclination at this point if it does that seemed to be slacking up too much to people is to pitch out of to address anything that people think is but I don't be interested in what people how people want to elaborate off of this question or other questions that we've been I think I think this machinery that we've looked at however briefly within these three aspects is the is the basic channel of cryptographic access to the QWERTY system and to what the quernomics are in there for in a certain sense this

for me at least a capstone of quernomics as an enterprise it sort of gives it it gives us our basic definition basic theoretical structure for what we're doing dealing with with this this sign system I think I'll hand it over to people now

So kind of on the topic or as a way of triangulating this in terms of diagonalization and what the sort of proper practice of dealing with this immunitizing problematic is, I was thinking actually like a half an hour ago I kind of realized that's the AQ encoder the anglossic cabala encoding of various phrases and words and so forth is something which has to be is obligately synthetically constructed because even if you use a computer to like you know match and produce encodings and so forth

you know it's not going to be able to render anything but some super set of of possible things from which someone will then go and have to check and put things together and code them to certain words. It's intrinsically synthetic network that needs another machine to be producing it and to be produced in tandem with it. And then that is precisely analogous to the way in TX, the natural number line has to be synthetically constructed. Like you have to go through the process of counting primes and factorizing in order to do it in the first place. so it requires this machinical loop. And that sort of definitely reminded me of what you said about anti-romanticism in relation to diagonalization, that synthetic process. I'm just wondering, is there a way to cash that out in terms of chronomics as being the same,

like especially with these letter pairings and sort of how to use them together or how to manipulate their consistency? Is there like a similarity? Is that another example of something that has to be synthetically done? If that makes sense? Yes, this is an interesting thing. Look, of the examples that you've given in talking about this, Jake, when you were talking about alphanumeric Kabbalism, is the one that I would sort of most... I can see absolutely clearly that the TX system is like you say, you just simply don't have the number line as something sort of intuitively given in that system.

and can you can I just kind of get from you again what what you think the analogous element is it seemed from what you're saying that you're saying it's the selective process from that there's the selective process is somehow the synthetic process in that is that is that I just like so that you yeah here is day or well I guess it's yours like your a Q dictionary and sort of the process of, so I pick a specific phrase that like comes up in conversation that just strikes me, I put it in there and I get like a series of encodings. There's no way for those strings of connection with a particular encoding to be constructed in any way other than synthetically, right? Like even, like you have to, someone, you have to spontaneously bring in like an actual

exterior impulse to check a particular number, to check a particular phrase and phrases in particular become part of like a dictionary of this yes the dictionary I guess is the right way to put the dictionary for a or any particular dictionary has to be path dependent and synthetically constructed is obligate is it an obligate synthesis is involved no matter how many actors are involved in constructing it even if they use computational tools you know sophisticated ones for doing the the head, like it has to be constructed that way. And that just reminded me, and like triadically as well, sort of between the numbers and especially like between two agents or any, I guess between the numerical series, the sort of disunified agent,

which is anyone else using or constructing this dictionary and my insertion into it or like search query into it form this sort of triadic progression progression in terms of constructing particular series of equivalences that sort of spark semantic meaning or something. And that seems to function both as like within that general matrix of diagonalization and in terms of the synthetic diagonal, which is the construction of the natural number line in Tx, which has no natural existence in it. Right. yes I mean there's something I'm inclined to throw in here actually because it's obviously that the Kant synthetic analytic distinction is is is not uncontroversial as we know you know and

especially within the analytic tradition there's been a tendency I think obviously the most famous landmark on this is Quine's essay calling it into question to really sort of try and dismantle the whole thing and say it's badly founded and I don't think Kant is very helpful in certain regards on this especially when he's in the area closest to us on saying that these elementary arithmetical calculations you know his exam seven plus five equals twelve is um is for he says patently synthetic because it has content that isn't analytically available in any of the elements

there i'd i don't think he's making the strongest case uh for for for the distinction in doing that and I think we now have a much stronger supportive structure for the analytic synthetic distinction that comes out of asymmetric cryptography and it's obviously very close actually to the Zenitation example you give. Yes, Wan Jung is totally right. Where these cryptographic functions, trapdoor functions, now they're extremely useful to us because obviously a trapdoor

function is actually the same thing as a lock-in event. You know between, if we go back to the start of our course the whole the whole historical lock-in structure is is deeply deeply isomorphic with the with the function of trapdoor with it with trapdoor functions in cryptography and and the classic example of a trapdoor function is Asia so you you have an assy a symmetry and I apologize to people if this is all very obvious but it just I'll be really quick so there's this crucial and crypt cryptographically extremely valuable and functional characteristic

which is that it's vastly simpler to do the arithmetical production of two numbers to multiply any two numbers by each other compared to the task of factorizing those numbers and the or sorry factorizing the resultant product and which which takes a lot a lot more work and work here I think is in exactly the same sense so it's it connects without difficulty to the way that work is used in in modern cryptic cryptography to do with with proof of work so the work you have to do is is exactly this kind of is the the the reverse slope the painful slope of this

asymmetric arithmetical relation yes one-way hashes there's a whole you know a set of arithmetical possibilities for this yes if we've got I didn't say anything about SHA but SHA is completely appropriate to this cryptographic hashes in general as as Adam says and so what I want to propose is that this the trapdoor function is the most solid and reliable of an analytic synthetic

distinction that the analytic side is the side that is relatively effortless and the synthetic side is the is the difficult side is that is this kind of the super abundance of difficulty on one side of the trapdoor function is the the sort of cryptographic grasp of the analytic synthetic distinction so anyway sorry I probably shouldn't go any further down this line but it's just to say it seems obviously relevant to the kind of things that Jake is saying here that we want to find if we're going to talk about an analytic synthetic distinction at work in these in these various systems we want to find where

there is some kind of trapdoor function at work where the production um vastly more effortless than the um tempted obviously to say analysis but that would be extremely unhelpful then the decomposition or or the actual thrashing out of the puzzle set by that product. I think the blockchain or the cryptographic process of the blockchain, I really love in comparison there because it's kind of a zipping together of three processes

of in tandem analysis and synthesis, which is value, time, and cryptographic step, essentially or the process of finding primes. And so by zipping those together, by being able to equate the steps in the equation to signs of time or signs of the time, and then put that into a value system is kind of what creates the machine. it's that triad of syntheses, like thermodynamic, cryptographic, and computational, I guess, would be the time because it's computational time. Those syntheses zip together are what allows it to do actual work and to expand itself as an autonomous abstract machine. Yeah. So looking for that place where those three zip together, which with QWERTY, maybe you

just throw out as layout you know alphabetic ordering and QWERTY ordering something along those lines you could point it out in other places as well like sort of three-plane intersections so so I think that that's right and you can see that we're actually always talking about time production time synthesis when you when you when you generate through a tapped or trapdoor function an asymmetry and therefore an irreversibility you're actually looking at the production of time and so as we'd always expect from the transcendental

so this our analytic synthetic problem and the sort of philosophical investigation transcendental analysis of time turn out to be the same thing with a robustness that can obviously be carried into history wherever we see a lock-in phenomenon we're actually seeing not only something happening in time we're seeing chronogenesis actually happen in that in that process. And sort of similarly to the linear asymmetric sort of like lock-in providing this basis for cronogenesis, it seems like that as a secondary product you could also say produces

other not as simply linearly asymmetric forms of time that are like on the keyboard. Like in terms of hands pounding things out on the keyboard, that is sort of a moment like a time of corby. And then if you look at what makes it so, like what kinds of associations are being struck or being keyed every time these movements happen, they're dictated by these recursive loop relationships among the keys in terms of their sort of double asymmetry. their asymmetry in each direction creates these loops of these loops of keys which define a sort of consistent uh time or sort of time strata of the keyboard which is itself made possible by the

sort of global asymmetry of lock-in chronogenesis yes sort of a stratic stack there i guess yes and if and if we're expecting it if we're expecting then this system to talk about itself then it should be able to actually um it should actually be able to model locking processes so it's not only that it is itself the outcome of a of a lock-in process but the phenomena in general of lock-in of these asymmetric thresholds becomes something that is is a kind of content for the for the code potential that we're we're dealing with

Is that the articulation of two senders, or is it more necessarily more complex than that? You have to just lead us off on a tangent. Yeah, I have no follow-up, sorry. So I think Theodore was saying he couldn't hear you, Jake, on your point. I was waiting for you. I was just saying, sorry. Is that the relationship of two senders, that sort of double asymmetry that makes a basis for encoding possible?

We said sort of like a message sent from X to X. And then sort of what are we, so as the, again, analysts is like now an overdetermined term, but as the navigator. I don't know, I think that's a complicated question. Isn't it it's a really complicated question because obviously the message the basic message is the actual cryptographic Protocol so to speak in that is itself It's self encrypted and so what our initial task is actually to engage in this in this initial decryption process, which is just actually to to to try and get some purchase on the actual cryptographic protocol itself and

so then the question of well are we dealing with messages in terms of particular applications protocol I don't know that it's a really interesting question and I don't know I mean you could obviously say everything every semiotic a whole a whole archive of alphanumeric semiotic systems is is then retrospectively structured as as set of messages that can be approached through this I think yeah

So if you're tempted by the extreme quernomic thesis, once you have actually begun to kind of hack the actual cryptographic protocol that the Quernet Apocalypse has delivered to us, then you would just be running through your library archive, running all of those concrete semiotic systems through this protocol. And the whole of a culture would now have this unconscious, this quantumic unconscious, that is being probed through this system.

but I think we're I'm taking it we're not there yet you know in the sense that I think we're in a more preparatory stage that that might be presumptuous of me to say that and of course what any of you are up to but so that was just my default hypothesis yeah and I think the idea is like before that idea of a preparatory stage was to sort of rather than figure a two place relation to like start with of sort of us probing on one end through the system versus this unconscious that it's risen if we sort of like end the figure that I post in the sidebar is like

if our entire semiotic archive was found you know stripped of context or just like honored something by aliens what message or what set of messages would it be so if we imagine ourselves as like sort of deciding what is what triangle are we forming yeah this sort that would this x's message to do this exit because even if aliens found it it wouldn't be a set of messages to them right or it wouldn't be a mess of messages from anyone like any patterns they might extract from and any you know would be sent by so I don't know where that goes but it's a way of seeing ourselves as trying no no definitely I think that's really really good I mean like if our alien if all cultural continuity is extinct except

for the fact that this archive still exists at least in sizable fragments and all our aliens have is a few legible keyboards and the alphabet or the alphanumeric series could they on that basis what could they on that basis alone extract from the archive of all alphanumerically encoded information deposits and again I think that the extreme economic thesis would say they

could they could ultimately extract everything you know but they would extract it from her backdoor where all our conventions of kind of communication would be would be embedded within this kind of cultural machine code of how this of how this actually has been almost like geologically geologically deposited through this through this implicit this implicit I'll say discourse on stratification which you know they

can they can get an exact they could do an exact complicated quasi geological diagram of all of these messages consisting purely of stratograms that's we know and within those stratograms that they I mean the implication of the of the extreme chronomic thesis is within those stratograms would be contained everything that is a topic geological moral so that would include the whole of the alloplastic stratum and therefore within that the whole of the whole history of interest species human communication but approached out of the

machine rather than approached out of human cultural as we as we ourselves see yet. Can I throw in perhaps a really basic question at that point? It does seem connected to where we are. Where are the morals in the geology of morals? Sorry, Adam, can you just repeat that question? Because your audio is terrible again. Oh, no. Okay. So it's a different location. now no it's suddenly brilliant yeah okay the actual question was where are the morals in the geology of morals because I can see the geo over the place I see

the call out to Nitschka all over the place but the actual so beyond that being would play on the sort of download of the entire cultural archive sort of question so I thought I'd just be interested to yes no it's a good question actually it's a very good question um you know sort of as you say taking for granted that there's a play on each of that can't be that can't be the end of the question so you assume they have some positive reason to preserve that word yes and I don't know I I've now prejudiced myself

by what I've just been saying you know and so I'm not sure I can any longer attain the level of detachment that would be required to to answer that question well I mean do you have any any I was struggling with it but I think it's an interesting angle yeah I'm not sure if lose track which one is Jake and which one is Theo in the yes they're hidden behind us I don't see on me right the lobster of the sidebar here but judgment yeah yeah um is actually a really good angle on it um so I'm not sure if if they want to

in and it's the question more coherently than I think I can at this point I mean my only guess really is the judgments of God thing The good sir, that's the only thing in the text that I remember that jumps out at me is potentially having a moral equivalency irrelevance They become like encoded commandments after the, you know, that's sort of the structure of this. Oh, you just did it. You just turned the chronomic analysis of ATP into a search for, like, law.

Thanks, Adam. Nice. it's also like methodologically taken from the genealogy of morals because it's a genetic account of of individuation in a way wouldn't you say like it's a it's a genealogy of like well yeah I mean to use the language that Nick was using last week compensatory structures so I guess there's a methodological link right yes but geological morals is in a way saying that we're not dealing purely with something ethological

in talking about morals we're not talking about anything different when we're talking in Jake's terms we're talking about judgments of God all the way down so we don't have to fundamentally change our transcendental conceptual apparatus when we cross out of the realm of recognizable human cultural concerns. I mean, is that in tune with what you're saying, Amy, or am I just taking it off in a setting? Yeah, no, that's exactly what I was saying. But I also have like a deeper, weirder interpretation of this, because I've been obsessing over it all week. Great. after going to a philosophy conference last week where I did a panel with a

friend who I often collaborate with and we always write these ridiculously synergetic papers and we haven't realized how close they connect until we actually give them and it turned out that he was giving his paper after me about the geology of morals and the gates of the silver key and the kind of like Nicole Carter Challenger story. And he was obsessed with this line at the end, which talks about Challenger's poison garden. Right. And he's writing a kind of thesis on sorcery and Nietzsche. And the first thing he connected it to was the fact that Nietzsche's share house, his first share house in Baloo was

known locally as the poison hut and had somehow threaded this through Deleuze's enigmatic references to Nietzsche's secret in some of the essays that are published in the desert islands and Lucelieu apparently having said that Nietzsche's secret was without giving away what it was that it was somehow connected to the horror of the eternal return and so that kind of started this whole weird line of investigation about this kind of reference to the poison garden which led to me like talking about this kind of methodological way of dealing with these different kinds of individuation whether they're sort of moral, cultural, chemiophysical, biological, alloplastic

as they're kind of termed in this particular chapter, led to me looking at the French version of the chapter and it's really interesting because the line about this particular line, so it's on like the second last page, in my version it's 81 but in the more common edition it's 73. The line that says, how does it go? Disarticulated, deterritorialized, Challenger muttered that he was taking the earth with him mysterious world his poison garden which in French reads like this which is really weird

because it's the poison garden is jadon venomous two different words for poison venomous one that is applicable only to plants and to the plant world in the vegetable world and one that is applicable to animals. And so the French for the plant world is veninue, which is not this one, and the French for poisonous animals is veninue. So it's weird because they've deliberately referred to this kind of organic place, the garden, as being poisonous in the way that an animal is poisonous. So there's kind of you know this idea that there's a sort of the garden that he's going to is this kind of cross animal vegetable assemblage or it doesn't

have a kind of differentiation between those two ways of thinking about things which kind of corresponds with the methodological position. But it's also interesting because when you think like a French person would think about it as the garden having some kind of sentience, a sort of like inhuman will, a creepy like a malevolent kind of will. So there's this strange way of referring to the garden. And you know there's a whole other bunch of weird lines that that led me to follow including references to Challenger having a poisonous a poisonous arm

comportment or something like that in the Arthur Conan Doyle books, here it is. Right. But anyway, I'm in the midst of this like kind of idea that there's some kind of nature conspiracy going on in this particular chapter. But that's as far as I've gotten with that particular way of thinking of it, Adam. But I am, yeah, without going, it's like somewhere that's even worse than that. So I'll just stop now. Sorry, somewhere worse, somewhere worse than what? Somewhere worse than where you've taken us so far. Than that particular associated, yeah. I don't know, when you say worse, can I just at least get an abstract sense of what worse would mean in this case?

Well, there's two levels of worstness. I can share the first one because it supports, it actually supports the extreme quenomic hypothesis really well, disconnected from Nietzsche. But the other strange thing that turned up reading the French original was that Challenger Then, a little bit further down the passage. So, Challenger, or what remained of him, slowly hurried towards the plane of consistency, following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into

an assemblage setting as a drum gate, the particle clock, with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute. The figure slumped ugly into a post just guess the human and began a curious fascinated sort of shuffle towards the coffin-shaped clot etc. So I started trying to answer your question Nick about what what happened in three novellas and kind of started with the um the clue about body posture. There's a line a little bit further on about the inhuman and posture of Challenger. Yes. And reading it through the lines with their different forms of the secret that are sort of taxonomized in the three novellas chapter. But I found this particular

really interesting difference in the French translation when I was trying to figure out what the hell the drum gate was. So in the French, it gives this. So a drum gate is a portes d'embaure, which is literally in French it's a gate drum or door drum, but it actually means in French a revolving door. So you basically, the machinic assemblage that leads to the plane of consistency is described as a revolving door which you can probably like diagram like this

completely connects up with the rotating beacons and this is really like the fact that this is in the Wikipedia article that I just posted it says like I assume that this is enough of a platitude about revolving doors that you can put it in a Wikipedia article it says the sense de rotation de ces portes, et dans la plupart de ces cas contraires sens, les aiguilles du montre, which translates as, in most cases, the rotation of the doors goes in the opposite direction to the hands of a clock. Right. Which I thought was interesting. Yes, yes. Suggestive, yes. And then I guess that's level two.

And I kind of put together a little sort of description of what happened, which I can post into the sidebar. I mean, everyone, it's clear you're on this, but everyone remembers this thing about the... oh i always lose this thing this thing are uh the machining assemblage rotating in all direction like beacons yes about 73 of mine well i've sort of repeated so much last

week so maybe i don't need to but obviously this It seems like beacons definitely seems to connect with this clock this clock issue a lot, doesn't it? Yeah, I checked it out on the AQ and immediately got a trifecta of 245s which was the first time that's ever happened. It blew me away. But it gave me this. right so I'm going to no I couldn't I couldn't yes I mean and then I guess that kind of leads to

like a question that maybe kind of connects back with Jake's question about what the plane of consistency is and how it's connected to time um are you are you um yes were you suggesting in the in the last session that the number the like the number line is the plane of consistency here um and that the the escape route out of the um the the letter strata is through the reading beacons which lead you back to the kind of um the homologue in in terms of the 69 of the number line um yeah i mean obviously i want to be cautious about it a little bit

but yeah when you're looking at it in these terms it's really compelling of course because you you do have them you have it is actually literally a plate of consistency in in that it when approached from that angle yeah So sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, no. I mean, that was the, I was asking that question. So then is that, I guess the thing, this is maybe just a like understanding Delores and Guattari question. Yes, Adam's thing. Sorry I lost your audio there. challenges, he gets his info from his friends, the Dogons. Is there just one

plane of consistency? So I mean if this is the plane of consistency that we have in a particular Transcendental Cognitive Engine, is it, is it like, can you kind of understand that particular way of grasping the plane of consistency as something that is um is consistent across all strata like they all come back to this particular plane of consistency or is it just applicable to this to our particular query arrangement i i don't know i think it's a really difficult question this because obviously it's a map isn't it i mean in the sense that so so what we're dealing with is already in a certain sense within a system of cognitive stratification that is threatening that if we are over hasty or or incautious about the whole thing

to to escape into a certain type of transcendence like that um um you know it would obviously be a mistake to just think because we have here a map of the plane of consistency that that some arrival or some unconditional rival at the plane of consistency has taken place. But on the other hand, obviously, we also can't rest on some comfortable division between the map and the territory. That is itself also totally stradic, and it would be a pathetically inadequate map

if the map of the plane of consistency was itself just entirely stratic so to be honest i'm i'm sort of tormented on this point a little bit exactly how you know what it means really to say that it is if it if it is If we take the extreme thesis and it is a fully transcendental horizon of our cultural system, then it has to connect with the real plane of consistency, surely. I mean, I don't see that we can avoid that conclusion.

and look at and so what is the what does that connection what is that connection well that connection clearly is the story that is being told in the georgia morals isn't it i mean if you know challenger challenger is mapping the strata and in doing so is himself of on this stationary voyage to the plane of consistency and but it but that again is folded into representation so you can sort of it it can be taken into comforting terms yeah sorry I'm just babbling I know I'm not really adding anything to this this question

Well, there's this, like, I mean, the very last bit of the page, they refer to, they call it the mechanosphere or the risosphere. And then, maybe tellingly on... Can you hear me a little bit better? Hello? I can hear you clearly. I can hear you. Okay. So... The plane of consistency is then referred to as the mechanosphere or the risosphere at the very end. And on page 69 of the Geology of Morals, they write the different figures, they're talking about this kind of rejecting this idea that there's a sort of cosmic evolution.

And they said the different figures of content and expression are not stages. There's no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same mechanosphere, which kind of makes you think it's just one. And then I was thinking about the fact that they use this particular Lovecraft story, and they use it again later on in a couple of other chapters. This is actually not even in level two of West Ness, but this is kind of working into weird historical speculation now. I was reading about Lovecraft writing this, and apparently he was possibly reading theosophy. He had connections, family connections to the Masons. And there's also this sort of contentious story

that his wife, Sylvia, hung out with Crowley in New York and perhaps communicated some things to him. But there's this definite like sense of the journey of the adept climbing the tree of life and going through ego death happening in the background and through the gates of the silver tree, the silver key, sorry. So there's this kind of combinatorial array embedded in that through like the kind of all of these particular mystical teachings that deal with the tree of life, which is the decimalism through the 10 sephirah. and so there's this kind i mean obviously there's a decimalism in our plane of consistency here too so there's i feel like there's almost this kind of very um vague haunting of this particular set

of 10 elements in the story as it's told as well funneled in through through lovecraft which maybe backs that theory up in some contentious way yeah you're saying you're saying that decimalism is is passed through mediated by the tree of life and the kind of mainstream Western esoteric tradition yeah well at this point yeah after 10,000 BC right yeah I mean I don't know whether everyone thinks this connection has totally been made and and I'm just being completely retarded but um I think this anti

evolutionism thing and the clock and the clock question are obviously really closely connected so I think in a certain sense that the kind of standard clock time of development and evolution and all of those things that they're criticizing is being located on one of our in one of our stratic cells if we're looking at it as a sort of diagonalization problem or we can be articulated and any other you know any other term and it's and as such the thing about evolution or clock time or any of these linear temporalities is they are

always compensated there's always when you when you actually assemble the whole stratagnetic map you will find a zone of compensation that will cancel that super you know that's why it can't ever be a line of absolute territorialization or a line of escape because of the fact that there is some compensatory structure to it on the on the other pincer um so so you need to find a normal compensatory map yes i think that that that that i would my

temptation is to well the interesting thing is in a certain sense and this is why i think that the Gilder Morals, you know, it's all about the strata, but it's the most extreme story of de-stratification that they tell. Because if you, there's very little difference. If you look at what's happening in Challenger's journey through that thing, you know, he becomes this pincered being, for sure. It's not as if he's somehow just avoiding the strata, is it? It's that in the process of stratoanalysis and the fact that you capture the whole compensatory system, you're not positioned on one side of a compensatory mechanism and therefore trapped by the fact that you are elsewhere compensated.

so just by becoming double it's really the same thing as becoming destratified that the very moment where challenger has his has his double pincers and his doubleness is at its most extreme and he's most fully um manifesting the strata is also where he's entering the most sort of intense phase of this of this voyage of destratification and i think it's the same you know this is the reverse this is the reverse clock issue you know it's that it's that as soon as you've got your clock and your and your anti-clock you have the you have the machinery

for a voyage of destratification a voyage outside evolutionary time and outside temporality like that double compensatory system of temporalization and counter-temporalization taken as a whole is your toolkit for destratification. There's a cryptic reference in the three novellas chapter about, so the form of the secret in the second line, the supple segmentation, is that of the double, but it's not the true double. So it's not until you get to the line of flight whose form of secrecy is the clandestine.

So in the first line, the couple, there's one plus one. In the second line, the double, there's one that becomes two. And then in the third line, there's the clandestine where one becomes many, and they refer to that particular becoming as the true double. Right. what you're talking about. Yes. But yeah, that's actually really, really, really good, really helpful for me anyways. That clandestine is the true double, Amy. That definitely reminds me of, like, clarifying more in my head, the other person that you encounter in an AQ dictionary, which even if you're the only person who uses it, right, you're encountering doubles like ghosts of past selves and encountering like collections of these

ghosts you're encountering future steps in this sort of path you're walking through the labyrinth of the dictionary and i think this and then if you have you know other people who are using them hell you might have forgotten which ones you put in and which ones where there's this like absolute anonymous clandestine discontinuum that you interact with every time you use it which seems kind of to work at that level. Oh I also had a question, so like for you, so how about the French-English thing? Like in terms of having been written in French and now like in terms of trying to track it through QWERTY, what is the significance of that transfer from French to English?

Do we have to sort of try to track both? Or does the French, like once you include diacritics and like different sort of word base, does, I don't know, is the French like irrelevant, not irrelevant, but is there like do we have to track fundamentally different things? And if so, how do we differentiate them? I guess is the question. Yeah, I think that's a good question. I mean I've got other than just signposting it as you've done. I Have nothing to say really um But but obviously yes, I Mean because obviously you don't as well as Amy and others have said I mean you do it is a Xerti in French anyway, isn't it so you you're it's a double it's a double disturbance

it's a disturbance both on the on the prior language level and then also on on the sort of techno reconstruction level yes I mean, this is making me think, this conversation about the possibility that perhaps a slightly paranoid way of thinking about this is that

One implication that you could take from this is that there is a kind of compensatory anti-culture that we don't have access to, but that we could strictly and rigorously predict from this kind of analytical work would show us that insofar that we have these kind of stratic cultural assemblages that they imply a compensatory counter assemblage at some other inaccessible level or zone that is actually working with what is

culturally accessible to us to make of our culture a kind of strata static caging system and obviously this could be done I guess in more or less entirely in terms of time if one wanted to but yes so is this to kind of agree with with Deloze and Guattari and a thousand plateaus that like there is there is no absolute de-territorialization there's just ways out of the um the set of compensatory strata that you might be stuck in to another set of perhaps counter i don't know i i

i'm not sure i take them quite as saying that that absolute de-territorialization is um um, continuo of intensity. So it seems to me that, you know, you've got a space for absolute de-territorialization that's fairly sort of timed as soon as you have, you set it all out on a diaconalization matrix. relative deterritorialization possible when you're in one of these two split zones you know these two zones of inconsistency and that relative deterritorialization is always found in that but there cannot be compensation

in a in a on the plane of consistency I mean so when that you know I mean again just to go back I won't read the whole section again because it's it's so long but this long passage that I started with where they they say let me just find the most relevant part of this So, for instance, okay, this isn't coming from the other side, but when they say, beneath relative movements, the plane of consistency or the abstract machine performs conjunctions of flows of deterritorialization that transform the respective index into absolute values.

And I think it's absolute because it just can't be compensated. compensated and it can't be compensated because it's not a split intensity and and every system of compensation is a is a split intensity and has to and has to be manifested on the system of content and expression and so yes maybe I'm being sort of obnoxiously and sort of resistant to this to their suggestion um but yeah i think that i think you know the the it's only saved basically that the earth

as matter is absolutely territorialization continuously you know and not in any it can't be a it can't be a kind of evolutionary outcome or an origin I mean any of that any of that type of time structure as we as we've seen is something that only can exist within the strata and is always compensated but outside the strata the earth is always absolutely de-territorialized. In those terms, sort of like going to the earth there, which I mean a lot of people

in the literature pointed out is a difficult thing for Galois and Gwaitari because of course like the literal physical earth is not absolutely deteriorate the territorialized you have all kinds of stratification processes happening but just like going way back to sort of uh when i proposed this with set the sequence of all key strokes made on a recording keyboard ever if we could just sort of postulate that as an object and you made like the perfectly you know the important response that there's no fact of the matter as to the simultaneity or non-simultaneity of keystrokes and that's true except in the fret or the largest frame of reference in which that's not true, the only one that has any chance of capturing all coordinate strokes, is that of the Earth. Like in that frame of reference, I think it's true

that there is a fact of the matter as to the simultaneity of every coordinate stroke ever made. Because even the ones that happen in orbit still happen within its frame of reference, I think. Right. And then sort of transmitted through GPS satellites as well, you know, are sort of further, which is approximations of the frame of reference of the earth I don't know how that's exactly relevant to the Lozu which are these important somehow yes I mean it there's a whole bunch of complicated things going on at the same time like I'm very sympathetic to Amy's cell reference here that that when you say the earth is always subject to these processes of destratification well okay but but the metal the fluid metal core of the earth I think in their terms is a body without

organs I mean and is and is destratified and is and is um it's obviously crosses are that's you know coming in the direction that you're more inclined to with this question because of the fact that it is a electromagnetic motor so sense that the whole you could just do you could if you were again get back to our high aesthetic or aliens and you your mode of perception of the earth was purely in some kind of sensory dimension that all it could pick up was electromagnetic waves and so the whole

of the technosphere now would be this complicated tangle of more or less more or less stratified um electromagnetic systems and communication grids but but the core of the earth you know the the which actually of course makes the earth a kind of polarized giant polarized magnet um it seems to me it's you know definitely escapes that process of stratification it's a It's this system of convective, vortical, metallic swirling that is the actual motor of electrical production of the kind of inner body of the earth.

And I don't think that that's something that could be, you know, you couldn't penetrate with a stratoanalytical description down to that level. I would say. Especially since biological strata couldn't exist without it. That geomagnetic envelope is what made it possible in the first place for genomes to be not just so bombarded by radiation. Yeah. It couldn't exist. And then also I sort of noted in the sidebar that if you understand a reference frame with respect to an object is just being within this space-time gradient towards its center, which spatially coincides with the core

and in terms of mass and of the origin of the accretion of mass which is the planet, is the root or the original seed. So there's at least a triple coincidence or dependency there. Yes. I mean, and obviously life in all kinds of ways is a kind of bioelectrical thing. phenomenon and continuously immersed in in this terrestrial electromagnetism in a way that is not in probably in any detail understood but but we know in principle that you know magnetic fields obviously extend right out to whatever

it is the Van Allen belt is no or whatever I mean so and in fact I think even at the extreme intensity is defined as all space but two different degrees of intensity so I'm not even he has a particular punctual point of disappearance so so the whole of the biosphere is in is inside the electrosphere and and and inside the uh radically yeah i actually i have a friend who's in electro does her phd research in electrobiology um studying fish marine animals mostly

and that's like absolutely like her number one thing that she tells you is that we don't understand like a damn thing about electro biological phenomena she did like neuroscience research before that dealing with like seizure patterns in rodent brains again it's like an electrical storm phenomenon so she's got kind of a threat of interest in this that just even the even the phenomena we know about we don't we mostly lack good explanations for much less the ones we don't yes it's no that's a great way of putting it though in terms of electric storms being as a nested complex of electric storms understood on one on one level yes in terms of seizures like I don't know this is slight TMI or something but I take a bipolar mood balancing drug that started

out like long-term management started out as an epilepsy long-term management drug because what they have in common is preventing like cyber positive feedback loops between cortices of electrical activity yeah which is also in linking by polarity with the storms is also interesting yes yes that's good that's really interesting so you see that so these these fits actually are um a kind of a bioelectrical cyclone phenomena but that go yeah exactly feedback dynamic and yeah and the interesting thing is that you know I I mean, you've got multiple kinds of seizures. Like the ones that you're thinking of where you fall on the floor

and like have certain spastic movements is a tonic-clonic seizure. But you also have absent seizures where the particular kind of storm just makes you blank out. Like whatever position you're sitting in, whatever, you know, you don't even close your eyes. You just go absent. Right, right, right. Yes. I Mean I don't I don't want to push the link with possession, but it's definitely hanging there. Yes. I think so too. I Mean this is a better you see this is like this is the strata

We've seen repeatedly going through this through this that way it's very easy to get into certain kind of topological confusions about it because the the topological structure is in a way um there's always a kind of level of disinformation about it and and when you're in the strata there's there seems to be a certain geometric and and and crudely topological structure that is missing the the the real pattern that is at work and their their constant um sort of gesture in that in the georgia morals is to is to try and complicate these topological structures isn't it whether the plane of consistency is always in a certain sense

perpendicular to the strata such that even though it it at one level is a epistratum and therefore seems to be kind of horizontally sort of sandwiched by the strata and runs the strata by being the the kind of machinic continuum between the processes of the two strata it's also on the other side strata and outside the strata um and this is i think comes out a lot in this in this geo-electrical framework, for sure. It's like what angle possession comes from, doesn't it? It's like it doesn't come from above or below terms.

It comes from the fact that there is always this bio-electrical diagonal line that is, actually that actually fuses onto the liquid iron eternal night ocean of the earth you know there's nothing sort of sort of speculative or about that it's just simply a straightforward a fact that there is this sort of electromagnetic structure that is in which we are continuously involved

even into the most intricate sort of the most intricate synaptic activity is still on this basic electromagnetic machine and So yeah, sorry this is all a possession riff. Yeah. That was absolutely fantastic. So the way it flips like the question of physical explanation and you know, and supernaturality over on its head and now it's not you know, how do how do lights flicker on and off? Like how do information patterns started out in one place and there's no like known mechanism

for them to migrate from one brain to another or something. It's a plane of absolute means or or absolute instrumentality for anything that's implicated with it. It's a means of autonomy of purely abstract genes. Yeah, sorry, abstract genes. Machines, machines, sorry. Oh, machines, machines, yes, yes, yes, yes. So genes in terms of like telefactors in a very abstract way is also kind of cool. No, you could have taken me down a line of abstract genes probably But abstract machines is definitely safer. Yeah

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, while everyone's just in a pause mode, I think it, I would just like to just point out that if you look at what I'm going to call for the purpose of this course, the diagram,

a set of integrated intensities on the alphabetical quonomic relation. The pattern that comes out in this diagram is in the pattern that we've been talking about you know in previous immediately previous weeks about the actual arrangement of the keys obviously on the and and I think confirms the fact that this row is is of is of crucial

importance to us and and and I think I don't know where to what extent I'm taking a kind of controversial what would count even as a controversial step at this point but this but this i'm hoping isn't hugely controversial is the fact that that you can you can actually see looking at the at the diagram how um homero is acting as an epistratum that an epistratum or or the machinic assemblage on its face into the strata that it seems to be an interstratum and yet it has these characteristics of the plane of consistency that it still preserves

this I maybe can say legacy although the temporal language is going to be complicated of unbroken continuous intensities. You can still see that there is a... you can see the effect of a continuum of intensities that is inserted into the strata from one point of view or that is pulled into the strata from another perspective, but certainly operates that the The consistency is required by the strata. The strata have to have a plane of consistency. The strata have to have a machinic interchange that allows the two, the superstratum and

the substratum content and expression to be operationalized relative to each other and to become a functioning machine. And I think that it's like, you know, therefore, there is this intuitive translation that we can take between this diagram and the keyboard that actually shows us how that home row functioning in the terms of a stratogenetic machine. Yeah, actually, no, but okay, because I've already taken this off an angle.

What do people think about Adam's point about Mars colonization? Because I do think that's a really interesting question. Because people obviously say, in fact, I read just recently, I bet I can't unfortunately find it immediately. I found an article that someone had said humans should forget Mars and the object of practical colonization and go for Titan because Titan is geologically active and Mars as we know is not. There is this whole level of debate about that.

What is it to colonize a geologically dead planet? Can a geologically dead planet have a biosphere at all? There was a recent Nautilus article about this, about the Gaian hypothesis and saying that that a planet as a whole is either alive or it is dead that life isn't something that happens on a planet satan happens to a planet and that and and there's a strong suggestion in that piece too was that geological activity is is that is a necessary part of that so if humans did colonize Mars, would it actually be that that Mars colony was only actually a tendril or extension

of the terrestrial, of the terrestrial, I feel inhibited about using the word biosphere now because obviously the D&G tactics about that, but the kind of this electromagnetic that is the Earth would actually have extended tentacles onto the surface of Mars. But Mars itself, you couldn't in a certain sense become ever a native Martian. Because Mars is not a planet that allows that to happen. Mars can only be an outpost

because it doesn't have its own abstract machine. I mean, if we take as a hypothesis, and I can't medically defend this, right, but it's certainly been hypothesized that you could, basically you structure your life with enough radiation shielding and you take you take much higher radiation hits but that's but because of the atmosphere and so on you can still get enough protection on Mars

to not immediately die in like a year or whatever and you can have some sort of biosphere there it's not dismissed as a yeah well okay some kind of bias right so so in in that you have so producing biological life you know whether it's people's out seating right ah right once you have that I'm not sure if I mean I that seems to me that's a critical sort of threshold that's been passed right and and yeah it's interesting for sure it might be right that there's no native Martians but you you have probably a

self-perpetuating colony at that point you have a you have bootstrapped that into a into another state and and and the the dependency on earth is more of a path dependency rather than a sort of you're always requiring input from the Earth system Mars system yes it is a path but you know if you then click this path dependency language on to this whole question about time and stratification and the anti-evolutionism and anti-developmentalism of the Deleuze

Guattari perspective does that raise some does that complicate this this question about part because part dependency it's you know that's to say if you strip them is is there a level of implicit depend uh development theory in the notion of past dependency that you want to strip out to fully rigorize that notion transcendently and if you did strip out that developmentalist level would it then mean that let me try and do this sort of with a graphic image like if you had

professor challenger on mars doing his doing a lecture on stratification to a bunch of his of these martian students who and they had some kind of sort of self-perpetuating biosphere here but would his of de-stratification lead back inverted commas to the earth you know right is it is it that there is actually a kind of possible zone of fully de-stratified matter that could be native to Mars that would then you know sorry maybe this is

sort of this is a question that's a bit hard to quite scan but it just seems to me um yeah no no it's going back to your original question it does it matter that mars is a can't ever be a body without organs in the same way that the earth is such that ultimately it's the it's a kind of it's a it's a para some it's some kind of parastrattle structure from the earth even if it is attains a certain amount of biological and

social autonomy on in on this new in this new thing which is not so different as if you're in just simply orbit all space station is it I mean that too I'm assuming if you had a large enough space station orbiting even just to take it a little bit further out orbiting some other planetary body of any kind even in an uninhabitable one let's say Venus um and it was large enough to become biologically self-sustaining is there any difference between that in principle and a self-sustaining Mars colony. The interesting difference with something like a space station there is that you're

carrying your own sort of uh electro uh electrosphere with you in a way and you're living within that sphere very clearly, right? And I think it's almost, yeah, and then you can argue about what is that? I mean, it's more clearly that sort of body without organ structure that you're sitting out, though, from one angle. But I guess the other way is that it's a highly structured machine if it's a space station, right? Where's the core, the sort of liquid core? Whereas on Mars you're sort of spread out. There's no... the electrosphere is not... it's not a sphere, really, I guess.

No. No, and it would be very tenuously connected to the Earth by, I'm assuming, there'd be some signal traffic. traffic but extremely extremely tenuous strands of electrical communication with the earth and just in terms of like you know big local constraints if you don't have that access then like in terms of electrodynamics around you like you don't have the access generated by a dynamo core then electrically you lack a direction like or an axis with respect to the rest of the solar system like you know on earth there is like a magnetic as well as rotational you know earth

and south and so in that em sense you have an absolute position with respect to the solar system in some ways the universe yeah you know the cosmos but you wouldn't in that dimension on mars no no exactly so would you still i guess my question is this thing would you still actually be an offshoot of terrestrial of the test terrestrial electromagnetic absolute um but given that you can't that there is no comparable thing on Mars maybe they're going to realize how alien we were and we would find out the

answer I'd be able to give yeah is that sort of your threshold for them in the in this that that you are totally outside this system of you know the body without organs or the electrospheric sort of plane of consistency well it's kind of or one way is that it's kind of this question of the you know the archive what kind of message is it to aliens again it's because

because you take this path-dependent coding that derives its structures of meaning from a context which includes the plane of consistency, and then you transplant it, cut it out, and put it into a void, sort of like the void, which is the complement of that particular encoding of plane of consistency. And now it has this whole space of recoding and mobility and sort of, yeah, like a sort of xenomobility or an alien mobility that couldn't be predicted in advance and like sort of asymmetrically connects to this original path dependency. It's just like it's a it's a break with asymmetric sides. I don't really know how to describe it quite yet, but there's definitely a strong threshold of almost like

ontological alienness happening. Yes. I mean, I'm sort of tempted obviously to sort of start talking about these clocks again like you know the the path dependency the easiest way the reason that path dependency doesn't upset people too much as a notion is that you can sort of track it within a sort of relatively commonplace evolutionary and developmental time system in which in which you've just got your sensible

clocks you don't have your anti-clock you don't have particle clocks of the silver key kind and so everything seems to come come out of the past and it's not particularly problematic to think that you could then you know develop on the earth leave the earth extend into orbit all of this kind of thing but on the on the in your counter clock which is obviously basically seems like extreme teleology um the ultimate destination the kind of what the scattering into outer space colonization of mars

whatever other kind of um um destiny that you might have becomes the actual uh causal driver of this whole process and this is what i'm saying about if you're doing you know even if you're orbiting even if you're orbiting like we've had i don't know whether pluto complicates it but let's okay I'll risk I'll risk pluto with some nervousness even if you're orbiting Pluto and you're giving your you're giving your challenger lecture the annual challenge lecture on destratification um you're that the error

of time the inverse error of time in this case is is is pointing you causally to the earth isn't it from that retro from this retro chronic point of view what's happened is this whole human cosmic diaspora is being sucked down as of the earth and glued onto this electromagnetic in the center of the planet, almost as if that machine was literally magnetic, and it was a giant cosmic attractor that was pulling all of this disparate schismogenetic biological

material in a convergent way down onto the earth where it could then be saturated in electricity and pushed down through the history of evolution back into some bio-tech. So, what I'm just saying is the notion that you're sort of leaving the earth is itself tied up with your clock working in a certain direction. And your clock working in that direction is just because you're on one side of this stratic compensatory assemblage.

it's not something that can be trusted once you get deep into this stratoanalytical lecture Are you kind of saying that there's two directionalities for time and then there's the plane of consistency and then that's kind of our complete map of temporalities? or is it more complicated than that I'm sorry Amy can I get you it's not I sort of I thought I could hear you but somehow it just neurologically the

glitching was enough to mean that I did quite get asked you to repeat it yeah um you kind of saying that there are there are two linear temporalities um opposed to one another and then there's the plane of consistency which is outside of time and and that's the map of the temporalities that we have or is it more complex than that um well i don't know i mean i i i'm sort of influenced a lot because i'm just reading this book which is kind of interesting it's interesting because it's so simple actually by a guy called called Hugh Price. It was recommended to me. And it's about time. It's called, maybe just

put it in if anyone's interested. It's about trying to sort of be rigorously time symmetrical. It's called Times Arrow. And he's got an ampersand. Oops. I mean, I'm not on one level I think people find it sort of philosophically kind of rudimentary almost but it's also extremely interesting and and he's trying to say look all micro physical processes are time symmetrical you know you if you if you're handed a series of sort of micro physical events there's absolutely

no way of knowing what your hour of time is and people for interesting reasons that he has certain hypotheses about always have a kind of time asymmetric orientation and smuggle in what he calls a double standard where you you treat certain things as if they naturally go forward in one way of time rather than the other way of time um so i'm sort of partly thinking in terms of this clock thing like like this i mean he his sort of implication is that you should always if you're just doing rigorous physics you should always have an anti-clock like if you're talking about a process you should be able to talk about a process going in the other direction

with absolute equal confidence and if you don't you're doing this double standard thing you'll betraying you're betraying the peculiarities of your own perspective in such a way that you're denying yourself objective detached um physical insight this is what he calls the archimedes's point of this so i guess you know that's that's sort of what is just immediately serving as my kind of um bank of imagery on this question and why your sort of forward and backward clock thing was so relevant to it um so sorry i'm in terms of your original question i don't know

from what i'm saying now it's probably more simple than what you're saying actually rather than being more complicated but i but i suspect that um you could get more complicated quite quickly yes i know it's the same because i sort of now wonder i'm pretty sure that it's giving me lots of resonance this book that's making me think maybe this was on razors reading list i couldn't remember because i know it was so you definitely um include you price stuff in right because price talks a lot about Boltzmann exactly in this way, yeah, for sure. I'm not sure if it was on the specific reading list for the event

in the middle of the year, but it's something that's Rez has mentioned a bunch of times, or at least in complexity's context. Right, it makes lots of sense, yes. Definitely, as Amy said, this whole Boltzmann issue, because because because Hugh Price thinks Boltzmann almost got this and was really tortured by the fact that the temporal asymmetries of thermodynamics were not really philosophically so yeah I think it's really interesting I'm sort of deeply tangled about this because

because this time asymmetry question just in this uh just this week just in our last couple of hours obviously has come in in these various different ways um you know one way that time asymmetry time asymmetry i would want to say i think as a kantian is time you know and that what hugh price is trying to do um is is annihilate time i think that this notion that um in this universe of absolute reversibility that such a thing as time exists at all is is simply unhelpful and it's so removed from the sense of time that we get from transcendental

philosophy that it we should just discard it so but but at least it does I think helpfully suggest that there's a certain sense you know since we're talking about our clocks that time asymmetry in the sense of time orientation that you naturally think of things going from the past into the future of time how times arrow as it's minimally put just in terms of there being a direction rather than a set of one-way functions. We, I think, have to see that as being compensated in the strata.

You know, I don't think there's any, ultimately, we cannot think what it is to disintegrate and intensity without thinking of it having a clock, an anti-clock attached to the two mutually compensatory functions. So it's not just like successive time and then whatever is outside of that. It's successive time, backwards successive time. back i mean backwards are useless is a useless term but and then maybe what's outside of that if there is well i think succession is complicated i mean look i i don't want to be at all dogmatic about this i mean because i think it's all it's also intricate but my tendency is to do the

opposite and to really say that there's no true notion of succession in geometric time if succession is just being geometrized on a timeline you should stop calling it succession because succession is an illegitimate temporal reference and what you're really talking about is a spatial relationship so the timeline and its geometric expression does not have succession at all succession is a relation of envelopment it's intensive you know and and an actual order of succession is an intensive continuum it's not a geometric line it's not a fourth dimension

and so that would be the way i would do that in terms of vocabulary and would just see that the that succession doesn't there's never actual succession in the strata that's that it's always reduced into some kind of them it's geometrized Yes.

I mean, the thing about coming back to the Earth, I'm happy enough with what you're describing about you run the arrow of time backwards or you... Oh, sorry, Adam. I've lost your audio. Oh, sorry. so for the concept of from the perspective of you can sort of have an anticlock view and you run it from the anticlock and then everything comes back to a plane of consistency on the earth, right? Whether lobsters colonize the galaxy or whether we do or whatever you know, lobster robots

etc. The It's the direction of time I get, I think. But the thing about it that's really striking is it just is sort of disappointingly local in a way, right? That we, it's, you know, it all comes back to the earth as such, which is, you know, so localized. Is that just a matter of that's just how it is? That's what we have. Right. Necessarily imperfect and local information, and that's just a recognition of it. Yeah. But look, in terms of what you're saying now,

it's interesting, obviously, surely, that they're calling the earth the absolutely de-territorialized. so it's always the you know this notion of locality is complicated by that um and um you know i totally get what you're saying like it's just one planet and why should we be this particular speck of of metal and and rock be be given this particular dignity so i'm it's not that i'm wanting to just fend off that but i think i think at the same time we can't we can't attach a a straightforward notion of locality to it in their

in their terms that that in a certain sense that's to that's just transport sort of stratic conceptuality beyond its zone of geological applicability and when you're actually on this fluid electro metallic machine it it's just not local in the same sense that we would have it's not local in any territorial sense

so I think you could take that two directions right you could say that there it's not the plane of consistency it's a plane of consistency and there's other planes of consistency that may not be liquid and metallic but I'll you know have that same body without organs sort of plane of consistency property somewhere within the universe however you you slice it, right? It doesn't have to do that, however you slice it. Or you can say that it is the plane of consistency and whatever other, and you sort of get back to that

no matter what, that it's somehow that's some property of the universe which extends to Earth as such. I mean, is it that the core of the earth is itself in a fusion or relation to a cosmic plane? So the art of as isolated in space is a stratic optic. And that on the plane of consistency, instead, cosmic plane

with modes of machinic engagement which are cosmically comprehensive and which we we're incapable of ascertaining out of the strata so you're pretty choppy just then Nick but I think you were saying that you could perhaps consider the earth as in the planet Earth sort of a strata on type within or

some other plane of consistency that is that is more cosmic in nature which would kind of relate back to the Challenger story in a in a funny way because that's sort of what the setup there is yes yes oh and and I think also this Lovecraft context this kind of gate of the silver key type context that there is there is no sort of territorial boundary on this cosmic voyage and you know Carter sort of fuses with the Yogg-Sothoth you know it's not that so

there's nothing like narrowly terrestrial about this about this intensive axis you know what I mean it's like it it only appears like that because we're applying this kind of static geometric conception on it from from where we are on the on the surface and it's a kind of topological error to see it i think i saw people talking about this maybe right up in the thread that it's not inside the earth in a in a in its in its true cosmic topology it's not in the middle of the earth it's like that that is the way it looks to us because we're not approaching it in intensity we're approaching it

in terms of these strata coordination systems I think fusion all takes on a pretty cool double meaning there You know especially given that the metals that make up the core the reason the core is able to be what it is Is that metals are you know terminal and sequences of fusion processes? both in the sense that they kill stars and that they are like unfusable like in almost yet there's always a last instance where there's no particular kind of stellar sequence that can end up fusing them and in general like iron is one of the most

common causes of supernova and then you have this sort of double sense of in terms of planes of consistency and into larger series of chronogenesis you know star formation is a kind of chronogenesis, I think, in terms of... Yeah. Yes. I mean, obviously, it's kind of slightly mind-warping where we're expected to follow this line of thought, and I'm not totally sure, but your suggestion is obviously very plausible in the sense that, look, what is this lump of meadow in the center of the earth? it's it's a it's a congelation that has a kind of stellar genealogy doesn't it I

mean so it's you know it's not our son that built it it's right it's an earlier generation of different kinds of stars there's almost like a Titan God sorry I I can't are you under? It's a kind of metallurgical talking Actually missed almost all that you I you broke up Okay, yeah, I'm sorry. Maybe my end is getting bad. Yeah, I don't know No, just just off and on so what did you just like the last like 30 seconds or so Yes, I'm just saying I'm basically just repeating your point

that what is this metal? And if you see the full, if you've got this time and neutral perspective on certain sense, then that a linkage to the core of the earth is a linkage to this whole metallic plane that we know has had its kind of cosmic genesis distributed over a large local galaxy yes I'm sorry is my signal still cracked yeah I'm getting more of the key

parts this time before it was just like i wasn't even sure if you were talking um i'm you guys are cutting out a lot for me too i don't know why it's suddenly going so bad yeah definitely just like it's almost like the constraints on what's possible on what it's possible for a metallic core to do and like so which makes perfect sense as the article a further stratic relationship would dictate the way the stratum of the core was able to dictate or was able to determine things above it right so that makes sense that you would see in like the very properties like the specific elemental composition of the core that drove its specific contingent behavior on the strata that it's able to generate you know is a is an echo or a shadow of these larger stardef processes or like yeah stuff that's intrinsic to the fusional series and things

like that as spread over space um yeah but no like as far as the mind warping like my next my only thought like next is to just sort of imagine all these things as the eyes of yogsothoth you know bubbling through a different strata of the involutions of matter so obviously this is going nowhere good well i don't yeah nowhere good at all but probably in the right direction and nevertheless they would think because that i think that is that is the answer to i do think that's the answer to adam's problem you know I think I don't think there is an art in the strongest and most contentious way I can I don't think that is an answer to Adams problem probably that doesn't actually at least

please Hey there Nick Hi, sorry, can you I think we can hear you, it's just going to Of all of the audio errors, that was the creepiest, just so you know. Oh, really? It's hidden from me. It's hidden from me. But I can sort of get a, I guess, tell because you guys are some really odd words.

Electromagnetic disturbance elbowing in on the conversation. So you don't want to be going to say... Okay, I don't know.

I think we're sort of approaching our last lab. does anyone does anyone have anything to say that's going to help to nail chronomics down firmly and securely and in everybody's memory do you think that would be great should we should we try to make an effort to claw our way back from from kind of iron

synthesis and supernova back to the keyboard or are we too far gone for that now to make any sense let me just have a look at this oh yeah yeah yeah it's true what theater saying that that that's the final statement and at least i hope i mean look this stuff is very um difficult for me for sure and i hope it is also difficult for other people um so my modest hope on this level is that is that seeing that

diagram now it makes some it makes some kind of sense what it's doing and why it is that the that that diagram has been broadcast to us out of this economic apocalypse whatever we whatever we make of the thing that's rigorously where it has been sent for in terms of its principle and and it does certain kinds of theoretical work though I would be the first to admit that where we enter uncut jungle very quickly and following those lines

Oh, is everyone totally silent for intelligible reasons or because my audio is completely collapsed? We're here. We can still hear you. Oh yeah, good. diagram link that I posted before by the always is open and editable if people want to like mess around with it I have copies so you know you're all welcome to fuck with it if you want to try and figure it out or play with it I'll stick it in the classroom maybe this is the link that you just put up

like just just now yeah it's a it's an open Google Doc so you can edit to like a I think it's a Google image program it's on. Maybe it's the PowerPoint app. But yeah, it's open. It's not restricted access. So yeah, pass it around. Yes. I mean, it's an extremely abstract map of, of course, everything we've been talking about. And then the hypothesis is, is it an extremely abstract map of everything in the Geology of Morals?

Which I'm sort of, I think, implicitly saying is the case. But I can see that that's a hypothesis of such extraordinary kind of recklessness that it shouldn't be taken on trust by anybody. And then is the geology of morals basically the only chapter that you need of anything in Deleuze and Gattari and does it also explain everything? Yes, I mean that's obviously There's a secondary level of Yes, yes, I mean, you know, I said maybe I don't know whether I should be apologizing for people for being focused so tightly on that chapter and and whether it's just me

in saying it seems so peculiarly attuned to our questions in this course. And maybe someone could find something elsewhere and say, well, surely this is also very relevant to what we've been doing in the last few weeks. So, yeah, I don't know. One of the conversations I had this week that, I mean, this was completely mad well but I was talking to to to my friend and he was I'm saying that the reason he was so obsessed with the geology of morals was because he went to one of those huge Deleuze conferences a few years ago and there's a a guy called I think his name

is Ronald Vogue who's a Deleuze expert expert who's been you know writing on writing on Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari for decades. And he said he gave his three-hour lecture on that chapter. He was convinced after reading everything that it was the only thing that mattered. And he was going to commit the rest of his career to writing and thinking through that chapter. So just some backup to that hypothesis. There's nothing online coming out of that. I haven't seen something that can be looked up. I think it will I think this this was the name that I got I think it's spelled like that

It could also be roll in the brig Okay, I'll try and follow it. Um yeah If I find something I'll send it I wonder whether that's How that's gone? it's only been a couple of years you always do worry a little bit about people's mental health when you hear about these sort of programs now maybe it's because I'm getting old but I just think oh god poor guy you know like I hope he's got a supply of tranks with it yeah maybe we should check off sorry what's I think Theodore's asking me something yeah i don't know

i think that's a my my guess theodore's got this question would i support the extermination of the native bios well first we're going to at least hypothetically accept that that is tied up with the fact that um there is a that titan is geologically active um and if we're if we're if we're then taking that step i think we get into strange time issues um that make it probably a kind of

a question a bit like as a time traveler would you kill your grandfather you know it's like it it sounds like a kind of moral it's it's ultimately not it's a it's a question about time structure that's the sense that if you found yourself in a position that you could kill your grandfather then find that your time circuitry is malfunctioning. It's just not, it's more an indication that you're misconceiving the situations that you could possibly find yourself in rather than an actual dilemma. So that would be my assumption, that it would be simply that you could never find yourself

in that situation and the fact that it looks like you could find yourself in that situation is the index of a confusion about the function of time but that's probably a bit of sounds like a bit of a cop-out I think it you know there's other levels all the levels in which I cannot I can sort of answer it more as a moral philosophy question I think just seem a bit trivial by comparison like I I guess I'd have to say well what is this what is this biosphere you could obviously be overawed by it to an extent where you would come back determined to exterminate the terrestrial biosphere so it

doesn't get in the way of the Titans and I wouldn't be able to rule that out April I so you have any closing remarks I think that that terraforming question may have erupted out of a different part of me the another new center oh yeah is that is Is there another course going on in the new center that is based on terraforming at the moment? Not that I know of, yeah. Okay. Still to happen. Last remarks. Well, my last remark is obviously to express enormous gratitude and appreciation for everyone

who's who's been doing this for the last weeks and say that i've really enjoyed it and learned masses from it and so buddy for that um and uh theodore you've done a fantastic job on keeping the whole thing together on various levels yeah thanks to both of you yeah glad to help out Thanks a lot. It was really interesting, guys. Thanks a lot. All right. I'll post this in the classroom, too. And then if people want to post more chronomic findings there, that might be a good place. Right. And yes, I will desperately definitely try to be as conscientious

as possible about checking in on the classroom regularly if anyone's got anything they want to see there. And I hope people have my contact details if they want to send things down to other channels. And so have a good yule, everybody, if I don't communicate with you before. It's been great. Super. Thanks, everyone. OK, bye bye. Thank you.