Thinking Fictions I (Session 4)

I think we need the one that's missing that's usually here is Celia. So let me find, make sure she can get access. So I think Ben, we can start and I can work on...

I think Shilius, like the major one that can't get in, and Matthew, who might show up late. Okay. Okay. Well, so I guess one thing just to talk about, one thing that seemed to come up this week and that I think goes across a lot of the texts and that points back to where we started with N. Francois is in many ways a certain kind of optics, these different ideas of different optics

that we've come across in the fictions and in the theoretical work, sort of between the theoretical work and the fictions. and you know in sort of the text we're kind of moving around today there's this question of of objects and difference whether it's this notion of diffraction in Karen Barad's work whether it's the notion of the telescopic as opposed to the panoptic in Deneb's work and then of course the emphasis on projection and the aesthetic

in Anne Francois' work and then of course in the novel we read this idea of data being encoded and what's encoded in in the visual in terms of what can what data can be gleaned from this kind of visual apparatuses in various ways all tries to on the one hand trouble the sense that the visual is generally taken to be inherently a negative thing or that's something that's well, that's sort of wedded to a very negative take on modernity and that there's on the one

hand but on the other hand there's these different modes a visuality in terms of... I hate to interrupt, but is anybody else getting, like, is the mic a little distorted with them? Or is it just me? Anybody? I'm getting, like, yeah, okay. Alright, well, it's just me then. Alright, keep going. I don't know. Yeah, let me know if it's better or worse. I can also move where I am in relationship to the mic. Okay. Yeah, I'll try not to move my computer. So, I mean,

there's multiple ways we can kind of address this, but one of the ways it came up in the novel, and I think it's very interesting in terms of the three-body problem because there's this moment that's in the book when they're talking about the idea that seemingly empty space, this idea that the seemingly empty sky actually contains more data in it than a cluttered painting. There's this moment where they talk about the fact that there's something inherently deceptive about the initial or general sense of visuality that there can be a lot of information and there's actually

doesn't seem to be a lot of visual difference you can kind of pull there's a lot of information you can pull from the images by various means in a lot of ways this sort of this idea of emphasizing visuality but going beyond kind of first order form of visuality is what connects all the different all the different texts that we're using today and this idea that in and this applies not only to sort of analogies and metaphors of the panoptic versus the telescopic or the you know maybe the spectroscopic in the three body problem but also the idea that

of the sort of metaphors and analogies of visuality allow us to move across philosophy and fiction more easily than if we stuck to a sort of more specific methodology that seemed to be specifically fictional or theoretical. So another thing I think is worth mentioning, and I think will come up, especially when we talk about Deneb's piece, but also in the novel, is how these different models of visuality, these different optics, relate to the universal and the local. And because in Deneb's text,

she wants to emphasize the sort of telescopic and transversal modes as demonstrating not that something like modernity or something like reason is inherently flawed, but that for it to be as universal as it claims to be it actually needs to be transversal it actually needs to be transformed by the context in which it's deployed not really be deployed on it from afar in a sort of vague colonial sense but this also means that the effects of the deployment of a model in a particular space can actually do something constructive to that space at the same time and this in a sense this is sort of seen in the inverse, the very opening scene of the three body problem

that this physicist is being browbeaten and literally beaten for defending the theory of relativity and the sort of claim there is that it's anti-dilectical, it's against party politics, that it's from the west and therefore it cannot be you know, it cannot be the kind of scientific theory that they want to defend. So this is the kind of spectrum between local context overpowering more universal models in that text. And then from Deneb's essay, this idea that local context are actually just a different kind of test of universal models. That it's merely the kind of reason versus cultural difference,

but that there's differences in the seemingly cultural context that are actually differences within the deployment of the model, and vice versa. With the ways in which the cultural revolution, those particular politics, constrained and sort of traumatized the characters of the three-body problem, that people can be so traumatized by these very local cultural contexts that they invite an alien invasion, for instance. And so I think that's the kind of extremes of play in the text that we're looking at today, and that Barad's text and this model of diffraction is maybe an attempt to sort

of mediate these two embassies. and Tony did you want that the people that wanted to talk about Barad's text specifically are they here or no? well we had the main person that was on Slack who was asking some questions was Sheila who has not showed up yet I know Ashley did a response which I was going to try to have a group discussion about but if Sheila doesn't show up then I guess we can just continue it on Slack. I know like, yeah, Ashley just posted something yesterday on the Slack. For now, let's, we can discuss maybe a free body problem or the Deneb text first.

It doesn't matter. Deneb might come in a little earlier than we planned. Okay. I just got an email from there. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I guess, sure. Sorry. Sorry, no, go ahead. I was going to say it could be up to the group on what they feel more comfortable discussing rather than being lectured on. Yeah. Three-body problems are pretty large, so I'd like to at least get engaged. Yeah, I mean, so did people, I guess I can just ask, did people get into the novel, at at least some chunk of it?

Yes, I didn't get all the way through, but I got to the discussion of the point where it's revealed that there's anticipation, an invitation of an alien invasion, the kind of split within that religiosity into Adventist and Redemptionist or something. I didn't get much further than that point, the kind of point where that was revealed. Okay.

Anybody else on the window? Red half, red red the rest finished about 15 minutes ago, okay. Nobody else? history of the ETO okay so I guess we can talk about Ben if we talk about 3-body we can talk about the beginning maybe well the beginning we can expect to have some response and then I mean it's not like there's no real spoiler in this one I don't really think yeah not really what do you know aliens will be coming

in some pro-future at the end. I spoiled it. Obviously, his work is way more interesting in the fact that it's being able to talk about higher level scientific concepts at detail rather than, I think, plots, like character-driven narrations kind of criticize a lot, but the piece of science in the work is very good. Has anybody read anything else by the author? There's a bunch of short stories. And the second one is out in hard trouble right now. Okay. Good to know. Then I can let you go back to leaving. I took over. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to gauge, you know.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, sorry. I didn't mean to, like, overly lecture or anything. I was just trying to find some sort of some kind of connection No, what you did was great That was great contextualization Because the optics thing just seemed like the most kind of, yeah, just like one way that everything sort of sticks together or potentially sticks together but I guess what's interesting about that to me is the way in which I guess a sort of universal optic is presented as a familiarizing technology.

So the encounters that people have in the simulation of the alien planet, the kind of science the optic the representation of science within there and the kind of optics that are used to describe that are used as a kind of a strategy to familiarise rather than to alienate in some way I don't know whether I'm expressing that well enough but Do you mean by that that you felt there was a kind of didactic tone to that?

Because I thought there was a didactic element to the three-body problem game. I was wondering, because I think the novelist is an engineer, isn't he? and I was wondering if there's a sort of cultural teaching element to the, including those sort of caricatured depictions of scientific interactions in the simulation. So he's sort of like educating the reader kind of thing. Because he, I think, in the postscript, he's quite clear that he's sort of very anti-literature and very pro-science. and he thinks, oh, science produces these, you know, more beautiful descriptions of reality than anything else. So he's, you know, I think he's quite invested in championing science, essentially.

I see that, too. I see him bringing out, like, the weird sort of imaginative elements in hard sci-fi and the experiments. And also, like, being a reader that might not be so familiar as he is, it seems like, I don't know if I got didactic, but I kind of see what you're saying in the postscript and the fact that the characters are kind of like, You don't really have too much emotional stake in them. I mean, some of the character arcs don't even happen. They happen in flashback, like the actual normal character arcs.

But I'm not sure, you know, if this is not really common in a lot of the short stories I've seen. But I've read the first two of these, and this one is very much like this. I mean, I guess one thing I would say to that is it's interesting that he does, I mean, he's obviously very pro-science, and it's a very hard sci-fi book, but at the same time there's a sort of nice tension at work I think between you know he's very critical of this idea of revolutionary science

in the sort of Maoist period that this science can be totally kind of steamrolled by certain non-scientific forces but on the other hand he is very much emphasizing like in the book itself as an example of this the kind of creative and kind of sort of intuitive jumps that scientists have to make in order to do, you know, in order to do, like, science is actually scientifically revolutionary. And I think it's kind of, it's particularly evident in, there's the part, the one discussion that the characters are having where he says that, you know, pseudo, or he says, you know, pseudo-scientists aren't afraid, aren't afraid of scientists, they're afraid of stage magicians. there's a certain skill there

but that skill isn't it's useful, it does a lot but it's not scientific, that doesn't mean it doesn't go with science it can go with or against science so I think there's something I think there's something there and that's also why I think he'd be writing science fiction in the first place I don't know if this is necessarily a helpful callback because it was two seminars ago, but in terms of it being didactic, which I definitely felt as a reader, but it might be interesting to compare it to the Southern Reads trilogy

in terms of that it's you know, that there's this anti-humanity or like, you know, can humanity be saved through its own actions, I suppose and an invading alien force but in the Southern Reads trilogy that is happening, I suppose outside of the control of human intervention Sorry, a question. Sorry. I had the same feeling. I wanted to bring in Annihilation, but also could not come up with.

like just in the forms are much different like the epistolary sort of elements of annihilation but the chaotic sort of systems I see but the Catherine would you say that like in annihilate but in annihilation it's much more for the trilogy in itself it's much more like showing the failures of empirical or failures of science completely yeah I mean are like the limitations of an objective point of view yeah sorry this is just something

that occurred time currently during this discussion but uh yeah no they're kind of, I suppose, incomparable because in Southern Ritualgy, any time the science tries to stake something out, the object of what's being observed changes. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know much else to say, but I don't feel that I know enough about astrophysics to really speak about this. I think there's an interesting twist in his sort of critique of the Cultural Revolution in that the Cultural Revolution's argument is that these scientists are not only high

intellectual bourgeois figures but that their science is also anti-revolutionary and that their science is going to hold the people back and keep the people down and all that and destroy the revolution. And then by the end of the novel, that kind of becomes, the prophecy comes true, because it's, I think it's the ETO they're called, isn't it? And they're described as being an organization of spiritual nobles from the educated classes, and it's they who bring down the Trisolarians and bring about the apocalypse. So the Cultural Revolution in the end gets strangely proven correct in their attitude towards science.

So there's an ambiguity there in how he's treating science as well. I guess, but there's also something about the way that scientific paradigms are presented again in the simulation as kind of ultimately kind of world rupturing, catastrophic.

But they're also sort of strangely counterfactual as well. So I guess this reinforces your didactic comment because you get a kind of explicit relation between Leibniz and von Neumann being kind of drawn out. So you get this kind of atemporal, counterfactual merging of science to kind of demonstrate this... Norbert Wiener fighting the pirates. Yeah. Which was great.

I on Does anybody who hasn't spoken have anything to say about the book or the novel? I would pass it back to Ben. Let's see where we want to go with this. Yeah, I mean, I guess the one question is how we can also look back to the Vahanger

and the idea of the sort of fictional status of science and of the sort of, again, relationship and hypothesis in fiction and how a fictional book presents that relationship, the relationship between science and whether it's pseudoscience or these kind of various means of, you know, like the ways in which the sciences kind of rely on fictions or science itself can be used to create certain kinds of fictions, which may be more or less true, which of course gets very complicated at the end of the text, because it's, you know, they kind of say that the aliens are actively interfering, right,

they're sort of interfering with the development of the sciences on the Earth, and one result of this is that there's an assumption that, oh, there are no laws to physics, or maybe there seems to be a fundamental limit to the sciences, but it's suggested that at least it's partially or completely due to the fact that the trisolarians sent this... I don't even know how to describe that thing. Like, computer in a proton thing. They kind of sent this sort of interference device just to mess up all the particle accelerators on the planet to slow down our progress, which has this weird kind of effect

that we then think that the nature of the cosmos has a hard limit. So even like with the fictional status or the instrumental versus the fictional or regulative status of something like the laws of nature is very interestingly played with there because it's this, you know, it's kind of suggested that maybe there actually are no limits to what science can do, but it's kind of used against itself. And so it becomes even hard to say where our imagination plays there. To kind of point back to this idea of, you know, these leaps and things that certain thinkers or individuals seem to be able to make, whether it's representing the figures in the game or the characters in the story.

I don't know if anybody has any thoughts about that. I mean, I don't think I've encountered that specific device yet. I don't know where that appears in the novel, but certainly there are many instances of its effects. so on early on there's the description of I'm like the countdown entering photography is now so right yeah yeah yeah I like the first

realization and that it in print and do a vision a little division yeah which I guess when you when you encounter it first it plays with It plays with the later introduction of those pseudo-scientific ideas. But I guess also there's some quite interesting, That idea of photography being the translation into two dimensions of a four-dimensionality. So there's something in this kind of optic that Ben's introduced, I think, the diffracting.

Could you say a bit more about that, Ben, maybe? I was also just thinking that in terms of Broad's work, right? The idea that she wants, instead of emphasizing representation and reflection, she wants to talk about diffraction. So this idea that there's no sort of hard line between the kind of methods of investigation and what's being investigated, but that there's this things kind of diffract and every kind of entity is actually the sort of scattering of tendencies that we can take as ethical, you know, political, ontological, and so on and so forth. So that it's never this kind of outside investigation, but that everything kind of has these tendencies

because everything is this sort of, is a pattern. It's like a diffractive pattern. It's not an object in a traditional sense. in one regard. So, I mean, what's interesting there, and I don't know if she talks about this so much, but in the novel and how the novel deals with this, and it's also in the essay, also in Deneb's essay, I think, is this idea of how you, you know, how you sort of translate these things. So even though you can say something has all these different qualities, it's like how do you kind of translate them into different fields or how do you account for this which often requires a means of flattening it you have an image of it

or you have to use aesthetics in some way to do it and this also points back to this idea that you have to construct a generic object you sort of have to have you know you can't just like find the generic object you're gonna have to build it in this weird way oh yeah let's look at this, yeah, the quote yeah, I mean it's very much in line with what Barad says, I think in terms of like meaning and mattering and how she kind of relates those two things right, yeah, I think it's a very nice metaphor

with that they use in this. So that might help people that might not have read the text. Also, there might be something, although I can't really get into it too much, but there

might be something well but if you want if you want to come back in 20 minutes she'll be on with us if you've read her text and you can skip the three body a problem one. Sorry, I got a message from her, so I was just letting her know. And now I lost track of what I was going to go on. Oh, with the photography and the numerical aspects, there might be something that I can't get into. It would be too far deflecting, but it would be something maybe we could pick up with later with Flusser's text since we

We kind of introduced Wuster, but you might be able to have something, for people who haven't read it, on his Genealogy of Technology, there might be something there. That's just kind of laying something on the table there. The Flusser one on photography, I can, I'll link it.

I mean it comes up in a lot of his work. While I'm looking for it, I'll just kind of talk about it. of the linearity of the written word and history. I mean, it probably comes up a lot in post history as well. But then technology is invented, photography being the first nonlinear technology introduced to us, then the computer, so and so. It has to do with its numerical abstraction. So hold on one second.

It comes up a lot in post history on his but then this is the toward this is debate the one of the major texts on it that you might want to create although in this book granite it would be too much to kind of go into like I said because the photography kind of thing is like a

plot it's a kind of like a plot device that just gets dropped quickly in the beginning of the novel show. But there might. Is there any other comments that we might have thinking about this novel, thinking about the book? Would you read the second one? I want to now. Yeah, the second is actually really good.

I haven't gotten the third one, although I've already read what happens. It sucks, but I don't really care about that, I guess. The third one sounds the best. I just have to wait. I can share the second one if you want an e-book version of it because right now it's not it's not in paperback it's coming in paperback I think in August so it's still quite expensive but I'll share the e-book great he also has a bunch of short stories I can also try to try to show as well. They're actually pretty fun on the read. Has anybody tried to read

the translator's work, which is like his cousin or his nephew or something? I think it's his nephew. It's more fantasy. I didn't really get into it. So Ben, should we transition now into maybe just, you want to give some, you want to give a little bit of background on Deneb a little bit for? Yeah. Yeah. When did she say she could join? Because she said it would be later, but you said it could be earlier now?

She said later, then she said 11.30, then she said even earlier. But it's almost 11.30. 30. So, I don't know, we don't want to discuss too much about that. We don't want to discuss too much about that. We could, I mean, there are things we can still talk about this novel. It's also the, even though Sheila's not here, we could do the broad thing. We plan to do that kind of. I don't know. It's up to you where you want to go. Yeah, I mean, if people are interested in talking about the broad stuff, maybe it would make sense in relationship to the novel

before moving on to Dineb's stuff. But I don't know if people are being shy today. I was thinking that Ashley wrote the novel. Okay. Yeah. Feel free. My response is just directly answering those questions. But I'm interested in that iceberg metaphor, because I used a very similar metaphor to try and explain what I meant in that Microsoft Word thing, but I used the example, have you ever heard of, I think it's a helocline mixture of salt water and fresh water, so that the water doesn't mix. And so it creates the illusion of air and water,

where it's actually two different bodies of water on top of each other. But yeah, I thought it was a similar way of describing what Karen Barad meant anyway. Find a picture. Or a video even. I really like the section where it's just like performing an experiment by moving pool tables

around and that kind of link back to the Asimov from a previous seminar. That was kind of nice. There's also these references from, well these references about experimental communities that seem to keep reappearing within the novel, but without really being developed. What do you think is going on there? There's a lot of discussion about pastoral communities, the establishing of experimental communities.

And this seems like quite an unusual, I guess, concept to be introducing within the context, the political context. I mean, is there a whole... Is there a point that you can point us to? Can I find that in the novel? Right. Or we might be able to just look at it together? that's one reference on

Page 118. This is Pan Han, the passage I'm referring to. Is this founder or prominent member of Frontiers of Science? He talks about his accuracy of his predictions was such that there were rumors that he came

from the future. The other cause for his fame was that he had created China's first experimental community. Unlike the return to nature utopian groups in the West, his pastoral China wasn't located in the wilderness, but in the midst of one of its largest cities. I mean, I don't know, I've never researched this, but what's the... Is the ETO a kind of experimental community? I mean, are they organized? I only get to the point where they're kind of introduced. So are they organized communities that are formed around the ETO?

I mean, it kind of relates to, I don't know if you got to this part in the book, but there's a character who talks about pan-species communism. Right. And so it's also this kind of, and there's references to some of the environmental damages that the Cultural Revolution did, like when they tried to eliminate all the sparrows in China. Really? Yeah, there's this project called the Elimination of the Four Pests or something, and it was like rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. And so they tried to wipe them all out. and so yeah there's this guy that's trying to replant trees and get the sparrows to come back

but then this kind of feeds into this idea of inviting the aliens it's like well what does it mean to have this kind of pan-species communism if it means that our species gets wiped that we think our species is as important as another or what if another species doesn't agree and we try and invite it into this pan-species communism so there's this kind of weird issue about yeah like radical communities that might be self-destructive in one way or another but he doesn't go in, at least as far as I remember, he doesn't go into that a whole lot and maybe that comes up in the second book more but it's something that's kind of hinted at a bit but it's not really delved into The idea that an alien species can be kind of

inducted into one of our own political forms Yeah, it sort of comes up right when they're trying to write the message to send to them. They say, they're like, no, this is like too ham-fisted, this is too communist, you need to be more generic in a way. It's like, we want them to join our political cause, we can't sound like we want them to do that. So there's this kind of funny movement also. Yeah. Yeah. And do other people have thoughts about the ecological side

of things in the book? Yes, no? I mean the whole going out the whole idea of pan species communism so what like It's a belief system right it's It's an ideology and in the world in this world in which it's hurt like the like youth father is Known to be anti and like it like I'd like to am anti-ideological suspect just each character also is right so you have this very so this is

like this dystopian elements of I've sort of I don't know any sort of like founding belief or ideology of of equality it seems Can anyone explain the three-body problem?

Can anyone explain the three-body problem? I could do it in a very, very simple way. Uh-huh. Which is, I mean, I mean, but how do you, I mean, it wouldn't be anything I don't think you would understand, or that you would, or you would already understand. Ah, Dineb, hello. Hi, how are you? I'm good, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm sorry to jump in right in the middle, but please keep going and let me know when, yeah, when we should go forward. Yeah, I think we're just kind of like We're exhausting Until you joined us So we can I think we have just a little bit left I mean, I really The basic concept

From what I know, a three body problem is that When you have any Experimental states in two bodies And you know their velocities And you know their directions You can predict at any moment their interactions And their collisions and One of the issues that they found is when you When you when you enter when you intervene with a third body or a third object Even though you know it's you can know its positions velocity is direction you it's impossible to predict At the point in which those bodies will collide or interact so So basically it's a metaphor for this world that's completely impossible to like, to,

it's a chaotic world. Something that can't be sort of predicted. Which is why most of the people in the Earth, or in this near future Earth, like, want the aliens to come. They want the aliens basically to come to force order. So yeah, this is the really basic perspective of three-body problem. Got it. Going to our discussion with Deneb then, Ben, if you care.

Yeah, I guess I can just sort of try to, I can do like a brief contextual thing. And just let me introduce Dineb, for those who don't know, very briefly. She's at Columbia and Latin American and Iberian cultures, and also comp lit, if I remember, right? Yeah, right. Okay, good. and she works on the concepts of the frontier, transmodernity, and multinaturalism. And for those who read her piece, that should make sense to you, hopefully. And so I thought that why we wanted to have you for this class

and why we talked about this science fiction novel and why the three-body problem is how do you deal with rationality and how do you deal with scientific models or even any kind of formalism that can address invariance without it being seen as necessarily colonial or as inflexible. Right. Yeah. So with that in mind, if you want to talk about your work what you're working on now in terms of constructing and chaos and instability. Awesome.

Yeah, I don't know if I should start or if you guys want to continue with that discussion or ask me questions about the article or the text because what I prepared is very much related to that. it's like a continuation of the turn of the canoe, essentially. So I can either pick up exactly from the end and elaborate a bit on that, or, I don't know, if you want to continue the discussion and then ask me questions, and then I talk more towards the end. I think we've all prepared. We've prepared the text, so if you can... How about... It would work if you would speak about what you've prepared, and then we could perhaps back...

They might change our questions a little bit, and then if we have to backtrack into the other article at the end of the discussion, we can do that. Because we've saved the discussion of your text when you were here. All right. So presentation towards the end, then. Just confirming it, because I'm having a bit of hard... I'm hearing you. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I don't know why specifically, but, yeah. Maybe I should probably just, like, grab my earplugs. Is this better? I changed my microphone. Yes, that's much better. That's much better. Sorry.

So, yeah, presentation now, discussion at the end. Sounds good. Okay, can you, can everyone hear me? Yeah? All right. Great. Yeah, so as Ben kindly introduced me, I'm on my fifth year in my PhD at Columbia, and I'm from Brazil, and I am working my dissertation project, which also kind of has tons of other ramifications that hopefully will become a book project or something later. has to do with the Amazon in a very specific period, like from mid-19th century to the early 20th century.

And surrounding that, I also deal with Brazilian fiction and Latin American culture and Latin American cultural theory at large. So essentially, my research on the Amazon has to do with travel writing and narratives written by engineers, by technicians, by... I'm not so much, like, getting into, like, ethnography and anthropology in my research because those, I mean, it's, like, two worlds of, like, exploring the Amazon that go, like, in relatively, like, different directions and, like, have very different ways of, like, conceptualizing the kind of, like, this, like, moment of, like, encounter with, like, indigenous people.

So I'm mostly interested in a way like in the emergence of modern technology in the Amazon and the way that that functions to stage again the colonial encounter as well. So I'm just going to pick up from the end of the turn of the canoe because I ended that assay with a relatively obscure suggestion regarding Fitzcarraldo, which is an absolutely important film for me. I don't know if everyone has watched it or not, but as I talk about it I think the plot of Fitzcarraldo will become clear because it should make sense.

So in the end of the essay, I essentially suggested that what the indigenous people in Fitzcarada were doing in some ways was something of a non-Western style cybernetics. And when I use the word cybernetics in that way, I am of course not talking about cybernetics in terms of machine-human interaction or in terms of artificial intelligence, which is refer to technological developments that are much later, but I'm in fact trying to go back to the ancient etymology of cybernetics as having to do with navigation. So my research right now is going back, I'm jumping from the Amazon and in a way doing

some research right now in Greek seafaring and seamanship in a way in order to understand really like what it was that the Kubernetes, who was that figure and how that figure functioned in ships, in the crew and in like Greek seafaring essentially. So of course like Wiener in the use of human beings he does say that like cybernetics comes from the Greek word Kubernetes and the Latin word for that is like governor. And also in cybernetics or control communication in the animal machine, he then adds that in choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feedback mechanisms

is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868, and that governor is derived from a Latin corruption of Kubernetes. So the interesting thing with this period also of 1868 is a period of intense navigation on what's up against that vision alike first the in engines in the Amazon is also like starting to receive finally like all day arm the are the rivers to like international navigation because up to like 1867 the Brazilian Emperor had essentially like he forbade are the entrance of like foreign ships so it was very hard for people to come there which is why also like when humble went to the Amazon he went to Venezuela he

He went to Colombia, Ecuador, but he was not allowed to go to Brazil. That also, the spirit of scientific history of thermodynamics and the development of steam engines also coincide and have to do with this period that ships start going to the Amazon because the Amazon then at that time is kind of like a horizon or limit of technological exploration. The interesting thing with the Wiener definition of the way that Wiener is retrieving the meaning of the word cybernetic in a way is, well in some ways is like, and

And I think Timothy Leary has a good criticism of that because he essentially says that the problem of Wiener is that he uses, he corrupts, I mean he says that the Latin governor is a corruption of the word Kubernetes, but essentially Wiener himself is corrupting the meaning of the word cybernetics by already putting it in a system of control and communication. for him those are the two things that he's interested at. The extent to which the feedback mechanisms will help calibrate the machine for further control and further accuracy in its governance, so to speak.

So then Leary, I mean he has a very kind of, I think in some ways, a romanticized understanding of what he wants the Kubernetes to be. And he says that what he wants to do is, yeah, we're liberating the term, seizing it free from serfdom to represent the autopoietic, self-directed principle of organization which arises in the universe in many systems of widely varying sizes, in people, societies, and atoms. And then another interesting thing that he says about it is, like, pilots, those who navigate on the seven seas or in the sky have to devise and execute course changes continually in response to the changing environment. They respond continually to feedback information about the environment."

Then he says, dynamic, alert, alive. What I like about the Leary criticism in a way, and his attempt to retrieve the meaning of Kubernetes as having to do with autonomy and self-direction is also the way in which it also helps me in a way frame the history of navigation in the Amazon and exploration in the Amazon as precisely a process of escape from constraints rather than it necessarily being something that is already circumscribed within technological infrastructures of modernity.

So there's one way of seeing the 19th century and early 20th century exploration of the Amazon as your typical movement of colonial expansion, but this time mediated with modern technology or there's also a way of looking at that as precisely like a movement of scape. And most of the narratives I deal with in a way are framed as such. And having done a bit more research on the actual function of the Kubernetes in a Greek ship, like what is it really that the Kubernetes is doing. So this is from a book that has a full inventory and explanation of seafaring Greece.

And the author is, oh, right here. This is Lionel Cassid, he's a historian. So he's saying that, and I quote, the earliest information available that is full enough to be useful concerning the Athenian navy of the 5th and 1st centuries BC. The capital ship was the Trirene, which was still a very primitive sort of ship, but with like 200 people in its crew. And in this ship, one of the officers was the Kubernetes, and this is one of the earliest functions that the Kubernetes had was in this very simple form of ship. And what he was was the executive officer when the triarch had the experience and desire

to commend himself, and commending the officer when he did not. Under the way, the Kubernetes took the captain's traditional station on the Pooh. In emergencies, he might handle the Tiller himself, but normally he used quartermasters. And I mean this gets a bit complicated and I don't want to get into detail with that, but the reason why I'm also interested in this function is in a way to try to understand how it is that the Kubernetes went from being this figure that is a social technical figure that is embedded in a collective function, he's not alone in the ship, I mean he's the helmsman, there is the captain, there are tons of other people in the ship, to being absolutely romanticized and extrapolated as a figure of autonomy, of absolute autonomy

in a way, in self-governance. So moving forward again to the turn of the canoe, the thing that really fascinated me with Fitzcarraldo in a way was the way in which the ship became became the space for a kind of struggle between two styles of navigation and two absolutely different purposes. So here I'm going to start reading a bit, having done this bit of an etymological excursion. And this is a draft I'm preparing that in a way follows from The Turn of the Canoe. So in The Turn of the Canoe, I wrote that Guimanez Rosa, the third bank of the river,

in Herzog Fitzcarado, suggests that at the limit of control navigation of the canoe or the boat lies the current of the river. So the limit of how much we can steer and pilot a ship in dangerous waters, be it a river or ocean, is in some ways an intensified version of the manifestation of radical, fatal weather phenomena. The limit of cybernetics as a governed and calibrated navigation embodies the facticity that we can navigate up to the point that we cannot. That is, to the extent that storms, vortices, rapids, waterfalls, so any kind of like geographic obstacle or any kind of like unexpected weather phenomena can be bypassed

or crossed with what can turn out to be like sheer lack of control and luck or nautical mastering caution. Ultimately though, and this is something I'm really interested in, and it has to do with the ambivalence of navigation in general and the way that this manifests in so much of literature from ancient literature to nowadays, but for me I'm mostly interested in colonial, so after the 1600s until now. But ultimately, accidents and expected discoveries and storms are the horizon of navigation. They're both the events that can task the mastery of pilots, captains and crews, and also of an entire technological infrastructure,

and they're also the libidinal attractors that motivate any true act of navigation or exploration. So there is an extent to which the truth of stories such as Post-Descent the Maelstrom, the narrative of Arthur Gardner, The Game of Nantucket, which I would, in a way, definitely place in science fiction broadly. Or Melville's Moby Dick, and even Nick Lynn's Chasm, which is a really, really, really good example of what I'm trying to get at with this investigation of ships in the Amazon. They're not going to the Amazon, but the ship itself is in control, there is no pilot whatsoever, which is an interesting thing. Or even J.J.

Ballard's Drowned World, which is another narrative that I'm looking at in this article. So the truth of it is that there is a way in which the characters do want to descend the maelstrom. They are looking for the storms. This is what they're going after. And the The storms are like what ends up being a contingency is in a way also this kind of libidinal attractor that will force technology to test itself in some ways. And this is a big part of an understanding that technology is not just something that is meant to remove obstacles from nature, but that obstacles from nature represent the

possibility of technological expansion and of technology learning about itself in some ways. Furthermore, there is an extent to which all these narratives also dramatize the question of who is doing the navigation. All of them put in question the agency of the captain, the capacity of the ship to keep the crew together and to provide safety and to actually make possible the arrival wherever they want. So I think in CASM the interesting thing with the python with this weird, bold submarine is that of course the crew is kind of being trapped on it. There is a huge storm

and it becomes pretty clear and I think Lin did a good job at that and suggesting that part of the horror of this is that you don't really know what is going on. There's an absolute loss of control, so I would say the cool thing with his narrative is that the cybernetic agency of the crew in a way is absolutely shattered. And another interesting moment, and I'm sorry that all my references right now are slightly scattered because this is like a draft I'm working on. But for those of you that know the Drowned World, there's a great chapter called The Pool of Tonatos

in which one of the characters who is Karens, he submerges himself in these murky waters to actually go to a planetarium. And in this planetarium, supposedly another character called Vulcan kind of hid something secret there, or he said that there was something there that he really, that is like a very precious thing in some way. So, Strangeman, who is like this other crazy character, who is like an absolute trickster figure, tells Kieran like, oh, you should go down there. And then when he goes down there, of course, it's not only like an entire time traveling experience in terms of how the water becomes a repository

of absolute time. So the water, in a way, is both what is preserving the drowned world and at the same time what makes it impossible for history to be told. What makes it impossible for there to be an archive that is accessible. Because as soon as you enter it, you're, of course, you're dealing with the possibility of death itself. So when Cairns submerges himself in this planetarium, he starts to become very concerned with the actual display of the constellations that are in the planetarium at that moment. and he becomes obsessed with imprinting that in his memory, as if that's the most important thing right now,

because the sky has changed above, so that vision of the sky is like a vision that we can no longer see. And of course, there's this whole thing with Karens, he's breathing through a tube, and there's only as far as the tube can go, but he, of course, wants to go farther than the tube allows in some ways, until the point that he starts to kind of like get dizzy. So I'm going to just cite, and so as he descends, he's not only like experiencing all these alterations in his like physiological capacities, but he's also like drawn intuitively to this, to the exploration of like the frontiers of like where the technological affordances of, you know,

of the breathing device can allow him. So he walked back down the steps and stopped halfway down the aisle, head back determined to engrave the image of the constellations on his retina. Already their patterns seemed more familiar than those of the classical constellations. In a vast convulsive recession of the equinoxes, a billion Cydario days had reborn themselves, realigned the nebula and island universes in their original perspectives. A sharp spur of pain drove itself into his ill-stacking tube, forcing him to swallow. Abruptly, he realized that the intake valve of the helmet supply was no longer working. So then he's pulled back up to the surface, and he wakes up, and then Strangman is right there teasing him, of course, as he is as a trickster character, and telling him, like,

I didn't do anything, I was not going to sabotage you and kill you down there. And he's like, let's admit that. It makes it more interesting, particularly for Karens. Did I or did I not try to kill myself? So I think this question that Ballard puts in the narrative is essential precisely because it embodies in a way the ambivalent, the ambivalent, like, libidinal investments of, like, exploration. On the one hand, this absolute, like, tenatotropic drive to search for death, search for the storm, find the whale that can destroy the ship and kill you, or arrive in an absolutely, like, unknown land with, like, savages that are going to kill you.

And on the other hand, the more Promethean part of exploration, which has to do with overcoming death, with surpassing the limits of what is possible. And this, in a way, this ambivalence also plays itself out in Fitzcarraud in a particularly interesting way. So, because the potentially hostile indigenous tribe that takes Fitzcarraldo for some kind of god and wants to help him move the ship over the mountain in order to avoid that part of the river that has the dangerous rapids, they're only doing that because they want

to actually use the ship for their own purposes. So they want to appease the spirit of the rapids by crashing and sacrificing the ship. And this already again splits the functional working of the ship, which for Fitzcarraldo is a way of arriving at the place where he wants to build the opera house. And he wants to keep the ship intact. He wants to preserve the ship. And he devises this whole structure, of course, to drag the ship over the mountain so the The ship remains intact and they arrive at the location safely. Whereas for the indigenous people, they're like, no, let's just use the ship as a sacrificial vessel to appease the spirit of the rapids.

So the indigenous people are profoundly, this fictional indigenous people are profoundly aware that there is an extent to which geographic obstacles cannot be overcome. So this, I think, at least the way that this is staged in the Amazon, I think creates two very divergent historical narratives of technology on the Amazon, because there is an extent to which technology is seen as something that will allow communication between isolated and remote places, that will allow for the kind of conversion of natural obstacles into

productive forces like let's use the current of the river for hydroelectric power plants, which is what Brazil has been so invested in doing for the past 20 years and what Belo Monchi right now represents. And there's an extent to which, from the Amerindian conception of the emergence of technology in the Amazon, it's absurd because the whole point of the rapid is that it consumes and that it kills. And of course that enters an entire cosmological vision of what the function of the rapid is. So instead of using the ship to bypass it, you're actually using the ship to deliver, to give the rapids what they want in a way.

So the other interesting thing with this moment in Fitzcarado, I think, and this relates to Ben Singleton's whole work with traps, has to do with the idea of cunning also, right? in like Maximum Jailbreak, he's talking about, and this is what I'm going to cite, he's saying, to outfox is to think more broadly, to find the crack in the scheme, to stick a knife into it, and to labor it open for new use. Frightening the environment with a counterplot is the best advice for escaping the machinations in which one is embroiled, a conversion of constraints into new opportunities for free action. So, I think if you look at Fitzcarraldo for this lens, it becomes very clear then why

it would seem like the tribe was only helping Fitzcarraldo because he was a god. What the indigenous outfoxing shows is that he was only a god because he delivered the ships to the hands of the tribe so they could expand their horizon of action. So the deployment of indigenous labor that permeates both the production of the film, and Fitzcarraldo is also entirely about that because Herzog himself actually depended on indigenous labor for a huge extent, and this also creates, I think, the kind of like hyperstitional layer between the film's fictional dimension and the actual dimension in which Fitzcarraldo exists. So the deployment of indigenous labor that permeates both the production of the film

and the fictional narrative cannot simply be understood for a fixed power struggle or relation of colonial subjugation. So that's the sense in which my reading, in a way, of the relations between Western technology and Western social technical activity in the Amazon. And indigenous life and indigenous labor in a way kind of to me cannot be simply looked at, I think, like in just a unilateral structure of subjugation. because there is a way in which also the arrival of technology is also allowing indigenous

people to expand the horizon of their own actions. And you can see this also with the way that, for better or for worse, indigenous people are in a way having to use the internet, to use GPS technologies, to use tons of other devices that are available so they can demarcate their own lands and in a way kind of like entered into litigation with the Brazilian government to try to either slow down some of the other more nefarious things that are going on and also claim their land. So this is an inevitable process, I think, that has been happening since the colonial period. And my criticism towards, I think, a kind of post-colonial view of this is the way in which

only tells the story of an annihilation of indigenous agency. And interestingly, I think that Herzog did a great job in totally enacting that, because there were the indigenous people, and as you can see in the documentary that is made about Fitzgerald, The Burden of Dreams, there are indigenous people that were criticizing Herzog criticizing Herzog and saying that what he was doing was totally not okay and there were indigenous people that were like, yeah, we'll join and we'll help you out. But regardless of which one determines, I think, the kind of like historical significance of the film, there is an extent to which the technology itself expanded what was going on there. So

It also propelled indigenous people to affirm their agency in relation to it. And more importantly, this ambivalence that characterizes Fitzcarraldo's plot and the dual function of the ship also pose the question of who is doing the steering of agency itself as embodied in the sphere of the pilot. But in another way, can a ship be ambivalently steered? And this cleverly orchestrated indigenous mutiny suggests that in some ways the oblique strategies of piloting can be as efficacious if not more than explicitly control navigation embodied in the figure of captains or pilots as the figures that determine the course of

the ship in some ways. So a ship can still be controlled by other people. And alternatively, Guimarães Rosa, The Third Bank of the River, shows that the son can only be a narrator of his father's, like, I think that what the father does in The Third Bank of the River is a very good example of a leery, autopoietic kind of style of cybernetics. The sun can only be a narrator because he's standing in a way, taking this position of observation. He's standing outside the current of the river and that's what allows him to translate that into a narrative.

So let me just skip some parts here and go to the part that I also find interesting about Fitzcarraudo is the hyperstitional dimension of the film. In a way, Fitzcarraudo not only stages a real historical process that started in the 19th century, the whole history of the rubber economy in a way is relived in the way that Herzog is doing the film. Fitzcarraudo himself, who is this Irish rubber baron who wants to build the opera house is in a way also modeled and inspired by like real rubber barons that

existed at that time. But not only that in a way, the film also shows how in the 19th century like there was the Amazon became the horizon of like expansion of capital in the sense that the absolute vision of the place as being natural, being destitute of any technology becomes the horizon of exploration and expansion of capital. So you have this strange, almost historically abrupt way in which the Amazon enters global markets. And the making of the film, Fitzcarraldo itself, is like hyper-station in the sense that it

is that locus where the actualization for the design and engineering of the structure to carry the ship physically makes the fictionalization possible. So the fiction exists in virtue of a technological intervention that is real. And of course, I mean, you can say that this is true of studios in Hollywood as well, that the films can only be made because there are material conditions that enable it, but Fitz Corrado I think makes the two sides so entangled that I don't think you can necessarily look

at it as fiction entirely. And of course what the character himself actually materializes with the transportation of the ship is the means of transportation itself. It's this absolutely redundant but also kind of like this rendering obsolete of the ship. And the ship that Herzog used was of course a ship that had been used in the Amazon before but was entirely inactive. We had to refurbish the ship, bring, invest, employ tons of labor to get the ship to be functional again. So what I'm interested in with looking at these narratives of navigation right now in

this second part of the article is an attempt to look at the history of cybernetics, to and try to trace a cultural space of cybernetics prior to the more recent digital machine human interaction era that starts in the 30s, 40s and 50s. In a way try to tie in the narratives of navigation with science fiction in general. And that's why for me, like, Poe was so important, Moby Dick as well. I'm going to stop here because I think I actually talked way more than I was planning to, but yeah, this is just to give you a sense of what it is that I'm looking at.

Can you, yeah, I can't hear any of you right now. Yes, go ahead. Oh, there. So now everybody's very quiet in this room. Thank you for that. I'm just interjecting just in case, because Ben has a bad network connection, but I would like him to begin since I want him. We shared the course. He's leading this one. Yeah. Thanks for that. That was great. One thing I really... One thing I wanted to bring up, which... One thing I wanted to ask you more about, especially, was...

Like, how do you view how the fictional element, or the hyperstitional element, relates to the tension between the Promethean and... I don't know what you want to call the other thing, this kind of pseudo-suicidal ballard mode. Right, the thanatotropic, yeah. Yeah, the thanatropic, yeah. Because there's something interesting there in terms of, you know, does the Promethean need a certain kind of fiction to overcome or to disguise the thanatropic? Does the thanatropic often use the Promethean to disguise itself, or is there a different mode? I think especially how that works in collectives

that, you know, there's often the kind of thanotropic figure which needs to be controlled by everybody else. Or either way around, there's a sort of Promethean mad figure who has to also be controlled. I just wonder how, if it's a different kind of fiction at work in those, or if it's the same kind of fictional or hyperstitional structure, if that makes sense. Right. So I think So the reason why also in the third bank of the river, I was interested in exploring this kind of dual direction of time in a way, is because ultimately I think you cannot determine.

Like, I think my vision in a way of, like, the kind of, like, technological, like, economic phase of, like, capitalism that we are in is that, and I think this is the extent to which I think that, like, Nick Lynn raises some good points in terms of, like, the impossibility of, like, determining the horizon of, like, success of, like, a Promethean project, right? And I think in teleoplexy, he touches on that in a kind of, like, really interesting way. And so the way that I see it is that ultimately you cannot have one without the other, right? I think to the extent that you're trying to deploy technology as a way of, like, designing constraints

and as a way of, like, designing constraints to be overcome or designing constraints to constrain, both of these things will like happen at the same time. So that's why I don't, and I think Ben Singleton also in like Maximum Jailbreak, he has this, he says, yeah, like the logic of traps in a way and the logic of constraint is not necessarily like synoptic, but it's synthetic, right? It's like cumulative. You can only, you become free of one constraint just to arrive at another one, right? And I don't... And I think in terms of, like,

I think in terms of, like, looking at, like, the kind of, like, more libidinal aspects of, like, exploration and the way that exploration is a vector of technological and economic development. That is the part of, like, colonialism that is, you know, absolutely destructive and also seen as a vector of emancipation at the same time. I don't think you can dissociate the two. I don't... Yeah, I think the two sides are always there in a way, which is also the extent to which I question a bit. I think the more like the parts of rationalism that weigh on agency too much rather than balancing it out with,

or looking at the ways in which the search for agency and the search for emancipation depends on the expansion of traps. So the expansion of freedom is also, in a way, the expansion of traps. And this becomes very clear also when you look at, like, the way that engineers narrate the attempt to build railroads in the Amazon in the 19th century. So here you have this, like, project that would be equivalent today to, like, going to Mars and building a colony in Mars. So those projects in, like, the 19th century in Antarctica, like, in the Amazon and in, like, very distant places, in a way represent this, like, the kind of, you know, the Promethean part of, like, let's go and start doing something there,

building railroads in order to, like, allow for communication, create a different kind of society in that place. and then allow commodities to be streamed down to the ocean so they can go to Europe and to other places in the northern hemisphere. And at the same time, as they're building this railroad, it becomes extremely clear that they're entirely entrapped by the difficulty in building it, like actually getting iron to the Amazon. It rusts. The soil doesn't allow you to build anything. However, it's also only possible to test what technology can do by taking it to its extreme, by taking it to this frontier. So that's what I'm interested in. And I think that in a way complicates a bit not only the historical narrative of technological

progress and emancipation and Prometheanism and the use of technology for human emancipation in a way, the idea that we can control it, which is there in some ways, but it shows this other side of like, no, you know, you can only really assess this, you can only really quantify this progress in a way in relation to the failures. And the failures in a way become opportunities for technology to unfold. So I would say that this is what I call this like, tenotropic, this kind of like the deaf instinct and the kind of like more Promethean instinct. And I find it hard to look at them separately,

to be honest, to dissociate them. And I know this is something important for someone like Pete, for example. And, you know, for like, and it's like I could totally have a discussion with him about that. I think just, but as someone that studies literature, For me, the kind of work I can do by telling both stories is more interesting than the philosophical benefits I would get by trying to transform the kind of Promethean narratives into a kind of like a political theoretical intervention, if you know what I mean. If that makes sense. Yeah. So, yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

Oh, and just as a note, also, it's interesting that there's not a lot of science fiction on the Amazon. So, not at least in the 19th century. There is a lot of realists. The weird thing is that I actually have to deal with the question of realism in a very close way. Because there is a way in which the description of the Amazon is already so fictional and so imaginary

from the perspective of like the audiences that are reading that have never been there, have no idea what that environment is like, that all the travelers and all the narrators that are trying to like write about it in the turn of the century are at like pains to go like this is really what it is. And then when you read that, it ends up being something like wow, like this is, it ends up like having the kind of like the symbolic way of like fiction in a way. And I think that's also the extent to which some of the questions of speculative realism and thinking of not so much of science fiction but let's say fictions of technology or narratives

of technology in a way has helped me navigate that. it's quite unusual, I think, from the field I'm in, in a way, to kind of be dealing mostly with non-fictional works. But literally there are very few fictional works that would even get close to something like science fiction at that moment. It's interesting, too, because I was going to say the one place that I know that Amazon or Amazonian-like things often emerges in science fiction is Venus. So all the Venusian science fiction is like when they realized how hot it was, they immediately created this weird transplantation of the Amazon to Venus.

Right, right. Yeah. It was somehow easier to think about it in those terms than in the actual Amazon itself in some weird way. Yeah. Yeah, and that's also why for me the Drowned World, like Ballard's The Drowned World is such an important reference because there are parts of the book that the descriptions are so similar to non-fictional descriptions of the Amazon in the early 20th century, even of the kind of like phenomenological effects of like being in the environment, that it's almost impossible for me in a way to kind of like read some of the people I'm reading without wanting to make references to Ballard and exploring this entanglement with a Permetian

attempt in a way to accept and embrace the conditions and also the more deathly vectors of like, yeah, am I submerging myself in this place because I do want to kill myself in here. So anyways, yeah, so sorry, I'll stop talking too much. Have you ever heard of the science fiction novel Brazil by Ian MacDonald? No, I haven't read it. Okay, because it has, it's based around three different narratives. He's a Belfast writer. stories from and it's from about 10 years ago

maybe slightly over 10 years ago but it has a narrative within it which is very heavily influenced by Heart of Darkness and is very similar to Ground World and a priest is sent into the Amazon to hunt out a rogue priest who's trying to who's using the natives to summon down this sort of apocalyptic holy city and he goes on this journey through the Amazon with a French natural philosopher who's trying to get to the equator so that he can measure the shape of the world. Oh, wow. Yeah, awesome. So I think I should probably read that. Yeah, because, yeah, and is it making reference to the, like, actual, because in the 18th century, Lacondamine, this French.

Yes, yes. Yeah, okay. Went to, yeah, he went to Ecuador in order precisely to measure that because they were in a race, in a kind of like scientific race with England to see who would establish that first. So, interesting. I'm going to look at that. Thank you. I think that Holy City has some relation to Brasilia as well. The priest is trying to summon down and buy. It was a few years ago that I read it, so I can't I don't remember exactly how that goes, but you should definitely check it out. Yeah, I will. Thank you. You made reference to Timothy Leary. Right. But I can't remember why he was introduced. Oh.

What was that? Oh. I introduced him because... Mostly because of how he is criticizing Wiener's definition of cybernetics. Because since I'm in a way, I'm trying to trace this alternative cultural literary history of cybernetics by looking at cybernetics more in terms of the following, being slightly more true to the etymology and to the fact that it comes from navigation and seafaring culture and seafaring techniques. But in this text it's called the cyberpunk, the individual as reality pilot.

Oh, cool. So there's a... Yeah, it's... Sorry? There's a... I can't remember the title of it, but there's a presentation that was given at one of the the tactical media events, I think, which was about cybernetics and entheogenics, which I think again would tie in with some of the work you're describing there, that kind of counter-cultural aspect of this. Right, and for Tim Leary, of course, I mean he's emphasizing, Tim Leary's conception is actually like too Promethean, I find. And therefore, I find maybe too unbalanced and naive to an extent.

Because he disregards, that's the problem I think with the way in which his conception of the cybernetician or the pilot as an autopoietic entity that is in a way using technology. So the example he gives of a cybernetician, for example, is a kid who in, I don't know, the Cold War period, took an airplane and flew to Russia and orchestrated this whole thing or another guy who in the desert gets a paraglider and flies super high up without any permit, without a license or a permit to do that. So it's a bit of a romanticization of Prometheanism in the sense that it sees the use of technology

sees the use of technology as being emancipatory and as being a way of exiting the bureaucracies that are involved in controlling technology and its uses, right? But it doesn't consider the extent to which technology is also constraining. If you are using an airplane, for example, in the 20s, all the narratives of airplane pilots that go to the Amazon, they are extremely limited by access to fuel. There's no gas station. It's not like they can easily land the hydroplane and go like, oh, here's gas, let's get some snacks and there's a hotel right there. They have to calculate things and control and enter in such a strong relationship of

discipline with the airplane that you can't just look at the narrative as like, oh, this is an amazing feat of scaping centers of infrastructure, overcoming the dependency on places that will have fuel, like Sao Paulo or Buenos Aires. So as soon as they start getting away, even in South America, from the cities, they have to calculate things and plan ahead quite a lot and limit what they can do. So that's the thing. I mean, Tim Leary, the critique I think stands of Wiener, but at the same time it's too Promethean

for me. Yeah. But you should... What's the name of the presentation that I referred to again? I think it was called Cybernetics and Entheogenics. cybernetics and yeah awesome thank you it's all part of that kind of psychedelia cybernetic overlap that Larry was yeah I'm yeah yeah he exactly yeah interestingly in this article he doesn't get as much into into psychedelics it really is an article like about like yeah I was surprised that he didn't mention that much about psychedelics in him.

Yeah, and the other thing that occurred to me while the cybernetic line was how it was withheld in in Russia in the late 40s and into the 50s, so it was a kind of banned science, it was an outlawed science in Soviet Russia. It was described as a pseudoscience, in fact. Right, yeah. I mean, I think in a way, yeah. Definitely, one of my friends is in computer science and machine learning, and when I talked to her

about cybernetics, she was like, yeah, then you start seeing the way in which it's like the power that cybernetics has had as not only a discourse, but as a transdisciplinary term in the humanities, in a way to make sense of certain ramifications of technology in the 20th century. But it's also not entirely taken very seriously by people that are, at least not the people that aren't interested in that cultural history, which is her case. Yeah. Yeah, the engineering fields are taught cybernetics

without going through the whole cybernetics history. But also, most of the first order cyberneticians were mathematicians, and then the second order were interested in anthropology and biology, pushing those two fields. and I think it's for engineering it's just so logically in it's so like ingrained in the logic of learning how a program works with functions and feedback and feed forward and like all these concepts that are you know brought into more of an organizational aspect that engineers don't even really think about policy, organization and that level but they're doing

but doing cybernetics, you know, I don't know, in that, yeah, I guess it's more, and then the higher up, then cybernetics is hugely involved, like DARPA and all the governments, or organizational robotics, yeah. Machine learning, maybe not so much. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean that's why, that's also the kind of like, I, it, the, yeah, the, I have, I've been inspired by this kind of, the connotation of like cybernetics as having to do with like a sense of like self-governance and autonomy in a way,

because it has helped me to kind of structure the field of my research. It's not, I mean, for me, it's not necessarily something I want, I don't necessarily want to pioneer this absolutely, the older use of cybernetics for that, but it allows me, in a way, to articulate this history of navigation and exploration at the Amazon and tie that together with a certain social political movement of people that went to the Amazon because they wanted to escape or because they wanted to leave. One of the guys that I'm looking at is someone who had a 9 to 5 job in early 20th century London. And he's like, I'm fed up with this. I can't stand this anymore.

He gets a job in a ship and ends up going to the Amazon to work in the railroad. And And of course when he gets there, it's like, oh, there is no freedom. It's like not this absolute freedom that he had conceived. And interestingly, he already seemed to be like not so naive about it. So I'm interested in this kind of like intersection of like narratives of like navigation as time to get their like vectors off like escape and emancipation and also showing the ways in which that creates new forms of discipline and technologically imposed constraints. And even natural ones too, because you're not just dealing with the limits of to what

extent can a railroad work in the Amazon, but the extent to which the Amazon wants to have a railroad. So like looking at the Amazon as also having a sort of environmental agency of its own, and that's also the part of my project that goes a bit more towards geophilosophy. So yeah. And I was trying to think of when you were speaking this whole time about ambiguity, the ambiguity between the phenological drive and the Promethean drive. I'm trying to think of it in the simpler terms of first and second order cybernetics or morphostasis,

morphogenesis, which is like, again, negative feedback or control mechanisms and then positive feedback, right? That's where auto-play police is. You align more with expanding on the, obviously, the positive force of feedback. And so then it doesn't quite relate inside of that system of positive and negative. It actually is like it seems like you're just discussing the ambiguity between the positive feedback, which is where it could go into viral and this is something that obviously that the 60s they were determining but I think it's

quite I find it really interesting that the way of rethinking or re-approaching that problem from from from literature which of what you're pulling out so think more about this sort of the ambiguity of just like a positive force of feedback. Which, of course, those... most, if you read any of the older work, they're all coming from geo... like geological metaphor, when they're trying to describe... The most famous one, I think, is is Maruyama, where they talk about positive feedback as being a rock. A rock that has a small crack in it.

Water enters into the rock, deviates the system because it freezes and actually expands the rock. So it's a deviation and a change, not a deviation and a control mechanism. And then the rock will continually expand over time. So this is like one of the most... This is one of the most... are the first or one of the first examples, I think, when they were trying to describe that. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing with, like, I think when you come from, like, I don't know, like literary studies in a way, like, the narratives that manage to, like, dramatize this, I don't want to even call it, like, a dialectic necessarily, because I do think

it's, like, just an inherent ambivalence of sense, like, that is produced at, like, the level of text, but the narratives that manage to dramatize that successfully don't conclude in anything. In this chapter in Ballard, it's called The Pool of Thanatos, very luckily, that when Kierens is submerging himself in search of this secret that the other guy says that is there, the guy turns to him and says, yeah, it's nothing less, it's nothing short than the ransom of the unconscious. And of course, what that turns out to be at the end of the chapter is absolutely inconclusive because what it turns out to be is the question of did I submerge myself to kill, did I want

to kill myself or not in a way? And that remains absolutely indetermined. So that's also why I was interested in the function of paradox and the ways that paradox allows, as a logical structure, allows you to thematize this more and I think explore the productivity of this ambivalence more than trying to resolve it. I find the pursuit of that more productive. And so to me, in a way, like, yeah, I mean, with Wiener, right, the idea is to have more control and to, like, reduce, like, positive feedback. And when I suggested also that, like, okay, this could be, like, you know, for Viverjo Castro, in a way, like, what he's doing with, like, perspectivism,

the kind of like the mutiny of the ship in Fitzcarraldo can be read as like a non-Western style in cybernetic, it's because also the attempt there is not to reduce, like to create more control by reducing positive feedback, but in a way it's to preserve the possibility of positive feedback still existing. So like no, give the ships to the rapids so that the spirits are satisfied. The rapids are not going to stop existing, clearly. It's not like they're going to stop being rapids. They're like a geological accident, like geographic accident in the water that's not going to be changed. I mean,

they don't want to engineer something to change their rapids. They want to make sure the rapids continue to produce things. And that's also something that I've been, I didn't mention this narrative, this book in my presentation, but there's a recent translation of a book by Yanomami shaman, Yanomami thinker called The Viko Penawa, called The Falling Sky. And it's, yeah, it's available in English, but there's an interesting moment that he's also narrating the Yanomami myth of like how, where do white people come from? And also an interesting reversal of like, yeah, like an anthropological perspective

or reversal of a narrative about where white people come from. But interestingly, it also involves phenomena in the water, involves essentially this creation of a huge hole in the Amazon that in a way like erupts water and the people that are displaced by this are supposedly like what to the Yanomami were the white people and they're like ancient people as well and we as like white contemporary white people as contemporary white people we are images of this ancient people that were the original white people so and essentially that all this narrative also

ties into the creation of the ocean itself. And apparently to the Yanomami there is also a part in the ocean that produces an absolute fatal storm that destroys boats that white people create. So I was very struck by this, hmm, the kind of, I mean not only the way in which the search search for storms, search for accidents is so present in 19th century narratives like Poe and Moby Dick, but in the way in which that crosses genres as well, crosses from a mythological genre that does have a claim to realism because, of course, to the Yanomami,

this is not just a story, it's real. I mean, this is their history. But the intersection that exists between that, the way in which it's the white people's boat that is prone to be attacked or to crash in this point in the ocean. So that was also something that I'm looking at as well. And the other thing is also the interdependent, kind of like the way in which a lot of the travelers of course depended on, there was a kind of cross-contamination between methods of navigation.

So like using indigenous knowledge to get across the Amazon, which is pretty indispensable, you could not, I mean they would not have managed to arrive at certain places if they hadn't used indigenous knowledge. and the other way around to the distribution of objects, like the compass maps that indigenous people do want to have. I mean, they end up acquiring and end up in a way kind of like repurposing that in a way. And I think this can be told as a story of cultural annihilation, which I find again a bit, not always, it doesn't always do justice to the ways that, even if it's inserted in

a kind of more nefarious aspect of modernization, it doesn't do justice to the ways that indigenous people are in fact using these technologies for different purposes, including for their own like you know emancipation and like attempt to resist some other kind of like invasive projects that at least in Brazil you've been seeing the past decades. So yeah anyways that was another aspect but I highly recommend this book The Falling Sky. It's very like a fascinating like yeah. In the chat, I have the right link, correct?

The Amazon link? Sorry? Is it Rajankana? Is it Rajankana? Or is it different book? Different book. You mean The Falling Sky? Yeah. No, it's- What is the author again? The Falling Sky is Words of Ayana Lama Shaman. And it's Daviko Penawa and the translator, because he wrote this book with Bruce Albert, who is an anthropologist. Bruce Albert essentially kind of transcribed the book, but Daviko Penawa is the author, and the translator is Nicholas Eliot.

But it's called The Falling Sky. I'll put it here on the chat. Yeah, I think we both, Ashley and I both found it, yeah. Mine was some fantasy about pirates. Oh, yeah, there we go. And then I'm sure, have you come across Designing Freedom by Stafford Beer, that lecture series? I haven't read it yet. Designing Freedom. Yeah, 1973 it was a lecture series. You can actually get the transcripts. It's like the first thing that comes up on Evergreen's website.

That's pretty much like a predecessor of a lot of these, I mean a lot of Singleton's work. He talks directly. The trap quote that I put up top, where he using that trap is not a function of the nature of the trap. I mean, he talks about this. He talks about a nuanced form of control based on variety. He was the one who instructed, I mean, he was the one who designed the Cybersyn in Chile, that experiment that you hear like, stop accelerations, of course. And that might be something you might want to check out just for some nuanced concepts that might help a little bit

better, like enabling sort of actions. Doesn't quite talk about navigation, but I think it's worthwhile if you're interested in the singleton sort of. Right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, in my case, especially, I'm mostly interested on the way in which these become metaphors, right? Because there's a way in which I can talk about that, use in a way the formalization of these concepts and terms and design or engineering, or even looking at, in a way, I don't know,

even anthropology in some way, like to use and etc. But the tricky part ends up being like translating that or translating the literary conception of that into other conceptions of what the design of freedom or the kind of overcoming constraints is. Because, of course, if you're, like, reading a narrative, I mean, the narrative is about that, but it's distilled in, you know, it's distilled in, like, imagery and, like, yeah, it's distilled in, like, metaphors in a way. And I, yeah. So that's the...

Would it be something to say that... Oh, sorry. No, no, go ahead. I'd say, would it be something to say that Stever Beer is also a poet on the side? Oh, I didn't know that. And the things he's talking about at this time are very almost futurist. He doesn't like the futurologist sort of tech thing. So he has a lot of metaphor involved in it. Like, I mean, even to the Scrub system, he's talking about the crashing of the waves being a chaotic system. I mean, he's using these metaphors, which are very interesting. Right. The nuanced concept of control as not being negative feedback, but as enabling freedom is actually great. And then I guess a side tidbit is there is a novel called Cinco, which is like a play on the five, like Cinco in Spanish.

It's a Tulane novel, and it's a play on the five systems of Beer's work, but it's about Cybersyn and an alternative future, where Cybersyn didn't get overtaken by the government and actually exists, but it turns into, like, a Skynet sort of dystopian aspect. So it does make its way into literature. I think it was written in like 2008. I think S-Y-M-C-O. Yeah. Yeah, one interesting metaphor that I came across in one of the books is like the idea of like a land sailor, which is a term that one of the narrators uses to describe this guy who like literally is also like the embodiment of like autonomy.

me, because this is a guy, like an American guy in the Amazon who essentially is solo, like someone that apparently, like even in Frontier Town, the Amazon, like respected no law whatsoever, was like described as being a person that created his own rules and at the same time embodied like an ethical code that was unbreakable. So this guy is seen as being, you know, yeah, I mean, he's essentially, and he's described as a land sailor, which is interesting because of the kind of collapse of two extremely different ways of using space and orienting in space that end up collapsing in the figure of this

guy as embodying freedom in some ways. So yeah, that's the kind of like, yeah, sorry? I was gonna, I'm not trying to keep pushing this design freedom thing, but there was something like when you were talking about this whole navigation, there is something when I read it that I just pulled up, where he said it's very, very small. like, so he says that like, above all, let us expect it of each other that we find ways to use power of science in a better cause, but ordinary people that, because ordinary folk do not understand science as it would be to say, we cannot sail a boat because we

cannot understand the wind and the sea and the tide race, or the tide race. And then he says, men have always navigated those unfathomable waters. We can do it now. So it's like, I don't know, I just found that. Yeah. Yeah. Without sort of operative control, this is obviously the continual metaphor that comes back up. But of course, you mentioned this from the etymology of cybernetics. Yeah. Are there any other questions from anybody else? I guess, had you read The Three-Body Problem, the book that we've just read in parallel

with your book? I have to read it. It's like on my Kindle, and I have like a, like writing my, I'm like trying to finish my dissertation within a year. So I am one of those unfortunate PhD people that have not been reading a lot out of my research unfortunately, but it's on my list. What did you guys make of it in relation to? One of the things that is the description of the space that the canoe occupies in your essay. Right. There is a section for the others.

I've got the e-book. It's on page 270 where one of the characters, because I can't remember which one it is, describes three imaginary spheres that they occupy in a kind of infinite space. They imagine creating the first, then a second, given equal weight, and then the third, which of course then introduces this kind of chaotic, turbulent kind of system. and there's a book by Andrew Pickering who writes about alternative versions of cybernetics and he observes in that book

that the idea of cybernetics of course is preceded by the kind of interactions, the feeding forward of systems in the three-body problem. So it's just something that might be useful. So it just has some kind of connection in some way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, thank you. Yeah, because I think the canoe in the third bank of the river, I think, and in Fitzcarado as well, I mean, this also has to do in a way with my own theoretical proclivities towards, and

also my engagement with Deleuze, which in that essay is really brief, I just mentioned it, but for me, I think if there is something to be gained in the logic of sense, it's precisely in a way the kinds of spatial temporal conceptions that it allows. And the figure of the canoe, I think, as being like, if you look at it as a very, like, supposedly rudimentary device to, like, navigate and, like, be on the water, in that narrative, like, ends up becoming, like, an interface with, like, time itself. Of course, there's the whole, like, Heraclitian current as well, with, like, you know, it is about being on the river and the river itself, like, as an image of time.

So that's the other part of this kind of exploration that I'm interested in, in terms of different spatial temporal conceptions for history. And I think that's why I was a bit resistant to either abiding by a kind of Promethean narrative that goes one way, no matter how rich it can be, in sacrificing the kinds of other directions and I think this is inevitable with any with any technological with any social technical contacts that you're looking at I think so I'll look at the three-body problem whenever yeah in the summer maybe hopefully I have time

your reference to the logic of sense there and I guess also indifference and repetition it's the three-body problem that Deleuze is using to begin to describe a kind of problematic, a problematic field. So the problem and its problematic field. There's this kind of movement of concepts that start with the body problem. Yeah, the triad didn't first as well. I was thinking like the triad in first as well but it might be a little more

right like the interpretive in the sort of chaotic aspect of it or the way that you might interpret a thing which is similar to like the the circle whatever I remember he calls it yeah the circle the proposition from the you mean the way that the most called are sorry I didn't hear the last part yeah goes in logic expenses it's she's it's like a your it breaks the hermeneutic circle right right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah also yeah I am

Yeah. I actually just found Lewis Carroll's book on symbolic logic, and logic, like, symbolic logic, which is actually quite similar to what Lewis is writing after him, like, using, like, many of the definitions, which I did not know. Yeah. Ben, would you like to close us up? I don't know. I think we're right around time. And I don't want to take up too much of your time, Deneb, because I know you're busy writing. You just got back from a meeting. You got all these ideas for your new...

No, but I... No, yeah. I have tons of references. And yeah, you heard my draft. Like, essentially, well my draft is going to be in a very initial state. So that's always very helpful for me to be able to elaborate that and get feedback. That was great. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, I'm excited to read it. Yeah. If you do have like a, you know, when you get closer to publication, if you'd like to keep up the conversation with our group, just send, you know, you could send it to one of Ben or I, we can share it. Awesome. That would be great. We can send more feedback. Yeah. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much.

I hope it was helpful to kind of workshop it here with us. Oh, yeah. No, definitely. Yeah, I mean, it's interestingly, like, in my own field, it's like some of my references are a bit like, even in the field of Latin American literature, for most people, what I'm doing is a bit not, it's a bit unusual precisely because a lot of my sources are actually Anglophone sources, and I'm trying to look at the, not necessarily looking at the Amazon, the cultural, national Latin American expression or narrative of the Amazon, but precisely like of like, you know,

the emergence of like Western technology in the Amazon. So some of these people are like really obscure and there's no way of like, there's no way of like expecting people to like to read them. But as soon as I start talking about it with like an audience that is involved in like, like cybernetics theory or like even like science fiction, the conversation tips the other way, and that helps me a lot. So I really appreciate the feedback. I guess the final question is, you've been following the Brazilian Army's use of cybernetics as defense control, and still they've been testing three different systems, right? One is the cybernetics defense control system.

Right. I think it's still in, that was like 2000, I don't know, it was like a few years ago, But I think it's still beating out of the three, and they're still continuing to use it in the Army. So maybe then that's your another end. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly, yeah. I mean, I think once I take a more, like, contemporary leap, because so far my project has a bit of, like, a historical, like, looking at a certain, like, historical period, but I think ultimately I, you know, I mean, it should be a way of, like, looking at continuities in technological interventions in the present as well, especially with hydroelectric power plants and construction of railroads, not only railroads because the Chinese are

now looking at the possibility of continuing the railroads project that was abandoned at some point. So there are talks also of like doing that right now and like building a super fast train in the Amazon. Which would be pretty interesting and of course people already, that was like highly criticized when it came out in the newspapers a few years ago. So yeah, we'll see what comes out of that. But yeah, ultimately I think I want to move to more contemporary, like deal with contemporary materials. Well, I guess to cite one last, before you go, to cite one last anglophone, there's

the one who's in conversation with fear. Mr. Jeffrey Vickers, which is the quote I did, comes from this one. So freedom in a rocking boat. Got it. Okay. It's actually... I think it's another technical one, but it's more about policy. Awesome. Well, I'll let the room go quiet for a second and see if anybody else has any final Thanks for doing that. Okay. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you very much for being here.

Yeah, thank you so much. That was great. Thanks, Ben. Yeah, and we'll catch up soon. I don't know whenever you're in New York or anyone is in New York. Right now, I am around this summer. I'll be in July. Oh, great. Yeah, so just shoot me an email. I'll be around here too. Should be. working and eventually doing other things. So it would be great to meet. Okay, cool. All right. Yeah, see you. Bye-bye. Bye. So, everybody, before we end, I want to talk about two final things. Well, one thing to pick up back up on the ETO thing, I found some things that are actually quite interesting because the three-body problem is huge in China.

It's like one of the large... I mean, it started a huge controversy through science fiction and everything. And people have multiple Twitter handles. But they actually did start creating the ETO. They've been fictionalizing it and trying to create it online as an actual functioning entity through Twitter and things. So getting into outside of the novel was just kind of interesting. There's a movie out in July, is there not, as well? Yeah, people have been trying to make trailers about Free Body Problem, like using different films. But then there's another thing was, the thing I was reading when I was trying to answer

Derek's question was that a lot of protesters have been actually quoting the book in response in protests against humanity and things like this. Interesting. It's quite interesting. ETO lives on... Which would be of interest to you, Derek. It's a religion in the making. Yes. Fictional entities. And then the second thing that I wanted to sort of mention was that on Slack, we were talking about possible projects, right? This is technically the fourth session, however, I think I'd like to do one last session, which is not...

If you don't show up, you don't show up. But I'd like to do it around organizing something that we could all do together. And I did propose something that Ben and I were talking about that we brought up last semester and we failed to do it. And this semester I want to do it, which would be to create a private media wiki or wiki page where we can start collecting all the stuff we've talked about in this seminar. And then like the people, well, Catherine I think is dropped, no, Catherine's here. Like Catherine and Derek who were here at the last seminar and the seminar before, we can just start collecting all this sort of knowledge and start like basically characters,

organizations, fictional agencies, utopian, dystopian. We could start kind of like developing an ontology for these sorts of things. But it would also open up to whoever is interested in creative writing or speculation to, you know, start writing in their own fictional arcs and aspects, which I think would be an interesting project to try to collaborate with. and I think some people picked up on it in the Slack that it would be something worthwhile. So if people wanted to, I was gonna propose that we meet next Saturday, same time, to discuss that project, like how we would do that project, maybe start formulating the project, and I can get the wiki up.

Yeah, we can maybe work, that would be some way of connecting or working together and continuing to work. Yeah, and then we can discuss what we do after that. I know Ben and I are going to be offering a second module, which will be on audiovisual aspects of what we've been discussing for the past three seminars, which we'll have some interesting guests for that as well. And I have, like, one, like, I also have another guest, Ed Keller, who is very, who runs a very interesting course at the new school, who also would be willing to meet so we could schedule a time for her to meet with him and have a session with him as well.

So I guess, like, are people up for doing this wiki thing as a final, as, like, trying to do some sort of collaborative project out of this? Yes, and no. Yeah? I think so. I'll be here next week. All right. So we meet next week, same time. We'll discuss that, and then we can talk about the future of what we do with this work. Okay. Cool. All right. Thank you all. Thanks, everyone.