the-k-files-who-s-pulling-your-strings-featuring-amy-ireland

Hello and welcome to another episode of The K-Files, brought to you by Zero Books, being also brought to you by Buddies Without Organs, or possibly the other way round. It's difficult to keep track of it sometimes. I'm your host, Sean. I'm operating on four hours of sleep because I am an insomniac ever since last December. I am joined by my two wonderful co-hosts Matt and Corey. And we are also joined by our, I'm not going to, I'm going to say our second inaugural guest, which I know is meaningless combination of words. We are joined by our second ever guest on the podcast, Amy Ireland. So we are going to be, unlike last week, we are going to be

talking about a text. We are talking about who's pulling your strings, which is a classic bit of CCRU chill fodder. But before we get into that, Amy, I'd like for you to tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background, your work, and especially what brought you into the strange milieu of all things CCRU. Well, I'm a writer and currently an editor for the publisher, Urbanomic. I've just joined Robin in that capacity as of last September. So I guess that's what I'm mainly occupied with at the moment.

But I guess people know me best for... I've had quite a few bits and pieces published around the web, I don't know, the last sort of five, six, seven years. And the thing I guess I'm best known for is being part of Laboria Cubonics and contributing to xenofeminism, a politics for alienation, which Corey is wrapping right now in the video, published by Verso, which was a collaborative piece born out of a summer school where all six members of Laboria Cubonics met in 2014 in Germany. and it was kind of an attempt to think contrary to kind of the sort of postmodern legacy of

materialist feminism what a rationalist feminism might look like so that was um yeah that I guess that's what people most know me for I have to say though kind of as a personal disclaimer my interest in xenofeminism was then and I guess is veered even more strongly kind of away from reason and looking at other kind of aspects of what xenofeminism was, like technology, that sort of thing. And, yeah, I guess that, I mean, I got to that summer school where I met Luboro Kubonics through a series of friendships and connections that came from being interested in CCIU.

and interested in collapse back when I was starting my PhD. So I did a master's at the University of Sydney quite a while ago on George Bataille. And two weeks before we were all due to hand in our theses, my good friend Patrick Quick stopped me on the stairs of the art library and kind of said in this really, like, mysterious conspiratorial tone, have you read that mad book on George Bataille by Nick Land? And I was like, what? There's no way that I can ever read a new book on George Bataille. Like right now I'm about to hand in my thesis. So I sort of like shelved it, but I never forgot the way that Patrick said that, like this absolutely crazy book on George Bataille.

I mean, like, yeah. So it kind of like sat in the back of my mind. I never forgot the name Nick Land. And when I was kind of thinking of things to do with my PhD thesis several years later, I was like, well, I'll go back and look up this book. So I read Thirst for Annihilation and was just like, this is like the absolute best book on Bataille I've ever read. And from there, I think Fang Numina had just been published and I had a copy of Collapse. I think I wrote to Robin like back in 2013 about something like asking someone like nerdy question about something. And I guess I think like urbanomic was actually really formative for me as it has been, I'm sure, for a lot of postgrads who were like maybe not feeling 100 percent comfortable in the academy or looking for something a little bit outside it.

to kind of release them from this like academic straight jacket thinking that you sometimes encounter there. And it was definitely that for me. So I was, I mean, I sort of started off thinking about following this trajectory of like Georges Bataille and like French kind of early 20th century philosophy. And I just ended up going, I'm going to write a PhD somehow connected to CCIU, which, I mean, like that just happened. Like it was absolutely this kind of Lovecraftian story of the sort of hapless scholar who ends up being kind of overrun by cathonic energy and completely like losing their agency or ability to get themselves out of a situation that's hurtling

further and further into destitution. And that, I mean, that actually kind of really happened. Like, so I was like, I was in a creative writing department. And I ended up being like, well, I have to describe the history of transcendental time in order to be able to explain what poetry is, was kind of like what I ended up with. And that project, like, it was really great. And I sort of, you know, like, got into this amazing headspace doing it. But after like my seventh year of doing the PhD and working on this trajectory, I just had like a massive health collapse. And I had like a thyroid, like a metabolic collapse, basically. And kind of ironically, it was due to my thyroid going cyber positive.

It's like a cybernetic regulation kind of system. and it went like completely on a cyber positive trajectory and just absolutely like slammed my whole system. And I ended up in hospital with organ failure and I like kind of trekked home after I was released with a kind of form that they'd given me with like an account of all of the things that they'd done to me while I was admitted. And there was this great note from the night that I was admitted. I was really like confused and out of it. And it said that I was having auditory hallucinations and denying them. So that's kind of where I ended up. I have no recollection of them either. So, yeah. So that's where my PhD ended up.

It kind of like just was a total crash. I ended up kind of picking up pieces of what I had and handing it in and getting my PhD. But I still don't kind of consider it finished. And hopefully I'll be able to sort of complete it. you know someone wants to give me a bunch of money to pay my rent so I can finish this book off that'd be cool but um but yeah I mean the thing I think that anyone who is attempting to write on or with or through CCIU in any kind of academic capacity is like confronted with this problem which is like how do you write what is ostensibly an academic thesis on this group of people who were so against recuperation

into the academy and whose whole kind of attitude to that was to keep pushing outside of it and, you know, eventually getting ejected from it, as the story of the CCIU goes. And like Sadie Plant's, like her PhD thesis was about how this process of recuperation happened to the situationists. and so I mean it's kind of yeah it's a problem for anyone who's trying to do that and so I think the way it all turned out for me was actually quite apt because I got sort of immunitized into the material that I was working with both through a sort of like actual embodied crisis but also because like throughout my seven years of researching this stuff I just kind of made friends with everyone and so I just ended up sort of like my PhD got just absorbed into a bunch of

friendships with members of CCIU and like, you know, hanging out with them, which is kind of, it's kind of cool. I mean, like I've got, ostensibly I have a PhD dealing with some kind of the topic of CCIU, but I've got a bunch of friendships, which is kind of even cooler. So yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have had it any other way. The real PhD is a friendship. Yeah. I mean, basically, that's the main version of the last five minutes of what I was saying. I mean, it's fascinating the role that friendship does play in the formation of these conversations, actually. I mean, like the antecedent podcast of the K-Files is called Bodies Without Organs.

And there's the obvious pun there. but at the same time there is something quite fun about us three and our guests addressing each other as body you know it's um there is a leveling um there's a leveling and de-inflationary element uh to that where we do just end up being three people who even though our primary like communication with each other is through this uh i mean i know i i've known matt through podcasting um through a mutual friend of ours and he came on to uh another podcast he used to do with signal and cory became involved specifically through this but yes it is simply through making friends that we end up having the end up forming these little intellectual groups really and that

is an important part of the of the dynamic and it's interesting in and i forget the name with I forget the name of the author, but in Intersecting Lives, the book about Deleuze and Guattari's working relationship, there is a line somewhere in there where they de-emphasise their friendship, interestingly, saying something like, and certain there are valences of meaning lost in the translation from the French, but what the translation says is, well, we're friends, but we're not buddies. um so obviously for our purposes we have transcended the um the coldness of that relationship into something a lot more uh warm and moist in uh by by transcending it into bodyhood

again four hours sleep everybody uh i'm recording this in my dressing gown sipping chamomile tea but that's it i think it's that's the we can say that about the bodies but that's the without organs too right i guess it's it's it's affirming that a lot of the time that there's an intensity, right? Because there's something interesting that even in Mark's own PhD thesis, or at least maybe there's the essay he wrote later about Gothic materialism, there's a whole section in there where he's referencing Artaud, and Artaud writing about Vincent van Gogh as also going through that process of sort of being, I can't remember the word that you used, Amy, but not, I guess, not rehabilitated, but I guess, you know, absorbed into a kind of cultural safe zone.

And yeah, Mark says it's like a disintensification by canonisation or something like that. But it's an interesting, there's an interesting tension even in that, I think, that to canonise someone and to sort of make them saintly or even to sort of acknowledge some sort of divinity is to acknowledge a kind of intensity. It's just not, how do you not capture that? How do you not like render it kind of inert as if you could put it on a kind of, I don't know, you could give someone a day of the year and then they sort of, we all go and have a meal with them or something, I don't know. I'm again, also quite tired. So that brain's firing off. But I think that's, I don't know, there's something about that that's, yeah, key to a lot of this stuff. And I guess it kind of, I mean, I'm saying this

because I think it also ties into this sort of text that we were sort of reading, right? There's the who's pulling your strings kind of feels like a dramatization of that very relationship. Sort of as you were kind of saying with your own story, Amy, of your auditory hallucinations and then the denial of them sort of feels like a similar process that's going on in this story, right? That you've got this psychedelic experience that is denied, that you deny yourself, but the very denial is what actually makes it, gives away something of its reality. maybe they're slightly rushing ahead slightly but maybe that's a point I don't know how do you feel about that that that kind of intensification process or that intensity how do you hold that open can you even I guess that's an open question for everybody but I think it's kind of like a key

thing here right that that how what you're meant to do with that and how you even like you know yeah being buddies is itself a it's a word that doesn't really do justice the what it is to be in a relationship with someone right it's kind of there's a for better or for worse or for i don't know however you want to put it the words are insufficient i guess is what i mean um and that feels like to be the thing that draws a lot of people in the i guess last week we were talking about the sort of occulted vibe as well it sort of all seems to be connected through that sense intensity. That's definitely a key aspect, I think, of what was happening in CCIU. And like Robin was saying in the previous conversation that you had with him for the last podcast, everyone, without an exception, who was involved in CCIU or kind of in that milieu in Warwick in

the 90s had a kind of crash in the 2000s that was linked to this sense of a loss of intensity um and like it's absolutely endemic across everyone who was involved in it and as someone who was kind of like when I first sort of started meeting everyone and getting to know them it's something that I noticed that I think wasn't even necessarily obvious to those guys like they didn't they weren't necessarily kind of um aware of it as a collective thing um but what something that I experienced so I kind of I've always been looking at CCIU from this weird position of kind of originally being outside of it um and I guess just getting to know it in a way now where it's not I don't have a relationship to it like it's something that I'm studying and writing about

um uh but yeah i had a really interesting experience in um around the end of 2016 to about the end of 2018 beginning of 2019 uh during the kind of rise of rep twitter and then cave twitter which was a sort of similar thing driven by friendship um and cave twitter ended up being a group of it's probably a core of about 12 maybe 16 people um and we were just 24 hours a day on this Slack talking theory, making things. We had the website, The Vast Abrupt. And it was just like the most intense energy, constant cultural production, a lot of stuff,

a lot of plans for things that never saw the light of day, a lot of things that did. We made a lot of stuff. And like you saw the kind of like last year or so of that, I think, Matt, firsthand. but that was just like for me I kind of a few moments during that where I was like this is must it must be what it was like for CCRU just this feeling of like there's something coursing through you that is part of the situation that you're in with this other group of people and the same thing happened when the caves kind of like dissipated as all of these things do I don't think they can ever last forever a lot of us felt a little bit like lost or you know something had something was missing and we didn't know how to get it back um so yeah definitely I think contrary to the biographer of intersecting lives that

friendship is a really important part of building intensities yeah I think that's uh sorry I mean this is probably a long tangent we can go on really we should probably um because I mean I guess I kind of wanted to add to that at least I think that's partly I mean I do I certainly do remember the sort of cave twitter days and it's funny because i was talking to someone about it recently who um wasn't there in those kind of those discussions but there was a moment where people who may be familiar with that as like a sort of quote-unquote movement um it people started using it as like a sort of a badge of a badge of some sort of being part of some sort of i don't know diffuse club no one really was kind of aware who was there and this guy i was trying

to you he's like yeah i had cave twitter in my bio and it's like yeah but you i mean i don't care that you weren't there but it's kind of interesting how that happens that as if that intensely kind of leaked out and people just kind of latched onto it and it became this more diffuse thing which i actually kind of i remember feeling weird about at the time but actually i kind of really like now um but it's strange because i feel like a lot of what's happened even this sort of podcast and other things not to get sort of too self-reflective about it but that was that was also what we felt I think at Goldsmiths after Mark died that I think that, I mean, this text in itself that we're reading tonight, I think I first read that year because we'd had, with Kojo Eshin and we had a group of us organise this series of lectures, and this was one of the texts that we chose to sort of read as a group. But it was sort of the same thing with that group of people

that I think everyone was thrown together in this really intense moment of after Mark's death. And it did, it was unsustainable. And I think that's the thing is that all these things are, but um the mark that they leave on you does kind of find it's always ends up emerging in these other things and it kind of strangely keeps the these things sort of fragment and fracture but the the fragments themselves kind of can flare up and have their own little i don't know it's like a like a chain reaction that's quite fascinating to track i guess rhizomatically there's not really a family tree of post-CCIE stuff that you could probably map out accurately, but actually it's there. You can sort of see how that's echoed down the years in all these different ways.

But yeah, maybe that's kind of enough, at least background, because I do think that's kind of, it is key to this sort of whole text. It's sort of the drama of that is sort of what's captured here. But maybe, yeah, kind of kick over the can to Sean or Corey. I will just say before I hand over to Corey to move us into synopsis and so on this is something I touched on last episode something that is always in the back of my mind with a lot of these conversations about CCRU I'm not saying the CCRU was consciously an occult, sorcerous order I'm just saying that it just acted a lot like one and might as well have been one in some ways. And it does feel some often when we hear,

like, and you could perhaps view this along hyperstitional vectors, but I've always had this sense of turning up a little bit too late to these moments, you know, sort of like, obviously CCRU was like decades before I become like intellectually aware, you know, because I'm a 90s kid. But yeah, like I was getting into Twitter, into theory twitter on the tail end of cave titan twitter and um ret twitter and all of that uh so it's always like these so often these things manifest as more sort of like echoes or shadows of something strange that was happening just slightly out of my field of vision uh and i would end up in the position of trying to piece together exactly what these things are and i remember when

the vast abrupt um twitter account like became live and people probably people probably like you were like retweeting it uh had thinking so like who are these people where's this come from what's this new bit of like the mystery of this you know um but yeah uh there's only only one eye of a triangle though the order is always the order no matter where it appears anyway um let's plough on a little bit into the actual text itself because i want to want to try and be a little bit a little bit tight with this one i always say that when they never actually ends up happening but uh yeah uh i'm gonna hand over to cory to uh start uh the ball rolling talking about the text itself who's pulling your strings yeah so i'll have to ask the the audience if they

haven't read this before they're gonna have to just bear with me because we've got layers of narrative and layers of reality and unreality all kind of sandwiched together and if it sounds confusing i'm gonna say it's deliberate and you're just gonna have to enjoy it for now um we're gonna have a link to the in the show notes to the piece itself and we're also going to be releasing a special audio reading of it are we keeping that a secret for now no no no but that will be for that'll be for zero patrons um i don't know probably about um we'll figure we can always cut this bit out. Audience, if you haven't read it, please pause and read it. And depending on how we release the special reading of it, either listen to that now or enter into whatever initiatory tier

you have to in order to access it. There's a smoother way of handling that, I'm certain, but that's what I've gone with. Corey, please continue. Yes. So there are like two parts to this piece and the meat of it is a transcript that's titled I Was a CCRU Meat Puppet, written by one Justine Morrison, and the remainder is an introduction and coda from CCRU. So with the introduction, we see some interesting tensions right away, with CCRU both casting doubt on the existence of Justine Morrison, whilst also explaining how they found the screed and its supposed provenance, which is that it was a talk given at the South London Monarch Victim Support Group. So whilst CCRU denies the veracity of Morrison's claims,

they never claim that she's lying. They believe, she believes what she's saying, even if they aren't convinced that she exists. So like I said, that's an interesting tension and the sort of unbelief that hyperstition can thrive on. Just very quickly before you continue, I do just want to clarify for the audience that this is a Mark Fisher text. It is under the aegis of CCRU and it is anonymous, but this is something that Mark wrote, which is why we are talking about it. I just, I realised I hadn't made that clear. Just want to confirm this is a Mark Fisher podcast. This isn't a CCRU podcast. Yes. When I talk about Justine Morrison and CCRU writing here, it's all Mark. And that's part of the fun of it. So yes, after that introduction,

we move on to I Was a CCRU Meat Puppet. which opens with a call to the curious, to the inquisitive, to those whose eyes are open or who are at least ready to have their eyes opened. And this is a pretty common tactic among conspiracy circles. You have to appeal to the intelligence of the audience. Only you can understand this message, not those sheeple, etc., etc. And there's another tactic that's another conspiracy trope and that's the suggestion that the conspiracy in question is global in scale and even that the entire human race is at risk. You know, like why don't conspiracists ever stumble onto a cosy local conspiracy? It's almost like when it's so incredibly large,

a person can't be expected to do anything about it. So, you know, they're allowed to post in good faith. So say what you will about Pizzagate, but if it was happening exactly as described and not on Little St. James, then showing up at a pizza restaurant with a assault rifle 15 was exactly the right thing to do like that's that's the correct like that's what they should have been doing if it was true but anyway but that does just make me think that about an alternative timeline where like this blog post from mark caused someone to show up at warwick with their grandpa shotgun stalking the halls looking for the CCRU office. So thank Christ that never happened. Yet.

So on to the accusations themselves. It begins with our now long forgotten Microsoft advertising campaign. It's better with the butterfly. And Justine claims that this worked as something like an activation code with her being a recovering monarch victim and Manchurian candidate style assassin. her handle was assassin8 as in the number eight and it's just so fucking beautifully clean and simple like i have to give mark fisher props for that it could be the name of a comic book or a movie assassin8 it's it's beautiful i wish i'd come up with it um from here justine introduces kathy o'brien um who is a real person uh who claims to have been a victim of project monarch

which according to her was part of the CIA's MKUltra project. And Morrison claims that it's O'Brien's disclosures that gave her the bravery to tell her story. So she describes a monarch program named after the butterfly because the program changes its victims in the way a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly. The program works by recruiting children, usually with the collusion of their parents, and subjecting them to traumatizing abuse that causes the child's psyche to disintegrate and their personality to split into so-called alters. So if you've read Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol or watched the TV show, you'll see that that same idea is represented in the origin story of Crazy Jane.

So Morrison, Justine, not Grant, weaves a web connecting MKUltra, Project Monarch, the Third Reich and satanic forces before moving on to her introduction to the CCRU at the Syzygy Festival in London, which didn't happen. Okay. There, she witnessed nightly twinning rituals conducted by the CCRU where they openly called upon demons, and she claimed that the CCRU controllers never sleep, which sounds kind of like a rumour I've heard about Nickland, whether that's founded or not. so she describes conversations with the ccriu where they discussed uh atlantean white magic lemurian time sorcery and other aspects of the ccriu mythos um so before that contact with the

nefarious agents of the ccriu could trigger a horrible break in justine psyche she was snatched off the street by trench coated figures who drugged her and took her away to voxel for an intensive six-month program of deprogramming. And God, I wish I could get six months off. So the deprogramming was performed by the Kowalski brothers, who were themselves twins, which honestly I think should have been a red flag to Justine Morrison here. She says that the deprogramming gave her the distance needed to see the true satanic machinations behind CCRU and her own role in the assassination of Dollar Bill Gates, or a syzygistic twin of the tech monopolist. So with Gates's death, Microsoft and the CCRU merged, bringing CCRU closer to realising their satanic plans for a world consumed by blood and fire.

Though according to the Kowalski twins and Justine, the members of CCRU were themselves most likely monarch victims, unaware of their own involvement in the conspiracy and in need of compassion and deprogramming. With Justine's missive ended, the piece closes with a coda from CCRU and rather than trying to outright deny the claims, they begin to acknowledge the historical facts or they begin by acknowledging the historical facts of the Nazi experiments that led to MKUltra through Project Paperclip, bringing all of those horrifying experiments home to the land of the free. They then point out the all-encompassing narrative of these sorts of conspiracy theories.

Here I'll quote directly from the piece because I think it summarises a lot about it and what makes it a great piece of theory fiction and hyperstitional fiction. So, to attempt to refute such narratives is to be drawn into a tedious double game One either has to embrace an arbitrary and outrageous cosmic plot or alternatively advocate submission to the most mundane construction of quotidian reality, dismissing the hyperstitional chaos that operates beyond the screens. This is why atheism is usually so boring. Again, rather than denying the allegations CCRU instead focuses on the Hypersitional power of conspiracies Claiming there was no monarch program Until monarch deprogramming created it

And similarly, that there was no devil worship Until after the witch trials These fictions function as reality And it ends on a note that everyone involved Be that Microsoft employees CCRU members or Justine Morrison herself might all be puppets in this production but no one is pulling the strings and I love that final bit because obviously the person pulling the strings is Mark Fisher in that he's writing all of it and if this was a Grant Morrison comic this is where it would break the fourth wall and show Mark sitting at his desk writing no doubt with a smirk across his face because he's just pulled off a brilliant little bit of multi-layered reality blurring hyperstition. Matt, did you want to add something?

Yeah. If only because, and I'm kind of interested to ask him about this too, actually, and I think it will kind of go on to what I know you want to talk about in a second, but I always feel super torn when it comes to talking about the CCIU in this way, because it's, this is a great, I mean, you've given the perfect overview really of what's going on here, but I almost feel like it's the there's that strange tension where in actually trying to address this piece as for what it is it's doing that thing that we guess we were almost talking about where you want to like talk about how wonderful it is and what's so enjoyable about it whilst at the same time not like de-intensifying it I kind of want to like go back and eat at all the words that we've just said but like it's not a story this is like it's a it's a it's a communique it's a it's a you know it's it's like want to fully embrace the cosmic plot almost like not to

even sort of retract that let's take back that this was a mark fisher text and i know it's written by justine morrison um but i wonder like i'm curious actually to how that fits into this how like like for amy as i kind of as uh i guess that's because i guess what you were sort of saying before is that's the context that you kind of approach the cci you said you're sort of in a creative writing context but how does that how do you feel about that now even having spent so much time with this do you do you sort of wrestle with that same tension of how to even approach this stuff without almost celebrating what you love about it creatively and at the same time not killing the kind of core of it yeah um i mean this is the problem though that talking about

CCIU kind of instantly inserts you into. You can do a sort of like material history and talk about the individual people and their role in producing particular creative objects and what their personal contribution was to like the group mood. Or you can kind of follow the CCIU story about itself where they're catching this signal and all being, you know, actually puppeted, truly puppeted by some other kind of force um that's like beneath all of them as individuals um and i mean isn't there i think i can remember um a post on k-punk of marx where he's talking about writing and sort of just says casually citing one of the the um numogram demons like

when i write it's not me that's writing i'm channeling atanol and it's atanol who's writing through me um and so i think this is kind of like that question that's in the title who's pulling your strings is also kind of pointing back to that as a philosophical question um like also i mean when like there's a kind of long tradition in um talking about creative practice um that you can extend to like all of you can turn you can you know extend it in a psychoanalytical vein you can talk about it ontologically it's I think the backbone of what transcendental philosophy is but creative practice kind of has a much more intuitive and like casual way of talking about

creating a work without really knowing what you're doing that you're channeling something or something's kind of taking hold of you and inspiring you I mean inspiration is a good kind of word for this it's like you know you're breathing in something inspiration and conspiration both really interesting words actually conspiration is like breathing with someone else you know you there's something that's flowing through you both together causing you to collaborate um and conspire um inspiration um again you're channeling something uh was it aristotle and he's like demon the muse again so art the history of art talks about this really casually all the time artists are always channeling some other force um and i think like that can be really trite

in one sort of way of thinking about it but when you think about it in terms of like like transcendental philosophy which cciu was like very uh connected to i mean i go so far to say as it underwrites like everything that is happening under the name of cciu it's all engaging with the history of transcendental philosophy but that's my particular take on it um and that is always about something else pulling your strings um so i think that like as well as like going well mark's writing this and creating this like amazing narrative as the creator of the narrative is one way of talking about it i think it's legitimate and i think that these kind of like sort of material histories of groups like cciu are really important um and also super interesting i mean like

Like, it's just a different mode of telling the story. But the way that is, like, more, has more fidelity to the way that CCIU conceived of itself as an entity is to kind of take the transcendental philosophy route and talk about it. The members of CCIU channeling this thing behind the screen. so the question who's pulling your strings is kind of you know it's much broader than just who's pulling justine morrison's strings and cciu's strings it's like as a spontaneous human individual are you really what you think you are yeah i should say i didn't want i didn't mean to

ask that question by delegitimizing your own but corey's magnificent introduction i felt like maybe I've done that by accident. But no, I feel like that's the core, I guess. Because I know that, Corey, you also want to talk about it in that sort of very fictional perspective. I guess that's that core tension almost, really. It's the unanswerable conundrum that kind of moves it all forwards. Well, I think one of the interesting parts about hyperstitional fiction is that as soon as you start to talk about it, you easily lose the kind of the hyperstitional anchor that makes it so intriguing in the first place. So like that's exactly it. As soon as you do start talking about the fact that this piece was written by Mark

and you start to think about it as like a piece of fiction or whatever, it's like you don't want to actually think about that because it's like much less fun than just going like, no, this is true. like this like if it's not real the people involved think it's real like that's much more interesting than just um yeah here's a piece of fiction and that's the same thing with every every bit of hyperstition like hyperstitional fiction that i've really latched on to as soon as i've kind of found out that it was fiction i was a little bit disappointed like one a film that i really enjoyed as i was watching it and i'm going to ruin it for anyone who hasn't already seen it just by talking about it which again that's the problem um the fourth kind it's presented as a documentary with

Mila Jojovic doing the reenactments of a woman who was, or claims that she was abducted by aliens and it's just like the whole thing is just really enthralling and it drags you right in and then you check Wikipedia and like the woman who is apparently the contactee that's an actor and it's a film with a script and all these it's not a documentary at all it's a mockumentary and um yeah but like in those in those you know minutes while you're watching the movie you want nothing more than it for it to be real because it's it makes the world so much more interesting if it were i think like there's that that tension between like belief and unbelief behind like the kind of

grounds superstition um and so like i think you need to just like hold on to that suspension of disbelief and just write it and just um yeah like I know I just kind of like tell when a bit of hyperstition is really working because it just kind of grabs something in the back of you like at the back end it grabs you by the scruff of your neck and it's just like this is real this is true and you just you just have to believe it because that's what it wants you to do I definitely got to a point when I was like in the deepest darkest depths of my PhD research where I was like just like a queuing words out of a thousand plateaus like there was one

particular instance I got I just got really obsessed with um the fourth plateau and there's one instance where I got like oh sorry I don't want to interrupt you but could you explain what AQing is actually. Sorry, sorry. So AQing is short for alphanumeric Kabbalah. And it's something that CCIU sort of developed. It's a kind of Gematria system, which comes from the tradition of like Hebraic mysticism. And they kind of developed their own version of it that connects to a magical diagram called the pneumogram, which they also discovered during their kind of like most fecund years of production. And it basically involves taking a word and breaking down the letters into their numerical equivalents.

I think that so if you take the alphabet and you start with 10 as being equivalent to A and Z is 36, And so every word has a numerical value, basically. And then words that have identical numerical values are basically akin to finding a coincidence in reality. And there's lots of different ways you can kind of look at resonations between numbers. And like, you know, there are people who actually, I mean, are practicing this stuff right now. I know quite a few of them. Like there's a Discord server that I frequent that's dedicated to this. but it's kind of like finding these little sort of glitches in reality and anyway so i was like

running the english translation of a thousand plateaus through this and like finding like several coincidences like like one after the other and like literally having like visceral responses to this like getting a shiver like you like what you just described korea of like sort of something just sort of seizing you from behind um and like yeah so like there is like there was like really a sort of moment when i was like in that headspace where i was like is wait is this real um and yeah losing that kind of uh spontaneous reverence that we have for truth in the process and i think it makes sense because we also like uh you know humans were hardwired for story as

well like after you know hundreds of thousands of years of sitting around campfires and telling stories with one another conspiring as you said um like we're also hardwired to want to latch onto them um even when there's proof you know leading to their untruth um sometimes the story is more important than truth um i think you know obviously that can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing if you look at you know politics in the current moment um but it's definitely a good thing when you start thinking about uh fiction and theory and um you know the intersection thereof i feel like we may even have to do like an episode at some point before yeah well at the risk of turning this into a cc iu podcast but i guess that's the that's the attraction of numbers though too right that kind of this isn't something that lan says too where it's like a counting always happens on

the outside in in the sense that you're always you know you count on your fingers it's something that you always sort of do externally you count objects that are around you um but as if that makes objects oh sorry um numbers more objective like so i guess that that that kind of part of the the rush of of of seeing those kind of aq coincidences it's kind of like the golden ratio or something where you kind of you you look at something that's so aesthetically pleasing and as soon as you kind of verify that in math it sort of feels like it's on the one hand it's a kind of confirmation and the other side it's it's sort of so uh unhuman that it kind of touches this other space yeah and i guess that's kind of that sort of transcendental i was gonna say vibe which

totally demeans it almost in a way but it's you know but it's it's it's maybe vibe's a good word for it even it's something that you can't quite it is it's like a mathematized feeling which is quite everything is vibes now embrace it yeah well that's i guess that's kind of what i wanted to say actually in kind of referring it back to the text is i think that's why it makes sense that it's a kind of like computational conspiracy that this is you know it's microsoft it's like this the secrets written in dollar bill gates's binary code as if even you know his name being dollar bill is like he's a he's a representation of currency rather than actually like subjectivity um it's like all of that seems to come out in a way that's yeah it i think that has at least for me someone who actually doesn't know anything about maths whatsoever um the all about already always

already feels occulted it really taps into that i think in a really fun way the um to give an example from the text at the end where justine morrison says that um she discovered that msn8 has the same what she say she's like it's connected to ccriu numerically this is doing aq So if you break down the letters MSN and the number 8 and add them up together, you get 81. And if you count the numerical values of C, C, R, and U, you also get 81. So that's an example of an alpha-cobalic resonance, which the CCIU says in the commentary, something they weren't aware of and that surprised them and they need to look into.

And 81 is also the number of one of the sysogetic demons on the diagram. So there's a whole, I mean, this text also has this whole kind of like background of lore that you can delve into, which kind of makes it also really interesting because it's pulling all of these other things that do exist out there. If you want to talk about it in terms of like this kind of comic genre, like in the CCIU universe that it's referring to. There's also other characters like Blind Humpty Johnson, who is supposed to be an avatar of Bill Gates, is another character in CCIU writing. which really interestingly, Bynham D. Johnson appears in a text called Black Snow, which was the title of a recent track released by

Oneotrix Point Never called Black Snow, which quotes lines from the CCRU text Black Snow. So this fiction has permeated our reality even very recently as like, I think it was 2019 or something, this track came out. So I'm just going to throw that out on the table. I think that we should maybe, if everyone agrees with this, move into discussing what this text is about. And I'm aware that the word about is a bit of a torturous word to be using for something like this. however like I mean I this is still this is a multi-layered like multi-symbolic text that's

drawing together a lot of the CCRU concepts as well as drawing from 90s conspiracy law as well and combining them together and I think there's I think if nothing else it will be quite quite fun and probably a bit disgusting to actually like delve into sort of like what's actually going on here though like what's this attempt what's this trying to accomplish what's all this why do we have this text about a made-up conspiracy theory um why do we have all of this business about twins you know i want to decode the symbolism you know i want i want to i want to turn the keys and pass through the seven veils of mysteries here in a little bit um i might just rattle off a little

bit of um just this is just some like broad background stuff to to the conspiracy law that we have in this uh in this text and cory you already mentioned and indeed the text itself mentions that um the mk mk ultra is real you know it's real real history um and it was literally nazis um trying to reprogram people with drugs for the cia um although there's and and although there's a lot of like distortions and sensationalism around what actually happened because of the you know just the general tendency towards making these things as exotic as as possible but the um and but the project monarch stuff like it originates with um kathy o'brien who and you and this is one of the things what's interesting here is how much this is just um

all stuff that gets repeated by q and on still you know these are fictives that um or hyperstitional uh vectors which are actually very powerful and do actually affect changes in the world like an act of dark magic and what kathy o'brien purported happened to her and to my knowledge this like i mean the impression i get is she's clearly quite a damaged person and it's and i i'm not a therapist i have no like qualifications to talk about this you know but i wouldn't be surprised if this is on some level sublimating actual abuse she suffered but it also strikes me as possible this is all sheer fantasism from her and of and probably working through some some trauma or some problems that she has or just acts of self like self-deception upon self-deception but she

spelled out this elaborate and incredibly viscerally nasty story about how she was raised from birth to be part of this satanic ritual abuse, Nazi mind control, New World Order, Mancurian candidate conspiracy to take over the world. And I've read through a little bit of her book for transformation of america and bloody hell it's horrid like it it's it's exactly like it's and i'm wondering i'm wondering how how transnational this was but matt i imagine you probably remember there was this really odd moment in the 2000s when when you went to like

the post office of a supermarket or something when you have all of those like paperbacks um on the all twizzly stands just like about nine about nine tenths of all of them were so like memoirs of child abuse which will always be very very lurid and it this and and there's like pulp trauma in a weird way which i'm sure no they kind of like it's funny i mean i mentioned robin probably as i say on that it's a kind of like it's like a traumatic sub-genre of not pulp fiction but pulp fact almost that's like yes exactly yeah they were they were really weird my mum used to devour those i remember she was obsessed with reading them yeah there was a very odd time in our national consciousness yes and there is and and and this is something that you do

see with this with this um horrible this horrible book for she wrote where about half a solid half of it is her just recounting endless endless reams of stories of her starting as a child and moving onwards being sexually abused by not only her own family but also dick cheney boxcar willie um all of these like all the all of the great and good and not so good of of of uh world of of um of the world and which is and it does just read like someone's as fantasy as trauma fantasy so to speak and there's something about the luridness and the schlockiness of it that lends itself to like you said to this pulpiness of this this kind of like pulp pulp fact rather

than pulp fiction that um this this very very very viscerally unpleasant and extremely lurid very, very sexualised kind of writing about trauma and abuse just propagates itself so powerfully and so quickly but it's exactly the kind of thing that you would get producing culture-changing movements like we have right now with Cura Non-Shit which is infecting the political culture over here in the UK as well now so it does feel like if nothing else this text does hit upon sort of like a very very there's something very powerful about dealing with it themes and imagery like that like this is proper like again this is

proper kind of like nasty dark magic at work here and it does feel like it uh like to be a little bit so like cod psychoanalytic about it it feels like probably the reason it's so powerful is because it does just tap really deeply into sort of oedipal traumas um of that very very much dealing with these prime like themes of primordial primal um trauma and there's a lot of energy in in dealing with things like that it resonates with people very powerfully um i've been umming and ahhing about whether or not to read an extract from the beginning from from this actually just to indicate that because there's some really like therapeutically fascinating like turns of phrases she used here but i'm actually not going to because we don't need to you can guess the kind

of stuff it is and we don't need to go into it because it is just really unpleasant and i don't want to give people a bad time um i really don't like because it's not it's like it's it's really really nasty but um what is interesting the thing that's more interesting to me though from fist because that's the background of the conspiracy law here, is the stuff about the syzygy in particular and the stuff about the divided consciousness, the divided self. Because what this, what they call it, trauma-based mind control, as they call it, is meant to do, the idea behind it is that through these acts of satanic, magical or cult sexual abuse,

it destroys the personality and splits it into these alters, into these fragments, and the process of deprogramming. And it should be very, very thematically obvious that the process of deprogramming sounds a lot like programming. You know, sort of like, oh, but I was kidnapped with these two guys who then drugged and hypnotised me for six months into seeing what the real truth was. The thing, but yeah, there is this, it's very interesting to me that like the real bad thing you get from this like the point of all of these activities is to produce a fractured sense of self a skitzed self right when if psychoanalysis tells us nothing else it tells us that we are actually all just like that all of the

time that like the actually like the the actual content and form and structure of the self the personality whatever is actually largely invisible to it and that is kind of natural state almost but there is this kind of but and this terror at the idea of becoming multiple which i think is the what is the the phrase that i'm fishing around here for there's a terror of the thought of becoming multiple to this is it will basically only be born out of trauma and the only thing that we can do to repair this is total integration of all aspects of the personality with it with itself um and this is something and i've been reading as a background for this like um some

some some young actually and what this sounds like from a jungian perspective is is this notion of the the self which is more the self being swallowed up by the ego uh i'm sorry if i'm using a lot of jargon here but this notion of the self being swallowed up by the ego which in jungian terms is this notion that the sense of i the conscious sense of i which is not the totality of the self because the totality of the self is always escapes the ego becomes so totally confused with the notion of selfhood that it can only result in an absolute total kind of like fascistic expansion of the sense of ourselves as being totally in control of ourselves and the world around us which can only result in like eventually just absolutely catastrophic systems failure basically um

with all of that in mind which i'm sure was helpful for everybody and not at all unclear um i want to just kind of throw open this discussion about the syzygy in particular the twins the twinness of it um and obviously syzygies occur in the pneumogram um or the gates are all binary in some sense, if my understanding of it is correct. And Amy, I'm just hoping that you can tell us a little bit about that, what the meaning of syzygy is in this context. Yeah, sure. So there actually was a syzygy event in 1999. This was a real event. So this is another interesting kind of thing that you get in these

hyperstitional stories where, you know, every now and then something that's real is thrown in there like um o'brien is real obviously justine morrison is a character as far as we know um syzygy really happened but it's you know it appears to be something that's so strange and out there that um you know can be forgiven for not thinking that it did um ultimately the you know the distinction between these things is completely obsolesced by the concept of hyperstition so what is real really real i think as you said before sean um versus what is merely real isn't even important anyway. It's what the hyperstition produces that's interesting. But Syzygy was a real event. So it was an art exhibition residency that was put on by CECIU

and Orphan Drift collaboratively at Beaconsfield in London between the 26th of February and 28th of March 1999. And it was interested in the approaching millennium, Y2K, which was obviously a big deal back in 1999, and calendrical systems. So the Y2K bug was going to be brought about by a problem with computational calendric systems where the date counters on global computer system would reset or potentially reset back to zero zero um when it hit the millennium um and all of the systems that were tagged to these dating systems would potentially go awry and there was

you know there was like an apocalyptic mood about this um that was very prevalent so they were kind of plugging into that um hence the kind of apocalyptic tone in some of the writing talking about the demon Katak and the end of the world and like apocalypse and stuff. So yes, the Syzygy exhibition was really real. One of the things that was showcased during the exhibition was this occult diagram called the pneumogram that CCIU, as the story goes, discovered in the basement of a house that they rented in Leamington Spa in the late 90s, which was Alistair Crowley's birthplace. And this is true um they did live in alice crowley's birthplace um house in in coventry um or in

leamington's bar close by uh so the interesting thing about the numagram is that it's very similar to the kabbalic tree of life if people are familiar with this diagram it has 10 spheres or 10 um Sephiroth. But as the Tree of Life is organized, counting from one to ten, so one is Kether, two, three, Bina and Chotmurix, and sort of like this kind of like, you know, create reality, basically. It's a sort of system that's numerically tagged, but you can understand it as describing like the creation of reality. It's a cosmogony. It's also something for understanding the self.

The Neumogram functions kind of in a similar broad way and with a similar kind of like broad occult style vibe attached to it. But there's one key difference and that's there's still 10 numbers in it but instead of counting from 1 to 10 it counts from 0 to 9. And this creates something really interesting in the arrangement of the diagram. And when CCIE talks about the diagram, they're like, it's not symbolic. It doesn't represent anything. It's not like numerology where numbers have a meaning attached to them. There's no symbolic or linguistic overcoding. It's just you get numbers. You start from zero instead of one and you go up to nine. And you do some simple arithmetic and you look at what kind of picture of reality this creates.

if you treat it as a diagram on par with the Hermetic Tree of Life. So, I mean, it's kind of, you probably have to, if there's an image you can get the diagram to look at, it's probably helpful. It's on the cover of CCIU Writings. It's also on their website. But it's basically created through a system of really basic arithmetic. So if you take the numbers from 0 to 9 and you put them in pairs that add up to 9, you get 5 pairs. So you get 0 and 9 equals 9, 1 and 8 equals 9, 2 and 7 equals 9, 5 and 4, and 6 and 3 all equal 9. So you've got these pairs. If you draw a line from...

Hang on. It's really hard to describe this stuff without, like, doing a diagram. If you draw a line between, like, each number and its other side of the pair, or as the terminology starts to kind of become attached to this, it's twin, it's syzygetic twin. You also get a spiral diagram. So there's a kind of like implicit spiral in the arrangement of these pairs of numbers. And the pairs start to be called or referred to as syzygies using the word zygo, which is twin, and nova, which is nine. So they talk about zygovanism, which is nine-some twinning, basically.

So these are all nine twin pairs. And that's the backbone of this particular diagram. When you start looking at relationships between these numbers, so the CCIU do two other things. They take the pairs of numbers and they subtract the smaller number from the larger number. So for example, with the pair eight and one, If you subtract 1 from 8, you get 7. On the diagram, there is accordingly a path from the pair 1 and 8 to the Sephiroth number 7. And this continues. You can kind of do this throughout the diagram, and you start to get this weird sort of swirly kind of structure appearing if you subtract the smaller number from the large number of each pair. These are called the channels in the diagram.

And then if you take each number or each Sephiroth individually, and you add each. So you count from the lowest. So for example, if you have the number five, you've got one, two, three, four, five. If you add each of those digits together, so one plus two plus three plus four plus five, you get 15. And then you digitally reduce whatever number you get from that sum. So until you get one single number. So 15, you digitally reduce it by adding them together. One and five, you get six single number. So 5, 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 plus 5 equals 15 equals 6, points to the 6th Sephiroth. So now you've got a, this is called a channel. Yeah, this is a channel to the Sephiroth 6.

The subtractions are currents. If I said that was a channel before, sorry, it's a current. Now you have this kind of, you have this structure basically here. with all of these strange currents and channels, like pathways going from one number to the other. And the numbers that you get from those sums, so 15, for example, in the previous example I gave, is a gate. And this is how you construct the diagram. And the matrix of numbers from which all of these relationships are constructed runs from 0 to 45. and these are all tagged to different demons. So there's a series of 45 demons. They all have different relationships.

There's a whole mythology that grows out of this really, really simple kind of arithmetic function. But this diagram, just, I mean, without going super deeply into any of this, the basic thing to kind of think of is if you hold this diagram up and then you have a look at the tree of life next to it, the tree of life is balanced it's very rigid it's very structurally organized the way of moving through the tree of life is always talked about in terms of like balance there's always like one sephiroth balances out the influence of a different one uh you can break it up into all of these like astrological permutations i mean there's all of this interesting stuff but it all comes down to this like structure that you can end up at a kind of like final immobility which is

I suppose, you know, the ultimate goal of the great work to ascent to Kapha, whatever. With a numogram, you can't stop anywhere. You are constantly being channeled around to something else. There's no resting place. And it is this really dynamic kind of system. You've also got like, you have like a cycle in the middle, you just keep moving around like this. And then you've got these two little kind of involution swirly bits at the top and bottom. So the CCRU understood these as kind of temporal systems. And this was all fed back into their development of new calendrical systems and looking at how the way that we break up time and space effectively is

a politics. I mean, the Roman Empire in a way became as powerful as it did by universalizing and coordinating everyone through a universal calendar system. So, sorry, that's kind of what Syzygy was about. Syzygies are these pairs of numbers on the numagram. They are referred to as demons and twins. So the theme of twins and Syzygies is referring back to this very real art event and this particular numerical diagram that was discovered by CCIU. just once this is a a tangential point about kabbalah which is um which really does feel often that most tangential of disciplines really isn't it especially uh grammatically speaking

where it's just following pathways into pathways into pathways but i wanted to pick up on a point that you made about the uh the sephirothic tree of life being uh a diagram indicating perfect divine balance ultimately is in the there are 10 sephira 10 spheres uh 10 being considered a number of perfection and what's interesting in reading people like kenneth grant who um who is one of my one of my obsessions as as as a character if nothing else very just a very very strange man But he developed his occult system with an enormous amount of care and attention paid to the Tree of Life, but with an eye to inverting it and subverting it.

and in particular paying attention to the so-called fallen Sephiroth, Dath, which is the, so at the top of the Tree of Life you have Ketha, it's Ketha, Bina and Chokmar, isn't it? The supernal triad of the jargon, the jargon. This is a Mark Fisher podcast. You have the supernal triad of the most perfect manifestations of Godhead cut off from the rest of the lower emanations by the abyss which correlates with the biblical fall that is the separation of world from divinity but what's interesting here is he what is his uh grant and crowley before him or at least grants grants crowley at least because he

does puppeteer these figures a lot himself is really interested in the fact that doth is the 11th Sephiroth because 11 in this system of grants at least which is incredibly idiosyncratic to him is a number of imperfection and is a diabolical number precisely because it is the one after the perfect number the one after the perfect number of stability which therefore has to be destabilizing influence on the whole structure and is accomplishing something similar to the numagram in that sense and that it is meant to be an opening to because like darth is considered to be the uh the gateway if i might be getting myself a little bit confused is the gateway to the other side of the tree of life the night side of it where um in grant system of it and this and

you know a jewish scholar of kabbalah or would tell you this is not what kabbalah is this is not what these things are at all this is this is just um sheer fantasy but it this passageway to the other side is where you encounter the realms of the cliff off which are the in his system again the fallen dark alternatives of the sephiroth um which are very spoken of very very demonic language and again this is clearly one of the influences on the the currents that ccru uh was pulling uh was pulling into itself and tying together in many many ways um matt you had something to say Yeah, I guess I was quite interested to try and draw a bunch of this stuff together, sort of talking about Kathy O'Brien and her kind of, I guess I'd say I'm using this word intentionally, sort of her hysterical narrative.

and also this I guess it's that what's come to my mind is that you starting with Cathy O'Brien and ending up with talking about this extra number as this kind of destabilizing function and maybe Amy can provide some more background in this but it kind of makes me think that that's part of the reason why it's zero to nine for the CCRU like I guess the number if we can call it that zero is, I guess, maybe that destabilizing numerical value, almost, of nothingness in... I mean, not to get too much of the history of zero, but I guess that's something that comes out often

in a lot of the CCIU's work, I guess, in Nick Lansworth, but also in Sadie Plant's work, where I guess she talks about the binary of one and zero. and I guess I was kind of curious as to because it's something I did want to bring up that I think maybe fits into this is that I don't think it's a coincidence that Justine Morrison likewise Catherine O'Brien is a woman and I guess that's something that maybe comes in from Amy on your own work in terms of the zero feminist manifesto and things around that where in a lot of these CCIU texts it is woman zero as a kind of like yonic number that that functions as that destabilizing force um i wondered if there's a way of bringing that sort of into this discussion around how um

because i guess i mean i guess to say that when i sort of say that for justine morrison at least i kind of do find it interesting that the way that it's that section of the text is written And it is wholly hysterical. It's kind of in the sense of sort of the politicized sense of hysteria being that kind of pathologization of a kind of feminine excess, an ungovernable emotional excess by sort of early psychoanalysts. And what I find really interesting about the text is that as much as it kind of dramatises that, it also, it's in large part affirming it, that Justine Morrison and the CCIU in themselves kind of become these two ungovernable forces trying to sort of like, almost going to war with each other.

But yeah, I mean, I kicked the can over to you, Amy. Well, like, two things. First, Kenneth Grant was a huge influence on CCIU and especially on land. And I definitely think that the Nightside of Eden and this idea of the dark side of the Tree of Life is probably... I mean, I don't know. I'm speculating on this piece of information. Just knowing that Grant was an influence, but it's possibly an influence in the development of the pneumogram. And also, I mean, this is like this, I don't know if this is like too esoteric to bring in as a reference, but since we're talking about like doubles and the role of doubles

and twins and syzygies in this particular text, I've got here the, I guess it's kind of like what was in place of the catalogue for the exhibition. It's a comic. It's called the Meshed Cata Comic was put together by Orphan Drift. and it's got on the back, it explains how to do alphanumeric Kabbalah. It has a bunch of information about the event and then at the bottom there's two quotes and one is a quote that is quoted a lot by CCIU from A Thousand Plateaus and it's from the Three Novellas plateau and it's in reference to the novella The Abyss and the Spyglass by Pierre-Erette Fletiot.

Is that her name? By this French writer. It's a really weird parable. It's about these kind of weird people who have spyglasses and they're looking at the people on the other side of an abyss and basically like kind of reporting them to the authorities if they're doing anything wrong, sort of like reforming them back into the shapes they're supposed to be. But this is a quote. Although they're collaborators with the most rigid and cruelest projects of control, how could they not feel a vague sympathy for the subterranean activity revealed to them? An ambiguity of the molecular line, as if vacillating between two sides. One day, what will have happened? A far seer will abandon his or her segment

and start walking across a narrow overpass across the dark abyss and depart on a line of flight to meet a blind double approaching from the other side. So this is from A Thousand Plateaus. And this image of the double approaching from the other side is like, yeah, it comes up a lot. It also, super interestingly, is crossing the abyss, which is where Darth is located, right, in the hermetic tree of life. And the whole kind of like Crowley and, um, and I think, I'm not sure Grant takes up this aspect of Crowley's stuff, but like you have to cross the abyss, um, is like, like this, this hole in the tree of life where the 11th, um, Sephiroth is kind of hidden in order to, um, basically achieve self-knowledge and, um, the great work or whatever.

so the kind of crossing of the abyss is like sort of really interesting that it's referenced there given all of this i mean that could just be pure apophenia possibly but you know why not just like follow the conspiratorial line for a bit um and also this so the image of doubles i mean delers i think in a thousand plateaus delers and gutari are using it in a really interesting way that you could probably do a whole entire podcast on um but i understand it as, again, a version of this question, who's pulling your strings? So, like, the transcendental subject is, like, since Kant, basically a split subject. And Kant sort of says, like, we're split by the form of time.

What we experience as human subjects is basically our experience of ourself as objects. so we're perpetually locked out of the thing that we call ourselves that is experiencing our experience of ourselves in time um which is kind of you know his like big philosophical innovation in the history of western philosophy everyone was like when he kind of comes up with this he's the first person um in that particular western history trajectory of philosophy to like put that line between subject and object inside the subject. So it's kind of like, it's, it's kind of a freaky thing to say, right? It's basically like asking who's pulling your strings. What is the thing that's thinking you? What is the thing that's creating your experience of you? And I mean,

this comes up like, you know, Mark, uh, obviously use this reference a lot in his writing. It comes up in Blade Runner. Um, uh, like this question of like, who, who do you think you are? How do you know um so the double um i understand is the two sides of the transcendental subject and there's the the dark double the one that you don't you don't know what it is um and the empirical double and so the doubles meeting together is this kind of like idea of like blinking out of empirical reality um over into the virtual or the sort of transcendental realm of like reality production so um so that quote is like yeah it's part of syzygy i think that this particular text which

was published a few years later is like pulling those ideas i mean it says at the bottom of the meshed comic uh to be continued in abstract culture swarm four which was the pet like i don't know if swarm four ever officially happened there was four uh the fourth swarm I think only had like, I don't know, actually, I have to go check what actually got published in that. But I have a feeling that like this text is kind of like coming out of that particular constellation of ideas that they were brewing up while putting this show together. So I mean, that's my kind of understanding of what's happening with the double imagery, the twins, the syzygy stuff. Oh, yeah. And like Women in Zero, really interestingly, and this is something

that uh like i sort of have talked to nick and anna about this and they were they were like oh yeah but they hadn't done it consciously is all of the um characters in the ccriu mythos who go to the outside or have some kind of like outside experience in this lovecraftian way where characters kind of you know meet with the polytendral abomination or whatever all the characters who have this experience and don't break down or come back intact are women and all the characters that break down are men it's really interesting and they did this kind of unconsciously um so i think there's definitely this kind of cyber feminist idea it comes from sadie plant where like women and zero are um somehow kind of allied and woman in this kind of like becoming

woman way where it's not you know it's not like sexual essentialism like women have to become women too it's basically like becoming multiple becoming prior to yourself becoming prior to a kind of like um individuated uh like ego identity um so obviously you're much more malleable and flexible if you don't have this like paranoid molar self to be completely destroyed by contact with the outside which is exactly what happens to all lovecrafts male scholars and again in the crow in the the crowleyan system the thalemic system what happened what's meant to happen when you arrive at the at the abyss is you encounter the the great demon coronzon and

coronzon is basically coronzon is meant to eat you he you are meant like the self is meant to be devoured by corazon and this is only when the self when all sense of self has been so totally consumed by corazon is kind of the holy remnant of it is then mingles in the the holy graal of of the whole goddess babylon and and allowing you passage into i think when you i when i you become a babe of the abyss then and again very very feminine language here isn't it we become you get eased out you become a babe of the abyss and you um join with the with the with the whole goddess babylon in her in her holy cup it's um fascinatingly feminine but also queered language

because all of these people you know like grant and crowley are men and you know crowley being like one of the things he's often listed as almost as if an occupation is bisexual um which is and there is something and one of the things that like i keep coming back to is when it is towards the end of this text is when uh justine realizes that um one of the bills gate um you know because they're because there's two of them because of the doubles the one who she uh didn't kill in the ritual sacrifice has been coming in various different costumes to this to the syzygy event including one in drag like quite it's specifically sort of like like which she figures it out when she sees bill gates in drag basically so there is still so there is this

kind of like um gender queering dynamic to this and maybe i'm reading too much into something that might have been intended to be a kind of flip into side but it is very striking that you have that's something that's oddly stuck with me that that specific image of bill gate in drag attending the syzygy event um and again to to bring it back to jungian terms and it's just because this is what i've been reading because that's where the my syzygy research took me is where that term occurs in jung's writing is in his discussion of the of anima and animus and specific and though he does use like really tremendously chauvinistic language to talk about this but specifically the anima is the feminine projecting component of the man of men and the animus uh is the masculine

projecting component of of women and it is these um and again and it is through this that we access the collective unconsciousness that we access the what's in jungian theory is like the great sort of like wellspring of pure of like of sort of pure unifying otherness almost of all of the elements of psych of our psychology which are not personal to us which are which are transcend transcendental in a particular sense of the word it is accessed through uh an opposite gendered component of ourselves which we always encounter as um and it isn't a double exactly it's not our double and like the syzygy in question is the syzygy of anima and animus and which he used and

he uses very very heteronormative language to talk about this but it is still uh the encounter with an other which is still part of us but which is not but will always exist as the opposite of our gender to us again brings together all of all of these strange themes of uh of a genderqueer alterity and yeah i mean i don't have anywhere i'm going with this these are just the things that were coming to me uh i don't think i'm going to be going into my digression about the uh the cosmic syzygies of valentinian gnosticism unfortunately because i think i don't think i can justify it i don't think i can justify that but um other than other than it has a repetition of the theme

of the necessity of the union with an opposite. Although in the Valentinian system, this is specifically, we do all of us have our twin, which is the angel that descends with the Christ Pleroma in the great cosmic unity with the Aeon Sophia. I will not go further than that with it though, because it will just be pure indulgence on my part. Can I just quickly mention, because I've been doing nothing all week except like reading this text. and you're talking about basil valentine right the mystic uh who am i talking about the valentinean system who's the yeah i'm talking yeah yeah yeah it is who i'm talking about yes yeah so i'm editing um for urbanomic revolutionary demonology um by the italian gruppo de nun who are influenced by

CCIU and a lot by Mark Fisher's writing um they launched a really compelling and excellent critique of the persistent use of sexual dimorphism in the history of western hermetic traditions which is I mean it is a like returning trope and I like I mean I I actually do really appreciate the Crowley and this idea of like in order to break down yourself you need to cross over to like the other gendered shard of yourself um but it's still based on this essential dualism and it returns time and time again and kind of like you know like the creation of new life and like creativity in general is always a union of masculine and feminine coded energies um and generally the

theme the feminine coded energy is like receptive and empathetic and it's a vessel and it's material And the masculine coded energy is like active and like intellectual rather than material and like and kind of essentially creative. So they make a really interesting kind of like they're doing a demonology and a politics. And it's also kind of connected to a like rewriting of some versions of occultism. really interestingly trying to think about how you can do an occult system and you can have like occult diagrams that don't base creativity on the union of masculine and feminine energies um and so yeah like all of these people we're talking about as well as for them like really

importantly like um julius avola and the er group because like big influence on italian occultism and Italian fascism also, you know, use this trope. So I just like, and this is something, I know CCIU are interested in this as well, just from like conversation, not anything that they published. But I think it's something really interesting to think about when you look at these occult systems, just to like be conscious of the fact that this is like fundamental to its understanding, even when this kind of like queering thing happens, it's still just pervasively like dualistically sexed just yeah yes yes and how do i couldn't i couldn't agree with you more and it is but it is one of the a constant frustration of having if you

have any kind of interest in the in in this sphere of um of however you understand it as a form of spirituality or or fascinating cultural artifact like if you have any interest in this well also So maintaining sort of like alignment with any form of meaningful, progressive or radical politics is deeply frustrating, but it does come back down to these very conservative, ultimately very conservative ideas of gender. Even if you can find progressive or subversive currents running through that, it does end up in this, it does end up with binaries still. We still end up trapped in this. yeah uh we've been i'm conscious a bit conscious of time i think we'll be going for about 90

minutes now so i'm going to uh push us towards last remarks um cory do you have any closing volleys of thought for us um not really um there was a bunch of other stuff that i had in the notes but I kind of covered it already, like just about, you know, the kind of links between conspiracy thinking in general and this sort of hyperstition. Yeah, no, I think we got to most everything I wanted to talk about. Matt? I kind of had a thought, if only because I think maybe

if we've done anything with these past two episodes of being wonderfully joined by Robin and Amy I feel like it sort of shows how deep this rabbit hole can go and it's a thrill to do so and if only we could, maybe I suppose we know in advance that we're not at the threshold, we won't continue down to the abyss, if only for our listeners sake, but we should encourage everyone to go and further explore if they so wish to because it's it's it's it's it's it's unfathomable how far you can go and it's yeah anyway but i guess that one thing that i think is at least my feeling in kind of doing this podcast that we're kind of talking about these sort of lesser known works of mark fisher is the stuff that's kind of not

talked about publicly um so much i guess beyond this kind of popular conception is that so much of this is sort of there in a lot of what he's still doing, in the stuff that he's sort of known for. And it's not to sort of go and turn off left field and say, here's some other weird stuff. It's like, no, this is there. And it's actually something that I wrote down when thinking about actually kind of what you were saying, Sean, about, again, kind of about the Kathy O'Brien thing. And it kind of reminded me of when we were talking about schizophrenia in de l'eau and guattery and we were talking about um uh lens the sort of uh giant schizoid who crosses mountains and forests in a single step um that for like for gregory

bates and his idea of schizophrenia that hugely influenced us in guattery that's the the kind of working mechanism of that as a phrase is that is that conjoining of of of two things that seem in day to day to be at a great distance from each other but there's nonetheless a kind of truth you can you can do it you can make the leap um and i guess it's something it's the it's the horror that comes out of the kind of book with sort of kathy o'brien in the way that we're saying that she's being abused by dick cheney and i guess well you know is that a fantasy or can you say at some point actually no yeah she is being abused by dick cheney and just in the sense of of of of how power works and being an American citizen, you know, that you are under the kind of cosh of that sort of force. So there's kind of, I guess what I'm saying is there's,

in all of these kind of dramas, there's still this kernel of truth that speaks to and actually helps to further denaturalise the sort of mundane reality that we take for granted. And I think that that's what comes across in this piece for me, actually, is that this is kind of, if we're going to acknowledge this is a Mark Fisher text. It's kind of Mark doing like a capitalist surrealism to the point where you've got this, you can think about it very mundanely. And I guess it's actually easier for us to do that now because this sort of, I mean, I just think, I like the bit at the end where in the CCIU commentary where they're talking about how both conspiracy and double sense, and this is the double sense, interesting spoonerism, conspiracy and common sense

depend on the dialectical side of the double game, on reflective twins, belief and disbelief. Because disbelief is merely the negative complement of belief. Cancellation of the provocation, disintensification, neutralisation of stimulus. Unbelief escapes all this by building a plane of potentiality. The CCRU denies it was ever part of the programme. It denies there ever was a programme until the deprogramming process introduced it. And it's kind of like going back to what we were talking about at the start, Amy mentioning the sort of cave Twitter moment, that I think in some ways to kind of historicise something you're already a part of, which is kind of weird to do. But I feel like the intensity of that moment can't really be divorced

from sort of the Trump presidency, and it's kind of the rise of when a lot of this thinking was kind of being put to work. People were referencing Nick Land on the alt-right, not just because of his own particular politics, but actually people were actively recognising the kind of the power of like quote unquote meme magic and its similarity to hyperstition that there was kind of a cybernetic precursor that was the CCIU to this kind of political usage and that I think made a lot of people very squeamish but really it's this it shows how they were already dramatising the kind of 4D chess game of public relations that's actually kind of become the norm now in a kind of, you know, this strangely Kafkaesque world

that I guess is also what draws this out as a quintessentially sort of Fisherian text. It's so Kafka. And Mark loves those sort of characters that are ultimately kind of absurdly and humorously at the mercy of bureaucracy. But the bureaucracy in this sense is scaled up to a conspiracy, a global conspiracy of just bureaucratic mundanity and so i guess if there's if there's if this is a if i can sort of seize the moment to because i i don't think we're going to continue down the line of cciu from this episode but i think it's kind of worth keeping in mind as like a stepping off point for ourselves a jumping off point that you know this is the kind of a sort of theory fictional version of what Mark continued to talk about for the rest of his life really um uh and

I think that's fascinating and kind of deserves being highlighted more because it's not um but it's wicked to sort of see these different modes and how they how affect affective they are um not just in the sort of pop um kind of cultural uh cultural commentator commentator vibe that mark's maybe well known for but in more of this intensified balladian barozian style that's they are that's that's the twinning of mark fisher maybe if there's such a thing there's that that one can't exist without the other and at the moments where they kind of come into almost colliding is when it gets super exciting but yeah it's all there and i'm excited to explore it further with buddies

uh amy final words please um i guess like i guess to kind of recontextualize it in the um uh the like spirit of the podcast i want to connect it to two other specific texts of marks the first one is the Templeton episode which was most recently published in Weird and Eerie but it's also in CCIU writings basically because that's just really useful as an explanation of what I'm talking about with the doubles and CCIU's obsession with the thing on the other side of the transcendental wall or the screen that is puppeting you or pulling your strings

so we're all meat puppets in the way that Templeton is kind of talking about in that piece. And the second one I wanted to connect it to was White Magic, which I don't know if it's still online. It used to be on a website that this is a printout of it, it looked like this, part of a journal called Virtual Criminologies. And it's kind of like he's talking about what white magic is. And he talks about this in the text. Justine Morrison says something like, white magic, Atlantean white magic. The CCAU claimed that ordinary social reality maintained the power of what they called Atlantean white magic, a kind of elite conspiracy which they said had secretly controlled

the planet for millennia. And in this piece, White Magic, he explains what that means through the Deleuze-Guattarian idea of the exclusive disjunction, which is basically just like X or Y, true or false. A or not A. Like the kind of like all of these, the rule of the binary, basically. And this is what you get in the kind of pair that Matt's talking about between deprogramming and programming co-constitute a similar reality. The conspiracy and the deprogramming of the conspiracy co-constitute the same mutual reality. This is the, you know, the one God universe in Burroughs speak. It's the architectonic order of the eschaton's control over time.

And so unbelief is kind of posed, like, kind of in this postmodern way, as the, like, the law of the excluded middle or the kind of third term that is neither A nor, not A. It's not X or Y. It's not true or false. That whole distinction, that binary is just not important. any. What unbelief does, as opposed to disbelief and belief, is produce something. So it's like, it's an ontological question. It's reframing everything so that you're not asking, is this true or false, but rather, what does it produce? And so I think for Mark, this is super important because it's like, if ordinary social reality is maintained by this

binary of belief and disbelief um how do we get out of it how do we create something new and unbelief hyperstition is one of the ways that these potentialities can be actualized um so yeah white magic and the templeton episode make a really awesome set of texts to read alongside this one well i'm certain better although we're not going to be continuing with ccru stuff into our fourth episode um i've no doubt that we will be returning to uh we will be returning to it at some point very soon uh and indeed we maybe will be reading those two texts actually because they sound very very very interesting and i'm not certain if i have read them or not anyway um thank you for joining us listeners uh i have been sean uh and i think i still am actually um

we will be back uh i think we'll be we should be back next week uh we're going to try and keep a very very tight uh turnaround with these uh thank you for joining us and um yes where can people yeah that's the final thing isn't it uh you can find me on twitter at horntonaut matt where can people find you you can find me xenogothic everywhere xenogothic.com cory same question All my links are on my Twitter at CJ White. And Amy, what about you? I'm on Twitter at QDNOKTSQFR, which is a cipher for my name in alpha question. And editing books for Urbanomic.com.

Fantastic. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us, Amy. It's been wonderful having you on. this has been a wonderful wonderful conversation by far the highlight of my week and yeah I'm certain about probably at some point we'll have you on again I really really hope we will maybe around the time Revolutionary Demonology comes out it'll be really interesting to talk to you about that maybe anyway I gotta say goodnight now and again thank you for joining us listeners bye bye thanks buddies

Thank you. Thank you.