Hyperstition & The New Weird II (Session 4)

There's a crowd this time in the room, so if you hear, like, people talking, it's not like a conspiracy or something. They're just listening in. All right, well, I would invite anybody that's there to participate if they want. If they want to chime in, they can. Okay, so, yeah, welcome to the final session of Ben and I's seminar on hyperstition and the new weird. fictional worlds and possible futures. Today's session we're going to be talking about the OK Dicks, Three Sigmata of Palma Eldridge, a little bit about Afro, the contested, or I don't know, the term that is not solely defined

as Afrofuturism with Kodo Eshwan's work, Eshwan's work, and Sonic Future. Let's talk about music, fiction, and literature, So we're going to start with Ben. Ben's going to open us up talking about Full Pay Dick. So Ben. OK, thanks, honey. So how many of the virtual use got through the book? Did anybody manage it? Not over here. I think we each got about probably halfway through. Yeah.

But we know what happens. Not to say it's the same as reading the book, but we have. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, I mean, like, Olive has this theme of, you know, he was obsessed with simulated realities, right? like pretty much everything he did was about figuring out how humans are by creating copies of copies of copies of copies in order to try and figure out what androids, you know, filling everything with androids and drug-induced hallucinations and culminating in this religious fantasy that he entertained, especially towards the end of his life,

that it was still the time of the Christians being persecuted by the Romans and that we were caught in this collective delusion that we think is the present. And that everything that happened since was this failure of God to sort of get us out of that time in a really weird way. And so one thing I wanted to read, which was optional, was this essay that he wrote when he was at Disneyland, for some reason, in 1978. And I just think this kind of ties a lot of the stuff in the class in terms of the relationship between the fictional themes and the philosophy themes together.

There's a link that I already sent if the virtual users want to see, and I'll just read it out. so this is from an essay called How to Build a World That Won't Fall Apart Two Days Later so he writes David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics meant to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy all members of the gathering nonetheless left the door rather than the window I see Hume's point it was all just talk the solemn philosophers weren't taking what they said seriously But I consider that the matter of defining what is real, that that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human.

Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce authentic humans very quickly. Spurious humans, as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic. They unite on this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. or fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them eventually into forgeries of themselves. So we end up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the pirate ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's wild ride. You can have them all, but none is true. And then a bit later, In Plato's Timaeus, God does not create the universe as does the Christian God.

He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets the work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs. What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it slowly and secretly into something real. So this novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge, is about, you know, is this kind of a version, is when Phil K. Dick starts to explore the relationship between simulated reality, drugs, and religion.

and so for people who didn't manage it or don't know the text it's basically about this company called PNP who they create doll these dolls in this toy world that people can sit in take this drug which is called Candy C-A-N-D and it allows them and these people are these people are oppressed workers on various planets in the solar system and taking this drug allows them to imagine they're still on earth in this and they can do anything to one another and it doesn't matter if they're on this drug

and even the UN approves it it's weird but then also part of this world is that there's some people in the novel who are pre-COGS for precognitive, they can see the future. There's another theme in his novels. And so they keep, they realize that these precogs can see somewhat into the future, but they only use them for business practices. So they're only really powerful companies like P&P, these people who make money off simulations to distract people from how horrible their life is, can have enough money to control and pay these precognitives to predict the future so they can make more money.

And so it's this kind of layer upon layer upon layer of hallucination and simulacra. And the main character, Palmer Eldritch, just was a new drug on another planet, which he calls Chu-Z. and that whereas candy, when you take the drug, everyone who takes the drug has a shared hallucination. But when you take QZ, it's your own hallucination. So the whole novel is about whether people are in their own hallucinations or in other people's hallucinations, or if they're in a shared hallucination but physically in the same space, or if they're taking choosy so it's their own solipsistic hallucination

but they're also in the same space as somebody else who might be on choosy or might be on candy so this kind of layer upon layer upon layer of simulation and so I think what this idea that this kind of Gnostic God this kind of possible trickster god is interesting in terms of what we've been talking about and the relationship between fiction, especially science fiction and possible worlds and that whereas in a lot of this stuff in a lot of this kind of philosophy and fiction worlds the idea is to find a logical structure

which can hold all these different worlds together or to have some open concept of world in which can take both fictional and non-fictional worlds into account whereas with Philip K. Dick you kind of have this opposite attempt at proliferating fake worlds as many fake worlds as possible in order to sort of by relief show what the real world might be like even though for him personally the real world is around the time of the crucifixion. But that's his own problem. So did anyone have anything to say about the text on that

or in relationship to that? Before we go on to Lendl? Can you talk about the Gnosticism? I can't, but obviously there's some relation with that. Yeah, because I'm trying to remember in the Gnostic tradition... Somehow there's a... There's a sort of like... There's a bad God... Yeah, there's a kind of God head, and there's a kind of second order creation, where there's where there was kind of a god and then god created like a second order god that kind of really fucked up and kind of screwed up the world.

And so there's like knowing the difference between second order god, yeah. Second order god and the original god is this kind of Gnostic tradition of like knowledge is trying to get through the false world created by the godhead and to actually get to the original god. To the particular kinds of, you know, this Gnosticism. Gnosis. Vales by Dick. Yeah. Yeah. Did anyone have anything to say about the text? I forgot how shitty all the discussions of women are on text, actually, which is something Dick does more often than not.

Pun intended. Tony, anything? I mean, when you're talking, you're speaking all, like, you're focusing all this on the God, and like I posted on the right here, I just keep thinking of Butler's concept of of the changing God and how it sort of differs. But, I mean, here we are in the same, in the earth, it's not earth seen, it's earth seed. I typed it wrong. But they say, you know, that God is trickster, teacher, chaos, clay.

God is change, beware. God exists to shape and be shaped. It's sort of like Less this It kind of aligns a little bit with Dick's understanding However You sort of get like this This changing nature between past and present and future And how each You know it's not such a linear concept I'm trying to extend it I didn't I didn't preempt that that would be what you talk about the most yeah one of the weird things is

it's also in Valis and it's in I think Fill My Tears the Policeman said and some of his other books that yeah it's like there's one time that's that's like the real time but then everything all these delusions that we've experienced since like that's time passing in one regard but not, like, actually passing. This is the whole, like, end-ended thing. Yeah, the same with the precogs, like, with Minority Report and these other novels, how they sort of, like, predict the future and how, you know, a lot of it is about being able to... If you can predict it... What is the novel where he can predict, like, eight seconds into the future or something? Oh, um...

I think we can... No, no, no. No, I can't remember. No, but I know which one you're talking about. It's not... You can predict, like, eight seconds into the future, but he realizes... But anyways, it's all about, like, this idea of linear history, and, like, the human is constantly trying to sort of, like, interrupt and change the future, and fails almost every time, right? I mean, fails to be able to... That's, like, the function of the precogs in a lot of the stories. Yeah. I mean, that's the kind of idea that there's... It's the idea that you can capitalize on certain delusions more than others. It's kind of what the precogs represent in a lot of his stories, right? Like, in Minority Report, it's more political.

In this one, it's more about, like, capitalist use of this idea that if we can, you know, it's almost like generating trends by predicting them, like sort of creates and there's kind of self-creating and it has this like hyperstitional element that what's, you know, what's predicted is created. Even though, again, the question is like whether it would have happened or not without you know, this kind of investment by by capital, by technology or not, so it becomes weird kind of sci-fi version of trendsetting in a way. And also, I mean, it's interesting for the class in terms of again, how there's possible worlds are different, but not completely different from something like fictional worlds.

And, you know, he kind of wants to erase the difference between fictional worlds and possible worlds. And he thinks that fictional worlds override and kind of completely overload any notion of possibility to the fact that there is no possibility. It's just a return of the same, kind of buried in simulation. Right, because an imagined world is a simulation, right? It's what happens I mean, you could say that this is what all fiction is for a dick is that there are simulations in the mind, right? They enact these fictional worlds. and I mean that's

yeah I mean one of the things that seems interesting is is this what you were saying about kind of simulation and solipsism and in the way the two I can't remember the other called one's choosy and the other one is what was it again? Candy Candy so where there's a kind of collectivity there's like both of these both of these drugs kind of initiate

a kind of solipsism but in one it's a kind of it's a collective solipsism. I know that doesn't make any kind of sense, but somehow you get this collapsing of the whole solipsistic construction. Well, yeah, that's weird because that's kind of like the business model, right? There's this kind of you know, like the capitalist delusion as opposed to the religious delusion, which is kind of the thing that he sets up in the text, where there's kind of evil people on both sides.

But there's, you know, something... You know, I think it almost... He starts... His fondness for the strange kind of Christianity, which he has a whole trilogy about later, starts to appear here. And that's really... There's this... You know, they're both kind of both collective but the way in which the one reflects on the other is quite different in terms of capitalism versus religion knowing he sees it just quite interesting in terms of they're both a drug both you know drug that has the kind of simulated world but the religious one is about you know you're ultimately responsible for yourself because it's a notion of faith right whereas in the

cop-bomers with candy with the collective cop-bomers drug, it's much easier to immediately hurt one another in a way. But whether or not that actually, that division can hold at all is a question. Yeah, so how dangerous, like different types of fiction being more or less dangerous. It's almost as if, like, the character is stuck in, like, one of the first forms of the database narrative, if any, like, the hypertextual narrative. Multiple different, you know, choices in which, you know, kind of, like, struggling, the character's always struggling

for making the sort of the correct or the real choice within this, like, I don't know like each hallucination has its own reality, its own memory its own history so it's sort of like I don't know about choice and irreversibility yeah they're all kind of equally helpless choices though in the end. And I guess ending is kind of an end of the choice in terms of whether you actually ever get out of the delusion or not.

Yeah, I guess that's a consistent theme. It's not really human choice, but like the failure of human decision or human choice. Really. Should we move on to Kojo? And Lyle? Sure. I mean, if we have nothing left, I mean, we could try to come back, maybe come back to this as we go. It just doesn't seem like we got, as a group, we got too far into it, so we can kind of just talk about it. I mean, you gave a good summary of it, and I mean, everybody knows that the 3Semotomy, and I guess that sort of has a good lead to

to the next function. So we'll introduce Lendl, who's behind the blue screen of Ben here. One of the many, but I don't know who's all there. I turned the camera off. That's kind of funny. Because the mic is right there. Hello. Hi. How's it going? Good. I feel pretty small on the screen.

I'm occupying less than one-third of it, I think. You're basically in line with my icons here. Like your face is... It's like you're not an icon. It's because tech phones are always really good to the background anyways. What am I doing here? No, I'm kidding. So, like, is the assumption that we all read Kojo's book? Yeah, the assumption is that we read, well, the assumption is that we attempted to read the whole thing, but perhaps we didn't. Okay. We can find that out if we ask. Derek, anybody?

But let's just go through it like it's a semi-intro that we can expand as we find out. Yeah, well, I thought you were going to do an intro and then I was going to pipe in after that. I can also do that. I mean, I guess I'm going to say, like, why we sort of want to... I think why putting Kojo's work with... I mean, in class and also with Philip Kidnik's work is, I think, interesting. Because on the one hand, I mean, he appears, Philgettic appears in the text a bit, and there's a very, like, science fiction theme to the whole work. But I guess broadly I would say, like, the point of the book is to try and have this alternative genealogy for,

I mean, yeah, what's kind of chemical Afrofuturism, maybe even more than that, it's about the relationship between sound, sound technology, and science fiction. but like a genealogy of that that's pretty much about I don't want to say black identity but in terms of that kind of cultural history as more than that cultural history that it kind of plugs into these science fiction themes because it's about futurity, it's about yeah, it's kind of about like pushing science fiction as something that's already in the present and that these kind of various forms of typical narratives about music and about science fiction and about how jazz and rap and hip-hop

and all these different histories aren't locked in this just sort of cultural shell, but they also have this world-making kind of function, even beyond music, but also very much music is very much part of it. Yeah, it's shifting a traditional narrative of, let's say, black culture as, you know, like, an oral tradition with an O to an oral tradition with an A, U, such that, no, no, no, like, literally, he said, you know, like, right off the bat, he makes a really good critique of music journalism by saying, you know, I don't know what the quote is, he's just saying, you know, like, you can't speak about the music itself.

I'm just going to write the first thing he says is, like, a really good critique of journalism. Because Kojo, so, like, just for some background, Kojo basically started as a music journalist. He was doing kind of like, say, top ten lists of the best asset house in what was going to be known as Jungle at the time. Saying like, oh, this is the best club music at the moment, this kind of shit. And, you know, he got really sort of, so like the first time, with respect to good music speaks for itself. No sleeve notes required. or just enjoy it, cut the crap back to basics, what else is there to add? And then he says, all these traumatic homilies are great British cretines of masquerading as vectors into the trash line.

Since the 80s, the mainstream British music press, which obviously he's heavily invested in because he's a journalist at the time. So since the 80s, the mainstream British music press has turned to black music only as a rest and refuge from the rigorous complexities of white guitar rock. Since this laughable reversal, a lyric always means more than the sound, while only guitarists can embody the zeitgeist, the rhythm machine is locked in a retarded essence. You can theorize words or style, but analyzing the groove is believed to kill its bodily pleasure, to drain its essence. So he's like, his positive, or his kind of intervention, is to try and say, like, what's the music itself?

What's sound itself in some sense doing? How can sound, you know, obviously the liner notes, the song titles, the cover art, the music videos, all this stuff is going to feed in really strongly to, like, how the sound is perceived and coded and all this stuff, and it's going to generate sonic fiction, which is, you know, kind of the mobilization of an alternate history, an alternate kind of black history that doesn't necessarily involve the streets, the ghetto, getting out of the ghetto, all this stuff, because he's like, that's a very traditional view of what can be a black or afro future. You know, it's like, oh, yeah, we're from the bottom now, we're here.

Like, come on. That's one narrative out of many, so let's proliferate the narratives, the possible worlds, the possible structures that people can embody, even if just in a fictional version. But that's not the sole thing that he does, too. I mean, like, he... It's not... Although one of the main positives is to kind of, like, immobilize black... This kind of thing, he also has this really strong line where, you know, where technology itself, sound technology itself, modifies the conceptual space. You know, so like the 808 completely transfigures

what's possible in sound and music and the conceptions of sound and music and these kind of things. So there's this kind of like techno-determinism in both senses of technology. it's sort of like alien rhythm machine this is 98 so it's like considered as this sort of like way of modifying and modulating the body into different spaces it also doesn't want to relegate sound just to the ear everyone cool with that so far? mhm like one of the definitions of sonic fiction is just to go with the

kind of imagery that Ben was kind of saying. They're explosive forces which technology ignites in us where alienation breaks down into the 21st century alien. So it's like he's already taking alienation in a kind of positive sense. There was a second quote that I wanted to read too. One second. Well I guess like the, what did I, because okay he talks about kind of,

this is again going to sort of, to tie it into kind of what was being said, He kind of talks about and critiques Kraftwerk's consensual future, where, I mean, like, he kind of has this sense that there's this lineage that's trying to be constructed in music journalism, where, you know, these people that you can trace into the Western classical music tradition, you can say that they were building sonic technology you know, Kraftwerk was building their own sonic technology and stuff like that you know, and it's these four white males in the middle of Germany you know, some of them students of Stockhouse and stuff like that, and obviously they're within this

lineage of pushing music into its forward into possible features that were stuck or Tony's stuck working again? I'm sorry? Yeah, yeah. You're dancing? But like, you know, trying to trace this lineage back in this Western classical sort of line, like male-dominated, white-dominated, et cetera, line. Within music journalism at the time, this was a very big thing. And all of the kind of massive conceptual shifts and all this stuff was happening with the people that you could trace back into the West classical line, whereas people that were doing you know like that were

doing jungle or hip hop or whatever techno even were you know relegated to like oh yeah they don't know how to do they don't really know how to do samples you know like if you really knew how to do samples you would be you know you'd have the most pristine high fidelity sample you would be doing it in a way where people can recognize what's going on or whatever like there was all this kind of talk about about the lineage of San Antonio and stuff like that. And Kojo and Sun Reynolds, we're both writing at the same time, we're kind of friends, we're trying to say that, no, there's other stuff going on here that there isn't just this one direct, you know, modernist, progressive future,

and that, you know, we can articulate the space or at least articulate history, or we can re-describe it in such a way that then alternate possibilities can show up and are there. He has this kind of sense where sometimes what seems like a technological future is actually this kind of retro, supremely retro force that's being embedded in the present, but in such a way that it's hard to recognize it as past or future. You're not sure exactly which way the direction is going. but like these kinds of playing, like this way of playing with reality, with playing with the description of reality, for him kind of recodes the possible space, which then

can redefine what reality might be and would be. So in that sense, jump in really quickly. In that sense, is possible, is the possible, like, the realm of language? Not solely, because of, like, modifications of even, like, the way that sound technology can modify the possibilities within sound itself. You know, you get different ways of sampling, different ways of synthesizing. So you can generate new sounds. up to a limit point. But you have, you know, even just the invention of, like, a new sub or something, new speakers,

new head-on, all of these things feed into the kind of, like, sonic possibility space in a very real way. Yeah, of course, like the Moog. Like the Moog in synthesized technology, like, 70s. But even, like, Siri now. Yep. You know, like, I mean, like, within, with Siri, you have something that can actually, like, recognize, quote-unquote, recognize, at least it can register differentials within pitch content and timbral content and then have some kind of way of tracing that differential pitch content onto the codified structure, which then, I guess, gets back to language because you'll have this database of songs and stuff like that.

So you have this kind of encyclopedia of songs that then you're drawing from. So maybe Siri is a bad example of pushing things towards the future, but if you were, let's say, to mobilize Siri in such a way where you would have a song playing and then it would play a song that would fit or play a song that would completely disrupt what's out there, maybe then you get a productive capacity that's not being activated. Okay, yeah, because I see from his point on the journalistic perspective, right, and to focus on being able to write about this sort of new inventions, new things that are happening, new possibilities, is that it's like music is a form of, what he comes up

with in Sonic Fiction is it's like a way of pushing language into new realms or something. So I guess language is not, it would be quote unquote what is real, right? Yeah, well, I don't think he would be I don't think language was solely It's not the sole constraint for his reality It is definitely a modulation of reality You know, like he says stuff like about hip-hop Well, phono extension, so like sound extension But also phonological, so linguistic extension Is why hip-hop takes over space in your head powered by analogical chains which I mean like a lot of possible worlds are analogies anyway

but powered by analogical chains it's syntactic prosthetics occupy your brain take up your mind and like by the same token he talks about Ramel Z who's this graffiti writer you know a dancer but also musician and MC and he he I mean And Kota talks about it as he was formalizing the implications of hip-hop. And what he was doing in terms of graffiti was actually talking about the, like, topologies of letters, saying that, you know, you can stretch letters to a certain point and maintain their legibility. But there's this sort of region where you get burners, you know, like, just like really crazy graffiti that's hard to read,

where if you're, you know, then it brings language back into, like, this sort of priestly tradition where if you're an initiate, you can read the burner, but if you're not, you know, then you're completely excluded. So, like, you have this kind of capacity where within hip-hop itself, where graffiti is one of the four pillars of hip-hop, within hip-hop itself, what are you laughing? According to Rousey or... Well, that's according to like, what's his name? Well, even like people like Questlove or whatever, like a lot of these people will say that the four pillars of hip-hop are emceeing, graffiti, dance, and music, like just music itself, like beats and stuff.

But to go back to this sort of extension of, the graphical parts of language then redefine and recode the linguistic possibilities in that space and also it's deployment because you have like you have words on walls that are functioning very differently than just saying stop go restaurant is open at this time you know you have actually like communication mechanisms that are very different because of something like a hip hop culture which is directly tied to the music so like it's not this like massively proliferationist sort of viewpoint but it does have like ramifications ramifications that extend really far sure yeah

I mean you just and you touched on like I think two major cornerstones of this framework as well I mean like highly influenced by McLuhan's work in understanding media, technology is an extension of man right and the other one you touched on is when you were talking about the graffiti is open secrecy which is another major which is like also what he finds in Ballard's work in science fiction and these sort of like elements that aren't quite defined which I think which is like what makes Afrofuturism sort of interesting in this sense it's been around for perhaps forever but has been coined for many, many years, and

we still have many different alternate histories. I'm hearing myself out of breath. Yeah, I mean, one thing that's super strange about it is that there's actually still very few that have taken his work seriously. Not none, but very few. It's a really weird phenomenon that I, like, you know, it's like, why? There's no sense why. But maybe they're afraid of possible futures. I'm not sure. Maybe it's just like the consistent repression of these sorts of ideas and thoughts as well.

Can you talk, can you say a little bit about Oligoth Group or no? in relation to this text it would be pretty hard maybe in relation to like deployment of sonic fictions if you really don't it's not I mean one thing that they do so like yeah the Otolith group which is this video art kind of collective that Kojo's the main conspirator of I mean they kind of they try I think that what they try and do is do this sort of like redescription of histories, often, you know, redescription of histories within a, you know, experimental, but like documentary, like, it's like experimental or like documentary sort of practice.

So, like, they're... I'm trying to think of... Like, they're very... When he's deploying kind of concepts in that way, in that mode, it's much more the visual, visual and the audio-visual contract, which is this idea by Michel Chien where movies are audio-visual mediums. They're not strictly visual mediums, so a lot of theorists forget the sound component. But there's an audio-visual contract, which is like, you know, when we're watching a movie, they're being paired to such an extent that it's hard to extract one from the other, although we think that we do. But they're often exploiting that capacity within their documentaries. It's hard for me to say much more

in terms of that, but for example, they were kind of... They have this one film, which I forget the title of at the moment, but they were tracing... The full film basically is just shots of stamps, and they were tracing this kind of... Basically, the history of Congo between I think it's like 70s and 80s and they did it just strictly from the visual representations that were on stamps and the audio content was the presidents and these kinds of things and other images that you see is where the stamps were designed

which was New York oddly enough and they're very politically valence to try and keep specific people in power and stuff like this. So it's a super political film, but it's just told from the perspective of the design of stamps. Yeah, I think it's in the Year of Quiet Son. They had a book as well. That's the one. Yeah, World 3. It had like France Fanon and the boy and a bunch of these major figures on the stamps.

Yeah, but it's like a very different way of looking at history, you know, it's like a very material history sort of, you know, mobilization of kind of like a critique of ideology via the images of, you know, this communicative medium, you know, or at least like something that's necessary for, you know, like, I mean, like if people were sending letters, you know, at the time, so like obviously like the stamps were being proliferated all over the place. or at least anywhere that had any kind of connection to Congo. But I can't say much more in terms of how sonic fictions directly relate to the otolith practice. Okay. Yeah, it's a question just because I was...it's something that personally interested in.

No, it's worth asking him one. Anybody else from your group or from our group that wants to ask anything about this? I think you just talked a little bit about the anachronism that seems to work throughout the book, the Sonic Fictions. Reading it again, I think this is really pronounced, actually, the way the future operates in the past or something.

I'm now echoing... It is. I mean, it's a lot about how we're covering sort of future's pasts. And but it's also the changing of how the present changes the past, the past changes the present. And the future is constantly changing. I mean, it is also good. I was just thinking one of the other things that seems really... I hadn't really noticed when I read it before, but is this, you know, the kind of Atlantic as a site of, you know,

this sort of alien movement, which, you know, is the thing everyone focuses on within the Afrofuturist. But of course there are kind of Nordic Atlantics and Portuguese Atlantics and Spanish Atlantics. So I think that's something where there are other kind of futures, traversing, crossing, sinking and so on with the Atlantic. And I think that's something that, because I'm not sure that the references to, I mean, they're all over, kind of can and gong and all of these sorts of, you know, kind of prog rather than hip-hop are as negative, actually, as was mentioned earlier.

I'm not quite sure, they seem much more kind of pointed to this sort of counter flow of possible futures across the Atlantic. Yeah, you're totally right. But he does posit that, I mean, although it's not, like with Kan and these kinds of sort of like kraut tendencies, he doesn't, I think what he's against is this kind of like figure of the sort of like, you know, like the guitarist that just like figured out the techniques of the guitar and just kind of like being privileged.

So bands like Canon and stuff are really interesting because they don't actively denounce that sort of thing, but in their music it's effectively making that critique because there's this sort of collectivized sonic space that they're inhabiting. while like being heavily, heavily influenced by the electronic music practices that are going on at the time like this would kind of filter into sort of like I guess post rock dynamics and this kind of thing later but I mean I think it would be really interesting to sort of see this like alternate Atlantics or Atlantis you know like sort of futurisms

I mean, it'd be really cool to see where that line goes. I don't know. I'm not sure where it goes or whether it's already been there and it's been fairly catastrophic I suppose, equally. It's all under the water. I was thinking, you know, the whole text is, at the time everything was what Richard Barbrook described as the Californian ideology, so the DeLuzo-Guatarians, a kind of religious fervor of DeLuzo-Guatarians, I think he described it as, or something similar.

So, I mean, now that I posted to the group, have you seen the Celt of Ramelzi? The Cult of Ramelzi is a sort of, I guess, a sort of neo-medieval PK-Dick-like hallucinogenic religious cult built around the work of Ramel Z enacting kind of hip hop rituals linoleum rituals

they're kind of quite interesting I think I think I posted it to the classroom is what you're saying? yeah I think so I don't know exactly where I'll see if I can find the link again. It's in the stream, I think. OK. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's looking for one bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they sort of used the imagery of Rammel Z.

Because Rammel Z was this really intense style. Like very collage-y, you know, like toys and like fluoro colors. and he always wore masks and just like a hodgepodge and stuff so the Cult of Ramosi sort of uses that sort of imagery in art context and mobilizes sort of like some of the ideas and a lot of the sort of yeah just visual I'm sorry I was trying to like describe what the Cult of Ramosi was to the people that were in the room

yeah they performed this sort of I guess it is sort of this kind of like they also embody this kind of anachronistic sort of futurism because it's so like rituals and repetition and like these like a lot of the stuff that they're doing has this sort of oh what's that tribe just like tribal dynamics or something like that Like, they're trying to invoke that, except what they're, or it's they're seemingly trying to invoke that, and what they're organizing around is Rammel Zee, right? Yeah. So it's an interesting kind of conflation. Yeah. Sort of neo-medieval Gothic futurism.

Yes. Well, the gothic futurism, just in case people don't know, like, that was Rick Rammel Zee coined that term. he has some writings available online which I highly recommend you can find PDFs of them somewhere but he's definitely a language proliferationist like Kojo you're going to get a lot of knowledges which to me Kojo does one of the reasons for doing that is to kind of proliferate possibility space and conceptual space. Like to kind of like within a newologism you have, you can have anyways,

the generation of new concept space in a very concise package. Like Aphrodelic, you know, already conjures a whole concept space. or phenomenon the yes any comments for a bundle or from banner path core anybody else

I just see faces laughing. I don't know how many faces there are in... I don't either. I can turn it really slowly and creepily, which will add... Oh, hello. Oh, hello. That's a big roomful. As he did that. Oh, hi. Do you feel self-conscious now? No. I actually feel better. If I'd known there were that many people, I would have pulled my hair and makeup. I haven't been taking the course, so I don't know exactly how it is.

I think you have to come closer. Hello. Hello. We're in the future, exactly. A future and a past. You spend your time, though. I haven't been taking the course, and so I don't know exactly how this has played out. But there's this distinction that seems to be going between possible futures and possible worlds here, or whether or not they're the same thing or not. And it seems that these examples from Eshin or Dick are mostly, how to put this, kind of modulating different possible paths that this world could develop, but still

roughly within the kind of laws or procedures that would govern this world in some way, versus like, genuinely quality to the different worlds. I guess that would be what you're talking about, something like Mayasu. And I wonder what you draw as that confluence or that conceptual kind of tension there is between how something like Mayer Sue and something like Eshin would relate, I guess. Yeah. I mean, maybe he has an answer. Or he has a response that happened. Now I'm hitting again. This is great. I think part of the reason for coupling

especially the novel with Kojo's stuff is that I mean I think the general thought was to talk about possible worlds and fiction and how the fictional and the possible relate in terms of colonizing the mind from within a particular world so as opposed Yeah, because we've talked about Maysu or David Lewis or even like China Mieville or Cisco. It's about, you know, creating, like, yeah, creating a world that's not our world or creating a structure for worlds in general. And I think part of the reason, you know, to talk about PDK and Kojo's work is it's just this kind of like hyper,

like imminent approach to creating a world, whether it's like, you know, yeah, looking at how the future is already here or was there in the past and also you know and how it relates to technology and also in the Palmer Eldridge that's very much about drugs that allow you to have simulations and simulations and simulations and simulations. So in a way it's like again it's what I was trying to say in terms of it's looking at the structure of world and worlds, but again in relief, kind of negatively by digging deep into our particular world, chemically or technologically, in this kind of sense, looking at how worlding is happening.

It's, I'm sorry, it's... It's very weird. It's different worlds, thought in terms of... It's very aggressive to come across the room and talk to someone. It's different worlds, but in terms of different worlds that our world could become, or perhaps already is. Yeah. Rather than worlds as ontologically split or already parallel, like separated. Yeah. OK, that's fine. Yeah, I think that works also for Koja, in Koja's case as well. All right. And I've got any. Yeah, I mean, I can read another quote that sort of speaks to that.

Go for it. He says, this is Kojo again, or Eshin. I should probably be saying Eshin. Concept techniques, one word. Concept techniques fluctuates between constraint as a function of the instrument's potential, so the synthesizer or whatever, and as a function of the producer's mind. This is kind of like what you're saying. So if your conditions or your constraints are the instrument and the producer, then all the possibilities there within constant techniques are not going to be so far afield that they're completely impossible.

It's not impossible worlds. Although, if you were to go in that direction In the sense of just conceiving of impossible worlds You can in some sense use them as a kind of mirror function Or a way that like seeps into the codification or conception of your own world Of the reality that you think is possible Even impossible worlds can in some sense be Put in dialogue or relation to worlds that are already existing that can push the world into possibilities or at least can push concept space into alternate trajectories potentially. No? Let me... Maybe.

Ish. Yeah. I'm on board. I'll probably say ish at the end. Maybe. Also, So, Katherine and Quiva, you've been very quiet. And hypertext came up, and I know you have a lot to say about that, so... I'm calling you out. I think we can hear you saying things about hypertext to my Quiva. Yeah. Katherine's gonna say some things about hypertext. I'm probably not gonna say any things about hypertext, But thank you. I really don't know what to say, especially to room full people in Paris, but hi all.

I don't know. I think, yeah, Lendl's point there at the end about sort of possible worlds, I guess, influencing our world is, I guess that is what fiction does, isn't it? Like science Transfiction. No? Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't sure if you were asking us or you were looking at Catherine because I can't see you. No. I don't really have much to say about Afrofuturism because I don't know enough about it, to be honest.

Okay, I'm sorry. Very interesting. Anything else? Anyone? Thanks. I have something I can think about, which I think is attributed to Cronenberg. So he says, or someone says, a future psychological, no, a future pathological psychology is developing now, but he anticipates it being even more developed in the future. He then brings it back to the past now, one word, and applies it as though it exists completely formed.

These characters are exhibiting the psychology of the future. So I think, again, this sort of folding of past, future and now is kind of really, it seems to me to be kind of central to this text and the way that, I mean I guess you can see in the way hip hop, what's the phrase that they use, kind of consciously ruins artifacts or objects in that scratching.

And there is something there that you can see in the way the Otolith Group now are working with the sort of filmic archive of science fiction, the sort of docu-fiction, you know, how you make a docu-fiction out of science fiction, albeit that it's kind of, seems like heavily mannerist, appropriately mannerist in some ways there. So that kind of pathological psychology I think seems to run through into, I mean, what's

One of the early Ottoleth films was Ottoleth I, where the term itself comes from a destabilization of the inner ear, doesn't it? So gravity induced destabilization of the inner ear, sort of transformation. I can't remember the title of that one. Something like that, like a space colony or something living without gravity. Don't want to beeping, it's fooling me. Facebook. I'm actually looking that one up for the reference right now.

OK. If anybody would mind in the, while you're looking that up, there was a, there was something Something that occurred to me in relation to Impossible Worlds, you know, creating as a contrast against reality, as a mirror, which I obviously, like Tony brought up earlier as well, in relation to that that's what Dick does.

So there is, in the Three Stigmata from this week there is a great paragraph in which a user of Candy is talking about his belief that the translation is reality and that unbelievers always come around. So I like the use of, obviously the idea of unbelievers and unbelief ties in with hypertension, but the idea that they always come around, so the repetition of the ritual and of going to this even if it's a false reality, kind of begets a real reality, but also the idea

of repeated use of the drug and ultimately affecting brain chemistry because that's a big thing for Dick and it kind of called to mind obviously his other scanner directly but what that had, what occurred to me about that was, and I think relates to kind of the alter ego aspect of Afrofuturism as well, was the, that he's chasing himself in A Scanner Darkly, as you know, so he kind of, So it's the second fictional self chasing the real self the whole time.

So the idea of creating this impossible kind of authority figure to kind of track down the real him without even knowing what the real him is. And by the time... But to do that, by the time he does it, he's consumed so much of the drug that there is no distinction and there's no reality to be found. That's what it brought to mind for me. I hope that made any sense to anyone anyway. I think that's great. There's a section in Sonic Fiction where Eshin talks about Dr. Octagon and a sort of movement

from schizophrenia or schizophrenia, the Marie Schaeffer practice where sounds are disassociated from sources and in relation to Dr. Octagon he talks about a kind of, is it Octophrenia I think, the sort of proliferation of schizophrenia and it becomes kind of premonitional. Sounds become detached in one stage but then you kind of become aware of them before you're aware of their causes. I think that's the way, something like that in Sonic Fictions.

So it seems very similar to what you were just describing in relation to Dick's novel. Deadly. Thanks, Eric. Okay, should we, Tony, should we maybe take a break before doing like the... Wrap up? ...big like wrap up? Sure. Yeah. Take a 15 minute break. Yep. All right. See you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

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Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Hello. Just waiting on Derek to see if he's around.

Either through the chat or popping up. I guess while we're waiting, Ben, what events are happening at PAP right now? What? What did you say, Tony? Is this the last summer school that's happening at PAP right now? No, there's no events. It's just people. No, it's just people. That's cool. All right, so I guess we're going to try to do a quick wrap-up.

Thank you for participating with us and joining us, some of you, for two brewing sessions at Benton. We're going to take a break the next seminar, the next session, the season, and we're going to move this sort of group into a research group, and we're going to continue to do readings around all of these ideas that we're kind of throwing out. These are a lot of times they're just we're trying to make interesting connections and

work out some ideas and hopefully you were able to do it as well. We kind of generally structured this around like trying to do a discussion group instead of like any formal lectures and we tried to bring guests in to come in. So since Lendl's there, thank you, Lendl, for being the backbone of this session. I really appreciate it. Lendl's kind of, he guessed it in the last seminar as well, I think on our first session. And he's always been great. And so I guess we can talk about, we can try to attempt to have a final discussion trying

to work these ideas out or the kinds of, I don't know, we want to try to produce some sort of documents at the end of this session. So I can talk a little bit about the structure of that now. And maybe we wrap up just trying to maybe make a summary. Yeah, I mean, I'm like very, very quickly, I just made, yeah, I made a list of like the general ideas that we went over in the whole course. Okay. And it's just on like a giant crazy board over there. so I could I could just go through that really quickly

alright yeah sure yeah so do you have a picture of it yeah I can take a picture of it I guess if I moved the light it would be less dark and thank you Lendl Ted Goblin yeah so I'll read you that you can kind of see it, but I'll take a picture so I just tried to go through all the texts we did and so basically we started we started with this short Mayasu text, which was actually a lecture on the relationship between philosophy and science fiction especially he was interested

in this idea of exo-science fiction that if you had a science fiction story, were the laws of science, like laws of physics themselves were broken. So he said that no science fiction actually does this, they just they sort of show that there's a tension between experiment and what can be known and what can happen, but that science fiction always in the end returns to supporting the endeavor of science and he imagines what if we had these kinds of stories because XFF XSF, where science, in a world where science would no longer function at all,

or like experimental science would break down. And so this idea that sci-fi is not chaotic enough, that's what it says on the board. And so, and then like, so we kind of, we read that with the Isaac Asimov story, The Billiard Ball, which is, he says, is a kind of something that he's interested in, doesn't go far enough. And then the other text that we coupled with it was a short story called The Schwarzweil's Radius by this woman named Connie Willis, which won a bunch of awards. It's a really great story. It's a true story of the guy who discovered, who theorized black holes for the first time while on the front in World War I. And so in this text,

it's this nice connection between him theorizing the black hole and this idea that the war itself is this kind of black hole. It's this thing which you can't escape. Everything's frozen, but it's really nicely done. It's not this kind of clunky relationship. It's very well-constructed, and the sort of tension there was that in War as May I See Once, these stories where science itself breaks down, it's not really clear how then you would still have storytelling, how you would still have, you know, narrative at all would be possible. And so looking at how this kind of effective register highlights this fact that even when everything is being swallowed and destroyed, you still have this, like, history as a form of science,

even in this world supposedly without it. And so when we talk about China-Maeville, City in the City, which is about this city in which there's two cities that border on each other physically and every once in a while you can see one city and the other city but politically you're not supposed to. If you see the other city you're supposed to look down and avoid it and pretend like it's not there. And a murder happens which someone from the other city moves. So it's about this very much all these political allegories about borders and who is allowed to cross and how you kind of have justice and politics in this kind of situation. And then relating that to, we talked about David Lewis,

who wrote this book called The Plurality of Worlds, very much the opposite end of the spectrum, saying that if you take modal statements seriously in logic, like could happen, might happen, you know, these kinds of notions of probability, that all of those imply a possible world, and that world is as real as our world. So anything like this could be the case means there's a real world that is the case. And people kind of thought he was crazy and think that's ridiculous, but he kind of claims it's the only way that makes sense. And so kind of looking at how, you know, possible worlds have a political valence and how possible worlds have a logical valence kind of opposite end of the spectrum

and whether they meet or not. And then we kind of, then we read this text by Michael Sisko last time, and he came on and did an interview for us, which is very nice, where he made this, he has this novel called Member, in which he, it's this cosmic level game, this strange game that exists across multiple solar systems, and the main character gets recruited in the game, but he doesn't want to play. so he's a really bad protagonist his name is Chance and he doesn't want to do anything so he's constantly being told by these aliens go do this great thing and he's like no I'm gonna go home and so the point of the book is that it's

this very chaotic surrealistic world but there's a definite structure but the structure is always a bit misleading the book has a list of terms but a lot of the terms are made up and don't even appear in the book. And he kind of described it as wanting to do a cut-up, or have the feel of a cut-up in Burroughs' sense, but with more rigor, as he put it. And then we read that with Marcus Gabriel, who's a philosopher, has a book called The World Does Not Exist, and his idea that the world is a container of all things doesn't exist. So he says, but anything we can describe and think about does, but we can't coherently think about a maximally inclusive category of world.

So that's why he says unicorns exist, but the world does not. And so looking at what does the world as a structure actually do in fiction and philosophy? And then, as we talked about today, the idea of world as past and future, colonialisms of the mind both in Philip K. Dick and in terms of I wrote Pharmacote this idea of accessing worlds world structures in terms of drugs and fictions and sonic technology in Mishon's work that's what we did

I guess do you want to add anything Tony? I mean that was a pretty great summary of literally every thing we went over. I mean, I hope that's actually really good for the people there, sitting there, so it puts a little bit more context over what they just participated in for their Friday night. I would say I'm more interested about you all that participated with us, how you think it went. Oh, you applauded for Ben.

It's a very good approval. what you think of this sort of thing, and I wanted to try to formulate how we can continue to do this type of thing outside of the structure of this four-session seminar. Like, if we were... Ben and I were discussing the idea of trying to create sort of like an internal Wikipedia or Wiki page where we can just post entries and kind of continue to post different books in different articles. And if we did that, then maybe one of the ways in which we can do, like, output for the end of this seminar would be to sort of create one of the articles

for the entries on any of these topics that Ben just outlined, which I hope we get a picture because it seems like you spent a lot of time. writing it all out. I spent a sad amount of not time actually doing it. No, did it very quickly? Yeah. I was like word vomit, but I think it's okay. But yeah, I mean, I think the idea of doing the wiki would be nice because this idea of hyperstition that we can kind of create fake entries and proliferate sort of fictional worlds that may or may not be real. I mean, doing that kind of wiki format, I think. would be quite nice. I think that would be great.

I think that would be great. All right, so, like, one thing I can do is I can set up, I can set something up for us and share it between us, give everybody accounts, and we can perhaps, like, try to write, you know, something in it, and obviously, they can be you know, review of like one thing we read or something you liked about, you know, the work, you want to write it down. Yeah, and, you know, I would like, if you guys want to, I would be open to, you know, holding random sessions if people read something. Like Ben really liked Member. That's why we read it.

He was like, he was really, he really enjoyed it when we read it. So if anybody has a book or something that they really enjoy and they want to share it and kind of talk about it, we can also do these kind of ad hoc sort of meetings like this. Yeah, I was going to ask what the possibility of other Hangouts might be. We can just continue to have some sort of network exchange between us where we can then just schedule one between us. We just kind of like, we can collectively decide it. If anybody has an idea, we can set it up. If you have, like, a series of ideas, we can do, like, a symposia on it. Yeah. Like a series, sort of, like, want to go in-depth on it.

The next semester, Ben's going to teach with Pete Wolfendale, actually. He's going to do a seminar on German idealism and structure, I believe. I just got your title. And I'll be doing something on also mobile. Ben, is it structure and German idealism? Yeah, it's not nearly as fun sounding. It's philosophy of system. Yeah, the legacy of German idealism. All right. Yeah. That would be really awesome. And, yeah, so we can just discuss. I mean, we're going to, we're a little bit, we have like 30, technically 30 minutes left,

but if we kind of went through the 30 minutes maybe to like try to have like a follow up, you know, 30 minute meeting where we can find a time where we can get together and kind of like work out, I don't know, these future possibilities, you know, at a later date. Yeah, sure. And we'll just save that time. Have a think about it. Okay. Yeah, good ways to figure this out. I think the possible worlds wiki would be really fun. So I'll set that up this week. And what else? Last. There's one. The Cisco interview, I did all the transcription.

So I'll send it out to you guys as well this weekend. Great. Yeah. Go ahead, Ben. Oh, no, no, that's great. I'm happy to see the interview once it's all put up. Am I on? Yeah. What I think I'll do is I'll share it with you guys this weekend, you all, and we can collectively kind of finalize it. If you have anything that you're quoted that you don't want in there, we'll figure it out. So that would be everything. I would leave it up to you if you have any questions or any suggestions for anything. Or if you want to say anything about the, you know,

what Ben said about the summary. Well, I mean, I think it was a great summary. And I think it's been a great program that you put together here. So thanks for making that happen. And I mean, I think let's just see where the wiki goes initially. and maybe have a, like you suggested, a half-hour conversation about what else might happen. It'd be a good thing to do. Just sort of say thanks from us. It's been really enjoyable. Also, if you're serious about people suggesting books,

I think it's a dangerous but like quite fun place to use. The suggestions could be endless, but I'll bring them to a half hour session at a later date. I think that's all right. I think like proposing like reading groups, you can just place it out there. It is dangerous, but also, you know, people can just, you know, not schedule if it's over. I think it will have its own, like, sort of feedback by being overwhelmed. But, yeah, please do, though, suggest things that you'd want to talk about that cover either this seminar or the last one

or sort of like any kind of general overarching themes in speculative fiction and in science fiction. Okay. All right, well, yeah, I want to thank you all for being here, and thanks to the people at PEF today. I hope you didn't ruin your Friday night. Every time and week and days have no meaning here, so it's okay. Okay, good. But Friday night is a Friday night. All right, well, yeah, thank you all. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you.