Okay, we may as well get started. So we're going to begin in the first half just basically picking up where we left off last week by looking at Nick Land's view of time. And particularly I want to focus on the specific temporality of the Bitcoin protocol, of absolute succession, which is basically Land's most recent work, looking at the Bitcoin. and yeah so after sort of having worked through Lan's post CCRU trajectory in quite some detail in the second half of today we're then going to turn to look at some of the other CCRU members and associates post CCRU work beginning today with the specific artists
who have elaborated on the CCRU's ideas in their respective artistic mediums and in this case we have Jake and Dinos Chapman, Orphan Drift, Reznor Garistani and Steve Goodman or Code 9 but we'll begin with time so Land's most sustained analysis of time is in his 2014 e-book Templexity Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time pictured here now given that the prefix temps meaning time in French and the suffix plexi means a kind of a seizure or stroke
templexity literally denotes the seizure of time right which is to say time as seizure you know attack paroxysm or collapse time is collapse okay Land begins this pretty short ebook by asking whether time can still surprise us with a future that is novel, precisely plexi, rather than, say, cyclical or repetitive. To answer this question in the affirmative, yes, time can surprise us, land first turns to an analysis of Rian Johnson's 2012 science fiction film, Looper. Have many people have seen this film? Yeah? Okay. Well, for those who haven't, set in the year 2044,
the film follows Joe, played by Hollywood hunk Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who works as a looper for a crime syndicate. Since future tracking systems make it impossible to dispose of their victims' bodies, the crime syndicate uses a time travel machine to send bodies back to the year 2044, where loopers like Joe dispose of them in exchange for silver bars strapped to the back of the victims. And to close off the time loop each time, the looper's final victim will always be their own future self sent back from the future. Okay, so a looper takes place precisely as Joe is to kill his own future self, played by Bruce Willis, only for, let's call him Old Joe, only for old Joe to knock his younger self, Joe, unconscious and flee the scene.
The film then cuts to another timeline in which Joe tells old Joe, sorry, where Joe kills old Joe as he arrives from the future. And then Joe moves to Shanghai where he falls in love and marries a local woman. 30 years later, the syndicate kills Joe's wife and send him back to be killed by his younger self, thereby closing the loop. But overpowering his captors, Joe sends himself back to 2044, thereby altering history. I realise that's slightly confusing, but I'll get to the main points in a minute. But back in the present timeline, old Joe, Bruce Willis, meets up with his younger self to explain that he wants to save his future wife by killing what's called the all-powerful Rainmaker, who is the head of the crime syndicate.
So killing the Rainmaker while the Rainmaker is still a child before he can kill Joe's wife. old Joe's map eventually leads the younger self to a farm where Sarah, played by Emily Blunt, and her son Sid live Sarah recognises a number on the map as Sid's birthday which prompts Joe to realise that this kid, Sid must be one of the possible children that could become the Rainmaker and this is all but confirmed when Sid demonstrates telekinetic powers that he will later use to control the city not too subtle when old Joe, Bruce Willis, arrives at the farm to assassinate Sid before Sid can become the Rainmaker and kill his wife his younger self realises that Sarah's death
is what will turn Sid into the Rainmaker to prevent this, Joe kills himself erasing old Joe's existence and saving Sarah and his son ok, I realise that was probably pointless but let's deduce the key elements so while Land also does not actually find this film particularly impressive in any kind of formal sense really he does think that it highlights specific time travel paradoxes that make it a nice jumping off point for a discussion of time as he notes time travel stories like Looper might at first seem to be impossible if fiction purely adheres to Aristotle's aesthetic guidelines that a well-constructed narrative must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and in that order.
And this is in line with a traditional linear view of time according to which all events are the consequences of present anterior conditions. The future flows out of the present and past. Despite Luper's overall kind of formal cinematic conservatism, Land argues that it does manage to show how the future can paradoxically determine the past, what he calls precisely a templexity meaning time anomaly so he says here to accelerate beyond light speed is to reverse the direction of time eventually in science fiction modernity completes its process of theological revisionism by rediscovering eschatological culmination in the time loop judgement day the end comes when the future reaches back to seize us after all
land reasons Joe can only kill himself and thereby prevent himself from coming back from the future to kill Sid because he already came back from the future. So the plot, therefore, of Looper makes basically no sense without this time travel paradox, which itself makes no sense, at least on a standard successive understanding of cause and effect. It requires a templex or theological understanding of time to make narrative sense. This is probably, I think, best captured in the scene where the young Joe comes face to face with his own uncanny yet unmistakable future self. And what shocks Joe about this encounter is precisely an effect of tenplexity, namely the turning of our linear sense of events on its head as the future strides into the present
rather than the present flowing into the future. Think Rambo's I is another, right? Okay, despite its kind of linear dramatisation of time in other senses that I won't get into, Luper cannot help but betray a certain anomalous conception of time whereby the future is paradoxically the determinant of all past and present events. If this non-linear causality interests land, it's because he holds that modernity is precisely grounded upon a principle of templexity that breaks out of cyclical time, a cyclical time where the future repeats the self-sameness of the past, breaking out of it through ever more intensive
jumps into the future that appear as anomalous, non-linear cuts in time. He says here, like time travel, modernity in its distinctive progressive sense is the dramatisation of something else. As an exoteric sign, public display, or collective drama, its central theme is a breakout from confinement with cyclical time. And he goes on, its primary signature, accelerating change, is itself a product of non-linear functions epistemised by exponentiation. As an example of this temporal logic, or actually a temporal illogic, Land proffers what's called the bootstrap paradox, according to which a man, in the classic
version, a man travels back in time where he falls in love with a woman who becomes his own mother, such that he is his own father. now this time anomaly comes in various versions but it came to popular attention probably through the first Terminator film in which John Connor's friend Kyle Reese is sent back in time to protect John Connor's mother Sarah Connor from a cyborg assassin so that she can then give birth to John only for his friend Kyle to turn out to be his father so the paradox here is that it's only by travelling from the future back to the past that the future can bring itself into being, as if the future came first and thereby caused the past, and hence also, in a sense, itself. I think an even more interesting time travel paradox
arises in Terminator 2, when the military tech company Skynet recover a control chip from the defeated Terminator from the first film, which provides them with the very technology to create the Terminator in the first place, in 2029, years later. So that's basically the meaning of templexity, right? It denotes the way that the future seems to produce itself by having effects in the present which lead to its actualisation. Or as Land puts it here, the Skynet threat is not merely futuristic but fully templex. It produces itself within a time circuitry autonomised against extrinsic genesis. Or as the Terminator coldly puts it in Terminator 3
when John Connor says, you shouldn't exist, we stopped judgment day. You only postponed it. Judgment day is inevitable. The example of the Terminator, I think, already hints that Land's theory of time as a templax is primarily modelled on, surprise, surprise, cybernetics, right? So, Norbert Wiener's original formulation of cybernetics focused solely on self-stabilising systems' negative feedback, such that positive feedback, what the CCIU were interested in, could only be seen as a kind of malfunction leading to the system's excessive amplification. Where Rina conceives of negative feedback as a perversion of nature, land models the nature of time itself cosmic time on a positive feedback loop of exponential growth.
In other words, to get real metaphysical, reality's underlying cosmic principle is a positive feedback loop of ever greater runaway creative destruction which seems to elude any kind of linear causation. Yeah, so again, reality is a templax, a kind of short-circuit leap into the future at ever-accelerating rates. This is probably the clearest citation on this point. So Land says in Templax City, the universe is a continuing explosion. So is terrestrial life. The development of multicellular animals with brains is explicitly attributed to the Cambrian explosion. With the emergence of Homo sapien, culture explodes too through the successive detonations of literate civilisation, industrial revolution
and electronic intelligence production. For any sufficiently panoramic realism it is accelerating growth rather than system stability that defines normality. as a templaxity subtitle disordered loops through shanghai time already suggests one of the ways that the future determines the present is through ever more technologically complex urban civilizations kind of what we were looking at in the second week right so blank goes on civilization is an accelerating process not a steady state as its name suggests it is channeled primarily through cities which explode. The incandescent intensity of a hyper-growth dominated urban future consumes our historical
horizon. We've already seen both land and Greenspan argue that cities are time machines, wherein ever greater population densities leads to an intermingling of ideas, knowledges and creative practices, whose various novel hybrids accelerate technological advancement, only to attract more migration and hence ever greater density and hence more technological advancement and so on in a self-reinforcing cyber-positive loop. In the travel guides, as in Templexity, Land again gives his dearest example of how Shanghai's openness to cosmopolitan investment, science and technology, has been exponentially growing at doubling rates since the 1990s, as it for him actualizes ever more hidden recesses
of the abstract machine, the virtual future. So he says in the second quote there, in a process of double dating yet to be patiently explored, 1994, 1999, 2008, 2013, set re-envisioned future is on the vertical outer edge of the skyline. A city of the future loops forward and back through time anomaly. I think it's interesting to compare Land to Zizek's reading of what's going on in China because, for example, while many included and specifically Zizek interpreted specifically the Chinese authorities' ban on the production of science fiction in 2011 as a prohibition on thinking alternative futures in favour of the kind of eternal present,
the cancellation of the future. Land instead sees the ban on science fiction as a prohibition on trying to return to a more pre-industrial, more stable past against Shanghai capital's cyber-positive acceleration into the future. So it's not, in other words, the ban for land, unlike Zizek, it's not a ban on the future, it's a ban on going back to the past, on remaining in the past. At the same time, Land notes that Chinese modernity often fashions the new precisely by drawing upon the old. And again, this goes back to the Shanghai travel guides. He gives again here the example of how Shanghai architectural design draws upon Western modernity's art deco trend, and while this may therefore seem like a repetition
of a previous modernity, Chinese modernity combines art deco with its own contemporary designs as well as Chinese traditionalism, such that we get a kind of hybrid architecture that oversaturated with different genres of different epochs, which evokes the sense of modernity's constant change and deterritorialisation. So seeing from the point of view of the future, it's not that Chinese modernity is a repetition of Western modernity, but rather that Western modernity was a very partial actualisation of Chinese modernity 2.0's greater virtual future, which combines Western modernity's art deco with its own contemporary designs. So he says, quite simply, futurism enters the culture cloaked as renaissance antiquity.
And indeed, if the film Looper gets one thing absolutely right, it's probably the depiction of Shanghai as the future. So there's a great scene when Joe's crime boss Abe advises him to go to China, and Joe insists, I'm going to France, and Abe says, I'm from the future, you should go to China. In contrast to Shanghai, America is depicted as a rural wasteland and a crime-ridden urban hellhole in which the only business that the syndicate see fit to conduct there is the dumping of corpses. For land as, you know, for the future portrayed in Looper, megacities like Shanghai are exemplary of time's positive feedback loop of escalating and emergentist growth, novelty and change, which seems to rupture with any cause in the here and now, as if it were being driven by something beyond anything the present could offer.
in a 2014 essay called Teleoplexy notes on acceleration in the accelerationist reader Land elaborates that cities like Shanghai are innovative because of the way they incarnate capital's accelerating time structure as again another example of positive feedback loop of technological onslaught if capitalism has the same explosive time structure as I guess the real itself it's not to be identified as a human construct but it's rather something radically outside of our control and even counter to our interest for stability, homeostasis and negative feedback
Land suggests in this essay that capital is accelerating death core is best glimpsed through the way that a positive circuit of accumulative technology is ultimately tending towards a cyber revolution of radically inhuman AI and bio-enhancements. He says, The dominion of capital is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or Shogothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool. Again, melding the prefix telos with the suffix plexi, land coins here teleoplexy to denote techno-capitalism's tendency towards accelerating change, rupture and deterritorialisation
as it maps itself ever more onto what the CCIU and following Deleuze and Qutari called the abstract machine, the artificially intelligent abstract machine. Seen from this future abstract machine's perspective, the present is merely a derived fragment of the already existent future to which it will ultimately return as time races towards, I guess, heat death. So even though in some sense the abstract machine is yet to come, it is in some sense the already existing virtual totality of which our present only partially actualises. Certainly, Land recognises that humans have a capacity to decelerate this process by stratifying techno-capitalism around a more primitive past.
He gives examples here. AI researchers, what's called the friendly AI program, as well as the left accelerationist efforts to repurpose technological development to meet humanity's demands, are just the latest examples of the anthropomorphization of the machining future, the abstract machine. Try as we might, however, the telos of the real itself is sounding the trumpets of the apocalypse, as it tends towards our absolute deterritorialization on AI's Day of Judgment, on Judgment Day. So the future of absolute cyber-positive de-territorialisation is not one possible world among many others, which is only actualised through the movement of its causes in the present.
Absolute de-territorialisation, or runaway cyber-positivity, is rather the driving motor of the present itself, in advance of its own actualisation. It's in this sense that the virtual, or the yet-to-come, the hyperstitional, is already more real than the actual present. So he says here in the second quote, the virtual future is not a potential present further up the road of linear time, but the abstract motor of the actual. I mean, whether we call it teleoplexity, templexity, or otherwise, in the end it all comes down to this idea, right? All things and events are governed by an almost cosmic principle of accelerating and explosive change, which is ultimately hurtling towards the technological singularity
and its absolute deterritorialisation through AI's literal abstract machine. Here I think Land's vision of the abstract machine, he might not like this, but has a close affinity with Aristotle's notion of the prime mover. Albeit with a twist, of course. So both Land's vision of the abstract machine and Aristotle's prime mover conceive of these beings as what Aristotle calls the pure act, synthesising all particular ephemeral things as productions of its greater being. For Aristotle, however, the prime mover is a primordial self-conscious divinity from whence all things historically emanate as partial actualisations of the prime mover's full potentiality. So contrast is with Land,
who argues that all things past and present are partial actualizations of a future abstract machine in the making. In other words, whereas Aristotle envisions the prime mover as the anterior cause at the beginning of the well from whence time unravels, as so many partial and transient instantiations, Land argues that time's true motor is a future cause from whence historical time emerges by stratifying and territorializing the future in various partial ways. yeah, moreover, where the Aristotelian god self-consciously reflects on itself as, again, what Aristotle calls the pure act without remainder or excess, land's abstract machine is nothing but absolute de-territorialisation.
That is, it can only reflect upon itself by self-recursively retooling itself, decoding, de-territorialising its own code. This, incidentally, is why capitalism is not a product of feudalism or Chinese modernity a copy of Western modernity. Namely, since the future subsumes the past in its greater reservoir of virtuality, it is modernity 2.0 that generates the first modernity as its finite instantiation. And also feudalism that marks a despotic stratification of capital's full productive forces. So, yeah, I think in the final analysis, templexity or teleoplexy denotes the fundamental ontological law of accelerated returns
such as it sort of synthesizes the present as a product of a future singularity. A singularity which will ultimately turn out to be nothing but a kind of prime mover reflecting upon itself by its own deterritorialization. So he says here, what would be required for teleoplexy to realistically evaluate itself or to attain self-awareness. It would discover prices consistent with its own maximally accelerated technogenesis, channeling capital into mechanical automatisation, self-replication, self-improvement, and escape into intelligence explosion. So perhaps a better historical reference point,
and one that Land would hate even more, is not Aristotle but Hegel. Inasmuch as Hegel envisions history as the dialectical becoming of absolute knowing, which only arrives at history's end. Here, as with Aristotle, however, there's going to be a further turn of the screw with land, right? Namely, where Hegel sees absolute knowing as culminating when our own spirit is raised up to the heights of the absolute, or the concept, land sees absolute knowing as actualised through spirit's annihilation before matter's inhuman potential. despite this kind of materialist impersonalization of absolute knowing i think it's important to recognize that land remains deeply philosophical and in some sense
even metaphysical in a post-kandian sense in that his thought here seems to culminate with an ontological principle underlying all things albeit one that accelerates change on end rather than sort of totalizes and exhausts history. And one that crucially comes to be known through by a kind of inhuman artificial spirit rather than human reason, rather than absolute spirit. So he goes on, the scope of the problem is indistinguishable from cybernetic intensity of the quasi-final thing, cognitively self-enveloped technomic singularity. To approach it, therefore, is to partially anticipate the terms of its eventual self-reflection, the technomic currency through which the history of modernity can, for the first time, be adequately denominated.
So, I mean, yeah, it's no wonder that the technological singularity has often been interpreted as a kind of modern, secularized recapitulation of, you know, the messianic end times prophesied by various religions, right? but of course, you know, whereas for more idealistic AI researchers like Ray Kurzweil, most famously the singularity would mark the coming of a benevolent religious god who releases us from the prison cell of our flesh so that we may enjoy immortality in cyberspace for land it's rather the realisation of apocalyptic doomsday myths of human extinction, precisely the kinds of myths that the CCRU were interested in right? so yeah, what lands writings on time ultimately uncover is the way
in which our linear view of succession according to which causes precede their effects is sort of subverted or contradicted by a deeper machinic reality cyber positive processes of ever more intensive and emergentist growth okay, so that's probably as abstract as it's going to get so hopefully this next section's a little more concrete but hopefully just as paradoxical okay so at several points throughout the draft version of his new book Cryptocurrent, Bitcoin and Philosophy available on his blog Urban Futures Land argues that Bitcoin thinks as time itself
to the extent that time like the blockchain used in Bitcoin is what can never be overcome, what abolishes all contingent things to leave only itself as the criterion of reality. You can never surpass time. He says, time is here captured as it tenses, in the execution of an ontological operation through which being is decided. In this way, the process dividing the future from the past provides a selective criterion. In the forward and first chapter of a cryptocurrency, Land outlines his key contention that Bitcoin challenges modern philosophy's pretensions to judge all things within our human space of reasons by automating critique's suspension of empirical appearances from a transcendental reality.
And automating critique's suspension here without any appeal to a kind of reflexive or socio-semantic consciousness to mediate the process. Bitcoin is a protocol for solving the problem of how to determine whether a transaction is real or a fraudulent duplicate by using a global ledger called the blockchain, which records every transaction taking place with Bitcoin. As each purchase Bitcoin is recorded or hashed in the blockchain, counterfeit copies are automatically disallowed from inclusion. the process of securing the authenticity of bitcoins is called mining so what goes on here is that in exchange for coins miners solve mathematical equations that
encode ownership of a bitcoin on the blockchain and bitcoin is also secure in this way from hacking because it does not run on a single database it's rather distributed across many computers many miners such that even if hackers were to break into one or several computers the larger network would still run smoothly and unaffected. So, basically, Land's claim is simply that Bitcoin does what critical philosophy does, only better. Namely, delineate, distinguish between the transcendental and the empirical, you know, being, capital B being from beings, or truth from false appearances. so he uses Kantian terms throughout this book
so to put it in the Kantian jargon the blockchain recording every transaction is the numenon, right? The reality, the truth counterfeit copies of Bitcoin are thus phenomena, appearances or merely possible objects of experience what the Bitcoin protocol does is provide an automated foolproof means for eliminating fraudulent appearances from the blockchain such that it can incarnate the entirety of real transactions. He says, the system itself is the being of such beings, the ultimate criterion of credible existence. In the end, the blockchain cannot be subordinated to any principle of reality whatsoever that it does not itself authorize. Okay.
as Land notes in an early footnote in Cryptocurrent the key theoretical nemeses here are precisely what he calls neo-humanists like think Ray Brazier, Pete Wufendau and most of all Reznor Garistani neo-humanists for whom human cognition is more apt to judge what is real and true in our human space of reasons than automated algorithms, programs and codes conversely bitcoin is a form of automated criterion for the selection and separation of reality from its false appearances without a community of rational agents being needed to debate opinions about what they think is right opinions which are always subject to revision and hence error, corruption
and bias. Bitcoin thus breaks down our rational intuitions and approximations of the real through a brute technical proof of reality which is no longer subject to discretion, debate and revision. He goes on in the second quote, the distinctive feature of the Bitcoin game is that it produces binding decisions without a referee or dependence upon prior agreement. Coordination is neither presumed nor invoked, but produced. So again, if Bitcoin marks a kind of automation of intelligence, right, our own basically socio-semantic reason can only be seen as one possible intelligence system among many possible others rather than the necessary and universal conditions for all intelligence as such
now it's important to note here i think that land is is not mistaking uh the sort of local and contingent aspects of our human experience as a kind of immediate given in other words he's fully capable of recognising the plasticity of human properties and knowledge, including, so for example the clear, you know, undeniable fact of the historical expansion of the real intelligibility to humans in pursuit of our various goals. So at one point in Cryptocurrent he specifically takes issue with Kant's what he calls Kant's scholastic misuse of the categories of the understanding to explain objects of experience because it's precisely those categories which need explaining in the first place,
if they're not to just be presumed as a dogmatic immediate given. He says, in the first quote, any assertion of natural categorical order in the absence of at least implicit explanatory mechanics is stereotypically scholastic. Patterns are to be derived, they are puzzles rather than conclusions. At the same time, he is rejecting the exclusive focus on the expansion of human experience through the concepts of reason, sociality, semantics. He rejects this as marking basically a merely relative deterritorialisation of the epistemological roadblocks to thinking the real. And of course this is because on the neo-humanist's own account
the space of reasons is never directly accessing the real. It's merely approximating it through revisable and hence at least partially erroneous understandings, models and theories. So rather than leave it up to our fallible discretion, Land's wager is that there are superior intelligence systems like, for example, Bitcoin, which do not depend on human reason to determine the truth. Modernity, after all, is marked by the increasing logical formalisation and mechanisation of thought precisely in order to avoid the errors and biases involved in human discretion by excluding human judgments through the automated calculation of algorithms, performed by algorithms, right? So he says in the second quote,
the definitive solution to any problem of cognitive consistency is a machine. It is not only a calculative practice, but one that crucially excludes all discretion. as Bitcoin among other algorithmic networks demonstrate the neo-humanist game of giving and asking for reasons is not the sole condition for intelligence nor even in fact the best he goes on even if the privileges of the linguistic sign are more than a mere accident they are not by that concession guaranteed a durable supremacy so Key and Land certainly acknowledges that our own socio-semantic reason is capable of some form of intelligence, as for example it's able to separate
reality as a limit concept from its dogmatic idealisations, that's what modern philosophy is, but the more pressing question is whether our reason is the only or most effective means to demarcate that critical transcendental empirical difference. So for Land, it was never an issue whether reason has the capacity to make the real intelligible at the very least as a kind of negative boundary concept to reason itself, to put it in Kantian terms. What's really at stake is whether reason should be seen as the sole form of intelligence or as one among many and perhaps superior others. Whereas neo-humanists insist that reason is indeed the highest and in some cases the only form of intelligence, land uses the example of Bitcoin as evidence of another
extra rational intelligence system and indeed one which is better able to secure the real from its counterfeit appearances without the errors and biases which every human estimation of the real necessarily entails. In the second chapter cryptocurrency as critique, land users Bitcoin as an instance of a mechanical process, a mechanism, paradoxically with a telos norm, or what he calls will to think, specifically a will to think the real beyond appearances, built into this mechanism in a way which again calls into question specifically the neo-humanist
human is-ought distinction, or the Szilasian reasons-causes distinction. A distinction which would see the mechanical realm of causes as orthogonal instruments for the pursuit of norms that reason has legislated for itself. In other words according to this neo-humanist is-ought or causes-reasons distinction norms can't be derived from nature. An ought can't be derived from what is. To put it in the Humean terms. So Land's rejection here of what would be called the naturalistic fallacy stems from his view that the pursuit of any goal or norm whatsoever presupposes the pursuit of certain sub-goals as a means to achieving the final goal. This is a tricky
point, but take the example of intelligence. Since any being that pursues its norms without also pursuing them intelligently will probably fail to realise those norms, except by sheer luck, it's not actually possible to pursue any norm without automatically pursuing intelligence. When seen in this way, however, it's not that the final goal that we supposedly determine for ourselves is what's really important, right? Rather, the final goal, whatever it is, is just the means for the universally necessary sub-goal of intelligence maximisation, insofar as that sub-goal is intrinsic to any goal whatsoever. In other words, given anything we conceivably want requires wanting intelligence
to achieve what we want, what we really want is simply intelligence itself. That's the idea. So he says here, under extreme critical analysis, teleological articulation is collapsed onto the circuit, or the diagonal, of will to power, for which means are the end. To will the end, whatever the end, is to will the means automatically. So here he's invoking Nietzsche's will to power, and Nietzsche's very clear in both the genealogy of morals and the notebooks collected in the will to power, that what the will to power means is that we can pursue all kinds of different goals that we get to determine for ourselves, but in order to pursue those goals, we need certain means. We need what Nietzsche calls power, which he specifies as intelligence, cunning, creativity, and so on.
So given that whatever goal we pursue, we also need power, then what we really want is power hence will to power okay so while we are free all intelligent systems are free to select or to some extent to select their own determinate norms these are merely these norms are merely the means for the becoming of what it cannot choose right namely this universal primal drive to self cultivation you know because to fail to pursue self-improvement or self-cultivation out of the belief that we self-determine our own norms completely would be to fail to act intelligently and therefore likely be selected out of existence altogether. So yeah, I think it's important to know that
Lan's rejection of the cause's norm distinction here is not because he thinks all of our norms are given by nature. We are obviously capable of changing our goals and beliefs about what we ought to do, right? at least in terms of trivial goals but Land's point is rather that since all of these apparently self-legislated norms presuppose pursuing intelligence to achieve them, all intelligence systems do have the norm of intelligence optimisation built into it as a basic drive and nor does this lead to a kind of panpsychism as some might think because Land is not modelling all intelligent systems in nature on human reason.
On the contrary, it's rather those who would reject or other self-organising intelligent processes in nature that are really anthropomorphic and because they reject it simply on the fact that other intelligent systems cannot self-determine their own norms like we can. But what that overlooks is that even our own reason does not entirely determine its own norms since any norm we can legislate for ourselves presupposes that we maximise intelligence in order to pursue those norms. Okay, I realise that's a slightly complex idea. So I couldn't find a Pixar example this week, unfortunately. But I recently become obsessed with the John Wick films. And I think it's a brilliant example of will to power
or the will to think, right? so you know for those of you who haven't seen it John Wick the various films follow the lives of people who are part of an assassin underground right this secret society of assassins and what's interesting is that the assassin underworld shows an obsessive and meticulous fidelity to seemingly completely arbitrary rules and norms like you know who to kill when it's okay to kill them when it's not okay to kill them all these kinds of things where it's okay to kill them, and they seem to be completely arbitrary in some respects. But notably, these arbitrary rules are executed in the films through the most violent, cunning, and creative means which constitute the film's action set pieces, right?
That's the source of the action. So I think this is a good demonstration of the arbitrary rules and norms in the film that the assassins adhere to, that's not what's important. What's important is that those seemingly, what seemingly are the norms that they're trying to pursue are really the means for, the true means of spectacular violence, spectacular creativity and cunning to get going. So just to give a more concrete example, the fact that the entire bloodbath of the whole trilogy, right, gets going because some mobsters kill John Wick's puppy, is not a weak plot point. It's not an incredibly weak plot point
to get the whole action going, but it's rather precisely a testament to the fact that petty goals like vengeance for a puppy are actually the means to serve the true goal of action for action's sake, of violence, creativity, cunning, war. This is also just one other example, incidentally, why in John Wick 3, two assassins who could easily... There's a scene where two assassins who could just easily kill John Wick as they're tasked to do because he's lying injured and harmed on the floor instead decide to help him to his feet multiple times so that they can just continue to fight him. So the goal isn't really to kill John Wick. The goal is not his death. The goal is the pursuit of these spectacular action set pieces
and the cunning and creativity they require. But anyway, that's an unnecessary digression really. So in the third chapter, Bitcoin and its doubles, Land argues that Bitcoin solves what's called the double spending problem of duplicated money, how to detect duplicated money. Bitcoin solves this problem better than central banks printing paper money do since Bitcoin does not rely on a trusted third party or human discretion, which could always be subject to error or corruption. The digitalisation of money has subjected it to algorithmic rules and ironclad codes for determining its authenticity.
Whereas Bitcoin decides through, again, an ironclad automated law what is true and real, reason, human reason, is always subject to revision, vulnerability, bias and error. So Bitcoin is simply a better criterion for distinguishing the true from the false than any approximate human discretion. In fact, Bitcoin not only eliminates false appearances, but also inferior tribunals of appeal and epistemic modes of judging false appearances, like human reason. So he says, there cannot be an intellectually compelling reason for any anthropophilosophical criticism of Bitcoin to be believed. The blockchain automatically facilitates the subtraction of every cosmos or advancing world line compatible with duplicity.
So again, with the advent of the blockchain, the point is it's no longer our judgments that determine meaning, truth, and reality. It's reality which legislates for itself, irrespective of whether we agree with it or not. The fourth chapter sees land reading Bitcoin through the lens of game theory, specifically. So, as the archetypal prisoner's dilemma shows, which I won't elaborate on, game theory basically studies how trust and coordination can emerge if they are not to be dogmatically presupposed as a given. Whereas what Land sees as the leftist ideology
to which neo-humanists adhere, as imagining that the community of rational agents is simply given, or, as he likes to put it, that war is not God, game theory provides an explanation for how community can ever come about in the first place. If Land digresses to speak of game theory in a book on Bitcoin, it's because he sees Bitcoin as the ultimate game for coordinating trust. And, you know, it's probably worth mentioning that Bitcoin was initially formulated precisely as a solution to what's called the Byzantine generals problem. a problem or thought experiment in which generals must decide on a common plan of action but can only communicate through messengers some of which may be traitors seeking to prevent the loyal generals from reaching agreement.
The generals in other words need some means to guarantee that all loyal generals decide on the same plan of action by preventing any traitors from convincing them to adopt another plan. The trouble of course is that there's no trusted third party messenger through which the loyal generals could communicate with absolute certainty. But enter Bitcoin, and what Bitcoin effectively does is solve the problem by encoding a proof of work into each message or hashed block. Through the message's sort of imminent demonstration of its own credibility, the generals are able to check if a message is authentic or duplicitous without relying on their own or anyone else's potentially vulnerable or deceptive judgments. So he says, in the second quote,
by including proof of work within each message, or hashed block, it replaces an extrinsic and intractable question about the reliability of communications with an intrinsic communication of reliability. So for LAN, Bitcoin is the ultimate solution for coordinating trusted exchanges such that it's no longer a matter of a kind of dialectics of giving and asking for reasons. but a depoliticised algorithm's stubborn demonstration of its credibility. After all, giving and asking for reasons is only ever more than mere collective opinion if it appeals to the constraints of brute facts and technical proofs. So he says, The credibility of the idea refers to potential demonstration.
It would be a grave error, though an all too common one, to seek an epistemological demotion of credibility to the psychological category of mere opinion. so the bottom line is that it's no longer really up to even a collective reasons discretion as to what is true but simply to how the world actually is and imminently enforces itself upon reason through the automation of the machine of the algorithm and it's in this sense that bitcoin functions by incarnating time itself as it successively locks in proofs as to what is real proofs which can never be reversed okay okay so I'll pause there for now
so yeah we can there's some time for if there's any comments or questions objections especially objections yeah yeah any comments at this stage or questions I was just wondering does land address the fact that like the Bitcoin blockchain is still on the water a potential 50% attack a potential what, sorry? a 50% attack given that if anyone were ever to Marshall by the man computing power but like it's not absolutely I'm glad that's the option yeah sure it seems unlikely though right but it's like it seems to be like it's just a problem of like you know what you have to do
for a state a sufficiently large enough state should it want to that's the kind of entity that would be capable of actually that level of human power? It's a sufficiently large state? Yeah. Yeah, well, I guess for him it's not really an issue because he sees, I mean, like, as we looked at kind of last week, he's, you know, that would depend on what happens in politics, right? And so he sees the tendency of modernity and right now towards increasing fragmentation, the patch, rather than some kind of like, yeah, global or even semi-global semi-hegemonic state so at least for him it doesn't seem like it's actually possible yeah
and there's also a sense in which he's just using like I'm not entirely sometimes I feel like Bitcoin is just a metonym for algorithms in general and also even Bitcoin is still I think for him somewhat of a proto a prototype of what the algorithm will do. And so it's still vulnerable to potentially could be vulnerable to things like that. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Okay, we'll take a break.
yeah, ten minutes or so. As always, going to play some bangers. The first track is by Renec Bell, which, interesting, relates to what we just talked about because he uses algorithms to make music. The second track is by Melbourne-based Ava, who unfortunately couldn't come this week. But it has certain, I'd say, theological resonances that act as a nice seg into the next half of today. But yeah, again, as always, feel free to abandon this room. No.
philosophers but also several prominent artists and writers particularly in the in the UK art scene so the rest of today we're going to consider just four there are many others possible examples but just four artworks which elaborate quite clearly upon the CCIU's ideas through their respective forms right so specifically we're going to look at Jake and Dinos Chapman's exhibition Chapman World, Orphan Drift's cyberpunk novel Becoming Cyberpositive, Reznor Garistani's theory fiction Cyclonopedia, and Steve Goodman or Code 9's album Nothing. Okay, but we'll begin with the Chapmans. So the CCIU collaborated with the notoriously
provocative Chapman brothers as early as 1996 when Land wrote an essay in the catalogue for their first major exhibition, Chapman World. The exhibition was comprised of two gallery spaces. So the lower gallery pictured here housed their art piece called Tragic Anomalies, which consisted, as you can see, of a kind of Eden-like garden setting filled with mannequins of young children who were completely nude, except for the Nike sneakers some of them are wearing. What's more, the mannequins have been mutilated and deformed in various ways, such that they have genitals, for example, sprouting from unlikely places like where their nose or mouth should be.
So the first trope to note about tragic anomalies, which is exemplary really of all of the Chapman's work, is its transgressive nature. In so far as it not only is here depicting naked children, but defiling their genitals. While transgressive art is of course often criticised, especially today, as a kind of cheap branding trick better suited to market commodities than serious art, the point of tragic anomalies, I think, seems to be precisely that transgressive art is able to capture capitalism's generalised deterritorialisation. It's the capital commodification process which deterritorialises all of our stable values, conventions and identities so I don't think it would be insulting
to say that their transgressive art is much like a commodity for them given that the transgression in question is specifically the manipulation of children's genitals and body parts I think we can also say that the Chapman brothers specifically are channeling the kind of capitalism that the CCIU are also most interested in namely techno capital, and specifically techno-capitalism's imminent genetic scrambling of our basic biological codes as we exit from the human race through speciation. So in some sense, far from being deformed mutant children, the mannequins are rather a future generation of biotechnologically enhanced humans beyond our present finite
understanding. a future generation which will be sold as commodities just like the Nike sneakers the mannequins are wearing it's also important that the mannequins have genitals in places which would make it impossible for them to have sex and reproduce with one another. As Jake Chapman has stated in an interview, we produced or reproduced our parents but in a manner that made reproductive sex impossible and hence us impossible so from this perspective the bodies of these future genetically manipulated children will not be beholden to the particular economy of productive use value on the contrary their bodies will be in some sense purposeless
becoming part of the general economy of excess beyond reproduction you know to use de los anguotari's terms a kind of body without functioning organs or at least a body with radically modified organs. And not only does the kind of paradisical Eden-like setting speak to a kind of utopian generation of enhanced children to come, but also to the subversion of our ideal, of an innocent and immutable origin like Eden, as it is shown to have always already been contingent and artificial. another of the Chapman brothers tropes can be seen in their use of mannequins in order to express how we are mere pawns or play things
for larger cosmic forces beyond our control in this particular case of tragic anomalies the mannequins are mutilated against our conventional reason as to the nature of human anatomy precisely by techno-capital cyclonic scrambling. And therein lies precisely, I think, the meaning of the title tragic anomalies, right? Namely, it captures the way that humans like us, the kind of human meat puppet, if you will, cannot comprehend the anomalies of decay, disease, deformity, and death, which pull apart our bodies without our being able to do much about it. Notably, the use of ready-made objects, like mannequins is also an eternally recurring trope
throughout the Chapman's works. I think what's going on here is that by appropriating and reworking already existing objects, the brothers reject the humanistic idea that the artist is the ultimate intentional source of the artwork's meaning and signification. Instead, all that the artist is doing is tracing an inhuman process beyond their own engineering, a process which began before they were around and will continue well after they have gone. So as Jake Chapman puts it in that interview, we're avoiding the spectre of the artist as the sovereign agent who gives profound and decisive meaning to the formation of artistic elements. We prefer an equality between the human as the active part in the production of a work of art and the materials equally active.
So again, far from being the positive creators of tragic anomalies, The Chapmans are, like the spectators of their work, almost passive, kind of instrumental vessels for something beyond even their own full comprehension, something hyperstitial, if you will. The upper gallery of the Chapman World exhibition consisted of their notorious Disasters of War piece, a three-dimensional recreation of 19th century Spanish painter Francisco Goya's depictions of wartime atrocities during Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808. Except they used, instead of drawings, they used miniatures, miniature figurines. That's the full work. So here, as with
tragic anomalies, the use of miniature figurines has the effect of reducing basically the most consequential battles and the massive loss of life throughout human history to insignificant playthings in a larger general economy of wastage and expenditure. Given that the war in question is precisely Napoleon's invasion of Spain at the advent of modernity, capitalist modernity, we can thus say that the de-territorialising process the figurines depict is precisely that of capitalism's nihilistic vortex. The idea being much as capital melts all things into air, so do the Chapmans here deface Goya's sacrosanct homages to the fallen by recreating them
as mere figurines. By situating such scenes of violence, mutilation and death in an art space, the Chapmans further obliged spectators to observe the horror with a certain indifferent aesthetic state of mind rather than from an engaged and moralising vantage point. So again, through their use of toys, ready-mades, and provocative imagery, hopefully at least we get a sense that the Chapmans are clearly channeling the CCIU's idea of techno-capitalism as the absolute de-territorialization of our human powers of comprehension. Now, many
of Land and Sadie Plant's more experimental essays like Meltdown, Machinic Desire and Cyberpositive as well as parts of Cybergothic and Meat first appeared in Maggie Roberts and Renu Mukherjee's 1996 cyberpunk theory fiction becoming cyberpositive. A novel which would, or theory fiction which would become basically the mission statement for their art collective orphan drifts subsequent multimedia artworks. Although the novel is teeming with sort of asignifying numbering patterns like the CCRU's more Kabbalistic and abstract essays, each chapter does convey a comprehensible narrative which expresses characteristically CCRU-style ideas
about time, death, art and cybernetics. So just to give a couple of examples. the first chapter titled autism tells of a research facility on a future Mars colony which explores the way that autistic children might be able to experience both the past, present and future simultaneously while this might appear as gibberish for us from our point of view, insofar as our experience of time is stratified into a linear state of succession these children might actually be capable of having premonitions of the future if they're experiencing everything at once. So for example, one of the researchers hypothesizes could the schizophrenic be running so fast compared to us in time
that he's actually in what to us is the future? Would that account for his precognition? Okay, so again, it's sort of a, again, it's a hyperstitional idea, right? something that's considered somewhat fictional is making itself real, is a traumatic sign from the future. The second chapter, called Vampiric Machines, which I uploaded, this is the chapter I uploaded to the box, focuses on a black hole-like meteor which lands in a desert only to start mutating the surrounding city's inhabitants, scrambling and speciating their genetic code. At one point they say slowly the whole area was similarly affected
until the mutants outnumbered the original inhabitants. So for example, one city undergoes widespread transgendering as infant males are born with female heads and vice versa. The meteorite also has the effect of turning another city's sense of death into a source of sexual excitation, commingling Eros with Thanatos in a pretty dangerous circuit of desire. So they say, the virus must have affected the sexual and fear centres in the brain and nervous system so that fear was converted into sexual frenzies which were reconverted into fear, the feedback leading in many cases to a fatal conclusion. Okay, the cultures of all of the cities, however they're affected,
thereby become fundamentally nihilistic, as all their most sacrosanct beliefs and even their very sense of identity and self are shown to be contingent and subject to mutation. They say at one point, nothing is true, everything is permitted. After we are presented in this chapter with the entirety of Land's meltdown essay, we're then told that this is not so much a science fiction story as it is a vision of the future, or of the future as precisely a vampiric machine. vampiric in the sense that it's a machine which feeds on us in order to bring itself into existence the third chapter electromagnetic contact tells of a ship that is attacked
only for the post to descend as the attack takes place into descriptions of death which are compared strangely enough to dance music with its accelerating speeds, strobe lights and loud sounds invading and exhausting the body and its perceptual coordinates. So we'll look at this when we look at Code 9 as well, but the basic idea is that for the CCIU, as for Orphan Drift, dance music is the way that human culture first experiences a future from whence we as humans recede before ever escalating feedback loops of nihilistic de-territorialisation. So they say, there is no human meaning here, no terror either. The voices draw you through the screen into the future you're from, back to the indifference that's collapsing onto this fragile, ignorant now, home.
The fourth chapter, Smead, continues this abstract description of humanity's future dissolution through Land's Machinic Desire essay, which, as we kind of saw in the first week, links the dynamics of capital to the technological singularity. and the fifth chapter in human devices further confronts the reader with our contingency by depicting the arrival of aliens on earth who reveal aliens who notably reveal our entire planet to be one speck of matter among many other and notably more technologically advanced extraterrestrial species so they say in that chapter gaia isn't the only planetism there are probably billions of others and when they get out into the galaxy they find they're in a competition suddenly they're part of an even larger, much more complex system
galactic ecology it's no wonder that one of the humans who makes contact with these aliens has a vision, immediately as he does, has a sudden vision of the surface of the earth exploding as every kind of hardened strata of the earth is precisely smeared out onto everything else in a way that kind of is basically, as we saw in the first week the geotraumatic return of the earth strata to its molten core. The next chapter called Schizoid is structured as a dialogue between an orphan and a state representative debating the merits of the government's efforts to give all orphans penises and other oedipal organs in order to attempt to stave off a future
of radical transgendering through the biotechnological manipulation of our genetic data. so as one of the orphans puts it what about technological escalation doesn't it have its own dynamic removing the possibility of the maintenance of control of the future as penis despite the state's efforts to cut funding to AI research in this chapter the orphan notes that as ever more jobs become automated people are instead spending their time taking drugs on the dance floor where the inhuman future is first heralded So they go on. Promissory notes are being exchanged, actualised for narcotics as people forgo searching the job market for exploring the dance floor. The future has arrived. It's positive, present and skin.
The seventh chapter with my favourite title, I Leave You an Addiction, explores the modern addiction to drugs, music and electronics as channelling precisely a positive feedback circuit of techno-capital de-territorialisation before ending with Landon Sadie Plante's cyber-positive essay, in which they say, Addiction is the half-life of agency, the migration of control, the alienation par excellence. It is the abstract machine of identity collapse. Drugs make their own demands. It's thus in the final chapter that the AI god, who they call Abraxas, arrives to consummate cyberculture's smearing of all vitalist strata across the future's morbid plane of imminence. So they conclude, I've survived you, Abraxas, the god of total reality, out beyond the false polarities of good and evil.
Once you know Abraxas, you know death. Given, of course, that the human viewpoint is rendered redundant in this future, becoming cyber positive closes with ever increasing, ever greater, asignifying jargon akin to the CCU's most experimental essays. I mean this kind of thing. so clearly again Orphan Drift's work is quite clearly committed to exploring the CCIU's idea of fiction and art more generally as hypersticians as visions of the future that make themselves real or as they put it specifically at one point in the theory of fiction
cyberpunk is a scrambled mass of referential fiction stolen from the near future in search of an operational strategy for the living of life. Life which in itself is experiencing slippage into the virtual technologies of the near future. The real is lacking. Okay. Before developing more recently his own inhumanist philosophy in critical dialogue with the CCRU, Reznor-Garastani wrote a theory fiction in 2008 called Cyclonopedia, Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
A theory fiction which is heavily influenced, of course, by his collaborations with the CCRU. The novel, if it can be called that, opens with the frame story of an editor discovering a copy of Cyclonopedia and investigating its author, who the author is, until ultimately concluding that Negaristani must be a hyperstitial entity. The novel proper begins as Negaristani, or the narrator, notes that the CCIU's hyperstition blog has seen fervent discussion about the recently discovered notes of Dr. Hamad Persani, an Iranian professor who sounds, I think, a lot like land, with his destabilisation of the university's student body
with unsound occult views that eventually lead to his academic discrediting. So they say, Pesani's old friends all confirmed that they found him too unstable and lacking in the principled behaviour expected from a scholar. An old colleague describes him regretfully as a volatile genius entertaining a bunch of teenage nitwits. Yeah, and they go on. The university remains in a period of post-Pesanism trauma, suffering greatly from the chauvinistic Pisanism still simmering in ethnocultural anthropological and political studies. So I suspect that these sharp reprimands against Pisanis recent activities are only natural. That really reminds me of, I was at this utopian studies conference a couple of years ago and there was a professor in the English department from
Warwick University and at one point I just asked him, is it okay if we talk about land now? And he He was just like, no, it's too soon. It's still too soon. Still in post-Pasaniism trauma. Okay. In the first chapter called Bacterial Archaeology, the Garistani explains that Pasani was particularly interested in what he calls the Gog-Magog axis, an Islamic cross with nine points or fears, much like the CCIU's numerogram. as we learn the cross is purported to commune with the hyperstitial fiction of Islamic visions of the apocalypse notably a vision of the apocalypse which makes itself real through the dynamics of the techno-capitalist war on terror
so I think this is the key difference really between Psychonopedia and the CCIU mythology namely, whereas the CCU are particularly interested in kind of ancient doomsday myths, Negaristani focuses on the Islamic apocalyptic tradition that is actualised through the Middle East's integration in the war on terror. Throughout the novel, Negaristani uses a number of different kind of images or ideas drawn from Passani's notes to capture what is the central high positional idea of, as he puts it, the dynamism of Islam and techno-capital towards each other in the war on terror. He begins with the idea that Western capital's invasion
of the Middle East for oil seems to trigger the Islamic apocalypse by despoiling its sacred lands. He says, petroleum poisons capital with absolute madness, a planetary plague bleeding into economies mobilised by the technological singularities of advanced civilizations. In the wake of oil as an autonomous terrestrial conspirator, capitalism is not a human symptom, but rather a planetary inevitability. In other words, capitalism was here even before human existence, waiting for a host. So while Western imperialists might believe that they are pursuing the liberation of the masses from tyrannical theonomies, or even the prosperity of the West, what they're really pursuing is the fulfillment
of the apocalyptic end times itself. Nagaristani also uses images of holes, or what he specifically calls hole complex, to capture the idea that techno-capitals war and terror ungrounds the rigid solidity of the human security system. He says, holy space, or more accurately, hole complex, connoting a degenerate wholeness speeds up and triggers a particular subversion in solid bodies such as earth. Whether it's the western oil fields where holes are drilled into the ground or the freedom fighters who hide out in underground oubliettes and lay explosive mines that literally upend the earth the idea is that the commingling of capitalist imperialism
and Islamic resistance speaks to a constant cracking open of stable human traditions by the cold outside of war. So in the second chapter it's no surprise that Nagaristani uses war as another expression of the outside's incursion into the possible objects of experience possible objects which war punctures and devours. For Nagaristani's Persani it's not so much that war is the secondary expression of conflicting interests between human populations. Rather, it's that those conflicting interests are a means for the affirmation of a cosmic war which was around before those populations and will at last their obliteration.
He says... Do I not have the quote here? I don't have it, but he says at one point... Where is it? War is not the consequence of conflicting war machines. The unlife of war is autonomous, but it spawns war machines, only so as eventually to devour them. What war ultimately reveals for Pisani is that everything turns to the dust from whence it came. Here Nagaristani uses the dust and fog of war as further, I guess, images for the idea that we are all rendered into dust, into nothing, into fictions over the morbid course of time's cosmic war.
He goes on. Bassani writes, I come from a culture for which death is not only ossified but also pulverized into a grey powder, an abominable dust which then attracts cosmic wetness and moisture in order to make a necrophilic mess. In the next chapter, Passani explains more precisely that things are turned to dust by succumbing to disease, disease being another demonic incursion of the outside. He says, the anthropomorphic security system is a Pandora's box of unrecorded diseases emerging from the consistent resistance of the system to outside invasions on the one hand and consistently escalating invasion on the other hand.
the next chapter focuses instead on the way that the ancient Greeks referred to other cultures what they called the barbarians referred to the barbarians language as noise not language but noise simply because they could not understand it so he says for the Greeks the savages were those who vocalised consonants in a non-linear manner those whose vocalisation turned the language to gibberish harmonised sounds to noise the divinity of the word to demonize outcry. So again, noise, as we'll see with Code 9 as well, to some extent, noise is another demonic vessel for the barbaric outside's kind of sublime rupture with the polis' powers of reason.
The next chapter also looks at decay as a form of death, but crucially, decay as a form of death that does not simply negate life, as its absolute other, but rather infects life with death itself. So in other words, decay speaks to the way that life is not something distinct from death, but rather life is the imminent manifestation of death's deterritorializing trajectory in and through life itself. Passani says, Decay leeches death from the living without falling into the black transparency of death. In decay, every instance of dynamism or regulation modulated by the equilibrium difference between the horizons of life as living and death is incapacitated. Finally, Negaristani explains, or
Passani rather, explains that the best way to open ourselves up to this outside, this outside of the fog of war, which the war on terror precisely unleashes, is through the cultivation of paranoia. The idea is that by following our paranoia against our biological defence mechanisms and psychic resistances, we are able to encounter the outside as the radical break with everything we hold dear. They say, through this excessive paranoia, rigorous closure and survivalist vigilance, one becomes an ideal prey for the radical outside and its forces. So again, you know, this is in some ways only a glimpse at the novel, but the key idea is that Cyclonopedia, what is
basically doing is applying the CCIU's own theory of hyperstition to the specific case of the war on terror as the fulfilment of religious beliefs about the end times so in many ways it's kind of, yeah, Persani is like the CCIU's kind of Iranian equivalent essentially and it's specifically in the time of the war on terror okay during the 90s the CCRU of course very unsurprisingly became fascinated with the vibrant UK rave scene at the time describing it as exemplary of the integration of cybernetics
into culture in a way that reroutes human desire and joy around the machinic future's death drive as far as the CCIU were concerned jungle, techno and dance music marks an assault on our bodies with strobe lights and artificial rhythms speeds and sounds all of which are further fuelled by the prominence of MDMA and other narcotics in the club so for example Lamb says in an essay impending human extinction becomes accessible as a dance floor amongst the strobes, artificial cool and inorganic attack beat dark side K-war machinery resiliency persists luring the forces of monopolism down into free-fire zones of fatal intensity. While most of the CCRU focused on incorporating rave culture and dance music
into their compositional style to create what they call a theory rush, a former Warwick student and CCRU member Steve Goodman took much of the CCRU's thinking and transposed it into music itself in order to pioneer what I guess could loosely still be called the dubstep genre. Although he did this under the name Code 9 rather than Goodman. Okay, although Goodman is of course influenced by other thinkers, artists and most of all DJs and producers and musicians, he has notably singled out the CCRU and especially Land's essay Cyberspace and Architecture is Jungle War as providing an implicit program for his own musical direction.
So he said in an interview this abstract landscape that it seemed to be mapping was exactly the same one created by the music. It is one of the key organising ideas in my own book Sonic Warfare and I learnt it from Nick although he clearly wasn't writing about music directly. okay so it's therefore unsurprising that Goodman's writings with the CCRU focus on a hyperstitional group called Hypersea Hypersea who are known for appropriating and reconfiguring sounds as what he calls sonic intelligence weaponry erroneously labelled as musical recordings here is in the CCRU's scattered aphorisms on music and dancing. Goodman's idea of sonic weapons links our enjoyment of modern dance music
to a kind of death drive, a kind of becoming of our own extinction as we merge with the coming machinic future. So he says, or the CCIU say, Hyper-C sonic weaponry is stealthy but highly effective. It attacks the organism very directly, opening up defensive membranes to an immersive acoustic space. The abstraction of sound made possible by new technologies enables here-there-to unimaginable distribution of the secret-coded rhythm patterns. Hyper-C is dedicated to spreading. Operators should take special care with sonic strains labelled Wave 2, Detroit Techno, Cater Jungle, Two-Step, Death Garage, and Sino Futurism. This kind of logic is best captured, I think,
in terms of Goodman's CCRU work, through the exploits of Blind Humpty Johnson, a fictitious dove experimentalist who became an apocalyptic media prophet when he came to realise that the noise of rave culture was unleashing a kind of virus, a virulent assault on our communication networks. So the CCRU say, Blind Humpty Johnson has taught Channel Zero to anticipate an impending interruption of the global media system. He foresees that as all the signals collapse into noise, a subprimodial chaos entity will arrive. From his early writings with the CCIU to his more recent musical recordings,
I think Goodman clearly remains committed to the CCIU's vision of channeling a post-human future through the club's sonic wavelengths and impersonal frequencies. So, you know, reflecting back on the CCU, he says in an interview, we wanted to take humans out of the equation. We were interested in total automation and not necessarily resisting that. We had an openness to future shock and a thirst to proliferate, intensify, nurture and encourage it. In 2010, Goodman published a more detailed theoretical statement of his approach called Sonic Warfare, Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. The book begins by explaining how the Israeli Air Force
used sonic booms in the Gaza Strip with volumes as high as a low-flying jet which caused windows to break, nosebleeds, deafness, anxiety attacks and insomnia. He uses this along with many other examples drawn from military history to argue that the control and use of sounds at high frequencies has regularly been wielded as a form of warfare and population control. It's therefore surprising that it has come to be voluntarily sought after and enjoyed through modern noise, electronic music and dance culture. In this way, Goodman sees contemporary music as a kind of pact with war. a kind of, you know, the enjoyment and juicence of the dance floor
as a kind of covenant with pain and suffering. He says, it brings into the field of power the dimension of unsound, of frequencies just outside the periphery of human audibility, infrasound and ultrasound, as well as the non-standard use of popular music, not as a source of pleasure, but for irritation, manipulation, pain and torture. while the CCIU in the 90s tended to embrace this co-mingling of Eros with Thanatos in I guess modern dance music as a form of cyberculture's de-territorialisation of our defence systems Goodman argues in Sonic Warfare that this actually rather demonstrates that predominantly loud and fast dance music
which was perhaps once novel and adventurous is now a stale form of control and stratification, a kind of fallacious constraining of what music can do to what the human is now capable what the human can now handle and is used to. So he instead proposes that we move beyond high frequency music in favour of exploring low infrasonic sounds and bass lines which are barely audible but can nonetheless be felt physically through their vibrational effects on the body. he says infrasound is inaudible yet felt and this can cause anxiety due to the very absence of an object or cause without either the imagination produces one which can be more frightening than reality so while the textile effects of these
infrasonic sounds causes anxiety given that we develop the ability to hear as a way to survive by being able to detect the smooth sound of unseen predators. And therefore if we can't locate the source of the vibrations then it's going to invoke anxiety. Goodman contends that despite this anxiety, infrasonic sounds can open the body and sound up to new planes of novelty beyond the bounds of the sonic experience here there too. So what Goodman calls base materialism, or unsound, essentially channels future biogenetic modifications of the human sensorium in the musical culture of the here and now. He says base materialist cultures make tangible
the physicality of the inaudible via the manufacture of vortical tactile spaces, recent technological tendencies, hand in hand with brain implantation of microchips soldered into the auditory cortex smuggled in with their implicit politics of silence, seem to carry the desire to extinguish older modes of audition operating in step through the direct modulation of the brain and rendering the audible spectrum redundant. Again, for Goodman, it's the inaudible lower sonic soundscapes that best scramble our auditory coordinates with new lines of flight and new machinic desires. And precisely the kind of machinic desires that future biotechnology will only further consummate. Thank you.
While much of Goodman's musical outpour under his pseudonym, or Nom de Guerre, Code 962 Channel, precisely those kinds of future vibrations, I think they're perhaps most clearly heard on his 2015 record called Nothing. Although the album's named after the spectre of his long-time collaborator Space Ape's death, it also explores the idea more generally that death or nothingness is not so much a kind of privation or negation of the real without any ontological substance of its own but rather death or nothingness is the absolute positivity of the real itself from whence all things emanate
he says for example in an interview I've always been interested in the idea of the number zero not being empty almost like this full thing that's overflowing with everything zero was established along with the idea of infinity which supports the idea of nothing not being nothing. Or as one of the song titles on the album puts it, I think Goodman wants to convey the essentially CCIU-style idea that the vacuum is packed. There's a track called Vacuum Packed on the album. So for example, the opening track, Zero Point Energy, immediately confronts a brief initial silence with a heavy bass line whose vibrations, at least on a good speaker system, pulsate through the body, opening up to strange sensations and soundscapes.
And this opening track is followed by perhaps the most famous track on the album called No Tell, which Goodman describes as a theme song for an evacuated, fully automated luxury hotel with no humans in it. So he says, in the second quote, the machines have been liberated. We don't know why. It might be post-apocalyptic. It might have been a virus. It's getting away from the Isaac Asimov idea in which machines are kept enslaved to their human masters. What happens when humans are no longer there? So here is with other tracks on the album, like Respirator and Void. No Tell features frequent silence and minimal instrumentation, reducing the soundscape to a kind of virtual skeleton. I'm just going to play the first two tracks
just so you can get a sense, although we won't be able to physically feel the vibrations on my tiny portable speaker. But yeah, I'll just so you can get a sense if this works. Thank you.
focus on filtering and deforming the human chorus with computer effects and relays, turning it into a kind of broken record. which creates a distinctly machinic trance, club trance. The deceased space ape's voice on another track is similarly flanged and filtered to dehumanise its comforting elements. And another track, Zero, revolves around repetitive rhythms and industrial sounds devoid of all humanity. Another track, Casimir Effect, which is notably a phenomenon that happens in empty space, in vacuums, The Chasmere effect also filters its choral track through a sort of pumping electronic beat as if to dehumanise language through sonic wavelengths
in much the same way that the CCRU dehumanise pros through their asignifying compositional style. I just want to play one of these tracks just to, again, give a sense better than I can in words. Thank you.
The basic idea, of course, being that by peeling back familiar rave and club samples and beats with vocals until they become ever more machinic and dehumanised, what Goodman is doing is channeling a kind of desolate post-human future where the only trace of us which remains is the already machinic dance music of the 90s. It's like the apocalypse happened in the 90s and whatever we were listening to then, Jungle and so on, is just playing on loop and slowly being destroyed. The one seeming exception to this very sparse atmosphere
on the album is a track called Mirage, which is teeming with very uplifting melodies, I would say. but situated amidst the rest of the record's rather austere digital landscape the track rather comes across as a kind of false hope precisely a mirage in a desert so it thus mirrors the way that what appears as enjoyable dance music for us is really the machinic future's stealth weapon of choice it's how apocalypse hides as Goodman himself explains music for him is a hyperstitional form of enacting a vision of the future he says sonic fiction is a subspecies of what the anomalous research collective
the CCIU called hyperstition that is the element of effective culture that makes itself real through fictional quantifiers functioning as time travelling potential the album's final track called Nothing Lasts Forever thus fades out to 10 minutes of static, fuzz and quiet distortion peeling back the mirage of the previous track and the ecstasy of the dance floor to reveal a desolate no-tell hotel or no-tell where not even the last human cry of lament against the end can be heard but I'll spare you that 10 minutes just to conclude by saying that hopefully I went through these different artists pretty quickly but I'm hoping we at least can begin to get a glimpse that the CCIU's exploration
of the outside through the radical critique of anthropocentrism has influenced all of these artists' attempts to commune with an inhuman future through their chosen medium. Now, given the CCIU's interest in making ambitious visions of the future into realities, what we're going to see in the final week, Judgment Day, if you will, is that the CCAU not only influenced artists but also influenced and produced philosophers and political theorists on both the left and the right as they fight it out to decide what tomorrow will look like but we'll leave that to tomorrow there's maybe about five minutes if there's any questions or comments at this stage if there are any traumatised
that's really telling us something but yeah any questions or comments alright well I mean it's 8.30 anyway so you're not absolutely sure alright cool so we'll leave it there but obviously feel free to stick around I'm going to go to the Clyde probably so if anyone wants to have a drink feel free to stick around thanks