The Three Stigmata of Kodwo Eshun On the

1 The Three Stigmata of Kodwo Eshun: On the Human as Hyperstition Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Prepared for The New Centre course on Hyperstition, Fictional Worlds & Possible Futures, August 3 2015, at the invitation of Ben Woodard. [[ Twitter.com/youtopos/status/629065570420453376 ]] Lecture Notes — In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes: “A maxim, the origin of which I withhold from scholarly curiosity, has long been my motto: Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus. ["The spirits increase, vigor grows through a wound."] Another mode of convalescence (in certain situations even more to my liking) is sounding out idols. There are more idols than realities in the world: that is my ‘evil eye’ upon this world; that is also my ‘evil ear’. Finally to pose questions with a hammer, and sometimes to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound that can only come from bloated entrails — what a delight for one who has ears even behind his ears, for me, an old psychologist and pied piper before whom just that which would remain silent must finally speak out.” Now, I would like to — and was asked to — bring together The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (PKD 1965) and The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche (Biswas Mellamphy 2011) while weaving-in — or rather, hyper-stitching — Eshun, Glissant, Bataille, Kofman, Land, Detienne and Vernant, all in a kind of sorcerous gesture: a conjuration in its own right (or again: a hyperstitching, to use Dan Mellamphy’s spin on hyperstition) of the concept of the human itself. In a 1978 speech, Philip K Dick said that “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” (PKD, BrainPickings.org/2013/09/06/how-to-build-a-universe-philip-k-dick): from PKD we get the idea that ‘reality’ is that which continues to exist long after you’ve stopped believing in it, and from Nietzsche we get the idea that the ear is a tuning-fork attuned to ‘reality’. The ear is also the aperture of subversion where the [in]formative Gift comes in; but as Palmer Eldritch reminds us, “In German, Gift means poison” (TSPE 171).

2 Apollo is god of the eye, and Dionysus, of the ear. As Nietzsche notes, Ariadne has Dionysus’s ears (Dionysian Dithyrambs). Nietzsche addresses the disciples of Dionysus (only those who possess such a third ear can hear his words): “the aphorism becomes a precaution against feeble minds, against the profanum vulgus; it allows one to express revolutionary ideas in the knowledge that one will be understood only by those who possess the third ear” (Kofman, Nietzsche 116). The ear deciphers the aphorism, performing what Nicola Masciandaro, at last year’s Tuning Speculation conference (TSpec 2, 2014), called a “hermeneutics of auscultation proper to the interface between mystical vision and the body as instrument of impossible sound” (‘Mystical Auscultation’, TheWhim.Blogspot.com/2014/11/ mystical-auscultation.html). The Dionysian ear is thus the third eye of Shiva: not the eye that sees, but the eye that seers/sears, the eye that hears: as Kodwo Eshun [KE] says, “the 3rd Eye is a secret faculty that scans the nonvisible spectrum for radio, ultraviolet, daemonic, acoustic waveforms” (KE 71). Enter the pineal the eye of Georges Bataille: “The eye, at the summit of the skull, opening on the incandescent sun in order to contemplate it in a sinister solitude, is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head (Visions of Excess, 82). Back to Palmer Eldritch. “[W]hich of us gets melted down for Palmer to guzzle? Because that’s what we are potentially for him: food to be consumed” (TSPE 155). Belief is bait within the nets of hyperstitional ecology, and the human is the catch of the day, so to speak, drawn by the mist of hallucination cast up by Palmer Eldritch, that fisherman of human souls. “Whether I like it or not”, says Barney Mayerson, “I’ve been born again” (109). “You’re a phantasm”; “You’re a ghost”; “Try building your life on that premise” the Eldritches continued. “Well, you got what Saint Paul promises, as Anne Hawthorne was blabbing about; you’re no longer clothed in a perishable, fleshly body — you’ve put on an ethereal body in its place. How do you like it, Mayerson?” (TSPE 161). To think of the ‘human’ as a ghost, a phantasm, is to encounter an incommunicable and incomputable inhumanity that “always adopts a cruel, despotic, amoral attitude towards the human species (Eshun 13).

3 “Philosophy”, Bataille writes, “has been, up to this point, as much as science, an expression of human subordination, and when man seeks to represent himself, no longer as a moment of a homogeneous process — of a necessary and pitiful process — but as a new laceration within a lacerated nature, it is no longer the leveling phraseology coming to him from the understanding that can help him: he can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chains of logic, but he recognizes himself, instead — not only with rage but in an ecstatic torment — in the virulence of his own phantasms” (‘The Pineal Eye’, Visions of Excess 80). Here the ‘human all-too-human’ becomes what it really is, the overhuman — hyperanthropos — a ‘poltergeist phenomenon’ as PKD calls it: phantasms that have the ability to manipulate matter. Sonically speaking, the posthuman or rather ‘ghosthuman’ is not disembodied but rather the exact reverse: it is hyperembodied. This is the musical or Dionysian rather than Apollonian zone of parahuman and overhuman elusiveness, where materiality and immateriality, corporeality and incorporeality, do not oppose one another but rather become enmeshed and entangled in textures and the overlapping relations between intensities. No opposition between dead or alive, human and machine here, but as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch reveals, rather the hyperstitching of foreign and familiar, of organic and prosthetic, of the vegetal, metallurgic, anthropological and machinic: “All three stigmata — the dead, artificial hand, the Jensen eyes, and the radically deranged jaw. Symbols of its inhabitation”. The ‘sixth extinction’ has already occurred; the human species has already become hyperstition, already died-out and become resurrected within and as the “parahuman biology of sound machines” of which Eshun speaks in relation to the “the Afrodelic Era [in which] percussive strata and polyrhythmic engines converge in a zone of parahuman elusiveness. Fugitive and tensile” (KE 01 [008]). Unrecognizability, opacity, illegibility become Dionysian weapons which “do not locate you in a tradition” as Eshun suggests, but instead “dislocate you from origins”’ “they uproute you by inducing a gulf crisis, a perceptual daze rendering today’s sonic discontinuum immediately audible” (KE 00 [-001]). “If we examine the process of ‘understanding’,” Edouard Glissant wrote in his Poetics of Relation, “we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with the grounds to make comparisons, and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce” (Glissant 189-90). “The opaque is not the obscure though it is possible for it to be so and to be accepted as such,” continues Glissant; “It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” (191). Transparency aims at understanding but only by reducing that which is ‘grasped’ to a concept. Begreifen: to grasp, understand, conceptualize; but most deleteriously, to mummify. “Everything that philosophers handled over the past thousands of years turned into concept mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive.

4 Whenever these venerable concept idolators revere something, they kill it and stuff it; they suck the life out of everything they worship” (Nietzsche, Twilight, ‘Reason in Philosophy’, 1). Eshun instead offers the idea of “concept-technics”: psychoacoustic fictional spaces that “migrate and mutate along the entire communicational landscape”. “Stolen from Sleeve note Manifestos, adapted from label fictions, driven as far and as fast as possible, they misshape until they become devices to drill into the new sensory experiences, endoscopes to magnify the new mind states Machine Music is inducing”. Should the posthuman ghosthuman not demand its right to opacity? There is no conception without deception; hyperstitching the human — the post-human ghost-human — is a game of con/deception within the playing-field of paradox and the architexture of aporetic agencies, “accelerating a discontinuum in which the future arrives from the past … webbed networks of staggered rhythms that function like the dispersed architecture of artificial life by generating emergent consciousness” (KE 24). This is Eshun’s “turntable consciousness”: the operative basis for sonic mutation which designs, manufactures, fabricates, synthesizes, cuts, pastes and edits an artificial discontinuum, encrypting its tones, demanding alien listeners who can hear another world, cutting passages and new neural pathways. Sonic futurism adopts a “cruel, despotic, even amoral attitude towards the human species”, but it is a cruelty ‘well-used’, as Machiavelli might say, mutating the human into becoming what it is: a ‘psy-borg’, ‘the human’ as a ‘population of processes’, a ‘mixillogical machine’ that can grow a third ear demanding a new neuromuscular interface: “You become a human Oncomouse, ear sprouting from your neck in a fleshy umbrella” (KE 01 [003]). Unlike Barney Mayerson but very much like Palmer Eldritch, Nietzsche celebrates the paradoxical supposition that truth and falsity are not opposites, but rather discontinuations of one another, streams of sonic matter that cross from the liquid state to the gas state of mute vapourdrift (KE 26). “Active intelligence” is thus musical, according to Masciandaro; “a matter of becoming all ears for the Reality that must be” (‘Mystical Auscultation’). The alien discontinuum operates not through continuities, retentions, or inheritances but through intervals, gaps, breaks, contaminating commonsense with the power of falsity (KE 16), a co-conspiracy between creation and destruction, truth and deception, knowledge and invention. This sonic intelligence is not logical, but interpenetrative, cunning and mètic: mètis, the ancient Greek designation for cunning intelligence, a word which in Greek antiquity was sometimes used

5 as a synonym of technè (or techniques) and which was said to operate in shifting, disconcerting, and ambiguous situations where precise calculation and rigorous logic either fail or lack time to operate. Mètis, or cunning intelligence, a kind of “absolute weapon,” said to involve the “interlacing of opposite directions [...] and imprints” producing “an enigma in the true sense of the word” that constitute[s] “living bond[s]”/double-binds which “bind” and “secure” but themselves elude capture (Detienne and Vernant 41, 42); the technical intelligence that is itself “net-like” and that necessitates a knowing how to manipulate the matrix of interlaced oppositions; that which proceeds by way of opaque and oblique rather than transparent and linear pathways, by deception, illusion and contagion rather than by way of logic, law and legitimacy. For Nietzsche, human beings are, at their best, such creatures of cunning intelligence, albeit ones doomed to extinction: “In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’ — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die” (On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense). Humans are creatures of a fleeting cosmic moment; they are insignificant, “the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent” of beings. For Nietzsche, as for Eshun, the trick is not to deny but affirm this alien and alienating condition, and this is the problem, for Eshun, with mainstream American media — “in its drive to banish alienation, and to recover a sense of the whole human being through belief systems that talk to the ‘real you’,” it has made itself allergic to the sonic future, made itself into a “giant inertia engine to put the brakes on breaks; a moronizer placing all thought on permanent pause, a futureshock absorber for ever shielding its readers from the future's cuts, tracks, scratches” (KE 00 [-006]). For PKD as for KE, as well as for Nietzsche, power is both enabling and disabling, and so rather than merely resistance to power, it’s a matter of dissolving or destratifying old hierarchies with the invention of new mutations, and monstrosities which often involve the establishment of new hierarchies that will require toppling. The game, in other words, is theatre of war fraught with danger, a predatory ecological network that must be navigated sonically and metically, “a system adapted and encrypted by successive religious regimes for warfare: the Roman, the Christian, the Medieval , the Gothic” (03 [032]); and here I think PKD would emphatically add “the Capitalistic”. “Words, letters, signs, symbols are all weapons, stolen , ornamented and wrongly titled to hide and manipulate their meaning. The prize? Control of the means of perception” (03 [032]). The ongoing war is perceptual and “symbols are commands that encode power: as says Eshun, “the letter is a signal system designed for armoured combat in the signwars” (52-3). Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, the ghosthuman reminds us. Symbols are

6 mathemagical, “imbued with lethal capabilities”. And in the sonic metics of mathemagics, the recombination of signs and symbols, words and numbers, are encrypted instructions for unknown authoring agents (KE 53). Indeed cunning as opposed to logical intelligence is associated with the power of mutation, and makes use of many temporalities, weaving ways in-and-out of various timeframes, eventually subverting and destroying any stable framework, framed world, or categorical identity through the cunning and magical manipulation of the very logic and grammar of that order, using and abusing identity by way of so{ᵘ}rcery and {ˢ}witchcraft. So, in conclusion then, I see hyperstition not just hype and superstition as it is usually described, but as the kind of mathemagical operation that is best approached as a conjuration, the heretical engineering of unlikely assemblages that unleash an uncontrollable power which often if not always has deleterious effects. “Hyperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality,” explains the Nick Land. “The hyperstitional object is no mere figment or ‘social construction’ but it is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it” (ibid). Hyperstitions are conjurations in this sense — they are sorcerous operations that involve the rapprochement of elements that do not normally go or have not normally belonged together but which have the effects of transmuting perceived reality and norms of culture. This is why hyperstition involves the Unheimlich, the uncanny, the unhomely, things which are not normally at home with one another. Hyperstition, as such, is not belief — religious or otherwise — insofar as the religious aims for holy union, communion, harmonious bringing together of any sort; hyperstition is always unhomely and unholy; therein lies its power. This is why hyperstition’s power is felt as insuperable, even weaponized; it is the power produced and released by the metissage of elements previously oblivious to one another. Hyperstition is intimately connected to technè, skill/art/craft, and mètis, cunning intelligence, ruse, deception, involving a mixing of elements and appearances — what Dan Mellamphy has called a ‘métissage’ for the purposes of producing unhomely effects. Hyperstitions are “chinese puzzle boxes, opening to unfold to reveal numerous ‘sorcerous’ interventions in the world of history,” and which can only be unleashed through obscure and oblique, rather than transparent and straightforward, manipulations. LIST OF REFERENCES Georges Bataille, ‘The Pineal Eye’, in Visions of Excess (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985). Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology the Age of Nihilism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

7 Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (New York: Manor Books, 1975). Philip K. Dick, ‘How to Build a Universe’, http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/09/06/ how-to-build-a-universe-philip-k-dick Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (London: Quartet Books, 1998). Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor (California: Stanford University Press, 1994). Nick Land, http://merliquify.com/blog/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction Nicola Masciandaro, (‘Mystical Auscultation’, http://thewhim.blogspot.com/2014/11/mysticalauscultation.html). Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (New York: Penguin, 1998). Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in a Extra-Moral Sense, http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/ phl201/modules/Philosophers/Nietzsche/Truth_and_Lie_in_an_Extra-Moral_Sense.htm