Okay, so we're kind of, in a way, retreading Mea-Sue's argument, but it's an argument that he's putting in a slightly different way with the case of Hume. Mea-Sue suggests that Hume squanders his important insight. Hume thinks that reason fails in the face of this problem because it can't give us any reason why the laws should remain as they are but Meir-Sue says it's no failure, this is a positive insight it's a piece of positive rational knowledge we should accept the verdict of reason even if it's counterintuitive reason tells us not only is each event that happens
according to the laws of nature contingent it could have been otherwise but the laws of nature themselves are also contingent and try to stop not to repeat myself here so the next question that comes in is that if anything could change at any moment then why doesn't it? why is our experience so stable? surely if the pure hyper chaos was the ultimate level of reality, then we'd know about it. And we talked a little before about this, but Meosu's answer to this uses the theory of transfinite sets
developed by the mathematician Cantor. And very briefly, Cantor demonstrated mathematically that once you have an infinity, it propagates itself. You can extract another larger infinity from it. This is a totally counterintuitive idea, but this is a mathematical proof. There's a certain way of extracting from one infinity a larger infinity. And so Cantor therefore shows that the all is unthinkable. You can never think the all. And Maesu uses this to argue that we can't judge this theory on the basis of probability. We can't use probability to say, if the laws of nature could change at any time, then chances are we would know it by now. like the idea that in all probability
we would have experienced these moments of feverish mad, irrational alteration or change and this is the basis of the notion that in hyperchaos hyperchaos is compatible with any state of affairs it's compatible with a lawful state of affairs and it's compatible with a lawless state of affairs and it's compatible with nothing happening because since there can be no all of the universe, you can't totalize the universe. Therefore, you can't operate a probabilistic calculation on it. We can't think or number the totality of possibility, so we can't talk about the probability of one or another thing happening.
So for this reason, it's entirely consistent to say that underlying nature is this pure hyperchaos, and that in fact our experience is stable. So the end point of Meosu's argument, of course, is this powerful rational intuition, and let's re-stress this, this rational intellectual intuition, the use of reason to directly apprehend something about reality. It's this strong intuition that there's absolutely no reason for things to be as they are rather than otherwise. But we're not, again, talking about chaos. We're not talking about a constant change and transformation. Hyperchaos is a state that's equally consistent with absolute stasis. In other words, there are many metaphysics, there are many sets of laws that might determine how things change through time.
All of these are possibilities of hyperchaos. They are all what Quentin calls quotations of hyperchaos. Any metaphysical system is a quotation of hyperchaos. It could happen. so as Quentin says very interestingly this rational insight destroys the supposed polarity between reason and imagination because hyperchaos describes the scope of an imagination that's synonymous with reason reason is the same thing as imagination because the founding act of reason is to affirm the contingency of everything everything that is has no reason to be as it is rather than otherwise so we can imagine our imagining of any number of ways in which things can be is actually the same thing as reason, it's consistent with reason
so there's several links that I saw as soon as I began talking with Florian about Meosu's work one of them is this kind of dead end almost that happened in in experimental avant-garde music in the turn to randomness. And the idea that even randomness is governed by a set of laws. If something's random, you still have to give it a framework. And this is very much what John Cage acknowledges. He says, I'm still writing the work.
I'm just writing the conditions under which it will happen. rather than writing the notes. And so perhaps hyperchaos could be a way to think about making work that didn't escape the strictures of musical convention by going to randomness, but went to some other place instead. and the other link as I said was that I'd begin to see Florian's work as probing beneath the metaphysics of sound objects and so he was very interested in these moments of abrupt change the disintegration of the laws of sonic nature if you like
so these moments when objects that are very clearly perceived suddenly break down into a multiplicity or reconfigure suddenly. And we can think of any kind of music and sound itself as being based on the metaphysics. That is, it's always based on some account of what a sonic thing is and what changes it can undergo over time. So in Hecker's work, there's already this intuition of a time in which not only do things not stay the same, begin and end according to the same compositional rules, but a time in which the compositional rules themselves the rules for the formation of sonic objects can also change abruptly so in effect I think the work was already indicating this level
beneath the metaphysical construction of sound objects toward a pure time in which these objects can shatter and diverge and fall apart in ways which are impossible in the sense of the natural sound objects which we expect to be put at our disposal as a human being. So he began to think about a piece that would be able to address this notion of hyper-chaos. And once again, just the stress that it's not a matter of creating a kind of chaotic mess where things are always changing, because that would be a misunderstanding of the concept. It goes beyond this, any kind of random stochastic, aleatory approach, or using chance to generate sound.
And we all know that this has already been done. Chance has a certain effect. So chance, the feeling of random disorder, has a style. It's only one possible quotation of what might happen under hyperchaos. Hyperchaos can't really be a style. It can't be something recognisable. And ultimately, what's really the interesting thing about this piece is that it makes a portrait of hyperchaos impossible. I mean, it's just not possible to do it. Unless you had an infinitely, infinitely long CD to put it on, you just can't do it. So you're restricted to making quotations. That's all you can do. You can make quotations of hyperchaos. And it really poses this question strongly, I think,
of the dramatization of ideas in an artwork. because hyperchaos can't be this recognizable genre or style. So we decided that since it would be impossible to represent hyperchaos, the way it would have to work was by presenting an analogy, a phenomenal analogon, something presented phenomenally which is analogous, a portrait of hyperchaos that inevitably fails. so it would only then present a kind of clue to the concept of hyperchaos in that case then the piece had to acknowledge this necessary failure of the enterprise and then we started thinking about the idea of including these other elements
so we thought of including texts, cards that would have little quotations on that you'd kind of look at when you were listening to it. Physical things like dice, billiard balls. Each of these elements would kind of point to the other in order to stimulate this thought of hyperchaos. So it would be a kind of meditation. And we started thinking of it as being like a Duchampian boite, of having this big box in which you'd have all these objects, which would be, if you like, kind of technological tools for thinking. Another good friend of mine, John Sellers,
has written this fantastic book in which he discusses the Stoics philosophers. And he talks about the Stoics, as indeed they talked about themselves, as conceiving philosophy as technical, and techni meaning an art or craft. but this philosophy being an art or craft a technique concerned with one's life so central to this conception which philosophers like Marcus Aurelius had was the role played by a kind of training or an exercise what they call an ascesis a practice, a training or an exercise so this notion of spiritual exercises which you find in the Stoics has really been lost to a large extent now
because the Stoic conception of philosophical thought is something that is not only to be understood but has to be brought into life. It's generally something that's not upheld in philosophy now. It's not something that people are interested in. And Sellers in his book talks about the philosopher Galen splitting up this practice or exercise into two parts. The first part is habituation. and the second part is digestion. So habituation is a kind of repetition of a thought. For instance, in Epicurus, accustom yourself to the belief that death is nothing to us. And you repeatedly think, it's obviously kind of related to prayer as well.
It's a repetition through which something kind of imbues you with this thought. And Marcus Aurelius says, contemplate continuously all things coming to pass by change and accustom yourself to think that universal nature loves nothing so much as to change what is and to create new things in their likeness. And Aurelius then speaks of accustoming yourself through repeated thinking of these themes and recitation. And he says, As are your repeated imaginations, so will your mind be, for the soul is dyed by its imagination. Dye it then in a succession of imaginations like these. So then we began to conceive of how this whole package,
this collection of objects could become a spiritual exercise or a transformation of the disposition of the soul that would reorient thought towards this one point of hyper-chaos. because that's the singular thing really about Meosu is that what's difficult in it is not the argument because the argument is very elegant and it's very clearly stated but what's difficult is actually turning around your mind to this completely new idea of hyper-chaos which is very easy to wrongly identify as I've said with randomness or with other kind of less radical thoughts.
So then the sound then would become a part of this technical apparatus to aid the digestion of the concept. It can't demonstrate the concept. It can't materialize the concept because that's impossible. But it becomes this apparatus for circulating the concept. It becomes a kind of prescription. It becomes a scripture and a prescription at the same time. And we obviously found in a kind of Duchampian vein that there was an interesting pun here because speculative solution, Mayasu's speculative solution to Hume's problem can also be thought of as a speculative solution
like a solution of medicine so we started thinking about it could be presented in this kind of medicine box with instructions for use and so on but the story is that I think we had to scale down our ambitions because this box was getting more and more deluxe So in the end, we have this box which has the CD. It's incredibly brightly colored. It has a CD and it has this booklet with three texts, one by myself, one by Meosu and one by Eli Ayash, who I believe was here before me. And then it has these, they're very intriguing before you open it
because it makes this rattling sound. It just has these five tiny metal balls in, which you can imagine are Hume's billiard ball table. And so I guess the best thing to do is to play some of the piece, if the audio is working here. That's also hyper chaos.
Thank you. I think I've injured your ears enough now. So hopefully you can see, you can hear that there's this attempt there to create the sense of these different physics,
these different laws governing sound, which sometimes merge one into the other, which sometimes stop abruptly. and there's long periods of silence and so on. And, yeah, admittedly, it can only be an analogy. But this is just one idea that we had of how you can overcome that kind of failure of the aesthetic in the face of the ideas to create this circulation between a set of objects. But can any sound be closer to hypertails than any other? No, exactly. Nothing. like if you just put Bach's fugues on the CD then it would be as good a representation of hyperchaos as anything that's the problem that we faced
precisely in the text that Klaza wrote in the minimum community he says like so every material has a every material is absolutely contingent and it's more about the relation or like the strict or closed relation of the artist to his material, to what he works with, to the materials that he can find out maybe the hypercaus or the hypercaus properties in the material. So what was the relation of the artist to the contingent popularity of the material?
It's a question about how you work with sound. Yeah, but firstly, the question of contingency as discussed in the medium of contingency in that case isn't necessarily the concept of absolute contingency. So the question of the artist being able to welcome the contingency of their materials is not the same concept as absolute contingency. No, because whatever material you work with as an artist, it has its certain contingencies and in terms of its material structure, the networks of commerce,
of cultural value, so on, in which it's implicated. These are all contingencies of the material, but it's not the same thing as the notion of absolute contingency. But secondly, I say I do think that for the reasons I've described, that Florian's work does have a very acute relationship to the contingencies of sound, because sound is not just sound. Sound is not waves in the air. Sound is the object that we make of it. And psychoacoustics is precisely the science of understanding the contingencies of how sound is produced. It's precisely the science of understanding the contingent evolutionary
happenstance that's led to us constructing sound in a certain way. Isn't this very cruel? Cruel. Correlation, yes. Like when you say that sound is not waving, but it's what the object is. Yeah, yeah. It's examining, but it's examining the nature of the correlation I think it's pointed at the I mean as, yeah, how could you not be in terms of practice how could you not be a correlationist because if you're communicating anything to anyone then in a certain sense you're implicated within it
but I think it's kind of testing the boundaries of the conditioning and it's exploring the relation between if you like, very much so the primary qualities and secondary qualities so I mean all of Hecker's work you could exhibit it all on a hard disk I mean it's all digital it exists in a digital format but when it's performed or when it's installed it produces these secondary qualities, it produces the sound that we hear so in a sense it's kind of straddling that the conditioning the barrier between the correlated
experience of sound and what science tells us sound is I think it explores the relation between those two things drawing a bit on I don't know if you know this This course was originally called, I think, by Moten, speculative realism and aesthetics without return. Is that correct? So I've been busy thinking about the problem also with reading Reza and Melasur facing this course. because the short route he takes to this possibility of thinking
the absolute is also denunciating exactly what you just demonstrated with the sound piece because as you said yourself or maybe you didn't you could have played a tenth of a second of it and it could have been as much Yeah, of course.
And what happened to Kant when he publishes 81, the first critique, he says, aesthetics is just a German freak that some sort of punk named Baumgarten said once when he was 21. It's never going to fly. And then he comes back 10 years later in the third critique, I was wrong. Aesthetic seems to have a place also in the scope of rational thinking. And probably it was a German freak because they had to systematize it. They had to rationalize aesthetics. Whilst the empiricist tradition with Hume did not. Because they didn't feel aesthetic had to have a place in occidental thought tradition as an installed colossus somehow.
I don't know if this is true. This is just thoughts I've been having. And then I'm thinking also in respect of the concept of hyperstition that Reza sort of pulls out of the hyperchaos as a, I don't know, way of production, a mode of production that operates vis-a-vis the concept of hyperchaos that is also creational. So I don't know if you would like to say something about the discrepancy or the problem of duration and time seeming to be inscribed in the possibility of creating things that are aesthetically perceivable for us.
because if you stay faithful to the sort of anti-vitalism of speculative realism, the desire to think a world without us, aesthetics must go as well. We can't think aesthetics within the concept of speculative realism. That's why I think the title of this course is very obscure, but nonetheless interesting, because there can be no aesthetics if we think speculative realism as an option. right yeah and still there is the idea of hyperstition where what we produce informs a virtual becoming that is not a becoming but a hyper chaotic absolute
and so that's one comment and then super super brief one like I'm thinking about Descartes God standing in for him to assure him that I exist, I can think it clearly and distinctly. Therefore it must be true that I exist. So is the name of Melasus God hyperchaos? because Kant ironically says that he has to castrate or narrow down the realm of our knowledge
he says it he's pretty proud of himself having cleaned the apartment as it were he said I have narrowed down our possibility to know to leave room for faith so God is dead because we invented him but it can have it more morally just implications to believe in him. I do it myself, says Kant. But that is just, we can continue solemnly to believe in God because we know that he's dead. This is a weird argument. So do you think, because I've been following a lecture series on speculative realism by John Caputo as well, which is a theologian, I do the same theologian picture,
but it was not really, it was a slip. Do you think that Melasu to some extent make room for God? Is this a new religious? Is religion back into philosophy? Or has philosophy and religion merged again with speculative realism? Right. Well, there's certainly an explicit sense in which, yes, Melasu does bring God back because he's written this paper on the virtual God the god that's not present but that isn't dead that may come, the god that may come and he wants to use that to develop
an ethics that's as radically different from preceding ethics as the system based on hyperchaos is different from metaphysics or transcendental critique so explicitly yes he does want to do that we don't yet know how he's going to do that or I think in Graham Harmon's book on Mayasu he has some extract from the forthcoming book but we don't really have so much to go on there very very this is his first critique I see what you mean And so now everybody waits for the second thing in the Kantian sense.
Like, you know, you have the practical reason, and you have the pure reason, is it? And then practical reason, and then... Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about... Sorry, going back to one of your earlier questions or comments was about camp's aesthetics, is that aesthetics in Kant is precisely where he gets into problems because he discovers something that hasn't already been correlated. He discovers that culture develops through the eruption into it of something that wasn't yet correlated, that hasn't already been bound by these forms of intuition.
That's genius. So in fact, the correlationism actually breaks down in aesthetics, which is really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. On the question of whether we kind of go, whether it, were you asking if it's a kind of betrayal of speculative realism to develop an aesthetics. I think... I mean, Melasue can't go back to correlationist philosophy on Saturdays afternoons
because of old time's sake. Yeah. So there is no regulative idea. I mean, Kant would put it, these ideas of the... What is it called? He would formulate a regulative idea that we can't know if it's true, but it's something to hold on to somehow. But when you speak about Melasso, I get the feeling that he's all-inclusive hyperchaos. I mean, I won't go back Saturday to... You see my point?
No, absolutely. I mean, that's because he's essentially a rationalist. He doesn't want to... He doesn't want to introduce... Instrumentally introduce features that don't follow rationally from what he's doing. He doesn't want to leave room for... He doesn't want to leave room for faith, I don't think, in that sense. But could you answer the question that you understood from the aesthetics? Right. Yeah, well, I think... For example, for me, this is like an extreme form of phenomenological kind of music. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally.
But I think it's important to say that, you know, know, to think speculative realism isn't necessarily to, it's not necessarily kind of a discipline in order to be able to like escape the conditions of your experience and like go off into some realm of primary qualities. We know that's not going to happen. I mean, what I find very interesting is, you know, what happens when we absorb these, this is why I was talking about this kind of dramatization, what I'm really interested in is what happens if we kind of absorb these ideas. It's not that we're going to be suddenly disabused of all
the conditions of our knowledge, but something, perhaps something new is going to happen and I think that's what the artists who are engaging with speculative realism are interested in is kind of blocking the endless return of aesthetics back to returning to the same themes and using speculative realist thought in some sense as this kind of blockage and rerouting of aesthetics and just to see what happens. And I'm not saying this is a successful example or the best example, but it's one example of what happens when you try to do that, I think. And so I think there's no shame in thinking,
well, speculative realist thought might produce something new in human culture. To me, that's an interesting possibility. And the interview with Maya Sue, where Hecker and I both talk with Mea Su about the project. He's talking very interestingly about, it's actually the essay that's in the book with the CD, his essay about science fiction and about how science fiction is a possible way in which you can present this analogon of hyper-chaos. So he's interested as well in ways in which one can kind of bring to life this idea. So I don't think we should kind of feel bad about it or anything.
No, it's just whether aesthetics, what can do aesthetics in order to help us to not kind of reproduce a metaphysical correlationism, but maybe help us for more. But surely, do you not agree that in Hecker's work, in an ideal situation, you're experiencing this kind of liminal realm between your normal construction of sound objects and an awareness that that is a construction, that it can be manipulated? So in a sense, you're not getting outside the correlation, but you are becoming aware of the constructive nature.
It's very problematic because there are other aspects of this role as a performer within the whole concert situation. Sure, yeah. And my role as a... So it's like, in fact, it's probably the opposite. It's trying to evade all these really complex questions. and put others that kind of try to cut through this extremely direct sensationally affective qualities but then that has been done since a long long time so i find it problematic
I think that the centerfold of correlational aesthetics even would be sort of deconstruction. So in choreography William Forsyth would be a correlationist that acknowledges that it is and reinforces it by fragmentation and randomization and acknowledging composition, etc. etc. So from my position I'm interested in speculative realism in
relationship to artistic activity in the sense that it seems to give me an opportunity to without improvement, without fixing something, or rather like it gives me, it seems to me that it opens for a possibility of a non-aesthetic production of art. So that it's not when I listen to the piece necessarily that this... So to me it seems that... I'm slightly blurry currently. But so Deleuze would say something in the direction of the responsibility of the philosopher is the production of the possibility of thinking differently. And if we turn this into the artist, the job of the artist is the production of the possibility of new kinds of experience.
So the question is, when is this new experience new? When I come with an... I can of course not present a radically new experience in the Kai Theater, or in the Royal Dramatic, or in a concert hall, especially not in front of 300 people. If I could do this, that would mean that they have an absolute relation, sort of an unconditional relationship to what is going on. So they are all contextualized and they are all correlated differently. But what Speculative Realism seems to me to do is that it offers me a text that opens for that, that there can be an experience that has no name.
and that this production can be in the studio or in a conversation with somebody and the experience of the emergence of hyperchaos is not necessarily or most oftenly not at all a radical or how do you say it's not an experience that shakes you life or you know it's not surprise it's not exactly it not at all but it is this possibility of a radically different one but of course when you when when we can also have it we must also be able to have it after it has happened or not
right? yes, yes, sure we will of course always enter into correlationism not and not, but or not yes but we will of course also always enter correlationism at some point otherwise if we don't we can of course not if we enter hyperchaos you and I hand in hand then we will never be able to find each other again but it wasn't hyperchaos everywhere all the time and represented by anything as well as something else then you are already hand in hand in hyper chaos now and finding and not finding or not finding each other also we have we build up correlations that that gives us the illusion or gives us the opportunity
to rely on some or other thing. But these are, in respect of Melasue's work, these are only, these are contingent. It can be like this, it could be something else, and it could be not at all. And it can change at every time. It just seems to me that you are trying to translate the hyper-chaus notion into some kind of Deleuzean reel or something like that, which I don't think is the case. I think that definitely that Deleuze virtual and hyper-canic have strong have strong connections maybe or
yeah but I mean Deleuze virtual has also strong relationships with Lacan's real and I don't think that made Lacan and Deleuze friends no, point taken but then Deleuze virtual is all about bashing Kant, Kant's transcendental and metaphysics, but not getting out of correlation, it's more out of language. And Meir-Sue seems to me to be one that dares to take a step further. That says that something exists outside of language. Right. but where Deleuze is bashed by Melassoux
why I find speculative realism to some extent I feel some kind of affinity with it because they have taken on this Deleuze that we've been dragging along for quite some time now is that they don't want to take him on out of I think valid reasons because the kind of desire that is the the Tellurian loop of Deleuzean thinking is strongly rooted in the concept of time and duration à la Bergson that is a drive, that is a force that is like ville sur macht or eternal reoccurrence
Deleuzean virtual involves a conception of time that's absolutely irreconcilable with what Meirassu is proposing, I think. Yeah. And that's so cool also, because he sort of fails humanity on the basis that we are finite, right? So that's why different kinds of organic and inorganic substances and entities have some kind of primacy over us. And I find that cool, and I find that even, maybe Meirassu would hate me for this, but I find that also an opening of trying to venture into that virtually possible aesthetics of speculative realism. Of course, Meissu doesn't fail us for being finite, because ultimately, he believes that we