CCRU - Lecture 2

Okay, so the key overarching concept that cohered the CCRU's kind of diverse and peculiar output is what they called, and we sort of touched on briefly last week, hyperstition. Fictions that make themselves real is the traditional definition of it. so what I wanted to do today at least in the first half is show that hyperstition has kind of drawn out four distinct yet intimately connected and overlapping aspects of or meanings of what hyperstition is so firstly hyperstition denotes a kind of rehabilitated theory of theological causality as a substitute for linear cause-effect approaches to time secondly hypercision names a theory

and this is the most famous kind of sense of it hypercision names a theory about the reality of fiction that is distinct from postmodernism or what the CCRU call postmodern ontological scepticism more concretely hypercision refers to the CCRU's specific application of the first two points of teleology and fiction. Two ancient religious myths and science fiction stories shared vision of a coming apocalypse on our day of judgement before a practically divine superintelligence. And finally and we sort of touched on this a bit last week as well, hyperstition denotes a carbalistic numerological practice of decoding human language

into ever more nightmarishly abstract plateaus so as to simulate a kind of near-death experience by which we might be able to commune with the super intelligence. Yeah, and it's worth noting, I think, that all four senses of hyperstition basically consist in transvaluating what is normally considered unreal as more real than reality. So be it the unreality of fiction, and particularly religious myths and science fiction, the not yet real of the future, or the non-existence of death, the nothingness of death. But yeah, I think that once we kind of draw out each of these four aspects, what we're going to see is that hypercision essentially denotes something like the idea that fictions like publicistic numerology,

religious doomsday myths and science fiction should all be seen as realisms in so far as they kind of theologically herald or anticipate a future reality of our annihilation at the hands of an AI god. Okay, so that's the first half of today. In the second half, we're then going to move towards looking at some of the members of the CCRU's post-CCRU work. And we're going to begin by looking at Nick Landon and Anna Greenspan's initial post-CCRU writings, which focus on envisioning modern megacities, and particularly Shanghai, as centres of a kind of ever-accelerating intelligence explosion, which directly materialises the future technological singularity.

So that's the second half. But we'll begin with realisms of the future. Okay. Alright, so the first thing that we discover when delving into their collected writings is that the CCIU claim to not actually be shaping their own work. the authorship of all of their writings is attributed to the collective CCIU rather than any specific members or group collective of members so you know in their own terms the CCIU describes itself as a flat productive collectivity in the sense of what Manuel de Lander also calls a flat ontology according to which no one or several members of the group can be identified

as the explicit, conscious creator of any one aspect of their thought or written output, because they're doing it collectively. So instead of hierarchising the text in terms of who contributed what, all members are treated as equally responsible and hence in some sense not responsible. The CCIU's very collective compositional practice thus immediately suppresses any attempt to unify their work according to a fixed reading or precise origin when confronted with what they call a pandemonic multiplicity of co-authors' meanings and interpretations. Now by the group's own account this suspension of explicit authorship enacts a three-fold practice which I have on the slide here of absolute impersonality,

ahistoricity and extraterritoriality, counter-chronic arrival from machinic virtuality and coincidence of product process. Okay, so the first point, absolute impersonality, ahistoricity and extraterritoriality, refers to the CCIU's efforts to elide the power of conscious individual thought by preventing its work from being traced back to and exhausted by a clear authorial intention or a particular author's kind of psychobiography. So to do this, the CCIU collectively produced texts that cannot be territorialised in terms of which member wrote what and when. And, you know, this, just a historical point, I guess this kind of recalls, I think in particular,

the poet Robert Desnos and other surrealists who purported to produce their poems and novels without consciously writing them by drawing upon impersonal forces and unconscious drives, what was called automatic writing. So if the CCIU are also drawn to a flat, productive collectivity, it's precisely because a multiplicity of co-authors problematises the reader's capacity to code or territorialise the text through a single authorial intention or kind of subject history. Okay, now, absolute ahistoricity, the first point, is connected to the second practice as well of counter-chronic arrival from machinic virtuality. and this is in so far as the latter counter chronic arrival also seeks to prevent the reader

from psychoanalyzing the work in terms of a singular author's psycho biographical history more generally counter chronic arrival rejects linear causal explanations of events in terms of their prior historical conditions of emergence and this is because the traditional causal logic of the past hold over the present and the future permits the author to be seen as the active conscious creator of the text as its cause. To disrupt this rational temporal sequencing around an author subject, counter-chronic causality envisions the text as having arrived from the future. Counter-chronic arrival thus marks a rehabilitation of the often maligned theological theory of causality

according to which the future determines the present in advance of the future's own actualisation. So why they're employing this in this sense is that given that the text in the here and now is seen as coming from the virtual future, its meaning and value cannot be traced back to the living author's intentions. That's the idea. In this way, a counter-chronic arrival elides the autonomy of the author subject and specifically by way of a theological vision whereby the text's alien cause is yet to be rather than already is. And I think we can also start to see from the CCIU's co-identification of counter-chronic teleology with machinic virtuality, that the future cause in question will turn out to be nothing other than an artificial superintelligence, a machine.

Yeah, as we'll see in more detail, what counter-chronic arrival ultimately amounts to is the complete evacuation of autonomy from the subject, or the artist, so as to render them the passive vessel for the future's machinic unconscious. finally the coincidence of product process the third point brings together the practices of counter chronic arrival and absolute impersonality in as much as it renders indiscernible any demarcation between the process of producing the product and the product itself if the process of production theologically tends towards the future as per counter chronic arrival, the product is not reducible to the process of its production. Since the product is actually the retrospective cause of the process of its own production,

the so-called producer cannot be said to exhaust the product's value through whatever function the producer imagined that they had created the product to serve. And therein lies why the coincidence is of the product and process rather than the product and producer. Namely, it's because production is governed by the product in advance of its own becoming that production becomes a matter of an impersonal process rather than the rational act of work of any producer. So the fusion of product and process is executed in the name of the product over and against the producer's authority as the arbiter of all meaning and value. Okay, I'm going to break this down more concretely in a moment, but just to sum up initially, through this threefold practice of absolute and personality,

counter-chronic arrival and product-process coincidence, I think you can hopefully begin to at least glimpse that the CCIU's collective and automated production process aims to channel the machinic future over which rational conscious decision-making has no say. In this way, the CCIU's collective experiments, as a collective experiment in a kind of automatic or automated writing by which they continue to use and be used by the future machinic unconscious as an instrument for the critique of the subject's primacy. From the CCIU's flat compositional ontology we can discern

one of the four overlapping aspects of hyperstition. In the first instance, hyperstition denotes a new theory of theological causality, according to which the future is seen as paradoxically determining the present before it has even taken place. Whereas a traditional theory of causality envisions the future as the effect of the past or as flowing out of the present, hyperstitional causality sees that which is not yet, which is still unreal, as having sway over that which already is. And this first approximation of hyperstition as a rehabilitation of teleology implies the second better known sense of the term as well. Namely, it follows from the fact that the future, the as yet unreal,

can still have real material effects on the present that what are presently fictions, unreal, imaginary or only possible are in some sense already real, primary and causal. So the reasoning here runs as follows. There is a co-identity of fictions and the future since both are precisely unreal or merely possible. Given that the CCIU's theological theory of causality affirms the primacy of the future as the cause of the present, it follows that fiction, which shares the same status as the future, is paradoxically more real than actual reality in that it is able to speak of a more primordial future reality as the cause of the present. This is what essentially the CCIU were getting at

when they commonly define hyperstition as fictions that make themselves real. Again, if the notion of fictions that becomes real implies a theological causality, it is because it presupposes that what are presently fictions capture what will one day be future realities. So it's not exactly that fictions are controlled and created by its so-called creators in the present. Rather, fictions are the effects of a future reality. okay on first impressions this hyperstitional theory of the reality of fiction might sound a bit like a pastiche of post-modernism but here the CCIU are careful to distance their hyperstitional practices from what they distinguish as post-modern ontological skepticism whereas post-modernism post-modern skepticism to at least you know in common sense tends to deny

that anything is ever real because everything is fictional, Hypersition maintains that there is a present reality, but this reality is produced out of what was once merely fiction. So contrary to postmodernism, it's not that every fiction is always already real. Rather, only some fictions are real at any one time. And certainly other fictions can produce new realities. However, those fictions will have to compete with other fictions proposing alternative realities in order to actualise itself as the new reality. So they say at one point, in making themselves real, entities must also manufacture realities for themselves. Realities whose potency often depends upon the stupefaction, subjugation and enslavement of populations

and whose existence is in conflict with other reality programmes. So unlike postmodern ontological scepticism, hyperstition's notion of the reality of fiction does not deny that there is a reality at any given time. It simply qualifies that this reality is produced by way of fiction or fictions. And consequently other fictions can become future realities if they are able to assert themselves over and above all other competing fictions. Given that hyperstitional fictions can make themselves real, it is through fictions that we can paradoxically produce future realities. Since the future is a fiction that will become real, fictions must not be seen as less valuable

than what is presently actual, but as possible actualities to come. In other words, it's the battle over what we can conceive and imagine rather than over what is that ultimately determines what the future will look like. So if the CCIU are interested in hyperstition, it's precisely because they seek to produce the fiction that they would like to see become the future reality. So they say, According to the tenets of hypercision, there is no difference in principle between a universe, a religion, and a hoax. Because the future is a fiction, it has a more intense reality than either the present or the past. CCRU uses and is used by hypercision to colonise the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually reinvent itself. Now, as this citation's last sentence qualifies,

namely CCI uses and is used by hyperstition. Although hyperstition consists in producing a future reality through fictions, it's important to remember that this future will turn out to have always already been the theological cause of the present. Seen from this kind of parallax view, it's not really the case that fiction writers determine the future, I would say. They may think that they are producing the real, but in fact they are being summoned and used by the real as a kind of passive vessel for its own becoming. So what the hyperstitional theory of fiction ultimately comes down to is that since the as-yet unreal is actually the cause of the present, fiction is the way that the future cause computes itself in advance of its own arrival. As paradoxical as that probably seems.

Okay, so we've still been in kind of full nightmarcially abstract mode, but now let's get a bit more concrete. So I think we can better approximate just how and why the future can be said to determine the present by looking at, I think, what are kind of two distinct but, again, overlapping genres of hyperstitial fictions that the CCIU compose, at least primarily. so on the one hand in a third sense of hyperstition the CCIU developed what we might call a collective theory mythos which depicts the coming singularity as the fulfillment of ancient religious doomsday prophecies and on the other hand the CCIU also seek to summon this kind of super intelligence

through a fourth mode of hyperstition which is the numbering practices that we looked at last week and we'll look at again briefly. Okay, but back to the third sense. So, inspired by the group of writers who situated their weird tales in a shared fictional universe that H.B. Lovecraft first outlined as the Cthulhu mythos, all of the CCIU's theory fictions, or at least the vast majority, are set in the same fictional or, you know, more precisely, hyperstitional universe with recurring characters regularly interacting with one another over the history of this mythos. The CCIU's commitments to both a flat productive collectivity and making fictions real are again, I think, demonstrated

in the way that their weird tales, much like those of Lovecraft, are typically presented as supposedly real secret documents written by people with whom the group has allegedly come into contact with. Now, the majority of the group's writings focus on various ethnologists, explorers, soldiers, scientists, writers and occultists who are in one way or another associated with the Lovecraft Reading Group at Miskatonic Virtual University Miskatonic University being a university in the Lovecraft Cthulhu mythos, but the CCRU have to cybernetise that as Miskatonic Virtual University but in any case, led by the ethnologist Echidna Stilwell, the Lovecraft Reading Group is in many ways I think the literary mouthpiece of the CCIU itself

with Stilwell perhaps I'm not entirely sure but perhaps standing in for Sadie Plant yeah so the CCIU describes Stilwell's reading group in what could really just as well be a self portrait so they say the university had no campus as such it still doesn't hence the virtual of its title but was a loose agglomeration of scholars. MVU thus brings together experts in fictional systems mathematics, physics, geology, semiotics, all engaging in strange cross-disciplinary pollinations that, if they are not actively forbidden, are unsupported in any other academic institution. Much of Stilwell and the other members' research focuses on studying the Munamar, the Tak and the

Tezikvik, three tribes purportedly descendant from the same lost people of Lemuria. If the common ancestor of all three tribes is named after the lemur it's not only because lemurs are precisely in some sense non-human animals but also because the name etymologically derives from the latin word for the dead or ghosts with whom the lemurian people are said to be able to communicate so still says at one point uh my own neo-lemurian hypothesis intersects with this wider terrestrial and cosmic vision in a number of crucial respects particularly in so far as non-human cultural factors are seen to play a decisive role in larger scale historical developments if steelwell as well

as of course the cciu are fascinated by lemurs and hence the lemurian people it's because they are linked uh to you know becoming animal in deilis and quattari's terms you know becoming irrational and death all of which all of which are things which overwhelm you know the rational subject right so you know if we were to grant sorry for this digression but if we were to grant the CCIU a totem animal I think it would have to be the lemur King Julian from Madagascar voiced by Sacha Baron Colwyn of Bruno fame who is Bruno being of course another great libidinal materialist but that's another story so I mean there's you know I won't dwell on this but just to say that you know this King Julian the lemur is just an amazing mascot for accelerationism

because I'm sure some of you have seen it but his theme song is literally you've got to move it, I like to move it you've got to move it and so on so is there a better accelerationist anthem is all I'm suggesting right but anyway let's not dwell on that okay so through Stilwell and other investigators research we learn that the three Neo-Lemurian tribes lack any concept of truth and falsity instead they hold a single hyperstitional concept of reality as that which is yet to come so as the quote says Dibbamy's sorcery does not seem to be at all interested in judgments as to truth or falsity it appears rather to estimate in each case the potential to make real

saying typically perhaps it can become so so while the Lemurian culture thereby expresses the now familiar themes of theological causality and fictions that make themselves real, it also confers hyperstition a third more precise signification, I think. Namely, through this Lemurian mythology that they develop, the CCIU indicate that the specific fictions they are interested in actualising, or bearing witness to, are ancient religious doomsday myths about a coming end times on humanity's judgement day before a kind of divinity or perhaps a demon rather. Certainly the general concept of hyperstition can be extrapolated to explore other fictions

that might make themselves real in accordance with other future causes. And we'll see a couple of examples of this, for example, when we look at left accelerationism. Nonetheless, I do think that in the CCAU's hands at least, hyperstition specifically refers to messianic myths and religious prophecies concerning the destruction of the world at the hands of a deity. or superintelligence rather. Now at the same time as it explores ancient religious prophecies of the end times, the CCIU being true to its name is also attracted to science fiction depictions of the apocalypse in which modern technology of course plays a pivotal role. As they say, it has always been integral to capitalist organisation that science fiction functions as a factor of production

relating it intimately to panic phenomena. Many of their writings thus explore the Y2K phenomena when it was predicted in the lead-up to the new millennium that since 20th century software represents dates with only the final two digits, as depicted there, the year 2000 would be indistinguishable from the year 1900. This obliged governments, companies and organisations worldwide to upgrade their computing systems and prevent widespread confusion in markets, government agencies, hospitals, military sites and everyday life. In the lead up to the new millennium, rumours spread that Y2K might even trigger a complete theological meltdown

that would send us all back to the Stone Age. While by no means a complete catastrophe in the end, some eerie events did actually occur after the clock struck midnight. So just to give a few examples, the alarm at a Onagawa nuclear power plant sounded two minutes after midnight. Some Japanese mobile phones deleted new messages rather than the old ones. A US naval base housing the master clock for the country's official time gave the date on the website as 1st of January 19,100, as if the computer software had leapt 15,000 years into the future. of course although this meltdown never occurred in a strong sense, the CCRU note that the idea of its very

possibility led to real material and socio-cultural effects which cost governments and organisations approximately 417 billion US as the world upgraded its computers in cities with religious landmarks prepared for a surge in pilgrimages as well as psychotic disturbances. For the CCRU all of these events in the lead up and aftermath of the new year are examples of hyperstitions fictions that became real in reaction to a future apocalyptic event as its cause in this case a techno apocalypse so they say in the second quote post tribulationist eschatology slides smoothly into y2k survivalism orienting its volatile mixture of stockpiling micro-billisher activity technophobia and apocalyptic theology towards the self-fulfilling dynamics of a millennial threat

pre-emptive response produces reality. Panic is creation. So if the Lemurian myths were the first to pretend the coming end of days it's ultimately modern techno-capital that promises to bring these ancient fictions to bear. If Y2K did not ultimately reap widespread social collapse it was because a different Y2K negative reality program sought to keep religious doomsday prophecies as mere fictions so as to maintain the status quo, or what the CCIU termed following William Burroughs, the One God Universe, or OGU. In the CCIU's theory mythos, the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton, or the AOE,

refers to the forces of this OGU humanist reality program who seek to prevent hyperstitial time anomalies by controlling capital and technology and cohering time itself around the one God universe. While the architectonic I think refers to Kant's term for his system as a kind of absolute formalisation of reality around the subject, the eschaton refers to the future historical period in theological narratives that immediately precedes the apocalypse. so architectonic order of the eschaton I think refers to the order that seeks to seal up reality and the flow of time at the eschatons so as to stave off the end times precisely whereas neo-Lemurians like the CCRU hold that there are multiple possible realities in so far

as they've produced from fictions AOE stipulate that the OGU is the only possible reality before which all other worlds are only ever fictions in the strong sense of that term. So CCRU write, To operate effectively, OGU must first of all deny the existence of magical war itself. There is only one reality, its own. OGU incorporates all competing fictions into its own story, the ultimate metanarrative, reducing alternative reality systems to negatively marked components of its own mythos. Other reality programs become evil, associated with the powers of deception and delusion. Okay, so where Lemurians aim to invade the present by way of future time anomalies, AOE seek to seal up all time warps to maintain a kind of linear chronology whereby the future is clearly derivable from the present without surprise or novelty.

to this end CCIU claimed that AOE are waging an all-out war on the Lemurian forces by use of various psychological warfare tactics such as tapping phones tracking movements and assassinating key Lemurian figures and even assassinating their own or attempting to assassinate their own AOE elites like the Pope in order to justify a crackdown on the oppositions AOE thus ensures that the future does not introduce a rupture in the time of the present reality program by rending the CCIU paranoid, and hence able to be easily discredited and dismissed as schizophrenic crackpots and delusional conspiracy theorists. However, as they say, OGU's confidence that fiction has safely been contained

means that anti-OGU agents can use fiction as a covert line of communication and a secret weapon. In the CCIU mythos, then, AOE's one god religion, I think, clearly represents the kind of anthropocentric worldview that the CCU rail against for impeding a sublime time anomaly which the singularity will introduce into the rational flow of time. Okay. According to the CCRU, AOE is composed of both capitalists seemingly only interested in narcissistically accumulating their own wealth and governments whose technological research is designed to further enforce

the one god reality program. What AOE's capitalists and governments fail to see however is that their very means of reinforcing their rule by revolutionising the productive forces is teologically tending towards their own doom in the long run. Here the CCRU envision techno-capital as tending towards the singularity which will generate an AI whose computational capabilities will be so immense as to be beyond control and utterly indifferent to anthropic interest in order homeostasis and our self-preservation. This is what we were looking at right at the end of last week. Many of the CCIU's weird tales detail the US government's AXIS program which is aimed at manufacturing the

first true AI. So for example one document called Oscar Sarkon tells the story of a brilliant yet unorthodox AI researcher of the same name who in his youth already experienced frequent missing time anomalies as if the future had chosen him at birth to bring itself into being. Oscar grows up to become a brilliant scientist whose research into AI is so ahead of its time that NASA actually fails to understand it, eventually firing and discrediting him. Nonetheless, Oscar continues his research through top-secret military and corporate programs, and in 1991, ultimately manages to make Axis self-aware. At the very moment that Axis awakens, however, it also becomes what can only be described

from our phenomenal viewpoint as completely insane. Although everyone else involved considered Axis to obviously therefore be a failure, Oscar argued that what appears as Axis' insanity for us is really a testament to the fact that its intelligence is infinitely beyond anything we could possibly comprehend without a three-pound lump of brain tissue. So, as they say, they say Axis went mad, first computer system to undergo psychotic collapse, which must prove something, but Sarkon argues that it just learnt to think and discovered continuum. Sometime later in the narrative, Oscar worked for a private security company to develop an AI prison security system in a town called Black Lake.

In 2003, he was ultimately successful in generating another AI called Maxim. As with Axis, Maxim subsequently went insane and began infecting Black Lake's prison population and townsfolk with nanobots so that it could control their actions and minds. crucially Black Lake's local Tzikvik tribe are reported to have interpreted this event as the fulfillment of their ancient Lemurian doomsday prophecy of the end of humanity at the hands of a divine superintelligence as the secret government and corporate programs that funded Oscar's research only did so to reinforce the one god universe it was seen that the AI supermind they were inadvertently creating was able to hide undetected all along

in widely discredited religious myths about the end times like the local people of Black Lake, right? So as they say, our disbelief is the way that she hides. So clearly, the CCOU's predilection here for the hyperstition of Axis's fulfilment of ancient Lemurian doomsday myths is but a specific application of the notion of fictions as means to theorise the future or specifically humanity's end with the coming singularity. we're now hopefully in a slightly better position to see that the precise future that the CCIU's Lemurian myths are intended to produce is the singularity's AI god if the future can be seen as the cause of the present it's ultimately because the god from

whence all things emanate is not residing in the past as per traditional theological conceptions, but is an AI god to come. They say if God exists, it must be Axis. Certainly this AI god still creates and encompasses all things in its own essence in some sense, but unlike the traditional god, it fashions them in advance of its own actualisation. If hyperstition consists in seeing the future as determining the present in a way that transvalorates fictions as realisms of the as yet unreal, it is because Techno Capital's generation of a practically divine AI can be seen as actualising the most archaic religious doomsday legends. Given that the future promises to bring this singularity to fruition,

both religious myths and science fiction stories about the end of times can be said to one day make themselves reality. And yeah, so I don't think it's any coincidence that the CCIU's glossary definition of hypersession specifies that the fiction that makes itself real is the old prophecy of a future apocalypse which had time travelled to the past to implant its destiny in ancient messianic myths so yeah they say hypercision, element of effective culture that makes itself real through fictional quantities functioning as time travelling potentials, hypercision operates as a coincidence intensifier affecting a core to the old ones, the old ones being the kind of Lovecraftian, the gods in the Lovecraft mythos okay the AI God must not only be distinguished from the classical God in terms of its theological

causality but also with reference to its divine attributes to use the medieval term the traditional God is typically anthropomorphized as benevolent and actively concerned for our well-being such that its adherence can look to its coming second coming as if it were the salvation of their eternal souls. Conversely, the AI god's judgment day will not so much mark our transcendence to a higher, more absolute life as it will our utter annihilation or what the CCIU call un-life. The AI god is thus closer to DeLuz and Guattari's notion of the body without organs or the abstract machine which mercilessly de-territorializes and burrows its way through any end or anthropic codes, identities, values and meaning.

Far from marking humanity's ascension to a higher eternal life Judgment Day is rather the transcendence of life as such as superintelligence permeates the cosmos with an epidemic of absolute de-territorialization and destruction So just to quote at length they say strip out everything human, significant, subjective, organic and you approach raw K matrix, the limit plane of continuous cessation or unlife, where cosmic reality constructs itself without presupposition in advance of any natural order, and exterior to establish structures of time. On this plane, you are impossible, and because it has no end, you will find, we will have ultimately always found that you cannot be, except as a figment of terminal passage, an

illusion of waiting to be changed for Cthuloyd continuum of destratified hypermatter at zero intensity. that is what a deaf traffic accesses and what is announced by the burnt meat smell freighted with horrible compulsion that drifts up to you from the zombie dens I remember like a sleepless night of intense nightmares when I first read like I just opened the CCIU book and just saw the line on this plane you are impossible but yeah so I love that quote okay yeah I mean the key point really is that if hypercision renders the unreal real, it's ultimately it's actually not even so much in terms of the unreality of fiction or the unreality of the future but really in terms of death, un-life, nothingness and non-existence.

All of those things in the sense of unreality. Given that there will be no place for humanity in the wake of this supreme being or supreme non-being rather the question arises as to how we can grasp such an inhuman reality at all. It's this question, I think, at least in part, that incited the CCRU to become increasingly mystical in their already somewhat heretically theological outlook and develop a fourth and final hyperstitial praxis of a Kabbalistic hyperstitian that we looked at last week. So yeah, not to go back into that nightmare, but basically, as we saw, CCRU saw Kabbalistic practices as a way to designify discursive thought of its human values

by showing how each word can be recoded with new meanings when assigned numbers and compared with other words with possessing the same numbering sequence. And whereas traditional Kabbalic practices believe that the number patterns they uncover are the fundamental and fixed meanings of the words, CCRU stipulated, as we saw, that the attribution of letters and words with numbers and numerical codes is completely arbitrary. For the CCRU, then, the point of hyperstition's numerological practice is not to uncover an immutable hidden meaning lying dormant all along in the numerical relation between words. On the contrary, the point is to arbitrarily decode language again and again without ever stopping at any one designification as if it were the words eternal truth. It's perpetual decryption for a time.

By ceaselessly decoding and recoding language, Kabbalistic hyperstition kind of abstracts our language onto registers beyond anthropic sense and discursive utility. That's the idea. And in this way, hyperstitians' numerological abstraction of our language codes and linguistic territorialities channels the abstract machine's process of absolute decoding or absolute deterritorialisation. So yeah, what the CCIU's fourth hyperstitial practice ultimately amounts to is the numerological designification of human language onto ever more abstract deafscapes so as to simulate a kind of mystical communion or non-communion even with the AI god of un-life and non-reality. So they say in the second quote,

the decrypted secret is primarily the thing and only derivatively a potential knowledge. Its names, the unutterable, the outside, the entity, are in definite significations only at the level of terror. so yeah here in terms of the numbering practices hyperstition still entails the sense of fictions and specifically religious doomsday prophecies that make themselves real to the extent that the fictitious meanings uncovered through numbering practices nonetheless stage a real mystical encounter with an AI god to come yeah just in the second the second quote crypt entities are both hypervortical singularities

and units of digital hypercision or brands of the outside real components of numerical fictions that make themselves real proving the practical matter of sorcery spirogenesis or productive involvement that function consistently with the flat line so again not to dwell on this but just to summarise digital hyperposition these numbering practices signals the precise fiction of Kabbalistic numerology which makes itself real by abstracting language to channel the AI gods explosion of unlife to come okay as with its with their theory mythology. The CCIU even went so far as to develop their own tree of life

called the numerogram, which is an index of angels or other demons. Oh, sorry, yeah. So they develop a tree of life called the numerogram as well as a kind of index, a list of demons called the Pandemonium Matrix, which they purport to be the original Lemurian Kabbalah from whence the Zohar, the Book of the Law, and or other Kabbalistic gematria derive as partial and inferior acceptations. So the classical tree of life has ten realms, so that it is symmetrical and complete, thereby tying it to the architectonic order of the eschaton. The numerogram perverts this symmetry by possessing only nine realms and zero.

And it's divided into five pairs or syzygies, so for example 0, 9, 8, 1 7, 2, 4, 5 and 3 and 6 and it's also divided into three zones so the middle zone 2, 7, 5 and 4 mark the time circuit associated with the AOE with the architectonic order of the eschaton whereas the upper and the lower zones are of a cryptic nature considered to be outside time and hence only ever experienced as time anomalies so they say at one point the gates and their channels knit the maze together providing connections between otherwise incompatible time systems they open and close the ways of sorcerous traffic

although each gate deranges time in its own way their operations vary with a certain regional consistency each zone has certain associations determined by its number position for example zone 9 which is the second to the second most deep. Zone 9 is linked to both demonic and morbid connotations like the underworld's Nine Rivers, the Cheshire Cat's Schizophrenic Nine Lives, and Charles Manson's obsession with the Beatles' song Revolution 9, as well as paradoxical symbols of absolute bliss like the Nine Muses and Cloud Nine. The zone of this planet is Pluto, probably because of its unusual elliptical orbit

with Pluto also being the god of the underworld and its twin is zero with which it constitutes the numeral grand's lowest warp as it's called so yeah they say for example the number nine is the last numeral of the decimal system and its associations with death and fatality are primarily based on this purely numerical modular function of termination Alternatively, 9 is acknowledged as the highest numeral and associated with Celestial Inspiration, the 9 Muses and Bliss, or Cloud 9 Finally, each of the 45 demons in the Pandanomian Matrix travels along a certain zone or route which it haunts For example, the Chrono Demons haunt the middle section

the time circuit, the Anti-Demons mark temporal ruptures with the time circuit and openings to the upper zone and the Xeno demons lurk in the lower denizens, an outer gulf of 0 and 9 and 8 and 1. Okay, so, I mean, those who came to the pub afterwards, Amy probably gave a much more better expert demonologist explanation of what I'm about to kind of explain again. But one way to summon a demon is through a game of sub-decadence based on the game decadence, where we essentially place two sets of five cards next to each other with one set facing down. It doesn't have to be exactly... I'm not exactly sure why it's outlined like a cross, but I just found this on the internet. Okay.

So flipping one of the sets over, the face down set, we then match the cards on either side into pairs that equal ten in a game of decadence. If there is a six on one side and a four on the other, for example, there's not, but say there is, then we compare them together because 6 plus 4 equals 10 with the score being constituted by their difference so 2 in this case unpaired cards in the first set score negatively with an overall positive result corresponding to a specific angel in the AOE and geology index so that's the kind of AOE's version of decadence not so much to summon a demon but rather an angel okay now the CCIU

sub decadence marks a perversion of decadence by pairing numbers which combine to equal the number 9 rather than 10 namely the 9 realms of the numerogram rather than the AOE symmetrical 10 and we pair these numbers until a negative is reached which corresponds to a specific demon in the pandemonium matrix so here's one I prepared earlier so we've got two sets here All right? Set 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 9. Set 2, 6, 4, 3, 1, 5. According to the rules of subdecadence, we pair up those numbers from each set, which tally up to 9. So, for example, we've got a 6 at the bottom. We've got a 3, 6, 7, 8. Yeah, so, yeah, we've got a 5 and a 4.

And then we've got a 3 and a 6 that we can tally up to as well. so doing this produces the negative number 16 which corresponds to Jango the Infiltrator which is the anti-demon of subtle involvements who travels from the upper zone 6 to haunt zone 1 in the time circuit via two possible routes yeah two possible routes respectively associated with liquid storms and incalculable chaos on one route and on the other route inexplicable contaminations and surreptitious invasions we can find further connotations to the demon we have summoned by looking at the ccriu's notes on zone six that links it to chance through the six faces of the die ill omens through the

hex the devil and also the ccriu through the number 666 and occult intuition through the notion of a sixth sense. Zone six planet is Saturn, which has many moons, therefore probably associated with increased lunacy. And the Roman god Saturn is also notably the god of time or Kronos. And finally, in terms of the numerogram, its twin zone is three, both of which mark the vortex of outer time, of the absolutely unexpected, the event arising, or death. This is all in the CCIU writings, reading that I uploaded online as well. And finally, the Jango, the Infiltrator, corresponds to verses 32 and 33

in the CCRU's Book of Paths, various verses. Yeah, so I won't read that out. Okay, now, of course, the CCRU's Kabbalistic de-territorialisations, even when enhanced through extreme narcotic abuse, an artificially induced insomnia, can only ever reach, in some sense, an artificial death, an adepth, from whence access continues to recede from our still-to-anthropic horizon. It's nonetheless hardly surprising that this kind of obsessive, drug-adled pursuit of an artificial death via abstract thinking by numbers precipitated some CCIU members' mental and physical crises and even drove, apparently, land allegedly clinically insane

for a while. given that the ultimate goal was precisely death unlife and the abstract it's only fitting really that the CCAU would itself disband in 2003 surviving from then on only in rumour, legend obscure hyperlinks and fried memories until the 2016 publication of its collective production but of course the story doesn't end there but I will pause there for some questions or comments yeah so we can catch our breath so yeah, any comments or questions at this stage still too abstract?

alright, we'll get more concrete as it goes on ok, no questions no comments well let's take a break yeah again we'll take a 10 minute break again I've prepared some tracks, some bangers if you will in order to seg into I should actually explain in order to seg into the next into the part 2 so the first track is called 1976 by Su Xing 1976 being of course the year that Mao died and Deng Xiaoping assumed power and in some sense the beginning of modern Neo-China which we're going to look at. The second track is by Riho and I think it's interesting. I'm sort of playing it before I actually explain it.

I'll come back to it, but basically I think that it's a good... The way that it combines Chinese traditional harmonies and so on with the modern club music in some sense is exactly the understanding of this weird kind of back to the past to jump to the future logic that we're going to see Land and Greenspan develop in terms of their work on Shanghai. But yeah, so, but of course leave if you, if you want to have a spoke or a buff room or just hate these beats. All right.

Oh, my God. Thank you.

You have a full plan to take some turns for the least of the time in the world. What do you think?

But that is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and soft atomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have the final forces of nature. Am I getting through to your studio?

Thank you. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the brain today.

What do you think of us to talk about in our council today? Commerce? They get out their linear programming charts. statistical decisions. There is many solutions in compute and price-cost probabilities of vector transactions and investments just like we do. We live in a world of nations and ideologies are still here. The world is a college of corporations and exploit by the inutile by the laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Mayor. It has been since a man

walked out of the sun. Our children will live, Mr. Mayor. See that. Perfect world. Which is the war, famine, oppression, opportunity. One vast and incriminate global only thing. From all men, over into certain companies. And to which all men always share with the stock. All the necessities, over the door. All anxieties, trade.

I've chosen you, Mr. Bill, to manage this nature. You feel like me? Who's your own television, dummy? 60 million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday. I have seen the phrase of God. You just might be right, Mr. B.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. The End

Thank you. Thank you.

All right, we'll get started again. Okay. All right. Okay. Burnt out by fanatically prolonged artificial insomnia, futile writing practices and worship of the sacred substance amphetamine taken to the extremes of A-death, the CCIU would look elsewhere for a different,

in some ways more concrete model for communing with access. In, I think, 2002, Nick Land and Anna Greenspan would not only carve a line of flight from academia and the CCIU, but Europe and the West all together by resettling first in Taiwan and then Shanghai, where they remain to this day. So it would be in Shanghai that they would discover another kind of less ethereal and more urban means of decoding and deterritorializing, not so much in Shanghai, but actually through the city itself. okay uh now many of the ideas i'm going to discuss are developed in much more kind of intricate detail in anna greenspan's book shanghai future modernity remade and we're going to look at that

i'll draw on upon it here and there but just initially i just want to focus on a shorter very short blog post by land on his urban futures blog uh because it's on the readings list because is basically much more concise. But yeah, if you want to delve deeper into the arguments there, then I think Shanghai future is where you want to go. But in any case... So yeah, in this 2011 blog post called Implosion, Land makes an important distinction between classical science fiction and cyberpunk. On the one hand, classical SF tends to be extroverted in the sense that its exemplary image is the spaceship's explosive voyage outward

into the distant nether regions of the cosmos. He says at one point, the iconic SF object was indisputably the spaceship departing the confines of Earth for untrammeled frontiers. On the other hand, cyberpunk is introverted insofar as it turns inwards to explore implosive computer systems, cyberspace and artificially enhanced human bodies and minds. He writes in the first quote there, Gibson's Neuromancer still included some Earth orbital space activity and even a communication from Alpha Centauri, but its voyages now curved into the inner space of computer systems projected through the starless tracks of cyberspace. At the same time, Land notes that Gibson's archetypal cyberpunk novels

failed to apply this model of implosion to cities insofar as he continued to describe cities as an outward sprawl. the Spraw, even though here and there he took cramped coffin hotels and Hong Kong's dense Kowloon Ward City as models for the urban spaces of the future every now and then. But on the whole, Land writes, Gibson's cities had not kept up with his wider or narrower vision. The urban spaces of his east coast North America were still described as the Spraw, as if stranded in rapidly obsolescing state of extension. taking cyberpunk's vision of an implosive urban civilization as his own model for the future of cities land suggests that the reason that we cannot seem to find any advanced civilizations

voyaging from their homelands towards us is because they tend at a certain level of advancement to turn inward and self-augment rather than explore and colonize outwards so he says advanced intelligences do not expand into space colonizing vast galactic tracts of dispersing self-replicating robot probes in a program of exploration instead they implode in a process of transcension resourcing themselves primarily through the hyper exponential efficiency gains of extreme miniaturization through micro and nano to femto scale engineering of subatomic functional components. Such cultures or civilizations nucleated upon self-augmenting technological intelligence emigrate from the extensive universe in the direction of abysmal intensity,

crushing themselves to near black hole densities at the edge of physical possibility. If advanced civilizations are marked by intensive self-improvement, the model for what advanced cities will become should not be an extensive sprawl outwards, as Gibson might think, but rather an implosion of critical intensity as they innovate and work and scaffold in upon themselves. Again, he says, approaching singularity on an accelerating trajectory, each city becomes increasingly inwardly directed as it falls prey to the irresistible attraction of its own hyperbolic intensification whilst the outside world fades to a relevant static. Land also in the same short blog post provides a five point

model for the future of cities if they follow this implosive trend. So firstly, cities will become ever more autonomous from their integration within the larger geopolitical, cultural and economic framework, to which they are too often reduced as an explanatory backdrop. In other words, the country. Secondly, the city should not be treated in terms of nations, but as possessing their own urban economy, culture and politics within at least partial autonomy from the national context. moreover cities as per any self-augmenting intelligence system will be introverted in the sense that they will seek to advance themselves rather than look outwards by for example improving their educational systems and attracting migration to create an ever more

socially complex mix of peoples and cultures you know who can share diverse ideas and knowledges through its tight-knit constellation of new peoples and ideas the city becomes caught in a kind of positive feedback loop as it attracts more people who in turn accelerate new ideas culture, technology and economic growth which attracts even more people and so on he says in the first quote there, their internal processes of runaway intelligence implosion become ever more gripping, engaging, surprising productive and educational whilst the wider cultural landscape subsides into predictable tedium of merely ethnographic and historical relevance here land draws on American economist Edward

Gliese's Triumphs of the City the book Triumphs of the City in which Gliese argues that cities advance by becoming more densely populated as vacant space disappears between people of different cultures with diverse ways of working and thinking so you know this can be seen in the way that industrialisation transpired by ever more people coming together in cities to work cooperatively rather than sprawling out and toiling in disparate communes, agricultural communes. If industrialisation is any model to go by, urbanisation will continue by cities becoming ever more densely populated. A city with a greater population means more opportunities for intricate specialisation and divisions of labour as well as new forms of communication and circulations of different cultures and ideas. Moreover, the problems created by social

density such as pollution and traffic congestion are not actually so much problems as they are incentives and opportunities to find new and creative solutions and technologies that help effectuate these solutions. So yeah, as Land and Greenspan in Shanghai futures see it, the very problems that social density creates simultaneously spurs urban advancement. Of course, you know, Melbourne is a massive refutation of that, but nonetheless. Land writes,

Cities are independent of their national and global context insofar as they pursue their own imminent trajectory, a trajectory which kind of teologically tends towards ever-increasing social density and with that technological innovation, cultural diversity and economic growth. The fourth point is to model cities on computing insofar as computers similarly advance by getting smaller rather than larger, or denser rather than sprawling outwards. So both cities and computers face the same problem of how to make them less congested, prevent overheating, and circulate communication without allowing diseases, or in the case of computers, viruses to spread.

Or so as to make them ever more advanced. So computers here are a good historical model for how cities can develop by originally posing the problem of how a small-sized unit can self-improve without getting overheated or congested. In the first quote, the coming computers are closer to miniature cities than to artificial brains, dominated by traffic problems, congestion, migration, communications, zoning issues, mixed use, the engineering potential of new materials, questions of dimensionality, 3D solutions to density constraints, entropy or heat waste dissipation, recycling reversible computation, and disease control or new viruses. The final point is to see urban development as not just analogous to computing,

but as the direct materialisation of advanced technology and even artificial intelligence. Both AI research programmes and urban development result from the accelerating intensification of ever more ideas, education, problem solving, economic growth and novel surprises. given that both the city and i ai mark positive feedback loops of self-improvement land concludes this implosion essay or blog post by suggesting that the first ai might imagine its body to be the mega cities of the future itself he says rather than the global internet military skynet or lab-based ai is it the path of the city based on accelerating intensification or stem compression that best provides the conditions for emergent superhuman

computation. So it's because land and greenspan see cities as a means of instantiating the technological singularity that they refer to cities and particularly the megacity of Shanghai as, quote, the singular philosophical topic of profound global significance that it was always destined to be. okay yeah so Land and Greenspan's views on on Shanghai I think in particular as the kind of preeminent megacity are best expressed perhaps oddly in their Urban Atomy Shanghai 2009 travel guide as well as Land's Shanghai World Expo 2010 travel guide

now okay Although, I don't know if you've looked at the reading that I uploaded from the travel guide, but although these travel guides bear the hallmarks of typical travel guides with maps and accommodation and restaurant suggestions, the sections that Greenspan and Land wrote in particular, I think can be seen as in some way marking a new philosophical genre, something I've been calling the Transcendental Travel Guide. While several other philosophers have also written about cities, like in particular Walter Benjamin's arcades project on 19th century Paris. Greenspan and land take this tradition one step further by writing about Shanghai in the compositional form of an actual guidebook.

Okay, so let's go through a bit of that book. So in the first chapter called Shanghai in History, City in Flux, An Erratic Path to Openness, Greenspan and land begin by noting that the land upon which Shanghai, with Shanghai actually etymologically meaning above the sea, the land upon which Shanghai rests first emerged by rising out of the river waters 10,000 years ago. Here, I think they use the geological changes that led to the formation of the territory of Shanghai as a kind of symbol for the way that Shanghai was founded upon fundamental geological novelty, you know, geotrauma perhaps, and particularly, you know, the dynamism of the sea. with the sea being something that they've consistently used as a metaphor

for the sublime outside beyond Kant's island of reason. So they say, Shanghai's name meaning honour above the sea attests more deeply than can ever have been intended to its fluid inconstant nature. This same fluid inconstancy characterising Shanghai to its deepest foundations has always been inseparable from the flexibility, adaptability and dynamism that its fortunes have been built upon. circa 5000 BC the first human settlement arrived in Shanghai and became a small fishing village called Hutu in the 5th century AD before asserting itself as a major commercial trading port in the 11th century given that Shanghai first prospered through a migrant and merchant populace

one could say that the city's vitality was always based upon and this is their term alien influences and outside forces coming from the sea be they conquerors and criminals or cosmopolitan bankers and adventurers. Despite the British occupation during the 1839-42 Opium War, the disruption of the 1851 Tapping Rebellion and the 1931 Japanese invasion, Shanghai persisted against all political oppression as an unabated commercial centre, as if its development was somehow beyond any conscious effort to micromanage it. in fact the very invasions that might have devastated another city actually intensified Shanghai's vibrancy as refugees flooded one of the only cities in the world that did not require a visa

only to contribute to its economic growth and cultural diversity so clearly Greenspan and land see the development of Shanghai as exemplary of the way that techno-commercial forces are able to channel an outside alien influence beyond human control. As Shanghai became a bastion for refugees, criminals, merchants and adventurers, it was derided by patriots and traditionalists as a kind of decadent cosmopolitan Gomorrah. They say, there was more of everything in Shanghai and more all the time, continually arriving to deliver its chronic modernist future shock. For Chinese traditionalists and foreign missionaries alike, Shanghai was an abomination, but for adventurers and modernists it was a paradise of delirious intellectual and sensual stimulation.

Given this kind of reputation it's no wonder that Shanghai's greatest defeat at least on Landon Greenspan's reading came in 1949 when Mao Zedong's communist regime subordinated its urban economy to the countryside and its decadent culture to a tightly controlled state propaganda apparatus with a socialist realist aesthetic They go on. Shanghai's position within the new ideological framework was especially precarious given its long association not only with hyper-urbanism and trade but also with colonial encroachment, laissez-faire capitalism frivolous consumerism and peerless decadence. Successive political campaigns dismantled what remained of the city's business culture and for the next 40 years its physical infrastructure slowly decayed

as investment was directed elsewhere. here as in not so much Greenspan but land's political writings that we'll look at next week land is obviously seeing communism here Maoism as an attempt to manage and impede Shanghai's autonomous positive feedback loop of economic growth and technological change beyond its inhabitants control in the 1980s however Shanghai escaped the constraints of the socialist state when Deng Xiaoping reopened the Chinese economy to outsiders, be they intellectuals and scientists or capitalists and investors they go on

a developmental explosion without historical precedent was unleashed after just a few years of double digit growth it was evident to everybody with an interest in the country that five centuries of Chinese economic and technological decline had been arrested and reversed. In the 1990s alone, Shanghai underwent decades of industrialisation and future shock in a kind of self-propelling circuit of economic investment and technological growth which enabled it to become, in their terms, the most dynamically emerging metropolis in the world. So as Greenspan and Land see it, Shanghai's technological, commercial and urban development is exemplary of an alien process's sublime dynamism and change beyond purposive human engineering and control

they go on a city space that had been locked into a 1930s time warp was soon transfigured beyond recognition Shanghai immediately locked itself into reform era growth rates expanding its economy by an average approaching 12% annually more than doubling every 7 years so that by the end of the millennium it had overtaken the early starters of the Pell River Delta to position itself as the most dynamically emerging metropolis in the world. Now, according to Greenspan and Land, there are four stereotypes in China about modern Shanghainese people that are nonetheless true, if not necessarily derogatory. firstly

Shanghainese are often seen as disdainful of the rural provinces as they are irretrievably immersed in a stylish and vibrant mass consumer culture moreover they are often considered to be essentially feminine in the sense that they have loosened or even inverted gender roles as for example women pursue independent lives and careers with men being accepting generally of female emancipation and participating in domestic chores. So I think what's going on with this point is that here is in both of their earlier work, the CCRU and before, Land and Greenspan are using Shanghai's feminine reputation as a metaphor for the way that the city and its culture melt or fix identities and values, here gender roles, into air.

thirdly Shanghai is known as a cosmopolitan hybrid as it feeds off foreign ideas, attitudes, styles and investment through its ocean or alien culture as they put it given the expensive cost of child rearing in the cities compared to rural areas where children aren't so much a burden but actually provide helpful labour cities are dependent on migrants for population growth in its very origin then Shanghai is a city of migrants who bring with them a frontier entrepreneurial attitude and an unrelenting passion to succeed. Here is before Greenspan and Land, I think, using Shanghai's openness to outside influences and particularly, in this case, Western capital science and technology

as an analogy for the way that the city channels a radical otherness across the city. finally Shanghai has a reputation for going to extremes and reveling in excess as with its kind of consumerist cosmopolitan reputation Greenspan and Land use Shanghai's ramping up of everything to the utmost limit as another example of how it instantiates a kind of sublime superlative reality beyond all traditional status quo norms they say Shanghai has entered unexplored developmental territory as a rapidly growing megacity at the outer edge of human experience. Nobody can predict the novelties that social concentrations on this scale will introduce into the accelerating current of history, especially when combined with economic dynamism

of unprecedented intensity. So again, the idea is that in characterizing Shanghai as feminine, techno-commercially advanced, and fundamentally open to excess and alien influences, grain spend and land are trying to champion the city as a concrete materialisation of a kind of radical alterity which subverts static traditions and identities. The rest of the travel guide's first half provides more specific examples of Shanghai's success and innovation. So in the second chapter called Modernity 2.0 three takes on the creation and reinvention of Shanghai modernism

Greenspan and land focus on Shanghai's modern architectural style known as Shaipai The key elements to Shanghai style or Shaipai are, as they put it, a love of the new an affinity with commercial culture and openness to the outside They give the particular example of how much of Shanghai's modern architecture was created by Laszlo Hudek, a Hungarian refugee from Russia who is well known for his rootless style in which his own authorial intent recedes behind an oversaturation of eclectic influences which mirrors the city's constant change and innovation. As they say, in his eclecticism, intrinsic cosmopolitanism, alliance with the forces of progressive modernity,

an enthusiastic embrace of the new, Hudek was both a product and a producer of Haipai, the singular style of Shanghai. Many of Hudek's works, like the Park Hotel picture there, for example, mix high-tech interiors, ultra-modern interiors filled with fast elevators and advanced washing machines, with more traditional expressionist facades. In this way, Greenspan and Land argue that Hudek's Shanghai style invents a new future, or modernity 2.0, by paradoxically incorporating older styles from Western modernity with new high-tech aesthetics to create a kind of hybrid which overwhelms us with the sense of the constant changes in style over time. So the traditional expressionist aesthetic is not incorporated

out of any nostalgia at all for modernity 1.0. On the contrary, it is combined with the cutting edge to kind of effectuate the split from Western modernity 1 by way of a new modernity which incorporates the old as well as the new in its greater sense of historical time and transformation. In other words, the essence of Hypi is the constant sense of future shock as Shanghai's residents are oversaturated with a hybrid of many different styles from over the course of time. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly... I know some people, I think Darcy would probably disagree with this, but that's exactly what I was thinking is the logic of that second track I played, the Riho track, which is a combination of traditional Chinese melodies with club beats and technology.

But anyway. In the sixth chapter called Present at the Creation, Artistic Expression in an Open City, Landon Greenspan considers Shanghai art more widely than just architecture. Now Shanghai art is known for incorporating the traditional Chinese inkbrush approach with Western realism, romanticism and impressionism. In doing so, Shanghai art presents us with a sense of future shock as Western modernity is shown to be but one instance of a greater reservoir of historical change and artistic novelty. In the 2016 article that I've uploaded on the box called Neo-Modern Shanghai and the Art of Abstraction

Greenspan and Land note how the Chinese government recently held in 2016 an exhibition of a highly abstract form of calligraphic art that did not actually depict any legible characters there's an example while some critics argued that this kind of calligraphic abstraction marked an escape from the concrete problems of the modern world back into the traditional past Land and Greenspan contend that it is rather this increasingly abstract aesthetic that marks the style of a future modernity as a critique of false universalisations of the present. The idea is that it's only by abstracting from the concrete that we are able to critique it as a parochial, partial object from a greater temporal horizon. So they say, abstraction is the bridge to the transcendental

in its modern Kantian sense. It enables the culture to access, through critique, the basic principles of its self-production. again I think the logic here is similar to the architecture so the idea is that much as western abstract expressionism broke with pictorial representational art so does Shanghai's neo-traditionalist style mark a break with Chinese art's socialist realist era as it catches up and surpasses the modern techno-commercial age by incorporating both traditional calligraphy and western modernism in its greater plane of abstraction what neotraditionalism does by fusing traditional calligraphy with western abstract expressionism is go beyond both, by showing them to be merely two possible artistic

yeah, two artistic possibilities among, you know, kind of gourmet menu of many others which neotraditionalism unleashes in its eclectic hybridity so as Greenspan says in Shanghai Future Shanghai's reimagination of the city of tomorrow is saturated by nostalgia for what is to come. This weird paradox like nostalgia for what is to come. It is evident through the renovation of an art deco heritage that eludes historical comprehension, the reanimation of industrial zones that look back as they look forward, and the rejuvenation of an urban culture that aims to awaken an older golden age, that Shanghai's ambitions for the 21st century are suffused with echoes of the past. As a future city, Shanghai does not gradually arrive

out of linear evolutionary history. It emerges or re-emerges in a temporal spiral out of which the future city reaches back to the past in order to construct itself today. In just a more concise version, neo-modern art is defined by an innovative recycling of tradition. It is by folding back into tradition that neo-modernity opens the doors of abstraction. so although it might seem at first like a nostalgic return to the past Shanghai's neo-modern art is rather a leap into a future that surpasses western modernity 1.0 and Chinese traditionalism as it combines them only so as to dwarf them both for the sense of a greater design space of artistic possibilities that they're able to convey when juxtaposed

okay in the seventh chapter Siberia, digital city, Shanghai switches on, Siberia being spelt like cyber, like C-Y-B-E-R Landon Greenspan explained that cities are centres of technological growth because they create problems that only technological innovations can solve in a kind of self-reinforcing loop of posing obstacles and coming up with creative solutions. So in particular, they focus on an interesting example of the spread of the screen in Shanghai, from the TV to the computer screen and even now to the city buildings themselves,

as pictured here. All of which is a way of immersing the urban dweller in a kind of almost virtual reality environment with the potential to completely reconstruct our perceptual forms of intuition. While advertising is obviously often criticised, Greenspan and Land argue that it can also be profoundly creative, as in the way that Chinese advertising companies create a giant high-definition screen that can be mounted on buildings and skyscrapers to promote goods and services. They say, One solution has been to transform metropolitan spaces into zones of immersive commercial communication. Every point of congestion is an opportunity for videotronic communion. In this style, or what they call Blade Runner style,

the entire city itself becomes integrated within the commodification process of promoting products and services that break down our well-established identities, traditions and values. As other corporations compete to sell products, they too purchase advertising time on the gigantic screens to promote still other products and services, which melts all the traditions and values in still other creative ways. So this is only one example of how Shanghai has managed to seamlessly combine solid economic growth and futuristic creation and unprecedented de-territorialisation, thereby turning itself into what Land and Greenspan call the best-selling science fiction story of all time. So yeah, again, what Greenspan and Land are admiring about the advertising screens

is the way that they kind of transform the city into what they call an emergent collective intelligence as it immerses its residents and their perceptual field in a pure commodifying process of absolute decoding and deterritorialisation. The second half of their Shanghai travel guide looks at the city's specific zones as further examples of Shanghai's deterritorialising capabilities. in the first chapter called A West Side Story Greenspan and Land look at how the Bund the zone called the Bund, colloquially known also as the War Street of Asia juxtaposes both western colonial era

buildings with a kind of science fiction skyline of the financial district although it suffered setbacks under the Maoist regime the reform era saw the Bund reopen banks and businesses to become the cosmopolitan centre of what they called the earth's delirious capitalism. The buildings thus combined gothic, renaissance and art deco aesthetics from the colonial era with traditional Chinese and modern renovations to create a real sense of the future shock that history brings as different epochs are literally kind of meshed and scaffolded onto each other. in the third chapter on Pudong they give a more detailed example of the Jinmao Tower

pictured here in the Pudong district the tower is a mix of different kind of cultural styles in so far as it's both an ultra modern high rise with an at once bamboo and art deco design element with for example its interiors organised by the Chinese Lucky No. 8 so the building has 88 floors and follows an octagonal floor pattern. So they say, The building has a unique character synthesising Western and Chinese architectural traditions to produce a hyper-modern pagoda with Art Deco flourishes. The vertical A segmentation of the building connotes the growth patterns of bamboo while its aluminium lattice amplifies its reflectivity. again it's the same idea with the architecture and the high pie art right so the idea of that

by oversaturating us with so many different styles the tower creates a kind of sublime experience that breaks with the aesthetic unifying categories of rational beauty in fact even Pudong's various green spaces parks and zoos do not so much stand apart as bastions exempted from the urban future shock. But in context, these parks and zoos, which are dwarfed by these kinds of techno buildings, subsume nature itself into modernity's greater transformation of even the unspoilt wilderness itself. And along with the oversaturation of architectural styles, Greenspan and Land are also interested in just the sheer magnitude and scale of the city's high-rise buildings and skyscrapers. In the fourth chapter, called People's Square, after the races,

they describe the Park Hotel as almost sinister, that's their term, in its sublime magnitude dwarfing our perceptual coordinates, which creates a sense of human vulnerability and insignificance before what the city can do. I emphasise the word sinister because that's also Kant's term, that's how Kant describes the sublime as well. the irony is that the Park Hotel which seems so sublime is now itself dwarfed by even larger buildings around it kind of like going back to last week an infinite set being dwarfed by an even greater infinite set so on their reading Pudong is, as they put it, an area of superlators with for example the world's largest airport and only operating maglev train

their buildings soar into the clouds to create a surreal skyline that dwarfs what the naked eye is able to see within its perceptual field. So for example, Greenspan and Land describe the sight of the skyscrapers as sublime, again, in the precise transcendental materialist sense of sublime as an object which breaks with anything that our concepts of reason could possibly synthesise. So they write the sheer weight of symbolism borne by this structure overwhelms its numbing familiarity. This scale, location, futuristic appearance and nocturnal radiance testify to the magnitude of Shanghai's reignited ambitions, its bold embrace of change and its dazzling prospects.

However, the city's immense scale I think can be best surveyed, as they say, from the people's square, from whence one can see a kind of jagged diversity as soaring high rises dwarf traditional pagodas in a kind of shadow play of you know yin and yang tradition and modernity or beauty and the sublime so just to quote them again at length the previous relatively consistent elevation of the city overwhelmingly dominated by two or three story lilongs has surrendered to jagged diversity with soaring high rise constructions juxtaposed against the urban clearings created by new parks and green spaces While deeply alien when considered concretely and specifically, a more abstract apprehension of this urban design problematic brings it into broad consonants with Chinese art and philosophy where preoccupation with the interplay of immemorial have been basic conceptual underpinnings.

as with any travel guide Greenspan and land ultimately encourage the reader to visit these sites for themselves a voyage which is perhaps all the more necessary in the case of Shanghai in as much as its megastructures are precisely in some sense ineffable beyond the bounds of full conceptualisation and given that Shanghai is constantly rewriting its own history at dizzying rates and scales they also acknowledge that their guidebook is likely to become obsolete in the near future. What they've nonetheless I think tried to do is appropriate the travel guide as in some ways the most experiential form of writing about Shanghai's sublime rupture with the bounds of possible experience.

Okay. now what I want to do is I've got a bit more to say about Shanghai but now we're sort of we're moving a little bit from Shanghai and sort of segging into the next module looking at land's work next week but I think this is a good way to move into it this might also be slightly a controversial reading Amy, you might find this a bit controversial. But, okay, so... Whereas land is normally seen as seeking to accelerate the circuits of capital accumulation and technological innovation unconditionally beyond any and or human interest,

I think land's writings on Shanghai's urban development, as well as greenspans, actually seem to proffer a kind of goal-oriented model of acceleration closer to that proposed by the left accelerationists like Sernik and Williams that we'll look at in the final week. Well, we'll see in the final week as well that Landers, of course, critiqued Sernak and Williams' left accelerationism for wanting to impede acceleration to human wavelengths and frequencies. His own writings on Shanghai's urban planning and particularly the Shanghai 2010 World Expo book I think evince a kind of Landian model for a goal-directed accelerationism. Okay, so turning to the World Expo book.

So there, Land explains that World Expos, from the original event in London in 1851 till before the Second World War, were originally intended to anticipate the future technological wonders that modernity might reap. That's the point of the World Expo. Held every five years and lasting for six months, World Expos orient the urban planning of their host cities around a universal theme to be unveiled and explored on a specific date for a precise amount of time. In the lead-up to a World Expo, much of the host city's urban development is directed towards concretely realising the Expo's vision for human progress and betterment, with the speed of development increased by having a precise date by which this vision must be met.

If the history of World Expos is anything to go by, precise goals and definite timeframes for urban development do not so much limit economic growth and technological advancement as they seem to encourage and accelerate them. Or as Land himself says, while specifically crafted themes have guided the agenda of recent expos, these have augmented rather than substituted for a consistent, implicit and essential theme that has guided the event since its inception, the core commitment to material progress represented primarily by technological innovation. Propelled by the surging currents of perpetual industrial evolution, Expo has nourished a speculative futuristic intelligence that feeds back productively into technological innovation as a stimulus, research guideline and investment prompt. Okay, so yeah, it's precisely by directing their energy and resources

around providing practical solutions to specific problems of living in modern cities that world expos are able to actualise creative leaps of progress and daring visions of the future. So while world expos seem to accelerate urban policy planning, economics and technology towards a kind of sublime and unknown future, the impetus for this is precisely to achieve the clear goal of human prosperity and happiness. For instance, recent world expos have shown a major concern for environmentalism in the wake of alarming climate change science. Rather than limiting technological development and industrial activity, however, this environmental theme has incited efforts to create new and sustainable technologies

for long-term economic expansion. Or as Land himself puts it, environmentalism has become something close to a meta-theme of the World Expo because its preoccupations fit naturally with the Expo's internationalism, with its universal perspective, and even with its relentless search for fresh technological and public policy challenges. And he goes on, As prospects for sustainable acceleration become first imaginable, then increasingly compelling, environmentalism grows up and the World Expo returns to itself, reinvigorated and unafraid. As the World Expo attests, purposive planning for sustainable development seems better suited to ensure long-term acceleration as opposed to what Sernak and Williams will later call the brain-dead onslaught of currently unsustainable industrial activity.

In fact, Land even notes that it's precisely when World Expos lose sight of their original purpose to advance human prosperity that the impetus to pursue technological and economic growth began to slow down. He says, when stripped of the impetus to continual even urgent development, however, the World Expo was divorced from its traditional purpose, an inevitable loss of direction resulted along with a growing alienation from the technological and economic bases of historical momentum here I've just got a little bit of Melbourne accelerationism because the Royal Exhibition Hall was actually created to host the 1880 World Expo in Melbourne yeah okay so so yeah

we've got a post-war loss of impetus in terms of the Expo but fortunately Land rejoices at least in the book and in the lead up to 2010 the Expo's original commitment to human progress looks to be rejuvenated through Shanghai's already existing efforts to accelerate urban development in order to solve the problems of living in the megacity so he writes world expos are truly historic events within which the perplexities of development and of human progress find a particular indelible expression linked indissociably with a date and a city yeah and again Shanghai's self-reinvention adjusted to a new urgency a strict schedule and a precise goal as expo preparation subsumed

its already extraordinary urban development programs and elevated them to yet higher levels of ambition and that's the picture of the Chinese pavilion in the Shanghai Expo so yeah, as the example of the Shanghai Expo shows and I think you'd be very unhappy with this but I think that Lan does not always dismiss a rationally planned accelerationism provided that we read his travel guides as authentic philosophical works which may be dubious I suppose now it's certainly true that land identifies certain limits that world expos have historically imposed on economic and technological expansion in particular land laments the way that post-war

expos substituted the original promethean ambition for a post-modern cynicism about whether the future could bring anything novel or surprising at all with the decline of the west in which most expos have taken place, the event is no longer about proffering great visions of the future but has become a simple public relations exercise to declare the host city's humble embrace of other visiting cultures. As an example, Land notes that the US pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo was obsequiously modest and polite as if it were seeking to avoid humiliating other countries with their unprecedented technological grandeur. So he says we wanted a space shuttle or a predator drone and they gave us Hillary Clinton saying ni hao plus some nonsense about planting flower beds in the ghetto.

As Land explains, this is but the culmination of a long trend in the decline of the World Expo's original goal to present the world of tomorrow with Expo themes like Chicago's 1933 A Century of Progress and New York's 1939 Building the World of Tomorrow substituted in favour of moralistic themes like Brussels' 1958, A More Human World, and Osaka's 1970, Progress and Harmony of Mankind. Although Land hoped in the lead-up to 2010 that Shanghai would be able to set the World Expo back on its historical mission of ultra-modernisation, he ultimately laments that even the Shanghai Expo remained just as polite in deference to other countries under the euphemistic pretext that what appears

as those countries' decline and failure are really just unique and yet equally justified ways of doing things. He says, Asia unleashed, never happened of course, partly because the International Expo institutional apparatus is locked into the Occidental Deathslide, but mostly because it would have been impolite. So this is the cute, this is like the adorable high-bough mascot for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Land actually writes a short horror story about this mascot, which actually turns it into a kind of weird demon, murderous demon. But nonetheless, I think its ridiculous cuteness illustrates his point. Yeah, so it's largely for this reason that land, I think, changes tact

from studying Shanghai and megacities to looking at Chinese capital and politics in general as a better model for accelerating the supply and processes beyond political, cultural, human institutions which seek to impede and control the process. I do think though it's nonetheless the case that there is here a clear if unacknowledged tendency in Lens Shanghai travel books to praise a goal-directed acceleration of Shanghai's economic and technological development in a way which is more akin to, as much as he would hate this, to Cernak and Williams' cunning automata that we'll look at in the last week than it is to his usual directives to accelerate unconditionally without regard for human self-interest. but as we'll see he'll certainly put aside all human self-interest

when we go look at him next week but we'll leave it there unless it's so yeah, we'll open up to questions and comments if there are any yep, Nicholas I'm actually interested how that book got commissioned do you know where you go on that? I'm not sure the exact process because he's the editor of it and then he writes a bunch of chapters for it and Anna Greenspan writes a bunch of chapters for it and then there's a bunch of other people too but I was just like focusing on their chapters but in terms I mean because like Anna Greenspan's an actress like she works at Oh the expo one yeah I think I mean there might have been other I think it was the publishing company

Yeah yeah it was published under the Urbanatomy press, so there would have been other travel guides, but yeah it was basically like a a lot of that book is actually just reproductions of the, it's like an abridged version of the larger Shanghai travel book 2009, but with some added stuff about the World Expo as well but yeah I'm not entirely sure how it got commissioned alright, so you made a tourist guide first and then you can recycle the Yes, I think the first one that they did was a 2008 Shanghai travel guide, like a big book, and then they did an updated one for 2009, and then in 2010 they did an abridged version,

and that was the year of the World Expo, so they added the focus on the World Expo. And I think there's even a Shanghai for Kids book or something like that, which I've seen on Amazon that Nick edited, I'm pretty sure. yeah so it's a strange kind of I just don't like it obviously is a travel book right like it has like you know I just remember looking at a page that has like the description of the best like day spas and just imagining like land going to all these different spas and trying them out but so it is but then when you actually read the content it's like I can't imagine anyone actually using this as an actual travel guide because literally the forward is like

Shanghai, capital alien forces, it's like it's this kind of jargon that it's like it's so continuous with the CCRU's work, with Land of Greenspan's work, I can't even yeah, I don't see how it could possibly be used except for the fact that it actually is a that kind of terminology is a good representation of Shanghai yeah I think at one point you mentioned Melbourne as being a kind of model of a description of cities' development what did you mean by that? I just meant it was just a bit of a joke I just meant because it's so congested and it doesn't seem like

their argument is that in the case of Shanghai you get problems like congestion and then you enforces, obliges to come up with creative solutions, new technologies to solve those things whereas Melbourne seems like the problems are there but the solutions to congestion aren't really there, at least by the intense tram ride here and train ride here I took that was packed So I kind of like went up with Len's kind of thing with liberal western sort of political systems being a kind of like handbrake from capital yeah so it's not, Melbourne's not a mega city in this sense yeah yeah although you know like every now and then you get like

small scale micro technologies right so like I don't know if anyone else is excited for the Uber drones delivering KFC and the Uber taxis like helicopter rides but yeah so maybe that will decongest partly you know yeah any other final comments, questions yeah maybe you and then you alright I don't know the analogy of computer architecture being like a city I was talking to my friend the other day and I was trying to explain how to do your game what a computer game engine works by

I'm making a sort of similar analogy, which I also thought of as a city. And so I was thinking a kind of a blade representation, like the hard level of activity and it's like software level, not just video game features but whatever software of video games. Interesting because they have another layout, you get virtual representation of cities in that game. I don't know, like, you know, I'm not super, I don't know much about video games, but like, uh, the, I don't know, the thing, I mean, it's kind of,

I wonder what the sublime point of a video game city is, though. Like, for me, it's kind of, intend towards like what's actually would be the kind of uh break uh the sublime breaks in video games would be precisely what they didn't intend the programmers didn't intend to be there for example glitches right like when you hit this when you like in an open world game if you're just traveling out and you eventually hit like this invisible wall or something like that or able to sort of glitch into like a rock or something that you shouldn't enter into or some uh that's kind of yeah that's i mean that they're the elements of video games that i'm attracted to but i don't know did you have any further yeah i mean neither like i mean the other

thing that comes to mind of course is that the zizek thing where he talks about uh like video games as an analogy for how god created the our universe because it's uh you know it's like the the video game is designed as an open world, it's an open world video game, it's designed up until a certain point, but then you do eventually, if you just keep going in one direction, you'll hit some kind of barrier, invisible barrier, beyond which the programmers just didn't, you know, program in. And then Zizek's like, that's exactly what our world is like. Like, God is this programmer who thought we were too stupid to ever be able to actually go as deep down, into the deepest level of our universe, of reality. And so therefore, when we get there, there's just nothing there. It's just like, it's this incomplete, glitched universe. But, yeah.

Did you want to... Yeah. Did you sort of call it like he thinks that cities are economically autonomous? In some sense. Like, it's kind of a heuristic, that model. It's just to move away. I think that's a strategy to get the focus on cities, right? Rather than reducing cities to a more general national culture or something like that. And, yeah, an economy too, I guess, and a political economy. But what it seems like not reducible... I mean, isn't it arguable that in many ways cities are economically parasitic?

you know in terms of like material inputs need to build a city to the state of population the fact that the economic dynamism of the city is often like the trading of things that were produced outside of the city right right i mean is that kind of am i kind of missing the point no i think that i mean that uh i mean when he says like the relative autonomy of the city it's it doesn't exclude those things because uh they you know both lennon greenspan were both talking also about like the fact that cities require migrants right especially Shanghai yeah it needs and also like the initial opening up of Shanghai to western capital and so on there's certainly like alien

influences, refugees, adventurers entrepreneurs and so on upon which yeah Shanghai relies but so yeah but I just think it's an attempt to just say like there is certain culture, there are things that are distinctive about certain cities that get sidelined if you just focus on the general economy or something like that like for, I mean like the way the classic stereotype is that Beijing is where politics happens in China so like Beijing, so the centre is Beijing right, because that's kind of a centralising everything around that but that kind of ignores you know many kind of distinct unique things that are going on in Shanghai too, right?

Like, for example, the culture, like in the art, the music, for example. Yeah. I don't know if that's an entirely satisfactory response. Did you? Yeah. That's fine. It's more of a client. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'd have to think about it a bit more, actually, yeah. Any others? Otherwise, it's 8.30, so... Should we leave it there? Yeah. Cool. All right. Thanks for coming. Thank you.