Hi everyone! My name is Eduarda Camargo and I am your host in the Ghost Lemus of Madagascar. Today we are looking at the part 5 called Barker, Teacher of the Theoretic Matrix. And before I start, there are some things that I want to say because we are now changing formats. Since I used to do this podcast with Erica, I'm now inviting people to participate and to give their own views.
and prompted discussion starting from the text but still going through other matters. I thought it would be more dynamic that way. So at the second part of the episode, we're going to have a guest here. She's going to be introduced and we're going to comment on some aspects of this part. So before we get to that, I'm still seeking to make summaries and descriptions of each part of the book. So in the future, this podcast can be heard for anyone that wants to dive in a specific part of the CCRU or want to have like a more of a direct account or commentary of what happens from part to part.
I find that this is useful because there are many characters which appear more than once and sometimes they appear in some part of the book and you have like this unfolding of the same concepts or ideas or images into different things. So I think it's worthwhile to still make a short commentary and most of the analysis will be done with the guest of the other episodes as well. Before we dive into this part, I wanted to make a brief commentary on the previous episode. I was reminded, funnily enough, of Azealia Banks,
because Black Atlantis, you have these strong ideas of Afrofuturism, you have the ideas which are tied to the sea strongly. And then I reminded myself of the fantasy mixtape by Azealia Banks, which is like a strong, incredible work of maybe like one of the only examples of what sea punk was coming as an internet aesthetic. and she sympathizes this aesthetic on this mixtape pretty well. I know Tavette Banks is a pretty controversial and polemical figure and I'm not here to advocate to anyone that doesn't like her for any reason to just go check her out.
But yet, if you want to get to some artistic rendition of some of the same ideas in a very tongue-in-cheek way, you must remember that right now Beyoncé is dropping house and a lot of people are like, well, Azir does this a hundred times better, which I agree. So I really recommend fantasy as a sort of recent instantiation of some of the ideas which were commented on part four. But regarding part five, we have then Barker, which is maybe one of the most iconic figures of the whole book, probably because of the specific text Barker Speaks, which I will get into soon,
but which we will dive with more time and care on the second part of the episode. The title of this part is Barker, Teacher of the Tick Matrix. So here we got an introduction of the tick system, which is akin to what we explored with the Decadence system and the Decadence card play, which I commented extensively with Attica on episode 2, and also with the avatars, which were done on the Beacon Suit Center exhibition with Orphan Drift.
So the tick system is a sort of unfolding of some of these ideas into a more or less systematic but openly abstract system. And the first text is called Cryptolith, which starts like with 65 million before Christ. and you have then an entity arriving with a K-time missile during this time. Then you have like a cataplex map and you have the first citation of the tick and you have just like on the first paragraph it is as the entity is going through the world
you have like this description, scars and vectors slot together, it sticks, a radiant stink of the entity so strong it hisses, thick iterations, sticks, scratches, chittering, silt across the outside. Barker senses its passage stroking, nerve tense as the distant twin weaving through the tethers of cord-out schizophrenia in the habitation blister. well here we have like this very lovecraftian description of something that we see also meltdown in the case of nick land's work the idea of this abstract this techno-capital singularity which arise on the past and accelerates time i don't want to say that these are the same things
but like the many mentions on the outside of this on this part seem to me like they are riffing off on similar ideas or getting close to what would be this this elaboration later here we have like a very i believe that this taxed cryptolith is very landian you have like many just like positions you have a strong lovecraftian influence you have also a mention of the publication of what would be a barker's book the geocosmic theory of trauma and i really one of the passages that i want to highlight from this is like they think barker is mad or want to
it isn't because teddy galak alexis talk and the earth screams everyone knows these things whether they admit it or not. And I think this is a good image of the whole thing they're proposing. I really, as I was reading this, I was thinking, there are times when I think the whole literary thing, it gets tiresome or it gets kind of repetitive. and I really think that from part 4 to part 5, things are more balanced out and actually some of my favorite passages are exactly the literary ones.
There's a paragraph that I want to read, which is like the final part of Cryptolive, which it is, it is here that you are always filled open, folding onto the outside, clicking, sucking, feeding, where you are all insides, raw, never numb, already dead, unreachable, limit, check, tick, where no protection can get it, it feeds and sucks, leaving you locked outside your inside, with nothing to defend, fleeing the place you never live, where it feeds and sucks, clicking, palpitating, muplititioness of intra-coiling malignancy, temmoto, and click, tick, feed, endless sucking on an ever-opening rotten mass of fuseration where nothing goes unless to take
feet suck and it can only thank you here being so close so it's leaders groping throughout your outside stupid they're already when you arrive it's 17 eyes glow dead gridlock i think this is a very a very interesting paragraph and i feel they are more why we have like strongly um We have strongly narrative passages on the precedent parts, such as who's pulling your strings, I was a CCU mid-puppet, you have, or the idea of the MVU or the Cthulhu Club.
I feel like here they are playing with rhythm and the sound of words in a more interesting way. You still have this idea of sort of narrative, but still I feel like the abstraction that goes through their prose is better attuned. You have very, very good passages, which I feel maybe they flesh out better, the idea of theory fiction, than some of the other ones, which I think they're more traditional and sometimes they are more strictly narrative. narrative, of course, we can't make that distinction so precisely, but I feel like here
the sort of prose helps to convey their ideas really well. The next text is called Tick Delirium, and it is divided into subtitles. One of the most interesting ones which I wanted to check out is called Under Pressure, where a site author called Thomas Goode and the book The Deep Hot Biosphere. I read briefly on this book and it's about the idea that you have like this second biosphere at the center of Earth and that fossil fuel doesn't come from the pressure of organic material through time but it comes from this sort of Earth's kernel.
And I think this idea is strongly important to what they would call the geotrauma when they get to Barker's Picks. And then you have like this Project SCAR, which is this description of when Barker is monitoring tropical storms. And they have like this word sanitation. and you think like it is almost as he's arriving at this method at this moment when he is trying in some way to interpret or monitor or in some way decode what the storm is bringing to him. And then they say how NASA actually approached Barker
and this would be when he starts working for them. And you have another description, which I think is similar to the passage that I read previously, which it is, the investigation was disguised as psychiatrically recording, hidden even from itself. This was shortly after the stuttering start, drifting in on a wave of body tics, Microspecific tremors A multiplication of mixed signals Chronometric tick-tock Melting into jungle noises Clicks and chirps of the cicadas Insectoid chitterings Static Take of materials for tick bite tinnitus Integrated with rhythm pattern virus
A subsamniotic staccato Of throat scratching tick chatter Stitching into the toxicness Calling demons And I like this a lot Because I think it's very Joyce-ian and tone and you have many many plays with the words which are really interesting such as clicks and chirps of the cicadas you have like this repetition of the sea and then you have like chittering static the tick by tinnitus intercut so you you have the sense of the staccato or the sub-semiotic staccato, which they're talking about, contained into their own text. And as it's going to be flashed through the other texts,
here you see that the tick system, it's a sort of a sound and a communication. It's like a click. It's like the sound of the cicadas. So it's very similar to how insects communicate. and yet it's a pattern, it's a virus and it's a sound that contains toxics and it amounts to calling demons. I think this ties perfectly to what we've seen with the Decadence CarPlay, the idea of calling demons and in some way the system which can tap into this through many sorts of different formalizations.
Another paragraph which helps to understand the idea of what they call the tick is the tick is a parasitic arachnid. It has been considered as an ethics packet that claims, sticks and sucks, functioning it as a vector for numerous fangs, tachyons, stickers, hallucinations, tinnitus, buzz clicks, micrasonic teamings, semi-sentient flickering across the fever escape, skin-tracked by infected suck marks that snake along the veins, tick dots, or IV punctures, according to them, from the sedatives and anti-psychotics unaccounted for in the medical locks, plus a tick delirium tacked on, because there was no flight into the jungle,
only high-frequency hallucinations of parasitic micromultitudes, each in skin swarms. Well, I think this does for what is the description of the take through this literary approach. And then we have like Daniel Charles Barker, a professor, which is how he is described on Barker Speaks, a professor of inorganic semiotics at Kingsport College, MVU, Massachusetts, since 1992. His extraordinary intellectual achievements resist easy summarization, involving profound and polymathic engagement across the entire range of life and earth sciences,
In addition to archaeological research, mathematical semiotics, anatomical linguistics, and informatic engineering. Trained as a cryptographer in the early 97s, he has spent his life decoding ancient scripts, quasi-biotic residues, and anomalous mineral patterns, among other things. In late autumn 1998, she said you met with Professor Barker in his office at MVU. The following is an edited transcript of Termiti. And I'll just read, this is the paragraph which precedes the so-called transcription. I'll just read what Barker says at the beginning. Tick systems.
Scriptography has been my guiding thread right through. What is Geotraumatics about, even now? A rigorous practicing of decoding. So I haven't really shifted at all in this respect. There is a voyage, but it's strangely immobile one. So he will get about his formation, his intellectual trajectory, and all of this sort of internal lore that the characters have from part to part. But if anyone is interested on this idea of the TX-610 and wants to grasp more fully at what they are attempting here, I really suggest that you might check the passage on Professor Challenger,
which was an actual character from Sherlock Holmes, and it is employed by Deleuze and Guattari in a very, very similar fashion as if he was given a class on the third plateau of a thousand plateaus. I believe that it's something, how the earth thinks. I think the title is something like this, how the earth thinks. And it seems like the CCIU is taking this idea. Of course, you have this... It's very interesting to think of the duplicate here because the twin system, as we talked on ZZ on episode 2, and their whole system, it works with doubling,
with a sort of twin system duplication or pairs, and this is a great part of their avatars and things like that. So if you really want to understand what Charles Barker is about, I suggest that you go through Professor Challengers because their ideas are really similar. so here what they call geotraumatics is how to make a complex pattern which could something that wants to be a super sort of formalization and wants to quantify it and quantifiable so the contradiction is right there
It's a sort of what they call cosmic, abstract, hyper-materialist approach. It is, we can say it is exactly a practical model, but it is like a development of something which was presented by Liz and Guatohi. And like, if you wanted to develop the system, I think you have somewhat a sort of account on how this could work here. Here, and I think it's very interesting also, I know that I'm talking a lot about Landon, this podcast isn't exactly about him,
but I really think it's hard to overlook his hand in this part or his influence because you have the same ideas you see on some texts of Fengenumina you already have there in work here so they want to make like this sort of system that wants to assimilate out of the contingencies It wants to understand on how things works with bacteria and how it works with virus, DNA. And what I take from it, it's like how they want to understand the formation of subjectivity as they understand the formation of the earth, which is highly delirious in Guatahean.
and the trauma here of course has like expanded meaning in the sense of trauma as how it can work on geology, seismographic movement, tectonic plate movement and the formation of the earth through this and it also comes as the more personal or private trauma And I feel they want to get these many registers and these many contingencies and find an abstract model that allows them to tap into these untappable workings of the world. here is what I think that
yes it is from page 114 to 115 and there you have like a description that it can be complemented by the text circuitries by Nick Land which it is tick systems are entirely intractable to subject and object segregation or to rigid disciplinary typologies There is no order of nature, no epistemology or scientific metaposition, and no unique level of intelligence. To advance in this area, which is the cosmos, requires new cultures, or what amounts to the same, new machines. Here you have like a very succinct, I would say, example of much of what Lens thought was and is about.
The idea that the machines can sort of process the stick system and arrive at a new understanding of how the world works. Here we have like a citation of the subsection geotraumatics of Equidna Stilwell. It's interesting to see because Equidna was a part of other episodes. so we see this internal coherence that runs through the book and maybe we can understand this as exactly what ties many it is it isn't the only thing but it's what ties many aspects of the book the characters and how they work through
their own systems and theories. And here they place, on this part, they place an interesting perception on Freud and they make this clear claim of engagement on Freud where it is said. On the contrary, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud takes a number of crucial initial steps toward mapping the geocosmic unconscious as a traumatic mega-system, with life and thought dynamically quantized in terms of inorganic attention, elasticity, or mechanic complexion. This requires the inorganizational materialist retuning of an entire vocabulary,
trauma, unconscious drive, association, screen, memory, condensation, regression, displacement, complex, repression, disavow, identity, and person. So this is the best description of what it would be like to get. In another context, I read like Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and it's a very short book. So if you're interested in Freud, it is really a brilliant and good book to grasp with his thought. and when I read the book I was like well this seems for me like a highly proto-cybernetic approach because you have um I'm gonna make like a very short and vulgar description but you have the
the life drive and the death drive and basically you have like the drives trying to arrive at a sort of stability. So you already have, in some ways, an interesting relationship proposed by Freud between the inside and the outside, the subjective and collective, because as Freud analyzes, and you have a great description of this by Ray Brassier or at the end of Nihil Unbound, where he grabs exactly with some of the ideas of Freud from this book.
And it is said that to create the separation with life, to become a unicellular individual, to make this possible, So the asteroid analyzes and makes a description based on scientific research of his time. To create this barrier, the unicellular organism dies. So you have this very interesting organic and inorganic dimension, which is the main idea that Mark Fisher works through flatline constructs, what he calls the inorganic continuum, what he calls the flatline is exactly
what is dealing with these two things. So these are some of the ways that you can deal with this. I like the description of trauma is a body and their attempts to think of impersonal trauma as a drive mechanism. And, well, I think this is enough for this part because we will comment on it later. And in case you're interested to get the ideas which were treated on other parts, I really recommend for you to check episode two, which deals on previous parts.
and it talks about ZGZ and twin and doubling, which is important here. It is important for his numbering. Go through some of the sections of where they're describing, I believe this is the third part on the AoE, about, yes, about the decadence card play. I will check that to understand what Barker talks about on the last parts of the section, where you have the Barker numbering and the Barker spinal and he shows how to relate the different numbers. It's something that is very simple but I think that tracing these previous descriptions they help us to understand better
how they are approaching from this multitude of ideas. And then finally we have some of, as I've described it on the previous episode some of my favorite passages here it ends with Kutadid and Tale of Cockroach which are the more narrative and somewhat mitological ideas that are worked through here and I really like how these parts are written basically on the part of Kutadid Barker meets a woman while he's in the South Pacific at the Boma woman and
she tries to sell to him what would be like an amulet, a marriage amulet which has the demon cuted it which is a giant cockroach and is bearing a larva of a parasitic wasp and when he asks about what Kutati does the demon have the woman replies Kutaita and he bewired Barker questions and what are Kutaita and she says that Kutaita are things that click or chirp and which seems to be demons but are not we never believe
anything Kutati tell us she's the most weak and and this honest demon, besides her disbelief is the way that she hides. So, I think it's very, you have this idea of this cockroach, which is a sort of trickster and deceiver character and figure, and then you have like, after this happens, you have like a description of Barker about how when he received telegraphs and when he was decoding messages during this mission, many local children went to look for him with amusement. And at the end, one of them said,
Ah, there is no demon. It is another trick of Kutadit. And now we see how it is done. So the children judge his activity of decoding as one of the activities of this demon, which it is essentially a deceitful demon. And Kutaida, as Equidna Stilwell says, it is a pseudo-vital animation. It is a fake life. it is like the it is like someone that is pretending to be alive and this is the whole idea of this demon Kutadid and finally
the moments that we have like the demons or the entities and which are just beautifully written the tale of cockroach I will read this because it's very, very short, but as I talked about on the previous part on Tale of the Frog People, this is one of the high parts for me, the one that I really enjoyed reading, to be honest. As I've said before, it somewhat reminds me of Ursula de Gaulle's writing, or sort of fictional writing that is dealing with this.
And as I was thinking on the structure of the book, I perceived that we have a similar passage since part two, which is on Chatuk, which is another of these demons. and I think if you want to follow this thread of I think you can make like a whole separation publication of these ideas because they are almost self-sufficient they work as a cashmere tales or as mythological narratives so if you want to get to this I think you could go to to
to Chattuck, the Chattuck test at the end of the second part, as well as the Vault of Murmurs, which precedes it, and it ties the whole Freudian and the fictional characters of the CCIU when this mythological aspect. But to go back to the tale of Cockroach, it goes like this. There was a time when Catac and Odub decided to play a trick on Murumur. Let us make a solar gadget that you may think is alive, they said. She knows nothing of the sun, so we can work in secrecy. Soon afterwards,
when Odub was on her way to Catac to carry out her plan, Cockroach, which was a red manny, fell out of the sun and ran past, exactly as if it was alive. Old Dub was amazed and a little irritated. When she reached Katak's lair, she couldn't help croaking sadly. You made cockroach refound me. I thought we were to do it together, but it scampered past just now. You must have started early because it was already very numerous. Katak was at first perplexed, then extremely angry. I didn't make cockroach, she raged. I have been waiting for you here. Somehow we have been tricked. To this day, no one knows where cockroach came from,
except maybe Muhumur, who has never said anything about it. Since then, Kutadir has existed too. Although some say that she existed secretly before, and others say that she has only ever pretended to exist. this is the end of this of part 5 we will get now to I believe that this I want to comment on it but I think that there has been enough and you can see this whole idea of the trickster and the demon communication and the life and death or fake life or illusional vitalism
through only these texts when you have this whole picture in mind. So right now we're going to the second part of the episode where I'm going to talk with my guest about some of the ideas and then go into another discussion that we'll also touch on other subjects. I'm out.
Well, now we're going for the second part of the episode. And today we have our first guest. It's Cassia Siqueira. She is a researcher, a noise musician and a DJ. and together we will be discussing on regards to the text Barker Speaks, some ideas towards the TIC systems, how the CCIU approaches the idea of demons and decodification. We're going to pass them to Susan Stryker and my words to Victor Frankenstein.
and finally we're going to see some of the influence of cyberfeminism and some recent developments which take off from the ideas of cyberfeminism and how we can understand the idea of coding and normativity and systems and communication towards these texts and authors. Thank you for coming here today, Kasia. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here. So first we have the text Barker Speaks, the CCIU interview with Professor DC Barker in this part. We have this sort of transcription of what would be the encounter of the CCIU and Daniel Charles Barker. We have this constant throughout the book in
in which sometimes the CCIU acts as an entity or even as characters or between these encounters, which is something which also happens on the first part. And here, Daniel Charles Barker, as they give very clear to the reader, it's very close to the part of Professor Challenger in A Thousand Plateaus by Leus and Guattari, where Professor Challenger presents the idea of how the earth faints and basically they want to get this whole concept of geotrauma as an initial idea that life could come up from the kernel of the earth, from its nucleus. They have like in the preceding text, Tick Delirium,
they have a specific book which is by Thomas Gold, a scientist, which proposed the idea that at the center of earth there's another biosphere and that actually oil comes from this biosphere and since this the thick delirium text precedes Barker speaks it seems like they're playing well how can we define a way of knowing and understanding through this whole conception that life is coming from the center of the earth which also plays an important part for their Lovecraft influence. So Barker is introduced as this cryptographer, as someone that had, as himself describes, a conservative thesis on noise reduction and synomodulation.
He presents then the idea of gel traumatism as something very close to the way of codification. and he then introduces of what would be the tick or the tick system in a very close idea which we can also find for instance in texts such as nickel and circuitries and you have this description of hyper materialist which i think it kind of gives the whole tone that they're aiming for but there's this whole comprehension of how you can have a pattern or organization or a system or a formula of decoding,
which goes through processes of formalization or processes of abstraction and how you could find something that can't be quantifiable. This is like the whole idea of how you could delineate the TIC system. It would be something which is very hard to capture and yet something that comes from the communication, as it seems on the later parts of the segment of part five. You have this idea that the tick is also a nutrients of a sound. It's the sound made by cicadas and it's the sound made by demons. So this sharing of ideas between communication with demons and how you can make this cryptography of non-quantifiable flows of energy are something that they are sort of building together on the segment.
um so cassia how you think we can understand this this whole sort of attempt of how we can normativize something that can be normativized in the beginning or how we can give meaning to things which are hard to quantify and what do you find about your whole approach to this I think that in a way this whole idea of life being generated from the kernel of the earth and the way that we are forced to comprehend life as this mixture mixture between what is somehow in the way that Deleuze's terminology,
this interplay between the molecular and the molar, we are forced to comprehend life in a way that it captures also the dimension of value and culture. I remember in some fragments, Bob Barker says something about culture demanding new machines. And I think that connects a lot with how value and the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of life, they also cannot be quantified. And this is a quarrel that has been occupying most of axiologic studies
and metaethics and, I don't know, every study that deals in a way with judgments of value and their place in the in a complex system that involves a material infrastructure and a complex network of superstructure that involves language and I don't know, this whole interplay involves a groundlessness that somehow amounts to an impression of ineffability somehow.
This connection with culture is not in the foreground context, but I think that it's somehow what Parker is speaking about it relates to a genesis or it functions as a genetic account of technoculture. And there's another influence which is very strong in this part. And I believe it is, I don't know if we can parse that easily who brought this or not, because as we've been discussing in other meetings,
we also find a good use of Freud in say the plans zeros and ones but we have we know the land has a clear engagement with Freud so I feel that it either comes from him or for her or from both of them which is like this interest that you you want to understand the formation of the word trauma and you want in some way to subsume the personal subjective trauma to what would be the trauma of the earth. And I think that's kind of what Deleuze and Quattahil are also making. Like you can't use trauma only in the sense of neuroplasticity or of how you have like an ego forming or the topology of Freud. You can also link this to what would be the traumatic
in the sense of seismographic and the geological sense of the word. So I think they're aiming at a sort of definition that comes from both of these instances, like how we can understand the formation of the world. And then you have the part of spinal catastrophes, which would be like you have a lot of stress in your body because of the development of the spine. And I think like this is a, I don't know how certain is this idea, but it's interesting to think this on how the determination of evolutionary process and affecting how you have like your subjectivity or your anxiety and to link this, especially with the development of the spine, which is something distinctive in human,
like it's something which marks the human, the capability of, or at least beings close to humans where you have this spine and they also put the spine as something that muffles the sound of the voice. in the sense that like in the top of your mouth you have like this you have your school which blocks the sound of coming out so i think when they want to also pose the tick as the sort of sound communication they're also thinking well it's like your whole school was holding the sound and creating sort of clashing and curious noise like the you have the sort of impediment because in the in the previous uh segment they have like this idea of a contra evolution
yet not being like i want to be a transhumanist which goes beyond but i want to become like an aquatic simple form of being and i thought it was curious like you maybe they call it like negative evolution to go back and to reach another form of being without um going forward necessarily but becoming like a simpler and almost non-individualized form of life. And I think they're trying to bring this. I also agree it's ineffable. In some sense, it seems like the tick system is a system of something that can be represented or captured, and it aims to give the idea that it can, actually, with a sort of esoteric or spiritualist undertones in the sense of the communication of demons.
but I agree it's hard to to see how you could have like a fractability of this it's much it has like a lot of flair in the prose but I don't know if there is an actual working of this in a more applied sense. Yeah I think that in a way the necessity of trauma marks the necessity of dealing with fractured selves and the imminent possibility of having oneself fractured by contingencies. These contingencies are often unmanaged situations that involve material and conceptual constructs. But in the sense of the importance of trauma,
maybe we could talk about a little bit about zeros and ones and how it treats this because i think this idea that the the opening is such a moving passage i found it very strong in the the idea i am part of the sea and that water we weren't individuated and then you have like this climatic changes and then suddenly life starts to develop and and other forms of being start to die and you have like this whole description of how it would be almost a sort of war or as if some of these uh forms of life had retraced themselves because they were starting to die and develop and i i thought it was a very very good description of sort of poetic description of what would be
this geotrauma in action like the development of an individuated life to a sort of human subjectivity and how this entails a lot of then the coding and decoding with it. Yeah, I think it's a compelling image because it puts us in a place where we are faced with the immense array of possibilities of evolution and mutations, of genetic mutations and how it involves a necessary process of conferring criteria to what is being taken as evolution.
And this also can be related to some kind of creating a process of creating a logical point of view where these possibilities are in some way available. So returning to this point of a primordial form of life, it gives us an image of how we can achieve some way of accessing a logical simple in which we can somehow attain a relative mastery of these processes of evolution
and what kinds of technologies these are going to involve. So I think this is a good link between what's the human will and what has been understood throughout history as the human way of dealing with life and death. and not that it is a unifical way, but this cluster of behaviors and dispositions and ideas that involve life and death
and technology as a way to intervene in this relation. yes i think i think that the the tick system is a is absolutely about mastery over what would be absolutely contingency and that's the problem of the system because it wants to deal with absolute contingency and like without the factors at once which is something that no system can do or at least it can we haven't arrived at something which can like have all this data coming from the outside and still process it in the way that they want but it shows like this will the will of a
sort of self-determination even if this self-determination will lead you to like a more primitive form of life which can be sort of embellished in some ways because and i think there is like a lot of disinfiction and i don't think it's it's exactly what they are arguing for because when we have like Sadie Plante's talk of seduced and abandoned, she says like dreams of immaterialization are like masculine dreams of the Western society. And this is not about what cybernetics is about or what we can do with it, what we can understand it. It's how it's a sort of relations or a sort of embodiment. And then she goes through a sort of snippet
of what would be the book, I think, like how the development of women's rights and the development of this growing agency with technology plays like a very similar way of how machines are developing, which is something she does like perfectly well. Begins to like, you have like this account of how she begins making these notes on someone's biography and these developments as the footnotes and commentaries. And then suddenly, not suddenly, but through this process, you have like the first algorithm. So it's very interesting to see as she has contact with technology,
she gains a sort of agency which she didn't have before on her condition as a woman, even like a privileged woman from like a noble class, she still gains agency through this contact with technology and the possibilities it opens to her and there's like a, I think like even a retroactive character to her because she died very young, right, and which makes like it even, I don't know, she gains recognition later and then curiously she began, she's like, her name is used as the nickname for or like the system of communication of the United States. It's this, I'm not sure like the certain institution, but they like name their communication as Adelaide.
So it's very curious to see how one thing, how their image and how her understanding for herself suddenly gets completely overturned with the development of technology as well. And her contributions remains neglected for quite a while. And I remembered a passage that relates a lot with the general thing that we were thinking about for this episode, that relates that the techno and the digital with logic and how the demonic enters into the game. Plants writes that the techno and the digital
are never perceived to run free of the coordinating eyes and hands of logic and its binary codes. But logic is nothing without their virtual play. They are the infrastructure to its superstructure. Not another order of things, but another mode of operations altogether. The matters of a distribution which is demonic rather than divine. Since it is a peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between the gods' fields of action. Thereby confounding the boundaries between properties. And right after, there is a quote from Ada Lovelace's journal, diary, in which she writes, you know, that I am a D-O-D-D animal.
And as my mother often says, she never has quite yet made up her mind if it is the devil or angel that watches peculiarly over me, only that it is one or the other, without doubt. And for my part, I'm quite indifferent which. So I think that connects with the problem that city plans and others raise with regards to the wish for mastery and dominion over nature. because this process of craftsmanship and manipulations and use of technology
must involve necessarily recognition and acknowledgement of death as an enabling condition and inescapable factor of living. And I think that the kind of mastery that is involved in this critique, especially many feminist critiques, are related to some aspiration or ambition or hubris with regards to immortality. So I think these are very linked things.
And also because I remember in our conversation, you highlighting that tick systems involved some kind of game between life and death because the entity somehow fakes its life while dead or the contrary. So I think the TIC system is a way to try to organize this material, but which recognizes the necessary aspects of death that is involved in the whole thing.
Yes, yes, I think this theme of immortality is a very important one. And then for the sort of goal, you have these mobilizing images or concepts such as demons or angels. Like the demon and the angel isn't so different in the sort of perspective. and the sort of beings which appear at moments to give a communication of something that is important. And then it even reminds me of Stryker. In a certain passage, she talks about Shelley's preface to Frankenstein. And she says that he's asking Newtonian questions.
And it's very much like Milton works with the devil as this sort of protagonist or tragic hero. Like I recently were studying Blake. I commented a little bit with you. And it's very interesting how the binary in Blake is something very dynamic. It sort of exists and doesn't exist. Like the difference between good and evil is an error of judgment for him. And then you have like sorts of goods and sorts of evils and they have to exist in dynamic ways, but he starts to go from a sort of metastability. For me, he's sort of the first psychoanalyst in the sense that he says, well, everything that's assigned to hell
is such as desire or bodily perceptions and it has to do with energy. And then he has like this God, which is called Utizen or your reason, which is very demiurgic. and then you have loss which is like the xenogram for soul and it is like this promethenic sort of good god which is in opposition to you years and and years and has like this binding effect on reality it is like fighting against the other gods and then it is input some laws and laws as a reaction is the sort of the energy of revolution and creativity. So you see that you have like this sort of almost satanic figure
as a god as well. And I think it's interesting to see how you have like this tradition of approaching these excluded or villainized entities as a sort of another way of dealing with reality. It's like just another perception or another ethical way of understanding or even another sort of subjectivity, another way of operating in the world. And how Stryker mobilizes this thinking, like in the image of the demon or the monster is very interesting because then the master gains this thing of being in like an eternal state of transition or transience between planes and in a sort of way opening it to other people
because she says, well, if you feel this way, you can remake it yourself, you can find agency in this. So I think this transitory state and this emphasis on a transitory state that the image of a demon occupies renders visible and renders salient the fact that we're constantly under the control of of an image that, as Wittgenstein puts it, held us captive. So I think that mainly the figure of the one God universe in CCRU is a compound of institutions
and mechanisms that safeguards the integrity of an entity, hegemonic image that rules over all of the marginalized and oppressed image that constantly try to emerge and to confront these other images. And the figure of the demon has these, carries these menace to these mechanisms that tries to contain the emergence of conflict and divergence. And because it is constantly reminding us
that every image is transitory and there is no metaphysical guarantees that will unite and integrate completely these different kinds of levels that compose our perception of reality as such, as it's mediated by sociality and this whole complicated dimension in which the very data that compose, for example, aesthetic judgments and ethical judgments and all of this that is traditionally compared to the figure of the demon.
I was remembering of an interview with Grupo de Nune in which Claudio Culesco makes this relation between the demon and the aesthetic judgment. He puts in the interview that finitude, transgression, excess and imperfection are essentially demonical. They belong to the realm of unbeing and becoming. In this sense, there is some sort of demonical presence even in the simplest of actions. such as deciding the position of a door when it is too far from the right or to the left, too high or too low. This is an aesthetic judgment, devoid of obvious causal links and
ratio, measure, or perhaps completely devoid of them. This is an example taken from Wittgenstein's lectures and conversations on aesthetics. So the refutation of the validity of the economic principle does not make us merely arbitrary. To be revealed is the arbitrariness of the world itself, its groundlessness, and the similarities it presents with games in regards to its construction by humans, but also to its self-construction faculty, also known as nature, end quote. So this also relates to our relation with nature and how it is implicated in every activity
that involves construction and manipulation somehow. And it stresses and remarks this inherent groundlessness that marks the loss of the absence of a strong guarantee of how we can delineate or found or describe solid sets of criteria of correction that will endure and stay valid throughout history
history because this is always subject to transformation all the time. So it's difficult to map and it's difficult to create some sort of totalizing diagram and rules of translation that will be correct without variations. And I think we are under this perspective in which we cannot formalize completely what is at stake when it comes to value and to what is the qualitative dimension of life,
something that supervenes biology in some sense, I guess. Yeah, I think that this sort of totalization is something that is impossible. It's always contextual it has to be put in like in this contingent dimension because otherwise as you said it's something that it's only it can be completely subsumed by our perception in some way we can like infer some things through our observation and practice and engagement with these things but like to have like a totalizing and complete systematization of it for me it seems
impossible what also interests me in the demonic identity and how the demon is assigned to to the sort of um place of judgment or aesthetics and in the or in this place of error or in the case of Blake this perception of energy and dynamicity and revolution, it's usually someone doesn't claim a demonic identity by itself, you become, you are ordered by someone and then at the moment that you are ordered by something, by evading some norm or by not assigning to what would be the idea of the one God universe or any sort of norms,
you are ordered because you don't reach that criteria. And at that moment, the judgment from other people play in. And it is this moment that you perceive as the order perceives you that you have the possibility of claiming for yourself, no, I am this. So giving, as Strikker said, an agency or a will or a rage, you can only turn it into a positive only after you experience it as a sort of negation of being part of something. Yeah, I think that this first position as being the other of itself makes us be faced with this decision to this interstitial identity and position.
because as I think Stryker herself says, we are somehow as transsexuals a product of normalizing technologies from medical discourse. But somehow with that recognition that as Sadi Plans puts that we're coming from an impossible place to another impossible place, we're only turning visible that this interstitial position is an inherent character of being human in the first place.
and when people that are usually framed within what is considered a normalized state or normal state or occupy a normal position, they're frightened with the possibility to see that it is all constructed, there is no fundamental link between nature and the way that their set of beliefs and behaviors and dispositions works in an integration as this thing that is called their lives.
and I think this is frightening because everybody is somehow an artifact. So this is scary for some people. I think everyone goes through anxiety when you perceive that you're like constructed and not organic in some way. Yeah, I think that everyone sort of faces this moment of despair and this can come, I think in many, many ways. it can come like as your perception of class or it can come like a certain disillusionment with a religious experience but at the moment that you understand there's something that you in which you believed as given as established is actually something non-natural or subsumed by a high
order then it becomes kind of a freaking because people don't as you said people don't want to face It can be despairing to look at this and I think that's why many images which are evoked from this are usually things which are seen as demonic because it is putting things into question. It is saying like, does it make sense in the moment that someone sees someone that they perceived as the other, they have their own identity in check because you don't have like a seamless process of recognition. You have like a very noise, many sort of fractions, sort of communication process. So I think I can understand because you can go through the sense of despair,
but then usually most people will like, they will strengthen their own perception of identity or their own perception of nature or their own perception of life. Because doubting it, it is painful. It can be painful. it is very liberating, but it is painful. And I think that's why the reaction of marginalized persons in general and other sorts of subjectivities always have this irksome reaction for people because they are questioning themselves. Even if they aren't actively thinking, oh, does my life make sense? I don't know if they're like going to this sort of reaction.
Maybe they can later, but I think the initial reaction is like, no, how can someone be like that? How can someone be like that and in some way be similar to me? I think this is like the key thing. People like they see you and they might have this reaction of rejection, but I think the rejection also comes with a fear of identification or a sort of repressed identification. I think sometimes the sort of reaction comes with this repressed identification where people get so scared of different people, of difference in general. And I think it is the sort of reaction which gives like a sort of psychic dimension to why other people or subjects
or bodies or any sort of word we give to this are seen with this evilness metaphors or images, because it is frightful for people. I think it's more of an immediate reaction. Yeah, I think it is very... the things that you're saying, they seem very clear when we think about the relation between the words that involves phobia as a suffix. And usually the common use of these words towards general behaviors of hostility, because this is not a trivial association between fear and hostility.
Usually fear comes with a reaction of running away or something like that. But usually xenophobia, transphobia, these are things that comes accompanied with a hostile reaction. And I think this ambiguity of fear and hostility and this negation, this denial of recognizing one's own artificiality reinforces a reactive behavior towards somehow trying to protect nature or institutions that are grounded in a
claiming the claim or re-indication of a natural status or divine somehow. Because sometimes the natural and the divine becomes one thing, depending on what we're talking about in terms of institutions and discourse. Yes, I think it often has a sacred meaning, and even when it doesn't have this sacred clear connotation, it has almost desourable connotation around it. Even when people don't claim they are thinking that the nature is divine, they are defending it in a very essentializing way. like no it people it seems like they want to find something which can explain how which maybe cannot
be explained so i believe like they want to have like this automatic automatic and easier answer like ah no if you'll get like a sort of vulgar darkness no it's just the reproduction and and then people put like strange on this or they put like uh envious and then you get well why are you putting like this sort of human emotions on a biological process maybe they're they don't work that way maybe you're framing them that way but it seems always like you have you want to find like a the biological subtraction or as a sort of totalizing answer and comprehensible and a sort of key which only reinforces what already happens in a very clear way and even in people
eat from this sort of trash can of the time because if you're not talking about the religious dimension you have like this pro-science people which argue like this is all the time like for then we're naturally envy and hostile and we can't cooperate in society and that's why capitalism is better and then and then like i think it's very funny because we were like talking about socializing systems and like the tick system acknowledges this and wants to be all abstract and then people come like with the sort of complete substantial of everything no because we are like hostile and angry naturally we can't cooperate in society and then we have to be capitalists because this is the best way to be is to preserve our nature and they don't see the the the
what is the suture behind these operations, how it's very stitched together, not like an organic continuum. I was thinking about this pretension of an absolute status or position of these kinds of images that are usually taken as normal or imposed as normal. And I think the problem is not so much with hegemony. I think it's necessarily comes with an evasion, an evasive attitudes towards conflict.
And this is general, and there are certain mechanisms that are responsible for, and accountable for suppressing these conflicts and eliminating them. And these usually turn out to produce more violence in these conflicts. And this comes in every level, in the discursive level, material level.
So I think that, in a way, resistance towards what usually is depicted as being a menace to the normal or the natural order of things can be framed as a manifestation of what the C.R. Liu calls the One God Universe one more time, I guess. So it is a fiction that tries to erase the fact that there's just fictions. So we're talking about the sort of reaction that people have at the moment that they perceive their own identity as constructed or as artificial as well.
I don't know to say if this could be something like that, but it could be like this sort of minimal crack that someone faces in their own sort of alienation state. Like they have like this sort of alienative state sort of shaken. Because I feel that in some way, even though this usually comes with hostile reaction, I think that progressively as people see more and more people, this can overturn. that someone can, I think that from the start of objection, someone can even perceive themselves as well as others in a certain moment. It can like, it can really awaken a sort of different perception of gender on people or on identity in general, I believe. This is totally possible,
and I think that this is one of the main goals of trying to master these kinds of processes that are difficult to master and that involve sociality and relation with people with values. Because this turning from objection to an embrace of difference and the fundamental transitory aspects of the forms of life as grounded in language use and in our relations with people. these movements from objections to identification, I think this passage can be mapped somehow.
I think that we have plenty of historical data regarding how these processes usually happen. And I think that the importance of having hegemony as a valuable aspect of playing language games that involves the resolution of conflicts and the resolution of problems that involves oppression and the struggle for equality involves a lot of persuasion.
And this persuasion is a collective achievement and goal that involves in the first place rendering visible the fact that the image that one has of the use of terms and concepts and ideas are just images and they have the structure of an image it has transformable links between between other beliefs, other ideas, other concepts. When you see that it is inherently transformable and susceptible to changes,
you can have a lot of different reactions to it. But one of those is this identification with the transitory. And I think that movements of expansion towards the place that becoming and unbecoming and the constant interplay between these things. We can persuade people to see that these things are happening all the time. yeah it is it is a complicated set of questions that that's why most people don't want to to keep asking them even themselves like in a personal level because
it is it is a structure sense of self it is like uh i'm acknowledging that i'm rebuilding and this and this is like something very hard to do it can be uh once again deliberating but it's hard and you have to do of course you will find a community and you find other people and identification and you share a certain sense of belonging but yet you have to do a lot of work for yourself and a lot of and a lot of this is hard on many many aspects of self-life like I don't want to throw this because I know it is a sort of joke between uh like a certain circle of ours but it is in some senses and I can think because I've been reading it it is like how to lead
a philosophical life for Plato or something like that how to get out of the cave it is painful and and I think more than to get out of the cave there's like a certain part of the dialogue where Socrates says well don't you think it's like the ethical function of this is someone that went out to the cave to go back and try to persuade more people to go out and I think this is like is a very very good idea or image on how we can understand this because it is something of this sort which happens like you enter in a place and persuade or to show another form of life and you have all sort of reactions as Socrates himself says you can end up yourself killed in this process but it's you have like the joyful affirmational side of it which i think
with all the darkness and demons and everything that comes with and rage it is certainly something good to feel and it gives you sort of a power you didn't have and you didn't know you had and that's and that's maybe part of the fearful reaction to it because having power sort of it gives you sort of pride once again because it has the responsibility and how you treat the others and everything that it comes and it's hard and yet very seducing in this. Yeah, I agree a lot. And just one quick thing that I remembered that I thought that it is also symptomatic that
Socrates was condemned by corrupting the youth and that this movement of this corruption of the youth can be correlated with this movement of return to the cave somehow. So I guess these are correlated things and this is the usual reading of the situation by the status quo or the dominant state of things and those who claim nature as a necessary substrat that supports all normative configurations, I'd think. We will now play one of Cassia's tracks. As I said, she is a DJ as Diane Tardou V and a
the nice musician as Novi Morto. I'll make sure to put the link of her works as a musician together with the episode so you can access it. And this track then is by Novi Morto. It is a part of the album Discografia, I mean, 1996, 2003. This track is 7, Sem título, arroba Avenida Brasil Bangu, 27 de janeiro de 1998.