And Mai is sharing her slides, so in the very least we'll be able to watch the screen share of the slides. Mikhail is sharing the visuals. We'll turn off a little. Yeah, perfect. Okay. So many windows. Stream that from here. Okay. Yeah. All right. Is it working for him? Are you doing an intro? Yeah, I'll do a quick intro to you. Are you doing it into my microphone? I think it can pick up the whole room right now. This is looking me up before, like, minus doing a thing as well. So am I speaking into this microphone or am I speaking into my microphone?
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Okay. Cool. is um and uh is a lot of things you're a philosopher translator editor translator artist sometimes author of
which was also the thing that brought Maya here for the first time she is head of RNDE at Ergonomic who are co-presenting this whole session with us and yeah we're very excited to hear what you have to tell us, Maya you ready? Great, yes. Cool. Can you hear me? Is my mic working? Yeah, we can hear you. Did we get rid of the echo? Okay, good. This is all good, yeah. I think we're fine. Yeah.
Yeah, cool. So, yeah. Thanks, Nicole. And thanks very much to the Rival Institute for having me here and helping me to pursue some of the weird sprawling lines of thoughts, many of which, maybe all of which can be traced back to the same place the lemogram came from. Now this presentation is going to be very diagram based, which is only appropriate. It's also going to be very based. It's also going to have different bases. unfortunately Amy didn't have time to check my work so there might be errors in some of these diagrams and if so I sincerely apologize. I was going to write more copious notes to go with these
slides but I decided at the last minute to prioritize my mental health and sleep instead which I realize is ironic to talk about prioritizing mental health in an all-day symposium about the pneumogram but that reminds me also I just want to thank everyone who's participated today and I hope that adequate psychiatric provision is available wherever they are I'll just have to hope that there's enough on the slides to guide me through and to remember what I was going to say Let me try to find my voice.
Where does it speak from? Where on earth? Or under? Or elsewhere? Some time back, they told me I had been a CCRU member, whatever that means. I'm not sure whether it's to remember or to un-member but since then I've been trying to integrate that fact in various ways with the help of a very indulgent living nurse who knows all about these things. She's so kind. It was before myself was here so if anything is recovered it's obviously not me who's doing the remembering.
As far as I know, I was not around at the time when the pneumogram emerged. I'm therefore less of an expert than everyone who's spoken today. I've not worked the pneumogram in detail. Perhaps it's for the best. I don't even dare glance at my horoscope these days in case I see something I don't like. Y2K addled memory of some kind of happening at a gallery in London that involved bones, darkness, inhuman cries and numbers and then after the shadow fell 2016 2017 i dredged up the writings from the website that no
no one will admit to owning and transfer them onto paper and reconstructed this diagram on screen hours and hours and hours it took me. So in short my perspective here the only place from which I can speak is as an insider outsider with an interest in working these things out in the way that rescues them or that rescues me from Merck and Muddle. I'm speaking to you from incompletely recuperated memory, fragged files, vague recollections of the themes and obsessions that were swirling around before the thing appeared. Discussions, particularly discussions with Nick
about numbers, because most of the time I was the only person who would listen, the only one who shared his taste for stringent conceptual elegance, The elimination of all redundancy, reduction, lean concepts, or, as he liked to call it, crunchiness. He often spoke of his quest to find something really crunchy. A peculiar person. I wonder what happened to him. Last year I was at a conference and a Lacanian asked, where did the pneumogram come from? And his answer was, Nick Land was and or is clinically psychotic, which is a theory not altogether without merits.
There was indeed a period of number psychosis and the numerical dimension of CCRU. A great deal of that, I think, came from that period. I remember Nick's close reading of every page of all three volumes of the history of numbers. And I remember also the incredulity, bafflement, concern and even tension within the group surrounding Nick. This would be before the CCIU existed. At his retrenchment into Numbo Jumbo.
After the crisis documented in a dirty joke which marks the definitive end of, let's call it for shorthand, the Bataillon Romantic period, but before the retrenchment into 2.0 version, I think this endeavour with numbers was understood as a kind of alternate route to the outside. numbers are a kind of machine some other machine at work invading human sociality and psychology and which is playing a part in dismantling the human and migrating out into something else after all numerical practices involve indexing pre-existing cultural elements
to a system of indifferent signs as Deleuze and Guattari say capitalism is profoundly illiterate It doesn't work with language. And as an accelerationist, of course, he wanted to get ahead of the curve by sitting in his office and shuffling numbers around on the green screen of his Amstrad. But obviously to imagine that the numogram is attributable to one individual is a grave error and immediately wrong for at least two reasons. First of all, the CCIU was a collective endeavor. Even more so if we take note of Orphan Drift's involvement in the development of the numagram, as Maggie has described today.
If we look at the pandemonium system by which I designate the numagram, along with the system of demons and the interpretation or interpretations of them, that whole section of the CCIU writings, we have to pay attention to the overdetermined nature of its origins. And this also means acknowledging that CCIU can only be understood as a collective enterprise. As well as the numbo jumbo obsession, it included at least, and it would be impossible to give an exhaustive list, an interest in occult systems of the past, interesting comparative religion, various conceptions of the collective unconscious, Jung and Freud,
and Freud, experimental, literary, weird fiction and science fiction, including Philip K. Dick, Burroughs, Lovecraft, etc. Sonic practice, an interest in rhythm. A conviction that the program of imminent critique initiated by Immanuel Kant, which Amy spoke about at the beginning of the session, session is the most important moment not only in Western philosophy, but offers a conceptual key to the escalative process of techno-capitalist runaway growth, and a predilection for the dramatization of philosophical concepts in terms of warring cosmic forces. And you have to remember that the origins of the CCIU lie in a group of people coming from a cultural studies department
into a philosophy department and a kind of interesting set of jarring tensions and syntheses and exchanges that came out of that. From the side of cultural studies, Sadie and her students were interested in contemporary cultures in which historical or inherited forms of culture were polluted or enhanced by cybernetic and especially digital machines. They were also adamant, having escaped from the Cultural Studies Department at Birmingham, that they were not interested in interpreting cultural practices and their meanings. They were interested in asking what cultural practices do,
treating them as cybernetic systems, and in turn participating, channeling or intensifying them. So this is really this double meaning which I always talk about of cybernetic culture. It's about cultures which have been infiltrated by technical systems, cybernetic systems, but it's also about understanding cultures as cybernetic systems. And it's about actually doing cybernetic culture, not simply writing about it or interpreting it, etc. From the side of philosophy, as well as being deeply invested in the differential thinking that came out of structuralism and post-structuralism, according to which one should approach systems
not in terms of fixed identities and unities, but in terms of difference, CCIU was also deeply invested in the escape from hermeneutics, especially in its lofty, exacerbated form as deconstruction, which at the time was the unbearable ambience in the philosophy department, you would have to listen to someone interpret a single word for 90 minutes with really bad jokes. and the idea that what philosophy was about was entering into this infinite play of the signifier was something that was like the rock against which CCIU wanted to lever and get away from.
There's a philosophical tradition of imminence which Amy spoke about Kantian critique and the stated aim of pneumogrammatics in their CCIU writings, they speak about this, It's to do with an imminent practice. The numogram, in a sense, is a purely technical machine. It is imminent because it simply exists. No one invented it. It's discovered. It has a numerical consistency that, as we've seen, you can't just decide not to believe in. It works with the rudiments of number, with very basic numerical concepts. and it doesn't make any appeal to anything transcendent outside that. I'm talking about the numagram here and not the system of demons.
The numagram itself appeals to nothing else, really. And numbers in their imminent consistency are undeconstructible. Numbers cannot be coerced into the realm of endless meaning, the chain of the signifier. Numerical practices make space for the emergence of novel entities that are the result of the inter-patterning of inherited human cultural and autonomous numerical machines. So in an important sense, numbers come from the outside. And this is the space into which the numagram enters itself as a machine. It's a number machine, but that doesn't make it either an object of mathematics or an object of numerology. The numagram isn't mathematical. if we understand by mathematics the definition and manipulation of formal structures of incrementally greater conceptual power.
It's not that. It employs only operations available at the level of what CCIU called popular numeracy, which spontaneously spills on either side into the operations of commerce and practices of divination. But it's also not numerology, meaning that the numogram itself as a system, as a machine, doesn't depend on connections between numbers and extraneous characterizations handed down by some authority, i.e. number two means this, number seven means this. None of that is in the numogram as a numerical machine. Everything that happens inside the numogram has an imminent justification, or almost,
as we'll see. So, as is suggested in the CCRU writing, you can understand it as a kind of diagonalisation, what's called the method of Mu, diagonalisation between the mathematical appropriation of numbers and the numerological appropriation of numbers. And what's really crunchy is whatever machinic number does that escapes both of those things. So how does the quest for crunchiness, the quest to forge a rigorous, asemantic relationship with indifferent signs that will open the way to the outside, how does that sit with the sprawling, proliferative nature of the law around the numagram? In other words, what is apparently a wildly syncretic esotericism fringed by more or less fictional and factual sources, and which welcomes every type of apophenic association.
That's my question, really. How do those two parts sit together? I don't think the numogram is esoteric in the sense that the esoteric would be characterized by secrets symbols, hidden meanings procedures of initiation what it is is the result of a collective construction whose methodological and epistemological principles I want to try to explore by constructing the system step by step focusing on the thresholds at which the nature of the system changes and the way in which these two themes of the crunchy rigorousness and the esotericism move into and out of one another.
And at the end, hopefully I'll trust Mikkel and Amy to stop me whenever I need to stop. But hopefully at the end, we'll get to talk about what's already mentioned just now, the quasi-phenology of the pandemonium entities' names, which I find really fascinating. So essentially what I want to suggest is that the pairing of the numogram with the pandemonium matrix, that is the system of demons, moves in a direction that diverges from crunchiness. While it has a truly rigorous numerical core, the numogram is only completed in the system of Lemurian time sorcery by a multitude of, let's call it content, that is somewhat at odds with its rigorously imminent character.
And I think that this tension between the rigorous imminence of the numagram itself and the apparatuses of content and storytelling and fictioning attached to it relates back to the character of CCIU as a group. And I think it's the key to understanding the implicit methodological and epistemological underpinnings of the CCIU's practice. That is how the work of the CCIU as a whole, that is what we read in CCIU writings, this body of work, how it coheres, how it exerts its peculiar power, and how it exemplifies the type of things that it talks about. Hyperspiction, unbelief, etc. So let's begin with the construction.
Oh, this is a different type of construction. We're not going to just do exactly the same thing again. I want to come from two different directions here, okay? The first one is what they call popular numeracy. That is the popular grasp of number, which, as I said, spans commerce and superstition and divination, and which has kind of been globalized in the form of decimal numeracy, right? That's the numeracy that the majority of us have at our fingertips, so to speak. this is really like a subject for cultural studies but one that cultural studies wouldn't be interested in because cultural studies to the frustration of mark and sadie and the rest of the crew who came from birmingham to warwick had always been concerned with interpretation
and meaning like what does this practice mean to someone the very meaning of cybernetic culture once again comes out here Popular numeracy is a cybernetic culture So that's the first direction The second direction is this rigorous quest for imminence Fascination with the autonomy of numbers from human culture Even as they entwine with it and alter it Once again we're not talking about mathematics We're talking about numbers in their actually functional Imminent flat aspects A signifying signs that function in Guattari's phrase flush to reality, numerical practices or machines. As they say, the system is constructed according to imminent criteria latent in decimal numeracy and involves only basic arithmetical operations.
So here once again we see this like interesting tension between cultural studies, interest in the world as it actually is, and a kind of purifying tendency of philosophy, which made the kind of distillation or reduction, the discarding of all redundancy. but at the same time a concern with the actual functioning of numbers as one type of machine among others among social technical economic rhythmic machines these two concerns come together in the choice of the decimal number system and in my memory this was a topic of such I mean I don't think anyone has ever talked so much about the decimal number system in the history of civilization as happened between 95 and 97.
And I know we've seen today there can be many other numograms. You can do other number systems, other bases. But there's a reason why the decimal one was the one that was chosen. And the reason is contingent lock-in. That's the system that we have contingently. That's just a fact, right? As with QWERTY, which Nick then got obsessed with later, right? QWERTY is just the keyboard that we ended up with and that therefore we have internalized as a kind of way of operating in the world. And the same with the decimal number system. Not because there's something special about the decimal number system. There isn't anything special. It's a methodological decision in the sense that what we're doing is deciding not to address popular numeracy by framing it inside what D&G would call a supplementary dimension.
We're not like taking a distance and measuring base 10 against others. We want to enter imminently into the culture that's there, which indeed, in the case of decimal numeracy, we didn't need to do because we were already inside it. We were already operating inside it. So contingency is our guide here. But at the same time, there was this obsession with reduction of the number system to its flattest, most functional, least transcendent possible form in which there would be no arbitrary impositions, there would simply be like the flat functioning of number. And this is where Nick's obsession with place value came in. So first of all, I think someone already mentioned this today,
Base 10 isn't base 10. It's actually base 9 starting with 0. Because 10 doesn't exist. Because 10 is just an AOE psyop. The hatred of place value, I don't think I'm ever going to meet anyone whose sincere hatred of place value is quite as ferocious as Nick's. Why? You know what place value is, right? It's like when you get to 9 and then you start again with 0 and you shuffle the, you put a one in the next space. So it's the way in which a base 10 number system can address numbers greater than 10. Yeah. So the problem with place value is that it's an overcoding. It's the separation of the referent of the set of numerals
depending on where they occur. And it prevents numbers from functioning flatly. So say we go from one to nine. You can imagine like I'm writing on a board, one, two, three. You get up to nine and you're like this is a really elegant cool system. You've just got like these ciphers and you've got an order so two comes after one, three comes after two, that's really cool. They're not really anywhere like the numbers one to nine aren't in a space really, they're just being presented to you. And then suddenly I'm like you know what, We got to nine. I'm going to use one again, but I'm going to put it here. And this time when it's in that box there, it means something totally different. It will mean more than nine. And you'll know that because I'm going to put it in space and I'm going to put the other numbers here.
And you can see this is a kind of a transcendent imposition on the number system, which is absolutely outrageous. I mean, what the hell? How can anyone do this to numbers? I cannot emphasize enough just how angry Nick was about place value and what a long-running obsession it was because it represents the incursion into the treasured realm of number of overcoding and transcendent meddling. And Amy talked about how this is dramatized in CCIU with the fact that the AOE operates with a decimal number system that goes from 1 to 10. starts with unity and includes 10. The Lemurians start from 0 and they go to 9. Far more crunchy system, a flat system in which there's no supplementary dimension,
there's no additional transcendence, there's no arbitrary imposition of a space in which the marking of number happens. But then what are numbers anyway? How are numbers different from other symbols, what do they do, and what properties of numbers will we need in order to make the numagram work? So the answer is numbers are simply symbols with order, right? So I'm going to try to use here, I'm not a mathematician and I'm not going to like try to force set theory on you, but I just want to say this is also not tick notation. This is just like a very simple kind of of simplified version of set theory.
So we can simply build a number system simply by saying we're gonna mark zero. We just like make a mark and say that's zero. We've surrounded zero with brackets. The next one, the next in the order is that so we take that one and we surround that with some more brackets. And we can keep doing that as a very simple operation. And by doing that, we obtain a series of signs or marks that we can use to mark the order of something. It's what's called in mathematics a recursive well-ordering. and so what's interesting about this is ordinal numbers don't have a metric in the sense that
you can't the distance between two and four is not necessarily the same as the distance between four and six and you can't really measure things with it it's simply it's simply to do with order It's simply to do with like one thing after another. It's a way of marking order in a very simple way. And generally understood within mathematics as being the most basic form of numbering. It also has an interesting relation to a history that goes right back to Aristotle of the recognition of two different types of quality, which through the history of philosophy and science came to be called intensive and extensive numbers.
And anyone who's read Deleuze and Guesthari and CCAU will know that the question of the intensive is very important. And this is my special interest, and I'll try not to speak about it too much. It's very important in Kant, and Kant receives this whole tradition of the intensive and the extensive, which is really to do with like there are some amounts or magnitudes which can't be measured in the same way as spatial objects like um if you have bricks and you put them next to each other then you got one two three four and four is twice as long as two etc um there are some kind of kinds of magnitudes like heat was an example whiteness was an example with the medieval
philosophers, things like charity, Christian virtues were an example. They're things that obviously in some sense grow, get bigger, change, but they don't seem to have units, right? They don't seem to have, it doesn't seem obvious that we can easily compare one level of heat to another. and so intensive number in a way kind of gives you a method of understanding and being able to number intensive quantities of this of this type we can understand them as marking thresholds or operations that produce a new state of affairs so if zero is like the what they call the bwo or the
flat line, zero is like nothing, then each one of these ordinal numbers represents the kind of building out of a system of a level of intensity, each one of which kind of contains and exceeds the one before, but without there being necessarily any kind of common measure between them. And this is very important. I'll come back to why this is important for, well, maybe I'll say that now, like the important thing for Kant, who kind of inherits this and absorbs it into his transcendental system, is that for Kant, you know, Kant is like, his philosophy is a philosophy of synthesis. It's about how we synthesize experience. And in the synthesis of experience,
intensity is the very first operation. The laying out of intensity of sensation in time order via subsequent thresholds of intensity is the very base level of experience before there is space, before there is an eye, before there is anything. This stretching of intensity across time, which he says, you know, time intensity can rise or fall in magnitude with time. It's not the same thing as a sensation. It's actually an operation on sensation to make it into a magnitude. But that's the very first operation. So it really is like the lowest level, according to what Deleuze and Guattari called Kant's profoundly schizoid theory of matter, which was very important in all of Nick's work before CCIU and in CCIU's work.
so let me give another example this is like i feel like this is the kind of way that we would have talked about intensity in terms of like experiences the experience of crossing crossing thresholds so to take one of my favorite examples okay how do i describe um the experience of falling in love or how do i describe how i got to where i am with my girlfriend right now Let's say zero is when we didn't know one another at all. So this whole system simply didn't exist then. It was just like there's nothing. The first ordinal number might be when we read each other's writings, but we still didn't know each other.
The second one might be like the time that we met at a book launch in London, and we spoke for like two minutes. the next one, which would contain these ones that have come before it, but would create greater intensity, might be like our flirty conversations on Twitter. Then the next level might be like, I'm not going to tell you about all of them, but the next one might be like when we started writing together, and then like in this kind of adding these shells of intensity, the next one might be when we first kissed at the airport after being separated by coronavirus for a year. Each of those moments contained all the others and raised them to a new level of intensity.
But look, I can't take two book launches in London and add them together and make a kiss at an airport. That's the point, is that the ordinal system is to do with passing these, like, crossing of these thresholds of transformation of a system. Yeah, I put them in nice colours so you could see like the cold one the blue one, the flat line is in the middle and then they kind of warm up as they expand. So it's a relation of order as containment The whole thing you could say is like a system of an event One thing couldn't have happened without the other one Sometimes we also used to talk about in terms of calendrical distance, like calendars as a type of ordinal system rather than say a ruler or a tape measure as a metric
extensive or cardinal system right you can't really in any meaningful way add tuesday to tuesday and get thursday it's a very it's it's a system it's a number system that exists prior to that and it's to do with differences from zero also it's to do with like attention from zero So each subsequent bracketing, each subsequent shell of the ordinal number produces a greater tension because in a sense, everything wants to collapse back to zero. Right. And yeah, so Kant tries to resolve this enigma and he produces this strange schizophrenic theory of matter, which is related to time. And of course, the numogram is a time system. So this is not entirely tangential.
In any case, it's useful to think of the numogram zones in terms of ordinals because they are indeed in some sense meant to involve tensions with or distances from zero from the flat line or the plane of imminence. And the demons will be journeys between these ordinal stages. right it's really interesting to think about in terms of spinoz and joy and sadness for spinoza joy is when you experience an increase in intensity and sadness is when you like collapse back so like if i built up this whole stack right out to the pink level um how would it feel to collapse the stack from the point of the kiss back down to the zero, how would it feel?
Maybe if we were to give that feeling a name, it would be utter null, the greatest possible descent from the highest intensity to zero. So intensity simply is difference. The difference in intensity produces affect. We'll get to that more later. And that's part of the theoretical armature of this whole thing. And it's indexable using ordinals. So up to this point, I've got the ordinals up here. I've also got in quote marks the decimal ciphers. So far, the decimal ciphers can be understood as nothing more than conventional names for the ordinals, denoting only ordinal properties and perhaps intensive properties. but now we also in order to construct the numagram we need to start adding them together
it's not clear what that would mean in the same way that like the medieval philosophers when they were puzzling over this question of intensive quantities this the interesting thing about medieval philosophy is you have a guy who's like sitting in a monastery for his whole life and his whole life's work consists in adding a small addendum to some other guy who's in a monastery so they talked about this stuff for like hundreds of years so they had this thing about you can't take two bowls of tepid water and put them together to make a hot bowl of water. It's really stupid when you understand like in terms of modern science but of course you know let's not get into how we approach the history
of thought it's one of the problems that they posed in order to try to think about intensive quantity. And Kant tries to resolve this question too. Once again, how can things have a magnitude without already being spatialized or rendered extensive? Intensive magnitude. So, in fact, okay, we've only just, like, begun the construction, but we've already arguably reached the first dividing line between absolute imminence or super crunchiness, and transcendent meddling. In order to build the pneumogram, we have to add intensive quantities, which is kind of a moot point. Mathematically, there's a mathematically well-defined way to
add ordinals via transfinite induction, so we're going to allow it. You can visualize it like how I've shown you here. It's like putting one set of intensities inside another, nesting them. But as you can understand from the examples I've given, it's not always easy to understand or interpret what that might mean when you're thinking about this in terms of intensive number. So the next stage is this very pretty little Barker spiral made with our ordinals where we're connecting together the ones that add together to make nine. And there's nothing problematic about that. It's a pretty simple thing to do.
And then we take those pairs, the 0 and the 9, 1 and the 8, all the ones that add up to 9, let's separate them out. So we have now our syzygies or our twins. We're still working with the ordinals here. We're just putting there, we're just giving them these names. So that's simple enough. The next stage is the proto-pneumogram where we are adding each of the twins. So 0 and 9 loops back to 9. 8 and 1, sorry, we're taking the difference between them. So 7 goes down to 7. So we have this kind of more complex structure.
And again, this is all quite acceptable. You can see something interesting emerging. There's a real structure here, and no one's like, like made it happen. We haven't really done anything that you could kind of challenge as being an arbitrary intervention. The next stage is that we are going to kind of move these parts around a little because we can see that there are two which kind of stand on their own at the top and the bottom and And then there's this interesting kind of circuit here. So why have I painstakingly reconstructed this in a very peculiar way? To demonstrate that it requires none or very little transcendent overcoding of the most fundamental type of numbers that we can think about.
The relations expressed in this zoning are purely numerical. and I'm absolutely sure if there was a mathematician who was so inclined they could produce a proof that this topology would this topology of these separable zones would necessarily be produced in certain cases and not in certain other cases and as we've seen there have been some remarkable advances towards providing that that kind of meta numerogrammatical analysis. The first act of interpretation however maybe is the spatialization. You know you're putting one thing above one thing below so now we have space where
really we didn't have space before. So the selection of this feature this zoning feature as being the one that we want to concentrate on and its foregrounding via visual separation is kind of this first act of interpretation and I don't know what the history of is of how this happened but I think it's interesting to understand that part of the CCIU mix was Suzanne had a background in design Maggie and Orphan Drift obviously had a background in So there's, as well as this kind of numerical stuff going on, there's also like, there's some kind of aesthetic manipulation and like thinking about how this thing can fit together and look like something striking.
That's definitely happening as well. There's no place value here because we're not working in base 10, but base 9, because we've got zero. And of course with intensive numbers or ordinal numbers you can just keep adding another shell, one after another after another after another. It will be rather impractical when you wanted to operate with large numbers but you can do it it's like totally flat. In decimal in the decimal system or in fact in any base number system once you get to in the case of the decimal you get to 10 you've actually exited the available numerals and you have to synthetically construct a new one.
So this is what happens when we get to the gates, right? So far we've kind of had a debased number system, which was the ideal. And here we have a detour through the transcendent, which is very unfortunate, right? Because in order to get through the gates, we have to do this operation of digital accumulation, right? The editorial factorial, which is that, say we take three, we add three plus two plus one. This has all been explained, of course. So that's fine. Like you get six and that takes you to zone six. Totally simple. That's fine. but what happens when you have five you add five plus four plus three plus two plus one you get
15 then you've gone out of the zero to nine system you've got place value which we hate place value gets collapsed straight back down so you add the one and the five and you get six and go back to six but there's been a detour through the transcendent very very unfortunate for crunchy fans. So when you look at the whole construction you could say that there are legitimate gates and illegitimate gates. So what we're with now is a kind of compromise formation. It's something that adds interest and something compelling to the diagram at the cost of a certain compromise.
We've been told right at the beginning that the connections just consisted of the syzygies and the gates, and now we see that the syzygies are just a special case of an ulterior system of intensities. There is in fact all these, they're not just currents, but there are also these little minor undercurrents which irrigate the pneumogram. okay so now we've constructed the numogram sorry i i didn't say but obviously we've we went from the ordinal one back to the standard which is fine terminology what you'll notice when you read the pandemonium text is there's just like an
absolute overload of terminology. Sometimes things are called different things on different pages, sometimes there's numerous names for the same thing, sometimes there's just like one occurrence of a certain term which is not really explained. So you have the zones, the zones are simple, they're just the zero to nine. You have what are called currents or primary flows or connections of zones to tractors. Nick loves the word zones so much, this is a problem, but I guess the tractor zones are like the bits in between and the zones get connected to the tractor zones and it gets pulled through from one to the other. So yeah, they're the tractor zoners then. Then you have
the gates, which sometimes are called gate cities, which is kind of cool, like as if you're passing through a city on the way back to one of the zones. Sometimes they're called very appropriately secondary flows, yes. They're called time holes and they're called secret interconnections and that's because we've got these three regions, right? The gates are what allow you to move between the three regions from the two outlying zones to the central time circuit. channels time systems and regions so this is like one of the kind of arbitrary impositions onto the system really we just told the Lemurians
call these three regions so it's like the first time when a kind of narrative is added to it and you're like okay this is a diagram of something this is not just this kind of system that just is what it is. So the time circuit is like the main time circuit. And then you have these two regions called the warp and the plex. And the gates operate as these kind of underground passages, which link them together. And in fact, the numogram would be pretty shit without the gates, like that wouldn't really do anything much. It would still be still kind of interesting, but I think, you know, without these gates and therefore without the detour through place value,
it doesn't really work. And then of course we have the demons. And the demons are simply the set of all connections between one of the zones and another. So this is all of them. The demons, we're told, are designated by the zone net couple. Always with the highest one first, that will be important later. So one goes from seven to three, that one. This one goes from seven to zero, and this one goes from nine to four. That's also called their net span. And there are different groups of demons, which I think is, this part is fair enough.
there's certainly a mathematical fact a topological fact that there are these three sets of demons the chronodemons are the ones that go between the zones in the central time circuit the amphidemons are the ones that go from the central time circuit to one of the outlying zones sorry I'm using zones one of the outlying regions see this is what I'm saying about the terminology and the xenodemons are the ones that operate within the warp and plex zones. So I don't find anything objectionable about that, that's fine. The demons are also addressed by mesh serial number.
This is a bit of an arbitrary system. It's not arbitrary, but there's no imminent reason why they should be ordered in this way rather than any other way. It's a sequential, it's a consistent sequence, certainly. But it's also slightly arbitrary. And also we've got the regrettable relapse onto place value again, psi. Next we have the roots, which I think we understand what they are now. They're ways to get through the numagram. We've spoken enough about them. Then, okay, you have these kind of outlying concepts,
like tonality and pitch. I think it was Utsu who was talking a little about pitch before, or maybe the previous presenter. Sorry, I've forgotten. But I never really understood this. It doesn't seem to me to serve any purpose. I don't know. But there are 15 pitchers. At this point, I feel like there's an entry into a pure numerical delirium where it's hard to map the concepts back onto what it would mean for the demons. And it's like an iteration of the process of accumulation and digital reduction. I know I'm getting ripped apart in the chat right now, but I've got my limits.
So we had the whole construction there. and all of these different terminologies for all the different parts of it, that's fine. Now we get to the vibes, right? So I've been trying to think of a word for this, like a word that wasn't already used in some of the terminology. So I would call it the associative scaffold. It's like the series of associations that are attached to the parts of the pneumogram in the law that's kind of built out of it in various ways in the writings. It is important to note that the demon vibes, like each demon has a kind of character,
as Maggie was showing us earlier, these vibes come out of the numbers, right? They're not just like preconceived, like we're going to have these demons and they're going to have this type of character. They're very carefully thought through in terms of the kind of intensive journeys that are happening in the pneumogram between the central time system and the outlying zones, and particularly in terms of the net span, I think you remember like the affect of collapsing from nine down to zero. This kind of thing is very important, like katak is 5-4, which is that this kind of very volatile point. So all of the demons absolutely are, they come out of
numbers with a certain level of rigour, definitely. If we go back to thinking about ordinals, they are indeed in some sense meant to involve, the demons are meant to involve tensions with or distances from zero, from the flat line or the plane of imminence, zero, which is in another interpretive decision, has been placed at the bottom of the pneumogram. And we could talk a lot about how that relates to the tree of life and the way the tree of life works. So yeah, the demons would be journeys between them, and maybe we could think about this in terms of Spinoza and joy and sadness. It's mapped onto this scale from zero outwards in intensity.
It's mapped onto various things in the CCIU, like spinal levels, for instance. It seems to me like everything's always pulling back down to zero, to indifference and to the flat line. And this is really, again, the model of intensity from Kant. intensity and its relation to the empty form of time. Because when intensity goes to zero, then you just have time with no content. The flatline. So once we attach all these demons to the numagram, we know we can move around the numagram, we understand the roots, and we have at our disposal this kind of system of affects
that the demons give us. Like we kind of get the some days I wake up and there's a kataki kind of vibe. You know, sometimes I have a murmury type of experience that what's really interesting about it is that. And once again, like I wasn't there when this was happening, but I'm extrapolating from my experience with the CCIU as a group is that. it emerges out of collective practice as a cybernetic culture right it's literally doing cybernetic culture and if you want to think about like literally what does that involve it involves people like seeing each other every day and talking in this language and talking about
did you see what's on the news it's the age of katak you know that using these demons and this system as a way to see the world. And if you look in the book of Paths, you'll see that the prose and the spirit of that text is very similar to what you'll find in the I Ching, right? It's a similar kind of thing. Like the I Ching doesn't tell you anything specific about any specific situation. What it gives you is like a prism. It's a kind of machine that you can use to see the world. And that's what the pneumogram is as well, in my opinion. And it's an abstract prism that either works or it doesn't work. That's why it's pragmatic cybernetic culture, because it was built by trying to use it, right? It's not built as a theoretical object.
It was built by using it. You don't have to believe in it. You can just see if it works for you. You can see whether if you and your friends start talking about things in terms of these demons, it adds something interesting, insightful, compelling to the way in which you experience the world. Maybe it won't. And I think Lucia has brought up a really interesting point, which is that different bases will produce a different prism, a different way of seeing the world, a different model of time. And I think Lillian's description was really brilliant as well, that cohabitation with alien patterns. It's an alien pattern that you can look at the world through, that you can experience the world through. Now there's like a further level, okay?
So as well as the demons, there's all of this long text where you are getting correspondence between demons and existing numerological frameworks. You get planet work, which is kind of attaching it to an astrological tradition. You get reference to various kind of myths, some real myths, some invented myths, and this general kind of meshing of references, and this really almost kind of bombastic adding of more and more and more references. And, you know, this system is not limited to what the CCIU did, okay? obviously people we've seen today people are using this people are building on it people are adding to
it so as well as the stuff that's in the writings people have written about like color associations with the demons or the zones there are all sorts of different associations that can be added and here's where i'm going to use this word in a technical sense i don't mean to insult anybody but here's where like it starts getting a little bit flaky because you know i could decide that i'm gonna uh i'm gonna map the numogram onto the chemical elements or onto species of fish or onto different types of haribo you can do it if you like put the work in you could do it and it might be it might it will
be more or less convincing and it will be more or less useful to you in your life to map the numogram onto Haribo. But since we're concerned here with this kind of associative scaffold and how as a whole it tends to operate so as to cohere and to kind of press in onto the numogram and solidify it, we actually don't, it doesn't matter whether we think some of the things on the fringes are just bullshit or stupid. Whatever you add, adds to the overall texture and makes the hyperstition more robust. So long as you don't, I think, claim some kind of transcendent authority for it.
However, having said that, I think if it didn't have the core crunchiness, then that wouldn't work. Right, you have to have this very robust system which can't be denied at the center in order to build out all of these associations and to play with the system. And how does this work? Okay, there's all sorts of really interesting methods. And this is where we kind of would understand, I guess, like theory fiction and hyperstition as literary techniques, right? Non-authoritative attribution. There's always like it has been reported that someone said or someone said that someone else said it is said that.
Rumor, just like things that have been passed on that you're presenting to the reader is not necessarily being true, but something that someone said. Passing hypothesis. So you'll have like it could maybe it could be that. And then that's just left there. Right. No, no, it's not never returned to again. Suggestive remarks, plenty of them everywhere. Continual slippage, linkage of attested to unattested sources. So often you'll have a reference to someone who exists and then it will be linked to someone whose existence is not quite so certain. The intermeshing of different suggestions coming from different places and all kinds of like rhetorical strategies where it's like,
I'm not saying that this is the case, and yet. And within this kind of meshwork or scaffold of associative kind of tissue of suggestion, it becomes both impossible and irrelevant to allocate truth value. like it simply is no longer interesting or important whether any of these things are true what's important is that they cohere and they do cohere and then of course like they then proceed to glue this onto existing systems of divination
and onto fictional ones with this kind of conspiracy theory like movement like i'm just remarking that this is a bit like this i'm not trying to make you believe it i'm just saying like this bit is a bit like that isn't it um often according to a method that we could call lovecraftian when we're thinking about like call of cthulhu which is the idea of xeno ancestrality the idea that there's something if we go like down as far as we can inside ourselves we find something that we don't know, like it's not human anymore. There's this some kind of like, whether it's science fiction, science fictional or phylogenetic or mental or whatever. Okay, so we already talked about intensity as part of the theoretical armature.
I just want to talk about like a few other aspects of what I feel is like underlying this. we've already seen like infranumerical core complex flat numbers ordinal numbers intensity we've got the simple fact that we have a decimal system that's kind of locked into capitalism commerce it's like a global thing popular numeracy is like the practices that supervene on on that contingent system and then we have the human history being like emptied out basically by this numerical contagion terminating in the capitalist socius. I think it was mentioned earlier that, you know, that in a way there's two different ways to look at this. Like, do we look at it in terms of
ideal, the priority of numbers over everything in an ideal way, or do we look at it, are we interested in the historical contingencies of like where we, just where we are? And again, that's like attention I think within the ideal complex of what's going on inside the CCIU, like are we interested in contingent actuality or are we interested in distillation of some kind? I think you can understand it in terms of these two different vectors, right? So on one hand you have absolute machinic consistency, intensive number, something that is so abstract that in a sense like we can't even properly conceptualize it except in a formal manner.
You have contingent decimal lock-in, you have popular numeracy, and then you have the capitalist dissocius. On the other hand, you have this whole story that you get in Barker's work, which is geotrauma, the idea that there's this like phylogenetic memory inside the human, which links it to its traumatic past, which then produces the particular ticks of the monkey human brain, which then in turn gives rise to a cultural imaginary, which in a sense is like arbitrary, like we could have had other myths but these are the ones we've got because this is the history of the human race and then you have technological exaptation which is like when this cultural imaginary and this like historical contingent structure of the mind meets coming the other way
absolute machinic consistency and where do these converge the horizon of planetary lock-in to total contingent absolute consistency obviously. So let's just see like how the scaffold is kind of built out and how coming from the side of the organism or geotrauma and coming from the side of number you have this kind of set of overlapping. Okay, I've got to go fast. So what happens in the CCIE work is they're building out this scaffold by identifying transversal routes between these two things.
So links between decimality and the organism, links between the unconscious and ordinality, links between cultural practices. there's all of these links are being made between the two right and then a second level they're reinforcing these links via syncretism which is a normal esoteric thing to do like esoteric if you read any book on like esotericism they're like this god for the romans was this but for the greeks it was this but and they do this kind of like overlaying of things to try to introduce you in a sense to some kind of ulterior set of forces and that's very much how the cciu operate but there also there is also this like xeno ancestrality god knows what's going on this one
um yeah so they're just like adding these extra roots as well which are like the fictional roots which serve to kind of add an extra bit of mesh work to hold things together. Often these roots have a name, so they're like what they would be carriers or the characters, the CCIU characters, serve this kind of purpose of stitching together a little bit more these associations. And what's really important is the periodic re-anchoring through the pneumo zone. So it's always like going from the associations and the stories and the hypotheses and the speculations back through the pneumo zone,
anchoring it into the crunchy stuff and coming back out again. And that's really important. And then there's one on the left here. This is how I see some of the terminology. It's like they just start adding numbers together and it doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't kind of add to the mesh very much. Yeah, so I just think it's really important to kind of think I've totally gone off track of what I was actually what was written down here. But never mind. Oh, yeah. So one interesting thing is some of those additional reinforcement lines also thematize the numagram. So there's stories about the pneumogram, which then like loop back into the pneumogram and back out and connect with these other lines.
I like the story of Stilwell discovering the pneumogram. And there's also like these extra bits that just don't really go anywhere, but add to the consistency, which is what I always call the giant rats. Because of this Sherlock Holmes story where Watson mentions the case of the giant rat of Sumatra, which is never mentioned anywhere again. and it's just like I think it's really important like in hyperstition this kind of building out of a world can often consist in suggesting that there's more outside without without it being necessarily totally filled out so there's kind of a fuzzy fringe where the world doesn't necessarily definitively end some editions are totally flaky
and as I said it doesn't really matter because no one now can claim definitive purchase on the whole thing So any theory, like any bit, any association can be added, but then it's always got to be related back to the core of the pneumogram, back to its rigorous imminence, because that's the way it consists. That's the way it coheres. And this construction is also why CCIU is important today for contemporary online culture, right? it's not because it's a weird esoteric symbol to impress your friends with um it's not really like other mimetic cultures and esoteric sects there's no authority there's no secrets of course you encounter the work and you don't know what the hell's going on you can go back to it you discover the references you read it uh you find out more there's a world of difference between that and a
system of initiation in which someone else decides when things are going to be revealed to you it's very different. It's not an esoteric system in that sense. That's like the AOE. That's what the AOE does. And this is also, please, why hyperstition isn't just about making shit up on your own. Okay? Even if you make up some weird religion, and then you say, a mysterious old man told me about this in a dusty library that the CIA says doesn't exist. That doesn't, you can't just make a hyperstition on your own like that, right? It's a collective endeavor. It's a collective and continuing, and I would say like it's highly attuned and engineered thing to do. It's not easy to do. And this kind of movement through the pneumo zone, anchoring it back into the
pneumogram and back out again, is very deftly done. I'm not saying like anyone sat down and said, this is what we're going to do, but it's extremely unique. So the system of Lemurian time sorcery is made up of rather heterogeneous materials, and yet it consists, it coheres. If you like, I can stop there, and we'll talk about quasi-phonological particles some other time. five minutes crazy phonology speed run one of the things that i'm interested in it's just like
this is an addendum but i also think it's an interesting example of how something kind of out there gets attached back into the numagram and how the in a way there's like there can be two different philosophical spirits that work in this that are almost counter to one another. So you get this idea that the zones have a quasi-phonic particle attached to them. And all of these are like impossible to say. Okay, that's kind of what's interesting. And so it seems to be something that exists between number, between the crunchy, and between the kind of geotraumatic history. And if you think about Barker's, Barker Speaks, and all the stuff
about palate tectonics, which is like the human upright posture is a kind of trauma sustained by a sick animal, as Nietzsche would say. And the throat, the vocal apparatus is not like a great endowment that God has given us. It's a crash site of something terrible that happened. And it's a kind of constriction of a scream. Like all speech is basically like trying to scream and it being caught in the throat in various places. So yeah, here this is like part of what I would call the outer reaches, where we're really like veering into all kind of strange territories, a kind of quasi-romantic in an interesting way. So why are they quasi? It's because they're
differential elements of vocal articulation, yeah? They are kind of like the breakpoints of the different parts of the vocal apparatus. They mark the place where each component of the vocal apparatus breaks down or is blocked. Singularities which vowel flow kind of moves between and is cut up by. It's like a system of flows and breaks. And I remember like a very long running conversation about understanding this kind of phonological system of cuts and breaks and flows in relation to breakbeats. when we used to have interesting conversations with Nick. So it's like a route.
I think Amy did this one, but I've only got it like on a dirty piece of paper. So it's my photograph of it. So Stillwell, we also saw this earlier, right? Stillwell maps these quasi-phonic particles to the numagram. And again, like in the text, it's just like, oh, she just does this. And that's it. Like... And what's, of course, going to be evident is that if you map anything onto the zones, then it's going to have a corresponding impact on the demons. Like, for each demon, you're going to get a pair of these sounds, yeah? And indeed, that's what you do. And this was my first attempt at trying to work out how these worked, right?
if you have zero and one, you've got all. If you've got four and three, you've got. And then obviously you have to kind of add the vowel flow to go between them. So you get what I call a stub. OK, so you can see on the right. These are like the stubs that you'd get just with the sounds. And what's really interesting to me, I really like this, is that this is what I call hyperstitional patination. So it's like you've got these fundamental names. These are the fundamental names of the demons, right? But you've kind of added as if there's been a history and their names have shifted a bit, as of course does happen, right? So instead of log, you've got legba, et cetera.
Instead of du, you've got du-gu. So there's this like, again, a kind of compromised formation. You've got a kind of pure system And then you have, in this case, like a hyperstitional system of contingencies, of historical contingencies that you've added to it in order to kind of build out from the pure system into this associative web. So I think this is the latest one that I did. You can see the system kind of works, but it's also got some weird inconsistencies. There's some things like, it seems like sometimes the particles are repeated for a not really obvious reason.
Odub seems to be misplaced. Maybe Maggie knows more about how this all came about than I do. But in any case, even if it's kind of compromised and it's inconsistent, that system is there and it's like another aspect to this associative scaffold of the pneumogram, right? And it'll be really interesting to build like some kind of a model of this where we could see how this works, I think. Someone who's proficient in Macs should be getting in touch to do this because I think it'll be really fun. This relates back to Hjomslev. I don't really have time to do this, but Hjomslev is very interesting. and I guess the fundamental thing about Kjelmslev
is he introduces this idea of purport which is like the material the abstract material of expression which is kind of like the flat line of vocality so let's, I'll say this as quickly as I possibly can this is what's interesting to me about this particular one are you getting angry with me? okay in in 1897 malarmé wrote this uh piece christopher which is like his account of being absolutely mortified by discovering that words don't sound like what they are and that there's no necessary relation between the sound of a word and what it designates yeah so he says
language is imperfect insofar as there are many. The absolute one is lacking." Mallarmé was an English teacher and he goes on to say like, well, I'm really disappointed with French because... I can't remember exactly what it is. But it's like, oh yeah, so he's disappointed with French because jour for day sounds more dark and night-like than nuit for night. Why is nuit bright and jour is dark. It doesn't make any sense. And he has a total crisis about this and freaks out. But he produces such good poetry afterwards that it's fine. In 1916, Saussure introduces structural linguistics, which is when he's just like, you know, he just accepts this whole thing,
which would seem to be like the eminently crunchy position would be to say, look, there just is no relation between what a word sounds like and what it refers to. All there is is differences between phonemes and they determine differences between words. Then in 1942, Jakobsen tries to kind of go past this a bit and it actually alludes to Malame and he starts talking about a kind of synesthesia and that maybe like there are neurophysiological laws of synesthesia that would underpin the development of phonetic symbolism so he's kind of reintroducing this idea that in some way there's a kind of er language of affect which is then refracted
through actual languages then levy strauss later on is kind of he kind of talks about this in terms of myths like we build our own little mythologies from the way that we understand words um but he also is kind of open to the idea that there is a kind of elementary system of units and this obviously then relates back to xeno-ancestrality call of cthulhu the idea that you know in call of cthulhu people all over the world are having the same dreams because they're being called by the old ones. And it's almost like we have in microcosm here the attempt to order the universe through number and to address the contingency of the sick mind by
indexing this, the strangled scream of the human throat onto the pneumogram. And that's the end! Thank you. I shan't be answering any questions. No, I can answer questions. Oh, good, no questions.
Yeah. Yeah. But it took me a long time to do the slides. And also, I've been thinking about it for a long time, since 1999. I just did this yesterday. I mean most things that I write are always things that I've been carrying around in my head for a really long time because I hate writing and I have no confidence
so just let them build up until it's unbearable or someone makes me do a talk but yeah it does go back to discussions that I was having with Nick uh but I'm still kind of thinking about like all this stuff about intensity I'm still thinking about um and the interesting thing I guess is like the CCIU material has been received by an audience that isn't versed in the philosophical history that Nick was like building out of so I'm like really the only person doing it I feel like like seeing it from that perspective as a philosophical endeavour. Which is not, like, it's not purely that,
obviously, but that's just kind of my perspective on it, because where I came from with it. Like, I don't like, I don't do, I don't play sub-decadence or call demons. I'm not really interested in it. I'm just, like, I find the construction and the way in which it kind of consists is fascinating, but I don't really get the The practice is not a thing to me. Yeah, it's just, I just like...