SUBLUNAR SPACE - chora

Close Encounters with Placeness: Enter the Zone

2020-05-30T16:00:00+02:00

v.3.0

Chōromanteia

"Contingency needs place," an idea we concluded with in the second part, echoes a distant, ancient wisdom. Let's pause our discussion on Randonauting and turn to Ancient Greek philosophy, where similar concepts were explored thousands of years ago. This reverberating thought leads us to a passage from Timaeus, a philosophical dialogue by Plato.

Timaeus ponders the nature of the cosmos, distinguishing three primary constituents: the Forms, representing ideal states; the copies of these Forms, which constitute physical reality; and the receptacle or space where these copies exist:

The third type is space, which exists always and cannot be destroyed. It provides a fixed state for all things that come to be. It is itself apprehended by a kind of bastard reasoning that does not involve sense perception, and it is hardly even an object of conviction. We look at it as in a dream when we say that everything that exists must of necessity be somewhere, in some place [topos; τόπος] and occupying some space [chōra; χώρα], and that which doesn’t exist somewhere, whether on earth or in heaven, doesn’t exist at all. (Timaeus 52b)

The distinction between topos and chōra in Greek, as indicated by the bracketed terms in the English translation of Plato's Timaeus, reveals a much more nuanced understanding of 'place' that is deeply embedded in the language, offering insights into the conceptual framework through which the Ancient Greeks viewed the world around them.

Topos [τόπος] refers to a specific, physical location, a tangible point or area in space that a material object occupies at any given time. It is characterized by its independence from the entities and objects it hosts; a topos remains what it is regardless of what resides within it, focusing on the exact, measurable aspects of place as understood in a conventional sense. Several English words derive their roots from the Greek word topos: topic, topology (study of place), topography (writing about place) but also utopia (un-place) and dystopia (bad place).

In contrast, chōra [χώρα] represents a broader, more abstract concept. It is not just a location but a nurturing space or field that allows for the emergence and existence of localities. Chōra transcends mere physicality to encompass the relational and contextual dimensions that imbue places with meaning and significance. It provides the environment within which things come into being and interact, offering not just room but also a contextual framework that shapes the identity and essence of what occupies it.

While topos can be seen as the concrete coordinates where entities exist, chōra suggests a deeper, more dynamic interaction between space and the entities within it, emphasizing the entanglement of context and being. This conceptualization invites a richer, more layered understanding of place, not merely as a backdrop for action but as an active participant in the shaping of reality.

In colloquial ancient Greek the term 'chōrai' was used for countryside, rural settlements - outspread but at the same time considered central. In Ptolemaic Egypt, Alexandria was described as 'polis' while the rest of Egypt was considered 'chōra'.

Chōra is dynamically involved in a thing's being and as such is ontologically essential to what the thing is. It is 'place' as expressive, as a keeper of memory, imagination and mythic presence.

In Plato's Timaeus the term is used to mean the 'receptacle' (hypodochē) onto which ideas are in-formed or in-scribed to make their particular copies that occupy and give shape to the 'kosmos' or 'world':

Not only does it always receive all things, it has never in any way whatever taken on any form [morphē] like any of those things that enter it. For its nature is to be a matrix [ekmageion] for all things; and it is modified, shaped, and reshaped by those things that enter it. These are the things that make it appear differentat different times. (Timaeus 50b–c)

Chōra remains essentially un-determined, characterless, formless, amorphous. It is neither intelligible, nor perceptible. It is a third kind (triton genos), where order emerges from chaos, coherence from disassociation, sense from nonsense.

The Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎), a preeminent Japanese philosopher and the founder of the Kyoto School, is renowned for his pioneering work that merges Eastern philosophical traditions with Western philosophical inquiries, particularly through his exploration of concepts such as "pure experience" and the notion of "place" as a foundational element of reality.

Kitarō Nishida's philosophical inquiries led him to critically assess the ancient Greeks' conceptualization of 'place,' finding it lacking in 'logical independence' or 'agency.' Unconvinced by their treatment of place as merely passive or incidental, Nishida embarked on developing a more dynamic and foundational concept of 'place' or 'basho' (場所) in his work. Unlike Plato's understanding of place as a mere receptacle for forms and entities, Nishida envisioned 'basho' as embodying self-formative formlessness—a primordial nothingness ('mu') from which all being ('yū') emerges.¹

For terms to interrelate, there must be a place (basho) that establishes their relationship. Physical things relate within a common space or, in terms of physics, a force field. And phenomena and acts of consciousness relate within the field of consciousness (ishiki no ba 意識の場). It is within that space of basho that we see consciousness and its object co-relating. 'Basho' is the standpoint vis-à-vis reality, the most concrete entailing the non-distinction between experience and reality, before the dichotomization between subject and object or the distinction between ideal and real. At its most concrete level, presupposed by all other levels, basho envelops and encompasses all a prioris, mental acts, categories, contexts, and perspectival horizons that constitute the world of objects.⁴

Nishida's 'basho' is an active, generative void in which the apparent dichotomies of subject-object, form-matter, and predicate-subject are reconciled and coalesce. Within 'basho,' these distinctions do not precede interaction but arise together, in the very act of determination and becoming. This conception positions 'basho' as a living, creative space that underlies and gives rise to the manifest world, presenting a space where differentiation occurs not apart from but within the continuum of existence.

Building on the discussions of Plato's concept of Chora and Nishida's Basho, it's fascinating to see how Carl Gustav Jung's exploration of synchronicity intersects with these ideas. Throughout his life, Jung sought to understand the mechanics underlying the phenomenon of synchronicity, culminating in a perspective that unites the psychic and material realms:

Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irrepresentable, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.⁵

This 'one and the same thing' is neither 'psychic' nor 'material' but prior to their differentiation. He named it: unus mundus ('one unitary world'), borrowing the term from alchemy. He might as well have used 'chōra'.

The Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva introduced a concept to psychoanalysis known as 'the semiotic', akin to Freud's unconscious 'drives'. It encompasses bio-physiological processes and is linked to the musical, poetic, and rhythmic aspects that exist before structure and meaning. Adopting Plato's 'chōra', she termed it semiotic chōra to denote the initial phase of psychosexual development, where humans are closest to existence's pure materiality. As children learn language, they transition into the symbolic realm, yet elements of the semiotic persist within them.²

Kristeva's semiotic chōra represents a pre-linguistic, pre-Oedipal stage in human development, marked by an undifferentiated, fluid state of being. This concept draws on the notion of a primal, instinctual connection to the world, a space where the emerging subject is not yet defined by language or social structures. The semiotic chōra is characterized by its emphasis on the non-verbal aspects of human experience—emotions, sensations, and the primal ties to the mother. It is a realm rich with potentiality, where the future subject's experiences are mediated through bodily rhythms and movements rather than through symbolic language. Kristeva suggests that while the transition to language and entry into the symbolic order are necessary for socialization and identity formation, the semiotic chōra leaves a lasting imprint on the psyche. This foundational layer continues to influence how individuals relate to the world, manifesting in artistic expression, dreams, and the unconscious flows of desire and thought, underscoring the complex interplay between the biological, psychic, and cultural dimensions of human existence.

In a sense this concept mirrors similar ideas Nishida attributed to chōra:

[For Nishida] the human body, mirroring the place of the world, is itself a chōra. As a microcosm, it takes part in the self-forming of the cosmic chōra. Both world and body, as macrocosmic and microcosmic places, are chōratic. [...] For Nishida, the individual body is the place of the existential contradiction between life and death. [...] [T]he mirroring of the cosmos's self-formation in the human body is simultaneously man's own active self-doing. [...] The human body is implaced and contextualized within, and mirrors, the world of meanings and its further implacement within an ever-receding and endless amorphous chōra sinking into the earth.⁶

Dance of Matter

Let's return and try to apply this mysterious placeness of 'chōra' to our field of inquiry: randonauting. Philosophical concepts such as the one revisited might seem like mere metaphysical speculations, detached from our everyday reality. Let me show you that is actually quite real: randonaut journeys often leave us with an uncanny but familiar feeling of the world being 'alive' and places somehow 'knowing' our most private thoughts. But if we accept the fact that our epistemological construct of a duality between 'world' and 'mind' is erroneous and follow Jung, Nishida, and Plato into an 'unitary world' where a chōra ceaselessly gives birth to meaning manifesting in ideas and material reality, then synchronicities seem much less 'weird' and rather a sign of attaining a healthier and more real sense of self and place.

Anthropological accounts of human societies with an 'animist' worldview bear witness of embodied human experience and living in an 'unus mundus.' Before getting into one such account, let's quote from a research paper called Explorations in Animist Materialism by Harry Garuba to try to define more rigidly what is meant here by 'animism' in contrast to popular 'colonial' misconceptions of the term:

Perhaps the single, most important characteristic of animist thought — in contrast to the major monotheistic religions — is its almost total refusal to countenance unlocalized, unembodied, unphysicalized gods and spirits. Animism is often simply seen as belief in objects such as stones or trees or rivers for the simple reason that animist gods and spirits are located and embodied in objects: the objects are the physical and material manifestations of the gods and spirits. ... Within the phenomenal world, nature and its objects are endowed with a spiritual life both simultaneous and coterminous with their natural properties.⁷

Tim Ingold reports how the Ojibwe, an Anishinaabe First Nations people of Canada and the northern Midwestern United States engage with the world:

Mainstream Western philosophy starts from the premise that the mind is distinct from the world; it is a facility that the person, presumed human, brings to the world in order to make sense of it. When it is not busy making sense of the world, during ‘time off', it dreams. For the Ojibwa, on the other hand, the mind subsists in the very involvement of the person in the world. Rather than approaching the world from a position outside of it, the person in Ojibwa eyes can only exist as a being in the world, caught up in an ongoing set of relationships with components of the lived-in environment. And the meanings that are found in the world, instead of being superimposed upon it by the mind, are drawn from the contexts of this personal involvement. Thus the dreaming self in its nocturnal journeys, far from taking a break from the demands of coping with reality, sets out in search of meanings that will help to make sense of the experiences of waking life.⁸

In an 'animist' worldview neither 'mind' is something outside of 'the world' nor is 'meaning' added onto it, but both are immanent in the intentional engagement, in perception and action, of living beings with the constituents of their environments. Both 'the world' and 'its inhabitants', dwell in, engage with, and even embody a constantly self-forming formlessness: 'chōra'. Again paraphrasing Nishida:

Instead of simply being projectors of meaning on the world, we are born into that world of pre-given meanings receding into non-meaning. Meanings are contextualized, and these contexts are contextualized by the succession of further hidden contexts withdrawing from our grasp. In negotiation with that everreceding environment, we are also actively shaping contexts and meanings as well. But as meaning-giving and receiving subjects, we find ourselves thrown into that contextualizing environment, enveloping the flux of contextualized realities. Eventually the contexts and meanings sink into the a-meaning of nature, earth, contingency, and finitude with which we must come to terms.⁹

Randonauts constantly interact and communicate with the chōratic unconscious that connects everyone and everything, material and imaginal. I believe that using randomness from a QRNG serves as acknowledgement of the fundamental principle of contingency and by sending an intention out and getting a location back, physically moving to that location, finding meaning and perhaps requesting another location, randonauts give 'biofeedback' to the larger field of consciousness that surrounds everything. When chaining random points by going to suggested places and generating more entropy from there for a subsequent coordinate the randonaut kind of gives the 'spirit of place' co-agency in modulating our intent for generating the next point.

It feels like a dance between the individual consciousness and body and the chōratic consciousness field and its body, which is the physical world itself. It very much resembles the notion of 'place in movement' that Nicoletta Isar discussed in her analysis of the Byzantine discourse of the term chōra. The term designated the space that is the 'matrix of the Incarnation', the dwelling space of the uncontainable God, a space 'which occupies space, and does not occupy space'.

There is a sense of movement contained in the Greek word chōra, which is linked to the verb chōrēō having two senses: first, it means to withdraw (give way), to make room for another, like in the Homeric Hymns: "The earth gave way from beneath (gaia d'enerthe chōrēsen)". The sense is of withdrawing, while inscribing the space in its withdrawal. Chōrēō means also to go forward, to be in motion or in flux, like Heraclitus said when he referred that nothing in the world remains still, but rather everything moves (panta chōrei). According to the context, the word chōrēō indicates either a movement with the sense to go forward, or to retreat, withdraw or recede, in both cases having the effect to "make room for", generating a particular kind of space. [...] The discourse of the Byzantine chōra space is the discourse of its trace, which appears only in the movement (chorōs). [...] Chorōs (chōral dance) was a performative means that gave structure to the sacred space of the church, and by which the sacred mystery (the Eucharistic rite) was enacted. Chōra space is as much about movement as it is about containment; it is a contained movement or a moving container. True to its etymology, the Byzantine chōra space is a space in expansion and movement.³

Isar suggests that the chōra was a sacred space of presence and 'presencing', a verb rather than a noun. This was not a mere physical extension of space, but a living body of liturgical experience, hence the type of realization of sacred space was the dance, chorós. Whereas a space of 'sacred containment' suggests a distinction between 'contained space' and 'container', those terms actually stand in the way of sacred space that makes room to the power of creative imagination.³

Enter the Zone

In the act of randonauting, it is often the journey to the coordinate rather than the place found at the coordinate that feels 'thickened' with synchronicities and meaning. The 'sacred space' a randonaut encounters while moving about in 'diviner's time' is distributed along the contingent pathway of the randonaut journey and allows a participation of being in the wholeness of the universe and in 'Being' itself.

This reminds of the "flow" state of positive psychology, a term coined in the 1970s by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi to describe the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time. Another term that is commonly used for "flow" is "being in the zone". In terms of randonauting it is even more appropriate due to its nature as a spatial descriptor.

Zone comes from the Greek word 'zōnē' which means the peripheral belt of contact between the womb of the mother and the body of the child. The womb can be seen as a symbol of chōra. The word 'zone' evokes a sense of liminality and temporality. That's also how it is mostly used: for a continuous area that differs in some respect, or is distinguished for some purpose, from adjoining areas, or within which certain distinctive circumstances exist or are established.

During the practice of randonauting one enters 'the zone' - not only in a new-agey psychological sense of 'flow' but in the very sense of the various liminal capital-Z 'Zones' that have been popularized in cultural discourse, literature and film:

It is in a way the Temporary Autonomous Zone envisioned by Hakim Bey:

It lies at the intersection of many forces, like some pagan power-spot at the junction of mysterious ley-lines, visible to the adept in seemingly unrelated bits of terrain, landscape, flows of air, water, animals. But now the lines are not all etched in time and space. Some of them exist only “within” the Web, even though they also intersect with real times and places. Perhaps some of the lines are “non-ordinary” in the sense that no convention for quantifying them exists.¹⁰

In a sense it is the same Zone that Thomas Pynchon described in his 1975 novel Gravity's Rainbow where the term is used for occupied Germany in the anarchic weeks and months immediately following the collapse of the Third Reich. Former national boundaries have been obliterated, the armies of the victorious Allies are jockeying for position, entire displaced nations are on the move, spies, black-marketeers, and free-lance adventurers dodge back and forth across the ruined landscape. But the collapse of regimes and national boundaries, it turns out, is only the outward and visible sign of the collapse of ontological boundaries.

The Zone is often the site of the ontological shifts which occur in these diegeses. [...] What the Zone permits is a collision between worlds and thus between different ontological states. In the Zone "a large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an impossible space"¹¹

It is also the interzone that William Burroughs writes about in his masterpiece Naked Lunch: a vast, ramshackle structure in which all the world’s architectural styles are fused and all its races and cultures mingle, the apotheosis of the Third World shanty-town, where the edges between the wake and material world are indistinguishable from psychotic and paranoid daydreams and where it is not even clear whether is is a real place or an imagined one.

Also the "Upside Down" in the Netflix Series Stranger Things is in a way such a Zone. JF Martel wrote in his essay Reality is Analog:

The Upside Down that we experience has a subaqueous, vegetal texture. It doesn’t seem an ethereal "echo of our world" so much as an even more earthly version of it: overgrown and murky, wild and visceral. Its topography is that of [the town in which the series takes place,] Hawkins, with the same woods, houses, and swimming pools; only, this is Hawkins without its human apparel, Hawkins restored to primeval forces to which it has always belonged. It is this primal nature that is right next to us though we don’t see it, as the [Dungeons & Dragons] game manual suggests. The Upside Down is the non-human aspect of the human world—the primordial stratum of instinct and the unconscious hiding beneath the dayworld of rational subjectivity.¹²

Most of all it is the mysterious Zone from the brothers Strugatzky's novel Roadside Picnic, an area that - after some unexplainable event called 'visitation' got infested with deadly phenomena and littered with mysterious objects with various properties whose original purpose was incomprehensible by humans and so advanced that it bordered on the supernatural. The only people exploring the zone illegally are legendary freelance agents called stalkers, hunting for strange artifacts to sell.

That's the Zone for you: come back with swag, a miracle; come back alive, success; come back with a patrol bullet in your ass, good luck; and everything else—that's fate.

The story has been beautifully turned into celluloid by Andrei Tarkovsky in his epic 1979 movie Stalker. The main protagonist who is one of these explorers leads two archetypal but broken figures, the Writer and the Professor to the center of the Zone to the legendary 'Room' - entry into which, it is rumored, will grant the wayfarer the fruition of his innermost desires. It is accessible only to travelers who have survived the invisible terrors of the 'Grinder' anomaly.

Here is a scene from the movie when the protagonists enter the zone:

What is beautifully similar to randonauting is the way the stalker journeys through the zone. He cannot go in straight lines and direct paths, but has to carefully traverse the territory in circumambulions and by means of following randomly thrown metal bolts. The stunningly beautiful landscape is contrasted with the wayfarers anxiety as they wander from bolt to bolt. The stalker constantly warns his companions of the utterly contingent dangers around them and it is never quite clear how much of that paranoia is actually justified and how much of the danger is actually real or imagined. But eventually it does not matter, because it is already the the overly humble and respectful journey through the zone, combined with the the mindful hyper-awareness and paranormal expectations of the travellers that turn the zone into the zone: an enchanted living place of contingency and magic.

Just like the stalker, the randonaut traverses the zone, from random point to random point, searching for anomalies and artifacts. Randonauting is an act of re-enchantment of the world, or rather of the reality tunnel that prevented the individual to see that the world is, has always been and will always be a deeply enchanted and weird place. It also opens one's eyes to the reality that 'life' is not the 'spectacle' sold to us by 'empire', but the magic that happens everyday when we pay attention to it by going about our journeys. Tim Ingold beautifully articulated a notion of 'life as lines':

Contrary to the assumptions of cartographers and cognitive map theorists, life is not contained within things, nor is it transported about. It is rather laid down along paths of movement, of action and perception. Every living being, accordingly, grows and reaches out into the environment along the sum of its paths. To find one’s way is to advance along a line of growth, in a world which is never quite the same from one moment to the next, and whose future configuration can never be fully known. Ways of life are not therefore determined in advance, as routes to be followed, but have continually to be worked out anew. And these ways, far from being inscribed upon the surface of an inanimate world, are the very threads from which the living world is woven.¹³

It is an almost initiatory gnosis that randonauting brings about on multiple levels of reality: from the expansion of a personal reality tunnel, sudden awareness of the false dichotomy between mind and matter, to facing the contingent and ever flowing nature of life itself that will always evade predictability no matter how much we are determined to contain it in any kind of humanly constructed pattern or 'stasis field'.

Shoutouts to T & E, Dax & Occulture, the RSBerlin coven, JF & Phil, Comrade & the Randonauts, and the Nyx of the Spree

Part 1 | Part 2

Krummel, John W. M. Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place. Indiana University Press, 2015. pg. 204 ↩
Schippers, Birgit. Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought. Edinburgh University Press, 2011 ↩
Isar, Nicoletta. Chorography (Chôra, Chôros, Chorós)-A performative paradigm of creation of sacred space in Byzantium. In: Hierotopy. Radunitsa, 2004. S. 36-38. ↩↩
Ibid. pg. 25 ↩
Jung, Carl Gustav. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. Collected Works Vol. 8. Princeton University Press, 1970. par. 418 ↩
Krummel, John W. M. Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place. Indiana University Press, 2015. pg. 205 ↩
Garuba, Harry. Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society. Project MUSE, 2003. Academia.edu ↩
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000. pg. 101 ↩
Krummel, John W. M. Nishida Kitarō's Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place. Indiana University Press, 2015. pg. 205 ↩
Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z. Temporary Autonomous Zone. Ontological Anarchy. Poetic Terrorism. 2nd edition. Autonomedia, Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. pg. 110. hermetic.com ↩
Bukutaman, Scott. Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction. Duke University Press, 1993. pg. 163 ↩
Martel, JF. Reality is Analog. pt. 3. metapsychosis.com] ↩
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000. pg. 242 ↩

Close Encounters with Placeness: The Odds

2020-05-29T16:00:00+02:00

v.3.0 - 4/3/2024

Serendipity

Randonauting offers a gateway to wonder and the uncanny, allowing individuals to encounter the extraordinary just beyond their (reality tunnel's) front door. It's important not to dismiss the peculiarities and synchronicities reported by randonauts as mere psychological phenomena triggered by expectations and wishful thinking.

To clarify, 'synchronicity' refers to the occurrence of significantly related events that coincide in time, notable more for their personal meaning to the observer than their external impact. Sometimes synchronicities repeat or accumulate within a short period of time for one person, in other cases they happen to different people in the same social group.

In his forthcoming monograph Beyond Doubt: The Anthropocene and the Restoration of Faith. author, filmmaker, researcher, and co-host of the Weird Studies podcast J.F. Martel summed it up concisely:

Synchronicities differ from coincidences by the meaning they appear to contain. Often that meaning is inscrutable; once in a while, it seems clear and direct. Either way, synchronicities are marked by a sense that we are being addressed. The sense is sewn into the event. Synchronicities temporarily erase the boundary between world and mind, object and subject, chance and fate. You are free to dismiss the effect as a mere impression, a brief lapse of reason, but doing so won’t banish the synchronicity.¹

In Randonauting lore these 'synchros' can be as simple as encountering repetitive number sequences on clocks, speedometers, or street signs, in New Age circles often referred to as 'angel numbers.'. Prominent examples in Randonaut reports are 222, 333, 12:12, 4444, and so on. On other occasions such coincidences are unusual objects that are repeatedly seen by different people in different places, figurines or images of white rabbits or owls, the infamous "piss bottles", purple flowers, red doors, street pylons and so on. In some rare, extreme cases randonaut trips end up becoming encounters with 'high strangeness' events such as UFO or cryptid sightings.

// examples of randonaut trips

In a philosophical essay on the Netflix series Stranger Things, J.F. Martel explores the contentious nature of Jung's contributions to psychology, highlighting how they clashed with the prevailing scientific perspective rooted in Cartesian body-mind dualism.

it made meaning integral to the event instead of regarding it as a caprice of subjective interpretation. In other words, Jung saw the expression of meaning as a property of the natural world rather than a surface effect of human mentation. Synchronicity, for him, was a real psychophysical process, but one that the modern worldview could recognize only at the cost of abandoning certain rationalistic assumptions about how the cosmos functions.²

Considering the probabilistic odds of synchronistic occurrences, it's clear that their repeated appearances in the context of randonauting cannot be explained by mere chance, nor are they sufficiently addressed by the original Fatum Project theory of discovering novelty through randomness. Within our dualistic worldview, intersections between thoughts 'in our mind' and random events 'out in the world' are only allowed to be nothing more than highly improbable coincidences.

Having delved into the body-mind divide and acknowledged its shortcomings, as well as recognized our actual deep entanglement with the surrounding world, these insights serve little insight into accounting for the skewed odds of serendipidous encounters and synchronicities. This prompts us to question whether our current conceptions of 'randomness' and 'chance' are truly adequate.

The Odds

In his work Essay on the Foundations of Knowledge, the French philosopher and mathematician Antoin Cournot, renowned for his contributions to mathematics and philosophy, discusses the relationship between knowledge, probability, and the scientific method. In the introduction to her translation of Cournot's book, the quantum physicist and ballerina Merritt H. Moore makes an important observation about the nature of 'chance':

contingency and chance must not be equated with that which is unexpected, or with that which surprises us. What is unexpected or occasions surprise is a function of epistemological, psychological or cultural factors. Natural objects, processes and events, independent of our experience or knowledge of them, involve both order, i.e., intrinsic relatedness, and chance, i.e., intrinsic unrelatedness. Both order and chance have their foundations in the nature of things; neither stems from the conditions of our awareness and understanding however limited or extensive, incidental or necessary these conditions may be. ³

Note how both order and chance are described as two equal and fundamental principles of nature. Cournot's perspective on order revolves around the idea that the laws of nature and the patterns we observe reflect an underlying orderliness that allows scientists to predict natural phenomena with a degree of certainty. On the other hand, Cournot also emphasizes that chance events — those that appear to be random or without a discernible cause — play a crucial role in the unfolding of natural processes. This acknowledgment was particularly innovative at the time, as it challenged the deterministic view of the universe that was prevalent in the scientific community. Cournot believed that understanding the natural world requires acknowledging the interplay between these two principles. He argues that we must recognize the limits of our knowledge and the role that unpredictability and randomness play in the natural world.

The experienced derivative market trader turned philosopher Elie Ayache takes this even further and coins the phrase 'contingency as a medium'. In his works Ayache presents a profound philosophical analysis of high-speed derivative trading, exploring its relationship with our metaphysical understanding of reality. Derivative trading involves financial contracts whose value is derived from the price movements of underlying assets, such as stocks, bonds, commodities, or market indexes, allowing traders to speculate on future price changes without directly owning the asset. Ayache challenges the predominant statistical and probabilistic approaches that dominate the field, proposing instead a radical reconceptualization of contingency as a fundamental matière première.

Reality always exceeds fiction. We encounter the real without previous warning. We are made aware of the event and of the world that this event brings about, and then go looking for a partition of that world into ‘states of affairs' or ‘states of the world'. This conceptualization of the real is only a model that is derived from the real itself. Only after the states of the world are identified do we call them possibilities and retroject them into the past so as to narrate a nice story about how the event might have come about, or about the possibilities that will have led to it. By extrapolation, we project those possibilities into the future and imagine that the future world will be no more than a variation of those identified possibilities.⁴

Operating from a vantage point that perceives the observer as separate from the mechanical workings of the world, we employ probability theory as a key tool to predict the future states of the world. We assume that by analyzing existing patterns and data, we can calculate probabilities for different future scenarios, effectively turning the uncertainty of the future into a series of quantifiable risks. This approach reflects a deep-seated belief in the separability of the observer from the observed and underscores our inclination to view the future as something that can be controlled or managed through the application of scientific and mathematical principles. In light of our insufficient responses to unforeseen events, like the recent pandemic, it has become imperative to reassess and humble our confidence in our intellectual capacities to understand chance and contingency.

By elevating contingency to the status of a primary material Ayache is not merely offering a new methodological lens for understanding derivative markets. He is suggesting a paradigm shift in how we conceptualize the foundation of reality itself. This bold stance challenges readers to reconsider the basis of economic theory and the nature of market speculation and move beyond deterministic and probabilistic models to embrace the uncharted territory of pure contingency:

The real is an altogether different matter than the possible, without any possible communication or mediation between the two. What lies outside possibility or beyond the range of possibilities – literally, the im-possible, or the event – is real, because the procedure whereby we fabricate the possible out of the real is always incomplete and deficient and falls short of the real. [...] Radical contingency, or the event, shakes the range of possibilities and updates a whole new world, which may be incompatible with the previous one. Historic events are history-changing.⁵

Phenomena such as synchronicities but also 'black swan' events like the Covid-19 pandemic serve as 'smoking gun' that our current epistemological framework is essentially nothing more than a fragile construct of anthropocentric wishful thinking. Confronted by such phenomena, our conventional understandings of psychology and physics, our perceptions of self and the world, and our grasp on the fundamental principles of reality appear to be incomplete, at best.

Synchronicities are generally rare when judged from a probabilistic point of view. Yet they happen quite often when Randonauting. Why is that? How can visits to coordinates generated by randomness so frequently result in encounters of significant meaning? Could this phenomenon be linked to the coordinates' origin from a quantum random number generator (QRNG), a device that enshrines pure contingency? Embracing Cournot and Ayache's view that contingency is a fundamental and intrinsic aspect of nature, akin to a prima materia, it seems both striking and logical to consider that such mechanisms might indeed be at play.

For Ayache, a thing such as a 'random generator' doesn't exist:

What I am arguing for is precisely the superiority of contingency in terms of changing the context (or the range of possibilities) and the fact that a 'random generator' is always relative to a certain context and its perfectly identifiable states. To repeat, it is not 'random' that I am arguing against; it is 'generator'. There is no generator of contingency as such, because contingency is absolute and not relative; it is always the ultimate mover, even though we may not – almost by definition – frame it into an ultimate context. Hence the deep metaphysical challenge in overturning the ontology and putting such an 'open' category as contingency first.⁶

The absolutist, almost theological perspective on contingency of Cournot and Ayache prompts a fundamental question: does Randonauting essentially function as a form of divination? Isn't the practice of Randonauting essentially similar to consulting a form of supra-personal agency, seeking guidance, reflection, or insight from the powers of pure chance? This question reimagines the act of exploring random coordinates not just as a physical journey, but as a metaphysical engagement with forces and patterns that lie beyond the immediate grasp of human intention and understanding.

Divination

Quentin Meillassoux, known for his work in speculative realism, takes the primacy of contingency to the extreme, positing a universe defined by absolute contingency, where nothing is necessarily true or essential. His stance leads to a nihilistic interpretation of reality as fundamentally devoid of inherent meaning or purpose, thereby challenging the stability of knowledge and the possibility of a meaningful existence. Responding to Meillassoux's stark outlook, the writer Joshua Ramey introduces the concept of a 'divining cause' as addition to the four classic causes 'material cause', 'formal cause', 'moving cause' and 'final cause' that Aristotle defined as fundamental basis of determinism:

The divining cause is in some sense the cause of the occasion, equivalent to the contingent or chance element itself. The divining cause is linked, as it were, to the singularity of an event. [...] It demonstrates a reasoning that is by nature occasional, not so much subject to chance as taking chance as its subject.⁷

Ramey describes the divining cause as the fundamental essence of divination, not to predict what will happen, but as a means of interpreting chance events to uncover their unique, contingent potentialities.

In some sense divination exploits the fact that contingency itself is not the derivation of the actual from an arbitrary set of possibilities but an effect of a dynamic tension within the actual itself.⁸

Seen through the lense of divination the randonaut queries a Quantum Random Number Generator for a coordinate instead of throwing dice, shuffling cards, or sorting yarrow stalks. The answer is given in the form of the lived and embodied experience of venturing to a geographic coordinate, looking for answers or signs. Maybe it is the very act of submitting to the fundamental force of contingency that triggers contingency to manifest in synchronistic ways. Randonauts who journey to their target points often describe their experience of being hyper-aware of their surrounding.

Their consciousness temporarily finds itself in diviner's time, a term coined by professor of musicology and co-host of the Weird Studies podcast Phil Ford expanding on Joshua Ramey's concept of the divining cause:

The divining cause gives us the logic of occasion. It accounts not only for what things happen but when, and for the significance of their timing. [...] Unlike formal or final causes, the divining cause feels like something. There is a temporality proper to it that registers on the human organism much as musical time does. [...] Time organized by the divining cause I will call diviner's time. It is a peculiar temporality in which the sign, leaden with dread or effulgent with promise, announces itself in experience. Diviner's time is structured by repetition: an act of divination gives us the sign of something to happen in the future, and then something happens in our experience to manifest that sign. The repetition between these two occurences is exact — the omen and its realization chime together in perfect resonance. And yet, paradoxically, they are always varied, and in ways that cannot be predicted. Same guy, different wig. In a divinatory result, there is a feeling of inevitability — a promise kept, or a doom one has not managed to escape, in fact could never have managed to escape — and yet we are always surprised, somehow. Thus, for the diviner, the repetition of a sign in experience is always unexpected and yet, in the moment of its happening, feels foreordained and inescapable.⁹

In conclusion Randonauts are essentialy diviners, experiencing their journeys from within 'diviner's time', allowing synchronicities to unfold. Having delved into the concepts of chance, contingency, and time, we now circle back to the core theme that initiated our exploration: Place.

Elie Ayache provides a poignant reflection on this return:

Contingency is what happens, what occurs, what arrives (ce qui arrive), what takes place. What arrives has to arrive in a place. Events take place: they don't take time.¹⁰

In essence, Ayache distinguishes between the theoretical realm of possibilities, which navigate through the dimension of time, and the concrete manifestation of contingency, which requires a physical place for its occurrence. Unlike possibilities that oscillate between hypothetical alternatives and the actualization of reality within the bounds of time, contingency anchors itself in the spatial, in the tangible realm where events unfold. This distinction underscores the significance of place not just as a backdrop, but as an integral component in the fabric of occurrence, shaping and being shaped by the unfolding of contingent events.

Part 1 | Part 3

Martel, Jean-François. Beyond Doubt: The Anthropocene and the Restoration of Faith. (forthcoming monograph). ↩
Martel, JF. Reality is Analog. metapsychosis.com ↩
Cournot, Antoine Augustin; Moore, Merritt H. An Essay on the Foundations of Our Knowledge. Liberal Arts Press, 1956. IV. ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pg. 21 ↩
Ibid. pg. 20 ↩
Ibid. pg. 82 ↩
Ramey, Joshua. Contingency Without Unreason. 2014. Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 19, 2014. pg. 40 ↩
Ibid. pg. 41 ↩
Ford, Phil. Diviner's Time. https://www.weirdstudies.com/66 ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Blank Swan: The End of Probability. Wiley, 2010. Ch. 18.1.5 ↩

Close Encounters with Placeness: Un-places

2020-05-28T16:00:00+02:00

v.3.0

This three part essay is a revised and expanded version of my notes for a lecture and workshop with the same title I gave at last year's Occulture conference in Berlin.

It became centered around Randonauting but you may as well consider that a place-holder for many other kind of mindful ways of engagement with place. It has a meandering shape, covering a lot of thoughts I've had related to Spirit of Place or Placeness throughout the last years.

In this first part we will explore our relationship with place in general and the strange un-places in our minds. In the next part we will dig into synchronicities, contingency and divination, and in the final one we will look at deeper meanings of place and The Zone.

Close Encounters with Placeness

Exploring the Boundaries Between Self and Space.

Spirit of Place

Everyone who has ever been on 'vacation' can probably relate to this: visiting new places can have a profound effect on us. Experiences of standing before the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon for the first time, or a gothic cathedral in Europe, inspire awe and change our whole sense of being in the world. Yet, the power of place isn't limited to just the excitement of experiencing novelty or the visual spectacle; it can also be the comforting familiarity of returning to a childhood beach each summer, deepening our sense of belonging and nostalgia. Both kinds of experience described transcend mere travel; they fundamentally alter our immediate state of sensory awareness and connection to the world. A journey isn't just a physical relocation to a new setting but also a significant shift in our inner landscape, encouraging reflection on our role in the world and our personal life's narrative.

In his book Becoming Animal, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram, who reflects on the intricate relationships between human beings and the natural world in all of his work, captures this succinctly:

For each land has its own psyche, its own style of sentience, and hence to travel from Rome to Paris, or from Barcelona to Berlin, is to voyage from one state of mind to another, very different, state of mind. Even to journey by train from Manhattan to Boston, or simply to walk from one New England town to another, is to transform one's state of awareness.²

The reason why we are so intimately connected to place is grounded in our basic corporeal presence in the world, a concept elegantly articulated by Mark Johnson in his influential work, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Johnson, a prominent figure in the field of cognitive science and philosophy, argues that our physical bodies are not merely vessels navigating through space but are fundamentally interconnected with our surroundings:

as animals we have bodies connected to the natural world, such that our consciousness and rationality are tied to our bodily orientations and interactions in and with our environment. Our embodiment is essential to who we are, and to what meaning is, and to our ability to draw rational inferences and be creative.³

By weaving together insights from cognitive science, philosophy, and linguistics, Johnson presents a holistic view where the body is seen as the conduit through which we interpret and make sense of our surroundings. Challenging traditional views that separate the mind and body, in The Body in the Mind, Johnson proposes instead that our sensory and motor experiences fundamentally shape our concepts, ideas, and linguistic expressions. The very physical acts of touching, moving, and interacting provide the foundational basis for our cognitive processes, including reasoning, imagination, and the creation of meaning.

Having a sense of oneself, as an individual embodied person, as a member of a society, as a self in relation to others is intricately linked to our connection with place. This nuanced relationship is explored in depth by Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas. In his book, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Malpas delves into how place forms personal and collective identity. He argues that places are not just background settings but active participants in constructing our identity and our position in the broader social and natural world:

the significance of place should not be construed as just a contingent feature of human psychology or biology, but instead as rooted in the very structure that makes possible experience or thought of the sort that is exemplified in the human (though this is not to rule out the possibility that certain particular features of our response to place may be contingently based). The sense, then, in which identity is tied to place (and so to a spatio-temporal realm in which persons and things can be encountered and a world can be grasped) is not just the sense in which a sense of identity might be tied up with a certain ‘emotional reminiscence', but derives from the way in which the very character of subjectivity, in the general and the particular, and the very content of our thoughts and feelings, is necessarily dependent on the place and places within which we live and act.⁴

It is a common perception that our transformation of self in places of novelty or nostalgia is merely a psychological effect 'inside our heads', a result of leisure or a break from our daily routines. This widespread perception overlooks a deeper, more complex phenomenon: the belief that we can 'pause' our embeddedness in the world and observe it from a perspective of 'visitors' moving through a landscape, ignoring the profound and intricate entanglements with our surroundings. We assume that we engage with the world around us as detached observers existing in temporarily worldless suspension.

The term was coined by renowned anthropologist Tim Ingold, whose extensive research spans the fields of anthropology, ecology, and philosophy. In his work, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. he criticises the misconception that life forms exist independently of the world they inhabit, encoded in a context-free medium—like 'genes' in biology or 'cultural information' in anthropology — falsely suggesting a separation between organisms and their environments. This view, prevalent in both fields, posits that organisms are defined by internal codes (such as genes) that are unaffected by their surroundings, and that culture operates similarly, existing inside individuals' minds and imposed upon the external world.

Again, there is one set of specifications for the forms of life that are carried around – as it used to be said – ‘inside people's heads'. And there is another set for the environment, often identified with ‘nature' or ‘the physical world', upon which these forms are inscribed.⁵

This perspective creates a dichotomy between the internal, encoded aspects of life and the external environment, neglecting the interdependent relationship between them.

In the subsequent sections, we will delve deeper into the understanding that 'place' transcends its simplistic representation as a mere point on a map 'in our heads' or 'the world out there' as a backdrop of our lives. We will explore its role as a potent ontological force, one that profoundly influences our identity at various levels—personal, societal, and even species-wide.

The narrative of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a classic colonial Australian novel that was later adapted into a film, serves as an uncanny illustration of the themes discussed here. Set against the backdrop of the mysterious Mount Diogenes¹ in central Victoria, Australia, on Valentine's Day in 1900, the story unfolds around a group of students from a girls' private school and their math teacher on an excursion to study and to have a picnic in the shade of the rock formation. After lunch four of the girls ask permission to explore the area and take geological measurements. They climb higher and higher into the rocks and soon a surreal atmosphere envelops them, leading to the inexplicable disappearance of several girls and subsequent tragic events, including the suicide of the school's headmistress.

An intriguing interpretation of the story is that the protagonists are no longer 'British colonizers' but have now been transformed into something else — they became 'Australians'. The foreign land had not only been conquered by the colonizers. In a weird kind of feedback loop the territory itself had also inevitably colonized the conquerors inner landscape.

Placelessness

The the buttoned up and well dressed Victorian characters in the story embody a broader human struggle stemming from a profound disorientation. This disorientation was triggered by a shift away from the old Aristotelian worldview, which valued a purposeful, interconnected cosmos, to Descartes' 17th-century philosophy of mind-body dualism. This dualism posits that the mind and body are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances: the mind is non-material and capable of thinking, while the body is material and operates in the physical realm. This separation laid the groundwork for viewing the mind as detached from the physical world, including one's own body.

David Abrams writes:

Psychological qualities once felt to be proper to the surrounding terrain—feeling-tones, moods, the animating spirits-of-place known to reside in particular wetlands or forests—all lost their home with the dissolution of the enclosing, wombish character of the pre-Copernican cosmos. For unlike quantities, qualities are fluid properties arising from the internal, felt relations between beings. Such feeling-tones now had no place in the physical world—itself newly conceived as a set of objects that had no internal relation to one another. Nature was beginning to be experienced as a pure exterior—a world of external, mechanical relationships: a world of quantities. It is only natural that psychological qualities fled from this open exteriority in the wake of the Copernican revolution, taking refuge in the private space now assumed to exist inside each individual.⁶

This division has been cemented into our collective psyche, with most scientific disciplines operating under the assumption of a clear demarcation between the mind, as an internal entity, and the world as something external. This dichotomy extends beyond the realms of science, permeating many modern spiritual practices as well:

If much natural science of the last two centuries held itself aloof from the nature it studied, pondering the material world as though that world were a huge aggregate of inert objects and mechanical events, many new-age spiritualities simply abandon material nature entirely, inviting their adherents to focus their intuitions upon non-material energies and disincarnate beings assumed to operate in an a-physical dimension, pulling the strings of our apparent reality and arranging earthly events according to an order that lies elsewhere, behind the scenes. Commonly reckoned to be at odds with one another, conventional over-reductive science and most new-age spiritualities actually fortify one another in their detachment from the earth, one of them reducing sensible nature to an object with scant room for sentience and creativity, the other projecting all creativity into a supernatural dimension beyond all bodily ken.⁷

Of course pointing fingers to a single cause or figure, such as Copernicus, Descartes, Kant, 'capitalism', 'empire', or 'technocracy', oversimplifies the complexity of these major paradigm shifts in human understanding. These shifts have deeply influenced how humanity perceives itself and the world, leading to a sense of alienation and fragmentation. Recognizing and acknowledging this disorientation is the first step towards integrating it.

In the 1960s, Guy Debord, a prominent figure in the avant-garde and political theory, emerged as a revolutionary voice against the prevailing currents of capitalism. As the founder of the Situationist International (SI), a group dedicated to critiquing and transforming modern society through radical artistic and philosophical practices, Debord introduced the concept of the 'spectacle' to describe and expose the ways in which capitalism has permeated every aspect of life, creating a society where genuine human experiences are replaced by mere representations and where the commodification of life is all-encompassing:

Spectacle is perhaps the major force in modern civilization: through selective, edited representation, the process of spectacle-making serves to reduce the vibrant, pluralistic, living richness of existence to a lifeless image which is then presented as reality. Spectacle serves to remove the "object" or "specimen" from its natural state of being itself into a state of separation ... Existence, which is a seamless continuum, is thereby represented as a disconnected assemblage of discrete and unrelated "objects" ... Spectacle is thereby a selfreferencing fiction, and like all such fictions, difficult to see for what it is. It is a closed loop that has, by accident and intention, created a specific self-perpetuating modus operandi.⁸

One practice that the SI encouraged to uncover the 'spectacle' was the 'Dérive' - the act of aimless drifting through the urban landscape, being led solely by subjective stimuli from the surrounding architecture. By doing so the drifter would notice the omnipresent organizing power structures that urban planning had imposed upon the city dwellers, the logic of production and commerce ruling the architectural landscape. Drifters were encouraged to create their own psychogeographical maps of the city, breaking the imposed structures and re-territorialize them into representations that would harmonize the inner from the outer sense of place in a more integral way.

In the 21st century cities show no more resemblance to how they looked in the 1960s, so the 'dérives' are probably less suited to unveil and break out of imposed patterns. 'Empire' has shifted to more subtle cybernetic means of control focusing mainly on individualized stimulation of desires in either aestetically harmonized environments or distracting us from 'the world' altogether by luring us into the fully synthetic version of artificial desire stimulation behind the inescapable multitude of our screens.

In this context, the practice of 'Randonauting' emerges as a potent antidote to the digital age's disembodied experiences. It combines elements of adventure, randomness, and the exploration of one's immediate environment. The 'Randonautica' smartphone app is used to generate a random set of geographical coordinates within a radius close to the participant. Participants, known as "Randonauts," then embark on a journey to these randomly determined locations, ideally with an open mind and a sense of curiosity, without any preconceived expectations of what they might find or experience.

Randonauting resonates with the Situationist ethos by inviting individuals to engage directly with their environment. It also suits the zeitgeist perfectly, because it lures the individual from within the confines of their portable screens 'out to the world' offering a way to reconnect with the tangible and the real, drawing attention away from the virtual distractions that dominate our lives.

But the aim is not just to discover new physical spaces and to defy the predetermined narratives and structures that digital and urban spectacles impose, but to go a step further and challenge one's own habitual patterns of movement and thought, to break out of daily routines and potentially experience the world in a new, more profound way. The core idea is that randomness and serendipity can lead to meaningful experiences, insights, or encounters that one would not have encountered in the course of the regular, predictable paths through life. The simple act of Randonauting has the potential to rekindle a sense of wonder and discovery in the everyday and to experience more meaningful connection to the places we live and to the myriad possibilities they hold.

The foundational theory of Randonauting laid out in a collection of text files published by the Fatum Project, argues that we all are trapped the confines of our daily experiences and perceptions, navigating through our "reality tunnel" imposed by the multitude of unseen rules that govern our lives—ranging from societal norms to personal habits and cognitive biases. These forces collectively form what's known as the "Stasis Field," effectively keeping us within the familiar bounds of our reality.

no matter what choices you make, and no matter how many variations on how your day may pass, there are always some places where you simply cannot be, because none of the chains of your decisions leads there.⁹

Through my own experiences and following the stories of others on the app's trip report feed and Randonauts subreddit it becomes evident that randonauting has the potential to lead to extraordinary moments. These experiences can range from simple, unexpected discoveries, more or less meaningful coincidences, serendipidous encounters, all the way to profound psychological shifts and, on occasion, events that might even be described as 'high strangeness'.

Part 2

A sacred place of gathering for the Dja Dja Wurrung, Woi Wurrung and Taungurung Peoples who refer to it as Ngannelong ↩
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Pantheon, 2010. EPUB Reference 17.11 ↩
Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press, 1990. pg xxxviii. ↩
Malpas, Jeff E. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge University Press, 1999. pg. 188 ↩
Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge, 2000. pg. 214 ↩
Abram, David. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Pantheon, 2010. EPUB Reference 17.68 ↩
Ibid. EPUB Reference 23.24 ↩
Pennick, Nigel. Anima Loci. NIDECK, 1993 ↩
Fatum Theory ↩