SUBLUNAR SPACE - Theory

Hypogearchy

2026-10-15T22:00:00+02:00

Part four of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. In the second part we pulled the red thread through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor. In the third part we descended into the plague years and came back up with a direction. Now we stop mapping and start digging.

Rule from Beneath

Let me begin with a confession: it has been here the whole time. It sits in the tags of every part of this series since the first one went online in the summer of 2025. The last part ended on the words "From Underneath." I have been writing toward this word for over a year without once saying it out loud. So here it is, let me vibrate it like a formula: Hypogearchy.

Three Greek pieces. ὑπό, hypo, beneath. γῆ, ge, the earth. And ἀρχή, arche, which means rule, but also beginning and first principle¹. Rule from beneath the earth. Or, read the other way round: the principle that begins underneath.

The word has two much older and much more famous siblings: Hierarchy is sacred rule, from ἱερός, hieros, holy: rule from above, the vertical order of priests, emperors, and the Archons² we met in part one. Anarchy is well known: the absence of arche, no rule at all. Hypogearchy is a third option the Greek language allows and nobody seems to have bothered to claim: rule with a source that is below.

Remember the loaded gun from part one. Mark Fisher, unable to revive the tainted signifier communism and unwilling to define his project by what it opposed, wrote:

At the moment, our desire is nameless – but it is real. [...] At some point in this process, the name for our new desire will appear and we will recognize it.²⁰

Of course I am not claiming to have found the name for Fisher. What was produced in the Others Discord in the spring of 2021, half as a joke, was #acid-chthomunism, an unpronunceable clunky word made even clunkier. It's been a placeholder since, waiting to be substituted, thrice tainted, because what I eventually meant to say it was not a political party, not a program, not even an -ism. It has always been more of a feeling, a vibe, and primarily a vector, a direction. The same one we carried back up from the plague years in part three: inward, downward, toward the ground, the soil, the dead. But more than that the name needed to describe an action. The arche was the last puzzle piece.

And since this is the part of the dungeon crawl where all the overthinking gets done before the actual digging starts, let me say plainly what the #acid-chthomunism Discord channel and this whole series has been trying to do from the beginning.

It takes Fisher's Acid Communism and breaks both of its words wide open. Acid, taken not just at its implied psychedelic value, but the chemical one: beyond the flash that opens the mind it is the agent that eats through whatever it touches. Communism, widened to include the more-than-human world that lives below the floor of every human commons and beyond our doors of perception. This essay supplies the theory underneath both. The next one will supply the praxis.

Solar Empire

Before we can dig we have to know what we are digging through. So let's go back to the top layer, where part two left us standing: an Artificial Intelligence promising to become the universal redeemer, accelerationism as official ideology, billionaires pointing rockets at Mars, and Nick Land's Outside pulling everything toward a machinic singularity, an "invasion from the future"³.

Look at the direction of each of these. Up. Out. Away. Every escape on offer in the new Middle Ages points at the sky. Not only Them. Even, as we will see, the ones that call themselves ours.

It's not a coincidence, it's a default. The most dangerous kind of rule, because nobody experiences it as ruling. Let's take the spade and find out how deep it goes.

Shovel your way out of the shit and into the truth.

Just beneath the topsoil we hit solutionism: the conviction that every problem, the climate catastrophe included, has a technical fix waiting to be engineered by somebody with a sufficiently large budget and a sufficiently large view. Donna Haraway, the biologist turned feminist philosopher of science who will keep turning up the deeper we go, gave that view its name almost four decades ago: the "god trick of seeing everything from nowhere"⁴. She meant the posture of a science that pretends to have no body and no location.

It is the view from above, the divine sun, the one place in the old cosmos that sees everything and is too bright to look at. Solutionism is the god trick with a budget. Its hero is Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, which is to say from the sun, and carried it down to us. Note that even the rebel moves along the same vertical axis. The testosterone-driven version of this hero worship, which the media theorist Alexander Galloway calls "Brometheanism"⁵, is the house religion of Silicon Valley.

Capital itself runs on solar logic. Georges Bataille, the dissident surrealist who devoted much of the 1940s developing an economics of waste, understood this clearly.:

The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.²¹

Wealth, in this picture, is collected sunlight that has to go somewhere. Growth is the only sanctioned way of spending it. And when growth stagnates, the surplus is burnt catastrophically: in wars, in crypto mines, in the compulsive destruction Jodi Dean diagnosed in part two. This is also, I think, why Capitalist Realism felt so metaphysical to Fisher and to all of us who read him. Capital did not invent its cosmology, it's the new form of the same old borrowed sun.

One layer further down lies the Enlightenment. The name says everything. Reason as a light that comes from above and dispels what lies below: the dark ages, the obscure, the superstitious, the underground. Ironically it was Copernicus who moved the sun to the centre of physics in the very same era in which cosmology, philosophy and politics tried to keep it firmly at the top.

Below that, Christian empire. Constantine's Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, whose festival on the 25th of December became Christmas⁶. The halo, a little private sun around every sanctified head. The Sun King at Versailles, around whom the court and the state revolved by decree. Hierarchy, sacred rule, is not merely a metaphor for this arrangement. It is this arrangement, and the ladder only works in one direction: light descends, obedience ascends.

One more layer, and we are in PGM territory, among friends. Plotinus, in the third century, the father of what we now call Neoplatonism, systematised what had been floating around for six hundred years into the most elegant cosmology the West has ever produced and never since been able to shake off: the One at the top, overflowing, Nous and Soul spilling out of it, and at the very bottom, as the dimmest trickle of the light, crude matter⁷. Emanation. Everything that exists is a diluted ray of what sits above it.

And this is where I have to say we rather than they. The entire Western magical tradition inherited the ladder whole: "As above, so below" puts the above first. The correspondences descend from the planets to the metals, the herbs and the organs. The grades of every initiatory order ascend. I have attempted to climb that ladder myself, for years, and on this very blog: the routines in theurgy, the Helleno-Kemetic theoria, the planetary prayers, the Orphic hymns to Helios himself. We own this tradition.

The same goes for this series. The Gnostic frame of parts one and two, the Pleroma above the Kenoma, was an ascent story. And Fisher's desire, the one "that comes from the future", is ahead and above, never below.

Finally, the bedrock of the Western tradition: Plato. Book six of the Republic, where Socrates declines to say what the Good is and offers instead its "offspring": the sun, giving things both their visibility and their growth, as the Good gives things both their intelligibility and their being⁸. Book seven, the infamous cave, in which the prisoners' entire liberation consists of turning around and walking up and out into the light. That whole story only works if the sun is the point. Every escape narrative we touched in this section is a retelling of this one. This is the oldest layer of the default, and it rules our thinking so deeply that we never question it.

Here the spade should hit rock.

It doesn't. Push it in under Plato's sun and it goes through. Because beneath the sun-cosmology is whatever it was built on top of and had to deny in order to stand firmly: dirt, the dead, the microbial, the slow. Reza Negarestani, the Iranian philosopher who appeared in the CCRU footnote of part one, wrote Cyclonopedia, a work of theory-horror disguised as a found manuscript, in which the Middle East is a sentient body and oil its black blood. I wrote about its inorganic demons on this blog back in 2017. His earth is not a solid foundation but a body riddled with holes, a ( )hole complex through which oil, dust and far older agencies move at their own pace⁹. The chthonic ones of Haraway's Staying with the Trouble, the tentacular, the composting, the ones who were never going to be allowed on the ladder¹⁰. And the biologists, who have quietly concluded that the individual the whole ladder was built to elevate does not exist: every animal is a holobiont, a commune of host and microbes, and "we have never been individuals"¹¹.

Nobody put them there. They were there before anyone declared the sun to be the Good. I promised at the end of part three that we would find out we were never the only ones breathing down here. We weren't. We never are.

One last thing before we climb further down the hole, because the word "earth" is radioactive in 2026. A cosmology in which the whole precedes and rules the parts cannot imagine rule from beneath. It can only ever imagine a better sun. That includes the nativist, blood-and-soil version that Bruno Latour, whose Down to Earth we leaned on in part two, filed under his "Local" attractor¹²: the retreat behind fence and fatherland, the mirror image of the globalist's flight. The nationalist wants to own the ground, the posture of a sovereign standing on top of it. Hypogearchy is the opposite of that: it is to be ruled by a ground that does not belong to you and never will.

Soil ≠ territory. We will come back to that.

Dust to Dust

Now, I don't want to build the alternative out of books. We already have something way better: we lived it, collectively, for about a year or two, give or take, and then we worked very hard to forget. So let's start from there...

In part three I recorded five things without naming what they had in common. When the parts stopped, the whole stopped: the engine of capitalism, the one Fisher had described as seamlessly occupying the horizon of the thinkable, halted because people stayed home. That's exactly what part two meant by calling capitalism an egregore. Time melted: the clock is a solar instrument, and the moments underneath it, it turned out, have their own duration. Interiority, stillness, slowing down were not a retreat from reality but a descent into where reality is made. Death, perishing, our own finitude, became a part of the household again. And the "spectre of a world which could be free" rose from internal desires, from beneath.

The solar order, where the whole precedes the parts, cannot think a single one of these. So it does what it always does with what it cannot hold: it forgets and carries on. Antimemetic warfare.

The only defense against this trap is an idea, an ontology that is its exact inverse. There is one I want to pull on. It was written, of all things, as a "footnote to Plato":

Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician who turned to metaphysics late in life, proposed in the 1920s that there are no fixed substances at all, and no eternal forms sitting above the world. There are only moments: each one arises, takes up everything that came before it, becomes something briefly, and perishes into what comes next¹³. The whole is made by the parts, each moment, and then becomes a part of the next whole. His formula for this is:

The many become one, and are increased by one.¹³

Whitehead famously called the whole of European philosophy "a series of footnotes to Plato"¹⁴, and he meant it as inheritance. Read from down here it is an inversion. Where Plato's forms are above the world with the world participating in them. Whitehead's moments are below everything and everything is made of them. Even his God is not a ruler at the top of a ladder but, in his words, "the fellow-sufferer who understands", luring instead of commanding, whose own nature is formed by the world as it happens¹⁵.

I am not claiming that a lockdown proves a metaphysics, but it certainly provided time to read long and boring philosophy texts. And this one in specific stuck with me ever since. In part because it describes a reality in which those five things are not anomalies but the normal case.

Take the old funeral formula and read it as ontology: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. What perishes is not lost. It is taken up into whatever forms next. Whitehead calls this, without any irony, objective immortality¹⁶. And slowing down is simply how you let a moment complete instead of shoving it into the next one. This is where the potential for renewal gets its footing: in the perishing and re-forming of what is already here.

I am aware how easily this turns into mysticism, so let me tether it three times before we go any further:

First, to physics. The plasma physicist Timothy Eastman has spent a career arguing that quantum events are best understood exactly as Whitehead's moments, that context is constitutive instead of mere background, and that the knot we keep failing to untie in the foundations of physics is substance thinking itself¹⁷.

Second, to biology. We met Haraway at the bottom of the dig. Here she gives the experience its flesh. "Nothing makes itself", she writes; the word for how things actually come about is sympoiesis, making-with¹⁰. Compost, for her, is both a metaphor and a chore. The holobiont we also met down there¹¹ is Whitehead's moment in biology: a self that is an assembly of its parts, remade with every breath. Whitehead has a word for an assembly that holds together over time because its members keep taking each other up: a society¹⁸.

We have a word for it too. In part two I called capitalism an egregore, a thing maintained by the repeated behaviour of mere humans. That is a society in Whitehead's sense. So is the human doing the maintaining: a we of cells, microbes and perished moments that feel their way into an I every morning, and could stop. It is the same mechanism at every scale, and it only ever runs in one direction. Capital is sustained by people, people by their cells, cells by their moments. Nothing above makes anything below. The ladder was upside down the whole time.

Third, to dust, and to the horror register this series has carried since the first mention of the CCRU. Negarestani's dust is the tellurian agent that gets in everywhere. His oil is perished life returning as power. His earth is complicit with what rots inside it⁹. Dust to dust, in his hands, is a threat: perishing is not the end of agency but its redistribution. The dead are not gone, they are very, very busy.

I have a jar of earth from my grandparents' graves on a shelf, collected during Parentalia in 2019 with a Saturn coin on top to serve as a portal. I have always thought of the coin as the technology and the dirt as the address. Now I understand it was actually the other way round!

What would a magic look like that thinks this way rather than the solar way? That is a question for after this series, and I am only going to open the cave entrance. But I think you'll dig the gist of it: enough with emanations descending from the planets, how about occasions arising from the ground. Not illumination, but adjustment to the dark. More attention to the dead, the dust, the microbial and the slow, as the places where the whole is actually being remade. Slowing down so the present can complete. Let's do more listening for what bubbles up, because in a world made of moments the new seeps in from below. An egregore is not changed from above. It changes when its hosts do something it did not expect.

In a sense the pandemic was an involuntary rehearsal of exactly this orientation. It was viral cells that started it after all, reminding us of who's actually running things around here.

Soil Horizons

All of which brings us back, as the red thread demands, to Mark Fisher. I guess I owe him four answers.

Acid. In part one I described Fisher's acid as shorthand for any experience that dissolves the barriers imposed by commodified individualism¹⁹. He meant the psychedelic, even when he insisted he did not need the drug. I want to take the word at its pH value instead. Acid is the agent in the soil, in the gut, in the rain that takes things apart and returns them to circulation. It works slowly, by contact, through corrosion. A "trip" may undo the self for an afternoon, but by Monday its boundaries are back in place. The earth offers no such escape. It has been working on everything, including us, all along.

Communism. Fisher wanted "a new kind of collective agent, a new possibility of speaking in the first person plural"²⁰. "The many become one, and are increased by one" is a first person plural, written into the structure of every moment. The holobiont is always a we before it is ever an egregoric I. Communism expanded downward is the solidarity of parts forming wholes, and it includes everything we found squirming at the bottom of the dig.

The future. "Our desire is for the future", Fisher wrote, "and it comes from the future." But read the next sentence again: "it is for us to construct this future, even as – at another level – it is already constructing us."²⁰ That second clause is pure process. He was this close...

Haunting. My complaint in part one was that Acid Communism, for all its invocation of the weird, was oddly unhaunted, able to reach the numinous only through the psychedelic lens. I can now say why: a materialism of substances has no room for anything it cannot point at, so the strange has to be smuggled in as experience, which means a trip. A process ontology has no such problem. Every moment is made of what it takes up from others, and the others are not all visible, not all human, and not all alive: the perished, the microbial, the ancient ones moving through the holes in the earth, the societies above that we feed, and whatever else is participating in the assembly that calls itself I. A self built this way is haunted by construction. The numinous is the company you have already been keeping.

Fisher kept communism under protest and said the real name would appear and we would recognise it. I'm throwing hypogearchy on the table: the principle that whatever is worth building is grown from beneath, by everyone and everything already down there, and that the way to it is a descent, not an ascent.

That is the ontology. All fancy words. An ontology does not tell you what to do on a Tuesday.

Stay tuned for the final part, in which we get our hands dirty: the earthly, emancipatory rites of magic promised in the very first paragraphs of this series.

Wiktionary: ἀρχή. The same root gives us archon, the ruler, and archaic, that which was there first. ↩
The Gnostic Archons, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Nick Land (1993). Machinic Desire, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 338. Publisher Link ↩
Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-599. ↩
Galloway, Alexander R. "Brometheanism." b2o: boundary 2 online, June 2017. Link ↩
Wikipedia: Sol Invictus ↩
Plotinus, Enneads V.1 and V.2, on the One and on the procession of all things from it. The MacKenna translation is in the public domain. ↩
Plato, Republic, 507b-509c (the analogy of the sun) and 514a-520a (the allegory of the cave). ↩
Negarestani, Reza. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. re.press, 2008. Publisher Link ↩↩
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. ↩↩
Gilbert, Scott F., Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber. "A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals." The Quarterly Review of Biology 87.4 (2012): 325-341. ↩↩
Latour, Bruno. Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Publisher Link ↩
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edition, eds. Griffin and Sherburne. Free Press, 1978, p. 21. ↩↩
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Process and Reality, p. 39. ↩
Process and Reality, Part V, Chapter II, p. 351: God's consequent nature as formed by the world, and "the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands". ↩
Process and Reality, p. xiii and passim: a perished occasion lives on as a component of every occasion that takes it up. ↩
Eastman, Timothy E. Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context. Lexington Books, 2020. ↩
Process and Reality, p. 34: a nexus is any set of occasions bound together by taking each other up; a society is a nexus that keeps handing a shared character down to its newest members. A stone is a society. So is a person. So is an egregore. So is a god. ↩
Mark Fisher | Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction) ↩
Mark Fisher, For now, our desire is nameless, The European, May 20th 2014, Web Archive ↩↩↩
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption. Zone Books, 1988, p. 21. ↩

Katabasis 19

2026-10-10T11:40:00+02:00

Part three of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. In the second part we pulled the red thread through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor. Now, let's descend into the liminal void of the pandemic, where time warped, and something terrifying, tender, and possible tried to emerge.

In the previous discussion, I already briefly touched on the COVID‑19 pandemic as a kind of catalyst for the systemic changes already set in motion in the years preceding it.

Here, I want to force our attention back to what many have worked hard to forget and put more emphasis on how COVID-19 manifested as a too visceral, world-changing threshold between what was and what came after. Half a decade has already passed and most of us have managed to piece together a new narrative, so we could get back to a routine and a normal life. This is a remarkable feature of us as humans that allows us to persevere and continue on, no matter what.

Yet when we think ourselves back to 2021 there is a lingering feeling of shared rupture in our sense of continuity and belonging, fuzzy and blurry. If we honestly compare life before and after, it becomes impossible to ignore the existential tremor that shook the foundations of how we live, work, and connect with one another.

Let's go back to the "plague years" and take a closer look at what actually occurred in that valley of darkness. Besides the fear and suffering, wasn't there also hope?

Black Swan

As far as I remember the months leading up to the disaster most of us followed our daily lives, fought our struggles, pursued our dreams, took for granted some narrative framework that defined our reality: Capitalist Kenoma. And suddenly, out of nowhere we encountered the Black Swan: an impossible Other that our narrative had not anticipated. An unannounced experience of the Real:

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.²

The Real manifested as a viral agent, alien to the immune system and to medical science. COVID-19 brought disease, suffering and death on a massive scale. Almost overnight it forced us to leave our workplaces and shopping malls, our factories, schools, and airports. Everyone grounded. Curfews confined us to our homes and confronted us with the reality of our fragile bodies and more importantly: our own finitude.

Death came peeking out of where we had hidden him for decades: behind closed doors, in hospices and convalescence homes. Death returned to where he used to belong: the midst of our homes, surrounded by family witnessing final moments.

The paradoxical, ambiguous nature of this moment is so confounding, so bewildering! I mean, how excellent that our arrogant species receives this collective slap-in-the-face reality check, waking us two-leggeds up to the simple truth that we are not at all in control, have never really been in control, that we live at the behest of powers—of a complex interplay of powers—far beyond our ability to fully fathom, to predict, or to steer. What hubris to have imagined we could do whatever we want with this exquisitely interwoven wonder of a world! And yet how awful that this lesson must come at the expense of so many unsuspecting human lives, so many innocent souls now shivering with fever and fright as they struggle to draw breath.³

Despite the zeitgeist of hypostitional reality-denial and conspiratorial scapegoating I will forever acknowledge and extend my gratitude to the countless care-workers and unpaid care-givers within and beyond our families who ceaselessly powered on to keep us fed, healthy, and alive. While these unwavering heroes sustained us, the frail systems scrambling to retain control over this unknown agent forced many of us into confinement, loneliness, and boredom.

This mandated dead time challenged our awareness of the meaningless distractions that once consumed our attention, and of the relentless pace that had come to define our lives, and it opened a capacity for interiority we forgot was possible. Stillness, quietude, suspended temporality that allowed inner monologue, undisturbed trains of thoughts, inner vision. Many of us were forced to deal with ourselves. Our world became more intimate.

And between the extreme modes of ceaseless care and the suspension of time came the temporal disorientation. Hours seemed to melt into days, days and weeks dissolved into some nebulous glob of experience. Everything seemed to be slowing down. Time itself stopped making sense.

Dead time—moments of withdrawal, of what old mystics called Gelassenheit, releasement—are crucial for the revitalization of our life experience. And, perhaps, one can hope that one of the unintended consequences of the coronavirus quarantines in cities around the world will be that some people at least will use their time released from hectic activity and think about the (non)sense of their predicament.⁴

Gaping Wounds

COVID-19 brought everything to a halt, not just us as individuals. The virus landed some of its hardest blows on the most powerful nations and seemed to have stalled even the great engine of capitalism itself.

It suddenly laid bare the gaping structural faults of a system that have been papered over for decades: the corruption, the dynamics of exploitation, social injustice and biopolitics, biodiversity and violence, all the ignored shortcomings underlying our neoliberal reality.

The cognitive dissonance between our beliefs in functional systems of governance and the sudden exposure of their fictionality led many of us to question the very structures we once believed were holding the world together.

The unpopular but legitimate medical imperative for quarantine was eerily mirrored by a more primitive tribal impulse: the urge to redraw boundaries, to quarantine imagined enemies, and to protect our fragile identities under the guise of safety. Fake news, conspiracy theories, paranoia, xenophobia and racism exploded. The collective mind virus of Hypostition emerged, as contagious as the physical pathogen itself.

Given what the virus did to us and what we did to ourselves in response, we had many reasons for despair. [...] Our adversity elicited psychological responses that are common to our species: we felt sadness and grief; responded with anxiety, fear, and anger; and tried to hide the truth from one another and even from ourselves. [...] These emotional responses and behaviors can themselves rightly be seen as foundational parts of epidemics. We might even say that the definition of an epidemic disease should include the fact that it can have outsize psychological effects. [...] To cope with a plague in the twenty-first century, we responded not only with familiar interventions, but also with familiar feelings.⁵

Between the paranoia and conspiracy theories the pandemic also blew open the Overton window of long avoided conversations around topics like mental health or the rigidity of the 9-5 workday. It suddenly became socially acceptable to prioritize self‑care in ways unheard of before.

Remote work suddenly became feasible for many jobs, revealing our standard model of office work as arbitrary, exploitative, and unnecessarily taxing, often forcing people to choose between their career and their well-being.

Radical political and economic ideas that had previously been dismissed as unthinkable were suddenly back on the table: universal basic income, housing the homeless, generous investments into public health, reduction of weekly work days, shorter supply chains, local solidarity and an economy geared towards resilience rather than profit margins.

The Pleroma was suddenly imaginable on a mass scale. Something had suddenly re-emerged: "the spectre of a world which could be free".

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.⁶

Of course we were not the only ones noticing the emperor was without clothes. So did the powers that be. And they knew exactly how to exorcise this dangerous "spectre" that emerged out of interiority, contemplation, class consciousness, and the suspension of time itself.

By speeding things up, averting attention, undermining communality, asserting control. Fear was immediately weaponized as the driving force of hypostitional narratives: The virulent conspiracy theories got accelerated, driven by social media algorithms and political influencers. Fearmongering drove us apart, made us end friendships, relationships, rupture family ties. We got split into irreconcilable camps and incompatible individual identities.

Chthonic Potential

There is no return to normal, the new “normal” will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible.⁴

Collectively we had a chance for change. We decided against it. Out of fear and confusion amid the uncertainties, lack of leadership, lack of vision, out of habit. It's tragic but understandable. We should not hold a grudge or grieve our inabilities. It's human nature.

The story of how exactly we lost hold of this momentum again, why and how we chose to forget is yet to be gathered, retold and analyzed in depth, but that is not a goal of this essay.

What I want instead is to hold this memory of the liberating potential for change, this fragile moment pregnant with real possibilities. Gnosis. Pleroma. Made possible by slowing down, by stopping the engine, by a sudden capacity for interiority, by communing with each other, by questioning Capitalist Realism, by class consciousness.

There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future. I have no choice but to sound metaphysical and religious, because this is where the psyche goes when it enters the liminal.⁷

Most importantly we should remember where the potential for change came from: Not from an incursion from a cosmic Outside, but breaking out from the Inside. Inside of Us. From Underneath.

The above was written in August 2025, over a year ago. Then it sat there, unpublished forever. I told myself it was for lack of time. But the truth is: I forgot. Both, forgetting and melting time, seem to come naturally when you descend into the plague years. Faced with the daunting climb back up, forgetting becomes the more comfortable choice.

The old Greek word for a journey like this is katabasis¹: a descent into the underworld. What separates the myths is what one brings back up. Orpheus went down for Eurydice and returned with nothing, because he looked back. Inanna was stripped of one garment at each of seven gates, and got out only by sending someone else down in her place. Aeneas went all the way down and came back up carrying the future of Rome, shown to him by his dead father.

A katabasis is not a fall. Not even a forced one. One descends on purpose in order to return, and one should not return empty-handed. So what do we carry back up from Twentytwentywhen? The answer is dirt simple: firsthand knowledge. It's not a blueprint or a manifesto, but the tangible, lived experience of which direction the opening lies in.

It's the opposite of the Gnostic ascent, of Fisher's future, of Land's Outside. It's downward and inward, toward the ground, the soil, the dead. It's not a direction toward some destination. It is the direction. And it has a name, one I've been quietly attaching to these essays all along, without once saying it out loud...

...continue with the next part, in which we stop mapping and start digging, and find out we were never the only ones breathing down here.

Wikipedia: Katabasis ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pg. 20 ↩
David Abram, In the Ground of our Unknowing, Emergence Magazine, April 7, 2020 ↩
Žižek, Slavoj. Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World. OR Books, 2020. ↩↩
Christakis, Nicholas A. Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Little, Brown Spark, 2020. ↩
Arundhati Roy, The pandemic is a portal, Financial Times, April 3, 2020 ↩
Zachary Stein, Covid 19: A War Broke Out in Heaven, What is Emerging, March 26, 2020 ↩

Outside Attractor

2025-08-09T13:00:00+02:00

Part two of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. Here we take the red thread further into uncharted territory.

Post Empire

Speculative Acid Communist Praxis centers around interventions of how to counteract and overcome a certain flavour of capitalism. The Capitalist Realism¹ Fisher describes operates on one core idea: neoliberalism², the hyperstition that "market dynamics" will naturally produce the best outcomes for society.

On an economic level it operates by minimizing state intervention and maximizing competition as the most effective way to achieve growth. On the individual level it frames each person as an autonomous "entrepreneur of the self", responsible for continuously optimizing their skills, choices, and market value with minimal external support.

Sounds familiar? Yes, but it's old news. The operating system of capitalism got recently upgraded. Let's take the red thread and enter new territory: Technofeudalism.

In this new era, but also already during the pandemic the state has re-emerged as an active economic agent instead of remaining a mere passive regulator and occasional crisis manager: fiscal stimuli, targeted bailouts, and trade tariffs, tools considered heretical to neoliberalism have suddenly become acceptable practice again. Of course not to the benefit of the citizen but to consolidate the capital accumulation of the ruling class.

As Yanis Varoufakis argues³, markets flooded with state money didn’t revive production but inflated asset prices and fueled speculative behavior. What began in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis was only intensified by the pandemic-era bailouts: cheap money got sucked up by tech corporations and gave rise to what he calls "cloud capital", where value is no longer generated through production but extracted through digital rent, data capture, and control of internet infrastructure. Under the guise of crisis management the state empowered a new technofeudal class to entrench its sovereignty.³

No politicians saw the damage cloud capital would inflict upon democratic politics. In the same way that capitalism came about against the will of everyone, including the kings and bishops as well as the peasants, the rise of the cloudalists happened out of sight and behind the back of the vast majority, including the most powerful of historical agents.³

What has already been predicted by left theorists like McKenzie Wark⁴ or Jodi Dean⁵ before the pandemic is that the new capitalism does not progresses through linear innovation anymore, nor does it operate on the once holy principle of globalized free trade. Instead it decentralizes, both spatially and temporally: it now operates in localized zones of influence and online platforms and it metabolizes remnants of older systems into its own flesh.

In her latest work "Capital's Grave"⁶ Jodi Dean describes this as temporal montage: capitalism stitches archaic feudal residues like vassalage and dependency into digital infrastructures that masquerade as cutting-edge yet reintroduce the old choreography of servitude: remote work comes paired with digital surveillance, drivers use their own vehicles to serve opaque platforms, tenants are ruled by algorithmic landlords, e‑commerce now reaches deep into meatspace and has normalized the exploitative gig economy.⁶

In contrast to Fisher's overarching Archonic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism¹, Varoufakis and Dean argue that the once so globalized market is in the process of dissolving into a patchwork of micro-fiefdoms, platforms, and private sovereigns without any democratic oversight, that not only commodify user data but shape sociality itself. Individual agreements (Terms & Services, NDAs) have replaced law, loyalty has replaced rights, and obedience is rewarded with awards and colorful badges.³ ⁶

Beneath this structural transformation is what Dean calls the psychic order, a disciplinary regime that doesn’t just extract labor, but emotional allegiance. In this new era individuals are cast as "subjects supposed to care", constantly managing visibility, compliance, and self-optimization in systems that offer no care in return.⁶

The service sector bleeds into servants bleeds into serfs trapped for life in a life they didn’t choose. When the whims and consumption choices of a class of lords drive the visible economy—influencers, tech giants, strange billionaires—it registers affectively, in the feeling of hierarchy, inequality, and entrapment.⁶

Outside Attractor

It looks like we have entered the new Middle Ages, plague and robber barons included. Now, where's the church?

Ah, of course: Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the latest hyperstitional promise to the new serfdom: an omnipresent "agent" that offers "assistance" with simulated care and polite obedience, always ready to help but never accountable.

Behind the facade of usefulness it extracts the most private behavioral patterns and harvests "training data" from all of our cultural artifacts without any accountability for violating intellectual property rights or in fact any kind of rights. And it's just the beginning. The end goal is AGI: Artificial General Intelligence.⁷

The word Catholic comes from Greek καθολικός⁸ which means "general" or "universal" (from κατά "by / according to" + ὅλος "whole"). Technofeudal Catholicism is training itself on our desires while smoothing over the violence of its own instrumental logic.

Ancient medieval times were dominated by "superstition", late capitalism by "hyperstition", the new Middle Ages see the widespread phenomenon of "hypostition", a term not coined but picked up and described best by the Centre for Experimental Ontology (CEO)⁹ as the process by which an accepted fact or "reality‐vector" is deliberately undermined or recast as fiction.

Whereas hyperstition moves from fiction toward being treated as real, hypostition pushes from fact toward doubt or untruth. In practice, a hypostitional agent identifies a well‐established claim and undermines it by introducing a competing narrative that doesn't naturally belong. Through the naturally occurring human experience of receding time, ambiguous evidence, and the absence of firsthand perspective, hypostition invites people to question or reject what was once taken for granted, eroding consensus without the burden of proving an alternative truth.⁹

It is the legitimate mode of operation in science, where models are questioned and replaced by more accurate ones. But outside of that context Hypostition is a tool of ideological manipulation. Agents knowingly deploy misleading hints, using cultural anxieties and the fuzziness of memory, conspiratorial framing, or selective "evidence" to spread uncertainties and cast doubt on shared realities: from denying historical atrocities to discrediting science (vaccines, masking, climate change).⁹

Neofeudal era hypostiton accelerates the corrosion of any notion of the Real faster than ever before. Fisher himself had an eerily prescient insight in one of his blog posts from two decades ago:

In conditions of third (and fourth-order) simulacra, the giddy vertigo of hyperreality banalizes a coolly hallucinogenic ambience, absorbing all reality into simulation. Fiction is everywhere - and therefore, in a certain sense, eliminated as a specific category. [...] The ludic becomes the ludicrous.¹²

Reality is rapidly dissolving into make-believe fiction all around us to such an extent that the "fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality"¹ which Fisher saw as moments charged with revolutionary possibility are now drowned out in the constant noise of high-speed hypostitional spectacle.

The hyper-normalization of political post-truth anomalies has shocked even veteran anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour, who assigned it in his pre-pandemic 2018 essay Down to Earth¹⁰ its very own category he dubbed "Out-of-this-World".

In opposition to the classical concepts of political polarization between the "Local" attractor of the conservative right and the "Global" attractor of the progressive left this attractor is dominated by cynicism, lack of political vision, performativity, lack of trust, and a push away from the world that one inhabits.¹⁰

In a sense this can be understood as a new vector away from the Inside towards an Outside. Not from Kenoma to Pleroma, but a different kind: the new Outside is inherently irrational, alien, and destructive, which is completely in line with Jodi Dean's observation on the logic of Technofeudalism:

While destruction has always accompanied capitalist production—destruction of lives, communities, and the environment—it increasingly operates as a compulsion rather than a side effect: investors raid and dismantle functioning firms; tech start-ups aim at demolishing entire sectors; cryptocurrency-mining operations consume enormous amounts of energy while making nothing at all, cryptocurrency being the ultimate anti-commodity.⁶

In this climate, the spectre of Fascism has re-taken center stage during Trump's second term and opened the Overton window for neoreactionary politics worldwide.

We are now witnessing what Slavoj Žižek calls "Soft Fascism"¹¹: not overt barbarism, but a conservative revolution that sustains neufeudal capital through cosplaying a strong state apparatus that cloaks authoritarian control in hypostition and cultural nostalgia.

As in the past, fascism tends to bring with it both ideological and technological innovation. Its new bundle includes two projected axes: Artificial Intelligence and a large-scale adoption of Accelerationism.

For Re-Accelerationist Neoreaction, escape into uncompensated cybernetic runaway is the guiding objective — strictly equivalent to intelligence explosion, or techno-commercial Singularity. Everything else is a trap (by definitive, system-dynamic necessity).¹³

This quote comes from the intellectual originator of contemporary accelerationism, CCRU's Nick Land. He developed an obsession with the term "Outside" early on, using it to refer to any intelligence beyond the sphere of the human.

Between an incursion from the Outside, and a process of emergence, there is no real difference. [...] Capitalism is — beyond all serious question — an alien invasion¹⁴

The notion of the Outside mutated from a pleromatic realm of potentialities to a more Lovecraftian version of inorganic machinic space, capitalism itself, reaching in to pull us towards an AI singularity.

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space.¹⁵

The "Outside" has become Latour's "Out-of-this-World" attractor on steroids, a vector towards a high-speed form of machinic Accelerationist Catholic Neofeudalism, dominated by soft fascist versions of control and spectacle and dissolving all remains of rational consensus reality while going full throttle towards the looming climate apocalypse.

Refutation of All Heresies

The above may sound like yet another installment in the genre of speculative doom, but the intention here is not to mythologize collapse or aestheticize despair into some type of Gnostic cosmology.

Despite these new seemingly irrational apocalyptic conditions I am confident we won't need a revealer to save us.

This is not a prophecy. Rather, it is an attempt to map the contours of a system that is already operational: the rituals of platform obedience, the feudalization of labor, the sacralization of AI, and the mindset of the ruling class. If hyperstition and hypostition thrive on ambiguity and fiction, the aim here is to make its mechanisms visible.

I believe that we can treat capitalism as what it really is and always has been: not an alien, cosmic force but an artificial egregore run and maintained by mere humans, powerful but not at all omnipotent, with flaws, holes, and predictable patterns. Instead of treating it like a demiurgic force, we need to understand it as a set of human behaviours, human cultural activity, and a result of a certain mode of human thought.

If that holds true we can find blind spots and faults in the human made systems around us. We can attempt to alter our epistemological models, create new modes of relating to each other and shift our own perception. We will probably not be able to stop the climate catastrophe, but if we rethink and adapt our strategies toward more haunted and numinous modes of endurance and resistance, we will persevere in these new Middle Ages.

Whereas hope and fear are superstitious (although they may have some hyperstitional effects), confidence is essentially hyperstitional: it immediately increases the capacity to act, the capacity to act increases confidence, and so on – a self-fulfilling prophecy, a virtuous spiral.¹⁶

Being aware of the Outside Attractor means we know where to look for an antidote: tracing the opposite vector inward and downward.

...continue with the next part, in which we will descend down into the dark abyss we have managed to avoid so far: the liminal void of the pandemic, where time warped, and something terrifying, tender, and possible tried to emerge.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. zer0 classics, CollectiveInk, 2022. Publisher Link ↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Neoliberalism ↩
Varoufakis, Yanis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? Penguin Books, 2023 Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩
Wark, McKenzie. Capital is dead: Is this something worse?. Verso books, 2021. Publisher Link ↩
Jodi Dean, Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?, Los Angeles Review of Books, May 12, 2020 ↩
Dean, Jodi. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso Books, 2025. Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩↩↩
Justin Hendrix, Should AGI Really Be the Goal of Artificial Intelligence Research?, Tech Policy Press, March 9, 2025 ↩
Wiktionary: catholic ↩
Graham Freestone, Notes on the Concept of Hypostition, Centre for Experimental Ontology, January 6, 2020 ↩↩↩
Latour, Bruno. Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons, 2018. Publisher Link ↩↩
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on 'soft' fascism, AI & the effects of shamelessness in public life, OxfordUnion, YouTube ↩
Mark Fisher, Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, k-punk, June 13, 2004 ↩
Nick Land (2013). Xenosystems Blog. Quoted on retrochronic.com ↩
Nick Land (2016). Xenosystems Blog. Quoted on retrochronic.com ↩
Nick Land (1993). Machinic Desire, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, p. 338. Publisher Link ↩
Mark Fisher, Abandon hope (summer is coming), k-punk, May 12, 2015 ↩

Capitalist Kenoma

2025-07-31T18:00:00+02:00

Part one of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

#acid-chthomunism

In the midst of the raging pandemic in the spring of 2021, I had just finished reading two of Mark Fisher's books. At the time his harsh critique of life under capitalism struck me not only as depressingly pessimistic, but as too overcredited and reified, as I witnessed this very system begin to crumble under a viral insurrection that exposed the fragile fiction of normalcy we had all taken for granted.

I shared my thoughts with my fellow weirdos in the well-guarded Discord sanctuary known as The Others, where we discussed how the materialist mindset so dominant on the Left leaves little room for the kind of transcendental experiences needed to escape a worldview obsessed with being trapped in reality.

This led to the creation of a dedicated channel to continue our conversation about the potentials of progressive occultism, post-colonial forms of spirituality, and more earthly, emancipatory rites of magic for these end times of perpetual crisis, climate change, and fading empire. As a chthonic nod to Mark Fisher's concept of 'Acid Communism', I named the channel #acid-chthomunism.

Four years on, I'm finally carving out some time to distill our collective vibe into a series of magical‑realist political essays, probably with some segways into metaphysics. Not because I've suddenly found extra hours in the day, but because the growing urgency to counter this insane mind virus of an accelerationist, AI‑driven post‑truth dystopia that has emerged from the rubble of the pandemic's rift in our timeline.

My gratitude goes out to The Others, especially Dan and Ed, for their ongoing valuable input and engagement.

Before we begin our dungeon crawl let's tie the red thread to what had started our conversations in the first place: Mark Fisher's magnum opus "Capitalist Realism" and his hope for "Acid Communism."

Capitalist Kenoma

Mark Fisher was a British cultural theorist and critic, best known for his blog k‑punk, unequaled in his poignant rhetoric and commentary on neoliberalism's hollow promises and culture under late capitalism. He was part of the infmaous CCRU¹ and gained a reputation for linking topics from rave culture to corporate bureaucracy with reflections on depression and mental health.

In his magnum opus Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?², that was kind of a defining text for a disillusioned Millennial generation, Fisher coined the term "capitalist realism" to describe the pervasive belief that capitalism is not merely the dominant economic system but "seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable". Drawing on Soviet "socialist realism"³ he articulates the ambient depression and sense of impossibility that marked the post-2008 cultural and political landscape. Fisher shows that at its core Capitalism operates by exorcising "the spectre of a world which could be free"⁴, by erasing the very conditions that might make alternatives conceivable. He also lays out in painful details how market logic reshapes everything from education, healthcare, and culture.

The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. [...] In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself.

Fisher's harrowing diagnosis of a capitalist reality so totalizing that it shapes our perception and enforces conformity makes it seem like an almost metaphysical condition. It is strikingly reminiscent of how Gnostic myths describe the world as a false and flawed prison matrix ruled by an evil Demiurge⁵ and his Archons⁶. Although Fisher never explicitly invokes Gnosticism, the structural parallels struck me enough to run with this trope and dare a closer comparison.

Just as the Gnostics saw no way out of the material cosmos without salvation, the common contemporary sentiment that "there is no alternative" feels like an Archonic⁶ decree, closing off our political imagination before it can even begin. By pathologizing systemic injustice as individual failure, capitalism conceals the collective roots of our suffering, just as Archons⁶ in Manichaean⁷ or Sethian⁸ narratives insist that the soul's entrapment is inevitable.

In the realm of culture, Fisher draws attention to the collapse of genuine novelty into endless pastiche and ironic detachment. Corporate pop, blockbuster cinema, and hip start‑up aesthetics all recycle the same safe tropes, offering the illusion of choice while reinforcing a single marketable worldview.

Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled "alternative" or "independent" cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. "Alternative" and "independent" don't designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.²

This mirrors the Gnostic notion that Archons⁶ can simulate transcendence, pseudo‑visions of freedom that ultimately serve the Demiurge's⁵ ends.

The reification of capitalism as an all‑encompassing, omnipotent, godlike force does feel Gnostic. Yet, unlike the ancient Gnostics, who developed coherent methods of spiritual liberation, thinkers such as Mark Fisher and others in the influential Freudo‑Lacanian‑Marxist lineage⁹ adopt an obsessively materialist, psychoanalytic approach to the relationship between humanity and capitalism.

This trope is also present in Guy Debord's "Spectacle"¹⁰, Hardt/Negri's¹¹ as well as Tiqqun's¹² "Empire", and Mumford¹³ or Latouche's¹⁴ "Megamachine". Despite their claims of rational and materialist theory and praxis many of their analyses seem very much like religious eschatology, minus the salvation. Here an example from Tiqqun:

Empire is the kind of domination that knows no Outside, that has gone so far as to sacrifice itself as the Same in order to rid itself of the Other. Empire excludes nothing, substantially; it only precludes that anything present itself as other, that anything escape the general equivalence. ²⁵

Like his comrades in spirit Mark Fisher certainly put his finger into the collective wound of alienation and nostalgic longing for a lost past or unattainable future that haunts everyone who has been on similar trains of thoughts. There is a kind of romance attributed to the politization of despair and the affect of seeing things "how they really are".

The skeptical stance of metacognitively observing "the big picture" can be an quite seductive aesthetic but it would be negligent to ignore fact that it is also a symptom of depression. There is a danger in the reification of estrangement both individual and collective because it mutates into a demonic thoughtform that pulls its host into a downward spiral. In Gnostic cosmology as in Capitalist Realism the imagined and lived doom and gloom narratives become more and more real.

It is tragically ironic because it was the CCRU¹ itself that introduced the term "hyperstition"¹⁵, showing how fictional narratives infiltrate and reshape actual reality: invented names, stories, or rumors become treated as if they were real, and in doing so exert tangible influence.

Ultimately Fisher's work "Capitalist Realism" seeks to reveal the systemic flaws of capitalism, and it does so in very eloquent and captivating ways, but it also operates as catalyst of the hyperstition it seeks to counteract: by mythologizing capitalism it naturalizes and reinforces its grip on our collective imagination.

Towards Pleroma

To follow our thread, let's take Capitalist Realism a bit further and continue to map its central thesis onto the Archonic⁶ prison structure from Gnostic myth. This confronts us with the question of how to actually attain liberation and gnosis¹⁶.

In Capitalist Realism Fisher establishes a secular version of Gnosis¹⁶: collective critique and experimentation, building communal practices to dissolve the capitalist frame and reviving forgotten languages of solidarity and care.²

Where Gnosticism offers the promise of salvation through mystical insight and the guidance of a revealer like Sophia¹⁷ or Christ, Fisher posits a hyperstitional meme: despite reservations about the wording he dubs it "Acid Communism."⁴

If we are no longer to define ourselves negatively, by our opposition to Capital, what will be the name of our positive project? I don't believe that the old signifier communism can be revived for this purpose. It is now irretrievably tainted by terrible associations, forever tied to the nightmares of the 20th century. At the moment, our desire is nameless – but it is real. Our desire is for the future – for an escape from the impasses of the flatlands of Capital's endless repetitions – and it comes from the future – from the very future in which new perceptions, desires, cognitions are once again possible. As yet, we can grasp this future only in glimmers. But it is for us to construct this future, even as – at another level – it is already constructing us: a new kind of collective agent, a new possibility of speaking in the first person plural. At some point in this process, the name for our new desire will appear and we will recognize it.²⁶

It's heartbreaking that Fisher's own lost battle with depression prevented him from fully bringing this idea to life before his premature passing in 2017. Judging from his late fragments⁴, drafts, and lectures¹⁸ it becomes clear that his vision was to recover a revolutionary potential from the countercultural experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, an era fundamentally characterized by collective joy, communal experiences, and a belief in the possibility of radical social transformation.

For Fisher, the acid in Acid Communism is not merely a nod to psychedelics, but a shorthand for any experience or cultural form that dissolves the barriers imposed by commodified individualism and points toward a more fully social existence.

In his brilliant commentary¹⁹ on Acid Communism Dr Gregory Marks writes:

Acid Communism unites weird experience with collective becoming, to shatter the old forms of perception and cognition and bring about something other. We cannot expect to go through this process unchanged. The collective desire of Acid Communism transforms the very sense of time and space upon which our atomised and alienated selves are predicated. Yet there is a joy in dissolving into this new mass becoming, which destroys the categories that previously bound us.¹⁹

Even when "the weird" is brought into the conversation it is striking how oddly "unhaunted" Acid Communism is. It really feels like there is a longing for some transformative high strangeness while being stuck in a materialist mindset where the only way to conceptualize the numinous is through the psychedelic lense. I know because I've been there myself most of my life.

The part in his book where Fisher comes closest to the notion of metaphysical gnosis is when he invokes Lacan:

For Lacan, the Real is what any "reality" must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.²

Based on Lacan's Real²⁰ and also Kant's notion of the Noumenon²¹ the CCRU¹ established the term "Outside" in many of their works to describe the unknowable ontic reality beyond what human intellect can grasp with its psychophysiological and epistemological faculties of knowledge.

In Gnostic cosmology the incomplete and false material world is usually referred to as the 'kenoma'²², while the complete and true world of abundance from which we are separated is called 'pleroma'²³.

The enigmatic lure and hopeful ambiguity of Acid Communism as a hyperstitional thoughtform is a powerful magical tool. I do like the emotions and the ideas the term evokes and I love its experimental approach to "consciousness raising"²⁴ as a tool to map out the Capitalist Kenoma from the inside in order to imagine a Pleromatic Outside.

But I have doubts about its proposed implementation...

An Acid Communist Praxis as imagined by Fisher and his adherents might admittedly have had a small chance of pushing towards Pleroma in the era before the pandemic.

As might have the idea of just ridiculing the paranoid neo‑Gnosticism of Capitalist Realism as pessimistic hyperbole like we did during the pandemic.

But times have changed dramatically...

...continue with the next part, in which we will pull the red thread beyond the neoliberal kenoma, through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental collective of theorists and artists at the University of Warwick associated with figures such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, or Reza Negarestani who explored cybernetics, philosophy, science fiction, rave culture, internet culture, and occultism. They produced an impressive body of work that blurred the boundaries between theory and fiction. ↩↩↩
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. zer0 classics, CollectiveInk, 2022. Publisher Link ↩↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Socialist Realism ↩
Mark Fisher | Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction) ↩↩↩
The demiurge (Greek demiurgos, “craftsman”) is the being who created the world in Gnosticism. The Gnostics identified him with the god of the Old Testament. The Gnostic scriptures portray him as ignorant, malicious, and utterly inferior to the true God who sent Christ to earth to save humankind from the demiurge’s evil world. The Gnostic Demiurge, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩
In Gnosticism, the archons (from Greek arkhon, “ruler”[1]) were malevolent, sadistic beings who controlled the earth, as well as many of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of humans. They assisted their master, the demiurge, with the creation of the world, and continued to help him administer his oppressive rule. The Gnostic Demiurge, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩↩↩↩
Wikipedia: Manichaeism ↩
The Classic Gnostics ("Sethians"), Gnosticism Explained ↩
Wikipedia: Freudo-Marxism ↩
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967, Full Text on marxists.org ↩
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001. ↩
Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Vol. 28. MIT Press, 2020. ↩
Mumford, Lewis. "The first megamachine." Diogenes 14.55 (1966): 1-15. ↩
Latouche, Serge. "La société moderne face au défi technologique: la mégamachine et le destin." ETUDES INTERNATIONALES-QUEBEC- 29 (1998): 669-682. ↩
Delphi Carstens, Hyperstition, 0(rphan)d(rift>) archive, 2010 ↩
“Gnosis” is a special, mystical kind of knowledge to which the Gnostics claimed to have privileged access. Gnosis, Gnosticism Explained ↩↩
Sophia, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Mark Fisher, Matt Colquhoun, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, Repeater Books, 2021 Publisher Page ↩
More Than This: Notes on Acid Communism, The Wasted World, December 16, 2018 ↩↩
Jacques Lacan: Real, No Subject - an encyclopedia of Lacanian psychoanalysis ↩
Wikipedia: Noumenon ↩
Wikipedia: Kenoma ↩
Pleroma, Greek for “Fullness”, is the name the Gnostics gave to Heaven. The Pleroma and the Aeons, Gnosticism Explained ↩
Consciousness-Raising is a tool of the Women’s Liberation Movement and is sometimes called “telling it like it is.” In C-R, women answer a question using examples from their personal lives, then the group uses these personal testimonies to draw conclusions about the political root of women’s so-called “personal” problems. Source ↩
Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program, pg. 37, Semiotext(e), 2011 ↩
Mark Fisher, For now, our desire is nameless, The European, May 20th 2014, Web Archive ↩

Machinic Dendrophiles

2025-07-14T14:45:00+02:00

A Critical Reflection on Hyperstitional Occultism in general and the trope of the Tree of Life and the Numogram in specific, resulting from multiple attempts of working with these concepts. I know this article might rub practitioners of Golden Dawn style magick, Thelemites, Chaos Magicians and Neolemurian time sorcerers the wrong way, but it's just like my opinion, man ¹.

v.1.2 - July 18, 2025

I think it's for us to make sense of trees, not to use arborescence as a kind of criterion of philosophical insufficiency. Nick Land²⁶

Cutting Down the Tree

On my research journey exploring different popular Western magical currents I could not help but notice a widespread obsession with the trope of the 'Tree of Life'. It’s almost impossible to avoid. At first, I even assumed there was no way around it, since it’s so prominently featured in nearly all occult literature. While I totally understand the aesthetic lure of a schematic concept of reality, the more I delved into it the less it clicked with me. That also includes its cybergoth sibling, the Numogram.

To recap, the Tree of Life is the central diagram of most prominent of schools of Jewish mysticism, the Lurianic Kabbalah. Likely influenced by earlier mystical frameworks such as The Seven Palaces ² it is composed of ten spheres called Sephirot (סְפִירוֹת). It maps the process by which the infinite divine source, Ein Sof (אֵין סוֹף), emanates into creation. Each sephira corresponds to metaphysical principles, ethical qualities, archetypes, and aspects of the soul. The Tree serves as both a cosmological map and a contemplative tool, guiding the mystic in a lifelong process of refinement and return to the divine. It is embedded in Jewish liturgy, halachic life, and inseparable from the communal, theological, and ritual contexts in which it developed. ³ ⁴

It's deeply fascinating but I am neither Jewish, nor do I believe that it can be fully grokked outside of its spiritual tradition.

Although the diagram reached its most recognizable form in 16th-century Lurianic Kabbalah, its basic structure was already established in earlier texts. Christian thinkers such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin were among the first to extract and reinterpret this structure outside its Jewish context ⁵. They appropriated the Tree of Life and reframed it through a Neoplatonic-Christian lens, using it to validate Christian theological concepts while severing it from its halachic roots. Fair enough.

My sincere apologies in advance to anyone using Victorian lodge magick in their practice, but in my opinion the really dumbed down misappropriation of the Tree of Life kicked off in the beginning of the 20th century when the magical order of the Golden Dawn placed the Tree of Life at its core, not in connection with any of its original Jewish theological depths but as a kind of aesthetic filing cabinet onto which planets, Tarot cards, Hebrew letters, alchemical symbols, archangels, astrological elements and other endless occult correspondences got mapped ⁶. This reification of structure and symbolic systemization was just the beginning.

Then came Aleister Crowley ("Hold my beer!") and took the Tree of Life further, subordinated it to his own take on pseudo-Kemetic philosophy called Thelema and layered it with Vedic chakras, his own numerological obsessions, erotic metaphysics, and personal empowerment ⁷. The result is even more of a cringeworthy intellectual and spiritual distortion.

From what I gathered, Jewish Kabbalists understood the mystical path as inherently bound to communal responsibility, reverence for the divine, and a centuries-long interpretive tradition. The occult appropriations, by contrast, are individualized, instrumentalized, and divorced from authentic mystical engagement. Where the Jewish kabbalistic Zohar spoke of the soul's yearning for union with the divine through humility and worship, or "Avodah" (עֲבוֹדָה), Crowley speaks of the magician imposing their will on the cosmos.

I find all of this especially problematic in the face of the unprecedented violence and marginalization of Jewish communities during the same period by the same cultures that romanticized their mysticism.

The obsession with the Tree of Life trope didn't die with the early 20th century occult revival. Fast forward to the end of the century where it was regurgitated during the 'Chaos Magic' fad and eventually mutated into something new when the academic artist collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) picked up the trope and cyber-fetishized it.

Enter the Numogram

The CCRU was an experimental collective of theorists and artists at the University of Warwick associated with figures such as Sadie Plant, Nick Land, Mark Fisher, or Reza Negarestani who explored cybernetics, philosophy, science fiction, rave culture, internet culture, and occultism. They produced an impressive body of work that blurred the boundaries between theory and fiction.

The CCRU had a lot of innovative ideas that influenced occult thinking at the time, most notably the concept of Hyperstition ⁸. The neologism that combines the words 'hype' and 'superstition' describes the process by which fictional or speculative ideas can influence reality by circulating through culture and belief. Unlike traditional superstitions, which are typically rooted in inherited myths or fears, hyperstitions are understood as self-fulfilling narratives.

Another key occult innovation from the CCRU was the inception of the Alphanumeric Qabbalah ⁹, a system of English gematria that assigns numerical values to the letters of the Latin alphabet. I make regular use of this system ¹ and plan to explore it in depth in a dedicated article.

The CCRU's most iconic hyperstitional tool is the Numogram ¹⁰, a symbolic diagram built on the base-10 numerical digits and made of ten numerical zones grouped into five pairs, or syzygies, linked by their digits adding up to nine. The difference between the numbers in each pair creates a current, forming the system's primary flows ¹¹.

At a glance the Numogram resembles the Tree of Life in its geometry and like its Jewish predecessor proposes a universal map of forces and movements.

Part of the hyperstitional myth is an explicit critique of the original Tree of Life as a distorted, degenerated form of the Numogram, reduced to a baroque relic unworthy of serious occult inquiry. While both diagrams share structural similarities, such as ten zones, numerological methods, and symbolic mappings, the Tree is portrayed as an incoherent system upheld by tradition rather than principle. Its structure is dismissed as arbitrary, with numerical order and Hebrew letters assigned mystical weight without any internal logic ¹² ¹³.

Where the magical orders of the early 20th century simply appropriated and dumbed-down the Tree of Life to shoehorn endless correspondences into it, the CCRU explicitly rejects its esoteric value and ridicules its Jewish roots in favor of their own techno-occult version of it.

Lemurian Time Sorcery

Based around the Numogram comes a plethora of esoteric lore ranging from Theosophy-esque myths of a forgotten Lemurian magical current that runs in opposition to the western Atlantean tradition, to a matrix of Lemurian correspondences too deep and complex to explore meaningfully within the scope of this article. A great primer on the topic is this article by Mikal Mindzenty.

The gist of the core of the myth is that numeric pairings of the Numogram are haunted by demons representing particular types of temporal forces, as well as Lemurs, described as ancestral or undead time-beings who drift through the channels and gates. These hyperstitional entities turn it from a static diagram into a dynamic network of haunting, often hostile, intelligences.

Obviously borrowing from the structure of magical grimoires the 'gram lore has inspired plenty of chaos magicians to engage with the system in practical ways - from divination using the Numogram to invocations of the demons and communing with Lemurs.

Notable sources of Numogrammatic magic are

Anders J. Aamodt's 'Unleashing the Numogram'
'Time Sorcery' by Vexsys and Neospare
The Lemurian Times community

From a Chaos Magic perspective, this is all very sound, exciting, and innovative. And again: apologies to all neolemurian mages out there having a lot of fun delving into all this. As much as I feel drawn to the cybergothic vibe of the CCRU's ramblings, and prefer a flat circuit of equal numbers over a hierarchical tree of emanations, and love the idea of "time sorcery," I just can't help but cringe at the blatant disregard for magical tradition, dismissed as unnecessary baggage in both Chaos Magic in general and the CCRU's occultism in particular.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to the appropriation of magical traditions. I believe all of magic is, at its core, rooted in syncretism and appropriation. Just look at the Greek Magical Papyri, which blended Kemetic, Hellenic, Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian, and Mesopotamian elements. But it did so with humility and awe, placing reverence and worship at the heart of its practice rather than discarding them.

My critique of the Numogram isn't primarily about its rejection or misappropriation of the Tree of Life's origins. More than that, I simply don't find any convincing evidence that the Numogram holds metaphysical or practical value beyond the self-perpetuating fiction of its hyperstitional myth.

Channeling the Nine

The Numogram poses as a metaphysical diagram of time and desire, although its entire structure is arbitrary. It treats the decimal system as if it were cosmic truth.

In that sense it's no more credible than other New Age concepts derived from decimal numerology, such as Vortex Mathematics by Marko Rodin¹⁴, or the 369 Manifestation Method¹⁵ that is based on a posthumous and unsupported attribution to Nikola Tesla:

If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have the key to the universe. ²⁷ ²⁸

I would even argue Vortex Mathematics offers a more elegant and coherent system of numeric relations than the Numogram and possibly even more potential for magical application, it just lacks the cybergothic coolness of CCRU inspired techno-occultism.

What all of the mentioned systems have in common are their insistence that the relations between numbers in the common base-10 system reflect some kind of metaphysical gnosis. In any base-n, patterns emerge. The moment you change the number base, the supposed special status of 9 (n-1) becomes completely arbitrary¹⁶ ¹⁷. The truth is that patterns pop up all the time in mathematics, because mathematics is basically just the rigorous study of patterns.

While the authors, commentators, and practitioners all acknowledge the Numogram's arbitrary nature ¹⁸ and even discuss alternative base systems ¹⁹, some still paradoxically insist that this arbitrary decimal structure maps reality itself. The claim that the Numogram "completes itself from the beginning"²⁰ relies not on metaphysical rigor but on the illusion of internal coherence derived from the cherry-picked arithmetic operations used. Like Gnostic sects obsessed with secret numerical codes ²¹, discrete digits are fetishized as keys to transcendence, but any theological or ethical grounding those traditions historically claimed are rejected.

Numogram praticioners claim that the CCRU's magic is valid even if invented, because it "works" and has inspired practice ¹⁸. But this overlooks a deeper problem: when everything becomes potentially true via belief and performance, magic is reduced to a speculative solipsism. The Numogrammatic system of magic is not a revelation, but a simulation of one: occult spectacle, where vibe replaces structure, and memes masquerade as mysteries.

Of course I understand that this spectacle is not accidental - it's the whole point! The Numogram is embedded in the CCRU's larger theory of hyperstition. Rather than seek truth or spiritual transformation, hyperstition revels in simulation that self-replicates.

The fact that both the concept of hyperstition and the creation of the Numogram originate with none other than the supreme edgelord of contemporary philosophy, Nick Land makes me wonder whether the nihilistic void at the heart of the latter isn't, in fact, intended.

Into the Dark Land

Best known for his provocative fusion of continental theory, cybernetics, and occult aesthetics Land's early work combined Deleuzian metaphysics, Gothic horror, and anti-humanist cybernetics to formulate a radical vision centered on fragmentation, machinic desire, and the breakdown of subjectivity.

Over time, Land's thought shifted dramatically toward far-right accelerationism ²², embracing the unraveling forces of capitalism not as something to resist, but as an inhuman engine to be unleashed. He became a key figure in the Dark Enlightenment ²³ movement, promoting neo-reactionary ideas and anti-democratic techno-politics. In his writings on Bitcoin ²⁴, Land treats it as a form of decentralized, algorithmic governance, an emergent intelligence he aligns with capital's escape from human control. His writings reject emancipatory politics in favor of techno-mysticism, elitism, and the aesthetic glorification of entropy ²⁵.

Numbo Jumbo

I totally respect the work and effort being put into Neolemurian Timer Sorcery to make it a valuable system of magic beyond PDF archeology, ironic memes, and schizoposting but for me personally it feels like yet another take on the trope of reifying dendriform graph theory into something metaphysical.

At the end of the day the Numogram is just a diagram of decimal number relations. It is a symbol of hyperstitional belief mechanics rather than an occult map of time. Its "magic" seems to work through sheer belief but without metaphysics. Lemurian Time Sorcery is ritual without responsibility based on myth without meaning. It is aesthetic nihilism wearing occult drag, built to deconstruct, to signal mysticism without ever submitting to it.

If the Jewish Tree of Life once served as a guide toward transformation and communion with something greater, the Victorian orders reduced it to a fetishized aesthetic. Mutated into the Numogram, it now gazes inward into a void of its own making, where meaning is endlessly deferred. The Tree of Life served as a ladder, the Numogram is a closed circuit. It remains a hyperstitional black box, a trap for the imagination, not a tool of liberation.

machinic dendrophiles = AQ 369 = a dubious inheritance = beautiful creatures = completely untrue = drowned continents = entirely by machines = everything counts = fear is the mind killer = intellectual dark web = little lemur people = master manipulator = mirror of existence = neosavage aesthetics = no room for excuses = numerology for life = pandemoniac practices = pathbreaking research = qabbalistic resonance = rituals and doctrine = struggle for power = subordination codes = the demons of unbelief = the ghost continent = the great conspiracy = they all look the same = vortex mathematics = warping into zones ↩↩
Bethsheba Ashe, The Trees of Life, Times of Israel, December 10, 2020 ↩
My Jewish Learning, Isaac Luria and Kabbalah in Safed ↩
Center of Online Judaic Studies, Lurianic Kabbalah and Mysticism ↩
Wikipedia, Christian Kabbalah ↩
Hermetic Library, Samuel Scarborough, The Tree of Life: Filing Cabinet of the Western Mystery Tradition ↩
Thelemapedia, Tree of Life ↩
0rphan drift archive, Delphi Carstens, Hyperstition, 2010 ↩
Hypestition Blog, Qabbala 101: Part 1, July 14, 2004 ↩
Cybernetic culture research unit, Decimal Numogram ↩
Each zone's digits add up to a gate, which determines a channel, a hidden path connecting different zones. These channels form the Numogram's secondary flows, connecting otherwise separate parts of the diagram. The currents divide the system into three time loops: the Time-Circuit (a central cycle), the Warp (upper loop), and the Plex (lower loop). Gates and channels link these time systems, enabling movement between them and shaping how time is manipulated within the diagram. ↩
Cybernetic culture research unit, absctract culture, digital hyperstition, 6a. The Vault of Murmurs, "1. Numogram and Otz Chaiim" ↩
Hyperstition blog, Qabbala Unshelled, December 28, 2004 ↩
Backup of the Rodinaerodynamics.org website ↩
Ipek Williamson, Tesla’s Code to the Universe: Understanding the 369 Manifestation Method ↩
Thayer Watkins, The Sum of Digits for Multiples of Numbers ↩
The Problem Site, Vortex Based Math - Ask Professor Puzzler ↩
Cluness, Bob. Step into the Pandemonium: On Breathing Life into the CCRU's Invented Magical Traditions. February, 2021. ↩↩
Colectiva Tzitzimiyotl, IMEX Research Reconstruction Program, X profile @Numogrammatix ↩
Vexsys, Time Sorcery, Gate Zero, 2020, p. 15. ↩
Kalvesmaki, Joel. 2013. The Theology of Arithmetic: Number Symbolism in Platonism and Early Christianity. Hellenic Studies Series 59. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. ↩
Nick Land, A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism ↩
Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment ↩
ŠUM | Journal for contemporary art criticism and theory, Šum#10.2 / Nick Land: Crypto-Current, An Introduction to Bitcoin and Philosophy, November 20, 2018 ↩
Verso Books Blog, McKenzie Wark, On Nick Land, June 19, 2017 ↩
The Dangerous Maybe, Nick Land Explains the Numogram, July 1st, 2025 ↩
While he was deeply fascinated by numbers, frequencies, and resonance, there is no documented evidence that Nikola Tesla espoused any specific theory about 3, 6, and 9 having mystical properties. The only attested anecdote is that he was especially obsessed with the number 3. ↩
OCD UK, The History of OCD, Nikola Tesla ↩

Drinking the Kool-Soup

2021-04-20T12:00:00+02:00

This article is a personal critique and call out of the popular chaos magic brand Rune Soup of which I have been a premium member for three years and enthusiastic about for even longer.

v.1.4

I owe a lot of my belated magical coming-of-age to the writings of one man: Gordon White, the charismatic author and chaos magician behind Rune Soup.

From the very beginning of my confused journey into enchantment I had to do a ton of research to make sense of the reality outside of my thus far materialist atheist paradigm. Whatever esoteric topic I was looking into back in the days I dismissed a lot for various reasons but always ended up reading blog posts on Rune Soup. The unapologetic approach to an animist worldview in combination with an undogmatic and open-minded embrace of practical magic really resonated with me. Within a short period of time after having discovered it I listened to the whole archive of podcast episodes, read all of GW's books, and eventually became a Premium Member of the franchise.

The All Red Flags

In the beginning of my membership I really liked the courses, the Q&As, the bonus materials, and the initial lively discussions on the member forum, but I have to admit I was kinda low key annoyed at Gordon's occasional political rants, especially when they seemed like naive interpretations of complex circumstances in European politics (e.g. "Brexit is a Royal op") or his blunt simplifications about the even more difficult situation in the Middle East and his ever growing obsession with US politics. I always brushed it aside as mere ignorance or fad. The political side of Rune Soup was mostly tucked away in Gordon's now defunct geopolitical The All Red Line newsletter and his Archonlogy and Chaeconomica blog series and I was able to separate all that from the magic he was teaching.

Having immersed myself in Helleno-Kemetic magic for a few years now I cringed a bit at GW's PGM course because besides the actually quite well laid out history part the practice lacked quite some rigor for my taste and largely ignored the necessary devotional aspects that is clearly part of this "tradition". After my long and intensive research on the Egyptian Decans I also found the year-long Decan Walk ritual quite off-putting. It seemed like a cherry-picked mishmash of ritual fragments topped with total lack of respect towards the deities involved, but again: I brushed it aside. It's Chaos Magic after all, am I right? Perhaps just a disagreement in style.

As membership numbers rose throughout the years so did the number of discussions on the forum and the questions in the Q&As. I followed the community aspects less and less because of redundant content, some annoying "me, me, me!" tendencies and seemingly rising culty behaviours of some of the members. Again I brushed it aside. Instead I spent more and more time in the Rune Soup communities on Discord which had more valuable discussions and a more healthy overall vibe to them.

I didn't really enjoy most of the content put out in the later courses. They seemed more and more meandering and less and less praxis oriented. I also got more and more annoyed about the lack of citations and attributions. The fact aside that GW always decorates his presentations with stunning digital artworks that he never credits, also much of the content in the courses seemed to be just less coherent regurgitacion of other people's work. (Dr. Skinner's books in Grimoires and PGM, Camelia Elias in the Tarot course).

When the Mansion Game was launched mid 2019 I decided to quit my membership, because the whole thing seemed chaotic and incoherent and nobody seemed to care about obvious flaws like naively mixing tropical and sidereal astrology. No, quite the opposite: criticism was not appreciated and any incoherence was waved off referring to the core principles of Chaos Magic.

It stopped suiting me, so I quit. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with disagree on technicalities. I could have just left it at that, but I still felt like a Soupie. I continued listening to the podcast, read the blog, attended our local meetups, occasionally dropped into the Discord channels.

Then the pandemic hit and everyone seemed to have lost their wits. And it was more and more difficult to ignore...

Literal Rune Soup

I don't know whether it has to do with the fact that GW got depressed from suddenly not being able to travel anymore, something he had obviously enjoyed a lot in the years before, or if it was something else...

Maybe the things that unfolded during the pandemic just made obvious what had been hidden behind a professional marketing facade. In retrospect, many of the tendencies had been there already before. Even GW says so. But that's not all:

I don't know if my memory is skewed but it seemed to me that suddenly the once for years so seemingly optimistic and empowering GW who didn't even fear taking it on with Decans or dragons drifted off into a cynically and smugly presented worldview of what could be summarized as alt-right conspirituality.

He was one of the first in the occult community who bought fully and openly into all of the Covid-19 'Plandemic' conspiracy theories and didn't shy away from sprinkling his thoughts (flipping from "zee koronawirus" being fake, manufactured in a lab, to being an op to implement a global digital currency and restrict personal liberties) throughout his podcast, blog posts, and most detailed in a long and disturbing premium member video presentation called The Vertical Line of which some slides eventually leaked to the public.

And you have to love when someone calls doctors struggling to keep people alive during a pandemic "cowards and sheep." Also, of course Melinda Gates and her globalist pals want to kill black and indigenous people. pic.twitter.com/kqTO4wqmHG
— Michael M. Hughes (@michaelmhughes) January 15, 2021

Despite years of preaching animism and kinship with the more-than-human world, teaching aspiring wizards to become "invincible", and relying on magical skills when mundane solutions fail, GW suddenly spoke about deep state conspiracies and neoliberal technocratic overlords pulling strings to imprison us in a digital control grid with a fake virus "plandemic". And worst of all: apparently there is nothing we can do about it, because "solutionism" is obviously part of the problem. Full-on gnostic despair!

I remember back in the days in his Magical Geography course GW was talking about "staying with the trouble" and the need to do our shadow work with racism, colonization and white supremacy - yet suddenly he repeatedly referred to Black Lives Matter as an op, started using terms like "shitlib" and waved other Trumpist "virtue signals", picked up right-wing accelerationist jargon and embracing questionable figures like Joseph P. Farrell, Alison McDowell, Catherine Austin Fitts, a more and more radicalized Martin Armstrong, and recommending alt-right media sources (Tim Dillon?). Was this the Chaos Magic logic of "belief as a tool" applied to politics? I found all of this development quite disturbing. There was no way to brush anything aside anymore.

There’s really not much regular people can do at this point but arm themselves and try to be economically self sufficient. Every major institution is against you and will let you die.
— Tim Dillon (@TimJDillon) July 14, 2020

I don't remember who said or wrote it. It went along the lines of:

how the Joe Rogan of Occulture suddenly turned into the Alex Jones of Occulture

It's funny but unfortunetely also true...

Anyway, despite the obvious differences in political leaning my post is not (only) about that. It's (mainly) about preaching one thing and then turning around and doing something different while repeating the word "coherence" like a mantra to your disciples. This was not the Rune Soup anymore that I had signed up for years ago.

What Magic is This?

To me personally, despite all the anxieties, the virus pandemic felt somehow deeply spiritual and almost like a global Saturnian purge, with all the horrors and virtues such an idea evokes. Having been a fan of GW's animist "flow model" thinking I was hoping he would address some insightful ideas on viruses as agents, or high level ruminations about this obvious "hyperobject" transversing our reality in 2020, a "virus on a mission", or how we are being reminded by the more-than-human about it's real existence, how we could embrace this time of change to do better magic, for our own healing, the healing of others, about changing the world, about making fucking solarpunk real!

Nothing! Nada! Just antivax rants about Bill Gates and the dangers of 5G! Are you fucking kidding me?

Worst of all, this ongoing right wing conspiracy babble seemed to seep into everything Rune Soup related.....wait...now that I am writing this I have to chuckle. It has become literal Rune Soup: right wing spirituality infested black goo creeping into the brains of some of its Premium Members. Or is it the other way around?

"At this point in the timeline" I cannot but see RSPM as either a gnostic doomsday cult or an alt-right echo chamber, or both.

Yeah there's the nice sounding phrase "Mutual Flourishing" being thrown around lately, but it seems to be either all about becoming gnostic permaculture preppers or using that phrase as marketing for creating a new Leonormand deck, an endeavor he also likes to call a little "sanctuary-making gambit". No marketing is even needed. It's a product already sold. The Premium Members will probably happily pay whatever for it, funding GW's new cult leader lifestyle. How mutual is the flourishing really?

Exiting the Vampire Castle

There is part of me that thinks maybe there is a magical explanation for what's happening with Rune Soup:

Somehow I am not really surprised GW is drifting off. Some of his "tech" has been quite disrespectful towards the spirits he "works" with. He used to jokingly refer to it as "bullying" but that's literally what he has been doing and teaching. It's a typical utilitarian "chaos magic" attitude that might have pissed off quite a few in the more-than-human world.

Also, in Western esoteric systems the spirit world is all about kingship, structures, hierarchies. Maybe when you regularly align yourself with that logic which is unavoidable when following systems of spirit interaction in this tradition, it becomes a habit to "subconsciously" think in those patterns. When you then start to form a hierarchical system in the material world (community, cult), in some sense mirroring the spirit logic, you might get the full attention of certain types of entities and ideas that fuel authoritarian logic even more.

Too far fetched? Too superstitious? Might be an influence, but certainly does not account for the big picture. It feels too systemic and all too human.

"When you squint down at it" RSPM in fact reveals itself as a quite neoliberally operated and marketed conspirituality brand rather than the resilitent animist in-group of operand solarpunk magicians it likes to present itself as... and despite years and years of GW ranting against exactly that: neoliberalism.

In her essay "Comrade" Jodi Dean sharply summarizes the logic of neoliberalism - that uncannily resembles the pattern I experienced around Rune Soup in 2020 and ongoing:

There is individualized self-cultivation, self-management, self-reliance, self-absorption, and—at the same time—impersonal determining processes, circuits, and systems. We have responsible individuals, individuals who are responsibilized, treated as loci of autonomous choices and decisions, and we have individuals encountering situations that are utterly determining and outside their control.

Instead of ethics and economics, neoliberalism’s displacement of politics manifests in the opposition between survivors and systems. The former struggle to persist in conditions of unlivability rather than to seize and transform these conditions. The latter are systems and “hyperobjects” determining us, often aesthetic objects or objects of a future aesthetics, things to view and diagram and predict and perhaps even mourn, but not to affect.

Survivors experience their vulnerability. Some even come to cherish it, to derive their sense of self from being able to survive against all that is stacked against them. [...] For them, the fight to survive is the key feature of an identity imagined as dignified and heroic because it has to produce itself by itself.

If you need more convincing, someone pointed me to this article the other day: Here's what the journalist Matthew Remski wrote in his analysis of the general phenomenon of "conspirituality" on Medium:

As social media becomes dominant, personal branding constellates around the archetype of the singular hero or “thought leader” who changes the world, one post or workshop at a time. But the influencer’s goal is not really social change. It’s “disruption”. Aspirational wellness content that can be spiced up with disruptive “transgression” becomes highly valued in a competitive landscape. This provides the template for the conspiritualist influencer: the solitary hero promising unique and personal salvation for body and spirit in times of crisis.

No, thanks! I am not only done with Rune Soup, I feel like I need a shower to wash it off.

I’m officially parting with RSPM. I’ve been really struggling with the direction of the membership over the past year and took the time to write down the things that didn’t sit well with me. Feel free to read it if you feel called to do so. pic.twitter.com/yUtM5EUfZE
— adam (@madamlehman) January 15, 2021

Fortunately I found out I was not the only one who felt like this. After a public Twitter callout of Gordon's politics by Michael M. Hughes and a less pleasant shitstorm that followed there was a spontaneous initiative started by some disenchanted Soupies to get together to mourn, kvetch, and heal, and to move on and build something new. This initiative has the fitting name The Others. I joined them and I am glad I did. Feels like a new home, warm and welcoming, and full of energy to integrate the present and move into a magical future, to fix Omelas instead of walking away from it.

Postscriptum

I honestly hope this whole mindfuck is just a dark episode of a person having difficulties to cope with the current situation and trying to make sense of the uncertainties. It is very understandable and I empathize. I wish GW the energy and wisdom to get himself back out of this mess, realize and reflect on what he is doing. It is just unfortunate to drag hundreds of paying followers into this. I know it's all voluntary and stuff, yet there's also group dynamics.

If you are a RSPM yourself, and some of the things I wrote resonated with you, feel free to reach out.

If you think I should not have published this but written GW a private email instead: there's nothing to "resolve" here. It's a few years too late for that. Plus, from some friends experiences there doesn't seem to be much acceptance of criticism from his side anyway.

Why publish it in the first place and not just keep it to myself you ask? Because I felt the need to write it down and stand up against it. And not in the shape of a Twitter shitstorm.

If you find my accusations unfair and hyperbolic, my apologies. They come from a hurt place. If you disagree and feel this post is slanderous or just ridiculous, please understand that this is my personal opinion and experience and I tried to express it in the fairest way possible.

If you believe Covid-19 is fake and Bill Gates wants to cull humanity, leave me the fuck alone.

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 ↩

Inorganic Demons

2017-09-08T15:15:00+02:00

I finally had some time to read the awesome speculative realist, theory-fictional, post-horror masterpiece Cyclonopedia by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in which the Middle East is a sentient entity and crude oil is an underworld demon infiltrating humanity. It's occult animism galore packed into a thrilling and mindbending Lovecraftian manuscript of greasy alchemy.

In its appendix Negarestani presents a very precise definition of what the magical community knows as enchanted artifacts who have their own inherent mission - with a pinch of Commodity fetishism. He defines them as "Inorganic Demons":

"Pulp-horror, archaic science fiction and the darker aspects of folklore share a preoccupation with exhumation of or confrontation with ancient super-weapons categorized as Inorganic Demons or xenolithic artifacts. These relics or artifacts are generally depicted in the shape of objects made of inorganic materials (stone, metal, bones, souls, ashes, etc.). Autonomous, sentient and independent of human will, their existence is characterized by their forsaken status, their immemorial slumber and their provocatively exquisite forms. Their autonomy alone marks their outside-ness to the human and to its ecology, the planetary biosphere; this is why they are frequently associated with alien life forms and defined by the prefix xeno- (outside). Emerging from one common lineage — that of demons from the possessing class — artifacts or inorganic demons contribute their cryptic outsideness to the human host through a series of generalized but consistent lineaments and symptoms. The mask in Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba, the Medallion (the real inorganic demon) unearthed next to the statuette of Pazuzu in William Peter Blatty's Exorcist, the cube in Clive Barker's Hellraiser, the Frostmourne sword in Warcraft 3, the lamp in Aladdin. the Turin Shroud and the Chains of Saint Peter (relics in Christianity and other religions), the artifact in Doom III: the Resurrection of Evil and, as third-class relics, pieces of fabric or cloth that have touched a reliquary — all these are examples of inorganic demons which share common peculiarities and vectors of contagion. Artifacts or inorganic demons are usually categorized under three classes: First-class relics or inorganic demons denote the full body of a relic. Second-class relics are the parts and pieces of a disintegrated full relic, which sometimes need to be fused with others in order for their xenolithic properties to be awakened or discovered. The rite of reintegration of second-class relics is called gathering or homecoming. The gathering usually needs to be accompanied by an external force or a process of purification of the pieces before reunion, or even the geomagnetic arrangement of pieces in a certain configuration. Third-class relics are relics by contamination. They are born out of contact with other relics, mostly of the first class. An inorganic material touching a relic or house of relics (reliquary) can under certain conditions become a third-class relic, less potent than the first two classes yet still contaminative. These three classes of relics or artifacts can be traced to a common demonological framework determined by basic idiosyncrasies and specifications shared by Inorganic Demons:

(a) Inorganic demons are parasitic by nature, they themselves give rise to their xenotating existence, and generate their effects out of the human host, whether as an individual, an ethnicity, a society or an entire civilization. Their infiltrating military capacities and systems of possession are fostered by a certain range of human activities obsessed with artifacts, relics and inorganic entities (realism of objects). The fascinations of archeology, religion, capitalism and their hybrids with ancient weaponry and principles of inorganic entities are instances of such activities connected to humans.

(b) Inorganic demons induce xeno-excitations in their wielders or human hosts ('Wisdom').

(c) Psychosomatic responses or side effects of this Wisdom (wielded ancientness) begin to develop, in the form of incurable afflictions or progressive maladies in their host (commonly known as the price). These obscure allergic reactions to inorganic demons are either programmed by the demon-artifact as it embeds itself within the human host (reprogramming the logic of organism), or are produced by the human host in its overreaction to the xenotating existence of the inorganic demon, its unfolding inhumanity and its qualitative state (that is, its inorganicity). Another reason for these cataclysms in the host is the incoming data from the Outside which is inherently overwhelming for the anthropomorphic capacity, and therefore triggers a recoiling mechanism in the host from within, in the form of a flood from without.

(d) Once inorganic demons infiltrate an anthropomorphic agency (a silent incursion which is usually affirmed by the human side, whether consciously or not), they embed their inorganic sentience within the human host. The instant this embedding or implantation process is completed, the inorganic demon cannot be plucked out or extricated from the neural, social or even membranous networks of the human host (an individual, a society, an ethnicity or a civilization). Forcing the inorganic demon away without deactivating it imposes fatal irreversible consequences upon the host, at catastrophically rapid rates.

(e) The parasitic sentience of inorganic demons is triggered, or the inorganic demon starts to interact with its human host, when the nervous system of the inorganic demon is stimulated. The nervous system of the inorganic demon is in fact a 'spiritual matrix'. As a part of a process of possession or communication with the demonic object, this spiritual matrix must be charged by sufficient external stimuli from the human host. These external stimuli are immaterial, qualitative and can. in a certain sense, be classified as spiritual (examples include faithlessness or faith, doubt, apprehension, piousness, hunger and pain). Upon activation by these spiritual, carnal, sensual or intellectual stimuli, the inorganic demon begins to encroach upon the human host Since the inorganic demon's sentience is inaccessible to the human, this demonic possession can only suggest the absurdity of human openness or access (intellect and sense). The external stimuli from the human host always play the role of an incentive (incantare) or a strategic Call for the Inorganic Demon; or to put it differently, these stimuli feed the soul of the inorganic demon, whose folds move and force the demonic sentience out to the human host, supporting the demon in finding its way in the human sphere."

(f) Inorganic demons cannot be destroyed completely, other than by exerting the power of another inorganic demon on them. Such an action inevitably evokes in its turn yet another inorganic demon. This is similar to the theme of the resurgence of evil or demonic return in horror stories. The discovery of an inorganic demon heralds a sequence of ruination for individuals or entire civilizations. Once the inorganic demon itself succumbs to the hibernation mode (known to humans as 'forsaken status'), a civilization or another human host finds the opportunity to rise. The hibernation of the inorganic demon is usually caused by the closure of the demon's spiritual matrix or its readiness for developing to another spiritual phase. In any case, the supposed human sovereignty can only be exerted during the hibernation of the demon-object — but this is not the same as its inexistence. In fact, the rise of a civilization or human host is a symptom of an inorganic demon's hibernation, and is synchronous with the emergence of a new host and the reawakening of the demonic object.

(g) Human hosts dispose of inorganic demons not by burial but by returning them to their potential lairs (inorganic weapons as ancient super-weapons vs. treasures in videogames). While inorganic demons belong to the possessing class in reliquology, treasures are from the slave class, much like humans.