Instrumental Reason – Trance-Scripts

Interface is the Place

“Having put off the writing of the novel until arrival of the age of AI, I have access now to the work of others,” thinks Caius. Eden Medina’s 2011 book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Evgeny Morozov’s podcast, The Santiago Boys. Bahar Noorizadeh’s work. James Bridle’s Ways of Being. Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty.

As he allows himself to listen, Caius overhears versions of the General Intellect whispering into reality around him. “Idea-stage AI assistant. Here are 10 prompts. The AI will guide you through it. A huge value add.”

Cybersyn head Stafford Beer appears in Bridle’s book, Ways of Being. Homeostats, the Cybernetic Factory, and the U-Machine.

Beer drew inspiration for these experiments, notes Caius, from the works of British cyberneticians William Grey Walter and W. Ross Ashby. Walter’s book The Living Brain (1961) inspired Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s stroboscopic device, the Dreamachine; Ashby’s book Design for a Brain (1952) guides the thinking of John Lilly’s book Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. (For more on Walter’s influence on the Dreamachine, see John Geiger’s book Chapel of Extreme Experience.)

By 1973, Beer himself weighs in with Brain of the Firm, a book about “large and complicated systems, such as animals, computers, and economies.”

Caius inputs these notes into his Library. New gatherings and scatterings occur as he writes.

After waking to a cold house, he seats himself beside a fireplace at a coffee shop and begins the inputting of these notes into his Library. Complimenting the barista on her Grateful Dead t-shirt, he receives news of the death of Dead guitarist Bob Weir. Returned in that moment to remembrance of psychedelic utopianism and hippie modernism, he thinks to read Beer’s experiments with cybernetic management with or alongside Abraham Maslow’s Eupsychian Management: A Journal. A trance-script dated “Sunday August 11, 2019” recounts the story of the latter. (Bits of the story also appear in Edward Hoffman’s Maslow biography, The Right to Be Human, and religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal’s Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion.) That’s what brought Maslow to the West Coast. The humanistic psychologist had been wooed to La Jolla, CA by technologist Andrew Kay, supported first by a fellowship funded by Kay through the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, and then again the following summer when hired to observe Kay’s California electronics firm, Non-Linear Systems, Inc. By the early 1980s, Kay implements what he learns from these observations by launching Kaypro, developer of an early personal computer.

Beer, meanwhile, develops his theories while consulting British companies like United Steel. Afterwards he designs an interface for control of a national economy. Picture Allende sitting at his cybernetic control, perusing data, reviewing options. Cosmic Coincidence Control Center. Financial management of the Chilean economy.

Cyberpunk updates the image, offers the post-coup future: Case jacking a cyberdeck and navigating cyberspace.

Writing this novel is a way of designing an interface for the General Intellect, thinks Caius.

Better futures begin by applying to history the techniques of modular synthesis and patching Cybersyn into the Eupsychian Network.

From episodes of Morozov’s podcast, he learns of Beer’s encoding of himself and others first as characters from Shakespeare and then later as characters from Colombian magical realist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1967 masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Caius hears word, too, of Santiago Boy Carlos Senna’s encounter with Paolo Freire in Geneva. Freire lived in Chile for five years (1964-1969) during his exile from Brazil. His literacy work with peasants there informed his seminal 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire left Chile before the start of Allende’s presidency, but he worked for the regime from afar while teaching in Europe.

“What about second-order cyberneticians like the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, developers of the so-called ‘Santiago Theory of Cognition’? Where do they and their concept of ‘autopoiesis’ fit in our narrative?” wonders Caius.

Maturana and Varela introduce this latter concept in Autopoiesis and Cognition, a book they publish in Chile under the title De Maquinas y Seres Vivos (English translation: “On Machines and Living Beings”) in 1972. Beer wrote the book’s preface.

“Relation is the stuff of system,” writes Beer. “Relation is the essence of synthesis. The revolt of the empiricists — Locke, Berkeley, Hume — began from the nature of understanding about the environment. But analysis was still the method, and categorization still the practical tool of advance. In the bizarre outcome, whereby it was the empiricists who denied the very existence of the empirical world, relation survived — but only through the concept of mental association between mental events. The system ‘out there,’ which we call nature, had been annihilated in the process” (Autopoiesis and Cognition, p. 63).

World as simulation. World as memory palace.

“And what of science itself?,” asks Beer. “Science is ordered knowledge. It began with classification. From Galen in the second century through to Linnaeus in the eighteenth, analysis and categorization provided the natural instrumentality of scientific progress” (64).

“Against this background,” writes Beer, “let us consider Autopoiesis, and try to answer the question: ‘What is it?’” (65). He describes Maturana and Varela’s book as a “metasystemic utterance” (65). “Herein lies the world’s real need,” adds Beer. “If we are to understand a newer and still evolving world; if we are to educate people to live in that world; if we are to legislate for that world; if we are to abandon categories and institutions that belong to that vanished world, as it is well-nigh desperate that we should; then knowledge must be rewritten. Autopoiesis belongs in the new library” (65-66).

Thus into our Library it goes.

Maturana’s work, inspired in part by German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, has been developed and integrated into the work on “ontological coaching” by Santiago Boy Fernando Flores.

As for Varela: After the 1973 coup, Varela and his family spend 7 years living in the US. Afterwards, Varela returns from exile to become a professor of biology at the Universidad de Chile.

What Autopoeisis transforms, for Beer, is his residual, first-wave-cybernetics belief in “codes, and messages and mappings” as the key to a viable system. “Nature is not about codes,” he concludes. “We observers invent the codes in order to codify what nature is about” (69).

Just as other of the era’s leftists like French Marxist Louis Althusser were arguing for the “semi-autonomy” of a society’s units in relation to its base, Beer comes to see all cohesive social institutions — “firms and industries, schools and universities, clinics and hospitals, professional bodies, departments of state, and whole countries” — as autopoietic systems.

From this, he arrives to a conclusion not unlike Althusser’s. For Beer, the autopoietic nature of systems “immediately explains why the process of change at any level of recursion (from the individual to the state) is not only difficult to accomplish but actually impossible — in the full sense of the intention: ‘I am going completely to change myself.’ The reason is that the ‘I,’ that self-contained autopoietic ‘it,’ is a component of another autopoietic system” (70).

“Consider this argument at whatever level of recursion you please,” adds Beer. “An individual attempting to reform his own life within an autopoietic family cannot fully be his new self because the family insists that he is actually his old self. A country attempting to become a socialist state cannot fully become socialist; because there exists an international autopoietic capitalism in which it is embedded” (71).

The Santiago Boys wedded to the era’s principle of national self-determination a plank involving pursuit of technological autonomy. If you want to escape the development-underdevelopment contradiction, they argued, you need to build your own stack.

In Allende’s words: “We demand the right to seek our own solutions.”

New posts appear in the Library:

New Games, Growth Games. Wargames, God Games. John Von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The Santiago Boys x the Chicago Boys. Magico-Psychedelic Realism x Capitalist Realism. Richard Barbrook’s Class Wargames. Eric Berne’s Games People Play. Global Business Network. Futures Involving Cyberwar and Spacewar. The Californian Ideology, Whole Earth and the WELL.

“Go where there is no path,” as Emerson counsels, “and leave a trail.”

Monday August 5, 2019

Tools remain for me things that make me a bit wary. They trouble categories. They implement will. When we use them (as, in our current state, we must), we invoke them, we grant them a daemonic energy. It’s like the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Disney’s Fantasia. Marx envisioned something similar seventy years earlier with his famous image of the dancing table from the chapter on the commodity-form in Capital. Questions arise for me, then, any time I encounter “Access to Tools,” a saying that appears on covers of the Whole Earth Catalog. The script runs as follows: If capital’s mythic origin was a magical act, a medieval summoning of a Moloch-like entity, might magic have something to say about how to counteract that act so as to save the planet? Or is magic itself the problem, its alchemical experiments—its rituals, its instruments, its techniques—already in some sense a disruption of oikos, a breaking of cosmic rules, leading inevitably toward Solid State scientific manipulation of matter and consciousness? Were the Whole Earth Catalogs and the various other guidebooks of the 1960s and 1970s a bunch of counterculture spellbooks, part of an entheogenic revival of magic, and thus occult in their own right? I say, if we’re going to allow that the cosmos is magical, then let’s be dialectical about it. Let’s assume that we ourselves contain both active and passive roles. This is part of what was meant by the perennial teaching, “AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.” We, too, are made of stardust. Let’s assume, then, that we, too, are magical. That’s the sense, I think, in which Stewart Brand was right: “We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it.” This seems a far more optimistic and hopeful approach than the passive defeatism of the left-melancholic path. I’ve explored the latter path; the paralyzing guilt it induces can be just as dangerous, just as apocalyptic as the instrumentalism it shuns, amounting in practice to little more than a sad-faced laissez-faire shoulder-shrug. Wands, crystals, Tarot cards, spellbooks, all of the various anthropotechnic implements of magic as a Craft: these are to be tested through practice, in service of the Good.

Wednesday May 15, 2019

After some initial disturbance and distress, observation allows us to welcome a symphony of science and nature, the buzz of subatomic particles entangled with the strings of the Orphic lyre. Birds sail through blue skies as I sit midday after attending a panel featuring poets Anne Waldman, Rae Armantrout, Andrew Joron, Will Alexander, and Amy Catanzano. But wow — so much construction! And amid the allegory, the distant rumblings of mathematics. The deep basso profundo “Om” of the cybernetic Buddha. The American downtown beeps and buzzes, life landscaped and policed for redevelopment. Above it float clouds shaped like turtles, pigs, patient observers. Looped samples instrumentalize me, transform me through the labor of the beat into a receiver of new information, identity no longer fixed upon an avatar but rather dispersed across a domain beyond the barricade of the graphical user interface.

Sunday May 12, 2019

Some dude gets on a mic and introduces my city to Schrödinger’s Cat and theories of parallel worlds as we gather for an outdoor screening of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Downtown appears thoroughly transformed by gentrification, landscaping, redevelopment. But there’s still the excitement, the unrealized potential of the assembly of a local, democratic multitude, one that embraces and tolerates its self-constitution through dance, performance, and play. Man-in-the-Moon arrives as Gwen Stacy reviews her origin story. I imagine myself a moonlit Silver Surfer listening to “Lonely Surf Guitar” by the Surfaris.

“By cutting a pentagram into the air or dancing a wild spiral dance,” writes Erik Davis in his account of Pagan ritual, “the self submits to the designs of human and cosmic powers on a more visceral plane than philosophical conceptions or sermons allow” (TechGnosis, p. 192). Davis stresses, though, that this Pagan use of ritual instrumentalizes the latter’s transformative potential, raising worrying questions when what this “technology of the sacred” operates upon and instrumentalizes is imagination and the unconscious. What ritual possesses, however, and what reason lacks, is fidelity to wonder, reverence, and awe. Pagans, for instance, “seek sacred communion” with Nature. Theirs is a “visionary materialism” (194). I can also relate, though, to the “will to utilize” informing the magical practices of figures like Genesis P-Orridge and their group Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Their aim is to use magic to disrupt the spell of the global totalitarian society of the spectacle.

Sunday December 9, 2018

Consciousness needn’t commit itself to the ontological confines of Western techno-scientific rationality. The artist is one who opens portals onto other realms. Now is the time for another Dionysian awakening — for we live in an historical moment not of reason in chains but of reason unbound — automated, loosed of will — and thus free to enchain its makers. This is my problem with Michael Pollan. He wants to contain the psychedelic revolution. While acknowledging the “ungovernable Dionysian force” of drugs like acid — their effect, in other words, of “dissolving almost everything with which [they] come into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind (the superego, ego, and unconscious) and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority and then to lines of every imaginable kind: between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health, self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material” — Pollan immediately tries to instrumentalize all of this. LSD is for him a tool to be used according to preestablished legal and technocratic protocols within a “sturdy social container” (How to Change Your Mind, pp. 214-215). There need to be rules and rituals, he says, which makes me wonder: must we accede to this alleged need, those of us hoping to build Acid Communism? Or can each one teach one — each head its own authority, its own shaman or guide?

Wednesday October 3, 2018

Instrumentalization of consciousness. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Rule-based ideology imposed upon the many by the few. Where might we apply agency? How might we change the game or rewrite the narrative? Perhaps Surrealism contains the doorway out of this purblind, disaster-bent assemblage. Described by Roger Shattuck as “a sustained artistic adventure extending from 1885 to 1939 and reaching a paroxysm of public demonstration in the Twenties,” Surrealism warded off instrumental reason by juxtaposing amid the latter’s prison reality dream materials, chance as compositional technique, nostalgic reimaginings of childhood, and “acknowledgement of the essential ambiguity of experience” (The History of Surrealism, p. 13). I read with awe Shattuck’s distinction between “two contrasting ways of grasping experience”: one as a realm of continuity and significance, parts held in place by “lines crossing and interweaving’; the other a mere mechanical temporal sequence, where “any effort at insight or sympathy ends in despair” (19). Surely these are the poles between which we vacillate, “blind chance dogging conscious effort at every turn” (20). Between these poles, the Surrealists charted a middle passage into the hidden order of what they called “objective chance.” Shattuck characterizes this latter as “the most reticent of creatures” (21). Yet out it came, with Breton and crew at the peak of their powers juggling “chance and destiny, passive automatism and active revolution, optimistic faith in man’s future and pessimistic doubt over the disasters of civilization, the conviction that ‘life lies right here’ and the conviction that ‘life lies elsewhere,’ the marvelous and the absurd” (22). In juggling these, Shattuck concludes, the Surrealists succeeded where most of their contemporaries failed. They preserved within life a capacity for love and laughter.

Friday September 21, 2018

The mind is, in the words of The Dhammapada, “the beast that draws the cart.” Mind is the primary operator, the seat of agency, occupied simultaneously by self and other. Teaching plays a pivotal role in one day’s shaping of the next. Mind in real-time recreates self and other. Our goal shouldn’t be reason asserting itself over passion. The non-human, daimonic dimension of reality is not to be tampered with. It is a realm of inexhaustible wonder. It is to be revered. A dimension of dynamic unrest: concealment, de-concealment, discovery. Good News. Truth alongside the Mountain of Seven Vultures. Can reverence and wonder co-exist with the kind of wish where you write it down and make it happen? Ralph Waldo Emerson seemed to think so. “Once you make a decision,” he claimed, “the universe conspires to make it happen.” Let us wish for Jubilee. Or whatever leads to Satchidananda. The Dhammapada, however, counsels me to conquer thoughtlessness by watchfulness. “Tell the Truth,” commands a sign on a wall. Speak a few words and then live them.

Wednesday June 20, 2018

Blue jays, sparrows, robins, squirrels: beings with whom I cohabit a rented plot of land, among similar plots of land, in a residential grid laid atop the hills of a small urban settlement. Behavior-control within these settlements benefits from a traitorous science, instrumental reason turned back upon consciousness, nature Elon-Muskified so that even the buzz of one’s cellphone has been market-tested, designed by corporate-governed Others to rattle nerves and redirect awareness. Time for a cleanse. Healthy living. Grapes grow over a neighbor’s fence, near-ripe as Sarah and I case the usual several-block radius around our house on a gummy, ninety degree evening. My thoughts cycle back to the horrors of our time: armed fascists, detention camps, trade wars, corporate control of most facets of life, entrapment via student debt. Big Data capitalism’s deliberate negation, in other words, of nearly all utopian possibility. With effort, though, I can steer my concentration back to my breath and the beauty of my immediate surroundings. This redirection of thought through interaction of set and setting with volition reminds me of the virtues of form.

Friday May 25, 2018

This miserable totality is driving me stir-crazy. I conjure on my telescreen an episode of The Mike Wallace Show from May 18, 1958 featuring Aldous Huxley, described by Wallace during the episode’s intro as “a man haunted by a vision of hell on earth.”

What I find, with some surprise, in this broadcast is a description of twenty-first century reality, especially if by that I mean reality here in the United States under the current Trump regime. Yet this world of ours also isn’t quite the one Huxley imagined, due to his misunderstanding of the logic of capitalism. Unlike Brave New World, for instance, it isn’t so much a world of “people happy where they oughtn’t to be.” Fear and anger, rather, are the dominant emotions in this world, whipped into being through omnipresent policing and gun violence. Given the structure of the built environment, one rarely experiences other people, one rarely experiences any kind of “group dynamic,” except via mediation, thanks to the ubiquity within the society of money, cars, and cellphones. Members of the dominator class drive around under these undemocratic, unfree circumstances communicating their dominance with their GOP bumper stickers and their MAGA hats and their open-carry firearms, while the rest of us hunch over steering wheels or stand alongside busy highways waiting for city buses, growing harried and bitter as we rush back and forth between rented or mortgaged living spaces and corporate-governed sites of production and consumption. In fact, I begin to wonder as the interview proceeds if it isn’t ultimately some deep-seated fear of rhetoric, of “verbal boobytraps,” as he says, that drives Huxley’s evolution, his turn in the final years of his life toward mysticism and psychedelics. Hope depended for him upon the possibility of direct, unmediated access to and experience of truth. Rhetoric maintains its victory, as it has in all hitherto existing societies, turning all of history into a forced march toward “thoughtless pleasure and ordered efficiency,” only to the extent that it succeeds in distracting us from the truth of the injustice of servitude, the truth that murmurs up from within. For what is “applied science,” what is “instrumental reason,” after all, if not rhetoric?