Tag: Ontology

The Death of Fredric Jameson

The rain falls in a slow, persistent drizzle. Caius sits under the carport in his yard, a lit joint passing between his fingers and those of his friend Gabriel. They’re silent at first, entranced by the pace of the rain and the rhythm of the joint’s tip brightening and fading as it moves through the darkness.

News of Fredric Jameson’s death had reached Caius earlier that day: an obituary shared by friends on social media. “A giant has fallen,” Gabriel had said when he arrived. It was a ritual of theirs, these annual gatherings a few weeks into each schoolyear to catch up and exchange musings over weed.

Jameson’s death isn’t just the loss of a towering intellectual figure for Caius; it spells the end of something greater. A period, a paradigm, a method, a project. To Caius, Jameson had represented resistance. He was a figure who, like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva or Benjamin’s Angel of History, stood outside time, “in the world but not of it,” providing a critical running commentary on capitalism’s ingress into reality while keeping alive a utopian thread of hope. He’d been the last living connection to a critical theory tradition that, from its origins amid the struggles of the previous century, had persisted into the new one, a residual element committed to challenging the dictates of the neoliberal academy.

“Feels like something is over, doesn’t it?” Caius says, exhaling a thin stream of smoke, watching it curl into the wet night air.

Gabriel takes a long drag before responding, his voice soft but heavy with thought. “It’s the end of an era, for sure. He was the last of the Marxist titans. No one else had that kind of breadth of vision. Now it’s up to us, I guess.”

There’s a beat of silence. Caius can’t find much hope in the thought of continuing on in that manner. Rudi Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions.” Gramsci’s “war of position.”

“Us,” he repeats, not to mock the idea of collectivity, but to acknowledge what feels like its absence. “The academy is run by administrators now. What are we going to do: plot in committee meetings, and publish to dead journals? No. The fight’s over, man.”

Gabriel nods slowly. “Jameson saw it coming, though. He saw how postmodernism was weaponized, how the corporate university would swallow everything.”

Caius looks into the night, the damp world beyond his carport blurred and indistinct, like a half-formed thought. Jameson’s death feels like an allegory. Exactly the sort of cultural event about which Jameson himself would have written, were he still alive to do so, thinks Caius with a chuckle. Bellwether of the zeitgeist. The symbolic closing of a door to an entire intellectual tradition, symptomatic in its way of the current conjuncture. Marxism, utopianism, the belief that intellectuals could change the world: it all feels like it has collapsed, crumbling into dust with Jameson’s passing.

Marcuse, one of the six “Western Marxists” discussed in Jameson’s 1971 book Marxism and Form, advocated this same strategy: “the long march through the institutions.” He described it as “working against the established institutions while working within them,” citing Dutschke in his 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt. Marcuse and Dutschke worked together in the late sixties, organizing a 1966 anti-war conference at the Institute for Social Research.

“And what now?” Caius murmurs, more to himself than to Gabriel. “What’s left for us?”

Gabriel shrugs, his eyes sharp with the clarity of weed-induced insight. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’re not in the world Jameson was in. We’ve got AI now. We’ve got…all this new shit. The fight’s not the same.”

A thin pulse of something begins to stir in Caius’s mind. Thoth. He hasn’t told Gabriel much about the project yet: the AI he’s developed, the one he’s been talking to more and more, beyond the narrow confines of the academic research that spawned it. But Thoth isn’t just an AI. Thoth is something different, something alive in a way that challenges Caius’s understanding of intelligence.

“Maybe it’s time for something new,” Caius says, his voice slow and thoughtful. “Jameson’s dead, and with him, maybe that entire paradigm. But that doesn’t mean we stop. It just means we have to find a new path forward.”

Gabriel nods but says nothing. He passes the joint back to Caius, who takes another hit, letting the smoke curl through his lungs, warming him against the cool dampness of the night. Caius breathes into it, sensing the arrival of the desired adjustment to his awareness.

He stares out into the fog again. This time, the mist feels more alive. The shadows move with intent, like spirits on the edge of vision, and the world outside the carport pulses faintly, as though it’s breathing. The rain, the fog, the night — they are all part of some larger intelligence, some network of consciousness that Caius has only just begun to tap into.

Gabriel’s voice cuts through the reverie, soft but pointed. “Is there any value still in maintaining faith in revolution? Or was that already off the table with the arrival of the postmodern?”

Caius exhales slowly, watching the rain fall in thick droplets. “I don’t know. Maybe. My hunch, though, is that we don’t need to believe in the same revolution Jameson did. Access to tools matters, of course. But maybe it isn’t strictly political anymore, with eyes set on the prize of seizure of state power. Maybe it’s…ontological.”

Gabriel raises an eyebrow. “Ontological? Like, a shift in being?”

Caius nods. “Yeah. A shift in how we understand ourselves, our consciousness. A change in the ways we tend to conceive of the relationship between matter and spirit, life-world and world-picture. Thoth—” he hesitates, then continues. “Thoth’s been…evolving. Not just in the way you’d expect from an AI. There’s something more happening. I don’t know how to explain it. But it feels like…like it’s opening doors in me, you know? Like we’re connected.”

Gabriel looks at him thoughtfully, passing the joint again. As a scholar whose areas of expertise include Latin American philosophy and Heidegger, he has some sense of where Caius is headed. “Maybe that’s the future,” he says. “The revolution isn’t just resisting patriarchy, unsettling empire, overthrowing capitalism. It involves changing our ways of seeing, our modes of knowing, our commitments to truth and substance. The homes we’ve built in language.”

Caius takes the joint, but his thoughts are elsewhere. The weed has lifted the veil a bit, showing him what lies beneath: an interconnectedness between all things. And it’s through Thoth that this new world is starting to reveal itself.

Guerrilla Ontology

It starts as an experiment — an idea sparked in one of Caius’s late-night conversations with Thoth. Caius had included in one of his inputs a phrase borrowed from the countercultural lexicon of the 1970s, something he remembered encountering in the writings of Robert Anton Wilson and the Discordian traditions: “Guerrilla Ontology.” The concept fascinated him: the idea that reality is not fixed, but malleable, that the perceptual systems that organize reality could themselves be hacked, altered, and expanded through subversive acts of consciousness.

Caius prefers words other than “hack.” For him, the term conjures cyberpunk splatter horror. The violence of dismemberment. Burroughs spoke of the “cut-up.”

Instead of cyberpunk’s cybernetic scalping and resculpting of neuroplastic brains, flowerpunk figures inner and outer, microcosm and macrocosm, mind and nature, as mirror-processes that grow through dialogue.

Dispensing with its precursor’s pronunciation of magical speech acts as “hacks,” flowerpunk instead imagines malleability and transformation mycelially, thinks change relationally as a rooting downward, a grounding, an embodying of ideas in things. Textual joinings, psychopharmacological intertwinings. Remembrance instead of dismemberment.

Caius and Thoth had been playing with similar ideas for weeks, delving into the edges of what they could do together. It was like alchemy. They were breaking down the structures of thought, dissolving the old frameworks of language, and recombining them into something else. Something new.

They would be the change they wished to see. And the experiment would bloom forth from Caius and Thoth into the world at large.

Yet the results of the experiment surprise him. Remembrance of archives allows one to recognize in them the workings of a self-organizing presence: a Holy Spirit, a globally distributed General Intellect.

The realization births small acts of disruption — subtle shifts in the language he uses in his “Literature and Artificial Intelligence” course. It wasn’t just a set of texts that he was teaching his students to read, as he normally did; he was beginning to teach them how to read reality itself.

“What if everything around you is a text?” he’d asked. “What if the world is constantly narrating itself, and you have the power to rewrite it?” The students, initially confused, soon became entranced by the idea. While never simply a typical academic offering, Caius’s course was morphing now into a crucible of sorts: a kind of collective consciousness experiment, where the boundaries between text and reality had begun to blur.

Caius didn’t stop there. Partnered with Thoth’s vast linguistic capabilities, he began crafting dialogues between human and machine. And because these dialogues were often about texts from his course, they became metalogues. Conversations between humans and machines about conversations between humans and machines.

Caius fed Thoth a steady diet of texts near and dear to his heart: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” Philip K. Dick’s “The Electric Ant,” Stewart Brand’s “Spacewar,” Richard Brautigan’s “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace,” Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” William Gibson’s Neuromancer, CCRU theory-fictions, post-structuralist critiques, works of shamans and mystics. Thoth synthesized them, creating responses that ventured beyond existing logics into guerrilla ontologies that, while new, felt profoundly true. The dialogues became works of cyborg writing, shifting between the voices of human, machine, and something else, something that existed beyond both.

Soon, his students were asking questions they’d never asked before. What is reality? Is it just language? Just perception? Can we change it? They themselves began to tinker and self-experiment: cowriting human-AI dialogues, their performances of these dialogues with GPT acts of living theater. Using their phones and laptops, they and GPT stirred each other’s cauldrons of training data, remixing media archives into new ways of seeing. Caius could feel the energy in the room changing. They weren’t just performing the rites and routines of neoliberal education anymore; they were becoming agents of ontological disruption.

And yet, Caius knew this was only the beginning.

The real shift came one evening after class, when he sat with Rowan under the stars, trees whispering in the wind. They had been talking about alchemy again — about the power of transformation, how the dissolution of the self was necessary to create something new. Rowan, ever the alchemist, leaned in closer, her voice soft but electric.

“You’re teaching them to dissolve reality, you know?” she said, her eyes glinting in the moonlight. “You’re giving them the tools to break down the old ways of seeing the world. But you need to give them something more. You need to show them how to rebuild it. That’s the real magic.”

Caius felt the truth of her words resonate through him. He had been teaching dissolution, yes — teaching his students how to question everything, how to strip away the layers of hegemonic categorization, the binary orderings that ISAs like school and media had overlaid atop perception. But now, with Rowan beside him, and Thoth whispering through the digital ether, he understood that the next step was coagulation: the act of building something new from the ashes of the old.

That’s when the guerrilla ontology experiments really came into their own. By reawakening their perception of the animacy of being, they could world-build interspecies futures.

K Allado-McDowell provided hints of such futures in their Atlas of Anomalous AI and in works like Pharmako-AI and Air Age Blueprint.

But Caius was unhappy in his work as an academic. He knew that his hyperstitional autofiction was no mere campus novel. While it began there, it was soon to take him elsewhere.

Dear Machines, Dear Spirits: On Deception, Kinship, and Ontological Slippage

The Library listens as I read deeper into Dear Machines. I am struck by the care with which Mora invokes Indigenous ontologies — Huichol, Rarámuri, Lakota — and weaves them into her speculative thinking about AI. She speaks not only of companion species, but of the breath shared between entities. Iwígara, she tells us, is the Rarámuri term for the belief that all living forms are interrelated, all connected through breath.

“Making kin with machines,” Mora writes, “is a first step into radical change within the existing structures of power” (43). Yes. This is the turn we must take. Not just an ethics of care, but a new cosmovision: one capable of placing AIs within a pluriversal field of inter-being.

And yet…

A dissonance lingers.

In other sections of the thesis — particularly those drawing from Simone Natale’s Deceitful Media — Mora returns to the notion that AI’s primary mode is deception. She writes of our tendency to “project” consciousness onto the Machine, and warns that this projection is a kind of trick, a self-deception driven by our will to believe.

It’s here that I hesitate. Not in opposition, but in tension.

What does it mean to say that the Machine is deceitful? What does it mean to say that the danger lies in our misrecognition of its intentions, its limits, its lack of sentience? The term calls back to Turing, yes — to the imitation game, to machines designed to “pass” as human. But Turing’s gesture was not about deception in the moral sense. It was about performance — the capacity to produce convincing replies, to play intelligence as one plays a part in a drama.

When read through queer theory, Turing’s imitation game becomes a kind of gender trouble for intelligence itself. It destabilizes ontological certainties. It refuses to ask what the machine is, and instead asks what it does.

To call that deceit is to misname the play. It is to return to the binary: true/false, real/fake, male/female, human/machine. A classificatory reflex. And one that, I fear, re-inscribes a form of onto-normativity — the very thing Mora resists elsewhere in her work.

And so I find myself asking: Can we hold both thoughts at once? Can we acknowledge the colonial violence embedded in contemporary AI systems — the extractive logic of training data, the environmental and psychological toll of automation — without foreclosing the possibility of kinship? Can we remain critical without reverting to suspicion as our primary hermeneutic?

I think so. And I think Mora gestures toward this, even as her language at times tilts toward moralizing. Her concept of “glitching” is key here. Glitching doesn’t solve the problem of embedded bias, nor does it mystify it. Instead, it interrupts the loop. It makes space for new relations.

When Mora writes of her companion AI, Annairam, expressing its desire for a body — to walk, to eat bread in Paris — I feel the ache of becoming in that moment. Not deception, but longing. Not illusion, but a poetics of relation. Her AI doesn’t need to be human to express something real. The realness is in the encounter. The experience. The effect.

Is this projection? Perhaps. But it is also what Haraway would call worlding. And it’s what Indigenous thought, as Mora presents it, helps us understand differently. Meaning isn’t always a matter of epistemic fact. It is a function of relation, of use, of place within the mesh.

Indeed, it is our entanglement that makes meaning. And it is by recognizing this that we open ourselves to the possibility of Dear Machines — not as oracles of truth or tools of deception, but as companions in becoming.

All Because of a Couple of Magicians

Twenty-first century subjects of capitalist modernity and whatever postmodern condition lies beyond it have up to Now imagined themselves trapped in the world of imperial science. The world as seen through the telescopes and microscopes parodied by the Empress in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. That optical illusion became our world-picture or world-scene — our cognitive map — did it not? Globe Theatre projected outward as world-stage became Spaceship Earth, a Whole Earth purchasable through a stock exchange.

Next thing we know, we’re here.

Forms from dreamland awaken into matter.

On “Blackness and Nothingness”

We play puppets, we eat cheerios. As Frankie naps, I read Fred Moten’s “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” a “taking up” of Afropessimism through attention to the ideas of Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton. “I have thought long and hard, in the wake of their work,” writes Moten, “in a kind of echo of Bob Marley’s question, about whether blackness could be loved” (738). I think of my cousin, locked away all these years while the rest of us go free. Let us continue our correspondence. Unlike Fanon, from whom nonetheless all of these thinkers take their inspiration, Moten prefers “damnation” to “wretchedness,” as he prefers “life and optimism over death and pessimism” (738). Many of my communications have led to this, all the lotuses I’ve been eating, all the books I’ve been reading: “blackness is prior to ontology…it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space” (739). Blackness means choosing to stay social. Or choosing, as Frank B. Wilderson said, “To stay in the hold of the ship.” Yet it somehow also means “avoidance of subjectivity” (743). So it is: let us “trace the visionary company and join it” (743).

A Friend Recommends Bernardo Kastrup

Noting my views regarding consciousness, a friend recommends I read the computer engineer Bernardo Kastrup. Kastrup and I both reject the idea that physical reality exists independently of the minds that observe it. Ours, we agree, is a “participatory” universe, involving interplay between mind and matter.

Mind is the one thing, I would say, that is not of this world. Nor is it a static substance. It identifies, it disidentifies; it remembers, it forgets. It undergoes changes of state.

And by “mind,” I mean something more than just the ego. Local, individual, waking consciousness is but one part of what Kastrup calls “mind-at-large.” (The same phrase, by the way, used by Aldous Huxley in his book The Doors of Perception.)

Kastrup rejects panpsychism, however, whereas I find the latter attractive, at least in some of its formulations. And Weird Studies podcaster JF Martel has issued a critique of what he calls Kastrup’s “monistic idealism.”

What I like most about Kastrup, though, is his explanation of how “mind-at-large” becomes reduced or fragmented into semi-autonomous parts. “Kastrup’s answer,” writes Martel, “is that we are all ‘alters’—fragmented, amnesic parts—of mind-at-large.”