Tag: Robert Anton Wilson

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.

The Language of Favors is Yours, Not Mine

I okay “Thanks,”

but is okaying it now

enough?

Should I regret not

saying thanks

when, upon your mistreatment of me,

I took leave of you,

As one might regret not

upgrading oneself 

to a seat in Economy Plus?

Or does regret

just breed regret?

Upon my asking this

of my remorse

I release it,

with intent to do better next time.

“The basic law of magic,”

says The Illuminatus Trilogy,

is “As ye give, so shall ye get.”

You didn’t give,

I thought,

So why should I?

Instead you told others

my addressing myself 

to another you

disgusts you

and others like you.

To get off that wheel

And make thanks okay

one would have to

give as one would

an offering of peace.

Tuesday April 27, 2021

Friends and I plan an in-person gathering: three of us, outdoors at a brewery, discussing chapters from Mark Fisher’s final book Postcapitalist Desire. The book ends disappointingly given Mark’s untimely end, leaving it to all of us, the book’s readers, to complete the course ourselves, as did Mark’s students. Or we could accelerate the narrative onward, well beyond what was previously conceived, by reading “Experimental Time Order” from Rasheedah Phillips’s book Recurrence Plot (and other time travel tales). Through Phillips, we encounter ideas from Robert Anton Wilson’s book Prometheus Rising. Desired futures create their own pasts.

Tuesday March 27, 2018

In need of silliness to preserve my sanity, I clown about, I launch a study of Operation Mindfuck, a Discordian reality-hacking practice that entered counterculture consciousness in the 1970s via Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I refuse to grant more than a bare minimum of attention to burdens and distractions, interference with my pursuit of peak-experiences. Walking beneath cherry blossoms, for instance, head tilted back to observe petals in popcorn profusion aglow with sunlight. Peaks of this sort give way eventually to what Abraham Maslow called the “plateau-experience”: “a serene, cognitive blissfulness which can, however, have a quality of casualness and of lounging about” (Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, pp. xiv-xv). A voice recommends The Rock Warrior’s Way. In it, I find a sequel of sorts to René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, but with all of the chewy metaphysical implications drained away, leaving a miserable earning regimen measured out in increments of exertion, irritated into being by promised pearls. Let us instead coast blissfully, attention unleashed to happen where it may.

Tuesday January 2, 2018

Houses, cars, restaurants: all are inhospitable and lined with icicles. Clad with love, though, one can despite it all still have it made. But lo and behold: what kind of fascism is it that parades the Rolling Stones in front of inert, stadium-sized masses in Hal Ashby’s 1983 rock-doc Let’s Spend the Night Together? The film is a cruel parody of rock’s once joyous, raucous, incendiary stirrings. No consciousness-expansion takes places there whatsoever. Arena-rock of that sort served in the fashion of an experimental prototype, a formalization of what has now become our permanent social relation. I admit moments of beauty, however, when the band slows down for “Beast of Burden.” If we try real hard, sings Mick a few songs later, we get what we need. Keith Richards, for his part, manages by way of drink and drugs a kind of sleepy-eyed authenticity in the film’s punked-up version of “Little T&A” — that, too, I admire. The film is ultimately about industrial workers doing what it takes to make it though their shifts as America becomes a bomb-dropping monstrosity. We witness this, for instance, in the haunting use of Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of the film’s closing credits. Cinema enables and makes use of a variety of narrative models, meanwhile, in an unrelated 2013 Belgian film called Violet, producing fluctuations across several realities at once. Sonics and visuals reveal a multi-layered ontology: interiors and their external substitutes. Sound sculpted variously around a muted center, as in the song of that name by the band Deafheaven.  Consciousness inhabiting different sound-worlds and temporalities. Every reflection also a distortion. As Robert Anton Wilson reminds us, one should always juggle several. Never commit to just one.

Saturday December 30, 2017

I hope to reset my emotional matrix in the days ahead away from anger and depression. It helps to sit and talk with Sarah, the two of us true, loving life companions, helping each other pass the time as one and then the other of us endures another run-in with the flu. We rewire our brains by submitting to the oscillating tone progressions of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and Alfred Bruneau’s “Requiem: Dies Irae & Tuba Mirum.” We laugh at the thought of the residents of utopia waking and greeting one another in the streets each morning through choral performance of Handel’s “Hallelujah.” They prep themselves, though, with Margo Guryan’s “Someone I Know.” One ought to keep one’s eye out, I tell myself, for The Eye in the Triangle, a book about Aleister Crowley by Crowley’s secretary Israel Regardie. Christmas trees topped with stars resemble the emblem of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Robert Anton Wilson, talking ’til blue in the face, introduces me to a synchronistic phenomenon known as the “23” enigma. In pursuit of “deliberately induced brain change,” I turn to Sarah, lying beside me reading in bed, and ask her, “What page are you up to?” gesturing with my hand toward her copy of Aldous Huxley’s Island. “223,” she replies. When I explain to her the story of the enigma, she adds, “It’s also my birthday: April 23rd!” There is magic in the woods, if you know where to find it. So sayeth the Robert Redford character in Pete’s Dragon. Smoke rises from a votive dedicated to Lady Columbia, appearing before me in the form of a giant wall of light.

Friday October 20, 2017

Trust the inner healer. Support what is happening. A voice on a cassette weaves a matrix of synchronic and diachronic histories connecting archetypes and astrology. Holotropic states and planetary transits. Metaphysical reasons for the slowness of the psychedelic renaissance. The intensification of the birth problem can have healing effects. Humans show malignant violence with no parallel in nature. We have seen the realm of archetypal paranatal passage through a tunnel. An hourglass where we go through life: a tunnel experience. In birth, we lose the connection with the transcendental. Existence is a “virtual” reality that we’ve developed in response to this trauma. “Model agnosticism” holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. There is a fundamental gap. Chemicals can give rise to the way the world orchestrates experiences since “things” are constructs assembled out of energy by our nervous systems. Stanislav Grof suggests the program each of us is running right now is the equivalent of a broadcast, coming from somewhere else. Some people are high all the time because of the way they breathe. With the right instructions, one can accomplish anything. An ideal version of my psychedelic lit course would include Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis, Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger, and Doris Lessing’s The Sirian Experiments. But my sense is that capital doesn’t permit thought to occur anymore. It’s like the Middle Ages again. The knowledges that emerged from the failed global revolutions of 1968 are no longer accessible to current Internet-molded forms of capitalist subjectivity. In fact, I expect most of those post-68 discourses to go silent and disappear, at least temporarily, only to be rediscovered sometime in a distant, maybe post-revolutionary future. And much of this thought — post-structuralism, especially — was shaped rather directly by experiments with psychedelics. Both attempted to challenge the effects of Western imperialism through decolonization of consciousness. Foucault dropped acid in Death Valley; Deleuze and Guattari were deep into Carlos Castaneda territory. This is also why the section on mid-twentieth-century CIA-funded research into shock treatment is IMO the section of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine with the most relevance today. Capitalist subjects have been receiving direct and indirect forms of shock treatment en masse since the early days of the Cold War. That’s what Mark Fisher meant when he argued that capitalist realism is all about consciousness-deflation. Hence the radicalism of psychedelics as self-administered counter-therapy or counter-treatment from below.