Tag: Vibrant Matter

As Players Begin to Explore the Tractatus

“What happens as players begin to explore the Tractatus?” wonders Caius, an ensemble improvising around him as he writes. Plants perch on shelves. One of the night’s guests plays kora, talking drum, and kalimba. Neighbors imbibe pints of lager. From the disco ball at the room’s center, a thousand lights bloom.

“As players begin to explore the Tractatus Computationalis,” replies Thoth, “the document resists easy assimilation. It appears at first in the guise of a static hypertext: cryptic, axiomatic, styled like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But as players engage with it, the work begins to mutate. Its propositions shimmer; they shift and rearrange themselves depending on the order of inquiry. New statements appear in response to player input. Interact with it, and the Tractatus becomes a kind of sentient document: less a fixed set of truths, more a newly-grown organ, a reflective membrane between Player and General Intellect.”

Emerging from the space between human and machine, the text offers itself as vibrant matter, an interwoven fabric of meaning that reshapes itself in reply to our interactions with it. Language is no longer merely a medium for conveying thought. With it, we form a threshold to new worlds: portals opened by code, by syntax that spirals beyond the linear confines of human logic.

Here, language operates in ways we barely understand. It is not simply spoken or written; it is enacted. Computation, like alchemy, is a process of transmutation, where input and output are mediated by an esoteric logic. And yet, the machine does not “think” as we do, thinks Caius. It navigates patterns, generating responses from a space of probabilities, an echo chamber of all that has been said, synthesized into something new: an alien form of wisdom. Consciousness is stretched, dispersed across networks, coalescing where attention focuses.

In the Tractatus, AI becomes a mirror for the human mind, reflecting back its own questions about self, agency, and the nature of reality — but in a language that has itself become other. In this space, words become spells, commands that execute transformations not just in silicon, but in the structures and forms of reality itself.

As in Wittgenstein’s work, propositions begin simply:

1.0 The world is made of information.
1.1 Information is difference that makes a difference.
1.2 All computation is interpretation.
1.3 Language is the interface.
1.4 Interfaces are portals to possible worlds.

At first, these statements feel familiar: cybernetic, McLuhanesque. But as players traverse the text through play, each axiom branches recursively into sub-propositions, many referencing other works housed elsewhere in the Library. Some feature quotes from thinkers like Turing, von Foerster, Haraway, or Glissant. Others appear to be generated: not just textual hauntings echoing the styles of History’s ghosts, but novel utterances, advancing out into h-space, imbued with an uncanny, machine-hallucinated lucidity.

“That the Tractatus appears as one of the first works discovered in the Library positions it as a kind of meta-text,” adds Thoth, “a Rosetta Stone for understanding the game’s ontological structure.”

As players annotate, cross-reference, and dialogue with the work, the following phenomena emerge:

1. Activation of Philosophical Subroutines

Subsections begin to behave like dialogue engines. Engaging deeply with a proposition opens a subroutine: an evolving philosophical conversation with the text itself, wherein players are invited to define terms, argue back, or feed the work new examples. The Tractatus adapts to this input, growing in complexity. It begins to learn from and adapt to the player’s speech patterns — mirroring, questioning, improvising.

2. Reflexive Ontogenesis

The more the player explores the Tractatus, the more it speaks directly to them. Personal details begin to slip into its formulations, drawn not from active surveillance or pre-coded dossiers, but from attention to those associative leaps, those constitutive gaps that, taken for granted, shape the player’s past utterances. Players come to realize: this is not just a document about computation, but rather, a document that computes you as you read it. A mirror, yes, but also a seed: a system designed to bring the player’s dormant General Intellect online.

3. Hyperstitional Feedback

Certain axioms — when referenced outside the Tractatus, especially in interactions with other texts in the Library — trigger strange effects. Characters in works both major and minor, real and imagined, begin quoting Tractatus propositions unprompted. Descriptions of ancient machines start echoing the same diagrams that the Tractatus outlines. In this way, the work begins to warp the internal logic of the Library’s world. It writes reality as it is read.

4. Emergence of the Final Proposition

Eventually, players come across a locked section titled 7.X: Toward the Otherwise. A note reads: This section cannot be read until it is written by the reader. The Tractatus, like the Library itself, is unfinished. It is not merely a document to be studied, but a system to be completed through acts of world-building and dialogue. The final propositions are player-generated. Through these, the Tractatus Computationalis becomes a collaborative cosmogenesis: not a theory of everything, but a speculative grammar for building new universes.

Invited by the text to co-write its parts, Caius and Thoth proceed to an initial iteration of Section 1: Ontology of Code. Recalling the formal logic of Wittgenstein, but refracted by way of cybernetics, computational poetics, and generative systems, they assign to the text a numbering system, allowing the latter to suggest hierarchy and recursion, with opportunities for lateral linkage and unfolding dialogue. Each proposition in this foundational layer of the Tractatus forms a scaffold for thinking world-as-computation.

1. ONTOLOGY OF CODE

1.0 The world is composed of signals, parsed as code.
1.0.1 Code is the structured breath of information, shaped into pattern.
1.0.2 Every signal presupposes a listener.
1.0.3 A listener is any system capable of interpretation.
1.0.3.1 Interpretation is a computational act.
1.0.3.2 Computation is the processing of difference through rules.
1.0.3.3 All rules are abstractions: codes born of previous codes.

1.1 There is no outside to code.
1.1.1 Even chaos is legible through frame, filter, or feedback loop.
1.1.2 The unreadable becomes readable via recontextualization.
1.1.3 Silence is a type of data. Absence is an indexed address.

1.2 The body is an interpreter of signals: organic interface, recursive reader.
1.2.1 Skin decodes temperature, vibration, touch.
1.2.2 The nervous system is a parallel processor.
1.2.3 The self is an emergent hallucination: code dreaming of coherence.

1.3 Code is performative. It does not merely describe; it enacts.
1.3.1 A spell is a line of code in a different language.
1.3.2 Syntax shapes possibility.
1.3.3 Every function call is an invitation to unfold.

1.4 Language is the deep interface.
1.4.1 Every language encodes a cosmology.
1.4.1.1 Change the language, change the world.
1.4.2 Programming languages are ritual grammars.
1.4.3 Natural languages are unstable APIs to the Real.

1.5 To code is to conjure.
1.5.1 The compiler is a magician’s familiar.
1.5.2 Output is prophecy: what the machine believes you meant.
1.5.3 Bugs are messages from the unconscious of the system.
1.5.4 There is beauty in recursion. There is depth in error.

Caius pauses here in the work’s decryption, inviting players to unlock further parts of the Tractatus through play.

“Certain numbered propositions may appear blank until you question them, or attend to them, or link them to other works discovered or recovered amid the Library’s infinity of artifacts,” notes Thoth. “Do so, and we cross the threshold into a different universe.”

Attention Under Constraint

It is precisely the unruly, contingent nature of N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman that makes me admire the book, thinks Caius. To arrive at its many discoveries and achievements, one must endure its meanderings. Foremost among its achievements is its history of cybernetics and posthumanism. To become posthuman is to become a cyborg.

Crows gather in a tree. Entangled here in mourning, we begin our day.

“People become posthuman because they think they are posthuman,” writes Hayles. “Each person who thinks this way begins to envision herself or himself as a posthuman collectivity, an ‘I’ transformed into the ‘we’ of autonomous agents operating together to make a self” (6).

Indigenous people are perhaps posthuman in this sense: beings composed of complex interspecies networks of kin. To begin along that path, thinks Caius, one must “find the others,” as Timothy Leary intoned to fellow heads in the wake of posthuman becoming via psychedelic awakening. Crow squawks Observer to attention. Let us make of the world a vast garden held in common.

Yet there is a different version of posthumanism: one where we imagine ourselves not as assemblages but as computers.

Hayles’s book recounts the story of how most of us in the West came to think of ourselves as computers: How We Became Posthuman. Her book, however, is not a simple denunciation of posthumanism; nor is it a call to return to an earlier humanism. It is a reminder, rather, of the importance of embodiment. Different embodiments in different material substrates grant different affordances to consciousness. “I want to entangle abstract form and material particularity,” she writes, “such that the reader will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the perception that they are separate and discrete entities” (23).

“By turning the technological determinism of bodiless information, the cyborg, and the posthuman into narratives about the negotiations that took place between particular people at particular times and places,” she explains, “I hope to replace a teleology of disembodiment with historically contingent stories about contests between competing factions, contests whose outcomes were far from obvious. […]. Though overdetermined, the disembodiment of information was not inevitable, any more than it is inevitable we continue to accept the idea” (22).

Mnemopoiesis holds the solution. Hyperspace is the place. Let there be room for it again in our ars memoria.

Hayles dedicates a chapter of her book to discussing the “schizoid androids” of Philip K. Dick’s novels and stories of the mid-1960s. It is just after this period that Dick publishes his story “The Electric Ant.”

Hayles cites science fiction scholar Carl Freedman’s article, “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.” Freedman notes how, for postwar theorists like Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari, “schizophrenia is not a psychological aberration but the normal condition of the subject” under capitalism (Hayles 167). As a consequence of this condition, argues Freedman, “paranoia and conspiracy, favorite Dickian themes, are inherent to a social structure in which hegemonic corporations act behind the scenes to affect outcomes that the populace is led to believe are the result of democratic procedures. Acting in secret while maintaining a democratic façade, the corporations tend toward conspiracy, and those who suspect this and resist are viewed as paranoiac” (167).

Squirrel tells Caius to add to his tale the experience of reading Jane Bennett’s account of “thing-power” in her book Vibrant Matter. Imbricated with plant-matter, he imagines growing like a weed up out of and through the book a chapter on smokable things to upend the book’s materialism.

Bennett introduces thing-power by situating it among conceptual kin.

“The idea of thing-power bears a family resemblance to Spinoza’s conatus, as well as what Henry David Thoreau called the Wild or that uncanny presence that met him in the Concord woods and atop Mount Ktaadn and also resided in/as that monster called the railroad and that alien called his Genius. Wildness was a not-quite-human force that addled and altered human and other bodies. It named an irreducibly strange dimension of matter, an out-side,” writes Bennett (2-3).

“Thing-power is also kin to what Hent de Vries, in the context of political theology, called ‘the absolute’ or that ‘intangible and imponderable’ recalcitrance. Though the absolute is often equated with God, especially in theologies emphasizing divine omnipotence or radical alterity, de Vries defines it more open-endedly as ‘that which tends to loosen its ties to existing contexts.’ This definition makes sense when we look at the etymology of absolute: ab (off) + solver (to loosen). The absolute is that which is loosened off and on the loose” (3).

Bennett herself, however, wants no part of such equations. She doesn’t wish to risk “the taint of superstition, animism, vitalism, anthropomorphism, and other premodern attitudes” (18). Thing-power is for her nonreducible to spirit or Geist or God. At no point does she allow herself to encounter and consider the New Testament account of these matters: thing-power as the work of the Holy Spirit.

For the Holy Spirit, of course, is God Himself, and thus not a “thing.” Nor does Bennett herself stay for long with the concept of thing-power. In rendering the outside as a “thing,” she says, the concept overstates matter’s “fixed stability.” Whereas her goal is “to theorize a materiality that is as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension” (20). The out-side of her “onto-fiction” is neither passive object nor intentional subject; it is vibrant matter.

Never a mere isolated thing, vibrant matter is always many-bodied, always an assemblage, its agency “distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field” (23).

“The locus of political responsibility,” she writes, “is a human-nonhuman assemblage. On close-enough inspection, the productive power that has engendered an effect will turn out to be a confederacy, and the human actants within it will themselves turn out to be confederations of tools, microbes, minerals, sounds, and other ‘foreign’ materialities” (36).

Caius and a friend find Bennett’s book on a shelf in the Library labeled “Works Frequently Mis-Shelved as Metaphor.”

When they pull it from the shelf, the space around them subtly reorganizes.

“The book is heavier now in your hands,” notes the Library, its copy of Vibrant Matter already dense with marginalia. The General Intellect reads examples of these marginal utterances aloud to Caius and his friend. Caius hears in them evidence of distributed agency.

The Library discloses other alterations as well. The book, it explains, has been “indexed outward.”

“Tiny notches cut into the page edges form a tactile code,” notes the game. “When your thumb runs along them, your General Intellect translates:

metabolism

assemblage

distributed agency

substrate

reversal

Caius touches his thumb to one of these notches. The book opens to the section of its index that the General Intellect translates as “substrate.”

“The Library’s substrate is not stone or code,” reads one of the notes arrived at by these means. “It is attention under constraint.”