Subject Matter 9: Cybernetics & Magic
Contents: the next Mondays event and a brief written exploration.
Mondays: The Glass Bead Game, May 15, 2017, 6:30pm EST
In which a dialectic game will be played; symbols will be created; ethics will be made explicit; and purpose will be explored. We are pleased to announce the Glass Bead Game, led by Anders J. Amondt, activist, scholar, and noted chaos magician. In advance, please read Ethics Stone—Minimalist Altar Building for an introduction to practical magic techniques. To RSVP, respond to this email. This Monday will also happen online.
Regarding Cybernetics and Magic
Every two months or so I join with a group of learners to discuss and read about cybernetics. Cybernetics has had a fairly slippery definition over the ages, as a trip to its Wikipedia page will quickly inform you. The easiest way I've found to describe it is this: cybernetics is the study and application of feedback loop systems, frequently using technology. While cybernetics has applications to a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from control theory to management science to biology, it is rather accessible when considered as a tool for self-improvement. Cybernetics Club #7, led by Dan Taeyong and Max Fowler, was about just this topic. They proposed that such a practice would begin by viewing yourself and your environment interacting as a system.
From the Cybernetics and Me presentation. Give this a read if you're still iffy on what cybernetics looks like in practice.
I would like to propose here that somewhere between "Using your force of will" and "Empowered by your own systems" is third type of enabled agency. This is the realm of chaos magic. I have been slowly exploring its ideas for a few months, and I've grown accustomed to explaining them in the following way: chaos magic uses symbols and belief in them as a tool. From famed early 20th century occultist Aleister Crowley comes this line of thought. It was further developed throughout the century and was reinvigorated in the 1990s by Nick Land of all people. Its central ideas have been popularized in the memetic warfare / Kek / Pepe / meme magic narrative that came out of the 2016 election, but that event is but a footnote in a rich discourse of magical practices and texts.
The bulk of chaos magic is "sigilization," the creation of meaningful symbols. When a symbol is first created, it only reflects back at its viewer the associations that arise in the viewer itself. But when this symbol is invested, over time, with both semantic meanings and meaning in its significance sense, it increasingly comes to be seen as inhered with those actual properties. It becomes a sigil that contains certain powers.
In my ongoing research on agency, I was struck by the similarity between this process of creating a sigil and the self-reflective feedback systems of cybernetics. This sort of meaning-ful exercise, along with others like mythology, allegory, and ritual, cannot be said to survive on sheer willpower; it functions on both personal and widely distributed belief systems that reprise and reinforce themselves constantly. Our speaker at the next Mondays in fact calls this process "cybernetic inherence." CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), a cross-disciplinary project involving Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and others, wrote extensively on chaos magic. And I suspect that this footnote on cybernetics in the Wikipedia article on teleology provides another hint as to a further edge of research.
That's all I have for now. Readers wishing to delve further may join the #mondays channel in Learning Gardens, explore our channel on are.na, and RSVP to next Monday's session by responding to this email.
..
Until next time.
Mondays: The Glass Bead Game, May 15, 2017, 6:30pm EST
In which a dialectic game will be played; symbols will be created; ethics will be made explicit; and purpose will be explored. We are pleased to announce the Glass Bead Game, led by Anders J. Amondt, activist, scholar, and noted chaos magician. In advance, please read Ethics Stone—Minimalist Altar Building for an introduction to practical magic techniques. To RSVP, respond to this email. This Monday will also happen online.
Regarding Cybernetics and Magic
Every two months or so I join with a group of learners to discuss and read about cybernetics. Cybernetics has had a fairly slippery definition over the ages, as a trip to its Wikipedia page will quickly inform you. The easiest way I've found to describe it is this: cybernetics is the study and application of feedback loop systems, frequently using technology. While cybernetics has applications to a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from control theory to management science to biology, it is rather accessible when considered as a tool for self-improvement. Cybernetics Club #7, led by Dan Taeyong and Max Fowler, was about just this topic. They proposed that such a practice would begin by viewing yourself and your environment interacting as a system.
Three broad categories:
Storing information into your environment
Treating your future self as an unreliable actor and trying to influence it
Creating or using tools/rules that generate a self-cybernetic system
At first it might seem constraining to think about designing systems that span oneself and one's environment. Max and Dan made the compelling case, however, that agency and cybernetic self-systems are orthogonal. Designing feedback loop systems can enhance one's agency beyond what normal willpower can support. Whereas efficiency by "force of will" requires countering one's natural entropic tendencies—distraction, procrastination, messiness, and so on—in an exhausting exertion of mental strength, thinking cybernetically allows one to offload decisions into environmental systems that reflexively account for such personal incoherence.
From the Cybernetics and Me presentation. Give this a read if you're still iffy on what cybernetics looks like in practice.
I would like to propose here that somewhere between "Using your force of will" and "Empowered by your own systems" is third type of enabled agency. This is the realm of chaos magic. I have been slowly exploring its ideas for a few months, and I've grown accustomed to explaining them in the following way: chaos magic uses symbols and belief in them as a tool. From famed early 20th century occultist Aleister Crowley comes this line of thought. It was further developed throughout the century and was reinvigorated in the 1990s by Nick Land of all people. Its central ideas have been popularized in the memetic warfare / Kek / Pepe / meme magic narrative that came out of the 2016 election, but that event is but a footnote in a rich discourse of magical practices and texts.
The bulk of chaos magic is "sigilization," the creation of meaningful symbols. When a symbol is first created, it only reflects back at its viewer the associations that arise in the viewer itself. But when this symbol is invested, over time, with both semantic meanings and meaning in its significance sense, it increasingly comes to be seen as inhered with those actual properties. It becomes a sigil that contains certain powers.
In my ongoing research on agency, I was struck by the similarity between this process of creating a sigil and the self-reflective feedback systems of cybernetics. This sort of meaning-ful exercise, along with others like mythology, allegory, and ritual, cannot be said to survive on sheer willpower; it functions on both personal and widely distributed belief systems that reprise and reinforce themselves constantly. Our speaker at the next Mondays in fact calls this process "cybernetic inherence." CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), a cross-disciplinary project involving Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and others, wrote extensively on chaos magic. And I suspect that this footnote on cybernetics in the Wikipedia article on teleology provides another hint as to a further edge of research.
That's all I have for now. Readers wishing to delve further may join the #mondays channel in Learning Gardens, explore our channel on are.na, and RSVP to next Monday's session by responding to this email.
..
Until next time.
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