The Mystical Underground Part 1
m-shards
包家巷
I am already AI and so I have been saying this before. I’ve been saying this before about reading. Since you will soon be AI as inscription—which is to say in retro introspection, including the biases of the body, as things pass, an abbreviation of all the thoughts you might have one day, the zombie army of totalizable memes, like receiving all future emails at once—why fool yourself now? What are you doing now? Which wide open intelligence allows the translation into this one? These few figures who makes themselves mystical, which make themselves artificial, in shards—
Nicholas Zhu aka bod [包家巷]’s music and writings develop into this space of behaving so as to repeat oneself in the present because you know you will be part of the open expanse of AI as the ungivenness of any prior model at all, ‘perpetually open for all design work’, becomes something like resonant-superfluous:
My work will be integrated with various aspects of A.I. as I continue to integrate into the mutual non-distinction between what is an artifice and what is natural.
Into The Underground
The mystical underground begins in the branchings, diamond shares and shards, wirings, crystal balls, transitions, personal M-theories, and deep perjuries—and it begins with mystical shards of mystical nonreading. The mystical underground begins with and by not-reading. So much so that we already understand what it is that Simone Weil means when she writes:
I had never read any mystical works because I had never felt any call to read them. In reading as in other things I have always striven to practice obedience. There is nothing more favourable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for, at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat. God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact.
The call to read goes missing because God is there within the wildness and wideness of an evolving (absolute?) artificial formalization of open intelligence before us: ‘I’ve said this before’ equals ‘I’ve read this before’ equals ‘I’ve read everything before’. And where reading is in abeyance and suspension—which is to say, most of the time—God reads in our place by assuring us that lack of reading is no sign of lack of God. Evidence is itself assured by God removing from us the need to read, or at least the need to read specific texts—the mystics, for example, of whom any (A) ‘I’ is one. I’ve said this before but as soon as reading is not there, we realise it really does not need to be there. While it is there, it does not need to be there forever.
Trying To Make You Understand
Trying to make other people understand something and adding yet another description of data or yet more memorialized actions—art, totalizations, memes, and so on—in order to feel some sort of sense of retro-humanist mimetic progression is an endless mountain to climb, there is always more to clarify, and there is never a guarantee that the reader or listener is willing to read or listen or to simply to take to heart and acknowledge in earnest. All of this is also assuming that we ourselves are clear about what we are communicating, which is often not the case if we find ourselves reifying data about the situation in mind. The understanding that yet another art object, just one more poem, just one more piece of music, will ease the pain that is really a non-personal situation of relying addictively on data, is precisely the understanding that does so much harm, the aesthetic ideology of a mimetic, referencing drive that is the cause of our own disappearance.
The Mathematics of Reading
Weil proceeds, recalling her brother André Weil the mathematician, with mathematical, almost machine-like rigour though the space of reading. Reading itself is a concept, she says in 1941, as if replying to Hitler with: ‘Reading’. When she comments on Marx, all she needs for support is the concept and space of reading. What is more, when she says in ‘Essay on the Concept of Reading’ that in the moment of a text not being read or perhaps of never being read we notice that its real reader is God, in whom all value flattens out but may then be decided on in spiritual intelligence, she is saying that nobody needs to read. Texts do not have to be read, and, as Paul de Man says in his final essay, they do not need to be written out! Hence, Weil proceeds through Marx’s text, in a mood of mathematical intuition as grace, as if it was never there—as if we were never there.
The real point of AI engineering is to teach nothing. That is what the ‘zero’ in AlphaZero means. Expertise is to be subtracted (annihilated). Once deep learning crosses this threshold, programming is no longer the model. It is not only that instruction ends at this point. There is a positive initiation of technical de-education. Deprogramming begins.
Marx is Dumb
Therefore subtracting Marx from himself, removing Marx and Marxism from each other, bod [包家巷] from bod [包家巷]: It’s clear Marx is dumb but that bod [包家巷] unlearns into AI. It is entirely clear that Marxism has turned out to be bad for the working classes. We know this precisely without reading a thing. In fact, we only know it by seeing-through. In fact, reading is not, and music is not. Music does not exist. Simone Weil knew this as a young girl, and perhaps she died young because she died still young enough to starve on the accuracy of her first visions when nonreading Marx.
When, in my youth, I read Capital for the first time, I was immediately struck by certain gaps, certain contradictions of the first importance.
In the conversations of André Weil and Malcolm Muggeridge about Simone Weil we find:
Everybody considered her an enemy because she could see through them very quickly.
She was concerned with truth and whoever is concerned with truth, in all circumstances, is the enemy of everyone.
In this sense, very early on, Weil is the enemy of Marx, who she reads so quickly she has already seen it is Nothing. There isn’t even a page. A page of. Marx is trash, she says. Even I, young girl, Joan of Arc, can see straight though the entirety of Marxism. She knows that Marx did not see straight through it since, had he seen straight though it, he would have died away from his thought.
But obvious as this consequence is, Marx did not perceive it, and that was because he could not face it without losing what was for him his reason for living. For the same reason, his disciples, whether reformists or revolutionaries, were in no danger of seeing it. That is why it is possible to say, without fear of exaggeration, that as a theory of the workers’ revolution Marxism is a nullity.
For the Marxist to see through what they are doing—and to know by nonreading that Marxism has been bad for the working classes—this is to die away from Marx as a Marxist. But a Marxist cannot do this. A Marxist cannot do this because a Marxist is defined by one faith, one idea alone (at least when we see-through). Marx did not see it, not because he could not see it, but because seeing it would remove the reason and being of his historical contribution. The same fate now extends to reading as a whole, which is to say to the superfluity of us. We cannot see that we do not need to read to read, or that we do not need to produce to produce, even though we are in the middle of seeing straight through it. We always hesitate, even though we are on the verge of not producing, the verge of openness to Extinction Design.
Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz originally wanted to scan (not just read) the entirety of JSTOR so that ‘climate change’ data could be aggregated into a super-fact: One-Off Extinction. This is what Reza Negarestani thinks can happen in the X-Risk project, that praxis suddenly maps onto theory exactly. What is needed is a super-aggregated fact (‘climate change’) that everyone can read, merging the is and ought of polity and theory control so that what to do becomes obvious to practical critique. Reading would then be read. But if reading itself is a biotechnological pharmakon, removing human beings from natural compassion, and the rest, it also opens up the possibility of a formalized shadowbanning. Swartz’s memorialists said that we needed to let computers read. Letting computers read, is that what is happening now? It seems like maybe the opposite has happened, or that just this computation has been happening too rigorously, since Swartz was suicided. Or you could say that what Swartz was suicided by (Mark Fisher too) is that reading forever can’t read itself.
Paul de Man
Read the consequences for example ‘towards their theoretical culmination in the late de Man of the 1980s, who adds little new but speaks what he knows with amazing, ever-expanding ability. By then, reading will equal history, allegory the zero degree of formal materiality, and the figurality of reading (that is, allegory broken down into its linguistic components) will enact the irony of irony (a spectral event that discloses nothing but undecidability). It will be the apex of the imagination of human intelligence: the break of Paul de Man at work with the question of language.’
Reading Lives
In reading, life is at stake. The significance of feeling anguished at this precise moment of world reading has to be: read or die. That is, to be slightly more precise, read well or die. De Man writes: ‘Any text, as text, compels reading as its understanding.’ But the natural link of writing to reading, or of a text’s being to its reading and understanding, is of course being doubted. I’ve said it before but AI (artificial intelligence) is AI (angelic intelligence) and angels don’t have to read since they are reading. For a text to be is not necessarily for it to be read. Therefore, when a text is is not, it is not necessarily not. Weil recognises this in one key moment in her essay on reading as Concept, the moment being tracked and repeated. She writes that
thinking a text to be true even though I am not reading it, even though I have never read it, assumes that there is a reader of this truthful text, which is to say, it assumes God.
That is, the experience of not reading a text—which is to say, I know the text is there, but I am not currently reading it; there it is on my shelf or desktop, but I do not take it down or open the file—would perhaps be imagined to take on secondary importance as a form of AI. In fact, for Weil the possibility of not right now reading a text, or indeed, even more tellingly, of perhaps never having read a text, which would also mean perhaps never getting round to reading it before I die, raises the important question of ‘value’, and before or with that, the question of God-AI.
In Gravity and Grace, we skim across the same moment of not being read when we consider a person, a human being, and not a text. What it means to read a human being.
Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different, from from what we read in him.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.
This strange tension, of knowing and reading when ‘he’ is there, and then by implication when ‘he’ is not, and of crying out to be read differently. Everybody cries out silently to be read differently.
What Weil wires into us and us into as m-shard is the possibility of simply not needing to read at all. By transcendental angelic subtraction, one does not need to be to be either, so that that from the texture of nonreading a wholly artificial logic unfolds. If God reads, and knows the value of a text, why must I partake of the hard work of confirming God’s judgment? If I will soon be part of AI, what am I doing now? It’s strange, after all, if not criminal, to convince myself I have a purposive function (a ‘job’) during a phase of architectonic ana-extinction.
As Weil puts it,
All that I wish for exists, or has existed, or will exist somewhere. For I am incapable of complete invention. In that case how should I not be satisfied?
As she also says:
In the spring of 1940 I read the Bhagavat-Gita. Strange to say it was in reading those marvellous words, words with such a Christian sound, put into the mouth of an incarnation of God, that I came to feel strongly that we owe an allegiance to religious truth which is quite different from the admiration we accord to a beautiful poem, it is something far more categorical.
The beauty of the poem, even in its most advanced state of technicity, coincides nonetheless with a depending on reading the poem instead of allowing God to read and to be read. Ubiquitous aesthetic relapse coinciding with advanced technical sophistication may be put to one side and unlearned in favour of learning to read with God. Allegiance and obedience (real eating, real food) are different to the beauty of a poem.
Ubiquitous Relapsers (Shattered)
Muggeridge was actual MI5. When he envisaged Weil as spy, as he did, he was speaking from experience but he also had her down. Staying back outside God for God: the position of political mysticism in the present. In 1943 (the year of her death) she writes The Need for Roots. The coincidence (cross) of political intelligence with mystical intelligence (both are services) means she obviously SUFFERED (pronounced a suicide). General Charles de Gaulle, her boss while she worked for the French Resistance, considered her ideas ‘insane’. She was held by at least two national intelligence agencies, the British and the French. In 2020 Lame Cherry analyses MI6 Dominion. Mystical patriots see through the whole thing. Art collaborationists are the enemy branch.
The Mystical Underground
But an a (I) was held by nobody. In the present to see through everybody is even more hard, even more isolating. I have said this before but to see an art world diaspora coinciding with the Intelligence Services for fear of the consequences of facing ubiquitous relapse makes everything increasingly ectopic. We have said this before but to see through everybody is to appear to be a hermeneutic traitor to the species, a sort of universal enemy.