This is a list of selected works on Xerodrome and Nomadology (esp. Desert Nomads) for interested readers. I think this might be helpful for anyone motivated to rigorously pursue the desert-nomadology as well as issues discussed here regarding War on Terror, Mecca-nomics and Petropolitics and even Abdul Alhazred's Al-Azif. (Have collected these books from different sources: used-book sellers, friends, bookshops and of course, book-robbers.)
The Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins, Alois Musil, New York: American Geographical Society, 1928.
The Empty Quarter, John Philby, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1933. (One of the best books on Rub al-Khalie)
Travels in Arabia Deserta, Charles Doughty, London: Johnathan Cape, 1936. (Highly recommended)
The Arab of the Desert: A Glimpse into Badawin Life in Kuwait and Sau’di Arabia, H. R. P. Dickson, London: Allen and Unwin, 1951.
Arabian Sands, Wilfred Thesiger, London: Longmans, 1959.
Nomads of South Persia: The Basseri Tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy, Fredrik Barth, 1961. (Analyzing demographic processes that maintain nomadization in regard to its environment)
The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority, and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe. Talal Asad, London: C. Hurst and Company, 1970.
The Politics of Stratification: A Study of Political Change in a South Arabian Town, Abdalla S. Bujra, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics, Derek Hopwood (ed.), London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972. (Wahhabism, the cult of the desert)
The Desert and the Sown: Nomads in the Wider Society, Cynthia Nelson (ed.), Berkeley: University of California, 1973.
Nomads of the Nomads: The Al Murrah Bedouin of the Empty Quarter, Donald Powell Cole, Illinois: AHM Publishing, 1975.
In the Shadow of the Black Tents, Thierry Mauger, Jeddah: Tihama Press, 1985. (Nomadology, the Smooth and the Striated)
Bedouins of Qatar, Klaus Ferdinant, London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.
Oil, God and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings, Anthony Cave Brown, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
Bedouin: Nomads of the Desert, Alan Keohane, Kyle Cathie Limited, 2003. (Photographic records)
This is not hyperstitional but I couldn’t resist the temptation of posting it here:
Yesterday, I found an Ad’ieh in the street, where I was supposed to wait for my friend.
If you remember Ringu (the Japanese movie based on a novel by Kôji Suzuki) you can guess what an Ad’ieh should be. The theme of the movie is based on the old Middle Eastern practice of (un)Cursing. For example, you love or hate someone, you write a text concerning your plea and the Ad’ieh associated to that plea (Ad’ieh: benediction, communion, an address for summoning) you entitle it as an AD’IEH and cite the number of copies (typically 10-30) that a reader should write. Finally, you should place it somewhere you have not visited before (the place is usually located by chance). Now, the first one who finds the text must copy it according to the number cited in the Ad’ieh and spreading the multiplied copies; each copy should be read or otherwise the reader (the copier) will be cursed – the penalty is usually the curse of death. Therefore, the reader participates to find ‘new’ preys (new readers) and the chain continues, each reader propagates the virus randomly, (un)cursing new people and no one falls into the category of victimhood. The question that remains: what about the last readers who cannot find anyone who hasn’t read the text yet (as usually an Ad’ieh cannot be read twice)? They are potentially cursed, sentenced to death.
This is a very brief and technically shattered note on an incisive question raised by Undercurrent on what has already been entitled The Chronic. I think the true part of the answer should be opened and investigated carefully in the next chapters of the Islamic Chronopolytics series. This is just an introductory note for later answers, so it is not devoid of rushed and confusing remarks.
Round 1:
u/c: As the compounding of interest is a motif of K+ period-doubling time, I wonder what we can make of the islamic prohibition on charging interest, in relation to your exposition of these chronopolitics? Is this a calming or warding-off mechanism, or what?
R: Well, for starting a discussion I should say that there are no such prohibitions as you read or hear about on technical / financial / economic / banking levels in Islamic countries. I do not know about all Islamic countries but at least know enough about such prohibitions in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to give you an ‘unsatisfying’ and ‘inaccurate’ answer:
Modern banking in Egypt almost follows the western patterns so it is not in our Islamic category in this respect. Saudi Arabia is fundamentalist and uses these prohibitions against charging interests, Riba (both Riba al-Nasee and Riba al-Fadhl) etc. Iran is fundamentally something else:
In Aug. 1983, after some disastrous failures in Central Bank (based on revolutionary anti-capitalist / anti-market / anti-foreign investment laws which actually cut off the country from the western world), an Usury-Free Banking Act which included less prohibitions against charging interests was finally ratified and accepted by the parliament but it did not went into effect until 1984. The main goal of reducing these prohibitions was to reach a dynamic economy affording the cost of the War and filling the gaps it opened in various levels of society; using the monetary tools to support the islamic objectives of Iran both inside and outside the country (in Lebanon for example) and preserving the value of Iran’s national currency and balancing it according to the huge public sector debt consists of interest-free loans owed to the Central Bank, or low-interest-bearing obligations to the nationalized banks. In 1984 laws of charging interests and investment, there is a highly ambiguous point; the law neither defined usury / interest (Riba al-Nasee and Riba al-Fadhl), nor did it distinguish it from normal bank interest (bahrih). Interest was replaced by profit and loss sharing arrangements between the bank and its depositors and borrowers according to a pre-scripted formula. No party was to be a debtor or creditor, but only a ‘partner’ in joint projects. However, lacking the experience of working with this kind of obscure Islamic system of interest, or as what here mockingly called ‘Islamic Riba’ the banks network and central bank at the center of this network lost both their former economic vibrancy and profitability as the result of working in this both quasi-islamic and obscurely twisted western economic trend towards interest (running at an interest rate collar i.e. oscillating between maximum and minimum interest rates through the combination of caps and floors). Remaining Islamic in name (also keeping certain prohibitions) and working with mutilated western / capitalist economic mechanisms in regard to interests, the banks lost even their primary designation. The interest rate merely renamed to ‘provisional (interim) rate of profit’ and the interest charged to bank debtors turned into ‘minimum expected rate of profit on granted facilities.’
But due to:
(1) the imbalance between ex-ante interest and ex-post profit (both in some way still restricted by Islamic prohibitions towards a fully western trend of charging interests; and as a result of ignoring the ‘profit-loss’ homeostatic stability (or as one may put it, an excessive risk-free profit, arbitrage as Ilinski [1] elaborates it, system) of a bank in a period of time [A Year]),
(2) the incompatibility between ‘islamic’ mechanisms of charging interest and the slump or boom years in economy and finally (among many other factors),
(3) the huge waste on annual budget on powerful economic entities like ‘Seda va Sima’ (TV & Radio), ‘Azad (free) University’ and those educational and research centers doing double-work (in terms of their redundancy) on ‘Islamic propagation’, etc. (all receiving a significant share from the annual budget),
the islamic banking system has been totally incapacitated and cannot direct micro-economic entities according to the economy of the State or transfer the power of the State’s economic ownership to micro-entities (including families, organizations, etc.) that means the maneuverability of the Islamic State on the economic front has been sabotaged by its rules from within (endogenously prepared into an unstable position from the beginning i.e. prior to its installation and even its functioning as Didier Sornette in his Econophysical work [2] points out about the underlying mechanism of majority of economic crashes), exhausted by the islamic political / economic prohibitions (which are inevitability combine with the western trends but in a very twisted [potentially rich in giving rise to unreported and cryptogenic economic diseases]) which are superficially political but subterraneously ‘polytical’ as they release insurgencies (disloyal to both the State and themselves) running at the edge of terminal multiplicities, epidemics.
One of the symptoms of this incapacitation for the state’s economic power, its authority of imposing prohibitions, feeding and being fed, and banking system is the emergence of private ‘homemade banks’ (as in the case of homemade semi-automatic weapons); the statistical reports (2002) show that there is one interest-based homemade bank among 18 families (considering the fact that Islamic countries are entirely family-oriented and local reports always cover up what is happening beneath the surface), and 6 families are connected to such homemade banks which evade homogenization; moreover, there is no relevant distribution of connectivity among these micro-economic swarms (which are expendable yet never exhausted or grow old and decrepit), consequently, they never take the network dynamism that is essential for invoking ‘developing structures’ (from which the State can be fueled) and centric spaces which consolidate these entities or distribute them over economic factions (what usually happens for private banking). In the wake of the economic poverty in recent years, economic decline of the State, sudden contact with global currents, low rate of income, etc, these homemade banks have become so popular, quite powerful / insurgent economic entities that recklessly undermine the State’s economic power and authorship, as well, the social economic grid from which they emerge. People usually receive a profit 3.5-4 times more than the bank’s ordinary rate of profit. These homemade banks are more profit-based than the traditional usury-based systems in Arabic countries; hardly you can find a homemade bank giving loan but you can invest money in these homemade banks and harvest a profit 3.5-4 times more than bank’s rate of provisional profit. However, the true power of these epidemic homemade banks is still not clear, and their catastrophic influence on the State’s economy (oscillating between Islamic economy / prohibitions and western capitalism) requires a deserving investigation. Homemade banks (which are also very popular in Saudi Arabia) re-invent capitalism from the other side of the Capital in Islamic countries, and in connection to the Islamic State and its intrinsic / internal economic incapacitation (that is to say including its prohibitions); but what they propagate is not a “capital-feeding-itself” but an autophagic capital, diseased in terms of awakening anomalies and new lines of collapse.
Round 2:
u/c: I knew that the prohibitions on interest had many bypass-routes, my
initial question was about the meaning of the prohibition itself rather
than its application (why does the prohibition form a part of
submission).
R:Yes, I know; it was just an introduction on these prohibitions in islamic countries. Don’t know if you are familiar with the Quranic account of interest (riba); this is a very crude / typically Islamic paper (on Allameh Parwez book) but is a very helpful introduction on some of the Quranic elements of these prohibitions and why they are supposed to ‘maintain a dynamic but tranquilized capital’; guess these introductions are necessary before we start our actual discussion on currency / Interest / Islam which sounds very crucial:
QURAN’S SYSTEM OF ECONOMICS (Introductory)
Is Islamic banking a challenge to ‘western-style’ capitalism?
NOTE
[1] Kirill Ilinski in Physics of Finance: Gauge Modeling in Non-Equilibrium Pricing (John Wiley & Sons, 2001) explores the connectivity and multiple links between the mechanism of interest rate and charging interest in finance to ‘Time component of connection’ in spatio-temporality. Interest rate, Ilinski insists, is the translation of spatio-temporal connectivity in physics.
The risk-free profit can be minimally formulized as:
(r = interest rate; “F is amount of money is to be received in T years’ time”; “NPV(F) is the sum of money P (principal) which, if invested today, would generate the compound amount F in T years' time”)
Dt or T-year discount factor, or the discount procedure “plays the role of a ‘parallel transport’ of an amount of money through time (though in fixed currency).” (Ilinski) What makes the interest-rate a preferred feeding ground for capital is its foundational characteristic to render a specialized Time-horizon/connectivity for currency which has chronopolitical tendencies of its own, more working with time and its spatio-temporal relations rather than economic factors.
[2] Didier Sornette, Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems, Princeton University Press, 2002.
Against Numerology
Consider first an extraordinarily direct numerological manifesto:
“When the qualitative aspects are included in our conception of numbers, they become more than simple quantities 1, 2, 3, 4; they acquire an archetypal character as Unity, Opposition, Conjunction, Completion. They are then analogous to more familiar [Jungian] archetypes... ”
It is hard to imagine a more ‘archetypal’ expression of numerological ambition than this. Yet rather than meeting this claim with docile compliance, the qabbalist is compelled to raise a number of awkward questions:
1) How can a numerological coding that proceeds in this fashion avoid entrapping itself among the very smallest of Naturals at the toe-damping edge of the number line? If ‘4’ symbolizes the archetype ‘Completion,’ what to make of 127, 709, 1023, or similar small Naturals? Do they also have analogues among the intelligible archetypes? How would one ‘qualitize’ (2^127)-1, or a larger number (of which there are a very considerable number)?
2) Is an ‘archetype’ more basic than a number in its unsymbolized state? Does ‘qualitizing’ a number reveal a more elementary truth, a germ the number itself conceals, or does it merely re-package the number for convenient anthropomorphic consumption, gift-wrapping the intolerable inhumanity of alogical numerical difference and connectivity?
3) Why should a number be considered ‘quantitative’ in its Natural state? Is it not that the imposition of a quantity/quality categorization upon the number requires a logical or philosophical overcoding, a projection of intelligibility alien to the number itself? Quantity is the decadence of number (while quality is its perversion), so - since arithmetic provides no basis for a reduction of the numerical to the quantitative - what is the supposed source of this (numeric-quantitative) identification (other than a disabling preliminary innumeracy)?
4) If ‘1’ numerologically evokes ‘Unity,’ why should UNITY not qabbalistically ‘evoke’ 134 (= 8, its Numogrammtic twin) with equal pertinence? Can any expressible ‘archetype’ avoid re-dissolution into the unfamiliarity of raw number pattern? Numerology might assimilate ‘2’ to opposition, but OPPOSITION = 238 = 13 = 4 (twice 2, and the Numogrammatic twin of (‘4’ = COMPLETION = 212 =) 5), while even if numerological ‘3’ as CONJUNCTION = 237 = 12 = 3 finds itself qabbalisitically confirmed (at the extremity of its decimalization), this is not, perhaps, in an altogether comfortable mode?
Numerology may be fascinated by numbers, but its basic orientation is profoundly antinumerical. It seeks – essentially – to redeem number, through symbolic absolution into a ‘higher’ significance. As if the concept of ‘opposition’ represented an elevation above the (‘mere’) number two, rather than a restriction, subjectivization, logicization and generalized perversion, directed to anthropomorphic use-value and psychological satisfaction.
Archetypes are sad limitations of the species, while numbers are an eternal hypercosmic delight.
Nevertheless, qabbalism is right up against numerology, insofar as it arises ‘here,’ within a specific biological and logocratic environment. The errors of numerology are only the common failures of logic and philosophy, human vanities, crudified in the interest of mass dissemination, but essentially uncorrupted. The numeric-critique (or transcendental arithmetic) of a Goedel (or Turing, or Chaitin (or Badiou?(??(???)))) can be rigorously transferred to this controversy, demonstrating - within each particular milieu - that overcodings of numerical relation by intelligible forms - ‘archetypes’ or ‘logics’ - are unsustainable reductions, reefed on the unsurpassable semiotic potency of number. Goedel has shown that there is always a number, in fact an infinitude of (Natural) numbers, that simulate, parody, logically dialectize, paradoxically dismantle, archetypally hypervert, and in whatever way necessary subvert each and every overcoding of arithmetic. Number cannot be superseded. There is no possibility of an authoritative ‘philosophy of arithmetic’ or numerological gnosis.
Qabbala assumes that semiotics is ‘always already’ cryptography, that the cryptographic sphere is undelimitable. It proceeds on the assumption that there cannot be an original (unproblematic) coding, providing the basis for any solid definition or archetypal symbol, since the terms required for such a coding are incapable of attaining the pure ‘arbitrariness’ that would ensure the absence of prior cryptographic investment. There is not - and can never be - any ‘plain text,’ except as a naïve political assumption about (the relative (non)insidiousness of) coding agencies and the presupposition that communicative signs accessibly exist that are not already ‘in code.’ Since everything is coded, or (at least) potentially coded, nothing is (definitively) symbolic. Qabbalistic cryptocultures – even those yet to come – ensure that number cannot be discussed or situated without subliminal or (more typically) wholly unconscious participation in numerical practices. Logos, including that of numerology, is also always something other than itself, and in fact very many things.
Qabbalism thus operates as an inverse or complementary Goedelian double-coding. Where Goedel demonstrated that the number line is infested by virtual discursive systems of undelimitable topicality and complexity, pre-emptively dismantling the prospects of any conceivable supranumerical metadiscourse, qabbala demonstrates that discourses are themselves intrinsically redoubled (and further multiplied) by coincidental numerical systems which enter into patterns of connectivity entirely independent of logical regimentation.
The supposed numerical de-activation of the alphabet, marking semiotic modernity (the era of specialized numerical signs), has an extremely fragile foundation, relying as it does upon the discontinuation of specific cultural procedures (precisely those that withdraw into ‘occultism’) rather than essential characteristics of signs themselves. The persistent numerical functionalization of the modern alphabet – with sorting procedures based on alphabetical ordering as the most prominent example – provides incontestible evidence (if any was required) that the semiotic substructure of all Oecumenic communications remains stubbornly amphibious between logos and nomos, perpetually agitated by numerical temptations and uncircumscribed polyprocesses.
At the discursive level, any ‘rigorization of qabbala’ can only be a floating city, with each and every definition, argument and manifesto continually calving off into unmasterable numerical currents and alogical resonances. How could qabbala be counterposed to a code, to meaning and reason, when CODE (= 63) finds duplicitous harmonics in MEANING = REASON = 126? If qabbala positions itself discursively AGAINST NUMEROLOGY (= 369), the echoes of its novanomic signature perpetuate themselves even through such unlikely terms as SIGNIFICANCE (= 207) and SIGNIFICATION (= 252). Pronouncements that begin as projected logical discriminations revert to variations on triplicity and the number nine, performing a base qabbalistic subversion of philosophical legislation and its authority to define (or delimit connectivity).
No polemic against numerology – whether conducted in the name of qabbala or of Oecumenic common reason – will transcend the magmic qabbalistic flux that multiplies and mutates its sense. Perhaps dreams of numerological archetypes even sharpen the lust for semiotic invention, opening new avenues for qabbalistic incursion. But this at least is certain: Numbers do not require – and will never find - any kind of logical redemption. They are an eternal hypercosmic delight.
Following my answer to Esmail, I should add this book is one of the rarest ABJAD books consistently approaching its unconventional syncretism through Shia religion and not traditional ABJAD. One of the most significant evidences for such a claim is that in ABJAD books, Figures, Diagrams and Magic Squares are usually surrounded by circles or shields which are commonly known as ABJAD watchers or ABJAD shields. Most of the published ABJAD books in Iran although contain the names of Shia Imams but correspond to the cipherology of traditional Arabic ABJAD in which diagrams or figures are guarded by ABJAD Watchers, covered by either the letter Meem or the letter Daal (the first and the last letters of the name Mohammad); these traditional ABJAD shields are designed by two lines intersected and formed an acute or obtuse angle representing the letter Daal (= 4). However, in Shia ABJAD, these shields are not pointed (consequently they are not in the form of the letter Daal) but curved lines (overrun by the letter Haa) diagramming the calligraphic element of the letter Haa (= 5) which is a fully curved letter (see the left figure: summoning 1). Haa (= 5) stands for ‘Panj Tan-e Aal-e Abba’ i.e. Mohammad, Ali, Hassan, Hussein, Fatemeh who are the pillars of Shia.
Numogrammatic Time-Mapping
In Peter Vysparov’s construction of the Cthulhu Club System, the central region of the Numogram is labelled the ‘Time-Circuit’ or the ‘Domain of Chronos.’ Despite misgivings about mythopoetic arguments, it is worth briefly rehearsing aspects of Vysparov’s discussion.
According to the Greek myth, Chronos was the son of Uranus and Gaia, last of the Titans and God of Time, married to the Goddess Rhea. Revolting against the tyranny of Uranus, Gaia provided Chronos with a sickle, with which he hacked the sexual organs from his father, killing him (and producing various fall-out entities – Erinyes, Giants, and Meliae). Chronos also fell under the prophecy that he would suffer an analagous fate at the hands of his offspring. He thus devoured the first five (Hestia, Hera, Demeter, Poseidon and Hades – order (to me) uncertain (Hestia first daughter)), but Zeus escaped and poisoned him. The five consumed children were regurgitated as their father died.
Vysparov seems to have been convinced that these six offspring of Chronos – three of each sex - could be rigorously allotted zonal ‘houses’ on the Numogram Time-Circuit, consistent with the Pythagorean gendering of numbers. If he ultimately succeeded in establishing these co-ordinations his results do not seem to have reached us.
Vysparov also emphasized that this ‘founding’ myth is one of time disintegration, not time persistence. The ‘Domain of Chronos’ is a burial complex, ordering the world through the death of integral time.
Whether beginning from Kant’s identification of time with the content of arithmetic, or Einstein’s definition of time as a (fourth) dimension, attempts to model time seem to necessarily call upon the number line. The most elementary – and notationally efficient – chronometric and calendric systems count time by addition of unit periods, from caesium atom half-lives through clock ticks to day counting and annual date-changing. Whatever the scale, the procedure remains the same: the apparently basic arithmetical operation of additive succession, +1, +1, +1, …
Of course, mathematicians have known for well over two millennia that the number line in no way compels such an assumption. Step-by-step additive progression by units is merely one arithmetically arbitrary mode of numerical accumulation. Nevertheless, it can at least be argued that this pattern of counting presents the overwhelmingly prevalent articulation of chronological common sense.
Echidna Stillwell refers to Vysparov’s ‘Time Circuit’ as the ‘Hex.’ She demonstrates the arithmetical consistency between this region of the Numogram and the Chinese Classic of Change, or I Ching. This intermapping is locked into place by two basic bino-decimal echoes:
1) The six-step cycle of digitally-reduced binary magnitudes, repeating the series 2, 4, 8, 7, 5, 1.
2) The 9-twinning of these repeating stages. (To quote Richard Wilhelm’s commentary: “The following lines, provided they differ in kind, correspond: the first and the fourth, the second and the fifth, the third and the top [sixth] line.”)
Stillwell cites the Nma version of an almost universally familiar story: “A poor mathematician from the great landmass came to the court with a game he had invented, now called ‘chess,’ and the king was so enthralled by this diversion he asked the visitor whether there was anything he could offer as a token of appreciation. The cunning mathematician replied: ‘Your majesty, perhaps if you were to place a grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, and continuing thus, doubling the number on each successive square until reaching the final [64th] one, it would at least spare me from the danger of starvation on my return journey.’ Shocked by the modesty of this request, the king readily agreed. It was in this way the kingdom passed for the first time into the hands of strangers …”
This tale, attributed variously to Indian, Chinese and Persian sources, with minor variations in each case, is now to be found mostly in schoolrooms, where it is used as an aid in the teaching of binary exponentiation. The topics it raises, whether concerning mathematics, games and power, number and trickery, numerical isomorphy between the chess board and the I Ching, or other matters, exceed the scope of this discussion. Two points will suffice for now:
1) The utter obscurity attending the origins of this tale provides highly suggestive support for Stillwell’s ‘ethnomic’ hypothesis, with its argument that numerical potentiality is capable of generating spontaneous unlocalizable cultural syndromes.
2) Binary exponentiation has a ‘mythic’ dimension, now largely supplanted in modern societies by ‘Moore’s Law’ of techonomic development.
A privileging of binary exponentiation rather than unit addition is entirely consistent with the prominence of the number line as a model of time. The basic ‘time unit,’ however, is now conceived as the ‘doubling period.’ This approach integrates an intriguing diversity of problematics:
1) The I Ching, where time progresses through doubling and bino-decimal cyclicity. There is nothing exclusively ‘modern’ about the extravagant power of time as an exponentially accumulative trend – modernity lies rather in the evasion of disaccumulation crisis, which in the time of the I Ching is described as an inevitability of periodic catastrophe.
2) The Numogram Hex, rigorously echoing the I Ching, although with certain supplementary complexities (exceeding the scope of this discussion). The Numogram also ‘positions’ the sphere of duplicative time within a greater – and for now obscure – time terrain.
3) Qabbalistic tradition, within which binary exponentiation has ‘always’ provided the key to certain crucial combinatorial calculations. Combinatorics, qabbala, and binary exponentiation share a common procedural reservoir.
4) Transfinite arithmetic, as consolidated by Cantor, whose Continuum Hypothesis proposes that binary exponentiation to Aleph-0 = Aleph-1 (the real number line).
But this could go on forever …
AQ notes:
CHRONO = 127 (enough said)
CHRONOLOGY = 222 (a little theatrical perhaps ...)
CHRONOS = 155 (31 x 5: The pentanomic order is the strict complement of binary within the decimalized Oecumenon - more on this elsewhere)
Nick, I just added the links to ‘Cryptomats section’ (however, Mehrdad will provide us with the graphically enhanced ver. of the Numogram) ... any suggestion for now?
Btw, I was thinking of some maps; for example, I had a map diagramming the geographic distribution of sects / heresies in Islam (Iran and Egypt had the most focused concentration from the time of Ibn Maymun) ... this for example is helpful for our ‘heresy-engineering’ division. A geographic distribution of oil wells in the Middle East for example is not a bad idea. Again, any suggestion, idea, materials?
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Anyone (u/c, Tachi, Northanger, Val, Craig, et al), any suggestion or material?
Also we need a more expanded link-section but it messes up the side-bar, any solution?
Primitive Numerization
Among the primary test-beds for qabbalistic analysis are the numerolexic systems inherited from cultures overcoded by the modern Oecumenic alphabet. These include the Hebrew and Greek alphabets (with their Neoroman letter names and mathematico-notational functions) and the Roman numbers (inherited as Neoroman letters and still numerically active in various domains). In this respect, the absence of names for Neoroman letters are an index of their pseudo-transcendence – as ‘unnameable’ - within the present Oecumenic order.
A discontinuity is marked in the alphanumeric series (0-Z) by the fact that the numerals composing the first 10 figures in this series do have names, grouping them with the letters of previous alphabetical numbering systems from a certain qabbalistic perspective. This might be taken as the residual indication of an ‘alien quality’ still characterizing the numerals in relation to the Oecumenic cultural order they now indisputably occupy, a legacy of the cultural trauma attending their introduction.
The qabbalistic provocation posed by this English number names is conceptually comparable to that of any other numerolexic system, while surpassing any other in the intimacy of its challenge. If the numerals have names, shouldn’t the qabbalistic processing of them as words yield – at the least – compelling suggestions of nonrandom signal? If the standard numeral names emit nothing but noise when qabbalistically transcoded, the attempt to establish relatively persuasive criteria for the evaluation of qabbalistic results suffers an obvious and immense reverse.
What, then, would count as a minimally controversial first step in such an examination?
Surely the most basic of all qabbalistic (or subqabbalistic?) procedures is simple letter counting – Primitive Numerization (PN). As a reversion to sheer ‘tallying’ PN has a resonance with the most archaic traces of numerical practice, such as simple strokes carved into mammoth bones and suchlike palaeo-ethnographic materials. If anyone was to bother systematizing PN procedure for the purpose of mechanization or simply for conceptual clarity, it would be most efficiently done by transcoding (‘ciphering’) each letter or notational element as ‘1’ and then processing the result numerically.
PN’s extremely tenuous relation to issues of modulus-notation ensures that it can only ever be a highly dubious tool when intricate qabbalistic calculation is required. Yet this utter crudity also makes it invaluable as a test case, since it minimizes axiomatic arbitrariness and precludes any plausible possibility of symbolic conjuration (‘sleight of hand’) while fully sharing the qabbalistic ‘deficiency’ of sufficient anthroposocial or communicative motivation. Common reason – sanity - insists upon noise as the only PN output consistent with the general intelligibility of signs (a pre-judgement applying rigorously to all qabbalistic procedures).
No message should inhere in the length of a word, excepting only the broad pragmatic trend to the shortening of commonly used terms. It is immediately obvious why this exception has no pertinence to the case in question here, unless stretched to a point (for instance, expecting the smaller numerals to exhibit the greatest lexical attrition) where it is straightforwardly contradicted by the actuality of the phenomenon.
So, proceeding to the ‘analysis’ -
PN of the English numeral names:
ZERO = 4, ONE = 3, TWO = 3, THREE = 5, FOUR = 4, FIVE = 4, SIX = 3, SEVEN = 5, EIGHT = 5, NINE = 4.
Is there a pattern here?
Several levels of apparent noise, noise, and pseudo-pattern can be expected to entangle themselves in this result, depending on the subsequent analytical procedures employed.
To restrict this discussion to the most evident secondary result, not only is there a demonstrable pattern, but this pattern complies with the single defining feature of the Numogram - the five Syzygies emerging from 9-sum twinning of the decimal numerals: 5:4, 6:3, 7:2, 8:1, 9:0.
In the shape most likely to impress common reason (entirely independent of numogrammatic commitments) this demonstration takes the form:
ZERO + NINE = ONE + EIGHT = TWO + SEVEN = THREE + SIX = FOUR + FIVE.
- revealing perfect numerolexic-arithmetical / PN-‘qabbalistic’ consistency.
PN confirmation of the Numogrammatic Novazygons (9-Twins).
ONE + EIGHT = NINE + ZERO. (PN 3 + 5 = (4 + 4 =) 8)
TWO + SEVEN = NINE + ZERO. (PN 3 + 5 = (4 + 4 =) 8)
THREE + SIX = NINE + ZERO. (PN 5 + 3 = (4 + 4 =) 8)
FOUR + FIVE = NINE + ZERO. (PN 4 + 4 = (4 + 4 =) 8)
The approximate probability of this pattern emerging ‘by chance’ is 1/243, if it is assumed that each decimal digit (0-9) is equiprobably allotted an English name of three, four, or five letter length, with 8-sum zygosys as the principle of synthesis. 7-sum or 9-sum zygosys are inconsistent with any five or three letter number-names respectively, and thus complicate probabilistic analysis beyond the scope of this demonstration (although if everything is conceded to the most elaborate conceivable objections of common reason, the probability of this phenomenon representing an accident of noise remains comfortably below 1/100).
Partisans of common reason can take some comfort from the octozygonic disturbance of the (novazygonic) Numogrammatic reference. How did nine become eight (or vice versa)?
Lemurophiliac numogrammaticists are likely to counter such queries with elementary qabbala (since digital cumulation and reduction bridges the ‘lesser abyss’ in two steps, 8 = 36 = 9, as diagrammed by the 8th Gate connecting Zn-8 to Zn-9).
[This is a step on the path to a discussion of time-travel – honestly!]
As anyone who has been following our fragmented discussion of hyperstitional method is already aware, Tachi has been raising a wide range of questions about the structure and organization of hyperstition as a research and production programme and about the potential arrangement of this site. These suggestions in some cases dovetail with requests from other contributors – especially as regards easily accessed introductory material – and in others conflict with arguments others have made, particularly in relation to emerging controversies about inherent problems of methodological meta-discussion and exclusion of ‘irrelevant’ interventions.
This post is primarily designed to open up a discussion thread. Rather than giving a detailed appraisal of Tachi’s elaborate suggestions and organizational model (divided into no less than 7 sections) - no doubt to be discussed within a more extended time-frame - it will instead offer a drastically simplified thematic ‘map’ of the activity taking place so far, in the hope of eliciting feedback and counter-proposals. The following remarks are guided by Tachi’s questions/suggestions.
One reason to favour a crudely simplified scheme at this stage is that ‘organizational models’ inevitably crystallize agendas. Since hyperstition is already in motion, and experimentalism seems to be its least contested feature, the imposition of doctrinal regularity should be treated with extreme caution. Anything that can be eliminated from the stock of core presuppositions should be. It could be argued that this site’s greatest ‘progress’ has been eliminative: abstracting the hyperstitonal enterprise from contestible agendas – however ‘obvious’ these may seem to particular participants – thus inducing an emergent minimalism.
Consider two examples.
1) Political ideology. Hyperstition is methodically inextricable from a ‘polytics’ or promotion of multiplicity. The consequences of this commitment, however, remain profoundly uncertain. Attempts to build recognizable ideological agendas into the core principles of hyperstition – ‘hyperstition is pro/contra capitalism’ being the most obvious case – simply degenerate into pointless slagging matches far better suited to an alternative venue. This is not to suggest that hyperstitional practitioners lack - often passionate – politico-economic agendas. It is simply to note that when such agendas attempt to establish themselves in the hyperstitional ‘command core’ of basic principles or procedures they immediately take on a futile dialectical character. The nature of the capitalism/hyperstition relationship remains essentially undecided and attempts to force a conclusion have been blatantly unsuccessful.
2) Antihumanism. Since hyperstition is a pragmatics of depersonalization and artificialization it might seem natural to identify it with polemical antihumanism. This identification, too, has proven to be superfluous and self-destructively controversial. Anyone willing to experimentally participate in hyperstitional puppetry is able to comply with all necessary procedural requirements, irrespective of any broader agenda in regards to the future of human subjectivity, machinic insurgency, Cthulhu cultivation or the love of Jesus.
One response to such a ‘polyminimalist’ position – favoured in this post – is to promote the greatest possible loosening of a key hyperstitional concept: that of carriers. At one extreme, carriers are well-articulated fictions able to convey a plausible sense of integrity and thus mimic a range of ‘hoax-type' effects. At the other extreme, proposed as a norm here, they are units of systematic relativization that function as sinks for ‘eccentric agendas.’ The term ‘eccentric agenda’ is being coined technically here, to cover an immense terrain, namely: every hypothesis, belief, emotion or commitment that can be evacuated from the principles of hyperstitional activity. The elementary function of carriers is to eliminate extraneous norms from hyperstitional practice. Carriers are the tools of hyperstitional autodisindoctrinization.
To consolidate this trajectory, hyperstition has to radically desophisticate carrier production. A ‘carrier function’ is satisfied by elementary propositions of such types as:
‘There are those who might say …’
‘Imagine an X holding that …’
‘A conceivable position on this question might be …’
‘What if someone felt that …’
‘There could be a being wanting …’
‘It might be thought …’
With the pragmatic tagging of such carrier-positions in no way necessitating elaborate fictionalizations, let alone quasi-credible hoaxing.
All this being said, a minimalistic schema of hyperstitional activity might have three basic divisions:
1) Hyperstitional Doctine. The assumed impetus here is eliminative. Can anything that has been treated as axiomatic be deducted from the set of ‘essential’ hyperstitional tools/principles? A series of ‘methodological appendices’ collects potentially functional but inessential procedural assets. Lemurian Hyperstition, based on the pre-eminence of the Numogram and decanomic decoding – and associated qabbalistic techniques - belongs here, but in a continuously self-problematizing position. Defining questions: What is Hyperstition? How does it work? What are its essential procedures?
2) Hyperstitional Analysis. This has been a relatively neglected dimension of the Hyperstition blog to date, but there is no obvious theoretical basis for this. Phenomena such as Apocalyptic Monotheism, Magick, Capitalism, Science Fiction … [‘random’ examples at this stage] and many others intrinsically involve the operationalization of virtualities, or ‘fictions that make themselves real.’ Even if programmatic hyperstition had no ‘engineering’ ambitions whatsoever, the existence of hyperstition as an analytical apparatus would still be legitimated by this ‘efficacy of potentials.’
3) Hyperstitional Production. The puppet theatre of carrier construction. Using hyperstitional procedures systematized in (1) above to investigate phenomena of all kinds within a polytical pragmatic framework. This dealt with at a methodological level in the series of ‘Hyperstitional Carriers’ posts, and practically exemplified elsewehere.
OK, enough for now … discuss. [Apologies to Tachi for everything not yet touched upon]
Skynet and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Nick, certainly, has a lot to say about Skynet.
