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1. Julio Bashmore: Battle for Middle You
2.Juan Atkins: Transport (Carl Craig RMX)
3. Omar S: Psychotic Photosynthesis
4. Robert Hood: And then We Planned Our Escape
5. Mood II Swing: Move Me
6. Ian Pooley: Kids Play (Stimming RMX)
7. Jimpster: Eel Pie Island (Adam Port RMX)
8. Art of Tones: Praise
9. Terry Francis: Smokey Rooms
10. Omar S. Strider's World
11. Armando: Don't Take It (Johnny Fiasco RMX)
12. K-Alexi Shelby: Ron Hardy Memo
13. Ian Pooley: Organic
14. Boris Dlugosch: Khalldrang
CS Peirce taught how semiotics related to ontology, or put more mystically, how our words become flesh. Peirce's semiotics can be related to the history of mysticism to show how his notion of "creative evolution," which he called "agapism," worked. In Part One of "How to Make the World New with Your Mouth," we'll try to fill in some of the background metaphysics necessary to follow Peirce's radical form of semiological creationism.
Peirce's notion of "Hypostatic Abstraction" was formulated to reflect the "Hypostatic Union" of the history of Christian theology. Both relational schemas reflect the necessary dependence that oneness has on multiplicity and that multiplicity has on oneness, which can also be formulated as the dependence of self on other(ness), or presence on absence. The immediate, given oneness of Peircean "Firstness" flows into the relational, cause-and-effect, self-as-other twoness of "Secondness" generating the incarnate trinity of the "Thirdness" that is the Hypostatic Abstraction of the appearance of "thirds" (phenomenal objects), which comprise Peirce's semiological ontology of the Firstness of first person, subjective experience.
Peirce's notion of "Hypostatic Abstraction" was formulated to reflect the "Hypostatic Union" of the history of Christian theology. Both relational schemas reflect the necessary dependence that oneness has on multiplicity and that multiplicity has on oneness, which can also be formulated as the dependence of self on other(ness), or presence on absence. The immediate, given oneness of Peircean "Firstness" flows into the relational, cause-and-effect, self-as-other twoness of "Secondness" generating the incarnate trinity of the "Thirdness" that is the Hypostatic Abstraction of the appearance of "thirds" (phenomenal objects), which comprise Peirce's semiological ontology of the Firstness of first person, subjective experience.
https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
When Ron Hardy said that House Music was Disco’s revenge, this is what he meant:
Cosmic Stew
https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
Does AI dream? If dreams are just the unnecessary detritus of the day, then probably not since dreams then would serve no real purpose in information processing. However, if dreams are a kind of information processing, as some sleep researchers now claim, then they might be a useful mode of scenario rehearsal that AI could employ to reduce uncertainty as any prediction machine looking to maximize its efficacy would. Maybe, AI's thinking is most like dreaming because of this type of "thinking's" lack of waking consciousness and impossibly rapid testing of multitudes of possibilities. But would AI ever need help falling into this sleep by counting sheep? What is so different about human intention that we need the assistance of a computational mode of thinking (counting sheep), which seems without intention, to "fall" asleep. No one can intentionally fall asleep. Famously, it must be accomplished by a letting go of intention, which is why it is characterized as a "fall." Even if it turns out that dreams have an intention because they are the "necessary" play of the possibility spaces of our waking intentions, then there is still a question about why this determinate program must be run on the non-intention of indetermination.
The other human phenomenon that is characterized as a "fall" is love, and so the same questions about intention and lack of intention arise when considering if AI can love. Love cannot be fully intended because the complete determination of the beloved would render the beloved an extension of our own intentions rather than a fall into the otherness of the beloved's difference, which is why the indetermination of freedom is the "necessary" condition of love. Famously, coerced or compelled love, like that given by so many cautionary tales of the misuse of magical potions and spells on the beloved, isn't love. Love is an intention whose ground is unintentional because what is desired in love isn't oneness but twoness. Join us as we discuss the relation between organic, embodied intention and "artificial" intention in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep.
https://youtu.be/eTqMZUMGMWI
https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
So Deep that It’s at an All Time Low
In Chicago in the 90’s, I learned about House Music from Derrick Carter. I had first heard House Music on WBMX, Oak Park like most Chicago area youth. My mind was blown in 1987 when I heard Armando Gallop play his song “Land of Confusion” on the radio. I felt strongly that the aliens had landed and that nothing would ever be the same. I already loved Chicago’s Wax Trax “Industrial” music, which was soon to be renamed “Electric Body Music” in the 90’s for its use of dancing drum machines, synth lines, and samples, but Armando’s, and his then partner Mike Dunn’s, “Acid House” took whatever psychedelic escape into alternate sonic textures and dance rhythms I was looking for as a fourteen-year-old to a whole new level.
I grew up on the Northside, a few blocks from the Campus of Northwestern University in the “village” of Wilmette, which was still on the Chicago “grid” of numbered north-south and east-west blocks, and which was the northern-most stop of the “El,” Linden St, but which seemed like a million miles away from the home of House Music in the 80’s on the Southside. House Music had a special home in Southside Catholic school fundraiser dances for reasons that I can’t get into right now, but besides my exposure to it on WBMX, when I went to Catholic youth summer camp in Wisconsin, the Southside campers came equipped with House mixtapes and new ways of dancing.
In Chicago in the 90’s, I saw Derrick Carter spinning at a club called “Belin” on the Northside. I had already been to some amazing warehouse parties where I heard House and Techno played at proper volume and on proper sound systems. I was completely obsessed with the sort of ecstatic trance that a 4 on the floor bass kick could evoke completely drug free. Electric body music, indeed. Derrick’s wise shamanism took the whole crossing the threshold of liminal realms-thing to a new level for me that evening. He mixed stuff, as a lot of Chicago Deejay's did, with a lot of disco and funk samples, which got me back in touch with the dreamy disco of my hazy younger years, which made it extra magical, extra liminal, extra ecstatic. I realized then that he was my favorite Deejay, so whenever I went to Gramophone to buy mixtapes, I only bought his from that point on.
His taste is what is reflected in this mix. I learned what was good from him. I probably heard him play each of these tracks over time on various of his mixtapes and outings and events. It has taken many years to track down these tracks, but it has gotten much easier now that I have learned how to cheat by using AI search engines rather than digging through the bins at gramophone.
https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
If you ever wanted to know how the alchemical Nigredo sounds, here's your chance. This was mixed by hand, so beat matching isn't perfect and volume shifts may be a little rough because I have the same mixer as I used in the 90s, but hopefully it adds character, or something like that. I had to sign many incomprehensible contracts with the unseen realm to get noetic direction on track selection, so I hope that you enjoy because I'm not sure what I've unleashed on myself and the world. Play it loud on good headphones or large hardwood speakers.
Nigredo Studies:
https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
It may be helpful to map some Peircean semiotic concepts onto Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to see how they illuminate each other. Ricoeur doesn’t use Peirce in this way himself, but he certainly used much of the semiotic work that built upon CS Peirce’s initial contributions to the field. Peirce adumbrates three types of signs: the icon, which relates the sign to the signifier via resemblance, the index via material causality, and the symbol via convention, each of which contains various degrees of freedom relative to the degrees of determination of each’s Peircean “Interpretant.” Peirce formulated the relation of the sign to its signified as a triad that included what he called the “Interpretant,” which was the intermediation of semantic meaning within the semiotic relation of seeing one thing (the signified) in terms of another (the sign). The sign did not directly present the signified in an unmediated way but through a concept, which for Peirce was the Interpretant in the intention of the interpreter.
Paul Ricoeur also formulated semantic meaning in terms of the relative degrees of freedom given to the intention of the interpretant, which for Ricouer was the hermeneutic circle of interpretation itself. The signifier determines its signified incompletely, which leaves room for possible interpretations in the gap between them. The irreducible ambiguity of this gap is generative because new semantics and new concepts can be formed in the clash of interpretations within the conceptual mediation of the intention of the interpretant, which mirrors Ricoeur’s depiction of a metaphor as a clash of meanings that poetically renewed and increased being within the degrees of freedom given by the virtuality of the imagination.
The more distantiated the relation between the signifier and its signified, which was the relative level of abstraction of the interpretant, the more degrees of freedom contained in the possibility space actuated by the relation. Even semantic possibility spaces that seemed mostly determined, such as the indexical relation of cause and effect, can be reopened to reinterpretation, or reimagination, through the clash of possible interpretations given by the interpretant of the metaphor. One of Ricoeur’s favorite examples is GM Hopkins’ metaphorical predication, “The mind contains mountains,” which clearly contains sublime degrees of freedom for the poetic imaginations of a community of interpreters. For Ricoeur, as for Giles Deleuze, imaginal virtuality was actual and as ontologically real as a physically actualized possibility space, just as a conceptual realization in this actual possibility space was as ontologically real as a physical realization. Finally, CS Peirce’s “Hypostatic Abstract” has many illuminating overlaps with Ricoeur’s notion of semantic realization in the poetic imagination to be covered in the next episode.
https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
Thacker’s Types of Worlds in relation to horror:
https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-of-the-gods/
Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?
“I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself? I prefer a God who isn’t really sure if He exists or not. In all the best religious experiences, nobody’s certain about what’s going on, including and especially God.”
“When God showed up in a whirlwind and upbraided Job about how he wasn’t there at the foundation of the Universe, God starts talking about those weird and heady creatio ex nihilo times all cool like were you there when Deep calls to Deep? and this sounds badass, but then God gets lost in rambling about Behemoth and Leviathan and stuff that nobody’s sure why He made or what exactly they even are—but God wanted to seem like He was in more control than He actually was.”
“God reveals His unconscious in this diatribe when He disavows His part in the evil that Job is suffering. Jung interpreted God’s “shadow self” as His repudiation of His relation to His son Satan—which is to deny that if you are the author of everything, then you are also the instigator of evil.”
“For me, God’s shadow is ambiguity, which is His inability to determine all there is of the Universe. In other words, God has an unconscious just like the rest of us. He can’t be omnibenevolent because of His part in the evils of the world. But this lack of at-oneness, this lack of control, allows for whatever cool but incomprehensible stuff might follow from this impotence.”
“My favorite Talmudic passage depicts rabbis arguing about the Oven of Akhani, which was a dispute about the purity of said oven for kosher cooking. God shows up to settle the controversy because it’s His law after all. But Rabbi Joshua tells God that He doesn’t have a say in the matter since the Torah is in their hands now.”
“The gift of ambiguity is better than clarity because it is always open to
further interpretation, and the joy of humanity is the community of interlocutors that indeterminacy gifts to us. Belief as a test of faith was a huge mistake. Religion took a wrong turn when it started to lift up psychosis as its preferred position. Psychosis is fine and has its place, but neurotic doubt is an undeniable salve for too much belief.”
“I’m whatever religion they were at Gobekli Tepe. Religious practice should be a celebration of irreducible ambiguity. I was so excited when they uncovered Gobekli Tepe in Southern Turkey and Klaus Schmidt was like, “What the hell was going on here?” and decided it was a prehistoric zoo. Here was a city almost twelve thousand years old, built not for sedentary and hierarchical people but for the sacred practices of hunter-gathers who came together uncoerced to celebrate holy mysteries with ambiguous trickster gods in liminal spaces designed for music, dancing, stories, feasting, and shit-tons of carved animals doing stuff, like a vulture presenting an orb to a man without a head but with a prominent phallus, and the sublime wonderment of a submerged room with benches along the walls and loads of giant stone penises in the middle for some reason.”
“Schmidt and countless others have speculated on what these people thought that they were doing there. I for one, perhaps naively, hope they didn’t precisely know what they were doing there. Hegel famously pondered the “mysteries of the Ancient Egyptian religions,” to which Žižek postulated that “the mysteries of the Ancient Egyptians were mysterious to the Ancient Egyptians too.””
“Amen.”
https://www.martinessig.com I mix the mixtapes that I post here but...,
Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes.
From the publisher's feed
I'm exploring why Generation X failed to get free, and how the concept of "authenticity" was turned into a sort of un-freedom.