First of all, why the title ‘Twisted Tree’? Where does this particular image sit in the history of eugenic modes of thinking?

The tree metaphor is an image which is borrowing from two other related images. First, it references the tree of life — the genealogical branching of species popularized by Darwin but predating him — and how it was applied to races as well (most famously by Ernst Haeckel). The tree was used by those who believed in teleological or progressive evolution to represent human racial hierarchies. Furthermore, the intentional confusion and collapse of race and biology has always been central to eugenics, especially as it began as a migration of animal husbandry (controlled breeding) to human beings.

The other tree image referenced is Kant’s comment about crooked timber in terms of the antagonisms and biases of human beings being a problem to the construction of any collective human project. Or, more specifically, it points out the flaws and limitations of humans as rational beings. The whole question is how to respond to this fact and eugenics is very much bound to the fear of ‘correcting’ inherent flaws in humans by means of camouflaging normative or cultural claims as biological ones that can be excised.

How do you think your approach to the history of Eugenic ideology allows us to understand contemporary movements operative today such as ‘MAHA’ (’Make America Healthy Again’) and the rise of new fascisms?

One problem with making historical comparisons to the present is that in public discourse eugenics is either reduced to something that ‘has always existed’ (pointing to the banishment of disabled bodies from the city state in Plato for instance) or to Nazi eugenics whose extreme and baroque form always exceeds the comparison attempted. Historical work by scholars like Marius Turda has shown that modern eugenics has to be thought hand in hand with the transformations of science in the late 1800s along with the construction of modern states and modern citizenry following World War 1. So the interplay between science, pseudo-science and modern racism is more important than any particular ideology. As Turda and others have shown, eugenics has appeared in every political ideology throughout history and on every continent. Of course, within fascism, eugenics is easier because it appeals to the aesthetic/racial dimension of fascism (reactivating traditionalism and ethno-nationalism).

With contemporary US fascism, and specifically in terms of MAHA, it’s difficult to draw easy comparisons because, for one, much of the eugenics is more ‘positive’ eugenics (in the sense of encouraging certain people to reproduce rather than limiting birth rates of others). In addition, much of MAHA is based on emphasizing environment rather than genetics or perceived genetics. I think there are two reasons for this. 1) Many in MAHA do not really believe in evolution and therefore emphasizing genetic factors comes into conflict with strict Christian ideology. 2) By emphasizing environmental factors one can emphasize traditionalism (getting rid of certain preservatives, pushing raw foods etc) as well as deny support or treatment for heritable conditions. This pushes eugenics into line with a ‘it’s the responsibility of the parents’ kind of thing. It’s pseudo-libertarian in how it advocates for small government and personal choice.

This is especially evident in how the Trump administration via RFK Jr has handled ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). They separate certain forms of autism under the name of ‘severe’ in order to allow mainly right-wing mothers to claim victim-hood and weaponize their children to claim political grievances. This in turn, allows environmental claims to be targeted in order to punish political enemies and allow for grifting on the right (alternative medicine, supplements, etc.). MAHA’s eugenics are traditionalist and play off of fake soft-inheritance/environmental inheritance rather than a pseudo-scientific understanding of genetics being falsely correlated with ‘superior’ traits (as in the case of the Nazi party). In terms of historical comparison, the early days of Fascist Italy (prior to the alliance with Hitler) are probably the most similar to contemporary US eugenics.

What can students expect from your upcoming course this June?

Besides discussing the issues mentioned above, students can expect an in-depth analysis of the history of eugenics, an analysis of the abuse of genetics and sociobiology, as well as a discussion of the history of the concept of race. For me it is important that students understand how biological science can be wrestled away from the center and from the right rather than merely abandoning the popular discourse on biology, believing it to be merely a tool of technocratic state power.

When it comes to producing research and teaching, the relationship between the humanities and the traditional structures of the academy is more tenuous than ever. Where do you see the future for new avenues and institutions in research today?

When I first started becoming involved in para-academic studies 12 years ago, it was largely due to the fact that the kinds of things I and others were interested in were not present in the academy. Our courses felt like worn out deserts at the conceptual level. Nowadays, it is more a necessity at the structural level. Generalized austerity present then has only worsened and accelerated due in no small part to more center right thinking and the techno-fix thinking making the humanities seem irrelevant. I think there is an assumption that video essays or learning in different forms must necessarily be of less value than sitting in a traditional classroom but I think the latter has become a privilege that few can afford. My hope is that online learning can become something that is not seen as a lesser or simply faster version but something that is more sustainable especially as it can remove the increasingly bloated management class from higher ed.

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 https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2755-revolutionary-forgiveness   

For information on the secret trials of lawyers defending Palestine solidarity activists in the UK https://www.declassifieduk.org/contempt-case-against-palestine-action-barrister-creating-chilling-effect/

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Jana's essay on the Free Nose Guy Problem: "Epistemic Autonomy and the Free Nose Guy Problem"

Jana's scholarly residency: Forest University

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An exhilarating sequence of events has unfolded over the past several weeks for Boards of Canada fans around the globe. After a series of mysterious VHS tapes began arriving at fans’ doors in early April, followed by an international poster campaign from April 10th, more than a decade of unmet yearning was finally satisfied on April 16th when the band quietly released “Tape 05” on their YouTube channel—a catalytic event that culminated in the announcement of their fifth LP, Inferno, scheduled for release on May 29th.

The news set aflame the worlds of music journalism and social media alike. Fan appreciation posts, celebratory short-form videos on Instagram and TikTok, and speculative pieces on Substack—like this one—continue to populate feeds in anticipation of the album. Things reached a fever pitch with Warp Records’ pre-sale of limited edition vinyl, the announcement of exclusive global listening parties, and the official release of “Introit” and “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” the tracks that lead off the latest addition to the Boards of Canada catalogue.

For those who have followed my work, whether here or on the Acid Horizon and LEPHT HAND podcasts, my shameless status as a BoC superfan will come as no surprise, nor will the ways I have both intentionally and accidentally inserted myself into the attentional mass forming rhizomatically around this release. If this is your first time reading my blog, whether as a kindred spirit in the Boards of Canada universe or simply someone curious about the title, I suggest beginning with my piece “Corduroy Psychedelia: On Boards of Canada, Hauntology, and the PBS Unconscious,” a philosophical retrospective on national broadcast culture and its connections to BoC’s corpus. I had written it belatedly; it comprises years of inchoate thoughts and nostalgic ruminations on the band and the politics of retro culture. When I published it on March 27th, I was unaware that we were only days away from the launch of Inferno‘s promotional campaign.

Since that fateful day, I have chased the ecstatic energy surrounding the album with some abandon. I recorded not one but two podcast episodes on Boards of Canada, re-released my specialty deck Vintagia: I Ching Oracle of Psychogeography and Creative Discovery, a hacked oracle partly inspired by the band, and had the pleasure of collaborating with Fredd-E of bocpages and Jack Chuter of ATTN Magazine (who has been commissioned to write a book on BoC) to author an article about BoC for Crack Magazine. I also pre-ordered the album, bought all the merch, and—not to inspire envy—secured a ticket to the May 22nd official listening party in New York City.

The resonance generated by the original blog piece—and the conversations and connections that followed in the wake of the Inferno announcements—has prompted me to consider a series of essays on the album, weaving reflections on the music into the theoretical and philosophical work I pursue here and elsewhere. The apocalyptic and eschatological themes running through Tomorrow’s Harvest and Inferno have long been a tangential research interest of mine, and the return of Boards of Canada has honed my willingness to pursue them in earnest.

As a preface to this piece and any others that may follow, I share with my new friend Jack Chuter a relative disinterest in any alleged orthodox understanding of the themes, motifs, and cryptic messaging put forward by the band, preferring instead the heterogeneous associations, feelings, memories, and moods individual listeners derive from the music. The overlaps and synergies are exciting, but so are the divergences—this music should take you somewhere both uncannily familiar and welcomingly alien.

Seat of C-Consciousness

As with “Tape 05,” I had the good fortune of having an opening during the scheduled release of “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” and the affordance of a studio listening environment where I could pare down distractions. I suspect many reading this move through their world harboring an interpassive fantasy similar to my own—of days and weeks finally disconnected from the deluge of digital notifications in which we instead cultivate more nourishing personal and aesthetic habits. New music from Boards of Canada was a call to be my best self in that regard. The moment impelled me to prepare an encounter with the work that was both intentional and sustained: lights dim, volume up, singular focus.

The recognizable corduroy texture of “Introit” evokes the iconic PBS ident of the collective national broadcast unconscious—its pitch-perfect imperfectly pitched melody paired with spellbinding ghostly halation, rendered masterfully by visual artist Robert Beatty. All begins with the warmth and innocence of a summer bible school promo or the civic realist’s here-to-serve optimism. Things shift quickly, reminding us that the halcyon past is bygone: apocalyptic energies surge beneath the phosphor noise and dead channel static, before an antiseptic “photo-psychic” trigger warning unveils “Prophecy at 1420 MHz.”

From the darkened dawn, “Prophecy” arises as a serpentine incantation, an Arabic scale uncoiling from a distant flute, its melody dotted by a shamanic pulse of sparing percussion, all summoning the long-tailed splash of silvery guitars evolved from the band’s earlier The Campfire Headphase. The armature of the track grows firm as it gains inertia, its crystalline bed slowly shaped into a “machine funk” upscaled from BoC’s earlier grooves. Seasoned listeners will acknowledge the palimpsest-like quality of Inferno‘s second track, with its superimposition of familiar tones and textures drawn from across their historical catalogue.

Then it speaks: the vocoded voice of God—the inchoate energy system which has long lurked beneath the band’s body of work, the “final boss of the Boards of Canada universe” as one YouTube commenter put it—surfacing at last in its full refulgence. In Beatty’s imaginal, the voice emanates from sphincteral Chladni figures pulsating within a hexagonal sun, drawing immediate parallels to philosopher Georges Bataille’s solar anus: the sun as the unyielding giver, the immemorial font of its own accursed share.

The utterances of the sun god comprise a cryptic bricolage drawn from a 2003 Dudleian Lecture at Harvard Divinity School—Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s “In the Beginning Was Consciousness.” Nasr asserts the primacy of consciousness over matter as the fundamental and primordial reality. Modernity’s ambition toward technological mastery demotes cosmic consciousness to a biological epiphenomenon. Amid our shared cosmic alienation, the yearning for contact with the inhuman does not abate but transforms: arms that once reached for angels turn toward elusive UAPs and the perennial prospect of extraterrestrial life. Our protracted endeavor to operationally define consciousness fails on its own terms: our conceptual tools, suffused with the very ontological substance our methods seek to distill, break down at the moment of contact. This, for Nasr, is proof of consciousness’s primacy and pervasiveness throughout the cosmos. The modern paradigm, insufficient to its own contradictions, is consigned to perish through accelerating self-exhaustion. Be that as it may, susurrations of primordial cosmic consciousness shall seep through modernity’s ongoing ruination.

What we moderns might view as Boards of Canada’s aesthetic détournement of Nasr’s lecture is, more precisely, an interpretation: a series of philosophical fragments about prophecy reconfigured into a prophetic message. The track presents itself as an aesthetic negotiation of the divide between prophecy and prophetic theory proper—a distinction and task to which we will return later. This is a strong claim, perhaps, given that the lyrical content of the track may have all been arranged simply for the vibes! A prolepsis, then: even if the fragments of “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” were assembled ironically—or simply for maximum aesthetic flourish—the prophetic act does not require the prophet’s intention to authorize it. The transmission remains indifferent to the transmitter’s sincerity and, to speculate, finds an apt conduit in the ubiquitous fiberoptic of ironic communication that modern culture so readily indulges. Admittedly, this is not a strong set of premises on which to hang the authenticity of any prophetic message. In the imaginal register, however, the resonant force of an image or transmission depends neither on strict adherence to established truth values nor on the fabrications of the ego. Given the force of the images at hand—images that invoke the prophetic within the figure of inferno, served up by one of the most mysterious musical artists of our time—the lyrical cipher of “Prophecy at 1420 MHz” feels like a transmission to be received, one that moreover invites the cultivation of a mode of receptivity Nasr sees as in decline.

But could prophecy have a secular afterlife in the wake of modernity? In a piece I published last month entitled “The Absolute Casinofication of Everything,” I drew on Federico Campagna’s distinction between prediction and prophecy to argue that we are collectively losing the capacity to speak from outside the current world-order, defaulting instead to the predictive mode: extrapolation, probability, the futures market. Campagna’s prophet, by contrast, speaks from a position the current world cannot fully accommodate, which is precisely why the prophet stammers. The prophetic voice cannot achieve fluency in the language of the world it addresses because it draws on a frequency that world has not colonized. The stammer is not a failure of articulation but a structural feature of prophetic transmission as it moves toward new epistemological, ontological, and political terrain.1

In view of the current hypertrophy of prediction markets, prophecy—or even the capacity to perceive something genuinely outside the clamor of modern life—has emerged once more as an object of theoretical urgency. But must we concede to the religious idiom in rediscovering importance in the prophetic expression? Prophecy should not be denied a secular accent. Let’s allow ourselves to imagine a form of prophecy that precedes and exceeds its religious institutionalization, one that does not rest on the presupposition of supernatural machinery, and one that does not terminate in mystifications that preempt philosophical inquiry or foreclose scientific analysis. Then again, why would prophecy concern us at all if it were denied its vital alterity to the pursuits of philosophy and science? Doesn’t prophecy engender a form of indeterminacy that challenges the conceit by which we believe we know the world in its current form? The secular and the cosmological versions of this question are not as far apart as they might appear—both identify something that the dominant paradigm cannot contain, something that exceeds the terms of its own legitimation. These questions find their most urgent cosmological formulation in Nasr, who avers that in the 21st century we are on the “cusp of the curve”: the moment when the dominant paradigm can no longer fully contain what is trying to penetrate it, when the prophetic signal begins to break the medium of transmission.2

During my first listen to “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” one thing caught my ear and inexplicably sent chills up my spine. When the vocoder god utters the fragment “seat of c-consciousness,” we hear Campagna’s prophetic stammer born electric: the voice stutters on the word “consciousness” because it must. Human language is an impoverished channel through which the prophetic signal reaches a receiver—a conduit necessarily too attenuated for prophecy to pass with full continuity or clarity. When the voice names what it transmits—consciousness—both the medium and the message begin to break down. The signal fractures the channel at the precise moment it nominates what the current paradigm, in Nasr’s view, has foreclosed. For the vocoder god, language functions as a flipped ghost box: the vocoder god does not “reach for the dead”; rather, it calls to the living through stuttered phonemes, static interference, the wanderings of wow and flutter, and the murmured mondegreens one might hear through convulsed analog—all transmitting what has been progressively lost to us since the dawn of the modern era.

The Hydrogen Line

So, what does 1420 MHz have to do with prophecy? In 1959, physicists Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, colleagues at Cornell University, published “Searching for Interstellar Communications” in Nature as part of the emerging field of SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.3 Recognizing the spin-flip resonance frequency of hydrogen and noting the ubiquity of the element throughout the cosmos, they deduced that other technologically advanced civilizations would similarly attempt to transmit messages on what they termed “the hydrogen line.” In effect, the scientists had identified a pre-civilizational cosmic commons: the hydrogen envelope enshrouding the Big Bang’s host of celestial bodies, cosmic detritus, and all potentially existing lifeforms beyond planet Earth—an open field for interstellar communication held in common before any civilization arrived to claim it.

In 1960, Frank Drake conducted the first practical SETI experiment, Project Ozma, training an 85-foot radio telescope at Green Bank, West Virginia on two nearby Sun-like stars. Drake was briefly convinced he had made contact when a strong pulsed signal arrived at exactly 1420 MHz before the anomaly was revealed to be a high-altitude aircraft. On August 15, 1977, an astronomer at Ohio State’s Big Ear observatory picked up an intense signal at the hydrogen spin-flip frequency of such force that a volunteer scrawled “Wow!” in red ink beside the printout—a signal that has never been explained and has never repeated itself since.

The 1420 MHz band is now protected by international convention, reserved strictly for the reception of potential transmissions and restricted from commercial or terrestrial use. The hydrogen line is thus shuttered to the appropriations of what Bataille terms “the restricted economy.”4 In our secular scientific world, the hydrogen line serves as the part of the frequency spectrum humanity holds open for contact with inhuman realms—the technological correlate of those channels through which, in Nasr’s multi-leveled cosmos, the voices of angels once moved freely before the paradigm closed them off. Through this aperture, humanity keeps vigil for what, in Nasr’s eyes, was never truly abandoned: a consciousness that recedes but cannot be fully lost.

The hydrogen line identified in Boards of Canada’s latest album finds an analogous cultural expression in the communion that gathers around the band’s music and aesthetics. Fans occupy what seems to be a protected frequency, maintaining a predilection for intimate receptivity that persists amid historical conditions actively hostile to the aesthetic universe they collectively indulge. The shared excitement around the latest releases—and the remarkable close-knittedness of strangers who share a love for their music, which I previously described as both “depersonalizing and deeply personal” and a “communion of atmospheres” (a phrase coined without yet knowing anything about “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” and without anticipating the associations this piece would draw from it)—has fostered bonds that seem to challenge the socially and politically fragmented world we inhabit.

It is with some caution that I attempt a political distillation of these events, intent on locating the potentially transformative core those bonds seem to engender. The synchronicity of the recent BoC releases alongside my own burgeoning interest in the relationship between philosophy and prophecy is, however, too ripe to leave hanging. Fortunately, there exists a philosophical precedent in one of the later works of someone who navigated the divide between prophecy and philosophy, and what was politically at stake in negotiating between their respective powers and potentialities: Baruch Spinoza. As we will see, Spinoza’s philosophical appropriation of prophecy becomes a work of liberation fraught with its own complications, particularly as it attempts to reconfigure the prophetic for a modernist political project.

The Alembic of Spinoza

In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza asserts that philosophy must interrupt its preoccupation with contemplative life to confront the nature of religious and political authority in the real world. Once philosophy has checked its own navel-gazing tendencies, it transforms itself into hermeneutics, embodying a new method of scriptural interpretation that, for Spinoza, opens a path across the gap between the rational and the ostensibly irrational dimensions of human life, chief among them the power of prophecy. Spinoza observes the almost incontestable strength and allure of the prophetic voice as the font of religious, political, and social power throughout human history: from the ability to interpret divine revelation flows all institutional authority. Spinoza’s methodology neither rejects prophetic power nor adopts a resentful critical standpoint to castigate its creative tendencies. Rather, Spinoza presupposes the historical grandeur of prophecy while transmuting its power through a philosophical reading. His radical move is the insistence that scripture be read as nature is read: empirically and immanently, deriving meaning from the text itself on its own terms rather than from external theological authority. In the spirit of the Cartesian revolution, Spinoza applies a skepticism to prophetic power that strikes at the conceit of those who claim to be gatekeepers of divine revelation.

The following account of Spinoza's relationship to prophecy draws heavily on Norman O. Brown's essay "Philosophy and Prophecy: Spinoza's Hermeneutics," collected in his final work Apocalypse &/or Metamorphosis (1991)—a book preoccupied, as its title suggests, with precisely the eschatological and transformative themes that animate the later Boards of Canada. The irony, as Norman O. Brown notes, is that in its turn toward scriptural analysis, philosophy assumes the mask of the prophet: interpreting divine revelation in an immanent mode is still interpretation, and interpretation of scripture, by Spinoza’s own definition, is an act of prophecy rather than philosophy proper. The application of the philosophical idiom to scripture inevitably draws thought into a mode of discourse that abandons the priority of demonstrative proof, preferring instead an exercise of creative imagination, rhetorical persuasion, and moral certainty. The prophetic mode, moreover, engenders what Brown calls “accommodation”—revelation is always shaped so as to be made intelligible through a conjunction of contingent cognitive, historical, and linguistic frameworks. Prophecy only becomes legible through the filter of images, voices, forms, and conceptual apparatuses capable of mediating its raw force (e.g. the vocoder god). Nonetheless, the event of revelation maintains an aspect always heterogeneous to the existing social order, one that resists full circumscription by any interpretive act.

Prophecy and philosophy have always existed in historical tension, but—as Brown argues, and as Spinoza’s inquiry gradually reveals—they are not opposed. “Philosophy needs the plane of history in order to unfold as enlightenment: then prophecy can be seen as praeparatio philosophandi, preparing the way for philosophy. The power that sets in motion the civilizational process, the progress toward perfection, is not philosophy but prophecy, not reason but imagination.”5 For Spinoza, this progress finds its pivot in Jesus Christ who, as the mouth of God, mutates the nature of the prophetic act, breaking with the historical flickering of the collective imaginal toward the clear and distinct ideas of universal moral law, which Christ inscribes upon “the fleshy tables of the human heart.”6 Spinoza’s tryst with prophecy thus culminates in the marriage of prophecy with the rationality and universal moral religion of Christ, a move which makes the light of prophecy common to all—but at the cost of losing the dark, imaginal richness from which prophecy emerges.

Spinoza’s treatment of prophecy introduces a host of complications and contradictions with rich implications for the future history of the prophetic tradition—and, not incidentally, for how we might understand the aesthetics of prophecy employed by artists like Boards of Canada. Spinoza’s turn to Christ as the eminent mouth of God may appear a betrayal of prophecy’s imaginal richness, but it is perhaps better understood as a sublation: the prophetic absorbed into the privileged rationality of modernity, at once preserved and cancelled in the same stroke. Even so, Spinoza does not fully disavow the necessity of accommodation and prevarication—his own phrase Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) indulges the familiar equivocation of the prophet, mutually suspending philosophical and theological forms of revelation in a single utterance. Spinoza is himself a product of historical contingency, forced to contend with the emergent forces of humanist rationality amid the lingering dominion of religious authority. On that basis, his philosophical intervention into the prophetic becomes an imaginative act, one necessary to extricating prophecy from its institutionalization in irrational forms of authority and creating the conditions under which new forms of life can be realized.

What Spinoza performs philosophically, Boards of Canada perform sonically: a liberation of prophetic content from the institutional forms that have enclosed it. The aesthetic fascination with cults in the work of Boards of Canada can be cast similarly—the venal authority of the modern cult is not to be emulated, but through an aesthetic simulation of the cultic and a détournement of its failures and tragedies, we become enveloped in an atmospheric remainder that activates our collective need for a line of flight. This line of flight is not a pure escape from the wreckage of history. Closer to Deleuze and Guattari’s own conception, a line of flight involves wrenching prophetic power from the hands of entrenched authority and cultic enclosures.

From Spinoza’s alembic arises the notion that prophecy culminates in political freedom—a world in which we become our own prophets. That we might collectively engender prophetic power finds its ultimate expression in democracy as a political ideal. Spinoza cites Moses’ exclamation from Numbers 11:29: “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets.”7 The ultimate transcendence is transcendence of our reliance upon the forms of authority desiccated from prophecy by the political priests of the old order. Brown interpolates Spinoza’s doctrine accordingly: “That government is best, the most natural, in which dependence on prophetic authority is transcended by all together being their own prophets, as is the case in the theoretical ideal of democracy.”8 With the sacrifice of Christ comes the prospect of internalizing the light of reason whereby each becomes a rational lawgiver in a community of equals. The prophetic function—interpreting divine revelation for those who cannot know directly—is no longer the privilege of a specialist caste but the latent capacity of every modern subject.

Yet there is a problem latent in Spinoza’s transmutation of prophecy into the democratic ideal that the work of François Laruelle allows us to bring to the surface. Laruelle formulates the axiom that “philosophy is the capital within thought, the capital-form of our general relations to the World”—and, more pointedly, that it is impossible to struggle against this capital “by means drawn from it: philosophical means or neighboring means to the philosophical: politics, ethics, etc.” Democracy, in other words, is a “neighboring means” to the philosophical conceit and cannot involute the operations that flow from its own establishing gesture. As Laruelle observes, we recognize the philosopher when they seize a knowledge produced outside philosophy’s conditions, capture it, and “submit this knowledge to the constraints of a transcendent decision in view of making it produce another thing than knowledge.”9 This is precisely what Spinoza does to prophecy: diverts it from its matrix of production and compels it to yield democratic theory rather than prophetic transmission. The criteria for traditional prophecy are thereby fixed at the moment of Spinoza’s founding philosophical decision: rational-moral universality, democratic accessibility, the natural light of reason common to all. A prophetic event occurring beyond the bounds of the democratic context could not legitimate itself under these terms—the imaginal vision, the Corbinian encounter, a Hillmanian seeing-through, the modes of consciousness Nasr insists modernity has foreclosed. Spinoza’s democracy inherits philosophy’s more general problem of adequation: it claims to be the final and adequate form of prophetic life while dismantling the conditions of reception that would make prophetic life possible. Prophecy poses a peculiar threat to philosophy in its privileging of ambiguity and receptivity over philosophy’s insistence on decision, assertion, and total legibility. The question remains whether a better philosophical decision could stand in genuine relation to ways of seeing and knowing heterogeneous to the enterprise of philosophy.

The Cusp of the Curve

Between the theses of Spinoza and Nasr, we face a conundrum, despite the asymmetries in their respective problematics. The Laruellean critique has already placed Spinoza’s democratic resolution under pressure from within; Nasr arrives to confirm that pressure from without, diagnosing in the actually existing modern world precisely the atrophied conditions of reception (also partially intimated by Laruelle’s analysis). Their points of convergence and departure are legible enough. For Spinoza, prophecy finds its evolution in the disavowal of gatekeepers of esoteric knowledge, delivering us to a world where sovereign power is distributed to all in equal share. For Nasr, this is a move that reduces the prophetic register to a simple allocation of political sovereignty while dispensing with—or detrimentally sublating—the substrate from which creative imagination flows. Spinoza’s view prefigures democracies to come while failing to perceive their future failures—not to mention the libidinal conditions that have either precipitated the collapse of democracy in the modern world or reveal the inadequacy of our operative notions and poor enactments of the secular democratic ideal. Nasr, having the benefit of centuries of modernity in view, diagnoses the modern subject’s failures (democratically oriented or otherwise) in terms of a tragic evacuation of cosmic receptivity: the capacity for prophetic reception not merely enclosed by or condensed upon institutional structures, as Spinoza assumed, but diminished by the modern world’s systematic dismantling of the very conditions that made reception possible in the first place.

Nasr’s position, however, occupies a relatively safer vantage that risks remaining perpetually vindicated in the absence of any marked shift in political or socioeconomic conditions: as long as the wreckage of history continues to pile up without intervention, the lament of lost traditions only gathers more appeal. His position raises other questions. How would we confirm the restoration of collective receptivity at any given point in the struggle to extricate ourselves from the trap of modernity—and what would that struggle even look like for Nasr? In the lecture, Nasr himself concedes that transformation on any significant scale will likely require “some kind of catastrophe waking us up”—a tragic realism that is neither quietist nor activist in character.10 Could the fury of a righteous violence against modernity’s many oppressions register, in Nasr’s terms, as a revival of our capacity to receive what he identifies as primordial forces? Or does the very nature of that receptivity resist the organized, mobilized, democratized forms that collective political struggle requires? While the Promethean conceit of modernity may be the cause of its many ills, an idle wait for the right apocalyptic flashpoint hardly seems a viable alternative.

Hydrogen Communism or Hydrogen Barbarism?

For those intent on reclaiming prophecy for secular ends, we should reject the idealism of Nasr while nonetheless pursuing something like a negotiation of the divide between Spinoza’s immanentist transmutation of prophecy into politics and the demand for a consciousness receptivity exceeding the human image that Nasr’s work keeps alive. I am going to call this hydrogen communism.

The hydrogen line, which I characterized earlier as a pre-civilizational commons, might be better cast as an “outside” to civilizing force, one through which science continues to grasp at yet-to-be-discovered cosmic affinities from a position of modern terrestrial alienation. The irony should not be lost on us that humanity has collectively reserved this singular channel for the reception of an otherworldliness through which only a handful of anomalous blips has ever been received. Amid the crumbling of the present, we have outsourced this receptivity to a legally bounded frequency spectrum and the machines that monitor it, while devoting every other frequency band, real and metaphorical, to reproducing a social and political context that has long foreclosed the liberated form of life Spinoza envisioned.

The precondition to envisioning and actualizing new forms of life is, as Nasr suggests, bound to our relationship with the imaginal—something akin to what he identifies as cosmic consciousness, though it need not carry a strict metaphysical inflection, whether secular or religious. As for its secular variant, we are once again at the nexus of a familiar problem, perhaps most aptly intimated in Mark Fisher’s unfinished essay “Acid Communism.” While Fisher would almost certainly have erred on the side of Spinoza, the acid communist project nonetheless risks repeating Spinoza’s troubled appropriation of imagination, potentially enslaving the imaginal register to a definite political will. Spinoza nonetheless rightly identifies the problem with leaving prophecy unblemished by critical approaches: without such intervention we risk reverting to a world where religious authority and the cultic configuration colonize the very spaces from which the otherworldly speaks. This question haunts whatever interventions Nasr might endorse.

Rather than rush to flesh out a full-blown philosophical concept of hydrogen communism, we should allow it first to thrive as a mere image, one for the time being unmarred by the axe of philosophical decision. Perhaps the image is best cast against an implied opposite of sorts: hydrogen barbarism.

Hydrogen barbarism is, simply put, the image of the total immolation of life, civilization, and the conditions for their possibility through nuclear annihilation. It evokes a political ontology of pure decimation. It finds among its precursors the hydrogen fusion at the core of thermonuclear weaponry. The image of hydrogen barbarism emerges through operationalizing hydrogen into a weapon: a triggered chain in which one annihilation ignites another, each explosion calling forth a greater one. The bomb is civilization’s own image returned to itself as pure destruction—the forced fusion of isotopes that exist freely throughout the cosmos, here compressed into a totality beyond all resistance, difference itself annihilated in the service of constituted political sovereignty. It is here that we must interrogate the rational sovereignty at the heart of Spinoza’s democratic project: is the form of reason in which the authority of Spinoza’s demos has been grounded a potential vector for the deprivation of life and imagination through the idiom of the constituted civil order? Is it possible to think the freedom we impute to the democratic ideal apart from the march of civilization? Does civilization, and the processes that comprise its development, necessarily tend toward the precipice of a one-button war of attrition? Is politics itself the self-annihilating terminal displacement of those forces and entities deemed alien or irrational to the constituted order?

I raise these questions rhetorically, to spark the possibility of an alternative: that we think toward an enlivened form of being together beyond the totalizing circumscriptions of wholly rational social organization.

Consider how we might aestheticize the image of the SETI project—its standing apart from the ordinary forms of productive expenditure—as a gesture toward an outside for collective receptivity. It offers an apt metaphor for thinking through and feeling through how we might begin to move beyond the long conjuncture of modernity. On one hand, the SETI project is an egregious, galactic-scale form of non-productive expenditure: an endeavor intent on making contact with beings yet unknown, while our own epistemological orientation toward the world we already inhabit remains marked by internal alienation. It is here that Nasr and Bataille nearly find common cause: we have offloaded an intimate dimension of experience to a function that mechanistically rummages through scattered data strewn across the cosmos. The reclamation of this function would be, in the first instance, aesthetic—as this piece has attempted—a wrenching back open of the imaginal aperture that Spinoza closed when he announced the triumph of reason through Christ. Yet, to Spinoza’s credit, we would want to leave intact the prophetic equality espoused in his democratic intervention.

To be sure, hydrogen communism is not a political program—but this is not to say it lacks a political dimension. It would be disingenuous for me to assert that the notion of hydrogen communism does not emerge out of a sensibility which imagines a liberation more radical than a constituted democratic order. Hydrogen communism could also be imagined as incendiary as its more cruel counterpart, but also as ambient and ubiquitous as the element itself. To get on the hydrogen line entails a form of attunement that is at once familiar and alien—it presupposes a mode of communication that suspends outbound transmission so that forms of alterity might appear in its most sublime field. As an aesthetic posture, it could certainly afford us new perspectives—perspectives themselves are cheap though; in the first instance, hydrogen communism would cultivate a sensitivity to a general cosmic pathos. A bold claim, perhaps: there is no transformation of this world without an aestheticization of our shared wounds. Post-Spinozist prophets are receivers of sublime transmissions and transmuters of the shared wound. If there are any good politics, they begin here.

While I am in no position to deploy a fully developed theory of hydrogen communism here, I feel more impelled to indulge further the aesthetic associations sampled in this piece. I am most inclined, however, to return to the initial impetus for this exploratory essay: I witnessed in the return of Boards of Canada a festival and sense of community rarely found in political spaces online—robust in its indulgence of mystery, ludic joys, and a measured sense of shared vulnerability amid the sentiments exchanged between the band’s adherents. The quasi-religious character of this celebration, which essentially welcomed the return of hallowed prophets of our age, continues to raise questions I hope to explore in future writing.

Coda

If you made it this far—thank you. Receiving responses to my first essay on Boards of Canada was uniquely exciting, and I can hardly imagine replicating those resonances as future writings on Inferno move deeper into the weeds of philosophy. My goal nonetheless is to probe thoughtfully the references the new album so eagerly invites, drawing connections to thoughts and images that extend beyond the record itself.

Followers of the Split Infinities blog (the name itself a quiet tip of the hat to BoC) will already be familiar with the Acid Horizon and LEPHT HAND projects, which in their distinct ways broach the political and the psychedelic through theoretical intervention. My musical project SEREPTIE emerged within the atmosphere of BoC’s autochthonic energies—imagined as the eventual aftermath of Boards of Canada: a lo-fi ambient world both inebriated and asphyxiated by the detritus of the apocalypse BoC heralds.

In this essay appears an image from Vintagia: I Ching Oracle for Psychogeography and Creative Discovery—an oracle deck I developed as a tool for navigating creative and spatial experience through the hexagrams of the I Ching. As I mentioned in the introduction, a second limited run of the deck will be printed in July. If you’d like to support my work, please purchase a deck.

An even better way to support the network I am helping to build is to take a course at Acid Horizon Research Commons. We offer rigorous, accessible courses at the intersection of philosophy, politics, and various other forms of theory.

“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister orchestra-tors of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements that have declared war on all that passes for Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.

Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat—a conflict causing real-world damage—can we effectively resist. This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents shaping politics in the twenty-first century.

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Vintagia is back! www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/vintagia-basecamp

What does it mean that the music most associated with wizards, capes, and sixteen keyboards also harbored some of the most radical left politics in rock history? In this episode, Emma and Sereptie are joined by writer, bassist, and WFMU radio DJ Dave Mandl for a deep dive into the origins, aesthetics, and political contradictions of progressive rock. From the egalitarian aristocracy of prog's classical pretensions to the outright communism of Henry Cow and the Art Bears, we trace the fault lines between individualism, elitism, and genuine aesthetic liberation. Along the way we ask whether the charge of bourgeois excess ever really stuck — and what prog's capacious, boundary-pushing spirit might still have to offer a left politics in search of new forms.

Dave Mandl

• davidmandl.com

• WFMU — It's Complicated: wfmu.org/playlists/GX

• LA Review of Books: lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/dave-mandl

• Elevated Landscapes (photo book): roman-nvmerals.myshopify.com/products/vol-cdxl-elevated-landscapes-by-dave-mandl

His Bands

• Emergency Group: emergencygroup.bandcamp.com

• Time Trout: otoroku.bandcamp.com/album/stuck-like-jane-austen

Sereptie's Prog Metal Band — eENIK

• Bandcamp: eenik.bandcamp.com/track/hints-of-mercury

• Spotify: open.spotify.com/album/2nQkBlBJuzhxo0fNDRtbRP

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Is sincerity even possible when the medium is rigged against it? In this episode, Hannah Smart, fiction writer, critic, and author of the debut novel Meat Puppets, joins Craig, Adam, and Emma to think through the legacy of David Foster Wallace and Mark Fisher, tracing the connections between Wallace's call for a new sincerity and Fisher's hauntological vision of a culture that forgot how to imagine its own future. Together we wrestle with the performative male, the death of boredom, the trap of self-consciousness, and whether any of us—writers, theorists, or just extremely online humans—have actually found a way out of the irony that Wallace spent his career trying to dismantle.

Hannah Smart

Website — https://hannahsmart97.wixsite.com/home

Preorder Meat Puppets — https://merchtable.bigcartel.com/product/meat-puppets-by-hannah-smart

LARB Essay — https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nothing-ever-happens-mister-squishy-and-the-year-of-the-sentence-diagram/

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Substack — https://substack.com/@howlingfantod?r=64xrn&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile

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Happy Hour at Hippel's (Adam’s blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com

​Split Infinities (Craig’s Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/

​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

"Corduroy Psychedelia: On Boards of Canada, Hauntology, and the PBS Unconscious": https://splitinfinities.substack.com/p/corduroy-psychedelia-on-boards-of

AHRC Summer School: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses

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Links:

"Tape 05": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bghDcbzfEU

Jack Chuter on Instagram: https://instagram.com/jack.chuter

Nothing Is Real (BoC Covers): https://chuter.bandcamp.com/album/nothing-is-real

Crucial Listening Podcast: https://pod.link/1247282591

ATTN Magazine: https://www.attnmagazine.co.uk

Hard Return Label: https://hardreturn.bandcamp.com

Corduroy Psychedelia: On Boards of Canada, Hauntology, and the PBS Unconscious: https://splitinfinities.substack.com/p/corduroy-psychedelia-on-boards-of

Vintaga: I Ching Oracle for Psychogeography and Creative Discovery: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/vintagia-basecamp

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Happy Hour at Hippel's (Adam’s blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com

​Split Infinities (Craig’s Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/

​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

The Future in Our Past tells the story of the 1926 General Strike on its centenary. It is a compelling on-the-ground account of how workers brought the country to a standstill for nine extraordinary days. Callum Cant and Matthew Lee take us on a journey through a Britain living on its nerves, from the London docklands to the South Wales coalfields and the railways and warehouses of middle England. Churchill feared that labour militancy presaged a Bolshevik-style revolution. The question of power hung in the air as rank-and-file militants pursued a chaotic, improvised and wildly uneven confrontation with the British ruling class.

This is social history at its most immediate and relevant. Cant and Lee revisit the communities where the struggle burned brightest, uncovering the lessons the General Strike holds for labour movements today.

Buy the Book: https://www.versobooks.com/products/3483-the-future-in-our-past?srsltid=AfmBOoqbtVwzsZJLvWF-4ecS-vnnrkV7WtRwdBoTNegUHhdXkCjKW_5q

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Website: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/

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Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438

Merch: http://www.crit-drip.com

Subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform: https://pod.link/1512615438

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Happy Hour at Hippel's (Adam’s blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com

​Split Infinities (Craig’s Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/

​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

At the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant—once the United States’ most monolithic steel producer, closed in 1995, the same year I graduated high school—you can now spend a few hours steeped in a cacophony of sports betting, stadium blackjack, or any number of popular mythologically-themed slot machines, all shrouded in the shadow of the Steel’s skeletal remains and the silhouettes of hulking blast furnaces that gave birth to much of the country’s early infrastructure. Wind Creek Bethlehem, one of the largest casinos in the northeastern United States, is owned by descendants of the indigenous Creek Nation, a group known as the Poarch Creek Indians.1 The casino and its event multiplex serve as but one instance of the absolute casinofication of everything.

America’s deindustrialization was already well underway when I began my academic journey at the nearby Northampton Community College more than thirty years ago, where many of Bethlehem Steel’s freshly unemployed took advantage of retraining benefits awarded as part of their untimely severance. Unlike the image of college life portrayed in the likes of Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds, the student body at NCC was a genuine confluence of society’s heterogeneous groups—people searching for a better financial foothold or finding their place amid the broader flux. It wasn’t uncommon to see the pixie-cut punk girl who worked at Play It Again Records seated in the same developmental psychology class as a former cold sheet mill operator in his early forties. Though the organs of industrial capitalism were being systematically dismantled from within America’s own borders, the promise of higher education still lingered, even as colleges continued to court corporate interests to the detriment of that promise.

The state of Pennsylvania—where I was born, raised, and currently reside—has become the ironic locus of America’s total casinofication. Once the veritable forge of the American empire and arena of some of the country’s most notable labor struggles, Pennsylvania suffered the pangs of post-industrial transformation as hard as any state in the union. In its perpetual swing-state status, it helped incubate the reigning Trumpism amid the shifting sentiments of its disenfranchised working class and a labor legacy ground under the wheels of the Democratic Party’s rightward drift. Pennsylvania now engenders a prototypical character of what is to come in our post-neoliberal conjuncture: the radical democratization of gambling as the basis for the economic paradigm.

While Pennsylvania is hardly unique in its expanded legalization of gambling, the scope and character of its gambling apparatus and the culture that has grown around it are notable. According to Crossing Broad, Pennsylvania holds the distinction of having become the biggest online casino market in the United States, generating $3.46 billion in gross iGaming revenue in 2025, marking a 27.7% increase over the previous year and producing $1.24 billion in tax revenue for the state.2 The casino’s reach has expanded to truck stops, coffee shops, and family-owned convenience stores—many of which now feature slot machines in the form of what are called “skill games,” which cloak the aleatory logic of slots beneath a thin veneer of proficiency challenges (think an inferior version of Japan’s pachinko parlors absent the cool little metal marbles). It has been a proliferation with legislative blessing: in October 2017, Pennsylvania’s Act 42 authorized satellite mini-casinos, video gaming terminals at truck stops, online casino games, sports wagering, and an online lottery, enshrining in law what was already metastasizing in practice.3

In Pennsylvania’s Happy Valley, where I now reside, residents have recently lost a battle that is converting the former Macy’s anchor space of the Nittany Mall into the Happy Valley Casino—a $120 million gambling venue opening its doors this spring.4 The addition of the casino promises a surface-level economic boost, but its arrival also heralds further woes for an already precarious working-class population living in the shadow of the wealthier State College region. Resistance signage along Benner Pike, where the mall is being converted, acknowledges the failure to prevent the project, engaging now in a more desperate politics of refusal, urging members of the community to boycott the now transformed venue.

We are now at a phase in late capitalism where the infrastructure of America’s dead factories and shopping malls is being repurposed for gambling—and only after these spaces enjoyed a brief afterlife as ruins suffused with an uncanny post-capitalist appeal. The return of “aura” to these spaces had been followed by a cultural resurgence of the exploratory imaginary—one evidenced in the vaporwave aesthetic of the 2010s, but which has since expanded into a broader wayfaring through America’s liminal unconscious made popular on YouTube and other social media: excursions into decayed infrastructure, abandoned hospitals, derelict malls, and the creeping dread of The Backrooms, the paradigmatic fictional liminal space first formulated on 4chan and soon to be featured in a forthcoming film from A24.5 The collective desire for a sublime aesthetic reorientation to our world amid the wreckage of crass consumerism has been overrun by the clamor to commodify liminality—to give it canonical contours, as Stranger Things has done, colonizing collective yearnings with clichéd renditions of era aesthetics. The excess that the market cannot metabolize as spectacle, however, it will eventually absorb in another form.

In the imaginal register, the experience of the liminal sublime is overcoded by spectacle; as for the husk of the real—the ruins of the shopping mall itself—it requires only a few legal adjustments to be reincorporated into ever-expanding casino logic. That Pennsylvania has presided over this acceleration while maintaining one of the more archaic bodies of vice law born in the original thirteen colonies is, to put it mildly, a curiosity.

Pennsylvania has a notoriously prudish—if not often absurd—history when it comes to the collision of vice and the rule book. Our infamous “blue laws” have been the occasional subject of clickbait articles for both their formal severity and characteristic quaintness. To this day, pursuant to the Board of Vehicles Act of 1983, you cannot buy a car on a Sunday. The specter of Protestant purity has haunted the ongoing culture war, which has at times weaponized blue laws as a cudgel against immigrant communities, practitioners of folk and occult traditions, and queer-coded spaces alike.

In October 2023, Beck Ravenswood, the owner of the Serpent’s Key Shoppe and Sanctuary in Hanover, was visited by police officers after a local nonprofit article casually mentioned that tarot readings were offered by appointment—prompting the Hanover Borough Police Chief to call and warn that such readings violated a Pennsylvania law dating to 1861. “The message was basically, ‘We’re watching you,’” Ravenswood recalled.6 The case has since grown into a statewide legal challenge aimed at overturning the law entirely. The irony was not lost on Ravenswood, who noted in their petition that the same state which threatened them with arrest “permits businesses to make predictions about this Sunday’s football score and permits individuals to give money to the prediction-providers in the form of a ‘bet.’”7

Yet other ironies abound. The Ravenswood case involves the clash of oracular tradition with crude betting at the level of law. Tarot and related practices were once seen as subversive in earlier decades of American culture; the specter of paganism maintained a firm power to unsettle the mandate of the Protestant-inflected sociopolitical order. The latter-day legalization of fortune-telling in Pennsylvania would serve as a delayed decoding of subversive flows that once threatened that order. Yet a deeper insight remains to be probed: the growing penchant in the US for gambling, tarot, and other aleatory logics as a symptom of systemic collapse. What I am gesturing toward is a feature of the political economy of epochal shifts and its general imaginal character—the Ravenswood vignette illustrates precisely what is at stake when the subversive power of prophetic culture becomes reduced to the predictive logic of the bet.

In Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (2021), Federico Campagna distinguishes between competing ways of seeing the future at the end of the world.8 For Campagna, as the dominant mode of Western civilization nears its end, its form of “worlding” becomes exhausted alongside it. The instabilities exacerbated by the crumbling of empire impel us to navigate the ruins and envision the world to come. This impulse finds expression in two modes: prediction and prophecy. Prediction follows the logic of internal continuity—extrapolating from the facts, perspectives, and the sociopolitical investments of extant reality in a bid to know what comes next under the current paradigm. Prophecy, on the other hand, involves a cosmological reorientation that cannot be articulated inside an existing logic. It collapses our chronological notion of time, emerging out of a gridless eternalism from which an “outside” speaks. The language of prophecy murmurs, stutters, and convulses something often nonsensical to the ear inured to the present, speaking forth a future for those who will inhabit the world after ours has come to pass.

Fellow philosophers might here be reminded of a poorer wager on the “outside,” where prediction was mistaken for prophecy: that of accelerationist Nick Land, whose bid to steward into existence a post-Marxist technocapitalist singularity was wholly bound to the predictive apparatus. Skitching on capital’s line of flight, Land fell in love with Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, enjoyed briefer affairs with Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, J.D. Vance, and Steve Bannon, and found himself sharing a clown car with an expanding roster of fascists and fascist sympathizers. Since learning of Anthropic’s alleged newer, more powerful AI platform Claude Mythos and its predilection for the grammar of his acid communist protégé and rival Mark Fisher, Land has seethed with resentment on social media, having failed to become the prince of predictive text to which he aspired.

Who knows—perhaps one of his venture capitalist admirers can set aside some seed funding to program a bespoke NickGPT as a conciliatory legacy project for the jilted villain.

As for the rest of us, casinofication continues in forms so perverse as to be unfathomable by any previous moral or ethical standard. The introduction of Polymarket—a blockchain-based prediction market founded in 2020 that allows users to wager on the outcomes of real-world events, from presidential elections to Federal Reserve rate decisions—has repurposed gambling technologies into an apparatus serving imperialist violence and those with market-obsessed epistemic privilege.9 Backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, the platform processed over $3 billion in bets on the 2024 presidential race alone, its CEO declaring it “the most accurate thing we have as mankind” for predicting future events.10 Now valued at $9 billion following a $2 billion investment from the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, Polymarket has since been implicated in a military insider trading scandal in which an Israeli air force officer allegedly earned approximately $162,000 betting on airstrikes he knew were coming—a tidy illustration of what happens when the wager becomes the only remaining idiom through which power dares to imagine the future.1112 This is to say nothing of figures surrounding the Trump administration becoming totally possessed by the demon of speculation, cashing in what remains of American hegemony to game the outcomes of political subterfuge and nuclear brinksmanship.13

Over the past week, things got notably worse. A Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruling strengthened the prediction market industry's position by exempting sports prediction contracts from state gambling laws—a decision brought by Kalshi against New Jersey but with sweeping implications for Polymarket and its competitors, all of which face ongoing pushback from states arguing that wagering on sporting outcomes constitutes gambling under state jurisdiction rather than the financial derivatives the federal government is content to call it.14 Also this past week, Polymarket bets began to populate on Google News alongside regular event-based reporting. When some had recorded the breach of this epochal threshold—inaugurating a world in which front-page links led directly to immediate financial risk for readers—Google intervened, citing the feature as a technical error.15 Mistake or not, the casino had a taste of primetime alongside AI-generated summaries, which have by now become an almost ineradicable feature of daily browsing.

With a new apocalyptic threshold phasing in and out before us, we are left to wonder where the “outside” truly remains—what speeds and orientations are demanded of us so that we are not consumed in the incandescence of the prophetic rite. This past week, back in the shopping malls of America, Luis Javier Gallegos Jr. was apprehended on arson charges after allegedly setting fire to the True Religion store at the Ontario Mills Mall in Ontario, California.16 Just down the road, a warehouse worker named Chamel Abdulkarim stood before a 1.2-million-square-foot Kimberly-Clark facility—the blaze he set estimated at $500 million in damages—and chanted “all you had to do was pay us enough to live.”17 Whether or not these acts constitute an enduring politics, they nonetheless constitute a symptom and a search.

The future, it seems, has become an intolerable promise. For those who wish to forsake the current world and its hollow guarantees, fire becomes a portal to an outside. Will flame, the universal and divine element of the prophetic rite, engulf the futurity to which we refuse to be condemned? In the absence of that refusal, it is a fate that seems guaranteed through the imminent reality of climate catastrophe, the infernum of the ongoing global war, and the absolute casinofication of everything.

A few nights after finishing the blog post, I had a dream featuring a familiar landscape. It was more of an atmospheric dream than the relatively semi-coherent narrative of dreams I typically remember. However, during the dream a voice had uttered an injunction. I was told to go to a local consignment shop and look in the basement for something that would be waiting for me there. The name of the consignment store in question is ‘Arcadian Consignment Vintage & Antique Co.’, and my wife and I will stop in every two or three months just to browse. What’s more, upon being woken by the dream, I thought I saw the diaphanous visage of a bearded man floating in the rafters of our mountain cottage. He appeared as an outline of three dimensional threads—imagine a head and face formed of a ragged fishing net. It was my wife’s day off, and during our morning coffee I told her about the dream and what I had seen. Now, keep in mind, she is quite used to hearing about the vivid details of my oneiric adventures, not to mention the other quotidian hallucinations I’ll often experience during waking hours. In any event, it was a given that we would head down to Arcadian, because in this house we honor the dream life. That was on a Tuesday, but the store would be closed until the weekend. So, we hit the store that Saturday.

By every measure, Arcadian is exquisitely curated: a secondhand shop of the highest order, stocking only the finest finds from former decades. There you’ll discover a set of amber highball glasses you didn’t know you needed, a scratchless mid-century modern credenza belonging to a former professor, or a hunter green L.L. Bean puffer vest from the 80s kept pristine after a season or two of enjoyment. After a bit of browsing on the top floor, we abandoned the array of old yuppie stuff to explore the discounted basement items, in accordance with the dream message. My flight down the stairs was brisk and focused—I knew exactly the corner of the basement level I was meant to investigate. And there it was: my old lamp.

Denuded of its original paper shade and exactly as I had left it nearly five years ago, the orange glass table lamp from my mid-twenties was resting in a darkened corner. Its power cord was coiled tight, still bearing Whisper’s bite marks, our once aloof kitten, who is now eight or nine (and much more social, in case you were wondering). My wife was in shock—we had offloaded that lamp specifically to be rid of it. Its brittle shade hadn’t survived our cross country trek, and in the compression of settling into a smaller space than our previous condo, it had been culled without proper consideration of its sentimental value.

What may be hard to believe at this point is where I originally purchased the lamp. I once lived in Monrovia, California—one of the San Gabriel Valley’s oldest cities, developed during westward expansion in the late 1800s—on the border of its neighboring city, Arcadia. It was there, at a consignment shop with ‘Arcadia’ in its name, or so I’m fairly certain, that I first bought it. I remember the purchase clearly: I had just moved to Monrovia, and it was a moment in my life when, amid chaos and real poverty, I had been afforded a kind of repose—a semblance of domestic sanctity I had not known in previous years. Curating my living space with some modest warmth was part of a broader auto-intervention I had quietly undertaken. The triple association—the encounter with the word ‘arcadian’ itself, the shop where the lamp was first found, the shop where it was recovered—came to me the moment I saw it standing in that darkened corner. Arcadian, Arcadian, Arcadia.

The lamp sparked another association almost immediately. Earlier that day, I had learned that Charles E. Scott—a cherished mentor and philosopher—had passed away. I had suspected he was not in good health the last time we spoke, and he may have understated some of the health issues he then conveyed to me. It was Charles who opened the world of philosophy to me: Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Otto, Heidegger, William James, Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and many others. I had the distinct privilege of conducting his last recorded interview on the wide timber deck of our home, overlooking the valley below. Charles was known for his amicable affect and the profound sense of wonder that poured through his philosophy. He would have loved this story—and he would have offered a phenomenological account that left all its mystery intact, without making recourse to a transcendent realm. I learned of his death several days after it occurred. When I did the math, it turned out he had died the same night I had the dream—and witnessed the spectral image of a man’s face hovering above our bed. These are the details one is tempted to adjust, however slightly, to serve a narrative. But when I reviewed the timeline with my wife, she confirmed it held.

It was a given that we had to buy back the lamp—though we hesitated. Perhaps still reeling with surprise, we both backed away to catch our breath. We left on the tacit promise that if we could sort out a proper lampshade, we’d pick it up later. I reckon that we tend to bail on about fifty percent of those promises. Nonetheless, I ended up searching for lampshades online and bookmarking a few contenders—but returning to the store would have to wait. Arcadian is only open Fridays and Saturdays, as was earlier intimated; most of their business, I gather, is done online. That meant waiting a full week before I could return.

On Monday morning, on some impulse I couldn’t quite account for, I checked to see whether the store might open an extra day—and oddly, the hunch was right. Arcadian was holding a clearance sale that week, expressly to clear out the basement and send whatever remained off to Goodwill. I raced to the shop just after it opened at three that afternoon and went straight downstairs. It was still there. The lamp was not, to be clear, a candidate for Sotheby’s—as old lamps go, its aesthetic appeal is average at best. I carried it up to the register and took a chance on telling the owner the whole story. By the time I finished, a couple of other patrons had drifted close to listen. The telling immediately drew out stories from everyone gathered round. The owner was quick to note that my experience at Arcadian was not entirely unique—other customers had reported dreams or reveries about items that had spent time in the store.

A day or two later I received a linen lampshade that recalled the lamp’s original decade. We had built a new studio several months prior, which gave us enough room to rearrange the lighting, and I was able to find a place for the lamp in our geodesic dome.

I am no stranger to synchronicity. I’d wager that most of us have our own stories of this kind, and the question for me is what to do with them beyond letting them become crude party fodder. Despite living through one of the most tumultuous periods in human memory, I have not yet fully succumbed to the cynicism that would prevent me from lifting such an experience toward something more meaningful.

If you read my last piece, you already know that I maintain certain criticisms of Jung and the Jungian tradition. But one of Jung’s intuitions worth preserving is his insistence on the absolute richness of psyche—the metaphor of soul itself, the metaphysical substrate that allows for our aesthetic flourishing—especially as it is revealed in moments of synchronicity. In ongoing conversation with a close friend, I have come to affirm the utter necessity of a sweeping cultural shift as a precondition of any lasting political revolution. Brute economic and political change, I believe, cannot be sustained without a drastic reorientation of values—toward an aesthetic flourishing set apart from our current consumer-driven model of expenditure. The empowerment of the dispossessed masses will only come through speeds and intensities that break with the capitalist milieu. It is partly on this basis that I have urged myself toward valuing moments like the one described above, however seemingly inconsequential they might appear. In an age where images proliferate endlessly, often with little purchase beyond the moment they are generated, I am happy to dwell again with the old light.

Perhaps this is the natural break off point for this reflection. But I hope that for the rest of us, an old light finds its way back—even if its reappearance is meant only as a way of saying goodbye to the luminance of a cherished teacher. Rest in peace, Charles.

For too long we have harbored the metaphor of depth as the wellspring of meaning, when in fact it has always been the surface from which meanings arise. And this has engendered real consequences, chief among them the problem of freedom across every register of our existence.

I want to propose a psychology of surfaces as an alternative to depth psychologies—a term used here broadly, inclusive of psychoanalysis and its various lineages, and encompassing what is more specifically designated as Jungian/analytical psychology, depth psychology in the proper sense, archetypal psychology, and its various offshoots. More importantly, the challenge put to depth here is not a bid to undermine the importance of meaning but rather to redouble that importance by locating the production of meaning on the surfaces of dream, text, and narrative. This problem is taken up with particular clinical urgency in the transversal methodology of Félix Guattari, whose decades of work as a practicing analyst at La Borde—the experimental psychiatric clinic in the Loire Valley founded by Jean Oury—produced a body of thought that refused the hierarchical structure of classical psychoanalytic treatment in favor of what he called transversality: a diagonal mode of relation that cuts across institutional and subjective boundaries without subordinating them to a governing axis. The clinical and theoretical dimensions of this project are documented in Psychoanalysis and Transversality (Semiotext(e)), an essential companion to the present work.1

Amidst fleshing out the surface-depth distinction, I want to show that this is not a trivial intervention, nor do I want to invite the misconception that surface or transversal methods simply recapitulate the general tenets of depth psychology in a trendier cast. A primary motivation for articulating a psychology of surfaces is to reveal its general animating principles and implicit methods as more efficacious than depth psychological methods, subsuming the latter’s goals into a broader and more capacious set of ambitions and imbuing them with a stronger political import.

Depth's Political Unconscious

These are old problems with compounded stakes—and in some sense it is always already too late to be raising them. Full-throated fascism has arrived (again), and its emergence was contemporaneous with a surge of strangely convergent cultural components. The new right is a complex if not sometimes contradictory assemblage: 4chan accelerationists, megachurch grifters, cryptocurrency speculators, QAnon-pilled suburban moms, Silicon Valley technocrats, tradwife influencers, anti-woke pagans, wellness-to-fascism pipeline devotees—to name just a few. What unites these otherwise incompatible factions is less a coherent ideology than a shared sentiment: the felt sense that something authentic has been stolen, that it lies buried beneath the corruptions of modernity, and that its recovery demands a return to depth.

A subsegment of the new right given to traditional spirituality and mysticism has also gravitated toward the work of Carl Jung. The appeal lies in the promise of an exit from the modern world and its destabilizing polyphony—an avenue back to a world that remains solid, hieratic, and deep. There is however a significant gap between Jung’s work as a path to genuine individuation and its life as a memetic object in the culture war; authentic engagement with Jung quickly demands an embrace of precisely the destabilizing elements his popularizers are most eager to suppress. Nonetheless, downgraded popularizations of Jungian psychology—spurious facsimiles, perhaps, yet facsimiles that preserved the essential ontological commitments—have proven fertile ground for this discourse of recovery: the appeal to hidden depths of meaning, the prioritization of an interior truth in a manifold cosmos, the promise of a unified subject reclaimed from the excesses of modernity. The most visible contemporary example is perhaps Jordan Peterson—his is not depth psychology proper but an imposter that retains its full ontological contours while converting its therapeutic potential into a revanchist narrative marked by its sneering queerphobic animus. In Peterson’s distortion, a semblance of the Jungian apparatus remains nonetheless intact: archetypes, mythologems, the descent into shadow, the slaying of dragons, the integrated self. But what was at least dynamically conceived in Jung became in Peterson a prescriptive form of moral marketing—exactly what Jung himself endeavored to avoid. Be that as it may, as the Jung scholar Dr. Bob Langan has observed, Peterson’s intervention amid the anomie of the 21st century was, before the sudden decline of his health and relative disappearance from the public eye, an attempt to address the abyss of collective meaninglessness felt by those drawn to his rhetoric and flair.2 Peterson is perhaps the most garish example, but the resonances between depth psychological ontology and authoritarian sensibility cannot be confined to any single figure—they surface wherever the conceit of occulted truth, unified selfhood, and legitimate hierarchy finds a popular vehicle, from wellness culture’s therapeutic individualism to nationalist mythologies of collective destiny.

The Broken Ladder of Hierarchy: Jung Reconsidered

Nonetheless, we are left to interrogate whether the primacy of depth has proven hospitable to authoritarian sensibilities precisely because it was never fully divested of them: the appeal to cosmic hierarchy as the truth of the depths, the mythic past as the ground of legitimate order, the domestication of our allegedly pagan tendencies and what is most monstrous within us as a preliminary phase, the magistral procession towards the authentic self and its monotheistic form of realization in Jung’s psychology. These are not incidental resemblances. A psychology of surfaces serves to explain how variants of the depth-oriented approaches tend to reinscribe a relationship with meaning-making that is structurally dependent on the vertical armature upon which authoritarianism depends.

To be fair, Jung’s work is more complicated than what has been portrayed in the abbreviated criticisms above. Jung himself evolved to become a complicated enemy of fascism by the end of his life and would have rightfully advised against the scapegoating temptation that shadows the act of criticism. His own concept of archetypes evolved as well, shifting from taxonomic trump cards to a dynamic interplay of tendencies, thresholds, and attractors. His veritable successor James Hillman suggests, moreover, that his metaphysical scaffolding recedes amid the more aleatory encounters of psyche in episodes of active imagination, as evidenced in the posthumously published personal journal, Liber Novus.3 His later efforts to marry psyche and matter in the theory of the psychoid—among his most searching and least reducible formulations—are routinely eclipsed by the caricatures disseminated by Peterson and other distortions of Jungian psychology. The ongoing evolution of this research, particularly with regard to the concept of the psychoid, raises the question of what Jung might have found useful in the concept of surface as presented by Guattari—as the site where the material and the psychical intersect.

Dreams and the Machinic Unconscious

In “The Refrain of Being and Meaning,” a characteristically dense yet generative piece of dream analysis by Félix Guattari collected in Soft Subversions (Semiotext(e)), the dream is proposed as a paradigmatic site for rethinking the production of meaning—not as the revelation of hidden contents but as a machinic operation unfolding entirely on the surface of experience.4 It is from this starting point that the following working model for dream work and image work is developed: provisional, surface-oriented, and explicitly posed against the symbolic castration and transcendent reification. It rests on three provisional tenets. First, meaning is not revealed from behind appearances but produced on the surface through the assembly of heterogeneous elements—linkages generated across a transversal, immanent field rather than excavated from beneath it. Second, the unconscious—or what we might equally call the imaginal—is not a latent depth oriented toward the past but an intensive and transversal field whose heterogeneous character resists reduction to any singular origin or temporal axis. Third, subjectivation entails the image of a unified subject yet is driven by forces in excess of its own goals; its ruptures and breaches are not obstacles but necessary conditions, the fractalization through which something appears where access was previously blocked.

Dreams are paradigmatic events in which these three operations become visible simultaneously. They comprise elements loosened from their mnemonic and semantic anchoring, nomadically distributed across a surface that resists the imposition of fixed symbolic coordinates. A further and more urgent question shadows this model: whether extant forms of depth psychology in any of its iterations engenders the risks implied above by its own structural necessity—and whether succumbing to them disposes us toward a form of authority not unfamiliar to fascism. To be clear, the leap I am not making here is that there is necessarily a direct line from depth psychologies to political fascism. However, I would defend the claim that the often depoliticized character of these disciplines—or at most the enlightened centrism they tend to espouse in conjunction with their uncritical ontologies—curtails the impulse toward revolt. Moreover, I would not suggest that depth psychologies are a mise en abyme of culture at large—but they share with a plethora of other therapeutic modalities, particularly those with a bohemian flair, a striking reluctance toward genuine political engagement absolutely demanded in the current conjuncture.

Intensity and Transversality: A Personal Account

Once again, the stakes of these distinctions are not merely theoretical. Before proceeding further, it may be worth grounding the concepts of intensity and transversality in something more immediate than their philosophical provenance—in the kind of experience that precedes its own interpretation and resists reduction to a governing symbol. The example that follows is, in its own way, an argument for surfaces in the most visceral sense.

When I was three years old, I was nearly drowned by a girl who was twice my size and age at our local public pool. As best as I can recall, a bout of innocent roughhousing instigated by the girl turned into a freak spell of morbid curiosity: she began to hold me down against the bottom of the pool.

They say that drowning may be the most ecstatic way to die; the visages of drowning victims are often marked by a peaceful countenance or even a beatific grin. My own brush with an all-too-soon watery demise delivered the oft-reported euphoric lucidity—once the piercing pain in my chest had hit its peak, an endorphin spike seemed to send a scintillating charge from my heart toward the pool’s surface. With the young girl’s hands pressed down onto my collarbone, I was suddenly gifted an uncanny sharpness of perception and the world above began to shimmer. Then a shadow swooped over the tangle of arms and legs—it was my mom—who deftly one-handed my would-be killer into the shallow end of the baby pool.

While I don’t recall the subsequent poolside recovery, what took place that day came to occupy a privileged place in my imaginal life. In a series of recurring dreams in the years that followed, I would return to the pool, which had become a portal to other worlds. From its depths the dead would rise to speak to me, delivering prophetic messages or muttering incomprehensible riddles. The crowds of waking life were conspicuously absent from the pool of my dreams, instead becoming a spiritual sanctuary—and sometimes a place of sordid secrets. Once, in a horrifying reversal, I became the would-be killer myself, attempting to murder and dispose of someone who simply refused to die by my knife. In a last bid to smother my surging sense of shame, I forced the torso with its full harvest of gaping bloodless wounds into the chlorine bath, hoping to finish what I had begun. Through my impotence and anguish, I could only hear their deathless voice whisper “I love you” from beneath the surface.

Nearly all of these dreams recapitulated the pain-euphoria of the original event—an intensity that came to inhabit each of the disparate dream scenarios without resolving into a singular meaning or symbolic resonance. These iterations of intensity nonetheless carried a distinct sense of degree and threshold—each dream registering the original charge at a different pitch, a different pressure, as though the intensity itself were being tested across varying conditions rather than repeated. The image of the pool meanwhile remained convertible and contingent. It appeared as public and private, familiar and alien, a site of death and of revelation, expressing through its very mutability what we mean by transversality. The pool did not symbolize a fixed meaning; it moved diagonally across registers of memory, shame, prophecy, power, and desire, belonging fully to none of them, connecting all of them interstitially.

Having been both gifted and cursed with a sublime forgetfulness—as both a matter of taste and tendency—I have come to prefer an understanding of dreams in terms of a reconfiguration of intensive thresholds versus what might be called a vulgar archetypalism, where dream images fall victim to a flashcard logic, given over to the reification of mythologems. It feels both alienating and disingenuous for a dream to simply terminate in any explanation, for that matter. The hermeneutics of dreaming should be more expansive, taking into account the dream’s afterimage, its curious residues, its lingering moods, its ensuing fractalization into the vectors of waking life.

Pathology and Its Outside

A psychology of surfaces also needs to make an account of psychopathology and what remains available to it in the operation of various forms of image work. The concern here is not simply with clinical pathology in the diagnostic sense. It begins earlier with the raw fact of suffering—the awareness of something intensely present that precedes its own discursive organization or arises amidst it silently. Pathology, understood in a more ontologically neutral valence, refers to a complex series of psychic or somatic interventions, repetitions, and refrains in which something crystallizes. It marks a concrescence that is less a disorder to be corrected than a figure demanding attention, a communication from the psyche rather than a failure of it. At its ontological root, pathology names the moment a volatile image takes shape, suffering coalescing into its mask of legibility and insisting on being seen. But every pathology has an outside: the intensity that refuses the fold, persisting as the ungovernable remainder of its own crystallization. This is what I have called the pathotic—the perpetual egress of pathos from the corridors of logos—not an ontologically prior vitality expended in the production of pathology, but its permanent outside, the intensity that exceeds every concrescence and cannot be fully captured by the figure it generates. The call of the pathological is then taken up across linguistic, semantic, and social registers; the pathotic cannot be—it remains silent. It must be acknowledged, moreover, that the act of pathologizing is never politically neutral—yet short of ignoring suffering altogether, the act of attending to it and building a discourse around it constitutes an unavoidable pathologizing gesture, even where no clinical accent is intended or desired. That said, the pathological is not reducible to the clinical. It begins, in every case, with the noticing of suffering—but what is noticed is never exhausted by the figure that makes it visible. Something persists beyond the form: an intensity that cannot be fully gathered, a remainder that continues to insist within a permanent elsewhere. The pathotic is functionally hostile to the pathological, but ontologically neutral in its silence. Both psychologies of surface and depth, not to mention everyday, non-psychologized approaches to pathos, must contend with the inconsumable pathotic remainder, though by definition they cannot.

James Hillman, the American depth psychologist and founder of archetypal psychology, spent much of his career arguing against the therapeutic impulse to normalize or eliminate psychological suffering. His instinct to deepen into symptoms rather than eliminate them is instructive here, though the metaphor of depth requires careful handling lest it trade on an ambiguity that undermines the very distinction we are trying to draw. Depth can name two quite different operations: on one hand, an intensification of the interplay of psychic elements, a deepening that is really a widening of resonance, a proliferation of connections across the surface rather than a descent beneath it; on the other, a vertical movement toward concealed symbolic truth, the kind of depth that terminates in reification and symbolic castration. The first sense is entirely consonant with a psychology of surfaces; the second is precisely what such a psychology works against. A further complication is that vectors of intensification are not all equivalent in their tendency: some pursue their own rigidification through the symbols they circulate, closing back into fixed figures, hierarchies, and transcendent coordinates; others remain open to the aleatory distribution of elements and their polyphony, sustaining the interplay without resolving it into a dominant or governing figure. Pathology in its most generative sense belongs to the latter: an opening rather than a closure, a communication whose full resonance remains available to the work of the surface.

The surface is not where meaning evaporates. It is what keeps us from drowning in the depths.

Unfolding the Deleuze Seminars, 1970-1987: Summaries and Commentary -  https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-unfolding-the-deleuze-seminars-1970-1987.html

Dr. Bob Langan's links: https://www.roberthlangan.com/

ig: roberthlangan

Jung and Spinoza: Passage Through The Blessed Self - https://www.routledge.com/Jung-and-Spinoza-Passage-Through-The-Blessed-Self/Langan/p/book/9781032851853

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What if the psychedelic revolution in end-of-life care is less a liberation from the medicalization of death than its most seductive intensification? In this crossover episode of LEPHT HAND and Acid Horizon, SEREPTIE and Emma are joined by anthropologist Sujit Thomas, whose research on psychedelic thanatology cuts through therapeutic optimism to ask harder questions about pastoral power, metaphysical belief shift, and the commodification of mystical experience. Drawing on Foucault, Deleuze, and Nietzsche, the conversation moves from authentic dying to the death transcendence scale and Huxley's heroic final dose — asking whether the good death being marketed to us is really a pacification of the excess and irrationality that makes life worth affirming.

Letheby paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12152-024-09564-3

Sujit Thomas:

https://as.nyu.edu/departments/anthropology/graduate/alumni/doctoral-alumni/thomas-sujit.html?challenge=d06e90d7-4d8f-4b88-9d8c-10b73beb60f1

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Happy Hour at Hippel's (Adam’s blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com

​Split Infinities (Craig’s Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/

​Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/

What if the psychedelic revolution in end-of-life care is less a liberation from the medicalization of death than its most seductive intensification? In this crossover episode of LEPHT HAND and Acid Horizon, SEREPTIE and Emma are joined by anthropologist Sujit Thomas, whose research on psychedelic thanatology cuts through therapeutic optimism to ask harder questions about pastoral power, metaphysical belief shift, and the commodification of mystical experience. Drawing on Foucault, Deleuze, and Nietzsche, the conversation moves from authentic dying to the death transcendence scale and Huxley's heroic final dose — asking whether the good death being marketed to us is really a pacification of the excess and irrationality that makes life worth affirming.

Letheby paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12152-024-09564-3

Sujit Thomas:

https://as.nyu.edu/departments/anthropology/graduate/alumni/doctoral-alumni/thomas-sujit.html?challenge=d06e90d7-4d8f-4b88-9d8c-10b73beb60f1

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In the early winter of 1983, I suffered a long bout of influenza which left me mostly bed-ridden. Brief moments of pseudo-convalescence had afforded me equally short reprisals against the peculiar anguish of missing out on whatever was happening in Mrs. Fatzinger’s first-grade class. I would amble dizzily between the tray of saltines and warm ginger ale left on the kitchen counter back to our tobacco-colored family couch, taking refuge in a well-known working class homeopathy. But before reclining again, I would summon enough strength to wrench the flip knob of our Sears-brand Zenith woodgrain television set, hoping to find something beyond the soap operas and game shows that colonized basic cable in those years.

Amid the mid-morning lull between morning cartoons and the much preferable after-school block, sick-at-home American schoolchildren of the late 20th century had one reliable standby to keep them company while their parents were at work: PBS, the United States’ Public Broadcasting Service. For us in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, PBS was broadcast on channel eight—and the amber glow of an uprighted infinity symbol on the Zenith signaled the opening of a narrow passage: a reprieve from illness, from the cacophony of regular TV, and from the low static of domestic anxiety. What would become a personal, if not a faintly secretive, convalescent ritual, I would later discover was an experience quietly shared by many of us. It would take the music of Boards of Canada to make sense of what that fever had burned into me.

The Telephasic Workshop

For those of us abandoned to our sick beds, afternoon hours spent with the dial locked on PBS piled up: Sesame Street (which Boards of Canada would later mine for samples with uncanny effect), Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company, Vegetable Soup, 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, stodgy imported BBC programming, reheated documentary series from the early 70s like Civilisation (1969) and The Ascent of Man (1973), campy prepubescent passion plays fit for school assemblies, and avant-garde short films repurposed as children’s entertainment. Among the latter, none better exemplifies the category than “Geometry of Circles” (1979)—animator Cathryn Aison’s hypnotic series of shifting, rainbow-colored geometric forms set to a pulsing minimalist score by Philip Glass, originally commissioned for Sesame Street as a vehicle for teaching spatial logic. The piece’s looping minimalist structures and predominantly hexagonal geometry feel, in retrospect, seemed like a direct predecessor of the Boards of Canada aesthetic. That a composer of Glass’s stature was producing work for children’s television speaks to the era’s genuine pedagogical ambition. Such collaborations also revealed a particular porousness between high modernism and the children’s programming block that characterized public broadcasting in those years. A more grandiose instance of this ambition arrived in Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Godfrey Reggio’s wordless meditation on the collision of nature and industrial civilization, scored again by Glass—a film that reached its widest audience when it aired on PBS’s Great Performances in 1985, and whose Hopi title, meaning “life out of balance,” quietly foreshadowed the apocalyptic undertow running beneath the era’s therapeutic utopianism. All of it melted together in our fevered brains until we were gently lulled into a psychic third space, a “telephasic workshop,” to borrow one of Boards of Canada’s mysterious coinages.

A particular sick day viewing experience stands out among all others, and perhaps best typifies the liminal quality of those flu-driven PBS marathons. A short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” still haunts me well into middle-age.1 For those unfamiliar with Bierce’s story: Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer and Alabama planter hanged by Union soldiers for attempting to sabotage a railroad bridge, hallucinates his escape in the moments before his death—the narrative’s twist being that his line of flight is ultimately revealed as a compensatory fiction conjured against imminent execution. The version I recall emanated the pallid cold of early professional video; its electronic pallor was a notch above the consumer-grade camcorder but still a world away from film. The low-budget visuals paired with the genuinely cinematic portrayal of Bierce’s story was neither Hollywood nor homegrown. Rather, the short film exuded an aesthetic mixture of run-and-gun style cinematography and the flat affect of civic realist filmmaking, caught in the uncanny interval between professional and amateur. Yet it was not only the liminal visuals of the PBS rendition that unsettled; the thematic strangeness of Bierce’s story felt all the more acute against the banal daytime backdrop of McHale’s Navy or I Dream of Jeannie reruns cycling on syndicated networks. Perhaps it was precisely the confluence of the hallucinated escape depicted in “Owl Creek Bridge” with a second or third dose of Dimetapp coursing through my bloodstream that constituted the exact alchemy of transcendence needed to temporarily flee the suburban spiritual imprisonment felt at the threshold of American deindustrialization.

Afternoons spent in febrile somnambulism turned the television set into an otherworldly gateway, opening onto a quasi-shamanic plane that broke the ordinary rhythm of my otherwise unglamorous childhood. A sick day’s ritual tryst with PBS involved inhabiting its unusual affective registers. I was seduced into public television’s subtle reproach of the frenetic pace and the shallow obscenity of normal TV. Everything from the ingenuous warmth of its children’s programming to the exploratory spirit of Nova and Nature stood at a curious distance from the familiar grid of commercialized media. This is to say nothing of the subtly psychedelic feeling that prolonged PBS exposure reliably produced—a slow dissolve of the ordinary, a quelling of pop culture’s ambient giddiness, the familiar rendered strange through sheer duration and repetition. Boards of Canada described a similar repetition-induced breakdown of our basal orientation when speaking of “Nlogax,” from their Hi Scores EP (1996): the tune “begins like an old electro or disco track but halfway through it suddenly becomes something nightmarish, like your brain is starting to malfunction in the middle of the tune.”

Corduroy Psychedelia

The atmosphere of PBS’s 70s and 80s heyday had its material correlate in corduroy’s contemporaneous rise. Worn soft with use and democratic in appeal—cutting across class, age, and social register without representing any of them—corduroy was the fabric of the reading rug, of fort building, puddle stomping, and world exploring. PBS offered a similarly unglamorous intimacy, an experience that sat close to the skin. It never traded that closeness for glamour, as denim had in its ascent to crass sexual appeal and strict class distinction with brands like Sassoon and Jordache. Corduroy’s fidelity to the communal and gregarious, however, concealed its deeper affinities: the intimate, the personal, the meditative.

What I am calling corduroy psychedelia—a term I owe partly to the music of Boards of Canada, whose analog warmth and hypnotic intimacy inhabit precisely this phenomenology—was never exclusively the province of sick days. PBS exuded this quality in its every transmission. It was available to anyone who found themselves on the right side of the channel dial on a slow afternoon (the effect was only further amplified by a 101-degree fever). For those of us trained on cartoons and primetime, programming that would ordinarily register as uninteresting or even painfully boring suddenly opened like a magic portal. Through the lens of illness, or simply lodged within an extended afternoon’s viewing, the sublime character of public broadcasting scintillated with an unexpected charge.

Can You Feel It

At the center of this era and its attendant mood was a new social and political wager: that the cultivated child might redeem what the adult world had broken. Corduroy psychedelia may have been a surface effect of the broader valorization of wonder, innocence, and affective reorientation promulgated through various American institutions during the post-Vietnam era, a sentiment that extended well beyond the television set. This historical conjuncture marks a pseudo-utopian shift from quotidian imperialism: a softer reclamation of the expansionist imaginary, wrested from the American war machine. Libidinal energies were redirected—at the level of sentiment if not of structure—toward civic-minded voluntarism, global consciousness raising, environmental protection initiatives, and the therapeutic turn’s faith in the properly nurtured child, a tendency Philip Rieff had diagnosed a decade earlier in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966). Beneath the camp and earnestness celebrated on Sesame Street and kindred programming, a particular affective apparatus was being assembled and installed: love of nature, exploratory joy, the desire to learn, the wish to transcend bigotry and violence, faith in human goodness—values worth having, but domesticated into dispositions, as though feeling them deeply enough might substitute for the structural shifts they actually required. In the decades before David Foster Wallace named it in “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), the iron rule of postmodern irony was already consolidating, and measures to insulate us from its effects were quietly being tried. Enter John Bradshaw’s concept of the inner child and our collective concern for it as a new vector of inward retreat and object of neurotic psychological investment. Consider as a possible anthem and visual spectacle for this shift the music video for The Jacksons’ “Can You Feel It” (1981), whose opening narration captures the mood, performing its naive innocence:

In the beginning, the land was pure. Even in the early morning light, you could see the beauty in the forms of nature. Soon men and women of every color and shape would be here too. And they would find it all too easy sometimes not to see the colors, and to ignore the beauty in each other.

To round out the aesthetic contours of this soft secular utopianism, we may borrow from the prelapsarian paradise often portrayed in pamphlets distributed by Jehovah’s Witnesses—only imagining it secularized and stripped of its attendant depictions of torment and hellfire. In these visions, all arrive in the new Eden consigned to the ethnically distinct clothing of their country or culture, the scene suffused with a jubilant energy detached from any collective political horizon and redirected toward the cultivation of the sensitive, wondering child-self.

But what about hell? Where is the analogous purgatory or Gehenna of therapeutic utopianism? Perhaps this is where the Jehovah’s Witnesses find unlikely confederates in Boards of Canada, united in what they have chosen not to elide. As we shall see, every cult of childlike wonder has its syzygy in an impending Satanic apocalypse—and Boards of Canada know this better than most.

Screen Memories Before Screen Time

That every cult of childlike wonder contains its syzygy in an impending Satanic apocalypse is perhaps the central intuition of hauntology: the lost future always shadowed by the catastrophe that foreclosed it. Corduroy psychedelia is, to be sure, a species of hauntology. Beyond the niches where hauntology is discussed, the specific experience identified in corduroy psychedelia—quietly shared by many GenXers and Millennials, it seems—remains, to my knowledge, almost entirely unexamined, or at least under-theorized. An Upworthy article from January 2026 gestures toward the sick-day television experience, though for 90s kids rather than the slightly earlier generation I’ve kept in view. Forums across the internet such as Television Obscurities feature users reaching for lost titles, particularly from PBS children’s programming, hoping to recover fragments that might reactivate foundational aesthetic experiences.

It is worth noting that corduroy psychedelia marks something historically bounded: the aleatory nature of media consumption prior to smartphones and on-demand platforms was itself a condition of possibility for the experience. One did not choose PBS so much as encounter it, stumbling into it with the dial locked and with few other stimulating avenues open for quick retreat. The late neoliberal reorganization of attention that followed, with its infinite scroll and algorithmic curation, foreclosed precisely the kind of passive, durational, unselected exposure that corduroy psychedelia required. The smartphone is perhaps its hard cutoff.

Corduroy psychedelia may also be a transatlantic phenomenon, despite perhaps analogous forms of nostalgia emerging contemporaneously elsewhere. As previously suggested, PBS regularly imported British programming from the BBC and Channel 4, while Canadian public broadcasting content crossed both borders. Together, North America and the UK produced a shared anglophone public broadcasting unconscious whose institutional register, civic realist and softly uncanny, was remarkably consistent on all three sides of the Atlantic. That Boards of Canada themselves embody this condition is not incidental: Scottish brothers who spent formative years in Alberta, drawing on the National Film Board of Canada while absorbing the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, they are perhaps the definitive artists of this shared sensibility. Despite their namesake, the confirmed American media sampled by the duo outstrips their Canadian and UK counterparts, with Sesame Street, produced by the Children's Television Workshop and a staple of PBS broadcasts, serving as their most reliable source.

Yet history and geography are not the only things at stake in this accounting. The risk implicit in forms of nostalgic recovery—for instance, for those forum users seeking out the missing pages of their memory’s scrapbooks—is neutralizing a picture whose power derives precisely from its gaps. These incomplete images are, in Freudian terms, a variety of screen memory, whose force lies not in what they preserve but in what they displace. Writing in The Wire, Kodwo Eshun intuited something similar when he observed that Boards of Canada had “tapped into a store of screen memories that electronica had collectively repressed”—their records, he noted, “supply you with fresh memories you never had before.” Where Eshun identifies the collective dimension of this repression, the experience I’ve been describing highlights what is more personally situated within a generational frame: corduroy psychedelia identifies the intense encounter with the psychical aperture through which images are transmitted or hallucinated alongside media—a distant signal that continues to carry residues of the past and the futures lost in its ruins.

Personally, I have long resisted, perhaps unconsciously, formulating my inchoate thoughts about these themes, even with the road cleared by the hauntology boom. Some nostalgic experiences (and perhaps even their explicit conceptualization) might only remain generative of their sublime energies when abandoned to the mute realm of inner life.

The Past Inside the Present

One of the risks of historicizing corduroy psychedelia, as I’ve done above, is draining the Proustian phenomenal richness of the imagination which its residues continue to nourish. Subjecting these remembrances to such intense scrutiny is tantamount to the dissection of a deep sea creature—we pivot from the intensity and effervescence of the images themselves toward politicizing interpretations that evacuate them of their sublimity. It is here where we must move carefully when we discuss the liberatory capacity of hauntology and the recovery of lost futures—indeed, some of these futures may not have guaranteed us a firewall against impending collapse or the forces they strove to contest. Granted, thinking along these lines often gets us talking about the right things and exposing the contradictions that undergird many of our collective fantasies.

From the gyre of forgotten fragments appear curious aleatory images, dreams, reveries, reflections, and infatuations which come to inhabit the present alongside us. They call for our attention and aestheticization, and for what James Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), calls “seeing through” the images. For Hillman, this is not an aesthete’s retreat from the political—it is its precondition. A culture that cannot see through its images, that literalizes and instrumentalizes them, has already surrendered the imaginative ground from which transformative political life grows. This immediate deepening of attention to worlds—developing a practice of going into images—has implications for a revolution I believe many of us desire: to live lives of shared aesthetic richness and genuine connectedness to the world that goes beyond our instrumentalized ways of engaging with it. For Hillman, attempts at literalizing images or dragging the imaginal into the real—repurposing it for explicit political projects—often end in disaster, a position Federico Campagna also echoes in Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons On Escaping History (2025). Walter Benjamin furthermore reminds us that the image is never purely aesthetic either: it carries within it a demand we cannot entirely aestheticize away. These tensions crystallize in the hauntological register. However, between Mark Fisher’s rendering of hauntology and his authoring of the later Acid Communism fragment, we see an ambivalence I find difficult to resolve—the former dwells with the ghost, attending to what capitalist realism has foreclosed; the latter risks conscripting that ghost into a political program, goading the image into prescribed service in which it may not abide.

Whatever the truly revolutionary perspective might be, the past remains inside the present with profound political import. Boards of Canada abides in this truth—the phrase “the past inside the present” loops throughout “Music Is Math,” from Geogaddi (2002), neither resolving nor releasing, simply recurring on the very album that slipped from the halcyon reflections of their early work, drawing closer to the imminent collapse that haunts their later work.

A Memory That Isn’t Yours

Boards of Canada has a way of seeking out the solitary corners of your memory, only to reveal it was never yours to possess nor were you ever alone. The inverse also obtains: in March 2026, a post made by the bocpages Instagram account featured a quote by Jose Adan in which he remarked that “Telephasic Workshop” invoked “a feeling of a memory that isn’t yours, yet somehow belongs to you.” This paradox of Boards of Canada’s music being both depersonalizing and deeply personal is widely reported among devotees of the duo’s discography—and it is precisely the paradox this essay has been circling.

At the heart of it all, Boards of Canada conjures a specter of community almost tribal in composition but uniquely diffuse—less like a collective and more like a communion of atmospheres suffusing the pores of space-time. Fantasies of bucolic flight and nomadic excursions into wilderness abound: a quasi-gorpcore romanticism edging toward an anarchist sensibility, a simultaneous pact with Nature and with Satan. The Dionysianism of The Wicker Man (1973) meets the diabolism of David Koresh—entwined in Bataillean sine waves of communal ecstasy and communal catastrophe. It is within this charged atmosphere that Boards of Canada’s cult of childhood takes root, the arcadian and the apocalyptic not as opposites but as twin expressions of the same restless desire to exit the administered world entirely.

The Cult of Childhood

Writing in Pitchfork, Simon Reynolds avers that the psychedelic character of Music Has the Right to Children springs from its devotion to a “cult of childhood.” The duo’s first major label release is marked by its spectral weave of sampled children’s voices and idyllic melodies unspooled from analog monosynths, typified in iconic selections like “Roygbiv” or the more austere “Kaini Industries.” Reynolds also notes that BoC described the title as “a statement of intention to affect the audience using sound”—the listener positioned as a child wrapped in its wistful haze. The playful inversion of subject and object in the title promises an elegiac involution of time and memory. The album artwork, moreover, depicts a faceless family frozen under bleached Kodachrome: childhood as both vivid and lost, evoking a past that belongs to everyone and no one. Music Has the Right elevates childhood not as a lost origin to recover but as a crystal through which experiences may enter to be replayed and reactivated—the temporal logic aeonic rather than chronic (philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s more precise rendering of BoC’s own “past inside the present”), memory not an object of retrieval but a circulation of fragments, the personal and the impersonal inhabiting the same frequency.

The cult of childhood lifted up by Boards of Canada is fraught with as many risks and pitfalls as it contains enlivening thresholds. The figure of the child often invites cheap sentiment, atavisms, regressions—and perhaps worse. In his “A Note on Cold Rationalism,” Mark Fisher writes: “Spinoza says children are abject because they do not know what causes their actions or desires. Like many adults, they confuse being free with ‘doing what they want,’ when freedom entails attuning your desires and emotions to your reason.” This alleged epistemic formlessness of youth finds its darkest mythical expression in the omnipotent child—the tyranny of desire made flesh in Anthony Fremont in “It’s a Good Life” from the film Twilight Zone (1983): desire without reason, will without limit. His family and neighbors have learned to suppress every authentic response—fear, grief, anger—behind a mask of cheerful compliance, lest a stray thought displease the child and consign them to “the cornfield”, Anthony’s name for the void into which he banishes whatever displeases him. That the only available reprieve is for a young woman named Ethel to follow Anthony into the cartoon world flickering on his television screen—dissolving into his omnipotent fantasy rather than contesting it—illuminates something essential about the cult of childhood at its most terrifying: the adult world does not contain the child’s sovereignty, it capitulates to it, falling into its abyss of desire.

Together with Ethel inside the television’s simulacrum, Anthony reveals his capacity to conjure idyllic beauty and invent florid worlds—the creative potency of the puer archetype disclosed on the very obverse of its horrors. For Nietzsche, this aspect of child is precisely the culminating point of spiritual maturation, a necessary threshold for vitality, creation, and the transfiguration of the past. Nietzsche’s valorization of the child continues and transforms in the work of Deleuze, whose concept of becoming-child describes not an injunction to imitate children but a vector through which sedimented identifications and crystallized subjectivities pass into zones of indiscernibility. To undergo a becoming-child does not demand rueful rumination on the past—if anything it demands the opposite: a radical openness to what has not yet been felt. Certain BoC tracks operate at the threshold where the anchor of memory and the current of new intensities converge, touching our deepest phantasmic investments and urging us to become-child. The poignancy of a diminutive track like “Olson” and its minimal melodic touchpoints unfold as a plaintive audio Rorschach—a melancholic music box that plays like a password to open a core memory and metamorphose its long-harbored yearnings. The childhood imagined in Music Has the Right skews arcadian, yet contains a kernel of the ominous, unbounded will that surfaces decades later in the apocalypticism of Tomorrow’s Harvest.

Geogaddi: A Sacred Conspiracy

The apocalyptic turn in BoC’s discography begins with Geogaddi (2002), the duo’s second major label release with Warp Records, touted for its asphyxiating minimalism and zoetropic nightmares, album made infamous for its subliminal diabolism and extensive gestures to the occult. The album deepens BoC’s penchant for analog saturation with the tape-melting jouissance of a razorburn forgotten under a demon’s caress in tracks like “Sunshine Recorder.” Potent philosophical intimations sublimate from Geogaddi‘s surface atop its aberrant brew of sampled oddities: washed out documentaries, more Sesame Street, found news segments, cult horror films, and even vintage porn. The overall feel of Geogaddi is comparatively upfront and ominous against Music Has the Right. Those who listen closely and often to “Beware the Friendly Stranger” or “The Smallest Weird Number” are beckoned into Geogaddi‘s sacred conspiracy via their precarious melodies and the prophetic madness encrypted within them. Here the nostalgic turns from wistful reminiscence into a darker meditation on the cosmic forces that bind us, as well as the cruelty capitalism and modernity has visited upon the earth.

Geogaddi‘s “Dandelion” enthralls us in a hypnotic negation of our Promethean optimism, its attendant pedagogy, and the civic realist confidence (the postwar institutional faith that the world yields its meaning to patient rational inquiry and attendant civic engagement) that defined the post-Vietnam era. Within the track’s backward-flowing bed of analog synthesizers are narrated clips from Dive to the Edge of Creation (1980), a National Geographic documentary voiced by Leslie Nielsen—an incongruous departure from his absurd characterization in the Naked Gun film series—whose deadpan institutional timbre conveys the blunt optimism of scientific progress as it confronts our planet’s chthonic machinations:

“When lava pours out near the sea surface, tremendous volcanic explosions sometimes occur…in time, submarine sea-mounts or islands are formed…when lava flows underwater, it behaves differently…and a new contraption to capture a ‘dandelion’ in one piece has been put together by the crew…the preparation for a dive is always a tense time…”

The “dandelion” of the title refers to a colony of deep-sea zooids, a cluster of tiny organisms much like jellyfish, whose attempts at surface retrieval tend to end in disintegration—the pressure change destroying the very organism the documentary’s expedition sought to capture intact. This image ramifies philosophically in several directions, particularly in the irony of attempting to extract a singular entity from a world where it thrives as a multiplicity. Our propensity for mythic failure amid our ceaseless lust for extractivism is precisely what the vignette “Dandelion” detourns. Now living almost 25 years in the wake of Geogaddi‘s release—and nearly half a century since Dive to the Edge of Creation—we confront the climate-related consequences of our Promethean megalomania while left in the company of a gormless global commentariat vying for the most viral take on the crisis. Amid the record-breaking rise of sea surface temperatures at the time of writing these words, one reality remains certain: whether a dandelion can be taken intact or not, the lava is not going back in the volcano. The fire stolen by Prometheus now turns upon the thief himself.

Sonic Enantiodromia

The Campfire Headphase (2005) offers a partial reprieve—warmth, folk textures, the open road—before Tomorrow’s Harvest (2013) closes the arc with the sound of a world that has already ended. “Gemini” heralds the destruction as a pall descends over earth’s last petroglyphs and the final dominion of urban sprawl. “White Cyclosa” recoils from the imperial boomerang—black hawk helicopters glimpsed through the silhouette of a child’s slingshot. “Telepath” reprises BoC’s penchant for children counting, but the playground is now vacant, its echo replaced by the microwaved vocalization of a disembodied prophet pronouncing “This is (is) the end of the Earth… for now.” From BoC’s early sun-kissed reminiscences to survivors living in the ruins of brutalist utopias, their corpus is sonic enantiodromia—a reminder that every cult of childlike wonder contains its syzygy in an impending Satanic apocalypse. Corduroy psychedelia identifies the frequency on which all of this was first received: the child on the tobacco-colored couch, dial locked, fever running, receiving transmissions from a world that was already, without knowing it, saying goodbye.

Coda

Many have come to this essay on the promise of finding a philosophical theory of Boards of Canada—or perhaps I have sent it to you under precisely that promise. Some of the reasons for writing it have been announced or implied in the foregoing, but the more immediate occasion was a recent conversation with someone developing a project that sought to include my reflections on the work of Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison—reflections grounded, in part, in my Vintagia project, which was heavily shaped by BoC and the world their music has unfolded. It was an unexpected privilege to be counted among the other, more towering names connected to the currently secret endeavor, and this essay served in part to crystallize thoughts I have been exchanging with that project—a document where those ideas might live somewhat more tangibly.

Followers of the Split Infinities blog (the name itself a quiet tip of the hat to BoC) will already be familiar with the Acid Horizon and LEPHT HAND projects, which in their distinct ways broach the political and the psychedelic through theoretical intervention. My musical project SEREPTIE emerged within the atmosphere of BoC’s autochthonic energies—imagined as the eventual aftermath of Boards of Canada: a lo-fi ambient world both inebriated and asphyxiated by the detritus of the apocalypse BoC heralds.

Interspersed throughout this essay are images from Vintagia: I Ching Oracle for Psychogeography and Creative Discovery—an oracle deck I developed as a tool for navigating creative and spatial experience through the hexagrams of the I Ching. The deck is currently sold out, though a second run is forthcoming—and if a publisher willing to distribute it more broadly happens to be reading, so much the better! If you would like to be notified when the next run becomes available, follow this blog and leave a note in the comments.

And to Marcus and Michael: if you’d be up for it, Acid Horizon would love to have you for an interview.