Audio File of the Nigredo

Audio File of the Nigredo

If you ever wanted to know how the alchemical Nigredo sounds, here's your chance. This was mixed by hand, so beat matching isn't perfect and volume shifts may be a little rough because I have the same mixer as I used in the 90s, but hopefully it adds character, or something like that. I had to sign many incomprehensible contracts with the unseen realm to get noetic direction on track selection, so I hope that you enjoy because I'm not sure what I've unleashed on myself and the world. Play it loud on good headphones or large hardwood speakers. Nigredo Studies:   1. Mark Henning, Jaguar: bouncy rays of twice-negated darkness  2. Mark Broom: Satellite (Alex Bau Repaint): take the line of flight found in the maw of these soft laser beams  3. Luke Slater, O-Ton (Reassembled 1): breathe through this precipitous sound machine, feel your guts tremble in vertiginous ecstasy  4. Juan Atkins, Transport (Carl Craig): the Detroit masters arrive with offerings from the unseen realm of deep, sonorous, rubbery bands as well as skull-smashing four on the floor bass drums  5. Juan Atkins, Starlight (Mike Huckaby): wash in the dub streams of fuzzy, dynamic bliss  6. Parallel 9, Quanan: time for a long swim in the river Styx, bathe in its electric biochemical flows   7. Parallel 9, Quantico: the warm rushes of nonbeing deterritorialize the determinate biology of being   8. Blawan, 993: open wide and let the deep resonances of the body without organs fill the air  9. Robert Hood: Higher! (Ben Sims): Praise and worship the capacious love from which you come  10. Terrance Parker, Alarm the Sound: (Tiefschwarz): let all with ears hear, elsewhere’s glorious groove is far-near, already but not yet, and revealed as hidden  11. Mark Henning, Exit Acid: cast out demons so they can wonder in the fatuousness of their own dry places and your daemon will find your house cleaned and hospitable for its gratuitous musings  12. Terrance Parker: Alarm the Sound (Dirty Channels): emergency dance meeting at my house  13. Luigi Madonna, Unconditional Beauty: beauty is a sublime horror, as the Italians well know  14. Truss, Beacon: The radiant, green snake speaks, so listen  15. Randomer, Stupid Things: stupidity is the new wisdom of alchemy’s synchronistic errors, only confusion can save us from clarity  https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] I mix the mixtapes that I post here but..., Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

What Can CS Peirce Illuminate about Paul Ricoeur?

It may be helpful to map some Peircean semiotic concepts onto Ricoeur’s hermeneutics to see how they illuminate each other. Ricoeur doesn’t use Peirce in this way himself, but he certainly used much of the semiotic work that built upon CS Peirce’s initial contributions to the field. Peirce adumbrates three types of signs: the icon, which relates the sign to the signifier via resemblance, the index via material causality, and the symbol via convention, each of which contains various degrees of freedom relative to the degrees of determination of each’s Peircean “Interpretant.” Peirce formulated the relation of the sign to its signified as a triad that included what he called the “Interpretant,” which was the intermediation of semantic meaning within the semiotic relation of seeing one thing (the signified) in terms of another (the sign). The sign did not directly present the signified in an unmediated way but through a concept, which for Peirce was the Interpretant in the intention of the interpreter.   Paul Ricoeur also formulated semantic meaning in terms of the relative degrees of freedom given to the intention of the interpretant, which for Ricouer was the hermeneutic circle of interpretation itself. The signifier determines its signified incompletely, which leaves room for possible interpretations in the gap between them. The irreducible ambiguity of this gap is generative because new semantics and new concepts can be formed in the clash of interpretations within the conceptual mediation of the intention of the interpretant, which mirrors Ricoeur’s depiction of a metaphor as a clash of meanings that poetically renewed and increased being within the degrees of freedom given by the virtuality of the imagination.  The more distantiated the relation between the signifier and its signified, which was the relative level of abstraction of the interpretant, the more degrees of freedom contained in the possibility space actuated by the relation. Even semantic possibility spaces that seemed mostly determined, such as the indexical relation of cause and effect, can be reopened to reinterpretation, or reimagination, through the clash of possible interpretations given by the interpretant of the metaphor. One of Ricoeur’s favorite examples is GM Hopkins’ metaphorical predication, “The mind contains mountains,” which clearly contains sublime degrees of freedom for the poetic imaginations of a community of interpreters. For Ricoeur, as for Giles Deleuze, imaginal virtuality was actual and as ontologically real as a physically actualized possibility space, just as a conceptual realization in this actual possibility space was as ontologically real as a physical realization. Finally, CS Peirce’s “Hypostatic Abstract” has many illuminating overlaps with Ricoeur’s notion of semantic realization in the poetic imagination to be covered in the next episode.  https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] I mix the mixtapes that I post here but..., Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

The Unknowable Intention: Desire Is a Demon

Thacker’s Types of Worlds in relation to horror:  1. Pagan horror, such as Wicker Man, The Witch, and Midsommer, are the horror of the World-for-Us because pagan techne is for the instrumentalization of the world. In Pagan religious praxis the spiritual realm is studied to transact with according to the intentions of the practitioner. From the perspective of Demonology, which is how the Christian Church viewed pagan praxis, demons were identified by name to bind them for a transactional intention. However, once summoned, demons often were able to trade their binding for the binding of the summoner. The mythological structure of the Faustian Bargain reveals this reversal in which obtaining the demon’s favor exacts a high price.  2. The Horror of the unknowable intention of the Other explored in narrative troupes such as the “Slasher” or demonic possession is the horror of the World-In-Itself. The world of the unknowable other withdraws from us as the enigma of Being-In-Itself. This is the same enigma as that of the Being-for-Itself of Heidegger's Present-at-Hand intention, but the Other’s intention withdraws from subjective intention in a sinister manner in the Horror genre because the paradox of intentional ambiguity appears as the threat of desire’s inherent unknowability. It is not just unclear what motivates Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers to kill, it is unknowable. This unknowability is the horror of the “in-itself” of desire’s eternal withdrawal from the intention. When this indeterminacy shifts from the external Other to the internalized Other of the voice from within, the question shifts from “What does the Other want from me?” to “What does the Other who speaks as me want?”. This internalization of unintentional desire is ultimately the reason why the desire of the Other is unknowable i.e.: the Other’s desire is also unknowable to himself. Jason Vorhees and Michael Myers also don’t know why they do what they do, even though the narratives of both include various versions of “Origin Stories.” Origin Stories may go some way to suggesting the Slasher’s intentions but offer no final or definitive account of the ambiguous excess of his desire. The demonic possession narrative simply conveys the unknowability of the desire of the Other to the ambiguity of the desire within. The intention of the Other withdraws from the subjective intention in the same way that the subject withdraws from itself as the subjective unconscious, which is why the unconscious is the fount of all horror.  3. The Cosmic horror of no-intention is most associated with HP Lovecraft. The end of entropy is not the unintentional relations of chaos but the total absence of relations. Cosmic Horror such as Stephen King’s The Mist or Lovecraft’s The Color out of Space present the absence of intention as what cannot be brought into relation with the subjective intention. This is not the unknowability of intention, nor the negation of intention, but the before and beyond of both.  https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] I mix the mixtapes that I post here but..., Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Return of the Gods: the Other's Intention

https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-of-the-gods/ Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe? “I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself? I prefer a God who isn’t really sure if He exists or not. In all the best religious experiences, nobody’s certain about what’s going on, including and especially God.” “When God showed up in a whirlwind and upbraided Job about how he wasn’t there at the foundation of the Universe, God starts talking about those weird and heady creatio ex nihilo times all cool like were you there when Deep calls to Deep? and this sounds badass, but then God gets lost in rambling about Behemoth and Leviathan and stuff that nobody’s sure why He made or what exactly they even are—but God wanted to seem like He was in more control than He actually was.” “God reveals His unconscious in this diatribe when He disavows His part in the evil that Job is suffering. Jung interpreted God’s “shadow self” as His repudiation of His relation to His son Satan—which is to deny that if you are the author of everything, then you are also the instigator of evil.” “For me, God’s shadow is ambiguity, which is His inability to determine all there is of the Universe. In other words, God has an unconscious just like the rest of us. He can’t be omnibenevolent because of His part in the evils of the world. But this lack of at-oneness, this lack of control, allows for whatever cool but incomprehensible stuff might follow from this impotence.” “My favorite Talmudic passage depicts rabbis arguing about the Oven of Akhani, which was a dispute about the purity of said oven for kosher cooking. God shows up to settle the controversy because it’s His law after all. But Rabbi Joshua tells God that He doesn’t have a say in the matter since the Torah is in their hands now.” “The gift of ambiguity is better than clarity because it is always open to further interpretation, and the joy of humanity is the community of interlocutors that indeterminacy gifts to us. Belief as a test of faith was a huge mistake. Religion took a wrong turn when it started to lift up psychosis as its preferred position. Psychosis is fine and has its place, but neurotic doubt is an undeniable salve for too much belief.” “I’m whatever religion they were at Gobekli Tepe. Religious practice should be a celebration of irreducible ambiguity. I was so excited when they uncovered Gobekli Tepe in Southern Turkey and Klaus Schmidt was like, “What the hell was going on here?” and decided it was a prehistoric zoo. Here was a city almost twelve thousand years old, built not for sedentary and hierarchical people but for the sacred practices of hunter-gathers who came together uncoerced to celebrate holy mysteries with ambiguous trickster gods in liminal spaces designed for music, dancing, stories, feasting, and shit-tons of carved animals doing stuff, like a vulture presenting an orb to a man without a head but with a prominent phallus, and the sublime wonderment of a submerged room with benches along the walls and loads of giant stone penises in the middle for some reason.” “Schmidt and countless others have speculated on what these people thought that they were doing there. I for one, perhaps naively, hope they didn’t precisely know what they were doing there. Hegel famously pondered the “mysteries of the Ancient Egyptian religions,” to which Žižek postulated that “the mysteries of the Ancient Egyptians were mysterious to the Ancient Egyptians too.”” “Amen.” https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] I mix the mixtapes that I post here but..., Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes.

Paul Ricoeur's Hermeneutics.

Paul Ricoeur demonstrated the shift from knowing being as it is in-itself, or as it is essentially, in the sense of without relation to a knower, to uncovering being as a process of relational interpretation, which might be thought of as the shift from the Husserlian "Eidetic" reduction to the Heideggerian "Hermeneutic Circle." Edmund Husserl hoped to disclose the things-in-themselves of the Kantian noumena without the observers intention, so that what appeared to us could show itself from its own intention without the interference of our projective presuppositions. However, he discovered that without the intentions of our presuppositions, nothing can be known. We know what there is through concepts, concepts that are motivated by our intention, rather than neutral observations. Martin Heidegger then showed that this conundrum, sometimes called the Observer Effect, was the result of our having been thrown into the facticity of a particular body at a particular place and time, which necessitated a particular intention.  But the limitations of situated-being's facticity was also the horizon of any possible knowing because knowing is intentional, which is to say that knowing is motivated, motivated in the first place by "Dasein's" thrownness, which is the limit and horizon of its knowing, and then motivated in the second place by the uncertainty reduction of niche construction. Therefore, all knowing is motivated by care about being and not by knowing itself, or rather, knowing itself is care for being. Ontic beings care about the Ontology of the Being from which they were thrown, as well as the particularities of the situation into which they have been thrown. Ricoeur's great contribution to knowing about being was to formulation how an observer's situated intention can contributed to an open circle of other intentional situations. The differences of intentional situations require interpretations of being rather than a closed, determinate identification of being-in-itself. Ricoeur's version of the hermeneutic circle was formulated as the circle of "Self as Another," in which each self knows itself through another, or through the indeterminacy of otherness. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] I mix the mixtapes that I post here but..., Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co [http://jamesreeves.co] for the intro and outro music of most episodes.