Society is the patient

the dispensing of existence / just prevention of total dependency / acquiring wrongful knowledge / unknown unknown / think not think / humming / the jewel ornament of liberation?

epochal as a body of work could be considered a meditation on the pharmakon—the technical supports for living we have developed as a species that both cure and comfort, poison and destroy. Technological humanity has been theorised by philosophers such as Bernard Stiegler as being explicitly pharmacological, dwelling in the collapsed dualities of sickness and health, appetite and satiation, emptiness and plenitude, knowing and uncertainty, existing and not—in the bothness, even radical plurality, of kōan, riddles and found objects.

Here, amid the work of the collective, nuclear technologies appear spectrally, the terrible sound of a blast coming from the autonomous purification unit (APU) as an explicit sign of the pharmakon. A technology, that is, with a terrifying sun-like power to warm and provide energy but which can also destroy planets. Within the conception of the pharmakon is everything we do to try and help ourselves, each technology exposing that we can be both skilled and unskilled, that our milieu can offer fidelity and infidelity, autonomy and automation.

Power and helplessness, potency and impotence, spirit and spiritual conflict—these are the materials of the pharmacology of the spirit that give us what Bernard Stiegler describes as ‘everyday apocalyptic feeling’ in What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology (2013).¹ Here he has it that the world has moved on from biopower or, rather, that psychopower has overlapped it, under which the prevalent condition is distractibility. Self-distrust and passivity cascade from this loss of attention and care, from a critical lack of esteemable acts.

et al. has been engaged with the mapping of the human experience of ignorance, of saṃsāra—the pain of grasping for permanence and solidity of existence—as the condition of pharmacological beings. The epistemological load is heavy, and traumas are piled on, yet desperation sometimes can be tuned to a focus or signal. Their practice is littered with lists, plans, schema:

1. why they are here / 2. who they have come for / 3. when they will leave

1. deceit / 2. dependence / debilitation / 4. dread / 5. desensitisation

re-ordering / re-emptying / re-absorption / re-newal / re-demption

Plans for escape from a prison of our own making might look like diagrams or mind maps, and they might take the form of numbered lists, such as those in buddhist texts: The Four Noble Truths, The Four Seals, The Three Higher Trainings, The Thirty-Seven Aspects of the Path to Enlightenment, The Eight Verses of Thought Transformation, The Twelve Links, The Ten Grounds, The Six Realms, The Six Yogas. The Tantras. The Sutras. The Quintessences. The Dharma.

We are told that if we do not think of the evolution of saṃsāra, you will not know how to sever its root. But it seems impossible to not become overly fearful as we draw our own maps. It seems we must use what we have and live in the production of negentropy—the opposite of entropy—to avoid the trap that Franco Berardi theorises in Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (2017), that is, that ‘[t]he social body that rebels against the automaton is obliged to choose between suicide and impotence.’²

The table of contents of Berardi’s book reads as a spell against impotence: I POTENCY: The Age of Impotence / Humanism, Misogyny and Late Modern Thought // II POWER: Automation and Terror / Necro-Capitalism / The Dark Side of Desire // III POSSIBILITY: Conundrum / Superstition / Disentanglement / A Short History of the General Intellect / Dynamics of the General Intellect / Invention // AFTERWORD: The Inconceivable.

There is a warning in et al.’s statements against automation, which Berardi describes as an explosion of the semiotic sphere that leaves the subject in informational freefall. Not knowing where to turn (or even believing that turning will be something anyone is interested in), living, acting with agency, feels chaotic and under-certain—there is insufficient trust in the self to even carry desire.

‘The impotence of subjectivity is an effect of the total potency of power when it becomes independent from human will, decision and government—when it is inscribed in the automated texture of technique and of language.’³ Berardi invokes the generative potential of chaos to mobilise desire, but laments (following Deleuze and Guattari) that ‘at a certain moment one perceives the suffering of the universe, chaos, and the surrounding acceleration that blurs perception, attention and understanding … This is the dark side of desire … the perception that we are no longer able to follow the rhythm of chaosmotic desire.’⁴

Where do we find solutions to alleviate suffering? There are many men’s ideas in my field of perception when I would prefer to hear women’s voices. It is important to pay attention to the aural and to aurality as well as the more obvious visual, textual routes of learning. In the notebook-mapping of epochal I read ‘AUDIO / SPINE / MUMA // mind control / the middle path’.

epochal models the corpus of human society as a body lying prone, as if receiving or waiting to receive treatment. It suggests a body that is indeterminate: if this work were a question, its answer would be both or all, simultaneously. This is the way of thinking pertaining to the pharmakon, the non-binary kill-and-cure that is the nature of any human effort to neurotically protect itself from disturbance. All experience is disturbance, a voice intones, and a bell is struck, its tone suggesting we return our focus to the breath.

The sound of a nuclear blast at Fangataufa, recorded in 1995 off the east coast of Great Barrier Island, emanates from the APU. Approximately 181 French tests took place there and on Mururoa between 1966 and 1996. The rusty box, breaking a code of secrecy, makes one explosion audible, and its horror perceptible. Given the APU’s referents, and in epochal’s attention to the pharmakon, this corpus could be gainfully studied through Stiegler’s writings on pharmacology and technics.

What Makes Life Worth Living concerns itself with the human practice of technology, describing our habit of externalising knowledge—techne—as foundational to the human experience, and is a reference point within et al.’s practice. Indeed, et al.’s index of atomic testing can be considered productively against Stiegler’s chapter ‘Pharmacology of Nuclear Fire, Generalized Automation and Total Proletarianization’. As if in unison with the knowledge-aspirations of the collective’s practice, he ends the book with an answer to the question sketched in its title—that the only thing worth living is the struggle against stupidity.⁵

Stiegler warns of how the techne of modern industrial capitalism disorients the subject and short-circuits its long chains of connection and knowledge. He wrote in the true horror of the present, urgently, of an entirely believable crisis of the episteme (based in the loss of attention, care and savoire-faire, in a disorientation and prevailing atmosphere of a-significance) from which we most likely will not be able to escape.

He writes (after Donald Winnicott’s Playing and Reality) of the importance of transitional space, of transitional objects, for the realm of illusion is the site of ‘our initiation of experience’ as children, and one that we turn to again. Significantly, transformative practices—in which, as artists, et al. are engaged—reside ‘in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts, and to religion, and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work’.⁶

He contends that it is the terrible speed of the industrial pharmakon, demanding the most return on investment for the least time and work, that causes desire to be unbound and decomposed: ‘The “spirit of capitalism” thereby reveals itself to be the pharmacology most poisonous for the spirit, in which there proliferates apocalyptic discourse, feelings and tones of all kinds, and as banality itself.’⁷

We can aim beyond this intoxication, beyond this capturing of ‘attentional fluxes’ and ‘the loss of attention that in politics results in the impossibility of making decisions, leading to resignation and to the exploitation of drives incited through industrial populism—via which a state of chronic carelessness and negligence is established, paving the way for extremely acute sociopolitical crises.’⁸ Beware of the displacement of thought and body into machines in an unfaithful milieu via dis-apprenticeship—the obstruction of learning and attention that is ruining the societal process of ‘learning to live’.⁹

Stiegler writes of a necessary detoxification, a ‘working of the spirit’, by which we reengage our attention to find a cure in technical objects that can open ourselves to new futures. He writes, at one point, as if summarising the work and resistance of the collective: ‘through their struggles, from out of which individuation is reconstituted, that is, a self, these “workers of the spirit” are engaged in the age of proletarianization—which is a kind of disintoxication.’ Indeed they are, always, against ‘a state of systemic stupidity that becomes the law of drive-based capitalism and industrial populism’.¹⁰

After Prometheus, the original and accursed stealer of fire (a conceptualisation grounded in phallocentric mythopoesis), ‘[t]his irreducibly pharmacological being will never be rid of the threat that is constituted in every pharmakon, and that is symbolised by fire as both technics and desire.’ It is this disintoxication, and the process of spreading it to foster ‘the everyday or ordinary capacity for discernment of the extra-ordinary that supports the individuation of those … ensconced within the mystery of their skill of their craft, their métier, and of its ministry’.¹¹

The pharmakon is an explicit philosophical figure in the collective’s recent work, one that speaks of how any medicine, restorative, reform or tool (including thought) can be medicinal or poisonous; how duality in thinking (and, as buddhism provokes thunderously, thinking itself) must be abandoned. Individualism has been long problematised by the collective, which proposes the idea of transindividuation—the way in which becoming an evolved ‘I’ is only possible through the ‘we’. Collectivisation, in other words.

no real self / the ‘knowing’ suffering existence / believe in fate blame on others / chronological homogeneity / we are our unquestioned beliefs / snake-knowing better way to catch a snake

epochal can be read as an expression of the ambivalence—the non-duality—that et al. establish in this ‘survey’ of their work, itself both document and non-document. A survey that is a non-survey invites acknowledgement of the fundamental indeterminacy maintained in the practice. It is a rat’s nest of erudition after a disaster specified in many discourses, and necessitates wire fencing (allowing us to see works from both sides of the fence), warnings, expressions of collective privation.

What could be seen as a refusal to be clear, about subjectivity, authorship, agency, thesis, history, also appears deeply philosophical, admirable, amorous, equanimous. Loving knowledge enough to let it be itself—a mystery, alien, plastic—it does not attempt to understand anything in perpetuity, to summarise knowing, stem its flows or control its growth. It does not shame or punish its disinterest in understanding itself in any simplistic way, nor see any weakness in acting collectively or anonymously.

The work of et al. has been ongoing since 2000, and the convoluted timeline that supports this ‘exhibition’ as its skeleton suggests that none of the work is old or outmoded. All material remains valid; all is matter for recalculation with new tools of juxtaposition and contradiction—findings circulate and are recomposed by the artists. There is no redundancy in the growing archive, and any questions regarding the practice are directed back to the self-evident documents of its repository.

The body of work is more anarcho-syndicalist than neoliberal-governmental in its collective material attempt to express thinking about consciousness, and other tautological problems of analysis. Or to show how as individuals we do not have enough life, energy, power or capacity to carry out a vision at scale. It is necessary to work beyond the limits of self and to entertain arguments for immortality and mortality.

I am considering a work which is a pink blanket inscribed as follows: ‘Thus it was said. This concludes the fifteenth chapter on incidental behavioural patterns from the Quintessence Tantra, the Secret Oral Tradition of the Eight Branches of the Science of Healing / from the Office of Radiation Safety Manatū Hauora.’ Linking two modalities of healing achieves a refutation of the idea that the only valid approach to healing is that which government defines.

There is another blanket, green and cream, also with institutional stripes, divided into four quadrants with the words ‘act no / of human / charit-able / traffick-ing actions’ above a single word ‘charity’—like a heading but at the end, if we read it as a page. The wall is picked out in institutional shades of green. There are screens with large redacted black areas obscuring who knows what—or nothing—inviting the projection of disowned experiences.

Here is a wheelie chair with ‘AUM’ sprayed on the back, on which those predisposed to parrhesia (truth-telling) might sit and write it up. The pink letters refer to ‘aum’ in the mantra–mystical sense, and the Aum Shinrikyo group who released nerve gas into the Tokyo subway in the 1990s. Its doctrines (based on idiosyncratic readings of early buddhist and Hindu Shiva-worshipping texts, Christian millennialist ideas and Nostradamus verses) aimed to transmute the sins of the world.

There are three metal-framed folding stools with cloth seats, and sitting on them are five lumpen objects—like asteroids, objects more cosmological than terrestrial. Four are cast in bronze, and the last is a crystal of equal size. All but one of these objects are attached to a bolt so they may be screwed into something and act as a knob. Three of these knobs used to stand on a wheeled box marked ‘mars / terra’ and at another time, on a similarly designated small suitcase.

These are boxes that might contain clothes and personal items, explosives, data-gathering equipment—or nothing. The knobs might be used to open perceptual doors or drawers, or simply to put something out of sight, or enclose within, like a small description. et al. is an abbreviation for et alia (neuter plural). But it can also be an abbreviation for et alii (masculine plural) or et aliae (feminine plural). There are several things hidden by the abbreviation.

A floorplan prepared by the collective for the MUMA exhibition takes the form of a human female body lying the length of the gallery, head to the dawn (east), feet to the dusk (west). On the map there are circles within squares, containing and intensifying energies. The material elements installed in epochal come from a number of previous installations, and a notebook flowchart shows how this articulation operates as an aggregation, an amalgam, a continuation of the work and its concerns, its interests.

In the collective’s notebooks, there are several such mind-maps explaining which bodies of work have appeared where, when and under what name. The floorplan might be sent into space to explain humanity, embodied as female and subject to the curse of Prometheus (a minor deity pertaining to forethought). He and his twin Epimetheus (afterthought, or memory) were charged with giving qualities to all animals. Epimetheus got carried away giving gifts to the beasts and left nothing for humanity.

In a panic to fix this problem, Prometheus resorted to stealing, and took fire from the senior gods so that we would not be without qualities. This fire was not only elemental fire, but knowledge, intellect and the ability to develop technologies. The curse of this is manifold: we are compelled to strive to know things and live with the habit of technology as the exteriorisation of that knowledge. We think of ourselves as apart from other beasts, and as ‘humankind’—surely the main driver of anthropocentrism, which is not kind.

The human habit of thought dooms us to apply thinking as a force to capture, extract or exert violence over something that would otherwise be wilder. What we invent to advance our species and decrease suffering can destroy us in new fires. Fixing one problem can lead to many more in its place. In taking fire, and with it the capacity for intellectual and technological life—to help but also to produce illness—the pharmacological subject is doomed to swing between craving and aversion.

The expression ‘society is the patient’ is cribbed from Tripping on Utopia (2024), a book about Margaret Mead’s work on expanding consciousness; and how this utopic work was swiftly coopted by state surveillance and mind-control programs. It seemed a useful framing device for considering the collective’s ongoing erudite yet tangled study of consciousness, error, existence and nonexistence, impermanence, and the health of the socius.

abstain from conforming to ritual motives for solidarity a baseless opinion / self-purification denial / humming / career opportunities for motivated people / the self neither exists nor does not exist / new moon blood moon real? unreal? the moon is always the moon no diminishment

et al.’s agency is collective, philosophical–spiritual in nature, and warns us to resist the algorithmic siren song of a hive mind offering distracted happy lives for messy ones. The collective form expresses a challenging aspect of the human experience—there is too much to do alone, yet in a group we have a tendency for violence in thought, action and habit of language. Especially, as et al.’s 2024 film n.f.w expounds, a particular and pervasive tendency for violence against women and girls.

This work seems to ask us how we might approach existence and nonexistence with groupthink. Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest (2023) showed us cinematically the dehumanisation that can be seeded in people grouping together. Texts such as González Rodríguez’s The Femicide Machine (2012) demonstrate the mechanistic force of violence, in this case the mass murder of women in the Mexican borderlands of Ciudad Juárez. Yet still there is the human capacity to refuse to register atrocity.

The artists rehumanise themselves with voice, critical teeth and summoned powers—subjectivity pluralised, labour organised and attention focused—apparently with soul-knowledge of the letters and machines for think/not-think. The APU is positioned towards the (north) head of the corpus, the figure of the female body in et al.’s floorplan for epochal. Is this an alternative machine that may, in turn, conjoin and distort or heal other machines in operation?

‘Her’ head is in the eastern cul-de-sac of the gallery, her spine an energetic hara line extending from feet and head on the horizontal plane, or if tilted to the vertical, into the earth and heavens—as if plotting of a golden mean or ratio. The series of attention-cages the size of carparks (classrooms, cells, sites of indoctrination, storage units) runs east to west on the gallery’s north side, which, in a rongoā Māori sense, is the side of the feminine. Body memory and lines of force become the dynamic imprint of the installation, guiding its intention and efficacy.

The APU is in the throat position, and is, as et al. have pointed out, the only complete work reshown in epochal. And at her heart or solar plexus is a ‘domestic abuse carpet’, like a mat for a high-traffic area. This MUMA gallery space has been described by the collective as ‘the lounge of denial’, because, from their horrified point of view, most of the world is sitting in denial, watching other things, not the atrocities of the world.

The silent film shown in the foyer, where visitors (although ‘participants’ is probably a better and less passive–spectacular word for their agencies) are inducted, harks back to overhead projection presentations and organisational inductions. The collective aims to understand our being and our conditions, and the conditions of our conditions, ad infinitum—a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose (like a recurring integer).

There is an indexing of violence in the work, as if attempting to render it an alchemical ingredient that might be neutralised or otherwise transmuted by focused metta (loving-kindness practice). Transitional space is made—in this case within the space of the institution—annexing it via utterance, material and verbal, or oracular. If the eyes are focused just past it, as when trying to see an aura around a tree, it can take, for the briefest moment (the processing time of intuition), the form of a pantheon of ululating goddesses.

There is a pair of photographs in Tripping on Utopia that show Mead with her colleagues (including Gregory Bateson, with whom she conducted groundbreaking work on expanded consciousness that ended up informing CIA of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’) at the 1954 Princeton conference called ‘The Problem of Consciousness’, an annual event. In one picture their eyes are open, and in another they are closed.

Margaret Mead looks like ‘manage mood’ in my terrible note-taking script. In the thinking of the collective, ‘the problem of consciousness’ is not a good frame for a conference or wānanga, as consciousness is not a problem, or rather should not be thought of as a problem. The fact that it is difficult to understand, to apprehend, does not make it a problem, it is merely and fundamentally the condition of our conditions.

To operate in that field of research productively at any time, alternative views of existence must be digested, including theories unpopular with empirical sciences. All four directions need to be called in, and the associated human facilities, which runs contrary to the privileging of the intellect in the dominant culture over the emotional, spiritual and physical.

et al. is a term that is expansive, connoting connection to others and pertaining to quantum knowledge (or that resulting from meta-binary processes) and with that knowledge comes ritual and heart energy. Just as hatred cannot coexist with loving kindness inwardly, and dissipates if supplanted with thoughts based on affection, the action of metta can be directed outwards. Dialectics and governmentality breathed in, and something healed breathed out.

Viable alternatives. Multiplicity. A dream of gates. Other energies can turn things upside-down, in a better way. We can see in the work of the collective the depiction of what it is to walk a path of self-enquiry, of mind training in the face of societal crises—of oppression, violence, surveillance, indoctrination. Crises of the episteme, of ontologies, of metaphysics. Materials and referents arrested in the permanent present of the work of art, like a monk dying in meditation.

Art is held to be the alchemical belly, crucible or cauldron into which dark is breathed in, and from which light is breathed out. et al.’s the fundamental practice, 2005, reads as such an attempt, an essay to transmute base metal into gold. By placing Tibetan buddhist and healing texts side-by-side in this energised space they are given extra healing ability. The kōan, poem and artwork are arguably the only sites which admit certain far-reaching complexities. It is here, in their semiotic surpluses, that we find door-maps to the subterranean zones of our suffering.

Buddhist tenets such as The Four Noble Truths have been likened to systems for diagnosing the human experience, tools to explain suffering and its cure. Accordingly, the care of the self, and the controls the self is subjected to, remain fundamental concerns of the collective, which they articulate as propositions—refutations, aphoristic quotations, process notes, and summary lists, albeit partial and organised to fit novel and searching schemata.

Western philosophical thought is juxtaposed with Eastern, esoteric and scientific fragments in the manifestations of et al.’s work. We encounter puzzles (escape rooms?) of thought and non-thought, being and non-being, I-thinking and idea-mind, to confound and complicate nice logics of sense and weak pseudo-illuminations. Analyses and theories are developed, intensified, then dissolved by their inherent vice; thought fails from the inside.

The practice is interested in the point where logic breaks down, the way of thinking we use to try to understand and control, and in non-meaning rather than meaning. When anything is inscribed ‘I’, it is done by juxtaposing logics, and by using words like ‘mu’, which mean nothing, nonsense is made out of logic. I-thinking creates meaningless information, and going past the thinking mind and the I-aesthetic is to pass into a more evolved state—one opposed to commodified forms of wellbeing.

There is another kind of knowing, we are told, that is different. An inner knowing, or an aesthetic knowing that can handle impermanence, indeterminacy and plasticity. A mind map can be a kōan, making and undoing itself somehow, its temporality apart from our supposedly real world, which is imagined empirically, devoid of intuition, spirit and embodied perception. What agencies are in play in the work of the practice, and in our sphere of being, if we consider that everything has consciousness?

In 2021 the collective wrote in correspondence about works made onto sheets of newspapers such as The New York Times.¹² Tape and window-shaped patches of brown–grey paint were applied to the paper, and words were scrawled along the sides: ‘no fixed self / spirit queen portal’, like incantations or entreaties to a generous and listening guardian. Is this an evocation of the spirit-queen from Michael Taussig’s The Magic of the State (1997), a text that also seeks ‘insight into what we might call history … of the spirits of the dead as the mark of nation and state’?:

Torn between the overlapping claims of fiction and those of documentary, I have allowed this magic of the state to settle in its awkwardness in the division of forms. I have changed the names and places of people where necessary to preserve anonymity, but also to render more adequately the fictional features without which documentary, including history and ethnography, could not be … After all it is not only the writer of fiction who fuses reality with dreamlike states. This privilege also belongs, as Kafka taught, to the being-in-the-world of the modern state itself.¹³

When discussing the brown–grey of the painted portal, the artists indicated their interest in colour having its own agency, and cited Alfred Gell’s writing in Art and Agency (1998) that everything has agency—materials, artist, viewer, colour, indices, documents, text.¹⁴ They raised this to indicate the range of agencies active in their work—social, physical, sonic and energetic, each with their own descent lines—as their aesthetic spaces are made.

In the Gell text, there is the reference to agency, the index, and to the condition of the ‘patient’: ‘Art objects are the equivalents of persons, or more precisely social agents … The index is the material thing which motivates abductions of an art-related kind. What we have to consider under this rubric are instances in which the material index dictates to the artist, who responds as ‘patient’ to its inherent agency.’¹⁵

The form of work in et al.’s practice gives the impression of an evolving experimental design drawn in space, in which all the materials have equal agency—and are authored by a collective in a constantly becoming state, et al. (and its variants) being a phrase that indicates interconnection with others, with all, as fundamental, and to quantum calculation or imaging. It makes perfect sense that a singular stable feminine subjectivity is insufficient for artists under these conditions.

When these newspaper works are displayed, it does not take long before they begin to disintegrate, the corrosive work of the acid in the paper pulp—newsprint’s ‘inherent vice’ in the language of conservation—being accelerated by light. In its physicality and beyond it, there are many agencies in play in the work: ‘We are thus dealing with a project of verification in which the artist takes an autonomous, impersonal, mediumistic role—“the spirit is quite capable of staging its own manifestations spontaneously”.’

This passage (quoting psychoanalyst Carl Jung) is taken from a text in the et al. publication Critical Remarks on the National Question, Volume 1: That’s Obvious! That’s Right! That’s True! (2009). Their essay is signed aliquem alium internum, a Latin expression meaning something along the lines of ‘someone other within’. To the Stoics, it connoted ‘the god within’, but it is more widely understood as the feeling that we are not alone inside our bodies.

Consciousness has been described as living in a house that has a basement. In the basement there is a part of us we ignore. Sometimes the basement-self throws a note in a bottle out a low window, and it rolls onto the footpath by the street outside. A passer-by self brings it to our door, and we answer. The self-aspect who picked it up says that they think the message is for us inside. We say we know nothing about any of this and close the door.

What do we hide from ourselves? How do we understand what is true, even for our selves? According to psychoanalysis, we functionally hire other people to carry out the aspects of ourselves we are negating. There are so many questions we can ask, and they all apparently contain their own answer. Critical Remarks also reproduces a passage from the anarchist text The Coming Insurrection. In that preface, the invisible committee ends with a series of questions:

How to decide?
How to subsist?
HOW TO FIND EACH OTHER?

there is no division or separateness / serial reform / psychological re-education / detention camps / believe in intercessions / bases of solidarity / norms feelings and emotions / they liberate while teaching

There is always the spectre of governmentality. In fact, the collective’s practice, fundamentally, could be seen as a charm against management of outcomes, biopolitics, neoliberalism—the addictogenic milieu that captures desire and fosters deficits and the human habit of privileging the intellect. In buddhist thought, dukkha (discontent, pain, suffering) and upadana (clinging, attachment) are forms of imprisonment. It asks us to see the bind we are in, that our attempts at solutions tend to employ a model of mastery that is doomed.

et al.’s practice, looking towards the horizon of possibility, might propose substances or elements of feminine plasticity, precarity, of gathering and forming medicine bundles. If we roll the idea that ‘we are not our minds’ around in our mouths a question forms: If we do not find ourselves in thought, where are we? The self, discovered to be plural by anti-rational means, explodes into a crowd of subjectivity, into chaos, its dysregulation valued as treasure.

In her study of the Robert Graves poem ‘It’s a Queer Time’, Elizabeth Freeman, in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (2010), models a way forward: ‘I try to think against the dominant arrangement of time and history that would ordinarily guide the understanding …’ Through encounters with particular works of art, her text operates as a charm against the way the ‘disciplinary historian’ ‘organizes various temporal schemae into consequential sequence.’¹⁶

We are warned, by the compositions of the collective, installations that traverse sound, object, text, film, image, gesture, to not privilege the textual or the visual over the aural in the attempt to establish a historical object; for, as Douglas Kahn writes in Wireless Imaginations: Sound, Radio and the Avant-Garde (1992): ‘We are dealing here … with historical events that by their nature do not exist in inviolable perceptual or phenomenological states. They are necessarily cultivated amid the clutter of the sensorium and the episteme.’¹⁷

There is a veritable wake of people behind and ahead of each of us, as any medium will tell you. Yet this would not be admitted into disciplinary or governmental thought—it would be diagnosed, medicalised and pathologised as a psychotic belief, or as the sign (trait) of a disordered personality. Freeman helpfully proposes that even if what we are looking at seems to be niche-identified, we can subject any findings (the indexed energies, ‘the excess generated by capitalism, its cast-offs, the episodes it wishes us to forget’) to our own forms of recapture.¹⁸

We can eschew the paranoid-critical habit of ‘having the problem solved ahead of time, about feeling more evolved than one’s context’. The key is to deterritorialise (‘dissolve forms, disintegrate identities, level taxonomies, scorn the social, even repudiate politics altogether’), but to not stop with negative thrust.¹⁹ We can reterritorialise at will, ignoring (with the revolutionary laughter of women) whatever side our bread is supposed to be buttered on. Eat something else than under-buttered pain.

I enjoy the post-Promethean space et al. propose, one that deals with the pharmakon humanity reaches for, the double helix of snakes that always cuts both ways. Society is the patient, and as subjects we are committed and commit ourselves to constant medication reviews. This doom spiral was described by the bodhisattva Shantideva, who taught ‘Although we want all happiness / We ignorantly destroy it, like an enemy / Although we want no misery / We rush to create its cause.’

Clearly, wisdom alone is not enough; we must purify our methods. Buddhism offers, to this end, the six perfections: generosity, discipline, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom. But it would never do to be so crass as to claim, as a former New Zealand Prime Minister did in the COVID-19 meltdown of governmentality, that they were a direct source of truth. There is a work made on a roman blind in epochal, upon which is scrawled ‘i am the direct source of truth,’ so we may ponder such happenings and ethical vacations.

To the collective, anyone who claims to be the direct source of truth does not act in a trustworthy fashion. How can any government claim this, and especially so in an epistemological crisis? In Critical Remarks the collective writes, quoting Heidegger, ‘In the work, the happening of the truth is at work.’ They liken the work to a ship’s graveyard of signs, a forest of signs: We are all haunted by our own histories. ‘If truth is present … it is at work under a sea of ideology and error.’²⁰

A voice of reason points out that in English, we can confuse Heidegger’s use of the word for ‘spirit’ as meaning something distinct from ‘mind’. In German, ‘geist’ means both spirit and mind. How like us to think that because they are separate words, they are separate things. There is no moving forward without memory, as myth teaches us. So, we are perpetually haunted by history, and haunt ourselves. And we are subject to the forms of government that were developed to protect us from and regulate our humanity.

The collective continued their Critical Remarks essay with a discussion of Marxism and alchemy sharing a methodology of indistinction and binary collapse: The hermetic art and the dialectic of history share similar solutions to the problem. What the alchemical procedure approached as an art the dialectic realised as an historical and philosophical phenomenon; both schools aimed at universality, reconciling antithetical notions and internal contradictions through the separation and unification of opposites.²¹

you will see from the above / non-repressive state apparatus / the colonial empire / sorry / we are a culture of occupation / readymade utterance / plague & famine / breathing out I am aware of my mind

An asterisk inside a circle appears, directing us to another place in a document. The Futurists, a hundred years ago, forecasted the soul-damaging potential of technology, just as today’s government agencies predict the visibility of solar flares as aurorae. And an alternative feminine ontology is put forward by Catherine Malabou in Changing Difference (2011), one that theorises ‘the possibility of allowing for a different understanding of essence—essence as change or metamorphosis’.²²

It is potent emptiness (a rapture, ululation) that demands we also challenge all authority within philosophy as a field: ‘Before concepts become fixed as noemes we must find a way of creating a trans-philosophical space, one in which women are allowed to transform their impossibility of being into a specific power. And whether it is through evolution or revolution, deformation or explosion, this space can no longer be the space of philosophy; it must be philosophy impeded.’²³

As aggregations of the efforts of a collective (itself an assemblage of sorts) to compose complexes of alternative views of existence, purification, healing and arcane growth, the work is rightly seen as a threat to forces that privilege the individual and control as primary behavioural and analytical models. Yet, it asks, what do we ever have any control over, and is our very desire for control—even over our self-image or I-thinking—in itself violent?

Buddhist concepts (seals, turnings, paths, views, categories, noble truths, divisions, turnings of the wheel, keys, stages) such as the bardo (the brief phase after death where the soul is battered and buffeted by a terrible wind as it prepares and hopes to reincarnate) show us how limiting the ‘I’ we seem so content with really is. And with how little skill the individual (each of us a plurality of instances of being) is treated and cared for intra- and inter-personally.

The collective’s installations work as if they are on the inside of a surveillance-resistant black box in order to rehumanise themselves. To avoid being drawn into one sinister machine or another, we must form machines in our own prone image—with an ‘autonomous purification unit’ as our speaking throat. Force against force, powerful thought-forms against entropy and semantic inflation. Haunting this survey is the ghost (as sound, static, palls) of simultaneous invalidations, 2011, with its committee of tables leaping mid-séance, crackling with energies.

There is a competition for Aotearoa New Zealand’s tree of the year, and in 2024 it was won by a compelling aged and windswept rātā near Karamea, whose split trunk makes it look like it is walking across a paddock. Buddhist thought has it—here voiced by Robert Lissen in Living Zen (1958)—that vegetative life shows us the flaw in human mental function that privileges hyper-intellectualisation over physical relations:

The mental function thinks that it is an entity, and as such, it corrupts the whole process of relations … When we are in the open air the sight of a beautiful tree or a sunset, no longer is for us a pure perception. We have lost all spontaneity, all disinterestedness. Often it happens that we want to ‘extract’ from this spectacle even if its invisible quintessence.

If we are hyper-intellectualized, let us take up modelling, sculpture, drawing or any other manual talk within our reach … We are residual in our often intoxicated bodies, we are residual in our hearts and our minds cluttered with incompleted actions, assuaged desires and unfinished thoughts. Our perception itself is residual. We only seize residues, the extinguished debris of the Eternal present Lightning.²⁴

In The Myth of Freedom (1976), Chögyam Trungpa explains, in a section titled ‘Cosmic Joke’, that for each of the conceived realms of existence, our versions of reality, there are corresponding emotional responses (styles of imprisonment) to dwelling in it: The realm of the gods / self-absorption // The realm of the jealous gods / paranoia // The human realm / passion // The animal realm / stupidity // The realm of the hungry ghosts / poverty // The hell realm / anger.

Writing code is a matter, I am told, of finding paths in the data, of making channels for it to flow through, or noticing the paths as they form, and then the flow. The text in et al.’s the fundamental practice reads like code to poa/phowa (practise conscious dying) humanity, to prepare us for death, to achieve transference of consciousness (mindstream) at the time of death, as dreaming prepares us for the bardo. A green sheet falls out. On it is a track listing to an audio recording:

1. My religious beliefs give me comfort
2. The ten causes of regret
3. Even freedom might be harmless
4. The idea of truth and the idea of certainty
5. Suddenly I held all the information
6. Evil is the one and only means

Spinning, switching, lurching, grasping from one realm to the next, taking our karma and that of others with us, is samsāra, a state we might see represented by the whirlpool drawing or diagram in Shout, Whisper, Wail! ²⁵ This is the cosmic joke: ‘The hoax is the sense of solidity of I and other. This dualistic fixation comes from nothingness … The attempt to confirm our solidity is very painful.’²⁶ Prana, our life-giving force, is carried on the breath.

Society is the patient, and the collective tracks progress in thought and knowing, testing attention and consciousness against banalities poisonous to the spirit. Crises, threats, cures, effects and passages are mapped. Long-term acts of apprenticeship are carried out through collectivisation on a horizontal plane without hierarchy. Not seduced by the empty panic of apocalyptic feeling, or by entertainment’s torpor, they assert a second moment, an après-coup, to continuously readopt the feeling of existing. The emphasis is ours.