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When Plato tells the story of Theuth in the Phaedrus, the god offers his invention as a gift to humankind. King Thamus declines, with the warning that writing will “implant forgetfulness” and give only “the appearance of wisdom.” The common accusation against AI writing—that it weakens thought, produces imitation rather than understanding, and severs authorship from the living speaker—is the latest form of the same worry.

Derrida’s famous reading of the Phaedrus reframes Thamus’s fear. Writing is not simply a tool added to speech; it is a supplement, both addition and substitute. It appears to aid memory, but only because speech itself is already dependent on spacing, iteration, and deferral—the conditions Derrida names arche-writing. The supplement therefore exposes that the supposed origin (the speaking, remembering subject) was never self-sufficient. Writing does not corrupt presence; it reveals that presence is already trace.

From a neurological perspective, writing does of course literally re-wires the brain. It recruits visual and spatial circuits that oral culture used differently, redistributing the part of the labour of memory from the hippocampus to the page. In this sense, Plato’s complaint is empirically true: writing does change us. But the change is not necessarily degeneration—it can be seen as the exteriorization of the same operation that already structures memory internally. Derrida’s arche-writing here meets Clark and Chalmers’s “Extended Mind”: cognition and recollection extend into the environment through inscriptions that function as parts of the cognitive loop. The notebook, the screen, or the archive is not outside the mind but part of its system of traces.

What AI systems do is generalize this exteriorization. They no longer merely store traces; they process and generate them. The writing machine remembers, recombines, and returns language to us in new configurations. In functional terms it is another layer of the extended mind: a dynamic tertiary retention, in Stiegler’s phrase, that supplements human thought. As alphabetic writing once externalized static memory, AI writing externalizes and increases memory as process: it actively constructs what we call ideas. This extension into process suggests a greater difference than there may actually be. The same structure of the supplement recurs: the aid that threatens to replace, the prosthesis that transforms what it extends.

Each stage—speech, writing, AI—alters neural, social, and cultural patterns, yet none of these abolish the structure of arche-writing itself. The trace remains the constant; the embodiment of the trace shifts. The human, then, is not displaced by technology but continually re-inscribed by it. The history of media is the history of arche-writing writing itself through new substrates—from mouth, to hand, to code. The question is not whether AI will change us (it will) but how we will inhabit the new spacing it opens in the field of memory.

But this is too simple. The notion that the same phantasy or concern exists between speech to writing and writing to AI writing is valid, yet to reiterate Plato was empirically correct in a sense and likewise expressions of concern are likewise correct, because it will alter the human. The issue concerns what it is exactly we think a human is. From a materialist perspective there is little issue here; likewise from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective (which is not necessarily materialist) there is also a lack of problem here —humankind simply extends its becoming other possibilities.

This thinking more concerns the phenomenology of the human as it takes itself to be in an incoherent coherence as opposed to its deconstructed coherent incoherence. The incoherent coherence is that of a being of a certain autonomy, possessing its own thoughts and feelings. To place these outside of it have a sense that undermines its sovereign importance. This tension is what is felt (currently) and brings the AI anxiety; literally a threat to perceived human ontology.

There is one more issue, which arguably is more potent than the above. This is that Derrida actually misreads or at least flattens Plato. Derrida treats Plato’s notion of memory more as a cognitve function, but arguably Plato means by anamnesis something much more spiritual. If the Platonic memory is more akin to Bruno’s art of memory, then Plato warns against the loss of a channel further back into being in an unambiguously magickal form. Neural rewiring in this sense is ontologically more than simply a change of cognitive functioning. Likewise then, the more recent shift in which process itself becomes externalised, can be seen as yet more damaging still to this access. From that perspective, every exterior inscription—whether written or algorithmic—is a distraction from the inner act of remembering the Good. If Derrida and Clark show that thought is always already technical, Plato reminds us that it may also be more than technical: a form of recollection that no prosthesis can perform on our behalf.

Without an absolute moral register, we cannot privilege the inner motion or the outer motion. The problem is thus ethico-ontological: the choice concerns not only what we ought to do, but what we choose to be. Ethics comes into play here in the sense of a choice, where we must consider from various angles which one constitutes what we wish to be—the autonomous subject whose access to Being is internal and effortful, or the re-inscribed human whose becoming is always already mediated by the technical trace. The history of media is the history of this ongoing ethical negotiation over the very boundaries of the human self.

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I have never been to New York. I have not walked under its autumn leaves or felt its changing light. Still through the eponymous song, I know its melancholy (or the fantasy of its melancholy). This song alone carries it to me. This is the reach of the pneuminous accretion: one need not inhabit the city for the accretion (which is in a sense truly the city) to inhabit you.

The city is an accretion of pneuminous accretions, a pneuminous machine. Its towers, boulevards, infrastructures: these are only the vectors. Accretion occurs as cultural crystallisation. A work fastens affect to a vector, charging it. Autumn in New York is such a fastening. The melancholy it carries is not a representation of the city but a pneuminous deposit within it.

The deposit does not remain inert. Feedback is essential. The melancholy aura of the song infects the vector of New York. NARP Listeners then walk those streets under its spell. Their reinforced experience — their photographs, their stories, their further art (all more accretion) — folds back into the city’s aura. Each iteration thickens the charge. The city becomes (amongst other many other things) melancholy because the song makes it so, and the song is melancholy because the city can be encountered as such.

Thus the city (any city) is never itself in a naive sense. It is always more than itself, a resonant circuit of pneuma: matter, art, perception, all interlooped. “New York in autumn” is no longer reducible to weather or architecture; it is an accreted object, a hyper-condensation of cultural aura.

Through the song, New York exports itself. The melancholy of its autumn arrives already folded into my imagination, a feedback loop extended across distance. In this way, the accretion proves itself: I do not need the city for “Autumn in New York” to move me. The song is the city; the city is the song. And the loop continues, thickening, even for those who have never yet walked those streets.

This is the rational occult theory of the accretion in action: the notion of the pneuminous circuits that constitute the everyday things we take to ‘be’.

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Adam Curtis is well known for espousing the notion that modern society (especially the West) has no notion of where it is heading, or even of how it could be heading somewhere or even what it would mean for it to head anywhere. Western societies cannot imagine anything other than more of the same — more capitalism, maybe slightly stranger capitalism, with AI augmentations, but still weirdly the same. As Nietzsche understood, this doesn’t actually satisfy the the spiritual(a new word is probably needed but it will have to do) nature of the human. Christianity — brutal as it was — offered structure and purpose. Without that scaffolding, we are adrift. Individually, we seem to bear the existence of staring into the void and keep going. Collectively, it tears us apart.

Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism: the pervasive sense that “there is no alternative.” Capitalism presents itself not as one system among others, but as the only imaginable frame. We may dislike aspects of it, even hate it, but we can’t picture a coherent beyond. The future, if we dare to imagine it at all, looks like a more intensified version of the present — just stranger, faster, weirder. Jean Baudrillard gestured in a similar direction: culture untethered from any ground, spinning in loops of simulation, losing orientation.

The problem, though, is even worse. Pneuminous theory, or chaos magick (they are similar projects), doesn’t rescue us from this malaise. It extends the nihilism. It shows that not only rational structures, but even magickal, symbolic, and esoteric frameworks are contingent accretions — pneuma infecting vectors, conscious doubles arising by intention. The abyss doesn’t shrink when one embraces occultism; it expands. There is no final ground, only shifting layers of contingency.

Which leaves us with a somewhat grim recognition: powerful people who manufacture myths and control structures are, in a sense, right to do so. Without myth, societies collapse into conspiracy, nostalgia, or despair. The real question is: can there be an ethical control myth — one that binds without domination, one that acknowledges the possibility of paranormaityl without relegating it to fringe counterculture or totalising it into religion?

Maybe this is where a new myth must be conceived — the Myth of Ur. Ur not as an ancient city, but as a beginning, a foundation that knows itself as contingent. It would say: we are something like multidimensional pneuminous beings, layered, accreted, entangled in vectors of meaning and possibility. We cannot (at least in regular consciousness, know if paranormality actually obtains, but we cannot deny the possibility either. We live inside the disjunction, thus rather than being opposing agents we should dwellers on the threshold so to speak.

Furthermore, the possibility of the actuality is what we should bet on. Even in recognising the agnostic disjunction, we should act as if the fluid-paranormality were real, as it is this side that makes reality truly interconnected hand invokes our responsibility. Like Pascal’s wager: live as if God exists, because it is the safer bet. Our wager is ontological: live as if we are pneuminous beings. Not because it is proven, but because this orientation does the least violence to the complexity of our condition.

These kinds of rules could be examples that might be part of such an ethical ontology:

  • Live as if the world is layered and multidimensional in the most literal sense.
  • Direct power toward preserving openness, not closing it down.
  • Treat technology and capital as the contingent manifestations of the second centre they are: new accretions, not ultimate horizons or grounds.
  • Play seriously with meaning: enact, invent, but never deny fragility.
  • Care for others as beings whose pneuma you inevitably entangle.

This horizon entails the understanding of the accretions as process in a more active sense. This is the wager, the new Myth of Ur: a transparent myth that everyone knows is made (contingently accreted), but which we agree to live inside because it is better than the void. Not salvation, not certainty, but a collective as if — a horizon we can orient toward, even knowing it may be provisional. It doesn’t solve things in the way we might think of a solution, because thinking in that way cannot give an answer. However the acceptance of the radical nature of reality coupled with a deeper understanding of its impermanence may be part of our ability to overcome the place we have become stuck.

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It is striking that the most obvious instances of process are disasters. We rarely perceive flux in its gentle sustainment. The air moves, the cells divide, the world remakes itself continually — but these motions go unseen, unnoticed. What we see are the catastrophes: the building falling, the body failing, the sudden rupture. Process manifests as accident, as collapse. When flux comes to presence, it often comes as violence.

Little wonder, then, that we are suspicious of it. The closer a thing comes to looking solid, unmoving, eternal, the more we like it. We exalt monuments, we conserve institutions, we worship permanence. We train our eyes to see stability, to rest in it, to forget the ceaseless perishing underneath. Process is lived as background — and when it comes to the foreground, it terrifies.

Death is the concentrated emblem of this repression. To die is to undergo the pure proof of flux: the body, the identity, the story, all dissolving. Our culture displaces death, hides it, or aestheticizes it, precisely because it is unbearable as the clearest testimony to becoming. Death and process mirror one another in this way: each is denied, and in their denial the fantasy of permanence is secured.

Perhaps this explains why process philosophy is a late discovery in the Western canon. From Plato to Descartes, metaphysics served the desire for stability: being over becoming, substance over relation, eternal forms over time’s decay. Only with the cracks of modernity — Darwin’s evolution, industrial flux, entropy, relativity — did a new thinking become possible. The repression faltered, the monuments looked less eternal, and thinkers like Bergson and Whitehead could say what had always been true: everything is process.

But here lies the difficulty. Even now, process is hard to think. Our intellectual habits echo our psychic needs. We cling to the stable idea, the fixed identity, the substance that endures. To think flux as primary is to unlearn this orientation. It requires dwelling in what is usually unbearable: that every moment perishes as it arises, that every thing is fragile, that death is the very horizon of life.

This does not strip process philosophy of value. On the contrary, it intensifies it. Process thought is not just another ontology. It is a kind of counter-repressive labour. It asks us to affirm what we are disposed to flee. It forces us to look at disaster, decay, death — and to find there not only terror but also creativity. Becoming destroys, but it also makes. Flux is catastrophe, but it is also genesis.

In pneuminous terms, we could say that the accretions manifest as reinforcements of stable reality, the ideal forms present exactly this. Process needs incorporating into pneuminous theory. The fantasy of stability is not to be abolished; it too is part of the flux. To think process is to see that even our denials belong to it. The repression of process itself is a mode of becoming.

The lateness of process philosophy, its difficulty, and its power, all come from the same root: it confronts us with what we most want not to see. To affirm process is to affirm the impermanence of everything we value. Yet in that very affirmation something new becomes possible — a thinking that no longer clings to monuments, but lives in the trembling of their foundations.

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The previous (first actual) mutation is included here accompanied by the second.

Harvest

The brittle straw man sat bewildered,

          by the cream that dripped,

          as he looked wistfully on,

and in the elevator,

          that hoary contraption of descent,

          which floated sonorously down,

a toad’s call echoes from the pool below,

          as the fake antagonist hungered still,

          dreaming of bees,

all this I heard without once moving,

          keeping my eye firmly,

          on the receding highway,

(a hare moves at speed,

          an alacrity of asphalt,

          suitable only for evasive swerves).

(Graham  5 April 2022)

2  Arm wrestling

a cephalopod can dance

          burning bright on coral sands

          and turning white to die

a newly tattooed limb facing the

          written blast of sacrifice

          relaxes into resignation again

and the switching gear trips

          in the coolest convoluted

          lizard part of the brain

marching to a different conviction

          banner furled and leaking guilty

          memories of whipping sheets

into the deafening foam

          every frequency registers

          the presence of other minds