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+title: "Revisiting Affects & Dreams: What Dreams in Me?"
+authors: ["nikomas.md"]
+tags: "Music", "Virtual", "Capitalist Realism", "Capital", "Philosophy", "Depression"
+date: "15.02.23"
+
+---
+
+Preface
+
+Last summer I was invited to participate in one of Documenta Fifteen’s auxilliary project: “Radio Lumbung”: radio broadcasts from around the world were to be bussed together, summed and a distributed, modelled on the Indonesian Rice Barn known to locals as “Lumbung”. I was invited due to my radio show “Good Morning, I Love You”, produced by Crossdressing Diogenes and broadcast on Barking Cats Radio.
+
+My proposal for the project involved turning my weekly Sunday morning broadcast into a 3-month (12-part) series, where I could explore some of the theoretics — I wanted to know to what extent these broadcasts were banal, and therefore to what extent our collective broadcasting could be called ‘useful’. Was I just part of the background noise of Neoliberalism? Was there anyone even listening? What experience were radio listeners having, if not one of banal drudgery? I wished to run with the ideas of ‘affectivity’ and ‘deep listening’ that came from one of my most cited texts, “The Potential of Paying Attention” by Maria Cichosz, a deeply Deleuzian text that proposes Deep Listening as an antidote to Capitalist Realism or the disorientation of hyperreality — I wished to create a series of recordings that could, theoretically, “jilt” people, to drawn people in and give them something negative (to negate capital; to dispell the mythology momentarily).
+    The aesthetic framework of the project drew largely from minimalism, sound art and electronic rave music, a repertoire that I believed to be deeply antihegemonic, from antihegemonic traditions; my naive idea was that all you needed was to give someone a chance to hear something that was not hegemonic, and for them to hear it in a place or a situation that did not reinforce hegemony, and they would potentially have the chance to experience that trip, that deviation from hegemonic consciousness. I wanted to imagine radio towers broadcasting hacker signals that were set to phase-cancel the hegemonic frequencies. So, aesthetically, I wanted to create something that could be argued to have a form that escaped hegemonic forms, something with a negating form, a negative form, and at the time I thought the only thing that could offer this lucidity and freedom was dreaming.
+
+I included the album and the original report at the bottom of this text _ you can listen while reading:
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+
+
+What dreams in me?
+
+In the opening of the complimentary text published alongside the recordings entitled “Affects & Dreams”, I believe I make one fatal error. The text brings up a lot of very interesting points, and the references offered are quite valuable, but upon holistic reflections of the arguments, one statement I made stands out as uniquely incorrect — or at the minimum, uniquely questionable. The suggestion was that, in regards to the territorialization of consciousness that is implied within the discourses of Baudrillard and hyperreality, and Deleuze & Guattari’s societies of control (the two fundamental axioms of Capitalism-cum-Neoliberalism), one of the few remaining sites not occupied by Capitalist Hegemony (primarily manifesting as a dedicated control over which discourses and representations are allowed to be present) is the dreamworld — I, perhaps naively, assumed that the only escape from Capitalism is found in deep sleep.
+
+We can forgive ourselves as to why; the experience people have of dreams can sometimes seem so deranged, atypical or divergent, that they seem to escape the banal prison of capitalist realism. I wanted somewhere to look for models that diverged from the norms of hegemony — you know, there is the cliche that many Western media consumers (myself included) go through a phase of loving anime or manga from Japan due to it seeming to escape the dull drudgery of storytelling that we have in the West, or that we perceive ourselves having in the West.
+        Storytelling, as I explored through such examples as Donna Haraway, Marco Polo, Sun Ra, is fundamental to human experience, and it is not to say that stories are not important. I even suggested at a notion of “Mythontology”, which simply gestures at a way of looking at human experience as being ontologically defined by this idea of “mythical stories as cosmology/metaphysics”. Furthermore, by reading David Wengrow (& David Graeber) On the Dawn of Everything, it became undeniable that even the power and hegemony of Capital, the champion of the Enlightenment, was entirely dependent upon irrational mythology. Humanity is the subject of a mythological realism that maps onto and even modulates supposedly objective sensory or perceptive faculties — our experience of the objective is always an objective+hegemony, and while at first, ideology may try to map onto human experiences, after doing so, it will proceed to modulate those direct experiences — the reactionaries start to have a changed experience of migrant workers only once hegemony has mapped itself onto the pre-existing and so-called objective factors.
+
+To make that clearer, we can look at an example. If there is a white man living in London in the 1980s, he is surely surrounded by people who are both white and not-white, it is after a multicultural city and so on. We know already that migration is a fundamental natural process, and even the idea of a migrant is quite absurd, because for the white man living in London in the 1980s to call someone a Migrant would be to imply that there is somehow no migration involved in his being in London — this is not an argument, this is just banal —  What is an Englishman if not an Anglo-Saxon, and what is an Anglo-Saxon if not someone who goes to other places by boat and either stays for a while or stays indefinitely. The only way it is possible for a White man in 1980 in London to see himself as the Aristotelian unmoving-mover (the righteous-by-virtue-of-stasis) is for certain stories to be covered up by other stories. Or for the importance of some stories to be usurped by other stories. The man can know from school that his bloodline comes from Sweden, and that he is effectively a migrant, from a family of migrants, who broke the chain by not being a migrant, but he can somehow still behave as if there is another more true story that, while not necessarily saying the story of the Swedish bloodline is false, takes priority - it is somehow more true to the Man that he is the stable one and that they are the migrants, and that migrants are not truly of the place they settle and never will be. This double truth or hierarchical truth makes sense when seeing it as mythology; we don’t question how two Hindustani myths directly contradict each other but both be held as true by a subject of that mythology, so the same can be applied here. We don’t experience cognitive dissonance because the tensions have already been resolved by a bigger story of more truth, the contradictions become just small issues in less important stories — god moves in mysterious ways overrules everything, the shareholders need to see higher growth overrules everything. This can include deciding which stories enter into historical textbooks taught in schools, or it can include deciding that history books should be about events and artefacts, and that written stories overrule spoken ones — all of these things are what Derrida referred to as logocentrism, of the transformation of discourse, restructuring it around a hierarchising of various modes of expression, resources and traditions and so on. For me, hegemony appears to encompass all of these processes, a technology either emerged or developed which acts to determine which stories are more true than others, and therefore control and systematise human experience.
+
+It is, apparently, quite a common experience for people to grow tired of the stories told in the West, whether that be the myth of the Agricultural Revolution or the mythology of Jack the Ripper  — I am not suggesting that irrigation was never invented or that humans weren’t once predominantly Hunter-Gatherer and have since ceased to be, neither am I suggesting that the dead were not murdered by Jack, only that how we remember these events are totally distorted through the “Chinese-Whispers” structure of mythontology and the way hegemony controls the mythology. We might then go and get into anime, thinking that it is so refreshing to hear different stories, only to eventually realise that anime is a fundamental part of how hegemony of Capital functions in Japan. As I explored in my reading of Felix Guattari in Japan, anime is a control image projected both inwards and outwards as a part of a system of controlling what Japanese identity is experiences as internally and externally. They are different stories, told differently, but they are by and large still just representations of capital. Maybe in such a simple way as, we could notice moments in Anime where budget cuts are literally visible, and we accept whole-heartedly anything that is done to protect capital — even if its annoying, we accept the very premise that the budget did not allow for the background to be animated so it is unthinkable, or we accept that the series has been pulled due to financial reasons or because projections weren’t good enough. In accepting this, we concede that capital production must take priority over production of images and stories — some regard this the religiosity of capital, where we all just admit, on some deep level, that we have to do what we have to do (often spoken as “they have to do what they have to do”) to be in compliance with capital’s demands. It would be absurd to protest the cancelling of a series due to it not making the shareholders enough money, but the more you think about it, stories are important, they are everything to us, and to tamper with stories is somehow universally immoral (to lie). How irresponsible must you be to begin a story and then cut it? Could it be so absurd as to say that one can be traumatised by a parasocial relationship cut short? A pathetic petit mort, but we are sensitive creatures, maybe we can be traumatised by the thought of never seeing that character again. Anecdotally my life was flipped upside by finding out I was a Scorpio rising, and until that point I couldn’t really have cared less about astrology — but I am a sensitive, fickle human, and I can be affected by stories.
+
+Stories are representations, they are images, and we in the West are particularly obsessed with imagery. In an essay published on NON about Non-Bodies and Process Ontology, I joined Jacques Derrida and Thomas Nail in accusing Western intellectual tradition dating back to Aristotle, in fetishising Presence (stasis, material, positivistic phenomena), and I continue to assert that the entire discourse of Hyperreality depends upon recognising that Images are Representations, which are aligned with Masculinity, Stasis and Presence in the symbolic order. I argue that the construction of binary opposites and the fetishisation of all the positive sides of those binaries is the performance of hegemony, as by influencing what we understand as reasonable, and influencing how we enact discourse, it creates limits to where discourse can reasonably go. The world around us may well have some objectivity to it, but we do not experience it, and I argue that there never has been an objective experience of reality for 2 reasons. Firstly that the very conditions of consciousness create a separation from any potential objectivity and our experience of it, and secondly because the faculty of perception comes with the flaw of being tied into other psychological systems, and thus being permanently exposed to hegemonic interference. There are no VPNs or virus scanners in our perceptive faculties, its down to us to guess what’s real and what isn’t using knowledge.
+
+It’s more true than ever, today, to say that it is up to us to decide which stories are true and which stories matter, and which, if both true, takes priority and why it takes priority. If it is true that such huge percentages of content and stories we consume is just auto-produced somehow, the mythology of the Russian Bot and so on, or the idea of future magazines produced entirely by AI, then we really do live in a situation comparable to any other mythology; a chaotic vortex of contradicting stories. Ulysse Carrière rightfully said that even if Tucker Carlson is not a bot, he might as well be, it is all derivative, sneering garbage that just reiterates the same predictable stories, converting every day’s news into another repeat of the same predictable rhetoric. If there is a real, whatever trace we get from it has been violated by hegemony long before it reaches us. Hegemony can intercept and alter the experience of the real because it is installed both internally within our perceptive faculties and our cognitive and symbolic faculties, and because we convert the external world to look more like it, creating an endless feedback. The grand conclusion of Baudrillard, for me, is that through the fetishisation of the static, and therefore through the fetishisation of the Image and of the representation, we have create a feedback loop where over time we have increasingly both made everything look like an Image, and made ourselves see everything as imagery, and this feedback loop has gone on for so long now that everything is just an image, just a representation, because we only see in imagery, and all we see is imagery. It is the formation of an inescapable absolute, confronted on all sides by representations that echo on forever, and in this delirium, we mistake getting further from the real as getting closer.
+
+By arguing that the dreamworld or the experience of dreams could perhaps be the last uncolonised site, I seem to have forgotten that we dream in Images. Whatever it is that we experience when dreaming, it is likely generated by the same systems that generate our internally experienced, auto corrective model of visual perception. To clarify, it is relatively common knowledge that the way the eyes and brain create visual experience is based on predictions and corrections. We do not see what is actually there, we see a projection of what we think is there, and the data stream pouring in from our eyes correct and update those projections. The perceptive system is based on error-correction. So when you close your eyes and dream, you are using the same projection system without any error-correct, so your visual experience just runs wild, gradually veering into insane stories as the brain constantly tries to make sense of this snowballing random visual imagery that has no error-correct system or any means to stop. Admittedly this does make dream experiences quite interesting. There is a banal element to it, because ultimately I am arguing that our dreams are presented to us, not as representations, but as error-uncorrected, so ultimately I do not care about the content of dreams, as this is easily explained by the historical and social and cultural contexts of the dreamer, and they have banks full of memories and so on, it is not difficult to imagine that someone who has experienced 25 years of living as human can autogenerate some visuals no differently to an AI. At this point, I might even add the argument that, based on Carrière’s approach to thinking about art and A.I, the dream experience might better be understood as the one place that has absolutely no creativity or intellect in it. Allow me to elaborate.
+
+In Carrière’s work on A.I, I infer that she wishes to argue that whatever A.I can produce is not art, because art is a matter of intellect, which is a form of expression defined by an absence of models. The intellect is pure creativity, in that it appears to conjure something that does not yet exist, and is not based on any model. The A.I operates on models, and has no intellect that could allow it to go beyond those models, and therefore, while it can create amazing and beautiful representations, and even collaging of representations, it is unlikely that it could ever break from those models. We learn from A.I that using models alone, you can create extremely imaginative things, that appear new and creative but cannot possibly be, as they can only be a collaging of models. In this case, it is easy to argue that using the models stored in memory alone, our mind could create vastly imaginative experiences that ironically lack the very creativity that actually defines creative. There is no need for an intellect to autogenerate experiences, but what we have to now concede, is that nothing of true value can come from those dreams. No genuine break can come from a rehashing of what you already know, there is nothing creative in the production of dreams. This is psychoanalysis’ fatal misunderstanding. To look for the way forward in dreams is to look for the way forward in A.I, and if, by and large, people believe that creativity doesn’t need to create anything to be called creative, then their answer may well come from something as derivative as a dream or an A.I generated image.
+
+We can also find a political economy of “Sleeping” in the text “24/7” by Jonathan Crary, where he argues that nothing annoys capitalists more than sleep. 1/3 of our lives not working or consuming, it is the one part of our day that has not been taken over. Sleep is inimical to capital in that sense. Sleep is the last frontier that capital has to conquer, but with the presence of dreams, it is hard to say that the war is going well. You do not need to go to Futurama-style humour, of advertisements being projected into the mind when you have the concept of hegemony. Capital doesn’t need to outright advertise itself, it has made everything in its image, all images reinforce the hegemony of representations and stasis, so all images reinforce capital. If what we need is a break from capital, it cannot come from dreams, because all our dreams do is relay images of capital, and the very act of trying to make dreams mean something is again falling into the psychoanalytical trap of enacting hegemony by trying to make everything into a representation or reading everything as a representation. A dream is an oedipal blackhole.
+
+When Deleuze said “beware the other’s dream”, should we have written it down as “beware the Other’s dream”? Are dreams the Other inside us projecting without the light that penetrates our eyes and corrects our mistakes? Perhaps the silence that schizoanalysis treats dreams is because either it sees nothing of interest in the derivative noise, or it fears it, and treats the dream as something cursed, compromised.  
+
+“minelli had an idea about dreams, one can engage this idea within totality of the cinematographic process that is at work in Minellia, and his great idea about dreams.. it seems to me that Minelli idea about dreams concerns those who don’t dream. The dream of those who dream concerns those who are not dreaming. And why does this concern them? Because as soon as someone else dreams, there is danger. people’s dreams are always devouring, and threaten to engulf us; the other’s dream is very dangerous. Dreams have a terrible will to power and each one of us is a victim to the other’s dreams. Even the gracious of young girls, is a terrible devourer, not because of her soul but because of her dreams. Beware the other’s dream because if you are caught in the other’s dream you are done for! “ — Deleuze, 1987, Lecture: “What is a creative act?”
+
+Marek Wojtaszek (2018) (writes that the rise of the digital has “given culture an incentive to reinvent itself as an insomniac dreaming-machine that has made dreaming a guardian of insomnia that keeps it from falling asleep (Deleuze, 2006: 13)”. They discuss an idea that the traditional opposition between dreaming and being awake has been eroded through the hegemony of capital and the induction of the hyperreal:
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+“Dreams no longer oppose reality; the dream of insomnia expresses a profound dream of and into reality, a becoming-dream of reality; that is its immanent creation — a dream within a dream, a vertiginous state of intoxication that our waking life has to learn how to fold so that we can sustainably endure the world’s dream of eternity by mindfully reducing and organizing its unlivable speed.” — Marek Mojtaszek, 2018
+
+
+In the report to Affects & Dreams, I also discussed an idea from Deleuze & Guattari that dreams were just visual noise unfolding, much like I argued earlier regarding the operation of the same perceptive faculties that generate our visual model without the error correction system to keep it from derailing. In that example there was the idea of a dynamic grey blob being interpreted as a blackbird flying across a field, and at some point in this interpretation of the black bird, the grey blob and green field stop looking as much like a grass field and flying bird and for a moment look more like a black ball on a billiard table. As soon as it seems more like that than the bird, the brain runs with it, and starts acting as though, all this time, that was actually a ball not a bird, covering up the previous image as if embarrassed to have made a mistake and trying to fix the model, only to have the green field turns slightly yellow and the billiard ball turns into a warthog and suddenly you are in Africa. Rather than being a symbolic text to unravel, a message to discern, it is a panicking, erroneous attempt to turn uncorrected visual noise into something (anything, because rendering a sensible model is its function) and building that model out of symbolic material. of course a dream is full of symbolism, what else could the system build an Image out of? It doesn’t mean that the juxtaposition or selection of symbolism has any connection to the real in any way that would imply communication, the mind is forced to use whatever crayons it has to try and render the noise you see in the back of your eyelids into a story. Yet, no matter how wild the story, nothing surprises us in a dream, and that reveals a lot; it is just what we already know, and it lacks the potential to jilt us.
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+Jilting was an important factor in Affects & Dreams, as I had envisioned a musical weapon that could trigger moments of disorientation, where capitalist realism momentarily gave in, and one might break their head through the clouds of hegemony and see clearly, or see something closer to the real than any representation capital can offer. Dreams cannot jilt us, they can scare us, they can make the adrenaline run, but they cannot show us anything outside of Capital, and it is very likely, based on our arguments so far, that it is Capital that dreams in us. We dream for Capital. A dream, for us, is just a dream within another dream, and our being devoured by capital makes Deleuze’s statement seem descriptive rather than prophetic. It has to be come more central to discourse that capital is intimately linked with the idea of desire, seeming at times like a titanic deity that has amassed enough power and weight to control and contour all desire that flows around and through it. The close relationship between the words dream and desire is uncanny, and capital, as a titan of desire, as a specification of desire that has grown to a point of having a monopolising gravity, can both create and control dreams. With no real to intervene, capital can invade your sleep through invading your dream, through making you think, consume, work, while sleeping, to turn your dream into another place to chase your capitalist dreams.
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+
+References
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+Deleuze lecture: What is a creative act? 1987
+Marek Wojtaszek. 2018. Dreaming-machine: Diurnal Insomnia in Digital Wonderland. Open Journal.
+Jonathan Crary. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep.
+Maria Cichosz. 2014. The potential of paying attention: Tripping and the ethics of affective attentiveness.
+niko mas - On Bodies, Musical Bodies, Dancing Bodies, And Bodies Without Organs