ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Fantasy and Conspiracy With Wu Ming 1

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

In 1999, an anonymous Italian collective published a novel called Q. Imagined by its left-wing authors as an “operation manual for cultural disruption,” the book has had a bewildering political afterlife, with its story arc and the collective’s media pranks around Satanic ritual and paedophilia seemingly providing the basis for alt-right conspiracy theory QAnon. Did […]

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kea Milburn and today I'm joined for a very special microdose by Woombe one, also known as Roberto Bui. Thanks for joining us, Roberto. Hi, thank you for having me. Let me just do a little interjection for the audience. So Roberto is part of a, of Wulming, which is a writing collective in Italy, who've offered several collective novels together, and Roberta's also produced several individual novels under the name Woming One. And in fact, you've also produced works of non-fiction, and I'd probably say some works in between non-fiction and fiction, which we perhaps will get to get to in a moment.

Wu Ming emerged from, what I assume, was a group of friends in the 1990s who took part in activities under the collective pseudonym Luther Blissitt. So, Luther Blissitt was a pseudonym under which people could sort of participate to build a collective myth. I like the name. I love the name, Luther Blissitt, because the name is reference to a football. who I remember from playing from Watford, but who also played for A.C. Milan had a rather disastrous spell at A.C. Malone, I believe.

So from that, Roberto, I'm imagining that you're an A.C. Milan fan. Is that true? Not exactly. Not exactly. But Luther Bisset was quite famous because of his disastrous season in 1993, 84, in the Italian League. So he was frequently referenced as an example of a foreign player who couldn't fit into the extremely defensive Italian game. I remember he got signed for like a big amount, which I can't remember. And then he got sold for a year later for like half that amount or something in the great tradition of British failures that I embrace wholeheartedly. Let me just continue the story. So Lufa Blissitt or the Lufa Blisset project,

there were a whole series of activities that took place under that pseudonym and some of which might be called sort of media pranks or guerrilla media I remember was another term in the sort of mid to late 1990s that was current and then in 1999 a novel was released called Q under the name Luther Blissitt which was written by Roberto and three of his friends or co-writers who then went on after Luther Bissett was a bit of a hit actually. The novel Q was a bit of a hit. Then went on to form the collective Woo Ming and to write novels, etc., etc. Cue was a really

big novel for me, actually, Roberto. I have the words Omnius and Communia tattooed on my arm. In fact, I forced four of my friends to also have Omniusant Communia tattooed on their arms to celebrate my 40th birthday, make of that way you will. But Omniusunt Communia means everything in common, or other people have I've interpreted it as Everything for Everyone, and it was like the watchword of Thomas Munster and the Peasant Rebellion that he led, and that plays that sort of pivotal role in the novel Q, and we'll get to that, I think, in a moment. But one of the prompts for me wanting to talk with you, Roberto, is the work you've been doing, sort of analyzing Q&ON and related phenomena,

and then providing what I think are really, really useful concepts for trying to help us work through what's, going on with this sort of like conspiracy fantasies as you say and how we might distinguish that from the activities that we might not want to give up on and as you know like in ACFM we'd be working with this team the cosmic rights which we're dealing with some of the same things so that's the sort of context in which I wanted to start the conversation perhaps you could you could explain or tell the story of how you came to start to think about and and tackle the whole problem of QAnon. Well, that's a hell of a story. That's what we want. Well, the first person to alert us about the rise of Q&ON was Florian Kramer, an old friend, a German friend,

a veteran of the Luther Brisset Project, and some sort of expert in far-right digital culture. He sent us an email in the spring of 2018. He informed us that someone had apparently taken inspiration from Luther Brisset to craft a conspiracy theory for the alt-right. That's how he put it. Nowadays, we usually draw a distinction between Q&ON and the alt-right. They're not one and the same. There are differences. But in the first half of 2018, Q&N was still very much associated with its origins on 4chan,

and it still revolves around the so-called Q-drops, which were posted on 8-chan. And those places were hangouts of the alt-right, so the association was automatic. Shortly thereafter, other people wrote to us, too, because the QAnon story sounded familiar to them. It was basically the plot of our novel Q, which I wrote with three other comrades between 1995 and 1998, as our last contribution to the Luther Bridgett Project. Later, we became Woming after the end of the Lutheran Brexit Project. Q was published in Italy in March 1999. For many reasons, its publication was an event.

In a work of theory titled Anti-Book on the Art and Politics of Book, Radical Publishing, Nicholas Thoburn provided a very intriguing analysis of that moment. the moment in which Q was published, probably the best one available in English. He described Q as an anti-book concept he devised himself, by which he means a printed, published work which its authors write and use in strategic ways to reflect upon the role. The very act of publishing books can play under capitalism. It's a little bit complex.

It's a book that disrupts expectations about books. We can't delve into this right now, I'm digressing. Well, Q was an international bestseller. It was translated into many languages, although it's an American publication in 2004 received mixed reviews and went largely and noticed except from some niches of radicals. some words about the plot. The novel takes place in Central Europe, the Netherlands and Northern Italy

in the first half of the 16th century. It is a kind of long-distance duel between two characters. One is a subversive heretic operating under different names. And the other one is a Catholic agent who infiltrates the radical movements of the time. He spreads disinformation among radicals, heretics, and Baptists, rebellious peasants. The agent continually sends all along the book. He sends dispatches to his superiors in Rome, signing them with the biblical name Coelette, often shortened to Q.

Our Q, the Q of the novel, pretends to be someone very close to power and to have access to confidential information, which he decided. to share with radicals. He begins correspondence with Thomas Munzer, the preacher who was the religious and political leader of the peasant revolt that broke out in some parts of

Germany in 15-204. And by sending letters to Munzer with false info, false intel, he convinces the insurgents together near a town in Turingia called Frankenhausen

to fight the ultimate battle, the final battle between the forces of good and evil to read the land of princes, bishops and corrupt authorities. And then there will be some sort of great spiritual awakening and so on. Instead, the peasants fall into a death trap. There is carnage and the revolt is suppressed and defeated. I'm not spoiling anything because people read about this in the very first chapter of the novel. Well, of course, other revolts will take place, will follow, and our protagonist, the heretic, will take part in them. But there will also be Q all the time to sabotage the apprisings at the behest of his superior Cardinal Carraffa. Now, take the premise of Q-announced narrative.

An anonymous figure sending these patches signed at Q, signed Q, pretending to have access to very valuable intel from the top echelons of the US federal government purportedly taking as a mission to share that intel with radicals, in this case, of course, right-wing radicals, Trumpists, saying that there's going to be a final battle between the forces of good and evil, the famous

the storm, you know. Basically, it's the same plot. It was so disturbing for us to see this incredible phenomenon. It's as if in autumn 2017, that's when the whole thing started, someone began to play a role-playing game based on our novel. And we still find it plausible even today that the person who posted the first batches of Q drops on fortune was inspired by some elements of our novel. I'm not talking about Q&On as a movement.

That's a common misconception. You know, there were some headlines on Anglo-American websites saying the novel that inspired Q&N, it's not exactly like that. The movement we came to know since then, Q&O, and on has nothing to be. do with our novel. We're talking about the beginning of the Q phenomenon. Before it was hijacked by Jim and Ron Watkins and other far-right scammers and entrepreneurs, before it got bigger and bigger. We're talking about the first person who started to post the Q-drops. What was his or her purpose, the purpose of this initiator? It may simply have been to play a prank, which was far from

unusual on fortune. You know, they call it shit posting. So call it shit posting was the rule. But one of our early hypothesis is that the whole thing start out as a hoax by anti-Trump activists

then got out of hand. We may never know, for sure, if it was like that, who this guy was. Several studies, stylometric studies of the Q-Drops concluded that this person stopped writing at the beginning of December 2017 and never reappeared, it never came back.

Anyway, of course, we, the authors of Q felt involved. We felt interpolated by this discovery, by what was going on. But we also felt interpolated for another reason. In the middle 90s, we played... very complex media hoaxes in Bologna and the rest of Italy, as part of a big counter-investigation and solidarity campaign with innocent people who were in jail. The subject was satanic ritual abuse, SRA, an urban legend which fueled many conspiracy fantasies in the last 40 years, more or less.

The context was that of three innocent men belonging to a cultural association, interesting in heavy metal, occultism and stuff like that. They were called the Bambini di Satan and the children of Satan. They were framed and jailed for a year and a half on horrific charges before being acquitted at trial. But in the meantime, the media turned them into monsters, monsters. In response to that, the Luther Bricet project started a campaign to prove that the satanic

cultural abuse was nothing more than an urban legend, and that the accusations were based on a conspiratorial fantasy on part of the inquiring magistrate. So we carried out intensive investigative work. into this subject, the satanic panic, the satanic ritual abuse, and other reactionary hate legends and conspiracy fantasy. Our research and our campaign contributed to the acquittal of the defendants, but our aim was to dismantle satanic ritual abuse as a hate legend through a story that was stronger and funnier than the conspiracy fantasy deposed.

So we invented a satanic insurgency and an anti-Satannist patrol whose members were fanatical Christians. They were called Comitato for the Salvaguardia of the Morale, the Committee for the Safeguardia of Morals. So we invented both groups, the satanists and the anti-Satanists. We invented their actions, black masses that were violently, violently interrupted by this vigilante group. It was all fake. Inventions that the Italian media took for true for a long time for more than a year. We made the news many times because it was very easy to exploit mass hysteria on satanism and pyrophilia to get stories in the press and in the telly. At some point we claimed the responsibility for all those hoaxes and we explained how and why we played them.

and that was the key moment. In this case, our claim was an important contribution to the acquittal and release of the accused. But then more than 20 years later, satanic ritual abuse, the hate legend we had defeated locally in Bologna was rising again globally because satanic ritual abuse is now at the center of Q&O's narrative, the cabal, slavery, children, members of the pedo-satanistic cabal, sucking the blood of children, and stuff like that. So, of course, we have to do something. So I, in particular, I decided to resume our studies on satanic panic and investigate the phenomenon

of Kianon, in particular, and conspiratorialism in general. So I worked hard for three years, and the result is my book, which was published last year in Italy, Lacudicomplotto, the Q of Conspiracy, and was recently published in France with the title Q. Complot. You're right. That is an incredible story. In fact, it's so incredible the sort of overlaps between Q and Q the novel, but also the history of the Lucubplicit project. You know, it's tempting. to take that story further and like, you know, imagine that the originator of the, of Q and the original writer of those first Q drops was perhaps a leftist who was trying to lead the alt-right into its own Frankenhausen, which occurred in January the 6th with the invasion.

Yeah, yeah. And in fact, when I first shared the idea that perhaps QAnon mirrored the novel Q, I was wondering whether that, perhaps that was an intervention by Wu Ming to try to do a counter myth to establish account to undermine, you know, the Wright's faith in the Q novels. And it's that thing where, like, where does it stop this imagining plots on plots? So that's a long-drawn-out way, Roberto I'm trying to say that there's, there needs to be some distinctions made, doesn't there, right? Like, the thing that disturbs me about perhaps Q&M, but also, you know, a lot of the alt-right and the sort of me-magic sort of ideas that the alt-right were playing with, with this Kekistan

and Trump being a god emperor and all these sorts of things. You know, I recognize some of the aesthetics in that. And in fact, I recognize that sort of prankish attitude because it reminds me very much of the milieu that I grew up in, in which that sort of attitude was much more associated with the left, of a sort of countercultural left. In fact, we'd probably want to associate it with what we called the weird left, which we embrace on ACFM.

So my question to you is, you know, in the light of the, of this whole phenomenon of a Q and on and this whole phenomenon of the old right and their sort of prankishness, do we have to give up on the idea of a weird left? Do we have to sort of stop with the media pranks? Or can we make the clear distinction between reactionary pranks and activities and sort of leftish weirdness pranks and activities? Well, sooner or later everything gets recuperated by capital or by our political enemies. And that's one of the lessons that the situationists never fully understood, and they themselves were recuperated, now they're part of the history of contemporary art, and there are exhibitions about the situationist and stuff like that. We do not need to give up on notions of what you call the weird left, but certainly you must understand the key aspect of our current situation, our current predicament.

many things that used to be weird in the 20th century are not weird anymore. So I'm talking about the traditional avant-garde repertoire, and that's an oxymoron in itself, a contradiction in terms of traditional avant-garde. That supply of practices, devices, and experience that avant-garde-infused the political activism we used to employ. Most stuff was recuperated by capital in such a way. that we need to do a thorough inventory of the concepts that we adopt, the weapons that we want to use, the effects that we aim at producing in people in their perception, in their minds.

We have to understand what is weird and also what is left, a phrase which I intentionally mean in both possible meanings, you know, what is left. think of those surprising juxtapositions, the detournements, the diversions of meaning. The surrealists famously used this image, the fortuitous encounter of the umbrella and the sewing machine on the operating table. In the first half of the 20th century, of last century, this was unheard of these tactics. tactics were unprecedented. They were disturbing and refreshing. This kept working for some time in 30 years, more or less, 30 years after the Second World War,

the period which the French called Le Tronte Glorious, the glorious 30 years, the years of capitalist development, economic boom, and the expansion of civil rights and consumerism. as well. Compared to our media landscape, today's media landscape, the media offer back then was very limited and rigid. The techniques I'm talking about, you know, cut up, a fold in the tournament, ironical recycling of the materials of mass culture, of pop culture. These all came from outside the dominant culture.

These tactics would trespass. They would cross semiotic and technological fences. They would unite what seemed to be divided, what appeared divided, and they brought together what appeared distant. One of the slogans that I frequently cite, they frequently quote as an example, is one of the most famous slogans of the French May 68 Sule Pavela Plage

under the cobblestones the beach that was a great slogan and all their examples are those situations is the comic strips that became revolutionary tracts by changing the lines

in the balloons or think of punk Queen Elizabeth with the punk safety pin on her lips that was what Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist had seen in Gargantuan and Pantagruel by Rabel

I'm quoting from memory break all the false hierarchical links between things and ideas set things free let them enter into new unions however bizarre they may seem bring together and unite what was divided

and disjointed what was brought together by the dominant ideology in order to work such a strategy must be based on basically one thing ratification because without ratification there can be no surprise

no shock, no unexpectedness, no expressive value. It's a little bit like with cast words, you know, bad words, foul language. If you use a cast word once in a while, it may add a force and expressive value to what you say. But if you put a fuck or fucking in every half sentence, it subtracts force and expressive value. It makes your language poorer and ineffective. And I think that there's no better example for this than irony. I write a lot about this in my book on Q and on. Irony.

Irony is the rhetorical figure. Most of these cultural interventions are based off. You know, the tournament, situation is the tournament. It's all about irony. Cut-up techniques are about the mechanical production of irony and so on. if this answer is getting too long stop me because I know the reasoning is very complex so well I'll try and prompt you to go further

because I quite like this idea that well perhaps we live in we probably live in a world of which is drenched in irony but also perhaps yeah yeah in which irony is allied to cynicism perhaps right to a sort of sense of cynicism that that that that which tends to be conservative, if not reactionary, because the cynicism is, things are the way they are. They can't be changed, therefore, you know,

if you believe that things can be changed, then you're naive. And irony always relies on that double audience, right? You have a supposed naive audience, and then you have the audience to understand the irony and your complicit audience, and the humor comes from mocking the apparently, naive audience, which is a very difficult thing to get out of, because if you, you know, any

expression of political sincerity, therefore, you know, you can be, it is immediately subject to mockery in some sort of way. So how do we get out of that? Do we need some sort of, do we need sincerity or do we need some sort of sincerity linked to a sort of criticality or something like that? Well, we think that in such a scenario, in such a media landscape, saturated with images and information, hyper-connected, always on, never off, overwhelming. We must ask ourselves, what communication strategy and tactics could pierce the membrane of dominant ideology? So I think that our toolbox, I insist on this in the book, our toolbox must be inventoried, re-inventory, rearranged. for each tool

that we have in the box we must find out whether it still has an effective critical use or not but the main issue is that of subjectivity the who does it

who is supposed to use the tools because the avant-garde doesn't work anymore small groups of experimenters are not enough tactical units no small group can work and no individual thinker

no individual artist aesthetic interventionist this is a collective thing to do the inventory has to be taking as collectively as possible social movements as large are the ones to do it

during the past decade the 2010s we've seen mass movements utterly rewrite the book of street tactics sometimes with stunning psychogeographical inventiveness

as when we saw the gilletjean the French yellow vests infused with completely new meanings as such dull locations as roundabouts on the outskirts of towns other times with great

incredible creativity in redefining the rules, the unwritten rules of confrontation with the police of rioting as happened in Hong Kong, for example. I think the new movements must do and will do the same thing as far as the toolbox of language and concepts and aesthetic interventions are concerned.

I think that the most important thing is to build narratives that can be shared and become environments. This was the thing that mattered most to us to the Luther Brescent project, much more than looking for shock value or anything like that. Luther Blisett was about inventing and narrating stories. The Luther Bristair project was a big alternate reality game with a lot of sub-games constantly going on, you know, smaller networks in which many kinds of role-playing took place.

Luther Brisset played with a great number of arts, forms, concepts, and disciplines. First of all, there was the multiple name itself. That was an incredible tool to use. You know, everybody can be Luther Blisett. And then the media pranks, the media stunts, radio, video, music, fanzines, performance art, conspiracy fantasies. Our tactics of culture jamming

were not important in themselves. They always say that building and keeping alive the network of people around the Luther Bricet legend, the open community, the open reputation of Luther Blysset as a folk hero. Because we understood the limits of culture jamming. You know, we're talking in the same years in which Ad Busters was active, the S-Men,

the work on the tactical media stuff. But we could see that culture jamming actions had an increasingly shorter cycle of effectiveness before losing their edge and become part of the general media blob. We felt it was necessary to slow down the cycle, to prolong the game, to delay its end. and I found it bizarre when I heard that this guy, Edmund Berger, in a book titled Grangell accelerationism, included the Lucerne Project in the genealogy of accelerationism,

of that philosophical, political, it's bizarre because the Lutheran Bishop Project was more dedicated to slowing down processes than making them faster. However, at last, in the end, we had to claim responsibility for the hoaxes. Because, as I said, that was the key moment. back then it was still possible to claim a prank and provide the public with evidence that you were telling the truth that it was indeed you who did it but since then things have changed a lot

the media landscape is radically different and today a fake story remains in circulation without any claim its proliferation maybe so swirling as to overwhelm the very idea of being able to claim it Think of the Q-Drops. Were they part of a prank? At least at the beginning, even if someone came out and confessed

that they were indeed part of a prank, would we believe them? They would immediately raise the suspicion that is just another act of manipulation, just a hoax within the hoax. So in today's media landscape, most likely, our old 1990s tactics couldn't work

like that. But they think that the spirit, we must retain the spirit, the spirit in which we conduct our guerrilla warfare can be still inspiring. We have to defy conspiracy fantasies and the cosmic right and all that stuff with stories that are more interesting, more intriguing, more engaging,

more funny than any conspiracy fantasy. That's perfect. Just to, I want to push you a little bit further on that as well because I know in the book Qude de Complotto, you draw on all sorts of examples, but you draw on stage magicians, stage magic, in order to try to think through how we may be able to work every

through this minefield. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, perhaps, and perhaps your critique of the sort of debunking attitude towards conspiracy fantasies? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. In my book, I write a lot about enchantment and the

necessity of re-enchantment. So I have to clarify a bit what I mean by that, by enchantment, and disenchantment. We live in the enchantment of disenchantment. That's what capitalism did to us. In every moment of our days and nights, except maybe when we sleep,

but the logic of capitalism is trying to figure out how to eliminate sleep. We sleep less and less. We are subjected to a world, a framing a worldview in which everything is considered calculable,

quantifiable, reducible to numbers, to digits, to algorithms, programmable, and I don't even know if such a word exists, pigeonholeable, and then engineerable, re-engineerable,

every human behavior and action is represented as segmentable, optimizable. It can be reduced to a performance, to grades, to scores, to records, to numbers. Every element of the world becomes data, data on what we do, what we want, what we like and dislike data on how we work on the pace we can plausibly keep at work short of, before collapsing. This French thinker, actually, he's a Franco-Argentian thinker. Miguel Benazayag describes this process as colonization of existing by functioning.

I mean, the functioning colonizes the existing. Everything must function and be functional for something else. And of course, this keeps us constantly competing against each other. I think everyone noticed that everything has become a competition. everywhere you see juries, votes, eliminations. There was a proliferation of reality shows and talent shows

and even cake competitions have become ferocious battles and you have to work faster than your colleagues so Amazon fires them instead of you. You got to have more likes under your posts. You got to get higher grades, etc. This is the enchantment of capitalism. This is what they call the enchantment of capitalism.

It's a spell. The spell cast by a unidimensional, monodimensional modernity that has nothing to do with the complexity, the elusive complexity and richness of the world. It is enchantment, and this enchantment at the same time, because it inhibits this qualifies, Often even criminalizes all other forms of enchantment that go in other directions. And it does so, in the name of reason, reason with the capital R, science with a capital S.

And all the rest is superstition, you know, myths, ignorance. The typical example is what is called scientism, a blind belief in science with a capital S that in the end is anti-scientific. anti-scientific and superstitious. For example, in these years of pandemic emergency, we've been more than ever hostage to this way of thinking a 19th century conception of science.

Every time a positivistic conception of science, every time we have heard people proclaim, science says that, we should have replied, first of all, there is no such thing as science. There are sciences in the

plural. Secondly, We were commenting provisional results of partial research, preprints, anticipations of articles that hadn't yet been scrutinized by the scientific community. So such a certainty, such an assertive tone, was completely out of place. But this is what happens. Usually, I believe, in scientism, confuses the temporary result, the provisional results of research with the more established the truths of sciences

and gives the same authority to both things when in fact an article on the contagiousness of asymptomatic SARS-COV-2 positives is one thing, the laws of thermodynamics and another. So we live inside

cages, within cages made of numbers. And that makes us sick, of course, it makes us ill. And we often don't understand why. the fact that we always have to live up to it we have to deliver a never-ending performance we have to compete all the time

and we're continually being assessed and evaluated so the need for a different life different than that is irrepressible and also the need to re-enchant the world this explains the success of conspiracy fantasies they try to give you an explanation for your malaise in terms of

there's someone conspiring against you. Of course, of course you feel bad because there's a conspiracy against you. And also, this explains the success of the various new age and new age movements advocating

new spiritualities, alternative therapies and stuff like that. These movements are not really alternative to the dominant ideology. For example, many currents of new age culture, embrace the same model of competition as neoliberalism.

To them, life is an ongoing performance. It's all about individual self-improvement, self-management, levels to overcome, a kind of biometrics of the soul, no, biometrics of the spirit. There's no moving away from the market logic.

On the contrary, these movements try to engineer the human, but they represent these engineering as a work on your inner self. Going back to conspiracy fantasies, a point I insist very much in my book. Conspiracy fantasies intercept social discontent, and they pervert kernels of truth

about how lousy capitalist society is. Conspiratorialism provides people with a substitute for anti-capitalism and class war. But they also, and that's very important, they also intercept. a need for wonder, for enchantment. Conspiratorialism is fascinating, and it uses your life with a new meaning. It gives you a truth with a capital T for which you can be an evangelist. It gives you a cause to fight for. It gives you a community to do it with, albeit a virtual community, some people on a Facebook

group or a telegram channel, but it's a community nonetheless. At the core, there's a need for reenchantment. especially during the pandemic and during the lockdowns many people realized that their life was shitty it was completely meaningless their job was devastating them so we have this gigantic phenomenon the big quit with millions of people living their jobs

all over the West it's precisely at that moment when you realize that your life has no meaning and you start looking for explanation for that it's precisely at that moment that conspiratorialism holds out its hand and says, come with me, come with me, I have the answer

and the answer will make your life meaningful again because you will know the truth at last. No counter-narrative will work if it does not intercept and hijack that very need. That's why we're trying to work with many materials, including magic, no, in order to understand that. because conspiracy narrative might be approached on that terrain,

not just the terrain of logic, fact-checking, debunking the stance of intellectual arrogance, which I call racial suprematism. We know these people are ignorant, they would believe anything, this is just crap, that's not true, stuff like that.

The difference between a conspiracy fantasy and the counter-narrative that we need is that we must keep together re-enchantment, In critical thinking, that is the challenge. We have to embrace the enchantment of the world without giving up on having a critical vision, a critical method, a critical analysis of the world.

That's fantastic, thanks. I want to push a little bit more on this notion of enchantment and how we might understand it, or even wonder perhaps. Like on ACFM, when we discuss sort of magic and in its various sorts of forms. And we kept coming back to this idea that perhaps, you know, we can understand some of these practices

as attempts to maintain an openness to like just how complex the world is. And perhaps that's why we might critique what you call racial suprematism, which sees the project of reason as closed, actually, as finished in some sort of way. But the other thing I had in my head was the idea that perhaps what we're talking about

is like an exceeding of, that like practices or perhaps even moments when our sense of what's possible gets exceeded and that's sort of like that that's almost fetidious feeling that the world is like repotentialized in some sort of way. It made me think of Georgia Gambon writing back in the early 2000s I think talking about Jewish traditions of thinking about heaven

and he said heaven is just like in that tradition heaven is just like our life on earth but it's one inch to the left and I always interpreted that as that one is the left is that that is a world which is repotentialized in which the fetishisms that construct our lives such as capital is a fetishism

so as concepts such as race etc etc once those are overcome you basically have the same life but like full of potential is that well we're getting up when we talk about enchantment yeah yeah absolutely

and I arrived to these through literature because of course my main field of intervention is literature. It's not philosophy, like in Agamben's case, not other forms. Of course, I'm

a novelist. And I think I have a good understanding of how powerful literature can be to repotentialize the world. It does it, it does this through empathy.

Because we can draw from the whole of culture. We can do from literature, art, magic, stage magic, also from those non-Western cultures that retain elements that aren't yet fully assimilated

by capital, you know, there are still some gaps, some empty spaces that are not empty, of course, they fool with forms of life, that capital hasn't yet

fully inco co-opted, integrated, commodified, et cetera. So we can draw examples if we talk about repotentializing the world, re-enchanting the world. I also draw from my experience, Luther Brist's pranks on satanic panic. At the time we were the protagonist of a story that once told, turned out to be far more fascinating and interesting and engaging and enchanting than the conspiracy.

We were fighting, you know, because the story was, these guys fooled the media for a year by inventing a satanic cult and a Catholic fascist vigilante group, and they did that in order to help some self-styled satanists rotting in jail, and they use the name of a British footballer. That's a great story, you know, and we totally told that story. We explained every aspect. We gave the public all the tools that they needed to understand how we did it. So, re-enchantment and critical thinking together.

But I was talking about literature, because I'm constantly digressing, sorry. Literature does, if you think of it, it does the opposite of what the social media are doing to us. The opposite. Because these big platforms do nothing but reinforce a perception, an experience that's tailor-made on us, on me, me as an individual, me as a user, thanks to the continuous constant drilling into my way of existing, my behavior, my needs, my habits, my preferences, drilling to extract data with which to personalize my experience. As a result, on social network, it's become almost impossible to put yourself in the shoes

on someone else in the shoes and minds of others because everything is just for you, it's customized, continually adapted to the perception that you already have. You're inside your epistemic bubble thanks to algorithms that suggest content based on what you already

think and what you already like. How is re-enchantment possible under these conditions? There is no re-enchantment without the possibility of putting yourself in the shoes of someone else. Leacher does exactly that, especially novel but not only novels.

Literature allows me to live other lives, albeit temporarily. It puts me in the shoes of people who live in other times, other places, even over the other planets, or here in the present day like me, and we could say that they're beside me, maybe they live in the same town,

albeit in a fictional version of it, but they have experiences that are different from mine. So literature allows me to to multiply the angles, to depersonalize my gaze, my perception, and that's a repotentialization of the world. And then there's magic. As you said, we are very interested in stage magic, in mentalism, etc.

We actually, we collaborate with magicians, especially one, Mariano Tomatis. He's a historian of stage magic. He's a comrade. and he tries to re-conceptualize stage magic in a radical anti-capitalistic ways. He started his exploration by asking himself a question.

If by magic we mean things that stand out from the normal, from the ordinary, they stand out from the background of everyday life and produce wonder, why is it so rare to see stage magic? associated with critical thinking about the world, with practices that abolish the present state of things.

Why is stage magic so disassociated from that? Why are the figures of the magician and the mentalist more often than not drenched in machismo and associated to a bourgeois reactionary, imaginary? And so he tried to answer this question. this question, he wrote several books. I suggest you to check out Mariano's work as also material

in English. Many other strategies of re-enchantment are possible. One can start from all kinds of fields and elements. For example, from the names of streets and squares. That's the names of the streets.

You walk every day. Most of the time, we take them for granted. But when we reactivate the story and the meaning of a street name, it can evoke ghosts, it can arouse wonder. We did that many times as Woming in Bologna and in other places, with streets named after forgotten heroes of the resistance, for example, partisans. Or on the contrary, with streets and squares in Italian towns, there are many of them whose names still celebrate forgotten episodes, forgotten horrors of Italian colonialism in Africa and the Balkans.

We steer up the ghosts of the stories, and there's some sort of re-enchantment of the world. When people who usually take that street name for granted, they never ask themselves why a street has that name and not another name, etc., all of a sudden they started to think of it and they see a story and they see ghosts, ghosts in that street. That's another form of enchantment, starting from autonomy, from the names of streets and squares and monuments, et cetera. You know, a couple of years ago, I recorded a sort of walking tour, a radical history, walking tour of the city of Leeds where I live. We recorded it for Navarra Media. So when you come and visit me, Roberto, I'll take you one hour.

We'll re-enchant the city of Leeds. There's so many different directions I could take this. One of the ones that comes to mind is that during lockdown, one of the things that I took up was tabletop role-playing games, and we recently recorded an episode on games. I also helped design sort of political strategy games. I'm really, really interested in tools to help collective narrative building, just to refer back to your discussion of literature. But perhaps one of the last things I wanted to push you on at, on a little bit, is that it's a return you back to philosophy. I know you don't want to go, but I was, I've read and listened to you talk about, about Kant's theory of the dynamical sublime.

Don't turn off, listeners, it's very interesting. Because I found that this idea, I want you to explain that a little bit about how you linked that to the, to enchantment. It's simpler than it sounds, yeah, because when I say that believing in conspiracy fantasies is empowering he's fascinating etc

some people raise this objection how is that possible a conspiracy fantasy such as Q and on gives you a horrible picture of the world you should be afraid

you should be terrified not empowered well that's where the dynamically sublime a concept devised and explained by philosopher Immanuel Kant

comes handy it comes very handy because he defined the dynamically sublime as that kind of emotion that feeling

that intense pleasure that you can feel after you've been blocked by fear there's something something happens a storm

an earthquake a sea storm because he used a lot of example taken from natural disasters because he lived in a pre-industrial, of course, reality. And he said, when there's a gigantic storm with thunders and bolts and pouring rain and you have to stay home and you're terrified because you see the trees swinging, you see, you know, very high waves in the sea and ships rocking from side to side and stuff like that. At first, you are terrified.

Your vital energy gets paralyzed by fear. But there's a second moment in which you start to enjoy the powerfulness of all that. Okay, so at first you are frozen by fear, but then you start to enjoy the situation because nothing harmful is really happening to you. You're inside the house, you can see the storm from inside. That's the example. Of course, I re-adapted the dynamically sublime to conspiratorialism and conspiracy fantasies. When you, as they say, take the red pill, when you get red peeled, okay, you learn about a horrible situation, of course, because the planet is secretly ruled by a secret society of pedophile satanists, keeping thousands or even millions of children slave in a state of slavery, in a state of slavery, in a deep underground military bases and those children get raped, violated, tortured and beaten all the time

so that their blood is rich with adrenaline, then their blood is extracted from that adrenaline with a chemical process they obtain, they obtain adrenochrome and they drink adrenochrome in order to stay forever young. Of course adrenochrome really exists, but that has no rejuvenating power. It's a satirical invention

by Hunter S. Thompson in Fid and Lothen in Las Vegas, that adrenochrome has such incredible power as a drug, nothing like that. And if they drink it in order to stay forever young, and Joe Biden

is among them, and you look at him Well, it doesn't work. But anyway, anyway, of course, this is horrible, a horrible picture. And you should be afraid because the cabal controls everything. The deep state controls everything. Okay, everything is a conspiracy by the cabal, et cetera. So at the beginning, you may feel lost. You know, how can I do something about such a terrible state of things?

and I had no power at all. But what the community tells you is that now you know the truth and this gives you power because the norm is they don't know the truth. They haven't been red-pilled. So you start to feel fascinated, empowered by

this new mission, by this cause you can fight for, by the fact that you know the secrets and you know the truth. So you start to feel yeah, re-potential eyes, empowered, fascinated, re-enchanted. Okay, that's exactly what Kant described

when he talked about the dynamically sublime. That's perfect. I mean, one of the reasons I really like that sort of train of thought is that it made me reassess what the cosmic and the cosmic right is, if you look, if you know what I mean. Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I think the cosmic right is a great image because it keeps together the political and the metaphysical.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. So the cosmic in the cosmic right might be like the cosmic and cosmic horror, which people associate with H.P. Lovecraft. Absolutely. And the horror of H.P. Lovecraft is that sort of almost sublime, you know, the glimpse of these sort of like these huge, almost infinite old ones, you know, and your feeling of both insignificance but also safety because we're the ones reading it, of course. Yeah.

This has all been great and fantastic, Roberto, but we should probably draw it, to an end. But so I'll just end with perhaps just to emphasize how important I think this train of thinking and trying to think through this problem of like enchantment and wonder is that I spent the last couple of days watching videos coming out of Iran where there's been five days of like protest strikes and what looks like an uprising actually in Iran after the murder of a of a 22-year-old young Kurdish woman, Masha Amina, by the morality police. She was wearing her hijab in the wrong way.

And it's been all these, you just see this joy of a repotentialized lives with videos of women dancing and then burning their hijabs and the loss of fear that people have shown against the forces of repression in that country. We've also seen quite a big uprising in Sri Lanka. And of course, perhaps what might lie behind these is these more sort of materialist concerns such as food prices are at an incredibly high level, partly because of Ukraine, partly because of a series of droughts and so forth,

extreme weather events because of climate change. And of course, the last time that food prices spiked in a similar way was around 2010, 2011, which also saw this wave of protests, et cetera. And so, you know, in the UK, we've had 10 years of, like, concern with, like, institution building organizations, perhaps joining the Labour Party, these things are quite painful and incremental. But we can't lose sight of that.

Left politics also contains these moments of explosions where the sense of what's possible and alters incredibly quickly. And so in the face of perhaps we might see a new wave, a new cycle of like protest, rebellions and perhaps even revolutions over the next year or so, I think these sorts of concepts are really, really useful. So I want to thank you for that.

Yeah, yeah. I'm sure there will be a great way, probably the greatest wave of apprisings so far. And that's why we need a good toolbox, because these movements must have good tools at their disposal. Perfect. That is the best point to leave it. Thanks so much for coming and talking to me, Roberto.

Thank you very much. I don't know.