Desiring Otherness: Midnight Radio 4: Slow Machines

Alister Crowley's definition of magic is something like pursuing the ends of the will by alternate means. If that is all that magic is, it's pretty boring since the personal will is mostly prosaic, as Crowley proved by pursuing the ends of his will mostly by means of his enchanted penis. James and I prefer a version of magic that allows for us to encounter something that we couldn't have willed, or imagined, before hand. An enchanted world is one that doesn't go according to plan because there are others with other plans that resist our prosaic ideas about the world. Real magic desires otherness, which is not to want the oneness of my own intention, but the twoness of another. Evolutionary niche construction made us prediction machines desiring uncertainty reduction, but a magical accident happened somewhere along the way because what makes us human is the strange desire that stirs within us for the uncertainty of otherness, which Freud named "Death Drive." Join us as James and I discuss the magical serendipity of Detroit techno, which has become a familiar otherness, or a ravishing "Far-Near," as the mystics say, in each of our lives.

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