Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture by David Cecchetto et al. (review)

At almost every turn (tune?), Ludic Dreaming resists the familiarizing and disciplining gestures of the academy, such as, for instance, a review in an academic journal. To begin with: is the “ludic dreaming” proposed by the authors theory or practice? In the introduction, the book announces itself as “a series of quasi-analytical essays that take the humor, (il)logic, and gibberish of dreaming as practical methods for thinking and listening away from contemporary culture’s compulsive need to make itself legible, sharable, meaningful, and ‘real’ ” (2). The prefix “quasi-” in “quasi-analytical,” with its index of conditionality, of almost-ness, signals to us that while we may have one foot in analytical territory, the other foot will always be elsewhere.

The book’s authorship is attributed to the Occulture, a group of academics that maintain an eponymous blog where they publish everything from contemporary political analysis to experimental fiction. Like the Occulture blog, Ludic Dreaming concerns itself with a diffuse, or détourned, concept of “the occult,” drawing explicitly from the Situationists, the speculative aesthetics and philosophy of ’pataphysics, Gilles Deleuze, and perhaps most conspicuously, British philosopher Nick Land, whose theory of “hyperstition” seems to operate as the tonic pitch in the compositions woven together by the Occulture. The invocation of Land, here, (his name is relegated to a footnote, but “hyperstition” appears everywhere throughout the text) (152) may give pause, considering that this particular post-Deleuzian took a dramatic recent turn toward “neoreactionary” (i.e., fascist) politics. Of course, any student of Western esotericism will know that its history is one of intermittent entanglement with such pathologies; yet I found myself wishing the polyonymous authors of Ludic Dreaming had directly confronted Land’s more repugnant inclinations.

Land’s concept of “hyperstition,” developed when he was a member of another speculative occult group, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit or CCRU, evaluates the agential or autonomous capacity of thoughts, ideas, fantasies, to become real. Ludic Dreaming, then, is perhaps meant as a hyperstitional unfolding of tactics and strategies for, as the subtitle puts it, “listening away from contemporary technoculture.” These include: a series of academic “essays,” each written under the sign of a dream which someone may or may not have actually had; the erroneous attribution of quotes to fictitious names constructed anagrammatically from that of their true author (18, 19); philosophical explorations in the form of sustained dialogue with a talking horse (49–55); and a “conclusion” that the authors identify as a seventeenth-century woodcut, despite its bearing a Latin translation of a certain familiar Arthur C. Clarke quote (142–43). Such Borgesian moves, such turnings and tunings, insist to readers that we are off the map of traditional academic writing.

If Ludic Dreaming does have a map, it is self-made, and its (non-)territories include sound studies, the borderlands between dreaming, cognition, and perception, and of course, more speculative zones such as the neologistic concept of the “auralneiric.” Collapsed within that word is the Occulture’s insistence on the dreaminess of sound, and the sonic quality of dreaming: “Sounds—like dreams (and data)—are ideal events, abstractions with real material effects that can only ever be thought retrospectively as autonomous entities” (10). In their recognition of relationality and assemblage, the author(s) stay true to their Deleuzian inheritance (and to Deleuze’s own inheritance, the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead). Indeed, there may be no theoretical writing that Ludic Dreaming so much resembles as the two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia; like their forebears, the authors do not shy away from making extremely technical trans-disciplinary detours during their adventures of thought, into art history, cognitive science, or in one particularly forbidding chapter, Fourier analysis.

Do they make successful arguments, or illuminate their subject...