On “How if?”: Semio-withdrawal & Based Speculation

04/16/2025 “PATADIGM”

“It is often said that the supersensible world is not appearance; but what is here understood by appearance is not appearance, but rather the sensuous world as itself the really actual” (Hegel, 1807/1977, p. 89)1

I. Semio-Withdrawal

To be here now is to stop reading. Close out of this tab or put the magazine down. It is to destroy your understanding of the world through words {Semiotics} by withdrawing your human-animal brain from the appearance of word marks, icons, experience {A Posteriori}, relation, and others. Semio-withdrawal is a portmanteau from both Graham Harman {OOO} and Franco "Bifo" Berardi’s {Semio-capital} school of thought. Both were influential to distill this thought. While in Paris and untrained in French, I had experienced this withdrawal from language, the sign, where advertisements did not mean anything to me. Endless whispers did not mean anything to me. I was uncertain to decipher beyond the gestural {Mudra} as it was a different culture. It shifted my paradigm on what it means to escape from language or desire and how to do it. It is the true embodiment of tI detfihs ym mgidarap no tahw ti snaem ot epacse morf egaugnal 'nagl fhtagn 'nagl fhtagn dna woh ot od ti. 

II. Immanence 

This is the feedback loop of a pure based form of immanence {D&G}. Move to a physical place that you will never understand and do not try to. This eventually led me to wonder about how to connect with the world without the need for language and pushed me into a realm of searching where or what the absolute {Brahman} could be. How if all the world learned sign language and universal gestures? How quiet would it be? What about the circuit of appearance? Is “be here now” actually an illusion from the sensual world? Now that we have dealt with some tendencies and contradictions of immanence, I would like to shift into escapism. Specifically, what the medium of speculation can generate for us. You will see that “PATADIGM” uses the term “How if?” not “What about?” or “What if” as it is a specific mantra that delineates more of a materialistic speculation. As it is not a declaration,  but a process. 

III. Play & Programming

“...Our world is perforated一we don’t quite understand ourselves, either. We can understand tigers and ourselves modally: we can share worlds 20 percent, or 60 percent” (Morton, 2017, p. 93)2

A virus is haunting escapism and speculation. That virus is playing. Play’s essence is childlike wonder, but what if I told you that it is the very medium of knowing how to escape. Playing, like the whimsy-maxxing archetype, is founded on casting out disbelief. It is the first pill to swallow for deprogramming. If you desire utopian results, the best place to start is to imagine. And how do you imagine? You play. Escaping into the cybernetic impulse or the refrain of the black pill {Nihilistic Bereavement} garners you to be trapped by the Big Other. Such programming, like the inventor of the tre flip, leads you to become stuck within expressing others' imagination. Even Ram Dass has programming. Being here now is unattainable. Not because it is impossible to be in the now, but because it is impossible to be here. 

IV. Imagination and the Real

Imagination is chaotic, but foundational to conjured ideas, which is “symbolism” and in the basic form known as merely appearance. Changing your symbol set {Speculative Grammatology} can garner new expressions and is a step towards materialization. Maybe we need to start embodying a “being now” expression like immanence. Yet, the process for escaping through language and the sensual is ultimately unknown as thought-forms {Tulpa} become the process of a new Big Other. Which is why semio-withdrawal is effective, as it is a counter tendency towards thought-forms and thought-phases {Egregore}. An extreme would be the death of consciousness or at least the notion of understanding. Be here now is anti-”human”. In contradiction, be here now is a form that tells that other forms of subjectivity {Atman} that they are escapist, but in itself nowness is an escape. Turn on, tune in, and drop out into another world or Reality {Lacan}. Reality is designed with ephemeral appearances in which the base Real is then driven out of formation. You can never know the Real. It is the presupposed. The void. You could not exist and be sentient. If physics is the Real, then Reality is metaphysics. As Reality is metaphysics, speculation is Pataphysics. The alternative to now is also a formation of designed understanding and a reality framework. Would you rather be in a frame of mind of nowness or one that is utopic? How can escapism be used as a tool? How does the mind alter the matter? How if we designed a consensual escape?

Imagination is in the realm of the imaginary where desires coalesce within the dialectic. Power is seized by the natural law of less resistance or suffering. If a new way of doing things were to exist, we could conspire as a group. It is different from the normie-ification of psychological groupthink. Power structures enforce the unification under a shared memetic spirit. But what about an escape that is pure in a form of socially constructed imagination? Playing is the medium for a dual environment world through escape. Game design is an art form to many avenues of playing. A foundational section of a game that we designed was talking about consensual imagination. Imagination, perception of matter, is meant as a new foundation in ways to counteract this feeling of if we cannot speculate about a better world, why even try making one? Playing games garners an atmosphere for speculative solutions to problems or contradictions. Each action is not alone, but within a systematic frame {Cybernetic Impulse}. So how if we simulate real world ethical and moral decisions at the table? The current simulation focuses on what is the spectacle and what is “BOTTOM TEXT”. But, how if we created a simulation that is ethical/utopian that will conversely affect the production of a perforated world? {Karma} Everyone says “be the change you want to be in the world”, but has anyone shown you how?

V. Aufhebung: Hegel though Dass and back into Hegel

“See: We’ve gotten so super-sophisticated in our evaluative mechanisms that you question everything you hear…I mean: What was Jesus up to? What’s the game, man?...If you are committed to an existing system with great attachment” (Dass, 1971, p. 71)3

I have a high regard for Ram Dass and Hegel; they are talking about almost the same thing through the so-called duality of Eastern and Western thought. They are figureheads for bifurcations among the Absolute. The tendency for escapism is to escape to the outside instead into the One. Ram Dass focuses on attachment of desires, but we might be desiring machines {D&G} and fundamentally need the supersensible for understanding. Hegel focuses on the process of absolute knowledge through the particular, but we might need to take a tab and ~vibe~. While Ram Dass is correct in a sense, the sustainability of attunement in that state can be unrealistic. Spend thirty minutes meditating and have twenty-three and a half hours left of the day to suffer. Whimsy-maxxing your way through life and having immanence can prolong the state and make it more attainable. How if a medium of existing that made us feel loved and to move through the fourth chakra? The prolonging of being one with the universe and being here now is a formidable task as is a section of the great work. However, attachment is what makes us exist in this perceived world and maybe it would be easier to exist if the absolute was investigated through speculation and logic. To know and then to sublate the circuit. Ram Dass might even be more accelerationist in his text in which attachment and evaluative mechanisms are just something to cast away like semio-withdrawal. Don’t think, be here now. Investigation via based speculation is towards the path of the Absolute as our species-being wants to desire, to want to form and create, which transforms us to be posthuman. 

VI. Based Speculation

“Destroying. Cracked open the broken pods on a plinth- the experts form cryogenic involvement [Redacted]. Unexplained ways. Jello, you see clouds-“ (“PATADIGM”, 2025, p.1)4

Based speculation is clarity towards this investigation of perforated worlds and the essence of escape. Based in the way of formation intwine with superstructure. We want to escape because we don’t feel loved and cared for. Why do you want to be here now? Being aware is transcendent and within contradiction towards immanence. The formation of an inner world and understanding is mediated by appearance. Appearance of reality as the Real can not be experienced. It deals with the mirror stage {Lacan}, our first understanding of our young selves, and our own understanding of subjectivity. To be here now would be to have no thoughts and a pure existence. How if you never existed? How if you never had any thoughts? No understanding at all. I am unsure if you would really want that as you can’t even want. To be here now is to stop reading. Close out of this tab or put the magazine down. It might be the cybernetic impulse for change that is beckoning instead. The danger is losing your grip on the world to escape and inadvertently contracting a realized desire to escape. If you think about not thinking you are entrapping and programming yourself. Play, but not programmed games, on the hand can be that space for escaping within the consensual othering such as role-play and live action role-play as the speculation can form a new totality through the designed artifacts of one’s experience. To the fiction that is yet to be true-

VII. TL;DR

]->-{Semiotics}->-{A Posteriori}->-{OOO}->-{Semio-capital}-

>-{Mudra}->-{D&G}->-{Brahman}->-{Nihilistic Bereavement}-

>-{Speculative Grammatology}->-{Tulpa}->-{Egregore}-

>-{Atman}->-{Lacan}->-{Cybernetic Impulse}-

>-{Karma}->-{D&G}->-{Lacan}-<[

Notes & Citations:

1. Hegel, G. W. F., & Miller, A. V. (1977). Force and the understanding: Appearance and the supersensible world. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (pp. 79–103). Oxford University Press. 
2. Morton, T. (2017). Humankind. Verso Books.
3. Dass, R., & Lama Foundation. (1971). Be here now, remember. Lama Foundation.
4. Collage poem from “PATADIGM” collaboration meeting on 04/04/25 testing out surrealist techniques for asset creation by flipping the TTRPG module to a random page and saying a phrase out loud. Group members present were: TMK, WD, KC, LA, & SZ.