Patricia Pisters - Different situations might need different types of intelligence; the forms of knowledge from speculative thinking, fiction, and design can be really powerful

To kick things off, we’d like to invite you to talk a bit about speculation and speculative thinking, especially in relation to urban contexts. Specifically, how do we perceive the city and, from a media studies perspective, how do we view the city as a kind of assemblage?

Looking at media history, it's really quite amazing how much of what is around now has been envisioned already early on in the film. Not only urban environments but also technology that is always very much part of the urban environment. I'm thinking, for instance, of Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, one of the first big urban symphonies. There were other films and symphonies of modern cities, but Metropolis is the most famous one. I'm always amazed when I watch the film again how much the mise-en-scene of the film speculates future technologies; they are video conferencing more or less in the 1920s. And, of course, there is the fear of technology overpowering us in Metropolis embodied in a sort of femme fatale’ robot. In general, but this is a speculative answer as well, I think that the power of our image culture is really quite significant in projecting ideas for the future. 

And this is not only for urban spaces, where you can just see it when you look around in the city, but I even think of political systems and politics, even wars. So, the film that I always have my students watch every year is La battaglia di Algeri, The Battle of Algiers (1966). I think it's a very important film in almost designing guerrilla warfare, and it has been used by the Algerians and other resistance fighters such as the Black Panthers and the PLO to respectively, celebrate their victory of independence or to find empowerment and tactics to fight with simple means. But it also has been used by the French and later also the Israeli and American governments to find counter-tactics. This film was based on real events that happened, but it has been replicated in so many fights for liberation and counter-tactics that it has become a sort of blueprint for many battles and wars that we are still stuck in. As the author of a book to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the film states, The Battle of Algiers is still waged, but now on a planetary scale.  So, in general, I think the power of images is that we are conjuring up worlds, and as soon as we have not only thought of them but somehow visualised them, they become real, they start to operate in the world, as co-creators of the world in complex assemblages that combine facts and fictions into virtual and actual realities. I think in architecture and urban design, this is absolutely also the case, you make models and maquettes, even if it seems completely unrealistic.; Once you have imagined it, there will be a way to make it. Right? And so, in that sense, I think imagination and speculation are hugely important for urban design as well.

So, Metropolis is an early example, and then I could mention a more recent example, for instance, The Beast (2023), a film from Bertrand Bonello that I mentioned this morning in my lecture. There, you see the old city of Paris from the past that we might remember and reconstruct from archival sources, and there is the LA that we know from our present days. Then there is this new future city, which is not located, but which is a sort of generic, futuristic modernity comparable perhaps to Metropolis, or even more to this other dystopian futuristic city from cinema history, Godard’s Alphaville (1965), which is another powerful film that warns us for the power of machines, combined with a fascist ideology that uses machine intelligence to control people. It seems like in the future city of The Beast, like in Alphaville, architecture and artificial intelligence have taken over, and the city itself becomes this sterile, soulless space. We might need more variations on imagining future cities. I have not yet seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopis (2024), but I think this might be an important contribution to our urban speculative imaginaries, even if it might take a while before the film will be recognised as such. 

I also mentioned this morning Apple TV’s series Dark Matter (2024). Here, the main character is a specialist in quantum physics. This character is literally opening doors to worlds, and they're all very different versions of the world he knows, but there is only one world that he actually would like to go to. It's all Chicago, but it's every time a different speculative version of Chicago, one even more dystopian than the other. There is one where somehow people manage to get over their wars, destructions, differences, grief, sickness, greed, etc. But somewhere out there, that is the message of the series. There is a possible version of the world where we can live together in a big futuristic city where we have not exhausted the planet and all its inhabitants, human and non-human. It's the utopian potential of speculation, of course, but I think it's also important that we ‘see’ those images where just to ‘see them’ might make it possible to actualise the virtual. 

Of course, what is worrying is that there is much more violence in all these images that we create, and so, somehow, that is also a summoning of the possible world. When 9-11 happened, philosopher Jean Baudrillard said that ‘we conjured up this event in Hollywood cinema, in speculative fiction and images that all presented what was going to happen.’  He argues that everything had already been envisioned in cinema before it all happened in actuality. Perhaps it is really important that we make more hopeful, beautiful images. Obviously, it is not like we have a magic wand. Still, somehow, and this is again very speculative, you open up a path that makes things possible.

So, our world is very much built around speculation, which offers a certain kind of knowledge that we might need to take into account more. It’s not like scientific knowledge; speculative knowledge is hard to prove. But it is an important factor in the construction of our world that we have to reckon with. I sometimes have this discussion now in the psychedelic community where there are a lot of neuroscientists who do experiments on the effects of certain substances, and these experiments have to be replicable in the exact same conditions to produce scientific truth. This scientific research offers really important insight, but it is not the only possible way of knowing. Not everything that is important is measurable. Not everything is replicable in the exact same way, especially not in relation to natural psychedelics because neither the substance nor the set and setting will never ever be exactly the same. You can also not do a placebo control study because people generally immediately know if they received a placebo or an actual psychoactive substance. This makes scientists a little bit desperate sometimes. So, it's interesting to have those conversations about all other forms of knowledge as well, such as ritualistic approaches and other deeply rooted forms of indigenous knowledge. Speculative thinking, fiction and design, I think, is also one of these alternative forms of knowledge that can be really powerful.

You mentioned imagery, particularly ‘beautiful’ imagery, and its impact on the world and real events. I wonder, though, if there are times when focusing too much on imagery and representation might shift attention away from exploring the core ideas. We noticed that you’ve also discussed the effects of imagery as ‘pharmakon’ in your research. We would be interested to hear your thoughts on the concept of ‘pharmakon’ and how it might relate to teaching—particularly in terms of balancing the use of images without letting them overshadow deeper exploration. From a media studies perspective, how do you approach the idea of images as ‘pharmakon,’ and how does this influence your approach to pedagogy?

Well, let me start with the easiest entrance point, which is the topic I am working on now, which is ‘psychedelics’ because that is a pharmakon. There is a famous adage in the psychedelic community that the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dosage. And that actually counts for everything, not even psychedelics but also something common like coffee. If you have too much coffee, you will not sleep, or you might even get a heart attack. The same goes for media consumption; everything needs a dosage – taking into account that individuals have different thresholds. The art of dosage is a very Deleuze-Guattarian concept and something that is very interesting to think about in relation to the pharmakon. Anything can be a pharmakon, and I think that rather than rejecting image culture, social media, and new technologies, we have to try somehow to keep a balance or learn the art of dosage by remaining on the alert and vigilant to what happens to ourselves and our environments. But that is not at all an easy task.

And then there is resilience, and I think cities of the future also have to think about the resilience of both their inhabitants but also the urban environment, especially in light of climate change that nobody can deny any longer.  I mean, I live in Amsterdam North, where urban development is just moving in astonishing fast paste. They built more than originally planned at the expense of green spaces to breathe and dampen the effects of climate change, such as extreme rain or heat.  But having so little green is not very good, neither for the direct environment, which becomes depressing and dull, nor for the people who live there. To speak with Gregory Bateson or Felix Guattari, this type of urban planning is affecting the environmental/material, as well as the social and mental ecologies of the city of the future. For the resilience of all these three entwined ecologies, everybody knows that more green would be beneficial. But there is always the pressure of money that is more decisive.

So, coming back to the pharmakon from a media studies perspective is a useful concept because it calls for the art of dosage and the necessity to create spaces for resilience as well. We cannot throw away our cell phones because we literally need them to get through the day. I cannot even enter my university website without this thing. But we do need to detox and dose our media consumption by creating ‘green spaces’ in our mental, social and environmental ecologies. I don't know if you had something else in mind with that question.

I completely agree with you, and I found your response to the earlier question really inspiring—especially your mention of the set, setting, and matrix. I find that connection very interesting, especially in relation to later discussions about Bateson. It makes me think about how we can create environments, like in creative ecologies, where the set, setting, and matrix come together.

Yes. Actually, set, setting and matrix concepts from psychedelic studies by which we mean, respectively, the mindset of a person embarking on a psychedelic journey, the location and setting in which they do this, and the environment outside of the setting to which they return, are actually possible definitions of the mental, social, and environmental ecologies, right? I never thought of that in that way, but it is actually that. Again, these are terms from psychedelic studies that are transferrable to other contexts, even to cities. 

We would like to move our question towards the idea that motricity precedes perception, as described by Simondon’s work on imagination and invention. How do you see this concept relating to the psychedelic experience, where movement and sensation (affect) seem to create new perceptions? How would you interpret or position this relationship between movement, space, and perception in such contexts?

If we just start now with cinema and then track back to psychedelics that I was addressing more explicitly in my talk, and that will be the topic of my new book project.  In classical cinema, the director always makes sure that you first know where you are. In classical Hollywood, there is always an establishing shot. A clear example would be the opening of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), where you first see the city of Phoenix. Then the camera zooms into a neighbourhood, then to a building, then to a window, then the camera goes into the room, and then you are in the hotel room with the protagonist. So, there is first a perception-image, the kind that Deleuze calls the objective pole of the perception-image, where the camera moves from an all-knowing perspective.  It puts the viewer in a situation where they know where the narrative is going to unfold, who is involved, where they live, etc. And then, we might align with more subjective perception-images that give us the points of view of characters, and we may start to feel with them on an affective level. But I think in contemporary cinema, especially also the neuro-image you referred to earlier and that I developed in one of my books in respect to digital cinema, you often don't have that objective establishing moment. Indeed, you're immediately plunged in somewhere, somehow in the middle of an action, often from a very subjective point of view, or even sometimes in very haptic images where you don't really perceive very well and as a viewer, you are affectively grasped (defined by Simondon, and Deleuze as motricity as in mirror neurons movements perhaps), confused maybe, and slowly you will manage cobbling together the story and find out what happened. That is a big difference between classical and contemporary cinema and even media culture: nowadays, affect is first, and understanding comes later (if at all). 

So, in that sense, we are thrown in the middle, as if we are in the midst of a psychedelic experience, a trippy journey full of weird encounters. Think of the recent film The Sweet East (2023) by Sean Price Williams, which is like falling through the rabbit hole where everything has turned into a bad trip without any logic and order. Again, affect first. Our technologically mediated culture is so overloaded that it just seems everything is pouring in.  In The Neuro-Image, I described this primacy of affect as an effect of the high subjectivity of the images, very often we are in a character's brain, as, for instance, in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), But usually there is a moment where it is revealed that we have been moving through the world from someone’s (schizophrenic, amnesiac or otherwise impaired, traumatised or overloaded brain scape). At the end of Fight Club, we understand that the Brad Pitt character is just the imagined alter ego of the Edward Norton character. I think now it's weirder. In The Sweet East, everything we know and could potentially recognise of the real world is warped and morphed. Sometimes, it's also very funny because, like an Alice in Wonderland or Alice on acid, you do recognise things, but everything has turned into its weird doppelganger–nothing holds. But we do not get out of it, it seems. I think this changing aesthetics is very telling–it’s psychedelics without any substances. And I am still figuring out how to assess all this. On the one hand, it seems like we are entering a new psychedelic wild west that is symptomatic of the cultural transformations we are going through. It’s our affective psychological response to dangerous and liminal times. On the other hand, the same psychedelics offer something to hold on to in a search for healing. This we also find back on an aesthetic and cultural level, ranging from the Hulu series like Nine Perfect Strangers (2021), where all characters seek healing in a luxurious retreat via rookie psychedelic therapy, to Mendonza Filho and Dornelles Brazilian neo-western Bacurau (2020) where an entire village uses their age-old psychotropics to take back control.

Could you say something about the development of artificial intelligence and how this might amplify the overwhelming flow of sensory inputs, much like in a psychedelic experience? It feels like Artificial Intelligence accelerates this process of sensory overload, making it even harder to navigate. For instance, when I’m scrolling through my phone, I find myself jumping from one thought to another, almost disoriented. I see this challenge in students, too—how can they tap into their own intuition without being overwhelmed by this constant stream of external stimuli? Whether we could engage these stimuli to help student gain their intuition? How can we help them find that balance?

Yes, that is the big problem of our time. It is difficult to find what's real and not real, or rather what’s true or not, what to believe or not.  I mean, for Deleuze, there is the virtual and the actual, and it's all real. But still, there is what Deleuze also called ‘the powers of the false,’ when we no longer can rely on a solid measure from which to assess the truth. This can be creative and generous, it can be good, and artists have always worked with those powers. But it can also be really problematic when propaganda (that can be recognised as propaganda that still is effective, turns into a complete turnover of values. That's just what happens on a political scale: when everything is declared fake news, and the actual fake news can no longer be unmasked. With deepfakes and the incredible powers of AI to create anything that looks like our real world, it is really hard to determine what we are looking at. And before we can even think, we have already been grasped on an affective level.

Actually, Deleuze talks about that in an interesting way in a chapter in The Time-Image where he brings in Nietzsche and says, okay if we no longer know what is real and what's not real, what remains? And then he says we still have the ‘power of bodies.’ And instead of asking if this is real or if this is not real, and this is Deleuze saying this in the 1980s, we should ask, ‘who wants this to be real?’ And then you get a different kind of discussion, and it's not about being right or wrong, because this you're not going to win because everything is so mixed up we really don't know. And this is also a strategy, political strategy. I mean, Putin has really actively created confusion, throwing out different versions of the same story that all create an ‘iron curtain’- around the truth. It's a huge strategy, so people really no longer know who you can believe, what is really, so what do you rely on? This is a real problem. This ‘power of the body’ is also adopted by Trump, a lesson that is clearly put across in Ali Abbassi’s The Apprentice (2024). There, we see how he learns three lessons to become a winner: Lesson 1: create a killer body: Attack, attack, attack. Lesson 2: never admit anything: deny, deny, deny. Lesson 3: always claim victory, also, if you lose: win, win, win. If we look around in the world, this is what is happening everywhere, with the help of a few big tech guys who all have the same strategy.

I think we have to find new strategies for dealing with all that. It also means letting go of the old questions of whether it is a representation, whether it is reality, whether it is a documentary or fiction. Everything is in this big pool that surrounds us, and so we have to somehow find new ways to navigate that. I do think that intuition can have a function in that, but we will need much more than intuition. It's a different type of knowledge that we need where it's not about true or not true, but that's the affect and the sensing. But it also means creating new bodies, perhaps beyond the human ones. Maybe it involves becoming-animal, or different kinds of animals; different situations might need different becomings where you align with a different type of intelligence. So, there are two books that I want to mention. When we were talking about the warping of everything into its opposition, I was thinking of Naomi Klein's book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. First of all, it starts with her own doppelganger. She's always mistaken for Naomi Wolf, who made this 180-degree turn from a democratic feminist into Steve Bannon's cherished right-wing anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. So, she starts out the book with that remarkable turn, and that then creates a snowball effect where it is really about our current political situation where we no longer know what is what, and everything is warped in ways that we also find back in cinema aesthetics as I just mentioned earlier in relation to The Sweet East. 

And then the intuition and maybe connecting to different types of intelligence. So there is a very interesting book by James Bridle, Ways of Being that I can also recommend. He's an artist and an inventor. He built his own electric car, for instance, to find out how an electric car thinks, and he could only find out by making it. And so, yes, this book is really interesting, and it's about all different forms of intelligence, which is important in relation to AI. He investigates what intelligence is, and he argues that if we model everything according to the human standard, we will enter or encounter big surprises. The intelligence of slime moulds or all kinds of animals offers wildly interesting and important ways of being and thinking that we might need to start taking more seriously.  It is a really interesting book to think about the types of intelligence that we will need in order to navigate the future. Our human brain is not enough, and it is not even the most intelligent one, given the mess that we have created as a human species. To navigate this hugely complex world, we might need to join up with panther knowledge or with tree knowledge, for instance, or water knowledge or anything, different types of knowledge that we really need to go forward, to sense better, to create not only better intuition but also create better worlds. There is so much knowledge that has been smashed, repressed, forgotten, and ignored, especially by the West, by colonialism and imperialism.

So, I think that is also exciting. We are living in a dangerous and terrible time, but it's also exciting because you feel that transformations are possible. And not only possible, they are necessary. Sooner or later, something has to give in order for us to survive. But like in Dark Matter that I mentioned before, there are more doors to dystopian future worlds than to a world where we can live in peaceful cohabitation between all kinds of diverse humans, nature and machines. But there must be a door. I think that is what we are collectively searching for in this mad and maddening world of the psychedelic revival.