GOBLIN QUEENS AND QUALIA KNIGHTS
Reviews
"We are all familiar with the chivalric codes of the knight and queen, but we inherited them from a hierarchic mediaeval ethos that laid the basis for modern acquiescence to power, division and ultimately to an AI spectre that may yet see us – correctly – as threats to planetary survival. That may be our future; but what can we do about it? Phil Smith, anarcho-mythogeographer, suggests a way of ‘detourning’ those mediaeval codes into modes of empathetic interaction with human and non-human, countermanding the demands of contemporary capitalist and post-Communist dehumanisation. For the NE reader, this invites revisiting our digital application, our views of place, and our perspective on the worldviews expressed in world archaeologies – implying a rewilding of our individual sensitivities to partake more fully as the veil of separateness is sundered.
Smith’s high-concept writing is not the most accessible, but his praxis offers new internal myths to confront techno-entropy and the controlled homogenisation of humanity and its past and future. His suggestions for this modern knight’s quest involve techniques of psychogeography, mindfulness, and gestures that alt-antiquarians may already have in their everyday repertoire – all in the service of seeing, not looking. [JB]." Reviewed by John Billingsley in Northern Earth, Issue 177, September 2024. |
"... What Smith is trying to do here is to get beyond abstract, universalising concepts that lump together discrete things. As a first step, qualia, a technical term used in philosophy, is explained as the feeling of your own experience as it is for you. It isn’t the same thing as ‘experience’, or ‘subjectivity’ or ‘feeling’ because those are all abstract concepts that can be applied to all sentient things. The quale is your own unrepeatable and non-transferable experience of something. From this first step, Smith goes on to outline ways of drawing out conscious encounters with these moments of qualia. All of this is couched in terms of the courtly quest...
Your experiences may resonate with those of others but there is a sinister force at play through algorithms, big data and machine learning that distorts this direct empathy. Our personal desires and intuitions are harnessed to feed occulted processes that no one fully understands or controls. We give them our data and they use it to sell back to us a diminished version of ourselves. We become locked into self-perpetuating chains of IYLTTT. Hence the anxiety, aimlessness and general shittiness that seems to characterise modern life. Goblin Queens and Qualia Knights shows you how to understand your inner experiences in terms of these mythical creatures and gives a series of practical exercises to expand upon them... ... [The book pays] careful attention to the unhuman. We do not seek out signs and patterns in order to add them into a blueprint; we attempt to become conversant with unhuman patterns on their own terms so that they can inform our own unique quest. Losing the details in pursuit of the ‘big picture’ is a hubristic error. Most contemporary systems of magick, such as Thelema, will encourage you to work through stages of initiation to reach an end goal which will be some version of conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. But with the quest of the Qualia Knights, there are no initiations and no end point. Or rather, every conscious moment is an initiation and an end in itself; which is more or less another way of saying the same thing. All of this is explained far better in the book. As is usual with Phil Smith’s writing, he is able to articulate several themes simultaneously whist achieving full clarity. Goblin Queens and Qualia Knights is shorter than most books on magic but it supersedes pretty much all of them. The slow cancellation of the future just became less certain." Reviewed in Corsepresentblog. See the full review here... |