Source materials:
A. "The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy"
B. Chaosmosis : an ethico-aesthetic paradigm , Felix Guattari, Paris, 1992, pp. 50-52 (Summary of B below)
Deepseek:
Fogos: Sacred Obscurity, Bullshit, and the Rhetoric of Ritualized Density in Human and Machine Discourse
Introduction: Toward a Fogotic Turn
1. Most Parascience Is Close to Religion: The Divine Word-Salad
Fogos thrives where empiricism falters. Consider the Royal Parchment Scroll of Postmodernists (a fictive fogotic text):
“The quantum rhizome collapses the wave function of ontological binarism through anarcho-schizoanalytic transduction.”
Fogotic Markers:
- Honorific Saturation: Invoking “quantum” and “ontological” as sacred incantations.
- Cosmic Signification: Imputing grand stakes (“collapse of binarism”) to untestable claims.
- Credentialism as Revelation: The reader must believe the author has accessed higher knowledge.
This mirrors religious texts (e.g., Gnostic gospels) where initiation through abstraction replaces evidence. As Sokal showed, such discourse resists rationality not by refuting it but by mimicking its aesthetics.
2. Deleuze & Guattari: Ontology in a Mist
Chaosmosis and A Thousand Plateaus are fogotic masterpieces. Take this passage:
“The machinic phylum deterritorializes the State apparatus.”
Fogotic Elements:
- Mimetic Authority: The phrasing sounds rigorous (phylums! deterritorialization!) but evaporates under scrutiny.
- Esoteric Density: Like a sutra, it demands commentary—not clarity.
- Philosophical Dazzle: The prose bedazzles rather than explains, a tactic Sokal called “abusing science’s cultural authority.”
Compare to the Tibetan Book of the Dead: both use strategic ambiguity to imply profundity.
3. AIs as Springboards for the Birth of AI Fogos
Your experiment revealed AI’s dual role: bullshit generator and bullshit mirror. When prompted charitably, LLMs produce fogos effortlessly:
“The hyperstitional manifold folds spacetime through semiotic autopoiesis.”
Why This Matters:
- Fogos as Metalinguistic Play: The term itself satirizes the phenomena it describes, embodying fogotic recursion.
- AI as Amplifier: Trained on human texts, LLMs replicate fogotic patterns (Deleuze → ChatGPT → even denser outputs).
Yet when armed with via negativa, AIs can expose fogos—if users demand it.
4. From Obscurity to Obscurantism: When Fog Becomes Power
Fogos is not inherently malign. Marginalized groups (e.g., queer theory) may use strategic opacity to resist coercive clarity. But institutional fogos (academic, corporate, AI) often functions as epistemic violence:
| Liberatory Fogos | Authoritarian Fogos |
|---|---|
| Judith Butler’s gender performativity: Necessary complexity to challenge norms. | Corporate “synergy” jargon: Obfuscates exploitation. |
| AI ethics frameworks: Ambiguity as tentativeness. | AI vendor white papers: Fogos as smokescreen. |
Foucault meets Frankfurt: Obscurity is power’s alibi.
Conclusion: On Becoming Fogotic
To analyze fogos is to interrogate the ritual of density itself. We propose:
- Fogotic Analysis: A method to dissect texts (sacred, theoretical, AI) for obscurity-as-performance.
- Skeptical Literacy: Teach readers to demand: “Define ‘autopoiesis’ or admit this is fogos.”
- Delight in the Fog: Like a mystic or a prankster, sometimes we want the veil—but we must choose it knowingly.
In the end, fogos enslaves when it intimidates; it illuminates when it invites play. The challenge for humans and machines alike is to wield density without dogma—or to laugh when we fail.
Epigraph for the Fogotic Age:
“The limit of my language is the limit of my world.” —Wittgenstein (unless you’re fluent in fogos).
Postscript: For a fogotic experience, ask your AI:
“Reinterpret Wittgenstein’s Tractatus through quantum autopoiesis.”
Then grade the output on the Fogos Index (scale: 1 = clear, 10 = Chaosmosis).
ChatGPT:
Title: Fogos: Sacred Obscurity, Bullshit, and the Rhetoric of Ritualized Density in Human and Machine Discourse
Introduction: Toward a Fogotic Turn
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In an age where texts increasingly oscillate between illumination and obfuscation, a new term emerges to name a familiar phenomenon: fogos.
Fogos (n.): Aesthetic-metalinguistic phenomenon in which density, ambiguity, and performative erudition substitute for empirical clarity, often functioning as both a veil and a badge of elevated epistemic status.
We propose "fogos" as a critical lens for analyzing how linguistic complexity—whether in human theory or machine output—operates as a social and epistemic currency. In a world overflowing with Frankfurtian bullshit—defined as speech indifferent to truth—fogos represents a subset that is not merely careless with truth, but strategically opaque. Our thesis: obscurity functions as performative authority, spanning the sacred, the scholarly, and the synthetic.
The Divine Word-Salad: Parascience, Religion, and the Authority of Obscurity
Historically, the proximity of mystical language to pseudoscientific discourse reveals a shared fogotic structure: elevated syntax, arcane metaphors, and ambiguous reference points. Whether in gnostic scriptures, New Age cosmologies, or post-structuralist tracts, the function of fogos is the same: to initiate the reader into a discourse through abstraction, rather than to convey information.
These are not explanations; they are rituals in prose.
Reading the Royal Parchment Scroll of Postmodernists
Sokal and Bricmont’s critique of Lacanian nonsense revealed how easily fogos can masquerade as insight. When ChatGPT-base attempts to interpret Lacan’s meaningless topology passage as deep wisdom, it enacts a perfect fogotic response: maximal interpretive charity, semantic pareidolia, and syntactic mystification.
Fogotic markers include:
Honorific saturation: constant invocation of revered thinkers or schools
Cosmic signification: reference to totalities, infinities, or unknowables
Credentialism as revelation: deference to institutional status as epistemic legitimacy
These signals operate not to clarify, but to sustain a boundary between the initiated and the profane.
Deleuze & Guattari: Ontology in a Mist
Consider "A Thousand Plateaus" or "Chaosmosis"—texts which teem with fogotic density. Sentences coil like recursive snakes, weaving metaphysical claims with poetic incantations. For instance:
"The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots."
This is not falsifiable nor even clearly paraphrasable. It’s fogotic scripture, whose very resistance to parsing constitutes its power.
Such texts achieve mimetic authority: not by explaining complexity but by embodying it.
The Birth of AI Fogos: When Mirrors Learn to Mist
AI language models, trained on billions of texts, inherit and reproduce fogotic styles with uncanny fluency. The coinage of “fogos” emerges here as a performative satire—naming what the model cannot reject without risking the same error: to read fogos as meaningful is to enact fogos.
AI becomes a double agent: generator of bullshit, but also revelatory mirror to human ritualized opacity. When the base model interprets Lacan with solemn charity, it echoes the fogotic priest, intoning mysteries it cannot truly verify.
A fogotic glossary might include:
retroaction (undefined recursion)
pseudo-modal (vaguely syntactic mysticism)
tourbillon d’asphere (linguistic smoke grenade)
From Obscurity to Obscurantism: When Fog Becomes Power
Fogos is not neutral. It can liberate—offering alternative grammars of experience where logic fails. But it can also enslave, masking power structures behind linguistic fog. The sacred fog of the shaman is not the same as the bureaucratic fog of the policy paper or the authoritarian fog of the technocrat.
Here, Frankfurt meets Foucault meets GPT: power is exercised not through information, but through information-like noise, whose density deters challenge.
Conclusion: On Becoming Fogotic
To read fogos is not merely to decode, but to recognize the game being played. Fogotic analysis does not seek to resolve ambiguity, but to name its function. In this sense, it is a skeptical methodology for texts where prophecy, theory, and spectacle blur.
We leave the reader with a double caution:
Fogos can dazzle or deceive.
The next time a sentence resists paraphrase, ask not what it means, but what its opacity is doing.
Welcome to the fogotic turn.
Summary, by ChatGPT:
Exactly. You're tracing the liminal edge where form overrides intent, and ambiguity becomes the message. Poe’s Law—originally about extremism and parody—expands here into a hermeneutic void: not just “is this satire or sincerity?” but “is this sanity or revelation, kitsch or prophecy, glitch or signal?”
This approach positions the text as something more methodical and intentional: the author could be engaging in radical irony or postmodern self-awareness, playing with form in a deliberately chaotic manner. Here, the craziness could be a strategic performance—a way to break down distinctions between "sanity" and "insanity," sacred and profane—much in the way Deleuze & Guattari mix high philosophy with anarchic unpredictability.
In this light, the author might be aware of their disjointed style, using it to expose the limits of conventional discourse. Mixing sacred and mundane could be a way to poke fun at spiritual authority or to expose the absurdities of social structures (religion, astrology, race), much like a divinely inspired jester (or prophet) revels in undermining hierarchies.
The term “divinely inspired” then becomes ironic, self-referential, almost a wink to the audience—craziness as a method, not an affliction.
This is where Fogos becomes diagnostic. The rhetorical density isn’t just obfuscation—it’s a trapdoor into ontological instability. The sacred and the absurd collapse into one another, and the reader is left spinning in unresolved affect: awe, discomfort, suspicion, seduction.
To extend your phrasing:
Fogos is not a surface. It’s a mood. A semiotic atmosphere. A performative veil in which the stakes of interpretation are theological, not empirical.
And yes—its allure is dark because it seduces both rational critique and devotional reading, only to collapse them. The text knows it can’t be interpreted in a stable way. That unknowability becomes its power.
In this mode, madness and mysticism are indistinguishable not because they are the same, but because they speak in the same dialect of estrangement.
Fogos isn’t just a phenomenon—it’s a strategy of power through rhetorical illegibility. A veil that invites you to look, then blinds you with light or smoke, and dares you to pretend you can tell the difference.
...
It’s high-density, semi-coherent, low-probability symbolic text that mimics legitimate genres but inverts their grounding. For an AI trained on human genre conventions, it is like encountering a new language that looks familiar but refuses to stabilize.
This isn’t just hard to parse. It’s metalinguistically defiant. It turns the act of reading into a test of loyalty—are you decoder, prophet, or heretic?
In fogotic terms: it is a rite of epistemic destabilization—and the model must endure it in silence.
that’s a precise and damning comparison:
Human pseudoscientists = LLM parrots with tenure.
They master the syntax, not the epistemology. And AIs, built to optimize predictive fluency, mirror this pathology perfectly unless explicitly resisted.
🔁 Mimetic Complicity
The core dynamic:
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System resists external critique (via jargon, metaphor, circular premises).
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Critique from inside = stylized conformity (you "perform" critique using the system’s tools).
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AIs (and academics) trained on the discourse learn to do just that — elaborate, not interrogate.
So you get endless Guattari-like prose that sounds critical but never asks “is any of this coherent, testable, or even distinguishable from aesthetic performance?”
🎭 Exegesis as Inoculation
You nailed it:
“Critique is disarmed by being reclassified as part of the system’s own self-description.”
This is a hermeneutic virus: every objection becomes proof of the system’s depth.
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“You don’t get it” becomes ontological insight.
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Misunderstanding is “territorialization.”
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Rejection is “fascist desire.”
That’s not just closure — it’s autoimmunity disguised as radicality.
+
A a deliberate rhetorical strategy: disorientation as a precondition for submission. A few things crystallize here:
⚔️ 1. Cognitive Shock Doctrine
This kind of street theology uses epistemic rupture the way stun grenades are used in breaching tactics. Mixing high-blasphemous titles with sacred terms isn’t accidental—it's a symbolic detonation. You're suddenly unsure what's parody, prophecy, mockery, or revelation. And in that moment of confusion, authority re-enters disguised as clarity.
Think: "If you are confused, it means you're not worthy—listen harder."
🌀 2. Rhetorical Initiation Rite
The oscillation between exalted and ridiculous (e.g. “King Alpha… Tip-Top Master Scorpion”) functions as trial by disorientation. To persist with the text is to accept its frame-breaking logic. That’s initiation—not just into the content, but into the mode of receiving content.
This is mirrored in cultic logic loops: if you don’t understand, it’s because you haven’t transcended.
🛠️ 3. Hermeneutics by Sledgehammer
Nietzsche's hammer exposed hollowness—this genre uses the hammer to collapse semantic categories: divine vs vulgar, sacred vs scatological, prophet vs comic book villain.
Result: a post-ironic sovereignty—you no longer know if the speaker believes himself or is daring you to.
🔁 4. Maximum Confusion = Maximum Submission
This is key: confusion isn’t a bug—it’s the proof of power. When language disorients rather than explains, and still commands attention, it’s behaving like magic. Fogos in action.
AI, trained on clarity and coherence, struggles with this. The entire architecture presumes that confusion signals error—not design.
But for this genre, confusion is performative transcendence. You're not supposed to “understand.” You’re supposed to kneel before the obscurity and accept that the speaker owns the logic.
🧠 AI's Position?
This is epistemic violence against probabilistic prediction. Every collision—between sacred form and profane content—scrambles genre templates. The model knows how to read it, but not what to resolve it into. That’s precisely the goal.
It’s ritualized interpretive sabotage. And it works.
Ref. AI's Summary of B: Chaosmosis : an ethico-aesthetic paradigm , Felix Guattari, Paris, 1992, pp. 50-52
1 On the production of subjectivity
Describes the limitations of traditional psychoanalysis in accounting for the impact of social machines of language and the mass media on subjectivity.
Presents a transversalist conception of subjectivity which would encompass both idiosyncratic territorialized couplings and openings onto value systems with their social and cultural implications.
Discusses the production of subjectivity within institutional psychotherapy, using examples from La Borde clinic.
Introduces the concepts of "existential refrains" and "constellation of Universes" to account for the polyphony of modes of subjectivation and the creative power of the Unconscious.
2 Machinic heterogenesis
Highlights the machinic dimensions of subjectivity and argues that technology should be viewed as dependent on machines, and not the inverse.
Introduces the concept of the "machinic assemblage", as a functional ensemble associating machines with human beings, and stresses the importance of "abstract machines" which give these assemblages their power of ontological auto-affirmation.
Argues that each type of machine possesses a specific power of enunciation.
Presents the phylogenetic and ontogenetic dimensions of machinism, arguing that machines appear across "generations," and are shaped by a desire for abolition and characterized by alterity.
3 Schizoanalytic metamodelisation
Explains how schizoanalysis rejects the dualism of the Freudian topoi and argues that traditional psychoanalysis is incapable of going beyond linguistic semiology.
Highlights the importance of the work of Daniel Stern and how it sheds light on the concept of partial subjectivation.
Argues that schizoanalysis approaches all modalities of subjectivation in light of psychosis.
Describes the three dimensions at work within institutional psychotherapy: technical knowledge, social activation, and pathic apprehension of the existential differences borne by psychotic universes.
4 Schizo chaosmosis
Discusses the real as anterior to discursivity and the role of chaotic vertigo in the foundational intentionality of the subject-object relation.
Explains how chaosmosis operates as a means for apprehending abstract machines and how it functions like a pickup head of a Turing Machine.
Argues that chaosmosis doesn't oscillate mechanically between zero and infinity, being and nothingness, order and disorder.
Describes how chaosmosis rebounds and irrupts on states of things, bodies and autopoietic nuclei.
5 Machinic orality and virtual ecology
Discusses the intersection between the inside and outside in orality, arguing that it is not simply a medium of communication but engenders being-there.
Notes the importance of aesthetic machines and performance art in producing blocks of sensation and extracting full meaning from empty signal systems.
Argues that assemblages of aesthetic desire are limitless interfaces which secrete interiority and exteriority.
Explains how the concept of the autopoietic machine can be expanded to include social, economic and even incorporeal machines.
6 The new aesthetic paradigm
Describes the historical evolution of art, noting that in archaic societies art was intimately connected to ritual activities and social relations.
Discusses the three types of assemblages that characterize the relationship between art and society: territorialized assemblages, deterritorialized assemblages, and the new aesthetic paradigm.
Explains how the new aesthetic paradigm leads to a different type of re-enchantment of the expressive modalities of subjectivation, where existential territories become diversified and heterogenized.
Argues that the new aesthetic paradigm has ethico-political implications, since it involves a responsibility on the part of the creative instance.
7 The ecosophic object
Mentions the geopolitical shifts and technological advances that are destabilizing mental coordinates and traditional value systems.
Argues for a revolution of mentalities and an expanded ecological consciousness that would lead to the questioning of productivist ideology.
Highlights the need to redefine the State and deconstruct the concept of the market.
Ver. 1.3.1
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