Table of Contents

Dictionary of Operations
Opening by Hakim Bey
Absolute Mammon
Action Heroes
Anxiety Management
Apophenic Drama
Bad Banks
Basic Complexity
Beauty Industries
Belief Schemata
Blood Money
Business Empires
Capital Magic
Category Errors
Clandestine Infiltration
Classification Warfare
Compulsive Order
Corporate Communication
Correctional Rationality
Crisis Relief
Critical Intrigue
Cryptic Tales
Dilemma Rebels
Disembodied Voices
Dissimulation Art
Dream Traps
Empathic Processes
Evolutionary Logic
Extreme Intuition
Fake Revolutions
Fama Clinics
Fascinating Phantasms
Fictional Rationalism
Fundamental Epiphenomena
Human Sacrifice
Illusionist Ringleader
Imaginary Realists
Immanent Transcendence
Index Adjustments
Individual Conformism
Interactive Technologies
Interior Authorities
Irrational Objectivity
Kabbalah Cabal
Market Lunacy
Memory Control
Miracle Value
Mythical Moderns
Narrative Politics
Navigation Programs
Network Economies
Nominal Freedom
Obsessive Recurrence
Occult Radicals
Perpetual Emergency
Practical Madness
Predictive Anticipation
Promethean Pronoia
Property Development
Pseudo Dissent
Psychological Facilitation
Reality Mining
Reason Seasons
Refractive Mirages
Revenants Revisiting
Ritual Relations
Shadow Governance
Simplified Simulations
Simulacra Scoundrels
Skeptic Dogmas
Speculative Finance
Subterranean Treasures
Thought Chains
Truth Production
Afterword
by Franco “Bifo” Berardi
/ KB / WIO 2
Autonomedia
Dictionary of Operations
Dictionary of Operations
Deep Politics and Cultural Intelligence
DOO/KB/WIO/WII
Konrad Becker
AutonomediA
Opening, by Hakim Bey — 7
Absolute Mammon — 11
Action Heroes — 13
Anxiety Management — 15
Apophenic Drama — 17
Bad Banks — 19
Basic Complexity — 21
Beauty Industries — 23
Belief Schemata — 25
Blood Money — 27
Business Empires — 29
Capital Magic — 31
Category Errors — 33
Clandestine Infiltration — 35
Classification Warfare — 37
Compulsive Order — 39
Corporate Communication — 41
Correctional Rationality — 43
Crisis Relief — 45
Critical Intrigue — 47
Cryptic Tales — 49
Dilemma Rebels — 51
Disembodied Voices — 53
Dissimulation Art — 55
Dream Traps — 57
Empathic Processes — 59
Evolutionary Logic — 61
Extreme Intuition — 63
Fake Revolutions — 65
Fama Clinics — 67
Fascinating Phantasms — 69
Fictional Rationalism — 71
Fundamental Epiphenomena — 73
Human Sacrifice — 75
Illusionist Ringleader — 77
Imaginary Realists — 79
Immanent Transcendence — 81
Index Adjustments — 83
Individual Conformism — 85
Interactive Technologies — 87
Interior Authorities — 89
Irrational Objectivity — 91
Kabbalah Cabal — 93
Market Lunacy — 95
Memory Control — 97
Miracle Value — 99
Mythical Moderns — 101
Narrative Politics — 103
Navigation Programs — 105
Network Economies — 107
Nominal Freedom — 109
Obsessive Recurrence — 111
Occult Radicals — 113
Perpetual Emergency — 115
Practical Madness — 117
Predictive Anticipation — 119
Promethean Pronoia — 121
Property Development — 123
Pseudo Dissent — 125
Psychological Facilitation — 127
Reality Mining — 129
Reason Seasons — 131
Refractive Mirages — 133
Revenants Revisiting — 135
Ritual Relations — 137
Shadow Governance — 139
Simplified Simulations — 141
Simulacra Scoundrels — 143
Skeptic Dogmas — 145
Speculative Finance — 147
Subterranean Treasures — 149
Thought Chains — 151
Truth Production — 153
Afterword, by Franco “Bifo” Berardi — 155
 Konrad Becker an interdisciplinary communication researcher,
has been active in electronic media as an author, artist,
and composer as well as curator, producer and organizer.
He is director and co-founder of the Institute for New Culture
Technologies/t0, World-Information.Org and World-Information
Institute, a cultural intelligence provider, the chairman
of Public Netbase from 1994 to 2006, and the founder
of “Global Security Alliance,” a cultural peacekeeping agency.
http://www.t0.or.at/
http://global-security-alliance.com/
http://world-information.org/
Opening
by Hakim Bey
Giordano Bruno, in his essay on Image Magic, famously
remarked that it was far easier to ensorcell millions of people at
once, by such means, than to make a single person fall in love with
you.
And as Ioan Culianu famously remarked, in his seminal Eros
and Magic in the Renaissance, this Brunonian insight marks the
foundation-point of all modern brainwashing, mind-control,
advertising, “public relations” and propaganda. In other words these
sciences in fact comprise a form of magic that happens to work.
This explains the age-old attraction between Intelligence (spying)
and Magic, including stage-magic and illusion as well as “real”
occultism, as Konrad Becker herein points out and documents; and
of course codes and cyphers, once the avocation of alchemists and
astrologers such as Trithemius and Della Porta, now the obsession
of quantum spooks.
The corollary of Bruno’s remark — its occult reversal, so to
speak — suggests that one can use Hermeticism not to “enchain”
others to illusion, but to free yourself from these vinculae and
attain a relative autonomy or freedom from ensorcellment, the hex
or fix that disempowers you — perhaps even from the Big Lies that
pass for Consensus Reality.
This process could be considered hermeneutics or even esoteric
hermeneutics (ta’wil, as the Suffis called it) — an exploration and
unpacking of a thing back to its origins. Etymology offers one good
way to go about this — the discovery of the hidden origins of words
— which branches off into a magical philology that makes use of
puns, rebuses and gematria — the subconsciousness of language
itself, the generative “space” of magic.
A very Viennese idea, it seems.
 Even the form of Konrad’s “dictionary entries” here is typically
Viennese — they are in fact feuilletons, blätter, “leaves,” mini-
essays in the tradition of Karl Kraus and the fin-de-siècle
coffeehouse wits.
Konrad personifies old Vienna for me; his great-grandfather
was Admiral of the Austrian Navy, which sounds like a joke (like
“Swiss Navy”) until you remember that Austria once possessed an
Empire and owned the port of Trieste, where at various times
James Joyce and the mad Hapsburg Empress Carlotte of Mexico
dreamed behind façades of genteel respectability.
Konrad is an ectomorph, wears a mournful suit & tie, is an
expert on Viennese pastry, and performs fake Spiritualist séances
complete with ersatz ectoplasm and eerie post-industrial noise.
The Hermetic Imagination is an epistemological weapon. A
radical dialectic or tri-alectic can be traced from Paracelsus to
Boehme to the Rosicrucians to Romantic Science (Novalis, Goethe,
Swedenborg) to the left Hegelians. Spinoza may be involved. Then
the radical French occultists like Nerval or Eliphas Levi. Then
onward to Surrealism, Situationism and Psychedelicism, the last
gasps of the old magical tradition.
But after the last gasp there still remains (like an ectoplasmic
stain) the unacknowledged Eternal Avantgarde, which has never
ceased since about 40,000 years ago to hope and agitate for an end
to alienation. It’s the Old Mole, the Neanderthal Underground —
the same gesture of refusal since the archaic dawn of hegemony.
The 21st century Hermeticist’s alchemical lab has become the
conceptual (laboratory as oratory) — a Memory Theatre. The
computer is its diabolical twin. The subject of much of the work
tuns out to be communication theory, meta-network theory,
sociology in a world where the Social has come to an end in
ecstatic representation.
 But at bedrock level the theory miraculously resurrects an
animism so basic, so primitive as to be called a Doctrine of
Signatures. “Everything is alive.” The point of the Hermetic critique
revolves around the protection of that life against the antibiosis of
Capital in its spectral form — against the Totality of the Image as
erasure of the Imagination.
Absolute Mammon
Infinite eternal accumulation is a defining feature of capitalism,
a transcendent orientation linking it to Christianity. Religion
competes with capital as an institutionalized intermediary between
real and unreal or super-real. It is written in the Bible, “You cannot
serve both God and Mammon.” According to Bakunin, “As long as
we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.”
Kings as simulacra of god are typical of antique ruler cults, not
just Biblical tradition. While kings die like anyone else, the King is
too big to fail and cannot die lest the fictional chains of immortality
break down. The oath to protect the crown, the impersonal
institution that never perishes, transforms into the legal obligation to
create profit for financial investors.
Despite affinities of money and religion, syncretistic cults of
capitalism do not yield meaning. Finance suffering a deficit of
significance develops parasitic relationships with art and religion. In
modernity the gods are inaccessible, but then art comes with a
promise to make the hidden visible. Displacing religion in secular
societies, both are incorporated into financial market forces where
they remain intertwined.
Capitalism, composed of a multitude of technical, organizational
and consumerist myths, is a cult without strict dogma. Narratives
emerge from a pool enriched by viral agents, not technically
constructed story-boards. Myth production feeds the imagination
while the hidden gods of capital remain invisible. Mysteries that
support a class of exalted priests, entranced mediums and tacit
oracles narrowing down the infinite investment possibilities to be
accommodated in the human mind. Cults of old assigned specific
days for ceremonial worship; today’s capital demands an eternal
procession of service in permanence.
While Lutherans and Catholics insist that Eucharistic
transubstantiation is for real, Calvin transposed it into the symbolic
domain. A concept of agency as ghostly pneumatic presence
anticipates the spectral economies of speculative finance. Like
religion, money, as the means of means, integrates every element of
societies, and it autonomously expands in relation with itself. In
eternal accumulation it immunizes against the dissonance of desire,
the disappointment or surprise after fulfillment.
A mediator between the relative and the absolute, it is a direct
channel to heaven. Moreover, the mediation of the particular
through the universal turns finance into the economic absolute.
“Money is therefore the god among commodities!” says Marx in
Grundrisse. From a mere medium of circulation it transforms into
the lord’s body. A manifestation of the absolute, capital becomes an
immanent God in self and the world. Absolute transcendence
transforms into its opposite, immanence.
Money, as the keystone of a narcissistic dream of individual
incorporation of the totality of potential, is the next best thing to
becoming a Deity. “God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny
and poverty; God is Evil,” wrote Pierre Proudhon in Philosophy of
Misery. While Heinrich Heine, another correspondent of Marx,
wrote: “I called the devil and he came, His face with wonder I must
scan; He is not ugly, he is not lame. He is a delightful, charming
man.”
Action Heroes
Volition is a process by which one commits to a course of
action, conscious or automatized as habits. Will-power, cognizance
and affect are primary psychological functions. These three
domains are targets of psychophysical systems with differing
approaches — from Hoodoo to Zen or competing strands of
medieval Christian mysticism. Meaning depends on framing
expressions. Volition seeking expression and resolution in
aggressive or sexual acts informs conflict represented in Amor and
Mars. Hostile identification with the other renders aggression
ambiguously self-defeating.
Yearning for action to affirm being alive is ritualized in episodic
rages of killing time in a night out. In A Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, stretches of well-managed work and free time,
carefully designed to be uneventful, contract into a quest for thrill
and excitement. Looking for action and challenges in life is a
fantasy play involving fashion, styles and accessories. Domains of
imaginary expressivity commercialize the difference to the safe and
silent spaces of the middle-class. Action-adventure media-markets
provide less risk of injury for a fee and offer cheap ways of
engaging in character plays without harm.
Patients and prisoners obsessively measure time to kill it.
Industrial societies developed weapons of mass destruction to kill
time. Identifying with stereotyped protagonists in action and peeping
in on fateful sensational situations. Living once-removed is a
bargain. Shadow theaters for a dislocated, proxy self permit
unexpected rescues, demonstrating that the lead will never
surrender against all odds. This recurrent movie feature applies to
expendable secondary characters just without the luck.
When people overexposed to confusing and contradictory
messages pay attention to narcotizing and dysfunctional media,
information is the opposite of action. Even though most lab-
research looks at automated processes of action control, conflicting
insights and desires clearly weaken purposeful striving towards
goals. Nevertheless, taking a chance depends on commitment to a
situation not under control. Not every problematic is consequential,
but situations that can be solved through the toss of a coin are rare.
Fundamental attribution errors overrate consistency and internal
traits of personal agency that are constantly modulated by external
vectors and contingency effects. Personality-based explanations
are vastly overestimated, and situational setting or social context
misjudged in explaining volitional behavior of others. In interpreting
our own performance, good fortune is credited to oneself, while
external factors are only considered to find excuses for failure.
A gaze, in an implicit understanding that a background is less
relevant, makes assumptions about significance. Focusing on
figurative cues, at the expense of context, produces cognitive
artifacts analog to optical and narrative illusions. Psychophysical
systems target configurations of foreground and background in
conscious experience. Escapist flight refuses prefabricated choices
in political spectacles. Appropriated into the arsenal of power,
independence and autonomy need to be cleared from delusive
drives in the political realm.
Anxiety Management
Explanations for attitudes toward political issues usually include
economic circumstances, social relations and education. However,
people with different attitudes also differ in threat sensitivity.
Research suggests conservative or protective social beliefs to be
related to a higher automatic fear response. Socialization in rigidly
authoritarian ways makes susceptible to conformism and hostile
hyper-awareness of potential threats. Emotional distress and
traumatic experiences render pro-establishment viewpoints and
charismatic authoritarian leaders more attractive.
Terror-management theory looks at emotional reactions to an
acute awareness of death, resulting in behavior change and beliefs
that protect world-view and self-esteem. Insulating from fear self-
images allow denying the susceptibility to a short-term existence.
Passing away is an existential source for anguish; reminding people
increases needs to boost confidence. Neurological pathways for
physical pain and pain from social exclusion overlap. Incidentally, a
twentieth-century discourse on the self concentrates on memory
and trauma as proof of individuality.
World-views diminish psychological terror, providing meaning
and continuity, help making sense of the world as a stable and
orderly place. Cultural standards create confidence in living a
meaningful life. After subliminal exposure to the national-flag test,
persons are more likely to endorse right-wing views, strengthening
the conservatives and weakening the resolve of the less
nationalistic.
Compliance with cultural values boosts feelings of security and
therefore people cling to traditional assumptions when reminded of
their inevitable demise. At the same time threatened world-views
and endangered self-respect drives to devalue and challenge other
views. Triggering a spiral of conflict where mortality salience will
reinforce stereotypic thinking and intergroup bias. Besides
reactionary fears of social change, fear is channeled into violence
against scapegoat groups made to symbolize a survival threat.
“Lacking control leads to an instinctive need for order, even
imaginary order.” Experiments of reducing control show
participants to have increased illusory pattern-perception; they are
more likely to identify coherent and meaningful interrelations among
a set of random, unrelated stimuli. Cognitive autonomy addresses
this effect when, in contrast to a delusion of knowing, intelligence is
capable of accepting uncertainties without irritable reaching after
fact and reason.
Seeking emotional control and cognitive closure, conservatives
do not tolerate jokes that fail to provide resolution of incongruent
elements. In contrast to a more abandoned self-expression and
thought they fail to accommodate double meanings, the timing and
reversal of expectations. They tend to have a bad sense of humor.
All theories of absurdity are predictably incongruent, but clearly
humor can both contain and release. The Weatherman acid test to
single out infiltrators proved famously inadequate, but in the higher
spheres of nonsense humor some will certainly never get the joke.
Apophenic Drama
Apophenia is the perception of significant connections and
patterns in random, meaningless data. Herman Rorschach’s
psycho-diagnostic research, a case in point, proved that perception
and interpretation depend on individual factors with no strict
boundaries. Interpretation may be considered a special kind of
perception. Seeing unfolds through the lens of accumulated
impressions, framing dispositions in which experience is situated. In
apperception the borders between “seeing” and “seeing as”
dissolve.
Generalized conclusions draw on information that confirms
existing preconceptions in undue focus on pre-selected segments of
the visible. With a tendency to fall for narratives, sensory input is
interpreted in a way that avoids contradicting prior beliefs. Grouping
events into little story-lines, modeled after recurring patterns,
descriptive plots legitimize actions. Individual behavior is modified
by narrative construction and restricted by its repertoire of
dramaturgic patterns.
Asked to report an event triggers false-memory syndrome in
eyewitnesses. Humans cannot tell an unbiased story. Perception of
events is filtered through modes of structuring information that exist
somewhere between the immediate past and the immediate future.
Episodes recovered from the archive of the mind, retold and
reinvented in the specific situation and point in time. Repositories of
past experiences remain in continuous processes of re-writing as
elements of one’s individual life.
Partaking in a scene is an empathic process that is inherently a
manipulation of memory, a source of lies and fabrication. It
insinuates intentions of others, producing wildly imaginary chains of
causality, implies deep significance of random events and highly
implausible connections. However, the most fundamental failure of
any intelligence agency is the inability to connect the dots.
 Cultural effects defy envisioning a worst possible outcome.
Vaticinium ex eventu is the fallacy of hindsight bias or prediction
after the fact. Creeping illusionary determinism paints a fictitious
order based on the inclination to see past events as more
predictable than they were before. Post-hoc rationalization explains
away understanding itself and, in an effort to correct what are
believed to be the problems of the past, new problems are created
for the future.
“Cut away the future and the present collapses, emptied of its
proper content. Immediate existence requires the insertion of the
future in the crannies of the present,” claims Alfred N. Whitehead
in Adventures of Ideas. Yet in testing vastly expanded or
contracted time through post-hypnotic suggestions, subjects with no
future experienced dissolution of identity, with deep, euphoric
sensations of a boundless, immanent present. Expanded futures
canceled fear of death, inducing serene and happy calmness. Being
robbed of the past brought on drowsy, regressive states and a
vague sense of meaninglessness in subjects, a dilated past triggered
egocentric and inhibited behavior. However, severe mental
disorders with extreme depression and catatonic states were
produced, eliminating the present.
Bad Banks
In the ancient world royal temple palaces provided secure safe-
keeping of products and grain. Banking receipts came to be used
for transfers, not only to depositors, but to third parties. Pecuniary,
from Latin for cattle, and capital derives from the same root as
chattel. There are limits to the usefulness of cattle, land or property
though: one cannot sit on more than one chair at the same time.
Without detaching money as the sign of value from material reality,
capitalism is impossible. It is not a thing itself that has value, but the
distance and the level of desire resulting in transaction.
Before the rise of digital and intangible finance, paper money
dominated the market allocative system as liquid assets. Chinese
emperors issued value tokens by 650 AD, but abandoned paper
money in 1455 for the reason that it caused inflation. By most
accounts the oldest Western security paper is a share certificate of
the Dutch Vereinigte Ostindische Compagnie (VOC) from 1606,
while paper money started with gold-deposit receipts and first notes
issued in 1661 by the Bank of Stockholm, and the Bank of England
in 1694.
Soon, ornamented with Christian and pagan symbols, typically
Fortuna, Ceres or Hermes, bonds and banknotes overflowed with
religious symbols of fertility and abundance. Rarely used in working
classes, the images transmitted a vision of commercial transactions
as deeply divine. Holders of such papers partake in a grand casino
of prosperity, guarded by a league of saints and tutelary goddesses.
In multiplication of icons and votive images that worked miracles
when you touch them, they turn into strange semiotic objects that
are simultaneously what they symbolize. In the twentieth century
the power of these idols did not seem to grant the prayers anymore.
Adam Smith translated protestant ideas of divine providence
into an all-powerful “invisible hand.” Humans err, but markets are
always right, and individuals touched by the invisible hand take part
in this miracle. As a matter of faith this hand emerges through the
interaction of individual agency within the market system, which
turns into corpus dei. Subject and object become undividable when
economic value objectifies subjective values. A Holy Cow
magically regulates individual and private conflicts towards a stable
and harmonious system, an infallible machinic ecosystem of
evolution towards the better and more efficient. Facticity never
enters the realm of these convictions.
Under the banner of so-called realism, believers worship the
market as reasonable Deity. His invisible hand guides through a
rational and ordered world to the promised land. Individual
happiness is achieved only where the universal is realized through
selfish players. Unfortunately, competition as the only governing
mechanism of societies eliminates politics and cooperation.
However, markets are not divine vehicles of the absolute, and not
heavenly equilibrium machines transcending human beings, but
complex systems of codependent networks and only relatively
autonomous Individuals. Economy as fate is the swindle of the
century, and Marxist thinking an accomplice. Napoleon, knowing
that prevailing conditions are not God-given but the product of
political decisions, put it this way: “Policy is destiny.”
Basic Complexity
Connectivity does not lead to greater concurrence but to
evidence for difference, opposition and conflict. As complexity
spreads and uncertainty gives rise to a longing for simplicity and
stability, velocity and volatility of societies increase: “all that is solid,
melts into thin air.”
Nineteenth-century speed of transport and international travel
spread epidemics like cholera. Steamships and transcontinental
railroads became agents of contagion. A magical principle of
contagion suggests that once objects come into contact they
continue to affect each other. Deeply embedded fear and loathing
of contamination in common social-interaction rituals preserve
personal sanctity. Concepts of contagion or sympathetic magic
weave into our consciousness to the point where disgust with
unsavory-looking things translates to similar feelings towards
repulsively problematic abstractions.
According to a theory of secularization, modernity involves
accelerated displacement of religion by reason. However the wave
of fundamentalist beliefs in the second half of the twentieth century
not only relates to crumbling believes of modernity. Based on
processes of globalization and the rise of post-industrial network
culture, fundamentalism is just the flipside of postmodernism.
Not only religious traditions, but also reductionist science paints
illusory pictures of clear borders or logocentric purity, despite
foundational instability and deficiencies of supposedly
comprehensive systems. Scientists took over from priests to speak
truth and to provide a spatio-temporal representational framework.
Perpetuating myths by incarnating the logos in natural and historical
processes, much science retreated into the classification of trivia. In
the pathos of a new clergy, relevance dissolves into role-playing.
Many formulas of modern statehood are thinly secularized
theology. Since the ancient god-kings, a military-academic complex
supported the monopoly of force to maintain a specific public order.
Armed forces go together with advanced technologies; timetable
tools that predict the behavior of the sun and the seasons, for
example. To keep people calm and have them accept their fate, top
social strata employ myth to justify inequality and make their power
appear given. Cleptocracies invest into religious ideology to
legitimize large-scale transfer of wealth to self-styled elites and
redistribute some of the tribute in populist ways.
Colonial times justified slavery by giving the captured natives a
chance to learn about the true god. With higher levels of income
and education come a decreasing willingness to accept such beliefs,
but even high-earners hold similar beliefs as long as they are
embedded in the same socio-cognitive environment. Humans form
religion which informs humans vice versa. In a pretense of
balanced moderation, hegemonies incorporate a vast adaptability to
the most-varied expression of ideas and forms. It is a type of
administrative power that pretends to abandon enemy–friend
distinctions in favor of an indeterminate “cultural difference,” as
long as it poses no threat of real change, and the unity at its social
apex is secured in a complexio oppositorum.
Beauty Industries
Aristocracies hold up their class values, adoring objects of
beauty. Establishing the superiority of artworks is co-functional with
the affirmation of supremacy of the social group which celebrates
them. A rising bourgeois class evolved the concept of art into a
mental set. Not so much about uniqueness, but a substitute to
individuality, it associated beauty with individual taste and a process
of reverence for activities suiting their needs.
With artists as shoeshine boys of ruling elites, aesthetic games
veiling the conflicts of existence are highly appreciated. Not only
skillfully celebrating banalities, the arts are also instrumentalized for
expansionist policies promoting the projection of power. Department
stores, some of the first modern-art sponsors, became models for
museums, where not just the size of a work pre-configures the
space of its perception. Mnemosyne, mother of the muses and
goddess of memory, translates to a name of Juno, Moneta.
Explanations of talent, a product of success, are rationalizations
after the fact.
Amplitude is the integration level of different flavors and stimuli
reaching the taste buds and olfactory glands in high-end food
testing. Art-market Ponzi schemes trade in high-amplitude
aesthetics, a seamless blending of sensory experience where
constituent elements converge into a single gestalt. However,
aesthetic discrimination is not rocket science; apparently any street
pigeon can be trained as curator when conditioned to identify
specific categories of beauty.
Nineteenth-century art-for-arts-sake mysticism, free from
history or society, and modernist attempts to liberate art from the
vulgar impurities of life, only achieved well-sealed self-referential
tombs. Alternatively, rendering art as pure subversion provided new
ideas for neoconservative intellectuals. By the mid-twentieth
century, the opposite poles of pure form and revolt collapsed into
each other. Situationists held art to be so deformed by its bourgeois
packaging that activities had to cease to be works of art. Millennial
artivism thrived on the idea that if control or negative feedback is a
key to power, one can fight back through positive feedback.
Strategies of affirmation play to power their own melody.
A critique of the image in defense of the imagination may bind
into leaden literalness and the letter of the law. Predictably there
are claims about aesthetic deficiencies or obsolete didactic gestures
in what is made out to be political art practice. Art is in some
imagined realm above all murky issues. Often referring to profound
personal experiences, in daydreaming of art that never was, they
fail to realize that any act is political. The impure, outside the
natural order, is much more interesting than the sterile categories
that confine human existence.
Robbing humans of the chance for surprise, stunted
perspectives steal a future of art beyond status-projection or
decorum, tax-evasion and money-laundering. As autonomous
examination of processes and systems, urban art practices
investigate influence spheres and generators of systemic reality.
Information players explore attractors of popular imagination at the
crossroads of the trivial. Invisible, like an algorithmic program of an
embedded processor, information-age cultural agents do not have
their hand seen.
Belief Schemata
Belief schemata fulfill certain functions to describe the real.
They serve to identify patterns, compress data, store information
incrementally and allow adaptive, anticipatory responses. One
approach to what is real is the here-and-now. Immanence grounded
in presence where the self is at home in a universe of implicit,
unfolding primal unity, difference is an illusion.
Environments of inherent order establish learning and
acceptance of what is, instead of what could be. Simplistic
immanence produces mindsets of compliance, where anyone who
rebels against authority challenges divine institutions. However,
such orthodox systems produce destabilizing effects, harboring
inner contradictions that lead to their downfall and the subsequent
emergence of new interpretative schemata.
Humans making sense by a heuristic handling of environments
in terms of reason, relevance and purpose become self-conscious
without a reliable set of myths. In a complex world and
contradictory nature of beliefs, symbols support illusionary narrative
threads. Infinite skills of detecting patterns keep people afloat in the
messy uncertainty of life.
Schemas of figuring and disfiguring the imagination inform
cognitive processes. Deploying transcendental schemata to
organize experience, imagination, creates worlds. Human
imagination functions not just as subjective process but a creation of
the real, where structures and operations of the mind engage with
the world. Observations framed in categories shape experience.
Laws are not drawn from nature, but dictated unto the natural
world. Phantoms of subjective organization define and determine
the human realm.
There is tacit consent to pretend, but who without restrictions
believes in reality? Is there anybody out there accepting as ultimate
reality what is forever enlaced by uncertainty in a state of
tentativeness? Time is just elusive moments; bodies are streams in
foreign lands and all settlements Potemkin villages. Who is so stupid
to believe one’s senses or logic when the solid world is merely a
shadow cast on the expanse of infinity? When in a haunted mansion
the visible is unreal, what about the invisible?
Some claim that religious ideologies have no existence outside
the imaginary. Political systems keep the order of things going and
that induces ideas or feelings. However, an understanding that
thoughts and feelings are within, while objects are “without” remain
very limited historical modes of self-interpretation. From its
affirmation to its degradation as a historic artifact, twentieth century
found conflicting interpretations for the functions and the substance
of the human self itself. Contempt towards what some consider
being primitive and archaic personifications of psychological
concepts lies at the heart of problems in the Western understanding
of a self. Cultures like voudou recognize aspects of the self both
within the physical and without. A shadow is as much a part of a
self as the crown of the head, and the star of a person is believed to
reside outside the body in the ocean of stars out there in the sky.
Blood Money
Money rituals in various parts of the world use spells, charms
and sacrifices to create individual wealth. Nollywood movies like
Blood Money imprinted such practices into a nation’s discourse. A
foremost purpose of bloodrites is to establish, maintain, or redeem a
relationship with a supernatural being. Sharing and eating the flesh
of sacrificial animals, slaughtered embodied deities, is an over-
identification with a divinity by consuming its body.
Blood flows as the material realization of the psycho-social aura
and money as objective realization of socio-economic value. Gold
and money replaced virgin sacrifice. Valuable or symbolic objects
were offered instead. An image of the sacrificed animal printed on
coins displaced the actual share of meat and the sacred bull
transcended into the bull market.
Paying with cash instead of cattle, a coin is a part of the
absolute the same way a communion waver turns into the body of
the lord. From a word used for victims of sacrifice the Latin
“hostia,” came to be applied to the Christian sacrificial lamb and a
simplified HIS Christ monogram turned into the dollar sign. A dead
body haunts the faithful. Money is the token of taking part in the
consumption of the body of god, the Communion Host. “When the
last tree has withered you will realize you cannot eat money”
somehow misses the point.
In “Land, Labour and Diet” Audrey Richards investigates use
of money in the African lakes region and describes how people felt
absolved from the traditional obligation to share food when meals
were bought with cash. A wealth of information on how blood is
extracted from the body weaves into the rich texture of stories
widespread throughout colonial Africa. With the ascent of global
capitalism a multitude of Vampires rise from their graves.
Ancient religious taboos against usury perceived it as stealing,
an unlawful usurpation of time due to the lord. The term previously
simply meant charging interest for money. Money from money was
seen as bestiality and incestuous perversion, a self-insemination
breeding monstrous offspring. Many traditions apply strict rules on
money and ban interest. Only complicated workarounds enabled
loan-interests without violating church laws or Sharia. Cashing in on
indulgencespal prohibitions made profit from money “without
working” sinful well into the nineteenth century. Condemning a
“market of souls” Luther was convinced that mercantilist capitalism
was evil and “Money is the word of the devil through which he
creates all things.”
A sixteenth century doctrine of salvation finally accommodated
new urban commercial classes and interest from money became
socially accepted as divine order. French theologian John Calvin laid
the base for a protestant business ethic and capitalist spirit that
changed the English speaking world. Henry VIII allowed charging
interest after his split with Rome. A bloodsucking image remained.
Money begetting money is a powerful mechanism to enrich the rich
and impoverish the poor. Favoring those with large assets the big
become monstrous and excess value produces deadly disaster
cycles of booms and busts.
Business Empires
Despite economic myths that growth will benefit the less
fortunate, if only on the long run, pauperism and plutocracy
complement one another. Global finance feeds on local misfortune.
Just like the mythical race from the aerial land of Magonia traveling
the skies in cloud ships. Working with tempestarii, weather-magi, in
magically raised storms they were said to swoop down in clouds to
steal the grain from the fields.
Like nomadic tribes providing “security” for caravans,
speculative investors do not recognize systems of social
organization other than clan laws or blood feuds. When government
business and global finance overlap criminal enterprise schemes
easily supplant public interest. Players operate across countries,
cultures and continents. Shapeshifters manage identity to exploit the
heterogeneity of standards, norms and law enforcement.
Multinationals trading with their branches and subsidiaries, called
transfer pricing, evade taxing without actually violating each
countries laws.
Capitalist systems predicated on spatial and temporal expansion,
of market penetration and speeding up of product cycle, always
reach limits. Structural adjustment costs are burdened on the
periphery by way of enforced trade imbalances, imposed credits,
overblown taxes, and control of currency or natural resources.
Surplus value from the periphery transfers back to the core through
unequal exchange.
Enforced flows of finance secure power projection, channeling
petrodollars under diplomatic or military threat into financial
recycling nodes and vascular investment regimes. Regardless of
ideologies that markets function spontaneously they never do;
helped along by military expeditions or incitement of civil wars.
Inversions of the transaction cycle manifest as overproduction crisis
and overtrading on virtual or anticipated future income.
Overaccumulation leads to devaluation and unemployment,
exporting surplus to territories forced open to capital and labor
produces conflict.
Growing commercialization of everyday life is a fierce
neoliberal assault on the public. It applies weapon grade
corporatization of science and education, militarization and
privatization as well as the dismantling of welfare systems.
Liberalism, a belief system of the ruling elites in a Jihad against the
have-nots, not only assumes God-given hunger for the poor but a
natural law of enrichment by the wealthy. Conservatives, opening
the public sphere to individual profit or neglect, prefer to regulate
individuals instead.
Justifying the dominance of a ruling group requires a set of
ideas that provide a narrative plausible enough for creating believe
in its reality. Privileged Westerners cherish the idea that poverty is a
voluntary human condition since the reformation. Now positive
thinkers see it as active denial to embrace wealth and expose
misfortune of poverty to ridicule.
Power flows in processing assemblages of superstitions, secrets
and non-sequiturs in media and education channels. Helped by the
entertainment industry power networks recapture the free time that
once was won in revolutionary struggle. Extracting value through
data-mining and at the same time subduing lower classes with toxic
by-products of bourgeoisie tastes.
Capital Magic
Money is never real in the sense that it exists independent of its
specific cultural context and system of communication. Which
tokens of desire should be addressed as money is never clear.
Information about money can be as important as money itself and it
is a way of talking that constitutes modern societies.
In Peter Pan the fairy is revived from near death by the belief
of the audience. Thanks to the Tinkerbelle effect many things exist
just because people believe. Monetary systems or the value of a
nation’s fiat money, from Latin “let it be done,” decreed to be legal
tender by a government. A token of zero meaning money appears
as a phenomenon of manifest emergence. Circulating only as long
as nobody refuses to accept them, banknotes are like belief in a
truth.
Credere is Latin for believe and entrust. But then reassuring
statements of confidence and stolidity make people nervous. Every
banker knows that if one has to prove ones worth, credit is already
gone. Finance is a confidence game where consistent performing
makes believers. Rainmaker executives with special abilities use
connections, attract clients and increase gains. Nonetheless
dissidents and non-believers are forced to attend the rites; they too
have credit cards, pension plans and installments for their living
quarters.
A turn from meaning to money is contrary to a political order
that reflects human intentions in societies. Value remains
untouchable beyond individual judgment, scientific methodology or
law. Capital structures drive large transpersonal mechanisms. In a
network of substitution and reallocation of subjective identity eternal
accumulation dispossessing human potential becomes an end in
itself. Monetary expressions of social relations materialize as
entities dominating social life. Like the Golem, abstractions escape
control to turn on their creators. In a conflict between humans and
capital the later always seem to win. Other systems than capitalism
have never been proven to work because that would require
exorcisms of dispossession.
The Enlightenment era opened flood gates of non-authorized
intelligence. Popular texts on secret knowledge show the impact of
an eighteenth century revolution of cheap print. Petit Albert, a
conjuring manual, became a household name that, beyond practical
domestic tips, healing charms and spells to catch fish, offered
instructions on how to make a Hand of Glory that renders one
invisible when stealing money.
For La Main De Gloire a candle made out of virgin fat is placed
between the fingers of the dried left hand of a hanged man. Well
known since the fifteenth century, this device casts a spell over any
home, rendering the inhabitants motionless. A thief breaking into a
house lights the candle and recites: “Hand of Glory shining bright-
lead us to our spoils tonight!”
It is easy to recognize the invisible hand of Lloyd Blankfein,
Goldman Sachs CEO, expressing his trust that he was “doing God’s
work” in November 2009. Evoking the curse of the Pharaoh,
Ronald Regan conjured the “magic of the marketplace” as the
secret weapon of economic superiority and Margaret Thatcher
revealed that “Economics are the method, but the object is to
change the soul.”
Category Errors
Melvil Dewey thought up a method of placing any conceivable
book on its proper shelf, based on a system of numbers from 0 to
1000. Still dominant, the Dewey Decimal Classification system
divided the entire universe into a hierarchy of ten classes, ten
divisions, and a thousand sections with infinite possible subsections.
Indulging in things that can be broken into categories easily and
avoiding those, however useful, appearing subjective or speculative.
Professional categorization workers anxiously avoid the context-
dependent and temporary, but always end up in the middle of it.
Fear drives to abstractions and Dewey’s obsessive-compulsive
listing was an anxious battle against the chaos of information;
subdividing reality into its smallest elements in an urge for self-
obliteration. Exemplifying narrow minded bigotry of nineteenth
century white middle class, his pseudoscience nevertheless
improved the art of cataloguing books in substantial ways.
Bureaucracies obsess with categories and statistics. Connected
with the rise of the statehood in the nineteenth century the science
of classification boomed. Ancient empires defined themselves
through lists of kings and subjects, modern states have more
extensive information gathering practices. Categorization’s
cognitive juju comes with beliefs that reality can be influenced by
correct use of name and order. Magically the number of objects in
the world is subject to change relative to interests.
In the “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” Jorge Luis
Borges writes about “a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the
Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant
pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong
to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d)
suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h)
those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as
if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a
very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just
broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”
This fictious encyclopedia, opposite of universal, is useless to
anyone but its author. Borges argues that no order is ever objective
despite enormous efforts applied to the creation of universal
categories since the early Enlightenment. He points to the absurdity
of attempts to build towers of babel and systems of universal
classification: “we do not know what the universe is.”
De docta ignorantia, On Scientific Ignorance by Nicholas of
Cusa in 1440 argues that limits of rational knowledge are passed by
speculation that blurs the borders between science and ignorance in
a union of opposites. Some peoples avoid flying squirrels because
they break the ontological categories of birds and mammals; the
uncanny swamp is neither land nor water. A collapse of age-old
borders between the same and the other unlocks the gates to an
invasion of the plethora of things, the Wild Hunt. However, the
unknowable is freedom exactly for its sovereignty from ontological
determinateness. Naïve beliefs in taxonomies representing
hierarchical structured reality give way to semantic mythopoiesis.
Clandestine Infiltration
While a game-theoretical drama of nuclear mutually assured
destruction (MAD) was at the forefront, invisible battle zones of
hidden warfare on both sides of the iron curtain signified the cold
war era. JF Kennedy in 1961 to US congress “The free world’s
security can be endangered not only by nuclear attack, but by being
nibbled away at the periphery… by forces of subversion, infiltration
intimidation, indirect non-overt aggression, internal revolution,
diplomatic blackmail, guerilla warfare or a series of limited wars.”
By the end of WWII a Western Union Clandestine Committee
(WUCC) coordinated unorthodox war and secret stay-behind
armies. Formed on the experience and strategies of special
operations units the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) was
integrated into the military alliance after the founding of NATO).
Next to its headquarters and hidden in Belgian military secret
service SGR under code name SDRA11, the Allied Clandestine
Committee (ACC) was in charge of undisclosed warfare by 1958.
Underground armies of black programs worked under code-names
like SDRA8 in Belgium, Absalon in Denmark, TD BDJ in Germany,
LOK in Greece, Gladio in Italy, I&O in the Netherlands, ROC in
Norway, Aginter in Portugal, P26 in Switzerland, Counter-Guerrilla
in Turkey, and OWSGV in Austria.
What was sold as a fall-back option, for a country overrun by
enemy forces, soon developed into invisible armies of internal
subversion against democratic and egalitarian politics. Large
demonstrations against British interference in the post-war
government in Athens are broken up by a secret stay-behind army
with many dead or wounded. Operatives in Turkey and other
European countries used their skills against domestic opponents and
to spark violent disorder.
In 1964 Gladio drives a silent coup d’état and forces a group of
socialist ministers out of government. A bomb killing Carabinieri in
1972, again blamed on the left, is traced back to the fascist guerilla
and uncovering Gladio. Thirty years later the Piazza Fontana
incident 1969 in Milan with 16 casualties was exposed in court as a
Gladio operation by General Giandelio Maletti, former head of
Italian counterintelligence. As in Italy, the Belgian left was
discredited by false-flag operations.
Hidden camps instructed mercenaries in covert action and silent
assassination, black propaganda and clandestine communication,
infiltration and colonial warfare techniques. Hundreds of
underground arms caches discovered from the 1960’s to the
present contained massive amounts of hi-tech combat material,
automatic weapons, chemical-warfare equipment, artillery and
explosives. One was used for a bomb attack on the Munich
Oktoberfest, with dozen dead and hundreds wounded.
To keep motivation burning at times of peaceful Cold War
coexistence, operators had to be kept alert with imaginary dangers
of revolution. Strategies of tension deployed political-destabilization
campaigns financed from highly discrete state agencies, private
sources and multi-national firms. Business elites, church and geo-
political interests on one side and the have nots on the other, the
battle lines were clearly drawn.
Classification Warfare
Science is supposed to be systematized knowledge, but
classification systems weigh heavier than facts. Ephemeral but
carrying their own context, they create realities that exclude
everything not on their grid and the possibility to think otherwise.
Science not only describes nature and politics not merely maps
social forces. Projecting categories and then calling nature a
witness the models are superimposed on the real. Theories that
provide systems to classify relevance suffer from bootstrapping
problems; without knowing all about the subject, ordering attempts
are largely futile.
Generalization is problematic by definition and simple everyday
statements may involve a range of questionable classifications in a
single sentence. While the sleep of reason begets monsters, its
dream spawns even bigger chimeras. United by their inability to fit
into categories and culturally constructed norms, monsters appear
as violations of natural law. Monsters remind everyone that the
ordinary is a delicate construction needing careful maintenance.
Classification works like a charm to make things fit together.
Driving distributed cognitive work, classification and standardization
facilitates coordination of labor among multiple agencies. However,
standardization also works against being useful across sites and
context. Organizational autonomy or professional discretion may
add useful ambiguity, nonetheless, managing complex similarities or
high levels of visibility and autonomous user control, puts a strain on
systems and threatens intuitive use.
Increasingly human relations are based on a databody of
categorization tags and symbolic indicators not personal presence.
Strategies to cope with the number of social interactions lead to
standard response routines. When friends and likes are part of
statistical net worth calculations, humans turn into market objects,
ghostly apparitions that follow the logic of economization to the
grave.
Information in large bureaucratic organizational systems
encodes structures of intentionality situated beyond the individual.
As operational support structures for the conduct of life
classifications are both conceptual and material. Not just a resource
for organizing abstractions but inscribed into the material identity of
physical objects. Cognitive categorization frameworks and
technological systems converge. Established characterizations
encoded in large systems are inescapable and eventually taken as a
given.
In obliteration by incorporation (OBI) ideas become so
commonly accepted that their contributors are no longer cited. As
in neural adaptation, a decline in the response of the sensory system
to a constant stimulus, information structures become invisible, the
bigger they get the harder to make out. Naturalized into routines of
everyday life they fade into transparency.
In the hidden dimensions of social systems, convictions people
hold are so self-understood that they are never wholly articulated in
any systematical way. Words convey ideas, take roots and are
forgotten. Categories transform into habit and vanish buried in
common assumptions. What is excluded as trivial, right under one’s
nose, may point to the heart of the matter.
Compulsive Order
In its original meaning obsession and possession were phases in
laying siege to a city. Obsession, the act of besieging, later became
to mean a “hostile action of an evil spirit” attacking body and soul,
not city and citadel. While possession is a takeover of control with
subjects not any longer being aware of it, obsession is the devil’s
oppressive regime where some resistance remains possible. An
awareness of uncontrollable actions and behavior not of one’s own
free decision keeps haunting. First recorded in its demonic sense in
the late sixteenth century, possession was a synonym for madness
in Shakespeare’s time. Obsession as “persistent influence or idea”
was introduced in the late seventeenth century. Later becoming a
medical phenomenon or subject of secular study it was in the range
of eccentricity before mid-eighteenth century.
States of mind were explained by “fibers that convey impulses
between the brain and the body.” Thinking too much was identified
as expressway to mental derangement. Pursuing a train of thought
too long, excessively examining the same subject, minds fall victim
to agents of madness. Prolonged mental activity weakens the brain
and too much study or reading, especially novels, was seen as
source of nervous disorders.
Neurasthenia and invalidism was a response to changing roles
and relations in industrialized urban society. Industrious nineteenth
century attempted to deliver itself from the torments of inner
demons and basic drives through compulsive production and
relentless sexual repression. At the turn to the twentieth century
nervous wreck became a term for repetitive fixations of the mind in
exhausted mental breakdown. Widespread assumptions held that an
above average intelligence constitutes a veritable health risk.
First recorded in 1927, now the fourth most common mental
disorder, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) is diagnosed nearly
as often as asthma or diabetes. OCD, characterized by intrusive
thoughts and repetitive behavior to reduce anxiety, is a defect of
rationality. In a flight from the impossible into the delusional
sufferers recognize their compulsive obsessions and are distressed
by the realization. Compulsions group into categories of cleaning,
checking and counting. Obsessive thought circles around
aggression, sexuality, blasphemy, dirt and contamination or a
preoccupation with precise accuracy.
Insanity, an impairment of the faculties of the mind and failure
of the imagination, is accompanied by error of judgment. Utilization
behavior compulsively utilizes objects that present themselves in the
immediate surroundings, referred to as Environmental Dependency
Syndrome in a social context. Directed by external contingencies in
the surrounding environment and dependent on indicators to guide
behavior, one loses the ability to act in a self-directed way.
When an excessive attraction to a real or imaginary object
becomes inescapable reality, obsession and monomania join.
Narcissists of late modernity would gladly take artificial refuge in
the idée fixe of compulsive magnificent obsessions to escape their
illusionary prison. Oral rage and dependence makes anxious
subjects crave for calm and desire external command and control.
Corporate Communication
Annihilation of space through telematic machines creates global
environments that shape the public mind and invade private life. All
basic principles of this trade, including cultivating a business friendly
climate through paid advertisements and free copy storylines, were
already in place a hundred years ago. Mass media started massive
games of opinion making. Only covert state operations cannot place
advertisements easily and have to resort to direct payments to
editors.
Starting in the early twentieth century methodical business
intelligence soon became common practice in large corporations.
Telecommunication companies like AT&T started large-scale
collection of clippings, articles, books, pictures or flyers to be
analyzed in public opinion assessment. Management theories
increasingly relied on psychologists who sold themselves as
specialists on knowledge and human relations, offering a frame of
reference based on emotions and personality.
Applying therapeutic concepts to business 1940s public relations
motivational research turned to techniques of psychoanalysis for
marketing and consumer behavior analysis. Social engineering
became a major research field taking its cues from wartime
propaganda Committees for Public Information.
With the rise of moving images and in search of a theory to
make pictures talk, the 1950s saw the first guide books on the
tactical use of television as medium of persuasion. In saturated
consumer markets, middle and lower classes had to be lured from
frugal traditions into delirious consumption by way of business
communication. Working phantom publics and regimenting the
minds of the masses, diversity of opinions needed to be compressed
and homogenized. Degrading significance and intensifying attitude
appealing to instinctual drives and subconscious urges forges a joint
outlook.
 Symbols are instruments of persuasion, strategic switchboards
to organize the chaos of popular aspirations and individual thought.
Loaded with emotions and attracting sentiments stripped of their
underlying ideas or reasons, symbols control energies of desire.
Pictures convey expressions that set off memories to channel and
connect the flow of ideas. Images triggering reflex reactions are a
fixture of the grand spectacle. Omission a main technique of
propaganda, the pen is more powerful than the eraser. Visual cues
and catchwords trigger collective impulses that convey simple
narratives.
Elite interest successfully established free enterprise next to
freedom of speech and creed as a principle of democracy.
Campaigns fought the widespread idea that property rights should
never be above human rights. Public agendas routinely preset by
invisible hands, corporate sovereignty is more of a universal right
than freedom from fear and want. Immortal corporations legally
bound to pursue profit against the public interest have more than
human rights. As Honore de Balzac already observed, “Behind
every great fortune there is a crime.” And in league with ruthless
sociopaths and timeless monsters the moral climate of corporations
is crime. For corporate communication it makes sense to seduce
the public into accepting a more flattering image where
corporations are friends.
Correctional Rationality
Based on pseudo-rational discourse and rule of semi-detached
experts, dissent management via scientific reason applies thought to
work upon itself. Capitalist ideology is articulated in terms of
universal rationality. Liberalisms political logic requires control at a
distance by indirect regulation and the instrumental use of reason in
specific types of rationality. Above all it is the middle class that
surrenders to the rational, acting as buffer between the elites and
the allegedly irrational crowds driven by drama and emotions.
Bewitched by the invisible power of the other, rationality becomes
the weapon of preventive interventions into dangerous styles of
deviant thought.
All rigorous forms of art or knowledge that create their own
truths or realities are suspect and dangerous. In dominant regimes
of truth, science and authority as legitimate and sanctioned bearers
of correct interpretation subdue competing knowledge and analysis.
As an engine of social cohesion, reason manufactures common
sense from uncommon sense. Respectable academics never
question fundamental frameworks of institutional reason; only
within the confines of an established regime dissent remains
acceptable.
Rationalizing narrative difference depicts diverging explanation
models as nostalgic fantasies or escapist devices of coping with the
powerlessness facing overwhelming anonymous institutions.
Anxious gatekeepers of reason spread conspiracy theory panic
about perilous ideas in dangerous mimicry of legitimate discourse.
At the same time paranoid style and conspiracy theory are
considered trivial popular misconceptions. Highly complex
simplifications explaining away contingency based on socio-
psychological functions. Suspicions are depicted as barbarous
myths of the restless poor, the feverish fantasies of uneducated
masses in a frenzy to hallucinate a labyrinth of evil. Even though
political paranoia is considered delusional thinking, it mostly amounts
to pumped up critique as in structural analyses or mainstream
skeptical thought.
Humans are inclined to presume purposeful intervention in
situations that may or may not involve intelligent agency. Assigning
frictions of life to deliberate malevolent intelligence looks like an
evolutionary by-product of a low cost of false positives.
Hyperactive agent detection creates belief in invisible entities but it
is better for survival to hallucinate agents than not detecting a real
enemy just once. However a conspiracy tag mostly functions as a
weapon to marginalize competing models of reality.
Attempts at systemic views and questioning modes of
operations are far more threatening to a regime than pointing out
isolated evil or misconduct. Challenging established frameworks of
reason connected to the underlying rationale of governmental
procedures is synonymous with madness. A USSR specialty of
treating dissidence as psychopathology soon got picked up by China
and adopted by neo-liberalism. Specific rationality embedded in
culture replaces violence and coercion. Professional pragmatism
internalizes thought control and being realistic is just another word
for censorship. Based on the authority and support of narratives,
reason produces the immanence of rule and its own justification.
Crisis Relief
Also called mammalian brain, the limbic system is an area of
the brain that deals with stress. Influencing emotions and memory, it
instantly responds to imminent or imagined threat via the autonomic
nervous system, the complex network of endocrine glands that
regulate metabolism. Sustained stress, short for distress from Latin
“to pull apart,” overloads with hormones for short-term emergency
situations.
Cumulative effects damage brain cells and hippocampus.
Chronic exposure makes it difficult to think, retrieve long-term
memories or learn new things. Excessive cortisol levels prevent
from integrating new, or accessing existing information. Constant
stress induces regress to mammalian and reptilian behavior modes.
Turning one pale and shaky, it reduces to base cravings. States of
physical stress invariably influence perception; psychology and
physiology interweave. Anxiety, a by-product of fear of the
unknown, shuts down thinking and turns on reactive survival modes.
In a crisis with high levels of uncertainty and potential threat, people
get baffled, confused and the mind goes blank.
A secret underground of ancient snake cults and solar worship
from Africa became a selfdefense weapon in high stress conditions
of slavery. Descending spirits, the Loa crisis, invisibles mount the
“horse.” Voodoo or Voudou, also spelled vo-du, derived from the
Fon prefix vo for introspection and suffix du translates to
“introspection into the unknown.” An intermediary between Loa
and humanity, Papa Legba opens and closes the doors to the virtual.
With the power to remove obstacles the master of crossroads
controls the gateway to the spirit world.
Secret societies played an important role in the resistance
against French colonialists. Ritual practices reflected the need for
secrecy and swift action in the struggle for liberation with regular
and magical weapons. On the island of Hispaniola several voodoo
Bokor joined the secret Bizango Society of slaves and maroons to
free captives under the motto “Order and Respect of the Night.”
Horror fiction genres thrive in crisis because it is a way to
address the unknowable. Beyond the rational in the reflex zones of
crisis is, according to cliché, the realm of the feeble minded and
desperately gullible. In contrast to the religious bigotry widespread
in societies and ubiquitous in clerical hierarchies, mastering radical
psychophysical systems requires considerable levels of discipline
and commitment. Wizards of so called primitive cults, many
determinedly working for social aims, are mostly smart, stylish and
decent — not sinister frauds.
Cultivating fear responses demonstrating relations of virtual
power and affect, contemporary domination hardly needs to apply
state terrorism on their populations. Effects become autonomous
from cause and terror turns spectral in the ecology of fear.
Affective activation and contagion enables a mode of
governmentality through states of possession shortcircuiting
memory processes. Hacking into the crisis of possession and
attacking the affective factories of existential anxiety could take a
cue from the Loas.
Critical Intrigue
Mirroring growth and the influence of a rising class, the secrets
of bourgeois society, clubs, lodges and business associations started
competing with the Arcana Imperii of state and church. Involved in
revolutionary activities challenging the rights of divine rulers, the
mysteries of governance were wrangled from aristocracy into the
hands of the bourgeoisie and economic royalty. While the
egalitarian pose of most eighteenth-century lodges may have been
very thin, Freemasonry was still far from a decline into Middle-
Class daydreams.
Driven by steam engines, printing press and education, power
passed from aristocracy to the bourgeois establishment. Extending
the term public to themselves, but not the unreasonable crowds, it
tried to keep its mysteries from the common people. Growing
numbers of people with more than minimal education not only
resulted in an expanding trained workforce, but in millions who think
they deserve a due place in society. Since colonial times a global
collusion of elites is tormented by fear of popular insurrection,
especially at the outposts of the dominion.
Old magical taboos not only protected the emperor but also the
subjects from violent transgression of the sovereign. New systems
of domination allocate treason and disloyalty to the subject alone. A
contagious stigma of the traitor spreads through the societal body
where everybody becomes a potential security risk in state
paranoia.
Complex segmentation of power relations brings about a shift
from discipline and its material or cultural enclosures to a control of
mobility and exchange. Instead of enforcing a norm, indirect power
modes structure the field of possibilities. Behavior modulation
allows greater flexibility towards difference. Differentiation of
consumer patterns threatens social cohesion, but flow-control and
segmented data-body targeting techniques offer overall
predictability. Consumer governmentality concerned with capturing
action within a controllable framework aims for intimate statistical
knowledge of populations to predict behavior and adapt control
strategies.
Testimonies that cabal and intrigue are not in the toolbox of
Western governmental management and were left behind with
Oriental despotism in the era of modernization reveal ethnocentric
delusions of liberal intellectuals. Rather with so many conspiracies
and so little time, reflecting only individual schemes in the ongoing
wars of the ideospheres seems less relevant. Capitalism and
religion compartmentalize body and mind, sexuality and language,
phantasms and the real, to divide life into separate spheres.
Compartmentalized classification being central for preventing free
circulation, to attack and break up these divisions means a
profanation of the arcana of domination.
The abject holds a promise of a return of the real. Not in the
truth of a statement but by breaking the construction of established
reality. Anomalies are allies against enforced normalization,
transgressing the categories of thought against all standing
classificatory norms. A typical horror narrative is the disclosure and
drama of entities breaking through the ontological boundaries of
everyday existence. As natural attractors of interest,
incomprehensibly lurking, monsters raise the question: what is?
Cryptic Tales
In the Hour of the Wolf when people die, ghosts and demons
come out to play. Between night and dawn when sleep is deepest
and nightmares are most real, the sleepless are haunted by their
innermost fears. To be human is to be haunted, bound in chains to a
past dominating the present.
Expanding a mediated intersubjective relation beyond individual
biological existence, life transforms in an intimate relation to death.
Power as supernatural force haunting and possessing the social
body in a world of nonphysical coercion does not rely on tangible
presence but capacities of transformation. Culture without a
ritualization of ancestor cults seems unimaginable. But cultures of
death entail pacification where dissolution of contradictions
translates to depoliticization. Reclaiming life means antagonistic
diversity flourishing in a place victimized by the neutrality of death.
The evening news project a timid fear of life and Hollywood’s
fare a cynical pessimism of expecting the worst in Grand Hotel
Abyss. Horror however, the art of haunting and possession not only
refers to patrician mansions but riots and civil insurrections. Ghost
stories may be tasteless but revolutionary. Romantic traditions
identify trauma as inverse miracle. Shocking complacent pseudo-
elites into awareness of their world of horrors and disturbing the
lazy confidence of sterile rationalist empiricism. “The lights burn
blue! — It is now dead midnight — Cold, fearful drops, stand on
my trembling flesh.”
There is a terror that frightens and one that inspires to fight
back. Panic is induced by anxiety, not fear. Tales from the crypt
transform unease into narratives of suspense, addressing existential
questions not only for teenagers tormented by hormones and
identity crises. Opening the mind to awful possibilities and stirring
the soul to eventualities that may never materialize. Where a
second self, a horrible double between here and the world beyond
lingers, obscure Tales of Terror submerge into the sublime.
In haunted mansions where the ego is not in control, the ideal
self acts as punisher. Terror from the part of the personality and
unconscious psychic agency trying to control drives, fantasies,
feelings, and actions. Unleashing depression and fatigue, the “over-
I” villain takes the stage and the tortured psyche accepts in
exchange for a sense of security and identity. Deterioration of
traditional self-image ideals leads to aggressive modes drawing on
dark impulses. As in the carnage of colonial atrocities, terror is born
out of utter fear of the wilderness within.
Horror narratives contemplate repulsive forms that live frozen
in annihilation. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with
strange eons even death may die.” Formal systems beyond
Aristotelian logic feel alien and legends of old insinuate a
psychology of intelligence without humanoid affect. Octopus
mentality seems oriented toward calculated cautiousness, more
plastic than reptiles and more aloof than mammals. Octopus Paul,
accurately predicting results of every German soccer match as well
as the final in the 2010 World Cup, stoked international tension
when the Iranian President accused the West of attempting to
“manipulate people’s minds.”
Dilemma Rebels
Social psychology suggests a motivational drive to reduce
cognitive dissonance. Ideas or behaviors that conflict with a
fundamental element of the self-concept are powerful causes of
dissonance. Anxieties in regard to self-image lead to rationalizations
that produce justifications to support one’s choices.
In the negative-state relief model humans have a drive to
engage in mood-elevating behavior of an egoistic nature.
Helpfulness paired with positive value such as smiles and thanks,
reduces bad feelings. Negative affect, like guilt, embarrassment or
awareness of cognitive inconsistency, increases motivation to help
others. Altruism interested in self-help only might prefer a
continued state of dependency serving as a screen for depreciative
projections. A look into the motivational base of the self-appointed
good seems very appropriate in some blue eyed worlds that claim
the moral high grounds.
Sociopathologies of rebels or revolutionaries without a cause
not only populate the fringes of science, politics or the arts and
cultural domains. People inflate personal grievances onto a political
agenda and project their own shortcomings unto sectors of society.
Attacking hypocrisy, unconsciously directed against childhood
authorities, or exposing injustice driven by issues of abuse in
growing up.
Techniques of indirect speech and innuendo keep knowledge
compartmentalized. Collective action depends on shared knowledge
but speaking up is taking a risk and exposes the one that tells.
Disagreeing with power in support of those who are not, the
fearless speech of parrhesia bridging individual and shared
knowledge is a catalytic revolutionary agent.
Pointing out contradictions in quaint traditions and exposing
cherished ideals to be myths may fuel disobedience but not
necessarily mutual cooperation. Everyone is witness to the
remorseless exploitation of life through coercive immersion in
financial schemes. Apathy prevails in the face of a rotten political
sphere, the excess of wealth and the desolation of the poor. In late
capitalism, resistance is futile by default. Additionally, similar to the
prisoner’s dilemma it is allegedly irrational to participate in dissident
activities. Potential rebels have an incentive to a free ride, so why
contribute to the public good. If one receives the benefits regardless
of whether one gets involved in revolutionary activities, why
participate and pay the costs?
Rationality results in market failure of rebellion. If rational
actors will never engage in fighting oppression or overthrow a
tyrannical regime, popular revolutions remain an enigma. Communal
norms created by coercion or social contract cannot solve the
dilemma. However, dissidents sharing common knowledge and
ideas overcome mutual ignorance and the narrow self-interest
characteristic of market solutions. Rebel potential rises to collective
action if based on shared processes of dissent, where vectors of
conformity and innovation, ritualism and retreatism collapse into
rebellion.
Disembodied Voices
Communication has meanings ranging from the existential
exposure of otherness or likeness to mysterious systems of
semantic classification. Definitions cover anything from pragmatic
organization of empiric action patterns, breakout attempts from the
fortress of the self, to media powered opinion management.
Whatever meaning one chooses, communication is mostly a socio-
political and not a semantic or technical problem.
All conventions of representation inscribed into media are
political. From mechanical man to the computer age, technology
imprints cognitive models. Insinuating itself in the way people think
how the brain functions or into a belief that human memory works
like digital storage. So far there is no danger that computers
become human, but the reverse is certainly evident.
Effective action requires efficient communication. Both the
atomic bomb and digital communication have their origin in the
WWII research environment. A milieu in which the science of
Cybernetics announced a new era of form: in the information age
time becomes space and the boundaries of inside and outside are
broken. From DNA as the great code to the worlds of arts,
language or social science, communication was considered the
fundamental shared process. This historic paradigm, now long
beyond half-life, unified the sciences of the nuclear age.
Modernity invested strong beliefs in the power of language to
command and control emotional states and social relations. In
Freud’s time psychological introspection and psychoanalytic therapy
remained a privilege of the upper social classes. Today, in a self-
perpetuating market where suffering and consuming become
codependent, therapeutic language is deeply embedded in everyday
culture.
Despite an abundance of terms most people stay significantly
challenged to identify or predict their psychological status.
Modernist beliefs in the ultimate transparency of communication
failed to realize its inescapable opacity and the layered indirectness
of decision making. Angelos, Greek for messenger, represent
models of pure communication. Both technocratic information
theory and therapeutic discourse of self-realization in modern
bourgeois life share angelic ideals of perfect exchange in denial of
communication breakdown.
Dreams of perfect semantic systems mirror fantasies of
telepathy. In a union of minds, as if bodies did not matter, politics is
a problem. As soon as the body and its pain was the last frontier in
mediated environments, counter insurgency appropriated
“propaganda of the deed” against deceptive communication.
However not the matching of minds but the coupling of desires is
the fundamental modus operandi making libido a primum agens of
communication.
Libidinal attention sucked into the media channels feeds a
plethora of ghosts multiplying every moment. New necromedia
machines increase fidelity to conjure on screen mirrorworlds of
deinterlacing phantoms. Ignes fatui, also called will-o’-the-wisp,
ghostly lights hovering over swamps at night, recede when
approached. Flickering phenomenon compel travelers, misled from
their way into dangerous marshes, to chase delusive walking fires.
Dissimulation Art
Imagination and deception, simulation technologies and
dissimulation deeply intertwine. Military camouflage, developed
with illusionists and artists, was a response to modern fire weapons.
All major armies soon followed the example of camoufleur
departments in WWI France, largely drafted from painters,
designers and architects under artist command.
Due to pressure from U-boats the new techniques expanded to
ships. Large vessels in open waters are not easily rendered
invisible. Even so, inspired by artistic ideas of the time a distinct
style of high contrast shapes was devised. British designs of so-
called dazzle camouflage by artists from London’s Royal Academy
were thouroughly tested on wooden models.
Rather than concealment, the purpose was to confuse
submarine periscope views. Deconstructing the outline with bizarre
patterns disrupts the optical mechanisms of rangefinders in naval
artillery and made it harder to strike. Largely obsolete with the
introduction of radar and new technologies, dazzle-painting
continued well beyond the end of WWII. Aesthetically advanced
compared to some works of public art, these abstract paintings
were held to boost morale.
A major work of illusionist art masked the Douglas military
aircraft production in Santa Monica during WWII. In military-
entertainment cooperation with Warner Bros, set-designers made
the plant and airstrips disappear under imaginary landscapes and
artificial aerial views of Californian suburbia. Lightweight imitations
complete with garages, fences, clotheslines and trees of feathered
wire on top of a mesh. Chicken-wire stretched across hundreds of
tall poles, covering hangars, buildings and parking lots. Painted
streets and sidewalks with simulated grass, blended into the
neighborhood of employee homes. Seen from above, streets of
burlap and mock-up trees looked like a gently sloping hillside
neighborhood.
Jasper Maskelyne, third in a family line of stage illusionists,
applied his skills to conceal British military assets and mislead aerial
reconnaissance. Together with artistic types ranging from the
avant-gardish to the traditional, the group known as Magic Gang
became the core of an industrial production of swindles in North
Africa. Strategic and tactical deceptions extended to simulated
armies and landscaping including fake train tracks and pipelines.
Using false artillery, phony trucks, tanks, buildings, even harbors, it
incorporated new artificial light, sound as well as radio-
communication design. Soon after the war new stereo hi-fi systems
for military deception got introduced into the home-entertainment
consumer market.
Confusion in interpretation became decisive for WW theaters
of battle. Middle East Commander General Wavell, in a memo from
1940: “The elementary principle of all deception is to attract the
enemy’s attention to what you wish him to see and to distract his
attention from what you do not wish him to see. It is by these
methods that the skillful conjuror obtains his results.” Long before
movies and high-tech media industries begins an ancient connection
between conjuring and the dark spagyric art of media truth-
projection.
Dream Traps
Advertisement is a major supplier of emotional experience
where streets are dark and empty without the glow of its
reflections. Exploitative fabrics of psychological manipulation
weave commodity symbols into personal experience. Advanced
product placement in libidinal streams of desire installs false
memories to enhance brand receptivity. Like processed textiles
ripped and torn to simulate years of intense activity, life becomes a
design issue. Predatory brandscapes leave products behind for
anticipative experience patterning. Branding is not just advertising,
but a constitutive cognitive control technology, an emotional
intervention where losing brand identity means loss of self.
Feeding back enriched streams of loaded symbol chains into
mediated publics requires analyzing prevalent cultural trends.
Steering identification to have targets project their innermost desires
captures affections. Inducing experiences and situations, invisible
governance makes one feel like doing something without direct
suggestion. Targets persuading themselves are a strategy of covert
persuasion and milieu control its principal device.
Contagious narratives spread through mimetic affinity. To get
imitated, before a groove can stick, a gesture needs to draw
attention first. Ideas not reproduced are socially non-existent.
Media technologies interact with an imaginary where availability
heuristics shape judgment and decisions. Audiences get drawn to
ideas and factoids that prominently reoccur in the cognitive media
environment, issues not reported are massively underestimated and
consequently produce distorted views. A story of a rise from rags
to riches picked up and replayed manifold supports myths of how
easy it is to changes one’s social class. Unwarranted belief in
opportunity and upward mobility makes inequality more acceptable.
People join a brand, a cult or simulations of community moving
in lockstep to belong and draw onto meaning. Mimesis allows
coming closer to others in regard to having company and finding out
what the world is about. Cognitive goods are the product of social
processes based on isomorphism.
Scientific discoveries have thrown humanity into a dark and
cold cosmos. In momentary lives as miserable nothings, herd
instincts compensate for isolation and anxiety at the heart of
modern life. Technologies turn scientific formulas of conceptual
torture chambers into meaningless realities. Stereotypes bind people
together in citadels to fortify their imaginary media environments,
worlds kept alive by the desire for a home.
Methodologies to bind are similar in any church. Commodities
as objects of devotion and emotional identification accommodate a
desire for transcendence. Creating mystery and belief in a story,
brand management systems produce meaning and loyalty beyond
reason. A colorful target marketing delirium may look like a better
option than a dull life. However, in devolution from cortex reason to
mammal emotion and reptilian brain imprints, David Ogilvy reminds
“Customers need a rational excuse to justify their emotional
decisions, so always include one.”
Empathic Processes
More often than not enthusiastic confidence in the faculty of
understanding others is illusory. False consensus effects are based
in a self-centered bias in social perception. Subjects overstate the
amount of agreement with others in an urge to assume a prevailing
accord. Isomorphic projections and false impressions of similarity
facilitate social bonds and intersubjective bridges.
Narrative empathy filters and modulates a neural base for
imitation. Weaving them into little storylines people comprehend
others and create illusions of understanding. Gossip, a core business
of human communication substitutes speech for mutual grooming
and lousing in social bonding. It is largely a practice of little stories
about who is with whom, the dissing of free-riders and outcasts or
unresolved conflicts.
Reciprocal communication requires to scale down the
expression of the speaker and to inspire the sympathetic interest of
the listener. Placing it in the context and command of the other,
ritual codes of interaction imply gestures of modesty beyond
individual desires. Negative bargaining is beyond the grasp of vulgar
economists. Data suggests that humans observing others share
emotions and neurophysiologically mirror their actions. Biological
mechanisms transform what others do and feel in the observer’s
experience. Observation of happiness triggers similar feelings.
Acting to render others happy may transform into egoistic mood
enhancement behavior. High-empathy individuals are more
supportive, but help behavior is better predicted by sad mood than
empathy levels.
Despite the relation of sympathy, the sharing of concerns, with
empathic intimacy, empathy does not necessarily have positive
consequences for others. Studies show that empathic orientation to
suffering increases personal levels of sadness. Individuals may
want to eliminate feelings caused by the presence of someone
miserable. Seeing with the eyes of the other might be for the
purpose of ruthless competition or hostile intelligence. To better
empathize with the character, telenovela viewers might want the
protagonist to suffer even more. Empathy between higher and
lower social strata is typically and significantly not in balance.
Giving up one’s point of view to influence the other and trigger
reciprocity, Stockholm Syndrome is a survival strategy through
empathic surrender, enabled by a small kindness towards the
hostage.
In the rubber hand illusion one feels an artificial limb to belong
to oneself. By manipulating visual perspective and supplying
sensory signals which correlate to the subject’s body, Perceptual
mechanisms overriding thought result in illusionary transfers of body
ownership. This misreading of owning a different body is typically
induced by virtual reality.
When causality seems to leave no room for interpretation and
everything is a given frozen in time, empathy is blocked. When no
conflicts drive toward decisions there is no dimension of intention to
provide identification anchors. Without taking sides most games
come to be quite boring, partisanship triggers empathy in narrative
scenarios. Giving up a detached view and choosing sides draws into
the space of game experience.
Evolutionary Logic
Explaining the living universe as survival of the fittest, where
chance mutation and competition are singularly privileged over
cooperation and mutual aid is political ideology. Darwin’s discovery
of variation replacing essence grew into an ideological instrument in
legends of survival and competition. Reductive analyses and
simplistic ideas of genetic software envision the immanentization of
divine providence. Myths about egoistic genes project a view of
individual vanity and subdue perspectives that include the social
power of living environments.
There are no egoistical genes or lone warrior species in
evolution but interdependent biological systems. Legends of genetic
survival machines under command to maximize multiplication of its
genome are based on ideas of a struggle for existence in Anglo-
Saxon economic ideologies. Thomas Malthus thought famines
represent part of a god given order to deter people from idleness;
Darwin drew on economic models of his time and its abhorrence of
nonlinear processes.
Vulgar Darwinisms correspond to the bourgeois world-view of
a cozy evolutionary development. It cannot accommodate sudden
transformation, spontaneous change, catastrophic shifts or rapid
cataclysm. Both a robust stasis of biological species and self-
stabilizing of genomes, as well as discreet bursts and phases of
acceleration beyond the need for adaption, contradict the primacy
given to continuous random mutation.
Life in ribonucleic acid worlds started with cooperative
connectedness and communication. Oceanic early life-forms
developed in horizontal genetic transfer and copy processes. Self-
modifying cells replicate according to imbedded principles of
cooperative potential in the Cambric explosion. Endosymbiotic
combinatory processes integrating bacterial and viral DNA in the
evolution of living cells did not follow slow, continuous mutation.
Living cells are not autistic actors of sociobiological dogma, but
sensitive entities in a copy-and-paste conspiracy.
As part of a relational network, environments interact with
evolution in autopoeitic processes. Natural selection in the
biosphere rests on non-random environments and symbiotic co-
evolution. External stress and the power of a defined environment
to repeatedly direct evolution exert significantly deeper formative
effects on biological organisms than the invisible hands of random
mutation. Analyzing ecologies of selective traits in non-genetic
systems like mechanisms of enforced replication by norms and
network laws may allow for a view into the future.
Urban environments do not simply consist of walls, bridges and
streets, spaces of production and consumption, symbolically located
in maps and land registers, but a topology of fields and relational
flows of energy and signs. Circuits of persons, capital and trade
embedded in ubiquitous electronic presence and all-pervasive
communication technology. Absolute, relative and relational
connections of multidimensional spaces formed by use, experience
and understanding. Geopolitical-influence spheres of finance and
information flows have a spooky influence at a distance.
Extreme Intuition
Intuition is about acquiring knowledge without inference of
reason and through insights that one cannot easily justify. From
Latin intueri roughly meaning to “look inside,” it is like a psychic
radar to feel out situations or persons in decision making and
problem solving. Beyond the characteristic immediacy there is not
much agreement on its distinctions. Some hold intuitions to be
similar to beliefs based in subjective experience differing between
social groups. In analytic philosophy rational intuitions distinguished
from beliefs and appealing to “common sense” make a kind of
necessity claim that something seems a priori inevitably the case.
Form-generating capabilities of our senses, the Gestalt effect,
help the recognition of figures and forms instead of just a collection
of lines and curves. Enabling a coherent world the nervous system
integrates multisensory information but brings into question the idea
of separate senses. As in the illusory continuity of tones and the
double-flash experiment where sound makes you see things that do
not exist.
In Cryptesthesia, or “hidden sensation,” information is gathered
by the senses outside the boundaries of an ordinary awareness
where consciousness represents the tip of the iceberg. Sensory
hallucinations may bring information to the forefront of cognizance
as perception or integration of physical cues. A narrative based on
sensory input intuitively refocused through pseudo-extra-sensory
perception. Correspondingly spaces and locations take on the aura
of practices taking place in it. Even fierce secularists fall into
cultural molds formed by devout activities and mind frames.
Thin-slicing, the ability to find patterns based on narrow
windows of experience is making quick decisions with minimal
amounts of information. Analytic language and verbal
overshadowing in problem articulation significantly obstructs
capacities for intuitive thinslicing. Decisions based on flash instincts
and deep intuitive knowledge about another human presence is the
opposite of statistical weighing of categories. Objects can be
understood relatively, as in comparative analysis, or an intuitive
mode.
Analysis, the creation of concepts through a division of points of
view, produces models but cannot transmit implicit experiential
understanding itself. One may pile commentaries upon
commentaries and never grasp the value of a graceful line.
Connecting to things in a deep empiricism and losing sight of
oneself as a subject in a struggle against conceptual knowledge
existence cuts through the thickness of surface reality in flashes of
illumination.
Immediate perception of life processes as patterns suggests
realms of expanded consciousness. Mystic communication is based
on direct knowledge through subjective experience of intuitive
insight. Modern neuroscience concurs with ancient sages that the
self is an emergent cognitive construction, both existential and an
illusion. Sufi traditions sought knowledge beyond thinking and
feeling to connect with a reality beyond forms, arresting the
psychological function of sense experience as the greatest obstacle
to intuition. Mediating between light and dark, the shadows of ideas
are the footprints in the forest of matter.
Fake Revolutions
When the Italian Senate commission researching Gladio and the
assassination of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro files a FOIA
request in 1995, “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the
existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request.”
Secret armies linked to internal subversion had been exposed by
former agent Philip Agee in his 1987 book Dirty Work: The CIA in
Western Europe, describing paramilitary groups that operate
throughout Europe and continuing historical practices of fake
insurgencies or assaults to trigger counter-insurgency methods.
Obviously some of the success stories of influencing opinion
cannot be told without killing the audience. Despite operational
achievements many clandestine interventions created messy
spillover effects and bad publicity. Regardless of top secret and
highest “need to know” compartmentalization a percentage of
missions or neutralization of journalists, judges and others, did not
remain hidden. Even without direct links to a state or military
command structure, the beans are bound to spill when judicial and
investigative researchers trail these activities and connect them to
events. Although covert operations continue to mystify audiences in
the transatlantic theater this compromises stability operations.
Despite its accomplishments the concept of clandestine operations
needed to be adapted to a twenty-first-century setting of globalized
information environments.
When traditional approaches conflicted with the principle of
plausible deniability, privatization provided added layers of
operational security and the private sector emerged as the future of
invisible warfare. Business driven peacekeeping is at a double
advantage in discretion and limited liability as well as profitability.
Outsourced angst creation proofs to be an efficient model for
economies producing desires set on course to be fed with products.
Since there never could be enough security it is a potentially endless
market.
Structural control reduces the need for prisons in the
transformation from welfare state to security economy. Both the
Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the International
Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF) deployed successful
socio-cultural operations in the Cold War theater. Still modeled on a
traditional top-down command structure, they already provided
blueprints for cultural asteroids of cellular-structured information
dominance.
Pervasive powers of soft weapons in cognitive mass protection
manipulate the cultural field further than procedures to terrorize
populations. Concerted information-influence translates into
nurturing myths for officials and mainstream audiences. Influencing
instinct, emotional response and physiological symptoms, emotivism
engineering transforms evaluative judgment into expressions of
attitude. With violence as a backup only, less-lethal containment and
pacification provide rich business opportunities in security
economies.
Far removed from public scrutiny, players interact in the interest
of mutual goals in multiple roles both inside and outside of
governments. Strategic communications and truth-projection are an
investment into reality, and enduring peacekeeping grounds risk
management options in economic success.
Fama Clinics
Depicted with wings and a trumpet, Pheme “who initiates and
furthers communication” is the daughter of Hope and
personification of fame and celebrity in Greek mythology. Fama,
her Roman equivalent with multiple tongues, eyes, ears and wings,
lives in a home with 1000 windows to hear everything in the world.
Snooping into the affairs of gods and mortals her goodwill meant
notability and her wrath scandal. Individual reality is reconstructed
in accordance with narratives that establish a frame of reference in
the echo chamber of hearsay. Rumor credibility however relies on
conforming to standards of hearsay and follows elaborate social
protocols and situative setting. Too much individualization risks
skepticism or ridicule.
Gossip, endemic in human organizations, marks the way to talk
about conflict. These little stories do not transmitt much information
as such but provide an articulation carrier where narrative details
give clues to specific concerns. Understanding codes and taboos
proofs essential for interfacing local populations. Rumors started
the revolt of the Indian subcontinent against the British Empire.
Allegedly greased with cow and pig fat, Hindu and Muslim soldiers
opening rifle cartridges with their teeth to load their guns would
have broken a taboo.
Scientific interest in rumors begins with nineteenth-century
psychology, later shifting to social psychology and sociology. Race
riots and revolts in the 1920s are at the beginning of American
rumor control research. Circulating Second World War rumors, lead
to multiple projects to counteract and the first rumor clinic was set
up in Boston to contain contagious stories set off by the Pearl
Harbor attack in 1942.
Civilian morale threatened and national security compromised,
social scientists applied the psychology of rumors. “If the mass will
be free of chains of iron, it must accept the chains of silver”
commented Harold D. Lasswell. Awed by the subversive power of
idle talk authorities devised techniques of talking back and
influencing viral communication. Call centers responded to
concerned citizens but newspaper rumor clinics proved to be the
decisive type of control. Officially shut down when the war was
over, civil-war talk after the 1968 Martin Luther King assassination
made it seem appropriate to deploy enhanced truth-projection.
Rumor control centers publicize information to specific
incidents, terrorist attack, civil disturbance or natural disaster crisis
response. It is argued that ambiguous situations create a vacuum
filled by rumor mills and impact control of these cathartic or
entertaining chunks of information requires active management of
informal communication. At any rate new digital communication
and regional 24-hour channels changed media operations.
By the 1990s rumor scholarship analysis mostly included
folklorist urban legends. It now ranges from the information
environment politics of belief to cultural shifts in ideas about truth
and falsity. Social network technologies and digital messaging make
it easier for rumors to spread. In times of crisis a good lie gets
halfway around the world before veracity can boot up.
Fascinating Phantasms
Fascinum was an effigy installed on Roman chariots as a
counter spell to fend off the evil eye. An obscene figure used
against a dangerous fascination of the public when dignitaries
paraded before the people became the god Fascinus. Evil or illness
believed to be an effect of fascination also created traditions of
blackening the eyelids to distract a destructive gaze. Serpents were
said to have the malocchio. As defensive shield against uncanny
supernatural dangers in battle, Roman legions like Hermes’
caduceus carried real serpents on a pole. From fascinare, “to cast
a spell,” fascination became to mean an effort to mentally control
another. Its current use developed rather late in the nineteenth
century.
Sign language also protects from the power of the evil eye.
Mano Fico, the thumb-and-fist gesture, was used in the belief that
demons are repelled by the notion of corporal reproduction. Ancient
customs used obscene emblems against anyone suspected of
witchcraft. Female animal parts or horseshoes at a house entrance
serve this purpose. Hoodoo gris-gris recreationally refers to any
implements that aid in sexual activity, a hex against the reversal of
live protecting the wearer from evil.
More than libidinous attraction of bodies, the psychopathology
of sex is the basic conceptual system of the mediated imaginary
public intercourse. “Copulation and mirrors are abominable. They
multiply the number of men.” wrote Borges linking copying and
sexual reproduction. Narratives, alphabets and replication
technologies multiply in print, photography, gramophones and
networked multimedia.
Emotions are not easily faked and conventional behavior is
difficult to mock. Like mirrors frozen in time photographs expose
fleeting facial expressions that linger in the air like ghosts. Ancient
scholars thought of writing in terms of a perversion and a ghostly
duplication disembodying the mind. In an influence over distance
many read the thought of one and the dead speak to the living.
Writing is haunted; speech action rises above human origins to the
dwelling place of immortals and ghosts. The medium’s body is the
ghost machine and Master’s Voice speaks from the land of the
dead. Therefore interpreting texts and symbols involves the
hermeneutic ability to understand a ghost’s point of view.
Sunlight takes eight minutes to reach the earth and more than a
hundred kilos of it every minute. Like extraterrestrial signals
arriving from the deep past, a transmission is a subset of recording
not the other way round. In a very well-known illusion people see
humanoid shadow ghosts in the corner of the eye. Some of the
most concise perceptions in social relations are observed only
through the peripheral field of vision.
Enlightenment was about what humans may know; romantic
horror stories are about the unknowable. Horror hides the
unknowable at its center where the inexplicable rouses interest
driven by a desire to know. Soothsayers and clairvoyants decipher
secret languages or random insignificance in the song of frogs or
cicadas at night. Techniques of continuously fixing the gaze induce
sudden illuminations. Beyond connecting the dots of a given image
lies redefining the context of what is the context.
Fictional Rationalism
Prospective or ex-post-facto narratives are traditional domains
of the arts. Painting pictures into the mind is at the core of the
devices of power, rendering artists, writers and engineers of the
imagination a force on the global stage. Not only in the realm of art
and fashion are ideas contagious and social fictions epidemic. Life
imitates art in embedded media environments of self-fulfilling
images. Descriptive and predictive interrelated, what are the hidden
boundaries and implications in the present?
Fiction is a heuristic tool of exploring scenarios in strategic
planning beyond scientific extrapolation. Narrative intelligence
hypothesizes in terms of good justifications constructing
explanations, alternative storylines and differing schemes. Each of
the blind men was partly right about the elephant but mostly very
wrong. Plots fixed to individual identities unfold an intersecting logic
of narrative bifurcations. Down to a simple joke multiple viewpoints
allow change of perspective and alterity of identities central to any
narrative.
Conjecture of what might be the future leads to the question
what is and “what really is behind it.” A perception of multiple
layers in the fabric of realities undermines borders between fact
and fiction. While most aspects of reality are unpredictable,
foresight trained to think around the corner and divination prying
into the future remains an asset in the fog of war. Intelligence
analysis interfaces are the scrying stones of today’s omni-
directional war where crystal ball screens reflect paranoid
rationality of game theories.
Conflict scenarios mapping out pictures of an adversary try to
force the opponent within the decision cycle where augmented
reality technology for anticipatory planning generates graphs of
multiple possible futures. Fixing the gaze on a model of the enemy’s
mind, in turn modeling its opponent, may at best foretell what the
other “should” do based on rational thought, not what they actually
do. Investigating a situation may drift from rational models to a
catastrophic delirium of infinite regress and computational
overheating. In virtual war games of the imagination the maps
attack the territory. Fact and fiction lose their boundaries in a
phantasmal dynamic of pseudo-rational machines and their
operators.
Facts that do not carry ideas are incomprehensibly remaining
outside cognizance. Without the power of ideas the most fortified
empire cannot persist. Exploiting dreams, binding vision and
manifest identities around fictional constructions, political practice
takes advantage of phobias and libidinal forces.
The Greek idea meant appearance, pattern or form and a
natural idealism perceives nature’s forms as idea. Magic is
therefore a realism in the realm of Morpheus, the shape-shifting
leader of the daimones of dreams, brother of Phantasos, son of
Hypnos the Elder God, and of Nyx the night. True dreams turning
false, the gates of horn and ivory collapse. Cultural counter-
intelligence, a practice that uses technologies of the imagination to
tell another story, holds conflicting views without getting out of
balance and provides an informational context for other people to
think.
Fundamental Epiphenomena
In epiphenomenalism everything is caused by another physical
phenomenon; mind is secondary, and its effect on the physical
world an illusion. Free will is a user illusion similar to a human-
computer interface or the visual metaphor of a desktop. In historic-
materialist thought, economic structures govern consciousness. Not
consciousness determines being, but relations of material production
generate legal, political and religious structures independent of will.
Material infrastructure is reality, and beliefs are secondary
phenomena to economic processes. All else is superstructure that
can only be understood in terms of the former.
Transforming speculative idealism into dialectical materialism,
Marxism described society as externalization, objectification and
internalization. Externalization, a human outpouring into the world,
objectification of a facticity that confronts its original producers to
themselves, and finally the reappropriation of this reality,
internalization transforming structures of the so-called objective
world into subjective consciousness.
A science of prediction and control of people’s actions in the
stimulus-response model of Behaviorism not only appealed to Soviet
bureaucracies. Yet, beliefs that social action and relations are fully
explainable through economic mechanisms, betray a naiveté
towards victimization and complex master/slave interrelations.
Producing ideas and objects over which they have no control, the
harder workers try to get out of bondage in the new spirit of
capitalism, the more powerful their slavemasters become. Cognitive
capitalism is not just about symbol manipulation of the perceptional
apparatus but how emotional and economic processes are
codependent. Immaterial economies are effectively based on affect
structures that in turn become subject to its logic of relations.
People do the wrong thing by their own agency but not without
subscribing to an ideology which justifies it. Cultural hegemony
reinforces political dominance by providing ideological validation
and artifacts staged as natural phenomena fortify power structures.
Kings making laws and laws making kings are in a mutual
interdependence of being both father and son. Concepts of
materialized divine agency ground human consciousness in the
depths of hell.
Knowledge of the world is not immediate; all sensation requires
processing time and conscious experience is less a rendering of
data but a simulation of the brain. Entities may exist beyond what
user illusion simulations can isolate or reduce from sensory data.
The Call of Cthulhu begins with “The most merciful thing in the
world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its
contents.”
Transforming human consciousness is often considered
romantic idealism that only nurtures religious delusions and thereby
preventing real change. However, battles are decided in the minds
of the opponents. Society and technology interweave in recursive
feedback loops of codependent cultural and socioeconomic
processes. Culture creates nature, symbolic systems condition
natural systems and attitudes shape value in the economic fabric of
societies.
Human Sacrifice
In early capitalism, ostentatious acquisition of wealth became a
fundamental criterion for status; withholding value from circulation
was a measure of individual worth. After agglomeration of great
fortunes, conspicuous consumption and waste was the order of the
day. Excessive displays of affluence and phantasmal deliriums of
wealth that make no sense in any rational economic logic.
Threatened by debates on redistribution of wealth, the moneyed
preferred to retreat and promote a culture where prestige goes to
those who have most but show least. Excess and libidinal pleasures
of luxury, curbed and refined into a more austere conduct, ascetic
capitalism was also a secular response to religious damnation of
worldly pleasures.
Unlike feudal lords or patricians of antiquity, social status today
is not so much defined by metaphysical hierarchies of ancestors but
“success.” Nineteenth-century cult of success still measured
achievement against an abstract ideal of discipline and inner-
worldly self-denial; twentieth-century competitive individualism
turned to winning in a war of all against all.
Immense inequalities are hidden in the invisible depths of
finance capitalism. More than half of the stock in the US market is
owned by less than 1% and half the population owns less than 3%
of private wealth. Regrettably, money’s use value is inverse
proportional to the wealth of its owner, and its initial distribution is
unjust. To strengthen forces of social cohesion, civilizations adhere
to cults of blood sacrifice. Killing its children in periodic warlike
situations where a nation’s psycho-sexual relation to the world is
expressed in a proliferation of prostheses of ever enlarged size or
power.
Death by a specific circulation of goods is calculated violence
and killing millions part of the deal. While more than fifty million
died during the great famines in India, food was exported to
England. Famines are characterized by starvation not lack of food;
speculation on food stocks creates hunger. As Mike Davis
observed, it is not barren lands that drifted offside in the course of
world history, but the fate of tropical regions changed when their
products and labor were forced into a London-controlled world
economy between 1870 and 1924. Agriculture production fostered
bond-slaves and hungry peasants as cheap labor for producing stuff
for the overstuffed. British India produced more serious famines
during their rule than in the thousands of years before.
Advancements of European powers in the colonization of
Africa and Asia were immediately followed by disasters of drought,
famine and disease. Such catastrophes and symbols of
cosmological crisis provoked superstition and obsessive beliefs in
witchcraft. Destroying systems of mutual support and aid,
contingency plans, communal reserves etc. the invisible hand
demands human sacrifice.
Ritual slaughter is also a traditional form of internal state terror
to sustain the power of the sovereign. Much talk about inner
demons is in denial of demonic manifestations and Wiener clarifies
in God and Golem: “using the magic of automatization to further
personal profit or let loose the apocalyptic terrors” is today’s evil
sorcery. Sorcery, adapted via Old French from the Vulgar Latin
sortiarius, meaning “one who influences fate.”
Illusionist Ringleader
Seminal US Secret Service chief John E. Wilkie had a passion
for espionage and conjuring. Wilkie studied with the illustrious
nineteenth-century stage magician Alexander Herrmann and as
Washington Post reporter under the pseudonym Fred S. Ellmore
invented the “Indian Rope Trick.” One of the most persistent media
fakes in history “the world’s greatest illusion” achieved mild mass-
hypnosis to sell more copies.
A master of media manipulation and mobilizing public opinion
Wilkie pioneered sophisticated practices of black propaganda
beyond the time-honored religious, monarchic or revolutionary
motives. Deploying fiction as weapon in the Spanish-American
War, he became a founding father of modern false-flag operations,
a practice that sacrifices its own citizens if reasonably well within
plausible deniability. Coordinating counterintelligence until 1911,
combining law-enforcement operations with dazzling illusionism and
performing arts, he saw conjurers as ideal operatives. He ran a ring
of illusionists and escape artists with well-known names on the
vaudeville circuit, including Prof. R.G. Hermann and Louis S. Leon.
Chicago’s Police Chief Andrew Rohan booked legendary
escape artist Harry Houdini to teach his city detectives. A co-
founder of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and a
fierce opponent of late-nineteenth-century anarchists introduced the
professional trickster to Wilkie, who was fascinated by Houdini’s
skillfully crafted deception devices in state-of-the-art technology.
Houdini, one of the first media celebrities, a world-class
showman and vocal opponent of the spiritualist fashion of his time,
realized spectacular mind-reading stunts using the most
sophisticated electronic equipment of the time. Special Branch
Superintendent William Melville befriended the widely travelled
undercover agent when he showcased his abilities at Scotland Yard
to easily free himself from any police shackles. Melville went on to
become the first head of British Secret Service, the later MI5,
under code name M.
John Mulholland, a notable illusionist performer in the 1930s,
author of the The Art of Illusion and editor of The Sphinx
magazine, left the stage to work for the newly established CIA.
Sidney Gottlieb of the MK-ULTRA program, a sinister poisoner
who personally delivered a bag of highly lethal toxins to assassinate
Lumumba, recruited him. His assignments included conceptualizing
devices, cracking codes and the twilight world of ESP drug
experiments. Mulholland wrote and illustrated the secret manual
Some Operational Applications of the Art of Deception,
including techniques to secretly dose someone with LSD.
From the friendly excuse to the sinister lie, deception is
everyday reality. Good liars use the infinite human capacity for self-
deception. To convincingly deceive with minimal guilt or anxiety, it
helps to be self-deluded. Second-level deception makes belief
sincere to everyone, including and specifically oneself. In the midst
of self remains an unknown place, hiding the secrets that a human
is too afraid to tell even itself.
Imaginary Realists
Naïve realism, evolving to a science of physics, showed that
realism is a false assumption. Realism, believing in a reality
ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes or linguistic
practices, typically assumes that truth is a belief’s correspondence
to reality. Knowledge of objects of representation and an external
totality of seemingly robust facts is viewed as absolute objectivity,
as real. However, the external world is ill-defined and ends up as an
inventory of cats and dogs, household appliances and stuff. Virtual
worlds are central to understanding, to optimization and predictive
analysis, to transmission of skills in education and in all science and
culture.
Despite Western conceptions of the self as a punctual power of
self-remaking or pure rational being, borders between mind and
world are drawn in the mind that defines its horizon. Whatever is
out there only makes sense to the viewer when perception is the
moment of internalization. A world both real and its own
representation presupposes a universe which is itself fiction.
Popular legends depict Satan, the great adversary, as a rationalist
and sensual realist in the insidious business of making deceit and
illusions appear logical.
Realists, judging the world by its appearances, make a
metaphysical statement regarding the separation of thought and
being which is a spooky assumption of thought itself. There is
matter, but who is talking? What is the agent of materialism, the
ghost of substance that declares eternal dominion in its dreams?
Does it matter? Efforts at describing reality being riddled with
contradictions and questionable postulations, it stays an ironic
paradox that most realists take it for granted that humans are ruled
by passions.
Realists construct the illusion of a disengaged subject as if it
were an agency separable from everything else, a disembodied
Cartesian ghost. To think everything as a body projects a unified
materiality that can never be proven by sensory perception. Trust in
the solidity of materiality creates individual objects in the mind that
cannot be perceived by the sensory apparatus. Matter is an
immaterial zoo of virtual particles in empty space, ripples in a sea of
tranquility. Materialist occultism more widespread than ever, the
underground accelerators at Cern became the biggest monument to
transcendence since the great pyramids.
Devotion to an idea is not passive, but inspires and drives a
desire to work for that ideal. Nothing great has been accomplished
without passion; material work refers to the immaterial. Utilitarian
understanding targeted at the material world reaches short for
insights into the non-practical realms of mind and imagination.
Human judgment of the future is impaired by a realism that is the
seamless production of an unreliable imagination.
Never seeing the thing itself but an image, to rely on this
impression is a fallible way of knowing. Therefore the god of the
gaps returns with a vengeance from the bottomless void, between
the pillars of rationality evanescence remains the most solid point.
Nature likes to hide; the greatest moments in this world are
anonymous, and the spirit wafts behind the veils.
Immanent Transcendence
In most major traditions transcendence surpasses physical
existence, is independent of it and beyond the grasp of humans. In
concepts where order is derived from elsewhere, there is an
apparent need of mediation and authorization of the the real —
priests, scriptures or scientists — that regularly lead to social
divisions and a dualism of good and evil.
Fascist ideologies immanentize transcendence into biopolitical
ideas. Immanence in the hysterical surplus of modernity’s
multiplying objects cannot reabsorb the spectral, transcendent angst
released in the process. Even though defined as the opposite of
immanence, both concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive,
and their radical renderings converge.
Nihilism, striving to immanentize the eschaton, negates the
world for reasons of transcendent thinking. Withdrawn to let the
world run governed by natural law, Enlightenment’s deist,
clockwork creator is a functional atheist. When individual deeds are
part of providence and everything or nothing is sacred,
transcendence collapses into immanence. Too transcendent to be
relevant, so distant as to be useless, so immanent that god and
world are one, the artificial differences of secular and religious
collapse.
In immanentism the absolute exists exclusively in the physical
order. For a pantheist, it is indistinguishable from its manifestation
and for panentheism simultaneously pervading and surpassing the
universe. In it, but not of it and both within and beyond it, Tzimtzum,
a Kabbalistic concept of an inherent paradox, requires the absolute
to be simultaneously transcendent and immanent. Similarly the
virtual is immanent transcendence but neither immanent nor
transcendent.
Looking for the opposite, understanding a thing in contrast with
what it is not, often helps to comprehend a subject through an
extended context. Thinking is always on the limit of the
incomprehensible, the borders of understanding and what is
remotely beyond. Ecstasy, from Greek ekstasis, for displacement
“stepping outside oneself,” distinguished from enthusiasm or
entheos meaning “possession by a god” or “having the god within.”
Translated as enthusiasm and joy, I-Ching Hexagram sixteen
relates to timing of action. Yü’s image of thunder rising from Earth
with crashing noise stood for a prototype of music, a sound that
allows containing and transmitting diverse energies against a
reactionary politics of silence. Rhythmic sounds are vehicles for
possession and bridges to the unseen. Breaks and offbeat phrasings
trigger the epiphany of immanent spirits, the coming of the Loas.
Following the idea of mechanical causality as divine will,
Spinoza developed pantheistic views, and Newton saw space-time
as form of being. Materialist pantheism conceives nature as one
extended divine substance, a naturalist world-view where
everything is sacred and thus deserves respect. For lovers or sages,
there is no such thing as insentient matter; all particles are
conscious and all things aware – even if the awareness is alien to
humans. Non-trivial fields curve space-time, and coupling the
gravitational field to itself makes all fields self-interact. Inclusionists
see all creatures in a cryptogamic relation. If life is a message the
universe sends itself, the cosmos like humans, corresponds with
itself.
Index Adjustments
Imposing order on the world amid the chaos of sensations in an
unformulable universe, bureaucracies authorize intellectuals and
experts to form authoritative environments that do not question
underlying assumptions lead to power abuse and questionable social
and cultural realities.
Classification typically establishes transient social fiction as
unchangeable fact in domains of vested interests. Dead
categorizations exposed as a fiction, dichotomist gender divisions
for instance, continue to loiter. Classification systems do not
document a given reality, but produce knowledge in a particular
interpretation of perception. This process of creating fictional truths
raises the question of what is a body of collected wisdoms or an
accumulation of insane ideas. In natural history museums beetles
exist out of proportion in respect to the richness of insect species
because they are so easy to collect, prepare and describe.
Representing Enlightenment thought, d’Alembert and Diderot’s
Encyclopédie played an important role in the intellectual climate
leading to the French Revolution. Writing the Encyclopedia or a
systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts Denis
Diderot’s aim was “to change the way people think,” and
accordingly its index was always in danger of being heavily
restricted by the censor.
In its index “theology” transforms into “religious studies,” based
on reason, not a source of knowledge of itself, just a few nodes
away from divination and black magic. That the Encyclopédie
cross-referenced “Eucharist” to “cannibals” revealed its spirit, and
appeals to reason undermined the position of the church. “Reason is
to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian....” Soon banned,
at the behest of clergy, then temporarily allowed, and finally
suspended of its privilège in 1759.
Demonstrating both the coexistence of conflicting answers on a
subject in diverse forms of knowing and that individuals cannot
internalize this multiplicity of ideas without assistance. The
obscurity of nature, the shortness of life and deceitfulness of the
senses, the weakness of judgment and difficulty of experiments in
the endeavor to know the world, depends on more than individual
effort. Ruling classes traditionally monopolized disputations on the
limits of human life. A long-term memory tool that allows
discernment through an overview of different materials on
fundamental issues threatened authorities.
Index concepts, as ordering systems, range from traditional
table of contents and reference structures to mathematical aspects
of databases. They appear in the context of access (Index
Librorum Prohibitorum) and links or even bookmarks. In digital
space the term broadens to search-engine indexes, torrent
collections and social networks. With the same index it is easy to
change every single bit of information. With just a little tweak one
refers to a whole new data set to “tell a different story.” Indices
are at the heart of information-autonomy issues. In an intimate
relation between knowledge and control, the elites hold the key to
the index of available knowledge.
Individual Conformism
Miraculously, almost all Western societies were sold on
neoliberalism and the totalitarianism of a mythical center. How has
its logic subjugated just about the entire political spectrum? How
come societies with all-time-highest education standards are
governed by principles which do not hold water? A questionable
achievement not owed to analytical intelligence but a farce that
found its actors.
Totalitarian conformism can do without a traditional apparatus
of dictatorship, at least temporarily. Some 95% of the parliamentary
spectrum is pedantically conformist, despite ideologies which
ostensibly celebrate individuality; the rest is subject to police
observation. Strongly unified and homogenous political and
governmental bodies, with no corrective mechanisms of diversity in
opinion, produce very stupid ideas. No-questions-asked in
conformist cultures; a mesh of spineless corruption and calculated
disorientation.
Consumer democracy breeds conformist individualists, each in
a shrinking market segment. In the torturous regime of modern
individuality, multiple dependencies and permanent contingencies
must be interpreted into an imagined rational path of individual
determination. Social conformity and mutilated subjectivity in an
exploited psychological domain of popular esotericist beliefs do not
help to escape the prison of abusive structures that render the
social crisis an individual crisis.
Despite niche marketing, skimming the Gaussian middle is a
lucrative media business. Not even media workers can afford a
perception of their own. Regrettably, it is difficult to understand
something when income depends on not understanding, and the
faithful gain prestige by managing to believe even more impossible
things than their rivals.
Even when newspapers are not fully advertisement-financed,
with up to 70% of revenue through marketing, editorial content is
secondary. TV is not free; every consumer pays tax for
commercial messages that try to make one into an idiot. Marketing
often excels 80% of the price tag; specifically for sneakers; or
textiles; the cost for the workers can be less than 1%.
Studies regularly reveal traditions or cultural norms seemingly
based on ignorance and credulity to be solutions to problems of a
certain class of people. Similarly, psychological deformations or
even intense aberrant behavior is often a solution to a deep dilemma
or effective in avoiding cognitive dissonance. Structured experience
supports modes of conformity in self-hypnotized subjects, hiding
what is beneath the layer of false memory implants. It is an
awkward homo economicus, worlds away from the brute and
passion-driven unreasonableness of individuals and the supposedly
even more irrational crowds.
When in late modernity the subject split into a restless swarm,
chasing mirages in perpetually unsatisfied desire, the “wisdom of
the crowds” was a desperate attempt to save the invisible hand.
Contrary to silly hypes, masses only make better decisions when
there is independent diversity of opinion, free of influence and
pressure, decentralized local sources of knowledge as well as
appropriate means for turning individual judgment into collective
decisions. In perilous infinity, multiple realities and omnidirectional
conflict, mediocrity becomes a natural point of gravity.
Interactive Technologies
Plenty of interactive communication artwork has been around
to reveal the dull righteousness of dialogism and the moral
despotism in games of interpersonal mimesis. Interactive media
arts, celebrating banal schemes of manipulation in a caricature of
Cold War high-tech labs, mirror the bland efforts of drawing
consumers into marketing schemes. Interactivity, the name of the
game for many in the 1980s new-media culture, turned into a
business model for moron TV call-in participation and inquisitive
questionnaires of data-mined fidelity cards. Along the lines, human
interaction is reduced to economic functionality; a generalized
contractual exchange of goods replaces free mutual give-and-take.
“Dialogue: The Ultimate Communication” in Harvard Business
School speak, is the art of the hustler. Hakim Bey described
interactivity as a satanic parody of communication. For those who
have no one to talk to, or agree with, a Japanese toy giant sells two-
leafed plants that bow and flap in response to a human voice.
Dialog scenarios allow tactics of humiliation and depreciation,
intimidation and terror. Power plays masked as “free and open”
good will. More often than not dialog is like a cross-examination, a
disciplinary method of grilling someone.
Dialog techniques relate to afflicting pain with torture as
interrogation foreplay. To learn another language means to gain
another soul, according to an Arabic saying. Interrogators are
merchants of anxiety; when the desired information is extracted
from the respondent, the dialog stops.
Universal access holds more significance than individuated
interaction that lacks respect for personal space and inaccessibility.
Interactive dialog is just one scenario among many. Dialogic
intervention may be a tyrannical scam enacted as a repressive ritual
to bind the mind in tight mental lockstep. Free dissemination and
suspended dialog are perfectly appropriate for the promiscuous
human interpretative apparatus.
Enforced two-way communication loses out on the ambiguity of
language in the play of words; a loosely-coupled diffusion of
symbols in the connective imaginary or pleasurable depths of the
unknown. Dialog does not take into account ambivalent actions,
gestures and non-directional signals. It does not include the
constitution of the imagination and ideas based on individual liberties
and networks of solidarity. Rigid dialogism cannot grasp signs taking
on a life themselves, images that reproduce and multiply like
microbes on the body of the popular imagination.
For Lévi-Strauss the main function of writing as communication
is “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.” He
describes writing in science or the arts as a secondary result that
may be “no more than a means of reinforcing, justifying or
dissimulating its primary function.” Communication as a
multiplication of a self that negates the difference of others is not a
very desirable community of mind. The gospel of interactive dialog
is based on religious ideas and angelic dreams of shared
consciousness. Thus, interactive communication failure is good for
you: it guarantees individual autonomy, dignity and sovereignty.
Interior Authorities
Hobbes’ theory of human nature in Leviathan, based on
Galileo’s laws of motion and advancement in mathematics, gave
rise to hopes that individual behavior can be calculated like the
movement of planets. Van Neumann and his contemporary,
paranoid game-theorists championed a belief in a human race of
adding-machine heads. But humans do not function according to
optimization logic, and have a romance with ambiguity.
If money represents organized self-interest, what is interest,
what is self? Self-interest, the biggest thing in the world, appears
less substantial than a ghostride apparition. Liberal conceptions of
the primacy of rational self-interest of economic human gave way
to more holistic concepts. Authoritarian personalities not anymore
the prototypal figure, social control channels animal spirits and
harvests deep irrational drives in private life. Advertisers never
believed in the mythical homo economicus and the rational-acting
maximizer.
Disinformation is not a simulation of truth but a regime of
hidden dimensions. That big moves cover small moves lies behind
much of the conjurer’s craft. Doing something big and suspicious
deflects attention. Manipulation exploits illusions of a rational
detached observer. While demonstrating freedom from the
influence of another will, information-flow control produces effects
on decision-making and preference. The greatest trick a controlling
instance can pull is to convince the target that manipulation does not
exist.
New control hierarchies are no longer about ordering around
inferiors. In more subtle methods, an opaque diffusion of
responsibilities enables soft oppression, in a game where the cards
are stacked against the losers. Since it appears that everyone plays
by the same rules, the losers have to accept it as personal failure.
There may be diffuse resentments of being manipulated. Suspicion
of grand violations based on hopes of being able to bend the rules
oneself. Hardly has it occurred to anyone to demand a new set of
game rules.
A product of bourgeois individualism, the psychological human,
haunted by anxiety, survives in a hysteric continuum from
compulsive guilt conscience to narcissistic self-reflection.
Depressed or anxious, with a vague feeling of discontent and
emptiness, it struggles for mental composure and health, not
liberation. Toxoplasma gondii parasites drive rats and mice into
suicide. Changing the behavior of its host, now drawn to the scent
of cats, they reproduce if eaten. Depending on the sex of the
infected person T. gondii parasites also change human behavior.
While the rich and powerful deceive themselves about how
their interests coincide with those of mankind, subordinates are
guided to experience their exploitation and deprivation with a sense
of personal guilt. Enslavement regimes of social subjection, through
technology, leave people like sinners in the face of a hidden
overlord in the machinery of control. Without a clear authority to
blame, instilled guilt transmutes into internalized, grandiose ideas of
potential opportunities and inflated opinions of own capacities.
Exploiting psychological effects of identification with the aggressor,
ruling classes justify their superiority with appeals to lofty principles
that make resistance not just a crime against the state, but against
humanity.
Irrational Objectivity
Reason is not simply about instrumental domination of object by
subject, but various agents of exchange and social dimensions of
language. Not just a drive to dominate nature, disengaged reason is
also a liberating recognition of everyday life. “A Fool’s the only one
who would rely on sense, and not the reasoning behind it,” says
Giordano Bruno in his “Second Response of the Heart to the Eyes”
of The Heroic Frenzies.
Reason, an Enlightenment assault on the old feudal order,
helped by Protestantism and secularization, was driven by the rise
in visibility and clout of the poor, the breakdown of geographic
distances and industrial revolutions. However, the new era of
reason could not hold its territory. Challenged by proclamations that
every human is its own priest, and that common values are
separable from religion, the church reacted with ornate cults and
spectacular Virgin adorations.
Establishing its power, the bourgeoisie not only favored a world-
view advocating the progress of society, but mostly itself, as rational
leaders over irrational masses. Phantasmic ideas of a “high culture”
of educated rationalism and the low culture of the masses still
abound. Rationalism, the base of bourgeois political economy, is
materialist in so far as it stands against old superstitions, and seeks
to expand productive forces for increasing the sum total of goods.
Imagined as an elite achievement on an inevitable path to
harmonious progress, such materialism without conflict is a vulgar
form of idealism. Contradictions implode rationalism in both its
traditional materialist form and its petty-bourgeois variations.
Cognitive establishments of disengaged reason decry a lack of
courage to “manly” face the supposedly hard facts of life in a vast,
cold universe, and to hide in comforting illusions. It has not gone
unnoticed that the most rigid advocates of a disengaged scientific
reason have private lives and motivations in the best tradition of the
very irrational. Seeking emotional fulfillment in cultural
consumption, their life is not less-biased on a personal index than
any starry-eyed muddlehead.
Objectivity and realism amount to styles like impressionism or
cubism. Yet, cool rationality, a male cliché associated with reliable
objective professionalism and social status, has a different market
value then the soft qualities of friendliness or cheerfulness.
Detached information, the cliché of pseudo-scientific propaganda,
uses facts to apply emotional pressure, not to make an argument.
Thinking about the world as a concept of its totality is driven by
the need to reduce complexity. Such an assemblage of knowledge,
beyond the veil of perception, resembles a theory of cognition that
transcends the particular. Thinking existence as part of a world
echoed in the mind, subjectivity reflects a mirror image for
perceiving material reality in the external world.
When objectivity and subjectivity emerge through shared
processes, worlds become knowable. When structures of mind and
matter resonate in auto-epistemic self-reflecting transparency, the
universe becomes conscious. Self-referential sympathies of the
cosmos and its beings appear more real than fragile concepts of
rational linearity.
Kabbalah Cabal
Cabal, a term introduced in the mid-seventeenth century, refers
to a scheme or group of people united in some plan, working
secretively and often by intrigue. Derived from Qabbalah, a
hermetic Jewish teaching, Kabbalists study scriptures according to
interpretations allegedly revealed to Moses. From an intellectual
system “cabal” evolved to mean a dangerous type of association
and insidious influence. Implying shadowy back rooms, it called up
associations with mystical traditions, coded communications,
political intrigue and secret knowledge. Clandestine Groups
suspected to exercise great power became known as cabals,
suggesting connections between supernatural and political power.
Beginning as a marginal tradition, Kabbalah slowly spread
throughout Europe to become part of established scholarly practice.
Applied by renowned philosophers and scientists, it was believed to
employ legitimate, if undisclosed, methods. In seventeenth-century
European science, the Kabbalah and other earlier systems turned
into points of conflict, and were increasingly viewed as dubious or
superstitious. Widely practiced Christian Cabbalah became
associated with witchcraft and suspicious behavior.
Kabbalah came to be the target of ridicule and cabal the word
for anxious projections of deep politics at the dawn of the modern
world. Dismissed as a method of understanding, it turned into a
term for occult mechanisms of power. Early modernism
rediscovered the idea that irregular rituals undermine the
foundations of church and state. Jewish ritual was thought to be
particular subversive, and this highly exploited cognitive artifact
remains stubbornly anchored in reactionary backwaters.
Historical situations or events are as likely to be shaped by
contingencies and particular circumstances as by general structures
or rules. Pascal argued that Cleopatra’s nose changed the course of
Roman history. If her profile had not been so attractive, Mark
Anthony would not have pursued her. In a common skepticism
towards intellectual pretension, history is explained by blunders and
inadequacies rather than grand theory. Behind great men there is a
mundane mix of ineptitude and stupidity. Attributed to Napoleon
Bonaparte is the insight “Never ascribe to malice that which is
adequately explained by incompetence.”
Cock-up theories do not contradict conspiracies. Incompetence
can be a blessing, and failure a sweet promise, to attempts of total
domination; but many blunders are failed plots. Countless morons
ascribe their own genuine failures to machinations from the elite
dens of infamy; nonetheless it is silly to assume events are never
influenced by collusions of interest.
Despite histories full of successful or failed plotting, theorizing
conspiracies is always portrayed as gullible secularization of
religion. This superstitious and delusory rationalization of
speculative analysis is grounded in an observation that some replace
abandoned deities with pious beliefs in sinister groups responsible
for evil. After the end of politics, in the new ideology of bipartisan,
dispassionate experts, a conspiracy of objects drives inherent
necessities that guide decision through practical constraint.
Market Lunacy
Rational-choice theory is a dominant framework for modeling
social, economic and political behavior. Crude simplifications and
idealized conditions in denial of uncertainty make it a poor tool to
deal with complexity, yet its illusory clarity continues to draw a
following. With rational actors in efficient markets, the price of a
product is always right and thus, in mysterious ways, the market
“speaks the truth.” This fantastic idea of interpreting markets and
financial transactions as revelation stands in the tradition of reading
entrails or cephalomancy, divination by means of a donkey’s head.
According to investor George Soros “market prices are always
wrong.” For the reason that economic decisions are never based on
facts but on financial information, a biased view of potential and
belief in projected future returns. It is not the value of an
investment that drives stock prices up, but faith in finding someone
more stupid to sell — as the greater-fool theory explains. Ever-
growing pay, and bonus packages for finance managers, are not
driven by markets but by soft extortion schemes. Insider-knowledge
racketeering exploits the information asymmetry of the agency
dilemma.
The New York Stock Exchange Index tends to be negative on
cloudy days, and data shows that market returns are correlated to
sunshine in almost all countries studied. Bright days put people in a
mood where they make more optimistic judgments. Victorian
England was so fascinated with sunspots and their influence on the
economy that they shifted the blame of market failures to the stars.
Rationality makes sense only in the exotic case of a normal
situation, but fails miserably in negative or positive stress, bubbles or
crises. Belief in the efficiency of markets and the rationality of
individual actors as well as illusions of markets to move
independently, are obvious flaws in risk-management calculations.
The crazy gospel of rational choice, a self-help survival cult for the
cold and hard world of paranoid, cutthroat business, misses out on
groupthink.
Economies are instable nodes in multi-dimensional networks
and complex adaptive systems, not isolated mechanical machines of
parts not directly connected. Exposed to confirmation bias, selective
thinking, informational cascades and contagious behavior in
networks of mutual codetermination, interacting agents reinforce
decisional feedback-loops where the dimensional space of opinion
sets shrinks. Temporal hegemonies of making sense drive market
bubbles, cultural fads and trends.
A financial crisis is a crisis of rationality in societies where
finance is a synonym for social rationality. Lunatics roaming the
streets went unnoticed when their madness was identical with the
logic of the environment. Extending their self-projection into the
technologies of power, people become invisible, not just merging in
the background but, like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, becoming machinic
reality itself.
Cybernetic machines of finance capitalism are haunted by fear,
mania and insider information. Surveys on widespread underlying
belief, in angels or demons, show the foundations of consensual
hallucination to be porous. Beliefs hidden in the cracks of official
world views may break through and nullify economic rationality at
any time.
Memory Control
Technical extensions of the imaginative faculty and the mind
function as receptacles for the flood of human sense perception.
Systems and disciplines applied to identify, harmonize and unite
phenomena without exhausting the mind or confounding memories.
Isolating individual sense-perceptions from the stream of
consciousness, the art of memory awards these with attributes,
transforming them into thought-forms. A microcosmic architecture
arranging ordered structure in the chaos of imagination.
Methods of transforming facts into stories to remember them
for extended periods of time involve associating images and
narratives. Routing nodes and spatial organization ground them in
the depth of long-term memory. Mnemonic systems do not try to be
objective, but apply narrative structuring of the imagination, and
visual anchoring of information as repository device in the geometry
of thought. Science likes elegant designs of theory, but a slight
change in their taxonomic hierarchy may turn the salience of their
whole memory-bank design into an awkward clutter.
Memory, not a record on playback but a taxonomic organization
of familiar types of recollectable mental images, binds actualities
into narrative chains. When the present spews the future in open-
ended anticipation, the past eats into it, and timelines strangely
intertwine. Much better guarded than the past, the future can be
infiltrated by recapturing historical memory.
City of the Sun, an urban utopia of the Italian Tommaso
Campanella written in 1602 after his imprisonment for civil unrest
and heresy, describes an egalitarian social order of managing
resources collectively. Knowledge is not shut away in books and
libraries, but open to all, in a theatre of information and art. Children
play to learn effortlessly. Painted walls of scientific visualization in
the public sphere encourage efficient ways of education.
Civitas Solis is an urban memory machine similar to the
mythical Adocentyn. It uses the emotional power of images in a
magical practice, and in an unusual but systematic access to the
meaning of space for human action. In complex relations relevant
for future social and scientific concepts of human behavior, space
effects behavior, and actions are influenced at a distance.
Every rock tells a story reaching back eons, every object on
earth is an archive of memories. Industrialization developing a
fascination with extended time-spans written into the crust of the
planet, Geology became a dominant scientific discipline in the
nineteenth century. At the same time, the early period of globalized
industrialization stands for an era of intense memory politics, and
the proliferation of commemorative monuments in every major city.
From the seventeenth century on, ideas were on the rise that
information does not have to be stored through Ars Memoria
techniques. It can be encoded in classifications, compressed and
unfolded through the algorithmic logic of scientific formulas.
However, in 1931, mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel, haunted
by ghosts all of his life, devised a proof that systems of logic are
internally inconsistent or incomplete. A single, grand logic,
subsuming all modes of logic while remaining consistent, turns out
to be logically impossible.
Miracle Value
Beyond paranoid economic game theories gone viral, most
economic theories assume prices to be derived from underlying
fundamental values. Nevertheless, defining prices is constructing
valuations, and in judging monetary value, as in psychophysics,
multiple stimulus force only doubles a response.
A price that feels right is not a mathematical formula but an
expression of desires, a guess about others and a collective
hallucination, based on a peculiar combination of arbitrariness and
coherence. What is the price of one’s shadow? Despite quaint
ideas about closed systems of exchange equilibrium, the equality of
supply and demand never happens in economies driven by complex
desires beyond reason.
Reason only has a point if shaped by what is needed, but it is
ever more difficult to find out what is wanted. Desires reveal
themselves by concealment in the irreducibly obscure. Need rooted
in absence and desire in lack, it is hard to know what to want.
When someone gets the desired, there is a good chance of
disappointment, having misjudged the future.
In victims of impact bias prediction, actual experiences
mismatch an overestimation of enjoyment. However, too-strict
control of desires undermines the motivational base, robs the
pleasure of having wishes and the ability to recognize needs.
Conversely, ownership leads to irrational decisions perceiving the
value of an object to be much higher than not owning it. Placing
more value on something once possession has been assigned
includes cherished opinions. Like a dog that cannot let go of its
retrieved stick, inner connections to things one holds create feelings
of entitlement, a focus on what may be lost.
Not only internal mechanisms form identity, but a looking-glass
self, where imagination creates a picture of how audiences
perceive one’s presence to modify appearance. Market machines
answer needs for recognition, and reassure individuals of their
existence; money not just represents abstract mutual relations but is
a symbol of liberty, happiness and freedom from constraint. At the
same time property represents the right of exclusion.
Commodity is conflict; price a relative measure in the struggle
for social status and the cost to exclude others. Luxury articles are
advertised to audiences that cannot afford them, just to demonstrate
that they are out of reach. Alienation and rejection are
indispensable, inherent elements in capitalist societies where, in a
guarantee of exclusivity, buyers of prestige items not only pay for a
commodity, but for the production of envy.
For consumers, dull specialists in pleasure-seeking, achievement
of consumption’s promises leads to depressing disappointment.
Hoarding of unspent capital is not a happy alternative. Having to
treat people like property is not a dignified state, and popular cults
of boredom mask a lack of meaningful attachments with political
consequences. Driven by a multitude of longings that can never be
satisfied, monstrous expectations destroy the normality of self-
image. Humiliated by the logic of desire, threats to an ideal self-
image of being nice and in control produce tensions and cognitive
dissonances that are dissolved through confabulation.
Mythical Moderns
Usually, the age of modernity is described as replacing myth at
the center of existence and mastering nature with science and
technology. Starting with sixteenth-century science, renaissance
humanism or political revolutions of the eighteenth century, in the
modern age exceptional individuals overcome superstition for a new
world of reason.
In the twelfth-century church, modern was the word used for
the beginning of a new age at the threshold of eternity, the end of
times. Nineteenth-century views of modernization saw
disenchantment of the world, and the replacement of traditional
charismatic authority by rational bureaucracies. However, the
reduction to European secularization and a seventeenth-century
invention of subjectivist individuality in conquest of nature is
misleading.
In transference to the human and natural world, to social forces
and historical processes, old ideas re-emerge in disguise. Traditional
notions of predestination reappear as the invisible hand, sovereignty,
progressive linear history, universal mechanical causality or big
bang. Nature as embodied rational will; immortal fame for static
eternities substitutes for the beatitude of the other world.
Royal mediatorship secularized in legal concepts, ancient
patterns rationalized by scientific jurisprudence, crystalize into
political theories. Privatizing faith, the public sphere gets
secularized, but profane activities charged with religious ideas stand
most influential when least obvious. Illusions of facticity, creating
belief in a solid framework of reference, open up speculative
navigation into multiple worlds. Structuralism and post-structuralism
reintroduce transcendence as the impossible and sublime.
From the thirteenth century on, a battle over priority in the
realms of being and the hierarchy of human, natural and
supernatural domains fired extensive religious wars. Steeped in
religious thought afflicted by inconsistencies, Humanism put man
first and in a divine status, Reformation had God at the center and
human will was considered irrelevant. Modernity’s asserting priority
to nature was riddled by questions how human will could be free in
a world ruled by an omniscient being. Freedom questions
omnipotence and the other way round.
If heaven’s will transforms into the laws of motion, and humans
are no longer driven by devils but by passions, it makes no practical
difference. Natural beings cannot be free, for the reason that freed
of the laws of physics they would hardly seem very natural.
Controversies of freely-acting will versus an infinite series of
material causalities offer every kind of blend between individual
freedom and radical determinism, secular or not.
In the early twentieth century, the economic order was
described as an iron cage, determining individual lives born into the
system with irresistible force until the last ton of fossil fuel is burnt.
By mid-century, contempt was poured on those daring to imagine a
spirit free from the cage of total institutions that shape the souls of
mankind. “Merely moved by the technologies of power that take
life as their object,” any escape is a Foucauldian transfer to another
disciplinarian authority. But it is the supreme and rightful privilege of
humankind to demand the impossible.
Narrative Politics
Individuals choose descriptions of possibilities rather than
options themselves. Humans read and write their own narrative.
Addicted to stories, some develop deeper relations with fictional
characters than their friends, with the understanding that one can
withdraw an emotional involvement with imaginary figures.
Sequences of behavioral modes compressed to narrative
images encode “good” or “bad” feelings towards a situation.
Affective threads produce contextual frames and coordinates for a
matrix of values and psycho-cybernetic control. When cognitive
processes lack the speed for informed options, affect is a shortcut
to behavioral decisions and automatized rules of engagement in
social relations. Affect becomes dominant in complex situations of
conflicting alternatives and ambiguous uncertainty. In the absence
of information, cultural adjustment takes over judgment.
Contrast-priming that anchors experience effects a
displacement away from subjective experience by direct
comparison of stimuli. Marketing strategies, using contrasts, position
unattainably-expensive luxuries to actually move and sell
inexpensive items next to them. Looking for an answer for a given
set of possible responses assimilation-anchoring draws subjective
experience towards an expected range. Interrogators may accuse a
prisoner of a horrible act, far worse than anything suspected, only
to extract a confession to a minor offence. Yet anchoring can be
used in fair and transparent games to induce a course of losing.
Natural-born storytellers, humans understand the world by
placing themselves within a larger hyper-narrative that signifies the
real. Exalted human faculties to see patterns and create narratives
produce excess. Superstitious self-centered views of events are a
side result of these high-powered abilities. Construing causality in
series of events and tendencies to contain all kind of behaviors in
narrative models leads to failures of judgment. Bound to spin and
weave their tales with narrative strings of selfhood, people become
entangled in their own web. Using various glands to produce a
diversity of fibers, some spiders spin up to eight different silks.
Extruded from its spinnerets, a spider web’s strength is comparable
to high-grade steel.
A traditional device to incorporate the unknown into a story is
the sequential arrow of time. Narration not only tells the untold, but
the untellable and incommunicable. Always ready to communicate
the incomprehensible, it speaks the phantasmal and impossible to
understand. Mythopoetic narratives provide modes of understanding
beyond dialectics, where “The one who tells the stories rules the
world.” Or, as Winston Churchill put it, “History will be kind to me
because I intend to write it.” Imperialists have only scorn for the
judicious study of the world, because empires create their own
reality.
Strategic communications in the info-sphere seems a secure
investment, and the art of truth-projection is a creative-industry
product for those who pay. Their stories make sense of worlds, but
when they collapse their legends fall apart, into fragments of
forgotten sentiments.
Navigation Programs
Modern idol-worship, typically condemning idolatry, not only
turns images or consumer objects into idols, but dialectics and
leaders. Conversely, “primitives” never believed in snakes, stones
or trees but in enigmatic forces beyond what meets the eye.
However, all humans worship ideals, and generate forms in the
mind. Unsophisticated minds may use concrete symbols, others
abstractions or mental images as props for fixing attention. To
corral the mind without some external aid is hard.
Navigating by the stars means intertwining one’s fate to their
path. As pitiless, malignant powers, the distant, shining stars render
life a vain thing, and thus Gnostics of late-antiquity obsessed with
escape plans from the seven planets’ prison. “What shapes the
mind controls the world,” argued El Iblis Shah. He pointed out that
a critique assuming logical and causal relations, but blind for
discontinuities between the planes of social and cognitive existence,
is weak in a world of unintended consequences. Rigid categories of
classic normativism have been replaced by competitive modes of
flexible normalizing, coupled to efficiency-enhancement styles.
World-views offer ontological models for describing and
explaining a world, a futurology for where it is heading, and a
creation myth for its construction or origins. Providing epistemic
theories of knowledge to decide what is true or false, and practical
methodologies to attain goals, they define values to “do the right
thing” and address questions like “What should be done?”
Intentionality renders episodes of perceptual experience
intelligible, and provides perspectives on the world. Constituted by
modes of thought and existential normative assumptions in regard to
emotions and values, weltanschauung gives fundamental
orientation. Influenced by languages of articulation as well as
fragments of various knowledge systems, in social situations world-
views operate in largely unconscious ways.
 Imperial archives keep beliefs frozen in categories of
knowledge. They are not just official keepers of records, but
systems to make people category-compliant and subject to
classification. Documenting sets of possible statements and
governing their form establishes the law of what can be expressed,
enforced by invisible exclusion. Beware nocturnal processions of
the damned, excluded data, the suppressed class of untouchable
outcasts destined to remain forever in the dark.
For Sumerians and the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation myth,
humankind was created to carry on the workings of existence for
the gods. Linking heavens above and depths below, the god Marduk
creates humans to fulfill this task. An ancient Babylonian “Dialogue
of Pessimism” portrays a rich, spoiled idler doing nothing with his
life, and who is totally dependent on his slave in all matters. One of
the earliest existential documents seems to project a very negative
world-view, without any horizon of hope, when not read as a sharp
satire of upper classes and the clergy. Indignation gives inspiration
to verse, and something better than death is everywhere. In stanza
VI the servant, with pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the
will, calls for a revolution: “one cannot escape misery without
revolting against the established powers.”
Network Economies
Modernity’s conquest of space, dropping transportation costs of
things and ideas, globalized people and institutions into a web of
complex interrelations. Increasing connectivity and speed came
with a dematerialization of systems of exchange. Computers have
been around a while, but systemic changes in society are
specifically about networking them.
Enhanced connectivity multiplies differences. Relations become
ever more multifaceted, and in complex systems small perturbations
can produce large, unexpected effects. Connecting everything, as in
total paranoia, the dynamic of complex networks produces change.
Founded in 1971, the US NASDAQ (National Association of
Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) quickly became the
largest electronic securities market, trading more volume than any
other stock exchange in the world. What LANs were for
corporations, systems like CHIPS or SWIFT were for banks.
Starting in the early 1970’s, transaction networks made finances a
transnational business.
Universal product barcoding enabled bit-structure-managed
diversity, distributed identities and disembodied territories, by 1976.
Complex dematerialized interrelations and increasing speed led to
higher volatility, and complex financial instruments to distribute
these hazards generated even more instability and risk. Endogenous
conflicts of interest in projected market values, indicators and
collateral debt obligations challenged models of probability,
calculation and risk evaluation, with the ontological impossibility of
setting binding meta-rules.
Money, bridging the gap between the actual and the possible,
accelerates the speed of the present. Options and bonds weave
deep into a future modulated by permanent scanning of the
environment for potential alternative paths. Classic market analysis
assumes atomistic individuals, not waves of intertwined, cascading-
flow systems or material and social processes interlocked in
complex feedback loops.
Change in environment-structure produces deep
transformational shifts in network economies of cultural and
technological interaction processes. Crude economistic universals
define everything that does not fit into a financial logic as simply
uneconomical. Yet, in a crisis of representation in religion, culture,
business and finance, signs become ungrounded. They unstably
float in turbulent currents, broadcasting a paranoid crisis of
confidence.
Ritual acts or beliefs based on mental or practical techniques
bridge dangerous gaps in significant human pursuit or critical
situations. Magical belief in the inherent higher reason and logic of
functional systems has somewhat declined since the last economic
crises. However, powerful people with weird beliefs tend to be shy
about it. Fundamentalist and esoteric obscurantists are rampant in
high places of government administration or business; security
agencies and scientific organizations are infiltration targets for
bizarre ideas.
In contrast to traditional interest groups, new power-networks
are not defined by boundaries, but gravitate around core attractors.
Bound by invisible alliances, a swarm of satellites creates an image
of reach and impact; echo chambers amplify the network signals
toward the media and the public.
Nominal Freedom
Classic scholasticism believed in the extra-mental existence of
abstract universals. Medieval ontological realists trusted in the
absolute reality of universals articulated in syllogistic logic. Humans
are guided by a natural telos that is the embodiment of divine
reason and an instantiation of its categories.
Nominalists undermined such ideas. For them individual reality
was particular, universals fiction and every generalization
misleading. They understood universal terms as constructions for
organizing experience. In a play of signification words are just signs
pointing to things that point to other signs without ever resembling
them.
In the fourteenth century, together with the rediscovery of
perspective in painting and the recognition of man as the measure
of things, hypothesis replaces syllogistic certainty. Multiplying
universals are cut with Ockham’s razor. Only cheap gods are
subject to human reason, an omnipotent entity cannot be grasped
except by revelation. Everything exists through heavenly will not
bound by law and anytime subject to change. A possibility of
change opens a potential for progress. Viewing freedom as
extremely limited, Nominalists nevertheless encouraged the study of
a cosmos in motion.
Neognostic human self-affirmation also challenged
scholasticism. Humanism reserved a privileged place for man in the
cosmos and stretched the idea into a promethean individualism in
the image of god. Celestial human sparks fly on the wings of will
and intellect to the reconciliation of omnipotence and individual. Its
belief in individual divine will and nature as a form of grace drew on
pagan and Christian mystic ideas. Despite concurrence with
nominalist supremacy of the individual, the questioning of traditional
authority and rejecting syllogistic theology, it was sinful pride in the
eyes of apocalyptic godheads.
 Difficulties of reconciling a rational cosmos with omnipotence
produced considerable anxieties. Emotionally unstable Luther saw
individuals devoid of free will, a fictitious invention of Satan, but
exposed to a wrathful universe. Unfortunately, humans without a
will created a dilemma of how evil came into the world. The devil is
not much of an answer. Enlightenment looked for freedom in a
science that denied its possibility. Secular disbelief or any Deus
Absconditus so great as to be useless are just variants of the same.
But privatized decentralizing of religion and up-valuation of the
individual influenced a transformation of socioeconomic practices
up to modern societies and political science.
Challenging moral philosophy of theological state rule
renaissance thinkers extoled on a new form of rule based on the
balance of individual interest. “Interest” came with the promise to
make humans calculable and that the human universe has rules like
the laws of motion in the physical world. This focus on individual
interest developed into an obsession in attempts to envision a
system of rule and governance based on reason. Early on many
have pointed to the observation that humans by no means know
their best interest and driven by vague and conflicting passions
often have no idea what they are doing anyway.
Obsessive Recurrence
In modernity’s attention to order and standardization, obsession
and specialization intertwine. Doing one thing too much, excessively
fixed attention on specific things, drifts toward madness.
Nevertheless, socially-accepted obsessions proliferate, and for
scientists, artists, or professionals, it is a regular category of
existence. Seen as individual ill-fortune in the eighteenth century,
madness becomes an endemic gateway to the modern world.
With obsessive-categorization and knowledge-specialization
developed a fascination with statistics. This rise of statistical
science is indebted to Eugenics, personified in Darwin’s cousin
Francis Galton, who coined the term. Suffering from nervous
breakdowns and obsessive-compulsive measuring, the Victorian
Royal Society fellow discovered mathematical solutions to
stochastic processes and standard deviation. Describing himself as
haunted, he pioneered forensic fingerprints and biometry for racial
discrimination. Forensics offered itself to obsessive study and
cataloguing of sexual perversions, and psychoanalysis to obsess
with the study of obsession itself.
Addiction, a more current term for haunted, provides another
variation on obsession. With a twentieth-century rise of individual
lifestyle-choice, the concept was applied to substance abuse.
Individual consumer-choice patterns and habits easily congeal into
forms of addiction. Obsession is not just what one does, but the
impossibility to stop. Besides shopaholic victims addicted to
ritualized desires, not being able to stop characterizes epidemic
dance mania: “Music has a strange effect on me, It doesn’t matter
wherever I may be — I just can’t stop dancing.” Unstoppable
repetitive patterns of choice invert the idea of individual options.
Sequential operations of existence lead to patterns of recurrence
predestined on a course of repetition.
Structurally inherent in issues of identity and narrative empathy,
compulsion to repeat plays out in trauma dramas and neurotic
prisoners of mind. By this logic, the actor in every horror movie will
be drawn to exactly the terribly wrong thing to do. In slapstick, the
worst thing that can happen usually does. This ironic tendency to do
precisely the worst thing connects to mental-control monitoring.
When under stress, or distracted, processes to avoid mistakes of
thought, speech and action actually increase the likelihood of such
errors.
Panic is about a conventional cognitive breakdown reducing to
inconsistent impulses without access to thought. A blockade is the
awkward effect of losing instinct by thinking too much. Under
stress, the explicit systems of skills inhibit acquired, implicit aptitude,
and blocks rapid processing of intuitive knowledge.
In Alien Hands disorder, a hand appears to take on a mind, and
sufferers may not be aware what it is doing until drawing attention
to its behavior: losing a sense of agency associated with purposeful
movement while retaining a sense of ownership. Also known as Dr.
Strangelove syndrome, without voluntary control the alien hands act
autonomously. Does a modern hyper-real media, based on reception
rather than production, allow for an active role of managing reality
rather than passive victimization?
Occult Radicals
Intellectual life was deeply entrenched in traditional thought
when nineteenth-century secular ideologies formed. As late as
1775, a law that condemned to death any person that expressed
irreligious opinions passed in France, and only members of the
Catholic Church had recognized civil status. Conceptual
vocabularies mostly had religious or anti-religious terminology, and
social protest or intellectual doubt triggered waves of sectarian
cults. Liberal circles and much of the period’s revolutionary ideas
were steeped in such language, including millennial prophecies
regarding the end of capitalism.
“The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority,
revolt in which we see the fecund germ of all human
emancipations, the revolution,” exclaimed Mikhail Bakunin, “in the
name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done.” For the
revolutionary in God and State, “Satan is the eternal rebel, the first
freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man
ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience.” Dreams of the
First International that capitalist market-regimes will lead to free
competition of ideas never materialized. Instead, visions to
revolutionize the world are assimilated, abused and turned on their
head for profit; the best humanity has to offer is dead on arrival.
Concepts of a “politics of sympathies” corresponding to
theories of mutual aid, utopians of the time were not content to
theorize but intent on doing something. Large numbers of mostly
short-lived experimental communities sprouted; particularly, Russian
anarcho-mystic movements drew a following among the cultural
intelligentsia. Paris in the 1830s and ’40s was the scene of a
revived interest in the occult, with deep links to revolutionary
circles. In these overlapping milieux much of the revolutionary print
outlets were controlled by bohemian or occult interests. Dialectical
materialism is not mutually exclusive with occultism.
 Despite countless students of the occult drawn to elitism or
apolitical conservatisms, others aimed for change and liberatory
transformation. “Where humanity bows before an altar, humanity,
the slave of kings and priests will be condemned....” wrote
Proudhon in The Philosophy of Misery. Perennial anthropological
universals should not be taken hostage by traditionalists.
Gullible treatment of ideology as illuminated knowledge in
obscure anti-empiricist doctrines betrays lack of judgment. To act
as if the universe were nothing but feeling and will is an unhelpful
fallacy for political organizing. However, an illusion that one’s inner
or psychic state is interchangeable with material actuality is not
synonymous with occult thought.
Precisely because “the hypnotic power exerted by things occult
resembles totalitarian terror,” it is not the metaphysic of dunces. In
Laurence Clarcson’s 1650 Ranter tract: “A Single I all Light, no
Darkness; or Light and Darkness One,” sin is invented by the
ruling class to keep the poor in order, declaring in the old tradition of
the Free Spirits: “Behold the King of glory now is come, T’reduce
God and Devil to their Doom; for both of them are servants unto
Me — That lives and rules in Majesty....”
Perpetual Emergency
Merging politics, coercive power and spectacle, the art of
crisis-management is at the heart of statecraft. Neo-conservatives
favor militarization as the answer against the chaos of individual
interests and social dissolution in neo-liberal consumer societies.
Magnifying threats of real or imagined enemies within or without,
general paranoia and a chronic sense of crisis justify executive
power for the full threat spectrum plus the secrecy around it.
Consumerist welfare capitalism set up against New Deal social
progressivism turned into cultural peacekeeping, a military
entertainment environment minus welfare. General services
contracts for government-approved operations go beyond
procedures to scare the hell out of people; they turn useless in
environments with constantly high threat levels. Instead of fighting
people, new profound risk-management strategies root out potential
conflict through integration. Bodies and hearts assimilated into a
Leviathan, not ruled by the will of the sovereign, but a modulated
aggregation of desires. Today’s technical systems and their
legislative framework support the internalization of control in the
transformation of welfare states into security economies.
International spheres of influence facilitate global footprints.
Territorial state-administration structures serve as executive
committees to secure interests for a profitable climate. Information
peace-keeping enterprises make no difference between war and
peace. Already by the eighteenth century it was clear that a
legislative and executive designed for the undisrupted flow of
business amounts to a new and legal tyranny.
Pressure on local commerce and expendable segments of the
population in global business regimes accelerates income gaps and
social tensions. Given population trends and likely sources of unrest,
the future of stability operations will be urban. Diversity being good
for business, deviance is a security issue to be eliminated, if
necessary, by force.
British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart: “In strategy the longest way
round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the
object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by
compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender’s
hold by upsetting his balance.” In 1935 he predicts: “The old
concentration of forces is likely to be replaced by an intangible
ubiquitous distribution of force — pressing everywhere, yet
assailable nowhere.” Delivering the unpredictable, instead of rigid
strategies revolving around direct attacks or fixed positions, a fluid,
elastic and indirect approach keeps the enemy uncertain about
situations and intentions. To be perceived is to be a target, and
visible technologies of force have to be overmatched by
investments in invisibility, stealth and deception.
Rizq, Arabian for property and making money, points to the
relation of commodity and conflict. Despite the complex
mathematics of loss probabilities, any risk-management model is
limited, and economist Alan Greenspan acknowledged, in the
Financial Times in March 2008, “It will eventually fail and a
disturbing reality will be laid bare, prompting an unexpected and
sharp discontinuous response.”
Practical Madness
In earlier times, the concept of pneuma and spiritus
phantasticus linked corporeal and incorporeal. Up to this day,
theory is mythology and logic a variant of theological reasoning.
According to Walter Benjamin, philosophy amounts to the “chatter
of pimps”; parasiting on the movements of the free spirit, they are
even too shallow to stay at the surface of things. However
“practical men are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”
and “madmen in authority distilling their frenzy from some
academic scribbler of a few years back” observed J. M. Keynes in
1936.
The more humans objectify themselves, the more subjective
reality takes on the appearance of illusion. In age-old controversies,
creation follows reason and the world is comprehensible, or another
agency overrides reason, which renders the world irreducibly
mysterious. This conflict reflects in the veiled relation of mystics
and scientists. Both attempt the overcoming of the divisions
between thought, cosmos and the fleeting world of change and
experience. Yet, reason and the unintelligible, rationalism and the
irrational are sides of the same coin.
A subjectivist quest for an immediated celebration of the
powers of the self, submerging into its depths, goes beyond
immersing the ego in the stream of life. When pursuit of happiness
turns into sterile and anxious self-preoccupation, “all power to the
imagination” holds disappointing results. A mocking indifference
and narcissistic detachment takes place, and a lack of capacity to
take interest in anything outside a constricted interpretation of self.
Navel-gazing cults, where everything is subjugated into instrumental
procedures of self-empowered expression, conflict with the social.
Free from boundaries, a universe populated by grandiose
conceptions of the self may turn out to be a lonely and exclusively
personal place. To make others share one’s belief alleviates acute
anxieties of loneliness. Acquiring social and political influence helps
to achieve a greater shared validity of personal interpretations. If
enough individuals are persuaded to share a dream, it might become
real.
Utilitarians rely on unsustainable meta-ethics without any
rational base for benevolence, or convivial freedom and equality.
Who would want to choose between the unfortunate public
consequences of utilitarian rationalism or expressive individualism?
Disengaged instrumentalism or romantic posturing in the name of a
richer experience, a decision for any side may be hypocritical or
delusional. Even when mediated, fullness of experience stands
against the conceptualized abstractions of realists who never finish
counting the grains of sand to enjoy the beach.
For born realists, the limited horizon of hope in awaiting death is
the attainment of material goods that come with the implicit terror
of rigid reality schemes. Nothing is lost in an escape from
annihilating realities, but it takes courage to break through the sense
barriers beyond reason. Reasonable rationalists made the darkness
their enemy; free spirits of the night explore it in their dreams.
Predictive Anticipation
Impression forms in mysterious ways. Drawing on stereotypes
that provide a register and influence perceptions before actual
experience, expectations design the world. Falsely perceived value
of something defines the outlook, which in turn modifies
performance in any given situation. Strong psychological drives
produce loss-aversion, disproportionate human efforts of avoidance.
Value-attribution clings to initially perceived value, blind to
contradictions of prior assessments. Failing to let go of the past
drives failure, but both closure and the lack of it challenge
deliberation. Avoiding premature closure and a propositional mode
of thought means suspending judgment and accommodating
contradictory information. Keeping in mind that things are not what
they appear to be helps in avoiding wrong value-attribution.
Expectancy-bias effects in two-way communications influence
even third-party observers. In the Pygmalion effect, trainees take
on characteristics of a diagnostic bias inscribed onto them. Those
invested with high expectations routinely perform better and score
higher in any test. People internalize labels and behave accordingly
in self-fulfilling prophecies. In job interviews, a dance of
expectations leads to results far removed from any reasonable path
of decision-making.
Not only social groups confronted with negative stereotypes
underperform in measurable ways. Stereotyping is a major source
for stress and threat-level in societies. Beneficial or detrimental,
depending on which label an individual gets assigned, performance
is context-dependent. Behavior is influenced by others, and reflects
audience expectations. What one believes about the world and
thinks what could be exerts a powerful effect on how things turn
out.
Empires need to extend mastery to symbolic and cultural levels
of domination. Interpersonal social organization strongly draws on
the dark side of charisma. Exploiting social relations, people may
aim for high likeability or never to make enemies, to avoid difficult
decisions or plot resentments below the surface. Based on their
self-absorbed confidence and a need for recognition, narcissist
personalities take center stage to become disproportionately
influential. Refusing advice and evading responsibility for failings,
they play on a supposed genius to take undue credit.
Too much self-knowledge and “realism” is frequently perceived
as an unhealthy impediment to good living. While everyone on the
street believes themselves to be somewhat-above-average smart,
nice, and good-looking, only the depressed have a realistic self-
image. Patients with depression score significantly better in
computer simulations for decisions and practice-oriented sequential
problems. Not easily satisfied, they look longer for solutions and
make better choices than non-depressed participants.
While legend has it that talented individuals make organizations
smart, it seems more the other way round. Humans act according
to intelligence that encompasses them. Credulous stereotyping
over-rates talent and intellect. Smart, a self-image bound for
destruction, affords an attitude at the cost of learning something
new. Defining yourself by that description produces cognitive
dissonances rapidly propelling into total delusion.
Promethean Pronoia
Language offers many functions; one is to provide descriptions
of reality. Communication cultivates relations, fosters social
cohesion, expresses solidarity, and is an instrument of deception.
These functions do not harmonize well in describing joint social
realities. Ubiquitous presence of advertisement language,
professional liars and politicians further undermines trust.
Communication systems, determined by individual interest, and
neither democratically distributed nor controlled, add suspicion.
A Cartesian fusion of thinking and willing brought lingering
doubts about a great natural deception. Obsessed with doubt,
double negation became a base of existence. Positive thinking is an
anxious mutation of Calvinist angst driven by a morbid hellfire god
that hates his creatures, and keeps limited seating in his joyless
heaven. The destitute are made to think they are millionaires just
temporarily out of luck. Relentless forms of bland optimism and
desperate affirmations — ever sure signs of dictatorial regimes
from East to West.
In an information-societal epidemic of signification, inability to
distinguish inner projections and outer messages represents the
norm. Hyperactive environment-scanning exalts interpretative
faculties. Everyone engulfed in an interpretative enigma stands a
permanent Turing test of pattern-detection and informational
artifacts. Subjects submerged in a web of ambiguous signs in
opaque bureaucracies or ambivalent telecommunications.
What are authentic signals, what are simulations or misdirected
reflections of alienated human energies? Where does the spider
web of cogitation and the self end, and another begin? Everything
reveals a message and every communication is an oracle that
invites to read what was never written. Does paranoia desperately
mirror the logic of late capitalism? Is it a natural response to
continuous streams of fakes and orchestrated information channels,
political marketing and entertainment? Is it “the poor person’s
cognitive mapping,” or reasonable cognitive skepticism in defense
of the sovereignty of political perception and interpretation? Who
owns meaning which authorizes legitimate knowledge?
Pronoia, the goddess of foresight, represents the pervading
forethought of the divine mind and sympathy of all creation. Where
whatever happens to any one part afflicts every other. Also known
as Hesione, she is the wife of Prometheus, who stole fire from the
gods to give it to the mortals. An eagle set to feed upon his liver, he
received eternal punishment for his rebellious attempt to
emancipate human life. From the Okaenid nymph of Mount
Parnassos, Pronoia has been taken to mean the reverse counterpart
of anxious paranoid states, a belief in a conspiracy of creation to
benefit oneself.
In psychology, the term has been adapted for the delusion that
others think well of one, and that people conspire to do one good. A
state of mind where, in the ambiguity of lives increasingly
dependent on opinions of others, mere acquaintances are perceived
to be close friends, simple politeness as an expression of deep
commitment. A pronoid environment is seen as benevolent and is
approached with empathy. Pronoia afflicts the desperate, the very
naïve, saints, and those under influence of the flesh of the gods.
Property Development
Devoid of the benefit of unions, egalitarian hunters and
gatherers worked only ten to fifteen hours a week, without straining
the ecosystem through extensive exploitation. Violent and stratified
societies, governed by ruling classes that maximized production and
population density, defeated free reciprocal societies. Expulsed
from common land in historical processes of enclosure, predatory
exploitation of communes based on free cooperation continued as
salarization and proletarization.
Money organizes the transition from common wealth to
exclusive individual possession. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century
European living standards were considerably below the rest of the
world, and South Indian workers were better off than their British
counterparts. Refined goods being much more available, Asia held
the centers of trade and productivity, as well as learning and
medical sciences.
Commons considered a waste in taxable property, a division of
public and private land, played a crucial role in the interference with
rural societies. Enclosing the commons for the benefit of the few
and loss of the many, the freely available space transformed into a
commodity. To communicate is to establish a common, a place
where people share understandings. Ideologies of property do not
understand how the private is based on the common. How it
became private in the first place remains shrouded in mystery.
Carpocrates asserted “Property is theft.” The first-century
Gnostics established communities that did not buy into concepts of
converting into private property what naturally belongs to all. When
all “melts into thin air,” property offers a surrogate narrative for the
self and a strategy to avoid the gaze from the void. Thus ruling
classes worship Pleonexia, the ruthless goddess of self-interest,
with an insatiable desire for things and exalted libidinal orientation
towards having.
 Due to limits of sucking ever more out of the living, surplus-
value extraction expands beyond factory gates into the bio-
economy and the spheres of cognitive labor. In increasingly
precarious work environments, financial mechanisms become
integral to consumer markets. A virtual economy comes to be co-
substantial to the production of actual goods and services.
Money works like a drug, where one adapts to a level and must
score above the baseline to get a high. Doubling the experimental
experience of happiness in getting a gift of ten coins requires forty,
not twenty coins. Monetary reward, the cocaine for economic
pleasure-centers, stimulates deep parts of the nucleus accumbens;
yet cerebral activity involved in social interaction is more complex.
Financial incentives are not the prime agency to increase
motivation; social pressure is cheaper and more effective.
Most Western people reject a deal, if they consider it unfair,
even when they would gain. Anthropological game rules and
emotional decisions of what is fair differ in various cultures. Social
construction of fairness has different interpretations. In comparison
with psychopathic inmates of German high-security institutions,
financial traders scored significantly higher in reckless asocial
behavior, according to a 2011 study. A miser does nothing right,
except when he dies.
Pseudo Dissent
Lifestyle niche markets of alienated middle-class youth supply
radical chic, strictly segregated from real social struggles and safely
removed from the militant or those on the margins. Pseudo-dissent
consumer markets sell things not by a utopian promise of
enjoyment, but a narcissist rebel pose and telepresent contagious
postures. Countercultural ideas of individual liberty or less over-
regulated lives turn into libertarian echoes of neoliberal dogmas.
Deregulated privatization converts to conservative dog-eat-dog
scenarios.
With the decline of essentialist identity concepts, leftist
discourse exchanged equality for difference. Nobody wants to be
equal anymore, but individually different. Unfortunately, the
freedom to choose is most often spent on emulation. When free
choice degenerates into gross consumerism, the maximization of
choice opens venues of neglect and exclusivist societies.
Haunting revelations, that things are not what they seem,
spawns a cynical appraisal that could not care less. That meaning
lies in the mind of the beholder turns toxic, into a cheap ersatz
critique. When nothing matters, there is nothing to rebel against.
When there is not even the chance of glorious failure, only a fate of
insignificance or career-planning remains. Destabilized by a lack of
meaning in the eternal regress of the real, people gravitate to those
who project an image of being self-assured and to the simplest
recipes that offer closure. Attraction to a pre-sexual radiance of
narcissist personalities produces celebrities that promise deliverance
from anonymous crowds, by turning followers into a faceless mass.
Mindsets and background beliefs affect interpretative
perception. Conscious thinking, powered by unconscious processes,
produces narrative rationalization, retrospective justification, and
constructive suspension of disbelief. Cultural nationalism
successfully exploits chronic economic insecurity and social
immobility to vote against one’s own interests. Business and
academia greatly value ideas that prevent people from grasping the
basis of their social existence. When political traditions for a more
equitable distribution of wealth and power lost the infectious visions
and utopian dreams to carry forward revolutionary impulses,
reactionary politics invaded dreamtime. In perfidious dreams of a
neoliberal utopia, disproportional wealth for the rich gives the poor
opportunity to share the leftovers.
Paying for a movie inclines one to like it. Otherwise you paid
for having a bad time, and this might make you look stupid. Holding
negative views on something requires effort and frustration-
tolerance. This seduces people to accept stupid things and drives to
dumbness. Expanding frustration-tolerance is, after all, part of
upper-class training for career-building. However, there is a positive
reward system for specific stupidity — better jobs, or even a Nobel
Prize. On the other hand, certain social setups perceive anyone not
ruthless, greedy and vile as vaguely stupid.
According to Flaubert, “To be stupid and selfish and to have
good health, are the three requirements for happiness; though if
stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.” This constellation
produces a conspiratorial consensus of mutually-enforced
mediocrity against the need for change.
Psychological Facilitation
At the dawn of the last century management theories
increasingly drew on psychologists. Speaking the language of
productivity, they sold themselves as specialists on human relations.
Psychology offered a frame of reference based on emotions and
personality, a technology of soft power in the spirit of capitalist
enterprise. The vague ideologies of liberal individualism that
became the norm for governmental elites are lined and littered with
psychological models.
Emotional configurations play a significant part in power
relations of social systems. Without them, roles and hierarchical
identities could not be reproduced. In consumer-service societies
emotional skills are a good deal more useful for jobs than IQ, and
much more relevant for market sales. For cognitive capitalism,
affective-response management in the psychological continuum
increases in relevance. With considerable input to the new science
coming from a background of emancipatory ideas, social and
academic movements subscribed to the codes of therapeutic
language for their own reasons.
For the new psychological engineers to classify extreme levels
of alienation from society as disease seems only logical. At the turn
of the millennium, the interest of authorities in the mindset of the
revolutionary activist and agitator shifted to terrorism. A vast range
of studies and government reports ventured into the deep
psychology of who becomes a terrorist, and why.
Despite all indicators pointing to multiple causal factors,
economic, political, and sociological among others, researchers
zoomed into the context of narcissistic injury. Specifically, on
manifestations of malignant rage, where the grandiose sense of self
is attacked. Conditions of defeat due to primitive fantasies of
parental omnipotence and idealized authority may lead to a rage
against sources of narcissistic injury. A grandiose self of primary
narcissism links to sociopathic individuals, attacking the self-worth
of others in an attempt to soothe internal pain.
Time-honored traditions of psychologizing about leftists and
their allegedly twisted mindsets dwell on borderline personality
disorders. Evidence for problematical traits can be found in a
number of cultural pacemakers. Radical politics provides a sense of
purpose, refuge from the terrors of inner life and release from the
shattered spaces of private biographies. Attention to one’s own
personal life should not wait until after the revolution. Self-styled
revolutionaries who suffer from developmental arrest drown
personal failures in collective action or self-dramatization.
Borderline symptoms are nowhere unusual, yet international
terrorism does not show striking psychopathologies. Careful
planning and the well-timed execution of operations are hardly
typical of the mentally challenged; to ascribe a narcissistic
personality to individuals who sacrifice their life is somewhat
questionable. No evidence support notions that terrorists are
psychologically peculiar, or that demands for political change are
based on projecting personal anxieties; on the contrary. War may be
“the rich man’s terror against the poor, and terror the poor man’s
war against the rich,” but it is sophisticated psychological terror that
is at the heart of totalitarian regimes.
Reality Mining
Polling systems and statistical market-research in consumer
democracies pit individual interests against the common good.
Demographic tools divide and rule fractionalized audiences, feeding
public opinion with the cooked data of statistical surveys. Instead of
walls and ramparts, software algorithms, satellites and electronic
tracking-systems constitute new architectures of control. Urban
fortifications transform into global assemblages of sensor linkages
and data banks. Socio-technological security designs replace
borders of nation states. Immaterial systems of order fragment and
stratify space.
Free-trade and export zones, duty-free warehouses, special-
economic areas, gated communities, security sectors and airports
remap the territory and privatize public space. Intelligent materials
woven into infrastructures and the security fabric of social space
control disenfranchised subjects. Orchestrated devices exploit
individuals embedded in the ambient intelligence of control societies.
Analyzing location data in massive amounts of information emitted
from mobile phones, automobiles GPS systems and other sources
identifies aggregate human behavior.
Social data mining of large longtime records uncovers consumer
spending trends and sentiment in real-time. Reality mining
companies compare it to X-rays: “We have to know next to nothing
about a person, but if we take their signals to the surroundings, we
can work with surprisingly high accuracy to predict whether
someone in a group has more authority, whether he will buy
something or expects a salary increase.”
New borderlines are drawn where the flows of the city are
forced through checkpoints. To overcome cognitive limitations,
adaptive computational systems extend human decision-making
with reality-mining methods. Militarized surveillance-networks
organize the inside and outside. The new enemy hides within the
gates, not outside. Automatized systems discern the guilty from the
presumably innocent by matching behavior patterns.
Conventional behavior is difficult to fake. Efforts to break the
cover of looking like everyone else, by tracing signs of agitation or
anxiousness without obvious cause, heighten levels of tenseness in
circular effects. Interface sensors determine user state and
emotions; classifiers and inference engines evaluate incoming
information in real-time. Augmented Reality Systems instantly
adapt to users, trends, patterns and situations relevant to context
and goals through sensing and learning.
According to Google’s Sergej Brin, “the perfect search engine
is like the mind of god.” Just as Google indexes Internet pages, real
places are correspondingly indexed by activity, proximity and
demographics to produce panoramic mobility-graphs connected to
databases. Knowing whereabouts and movements, it is simple to
identify persons, even when telephone-company data is
anonymized. Psychometrics measures the conscious experience of
a body based on ownership, location, and agency. Identity relates to
geography; knowing where someone is soon means knowing who it
is. Digital geoslavery, a dream of slaveholder management come
true.
Reason Seasons
During the French Revolution a Cult of Reason was thought up
to replace religion. In November 1793 the Goddess of reason was
publically proclaimed. Even though the objective truth of scientific
rationality is officially non-negotiable, higher mathematics has little
to do with what one may call rational by everyday standards.
Routinely conjuring things that do not exist, like perfect circles or
platonic solids, it treads lofty paths to far-out realms.
Since ancient Greece, scientific rationalism is associated with
strict determinism and thorough materialism; everything is the result
of natural laws and not chance. Atomists, attempting to explain the
mechanics of the world without assuming a purpose, prime mover,
or final cause, asked: “What caused an event?” Opponents,
including Aristotle, searched for teleological explanations for: “What
purpose did this event serve?”
Scholastic teleology proved largely useless, and even seemed to
get in the way of scientific knowledge, whereas tinkering with
mechanistic agency lead to countless practical discoveries. Neither
ideas that nature adapts to function, nor that what happens to exist
is the cause of its use, seem satisfactory. Technological
breakthroughs are mostly inventions in search of a use; curiosity is
the mother of necessity, not the other way round.
From the Greek root for Latin gubernator Norbert Wiener
coined the term cybernetics for the study of teleological
mechanisms. It looked into regulatory communication and control in
biological beings and machines, with an understanding that non-
living systems can have purpose formed by feedback. Goal-oriented
teleological notions of the “historical process as a whole” were
thoroughly discredited in the later twentieth century. Grand
narratives exposed as reductive, exclusionary and harmful to those
whose stories are wiped out.
Scientific enquiry teleologically aligned to an understanding of
their objects, end-driven teleology has been contrasted with
emergence in teleonomic process-driven systems. Lacking the
power to name things, epiphany is evoked by framing constellations.
Binding terms in clusters like in relational and object-oriented
databases breaks the narrative hierarchical order of memory
systems.
To change everything so that nothing ever changes is the grand
conservative strategy. Strategic skill applies a permanence of
impermance that Eyal Weizmann calls the endless present. Even
thinking becomes different, but nothing changes except
phallocentric perspectives of pseudo-reason. Strategies of change
and manipulation of relational space-time transform potentials of
cognitive labor into an informational matrix. Dynamic realities of
trialectic relations require operational logic at the borders of chaos,
disorientation as the path to discovery and topsy-turvication as a
source of insight.
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and clarity never
helped anyone to come closer to a subject. Nonetheless, narratives
of free agents in mutual social practices orientated to a common
good are liberatory. Unlike anything-goes relativism, relationalism
aspires to non-discursive and non-propositional modes of thought
beyond truth-projection and closed-sentence statements.
Refractive Mirages
Every social interaction relies on the sweet guilt of conspirators.
Any conversational routine depends on a dance of tacit agreements,
conventions of relevance, timing and face-saving constructions.
Geopolitical machinations as well as personal social interaction
exploit asymmetric relations between individual and mutual
knowledge. Strategic illusionism and the practice of plausible
deniability rely on a lack of opportunity for independent verification
to boost authority and decrease accountability.
Illusionists not only strive for the most sophisticated gadgetry
but apply practical cognitive psychology. Spies, method acting
mimetic cartographers, conjure in the service of influence and
domination. In a domain of nested identities, professional
intelligence implies deep mimesis and rapport with the other in
complex convolutions that liquefy identity. Concepts of selfness
shatter in endless refractive reflections of the impenetrable “mirror
of mirrors.”
Konspiracija is merely a Russian term for undisclosed political
work and its rules. Nonetheless, secret knowledge inevitably implies
hallucination beyond rational logic. Spooks populate the twilight
zones of alcoholism, suspicious distrust and borderline madness.
Frank
Wisner, first head of CIA covert operations from 1948 to 1958,
drifted into psychotic mania despite massive electroshock therapy.
One of his shock and awe psy-ops schemes planned to drop huge
condoms into Russian territory, apparently made for Americans but
labeled medium size. Four decades later the US Air Force Wright
Laboratory aimed to build a bomb with strong aphrodisiacs to make
enemy soldiers “sexually irresistible” to each other.
Consent and common error makes law. What is rational in the
domain of causal explanation is mostly defined by common sense; a
shared cultural belief system outlines views of the world largely by
habit. In a diverging cosmos of fragmented factoids, truth and
fiction collapse into a credibility potential, for everyone to make up
their own standards of evidence.
According to a 1993 Time magazine survey, 69% of Americans
claim to believe in angels, and according to Gallup more than 20%
of the British believe in ghosts. Similar numbers confirmed for the
US in the 90’s: 16% assume that people can curse others with the
evil eye or other harmful practices. In 1996 only 18% of surveyed
Americans had been in contact with the dead; by 2009 it was up to
29%, and those interacting with ghosts and spirits had doubled to
18%. A recent study found a UK majority believing Sherlock
Holmes to be a historical character, while half of the queried
considered Richard the Lionhearted to be fictional.
Turning a buzzing confusion of sense data into meaningful order
is not only a powerful function in the human cognitive setup, but the
source of deeply illusory belief systems. Phenomena like
Pareidolia make vague or random stimuli significant. Seeing faces
in clouds and identifying hidden messages in sounds or images. Yet
victims of fancy have less of a chance to lose their marbles than
those whose life is strapped down on a cot of logic. When scientific
experts believe their formulas to have an existence of their own,
mythological rationality turns into comedy.
Revenants Revisiting
Descending through the seven gates of the underworld, Ishtar
threatens the gatekeeper of the land of no return with a formula
also used by her sister Ereshkigal: “I shall raise up the dead and
they shall eat the living. I shall make the dead outnumber the
living.” Fear of the walking dead, older than the most ancient
literature on earth. In the 1190s, historian William of Newburgh
wrote: “One would not easily believe that corpses come out of their
graves and wander around, animated by some evil spirit, to terrorize
or harm the living, unless there were many cases in our times,
supported by ample testimony.”
Revenants had a number of common features and, unlike today,
were always personalized specific individuals. An early European
history of ghosts was characterized by the dead seeking out the
living, who attempted to limit their earthly appearance. In the late-
nineteenth century, necromantic spiritualism started to massively
contact the dead. In spiritist séances, mediums like Eva C.
produced orchid shapes from her vagina, and Nobel Prize
physiologist Charles Richet coined the term ectoplasm for this
ghostly “unfamiliar form of matter.”
Based on Aztec death goddess Mictecacihuatl, ruling the
underworld together with her husband, La Santisima Muerte
represents the currently most popular syncretic Mesoamerican
deity. Clandestine for decades, “Saint Death,” the dark sister of the
Virgin of Guadalupe has gone public, and appears as a skeletal
figure in a long robe carrying one or more objects, usually a scythe
and globe.
Condemned as devil-worship by the Church, Santa Muerte,
deeply entrenched among Mexico’s lower classes and criminal
underworld, also attracts faithful police and military personnel.
Señora de la Noche protects against all types of assaults and
violent death. From inner cities and rural areas the base of believers
expanded to millions, far beyond the northern borders.
Corresponding to what scholars like to call crisis cult, some of the
most devoted followers of the “Lady of Death” are associated with
crimes of economic desperation.
Burial and revival as living dead, was a punishment for those
who crossed the secret Haitian Bizango society. For more than a
hundred years scientists have known about a ghastly capacity to
turn unsuspecting ants into zombies. Infected by Ophiocordyceps
unilateralis, ants remain alive for a time under the precise control
of the fungus, but the mechanisms to govern behavior remains
unknown. Behavior manipulation includes gypsy moths infected by
a baculovirus. They climb tree tops to die, and shower the virus on
the foliage to infect new hosts.
Malware-infested remotely-controlled Zombie-PCs proliferate.
With a net worth less than zero, Zombie banks continue to operate
with debts shored up by public money. Facing runs by depositors
and calls from derivatives transactions, engaged in high-risk
resurrection gambles, they spread distress and insolvency. Zombie
metaphors for consumer society in a technological age correspond
to the growing trend to take mobile phones into the grave. Playing
dead is an animal-kingdom reaction to fear and unresolved
authority; humans make it a way of life without being alive.
Ritual Relations
Societies organize members as self-regulating actors in social
interaction rituals. Humans, gated into elaborate regulations of
conduct and situational decorum, are made to desire socially-
marked-out goals under the pretense of self-interest. Socialization is
expected to result in internalization of myths and rhetoric. This is
never fully achieved, and individual households socialize their
members into deviance and rebellion. Language and expressions
that establish modes of proper ceremonial conduct unavoidably
provoke forms of desecration and profanation. Every ceremony is a
potential black mass.
Anti-systemic socialization, as an outlet for unruly spirits, may
be useful, as long as destabilizing effects remain below a threshold.
Fluctuating incapacitation levels of internalized rules reveal
instabilities of the design. Marginal elements have unsettling effects
in a crisis and may get out of control. Denied desires do not
disappear, but go underground; rituals allow a regulated return of
the repressed to avoid outbursts into uninhibited rage.
Individuals adjust to hints and clues in their circles of informal
social control, establishing boundaries that provide a space to be
decorated, within certain limits. Avoidance strategies protect this
shelter. Individuals insulate themselves by partial blindness, half-
truths, illusions and decorative rationalizations. Losing face means
not being able to sustain a line that can be presented to others, or
can be integrated into public appearance. This idea about oneself is
the object of defense. Not based on facts but on communication,
much is gained by evasion, and staying out of the way of potential
face-loss.
People trying to project an image are constrained by imaginary
models and products of self-deception, lost in embarrassing pursuit
of a mirage. Everyone takes part in a complicated dance of little
symbolic offerings, a play of generousness and greediness, cautious
rituals of attraction and repulsion. Each individual in every minor
interaction is constantly reminded by the presence of others to
obligations in demeanor and proper handling of the self. Human
brains are high-powered social organs, not thinking machines.
Even seemingly empty gestures produce unending flows of
observances and ripples of expectations spreading through society.
Rules of conduct for interpersonal communication have
transcendental significance in spoken interaction. Silence and
speech pauses signaling allusions not contained in explicit language
require other forms of decoding.
Spontaneous proceedings of social encounters provide
individuals with opportunities to derive a sense of reality. When this
involvement is suspended, reality tunnels go to pieces. Losing a
framework of ceremonial interaction may result in the loss of
perception of individuals as entities. When social systems, brought
into existence through complex ritual-settings, fall apart, their
partakers feel unreal. Situations denying socially-adequate
interaction constitute an essential element of torture. Action
connects to attentional agentivity; losing the ability to direct
attention leads to a loss of an experience of self.
Shadow Governance
Governance, the new concept for government by context-
control, shares the same root word as cybernetics. Based on
technocratic steering-models and naïve beliefs in optimization, it
thinks in terms of streamlining efficiency, not in terms of strategies,
political outlook or a need for change. Ahistorical perspectives hide
asymmetrical relations of power. Participation is instrumentalized
toward narrow forms of problem-solving and reductionist efficiency
concepts. Autonomy and consensus are appropriated into the
arsenal of power as the latest strategies of force.
A new breed of shadow elites operates under the radar of
public visibility. With professional influencers maneuvering in new
power networks, the existing means of holding public decision-
makers accountable seem hopeless. Exploiting the redesign of
governing and transformation of the public sector, shadow networks
organize the interrelations between state and private. New layers of
control strategically oscillate at the interface of public and private
interest, bureaucracy and market. Blurring the boundaries between
these domains, they privatize information and personalize
bureaucracy.
In ever-changing roles, the new gatekeepers of sensitive
information apply it to produce opinion. Mapping social data with
information systems permits visualizing socio-graphic hot spots,
trends and patterns. Aggressively flexible modes of organization
influence public policies, and engineer the coincidence of interests
far beyond the reach of legal instruments. Not simply your old
oligarchic elites, the flexible private-state networks are an
ambiguous set of interconnections woven together by shared
activities and histories.
Legal corporations resemble angelomorphic personifications. A
body of an immaterial being becomes immortal, being invisible but
real. The king “is a corporation in himself that liveth ever” was a
commonplace in seventeenth-century legal dictionaries. Spatial
plurality in the collective body was discarded for a corporate
persona mystica where plurality is only on the time axis of
succession. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Covering up problems of continuity creates a fictious linked
permanence, a world of no beginning. Exalted kingship transferred
in a secular setting, the state became a quasi-church or mystical
corporation organized by a specific rationality. A doppelgänger is
inscribed into the fabric of the corpus mysticum and corporation. A
duplex corpus of natural and mystic, of personal and corporate,
individual and collective, has survived in the political sphere, mostly
by juristic means. Since the nineteenth century, courts have
extended other rights to the corporation and “corporate
personhood.”
Black helicopter shadows designate areas of ambivalent
psychological energies. Similar to fairy circles, burned into the
ground by dancing elves. Zones frequently connected with the idea
of UFOs or other alien footprints. Extraordinary-rendition programs
for the extrajudicial-transfer operate unidentified shadow flights into
the underworld of black sites. Popular traditions warn against
entering such dark gateways to other worlds. If one returns from a
dance with these phantoms, the world has moved on in time.
Simplified Simulations
Constitutional myths create the culture in which they are
believed. Economic world-views produce models, and their
underlying methods the reality they represent. Processes of
reasoning make fictions come true. Ancient accounting methods of
double bookkeeping and the processing mechanisms of mechanical
thinking informed cosmological systems. Calculating the world,
numbers prove so useful for policy arguments that they are
invented if they do not exist.
Money is so fundamental to an understanding of the world, as if
it were a law of nature. An illusion professionally exploited. Modern
finance, a platonic simplification of the world in the sacred tradition
of celestial geometry, seems the cunning of reason towards infernal
mechanics. Economic discourse emerges as the grotesque attempt
to bring together a discourse of the laws of objects in motion and
the social imagination, while Newton’s invisible hand tries to save
the world from gravitational collapse. In large, integrated societies
many issues constitute mysteries of profound complexity that
cannot be addressed with simple logic.
Financial markets resemble a confidence game, but offer a
conceptual grip on complex realities at the same time. Cultivating
pretense and bound to produce theories, experts become the next
best thing to fraud. Hypnotized by what they know, and repressing
the known unknown, they remain oblivious to the unknown
unknown. Comparisons of stockbrokers and darts randomly thrown
at a business page show no advantage for the experts. Extracted
from the social sciences, neoclassical economics pretends to be not
just another doctrine to defend material interests or massive
inequality of wealth and cutthroat exploitation as self-evident
dogmas. So algebraic modeling of efficiency and resources became
a fixture of speaking truth about market orthodoxy or heresy. Nobel
Prize winners setting up Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM),
a hedge fund, based on economic theological abstractions masked
as mathematical formulas, soon lost their capital.
Needs to simplify the world create belief in a universe less
complex than it is. Life does not afford too many opportunities to
match complex causes and effects. When in the fluid vastness of
unpredictability a naïve belief in simplified patterns of idealized
models dissolves, fake rationality gives orders. They want to
believe! Caught by illusions of predictability, the future is taken
hostage by habits.
Simple explanations bind together chains of relationships or
logical links. This makes information easier to handle or hold in
memory but its byproduct is a toxic illusion of understanding.
Habitual pretension to comprehend complex and random
interrelations of the world is the social mainstream. Fantasies feed
on overrated artifacts grounded in dubious categories, not realizing
the fuzziness of boundaries and need of continuous revision.
Studies on selective memory show that people discount
evidence that is inconsistent with preexisting beliefs. They are less
likely to remember information that conflicts with their convictions.
Fooled by complexity-reduction and flawed reference instruments,
decision-makers lean toward information that is most compatible
with the required answer. Behind reasoning based on erroneous
premises, madness lurks.
Simulacra Scoundrels
Mind-body problems inform ongoing turmoil between all flavors
of idealists and realists, positivist reductionists, dialectical
materialists, transcendental nihilists, digital virtualists or
neuroscientists. “Everything-is-just-a-thought” transcendentalisms,
in denial of material misery, seem as useless as narrow doctrines of
consciousness derived from material conditions in a world of signs
and wonder. Countercultures in the West subscribed to ideas that
consciousness controls history. But to believe something that
questions one’s material privileges is harder.
With a level of satisfying physical needs, desires and
abstractions take over in importance. Upper-class types may be
natural-born idealists, for the reason that realities of life never come
close. In the good old times, Western theologians would discuss if
Africans indeed do have souls. At the same time, it was understood
that only people who do not have to work for subsistence can
aspire to complex reasoning, loftier ideals or psychological
reflection. That is why aristocracy and gentry monopolize the
personnel of so many early dramas. Aristotelian idealism, an
ideological expression of the Greek propertied classes, reflects a
landowning, slaveholder aristocracy in defense against plebeian and
mercantile democratic tendencies. Until today, idealism works well
for lazy rentiers and loaded scoundrels.
Consciousness is not just individual self-awareness, but a
product of social practices, including language as well as life’s
circumstances and material relationships. That ruling-class ideas
usually make up the dominant ideology is hardly surprising; a politics
of the mind has to include the body and the question of force.
Influencing consciousness that is adapted to practical, everyday
conditions requires intervention into material settings. People arrive
at a mindset of competitive consumerism because prevailing socio-
political economic powers set them up to go there.
 Conditions influence mind, and consciousness affects physical
reality in confluent relations. Insights into processes within help to
understand what is happening out there. Emergent human practices
and flows of non-human interrelations surpass idealism or
materialism. Marxist theory has little to say about the way culture
shapes economic realities, and neoliberal, system-theory sociologies
even less. Critique based on psycho-linguistic mind-games or art-
entertainment is of limited use in attacking power-economies behind
phantasmal regimes. Counter-information campaigns that do not
address hidden channels of libidinal economies are seldom
effective.
Everybody knows the emperor has no clothes, but believes it
anyway, pretending irony when it is just cynical. Derivative of pop
modernism, postmodernism, a cult pretending that everything under
the sun is new, turned into a self-help program for anxious
academics. Scared by complexity and real-existing simulacra, they
promote the systems they claim to resist. It is impossible to awaken
a man who pretends to be asleep. According to Heraclitus, “Even
sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the
Universe.”
Skeptic Dogmas
Enquries into very many received tenets and commonly
presumed truths, also known as Pseudodoxia Epidemica or
Vulgar Errors, by Thomas Browne, refutes common mistakes and
superstitions in 1646. “It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the
human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives
than by negatives” observed Francis Bacon. Until today, a
questionable production of scientific knowledge is hidden in the
formation and training of experts who are wrong most of the time.
Trapped between cults of individual heroism and hierarchic
ancestor-worship, skepticism may be revolutionary. Attempts to
shed illusions, comforting habits and compulsive deceptions can be
disorienting to the point of nausea. Tensions of delay between
desire and fulfillment require commitment. Expanding tolerance for
ambiguity does not come easily, and provokes episodes of vertigo.
Awe of the unknown or unknowable should not trigger leaps of faith
too soon. Nonetheless relying on a heroic pathos of unbelief, faith in
the existence and deliverances of an utterly non-situated reason is
just another superstition.
Through knowledge based on sense impression, Stoicism sought
freedom and happiness in becoming one with a logos that governs
all things. Stoics cultivated an ascetic and aristocratic fatalism that
defined freedom of thought by a certain skepticism. However, they
were convinced that knowledge is attained through reason, and that
truth can be distinguished from fallacy, even if actual practice only
allows an approximation.
Ancient skeptics soon drew them in to contradictions regarding
certainty. They proposed probability instead. Not some imaginary
union or withdrawal from social reality, but freedom from illusion
was worthwhile for sceptics. They did not quite accept the
conclusion that only the mechanics of their own mind constitutes
reality. Today, skepticism in regard to the problem of
epistemological justification in cognitive science and second-order
theory challenges assumptions of an external environment.
Skepticism towards naïve certainty and deeply-ingrained
delusions about the nature of reality is a must. Deconstructing
mental representationalism or simple-minded realism opens ways to
understanding and autonomy. Skepticism and error theory relativize
and pacify conflicting values and a struggle of ideas. However,
challenging actuality easily turns into routines of bureaucratic
pragmatism. Humorless skepticism, embedded in constricted
cultural legends, defends unenlightened myths of vulgar scientific
rationality.
Conservative cultural critics readily accept baseless but widely
shared and ratified beliefs, for reasons of convenience, but
fanatically denounce any agency for change. Due to the need to
constantly attack any real or imagined dogmatic tendencies, peace
of mind is never attained. An oscillating lifestyle of producing
dogma by attacking it is disturbed by any thought that could
establish new ideas that fail to serve the stability of the status quo.
New cynical skeptics always deny a standpoint and are ready to
attack any position — until their minds abruptly shift from
skepticism into horrorstruck belief.
Speculative Finance
Calculated risk is supposedly the difference between gambling
and speculative finance, but the dividing lines are unclear. Credit
default swaps and a range of arcane financial instruments not only
bet on the misfortune of others, but influence the outcome. Like
taking insurance on the other village and then starting a fire. In
2000 a Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) exonerated
US financial speculation from gambling laws, facilitating a shadow
system where transactions soon exceeded traditional banking.
Finance discourse pretends that money is about exchange-
value, not a system of credit. Banks create money out of thin air by
issuing credit. At first the virtualization of credit and foreign-
currency exchange domesticated the absolute powers of feudal
monarchs. Moderating follies of despotism, it balanced desires
towards a more reasonable attitude in the view of the gentry. Since
only small groups have sufficient access to credit to be actionable in
accumulating wealth, the economic system still amounts to financial
feudalism.
Las-Vegas-style gambling is domesticated. It rules out nonlinear
processes and stochastic events with contained and evenly
distributed probabilities. Today’s immaterialized world of finance is
in the business of wild bets. In an environment of disruptive,
unexpected phase-transitions on the dynamic edges of order and
disorder, it is delusional to call financial investments “securities.”
Not even real economies are secure. Financial tools to manage risk
in precarious Ponzi-scheme markets produce more increased
volatility and uncertainty than stabilizing effects.
Transactions moved from natural to legal persons and to
interest in corporations, from corporations’ activities to derivatives
in relation to such interests. In a daily trade of 1.2 trillion dollars,
less than 5% relates to direct investments or trade deals; the rest is
speculation and arbitrage. Everything is telemarketing in a spectral
network economy, and financial markets are a play of signs.
Placing bets on risks of complex indexes is not grounded in value
but speculative manipulation. In the alchemy of virtually
undetectable particles, turbulent brief-lived bits in the phantom flow
of financial trade, illusionary ex nihilo creations have bloody real
effects.
“The body of money is but a shadow,” but the repressed world
of bodies haunts spectral economies. Over-accumulated virtual
capital hovers over the material world like a ghost in search of a
body, in bubbles producing death and destruction. Spectral
derivatives, descending onto housing developments in the 2009
subprime crisis, gave rise to ghost-towns stripped of life by toxic
assets. Incarnations in real estate materialize as haunted houses;
speculation in food stocks produces death and starvation.
With the global ascent of capitalism and new theories of the
body, a rich texture of bloodsucking stories spread widely. Also
throughout colonial Africa, vampires rise from their graves in
masses. Finance, an exalted medium, channels the uncanny
abstractions of blood sucked from the living. Restless, drifting
ghosts in the midst of the tumult, feeding on corpses but starving for
stimulus, mirror the psychological condition of urban dwellers in the
wheel of existence.
Subterranean Treasures
Grimoires date back to the dawn of writing. With a mix of
spells, conjurations, natural secrets and ancient wisdom, magic
textbooks circulated throughout Europe since medieval times.
Books on divination and magical powers, invoking angels or
demons, intertwined with the Abrahamic religions and Europe’s
development of science. Print and the social impact of colonialism
broadened the diffusion of syncretistic adaptations.
Cheap, eighteenth-century prints of the Sixth and Seventh
Books of Moses, filled with pseudo-Hebraic symbols, spread from
Germany to America via the Pennsylvania Dutch. Adopted by
African Americans, the conjurations and psalms became founding
texts of Rastafarianism and West African religious movements.
Popular vulgarizations and inventive exploitations fired a boom of
cheap grimoires; supernatural beings that guard hidden treasures
stirred additional interest.
In many legends, spirits are tied to limits and bounds they
cannot pass. When stones marking property boundaries are secretly
moved, the spirits of the dead return to set them right again. One of
72 demons described in the Goetia to know about hidden treasures
is Valac: “His office is to give True Answers of Hidden Treasures,
and to tell where Serpents may be seen.” Brian Springer’s semi-
autobiographic documentary about the search for lost treasures
buried on a farm in Missouri takes its name from a mid-eighteenth-
century American opera. The Disappointment: Or, The Force of
Credulity, a satirical play on the colonial craze of haunted treasure
hunts.
Benjamin Franklin, in Philadelphia, complained: “You can hardly
walk half a mile out of Town on any side, without observing the
several Pits dug with that design.” A hunt for treasures more high-
tech, in 1934 the Los Angeles Times front page reported on
Ancient Lizard Cults and hidden gold tablets deep under L.A:
“Lizard Peoples’ Catacomb City Hunted.” Highly determined
engineers used X-rays and mysterious radio devices to drive shafts
into the ground towards “priceless treasures of legendary
Inhabitants” of a lost subterranean city 72 meters below downtown.
Dragon Rouge, widely available in the nineteenth century, is
still well-known in the former Caribbean French colonies. Infamous
for an invocation of the Devil, it circulated together with La Poule
Noire. A text on the creation of magical properties, such as
talismanic amulets and the Black Pullet itself, also known as the
Hen that lays Golden Eggs. This grimoire claims that the one who
attains the power to instruct the Black Pullet gains unlimited wealth.
Today, ordering Black Pullet juju over the internet “comes with full
secret formulae,” not only promising to “get rich quick,” but adding,
“You can use it over and over to become stinking rich.”
Get-rich-quick schemes and fake lotteries flood the net
channels in the dark underbelly of the psychoeconomy, and in the
repressed unconscious of the positive-thinking doctrine. Gold
extends an infantile fascination with defecation. Ancient
Babylonians assumed gold to be the excrements of hell. Twentieth-
century psychology documented hidden inversions of coprophilous
lust into drives for compulsive order and accumulation. Re-
appropriating the debased and the profaned finds secret
undiscovered treasures.
Thought Chains
Emperor Constantine, decreeing a new state religion, gave a
distinct warning: “There shall be no more divination, no curious
inquiry, for evermore. Whoever dares disobey shall lose his head by
the avenging sword of the executioner.” Practices encouraging sub-
alterns to trade their own ideas can be disadvantageous for the
control of power. Tools for the unlicensed manipulation of the
imagination threaten enforced ideologies.
Speculative intelligence proved a continuing factor of European
unrest; free inference at the borders of fact and fiction nourishes
revolutionary milieus. Sixteenth-century magi and cryptographers
like Agrippa von Nettesheim associated in secret societies, where
revolutionary radicals fought in armed uprisings of dispossessed
peasants. Exposing Catholic nunneries as brothels, he passionately
championed female superiority. Invisible colleges of speculative
thought connected like-minded trouble-makers all over seventeenth-
century Europe.
On the other side, Rosicrucian royalists drew on ideas of magic
imperialism from sixteenth-century astronomer, spy-chief John Dee.
The new technology to look into the far distance, the stargazers’
telescope, was widely known as the spyglass. Spies, the secular
approach to foreseeing the future, are the fortune-tellers of
espionage. Utopian, eighteenth-century revolutionaries explored
turning ideas into reality through psychological manipulation.
Philippe Buonarroti believed in the adoption of ideas by masses with
the help of secret societies.
Secret cults organized the first slave populations to throw off
the yoke of European colonialism. Haïtian guerrilla leaders like
François Mackandal, a houngan associated with black magic and
knowledgeable about poisons, spread terror among French slave-
owners. Voudou priest Boukman Dutty kicked off a late-eighteenth-
century uprising that sparked the Revolution. Later admitted into
the Loa pantheon, he stood in the secret tradition of organizations
connecting maroon bands with plantation slaves.
According to an old Mongol proverb, “you can shake the world
with forty people.” The history of popular discontent proves that
those without formal power are not necessarily powerless.
Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals brought the egalitarian into trouble
after the French Revolution, but it informed the work of astronomer
and activist Louis Auguste Blanqui. While Blanquism was used
perjoratively throughout the political spectrum, conspiratorial politics
remained influential. Both Baudelaire and Alphonse L. Constant
briefly joined his organization. Constant, also known as Eliphas Levi
and the author of Transcendental Magic, earned a long prison
sentence for his 1839 book The Gospel of Liberty.
Conspiratorial organizations, some imitating Masonic forms,
played decisive roles in forming the First International. Issued under
Pope Pius IX, the1864 Syllabus of Errors cites “socialism,
communism, secret societies” as pests of the same kind. A
notorious inventor of secrets, Bakunin wrote: “Thus the sole aim of
a secret society must be, not the creation of an artificial power
outside the people, but the rousing, uniting and organizing of the
spontaneous power of the people.”
Truth Production
When land is underwater, in floods of uncertainty and a rising
crisis of credibility, technocrats and positivist realists cling to
objective truths. According to ideas about noble lies in Plato’s
Republic, truth is an elite luxury item for the select few who handle
the dark realities behind the necessary collective illusions.
Some argue that knowledge is significantly gained
independently of sense experience; others maintain that senses are
the only source. Rationalists show cases where ideas outstrip
experience, and empiricists argue how experience provides
information that rationalists cite in the first place.
Empiricists attack accounts of reason as a source of concepts
providing information about the world. Assuming impossible
conditions of access to the world, empiricism denies that thought
constantly produces situations that end in undetermined
externalities. Mental representations cannot be observed removed
from the act of perception. Sense experience remains incomplete,
forever grounded in the abyss of the unknown. Experiences that
are not the base of knowledge are not real, and empiricists
inevitably turn skeptic.
Creating an illusion of deep insight without any actual
knowledge is the art of cold reading. Expert uses of semantic-
manipulation toolsets convince even skeptics to witness telepathic
transmission. Vague and contradictory, rainbow ruse statements
simultaneously award subjects with a specific personality trait, as
well as its opposite. As if they had made an accurate reading of the
subject’s mind, cold readers just cover enough possibilities. Truth is
made up by the vocabularies of humans; words are used for the
magic of self-deception and deconstructivist thought made it clear
that any reading is a misreading.
To see the citadels of certainty in ruins is a pleasing vista, but
shared objectives rapidly fade into a privatized multiplicity of
subjective realities. Ideologies of individualization impose
fragmentation schemes to encage isolated selves in a personal
insane asylum. At the same time, emancipation from canonical,
repressive, totalities rebels against ideas of a unity of ego, and
celebrates individuation in recognition of particularity. Trying to
bring order into a chaotic world, an implicit intertwinedness of
opposite concepts undermines the hierarchies of meaning. Not even
the abstract and concrete, or plain and confused, are clearly
separated.
In a world of lies, truth is a rhetorical formula tapping emotional
energies. Structuralist synchronic relations or universal foundational
codes have little to say about historical development and revolution
for change. Seeing difference as epiphenomal asserts repressive
hermeneutic interpretations and hegemonies. Deconstruction is a
must, but critique needs to provide a view beyond the ruins.
Poststructuralists lean toward crypto-capitalist libertarian positions,
since without temporal structuralisms it becomes hard to formulate
critique. What emerges from the deconstructed flux worth
affirming, beyond bright flashes of insight and dark somnambulist
intuitions?
Afterword

by Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Dictionary of Operations is a book by Konrad Becker. What

is Konrad Becker talking about?
About everything. Everything is here: Language and Money,
Conjuration and Conspiration. According to recombinant
methodology, the operations the title is hinting to are the countless
operations that a reader can do, by recombining the conceptual
units that can be found in this book.
The Author is walking at the border that separates (and actually
connects) the world of superstitious Reality and the world of
theoretical superstition.
The book has been composed — better, assembled — in the
period in which the black hole of financial capitalism is swallowing
the world. Perfect timing. This is the right moment to reflect on the
(dangerous) confusion between linguistic production and the
economy.
This confusion was started by the Symbolist poets, who
replaced representation with evocation and realist description with
the mystic epiphany of transmental words, and was perfected by
the Virtual technology which generates the world that surrounds us
as a by-product of Simulation.
Financial capitalism — the last step in the suicidal pathway of
the Invisible Hand that is strangling us — is the theological
translation of Indust-Reality.
Magic algorithms have taken the place of the old machines
made of iron and steel, and although “syncretistic cults of capitalism
do not yield meaning,” (as Becker says), they do yield value.
Physical things disappear, bewitched and swallowed by the
financial spell: buildings, cities, human beings, institutions, trains,
schools. Immaterial money (unspeakable figures, uncountable
amounts of credit and debt) is taking their place.
In an article published in1996, with the title “Global Debt and
Parallel Universe,” Jean Baudrillard wrote that debt is forever
orbitalized, out of Planet Earth, out of our lives and out of our time:
“In fact, the debt will never be paid. No debt will ever be paid.
The final counts will never take place. If time is counted [si le
temps nous est compte], the missing money is beyond counting
[au-delà de toute compatabilité]. The United States is already
virtually unable to pay, but this will have no consequence
whatsoever. There will be no judgment day for this virtual
bankruptcy. It is simple enough to enter an exponential or virtual
mode to become free of any responsibility, since there is no
reference anymore, no referential world to serve as a measuring
norm,” he said.
He was wrong, although genially prophetic (prophets are often
wrong, but they see the point, while other people are often right,
though they talk about pointless things). Baudrillard was wrong,
because The Debt is back on Earth, as you know, and we are
looking at it in a state of astonishment. Incredulous of what we see,
we to try to understand the metaphysical debt, but we can’t.
This is why (as Konrad Becker puts it), “Displacing religion in
secular societies, both are incorporated into financial market forces
where they remain intertwined.”
And also (anthropologically speaking, of non-anthropological
things), “Humans form religion which informs humans vice versa.”
And also (biologically speaking, on non-biological prospects),
“DNA in the evolvement of living cells did not follow slow
continuous mutation. Living cells are not autistic actors of
sociobiological dogma but sensitive entities in a copy and paste
conspiracy.”
 So who knows? It may be that, in the infinite, future
recombination of DNA possibilities, we can find a way out.
Entrapped, entangled, but doing operations, and always hopeful,
stupidly hopeful, because, as Becker says: “The most merciful thing
in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its
contents.”
As we cannot correlate, we do operations, and look around for
something that so far we have been missing.
What?
 Dictionary of Operations

Konrad Becker

The author is deeply indebted to very many

who made this publication possible.

ISBN 978-1-57027-261-5

Autonomedia and Konrad Becker

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By the same author:

Critical Strategies in Art and Media
Deep Search
Strategic Reality Dictionary
Tactical Reality Dictionary
Acknowledgements