figment on Sun, 22 Jun 1997 02:09:45 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Technocult/Religion (2/3) |
B. TECHGNOSIS A number of people have pointed out that of all the religious, spiritual, or mythic qualities that seem to be mobilized in technoculture, gnosticism is one of the more predominant (by saying gnosticism, I am speaking more about a tendency found within many patterns of religious thought, and not so much about a specifically "Gnostic" set of groups and texts). I had prepared a bit of historical material to discuss, but if you boil it all down, the gnostic impulse can be defined simply as a radical dualism between mind and body, self and world -- with the radical rejection of the fleshy side of the equation. In "The Information War," Hakim Bey shows how the image of disembodied spirit is mapped onto the cultural construction of information, such that the self becomes virtualised and disengaged from a whole set of carnal and real world relationships. This gnostic split is a very strong temptation, both from a spiritual perspective and from the perspective of digital subjectivity. And it is one to be heartily resisted, or rather, transmuted into a far less naive integration of self and world. But to do so thoroughly, we must understand its appeal. Gnosis is not knowledge in the abstract sense of possessing a bunch of information within an interpretive framework. Leaving aside a more rigorous phenomenology of mystical experience, we can say that gnosis is an ecstatic moment, one in which the conventional division between experience and knowledge breaks down, an expansive almost "psychokinetic" experience that unfolds itself as a kind of knowing that rewrites the boundaries of the self. Though found in mystical literature, I don't believe that such ecstasies of knowing and perception are reserved for the religious. A particularly embodied example is the peak of ecstatic communion engineered at raves: entheogens uncork your loving heart, the music is superb, the people have hit a peak of absolute collective life -- what is that like? Nothing is like that. Though more "pagan" spiritual modalities could describe that moment, gnosis captures its cognitive character. An even more technological "ecstasy of communication" derives from the intense kinds of epiphanies that many people often describe when they first realize the reach and magnitude of the Internet. There is a kind of sparkling leap when you realize that the relationship of your solitary communication and the world have radically changed, that the horizons of communicative possibility have drastically changed, and that this new medium of mind is both intimate and powerful. As Hakim Bey has noted, info-gnosis arises when the self becomes recoded as information. And the enormous temptation of gnosticism, in both religious history and technoculture, is to hit the escape button: to reify the peak, the utopian possibility, the promise of disembodied liberation, and to reject everything else. In some sense, this capitulation has fueled the Californian Ideology, especially in its more Extropian guises; more generally, it has led to the incorporeal hubris, ecological insensitivity, and otherworldly disassociation that fuels the cultural enthusiasm for information technology. It's a foolish feeling to build a politics upon, as so many have attempted to do, but if we ignore this experience, we will never understand the millennialism of the Net. What is going on with that moment of cognitive ecstasy, and what is going on with the startling return of spiritual and religious patterns of thought in the midst of technoculture? When I encounter people who simply condemn the religious elements and spiritual modalities they recognize within technoculture as atavistic and ideologically suspect, I am disappointed. That such premodern material could return with a vengeance at this late date indicates to me that we cannot simply turn our backs on this stuff and let it fester in its most reactionary and misguided forms. It's part of who we are, and we need to engage and transmute, not simply attack out of some strained mixture of Enlightenment rationalism and postmodern cynicism. I am not going to try to defend this position philosophically, and certainly not according to the canonical axioms of contemporary "discourse." I am just going to say that spiritual phenomena, cosmology and the like, as well as its perhaps inevitable reification into religious and mythic forms, simply keeps coming up. Look at the 19th century, which is so committed to materialism, a commitment not only realized in the near total detachment of science from religion effected by the end of the century, but also in the utterly this-worldly orientation of both Darwinism and historical materialism. We only need to crack open Kevin Kelly to realize how mystical Darwinism can become. And yet, as a pattern of social expectation and historical thought, Marxism too was infused with a millennialist spirit that you can trace back to Joachime of Fiore and the pre-socialist utopias of the hermetic imagination. Though its intellectual force has waned enormously, utopia maintained a vital role in critical discourse throughout the twentieth century, and in headier moments it seems to me that the image of utopia ultimately derives from an image of the soul projected onto the immanent possibilities of the existing world. In whatever guise, revolution cannot be divorced from an underlying wellspring of millennial emotions, from the sense that something is just coming to be, that the self is about to fuse with the world in some unexpected and magnificent fashion. So when we encounter that feeling complex, even in the most degraded of places and in the most cynically manipulated of manners, it seems like we miss the boat by refusing to look it in the face, to recognize the mutant subjectivities suggested in technoculture. At the same time, I am not suggesting that we abandon our critical attention on those institutional and cultural mechanisms that capture, diffuse and even help engender these subjectivities -- to "religion" in the repressive sense. We might even say that spiritual experience, ecstasy, and vision are always captured by belief systems and institutions, which construct themselves and their meanings around experiences that both legitimate them and always threaten to escape and upset their rule. Not to invoke Kevin Kelley, but spirit is always out of control. If institutional Christianity is the archetype of religious oppression and control, its history cannot be seen outside its own deterritorializations: massed peasant rebellions, mystical antinomianism, millennialist reform, the heresy of the free spirit, even the pagan this-wordliness that lurks in the edges of the Christian imaginary. Religion too is the story of nomads and states, the smooth and striated spaces that commingle within the self. How often has real immanence been produced in the name of a transcendence that never arrives? C. VIRTUAL, IMAGINAL Now I want to leave the problem of dogma, belief, and institutional control aside, and to mention just two spiritual modalities that impact discussions of technoculture. Both of these modalities figure in traditional practices and cosmologies, as well as in the eclectic postmodern stew of spirituality we too often write off under the catch-all category of "New Age." And yet I'd like to discuss these modalities in non-religious, secular language, because their intelligence and fundamental lack of dogmatism ultimately escape such discourses. Those two modalities are the imaginal, and what for the sake of simplicity I will just call attention. Because we associate the imagination with moldy philosophies and now fashionably denigrated aesthetic theories, our relationship to the imaginal these days is impoverished and full of suspicion. Shredded apart by different disciplinary machines and eviscerated of its experiential force, we are now more likely to blame our imaginations for perceptual errors than to claim it as an engine of what Hakim Bey would call poetic facts. Bracketing all sorts of psychological and philosophical issues, and leaving aside the problem of Romanticism, I would like to simply argue here that the imagination cannot be reduced to a concept, but should be recognized as an irreducible component of the human sensorium, as real as its siblings dream and desire. Obviously the creative imagination is allied with the subconscious dimensions of the psyche -- another heretical, or should I say, "problematic" construct. But though I toy with the belief there are some deep patterns in the psyche that are in some sense transhistorical, the Jungians are wrong to picture it as some pure and changeless realm where the great godlike archetypes of the past live eternally. The psyche too moves and mutates and creates itself through history, even if its dream-like resonances and imaginal relationships always beckon to some eternal return just out of reach. The cavern of the imaginary is full of machines. All this is important because of because of course the whole motive force of the commodity spectacle derives from its ability to invade and rewrite the imaginal. What's happening on the Net and throughout our culture of the simulacrum is the extraordinary technical intervention, manipulation, and externalization of the imagination. My favorite description of this process is "the corporate colonization of the subconscious," a phrase that captures both the invasive quality of media viruses as well as the plastic nature of the subconscious. But if we take the imagination seriously, perhaps even dangerously seriously, then these imaginal relationships we form with the mechanisms of the spectacle have real consequences. I am quite taken with the British cultural studies rejoinder to Frankfurt School pessimism regarding the culture industry, and unlike those who are content to sniff out the evil hand of capitalist ideology in every crass blockbuster or MTV video, I follow Benjamin in remaining passionately committed to the imaginal traces that course through the media carnival. At the same time, the narcotic, hypnotic, and coercive aspects of imaginal control need to be considered even more seriously then ever in our era of engineered media viruses. By taking the creative powers of the imagination seriously, we also open up its social and democratic potential, as well as its ability to revivify our fractured lives and fragmented subjectivities. The imagination is not some aristocratic faculty reserved for poets and artists, which allows them to make art that the rest of us consume in our poverty. To varying degrees, we all have the capacity for imaginal action, no less than we do for rational action. One of the things we love about subcultures is that ordinary people create, in however degraded a guise, a space of the active imagination within the spectacle's clamoring mall of glittering images. One quite technical example of this active imagination, culled from the increasingly popular culture of alternative healing practices, is guided visualization, which, though now associated with New Age self-help practices, can be traced through esoteric and mystical traditions of the past, like hermetic magic or the Vajrayana in Tibetan Buddhism. These traditions indicate that the imagination is an internal generative force, that we can improve and shape it, and that we can achieve some autonomous power over its products. At the same time, the unleashed imaginal always overleaps the mechanisms of control, internally or externally imposed -- that is its "magic." Living in San Francisco is very interesting because often one sees early glimmers of technical developments. Most of these things will fizzle out, but it's still interesting because even the false starts are symptoms of the evolving logic of dominant technoculture. I am particularly fascinated by the psychedelic freak culture which has driven the technocultural machinery of the so-called Californian Ideology in such extraordinary and bizarre ways. This freak spirit, which has much to do with technically stimulating the magic of the imaginal, through LSD or electric guitars or virtual worlds, is now focusing on avatar and VRML-based worlds. These are graphic, three-dimensional, networked environments where you construct or adopt an avatar -- an image that represents yourself and allows you to navigate and move around the space. It's like a MUD, except with graphics, and some worlds even have little microphones that sound just terrible. The ones I've seen are crude and rather stupid, with extremely chintzy graphics. But though full immersive virtual reality on the Net remains a pipe dream, it nonetheless seems that we may eventually be treated to extremely addictive virtual worlds that people will pour a lot of time, energy, and imaginal force into. Speaking from personal experience, I'd say that low-bandwidth, text-based MUDs are already remarkably addictive, partly because they sink their talons into the imaginal. Something about the combination of implied space and textual constructs, the interpersonal play of personas, the amplification of the imaginary potential of writing -- all of this allows you to lose and remake yourself inside these occasionally dreamlike worlds of text. (Of course, that may simply reflect my own peculiar temperment, and obviously many, many other things are going on as well -- which is what makes MUDs to my mind the most interesting sociio-cultural petri dishes on the Net.) And these avatar VRML worlds may very well produce similarly evocative, complex, and addictive realms of phantasm -- except now they will be delivered to a mass audience currently alienated from textual production. And of course, these junky strip-mall astral planes will be brought to you by the same old bastards, littering their products and icons about, manipulating and capturing the revolutionary potential of imaginal desire. So the task of revivifying both our conception and practice of the imaginal becomes non-trivial task, if only to understand the underlying nature of technocultural transformations. The imaginal will continue to be a dominant factor in the mystification of the Internet, in the future possibilities of play and phantasmic resistance, and in the re-engineering of the psyche by the new mechanisms of spectacular communication. I suspect that a frank, paradoxically demystified look at mystical traditions, including shamanic practices, popular occultism, and esoteric religions, may well come in handy, because it is there that we can investigate imaginal technologies without having to fully tangle with aesthetics, Romanticism, surrealism, etc. Moreover -- and in this I could certainly be accused of my own brand of romanticism -- the synthetic and spontaneous qualities of the imaginal may very well suggest their own avenues to overcoming Bruno Latour's Great Divide with crafty grace and vision, enabling us to wisely play with the emerging patterns in the networks of thoughts, practices, images, and technologies we now, by necessity, must weave. D. PAYING ATTENTION Now I'd like to turn to the second spiritual modality I mentioned above, which is attention. Though the gnostic inflection in cyberculture is for the most part a dangerously dualistic tendency, it arises at its core from something very profound. To put it baldly, even willfully naively, I would say that it is the recognition that individual consciousness, or mind, cannot ultimately be reduced to anything else. We are used to collapsing consciousness to another level of reality and explanation. From a political cultural perspective, we reduce it to a symptom of ideology. From a poststructuralist perspective -- with its horror of the untheorized subject -- we reduce it to an effect of the networks of language and difference. >From a cognitive science perspective, we reduce it to a symphony of neural chemicals, an epiphenomenon of the Darwinian expansion of the brain pan. There are many ways of demystifying consciousness, and though I'm not interested in remystifying it per se, I do think that from a certain very important perspective one cannot afford to reduce it to anything else. Whatever I conceptualize about the "true" mechanisms of power, authority, and causality, I still have to engage my own existence as an awake and aware being with an active self-consciousness about my own subjective flux unto death. How much can I afford to ignore that, in myself and in others? The gnostic temptation, as we are characterizing it here and as you find it expressed in the history of religion and mysticism, is to identify solely with the observer level of consciousness, which becomes a kind of internalized transcendent principle. The body, the physical world, the world of power -- all that becomes a prison for the free light of the mind. And while we are hardly experiencing a mystical renaissance these days, much less a mature one, this gnostic spirit charges the digital air, because, as Hakim Bey has explained, the Internet and our hyperreal media simulations hardwire a crude and technological analog of the gnostic split, whose ultimate example is the Extropian dream of downloading consciousness into a machine. And Bey is quite right in bringing attention to the dangerous and disassociated aspects of this impulse. Of course, for critics like Barbrook and Dery, all this simply reaffirms the essential pathology of the spiritual imaginary. And yet many esoteric religions, hermetic practices, and wisdom traditions also have ways of both critiquing and integrating the gnostic tendency into a more mature and transformative view of the world, of infusing body and world with the alchemical potentials of consciousness. We could certainly discuss both Bey's and Peter Lamborn Wilson's work in this respect, but I am going to switch gears and talk a bit about Buddhism, which is very much a religion of gnosis, one whose phenomenology and philosophy rest upon the radical recognition and technical exploration of the liberatory potentials of consciousness -- potentials that have as much to do with immanence as transcendence, bodies as minds. As a historical religion, some dominant forms of Buddhism have certainly drifted into hardcore asceticism and otherworldly flight, but many of its more Tantric and Taoist-inflected forms, as well as its current Western manifestations possess encouraging this-wordly elements. What moves to the fore in many of these Buddhist mutations is attention, mindfulness, and a commitment to the spontaneous clarity and emptiness of the mind as it reveals itself to us in everyday experience. This quality of attention has the ability to de-reify the given reality of ordinary experience, which in some sense is the first step on the ladder of gnosis. And yet, as a practice, the work of mindfulness and attention also revolve around a radical embrace of the passing present, and serves as a hedge against both the constant temptations of delusional fantasy, and the instrumental machinations of the anxious clutching ego. It is not an escape so much as a letting go, a renunciation of already habitual forms of escape. Renunciation does not just mean a quiescent refusal to act; one can also renounce those very illusions that prevent on honest appraisal of the reality of our condition, socio-historical as well as subjective. Gurdjieffians say that "There is no God but reality. To seek Him elsewhere is the action of the Fall." One of the ways these considerations can fit into the question of technoculture, media power, and the Internet concerns the psychodynamics of attention in the empire of signs. How do you move in a hypertext environment? How do you filter a suspect media glut? What draws you through the digital garden of forking paths? How do they sink their talons in? The answer in part has to do with the tactics of attention. As Bruce Sterling has pointed out, one of the secret equations that defines the future of the Net is that money is attention. Attention is the evanescent point of capture and resistance. The more awareness you have about the way your attention works on a moment-to-moment level, the more suppleness, the more space will form around that activity. Your tactics change. It's not that you are no longer captured, seduced or compelled, or that you escape somehow to some realm where you can completely control your experience of the world. But psychodynamic practices which deepen your awareness and attention, whether from Buddhism, or other contemplative traditions, or purely secular techniques, give you a sort of edge, a more fluid and tactical intelligence. And all this has nothing at all to do with religious belief. --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de