Technogypsy

A response to Dr Last's technosocialism

It’s interesting to see Cadell Last developing “technosocialism”. I coined the term Technosocial for my cult podcast with Dylan Walker, Daniel Fraga and Raven Connolly, and yet I have mixed feelings about it.

The first couple of points I would like to make are not responding directly to anything Dr. Last writes in his article, but rather general thoughts on technosocialism as a term. We’ll get to Cadell’s points later.

Partly, my issue is a knee-jerk reaction. I live in London and encounter much of the “millennial left” here. They are terrible. When I spoke to Dave McKerracher recently he emphasised the importance of not dunking on other movements. Sorry Dave. If Owen Jones, Novara Media, and their ilk are the face of the revolution, shoot me now.

My sticking point, however, concerns the centre of power. 19th and 20th century socialism could identify a power centre (the means of production), and other power centres (government, trade unions), and imagine that if the masses could use the latter to control the former, things could be different.

Today, it is hard to imagine a power centre that could rival and control the platforms and algorithms of the tech lords. On the right, people ARE attempting to theorise this, as a potentially human/potentially AI Warhammer monarchy. The left could conceive a master system controlled by the people for their own good. But what agency would allow them to claim this power? Is this the birth of left wing Yarvinism? AKA fully automated luxury lesbian cyber-Stalinism? Again, count me out. I prefer my lesbians glossy and Paglian.

But let’s spend some time with Cadell’s ideas. I share his concern with the brutal reality of social difference in the internet age. I appreciate Cadell’s interest in exploring what a 21st century social contract might look like, insulating people against endless exploitation by algorithms and rent-seeking platforms.

Cadell:

In short: technofeudal society is structured by a precarious consciousness paying rents to become entrapped by specular imaginaries. These specular imaginaries promise disembodied positive experiences and/or the illusory offer of the opportunity to be seen and heard in a free democratic competition of ideas. In the real of the system, any foundation for actual life becomes systematically undermined. What disappears is any semblance of an ethical commitment to structures supporting real long-term intimacy, because they are diametrically opposed to the specular imaginary of positive experience. Structures supporting real long-term intimacy are built in the symbolic fires of negativity and lack — the basic acceptance of symbolic castration — for the establishment of something that has often emerged in the relations between father-son, mother-daughter, or simply and perhaps most generally: elder and child (or even teacher and student). The social fabric of society is breaking down, not only because there are no longer elders that are willing to sacrifice for the future child, but also because we all seem to be put in the position of children entrapped by specular imaginaries. The result is not a society capable of mediating itself, but a society lost in the immediacy of positive experience structured by auto-erotic loops.

Whew. Even shorter: we are incapable of building professional solidarity, meaningful communities, or even functional families, because the endless flow of cheap, fast-food media is simply too good to give up. It feels better to follow pretty faces and slick voices on Instagram and TikTok, imagining we too are part of the cool club, than it does to hammer out deep bonds and alliances in the flesh.

The solution, for Cadell, is to move away from “specular imaginary capture, and push towards real symbolic ground”, embracing castration, lack, and the painful contradictions and impossibilities of social life.

In other words, to stop chasing total sexual satisfaction, to stop fantasizing about harmonious and whole social arrangements, and to stop buying into the mirages and vampires that promise total wellbeing, total independence, and total integration.

Here, however, I become a Fragaist. If Cadell’s interest is in the political horizons of the real-symbolic, mine I suspect is in the cultural horizons of the real-imaginary. Rather than stepping out of the imaginary, the question is “what can we do here?”.

The immediate danger is of falling into psychosis or perversion, ending up in meaningless masturbatory loops which feel good but which provide no political or social agency. In short, which do not give us power.

However, thousands of years of occult practice and experiment has been preoccupied with precisely this question. Given that we have a propensity to exist in images, how can we use said images to our advantage?

This is a different order of being to being a passive consumer of digital specular imaginaries. It means being an active participant in the creation of one’s own imaginaries. To paraphrase Nietzsche, modern man thinks he is intelligent because he has no need for belief, but anyone who ever needed to create anything - believed in belief.

It must be granted that many of the magical, neo-pagan and New Age communities practicing “occultism” are fringe and, by several measures of political and social agency, handicapped. However, it must also be granted that they have, for several decades, if not for centuries, been building up parallel systems of education, healthcare and communal life. As social collapse has ramped up in the past few years, it is these communities which have remained relatively calm, collected, and unfazed, whispering “well, what did you expect?”.

By orthodox leftist standards, they are not revolutionary proletarians. They are, if anything, the people who have preserved fragments of the pre-industrial feudal relations, with plenty of lascivious pseudo-aristocrats and villagers practicing witchcrafts in their barns.

There is, I suspect, an interesting parallel with much of “proletarian” culture in Eastern Europe. No less than the eminent Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm writes of how, in several Soviet vassal states, conditions remained so bad that the proletarians never truly abandoned the folk and peasant customs that existed prior to “modernist” takeover. Paradoxically - and knowing several Eastern Europeans intimately myself - this means that AFTER communism, there remain traces of a sense for social life, sexual difference, public duty and intrinsic motivation that the cynical proletarianized West is sorely missing.

There is something here. If 19th and 20th century radicalism aimed at a social constellation beyond religion, 21st century radicalism may have to reckon with the folk layers of religion itself.

The stakes are not as diametrically opposed as we might believe. One way to think about the horizon of an imaginary-real occult practice, inclusive of psychoanalytic knowledge, is as follows. (Yes, we can also call this “psychoanalysis outside of the clinic” for better branding.)

Human life is beset by powerful forces external to us. In infancy, these are experienced as, for all intents and purposes, omnipotent. They leave their marks. The experience of a domineering father, a weak but manipulative mother, a beautiful and sexually alluring older sister, an apparently clairvoyant grandma, a violent bully in the playground, create unconscious impressions. The mind continues to believe in the omnipotence of these forces, despite the rational attempts of the conscious mind to overcome and make sense of them.

These then structure the projection space of ordinary life. We react to others who remind us of these impressions, bestowing upon them spooky powers.

However, if we can train ourselves to see these impressions as the work of transpersonal forms, rather than particular individuals, we can work with the energy involved.

For example, the impression is of a violent, domineering male figure, and one continues to attract and yet feel overwhelmed by such figures, one magical flip is to see this as a complex in the sphere of Mars, the war god, or of Saturn, the brutal lord of time. One can approach these encounters as initiations; and rather than projecting omnipotence onto mortal humans, we can see these people as avatars of particular forces that move through both of us, with destructive and constructive tendencies.

Here we see the importance of the idea of “karmic imprints”. A traumatic childhood experience, thus framed, is an unsolicited initiation into the sphere of a particular god-form, but it requires serious work to learn its lessons. Once one masters this imprint, however, one is able to act creatively as a magician in this sphere, invoking the energy productively and helping others on the same path.

The gods take the forms of lords of sex, violence, fathers and mothers, birth, thieves, and so on, precisely because these are the forces that overwhelm us and which we need to learn to resonate with.

(Of course there are other ways to frame what is going on, less psychological, more spiritual. Fortunately, when discussing such matters, the important thing is never theoretically “what is happening”, but “does it work?”).

Last’s “specular digital imaginary” is a form of consumer capitalism that preys upon these complexes. Premodern religion offered saints and deities to mitigate these effects; I agree with Alexander Bard that 20th century mass media culture replaced these with the cults and icons of celebrity, who capture and allow us to move these energies. Walls are plastered with icons of musicians, sportstars, glamour models, and other celebrities, precisely as temples to these energies.

Unfortunately, the problem with deifying other living human beings is that one is always alienated from them. I will never be the lover of the hot women in Playboy; nor will I ever be on stage with the guys in Metallica.

HOWEVER, I CAN form an intimate personal relationship with gods and goddesses of beauty and love, and the various Muses and god-forms of poetry and music. I can take these relationships with me wherever I go. And I can use them to untangle my speculative captures, invoking the forms more authoritatively and with agency.

Worked properly, this is no longer an obfuscation of a real political position (sexually unsatisfied, creatively malnourished, with pornographic and pop culture images soothing inconsolable social isolation). Rather, it unlocks drive, making more expansive expressions of sexuality and of art possible, because I am no longer chasing predatory substitutions, but expressing an intrinsic motivation via an inner erotic dance. There is a reason why the ur-myths of magic always involve fairies, angels and gods taking human men and women as lovers.

Another approach, granted, IS to continually meditate on the emptiness, or the negativity, of these forces, attempting to teach the unconscious mind to stop imagining omnipotent deities where there are none. The problem with this approach to my mind is twofold: it isn’t clear how effective it actually is in escaping capture by the spectral images of pop culture; it doesn’t solve the fact that other people continue to believe in omnipotent deities and godforms regardless. Nor the fact that we actively enjoy the participation in and creation of these forms.

This gets to a point of tension with the Lacanian-Zizekian school, which is critical of ideas of feminised divinity. The argument, as I understand it, is that any form of feminised divinity is representing the infantile unconscious desire to return to blissful unity with the Mother. The importance of masculine Christianity, and Protestantism in particular, is that it jetisons mother-worship and focuses on Fathers and Sons, particularly the Son who is crucified (castrated) by the world.

However, this ignores several of the other forms of feminised deity, which includes the of the abyss of the mother and matrix, rather than presenting a positivist vision qua Mary the good Mother or Gaia the bountiful earth. The sterile mother of the dark moon, Kali, Lilith, Persephone, all present a much more complex, painful and rich relationship with the spirit of woman.

Ironically, the “negativity” identified by Zizekian school IS, to my mind, this same godform, the terrifying and yet ontologically productive emptiness of space and time. The attempt to desexualise and depolarise this form is a symptom of masculine logic, which yet remains erotically sustained by its relationship with this abyss.

An example of this dark, ontoligically productive feminine spirituality can be found in Butoh performances. At stake is an art which is deconstructive of positivist forms, without lapsing into postmodern relativism and sterility. This is no ironic exposition of the artificiality of the screen, the pen, and the conventions of criticism. Nor is it an assault on the craft of authorship and genius.

Instead, drawing from the traditions of the occult and the surreal, what is framed is an art of mediumship and evocation. The impulse is not towards perfection and pure form, but in giving shape, form and voice to that which is in us, and yet beyond us; the extimate, the occulted, the inhuman.

It is, in analytical terms, an art of Das Ding, of working with the elements of humanity that cannot be spoken of in the light. Whether we frame these psychologically, as subconscious drives and repressed complexes, or spiritually, as agencies, energies and egregores operating above and yet through physical form, is less important than the practice itself. The important thing is that it works, and that it is unmistakeably erotically charged.

In conclusion then, I return to the dialogue with Cadell on technosocialism. If what is at stakes there is a form of political settlement that protects people from the violence of the digital imaginary, what I am interested in is a cultural practice that enables people to craft and dance with their own imaginary, digital or otherwise.

In this regard, I probably find the inverse idea of “technofeudalism”, ie. “technopeasantry” more interesting than some. Or, to factor in the nomadic lifestyles, intense creativity, alienness and international culture of people reading this, and in the occult communities more broadly - “technogypsies”.

Gypsies get a bad rap, for being dirty, uneducated, parasitical, violent. But we rarely stop to think of Jews as another successful “gypsy” community (until they got their evil masterplan deathstar James Bond bad guy state of Israel.) Nomadic and alien, but universal in their alienness. And, for that matter, often highly educated and highly capable.

In fact, one Jewish friend once described it to me this way. “In our culture, you never know when the state might turn on you and you’ll have to get up and go somewhere new. So there’s a strong incentive to learn skills that can make a good living anywhere”.

As we have seen with the recent war, Jewishness remains a problem for Western political consciousness. It will be a hilarious irony of history if it is arguments over Israel that destroys the millennial left Antifa brigade. I’m here for it.

As to why this is, is a long and eternal debate. I have some thoughts that I will probably share in a longer article on Freud the Kabbalist, but I can trace the basic outlines here.

My hypothesis is that Jewish religious and cultural education contains traces of Kabbalistic training, whether implicitly or explicitly. This is a form of ancient high mysticism that had its own renaissance in the 16th century following the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain.

Kabbalah, as Harold Bloom has noted, is among other things, a method of interpretation. It is about unfolding layers of meaning encoded in cultural artifacts, rather than taking things as they stand on the surface.

A great paper I discovered lays out the differences between what the author calls a “Hebraic education” and a “Greek education” as follows:

In the Greek teaching method, the professor or the instructor claims to be the authority. If one attends a Bible study class and the class leader says, “I will teach you the only way to understand this biblical book,” you may want to consider the implications. This method is standard since most Seminaries and Bible colleges teach a Greek mode of learning, which is the same method the church has been utilizing for centuries. Hebraic teaching methods are different. The teacher wants the students to challenge what they hear. It is through questioning that a student can learn. Also, the teacher wants his/her students to excel to a point where the student becomes the teacher.

If two rabbis come together to discuss a passage of Scripture, the result will be at least ten different opinions. All points of view are acceptable if each is supported by biblical evidence. It is permissible and encouraged that students develop many ideas. There is a depth to God’s Word, and God wants us to find all His messages contained in the Scripture. Seeking out the meaning of the Scriptures beyond the literal meaning is essential to understand God’s Word fully.

The Greek method of learning the Scriptures has prevailed over the centuries. One problem is that only the literal interpretation of Scripture was often viewed as valid, as prompted by Martin Luther’s “sola literalis,”meaning that just the literal translation of Scripture was accurate. The Fundamentalist movements of today base their beliefs on the literal interpretation of the Scripture. Therefore, they do not believe that God placed more profound, hidden, or secret meanings in the Word. The students of the Scriptures who learn through Hebraic training and understanding have drawn a different conclusion. The Hebrew language itself leads to different possible interpretations because of the construction of the language. The Hebraic method of Bible study opens avenues of thought about God’s revelations in the Scripture never considered. Not all questions about the Scripture studied will have an immediate answer. If so, it becomes the responsibility of the learners to uncover the meaning. Also, remember that many opinions about the meaning of Scripture are also acceptable

In short, a Hebraic education is about discovering meaning. God hides secrets in creation and man’s job is to unfold them and complete them. The idea of textual literalism is absurd, implying that the spiritual mind must be forever a serf to words and ideas written hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Now what is this lengthy digression all about? The hypothesis is this. A Hebraic, or Kabbalistically influenced education, places the mature subject in a totally different relationship to what psychoanalysis calls the Big Other than a Greek, or a traditional Christian (or Islamic) scriptural education. The latter goes around seeking literal, fundamental absolutes, coherent, consistent and unchanging. The former sees the source material as a springboard for new discovery, new inspiration, new creation. Furthermore, jumping off this springboard is a necessary, spiritual act - it is in fact the whole point of human existence.

What might the outcome of this be in other spheres? Well, in the creative and intellectual professions, science, art, law, technology, philosophy, the ability to free oneself from the constraints of absolutes and fundamentals is a HUGE advantage. Creativity is trained not to accept the field as it currently stands, but to plunge into its shadows and discover new forms, new interpretations, new faces of God.

What about for occultism, for psychoanalysis outside of the clinic? Well, whatever the “karmic imprint”, whatever the complex, there is endless meaning, art, thought to be unfolded from it. Even our unknown knowns, the mysteries that our subconscious infantile fantasies take as absolutes, are there not to be seen through and annihilated, but unfolded in real time. The task is not to overcome separation and return to God, but to discover separation and continue God’s work.

It is easy to see why cultural, political and religious totalitarians might HATE such a way of living and being.

And yet, perhaps readers can appreciate the advantages this might give us. To live a spiritual life that can dance with whatever dominant philosophies, legal codes, artistic norms predominate, dive into their depths, revamp and renew them, and to experience this as an act of devotion - what a gift.

This is my suggestion of the stakes of what it takes to become a technogypsy. A man or woman who has no home, but who finds his or her people wherever he or she goes.

This gypsy existence has its price. One must become an exile, inwardly if not outwardly. Here, there is a lesson for the political horizon to take from the experiences of the 20th century countercultural scenes, the early trade unionists, and all the nomads in exile across the ages.

You don’t get to be a universal subject for free. You have to earn your stripes. This means sacrificing something. If you are not already wealthy, it means risking being broke and lonely. It means plunging into your complexes and shadows with the attitude of an alchemist, seeking the gold in the shit. It probably means becoming an outcast and an outsider, alien from the people you grew up with. It means, in the oldest meaning of the term, turning yourself over to a life in God, whatever the fuck that means.

I guess this is where I lean. Towards a technosocialism-in-exile. I’m probably closer to Alexander Bard, with his vision of a digital nomadic gypsy class living on the edge of an emerging technological mega-empire.