💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › hakim-bey-the-obelisk.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:45:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: The Obelisk
Author: Hakim Bey
Date: May 1, 1997
Language: en
Topics: history, ideology
Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://hermetic.com/bey/obelisk

Hakim Bey

The Obelisk

1. Dans la merde

No systematic ideation seems able to measure the universe—a one-to-one

map even of the subjective world can probably only be achieved in

non-ideational states. Nothing can be posited—“nevertheless, it moves.”

Something comes into cognition, and consciousness attempts to structure

it. This structure is then taken for the bedrock of reality, and applied

as a mappa mundi—first as language, then as ideology inherent in

language. These language/ideology complexes tend to become orthodoxies.

For example, since the Enlightenment it has been considered indisputable

that only one mode of consciousness is fully real; we might call it the

consciousness that “falsifies”—i.e., that verifies science as true.

Before the Enlightenment other orthodoxies held sway and valued other

forms of consciousness or cognition. We could sum up these earlier

orthodoxies under the rubrics of God and Nature, and perhaps associate

them with the Neolithic and Paleolithic, respectively. Although these

worldviews retain some adherents they have been archaeologically

submerged, so to speak, by “Universal Reason”. The Enlightenment

coincides with the first determined breakthrough into scientific

instrumentality and the “conquest of Nature”; God survives the onslaught

for another century but finally (after a deathbed scene of positively

operatic length) succumbs around 1899. Nature is silent; God is dead.

Ideology is rational and scientific; the dark ages are over. If we can

say that the 18^(th) century brought us the betrayal of Nature, and the

19^(th) century the betrayal of God, then the 20^(th) century has

certainly produced the betrayal of (and by) ideology. Enlightenment

Rationalism and its offshoot/rival Dialectical Materialism have expired

and gone to heaven and left us “dans la merde” (as the dying Gurdjieff

told his disciples), stuck in the mire of a material world reduced to

the cruel abstraction of exchange and dedicated only to its own

self-defacement and disappearance.

The fact is that any map will fit any territory…given sufficient

violence. Every ideology is complicit with every other ideology—given

enough time (and rope). These complexes are nothing but unreal estate,

properties to be stripped of assets, vampirized for imagery, propped up

to keep the marks in line, manipulated for profit—but not taken

seriously by grown-ups. For the adult of the species there remains

nothing but the atomized sell of exchange, and the unlikely consolations

of greed and power.

2. Hermes Revividus

But there appear to exist other consciousnesses, and perhaps even kinds

of cognition that remain uninvolved in consciousness in any ordinary

sense. Aside from all scientific or religious definitions of these other

forms, they persist in appearing, and are therefore potentially

interesting. Without ideologizing these forms, can we still say anything

useful about them? Language is still traditionally deemed ineffective in

this regard. But theoria, originally in the sense of “vision” or

insight, possesses a sudden and drifting nature, akin to poetry. In such

terms could we speak of a kind of hermetic criticism (on the model of

Dali’s “paranoia criticism”) capable of dealing with these other forms,

however obliquely and glancingly?

It is Hermes who bridges the gap between the metalinguistic and the

sublinguistic in the form of the message, language itself, the medium;

he is the trickster who leads in misleading, the tremendum that echoes

through the broken word. Hermes is therefore political, or rather

ambassadorial—patron of intelligence and cryptography as well as an

alchemy that seeks only the embodiment of the real. Hermes is between

text and image, master of the hieroglyphs that are simultaneously

both—Hermes is their significance, their translatability. As one who

goes “up and down” between spirits and humans, Hermes Psychopomp is the

shamanic consciousness, the medium of direct experience, and the

interface between these other forms and the political. “Hermetic” can

also mean “unseen”.

The late Ioan Couliano pointed out that Renaissance Hermeticism offered,

as one definition of magic, the influence of text/image complexes “at a

distance” on the conscious and unconscious cognition of subjects. In a

positive sense these techniques were meant for the “divinizing” of the

magus and of material creation itself; thus alchemy is seen as a freeing

of consciousness (as well as matter) from the heavier and more negative

forms and its realization as self-illumination. But as Blake—himself a

great hermeticist—pointed out, everything has its “form and spectre,”

its positive and negative appearance. If we look at the positive “form”

of hermeticism we see it as liberation and therefore as politically

radical (as with Blake, for instance); if we regard its “spectre”,

however, we see that the Renaissance magi were the first modern spies

and the direct ancestors of all spin-doctors, PR men, advertisers and

brainwashers. “Hermetic criticism” as I see it would involve an attempt

to “separate out” various formal and spectral aspects of communication

theory and its modern applications; but this realm is choked with

undergrowth and clear separations can rarely be defended. Let’s just say

we’re looking for patches of sunlight.

3. Critique of the Image

The critique of the Image is at the same time a defense of the

Imagination.

If the spectral hermeticism of the totality consists of the totality of

its imagery, then clearly something can be said in defense of

iconoclasm, and for resistance to the screen (the media interface). The

perfection of exchange is presented as a universal imaginaire, as a

complex of images (and text/image complexes) arranged through

reproduction, education, work, leisure, advertising, news, medicine,

death, etc., into an apparent consensus or “totality”. The unmediated is

the unimagined—even though it is life itself we’re discussing, we have

failed to imagine it, or to evaluate it. That which is present but

remains unrepresented also remains virtually unreal for us, inasmuch as

we have capitulated to the consensus. And since consciousness actually

plays a rather miniscule role here, we all capitulate at least most of

the time, either because we can’t stand too much reality, or because

we’ve decided to think about it later, or because we’re afraid we’re

insane, and so on.

Byzantine Iconoclasm and (later) Islam attempted to cut through the

hermetic dilemma by “prohibiting” the Image. To a certain extent the

latter succeeded, so that even its representational art deliberately

refused perspective and dimensional illusion; moreover, in a way that

Benjamin might have noticed, the painting never stands alone but is

“alienated” by text that enters it and flattens it yet more. The

“highest” arts are architecture as arrangement of organic space and

calligraphy as arrangement of organic time; moreover the word is

ideological for Islam—it not only represents logos but presents it as

linearity, as a linked series of moments of meaning. Islam is

“text-based” but it refuses the Image not simply to exalt the text.

There are two “Korans” in Islam, and the other one is generally

interpreted as integral with Nature itself as a kind of non-verbal

semiotics, “waymarks on the horizon.” Hence the geomorphism of the

architecture, and its interaction with water, greenery, landscape and

horizon—and also its ideal interpenetration by calligraphic text.

Now admittedly this ideational or religious complex can assume its own

intense rigidity and heaviness. Its truly luminous organicity can

perhaps best be appreciated in old anonymous unofficial forms like the

domed caravansaries of Central Asia or the African mud mosques rather

than in the grand imperial Masterpieces— or the catastrophic modern

capital cities of Islamdom. But wherever the Image has been lost and

forgotten (or at least supplanted to some extent by other possibilities)

it is possible to feel a certain lightness or relief from the burden of

the image, and a certain lightness in the sense of luminousness as well.

Even in modern Libya, which has banned all commercial advertising (and

allows signs only in Arabic), one can experience at least a moment of

the utopia of the absence of the image, the public image, the

hieroglyphics of exchange, the iconolatry of representation. One can

reject the authoritarianism of the ban on imagery without necessarily

rejecting its intentionality. We could interpret it in a sufiistic

manner—that a voluntary self-restraint vis-a-vis imagery and

representation (a sublimation of the image) can result in a flow of

power to the autonomous (“divinized”) imagination. This could also be

envisioned as a suppression-and-realization in the dialectical sense.

The purpose of such an exercise, from a sufi perspective, would be to

channelize the “creative imagination” toward the realization of

spiritual insight—for example, revealed or inspired texts are not merely

read but re-created within the imaginal consciousness. Clearly this

direct experience aspect of imaginal work may raise the question of

one’s relation with orthodoxy and mediated spiritual authority. In some

cases values are not merely re-created, but created. Values arc

imagined. The possibility appears that orthodoxy may deconstruct itself,

that ideology may be overcome from within. Hence the ambiguous relation

between Islamic authorities and Islamic mystics.

Thc sufi critique of the Image can certainly be ‘“secularized” to the

extent of adding to our own concept of hermetic criticism. (Some sufis

were themselves hermeticists and even accepted the existence of Hermes

Trismegistus as a “prophet”.) In other words, we do not oppose the Image

as theological iconoclasts but because we require the liberation of the

imagination itself—our imagination, not the mediated imaginaire of the

market.

Of course this critique of the image could just as well be applied to

the word—to the book—to language itself. And of course it should be so

applied. To question a medium is not necessarily to destroy it, in the

name of either orthodoxy or heresy. The Renaissance magi were not

interested merely in reading the hieroglyphs but in writing them.

Hieroglyphics was seen as a kind of projective semiotics or textual

imaginal performance produced to effect change in the world. The point

is that we imagine ourselves rather than allow ourselves to be imagined;

we must ourselves write ourselves—or else be written.

4. The Unseen Obelisk

If oppression emanates from the power of that which is seen, then logic

might compel us to investigate the possibility that resistance could

ally itself with the power of that which is unseen. The unseen is not

necessarily the invisible or the disappeared. It can be seen and might

be seen. It is not yet seen—or it is deliberately hidden. It reserves

the right to re-appear, or to escape from representation. This hermetic

ambiguity shapes its tactical movement; to use a military metaphor, it

practices guerrilla techniques of “primitive war” against those of

“classical war”, refusing confrontation on unequal terms, melting into

the generalized resistance of the excluded, occupying cracks in the

strategic monolith of control, refusing the monopoly of violence to

power, etc. (“Violence” here also signifies imagistic or conceptual

violence.) In effect it opposes strategy (ideology) with tactics that

cannot be strategically bound or ideologically fixed. It might be said

that consciousness “alone” does not play as vital a role in this as

certain other factors (“Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill”).

For example, there is an aspect of the unseen that involves no effort,

but consists simply in the experience of places that remain unknown,

times that are not marked. The Japanese aesthetic term wabi refers to

the power of such places or objects—it means “poor”. It is used to

refer, for example, to certain teacups that appear badly-made

(irregular, unevenly fired, etc.), but upon a more sensitive appraisal

are seen to possess great expressiveness of “suchness”—an elegance that

approaches conceptual silence—something of the melancholy of

transitoriness, anonymity, a point at which poverty cannot be

distinguished from the most refined aesthetic, a quintessence of the

Taoist yin, the “mysterious power” of flowing water or empty space. Some

of these teacups sell for millions. Most of them are made by Zen

artisans who have achieved the state of wabi, but it might be said that

the most prized of all would be made unselfconsciously (or even

“unconsciously”) by genuinely poor craftsmen. This mania for the natural

and spontaneous also finds its expression in the Taoist fondness for

bizarre rocks that stimulate the imagination with convolutions and

extrusions and strange imbalances. Zen gardeners prefer rocks that

suggest distant mountains or islands, erasing all other images, or

better yet rocks suggestive of nothing at all—non-ideational

form—perfect poorness.

As soon as something is represented it becomes an image of itself,

semiotically richer but existentially impoverished, alienated, drawn out

of itself and extenuated—a potential commodity. The wabi of the teacups

is seriously compromised by the high prices they command. To be

effective (to produce “satori”) the object must be experienced directly

and not mediated in exchange. Perhaps the really valuable cups are not

yet seen because they are overlooked. No one can even perceive them,

much less their value. The sole and spontaneous exception to this

general inattentiveness is…ourselves!—we have imagined the value of wabi

for these objects times or places—for ourselves. These are perhaps among

the “small pleasures” that Nietzsche says are more important than the

great ones. In some cases the melancholy aspect of these things is

exacerbated by the realization that time itself has overcome ugliness

and turned it into an unnoticed beauty. Certain streets in North Dublin

capture this quality perfectly, as do some abandoned New Jersey

industrial sites where the organic (rust, water, weeds) has sculpted old

machinery into spontaneous pure form and landscape. This melancholia

(which was held to be a trait or sign of creativity by the old

hermeticists) approaches another aesthetic term, the Persian word

dard—which literally means “pain”, but is applied in more subtle terms

to the art of direct expression of certain musicians (especially

singers) in the sense of a transparent and unaffected melancholic

longing for an absent transcendent or beloved. The Persian fable teaches

that the pain of rejected love turns an ordinary sparrow into a

nightingale. The lover is poor as the dervish is poor, because desire is

that which is not fulfilled—but from this poverty there emerges an

aesthetic of wealth, an overflowing, a generosity or even painful excess

of meaning—under the guise of melancholy and disappointment.

Aside from the inadvertancy of the unseen, there also exists a more

active form, so to speak—the form of the deliberate unseen. This is part

of the sphere wherein appears the consciousness of everyday life of

itself and its tactical intention to enhance its own unmediated

pleasures and the autonomy of its freedom from representation. Thus

conditions are maximized for the potential emergence of “the marvelous”

into the sphere of lived experience. This situation resembles that of

the artist—but “art” enters this space only on condition that it refuses

to mediate experience for us and instead “facilitate” it. One example

would be a love affair based on an eroticism that does not appear in

mediation, for which no “roles” are constructed, no commodities

produced. Another example might be a spontaneous festival, or a

temporary autonomous zone, or a secret society; here, “art” would regain

its utility.

The Renaissance magi understood that the ancient Egyptian obelisk was a

perfect hermetic form for the dissemination of their hieroglyphic

projective semiotics. From the top down it represents (mathematically) a

sun-beam; from the bottom up, a lingam. It broadcasts or radiates its

text/image complexes therefore both to the light above consciousness

itself, and to the unconscious represented by sexuality. From the

emblem-books such as the great Hypnerotomachia of 1499 we learn that the

hermetic purpose for such monuments would be to call into existence the

utopia of desire and the bliss of alchemical union. But the Magi never

perfected their deciphering of the hieroglyphs and their utopia remained

enclosed within the hermetic landscapes of the Emblems. The notion of

the power of the obelisks, however, took root in western consciousness

and unconsciousness, from the Napoleonic and British appropriations in

Egypt to the Masonic involvement in the Washington Monument.

By contrast to the obelisk of the State, one could imagine a genuinely

hermetic obelisk inscribed with magical writing about direct experience

of non-ordinary consciousness; its effectiveness would consist of the

near-impossibility of its being seen; it might, for example, be sited in

a remote wilderness—or in the midst of abandoned industrial decay. It

might even be buried. It would be a “poor” obelisk. Rumors would

circulate about it. Those who actually found it would perhaps be deeply

moved by its mysteriousness and remoteness. The obelisk itself might

even have vanished, and been replaced again with a beam of dusty

sunlight. But the story of it might retain some power.

5. The Organic Machine

But what is revolt for? Simply to assuage the terminal resentment of the

eternally disappointed and belated? Could we not simply cease our

agitation and pursue that teacup or that beam of sunlight, if we cannot

be satisfied with the ecstasy of the totality? Why should our hermetic

critique lead us to an assertion of a dialectic of presence over

exchange, over alienation, over separation? If we pretend to “create

values” then we should be prepared to articulate them, however much we

may reject “ideology”. After all, pancapitalism also rejects ideology

and has even proclaimed the end of the dialectic—are our values

therefore to be subsumed in Capital? If so, then—why struggle?

One possible response to this question could be made on the basis of an

existentialist revolt-for-revolt’s sake, in the tradition of Camus or

the Italian Stirnerite anarchists. We would be ill-advised to despise

this answer—but it may perhaps be possible to add to it in more positive

terms (in terms of “form”, not “spectre”).

For example, we could say that the Paleolithic economy of the Gift still

persists, along with the “direct experience” spirituality of shamanism,

and the non-separation of “Society Against the State” (Pierre Clastres),

in the form of those rights and customs discussed by E. P. Thompson,

reflected in myth and folklore, and expressed in popular festal and

heretically resistant forms throughout history. Refer to Bakhtin’s

Rabelais, to Christopher Hill’s Word Turn’d Upside Down, or Vaneigem’s

Free.Spirit. In other words: a tradition of resistance has persisted

since the Neolithic, unbroken by the rise of the first States, and even

till today. Thus: we resist and revolt because it is our glorious

heritage to do so—it is our “conservatism”. This resistance movement has

become incredibly shabby and dusty since it first arose some 12,000

years ago in response to the “first ideologies” (agriculture, the

calendar, the appropriation of labor)—but it still persists because it

still defines most of the “empirical freedoms” that most people would

like to enjoy: absence of oppression, peace, plenty, autonomy,

conviviality or community, no rich or poor, spiritual expression and the

pleasure of the body, and so on. It may be impossible to construct a

system or ideology or strategy on such uncategorizable desires—but it is

equally impossible to refute them with ideology, precisely because of

their empirical and “tactical” nature. No matter what, they persist—even

if they remain for all practical purposes unseen, still they refuse to

go away. When all the ideas have betrayed us, this “organic machine”

(Society vs. the State) declines even to define itself as an idea. It

remains loyal to our immemorial inarticulacy, our silence, our poorness.

Capital pursues its telos beyond the human. Science has already betrayed

us—perhaps the next (or last) betrayal will be of the human itself, and

of the entire material world. Only two examples need be given here to

illuminate (rather than “prove”) this contention. The first concerns

money, which in the last five or six years has transcended its links

with production to the alarming degree that some 94.2% of the global

“money supply” now consists of pure financial capital. I’ve called this

the Gnostic uploading of the economic body, in honor of those old

Gnostic Dualists and their hatred of everything material. The practical

result of this situation is staggering for any consideration of economic

justice as an “empirical” concern, since the migratory or nomadic nature

of pancapitalism permits “disembodied Capital” to strip the productive

economy of its assets in the cause of profits that can only be measured

by purely “spiritual” means. Moreover, this Capital has become its own

medium, and now attempts to define a universal discourse in which

alternatives to exchange simply vanish as if they’d never existed and

could never exist. Thus all human relations are to be measured in money.

To illustrate Capital as its own medium, and as our second example, we

can look at bioengineering. There is no force that can prevent

pancapitalism from acquiring patents to every identifiable gene. This

means that farmers are now being asked to pay “rents” on certain genetic

strains that they themselves developed, because the “rights” to those

strains were acquired by the zaibatsus. The dubious triumph of cloning

is supposed to compensate for the profit-driven ravaging of Nature’s

last remnants. Moreover, the human genome project, which has “solved”

the production of life as a biochemical machine, allows “evolution”

itself to be coopted and absorbed into Capital. As the market envisions

the future, the human itself will become humanity’s final commodity—and

into this “value” the human will disappear. Capital’s self defacement

implies humanity’s self-effacement. Acting as a purely spiritual

substance—money—Capital will attain the ownership of life’s becoming,

and thus the power to shape the very protoplasm of the material world as

pure exchange.

Our essential question then concerns the possibility of the

re-appearance of the unseen as opposition. Finally it would seem that a

tactical refusal of all strategic systemization may be inadequate to

bring about this desired re-appearance. A positive proposal is required

to balance the gestures of refusal. We must hope that an organic

strategy of victory will emerge as “spontaneous ordering” from the

driftwork of tactics. Any attempt to impose this strategic unity from

“above” must be renounced as (at best) nostalgia for the lost utopia of

ideology—or as “bad religion” of some sort.

But just as the Image has its spectre and its form, so we might play

with the notion that the Idea, too, has a spectral and a formal

manifestation. As a “spook in the head” the idea remains nothing but a

semantic trap—disguised for example as a moral imperative. But as a

“form” in the Blakean sense the idea itself may take on organicity as a

production of the body and the “creative intellect”, just as the image

may be turned toward realization by the body and the “creative

imagination”. Perhaps in some sense it is the idea that has remained

unseen till now, and thus retains all its power, having never fallen

away into representation. Neglected all along—having never been given a

price—and perhaps remaining inexpressible even in its manifestation—this

idea may “give meaning to revolt.” And it may be written ambiguously in

hieroglyphs whose meaning is uncertain, but whose “magical” effect is

nevertheless potent—it may be written even on a hidden obelisk. But it

will have been written by us.

6. Platonic Nets

It seems as if there should exist two possible kinds of network (or even

of communication technology)— one aristotelian, text-based, linear—the

other platonic, image-based, non-linear. Language, for example, as

viewed from this perspective might appear more platonic, since words are

based on “inner pictures” and thus cannot be limited by pure lexicality

or one-to-one “translation”; while by contrast a network of computers,

using digital text-based programming, might appear as a perfect

aristotelian system.

But this neat dualism dissolves into paradox and conundrum. Text itself

is picture-based (hence “non-linear”) in Sumer, Egypt, China. Even our

alphabet is picture-based; the letter “p”, for example, is simply an

upside-down foot, since Indo-European words for “foot” almost always

begin with “p” (or “f”). Text, which is supposed to be linear, is

“language-based” and partakes of language’s non-linearity. When “speech

genres” are textualized they become in some senses more linear (because

stripped of contextual depth formerly provided by the extra dimensions

of speech such as tone, gesture, performance, etc.)—but in some other

ways this stripping of language to produce text results in further

ambiguities, since the context of the text now consists largely of the

reader and the reader’s inner world.

Thus the fact that computers are digital (simple on/off switches in

massive array) and text-based does not make them genuine aristotelian

machines, since image is already embedded in language, and even more

because the screen itself is also already an image, whether it displays

image, text, or both at once. If programming could be based directly on

images rather than text—as some savants believe possible—the computer

could easily be seen as a platonic machine. The platonizing effect of

the computer is already present not only in its screenal display of

images but also in the psychological reality of the screen as image. In

effect, the computer is a hieroglyphic machine, an interface mode of

text and image; hence its magic appearance to the unconscious.

The Renaissance magi (especially Athanasius Kircher) believed that the

Egyptian hieroglyphs were purely platonic (—in this, they followed

Plotinus and Iamblichus)—that is, that each image was an ideal form, and

that their deployment could not only indicate meaning but also create

and project it. Thus the hieroglyphs were seen as an ideal amalgam of

text and image—an emblematic form of writing. Now when Champollion

deciphered the Rosetta Stone, it was discovered that hieroglyphs were

already used quasi-alphabetically (on the model of “[picture] foot =

[phoneme] p”), although there were also cases where single images or

imageclusters represented the objects depicted as words. This discovery

relegated the unsuccessful translation attempts of the old magi to

complete oblivion. Their theories are now only mentioned in passing as

examples of “false” hermetic science and bad Egyptology. But as Couliano

noted, these discarded theories have great secret heuristic power,

because they describe empirically some of the ways in which text, image,

and mind interact. Once the neo-platonic metaphysics and crude magical

fantasies have been discarded, hieroglyphic theory can be used to

understand the mode of operation of text/image complexes—that is,

emblems.

The emblem books were Renaissance experiments in the “projective

semiotics” of hieroglyph-theory. Allegorical pictures accompanied by

texts (often one text in prose and one in poetry)—and in a few cases

even by music (the great Atalanta Fugiens of Michael Maier, for

example)—were collected in sequences, published as books, and intended

for the magical edification of readers. The “morals” of the emblems were

thus conveyed on more than one level at once. Each emblem was

simultaneously:

a) a picture accompanied by words;

b) a picture “translated” from words. That is, the pictures’ real values

are not purely formal but also allegorical, so that Hercules stands for

“strength”, Cupid for “desire”, and the emblem itself can be read as a

“sentence” composed of these “words”;

c) a hieroglyphic “coding” in which certain images not only represent

words but also “express the essence” of those words, and project them in

a “magical” manner, whether or not the reader is consciously aware of

this process.

Our working hypothesis is that the world’s image of itself not only

defines its possibilities but also its limits. The world’s

representation of itself to itself (its “macrocosmic” image) is no more

and no less than the self’s “microcosmic” image of itself “writ large”

so to speak, on the level or mentalité and the imaginaire. This is part

of our “secularized” hermetic theory; it explains, for instance, why

emblems have influences on multiple levels of cognition.

The radical magi encountered a world wherein one world-image was locked

in place—not just the geocentric cosmos but the whole Christian orthodox

value system that went with it. Their subversive purpose revolved around

the project of a free circulation of imagery, a breaking-up of the

stasis and the creation of a more responsive model. The single

world-view of orthodoxy was seen as stifling, tyrannical, oppressive.

Inasmuch as the self interiorized this view it reproduced the oppression

on the level of the subjective. The hermeticists opposed the very

singleness of this worldview with a contradictory multiplicity, a

critical form of “paganism” based on difference.

Analogously, since 1989–91 we have entered a new “dark age” in which one

worldview (and its imaginaire) claims hegemony over all difference. Not

only is “pancapitalism” a global system, it has also become its own

medium, so to speak, in that it proposes a universal stasis of imagery.

The free circulation of the image is blocked when one image of the world

structures the world’s self-image. True difference is leached away

toward disappearance and replaced by an obsessive re-cycling and

sifting-through of “permitted” imagery within the single system of

discourse (like the medieval theologians who supposedly quarreled over

the gender of angels as the Turks besieged Byzantium). Pancapitalism

“permits” any imagery that enhances profit—hence in theory it might

permit any imagery—but in practice, it cannot. This is the crisis of

“postmodernism”—crisis as a form of stasis, of infinite re-circulation

of the same—the impossibility of difference.

Within the crisis of stasis all manner of imagery can be allowed or even

encouraged when it tends toward the depiction of relation as

exchange—even the imagery of terror, murder, crime—even the extinction

of Nature and the Human—all this can be turned (as imagery at least!)

into profit. What cannot be allowed (except perhaps as nostalgia) is the

imagery of relations other than exchange. Nostalgia can be contained and

marketed—but actual difference would threaten the hegemony of the one

worldview. The “Gift Economy” of some nearly-extinguished “primitive

tribe” makes excellent TV; our mourning for its disappearance can only

boost the sales of whatever commodity might soothe our sense of loss.

Mourning itself can become fetishized, as in the victorian era of onyx

and jet and black-plumed graveyard horses. Death is good for Capital,

because money is the sexuality of the dead. Corpses have already

appeared in advertising—“real” corpses.

Assuming that our hypothesis holds so far, we might well ask from

“whence” there could appear any image of true difference in such a

situation. The obvious answer is that it would have to come from

“outside” the stasis.

This means war, obviously. At the very least, it means “Image War”.

But how can we even begin to define what might lie “outside” the stasis?

Are we not precisely engaged in a situation where all circulating images

become part of the crisis of circulation? This is the “malign

hermeticism” of the totality of mediation—its spectral metastasis, so to

speak—ontology as oncology. Everything that enters the discourse, all

that which is “seen”, is subverted by the very fact that there is only

one discourse, one exchange. “Image War” might be just as productive for

exchange as other forms of “pure war”, since it would at least offer an

“illusion of choice”. This, then, is the hermetic crisis of the tactical

media.

7. Tactical Media

The unseen lies at least potentially outside the space of the

represented totality. Thus it becomes for tactical media a subject of

great theoretical interest. But as media the tactical media must still

mediate, and therefore the unseen remains “mysterious” in the precise

sense of the term. Since only the seen can be described, the pure unseen

cannot be written about or represented—although it can be communicated,

at least in “Zen” terms.

However the unseen is not necessarily “pure”. If it were pure, it would

interest us a great deal less that it does, sinee it would thereby share

in a characteristic we associate with ideology and stasis. In fact the

unseen attracts us because of its impurity.

In effect there appear to exist degrees of the unseen. The unseen can

paradoxically appear even within the locked circularity of the mediated

totality, either inadvertently or else by subversion. For example the TV

show about the primitive tribe, and the melancholy of the disappearance

of the Gift, cannot touch the unseen actuality of the Gift and its

meaning for the people who know it. But sometimes the spoken text or the

editing of the film will create potent cognitive dissonances with

certain images that suggest the presence of the unseen, at least for a

few viewers who are prepared for such irruptions of the mysterious, its

“guerrilla” raids on consensus consciousness.

Moreover, the “intimate media” remain relatively invisible to the

totality because they are so “poor”. The petty extent to which such

media participate in market economics, much less consensus aesthetics,

makes them so insignificant as to render them meaningless for all

practical purposes. Of course as soon as any energy and originality is

seen to emanate from such media they are at once absorbed into

Capital—and the unseen must retreat, drift on, evade definition, move

elsewhere. But this process takes time, and time makes opportunities.

Thus tactical media could make use either of “guerrilla” operations

within the media totality, or of intimate media that remain (in some

impure manner) outside that totality. But in either case tactical

integrity would demand that such “appearances” take place only where

they can be effective—in military terms: where they can damage the

totality without being absorbed into its “spectacle of dissidence” and

permitted rebelliousness. Tactical media will retreat from any such

englobement, and in such moments of tactical withdrawal tactical media

may have to engage in violence and sacrifice (at least on a conceptual

level). Tactical media will make mistakes—all the more so because of its

improvisational nature, the absence of any overall strategy. Because

tactical media refuses purity, it will engage—and it will be defeated,

very often by its own “success”.

The purpose and intention of tactical media is precisely not to

rejuvenate the consensus by allowing itself to be vampirized of its

creative energies by the imaginaire of the UnDead and its “natural laws”

of exchange. But we cannot say therefore that the purpose of tactical

media “is” the destruction of the totality. This statement of identity

would define an ideology or source of authority for tactical media, and

limit it to the role of opposition—in effect, to its “spectral”

appearance. We certainly don’t wish long life and success to the

totality, but by defining ourselves (or our techniques) solely as

“destructive” we are simply inviting our own recuperation into the

pattern of oppression. Tactical media, I suggest, should be about

something and for something—this would constitute its “formal”

appearance.It should be for the unseen—even for a seduction into the

unseen.

Does this mean that the tactics of tactical media can only be defined

“situationally”? Even if we reject all ideologizing of intentionality

can we still say anything descriptive about specific goals? If we refuse

strategy, can we nevertheless articulate something about a tendency or

movement or unifying imaginaire of presence (a “myth” perhaps) that

might underlie and inform our tactical mediations?

This may indeed be possible, if only because the imaginal values in the

process of emergence in tactical media seem to concern those empirical

freedoms expressed not only in immemorial “rights and customs” but also

in the most radical politics of desire. In other words, an “organic”

substitute for strategy/ideology arises from a shared imaginaire based

on such traditional yet radical perspectives. It is in this way that

tactical media can be seen as an aspect of a possible effective

opposition to exchange itself, to the post ideological ideology of

Capital—an opposition that cannot be englobed, and therefore can

contemplate the possibility of victory.

All this is pure hypothesis, so it would be pointless and perhaps even

counter-productive to engage in any attempt to prescribe or predict or

even to influence the tactical media. The historical movement envisioned

here (which even faces the challenge of the very “End of History”) can

make nothing out of any outmoded vanguardism or “unacknowledged

legislator-ism of a discredited intelligentsia, artists, etc., etc. It

does, however, seem possible lo adopt an experimental” approach. Who can

foretell success or failure? An inherent weakness for narrativity,

however, and a desire to work on some sort of “emblematic” structure

leads me to an “aimless wandering” or taoist theorizing around certain

themes considered here—notably the notions of hermeticism in both its

“formal” and “spectral” aspects. For instance: since money is “imaginal”

it is susceptible to hermetic manipulation—even to the “intuition”

discussed by such strange billionaires as George Soros. It seems

theoretically possible to “hack” money at the level of its

representationality—all the more so now that most of it is pure

representation. Money that can be manipulated imagistically because

money itself is image, however, can also be “downloaded” from its

CyberGnostic numisphere and manifested on the earthly plane as hard

cash, goods, production. Thus it would appear feasible to redirect

capital as wealth, away from areas where pancapitalism has “decreed” its

(symbolic) presence, into areas where it has “forbidden” its (real)

presence.

“Decree” and “forbid” are enclosed by quotation marks because in truth

the situation is so complex that “legality” has become an extremely

ambiguous category. Money as medium is engulfed in the same crisis of

definition as all the other media. Into this space of uncertainty,

hermetic operations could be directed (in perfectly legal ways) such as

to interfere with the circulation of Capital. The space of

uncertainty—the crack in the monolith of representation—has its deep

origin in the intense anxiety of the crisis of stasis. The image of the

imaginaire as a labyrinth with no exit induces a kind of claustrophobia

akin to that experienced by the Renaissance occultists in relation to

the cosmic stasis of doctrine: escape panic. We are after all still “in

transition” toward a perfect global market—the cosmos of economy is not

yet fully and flawlessly enclosed.

Hence for instance the sudden obsession with “content”. What are we

going to do with all the data—what use is it? And who shall create in

order that others (all others) may consume? A real puzzle.

Certain elements within political structures still retain a half-hearted

sentimentality about the “Social” state; they still want to help program

the “content”. They are opposed by the zaibatsus that demand “pure”

content, measurable only by price rather than value. But what do “the

people” want? Into the tactical spaces left vacant by this clash of

bewildered titans, certain mediations might be effected. The old magic

power of the scribe, the hermetic initiate, might constitute a

counter-force to the magic power of the manipulation of content, the

monopoly of meaning and interpretation claimed by the totality (which

suddenly doesn’t look quite so total…).

As we are discussing media, the evocation of the word “magic” seems

somehow permissible. How relevant these musings might prove to

situations encountered in unmediated reality—perhaps that is another

kettle of fish. For now, however, we are simply exercising our

imagination.