This is a book for those who lie defeated by history and by the present. It isn’t a manual to turn the current defeat into a future triumph, but a rumour about a passage hidden within the battlefield leading to a forest beyond it.1 I began to write this book in the late autumn of 2016, at the time when resurging fascism had joined environmental devastation and capitalist biopolitics, in the bleak Valhalla of world-making forces. In earlier years, I had believed that the catalogue of atrocities of our time called for a form of intervention that was quintessentially political. If the problems have to do with the form of our social institutions, I thought, then the changes that are necessary must take place at that same level. It is a matter of achieving change at the level of our organization of the economy, the politics and the social discourse. The rest will follow. Or so I thought. Then, the unfolding events and the apparent impossibility to put a stop both to the disintegration of those institutions that had prevented the return of recent atrocities and to the blatantly suicidal path of environmental wreckage, started to instil a doubt in me. Somehow, it appeared as if the range of the possible had dramatically been shrunk, and that our ability to act differently, or even to imagine otherwise than in a way already inscribed in the present, had been curbed once and for all. Like many others of my generation and of our time, I myself experience this paralysis. Whether by taking the form of political impotence or of individual psychopathology, the oppressive weather of our age seems to impact all of us equally. But even though the present had little in store for anybody interested in fostering what used to be called ‘emancipation’, perhaps the future still hosted the possibility of a change as-yet to come. As anybody with children, I too didn’t want to let go of a however implausible hope for a future, planetary turn in a different direction. And indeed, I too didn’t want to renounce the dubious belief that even an individual can always contribute, however marginally, to social transformations on a large scale. Yet, such stubborn hopes didn’t silence my doubts. For one, I wondered, what am I to do with myself, while we journey through these gloomy, penultimate times? And secondly, is it really true that a sociopolitical revolution would be sufficient to change the course of the events? Or is it perhaps the case that something else, at a different level, would have to change?
This double questioning – a pressing anxiety for my own well-being, and a more theoretical curiosity over the general mechanisms of change – led me to consider the problem through another angle. Might it not be the case that change seems impossible, because technically it is impossible? And might it not be the case that imagination, action or even just life or happiness seem impossible, because they are impossible, at least within the present reality- settings? At their core, both questions pointed towards an element within our reality that stood as the ground of the specific cultural/social/political/economic settings of our age. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we implicitly define what is possible and what is impossible within our world. Perhaps, it is at that level, that we decide what is our world. In traditional philosophical parlance, that is the level of metaphysics: the place where it is discussed what it means to exist, what kind of things legitimately exist, how they exist, in what relation they stand to each other and to their attributes and so on. By deciding on metaphysics, that is by deciding on the most fundamental composition of our world, it is implicitly decided what kind of things can or cannot take place in that world. In less specialist parlance, we could say that it is at that level, that ‘reality’ itself is defined. As the parameters of existence, particularly of legitimate existence, in the world change, so the composition of our world changes – and consequently, the range of the possible takes one or another shape, and with it the field of the ‘good’, that is ethics, and politics, etc.
It might be objected, of course, that metaphysics should be an exact science, much like hard sciences like chemistry or biology are supposed to be. But this objection would require a belief in our ability, as humans, to apprehend the existent as it authentically is: of approaching ‘facts’ in their purest, uncompromised form. And, what is more, that we could convey these immaculate facts through descriptive language, as if onto the marble slab of a laboratory or a morgue, so that we could dissect them and acquire from them an authentic knowledge of things as they are. Such a demand on our ability to know and communicate exactly the ‘truth’ of ‘facts’ would resemble that placed upon the Man with the Blue Guitar, in Wallace Stevens’s poem.
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.2
Whatever we can grasp and communicate through descriptive language – that is through the typical language of history, economics, science, culture – arrives to us always-already shaped by criteria that are not internal to it. Kant argued that the main filter through which the existent had to pass, to reach our perception, was indivisible from our very human nature. It is unavoidable, for example, that we perceive things in space/time – though these dimensions are nowhere to be found in the world as it is in itself. But aside from Kant’s considerations, language itself also plays a crucial role in our perception of things and of the world. Only a range of the existent can be conveyed through linguistic means, much like only a range of the colour spectrum can be perceived by the human eye. No matter what the evolution of our technological prosthetics will be, there wi ll always be shades and things that will remain immune from language and from colour detection. Yet, this last statement is, in itself, a metaphysical axiom: it is a criterion which I suggest to place at the foundation of our understanding of what exists. Also the opposite criterion, that of the limitless ability of language and of its technology to grasp the truth of the existence, is an equally legitimate axiom. Both of them find their justification in themselves, and nowhere else. Since God’s death, we have been left alone to decide the axiomatics of our understanding of the world. We have to set the ground over which we can place our meaningful construction of a world that we can inhabit. These axiomatics, I call ‘reality-settings’: the historically specific decision (witting or unwitting) over what criteria we use to understand the baffling experience of existing somewhere, somewhen.
I wondered if it was precisely at this axiomatic level, that I could detect the present constitution of our world and of today’s range of the possible. I started asking myself: what are the implicit metaphysical assumptions that define the architecture of our reality, and that structure our contemporary existential experience? What defines at the core the peculiarity of our present time, as opposed, for example, to previous times populated by ghosts and gods? I began looking for clues along a cross section traversing contemporary culture, politics and economics, particularly in their globalized Western form. In doing so, my questioning was primarily metaphysical: for such and such cultural or economic forms to take place, what underlying assumptions are necessary at a metaphysical level? What kind of belief in the existence or non-existence of certain things is necessary, to support such and such combination of social practices? What ontology is necessary, to justify the ethical goals that are implicit in so many of our currently prevalent social institutions? And so on. We could also translate in architectural terms this form of questioning. Let us imagine we encountered a mysterious building on a newly discovered alien planet, and we wished to investigate its peculiar architecture. Even before looking for the name of its architect, the first thing that we would ask is: what kind of materials and forces would be necessary, to sustain this type of structure?
But just like a certain type of architecture requires a particular array of materials, so also a certain type of materials seems to have implicit within itself a particular array of possible architectures. As I continued looking for the metaphysical assumptions underlying the form of the present, I started to notice that this particular combination of metaphysical tenets seemed to have inscribed within itself, like a destiny of sort, a particular form of reality and of the world. Thus, my research took a morphological turn; I wasn’t only interested in the building material that makes up our world as we experience it in the contemporary age, but also in the specific destiny of such a world. This destiny, we could call its cosmological form. All metaphysics is a set of decisions on how best to order the chaos of mere existence; it is the form of a particular universe, or cosmos. Cosmology, the ‘discourse around the order of the cosmos’, thus seemed to me a more apt term than just metaphysics, to define the object of my inquiry.3 But underneath every cosmology, as every good myth teaches us, there is a cosmogony: a process of creation of that particular universe. There, at the level of cosmogony, the various aspects of my research seemed to finally coalesce. At that level, at least, I could create a ‘likely story’ – eikos mythos, as Plato has Timaeus define his own cosmogonic tale4 – that would be able to reunite them in one coherent narrative.
My likely story unfolds as follows. The character of our contemporary existential experience, points towards a certain type of ordering of our world, and of ourselves within it. This ordering is superficially social/economic/etc., but in fact derives from a set of fundamental metaphysical axioms. These axioms combine together in an overall system, which is the reality-system of our age. A reality-system shapes the world in a certain way, and endows it with a particular destiny: it is the cosmological form that defines a historical age. At the same time, however, it is also a cosmogonic force: its metaphysical settings and parameters actually create the world – if for ‘world’, as the Greek cosmos or the Latin mundus, we understand precisely the product of an act of ordering chaos. Here comes the mythological aspect of my eikos mythos. It is possible, narratively at least, to present this cosmogonic force as almost a thing, whose world-making activity is revealed by its internal structure. I chose to call the cosmogonic form of our age, ‘Technic’.5
In this book, particularly in Chapter 2, I wish to offer a possible anatomy of Technic, detailing the different parts that compose it and that account for the main reality-settings of our time. This is no normal reality-system, however, since one of its main characteristics is that it involves a disintegration of reality as such. Such a disintegration of reality – which will be described in detail in the intermission between Chapters 2 and 3 – accounts for the nihilistic quality of Technic. This metaphysical nihilism is the destiny that Technic inscribes within the world that it goes on to create, and it can be found in its purest form in the central kernel of Technic: the principle of ‘absolute language’. In the course of my analysis of Technic’s cosmogony, absolute language will figure as the first principle, acting as the innermost level from which all other aspects of Technic are emanated, like light out of a merciless sun. In keeping with my attempt to convey my analysis in a narrative, almost mythological form, I have chosen to borrow from Neoplatonic philosophy the use of ‘hypostases’ to describe the various levels that compose the overall form of Technic. Every hypostasis acts as a sub-force in its own right, defining a specific layer in the overall cosmogonic architecture through which Technic structures our world. Evermore mythologically, I have paired each hypostasis with an ‘archetypal incarn ation’: a figure from our everyday world that embodies the main qualities of a particular level of Technic.
But Technic is just one possible cosmogonic force, and only one possible form of reality. Without doubt it enjoys hegemonic status today, and it shapes the world and the existential experience of billions of our contemporaries – but this doesn’t make it any less contingent than any other possible form of reality. The second part of this book proceeds precisely from the realization of the contingency of Technic’s cosmology, and from the necessity to imagine a different world deriving from different reality-settings. If the metaphysical architecture of Technic’s world has produced such an annihilating immiseration of our existential experience, then we must imagine a new set of reality-principles that would allow for a new range of the possible to emerge. Let’s be immediately clear, though: my attempt is not to provide a blueprint for a global process of renewal of reality. This book is not a political manifesto, or a general call to arms. More modestly, it is a reminder that reality-systems are contingent conglomerates of metaphysical axioms, and that their modification is always possible. Indeed, we are always able to modify our own reality-settings beyond the diktats of our social context, even when history tells us that we are powerless and stuck. This volume is intended for those who lie defeated by history and the present, in the most general and most tragic sense. Regardless of the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves to live, and even if we are completely hopeless about our power to modify the balance of forces on a macroscopic scale, we are always capable of modifying our own reality-settings – thus giving to ourselves a different reality, a different world and a different existential experience within it. Is it pure illusion? Not any more, or any less, than any other reality or any other world that is hegemonic enough to impose its own social institutions over a specific historical period.
At this point, however, a second clarification is needed: I am not claiming that we should relinquish altogether any involvement in worldly activity and politics. Rather, I am pointing in two directions, one pre-political and one post-political. On the one hand, the silent acceptance of a certain reality-system over another goes to define which politics and social policies are possible. Changing reality-settings is a pre-political process that is crucial to any radical rethinking of our political and social life. On the other, my attempt is to offer an emergency plan that is immediately useful to individuals living in a ‘worst case scenario’. My main concern was: how can we still have a dignified life, even when everything seems to have been taken away from us? In this sense, this book suggests a possible therapy to the historical maladies that affect us today – as they affected countless others before us, and predictably also after us in the future. Precisely, to the malady of having to live within history.6
I chose to call ‘Magic’ the therapeutic path of embracing a particular, alternative reality-system. This is, once again, a mythological trope. Like I personified the current reality-system as ‘Technic’, so I named ‘Magic’ the alternative cosmology that I would like to propose. Indeed, neither Technic nor Magic are actually ‘things’ that we physically encounter – rather, they are akin to those ‘hyperobjects’ described by American philosopher Timothy Morton7 as massively distributed, invisible entities that are perceivable only through the mark that they leave on the world. I preferred to define both of them as ‘cosmogonic forces’ – as if they were mythological deities that could feature in Hesiod’s poem. In a sense, I borrowed the method employed, by Giordano Bruno in his 1586 book Lampas Triginta Statuarum – where he identified each cosmological principle with a ‘statue’, and each cluster of statues with original mythological characters going under the names of Chaos, the Ogre, the Night, the Light and so on. As Bruno pointed out:
All things can be easily figured in the form of statues, inasmuch as it is possible to orderly explicate all their ways of being as certain hypostatic configurations.8
I have also implicitly assigned a specific geography to each of the two cosmogonic forces that I discuss, although this is once again a mythological and metaphorical geography rather than a physical one. While Technic represents the spirit of a Northern force – indeed, the first two chapters will refer almost exclusively to thinkers from Northern Europe – Magic belongs to the area of the Mediterranean. This is a different Mediterranean from that which we encounter on the maps, tough, and in fact Chapters 2 and 3 (where I discuss Magic’s cosmogony and Magic’s world) will include references spanning from Ibn Arabi’s Andalusia through Mulla Sadra’s Persia, to Adi Shankara’s India. Like James Hillman’s conception of Greece,9 my Mediterranean is a place of the imagination rather than a product of cartography. Magic’s Mediterranean and Technic’s North resemble thos e sacred cities that French philosopher Henry Corbin locates at the level of the ‘imaginal world’ (mundus imaginalis), where things become forces, and ideas become models for our existence in the world. In this sense, Magic’s reality-system is not an ‘utopia’, but rather a force that lives in Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, ‘the land of non-where’, which Persian philosopher Suhrawardi describes as existing always alongside our material world, however invisibly.10 The Mediterranean is a form of reality, which resounds only metaphorically with the historical modes of life that have emerged along the coasts of Europe, Africa and Asia. My Mediterranean is a vast area of the spirit that, like the sea which it recalls, challenges and transcends the linguistic divisions imposed by exoteric (i.e. public, descriptive) politics and culture.11 It is an area of migration and contamination, where sunlight doesn’t merely reveal the qualities of things and their productive categories, but primarily their ineffable dimension. Like the midday hour in summer, it is haunted by an unnameable temporality, beyond the measure of clocks and of history books.12
Indeed, the notion of the ‘ineffable’ constitutes within Magic’s cosmogony the first and original principle – in specular opposition to the principle of ‘absolute language’ in Technic. The ineffable dimension of existence is that which cannot be captured by descriptive language, and which escapes all attempts to put it to ‘work’ – either in the economic series of production, or in those of citizenship, technology, science, social roles and so on. As recently noted by the Italian philosopher Massimo Donà:
Magical thinking lives wholly and always in the ‘initial difference’ of a process which can never be fully accomplished. ‘Magical’ is thus that form of thinking which is aware of the excess at the basis of any step of its un-folding.13
In Magic’s system, the ineffable dimension of existence – which I describe as ‘life’ – emanates in turn a series of reality-making hypostases, at once similarly and in the opposite fashion than it happens with Technic.
The specularity, or mirror resemblance, between Magic’s and Technic’s reality-system runs throughout this book, and structures it. I conceived this volume as a folding mirror, so that the first and last chapters, and the two central ones, are placed like specular reflections of each other. Chapter 1 on ‘Technic’s world’ is the negative reflection of Chapter 4 ‘Magic’s world’, in the same way that Chapter 2 ‘Technic’s cosmogony’ is the specular opposite of Chapter 3, ‘Magic’s cosmogony’. Even more in detail, the individual hypostases of Technic’s and Magic’s cosmogonies are placed in negatively specular relationship: the first principle of one system reflects and thus is the opposite of the last hypostasis of the other system, and vice versa, and so on for each level. Acting as the hinge between the two mirroring surfaces of Technic and Magic, I placed the brief intermission ‘What is reality?’, where I attempt to clarify my understanding of reality as such and of the mechanisms that regulate its workings – whether they are shaped by Technic, by Magic or by any other possible cosmogonic force. While the rest of the book wishes to serve as a therapeutic instrument of sorts, the hinge-section at its centre wishes to systematize its core methodological proposal.
Before closing this brief introduction, I would like to thank a number of people that have helped me in writing this book. First of all, I would like to thank Teodora Pasquinelli – not only for her loving patience, but also for her help in clarifying with me a number of crucial concepts and stylistic choices since the earliest stages of composition of this book. If this book has any merits, it’s in great part thanks to endless conversations with Teodora. Thanks also to Professor Gaitanidis for his decisive help to get me started on writing these pages and to my friend Anastasios for his continuous support during the writing process. Thanks to the publisher Bloomsbury for having believed in my proposal, and particularly to my editor Frankie Mace who championed it. Thanks to the peer reviewers for their comments, to my dear friends Franco Berardi, Saul Newman and Adelita Husni-Bey for their support and suggestions, and infinite thanks to my friend Timothy Morton for honouring this volume with his preface. Thanks, as always, to my family, Nellina, Luciano and Elisabetta Campagna for their closeness and even just for their presence. Finally, thanks to my son Arturo for confirming to me every day that, despite all its bleakness, the world is still host to a wonderful treasure.
Notes
1 ‘Once again, we have fallen into one of those eras that ask the philosopher, not to explain or to transform the world, but solely to build refuges against the harshness of the weather’. From N. G. Davila, Escolios a un Texto Implicito I – my translation from Franco Volpi’s Italian version of the Spanish original, in N. G. Davila, In Margine a un Testo Implicito, Milano: Adelphi, 2015, p. 28.
2 W. Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar, in Wallace Stevens, edited by J. Burnside, London: Faber and Faber, 2008, p. 28.
3 The inspiration behind this stylistic decision comes, in part, from C. Sini, Raccontare il Mondo: Filosofia e Cosmologia, Milano: CUEM, 2001.
4 See Plato, Timaeus, 29d. On the interpretation of Plato’s ‘eykos mythos’ in Timaeus, see M. F. Burnyeat, Eykos Mythos, in Rhizai, 2, 2005, pp. 7–29. G. Reale, Introduzione, in J. N. Findlay, Platone: le dottrine scritte e non scritte, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1994, pp. XXIV–XXV. E. Berti, L’Oggetto dell’Eikos Mythos nel Timeo di Platone, in T. Calvo and L. Brisson (eds), Interpreting the Timaeus – Critias, Sankt Augustin: Acaemia Verlag, 1997, pp. 119–31.
5 I have chosen to adopt the (mis)spelling ‘Technic’, rather than the more common ‘Technics’ or the German ‘Technik’, as an oblique homage to the Italian form ‘Tecnica’. This inopportune choice, can be read as part of my overall mythopoeic project of a ‘Mediterranean’ philosophy.
6 I am willing to follow Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr Cogito, who ‘will accept a supporting role / he will not dwell in history’ (Mr Cogito’s Game, in Z. Herbert, The Collected Poems, London: Atlantic Books, 2014, p. 328), precisely to avoid the brutality of historiography described in Herbert’s Sequoia: ‘a cross section of a tree the copper trunk of the West / with immeasurably regular rings like circles on the water / and a cross-grained fool wrote in the dates of human history / … The tree’s Tacitus was a surveyor he had no adjectives / no syntax expressive of terror he knew no words at all / so he counted added years and centuries as if to say it’s / nothing but birth and death nothing just birth and death / and inside the bloody pulp of the sequoia’ (Sequoia, in Z. Herbert, The Collected Poems, London: Atlantic Books, 2014, p. 296). In doing so, I am also willing to endorse in part the attitude expressed by Adam Zagajewski, when he writes ‘One day apes made their grab for power / … Deeply involved in our other pursuits, / we didn’t notice: someone read Aristotle, / someone else was wholly in love. / … Apes, it seems, made their grab for power’ (Apes, in A. Zagajewski, Without End: New and Selected Poems, New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003) – though of course, with a number of caveats, as discussed in the introduction.
7 See T. Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
8 My translation from the Italian translation of G. Bruno, Lampas triginta statuarum, in Opere Magiche, Milano: Adelphi, 2000, p. 1393.
9 ‘A historical and geographical psychic region, a fantasy or mythic Greece, an inner Greece of the mind that is only indirectly connected with actual geography and actual history.’ J. Hillman, An Essay on Pan, in Pan and the Nightmare, Washington, DC: Spring Publications, 2015, p. 10.
10 See Sheikh S. Suhrawardi, A Tale of Occidental Exile, in The Mystical and Visionary Treatises, translated by W. M. Trackston Jr, London: Octogon Press, 1982, pp. 100–8; see also H. Corbin, En Islam iranien. Tome 2: Sohrawardi et les platoniciens de Perse, Paris: Gallimard, 1991, Chapters V–VII.
11 My notion of the Mediterranean can also recall the figure of the Egyptian-Greek god Serapis, Ptolemy I of Egypt’s great religious/poetic invention in the third century BCE. Like Serapis, my notion of the Mediterranean is a mythopoeic fiction that wishes to integrate several different strands of thought, through a form of syncretism that presents strong esoteric connotations. For a scholarly interpretation of Serapis in this direction, see P. Schmitt, Serapis: The Universal Mystery Religion, in J. Campbell (ed.), The Mysteries: papers from the Eranos Yearbook, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 104–15.
12 It is also somehow reminiscent of Zagajewski’s Sicily: ‘At night we sailed past shadowed, / enigmatic shores. Far off, the huge leaves / of hills swayed like a giant’s dreams. / Waves slapped the boat’s wood, / a warm wind kissed the sails, / stars rushed, helter-skelter, / to tell the history of the world. / That’s Sicily, someone whispered, / three-cornered island, owl’s breath, / handkerchief of the dead’ (That’s Sicily, in A. Zagajewski, Mysticism for Beginners: Poems, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
13 My translation from M. Donà, Magia e Filosofia, Milano: Bompiani, 2004, p. 172.